Prologue and Reasoning
Currently, clan building is a feature that feels underutilized within Arcane Odyssey, and the growth of your empire feels overall underwhelming due to a multitude of factors mainly in regards to growth of a clanbase slowing to an unsatisfactory pace once you’ve maxed out the amount of wheat fields and sugarcane rows, and it feels entirely finished once a clan has successfully maxed out their clans walls, cannons, and mortars: which overall, feels unsatisfying for clans that lack infamy or consistent players.
To improve upon this, I propose the following reworks and changes.
Clan Civilizations
Within a clan base, I propose that a few new changes are added.
Giving functionality to practically everything that can be built within a few new systems: A population and housing system, and civilian quality of life system (name pending).
The population system would be rather simple. It would rely on the player building up proper housing via different means whether it is a larger keep, or housing of increasing quality starting from the tents and wooden huts we already have, all the way up to nicer forms of housing.
Quality of life system
This would be a simple change that helps increase the overall happiness of a population. It works by organizing decorations into multiple different types: Nature, architecture, and entertainment. These 3 different types of decorations would need to be present within a clan base to increase the overall happiness of your population, giving the player a direct benefit and reason to decorate their clan base to their heart’s content through building things that overall make the clanbase look nicer.
Job buildings
Job buildings would be a new feature that can hold a certain amount of people within them. This would include things such as farmers (Which would rework farm huts to increase their range but decrease the speed at which things are harvested, giving people the opportunity to make nicer looking farms rather than the strange farms we’ve seen players build to make the max amount of money), miners, lumberjacks (both of which help to supply other job buildings), blacksmiths, merchants, etc.
Blacksmiths and merchants would keep their same role to the player, allowing the player to buy and sell from them. However, they would gain the additional feature of being able to arm guards within a clan base, allowing NPCs to defend from inbound attackers.
Civilian quests
Civilian quests would be a way of increasing the general populations happiness within a clan build. You’d get more and more complicated requests as the happiness of a civilization increases. However, with increasing happiness, these quests could also begin to give the clan infamy, clan drachma, or materials to further contribute to the clan. This could be anything from slaying a notable villain that exists within the server (specifically an npc), giving somebody basic armor or weapons (completing said request would have them immediately begin to wear said armor or weapons), to more advanced quests that could incorporate things like slaying minibosses, slaying a dragon, or supplying a certain amount of drachma to one individual.
Clan Happiness
This feature would exist to help the clan grow in population. With more clan happiness, NPC dialogue would become more positive as you overhear your general population. Not only this, but you could see the direct improvement in working citizens which could improve the quality of what they sell to the player, how quickly they run farms, mines, or chopping wood, to even giving the player gifts in a way similarly proposed to the previously retconned kingdom alignment update.
Improving happiness would also increase the amount of decorations available to the player to be able to build. All decorations that are currently available would continue to be available, however, new ones could be added that are generally nicer including nicer housing, nicer job buildings, or outright fancier decorations such as fountains. Possibly, when the player hits the cap in clan happiness, they could even be offered the possibility to build a statue of the clans owner (which would take the current model of the clan owner in game and create a statue of them), whether via direct allowance, or even a quest line to prove your worthiness by completing a monumental task (possibly slaying a dark sea dragon or something along those lines?)
Location dependent building
I find it interesting how in Cassia Bay, we can only build sugarcane rows, but get extra reagent pots as a way of ensuring that Cassia is worthwhile to capture. However, I feel as if this could be taken further. My idea is that various different islands could have certain things they specialize in trading. For example, whispering caverns would naturally have a population much more centralized on mining, and likely fishing due to the unavailability of proper farming. Their main exports could not only contribute to a clan’s overall drachma bank, but also, clan islands could work with one another. If someone has captured, for instance, harvest island and whispering caverns. The two could trade with one another, supplying wood and mined materials back and forth. This would possibly require a clan to have more than 1 active player in a server to function, but at the very same time, it would not be a required feature for success. At most, if a player is attempting to send resources from one civilization to another, they could take up resources in the form of crates (Think similarly to how cargo is done currently), store them in their ship, and then proceed to sail out to another island to deliver them.
This could also be done by NPC ships which are hired by your civilizations shipwrights, which could naturally import and export materials from various civilizations in the server, prioritizing any civilization that your own clan owns before trading with other clans if they don’t show hostility towards said ships.
Outside of this, decor would also make sense. All current decorations would be available on all islands, but more specific decorations suited to an island could be added. This could be minecarts or crystals for whispering caverns, or specific species and types of trees for certain islands.
This could also introduce the possibility of merchants incorporating locally available resources into their stores. Ex: Shale reef food merchants can begin selling the player Omprello mushrooms, sun caraway from sandfall, certain fish can be sold at fishing merchants (Warm pond fish from places like shale reef, ocean fish from whispering caverns, likely can not sell legendary fish: mostly useful for cooking exclusively)
Potential clan rework
The content mentioned above would hopefully provide a satisfying gameplay loop for players to watch over as they grow their civilization. However, I feel as if I need to address that the content, with how the game’s current state is, would be locked to clans. This could be seen as problematic as many will be discouraged from playing in clans due to the upcoming PVP toggle change. My proposal is one of few options:
A: If a clan contains exactly one player, they can still toggle PVP on or off. However, other players can attack their clan’s civilization. If an attack is underway while they have PVP toggled on or off, they would be prohibited from toggling PVP on or off, forcing them to rely on their clans defenses to handle the attacker: from cannons, mortars, and the upcoming idea of guards.
B: Allow a player to be in a clan, but to also have their own clan building separate from their clan. This would essentially give a further purpose to the entire “individual building VS clan building” aspect of clan building. Building a clan as an individual would benefit the player, and anybody would be allowed to capture an island for this feature, clan or not. Being in a clan would let players choose either option, but it would likely be more beneficial to build for a clan due to the access to a shared drachma bank which benefits from multiple islands having been captured at the same time.
War
A civilization war feature that works similarly to the upcoming duel feature that allows two civilizations to duke it out with nothing but their soldiers, guards, and other townspeople. The civilizations leaders would not be able to personally interfere in this. (Maybe add a feature to allow both leaders to personally contribute, but the death of a leader would cause them to lose the war instantly?)
Two civilizations would send war boats to each other to fight, victor earns gold, clan happiness, and resources. Loser loses the formerly mentioned gains. Both sides would have to agree to said war.
Win condition could be declared in war rules (Whether its two boats fighting, or the capturing of a clans island, or death of a significant amount of guards/soldiers on one side or the other)
Conclusion and Inspirations
Overall, I feel as if the formerly mentioned futures would help bring clan building into a larger focus of the game, giving the player a strong sense of accomplishment due to having built up their own society with the help of their clan, which would fit in perfectly with the upcoming liveliness of towns in the coming full release update. Overall, this acts to add a new gameplay loop to endgame players, or even to people who want an extra thing to work on inbetween quests, fighting, and exploring the dark sea, due to the formerly mentioned features having either a lack of overall “rewardingness”, or feeling generally unsatisfying, tending to lack in the feeling of long term improvement upon the player that allows us to look back and see how we’ve progressed.
These ideas have primarily come from two sources: Retconned ideas of the kingdom alignment update, and the entire Tarrey town “From the ground up” questline featured in The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild.
This would likely need its own dedicated update similar to when clan building was first introduced, and therefore, may have low reasonability due to the excess effort required to code it. However, my hope is that this would be able to re-use features from the scrapped kingdom alignment update, the upcoming random town NPC feature, and something akin to what may someday become the ship fleet system.