I posted these ideas in the general forum, but they're buried in a thread so figured it would be worth reposting / expanding here for ease of access.
The Problem
Mythic entertainment simply designed keep mechanics in a bad way. There is only one way to win: knock down two doors with rams, then kill the lord. It's a pretty boring experience from a players point of view that tends to get worse the more players there are. From a melee point of view, there's just a lot of standing around guarding posterns or guarding rdps and using hold the line. A quick zerg or two when the door comes down. There aren't enough strategies to employ so it gets very repetitive.
Individual performance just doesn't really play into it much either, it's hard to feel like you're really contributing a huge amount when there are so many people involved. It may be rewarding from a RR point of view, but its not rewarding from a gameplay point of view.
The Goal
The purpose of these proposals is to make keep fights more interesting for more players, opening up more potential strategies for winning the day. I'd like to have a reason for the players to spread out more, rather than stay with the zerg, as breaking up the zerg into smaller fights should make us feel like we are contributing more to the outcome as well as providing us with more diverse combat encounters.
Step 1: Unlocking and Relocking Keep Doors
It would be great if players had the ability to unlock keep doors from the inside, and likewise, if defenders had the ability to relock a door if they are able to push the attackers back out.
This would be useful in small-scale keep fights, but unlikely to have any impact on large scale keep fights.
A group of melee dps, who can enter through the postern, would have the possibility of briefly clearing the door area then opening the door for those waiting outside. Most likely this would be a suicide run, but if they're lucky, or all the defenders are on the walls, then they could get those doors open and speed up the attack.
Defenders should also have the ability to close the doors if they are able. Maybe they do this after pushing the attackers back out, or maybe they do it whilst the attackers are still inside, effectively cutting off reinforcements for the attackers.
This ability would also open up the potential for a "ninja" keep take: before even triggering the "keep under attack" warnings, some stealthers could creep into the keep and unlock inner and outer doors, then a hidden wb nearby could rush straight in, potentially taking the keep before the other side knew what was happening. Obviously rewards should be less in such circumstances, but again, this is aiming at opening up more ways of attacking.
Step 2: Siege Ladders
It would be awesome if attackers could place siege ladders against the walls as an alternative to knocking down the doors. The ability to scale the walls would open up the following scenarios:
Attackers could scale the walls, rush the oil room and hold it. that would mean the ram could work unhindered, reducing the time spent waiting for the doors to drop.
Attackers could scale the walls and rush the doors, holding the area so that someone could open the doors from the inside (using step 1 mechanic above), again reducing the need to wait for a ram to do it's thing.
Attackers could scale the walls, holding a section open as a breach whilst more of the army climbs up.
Defenders would have a reason to use ballistas etc from the inner keep, as they'd be needed to help "sweep" the walls of attackers.
Defenders could have a "flying response" unit, so that figuring out when to reinforce the walls or when to leave them becomes a part of how to defend a keep successfully.
Ladders would be less effective on the inner keep, as there is less wall space to put them up and the defenders are much closer, so quicker to respond and destroy them.
All of this would hopefully mean that the attackers spread out more, attacking a keep from multiple directions, opening up multiple strategies. Melee would have more to do, with more small scale fights opening up around teh walls. Ranged would still have their current duties of putting pressure on the wall's defenders, but they would also have the option of joining in scaling the walls if they wanted. The final stage of entering the keep lord's room and killing him would remain largely the same, so there would still be suitable funnels and defensive strategies.
Other things to consider
Health of the ladder - you want them weak enough that they can be destroyed by just a few defenders, but not so weak that the attacker has no chance of reaching the top.
Time to scale - im guessing you'd want the climb time to be somewhere in the 3-10 second range. Attackers should be at risk when climbing, like in real life, but if you make it too long then the ladders will just be ignored by attackers.
Price - ladders are much weaker than other siege equipment, so they should be cheaper. But, there should still be some cost, so that the decision to use them (or not) is meaningful.
Placement - I'm guessing this would be driven more by implementation difficulty rather than gameplay. Ideally, from a players point of view we'd love these to be freeform placement, putting us in charge. However, I would understand if you restricted placement to set locations, either for balance (so every keep only 10 ladder spots) or effectiveness (to prevent players placing ladders where the wall is too high to scale with a ladder) or just because it is easier to code (like putting those siege spawn points in set locations, like how vanilla siege weapons worked)
Forts - I've not really experienced many forts since returning, or even in live as they were turned off for most of my time on live due to stability issues. Gut feeling is that ladders aren't really needed for forts, but I'll leave that up to you.
Hope you enjoy the idea! I'm sure there are plenty of improvements on what I've written, and I've no idea about the feasibility of what im suggesting so will understand if nothing happens. Keep up the good work with RoR, I'm certainly enjoying myself as is
