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Caravan planning table
Doran
Member
Hi!
After the caravan PVP stream I came up with a simple idea to enhance the succesrate of your future caravan travels:
The caravan planning table.
This would be a large table showing the map of Verra, that you and your caravan defenders can interact with.
The owner of the caravan can draw the route he wants to go on it with a pen tool and can give permission to lets say generals/officers of the defenders to draw out their best idea of a route on there as well. And with different colors you might want to encircle points on the map that need extra attention or scouting beforehand, like chokepoints, areas where dangerous mobs are located or roaming around, entry points where you want to convert the caravan into a raft, and other things of that nature.
This table can be unlocked either in the caravansary at the town stage when the caravansary has become such a big enough building it has enough space for it, or better/eventually your own guildhall.
It will only be accessible by people of your own caravan party to keep the chance of prying eyes at a minimum (but beware of moles, even in your own ranks!).
Let me know what you think!
Doran
After the caravan PVP stream I came up with a simple idea to enhance the succesrate of your future caravan travels:
The caravan planning table.
This would be a large table showing the map of Verra, that you and your caravan defenders can interact with.
The owner of the caravan can draw the route he wants to go on it with a pen tool and can give permission to lets say generals/officers of the defenders to draw out their best idea of a route on there as well. And with different colors you might want to encircle points on the map that need extra attention or scouting beforehand, like chokepoints, areas where dangerous mobs are located or roaming around, entry points where you want to convert the caravan into a raft, and other things of that nature.
This table can be unlocked either in the caravansary at the town stage when the caravansary has become such a big enough building it has enough space for it, or better/eventually your own guildhall.
It will only be accessible by people of your own caravan party to keep the chance of prying eyes at a minimum (but beware of moles, even in your own ranks!).
Let me know what you think!
Doran
4
Comments
1. Access to the map should be only permitted by the mayor, since a spy seeing the map would be a disaster.
2. Yours is a good idea. It got me thinking about how a mayor or a caravan master could take certain steps to make a caravan safer. After writing about a dozen things to do, I realized that I should not publish them but rather keep it secret and try it all out after the game goes live. So, I put it all in a Word document for later use and deleted the rest of this post.
That's fine for mayoral caravans, but personal caravans have nothing to do with the node's mayor.
I wouldn't invest time in developing something like this because it doesn't substantially alter gameplay or have any meaningful impact on world events. It might be a neat moment you and your buddies "planning" something, but ultimately, it wouldn't be particularly relevant to anything or anybody else
It's a spoon of salt thrown into the ocean
on your first point i think as daveywavey pointed out, the mayor may or may not want something to do with citizens sending out probably up to dozens of caravans per day at some point and the route they think is best. Taking work out of the mayor's hands here is imo the best thing to do, otherwise it could be too much work because the mayors attention could be used better elsewhere. Also like i implied spies could even be among your own defenders, and for that i came up with the permission system of the caravan master. I think it will be a game of trial and error on who to trust but its best to leave that to the CM. If I as a CM wanted to invite people I talk to at my guild discord to see the route and other points of attention, and one of them turned out to be a mole also talking to attackers in another discord server, it would be my mistake and responsibility. And I could learn from that and not invite that person next time I send out a caravan. For what its worth, my system should be safer than screensharing on discord the plans being discussed and drawn out in Paint or Photoshop for example, because then everybody who want to can see it by default.
It might not substantially alter gameplay too much, but it might aswell be the difference between having a solid plan where everybody who's in, knows their task along the journey from point A to B, and failing to complete the caravan run because we haven't properly prepared the run. It also gives a sense of importance to be part of the planning phase, which yes, might not be relevant to anyone else but for those involved but it can enhance your enjoyment in this specific facet of the game which is always a good thing.
It might be a spoon of salt thrown into the ocean, or flavor added to a stew in the making which is what i would like to call the development of Ashes. And a stew in the making could always use some more flavor, right?
Thank you both for your feedback!
But as a Guild/Group-Feature solely for Caravans ? Sounds cool - but forgive me when i ask : do Players really need this ? In the End of the Day, no matter if everything goes as planned beforehand on such a Table or not,
the Defenders will need to follow, guard and escort the Caravan anyway. At the very Moment it is underway between the Nodes it is supposed to transport Wares between.
I got the inspiration from ARMA III, a military simulation game, haha. It really has its uses in there.
One could say it is more ''utility-candy'', fun to have but not gamebreakingly important ofcourse since no plan survives first contact with the outside world, and reality on the road nearly always differs from your own plans anyway.
But it could be useful to get ''noses pointed in the same direction'' so to speak.
Another version or use of this table could also be drawing out battle tactics when under siege or conducting a siege, so not solely for caravan purposes.