Smithing Skill - discussion

[Beans]

If the goal of smithing is to allow clans to produce their preferred gear for a little cheaper then I think there are a few ways to do this that involve players/clans making hard choices rather than pure chance over time. Get rid of the All Thyine Hard Work completely.

Every player has a flat smithing value. This does not increase or decrease. Lets say it is 1000. These values pool together when in the same town(or fief/castle however you want to balance it)when multiple people in the same faction are in the same town. So if we have 5 people in one faction in the same town their smithing is 5000. They choose what items they want to smith based on a comparison of their total smithing points to the cost of the items they are trying to smith. How you determine what discounts they get, or how much smithing you need compared to an items cost is up to the balance team and however they want to do it.

To balance it from a perspective of large clans vs smaller ones you could just have a point where addition people in the smithing group contribute much less. In our example  5 players may have 5000 smithing in their group but adding a 6th player only brings the total to 5500, and a 7th brings the total to 5650.



Another similar but different idea would be to allow faction leaders to pick faction items that then all their players could craft for discounts. Each player in a faction adds points to a faction item pool and then you use those points to 'buy' which items you want for your faction discount. If they want to change items you can pay a fee to free up those points and then select a different item. Like the previous example you can set a point of serious diminishing returns so larger factions don't have a big advantage.


I don't have a specific process example but I also like the idea of a system where factions have the advantage of being able to produce large amounts of equipment and/or discounted basic equipment but small single smiths are at an advantage of being able to craft the heirloomed stuff. I'm not sure how to exactly work that idea in though.

[Matey]

Unlink smithing from crpg entirely.

Smithing is a strategus-only skill so tying it to crpg is really unnecessary.

Instead, start everyone at a base chance to produce every item, like 5%. Then, every time they successfully create an item, their skill in producing that item has a chance of going up. So, in the beginning for example your skill at making Leather Gloves will be poor, but the more Leather Gloves you produce, the more efficient you will become at it, getting a production discount and being able to make more each batch. So people can choose to specialize and have a few items they can produce cheaply and in bulk, or have a wider selection of items they're not as good at producing.

Perhaps allow people to choose a "specialization" like shields, or bows, that they get bonus smithing skill in. So one clan member can be the go-to for making bows, while another may specialize in armor, ect.

This. If a clan chooses to specialize in certain gear this would make it a lot easier, it would add some interesting stuff to the game as you could predict what your enemy might use and try to counter it, but also lets clans have more consistent themes at cheaper costs. of course clans can still buy completely different stuff if they think their enemies are bringing gear to counter their usual stuff.

as for those who have ideas of "you need 5 pieces of string 3 chewed gum 6 eye of newt and 2 miracles to craft 1 leather glove... NO! dont make us gather resources to craft shit... that always the worst part of mmos' and considering how slow things move in strat... it would be unbearably brutal to have to spend 40 hours traveling around collecting shit in order to make 1 shitty item.

[Flawless]

I really like leet's idea. It should be added.

[Jarlek]

This. If a clan chooses to specialize in certain gear this would make it a lot easier, it would add some interesting stuff to the game as you could predict what your enemy might use and try to counter it, but also lets clans have more consistent themes at cheaper costs. of course clans can still buy completely different stuff if they think their enemies are bringing gear to counter their usual stuff.

as for those who have ideas of "you need 5 pieces of string 3 chewed gum 6 eye of newt and 2 miracles to craft 1 leather glove... NO! dont make us gather resources to craft shit... that always the worst part of mmos' and considering how slow things move in strat... it would be unbearably brutal to have to spend 40 hours traveling around collecting shit in order to make 1 shitty item.

I disagree. I would like a "bring x amount of that resource" to make something. Yeah, having too many of them (as you pointed out) would just be really annoying, but some more simplified version would be nice. Basically, throwing stones, sticks etc, would just be free to craft (basicaly "gather"), low tier equipment like simple sword, bow, scythe would require 1 resource, next group would require 2 different, next would require 3 different and the top tier would require 4.

Nothing more than that and keep it as few different types of resources overall. Maybe something like "Steel, Planks, Tanned Leather, Cloth, Tools". Maybe make them be refined from the trade goods or make "gathering" materials? Like, you can craft trade goods for gold (more money from trading, but a price to make them originally) and you can mine/cut/hunt/gather etc stuff like Iron Ore (for Steel), Timber (for planks), Hides (for leather) and wool (for cloth) and then either go to the town/castle and refine it yourself or sell it directly for profit (less than what you would have gained from trade goods w/ no traveling).

When selling raw materials or refined materials, they shouldn't go away. Trade goods should go, but the others should go in a "village pool" that can either be accessed by the fief owner (for 100% or the gold is taken away from the fief itself) or bought (for 120% of sell price) by anyone.

[Matey]

the problem with resource gathering is it already takes hours to go anywhere or do anything. if i can buy an item for gold, or spend 4 hours going to a tree on the map then 5 hours to get lumber, then 3 hours to go to a mountain, then 2 hours to gather iron, then 4 hours to go a river, then 6 hours to get fish guts, then 3 hours to get back to a village, then 1 hour to craft 1 item using all the resources i gathered... ill pay the gold.

[Gisbert_of_Thuringia]

Maybe this thread is the right one to post in:

Are there any bugs with the crafting or is it necessary that you got the message a certain amount of times?

I know I received it with my mainchar more than once, but I can't craft anything

And I know another Guard who always wrote down what he wore when he got the message, but he can craft stuff he got the message often with with the same percentage as with stuff with which he had the message very rarely :/

[Slamz]

the problem with resource gathering is it already takes hours to go anywhere or do anything. if i can buy an item for gold, or spend 4 hours going to a tree on the map then 5 hours to get lumber, then 3 hours to go to a mountain, then 2 hours to gather iron, then 4 hours to go a river, then 6 hours to get fish guts, then 3 hours to get back to a village, then 1 hour to craft 1 item using all the resources i gathered... ill pay the gold.

It's massively multiplayer and you're talking about it like it's single player.

If you're running around collecting all the crafting materials yourself then a) you're doing it wrong and b) you're missing the point.

YOU don't collect everything.  YOU collect wood.  You take the wood to a market and sell most of it for money.  You use that money to buy iron from the guy who did the same thing as you.  You and iron guy both use your money to buy leather from the leather guy and coal from the coal guy, etc.

So what you really want is 50 wood, 100 iron and 80 coal but all you do is get 500 wood, sell 450 of it and buy the other things you need.


And ideally you would gather the wood by going to a town and creating a "lumber yard" which spends money on an hourly basis and gathers wood, which you can then come around and collect and take to market.

[Matey]

still way more effort and coordination than anyone wants to deal with to craft items when you could just make money with trade caravans and then buy the items as you need them.

[Tydeus]

Remove "time played" as a factor altogether and instead of having smith skill being player based, have it faction based.

Here's one way of implementing a system with such requirements:

Each player can "vote" to +1 a piece of equipment in their equipment page on the website.
10 being the max needed to "cap" your faction's smith skill for that item.
Faction leaders assign a specific rank to "smiths" in their Faction.
Each faction can only have 1/2 smiths per 10 players.

Larger factions still get an advantage, but i'm not sure I'd call it huge and if you wanted to reduce the advantage, you'd just increase the number of "votes" each player gets.

[Jarlek]

the problem with resource gathering is it already takes hours to go anywhere or do anything. if i can buy an item for gold, or spend 4 hours going to a tree on the map then 5 hours to get lumber, then 3 hours to go to a mountain, then 2 hours to gather iron, then 4 hours to go a river, then 6 hours to get fish guts, then 3 hours to get back to a village, then 1 hour to craft 1 item using all the resources i gathered... ill pay the gold.

Valid point. As the other guy said, you are not supposed to do it yourself, although I say you SHOULD be able to do a lot yourself! This is why I mentioned the different tiers. You do all yourself and get low equipment, or you can get lots of people all getting resources, get them to a town where they hand it over to designated refiners who, when finished, gives it to designated craftmen.

One thing that would be pretty necessary for this would be for factions to have "guilds" or "headquarters" in fiefs. They pay X ammount of money and they have a small base there where everyone can store items/equipment/money (NOT troops) and where rank over X (or title Y like smith) can take resources and rank Z and above can take resources/refined stuff and rank Æ and above can take everything (including gold).

Otherwise this would be a COMPLETE nightmare to micromanage.

I would also like a way to "auto pickup" for other players. This is more for Caravans than crafting. Basically you can let another player get all your TRADE Goods without having to manually login. So a faction can set up a caravan, he goes from fief to fief and pickup while the different members make Trade Goods. Might be a bit OP and minimize what the different members has to do, but currently it's still very little for them to do. Having those "Headquarters", though, could make this not needed AND make the individual member actually have to do something (dump his stuff or travel and dump).

EDIT: FUCK! Forgot this is the SMITHING discussion. Sry for my very off topic post. Gonna make a new thread to discuss this:


ON TOPIC:
I think you should redo the smithing considerably. The whole "random thing for everyone beneath 31" is kinda mean and I also believe having them on so many different equipment is weird. Make them faction oriented or a skill or something. Just not random.

[Slamz]

Remove "time played" as a factor altogether and instead of having smith skill being player based, have it faction based.

A similar idea might be to make it "forge based".

Go to a village.  Buy a forge (300 gold, flat fee).

Tell the forge what to start making.  You tell it to start making Heavy Round Shields.  Initially, it's 5% off the price.

Every hour:
5 shields are produced
price reduction is improved by 1%

After 10 hours you'll be a 15% price reduction (and you'll have 50 shields).

If you order this forge to produce anything else, that item will start improving and your shield bonus will start to decay at the same rate.  So you switch from shields to swords.  After 5 hours your sword bonus is up to 10% price reduction but your shield bonus is down to 10%.

Basically it's "forge specialization".  The more you have a forge make one item, the better at it it becomes.  If you switch items, you start over.


You can have 1 forge per village.  So if you want to fully equip your army all by yourself, you'll need at least 5 forges, meaning 1 forge in each of 5 villages.  (Ideally, you do not need to stay to run the forge.  You tell it you want 10 runs of Nordic Short Sword and then you can leave.  Come back 10 hours later and it will be done, and there's your 50 swords.)

More likely, though, you'd be with your clan.  20 people based in 1 village with 1 forge each can outfit their armies fairly rapidly.

[Tydeus]

A similar idea might be to make it "forge based".

Go to a village.  Buy a forge (300 gold, flat fee).

Tell the forge what to start making.  You tell it to start making Heavy Round Shields.  Initially, it's 5% off the price.

Every hour:
5 shields are produced
price reduction is improved by 1%

After 10 hours you'll be a 15% price reduction (and you'll have 50 shields).

If you order this forge to produce anything else, that item will start improving and your shield bonus will start to decay at the same rate.  So you switch from shields to swords.  After 5 hours your sword bonus is up to 10% price reduction but your shield bonus is down to 10%.

Basically it's "forge specialization".  The more you have a forge make one item, the better at it it becomes.  If you switch items, you start over.


You can have 1 forge per village.  So if you want to fully equip your army all by yourself, you'll need at least 5 forges, meaning 1 forge in each of 5 villages.  (Ideally, you do not need to stay to run the forge.  You tell it you want 10 runs of Nordic Short Sword and then you can leave.  Come back 10 hours later and it will be done, and there's your 50 swords.)

More likely, though, you'd be with your clan.  20 people based in 1 village with 1 forge each can outfit their armies fairly rapidly.

I think they're wanting to keep the heirloom part in tact as well, so if you have lordly gloves in crpg, you'd still be able to craft those at lordly quality.

[Digglez]

As a cavalry player I noticed I had no bonus to craft horse, is this intended?  You mean my hours and days on horseback dont make me a better eye to help breed better horses?!

[Torben]

I like gaining skills for the items you love. If I ride my courser day in day out for a year now,  I goddam well wanna be a pro breeder. 

however I want to be able to get the skill at any level.  Never had it yet cause i wasnt under 32 fdor ages
 

[Jarlek]

I like gaining skills for the items you love. If I ride my courser day in day out for a year now,  I goddam well wanna be a pro breeder. 

however I want to be able to get the skill at any level.  Never had it yet cause i wasnt under 32 fdor ages

I didn't think I had it once. I was wrong. I've had it once. When I was pure pole cav. Which is 2 or 3 generations ago....