Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30638561-20131030195810/@comment-24108228-20131125184743

Time it takes to get 20+ ores (the preferable amount to create and reload, I will explain why later), 10 minutes to 5 minutes for a fast player. Time it takes to make a new wall with 6 quarrys at hand (the amount a castle owning tribe would have), 30 seconds.

The 'jelly nubs' would not 'raig quit'. They would make a new one and laugh at you.

Or you could use an Ultimate Wall Beater, and a good sword. Or bombs and fire inside their castle. To make them 'raig quit' from castle damage, the 'jelly nubs' would need a large chunk of their castle taken out. At least a third. Count how many cannonballs that would take, and realise that would come to 50 to 70 ores. Or you could bomb their buildings on the inside of the castle, of which the walls are rendered useless by the wall uselessifyer. As buildings as harder to replace than walls, this would do more damage and be cheaper.

Personally, I think the safety of a castle is provided by the intimidation, not the walls. A fireproofed wooded castle is identical to a stone one (there is a few differences, but they are not massive), and that will still get raided. A stone castle however, will not get raided. Why? Beacause if you live in a stone castle, you probably have full mithril. Bad idea to raid the dude with full mithril stuff.

Also, if you have a castle and mithril, you are unlikely to stay on for much longer. You have conquered the server, made mithril, and a castle. You may get bored, as you have done everything, and leave. If, like me, and most other hardcore players, you still have a long checklist, you will want to stay playing. But you may not have the time. Getting mithril is a quickly done task for the experienced, but a castle takes time. You will need to get a tribe of at least two experienced players, and preferably some extra less experienced ones to do labour work. And in that time, you will probably have used a lot of the free time you had, and decided to play survival 303 in. And even of that is not the case, and you have a TON of free time, the server may not appreciate the huge piles of stuff you are accumulating (frigates, castles, bridges, etc), and shut down. So after a castle has been built, the owner may not be around for too long anyway, meaning the few castles that are built dont last long enough to be raided in the first place, especially if you spend a long time making the cannon and cannonballs, making the devise even more useless, as it never gets used.

Sure, we have our special days, when the servers dont crash, you don't disconnect randomly, and you have plenty of time to play. Then your castle lasts for ages, and you have a huge adventure. But that is uncommon, and it would really suck to have a dude who you rejected from the tribe half an hour before, come back with a cannon, and a ton of cannon balls. We don't want to ragequit, as ragequiting is not a nice experiance. You get so mad, you have to leave and destroy all the hard work you just made, and live with the fact that the noob with the cannon will be yelling "I MADE A GUY WITH A CASTLE RAGEQUIT! IMA SO EPIC!" to the server, for about 20 minutes.

Funny how when we are inside the castle, we think of the guy with the cannon as a noob. Then when we have the cannon and we are attacking the castle, they are the noobs. Anyway, to balance the idea would invole making it cheap enough to blowing it up and getting a bit more satisfaction, considerable compaired to just making a ladder and killing them from the inside, then burning the village; while being expensive enough to beat the price of bombs by far, which blow up with little force compaired to our large cannon. If you already had a cannon, we would want it to cost more than a bomb to fire it. Yes, we have already payed a lot for the cannon, but this is an explosive at least 3x the strength of a bomb if it is knocking down a medieval wall with ease, so it should be more expensive anyway.

For demonstrative purposes, let us first make it equal to the cost of a bomb, for then we know that it will not be any cheaper. One bomb costs 12 ores in total (2 gunpowder, which is 8 coal and 2 sulphur, and a fuse, which is two). If we revert back to the original cost for the cannon, of 6 ores, as we know that it will be more expensive than that also, (with our current small cannon standing at 6, and the large cannon have to be higher). 12 ores per cannonball + 6 ores per cannon = 18 ore This may not seem like much, but the cannon logically should cost more than the cannonball, so lets assume that the cannon costs the same amount as a cannonball, for the same demonstrative purposes as shown before. 12 ores for a cannonball + 12 ores per cannon = 24 ores That is a lot of ore. Roughly the amount needed to be mined to obtain a mithril sword, starting from no smithing and no forge. As this is a minimum, and you will probably want to launch more than one shot at your opponent, this will increase rapidly. To take out an entire castle will take over 100 ores, and a third of one (enough to make somebody rage quit) may take 70 or so.

Now if you have a castle with a handful of quarrys, this will not take too long to replace, giving only enough time to either spend even more ores launching cannons at the innards of their base, or running in swords blazing. The first option being immensely expensive, and the second option being much cheaper and easyer to do with a mighty wall beater. If enough is destroyed, this will easily demoralise the castle owner, but cost a fortune (5 times as long as creating the castle would be spent getting the ores to do so). If not enough is blown to smithereens, then they will simply replace it. The cost is not fixable. The cannonball must be higher than 12 to be addable, and 12 + A Cannon is always to high to be wanted.