I remember playing a sort-of RP map one time... Utterly crap landscape, but it had a few castles here and there that you could take over and start building in.
I picked gnolls as my race to play as (one of the more "barbaric" races, so they weren't really supposed to be building up inside a walled city or whatever, but there were plenty of castles to go around). I pumped out a few citizens to stand around and look useless, and started planning what I was going to do with my little kingdom.
After a time, some bandits showed up (another player). They came in, slaughtered the few soldiers I had raised, and destroyed a fair chunk of my population and buildings. Instead of destroying me outright however, they retreated back outside the city gates when they felt I was "docile" enough. From time to time they would come back and kill off a chunk of whatever population I'd managed to bring back from the ashes, essentially "farming" me for loot and experience.
What could I do? There was only one entrance to the castle, and they had built up barracks just outside the gate. Any attempt to raise an army to push them back would quickly be discovered and then put down. Even building an unusual number of houses would illicit a violent response.
Getting a couple builder units outside wouldn't be too much of an issue, but there was a snag... I was embodied on the playing field as the gnollish king, a little character with a crown hovering over his head. Should the king unit fall, I would be toast. So even if I could start up a settlement outside the walls, my king would still be imprisoned inside the old city, so I would still be under the thumb of the Bandit Lords.
It was then that I devised an ingenious plan... I put up a couple more peasant huts, and started producing more civilians, as was the normal method of doing things (civilians would automatically generate resources). No military units were created, so the bandit player didn't get alarmed.
I produced many more civilians, throwing in a number of the nearly identical builder units. I eventually had quite a crowd packed into the little fort, and it would occasionally get the edges trimmed down by minor bandit raids, but since everyone was non-military, the bandits didn't feel threatened.
Then, the moment of truth. I shoved my king into the rear middle of this vast crowd of civilians, and commanded the whole pile of them to run for the hills.
A tide of peasant workers and their families charged out the gates as the bandits sounded the alarm. They bandits attempted to stop the flood of escapees, but could only pick away at the stragglers around the edges. The padding of many, many gnollish lives served as an impenetrable defense for the king.
Faster than the bandit footsoldiers, my gnollish citizens finally managed to break away from the tyranny of the Bandit Lords. We traveled for quite some distance, always fearing that the bandits would catch up to us, or that one of the many local orcish tribes would pick up our scent. We passed beneath the unwelcoming ramparts of the elven citadel, narrowly making our way through the gap between their arrows and the axes of the barbarians that had set up camp not far outside.
Past the elven citadel, we came upon a great swamp that was hidden from view by a barrier of dense forest. We put up a few basic dwellings on the soggy ground, and began to pick up the pieces of what once was. We had done it. We were free.
And there it was... A great exodus of the dog-people that would be passed down by storytellers for generations to come. Some day, we would raise a mighty army to take back the mother city, to reclaim what was ours by right... But for now, we would rest, and mourn the many who had given their lives so that we could survive. We would live.
...shortly thereafter, it was dinnertime. I had to abandon the gnollish people in the hidden swamp next door to those bastard elves, so I was unable to see them through to their destiny. But dammit, I ESCAPED. I can't possibly describe just how awesome a feeling it was to see my plan come to fruition, and to see that I'd managed to slip past the defenses of my slave drivers into a free world. Watching the bandits try desperately to assemble enough troops to stop me as I ran for my life right out the shattered ruins of the front gate... Man, that was epic.
Still kind of a crappy map though.
Author
Topic: Being "Reported" (Read 24284 times)