Al Mareyah in singleplayer

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Hello Conan Exiles

i tried to take this on in singleplayer mode,
i have never seen this before, i took a long break from conan exiles, and this is new content to me,

i tried to frontally assault the gate with the best top most geared followers i had
they got over-ran by the rapid and gratuitous respawns

i tried to use sorcery, and fly up to the top tower on the bat, and sneaky infiltrate the castle

that was a no-go, a big disappointment… all the doors on the top lead nowhere… that is highly unrealistic…

the castle is not built true. its a darn facade… the only part of it that is true, is through the main front gates and up the stairs…

i was expecting a multi level castle where every door leads to somewhere. that was not the case.

i disagree with the mechanics of those Barbed walls. they should not prevent climbing… look at how many cracks and space separate the barbs…

i can climb right in between them and not take any damage…

there should be a viable way to penetrate the castle through the upper tier doors… there is not… but only after serious effort do i find that out…

this is a total disaster for the role-play campaign setting of single player

a castle that self rebuilds that cannot be permanently taken over

its a huge nuisance. the respawns are way too fast, i risk permanent follower thrall deaths and unrecoverable items, all for this venture, with little or no reward

all for them to rebuild again,…

there is zero purpose to this…

Thank You Conan for your wonderful castle. I hope to see you make this game More Singleplayer / Campaign friendly… you do not have to do this at the expense of your PvP base… you can make all these options toggle-able…

you can let the server decide if you want the NPCs to respawn or how long you want the interval to be…

You can let the server decide if you want Al-Merayah to rebuild itself or if you want to allow the player to take it over…

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Apologies for not reading all the way through but I stopped at where you flew up on top.
Try explosives on the ceiling tiles above the boss room.
Then rain hell down on them with obnoxious gas arrows.

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Yep, that worked for me too. I do agree with the OP that it’s kinda dumb that the doors from the roof don’t lead anywhere that’s connected to the main complex - are the Stygian soldiers manning the castle expected to climb or fly to the higher platforms, too?

I spent many explosives blowing up doors from the roof inwards and got nowhere, too.

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imho and apparently the OP’s, Al Mareyah leaves a lot to be desired.
Here are my 2 cents.

  • it is too big. Get rid of the outer most wall.
  • move the main gate of the second wall to the opposite side of the entrance.
  • perpetual spawn, especially at the current rate is not good base design.
  • actually do a good base design… OR make it a dungeon. Meaning you enter through the main gate of the castle, as if it were an instanced dungeon.

As it stands now, it is a really cool idea, but executet poorly. I have ZERO experience in game developement or game design, just a dedicated player of many games and I’m convinced I could do a better job.

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The castle is disappointing and should be reworked. But just for clarity: It is possible to climb into the castle. There’re probably some youtube videos how, but I’ll try to write it down.

West of the main gate, the ground is higher than the walls (yes, only an idiot would build a castle like that). You can jump onto the outermost wall from there.

Run to the rocks the second wall sits upon. Climb the rocks, then carefully climb the wall. You may get shot down by archers, but you will survive - try until you get to the top.

There, avoid the wall spikes, jump onto the second wall.

You should be in an inner courtyard now. Again, climb onto the rocks the castle is built upon and climb upwards. You can reach the roof or any of the balconies. From there, use bombs or a ram to break through the wall. Kill the boss with gas bombs and poison arrows. One could melee him, but the area is so laggy that melee is just too risky.

Wait, you say, the “siege” of Al Mareyah is actually just an exploity climbing test? Yes, it is. Way, way easier than actually breaking down the doors or hacking through bugged (?) respawns.

Was it reported on Test Live? Yes, it was. Did they care? No, they didn’t.

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You can get all the way to the boss room alone and kill him. You just need to know how. I once used the trebuchet and all the fireworks just for fun, but it’s not worth it.

From the weeping ruins platform jump inside, then go left, climb, yadda yadda, enter through the broken wall, kill everyone there, loot, leave as you went in. Try first in single player, so you find the way. It’s easy. I had a video doing it, but it’s long gone. You’ll figure it out.

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The place where they put the castle is horrible , the reward is horrible , the no stopped respawn horrible and even the lag is horrible.

They need to rework it moving the castle to a place isolated to dimish lag or make it like a instance.
They need to add a real treasure room with legendary weapons and very rare recipes.
They need to add a prison with very rare thralls to rescue.
Why in the earth they a castle dont have cages/prison with prisioners but we have the patetic purge with cages and prisioners?
They need make the castle imune to magic no flying or invisible spell.
They need to add the anticlimb we have in the purges you cant climb nothing near the purge camp they shall make in the castle same thing.
For last they need to add more small bosses before the last boss.

The castle right now is just a huge waste of space with trash reward and very easy done by any player naked all the items you need you can get for free in the castle bombs , ariete and even one legendary katana.

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Here (Link) is how I go about it. (Quality will improve, just uploaded)

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If you want a proper siege then build a trebuchet and target gates to get in, as i found out walls take enormous amount of resources to break and in single player game it seems nearly impossible as everything rebuilds when you leave the area.

I don’t remember whose video was that but there’s one on how to get straight to the treasure room even without sorcery and pick up a few explosive jars on the way to make a “door” for yourself.

I personally strayed a bit from the video and found a good piece of wall with barrels behind it so when i blow up the wall piece of a treasure room up top i get barrels separating me from the commander and his guys in the room so i can always gtfo and retry if things don’t go my way.

After the commander is dead all the NPCs in the area stop respawning allowing to kill and loot them at your own pace. As you’ll find out while there’s a lot of fake doors there is a clear way to the treasure room from the ground floor and there is one way to a balcony, i could never remember which door is the real deal so when i need gold i still break the wall instead.

Feels like bs the first time you try to do it, but when you learn the exact route to the commander it’s a piece of cake!

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I just want the option to remove the castle entirely in Single Player. I raided it plenty of times in AoW. Zero incentive to raid it again as the novelty has worn off.

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if you are on PC, that is

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A couple small things, as others mentioned, it is easy to infiltrate once you know where the gaps in anti-climb are.
From there, it is trivial to snatch a Musashi’s Black Blade. Legendary Katana, probably the best in the game. The real prize is now had, sneak back out.
But if you need a large amount of gold, we can continue in.
You may want to kill an archer or two, but once you know the layout, there are enough explosives and rams within the fortress itself to blast thru an upper wall, and then snipe or poison the boss.

The boss does hit like a truck, so be careful if you do decide to melee him.
The gold piles on the floor can be looted.
There are also recipes that you can get from the library anyway.

This area reminds us that Conan was a thief as well as a warrior.
It also is a babies first primer for how PvP works, specifically base raids.
Frontal attacks are generally the worst way to go. Since NPCs will never have the capacity of player controlled characters, they instead throw an unending clown car at you.
This is good, they often have good food and higher end healing items in inventory. As well as hardened steel weapons if you rush them early enough that that would be relevant.

One danger is the potential lag/performance drop because that structure and the enemies within are very memory intensive.

As for the design, it looks like a fortress. The Outer and Inner Curtain walls are very good at mimicing concentric ring forts.
The main keep is, yes, a little nonsensical.
More placeables left sitting around would make it seem more lived in, but would ravage performance.
As for climbing options…
This game lacks propper ladders.
That’s actually a huge immersion break.
In an actual premodern fortification, areas that are only accessible via ladders dropped from above or brought to the wall are not at all uncommon. So yes, but also no, they would climb to get to posts. But they would have ladders.

The absolute worst way to engage this content is with a frontal assault using siege engines.
This content also highlights exactly how weak and wasteful siege engines are. Use bombs. Do not waste your time or resources on trebuchets or other such devices.
This is less an issue with this content as it is the state of PvP. It’s the IED meta and it has been forced for years now.
The ram is fairly efficient, but only if you know where to break. Using it at a door while going solo you will be ganked. Again, bombs are the right answer, the only real answer.

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Biggest issue I have with it is the respawning enemies. It removes all incentive to actually fight them and the back-wall bomb cheese becomes the least annoying way to break in. That shouldn’t be the case. I love fighting. I just don’t like killing a guy only to have him show up again 20 seconds later.

I think they wanted to add more in the empty rooms but due to hardware/server limitations doing so would make it a bigger laggier mess.

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Think of them as food and curative delivery services.

Like those little cluckers in Golden Axe.

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Makes you think: Should I get a C-64 Emulator and try to finally beat Golden Axe?

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Yes
Especially before whatever madness they are putting into the remake hits.

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For your defense mostly all the pve community, including me, have whined in the past for Al Mera yah.

It was whining however.

Keep playing, getting ideas, create your own roots. Al Mera yah is the best, i won’t spoil anything.

Al Mera yah is a gem of excitement!

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well, you are of course right, but considering the outer wall literally runs below a rock from where you can jump in. It is like having a fixed siege tower there.
The gates are more or less in one line. Usually they would be on opposite sides of a castle.
So yeah, 2 tiered wall systems definitely existed, if they made sense…in this case it does not make sense. As you said, the inner keep is nonsensical…the whole thing is nonsensically designed.

this game should only allow climbing with climbing gear equipped. You know, giving that thing some actual use, imho.

For making this “siege” engaging, the siege enginges should already be prebuild there…maybe with Conan commanding it, and you having assistance from some of your own perpetually spawning soldiers, once you breached the first gate. You know, give it some story, have it as a limited time event, similar to the head hunters and sacred hunt.

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It’s a training wheels situation.
The jump point from the rock cliff makes it easy…
But only for the observant, or for those who don’t mind cribbing the notes from someone else.
If we look at the raid (it’s not a siege, but then again words have lost much meaning in this game anyway, glares with hate at the Bec De Corbin and flavour text of Bane of Khostrel Kel) as training for PvP as the devs understand it, it makes perfect sense.

Hard no.
This one hates that idea.
It shares a place in esteem with the we need to move all colouration to the dyers bench to give it a reason to be used idea.
Must wear climbing gear to lift oneself up rough rocks?
Need climbing gear to climb a tree?
What type of weak and pathetic characters are we supposed to be playing?
This game already defecates all over verisimilitude on a regular basis, why not add more?
No. It’s already stupid enough that we magically cannot climb in dungeons.

However, as much as this one absolutely hates that idea in the general…
In the specific, of having some surfaces that would not be climb ok without the gear (such as sheer ice, dungeon walls, and perhaps either a tier of building material, or a particular defense that could be added to walls) that this one agrees with very much.
If Climbing gear made otherwise climbing forbidden surfaces climbable, that would actually be interesting and while niche, would pull it about on line with Breathing Masks.

As for having forces to attack, of we could add mercenary banners at least, that would be something.
Or as you note a permanent platform in place.

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