The devs mentioned that in PvP raid mode (where you can load another players city and attack it) that if a player “power gamed” his mods making or downloading “Swords of Infinite Power” and things that unbalance the game. Let’s be honest modders from past games are usually grouped into different categories. You have your people that want to make the game far more difficult (hell mode/rogue-like), you have you power game folks that want to make things obscenely powerful, you have your people that want to make balanced mods that fit into the game, you have some people that just want to make visually awesome new stuff that doesn’t effect much, etc. So anyways they mentioned if an ultra power game made a city nobody could touch that it would be low rated and nobody would go there but isn’t that kind of chaotic in nature? There has to be a better way to separate whether a city is vanilla or balanced with vanilla or power gamed up. Or do you guys think anything goes enhances the game?
I think city designs could be designated vanilla, balanced with vanilla, and powerful so you have an idea what you are going to do in the first place. To determine what is balanced vs powerful we could have a community voting system. Or the mods could try out popular mods and say yes balanced! or no too powerful! or maybe even feedback the author and say tone with this a little and its great. At the very least we should just be given a label system to attach to our city as a description for what you find inside. Then if certain mods become extremely popular they can become popular PvP styles. For instance if someone makes a amazing fire + ice pack that adds volcanos and fire monsters and ice structures and ice monsters then a city could be labeled fire/ice meaning vanilla plus that set of 2 packs. Otherwise what good will leaderboards do?
Think of in terms of Magic the Gathering tournaments. Type 2 was created with the newest cards only as older sets may imbalance the game. With Stonehearth having such a broad modability its the equivalent of a player going to a type 2 tournament and not just using type 1 cards but making up his own cards and adding them to the deck.
I think a voting or rating system would be the best. I dont think you should make a leaderboard in a game like stonhearth cause it is based on mods. This makes it hard to determ which one is better.
Its a good question tho ;D
I think there was talk about this in the last Kickstarter Q&A. There were 2 answers for this, the first being that they spoke about a way to have it list all mods that were used, although this related to a particular world, not so much sure if that would spread down to the city level or not.
The second answer the gave, was that they were not too worried about it because if people didn’t like the mod or an OP city that was impossible to siege, the community would down vote it and no one would get that mod or city. I paraphrased this a little, but its either in the pizza Q&A or the last one that Tom did. I hope this helps a little.
Wait, so you can download mods and make yourself more powerful? I thought everyone has to have the mod in order for the game/server to function correctly?
If you host the game you can have what ever mod you would like. Other people joining your game\server would also need those mods. You could host a server play by yourself, and make a crazy cool town with all of the crazy potentially OP mods installed, then upload your city to be attacked. This way people who tried to raid your city might not be aware of the mods you used to build the town.
@bluetiger6001 if you go into a MULTIPLAYER game coop with a friend/family you will need the same mods as the game host. I don’t know how persistent will work. PvP raids you download another players city and fight against it so they can have different mods than you.
@brendan_ms I saw the Q&A but if there is a leaderboard for who has the best city and who is the best attacker I am not sure if a balance doesn’t matter approach would work. They either have to cut the leaderboards and make it a free for all or use a method i described or something else to ensure an even playing field.
I think they did say that it would be “lists the mods present” as a feature of multiplayer. I’m thinking that you probably won’t even be able to try and play in something you don’t even have the assets for. And I agree with the abusiveness comment. If someone has a cheesy map uploaded, people will simply violently dislike it and call it for being lame.
I mean, people who play these kinds of games are potentially fairly savvy and vocal. People just aren’t going to do this mode on on mod that makes it unfun to siege/raid. (Well, the masochists might, but only if it’s you know, possible.)
I do think it might be fun to occasionally have a difficult challenge to deal with of course. Like, someone makes a Carcassone or Jericho. That might be fun to take a crack at. (The Jericho especially if it’s in a conspicuously Bronze Age mod or something.)
Player versus player raids do not affect your town, village, cottage, or kingdom. They are for the benefit of the attacker who attacks a copy of your area, while your world remains untouched.
Right which means if someone “power games” their soldiers up they can smash my vanilla city with relative ease with their mod advantage. That won’t ruin my kingdom but if they have leaderboards it will move my city down and it will move their attack force up on the other board. This does directly effect PvP.
hi @Dafaman123… at this stage, we know next to nothing about PvP, and all that comes along with that option… i’ve merged your thread here though, so perhaps your particular question can spark some additional discussion…
Well, at last check it seemed like PvP would be asynchronous - where you would download and assault a copy of a friends settlement. No idea about rewards for doing this, but I would highly doubt that you would see any damage/ effects to your settlement for being involved in the raids.
Kind of. The original question was asked in relation to what we know about asynchronous PvP; specifically how will the game balance out settlements with mods that potentially give it an unfair advantage.
