The miner setup right now is pretty obnoxious. It seems like the system was designed for back when villages were incredibly easy to raid, with no guards or anything, and it hasn't changed since. Since this is the only way to get your org metals, it's a pretty important quest. Also, the default state is "having no metals" - you have to engage in the quest to get anything, rather than being able to engage in the quest to gain bonuses.

Since the quest was designed way back before day 1, a lot of things about villages have changed, particularly distort and obelisks. The end result is that it encourages two tactics: raiding the guards when security aren't around to swarm more on people, and finding some overpowered skill that lets you get out if any players show up, like divinefire/ghost (yes, I know distort hits ghost, but it's still a damn useful way to get out.) If someone DOES try to take your miners, and you can find them quickly enough, you can just swarm guards on them and they die and pray (unless they're magnagoran/gloom/demigod.) This is pretty much just annoying for everyone.

So I recommend 1 of 3 things.
1. Make a peaceful way to get miners. It can still be considered "offensive" like Estelbar/Acknor, but at least it doesn't force people to defend and so on. You could give the dwarves a vitae-charged compound or jab them with needles containing a deadly miner-zombifying poison that kills and reanimates them really fast (and then have them follow you out in either case.)
2. Make it so that mines give orgs metals even without miners. Having the miners just involves a boost.
3. Make it so you can beg ores from miners. Then add a really simplistic quest somewhere that lets you get an undead-speaking cloak so you can talk to the Angkrag ones (or some similar solution.) Hopefully orgs might not even enemy you for doing this one, though I very much doubt it.

You're still touchy about the fact that Rockholm/Southgard lost miners to Angkrag, no?

I don't know - it's a fun factor, the challenge and the risks.

No, and it's not like I haven't raided miners in the past. I was hoping someone wouldn't say that and waste my time having to dismiss it so people can debate the idea itself, but whatever. Guess I really do need those disclaimers.

As for the fun factor, not really. As I said, the way it gets played in practice is that there is no or next to no risk, because people wait specifically until there isn't any in order to raid, or just overpowered-skill-out-of-the-door to eliminate it. Willingness to actually suffer risk means you get another 15-20 guards thrown on top of you because defenders play to get people out ASAP. It's not like they can be blamed for this either. But since the objects produced by the quest are important, one of the three ideas I listed would be good. Note that I'm not saying you'd have to also disable the obnoxious miner-raiding situation, you can leave that in if you want.

Hooray. It's finally catching on!

I like the principle of a nonviolent way to get miners, but simpy copying Estelbar/Acknor seems, well, just as boring.

I can see this, but it doesn't really make sense. Without miners, who's mining the ores? Although I guess I should ask, do Estelba/Acknor get the food comms if no one is there farming them? If they do, then this idea makes perfect sense.



You can't already?? Then yes, yes to this!



I wouldn't hold my breath. We enemy people nonviolently kidnapping farmers from Estelbar (preferably before they get out so they have nice surprise waiting along their escape route ), I would expect this to be no different.

Would love if you could beg from miners and farmers and have that miner/farmer not produce a commodity that tick.

What if nations could create miners/farmers that are loyal to the org rather than the village for a monthy cost of power? Skeletons for Mag, water elementals for Celest, lomadores for Glom and some other sort of thing for Seren. Basicly option two at a power cost.

Or, you can come2glom. We have crow cloaks that let you talk to undead!

Or just steal one, like Tael.

Uh you already can get ores from the miners, via begging. Then you give the ores to the right mine masters, and it produces commodities. Though in the case of angkrag, only Glooms would be able to do this unless Serens have stolen crow cloaks.

The miners are greedy, so you can't beg from them.

you can use any type of influence on a mob. It's just easier to use the influence that is their weakness.

Wrong. Each personality has a type of influence they are completely immune to. Greedy is immune to charity.

Eh, I'm not entirely sure what to think of this. Commodity acquisition and retention is a very neutral activity with few opportunities for real organizational conflict. Which is nice for the non-combatants, but leaves very little for the combatants in an area that should be just as much rooted with conflict and conquest as the ideological clashings in Lusternia (how many wars have been waged over control of land and the resources therein?). I like the idea of flat out fighting being necessary for at least some commodities and I'm not sure if watering it down for the sake of making miners less essential is doing anyone justice, especially with complaints about how watered down conflict already is.

If anything, I'd be more in support of mining villages being more difficult to defend so that both losing miners and getting them back is easier for everyone. Maybe limit the number of guards you can have in the village at once - if you have too many guards, they end up consuming more resources themselves and get in the way of the miners, causing productivity to drop and eliminating the benefit of actually having extra miners. Or if you have a lot of guards in the tunnels at once, they might increase the probability of causing a random cave-in within a section of the mines, killing all the miners and guards there instantaneously! So you wouldn't want to station too many to avoid this.

Allowing begging from miners might be fun and cute too. It wouldn't actually help all that much, particularly since the price curve for metals scaling as supply increases is far more noticeable with how expensive they are.

And if all else fails, there's always a black market to fall back on for those who are willing.



If there are no farmers on the grain fields in Estelbar, no grain will be produced or tithed.

The same applies to fruits and vegetables, but not to any other commodities in Estelbar.

Having said that much, please keep in mind that Estelbar and Acknor are not the only villages capable of producing grain, vegetables, and fruit. They certainly can do far more than any other village in this regard, but you can hold other villages too and not be totally out of luck.

Dairuchi can produce marble, and Delport can produce gold to some extent. But for steel, platinum, iron, and silver, you need to kill and move miners around AND have control of a mining village to get much in the line of those metals. So while from the perspective of continuity and mechanics it makes sense, you might argue that it's just overly annoying from a functional perspective.

But is it? Warriors need these metals for most of their forging designs, without which they can't really do much. Aside from that, steel/platinum/silver/iron aren't used for terribly much, though iron is still needed in some amounts for a few tracker traps, darts, shovels, and tinderboxes. Maybe for constructs and colossi too? What else?

If an org cannot regularly acquire any of these for an extended period of time, they will be at some level of disadvantage, but I don't think it can get severe enough to ever warrant saying that the majority of the org can become too crippled to compete. And having said that much, that's why I don't think watering down the relevance of miners is particularly necessary.

Metals are a lot more important than you give them credit for.

Metals are definitely more important than most of the food commodities, but I think the situation would be much more pungent if you switched around metals for cloth or gems. And while the status quo is imperfect, I think making it easier for everyone to get them back and lose them is a better answer. That way this avenue of commodity acquisition stays unique and you lessen the chances that miners can stay in any one village for too long.

If they do become easier to move around, though, we'll want to have miners start having an effect on metal production and tithes immediately (there's currently a delay before they start effecting tithes), otherwise they might end up bouncing around so much that no one will get anything.

It's fun for some. I enjoy it personally. Nejii likes to turn into Nubby sometimes. Seren has at most 4 people at any point in time who do not care whether or not they end up dying in the fight and lose experience. Maybe more after Nejii gets Ascendant. But normally there's me, Nejii when he feels there's a reasonable (more likely than not) chance to survive, and others who transmigrate or have some form of non dying ness.

I like the idea for the change, but it could really be much more simpler. The real problem relates to what Nejii originally brought up. The admin constantly say that conflict should be focused off prime. But they forget to change/alter/remove previous implementations of conflict like this miner set up.

They go and they schedule all these off prime things. We also like our spontaneity. But those get cut down by free discretionary power costs. The mechanics that were implemented to increase off prime conflict and also introduced this free discretionary off prime idea just so happens to contradict each other. So then there's prime, if people use powers there, at least it cost them something. But then they went and buffed up guards. That was probably their best move. The guards and discretionaries like distort have been buffed to an extent where it's fairly difficult for most of an enemied population to sneak into an indoor village like Angkrag, Rockholm, or Southgard. Even the other villages are difficult if guards were being used properly. This actually helps shifts the focus to off prime raids. Free discretionary off prime absolutely does not. Sure, the Demon Lords and Supernals are being slain every other week. But that is the most managable (for the raiding side) discretionary power they will have to deal with. When was the last time ethereal was raided? When was the last time anyone raided -in- flux? Half the time I'm logged in, I'm begging Thoros to raid or someone from Mag to raid. Ethereal is just a ridiculous fortress and either the no demesne clause needs to go, or the free discretionary needs to go and get replaced by free orgwide conglutination on the respective plane only.

A few hours ago? Albion died.

Edit: Not that that actually nullifies your point, since before that it was quite a while, and it took Seren & Celest teaming up on Mag for a few days to make it happen. Heh. Not a common event.