Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-33763020-20191009115230/@comment-33763020-20191013104921

GoldenesKalb wrote: don´t get me wrong i´m absolutly with you. My idea was not the "decay" over time, but decay by loosing troops in the fight in PvE or EvE if you are nearby so the chunks are loaded. So that the NPCs could recapture their land. Ah, I think I understand what you mean. So basically if an NPC kills one of the allied NPC's, the conquest points get reduced, but only when the chunks are loaded, so when the player (or any other player if multiplayer) is nearby? I'm not sure if technically anything that an NPC does can be coded into what a player does (so the conquest points in this case), so probably technically that's quite challenging. Also, the purpose of conquest is that no more enemy NPC's spawn at all in a conquered chunk, otherwise we're back to the current scenario where enemy NPC's keep spawning and "conquered" territory is still a warzone.

I understand where you're coming from with the concept of "border" fights (like the front in a real war), but as every chunk that's loaded is the front of a war (since MC cannot distinguish between the 4 wind directions when it comes to conquered terrain, e.g. as you move west, the program cannot be stopped from loading in NPC's at the east edge of the chunk), it is not really conquest anymore, because the enemy can play guerilla warfare by attacking anywhere behind your lines. It could only be realistic if MC would know that you're at the edge of your conquered territory and that is where enemy NPC's would have a chance to conquer back territory, but unfortunately in Minecraft the only existing territory at any time are the loaded chunks and biomes. If your conquered territory spans 100 chunks and you want the NPC's to fight back at its edge, MC will still only consider the maximum possible chunks of 16 (in v1.7.10) to be valid for any territory conquered. The biomes are not a possibility either, as those are fixed. I had a suggestion on biome change some time back, but was answered that technically that is not possible.

Theoretically it could be done by naming the "front" those chunks where the conquest points are below a certain value, indicating that the higher conquest points are the middle of your conquered territory and no enemies should spawn there, contrary to the borders of your territory. This would be really difficult to implement though, as you never have the same amount of conquest points in different chunks: as you move on, the number of enemies killed differs as you make the kills, so each chunk will have different values. Say, in the center of your conquered area you have 800 conquest points, but as you are expanding, at the "front" (e.g. close to an Orc camp or where you meet an invasion, if neutral land) you make enough kills to have 900 conquest points in that area. The system would then no longer consider it the border of your area as it has higher conquest points and wrongfully spawn enemies behind your lines, while not spawning any at its edge where the points are higher. To determine what are the edges of your conquered area becomes a near impossible task without complex algorithms, at least it seems to me that's the way it works.

But I could be wrong and maybe MC can distinguish between chunks where your territory borders that of the enemy versus chunks where your territory borders your own territory. That would be great if it could be capitalized upon, it would make your idea feasible.