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Dominance of one race on the server!
tul1pe
Member
Good afternoon. I apologize in advance if such a question has already been asked. But I suddenly had a question in my head! I would like to know your opinion - how many cities in total can be built in the game? And what if suddenly some one race dominates on some server and all the cities are built in their style! It doesn't matter what race, but for example there will be the most people and all the cities on the server will be human. Will it be possible to avoid this somehow, so that there is a variety.
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If every City on a server is Human, that's the story of that server.
Fair game.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Architecture go read the wiki if you want to learn more.
So you want to say that only the metropolis will have the architectural appearance of the dominant race? And the cities and settlements that are lower in rank, will this not apply to them?
or will they change under the culture of the metropolis and also have an architectural appearance that the metropolis has?
Yeah, all of those would result in a unique, unusual server. But I would expect that would make other players want to make a character on that server just to see how it all shook out.
Reminds me a bit of L2 where someone made a dwarf-only guild. They were pretty constrained in what they could accomplish but it sure was a laugh to see them all hunting together!
Also, I am not sure, but I hope that vassal nodes' architecture aren't affected as much by the parent node: for instance, if a mostly human and a mostly orc neighboring nodes are competing to see who's going to become the parent node, whoever loses still keeps a great part of their architecture on their city.
Race in this game will not mean as much as it means in WoW, for example. It's not as if orcs and humans are always enemies, this doesn't exist in Ashes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but each of the 5 (I don't think 9 is the correct number in this context) races you can pick from are neutral with each other. You can also first spawn at any of the portals, maybe except for the Tulnar, so there's no way of telling where each race is going to be more predominant.
Last but not least, there's an easy way to fix this: make racial skills relevant so that it's likely that no race will represent less than 10% of a server population. I don't want the meta to mean every mage must be a human, every tank an orc, every ranger an elf and so on, but definitely make racial skills relevant PvP, PvE and Artisan wise.
tl;dr: this is really a non-issue. In the list of things to worry about, how homogenous cities might look like across the server because of the most predominant race(s) is one of the least important ones.
*scrunch!
Since as of now the highest % race that contributes to the node advancement will choose the race architecture, then that's most important factor to consider. The best way for the dev's and artists to influence the system is make sure that all the races are an enticing option through great design, lore, and architecture.
Guilds themselves will be highly influential for race and architecture. The best guilds that are gunning for highest advanced nodes ought to discuss among themselves what race architecture they'd like to have. If they don't care, then just go with w/e. If you want a "dwarf" capital, then you better have all your members play a dwarf.
I've been playing games for over 30 years too, so that's what I thought about when I immersed myself in the gaming world. And he began to come to an understanding of how much the character's race affects the world around him. But you can fix it partially. For example, enter the starting (ancient) the capitals of the race that cannot be changed or captured by military means. And it will be possible, for example, to be elected mayor of the city there and perform the actions that the game will give, but without changing the architecture of this starting (ancient) capital of a particular race. And already the cities that the players themselves build can already be subjected to any changes and mechanics that the mechanics of the game allow
I highly recommend reading the wiki link I gave as it would have answered this question. But no, each node settlement has it's own racial architecture that is dependent on what race has the highest percentage of contribution to any given node. Changes to what racial style a nodes architecture exhibits are made upon advancement from one stage to the next. Parent node has no direct effect on a child nodes architecture.
I'd love to see the quote about racial architecture mixing @BaSkA13 . Everything I've seen up to this point indicates otherwise, so it'd be good to have it. Don't feel put on by the request though, I certainly don't care enough to spend that much of your effort.
Unfortunately I have no idea where this quote can be found, if it was even said. All I can say is that from the best of my memory and "knowledge" about the game after following it for a few years, watching streams, reading discussions, fan videos, etc is that not only the predominant race will affect the architecture, i.e. you might have elvish street light poles in a orcish city.
I could be wrong though which I apologize for, honest mistake! If I'm indeed wrong, it would be a cool addition to the game, in my opinion. I don't have the time to look for this quote, but if I had, I would probably watch Steven's Q&As with the big streamers and the early videos about node development.
Cheers and sorry again.
Yeah no worries. I also think it'd be a great addition, I just 'have been lead to the conclusion it's not in the game.' But hey if I'm wrong I'm technically happier.
Cheers mate.
Maybe in the mountains Dünir have a special contributing bonus so things can seem more esthetic.
I wouldnt want this. Fairness is unfair. Id rather all races have equal influence everywhere, so the world truly relects where the players or certain races like to be. As well as the initial spawn zones being the racial gates, itll be interesting to see the game go from dwarvern cities around the dwarf gate, to more mixed or more random over time
They are the 4 racial gates.... you can choose to pick a gate with your friends, that isnt of your characters race. But your racial quests originate at your races gate. So doing so will potentially "slow down" your character and your racial lore progression.
So most.... not all... but most? A good amount. Of players will probably stick to their races gate....
As of last i heard about it... its been a while, i could be mistaken. Dont quote me.
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You've been added to a list...........
We won't even have Vek street poles in a Ren'Kai City.
The architecture will all change to reflect the dominant culture/race.
Is just another thing to tune race choice. I would say its less impactful that racial augments in general, but yeah, its a factor
Also if you like the building design of race x, it would probably be easier to move to a town with alot of them around than to expect your single contribution to sway the entire node you live in. No need to race lock yourself, there is a whole population of players.
It could be minor bonuses so Dearden influenced zones each dwarf player founds as 1.1 dwarfs in the Tally so 10percent bonus.
My goal now is to have a land plot in an orchidh city and place a elvish light pole on my plot of land closest to the city road
If that is true, I would say that this is a missed opportunity and I would love to give a suggestion to Intrepid that is (hopefully) not difficult to add, since most of the work of the current design will (hopefully) be re-used:
Imagine Node X is about to level up and has the following contribution points distribution:
I hope that we can all agree that this Node is influenced by many different races, so it would be a shame if this became a city with only Tulnar architecture and culture (or any other race, it's just an example).
I imagine that the current pseudo logic behind the current design looks something like this, very simplified:
Starting from the premise that Nodes are completely modular, i.e. it is be possible to mix and match different races' architecture into the same Node:
What if, instead of only one race determining how the entire Node looks like, the design also takes into account other races that contributed to it and adds bits of those races' architecture as well? That would probably help with the topic raised by the OP, because even if all Nodes are dominated by one race, it's likely that they would look at least a little different from each other.
Now the difficult part is to decide which parts of a Node would be influenced by each of the contributing races. First we need to know which elements can be influenced by race: NPCs, road design, building design, light poles, stalls design, gates design, walls design, furniture design, campfires, etc. With that list of elements set, all that is left to do is to define how it will be done, in other words, the logic behind it. Something very simple would suffice and would be an improvement to the current design, in my view.
A low effort pseudo logic would look something like this, again simplified:
This logic can obviously be improved. You could add minimal contribution thresholds, add more races, add more elements to each of the highest ranking races, etc.
Lastly, I expect that changing the current design is something trivial to do. If that's not the case, for some reason I am not aware of, and this design change would take two weeks of development, testing and QA, then it might not be worth doing, even though it would be an interesting addition.
I would rather a whole city consist of one ascetic. So that it looks good. Making every aspect of a city have a cultural feel. And making those cultures have very different looks and feels.
Mashing all the peices at random just because it shows more of the cultures does not sound better to me, it sounds gaudy.
Also it fuels a since of community with your race to try and maintain city culture and such. Becoming somewhat a competition. And that is good for over all game play.
Striving for a Metro with the amenities of the dominant race you prefer promotes Node Sieges.
I agree my idea has its cons, definitely could look weird!
Now regarding this animosity and competition between races, I had no idea people actually cared about races that much. From my understanding, races have their lore and wars but that was going to be it. It's not like in WoW where you'd start hating other races because players kept camping your corpse. In Ashes, you might end up hating your own race more than other ones because of enemy guilds and whatnot.
I really don't think I'm going to care about that "race lore" at all