Village Domination: The Meaning of Going to War

[Dragon6624]

This is--in part--based off of the "War Mechanics" Topic in Suggestions board, so thanks to Fedro for making that and partly inspiring me to think this out.

I noted in Naruto Shippuden that the shinobi had "World Wars". This--due to the nature of shinobi--made little sense to me later on, as I realized that went to such lengths as going into all out battles..which is odd to have for groups of warriors designed to carry out most of their missions in silence and small groups...not large formations. First off, shinobi are mostly meant for stealth, sure, there are your heavy-hitters, and the Kage will I'm sure see that they're put to good use, but the key to war is mostly to diminish enemy numbers without losing too many of yours. In other words, most combat actions would more than likely be ambushes/sieges, because no--smart--commander wants a fair fight with the enemy. Of course, it's probably going to be up to the players to decide how a war is fought--and subsequently who wins said war--but it would still be nice to see you get bonuses for fighting a "tactical" war. Shall we say...resource points that you can take/hold during wars and after them? Territory boundaries could be useful in motivating villages to expand, and it would actually give villages reasonable cause to go to war, not just over each other's jutsu, which they'd end up learning pretty quickly from conflict anyway. On top of that, you could give them even more reason to gain control of these resource/territory areas by implementing systems that correspond with the villages themselves.
Mines = more gold/metal production, which in turn increases the wealth/military power of a village.
Rice paddies/other farming lands = more grain for the village, which increases village (NPC Soldier?) population.
Timber lands/stone quarries = increases in the rebuilding speed of besieged villages.
Herbal patches (yeah, you remember that episode where Naruto had to gather those medical herbs so that they could PREPARE FOR WAR, right?) = increases in healing/curing times for shinobi that rest/respawn in villages and increases in the production of things such as food-pills, poisons, and other alchemical elements used by shinobi in war-times.

And those are only a FEW of the quite varied territory types you could have villages controlling, each with their own benefits, giving the villages their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as personalities based upon these "traits".

Hell, you could motivate villages to literally DOMINATE others in order to prove they have the best weapons, wealth, economy, and population size, which in turn bolsters the prowess and reputation of those villages' shinobi. By having a "Power" ranking for each village, you could increase the amount of randomized NPC "requests" for missions, increasing prosperity for those villages with greater power. Poorer villages with fewer territories could be branded as "lesser", by having things like lower quality weapons available to buy, which in turn affects the performance of your shinobi--would you want to go into battle with a copper kunai against a high-quality steel one? Maybe..if you were really confident in your abilities--and thus the performance of your village as a whole. It would also give more meaning to the role of the Kage. Would it be good to strike this village and make a temporary treaty with that one? Are those people weak enough for us to nab a territory or two, and then HOLD that territory? Who's to be trusted when you control a key resource point? Are you skilled enough to slyly push the other villages into conflict with each other, only to crush them after they're all weak, seizing massive amounts of territory from the spoils of your trap?

This is a discussion by the way, anyone--and I EXPECT you all to give your thoughts here, this is important--can reply with their own thoughts and ideas on the subject.

...just so long as it doesn't involve something idiotic or, *gags* something to do with paying irl currency in order to get an edge.


P.S.
If you didn't take the time to read the whole post, you have 1 of 3 options you can now choose from:

1. Go back to Kindergarten, it's where you belong if you couldn't get through a meager amount of text like the above...

2. RE-READ IT, it's an important issue that should be addressed, as is the case with MANY of the suggestions here!

3. Please don't ever respond or read another one of my posts again...you are a shame to the human race.
...no, not this one, the pre-historic human race. The damned cave-artists could probably take the time to read more than you ever could.

[Shivraj]

Damn it, more conflict........... I wonder how I'll ever achieve world peace..... Oh well... I agree about the tactical conflicts though, not straight on slaughter, will actually require people to use their Brains instead of Brawns. And the stuff to motivate villages to fight, wow man, good idea but it just creates more war ;-;

[vipto]

WAR!!!

[Brakelvierr]

Damn it, more conflict........... I wonder how I'll ever achieve world peace..... Oh well... I agree about the tactical conflicts though, not straight on slaughter, will actually require people to use their Brains instead of Brawns. And the stuff to motivate villages to fight, wow man, good idea but it just creates more war ;-;

When these big wars aren't raging, are we gonna see a ninja cold war anyway 0.O

I like this idea of more strategic attacks adds a lot more to the realism and variation to war.

[Vreg]

Nice suggestions, although implementing them in an MMO world would be very difficult.

[StrawHatSeyi]

A war should be up to the players. No war mechanics should be implemented. Plus, I think people will hesitant to partake in war, as this game is perma death and people will be careful before going into battle.

[Mars]

Vreg should pay me to kill kids in wars.
They'll pay $100 to get their account back, I say 50/50 split

[Dragon6624]

A war should be up to the players. No war mechanics should be implemented. Plus, I think people will hesitant to partake in war, as this game is perma death and people will be careful before going into battle.

I empathize with you @Straw, but I was talking about actual motivations for going to war. With a territory/power ranking system, villages will have just cause to start conflicts, not have to come up with some Illiad or--sorry Shippuden, I still love you--Naruto Shippuden excuse so they can get some action in every once and a while. For actual conflict, I would reccommend reading Fedro's War Mechanics post, he's got some good ideas on the actual systems that could be used IN player wars. I especially agree with his "temporary perma-death zone" idea, it makes sense and it adds in that feeling of tension for even the lowest level ninja, as certain things like missions could be restricted until those zones were declared safe once more.

Pff XD @Mars, I bet you'd actually do that in-game too. Damned vagabonds!

@Vreg I was thinking the territories overall wouldn't be that hard to implement, though perhaps their buffs might be a bit hard to do...who knows for sure, all I can do is imagine how things could be done, I'm not into coding yet.

@Brakelvierr Seen my post on War Mechanics yet?

@Shivraj In the distant future that is Shinobilifeonline40V...(Vreggian unit of time...definition not yet fully explained)...there is only...WAR!

[Shivraj]

@StrawHatSeyi life is perma death, didn't stop people from going to war now did it?

@dragon6624 man.....I don't want no war ;-; death is not fun I will stop war no matter what, so yeah (And yes, I know it is just a game, but it's nice to have an in game goal long before the game has been released xD, but if I had the power irl to stop war, you wouldn't be seeing it rn )

[taigakun]

 you'd make a great kage someday Mars sama

[Vreg]

@Vreg I was thinking the territories overall wouldn't be that hard to implement, though perhaps their buffs might be a bit hard to do...who knows for sure, all I can do is imagine how things could be done, I'm not into coding yet.

Territorial boundaries require a highly dynamic world, and most MMO worlds including that of SLO are static i.e. pre-constructed. The problem with creating a highly dynamic world is that it's very difficult, I would have to drop everything I'm doing now and start designing a very complex system that may or may not work and put all my efforts into that for a long time.

This reddit post makes some good points regarding that: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/32qe4s/the_challenge_of_creating_dynamic_worlds_in/

[Dragon6624]

I'll admit, I've thought of fully living, breathing, NPC-filled worlds before--but those have only ever been for my own flights of fantasy. For the territories, I meant something far less complex. Basically, it'd just be a location with maybe one NPC (for show, he just walks about/occasionally mine-animations), with a village color over its location name on the map. If the village went to war, you could claim said territory from said village by holding that zone from attackers until the war was declared over. Think along the lines of the ESO PvP Outpost system, just on a much smaller scale and with minor buffs for certain village needs/actions. Everything is already in place, the only thing that changes is which village is acquiring the buffs and when. And, of course, this would be later game stuff, nothing I've ever posted has really been meant for you guys to get working on right away, because that would be unrealistic and impossible to ask of you atm. Maybe if I had a couple hundred quid to donate to you, I might ask such things, but I don't XD

[Nas]

To be honest I think its way too early to be worrying or thinking about village wars even though its what we all want deep inside lol. But in all seriousness I don't think kages would be all for war early game, they would need a lot resources for example money, ninjas etc. All this would take time, we would first need to see how the slo world works and whether or not if a village would gain anything from going to war. I would like to think if there were disputes between villages most conflicts would be low key, like assainations, spying etc at least early game. All this taking over locations and war strategies are way into late game. At least that what I think...war should be the last thing we and the developers need to think about at the moment. XD

[Dragon6624]

To be honest I think its way too early to be worrying or thinking about village wars even though its what we all want deep inside lol. But in all seriousness I don't think kages would be all for war early game, they would need a lot resources for example money, ninjas etc. All this would take time, we would first need to see how the slo world works and whether or not if a village would gain anything from going to war. I would like to think if there were disputes between villages most conflicts would be low key, like assainations, spying etc at least early game. All this taking over locations and war strategies are way into late game. At least that what I think...war should be the last thing we and the developers need to think about at the moment. XD

Thus is the reason I always state my things to be late-game my friend, but thanks for the response anyway. Most of my ideas here probably can't be done right now, they simply require more time, funding, and a bigger team in general to complete within a reasonable manner. And I agree, most conflict would be solved through smaller, simpler, softer means (+Rep). You do, however, forget the fact that certain smaller actions can inevitably lead to larger ones...though I suppose it's really the Kage that decide a war.

P.S. Choose those Kage carefully folks! ^_^

[Vreg]

To be honest I think its way too early to be worrying or thinking about village wars even though its what we all want deep inside lol. But in all seriousness I don't think kages would be all for war early game, they would need a lot resources for example money, ninjas etc. All this would take time, we would first need to see how the slo world works and whether or not if a village would gain anything from going to war. I would like to think if there were disputes between villages most conflicts would be low key, like assainations, spying etc at least early game. All this taking over locations and war strategies are way into late game. At least that what I think...war should be the last thing we and the developers need to think about at the moment. XD

Thus is the reason I always state my things to be late-game my friend, but thanks for the response anyway. Most of my ideas here probably can't be done right now, they simply require more time, funding, and a bigger team in general to complete within a reasonable manner. And I agree, most conflict would be solved through smaller, simpler, softer means (+Rep). You do, however, forget the fact that certain smaller actions can inevitably lead to larger ones...though I suppose it's really the Kage that decide a war.

P.S. Choose those Kage carefully folks! ^_^

Actually, I think if a people is ready for war, they will elect the right kind of leader for it. Certain leaders may also disregard their own wishes in order to protect themselves from the people. Look at what happened with Hitler in WW2, the only reason he was able to rise as much in power as he did was because the people needed it after getting pressured by The Allies because of WW1 with the Treaty of Versailles also called the Dictate of Versailles.