Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-24108228-20150412155106

I've just spent around 10 minutes trying to think of a suggestion bad enough that it will attract controversy and have enough dislike for it to stay alive and work as a thread, but also good enough that it's not a complete write off.

There's one type of suggestion that does that, and that's a combat suggestion.

Orespawn
Changing how, well, ores spawn. Simple really.

The Issue
Currently, the way ore generates is a bit of a write off. Yes, it has it's perks, the difficult to live on islands have more good ores (or at least in theory, mainland's quite easy to make your residence actually), and it would be perfect if it wasn't for one specific type of people - nomads. They make up around half the surviving population and turn the system right on it's head by taking advantage of all the island's perks, by simply hopping from island to island as they need items.

This means that they not only get spire-level access to ore (meaning that they should have to work really hard to survive), but have paradise access to food (meaning that they should have very little in the way of combat). There's no significant drawback other than the fact you can't recruit more man-power, which is useless because you have access to all the islands, meaning you can just go to the island built for that specific purpose instead of having someone else work hard to get it. In other words, it's pretty much inherently better.

This also means that tribes can't defend themselves in the slightest against a nomadic raider, and as someone who's had tribes of 12 that got destroyed by a single mithrilite, I can confirm that. It's not a case of "Oh, they should spend less time making food and mucking around and more time mining.", it's a case of the tribe being rooted to one island, making the other islands harder to gather from. Large tribes need farmers, who in turn need to be stationary as farms dont retool. Even tribes who do set up at islands with mithril have a harder time, no tribe friendly island has mithril and steel, so the only good tool material available is mithril, which is in short supply because you only have one vein, which regenerates 4x as slowly, so it's not even useful by the time you've distributed it out.

The one type of tribe that is actually capable of fending off a mithrilite raider, and that's a tribe living at an island where they can make masses of steel, enough to equip each member with javelins, swords, and in some cases even crossbows. Since steel armour is infamously slowing and on islands like magma and rockma, ores are fairly spread out and you need to be able to walk between them quickly, it's omitted, and so even then there are tales of magma tribes taken out by the likes of Mesocare, armed only with a sword and javelin, because bows were bugged at the time.

All in all, tribes need help. More need access to steel, and possibly even mithril, to help combat the abundance of the stuff available to nomads. Hence this suggestion:

The Solution
It's simple really. Instead of every island having preset ores that spawn at each vein, a wide variety of ores spawn at each one. In other words ores would have a small chance of not spawning as the ore they are now; for instance mainland's iron veins would have a 20% chance of spawning as coal veins, meaning tribes situated there would have a limited, but existant, supply of coal. The disadvantages of living at easy islands would still exist, but would be softened, because right now the only good islands aren't big enough for tribes. Gold veins could have a 5% chance of spawning as mithril, and vice versa with a 50% chance on mithril veins, stemming the amount of mithril the nomads get on their runs. Using my future predicting powers, I can guess a big question would be:
 * "What's stopping the nomads from taking advantage of this?"

Assuming you mean mithril, as steel is still very simple for nomads to get thanks to rockma, the nomads don't hoard the veins. The players at a mainland iron mine would be constantly mining the ore, making it regenerate until they create across the ore they wanted, while the nomads wouldn't have a constant eye on the veins, they're nomads. If they did stay at a vein until it became mithril, they wouldn't be nomads anymore. Sure, they might leave afterwards, but they've still sat at a gold spawnpoint for a good 20-30 minutes, waiting for the ore to appear.

Overall, tribes would have access to the same ores nomads do, just in smaller quantities. Easy islands to set up a tribe at, like flax, paradise, and bento, would still have less material than islands like magma, plateau, and spire, so the hierarchy still exists and metal isn't thrown out to everyone, difficult islands are still rewarded, however it's softened up and nomads recive a debuff.

Thoughts? 