MMORPG.com Age of Conan Correspondent Garrett Perkins writes this guide to the siege system for first-time players of Funcom's "M" rated MMO.

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.

Read Siege Basics

Game Mechanics are still a big pile of fail. Sure Sieges are nice for the 25% of leel 80s who can participate in them weekly. The other 75% of players can't because of siege blocking on most servers or that they are not in a guild which has a battlekeep because they are limited. You'll also note if you read about AOC that they haven't added even yet the battle towers, and there remains no guild alliance system, or ability to merc your way into a a siege so unless you are in the top 5-10% of guilds you dont siege.

The free trial has led to a modest influx of players coming back. Most are reporting better performance of the client which was achieved 6 months ago, and again the complaints are bank size too small, guild customization options are nil, npc sieges of battlekeeps or city centers, non-existent, looking for group channel non-existent, and dozens of other major features that have been requested since launch, not in game.

Oh yes DX10 is there, current build is pretty buggy but a year after launch it's "Beta" hope that doesn't spoil. The game is fun if you can find a good guild in PVP and you like the mindless FFA PVP that exists in AOC. There still is hardly any incentive to earn PVP points, no real additional abilities, and there sure as hell is no disincentive, which is leading the majority of those giving the 14 day free trial to not-sub. Hence the extension. Oh yeah if you want to run DX10 with any glory you need a GTX level card, no not the 9800GTX+ you need a GTX 275-285-290. Yeah dissapointing considering you can get 50-60 fps in DX9 with a 9800GTX+ only getting between 15-30 in DX10.

AOC dev team has little to show for the past year in terms of real feature adds to AOC, they invested considerable time in fixing performance and that doesn't really matter to the core base who plays on Vista anyway or who will be playing on Win7 with 4 gigs of ram it will run fine. It even runs fine on XP now, but the question is, why are not hundreds of thousands of players coming back to sub and flood servers, create the need for expansions? With DDR2 so dirt cheap It's too bad they didn't include a stick of it in the box instead of busting ass for 12 months since launch to improve performance.

Fundamentally AOC is still not ready for players to pay for. Give it another 6 months or a year, if it survives that long, it should have some major feature tweaks and investment in playability above and beyond bug squashing which seems like all they've really done with AOC since launch.

Originally posted by LordBonezy

Game Mechanics are still a big pile of fail. Sure Sieges are nice for the 25% of leel 80s who can participate in them weekly. The other 75% of players can't because of siege blocking on most servers or that they are not in a guild which has a battlekeep because they are limited. You'll also note if you read about AOC that they haven't added even yet the battle towers, and there remains no guild alliance system, or ability to merc your way into a a siege so unless you are in the top 5-10% of guilds you dont siege.

The free trial has led to a modest influx of players coming back. Most are reporting better performance of the client which was achieved 6 months ago, and again the complaints are bank size too small, guild customization options are nil, npc sieges of battlekeeps or city centers, non-existent, looking for group channel non-existent, and dozens of other major features that have been requested since launch, not in game.

Oh yes DX10 is there, current build is pretty buggy but a year after launch it's "Beta" hope that doesn't spoil. The game is fun if you can find a good guild in PVP and you like the mindless FFA PVP that exists in AOC. There still is hardly any incentive to earn PVP points, no real additional abilities, and there sure as hell is no disincentive, which is leading the majority of those giving the 14 day free trial to not-sub. Hence the extension. Oh yeah if you want to run DX10 with any glory you need a GTX level card, no not the 9800GTX+ you need a GTX 275-285-290. Yeah dissapointing considering you can get 50-60 fps in DX9 with a 9800GTX+ only getting between 15-30 in DX10.

AOC dev team has little to show for the past year in terms of real feature adds to AOC, they invested considerable time in fixing performance and that doesn't really matter to the core base who plays on Vista anyway or who will be playing on Win7 with 4 gigs of ram it will run fine. It even runs fine on XP now, but the question is, why are not hundreds of thousands of players coming back to sub and flood servers, create the need for expansions? With DDR2 so dirt cheap It's too bad they didn't include a stick of it in the box instead of busting ass for 12 months since launch to improve performance.

Fundamentally AOC is still not ready for players to pay for. Give it another 6 months or a year, if it survives that long, it should have some major feature tweaks and investment in playability above and beyond bug squashing which seems like all they've really done with AOC since launch.

Just move on. Don't like it? Go play another game and stop bitching.

A guild bids to be the attacker? Are they bidding gold??

They bid Guild PVP points, which are largely accumulated via PVP minigames. The more players you have the more opportunities for guild points. So larger guilds are proportionately favored.

They really have some balls to post this after a year of broken sieges and, just recently, after that 3-second sieges. I remember when I played back in summer 2008 when we didn't even know how this unintuitive and very queer siege system works, we contacted a GM and even he didn't know, lol. Well, better late than never, I guess. It took them one year to post basic info about the sieges, so I guess it will take them another year to officially recognize sieges as a total failure and then another year to actually fix them.

Every Siege I have particapated in since 1.05 went live has crashed, not to mention invisible walls that people can walk through among other game breaking bugs. Wasting the time of almost 100 people, and the attackers loose their trebs, gold, and points to bid - GM's won't give ANY of it back. The defending side gets their battle keep rebuilt for free (bug after the zone crashes) and gets an X in the win column. 1.05 is not the NGE, but in all fairness it's not too far off it either.

It is just short of 100% retarded for this to be on the front page of their website. The system is completely fubar and does not work.

GG FC

This guide is surreal , really ..when nothing work on the sieges system (before 1 YEAR) and FC deliver this guide to customers, this is a epic Fail from you Funcom.

This is so sad really.

Why they decided to not have sieges at the ACTUAL towns is just beyond me. Such promise, and such failures.

Imagine, you lose, you lose your town!? How awesome would that be. Real Loss. Real story. Real fun.

I don't know what people have against this game... I have played since launch, and yes, it did have a few bugs, but nothing major.  Maybe my PC software was up to date, who knows.

I have recently reached lvl 80 and joined one of the top guilds on my server, Tyranny, and it has been alot of fun.  I have been in about 6 Siege battles and had a blast in all of them.  You do have to turn your graphics down some, but the play was smooth and fun... just make sure you guild is organized.

Having a blast, wish more had the PC and desire to play.

 lol billy