As the title says, I think there are some major issues going on especially with the village feelings back. We are seeing almost constant raiding on villages now to lower the feelings of the village towards the Organization that currently holds sway over the village. That is all good and well, the issue I see if that it is these people who are raiding that turn around and get amnesty a few days or even that day of the revolt and sway the same villagers they were just killing, to go with them. That, I do not get, it is like the villagers suddenly forget, hey these people were killing me almost non stop for the past year!

I have thought about this for a while, how this can be change and well have come up with a few ways to make this a bit more fair. First, if the village feelings do not already act this way they should, their views of an organization that attacks and kills them, should be drastically reduced making it much much harder for the org as a whole to be able to influence them during the revolt since it is also effecting the organization that should be protecting it, this should be a double edge blade.

Also, those who are enemy to a village, amnesty or not, during a revolt should not be able to influence the villagers at all. They are technically still enemies and this will prevent this constant raiding we are seeing if there is not a quick fix to it. Now, I have never been an enemy to a village so I have no clue what kind of fines you are looking at to be unenemied but hopefully, they scale to the amount of damage you have done and is not just entirely random.

Also, with the village feelings back, back when I first started, it was impossible to gain control of certain villages if you had sway over another certain village, mainly comes to mind is the mountain villages. If you had Angkrag you could NOT have either of the other two no matter how hard you tried. Having Acknor made it really hard to get Estelbar (was possible just very hard). I am thinking that the two new villages, should never come under the same organization's sway at the same time. I am just wondering if these aspects were brought back or not, and if not, should be looked into. There needs to be a better spread of how the villages are swayed than what we see right now now and unless rules are put into place how it works, I doubt we will see any improvement.

I remember back when it was really freaking hard to get Estelbar and Acknor at the same time, and I thought I had read somewhere that it was even impossible. I think we should bring this back. Even with village feelings, if it was supposed to curb monopolies on villages... well, I don't think it's doing it's job. I'm not certain that was the point of it though, that's just my best guess.

A few points:

First, I believe you're never enemied to the village if the village is under the control of an org. This is taken from another thread, so it might not be 100% accurate though as I've not seen it for myself.

Second, the fine is generally about 100k to get unenemied to a village. I don't think this scales to the damage done, but I think it would be a good idea if it did. For instance, an accidental kill (unlucky crit if you happened to press the attack macro instead of the influence macro, for instance) shouldn't cost you 100k, but rather a lower one, climbing to 100k and above.

You are not enemied to the village unless it's uninfluenced.

Fines based on damage done would be pretty cool, but made moot by the first point, in this case.

My only issue with the Conquest type is the unbelievable frequency of the raids. Personally, I believe the raids would be more limited to groups, if it were not so easy for demigod+ folks to waltz in and out.

As Eventru pointed out, it does make sense in a way that killing them repeatedly is swaying them towards you. It's saying, "This is what happens when you are aligned with our enemy. Swear to us and this won't happen anymore. You're either with us, or you're against us." History is full of examples of empires that conquered people by killing them until the survivors said "Hold, enough!" so it's pretty reasonable.

It is a bit odd that the way it works is you don't get enemied, though. It would make more sense if you did get enemied, but as long as you were Conquest type, you could still influence while enemied. If we wanted to go all the way (and I'm not saying we do, but it's an entertaining idea to consider), maybe if you're a conquerer, you can't influence unless you're enemied, because how convincing is "sign on with me or I'll kill you" if you've never killed any of them?

Fortunately, most of the paradoxical consequences of not being enemied are moot because you're enemied to the controlling organization, which has most of the same effects. The only place it creates nonsensical effects is when the allegiances change. You go in and murder the farmers every day for five years, and then the farmers revolt and by coincidence, you don't sway them, but neither does the city who had them before; instead, someone else gets them, and you're on good terms with that city. Suddenly the villagers treat you like a good buddy and will happily trade with you.

Even this isn't a big problem in Lusternia since at any given time, 90% of you are enemied to 90% of the organizations out there on the flimsiest of pretexts, so this absurd scenario will happen rarely enough that it probably won't bother many people.

It's not actually demigod that makes it 'easy' (it's not even easy ) to waltz in and out of an enemy village (but yes, so far we've only been testing with demigods since we don't like little ones being test subjects).

The biggest thing about village feelings is the Conquest political structure. It basically forces the Conquest nation to raid Prrime enemy organization areas (painful), and the defending nation to pile guards and defenses into the village. It's draining for both. However, I don't see a way on how this can be fixed, other than removing Conquest or village feelings entirely.

This has already been covered on other threads, but there are a couple of misapprehensions in the first post that could do with correction.
With the conquest style government (which Glomdoring has):
- villages that we hold passively increase positive feeling toward us
- villages that we don't hold passively increase positive feeling toward us, by a magnitude dependent on how many total villages we hold
- villages opposing those that we hold (even if we hold both) will passively feel more negative toward us (true for all government types)
- villages that we don't control can increase positive feeling toward us if we kill them (respect through fear)

If villagers are killed in your village, this has no effect on the village's feeling toward you. With a Benign-Religious government, you should not drop below neutral in Shanthmark, as you are doing nothing to upset your villagers. By contrast, Paavik is slowly accruing negative feelings toward Serenwilde, because you hold Shanthmark. Likewise, Shanthmark will slowly be accruing negative feelings to Glomdoring, because we hold Paavik. With a Religious structure, you are able to influence the denizens of Paavik to counteract this. As we have a Conquest structure, we must kill denizens to try to counteract this.

The passive gain in good feelings that a conquest government accrues from villages that it does not hold is not enough to counteract the negative feelings for an opposing village alone - as we see in the case of Delport. This is the reason why we are raiding Shanthmark - so that we may sustain it as a viable option for village influencing in the future.

The negative feelings absolutely do play a role in the ability to claim a village now, as we have seen in Southgard and Dairuchi recently. In Southgard, Glomdoring entered the revolt with a negative feelings penalty. Despite having a sizable group which likely would have won us the village in the past, we could not overcome the penalty before Hallifax, who began the revolt with a neutral feeling, was able to claim it. Similarly, in Dairuchi, where Magnagora had a massive lead and a huge force, the village feeling toward them was so bad that they could make no progress at all. If village feelings were not in play, they would have reclaimed Dairuchi very easily.

As for hard and fast "if you have this village, you cannot have these others" rules, I'm not in favor of them. I can see the value of it in the case of the mining villages - as these are much-used commodities that can't really be quested for and aren't produced anywhere else. (Unlike wood or cloth or meat, etc.) It is incredibly unlikely that 1 organization will hold more than 2 at a time, now. But to make it so that even with a lot of regular effort you can do nothing to improve a village's feeling with you would be very frustrating. Even if Glomdoring remains a strong org, it is unlikely now that we will be able to claim pairs of opposing villages in the future, as we have already started to see.

To claim one village against the opposition of 1-5 orgs then claim a second against the same opposition, where others already have a head start, while suffering a penalty from holding the first, seems unlikely, even if not technically impossible. It's a de facto system of what you're requesting, while still leaving a small opening for the serendipitous occurrence that would fill the winning org with glee on very rare occasions. Give it time.

One option would be for everyone to go conquest.

Then everyone could be raiding this or that village, all day, every day.

I agree with Talan that an absolute "if you have this you can't have that" should only be used in extreme cases. Most of the people who've talked about the effect of opposing villages have only suggested that how much having one affects the other might need to be recalibrated. Since it was recalibrated with village feelings recently, and we're still seeing how that's going to impact things (we haven't even been through a whole cycle yet!), it's too soon to tell if it's been made too strong or too weak or "just right".

In all, I'm pretty optimistic. For as tedious as the raids on Shanthmark have been, they're still a big step up from the previous raids. I don't want to stir up the hornet's nest I stirred up last time with the issue of indefensible-versus-impregnable-borders, but I do want to be clear that that's an entirely separate issue from the question of how village feelings work.

Incidentally, one change that could be made to keep Conquest from being too exhausting is to borrow a page from the discarded nexus world conflict system. Make it so raids are five times as impactful as they are now, but so they can only be done on some astrological combination that happens only one fifth of the time. (Or make it two/two, or ten/ten, or whatever.) Recalibrate how much the effort drains both sides by the same amount, so the net effect is identical. Then we can still have raids that are mechanically encouraged and rewarded, but can only happen every so often, so we can all take a breather in between, and even do other things.

Keep in mind that Conquest actually gives power to the C.P and less commodities. So, the benefits are really only worth it with 5 or more villages.

Well, worth it is all relative. I mean, if you have one or two villages, you have a whole world out there to raid.

On the other hand, since villages under a sphere of influence don't enemy to themselves, people could raid just out of spite, without changing government styles too.

Actually, that would be an interesting change to conquest. Villages lose respect for a conquest government if denizens under their sphere of influence are killed.

That might make it more dynamic, and it would make perfect sense with the logic of the reverse side.

Only if commercial and religious lose respect when someone else does your commodity quest or influences for you.

That suggestion would just mean no one would use conquest at all.

I agree with Talan.

Edit: Lendren's suggestions would be kind of interesting, though I'm not sure how I feel about the enemy knowing when the raid is about to happen and we can't do anything to defend ourselves since it's PRIME, though.

If we got enemied for killing them, Conquest would be pretty useless since it defeats the purpose of us accruing positive feelings if we can't influence the denizens.

I think that the conquest method should just be scrapped. It's an interesting idea yeah, but it has just too severe drawbacks to make it unbalanced. After all, it further tips the scale in the favour of those who are already doing well at village influencing. It is easier for much to get more, and that's BadTM. Secondly, the method of increasing village feelings is a tiring hassle, especially for the defender, because they have to constantly be on guard for someone to jump in and kick denizens. We've all felt the exhaustion and frustration that comes when angels/demons/daughters/ladies are killed non-stop.

I just don't feel that it adds anything positive to the game. Especially since one of the core ideas of the game was to keep conflict away from prime.

Still think we should see how things play out over a few more influences before making any serious changes.

We've already lowered the to-influence rate somewhat (And part of the system changed it so that you really have to influence a % of the village itself, not reach some hard number as before - allowing for 'stronger' villages like Ptoma and Ixthiaxa, with high-level influencing, versus say Estelbar/Delport, with low-level influencing) for revolts, which I think has really made the time go a bit quicker (it is still possibly to influence in a single round at neutral or higher feelings).

I'm feeling like the feelings gained by religious/commercial is too small and may need increasing (which we've done once already, though not by any great amount) - but at the same time, I see Celest going only a couple times (1-2) a day to influence their villages, so I'm a little uncertain if it's a problem or not. I don't know, a few things are coming to mind that might address this. Has Hallifax been doing commodity quests at all? Only commercial org with a village. At the same time, both are despotic governments, so it's kind of inherently given in my mind that they would need to struggle just to keep neutral feelings. Feelings or productivity.

If you hold a village, all opposing villages (if you're not working on gaining influence in them) will be practically uninfluencable by the next revolt (it was aimed to have the highest resistance possible, which makes your influence have a pretty heavy (-80% sticks out for some reason) penalty). Conquest orgs will have a slightly smaller penalty to it, but it's still pretty heavy.

We'd discussed (and initially it was that the worst resistance made it so) villages being uninfluencable, but I think the sentiment of 'if they really are going to work that hard for it, we should let them' won out. I think the idea of some villages being 'predisposed' to certain orgs had been thrown around but ended up falling out (ie dairuchi would naturally like Gaudiguch, angkrag Magnagora, etc) but I think the lack of 'matching villages' killed that. Can't really remember off-hand, though.

On the topic of conquest gov'ts raiding for feelings - it's not a very large gain, but it is a gain. It does slow things a bit, I suppose. I've always looked at Conquest gov'ts as very Machievellian - 'it is better than to be feared than loved' and all that.

We are watching though, and changes can be made if necessary.

Edit: And, as always, 'delete this' is a pretty unhelpful and uninteresting suggestion. 'Change the benefit to x' or 'change the method to garner positive feelings to y' would be a good bit more productive imho.

I don't feel it addresses the fact that the Conquest government favours the strong. If you have many villages, from what I gather it becomes easier to get more, and that's VERY bad when trying to make the game fun for many. Being without resources isn't fun at all, both when it comes to commodities and power.

Also, the concept of forcing raid to increase feelings would also be tiring.

Regarding Hallifax and comm quests. I know we did em a lot initially, but I think it tapered out because it just seemed to have no effect on village feelings. If it has since been boosted, I'll see if we can't kick some activity into it and check.

While it has an effect, it's a really really small effect (it seems like the numbers are based on expected gain over a multiple-week-period), so you'd have to do comm quests for a week straight to see anything.

Obviously I don't know how long it really is, but it takes a lot of constant work to get anywhere it seems.

T'was a week of constant work. Anyway, I wonder. Is it even possible to do commodity quests in villages you're an enemy off by virtue of being enemied to the owner org? Usually, people just go aggressive if you give them items and you're an enemy.

And anyway, it should be easier to raise village feelings for a commercial village, because there's a very hard cap on how many commodities you can get a village. There's only so many rockeaters and cows, a number that is unaltered by the number of villages you own, and which you will be sharing with others who also want to do commodity quests. Unlike Religious, which has a cap tied directly to the village itself.

I do not believe there really is a cap on village quests.

There's more than 90 rockeaters available for the gem commodity quest - simply doing that, I doubt you'd get them all before the first started resetting.

Beyond that there's about, oh, 15-20 deer about for leather or meat, 25 viable 'sheep' for mutton, 13 that can be lead about for commodity cloth, about 22 cows that can be lead about while 36 can be used to make leather/meat. There's 19, 20 chickens for meat/eggs. 37 or so trout for fish commodities.

I don't really buy that there's a limited supply of commodity quests. Really, religious has it the 'hardest', in terms of amount that can be gained at once.