I’ve had an idea I’ve been kinda refining over a few months along this lines. Or at least with a similar goal. The idea was that storage (chests, vaults, etc) could not be enclosed by walls and ceilings without a path leading outside the building via doors, gates, and/or hatches. And the reason being is that walls, floors, ceilings, and roofs would receive a massive buff across the board. Like you would still be able to blow through a wall, but it would take an inordinate amount of resources to do so.
This would cause raiders to prefer doors and gates as a means of entry. Leaving much of the base undamaged or lightly damaged and leveling a base would be right out. But defenders wouldn’t be able to abuse this by simply burying their treasure in construction hammer moveable walls.
This idea was formed long before treasure hoards were known, so it could be applied to them as well.
But if we’re only going to allow treasures to be looted, I do believe that some resources may need to be reclassed in some form. Resource raids should be a thing. And obviously I don’t mean stone and wood here. But definitely stuff like Alchemical Base, Dragonpowder, and many other multi-tier crafted resources used in high end equipment and such.
But as the evolution of my idea grew I came to realize that the current crafting table system might need an overhaul. I’m not a fan of having to load benches with material. From a PVE perspective, its cumbersome and extra steps. From a PVP perspective, it makes crafting tables targets. Crafting tables are expensive, have rare thralls in them, and in some builds… are a pain in the butt to place. So when one gets blown up, its no mystery to why the owner is frustrated. Depending on the thrall, that could be dozens to hundreds of hours of play just gone. And when one loses all their thralls like that, its barely one step above having to start a new character in its impact.
So definitely would like to have a system that makes these benches far more resilient if not immune to damage even. But they can no long store materials. Instead drawing it from local storage inventories. Combine this with more storage options, and we can have a really efficient crafting system that allows players to do what they really want to do. Play the game. And given how repairs work and the like in AoW this could lighten the sting of having to replace weapons and equipment. I mean if it was as simple to craft something as click the button once and not have run around getting mats for a dozen sub combines, then that make things more palatable. Not going to say no to side effects solving unrelated problems here.
But then you can kind of course those storage mediums into the hoard room. Thus providing wealth and power to those who can potentially craft high quality weapons and armors. Or at least add a bit to it.
This one I’m not so certain about. Like my biggest issue with it is it sort of breaks immersion a bit. Like we all have radars that show how much gold and silver each of us have. That’s a bit weird and a bit arcadey. But at the same time I don’t want to throw out the idea entirely either.
We don’t have wealth radars that tell us what everyone has. But at the same time wealth IS rather hard to hide. Wealthy people get well known, wealth gets displayed, even the most careful people tend to stand out. With that said a more abstract indicator might be better. So you can tell who the wealthiest people are on the server. But you won’t know exactly what they got. Even better if the system is relative to the wealth on the server. That way actual values are obscurred even more. You can tell if an opponent has less or more, but not what. You still get the information you need without it feeling like a high score at the arcade.
With that said… some may like to see the score and compare them. There’s nothing wrong with that, so perhaps a server setting to toggle that for those that want it. Just in case there’s a few servers out there that may want to have competitions for the largest hoards in a certain amount of time (just an idea, and something PVE servers could easily do).