Conquest events

Conquest is a territory event, loosely based on the board game Risk and the territory events some clans have been running by hand for years. The map is split into regions, every region is made up of tiles, and every tile is a boss or activity. Teams take land by playing it, defend it by playing it, and try to be holding the most (or have held the most) by the time the event ends.

Conquest is still being tested, so only DropTracker staff can create one right now. If you'd like to try it with your clan, let us know.

The short version

1. Your team plays the bosses on the map like it would for any other event.
2. Every so many kills (or any unique drop) earns your team troops on that boss's tile.
3. Troops land straight away. They claim an empty tile, reinforce one you already own, or attack one that belongs to another team.
4. You can only take land next to land you already hold, so you have to push outward from where you are. Crossing water means taking a sea tile first.
5. Own every tile in a region and you control it, which is worth bonus points.
6. Depending on how the event is set up, you either score points for every hour you hold land, or only what you're holding when the event ends counts.

The map

The default map is Gielinor: 56 tiles spread over 12 regions, drawn on the real world map. Vorkath sits up in Fremennik, the God Wars bosses share a region, Karamja has TzHaar and Slayer, and so on.

The Seas cover all the open water between the landmasses. Each sea tile is a Sailing collection log page, and it borders every coast it touches. Since you can only attack next to your own land, getting from the mainland to Karamja, Zeah or an island boss like Vorkath means taking a sea tile on the way.

Organisers can leave out any region or tile. The map is then redrawn without them: neighbouring regions take over the land, islands with nothing left on them disappear, and the map is cropped to fit. It still follows the real map, just without the parts you're not using. Organisers can also build their own map from scratch in the map designer and upload their own background art.

Every tile has a value (1 point on the Gielinor map) and every region has a bonus for holding all of its tiles (about half the region's tile count on the Gielinor map, so a 5-tile region is worth 3).

Earning troops

Each tile has one or more ways to earn troops on it. These are just normal event tasks, like "35 Zulrah kills" or "any Zulrah unique". The difference is that they never complete. Every time your team crosses another multiple of the target, you get that tile's troops again, for the whole event.

On the Gielinor map every tile gets two:

• Kills: 1 troop every N kills, where N is roughly 30 minutes of efficient kills at that boss. This keeps things fair, since a troop costs about the same time at Zulrah as it does at Nex, so nobody wins just by camping the fastest boss. The organiser can make troops cheaper or more expensive (anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours per troop) and the designer suggests a cost based on how many teams, players and days the event has.
• Uniques: 2 troops for any of the boss's uniques, so a lucky drop turns into a surge of troops.

Troops come from your normal submissions (drops, KC, the collection log and so on), so nothing extra needs installing. If your event has manual review turned on, troops only land once the submission is approved.

Troops always land on the tile that earned them. Killing Zulrah sends troops to the Zulrah tile. You can't save them up or send them somewhere else.

Troops only count on tiles you can reach. That means tiles your team owns and the tiles right next to them. If you kill a boss on the other side of the map, those troops are wasted, so it pays to play the bosses on your border. On the site, tiles out of your team's reach are faded out. (Organisers can turn this off and let teams attack anywhere.)

What a troop does

When a tile changes hands, the troop that took it stays behind as 1 defense, so it can't flip straight back on the very next troop.

Battles

Attacks work like Risk. Your troop rolls 2 dice and the defender rolls 1 die per defense point, up to 2. The highest dice are compared in pairs, and every pair you win knocks 1 defense off the tile. Ties go to the defender.

Knock the last point of defense off and the tile is breached. It doesn't fall yet: the next enemy troop takes it. That gives the owner a window to throw troops back in and rebuild the defense before it's lost.

If you'd rather leave luck out of it, the organiser can switch to no dice, where every attacking troop simply removes 1 defense.

Starting the event

The organiser picks one of four ways to start:

• Land grab: every tile starts unowned. A team with no land can claim any tile, then has to grow from there.
• Deal the whole map: every tile is shared out evenly between the teams (balancing both the number of tiles and their value).
• One random tile each: every team starts on a single random tile, spread as far apart from each other as the map allows.
• Home tiles: the organiser picks each team's starting tile. A team that loses everything comes back in at its home.

In the other modes, a team that loses all of its land can come back in anywhere.

Unowned tiles can also start with their own garrison, so the first team there has to fight for it instead of just walking in.

Scoring

There are two scoring modes, picked by the organiser:

• Points for every hour held: every tile pays its value in points for every hour your team holds it, and every region you control pays its bonus per hour. It's worked out to the minute, so grabbing a tile right before a cut-off doesn't earn you a whole hour. Points you've earned are yours to keep, even after you lose the land.
• Only the map at the end counts: nothing builds up over time. Your score is whatever you're holding right now, so if a tile gets taken from you, you lose its points and never earned any while you had it. The standings during the event show where things would land "if it ended now", and it's all settled when the event ends.

Ties are broken by tiles held, then regions held.

The organiser can switch scoring modes while the event is running, but keep in mind this recalculates every team's score for the whole event, not just from that point on. Once the event has ended, the scoring can't be changed anymore.

Following along

• On the site, the event page shows the live map. Hover over (or tap) a tile to see who owns it, its defense, and how close each team is to its next troop. Tiles your team can't reach yet are faded. There's also a battle log and the team standings.
• On Discord, the bot posts when a tile is claimed or captured, when a battle happens (with the dice rolls), and when a region changes hands. It also posts a map update with the standings every 24 hours by default (every 6, 12 or 48 hours, or never, are options too). There's no map update in the last hour, since the final results post covers it.
• Standings update about once a minute.

For organisers

Everything is set up from the event's Map tab while it's still a draft:

• Start from the Gielinor preset and untick any regions or tiles you don't want (the map is redrawn for you, which takes about half a minute), or build your own map from scratch. You can have up to 24 regions and 120 tiles.
• Every tile's tasks are yours to change. The preset fills them in for you, but they're normal event tasks: change the kill count, swap in a different task, or add your own from the Tasks tab. Each tile can have up to 8 tasks, and each one pays however many troops you want (up to 50).
• Tick only once on a task to make it a one-time award, like a first pet or a mega-rare drop, instead of paying out every time the target is reached again.
• Tile tasks have to be ones that count up: kills, items (a single item, "any of" a list, or a points list), XP, loot value, pets, combat achievements, slayer tasks, or a manual task. Things like "get all of these items" or PB times can't drive a tile, since there's no such thing as doing them a second time.
• Each tile can have its own limits: the most defense it can hold and the garrison it starts with, or leave them to the map's rules. This is also where you pick each team's home tile.
• Connections decide which tiles border each other. The Gielinor map comes with them already, following the real borders and coastlines. On your own map, use Connect tiles (click a tile, then the ones it borders), or Connect nearby tiles to have it done for you.
• Rules (under the map) cover scoring, whether teams can only attack next to their own land, dice or no dice, how many dice each side rolls, the most defense a tile can have, how the event starts, and how often the Discord map update posts. Battle rules can be changed at any time and apply from the next troop.
• Before the event can start, every tile needs a way to earn troops, there need to be at least two teams, every tile has to be connected to the rest of the map, and with home tiles, every team needs one.
• Mistakes can be fixed while the event runs: you can hand a tile to a team (or back to nobody) and set its defense. These fixes show in the battle log but aren't announced on Discord.
• If a submission gets revoked after its troops already fought, the dice can't be un-rolled. Instead, the team owes those troops back, and its next troops on that tile pay off the debt first.

A few things that work in other events don't work with Conquest yet: templates, recurring schedules, the live map inside the Discord Activity, and a proper in-game display in the plugin.

Things we're still deciding

This section is for the people testing Conquest with us, and will come out before the page goes public. These are the parts of the design we'd like opinions on:

• Troops earned out of reach are simply wasted for now. We kept them on record, so we could instead have them wait and join the fight once the tile is reachable, or go into a team pool a captain sends out. Which would you prefer?
• Troops still fight on the tile that earned them. To take Zulrah you kill Zulrah, and to defend Zulrah you also kill Zulrah. You can't use your strongest bosses to shore up your weak ones.
• Troops get wasted once a tile is maxed out. When all of your tiles are at full defense, extra kills on them don't do anything.
• The northern ocean is a big hub. With only seven sea tiles to share out all the water, the one up north touches a lot of coast. More sea tiles would split it up, but each needs something to play.
• Bigger teams have the advantage. Troop costs don't change with team size.