Bold bit is where the confusion is coming from I think. Assuming we keep base CiV's distinctions, the dates don't matter to us. Exactly like you said, the birth of Christ (year 0) is at a specific point in our world's calendar, which corresponds to a specific stage of technological progression in human history. CiV breaks that association.
Say (purely for argument's sake - this isn't historically accurate) that compasses were invented in 200BC on Earth, in actual human history. In CiV, you could finish researching Compass (the tech - so you invent compasses) in 800BC if you were fast. You might complete it in 100AD if you're slow - it will vary not only per game but also per player within each game, because tech progression is individual.
Right. I gotcha. I do think that the calendar changes are more "formative" to our game than Christ's birth is to CiV. It's like if the spread of christianity was the point of CiV... then it'd be more relevant. That said, I understand the issues we're up against and know there may not be a better solution.
Hopefully that example makes it clearer!
I hadn't thought of this and it is possible (I think - we should be able to hijack the system that presents it to the Mayans). At first I really liked it, but then it does present a bit of a problem. In base CiV, the date is universal (even the Mayans have the 'real' date in the tooltip). If we do this, that won't be the case anymore. That might not in itself be a problem - the turn number will still be universal, but I think it's a bit weird.
I recall you not thinking it would work when we discussed this option before.
The problem with this method as I recall - though, in theory, I love this idea - is with the "time compression," right? Like, how would we change the year-increment per turn when how many turns per era isn't standardized. Isn't that the problem? If not, and this is possible, this is the best option, IMO.
So, I'm still leaning towards the proposal I had in my last post. I think I should provide a fully worked example to make this more clear. Turn numbers are approximate and subject to balancing. So, here we go:
Turn 0 to 130: AB0 to AB1000
Turn 131-260: FY0 to FY1000
Turn 261+: NE0 onwards (just keep counting up from here - we have a full calendar specification so we can go on forever)
Right, OR the fourth age starts after NE 1000 or something. Don't like this, but its an idea.
Don't forget the option of just calling everything AB something. I think that might be viable in that it completely ignores the issue and wont have any contradictions (e.g. FY 1 being in the middle of the trolloc wars)
Era list, in "chronological" order (the order you progress through them as you're playing the game):
- After Breaking
- Ten Nations
- <- Trolloc Wars happen here
- Era of Reconstruction (recovering from Trolloc Wars - name up for grabs)
- Era of the High King (parallel to Hawkwing - but it's not a specific reference that he exists right now in this game)
- Era of Consolidation (parallel to Seanchan, as mentioned before)
- Era of Encroaching Blight (Name up for grabs - reference to the Blight swallowing several Stedding and Malkier in this time frame)
- Age (Era?) of the Dragon
- The Fourth Age
Note that I've used "After Breaking" (in bold) as the name of the first era, despite that being the same name as the calendar, which I've avoided elsewhere. There are a couple of factors here. The reason we want to avoid the era names and calendar names overlapping is situations like this: "Elayne has entered the Free Years era" in FY250 - that's weird.
OK, one problem with the use of the word "Consolidation" here is that it refers to both the conquest of Seanchan (a NE thing), and the conquest of the westlands by hawkwing (before that). The Seanchan invasion is also called The Conquest, which might be better - though that name does feel rather generic, despite it being a real thing.
The thing is, you're looking for the era of the high king to be what, around 500 years? It's only a few decades.
Also, the era of encroaching blight... does that really happen for hundreds of years, or is that more of a Dragon era thing? I mean, malkier was swallowed right before Lan was born, so... 50 years ago or something? Certainly the age of the dragon could be extended to include things like the whitecloak war, if we needed to stretch that out so its a hundred years or so.
However, that's not a problem with "After Breaking" - the game starts here, so everyone has to be at that point at the same time. (Or the game was set up to start in a later era, in which case it doesn't matter.) The eras and calendars will tend to diverge toward the end of the game, when people's science progression has affected their rate of movement through the tech tree.
Honestly, I don't really see a problem, given the calendar setup you propose, with using the "real" terms throughout. I don't think changing the names saves us from the contradictions, really, since the FYs will be beginning during the Trolloc Wars anyway (in theory). I suppose it is somewhat worse, though.
Hand on a second.... the "True to Story" starting points of the different calendar eras do not have to do with tech. Not at all. They have to do with global events. And all CiVs would be linked in time with those. Coming off of what Illianor was saying - when the Trolloc Wars end - whenever that is - reset the clock to zero and spit out FY instead of AB. Is that possible? Same would happen after the 100 years war event (whatever that is). Would that answer our problems?
Of course, then we'd really have to try to come up with nice names for the eras, because then the contradictions really would be felt, since verything else would feel so aligned. Hmmm...
- After Breaking
- Era of Nations - maybe this is better, in that its more generic. Since we obviously won't have Ten exact nations. More just about embodying the fact that nations are popping up at this time.
- <- Trolloc Wars happen here
- Era of Recovery/ Era of Freedom - Reconstruction is somewhat a loaded term in the US. Means the period after our Civil War. Doesn't quite fit here. I don't love these names, but Freedom at least somewhat evokes the Free Years thing.
- Era of Consolidation/ Imperial Era/Era of the High King) Hmm... Maybe this could be the Era of Consolidation? I mean, I know his son settles to Seanchan in like 969... near the end of the era, but still, both events sort of take place in this period. It sounds more like an era name, and it seems somehow more generic - I can understand the "consolidation" of power being something that took a few hudnred years, whereas the high king himself was only around for a small bit. Imperial era is no better than yours, but I throw it out here nonetheless.
- Era of Consolidation/ Era of the Conquest/ Era of Fragmentation/ Era of New Nations - I don't know about this one.... all of these have problems.
- Era of Encroaching Blight - I can be ok with this one, it certainly is nice and ominous, but I don't know if it's too ominous. I mean, this is almost our "Modern Era," right ( relatively)? Is there a name for it that somehow corresponds to that?
- Age (Era?) of the Dragon
- The Fourth Age
Right, I see what you mean! We could do the production trade routes between civs - I already know what to change to get that mechanic to work due to a similar change in SiegeMod. We could also have some static 'global' projects that only the Light side can contribute to "Military Recruitment," "Scientific Focus," or things like that - where there are thresholds for total production per turn going into them. For example, if more than 50 hammers per turn go into "Military Recruitment" across all Light civs, then all units trained by Light civs start with +15XP. Things like that?
In fact, I think this is definitely thew ay to do it! The threshold thing is awesome, mostly. I don't want it to get too min-maxy though. Like, people obsessing over not "wasting" their production (like I am with the World's Fair). That's the advantage of doing it on a city-by-city basis. My city's production creates upgrades in X number of cities. That makes the effects more obviously tangible. Is there a way to take out the weird gamesmanship of the pot-of-gold method you described? I like it, but I would hate situations where the team is sitting at 49 hammers (needing 50) and the AI won't pop in the extra one, etc.
I think base CiV moved the 'culture bomb' onto the Great General because it's more of a Domination mechanic, wanting to steal other people's territory. We touched on a territories thing a few pages back, where the Shadow could claim individual tiles from civs as a part of the Last Battle and we could use Prestige/the Ogier to reclaim it?
The ogier? Was this a mechanic someone proposed? sounds interesting. I don't remember it.
I like the idea of affecting opposing civs' happiness - that's something that happens in base CiV as well and it makes a lot of sense. Once you get to a certain amount of unhappiness your people rebel and in the late-game your cities can join other civs that follow Ideologies they prefer - we could do the same with Light/Shadow at the extreme of unhappiness on one side? I believe liked the idea of Shadowspawn uprisings as a part of the Last Battle anyway, so maybe this just connects and runs in paralle with that?
What do you mean by shadowspawn uprisings? In the ligh civs? There aren't really shadowspawn around to rebel.
Personally, I feel like a Dark civ probably is always unhappy. I guess it's possible they could be happy, but it'd take some serious brainwashing. Think the townspeople in that thakandar town from aMoL... they're either all turned or constantly horrified... or Slayer.
But yes, cities switching sides beased on presitge - which was in Civ 3 and 4, if I recall, may be an option here.
I think we're better off scaling the price of things rather than setting a hard limit of "once only." It might be prohibitively expensive after the first time, but if a specific CS is super important, someone might pour all their money into it to flip them back. Also keep in mind that most (but not quite all) CSes are Stedding, if there's any specific flavor we could use there.
Are really most of them stedding? It seems like we have a handful of CSs that are somewhat essential, without them. Mayene. WT, Far Madding, Falme. OK, maybe that's only four. Still, I don't know if we have that many more stedding than that.
Still nothing jumping out at me for this one - maybe it is best to factor it into the bonuses of the Path and let those extra bonuses be what you get from it.
Right. I'm still liking the idea that Faith is your REWARD for doing stuff in the LB (helpin the team and all).
Ah, I see. I think this depends on what "cool stuff as a unit" is. The properties that differentiate a unit from a spy (movement on the map, combat) are the ones that we can't afford to give the AI control of if the Dragon were to crop up somewhere. I mean, we can have him *visually* appear on the map when he's doing - like if one of his 'moves' was attacking a unit, he could have a 3D model that appears on a tile nearby.
Yeah, maybe that's all it is, a model that appears. Still, you mentioned before that some people will want to control Rand. They just don't know that we considered it and that this is probably better - my thought is merely that we might try to create a sort f illusion that he IS there, so nobody complains.
I think we should go through and define all of the things that the Dragon can actually *do* here, because that list is still a bit nebulous. I think we like the 'turn order' solution where civs get to choose moves in a round-based order? We're still discussing what yield determines that order, but this ranking priority system seems good? (Regardless of whether we use Faith/Prestige/anything else)
So, possible actions the Dragon can take, regardless of *how* we choose which actions he takes (taking some from Illianor's post too), all up for debate, just to list them all in one place:
Running out of time tonight. So just a few thoughts on these.
- Steal a Seal from the Shadow - Gosh, I just don't know anymore. Golly! Gee whiz! This is tricky. MAybe this isn't a great use of his time? Or maybe it's simply that he does it way faster than a spy can?
- Root out Darkfriends - Yeah sure. This makes sense if there is the mechanic of a city switching sides... which seems crazy to implement, but cool.
- Attack Shadowspawn - Yeah, I think he's a Randplane. And I think he can attack anybody... maybe not neutral units, though. Not sure on this. Depends, is this Zen rand of aMoL or bad Rand of 11-13?
- Influence with the Tower - Yeah, doing *something* there, for sure. Researchy stuff? I really don't know.
- Ta'veren Probability Manipulation - Yeah, the randomness seems cool... but ould anybody really ever choose to do it? I think honestly its just a consequence wherever he goes. As in, not something you choose to do. And maybe its not always, just sometimes, randomly.
- Winning the Last Battle - I think probably - Dragon captures the City is the answer here. What else could it be.
- Boost City Combat Strength/HP - Yes
- Dragon Bomb - Totally agree. I mean, this is the same as shadowspawn attack, though, right? Just stronger? What's the difference?
Holy crash - what if he used balefire? Could it be a nuke but that there's a chance of some crazy stuff happening, like unraveling the pattern? I don't know what that would be, but... maybe we think on it? Radiation?
- Asha'man Recruitment - I don't think I like this, really. Aren't ashaman going to be a separate mechanic? I mean, maybe the dragon can help you get them faster. Haven't figured out ashaman yet... so maybe table this one
- Rally to the Dragon - yeah, I can see this as being sort worth it, rarely. Not so exciting though.
- Dragon Mercantilism - same as above. I'm not sure the dragon should be able to help every facet of the game, right?
- Popular Resistance - Yeah this seems to powerful.
I see what you mean here, I think I like the Prestige-for-the-Dragon idea then! I think Light-leaning as represented by Faith still plays a role though - Rand works with the other nations that he does (rather than conquer, like Illian) because they are aligned with the Light. How about, given approximate base CiV rates of Tourism and Faith, we choose turn order using the metric:
Faith per turn + (4 * Prestige per turn)
Sure! Both is fine with me. I will say, though, that Illianor's comments later, and some thought of my own, is making me not love the whole idea of Light-leaning as faith.
They should be related. Certainly. But I think they're related int he opposite direction: Light Leaning creates Faith. Not faith leads to light leaning.
I think if you are heavily light leaning, you should get faith bonuses. Heavily shadow leaning = faith minuses, etc. Maybe a few gradations along the way (or percentages or something).
To me this is an important distinction because its still possible to have a high faith shadow civ - they chose certain Path tenants, buildings, got lots of Prophets, their UA, etc. They should still have high faith... but less high than if they were light. Perhaps significantly so.
But, then, we wouldn't use Faith to determine the dragon, then. A super light-leaning civ could have never done much infrastructure, or could be Tall (Illianor indicates that this causes less faith), and would be penalized in terms of dragon awesomeness. This Light civ should also still be a primary target for shadowspawn (or other consequences of being light),d espite perhaps having a lower total faith output than a Wide, but less Lighty, civ.
Perhaps there needs to be a separate variable - your "brightness" so to speak - that just tracks Light and Shadow.
Perhaps the shadow calculation is then just Light and Prestige. OR Light and Prestige AND faith, all together
Thoughts?
This is where the weirdness of the way the AI works is difficult to explain. Explicitly locked in roles will force the AI into strange positions, because it's unable to truly assess which of the options it's long-term more suited for. Letting them do whichever one is best for them at the time is probably less optimal overall, but will likely result in more reasonable behavior.
I think some bonuses to overall yields/some kind of immediate reward makes a lot of sense. The possibility he could be born in a Shadow civ means we probably don't want to always weight his bonuses toward the Light - we don't want to punish Shadow players who tech quickly. We could provide different bonuses going forward depending on which side they end up on though? If they're Light side, they could gain some boost in choosing moves for the Dragon. If they're Shadow, they gain control of extra Shadowspawn during the war to root out the 'sacred' blood in their people?
Cool. Also, it could just be a standard Diplo bonus, like being the host.
I see what you mean, but I think this is a prime example of where a Shadow player would (and should) turn on his 'ally.' To the Dark One, that civilization is holding off *just in case* the Shadow doesn't come out on top. He's got no time for those kinds of shenanigans, so he sends one of his other minions to stamp them into line.
Point taken
I think I'm with Illianor on this one, I thought Thriving Populace was the best of the 'red' ones.
OK. the people hath spoken!
Not as sure about this one, I think I still prefer Staunch Defenders here.
OK. The reason I don't love these names is they don't feel WoT to me at all. Like, I want an adjective that is more in-unverse. Barring that, I do think I like Stalwart Defenders/Protectors better than Staunch. Staunch is just a weird one, for me.
I think Frontiersman is very much associated with the American Frontier, which isn't really what we want. I agree with what counterpoint is saying about "Border Settlements" not being 'a people.' I think "Border Settlers" might work though - there isn't really any crossover between belief selection/use and units, so there's not much opportunity to be confused with the unit.
Wow, no idea about changing the settler name. To what?
Border Settlers could work, at least for the time being.
Also, while I think of it, I really want to add a late-game Settler unit that founds partially developed cities (I want a prebuilt Granary, please) - I think it's a big oversight that you can't do this in base CiV.
Well, then! Interesting. What would you call that, in-universe?
We wouldn't use the actual radiation/fallout name or art, but I like this idea. We could even have it pillage a certain number of tiles over a given radius (or an uneven scattering within a specific area - rather like a nuke). Bubbles of evil don't traditionally involve actual Shadowspawn though, right? It's tempting to want to spawn Shadowspawn then too.
Right. The bubbles are just crazy stuff happening. Axes flying around, etc. I like this idea, I think! (ignoring the balefire thing for now) I don't know if you shoudl really be targeting specific civs. They're random aren't they? Couldn't they smack the shadow civs as well? I mean, the decline of the world does negatively impact the shadow civs too.
It says something about the length of these posts that I can be ninja'd by a post from 45 minutes ago!
I think I arrived at a very similar idea as a part of my posts above, with 'global' projects that the Light side can participate in. Great minds thinking alike and all that jazz! So I like this one!
In terms of voting civs in and out, that requires a lot of technical work to make that possible. We run up against our favorite AI restrictions then as well - what if the AI decides you're not helping because it hasn't properly assessed the situation? Getting voted out then is a bad experience for the player. But it's something we should consider, getting locked into mechanics like this completely opens up avenues for exploits as well.
Right, the key distinction I was trying to highlight was that Faith (maybe hapiness or prestige) would be a direct reward for helping out the team.
OK, maybe we currently stay with permanent alliance - no voting - and see how much it sucks.
In regards to the breaking of the seals, could
If I play Tall, am I going to be low in faith and so not strongly "light aligned"? Am I then not going to have much agency in controlling the dragon, especially if there is a very wide, faith focused civ? How does making shadow/light decisions relate to this during the game? Compare if I had only chosen light aligned actions, but the wide civ barely scraped in.
Will this necessitate faith/population and % increases to help tall Civs participate in controlling the dragon?
Yeah, I think I'm with you here. Spoke more of that above.
What about using "world Era" for imposing the moment for switching from one calendar to the other ?
You mean world era as distinct from era for the player civ, right? Makes sense.
I think there's a specific reason why this doesn't work, according to S3rg. Not remembering why, though....
Another Idea I had was to propose "Heros" / World unique UU for each civ (as in FFH or 3kingdom (civ4 mod)) + some for each
Those could be special GP-like units or "normal" units / channeler (mostly) or not.
but this would take up some names that you might have wanted for the GP.
However It could be a nice way to get to play with the characters of the books, and still play the world.
I think we could arrive to one per civ:
Andor: Elayne
Manetheren : Perrin (or Mat for the Red Hand)
Caihrien : Maybe Mat ? (he came into command of the Red Hand there iirc) / or Aldura ?
Aiels: Aviendha
Tear: Moiraine
Saldea : Fail Bashere or her father
SeanChan: Tuon / ...?
FarMadding : Caldsuane (or was she from another place?)
Malkier : Lan Mandragoran
WT : a Forsaken or Egwene depending on orientations of the WT
Illian ?
realtionship in the books could represent "alliance / peace-treaties, whatever" between those nations.
Maybe those special UU could get a "special treatment": means to ge them to change civ owner under some conditions (to reflect that aldura and mat went somehow into Andor's service in the books)
(conditions to be determined: faith/prestige higher than civ owner by x factor? + something else because we do not want high prestige civ to steal all heros)
Maybe each of those "heros" could get individual abilities (related to the book) that upgrade or come into play with : xp and/or techs/policies, to reflect the story of the book.
NB: possibility : add Rhuarc as a Great Capitain (even if he is not known as one... indeed the title of great capitain was only given to westlanders)
I'm not sure I love this. I think, in general, it might pull us too far "off base." I was drawn to this mod first and foremost because it would be cool to play a game of civ in the WoT universe. Of course, playing as the characters could be cool, but Civ games are quite removed from characters and stuff - the characters are the leaders you play as. Heroes and other rpg elements might take away from that. I don't know, it's a "vibe" thing to me. UUs, UAs, and UBs are probably enough to differentiate the Civs.
I'm open to it, though.
Also, probably really hard to balance - one unit could throw the whole game off, yes?
Plus, on a specific level, your list shows how Andor biased are characters really are. Especially since the vast majority of the characters really have no real sense of loyalty to their nations - they left to become AS, to follow Rand, etc.
Maybe our characters just make the best sense as cameo Great People?