I popped this up in guild chat and it seems like a decent idea, then I realized it could go farther in a "phase II" - you'll note roman numerals make it seem more official:
Phase I:
Home island bandit invasions by the River and Mountain Bandits.
1. At daily log in, the game randomly (maybe one in five days or so) presents a quest to defeat the River and/or Mountain Bandits that have invaded the home island.
2. If you accept, the bandits are spawned/invade with an area affect of negative production until you defeat them - the settlers are afraid.
3. If you reject, the bandits don't invade, nothing bad happens to your "perfectly balanced economy" so no whining.
4. You can't see the bandit composition until you accept, so you could get easy to hard quests. Some bandit camps could spawn with different invaders each time even. We can code a random number right?
As far as the invasion itself, the bandits show up on uninhabitable spaces on the home island map, the river or mountains. You must defeat all of them to clear the area and restore normal production. A few should be set up to "unofficially" enable them to be blocked, just in case Evil shows back up to write a guide for it.
Sample ideas for quests:
- Bandits invade s9, reducing gold mining by 25% while they are present. New boss "Gold Tooth" and his henchman must be defeated to restore production. Once complete, quest yields star coins or XP for defeated bandits plus mining bonus buffs.
- Bandits invade s2, reduce all production in the sector by 10% while they are present. New boss "The Mountain Man" and his bandits must be defeated. I imagine the Mountain Man as a big Scottish-type wearing a kilt and attacking the strongest units first (you want a use for higher troops than R or M?) - "the wee little ones can't hurt me anyway!" Once complete, get one of those area buffs (Chant) and the star coins/xp for defeating the bandits.
Anyway, some advantages to this are: no travel time to/from adventures, new quest series unlockable after home island is cleared, new boss requiring higher troops to defeat, accepting triggers negative effect - reject quest if you don't have time to try to complete it, so there is no requirement to play it on the day the quest pops up. And I don't think it would be impossible to code - given the area of effect buff is already coded, you could have a negative area of effect from a bandit camp right?
I had it much more fleshed out in a previous thing I started typing, but I figure I'll let others make up more ideas if they like it. Looking for some new content here somewhere now that BB got us 24-hour irmas and a slide bar for stacks...
Did I say no travel time to adventures? No 30-minute wait for that reg gen to get somewhere? Or back?
Phase II:
And.... there could be a non-optional global quest series event that would replace the crisis quests, a real home-island massive invasion, multiple daily bandit spawns, requiring a lot of effort (level specific of course) to overcome, but for real rewards if you defeat them during the event, like the 500 gems at the end of the crisis quest. Maybe even make an Epic buff only usable on a friend's home island, with similar effect as Rain of Arrows...
I'm just saying, that's a real crisis for us pixel-loving economy balancers, worthy of being called a crisis quest