Sieges

Sieges in Ashes of Creation refer to:

• Castle sieges, where guilds battle to occupy one of five Guild castles.
• Node sieges, which are open world battles fought to delevel or destroy nodes.

Siege alliances

When a siege begins, temporary alliances are formed among attackers and defenders.

• For node sieges, citizens of the node or provincial nodes being attacked are automatically registered as defenders.
• There are many reasons to participate as an ally in the attack or defence of other nodes.
  • Titles.
  • Items.
  • Materials.
  • Money.
  • Social bonds.

Many incentives exist that can benefit your node and yourself personally by participating in the attack or defense of cities. These range from titles, to items, to materials, to money. Additionally, aiding others may help you strengthen bonds when your assets are threatened. – Steven Sharif

Siege mechanics

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

A siege occurs over several phases.

• Certain siege mechanics may be gated for specific size groups during sieges.
• There will not be a deserter debuff for leaving a siege before it is complete.
• More will be revealed in an upcoming blog entry.

Siege PvP

Sieges don't use the PvP flagging system.

Death penalties do not apply to objective-based events (such as caravans, guild wars, and node sieges).

Siege NPCs

Siege NPCs, NPC guards, and mercenary NPCs serve as defense points during sieges and other events.

• Only combat NPCs are killable during a siege. Non-combat NPCs, such as merchants, will despawn and will respawn if the siege is unsuccessful.

• Upgrades to the node's Barracks may allow a garrison of siege NPCs to be spawned in the event of an attack.

• Mercenary NPCs can be hired in advance. They are intended to be a significant presence but not the main line of defense in a siege.

Siege objectives

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

Each node has a number of districts, depending on its stage.

• Districts are taken by defeating a "raid boss" guard NPC in that district.
• If attackers take over a district, they gain that district as a respawn location.
• Attackers can kill the quartermasters to increase the respawn times of the defenders while reducing their own respawn times.

Defenders can assault the outposts of the attackers to hinder them.

• Destroying the headquarters of the attacking army is a victory condition for the defenders.

Attackers may not be capable of deleveling a node. Instead they may carry out precision attacks to disable specific service-oriented buildings within the node. These buildings can be targeted with siege weapons and bombs.

As the attackers are sieging a city they have obviously a win condition- a win objective- but additionally there can be casualties from a structural standpoint during that process. So let's say if the... attackers were to not succeed in completely destroying the node they could still affect damage across multiple types of buildings that are present within the node, which disables services for that those citizens and also will require some type of reconstruction effort on behalf of the citizens. – Steven Sharif

See also

• World PvP
• Combat