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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.
How Frequently will Caravans be Attacked?
tautau
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
We know Caravans are PvP zones and we know they carry valuable goods. There seems to be some consensus in threads that Caravans are going to be attacked frequently, perhaps to the great frustration of players who don't like the resulting PvP and losses. But let's do a bit of rough analysis of whether or not Caravan battles are frequent. I am presenting this post as a starting point in the hope that other players will refine and improve it.
Including castles, we know that there will be 118 nodes. It is probably reasonable to assume that within a few weeks of launch, they will all reach village level and be able to start Caravans, at least most of them will. If Caravan destinations are only nodes, that is over 13,000 Caravan possible routings. However, most caravans will probably go to nodes that aren't that distant so we might cut that by two-thirds. We are still looking at over 4,000 Caravan routings. There are lots of places Caravans might go which makes them harder to find.
The map is roughly 100km x 100km, or 10,000 square kilometers, some of it is underground Tulnar regions. However, I think there will be some impassible areas in the mountains so I'll guess 9,500 sq km that players can travel. How far can an individual see? Less than 100meters in dense jungle, maybe 1 or 2 km over the ocean or desert...clearly I am guessing about that. If the average visible distance is 1/2 km in each direction, then am I right that roughly each player can see 1/9500th of the map? That's not much of it. Maybe you can see twice that far, you still are not seeing much of the map. In forests, jungles, mountains, under-realm you can probably see much less in each direction. Caravans will be hard to spot.
How many Caravans will be out there at any given time? That depends on how many Caravans are generated each week and how long each Caravan takes to get to its destination. Will each node generate enough stuff to send one Caravan a week? Maybe two? It will take harvesting, production, assembling parts through quests for axels and wheels, and a fair amount of organization to get the node citizens motivated, coordinated and assembled to guard the Caravan. Let's start with one per week per node. Maybe you can get the Caravan to the next node in an hour, or two hours for a couple nodes over. Land is probably slower than by ship, but ships may take more distant and profitable destinations. Let's work with three hours per Caravan for travel time. Which gives us:
118 nodes at one Caravan per week x 3 hours travel = 354 Caravan travel hours in a week on the server. There are 168 hours in a week. So, at any given moment, there is an average of roughly 2.2 active Caravans in the world. The world of 9,500 sq km. In other words, if about 4,500 players were spread out over the world, only one would spot a Caravan. And one player isn't going to take down a guarded Caravan. It might take a dozen good PvPers to be reasonably certain of taking the average Caravan. A group formed for a 'Caravan Hunt' is usually going to come up empty.
Caravan ship captains are going to learn to hug the edge of the map, not take a straight line to the destination port. Land Caravan drivers are going to slink through the woods and over obscure passes, not run through choke points and well travelled highways. Smart mayors will run valuable Caravans on Monday mornings during work/school hours, not on Saturday afternoons.
So I'm thinking thinking that most Caravans will get through without a fight. The ones that get attacked will tend to be driven by dumber players, Darwinism at work again. But it will sound like lots of them get attacked because dumber players are also the ones who complain the most, right?
Including castles, we know that there will be 118 nodes. It is probably reasonable to assume that within a few weeks of launch, they will all reach village level and be able to start Caravans, at least most of them will. If Caravan destinations are only nodes, that is over 13,000 Caravan possible routings. However, most caravans will probably go to nodes that aren't that distant so we might cut that by two-thirds. We are still looking at over 4,000 Caravan routings. There are lots of places Caravans might go which makes them harder to find.
The map is roughly 100km x 100km, or 10,000 square kilometers, some of it is underground Tulnar regions. However, I think there will be some impassible areas in the mountains so I'll guess 9,500 sq km that players can travel. How far can an individual see? Less than 100meters in dense jungle, maybe 1 or 2 km over the ocean or desert...clearly I am guessing about that. If the average visible distance is 1/2 km in each direction, then am I right that roughly each player can see 1/9500th of the map? That's not much of it. Maybe you can see twice that far, you still are not seeing much of the map. In forests, jungles, mountains, under-realm you can probably see much less in each direction. Caravans will be hard to spot.
How many Caravans will be out there at any given time? That depends on how many Caravans are generated each week and how long each Caravan takes to get to its destination. Will each node generate enough stuff to send one Caravan a week? Maybe two? It will take harvesting, production, assembling parts through quests for axels and wheels, and a fair amount of organization to get the node citizens motivated, coordinated and assembled to guard the Caravan. Let's start with one per week per node. Maybe you can get the Caravan to the next node in an hour, or two hours for a couple nodes over. Land is probably slower than by ship, but ships may take more distant and profitable destinations. Let's work with three hours per Caravan for travel time. Which gives us:
118 nodes at one Caravan per week x 3 hours travel = 354 Caravan travel hours in a week on the server. There are 168 hours in a week. So, at any given moment, there is an average of roughly 2.2 active Caravans in the world. The world of 9,500 sq km. In other words, if about 4,500 players were spread out over the world, only one would spot a Caravan. And one player isn't going to take down a guarded Caravan. It might take a dozen good PvPers to be reasonably certain of taking the average Caravan. A group formed for a 'Caravan Hunt' is usually going to come up empty.
Caravan ship captains are going to learn to hug the edge of the map, not take a straight line to the destination port. Land Caravan drivers are going to slink through the woods and over obscure passes, not run through choke points and well travelled highways. Smart mayors will run valuable Caravans on Monday mornings during work/school hours, not on Saturday afternoons.
So I'm thinking thinking that most Caravans will get through without a fight. The ones that get attacked will tend to be driven by dumber players, Darwinism at work again. But it will sound like lots of them get attacked because dumber players are also the ones who complain the most, right?
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However, we dont need numbers.
If a location has infrastructure in place to work stone in to crafting materials, we can assume there will be caravans full of stone headed to that location.
If there are only a few quarries in the wider area that have stone, we can assume a caravan will go from those stone quarries to that location.
Caravans will be largely predictable in terms of the start and finish point. All that isn't predictable is the time players chose to run them, and the exact route they take.
The map is not that big, it's 480km2 with another 100km2 of Underrealm.
It would pretty much just be those friends and guild members close enough to notice the caravan on their own.
If the implementation matches Steven's vision.
Don't forget the family summons.
The biggest issue with the family summons to me is that it totally destroys Stevens vision of caravans, and there isn't really much of a way around that.
I will not allow a system in place that circumvents the resource or region mechanics. Nor will an implementation be allowed that could abuse my “anti-Zerg” desires. The testing for this feature will be present in A2 and I will always err on the side of caution when examining the data we collect around this mechanic."
https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/i9k5rp/family_fast_travel_is_an_awful_idea_in_its/g1hru73/
Wow, it's like you think I wasn't one of the first people to point out the issues with the family summons when Steven first mentioned it.
Yes, it won't be used for zergs, but caravan attacks are not zergs.
Yes, it will be tested in A2, but A2 will not have the same level of organization that the game will have when it goes live.
If I am able to have - say - 11 friends with me (so 12 people all up) and we wanted to go hunting caravans, we would basically all have to stay together. We would have a very limited area in which the 12 of us could look for a caravan, becuase when we found one, we would all need to be close enough to attack it.
Add in a family summons to that group of 12 players, have them organize themselves around it. 2 families, each with 6 members out looking - broken down in to 6 groups of 2 players, 1 player from each family per group.
You can suddenly now search 6 times the area looking for carvans, and summon your friends to you when you find one.
Do something like this on a large guild scale, and they can cause havoc on caravans over a large area if they want to.
I know you think Steven is magical or something, but there is no mechanic that can be implemented to prevent this other than not having the family summons.
24/7 the thunder will roll!
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Every 4.5 seconds, assuming it's a Tuesday. Any other day will be 4.3 seconds. Unless it's a Monday in June. At 8pm. And it's raining outside.
better readvup on the game first then try again
They can also be created by quests, or mayors or other events.
I would say that about triples the possible number of caravans travelling at any one point in time.
As for how frequently those will be attacked.
I am of the opinion that it'll vastly depend on how guarded they are upon leaving their starting node.
If a trader invests lots of resources on a good caravan and on increases the number and level of NPC guards, and contracts a number of mercs to help guard the valuables, odds are people won't take chances in attacking the caravan.
Not so much because of possibly incurred death, but because it doesn't benefit their PvP rating at the end of the season.
Any somewhat equal amount of forces between attackers and defenders will for sure trigger a skirmish around the caravan. Otherwise I'd assume the caravan will be left alone (also thanks to no fast travel allowing for calls to friends to come gank one)
He is also correct that not all the nodes will level to 3, so the level 0, 1 and 2 nodes will not be sending out Caravans. We do not know what proportion of the nodes will be level 3 or higher. What would you all predict, perhaps half of them? If that is the case, there would be about half the Caravans active in the world at a given moment than what I predicted.
So the two corrections pretty much offset each other. Half the world size to search for Caravans and half the number of Caravans to find.
I think about half will be villages or higher. So some 60 odd ones depending on placement, and to how many nodes a node will be adjacent to.
However I would also take into account the amount of players in said nodes. We know that about 10.000 concurrent players is the expectation at launch - with a projection to increase that up to 50.000 later on.
If previous polls on here and on Reddit are anything to go by, At least a third of those players are interested in being Artisans and trading their goods. That means somewhere around: 3.000 players at launch and then 17.000 later on.
Of those I would expect half to have to send caravans to and fro at some point. So perhaps some 1.500 caravans total. Not accounting for mayoral initiated caravans, guild caravans, quest caravans etc.
I also predict that most caravans won't be crossing the entire map, and might instead travel from Village to Village. This gives the space of one or two non level 3, Node ZOI, for people to attack them, thus effectively reducing the zone players looking to attack them will have to survey. This is further so reduced, if you take into account the need for roads for a caravan to travel at its optimal speed.
I would also posit that most caravan attack might instead occur on the basis of personal conflict between two players or guilds, rather than just people playing as highway robbers for a living.
So although attacks to normal caravans may be fewer and farther between, a guild's caravan or one that is intrinsically Node related, will likely see higher number of attacks from their rivals.
Think of it this way. If I'm a level 2 node, trying to reach level 3 but my neighbouring Node isn't allowing for it: I can start attacking its caravans. After all, to go from node to node, they have to inevitably cross my lower level one. Have a concerted effort to attack them, and slowly but surely, the citizens of that Village lose materials and wealth.
I then declare a node siege/war on them, except I now have more resources than them, and can better fight them. This way I increase my node's level.
Although, I expect this kind of scenario, to grow more prevalent at higher levels of node development, to be honest.
At first, lower level nodes will just be in a race to grow first, and then wait for the adjacent bigger node to level up, so they can level up too. Once you reach Metropolis however, that's where you also can't grow anymore, and the need to destroy said Metropolis, arises. And targeting their trade routes is a great way to start undermining them, even in between non aggression periods after failed node sieges.
I just want to clarify that it's 8-10k accounts playing concurrently with 50k accounts registered per server over all as the devs goal. I can't look for a source right now though, I'm pretty sure Sorceror says it when he is chatting with summit or someone.
You are indeed correct. Went back and double checked and turns out I had misread accounts for players.
@tautau ???
The amount of caravans doesn't depend on the amount of nodes. The amount of players stays the same on the server, the amount of resources they farm stays the same, the amount of demand for resources stays the same, so the amount of caravans that need to be run stays the same as well, whether there are 10 nodes, or 500.
Back in the day I worked shortly for a company that sold tonnes of industrially used salt. We would need to contact transport companies for certain destinations.
Those companies would base their decision to take on the cargo, depending on whether there would be a return transport for them from X or Y city.
That means that the cost of sending a caravan to a certain destination, increases if you have nothing to bring back from said destination.
Considering that only level 3 nodes can initiate a caravan, the amount of level 3+ nodes absolutely matters.
Sending a caravan to a sub level 3 node, will just essentially increase your costs, if only for the loss of time that ensues in having to go back to your own node to then initiate a new caravan.
How many truckloads of salt daily used to be attacked would you say?
You'd need to ask that to Legal. I only handled prospection of the trade routes.
They must have been salty.
I will see myself out
I'd kill you for that one, but I'm sure you'd find a way to raise your own dead body again.
I could see whole guilds getting together to move one. Could lead to fewer attacks then some people think or maybe larger battles then some of us think.
Either way will be interesting to see.
Depends how they implement it. If you're an anonymous attacker, you've nothing to lose. If the defenders get a list of who's attacked it, then you're immediately a target.
This is a good point, I could see big guilds making a list of who attacks their caravans and putting a bounty on them.
I mean, your assumption of one caravan per week per node is literally pulled out of nowhere, and your assumption of 3 hours per caravan seems to completely ignore the fact that players will set up industry in locations that make sense, reducing travel times as much as possible.
This would actually be more analagous to the issue of moving goods and returning empty.
Have a large party of guild mates escort your caravan to foreign economic node, then set up ambush points on caravans coming out to/in from other foreign nodes. Pillage till you fill enough for your return caravan home. A good night was had by all.
The other two thirds lie in wait along the route, which you know cos you're escorting it, and "massacre" the escorting third.
Payment + Loot.
Om nom nom.