S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

yeah, and just to be clear, these names were decided by us a year or two ago! I've kept them intact for now, and tried to make mechanics and policies that fit with those concepts.

Awesome! Man, I don't remember that. I'm glad we're writing all this down!

yeah, was surprised that I didn't see at least somebody who could stand against me. I think this was a bit more surprising given how little I understand the game at this point....

Yeah, good point, we shouldn't fair so well while we don't know how the play properly! Maybe expertise from CiV is just carrying over better than picking up civ originally.

I suspect that I'm in the minority, but I actually like the tall/wide choice. It put me off majorly when I first started ciV, but over time I appreciated the strategic element it presented. I feel like, ultimately, in civ 3 and 4, I felt somewhat encouraged to make sprawling empires that ultimately were too big to work well. The rather draconian happiness cap kind of made it easier to be restrained.

I never really much liked it. I would like for there to be distinct approaches to playing the game that made sense, but I always felt like having a strategy that requires you don't colonize more of the map as you explore it squanders a lot of the fun of that exploration. I'm hoping there will be a new trade off in CiVI like Tall/Wide (dunno what that will be yet), but I like to always have the option of settling more cities as a strategic option. Either to launch an invasion, to give me a religious outpost, to do spying, all sorts of stuff.

also, I'm super confused, ultimately, about the casus belli. I like the idea in theory, but found that I was essentially declaring one (usually colonization or religion) when I was, essentially, just doing a surprise war. I don't quite understand why you'd ever *not* do a CB war...

I think if a CB war is available, then it's intended that it's always the preferred choice. Surprise war is only really there for if you have no other options that work for you and you need to go to war now. This makes sense historically - using a convenient situation to justify a war that a civilization wants to enter for other reasons, even if you're not always actually pursuing the thing you declared war for. I feel like the current CBs need some calibrating, and possibly that they should unlock a bit earlier (and be available for actions that happened before they unlocked - liberating CSes that died a long time ago, for example). It would be good to have some other CB types too, and possibly have them unlock on different civics, rather than all at once. Religious war could unlock much earlier than liberation, for example.

 

[counterpoint]

I never really much liked it. I would like for there to be distinct approaches to playing the game that made sense, but I always felt like having a strategy that requires you don't colonize more of the map as you explore it squanders a lot of the fun of that exploration. I'm hoping there will be a new trade off in CiVI like Tall/Wide (dunno what that will be yet), but I like to always have the option of settling more cities as a strategic option. Either to launch an invasion, to give me a religious outpost, to do spying, all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, I think the problem is sort of that it does force you to choose one of those styles. It's nice to be rewarded in some ways to have a few big cities, but you are quite right that that does negate colonies and such. Wish there was a bit more of a balanced spectrum.

I think if a CB war is available, then it's intended that it's always the preferred choice. Surprise war is only really there for if you have no other options that work for you and you need to go to war now. This makes sense historically - using a convenient situation to justify a war that a civilization wants to enter for other reasons, even if you're not always actually pursuing the thing you declared war for. I feel like the current CBs need some calibrating, and possibly that they should unlock a bit earlier (and be available for actions that happened before they unlocked - liberating CSes that died a long time ago, for example). It would be good to have some other CB types too, and possibly have them unlock on different civics, rather than all at once. Religious war could unlock much earlier than liberation, for example.

Yeah, those unlock points could be tweaked for sure. I guess it feels to me like it's sort of "always on" in a way that it's almost a pointless differentiation. Kind of like giving all the characters in a D&D campaign a +4 to the same stat - yeah, it feels cool, but it doesn't help to differentiate anything and ultimately just inflates the opposition. I guess I'd like to feel like it was a little special

 

[counterpoint]

quick update on my progress...... there's been very very little, this week. It's been almost impossible to find time to work on the Policies. And no, not just because my country just adopted a rather insane Social Policy.

Hopefully NaNoWriMo goes well!

 

[S3rgeus]

quick update on my progress...... there's been very very little, this week. It's been almost impossible to find time to work on the Policies. And no, not just because my country just adopted a rather insane Social Policy.

Hopefully NaNoWriMo goes well!

No worries, I haven't made much progress either. I have been NaNoWriMoing effectively though, keeping ahead of the word targets and am quite enjoying this story!

Welcome to the insane Social Policy club! Hopefully yours works out as well as it can!

And still no sign of the CiVI mod tools!

 

[counterpoint]

Ok, so here we go! It's been a looong time since either of us posted, and even longer since either of us *really* posted.

Well, I suppose your book is nearing completion, and I've *finally* been able to find time to finish my treatment of Social policies. A detailed but kind of unreadable summary is in this post. a xls version is also attached - a bit less precise, but much more intuitive to follow.

I'm placing this mostly without comment, except for a few after every category. A few general comments, though:

- I opted to essentially preserve the BNW trees more-or-less in their entirety as one branch option (the left option, typically). Exploration is cut up between Ambition: Power and Wealth: Opportunity, and Patronage is split roughly evenly between Politics' two branches.
- Originally the idea was to have no branching in Creativity and Scholarship. I found this highly, highly unlikeable from a design perspective, and, especially, an aesthetic perspective. Thus, I added branching in those.
- Most of the trees have two non-demoninational policies, with three branch-specific policies (per branch). I settled upon this as a pretty solid setup that let each branch feel distinct but also allowed for some baseline-bonuses they both could share. However, I hadn't settled on this until after making a few of these, and Unity and War have three neutral policies. I contemplated going back and fixing this - I prefer, greatly, the consistency - but decided against it for now, figuring I might as well just put out what I have for now and see what you think.
- Coming up with names for the policies was really, really hard. I found it tough to find things that were 1)flavorful - there's some WoT stuff in there, but truly not much. I'm positive more could be found. 2) felt like policies - some of these are super generic in a way that doesn't quite fit the vibe we should be going for, and 3) were consistent with the branch names - I tried hard to make sure at least one policy per branch justified the name of that branch. In any case, totally open to changing policy names and branch names.
- The mapping got complicated at times. I tried to do something that felt 1)different from BNW, and 2) unique per tree. I paid only moderate attention to "balance" and more towards which ones felt intuitively and flavorfully related.

Counterpoint's First Draft of WotMod Social Policies

FORMAT:

<TREE NAME>
Unlock:
Branches:
First Honorific:

Policy:
Branch:
Requires:
Leads to:
Based on:
Effect:

Unity
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Loyalty (based on Tradition), Leadership
First Honorific: The Builder

Policy: Opener (Unity)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Ogier Hostel, National Monuments, City Watch
Based on: Opener (Tradition)
Effect: Adopting Unity greatly increases the rate of border expansion in Cities and also grants 3 Culture in the Capital. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Ogier Hostel
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: none
Based on: Aristocracy (Tradition)
Effect: +15% Production when building Wonders. +1 Happiness for every 10 Citizens in a City.

Policy: National Monuments
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Marriage Rites, Feast Days, High Lordship
Based on: Legalism (Tradition)
Effect: Provides a free culture building in your first 4 Cities.

Policy: City Watch
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: none
Based on: Oligarchy (Tradition)
Effect: Garrisoned units cost no maintenance and Cities with a garrison gain +50% Ranged Combat Strength.

Policy: Marriage Rites
Branch: Loyalty
Requires: National Monuments
Leads to: none
Based on: Landed Elite (Tradition)
Effect: +10% Growth and +2 Food in the Capital.

Policy: Feast Days
Branch: Loyalty
Requires: National Monuments
Leads to: none
Based on: Monarchy (Tradition)
Effect: +1 Gold and -1 Unhappiness for every 2 Citizens in the Capital.

Policy: High Lordship
Branch: Leadership
Requires: National Monuments
Leads to: Estate Taxes
Based on: none
Effect: Your first 4 Governors provide +X% Growth.

Policy: Estate Taxes
Branch: Leadership
Requires: High Lordship
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X to Governor Yields in the Capital for every Y Citizens in the Capital.

Policy: Finisher (Unity: Loyalty)
Branch: Loyalty
Requires: all Unity: Loyalty Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Tradition)
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Unity: Loyalty tree will grant +15% Growth in all Cities and a free <Food 2> in your first 4 cities. It also allows the purchase of Ogier Stonemasons with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Unity: Leadership)
Branch: Leadership
Requires: all Unity: Leadership Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Unity: Leadership tree will grant +X Production to Farms worked by the Capital. It also allows the purchase of Ogier Stonemasons with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: Leadership is intended to use governors to make your cities big and productive. Some of this flavor might already be used elsewhere. I'm not sure the name Loyalty really fits here.​

Ambition
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Prosperity (based on Liberty), Expansion (based in part on [/B]Exploration[/B])
First Honorific: The Resourceful

Policy: Opener (Ambition)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Old Blood, Family Trade, Seafarer's Guild
Based on: Opener (Liberty)
Effect: Adopting Ambition will provide +1 Culture in every City. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Old Blood
Branch: Prosperity
Requires: none
Leads to: Guestright, Royal Gifts
Based on: Citizenship (Liberty)
Effect: Tile improvement construction rate increased by 25% and a Worker appears near the Capital.

Policy: Family Trade
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Forerunners
Based on: Republic (Liberty)
Effect: +1 Production in every City and +5% Production in cities when constructing Buildings (including Wonders).

Policy: Seafarer's Guild
Branch: Expansion
Requires: none
Leads to: Colonial Destiny
Based on: Maritime Infrastructure (Exploration)
Effect: +3 Production in all coastal Cities.

Policy: Guestright
Branch: Prosperity
Requires: Old Blood
Leads to: none
Based on: Representation (Liberty)
Effect: Each City you found will increase the Culture cost of Policies by 33% less than normal. Also starts a Golden Age.

Policy: Royal Gifts
Branch: Prosperity
Requires: Old Blood
Leads to: none
Based on: Meritocracy (Liberty)
Effect: +1 Happiness for each City you own connected to the Capital and -5% Unhappiness from Citizens in non-occupied Cities.

Policy: Forerunners
Branch: none
Requires: Family Trade
Leads to: none
Based on: Collective Rule (Liberty)
Effect:

Policy: Colonial Destiny
Branch: Expansion
Requires: Seafarer's Guild
Leads to: Signature Wares
Based on: Naval Tradition (Exploration), modified
Effect: +1 Happiness from <Coastal 1>, <Coastal 2>, and <Food (Coastal)>. +1 Gold from Fishing Boats.

Policy: Finisher (Ambition: Prosperity)
Branch: Prosperity
Requires: all Ambition: Prosperity Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Liberty)
Effect: Adopting all policies in the Ambition: Prosperity tree will grant a free Legendary Person of your choice near the Capital.

Policy: Finisher (Ambition: Expansion)
Branch: Expansion
Requires: all Ambition: Expansion Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Liberty)
Effect: Adopting all policies in the Ambition: Expansion tree will grant a free Legendary Person of your choice near the Capital.

Notes: I'm not sure the name Prosperity really fits here. Expansion is some of the stuff from Exploration plus some beefing up. I couldn't think of a Finisher for this one that felt equivalent in value to the Liberty finisher - this bugs me, since all other trees have at least somewhat different finishers!​

War
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Justice (based on Honor), Valor
First Honorific: Battle Lord/Battle Lady

Policy: Opener (War)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Nameday Sword, Local Hero
Based on: Opener (Honor), modified
Effect: Adopting Honor gives a +33% combat bonus against Lawless and Dragonsworn, and notifications will be provided when new Lawless and Dragonsworn camps spawn in revealed territory. Gain Culture for the empire from each Lawless or Dragonsworn killed. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Nameday Sword
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Battlecry
Based on: Warrior Code (Honor)
Effect: +15% Production when training Melee units and a Great Captain appears outside the Capital. Great Captains are earned 50% faster.

Policy: Local Hero
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Rank and Reward, Lamplights, Blight Lore
Based on: Military Caste (Honor)
Effect: Each City with a garrison increases local City Happiness by 1 and Culture by 2.

Policy: Battlecry
Branch: none
Requires: Nameday Sword
Leads to: none
Based on: Military Tradition (Honor)
Effect: Military units gain 50% more Experience from combat.

Policy: Rank and Reward
Branch: Justice
Requires: Local Hero
Leads to: Martial Levies
Based on: Discipline (Honor), modified
Effect: +X% Combat Strength for Melee units which have another military unit in an adjacent tile. +Y Production gained in nearest City when clearing a Lawless or Dragonsworn camp.

Policy: Lamplights
Branch: Valor
Requires: Local Hero
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X% to City attacks on non-Trolloc Shadowspawn. Gain Y Gold on non-Trolloc Shadowspawn kills.

Policy: Blight Lore
Branch: Valor
Requires: Local Hero
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Combat Strength reduction from injury is halved against Shadowspawn.

Policy: Martial Levies
Branch: Justice
Requires: Rank and Reward
Leads to: none
Based on: Professional Army (Honor)
Effect: Gold cost of upgrading military units reduced by 33% and construct <EXP 1>, <EXP 2>, and <EXP 3> 50% faster.

Policy: Finisher (War: Justice)
Branch: Justice
Requires: all War: Justice Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Honor)
Effect: Adopting all policies in the War: Justice tree will grant Gold for each enemy unit killed. It also allows the purchase of Great Captains with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (War: Valor)
Branch: Valor
Requires: all War: Valor Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all policies in the War: Valor tree will allow the Light gained from Shadowspawn kills to be doubled or eliminated. It also allows the purchase of Great Captains with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: The names Justice and Valor are also kind of random for what these trees do. Lamplights might be more of a tech than a policy, so might need to be retitled something to show "you can't cover your face in this civ." Blight Lore might be too weak or redundant to other abilities. The Valor Finisher is meant to fuel either light or shadow. Not sure it's really that awesome - might need some beefing.​

Myth
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Folklore (based on Piety), Dreams
First Honorific: Teacher

Policy: Myth (Opener)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Regional Pride, Ethos, Initiation
Based on: Opener (Piety)
Effect: Adopting Myth reduces the time to build <Faith 1> and <Faith 2> by 50%. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Regional Pride
Branch: Folklore
Requires: none
Leads to: Unified Traditions
Based on: Mandate of Heaven (Piety)
Effect: 20% discount on all purchases of Path units and buildings with Faith.

Policy: Ethos
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Peddler's Tales, Dream Interpretation, Renewal
Based on: Organized Religion (Piety)
Effect: +1 Faith from <Faith 1> and <Faith 2>.

Policy: Initiation
Branch: Dreams
Requires: none
Leads to: Culture of Will
Based on: none
Effect: +X% Production towards channeling units for every Y Faith generated per turn in the empire.

Policy: Unified Traditions
Branch: Folklore
Requires: Regional Pride
Leads to: Renewal
Based on: Religious Tolerance (Piety)
Effect: Cities with a majority Path also get the Lineage Custom bonus of the second most popular Path.

Policy: Peddler's Tales
Branch: none
Requires: Ethos
Leads to: none
Based on: Theocracy (Piety)
Effect: <Faith 2> increase a City's Gold output by 25%. Pilgrimmate Sites provide +3 Gold.

Policy: Dream Interpretation
Branch: Dreams
Requires: Ethos
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X Faith when gathering Glimmers.

Policy: Culture of Will
Branch: Dreams
Requires: Initiation
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X% Combat Strength in Tel'aran'rhiod.

Policy: Renewal
Branch: Folklore
Requires: Unified Traditions, Peddler's Tales
Leads to: none
Based on: Reformation (Piety)
Effect: If you founded a Path, gain a bonus Renewal Custom.

Policy: Finisher (Myth: Folklore)
Branch: Folklore
Requires: all Myth: Folklore Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Myth)
Effect: Adopting all policies in the Myth: Folklore tree will cause a Visionary to appear and Pilgrimmage Sites provide +3 Culture.

Policy: Finisher (Myth: Dreams)
Branch: Dreams
Requires: all Myth: Dreams Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all policies in the Myth: Dreams tree will grant Culture for each enemy unit killed in Tel'aran'rhiod. It also allows the purchase of Wolfbrothers with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: names were really hard here. The goal of Dreams is, in addition to providing some T'a'r benefits, to provide a use for faith that doesn't rely on having your own religion.​

Power
Unlock: Era 2
Branches: Acceptance, Fear
First Honorific: The Stalwart

Policy: Opener (Power)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Channeling Advisors, Testing, Cautionary Tales
Based on: none
Effect: +X Culture and +Y Science when a Male Channeler is born in your empire. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Channeling Advisors
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Deference
Based on: none
Effect: -X% damage suffered from enemy channeling units.

Policy: Testing
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Wise Women, Shame and Honor
Based on: none
Effect: +X to maximum Spark.

Policy: Cautionary Tales
Branch: Fear
Requires: none
Leads to: Shame and Honor
Based on: none
Effect: False Dragon near your territory spawn with fewer Dragonsworn. +Y% to False Dragon capture rewards.

Policy: Deference
Branch: Acceptance
Requires: Channeling Advisors
Leads to: Tolerant Attitudes
Based on: none
Effect: +X Happiness for every Y Spark used.

Policy: Wise Women
Branch: Acceptance
Requires: Testing
Leads to: Tolerant Attitudes
Based on: none
Effect: +X to Sight and +Y% to channeling damage for Saidar units.

Policy: Shame and Honor
Branch: Fear
Requires: Testing, Cautionary Tales
Leads to: Segregation
Based on: none
Effect: +X% to success and +Y Faith when Gentling, Executing, or sending your Male Channelers to the Tower.

Policy: Tolerant Attitudes
Branch: Acceptance
Requires: Deference, Wise Women
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: X% slower onset of Madness and +1 Movement for Saidin units.

Policy: Segregation
Branch: Fear
Requires: Shame and Honor
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X% to Producttion when using less than 50% of your maximum Spark.

Policy: Finisher (Power: Acceptance)
Branch: Acceptance
Requires: all Power: Acceptance Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Creativity: Inspiration tree grants +X Experience for Channeling units produced in Cities of Stable Alignment. It also allows the purchase of Saidar units with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Power: Fear)
Branch: Fear
Requires: all Power: Fear Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Creativity: Inspiration tree grants +X Experience for each Channeling unit killed and +Y% to Combat Strength versus False Dragons and Aes Sedai for every Z Light and Shadow Points earned.

Notes: This one's all original, obviously. I did my best to make these feel equivalent, flavorful, and worth doing. Not sure how successful I was. I took a leap by making the Finishers both related to Alignment - these elements could be removed. The Fear finisher is supposed to reward *both* accumulation of light and shadow, though over tremendous amounts of points. The problem with this is of course the neutral folks who are left out (this isn't a problem with the Acceptance finisher).​

Creativity
Unlock: Era 2
Branches: Inspiration (based on Aesthetics), Legacy
First Honorific: The Impassioned

Policy: Opener (Creativity)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Tenacity, Recreation, Distinguishing Style
Based on: Opener (Aesthetics)
Effect: Adopting Creativity allows you to earn Doomseers, Master Artisans, and Gleemen 25% faster. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Tenacity
Branch: Inspiration
Requires: none
Leads to: Celebrity, Universality
Based on: Cultural Centers (Aesthetics)
Effect: Construct <Culture 1>, <Culture 2>, <Culture 3>, <Culture 4>, and <Culture 5> 50% faster.

Policy: Recreation
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Tourism
Based on: Fine Arts
Effect: 50% of excess Happiness added each turn to the amount of Culture that may be spent on Social Policies or Philosophical Tenets.

Policy: Distinguishing Style
Branch: Legacy
Requires: none
Leads to: Dogma
Based on: none
Effect: +X Golden Age Points for every Y Culture earned per turn in the empire.

Policy: Celebrity
Branch: Inspiration
Requires: Tenacity
Leads to: none
Based on: Artistic Genius (Aesthetics)
Effect: A Master Artisan appears.

Policy: Tourism
Branch: none
Requires: Recreation
Leads to: Universality, Hegemony
Based on: Flourishing of the Arts (Aesthetics)
Effect: Culture increased by 33% in all Cities which have build a World Wonder and the empire immediately enters a Golden Age.

Policy: Dogma
Branch: Legacy
Requires: Distinguishing Style
Leads to: Hegemony
Based on: none
Effect: +X% Culture from buildings in Cities of Stable Alignment.

Policy: Universality
Branch: Inspiration
Requires: Tenacity, Tourism
Leads to: none
Based on: Cultural Exchange (Aesthetics)
Effect: Increases the Prestige modifier for Shared Path, Trade Routes, and Open Borders by 15% each.

Policy: Hegemony
Branch: Legacy
Requires: Tourism, Dogma
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X Gold from Trade Routes for every Y Prestige with the Trade Route's desintation Civilization.

Policy: Finisher (Creativity: Inspiration)
Branch: Inspiration
Requires: all Creativity: Inspiration Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Aesthetics)
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Creativity: Inspiration tree doubles the theming bonus you receive from <Culture 4> and Wonders. It also allows the purchase of Doomseers, Master Artisans, or Gleemen with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Creativity: Legacy)
Branch: Legacy
Requires: all Creativity: Legacy Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Creativity: Legacy tree grants +X% to Science produced in each City for each theming bonus in that City. It also allows the purchase of Doomseers, Master Artisans, or Gleemen with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: Note that I think we made this tree unlock earlier than in BNW, thus it is placed before Politics. Naming was also tricky here, as well as the names/correspondence of the branches. The idea behind Legacy is to boost Culture for players who aren't seeking a Culture VC - benefit from your prestige and defend against others' culture.​

 

[counterpoint]

PART II

Politics
Unlock: Era 3
Branches: Diplomacy (based in part on Patronage), Friendship (based in part on Patronage)
First Honorific: Arbiter

Policy: Opener (Politics)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Daughter-Heirs
Based on: Opener (Patronage)
Effect: Adopting Politics makes your Influence with City-States degrade 25% slower than normal. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Daughter-Heirs
Branch: Diplomacy
Requires: none
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X Happiness for each Novice, Accepted, and Aes Sedai from your empire residing in the White Tower. Ambassadors earned Y% faster.

Policy: Foreign Aid
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Standards of Discourse
Based on: Philanthropy (Patronage)
Effect: Gifts of Gold to a City-State generate 25% more Influence.

Policy: Traveling Delegation
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Trade Accord, Public Forum
Based on: Consulates (Patronage)
Effect: Resting point for Influence level with all City-States is increased by 20.

Policy: Groves
Branch: Friendship
Requires: none
Leads to: Solidarity
Based on: none
Effect: +X% to Influence earned through Stedding Quests. Ambassadors earned Y% faster.

Policy: Standards of Discourse
Branch: Diplomacy
Requires: Foreign Aid
Leads to: none
Based on: Scholasticism (Patronage)
Effect: All City-States which are Allies provide a Science bonus equal to 25% of what they produce for themselves.

Policy: Trade Accord
Branch: Diplomacy
Requires: Traveling Delegation
Leads to: none
Based on: Merchant Confederacy (Patronage), modified
Effect: +X Gold for trade routes with City-States. +Y Tower Influence from trade routes with the White Tower.

Policy: Public Forum
Branch: Friendship
Requires: Traveling Delegation
Leads to: Solidarity
Based on: Merchant Confederacy (Patronage), modified
Effect: +X Science from trade routes with City-States. +Y Gold from trade routes with Stedding.

Policy: Solidarity
Branch: Friendship
Requires: Groves, Public Forum
Leads to: none
Based on: Cultural Diplomacy
Effect: Quantity of Resources gifted by City-States increased by 100%. Happiness for gifted Luxuries increased by 50%.

Policy: Finisher (Politics: Diplomacy)
Branch: Diplomacy
Requires: all Politics: Diplomacy Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Politics: Diplomacy tree will grant +X to Aes Sedai Quota. It also allows the purchase of Ambassadors with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Politics: Friendship)
Branch: Friendship
Requires: all Politics: Friendship Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Patronage)
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Politics: Friendship tree will cause allied City-States to occasionally gift you Great People. It also allows the purchase of Ambassadors with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: Left is for Tower and right is for stedding. This is one where I split Patronage up instead of putting all of its bonuses on the left side - doing so would likely make the right side quite unused, given the purpose of this tree. However, I did my best to balance the branches such that the lost functionality for each side was roughly there despite the subtractions - making sure there was a +Happ option on both sides, etc. It's possible that the +Aes Sedai quota is problematic as a finisher.​

Wealth
Unlock: Era 3
Branches: Fortune (based on Commerce), Opportunity (based in part on Exploration)
First Honorific: The Magnate

Policy: Opener (Wealth)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Outlander Recruitment, Royal Roadway, Inrepidness
Based on: Opener (Commerce)
Effect: Adopting Wealth boosts Gold output in Capital City by 25%. Unlocks building <Wonder>.

Policy: Outlander Recruitment
Branch: Fortune
Requires: none
Leads to: Enterprise
Based on: Mercenary Army (Commerce), modified
Effect: Allows the purchasing of Sellswords. X civilian units are maintenance-free.

Policy: Royal Roadway
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Foresight, Opulence
Based on: Wagon Trains (Commerce)
Effect: +2 Gold from all your Land Trade Routes. Maintenance paid on Roads and Cobbled Roads reduced by 50%.

Policy: Intrepidness
Branch: Opportunity
Requires: none
Leads to: Tariffs
Based on: Opener (Exploration), modified
Effect: +1 Movement to Naval and Tel'aran'rhiod units. +X Gold from <Coastal 1>, <Coastal 2>, and <Coastal 3>.

Policy: Enterprise
Branch: Fortune
Requires: Outlander Recruitment
Leads to: none
Based on: Mercantilism (Commerce)
Effect: Purchasing items in Cities requires 25% less Gold. +1 Science from every <Gold 1>, <Gold 2>, <Gold 3>, and <Gold 4>.

Policy: Foresight
Branch: Fortune
Requires: Royal Roadway
Leads to: none
Based on: Entrepreneurship (Commerce)
Effect: Merchant Lords are earned 25% faster. Receive double Gold from Merchant Lord Direct Peddlers missions.

Policy: Opulence
Branch: none
Requires: Royal Roadway
Leads to: Providence
Based on: Protectionism (Commerce)
Effect: +2 Happiness from each Luxury Resource.

Policy: Tariffs
Branch: Opportunity
Requires: Intrepidness
Leads to: none
Based on: Treasure Fleets (Exploration), modified
Effect: +4 Gold from all your Sea Trade Routes. +1 Sight for Naval combat units.

Policy: Providence
Branch: Opportunity
Requires: Opulence
Leads to: none
Based on: Merchant Navy (Exploration), modified
Effect: +1 Gold for each <Coastal 1>, <Coastal 2>, or <Food (Coastal)>. +4 Production and +4 Culture in the City with the <Gold National Wonder 1>. +X Culture from Dreamwards.

Policy: Finisher (Wealth: Fortune)
Branch: Fortune
Requires: all Wealth: Fortune Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Commerce)
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Wealth: Fortune tree will grant +1 Gold from every Trading Post. It also allows the purchase of Merchant Lords with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Wealth: Opportunity)
Branch: Opportunity
Requires: all Wealth: Opportunity Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Exploration), modified
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Wealth: Opportunity tree allows you to see Reflections of Power. It also allows the purchase of Dreamwalkers with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: naming tricky, once again! The challenger here was to make Opportunity (more Exploration cast-offs) worth considering. I did that through some T'a'r functionality - it's possible some of these policies are too good now.
It's worth mentioning that in the Culture Summary, it states that Reflections of Power (hidden antiquity sites) should appear after a non-finisher policy in the Culture Tree (Creativity). This is problematic, it seems to me. First, BNW deliberately separates them into a non-culture tree for a reason. Second, Reflections are created (so say the summaries) when a Wolfbrother or dreamwalker is expended. We could change that, but as is, that has to do with T'a'r, and I don't really see us making a culture branch that's super T'a'r focused. We could have a t'a'r branch in Creativity, but then it'd mean players would have to choose to go with that *instead* of normal culture bonuses... which wouldn't usually be worth it.​

Scholarship
Unlock: Era 4
Branches: Resolve (based on Rationalism), Insight
First Honorific: The Learned

Policy: Opener (Scholarship)
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, Literacy
Based on: Opener (Rationalism)
Effect: Adopting Scholarship will grant +10% Science while the empire is Happy. Unlocks building the <Wonder>.

Policy: Academic Freedom
Branch: Resolve
Requires: none
Leads to: none
Based on: Secularism (Rationalism)
Effect: +2 Science from every Specialist.

Policy: Pedagogy
Branch: none
Requires: none
Leads to: Patent Rights, Industrial Research
Based on: Humanism (Rationalism)
Effect: Scholars are earned 25% faster.

Policy: Literacy
Branch: Insight
Requires: none
Leads to: Social Science
Based on: none
Effect: +X Science per City and +Y Science per National Wonder.

Policy: Patent Rights
Branch: Resolve
Requires: Pedagogy
Leads to: none
Based on: Free Thought (Rationalism)
Effect: +1 Science from every Trading Post and +17% Science from <Science 2>.

Policy: Industrial Research
Branch: none
Requires: Pedagogy
Leads to: Symposia
Based on: Sovereignty (Rationalism)
Effect: +1 Gold from Science buildings.

Policy: Social Science
Branch: Insight
Requires: Literacy
Leads to: Paradigm Shift
Based on: none
Effect: +X Science when expending a Questioner in foreign territory.

Policy: Symposia
Branch: Resolve
Requires: Industrial Research
Leads to: none
Based on: Scientific Revolution (Rationalism)
Effect: Boosts Science gained from Research Agreements by 50%.

Policy: Paradigm Shift
Branch: Insight
Requires: Industrial Research, Social Science
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: +X% Production and +Y% Faith on turns immediately after a Technology is Researched.

Policy: Finisher (Scholarship: Resolve)
Branch: Resolve
Requires: all Scholarship: Resolve Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: Finisher (Rationalism)
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Scholarship: Resolve tree will grant a free Technology. It also allows the purchase of Scholars with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Policy: Finisher (Scholarship: Insight)
Branch: Insight
Requires: all Scholarship: Insight Policies
Leads to: none
Based on: none
Effect: Adopting all Policies in the Scholarship: Insight tree will grant X% of all earned Science as Golden Age Points. It also allows the purchase of Scholars with Faith starting in the Era of New Beginnings.

Notes: So another one that I forced in a branch. This one was a little less easy to justify than the Creativity one. Basically I chose to center it around boosting your science while also using science to boost other things (as in Paradigm shift and the Insight Finisher). Literacy might seem weird - the idea is to benefit both Wide and Tall civs. Social Science mixes in alignment - perhaps not well. I figured it was an interesting change of pace.​

Finished!

 

[S3rgeus]

Ok, so here we go! It's been a looong time since either of us posted, and even longer since either of us *really* posted.

Well, I suppose your book is nearing completion, and I've *finally* been able to find time to finish my treatment of Social policies. A detailed but kind of unreadable summary is in this post. a xls version is also attached - a bit less precise, but much more intuitive to follow.

And we're back! I got to my 50,000 words! (50,980 to be precise.) The book isn't finished, but the word count is, so it doesn't need to consume my entire life anymore, which is good. I anticipate getting significantly more sleep.

So, a return to WoTMod! Thanks for doing this treatment for policies! It's looking really good. More comments below, but I'll also take a bit more time to get back into where we were with Policies and Culture before!

Also thank you for the spreadsheet version! It's definitely much easier to see where the dependencies are going with the visuals from there.

I'm placing this mostly without comment, except for a few after every category. A few general comments, though:

- I opted to essentially preserve the BNW trees more-or-less in their entirety as one branch option (the left option, typically). Exploration is cut up between Ambition: Power and Wealth: Opportunity, and Patronage is split roughly evenly between Politics' two branches.

The BNW policies definitely stand out to me, but mainly because I'm so used to them! They make a good basis for us, and avoiding them would probably make our bonuses relatively obtuse, since we'd want to achieve many of the same goals.

The branches that are distributed between both look like good choices, we don't want the mechanical objective of one branch to become a dominating factor within that tree.

- Originally the idea was to have no branching in Creativity and Scholarship. I found this highly, highly unlikeable from a design perspective, and, especially, an aesthetic perspective. Thus, I added branching in those.

This sounds good to me!

- Most of the trees have two non-demoninational policies, with three branch-specific policies (per branch). I settled upon this as a pretty solid setup that let each branch feel distinct but also allowed for some baseline-bonuses they both could share. However, I hadn't settled on this until after making a few of these, and Unity and War have three neutral policies. I contemplated going back and fixing this - I prefer, greatly, the consistency - but decided against it for now, figuring I might as well just put out what I have for now and see what you think.

That's a fine place for us to start for Unity and War. It could be an option that these ones remain more unbranched-Policy-heavy than the others, since they're very early trees, but changing them for consistency also makes sense.

The whole concept of having 2 unbranched Policies sounds good. It means that there will be a similar basis for each branch, so they'll feel like a part of the whole tree rather than just two mutually exclusive Policy trees.

- Coming up with names for the policies was really, really hard. I found it tough to find things that were 1)flavorful - there's some WoT stuff in there, but truly not much. I'm positive more could be found. 2) felt like policies - some of these are super generic in a way that doesn't quite fit the vibe we should be going for, and 3) were consistent with the branch names - I tried hard to make sure at least one policy per branch justified the name of that branch. In any case, totally open to changing policy names and branch names.

I like a lot of the names! A couple jumped out as quite strange, which is probably an artifact of what you mentioned here! I'll comment more on specific names when looking more in depth at individual Policies.

- The mapping got complicated at times. I tried to do something that felt 1)different from BNW, and 2) unique per tree. I paid only moderate attention to "balance" and more towards which ones felt intuitively and flavorfully related.

Those are good guiding principals, it's best to capture the essence of the flavor first. I'm sure we'll find some edge cases for the length of the branches, but that's tweaking we can do as we go! Even Firaxis significantly changed the BNW Policy dependencies in a balance patch, so it's certainly an iterative thing.



Before diving into any of the individual Policies, I think it's a good idea for us to go through the bigger picture of Policies overall and each tree/branch as a whole.

A sojourn on the big picture:

I'm liking the Policy split between branches within trees! It should give the player a lot of new choices and possible ways to combine stuff. It will hopefully make Policies more adaptable to the map as well - with some being more useful in certain situations and pushing players toward them then. Strategic diversity, I like it! The BNW Policies' decision of this type is largely about the usefulness of Exploration/Commerce (they depend on ocean access), whereas we have a lot more variety within that (I hope!).

Do we want to make the branches mean more outside the Policy system? As one of the last systems we're working on, they're not particularly referenced elsewhere. I'm wondering if the AI should care that you've chosen an opposing branch to it? Should there be buildings/wonders/Governors/Threads/other mechanics that care about the player having chosen (or having not chosen) a specific branch? It seems like the Tower and the Stedding would care about some choices?

Are branches definitely just a choice? This seems consistent with CiV, you choose whichever Policies you want within some constraints. In a more high concept way, I'm wondering if there should be "types" of Culture or something that unlock one branch faster than another? Just something that's come to mind looking at this structure.

Do we want individual Policies to be more game changing? This would necessitate reworking a lot of BNW Policies since they;re very much "bonuses to other systems". I'm wondering if Tolerance vs Fear civs should play markedly different from each other in some fundamental mechanical way. Not sure on specifics yet (haven't had time to brainstorm this out properly), but more far-reaching like some of our more exotic uniques.

Are there any other big picture considerations we want to make about Policies as a whole?

I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut it short there for the moment! I've run out of time to go through the trees (rather than the specific Policies) below, but I'll be back! However, I'm not here tomorrow, so I'll have to be back on Saturday! (Feel free to reply to the above though if you're free before then - it's possible we may want to go through the big picture stuff first!)

One last note: still no sign of the Civ6 mod tools! Makes me sad! There has been one patch, which added some notable things. I haven't played any Civ6 in November, so I'll need to get back on that!

 

[counterpoint]

And we're back! I got to my 50,000 words! (50,980 to be precise.) The book isn't finished, but the word count is, so it doesn't need to consume my entire life anymore, which is good. I anticipate getting significantly more sleep.

cool. congrats! what "kind" of book is this one?

That's a fine place for us to start for Unity and War. It could be an option that these ones remain more unbranched-Policy-heavy than the others, since they're very early trees, but changing them for consistency also makes sense.

yeah, I could see us doing either. I don't remember these being too difficult to make, so finding one more policy for the right side of each of these is probably doable. If it turns out that we really want some functionality of the left side to remain also on the left side, we can also do a right-side variant of that policy, with a subtle tweak (I did this in a few other cases, like in Politics, where there are a few policies that are sort of "mirrors" of one another).

I like a lot of the names! A couple jumped out as quite strange, which is probably an artifact of what you mentioned here! I'll comment more on specific names when looking more in depth at individual Policies.

yeah, a lot of the lameness of these names also likely stems from me slamming this over and over for a month by myself. So I'm sure that simply having another person (or advanced AI, whichever you really are!) look at them will probably lead us to a bunch of flavor and interpretations that are obvious but were dancing right under my nose.

Those are good guiding principals, it's best to capture the essence of the flavor first. I'm sure we'll find some edge cases for the length of the branches, but that's tweaking we can do as we go! Even Firaxis significantly changed the BNW Policy dependencies in a balance patch, so it's certainly an iterative thing.

I'm not sure, truly, I've ever had a good guiding principal. I suppose the one I had in elementary school was fine. Most of the rest of them were pretty "hands off" or even "do nothing" educators, though, at least as it seemed to me. I guess they weren't bad, but they also didn't guide the school in any particularly meaningful way.

Yeah, the can't-so-quickly-get-a-settler-in-Liberty sticks out in my mind as one that happened during my tenure playing the game.

Before diving into any of the individual Policies, I think it's a good idea for us to go through the bigger picture of Policies overall and each tree/branch as a whole.

A sojourn on the big picture:

I'm liking the Policy split between branches within trees! It should give the player a lot of new choices and possible ways to combine stuff. It will hopefully make Policies more adaptable to the map as well - with some being more useful in certain situations and pushing players toward them then. Strategic diversity, I like it! The BNW Policies' decision of this type is largely about the usefulness of Exploration/Commerce (they depend on ocean access), whereas we have a lot more variety within that (I hope!).

I'm not 100% sure I understand that last sentence.

I agree overall, though. I should note that it's possible the "right side" policies have some tenets that might be a little too strong. This might be on accident in some cases, but was sort of on purpose in others - the BNW stuff does seem to offer the most general use, as it targets the main game mechanics. So some of the right ones are a little more random - thus maybe they can be a little beefy in some cases without messing up the whole game.I don't want a situation where nobody ever chooses the new ones - that said, we don't want the opposite to be true either. There are of course mostly just +X's and +Y's for this reason...

Do we want to make the branches mean more outside the Policy system? As one of the last systems we're working on, they're not particularly referenced elsewhere. I'm wondering if the AI should care that you've chosen an opposing branch to it? Should there be buildings/wonders/Governors/Threads/other mechanics that care about the player having chosen (or having not chosen) a specific branch? It seems like the Tower and the Stedding would care about some choices?

Hmm... I don't think so. I mostly feel like these should be largely invisible, as distinct from the Philosophies. I think a main thing is that you don't have to open a particular tree. So, take Power, for instance - which intuitively seems to be one that might cause a shift in attitude or something: many players will simply not take this tree, because they're on Myth or Aesthetics or something. That makes having a bunch of other effects on it a little strange.

I'd say if you want this kind of thing, we could consider having "openers" for these Branches. But I'm not sure that's a good idea, because that's either another policy we expect somebody to buy, or else makes there be one or more (depending on how many possible "first policies" are in the branch) policies that are really powerful.

Are branches definitely just a choice? This seems consistent with CiV, you choose whichever Policies you want within some constraints. In a more high concept way, I'm wondering if there should be "types" of Culture or something that unlock one branch faster than another? Just something that's come to mind looking at this structure.

Hmmm.... I'm not sure *why* we'd need this. I think one issue with it is is that there isn't real consistency vs the purpose of "left side" and "right side," such that we couldn't really consistently apply the point of these two culture types.

I could theoretically see us devising a system where we rip off of CiVI by "boosting" certain ones when certain conditions are met. Not sure how we'd do that though, since it's not like each policy "Costs culture" - culture just buys you the policy unlock in general.

I could also imagine a system where, you're on the "choose a policy" screen, and some of them require something extra, like X Faith, or Y Science, to unlock. Not sure why you'd want to spend extra resources to get policies here.

Do we want individual Policies to be more game changing? This would necessitate reworking a lot of BNW Policies since they;re very much "bonuses to other systems". I'm wondering if Tolerance vs Fear civs should play markedly different from each other in some fundamental mechanical way. Not sure on specifics yet (haven't had time to brainstorm this out properly), but more far-reaching like some of our more exotic uniques.

Hmmm... I'm not sure either way. Part of me thinks this could be cool, to upend things a bit. But again, I don't know why we'd necessarily need to do this. I think, especially considering how late in the process we are, there is probably enough going on in this game without doing something like this. I'd be fine, in theory, with some "unbalanced" policies (probably "final" policies) or finishers, but I'd certainly want them to be balanced within policies as a whole - I'd rather the trees themselves be *more* equal than in BNW, not less.

Not sure if I prefer going down a path like this, or going down the "policy branches mean more to the rest of the game" path. Maybe the latter, since it feels more like we added a feature, and less like we messed with it.

Are there any other big picture considerations we want to make about Policies as a whole?

not sure! Can't really pull my head out of the long brainstorm process I just went through...

I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut it short there for the moment! I've run out of time to go through the trees (rather than the specific Policies) below, but I'll be back! However, I'm not here tomorrow, so I'll have to be back on Saturday! (Feel free to reply to the above though if you're free before then - it's possible we may want to go through the big picture stuff first!)

take your time. Obviously I haven't been able to spend more than a fraction of time on this stuff (as evidenced by the month between posts). That's still true for a few more days, I think.

One last note: still no sign of the Civ6 mod tools! Makes me sad! There has been one patch, which added some notable things. I haven't played any Civ6 in November, so I'll need to get back on that!

dang... uh oh. Well, let's get through at least your initial thoughts on this thing before we come back to the decision-making table.
Haven't played either since finishing my first game. Been insanely swamped!

 

[S3rgeus]

cool. congrats! what "kind" of book is this one?

Thanks! This year was a fantasy book where inventing things fuels magic. There was one person who'd worked out how to do it and built the only city in the world and the main character thinks anyone can invent stuff, so she's out to prove it!

yeah, I could see us doing either. I don't remember these being too difficult to make, so finding one more policy for the right side of each of these is probably doable. If it turns out that we really want some functionality of the left side to remain also on the left side, we can also do a right-side variant of that policy, with a subtle tweak (I did this in a few other cases, like in Politics, where there are a few policies that are sort of "mirrors" of one another).

Sounds good, we can come to that below with the branch level run throughs then!

yeah, a lot of the lameness of these names also likely stems from me slamming this over and over for a month by myself. So I'm sure that simply having another person (or advanced AI, whichever you really are!) look at them will probably lead us to a bunch of flavor and interpretations that are obvious but were dancing right under my nose.

Google's advanced AI would probably be quite good at seeding this process actually! All those digitized books, I'm sure they could mine WoT specifically for notable flavor that we could use here. It would find a lot of red herrings, but we only need the few that make us remember some good matches for the Policies we're making!

I'm not sure, truly, I've ever had a good guiding principal. I suppose the one I had in elementary school was fine. Most of the rest of them were pretty "hands off" or even "do nothing" educators, though, at least as it seemed to me. I guess they weren't bad, but they also didn't guide the school in any particularly meaningful way.

Argh, principles! Can't believe I got that wrong.

Yeah, the can't-so-quickly-get-a-settler-in-Liberty sticks out in my mind as one that happened during my tenure playing the game.

Yeah, that was one of the major things they targeted!

I'm not 100% sure I understand that last sentence.

I was saying that the BNW Policy trees most influenced by map placement were Commerce and Exploration, since they're dependent on access to the ocean. The other BNW trees are all more about what strategy you're going for, regardless of what the map is like.

I agree overall, though. I should note that it's possible the "right side" policies have some tenets that might be a little too strong. This might be on accident in some cases, but was sort of on purpose in others - the BNW stuff does seem to offer the most general use, as it targets the main game mechanics. So some of the right ones are a little more random - thus maybe they can be a little beefy in some cases without messing up the whole game.I don't want a situation where nobody ever chooses the new ones - that said, we don't want the opposite to be true either. There are of course mostly just +X's and +Y's for this reason...

Agreed, we want both branches to be competitive, so for each one there are situations where it's the best choice to pick it. We'll have to tweak as we play them to get there, I'd say. We can't know what all the combinations will do yet!

Hmm... I don't think so. I mostly feel like these should be largely invisible, as distinct from the Philosophies. I think a main thing is that you don't have to open a particular tree. So, take Power, for instance - which intuitively seems to be one that might cause a shift in attitude or something: many players will simply not take this tree, because they're on Myth or Aesthetics or something. That makes having a bunch of other effects on it a little strange.

Is this mostly about the AI attitude? I could see us leaving it out of there, but I don't think the capacity to skip trees necessarily means this doesn't work. It would be an "optional opinion" - if a civ hasn't picked a branch on a tree then it doesn't affect their opinion of anyone else. But if two civs have opened opposing branches of the same tree, they could dislike each other a bit. (Not a dominating factor, but one of many.) And if they've opened the same branch of the same tree they could like each other a bit. If neither of those occurs then all just proceeds as normal.

Alternatively we could have certain leaders have built in likes and dislikes for certain branches, according to their canonical character. (We would be smart about this though - if they've chosen a branch that's "against" their canonical preference, then they shouldn't dislike others who have made the same choice.)

More on the non-Policy-things-that-care-about-branches below.

I'd say if you want this kind of thing, we could consider having "openers" for these Branches. But I'm not sure that's a good idea, because that's either another policy we expect somebody to buy, or else makes there be one or more (depending on how many possible "first policies" are in the branch) policies that are really powerful.

I could see us doing openers for the branches, that could be interesting. I think we'd want them to be "opened" when the player picks any Policy from the branch, rather than them needing to purchase the opener specifically. That does create the problem you mentioned here of potentially making some branches quite powerful by giving you an opener and a Policy at the same time, so minimal investment in many trees just to unlock the branches could become a strong strategy. Is that a problem though? It's just an alternate way to play, right?

However, I think this is orthogonal to other systems in the game caring about the player's choice of branches. Even if we don't have openers, we could still have things like:

• a building that grants +1 Faith when you pursue the Fear branch of Power
• a unit that does +X% damage against enemies who have pursued the Friendship branch of Politics
• a Thread that's only available to civs who have pursued the Insight branch of Scholarship

These are just demonstrative examples, not specific suggestions.

We can make it clear through the UI to the human player that "opening" a branch (even if it doesn't provide any bonus beyond the Policy being selected) is a choice that they're making to the exclusion of the other branch. (We'll need to do this anyway, since it locks them out of the other branch, right?) They'll know which branch they've chosen, so it's a piece of information that they have ready access to and can use strategically if other parts of the game care about that choice.

The reason I gravitate toward other mechanics caring about branch selection is it makes the branches feel more like a mechanic that's a part of the whole game. It's also another new axis we can use to make our base game units/buildings/wonders different from the BNW ones while still accomplishing similar goals.

Hmmm.... I'm not sure *why* we'd need this. I think one issue with it is is that there isn't real consistency vs the purpose of "left side" and "right side," such that we couldn't really consistently apply the point of these two culture types.

Yeah, there's no real motivating factor for having different Culture types, it was just an idea I figured might be interesting to consider. I wasn't thinking of it as something that is globally "left" or "right" across branches, but more specifically about each branch, which we could more readily tie mechanics to. (There are actions that fit into the flavor of most branches, whereas there isn't a consistent flavor across "left branch", as you said.) Which leads to:

I could theoretically see us devising a system where we rip off of CiVI by "boosting" certain ones when certain conditions are met. Not sure how we'd do that though, since it's not like each policy "Costs culture" - culture just buys you the policy unlock in general.

Yeah, the Eureka bonuses don't work as well for CiV Policies since they don't get unlocked like the tech tree. We could refund the player X% if they had the Eureka bonus for a Policy they chose, but it's still a bit backwards. It'd also be very "port from CiVI", which I'm not sure I like the idea of yet.

I could also imagine a system where, you're on the "choose a policy" screen, and some of them require something extra, like X Faith, or Y Science, to unlock. Not sure why you'd want to spend extra resources to get policies here.

I don't think we want to stack costs onto the Policies before they can be unlocked.

Hmmm... I'm not sure either way. Part of me thinks this could be cool, to upend things a bit. But again, I don't know why we'd necessarily need to do this. I think, especially considering how late in the process we are, there is probably enough going on in this game without doing something like this. I'd be fine, in theory, with some "unbalanced" policies (probably "final" policies) or finishers, but I'd certainly want them to be balanced within policies as a whole - I'd rather the trees themselves be *more* equal than in BNW, not less.

I think upending in relation to BNW is generally a good thing for us. I don't see our current stage of the process as an obstacle for this. If anything, it makes it more important that we don't let these final pieces feel "tacked on". We don't want to transform most of the game and have some sections stand out as glaringly BNW-like.

Balance of such Policies is something to consider with these, but only really in that more exotic Policies are difficult to know when they're comparable, rather than exotic Policies are inherently unbalanced. We've mentioned elsewhere that markedly different mechanical systems that play off against each other in a balanced way are more rewarding for the player (Starcraft's diverse factions, for example), so it's mostly about whether we can deliver an acceptable balance with it.

I'm thinking of things that would change the way the player uses other mechanics, rather than makes those mechanics better. Either unlocked just by pursuing a branch, finishing a branch, or as mechanics for individual Policies. So things like (examples, not suggestions):

• something in the Ogier branch that makes trade routes you establish with Stedding unplunderable
• something in the Fear branch that makes FDs always spawn outside your territory, never in it
• something in the Resolve branch that means enemy EaE can't steal techs from your capital

They're mostly just different types of effects, but they're things that don't fit into the BNW-style notion of Policies as bonuses to elsewhere.

Not sure if I prefer going down a path like this, or going down the "policy branches mean more to the rest of the game" path. Maybe the latter, since it feels more like we added a feature, and less like we messed with it.

Yeah, this is a similar sentiment to what I said above (having read this already when I wrote that). Having the rest of the game care about branch selection in some way makes the branches feel more like a part of the game, rather than something we've just dropped on top of it.

take your time. Obviously I haven't been able to spend more than a fraction of time on this stuff (as evidenced by the month between posts). That's still true for a few more days, I think.

I will be returning tomorrow for some branch-level run throughs then!

dang... uh oh. Well, let's get through at least your initial thoughts on this thing before we come back to the decision-making table.
Haven't played either since finishing my first game. Been insanely swamped!

They've got to release them eventually! I'm hoping they've been slow to do so because they've making the tools rock solid post-release of CiVI and debating (and eventually choosing to) release the game source with the first set of tools.

 

[S3rgeus]

Time for a tree-level run through! I'm avoiding drilling down into specific Policies at this stage so that we can consider the whole of the objectives of the trees and the two branches within each and whether we want to switch or repurpose any of those branches wholesale. I feel like some of my suggestions/thoughts are a bit woolly because of this, but hopefully they start the right conversations about the role of each tree/branch!

Unity
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Loyalty (based on Tradition), Leadership
First Honorific: The Builder

Notes: Leadership is intended to use governors to make your cities big and productive. Some of this flavor might already be used elsewhere. I'm not sure the name Loyalty really fits here.​

I like the use of Governors as one of the branches, that's something that we've added that provides good design space for bonuses for Policies. Would we be concerned that this tree unlocks quite early, but Governors can show up at earliest when a civ first receives an LP, which might be later?

If I'm reading the flavor of the two branches on this one right, I'm seeing the left side is kind of "Two Rivers style village" bonuses and the right is more Governor-driven nobility bonuses. It's a good flavor crossover between the two branches: different ways of leading a newly created civ. They also both play well into Tall, which, as the Tradition replacement, makes sense.

Ambition
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Prosperity (based on Liberty), Expansion (based in part on [/B]Exploration[/B])
First Honorific: The Resourceful

Notes: I'm not sure the name Prosperity really fits here. Expansion is some of the stuff from Exploration plus some beefing up. I couldn't think of a Finisher for this one that felt equivalent in value to the Liberty finisher - this bugs me, since all other trees have at least somewhat different finishers!​

Yeah, the two identical finishers does stand out since there aren't any other trees that do that. I won't make new suggestions for that just yet, since this pass is more about the general flavor and mechanical structure of the whole branch, rather than individual Policies.

The Sea Folk seem like they would like Expansion a lot, mechanically. Which is a bit strange, because "Expansionist" isn't how the Sea Folk would flavorfully be characterized. I see that this is the Exploration stuff though. I think Unity's branches are a bit more flavorfully connected - this one is basically sea and not-sea bonuses. It's the Liberty equivalent, so the general "encourage expansion" thread is there on both sides, which is cool. The choice will be fairly clear cut if you don't have access to the ocean, but it's ok for us to do that sometimes.

Are there other ways we could encourage expansion that wouldn't necessarily be dependent on the ocean? (And would we have anywhere else to put the ocean stuff if it moved from here?) The two primary vehicles for expansion are usually settling or conquest, which we could have two branches for, but then we have an entire War tree, which kind of takes care of the latter.

Would encouraging non-conquest expansion in different ways be enough? Something about trading that would add additional Happiness to luxuries on one branch and then have a "living off the land" flavor which possibly finished to grant bonus resources some Happiness yield? (This could be similar to how luxuries work, duplicates don't give additional Happiness, and their yield would probably be lower.) This would change how the civs prioritized settling locations depending on which branch they pursued.

War
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Justice (based on Honor), Valor
First Honorific: Battle Lord/Battle Lady

Notes: The names Justice and Valor are also kind of random for what these trees do. Lamplights might be more of a tech than a policy, so might need to be retitled something to show "you can't cover your face in this civ." Blight Lore might be too weak or redundant to other abilities. The Valor Finisher is meant to fuel either light or shadow. Not sure it's really that awesome - might need some beefing.​

Blight Lore could possibly just eliminate the combat strength reduction from injury when fighting Shadowspawn. That's more of a specific Policy thing we could discuss in the next stage though.

I like the flavor concepts of the two branches, one for fighting Shadowspawn and one for fighting in general. This is one of the two trees that have 3 non-branched Policies and looking closer at this one I think we'll want to change it to be consistent. I think the Shadowspawn branch needs some more oomph so that civs on the Blightborder can take those Policies and it give them a definite leg up that offsets the Blight's otherwise disadvantageous presence.

I think we'd want to get quite aggressive with those Policies, since our "main" mechanic otherwise makes running Blightborder civs very difficult. It's also the more niche pick, which makes me think we want it to be stronger in the situation where it's relevant to compensate for that. (Though there's certainly a school of thought for not wanting it to be an auto-pick if you're near the Blight as well.)




And unfortunately I'm out of time! I'll keep mulling the remaining ones (and those above) and will return tomorrow!

EDIT: Apologies, I'm not actually home tomorrow evening! Tuesday!

EDIT again: Unfortunately I didn't get time to give the remaining trees justice tonight. I'll attempt again tomorrow after D&D!

 

[S3rgeus]

Continuing on! Advance warning, I am going to be away at a series of events over the rest of this week, so the next time I'll be home to post will be next Monday!

Myth
Unlock: Era 1
Branches: Folklore (based on Piety), Dreams
First Honorific: Teacher

Notes: names were really hard here. The goal of Dreams is, in addition to providing some T'a'r benefits, to provide a use for faith that doesn't rely on having your own religion.​

I can see what you mean about the names, but I think I get the intended flavor gist of each one. Folklore is the more general cultural concepts in the Westlands, the stuff that makes people follow the Light and all that. Plays well into the Path and Lineages flavors. Dreams is obviously a T'a'r driven branch.

My first thought is are we ok with the connection between T'a'r and Faith? As the Piety replacement tree, this will make a lot of players consider T'a'r to be a part of the Faith/Paths part of the game. It's something we can certainly do, but I think we should make that decision quite consciously. (Maybe we already did and I'm forgetting.) I don't see other connections to T'a'r in other branches, so would civs using T'a'r more for its Domination advantages find themselves drawn to this Faith tree?

Looking back at how T'a'r works, it doesn't seem to be particularly connected to Faith yet, but more integration with other game systems is usually a good thing.

Power
Unlock: Era 2
Branches: Acceptance, Fear
First Honorific: The Stalwart

Notes: This one's all original, obviously. I did my best to make these feel equivalent, flavorful, and worth doing. Not sure how successful I was. I took a leap by making the Finishers both related to Alignment - these elements could be removed. The Fear finisher is supposed to reward *both* accumulation of light and shadow, though over tremendous amounts of points. The problem with this is of course the neutral folks who are left out (this isn't a problem with the Acceptance finisher).​

The Power Tree!

This is one where I feel like gamechanging stuff is most at home. My first reaction is that we don't want it to be significantly different from the other trees, but is that definitely the case? Would there be drawbacks to this tree being very different?

As you've pointed out in the doc, the association with Alignment on the finishers is possibly a bit problematic. I don't think we particularly want to associate Alignment directly with any particular channeling opinion, though the presence of these Policies doesn't necessarily cause that by themselves. More on a potential Alignment tree below.

Quick question for this, what unit does "Saidar w/ Faith after Era 5" mean? The Wilder unit (or that civilization's replacement)? (Since we've now eliminated Kin.)

I like how +X Spark ties in well to the bonuses from either branch, that's very mechanically elegant.

I do feel like there should be more to this, more to distinguish Acceptance and Fear civs since it was such a defining part of our flavor considerations. But maybe that comes from the "other systems caring about branches" mechanics more so than the actual mechanics of the Policies on each branch themselves.

Creativity
Unlock: Era 2
Branches: Inspiration (based on Aesthetics), Legacy
First Honorific: The Impassioned

Notes: Note that I think we made this tree unlock earlier than in BNW, thus it is placed before Politics. Naming was also tricky here, as well as the names/correspondence of the branches. The idea behind Legacy is to boost Culture for players who aren't seeking a Culture VC - benefit from your prestige and defend against others' culture.​

This is the Aesthetics replacement, right? I don't think we're unlocking it early then, because BNW Aesthetics unlocks in the Classical Era, which is Era 2. Politics, as the Patronage replacement, is being unlocked later though (Era 2 in BNW and Era 3 in WoTMod), according to this overview. I don't remember if we decided to swap that around to accommodate the Power tree? That seems likely.

This tree (Creativity) seems fairly straightforward. Given the first two Policies on the Legacy side, I don't know if non-Culture players would be inclined to pick it, but we can swap and tweak for balance on those. Given the offense/defense mechanics that are available on Culture, having a branch for each seems like a good way to diversify this. Since players unlock these Policies with Culture though, I don't know if a purely defensive tree will be useful for them, rather than beelining the tree that makes them win the non-Culture VC they're going for more effectively.

Politics
Unlock: Era 3
Branches: Diplomacy (based in part on Patronage), Friendship (based in part on Patronage)
First Honorific: Arbiter

Notes: Left is for Tower and right is for stedding. This is one where I split Patronage up instead of putting all of its bonuses on the left side - doing so would likely make the right side quite unused, given the purpose of this tree. However, I did my best to balance the branches such that the lost functionality for each side was roughly there despite the subtractions - making sure there was a +Happ option on both sides, etc. It's possible that the +Aes Sedai quota is problematic as a finisher.​

I really like the branch diversity on this one. And I'm actually finding I really like our mechanical play on Diplomacy (on paper, we'll see how it plays!). The existence of the Stedding and the Tower should change voting quite a bit and it gives us a lot more design space for civs to specialize in dealing with certain kinds of CSes. I wonder if Firaxis tried out mechanics that cared about CS trait type? (Maritime, Mercantile, etc.) And if they did how come none made it into the final game. (There aren't any in BNW, right?)

Don't have much to say except I very much like this one overall. Sort of like the Power tree, I feel like maybe it could do some "bigger" things, but I feel more sure the "other mechanics care about branches" stuff will resolve that for this tree than the Power tree.

Wealth
Unlock: Era 3
Branches: Fortune (based on Commerce), Opportunity (based in part on Exploration)
First Honorific: The Magnate

Notes: naming tricky, once again! The challenger here was to make Opportunity (more Exploration cast-offs) worth considering. I did that through some T'a'r functionality - it's possible some of these policies are too good now.
It's worth mentioning that in the Culture Summary, it states that Reflections of Power (hidden antiquity sites) should appear after a non-finisher policy in the Culture Tree (Creativity). This is problematic, it seems to me. First, BNW deliberately separates them into a non-culture tree for a reason. Second, Reflections are created (so say the summaries) when a Wolfbrother or dreamwalker is expended. We could change that, but as is, that has to do with T'a'r, and I don't really see us making a culture branch that's super T'a'r focused. We could have a t'a'r branch in Creativity, but then it'd mean players would have to choose to go with that *instead* of normal culture bonuses... which wouldn't usually be worth it.​

Interesting, yes, I can see why we'd want to separate the Reflections from the Culture tree actually. As you've said, they're in the BNW Exploration tree, rather than Aesthetics, for a reason. We did have a very specific reason for why we wanted it to be a non-finisher Policy though! I'm struggling to find it now, but I remember having a very specific mechanical requirement for that one.

I think a T'a'r branch in the Culture tree might work though, even if we don't put the Reflections in there. It fits relatively well flavor wise that it's a "cultured" activity, being immersed in T'a'r. And the T'a'r branch wouldn't need to forgo Culture for T'a'r, it could be about gaining Culture through T'a'r and/or using superior Culture to gain advantage in T'a'r. This might be a better competing branch to the traditional Culture-VC-targeting-branch (which is Inspiration atm). (So it would take Legacy's place.) It depends on what we think about the viability of a defensive branch in a Culture tree, related to what I mentioned above about players choosing to pursue their intended VC rather than defend against Culture.

I also don't think that we want to dismiss T'a'r vs Culture in general as potential opposing branches, even if the T'a'r branch isn't very Culture-y. If that choice means the T'a'r branch is never worth it, then we have a more fundamental problem with the T'a'r system in that it isn't connected enough to the rest of the game to be impactful, rather than any problems with the branching of this specific Policy tree. And particularly since there will be many players not going for the Culture VC, the Culture branch should be less relevant for them, making the T'a'r branch more useful relative to the Culture one.

As for the Wealth tree, I see this one as quite flexible. If we do move any T'a'r stuff above, Gold can be integrated with most other game mechanics in some way, so how that would work is likely a knock-on decision from the above!

Scholarship
Unlock: Era 4
Branches: Resolve (based on Rationalism), Insight
First Honorific: The Learned

Notes: So another one that I forced in a branch. This one was a little less easy to justify than the Creativity one. Basically I chose to center it around boosting your science while also using science to boost other things (as in Paradigm shift and the Insight Finisher). Literacy might seem weird - the idea is to benefit both Wide and Tall civs. Social Science mixes in alignment - perhaps not well. I figured it was an interesting change of pace.​

All right, our replacement for the best tree, Rationalism!

I agree that the branching here is less well defined than a lot of the other trees. I can see where you're going with the mechanics of it, but there's no big flavor through line that I'm seeing the player choosing between. Understandable since we hadn't originally intended to branch this one, on the assumption-at-a-glance that it doesn't really have two "opposing sides". (However I do agree it's a good call to branch it, since having just one unbranched tree is super bizarre.)

More on Alignment below, but I wonder if we could roll ethics into this tree, and present that as two possible branches? "Irresponsible" vs "Altruistic" experimentation could present an interesting flavor difference and naturally points them toward quite different mechanics, but both of which can be used to achieve an overall "more Science!" goal.



So, Alignment! I've mentioned Alignment a few times above. Alignment has also come up in a few of the Policies and one branch in your initial treatment. I'm wondering if we should have an Alignment/LB tree?

There are a few considerations for this. One thing is I remember us discussing that we wanted to keep the number of Policies available to the player in a single game the same as BNW. Hence we've replaced 1 tree, cannibalizing its parts into some of the others, and presented a lot of our new stuff as mutually exclusive options via the branching system. That ends up meaning players have the same/very similar number of total available Policies over the course of one game.

What was our reason for sticking to that? Just looking at it briefly now, because Policies are no longer tied directly to the Culture VC (as of BNW, and we've kept that), it seems like the primary limiting factor of how many Policies a player can adopt is how much Culture they generate, rather than how many Policies they have at their disposal. In fact, I read in a reddit thread recently that there's a soft lock in CiV where if there are no Policies left for you to unlock and you receive a free Policy, you are unable to end your turn. So Firaxis clearly envisioned all reasonable games ending before that became a factor.

This makes me think adding more Policies doesn't necessarily require us to adjust the scale of how quickly players gain Culture or unlock Policies, which is something I believe we said we wanted to avoid before. Sensibly so because it's super hard to balance. (Though we may end up doing it anyway since we've added more sources of Culture.) If there are more Policies available, players will just have more choices, rather than end up with more bonuses. I may be forgetting some part of our original reasoning for this though.

As for the Alignment tree in general, it seems to me that our Alignment system (which I consider to include the Alignment yields, Threads, Forsaken Quests, the TW, and the LB VC) is a big chunk of the game worthy of its own set of Policies. It's also something that flavorfully a civilization would have as a part of their governmental structure. (Not that they would have "evil legislation" but that they would be structured in a way that encourages corruption, or in a way that actively elevates their people's standards of living, for two opposing Alignment examples.)

An Alignment tree could be an early tree (unlocks in era 1 or 2) that builds on early decisions. But I feel like it's more at home unlocking toward the end alongside/after Scholarship, where the LB is more imminent. (Many of the other trees have Policies that address mechanics for very specific VCs, like Reflections of Power/Hidden Antiquity Sites, and the mechanics of how the LB works weights their effectiveness more heavily toward the end of the game.)

How an Alignment tree could be structured, branch-wise could vary:

There's a very obvious option of having a Light and Shadow tree. (This would need to be addressed for telegraphing somehow if Branch choice did affect Diplomatic relationships, but that can be dealt with in a few ways, if we like this idea.) This could have some very targeted bonuses that would have very clear usage scenarios for civs in certain situations. I have several suggestions for what Policies could look like on either of these branches, but I figure it helps to go through the high level design of it first.

Alternatively, there are more Alignment agnostic branching strategies. One branch could be an "aggressive Alignment" branch, for players who are trying to maximize their Alignment generation one way or the other. It could be pitted against a "controlled Alignment" branch, that gives the civ finer grained control over the Alignment sources they already have. This could be used to very efficiently reach a given Alignment threshold, or remain Neutral intentionally to avoid being dragged into the LB by the declaration bonuses/penalties.

Alternatively, there's also significant room to have a "war" style Alignment branch pitted against a "peace" style one. (Even Shadow could adopt "peace" - in that case it would be more "subterfuge" vs "legions of Trollocs".)

This style (war vs peace) and the one above (aggressive vs controlled) could potentially be amenable for a style of branching where the Policies are actually different depending on the player's Alignment. This would give us a lot of design space to target side-specific mechanics on each branch, where some types of bonuses will make the most sense to only one Alignment or the other. For example, in such a war vs peace set up, one branch has a Policy that allows you to purchase Trollocs with Faith, the other Grey Men. That kind of thing. It would let us avoid the inherently "generic" bonus approach that we're forced into when we need to cater to both Alignments in the same bonus (though doing this does not preclude us from having such symmetrical Policies where they are viable).

As for how "different depending on the player's Alignment" would work, there are several ways to do that, with their own pros and cons. Have a threshold in the tiers (above 4, picking a tier very roughly), and maybe you can't pick the branched Policies unless you satisfy that. Or taking whatever the player's current net Alignment is at the time they open the tree. Or even taking the player's net Alignment at the time when they adopt each individual Policy. There are a bunch of ways to do that, which we could discuss in more depth.

And for Neutral civs, Policy trees are of course entirely optional, so they aren't compelled to open the Alignment tree at all, if they want to retain Neutrality. (Though some of the above branching options could mesh with a Neutral strategy, even the Light/Shadow branching options could be used to compensate for unintended drift in the opposite direction.)

And as a potential alternative for having an entire tree devoted to Alignment, we have several existing trees that have some relatively flexible branching flavors/mechanics at the moment. (We could swap them out and the choices would still be reasonable, unlike Fear/Acceptance, which couldn't have half of it swapped for Alignment in any way that's particularly simple.) These seem to me to be Creativity, Wealth, and Scholarship. I mentioned above an "ethics" approach to branching Scholarship that could play well into Alignment. Would we want to consider making some of the branches on those trees more Alignment heavy? And how would that play as an alternative to the more "direct" opposing branch? (If in all cases, the opposing branch is in fact more "direct" - it may not be, depending on how we tweak it!)


There we go! Finally got some words down! And it turns out I had more to say than I expected. Hopefully this all makes sense. I also want to say thanks again for doing this treatment! I don't want it to feel like I'm pulling the rug out from under it, particularly a lot of the specific Policies, with these more abstract suggestions for tree/branch level changes, that's not my intention!

 

[counterpoint]

ok, I'm back! Hopefully I should be able to post more often for now.

I want to ask, though - how far down this policy rabbit hole are we going, considering the big CiVI decision we're going to need to make? Are we going to continue and build the whole thing while we wait for more information?

Thanks! This year was a fantasy book where inventing things fuels magic. There was one person who'd worked out how to do it and built the only city in the world and the main character thinks anyone can invent stuff, so she's out to prove it!

cool. good luck on wrapping it all up

Google's advanced AI would probably be quite good at seeding this process actually! All those digitized books, I'm sure they could mine WoT specifically for notable flavor that we could use here. It would find a lot of red herrings, but we only need the few that make us remember some good matches for the Policies we're making!

ok, so you do agree that this process would work better if one of us were an AI...

I was saying that the BNW Policy trees most influenced by map placement were Commerce and Exploration, since they're dependent on access to the ocean. The other BNW trees are all more about what strategy you're going for, regardless of what the map is like.

got it. Of course, we can add the shadowspawn-related War branch to that list.

Is this mostly about the AI attitude? I could see us leaving it out of there, but I don't think the capacity to skip trees necessarily means this doesn't work. It would be an "optional opinion" - if a civ hasn't picked a branch on a tree then it doesn't affect their opinion of anyone else. But if two civs have opened opposing branches of the same tree, they could dislike each other a bit. (Not a dominating factor, but one of many.) And if they've opened the same branch of the same tree they could like each other a bit. If neither of those occurs then all just proceeds as normal.

Alternatively we could have certain leaders have built in likes and dislikes for certain branches, according to their canonical character. (We would be smart about this though - if they've chosen a branch that's "against" their canonical preference, then they shouldn't dislike others who have made the same choice.)

More on the non-Policy-things-that-care-about-branches below.

Yeah, I'm not so sure of all of this. True, it's a mechanically sound possibility, but I'm not sure it makes that much flavorful sense. Yeah, Fear/Tolerance, of course, but what about the two Unity trees? War trees (wouldn't everybody be "mad" when *anybody* takes one of those)? It doesn't seem grounded in reality for most of them. I think, obviously, the opposition of Acceptance and Fear is well-grounded in flavor, and probably deserves to be represented, but what we'd be "tracking" in that case is already pretty much accounted for with the Philosophies, which factors in essentially similar flavor concepts into an existing mechanics. So, I'm tempted to just leave it at that.

Also, I do think it's best to keep what branches someone has chosen mostly a secret, if we end up having an alignment branch. So that'd mess all this up anyways

I could see us doing openers for the branches, that could be interesting. I think we'd want them to be "opened" when the player picks any Policy from the branch, rather than them needing to purchase the opener specifically. That does create the problem you mentioned here of potentially making some branches quite powerful by giving you an opener and a Policy at the same time, so minimal investment in many trees just to unlock the branches could become a strong strategy. Is that a problem though? It's just an alternate way to play, right?

eh... I could see us doing this, but I don't think it's all that worth it. Maybe feels a little cluttered. Unlocking other things by each branch, as you describe below, would be cooler.

However, I think this is orthogonal to other systems in the game caring about the player's choice of branches. Even if we don't have openers, we could still have things like:

• a building that grants +1 Faith when you pursue the Fear branch of Power
• a unit that does +X% damage against enemies who have pursued the Friendship branch of Politics
• a Thread that's only available to civs who have pursued the Insight branch of Scholarship

These are just demonstrative examples, not specific suggestions.

We can make it clear through the UI to the human player that "opening" a branch (even if it doesn't provide any bonus beyond the Policy being selected) is a choice that they're making to the exclusion of the other branch. (We'll need to do this anyway, since it locks them out of the other branch, right?) They'll know which branch they've chosen, so it's a piece of information that they have ready access to and can use strategically if other parts of the game care about that choice.

The reason I gravitate toward other mechanics caring about branch selection is it makes the branches feel more like a mechanic that's a part of the whole game. It's also another new axis we can use to make our base game units/buildings/wonders different from the BNW ones while still accomplishing similar goals.

,yeah, in theory at least, I can get behind this. It's more organic than the other things mentioned above.

I do wonder if it's likely to be a little too "min-max-ey" though, where it the single unlock of the branch is more powerful than the policies of that branch. I'm ok with "unlock a bunch of branches, finish none" being a strategy, but I don't want it to be *the* strategy. One answer to this would be to put it on the Finisher, but then that feels like a normal ol finisher bonus, which undermines what I think you're going for.

So I'd want to be careful that the choices we do make are very clearly symmetrical, and rather minor over the long-haul, or at least no more major than any one policy, in most situations. Given the fact that there are some policies that are essentially "+1 to this yield per city", having a knock-on effect of +1 Faith to some building is actually pretty major. Keeping things circumstantial, and rather flavor-linked, should help this.

Yeah, there's no real motivating factor for having different Culture types, it was just an idea I figured might be interesting to consider. I wasn't thinking of it as something that is globally "left" or "right" across branches, but more specifically about each branch, which we could more readily tie mechanics to. (There are actions that fit into the flavor of most branches, whereas there isn't a consistent flavor across "left branch", as you said.) Which leads to:

yeah, I'd say we should leave this off.

Yeah, the Eureka bonuses don't work as well for CiV Policies since they don't get unlocked like the tech tree. We could refund the player X% if they had the Eureka bonus for a Policy they chose, but it's still a bit backwards. It'd also be very "port from CiVI", which I'm not sure I like the idea of yet.

agreed.

I don't think we want to stack costs onto the Policies before they can be unlocked.

agreed

I think upending in relation to BNW is generally a good thing for us. I don't see our current stage of the process as an obstacle for this. If anything, it makes it more important that we don't let these final pieces feel "tacked on". We don't want to transform most of the game and have some sections stand out as glaringly BNW-like.

Balance of such Policies is something to consider with these, but only really in that more exotic Policies are difficult to know when they're comparable, rather than exotic Policies are inherently unbalanced. We've mentioned elsewhere that markedly different mechanical systems that play off against each other in a balanced way are more rewarding for the player (Starcraft's diverse factions, for example), so it's mostly about whether we can deliver an acceptable balance with it.

I'm thinking of things that would change the way the player uses other mechanics, rather than makes those mechanics better. Either unlocked just by pursuing a branch, finishing a branch, or as mechanics for individual Policies. So things like (examples, not suggestions):

• something in the Ogier branch that makes trade routes you establish with Stedding unplunderable
• something in the Fear branch that makes FDs always spawn outside your territory, never in it
• something in the Resolve branch that means enemy EaE can't steal techs from your capital

They're mostly just different types of effects, but they're things that don't fit into the BNW-style notion of Policies as bonuses to elsewhere.

yeah, I think maybe this could be the answer for the above discussion on unlock-bonuses. Maybe the thing you get for opening a branch is more of a "trait" or "ability" like these, instead of a "bonus" that has to be balanced against the other policies. Then again, those things would have to remain relatively mild, else it really, really encourages people to just unlock all the branches, and never finish them, I suppose. This is especially the case as some Branches can be unlocked as soon as the Tree is opened. Still, it "feels" like a better fit than the alternative. It also feels like a weirder fit to include these kinds of abilities as *policies*, where I think people will "buy" them more as some additional feature (sort of like how an opener for Honor letting you see barb camps doesn't feel weird).

I know those were examples, not suggestions, but I should mention that that Fear ability might not be universally good for them - killing FDs provides rewards that they might want. Thus,my Fear bonuses had to do with making your FDs weaker and provide better rewards, not rarer. Sort of like how we don't want to actually lower incidence of MC spawn rate, for similar reasons.

Yeah, this is a similar sentiment to what I said above (having read this already when I wrote that). Having the rest of the game care about branch selection in some way makes the branches feel more like a part of the game, rather than something we've just dropped on top of it.

They've got to release them eventually! I'm hoping they've been slow to do so because they've making the tools rock solid post-release of CiVI and debating (and eventually choosing to) release the game source with the first set of tools.

so I guess we'll kick the ball down the field a bit more...

So I'll be back and forth this weekend, finishing these posts in an a la carte manner

 

[counterpoint]

Time for a tree-level run through! I'm avoiding drilling down into specific Policies at this stage so that we can consider the whole of the objectives of the trees and the two branches within each and whether we want to switch or repurpose any of those branches wholesale. I feel like some of my suggestions/thoughts are a bit woolly because of this, but hopefully they start the right conversations about the role of each tree/branch!

ok!

So, one thing I should mention at the top - we'd decided on this branching, and the names of the branches, months ago (probably a year ago or more). They're in the social policies summary. I say that because some of your comments seem to indicate that these were decisions I made, or were new in general.

The exception to this of course is the Scholarship and Creativity branching, which, as noted, I added.

Not a big point, but worthy of mention, I guess.I suppose the effect of that is that A) I'm not personally attached to some of these branching choices, but B) past-us seems to have had good reasons for making these decisions.

I like the use of Governors as one of the branches, that's something that we've added that provides good design space for bonuses for Policies. Would we be concerned that this tree unlocks quite early, but Governors can show up at earliest when a civ first receives an LP, which might be later?

this is all about Unity.

That's a good point. Maybe we need to do it such that the governor bonuses are only towards the end of the tree - three deep or something. I'm not sure if there's a better solution, if we want governor stuff. Governors seem to be a tall-favoring mechanic, right? That means they probably belong with Unity, cirhgt?

If I'm reading the flavor of the two branches on this one right, I'm seeing the left side is kind of "Two Rivers style village" bonuses and the right is more Governor-driven nobility bonuses. It's a good flavor crossover between the two branches: different ways of leading a newly created civ. They also both play well into Tall, which, as the Tradition replacement, makes sense.

yeah, that view of it makes sense, I'd say. Maybe we can reflavor the left side to reflect that. Loyalty, as is, blurs with "Fealty," which I think is a tech we have.

Yeah, the two identical finishers does stand out since there aren't any other trees that do that. I won't make new suggestions for that just yet, since this pass is more about the general flavor and mechanical structure of the whole branch, rather than individual Policies.

This is on Ambition. Yes, agreed we should change the right side finisher.

The Sea Folk seem like they would like Expansion a lot, mechanically. Which is a bit strange, because "Expansionist" isn't how the Sea Folk would flavorfully be characterized. I see that this is the Exploration stuff though. I think Unity's branches are a bit more flavorfully connected - this one is basically sea and not-sea bonuses. It's the Liberty equivalent, so the general "encourage expansion" thread is there on both sides, which is cool. The choice will be fairly clear cut if you don't have access to the ocean, but it's ok for us to do that sometimes.

I see what you mean. I'd say this is possibly just an issue of naming, though. Perhaps "Breatdh" or "Diaspora" (no, but something like that) would be more appropriate.

Are there other ways we could encourage expansion that wouldn't necessarily be dependent on the ocean? (And would we have anywhere else to put the ocean stuff if it moved from here?) The two primary vehicles for expansion are usually settling or conquest, which we could have two branches for, but then we have an entire War tree, which kind of takes care of the latter.

right. So these policies are essentially lifted from Exploration. If we want to preserve the BNW policies in some form, this is a logical place to do that. I'm not sold that we must do so, though (but it feels good to do it)

Would encouraging non-conquest expansion in different ways be enough? Something about trading that would add additional Happiness to luxuries on one branch and then have a "living off the land" flavor which possibly finished to grant bonus resources some Happiness yield? (This could be similar to how luxuries work, duplicates don't give additional Happiness, and their yield would probably be lower.) This would change how the civs prioritized settling locations depending on which branch they pursued.

hmmm, the "bonus" sentence is kind of confusing. You mean "bonus resources" would have +happiness? Hmmm, that's possibly too powerful, especially this early in the game. Obviously youcould scale it as you say. I'm honestly not sure we want a simple social policy choice to result it such a drastically different city placement priority. This connects to our conversation way back when about the possible Aiel and Sea Folk UAs that would allow settling on ocean or on terrible desert. A simple social policy would make your cities kind of uncapturable (in terms of usefulness) to civs that didn't have that branch. It's also likely to kind of favor the "willy nilly" approach the AI tends to often make with building tons of cities in random terrible places. It's possible this'd mess up the already tenuous optimum map distribution of cities. I'm open to it, but it's possible that it's too much.

Blight Lore could possibly just eliminate the combat strength reduction from injury when fighting Shadowspawn. That's more of a specific Policy thing we could discuss in the next stage though.

these are about War. Yeah, that's probably a good choice.

I like the flavor concepts of the two branches, one for fighting Shadowspawn and one for fighting in general. This is one of the two trees that have 3 non-branched Policies and looking closer at this one I think we'll want to change it to be consistent. I think the Shadowspawn branch needs some more oomph so that civs on the Blightborder can take those Policies and it give them a definite leg up that offsets the Blight's otherwise disadvantageous presence.

I agree.

I think we'd want to get quite aggressive with those Policies, since our "main" mechanic otherwise makes running Blightborder civs very difficult. It's also the more niche pick, which makes me think we want it to be stronger in the situation where it's relevant to compensate for that. (Though there's certainly a school of thought for not wanting it to be an auto-pick if you're near the Blight as well.)

I also agree. Can make this branch a little nuttier. But yeah, auto-pick shouldn't be necessary - especially if you're near the blight but not planning on going war-heavy. This should be chosen by either warmongers/dom civs near the blight or warmongers/dom civs who expect a lot of action in the LB.

 

[counterpoint]

Continuing on! Advance warning, I am going to be away at a series of events over the rest of this week, so the next time I'll be home to post will be next Monday!

this has all been delightfully effective at giving me a chance to catch up!

I can see what you mean about the names, but I think I get the intended flavor gist of each one. Folklore is the more general cultural concepts in the Westlands, the stuff that makes people follow the Light and all that. Plays well into the Path and Lineages flavors. Dreams is obviously a T'a'r driven branch.

yeah. Dreams is a somewhat uninspired name, though. A little on the nose.

My first thought is are we ok with the connection between T'a'r and Faith? As the Piety replacement tree, this will make a lot of players consider T'a'r to be a part of the Faith/Paths part of the game. It's something we can certainly do, but I think we should make that decision quite consciously. (Maybe we already did and I'm forgetting.) I don't see other connections to T'a'r in other branches, so would civs using T'a'r more for its Domination advantages find themselves drawn to this Faith tree?

Looking back at how T'a'r works, it doesn't seem to be particularly connected to Faith yet, but more integration with other game systems is usually a good thing.

First off, there are definitely other T'a'r connections is other branches. The Opportunity branch of Wealth is definitely T'a'r related, though not as majorly.

We did make this decision consciously, but I don't remember much about the logic of it, and I don't always trust past-us, since past-us didn't always see the world with the clarity of present-us.

I can see how T'a'r as opposed to Faith is a bit shaky. Were we to change this, I think we need to consider a few things:

1) what would be the opposition to the "normal" Path branch? I went out of the way to make this branch not require a civ to be a path founder, and I think that should remain true. What would be the "angle" though? Perhaps some of these policies can remain, just removing the t'a'r angle. But still I think we'd need a central theme. "using faith production to boost other parts of your civ"?
2) What would we do with t'a'r stuff? I don't think we should necessarily have a t'a'r tree? (coming up with two full branches on that tree would be tough). You mention tar vs culture later. That might be acceptable, though that's also somewhat random. Perhaps instead there shouldn't be a t'a'r-focused branch anywhere, and we just spread the functionality of this stuff throughout many trees (probably mostly right-side stuff for obvious reasons)..

The Power Tree!

This is one where I feel like gamechanging stuff is most at home. My first reaction is that we don't want it to be significantly different from the other trees, but is that definitely the case? Would there be drawbacks to this tree being very different?

I think I'd prefer this not be significantly different from the other trees, both in the kinds of bonuses received, the power of those bonuses, and the way the tree interacts with the rest of the game (for instance, I don't want this tree and this tree alone to affect AI-love, I don't think).

As you've pointed out in the doc, the association with Alignment on the finishers is possibly a bit problematic. I don't think we particularly want to associate Alignment directly with any particular channeling opinion, though the presence of these Policies doesn't necessarily cause that by themselves. More on a potential Alignment tree below.

Yeah, I went out of my way to make these Alignment agnostic, though - true that they both relate to alignment differently, but one doesn't favor shadow or light more than the other (arguably, one enables neutral more than the other). So I think the problem is only there if we don't like the flavor.

Quick question for this, what unit does "Saidar w/ Faith after Era 5" mean? The Wilder unit (or that civilization's replacement)? (Since we've now eliminated Kin.)

Yeah, I meant wilder, but didn't put that because of UU possibilities. I figured it wouldn't be Aes Sedai, so we should probably be more specific.

I like how +X Spark ties in well to the bonuses from either branch, that's very mechanically elegant.

yeah, I figured the better mechanic was to reward their *use* of spark, not their number of spark - so a bonus to spark is good for both sides.

I do feel like there should be more to this, more to distinguish Acceptance and Fear civs since it was such a defining part of our flavor considerations. But maybe that comes from the "other systems caring about branches" mechanics more so than the actual mechanics of the Policies on each branch themselves.

Yeah, we could beef it up, but I also feel like our Philosophies cover most of that ground for us - remember, we need to come up with a whole set of tenets as well. If we're doing overarching "other systems caring about branches" stuff, then we would of course put something appropriate here, though. Also, this is essentially serving the "channeler combat" niche as well, which feels appropriate. Maybe we could smash some of the t'a'r stuff in here if we eliminate Dreams above (though intuitively it makes sense linked to Acceptance, and not Fear, but I don't think we'd want to make fear civs not also able to be t'a'r civs (we'd have to distribute the bonuses appropriately).

Also, this is essentially serving the "channeler combat" niche as well.
This is the Aesthetics replacement, right? I don't think we're unlocking it early then, because BNW Aesthetics unlocks in the Classical Era, which is Era 2. Politics, as the Patronage replacement, is being unlocked later though (Era 2 in BNW and Era 3 in WoTMod), according to this overview. I don't remember if we decided to swap that around to accommodate the Power tree? That seems likely.[/quote]really? Oh, ok. I thought Aesthetics was later. We're good then.

I think we must have moved Politics back for the Power thing. Do we still agree with that? Should *power* be later? I suppose we'd have to look into the bonuses themselves for this. BNW has two era-three unlocks, right (commerce and explo)? I suppose we want two as well..... not sure.

This tree (Creativity) seems fairly straightforward. Given the first two Policies on the Legacy side, I don't know if non-Culture players would be inclined to pick it, but we can swap and tweak for balance on those. Given the offense/defense mechanics that are available on Culture, having a branch for each seems like a good way to diversify this. Since players unlock these Policies with Culture though, I don't know if a purely defensive tree will be useful for them, rather than beelining the tree that makes them win the non-Culture VC they're going for more effectively.

definitely open to more dramatic separation between these, or more to make creativity part 2 attractive. Could theoretically put in t'a'r stuff, I guess.

I really like the branch diversity on this one. And I'm actually finding I really like our mechanical play on Diplomacy (on paper, we'll see how it plays!). The existence of the Stedding and the Tower should change voting quite a bit and it gives us a lot more design space for civs to specialize in dealing with certain kinds of CSes. I wonder if Firaxis tried out mechanics that cared about CS trait type? (Maritime, Mercantile, etc.) And if they did how come none made it into the final game. (There aren't any in BNW, right?)

Don't have much to say except I very much like this one overall. Sort of like the Power tree, I feel like maybe it could do some "bigger" things, but I feel more sure the "other mechanics care about branches" stuff will resolve that for this tree than the Power tree.

this is politics.

Interesting thoughts regarding CS-type. I don't think they matter in the compact. That would be an interesting twist. ok, not much to say here, then!

Interesting, yes, I can see why we'd want to separate the Reflections from the Culture tree actually. As you've said, they're in the BNW Exploration tree, rather than Aesthetics, for a reason. We did have a very specific reason for why we wanted it to be a non-finisher Policy though! I'm struggling to find it now, but I remember having a very specific mechanical requirement for that one.

This is Wealth. I think it might be related to the fact that the Reflections aren't just randomly placed - they are generated by actual in game actions (expending of LPs). Maybe we thought that we needed to give people an earlier chance to grab this capability to compensate for some extra weirdness in the mechanic. Not sure. I'm sure it's in there somewhere, probably around where we came up with the name or something.

I think a T'a'r branch in the Culture tree might work though, even if we don't put the Reflections in there. It fits relatively well flavor wise that it's a "cultured" activity, being immersed in T'a'r. And the T'a'r branch wouldn't need to forgo Culture for T'a'r, it could be about gaining Culture through T'a'r and/or using superior Culture to gain advantage in T'a'r. This might be a better competing branch to the traditional Culture-VC-targeting-branch (which is Inspiration atm). (So it would take Legacy's place.) It depends on what we think about the viability of a defensive branch in a Culture tree, related to what I mentioned above about players choosing to pursue their intended VC rather than defend against Culture.

supposedly about Wealth, but we don't really talk bout it much!

yeah, this is tough. I think a culture-related T'a'r branch is probably more compelling than a defensive culture branch. The main potential issue though is the same as what was true with Myth - do we want to excluse a Culture-VC-focused civ from also going for T'a'r superiority? I think putting T'a'r in direct opposition to any of the VC-linked policies is tricky in this regard. Unless it was such that it also boosted culture enough to support the VC as well... though, still, it's probably not as powerful as just choosing Inspiration in the first place.

I'm open to this, especially considering the lameness of Legacy, but this also could be read to suggest we might be better off with T'a'r stuff either distributed throughout the branches, or else paired against a less VC-linked branch, though unfortunately the only ones like that appear to be Unity, Ambition, and Power.

Tying into what you say below (which I'll respond to later), I could see us having a T'a'r branch paired with an alignment branch, conceivably. Or maybe make the alignment branch have a bunch of t'a'r stuff on it. They aren't necessarily linked or diametrically opposed, but at least their both mechanics that are somewhat VC-agnostic. Also, t'a'r does relate to Threads (Wolfbrother), which is very much Alignment-linked.

I also don't think that we want to dismiss T'a'r vs Culture in general as potential opposing branches, even if the T'a'r branch isn't very Culture-y. If that choice means the T'a'r branch is never worth it, then we have a more fundamental problem with the T'a'r system in that it isn't connected enough to the rest of the game to be impactful, rather than any problems with the branching of this specific Policy tree. And particularly since there will be many players not going for the Culture VC, the Culture branch should be less relevant for them, making the T'a'r branch more useful relative to the Culture one.

yeah, mostly addressed this above, and I mostly agree. hmmm... glimmers give you LP points for T'a'r... do either of them have culture-related abilities? I suppose not, unless we make dreamwards do culture stuff in a policy.

As for the Wealth tree, I see this one as quite flexible. If we do move any T'a'r stuff above, Gold can be integrated with most other game mechanics in some way, so how that would work is likely a knock-on decision from the above!

ok

All right, our replacement for the best tree, Rationalism!

I agree that the branching here is less well defined than a lot of the other trees. I can see where you're going with the mechanics of it, but there's no big flavor through line that I'm seeing the player choosing between. Understandable since we hadn't originally intended to branch this one, on the assumption-at-a-glance that it doesn't really have two "opposing sides". (However I do agree it's a good call to branch it, since having just one unbranched tree is super bizarre.)

More on Alignment below, but I wonder if we could roll ethics into this tree, and present that as two possible branches? "Irresponsible" vs "Altruistic" experimentation could present an interesting flavor difference and naturally points them toward quite different mechanics, but both of which can be used to achieve an overall "more Science!" goal.

you're suggesting having both science branches be alignment related, or having a science branch vs an alignment branch? The former is logically and flavorfully appropriate, sort of (though perhaps "science versus faith" would be more apt), but mechanically problematic in that it doesn't allow Alignment and Science specialization simultaneously. The latter would lead us down a similar path to Politics, where we split the BNW tree into two halves each with a different flavor. I'd be ok with that, in theorty. I don't think I'm ok with having one of the halves be shadow and the other be light, though. I wouldn't want to forcibly link certain science mechanics (e.g. research agreements) to one alignment side. I'd rather one side be "science and alignment" and the other one be "science and <X>" (t'a'r, gold, whatever).

tough!

ok, response on the alignment stuff later!

 

[counterpoint]

So, Alignment! I've mentioned Alignment a few times above. Alignment has also come up in a few of the Policies and one branch in your initial treatment. I'm wondering if we should have an Alignment/LB tree?

There are a few considerations for this. One thing is I remember us discussing that we wanted to keep the number of Policies available to the player in a single game the same as BNW. Hence we've replaced 1 tree, cannibalizing its parts into some of the others, and presented a lot of our new stuff as mutually exclusive options via the branching system. That ends up meaning players have the same/very similar number of total available Policies over the course of one game.

What was our reason for sticking to that? Just looking at it briefly now, because Policies are no longer tied directly to the Culture VC (as of BNW, and we've kept that), it seems like the primary limiting factor of how many Policies a player can adopt is how much Culture they generate, rather than how many Policies they have at their disposal. In fact, I read in a reddit thread recently that there's a soft lock in CiV where if there are no Policies left for you to unlock and you receive a free Policy, you are unable to end your turn. So Firaxis clearly envisioned all reasonable games ending before that became a factor.

This makes me think adding more Policies doesn't necessarily require us to adjust the scale of how quickly players gain Culture or unlock Policies, which is something I believe we said we wanted to avoid before. Sensibly so because it's super hard to balance. (Though we may end up doing it anyway since we've added more sources of Culture.) If there are more Policies available, players will just have more choices, rather than end up with more bonuses. I may be forgetting some part of our original reasoning for this though.

Ah! So, I think our reasoning was twofold:

1) to ease in balancing, we'd keep the policy costs the same throughout the game, and thus the number of policies the average player would unlock would also remain the same
2) to ease in balancing (?) and predictability (?), we'd keep the number of policies available to the player the same.

I still pretty much agree with 1. I wouldn't want to drastically change the culture cost of things, because I do think it might result in balance issues - specifically involving civs ending up with way too many bonuses.

That said, I could be fine with either A) raising the culture cost of each policy slightly to offset the increases in culture sources in the mod, or, very differently, B)leaving it the same and simply enabling a slightly higher number of policy unlocks throughout a typical game, with the understanding that this would be roughly equal across all civs.

Number 2, though... I'm not quite so sure why it's so necessary. I can't remember exactly why we thought it was a big deal to us- perhaps we wanted the kinds of bonuses held by any one civ, and the time frame in which they are unlocked, to roughly resemble civs in BNW. I suppose that's somewhat admirable, but I'm not sure it's really very important. I think I'd probably be fine with having a different number of policy trees. Would they all fit on the screen, though.....?

As for the Alignment tree in general, it seems to me that our Alignment system (which I consider to include the Alignment yields, Threads, Forsaken Quests, the TW, and the LB VC) is a big chunk of the game worthy of its own set of Policies. It's also something that flavorfully a civilization would have as a part of their governmental structure. (Not that they would have "evil legislation" but that they would be structured in a way that encourages corruption, or in a way that actively elevates their people's standards of living, for two opposing Alignment examples.)

mostly agree. I think some mechanics (e.g. spies) in BNW don't enter into policies, and BNW does fine by me in that regard, but I can see how that could be viewed as a flaw.

An Alignment tree could be an early tree (unlocks in era 1 or 2) that builds on early decisions. But I feel like it's more at home unlocking toward the end alongside/after Scholarship, where the LB is more imminent. (Many of the other trees have Policies that address mechanics for very specific VCs, like Reflections of Power/Hidden Antiquity Sites, and the mechanics of how the LB works weights their effectiveness more heavily toward the end of the game.)

I feel like it needs to be as late as Scholarship - theoretically even later. This is mainly because I think I want to give the player as much time as possible to decide A) how much they plan to engage in the alignment system in this play through (partially based on how likely they think the LB will occur, and B)what side they're likely to take (especially if that is relevant to the policies itself)

How an Alignment tree could be structured, branch-wise could vary:

There's a very obvious option of having a Light and Shadow tree. (This would need to be addressed for telegraphing somehow if Branch choice did affect Diplomatic relationships, but that can be dealt with in a few ways, if we like this idea.) This could have some very targeted bonuses that would have very clear usage scenarios for civs in certain situations. I have several suggestions for what Policies could look like on either of these branches, but I figure it helps to go through the high level design of it first.

I could be ok with this. Normally I don't like being too on-the-nose with alignment stuff, but given that this is an optional system, and a player can clearly choose, I could be fine with a shadow and light side. If we did do it, I'd feel pretty solid that branch choices should remain private.

Alternatively, there are more Alignment agnostic branching strategies. One branch could be an "aggressive Alignment" branch, for players who are trying to maximize their Alignment generation one way or the other. It could be pitted against a "controlled Alignment" branch, that gives the civ finer grained control over the Alignment sources they already have. This could be used to very efficiently reach a given Alignment threshold, or remain Neutral intentionally to avoid being dragged into the LB by the declaration bonuses/penalties.

Also pretty ok with this option, assuming that both sides would be alignment-agnostic. I do think it might be harder to make the "controlled" one appealing - might have to have some splash.

Alternatively, there's also significant room to have a "war" style Alignment branch pitted against a "peace" style one. (Even Shadow could adopt "peace" - in that case it would be more "subterfuge" vs "legions of Trollocs".)

broadly speaking, I'm fine with this as well. Would need to see some policy suggestions

This style (war vs peace) and the one above (aggressive vs controlled) could potentially be amenable for a style of branching where the Policies are actually different depending on the player's Alignment. This would give us a lot of design space to target side-specific mechanics on each branch, where some types of bonuses will make the most sense to only one Alignment or the other. For example, in such a war vs peace set up, one branch has a Policy that allows you to purchase Trollocs with Faith, the other Grey Men. That kind of thing. It would let us avoid the inherently "generic" bonus approach that we're forced into when we need to cater to both Alignments in the same bonus (though doing this does not preclude us from having such symmetrical Policies where they are viable).

ok, not getting into how this would "unlock" (discussed below), I think I'm mostly ok with this as well. Makes things quite a bit more complicated, since we need to have two versions of each path.

As for how "different depending on the player's Alignment" would work, there are several ways to do that, with their own pros and cons. Have a threshold in the tiers (above 4, picking a tier very roughly), and maybe you can't pick the branched Policies unless you satisfy that. Or taking whatever the player's current net Alignment is at the time they open the tree. Or even taking the player's net Alignment at the time when they adopt each individual Policy. There are a bunch of ways to do that, which we could discuss in more depth.

I'm not sure which of these I prefer. I do think overall we'd want it to be kind of "fluid" though. I don't love the idea of you starting light,a nd then you turn shadow later (maybe in actual alignment, but possibly just in your LB choice), but you're stuck with all these policies that are pushing you more and more light. I guess I feel like I'd appreciate the whole tree being fluid to change based o whatever you are right now. So the aforementioned Gray Man ability would flip to an anti-gray man ability if you flipped light later. Of course, this makes a somewhat complex mechanic even more complex.

And for Neutral civs, Policy trees are of course entirely optional, so they aren't compelled to open the Alignment tree at all, if they want to retain Neutrality. (Though some of the above branching options could mesh with a Neutral strategy, even the Light/Shadow branching options could be used to compensate for unintended drift in the opposite direction.)

I could theoretically consider a "neutral version" of the tree as well. This would probably be important to have if we wanted it all to be "fluid" - if a player started out light and drifted towards neutral (below tier 4, let's say), we definitely wouldn't want their policies to flip to *shadow* (unless they kept going more shadow)

And as a potential alternative for having an entire tree devoted to Alignment, we have several existing trees that have some relatively flexible branching flavors/mechanics at the moment. (We could swap them out and the choices would still be reasonable, unlike Fear/Acceptance, which couldn't have half of it swapped for Alignment in any way that's particularly simple.) These seem to me to be Creativity, Wealth, and Scholarship. I mentioned above an "ethics" approach to branching Scholarship that could play well into Alignment. Would we want to consider making some of the branches on those trees more Alignment heavy? And how would that play as an alternative to the more "direct" opposing branch? (If in all cases, the opposing branch is in fact more "direct" - it may not be, depending on how we tweak it!)

I'd also be fine with having Alignment live simply as a Branch of osme other tree, but the discussion above does suggest that picking exactly which one is quite difficult (all have issues). I would contest that Fear/Acc *could* work, just not as a full branch (you'd have to inject Alignment into both, which would kind of make it the "WotMod Tree"). This is a similar thing, overall, to T'a'r.

I would say that in doing this kind of thing, it'd probably need to be alignment-agnostic, and *not* changing based on your alignment - half of one tree being variable seems kind of confusing and random.

This is tough! Not sure which way to go (if anywhere).

There we go! Finally got some words down! And it turns out I had more to say than I expected. Hopefully this all makes sense. I also want to say thanks again for doing this treatment! I don't want it to feel like I'm pulling the rug out from under it, particularly a lot of the specific Policies, with these more abstract suggestions for tree/branch level changes, that's not my intention!

it's fine. I knew that somebody had to do a bunch of grunt work before all the abstract discussion would be effective - this gives us something concrete to discuss and compare against, even if we thrash it.

 

[S3rgeus]

ok, I'm back! Hopefully I should be able to post more often for now.

I may have to work through this over a few days again though!

I want to ask, though - how far down this policy rabbit hole are we going, considering the big CiVI decision we're going to need to make? Are we going to continue and build the whole thing while we wait for more information?

I figure we can continue on as normal, disregarding CiVI because there isn't really any design work left for us that doesn't get undone by moving to CiVI. So it's much of muchness and it's better if we keep going until there's less ambiguity about how CiVI will work.

cool. good luck on wrapping it all up

Thanks!

ok, so you do agree that this process would work better if one of us were an AI...

I think the AI would do a good job of finding the first nuggets of information for us to get started! We'd still need both of us once it was done. Though if one of us has been an AI this whole time then it'll be fine!

Yeah, I'm not so sure of all of this. True, it's a mechanically sound possibility, but I'm not sure it makes that much flavorful sense. Yeah, Fear/Tolerance, of course, but what about the two Unity trees? War trees (wouldn't everybody be "mad" when *anybody* takes one of those)? It doesn't seem grounded in reality for most of them. I think, obviously, the opposition of Acceptance and Fear is well-grounded in flavor, and probably deserves to be represented, but what we'd be "tracking" in that case is already pretty much accounted for with the Philosophies, which factors in essentially similar flavor concepts into an existing mechanics. So, I'm tempted to just leave it at that.

I'm on the verge of leaving this one be at the moment, since it's not necessarily something that will make a big difference, but I think it's worth going through it.

The Unity branches seem like they would dislike each other - the village-y commoners vs the stuck-up nobility being their negative characterization of each other. Of course the Philosophies do represent this as well and I think they'd have a much bigger Diplo modifier, but making Diplo more interesting usually amounts to providing more dimensions for the players to realstically interact with each other. "Civ X should be annoyed when I do this but... oh, the AI doesn't care about that." That kind of sentiment, this is just another small axis that will affect the relationship between two given civs.

As for War, there's a bit of a flavor stretch but there's something there. The Seanchan, who hadn't dealt with Shadowspawn in centuries, saw the stories about trollocs and such as fairy tales and dismissed them, thinking people in the Westlands were overly superstitious. Borderlanders hold the disunity of other Westlands civs with some disdain because those civs don't understand the real threat on the Blightborder. Certainly reasons to dislike each other a bit, even if not very "rivalry" creating.

Alternatively, it might not be as direct as the pursuit of one branch makes civs that have pursued the other dislike you. Maybe some leaders dislike certain branches as a part of their personality. Or certain flavor values (flavors are weighted random to determine an AI civ's general characteristics in a given game, among other things) mean civs dislike certain branches. (Which will lead to some leaders that are weighted toward that flavor often disliking that branch.) This is somewhat reminiscent of CiVI's agendas, but not as complex.

Also, I do think it's best to keep what branches someone has chosen mostly a secret, if we end up having an alignment branch. So that'd mess all this up anyways

This is possible with any of the approaches above - there could simply be a "they (dis)approve of your government" modifier, without telling the player which of their branch pursuits specifically is causing it. And given that Alignment will be a late tree, if we add it, based on our discussion below, there should be too many branches opened on both sides to work out what any other civs has chosen by that time. Or if we wanted to keep those AI opinions more transparent (which would otherwise be useful) the Alignment one could feed into their "Alignment suspicion opinion", rather than any visible Policy differences opinion.

eh... I could see us doing this, but I don't think it's all that worth it. Maybe feels a little cluttered. Unlocking other things by each branch, as you describe below, would be cooler.

Agreed

,yeah, in theory at least, I can get behind this. It's more organic than the other things mentioned above.

I do wonder if it's likely to be a little too "min-max-ey" though, where it the single unlock of the branch is more powerful than the policies of that branch. I'm ok with "unlock a bunch of branches, finish none" being a strategy, but I don't want it to be *the* strategy. One answer to this would be to put it on the Finisher, but then that feels like a normal ol finisher bonus, which undermines what I think you're going for.

I think CiV is in general very min-max-ey, there are just too many parameters to know if you've truly min-max-ed it. I think we're in agreement here, the fundamental concern is that it should be balanced, right? We want the player to have choices, not have obvious best options 100% of the time. I think in that way we've added another option for the player - opening many trees for their first few Policies was almost never a good idea in BNW, which we'd now be making possibly viable.

So I'd want to be careful that the choices we do make are very clearly symmetrical, and rather minor over the long-haul, or at least no more major than any one policy, in most situations. Given the fact that there are some policies that are essentially "+1 to this yield per city", having a knock-on effect of +1 Faith to some building is actually pretty major. Keeping things circumstantial, and rather flavor-linked, should help this.

Yeah, this makes sense. It can also be a consideration for the balance of the unit/building/Custom/whatever that has that bonus. It's not as strong as a straight up +1 Faith bonus to the building, but a conditional one lets us boost that unit/building/etc without it having that bonus all the time.

yeah, I think maybe this could be the answer for the above discussion on unlock-bonuses. Maybe the thing you get for opening a branch is more of a "trait" or "ability" like these, instead of a "bonus" that has to be balanced against the other policies. Then again, those things would have to remain relatively mild, else it really, really encourages people to just unlock all the branches, and never finish them, I suppose. This is especially the case as some Branches can be unlocked as soon as the Tree is opened. Still, it "feels" like a better fit than the alternative. It also feels like a weirder fit to include these kinds of abilities as *policies*, where I think people will "buy" them more as some additional feature (sort of like how an opener for Honor letting you see barb camps doesn't feel weird).

I'm less enthused by this option (despite suggesting it myself). It's not mutually exclusive with the "other mechanics caring about branches", it's just another option that we could layer on (you didn't say they were mutually exclusive, but I figure it's worth calling out explicitly, since my phrasing here might suggest it is).

In fact, it seems like these abilities are just a subset of the ways we could have other mechanics care about civs opening branches. Rather than be an "ability" that's a property of the branch that's being opened, it can be an "unlockable" bonus provided by the thing that's being given the bonus for the civ. So, in the Ogier case, it's the Stedding that care about the Friendship branch, rather than the Friendship branch giving the player the ability that affects Stedding. The others could be similarly transformed. It resolves to the same bonus, but gives us more design space, I think.

I know those were examples, not suggestions, but I should mention that that Fear ability might not be universally good for them - killing FDs provides rewards that they might want. Thus,my Fear bonuses had to do with making your FDs weaker and provide better rewards, not rarer. Sort of like how we don't want to actually lower incidence of MC spawn rate, for similar reasons.

Yeah, good point, we probably wouldn't want to use that ability for this reason!

And that's all for tonight! I'll be back tomorrow!

 

[counterpoint]

I may have to work through this over a few days again though!

aha! And I'm back to cutting in line before you're done... just like the old times.

I'm on the verge of leaving this one be at the moment, since it's not necessarily something that will make a big difference, but I think it's worth going through it.

The Unity branches seem like they would dislike each other - the village-y commoners vs the stuck-up nobility being their negative characterization of each other. Of course the Philosophies do represent this as well and I think they'd have a much bigger Diplo modifier, but making Diplo more interesting usually amounts to providing more dimensions for the players to realstically interact with each other. "Civ X should be annoyed when I do this but... oh, the AI doesn't care about that." That kind of sentiment, this is just another small axis that will affect the relationship between two given civs.

As for War, there's a bit of a flavor stretch but there's something there. The Seanchan, who hadn't dealt with Shadowspawn in centuries, saw the stories about trollocs and such as fairy tales and dismissed them, thinking people in the Westlands were overly superstitious. Borderlanders hold the disunity of other Westlands civs with some disdain because those civs don't understand the real threat on the Blightborder. Certainly reasons to dislike each other a bit, even if not very "rivalry" creating.

Alternatively, it might not be as direct as the pursuit of one branch makes civs that have pursued the other dislike you. Maybe some leaders dislike certain branches as a part of their personality. Or certain flavor values (flavors are weighted random to determine an AI civ's general characteristics in a given game, among other things) mean civs dislike certain branches. (Which will lead to some leaders that are weighted toward that flavor often disliking that branch.) This is somewhat reminiscent of CiVI's agendas, but not as complex.

This is possible with any of the approaches above - there could simply be a "they (dis)approve of your government" modifier, without telling the player which of their branch pursuits specifically is causing it. And given that Alignment will be a late tree, if we add it, based on our discussion below, there should be too many branches opened on both sides to work out what any other civs has chosen by that time. Or if we wanted to keep those AI opinions more transparent (which would otherwise be useful) the Alignment one could feed into their "Alignment suspicion opinion", rather than any visible Policy differences opinion.

Yeah, I can see how with something like Unity, the people of that civilization would feel at odds with the other variety. But I think a case could be made for the opposite, in a sense. Those civilizations, while approaching "tallness" differently, are still both approaching tallness *at all*. And your War example makes some sense when stretched, but the Shadowspawn-fighting civs would feel no more contempt for the War-Justice civs than for the civs that didn't take War at all. Wealth civs are all Wealth civs, regardless of how they do it. That gives them some cultural affinity, even if they achieve it through different means. I don't feel the need to go for the diametrically opposed relations for different branches of trees. If we went with anything, I could see us going with liking people who chose your branch and only that - not disliking the opposite branch any more than you'd dislike people who ignored the tree entirely.

I think a more nuanced approach could work, where it's tied to a civ's leader's personality, or something. Or, perhaps its just circumstantial, based on their condition in-game. A non-warlike civ will dislike all War civs. Not sure we need it though, or that it adds a whole lot to the game.

I see that we can do it without disclosing this information, but it does feel a little weird to allow the AIs to "act" upon knowledge that a human in that same scenario wouldn't be able to know. Of course, this would be a challenge with the policy system in general. In BNW, if you're fighting against somebody who has the Discipline flanking bonus, are you made aware of that bonus or is it hidden from you? Obviously, if you see a Landsnekt, you are made aware that they are a loser chose Commerce.

I think CiV is in general very min-max-ey, there are just too many parameters to know if you've truly min-max-ed it. I think we're in agreement here, the fundamental concern is that it should be balanced, right? We want the player to have choices, not have obvious best options 100% of the time. I think in that way we've added another option for the player - opening many trees for their first few Policies was almost never a good idea in BNW, which we'd now be making possibly viable.

ok, yeah. understood.

Yeah, this makes sense. It can also be a consideration for the balance of the unit/building/Custom/whatever that has that bonus. It's not as strong as a straight up +1 Faith bonus to the building, but a conditional one lets us boost that unit/building/etc without it having that bonus all the time.

right, and it's actually possible that we could load multiple of these into one building, which could get cool but also get extreme rather easily.

A mid-game gold building, for instance, could start with one fewer gold that it adds. If you take Wealth: Fortune it gets the additional +Gold. If you take Wealth: Opportunity it gets +Production. This makes the building customizeable, however, objectively worse since many/most civs don't get the bonus. However, we could *also* give the building a +Prestige if you take Creativity:Inspiration, or a +Culture if you take Creativity: Legacy. So in that regard, the building has the potential to also be way better.

These kinds of things would be easier to limit with Nat wonders of course, though those favor Tall, which isn't ideal.

I'm less enthused by this option (despite suggesting it myself). It's not mutually exclusive with the "other mechanics caring about branches", it's just another option that we could layer on (you didn't say they were mutually exclusive, but I figure it's worth calling out explicitly, since my phrasing here might suggest it is).

In fact, it seems like these abilities are just a subset of the ways we could have other mechanics care about civs opening branches. Rather than be an "ability" that's a property of the branch that's being opened, it can be an "unlockable" bonus provided by the thing that's being given the bonus for the civ. So, in the Ogier case, it's the Stedding that care about the Friendship branch, rather than the Friendship branch giving the player the ability that affects Stedding. The others could be similarly transformed. It resolves to the same bonus, but gives us more design space, I think.

hmmm, I am having some trouble picturing how what you've described with the Stedding would be different from what we were already discussing. In any case, my reason for feeling that this could be the answer has more to do with the fact that this idea feels somewhat weirder when a part of actual policies, but might make some sense if attached to a more generic "bonus" or "trait."

Also, was thinking that one way to handle these kind of "unlock bonuses" would be to go out of our way to provide non-scalable - thus predictable - bonuses. +1 to strategic resources. a Flat +X to happiness, that kind of thing. That way we can provide bonuses that feel real, but are much easier to balance than, say, +X% to production of melee units, which then because incredibly powerful if you're all in on melee units, and incredibly useless if you aren't.

 

[S3rgeus]

So, one thing I should mention at the top - we'd decided on this branching, and the names of the branches, months ago (probably a year ago or more). They're in the social policies summary. I say that because some of your comments seem to indicate that these were decisions I made, or were new in general.

The exception to this of course is the Scholarship and Creativity branching, which, as noted, I added.

Not a big point, but worthy of mention, I guess.I suppose the effect of that is that A) I'm not personally attached to some of these branching choices, but B) past-us seems to have had good reasons for making these decisions.

Very good point! I knew we'd decided on the branches before (we mentioned that a while back when discussing who would do the initial treatment), but I hadn't looked back at the Social Policies summary since we finished it! Having looked through it now, it's a good foundation, and I think it's still valuable to go through this stuff at the granularity we've got running now. And now that you've gone through and put a bunch of individual Policies to the branches, I think we have a much better view of how they'll work. Looking just at the summary, I don't see us being able to find the issues above/below.

Past us does certainly seem to have set out a good foundation! Looks like we may make some larger changes below, but the major pieces remain useful!

this is all about Unity.

That's a good point. Maybe we need to do it such that the governor bonuses are only towards the end of the tree - three deep or something. I'm not sure if there's a better solution, if we want governor stuff. Governors seem to be a tall-favoring mechanic, right? That means they probably belong with Unity, cirhgt?

Governors are Tall-favoring, yeah. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to be in the Unity tree, but it does certainly push fairly hard that way. If we move the Governor bonuses toward only the last couple of Policies, I feel like we'll lose a lot of what makes the branch distinct. I would say that we might need to rely on players planning ahead and picking these Policies with the intention of having more Governors imminently, which is a bit annoying though.

Does the timing of this work out? At what turn number do players often get their third and onward Policy? If it's in the right range for their first LP then that is probably ok.

yeah, that view of it makes sense, I'd say. Maybe we can reflavor the left side to reflect that. Loyalty, as is, blurs with "Fealty," which I think is a tech we have.

Cool, what would we call that flavor? Apparently "rurality" is a word, though I don't think it's what we're looking for. Would Legacy perhaps fit here if we remove it from the Creativity tree? Homestead?

I see what you mean. I'd say this is possibly just an issue of naming, though. Perhaps "Breatdh" or "Diaspora" (no, but something like that) would be more appropriate.

Diaspora sounds quite cool! It's a bit sci-fi rather than fantasy, I suppose. I see what you mean though, that does change the flavor of this to be much more suitable for the Sea Folk!

right. So these policies are essentially lifted from Exploration. If we want to preserve the BNW policies in some form, this is a logical place to do that. I'm not sold that we must do so, though (but it feels good to do it)

Sounds like this might get pulled into our larger discussion about the role of BNW Policies and how many trees we have way below! We probably do want some naval Policies to help coastal/seafaring civs to be able to grab bonuses relevant to them. Not sure if they should be here, but they do fit in!

hmmm, the "bonus" sentence is kind of confusing. You mean "bonus resources" would have +happiness? Hmmm, that's possibly too powerful, especially this early in the game. Obviously youcould scale it as you say. I'm honestly not sure we want a simple social policy choice to result it such a drastically different city placement priority. This connects to our conversation way back when about the possible Aiel and Sea Folk UAs that would allow settling on ocean or on terrible desert. A simple social policy would make your cities kind of uncapturable (in terms of usefulness) to civs that didn't have that branch. It's also likely to kind of favor the "willy nilly" approach the AI tends to often make with building tons of cities in random terrible places. It's possible this'd mess up the already tenuous optimum map distribution of cities. I'm open to it, but it's possible that it's too much.

Yes, having bonus resources provide Happiness, but much less so than Luxuries. I think we could sort out the balance of that in terms of magnitude, Luxuries would still definitely be the priority, it would be more of an additional consideration that would make some settling locations more viable than they would have been otherwise.

The others don't really seem like drawbacks to me, or their problems are actually rooted elsewhere. I see what you're getting at about the cities not being as useful to everyone else, but that doesn't really strike me as something we should avoid to this extent, particularly when it's something that's boosting properties that make the city better in normal circumstances. Given the way Happiness works, conquering loads of enemy cities is quite slow and razing is usually a good option for warmongers anyway. This would just make it a better option for more cities. And of course the capturing civ could also have this ability, which would eliminate such considerations.

The AI difficulties are rooted elsewhere, in that the AI doesn't choose city locations as well as the human player. Bonus resources providing some Happiness will make more locations viable cities, but if the AI is choosing terrible city locations, it seems to me that us making those slightly better is only going to improve the AI's performance somewhere that it currently falls down, which is a positive. The actual solution here would be making the AI better at choosing city locations.

This suggestion was mainly centered around that bonus resources bit providing one branch of an alternative set of branches for Ambition. The general approach I was trying to get to was having two expansion branches (since this is an expansion tree) that encourage a civ to expand in different ways from each other. I'm sure there are other options here as well - any come to mind?

I also agree. Can make this branch a little nuttier. But yeah, auto-pick shouldn't be necessary - especially if you're near the blight but not planning on going war-heavy. This should be chosen by either warmongers/dom civs near the blight or warmongers/dom civs who expect a lot of action in the LB.

Sounds good

this has all been delightfully effective at giving me a chance to catch up!

And now I'm falling behind!

yeah. Dreams is a somewhat uninspired name, though. A little on the nose.

We can change that if we want, but I think it provides a good enough flavor basis for now that we know what kinds of effects/flavor we can/should be going for.


I'm afraid that's all for tonight! I'll spend some time digging to try to find our previous discussion about why the Reflections mechanic should be a non-finisher before I post again tomorrow after D&D!

EDIT: I have failed at post-D&D research/posting! Unfortunately I'm not going to be home tomorrow night, so I'll be back on Friday!

 

[counterpoint]

Governors are Tall-favoring, yeah. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to be in the Unity tree, but it does certainly push fairly hard that way. If we move the Governor bonuses toward only the last couple of Policies, I feel like we'll lose a lot of what makes the branch distinct. I would say that we might need to rely on players planning ahead and picking these Policies with the intention of having more Governors imminently, which is a bit annoying though.

Does the timing of this work out? At what turn number do players often get their third and onward Policy? If it's in the right range for their first LP then that is probably ok.

I definitely don't know the approximate timing of when the average player gets those policies...

The other thing is that we could tweak one of the early policies so that it helps them *get* an earlier governor in the first place. I'm not sure how to do that without just giving a blanket +LP points, which is really a bigger thing than just being a governor-related mechanic. I think "free governor of your choice" is likely way too powerful.

Cool, what would we call that flavor? Apparently "rurality" is a word, though I don't think it's what we're looking for. Would Legacy perhaps fit here if we remove it from the Creativity tree? Homestead?

I think we can probably table this for now, until we really know exactly how the tree is going to look. But I'd be tempted to put it more in line with "Community" or something like that instead.

Diaspora sounds quite cool! It's a bit sci-fi rather than fantasy, I suppose. I see what you mean though, that does change the flavor of this to be much more suitable for the Sea Folk!

what makes Disaspora sci-fi? Here in el EEUU, at least, it's very much a term that comes up in discussion of history, anthropology, and even racial/ethnic studies. Say the word "diaspora" and it almost always will call to mind "African Diaspora" or "Jewish Diaspora", etc. Also, diaspora seems not to really mean expansion, so much as a people spreading *outside* of their homeland, within *other* nations. The Tuatha'an might in this way be a diaspora, but an expansionist civ, not so much.

But something else could work...

Sounds like this might get pulled into our larger discussion about the role of BNW Policies and how many trees we have way below! We probably do want some naval Policies to help coastal/seafaring civs to be able to grab bonuses relevant to them. Not sure if they should be here, but they do fit in!

ok, I'm curious as to what your thoughts are, then.

Yes, having bonus resources provide Happiness, but much less so than Luxuries. I think we could sort out the balance of that in terms of magnitude, Luxuries would still definitely be the priority, it would be more of an additional consideration that would make some settling locations more viable than they would have been otherwise.

The others don't really seem like drawbacks to me, or their problems are actually rooted elsewhere. I see what you're getting at about the cities not being as useful to everyone else, but that doesn't really strike me as something we should avoid to this extent, particularly when it's something that's boosting properties that make the city better in normal circumstances. Given the way Happiness works, conquering loads of enemy cities is quite slow and razing is usually a good option for warmongers anyway. This would just make it a better option for more cities. And of course the capturing civ could also have this ability, which would eliminate such considerations.

hmmm, I see what you mean, but I'm still not quite sure. I know that this is sort of similar to somebody having a policy that gives a boost to any tile, but happiness is somewhat "foundational" so it feels like a larger impact. I dunno, that's not exactly a scientific viewpoint.

The AI difficulties are rooted elsewhere, in that the AI doesn't choose city locations as well as the human player. Bonus resources providing some Happiness will make more locations viable cities, but if the AI is choosing terrible city locations, it seems to me that us making those slightly better is only going to improve the AI's performance somewhere that it currently falls down, which is a positive. The actual solution here would be making the AI better at choosing city locations.

I think the issue I have here is that this might actually *encourage* the AI to be even stupider with city placement, because terrible sites at least have a little extra happiness...

This suggestion was mainly centered around that bonus resources bit providing one branch of an alternative set of branches for Ambition. The general approach I was trying to get to was having two expansion branches (since this is an expansion tree) that encourage a civ to expand in different ways from each other. I'm sure there are other options here as well - any come to mind?

yeah, I think we probably need to settle on a "big picture" difference between these branches. Before it was seafaring... I'm not sure what else makes sense. The bonus resource thing is just one element - it's not likely to be the "main point" of that branch... I'm kind of coming up on blanks with this, though. The peaceful vs warlike expansion element is possible, but that isn't so easy to express in terms of bonuses, unless one side was all about lower occupation penalties, etc.

Hmmm, I like how in Unity, we have BNW on the left, and New Mechanics on the right. Is there anything new to the mod that we could place on the right that could somehow relate to wideness? Unfortunately, I don't think so...

Not sure on this!

 

[S3rgeus]

At last, more significant postage! Also advance warning, I'm going to be away tomorrow, so I'll be back on Sunday.

First off, there are definitely other T'a'r connections is other branches. The Opportunity branch of Wealth is definitely T'a'r related, though not as majorly.

We did make this decision consciously, but I don't remember much about the logic of it, and I don't always trust past-us, since past-us didn't always see the world with the clarity of present-us.

I don't remember much of the logic of it either, but then I don't really remember our first pass at Policies at all! >.>

I do agree that we have a much better overall picture of how Policies will fit into the game now than we did before. Looking through how we decided before, I think we set out a good guiding framework, but we should feel free to make changes with branches because we were discussing much more in abstract before, without much in the way of specific Policies.

As for T'a'r being present elsewhere, this is very true. I saw it mostly in Myth in my first look through, but it does have a significant presence in Wealth, as you've said. Myth will stand out to new players since it's where they'll see T'a'r first, since Wealth doesn't unlock until later and Myth is available straight away.

I think my thoughts on this are mostly connected to what other options we have available:

I can see how T'a'r as opposed to Faith is a bit shaky. Were we to change this, I think we need to consider a few things:

1) what would be the opposition to the "normal" Path branch? I went out of the way to make this branch not require a civ to be a path founder, and I think that should remain true. What would be the "angle" though? Perhaps some of these policies can remain, just removing the t'a'r angle. But still I think we'd need a central theme. "using faith production to boost other parts of your civ"?

Arguably this is flavorfully quite a good place for Alignment, but it's available very early, which is mechanically problematic. Flavor wise, there's significant mileage in having a Path branch that's about the development of societies and the like and their beliefs that permeate their culture. And then an opposing one that's more dedicated to the actual Alignment of the whole thing (so the Children at one end and the Darkfriends at the other, who are both flavorfully pursuing this branch that combines Faith and Alignment).

Mechanically we've also associated Faith and Alignment already, with the bonuses to Faith on the Light side and Faith-purchaseable mechanics on both sides.

The more I consider this, the more Faith and Alignment seem like they should be together to me. Is there a way we can resolve the earliness problem without hamstringing the tree's usefulness in the early game? Things that will help Faith generation in the short term but long term modify Alignment sources so the player can reap those benefits later on?

2) What would we do with t'a'r stuff? I don't think we should necessarily have a t'a'r tree? (coming up with two full branches on that tree would be tough). You mention tar vs culture later. That might be acceptable, though that's also somewhat random. Perhaps instead there shouldn't be a t'a'r-focused branch anywhere, and we just spread the functionality of this stuff throughout many trees (probably mostly right-side stuff for obvious reasons)..

I'd like to explore the idea of a T'a'r tree, since it does seem like it could be interesting. There are certainly two schools of thought about it flavorfully: "exploit" via Dreamwalkers and "commune" via Wolfbrothers. The two LPs are even generated the same way and presented as a choice. I'm not sure what the "Policies" would be, flavor wise, that would impact these two approaches to T'a'r though.

We could also approach a T'a'r tree by associating it with the main game mechanics that we want to be correlated with it. We could have a "T'a'r and Alignment" and "T'a'r and Military" branch, since those seem to be the two mechanics that connect most with T'a'r from elsewhere.

In terms of getting T'a'r branches in elsewhere, I feel like Culture is a good flavorful fit for T'a'r, though I can't really nail down why I feel like those connect. It seems to me that the use of T'a'r became very interlinked with the culture of the people trying to use it in the Westlands. That the Aiel were able to master it while the wetlanders let it fade into obscurity. More about how that might work below.

I also did want to quickly visit the "right side is WoTMod" concept in general. This makes some things easier for us, but are we worried about the balance of that? I think some players may be significantly less likely to choose the left hand side if it's just BNW Policies renamed when the right is new and shiny. Or even worse if the right is interesting and new but mechanically worse, they'll be compelled to choose the less fun option. I wonder if we shouldn't mix the BNW Policies where appropriate? Or possibly remove them, if there are alternatives that achieve similar goals?

I think I'd prefer this not be significantly different from the other trees, both in the kinds of bonuses received, the power of those bonuses, and the way the tree interacts with the rest of the game (for instance, I don't want this tree and this tree alone to affect AI-love, I don't think).

Agreed, it's probably best to keep this tree more like the others in this respect.

Yeah, I went out of my way to make these Alignment agnostic, though - true that they both relate to alignment differently, but one doesn't favor shadow or light more than the other (arguably, one enables neutral more than the other). So I think the problem is only there if we don't like the flavor.

I'm not a big fan of the flavor, but I'm more thinking that we don't want to link dedication to channeling in general to having a significant correlation with extremes in Alignment as well.

Yeah, I meant wilder, but didn't put that because of UU possibilities. I figured it wouldn't be Aes Sedai, so we should probably be more specific.

Cool, we can say Female1?

Yeah, we could beef it up, but I also feel like our Philosophies cover most of that ground for us - remember, we need to come up with a whole set of tenets as well. If we're doing overarching "other systems caring about branches" stuff, then we would of course put something appropriate here, though. Also, this is essentially serving the "channeler combat" niche as well, which feels appropriate. Maybe we could smash some of the t'a'r stuff in here if we eliminate Dreams above (though intuitively it makes sense linked to Acceptance, and not Fear, but I don't think we'd want to make fear civs not also able to be t'a'r civs (we'd have to distribute the bonuses appropriately).

Yes, some T'a'r stuff in the channeling tree would certainly make flavorful sense. You're right that we'd want to avoid favoring Acceptance over Fear in that case. Though we could go heavier with T'a'r on Acceptance if it encouraged a "style of interacting with T'a'r" rather than straight up betterness. So Fear civs could still be T'a'r civs, but they wouldn't do so in the same way as Acceptance civs.

really? Oh, ok. I thought Aesthetics was later. We're good then.

I think we must have moved Politics back for the Power thing. Do we still agree with that? Should *power* be later? I suppose we'd have to look into the bonuses themselves for this. BNW has two era-three unlocks, right (commerce and explo)? I suppose we want two as well..... not sure.

I feel ok with Power being era 2, the channeler mechanics do open up fairly quickly once the game starts, which is good for that placement. You're right that we probably want to look at this in the next stage, when we have a better idea of the actual bonuses that each tree will be giving out. Then we'll know more about what part of the game they'll be most appropriate in.

definitely open to more dramatic separation between these, or more to make creativity part 2 attractive. Could theoretically put in t'a'r stuff, I guess.

More T'a'r stuff below!

This is Wealth. I think it might be related to the fact that the Reflections aren't just randomly placed - they are generated by actual in game actions (expending of LPs). Maybe we thought that we needed to give people an earlier chance to grab this capability to compensate for some extra weirdness in the mechanic. Not sure. I'm sure it's in there somewhere, probably around where we came up with the name or something.

All right, digging successful! I think one of our summaries is missing some information, because there's a bunch of stuff about how Reflections are different from Hidden Antiquity Sites that I had forgotten and I don't see in the summaries! This post outlines the details of it.

Given that we have Reflections work like how they were described there (I responded mostly in the positive lower down on that page (page 35 for reference)), having Reflections being a non-Finisher makes a lot of sense. We've added the system about revealing Reflections progressively, which means the player has more hurdles to deal with before being able to find all Reflections. (We also didn't want a single runaway player being able to grab all Reflections immediately when they unlocked it, a progressive unlock means that can't happen.) We compensate for those additional hurdles by making the Policy requirement easier (non finisher), and also meaning more players will dip into it.

Are we happy with how that discussion on how Reflections works was resolved? Shall I add it to the T'a'r summary?

supposedly about Wealth, but we don't really talk bout it much!

yeah, this is tough. I think a culture-related T'a'r branch is probably more compelling than a defensive culture branch. The main potential issue though is the same as what was true with Myth - do we want to excluse a Culture-VC-focused civ from also going for T'a'r superiority? I think putting T'a'r in direct opposition to any of the VC-linked policies is tricky in this regard. Unless it was such that it also boosted culture enough to support the VC as well... though, still, it's probably not as powerful as just choosing Inspiration in the first place.

I'm open to this, especially considering the lameness of Legacy, but this also could be read to suggest we might be better off with T'a'r stuff either distributed throughout the branches, or else paired against a less VC-linked branch, though unfortunately the only ones like that appear to be Unity, Ambition, and Power.

Yeah, this isn't really about Wealth in the end!

I could see us adding some elements of T'a'r into the Power tree, but not enough to represent T'a'r in Policies overall. Unity and Ambition could work - could this be our answer for a "different way to expand" in Ambition? Non-war expansion on one side and T'a'r-driven expansion on the other? But what does T'a'r-driven-expansion look like?

In terms of T'a'r in the Culture tree, Culture's main link to T'a'r is through Reflections, since that enables the Cultural victory. T'a'r dominance is probably something you'd want to pursue if you go for hunting down Reflections (if I'm remembering the mechanics I found above correctly?). Unless we plan to tweak that in a way that would break the requirement for Culture players to have a strong T'a'r presence to pursue Reflections?

If we do do that, then suddenly a T'a'r branch vs a Culture branch doesn't seem so bad. T'a'r isn't really something Culture players are overly concerned with otherwise, so all this really does is make what was previously a Culture tree into one that other players will consider as well.

If we don't do that, one option would be to go heavy on the Culture via T'a'r angle. But this creates the opposite problem, where we're conflating Culture with T'a'r, so non-Culture players are disadvantaged in T'a'r. This makes me prefer the above actually: tweaking Reflections' mechanics so that Culture players don't need T'a'r, allowing us to have a T'a'r branch compete directly with a Culture one without players being left out by it.

Tying into what you say below (which I'll respond to later), I could see us having a T'a'r branch paired with an alignment branch, conceivably. Or maybe make the alignment branch have a bunch of t'a'r stuff on it. They aren't necessarily linked or diametrically opposed, but at least their both mechanics that are somewhat VC-agnostic. Also, t'a'r does relate to Threads (Wolfbrother), which is very much Alignment-linked.

Cool, I think I've covered a lot of the contents here in other quote blocks now! Particularly T'a'r and Alignment a bit above.

yeah, mostly addressed this above, and I mostly agree. hmmm... glimmers give you LP points for T'a'r... do either of them have culture-related abilities? I suppose not, unless we make dreamwards do culture stuff in a policy.

Yeah, neither the Wolfbrother nor Dreamwalker do very much to do with Culture. I don't think we really want to add more functionality to the Dreamwards at this stage. Policies that can change the behavior of Dreamwards are a bit weird flavor wise, given that Dreamwards are a kind of "passive aura" that the general population isn't aware of in the real world.

you're suggesting having both science branches be alignment related, or having a science branch vs an alignment branch? The former is logically and flavorfully appropriate, sort of (though perhaps "science versus faith" would be more apt), but mechanically problematic in that it doesn't allow Alignment and Science specialization simultaneously. The latter would lead us down a similar path to Politics, where we split the BNW tree into two halves each with a different flavor. I'd be ok with that, in theorty. I don't think I'm ok with having one of the halves be shadow and the other be light, though. I wouldn't want to forcibly link certain science mechanics (e.g. research agreements) to one alignment side. I'd rather one side be "science and alignment" and the other one be "science and <X>" (t'a'r, gold, whatever).

I'm a bit confused, have you used former and latter the opposite way around here? It seems to me that science vs alignment (the latter in sentence 1) would lead to mechanical problems with not allowing Alignment and Science specialization at the same time. And the inverse for the former (both alignment related), being more like Politics.

Here I was saying the former, so having two Alignment-y Science branches. Taking the Scholarship tree at all is a Science specialization, and which branch you choose determines your intended Alignment specialization.

One option I was mulling before was having one branch be "Science and Light" and the other be "Science and Shadow", since we can be more targeted with our bonus for those. They also have some fairly compelling flavor associations that are flavorfully opposed to each other, which works well. This wouldn't play well with the idea of an Alignment tree though, which I'm otherwise a big fan of.

Your suggestion of "science and alignment" vs "science and <X>" also sounds good. Using Gold as X, that could let us move Wealth a bit as well, if we wanted to free up more space in the earlier trees for more WoTMod-y stuff.

Ah! So, I think our reasoning was twofold:

1) to ease in balancing, we'd keep the policy costs the same throughout the game, and thus the number of policies the average player would unlock would also remain the same
2) to ease in balancing (?) and predictability (?), we'd keep the number of policies available to the player the same.

I still pretty much agree with 1. I wouldn't want to drastically change the culture cost of things, because I do think it might result in balance issues - specifically involving civs ending up with way too many bonuses.

That said, I could be fine with either A) raising the culture cost of each policy slightly to offset the increases in culture sources in the mod, or, very differently, B)leaving it the same and simply enabling a slightly higher number of policy unlocks throughout a typical game, with the understanding that this would be roughly equal across all civs.

Number 2, though... I'm not quite so sure why it's so necessary. I can't remember exactly why we thought it was a big deal to us- perhaps we wanted the kinds of bonuses held by any one civ, and the time frame in which they are unlocked, to roughly resemble civs in BNW. I suppose that's somewhat admirable, but I'm not sure it's really very important. I think I'd probably be fine with having a different number of policy trees. Would they all fit on the screen, though.....?

I agree with the principle of #1, but I don't think we'll get that outcome regardless of what we choose here. We're added several mechanics that can pay out Culture over the course of the game (Governors and Threads come to mind first) and that will inherently unbalance the cost of Policies from BNW. So I think we'll end up tweaking these parameters anyway, to bring Policy adoption back in line with what we want to do with it.

I'm agreed on #2, mostly following on from what I mentioned before about Policies not being all adopted 99% of the time anyway. As for the screen, we'll need to rewrite the UI screen for Policies for our branching changes anyway, so we can incorporate changes to the number of trees available at the same time.

It sounds like we're all good for adding a tree then? I find this is my preference for how we should deal with Alignment, though what the contents of said new Alignment tree should be is the subject of much discussion below!

mostly agree. I think some mechanics (e.g. spies) in BNW don't enter into policies, and BNW does fine by me in that regard, but I can see how that could be viewed as a flaw.

I think that's also a timing thing, since Spies only become available in the Renaissance, which is when the last Policy tree unlocks. All of our mechanics, even if not totally at their full prevalence (like Alignment) do exist in the early game.

I feel like it needs to be as late as Scholarship - theoretically even later. This is mainly because I think I want to give the player as much time as possible to decide A) how much they plan to engage in the alignment system in this play through (partially based on how likely they think the LB will occur, and B)what side they're likely to take (especially if that is relevant to the policies itself)

I think I like it unlocking alongside Scholarship in Era 4. It could be an interesting choice, going for one or the other as your last Policy tree before Philosophies take over. That's another thing that I think means we should stick with Era 4 (rather than 5 or later) so that the Alignment tree would have time to be effective before the Philosophies swoop in.

I do worry a bit that in the mechanical contest of Science vs anything that Science will always win, but we'll see!

I could be ok with this. Normally I don't like being too on-the-nose with alignment stuff, but given that this is an optional system, and a player can clearly choose, I could be fine with a shadow and light side. If we did do it, I'd feel pretty solid that branch choices should remain private.

Yeah, if we have Light and Shadow branches, then exact branch selection of at least this tree would need to be secret.

There is definitely a lot of great flavor and bonuses for this approach, but it does mean we won't particularly get to incorporate non-Alignment systems very much. (Like if we wanted T'a'r to play a big role in one side.) Since we don't want to make that mechanic side-specific.

Also pretty ok with this option, assuming that both sides would be alignment-agnostic. I do think it might be harder to make the "controlled" one appealing - might have to have some splash.

Yeah, it would need non-Alignment rewards for specific ranges and such that players could go for. Let them use their increased control over their Alignment to their advantage. (Bonuses for balanced cities and the like.)

broadly speaking, I'm fine with this as well. Would need to see some policy suggestions

Cool, should I come up with some of those now? Even though a drill-down to individual Policies isn't until the next stage, having the first treatment Policies is what lets us frame these discussions much better with the trees you've already done.

ok, not getting into how this would "unlock" (discussed below), I think I'm mostly ok with this as well. Makes things quite a bit more complicated, since we need to have two versions of each path.

Yeah, there's a definite complexity increase if we have Policies that are different on the Light and Shadow side. The payoff for that is getting the good parts of the Light vs Shadow branching without the drawbacks of inter-system relationship restrictions. (The Policy that boosts your T'a'r can just boost Shadow and Light players in different ways, both that help T'a'r, but both that are appropriate to their flavor.)

I'm not sure which of these I prefer. I do think overall we'd want it to be kind of "fluid" though. I don't love the idea of you starting light,a nd then you turn shadow later (maybe in actual alignment, but possibly just in your LB choice), but you're stuck with all these policies that are pushing you more and more light. I guess I feel like I'd appreciate the whole tree being fluid to change based o whatever you are right now. So the aforementioned Gray Man ability would flip to an anti-gray man ability if you flipped light later. Of course, this makes a somewhat complex mechanic even more complex.

Right, I can see the merits in that. We could make it fairly clear to the player with some icons and the like. Notifications that say "you are now generating more Light than Shadow, so some Policy effects have changed" in a similar vein to the CS-bonus notification when you move to a new era.

I could theoretically consider a "neutral version" of the tree as well. This would probably be important to have if we wanted it all to be "fluid" - if a player started out light and drifted towards neutral (below tier 4, let's say), we definitely wouldn't want their policies to flip to *shadow* (unless they kept going more shadow)

Yeah, having a buffer in the middle could have benefits as well. It would mean there are 3 versions of all of these Policies. I might be more inclined to let the optional nature of Policy trees take care of Neutral players for us, if we don't go for one of the Neutral-friendly branch ideas like "controlled vs aggressive" (where controlled is good for Neutral).

I'd also be fine with having Alignment live simply as a Branch of osme other tree, but the discussion above does suggest that picking exactly which one is quite difficult (all have issues). I would contest that Fear/Acc *could* work, just not as a full branch (you'd have to inject Alignment into both, which would kind of make it the "WotMod Tree"). This is a similar thing, overall, to T'a'r.

I'm finding the most compelling one above to be Myth, but as I go over there, I'm not too sure how it would work. I'm gravitating toward having Alignment be its own tree, but not 100% decided.

I would say that in doing this kind of thing, it'd probably need to be alignment-agnostic, and *not* changing based on your alignment - half of one tree being variable seems kind of confusing and random.

Yes, if Alignment isn't its own tree then I would agree that it should be Alignment-agnostic in its Policy implementations.

it's fine. I knew that somebody had to do a bunch of grunt work before all the abstract discussion would be effective - this gives us something concrete to discuss and compare against, even if we thrash it.

And then Civ6 will rewrite history on us!