The guards should keep the positions they currently have outside of the major cities and also should patrol inside the cities itself. Stables can be very well kept out of their range to a reasonable limit (which is harder to do for some of the smaller towns as the stables there are quite close to the town entry).
As for the forced PvP: You attack a city, you have to get forced flagged. If you attack one of the smaller camps, you can do without. I do understand your doubts that there will always be a large group of homins trying to fight off the Marauders attacking their city, but that's the whole point of it.
If Marauders are successful in attacking a major city, the reward should reflect that. It also should be one of the hardest tasks for them to accomplish and needing a well organized group capable of defeating the high-level guards and the defending homins.
If there's Marauders that do not want to do their "occupation" flagged, then those can always eye the smaller camps. That being said, there also should be a type of "frontline-suppliers" much like the patrolling groups of the tribes, which a single homin might be able to attack and take down.
This gives you several targets to chose from:
The points you get for taking down each of them are tiered by the difficulty (on the list above from top to down).
As for the forced PvP: You attack a city, you have to get forced flagged. If you attack one of the smaller camps, you can do without. I do understand your doubts that there will always be a large group of homins trying to fight off the Marauders attacking their city, but that's the whole point of it.
If Marauders are successful in attacking a major city, the reward should reflect that. It also should be one of the hardest tasks for them to accomplish and needing a well organized group capable of defeating the high-level guards and the defending homins.
If there's Marauders that do not want to do their "occupation" flagged, then those can always eye the smaller camps. That being said, there also should be a type of "frontline-suppliers" much like the patrolling groups of the tribes, which a single homin might be able to attack and take down.
This gives you several targets to chose from:
- patrolling groups for single Marauders to attack
- small camps for Marauder groups of 3 to 5 (depending on player skill)
- attack on major cities for organized raid groups (at least 8+ forced flagged)
The points you get for taking down each of them are tiered by the difficulty (on the list above from top to down).