Hi there!
We hope everyone's weekend was brilliant - without further delay, let's get to the question of the week!

This week we will shred some light on Ghstwolf's pair of questions regarding materials and logistics within contested territories.

Q1: Will there be nodes for common materials that are "up for grabs" under territory control?
A: No. All common materials will be widely available from both markets of Continoma and Noir, while all rare materials will be available only from contested territories. Given the relative low price of common materials, their production from contested territories versus the risk of supporting and protecting such territory would make very little sense. Also, the separation is very important because it makes rare materials even more important when developing your guild's contested territory, and we are aiming to balance the economic impact of rare material production so that players won't lower the influx of rare materials by concentrating on common materials instead due to the limited amount of space and facilities that can be built within a contested territory.

Q2: Will there be supply chains from the "mines" to the control center of a contestable area?
A: Not in contested territories, no. As currently designed, the mines will directly send all mined resources towards the Control Center of the contested territory, and from there it can be transported for a price to Guild's Warehouse. A Guild could do it themselves for free by using Mechanoids to transfer large amounts of resource to the nearest populated territory such as the city of Sal Vitas or other smaller towns, however they will be risking an likely ambush from rival guilds. However, we are working on at least one very special resource that will almost exclusively require the need to be transported by Mechanoids. As Mechanoids presently fall in two specific groups - Harvester/Carriers with very little weaponry and destruction-heavy Combat Mecha - transportation of that resource will require at least two players to cooperate in a group in order to safely transport it.

The special resource thing sounds intriguing to me, what do you guys think? Feel free to share your comments and speculation below!
~ m.

 

So if I am getting this correct.  If an other guild takes over an territory all the resources in that control point switches over to the new guild.  hmmm... I like that.  Let some other guild do all the work than, take the territory over and WAHLA free mined resources. 

Oooh, the mech part sounds fun. I also really like the idea of having convoys.

If they do hit the self-destruct sequence does that mean it also destroys the resources? 

I think he was referring to whatever resources had been mined but not yet transferred: I'd assume they would be destroyed.

Setesh: yeah, that's my point: I'm hoping that a lot of people will go for caravaning and hire protection, use overland routes, etc.... as otherwise doing any sort of economic warfare to "bleed an enemy dry" would be next to impossible.

The transportation system also sounds like an excellent compromise between the enjoyment that convoys can offer (i.e. ambushes and the strategic planning involved in both carrying them out and protecting yourself from them) and the tedium of constantly having to guard haulers without event.

Fun stuff.

I'm still paying for a weekend of camping (aka being obnoxiously drunk in the wood), so I'm hoping some of this makes sense.

The convoy/auto transport thing doesn't worry me yet.  There are plenty of ways to encourage player convoys.  Cost is an obvious choice, but there are some "outside the box" ways too.  Time could be another factor, while the mine to comand center sounds almost instant, it's possible that transport to safe towns could take days (by the NPC shipping system).  There could be a quantity cap, for example you can mine 100 resources a day but the NPC system can only "ship" 75 a day, to keep inventory out of high risk storage you'd need to convoy every 3-4 days.  Or NPC shipping might only happen every few days, just infrequently enough that a guild might have to convoy to keep usable reserves up.  I'm guessing any number of these could work seperately or together to keep player convoys fairly commonplace.

Magunnus- Moving resources will be a must.  Even if you can build and secure all the factory space needed for production in a given territory (we don't know how much space there will be for huge structures), I'd think it very likely that you'd still need several common materials to build finished products.  With common materials not existing in a territory, you'd need a way to get them out there.  Many of the same limits I've proposed for getting resources to safe storage would work well in reverse.

Tyrus Dark- I'd say the worst-case scenerio for ecconomic war would be that damaging/destroying the mining facilities is the main weapon.  Hopefully, the tuning on the system does encourage player convoys and not just for the special resource that's only been mentioned in passing once or twice before (IIRC it came up in an enviroment thread and in an interview answer focused on mechs).  Granted, the system doesn't really sound like it encourages attacking logistics a ton yet, but the insurance system sounded like a major detriment to PKers at first too.

Dang what a wall-o-text this turned into

Sure, but I guess I'm making an assumption here that since common materials will be harder to transport than rare materials.  Just the names suggest that, common materials most likely get used in bulk while rare materials get used in ones and twos.

I just hope they don't make the same decision that another sandbox game made, where it's nearly impossible to produce anything in contested areas because the effort involved in moving vast amounts of common materials makes it pointless to do, because it takes 10 trips to move commons out, but only 1 small trip to move rares in.  That really screwed up our ability to do any significant production in contested areas and made remote factories a waste of money and discouraged builders from going out to contested areas.  Usually, the built items were easier to transport than the common materials used to create them.  This caused most builders to stay in 'safe' areas because there was nothing they could do better in the contested areas except for a few jobs that usually only happened once every few months if you were lucky, and even those were 'go out, click a button, go back' type jobs.