The main fun of civ is to replay history with things happening completely differently. What if the aztecs had mastered astronomy before europeans and sent ships to colonise eurasia? What if the Roman empire had never fallen? If we had to play everything exactly like it is in real life the game would be no fun!

We must remember this very important rule when making this mod. More and more I feel that we are pushing this mod towards the stereotypes of 'real' warhammer history. What if the orcs fielded small elite armies of black orcs instead of huge goblin hordes? What if the greed of the dwarves had encouraged them to master magic? What if the dark elves had been the first to discover gunpowder?

Of course, it is important to keep some of the original flavour of warhammer, or this mod would loose all meaning, but I am starting to feel tht we are forcing the player to play the game in a particular way depending on their choice of civ, rather than encouraging them. In vanilla civ you can achieve a cultural win with Caesar, but his traits and UU encourage the player to go for a war like victory. The same should be true here, chaos should have traits and UU that encourage it to pillage and conquer, but it should in no way make this the only viable strategy for that Civ.

You´re oh so true!

That is why I, for example, dislike the idea of Wonders unique to only one civ very very much.

If this idea should be implemented I´d like to see that at least some civs (for example grouped into good, evil, neutral) can race for each Wonder.

Each civ should be allowed to race for each wonder, but some civs should be encouraged to get certain specific wonders. For example, everyone can build 'The shrine of the Holy Grail' and get some benefits from it, but the Brettonians should reap the benefits if they get it. If you have one 'Special Wonder' per civ, then the game is fair!

Is it possible to have civs get bonuses when building buildings and Wonders ala stone and marble? Anyone can build the Pyramids, but if you have stone it goes twice as fast. Can the same be done for civs? Anyone can build X, but civ Y does it twice as fast.

Though I agree we shouldn't carve everything into stone. It would REALLY bother me seeing Orcs building large Museums and Universities. What about diversity then? We can simply stop modding and just put some new models in to have a bit fantasy flavor and that's it. Look at FFH. Version one is pretty generic. Every civ has quite similar chances and it's very well balanced. FFH2 makes a difference to this. You can't play every civ towards every kind of victory.(They have races which destroy every city they conquer by trait) so is this less fun then? I think the contrary. WH is and allways was more fun with maps/scenarios than without. We should design the mod the way WH history simulation is possible. And I mean possible only;)

Btw I have lot of ideas how we could change gameplay to open choices. I.e. the elves. The elves could start as generic civs and depending on the magictechs or gods they discover they could switch to Darkelves, Highelves, Woodelves within the game and then stick to the path chosen. That'll be an awesome feature adding to both freedom of choice AND authentic WH history.
Dwarfs same thing. Start of as generic Dwarfs but possibility of turning into chaos or sticking to Dwarf culture.
Something like that I already posted months ago in the old thread. There it was human civ becoming chaos civ etc. pp.
But we need a lot of programming for it. So this is pretty much future stuff. We don't even have the basics in! Speaking of that what's the progress?:p

I don't see whats wrong with having orcs with large univercities? What if man had forged an aliiance with orcs, civilising them in the process. The only thing is that orcs with universities should never happen, because orcs should be stronger at other stuff, and researching techs isn't to their advantage (they have relatively strong ancient units, and relatively weak modern units, making them strong in the ancient era and gradualy weaker). We should be able to use the warlord system of UB to make this even stronger, but we must still give the player the possibility to play as peaceful orcs.

Woodelf: Yer, this is possible with a relatively small amount of python code.


I should finish a rudimentary magic AI by saturday, and will begin work on psychology, although progress will be slow as I won't have access to civ for quite a few weeks.

Another add. Rhye wrote a revolutionary code that enable Players to switch civs once during gameplay, civilizations are generating and degenerating as it is reflected in real history. That gameexperience was the best I had since months!
Highly recommend this one.
Now what about WH?
Why not go for something similar and yet quite diverse in WH. The above mentioned elves could break apart into the three elvish poeple we know of by event. Ah well I'm to lazy now to explain everything. Play Rhye's mod and see for yourself. One of the best features is the system what civs delare war on the others. Civs there very likly will declare resonable wars most of the time. Vanilla AI doesn't really care wether it would get an advantage conquring you. In Rhyes they are forced by python or sdk don't know for sure to concentrate on warfare that can actually result in making a bigger empire. And indeed it's very hard there to win wars against the AI cause it will behave almost like a human player!

Orcs writing poems is definitly a noGo for me! I won't work on a mod that feature that and I won't play it since I want to play orcs as orcs and not ugly elves!!!

Edit: If orcs should be peaceful why bothering to give them peaceweariness???

One of the best features is the system what civs delare war on the others. Civs there very likly will declare resonable wars most of the time. Vanilla AI doesn't really care wether it would get an advantage conquring you. In Rhyes they are forced by python or sdk don't know for sure to concentrate on warfare that can actually result in making a bigger empire. And indeed it's very hard there to win wars against the AI cause it will behave almost like a human player!

That sounds really good! I always hated the way the AI declared War in Vanilla cIV. We should dig into that.

I´m not quite sure about the thing with civs breaking apart, have to think about that.

To get back to the wonders, is it possible to have certain civs get MORE benefits from a Wonder instead of giving it production bonuses? That way the Player would be really encouraged to build certain Wonders.

Still not sure where you want to go with that. We could let all civs build Nagashs pyramid but this would have to mean then the civs that builds it would have to become undead. Why should Archaon build a Shrine of the Holy Grail I ask you?
I still think some wonders should be unique. There are still plenty of wonders left for racing. And having some wonders related to alignment shouldn't be hard to do also. This is a simple xml task:(

That´s not where I want to go, But Nagashs Black pyramid could be raced for by every "evil" civ IMO, same goes for the Shrine of the Holy Grail, but only by the Human civs for example.

I want to say: let´s not make Wonders unique to one civ, but maybe to groups that seem reasonable (can be different groups for each wonder) so we can at least have some racing for EVERY Wonder.

Makes no sense to me. The holy Grail is what the Bretonnian culture is about. Nagashs pyramid is essential for Khemri since without that that civ would never have turned undead. Why bothering that much about wonder racing anyway? Imo the civs should be so much bothered by war that they can be happy to be able to build a granary from time to time:D
But seriosly there are enough wonders to race for in WH-world. All human european civs could race for Knightly orders, the magic colleges(I think each single one should be a wonder on it's own).
Highelves and Woodelves can race for elven spec wonders.
Darkelves, Chaos can race for Khorne related wonders etc.pp.
And on top of that we'll have generic wonders for all of them(like the Boodweiser Blood Bowl Arena). So what's the problem with 1 or 2 unique wonders for every civ?

Who are we to forbid the player to make his orcs write poetry?

We should just give him very little reason to write poetry, and program the orc AI to never write poetry. That way, you will never see a Orc write poetry, but they still can!

Well if you program the AI to never research for Writing if it's orcish I don't have a problem with that. Until then I prefer simply to disable that tech for them. Compromise?

Why bothering that much about wonder racing anyway? Imo the civs should be so much bothered by war that they can be happy to be able to build a granary from time to time:D

Because I just love the wonder-race :D , but that´s only my two cents.

Well, If we get enough Wonders into the mod, I don´t have a problem with every civ having the SAME number of wonders Unique to them, groupspecific wonders and generic wonders (to be true I really love the idea of having group specific wonders)

But We should have at least some wonders with nearly the same effects for different groups to build, even if the Groups sometimes overlap (for example Al-Anons Garden for Desert civs and The Floating Gardens of Lost Xholankha for New Worlders).
That´s because we should have different groups for each group specific wonders (One time the Darkelves are in the "Elves Group" one time they are in the "Evil Group" - if that makes sense to you)

EDIT: I´ll open a discussion about this topic in the Wonders and Buildings thread after the public release of the next version - I think we have other things to concentrate on for now.

Fine, lets do that.

As for wonders, why don't we make 1 UW (unique wonder) per civ and have all the other wonders available to every civ.

@Duke
Sure it depends allways on the wonder which civ it could have a meaning for.

@Olleus
Because there are wonders like the Knightly orders which would sort of fit for Bretonnia, Estalia, Empire, Tilea since all this cultures have an idea of chivalry. But Knights of the White Wolf fighting for the good of Gork and Mork is just weird. The game might have more freedom but the price is a huge loss of flavor. And I really mean HUGE here.

@Olleus
Another point is. All civs should have certain advanteges and disadvanteges which we will have to balance somehow. But the more generic stuff dominates the game the more we loose the specific flavor of the single civs.
If an Orcplayer can build Knights Panther because he can build the Knightly order of the Panther wonder(which should be prereq for this) or similar things the civ wouldn't suffer from it's handicaps anymore and easily get overpowered.
WH-tabletop lives from the diversity of the armys which makes some tactics useful and others useless. Some handycaps can be overcome by using mercenaries or ally troops but only to a limited effect. I think we should also stick to that concept. It wouldn't make fun playing against someone who would put the best troops every army has together and leave out the weak ones. No need for strategy anymore since you simply can't win. You again loose flavor and it would look quite stupid on the table btw. Same with civ.

How about having awonder just called 'Knightly Order' and then have its name depend on who builds it? That way we keep the flavour of having sensible name, but also keep the freedom of allowing Chaos to create an order of evil knights.

That's already more to my liking. But I'm still not sure if this'll work for all civs. For Chaos maybe since they are a mockery of the Old World Human Culture. But I see no equivalent to a Knightly Order with the Orcs or Skaven i.e. And I want to see ALL the Models we make in the game;)

But other than with Knightly orders this idea would indeed work with Vault's Smithy i.e. since many cultures can have something like a Great Smithy and instead of making it a small wonder for every civ we could go this way then:thumbsup:

I do like this thread and the ideas presented, it is exactly how the mod should be if the possibilities are there :)

For example with Elves, I'd very much like it if there could be up to three Elf civs per game, and there could be three techs available, one for each of the three types of elf, and each civ gets one path to research the technology, whoever gets there first becomes that type of elf and the other paths are closed off. Start all in the forests? Go for the Wood Elf tech then!

There is the issue as well of how much freedom there should be... orcversities? Well actually 1000's of years before the "present day" Warhammer world, goblins had an advanced civilisation, with such learning centres across their lands. Though they all got destroyed and goblins generally became slaves to the orcs, and that was that. I think there should be elements of guidance from the designers to the players, for example Orcs and Goblins might have some units only available in a warmongering civic, but if the player or AI really wants, they can become a more peaceful variant and build those goblin universities after all...

Goblins had an advanced civilization?! :lol: Great that's totally new for me. Yes we should find a balance between design guiding the player and freedom. However this will take a long time programming all this code so for now I'll stick to disabling some techs. But on the long run if we can make it more free and at the same time preserve the WH flavor of the game I would gladly allow the player to build universities for the future Goblin civ but only if we can make the AI not to force it by itself. Orcs on the other hand are simply to stupid and I think no university could change that.

Mr. Do .. that idea is simply AWESOME! The only problem is the leader .. or is it possible get the apropriate leader at a later time in the game?

The Goblin civilisation is new to me too, but it's certainly possible. Look at the Giants. They were a noble people that lived atop the mountains. Now they are stupid luggish brutes that live as mercenaries to eat smaller beings.

and Ploepelpengel .. i'm on your side in the discussion .. some races shouldn't be doing certain things .. but you can easily overcome that. Simply make the university a Shaman's Market, Shaman Gathering or something. Give it the same benefits, and voila ..

I think i'm too late for the discussion so i'll keep it short .. I think there can be race-unique wonders (grail for Brettonia), certain-race-unique wonders (all Khorne followers for example) and 'normal' wonders. Just a small amount, 1 or 2 per race and only certain-race-unique if we have good fluff.

and Ploepelpengel .. i'm on your side in the discussion .. some races shouldn't be doing certain things .. but you can easily overcome that. Simply make the university a Shaman's Market, Shaman Gathering or something. Give it the same benefits, and voila ..

I think i'm too late for the discussion so i'll keep it short .. I think there can be race-unique wonders (grail for Brettonia), certain-race-unique wonders (all Khorne followers for example) and 'normal' wonders. Just a small amount, 1 or 2 per race and only certain-race-unique if we have good fluff.

Right and right, I totally agrre with you and your points DJ (Shaman Gathering or whatever it should be called is a nice name for the Universities of the Whaagh! and give a good WH gfeeling to it) :goodjob:

I have to state that I´m generally against changing civs during the game or becoming another civ. I´d like to have all civ as they are from the beginning not going from generic elves to Dark Elves etc. We should leave such things for Rhye to do in his mod and should not try to implement every good idea that is out there on the forums into our mod, but instead try to give it a good feeling and I think I would get it more with civs staying what they are, for a fantasy theme.

Scenarios with such things can still be done, but I really don´t like it for the "vanilla" WH FB mod.

Keep in mind the elves in the ancient era ARE generic already. They just have different hair color mostly that's all. Also this is no idea of Rhye but my own. In Rhyes mod you switch civs not change them neither in appearance nor gameplay. And as I said with chaos I had the idea long ago in the old thread where I didn't even know of Rhyes catapult or lets say recognized it.
This would indeed be a feature totally unique to our mod! I just mentioned Rhyes mod because it gives the closest experience to what I thought of up to now.

Btw: not all civs would act like that. But you were asking for more freedom and heres an interesting way to get it!

But I also could imagine humans starting of as simple Barbs and later founding the Empire i.e. endless possibilities here.

Yes, I don't think it's too radical a path to take... instead of choosing which Elf civ you want to be on the main screen, you make that choice in the first tech that you discover. That does of course make difficulties in what the actual civ would be (Can the city list be controlled afterwards? Leader name?), but I'm sure it's easily modded... "if civ discovers forestry, change leadername to Orion"; it can probably even be done with leaderhead images too, and assuming that custom images will be made for the elves, we could have one generic elf leader image and a different wood/ dark/ high elf variant based therein...

But yeah, this is all long way off down the line kinda stuff...

It should definitly be possible even later than the first tech(It's possible to switch civs, convert cities and units to that new civ like in Rhyes' Mod we just would have to adjust that code to our preferences), which I would prefer-so you can make the ancient elves also in interesting part of the game to play.

Its an interesting dilema about how much freedom to offer players. There is no right answer, at the end of the day its just personal preference. I'll list a few of things that we talked through when we considered the options. Hopefully to add an additional perspective (and hopefully not muddy the waters).

Players should have access to multiple viable options. If they feel like they are being railroaded down one path it will be the game playing them instead of them playing the game and they won't enjoy it. Likewise offering 3 options and having one be more efficient than the other two is no real choice. Instead all you have built is a "noob trap" (where inexperienced players are punished for their inexperience by being presented with less viable options). Noob traps are inevitable in play decisions, but they should be minimized in build decisions. For every player that wants to play inefficently and build an orcish intellectual society there will be 10 that do it without real consideration and suffer for it. It will also be frustrating to be presented with an option for Johnny^1 players to have an ineffcient option sitting in their build lists.

But I agree with Lord Olleus initial assertion, the game has to develop differently than a specific storyline if you want to have any sort of replayability. The evil civs can become good in FfH and the good civs can become evil. Each faction should have strengths and weaknesses and if you decide that research is the weakness of the orcs then maybe they shouldnt have libraries. But they still need to have multiple other paths that can follow to victory. Can they excel as a religious civilization? How about world exploration? Culture? Military? Naval? Etc etc. Let them work under multiple viable builds, but maybe not all builds.

As for the civ specific wonders. We have gone around and around on them. We havent added them because once you make a wonder civ specific there is no challenge to building it anymore. The player will get it regardless of the actions of the other civs, since they will never have access to it. In FfH we start each civ with a resource (mana type) and a lot of wonders require mana to be built. So in effect we dispose certain civs to certain wonders, but they can always be beat to them by other civs who go through the extra effort to gain the required resource. Your idea of having wonders that are available to a set of factions is good too, but it make fall into the first scenrio (only one civ can build) in maps where only one civ in that group exists.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Please dont take it as anything more than the ramblings of someone who loves talk about game design.

Kaelspeak:

^1 Johnny: One of the 3 player archetypes, Johnny's want to build the most efficient empire possible and delight in beating the game at ever increasing difficulty levels.

Johnny?!:lol:
Great! Yeah lot of these guys are out there and very likly I count myself to them too:mischief:
I too don't like having options to build that are ineffective to my civ that's why I don't like orclibraries. It's difficult though to find something for orcs other than conquest that fits their flavor(well conquest and domination:( ).
I wouldn't mind having only this option for them. They are simply THE perfect race for Warmongerers!
Chaos shares the warmongering but there I don't see any problem going for religios and even techconquest.
Imo I still vote for that single option for orcs. Players who like to win with other options than conquest would choose another race anyway I'd say! That doesn't mean winning wars should be easy for the orcplayer on the contrary it should be a really hard challenge.

About the three options I guess you mean the elves changing to their respective race after the ancient era. I'm not sure if we really need to avoid any thinkable noobtrap here. For noobs it will possibly be the choice of flavor more than strategy anyway. That's exactly what I think should suffice for noobs - flavor. I prefer (considering gamemechanics) designing a game that finally will get some approvement by more advanced players to be true than by noobs only. I don't know yet how we will get to that stage since the gameplaydesign imo isn't really started yet but on the long run that's my egoistic conclusion here - better make it hard for noobs than boring for advanced gamers since it's got to be a game at least I/we want to play:crazyeye:
That's of course if's no balance possible to satisfy both.

Johnny?!:lol:
Great! Yeah lot of these guys are out there and very likly I count myself to them too:mischief:
I too don't like having options to build that are ineffective to my civ that's why I don't like orclibraries. It's difficult though to find something for orcs other than conquest that fits their flavor(well conquest and domination:( ).
I wouldn't mind having only this option for them. They are simply THE perfect race for Warmongerers!
Chaos shares the warmongering but there I don't see any problem going for religios and even techconquest.
Imo I still vote for that single option for orcs. Players who like to win with other options than conquest would choose another race anyway I'd say! That doesn't mean winning wars should be easy for the orcplayer on the contrary it should be a really hard challenge.

The problem with a civ that is tuned to one goal is that it offers the players only one real option (which is the same as no real options). Therefor the civ becomes boring to play. Players may have the option to try different strategies by picking different starting civs but thats like saying that if you develop a boardgame with only one options players have multiple options as they can select to play different board games. Thats probably a bad example but I hope it makes some sense.

You may want to find another goal for the orcs, to give them more depth. Im not sure what victory conditions you have planned, but if the orcs are as able to accomplish other ones besides domination it may go a ways toward making them more versatile.

About the three options I guess you mean the elves changing to their respective race after the ancient era. I'm not sure if we really need to avoid any thinkable noobtrap here. For noobs it will possibly be the choice of flavor more than strategy anyway. That's exactly what I think should suffice for noobs - flavor. I prefer (considering gamemechanics) designing a game that finally will get some approvement by more advanced players to be true than by noobs only. I don't know yet how we will get to that stage since the gameplaydesign imo isn't really started yet but on the long run that's my egoistic conclusion here - better make it hard for noobs than boring for advanced gamers since it's got to be a game at least I/we want to play:crazyeye:
That's of course if's no balance possible to satisfy both.

I wasnt refering to the 3 elven types, I think thats a really cool idea. "Noob traps" aren't appreciated by anyone. For inexperienced players it makes the game harder than it need be, for experienced players the bad option just clutters up their menus. So I agree with your statement that you can find options that appeal to both sorts.

Ok think I understood better now what you mean with noob traps(sorry for my english again-first read I sometimes only undertand half of what's written:blush: ). And I agree largly with what you said about that. Civs should have more than one way to win and each way should be interesting to go.
I still disagree about that with you refering to orcs though. I think the mod will be in general more focused on war than FFH(it's Warhammer after all) so what we got to do is make war in civ more interesting by opening more (and diverse) ways to win them- tactics must be important not sheer numbers(even for orcs).
I still can't think of any other way for the orcs to win the game than warfare(that's simply their nature) other races should and no doubt will have other options too. But what we can do with orcs is maybe make them the most interesting civ for warfare. They have the most diverse coretroops of all WH-races at least of what I know. So it might be interesting to indeed merge them with the goblins totally and make up some choices in game which will greatly affect their tactical options. Will they rely only on their gods powers and stay savages(Savage orcs could get stronger with growing confidence in religion and get wartattoo-upgrades) will they adopt limited techadvancement and gain better weapons but loose a bit of their divine powers or will they be dominated by they crazed nightgoblin culture which opens again other options of getting lots of crazy stuff to throw at the enemy but neither have the power of religion nor many strong orcs.

1. Savages
Strong magic
average fighting
2. orcs
weak magic
strong fighters
3.Nightgoblins
average magic
crazed beserk tactic fighting
(strong attack-weak defense)

I really like your O&G idea Ploeperpengel, but imo one choice shouldn't seclude the other. One of the great things about the O&G is indeed the diversity in the army. The option to choose a specific cult is a good one, but if you choose a Night Goblin Cult, it should still be possible to build the other units too. Otherwise the fraction will be far more boring than it could and should be!

The armybook gives some nice examples. In the back different flavoured armies are described in alternative army lists (try-outs). This lists represent nightgoblin hordes, orc hordes, hill hordes etc. Whatever the flavour, most troops are available, BUT flavoured troops are less expensive (special and rare instead of core) than not-flavoured troops. It think that should be a better option.

Another way to approach it is the region approach. In Orc civilization (can you call it that? :)) every region/hold/valley/etc has different fighting techniques and different troops. Maybe we can add something like that. For example: - Night Goblins can only be build near mountains. That city will then become a Night Goblin Hold. Then it would even be kewl to really choose for a night-goblin-only-city by building some improvement that only lets you build Night Goblins (which it not good because you want choices and diversity) but increases the speed they are build with (which is good abviously). In this way the player can decide with every city what city it becomes (neutral/normal-speed unitbuilding or flavoured/high-speed unitbuilding).

That's a really nice idea that last one, DJ! I'm not sure why it shouldn't be possible either. A programmer would have to define that there must be a mountain in the city radius to build a night goblin in it. I love that!

That's a really nice idea that last one, DJ! I'm not sure why it shouldn't be possible either. A programmer would have to define that there must be a mountain in the city radius to build a night goblin in it. I love that!

It cold be implemented on other species too:
- Savage Orcs are savage because of the heat in the desert, it gives them a (even more) lack of intelligence and more furiousity. We could do the some for them as for the NG, only then when a desert is in radius.
- Forests for Forest goblins. (You can even plant a forest to get them! ;))

But my main point is the city idea .. (i kinda like that :mischief: ). Every O&G city can build every common unit. In addition they need certain environment for certain units. If the city has access to this environment it can choose to be a specific cult/hold/city/whatever to build the special units faster, but make some common units impossible (in that city only!). Do you like anything in this idea?

Ploe, DJ, I really like those ideas about Orcs and Goblins. they force the player to make tactical decisions and not to only pump out unit after unit to accomplish his warmongering Victory-Conditions.

The units that can be build should be defined by buildings maybe. Buildings that are needed for Nightgoblins for example could only be buildable if the City has 1 or 2 peaks or Hills in its city-radius, same for Savageorcs with deserts and Forestgoblins with Fotrests - I think you get the idea.

sounds great! i think we can get more diversity in other civs easily... We could create many options by techs also, so you dont exclude night goblins and savage orcs or advanced weapons, but it simply will take longer to research bot trees...

btw is it possible to define a very general tree which has different effects on different civs ?! or even different techtrees?!

Maybe we should more types of military victories:

1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)

That way, even orcs have a choice of victory !

Maybe we should more types of military victories:

1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)

That way, even orcs have a choice of victory !

Sounds nice to me, especially the pillaging variant :goodjob:

BTW Olleus, if we want to do the things with certain "types" of Orc units becoming cheaper with buildings we would need even more UNIT_COMBAT types... that leads me to another question: did you start working on adding those UNIT_COMBAT tags for artillery and other groups (Archer etc.) for the BuildingInfos.xml, or are you still working on the magic-system?

How about a Razer victory? X number of cities burned to the ground. :)

Edit: This is mostly a response to the first several posts in the thread, I didn't follow through with the discussion.

I see your point Olleus (I live in a democracy so I don't recognize your title ;)) but I think that it's dangerous to go too far with that. I mean if you think about it, you can't let every civ do everything the same way (i.e. giving them freedom to do things any way they want) without basically making them the same. In fact, I think that's one of the weak points of vanilla civ - not enough difference between civilizations (oh and did you notice how many mods exist that give religions more flavor, same thing). The UUs only last for an age or so, and the traits are, well just not enough. At least personally, many of my games felt (and even to an extent developed) the same way, not in a turn-by-turn way, but in the larger picture definitely.

Now as you point out, in vanilla one of the beauties of the game is alternate history and so while I still feel the civs could have had more differences, it's not a big deal. Given that all civs are humans, that are essentially the same, it's easy to accept that alternate version of civs.

Warhammer universe however presents a completely different picture. For one, there are many more differences between the civs thematically, i.e. different races and even different existential states (the undead ;)). The conflicts and the differences are also much more fleshed out and somewhat exaggerated because being a fantasy setting that's the idea (yeah a good story will always have shades of grey rather than black and white, but I think it's better to have "256" shades of grey instead of "65,000", if you know what I mean). In fact, the whole warhammer universe could be viewed as somewhat of an alternate history.

In the end though, whatever my or your opinions are on the topic of (for example) allowing orcs to write poetry, it all comes down to the perception of most players and how it affects the fun factor of the game. When people load a Warhammer mod they do it with certain expectations - one of them is that orcs are savage "people" that would rather stick your head on a pole than talk to you about philosophy. Of course that doesn't mean you have to force them to be at war always, but if I were to open a city window while playing with orcs, and see there an option to build a university I would probably go "hmmm, that's odd *shrug*", and it will probably take away a tiny bit of immersion.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents (well more like a quarter really ;)) on the topic.

I like that new victory types.
1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)
and 6
City razer:goodjob:
Way to go for me.

I'm not sure about having prereq buildings for EVERY unit. If it's doable I prefer the terrain idea at least for some. An alternative would be also a resource(for Nightgoblins-Mushrooms, for other civs mushrooms just provide food) that must be within cityradius to build units. Forestgoblins could go with a building maybe though(venomous-spider farming is what they do)

@seZ
it's already possible to have different effects for different techs by techs(UUs, Unique buildings) but I think there's no way around unique techs for some of the civs.

I'm not sure about having prereq buildings for EVERY unit. If it's doable I prefer the terrain idea at least for some. An alternative would be also a resource(for Nightgoblins-Mushrooms, for other civs mushrooms just provide food) that must be within cityradius to build units. Forestgoblins could go with a building maybe though(venomous-spider farming is what they do)

Didn´t mean that every unit has a prereq building, only some special units, which we should decide upon. And if the Player has to construct a building first (and I understood that you want it to be tough for players to build those, because they have a constant need for units and therefore can only construct buildings from time to time) he really has to do some tactical decisions, that are harder than "just" building a city in the right place and by that way getting the option to train certain units.

And remember one point: in my suggestion the buildings for some units would require the things that the units would require in the case of no prereq buildings (does that make sense :confused: ).

The City-Razer thing would be nice for some of the "evil races", especially Chaos.

Ok maybe yes;) . As said for forestgoblin it would. They could need a temple of the spidercult or something like that to build. Nightgoblins could go with a mushroomfarm maybe.

well, if you want you could go with the humans and elves like that: be almost the same in the ancient era, then come to a point where you have to build a wonder, if you build the death king pyramid you become the tomb kings, if you build the great forge, you get sigmars hammer and become the emporer of the empire ;) if you build the altar of the chaos gods you become corrupted... or if you do another thing you become cathay, nippon etc. what ever... no idea how this would develop ;)

thats the same with the elves, differentiating by somethng else...

or you let the races be the race from start on and do that buildings thing, what duke mentioned etc... i wouldnt have a problem with having preset races

Im sorry, but i really dont like this whole "Humans and elves start out identical" thing. thats why you can choose what civ you want at the start. What if you were racing towards the 'Woodelf' tech or whatever, and then one turn away, some other elven sect got there first? then you would have no choice in what civ you will get. same with humans.
if this idea is implemented, i will be forced to stop with this mod. it will remove all fun from the game for me.

I think that, if you REALLY must have civs splitting up all over the place, you could make random events, like great people popping up called "revolutionaries", who run around converting your cities to another elven civ. for example if you are woodelves, and you have met the darkelves, and a 'revolutionary' happens to pop up, then he can run around converting your cities to the dark elf cause.
Mind you i really hate this idea also, and i have no idea why i just typed it all up:crazyeye:

On the Orc dispute:
Befor i start i just want to say that i agree with Ploe and DJ on this one.

Orcs are a very misunderstood race i think. just because thay are a bit tougher and uglyer and cruder dosnt mean they are idiots. there have actually been quite a few intelegent orcs around (sure thay got killed because of thier ideas, but what if they weren't killded??) I think Orc definately have the potential to be an intelegent race if they really put some effort into it. Who was it that said something like "an orc paints himself red in order to make himself faster, because they believe red things to be fast?" any way it was something like that. I say just rename the orc univercities and other educational and scientific buildings to things like:

Library: Cave of Carving
Uni: The Great Green (places where shamans can gather thier energy an education)
Research buildings: Shaman Council / Council of elders / Shaman Gathering / Stone of Gork / Stone of Mork etc etc

Goblins are also very misunderstood, and i believe that whoever said that Gobbos had an advanced civ at one point in history is correct, though i have no evidence of this.

I like the idea of the mountains = night gobbos, desert = savages etc thing, and think that would work very well


I also think that this mod and the current layout of the civ is not too restricting on players and i think that there is plenty of diversity.
(end of my rant ;) )

I also like the idea of having terrain specific units. They encourage the player to "migrate" towards its natural habitat, without forcing him to. Thumbs up from me!

I'm still no friend of orcuniversities even not renmed ones as long they receive something like that from the same techs. I really prefer making some greenskin techs and let unitdiversity come from the terrain mainly. Unitstrength could be altered by the strenght of the whaaagh.(currently only two different techs that represent that in the mod: whaaagh! and whaaagh!!!) But I think we could pimp that up a bit.

@seZ and PL
I never meant we should ONLY have generic ancients. But there are some civ where this idea makes sense for me:

Elves->High-, Wood-, Darkelves

Unberogen->Empire, Bretonnia(?), Estalia(?), Tilea(?), Sylvanians!

Dwarfs->Dwarfs, Chaos Dwarfs

btw: PL it shouldn't be a problem to have premapscenarios where everything is set up from the beginning even if we ever come to include some of his ideas. Maybe it even would be possible to have a config file for it for noobs to use and choose to enable this option or not. Any way it's future talk but we can decide on this subject with a poll later.

Still dont like the 'generic ancients idea, but as you say it is only future talk.

Ok for you nasty critics:p
What about giving the player the ability to choose the elven civ after he reached their prereqs and not automatically change them? If another civ chose the same before they should just be a limit what Leader you choose(no doubles with leaders). This should work similar to other generic civ concepts.

its a waste of effort though because it wont add anything nice:sad: but you can do it if you REALLY HAVE TO. but if you do upload a version with and one without that option, or make it so you can turn that mod off if you dont want it.

seems like a lot of extra work for very little gain.

exactly my point Olleus:D

How about having awonder just called 'Knightly Order' and then have its name depend on who builds it? That way we keep the flavour of having sensible name, but also keep the freedom of allowing Chaos to create an order of evil knights.
Exactly that script we could use now for religious buildings!!!



And summarize the rest:

The idea of "generic" civs turning into another strangely doesn't find acceptance by all members but most important the one who would have to do most of the work for it doesn't approve it allthough you all like the idea of civil wars and the idea I mentioned (thinking of gamemechanics) is not much different too - after a civ splitted up by civil war - giving the player also the chance to choose on which side he wants to fight on further. So I still can't really understand your reasoning here but anyway I give up and dump it...until I find someone willing to produce the needed code for that:D


Orcs and Goblins:

-will have unitbuilding abilities based on terraintiles


We will include new victory types:

1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)
and 6 City razer

:lol: I dont think you get to choose which side of a civil war you go on. the player HAS to stay with his initial civ, and the REBLES become a new civ that the player has no influence over (is that right Olleus?) thats what i was thinking anyway.

By all means, if you can find someone to do the script for youre generic civ idea, go ahead and do it, but if you do, Please keep the mod as 2 separate files then, one with generic civs, and one without generic civs:) so we can choose if we want it (thats you i guess) and those that dont (thats me)


All the other ideas you summarized are nice though. i like them.

Sigh I meant concerning the gamemechanics of course it's not the same! And I still think it would give much more gain than just civil war cause it opens a path to endless scenario possibilities having the gamemechanic for it. But anyway let's dump it and get to serious business-I mean something more likely to get realized in the near future.

OK then :)

Have we decided what we're going to do with wonders yet?