To make things a little easier on us this thread is ONLY for the Alignment and Religion Tech Tree.

Please share your ideas. I will update the first post as we go.

Alignment Techs:

Good:
- Guidance Of The Valar, Preservation Of Lore

Neutral:
- None

Evil:
- Slavery, Tainted Knowledge

Religion Techs:

- Worship of the Shadow - Requires: Alignment: EVIL

Some of my Ideas:

Alignment Techs:

- Evil: Slavery
- Neutral: Cultural Tolerance
- Good:

Religious Techs: - requires correct Alignment/Race/Civ

- Good: Light of Aman
- Khazâd: Teachings of Aulë
- Neutral: Guidance of the Valar
- Shadow: Corruption of Melkor

I believe some of you also had some very good ideas, so please copy them here so we can discuss them. We should do this one by one. So post your overall suggestions, thenwe will do this in order to get it done quickly and efficiently.

I suggest we start with Alignment Techs. Finalize one before moving on to the next, so we don't miss anything. Let us begin with:

Alignment:

Evil:
-

As above, one of my suggestions would be:

Slavery

Yeah, Slavery should definately be an evil tech. Can't think of anything else atm though.

Updated Evil with Slavery in 1st post as suggested.

Slavery is good. I wouldn't know a better one. Maybe forbidden knowledge or something.
For good, maybe something like Guidance of the Valar and/or Preservation of Lore.

Updated with Berenthors suggestions.

I'm not sure yet what they should do. The preservation of lore maybe something like enabling a wonder that gives you a free technology (like the oracle) and maybe a certain academy/university/library type of thing.

Or perhaps it just grants you bonuses to your science output for each typoe of science building. Increaseing each by +1 Beakers or something like that. Although, enabling a Wonder would be cool too.

That might even be better than another building, just increasing output of certain building(s). And we can also do the wonder in it (maybe quite expensive). For the religion/religion techs, there are some ideas in the religion thread. Maybe first choose which religions we want before looking into the techs.

True. We will leave off the Religion ones until we have finalized the religions themselves.

I think I would rename Forbidden Knowlegde to Tainted Knowledge, to show that Melkor didn't think of anything himself, but twisted what was allready there.

I like the suggestions for good; agree that Preservation of Lore should grant a bonus to existing buildings, maybe Guidance of Valar can enable some Good civic?

Yeah that is a great idea. Maybe some civic as a counter to the slavery civic maybe also? I think indeed that tainted knowledge is better. Now for some neutral ones :hmm:.

Maybe we shouldn't add neutral techs, to make picking sides more of a temptation then staying in the middle.

That is actually not a bad idea. It will at least give more incentive to choose sides. I like it. Is the slavery civic now only available with slavery (the tech)?

That would be my proposal (and would need evil alignment as well, so you can't research it, switch to slavery and become good).

Yeah we have to make sure the benefits and civics and stuff that you get from a certain allignment are lost when you switch allignment. But maybe this is already done when you have an allignment as prerequisite for a civic or building or unit or whatever.

I can agree with no Neutral Techs. I will change it to Tainted Knowledge as well.

Perhaps the Civic could be called Free Peoples.

EDIT: Changed for just for Sengir :lol:

Shouldn't that be Free Peoples then?

If you want to be politically correct (in a Modern sense), yes. I will change it immediately.

Free Peoples actually sounds pretty good for a civic name (or something else that's more like the State of Being a Free People).

Agreed on no Neutral Techs. As I have said before, we want polarization.

I like the name.

So, unless anyone else has suggestions for Alignment Techs, those are done. Two each sounds good, unles we want more.

Now we are just down to the Religious Techs, but for that we first have to finish the Religion discussion. We should probably get some more work done on that soon. As we are just about finished units however, I would recommend getting that out of the way first.

Now that we have finalized Religions to 3 for the first release, we can now start on their Techs. Lets here some suggestions. I am drawing a blank right now and will be gone until after 5pm EST. Hopefully I'll come up with something dureing the day. Until then. Share!

The Valar and Aulë ones are lategame, the Shadow one isn't as much.

Valar: Crusade (or whatever), enabling some civic the Bannor's Crusade one.
Aulë: Advanced Mithril Working, gives a major upgrade to tiles with Mithril and adds some extra bonuses to units with Mithril weaponry
Shadow: Disregard for Life (or something similar), that enables civics like Slavery (and maybe a Sacrifice the Weak-esque thing)

I will add some of your suggestions, but I think that the Slavery Tech we already have would add it as a Civic.

Whoops, not too familiar with the core tech tree. It could still have some sort of Sacrifice the Weak thing.

Slavery is in the Alignment Tech Tree in post 1 directly above the Religion Tech Tree. ;)

:P FAIL

Oh well...

Maybe for the shadow something like corruption that spreads more?

I'm not too sure we need techs based on religions, we have enough techs with requirements as is IMHO. As for T_F's suggestions: I like Crusade, but the Aulë one should be/is a dwarven tech and fits better as such, Disregard of Life, don't like the name too much.

If we add something for the shadow I'd agree with Berenthor to have something for enhanced shadow spreading. Something like 'Corruption of the Soul', though as said, I'm not too sure that we should tie it to religion rather then evil.

True. There's so much correspondence between religion and alignment that it's almost pointless to have both religion and alignment techs.

We can just eliminate the Religion based Techs, that doesn't bother me. We can come up with more Alignment Techs or just leave them as is. That is why these are the "Discussion" Threads. Too work all that stuff out. :goodjob:

Okay then. How about this. Each Religion is its own tech available upon AGE OF THE STARS.

Religion Techs:

- Light of the Valar (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can Build Temple)
- Runes of Aulë (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can build Temple)
- Worship of the Shadow (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can build Temple)
- Inquisition (Inquisitor National Unit: 3)

A Further Idea:

I am thinking we should attach 1 single building to each. A Temple (Temple of the Valar, Temple of Aulë, Temple of the Shadow) that grants +1 Happiness, +1 Production & +1 Culture. That activates the Religion in that city. However, you can only build the Temple upon switching to the proper Religion. Also, though you may in the end have multiple Temples in a city, you only gain the bonuses from the one corresponding to your current Religion.

The Temple is how you acitvely spread your Religion. Passive spreading still takes place through normal means.

Having the Religion present in your city without the Temple grants you a +1 Happiness (If it is your current state religion). Thus, with a Temple in your City, you would have a total of +2 Happiness, +1 Production & +1 Culture.

We could also use the Inquisition Mod but change it so you can only use the Inquisitor Unit within your own Cities. If we do this, we could give a -1 Happiness per non State Religion in your city if you have a State Religion. You gain no benefits and incure no penalties if you have no State Religion.

I like the ideas. I agree that we should limit the techs to the founding ones. The idea of the temples is very good I think, building a temple means spreading the religion (this is easily doable in Python). Maybe we can say that when you discover a religion tech when someone else has founded it already, you still get the religion in one of your cities. Then after a number of turns it disappears if you don't adopt it. Also, I'm not sure about the inquisitions. This only is neccessary I would say when we have multiple religions in a city or when we have a religious victory setting.

Okay then. How about this. Each Religion is its own tech available upon AGE OF THE STARS.

Religion Techs:

- Light of the Valar (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can Build Temple)
- Runes of Aulë (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can build Temple)
- Worship of the Shadow (Enables the Religion, Appears in Capital City if adopted, Can build Temple)
- Inquisition (Inquisitor National Unit: 3)

A Further Idea:

I am thinking we should attach 1 single building to each. A Temple (Temple of the Valar, Temple of Aulë, Temple of the Shadow) that grants +1 Happiness, +1 Production & +1 Culture. That activates the Religion in that city. However, you can only build the Temple upon switching to the proper Religion. Also, though you may in the end have multiple Temples in a city, you only gain the bonuses from the one corresponding to your current Religion.

The Temple is how you acitvely spread your Religion. Passive spreading still takes place through normal means.

Having the Religion present in your city without the Temple grants you a +1 Happiness (If it is your current state religion). Thus, with a Temple in your City, you would have a total of +2 Happiness, +1 Production & +1 Culture.

We could also use the Inquisition Mod but change it so you can only use the Inquisitor Unit within your own Cities. If we do this, we could give a -1 Happiness per non State Religion in your city if you have a State Religion. You gain no benefits and incure no penalties if you have no State Religion.
Good ideas, I like them. I think I'd go with unhappiness for non-state religion.

Maybe we can say that when you discover a religion tech when someone else has founded it already, you still get the religion in one of your cities. Then after a number of turns it disappears if you don't adopt it.
If we can make it disappear after a number of turns, I'm all for it. Sounds good.



I would like to rename the Temple to something else, as there was no real worshipping in Arda, so I'd go for that implies meditation rather then worship. For the evil religion we can have an altar (sacrificial altar?) or something similar.

Inquisitors should be renamed as well if we are going to include them IMHO

Some ideas for temple names:
Valar/Eru: Honered Trees or Holy Trees
Aule: Stonewarden of Crafting
Melkor: Sacrificial Altar or Temple (in the book it was called Temple I think that the Numenorians build to honor Melkor)

Sounds a lot better. I know it was a Temple the Numenorians built, but I think that was an exception rather then a rule.

Yes, I was thinking Temple because of the Numenoreans. Not sure what we could rename them myself.

I like the suggestions of Berenthor.

We could take religion out. It does seem to have been a more personal matter than most other worlds/books/real life. It wasn't an organized religious institution as we know it in most places.

It might fit the flavour of Arda more to leave it out.

There were no wars over religion in Arda and no attempted conversions. Everyone accepted that all of these people existed and gave thanks in the appropriate manner based up the situation at hand.

I believe I've also suggested leaving religions out. It seems to make more sense.

Yeah, we kinda had this discussion allready. I'm still not opposed to it, depending on how much trouble it would cause to remove ut.

Berenthor, what are your thoughts on the idea of possibly dropping the Religion idea?

I personnally find the religions like we have them now (three) with only one temple quite nice but I can see why you want to remove them. I'm not sure to be honest. For me, the religions could bring quite a nice way of spreading corruption for example later on, but not sure.

Well, think on it. This is something we need to decide on quickly. We all seem to be ambivalent towards having it or not. I don't mind including it, but we do seem to be having some difficulty in deciding how to incorporate it. I am fine with having it in, otherwise I probably would not have come up with the ideas I did on my own without being asked.

So, we should make a final decision on this.

Barring the elimination of Religion these are my suggestions for prerequisites:

Alignment Techs:

Guidance Of The Valar:
- Requries: Alignment: Good, AGE OF THE STARS
Preservation Of Lore:
- Requires: Alignment: Good, Tradition Keeping
Slavery:
- Requires: Alignment: Evil & AGE OF THE STARS
Tainted Knowledge:
- Requries: Alignment: Evil & Tradition Keeping

Religion Techs:

Light of the Valar:
- Requires: Alignment: Good & Guidance of the Valar
Runes of Aulë:
- Requies: Alignment: Neutral & AGE OF THE STARS
Worship of the Shadow:
- Requires: Alignment: Evil & Slavery

Once we have agreement here after discussions, we can call this finalized.

I don't think the religions need a prereq. A lot depends on how we want to implement it though. I think we need to discuss religion itself a bit more before deciding on this.

Alignment Techs look good.

The idea of teh Religion Prereq' is that you are proving yourself on the road to that belief. It is just a suggestion however.

Also, I agree that we should probably make that final decision on whether Religion is in or out first.

Updated List:

Alignment Techs:

Guidance Of The Valar:
- Requries: Alignment: Good, AGE OF THE STARS
Preservation Of Lore:
- Requires: Alignment: Good, Tradition Keeping
Slavery:
- Requires: Alignment: Evil & AGE OF THE STARS
Tainted Knowledge:
- Requries: Alignment: Evil & Tradition Keeping

Religion Techs:

Light of the Valar:
- Requires: Alignment: Good
Runes of Aulë:
- Requies: None
Worship of the Shadow:
- Requires: Alignment: Evil


Do we want to have Both Light of the Valar & Runes of Aulë open to both Good & Neutral Alignments or are they limited as I have written them above?

I hope to have this one finalized either tonight or tomorrow. We are that close.

I would drop the requirements from Runes of Aulë (I don't think that that particular religion has much to do with alignment). Keep Good as requirement for Light of the Valar

Updated as suggested.

Updated List:

Alignment Techs:

Guidance Of The Valar:
- Requries: Alignment: Good, AGE OF THE STARS
Preservation Of Lore:
- Requires: Alignment: Good, Tradition Keeping
Slavery:
- Requires: Alignment: Evil & AGE OF THE STARS
Tainted Knowledge:
- Requries: Alignment: Evil & Tradition Keeping

Religion Techs:

Light of the Valar:
- Requires: None
Runes of Aulë:
- Requies: None
Worship of the Shadow:
- Requires: None


I have removed all prerequisites from the Religion Techs. If we incorporate Religions, this will the Finalized list, am I correct?

So, just to double check so I can either Finalize this or we can continue discussing it. Is the above list in the previous post a good choice? If so, should we consider the Alignment/Religion Tech Tree Finalized?

Seems good to me.

Fine by me. If we go with no religion or only the shadow religion we would have no religion techs or only the shadow one.

I'm still in favor of dropping all religions except the shadow, and thus dropping all religion techs except 'Worship of the Shadow' as well.

Agreed. This way we can also add becoming more evil to the shadow religion (having it in a city for example and having it as state religion) and use the inquisition from FFH2 to remove it from cities (could rename it bringing of light or blessings of the vala).

I would go with 'Bringing the Light' (as the Vala were seldom directly involved)

I like the idea. 'Bringing the Light' sounds good to me.

Sounds good to me as well.

#1:We will drop Religion except for Worship of the Shadow for now.

#2: Worship of the Shadow will be the only Religious Tech.

#3: We will incorporate "Bringing the Light" Inquisitorial Element.

Just one last thing to decide. Should we limit that Tech to only be able to be researched by Evil Civs? I think that would be appropriate, but what do you think?

Yes, evil only. We dont want everybody running around with it.

Updated first post.

Definitely evil only, otherwise we'd have to write the AI to avoid it.

I thought it was mainly the men of Rhun who worshiped the shadow so it could be a faction specifc tech

There were other groups who followed Sauron as well at different times. Including the Black Numenoreans as one example.

Númenórë in general near the end, Black Númenóreans, Haradrim, Easterlings, etc.
As well as everybody under Sauron or Morgoth's direct command, and quite probably a lot of orcs/goblins/what have you that weren't.

There were other groups who followed Sauron as well at different times. Including the Black Numenoreans as one example.
Tolkien seemed to present their allegiance to Sauron as more the "Hubris of Man" than any real dedication to the tenets of the Shadow of Mordor.

Moreover, religion is an undertone in the entire setting, with philosophies being much more prevalent (Guidance of the Valar, for instance, for the Rangers of the North (and arguably all of the Dunedain, such as they are), the Forces of Rivendell, and the Knights of Dol Amroth [and presumably Dol Amroth as an entirety]). Whereas the Shire always seemed to abide by an isolationist philosophy: "If they don't notice us, they can't bother us" prior to the events of the Fellowship trilogy and its subsequent annexation by Gondor. Although, not surprisingly, Tolkien's notes insist that not much changed save that Pippin's position as the Thane actually held the weight of Gondor's support instead of simply being an office respected by the Shire folk (much the same as the shiriffs).

While it might be overstepping to insist that the Black Numenoreans even actively prescribed to a philosophy, they did indeed seem to be governed by Tolkien's "Hubris of Man" in a very real way.

Perhaps then the shadow religion could represent no more than having the followers having given themselves over to the hubris. (Of course, that rules out UUs and UBs and stuff, so maybe not.)

Perhaps then the shadow religion could represent no more than having the followers having given themselves over to the hubris. (Of course, that rules out UUs and UBs and stuff, so maybe not.)
Well, Mordor's unique units are, I think, Mordor's and not freely loaned to those who share Sauron's ideals. Remember that greed (in the desire to possess) is a major cornerstone of the One Ring's corruption.

While the Guidance of the Valar might offer UUs and UBs (this, however, is also a stretch in my opinion as the Valar have, by and large, departed, depending on what you choose to construe the true identity of the Wizards as), I don't see the Shadow necessarily doing the same. Beyond the benefit of disciple units, I doubt much would come of it at all, frankly. The Hubris of Man could provide UUs and UBs, though, as most of the "evil" groups of men had some passing similarities besides ancestry.