Was It Wise To Make Lairshaping So Complicated?

[Pharcellus]

Dragons and bipeds do not exist in two separate universes.

Reward for Effort must apply to both equally, or it has no meaning whatsoever.

The comparisons are valid and meaningful, just as the comparisons between biped and Dragon capabilities have been.

If you don't want us to be able to compare them, then petition the devs for two separate games, THEN AND ONLY THEN would any comparisons between them be invalid and "silly".

The FACT of the matter is that both play the SAME game, in the SAME world, and should have the SAME base opportunities.

If you disagree with any of that, then we'll just have to agree to disagree on everything about the game, because that is the foundation for the vast majority of my arguments, and simply saying it is baseless won't cut the mustard as a counter-argument.

[PJ]

Reward for Effort is a drum I beat all the time.

But aside from the situation I outlined previously, I don't feel there's a disparity.

True, if you quantify the reward from the effort spent obtaining a plot, entirely on how many silos you can cram into it, you will get less from a lair. But that is offset to an extent by the amount of other structures you can cram in. And there is no exact relationbetween the value of a chamber/hall/grand hall and that of a silo. It will be pleasing to some, and displeasing to others, just like the ability to cram in silos on a biped plot but not houses/guildhalls is pleasing to some and displeasing to others.

[Tympest]

Some perusing of the Lair footprints at http://home.comcast.net/~ksulitan/Lair_Pieces.xls


(thoughtfully provided by Tympest)

has shown to me that the volume occupied by higher tier silos, would be substantially better served by being filled with severall t1 silos, in both number of stacks and in bulk storage. I'm not sure how exactly silos are accessed in lairs, so I can't say if ease of access for a large t6 silo even matters in the discussion.

So while I don't agree with that being able to fit fewer silos in a lair then on a plot matters. I do think there may be an issue because there seems to be no benefit to building higher tier lair silos.

Aye, you could fit 9 T1 silos in the volume taken up by a T6 silo... however, each silo has one door that needs to be attached to something. So in the end, you might waste more space putting in a string of corridors to access 9 T1 silos, than if you had one corridor and a T6 silo. Though with the L shape of the silo, you could put in a 3 or 4-way junction and place two T1 silos in the space the first level of the T6 silo takes up, and do the same on the lower two levels... so potentially you could place 6 T1 silos in the space of the T6 without too much trouble, as long as you find a way to attach everything.

[Pharcellus]

I don't base it entirely on "how many silos I can cram onto it". I base it on needed functionality to suit my playstyle.

As a crafter, I have need to store of upwards of 70 different resources, the machines to work them, and a place to "live". With a large biped plot, that isn't a problem. With what is called a "large" lair, it is. I have been playing for two years, waiting for the opportunity to build a Lair which suits me, just like bipeds have had almost since release. There's my effort. What is my reward? "Go play a biped!" "Go buy a biped plot!".

******** that.

[PJ]

You may have to adapt your playstyle to the specifics of the system, just like the rest of us.

[Pharcellus]

What part of this are you missing?

The "rest of you" haven't had to adapt. YOU"VE FRIGGIN' HAD IT ALL ALONG!

[PJ]

Haven't had to adapt? Gosh no. Following your lines of thought:

As a crafter I"need" 12 different workshops. And as many silos for all the resource types as you "need", I need even more to accomodate the greater variety of resources. Hard to squeeze that into a plot along with the storage space for the copious amount of equipment I "need" to cover my crafts.

I couldn't fit absolutely everything I felt I "needed" to have. SoI adapted, made sacrifices, choices. My plot has no machines. I've enough silos for a selection of resources, not every dang resource I could possibly need in every possible circumstance. You can't have everything.

[Pharcellus]

1) I have TWO crafting classes. You have NINETEEN. Besides it being just about the dumbest class system in any game, who do you think it is more fair to? Any BIPED TWO-CLASS crafter can get a 90x90+ plot, fill it with the machines he/she/it needs, silos for crafting, and STILL have more than ample room for living spaces, including large houses and lots of decorations.

2) Our guild has four plots that add up to less space than the largest of the available biped plots, and we've been able to fit ALL TWELVE machines, and ONE HUNDRED FIFTY silos, T6 if we wanted. We even have room left over for a T3/T3 house on one of them, if we wanted. Maybe you can't do it, but it CAN be done.

[Goriax]

I don't want to be comparing every last inch of lair space vs plot space although I think bipeds who insist on getting upset over lairs or just the attention dragons have been getting lately are being very unreasonable -- the attention was just to bring dragons up to the same level of refinement that bipeds have always had although in places TG has applied what they've learned and refined over the last two years. Bipeds will eventually get those same refinements (such as the modular building system).

Be that as it may, things do NOT have to be equal. I'll compare the classic D&D classes because they're far more straightforward then HZ schools and less contreversial. In D&D, you can be one of various classes. These classes are NOT the same. They are hopefully complimentary but definately not the same except for presentation. A cleric definately is not equal to a fighter although they each have their own roles to play which should be complimentary. I could see someone representing D&D clerics complaining that he can't do squat for damage while the D&D fighter complains that he has no healing power whatsoever. Neither islooking atthings in the right way.

I.e. a fighter working with a cleric is far stronger then a fighter working alone and a cleric working alone. Each must be well thought out and polished, but they do not have to be equal. They should have abilities which compliment, so that when they work together they get a lot more done. In fact differences make for a more interesting game.

I see no reason for dragons and bipeds to be the same except for presentation, although that is not an excuse to shaft dragons. If bipeds are strongerin one thing then dragons should be stronger in something else. It should be such that dragons and bipeds can work together in a complimentary way.

Seeing as how dragons haven't had a chance to design and build their own lairs, as well as see how their designs work out in practice, it's a bit early to identify the strong points of lairs vs biped plots. But hopefully it'll become obvious in the next few months. Also hopefully it also becomes obvious that a dragon lair is not an exact equivalent to a biped plot and that each is goodat things the other is not.

[dorrin]

Skalkaar is a Tier 1 island. New Brommel, New Vassarak, and New Koraelia are also Tier 1 islands. There are NO crystals on ANY of those places.

the other new islands don't have them because they're abandoning them to focus on trismus as the training island. skalkaar because you're not meant to even be there past level 5, really. besides, it's inconvenient there anyway because there are no dim wisps.

It is meant to be convenient... for NEW PLAYERS. It is an introduction to the game for newbies, so ease of access to resources near machines is the goal. Increasing resource spawns would encourage more veteran player abuse.

wow, so i've been abusing new trismus? .. ouch.
my point was that it's just as convenient for older players as new.. and you can bet people will use it for that reason no matter the devs' intention for the island.
fine.. if you want it discouraged, sure.. put the cost to port there back in.

Of course there weren't any veteran players around to contend with, ...

this is simply not true... there weren't _many_, perhaps, but there were definitely some who used those islands past level 20, particularly brommel, i'm sure.

[Death-knell]

I have yet to see someone actually list the locations for Azulyte crystals. For example, Titian Azulyte Crystals are found in more locations than simply Chiconis.

Tier 1 gems are found in other locations than New Trismus. In fact, you're only hurting newbies by working them there.

OK, so let me get this straight. You folks at Tulga go out of your way to hide and put crystals in the most remote locations. Even though it is a primary building block and now you want to try and guilt trip us because we use what we can find?

You really need to get a clue.....unless of course we're not suppose to be able to complete our lairs.

Rebuilding the collapsed lair also showed me you guys don't have a clue what amount of resources we need. I had to wait for titian crystals to pop and bright essense we even a challenge to find. Funny, biped construction isn't that limited. And no, I shouldn't have to run all over the world trying to find the supplies I need.

[Illi]

I have to agree with Death-Knell here.


On one hand, we've got a newbie island, with all T1 resources is the same general location. All machines nearby, including a crystalshaper(when it's activated).

On the other hand, we've got T1 resources in Lesser Aradoth, very spread out, Kion volcano crystals are sparse at best. No crystalshaper anywhere near Lesser Aradoth and no plans(that I've heard) to place one there. And other T1 resources in other locations but with no machines, some machines, or machines 700 miles away, still no crystal shaper.

Call me crazy, but which option seems more realistic, logical, and PRACTICAL? Flying all over the place for hours on end, porting endlessly, and placing less units per hour? Or using the easiest location for convienience?

So it's US hurting newbies by working gems and crystals on New Trismus? No, I don't think so. WE didn't decide to make lairshaping a web of complication, while placing the resources in spread out locations that make no sense.

I'll be working mine wherever I deem practical.

[Dragoniade]

Dragonaide:

The whole "you can't pack as many dragon silos into a lair as you can biped silos into a plot" is silly. Silos in lairs are not equivalent to silos on plots, they are analogous. Like Chambers are to houses, and Halls are to Guild Houses. They aren't meant to be exactly the same. If you docompare lairs to plots, you have to consider the whole picture not one small aspect where lairs come out worse then plots.

Firstly your largest nonguild lairs are ~500s, and you can only get about a 35x35 plot for that much money. Now in that space you can probably pack more t6 silos, i don't have any accurate figures on the footprints of biped silos. But what i do know is that that 500 silver plot cannot hold a t6 guildhall, or a t5 guildhall, much less both. My 10+g plot can't hold both, yet you can fit both a t6 hall and a t5 hall easily in a 500s lair. But who cares, plots != lairs. A t6 guildhall takes up ~50% of the area of my 93x9x 10g plot, but a t6 hall fits easily in a 3x3x3 cube (18% of the volume) of a 500s lair. But you don't see me complaining about it.

Plots are superior in some areas, Lairs are superior in others. Get over it. You're lucky in that your dragoncan choose to own a plot if you don't like lairs, while my biped cannot choose to own a lair.

Price isn't a good comparaison, for 200s more, you could get a 60x60 plots. Lerena has some of those plot.

I would like to know, WHEN racial silos are going to be released, can we expect those to have different footprints, for each? If so, why would someone bother building a silo that take twice the space for less storage? This is what is happening with lair silos.

If tulga had adapted the silo for the footprints, it would have been fine. They did it when they introduced the Tiered building. The grandfather human, slikk, dwarven, saris house were of the same tier, but with a different footprints. So they ajusted the capacity of those to reflect the used space.

Why not do the same with lair silos? A tier 2 take twice the space of a Tier 1 Silo? Then give it twice or 75% the capacity of 2 tier 2 silo. Tier 3 take 3 time the space? Give it 3 time the capacity of a tier 3.

T1 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 20,000 bulk
T2 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 60,000 bulk
T3 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 125,000 bulk
T4 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 215,000 bulk
T5 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 330,000 bulk
T6 Storage Chamber - 1 stack, 470,000 bulk

The Tier 6 look huge, but I assumed you can fit 6 Tier 1 silo in the space of a Tier 6 silos.

Like Pharcellus said, all the lairs room are equivalent in gain and reward to a plot building, except for the footprint and effort. If it's only the shape that change, it isn't enough difference to call them 'analogue'.

I would sure like to see what's so different between lairs and plots in term of benefit? Since comparing prices isn't good, lets take the biggest non guild plots and lairs. For plots, it's a 90x90 plot if I remember correctly, found in Sheeperd home (I'm excluding the single Castle Plot in South Marsh here). As far as I remember, you can put a Tier 5 house and a Tier 5 GH in there too. Plus enough room to add quite a bunch of Tier 6 silo. Could you do the same with the biggest non guild lairs (150 units), especially with Tier 6 silos? I don't think so.
And you can do even better with the south marsh plots, which is bigger and way cheaper than one at SH. But that one stand alone.

Edit: I just saw the Lair Pieces excel files. Look like Tier 6 take 9 time more space than a Tier 1 silo.That would be something like 700,000 bulk instead of my 470,000 bulk

[Dragoniade]

Could a biped reach all of those silos? Is there a way besides clicking on them to reach them? Would they be able to reach the middle ones to be in range/click them? I have never had a biped plot so know not all the in's and outs of owning one and accessing one.

Remember that biped aren't restricted by cubic unit when placing building. they can put a building to the centimeter. the average biped take about 1 meter, and a silo, 3.5meters I think.
For a dragon, you have to sacrifice 1 unit of space for 1 unit of silo. But for a biped, all you need is 1 meter of space, even less if the player decide to use Set Scale on himself (I never tried setScale on a silo).

When ther Tiered silos got released, a player could only access it by clicking on the tiny doors in front of it, so that the players would be forced to make 'trails' to their silo. The players complained and tulga put it back the the way it was before: clicking anywhere on the silo. With that, all you need is to be able to see the silo. and be able able to click it.

So a plot silos can easily be smacked all together withou worrying about being able to reach it. There's no wasted space for road and access space.

Tulga changed the silo because it wasn't efficient to have them require a single path to access them. Why repeat the same mistake for dragons?


Edit: I just checked in game. You can setscale a building. You want to select a silo? Setscale it at 3 and you can easily select it. If some are in the way. Setscale it at 0.5 to reach it.

Since people keept tell that dragon should setscale themselves, look like it's fair use to setscale their own buildings too

[Balthizar]

Lairs are cool. Lair playing cool. The work is at a crazy level of pain for all the resoures you need to combine. What is a dragon going to do that dos not have some silos to work out of. Its insain and i feel sorry for them. Hell I feel sorry for use that do have silos to work out of lol. No one said cram it all into one school did they no they did not. Wish it takes 5 schools to build lairs then I could work one thing at a time and not this crazy balancing act. By the way there are level 100 Laircrafters already and no bloody lairs you Faild to stop your power levelers kk so take the pain out of it for the rest of us normal people please.

Balthizar Drako!

[Goriax]

I have to agree with Death-Knell here.


On one hand, we've got a newbie island, with all T1 resources is the same general location. All machines nearby, including a crystalshaper(when it's activated).

On the other hand, we've got T1 resources in Lesser Aradoth, very spread out, Kion volcano crystals are sparse at best. No crystalshaper anywhere near Lesser Aradoth and no plans(that I've heard) to place one there. And other T1 resources in other locations but with no machines, some machines, or machines 700 miles away, still no crystal shaper.

Call me crazy, but which option seems more realistic, logical, and PRACTICAL? Flying all over the place for hours on end, porting endlessly, and placing less units per hour? Or using the easiest location for convienience?

So it's US hurting newbies by working gems and crystals on New Trismus? No, I don't think so. WE didn't decide to make lairshaping a web of complication, while placing the resources in spread out locations that make no sense.

I'll be working mine wherever I deem practical.

I've been stockpiling ALL the tier 1 building materials and I've been using Lesser Aradoth exclusively. I don't know if it's harder then New Trismus since I've never bothered with New Trismus (I did survey it a bit and did not consider it an improvement), but it isn't hard. And it's easier then the Tier 2 building materials I've tried so far.If you think things through on Lesser Aradoth you can do quite a bit and you need to start getting used to what you have to do for higher tiers.

I've never come remotely close to running out of crystals to mine in the Kion volcano. Plus, if you and your Tarbash jump over the side you're not far from the Kion teleport with a road most of the way there.

Once people have made crystal shaper machines in the lairs on Lesser Aradoth it'll get easier still.

So maybe New Trismus is easier then Lesser Aradoth; I don't know never having tried New Trismus. But Lesser Aradoth is not hard and it's easier then higher tiers. It'll be easier yet if some of those lairsget machines.

I'll concede that you can pack more high tier silos on a biped plot then a lair plot. I'd like to know how many people actually pack their plot like that. Flying around Istaria I think the answer is not many. And your typical dragon plot can easily hold multiple halls (guild houses) lairs (houses) all machines (even high tier machines), and you can do the grand hall (no biped equivalent)if you're wiling to sacrifice a bit (but only a bit - I'd be more deterred from building a grand hall by the work involved and not the space required). On one average plot. So it's not like we're all THAT tight for space.

Besides which those higher tier halls and the grand hall beat the crap out of anything the bipeds have as far as looks go in my opinion.

Incidentally you do NOT need one 1x1x1 hallwayto accessone silo. At the worst you need one per two silos (get a 4-way put silos on either side connected to 4 ways front and back which connect to other silos. Final 4-way can have 3 silos instead of 2 although that's also a good place for something else so as to not waste space). The advantage of higher tier over lower tier is less access needed, not more holding capacity. That depends on lair design.

[Death-knell]

Great, so everythings fine because you don't have a prob finding tier 1. Try the higher tiers and get back to us

[Goriax]

Great, so everythings fine because you don't have a prob finding tier 1. Try the higher tiers and get back to us

I never said it was. In fact I specficially said higher tiers were harder. .I was merely addressing the people who feel Lesser Aradoth is lousy for tier 1. That's all.

Sheeze

[Dragoniade]

I'll concede that you can pack more high tier silos on a biped plot then a lair plot. I'd like to know how many people actually pack their plot like that. Flying around Istaria I think the answer is not many. And your typical dragon plot can easily hold multiple halls (guild houses) lairs (houses) all machines (even high tier machines), and you can do the grand hall (no biped equivalent)if you're wiling to sacrifice a bit (but only a bit - I'd be more deterred from building a grand hall by the work involved and not the space required). On one average plot. So it's not like we're all THAT tight for space.

More than you've seen. I've seen plot with rows of Tier 5-6 silos.
For the others, you don'T see many because, for a biped, a Tier 6 silo is worth 4 Tier 1 silo, for the same space used.
Have those silo use 9 times the footprints, and I bet it would have been another story.

Heck, I had 24 silos on my old plot, and that was far from being 20% of my plot surface.
By the way, the Grand Hall is the equivalent of a biped House. And as far as I know, you can only have 1 hall of each tier per lairs, and they are far from being the equivalent of a silo.

Thinks 'crafter' rather than 'adventurer' for a second. Those are pratically useless for a crafter versus a Silo.

And the main arguement is, Lair silos can hols up to NINE time LESS than a plot silo. That's a LOT of wasted bulk.

[Nayuaka]

The lair chambers are the equivalent of a house. The grand hall is something different. Much bigger and has tons of storage. Though I'll prolly never build one cause I don't want to put myself through the painful grind that will be teir 6.