Unusual skills for caravans and leadership

Easelman

I am hoping for unusual skills, possibly in the artisan area to help with city management (like Star Wars Galaxy), or skills to improve the speed/control/protection of caravans.

Something to specialize and work toward. This way, you might hire a skilled caravaner or politicians in a city would have someone that could lower the taxes or boost node production etc.

These skills could only be achieved by 'doing' it, so a guild might have someone that would run their caravans and invest in a player.

Cat Quiver

What are these skills you're asking for exactly? Because everything you described is basically going to be present from what we've been told/shown. If you want to hire a good caravanner, find out who the best of your node is. Caravans need more protection? Mayor or other node officials can try to cobble together a force. Or players themselves could band together with money, wares, etc. to buy the protection they seek. Politicians of the game, the ones with charisma specifically will probably be heading up the scientific and possibly religious nodes.

Charlie Ashwood

I love this idea. This would make mercenaries more specialized too. They could advertise their skills and market themselves more effectively depending on what areas they specialize in.

tautau

It seems to me that it is going to be darn difficult to trust mercenaries, since working for money implies a larger bribe will make you switch sides, right? If I can't trust them, I won't hire them.

SnowElf

I wonder if the mayoral system will have skill trees to assist in caravans!

Voxtrium

@tautau We make work for money, but 1 contract is worth a lot less than the relationship behind the contract.

tautau

Thanks, @Voxtrium - if we are on the same server, I'll be in touch.

Atama

tautau wrote: »

It seems to me that it is going to be darn difficult to trust mercenaries, since working for money implies a larger bribe will make you switch sides, right? If I can't trust them, I won't hire them.

I don't think technically that will be feasible. You are presented with a UI and choose to be an attacker or defender, and then the game sets you that way. I don't think you can arbitrarily change that once the caravan starts, otherwise that choice is meaningless. You basically can't be bribed.

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans#Caravan_PvP

I'll also point out that they already have a plan to allow people to "specialize" as caravan guards by giving progression paths for that role.

"The caravan defender role is going to have its own progression questing and rewards associated with it that are going to attract a certain subset of players and then you know vice-versa wise we're going to have incentives that appeal to the more highway brigand type players; and you know you might not always be on one side or the other: that might change depending on what your interests are in the at the time. But obviously you know those types of systems need to have robust you know consequential type rewards and benefits associated with them in order to compel the player; and that's something obviously we're going to test in alphas and betas and see how performant it is in actually attracting players to participate and make sure it's not just one-sided so-to-speak." – Steven Sharif