❔ Conundrum: The same few hunters get buff while half your pack sits around with no way to level up!

What to do with these wayward hunters and lazy packmates?

What if they could take another role in the pack instead?

⚔️ Introducing the Territory Patrol! ⚔️

Your Patrol is a party that vigilantly keeps watch over your pack's borders. The patrol members' headshot and role display at the top of the den page after the feature is unlocked (30 days?) only if you opt-in.* Underneath is a button to challenge the pack's patrol! Pit your warriors against another pack!

It takes 30 minutes to complete the challenge. When the battle begins you can give a command like Flank, Charge, or Defend as a sort of rock/paper/scissors bonus. The victor is calculated based on the role distribution and stats of the party ** caveat: some kind of flattening so wolves with different levels aren't too overpowered, and maybe requirement that a wolf must be minimum level/stats to participate.

Patrols gain exp just like hunting, with a bigger reward for living in a harder biome and challenging a pack in a biome difficulty equal or greater than yours! Prizes for winning could be a 1 use bone or 2sc (something small comparable to winning battles with your lead wolf) with super rare drops of fang/claw, wolf skull, wolf tail etc. Most importantly you increase your ranking on the Patrol Leaderboard! One for the whole world and one for your home biome like fishing.

*Players who don't want to participate in PVP can opt-out.

Patrol Roles

Here's the heart of the matter. We want some way to use those weird stat combos! So a wolf with strength/smarts or strength/wisdom as their highest stats could be well suited to the Commander role. A speed/smarts could be a great Skirmisher. Agility/wisdom has adaptability required for a Tactician. Strength/speed would make a good Juggernaut.

This is just a brainstorm but you get the idea!

Then your patrol can be made up of different combinations of roles. Certain party balance could have the advantage over different patrols, but be weak to something else. Too many Skirmishers and you'll be weak to Juggernauts. No Commander or Tactician and you'll get outmaneuvered! So you'll have to figure out the style and balance that works best for you.

Thanks for reading! This idea has been floating around my head for a while. I hope you like it, please leave your suggestions below!

Obviously this would be a big project and a lot of work 🙏 but could also be a lot of fun! And solve problems I've seen discussed frequently.

Possible roles brainstorming ~~~

Strength / Speed • Juggernaut

• Advantange: ... Weakness: ...
  

Strength / Agility • Assassin

Strength / Smarts • Commander

Strength / Wisdom • Raider

Speed / Smarts • Skirmisher

• Advantange: Flanking bonus. Weakness: Juggernaut.
  
  

Speed / Wisdom •

Agility / Smarts •

Agility / Wisdom • Tactician

Also if the wolf would be better off in a hunting team, their patrol role will default to "Hunter" with the least effective patrol status as the game's way of telling you they belong elsewhere!

Since it's easy to get a high strength wolf by training as a Finisher, a balanced patrol should NEED non-strength roles in it for best results.

Scouting makes it easy to train for Strength / Wisdom so this should be the most common basic role.

Oh this would be fun. And give me more to do with my wolves.

As an addition, maybe patrol size/number of patrol/challenges you can issue are based on pack size. So a pack with ~25 members could have 1 patrol of 3(?) wolves, increasing with every 10 or so slots? Although based on this and your leadership suggestion, it is clear that packs with larger territories have more advantages to get on the leaderboards. Hmm food for thought.

Yes I like this, my fave wolf is currently extremely rudely refusing to allocate her stats correctly and it is causing me great pain. I crave str/wis combo like the desert craves rain

Yes I intended it to reward players for living in the harder biomes, and I think this is too complicated to unlock before 1 month anyway- I'm not too worried about this giving experienced players an advantage since the prizes should be *SMALL* items, mostly leaderboards bragging rights with very very rare trophies since wolf fangs seem appropriate for flavor XD Mostly, participation is it's own reward in the form of exp. Maybe larger parties actually get less exp per wolf so it can't outpace leveling via hunting. Could need some kind of cap on patrol size, either that or you can only challenge patrols your size or bigger. Encourages you to unlock pack slots ;D

But yeah this is a big complicated system that would require a lot of thought to go into it to make sure it works fairly.

They could also be a great addition to the leader's explore and battle system. Having a small support pack that boosts your chances during a fight or trigger specific encounters, depending on which roles you decide to take with you 0: