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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures: Siege Basics

Jul 31, 2009 Age of Conan|484views

The border kingdoms of Hyboria are where the best of the best duke it out in an epic battle of wits and strength to find out who has the right to rule over one of the few battle keeps that are available on each server. Siege is the apex of PvP in Age of Conan in which there is a defending and attacking guild fighting during a set time frame (set by the defending guild) over a battle keep. These battle keeps offer up extreme PvP and PvE stat bonuses along with the bragging rights that come with owning one of the selective structures. This makes the battles to claim and defend those keeps extremely brutal, and sometimes even personal. Knowledge can always change the tide of battle, so I put up this little guide on the basics of how Sieges work in AoC so that rookie warriors won’t be caught clueless on this merciless battlefield.

Getting a BK / applying for siege:

First off before you can even try and apply to siege your guild must:

1. Have a T3 city keep (you do not need T3 buildings though)
2. Have the minimum number of guild PvP points* to bid on the attacking siege spot

*Guild PvP points are gained every time someone in your guild completes a PvP mini game or kills a player of an enemy guild (that you have just declared siege on) your guild master can then use these points to bid against other guilds attempting to siege the same keep as you.

Once you have met all of the requirements, pull up the massive PvP tab and look for the battle keep you would like and make a bid. If you are the top bidding guild when the bid phase ends then congratulations, you will be participating in a siege at the time listed. If for some reason there is an unoccupied battle keep in a zone, you can acquire it just like you would a guild city. Now whether you are attacking or defending there is quite a bit of preparation to be had:

For Attackers:

For the defending guild to upgrade their battle keep (if it is not yet a T3 BK), they will need to collect special resources only found in the border kingdoms. However, these resources drop if the carrier is killed in PvP combat. Some of the more aggressive guilds will systematically attack and steal from the resource gatherers of the defending guild, which will effectively slow the upgrading of their BK, give you resources to more quickly build their BK if the siege is successful and also earn Guild PvP points in the process. Remember the higher the tier, the more hits it can take.

It is also important for anyone participating in the siege to know the locations of the siege camps throughout the enemy BK. Though knowing the exact points within the walls of the keep are difficult to obtain without being creative, there is no reason that the outer wall siege camps are not known by everyone so that rally points can be clearly set.

Have a plan! Explaining a simple siege strategy to your comrades is the quickest way to victory. 48 players running around doing their own thing will only give the defenders an easy win while 48 players that know exactly where to go can topple the most tenacious of defenders.

For Defenders:

Know the locations of siege camps! Have as many people as possible mark on their maps where the enemy could put up trebuchets and catapults. This will help you communicate where to counter attack.

Keep the doors closed! At no point during the siege should the front or inner gates be open as this gives a huge time advantage to the attackers. Many guilds will even keep the doors shut days before the battle just to make sure no stealthy scouts or would be saboteurs gain entry.

Know the tunnels. As of 1.05, there are now tunnels throughout the inner keep for the defense force to use. Make sure people know the locations of these secret passages and are using them instead of the gates or jumping from the walls.

Trebuchets and Ballistae:

To create a trebuchet,t simply walk up to a siege camp (big orange tents that you can build on those piles of rocks aka siege camps that you hopefully marked earlier) and click it. You then select which plans in your inventory you want to use and viola, a siege weapon of your very own! These little puppies will start firing by themselves, but while they do it is you and your raid’s responsibility to let it do as much damage as possible before the defenders take it out. And trust me the defenders will come at these things like wild dogs.

*TIP* using the advanced trebuchets is highly recommended as they have a great amount of hit points, meaning it will get off at least one shot before it is taken out ( it costs a lot more though so is recommended when attacking the main keep directly).

For defenders, there will be special NPCs that spawn on certain towers during the siege. Talking to these guys will create a ballista on the tower and give you an item (so make sure you have inventory space!) using the item will create an AoE circle that you can put on the ground wherever you think the enemy might be. The ballista will then fire continuously at that spot until either you die, the tower is destroyed, or you give it another location to shoot. The ballista will not do any damage to the attackers but it will be a constant knock back AoE that ignores most anti-cc.

*TIP* Ballistae can fire behind the tower they are mounted on! Some attackers will overlook a tower they have already gotten past allowing you to set a knock back zone in very annoying places!

Getting to the battleground:

Use the Massive PvP tab to find which of the three border kingdoms you will be attacking. To get to the Aquillonian end go to the border kingdoms recruiter at the garrison just a bit up the street from the temple of Mitra. For the Border of Kush talk to the recruiter near the armory in Khemi. For the Cimmerian end talk to the border kingdoms guide right across from the wagoner.

You can also go to the border kingdoms straight from any of the resource zones. Purple lotus swamp=Kush, Poitain=Aquillonian end, Lacheish Plains= Cimmerian end.

Once you arrive, simply check the local map for which BK you are heading toward.

If you own a BK then all you have to do is talk to a special NPC in your guild city who can port you there instantly for a small fee.

The Basics of Siege:

When the time for siege comes, there will be a guild wide message along with a counter that appears in the top left of your screen (default). This counter will show the defending guild’s name along with a certain number along the attacking guild’s name next to a zero as well as the time left in the siege. The numbers next to the guild names are the amount of points the defending guild has from their buildings (The higher the tier of the city/ more buildings the more points they will have). Every time a building or wall takes damage or is destroyed, points are lost from the defending guild and given to the attackers. To achieve complete victory, causing ownership of the BK to go over to the attackers, you will not only need to destroy the keep itself but have more points than the defenders. For attacking guilds that already own a BK; only the keep itself needs to be destroyed for a victory to show up on your record, though the defenders will still own the land as a guild cannot own two BKs. This will reset a T3/T2 keep back to T1, however. Destroying buildings for points is not the only advantage you get from destruction. The defending guild will lose any bonus they gained from the building as well.

Siege can be one of the most intense PvP experiences in any game but having 48 v. 48 max in a zone can be very taxing on even the beefiest of computers, so turning down settings is a must if you do not want to experience lag or a disconnect because of high latency. There is a nifty little siege/raid setting that will work for most computers but most high end systems will only need to turn view distance down and particle effects off.

Sieging has some of the highest stakes PvP out there, so you can imagine that there are countless strategies out there used to achieve victory. From the more underhanded tactics such as planting spies or using a mammoth mount to block the targeting of siege weapons to the more creative ones such as defenders paying off a mercenary guild or creating a dummy guild just to grab their keep’s attacking spot and effectively get a free siege win. Each guild has their own play style and strategy that they bring to raiding and sieging alike. Just be sure to end the battle on a good note, even if your keep is razed to the ground and the corpses of your friends lie strewn over the battlefield just remember that you can come back the next week and take it right back!

Tags: Age of Conan