If you are involved in maintaining guards for the defence of your city or council, you will want to read this post thoroughly. Unless you want your city to become an Undeadville, that is. Or a Hordeville or Demonville. Take your pick.

First of all, a very important change. Starting tomorrow, all the army squads will be handling their targetting differently. Unlike regular mobs who always attack their last attacker, squad soldiers will remain focused on their current target until it is dead, and only then will they switch to a new one, despite distractions (see below for an exception to this). This means that you will start seeing much bigger guard casualties if you continue relying on them alone. This change is NOT active yet, but will be loaded tomorrow.

Cities and councils can now recruit their own armies and send them to build and attack fortifications, or to help defend against attacks. All these commands require you to have the War privilege.

ARMY LIST - gives you a list of your active troop squads, and what they are doing

ARMY SHOW <id> - shows information about a squad

ARMY HIRE LIST - list of troop types available for hire (details below)

ARMY HIRE <id> TO <squad> - hire a new soldier and assign him to the specified squad, which must be located in your room. Use NEW as the squad number to create a new squad. This costs 5,000 gold and each squad can have up to 30 soldiers. Soldiers have a maintenance cost as well (500 gold per game month).

ARMY ASSIGN <soldier> TO <squad> - assign a soldier to another squad, which must be in your room. Use NEW to create a new squad.

ARMY DISMISS <soldier> - dismiss a soldier from service.

ARMY FORTS - list fortifications held by your troops.

ARMY POINTS - lists all locations where fortifications can be built.

ARMY SEND <squad> - sends a squad, which can be located anywhere, to your current location. You cannot send a squad to a territory controlled by another organization (but can send them to your townes).

Squads operate autonomously - if they see an enemy squad, they will attack by themselves. If they are sent to a location where a fortification can be built, they will start building it (or dismantling, if another is present). At this time, squads will NOT attack other players. Squads will also NOT attack squads belonging to another city or council. This will likely change in the future, but for now they only attack mob squads (though they will defend themselves if attacked by players). Similarly, squads will currently not dismantle fortifications owned by another city.

Squads loyal to cities are currently not affected by trenches and bomb/poison fields. Again, this will likely change in the future.

Hiring and disbanding soldiers can only be done in the Council room. Each soldier costs 5,000 gold to hire and 500 gold per game month to maintain. A city can have up to 200 soldiers at once.

Each city has three types of soldiers available, in this order:

1 - heavy soldier. Has a 50% chance to hit for double damage

2 - defender. When attacking, has a 50% chance to instead attempt to intercept the next target aimed at any mob loyal to the city (usually another soldier, but it works on any city-loyal), rendering it harmless. This will also cause the attacker to start attacking the defender instead of his original target, and will be the only way to distribute attacks across multiple targets after the change described at the top of this post has been activated.

3 - healer. Has a 50% chance to heal the most damaged mob loyal to the city in the room by 50% of his maximum health, instead of doing a regular attack. This has a short cooldown during which the same mob cannot be healed again (but others can).

There will undoubtedly be more changes to this system coming, so play around with it and let me know if anything doesn't work properly.


In other news, city workers and slaves no longer act as a make-shift militia - they will no longer assist guards when they are attacked.



Garryn



Penned by My hand on the 19th of Aequitas, in the year 678 AD.