Sacking a capital city

[Dankus]

I've heard it mentioned that raiding a capital city will be instanced and only allow 75 players. Any word on this?

[Selwynn]

I've heard it mentioned that raiding a capital city will be instanced and only allow 75 players. Any word on this?

End game content functions exactly as we have explained in the podcast.

You lock down 2 pairings by capturing the fortress at the end of each. At this time the city becomes contested and enemy players may storm the gates and begin a city wide public quest build on ransacking, pillaging, and killing their enemies. We have tested capturing 2 pairings and watched the city flip to contested. In addition to the public quests you also have a scenario of epic proportions. It encompasses multiple rulesets and requires a large amount of coordination in order to win.

Cities are broken up into instances of 48 on 48, which in the concentrated, urban environment is quite intense. Players must play a tug of war in the city wide public quest to attempt to beat the other side (one side is trying to put out the fires that the other is lighting) in addition to controlling battlefield objectives at key strategic areas. This PQ plus winning scenarios contributes victory points, and much like normal zone capture this is displayed in the victory points bar above the minimap.

At this point the defender will either win and oust the attacker or the attacker will capture the city. No defenders can enter the city at this time and the rest will be booted once they're dead (but they're still able to put up a fight!) If the defenders win the campaign resets and control goes back to the neutral tier 4 zones.

Once the city is captured 2 public quests unlock and players are able to explore the PvE dungeons within the city. (expanding the amount of PvE content available to the server.)

Once these two PQ's are defeated the king encounter unlocks for all city instances and warbands can now assault the palace and challenge the king.

All of this has been tested, in some cases multiple times.

I'm not sure what bug's you're referring to but bugs do appear on the Test Server. These are builds that come straight from our internal test servers and this is why we roll out versions to the Test Servers first and why it's still under NDA.

The game is in a changing state and players on these servers are experiencing cutting edge content. We want, to some degree, for this content to still be exciting and mysterious for our players while still being able to test it thouroughly and make changes based on feedback.

Thanks all, hope that clears that up __________________
James Nichols
Community Coordinator
Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

What isn't clear is if those "fortresses" are instanced.... and I deeply hope they are not.

[Selwynn]

Additionally:

Here is a write-up from early '08 beta that describes the 75v75 thing. It appears that the info by Mythic above is more current.

http://war.mmolecule.com/articles/ar...4-6b5b51e11b39

[Gisli]

Consider how long it took DAOC to iron out the bugs related to relics. And relics are a fairly simple mechanism. This city capture mechanic is easily an order of magnitude more complex. It has multiple game-stopping failure modes, in terms of potential bugs. The testing that has been done is actually pretty trivial. I highly doubt this is going to work correctly for years, if it ever can be made to work at all. And even if it could be debugged, I'm not convinced yet that with the way things are set up, any side could ever capture a city unless the populations are horribly imbalanced. And even then, its possible that the instancing mechanism means that most of the attackers have to sit on their hands and hope for the best in a "soccer match" that they don't even participate in.

This city-sacking endgame mechanic is one of the two great question marks in my mind about Warhammer's long-term viability. (The other is the fact that there are only two sides, which might lead to perpetual local imbalance on pretty much every server.)

[Monstein]

I know Forts are just part of a zone, I've looket at the Chaos one...you can go out the front of IC and look at it....man dose it look fun.

[Selwynn]

Consider how long it took DAOC to iron out the bugs related to relics. And relics are a fairly simple mechanism. This city capture mechanic is easily an order of magnitude more complex. It has multiple game-stopping failure modes, in terms of potential bugs. The testing that has been done is actually pretty trivial. I highly doubt this is going to work correctly for years, if it ever can be made to work at all. And even if it could be debugged, I'm not convinced yet that with the way things are set up, any side could ever capture a city unless the populations are horribly imbalanced. And even then, its possible that the instancing mechanism means that most of the attackers have to sit on their hands and hope for the best in a "soccer match" that they don't even participate in.

This city-sacking endgame mechanic is one of the two great question marks in my mind about Warhammer's long-term viability. (The other is the fact that there are only two sides, which might lead to perpetual local imbalance on pretty much every server.)

Well.... I'm a little more optimistic than that! Sheesh.

Things don't have to be an exact clone of DAOC to be awesomestastic. Not that you were saying that, that's just my own thought. The leadup to the city saking part is what I hope will feel the most like DAOC. Taking the keeps in Tier 4 and assaulting the fortresses that unlock the City is where I think we'll get that old school feel. If those were truly open world situations where its lag-be-damned massive - that would be great. The fortresses are like Relic Keeps on steroids.

The Cities are a lot like the other part of DAOC that I absolutely loved with all of my little black heart -- Darkness Falls.

I am more than happy to participate in complicated larger scale "Public Quests" / "Scenarios" that have a unifed story around sacking the City. You can do things with scripted quests like that which you can't necessarily do other wise, and it can potentially be incredibly awesome.

If we can mass raid the tier 4s and the fortress with as many people as we can muster before opening Darkness Falls-esque scenarios, quests and story lines - some of which, yes, may be limited to certain number of players -- I think I'm more than fine with that.

[Gisli]

Yes, the only reason I related it to DAOC was to illustrate how hard it is to debug something that happens only rarely (like as rarely as getting close enough to take a relic in DAOC). Given how simple that mechanic is, and how difficult the Warhammer city mechanics are, I don't have so much faith.

That said... I agree with you totally on the T4 stuff. Just getting the city to contested state is something of a "win". And doing that drops the enemy city a notch. So even if it turns out to be totally hosed from that point on, it should still be fun!

[Cymrych Lok-ri]

There were multiple instances with a limit of 45 per side. Whether or not that limit has been increased, I am unsure.

[Radaghast]

Does "lock down 2 pairings" mean just the T4 keeps or is it T1 through T4, it would seem silly to me if you had to have alts to capture the lower tiers.

[Drakhon]

Control of the T4 zones is all that counts directly for campaign progression. Control of T3 makes it easier to control T4, however, and T2 makes T3 easier and T1 makes T2 easier. They make it easier by providing a certain amount of control points to the Tier above them.

"Locking down" just means taking the Fortresses, which are the extra big keeps at each end of the T4 battlefronts.