Map: Barricades block flying

[iButt]

we'll see how big a deal it is, people were complaining Fly sucked in B4 so I think Fly having some advantage over the runner classes who can get barricaded is fine

You'd need people making barricades in first place though. And since everyone can get around barricades, I can't imagine most people would bother. At least, not enough to get sufficient data.

I feel the same.

[sekki]

Well now that we’ve seen, at least to some extent, barricades in action it does seem like they have mostly panned out as expected.

PH has roughly entered the age of ubiquitous barricades that are only being attacked because attacking barricades is good/reasonable exp depending on class. (But attacking barricades to get inside is not common due to several layers of barricades). Aka “lol have appropriate T3 movement or get reckt”. Aka the rich (T3s) get richer and the poor (T2s) get poorer.

[Huojin]

Definitely agree that barricades are gonna end up completely unused at this rate, especially once we hit an era with much higher numbers of T3s. It's a pretty worthless pay-off to invest Infusion + Structural Engineering + lots of AP and MP on both to build barricades when people can ignore them.

I think the "ceiling" idea could be a good solution. Perhaps if the tile is barricaded over a certain level on all sides, you can build a cap over the top of the tile. That way you're investing at least as much AP as it takes to build the barricades up to a sufficient level on 4 sides and to build the ceiling barricades. Seems a reasonable balance between attackers and defenders, and would equalise things significantly.

[sekki]

At the *very least* PMs need to be unable to move past/bring their pets past hostile barricades.

The only reason there aren’t a bunch of complaints about PMs slaughtering entire barricaded areas is because the current set of PMs afaict are being nice about it.

Because it is absolutely trivial for a PM to waltz into a barricaded area, let their pets lose and kill everyone in a pseudo-SH. It’s oppressive and given the current state of defenses *incredibly hard* to defend against. (Spelltraps are useless, glyphs are situational, the only thing that really works is a defending pet wall. So literally only opposed by other T3s).

[Fellis]

I'm not confident that barricades are a compelling enough mechanic, and expanding them to force people to interact with it could just be bad. If we increase the amount of interaction with barricades via forcing T3 to respect them, then they massively benefit factions and groups that are larger and better organized. Port Hope has been miserable if you aren't Good, and returning to that doesn't seem ideal.

Aka the rich (T3s) get richer and the poor (T2s) get poorer.

With only 6000 to T3 I'm much less concerned about this honestly, there's plenty you can do especially with the outer planes being turned on.

Definitely agree that barricades are gonna end up completely unused at this rate, especially once we hit an era with much higher numbers of T3s. It's a pretty worthless pay-off to invest Infusion + Structural Engineering + lots of AP and MP on both to build barricades when people can ignore them.

I think the "ceiling" idea could be a good solution. Perhaps if the tile is barricaded over a certain level on all sides, you can build a cap over the top of the tile. That way you're investing at least as much AP as it takes to build the barricades up to a sufficient level on 4 sides and to build the ceiling barricades. Seems a reasonable balance between attackers and defenders, and would equalise things significantly.

Barricade ceilings don't make a lot of sense w/r/t the scale of the game. I know there's plenty that doesn't but I'd like to figure out a different way to force interaction. One idea I had was what if barricades blocked dispels, because now we have an already established game mechanic (glyphs) to force T3 to respect barricades. This would involve a lot of other changes also, but some things have already been discussed in dev like: glyph mastery doesn't increase health of glyphs instead increases duration; glyphs can cover 3x3 with higher casting cost (but dispelled as one); etc.

This has it's own problems, like the amount of territory that can be effectively controlled, and the obvious higher amount of structures you have to go through to get to a SH. But with the higher emphasis on alignments working together, I could see more combined arms vs harder targets.

[sekki]

With only 6000 to T3 I'm much less concerned about this honestly, there's plenty you can do especially with the outer planes being turned on.

Outside of aligned books and evils doing pet hunting in stygia I’m not really seeing how they add much to the exp equation.

I am making several assumptions here which may be flawed:
Exploring the outer planes while interesting is actually not a way to get exp except for evils in stygia.
Getting pp is difficult: hence casual hunting in Stygian by non-evils is difficult.
Goods don’t want to hunt pets in Ely for morality reasons. Casual hunting by other alignments is difficult for pp reasons.
Transcends are just sad seeing as there are no pets in Purg at all.

I personally don’t find “the path to T2 is shorter” as a compelling reason why T2s should suffer something that is bad to force T3s to deal with. If barricades are bad then… get rid of them? (easier said then done I know) Or make them harder to build/easier to take down?

[Fellis]

I personally don’t find “the path to T2 is shorter” as a compelling reason why T2s should suffer something that is bad to force T3s to deal with. If barricades are bad then… get rid of them? Or make them harder to build/easier to take down? But the current inequity is really glaring.

The dev team is not a monolith, and I'm just representing my own opinion and interacting with folks in the suggestion forum so people know their posts are getting read. Barricades are a mechanic that were seemingly intended to be primarily a T2 thing only, when T2 was going to be a much longer timescale phase of the game. Devs disagreed with T2 phase being months long, and the XP tables got changed. This has kinda squeezed out barricades as a mechanic.

Honestly unless we have a really excellent idea of how to change up barricades, they are unlikely to change anytime soon. Just a very low priority to figure out how to make a meh mechanic compelling into the endgame. I think the experiment of making barricades aligned rather than hit everyone/non-faction was a success, and there could be value in making the mechanic more engaging. I also think that working on Outposts (non-warded stronghold-like things) would fill in that same T2 pre-stronghold play that we are seeking to make T2 more interesting (among other wild B6 ideas like expanding the amount of T2 classes for even greater build variety)

[sekki]

FWIW (and sorry for posting again hah) I do like the “prot as a ceiling” idea. Sounds basically like “you can’t whack the glyph through a barricade?”

[Fellis]

that last post was not meant to signal to stop talking about this! if it was, I would have just promoted or dumped the thread.

However I do think that further discussion about barricade mechanics in general are better for a mechanics thread in general discussion, rather than a suggestion thread which we prefer to keep quite specific. Sekki made one here: https://www.nexusclash.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=929

[Kandarin]

Barricades simply aren't as well liked as they were originally envisioned, and future changes are more likely to dial them back than ramp up their power.