Caravans – QUESTION EDITED
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The stats we keep show that fewer people are doing caravans these days. What are the reasons? I loved caravans as a player and I'm a little confused by this.
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A more helpful question to answer is: what would have to be done to make caravans more fun?
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I prefered the old style caravans where you would walk through a quest area protecting the gnomes. Last 3 times I did a caravan though it had changed and twice it bugged out and I got nothing and once I got so little coin that it wasnt really worth my characters time.
I might be remembering wrong but could you not go on as many caravan trips per reset as you wanted before rather than having only one trip per reset?
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The newer caravans, when I tried them, were far too chaotic. Players didn't know how to tell their respective oxen to "stand ground", so their oxen charged into the melee and got slaughtered. And an attack from behind messed things up even worse. Basically, it's too hard to protect them, and keep things organised and thus survivable. Unless it's changed since I last tried one.
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Few times I did..it was a party wipe..we had to run for shelter. May be the way the Monsters spawn..the sudden ambush is something hard to handle in real time
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They are problably just too challenging. You never know what risk you're taking and sometimes you're slaughtered yourself. I wonder if there still is a chance 3 goblin chieftains and 30 elite goblins & mages can spawn on the road?
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The older caravans, thinking about it now, were better because you could assign the whole caravan to a single player. That player (a mage, or archer generally), could sit back with the caravan so it didn't run into trouble. It gave stability in battle, and let people have some control over their battles instead of "oh god there's 2 oxen following me, how do I keep them safe and fight efficiently at the same time while also keeping myself alive?"
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I went on four or five caravans maybe, and fought a bunch of orcs on one, just that. All the others were uneventuful.
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Too high reward for too low risks is my personal experience.
And lots of mess with charging oxen when the fight ensues.Other than that I like the new system.
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In response to the new question: More control over the caravan (allow one player to adopt all of them, instead of 2 each, which splits it up, or something like that), and more reliability in terms of the spawns you'll find.
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It's kinda funny that this topic is brought up. For since I started back playing on CoA I've wrapped my current character around the importance of trade, caravans and ect.
Only to see the lack of interest in doing them. Yes, the road bears an uncertainity about it. But, if everything was predictable about the UNTAMED roads. It'll just be boring and unwarrented.
Honestly, I could see it being like that one day. If those take the efforts to make it so. Which will in turn take a cut out of caravan gaurds pay for the lack of possible danger. But it's either one way or the other. Ya can't have them both.
As for challenging not so much in terms of acting accordingly to what is presented to you. Which makes it a good thing that the caravans are allowed to roam around on a non quest map. It gives a sense of adaptablity to the mix. Allowing the caravan to go a different route provided there's an alternative route.
Anyway, the caravans are fun, with an hint of exicitment of not knowing what will come. Giving the option to allow the scouts be scouts the rangers and druids do their animal control thingy and the fighters . . . Well the fighters can be themselves just about anywhere.
In short if you didn't read all of that I like the caravan system as they are now. I would like to see more possible roads heading away and to these trade routes. of course supplementing the alternative less traveled road to be slightly more dangerous because of the lack of their of travel.
Heck I can see it now!
A group of bandit barring off the regular road just a to lure an expected caravan to the "dangerous" alterative route for a well devised ambushed.
But hey that's me. I just see possiblity where ever I can.
IceNinja Out!
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I think it would help if one player was allow to control the oxens. I for one have no clue of how to control them, if it is like a pet is still annoying that one player can't control all of them. When it comes to someone scouting ahead, I wonder how the Hostiles trigger is handled. I hope they are not trigger by the oxens and a player could have a chance to detect what is about to ambush them.
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I've only done them a few times, and found them to be rather than a death trap, far too easy for the reward of doing them. While it might have been lag related, nothing spawned on us on two occasions after picking up the caravan, hardest part was controlling the oxen and getting them to leave once we were done. While the system isn't any more clunky than the old caravans, (remember how was it was to lead them during lag? Walk three steps, wait thirty seconds, walk three more steps) there's something about it that drives folks away a bit, not sure if it's the unloading/nondisappearing oxen, rumours of difficulty, or what. Some of the old routes were known to be rather rough at times, with the added bonus of being in areas no one else could get to if you ran into trouble and those were still done very often, so I don't know what the troubles are
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The problem for me the last few times was not difficulty, but buggy oxen. They kept getting stuck on shit. At the point I spend longer than an hour on a caravan, half of the time sitting around waiting for the oxen-people to get the oxen taken care of, I decide not to do it anymore:
SUGGESTION:
If it's possible, I would like to see the option to raid caravans. I imagine it'd be easier since we wouldn't have to worry about protecting the oxen or getting them to move around a rock, or a log, or whatever. Perhaps make it more difficult by providing a few protectors…. maybe clash with other PCs that are protecting it?
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Right now, it seems to overlap with the Fivestars delivery, and that one doesn't suffer from the oxen control issues, and the sometimes TPK from mega ambushes (though this is usually in wide level range parties).
Both can obviously have the rather dull case of nothing happening, but Fivestar delivery doesn't eat as much of your time messing with oxen.
And the set times for departure have always kidn of put me off, since v2. Where you often have to rush to assemble your party or wait however long for the proper time to come around.
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I haven't done the new style caravans since coming back to COA, but I remember even on the old style ones the oxen AI being a pain in the backside. The stupid creatures are forever getting stuck on things, refusing to follow, refusing to transition, etc. If you can't have one person hang back with them, it's so much worse. Assigning oxen to each character is a good idea in principle because practically speaking, fighting with large stupid animals around you're supposed to protect should be hard. However, it's made a bad idea in practice because of the limitations of the game engine and the retardedness of oxen AI - it's just not worth it any more.
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one person in the group can take multiple oxen i think. I know I could take 2 at the same time. Problem with them is you attack they charge all the time even if you order them to follow you. I guess you just need some strategy to get the hang of it. Maybe order them to follow (while not attacking) and when they are close you tell em to stand still. The voiceset commands (V key) work wonders with that.
I've only been on one since the bugs been worked out of it and we lost most of our ozen because they kept charging when battle started. Is there a way to tell them never to attack and keep following you?
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I think this is a handful of minor problems that end of being a headache and more trouble then they are worth.
Firstly, as many have pointed out, having the oxen controlled by multiple people is a mess and just does not work well, especially with there somewhat bad AI. Make one person have control of the oxen and I think both problems will be lessened.
Secondly, is the matter of the oxen of taking the stuff off the oxen, then trying to ge the oxen to disappear. Its a huge hassle for everyone to take the stuff from the oxen then give it all to one person, then get the oxen to leave. It seems very laggy as well, as many times I have to drag to the stuff to my inventory over and over until it finally goes. It would be much better if there was a way for the quest to just automatically read how many oxen are left alive and pay you based on that and despawn them itself. What would be even better, is if there was a Caravan master that spawn at the city gate when you take a caravan quest so you dont have to lead the oxen bumping, banging and bumbling threw the city.
Thirdly, and lastly, is the fact that the Caravan seems either way to hard or way to easy. I have only been on a few caravan runs that seemed like a fair difficulty. On a couple our whole caravan and half our group got killed and on more then a few there was no eneimes at all or very few enemies. I dont want to be killed everytime I go and on the other hand I dont want to be bored out of my mind either.
Honestly, I think the problem with the regular quests of which there are MANY that never get done should be solved first. As a caravan quest is straight forward and there are tons of quests out there that I never see people do…But, thats getting off topic.
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Well, the spawns for this quest are kinda messed up. You either get a VERY easy spawn(One time we only had like five 8 AB spawns) or a VERY hard one(With a similar group I got about 5 Goblin Warriors(12 AB+Sneaks) + Bandits + 5 Young Wyverns + 1 Adult Wyvern(16 AB), for a party of 4 people(Levels 8, 7, 5 and 4). Not only did we have a couple deaths and used a gross amount of consumables to make it out, but all the oxen got slaughtered and thus was a lost trip.
Sure, caravan raids are chaotic and deadly, but there's too many OOC mechanical factors making it WAY too hard to keep your oxens alive when there's triple the amount of enemies than your group, you're getting attacked from the front and the back, that pesky goblin keeps attacking an ox even though you're trying to run him from behind and for some reasons the oxen turn into Garagosians and charges into battle to fight to the death.
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We should totally buff the Oxen..hehe.
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@Swifty:
We should totally buff the Oxen..hehe.
And maybe not have everyone take 2 of them, especially if they are not too good at animal handling.. You don't have to bring 2 oxen per person.
Anyway I've done old and new style caravans and on both of them you'd have dull trips and deadly trips. The old system seemed far more vulnerable to lag, at least to me, and the new system seems a bit too much of a hassle for the reward, at least at levels 1-6 where there's enough other things to do per reset to keep you busy for a couple of hours at a much lower risk/reward ratio.
Doing the 'solo' delivery quests does become a little less boring if you have an ox left over from a caravan to carry the goods, so there's a small added bonus there.