The toxicity of interior and lollypop base types and their negative influence on gameplay

Conan Exiles General Discussion
1

Both raiding and constructing a base is a work of art.

Builder tries to make a base not only ballance between comfort and deffencive capabilities, but also trick the raider into falling to the traps, or wasting their explosive to gain nothing in return by creating mazes of doors or bait rooms full of chests with nothing in them. He can use the temperature spikes to make some parts of the base harder to climb, he can use lava as part of deffencive mechanisms…

In the same time, raider tries to find all the weak spots base have - bypassing spikes by climbing flags, jumping from mountains, spying on the owners to figure out the best (usually cheapest and fastest) way in, the ways to bypass or safely kill thralls, playing mindgames by quessing where the main loot is located, trying to figure out workshop location by the sound of thralls - this all allows for diverse amount of raid plans to be created, making the game fun…

But not for expirienced players, who use only 2 types of buildings - walled interiors or lollypops, because they are absolutley op compared to any other base type.

How to raid interior base? Just bomb the exit for entire raid time nonstop and hope that deffender will run out of resourses (and concidering that repairing is a lot cheaper than making bombs, they probably will not). Repeat every single day until one of you will get bored from that. There is no way around as long as building pieces can be placed without having visuals on placement location, allowing deffender to place foundations around intruders as they try to break in.

How to raid lollypop base? Fast way - is to drop several jhebbal sag’s on them at the same time and hope they won’t kill you before you are done. Slow way - is to spend weeks on removing their land claims, and then bomb them with insane amount of jars from the trebuche. This can only be done if you outnumber your enemies a lot and able to prevent them from restoring claims.

There is no art involved into either building or raiding those bases, only the same, boring and repeatable pattern. All the fun elements about land conflicts are just gone from the game because players found an op loophole and abusing the hell out of that.

But i didn’t came just to complain about it. Here is how easy it can be fixed:

Interior bases: add a raid block, that won’t allow to repair damaged or replace destroyed structures 10 minutes after they received damage.

Lollypops: add gliders, and then no elevated base will be perfectly safe, and people will have to use different approach when building.

This would solve the situation of dying servers, where lollypoppers just raid everyone else without much retaliation, and then just sit in their bases, unable to raid each other until they get bored of that and leave. I witnessed to many servers being emptied by exactly this sequence of events.

3 Likes
2

Wow I play pve on official because I enjoy making beautiful base designs but I didn’t know that this was a problem to begin with. Makes me glad I didn’t choose pvp but you guys have my respect for dealing with this kind of stuff.

4 Likes
3

its because its not pvp base building is geared more for practicality then aesthetic and pve is vice verse. this dude made a post on reddit and people even broke down how to get around these bases so at this point he just sees it his way

5

I’ve got to disagree on the point of not being able to build or repair structures for 10-15 minutes after they’ve been damaged. I do not disagree with the stated problem, but the solution I can foresee having unintended consequences (such as when you accidentally damage your own building during raid window, whether by you, your own thrall, or a teammate). However, one solution I have proposed before that I think deserves further look is; 1) remove the ability to place building pieces without line of sight and 2) remove the ability to snap any building piece that is not fully repaired. Both of these significantly change the defensive game, and put defenders at more risk while they attempt to repair or close off damaged portions of their base, thus giving raiders a fair shake at being able to further penetrate a base or even possibly kill a defender. If a defender has NO ability to repair or build for 10-15 minutes after the last damaged occurred, you will see raiders rip into a base in no-time, just as if it was an offline raid (IMHO).

2 Likes
6

They cannot rip trough the base if they are dead. So go out and deffend. If you can’t do that - well, that’s the point of the game, in pvp someone is stronger, someone is weaker. Attackers surely have no benefits in combat since they need to carry explosives, carry out resourses, deal with your thralls and traps, while dealing with you, constantly spawning and attacking again.

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To deal with lollipop bases… remove elevators from the game.
To deal with repair/building raid defenses… Turn of repair during raid hours, turn off building for 30 mins after piece destroyed or steal TCs from RUST.

8

I like your idea of snapping only to healthy items during raid hours. But to be safe, make it so it has to be 90% of the health and not 100%, as sometimes while building for some reason some areas will have 1-2 hp of damage. So you only have to repair things that have less than 90% health in order to snap to it again.

1 Like
9

The Purge handles this ideally. It seems to me there is already a targeting mechanism within the game that prohibits building and repair. There is also a Battle Standard. Put the two of them together and you have the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of attack options.

Spitball* PvP Battle Standard:

  • Place this to prohibit building and repair.
  • Make it placeable on enemy turf like a bomb.
  • Make it one-at-a-time only.
  • Have a way to make it locatable on the map.


* Just throwin’ it out there. #stewie

3 Likes
10

Without Sag, the only effective way to deal with lollipops is to try and build a diving board. That means you need to attack them elsewhere and fill up their logs, while simultaneously killing their landclaim so you can get close enough. It takes time and it is painful when you go splat while diving from cloud ceiling. There’s usually a temple on the roof: if there’s no alternative, I almost always try to grab onto the altar as a last-ditch effort to arrest my fall.

With interior bases, they almost always have support bases elsewhere. It may sound cruel, but annihilate the support bases and their allies on the server. Then just sit and siege the cave dwellers.

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Barnes, you cannot honestly concider that as a healthy, fun and reliable gameplay mechanics.

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I don’t. In fact, I’m playing on a peaceful server right now rather than doing that kind of stuff anymore. Thanks for askin’.

4 Likes
13

Of course. So why make any change at all? This argument can be used for both sides rather than look at the balance aspect. In reality, someone can rip through the base. It’s often that greater numbers attack lower numbers, and the lower number can defend under the current method. Making it so they can’t build or repair AT ALL during a raid makes the numbers advantage entirely out of balance. Should greater numbers have an advantage? Of course, and they do. So let’s not completely neuter the ability to defend by eliminating repair or rebuilding.

14

The change is needed for two reasons:

  1. To prevent boredom, where several clans who reached end-game can’t do anything about each other, and spending all time on sitting online and waiting for someone from opponents to go offline.

  2. To give everyone ability to retaliate. I bet that ability to actually raid the opponents in normal way would mean a lot more for PVP players than ability to be unraidable. And those who perfer being unraidable - there is always pve-c servers for them, they won’t even notice the change.

1 Like
16

grabs popcorn and sits down with a grin waiting to see where this goes

17

Those bases are hilariously easy to build, maintain and defend. I laughed at the door HP discussion, knowing that you don’t even need doors to setup a hell of a lollipop fortress.

2 Likes
18

Doors are only needed during non raid time. Then its swap to walls for your loot base lol.

1 Like
19

Finally, people with actual pvp expirience who knows reality of the game.

20

a chest with walls and foundations next to your entrepot will make doors irrelevant
a t1 doorfram which holds up the elevator will make the elevator irrelevant

the essence of a lollipopbase is simple

options

  1. they forget to turn on the bubble in time - solution wipe out the foundations with ex+gas arrows in the 30 mins it takes to start the bubble collapsing the entire base
  2. they forget to pull up the elevator - solution take the elevator up, destroy the door with orbs/ex arrows because the door has less hp than the elevator
  3. clan turns on each other due to cheating/assholery/douschbaggery - solution try not to laugh as the clan falls apart
23

Well-crafted and worth the read.

My particular favorite strategy is having more than a handful of nodal bases instead of central ones. Nothing frustrates an enemy like attacking a decoy Turanian Tower filled with wood.

I do believe with the incoming thrall rework we’ll get personnel commands and more.

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Also on the note of people being mad about people repairing as you try to raid an interior base. Are you only throwing down one bomb at a time because if so that’s the issue right there. If you light off 4-5 at a time you’ll be inside long before they can even begin to put a dent in the damage your doing.