Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-27392489-20160902214322

I have what I feel to be some pretty cool suggestions regarding the horns of middle earth, including improvements, upgrades, and a few new items.

The Battle Horn

The Battle Horn would be crafted like the horns of command were crafted pre-29.1, with 3 bronze ingots in an "L" shape. However, bronze blocks would be used in place of ingots, making it a great deal more expensive. It could only be crafted on a faction crafting table, and a different item would be produced depending on the table used. (ie. Gondor Battle Horn, Mordor Battle Horn, Rohan Battle Horn, etc.) Once crafted, the horn could be placed down as a block. When right-clicked by a player, the horn would emit a loud, low sound that could be heard for many blocks. All NPCs of the faction the horn belonged to would receive varying strength, speed, absorbance, and regen boosts for about 20 seconds after the horn was blown. The horn would have a ten minute cool down period before it could be blown again.

Horn of Conquest Improvements

I think it would be really cool if the horns of conquest and invasion horns for different factions made different sounds for different factions. No specific ideas, just something I think would make the mod a bit more immersive. Perhaps different sounding horns would replace the message in chat, and players would only hear the signature horn of a faction before the invasion hit.

Horn of Command improvements

Currently one's hired units have two settings: kill everything that moves or be sitting ducks. I suggest a more complex horn system that would not require better AI, instead simply taking advantage of preexisting NPC actions. Instead of having many different horns of command to fill the various purposes, right clicking while holding the horn would instead open a separate hotbar for the player to control their units (I'm pretty sure there are some plugins that can do this). In 8 of the nine slots would be horns of command, each with a different name, which can be blown to trigger different unit responses.

1. Halt/Ready: The basic horn of command function. Blowing it will halt your hired units, blowing it again will have them enter "ready" mode again.

2. Summon: Another basic function. All units in loaded chunks assigned to the horn will teleport to the player.

3. Stand at attention: All units will stop what they were doing and stand still, as if halted, but will still fast travel with the player if he/she choses to do so. This would remove the annoying tendency of hired units to bump into you and mess up the ft countdown.

4. Follow: Hired units will follow the player, but will not attack any mobs unless the player attacks first. This would allow players to travel quickly through mob-heavy areas such as Mirkwood, without units stopping to kill every single spider within 20 blocks.

5. Charge: Hired units will attack any hostile mobs, and will not teleport back to the player if they go too far away. This would allow players to retreat to a safe distance to command their forces, without having to be in the thick of the fight themselves to keep the units engaged. Switching to "follow" or "summon" would teleport units back to the player.

6. Protect: Units will stay within 3 blocks of the player as much as possible, only attacking enemies that came close to the player. This would allow players to have personal vanguards or bodyguard units.

7. Guard: All units assigned to the horn will enter a temporary guard mode, with a default guard radius of 8 blocks. This would both allow players to put large numbers of units into guard mode instead of doing it one unit at a time, and to leave their armies "stationed" at an area without the units becoming sitting ducks to be picked off one by one by enemies.

8. Retreat: All units assigned to the horn will stop whatever skirmish they were involved in and run away from nearby enemies, similar to Hobbit civilians. This would allow players to withdraw from a losing battle without having massive casualties in the process as units are left behind and overwhelmed.

9. Pressing 9 while in the command hotbar will return the player to the normal hotbar. 