Colonies at War - Walls and Warfare for MineColonies

Curtain walls your Builder builds and upgrades, towers your guards patrol — and, since 0.2.0, the war itself: warbands that march, sieges at the gate, kingdoms that strike back, peace with terms, convoys and alliances.

MineColonies gives you guards, a barracks and a gatehouse, but it has never had a wall — the thing every town in every picture of a colony has. This mod adds one the Builder treats like any other work: placed as a plan, built piece by piece, upgraded through five levels. And it adds the reason to build one.

0.2.0 is the war. Until now this mod was the walls and the standing map; from 0.2.0 the War Room's guards go out. Declare a war by hand, march, and at the other end there is a real MineColonies raid in the enemy's town when somebody is there to see it, or a battle rolled on strength against strength when nobody is. Plunder comes home to the warehouse; the men come home hurt, or as veterans, or are held for ransom. It is a beta: every piece ran headless on a test server and then in a real modded world before it was uploaded, but it is a lot of new machinery — read the changelog, keep a backup, and report anything odd with your latest.log.

The wall

Four pieces — segment, corner, gateway, stair — each at five levels, in three tiers (palisade, stone, fortified). The tier is the strength, never the skin: a palisade dressed as granite does not defend like granite.

The walk along the top is two blocks wide and deliberately clear, so MineColonies pathing sees it as a road and your guards really walk it.

The Wall Planner

An item, four ways to use it:

• ring — mark two corners of a field and get a closed rectangle with a gateway and stairs, snapped so the pieces meet cleanly.
• run — mark two points and get the straight wall between them.
• grow — one click, one piece. The wall extends the way you are looking, so you walk your own line and lay it as you go, over as many evenings as you like.
• slot — click a stretch of wall and it becomes a gap: the Builder takes down that one piece and nothing else, and you put a Wall Tower, a MineColonies guard tower or a gatehouse in the hole. Click the gap again and it goes back to being wall. The colony still counts that stretch as walled while a building stands in it.

Walls from other style packs count too: a Caledonia curtain wall or a Nordic palisade built as a decoration is measured where it stands and credited to the colony.

The Wall Tower

A guard building that sits in the wall rather than beside it. Its patrol is laid from the wall itself — a point every eight blocks along the run — so a guard posted here walks your wall instead of circling a tower. Two towers on one stretch share it and turn at the midpoint. A man on a wall also sees further. Walk the wall in the tower's settings turns that off and leaves you an ordinary guard tower with a very good view.

The War Room

Hires like the Barracks — 2 / 4 / 6 / 9 / 12 guards by level, knights and rangers in any mix — plus one Explorer. The distinction that matters: tower guards defend, War Room guards campaign. A colony that empties its towers to march is a colony a thief walks into.

Its window has four tabs of its own: the war table (every target within reach with distance, direction, strength and standing — March, Peace, Accept, Ally, Convoy, Recall, Ransom, Hire, and the war log), expeditions, the convoy (a manifest, and what the couriers have brought so far) and the walls (the score, every piece and its state, raise the whole ring, mend it). Both huts carry the red ? with pages of their own, the way MineColonies' huts do.

The war

• Campaigns. /war march <colony> [guards], or March on the table: the guards leave the world the way the Nether Worker does and walk the map at a minute per 200 blocks. Mustering eats rations, every campaign wears both towns down, and /war recall turns them round while they are still on the road.
• A siege, when somebody is home. If the town they march on is being played, the warband arrives as a real raid — the same boss bar, the same guards fighting it, soldiers statted from your men and carrying your colony's name. Half of them still standing at nightfall is a town overrun. Nobody home? Strength against strength with luck the size of the fight, and the report says what was rolled.
• War goals. Declared to plunder, a victory rolls a loot table by the town's wealth; to raze, it breaches the wall; to conquer (at conquest depth) the town becomes your vassal and pays tribute for a week. warLevel in the server config — skirmish, siege, conquest — says how far a war may go.
• The men who fell are held, not dead — up to half the warband, until you pay their ransom or a few days pass. Everyone who fought earns experience on his guard skills.
• Kingdoms, camps and villages. With The Waking World installed you can march on a kingdom — no declaration, a kingdom is nobody's — and the kingdom strikes back some days later with a real raid at your walls. A raider camp overrun is cleared for good; a village is robbed.
• Peace is a negotiation. One side offers terms — a white peace, tribute, pay, or vassalage — and the other accepts or refuses, by hand. Accepting moves the gold, sends every captive on both sides home and starts a truce.
• Alliances. High standing unlocks the offer of an alliance the way low standing unlocks a declaration. Allies cannot declare on each other, and their convoys carry three times the goods.
• Convoys. Put goods on the convoy tab's manifest, the couriers bring them to the War Room, Convoy sends them with an escort — and standing rises when they arrive. To a kingdom it is a gift that also pays off a reprisal it owed you.
• Sellswords. Hire mercenaries for gold; they wait at the War Room and go with the next warband.
• The Explorer. Send him on an expedition — a kind of country, a difficulty, an escort — and he comes home with the land's goods and the drops of whatever they killed there, rolled from the biome's own spawn lists.
• Find the Raiders. A research that gives your town an alarm: during a raid every guard building on patrol is pointed at the nearest raider, and every idle guard within reach is set on him. Posted guards keep their ground, except against a raider who has got behind them; Hue and Cry widens that to earshot.

Standing

Every pair of colonies has a number and a state. Robbery and war lower it; convoys raise it. Below the threshold the War Room unlocks the right to declare war by hand — never automatically, never on a timer — and peace and alliances are made the same way, by hand.

Unlocked by research: Combat → Tactic Training.

With Colonist Thieves installed

Your Hideout can send a thief to scout a target before you move on it, or to sabotage it so it stands weaker for a few days — and thefts are what move standing in the first place.

Requires: MineColonies, Structurize Optional: Colonist Thieves; The Waking World (kingdoms as targets)

Beta. Walls and diplomacy first, and now the war.

Made by Lovkar & Claude.