This is what I feel really strongly about with regards to Gaudiguch. I initially wrote a huge paragraph bemoaning the circumstances that led Gaudiguch to the state that it is in now and about its current state, but I feel far too bitter about that, so I deleted it all to avoid detracting from the topic.

I've some areas as well as some questions with regards to organising an organisation.

Guards: Where and how many
Statues: Where (I know the ideal answer is everywhere, but realistically, which are the most important places to statue) and what runes
Discretionaries: When to use them if they're not free?
Melds: A huge topic here, I'm still trying to learn about this, but hard to find Gaudiguch-specific knowledge, but generic things would be nice too.
Communication: Combat clan vs squad?
Group combat: How do we prioritise targets other than melders-first? How do we coordinate tactics?

Also, I'm not sure if I managed to get all of the areas, so if I missed anything out, feel free to add in too.

Guards go where things need protecting on prime. Your nexus - because that needs to be a safe place for your citizens at all times, and any high priority targets. They should be standguard permanent at these locations. For Glom our essence converter is on prime, so we guard that. We guard the ethereal nexus as well. You will need to decide where you important targets are (based on what you defend/need to have access to) and how many guards you can afford. (Power minister and CL.) Groups of 25 or more are usually effective for anything but a huge group.

The entrances, particularly the ends of straightaways are most important for statues. Also with guards if possible.

Use distort to trap raiders if you are fighting back and intend to track the group down. Use ripple/flux while you are fighting or if they are moving around killing your mobs or people. If power cost is an issue you may wish to save them for big raids.

Meld where you wish to fight. In a raid you want to meld the opponent's target or failing that the path raiders must take to reach this target. In this vein, meld entrances.

It does not matter what channel you use. The important thing is that everyone hears. Usually people use clans but in a big raid we just go ahead and use ct sometimes.

Kill the targets whose abilities are most harmful to your group. Probably balestoners, melders, bards, and the opposing combat leader.

I thought I'd start by saying what I do know about peaced revolts, since that's all I know, and if I miss anything or get something wrong, I might even get to learn more about it!

During a peaced revolt, there are a few categories of people:
1. Influencers
2. Debaters
3. Diverters
4. Watchers

Influencers:
These are ideally the people with high charisma, CR6 and Trans Influence. They go for the named denizens and when they're all taken, try to sweep as many of the unnamed ones. Bring a focus enchantment along, because you will get dramatics afflictions.

Debators:
Again, ideally these people have high charisma, ego regen abilities, toting a focus enchantment and of high level but not of high enough CR to effectively influence. There are two ways to go about debating:
- Roam the village looking for opposing influencers to debate out
- Follow one of your own influencers to protect him/her from being debated while influencing.

Diverters:
Of course, this requires the people to have at least Divert in Influence. They follow an influencer around to divert mobs for your city. (Somethinig that I'm still working on is how to coordinate the diverting process, as I've seen many instances with multiple diverters who end up diverting their own influencer)

Watchers:
These are the people who usually think they can't do anything in a peaced revolt, but play a very important role. Watchers sit in the same room as an important mob (highest priorities are the village leader and the first named mob to be influenced in that round), to watch for the line where the mob shuffles to indicate that they have reset and are ready for influencing. They'll then announce this to the influencers.

These roles aren't exactly fixed, as a person following the main influencer can both divert and then debate, or break off to get some of the unnamed mobs when the main influencer is safe alone.

Additional points:
I know I get a little antsy during the lull when all mobs are influenced out. Normally, I start roaming the village to check on the unnamed mobs and to debate out their influencers. But if it's a particularly long revolt (or if I got debated out), I'll settle down and watch a named mob which isn't being watched so that I don't get too tense throughout the entire revolt.

For 'violent' revolts, I'm not as competent, but most of the above mentioned points apply. Replace debaters with combatants and most points would still be relevant. Also, everyone should bring along crusade if they can. A divertor/watcher setting up the crusade saves the influencer valuable time in trying to get the mob before being debated/diverted/killed.


Things I'm not too sure on:
How does a revolt decide an organisation won? Is it when the organisation has earned enough points over the period of the revolt? Or when a particular organisation holds the village leader and a good chunk of the named denizens?

Just to echo a bit of what Talan has already covered:

Statues: Realistically, cities with two guilds capable of taking on Enchantment really should enchant and rune each and every room capable of holding a statue. This holds especially true for rooms with mobs susceptible to being bashed as well as choke points (ie. rooms where people have to stop and actually turn at rather than be able to sprint past them.) Since I'm pretty sure those statues stay enchanted for a very, very long time, I really don't see why people chip in to handle this basic defense. It'd not only be a good way to build organizational defense, but could a) be a potential mine for city activity and be a reward zone for CFs for said activity.

Guards: Unless I'm missing something terrible, I think Gaudiguch has two main entrances as well as one main congregation point. Set up a choke point with an enchanted statue and then stick 20 guards or so there. Level twos and elementals with a statue guarding them can be a good deterrent to people who think they can just waltz in with a group most of the time.

Discretionaries: Any time you have a raid, use them. For people who kick and run, usually dropping shrine powers (which are a lot cheaper) will be a good deterrent for them.

Communication: Combat clan, definitely. Squads take time and vast expenditures of equilibrium to set them up. Moreso if the leader dies and has to rebuild it. Clans also come with the dandy CLHELPs you'll usually want to stuff full of information pertinent to your procedures.

Melds: Ahhh, how to summarize this. Mind, I'm far from being any sort of master melder, but a general rule of thumb to learn with melds is that you want to make whatever territory you hold as hard to break as you can. This applies to both offense and defense, but if you want to fight in a given room, do your darndest to make that room unbreakable - and that happens by understanding that if you have say, a room that lines up this way:



B is where you'll want to hole up considering the enemy will have to break either A or C first to be able to break B. Mind, that is a really summarized form of how breakpoints work since the largest melds can be 30 rooms large and the people who have some idea what they're doing will have more branches to prevent the easy breaking of the melded line. To cap it off, if you ever become a melder, don't ever loop the line back on itself - if you make the meld a circle, that compromises ALL the rooms of the meld rather than the points you allow to be broken, giving the other side the advantage rather than keeping it for yourself.

QUOTE (Caerulo @ Mar 30 2011, 12:15 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Things I'm not too sure on:
How does a revolt decide an organisation won? Is it when the organisation has earned enough points over the period of the revolt? Or when a particular organisation holds the village leader and a good chunk of the named denizens?

I'm -pretty- sure that a village is won when organization A has accrued enough points above any other competition. Swaying the village leader and the named denizens is usually the best way this can happen since they are worth a lot - but that doesn't mean the nameless denizens are useless either.

That should do for a pre-discussion, but group leadership is another topic I don't feel like tackling right now. Enjoy!

Pretty sure it's possible to get a village even if the leader belongs to someone else. The villagers are worth points, and when an org has X points (seems it is X more than second place, and X varies with village feelings) the village is won over.

Also, as a city, you have another role to make use of. Chanters. Those who can chant Laetitia can go around supporting influencers and debaters by chanting for them.

Also, it's not enough to set up those roles. You need to drill your folks in em. You want everyone to be able to take the role of Watcher, Diverter, Debater and Influencer as the situation demands.

According to admin posts, since the changes, you also need a flat percentage of the villagers in addition to a lead on other organizations.

Yeah, a clan for calling out targets or warning about skills being used is kind of mandatory in zerg combat. Otherwise, you have people hitting five different targets and getting nowhere fast!

Good for you for asking questions and saying you need help. A lot of people try to muddle things through and waste time re-inventing the wheel.

I think you'll find that most people, regardless of ic alignments, are pretty willing to help people out in an ooc setting.

So, prioritize everyone but knights.


...but sometimes knights.

The two main entrances are outdoors, Gaudiguch (and Hallifax but a large part of that city is indoors and thus less an issue) do not have guards that can pull you from other elevations, meaning enemies will fly over them (or scale if that is possible). This problem was solved for other organisations by bard guards. So at this time it is best to keep guards located at locations where the enemy is forced to go indoors (the plaza before the great pyramid, before the pleasure palace, outside the house of the masters). Also since Gaudiguch seems to mainly draw true ascendants, demigods, etc as enemies, I think the guard placement is more likely to be in the numbers of 30 for prime to 40 on Vortex.

As for melds, I am not sure how that works for a place for Vortex, some master melder should come teach us

You can meld Vortex like a boss and make it unbreakable except for from one room.

Also, PM sent. But, disregard my comment as to the guards; didn't realize both outdoor locations and no guards that pull.

Vortex is really the simplest place plane in the game to meld, because you honestly don't have much choice in it. Just meld as much of the falls as you can, except for one room. Doesn't matter too much which room, probably don't want it to be the same spot every time, so enemies have trouble finding it. And I suppose you'd want to have it away from uh... I guess whatever flesh pots you want to defend, or the nexus and orgbix entrance if you want safe entrance for people, or perhaps the dock if you're going to distort and want to make it tough for them to leave.

it is more the breaking part that tends to be incredibly hard, and as things are defenders are more likely going to be breaking than holding.

They'll have done what I just said, so really your best hope is to run around spamming perceive looking for the breakpoint. Could also use a bond or dreamweaving to look for a room not obscured by Duststorm if it's geos that are melding, can't recall if Aero's got something visual like that, and think there's some Aqua effect that makes it show up a different shade of blue. That is, if their melder didn't have the sense to use single room effects in that spot which was the case whenever I did show up to help defend Vortex.

That is pretty much what I feared. Navigating a geomancer demesne is ... not fun.

also for visible effects

aeromancers: blizzard
aquamancers: deep water (deluge)

EDIT: One of the biggest things is morale, and getting people involved. Using CT is a great way to get people involved (They hear stuff going on), as is winning battles. Spending 1-2k on discretionaries is well worth it if you turn the tide of a battle with them, since it'll boost morale far more than saving the power will.

Target priority changes alot based on the situation. From personal experience: If it is a faethorn fight and we have an active melder, we can usually ignore enemy melders and let our melder do the breaking/maintaining of the melds as needed while the rest of us hammer on whoever is next in line. In discretionary powers with gravity and without a tracker of our own, enemy trackers become dangerous because of pits. As such, if there is an enemy bard but who is known to not be so dangerous, the target priority might be the main tracker instead. If fighting mag, and malarious/sahm is around, they might sometimes take priority over the usual melders/bards, because of chainyank or simply the danger of leaving them alone (they'd almost certainly kill one or two of our group if left alone). In a fight where we are forced into an enemy meld with little hope of breaking, the melder would take priority, etc etc.

Exactly which priority to take is sometimes very dependant on where the fight is taking place, who is participating in the fight, and who specifically your opponents are. There is no best order, and the best you can do is to start learning. This means alot of hard work fighting and dying. Perseverance is the most important thing I've learnt in my short time PKing in lusternia.

It's not that Gaudiguch doesn't have people that know what they're doing, it's just that the leadership is 100% noncoms, and thus is slow to act on that knowledge when it is offered. Everything has to go through a full vote with everyone on the FC getting their say, and everyone walks on eggshells instead of just making an executive decision about defense. It is frustrating.



As was previously mentioned, Gaudiguch does not have access to bard guards. As such, we have no way to bring raiders who want to fly over the guards and statues or climb the rooftops back to the ground elevation besides active skills like geyser and hexagram. The net result is that placing guards at the two entrances is next to useless: raiders will just fly over them and then land, head to an indoor area with no statues, and let their group, if they have one, port to them before starting to kill denizens. A better solution, rather than placing guards at the gates, is to place them outside of the Palace and the House of Meditation, so that raiders will have to go to ground level in front of the guards if they want to get at the most likely targets.

Similarly, wihout the ability to use guards to create hard chokepoints where potential raiders are forced to encounter the guards, there is little point in ordering them to standguard permentantly. It would be much better if they pursued the enemy across the city through statues, rather than allowing the enemy to bypass the guards completely as they do now. There's little chance of the guards getting stuck in trees, since we don't have any, and almost nobody uses the rooftops, since they're spotty at best.

PS: Check the Vortex Geography thread for a summary of how Vortex melding works now, and why it sucks.

If you don't standguard permanent your guards, then it becomes easy to break them up to little groups, which, in turn, makes them easier targets for enemy groups. I think Gaudiguch and Hallifax should at least get pseudo bard guards, though; something that'll pull enemies down to ground level.

Agreed. Worth asking your patrons about at least.