NPC basic "alarm" system

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Suggestion : In NPC base (or maybe player too ?) create an alarm system (with drums or gong ?) that force every NPC of the camp to move to the point or patrol when the alarm sound.

Why ?

  • It will force player to use their intelligence, choose their targets, run away when needed.
  • For the moment, you can exterminate an entire camp by killing every NPC one by one, with the others dancing or making strange noise alone. It’s unimmersive, ridiculous, pretty pathetic for a game of 2015+.
  • Another way would be to revamp NPC detection capacity, a needed work, but probably much more difficult to do.
  • Attacking Faction main base would be much more difficult, and so rewarding.
2 Likes
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It’s a decent idea - and the ‘AI’ of thralls could certainly use some work for immersion’s sake - but I think I can see a flaw.

If I understand you correctly, you are, more or less, suggesting that an attack on a camp thrall would ‘alert’ the rest of the camp - some or all of whom would then rush over to the attacked thrall to defend them, is that right? In that case, what would stop a couple of players from just cheesing every base by luring all of the thralls to one part of the camp (probably to a collection of traps, or an archer ambush), while another player sneaks in to loot all the chests/get all the emotes/whatever? Wiping a camp would be beyond simple if all it took was placing a handful of mines and then firing at the nearest thrall.
Also, knocking out thralls to drag back to the wheel would become almost impossible in all but the smallest camps - you’d need to just take whoever was left after killing almost every thrall - and, given that non-combat thralls (carpenters, blacksmiths, etc.) generally have less HP than combat thralls, getting workbench thralls would be rare indeed.

I see what you are aiming for - and I support the idea - but I just don’t see anyway that thrall AI set up like this will make them any less stupid than they currently are. More frustrating, perhaps, but not really more immersive or less exploitable.

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OP’s idea can be modified to spawn a few extra npcs that would rush to the location, keeping the standard ones in place.

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I think that would certainly work better; I do worry, though, that extra npcs popping in to existence, or emerging from a ‘spawn tent’ or similar, is a bit… retro, I suppose, and might make the game seem a bit dated. Still, it would likely work, increase challenge somewhat, and could be interesting.

I think, really, what the game needs is just some more variety and immersion with thralls. At the moment, every spawn is a fixed position, and (barring a few) every thrall just stands still (I’m counting any static animation, including dances, as ‘standing still’ here), or walks a fixed path. Also, every spawn point either spawns the same thrall type every time, or randomly chooses from a very small pool. So, for every camp you know where every enemy is, and what they are, before you are even in sight of the camp. That’s… a bit dull, and sorta sad.

I think Funcom could make a significant difference to camps by adopting an altered spawn mechanic. At the moment, if a camp contains, say, 6 thralls, then exact locations and types of those thralls are always the same (with tiny variations to type - like a carpenter instead of a blacksmith - and some variation in tier). If the camp, as a whole, had, let’s say, 36 spawn locations, instead of 6, and the camp had a ‘spawn table’ of it’s own, then it could be much more interesting. Imagine that the camp is set to always spawn 6 npc’s, with a minimum of 3 being fighters or archers, and each npc spawns on a random spawn location which is valid for their type. Then, every so often (at a somewhat randomised time interval) an npc may choose to path to a different spawn location (again, a valid location for their type), and play any relevant emote for that location and their type. The result would be a dynamic base, with fighter types moving around patrol points, standing guard, or taking a break by the fire at unpredictable intervals, while the workbench thralls move around inside the camp chatting, pondering, tinkering, or sleeping, as dancers range around, dance by the fire, or visit the altar.

Adding a little variation to the number of thralls in a camp, and possibly patrols from camp to camp, or around larger camps, with these changes would lead to a significantly more dynamic and living world; but, of course, would also add some server load (but I think it could be done without huge load, if implemented correctly).

Of course, none of this would really answer op’s original point :confused: (I probably should be posting this brain-fart as a separate suggestion)

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If we can have an actually functioning Stealth mechanic in the game too, then yeah, why not? But with what we have right now, picking off stragglers on the edges of a camp without everyone noticing is the best we can do.

But currently, an alarm system, as much sense as it would make, would turn the game into “can you fight 30 Nordheimers simultaneously?”

2 Likes
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Maybe a good reason to play in group ? or to use bomb ?
But yes, a fix on the NPC aggro/detection system would be needed, because it’s highly unpredictable for the moment.

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Even if the OP’s suggestion isn’t technically viable I’d accept a station where you could put a thrall in it and any time a hostile creature comes within range it blows the horn sound 2-3 times louder than normal.

1 Like
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This is a great idea, the horn would also be a great alarm, set a fighter on it and it gives you a horn blast alert like the purge horn

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