I have always liked the idea of another way out of the village but always assumed that it was simply part of the burden of no magic.

As far as the sand and woods... well I recall long ago burning down the woods with some smith help but always missed them any time I had a ranger who wasn't against battle.

Fun times facing Sylvan on the dwarf road heading into battle.

Ganicus,

Great questions and definitely worth observing and possibly changing in the future. Keep in mind, these changes are quite controllable by the players through some solid communication and RP.

I think it is highly important to continue to evolve cabals. Even if this means making slight evolution changes by addressing room sectors in the cabal. As long as I remain a Battle Imm, I will continue to evolve Battle. Player feedback is always a helpful means to do so. Keep in mind, not all ideas can come to fruition due to coding requirements and overall game balance (which I tend to address with my peers among the Immortal staff).

To answer your questions:

To be fair, the terrain at the Giant is under great consideration from me. It can be a great asset to the Village Ranger/Assassin and even Warrior based on Legacy choices. It can also be a boon for several reasons -

1: I disagree. The village has one particular enemy that can leverage all terrain types with their spells. However, this same class could cause similar problems in a choke point just one pace east of the massive giant also.

2: There are pros and con to this terrain also. I will take it into consideration but I feel the pros far outweigh this con.

3: See point 1. Snare works both ways and Quicksand can be used a pace east of the giant (a similar choke point). Again, under consideration. I think there are some pretty cool things we can do to help make this more of a dynamic.

4: Help me understand how this applies?

Regarding a second way out of the Village - I highly doubt this is possible for a couple of reasons.

- Aesthetically, it changes (slightly) the concept of Courage.
- No other cabal has a second route out of the cabal.
- It would require a second outer guardian.
- It would have to be approved by individuals over my immortal rank.

Great ideas but probably worth fleshing out before pitching to my superiors.

I would have brought this stuff up in game but as I am sure you can see from the logs I am not exactly Mr. On-all-the-time and I suffer from the whole not being comfertable interacting with imms in game in general.

1.) Without going into exhaustive detail of why here is the list of non villagers that gain from this change.
Invokers
Rangers
Druids
Assassins
Outlanders
Warriors with Surrounding the Sunrise

This is the list of villagers that gain
Assasins
Rangers
Warriors with Surrounding the Sunrise

*On an aside are you sure vokers can put sand in the ruins? I might just be having a brain fart in my older age but for some reason I had it in my head they couldn't drop sand in the ruins. But the more I think of it the more I think you are right.

2.) I agree about the pro's and con's and in general I think it is a wash (in my original calculation I forgot about hiding from shifters)

3.) Honestly I had it in my head quicksand wasn't usable in the ruins, that aside this really is mostly going to be a rough time for dwarves/duergar/mino as outlanders start camping the giant for them. The snare choke point is a bit scary but I do admit there is not enough anti-whole village rangers out there to really make it hurt.

4.) So the big danger from rangers isn't really snare (though as a tool to start a gank its wicked) and it isn't ambush. The scary thing is bearcharge + wilderness fam. There are a number of popular ranger builds where if they can achieve a one size bigger difference they can have highly reliable perma-lag against all but giant size villagers (the terrain choice of the giant also supports the biggest bearcharge build as well).

Now of course a village ranger can now also use bearcharge + wilderness fam but there are 3 caveats. Enemies can change their size to protect themselves somewhat and villagers can't compensate. A lot of mage classes have built in bearcharge lag protection. There tend to be more non village rangers then village rangers.



In summary I don't really think the fact that the giant is wilderness needs to change (maybe wilderness type to forest trail or something) But with these changes it would just be super duper cool to have an extra exit from the village to somewhat mitigate it as a death trap for defenders. You say no other cabal has 2 exits but I would argue that word of recall/teleport is a built in exit for all other cabals. Even with getting outside the village you have all the limitations of having to run everywhere on foot. If you make the exit just an out you wouldn't need to have an outer guardian on it and by bringing it out on water you increase the situations in which water shifters and mariners are interesting.

I don't think this would have any effect on the concept of courage at all. The only difference is that when you retreat you have 2 options instead of 1. It also makes sitting in the village less prone to assassination which is always frustrating (agan everyone else can just teleport/word if they know they are being stalked while doing cabal business)

Why are rangers non-villagers? I mean in the past I've wanted to play a village ranger but always been discouraged by the fact that the cabal is so ranger unfriendly. I'm guessing this has changed... More ranger ragers = more good.

I have no opinion or comments on the rest.