I stand by the moderation of this thread. Reopening this only because I do find the constructive feedback useful for my team.
Please adhere to the following:
As always, thank you @Umborls for your interaction with us. We’re a contentious lot, but we’re grateful for your continued patience (stretched thin as it may be) and understanding.
As of this moment, is there any news regarding balance changes to bombs/gods/explosive arrows/etc that are coming down the pipeline now that the stacking issue has been somewhat addressed? I ask because of this particular topic of discussion:
With the removal of fence stacking, drawbridges are now the most secure building method aside from hideous vault spamming. As I’ve said in a previous thread, however, these new issues aren’t problems in and of themselves, but symptoms. As the symptoms of the real problem, if they’re dealt with, but the central issue isn’t, then new symptoms will appear. And the main problem that i’ve witnessed is that building pieces (especially doors) are too fragile in comparison to more…let’s call it “nuanced” structural pieces. Is there anything that you can tell us regarding this matter?
Thanks. That was the idea behind the topic.
Now, that would be freaking awesome. Like a “community wiki” flag for builds.
After reviewing the TOS and clarification notes, I think it might be beneficial to define the differences between “claim spam” and “claim size”. It seems to me that the distinction between the two is the cause of confusion in a lot of players.
Meaning a 10 person clan might have a “claim size” equal to 10 individual players so long as they have no instances of “claim spam”. I think many players are conflating “claim size” with the rules surrounding “build size”. It may be the case that there is no category of “claim size” - only instances of “claim spam” and violation of “build size” rules. However, I often see questions here regarding this concept of “claim size”.
It seems to me @Umborls that your team’s goal with land claim abuse is to target intent primarily and effect secondarily. Any “claim spam” is a violation, whether it is 20 or 2000 foundations.
“Build size”, while a discussion for another time, seems to me to be based on effect primarily and intent secondarily.
Is there anything to be said in regards to “claim spam” vs “claim size”?
@CodeMage if too off topic of the OP’s scope I will delete
It might not be entirely on topic, but I really want to know the answer to this. I’ll just cross my fingers and hope it doesn’t end up derailing the discussion.
Besides, just because I’m okay with it, doesn’t mean other people can’t flag you if they decide you were off topic 
I agree with both of you on this. Intent is important, but @biggcane55 is right. When you are constantly adding and removing people from a team, you need firm guidelines. Ultimately it is an admin’s discretion, but by having firm guidelines made public that clarifies grey areas based on common use cases: I.E. Roads, Arenas, Maprooms, it helps keep everyone on the same page. It also shows that FC actually plays their own game and looks at what players do on their servers. (i.e. how they play FC’s game.) I am glad @Umborls has provided some more clarification around these things.
Yes. This is part of the problem–in my personal and professional opinion–with tying land claim to all building pieces. By increasing building size (in the horizontal plane) players AUTOMATICALLY increase claim size.
This is exactly the kind of feedback I am looking for. Please describe your specific concerns with each of these offensive options (bombs, trebuchets, gods, etc.). If we need to ask that they be rebalanced, then I’m more than happy to get this feedback to the right people.
That’s a great start. Can you spell out what you mean by “nuanced” structural pieces? Are we specifically talking about drawbridges here? Or is there other pieces we could group with drawbridges? What entrance options have you ruled out for your own bases due to their defensive shortcomings?
I somewhat unsuccessfully tried to address this in a previous thread. In my mind it’s binary. You either are unnecessarily extending the land claim of your base or you aren’t. The size of your guild does not dictate how much claim spam you use. Regardless of the size of your guild, you never need to engage in any of these strategies.
Maybe I’m missing something. Please feel free to give me a hypothetical example and I’ll see if there is any gray area that can be better described.
Yes. This is true. Making space for the extra beds, storage, and other things that come with additional members will overall increase your claim footprint on the server. As your guild grows your buildings will grow, and so will your claim size.
Remember that “claim size” does not refer to any of the specific infractions we have described. A 10 man guild doesn’t have more of a right to fence off an entire quadrant of the map that they aren’t using any more than than a solo player. A 10 man guild doesn’t get to cap each surrounding mountain with foundations to block trebuchets.
If the confusion is still with the Walls and Villages example, then maybe I can give you an analogy that would help. Think of the set of a play you would see at a theater. You might see a scene that takes place in a city street. Production didn’t build city buildings on the stage for the scene, but rather have constructed a flat wooden backdrop which has been carved and painted to look like buildings. The backdrop looks the part, but no one is living in these buildings.
This is the spirit of that example. We just don’t want to see a bunch of empty buildings that are just taking up space without serving a function. Because at that point, taking up space and looking cool is the only functions they serve.
I’d just like to point out that when it comes to things like bridges in particular, there was a time when they did serve a purpose. But things have changed. We can now swim while dragging thralls, and mounts make traversing the terrain much faster. This reduced the need for bridges over rivers and canyons and whatnot.
Ah, drawbridges!
A favourite (read:pet peeve) of mine.
I do find their HP relative to the HP of Gates, Walls, and even the foundations they sit upon, to be somewhat high.
Honestly, just looking at them, they should be able to be dismantled by hand, yet they have HP greater than the much more sturdy looking tier 3 stone walls.
I hadn’t addressed building for PvP in my previous post, but it looks like someone was shaking Pandora’s box to see what was in it…
Most tier 3 gates have 32.5k hp. The Drawbridge chunks in at 200k.
By comparison tier 3 walls have 70k and foundations 100k (fence foundations 90k).
Arguments could be made that as a larger piece, it should have the hp of several pieces, but due to the way explosions work, in that multiple pieces may be damaged as opposed to the Drawbridge (or Gate) taking only one instance of the damage, it sorta becomes moot.
Given that currently sword has far outstripped shield in terms of power (offense in raids has a huge advantage due to the current building restrictions which basically removed the most common means of creating defense in depth while doing nothing to blunt the power of explosives) we are going to see builds use pieces with the most hp in the tightest bundle possible.
Amusingly enough, throwing a chair up to brace a wall is a common trope, and thrones do have many hp.
Previously, my suggestion has been to lower Drawbridge HP to something along the line of tier 1 or 2 at most gates. Even better, have three tiers of Drawbridge just as there are three tiers of gate.
However, that suggestion has not age well in the current dynamic.
Instead of softening the Drawbridge, the remainder of tier 3 building pieces aught get a significant hp boost.
Dragonpowder can have it’s production speed (not as relevant anymore with speed building) increased and cost decreased through advanced crafting stations and thralls. Rebuilding has no such option.
Mind you, this benefits my PvP style immensely. I’m a solo despoiler. In PvP I don’t build pretty structures and have prisoners with jobs pampering me. I bring pain and ruination to my enemies (never unprovoked, I wait until some starts stuff, I may be a jerk, but it’s not arbitrary). It has gotten so much easier. With basic harvest runs for supplies and sneaking in to other people’s bases to use their craft benches, I can amass enough explosives to severely inconvenience of not induce rage quit in most foes. It’s easy. Especially on Console where one has to waste an item slot with the repair hammer to do any damage control.
If my one man tantrum can tear down primary fortifications with regularity, I can only imagine what a competent demolition team with the resources of a clan backing them could do.
PvP building patterns will always be impacted, if not dictated, by what is pragmatic, weighted towards the most impenetrable. If defenses are too weak, it prevents players from roaming out to do anything. Strong defenses are not meant to defeat invaders out right, merely make the resource cost of aggression high, and buy time for the manor lords to get back to base and mount an active defense before important damage is done. When walls are tissue, this encourages everyone (with a build) to just hunker down during raid windows and bite their nails behind their thin walls. Meanwhile, vagabond reavers like me run rampant and free.
I suppose Howard would have approved…
This is a bit of a sidenote here, but as it was mentioned specifically already I thought it would not stray too far from core concept.
Could we have a word about stairs and elevators on the cliffs? My base is in north, and people frequently closes the passage between the desert and the north that are located rigth in the middle of G8, as the crevice in O11 too. Aparently it was not against the rules in the past, so we had to build stairs and elevators on the big cliff that separetes the north and the desert to avoid walking a big extra distance to make another route, and climbing with dragging a thrall is not possible. Even the passage in G8 needs a little stair to go up, some times i avoid to the max to release the thrall on the chain because it could bug in various ways, they can fall undermesh, if you teleported they vanishes and if you release the chain it will be lost, or they simple disapear if released. So those stairs and elevators was of much help, i used to has a stair down to the cliff in northwest corner of H7. Other player had it before me and when he leaves i made one my own, since the update on ToS i removed it.
If I could describe it in a hypothetical, maybe something like:
If I were to build fully functional, with zero claim spam, TOS compliant bases placed at random locations infinitely - would the total area of my land claim reach a level of “abuse” before the rules on “build size” find me in violation?
Many of the “unfair ban” threads will claim to have no “claim spam” violations just regular bases and big clan numbers. They will assume their combined area of land claim is the abuse grounds for their removal. I can tell them they are lying about no “claim spam”, that they might have violated “build size” rules, but not that the extent of their alleged legal land claim was or was not a violation based on the language in the TOS.
I agree with you that land “claim spam” should be treated as a binary. This is more a question about the limitations of “legal land claim”. Personally, I think the “build size” rules sufficiently police over zealous “legal land claim”, but I think knowing by which measure my hypothetical is limited we can eliminate a significant amount of confusion.
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Edit:
Didn’t see this part. This is what I am asking about, roughly speaking. I think a statement on this “claim size” issue as a part of the TOS/clarification notes would be beneficial as it gets brought up here very often.
Realistically defence is way out of whack with offense, of course off server people can farm infinite ammount of bombs then deploy them on transfer.
A good thing to counter this could be some kind of ingame spymaster to give you information on the “portals” they have traveled for coin.
the nuance of how defence is at the moment is many are using drawbridges because they cant be blown in one volley and thus can be repaired, but I am also seeing people not use doors at all (because they are so weak) and use pickup walls/foundations/fences even gate frames wedged in base locations like the “keyhole” (so you basically have to blow through a gate to get to the base) others are also blocking with vaults which can absorb a ton of punishment thats basically how on the ground defence post fence stack is working, gods specifically are rather decent for clearing drawbridges however if a shield is up or god trap this becomes impossible.
I would love to see claim removed from trebuchets, I know its possible as I did it in a mod once, you can then not worry about people building fake raid claim bases around their base with alts etc.
The biggest issue for officials os offline raiding. Most claim builds are mainly to force slow raiding while offline and living a semi spocal life. If DbD was ever turned on and let run for a bit on officials, we may see real feedback.
As far as bombs, 2 things move them to altars to craft, and add in a 1 sec placement animation.
As far as defensively, repairing could become an issue with live only raiding. So make it a true 3 sec animation to repair, and make it only for direct contact (in other words 2 foundatuins wide, i cant repair thru the 1st wall to fox second).
Bombs are too easy to make, too easy to place, and too easy to detonate.
None of this will fix the core of them, though, which is their alpha strike damage. I’ll get into that later
Trebuchets are cool, but really really difficult to use. I haven’t playtested them myself, but I do know that in my experience, they’re not worth the effort when normal bombs do the treb’s job better than the treb does 99.9% of the time (Remember: 56.97% of all statistics are made up on the spot, so YMMV)
Gods, again, are cool, but there are so many reasons not to use them. Mostly this: If they have a bubble, they’re immune. Gods, in my eyes, should be the be-all-end-all of destruction, and in a sense they are. However, they have several flaws.
I don’t think gods need a nerf. I think that the bubble should be slightly smaller and that gods should have some of their janky behaviors fixed
I also believe that the ways of attacking are too limited, so everyone gravitates towards one raiding method as being the “correct” way of raiding. Balancing the offensive weapons against each other, you can see why bombs are regarded as being OP.
I’d be glad to! At the same time, I’ll address a couple other issues I’ve noticed.
When I say nuanced structures, I mean structures being used in ways they were obviously not meant to. Drawbridge stacking, gate stacking, vault spam, Improved Beehives as pillars, Thrones in doorways, and other building pieces/placeables with out-of-scale HP are what I think of when I think of weird interactions. I believe that their HP is too high, and should be brought down to reasonable levels. This, however, needs to happen in conjunction with increasing the Base HP of standard structural pieces to something viable, especially doors. A fence stacked hallway of 20 doors sounds like a lot, but would take only about 60 bombs to get through. Which a solo can farm in about an hour. And now that we can’t fence stack, it’s even worse. This is why no one in their right minds uses doors anymore since we can pick up building pieces. I’m not sure what would be considered balanced, but I believe that doors in particular should have about 85% of the HP that an equal-tier wall would have. Doors should still be a weak point for your base, of course, but not a crippling weakness.
While on the topic of building HP, I’ll loop back to bombs: their damage is too high. If we reduce the HP of the out-of-scale structures, and increase the HP of standard building pieces and whatnot, bombs are still out of scale. Their alpha damage needs a rebalance, and perhaps the rest of their damage can be from the D.O.T. that the resulting fire (which can be put out with a water orb IIRC, and if it can’t, it should be).
(While we’re on the topic of drawbridges, can you let someone know how much we’d like new drawbridge textures? I’ve got all these DLC pieces and want a nice looking drawbridge to go with it pretty please ^^)
First of all the building System in Conan is one of the best in my opinion. To test your base in PvP with some castle sieges and stuff was one of the fun part for me.
For just playing plain pvp I can go BF or CS and so on.
Now I got banned 2 times already just because I have fun building in this game on official servers and have fun when this base get attacked and we try to defend it.
Before last ban all clans got raided from a single clan with a good amount of people and pvp experience and after they wiped the bases they reported every single clan on the server.
So 4 clan got banned for small to medium size bases, all under 10k building pieces.
I never had that in any game I played that the most fun part in game gets you banned.
I understand that big foundation spam and stuff can be considering for deletion, but I think what is now happening is going way to far.
Suggestion:
1.Do a building piece limit for max 50k building pieces. If you guys go lower give some more defense capabilities. The worst part is always the offline raids.
With now just small allowed bases you are in after 15 minutes, so most people go for body vaults and teleportation. Aggressive clans go for short 3-5 days raiding on a server and delete or
take stuff with them after server got mostly empty. Mostly they have a big amount of teleportation accounts too. The fun part when you got into a base from more aggressive players
and get some loot is gone. Revenge is in most of the cases not possible.
This small bleed traps and stuff are nice ideas but they don’t work because they got exploded very fast.
2. Or go direction like Myth of Empire with this border system. 3 border max and you can increase range up to some range.
3. Or do more building blockers for places you think should not blocked for ressources.
Overall you guys need to get the systems working. Punishing players hard for this is bad advertisement. On pvp I personally saw land claim never as a big problem.
Most of this people loose fast interest, there might be a small percentage who not but I saw many big land claims come and go. The bigger problems are always exploiters, cheaters and
the bugs and netcode issues. For example when you climb a foundation you can’t often dont get it climped for 3-4 trys since it lags and this problem is now in game for almost a year.
Or such small things when you jump and hit attack on mouse a few times it starts a small lag spike depending on camera direction.
Not a big deal of course but there are definitely some network errors in the code.
Last but not least I don’t think that bases (exteriors) need to be loaded out of the game so quickly on PC. This causes the most lag when a chunk gets loaded in and out, not the actual rendering.
Of course interiors like light and stuff can be unloaded before exteriors what is often not happening. Shadows is the most consuming part in this game.
On the GPUs that needs more Watt you can see and insane decrease of watt usage and increase of FPS if you lower shadow resolution (more on big bases).
At the risk of derailing my topic, I’m going to be that guy and say: no, let’s not implement a building cap.
It’s been said, time and again, that a building cap would not solve any problem with the TOS rules, because the rules are not about the number of pieces. The rules are about how you use building pieces, placeables, and thralls. If you look at all the clarifications @Umborls has posted so far, there’s no mention of the number of building pieces being something that needs to be capped. So far, it has all been about the usage of the pieces and the intentions behind that usage.
There have been many topics discussing that and some of them are even still active, so we can take further discussion there if you want.
If you’re saying they should add more no-build zones, then that’s also something many of us are against, unless they add a configuration option to disable them on private servers and in single-player mode.
I’ve been on these forums a while and never seen you around @Umborls so I’m assuming you’re new to the CE mod team. Welcome.
If you want DETAILED explanations of building balance problems in PvP simply go into my user profile and browse my post history. I have started and been involved in MANY conversations over the past 2 years with regards to the game’s issues and shortcomings.
The TLDR is: you guys (i.e. Funcom) are starting to enforce rules on your servers to curb over-building. Generally this is good, as it improves server performance all around.
HOWEVER, many PvP players–in particular those that love building–have been VERY upset over recent changes in policy, policing, and the removal of fence stacking and OTHER stacking of building pieces. Why? For the same reason that over-building has become rampant in Conan PvP: because siege weapons like bombs and arrow/orb combos, are simply too strong compared to building HP at T3. Without fence stacking, or stacking other pieces, it is entirely possible to wipe a T3 (which, remember, is the END GAME BUILDING TIER) base with bombs in less than an hour, often in less than 30 minutes. I’ve seen people be raided in the time it took them to take a wizz. It’s ridiculous.
The castle that was build to showcase the Nemedian DLC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is6UvpHsEHA) could be completely emptied out with bombs in less than 10 minutes by an experienced player like myself. Similar to the bases shown in the game’s launch trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNOcrCV-N7E). On PvP these bases would be considered “HORRIBLE”. The fast TTB (Time to breach, as I have called it in my tests–defined as: the time to breach a base and reach all of its workbenches, chests, and vaults) leaves little response time for the defending clan to mount a defense and therefore results in less PvP engagement; just PvE (Raiders vs Thralls and Walls–thralls which can be safely nuked with Acid or Poison damage from a distance). This is with both clans already online, to not even talk about offline raiding.
On top of this, other members of the team have communicated that even the Nemedian DLC base and the trailer bases that I am discussing are “too big” for official servers. If you guys want us building bases smaller than that, then PvP defenders are going to need a lot more Time To Breach (i.e. more building HP and/or Reduced Siege Damage).
Also, a lot of builders are very unhappy about the fact the we were sold a building game by your marketing department and we can’t even build the bases that you guys advertised on official servers.
EDIT: I also just fully read the Rules about Walls and Villages that @Umborls posted. Most of the examples provided are super weak in PvP. So yea. These new rules are killing PvP because buildings are too soft. Also…@Umborls I just quit playing officials due to all these changes and hackers ruining your fun. I’m all for the new, clear policies, but if the dev team doesn’t rebalance Siege Damage or Building Health to compensate PvP servers are going to stay down–most of the people I know have quit since I told them about fence stacking being illegal.
Oh hey, the build piece limit dire mammoth entered the room!
This one has noted that not all pieces seem to impact performance equally.
With this in mind, and please, bear with this one…
In Genshin Impact there is an item that gives one an extra dimensional space to build in.
The space has a load limit.
When you go to place an object, it displays green, yellow, or red. Depending on how close to the load limit one is. Of course, not every piece has the same impact on load. Animated objects, large objects with many textures, interactable objects all have higher loads.
Something in the same vein, a display of how high the load at the area is, so people know if they are overburdening, would be lovely. Not a hard limit, but a very solid clue that the reasonable limit is being reached would be lovely.