Changes for Builders/Bridges

We'll test the background thing.
I personally very much like the idea of digging under buildings to collapse them. If you're letting a team of tunnelling builders get so close they can literally undermine your fortress, you're doing something wrong. As Miczu says: "when you have the builder under a wall what is the point anyway as he will take whole thing anyway".
It also means that floating spammed bridge and ladder blocks wouldn't be a pain in the ass when trying to defend the underground - you'll be able to drop them off by cutting their connection to the land.

To be clear - charging for builders would literally just be a progress ring around your cursor at the end of which a block would build like it does now, and without the cursor lock delay on building like there is now that leads to odd placement. We can set this up to make building stone blocks take exactly the same amount of time as it does now while cripping a builder's ability to move while building and allowing enemies to prevent the builder from building by attacking him (-> cancelling the charge bar), as well as making more complicated mechanisms take longer to build.
It also means getting the jump on a builder would be easier - they wouldn't be able to instantly drop blocks -> a knight would have some reaction time before that inpenetrable stone block went down.

"Worst mechanic in history" - go boil your head. Your other points are mostly fine, however:
- :builder = obsolete during the game": False. As stated above, the only time I've seen builders actively building while moving a lot is when they're spamming one block or another - bridges and ladders at a wall or stone blocks in a tunnel. Frontline builders build either behind or with their group of soldiers and do so whilst almost always stationary -> this isn't a nerf for them, it's a nerf for the aforementioned spammers.
- "I've never seen a frontline builder not jumping around while trying to build a tower": You're not playing the same game as me then. If you're talking about not having seen knights defending a builder ever, then you've experienced the same thing I have - public players suck. I'm not planning on catering to the majority that suck, especially as they're unlikely to notice or care about the changes. My main point was staying stationary while building - you do it anyway if you're trying to build anything sensible.
- "I only run from knights and spam blocks because I don't want to die D:> why are the guy with swords good at killing the guys that build stuff?": Thing is, in that situation, I want you to die.
- "do it as a server option": there are literally 7 custom servers out of 39 at the moment. If we add charge time and build radius as a server option (which we probably will as it'll be fairly simple) then I predict approximately 5 servers will tweak the variable in the first week and then ~2 in the coming months. The majority of server hosts literally just change the name, info, map size and player count.

To those saying "builders need to be able to defend themselves!" - you're wrong. They're a utility class that's supposed to either be protected by allies or behind the frontline. Builders walling themselves in in tunnels is a shitty mechanic and makes me want to permaban the user doing it every time I see it.

Neat: Increased build radius doesn't help builders barricade in caves more at all unless they're being smart and covering their ass before moving on (as opposed to when they're caught). I don't have a problem with that as it literally means the threat from that tunnel is one builder.
"double" the build radius is only 2.5 more tiles fwiw. We could simply add 1 or 2 tiles more range, it's just to get around not being able to jump-place that final block on your wall if you don't have any wood.

sorry if I've missed stuff, I think this has covered most of it.

 

Okay, let's see...

Builders are already insanely easy to kill, the only way you're not killing one is if he gets stone and fills it in and around him and even then he's stuck, you open a hole with a bomb and get an archer to shoot him, but if your front line is protected there's almost no way he's getting in without a strong push, when has this ever been a problem, if anything it's pretty neat and shows how your structures should be set to also protect a bit under it or allow you easy access to kill people digging shallow earth.

The builder would be able to reuse the structure, as it is many maps run out of resources as times go by and taking a fortification to use for your advantage is much better/easier than simply destroying it most of the time, maybe more people can comment on this aspect, people used to playing forward builders.

Re: builder = obsolete during the game ; As it is most stay behind because coming out to the front is so intense for a builder it usually all but spells their death, they can die very easily to archers, are targeted easy and have almost no defense, building up there must be fast not to die and slowing this down means that knights have to work much harder to stop this from happening. No one likes the builders that wall themselves out and slowly progress through stone going into something, but no one likes those people period, they're annoying "I don't want to die so I'll wall myself in until you go away instead of making any progress!'.

As for jumping while building, if you're making something small this isn't as much of a problem but with the sometimes very small startup times to build things, charging along with this could be a problem, now if the radius is that where you could build high enough where let's say you could at least cover the top of the flag, maybe 9 blocks then that would be pretty decent, but the charge time might still make building a castle really slow (I guess it depends on how long the time is, but charge times seem like they'd slow things down quite a bit, which may be annoying).

I also have to wonder, if you can drop stuff underground (constructions) isn't it overkill to also have charge times on those stone blocks? I mean couldn't the knight just dig right under that stone block (that dirt tile) and it now falls giving him much easier passage to get to the builder unless the builder literally spams a stone line?

Look forward to testing these things either way, they are definitely interesting changes.

 

The fundamental problem people seem to happen with charging is that "everything will take ages" - I've said a few times in here that we'd tweak the charge so that building normal castle blocks would take roughly the same amount of time as it does now, with larger delays for bridges (-> skybridges would take ages and ages to build) and probably a little longer for doors and spikes too. By a "larger delay" I mean 1 second of charge - that only stacks up if you're trying to spam blocks (or building a skybridge).

We'll try to get a test build together over the next day or so with the changes, at least to test the blocks dropping off background dirt - we need to determine whether it'll make towers totally redundant or not. Seems to me like they'd just start needing a basement to prevent really speedy undermining but we might need to slow up dirt destruction time (which has the added bonus of making whole map tunneller's lives hell)

@Terry: I don't want to do multiple hits to build various structures at this point because I have the feeling a lot of noobs would assume the bridge or whatever was done on the first hit -> public games would be even more frustrating than they are now.

 

@Sani: I like all of that and it matches what I'd like to do except for the "can move while charging" thing - that doesn't address them hoppity builders being slippery as mackerel out of water. I think if they were slowed like charging knights are it'd work. We'll see over the course of a few test builds I guess.

 

Tar moats to burn them alive! :D

 

The more i think about no background tiles, the more scared i become. The griefing potential is absolutely huge for collapses caused by tunneling. Simply make a tunnel under your team during warmup, and when the round starts, initiate collapse of whole team area.

Also, everyone has seen a tunnel that spans from tent to tent... so the whole map will collapse when this happens? Not only will this screw up the whole map, but servers / clients will crash like crazy if this were to happen.

I really do not think this will work out as well as intended, but i hope i'm wrong.

 

Hmm. That indeed does resolve my issues i think! Thanks, and sorry! =]