Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
And then it's also entitled of all the guilds to assume they're worthy of trying to get a castle, or go to war against other guilds. It's also entitled of nodes of other vassal systems to want to war and siege their neighbor vassal systems. It's entitled of other people to have the ability to hit me when I'm walking around.
Do you see how this one rule does not match with the entire design of the rest of the game? Steven claims to have given players freedom of choice (with appropriate consuequences), but then takes away one of the biggest choices in the game.
As you said yourself, the nodes will most likely stay static after their first settling of progress. Prices to siege a node would be insanely high and would reap very vague benefits for the attackers (especially if you consider that those costs are meant to be paid by a single person that casts the siege scroll). All while there's more than enough benefits, motivation and reasons for vassals to want to go up in lvls.
This is just yet another contradiction in the current design.
I still agree with the previous half of that paragraph though Disagree. You underestimate people's hunger for PvP. Keep in mind, every time a node falls its XP gets reset. If a few nodes in the same general area get sieged successfully within a few months, the node power dynamics might rebuild very differently afterwards.
@Ludullu_(NiKr) Can't help but point out that you ignored a lot of my core arguments there, and essentially just responded to the postscript.
It is not a bad thing to be vasseled, it is a good thing to be vasseled. It brings many benefits from the Sovereign, which is the ultimate parent of that vassal network down to the vassal node itself; and it allows that vassal node to even live outside of its normal mechanics. You get to adopt some of the benefits that the node type of your sovereign is, even if your node type as a vassal node isn't the same
So what i get from this is that if you are in a city node, You will get a lot benefits from the Metropolis.
The downside of being in vasal node are:
* you give taxes to the parent node
* Metropolis will have more merchants and as a whole better crafting equipment, thus best buyers/sellers will be there, and less will be in the city
* Metropolis will have option to spec into more different utilities / while city will have less
* You will get destroyed first in a war, Since the metropolis is way harder to take.
The pros of being in a city
* Even tho you will have less node equipment you can still put some that the metropolis dont have. For example Black market. So you can still provide stuff that will be needed by players and are not covered by the Metropolis
* Even tho you pay taxes to the parent node, Your apartment costs will be Way less.
* You can be different node type from the parent which again will give your unique purpose.
* As far as i am familiar - you can use the metropolis crafting equipment even tho you are not citizen there.
So doesnt seem like that bad option to be in city. BUT if you are in Town, then your parent node is a City. So you dont get the metropolis bonuses. So i think being in metro or city will be good enough, but we shall see how it goes.
The way i think they are making it is - you grow as a whole together, both Parent and vassal nodes. And When the Metropolis develops, the vassals get better too.
This is just agreeance
I responded to this.
I've responded to a similar sentiment several times. I don't want to move, I don't want to wait and pray - I want to have the ability to do something. I want to be proactive. Getting an outside to join me (hell, even requiring it) would be completely fine. High cost requirements - also completely fine.
But give me the ability to do SOMETHING to try and attempt a revolution.
I didn't address this in the previous comment because I've said the answer several times now.
Nodes will be controlled by guilds one way or the other. Guilds will always strive for optimization of their gameplay (especially the strong ones that would be the ones controlling the nodes). From that we can assume that the strongest guilds would do their best to optimize the node build of their server.
Smartest guilds will be doing this right from release, so the supposed staticness of servers several months in will simply support that build.
And I addressed stuff related to this at the end of my previous comment. I guess I should've grabbed this part of your comment to include it in the address. That's my bad.
Vassal agency would be a big part of this if Steven truly wants people to care about their node more than their guild. Because they wouldn't care about some random meta that the strong guilds are trying to build, and would instead care about their own node being stronger.
To me, the current design is a contradicting one (which just one of several such contradictions at this point), which is why I've brought this topic up on a few occasions. But I'm sure that absolute majority won't give two shits about their nodes and will simply play the game for all the other reasons. Steven will see this as "system working as intended" and won't change it, even though all that majority of players will still care about guilds and stuff and will involve themselves in their politics in some way (because that's what you do when you care about an entity that represents your group of people), so Steven's presented desire for player loyalty will simply fail.
And this part of the response is just a more verbose retelling of my core issue of "why shouldn't I be able to rebel, if my loyalty to MY node is higher than the loyalty towards my node's parent".
Imagine you live in a small town next to a big city. There is not many jobs in your town so like 30-40% of your town population travels 40min-1hr to reach the city each day to work there, and then return home. You get most food supplies, electronics, cloths and delivered from the city.
Is there reason to rebel against the city? Like they dont prevent you from anything. You can spend 1 hour to reach the city and after this you will have absolutely the same access of things in the city as every other citizen there.
And in game perspective, guess Steven thought about this "superiority complex" that players my feel. so by preventing this he ensures that the whole vasal system will go forward, and be ready for wars with other vasal systems. Since if you have to worry about internal conflicts, then you wont go anywhere.
And lets be real here.. you have total 8 cities + towns + villages. The chance that from those 8 you wont get 1-2 or 3 rebels is almost non existent. So just coz few of the vassals are not happy doesnt mean the rest should suffer.
The only way other citizens can stop the "go to war" project is to PK the people who are doing the project. That's not practical long term. One protection IS could implement is a "don't go to war" project that automatically comes up alongside the "go to war" project. A way to vote with your actions against the war.
Note that I'm talking about rebellion-within-an-alliance kind of war action that needs some special rules. Not about the other war actions that would involve just raiding or trying to destroy an un-allied node.
The path to vassalization is unclear, it reads like it happens automatically without any war or anything.
"Beginning at Node Stage 3, when a Node advances, it enslaves nearby Nodes and makes them into its Vassals." (https://ashesofcreation.com/news/2019-03-16-know-your-nodes-the-basics)
I'm not sure how automatic vassalization would feel in practice. If two level 2 nodes right next to each other are racing to level 3, it's going to feel pretty bad to suddenly be vassalized when you had the fullest intention to boost your node to level 3. Then again, we're talking about level 2 nodes, so it wouldn't be all that bad to pick up and move to a new node at that early point.
It would also feel bad if you were in a level 5 node working towards level 6, but a far-ish away level 5 hits 6 before you and you're suddenly vassalized. In that case, I would like to see some option for rebelling.
If you are planning to rebel against a parent node, are you ready to have your node get crippling taxes imposed on it? If you can "fight up", then the parent needs to have agency to "fight down". Now you're getting into a very adversarial relationship in this alliance. That's not the idea of an alliance.
The idea of rebelling just does not work with the idea of the highest level node automatically getting vassals. Although the act of rebelling could be only available to a "capped" node that's ready to advance but can't due to vassalship. Then if the node successfully rebels it levels up and therefore cannot become a vassal.
If a node can rebel, what happens to the rebelling node's vassals? If a 5 rebels against a 6, that's half of the nodes gone. That 5-node has a 4 and a three directly under it. Both of those can't be attached to the 6 because the 6 already has a 4.
My understanding is that node alliance fluidity is supposed to be low. That's why after a node gets attacked they're talking about a 1 month cooldown on it getting attacked again even if they successfully defend (this may change, and it may only apply to getting attacked to destroy. We don't know yet, because this info is pretty old). I think they also talked about a lockout on being attacked after upgrading a node too.
Rare node alliance changes are why we saw a bunch of different node-attack options in the war preview. Rather than just attack-to-destroy, there are attack-to-cripple or attack-to-steal-resources options. IS wants node destruction to be very very rare. Building up a node from 4->6 is a several month undertaking. Having it be destroyed is the kind of thing that will make people rage quit the game.
And I've already given an example of what those cities prevent us from doing. We also don't know the extent of services that are shared between metro citizens and vassal node citizens.
Except the resentment wouldn't go anywhere. If enough people dislike their current parent node, they can just go farm/do stuff in other nodes, so that the parent doesn't get enough xp. But this would then lead to both sides feeling bad. The parent node might degrade due to lack of xp, while the citizens of the vassal node are not supporting their own node with their gameplay. It's a lose-lose design imo.
And those other vassals can still come to the support of their parent node during a war/siege, if they disagree with the rebellion.
This would be literally the same situation as that parent getting sieged by randos from other nodes and then an entire vassal's worth of people not coming to its defense. Except in my suggestion those vassal citizens would be more proactive in their actions, instead of just sitting on a hill and watching their parent node burn down, in hopes of it losing completely.
Passive gameplay is very rarely good. Especially when it comes to social interactions and politics.
Then if you rebel and lose from the metropolis - then you should be forced to leave the node together with ALL citizens. So the metropolis can put their own people there so there are no further rebelions. The worst thing is when some small fries are attacking you from inside and you cant do anything about it.
There has been no agreement, there has been no "alliance", there has been no "we won this vassalship in an equal contest of skill/politics/etc".
Hell, I totally expect node layouts to look reaaal similar, cause I expect mobs to have the same respawn locations across servers. And those mob respawns will determine the distribution of player gameplay, which directly influences node growth.
So if a certain location has best mobs in that region - that location's node will be the one to grow the fastest, because all the hardcore players will be grinding that location 24/7 and giving that node xp.
The only way to fight this would be to completely randomize mob respawns or set them up differently on each server, but I do not see Intrepid going that far.
Every node will be capped, because players always give xp to the node they're in first and only after that node has maxxed out its xp does the overflow xp go towards the node above on the ladder.
And if you mean "only lvl5s should be able to siege/war lvl6s and all the other node lvls cannot" - this would probably be a compromise that i'd be willing to accept, purely because it'd be a way to rise up even for lower nodes, cause they can try and influence the lvl5 node in the vassal system to bring the lvl6 down. And in time any node in the system could rise up high enough to become a metro.
Right now we only know about lvl3s and their "vassals" (unless I missed more info). That full chain would get destroyed if lvl3 gets successfully sieged.
As I imagine it, if the rebellion ends up in a successful siege of lvl6 - the lvl5 that had the most rebells in the siege would be the one that ascends to lvl6 and takes over the vassal system. Same would apply for any other combo of node lvls, cause I personally want people to have the ability to rise up from the very bottom.
Any given node can be sieged at any given time outside of their own personal lockouts, so that part of the design doesn't have to do anything with alliances.
Theoretically, a vassal system could be sieged fully by enemies at the same time and then completely destroyed at the same time as well. At which point there'd be no alliance left.
And with buffer nodes (as I understand them) a siege of lvl3 would then introduce fully new nodes into the vassal system, because a few buffer bois would be taken into it. So the presumed alliance would get changed.
Wars are not sieges though. We don't know how frequent Intrepid wants the wars to be (supposedly relatively infrequent). And when we consider that wars require bad relationships between nodes - that might make warring an even rarer thing than sieges, unless a full war does nothing to change said relationship.
A successful siege would accomplish the same thing you're suggesting, but w/o the auto-punishment and would instead lead to even more politics and player interaction.
Ye but if the matropolis siege city, it will be destroyed. And thats not the idea. This is huge lose for the whole vasal system to lose a city and to have to rebuild new one.
Removing all citizens would pretty much do the same thing. Their housing would be removed, most likely their shops and stalls as well. All their node currency would be gone as well, so taxes would stall for quite a bit. Mayoral elections would have to be delayed for some time.
Except now this empty node would be the best target for a siege, which would then mean that any rebellion would be tracked by enemies and the lvl5 would still be destroyed.
To me those would be the preferred method of addressing the rebells, cause I'm not really asking for the entire node to become rebelious. I'd be more than satisfied with "a vassal citizen can join a siege against the parent". And targeted punishments would be perfect for that kind of situation.
The average players have to understand that a hierarchical structure is just a content generator, the idea of being at the bottom of the chain is making the whole thing fall apart.
Ashes need enough gaps among the many rules so people have the freedom to destroy the chain if they want to
There should be some sort of active player interaction in the prospective sovereign node that is required to start the process to vassalize another, be it war or diplomatic, and a corresponding active interaction of the prospective vassal to either support or fight the vassalization process. The prospective vassal’s action should have a time limit to start, or have it be registered as automatic acceptance to prevent intentional stalling out of the system. The fact that one node has better, or more popular hunting/gathering locations should not be the determining factor. If you say that players will not flock to those spots and consequently earn exp for those nodes you’re lying to yourself.
I also agree there should be a way to rebel against a sovereign node, a siege or war should be an option but a very long and drawn-out process out to start one. When I say a very long and drawn-out process I’m talking at least a month of real-world time, rebellions rarely pop up suddenly overnight and even more rare was the successful one that did. I’d say have hidden rebel only quests to undermine the sovereign in some way, maybe cause scaling percentage of node exp/tax/material loss over time eventually leading to either a siege for freedom/control over the former sovereign or a declaration of independence from the sovereign. Maybe even evolve those quests to send a portion of the sovereign’s losses to another node. The rebel only quests should only affect the sovereign if a certain percentage of the vassal node’s registered population participates in those quests. Say 60-70 percent of the registered population is rebellious and does the hidden quests then they start having an effect and until that percentage is reached the quests have no real effect on the sovereign. That way if you are rebelling you can do something, if after a while nothing is happening you know you’re in the minority and can either stop or relocate. Sovereign nodes should have similar anti-rebellion quests to help counter act those rebel quests. Sovereign nodes should not be automatically aware of which vassal is rebelling, only that at least one is. This would add layers of espionage and sabotage as enemies could also acquire citizenship for this purpose. I’d even say that if a player is caught actively rebelling against the sovereign node, then corruption is applied as if they were out there killing non-combatant players, I mean there should be some risk to rebellion, and they are in a way causing grief to others. Also have a flag that lets the leadership of a sovereign node actively force loss of citizenship status to a vassal citizen and prevent them from join any other nodes under the sovereign if they are caught doing rebellious things X number of times and let them put a bounty on the rebels. That would allow the sovereign nodes to slowly weed out any rebels and force war like leadership to focus inside as well as outside their borders. Any rebellious wars should also absolutely allow the sovereign node leadership to actively cancel citizenship of any rebels who participated in the war in the event that the rebels fail to win. I mean the sovereign can’t really hang them or treason and allowing them to stay to waste more time and resources only to try again isn’t productive. There should be consequences and that would fit in nicely. Don’t want to leave your home node? Accept being a vassal, suck it up and move away, start rebellion and risk being forced out if you fail. You have options.
This is already said in the WIKI:
Nodes encompass more land as they grow and will require more effort to be sustained. This system is a main driver for change in the world because it creates scarcity. As Nodes advance in stages of growth they will lock out neighboring Nodes from progressing, and will absorb their zones of influence.[1]
You always have options. Even without rebellion you can relocate to different zone. Maybe 1 day you will be able to siege the node as enemy and take what was yours.
The whole idea behind the Vasal system is that TOGETHER you are like 1 country. And you should work together for the prosperity of this country.
For rebellion, for example if city want to rebel against the Metropolis. This will affect all vasal nodes below the city. As well as the whole country negatively.
Just imagine with the current 9 nodes above Village. Everyone will want to ascend to next stage.
So what will happen? You will have 4 Villages rebelling against cities and towns. Towns rebelling against Cities and cities rebelling against the Metropolis. In the end everyone is with 0 resources, 0 equipment, 0 crafting workstations and ect.
Is this what you want?
THATS NOT HOW IT WORKS!
PER THE WIKI:
A Village (stage 3) can control an Encampment (stage 2) or an Expedition (stage 1). If the Village (stage 3) gets destroyed through a siege, its dependant Encampment (stage 2) and Expedition (stage 1) nodes are also destroyed.
The moment your Metropolis destroy a city, you lose 1 city, 1 towns, 2 villages and all encamplents.
And also. if you destroy your own Metropolis, the whole region is destroyed.
OR maybe you want to change their whole way sieges work? Its like making changes to provide what some superiority complexed players want, but negatively impact 80% of the playerbase.
The whole game focus is interaction between different Vassal systems. Not Rebels inside your own ZOI.
When a Metropolis unlocks a dungeon for example. All vasal nodes also get access to it. No reason to destroy your Metropolis, and then start all over spending 3 weeks to unlock the same dungeon.
No, the wiki says if you destroy a stage 3 node, all stage 1 and 2 nodes under it are destroyed.
It says nothing about a stage 4 (or higher) node being destroyed having any effect on any stage 3 (or higher) nodes under.
This is because stage 1 and 2 nodes aren't considered something that can support themselves properly, not because a nodes destruction destroys everything below it in the chain.
this in the wiki is just example how the siege works. Not that it only applies to stage 3 nodes
No, you are wrong.
If you go to the clip after the statement you are talking about, Steven clarifies that this is a specific distinction for stage 3 nodes and their vassals, stating that this because the stage 1 and 2 nodes technically aren't vassals because they have no citizens.
Ok if this is like this, Then for example if the Metropolis is destroyed, Which of the 2 cities will become the new Metropolis. They are Full exp both of them?
And also. Does this means if i declare war and successfully siege a Metropolis. Instantly a city becomes the new Metropolis, and now i have to siege another Metropolis?
My assumption is that they start at 0 experience.
Not instantly, but somewhat soon after - a few weeks, a month, something like that.
If you plan to siege a metropolis, best you know who is running the level 5 nodes under it.
So if i want for example to make a divine node the new metropolis, which atm is village in the current Vassal system. I will have to siege 1 metro, 2 cities, 2 towns and 3 other villages? Seems like overkill.
If we ignore why you aren't just going to a different region with a higher level divine node...
Why would you be starting from the top?
Well we are still not sure how sieges work, But we know that the Metropolis can help the vasal nodes in defenses. So If we consider that the best players in this ZOI are in the Metropolis. There is no reason to fight those same strongest guys over and over and over again for each vassal system, Instead fight them once.
And then the rest of the cities will be defended by weaker players.
Why would we assume the best players are in the metropolis?
Why would we assume players in the parent node would care about the vassal?
If you are assuming the above for what ever reason, why are you not distracting the players in that parent node at a point in time when you are sieging the lower level nodes?
I get that your notion of the relationship between parent and vassal nodes has just had to take a sudden shift, but you need to think on these things more.
Well if not best - then for sure the most dedicated. And those who spend most time in the game. And yes i am aware that is not how skill is determined, but if you have big enough time to spend in AOC, then you would have been spending this same time on other games before this. So i would assume that they will be with above average skill (ofc not all of these players, but most).
Vasal nodes pay taxes, Contribute with exp, Their ZOI is part of the Metropolis ZOI, so if a city gets destroyed for example, the Whole Vasal system loses territory.
The sieges have preparation time. You cant make a surprising siege while you distract the Metropolis. They will have for example few days to prepare for this siege that will happen in the EXACT allocated time
I agree. on a personal level, sitting by and watching something I don't want to happen without doing something about it goes against my principles. on a less subjective level I don't see how automatic failure based on population density is fun.
there will be people that are fine with being vassalized and I got nothing to say about that. but I don't like the feeling of helplessness of being told to suck it up and accept this situation you are in. we are talking about forced servitude after all. they can pretty that up as much as they want with rewards, and falsely call it an alliance. but that doesn't change the situation at the core.