1. There is more than one way to overthrow a node, you could hyjack the mayorship and sabotage from within by setting tax rates to 100% driving out the citizens or effecting the land management in a negative way, 1 person or guild could do major dmg to any node at any stage for any reason.
2. you don't have to be a citizen of any node and if you arn't you can either attack or defend in any node siege, i think guilds and other player alliances have roll to play aswel. For example if guilds move around in order to progress in other aspects of the game (like move to a scientific node to improve their artisan skills etc.) this could drastically effect the amount of citizens overnight.
3. if the same nodes would always be maxed out no new content would ever be unlocked, at some point we will know from other servers what new content awaits us if we level up other nodes. This will also drive up the need to keep changing things around, even for those who are citizens of the metro nodes. No particular setup of nodes will last forever
4. obviously we still don't have all the facts yet, we don't even know if there is going to be a a max number of participants on either side during siege events. Everything we do know is also subject to change when intrepid starts on ballancing this during Alpha/Beta testing i think we will see many things changed around.
the beginning of wisdom is to know you know nothing
Now that all of that rambling is done, you have all of those numbers, and those aren't even considering the 5 castles and their 10 nodes which will house their guilds. So all of this said, does everyone think that there are enough nodes to create the proper amount of conflict despite the vassal system? How many citizens should each node be designed for? Are lower level nodes too cornered to progress with the current vassal systems design?
.
I drew up an 8x10 grid (for 82 nodes), and put 5 lv 6 nodes, then put as many 5's and 4's i could whilst trying to respect node hierarchy, then 3-2-1's in between, and got about similar results as your calculations!
The population numbers you've posted actually make a lot of sense to me from a conflict perspective. Obviously, conflict will be around major node systems. Some areas of the map will be much less active. And remember its about 10k concurent players! If as you say, 5-7k of those revolve around the 5-10 major node/vassal/castle systems, seems to me like its gong to be action packed! I have no doubt people will congregate to zone events naturally.
I am not worried about this, but all remains to be tried!
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
This is the worst idea ive heard about siege defense strategy lol. If they enroll as attackers, they cant defend. Thats the bottom line.
If you are expecting there to be an "attacker limit" and to fulfill that limit with people who dont attack, you can be 100% sure Intrepid wont let this fly and put in a mechanic to detter this. There are a thousand ways this absolutely doesnt work. Like having no limits on attackers or defenders. Or citizens of a node not being able to enlist as attackers, etc.
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
This is the worst idea ive heard about siege defense strategy lol. If they enroll as attackers, they cant defend. Thats the bottom line.
If you are expecting there to be an "attacker limit" and to fulfill that limit with people who dont attack, you can be 100% sure Intrepid wont let this fly and put in a mechanic to detter this. There are a thousand ways this absolutely doesnt work. Like having no limits on attackers or defenders. Or citizens of a node not being able to enlist as attackers, etc.
You made me laugh tho
If Im a mega guild, I got enough defender, to send attackers to take spots and lower their attacker numbers....
{UPK} United Player Killer - All your loot belongs to us.
Only thing that comes to mind as far as deterring that behavior is banhammers, or at the very least banning those people from being able to participate in castle sieges. And if it is able to be proven that the defending guild set it up, bar them from being able to own a castle. And establish that in a warning in the TOS. Sounds harsh and I would rather design a system that prevents it in general, but if that isn't possible, have to drive the point home to the exploiters.
How do you prove that though? Any self-respecting hardcore guilds would just start off as 2 different guilds with one being the foe attacker and the other being the defender. Also, you don't even need those types of guilds, because you could just hire a merc guild and tell them "don't fight". Would that not be a social interaction between guilds?
You could put a ton of different limitations on sieges and/or requirements for guild's actions during a siege, but literally all of those would influence the normal guild behavior much more than that of a single megaguild's one.
L2's castle sieges were pretty much the same as AoC's node ones. Anyone could attack, anyone could defend, no caps (afaik). It was obviously unfair against all the non-huge guilds, but that in itself was a social interaction telling those smaller guilds to band together and stand up against the big bois. And people did.
So unless Intrepid decide to remove the limit on registered participants - I really don't see how they'll prevent this abuse of the system. Banning all the guilds who do this would be very counterproductive and I doubt it would even do anything, unless you were to ban all the players themselves.
I mean, that's the thing, you'd need to prove it. And there may or may not be ways to do so. But if you have people on the defensive doing nothing while maintaining themselves as not afk, it's pretty simple to penalize those players for throwing.
If a node clusters vassals are not happy with their metropolis, to me the appropriate thing for them to do is to assist another metropolis in sieging said metropolis. Obviously not directly, but to me, a metropolis that doesnt have active support from most of its vassals in a siege shouldnt stand much of a chance.
So ideally here the seige engine's and seige defenses require significant resources.
Lets say all together these machines, buffs and barricades, can have an influence of up to +50% to one side's brute strength on the battlefield. However to reach that +50% limit it would likely require the resource contributions of a node, and the overwhelming majority of its vassals. (Perhaps some added xp requirements or quests to build certain things after seige declaration, so that not all resources can be stock piled. Or simply the cost of wharehousing such materials have a cost benifit trade off, due to the potentially limited nature of storage.)
If then a disgruntled vassel chooses to instead support a agressor against their liege node with materials. They could substantially shift the odds of the seiges success. They could even negotiate conditions for their support, and politics ensues.
The other live question to me for disgruntled vassals is their citizens voting with their feet. While some may be invested due to free holds or node housing, others may simply decide to move on, causing the node to decay.
Last I heard intrepid were still deciding whether a node atrophying ment it would simply go down a tier, or reset all together.
Following, how that nodes' vassal or vassaled status changes in that situation I am not sure. Does that becomes a contested space or is it immediately re-vassaled?
The other live question to me for disgruntled vassals is their citizens voting with their feet. While some may be invested due to free holds or node housing, others may simply decide to move on, causing the node to decay.
Last I heard intrepid were still deciding whether a node atrophying ment it would simply go down a tier, or reset all together.
Following, how that nodes' vassal or vassaled status changes in that situation I am not sure. Does that becomes a contested space or is it immediately re-vassaled?
My assumption in this situation (which I see as being rare, but possible), is that the parent node will siege the vassal node in order to destroy it - which will free other nodes in the area, allowing them to level up.
Vassals.cant siege parent nodes, but parent nodes can siege vassals.
Just out of interest, once at metropolis stage, how many nodes are likely attached and how much land area would be under the ZOI?
Then wondering, if that ZOI is the zone you want to XP in to develop, how does it compare to a % or fraction of the overall map?
And a metropolis' ZOI is roughly 1/5 of the world map (excluding oceans I'm assuming)
I always assumed that the ZoI of a metropolis will extend until they cover 20% of the map, including the Underrealm, to fulfill the requirement that they together cover 100% of the map.
But what shape the ZoI would be is unclear. Is it a circle? Is it a manually delimited area?
If the metropolis is on the coast of the ocean and if for some reason the ocean must be free of any ZoI then the ZoI shape might look distorted.
I think the coverage was needed to ensure that there are no nodes outside of the metropolis influence, in the previous concept when all nodes ended up being vassals.
I am curious if two metropolises end up close to each-other, how their ZoI look like:
Normally the algorithm that's applied to the node territorial expansion will prevent significant nodes from being in close proximity to each other... There could be a perfect storm where all of the algorithmic progression of territory leads to having these nodes very close to each other because there's certain requirements that should that need to be available to satisfy node vassal takeovers; and it's possible that two nodes would never take each other over as vassals and end up kind of close together and spanning their territories in kind of opposite directions: The Tale of Two Cities kind of thing.[22] – Steven Sharif
The way how I see this possible is when two adjacent level 5 nodes end up being vassals of different metropolises. Then one of the metropolises is destroyed and a level 5 becomes metropolis and gets other 2 x lvl 5 vassal nodes. Then the neighbor lvl 5 loses it's metro and becomes a metro too.
This could be possible only if both of them can get enough vassals.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
Regarding population size, I think the system will have to dynamically balance itself.
Else, with hardcoded experience progression, a 60% populated server would fare better if players will maintain 3 metropolises. They'll have a lot of resources on the remaining 40% of the map and no reason to siege each-other.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
I mean, that's the thing, you'd need to prove it. And there may or may not be ways to do so. But if you have people on the defensive doing nothing while maintaining themselves as not afk, it's pretty simple to penalize those players for throwing.
Yeah, that's one of the ways you could automate a "check" for this abuse. Put some requirement for participants "to move" or "to fight" or whatever. But then the merc guild (or the alt one) could just not take crucial points within the castle. So both sides are fighting and dying and all that good shit, but the siege itself doesn't progress beyond the very first stage of attack.
Do you then punish any other guild that fails to progress beyond the same stage in other sieges? Cause I've seen countless sieges where people just didn't have the power to push through the very first gates of the castle. So if you then design a system that literally punishes the weaker side of the conflict - that'd be the highway to destroying your game's community.
So like I said, you can't prove who's abusing the system and who's not.
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
this worries me or looking in to deep.
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
We did something like this in New World - we signed up and didnt fight, allowing us to win the war by pretending to be the enemies.
doesnt help, if leader isnt knowledgeable of who player names are and accepts all 60 with good gearscore into their war... or at worse, unfortunately seeing our Guild leader get us to mass report the war leader, to prevent him from editing the 50 players before war starts.
There will be a reputation system in the game.
Those who intercept and loot caravans will have a lower reputation toward that node.
Those with lower reputation should have a higher priority in the que when joining the siege.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
I mean, that's the thing, you'd need to prove it. And there may or may not be ways to do so. But if you have people on the defensive doing nothing while maintaining themselves as not afk, it's pretty simple to penalize those players for throwing.
Yeah, that's one of the ways you could automate a "check" for this abuse. Put some requirement for participants "to move" or "to fight" or whatever. But then the merc guild (or the alt one) could just not take crucial points within the castle. So both sides are fighting and dying and all that good shit, but the siege itself doesn't progress beyond the very first stage of attack.
Do you then punish any other guild that fails to progress beyond the same stage in other sieges? Cause I've seen countless sieges where people just didn't have the power to push through the very first gates of the castle. So if you then design a system that literally punishes the weaker side of the conflict - that'd be the highway to destroying your game's community.
So like I said, you can't prove who's abusing the system and who's not.
You're definitely not wrong. What it comes down to is designing it in a way to be able to tell whether or not someone is cheesing the system. Which is not easy by any means. We should probably brainstorm for solutions when we have some free time.
You're definitely not wrong. What it comes down to is designing it in a way to be able to tell whether or not someone is cheesing the system. Which is not easy by any means. We should probably brainstorm for solutions when we have some free time.
I can at best come and go with some additional comments. Only have 6h of electricity (split into 3 periods) during waking hours, so can't really go back and forth on the forums for a long time like I could previously.
Might start a thread about it in 4h, if no one else is up to that before that time.
Only have 6h of electricity (split into 3 periods) during waking hours, so can't really go back and forth on the forums for a long time like I could previously.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
It let me listen to all of Mistborn series and now Stormlight Archive Might've come back to more time too, cause I got power sooner than it was supposed to have come back. Gonna make that thread soon.
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
this worries me or looking in to deep.
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
We did something like this in New World - we signed up and didnt fight, allowing us to win the war by pretending to be the enemies.
doesnt help, if leader isnt knowledgeable of who player names are and accepts all 60 with good gearscore into their war... or at worse, unfortunately seeing our Guild leader get us to mass report the war leader, to prevent him from editing the 50 players before war starts.
There will be a reputation system in the game.
Those who intercept and loot caravans will have a lower reputation toward that node.
Those with lower reputation should have a higher priority in the que when joining the siege.
I have a guild called "Asmon Sucks" which holds 600 guildies.
I will split the guild into 2 guildies "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"
We now secure a castle.
All 600 players will be working on that node, thus gaining rep.
Seige War event begins, I will tell my second guild "Asmon Sucks2" to fill in all the spots as an Attacker.
GG - we locked everyone out from taking our castle.
Hell, if we can just secure 50-100 spots - they can AFK or pretend they are fighting, hand to hand combat for low DPS and throw for the attackers.
Reputation doesnt mean shit, since I got all 600 members working in our node.
And if it requires reputation from another noded needed, then I will just send those 300 there.
{UPK} United Player Killer - All your loot belongs to us.
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
this worries me or looking in to deep.
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
We did something like this in New World - we signed up and didnt fight, allowing us to win the war by pretending to be the enemies.
doesnt help, if leader isnt knowledgeable of who player names are and accepts all 60 with good gearscore into their war... or at worse, unfortunately seeing our Guild leader get us to mass report the war leader, to prevent him from editing the 50 players before war starts.
There will be a reputation system in the game.
Those who intercept and loot caravans will have a lower reputation toward that node.
Those with lower reputation should have a higher priority in the que when joining the siege.
I have a guild called "Asmon Sucks" which holds 600 guildies.
I will split the guild into 2 guildies "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"
We now secure a castle.
All 600 players will be working on that node, thus gaining rep.
Seige War event begins, I will tell my second guild "Asmon Sucks2" to fill in all the spots as an Attacker.
GG - we locked everyone out from taking our castle.
Hell, if we can just secure 50-100 spots - they can AFK or pretend they are fighting, hand to hand combat for low DPS and throw for the attackers.
Reputation doesnt mean shit, since I got all 600 members working in our node.
And if it requires reputation from another noded needed, then I will just send those 300 there.
The rule The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
is to prevent "Asmon Sucks2" exclude real attackers.
The way I see it, is that 8000 players may sign up against "Asmon Sucks" and they'll be in the queue to join when the siege starts.
That queue should be ordered based on player history as combatant, e.g. if they attacked and destroyed caravans supporting the node under siege and should put gatherers at the end of the list (unless those are foreign gatherers who also ruined the resource respawn rate defying node policies)
Wiki quote:
We have progression paths that exist for bandits and that exists for defenders; and if you choose to opt into a caravan attack- you sign up for that attack and you fail that attack- it is detrimental to your path of progression down the bandit area.
A quest system will track a player's successful or failed defenses and attacks. This will provide rewards that scale up over time based on the player's history.[41][42][43]
If "Asmon Sucks2" consists of players rated as bandits toward Asmon's crazy node, to be able to be at the top of the siege participation queue, then they did quite some damage already and that node may fall by itself due to lack of resources, if we talk about a normal node.
But the same can be applied for a castle node too, which will have no defenses during siege and no resources/taxes left for the guild.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
this worries me or looking in to deep.
You are seiging me. I get my mega guild of 300 players and tell 100 of them to join the war as an attacker. Now we go into war, you dont attack, we took all of your spots.
We did something like this in New World - we signed up and didnt fight, allowing us to win the war by pretending to be the enemies.
doesnt help, if leader isnt knowledgeable of who player names are and accepts all 60 with good gearscore into their war... or at worse, unfortunately seeing our Guild leader get us to mass report the war leader, to prevent him from editing the 50 players before war starts.
There will be a reputation system in the game.
Those who intercept and loot caravans will have a lower reputation toward that node.
Those with lower reputation should have a higher priority in the que when joining the siege.
I have a guild called "Asmon Sucks" which holds 600 guildies.
I will split the guild into 2 guildies "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"
We now secure a castle.
All 600 players will be working on that node, thus gaining rep.
Seige War event begins, I will tell my second guild "Asmon Sucks2" to fill in all the spots as an Attacker.
GG - we locked everyone out from taking our castle.
Hell, if we can just secure 50-100 spots - they can AFK or pretend they are fighting, hand to hand combat for low DPS and throw for the attackers.
Reputation doesnt mean shit, since I got all 600 members working in our node.
And if it requires reputation from another noded needed, then I will just send those 300 there.
Why are the guilds "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"not in an alliance?
Comments
2. you don't have to be a citizen of any node and if you arn't you can either attack or defend in any node siege, i think guilds and other player alliances have roll to play aswel. For example if guilds move around in order to progress in other aspects of the game (like move to a scientific node to improve their artisan skills etc.) this could drastically effect the amount of citizens overnight.
3. if the same nodes would always be maxed out no new content would ever be unlocked, at some point we will know from other servers what new content awaits us if we level up other nodes. This will also drive up the need to keep changing things around, even for those who are citizens of the metro nodes. No particular setup of nodes will last forever
4. obviously we still don't have all the facts yet, we don't even know if there is going to be a a max number of participants on either side during siege events. Everything we do know is also subject to change when intrepid starts on ballancing this during Alpha/Beta testing i think we will see many things changed around.
I drew up an 8x10 grid (for 82 nodes), and put 5 lv 6 nodes, then put as many 5's and 4's i could whilst trying to respect node hierarchy, then 3-2-1's in between, and got about similar results as your calculations!
The population numbers you've posted actually make a lot of sense to me from a conflict perspective. Obviously, conflict will be around major node systems. Some areas of the map will be much less active. And remember its about 10k concurent players! If as you say, 5-7k of those revolve around the 5-10 major node/vassal/castle systems, seems to me like its gong to be action packed! I have no doubt people will congregate to zone events naturally.
I am not worried about this, but all remains to be tried!
This is the worst idea ive heard about siege defense strategy lol. If they enroll as attackers, they cant defend. Thats the bottom line.
If you are expecting there to be an "attacker limit" and to fulfill that limit with people who dont attack, you can be 100% sure Intrepid wont let this fly and put in a mechanic to detter this. There are a thousand ways this absolutely doesnt work. Like having no limits on attackers or defenders. Or citizens of a node not being able to enlist as attackers, etc.
You made me laugh tho
If Im a mega guild, I got enough defender, to send attackers to take spots and lower their attacker numbers....
I mean, that's the thing, you'd need to prove it. And there may or may not be ways to do so. But if you have people on the defensive doing nothing while maintaining themselves as not afk, it's pretty simple to penalize those players for throwing.
So ideally here the seige engine's and seige defenses require significant resources.
Lets say all together these machines, buffs and barricades, can have an influence of up to +50% to one side's brute strength on the battlefield. However to reach that +50% limit it would likely require the resource contributions of a node, and the overwhelming majority of its vassals. (Perhaps some added xp requirements or quests to build certain things after seige declaration, so that not all resources can be stock piled. Or simply the cost of wharehousing such materials have a cost benifit trade off, due to the potentially limited nature of storage.)
If then a disgruntled vassel chooses to instead support a agressor against their liege node with materials. They could substantially shift the odds of the seiges success. They could even negotiate conditions for their support, and politics ensues.
The other live question to me for disgruntled vassals is their citizens voting with their feet. While some may be invested due to free holds or node housing, others may simply decide to move on, causing the node to decay.
Last I heard intrepid were still deciding whether a node atrophying ment it would simply go down a tier, or reset all together.
Following, how that nodes' vassal or vassaled status changes in that situation I am not sure. Does that becomes a contested space or is it immediately re-vassaled?
Vassals.cant siege parent nodes, but parent nodes can siege vassals.
I always assumed that the ZoI of a metropolis will extend until they cover 20% of the map, including the Underrealm, to fulfill the requirement that they together cover 100% of the map.
But what shape the ZoI would be is unclear. Is it a circle? Is it a manually delimited area?
If the metropolis is on the coast of the ocean and if for some reason the ocean must be free of any ZoI then the ZoI shape might look distorted.
I think the coverage was needed to ensure that there are no nodes outside of the metropolis influence, in the previous concept when all nodes ended up being vassals.
I am curious if two metropolises end up close to each-other, how their ZoI look like: The way how I see this possible is when two adjacent level 5 nodes end up being vassals of different metropolises. Then one of the metropolises is destroyed and a level 5 becomes metropolis and gets other 2 x lvl 5 vassal nodes. Then the neighbor lvl 5 loses it's metro and becomes a metro too.
This could be possible only if both of them can get enough vassals.
Else, with hardcoded experience progression, a 60% populated server would fare better if players will maintain 3 metropolises. They'll have a lot of resources on the remaining 40% of the map and no reason to siege each-other.
Do you then punish any other guild that fails to progress beyond the same stage in other sieges? Cause I've seen countless sieges where people just didn't have the power to push through the very first gates of the castle. So if you then design a system that literally punishes the weaker side of the conflict - that'd be the highway to destroying your game's community.
So like I said, you can't prove who's abusing the system and who's not.
There will be a reputation system in the game.
Those who intercept and loot caravans will have a lower reputation toward that node.
Those with lower reputation should have a higher priority in the que when joining the siege.
You're definitely not wrong. What it comes down to is designing it in a way to be able to tell whether or not someone is cheesing the system. Which is not easy by any means. We should probably brainstorm for solutions when we have some free time.
Might start a thread about it in 4h, if no one else is up to that before that time.
Numbers scare me but I love a good theory-craft 🥺
Hope you feel well soon @Dolyem and great conversations happening in here, everyone!
I have a guild called "Asmon Sucks" which holds 600 guildies.
I will split the guild into 2 guildies "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"
We now secure a castle.
All 600 players will be working on that node, thus gaining rep.
Seige War event begins, I will tell my second guild "Asmon Sucks2" to fill in all the spots as an Attacker.
GG - we locked everyone out from taking our castle.
Hell, if we can just secure 50-100 spots - they can AFK or pretend they are fighting, hand to hand combat for low DPS and throw for the attackers.
Reputation doesnt mean shit, since I got all 600 members working in our node.
And if it requires reputation from another noded needed, then I will just send those 300 there.
The rule
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
is to prevent "Asmon Sucks2" exclude real attackers.
The way I see it, is that 8000 players may sign up against "Asmon Sucks" and they'll be in the queue to join when the siege starts.
That queue should be ordered based on player history as combatant, e.g. if they attacked and destroyed caravans supporting the node under siege and should put gatherers at the end of the list (unless those are foreign gatherers who also ruined the resource respawn rate defying node policies)
Wiki quote:
We have progression paths that exist for bandits and that exists for defenders; and if you choose to opt into a caravan attack- you sign up for that attack and you fail that attack- it is detrimental to your path of progression down the bandit area.
A quest system will track a player's successful or failed defenses and attacks. This will provide rewards that scale up over time based on the player's history.[41][42][43]
If "Asmon Sucks2" consists of players rated as bandits toward Asmon's crazy node, to be able to be at the top of the siege participation queue, then they did quite some damage already and that node may fall by itself due to lack of resources, if we talk about a normal node.
But the same can be applied for a castle node too, which will have no defenses during siege and no resources/taxes left for the guild.
Why are the guilds "Asmon Sucks" and "Asmon Sucks2"not in an alliance?