First of all, be warned this is a lenghty suggestion. Have in mind though, I have invested a lot of time and thoughts into it, which doesn't mean it is perfect. Even the opposite, I am certain a lot of you will find many flaws and loopholes. That is why I am posting it here instead of the prayer forum. I would like to hear opinions, whether you like it or not - my only request is for them to be constructive. Possible suggestion whether to improve it or suggest a whole new cabal warfare system are more than welcome. Also, remember this is a VERY rough draw and with your help I am expecting it to change to something completely different.
We are all famliar with the current capture the flag (standard) system. It is one that provokes agressiveness and the more agressive one is, the better. With this suggestion, I seek to move this focus a bit far from the PK angle and place it more towards a strategic angle, without lessening the importance of PK. Whether I have succeeded or not is not of such importance as the fact that we are making an attempt, and if I alone am not enough to make an adequate suggestion, I am certain we all together can create it. I believe we all agree on the fact that the currect cabal warfare system needs to be replaced by a more interesting one, so please do not look at this suggestion as f0xx's suggestion. Look at it as your suggestion and instead of rejecting it, try to make it work, even if you have to suggest things which will completely change it.
So, the current situation with cabal warfare is the following: if there is no present enemy in the lands, you lead armies and capture territories. Leading is quite an inadequate word for that though, since all the "leading" is limited to sitting with your armies in the same room and doing NOTHING while they fight. This is a long and boring process. Not just that, but while leading armies you are more often losing CPs than gathering them. So much for the army cabals. Now for the raiding ones - what do you do with raiding cabals when there is none of your enemies on to fight? You can still raid, but that is quite unprofitable. That coupled with the fact that you are gaining very small amount of CPs to begin with makes things quite annoying for the people in those cabals, especially newer ones. With this suggestion I will try to fix those problems as well.
The suggestion - I wish the current armies to be replaced by elite armies, but is not a very good way to describe it. By elite armies, I mean a strong mob (which I will call General for now) which will have the ability to attack bastions. Current armies will not be replaced, the General will simply be added as an attacking force. The already existing armies will serve as armies which you fortify and garrison with. They will be your "normal" armies. If you want to attack and capture lands though, you will have to use your General. This General will not be able to attack normal NPCs and characters though. The limitations of his ability to what exactly will it be allowed to attack are yet to be decided, but for the moment lets take it as the only thing it will be able to attack are bastions, enemy Generals and enemy characters (I will explain exactly how).
Those Generals should be very strong, HP wise. One should have around 100k (100 thousand) HP. PCs will be able to equip their Generals via orders. Every stat that comes from a piece of EQ though will be multiplied by 2. A naked General should have as much saves, AC hit and dam as a naked character with the corresponding stats should have. Each General's starting stats should be 20 of each. Each cabal's General will have unique abilites and feats corresponding to the style of the cabal. For example:
Warmaster's General will be warrior like.
Style: At a random time every tick it will do a Warmaster skill, including the barbarian combo skills without having to do the actual combos for the special strike. The passive Warmaster skills will be active all the time. It will do around 3 attacks (if equipped with a two hander) and around 7 attacks (if equipped with two weapons). Two handers will deal twice the
damage of a one handed weapon with the same stats. A warmaster General, just as any warrior, should deal damage corresponding to the level of his deckedness. I am planning them to not be able to deal more than 150 damage per round.
Feats: Unlimited stats which can be affected by EQ. Cannot use defensive spells or boosts.
Savant's General will be invoker like.
Style: It will cast a strong spell with unique name every round. Spell damage will vary from scratch to UNSPEAKABLE while the sum of the damage dealt during the tick shouldn't be more than 1000 (one thousand).
Feats: For every +1 spell level EQ the General wears he will gain 5 additional damage (10 in total since any stat is multiplied by 2) to his spells.. If the General belongs to character that is T or above, he will automatically gain +1 spell level spell that he will cast on himself once every 10 ticks. The spell will last for 10 ticks. If the owner of the General is invoker, every +1 aff spell level the General wears will also give 50 aditional damage (it will basicly be considered as +1 spell level). If the owner is battlemage, cleric, necromancer or any class which effectively uses all three types of magic, any wear that grants +1 spell level to any kinds of magic will be considered as +1 spell level for the General (i.e. will grant 50 bonus damage for the tick). The General will cast a fire based spell once every three rounds that will always blind (via smoke).
Nexus's General will be shaman like.
Style: It will cast all the array of maledictions a normal shaman casts. His maledictions will be much stronger than those of a normal shaman. (plague up to unspeakables, Poison will be hitting for DISMEMBERS, Demonic servant will be up to UNSPEAKABLES too.)
Feats: The nexus General, just like a real shaman will have little dependence on EQ, therefore he gains no feats. His powerpeak though will be limited.
Knight's General will be paladin like.
Style: A two handler (with one attack per round) and either a strong spell (wrath) every round or a heal (that should heal as much HP as the wrath spell does damage ~UNSPEAKABLE.
Feats: He will be able to cast defensive spells on himself. Those defensive spells will also have their stats doubled. Armor, shield, bless.
Every item that is equipped on the Generals will not be counted towards the rare limit. Once equipped on the General, an item can only be removed and dropped. Once a General drops an item, it will disolve. The General will execute those commands upon "order".
How is the control of the General going to happen? Easily - from the same menu we control our armies. "aaa" and "ppp" should be enough. From there on everything enemy they encounter will be automatically attacked. Enemy Generals will have priority, then its bastions, then its armies, then characters. Generals should move with the same speed as normal armies.
Compared to a strong army, a decked general should be about ten times stronger. I don't know the stats of the armies though, so I leave this field blank for someone who knows more about the system behind current armies.
Raiding cabals i.e. Syndi and Watcher should be able to raid the generals. I don't know the stats of the raiding troops though so I leave this field blank and since this is only a rough idea the stats of the Generals can also be tweaked.
When a character leaves the lands, his General should stay inside. A character can leave his General either on the entrance of an important area or somewhere behind the lines of bastions. Problem with the second though, is that an enemy General will cut through bastions like knife through butter and a cabal that is hiding his Generals from the front line will lose his lands fast to active enemies.
By my calculations, it should take around an hour for Generals to kill each other with auras around them. With a PC assisting though, I can't really predict it so it should be tested and tweaked. The kill time shouldn't be less than half an hour with a PC assisting though.
The price for killing a General should be in CPs and should be fat. I am thinking about at least 100 CPs. A fallen General would revive 30 munites later at the room before the altar of the cabal it serves. When the owner of the General leaves the lands, the general would not be agressive towards enemies any more. It would still repond to attacks though. Non enemies would not be able to attack a General. When a general is killed he will lose none of his items i.e. there is no way for a general to lose items unless he is ordered to drop them. I was also thinking about the names of the items being customizable via an application.
The idea behind the suggestion:
With this I want to give weaker cabal characters some more options. They can try killing the General OR they can go for the standard. This would also help people gain more CPs - Kaylia who recently deleted and had 1000 hour on her character had only about 3.5k CPs which is rediculous. CPs are important, there are a lot of things one can do with them and too little ways to gain them.
Problems:
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I still have no solutions for an uneven situation i.e. 2 against 1, 2 against 3 and so on. I was thinking about raising the stats multiplier to a correspong the ratio of the enemies/allies in the lands but that doesn't seem like a good idea for the moment. Any suggestions?
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Still one of my biggest annoyances stands - after you kill the general you are up for sitting in the same room and watching your troops fight, even though bastions would be taken much faster with a General tanking, it still seems boring, so some suggestion on working in this area would be great.
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Raiding cabals don't have generals as you've noticed. I don't know what to do with them since they don't have bastions and territories too.
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Tribunal - I don't know what to do with them as well. They don't even have raiding troops. I wanted to include the ability to besiege cities, but I don't know exactly how to do it. Could use some ideas here as well.
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Finally there is one last thing that bothers me - Nexus and knight. With General items being permanent, I wanted when a character was about to give a valuable item to his general, to sit and think whether should he do it since the item itself would be useful to him too. The best example here is with savants general since +spell level gear is hard to find and it wouldn't be an easy decision to give that sphere of annihilation or that ring of evil to a mob. Yes, it would re-pop later, but you would still have to obtain it. What I mean is, I was trying to make the general benefit most from the same items the owner would. This didn't work very well with Nexus' and Knight's generals so we could use some more suggestions about different generals (even if it is a melee type for reaver/praet and a mage type for pandy/sigil).
