Right.

The only problem then becomes that religious and commercial are more tedious and conquest is the five minutes a day thing... ?

Well the other two already suck in comparison to Conquest. So the status quo would stay the same there

Prime enemy territory death is 2 million essence. That is a high risk. It's more of a short-burst-boom compared to a slowly-but-safely thing.

At the same time, religious and commercial don't make mobs call out for help and summon people to nom on you where you can't fight back because the Avenger says no.

I understand the drawbacks can be severe. I'm pointing out another reason the system needs to be re-examined for balance, especially if the raiding is curbed simply through increased rewards.

On the other hand, mobs not calling out may be a slight boon to influencers, but most don't have gems of cloaking and it's really not hard to spot people in your villages that shouldn't be and deal with them. Especially once you learn who the influencers are and know they are trying to influence your mobs.

I'd be fine with the SQUAD CONQUEST idea including some mitigation of the "enemy territory experience loss" thing for its duration. Maybe make deaths during the raid be normal prime, no enemy territory factor. I'm not sure what other Avenger change it would need, since these village raids are always already in enemy territory so Avenger is already not protecting people (except for that whole "lose status when defending" bug that we're stuck with, but that's no different than prime city/commune raids already). But I'd be fine with such changes, if they made sense, to happen during the 20-minutes-every-four-hours timed conquest.

Furthermore, I'd be happy to see this also tied into changes to guards. Make the guards all go on break during the conquest periods, in exchange for making them a good deal more effective at other times. That way, during the conquest-raid, no one can use guards to lock down a village at all; but the rest of the time, guards are beefed up enough that they can prevent petty raids and require a coordinated effort for a risky assault.

I'm all for making it so they can make those raids with a reasonable balance of risk and reward... as long as they aren't all the time.

We can't attack you in your villages. It's enemy territory for us, not you --- Avenger problem.

I honestly hate how guards work. We either put up several dozen and spend like crazy, or they all die. There is no in between. The only time they actually buy us time to come defend is if the objective is to kill guards. If you just dfire past and set a bonded rift or something, they're still pretty worthless for anything besides making you burn divinefire.

Commercial and to a lesser extent, religious still need to be buffed imo. It's just too easy for a conquest government to keep their villages as long as they have a few of them.

POLITICS ESTELBAR.

Seems quite plausible, really, at least for Religious with the buffs they already got.

Well, okay, I admit that religious is looking very good right now, as you can potentially influence all 11 villages. Commercial is, right now, by far the hardest to build up right now. Not only does it take a long time to do, the gains are less than religious and it is really only effective (as far as getting to the thresholds for the new 'levels' go) if you focus on one village.

Not sure about Serenwilde, but I know that in Celest we just can NOT keep the villages influenced. We'll get someone to influence for one or two rounds, but then interest in it just...dies.

Holy crap this thread grew fast. A couple points, because I'm too lazy to go back and try to quote them all.

I know I have sent at least two letters sometime in the past asking what the point of all this was and about stopping the fighting. One was flat out ignored, and I can't remember what happened with the other one. People are willing to talk peace, they are just the vast minority.

A raid into Faethorn to kill someone does indeed boost morale-- until that person congluts, grabs 4-5 demis and goes on a retaliatory slaughter. No longer worth the trouble.

And nobody likes to lose-- hence the huge migration of fighters to the "winning side" every few months.

As for conquest government, I think it has good potential. It makes sense, what it does. My only wish is that there were ways to use the same idea without being so freakin' annoying (which is the fault of the mechanics).

A timer on being able to gain through conquest is a good idea, but the timer should be character-based, not organization/squad based. Because then you log in, and someone from your org did it like 3 hours ago, and now you can't do it? That's no fun.

Neither is having continuous raids. Your idea would either break up the groups into incessant one man raids, or not fix the issue not being able to do it due to timer at all, really.

Guards might discourage one man raids to an extent, and make it so that most people do it in groups anyway.

But, how about we have... siege weapons! That take city commodities to make! And you build one, and wheel it over, and this starts a conquest period? Could be combined with some kind of cooldown per village.

P.S. The Iron Fist of Conquest stings.

Guards stop the continuous one-man raids; they do little to nothing against the groups.

The endless raiding can be ridiculous at times. I easily heard over fifty entrances/exits (usually about 25-30s apart) in the twenty-five minutes I was logged in a few days ago- that's a 25 one-minute 'raids' in 25 minutes, that went detected.

That being said, removing conquest will not solve the problem. We still had continuous 1-man raids on Ethereal all the time before conquest; removing conquest will just funnel them all over to Prime/Ethereal Serenwilde rather than villages.

I didn't realize avenger protected defenders in their own territory- I'd be fine with removing it for within villages, as long as the defender attacks first- I.E. I blanknote Shuyin, now he's free to smash me without the Avenger caring. (Otherwise, this will just lead to more griefing.)

EDIT: Clarificiation: just villages, not prime Org territory.