City Ruins

ArchivedUser

Hey guys, I've been chewing over something for awhile and thought I'd finally ask the community's opinion.

Since nodes can reach a  Metropolis level, understandably covering a large area with walls, structures, and statues, what happens to those structures if the node delevels to a city? Or all the way back down to a town or village? What if it delevels to stage 0? Will the walls and buildings just vanish, poof!, and bring back untouched wilderness, or will they leave ruins behind that get rebuilt if the node is leveled again?

Understandably the idea of ruins being left behind would be more realistic, but also probably more difficult to include in the game. Have the AoC team commented on this yet anywhere?

ArchivedUser

I do not believe there has been any comment on ruins being left behind when a node drops down a level. There are plenty of ruins from before the original exodus but that is not what you are asking.

Could be a good question for the next live stream on December 15th.

ArchivedUser

Also what we know about siege mechanics and deleveling may be incomplete. They stated earlier that a successful siege would delevel a node. What has not been clarified is if that is a total reset to 0 or a drop in a single level from say 6 to 5. We know that a siege where the defenders win, the city enters a long cooldown period where it cannot be sieged again. No clarification if the rule is a single level drop on a win, then able to be sieged or a new siege countdown begun immediately after that. Since a siege can only be initiated from level 3 upwards, to take it to 0 would be one of two scenarios. Either a successful siege completely destroys the node from whatever level to 0, or once the node drops from 3 to 2 it would have to naturally decay due to not being fed exp or resources. We do know that nodes atrophy and delevel over time when not actively fed.


Since these quotes are from months ago, they may have changed the mechanic significantly. Hopefully one day we will get the promised blog and videos. (from March)

ArchivedUser

Hm. If they DO implement some sort of ruins for deleveled nodes, then it does raise other questions. What happens when a server gets very old? Will all of its nodes, except the ones currently hosting the Metropoli, be surrounded by ruins? Maybe a system or a timer will be implemented to gradually get rid of the player-generated ruins, via looting or natural disasters.

This is the realm of theorycraft for now, but it is fun to think about what sorts of things the developers could do with the ruins of a once-great city.

ArchivedUser

@Aegis_Lyon One thing is known for sure: when a node levels UP, and a charcater is at a position that will be blocked by an object after the level up completed, it will be teleported to a safe location close by. For leveling DOWN a node, I think the same things might apply. So even IF there will be ruins, people will be teleported all over the place as most of the buildings will disappear (I guess).