Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4842859-20141004014439/@comment-24108228-20141013220235

An Observer wrote: Ranged weapons, with these edits in place, would be unusable in melee situations without melee backing from a friend or yourself. This is much like melee weapons in ranged situations. Colonial groups manage to survive with completely immobile and lengthy reloads, surrounded with enemies with virtually unlimited access to ammo and melee weapons. No, my point is that they are completely unusable. Take the crossbow for example. It has a 10 second reload and 120 range. You can only accurately hit someone from about 60-80 studs, and when completely immobile, one shot is enough for your target to actually walk right up to you. Multi-Wielding is now a must if you are to kill your enemy from a range.

Fireproofing, as well as the application of the same rules as other tools might make for a poor time for the raider, because of the insanely long reload time of fire starters rivaling even the appropriately leveled knife slicing bread. So you now have to fireproof? This is the zeppelin thread all over again... Ok, the raider is now no longer using a firemaking bow and has instead got an inventory screen full of pre-prepared burning leaves. Previously I could kill them with a ranged weapon, such as a longbow, but since running away is now remarkably easy, I cant, because ranged weapons now suck and nobody in their right mind would make one.

And this hardship goes for both sides of the fight. If a raiding party is going to be 'serious' about wanting to take down important players, appropriate effort needs to be made to achieve what a multi-wielder used to be able to do. The same goes for tribes wanting to hold onto contested areas. No, it's easy for the raiders. They just say "Right, have this, we're going raiding", and are off on their merry way. The defenders have to constantly make spare crossbows should they want any, but a raiding tribe's blacksmith can hand one out to everyone before the raid and kill everyone before the tribe's inhabitants lose theirs. Plus, solo raiders still have the huge advantage that they can be nomadic, and even without multi-wield the nomad will always beat the tribe in combat. With the rare exception of the mainland tribe with the mithril, in which case the raider kills about 3/4 of the tribe with a sneak attack. You're not solving these issues, just pretending to, and hurting everybody else as a side effect.

With the inability to kill people who isn't fighting you, offensive potential is an optional branch of the game. This is a WONDERFUL thing, because then tribes don't stand to lose everything when they don't invest in weaponry. Passive players rejoice, because when you see a crossbowman on your doorstep, you can leave through the back and never see them again. Go have a bunny-hopper steal your entire tribes food supply and then tell me that the inability to kill people who aren't fighting back is a good thing. Tribes still lose anything they didn't fireproof (you cant expect everyone to fireproof), and a decent shot with a crossbow can kill someone through surprise. If you raid a tribe on bento for example, you just take a crossbow, 6 bolts, and a woven vest. Use a sailboat to circle their island, kill everyone on it, and burn the remains. Easy peasy. For flax, take away a couple bolts. In fact, the only exception is large islands like mainland, in which case you can still kill a handful of the people as they run off using multi-wielded crossbows you brought along. You haven't prevented anything but easy mining, defence, and a butload of convenience methods for non-sadistic objectives. You still omitted the community response. Scar hates it when he spends ages adding something and everyone starts yelling at him, how is this going to work?