The Relic Wars

[ponderingdemocritus]

Much has been discussed about the Relic wars concept within discord so I thought it would be wise to distill the concept here and explain one path to implementation.

Custom ERC721 collection of Relics

• Transfer function removed for owner
• • Relics can only be moved from the originating realm to another realm and back. No owner functions.
• New storage_var - held_by
• • All Relics exist to begin with, in the home Realm. They can be captured by successfully defeating another Realm in battle. Once captured the held_by var will change from the owner to the victor.
• • The only way to get a relic back is either by:
• • • Defeating the Realm that captured the Relic
• • • Having a member of your Order defeat the Realm that holds the Relic

The benefit of having Relics as NFTs is that the information can be easily captured in the indexer without much custom code. Once captured we can create an 'Annexed Vault' (name needs work) where the victor can proudly display these.

Additionally, since this is Realm v Realm having these as NFTs we can create a Wallet leaderboard for who holds the most Relics.

Thoughts?

[GauravGoswami]

Perhaps adding a season-wise relic leaderboard might be interesting? Most captures and such? Top X players at the end of the season get a badge that they can display on their Realms profile or equivalent as an achievement? Perhaps the top few spots could have some in-game reward (not necessarily anything convertible to on-chain currencies) as well.

[ponderingdemocritus]

yes! This would be a great idea. These in-game rewards can be SB tokens that do nothing but the only way to get them is by winning the season.

[gogibear]

• a concept I was talking about in Discord was the idea if you capture a certain number of relics it would give you access to something, for example a rare Crypts and Caverns dungeon that you could only raid if you were in possession of 100 Vitriol relics - so typically all realms of the order of vitriol get access to that dungeon but if another order takes 100 vitriol relics then they can raid it too. Maybe crypts and caverns could pick 16 rare, dangerous, lucrative dungeons to assign 1 to each order. And maybe only one order can raid the dungeon at a time giving more urgency to regaining your relics. The number of relics needed could be relatively high requiring coordination between an enemy order to capture enough in a short time frame before they can get them back e.g. 200-400 attacks in the same night in an attempt to get at least 100 victories and give you some leeway before they start counter attacking to regain the relics the next day.
• maybe a system where you can tithe your captured relics to your order (or an allied order's) wonder and get a small % of whatever resources it generates to offer the whole order benefits since you are fighting for the order's glory.
• I think free to play adventurers should get some sort of bonus when they join in capturing a relic to encourage them to participate. the bonus could be a bounty paid by the realm, some statistic bonus for themselves when they raid dungeons to equip themselves, a title change like in daoc it went Guardian -> Myrmidon -> Gryphon Knight -> Eagle Knight -> Phoenix Knight -> Alerion Knight -> Unicorn Knight -> Lion Knight -> Dragon Knight -> Lord -> Baronet -> Baron -> Arch Duke as they gain experience
• each realm should be able to beautify it's own relic e.g. spend resources, loot items, crypts and caverns item drops in a little mini game that lets you design your relic. Take a demon crown distilled from your loot, some sapphire and diamonds you raided for, a cosmetic goblin's head dropped in a crypt and cavern raid and put this new grotesque and gaudy demon goblin king head in your realm's chalice, or golden frame, or impaled with excalibur etc. I am hoping it would be simple to have drag and drop functionality to do this but maybe it is more complex than I think.

I think we need to give people as much reason to join in on PvP as possible even if there's no monetary rewards, in fact even if there's a monetary cost e.g. upgrading your relic, the cost of units in exchange for reputation/glory, cost of recruiting ftp adventurers etc. because you love your realm/order so much or hate an enemy realm/order even more.

[ponderingdemocritus]

This is great and got me thinking about a slightly different mechanic that is similar. Perhaps if you have enough of the same orders relic you can summon a world boss which you collectively take down as the order. Each boss would drop unique items. This could be a mini-game within the greater relic wars game. Each season there are 16 potential world bosses, so it would force co-op between the members of the order.

Yes we should bake in an advantage for the adventurer if they partake in a relic capture.

I think Relics are above monetary value it is about pride and glory (in fact you can't even trade them). It should be frowned upon if you lose your relic

[milancermak]

I love the discussion about various mechanics this spawned! As I read this comment:

It should be frowned upon if you lose your relic

I though we could also have some kind of negative leaderboard so that Orders can taunt each other. Or an NFT for those who lost the most. I think an important thing here is that it would be temporary, that you could reclaim your status as a strong Lord / Lady, not having to live in shame forevermore.

@ponderingdemocritus What is the difference between these two points?

The only way to get a relic back is either by:
* Defeating the Realm that captured the Relic
* Having a member of your Order defeat the Realm that holds the Relic

If a member of my Order defeats the Realm holding a Relic, don't they get it? If yes, that's just the first point. If not, what did you have in mind?

From an implementation standpoint, I guess it's just a simple addition to the combat module. Agree with having Relics as NFTs.

[ponderingdemocritus]

The idea is that any member of the same Order can go and capture your lost relic back on your behalf. This would encourage co-op between players. See #134 I have made preliminary design for this

[milancermak]

This also got me thinking about creating a generalizable way how to incorporate new modules in the future. I chatted with LoaF about this shortly, now describing it here in public.

My idea is to have a callback system, so that other modules can hook into. An example for this case would be that there would be a defined Combat hook interface, e.g.

@contract_interface
namespace I06_CombatHooks:
    func on_combat_end(
        attacking_realm_id : Uint256, 
        defending_realm_id : Uint256, 
        attacker_after_combat : Squad, 
        defender_after_combat : Squad,
        combat_outcome : felt):
    end
end

A module that wants to react to the event of a combat finishing would implement this interface and register itself with the L06_Combat contract. Of course, multiple modules could be registered. Then, we would iterate through the list of registered contracts and call on_combat_end for each inside initiate_combat.

So if we had a Relic Wars module, it would contain whatever logic it needs to, independent of the Combat module. The advantage is hopefully obvious. The primary disadvantage however is that the registered hooks must not fail otherwise the whole combat TX would fail and block the whole game. Sadly there's no (yet?) try-catch in Cairo.

[ponderingdemocritus]

Yes, this is a great idea. I think we need to hack it out in a POC before implementation.