Raiding questions.

[ratzlaff]

First, I have limited exp. with raiding, so some of the questions may just be due to my limited knowledge.

1. Dear Devs, is there a vision/concept how raiding should play out in the finished project? What benefits should the player get by doing it?

2. In the current state, raiding is not cost-effective, mostly due to the fact, that when you have breached several wall rings, you still need to destroy caches with bombs, one of the most expensive items in the game. Am I missing something here? Is this intended? (I tried pickaxe/axe, but the damage was abysmal, could take years to destroy even wood chests)

3. Will the bombs stay that expensive relative to the other items?

Thanks!

[Lurler]

1. Dear Devs, is there a vision/concept how raiding should play out in the finished project? What benefits should the player get by doing it?

Frankly, it's not something we can answer definitively
We have our rough vision and requirements that we want to fulfill, e.g. we don't want people raiding noobs, instead we want high-level players to engage in fighting over points of control.
But how exactly all is going to work together - no one knows, we just implement incremental changes and react accordingly.
In one of the next updates we are going to add automated turrets which will offer active defenses to your bases. And there are many other changes.

2. In the current state, raiding is not cost-effective, mostly due to the fact, that when you have breached several wall rings, you still need to destroy caches with bombs, one of the most expensive items in the game. Am I missing something here? Is this intended? (I tried pickaxe/axe, but the damage was abysmal, could take years to destroy even wood chests)

When the are other planned parts of defense/attack will be in place we will significantly reduce HP of chests or even make them unlocked again.
As I mentioned - this is iterative process and we will be changing stuff along as we add more.

3. Will the bombs stay that expensive relative to the other items?

Yes. We don't want people attacking everything left and right
Our vision is to create a game that is more than just ducking it out between each other. We want many different types of creative cooperation to be possible.

[Warbot]

2. In the current state, raiding is not cost-effective

Why does everyone expect raiding to be a huge gain?!

You can get a huge gain if you find a poorly defended base with a huge hoarder inside, which isn't that rare I heard... except chests, but that's w.i.p. I guess.

IF you would always make a plus from raiding other people, or even in most cases, just think for a moment what would happen,
now tell me again if it should be cost efficient or not!


...as for the "why raid" question, my "vision" would be one were noobs are simply of no interest to raiding, which might be the case already,
- you'd want to raid to fight for resource nodes (which is going to be nullified with the coming changes due to how it will be totally pointless to invest huge resources to raid a place that holds a resource node that will just vanish shortly, to respawn elsewhere)
- you'd definitely want to raid (hostile) groups that are a threat to you, or could be, to throw them back on the progression ladder, and gain an advantage for future encounters,
this is probably the most compelling reason to raid, and will likely be the sole true purpose for quite a while to come
- you might want to raid for the sake of griefing other players, people do that, and if your group dominates a server and you have plenty of resources, there is little else to do, so ...

I'd like to point out a few more issues, that I have mentioned before, but well, I'll do anyways:
- as of now, there are NO raiding mechanics in place, looking at other games, be it EVE or Salem or many other games, there are a lot of places to "get some inspiration" in that matter...
- due to no raiding mechanics, raiding someone / some group who is offline is beyond simple, which means you need to have a group that covers all time zones to be able to defend, which would require a much larger player base and MUCH larger servers, which does not align with the visions of server size that the devs mentioned so far, this is a critical contradiction and needs to be dealt with (!)
- more crafting, higher lvl pve content requirering higher tech, and vast areas with mid lvl content that just require mid lvl crafting products to do, would be one idea to use as a base for a player driven economy, which could be a basis to generate demand for certain resources available only/mostly through fixed resource nodes, which then could be a basis for meaningful pvp and raiding, this all is a rather complex field, but vastly misaligns with the devs current "vision" of the game, because it would also require much larger servers both in space and player count, whereas fixed resource nodes to fight over would be the thing to do, and the "decaying nodes" that the devs currently envision would make raiding mostly useless,
yes there are problems with fixed nodes in the current game, which come again due to the tiny size of both the map and the player base

To sum it up, this game has the potential to be pretty nice in PvE terms,
but to make a leap into meaningful PvP, there'd need to be a huge change in the direction the devs are currently going,
and by how they envision it, I start to doubt that this is even possible.

[ratzlaff]

- you'd definitely want to raid (hostile) groups that are a threat to you, or could be, to throw them back on the progression ladder, and gain an advantage for future encounters,
this is probably the most compelling reason to raid, and will likely be the sole true purpose for quite a while to come

I can see the point in this, but raiding them would require you to make a huge investment in the first place, not sure if its worth it in the long run. But this could be viable.

With regard to your other points:

This game, while I enjoy it very much, even in alpha state, is not eve. You cannot just wish for a larger playerbase.