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Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
An issue with Castle Sieges
Ludullu
Member, Alpha Two
A recent node discussion touched on node sieges which in turn reminded me of the current castle siege design.
Castle sieges are supposed to have a limited amount of participants. This design seems faulty to me because it would lead to absolute domination by the huge guilds. Any guild that has over 500 people (split into several sub-guilds), or alternatively can afford to hire enough mercs, can just register half of their forces to the attacking side and prevent anyone else from even attempting to siege the defenders.
And even if Intrepid manage to support 500x500 sieges, the defending guild can hire mercs to fill up the limited attacker slots. Castle taxes can be used freely by the defending guild, so anyone who holds a castle will have a ton of money and would only benefit from buying mercs.
The main question of this thread is whether you think something should be done to prevent that. We don't know if Intrepid have addressed this issue already (if they even see it as one), but I think some preliminary discussion could help them decide one way or the other, before releasing more info on the topic.
I am personally against allowing this kind of "exploit", but don't see a good enough solution, outside of making the slots unlimited. If you agree that something has to be done about this, any ideas would be appreciated.
Castle sieges are supposed to have a limited amount of participants. This design seems faulty to me because it would lead to absolute domination by the huge guilds. Any guild that has over 500 people (split into several sub-guilds), or alternatively can afford to hire enough mercs, can just register half of their forces to the attacking side and prevent anyone else from even attempting to siege the defenders.
And even if Intrepid manage to support 500x500 sieges, the defending guild can hire mercs to fill up the limited attacker slots. Castle taxes can be used freely by the defending guild, so anyone who holds a castle will have a ton of money and would only benefit from buying mercs.
The main question of this thread is whether you think something should be done to prevent that. We don't know if Intrepid have addressed this issue already (if they even see it as one), but I think some preliminary discussion could help them decide one way or the other, before releasing more info on the topic.
I am personally against allowing this kind of "exploit", but don't see a good enough solution, outside of making the slots unlimited. If you agree that something has to be done about this, any ideas would be appreciated.
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Comments
While I realize it doesn't negate your point, I believe guild size will be limited. Currently 300 is the limit unless something has changed, which is possible considering how long it has been since Steven commented on it:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_size
"It's important to note that the 300 is the maximum cap that is attained by leveling the guild and selecting the path of size as opposed to the path of guild skills. So the larger you choose to allow for members to join your guild, increasing that member cap, the less focused and honed the available skill options will be from a guild level up perspective for guild members. So the way that kind of works is it plays as a balance/counterbalance to larger guilds versus smaller more honed and focused guilds. It kind of gives them an equitable edge of participation.[1]" – Steven Sharif
Hell, I'd assume they'll just have 40-men guilds to fully benefit from the guild perks. But that in no way prevents them from being the ones to fully fill out the attacker list on the siege and prevent any proper guild from taking the castle away from them.
At this point you wouldn't even have to 'throw the fight' if the two guilds were organized.
They'd just have 'Siege Combat Practice' every so often.
Making it so you are wasting your time and mats to attempt to dec yourself.
A guild that captures a castle will own that castle for a month before it is sieged again.[14][15]
Castle sieges are every month whether the guild wants it or not.
And as for spending money on the siege. The castle will supposedly gather taxes from 1/5 of the server. That's a shitload of cash. There's obviously the possibility that some guilds might try and attack the tax caravans, but a 500+ guild would probably have enough people to defend their stuff well enough.
Also, if you go down the rng way of picking attackers, you not only defeat the whole point of "band together to topple the strong" design (that mainly comes from the small guild perks vs huge perkless guilds), but it would also just be abused in another way. The huge guild would just register a ton of smaller guilds to raise their chances of successfully getting in. Hell, if they split all of their guild into 40-mens then they will already have several spots taken up. A few merc guilds on top of that and you have yourself super high chances to be the only ones who attack.
Also also, the foe attackers wouldn't need to prepare any resources for the siege, so it'd be way cheaper for them. In theory, even the defenders wouldn't have to prepare anything, though that would obviously depend on how the issue in the OP gets addressed.
Every game I have ever played that has had two guilds functioning as one has eventually split though, so that is what I would expect to see I Ashes as well.
Other than the obvious not being able to join the attacking side on a siege on your own guild castle (or that of an ally), I dont see a need for anything to be done.
Thx for the opinion.
It don't.
But it does address the attackers cost. A side from siege equipment , time and gear repair.
As to your main point. I think this is a community concern and not an Intrepid concern. I agree I don't see any way to prevent this with out having severe unintended consequences.
But if the registration cost is that damn high, I dunno how many people would even want to siege a castle.
I don't see you losing anything to band together, it simple means banding together with more scrolls ensures there is a higher chance they can't dec themselves. Also it's not possible for a bunch of smaller guilds to just dec since it has been mentioned is going to be a considerable resource sink based on the size of the node. Bunch of small guilds aren't just going to dec unless they have infinite resources given to them to do the dec (therefore being more of an economy thing).
Or at the very least it'd allow for Intrepid to see the interaction between the guilds if they do throw the attack, could make it a sort of "evidence" for punishment from intrepid.
Another option is to put a cooldown on guild alliances, so if a guild leaves and alliance, they can't join a siege against that alliance for a set amount of time. This would allow for another form of tracking if they continue to leave and join the alliance for sieges. Only downside would be on the intrigue side, because backstabbing alliances could be fun politics. Maybe make the alliance have the cooldown and make a substantial loss for not killing the enemies during that period, forcing those guilds to fight so they don't lose resources or xp or whatever.
A fun punishment instead of a ban could be to make the guilds corrupted and locked with the gear they have equipped. Let the server tear them apart and made an example of.
Hell, in L2 some guilds registered for the siege at the very last second possible, just to keep their involvement a secret. And when this practice became widespread, the defending guilds would put PKing parties (or just killing ones for the warring guilds) around the registering npc, so that those sneaky guilds couldn't register at the end.
The sneakiness was mainly done so that the defenders didn't know how many guilds would attempt the attack and there'd be a higher chance to successfully attack. With the current system it would be the direct opposite. The defending guild would just be ready to get the scroll quest at the first possible second and would be super cooperated, so that they're the ones to be the first to fill out the slots. And even if they're a bit late - they'll just kill any scroll-casters.
You're a psycho
There are hoops to jump through to siege a castle.
If a guild has another guild that isnt an official ally, yet is friendly enough to be trusted, and is willing to jump through all of those hoops, then yeah, that should be a le to block a siege.
The thing is, I just dont see it happening. If you are that close to another guild, you will likely want to join an alliance with them.
I just don't see the situation where a guild that large has another guild that large that is also close and that trusted, yet not an ally.
A guild that does have that in place probably wouldnt be beaten in a siege anyway, so if they want to invest the time in to preventing them happening, more power to them imo. People wanting to take over a castle can siege one of the other castles.
Also, considering the potential profits from the castle, I'd assume most guild would be completely fine with doing this thing once a month for some nice stacks of cash. Don't even have to be allies with the defenders.
But since you are extremely blessed in life and lucky as f*** because I am around and I have big brains, then I will give you one idea for a scenario having a node A 50 x 250 B:
In the siege event force a spawn/ress time for node B that is 5x bigger than Team A spawn/ress time
This will not fix the issue of zergging, but this instantly fixes even fights if Team B is comming in waves
Do you wanna know what is worse than that? The City Hall has barely any intel on it's citizens!!!!!
The mayor has no clue how many of citizens from node A actually belongs to guilds from node B, so in siege day node A may have 20 out of 50 who actually belongs to the main guild from node B
So, just like in other games, the defenders may actually have a large amount of moles and the mayor has no way to tell this, there is a city board where you can list all citizens in the node but you have to click citizen by citizen and write down on a paper besides you and do the accounting about how many citizens from which guild lives in his node. Having moles and spies is ok, but the mayor having zero intel about this and being completely clueless is not ok
LMAO
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/54645/guild-hall-needs-more-options#latest
Then we come to the topic Castle Sieges, that is guild vs guild right?
I would do the same spawn/ress cooldown thing
If the small guild has a castle, it's their problem if they don't have people!
I gave the idea about bounty hunters being able to be hired for sieges in the topic "Bounty Hunter: Mercenary"
Example adapted to AoC:
A declares war on B
C offers aid to B
Now C is automatically at war against A for free, in a defensive war, the war between A and B ends, then the war A and C ends too
So in the caste siege day they will have 250 x 120, plus my idea of delayed spawn/ress for A
plus possible mercenaries
plus my idea of bounty hunters being able to particpate as Mercenaries
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/54509/bounty-hunter-mercenary
Everything I said makes sense for node sieges and castle sieges:
Will this "fix" everything?
No, because you can't fix the fact that guild A has 250 and guild B has 50, but at least this gives many options for B
I was editing and adding the Castle siges was added in the end of the reply
check your shit up before you start flamming otherwise I will flame you as hard as I can
Edit: could also prevent trades as well
I hope they change their minds at IS.
We're getting close to the monthly development update stream, @Nikr ... just two days away.
It's a great time to get your question (questions?) in for the Q&A session of the stream.
I get all of this, but again, I don't see the issue.
Guild cap in Ashes is about 300. Alliance cap is 4 guilds. This means that an alliance can have up to 1200 players in it.
Once again, my position is that IF you are in a position where you have the full trust of more than that many players, the castle will essentially go uncontested.
You will always hit the point where players will not bother (there will be easier castles to take over) long before you are able to achieve this.
Again, this is why I just don't see the issue.
It is perhaps best described as a paper issue, rather than a real one.
I want you to conduct a thought experiment based on this comment of yours.
If a guild has the coin on hand to bribe literally every player on a server to not siege their castle, is that a valid gameplay tactic in a sandbox game like Ashes?
If you answer yes to the above, what if they literally bribe everyone on the server other than one person? It isn't as if that one person is going to siege the castle by themself, so is it still a valid tactic?
If you answered yes, then what about if they bribe everyone other than one guild? Still valid?
What about if they only bribe enough players so that if all of those that are left decided to attack, they wouldn't be able to beat all of those that had taken the bribe. Still valid?
If a guild has that amount of control over that many people, then yeah, they deserve the right to not have their castle contested via a siege. If you want to siege it, you need to first deconstruct that guilds power source. If the castle itself is a power source that strong, then every guild with a castle will be in this position and castles will be broken. If it is just one guild with a lot of influence, then of course they are going to be able to do things like this - and the game should enable them to do such things.
Attacking players will have a cool down to Seige a castle, 90 days. Meaning they can't attack the SAME castle again. They can choose to participate in another castle(s).
Thus Mega Guilds trying to abuse the system can only do it once every 4 months
Alliance Guilds can only help you every 4 months.
This now creates a system of other fairy large guilds that has just enough guildies (250-300) to attempt to seige castle 1. If they fail. They cant attack castle 1 for the next 3 month, so now they need to decide to target another castle, migrate their guilds - creates conflict of interest for guild members showing loyalty to guild or to their citizenship/freehold. Having flux of players moving around the world would be nice.
Probaby also helps economy with all the movement.
If one large guild can hold a castle this way, then all can.
If all guild members are happy their taxes to go to the guild then they'll support this action.
Also the 5 castle sieges might happen at the same time and those busy with such complicated ways of preventing enemy attacks, will not be able to siege other castles.
Eventually this boils down to human nature.
Greedy large guilds might lose internal support. They'll grow lazy too.
Payments to mercenary guilds can be seen as tax for protection. From which metro nation do they come? They may become a threat too.
If human nature leads to order and discipline, then maybe there will be no pvp at all
Players who attack the castle caravans should have priority in participating in the siege.
From the wiki:
In other words, it should be prohibitively costly for the defending guild to pay both for the running castle defenses (building up the 3 castle nodes etc.), and for the declaration scroll. And even if they can afford it, if there is one or more guilds that genuinely want to attack and take over the castle, they can organize and kill the guild leader of the Fake Attackers to prevent them from planting the scroll until their own siege scrolls are planted.
Castles might require alliances to successfully hold. The strain on the ruling guild to keep compensating those alliance members might be too much if they include also having to fake attack themselves.
One thing I would like to see is that alt characters on the same account as the character that is in a ruling guild aren't allowed to participate in guild sieges as attackers. Right now guilds are per character, so in theory the guild controlling the castle can have an alt guild with all the same members that could lay down the siege scroll. I don't think that should be possible.
Sure, people can pay for extra accounts, but then we're entering the territory of making it not only ingame costly, but RL costly as well. The more hurdles against cheesing the system the better. If members of the ruling guild have to spend every moment ingame grinding for money and materials to both defend and attack, they'll grow tired of it after a month or two and either stop or find another guild.
On a side-note, I think the GMs should keep an extra close eye on the 5 ruling guilds per server when it comes to RMT. The temptation to throw RL money at the problem will be great.