Nexus Clash

Fellis Edit: This was originally in suggestions before so that's why the OP is written like that. See my post below, would like to discuss this more!


The sacrifice/overdraw of fonts is heavily biased toward maintaining existing fonts. Each aligned potion sacrifice adds 3 points to the max depth, while each overdraw weakens max depth by 1. This makes the game of occupation and font colonization of land a first come/first served scenario. It has major downstream effects in terms of infusion, and power dynamics.

I suggest we make the overdraws decrease max depth of a font by 2. I think adding this change will make it easier to destroy a font and replace it, but not too easy. At the moment, only forgotten fonts are destroyable. If anyone drops a stack of aligned potions on them, your days or weeks of work can be erased. while this will not fix the balance issue entirely, I think with this change, destruction might be a viable tactic in the font war.

I disagree on the whole concept of waging war on a font's existence.
Font creation can only be performed by three classes in the game, and at heavy AP/MP cost - while they can be enjoyed by whoever wants to tap them. Should we really find in fonts yet another battleground geared specifically towards destruction tactics? Our characters can kill one another, break one another's strongholds, deinfuse one another, break one another's equipment... now should it come to destroying fonts too, that are so rare and are usable by everyone regardless of morality and alignment?
Besides, fonts can already be a battleground, with bars and traps. Yeah, you can't bar or trap the creator of the font, but you can do it on eveyone else, isn't that enough? After the AP/MP spent to create a font, there should be some minimal benefit for the creator.
About infusion, I honestly don't see a problem. If you get 20 XP from sacrificing a potion, you're passively infusing 2 points to your own Faction's alignment. What difference does it make if the font creator is/was Evil, Good or Unaligned? And if a font get sacrificed more by, say, Good factions than Evil factions, that's not a font problem; Evil factions simply don't hang around that territory much. I'm sure the reverse is perfectly true for fonts near an Evil SH, they'll help towards infusing for Evil, just because Evil characters will sacrifice to them more often. If font-related passive infusion was a game-breaking advantage, we'd all be fighting for a spot in the Choral Forest and filling it to the brim with fonts.

Weirdomen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:09 pm I disagree on the whole concept of waging war on a font's existence.

I feel nexus clash is a war on all fronts and that's a central theme of the game. Destroying natural fonts moves them to a new location. And user generated fonts are not neutral - the owner cannot be barred or trapped and most importantly the owner can see the font totals. Information is power. Power in this game is used for competing interests. Having whoever is first to hold a monopoly on this power with little recourse for changing is unfair to me and highly favors older players.

Weirdomen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:09 pm Font creation can only be performed by three classes in the game, and at heavy AP/MP cost - while they can be enjoyed by whoever wants to tap them.

And those same classes are the only ones who can see max depth - and therefore are the only ones that can lead a coordinated effort to destroy a Font. Speaking from experience it takes more time, and more ap to destroy a font than to craft one. Destroying a Font quickly leaves a multitude of uses (potential traps) to discourage the destroyer. And if the destruction is noticed, it only takes a few sacrifices to undo the damage - this will be true even with my suggestion.

Weirdomen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:09 pm About infusion, I honestly don't see a problem. If you get 20 XP from sacrificing a potion, you're passively infusing 2 points to your own Faction's alignment

This adds up. A lot. Especially if you are leveling new characters.

squib wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:44 pm And those same classes are the only ones who can see max depth - and therefore are the only ones that can lead a coordinated effort to destroy a Font. Speaking from experience it takes more time, and more ap to destroy a font than to craft one. Destroying a Font quickly leaves a multitude of uses (potential traps) to discourage the destroyer. And if the destruction is noticed, it only takes a few sacrifices to undo the damage - this will be true even with my suggestion.

I see the appeal, but I also see the danger of just making the Nexus overall poorer (of fonts) for everyone. Take Stygia for example, I'm not even much invested in Evil factions, but there's such a beautiful landscape of fonts there (as opposed to Elysium). I'm not sure that Stygia-based Evil factions have the people and AP to tend to all of them. And if a Good faction destroys any of them, they're not going to combat-rebuild anything there. There'll just be one less font around, which the Evil factions will have to rebuild, with time. As Good-invested as I am, I like the idea of more fonts for everyone.

squib wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:44 pm

Weirdomen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:09 pm About infusion, I honestly don't see a problem. If you get 20 XP from sacrificing a potion, you're passively infusing 2 points to your own Faction's alignment

This adds up. A lot. Especially if you are leveling new characters.

What I meant is just (and I'm sorry if I was stating the obvious) that font-related infusion will be neutrally towards anyone that's sacrificing. If, say, an Evil faction has created a font near their SH, then their sacrifices will infuse towards Evil, but if hypothetically a Good faction moves nearby and starts sacrificing to the font, their infusion will be toward Good... the font stays neutral in regard to the direction of the infusion. Let the poor font be. :)

It will still be very easy to fix up a font. Any font in active use can be massively bolstered with sacrifices and is not under threat even if overdraw leeched 4 MP let alone 2. This update helps (slightly) clear the landscape of old fonts that are not being upkept, gives the overdraw mechanic a bit more oomph, and is a good thing.

I somewhat disagree with the premise of this suggestion. I think the most important change that needs to be made is for overdraws to be the actual selfish move again.

Earlier in the breath overdraw basically meant you got free mp from overdrawing a font, at the cost of the font depth. Now, there's virtually no actual incentive to overdraw aside from actively trying to destroy a font. I think reverting that change or doing something like it would be a better first step, then see if the overdraw amount needs to be buffed.

Also, I think this would enable a 'sacrifice a pot to drain a font' strategy, where you sac for +1 then overdraw for -2. This would let a person destroy a font too quickly. 3 people working together could destroy any font in a cycle, which isn't really fair IMO.

This is probably more of a mechanics discussion thread as not even dev has good consensus on what it should look like, and it's absolutely something to have some broader input on. SO THREAD MOVED

squib wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 3:01 pm The sacrifice/overdraw of fonts is heavily biased toward maintaining existing fonts.

Weirdomen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 8:09 pm I disagree on the whole concept of waging war on a font's existence.

Quoted you all just to ping folks because I moved the thread.
A bit of history and understanding is good to understand what we're looking for with this mechanic. And that Fonts are a "relatively" new mechanic by nexus standards, so there is some room for creativity or out of the box changes to it. For a long time there were just neutral places of power that anyone could grab spare MP from (called ley lines) with some random assignment of good/evil/neutral "alignment". Sometimes factions would do some soft attacking of others by using up their ley lines (at least I did), but they would never be destroyed, only temporarily drained.

Fonts now have a lot more complexity to them and are more interesting! I think there's room for refinement of the trap and bar mechanics (such as % and maybe traps aren't just completely eff you bursts, but instead per action slaps), but lets keep the scope of this narrow for now.

I think that there should be capacity to "destroy" a font, because there is significant advantage in creating one and being the owner. It is a way to improve an area for your faction and it gives advantages to any activities requiring MP, and a nice XP source. For an example of out-of-the box thinking: if the ownership is what is important, maybe then "destruction" is just something that allows for changing the ownership? I dunno, lets dive in!

Stretch wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 3:06 am It will still be very easy to fix up a font.

Klapaucius wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:37 am I somewhat disagree with the premise of this suggestion. I think the most important change that needs to be made is for overdraws to be the actual selfish move again.

Earlier in the breath overdraw basically meant you got free mp from overdrawing a font, at the cost of the font depth. Now, there's virtually no actual incentive to overdraw aside from actively trying to destroy a font. I think reverting that change or doing something like it would be a better first step, then see if the overdraw amount needs to be buffed.

Also, I think this would enable a 'sacrifice a pot to drain a font' strategy, where you sac for +1 then overdraw for -2. This would let a person destroy a font too quickly. 3 people working together could destroy any font in a cycle, which isn't really fair IMO.

Still generally speaking, Fonts were made very resilient on purpose and I'm glad they were because the construction cost is obscene. I think that while fonts still require almost a week for a character to create they will be nearly indestructible if maintained. If dev team starts messing with the balance of how font depth depletes, I would like us to first code a mechanic where fonts go dormant when depleted instead of exploding. If a font is dormant, it'll lose one of it's creation items and the font creator just needs to drop a new one before someone else drops 7 to re-power it. So we have a failsafe of sorts while we mess with the mechanics. If we feel the balance of maintenance/depletion is good, then we'll probably remove the safety and lower the cost of creation so the whole thing is more dynamic.

Onto specifics of the quotes:
• Agree that the original suggestion is not really enough to change the dynamic easily, font regeneration is very strong
• When overdraw = free MP out of the font, it heavily heavily benefitted anyone with a high MP-cost action. It's an obvious spot to allow for "damage" to the font, but again that is then really influenced by those kinds of actions. I agree this limits the incentive to overdraw, but not sure how to manage that.
• Absolutely correct that sac a pot/drain font coordination is far too strong, before I knew the exact font mechanics I was worried about that exact thing making fonts non-existent because nobody would spend so much effort on something that can die so easily

Some ideas from dev chats that haven't really been developed:
• Fragility of fonts is based on how many fonts of that element already exist on the plane, so it is easier to deplete max depth the more there are. Currently the code allows for one "wild" font of certain elements to always exist on a plane (before you ask, i don't remember off the top of my head, it's all the ones that make sense ok). If the wild font dies, it is dead unless all the fonts of that element are gone, then it will respawn. This is probably not in the wiki, but it's also probably not fully accurate.

• Each element has a certain total strength on a plane, and each font has a max depth based on that strength divided by the number of fonts. Fonts that are "stronger" get a bit more share, not sure how to define/influence strength- maybe age? This is similar to the above, but the former allows for full strength fonts that are more fragile and could be chopped down quickly. The latter has overall weaker fonts that only easy to destroy by having more HP, won't be necessarily destroyed quicker depending.

• As fonts decrease in depth, they get un-removeable bars vs everyone except the owner so that it gets "harder" to deplete a font as you reduce it. I think this would be a good braking mechanism on any implemented means of killing fonts faster