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Author Topic: Option to 'guard passage way'  (Read 1332 times)

therahedwig

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Option to 'guard passage way'
« on: April 21, 2020, 06:43:40 am »

Problem:

There's no way to control who goes through a given passageway and who doesn't. This makes it hard to reduce the effect of villains, but in general it would be nice to limit your tavern or library to civs you're actually at peace with...

My suggestion is to solve this by allowing military units to guard doors, hatches, bridges and floodgates. This is different from stationing, because the units involved should be able to check who goes in and out of a passageway, and hold back those that aren't allowed somewhere. Attempts to breach should be reported to the sheriff.

Guards should be able to grant and dissallow passage based on:
- Citizenship
- Residency
- Membership of a particular entity (such as, 'carpenter guild members only')
 - membership of entities that have a certain diplomatic state with yours (such as, only folk we're at peace with, or only folk we have trade agreements with)
- Positions or titles (example: only the king, bookkeeper and high lilac of the diamond order are allowed to enter this chamber)
- profession.
- ownership of a certain kind of item (only people with red cloaks are allowed to enter this area)
- ownership of the room that the door leads into (only the king or queen are allowed to enter their own rooms)
- state of life (baby/child, prevent baby from crawling to the magma chambers)

To ensure it isn't foolproof there's the following considerations:

- It takes time to setup and you'd need to use the military scheduling system.
- Histfigs are already able to lie about their identity, which in the event it is about membership to groups possible to claim to be part of them. Being the king himself might be much harder to pull off.
- Histfigs should be able to flip guards, this is already in the game.
- guards should be supplied with food and drink, or otherwise just leave their post to get some.

This will also improve the intrigue game when villains do manage to penetrate the chamber: Was it the guards who were responsible for the breach, or, in fact, was it the king himself!?

As a last note: citizens in general should be treated more gently by the guards, but children especially should not trigger anything but being disallowed, even if the child is doing his hardest best to prove the guards that they are totally an adult.

Edit: I just realized this has the same problem as keys and locks, in that it means the pathfinding map is not homogenous among all units.
« Last Edit: April 21, 2020, 06:50:14 am by therahedwig »
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Hamsmagoo

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2020, 10:03:08 am »

What if you can assign a "bouncer" to a location the same way you assign a messenger or performer? Then this bouncer can go around the location finding dwarves to throw out, rather than touching the pathfinding of the general population.
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Azerty

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #2 on: April 21, 2020, 01:34:19 pm »

I would add skill: for exemple, bad swimmers might be banned from near a river.

Could actions be added? It would enable the following:

  • Giving an item: For when the player wants passerby to give money or items such as ivory.
  • Gesture: Foreigners might be asked to kneel in front of the local leader's portrait.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #3 on: April 25, 2020, 04:32:00 am »

I don't find it realistic that a villain should be able to pretend to be a citizen (let alone the king specifically), but prior corruption and immediate bribery certainly makes sense, and pretending to be a member of the civ would certainly be possible.

Someone kicking people would probably work about as well as the pathing around obstacles does: the people would just return again and again and again, possibly bugging up their ability to switch to new tasks (observe a path where a harmless undead scares the character away, or two single tile wide paths to the same location where two people meeting each other both turn around to meet each other in the other passage, turning around...).

I wouldn't use this ability to keep kids away: I use a kid burrow to keep them to a reasonably safe set of areas (to e.g. stop them from running out on the battle field to pick up underwear and then decide it's time to make-believe on top of the corpses). Add them when they turn into a child and remove them when they turn into an adult.
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Azerty

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #4 on: April 25, 2020, 01:15:36 pm »

I don't find it realistic that a villain should be able to pretend to be a citizen (let alone the king specifically), but prior corruption and immediate bribery certainly makes sense, and pretending to be a member of the civ would certainly be possible.

I could see more administrative places using passports and having census lists.
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NEANDERTHAL

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #5 on: May 13, 2020, 03:37:09 pm »

some sort of classification system for creatures and their souls a la the work order/minecart item rules systems would be useful also for specifying burrow inhabitants.
perhaps the "defend passage" suggestion should be a derivative of the defend burrow suggestion, with the guard only allowing those specified in a burrow's filter to pass thru it.
this all would of course require more pathing data to be calculated/stored.
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knutor

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Re: Option to 'guard passage way'
« Reply #6 on: May 29, 2020, 08:27:30 am »

I really like this idea, but FEAR its implications, especially on LAG. They cannot, for yrs upon yrs now, fix door lag by pets.
Horrific images are circling my head of images of uncontrolled visitors at path thwarting guards dragging FPS from lost pathfinding into gameplay hell.
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