"Seek and destroy" contracts

[serf]

As this is my first post on these forums, please accept my thanks and adoration for your work so far. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing and if RL RNGesus wills it, I’ll happily spend hundreds more. Also, please excuse any formatting issues, as I have very little experience with this sort of thing.

As for my suggestion, one of the aspects of the game I’ve enjoyed most is exploring the beautiful map and unearthing treasures. However, as the game stands, I consider such endeavors a luxury that a early- or mid-game company will rarely prioritize. It struck me that the exploration part would fit well into certain contract types and might expand the strategic gameplay outside battles while being relativly easy to implement.

The attached image illustrates the current mechanics of how directions associated with contracts of the ‘Clear enemy encampment’ variety are given. In short, you’re pointed in a vague and often quite unreliable direction relative to the nearest town, but any confusion is mitigated by also giving a pin-point location and a marker – even if the target location was previously undiscovered.

My proposal is that instead of giving up the exact location upon accepting the contract(unless you’ve already discovered it), the directions should be more substantial. Again using the attached image as reference, the contracts’ directions could be “Destroy Jagged Fangs Hideout located in the grasslands less than a days march east of Weidemark”. This would certainly add to the strategic considerations around time on the map (wages and food), add to the sense of accomplishment even before the battle ensues and it will make exploring and getting a sense of the surrounding area before accepting local contracts a feasible approach. As in the above example, a reliable direction, terrain type and rough estimate of travel time would suffice – and from what I’ve seen in tavern rumor directions, at least some of the framework is already there.

We who are about to (send our battle brothers to) die – salute you!

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[ERICdb]

Great suggestion! I would even elaborate on your proposal and make some notes. If i’m not wrong current seek and destroy contracts are generated once a point of interest has spawned close to the city or town. This is great, but I believe that plainly giving the location of said point is rather uninspiring. For future add-ons i’d like to see some kind of progressive quest system for this type of contracts to give more immersion. For example:

1. Noble house/town has a vague idea of where the point of interest is located based on where the enemies came from. You are given a general direction and must search for steps that lead you to the point of interest, and return with the relevant information. You should probably face a spawn from the point of interest that is meant to be weaker than the encampment/fortress itself. Alternatively you can try to destroy the menace by yourself and gain some crowns if you think you can handle it.

2. Noble house/town already has information about the location of the point of interest and doesn’t have available soldiers to stop the threat. Maybe you or another mercenary band got the info some time ago. You are sent to destroy the point of interest. If the point of interest was not the only of of this faction, then once cleared you have a chance to discover that this was just an outpost of the enemy. You then can risk some time/supplies and a possible ambush to search for the evil source and extra rewards.

3. Noble house/town already has information about the location of main enemy base of operations. You are sent to destroy the root of the problem. You may be given some spare forces depending on the enemy power level to deal with them and get rewards based on the remaining helping forces.

All of this is meant to avoid giving the player this sense of artificiality when given the location of points of interest. This also gives the player more options when things have gone bad and you are trying to rebuild your company.

[icemelon]

I remember early on the EA, the first seek and destroy were in the way you two say. It added some nice exploration and also a little fear to ambushes and unexpected combats or situations. The problem, in my opinion, was that indications were too vague, so it made difficult to find the spot. I don’t know if I’m right, but I also remember that triggering the location to appear on the map was very sensitive, you had to be really close to it. So it was a bit frustrating slow walking through a forest to find nothing, and getting ambushed by direwolves.

Some balance in this would be really good.

[spamtaboo]

+1 to icelemon It was like that before and I personally felt frustrated as hell when you keep going circles around the supposed location and cannot find it. Sometimes you had to drop the contract because of that since you had no money or food to wander about blindly.

[Fardax]

there used to be such contracts but they where a pain in the ass, so they remove them and replace it whit the tavern rumors that some times gives you the direction to some random location.

[ERICdb]

It would seem that the implementation on the previous seek and destroy contract wasn’t very fun, but I still believe that a more flavorful search would benefit the game. What if the employer give general directions and then when you get at X distance to the point of interest a prompt says: oh, you have found tracks leading to the place in question. And some tracks actually appear, leading to the destination?

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