Split Renown into two different factional resources

[Fellis]

Renown inflation and ‘more things to spend renown on’ are some problems that have been discussed before, and I think making the factional resources a bit more complex would allow for some more unique and interesting things for factions to purchase, and also ways for factions to interact. The primary way renown is generated in B4 is through killing characters that your faction has identified as hostile, the action of grabbing flags gives very little. In fact, the best way to generate renown is to have an aura/AoE get all the pets very low, and manually kill them.

What I propose would be two different resources:
1. Renown: sort of as-is, gained by grabbing flags and earning badges
2. Power (or whatever name): gained by killing other characters, possibly other methods (sacrificing potions/gems/items?)

I think this change would allow permanent upgrades to be assigned to Renown and would slow renown gain, which would make the different upgrades have a bit more meaningful choice in priority. Power would be used for the more temporary upgrades such as bunker/spelltrap/beacon or per-day improvements. I think there would be more room for design of interesting one-shot or event upgrades with this new resource as well.

This is the basic idea. I think at this level you create space for balancing the costs of various upgrades with different rates of resource accumulation.

However I have some additional ideas where the game could be more interesting once we have established a secondary factional resource. This is kind of the meat of the suggestion:

Main Concepts I’m looking to address:
1. Factions of all sizes have decisions to make about their upgrades
2. Big factions should not be completely self-sufficient without some opportunity cost (a decision)
3. The game doesn’t really have a shared incentive to enable interactions between factions
4. Creating some space for different playstyles (hunting, raiding, logistics) to contribute to a faction or alliance.

Adjusting Power gains and politics:
I think with this change, it would also be beneficial to change how resources are gained when killing people. Rewards based on hostile/enemy affiliation really just make it most beneficial to have as many factions hostile as possible. This is pretty boring and doesn’t allow for interesting decisions regarding factional politics. I think there should be a non-aggression setting that grants minor kill rewards outside of the SH (a stance that better reflects most factional politics)

Power gains could be more interesting, for example there was an interesting suggestion about higher ranked faction members granting more kill reward. Kills on the streets (not in SH) could be given more reward so hunters feel like they are contributing to their faction. Going out on hunts could be a faction activity, especially if some sort of PvE content was put into the game.

Renown/Power with inter-factional relations
I think that Power should be capped (~100 to start going by B4 renown numbers?), with renown upgrades to increase the cap. However excess Power generated would not be lost. Instead when the cap is reached, an amount of power is consumed on the tick to make an item: crystallized power. This item has the faction identity tied to it and *other* allied factions can consume the item to gain renown. In this way, factions can have some exchange of goods between them for mutual benefit. Raiding/hunter factions that gain a lot of Power can exchange it with crafting factions for additional items. I also think that factions should be able to create crystalized power using renown if they want to more directly help a new/allied faction instead of waiting for their power to cap out. Power to renown should be pretty hefty, like 50:1 or higher depending on what power gains look like.

Another idea would be for crystallized power to drop to the floor (either stored crystals or power is taxed at some rate) when a faction is raided and remove renown loss. Raiders could choose to loot or not (I think it would be interesting if it was a high wt item to make this a pain!), and if they did loot they would have to ransom it or trade it around until it made it somewhere it could be consumed (as they are not allied and can’t consume it). This would also force some more interesting decisions in factional politics, as the more allies you have, the more valuable a target you are for your resources. Who’s to say your allies aren’t accepting your power under the table from your enemies?

Power and temporary/daily improvements
I think that along with these changes, one-time improvements and daily improvements should scale with faction level. Scaling could be done in a few different ways, but a system I thought of is:
Having zero daily improvements gives passive power generation, maybe 5/day or something so small dormant factions can still play with the systems
1 daily improvement: standard costs
2+ daily improvements: costs start to scale according to faction level. Costs could also scale according to the amount of improvements already active. Or both!

Big factions already have a lot of advantages, I think it should be harder to maintain faction-wide amenities like a forge/medbay for larger factions than it should be for smaller factions. The decision to keep these amenities up should be a decision instead of an afterthought.

I think that the game is missing some good ally interaction or meaningful shared incentives for big/small factions to be allied. A lot of big factions have enough logistics to not need any help from anyone. Small crafting factions need friends to trade goods with and raiders need goods. With the B5 teases about good vs evil being emphasized more and Valhalla being more of the frontline with outer planes being further from conflict I’d like to see space for more cooperation.

However there should be a path for a big faction that forgoes allies, and I think having renown upgrades to lessen some of these penalties would be interesting! However it should be a priority decision alongside other nice upgrades.

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This is a lot of text to decipher and comment on. I'm still looking to brush up this idea so any criticism is welcome. I haven't fully thought through all the consequences of these changes either, I'm mostly trying to address what I outlined in Main Concepts in a way that rewards factional interaction and doesn't really punish people who don't want to engage in the systems. Please ask questions if I didn't explain anything well!