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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
There are perks and risk as well to being a vassal so it would have to be a serious discussion if you were to join them.
Yes, rebels should be on defensive, it just makes sense they stop paying taxes to the master node and the master node should come and get it!
Maybe rebels also should be able to freely kill anyone in the master node, for sabotaging their xp farm for the node an force the master node to delevel... just gank everybody without corruption.
The master node should let the vassal free or take the fight.
Voting for secession seems cool.
1) citizens in the vassal node vote yay (1 week)
2) then the master node's mayor should decide in a week for freeing the vassal node or fighting the rebels (1 week)
3) a siege against the vassal node will be scheduled (1 week)
So without fighting the vassals could be free in 2 weeks and fighting they could be free in 3 weeks...
What happens if they lose?
Maybe double tax it for 3 weeks
Makes sense, also vassals will not receive any of the bonuses offered by the master node... there's benefits in being a vassal.
But people should be able to opt out being a vassal and give up all the benefits... what if you live in the vassal node and you and your guild want to level it up and be mayor? There's ambitions involved, people will want to do stuff... people not always will accept having their node level capped down.
I think smaller nodes will be simply beat up bad, but when they win it will be REALLY COOL.
Because there is a chain and who is bellow in the chain is level capped, if you get free you can level up your node freely and if you become a vassal again then you already won because now you are bigger and you will have your vassals bellow you.
It is a thing!
Who would they rebel against?
Just the master above your node in the chain, so every node in the middle of the chain would have to fight in 2 fronts... a defense siege against their master and an offensive siege against their vassals... but he could have 2 vassals so it would be a 3 front fight
That would be an awesome Sunday, having 3 sieges to fight!
You might use a refresher on the vassalization system:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Vassal_nodes
The system is completely automatic and the only way players can influence it is by leveling up their node as fast as possible. Vassals can't war/siege their parent node, and there is no joining or breaking off a vassal chain through player action.
Even if there are benefits to being a vassal (I don't think there are any risks), there is always more benefit to being the parent node instead of the vassal.
In my suggestion a rebellion would work just like a regular siege and would follow the same rules. Since so far there doesn't seem to be a restriction on how many sieges can happen at once, it should be possible that every node rebels against their immediate parent at the same time. That would be some big chaos.
Where in the wiki does it say it sets you automatically as a vassal? I don't believe that map was that binary, and you would have some element of choices on what you might pick.
Please give me a quote.
Here's Summit being lectured about how node expansion works, with nodes being vassalized mentioned in passing.
That's what I thought!
Everybody rebelling against their own immediate master, so your vassal would rebel against you too, meaning you would have two sieges being an offensive and a defensive.
Total chaos, this makes me salivate for it!
Where in the wiki does it say it sets you automatically as a vassal? I don't believe that map was that binary, and you would have some element of choices on what you might pick.
Please give me a quote.[/quote]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Nodes
When I say that carebears will be the ultimate oppressors in AoC people think I am joking!
I'm not joking at all!
People who farm more like a colony of drone ants will enslave everybody else and today the vassals have no tools to deal with that other than:
1: guild wars, guild on guild... that would need a lot of coordination which we don't know if it's gonna happen
2: ganking, but the corruption will apply some nasty dampening effects on you
3: node wars, try to work with another master node who can declare war against your master and backstab your master
4: massive efforts in deleveling the master node, if the master delevel it loses it's vassals
It would also open up things like proxy wars through vassal rebellions, which could be fun in some cases, but just to complicated overall. Better to just have the major nodes declare wars rather than go through proxies
I see in the interview makes it seem like it is automatic then.
Being a Vassal node should be a choice and not forced. That way you can decide if the benefits are worth it to you or not.
However, if someone else successfully sieges the node which vassals your node, then your node might then be the dominant node in the area and the other, lower level, nearby nodes would be your node's vassals. You could encourage this, of course, by encouraging that siege and being a spy for the attackers to help them win.
Second, in order to obtain a siege scroll, you need to do a LOT of effort, perhaps similar to the effort needed to level up the node being sieged: "Sieging will require a similar amount of resources and time to what it took to develop the node being sieged.[13]" and "The questing that is incorporated as part of attaining that particular scroll is very particular to the type of scroll you're attempting to acquire and that is inclusive not just of the materials required as part of that questing but also the time associated with completing that quest, because we want there to be a reciprocal relationship between how much time it takes to stand up a node of the particular size and the types of quests that are required in order to attain the siege scroll. So, there won't be a method by which you can first attain a scroll for a lower-level node and then increase or augment or change that scroll after you've completed the quest. You'll have to go through a new quest again for the type of level of node you want.[12]"
Therefore, something as simple as a vassal declaring that it is rebelling against its overlord would appear to be an 'end run' around the enormous effort that will be required to declare a formal siege.
Third, a simple majority vote of citizens to do this would seem appropriate only in a Scientific node which elects mayors. A Military node might have it be a mayoral decision, a Divine node perhaps requiring quests on the parts of the citizens, and an Economic node a huge cash payment by the node.
My personal opinion would be a solid NO for this idea for the reasons posted above AND because there is already a way for a node to become free of its own accord, as I discussed in my second paragraph above. Find another node to successfully siege your overlord and provide inside information on the defenses so that the attacker succeeds. Of course, if someone leaks that you are a spy, expect the patron guilds in your overlord node to declare you 'kill on sight' for eternity!!! That is another example of this wonderful game design.
If your spy alt gets caught, delete it and make another.
@tautau what if the "enemy" master node has no interest or even military strengh to beat your master node?
Then nothing can help you if you are a vassal node and wants to level your node.
I did understand your point that a rebelion would simply undo everything, all the work.
I guess I assumed (bad on my part) that you/your toon was the mayor of the node wanting to rebel, thus would likely be your main. If you wanted to use an alt to convince another large node to attack your overlord node, I suspect it would be difficult for your alt to convince the other node's Mayor and citizens to attack - after all, why would they listen to some lower-level alt to start a war? Improbable. You would likely have to reveal your main, as mayor of your vassal node, to convince the other node's Mayor to buy into your scheme, and once you revealed your Main....you know as well as I do how hopeless it is to keep a secret like that forever.
I expect that such things will happen, lower-level nodes will conspire with enemies of their overlord node to bring them down in a siege, and that such rebellions may succeed sometimes and fail other times. All of this is an example of what is going to keep AoC exciting for years, brilliant motivations for players to conspire against each other and make this game a classic.
Thanks for introducing this thread, though I still do not think we need to change the current design.
I guess the vassals will have to harass their masters as much as possible in many ways
I'm a bit unconvinced by your arguments, and I'll go through my disagreements point by point.
To me, being a "spy" does absolutely nothing. What useful information can a vassal node report on it's parent node that another player can't get by just simply walking in? They are not part of the parent node and shouldn't have any more insight into the inside dealings. Furthermore, the idea that "encouraging" a siege is enough for one to happen doesn't sound right to me. A vassal would have to find some external party that is willing to go through the siege scroll quest for them, as alts are tied to the same citizenship as the main. The vassal node could feed resources to the external party to help with the completion at least, but the "helper" could just pocket all the resources instead, because they don't really have a stake in helping out.
If you read my suggestion more thoroughly, I indicated that a siege scroll is still required for a rebellion. The rebellion part is just simply the ABILITY to use the scroll and join the list of atttackers.
This is something I did think about and I half agree because it would be thematic with the nodes. However, if there would be a serious downside to rebelling (like in suggestion type B ), I wouldn't want someone being able to just throw money at it and now everyone else not wanting to rebel has to suffer. At the end of the day, rebellion comes down to the will of the people, so a vote roughly mimics that.
This would be my main disagreement. More often than not, the thing that's blocking a node from growing is the parent node, not any external node. The nearby parent nodes could very well just be happy with the status quo and not want to weaken their position by spending resources on useless wars that don't affect their own growth (especially if they are already metropolises). The situation is worse if your node is a town node blocked by a city node that is blocked by a metropolis. If you want to take out the city that is directly blocking you, convincing outside parties to spend time and effort sieging some middle-of-the-chain node seems extremely difficult.
Secondly, this "if you cannot convince any of them to attack, then you do not deserve to be free" sounds a bit backwards. Shouldn't it be "if you're not strong enough to defeat your oppressor, then you do not deserve to be free"? I don't want begging and cheerleading being the skills that decide if my node can grow. I don't see yelling for help and then watching other people decide my fate being a fun political system. Why not let me fight for my own freedom with my own skill in pvp and leadership?
Anyway, to summarize my whole argument in a sentence:
A rebellion mechanic would help prevent stale world states, add more interesting node politics, and give more agency to players over their outcomes.
There should be an option to strip the Masternode from the throne.
Imagine the Mad King from Game of Thrones would be magically protected from rebellions and only a forgein army (does not exsist in GoT) could put him down?!
I played years EvE online and have seen everything.
This "5" number is the reason. Fewer would make the world less dynamic and more of them would increase the granularity too much. This is the number Steven sees as good for politics and war on the AoC's map size.
That has nothing to do with limiting to stage 6, why are you suggesting that? Being forced to support a node than be against should have 0 impact on lvl 6 nodes and the amount in the world.
This is not a design reason as that design doesn't relate to who you can and can't declare war on.
I say there will be up to 5 metropolises on the map. Steven said that this number is important, that there should be no more of them. I assume is related to the dynamic of the map, trying to prevent a high granularity, where each node stays solo against the others and also no granularity at all, where an equilibrium is reached.
If vassals would declare war onto parents or would break away, there would either more chaos or too much player control. The way how nodes gain experience and level up is also secret. Steven wants players to not be able to influence this aspect easily.
Caravans to run from the vassals to the parent. One rebel mechanic would be to attack these caravans as they leave your node. Maybe with enough chaos and raiding a parent could be deleveled as it couldn’t afford maintenance. Dunno who would become parent in that case.
Why would everyone be lvl 5, you can still have an area of influence that prevents other lvl 5, unless your place is destroyed? You simply make it a choice to be a vassal or not.
Chaos will happen ither way, people just have to move far away then attack their own node. It is better if players have a choice to become a vassal or not.
Only thing i can think of is if the node distribution won't be as impactful as one might think, so they are forcing vassals so it will have a bigger impact in destroying multiple areas.
I still play EVE, my ingame name is Arya Yeshe there
At the momment there's no direct way for the vassals from saving themselves from the master node, also the vassals are level capped so they can level up to the same level as the master
'So it's kinda worse than slavery and the players will probably have to do this:
-guild wars: equivalent to war decs in EVE
-ganking gatherers in the master node: ganking highsec miners in EVE
-support enemy nodes that can declare war on your master, but it will be a problem if we have a blue donut in AoC
-caravan raiding
So there aren't many options right now
Good point, when a node falls, it also causes bigger impact on the political map, if that is what you mean by "destroying multiple areas".
Fair enough,
Would loose much of the npc caravans though with less vassalage. I think they could be fun to raid/protect.
Also like the idea of empires forming rather than city states. Maybe they could force vassalage by intimidation/war as an alternative. That could be fun but more complicated and open to abuse.
In general I don’t see vassalage as something you choose it’s something that’s forced onto you; economically, through war, or threats. Something you choose is more like an alliance.
I just find it makes things a lot more interesting being able to freely create your alliances around the map with nodes agreeing to work together and such potentially. Like some LOTR stuff where u have an ally across the map and you ride over there to help them.
Just feel like choice is loss and you feel the need to leave or feel like it's impossible for your node to level up as you have to hope one is destroyed, rather than making that happen yourself.
I think high level nodes fall apart as you say due to not being able to sustain themselves if vassals are lost.
Regarding caravans, it is unclear to me if players can attack or not caravans which go from a sibling node to the metropolis. IF they can, the metropolis might fall apart and those citizens will have no high level node anymore for a while.
You mean harvesting on their territory?
Some node policies were mentioned this stream and more info will come later.