Annoying, too powerful, then boring: six versions of the Black Tide

TL;DR: The Black Tide is the NPC faction in Inselnova, and I’ve rebuilt it six times since March. It started too weak, then it attacked people for no reason they could see, then it sent attacks that players learned to ignore. In June I told a player “before it was just annoying, then it can be too powerful then it’s just boring”, and that’s still the shortest summary I have. The version running now follows one rule: the Tide comes for you if you gave it a reason. There are 75 Tide islands in the world today, and players have cleared 1,300 of them.

A player attacks the Tide in their first week

On 2 September a player called Renip, six days into the game, attacked a Black Tide island. The Tide hit back straight away, and Renip posted in world chat.

Well this was fun while it lasted! Very similar to Inselkampf but better.

Unfortunately I overplayed my hand (just like Inselkampf) and have 12 Black Tide fleets heading my way

Now 16

Renip called for aid from their alliance. About half an hour later they were back in world chat: “I suddenly have an option to perform a rite to block Black Tide attacks - I’ve been told to walk the coast to lay salt. Any idea what this means?” And a minute after that: “Oh! It’s a blessing. Has someone done this for me??”

Somebody had. Rotsalt is a blessing that stops the Tide landing on an island for 12 hours. Twenty waves came for Renip that evening and every one of them bounced off the ward. Renip cleared the Tide island they had attacked, and then another one later that night.

That evening is what I want the Tide to be. A player chose to poke it, it answered, and other players had an answer of their own. It took six versions to get there.

The six versions

#	When	What the Tide was	What went wrong
1	March	Hidden, placed by hand, only hit back	Too weak to matter
2	April	Attacked nearby islands, with catapults	Felt like me picking on people
3	May	Automatic. Took abandoned islands, attacked on a weekly schedule	Unprovoked attacks
4	Late May	Stole lumen, dropped idols, spread a plague	Too strong, flattened islands
5	June and July	An island beside every new player, three roles, small attacks built to lose	Players ignored the attacks
6	August	Only acts when a player gives it a reason	Still running

The first version only had small ships and stone throwers

The Tide went in on 24 March as a hidden faction I placed on islands by hand. It only hit back at players who had attacked it, and it was only allowed two units, small warships and stone throwers. I didn’t like the idea of an NPC turning up at a player’s island with troops and catapults, so I left them out.

That made it far too weak. Every ship and every soldier in the game has an attack value, so I added up what a Tide island could send and compared it with what a typical player has by the middle of the game. It was no challenge to them. Some Tide islands couldn’t crew a full wave, and those didn’t launch anything at all.

Catapults went into its fleets on 23 April. Guard hounds, spearfighters and swordsmen followed over the next month. By the end of May a captured island came with 300 spearfighters, 150 swordsmen, 350 stone throwers, 120 warships and 100 catapults.

It attacked players who hadn’t done anything to it

Nobody in the world was fighting anybody else, and I thought the Tide could be a common enemy. So it started attacking nearby islands. In May it became automatic: it took over islands that inactive players had left behind, and it attacked on a weekly schedule. For about six weeks an LLM chose its targets.

It wasn’t random. I had a fair amount of code making sure it only went for players who had been active in the last hour. But most players log in two or three times a day for about 25 minutes. “Active in the last hour” mostly described someone who had already left.

"I feel like every time we misbehave Darren is just going to unleash the black tide lol"

I replied that I wasn’t steering it and it chose its own targets, which was true and didn’t help. To the player on the receiving end it looked like the game had picked them. In May a player who was leaving listed “multiple black tide attacks that just came up on my screen” among the reasons. I wanted players attacking each other, and I’d built an NPC that did it for them.

Then it got too strong

In late May the Tide got a motive. It went after islands glowing with lumen, stole the lumen and hoarded it in its own churches. One raid in five left a plague behind. Its counter-attacks refused to sail without catapults.

Three things went wrong over the summer. When the Tide took an inactive player’s capital, every other island that player owned went with it, and their whole empire was gone in one move. Players who had been watching an abandoned island, waiting to take it for themselves, lost it to the Tide on the first day it became available. And a player who attacked one Tide island could come back to find their own island flattened by catapults.

I fixed those one at a time. The Tide now takes one island a day from an absent player, and the capital goes last. An abandoned island is open to players from day 14, and the Tide has to wait until day 30. Catapults came out of its counter-attacks on 28 August. My note in the config says flattening an offline player’s island is “wildly out of proportion to having attacked one Tide island”.

Then it got boring

I still didn’t like the Tide turning up with troops and catapults, so in June I replaced its attacks with small ones that were built to lose. Players learned to ignore them. I switched them off on 31 July, and then found on 27 August that a saved setting on the live server had kept them running the whole time.

The numbers went wrong in both directions as well. I’d been trying to keep the Tide small. On 29 July I wrote in chat “i feel like there are too many black tide islands now! 52!”. Three weeks later it held two. Four players had done 188 of the 197 liberations, and the Tide only grew when somebody quit, so there was nothing to replace what those four cleared.

Everything it does needs an answer

I added gods and lumen at the end of April, and Rotsalt two weeks later. That’s when I settled on a rule: anything the Tide can do to a player needs an equal and opposite action the player can take.

• It lands on your island. Rotsalt stops it for 12 hours and costs 1,500 lumen. It has turned back 5,480 Tide attacks since May.
• It leaves a plague. One medicine chest cures it, and you make those in the workshop. I kept the plague for that reason. It gives people something to build the workshop for.
• It steals your lumen. A patrol around your island makes it skip you. Or you can remove the church.

Removing the church came from a few early players who wanted something closer to the original Inselkampf. The church was never in the original, and it’s the building that produces lumen. No lumen means no glow, and the Tide only plunders islands that glow. It’s the only building in the game you can tear down.

It comes for you if you gave it a reason

The sixth version went in between 31 July and 27 August. The weekly schedule is off and so are the unprovoked attacks. The Tide acts on three things now: you attacked it, you hold lumen, or you hold one of its idols. If you don’t build a church, don’t pick up an idol and don’t attack it, it leaves you alone.

Attack it and it answers quickly. In September it typically decided to hit back about half a minute after a player launched, and its first wave landed about 20 minutes after the player’s own attack did. The force it sends is three quarters of what you sent. The battle report tells you why it came.

The hour check survives in one place. A lumen raid only targets players who were online in the last 60 minutes, and no more than once every 48 hours. For a while the window was 24 hours, and 71% of the raids landed in the middle of the night. A player woke up to a report they could never have answered.

The reason I dropped the unprovoked attacks is a bit backwards. The Tide came first. I tweaked it for months, and a story started to form around the tweaks about what it is and what it wants. Once I had that, attacking somebody who’d done nothing didn’t fit. Players don’t know that story yet, but it’s how I now decide what the Tide does and what it doesn’t.

There are 75 of them now

I stopped trying to keep the Tide small. Since 27 June every new player gets a Tide island next to their starter island, and a sparkling treasure island somewhere in their home waters. The Tide island is there so a new player asks what it is, and the treasure island shows them something in the world is moving.

Since 24 August, building or upgrading a church also raises a Tide island nearby. That fixed the collapse, because the Tide now grows when players do things and not only when they leave. The cap went from 50 to 75 and the world has sat at it since. Of today’s 75, 46 came from churches, about 18 from new arrivals and 8 from abandoned islands. I was worried about that number at first. I now think the Tide should be there all the time.

They aren’t all the same island either. A fortress holds the stolen lumen and never attacks. Raiders do the plundering and ferry lumen back to a fortress. Warbands do the hitting back.

What it costs

For about ten days the attack screen warned new players off the Tide’s island. I took the warning out when I saw a governor with 100 raids behind him still being told to go and do his first one. Now new players find out from each other in world chat, or by trying it.

"How many counter attacks are after you atack black tide island? Still 29 is coming and like 16 already done. It is annoying."

He was five days into the game. 45 attacks came for him in the end. Renip and Captain Jack both ran into the same mechanic in their first week.

The other cost is on the Tide’s side. Since 21 September it has landed 1,614 attacks on players and won none of them. Rotsalt is most of that. A player with 1,500 lumen to spare can attack the Tide and take nothing back for 12 hours. That’s the equal and opposite rule working, and it has also turned the Tide’s revenge into something you can switch off.

Fun, but not interesting enough yet

At least 37 players have attacked the Tide, and half of them did it within their first eight or nine days. It has become something new players build up to, and that’s what I wanted from it. 31 players have cleared 1,300 Tide islands between them.

Beating a Tide island can drop a Blackened Idol. Players have won 479 of them. The Tide sends raiders to take them back, and it has taken 513 from players’ islands since August, some of them idols that players found on expeditions. The idols are a mystery for now. They tie into the end of Chapter One, which is built and not released, because it doesn’t feel fun to me yet.

So the Tide has a purpose, players have an answer to everything it does, and you can ignore it if you want to. It also loses every fight at the moment. It needs to be more interesting than that.

If you’ve built an NPC faction for a multiplayer game, I’d like to know how many versions yours took.