[IDEA] Let me introduce to you : the Foreman (or Forewoman)

Conan Exiles General Discussion Creative Corner
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Once again, sorry for my English level. I hope you will understand this post.
As I’m in the process of moving my base (a sad story of people spending their time building in front of my door), I have quite a bit of time to think and thought of a slightly different concept of thrall . But that could be very useful for all players. I called him the Foreman.

The foreman is not an ordinary thrall, he is a superior NPC who cannot be placed on the wheel of pain. The only way to have him/her at your service is to pay for. Yes, like a mercenary, an elite. Some foremen will ask for an amount of gold, silver, or even a certain type of legendary weapon to agree to come to your house. Once the payment is made, this NPC appears in your inventory (like a thrall) and you can place it in your base.

This is how it works:

The foreman does not deploy alone. It’s not just a person who will stand and wait for your requests. Each foreman would spawn with their own workshop, workbench, or small work area. This enriches the decor and is more or less large, depending on the type of foreman.

  • Each foreman offers different services but each service must be purchased in exchange for something. Weapon, resources, food, potions…

  • The purpose of a foreman is to improve your existing thralls, offer you additional customizations, even new resources.

Examples:

  • The WeaponMaster is a foreman who appears surrounded by a small training circle for warriors. In exchange of loots, it allows you to assign bonuses to your fighters (+100 HP…) or reset a perk.

  • The Mistress of Ornaments is a woman of exquisite taste, who allows you to earn ornaments in exchange of precious materials. An ornament is a skin, a style that you can assign to an artisan thrall. For example, if you assign this skin (sorry, this « style of sumptuous clothing ») to a blacksmith, you just have to click/drop the skin on the icon of the blacksmith and its look changes. Gone are the greyish rags. We have style in this base !

-The Beastmaster is not just a Teimos. He is a foreman specializing in animals and capable, like the Weaponmaster of improving your pets and resetting their perks.

  • The Gardener appears with a small patch of vegetable patch. In exchange of materials, it allows to create new types of seeds and vegetables (potatoes, carrots, edible roots) allowing to create new recipes

  • The Children of the King in Yellow are three foremen who appear together. It is a troupe of dancers and musicians. Not only do they improve your dancers, but they also make music, juggle and do acrobatics, enough to liven up your dancing room !

Etc…etc…

Thanks for reading !

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I am pretty happy someone wishes to see my real profession in game :rofl::rofl::rofl:. I don’t know if they will exactly use the idea as it is, but surely we need more paid services in this game than the existed. A fighter, an archer and an alchemist is not enough. There should be more crafting positions for sale in the game even this foreman that would boost every position, why not :man_shrugging:.

About your issue of moving, if you play pve use pvp flags. I always move all my base in a couple of hours just by removing bracelet in front of the flags, spawning from bed to bedroll. All you have to do is go to where you want to build your new base and place some foundations, a pvp flag and a bedroll. The others are easy :wink:.

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Interesting.
It may be a bit challenging to implement the radius based features, but if it is tied to something like the thrall pot which has a certain foundation connection radius it could use an existing system.

Would the “pay” system work not unlike a craft station? Put these materials into the Shift Supervisor and then hit craft?

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Relevance has nothing to do with it. You can change relevance at will, and it is not actually that which defines the inner workings of something, it just defines how it shows to you.
For Unreal Engine, the Server works as a “invisible World Builder” which is nowhere actually in the game. The player controller is a bridge that gets things from your client to the server and vice versa in terms of you the human player, but characters are all “pawns” under the control of the server. The fact that you dont see what is happening does not mean it isnt. The problem in this and many other games is that not only the players have a hard time understanding how relevance works, devs too.
You cant actually know what relevance will do to your results until the results are done, because when you get to put system on top of system, the interactions of them flowing through one single “player controller” is already a “scalable probability of failure”, and that is multiplied by the number of players. However the system itself does not prevent you from doing something just because you cant be around to see that thing being done.
What this will cause is sometimes something, like a character, showing up out if thin air because the server knows it is there, but your client is not informed as it is not “relevant”. But that is entirely on the devs account, for not working relevance right.
All that to say there is no technical problems with doing this, only the ones that the core game has.

For a bonus fact, from the game dev “grape vine”, World of Warcraft has an army of invisible bunnies that “keep the system” so the engine can use the same “character controller” (Player or AI) to do stuff instead of making a fully separated system for everything. So when something is happening to you like a curse or buff, in some cases you have an invisible bunny following you and doing the stuff.
In other engines like that crappy Bethesda one, there are invisible characters around " ventriloquizing" ambience to avoid the need of a ambience fully fledged component to do that in a way you can use hearing to find what is making the noise.

The same way, most things in games are made by hiding from the player what is being done.

Still, the one I like the most is those Valve games you “wear” a train to be able to have a first person perspective of riding one.

But in that sense, Unreal Engine gives us the tools to do those things without having to resort to these tricks, by using correctly replication and relevance. But again, it is not easy to get it done when compounding system over system.
The Conan Exiles code has dozen kinds of thralls coded, and if I have found them all, 5 types of character blueprints for thralls. In the game, they use the types you know, over basically one blueprint, being the entertainer a different one but nested on the same one from the others, just adding some stuff for the entertainer work that cant be on the main.

The thing is: They might not be workable to put to players, who have the tendency to complain about things that are not “perfectly working from the get go”, so instead of giving the thing and waiting for feedback, most developers wait to release a foolproof thing to the community so the whinny minority dont trash the game for us all.

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Probably yes. Afterwards, the foreman can also craft an item which, once transferred to the inventory of a thrall or an animal, provides bonuses.
Actually, my concern is that the thralls are being underutilized. They are our only companions but it is not possible to make real Valeria, Zula, Bombaata, Akiro, Subotai… They are silent, static, have randoms perks and seriously lack life (and I’m not talking about all identical faces… omg).

I also find that crops, agriculture, are totally set aside. It’s a shame, when you know that slaves are mainly used for mining, construction and plantations (not too much for combat, since gladiators did not pass through a wheel of pain).

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This can open a big conversation here. Some players try to fix a character that already exists in the game, Conan. Nobody can become Conan, he is already there.
However you can become Valeria, Zula, or any other hero you wish, nothing stops you to do it. And apparently you didn’t pass from a wheel of pain too :wink:. Heroes are meant to be covered by us not thralls, thralls are just support, mindless warriors. So if you wish to play with all the heroes of this novel, join a RP server and choose your favorite hero :man_shrugging:.
Foreman is able to boost a crafter in speed or quality, depending the bench ofcurce and the quality of the crafter, but in no case to craft. Foremans craft cannot be as good as a crafters, it cannot happen in real life anyway, that is not his job.
So a foreman could craft in a working bench but it would be as crappie as yours :rofl::rofl::rofl: or a bit better, but in no chance equal to the crafters :wink:.