Okay do you happen to know ANY game that cant be broken by just letting thousands of players join? XD
Just curious how THEY solve that Issue, if at all. ^^
As for Plugins preventing the breaking of Stuff, that could be complicated indeed, especially since I plan of having such World protection built into the base game. I might let Reverse Engineering happen at a much slower pace if you are at the location of a set up Machine, so you can steal the info without actually breaking Stuff.
Another way would be that you could still copy the Books that NPCs have even when in a protected Area, since NPCs do need to have some sort of Book or Data next to them in order to know the Recipes they are crafting, like a Blacksmith would inevitably need to have a Book on smithing inside either his Workshop or at his place of Living. And NPCs will need actual paths between their Home, their Workplace and wherever they get their Resources from, so a Player could infiltrate those paths in order to break into places (Lock Picks would still work for breaking into houses in protected areas, since they just open and not break the Doors).
What really could pose an Issue is when someone makes an Underground City and nobody knows where the fuck that Base is, but what would be the proper course of Tech Tree for that? Making things cheaper for others wouldn’t be realistic, simply because that Underground place might not even be connected to any other NPC City, so there wouldn’t be any communication between them and the outside World.
I might increase NPC Guard count based on how many Players are closeby, so rushing with a ton of Players would generally be a bad Idea, since that increases the amount of Guards closeby. Though if you attack with an NPC Army the Guard Count would NOT increase, encouraging use of NPCs in general.
The Guards wouldn’t attack unless you commit any sort of crime and are caught, so that might be an issue if you go and attack one by one with an Army. And I presume “Chinese Super Armies” wouldn’t “officially” Team up using Game Mechanics and instead form multiple Teams that just happen to work together, so the NPCs cant easily tell who works together with who.
Though I could make it so that NPCs will be paranoid about new Players and always have a Guard walking alongside brand new Players, especially if there has been attacks recently.
And the World protection kinda thing might automatically protect the Walls of NPC Houses, or at least call the Guards whenever an NPC House Block has been removed by a Player who doesn’t have the authority to be allowed doing that (since it is ofcourse possible to own NPC Towns or parts of NPC Towns).