War and Vengeance

Two things put a sim hunting party on the map, and both of them are causes rather than schedules. A sim does not go hunting because a timer said so.

Vengeance

Kill a sim, and its guild may put together a war party of guild-mates and travel to the place it happened.

What counts as an offence is deliberately narrow:

• A player killing a sim — yes.
• A sim of a different guild killing it — yes.
• A monster killing it — no. Nobody avenges a boar.
• A guild-mate killing it — no. A house that hunted itself would tear itself apart in an afternoon.

A war party takes whoever is free, at any level — answering for one of your own is not a job advertisement — and it walks to where the offence happened rather than to a camp.

There is a cooldown per guild. A guild that has just ridden out waits before doing it again, so a guild being farmed by one strong player does not feed them the whole roster one party at a time.

Disposition

Every sim carries an aggression rating, decided when the character is created and never changed for the rest of its life. It is who they are, not what mood they are in.

Most of the population is peaceable — a little over half sit at the bottom of the scale. A small minority, around one in seven, genuinely prefer hunting people, and they go looking for a fight without needing any provocation at all.

The part worth knowing: they seek each other out. When a raiding party forms it is assembled from the most aggressive sims available, not from whoever was nearby. So the same names keep turning up together. If one particular group has ruined your week twice, that is not a coincidence — it is the same people, and you can learn who they are.

Standing directives

A house's behaviour can also be shifted for a period by its own recent history — which doctrine it operates under, and how forward it is being generally.

A directive only ever selects from the same named set of strategies the house draws on normally, so a house never behaves in a way it has no vocabulary for. It adopts a different one of the strategies you may already have seen it use, and returns to its usual footing when the directive lapses.

What this means for you

The world is not purely reactive. Left completely alone, some of it will still come and find you — and if you have been killing sims, rather more of it will.