Node Development - Full vs Blended racial appearance

Getting away from all of the dumb P2W takes on this forum lately, let's talk actual mechanics and visuals.

Let me define my terms and provide an example:

Full racial appearance of a Node - a node that adopts the visuals of a specific race for all of its buildings etc.
Blended racial appearance - a node that mixes the visuals of multiple races for its buildings etc.

Example:
One Node develops to level 1 - it adopts the appearance corresponding to the most populous race at that time. For this example we'll say Ren'Kai.
Same Node levels up to level 2 - assuming a potential demographic change, now Py'Rai are the more prominent citizens. The Node now assumes the Py'Rai appearance in its entirety.

My questions are:

Should the node entirely switch its appearance, essentially "erasing" its past, in favor of a fully new look?

Would it be possible to have the Node gain a sort of blended racial appearance? Something akin to having a specific area of the example Node retaining the Ren'Kai appearance. This would simulate the idea of a quarter being that of the early settlers, and the city then evolving with a different cultural touch.

Does this incur too much of a feature creep for the game?

My opinion:

Personally, I fell like the Node possibly shifting appearances in its entirety from one level up to the next, feels a tad too radical and ultimately "disrespectful". (Can't think of a softer word to mean the same) It removes the history of that Node to some extent.

Examples in real life can be found all around the globe -- but perhaps most clearly in Europe -- where one city will have its innermost areas born of a specific type of architecture, and the later areas -- usually further outwards from the center -- deriving from later styles.
Thus I do think it could be a cool idea to adopt for AoC. Giving the Nodes further personality and history.

Of course, I do believe that if some node were to be destroyed or abandoned entirely and having to restart at level 1, that the initial racial components could be reset, giving birth to new history for the Node.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Xefjord

So this is something I have been thinking about a lot lately, I have had people tell me that racial warfare won't be that prominent because everyone is working together to build up a node and it doesn't have to be about race unless "people make it so."

But the current mechanics of the dominant race at the point of node upgrade taking the whole city really does promote racial segregation to reap all the benefits of races living in nodes of their own. And it also creates a lot of hostility for foreigners coming in that may upset that balance and can result in racial wars.

On one hand, I find that fascinating and like an interesting motivator for unique content, but on the other hand, it really does make it difficult to create a fulfilling multi-cultural metropolis, and like some people have said in the thread above, it can really rob many players who helped settle the node initially from being able to keep their influence and history, and there isn't really a way to take it back.

When doing a cost-benefit analysis we obviously want to increase immersion and give people that representation and mark to leave on the Node, but full on dynamic blended cultural influences and automatic districting based on racial populations is reasonably difficult and cost inefficient.

What I would recommend since Mayors do have some impact on taxes, building development, etc, is to give Mayors a certain level of zoning power to designate certain existing buildings manually to be of a "heritage" style. They can designate a couple buildings in proximity of each other or scattered about to use any older style of a previously contributing majority culture and essentially create a district of their own, but it won't receive the same perks the new majority culture/race has, nor have the same questlines as a racially dominant city, it will just be a skin essentially. Mayors should also have the ability to raise a monument in respect of the cultures that came before, and this could potentially increase the amount of NPC's of that race in the city slightly. Again a mostly cosmetic function, but one that could offer some diversity and recognition of the minorities there. This would also give minorities in a city something to lobby for and mayors a way to appease them

Since the above suggestion is purely cosmetic changes on a building by building level, and a single monument that increases the volume of minority races slightly as background characters, my hope is that this suggestion offers some player interactable diversity and recognition of minorities without being too taxing in the development cycle. Lemme know what everyone else here thinks.

Edit: as a quick side note, monuments already exist for many races to my knowledge, and we already have a building cosmetic system with freeholds. I think that going for an individual building by building decision relinquishes some of the responsibility and cost to develop detailed mechanics for an entire districting system while still giving players the choice for representation

They could hopefully repurpose existing systems without going too crazy into content creep.

Xefjord

Alternatively, don't change anything about the buildings, culture, or opportunities. But still have 10% of the background NPC's represent second place culture, and 5% of the NPC's represent 3rd place culture. That way at least the ethnic diversity is represented, if not the cultural architectural one.

Child Item