Node Sidegrade - Monster Nodes

I've been thinking about this one for a while and I've been gone for a while too so I'm not sure if it's been suggested already. I didn't find anything from a quick search.

Anyway, here's the idea. Add an alternate node path that allows them to be controlled by monsters. Let the monster nodes grow just like other nodes, making them more complex. These monster nodes could fight nearby nodes to grow, whether that's player nodes or other monsters. This could make a dynamic world that feels very lived in. It would also give the players some more agency on the shape of Verra.

Pros
Fills in the empty places of the world in a somewhat automated way
Great PvE opportunities
- Culling a nearby node to prevent upcoming monster hordes
- Cultivate choice monster spawns
- Provides incentive to dive deep into the unexplored areas of Verra (for the larger monster nodes with better loot)
- Protecting caravans through monster territory
Ample opportunity for emergent gameplay
Constantly shifting safe routes and the need to protect them
Slows progression into the world if we have to carve out our own place first. Also gives us more investment into those earned places.
Gives a reason for node decay beyond lack of upkeep
Further differentiate the servers

Cons
Probably pretty taxing on the servers to simulate the monster interactions
Adds more complexity to balancing
Could make getting through some areas too difficult
Could mess with tailored content

Obviously there's more to the pros and cons that I haven't thought of but that's why I'm posting. Lemme know what you guys think and poke all the holes in my idea (or point me to the other thread about this that I didn't find if there is one)

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Comments

Ludullu

This seems a bit too big of an undertaking for the game's release, but I'd definitely like to see smth like this down the line. And the "buffer nodes" Steven mentioned in one of the dev streams could serve as the grounds for mobs to take over.

Strevi

Somewhat similar idea I had

Strevi wrote: »

Idea of defense style management.

According to wiki

Corrupted areas are sources of NPC events that players need to address before they grow out of hand.[4][2]
If players fail to address these corrupted areas, the frequency of NPC events against their node will increase.

These events could be small and frequent or larger and more powerful.
The mayor could have some strategic control and shift between these patterns by triggering certain type of daily quests.
The purpose would be to try to ensure that the larger events will happen in weekend when more players are online.
That means that these larger events should, without mayor action slide away from weekends and the consequence would be that there are not enough players available to defend the city or whatever points are being attacked by NPCs.

Certain quests would delay the large invasions, other quests would hasten them.
Finding the right succession for these quests can be made more or less challenging by adding player perturbations:
player activities on the map might also influence NPCs behavior and alter the mayor's prediction. So he has to observe what players do or don't: his citizens may gather, harvest, hunt, quest too much or too little...

there might be non-citizens and other node citizens too which may intentionally interfere.

maybe other mayors could trigger quests which would push the corruption attacks away from their nodes and more toward our mayor's node. This would add also a political dimension. Allied nodes could even attract NPCs to reduce attacks on the weaker neighboring nodes, helping them to survive.

super events: two or more nodes could synchronize to create super events by luring the NPCs from multiple direction toward a strategic point of conflict. If that succeeds then special higher tier NPCs should spawn too. Such larger events once triggered could maybe even be deflected implanting fake information and enraging the corrupted army toward a common enemy node. The NPCs would start a march over a larger distance and attack the unsuspecting node. The quest which triggers this "rage" could also fail (either because the undercover agents are not good enough or because a simultaneous counter intelligence quest - maybe a pvp or monster coin interference). Then the NPC horde would go against the original nodes which initiated this chain of events.

Strevi

NiKr wrote: »

This seems a bit too big of an undertaking for the game's release, but I'd definitely like to see smth like this down the line. And the "buffer nodes" Steven mentioned in one of the dev streams could serve as the grounds for mobs to take over.

The buffer nodes are just nodes which do not become vassal
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Vassal_nodes

That means when a metropolis falls, they can take it's place fast. Being taken out of that 'buffer' and entering in competition with the other lvl 5 nodes.
Any node can have this autonomous state if somehow avoids falling under the influence of another one.

Ludullu

Strevi wrote: »

The buffer nodes are just nodes which do not become vassal
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Vassal_nodes

That means when a metropolis falls, they can take it's place fast. Being taken out of that 'buffer' and entering in competition with the other lvl 5 nodes.
Any node can have this autonomous state if somehow avoids falling under the influence of another one.

Mmm, how I understood Steven's description is that the buffer nodes are the 1s and 2s that are not connected to any vassal system that's present when the server has all 5 metros built up. These buffer 1s and 2s will be located in-between those vassal systems.

When a metro falls, one of the fives will level up to take its place. But instead of just taking over the exact same set of nodes from that metro's vassal system, the new metro will pull up nodes from new places. And those new places are provided by the buffer 1s and 2s.

And in that context the suggestion for mob nodes could apply to a few of the buffer nodes which could level up to a stage 3 and block a player node from joining the newly established vassal system. At which point people would have to siege this node to let others grow and become vassals.

Or at least that's how I see it going down in my head.

Strevi

NiKr wrote: »

Strevi wrote: »

The buffer nodes are just nodes which do not become vassal
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Vassal_nodes

That means when a metropolis falls, they can take it's place fast. Being taken out of that 'buffer' and entering in competition with the other lvl 5 nodes.
Any node can have this autonomous state if somehow avoids falling under the influence of another one.

Mmm, how I understood Steven's description is that the buffer nodes are the 1s and 2s that are not connected to any vassal system that's present when the server has all 5 metros built up. These buffer 1s and 2s will be located in-between those vassal systems.

When a metro falls, one of the fives will level up to take its place. But instead of just taking over the exact same set of nodes from that metro's vassal system, the new metro will pull up nodes from new places. And those new places are provided by the buffer 1s and 2s.

And in that context the suggestion for mob nodes could apply to a few of the buffer nodes which could level up to a stage 3 and block a player node from joining the newly established vassal system. At which point people would have to siege this node to let others grow and become vassals.

Or at least that's how I see it going down in my head.

When a lvl 6 falls, the lvl 5 former vassals have no reason to wait for those 20 lvl 1-2 nodes to level up.

Before the first lvl 6 appears on the map, all other nodes will have relationships.

A single isolated node can grow more or less depending how much experience it's citizens can feed into it. If nobody buys appartments there, will die of attrition.

Unless some of these 20 are lvl 5 with their own vassals, their influence will be low and any of the 2 former lvl 5 will become the new metro. That is what Steven wants to avoid. He wants to prevent players to easily predict what will happen.

Ludullu

Strevi wrote: »

Unless some of these 20 are lvl 5 with their own vassals, their influence will be low and any of the 2 former lvl 5 will become the new metro. That is what Steven wants to avoid. He wants to prevent players to easily predict what will happen.

The 20 buffer nodes will be at lvl 1-2. They'll be outside of the vassal systems. That's what I was getting at.

Strevi

NiKr wrote: »

Strevi wrote: »

Unless some of these 20 are lvl 5 with their own vassals, their influence will be low and any of the 2 former lvl 5 will become the new metro. That is what Steven wants to avoid. He wants to prevent players to easily predict what will happen.

The 20 buffer nodes will be at lvl 1-2. They'll be outside of the vassal systems. That's what I was getting at.

why would they stay at lvl 1-2? Who will push them down or detach them from their parent nodes?
This picture shows that the largest vassal tree can have 13 modes
SSLivestream-2022-08-26-1%3A06%3A51.09.png

SSLivestream-2022-08-26-1%3A06%3A51.09.png

the game allows 5 metropolises. That means in an ideal case, we can have 5 x "13 node tree" = 65 nodes in maximum 13 size trees. Then 20 remain without a metropolis main node.

But these 20 can still be linked with each other.

At server start, as the 85 nodes start leveling up, before the first level 6 metro node appears on the map, it is possible that we will have 14 trees of up to 6 nodes each, like in this picture.

14 x "6 node" = 84 and 1 solo node

5 of the 14 nodes can grow to level 6 and take under control 5 of the remaining 9 nodes

That means we can end up with 4 x "6 node trees" + 1 solo node = 25 nodes outside of the metropolises influence.

If players attack and destroy these smaller chains, the destroyed nodes become level 1 and start filling the branches which can still receive nodes (5 of them - each metro has place for one more level 1 - 2 node)

That remaining solo node can maybe fall immediately under the influence of a metro. But can also happen that the "x" leafs of the metro trees are level 1 and the solo node is level 2 and then it remains solo.

Solo nodes can even have higher level if they were pushed to high level by former vassals, which possibly were destroyed. The citizens of those solo nodes might have a hard time preventing them to decay through attrition.

But let's say we are in the state of 5 x 13 = 65 nodes + 20 solo level 1 nodes.
We don't know what happens with these level 1 nodes . Maybe they level up if players play close to them. Or maybe some nearby higher level node will get the experience.

If a level 6 metro node falls, it's chain splits and we have only 2 level 5 nodes which can take the place of the metropolis.

So in order to have more possibilities as Steven wants, the 20 level 1 nodes must be able to grow and create their own structures: 3 x 6 + 2
That means 3 level 5 nodes to compete with the two level 5 former vassals of the metro.
However these 20 nodes will be distributed over the map in various ways, depending how the leveling happened and might be too far to link with each-other. Again this depends how big the ZoI of the lower nodes is.

Because you say you have a different understanding, I wonder if I miss important mechanics.
Maybe if a metro falls, the vassal relationships are temporarily broken?

Ludullu

Strevi wrote: »

Because you say you have a different understanding, I wonder if I miss important mechanics.
Maybe if a metro falls, the vassal relationships are temporarily broken?

I'm mainly basing it on the node growth demo they showed some months ago. It showed that any fringe node that received the least XP would pretty much always stay at low lvls (lvl2 in the demo) because it would get constantly blocked out by all the surrounding nodes that did get enough XP to grow.

So when I try to imagine how nodes would start growing in lvls I see these potential buffer nodes as just the ones w/o XP. Everything around them would be leveling up and when the buffers ones do get some XP - they'll be blocked by their surroundings.

Now I could be wrong in that assumption or there might just be some edge cases where the buffer nodes manage to get bunched up all together in one spot instead being spread out across the world, at which point they'd be able to grow past lvl2 w/o being blocked. But I'd need to see Intrepid's new tech demo on how this new system works to really understand if that's even a possibility.

Grimm IV

Using a monster node system for the buffer/unaffiliated nodes could work out nicely. It would be like anywhere we are not actively holding on to falls back to the wilds. It also gives a lore/PvE reason for the different vassal trees to work together.

They could even make some dungeons only spawn in higher tier monster nodes. Then even the dungeon entrances wouldn't be static between servers and there would be a reason to allow monster nodes to grow.

I mainly like this idea cause it makes Verra feel like it went on with life in our absence. We could be helping to reconnect those who remained (but this is getting away from the system itself and into story territory).
I think it would just be really cool to have monster controlled nodes that operate within the existing node system.

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