Gloria Victis offers various ways to make a living: earning the reputation as an undefeated duelist or a famous crafting master, being an experienced warrior fighting in countless battles or a trader who always have something precious in store. But whichever path you choose, your life will be concentrated around various settlements. Let's take a look at the structures building and development system, implemented in the latest Gloria Victis update.
Despite very few prebuilt locations, such as the nation's capitals, all of the structures are meant to be built by players. While only guilds will be able to capture and develop the most important of them - castles and towns - every player can reclaim the keeps and resources extraction spots or bring the materials required to upgrade structures controlled by their nation. To prevent an overload of the servers and exploits well known from the free building systems, such as building castles inside dungeons, structures can be raised in preset places only; towns will be built near the important trading routes: roads, rivers and safe bays, while castles will be raised in locations making them harder to capture, like hills or mountain slopes. Thereby everything will be located as it would be in the middle ages, not breaking the immersion.
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Anyway, players will still have a lot of freedom when developing and customizing the locations, as every wall section, gate and tower is being developed, destroyed and repaired separately, as well as the buildings contained inside the fortifications will be in future. As well as the crafting system, also the locations development process has been designed after the authentic medieval techniques. Players have to gather the required resources and craft more advanced materials, such as lime mortar, bricks or nails. A tailor’s workshop or a guardhouse, wood or stone, with a roof made of planks or ceramic tiles – guilds will receive numerous ways to customize their property. The material that has been used for developing the structures will also vary depending on the lands where they have been built – most likely wood in the northern realms, stone in Logres kingdom and bricks in the deserts of the Azeb Empire.
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After conquering a territory for the first time, a guild will have to raise a central building – castle’s donjon or town hall. The central building is an essential part of a structure, being the home of the guild members. They will be able to develop it as well, increasing the prosperity of the entire structure, and customize it using numerous options and additions, like trophies, exposed weaponry or their guild’s banners.
Central buildings will be the place where a main spawn point is being set, so it will be the last line of defense when another guild performs a siege. Or at least it could be a place where you can sit after a battle, warm yourself and drink some beer while talking with your friends about the latest events or pray for the fallen brethren. This will be the home for you and your guild members.
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Yet a central building alone doesn’t make a town or a castle by itself and the real development of a structure just starts when a town hall or a donjon has been built. From this moment on, a guild can deploy houses, merchant stalls or crafting workshops, which could attract players from all around the nation to live, craft and trade in this town. Those objects will generate income to a guild controlling the location, as the leaders will be able to tax the transactions between players and rent them houses, which will also receive various customization options.
As Gloria Victis offers a player-driven economy, towns will play an important role, attracting crafters, traders and warriors or explorers looking for new equipment. Setting the best crafting workshops will be possible in towns only and controlling such locations will allow to develop the nearby resources extraction spots as well, so the gatherers will gain more resources of better quality, while crafters will be able to create better materials and equipment. However, one's prosperity gives birth to envy of others, so to keep a thriving town safe, a guild should fortify it, raising walls and towers around it – or, at least, a simple palisade.
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On the other side, fortifications will be the key of a castles’ development. Each fortress is different – they may be placed on top of a hill, rising from a rocky slope or built on an island and surrounded by a stormy ocean; they may have one or several circles of walls, be made of bricks or stone, high or low. However, their main purpose remains the same: to provide the best defensive properties as possible, and it can be seen even in their structure – comparing to towns they have more towers which are placed in strategic points, and the donjons are fortresses by themselves.
Castles will not offer as much variety in the development of economy-related objects as towns do, but players will be able to build special workshops where they can craft siege engines and deck weapons for ships or hire more and better skilled guards. Unlike the towns, a well-developed castle will allow a guild to stand the siege for hours, for archers can eliminate the invaders from the towers on flanks and the defenders can fall back to the inner circle of walls if needed, shortening the line of defense and reducing the impact of enemy advantage of numbers if they are skilled in combat.
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At the moment, the building system allows to raise fortifications and develop them. In the nearest future it will be continuously expanded with implementation of siege engines, siege camps and deployable guardhouses, crafting workshops, merchant stalls and player-owned houses. Combined, all of those additions will lead to a solid, deep system that does not break immersion and core gameplay but greatly improves them, adding fuel to the fire of an exciting open PVP, guilds competition and conflicts between the nations. As in the Middle Ages!
