Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24108228-20150912002302

Just a little something to discuss, plus I'm curious on your opinions.

What's the best island? Excluding cop-outs like "My floating island" or "Admin island from the new map", which island, in your opinion, is the best for surviving on? Tl;Dr= So after I wrote this, I noticed that it was much longer than I expected. Here's a shorter version if you don't want to read 5 long paragraphs:

I'm personally stuck between mainland and plateau. For mainland, fast carts allow you to get all the food, water, wood and stone very quickly, speeding through the early game (I do most my speed-running on mainland). You can then setup near the oil spill for a fortified area, mithril, and no spawnpoints. Unfortunately, it's a lot of effort to build a wall to keep out the fast-cart raiders, and they'll kill you easily if you don't have one. They can effectively kite you by picking off isolated members with ranged weapons and explosives until you run out of resources to make replacement weapons and tools, and then they're stronger than you and capable of just waltzing in (on the fast-cart of course) and killing you with their iron/steel weapons.

Plateau sacrafices food, water, and mithril for hugely increased defences. It's all a trade-off really. Original= If you were to ask me, I'd be stuck between plateau and mainland. As far as I'm concerned, magma is too much effort to colonise, and doesn't reap all too much, since the steel's got limited usage if you're ambushed, mithril is extremely far away, and bluesteel requires sending one of your tribe-members to go on a solo adventure to gather materials for a while, which is roughly equivilant to saying "Go away for an age so you get bored, then leave the server without telling us".

On the one hand, mainland has everything. If there wasn't raiders, I would certainly vote mainland. Thanks to fast-carts, you can wizz across the entire island and get food, water, wood and stone easily, and then proceed to set up next to the oil spill for access to oil, iron, mithril, and half your castle already built in the form of mountains. The downside is that the castle is manditory. Anyone raiding mainland nowadays attacks from the safety of a fast-cart, and unless you have a wall to stop them, they can charge in, stab/shoot you a few times before you can react, and then charge out again to raid the next "noob tribe". Speed is crucial in combat, as it dictates your ability to chase and run away. It's why most people would turn down the offer of reinforced steel armour if they already had leather. So when your foe can move 3x as fast as you, you're pretty much dead. I've been victim of one guy on a fast cart, wearing only iron armour and a steel pickaxe for a weapon, while I had full mithril and a friend who also had full mithril. By using a bomb to kill us while we weren't expecting it, they could quite easily zip in and out, exploding/steel-pickaxing one of us before proceeding to run away again. By repeating this process, they could run us dry of mithril and steel supplies faster than we could replenish them, and they eventually killed the entire lot of us and destroyed the village. And since there's no cheap, long barrier to block fast carts, stopping people who do this is expensive, and when balancing in other priorities such as food and water, it can be very difficult to build the wall in time.

And then there's plateau. Certainly one of the most fortified of the islands, it's protected from raiders. Fast carts will not help you here. It has tons of wood and stone for building (better than any other island), oil and the core crops are nearby, and if you build a bridge to spire, you can become a poison wielding mithrilite. Added onto this, it has plenty of flat ground to build and farm on, and if you're into airships, the added height and cliffs make it fairly simple to build airships. Unfortunately, it still has disadvantages. There's no mithril on the island itself, and spire bridges are hard to make and extremely vulnerable (all bridges I've made have been destroyed). Unless there's a lot of you, and you're all armed to the teeth with top-end steel weapons (which is expensive and impractical), you're going to be at the mercy of the first mithrilite who comes to visit. And you may find they want more than to see your village burn. Owing to the ideal conditions of plateau for a end-game fort, it's very possible that people may visit with intentions to claim the island, and any form of hostility/self-defence will result in a full scale war. What do you guys consider the best island? 