Castles and houses, was Re: [CF List] The 'dis'economy of crossfire

[Mark Wedel]

  The castle idea is an interesting one.

  I'd abstract it to all houses.

  It would probably be more interesting to implement this idea on the 
maps-bigworld, since there is a lot more empty real-estate.

  You could start out buying a 'deed' from a nearby town.  Various deeds 
available (huts, houses, castles, towers, etc).

  The owner of the deed goes out into the wilderness, and applies the deed.  The 
appropriate building is then created on that space (some sanity checking is done 
to make sure it is ok to build there, eg, not on a road, river, etc).

  The basic layout of the building is determined by the type of deed you bought. 
  Thus, a tower might have relatively small levels, but several of them.  A hut 
may have just one room, castles many rooms and levels, etc.  In thus way, you at 
least reduce some of the mundaneness of the player having to put down walls and 
whatnot.  this also removes any trickiness of trying to deal with expanding with 
staircases on so forth.

  When you use the deed, it remains in your inventory, but not as a way to 
create a new building - to show you own the current one.  Only the person with 
the deed can do things like change the floors, bushes, etc.  The user could 
sell/give this deed to some other player if he wanted.  If he didn't pay his 
taxes, his deed may get re-possessed and the town puts up for sale.  IF no one 
buys it, the house gets demolished.

  The idea of buying scrolls (contracts) to do decoration makes the most sense - 
it is much easier to implement this idea than trying to integrate an editor.

  Perhaps the building has some areas only accessible to the deed holder, like 
an area that has a bunch of keys he can give to friends that may visit, as well 
as access to 'display' cases where the owner can display some artifacts he has 
acquired, as sort of a way to 'show off' what he has done.

  I think to some extent for this to be more appealing to the players, other 
players need to be able to see what they have done.  I'm not sure how much work 
I would do making up a house in the game if no one else would ever see it.  So 
perhaps things like only the deed holder being able to pick up/move furniture or 
many other things within his own house.

  The idea of needing artifacts for certain things make sense - I think the idea 
of deeds/houses would really be a way for players to show things off (ala the 
statue idea).  If no one could see what you have done, I would think the idea of 
building castles would not be as interesting.