We are no longer just farmers!
In my last update I talked about our new conflict with the Chinese guild gondor. The big takeaway was that at the time of the war declaration, we were not ready to fight. We did not have weapons or armor, and we were not focused on training up our combat skills. Until that point, we had fully focused on crafting/gathering skills, and building up our holding with production buildings.
Since that update, things have greatly improved on that front. The nice thing about LiF is that while the overall grind is very long, you can get yourself to ‘decent’ status rather quickly, and that’s exactly what happened. Most of us now are able to use at least tier one weapons and armor, and our crafters are also able to produce those items. Tier two usage and production is also not far off.
The result is we no longer fully rely on our allies from Revenant to deal with gondor. In the last few days, we have been able to chase them off when they have come to harass us, and we know our first kill is coming soon. One reason we haven’t killed one yet is we are still refining our tactics in that regard, while another reason is that LiF heavily favors being able to run away vs dying in PvP. That’s a double-edged sword for us. On the one hand, being able to run away means when gondor jumps us, if we are paying attention we can get away and they won’t get a kill. On the other hand, we have to work especially hard to actually kill an attacker, vs just damaging them a bit and having them run away.
So far the skirmishes with gondor have been a lot of fun for us though. In one example, an enemy in full plate showed up and attempted to attack us. We ran into our little palisade to gear up, and came out with two archers and one neutral alt (yes, abusing neutral alts is a thing in LiF, because it wouldn’t be a PvP MMO if that wasn’t the case). Since our archers were in light armor, the enemy was much slower than us, meaning he was very easy to kite around. This was made even easier because our neutral would body-block him, and the enemy can’t kill the neutral without taking a large alignment hit. The funny thing is he tried to fight us for a good while, running back and forth like a fool. Eventually we hit him enough times that he ran away, and he would have died had our gear/skills been a bit higher to hit harder.
In a different engagement, another enemy showed up to our gates. This time we had five of us on, so we had three people grab a weapon and no armor (faster running), while I was in full gear, and our fifth was a neutral again. The enemy initially tried to fight straight up, but it only took a few hits before he started running. We gave chase, getting in more shots, before he finally used the flee ability (removes your weapons, gives a speed boost) to end the chase. Here had we done a better job of catching up to him and cutting him off, I think we could have gotten the kill, but it was a good learning experience.
On our way back to our base, we noticed a bear in the nearby woods, so stayed clear of it. An enemy horseman however lured the bear into our area, no doubt hoping it would cause us problems. That wasn’t really the case, as the bear wasn’t able to climb up our walls, and we were able to easily shoot at it. At one point, the horseman rode into our crafting area, and got himself stuck between a building and the bear. The bear mauled him once before he was able to ride away, and that was the extent of his ‘harassment’. We ended up killing the bear and skinning it for some nice and easy materials.
In addition to focusing on combat, we have also been working on our stone walls. We have a gatehouse built now, along with about 30% of the walls. We also have a warehouse build, which is a large storage building that makes it much easier for everyone to place stone and wood materials inside to be later used on the walls. I expect we will have all our walls built prior to Judgement Hour on Saturday, but a lot of work remains to make that happen. Once the walls are fully built, it will mean enemies can no longer disrupt our crafting/gathering within our holding, and can only harass us when we venture out, which will be very nice for those times when only one person is online.
I was initially a bit worried that the gondor harassment would result in people being less willing to log in, or getting frustrated by not being able to do what they want when online. But surprisingly, so far it’s been a positive. We have a very clear short-term goal (combat training and walls), and are actively learning a major part of the game (PvP) without it heavily impacting the other part (crafting) that we initially focused on. We are also getting some good laughs from the actions of our enemies, and get a reason to really group up and focus on something together for a short time (chasing an enemy). Good times all around.
Hardcore Casual 
This actually sounds pretty boring. I assume it’s more fun when you are actually going through all these steps?
Its overall boring, yet somehow surprisingly fun. Like nothing you can say or write about the game jumps off the page as exciting (other than maybe the big-picture scope of it all), but then all of us are putting in crazy hours into the game because we all find it fun.
I was trying to think of examples to compare it to, best I could come up with was the laning phase in league of legends where you are trying to last hit. Success is measured in how many minions you get the last hit on, but it is influenced by a ton of factors i.e. enemy champion position, which champion they are playing, potential attack from the jungler, wards, global abilities. Whilst digging out a hillside or planting a wheat field there is also a lot of other factors that make it engaging that aren’t immediately obvious i.e. always the chance of attack from our enemies, tool durability, character load (can be looted if killed but better tools mean faster results). And then you have secondary factors like the joint goals you are trying to achieve and figuring out optimal ways to get there.
It’s fun but definitely not for everyone (not for most people I would say). The buy in is fairly small for a single character as well as the subscription is not a necessity, it’s worth giving a shot.
oh also in league of legends watching the average person in the laning phase is incredibly boring, youtube videos don’t do justice to the game, look for testimonials.
It sounds very much like Wurm Online with a larger (or any) warfare focus, if you have experience with that.
Hearing about it and watching it happen is boring as all sin — but if you’re the right type, watching your long term projects come to fruition and shape the land is fantastic. It scratches that itch of a Minecraft game (“I want to be creative and build things!”), but removes the way too instant gratification that makes a lot of it feel pointless. Again, can be great fun if you’re the right type and in the right mind frame, but the actual loop can also be soul crushingly boring.
I loved Wurm, but recently got most of it out of my system, and I’m not much of a PvPer otherwise I’d jump on this game. Reading this is definitely poking that part of my brain.
So far the PvP has been kinda minimal. I’ve written about it because its the more interesting content than ‘shaped more stones’, but I’d say 95% of our time has been crafting/building vs PvP, and that other 5% is pretty easy to opt out of, especially once our walls are up. If the itch continues, jump into Discord.
It is only fun if you like long term projects and accomplishing things as a group instead of an individual. Also need to enjoy doing something beside combat in a game.