Age of Conan Battlekeep System Guide

Age of Conan Battlekeep System Guide by Darkwavve

The purpose of this thread is to provide all available information about battlekeeps and sieges to the player community, and to give suggestions to the developers on how to improve the current system. I welcome other players responding with things I have stated incorrectly or points I forgot to mention. I will update this regularly as time goes on.

I will begin with an overview of claiming a BK and how attacks currently work.

CLAIMING A VACANT BK PLOT:

Your guild must have a tier 3 keep. Then your GM simply walks up to the unclaimed plot with the necessary T1 mats and clicks build. You now have a battlekeep.

Details: No keep plan is necessary, just the mats. Same for every structure.

Bugs: none

UPGRADING BATTLEKEEPS

To get your battlekeep itself, and the other buildings to tier 2 and 3, you must wait a certain amount of time after claiming or capturing the keep. Currently it appears the timer is one week. When the timer is up, you are allowed to pay the necessary materials to upgrade your buildings to tier 2, and I assume eventually t3.

Details: Once again, no plans are necessary when upgrading.

Bugs: Since they appear to have fixed the phantom keep sydrome, no bugs.

SETTING A VULNERABILITY WINDOW:

Every three days your battlekeep is vulnerable. At the end of each vulnerability window, assuming you still control the keep, the guild leader may change the slot in which his keep will be vulnerable on the predetermined day. You cannot pick what day of the week, only what time your window starts.

Details: You have fifteen minutes after your window ends to pick the next time. You may change the window 6 times in this 15 minutes. (no idea why they limited it)

On July 2nd they changed it so you can start your vulnerability at 7, 9 or 11 est! Thank you funcom!

Bugs: They fixed the spam of guild chat after the vuln time ends, thank you! No other bugs atm.

DECLARING AN ATTACK ON ANOTHER KEEP:

To declare an attack on another guild’s keep you open up the pvp tab by zoning into the border kingdom, or typing something close to /setoption massive_pvp_window 1. (type up to massive, then hit tab and it will autocomplete, then type 1 and hit enter). Assuming you own a T3 keep, you then have the option to click on a keep’s vulnerability window and declare an attack.

Edit: The patch on the 26th made it so you can no longer declare an attack once the window has started. It appears that you can still wait until 1 minute before the window starts. A step in the right direction.

Bugs: Still are able to declare an attack anytime up until the window actually begins.

Details: It costs a guild pvp points to declare an attack. I will edit later with the exact cost. It is unknown at this time if you can trump another guild’s declared attack if you have more pvp points, and it is also unknown if the first would be attacker gets their pvp points back if trumped.

FIGHTING A SIEGE BATTLE:

The winner of a siege battle is determined by a point system. The defender starts with points based on the number of buildings, including walls, in their plot. The attacker starts with zero. The attacker gets points for destroying buildings, and for killing defending players. When they destroy a building they “steal” points from the defender, kill points are not “conserved”. The defender gets kill points as well. The attacker can build siege tents in predetermined plots from which he can spawn siege engines such as trebuchets and catapults. At the end of the vulnerability window the side with the most points wins.

Details: Destroying a wall segment seems to give around 70 points. More details to follow once I learn them. Killing an enemy player gives 1 point.

Walls and buildings are difficult to destroy by hand.

To build seige engines you purchase the plans from a seige vendor, which should be located in your PvE city keep. Then simply click on your seige tent and it constructs itself. I do not believe any architects are currently necessary for this process.

Trebuchets and catapults can be built by the attacker. However, it seems they currently do not in fact do much damage to buildings. I was mistaken for previously posting that they were effective. The catapults, and maybe the trebs too have an aoe knockback and do damage where they land. This can knock people off of walls and towers causing them to fall to their death. (which is awesome)

Ballista can be built by the defenders by talking to npcs on towers. Ballista have an aoe template that knocks back everyone they hit. It does no damage but is still very useful.

Walls and buildings have cool partially destroyed and destroyed models that change as they take damage.

Performance:
Since the latest patch the game seems to run pretty well with 48v48, most players still have crazy lag but at least it functions. Keep working on it funcom you’re on the right track.

Bugs:

Ballistas are very iffy at the moment. You can initially get one to work, but if you walk to far away, dismiss the ballista, or if it gets killed you can’t ever get another one. The npc says “You already have a ballista, you cant have two.” Fix this! Ballistas are fun and needed by defenders. Also, if you by accident set the ballista to cease fire, you cannot get it to resume firing. it seems the bugs happen less frequently when the operator is out of combat.

Unknown if this still exists: Players receive a kill point when they kill themselves through fall damage. This should be a priority funcom, currently there is NO point to fighting because massed lemming brigades trickling up and off your keep are the way to a boring but inevitable victory. With this bug in place there are no sieges, meaning there is no endgame.

Unknown if this still exists: Buildings are all worth the same as wall segments. I do not know if this is a bug or working as intended, but either way it should be changed. Attackers can achieve victory just by destroying walls, no reason to fight your way inside in epic fashion.

And of course lastly, bonuses for owning a BK do not yet exist.