The KGB Oracle Forums The KGB Great Hall of History (ARCHIVE) Darkfall Members Forum kgb = sieged in beta wed night siege 5:30cst

Sorry I missed it, bowling. Hope you guys had a good time and took lots of notes!

Lol Wolfgang that sounds like an awful familiar strategy.

But don't stop their, grind every weapon as fast as possible so you get all the stam gain you can. If you are going to play pressure melee you have to have as much stam as you can get.

Self-grading:
2 Log/Crash Deaths for Me
1 Friendly Fire Death by Alliance Member

0 PvP Kills

Looks like I officially suck at PvP!

On a serious note, my rig may not be equipped to handle large scale PvP in this game. I am looking to upgrade, but if I can't, I may be forced to be harvesting & crafting whipping boy...

Other observations:
1) It seems as though there is little support for alliance tags at the moment. This impacts the sieging in two ways:
a. Friendly fire makes defensive towers useless. When we use them, our allies get killed. Conversely, if our allies had them during a siege on their holdings, we would get shot trying to help. The only winning strategy would have been to have the clan hold the stone with the towers up and have the allies attack the siege stone or harass the enemy's flanks.
b. Apparently, having alliance tags does not sufficiently differentiate friend from foe. Maybe we should investigate the player flags...
2) There is no mechanism to prevent sieges at poor times for the guild. The attacking guild sets the time of the siege based on the timer from the laying of the siege stones/war declaration. Therefore, the advantage in sieging is slanted towards the attacker. The attacker will always get to pick the time which works best for the attacker while the defender is stuck with whatever time they get. Therefore, it would be simple to pick a time which allows for the guild to maximize our turnout during an offensive siege, but we are vulnerable to a defensive seige by enemys whom contain a majority of people in Eastern time zones (since most of our players are based further West). I left work a little early today and barely made it in time for the siege this afternoon. We ought to look for alliances with a player base mostly on the East Coast in order to implement a "follow the sun" strategy...
3) Once the siege started, they knocked down the bind stone almost immediately. Therefore, it seems like playing defense on a hamlet is not a winning strategy(unless repair shards> siege hammers and battle spikes). Hence, the winning strategy may be to focus fire on the siege stone instead of defending the bind stone. Instead of launching a defense from the bind stone towards the seige stone, we could launch an attack from the opposite angle and hope we can knock down the stone before the enemy knocks down our holding. Maybe having rival boats with cannons will help as well...
4) Having a city so close to the newbie city favored the side with greater numbers. The only chance we had was to force the larger group to spend more time running to the fight than we spent running from the bind. Having the starter city nearby negated that advantage. In addition, the enemy knew which direction we would be coming from and had the approaches camped.
5) I am not sure what is the best tactic for group PvP. Currently, it seems Darkfall favors a bunch of 1v1 combats. Somehow, we ought to figure to a way to turn the fighting into a 2v1 or 3v1 fight(even if we are outnumbered in total on a sub-scale we can force the odds in our favor). It is kind of like old-school WWII dogfighting -- everyone should have a wingman. In Shadowbane, we used focus-fire on called targets. This was possible due to the cycle-tabbing to locate enemies. Obviously, this tactic will not work. However, the idea of using called targets might still be useful. Of course, the lack of tags make it hard to identify the targets...In any case, with the weapon vs armor balance being what it is at the moment, only through multiple people attacking the same target will we have a shot at damaging enemy warriors in heavy armor.

Finally, we ought to group more with the alliance folks. I suspect some of the issues where caused by not having the lines of communication well-established in advance. I wasn't even sure which guilds were part of the alliance and vice-versa(though that is my own fault for not getting signed up for mumble in time).


Sorry for the long post. Just trying to get my thoughts and observations down.

heh. My plan too but substitute armorsmithing for swords!

Everything you just posted are the same problems the game had in it's original form.

DF lends to alliance nutcupping in EVERY siege. Cities and hamlets are total crap and you are far better offfocusing resources on obtaining player houses in scattered villages.

Hopefully we learn from this. We were ill prepared for a fight. Oldtimers were trying to get armor, talking about making bows and learning how to get on a mount minutes before the stone went live. Mor was the only one of us wearing plate, and didn't get killed as a result probably, the rest were naked or wearing misc gear.

We had no way to destroy the siege stone and neither did our allies.

Plan 1 was to mount rush the enemies and take out the back row range, which I thought sounded like a good plan. Unfortunately target callers all dropped shortly into the fight and we were routed. Mor ended up walking back to the safe hold and out regenned/healed enemies whacking on his plate.

Part b of plan 1 was to loot enemies with hammers or bombs to kill the stone. This plan failed because they did not have hammers or bombs either. They spawned 2 boats and used the cannons to beat the clan stone down.

I think we were "outgeared" and out maneuvered in this siege. It was our hamlet and we had no defensive plan other than asking old timers for help. Many KGB showed up naked and fought the best they could against enemies in plate which was a wipe in every case. Except for our plate wearer who crashed.

The game mechanics are borked as usual. The bank may or may not have worked, the alliance system had an unforeseen delay after a server resetting alliances so every possible way of working with old timers in the hamlet were futile.

The towers were off when the battle first hit the hamlet and turned on after we were routed. The result of turning them on was that we cleared all enemies from the town fairly quickly. All allies were dead or left as well.

With no answer for hitting the siege stone and facing superior forces gear and preparation, we didn't offer much resistance when the 2 boats cannons blasted down the clan stone.

I didn't have a problem with fps or the game during the fights but to be honest I could not identify friend from enemy until I figured out all the enemies were in plate and we were the other guys. I did get kill a plate wearer as he tried to leave town, assist from towers, Cheerio and probably others, I think Cheerio ganked and looted him. Other guys said it was a slide show or their fps were single digits. I can say it really makes a difference to be able to keep moving and fighting during lag times for others.

I only fought in the hamlet fight as I was planning to defend the stone from the beginning.


Going forward I suggest everyone gear and train a warrior to plate as their first process after wipes or for launch. Skirmishers and magic can be developed later and may take some time to get up to speed but warriors in plate rule DFUW right now.

wut the fluff. i got back from vaca today, got into the beta, have yet to see a KGB clan tag.

whats the hizzaps

i actually think we have choices.
i would like to see what 8-10 skirmishers volley firing would do to a guy in heavy armor- using salvo + explosive shot.

both have short cooldowns and skirms have the ability to hit and run.

not sure how we could get ganks off, but if you volley fire and knock one guy down, then try to do the same to the guys rezzing him...

with a R0 bow i hit a medium geared guy for 40 in the face with the explosion. could be worth a try

I loved the fact that we experienced a siege so early in the game. I think that we learned a lot from this experience. Here are some of my notes:

To repeat some of Zen's points...
1) The guild tag system sucks big time. Very hard to tell who is who. I hope that they improve this, but I suspect they will not. Best way to survive this is to get very good tactical awareness, and use vent to identify locations effectively. Stay together, and know where your group members are. They are the only players easy to identify.

2) Advantage to the attacker on setting the time. This encourages us to not take a Hamlet to start, but join the alliance city, and plan our attack accordingly.

3) There should have been a more focused attack on the siege stone. This was open to our attack for an hour, and no effective attack was launched. Easier to attack then defend in this game, and I suspect more siege stones are not placed in the most defensible locations.

4) I was able to play DF1 when it 1st came out, before KGB became active. I was lucky and able to get a house, and it AWESOME. The most enjoyable part of the game, and invul. I like the idea of getting houses near each other. If I remember correctly, you could only have 5 friends of the house. They may have changed this. For access to all reaches of the map, spreading out makes sense, for staying united and controlling an area of the map better to focus location of house. Hope I get one.

5) They need to fix the tower attacking alliance members. Once we turned it back on it was able to provide KGB some help, but it meant that our alliance was not able to be involved. This was not good.

6) Boats with cannons are the bomb. They were able to take out the bind stone without having to even enter the town. We had no way of making a dent on the boats, only a suicide run.

7) My role was limited given my 7-10fps. I chose to watch and announce the show from the hamlet till the end. Looking at adding more RAM, and maybe upgrading my NVIDIA GT 420... Any other ideas?

8) It was good to know about the OTG mumble server. We should work to group up with them more, and coordinate our actions more. SKD seems like good people, but too dependent on the dup bug.

9) I like the idea of joining OTG/SKD's city. I think that to start it will be good for KGB to focus our actions/bind location in/near a town that has crafting stations.

10) Let the games begin...

Oh man I had to listen to Pax for 20 minutes before I left for work talk about shit stomping KGB in the siege.

The tactics they used are the same tactics that we used in almost every waterway fight we had in early DF.

I hope you guys that plan on really playing DF come around to understanding what the game is. Darkfall is who can cheese who the most.

I told you all in my first post during DF beta that mages and range combat were going to rule the day and most of you are insistant on still playing warrior types and this WILL NOT WORK in mass pvp. I see the complaints from a lot of our people about not being able to distinguish frind from foe. Until you learn how to do that in a scramble your best chance of success is to utilize casting. Darkfall is still the same game. AOE WILL WIN 90% of large engagements. SKirmishers and melle are for point rushing and mop up.

Any time there is a stone of any type near water you have to KNOW that the attackers WILL have them. You cannot and never have or will be able to defend a hamlet from the hamlet itself. You leave the hamlet and secure the area around it.

That aside your main priority at launch should still remain grinding magery and you should never control any assets other than personal housing.

Most of you are still in the mindset that DF is a world with pvp in it. Your mindset needs to be that DF is PVP with other stuff to do on occasion. If you don't think like that then you are going to end up not being succesful.

At launch the only people that craft should be the ones that are running the guild crafters. All other members should be COMBAT SKILL BUILDING. If you arent then you are doing it wrong.

DF is a game about throwing your weight around in PvP. Take that to the bank and dont let shit groups beat you.