Siege weapons

Trebuchet siege weapon in Alpha-1 castle sieges preview.

It wouldn’t be a castle siege without siege weapons. These are massive machines of war that enable attackers to bring down the walls, and defenders to keep their keep safe. Crafters can bring their own powerful schematics to the battlefield, or you can order baseline siege weapons from your friendly neighborhood siege master NPC. The Castle’s defenders will be able to deploy their own defensive weapons and turrets based on how well they maintained and defended their own Nodes. The sky will be illuminated with fire and fury.

Ballista siege weapon in Alpha-1 castle sieges preview.

Siege weapons and siege vehicles are able to be utilized during sieges.

• Siege equipment is able to be crafted or purchased from NPCs. Crafting will require materials, recipes and craftsmanship.

Part of this endeavor of sieging a player-held location (or non-player-held location) is time to prepare; and that includes gathering and crafting these mega weapons or collecting the resources: Whether it be gold or specific quest items to purchase from NPCs. – Steven Sharif

• There will be ways to repair destructible structures (such as walls and gates) and also repair (or re-craft) siege weapons that were damaged during sieges.
  • This is a long term design goal that will not be present during Alpha-1.

Anything that you want to bring into existence in the world is going to be built by players: Whether that is Ships, Siege engines, Weapons, Armor, etc. – Jeffrey Bard

List of siege weapons

• Ballistas
• Trebuchets

Summoning siege equipment

Siege weapons and vehicles can be summoned by registered participants of the castle or node siege who have the particular item in their inventory.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

A summoning sheet is used to summon siege equipment to the player's position.

• Siege vehicles that can be player driven.
• Hand held weapons.
• Multiple people may need to equip some items of siege equipment for it to function.

Guns and gunpowder

The Gilded Galleon pre-order pack cosmetic ship skin.

The potion launcher idea will be incorporated as part of how cannons operate on ships; and these will be very large potion launchers obviously. The storage of this ammunitions are going to be very important as well... It's not going to be the same potion every time. You can equip the cannon with different types of potions that have different types of effects from a munitions standpoint; and I think that's going to provide a very cool gameplay because as you see the different color of the trail that's coming out of the potion launched, you'll be aware of what your adversary is using and how that affects your ship; and you'll be able to counter based on maneuverability, based on whatever you want to counter that with. I think that's going to present a very interesting dynamic to the attacks with these ships. – Steven Sharif

Gunpowder (black powder) weapons will not be present in Ashes of Creation.

• Ships will utilize a larger form of potion launcher in place of canons. These canons will be able to be equipped with different potions that have different effects.

I previously said there was not going to be gunpowder in Ashes. What there will be is something very similar to gunpowder but has a more arcane nature to it. It's not necessarily going to be explainable through the conventional means of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics and what not, but rather the Essence is the core component of many types of magic, one of which is obviously going to be evocation type magic; and that evocation can have some explosive tendencies. – Steven Sharif

Weaponry such as Potion launchers, Siege weapons and weapons used in Naval combat are based on the arcane arts.

• The elements (evocation magic).
• The use of radiance and darkness.

As we said in the past, were not really about that black powder life. Instead it's really going to be focused on the arcane arts: The elements; the use of radiance and darkness; and then those being employed in larger weaponry, such as the type of siege weaponry between ship battles as well as those and sieges. A potion launcher is an example of the arcane energies that can be mastered in order to facilitate these highly destructive alchemical blends that can be created. – Steven Sharif

Siege participation

• Participation in castle and node sieges will require pre-registration for the siege event. The registration and approval process is said to be a temporary measure to manage the number of participants during Alpha-2 testing.
  • Alpha-2 phase-2 siege participation will initially be restricted to a minimum of 100v100 until dynamic gridding is fully online. This will be enforced by a death volume. Mayors will administer the list of valid node siege defenders. The initiator of the node siege will administer the list of valid attackers.
  • Alpha-1 castle sieges were located in a separate zone that was accessible via a NPC teleporter.
  • Castle sieges (in the final game) may or may not be instanced.

• PvE-oriented players will have alternative ways to participate in sieges, such as fulfilling buy orders to fund the siege and constructing siege weapons to support either the attackers or defenders.

If non-PvP players wish to participate, there will be buy orders that get stood up during the Declaration phase. There will be certain types of commissions that will be available during the declaration phase that will require the efforts of many people, all of whom do not perhaps need to participate within the PvP event. And so those are ways that you can contribute to the defense of your node, or the attackers: if you want to help construct vehicles, if you want to bring in resources, to acquire the the seed scroll. Those are all possible things. – Steven Sharif

• Lower level characters will have usefulness in mass combat that does not depend on their level, such as manning siege weapons, helping repair fortifications, bringing proximity-based buffs to key positions, using stealth or scaling walls. These types of things are relevant to the tide of battle and do not require the player to be max-level or have high combat stats.

• Players may choose to respawn at their HQ as long as they are registered.
  • Non-registered guilds are not granted the ability to take ownership of the castle if victorious.

• Players could potentially intercept stragglers with the guild war or flagging system en route to the siege field.

Siege summons

Summoners may be able collaborate together during sieges to summon larger creatures, such as Golems.

We do have the concept of siege summons being a thing with multiple summoners being required in order to create that siege summon. In those situations your character becomes the summon. So you don't have an AI that takes over your previous character but instead the recipient of those additional spell effects becomes the actual summon itself. – Steven Sharif

• The target of the group summon becomes the summon itself.
  • Previously it was stated that the party-leader becomes the summon.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• A siege summon will have an incremental size based on the number of summoners participating in that summon activity, with a maximum of eight.
• The number of summoners participating in the summon will determine its overall size.
• All summoners must be in the same party and the party leader must be a summoner.
  • The party leader initiates the summon and then takes control of it.
  • Once summoned, the party leader cannot be changed.
  • If the party disbands, the summon ends. There will be a grace period to handle disconnects.
  • The party may also contain non-Summoners.

Visuals

• 2021-05-29
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  2021-05-29
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• 2021-05-29
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  2020-01-31
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  2020-01-31
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  2019-10-12
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  2019-07-02
• 2019-01-12
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  2018-09-01
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  2018-04-29
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  2018-04-02
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  2018-01-01

See also

• Node sieges
• Castle sieges
• Combat