Hello Funcom. I just heard the upcoming follower cap and I think it is not a good idea the way you want to make it. My idea to make this ( if it really happens) better! A Barrack system!
So let say you can have only 60 placed fighters, but you want to have more. You craft a barrack and place it in your base like a wheel of pain or a vault. And you can store the thralls in it that are over the limit or not needed. Only for fighters, archers, dancers and bearers off course! You just go to an unneeded thrall and press E, and there would be a “Send to Barrack” option. The thrall then transported to the nearest barrack.
There would be 3 tier of barracks.
Tier 1: Simple barrack, can hold 10 thralls. (10 slots of inventory)
Tier 2: Barrack, can hold 20 thralls. (20 slots of inventory)
Tier 3: Improved barrack, can hold 30 thralls. (30 slots of inventory)
If you select a thrall icon in one off the slots you can view that thrall and its armour and weapons on the right just like you do with placed thralls when pressing “E” on them to see their inventory. That way you can add or remove their stuff even if they are just stored thralls.
On PvP you could use this to have more fighters so if a purge or raid is going on and your fighters die you could just grab some reinforcements from the barracks.
Well this would be my idea to make this cap thing a little more endurable for players who don’t want to loose any of their thralls.
Please Funcom consider my idea, because I think this would work.
You know what? That is an awesome idea! It’s not trivial, but I’m willing to bet that a lot of the building blocks in their engine are already there: the logic for the Animal Pet is similar to your idea for Barracks. Some of the stuff you’re asking for might not be feasible, but it’s a core of a great idea!
I don’t think Funcom will listen, but thanks for posting it!
I would love to see barracks in the game. However i think that it would not be necessary to create a new building, it would be enough to expand the possibilities of the wheel of pain and maybe the animal pens so that unused followers can be stationed there.
I particularly like this function, it is very suitable.
This idea was considered in early stages of the thrall leveling system, but would turn to be quite taxing to the server, totally defeating the main purpose of the cap in the first place.
I don’t think so @Ignasi. Maybe I am wrong but I would say @Dragonman means, that when you send the Fighter/Archer/Dancer/Bearer Thrall to the Barrack this Thrall will vanish from the map but you still own him, like you store him in a chest. I understand this as a reserve function, if you loose one Thrall you can directly replace him with a new one from the barracks. Am I Right @Dragonman?
I’m not for pre-built buildings, but I will welcome a BED-based system. You can build your barrack the way you want, but you must have a bed for each 2-3 thralls. 50 bed -> 100-150 thralls.
Here’s is my to cents. This should only apply to PVP servers. I mainly play PVE. Thralls don’t attack players during PvP times anyway. Thrawls are window dressing. But they are my window dressing. I tammed them and equipped them. Most with the best gear in the game. And with the theme of my base. Kitan, black ice, etc. It is very important to me and my clan for funcom to realize the time investment it takes to get legendary thrawls. My clans, 2 groups of 8,10) are considering leaving this game. Which is a shame. I really want to know how this makes sense for PVE. Are they going to have these new followers attack players during PvP? All my name thralls I have do I lose them outright or do I get to pick and choose to break their bond?
They really need to flush this out. This really is going to break the fun of this game. I don’t want to have to level up 55 followers to Max level. That is truly tedious.
If they want this to work we should be able to have multiple followers following us. Much like WOW did. Pet and thrawls
That is an interesting insight, @Ignasi. Thank you for sharing it with us. Is there any chance you could help us understand which aspect of this is taxing to the server?
From what I understand about this suggestion and about how servers work, I was under the impression that keeping the followers inside the barracks would be no different from keeping them in chests – no server-side simulation to run, no catch-up logic involved, no expensive periodic operations (like thrall feeding constantly accessing the thralls’ inventory on a regular basis), etc. I’m extremely curious about what I got wrong and would welcome a chance to learn more.
Maybe I haven’t had enough caffeine today, but I can’t see it. Can you help me spot it? (genuine question, no snark)
The way I understood this, it’s basically:
Keep thralls in barracks like in chests. No simulation or server-side logic involved with keeping them in barracks.
Be able to send a follower to the barracks using the radial menu. This is what makes barracks different from chests – remote storage. Maybe this particular bit is somehow taxing to the server, but I don’t have any clue why that would be. Perhaps if you implement it as “send to nearest barracks”, that would incur a performance penalty because the game would have to look up the nearest barracks. But there’s a simple solution for that: just like each placed thrall knows what was the last guarding point and can teleport back there when it’s in the “returning home” state, it can also know what barracks it came from.
Be able to pick up a thrall from the barracks. As far as I understood, this isn’t remote teleportation or anything, this is literally just like picking up a thrall from the chest.
Kinda like entities, actors, components and blueprints in the engine I’ve worked with. Makes sense, but I honestly didn’t think adding a barracks component to the thralls would make it that taxing.
Another problem that just occurred to me might also be the resource usage involved in being able to convert a follower actor back into an item placed inside the barracks container. I think perhaps that is one of the reasons why we can’t pick up placed thralls. I haven’t actually looked at the devkit and modding of Conan Exiles, so I don’t know this, but I have a hunch that a thrall actor has a bunch of properties that are randomly generated when it’s placed and the thrall item does not have to keep track of those. Having to track them would increase memory usage drastically.
Thanks for helping me reason about this! I might still be way off and completely wrong, but at least it’s fun
There are a couple of pickup mods, but the function can easily be exploited (and probably in more ways then I know). That’s my hunch as to why follower pickup isn’t in.
I’m sorry, I didn’t explain my concern clearly enough. The new thrall leveling system adds a bunch of new attributes to thrall actors: strength, agility, vitality, accuracy, survival, level and perks; there might be others that I’ve missed. A thrall item, on the other hand, doesn’t have these. If I’m right, it should just have a reference to the blueprint for that particular breed of thrall (e.g. Zingaran Archer II) and this blueprint has all the attribute roll chances and other bits of data that pertain to this breed. This data is defined once for each breed and shared for all instances of it.
If you allow players to convert a thrall actor back to a thrall item, that would mean the items would now have to store all that data. So now if the follower cap restricts your clan to a maximum of 100 followers, you could still hog a boatload of memory just by having 1000+ followers in barracks.
I’m entirely unconvinced that adding a “barracks component” to follower actors will have such a drastic increase in processing when placing a thrall. It might be that they want to limit how often thralls are placed, because if 40 players kept placing and picking up thralls frequently and simultaneously, that might be taxing. It still sounds iffy, because it’s not really something that the players would be doing so often.
Interesting. I would expect this to have approximately the same cost as storing the weapons and armor in chests. Then again, if that bit is the real problem, then wouldn’t it be easy to cut it out of the implementation and let people manage that stuff on their own? Hell, you don’t even have to store armor and weapons together with the follower in the barracks, just have the whole inventory drop in a lootbag when the follower is sent to the barracks.
I’m more inclined to believe that memory usage is a big problem, as I speculated above. And there might be some processing load involved with converting followers from actors to items and back, like @estevanweb claims.
Yep, limiting the frequency of thrall actor-to-item or item-to-actor conversion, I get it. Somewhat plausible, but not entirely convincing given all the numbers in the formula: let P be maximum concurrent players online (40 on official servers), E the expected probability of a player placing/storing a follower in barracks and C the cost of doing so. I don’t think PxExC is large enough to be called “taxing on the server”, unless you modify one of those numbers to be way higher. Which leads me to the next point:
So what we’re talking about here is not normal usage, but intentional and malicious abuse? As in, a clan agrees to keep placing and picking up followers in a rapid succession, in order to intentionally lower the server framerate? That might be a valid argument.
Uh, I think there might be some misunderstanding here. There is nothing in the proposal that would allow the players on official servers to unleash 100 thralls at once. The maximum number of concurrent online players on official servers is 40. If all the stars aligned, you could unleash 40 thralls at once.
As for the rest of your post, please don’t get offended when I say this, but I do understand how concurrency, resource usage and other programming concepts work. Please believe me that, in my 20+ years as a professional software developer, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to learn a lot about this. Only 2 of those years were in a game studio, but I’ve had plenty of years designing and implementing highly scalable systems with lots of concurrent users
As much as I hate this phrase, I guess we will have to “agree to disagree”. Apart from intentional, malicious abuse of the feature – which I agree could be a problem – you haven’t presented any other argument that I find convincing.
Not that I don’t believe the feature would be taxing for the server. I’m just convinced that the memory usage would turn out to be a much bigger problem than what you’re arguing.
barracks in the game. However i think that it would not be necessary to create a new building, it would be enough to expand the possibilities of the wheel of pain and maybe the animal pens so that unused followers can be stationed there.
