Bay 12 Games Forum

EE was great in some ways, but silly in others (eg. to "Win" you had to chase the literal last enemy soldier and murder him since the AI was incapable of surrender).

EE2 improved on a lot of things (Especially diplomacy), but the graphics were really, really silly (The "leader" who is twice the size of a goddamn apartment building, apparently leadership in this world is granted only to an elite race of giants though even regular marines are about house sized)

Stealing only bring juice up to 100 though.

You usually won't need to get the leader's juice beyond 100 unless you plan on having him personally go on missions, and in that case you may as well just have him pack a gun and shoot up a news station.

Another status report:

-The "main" underground complex is very nice looking and mostly complete ! Now we only need add "rooms" to the areas laid out, and expand the aboveground area. I personally would prefer it be less exposed to sky, but that's entirely stylistic so its fine otherwise. Also, it would be ideal were it possible to completely lock out the underground via a couple of switches as a last line of defense (if they claim the front door we can still hold out in the underground), though its unnecessary barring a complete disaster.

-We need the airlock from our fort to the rest of the world to be started on soon. Our expansion is really limited by our current space, and we could use easier access to the outside.

-We still need enchantments. Fortunately, some enterprising fellow (I think it was Vattic) found a small dungeon with a mob spawner inside, so I'll get to work on enlarging it and making it a bit more detailed. From there, getting enchants should be quite a bit easier.

-If you have damaged equipment (ESPECIALLY damaged diamond equipment or damaged enchanted equipment), place it in the "enchants" bin (a special "repairs" bin would be even better). This way, we can repair valuables without having to waste extra resources making new ones.

-Seeing as how everything is functional now, we should start thinking about revenge against the punks who punked our base. These factions would be (as I recall) from Edge, Rangers, and Warriors. As I recall, they are very powerful and have bases located nearish to spawn. Besides enchants, we need a method to get to them quickly; our earlier plan to have a secondary faction for raiding and recruiting (non dorf mercenaries/cannon fodder) is probably the easiest way to do this, but presently we lack volunteers for it. We could use our old base as the "forward base", but it would probably be better to have it somewhere else somewhat closer to spawn (but more contained). It would be regularly given basic supplies by our primary faction, would be hidden and completely planned out before placing things (so as to be impossible to counter-raid, with everything contained in a couple of chunks going down in set formations), and would in turn supply us with whatever extra valuables it mined. If we ever wanted to raid, we'd merely switch factions, use /f home, and go have fun. Plus, in the event we get raided, it would serve as a way to let people die over and over without draining our overall power. If no one else wants to do this, I might after we hold proper elections for mayor/adminship.

-Also, if you want to make us money, go found a nethermine. Netherrack sells for way more than it really should be worth, is incredibly easy to mine (IIRC stone pickaxes do about the same speed as iron or diamond), and literally covers the nether. There are random raiders who think murdering netherminers and stealing their stuff is funny, but they are generally really stupid and can be beaten just by placing stuff in their way and/or claiming land. We have about a 2-1 ratio between power and land, so its mostly safe to claim a little bit of nether for mining. Don't overdo it, though. If you have valuables, take precautions by going out a bit and surrounding yourself with nether in a claimed area so that it's impossible to ambush you, and cover up all "holes" to the outside with more nether.

-I was only able to recruit one person on that list (the third). Are those the actual names?

hold on, seeing as how you already have a faction with a base, we could possibly use your "new" faction as a raiders base like we were planning on earlier (before our old one was punked) as a training/filter/forward base faction for the purposes of conquest. Seeing as how we know have a bunch of fairly tough enemies to take on (Edge, the Rangers, Warriors, and the rest of the factions that ganged up on us earlier) and our base is in a totally impractical position for raids (its a good 3-4 continents between our base and the nearest faction and even that is just ruins of a faction partially raided by Edge). With a forward base, revenge would be much more practical, and with the support of those random "I want a faction I'm a good archer etc etc" people we could bleed them dry without much cost to ourselves. Otherwise, we'll have to prepare a proper raiding group, work for enchantments (I've managed to do some minor work on that side of things, but we need a large in-base mob farm as I'm only practically able to get level 15 enchants on a regular basis even with the abandoned mines in the southron mountains), make a map room, and hope we can beat an established faction with that.

In more mundane news, I haven't been on for a while, but some things of note:

-We currently have something like 150 power to 50 land. In other words, unless you guys all go inactive or start getting killed repeatedly, we're basically safe from any attempts at land claims (so if enemy raiders can't make it into our base, its impossible to mine through as well) and strategic land claims are acceptable (don't overdo it though, if the ratio becomes 2-1 we might actually be beaten by clever raids if they plan far enough ahead and bring great equipment). Try to be somewhat active or our power goes down, making us much more vulnerable.

-On my last count, we have about 30 Dorfs, which probably makes us the largest faction on the server (too bad /f list isn't active) .

-We ought to finish the airlock and then we can start expansion, exploration, etc. A mob farm is something we really need (and I'll work on it later)

-We need enchantments! I've managed to pump out some minor ones (Two "sharpness" swords, one "efficiency" diamond pickaxe), but we don't stand a chance against the "major" factions as is. One lvl 50 enchanted weapon would be amazing, as big an investment as it may be. On that note, damaging potions would be exceptionally useful.

-We ought to do some raiding soon. The details for this need to be worked out (if we're strong enough, the random chumps in full diamond at spawn are AMAZINGLY well supplied, but otherwise we run the risk of painful deaths), but if we don't it'll take very long to get excellent equipment. Also, we need vengeance for our lost fort.

Frankly, we have lots of redstone so devices are great, but we don't have a source of slimes and sticky pistons are expensive, so we ought to be somewhat conservative. A basic airlock design would somewhat resemble:

XXXXX
YXXXY
YXXXY
XXXXX

X being the "airlock material" (Stone or what have you), Y being the "lifting area". In a perfect world it would be timed so that the one entry closes exactly as the other opens, but I'm afraid my redstone skills are merely at a novice level, so it would be far simpler to make a design with two switches for each door and a "failsafe" that automatically closes both after a given period of time (this could be done using a mixture of the "Self closing door" trick and the "cobble-break door opener).

Besides that, the current entry to our "treasure room" is rather conspicuous. Of course, if an enemy actually breaks through our defenses at this point they'd have to be incredibly dedicated, but then we don't want to leave anything to chance (and we might, MIGHT be willing/able to recover from minor griefing and robbery of non-valuables, but it'll be over if they stroll in and punk our diamond/iron stash after all the mining we did for it). I hope we can replace it with something similar to our original treasure room's mechanism; a "dummy room" with fairly worthless stuff in it (originally it was in a "misc liquid storage area"), but a switch well hidden (under water/magma) that opens a secret room that disguises into the dummy room.

So far as traps go, they're probably the only practical use for our gunpowder, since TNT only inflicts player damage on the server. Simple land mines (pressure plate + block + TNT) would be very effective against raiders barring silly Dorfs stomping on them, and we could scare them away with psychological warfare if we placed lots of pressure plates around our entrance (in claimed land so they couldn't just mine out everything). Besides that, "fake houses" outside our base could be superb honeypots for dumbasses with expensive equipment; place a reasonably nice looking house a fair distance from base (outside of our land), give it pressure plate activated doors, put valuables inside (a gold or iron block, since Notch knows we have more than enough), then cleverly deploy about 9 mines (in a 3x3x1 pattern) directly under the door-opener. Your average raider is pretty stupid (on the first raid, I trapped one dumbass inside a Dorf's room and flooded the room with lava when he had several chances to get out), and we could gather valuables from their corpses.

Well, I got us one sharpness 1 sword and one efficiency 2 diamond pickaxe.

However, I could get enchants much, much faster with a mob farm. It would take some work, but once done we might actually be able to pump out level 50, etc enchants and take on raiders toe to toe.

Should this be made aboveground or belowground? I don't want to waste space after all

A map room would indeed be great, but we'd need to have a lot of open space underground for it, and clearly defined boundaries.

Location of the mineshaft with diamonds and mob spawners:

x: -5353
y: 14
z: 5121

In other words, a fair walk but not a gigantic trek. It has a route inside via mountain

EDIT: Make that 18 diamonds