Landclaim attached to flagpole and bed

[cimbriiblood]

Conan Exiles is my favorite survival game because it accomplishes so well what others have not: building a castle to put it to the test. Between purges and other players, it is so fun to look at the landscape and strategize chokepoints, fortification locations, and balance between ease of access to resources vs difficulty to siege and raid.

One thing that I believe would enhance this awesome experience is land-claim flags. Building pieces when placed would have no ownership, but when connected to a flag they will be owned by whoever owns the flag. A flag would be a tall ( 3 foundations maybe?) but thin placable, making them easy to see and hard to hide. This is a public display of claiming territory! The flag’s ownership can be changed by merely walking up and interacting with it. This means you have to protect your flag! Flags would cover a certain radius and/or building piece limit based on flag tier, (Stone and plant fiber for early game, Layered silk and hardened brick for last, etc.) so that the more land you want to claim or the bigger the fortress, the more flags you need to fortify.

You could choose to put multiple flags in a central courtyard, but if an enemy clan breaks in and reaches that location, your stronghold is lost. maybe you split up your flag locations to protect yourself from such a tragedy, and a clan has claimed one on your walls, then you have only lost your outer defenses.

Flags in overlapping areas would be based on ownership seniority determined by the first claim, so if an enemy captures one flag but you have another covering the area, you still own the pieces attached to yours.

“This is all good for the large clans,” you might be saying “but I’m just a little guy farming out here in the prairie. What happens when those fat cats throw a flag over my lil’ homestead. What about my Landclaim rights? I don’t have enough room in my microbase to put one of those newfangled flags in my kitchen!”
I feel your pain my friend, that is why your bed that you spawn on when the unfortunate accident happens with the local wildlife will provide a limit claim that protects you from NEW claims. If your bed is attached to a flag previously, and it gets captured, well you’re outta luck. But as long as you are not attached to a flag the bed will protect you from squatters movin’ in.

This will prevent some of my least favorite things people do in the game: Griefing and inconsiderate building projects. Griefers will only have two spawn points to use, so they can’t spam beds. Greifers are also unintelligent cretens in my experience, and will either spam unprotected flags or actually build real fortifications to protect the flags, which will be honest work (which they hate, they are griefers after all) and also put them on the defensive.
As for those unfinished building projects that are ruining my view, either pop a flag down and remove them, if protected by bed, destroy it. No longer will we have to wait for decay to rid the land of said structure or farm fire bombs and destroy Every. Last. Piece.

I believe this could also add some fun dynamics as sieges will now have stages, fortresses can now become strategic points that are contested and switch hands from clan to clan, as well as if you wish to declare your independence from your clanmates stealing your stuff from the tower you built because your tired of being bothered, you can just leave clan and claim flag.
What do you guys think about this?

[Tephra]

Sounds more like something that would only be appropriate as an alternate game mode, and not something I would ever hope or expect to see in the normal game.

[DanQuixote]

Interesting idea - PVP’s not my area, but the concept of being able to ‘take’ a wall really resonates as adding both depth and realism of a sort. As @Tephra suggests, I think it would probably have to be a separate game mode (the howls of ‘turning PVP into capture the flag’ would otherwise likely be epic).

It might work well with what I’m starting to suspect may be Funcom’s vision of PVP - easy to build, fairly easy to raid, hard to keep. If I’m right (and it’s a big ‘if’), then this idea might definitely help drive that.