Shattered Kingdoms

I would like the community's help developing an idea for war between Tribunals. The purpose of this idea is to make war more dynamic within Shattered Kingdoms. If players can see the impact of that their characters' make across Pyrathia, it would, in my opinion, increase player enjoyment. I am posting this in Gameplay in the hopes that we will get constructive additions to this idea.

Each kingdom should have a series of keeps and castles (or Capture Points, further discussed as CPs). The general make up of each CP should probably be similar in nature, much like cabal keeps. Taking a CP should have very real impact on the game which could range from a change of kingdom borders, to a change in kingdom revenue generation or even soldier strength either within the kingdom or corresponding CPs within that kingdom.

CPs could have a number of different functions such as, Merchant CP, War CP, Logistical CP, and Diplomatic CP each with a corresponding bonus given to the individuals who captures it. A Merchant CP could give a bonus to kingdom revenue, while a War CP could perhaps give a bonus to kingdom soldiers, Logistical CPs could give a bonus to other CPs owned by the kingdom who takes it. Finally, Diplomatic CPs could lower the cost of wars and alliances.

Let me try to explain all this by way of example: Taslamaran CPs could be The Tower of Rose, the Hero's Inn, Skybolt military outpost, Everclear Fishing Company and The Taslamaran Orphanage and the Taslamaran Embassy. 5-6 seems to be a good number. Note that each CP is not necessarily militaristic in nature, as there is much more to a kingdom than it's military prowess.

Each CP could represent a quadrant of land surrounding it. If Taslamar were to lose control of a CP, their borders might shrink to represent a loss of control over this area. This should be a temporary thing, lasting only until a system reboot (so every couple of days) or until another faction takes the CP. A CP is not as defensible as a cabal HQ, but it can be upgraded in a number of ways. Upgrading a CP would cost a fee (perhaps an obsidian per upgrade). One could upgrade the melee strength of defending soldiers, the armor of it's soldiers, magical abilities or range capabilities. I think one should not be able to upgrade everything, however. There should be a cap on the maximum total upgrades or the upgrades should be opposing toward one another, meaning that if you choose to upgrade A, then B will be unavailable for you to upgrade.

When a CP changes hands, it will be filled with guards corresponding to the faction which took it over. The guards will begin to fill the CP over the course of several real life hours and finish after 5 or 6 hours. This means that a faction would have to actively defend a CP which it recently took over and counterattacks would be effective.

Uxmal should certainly have CPs, also. An individual Uxmaln could take a CP and claim it for themselves. Upgrade the CP would cost funds from the individual's own account, rather than any tribunal's account. How cool would it be to claim your own lands within SK?!

This idea needs a lot of development and that is why I am calling upon the SK community to build it with their own ideas! For the most part, I think the coding for such a system exists already. Mostly, the idea needs further development, CPs would need to be selected and have room descriptions written. This could be a really unique addition to Shattered Kingdoms.

Suggested this several times, I think it would absolutely transform tribunal wars, in a way that is good. It is different enough from CRS, and has an impact on the game, in a fluid way. Making the game truly shattered kingdoms.

I had started a similar thread back in 2013 about it.

Several good ideas were posted there.

I know that this idea is similar to others that have been discussed before. I don't see any reason to give up on those ideas if we really did like them. They were good ideas then and this is a good idea now. I'm glad you pointed out a thread where something similar was discussed. It is good to have a starting point for a complicated idea like this.

Not trying to dissuade you here or anything, as I agree with the whole concept of tribunal warfare. I just linked the old thread here so they can be viewed in total

Opey and I were floating this idea earlier and glad to see he posted it so quickly. I would like to add that once a faction defeats another CP they must defend it for X amount of time before their faction npc's take it over. This will give the previous owners time to form a counter attack and a chance to keep their CP. This IMHO would greatly up rp, battle, and tactics of pk.

And when we say changes territory it would also include the ability or lose the ability to use law NPCs in said quadrant.

I would go further and suggest an option that every city has a main fortress/palace/etc that connects to the capital city. The fortress would be at full strength while all kingdom cp's are controlled. If enemy cp's are captured perhaps a bonus to the fortress defensive's could be granted. But once a kingdoms original cp's are lost the strength of the capital fortress is reduced and if all cp's are captured and the capital cp falls all laws, money, guards are under the new leadership. Then perhaps a resistance location elsewhere in the kingdom opens with the option of controllable guards whatever to mount counter strikes to regain their kingdom.

I would very much like to see an option for kingdoms to pay a fee to allow Allies to bring their guards in your kingdom.

I appreciate that you linked the previous thread here. The idea, both this one and the previous one, needs more input from the community in order to be fully developed. It is a cool idea made even cooler by the fact that multiple people have come up with similar ideas.

This sounds great ... until you look at CRS cable system. The sides are always stacked one way or the other. People if the timers are too short not enough people will be on if they are too long no one will be able to actually capture anything. CRS is already considered a failed system by most players. This is just an expanded CRS. With no reset button you do not want to be playing a LoL mud game because of the whole cascading loss if you include the ability to switch teams ... You have to remember the game is active 24 hours and played by people who will wake up at stupid times just to get an edge.

Or you can make the capture points uncappable unless there are X number of defenders online. That would stop ninja ganking and then help with trying to make actual pvp combat.

Not to be a negative nancy here but I think this idea is terrible.

In a -different- game it would work wonders, but not so much in SK. What you are doing with this is making some NPC's high value targets and sort of trying to force players to defend them, as I understand it.

So here's the problem. Faction A during time period X has more people than faction B, so they group up and attack, usually when faction A isn't even online. This eventually causes faction A's players to lose interest in the game and log out for extended periods of time, eventually dropping their characters or the game entirely. This is pretty much what you are currently achieving with attacking a certain country which happens to be one of the weakest in the game at the moment, but that's besides the main point.

This said, I like the thought behind your idea, making people want to be more involved in wars. It just needs to be a bit more considerate toward both sides.

So here's the counter-suggestion:

The Weekend War Battle System!

I'll keep it stupid simple.


You can modify this a lot of ways, like during a weekend battle there could be 3 or so CP's as you said which your faction needs to take to win within the span of 1 hour, so you can split your groups and the enemy can split their defenders etc.


In conclusion, this counter-suggestion's purpose is to actually promote group vs group pvp and make people want to be involved in it, make people know when to log in for it, rather than just allow anyone who happens to have the larger force at time X to go and ninja CP's when the other side is off.

It also creates interesting strategies. You can for example, if you are allied with another country, declare you will be fighting 2 countries. Then you are forcing the enemy to sort of guess which one you'll be attacking and split their focus, while you and your ally country are only going to attack 1 etc.


[edited because I can't type for [REDACTED]]