S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

EDIT: This post is the second of 2, starting a new page, which I figured was worth mentioning to avoid confusion!

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

And I'm back to my burst catchups and will inevitably fall behind again by tomorrow!

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.

Yeah, this does make good sense. I'd be cool with choosing the same branch having a positive effect, but otherwise not having diplo modifiers.

What would we do about an Alignment tree then? Would we hide it by grouping it under a single diplo modifier of "they approve of your government's policies"?

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.

Yeah, it's a significant chunk of work and doesn't add much.

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 you do see the bonus for such Policies. And you can look up how many Policies from each tree that players have adopted in one of the Diplo screens, right? (The global relations one?) So human players would have this information.

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.

Totally, this is exactly what I was picturing. There's a lot of room for us to tweak them to be reasonable. (And a lot of combinations that lead to them being crazy good, I'm sure!)

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

Yeah, that would make it easier, but I don't think we'd want to restrict it to national wonders, as you've said.

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."

That's mostly what I mean, the difference isn't about the actual bonus you get or not, it's about the source of that bonus. We don't need to explain and justify a concept of branch opener abilities and present them to the player in some way. We can present it as a part of the system that provides the bonus instead. So this would show up as a notification and on the actual Stedding screens, rather than as something represented on the Policy screen. It's not a mechanical change, just a conceptual one.

And totally agree with what you've said here, that these kinds of bonuses can take forms that don't make nearly as much flavorful sense as "policies" adopted by a civ, since they can be defined in the context of "something else" (Stedding in the above example) caring about which Policies the civ has adopted.

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.

Yeah, that seems reasonable. I think we'd want to go into these kinds of bonuses in the next stage. I'm not sure if we should look at them after we've finished this first part or after we've gone through the individual Policies?

After we've finished this first part we'll have a set of trees and branches, which is the actual flavor and general mechanical ideas that these other systems will care about. But if we've already done the Policies, then we'll know a lot more about how the mechanics of each branch works and how these other systems could complement that. Conversely, we'll have more relevant flavor and mechanical design space for the individual Policies if we already know what other systems they connect to. Chicken and egg and all that.

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

According to someone on reddit, the cost to adopt your kth Policy can be calculated as follows:

(25 + (3k)2.01 ) (1+0.1*(n-1))

Where n is how many cities you have. It rounds down to the nearest multiple of 5.

I'm afraid of the amount of guesswork that would be involved in trying to work out how quickly players accumulate Culture though. And especially since we will have changed that significantly, even if we work from BNW data. So this will be something we're calibrating anyway, but the problem is whether the general necessity for Policy unlock speed will mesh up with how quickly players create Governors to take advantage of these Unity bonuses. I'm... not really sure how to work that out.

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.

We could set up an obvious bonus in one of the earlier Policies that would trigger later. Something like "First X cities with Population over Y receive a free Governor"? Too strong?

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.

Agreed.

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...

I suppose I usually see the term diaspora more in the context of sci-fi's usually significantly cosmopolitan cityscapes, but that's likely just because of what I like to read!

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

I didn't actually go much into this above, so it's good to have this block to refocus on it!

This was mostly about the role of the naval Policies that we moved out of Commerce and Exploration and into other places. Now that we're going with having more trees, would a "naval" tree make sense? Or do we still want to put the naval stuff into branches of the existing trees?

A problem I find with them being in existing branches is it tends to make the branch choice in that tree very black and white. If the civ is mostly ocean-going on this map they should choose the naval one, otherwise not. Is there a way to avoid that without having a separate tree?

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.

I think it could work well. It's mostly about having two different ways of encouraging players to expand. Warlike expansion is covered in the War tree, so we want two wauys that are mostly non-conflict, which this strikes me as a good foundational way to differentiate them.

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...

I think that's still a separate problem though. Either those spaces are now actually good for the AI, in which case it's doing its job. Or they're still bad at it and that's the actual problem.

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.

Seafaring is definitely an option. It does suffer from the problem I mentioned above of being a relatively automatic choice, but that's not the worst of problems overall.

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.

I think it could be the main point of the branches though. To encourage the player to expand to different places from what they would otherwise. Not all Policies would necessarily be exactly about bonuses/luxuries, but they could complement that difference.

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.

I don't think we'd want to go for peaceful vs warlike because of the existence of the War tree - Domination focused expansion should mostly be driven there.

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...

I'm also not the biggest fan of WoTMod on the right and BNW on the left, which is covered above. (I may be straight up disagreeing with my initial assessment of this right now.)

So how else could we encourage Wideness in a branch? We've got a Wide tree in Ambition and it needs two branches that both encourage that Wideness, but in different ways.

Just to talk through the process, the primary motivation of a Wide player is to gain advantage through having many cities. So bonuses that scale with number of cities are good for them. Things that reduce the barriers to establishing more cities are good for them. The main barrier to more cities is Happiness.

Do we want to have two non-VC-mechanics make up a "wide and <X>" branch on both sides?

So, for example: "wide and T'a'r" and "wide and naval". Both T'a'r and naval are potentially looking for branches to call home. T'a'r could be things that allow Projections to reveal the fog (helping to scout) or even allow T'a'r to be used to found cities somehow. ("A Wilder who has created X Dreamwards can be expended to found a city," for example.) Naval has some obvious uses, and some we could take from Civ6. Care about founding cities on other landmasses and the like. It does have the issue I mentioned above of only being even an option when you're near water, but as also mentioned above, that isn't necessarily terrible.

 

[counterpoint]

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

OK, I'm back, and somewhat falling behind - unfortunately, I'm not sure if I'll have enough time to fully catch up today, we'll see.

Also, full disclosure - I'm finding that after the month of working on these policies, I'm kind of tired of this topic! It is what it is - I'm not suggesting we do anything different - but I feel a degree of fatigue on Policies, which were, in the first place, not a topic I felt particularly compelled by. Kind of a bummer, but again, it is what it is. I say this now to mostly just warn you that I might not be as inspired as I try to be, so you should take my feedback with a grain of salt.

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).

hmmmmm, I feel like we don't want to set Faith and Alignment in opposition to one another. It should definitely be possible to focu on both. I understand, flavor-wise, how this might make sense, but it should be possible to both be Children *and* Darkfriends.

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?

so, are you suggesting Faith on one side and alignment on the other? I do see that as problematic, as discussed above. But I could see these be fused, so that both sides of Myth deal with Alignment - so would that be "Path + Alignment" vs "Somebody Else's Path + Alignment," or what?

In terms of the early bonuses, yeah, it's hard to not make these result in cascading bonuses (+1 in the early game will get big). Maybe the deal is not to provide bonuses to Alignment, but bonuses to Alignment actions - using Questioners, etc. - or do those unlock too late as well? Could also link it to threads (which resonates well with the WBr LP, which could be the faith-buy for one of the sides of the tree.

But if you're suggesting Faith vs Alignment... that's somewhat problematic for me, essentially if you're a civ who did found a Path.

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.

I've reread the T'a'r summary and I'm not sure there's really enough mechanical "ammo" for two separate T'a'r branches, unless they are attached to other rather large mechanics. As far as I see it, T'a'r allows for the following:

- sight and map stuff
- harvesting glimmers (thus generating the T'a'r LPs)
- generating wolfbrothers for dominance within T'a'r (aiding the rest of these)
- generating wolfbrothers to remove dreamspikes (useful for domination)
- generating wolfbrothers to summon threads (relates to Alignment and other yields)
- offsetting occupied unhappiness (via dreamwards, aids in domination)
- slowing CS influence decay (via dreamwards, aids in diplo)
- stopping traveling (via dreamspikes, aids in domination)
- siphoning science from expended envoys (via dreamspikes, aids in science/everything)
- creating Relfections (via expending T'a'r LPs, aids in Culture)
- revealing Reflections (via harvesting glimmers, aids in Culture)

So, while there are a fair amount of things there - we tried to relate it to the larger game as much as possible - I'm a little nervous about splitting it up and calling that a tree. I suppose it's all so interlinked, I wouldn't want people who have to limit themselves so much, if that was the main point of a tree in the first place. If you're unlocking a whole T'a'r tree, you'd best be awesome at T'a'r!. I think I'd rather see one of the following:

- attaching the split T'a'r functionality to the divisions of an existing tree (e.g. *both* halves of Myth, or War, or whatever)
- as needed, putting T'a'r-related stuff throughout all the trees, when relevant (one in War, one in Politics, etc.)
- A T'a'r side of another tree, if the right other half can be found - I suspect the correct other half cannot be found, though, since it's hard to choose what should be mutually-exclusive with T'a'r dominance.

So, if we do want a "t'a'r" tree that isn't based on an existing tree, I'd want both halves of that tree to also be about something else that is new, e.g. Alignment or channeling.

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 see what you mean, but I'd also suggest that you're taking a somewhat liberal definition of Culture that might not be helpful to us. True, the Aiel culture is linked to T'a'r, but it's also linked to their warlike nature, their kinds of settlements, and their codes of ethics (their "Path"). That doesn't mean that each of these should be a part of their Culture tree. Essentially, I think "Culture" in Civ is supposed to have more to do with art and tangible records of your culture, and the popularity/fame of that culture. Social policies are "bought" with culture, which keeps all these things linked, but culture itself is more strictly defined for our purposes.

Thus, I'm not sure T'a'r and culture should be really all that linked.

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?

this is where you need to consider the fact that I am fatigued by this process...

I see what you're saying, but I think if we balance appropriately, it isn't a problem. The thing is, the BNW trees hit the "Greatest Hits" of their respective mechanics pretty well (with some exception). It does sort of feel like we're "breaking up the band" to make impossible, for instance, to complete the full Tradition tree and its effects.

We could do this, but I also sort of consider the BNW sides as the "straight line" to something. Yes, if what you care about is maximizing Tallness, you might want to go with the left of Unity. But if you want to temper that a bit, and in return get some gov benefits, go with the right side. Right sides include either new mechanics, or else are a bit broader in their function. I think this system could work well.

We could mix them, though, but then it's a matter of replacing them with things that people won't miss. I tried this on Politics, but then again, that one has a few that are deliberately "equivalents", with similar mechanics on either side.

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.

Cool, we can say Female1?

sure, though there isn't likely a Female2

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.

yeah, this could be fine. All trapped up in the conversation way above.

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.

sure, sounds good.

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.

it looks like what we settled on is in one of the summaries - the T'a'r summary, but not the culture one. (unless you just updated 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?

Yeah, I think it's already there!

OK, I have to end here! Back soon! (but it might be tomorrow)...

 

[counterpoint]

ok, back for a little more! let's see how far I can get...

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?

looking at what the overall mechanics of T'a'r are, I'm not sure there's anything expansionist about it, aside from, perhaps, keeping vision on tiles - though, it could be argued that that is more tall-friendly, because wide civs are likely to have actual vision on more tiles due to their number of cities.... Also, since glimmers are spawned from LP use, wide civs may be in a better position to at least *create* glimmers (not necessarily to harvest them). a wide civ obviously has more cities that could take advantage of the benefits of a dreamward, but that really just relates to the military expansion angle anyway. Same with dreamspikes (the defense-against-traveling side would actually be easier to pull off for a tall civ). So, I'd say not enough link to either tall or wide to include them here. We could include them anyways, but the elements would be somewhat random.

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.

I think the way we've conceived T'a'r, it intersects with every major VC, at least somewhat: Dom through traveling-limiting and occupation-happineess, Diplo through decay-lowering, Science through envoy-stealing, LB through threads, and Culture through reflections. I think the t'a'r-link to the culture game - helpful, but not required, as Hidden Sites are in BNW - is logically sound and probably should be preserved.

And, even putting that aside, a culture player is likely to spawn a bunch of LPs, which they would then have the inside track on harvesting, so I could see it being relatively logical for them to have a good t'a'r game. Additionally, culture players might be playing defensively, and there are ways to spin T'a'r to aid you in that regard (dreamspikes and whatnot). So I don't see a reason at all why we should *exclude* culture players from t'a'r dominance.

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.

I agree. Probably best not to directly correlate t'ar and culture. The only thing that directly relates to culture is the Reflection thing, and BNW gives us precedent for separating that into another tree - though I could be theoretically ok with it being in the Creativity tree, if need be ),maybe even in an early, shared 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.

Yeah, I can see that point.

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.

yeah, it looks like I flipped which one was the former and which was the latter. Sorry. It looks like you somehow deciphered it, though.

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.

Yeah, I think I could get on board with Science joined with two kinds of Alignment. I wonder if we'd want it to be Light and Shadow, though - that makes me worry a bit about neutral players who want science (which seems highly reasonable). I guess I'm only really ok with a Light/Shadow Alignment duality in a tree if its an "Alignment Tree," and not one that is so central and universal as faux-Rationalism. That said, if you can think of a way around this, let me know.

I could see it going with Science and two different kinds of Alignment manipulation (going back to the "controlling" and "aggressive" elements, for example). We'd also obviously be splitting the science functionality down the middle, so we'd be trying to come up with some unifying principle for each side. I don't have any immediate ideas on what that'd be. Maybe one side is more LB related (though not in a way that steps on War: Valor.

(if we did this way, where it was two flavors of alignment, we could also *theoretically* do the "mirrored versions" of the tree, with light/neutral/shadow causing your choices to provide different actual benefits for a few policies. This could be cool, but also might be a little too complex, given that this is mostly the "science tree.")

The "Alignment vs X" kind could also work, though again, not sure what it'd be. Wealth *could* work, but don't you think money generation deserves to be its own tree? This, especially considering that it unlocks earlier.

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!

Yeah, it looks like we can add a tree. I suppose my preference would be to keep the number the same, as it feels elegant/simpler, but I'm open to adding one if the need strikes us. So far, I'm not totally sure the need is there - basically, it comes down to whether we need a stand-alone Alignment tree. If it's integrated into Scholarship (or Myth), then I think our tree # will be the same.

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!

that last is a good point! Perhaps thats a reason to fuse it with the science tree, warts and all...

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.

if you want to, go for it! Just "samples" though - don't waste your time on a full tree, I think.

It seems to me that cohabitating the Science tree might be the other major option, aside from just scattering Alignment all over the place (like T'a'r)... Am I right? If you want, you could "test" a few ideas for that as well. Also fine to keep it all theoretical at this stage. We're making progress.

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.)

agreed

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.

right.

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).

Right, though if we attach Alignment to something like science, we'd *need* the buffer to make sure neutral civs would be fine.

And I'd say the neutral buffer is useful even if it's just "optional." Just because you drop below a certain Light threshold (say, Tier 3), doesn't mean you want to be actively *generating Shadow*, right? The buffer let's somebody "hold," or at least not keep spinning further and further away.

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.

Yeah, Myth could work, possible, but I think I'd prefer it to be merged into both trees, and not an either or. Science is the other option, it seems.

Not sure if I land on merged or stand alone being better.

OK, slowly catching up but not caught up! Will try to finish ASAP.

 

[counterpoint]

Yeah, this does make good sense. I'd be cool with choosing the same branch having a positive effect, but otherwise not having diplo modifiers.

What would we do about an Alignment tree then? Would we hide it by grouping it under a single diplo modifier of "they approve of your government's policies"?

Alignment throws the whole thing off if it's opposed (light vs shadow). If not, it's kind of the same thing, I think. I think maybe choosing the tree *at all* doesn't have to be as secret as other things.

I think you do see the bonus for such Policies. And you can look up how many Policies from each tree that players have adopted in one of the Diplo screens, right? (The global relations one?) So human players would have this information.

ok

Totally, this is exactly what I was picturing. There's a lot of room for us to tweak them to be reasonable. (And a lot of combinations that lead to them being crazy good, I'm sure!)

cool

That's mostly what I mean, the difference isn't about the actual bonus you get or not, it's about the source of that bonus. We don't need to explain and justify a concept of branch opener abilities and present them to the player in some way. We can present it as a part of the system that provides the bonus instead. So this would show up as a notification and on the actual Stedding screens, rather than as something represented on the Policy screen. It's not a mechanical change, just a conceptual one.

And totally agree with what you've said here, that these kinds of bonuses can take forms that don't make nearly as much flavorful sense as "policies" adopted by a civ, since they can be defined in the context of "something else" (Stedding in the above example) caring about which Policies the civ has adopted.

ok, all makes sense and agreed.

Yeah, that seems reasonable. I think we'd want to go into these kinds of bonuses in the next stage. I'm not sure if we should look at them after we've finished this first part or after we've gone through the individual Policies?

definitely need to lock down the big picture first, I think.

After we've finished this first part we'll have a set of trees and branches, which is the actual flavor and general mechanical ideas that these other systems will care about. But if we've already done the Policies, then we'll know a lot more about how the mechanics of each branch works and how these other systems could complement that. Conversely, we'll have more relevant flavor and mechanical design space for the individual Policies if we already know what other systems they connect to. Chicken and egg and all that.

I've fine with taking this process in whichever direction you prefer. Before or after specific policies.

According to someone on reddit, the cost to adopt your kth Policy can be calculated as follows:

(25 + (3k)2.01 ) (1+0.1*(n-1))

Where n is how many cities you have. It rounds down to the nearest multiple of 5.

I'm afraid of the amount of guesswork that would be involved in trying to work out how quickly players accumulate Culture though. And especially since we will have changed that significantly, even if we work from BNW data. So this will be something we're calibrating anyway, but the problem is whether the general necessity for Policy unlock speed will mesh up with how quickly players create Governors to take advantage of these Unity bonuses. I'm... not really sure how to work that out.

then... let's not (work it out)...

We could set up an obvious bonus in one of the earlier Policies that would trigger later. Something like "First X cities with Population over Y receive a free Governor"? Too strong?

yeah, too strong, I'd say. I think one free governor would in and of itself be strong enough, since a governor is essentially a LP, and there are policies that grant a single LP

I didn't actually go much into this above, so it's good to have this block to refocus on it!

This was mostly about the role of the naval Policies that we moved out of Commerce and Exploration and into other places. Now that we're going with having more trees, would a "naval" tree make sense? Or do we still want to put the naval stuff into branches of the existing trees?

A problem I find with them being in existing branches is it tends to make the branch choice in that tree very black and white. If the civ is mostly ocean-going on this map they should choose the naval one, otherwise not. Is there a way to avoid that without having a separate tree?

Hmmm, I find I mostly don't like the Naval Tree thing, for a few reasons.

First, it seems to go against what we've done here, by removing the GAd and making the GC more universal. We're looking to fuse the naval and land mechanics somewhat. This separates them again, and seems to work opposite to that aim.

Related to that, the flavor of WoT doesn't seem to justify it. There is one naval focused entity. It seems kind of a random source material to justify such a tree.

I feel like Exploration is the unwanted child already, and going all-in on naval-ness (with two branches!) makes this even more extreme. It takes away some of the stuff that people do choose exploration for (hidden sites), presumably, and doubles down on the naval thing.

I think the branch choice being black and white is probably better than a *tree* choice being black or white. We have that in other branches, anyways - Fear or acceptance is a clear choice based on playstyle.

Besides, maybe we don't have to have it be a dedicated branch. Perhaps we can spread the naval stuff around? That makes it harder to specialize in navy, but that's an option.

I don't see the one-branch thing as being a big problem.

I think that's still a separate problem though. Either those spaces are now actually good for the AI, in which case it's doing its job. Or they're still bad at it and that's the actual problem.

well, that puts the pressure on you to build the AI better... instead of on us to make design choices around its current limits. Are you up for the pressure?

I think it could be the main point of the branches though. To encourage the player to expand to different places from what they would otherwise. Not all Policies would necessarily be exactly about bonuses/luxuries, but they could complement that difference.

hmmm, this is tough. I'd have to see how the other policies looked! I'm fine with this in theory, but I'm not confident it would work.

I don't think we'd want to go for peaceful vs warlike because of the existence of the War tree - Domination focused expansion should mostly be driven there.

yeah, agreed.

I'm also not the biggest fan of WoTMod on the right and BNW on the left, which is covered above. (I may be straight up disagreeing with my initial assessment of this right now.)

covered above.

So how else could we encourage Wideness in a branch? We've got a Wide tree in Ambition and it needs two branches that both encourage that Wideness, but in different ways.

Just to talk through the process, the primary motivation of a Wide player is to gain advantage through having many cities. So bonuses that scale with number of cities are good for them. Things that reduce the barriers to establishing more cities are good for them. The main barrier to more cities is Happiness.

Do we want to have two non-VC-mechanics make up a "wide and <X>" branch on both sides?

So, for example: "wide and T'a'r" and "wide and naval". Both T'a'r and naval are potentially looking for branches to call home. T'a'r could be things that allow Projections to reveal the fog (helping to scout) or even allow T'a'r to be used to found cities somehow. ("A Wilder who has created X Dreamwards can be expended to found a city," for example.) Naval has some obvious uses, and some we could take from Civ6. Care about founding cities on other landmasses and the like. It does have the issue I mentioned above of only being even an option when you're near water, but as also mentioned above, that isn't necessarily terrible.

hmmmm, this is tough.

I think one issue with "wide and x" is what that does to Unity. If we did that, it sort of seems like we'd need to also do "tall and x" with the same options for Unity. I don't think we want to do that. Of course, a unity player could take unity and THEN take Ambition in order to grab ocean stuff, but that seems less intuitive than them moving on to a later tree (as happens more often in BNW).

Also, I wonder if T'a'r unlock slightly too late in the game to make sense as attached to Ambition. I guess this is the same issue as Governors, but it feels a little worse here, though off the top of my head, I don't know when t'a'r unlocks.

I discussed this in the previous post, but i don't see a whole lot of Wide angles for T'a'r, unless re reconceptualize the whole thing. The city-founding thing is also pretty ridiculous flavor.

I hate to bastardize the current BNW tree too much, but those bonuses do seem to split into two halves - happiness management and actual expansion (building settlers, workers, etc.). It's possible we could keep going with that, with one helping the happiness problem, and the other aiding in expansion in the more literal sense. Hmmm

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, I'm back, and somewhat falling behind - unfortunately, I'm not sure if I'll have enough time to fully catch up today, we'll see.

No worries! Some advance warning about my schedule over Christmas. I'm going to be traveling on Saturday but should be back to posting on Monday. I'll be traveling again on the 29th and won't be able to post until the 3rd after that!

Also, full disclosure - I'm finding that after the month of working on these policies, I'm kind of tired of this topic! It is what it is - I'm not suggesting we do anything different - but I feel a degree of fatigue on Policies, which were, in the first place, not a topic I felt particularly compelled by. Kind of a bummer, but again, it is what it is. I say this now to mostly just warn you that I might not be as inspired as I try to be, so you should take my feedback with a grain of salt.

I understand about the fatigue, so hopefully I'm not dragging this out too much below! I figure it's still better for us to go through this now and have considered it rather than decide we need to revisit it after it's already in the game. You've still got plenty of good points despite the fatigue!

hmmmmm, I feel like we don't want to set Faith and Alignment in opposition to one another. It should definitely be possible to focu on both. I understand, flavor-wise, how this might make sense, but it should be possible to both be Children *and* Darkfriends.

I'm not suggesting setting Faith and Alignment in opposition, I'm suggesting "Faith and Paths" as one branch and "Faith and Alignment" as its opposing branch. So most Westlands civs would embody the flavor of the former - their societies' customs and the like are related to the Light and our loose definition of what a "Path" is. Whereas the Children and the Darkfriends embody the latter branch, the branch that marries up generating Faith with extremes of Alignment. The Children are a fusion of extreme Faith and dedication to the Light, Darkfriends are "Faith" in the Dark One and being evil. These are all flavor considerations. (Given how we've mechanically characterized the usage of Children, it is possible in this set up to be Children and Darkfriend at the same time, here I'm talking about the canonical flavor characterization of the Children from the books as fitting well.)

Those fit together really well, I think. The main problem I see is making Alignment a major feature of a Policy tree that's available at the start of the game. Like we've mentioned elsewhere, it's difficult to have Alignment mechanics that early. More on this below.

so, are you suggesting Faith on one side and alignment on the other? I do see that as problematic, as discussed above. But I could see these be fused, so that both sides of Myth deal with Alignment - so would that be "Path + Alignment" vs "Somebody Else's Path + Alignment," or what?

"Path and Alignment" vs "Someone Else's Path and Alignment" could work. I do find that focusing on spreading someone else's Path has a similar problem to a defensive Culture branch. Players who don't found their own Path probably aren't very invested in the Faith aspect of the game, and so them investing in a Faith tree rather than one that helps them pursue their other goals is unlikely. (Paths aren't as bad as Culture in this way though - you can use someone else's Path to help you win the game with its yields, you can't win the game by someone else not being able to win it because of your Culture.)

Having both branches of Myth be Alignment related also seems like it wouldn't play well with also having an entire Alignment tree, which I'm becoming more of a fan of as we'll see later!

In terms of the early bonuses, yeah, it's hard to not make these result in cascading bonuses (+1 in the early game will get big). Maybe the deal is not to provide bonuses to Alignment, but bonuses to Alignment actions - using Questioners, etc. - or do those unlock too late as well? Could also link it to threads (which resonates well with the WBr LP, which could be the faith-buy for one of the sides of the tree.

This is a good way to frame this, bonuses for being good at Alignment rather than bonuses that make you better at Alignment (where "better" is more extreme). The Alignment mechanics do unlock later in the game though, and early game Policy decisions tend to be driven by the needs of the civ then. The player can take their Alignment Policies and wait for them to become more relevant or choose different Policies that help them now. That's not to say that longer-term-payoff Policies are always bad though, there are also the inverse, Policies that are only really helpful in the early game.

I don't see an unlock point mentioned for Questioners in any of our tech discussions. Do we want them to be locked behind a tech? (Or possibly locked behind a Policy? That could be a good early Alignment unlock?) Otherwise they're presumably available right away, though don't do much to start with since everyone will be mostly neutral.

It also occurs to me that having a single branch of the Myth tree being Alignment-y (so the "Faith and Paths" vs "Faith and Alignment") does co-operate with there being a full on Alignment tree later. In the same way that Exploration has quite a few Policies that help Culture players, Myth could be an "introduction" to Alignment, with the Alignment tree itself targeting more of the meatier late-game Alignment mechanics.

Looking back at this a bit more, it could be effective to make the Alignment actions help out with Faith, rather than the other way around. So this is just another way to pursue a Path, and also something you'd do if you were interested in the Faith game, just playing it differently from the straight-up-Path-bonuses approach.

Some rough scratchings of what "Faith and Alignment" branch Policies might look like (I'm suggesting more than we need to give an idea of our options):

• All Thread choices grant you Medium Faith in addition to their other yields.
• Your choice of a Wolfbrother or Dreamwalker appears near the capital.
• Your Questioners are X% more effective and generate Y Faith when expended.
• You can purchase Questioners with Faith.
• Questioners also spread the Path of the city they were trained in when they use their "Question" ability. (Like Missionaries, presumably just less powerful.)
• When another civilization uses Corrupt Dreams against you, only half as many rebels appear and a melee unit spawns under your control adjacent to the affected city.

I've reread the T'a'r summary and I'm not sure there's really enough mechanical "ammo" for two separate T'a'r branches, unless they are attached to other rather large mechanics. As far as I see it, T'a'r allows for the following:

- sight and map stuff
- harvesting glimmers (thus generating the T'a'r LPs)
- generating wolfbrothers for dominance within T'a'r (aiding the rest of these)
- generating wolfbrothers to remove dreamspikes (useful for domination)
- generating wolfbrothers to summon threads (relates to Alignment and other yields)
- offsetting occupied unhappiness (via dreamwards, aids in domination)
- slowing CS influence decay (via dreamwards, aids in diplo)
- stopping traveling (via dreamspikes, aids in domination)
- siphoning science from expended envoys (via dreamspikes, aids in science/everything)
- creating Relfections (via expending T'a'r LPs, aids in Culture)
- revealing Reflections (via harvesting glimmers, aids in Culture)

So, while there are a fair amount of things there - we tried to relate it to the larger game as much as possible - I'm a little nervous about splitting it up and calling that a tree. I suppose it's all so interlinked, I wouldn't want people who have to limit themselves so much, if that was the main point of a tree in the first place. If you're unlocking a whole T'a'r tree, you'd best be awesome at T'a'r!. I think I'd rather see one of the following:

- attaching the split T'a'r functionality to the divisions of an existing tree (e.g. *both* halves of Myth, or War, or whatever)
- as needed, putting T'a'r-related stuff throughout all the trees, when relevant (one in War, one in Politics, etc.)
- A T'a'r side of another tree, if the right other half can be found - I suspect the correct other half cannot be found, though, since it's hard to choose what should be mutually-exclusive with T'a'r dominance.

So, if we do want a "t'a'r" tree that isn't based on an existing tree, I'd want both halves of that tree to also be about something else that is new, e.g. Alignment or channeling.

These are all good points! I'm sold on this, let's distribute T'a'r throughout the other trees wherever it's appropriate for the mechanical overlap of how the "main" part of the tree would work and how it overlaps with T'a'r. (so T'a'r Dreamward radius expansion on the War tree, that kind of thing.)

I see what you mean, but I'd also suggest that you're taking a somewhat liberal definition of Culture that might not be helpful to us. True, the Aiel culture is linked to T'a'r, but it's also linked to their warlike nature, their kinds of settlements, and their codes of ethics (their "Path"). That doesn't mean that each of these should be a part of their Culture tree. Essentially, I think "Culture" in Civ is supposed to have more to do with art and tangible records of your culture, and the popularity/fame of that culture. Social policies are "bought" with culture, which keeps all these things linked, but culture itself is more strictly defined for our purposes.

Thus, I'm not sure T'a'r and culture should be really all that linked.

Yeah, that makes sense. Your points below about mutual exclusion with Culture have convinced me anyway, so I don't think we should have T'a'r as a branch pitted against Culture anymore!

this is where you need to consider the fact that I am fatigued by this process...

I see what you're saying, but I think if we balance appropriately, it isn't a problem. The thing is, the BNW trees hit the "Greatest Hits" of their respective mechanics pretty well (with some exception). It does sort of feel like we're "breaking up the band" to make impossible, for instance, to complete the full Tradition tree and its effects.

We could do this, but I also sort of consider the BNW sides as the "straight line" to something. Yes, if what you care about is maximizing Tallness, you might want to go with the left of Unity. But if you want to temper that a bit, and in return get some gov benefits, go with the right side. Right sides include either new mechanics, or else are a bit broader in their function. I think this system could work well.

We could mix them, though, but then it's a matter of replacing them with things that people won't miss. I tried this on Politics, but then again, that one has a few that are deliberately "equivalents", with similar mechanics on either side.

This is probably one of the reasons that I liked Politics so much the first time through! I think that's one of the trees that I feel most engaged by, looking at it from the perspective of "what from this would I want to adopt?"

I think that the risk with "straight line" vs tempered is that if you're going for a specific strategy then straight line will most often be the better choice, because it directly helps you achieve the aims associated with that strategy. The tempered versions are the general case version of the problem I mentioned with bonuses-to-Paths-from-other-players and defensive Culture branches, because that player who might consider the tempered versions is presumably using a different strategy, for which they could adopt the straight line branch from a different tree. We're making players not choose our cool new stuff because the old stuff is more effective at achieving their goals in the game, which will be super frustrating for the player.

I think there are two really good forms of branching: having the two branches be two different ways to achieve similar objectives. Politics does this really well, focusing on Diplomacy via the Tower or the Stedding on each branch respectively. The other is where each branch achieve different things that are intended to be mechanically exclusive, in our choice of similar or different ways. An Alignment tree that's Light vs Shadow would fit this bill (there are no cases where you'd want to be both Light and Shadow).

And of course the Politics tree does have several Policies from the BNW mixed into both sides, as you've said, and that's a really good example of this working well.

it looks like what we settled on is in one of the summaries - the T'a'r summary, but not the culture one. (unless you just updated it)

Apparently I can't read!

looking at what the overall mechanics of T'a'r are, I'm not sure there's anything expansionist about it, aside from, perhaps, keeping vision on tiles - though, it could be argued that that is more tall-friendly, because wide civs are likely to have actual vision on more tiles due to their number of cities.... Also, since glimmers are spawned from LP use, wide civs may be in a better position to at least *create* glimmers (not necessarily to harvest them). a wide civ obviously has more cities that could take advantage of the benefits of a dreamward, but that really just relates to the military expansion angle anyway. Same with dreamspikes (the defense-against-traveling side would actually be easier to pull off for a tall civ). So, I'd say not enough link to either tall or wide to include them here. We could include them anyways, but the elements would be somewhat random.

The Dreamward Happiness bonus could be a big thing for Wide, which was the main connection I was thinking here. Though that is conquest related (it reduces occupied unhappiness) so that should probably go in the War tree somewhere! Anyway, related to above, I'm all good for having T'a'r mixed into all of the trees as appropriate, so I don't think we need to create a T'a'r-focused branch in Ambition.

I think the way we've conceived T'a'r, it intersects with every major VC, at least somewhat: Dom through traveling-limiting and occupation-happineess, Diplo through decay-lowering, Science through envoy-stealing, LB through threads, and Culture through reflections. I think the t'a'r-link to the culture game - helpful, but not required, as Hidden Sites are in BNW - is logically sound and probably should be preserved.

And, even putting that aside, a culture player is likely to spawn a bunch of LPs, which they would then have the inside track on harvesting, so I could see it being relatively logical for them to have a good t'a'r game. Additionally, culture players might be playing defensively, and there are ways to spin T'a'r to aid you in that regard (dreamspikes and whatnot). So I don't see a reason at all why we should *exclude* culture players from t'a'r dominance.

All good points! Let's steer clear of pitting T'a'r against Culture then.

I agree. Probably best not to directly correlate t'ar and culture. The only thing that directly relates to culture is the Reflection thing, and BNW gives us precedent for separating that into another tree - though I could be theoretically ok with it being in the Creativity tree, if need be ),maybe even in an early, shared policy?).

Sounds good. Should the Reflection Policy be an unbranched Policy in the Wealth tree then?

Yeah, I think I could get on board with Science joined with two kinds of Alignment. I wonder if we'd want it to be Light and Shadow, though - that makes me worry a bit about neutral players who want science (which seems highly reasonable). I guess I'm only really ok with a Light/Shadow Alignment duality in a tree if its an "Alignment Tree," and not one that is so central and universal as faux-Rationalism. That said, if you can think of a way around this, let me know.

Very good point, we don't want to take Science away from Neutral players since Neutral Science should totally be a viable strategy!

I could see it going with Science and two different kinds of Alignment manipulation (going back to the "controlling" and "aggressive" elements, for example). We'd also obviously be splitting the science functionality down the middle, so we'd be trying to come up with some unifying principle for each side. I don't have any immediate ideas on what that'd be. Maybe one side is more LB related (though not in a way that steps on War: Valor.

"Science and Controlled Alignment" vs "Science and Aggressive Alignment" sounds like it could work really well. It could also co-operate with an actual dedicated Alignment tree. Scholarship's Alignment contributions would mostly be about how Alignment is generated (and more so be about Science, obviously). The Alignment tree could be more about the actual Alignment mechanics themselves and the LB.

Given the way that War: Valor works, I think we're relatively ok on both of these fronts. Valor is available very early so there are a bunch of mechanics we can use here that are unavailable to it back then.

(if we did this way, where it was two flavors of alignment, we could also *theoretically* do the "mirrored versions" of the tree, with light/neutral/shadow causing your choices to provide different actual benefits for a few policies. This could be cool, but also might be a little too complex, given that this is mostly the "science tree.")

I think this would be more at home in a dedicated Alignment tree, given its complexity.

The "Alignment vs X" kind could also work, though again, not sure what it'd be. Wealth *could* work, but don't you think money generation deserves to be its own tree? This, especially considering that it unlocks earlier.

Good point, Gold should have its own tree!


I'm afraid that's all I've got time for tonight! I'll be back tomorrow with an initial pass at ideas for an Alignment tree.

EDIT: Curses! Preparations for going away have delayed me tonight, so I'll do my best to post tomorrow.

 

[counterpoint]

No worries! Some advance warning about my schedule over Christmas. I'm going to be traveling on Saturday but should be back to posting on Monday. I'll be traveling again on the 29th and won't be able to post until the 3rd after that!

No problem. I'm also traveling until the 30th. I'll have some time to post, but it won't be predictable.... and then I'm moving almost immediately, so there will likely be some patches where posting will be tough.

Happy holidays!

I understand about the fatigue, so hopefully I'm not dragging this out too much below! I figure it's still better for us to go through this now and have considered it rather than decide we need to revisit it after it's already in the game. You've still got plenty of good points despite the fatigue!

Yeah, I suspect at the root of this may be the whole "this might be unneeded because we're moving to CiVI" thing...

I'm not suggesting setting Faith and Alignment in opposition, I'm suggesting "Faith and Paths" as one branch and "Faith and Alignment" as its opposing branch. So most Westlands civs would embody the flavor of the former - their societies' customs and the like are related to the Light and our loose definition of what a "Path" is. Whereas the Children and the Darkfriends embody the latter branch, the branch that marries up generating Faith with extremes of Alignment. The Children are a fusion of extreme Faith and dedication to the Light, Darkfriends are "Faith" in the Dark One and being evil. These are all flavor considerations. (Given how we've mechanically characterized the usage of Children, it is possible in this set up to be Children and Darkfriend at the same time, here I'm talking about the canonical flavor characterization of the Children from the books as fitting well.)

Those fit together really well, I think. The main problem I see is making Alignment a major feature of a Policy tree that's available at the start of the game. Like we've mentioned elsewhere, it's difficult to have Alignment mechanics that early. More on this below.

OK, I understand now. I suppose the main confusion for me was that I thought you mean "Faith and Paths" and "Faith and <the alignment branch>", in the sense that the latter was the main way a civ could specialize in Alignment - which essentially makes a good Path incompatible to a good alignment. In fact, what it seems you're suggesting is "Faith and paths" vs "faith *as related to* Alignment", which makes more sense.

"Path and Alignment" vs "Someone Else's Path and Alignment" could work. I do find that focusing on spreading someone else's Path has a similar problem to a defensive Culture branch. Players who don't found their own Path probably aren't very invested in the Faith aspect of the game, and so them investing in a Faith tree rather than one that helps them pursue their other goals is unlikely. (Paths aren't as bad as Culture in this way though - you can use someone else's Path to help you win the game with its yields, you can't win the game by someone else not being able to win it because of your Culture.)

Having both branches of Myth be Alignment related also seems like it wouldn't play well with also having an entire Alignment tree, which I'm becoming more of a fan of as we'll see later!

yeah, I agree on that last point.

As to the first, the goal here, for me, was to provide a viable way to boost your faith-game - maybe through spreading a Path or just through Faith generation - if you were unable to gain a Path yourself. I think that is worthy. but it doesn't have to necessarily be about spreading somebody else's path - maybe it's more about gaining more benefits from follower bonuses, or improved faith generation, or, as I think "Dreams" sort of embodied, gain *benefit* from your high faith generation. Thus, this could be an attractive option even if you do have a Path, but kind of don't "care" about it.

This is a good way to frame this, bonuses for being good at Alignment rather than bonuses that make you better at Alignment (where "better" is more extreme). The Alignment mechanics do unlock later in the game though, and early game Policy decisions tend to be driven by the needs of the civ then. The player can take their Alignment Policies and wait for them to become more relevant or choose different Policies that help them now. That's not to say that longer-term-payoff Policies are always bad though, there are also the inverse, Policies that are only really helpful in the early game.

I don't see an unlock point mentioned for Questioners in any of our tech discussions. Do we want them to be locked behind a tech? (Or possibly locked behind a Policy? That could be a good early Alignment unlock?) Otherwise they're presumably available right away, though don't do much to start with since everyone will be mostly neutral.

Interesting question. Intuitively, I feel like they would unlock with a tech or something, but I'm not sure if that's actually necessary, mechanically, nor am I sure what that tech would be. Also, a policy makes good sense, but I worry it would really limit the Alignment game for a lot of players - probably best that we make the Questioners as accessible as possible in order to make Alignment as accessible as possible

The main issue I see with unlocking them at game-start is sort of with the "feel" of them. You are correct that they essentially do nothing at game start. that said, they are a new mechanic, and new players will undoubtedly want to explore that new mechanic - only to find that the Questioner does nothing and is a "waste." This is a problem. Yes, returning players won't have that problem, but their opinion might already be set (in a bad way!). In any case, a mechanic that does nothing in the early game is a problem I think - better to make it pop up later. I convinced myself of this only in writing this response (I figured I was fine with it being open at game start).

It also occurs to me that having a single branch of the Myth tree being Alignment-y (so the "Faith and Paths" vs "Faith and Alignment") does co-operate with there being a full on Alignment tree later. In the same way that Exploration has quite a few Policies that help Culture players, Myth could be an "introduction" to Alignment, with the Alignment tree itself targeting more of the meatier late-game Alignment mechanics.

yeah, that's fine, especially if it's really just about the linkage between faith and alignment anyways.

Looking back at this a bit more, it could be effective to make the Alignment actions help out with Faith, rather than the other way around. So this is just another way to pursue a Path, and also something you'd do if you were interested in the Faith game, just playing it differently from the straight-up-Path-bonuses approach.

yeah, agreed.

Some rough scratchings of what "Faith and Alignment" branch Policies might look like (I'm suggesting more than we need to give an idea of our options):

• All Thread choices grant you Medium Faith in addition to their other yields.
• Your choice of a Wolfbrother or Dreamwalker appears near the capital.
• Your Questioners are X% more effective and generate Y Faith when expended.
• You can purchase Questioners with Faith.
• Questioners also spread the Path of the city they were trained in when they use their "Question" ability. (Like Missionaries, presumably just less powerful.)
• When another civilization uses Corrupt Dreams against you, only half as many rebels appear and a melee unit spawns under your control adjacent to the affected city.

• yeah, some of these should be fine! Can examine in more detail when we get "there"

These are all good points! I'm sold on this, let's distribute T'a'r throughout the other trees wherever it's appropriate for the mechanical overlap of how the "main" part of the tree would work and how it overlaps with T'a'r. (so T'a'r Dreamward radius expansion on the War tree, that kind of thing.)

cool, how systematic should we be with this? Should it be sort of ad hoc and/or willy nilly? Or should we make it take place in every Tree? Every branch?

This is probably one of the reasons that I liked Politics so much the first time through! I think that's one of the trees that I feel most engaged by, looking at it from the perspective of "what from this would I want to adopt?"

I think that the risk with "straight line" vs tempered is that if you're going for a specific strategy then straight line will most often be the better choice, because it directly helps you achieve the aims associated with that strategy. The tempered versions are the general case version of the problem I mentioned with bonuses-to-Paths-from-other-players and defensive Culture branches, because that player who might consider the tempered versions is presumably using a different strategy, for which they could adopt the straight line branch from a different tree. We're making players not choose our cool new stuff because the old stuff is more effective at achieving their goals in the game, which will be super frustrating for the player.

ok ok OK, I'm sold. Sheesh!

I think there are two really good forms of branching: having the two branches be two different ways to achieve similar objectives. Politics does this really well, focusing on Diplomacy via the Tower or the Stedding on each branch respectively. The other is where each branch achieve different things that are intended to be mechanically exclusive, in our choice of similar or different ways. An Alignment tree that's Light vs Shadow would fit this bill (there are no cases where you'd want to be both Light and Shadow).

And of course the Politics tree does have several Policies from the BNW mixed into both sides, as you've said, and that's a really good example of this working well.

cool, I like this way of looking at things, and framing it all. Again, do you think we should try to be systematic about this? Like, do we need to have all the branching be of the same type, or can some be Convergent and some be Divergent? (I assume we'll be mixing them).

In any case, I think it would be rather helpful to line up all the Trees once we are further along in this phase (perhaps with your finished posts we will be), and specify which of these branch-types we'll be using. I think , for me at least, it would be helpful to better understand the tree (and see how they relate to one another).

The Dreamward Happiness bonus could be a big thing for Wide, which was the main connection I was thinking here. Though that is conquest related (it reduces occupied unhappiness) so that should probably go in the War tree somewhere! Anyway, related to above, I'm all good for having T'a'r mixed into all of the trees as appropriate, so I don't think we need to create a T'a'r-focused branch in Ambition.

yeah, agreed. that is wide, but it is also better linked to War, I'd say (which is of course secondarily wide).

Sounds good. Should the Reflection Policy be an unbranched Policy in the Wealth tree then?

I'm not sure. This could be an answer. But it also could be another tree. I think we can wait on this, as it'll depend on what happens with the ashes of Exploration. I suppose it also could be branched, but it's probably best unbranched (though perhaps with a prereq).

Very good point, we don't want to take Science away from Neutral players since Neutral Science should totally be a viable strategy!

agreed.

"Science and Controlled Alignment" vs "Science and Aggressive Alignment" sounds like it could work really well. It could also co-operate with an actual dedicated Alignment tree. Scholarship's Alignment contributions would mostly be about how Alignment is generated (and more so be about Science, obviously). The Alignment tree could be more about the actual Alignment mechanics themselves and the LB.

Do you see this as the "main" differentiation between these branches? Do you think that's enough differentiation to make it feel worthy? I worry that, while this is interesting, there will be plenty of Science players who just plain don't care about Alignment. That's fine, I guess, but it seems to me that all the other branching on the VC-linked trees is somewhat central to the VC itself, or at least of primary interest. Am I right about that? I guess I'd want to make sure it doesn't feel tacked on

Given the way that War: Valor works, I think we're relatively ok on both of these fronts. Valor is available very early so there are a bunch of mechanics we can use here that are unavailable to it back then.

ok

I think this would be more at home in a dedicated Alignment tree, given its complexity.

ok! agreed

 

[S3rgeus]

I have returned! I'm a bit pressed for time packing all my stuff to leave at crazy o'clock tomorrow morning, but I'll at least catch up to all of your posts from the last round!

Yeah, it looks like we can add a tree. I suppose my preference would be to keep the number the same, as it feels elegant/simpler, but I'm open to adding one if the need strikes us. So far, I'm not totally sure the need is there - basically, it comes down to whether we need a stand-alone Alignment tree. If it's integrated into Scholarship (or Myth), then I think our tree # will be the same.

I think my preference is coming down more on having an additional tree, specifically the Alignment tree, as I mentioned in my last post! I think it's a combination of a few reasons: we have a lot of new mechanics there to center Policies around, it's a big flavorful part of what the Wheel of Time is and lets players live that fiction, and we're adding the LB as a new victory condition, so having Policies that target that, like there are for the other victories, seems like a good idea to me.

that last is a good point! Perhaps thats a reason to fuse it with the science tree, warts and all...

Related to fusing Alignment into the Scholarship tree, I think we can still do that even if we have a separate Alignment tree. You do bring up good points about some drawbacks of that in your latest post though. More on that when I reach it!

if you want to, go for it! Just "samples" though - don't waste your time on a full tree, I think.

Right, so we have two main competitors, I think, for the structure of an Alignment tree. Controlled vs Aggressive and Light vs Shadow. Are there others I'm missing? I'll go through these two this time and do more if we need to. Of course there are also unbranched Policies. I've created three for each to give us a general idea of the direction for each one, though when we go deeper we should definitely consider more options.

Unbranched:

• Wolfbrothers and Dreamwalkers earned X% faster.
• Threads occur X% more frequently and always have at least one option that yields High for your current overall Alignment leaning.
• Your Questioners are X% more effective in your cities and foreign Questioners are Y% less effective in your cities.

Controlled branch:

• Whenever you make a choice in a Thread, a single citizen in each of your cities changes Alignment from the opposing side to the side of the choice you chose. (If you choose a Shadow choice, one of your Light citizens becomes a Darkfriend, and vice versa.)
• Threads yield X% less Alignment and X% more yields of other types.
• +X Happiness in cities that have a balanced citizen Alignment distribution for your current Alignment tier.

Aggressive branch: (I added an extra one here.)

• Citizens and Threads produce double Alignment
• +X Happiness and +Y Prestige for each Alignment tier away from Neutral you are.
• +X Science from Alignment buildings and +Y Alignment of your current Alignment leaning from Science buildings.
• Killing an enemy unit in T'a'r permanently increases your Alignment production by X in the direction of your overall leaning at the time.

Light branch:

• Your units heal for X% of their total health when they kill a Shadowspawn unit. (Note: not just units controlled by the Shadowspawn civ.)
• +X Happiness for each Stedding you are allied with and +Y Happiness for each one you are friends with.
• You produce +X% Science for each other civilization that is a part of the Dragon's Peace.

Shadow branch:

• Completing an objective for Turning the Tower gives you double Shadow and your civilization enters a Golden Age.
• Your Projections can attack units in the main map layers with the ranged strength of their host Saidar unit. Attacking expends the Projection.
• Trollocs cost X% less production after the start of the Last Battle and can be purchased with Gold or Faith.

It seems to me that cohabitating the Science tree might be the other major option, aside from just scattering Alignment all over the place (like T'a'r)... Am I right? If you want, you could "test" a few ideas for that as well. Also fine to keep it all theoretical at this stage. We're making progress.

Agreed, having Alignment in the Science tree could work, with or without the Alignment tree. You bring this up again in your latest post, so I'm going to cheat a bit and do the testing of ideas for that when I get there! (Which won't be today, unfortunately!)

Right, though if we attach Alignment to something like science, we'd *need* the buffer to make sure neutral civs would be fine.

And I'd say the neutral buffer is useful even if it's just "optional." Just because you drop below a certain Light threshold (say, Tier 3), doesn't mean you want to be actively *generating Shadow*, right? The buffer let's somebody "hold," or at least not keep spinning further and further away.

This makes me think that controlled vs aggressive are good characterizations for the two sides of such an Alignment-influenced Science tree. I'm thinking that Policies in the Science tree (and even in the Alignment tree) that fluctuate with the player's Alignment will be something that's quite difficult for the player to track, because of the whole "grey area" in the less extreme portions of either side.

Your point later about being a Science civ that doesn't particularly care about Alignment is another good one. Maybe the Science tree could be more like what we're discussing with Myth above: one side uses Science for the Science victory and the other uses Science for Alignment. (The mirror with Myth being Faith for Paths vs Alignment for Faith.) Difficulty there is that it crosses over more with the Alignment tree, since the latter branch would be wanting to use Science output to help with the LB and its associated mechanics.

Difficult choices here, I'll come back to it more responding to your latest post.

Yeah, Myth could work, possible, but I think I'd prefer it to be merged into both trees, and not an either or. Science is the other option, it seems.

Not sure if I land on merged or stand alone being better.

Agreed, it's looking good for merging Alignment into Myth and very possible for Science. *And* an Alignment tree!

Alignment throws the whole thing off if it's opposed (light vs shadow). If not, it's kind of the same thing, I think. I think maybe choosing the tree *at all* doesn't have to be as secret as other things.

Cool, sounds like we can sort this out once we know which variant of all the trees we're taking!

I've fine with taking this process in whichever direction you prefer. Before or after specific policies.

If you're more fatigued on the Policies discussion specifically, it may help for us to go to the "other mechanics that care about branches" discussion before specific Policies then? I think it's pretty much a wash as for which one has the most upsides or downsides and we'll probably need to tweak the first one after we've done both anyway.

then... let's not (work it out)...

Yeah, let's leave that, seems like any results we do work out would probably be quite inaccurate!

yeah, too strong, I'd say. I think one free governor would in and of itself be strong enough, since a governor is essentially a LP, and there are policies that grant a single LP

A free Governor now certainly would be, but Governors overall aren't as flexible as LPs (since an LP can give you the Governor or any of its other abilities, it's inherently more useful). And if X were 10 or something, then it would only be the player's more developed cities that get there. (But they also wouldn't see any benefit from the Policy itself until later.)

Hmmm, I find I mostly don't like the Naval Tree thing, for a few reasons.

First, it seems to go against what we've done here, by removing the GAd and making the GC more universal. We're looking to fuse the naval and land mechanics somewhat. This separates them again, and seems to work opposite to that aim.

Related to that, the flavor of WoT doesn't seem to justify it. There is one naval focused entity. It seems kind of a random source material to justify such a tree.

I feel like Exploration is the unwanted child already, and going all-in on naval-ness (with two branches!) makes this even more extreme. It takes away some of the stuff that people do choose exploration for (hidden sites), presumably, and doubles down on the naval thing.

I think the branch choice being black and white is probably better than a *tree* choice being black or white. We have that in other branches, anyways - Fear or acceptance is a clear choice based on playstyle.

Besides, maybe we don't have to have it be a dedicated branch. Perhaps we can spread the naval stuff around? That makes it harder to specialize in navy, but that's an option.

I don't see the one-branch thing as being a big problem.

All good points! Let's not do a naval tree then. In fact, you've convinced me somewhat that we could do the kinds of naval-specialization branches that we have in the treatment at the moment. Even if some choices are black and white for some maps, we're still providing options that will vary from game to game.

well, that puts the pressure on you to build the AI better... instead of on us to make design choices around its current limits. Are you up for the pressure?

All the pressure! I'm not sure, I think we'll have to see how AI work pans out. I think we should lean towards the better overall solution for now and if we find later that the AI is too much of an issue, adjust the design around them, rather than go in with a design drawback that might not be necessary.

hmmm, this is tough. I'd have to see how the other policies looked! I'm fine with this in theory, but I'm not confident it would work.

Some rough scratches for this (more suggestions than we have slots, to get an idea of the design objectives, rather than come up with a final list):

Luxury tree

• +X Happiness from luxury resources that are not found near your capital (where "near" is defined by tiles owned by your capital city).
• Worker speed improvement (Old Blood)
• Policy cost increase from number of cities decreased (Guestright)
• +1 Happiness per connected city (Royal Gifts)
• Cities founded one hex away from luxury resources start with territory encompassing those resources (it grabs the individual tiles the luxuries are on).

Bonus tree

• +X (like 1 or 2) Happiness from bonus resources (possibly only if worked?)
• +X Production for cities with less than Y Population
• Bonus resources provide +X Food and +Y Gold when improved
• +X Happiness and +Y Production in cities that are not connected to your capital
• Internal trade routes have +X% boosted range and provide the movement bonus of a road along their path for their duration. (Could also provide connection, but probably wouldn't co-exist with the above Policy then. Unless we specifically opt out connections of this form from affecting the above Policy - could be done elegantly by saying "connected by roads" in the above.)

I think one issue with "wide and x" is what that does to Unity. If we did that, it sort of seems like we'd need to also do "tall and x" with the same options for Unity. I don't think we want to do that. Of course, a unity player could take unity and THEN take Ambition in order to grab ocean stuff, but that seems less intuitive than them moving on to a later tree (as happens more often in BNW).

Good point, is this a drawback of using the Policies as described in the treatment then? Or would the fact that Ambition's Naval branch would be "expansion through navy" mean a Unity player would be unlikely to find it helpful? (Since they're presumably playing Tall.)

Also, I wonder if T'a'r unlock slightly too late in the game to make sense as attached to Ambition. I guess this is the same issue as Governors, but it feels a little worse here, though off the top of my head, I don't know when t'a'r unlocks.

Projections are the first T'a'r mechanic that players unlock (unless they rush a free LP and choose Wolfbrother/Dreamwalker) and it's gated behind a tech in Era 2 Column 2 (The Wheel of Time). Given that we can have the unbranched Policies as prereqs for the branch, I don't think T'a'r for the branch would be a problem in terms of unlock time for a Policy tree that unlocks in Era 1.

I discussed this in the previous post, but i don't see a whole lot of Wide angles for T'a'r, unless re reconceptualize the whole thing. The city-founding thing is also pretty ridiculous flavor.

Good point, that flavor's pretty crazy! Agreed re expansion and T'a'r. We could use this tree to allow players to use T'a'r mechanics in an expansionist way though. Things like letting Projections reveal the fog, which does make flavorful sense.

I hate to bastardize the current BNW tree too much, but those bonuses do seem to split into two halves - happiness management and actual expansion (building settlers, workers, etc.). It's possible we could keep going with that, with one helping the happiness problem, and the other aiding in expansion in the more literal sense. Hmmm

I feel like players would gravitate towards Happiness management because of the way CiV's difficulties work with the Happiness penalties, but that may just be because of the way BNW is balanced, rather than an intrinsic problem.

Your suggestion above in relation to the naval tree also comes back into play here. If we're ok with some more black-and-white choices based on the map (which we seem to be!), then having one branch be land based expansion and the other be naval expansion does make a lot of sense. It's two different ways of achieving the same thing (having more cities), so it does fit well!

Also, a very sweet Policy for an Ambition naval tree would be to allow workers to construct improvements on coastal resources (Fish etc.).


And that's all for now! I'll be back on Monday to reply to your latest post! Have a very Merry Christmas!

 

[counterpoint]

I have returned! I'm a bit pressed for time packing all my stuff to leave at crazy o'clock tomorrow morning, but I'll at least catch up to all of your posts from the last round!

ah, crazy o'clock. Almost as bad as Late-thirty!

I think my preference is coming down more on having an additional tree, specifically the Alignment tree, as I mentioned in my last post! I think it's a combination of a few reasons: we have a lot of new mechanics there to center Policies around, it's a big flavorful part of what the Wheel of Time is and lets players live that fiction, and we're adding the LB as a new victory condition, so having Policies that target that, like there are for the other victories, seems like a good idea to me.

OK. cool. I'm still somewhat ambivalent on this. not negative, but also not wholly embracing it. I think it it will be fine, or even quite good, but I also could be convinced not to do it.

Right, so we have two main competitors, I think, for the structure of an Alignment tree. Controlled vs Aggressive and Light vs Shadow. Are there others I'm missing? I'll go through these two this time and do more if we need to. Of course there are also unbranched Policies. I've created three for each to give us a general idea of the direction for each one, though when we go deeper we should definitely consider more options.

Yeah, I think those are the main dualities. The others, I'm not quite sure are necessarily distinct from those, such as: "Reap benefits from Alignment" vs "Bonuses *to* Alignment," or "LB stuff" vs "Not LB stuff"

Unbranched:

• Wolfbrothers and Dreamwalkers earned X% faster.
• Threads occur X% more frequently and always have at least one option that yields High for your current overall Alignment leaning.
• Your Questioners are X% more effective in your cities and foreign Questioners are Y% less effective in your cities.

I think the first of these is neat, but is more T'a'r specific than anything. I wonder if it makes sense in this tree (understanding that t'ar is spread out now).

The second I find a little tough because Thread choices are often decided because of Alignment (which this would help), but also might be decided in favor of the other yields. You know, accepting some small amount of Shadow in order to grab a boost you need right now, etc. I worry that the availability of an Always High - might end up forcing people down a "only choose the "High"" path. Or, alternatively, if you're trying to stay somewhat neutral (let's say this is with the Aggressive/Controlled branching), that might become a little tougher to do.

third one is nice.

Controlled branch:

• Whenever you make a choice in a Thread, a single citizen in each of your cities changes Alignment from the opposing side to the side of the choice you chose. (If you choose a Shadow choice, one of your Light citizens becomes a Darkfriend, and vice versa.)
• Threads yield X% less Alignment and X% more yields of other types.
• +X Happiness in cities that have a balanced citizen Alignment distribution for your current Alignment tier.

The first one is interesting, but does have some of the caveats of number 2 above - does it put too much pressue on a single alignment choice?

the second is also kind of strange because it necessarily limits somebody's growth in alignment. I interpret "Controlled" as "protect your alignment from others or from unintended change". this might do that, but it also lessens the growth of your alignment that you could do deliberately. Essentially, there are times when it isn't a bonus, and I don't love that in a policy.

third is good. Think that might have been a UA we tossed around for some civs.

Aggressive branch: (I added an extra one here.)

• Citizens and Threads produce double Alignment
• +X Happiness and +Y Prestige for each Alignment tier away from Neutral you are.
• +X Science from Alignment buildings and +Y Alignment of your current Alignment leaning from Science buildings.
• Killing an enemy unit in T'a'r permanently increases your Alignment production by X in the direction of your overall leaning at the time.

I think this one may also have the issue of "punishing" somebody going against their main alignment like the ones above, though I suppose this would always work out in the balance - the "wrong" choice generates double, but so do all the "right" choices you make.

Second is good, provided that we don't want Aggressive to be possible for neutral (which I suppose makes sense)

Interesting on the third one with the science link. I'd think going with something like this makes the most sense if we *don't* have a science-alignment tree

Fourth could be cool, but it does strike me as a little odd that it sends you down an irreversible path due to its permanence. I suppose again that it just presumes you are "set" in your alignment before you choose this side, and you are already on that alignment side when you do so (as opposed to being slightly shadow and wanting to go heavy light"

Also, just making note here that this controlled/Aggressive schema above is all neutral, right? Or are we still considering doing evil/neutral/good versions of it based on your current status?

Light branch:

• Your units heal for X% of their total health when they kill a Shadowspawn unit. (Note: not just units controlled by the Shadowspawn civ.)
• +X Happiness for each Stedding you are allied with and +Y Happiness for each one you are friends with.
• You produce +X% Science for each other civilization that is a part of the Dragon's Peace.

sure, first one. Doesn't help alignment, but provides bonuses against Shadow folks.

second - what's the connection? This makes sense as an ability (though obviously makes perhaps more sense with Friendship branch), but it doesn't have much to do with alignment

third makes sense. a good ability, flavor, and link to alignment.

Shadow branch:

• Completing an objective for Turning the Tower gives you double Shadow and your civilization enters a Golden Age.
• Your Projections can attack units in the main map layers with the ranged strength of their host Saidar unit. Attacking expends the Projection.
• Trollocs cost X% less production after the start of the Last Battle and can be purchased with Gold or Faith.

first one is nice, assuming the objectives are reasonably attainable.

second... I wonder if this kind of thing will really mess up T'a'r. I think we discussed this kind of thing when conceptualizing it a year or two ago. We get to treat T'a'r combat in isolation from the rest of the game, keeping it separate from the scaling of combat strength that occurs elsewhere. Projections have the "poison aura", Wolves have fixed damage, etc. Adding this in messes it all up. If we wanted something like this, just provide a combat bonus or something, maybe. Or just keep it abstract, that projections can do an insta-kill (which this would likely be anyways)

Third one makes sense.

So, the issues I have with these last two categories, as opposed to the first ones is that they concern "playing on the light side" and "playing on the dark side," but don't really concern Alignment enough, I'd say. It's cool to have this other stuff, but I'd think there would have to be something that directly connects to the alignment system somehow - not necessarily in *generating* it, but in reaping rewards for it, etc.

Agreed, having Alignment in the Science tree could work, with or without the Alignment tree. You bring this up again in your latest post, so I'm going to cheat a bit and do the testing of ideas for that when I get there! (Which won't be today, unfortunately!)

yeah, we can cover this later. I'm starting to think we'll need to do better than science/alignment as the main differentiating factor. If Scholarship and "ALignment" pop up in the same era, it feels weak to have the branching in Sch just pertain to alignment.

This makes me think that controlled vs aggressive are good characterizations for the two sides of such an Alignment-influenced Science tree. I'm thinking that Policies in the Science tree (and even in the Alignment tree) that fluctuate with the player's Alignment will be something that's quite difficult for the player to track, because of the whole "grey area" in the less extreme portions of either side.

Yeah, I still think that for the Al. tree, at least, we'd need three levels, to accommodate the gray area.

Your point later about being a Science civ that doesn't particularly care about Alignment is another good one. Maybe the Science tree could be more like what we're discussing with Myth above: one side uses Science for the Science victory and the other uses Science for Alignment. (The mirror with Myth being Faith for Paths vs Alignment for Faith.) Difficulty there is that it crosses over more with the Alignment tree, since the latter branch would be wanting to use Science output to help with the LB and its associated mechanics.

Difficult choices here, I'll come back to it more responding to your latest post.

Yeah, I think the better path would probably be "Science for the VC" vs "Science for X", where X is something else....

If you're more fatigued on the Policies discussion specifically, it may help for us to go to the "other mechanics that care about branches" discussion before specific Policies then? I think it's pretty much a wash as for which one has the most upsides or downsides and we'll probably need to tweak the first one after we've done both anyway.

sure! Either way, though.

A free Governor now certainly would be, but Governors overall aren't as flexible as LPs (since an LP can give you the Governor or any of its other abilities, it's inherently more useful). And if X were 10 or something, then it would only be the player's more developed cities that get there. (But they also wouldn't see any benefit from the Policy itself until later.)

I disagree. None of the policies give you a "free LP of your choice" - just the BNW Liberty finisher. They give you something very specific: a free Great artist, for example. A single free Governor of your choice is, then, much more powerful, than, say, a free Smith (or whatever we call the Stonemason gov). It lacks the flexibility of an LP (which can do various things), but it would be *all LPs* in a certain sense.

All good points! Let's not do a naval tree then. In fact, you've convinced me somewhat that we could do the kinds of naval-specialization branches that we have in the treatment at the moment. Even if some choices are black and white for some maps, we're still providing options that will vary from game to game.

agreed

All the pressure! I'm not sure, I think we'll have to see how AI work pans out. I think we should lean towards the better overall solution for now and if we find later that the AI is too much of an issue, adjust the design around them, rather than go in with a design drawback that might not be necessary.

ok, follow you on this!

Some rough scratches for this (more suggestions than we have slots, to get an idea of the design objectives, rather than come up with a final list):

Luxury tree

• +X Happiness from luxury resources that are not found near your capital (where "near" is defined by tiles owned by your capital city).
• Worker speed improvement (Old Blood)
• Policy cost increase from number of cities decreased (Guestright)
• +1 Happiness per connected city (Royal Gifts)
• Cities founded one hex away from luxury resources start with territory encompassing those resources (it grabs the individual tiles the luxuries are on).

Bonus tree

• +X (like 1 or 2) Happiness from bonus resources (possibly only if worked?)
• +X Production for cities with less than Y Population
• Bonus resources provide +X Food and +Y Gold when improved
• +X Happiness and +Y Production in cities that are not connected to your capital
• Internal trade routes have +X% boosted range and provide the movement bonus of a road along their path for their duration. (Could also provide connection, but probably wouldn't co-exist with the above Policy then. Unless we specifically opt out connections of this form from affecting the above Policy - could be done elegantly by saying "connected by roads" in the above.)

i like em! I think there are a few that might need tweaking (especially in Bonus - probably also needs some stuff pulled from BNW, otherwise it's similar to what I've done with left being BNW), but I am on board with this conceptualization, I think!

Good point, is this a drawback of using the Policies as described in the treatment then? Or would the fact that Ambition's Naval branch would be "expansion through navy" mean a Unity player would be unlikely to find it helpful? (Since they're presumably playing Tall.)

yeah, it's a contradictory observation.... which I'll retract...

Projections are the first T'a'r mechanic that players unlock (unless they rush a free LP and choose Wolfbrother/Dreamwalker) and it's gated behind a tech in Era 2 Column 2 (The Wheel of Time). Given that we can have the unbranched Policies as prereqs for the branch, I don't think T'a'r for the branch would be a problem in terms of unlock time for a Policy tree that unlocks in Era 1.

ok, and we're looking at only one or two policies even related to T'a'r at this point anyways - not a whole branch.

Good point, that flavor's pretty crazy! Agreed re expansion and T'a'r. We could use this tree to allow players to use T'a'r mechanics in an expansionist way though. Things like letting Projections reveal the fog, which does make flavorful sense.

Yeah, it does... it also might be too good for an early game unlock, though. we can see.

I feel like players would gravitate towards Happiness management because of the way CiV's difficulties work with the Happiness penalties, but that may just be because of the way BNW is balanced, rather than an intrinsic problem.

Your suggestion above in relation to the naval tree also comes back into play here. If we're ok with some more black-and-white choices based on the map (which we seem to be!), then having one branch be land based expansion and the other be naval expansion does make a lot of sense. It's two different ways of achieving the same thing (having more cities), so it does fit well!

Also, a very sweet Policy for an Ambition naval tree would be to allow workers to construct improvements on coastal resources (Fish etc.).

yeah, I could see us going with ambition-naval as one branch, but I think the bonus idea is good too! Maybe fuse the two - naval expansion is, in a sense, a part of the "make otherwise bad city sites viable", right? (since coastal sites are often resource-poor

the worker idea is awesome, but I think that's a problem - it completely neuters the very annoying workboat! I'd say the better idea would probably be to just give Workboats 2 "charges". A "naval civ" should still use that unit, if it exists.

(...if it exists...) I wonder why, balance wise, they didn't want workers to work on land.

Happy Christ's Mass!

 

[S3rgeus]

No problem. I'm also traveling until the 30th. I'll have some time to post, but it won't be predictable.... and then I'm moving almost immediately, so there will likely be some patches where posting will be tough.

Happy holidays!

Happy holidays again! It's been a good few days here, I hope it's been the same with you! And now back to WoTModding!

Yeah, I suspect at the root of this may be the whole "this might be unneeded because we're moving to CiVI" thing...

Yeah, quite possible. Still nothing on the mod tools for CiVI. I've seen several people theorize that they might be released when the Aztec preorder bonus expires, which seems plausible. That would be in the middle of January. We'll see! I'm hoping they're spending this time polishing them, because for CiV they came out a week after release!

OK, I understand now. I suppose the main confusion for me was that I thought you mean "Faith and Paths" and "Faith and <the alignment branch>", in the sense that the latter was the main way a civ could specialize in Alignment - which essentially makes a good Path incompatible to a good alignment. In fact, what it seems you're suggesting is "Faith and paths" vs "faith *as related to* Alignment", which makes more sense.

Awesome sounds good!

yeah, I agree on that last point.

As to the first, the goal here, for me, was to provide a viable way to boost your faith-game - maybe through spreading a Path or just through Faith generation - if you were unable to gain a Path yourself. I think that is worthy. but it doesn't have to necessarily be about spreading somebody else's path - maybe it's more about gaining more benefits from follower bonuses, or improved faith generation, or, as I think "Dreams" sort of embodied, gain *benefit* from your high faith generation. Thus, this could be an attractive option even if you do have a Path, but kind of don't "care" about it.

Possibly, I can see how this would work and could be useful. It could work, but I feel like it doesn't provide as compelling a choice for the player as the "Faith and Paths" vs "Faith and Alignment" tree arrangement. The former's second branch will tend to be the one for the players less engaged with the system, in which case they'd like be drawn to other trees. We could make them both mechanically viable, but pulling in Alignment seems like it will make players more enthusiastic about choosing whichever one fits them best.

Interesting question. Intuitively, I feel like they would unlock with a tech or something, but I'm not sure if that's actually necessary, mechanically, nor am I sure what that tech would be. Also, a policy makes good sense, but I worry it would really limit the Alignment game for a lot of players - probably best that we make the Questioners as accessible as possible in order to make Alignment as accessible as possible

The main issue I see with unlocking them at game-start is sort of with the "feel" of them. You are correct that they essentially do nothing at game start. that said, they are a new mechanic, and new players will undoubtedly want to explore that new mechanic - only to find that the Questioner does nothing and is a "waste." This is a problem. Yes, returning players won't have that problem, but their opinion might already be set (in a bad way!). In any case, a mechanic that does nothing in the early game is a problem I think - better to make it pop up later. I convinced myself of this only in writing this response (I figured I was fine with it being open at game start).

Awesome, I agree that it's not great if the Questioners are available straight away since they won't be useful yet at that time!

So, tech or Policy seem to be our options. Are there any other potential unlock mechanisms?

If we go for tech, what kind of time are we thinking? Somewhere in like Era 4 or is that too late?

I think Policy could also work actually. It will mean that fewer civs have Questioners available, but will most civs make use of Questioners? Questioners' primary output aside from affecting the Alignment of others (which is only really relevant in the extremely long game of trying to choose your LB allies/enemies) is Faith. That makes them ideal unlocks for an early Faith tree, I'd say. We could even make them unlocked by a Policy that has no prereqs, so it would be super easy to dip into if players wanted to.

cool, how systematic should we be with this? Should it be sort of ad hoc and/or willy nilly? Or should we make it take place in every Tree? Every branch?

Hm, trying to get it into every tree would be interesting. There are certainly ways to link T'a'r to each tree, and even every branch. do you have a preference? I'd be inclined to just go ad hoc to start with and do a review at the end to see if we think we need more T'a'r presence overall.

ok ok OK, I'm sold. Sheesh!

Sounds good then!

cool, I like this way of looking at things, and framing it all. Again, do you think we should try to be systematic about this? Like, do we need to have all the branching be of the same type, or can some be Convergent and some be Divergent? (I assume we'll be mixing them).

In any case, I think it would be rather helpful to line up all the Trees once we are further along in this phase (perhaps with your finished posts we will be), and specify which of these branch-types we'll be using. I think , for me at least, it would be helpful to better understand the tree (and see how they relate to one another).

This one I think it will work well to be systematic. I'd say we can have some branches of each type, they're both effective from a player experience perspective of making the branching mechanics more interesting, so let's use some of each.

So, to be clear, Convergent is where the two branches achieve the same end goal through different means. Divergent is where the two branches achieve two different, mechanically exclusive goals from one another?

I'd say Convergent will be the more common one, because CiV doesn't have many mechanics that are mutually exclusive with one another. Some "mutual exclusives" are just different ways of achieving the same thing, and pursuing one means you didn't pursue the other, which will look more Convergent. Anyway, quick run through of the trees:

Unity: Convergent - two ways to be Tall
Ambition: Convergent - two ways to be Wide (whichever version of Ambition we end up choosing)
War: Divergent? - be better at fighting people or fighting Shadowspawn
Myth Faith/T'a'r: Divergent - be better at being a Path founder or using T'a'r and generating Faith
Myth Faith/Alignment: Convergent - two ways to be better at Faith (through Paths or Alignment)
Power: Divergent - be better at Fear stuff or Acceptance stuff (outlined elsewhere)
Creativity: I'm actually a bit stuck working out where we are with the branches for this tree?
Politics: Convergent - two ways of being better at Diplomacy (Tower or Stedding)
Wealth: Convergent? - two ways of generating more Gold
Scholarship: the branches in this one are in flux at the moment

We have two options for Myth, so I've covered both above. We need to firm up some more about Scholarship before we know what that will look like.

What's happening with Creativity at this stage? We discussed but decided against a T'a'r branch for it. We decided we didn't want a defensive Culture branch. Did we go through other options? I feel like I've missed a quote block somewhere.

I'm not sure. This could be an answer. But it also could be another tree. I think we can wait on this, as it'll depend on what happens with the ashes of Exploration. I suppose it also could be branched, but it's probably best unbranched (though perhaps with a prereq).

Sounds good, we can come back to this later.

Do you see this as the "main" differentiation between these branches? Do you think that's enough differentiation to make it feel worthy? I worry that, while this is interesting, there will be plenty of Science players who just plain don't care about Alignment. That's fine, I guess, but it seems to me that all the other branching on the VC-linked trees is somewhat central to the VC itself, or at least of primary interest. Am I right about that? I guess I'd want to make sure it doesn't feel tacked on

I mentioned this quote block several times in my last post so we're finally here! You make good points! The Scholarship tree with Alignment on both sides would be problematic for civs who don't care about Alignment, but just want Science. It also consumes the flavor of the opposition between the two branches, making the whole tree less about Science, when that's what it should be.

One key question here though: Rationalism is regarded as the best tree in BNW because Science unlocks all other things in CiV. Is that something that can be avoided by not having a dedicated Science tree, just one that references it? (So it would have some Science-y stuff, but that may not be the point of the tree.) Is that something we'd want to consider?

Leaving those questions there for now and assuming we want to keep the Science tree, what could our potential branches be? Nothing is mutually exclusive with pursuing Science in general because Science unlocks everything, so a Divergent tree seems unlikely. Unless we target the Science Victory on one branch and some other mechanic on the other (which we've discussed as an option before). But it's also quite early in the game (Era 4) to be targeting the mechanics of the Science victory already.

All of this makes me think we're best off having two branches that are ways to use Science differently to achieve the goal of generating more Science. Flavor wise, WoT itself seems to have two competing forms of "knowledge" that recur throughout the books. Channeling knowledge: the libraries in Tar Valon, the artifacts in the Stone, the techniques for different kinds of channeling and how it can be used sometimes to help "civilization" in general, instead of just used for an immediate effect. There's some crossover with Culture there, but taking the more strict definition of Culture relating to art and the like, it's not much of an overlap. And then there's the traditional inventionist Science: the academies Rand sets up, historians like Herid Fel, and the leftovers from the Age of Legends (even if some of those can be a bit Power-y). Would it make this tree more WoT-y if we used this dichotomy to present the two Scholarship branches?

So the former (channeling) would add Science yields to channeling mechanics (any buildings/wonders associated with them, possibly using the units, relationship with the Tower? - though that could be difficult because of the crossover with Alignment). The latter would add Science to the traditional Science buildings. We're still at risk here of ending up with a "straight line" vs "tempered" set of branches. The channeler branch would need to definitively provide as much of a Science bonus as its opposing branch, but it would require the player to be a channeling-oriented player to gain that much. Should the opposing side be non-pure-Science then? Should it be linked to Culture buildings and the like, given its connection to history in WoT?

 

[S3rgeus]

OK. cool. I'm still somewhat ambivalent on this. not negative, but also not wholly embracing it. I think it it will be fine, or even quite good, but I also could be convinced not to do it.

The more I consider an Alignment tree, the more I think it's a good call for us. It seems like this is our largest mechanical addition to the game, so it would be strange for it not to be represented. And all of the stuff I mentioned above.

Yeah, I think those are the main dualities. The others, I'm not quite sure are necessarily distinct from those, such as: "Reap benefits from Alignment" vs "Bonuses *to* Alignment," or "LB stuff" vs "Not LB stuff"

It doesn't sound like we'd want to separate the former, unless we were putting them on two separate trees. We wouldn't want the extreme bonuses to Alignment to be mutually exclusive with some of the bigger bonuses from being extreme about Alignment. Same with the LB, Alignment the yield is only really impactful for the LB itself, so a non-LB-Alignment-branch would have the same problems as a defensive Culture branch.

I think the first of these is neat, but is more T'a'r specific than anything. I wonder if it makes sense in this tree (understanding that t'ar is spread out now).

Yeah, I think with T'a'r spread out it makes sense to have this connection here, particularly when the Wolfbrother is quite connected to Alignment. We could make it a free Wolfbrother specifically, though the two LPs are tied together elsewhere.

The second I find a little tough because Thread choices are often decided because of Alignment (which this would help), but also might be decided in favor of the other yields. You know, accepting some small amount of Shadow in order to grab a boost you need right now, etc. I worry that the availability of an Always High - might end up forcing people down a "only choose the "High"" path. Or, alternatively, if you're trying to stay somewhat neutral (let's say this is with the Aggressive/Controlled branching), that might become a little tougher to do.

I did find that this was something that could easily live in the Aggressive Alignment branch and wanted to move it there, but that one already had 4 options! Unbranched Policies were a bit difficult, probably because I did a single set of Unbranched for both trees (controlled vs aggressive and light vs shadow). Two sets would have been better.

I don't think the availability of High on all Threads will necessarily remove the "take some Shadow for the yield you want" option. Those options will still be there. It just removes the cases where the player is trying to increase their Alignment a certain way and none of the choices help them with that. This should be in the aggressive branch, yeah.

The first one is interesting, but does have some of the caveats of number 2 above - does it put too much pressue on a single alignment choice?

I don't think so, this is about overall "adjustment". The player sees they're tilting too far one way so they can use a single choice to try to push it back the other more effectively - they don't need to try to generate enough Alignment or build a bunch of Questioners to switch it back. It makes flipping citizens much easier which is helpful for remaining purposeful about changes. If you want to have high Alignment, then this will amplify that. If you want to be Neutral, this makes it easier to compensate.

the second is also kind of strange because it necessarily limits somebody's growth in alignment. I interpret "Controlled" as "protect your alignment from others or from unintended change". this might do that, but it also lessens the growth of your alignment that you could do deliberately. Essentially, there are times when it isn't a bonus, and I don't love that in a policy.

I do agree, but I'd also say that I don't see the controlled branch as "protect your Alignment from others or from unintended change". I'd say it's about the civilization having more granular control over their Alignment output. Base WoTMod, the player can take certain actions that increase their Alignment one way or the other. The controlled branch should give them more options to adjust their Alignment in more deliberate increments, either back towards the middle or toward the extreme. (Given that the competition for controlled is aggressive though, which targets making extreme Alignment, I do wonder if that's a helpful objective for controlled, to facilitate both?)

I did find this one a bit difficult though, because it discourages the Alignment extremes. It makes staying Neutral much easier, which is why I kept it, but you're right that it isn't a bonus in all cases.

I think this one may also have the issue of "punishing" somebody going against their main alignment like the ones above, though I suppose this would always work out in the balance - the "wrong" choice generates double, but so do all the "right" choices you make.

The objective of this branch is to facilitate gaining extremes of Alignment more easily. If this Policy isn't helping the player do that (because they're doing things that give them opposing Alignment, which are now doubled), then they weren't acting toward that goal in the first place, so it doesn't seem like a problem to me. It should punish players who are acting against their Alignment, because their expressed intent by choosing this is that they want to go all in on one of the two that they've chosen.

Second is good, provided that we don't want Aggressive to be possible for neutral (which I suppose makes sense)

I don't think we do - stuff that makes Alignment generation increase will inherently make remaining near the middle less stable, so Neutral players will want to steer clear of the aggressive branch.

Interesting on the third one with the science link. I'd think going with something like this makes the most sense if we *don't* have a science-alignment tree

Which is looking more likely above! We'll see what happens there. Mostly this is just an example of "bonus to <other thing> because high Alignment".

Fourth could be cool, but it does strike me as a little odd that it sends you down an irreversible path due to its permanence. I suppose again that it just presumes you are "set" in your alignment before you choose this side, and you are already on that alignment side when you do so (as opposed to being slightly shadow and wanting to go heavy light"

Like the first one above, choosing the aggressive branch should mean you're set in your Alignment. It's not impossible to change (as in, mechanically you can start working against it later) but I feel like it totally makes sense that having chosen this branch and the style of Policies it unlocks should make it harder to do so. If a player is slightly Shadow and wants to go heavy Light by the end game, then I'd say they've had enough chances to undo that by the time they reach this Policy.

Also, just making note here that this controlled/Aggressive schema above is all neutral, right? Or are we still considering doing evil/neutral/good versions of it based on your current status?

Yes, this doesn't consider Policies that change based on the player's Alignment.

We could still consider it. My overall feeling with it is that while it helps us makes the Policies more meaningful now, it will be much harder for the players to get a clear idea of how they will change and gives them a lot more stuff to keep track of that might not necessarily be obvious.

sure, first one. Doesn't help alignment, but provides bonuses against Shadow folks.

And killing units controlled by the Shadowspawn civ (which a lot of these will be) generates Light, so it does feed back into that.

second - what's the connection? This makes sense as an ability (though obviously makes perhaps more sense with Friendship branch), but it doesn't have much to do with alignment

In the Alignment summary, we have Ogier Quests as a Light-side-exclusive source of Alignment. This Policy should probably be more about those quests than just relationship with the Ogier in general though.

second... I wonder if this kind of thing will really mess up T'a'r. I think we discussed this kind of thing when conceptualizing it a year or two ago. We get to treat T'a'r combat in isolation from the rest of the game, keeping it separate from the scaling of combat strength that occurs elsewhere. Projections have the "poison aura", Wolves have fixed damage, etc. Adding this in messes it all up. If we wanted something like this, just provide a combat bonus or something, maybe. Or just keep it abstract, that projections can do an insta-kill (which this would likely be anyways)

To be clear, the Projection is attacking a unit in the main map layer. Other T'a'r units are interacted with normally. And the Projection uses the ranged combat strength of its host (the main map layer unit that created the Projection) for this attack, so the scaling is taken care of for us by the scaling of the Saidar units that already exists throughout the game. I think this actually quite elegantly avoids the problems you outline here. Flavor wise it's certainly very Shadow-y, given how we saw dreams used to attack several characters in the books.

So, the issues I have with these last two categories, as opposed to the first ones is that they concern "playing on the light side" and "playing on the dark side," but don't really concern Alignment enough, I'd say. It's cool to have this other stuff, but I'd think there would have to be something that directly connects to the alignment system somehow - not necessarily in *generating* it, but in reaping rewards for it, etc.

I think part of this is a result of the above all only being conceptual examples. It wasn't my objective to come up with a list that we would transplant straight into a tree, but to inform what kinds of Policies we could use in each. In terms of generating Alignment, we'd probably want to have more options like the Turning the Tower one on the Shadow side - that gives that player more Shadow. I did certainly go light on options that generated more Alignment in the Light vs Shadow set.

In terms of reaping rewards, do you mean stuff like the bonuses for having higher tiers and such? That could certainly exist for both trees. I targeted the more mechanically exclusive stuff with the Light vs Shadow branches because that's the thing that's unique to that kind of tree set up, but there's certainly room for some of the Policies I listed under aggressive vs controlled to be modified to fit one side and used in a Light vs Shadow tree.

yeah, we can cover this later. I'm starting to think we'll need to do better than science/alignment as the main differentiating factor. If Scholarship and "ALignment" pop up in the same era, it feels weak to have the branching in Sch just pertain to alignment.

Agreed, more on this above!

Yeah, I still think that for the Al. tree, at least, we'd need three levels, to accommodate the gray area.

I don't think we need to have the Policies switch around how they work based on the player's Alignment. (As in, do different things for very Light, Neutral-ish, or very Shadow.) I think the aggressive vs controlled tree stuff above shows we can be symmetrical if we don't have a branch for each side.

Yeah, I think the better path would probably be "Science for the VC" vs "Science for X", where X is something else....

Also above!

I disagree. None of the policies give you a "free LP of your choice" - just the BNW Liberty finisher. They give you something very specific: a free Great artist, for example. A single free Governor of your choice is, then, much more powerful, than, say, a free Smith (or whatever we call the Stonemason gov). It lacks the flexibility of an LP (which can do various things), but it would be *all LPs* in a certain sense.

But it doesn't have to be a free Governor of your choice of type. We could totally give them a free Smith, or free Dignitary or whatever. The difficulty then is that we'd be forcing the player into a specific Governor type, which may not work with their strategy, and this is a more generic "Tall tree".

Compared to the Liberty finisher, even a free Governor of your choice of type has a lot of caveats though. Especially if attached to a city Population requirement. The Liberty one is a finisher, so it's stronger, but this one doesn't let you use any of the LP abilities (so it's a lot less flexible) and requires you to grow cities over a certain size. It does scale over the course of the game, of couse, as more cities reach that stage. (Could do first 2 cities? That would prevent that?)

i like em! I think there are a few that might need tweaking (especially in Bonus - probably also needs some stuff pulled from BNW, otherwise it's similar to what I've done with left being BNW), but I am on board with this conceptualization, I think!

Agreed, we could move some of those BNW Policies over!

ok, and we're looking at only one or two policies even related to T'a'r at this point anyways - not a whole branch.

Agreed, this has become moot!

yeah, I could see us going with ambition-naval as one branch, but I think the bonus idea is good too! Maybe fuse the two - naval expansion is, in a sense, a part of the "make otherwise bad city sites viable", right? (since coastal sites are often resource-poor

Hmm, I'm not so sure. I feel like once we have any Policies on this branch that are geared towards naval expansion, then that becomes the point of the whole branch. Because if the player isn't expanding across the sea then those Policies become useless to them, and then the opposing branch is always going to be a better idea.

I do think either could work and I'm not sure which is better. If we don't use naval here, where else would it go? Would it go back to Wealth? Could it be our answer for what the other branch of Culture should be?

I'm drawn toward the luxury vs bonus tree approach because it makes our Policy tree almost completely different from the BNW one.

the worker idea is awesome, but I think that's a problem - it completely neuters the very annoying workboat! I'd say the better idea would probably be to just give Workboats 2 "charges". A "naval civ" should still use that unit, if it exists.

Additional charges for the work boat sounds awesome too! That's a good way of keeping both relevant.

(...if it exists...) I wonder why, balance wise, they didn't want workers to work on land.

Workers do work on land. >.> Work boats work on land? Or workers work in the sea? The latter I've never been very sure why they don't do that.

Happy Christ's Mass!

Indeed, Merry Christmas again!

 

[counterpoint]

gonna try to sneak in a response here! We'll see how far I get...

Possibly, I can see how this would work and could be useful. It could work, but I feel like it doesn't provide as compelling a choice for the player as the "Faith and Paths" vs "Faith and Alignment" tree arrangement. The former's second branch will tend to be the one for the players less engaged with the system, in which case they'd like be drawn to other trees. We could make them both mechanically viable, but pulling in Alignment seems like it will make players more enthusiastic about choosing whichever one fits them best.

yeah, I think that makes sense.

Awesome, I agree that it's not great if the Questioners are available straight away since they won't be useful yet at that time!

So, tech or Policy seem to be our options. Are there any other potential unlock mechanisms?

hmmm.... I don't think so. Faith units are unlocked when your city has a Path. If Questioners were only for defense/rebalancing, we unlock them only when you were out of phase, but since they can be used to "attack" others, regardless of your Alignment, that wouldn't work.

If we go for tech, what kind of time are we thinking? Somewhere in like Era 4 or is that too late?

I think something like that could work. Maybe era 3 or 5, even. I guess it depends on how far into the game it takes for A) Light or Shadow alignment to have accrued naturally through various means (threads, killing shadowspawn [so definitely post-TW]... what else?) in a meaningful way, and B) a city to be possibly *out* of balance.

The last bit is tricky if others' Questioners is the only way for a city to fall out of balance. Because that simply means if nobody is playing with Questioners for aggressive purposes, Questioners serve no purpose. I think that might be a problem, or at least not the optimum solution. I think if citizens can flip through "natural causes," that makes Questioners suddenly much more important to the game from a defensive perspective, and thus also much more visible and likely to be used offensively, I'd guess.

Could some Threads flip citizens instead of merely add Alignment points? What else could we do? Maybe we could have some TW rewards be Light citizens... Any ways to generate Darkfriends? Would it be possible to include some sort of "Alignment pressure" (maybe only occurring from cities of "stable" alignment) in a way that doesn't telegraph a civ's alignment?

Plus, if we make some flip naturally, that makes "stabilizing" Policies (and Uniques!) much more useful, since they'll apply in all games, regardless of who does what with Alignment (even in a game with, say, all Light Civs).

So what era is essentially the earliest point that enough of this could be done to make building them meaningful? I'd say, given the fact that they generate faith when used, I think I wouldn't want it so early that they could be used to "buy" a Path (I know the faith generation is likely to be production-inefficient, but that would be totally worth it in some cases if you needed a little push to guarantee a Path), so not too early. A little time going by where you feel unsettled by your cities that aren't in-line with what you want, but not enough to get frustrated, would be good. A little time to see how your civ shapes up before starting to make alignment decisions, but not enough to be wasting too much time, would be good. So, era 4 or so is likely good, but I'm unsure.

Also, the nice thing about techs is it allows some players to get ahead of the process if they orient their research accordingly.

I think Policy could also work actually. It will mean that fewer civs have Questioners available, but will most civs make use of Questioners? Questioners' primary output aside from affecting the Alignment of others (which is only really relevant in the extremely long game of trying to choose your LB allies/enemies) is Faith. That makes them ideal unlocks for an early Faith tree, I'd say. We could even make them unlocked by a Policy that has no prereqs, so it would be super easy to dip into if players wanted to.

right, they generate faith. Of course.

Or... an "opener," if we really wanted it that way.

I'm a little unsure about this, especially if we open up some Citizen shift to natural or random causes, because then we're sort of requiring everybody to go down a policy path if they want to have meaningful control over their LB destiny. Even if we keep it all player-caused, presumably we'll be making the Questioner thing useful enough for Aggressive civs that it's always *likely* somebody in the game will participate (if it's not, we've designed it to be too lame, I think), so it might essentially be that we're forcing somebody down a particular tree "just in case," which I don't really like.

I guess I don't see there being any real benefits to doing it with policies, so I prefer techs.

Hm, trying to get it into every tree would be interesting. There are certainly ways to link T'a'r to each tree, and even every branch. do you have a preference? I'd be inclined to just go ad hoc to start with and do a review at the end to see if we think we need more T'a'r presence overall.

I agree. Let's just see what happens. We've already noted how it's somewhat problematic to include in the ancient-era trees.

This one I think it will work well to be systematic. I'd say we can have some branches of each type, they're both effective from a player experience perspective of making the branching mechanics more interesting, so let's use some of each.

So, to be clear, Convergent is where the two branches achieve the same end goal through different means. Divergent is where the two branches achieve two different, mechanically exclusive goals from one another?

I'd say Convergent will be the more common one, because CiV doesn't have many mechanics that are mutually exclusive with one another. Some "mutual exclusives" are just different ways of achieving the same thing, and pursuing one means you didn't pursue the other, which will look more Convergent. Anyway, quick run through of the trees:

Cool. Yeah, those were the definitions I was using. Not perfect works, but that's what came to me in the moment (maybe hanging out with my scientist brother over the holidays had an effect on me).

But yeah, Convergent is likely to be more common. Most things that help science help whatever you're doing with science...

Unity: Convergent - two ways to be Tall
Ambition: Convergent - two ways to be Wide (whichever version of Ambition we end up choosing)

Yeah. I'd argue in some ways that the governor unity tree might in some way be a way to *benefit* from your tallness as well. Still convergent, I'd say.

War: Divergent? - be better at fighting people or fighting Shadowspawn

hmm, hard to say which category this is. Sort of Convergent, I guess. If the two unities are, I suppose this is as well.

Myth Faith/T'a'r: Divergent - be better at being a Path founder or using T'a'r and generating Faith
Myth Faith/Alignment: Convergent - two ways to be better at Faith (through Paths or Alignment)

yeah, I think so.

Power: Divergent - be better at Fear stuff or Acceptance stuff (outlined elsewhere)
Creativity: I'm actually a bit stuck working out where we are with the branches for this tree?
Politics: Convergent - two ways of being better at Diplomacy (Tower or Stedding)

yeah, agreed.

Wealth: Convergent? - two ways of generating more Gold
Scholarship: the branches in this one are in flux at the moment

right.

We have two options for Myth, so I've covered both above. We need to firm up some more about Scholarship before we know what that will look like.

Yeah, I am reminded that Myth is ancient era, so going T'a'r heavy on one of its sides might be somewhat problematic, or at least not ideal.. I suppose it's unlikely that most civs choose that as a first tree, though. It's probably fine.

I think I might be more likely to jump in Path/Alignment than Path/T'a'r, in general, though.

What's happening with Creativity at this stage? We discussed but decided against a T'a'r branch for it. We decided we didn't want a defensive Culture branch. Did we go through other options? I feel like I've missed a quote block somewhere.

I don't think we settled it, actually.

Hmmm... I think we might want to look for a non-VC related use of Culture that makes your Culture Work for You. So, a branch that does include some of the Culture defense stuff, but couches it in a way that spins your culture to other purposes that might be more generically useful. So, stuff like.

- Prestige against you is "converted" into Culture *for* you (also lowering the prestige against you)
- X% of Culture generated also produced Y other yield.
- LWs produce X yield as well
- something that makes Policies faster to acquire, either as some distinct mechanism from the Liberty/Ambition policy (-33%...), or instead of that policy

This is actually, now that I think of it, stuff that was already happening in my "Legacy" branch, and I find I'm not as "down" as you on that branch. I think if we raise the bar on the "make culture work for you" stuff, and go less heavily on the defense, it'd be kind of cool. I've found myself playing as civs where, say, I'm going tall for science, but am producing tons of culture too, or going Dom and have tons of culture due to captured wonders, where I'm in a solid second place for culture, but don't really have any intention of going for the culture VC. In those cases, all the culture does for me (aside from stave off that 1st place player's victory) is unlock policies. It might be cool to have another tree I could unlock that gives me other benefits for it (especially since I'm likely to have some policies to spare due to my high culture output). Under BNW's setup, I'd essentially never unlock Aesthetics.

I mentioned this quote block several times in my last post so we're finally here! You make good points! The Scholarship tree with Alignment on both sides would be problematic for civs who don't care about Alignment, but just want Science. It also consumes the flavor of the opposition between the two branches, making the whole tree less about Science, when that's what it should be.

yeah, that last point on flavor is quite apt! Otherwise, we'd need to make the flavor have nothing to do with the mechanics, which would be bad.

One key question here though: Rationalism is regarded as the best tree in BNW because Science unlocks all other things in CiV. Is that something that can be avoided by not having a dedicated Science tree, just one that references it? (So it would have some Science-y stuff, but that may not be the point of the tree.) Is that something we'd want to consider?

wait, are we considering not having a Science tree? You're saying if we "mix up" the trees (Science+Alignment, etc.) then each branch would necessarily include stuff that makes it less sciencey? Yeah, I guess that's an issue. I think it would be minor, though - still rather sciencey. And besides, maybe that tree deserves to be knocked down a single peg, so it's not so obviously the best. (FWIW, I very much don't always choose it - if I'm playing pretty low culture, I am often still working on other trees when Ideology unlocks).

Leaving those questions there for now and assuming we want to keep the Science tree, what could our potential branches be? Nothing is mutually exclusive with pursuing Science in general because Science unlocks everything, so a Divergent tree seems unlikely. Unless we target the Science Victory on one branch and some other mechanic on the other (which we've discussed as an option before). But it's also quite early in the game (Era 4) to be targeting the mechanics of the Science victory already.

yeah, I agree that we're looking at something relatively convergent. I suppose, though, we could follow suit with culture and do a "make your science work for you" as well. Include boosts to science, but also have your science generate other stuff (like +Culture every time you get a tech, etc.).

All of this makes me think we're best off having two branches that are ways to use Science differently to achieve the goal of generating more Science. Flavor wise, WoT itself seems to have two competing forms of "knowledge" that recur throughout the books. Channeling knowledge: the libraries in Tar Valon, the artifacts in the Stone, the techniques for different kinds of channeling and how it can be used sometimes to help "civilization" in general, instead of just used for an immediate effect. There's some crossover with Culture there, but taking the more strict definition of Culture relating to art and the like, it's not much of an overlap. And then there's the traditional inventionist Science: the academies Rand sets up, historians like Herid Fel, and the leftovers from the Age of Legends (even if some of those can be a bit Power-y). Would it make this tree more WoT-y if we used this dichotomy to present the two Scholarship branches?

yeah, I don't think that's the only dichotomy we could create, but it is definitely *a* dichotomy that would make a lot of sense in WoT.

So the former (channeling) would add Science yields to channeling mechanics (any buildings/wonders associated with them, possibly using the units, relationship with the Tower? - though that could be difficult because of the crossover with Alignment). The latter would add Science to the traditional Science buildings. We're still at risk here of ending up with a "straight line" vs "tempered" set of branches. The channeler branch would need to definitively provide as much of a Science bonus as its opposing branch, but it would require the player to be a channeling-oriented player to gain that much. Should the opposing side be non-pure-Science then? Should it be linked to Culture buildings and the like, given its connection to history in WoT?

I think maybe we could/should open up the second branch beyond channeling. I think that would likely limit us and possibly force us into some linkages that go a bit too far. I feel like policies should extend the "reach" of a system one "degree," where things still feel related. I think necessarily making everything channeling-related might lead us to have to do some things that feel somewhat random.

It might be easier if opened up to be the "Higher Mysteries" in general, including Steddings, possibly, LWs, possibly, even some Alignment, and Sites of Power, possibly.... Basically, things to fuel your science generation if your science generation isn't all that hot. Does this make it too broad, though? We don't want it to be too weak if you don't take advantage of all these systems to their fullest, and too strong if you do. I'd like it to be the kind of thing where these things are things you might be likely to do even if you aren't "all in" on, say, winning Diplo from steddings.

As far as making the "straight line" on the other side... I think that might be somewhat necessary here. however, I do think we might stand to knock one policy, maybe two, off of Rationalism and stick it on the right side. That way this new one is actually good at science. Also, then maybe we could justify including a "VC related" mechanic on the left side, in lieu of one that directly adds science.

What do you think?

OK, done for now! Going to try to come back later tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.

 

[counterpoint]

The more I consider an Alignment tree, the more I think it's a good call for us. It seems like this is our largest mechanical addition to the game, so it would be strange for it not to be represented. And all of the stuff I mentioned above.

yeah, that makes sense.

It doesn't sound like we'd want to separate the former, unless we were putting them on two separate trees. We wouldn't want the extreme bonuses to Alignment to be mutually exclusive with some of the bigger bonuses from being extreme about Alignment. Same with the LB, Alignment the yield is only really impactful for the LB itself, so a non-LB-Alignment-branch would have the same problems as a defensive Culture branch.

ok. sure.

Yeah, I think with T'a'r spread out it makes sense to have this connection here, particularly when the Wolfbrother is quite connected to Alignment. We could make it a free Wolfbrother specifically, though the two LPs are tied together elsewhere.

I think the other thing we'll need to consider with WBr and DW is the finishers that allow you to buy them with faith - if we still do those, we may find it useful to use them in *different* trees, or as a part of one big finisher. I could see us keeping them separate at the policy level, if need be.

I did find that this was something that could easily live in the Aggressive Alignment branch and wanted to move it there, but that one already had 4 options! Unbranched Policies were a bit difficult, probably because I did a single set of Unbranched for both trees (controlled vs aggressive and light vs shadow). Two sets would have been better.

I don't think the availability of High on all Threads will necessarily remove the "take some Shadow for the yield you want" option. Those options will still be there. It just removes the cases where the player is trying to increase their Alignment a certain way and none of the choices help them with that. This should be in the aggressive branch, yeah.

OK, for this one, I suppose It'd just depend on the specific other policies we decide on. There are certain sets where this'd make great sense, and others where it might pose some issues.

I don't think so, this is about overall "adjustment". The player sees they're tilting too far one way so they can use a single choice to try to push it back the other more effectively - they don't need to try to generate enough Alignment or build a bunch of Questioners to switch it back. It makes flipping citizens much easier which is helpful for remaining purposeful about changes. If you want to have high Alignment, then this will amplify that. If you want to be Neutral, this makes it easier to compensate.

Yeah, I see what you mean. But I also see this as somewhat undermining the actual values of the alignment. A +Minor for Shadow is very different from a +Major shadow, and should be treated as such. Having it be one citizen regardless feels somewhat like a boolean that removes some of the nuance of the system. Should something like this trigger only with certain "sized" alignment bonuses? Or in different numbers of cities based on the size of the yield?

I do agree, but I'd also say that I don't see the controlled branch as "protect your Alignment from others or from unintended change". I'd say it's about the civilization having more granular control over their Alignment output. Base WoTMod, the player can take certain actions that increase their Alignment one way or the other. The controlled branch should give them more options to adjust their Alignment in more deliberate increments, either back towards the middle or toward the extreme. (Given that the competition for controlled is aggressive though, which targets making extreme Alignment, I do wonder if that's a helpful objective for controlled, to facilitate both?)

I did find this one a bit difficult though, because it discourages the Alignment extremes. It makes staying Neutral much easier, which is why I kept it, but you're right that it isn't a bonus in all cases.

I think this kind of thing would be best if it's always a "bonus" - if there was some way to make it variable so it reacted differently in different situations, that'd be ideal. I don't know how that'd be possible, which makes me not like this option all that much.

The objective of this branch is to facilitate gaining extremes of Alignment more easily. If this Policy isn't helping the player do that (because they're doing things that give them opposing Alignment, which are now doubled), then they weren't acting toward that goal in the first place, so it doesn't seem like a problem to me. It should punish players who are acting against their Alignment, because their expressed intent by choosing this is that they want to go all in on one of the two that they've chosen.

Yeah, I can accept this one, given the fact that players have obviously made the bed they plan to sleep in.

I don't think we do - stuff that makes Alignment generation increase will inherently make remaining near the middle less stable, so Neutral players will want to steer clear of the aggressive branch.

sure.

Which is looking more likely above! We'll see what happens there. Mostly this is just an example of "bonus to <other thing> because high Alignment".

yeah, for sure. A good idea.

Like the first one above, choosing the aggressive branch should mean you're set in your Alignment. It's not impossible to change (as in, mechanically you can start working against it later) but I feel like it totally makes sense that having chosen this branch and the style of Policies it unlocks should make it harder to do so. If a player is slightly Shadow and wants to go heavy Light by the end game, then I'd say they've had enough chances to undo that by the time they reach this Policy.

yea, I suppose it's a bit like a politics player deciding to wage war against the Tower or steddings all the time....

Yes, this doesn't consider Policies that change based on the player's Alignment.

We could still consider it. My overall feeling with it is that while it helps us makes the Policies more meaningful now, it will be much harder for the players to get a clear idea of how they will change and gives them a lot more stuff to keep track of that might not necessarily be obvious.

yeah, I think I might agree. It seems possible to do relatively agnostic policies, as you've demonstrated.

In the Alignment summary, we have Ogier Quests as a Light-side-exclusive source of Alignment. This Policy should probably be more about those quests than just relationship with the Ogier in general though.

oh, I'd forgotten about that. Might be better off as a more specific link. Not a big deal at this stage, though.

To be clear, the Projection is attacking a unit in the main map layer. Other T'a'r units are interacted with normally. And the Projection uses the ranged combat strength of its host (the main map layer unit that created the Projection) for this attack, so the scaling is taken care of for us by the scaling of the Saidar units that already exists throughout the game. I think this actually quite elegantly avoids the problems you outline here. Flavor wise it's certainly very Shadow-y, given how we saw dreams used to attack several characters in the books.

OH. Sorry, I'd somehow missed that. That makes a lot more sense. This is a pretty powerful ability, but definitely avoids the problem I'd keyed in on.... retracted

I think part of this is a result of the above all only being conceptual examples. It wasn't my objective to come up with a list that we would transplant straight into a tree, but to inform what kinds of Policies we could use in each. In terms of generating Alignment, we'd probably want to have more options like the Turning the Tower one on the Shadow side - that gives that player more Shadow. I did certainly go light on options that generated more Alignment in the Light vs Shadow set.

right. And it's also possible that the unbranched policies will be more heavy on Alignment itself.

In terms of reaping rewards, do you mean stuff like the bonuses for having higher tiers and such? That could certainly exist for both trees. I targeted the more mechanically exclusive stuff with the Light vs Shadow branches because that's the thing that's unique to that kind of tree set up, but there's certainly room for some of the Policies I listed under aggressive vs controlled to be modified to fit one side and used in a Light vs Shadow tree.

yeah, that's what I meant. And yes, we could use the unbranched abilities to cover some of that stuff, or have them exist in the branches, but with slight modifications.

I don't think we need to have the Policies switch around how they work based on the player's Alignment. (As in, do different things for very Light, Neutral-ish, or very Shadow.) I think the aggressive vs controlled tree stuff above shows we can be symmetrical if we don't have a branch for each side.

agreed.

OK, so where does this all leave us? Which version to you prefer, Controlled/Aggressive or Light/Shadow? I'm not totally decided, but I suppose if I had to choose, I'd go for Light/Shadow. I think it will seem a little more sensational and striking to the player, whereas the differences between C/A are a little more subtle and steeped in more nuanced mechanics that might make the tree seem a little inaccessible at first. Also, I like some of the C/A policies, but it's possible that versions of them would make good additions into earlier trees, like if we did Myth/Alignment. Also, I think Light/Shadow allows us to make it more directly VC-related that way. While Light/Shadow doesn't support neutral players as well, I do think we might be able to configure it so either side could be worth choosing for neutral players in cases where a rowdy LB is imminent.

I would also suggest that the flavor/naming of the sides (if we go L/S) should be chosen in a way that doesn't make it seem like you are actually choosing a side at this point - since, you could certainly still choose neutral after opening one of these trees, or even flip completely. These are, after all, societal traits of your civilization, not actual darkfriend status or allegiance in the LB.

But it doesn't have to be a free Governor of your choice of type. We could totally give them a free Smith, or free Dignitary or whatever. The difficulty then is that we'd be forcing the player into a specific Governor type, which may not work with their strategy, and this is a more generic "Tall tree".

Compared to the Liberty finisher, even a free Governor of your choice of type has a lot of caveats though. Especially if attached to a city Population requirement. The Liberty one is a finisher, so it's stronger, but this one doesn't let you use any of the LP abilities (so it's a lot less flexible) and requires you to grow cities over a certain size. It does scale over the course of the game, of couse, as more cities reach that stage. (Could do first 2 cities? That would prevent that?)

I still don't see where the problem with "get a free Gov of any type" comes from (whether it has a pop requirement or not). Yeah, Liberty's finisher is more flexible, but as we've described, it's a finisher. Comparing this to other similar policies, there's one that creates a Great Artist, this is certainly as good, if not better, than that.

I suspect two cities might be too good.

Also, one other thing is, in order to make sure this isn't a burden, it could be a free Gov of any type that doesn't harm happiness as much (though that probably intrudes with one of the later tier abilities, as I recall).

Hmm, I'm not so sure. I feel like once we have any Policies on this branch that are geared towards naval expansion, then that becomes the point of the whole branch. Because if the player isn't expanding across the sea then those Policies become useless to them, and then the opposing branch is always going to be a better idea.

hmmm, I don't think we need to be so all-in on this meaning "Expanding across the sea." The Exploration policies are largely about bonuses to coastal cities. That fits right in with this notion of simply making there be many more options available to wide players. Making coastal cities could be part of that. Coastal cities are very much a part of most civilizations, not just naval civs. I believe I may have augmented one or more of the policies in my previous treatment. We could do the same, but make sure that the augmentations to the coastal policies were not necessarily coastal-related could be useful to land-locked civs.

I'm not convinced we can't fuse these styles.

I do think either could work and I'm not sure which is better. If we don't use naval here, where else would it go? Would it go back to Wealth? Could it be our answer for what the other branch of Culture should be?

I'm not sure where. I suppose Wealth is the answer, but with some more direct tweaks to make it more money-ish, but not just "coastal money."

What are our other options for Wealth, though? I don't have a good handle on what the surviving branches of that tree are.

I'm drawn toward the luxury vs bonus tree approach because it makes our Policy tree almost completely different from the BNW one.

Yeah, I think I like it too. But I don't think it fails if it has one or two coastal-related policies.

Additional charges for the work boat sounds awesome too! That's a good way of keeping both relevant.

ya.

Workers do work on land. >.> Work boats work on land? Or workers work in the sea? The latter I've never been very sure why they don't do that.

definitely meant workers in the sea.

ok, all caught up!

 

[S3rgeus]

hmmm.... I don't think so. Faith units are unlocked when your city has a Path. If Questioners were only for defense/rebalancing, we unlock them only when you were out of phase, but since they can be used to "attack" others, regardless of your Alignment, that wouldn't work.

Oo, I have just realized, there's another option where we could unlock them with Alignment? They could unlock when you get more than X tiers away from Neutral? The difficulty there of course is Neutral civs will want to use them to offset more extreme Alignment.

What about once you've generated X total Alignment, of either side? (As in, I've generated 5 Shadow and 3 Light, so I've generated 8 total Alignment.) Having generated enough Alignment, you will start to care more about the Alignment of your citizens and how that's affecting your overall leaning.

I think something like that could work. Maybe era 3 or 5, even. I guess it depends on how far into the game it takes for A) Light or Shadow alignment to have accrued naturally through various means (threads, killing shadowspawn [so definitely post-TW]... what else?) in a meaningful way, and B) a city to be possibly *out* of balance.

The last bit is tricky if others' Questioners is the only way for a city to fall out of balance. Because that simply means if nobody is playing with Questioners for aggressive purposes, Questioners serve no purpose. I think that might be a problem, or at least not the optimum solution. I think if citizens can flip through "natural causes," that makes Questioners suddenly much more important to the game from a defensive perspective, and thus also much more visible and likely to be used offensively, I'd guess.

This is a core point that has been buzzing around in my head for a while, but it's great to see you bring it up here! I do think the mechanics of Questioners as they stand at the moment will lead to players not using them very often, so a lot of your proposals here are doing good work in rectifying that!

In terms of having cities that are out of balance, it's worth noting that since you don't accrue much Alignment in the early game, if you're going for Light or Shadow, your cities will tend to tilt Neutral, in terms of citizen layout. So Questioners would be useful for undoing that, but it's still a majorly small thing that will only happen for a few cities as players are beginning to get into their Alignments. And never happens for Neutral players. Certainly not enough to justify the Questioners by themselves!

Could some Threads flip citizens instead of merely add Alignment points? What else could we do? Maybe we could have some TW rewards be Light citizens... Any ways to generate Darkfriends? Would it be possible to include some sort of "Alignment pressure" (maybe only occurring from cities of "stable" alignment) in a way that doesn't telegraph a civ's alignment?

Plus, if we make some flip naturally, that makes "stabilizing" Policies (and Uniques!) much more useful, since they'll apply in all games, regardless of who does what with Alignment (even in a game with, say, all Light Civs).

Threads flipping citizens sounds like a really good idea. Would we want to go back and add that to existing threads or add new ones that do that? (Or both?) Or would we want to make it something systematic like "all Threads that target a specific city affect the citizens of that city corresponding to the player's choice from that Thread". And would we want to do that now or put it on the list of things to do next? (Happily, this is something that transplants much more directly to CiVI than the Policies stuff we're doing otherwise.)

What form would the TW reward of Light citizens be? Some of your citizens convert at certain reward thresholds? The flavor's a bit tenuous for that, but it could work.

Is it too narrow to have Shadowspawn attacks on cities during the TW cause some citizens to become Darkfriends? (They're sneaking in spies etc.)

Alignment pressure, like religious pressure in BW, will definitely make Questioners more useful overall. Also a very good call. Religion is public information though, and as you've noted we don't want to expose the Alignment of nearby civs through the pressure displayed to players. (Even if we hide the source, if you've only got one neighbor you'd know where it was coming from.)

Like religious pressure, it needs to be something that the player can see and plan for, otherwise it will feel really random and punishing. I suppose our starting point is the flavor - what makes people Light or Shadow in the WoT-verse?

Shadow seems to come from the temptation of power and the desire for instant gratification - not having to wait to work towards something and instead being able to take it from someone else. The Dark One also seems to take direct holds over people who are important, his suggestions controlling them, or via the Forsaken.

Light seems to be the more kind of everyday kindnesses and that kind of thing. Acceptance of other people, do good for your neighbor, defend the downtrodden, and such.

Do we have mechanics that capture this flavor that we can link into? We have Forsaken Quests, but that's too active of a mechanic, we need something ongoing that could push civs one way or the other due to a persistent state of the game. It also can't be something that the player can just focus on manufacturing to massively tilt their Alignment one way or the other.

What if we make it local - internal to the civilization? The system would need to work against you in order to be effective. If Light spreads Light and Shadow spreads Shadow, then they'll just end up canceling each other out and reflecting your Alignment. So we could make it so that once you're past tier X either way, citizens of the opposite type begin to "spread". So you need to keep them under control. (This would be like an X% chance of flipping a citizen in the same city every Y turns, say.)

Any other ideas how we could do that over time? I feel like most of the ideas of citizen Alignment "spreading" are hamstrung by needing to keep other players' Alignment secret. (Not suggesting we change that, but I've come up with and knocked down several versions of the above that wouldn't work at all because of telegraphing!)

So what era is essentially the earliest point that enough of this could be done to make building them meaningful? I'd say, given the fact that they generate faith when used, I think I wouldn't want it so early that they could be used to "buy" a Path (I know the faith generation is likely to be production-inefficient, but that would be totally worth it in some cases if you needed a little push to guarantee a Path), so not too early. A little time going by where you feel unsettled by your cities that aren't in-line with what you want, but not enough to get frustrated, would be good. A little time to see how your civ shapes up before starting to make alignment decisions, but not enough to be wasting too much time, would be good. So, era 4 or so is likely good, but I'm unsure.

Era 4 seems good to me then, taking into consideration what you've said here. Looking at the techs in era 4:

Mapmaking, Sailcloth, Bitterns, Snakes and Foxes, Dreaming, Wards, The New Tongue, Profession, Formation, Sword Forms

There's a certain tongue in cheek of putting it on Snakes and Foxes, but that already has a lot of unlocks. Profession or Formation, while not explicitly very flavor-y, are relatively appropriate for Questioners. I'd say we should avoid Mapmaking, Sailcloth, Bitterns, Wards, or Sword Forms.

Also, the nice thing about techs is it allows some players to get ahead of the process if they orient their research accordingly.

This is a really good thing about the tech unlock option, actually. I really like that players can be allowed to lag behind their Alignment output (if they wish) or can rush it early to gain control of it more quickly. It's a nice strategic choice provided to the player.

Or... an "opener," if we really wanted it that way.

I'm a little unsure about this, especially if we open up some Citizen shift to natural or random causes, because then we're sort of requiring everybody to go down a policy path if they want to have meaningful control over their LB destiny. Even if we keep it all player-caused, presumably we'll be making the Questioner thing useful enough for Aggressive civs that it's always *likely* somebody in the game will participate (if it's not, we've designed it to be too lame, I think), so it might essentially be that we're forcing somebody down a particular tree "just in case," which I don't really like.

I guess I don't see there being any real benefits to doing it with policies, so I prefer techs.

Yeah, an opener could work. After going through everything you've said above though, I think after we make some tweaks to make Questioners more useful in the general case, then I prefer the tech option as well.

Yeah, I am reminded that Myth is ancient era, so going T'a'r heavy on one of its sides might be somewhat problematic, or at least not ideal.. I suppose it's unlikely that most civs choose that as a first tree, though. It's probably fine.

I think I might be more likely to jump in Path/Alignment than Path/T'a'r, in general, though.

I'm also preferring the Path/Alignment split for Myth, so let's go with that!

I don't think we settled it, actually.

Hmmm... I think we might want to look for a non-VC related use of Culture that makes your Culture Work for You. So, a branch that does include some of the Culture defense stuff, but couches it in a way that spins your culture to other purposes that might be more generically useful. So, stuff like.

- Prestige against you is "converted" into Culture *for* you (also lowering the prestige against you)
- X% of Culture generated also produced Y other yield.
- LWs produce X yield as well
- something that makes Policies faster to acquire, either as some distinct mechanism from the Liberty/Ambition policy (-33%...), or instead of that policy

This is actually, now that I think of it, stuff that was already happening in my "Legacy" branch, and I find I'm not as "down" as you on that branch. I think if we raise the bar on the "make culture work for you" stuff, and go less heavily on the defense, it'd be kind of cool. I've found myself playing as civs where, say, I'm going tall for science, but am producing tons of culture too, or going Dom and have tons of culture due to captured wonders, where I'm in a solid second place for culture, but don't really have any intention of going for the culture VC. In those cases, all the culture does for me (aside from stave off that 1st place player's victory) is unlock policies. It might be cool to have another tree I could unlock that gives me other benefits for it (especially since I'm likely to have some policies to spare due to my high culture output). Under BNW's setup, I'd essentially never unlock Aesthetics.

A lot of good points here, and I think the central one of going more for "Culture gives you other stuff" rather than Culture as defense against other players changes the characterization. It is what you've put into the existing Legacy tree, and I've been mostly focused on the general problem of a branch being "defensive Culture" rather than what you've actually proposed! Sorry about that!

I would say though, should we pick one thing and aim for that as the branch's objective to use Culture? Rather than split the bonuses between several other systems, make it the branch for Culture that works to do <thing>. Examples might be "T'a'r dominance", "Domination", "Shadowspawn fighting", "Gold production", etc. I would think that a branch that has bonuses that are distributed across too many systems would usually have at least one dead Policy for most individual players. But this might be running against the idea you're presenting of "getting something for the Culture anyway" as the philosophy of the branch.

wait, are we considering not having a Science tree? You're saying if we "mix up" the trees (Science+Alignment, etc.) then each branch would necessarily include stuff that makes it less sciencey? Yeah, I guess that's an issue. I think it would be minor, though - still rather sciencey. And besides, maybe that tree deserves to be knocked down a single peg, so it's not so obviously the best. (FWIW, I very much don't always choose it - if I'm playing pretty low culture, I am often still working on other trees when Ideology unlocks).

Yeah, I wanted us to consider the idea of not having a wholly focused Science tree at all. There may be some Science-y bits to whatever this tree becomes, but its purpose wouldn't be Science, because of how Science underpins pretty much everything else.

Of course, "playing for Science" is a way to play the game and that not being represented would be problematic. Are there other problems with the lack of a Science tree?

yeah, I agree that we're looking at something relatively convergent. I suppose, though, we could follow suit with culture and do a "make your science work for you" as well. Include boosts to science, but also have your science generate other stuff (like +Culture every time you get a tech, etc.).

yeah, I don't think that's the only dichotomy we could create, but it is definitely *a* dichotomy that would make a lot of sense in WoT.

I think maybe we could/should open up the second branch beyond channeling. I think that would likely limit us and possibly force us into some linkages that go a bit too far. I feel like policies should extend the "reach" of a system one "degree," where things still feel related. I think necessarily making everything channeling-related might lead us to have to do some things that feel somewhat random.

It might be easier if opened up to be the "Higher Mysteries" in general, including Steddings, possibly, LWs, possibly, even some Alignment, and Sites of Power, possibly.... Basically, things to fuel your science generation if your science generation isn't all that hot. Does this make it too broad, though? We don't want it to be too weak if you don't take advantage of all these systems to their fullest, and too strong if you do. I'd like it to be the kind of thing where these things are things you might be likely to do even if you aren't "all in" on, say, winning Diplo from steddings.

As far as making the "straight line" on the other side... I think that might be somewhat necessary here. however, I do think we might stand to knock one policy, maybe two, off of Rationalism and stick it on the right side. That way this new one is actually good at science. Also, then maybe we could justify including a "VC related" mechanic on the left side, in lieu of one that directly adds science.

What do you think?

I think you're right that this might become too broad. We only have 4 Policies to work with for a single branch (3 normal Policies and a Finisher), so the only way to cover all of those things would be to have one Policy for each, which will make it really haphazard. If we take one of Rationalism's existing Policies across then we only have 3 left. I think just channeling has enough mechanics that we could fill all 3/4 slots with appropriately flavored bonuses. I don't think it will feel random, because we just need to provide appropriate names. For example: "Sisters' Depositories: +X Science from <channeling related building>", "Studious Daughters: +X Science for each Novice, Accepted, or Sister you have in the Tower". That kind of stuff is fairly easy to link up.

I'd say the merit of choosing channeling over any of the other mechanics, is that we're making it very core to a civ's identity as they play through the game. The Philosophies are all about how you treat channelers. Our new and shiny units are mostly channeling units. The Tower diplomacy stuff is all bout channeling. And it's one of the biggest flavor elements from the books. We'd need to be careful about how the bonuses interacted with Fear/Acceptance and the three Philosophies, but I think it will be a strong candidate when it's done. And mechanically a civ that has specialized in channeling (in any of the several ways to do so) can leverage those Policies to be an effective Science boost, which is the point of this tree overall.

Sounds good re the "straight line" - splitting the pure Science bonuses (reflavoring as appropriate) will help in making sure a new branch can compete with old fashioned Science-makes-more-Science bonuses.

 

[S3rgeus]

I think the other thing we'll need to consider with WBr and DW is the finishers that allow you to buy them with faith - if we still do those, we may find it useful to use them in *different* trees, or as a part of one big finisher. I could see us keeping them separate at the policy level, if need be.

Good point, yeah, that's a good precedent for just giving out a Wolfbrother in the Alignment tree.

Yeah, I see what you mean. But I also see this as somewhat undermining the actual values of the alignment. A +Minor for Shadow is very different from a +Major shadow, and should be treated as such. Having it be one citizen regardless feels somewhat like a boolean that removes some of the nuance of the system. Should something like this trigger only with certain "sized" alignment bonuses? Or in different numbers of cities based on the size of the yield?

Yeah, either of those variants sound good, trigger on X yield or above, or trigger in one city per Low/Med/High/Major (can't remember our actual names for the values right now).

I think this kind of thing would be best if it's always a "bonus" - if there was some way to make it variable so it reacted differently in different situations, that'd be ideal. I don't know how that'd be possible, which makes me not like this option all that much.

Right, but this is attempting to come up with a principle of how we could do Policies like this. We don't want to diminish the Alignment yield of all Threads, because of the issues we've outlined here. So how would we give players more minute control over the Alignment output of their Threads over time, without punishing the actual yields of them? We could do something like, instead of receiving a random Thread, you receive a random 2 and get to pick which one you want to act on? That way players could pick the ones with the lowest Alignment options if they are going Neutral, or higher if they're going extreme.

yea, I suppose it's a bit like a politics player deciding to wage war against the Tower or steddings all the time....

Yeah, exactly, they're definitely working against themselves!

oh, I'd forgotten about that. Might be better off as a more specific link. Not a big deal at this stage, though.

Cool, sounds like we'll be able to come up with one later!

OH. Sorry, I'd somehow missed that. That makes a lot more sense. This is a pretty powerful ability, but definitely avoids the problem I'd keyed in on.... retracted

Phew, I'm glad that was just a misread! I was worried I'd forgotten something about T'a'r combat!

right. And it's also possible that the unbranched policies will be more heavy on Alignment itself.

Yeah, that could work really well with the Light vs Shadow approach.

OK, so where does this all leave us? Which version to you prefer, Controlled/Aggressive or Light/Shadow? I'm not totally decided, but I suppose if I had to choose, I'd go for Light/Shadow. I think it will seem a little more sensational and striking to the player, whereas the differences between C/A are a little more subtle and steeped in more nuanced mechanics that might make the tree seem a little inaccessible at first. Also, I like some of the C/A policies, but it's possible that versions of them would make good additions into earlier trees, like if we did Myth/Alignment. Also, I think Light/Shadow allows us to make it more directly VC-related that way. While Light/Shadow doesn't support neutral players as well, I do think we might be able to configure it so either side could be worth choosing for neutral players in cases where a rowdy LB is imminent.

I like the Light vs Shadow side as well. As you've said, I think we can take the best parts of the Controlled vs Aggressive and put them into Light vs Shadow, but not vice versa. So I say let's go with that! Specific Policies to come in the next stage then!

I'm ok with not supporting Neutral players with this tree, since there's nothing pushing them to take it. And as you've said, it might be useful if they decide to suddenly swing one way seeing an imminent LB stacked against them!

I would also suggest that the flavor/naming of the sides (if we go L/S) should be chosen in a way that doesn't make it seem like you are actually choosing a side at this point - since, you could certainly still choose neutral after opening one of these trees, or even flip completely. These are, after all, societal traits of your civilization, not actual darkfriend status or allegiance in the LB.

Agreed, that seems sensible!

I still don't see where the problem with "get a free Gov of any type" comes from (whether it has a pop requirement or not). Yeah, Liberty's finisher is more flexible, but as we've described, it's a finisher. Comparing this to other similar policies, there's one that creates a Great Artist, this is certainly as good, if not better, than that.

I suspect two cities might be too good.

I'm confused, in your last post didn't you say that the "get a free Gov of any type" was too strong, because of its flexibility? That was why I was working through some alternatives with specific Governor types.

It sounds like we're just tweaking balance at this stage though, right? That the Policy does work in principle? "Gain a free Governor in your first ungoverned city to reach Population X" - tweakable by value of X, or making it first Y cities, or making it a specific, more generically useful Governor type.

Also, one other thing is, in order to make sure this isn't a burden, it could be a free Gov of any type that doesn't harm happiness as much (though that probably intrudes with one of the later tier abilities, as I recall).

I think if the player chooses the Governor branch of the tree for Tallness, we expect them to go in knowing they'll need to manage the Happiness impact of having Governors in their cities, so I'd be ok with it being a standard Governor Happiness cap penalty.

hmmm, I don't think we need to be so all-in on this meaning "Expanding across the sea." The Exploration policies are largely about bonuses to coastal cities. That fits right in with this notion of simply making there be many more options available to wide players. Making coastal cities could be part of that. Coastal cities are very much a part of most civilizations, not just naval civs. I believe I may have augmented one or more of the policies in my previous treatment. We could do the same, but make sure that the augmentations to the coastal policies were not necessarily coastal-related could be useful to land-locked civs.

I'm not convinced we can't fuse these styles.

Yeah, by "expanding across the sea" I mean to include those coastal Policies as well. Landlocked civs are my main concern and fairly common on a lot of map types. As you've said here, making them useful to landlocked civs is essential, but I'm not sure how we'd do that if they're Policies that help "sea expansion"/"coastal civs"? Once you have a single Policy (1/4 of the bonus of taking that branch) that's "<bonus> for coastal cities" and that's it, the other branch is going to be better unless the remaining 3/4 are really strong to make up for it (in which case they'd be too strong for actual coastal civs, and then we have a different problem). What I want to avoid is the bonus/naval branch being outclassed by the luxury branch just because the player has selected the Great Plains map type. If that's going to be the case, I think we should go more all in on the naval approach, since that will allow us to make the naval expansion part more engaging.

Do you have any rough examples of how we'd fuse the naval/bonus branch to keep it competitive with the luxury branch?

I'm not sure where. I suppose Wealth is the answer, but with some more direct tweaks to make it more money-ish, but not just "coastal money."

What are our other options for Wealth, though? I don't have a good handle on what the surviving branches of that tree are.

I think we were waiting to see where everything else ended up since Wealth is quite flexible in what we can combine it with.

With an Alignment tree decided elsewhere and our options for a Science tree working out, that all seems like it's not going to end up intersecting with Wealth. We'll probably get a T'a'r Policy or two into Wealth, given that we're putting that where it fits.

Even if we get the naval stuff into the Ambition tree, I feel like the deeper naval bonuses are still going to be missing, given the way the other trees all look. Do we want one branch of Wealth to be a decidedly naval branch? This would be one you'd only pick if you were specifically trying to be a naval oriented civ. (Either settling on a bunch of islands or living off of naval trade.) We could borrow some flavor from the seaports in Tear, Illian, and Ebou Dar and some obvious trading/negotiation and seafaring flavor from the Sea Folk. (Possibly some invasion flavor from the Seanchan.)

We could make it a Convergent tree that way - Gold by land vs Gold by sea?

I'm struck by the idea for a Policy that lets Cargo Ships establish trade routes via river, instead of just water tiles.



And now I'm traveling again, so I shall return on the 3rd of January! Happy New Year for then!

 

[counterpoint]

Oo, I have just realized, there's another option where we could unlock them with Alignment? They could unlock when you get more than X tiers away from Neutral? The difficulty there of course is Neutral civs will want to use them to offset more extreme Alignment.

What about once you've generated X total Alignment, of either side? (As in, I've generated 5 Shadow and 3 Light, so I've generated 8 total Alignment.) Having generated enough Alignment, you will start to care more about the Alignment of your citizens and how that's affecting your overall leaning.

hmmm, this could work, especially the total-alignment-generation side of things. However, that still doesn't necessarily help a neutral civ that's been going for the "low" values on Threads purposefully. The difference in earned alignment for Minor and Major threads is likely to be large enough that such civs wouldn't unlock the Questioner until *much* later.

Given the fact that Q's can also generate faith for a civ, I wouldn't want to block a certain playstyle from earning them until several eras later than everybody else, especially when that playstyle (going neutral) is very much in sync with the "point" of Questioners.

This is a core point that has been buzzing around in my head for a while, but it's great to see you bring it up here! I do think the mechanics of Questioners as they stand at the moment will lead to players not using them very often, so a lot of your proposals here are doing good work in rectifying that!

In terms of having cities that are out of balance, it's worth noting that since you don't accrue much Alignment in the early game, if you're going for Light or Shadow, your cities will tend to tilt Neutral, in terms of citizen layout. So Questioners would be useful for undoing that, but it's still a majorly small thing that will only happen for a few cities as players are beginning to get into their Alignments. And never happens for Neutral players. Certainly not enough to justify the Questioners by themselves!

agreed.

Threads flipping citizens sounds like a really good idea. Would we want to go back and add that to existing threads or add new ones that do that? (Or both?) Or would we want to make it something systematic like "all Threads that target a specific city affect the citizens of that city corresponding to the player's choice from that Thread". And would we want to do that now or put it on the list of things to do next? (Happily, this is something that transplants much more directly to CiVI than the Policies stuff we're doing otherwise.)

I'm flexible. yes, we can do this next, I'd say. But as far as addition or modification, I'm not sure - either is possible. Probably it would be simplest to just adjust some of the threads. The systematic method could be fine, but it would depend on us having a robust enough set of Threads that meet that condition, and in a diversity of cities (probably with lots of them on the capital).

What form would the TW reward of Light citizens be? Some of your citizens convert at certain reward thresholds? The flavor's a bit tenuous for that, but it could work.

Well, don't each reward thresholds give a different dump of Light points? How is this different?

Is it too narrow to have Shadowspawn attacks on cities during the TW cause some citizens to become Darkfriends? (They're sneaking in spies etc.)

This is possible. I'd say if we did something like this, it should probably be shadowspawn in general, not just the TW. That said, there are some issues with this, namely what it does to Borderlander civs. Flipping a citizen is much more dramatic than killing a Trolloc, which nets +1 Light. I'd prefer things to be a little more "player behavior" related than that, I think. Though I could be convinced of this kind of thing.

I know this isn't the quote-block where you request additional ideas, but I'll leave these thoughts here nonetheless. Is it possible for "player behavior" in general to elicit Alignment shifts?

I wouldn't want it to just be "warmongering = shadow" and that kind of thing, but maybe we can do some of this. I'm looking, in particular, for things that might be used to flip citizens instead of just generate points - though these things could of course do that instead. So, things like:

Razing a city of X population or with a Wonder - flips Y citizens in nearest city/capital to DF
Declaring war on a Friend - flips X citizens in nearest city/capital of *both* civs to DF
Losing a city to Shadowspawn - flips X citizens in nearest city/capital to Light
Sharing intrigue with a civ with X relationship with you - flips Y citizens in nearest city/capital to Light
Liberating a fallen civilization or CS - flips X citizens in this city and nearest city/capital to light

Considered some other things too, but wanted to keep these to things you couldn't do *for* the Alignment shift, but that happen over the course of the game naturally (sometimes). So, fips because you trade or use balefire wouldn't work because that's something you can instantiate yourself, repeatedly.

Anyways, I can't remember if we discussed having playstyle be linked to Alignment. It's possibly a bad idea. But I thought I'd bring it up nonetheless, as it provides some more flip opportunities, and certainly makes alignment maintenance a bigger part of the game.

Alignment pressure, like religious pressure in BW, will definitely make Questioners more useful overall. Also a very good call. Religion is public information though, and as you've noted we don't want to expose the Alignment of nearby civs through the pressure displayed to players. (Even if we hide the source, if you've only got one neighbor you'd know where it was coming from.)

Like religious pressure, it needs to be something that the player can see and plan for, otherwise it will feel really random and punishing. I suppose our starting point is the flavor - what makes people Light or Shadow in the WoT-verse?

Shadow seems to come from the temptation of power and the desire for instant gratification - not having to wait to work towards something and instead being able to take it from someone else. The Dark One also seems to take direct holds over people who are important, his suggestions controlling them, or via the Forsaken.

Light seems to be the more kind of everyday kindnesses and that kind of thing. Acceptance of other people, do good for your neighbor, defend the downtrodden, and such.

Do we have mechanics that capture this flavor that we can link into? We have Forsaken Quests, but that's too active of a mechanic, we need something ongoing that could push civs one way or the other due to a persistent state of the game. It also can't be something that the player can just focus on manufacturing to massively tilt their Alignment one way or the other.

ok, so this block started talking about pressure, and then spread more generally.... the general stuff is somewhat addressed above in my brainstorming.

As far as the pressure, I think the "secret" quality is at odds with the "can be fought against" quality. I think we could, with the aim of keeping the source of pressure private, broaden the reach of pressure past that of Paths, with distance mattering much less. Like, true, you might have one neighbor, but that neighbor might only count for 40% of your Alignment pressure anyways. One way to do this would be with CSs having specific Alignments, for instance (though, we've previously decided that they seem to all be Light, in some sense, based on their LB behavior). Trade routes, geography, shared path, etc., could all play a role. And Alignments are likely to be pretty neutral in the early game, such that there won't really be any visible pressure until late enough in the game that most civs have met multiple other civs.

However, in making it more abstract and opening it up wider, we also do two things, 1) make it more likely this will all just bleed into 50/50 Light/Shadow pressure, since we're taking in too much, and 2) it becomes almost impossible to prepare for or counter, outside of using Questioners.

So, I'm not sure.

What if we make it local - internal to the civilization? The system would need to work against you in order to be effective. If Light spreads Light and Shadow spreads Shadow, then they'll just end up canceling each other out and reflecting your Alignment. So we could make it so that once you're past tier X either way, citizens of the opposite type begin to "spread". So you need to keep them under control. (This would be like an X% chance of flipping a citizen in the same city every Y turns, say.)

I think we already are doing this, in a sense, and I think this is actually sort of what a civ would want to happen, right?

Light citizens beget Light points, which pushes your alignment further up and up. This is turn shifts your DF composition in cities gradually. This just sort of compounds that, if I'm understanding you correctly. So, in that example, your cities would become unbalanced with too much Light, right? But your overall alignment is also changing, so... is that before your light tier changes, or after/during? Wouldn't this just spiral out of control if they're always "too light", (thus generating more Light points)? And, wouldn't some civs want this? There are some consequences to being out of balance, possibly (based on UAs and the Policies we're discussing), but otherwise, the only consequence of being out of balance is more Alignment shift. So, if you're trying to go All-in on Light, this would actually be *good*. So, unless I'm missing something, I don't see how this system isn't just what we're doing x2.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it, it is interesting how some foreign Alignment tampering might be *welcome*. If I'm hoping to go Light, but am not super Light, and a Light-heavy neighbor starts hitting me with Q's, they'll pull my cities out of balance and towards light, and... I'll be fine with that. Eventually they will affect my overall Tier, and those cities will become balanced again as a consequence (right?), so I'll eventually be able to take advantage of any possible benefits of being Balanced, but in general it'd just accelerate my overall goal. And I guess that's fine, right? That's one of the points of tampering with somebody's alignment - make them want to join your LB side (at the risk of providing them with bonuses due to that strong Alignment during the actual LB.

So, I suppose we should probably also ask if there should be some kind of benefits to being Balanced or drawbacks to not being Balanced. Thoughts?

I was wondering, for clarity's sake, on the way the mechanism is set up currently, Is being out of Balance something that'll happen whenever a civ is about to flip a tier? - enough Alignment points accrue to flip a few citizens, before the new Tier comes.along with it. Or does the Tier change likely happen first, and all cities shift their citizen set accordingly (we know that happens when a Tier changes, I just don't know which happens first. And I'm speaking of "natural" alignment shifts, caused by the citizens themselves (even a Balanced Alignment might create net Light output, if you are on the Light tier.

This is quite a little side quest we're on!

Era 4 seems good to me then, taking into consideration what you've said here. Looking at the techs in era 4:

Mapmaking, Sailcloth, Bitterns, Snakes and Foxes, Dreaming, Wards, The New Tongue, Profession, Formation, Sword Forms

There's a certain tongue in cheek of putting it on Snakes and Foxes, but that already has a lot of unlocks. Profession or Formation, while not explicitly very flavor-y, are relatively appropriate for Questioners. I'd say we should avoid Mapmaking, Sailcloth, Bitterns, Wards, or Sword Forms.

What about The New Tongue? That has a fair number of unlocks, but it does also to me seem to be pretty darn appropriate for what we're talking about.

Dreams also works, based on the other unlocks - a spy building, some t'a'r stuff. We could change the name a bit if need be (that's true with any of these)

Is there an "altitude" in the tree we want this to inhabit?

This is a really good thing about the tech unlock option, actually. I really like that players can be allowed to lag behind their Alignment output (if they wish) or can rush it early to gain control of it more quickly. It's a nice strategic choice provided to the player.

agreed

Yeah, an opener could work. After going through everything you've said above though, I think after we make some tweaks to make Questioners more useful in the general case, then I prefer the tech option as well.

agreed

I'm also preferring the Path/Alignment split for Myth, so let's go with that!

deal!

A lot of good points here, and I think the central one of going more for "Culture gives you other stuff" rather than Culture as defense against other players changes the characterization. It is what you've put into the existing Legacy tree, and I've been mostly focused on the general problem of a branch being "defensive Culture" rather than what you've actually proposed! Sorry about that!

I would say though, should we pick one thing and aim for that as the branch's objective to use Culture? Rather than split the bonuses between several other systems, make it the branch for Culture that works to do <thing>. Examples might be "T'a'r dominance", "Domination", "Shadowspawn fighting", "Gold production", etc. I would think that a branch that has bonuses that are distributed across too many systems would usually have at least one dead Policy for most individual players. But this might be running against the idea you're presenting of "getting something for the Culture anyway" as the philosophy of the branch.

right. Good. Let's go in this direction, then.

But yeah, the "breadth" vs "specific" benefits of culture (and Prestige, I think getting something out of your Prestige might be even neater, since that really does *nothing* for you at all if you aren't playing for the Culture VC) is an important consideration. I see what you mean, that some of the stuff might end up kind of useless, especially if we target very specific mechanics (e.g. t'a'r dominance). But on the other hand, if we have it do <thing>, then we have the problem where it'd be totally useless to *most* players - only being useful for the subset of players who have/want a strong Culture but *won't* be playing for the Culture VC *and* want to excel at that <thing>. To me, providing bonuses to things that are generally useful - faith, gold, production, etc. - make the tree rather attractive, even if there's a "weird" one in there.

The other thing, is if it were Gold or something, then it'd feel like it should be a part of the Wealth tree. (etc.). This way, the culture connection is the most "present" in the tree.

Yeah, I wanted us to consider the idea of not having a wholly focused Science tree at all. There may be some Science-y bits to whatever this tree becomes, but its purpose wouldn't be Science, because of how Science underpins pretty much everything else.

Of course, "playing for Science" is a way to play the game and that not being represented would be problematic. Are there other problems with the lack of a Science tree?

I guess I feel like the "burden of proof" falls on why we should *change* it, not why it should stay. Science is one of the game's central mechanics, and all of those central mechanics (except for production and happiness, though in some ways Unity and Ambition are those) have trees - certainly all of the VCs of BNW at least. So I don't see a need to change that just because it's "too good." If it's too good, we can make it less good, or the other trees better. I think people will want there to be a science tree, and would expect it. That said, I'm fine with modifying it - if we split Rationalism between the two halfs, and the policies we add in replacement are tangentially related (i.e. not "straight line science",), that's definitely fine with me. The question what those two haves are, though (in terms of what makes them distinct) still remains, though!

yeah, I agree that we're looking at something relatively convergent. I suppose, though, we could follow suit with culture and do a "make your science work for you" as well. Include boosts to science, but also have your science generate other stuff (like +Culture every time you get a tech, etc.).

yeah, I don't think that's the only dichotomy we could create, but it is definitely *a* dichotomy that would make a lot of sense in WoT.

so do you like the "make science work for you" thing, or does Science already do that enough? It sounds like you enjoy the Channeling-related system the best.

I think you're right that this might become too broad. We only have 4 Policies to work with for a single branch (3 normal Policies and a Finisher), so the only way to cover all of those things would be to have one Policy for each, which will make it really haphazard. If we take one of Rationalism's existing Policies across then we only have 3 left. I think just channeling has enough mechanics that we could fill all 3/4 slots with appropriately flavored bonuses. I don't think it will feel random, because we just need to provide appropriate names. For example: "Sisters' Depositories: +X Science from <channeling related building>", "Studious Daughters: +X Science for each Novice, Accepted, or Sister you have in the Tower". That kind of stuff is fairly easy to link up.

I'd say the merit of choosing channeling over any of the other mechanics, is that we're making it very core to a civ's identity as they play through the game. The Philosophies are all about how you treat channelers. Our new and shiny units are mostly channeling units. The Tower diplomacy stuff is all bout channeling. And it's one of the biggest flavor elements from the books. We'd need to be careful about how the bonuses interacted with Fear/Acceptance and the three Philosophies, but I think it will be a strong candidate when it's done. And mechanically a civ that has specialized in channeling (in any of the several ways to do so) can leverage those Policies to be an effective Science boost, which is the point of this tree overall.

Sounds good re the "straight line" - splitting the pure Science bonuses (reflavoring as appropriate) will help in making sure a new branch can compete with old fashioned Science-makes-more-Science bonuses.

yeah, I think I can get on board with this, especially once we open up "channeling" to include things that aren't necessarily combat-related. And we can, as you say, pull in one (or even two) policies from Rationalism as well, perhaps with some modifications.

Is it possible we could also somewhat incorporate the "make science work for you" element as well into this tree? The concern I have is just that it'll be a "if you have channelers, choose X, if not, choose Y," which feels somewhat bland from a player experience perspective, similar to the "if X, choose Naval branch" situation.

i do think the "worldly" side would be the one that makes the most sense for somebody pursuing a science VC - and maybe we can include a policy that is more direct in that regard. The channeling side should enable the VC as well, I suppose, if you have a lot of channeling stuff, but I'd also like to see it take on a slightly different *purpose* as well - not just "another way to be good at science," but "another way to use science" as well. This is of course how the Creativity tree is working, but also how the Politics tree seems to work as well - true, both sides help you towards diplo, but you also get other peripheral benefits along the way.

OK, that's it for me for now. Possibly more today, but certainly will have the second post done by the time you're back. Happy new year!

 

[counterpoint]

Yeah, either of those variants sound good, trigger on X yield or above, or trigger in one city per Low/Med/High/Major (can't remember our actual names for the values right now).

ok, let's tentatively go with that then.

Right, but this is attempting to come up with a principle of how we could do Policies like this. We don't want to diminish the Alignment yield of all Threads, because of the issues we've outlined here. So how would we give players more minute control over the Alignment output of their Threads over time, without punishing the actual yields of them? We could do something like, instead of receiving a random Thread, you receive a random 2 and get to pick which one you want to act on? That way players could pick the ones with the lowest Alignment options if they are going Neutral, or higher if they're going extreme.

yeah, having a choice of two threads is an interesting idea. It's possible it's too awesome, though, and not just necessarily only an alignment perspective - it gives an extra four choices. It'll also churn through our threads. We spoke earlier about having an extra choice on each thread (not sure if that was in this conversation, or with Uniques), and that could work as well - but is a rather large amount of work, since we'd have to calibrate each thread for that.

I feel like what it needs might not be realistic from a gameplay perspective - actual fine-control of the alignment yield you get from a thread. Like, you can choose to boost or lower the alignment you get from a thread on a case-by-case basis. This seems very clunky and complex on an interface level though, and also might be "abused" in that it would become the go-to for people who may not care about the alignment itself that much - it'd give them a kind of "free reign" on whichever non-alignment yield they want from their threads.

I like the Light vs Shadow side as well. As you've said, I think we can take the best parts of the Controlled vs Aggressive and put them into Light vs Shadow, but not vice versa. So I say let's go with that! Specific Policies to come in the next stage then!

I'm ok with not supporting Neutral players with this tree, since there's nothing pushing them to take it. And as you've said, it might be useful if they decide to suddenly swing one way seeing an imminent LB stacked against them!

Cool. Agreed on Light v Shadow! We'll need to come up with some cool names eventually... let's see how the policies stack up, I suppose.

I'm confused, in your last post didn't you say that the "get a free Gov of any type" was too strong, because of its flexibility? That was why I was working through some alternatives with specific Governor types.

No, I've been essentially advocating free gov of any type since (near) the beginning. The thing that was too strong was giving the civ free govs in their first X cities. I had a problem with giving multiple LPs-worth of govs from one policy. "any type" is powerful, but not unbalancingly so.
.

It sounds like we're just tweaking balance at this stage though, right? That the Policy does work in principle? "Gain a free Governor in your first ungoverned city to reach Population X" - tweakable by value of X, or making it first Y cities, or making it a specific, more generically useful Governor type.

yes, though I don't think first Y cities is likely to work.

I think if the player chooses the Governor branch of the tree for Tallness, we expect them to go in knowing they'll need to manage the Happiness impact of having Governors in their cities, so I'd be ok with it being a standard Governor Happiness cap penalty.

ok, good. Besides, happiness bonuses there would make that sort of a wide policy...

Yeah, by "expanding across the sea" I mean to include those coastal Policies as well. Landlocked civs are my main concern and fairly common on a lot of map types. As you've said here, making them useful to landlocked civs is essential, but I'm not sure how we'd do that if they're Policies that help "sea expansion"/"coastal civs"? Once you have a single Policy (1/4 of the bonus of taking that branch) that's "<bonus> for coastal cities" and that's it, the other branch is going to be better unless the remaining 3/4 are really strong to make up for it (in which case they'd be too strong for actual coastal civs, and then we have a different problem). What I want to avoid is the bonus/naval branch being outclassed by the luxury branch just because the player has selected the Great Plains map type. If that's going to be the case, I think we should go more all in on the naval approach, since that will allow us to make the naval expansion part more engaging.

Do you have any rough examples of how we'd fuse the naval/bonus branch to keep it competitive with the luxury branch?

Hmmm, I do see what you mean. However, I think "civ with some access to water" is much more common than "totally naval civ" such that we're actually "serving" more players by going with the bonus+some-coastal than all-in-naval branches (I'd say landlocked civs are less common than civs that are fully-coastal and thus definitely would want such a branch).

The flip side of this is if the ambition branch is "all in on navy", then it's likely going to have a few policies that make it of little interest to many civs - essentially proving only one real "wide option" (the left side) I feel like this is a little bit less a problem for the wealth tree, if we went with that having a naval branch, since that's obviously a more "specialty" branch.

I feel like BNW has several policies spread throughout that don't apply to certain map situations or game situations (even on a "normal" map). Many civs have few land caravans by the time commerce unlocks, it seems. Several tall civs might be ignoring wonder production for the most part. I know science civs often have no possible or willing partners for research agreements, so that one is often moot as well. A naval civ that isn't going for culture (i.e. England or something) has little interest in Hidden Antiquity sites. Those are just off the top of my head. So, not exactly the same thing, but similar, I'd say. In any case, not totally damning if there's one policy that's a little "off," maybe.

I do think we should try to find a way to fuse them somehow. Is there a way to make some policies that create benefits that are somehow broad in a way that's "mutually exclusive," in that it'd likely help a coastal civ AND a landlocked civ, without making a civ with both kinds of cities too powerful?

a bonus-resources-yield-production option might do something similar to the coastal-cities-production policy, but that'd make it all cities much better, which is probably too good. Also, we could do stuff like "+X <Yield> to coastal cities or cities with no access to water" to somehow capture both kinds of extreme conditions.The flavor for that one would be tricky, though.

Ideas?

I think we were waiting to see where everything else ended up since Wealth is quite flexible in what we can combine it with.

With an Alignment tree decided elsewhere and our options for a Science tree working out, that all seems like it's not going to end up intersecting with Wealth. We'll probably get a T'a'r Policy or two into Wealth, given that we're putting that where it fits.

Even if we get the naval stuff into the Ambition tree, I feel like the deeper naval bonuses are still going to be missing, given the way the other trees all look. Do we want one branch of Wealth to be a decidedly naval branch? This would be one you'd only pick if you were specifically trying to be a naval oriented civ. (Either settling on a bunch of islands or living off of naval trade.) We could borrow some flavor from the seaports in Tear, Illian, and Ebou Dar and some obvious trading/negotiation and seafaring flavor from the Sea Folk. (Possibly some invasion flavor from the Seanchan.)

We could make it a Convergent tree that way - Gold by land vs Gold by sea?

Yeah, I find this one tough. We certainly could go with land/sea here and just move on to luxury/bonus only for Ambition. I think the one issue with that is that it wouldn't be totally land/sea, since there'd be *naval* stuff as well that isn't totally gold-related. Maybe that's fine, since landsnekts aren't totally gold related (though I suppose they are, and they're certainly not dom-related). I guess it just compromises the "balance or purpose" of the branches a little bit. Not terrible, though, and better here than elsewhere.

I guess the question here is "what else would we do?" Are there any other competing possibilities for wealth. The idea of "make your gold work for you" doesn't make much sense, since that's what gold already does...

I'm struck by the idea for a Policy that lets Cargo Ships establish trade routes via river, instead of just water tiles.

Yeah, in coming up with my trees, I kept coming back to the Bayle Doman "River Boat Traders" idea, wanting to stick it in somewhere. I tended to think of doing so as it related to sea trade, since it was hard to come up with those names, but obviously that didn't make sense. I hadn't considered doing this "weird" of a mechanic at this stage.

We can talk about it later, but as I've thought about this, there are a few ways this could work:

- land caravans that travel along a river have extended range or yields (maybe this already happens?)
- trade ships can travel "on land", assuming those cities are connected by river (kind of limited?)
- trade ships can travel "on land" as long as there is some water in between them
- trade ships by sea can then travel "inland" to landlocked or inaccessible cities that are connected to the ocean by a river

what do you think?

 

[S3rgeus]

I have returned! Happy New Year!

hmmm, this could work, especially the total-alignment-generation side of things. However, that still doesn't necessarily help a neutral civ that's been going for the "low" values on Threads purposefully. The difference in earned alignment for Minor and Major threads is likely to be large enough that such civs wouldn't unlock the Questioner until *much* later.

Given the fact that Q's can also generate faith for a civ, I wouldn't want to block a certain playstyle from earning them until several eras later than everybody else, especially when that playstyle (going neutral) is very much in sync with the "point" of Questioners.

Agreed, and thinking over this some more it also presents a problem where a strategy could emerge for rushing Alignment generation early in order to unlock Questioners and use them to stabilize back to Neutrality before too many other players can affect your Alignment. This could end up being a viable strategy and it's super strange and non-obvious, so let's not do that! Tech seems like the way to go.

I'm flexible. yes, we can do this next, I'd say. But as far as addition or modification, I'm not sure - either is possible. Probably it would be simplest to just adjust some of the threads. The systematic method could be fine, but it would depend on us having a robust enough set of Threads that meet that condition, and in a diversity of cities (probably with lots of them on the capital).

Sounds good! We'll move on to adjusting the Threads to include citizen flipping after this. Does "after this" mean before we move on to specific Policies or when we're done Policies overall?

Well, don't each reward thresholds give a different dump of Light points? How is this different?

Light points are a civilization-wide metric, which we're rewarding from a civilization-wide mechanic. But it feels like more of a mechanical stretch to dive down into the city-level mechanic without flavor to back it up. (Policies being civilization wide often dive down into city-level mechanics via flavor of the Policy being enacted.) The mechanics like this one (rewards at the Alignment tiers) which just work how they do because it provides mechanical interaction, usually stay closer to the level they originate at.

It's certainly not a strong opposition to doing this if changing citizens at the tiers helps us a lot, it just does feel different from the point dumps and other existing tier rewards. (Are there other rewards pre-LB?) I'd certainly be up for doing the citizen-flipping at the tiers, just figured I'd mention this difference!

This is possible. I'd say if we did something like this, it should probably be shadowspawn in general, not just the TW. That said, there are some issues with this, namely what it does to Borderlander civs. Flipping a citizen is much more dramatic than killing a Trolloc, which nets +1 Light. I'd prefer things to be a little more "player behavior" related than that, I think. Though I could be convinced of this kind of thing.

Yeah, I do agree, this mechanic seems to run counter to the flavor. Darkfriends were less common in the Borderlands - if anything maybe being attacked by Shadowspawn should flip citizens the other way? From Darkfriend to Light? That way Borderlander civs would tend more Light, which makes sense given the existing mechanics and the flavor. It's still possible to play a Shadow Borderlander civ, just a little uphill, which I think is ok.

Also agreed that it should affect Shadowspawn in general, not just during the TW.

I know this isn't the quote-block where you request additional ideas, but I'll leave these thoughts here nonetheless. Is it possible for "player behavior" in general to elicit Alignment shifts?

I wouldn't want it to just be "warmongering = shadow" and that kind of thing, but maybe we can do some of this. I'm looking, in particular, for things that might be used to flip citizens instead of just generate points - though these things could of course do that instead. So, things like:

Razing a city of X population or with a Wonder - flips Y citizens in nearest city/capital to DF
Declaring war on a Friend - flips X citizens in nearest city/capital of *both* civs to DF
Losing a city to Shadowspawn - flips X citizens in nearest city/capital to Light
Sharing intrigue with a civ with X relationship with you - flips Y citizens in nearest city/capital to Light
Liberating a fallen civilization or CS - flips X citizens in this city and nearest city/capital to light

Considered some other things too, but wanted to keep these to things you couldn't do *for* the Alignment shift, but that happen over the course of the game naturally (sometimes). So, fips because you trade or use balefire wouldn't work because that's something you can instantiate yourself, repeatedly.

Anyways, I can't remember if we discussed having playstyle be linked to Alignment. It's possibly a bad idea. But I thought I'd bring it up nonetheless, as it provides some more flip opportunities, and certainly makes alignment maintenance a bigger part of the game.

Linking the citizen flipping to diplomatic actions that the player can't control alone is a good call, otherwise such mechanics could be used as a factory for changing citizens and manufacturing Alignment, which we don't want. (Just to make sure - there are good reasons we don't want that, right? Impossible to balance the "fair" way of playing Alignment against it? (The "fair" way is definitely our preferred way, flavor and fun wise?) Any other reasons?)

We have discussed playstyle being linked to Alignment before. Or at least I think we have, going off what I remember. I think we decided against it, for a couple of reasons. Civilization-the-game-wise we didn't want to preclude certain ways of playing the game from being Light or Shadow. We liked the idea of holy Light warmongers or peaceful Culture-y Shadow civs being doable.

Mechanically, we wanted Alignment to remain secret until the actual start of the LB. And if certain playstyles encouraged a certain Alignment, then other players, particularly the human player, could use that information to make much more accurate guesses about other civs' Alignments.

These are certainly points to consider, but I wonder if we didn't have the perspective of how everything fits together then that we have more of now. If Alignment is completely agnostic of other gameplay mechanics, then it's inherently separated from them. If players have literally no way of even suspecting what Alignments the other civs in the game are likely to choose, then how do they choose their Alignment if their choice isn't forced by their own? Is that essentially random (and save-scumming encouraging!) choice good for the game?

Further, the flavor for certain types of actions, particularly the ones you've picked out in your suggestions, definitely has an element of Alignment to it. Conquering and razing a city full of people is a relatively evil thing to do. Being a global warmonger that conquers anyone who can't defend themselves... actually sort of sounds like Artur Hawkwing, and he's not particularly evil. (I'm writing as I'm thinking here.)

BNW does have some relationships like this. Investing in Culture output is less rewarding if you're playing Wide, because of how Policy costs increase with city count. Being a warmonger throughout the whole game also doesn't co-operate well with the Cultural Victory, because of how Happiness is often used to help the Culture mechanics. The tech tree is laid out such that the more "developmental" technologies aren't the same as the military ones - so being a warmonger usually means you'll be outpaced in tech by an equally resource-rich rival who isn't as warmonger-y.

I'm not sure, really. I can see really good arguments both ways. Does any inspiration push you more one way or the other?

I'm not really commenting on your specific suggestions here, more trying to work out if we want certain playstyles to be Shadow-Y and others to be Light-y. What we're talking about in the quote block above this - Borderlander civs being more likely to be Light - is another example of that.

ok, so this block started talking about pressure, and then spread more generally.... the general stuff is somewhat addressed above in my brainstorming.

As far as the pressure, I think the "secret" quality is at odds with the "can be fought against" quality. I think we could, with the aim of keeping the source of pressure private, broaden the reach of pressure past that of Paths, with distance mattering much less. Like, true, you might have one neighbor, but that neighbor might only count for 40% of your Alignment pressure anyways. One way to do this would be with CSs having specific Alignments, for instance (though, we've previously decided that they seem to all be Light, in some sense, based on their LB behavior). Trade routes, geography, shared path, etc., could all play a role. And Alignments are likely to be pretty neutral in the early game, such that there won't really be any visible pressure until late enough in the game that most civs have met multiple other civs.

However, in making it more abstract and opening it up wider, we also do two things, 1) make it more likely this will all just bleed into 50/50 Light/Shadow pressure, since we're taking in too much, and 2) it becomes almost impossible to prepare for or counter, outside of using Questioners.

So, I'm not sure.

I thought CSes chose their Alignment for the LB based on the accrual of Alignment leaning from their allies over the course of the game? We did discuss the possibility of having some CSes tend naturally one way or the other and I think were relatively in favor of it?

Once we bring in any targeted mechanics like trade routes though, players can use that to deduce where the pressure is coming from. (Trade route ends, pressure drops, that tells you something about the city at the other end.)

Letting pressure work from a larger distance could go a ways to eliminating the neighbor problem, but I still think external pressure will let a sensible human player work out quite a bit about their neighbors' Alignments. There will always be a difference you can work out based on city count and proximity to your own cities that helps with that.

I mention above that having ways of guessing at other players' Alignments can be advantageous, but I feel like this one is a bit too math-based for it to be fun for the player. They'd need to do a lot of distance calculations and such to play optimally, which is made possible but frustrating by the way CiV is laid out, which isn't a good combo when it might be mechanically advantageous for the player. CiV also tends to encourage breaking down the components of such pressure for the player so they they know how to manage it. ("All of this pressure is coming from having a shared path with the Aiel, so I'll adopt the Seanchan's Path instead!" is something the player will want to do.)

I'm not sure what to suggest in its place though. It makes me think we should make it more internal, somehow hinged on the actions of the player. That, or allow for more information leakage about foreign Alignment, which would let us use a lot more mechanics here.

Also, I do wonder about Questioners' "fun" factor. Will it be fun to send the Questioners to other civs? Because of the Alignment secrecy, you won't know how effective they're being and won't see enemy ones to "fight" in any way. Will it be busywork sending them all over the globe to affect other civs that are really far away?

I think we already are doing this, in a sense, and I think this is actually sort of what a civ would want to happen, right?

Light citizens beget Light points, which pushes your alignment further up and up. This is turn shifts your DF composition in cities gradually. This just sort of compounds that, if I'm understanding you correctly. So, in that example, your cities would become unbalanced with too much Light, right? But your overall alignment is also changing, so... is that before your light tier changes, or after/during? Wouldn't this just spiral out of control if they're always "too light", (thus generating more Light points)? And, wouldn't some civs want this? There are some consequences to being out of balance, possibly (based on UAs and the Policies we're discussing), but otherwise, the only consequence of being out of balance is more Alignment shift. So, if you're trying to go All-in on Light, this would actually be *good*. So, unless I'm missing something, I don't see how this system isn't just what we're doing x2.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it, it is interesting how some foreign Alignment tampering might be *welcome*. If I'm hoping to go Light, but am not super Light, and a Light-heavy neighbor starts hitting me with Q's, they'll pull my cities out of balance and towards light, and... I'll be fine with that. Eventually they will affect my overall Tier, and those cities will become balanced again as a consequence (right?), so I'll eventually be able to take advantage of any possible benefits of being Balanced, but in general it'd just accelerate my overall goal. And I guess that's fine, right? That's one of the points of tampering with somebody's alignment - make them want to join your LB side (at the risk of providing them with bonuses due to that strong Alignment during the actual LB.

So, I suppose we should probably also ask if there should be some kind of benefits to being Balanced or drawbacks to not being Balanced. Thoughts?

Sorry, I wasn't very clear! I was suggesting the inverse of this relationship. Yes, as civs ascend through the Alignment tiers, the new citizens that are born in their cities will follow a progression that leans further toward the Alignment they are tending towards. (The more Light you get, the higher proportion of your new citizens are Light.)

I was suggesting that when you get to a new Light tier, we flip some citizens to be Darkfriends. (And vice versa.) This "fights back" against your changing Alignment, meaning you'd need to use more Questioners as you got to higher tiers to be able to keep the cities balanced (since higher tiers have more precarious balanced layouts).

Unrelated to that, totally agree that sometimes foreign Alignment tampering will be welcome! That's definitely something that's a good feature of the system, IMO. You're encouraged to use Questioners on other civs because it makes them more likely to choose the same Alignment as you in the LB, to an extent. (And could elect specifically to *not* do that if your objective were to end up on the opposite side from a given civ.)

I was wondering, for clarity's sake, on the way the mechanism is set up currently, Is being out of Balance something that'll happen whenever a civ is about to flip a tier? - enough Alignment points accrue to flip a few citizens, before the new Tier comes.along with it. Or does the Tier change likely happen first, and all cities shift their citizen set accordingly (we know that happens when a Tier changes, I just don't know which happens first. And I'm speaking of "natural" alignment shifts, caused by the citizens themselves (even a Balanced Alignment might create net Light output, if you are on the Light tier.

Being out of balance will tend to happen right after the civ goes up to a new tier. The ratio of citizens that meant balanced on their previous tier is, on their new tier, unbalanced in the opposite direction. (If they have risen to Light 4, what was balanced on Light 3 is now unbalanced toward Shadow.)

This is quite a little side quest we're on!

It is! Suddenly Alignment!

What about The New Tongue? That has a fair number of unlocks, but it does also to me seem to be pretty darn appropriate for what we're talking about.

Dreams also works, based on the other unlocks - a spy building, some t'a'r stuff. We could change the name a bit if need be (that's true with any of these)

Is there an "altitude" in the tree we want this to inhabit?

The New Tongue sounds good! We want it to be generally low-ish altitude, I think, since the endgame channeling/LB/Alignment stuff ends up on the bottom of the tree at the end.

I've updated the Editor tree in Dropbox!


Unfortunately I'm out of time for tonight, so I'll be back tomorrow!

 

[counterpoint]

I have returned! Happy New Year!

HNY!

Agreed, and thinking over this some more it also presents a problem where a strategy could emerge for rushing Alignment generation early in order to unlock Questioners and use them to stabilize back to Neutrality before too many other players can affect your Alignment. This could end up being a viable strategy and it's super strange and non-obvious, so let's not do that! Tech seems like the way to go.

yeah, yuck. Tech it is.

Sounds good! We'll move on to adjusting the Threads to include citizen flipping after this. Does "after this" mean before we move on to specific Policies or when we're done Policies overall?

I'm not sure. Either? I suppose after Policies overall makes sense intuitively, but if you think we need to get a scope of the Thread system again before we do the Policies, that could work. We could, of course, ultimately decide to leave out policies that relate to this (which doesn't have to exclude adding this element to threads).

Light points are a civilization-wide metric, which we're rewarding from a civilization-wide mechanic. But it feels like more of a mechanical stretch to dive down into the city-level mechanic without flavor to back it up. (Policies being civilization wide often dive down into city-level mechanics via flavor of the Policy being enacted.) The mechanics like this one (rewards at the Alignment tiers) which just work how they do because it provides mechanical interaction, usually stay closer to the level they originate at.

It's certainly not a strong opposition to doing this if changing citizens at the tiers helps us a lot, it just does feel different from the point dumps and other existing tier rewards. (Are there other rewards pre-LB?) I'd certainly be up for doing the citizen-flipping at the tiers, just figured I'd mention this difference!

Right. I understand the difference now. Yeah, I don't think the TW rewards really fit in with flipping, as you say. I could see it working flavor-wise if you have cities conquered by the Shadowspawn, and then saved, but that's kind of a different thing. I say leave as it is.

Yeah, I do agree, this mechanic seems to run counter to the flavor. Darkfriends were less common in the Borderlands - if anything maybe being attacked by Shadowspawn should flip citizens the other way? From Darkfriend to Light? That way Borderlander civs would tend more Light, which makes sense given the existing mechanics and the flavor. It's still possible to play a Shadow Borderlander civ, just a little uphill, which I think is ok.

Also agreed that it should affect Shadowspawn in general, not just during the TW.

Right. Borderlander civs might already be nominally light because of all the + X Light they'll be getting by constantly killing Shadowspawn.

Do you think we should take it a step further and go with SSp attacks/conquests pushing you further light? I suppose this could be tackled in the larger discussion on "game events/behavior" causing alignment shifts (below).

Linking the citizen flipping to diplomatic actions that the player can't control alone is a good call, otherwise such mechanics could be used as a factory for changing citizens and manufacturing Alignment, which we don't want. (Just to make sure - there are good reasons we don't want that, right? Impossible to balance the "fair" way of playing Alignment against it? (The "fair" way is definitely our preferred way, flavor and fun wise?) Any other reasons?)

Yes I agree that the "factory" approach wouldn't be desirable, and we'd like Alignment to end up "realistic." I think the flavor is a key part of it. I also think the Alignment system grew out of a few things. First, a desire to link a larger system to the LB, so the choice at the end wasn't wholly random. I suppose making it random or factory-like doesn't fight terribly with that. But second, it was to add some level of immersion, I'd say. As I recall, the threads were the first meaty thing we came up with for Alignment. Those are, fundamentally, just bonus-selection, but they are bonus selection that's supposed to be guided by some kind of morality or feeling of how your civ would behave. Anything we can do to keep people focused on that "moral choice" and not just the "mechanical choice" reinforces the immersible element of Alignment. I think that design priority should echo throughout the Alignment system, if possible.

We have discussed playstyle being linked to Alignment before. Or at least I think we have, going off what I remember. I think we decided against it, for a couple of reasons. Civilization-the-game-wise we didn't want to preclude certain ways of playing the game from being Light or Shadow. We liked the idea of holy Light warmongers or peaceful Culture-y Shadow civs being doable.

Mechanically, we wanted Alignment to remain secret until the actual start of the LB. And if certain playstyles encouraged a certain Alignment, then other players, particularly the human player, could use that information to make much more accurate guesses about other civs' Alignments.

I think these are excellent counterarguments, and I'm glad to be reminded of them. I'd say these would be reasons to keep the playstyle's share of the Alignment game relatively limited. warmongering (with razing) shouldn't mean you "are Shadow". It would just be one of several components that contribute to Shadowness. A ruthless warmonger might also be doing some things (to be determined [soon?]) that are logical playstyle choices that might actually be Light actions. Not sure what these would be, though.

In any case. Yes, playstyle shouldn't limit Alignment, nor should it telegraph Alignment. However, it's probably unlikely you'd see a lot of max-tier Light players that spent the whole game burning down cities and breaking treaties. They'd probably end up mid-tier or something.

These are certainly points to consider, but I wonder if we didn't have the perspective of how everything fits together then that we have more of now. If Alignment is completely agnostic of other gameplay mechanics, then it's inherently separated from them. If players have literally no way of even suspecting what Alignments the other civs in the game are likely to choose, then how do they choose their Alignment if their choice isn't forced by their own? Is that essentially random (and save-scumming encouraging!) choice good for the game?

Yes, I agree. I think Alignment, like T'a'r, was originally proposed as a kind of transparency we'd layer on top of the existing mechanics. I know I didn't want either to be "a big deal," in that they'd redefine the whole game. I still feel that way, broadly, but the effect of that approach was that those systems are a little disjointed, and thus, pointless. I think we've woven T'a'r back into the fold a bit, and it feels appropriate to do the same with Alignment.

Further, the flavor for certain types of actions, particularly the ones you've picked out in your suggestions, definitely has an element of Alignment to it. Conquering and razing a city full of people is a relatively evil thing to do. Being a global warmonger that conquers anyone who can't defend themselves... actually sort of sounds like Artur Hawkwing, and he's not particularly evil. (I'm writing as I'm thinking here.)

BNW does have some relationships like this. Investing in Culture output is less rewarding if you're playing Wide, because of how Policy costs increase with city count. Being a warmonger throughout the whole game also doesn't co-operate well with the Cultural Victory, because of how Happiness is often used to help the Culture mechanics. The tech tree is laid out such that the more "developmental" technologies aren't the same as the military ones - so being a warmonger usually means you'll be outpaced in tech by an equally resource-rich rival who isn't as warmonger-y.

I'm not sure, really. I can see really good arguments both ways. Does any inspiration push you more one way or the other?

I see arguments both ways, too. I suppose I'm landing on the "allow these actions to control Alignment, but only moderately." Finding the balance there will be tricky. Your examples of similar systems in BNW are good ones, though I do think this goes a little bit further than that. I think the important thing, regardless of the actual mechanics, is to make the Alignment consequences of the players actions both feel "real", but at the same not, not feel "constraining." They should be somewhat impact, but I don't really want players who have an early game war shrugging their shoulder's and feeling like they "have" to play Shadow, nor do we want peaceful players sort of assuming they "have" to play Light. This should be the case even with he aforementioned Borderlanders. A BLander civ who chooses the "right" Threads (and later, forsaken, quests, etc.) should feel very empowered to be a Shadow civ, despite the push their map position might make towards Light.

I'm not really commenting on your specific suggestions here, more trying to work out if we want certain playstyles to be Shadow-Y and others to be Light-y. What we're talking about in the quote block above this - Borderlander civs being more likely to be Light - is another example of that.

sure, that's fine. When shall we revisit this, though? Post-policies or after we wrap up this mini Alignment discussion here?

Also, interesting to note that, had we gone with Controlled vs. Aggressive, this aspect could have provided us with some Policy options - i.e. Diplomatic choices yield less Alignment change (or more), for instance. Still could happen, I suppose ("Light In-Game Actions provide double Alignment. Shadow In-Game actions provide half Shadow"), though that might kill the immersion anyway.

I thought CSes chose their Alignment for the LB based on the accrual of Alignment leaning from their allies over the course of the game? We did discuss the possibility of having some CSes tend naturally one way or the other and I think were relatively in favor of it?

Yeah, I guess you're right. I hadn't reviewed all that. Not sure why I assumed they were Light-until-proven-otherwise. I think stedding are, though, right?

Once we bring in any targeted mechanics like trade routes though, players can use that to deduce where the pressure is coming from. (Trade route ends, pressure drops, that tells you something about the city at the other end.)

Letting pressure work from a larger distance could go a ways to eliminating the neighbor problem, but I still think external pressure will let a sensible human player work out quite a bit about their neighbors' Alignments. There will always be a difference you can work out based on city count and proximity to your own cities that helps with that.

I mention above that having ways of guessing at other players' Alignments can be advantageous, but I feel like this one is a bit too math-based for it to be fun for the player. They'd need to do a lot of distance calculations and such to play optimally, which is made possible but frustrating by the way CiV is laid out, which isn't a good combo when it might be mechanically advantageous for the player. CiV also tends to encourage breaking down the components of such pressure for the player so they they know how to manage it. ("All of this pressure is coming from having a shared path with the Aiel, so I'll adopt the Seanchan's Path instead!" is something the player will want to do.)

totally agree. I feel like people will feel compelled to decrypt all of this, and get to the bottom of who is what Alignment. And that spelunking is not particularly fun. I think I'd prefer the clues to be embedded elsewhere in the game. So, no to trade route and influence stuff, then.

I'm not sure what to suggest in its place though. It makes me think we should make it more internal, somehow hinged on the actions of the player. That, or allow for more information leakage about foreign Alignment, which would let us use a lot more mechanics here.

I think the kinds of things we're already working with here (playstyle stuff) might be enough.

As far as leakage, in general I prefer the "airtight" approach for most of the game (barring deduction and such), but perhaps in the later stages of the pre-LB game, we could loosen things a little and let some info out?

Also, I do wonder about Questioners' "fun" factor. Will it be fun to send the Questioners to other civs? Because of the Alignment secrecy, you won't know how effective they're being and won't see enemy ones to "fight" in any way. Will it be busywork sending them all over the globe to affect other civs that are really far away?

This is a good question. I'd hoped to have some time to posit some ideas to how we might make this a little more fun. I do think perhaps it is time that we briefly dive back into the Questioners' functionality in order to make them a little more fun. What could we change? Use them sort of like CiVI spies? Make them "embed" within a city and do stuff? The Faith bonus was what we originally came up with, but that's only valuable if you care about Faith (and also not that fun).

EDIT
OK, so thought about this a little bit. I do think one of the "problems" we're having is that the flavor of Questioner means a whole lot more than what we're having them do.

Shouldn't a Questioner be a kind of mix between a prophet/missionary/herald and a Spy? Shouldn't they provide some information for the owner? I think intuitively, it seems like they should be "up to something" beyond just flipping some Alignment in a city. So, a few ideas.

What if, throughout the course of the game, questioners gradually began to reveal more information when used in Foreign cities. So, at New Tongue (unlock), they tell you nothing. In era, say, six, a tech upgrade makes them reveal whether or not they were effective, and perhaps even how effective [thought possibly not that far] ("this Questioner converted citizens" or "this Questioner found the population rather uncooperative"), but saying nothing about "direction" (Light/shadow). This way, civs could begin to target their use of Questioners on places where they will matter, and also begin to divine actual alignment.

Then, say, around era 8, they might then reveal "direction" ("This Questioner showed many followers of the Dark One the true value of the Light", etc.). Though, doing this, we'd probably not want to show "how much," else that might just give away actual Alignment of a civ too much.

I guess I'm starting to think that some telegraphing towards the late-game might be essential in order to make the Alignment system fun. And this would only be happening for civs that really "dive in" and take advantage of it.

Also, these would be an imperfect metric in isolation - a single city might have an alignment way out of whack with the civ in general. How do you know that city isn't Shadow only because another Shadow civ is tainting it?

Anyways, that's one idea. An imperfect one, certainly.

Another possibility that could coexist with the above, or not, is of Questioner's providing "lasting" information on a city, or at least the Alignment-related actions of that city. For instance, for X turns after using a Questioner, you are told when Alignment-related things happen in that city, like, another Questioner being used. This could possibly even be something like "The Shadow has corrupted <City>", which would leave it ambiguous as to whether the Alignment of the civ shifted (and the citizens followed), or a different civ hit them with a Questioner. In a sense, the Questioner would sort of be "stationed" in the city for a certain number of turns, providing "Intrigue" like an EaE.

These two ideas don't really offer much for using them in home cities, though. The show-whether-effective thing is obviously moot, since you already know all that. The recurring-information is also largely pointless, and you presumably will be told if and when your city's Alignment is changed.

I suppose it could provide some info about who has been messing with your Alignment, but I'm not sure that's the kind of info we should be giving out.

I wish there was a way to make local Questioners feels more "Questerioner-ey" and give them more depth. On the other hand, the defensive use of Q's is the one that's not as much in question, since it's more obviously useful. Not quite as much fun potential, though.

Here's a drastic, weird idea that is sort of on a different wavelength: what if one Questioner worked on both a Foreign city and a domestic city? Thing of each Q as having two "charges." So, either Questioner "triggered" in the city that produced it when it was produced (and then goes on to interact internationally), or else, nothing happens when one is produced, but when it is expended in a foreign city, it is also expended in the home city.

The idea here is to set up a system that basically makes you send them at your neighbors. If you want to defend your own city, you have to send it somewhere else as well. There's something cool about it

There are also some problems with it (aside from the simple absurdity). First, it might just result in people spamming pointless bordertowns with Questioners, which requires the other civ to defend them against their own, who then just send at your own bordertowns... endless zero-sum war and all that. Second, it doesn't include much provisions for producing something in one city (with lots of production) and then defending another one of your cities... Unless you could use them internally, but you don't get the double-payout.

I dunno, bizarre idea. Just trying to encourage interaction. This probably goes too far, though.

Other weird spitball - Questioners as viewable in T'a'r? Probably too powerful. Also, flavor-nonsense.

Ok, that's where I stop!

/EDIT

Sorry, I wasn't very clear! I was suggesting the inverse of this relationship. Yes, as civs ascend through the Alignment tiers, the new citizens that are born in their cities will follow a progression that leans further toward the Alignment they are tending towards. (The more Light you get, the higher proportion of your new citizens are Light.)

I was suggesting that when you get to a new Light tier, we flip some citizens to be Darkfriends. (And vice versa.) This "fights back" against your changing Alignment, meaning you'd need to use more Questioners as you got to higher tiers to be able to keep the cities balanced (since higher tiers have more precarious balanced layouts).

hmmmm , I understand. I'm not sure that'll "feel" right, though. I can see that driving up demand for Q's, but, again, is that demand "fun"? Seems more like tedious maintenance (moreso than normal).

Unrelated to that, totally agree that sometimes foreign Alignment tampering will be welcome! That's definitely something that's a good feature of the system, IMO. You're encouraged to use Questioners on other civs because it makes them more likely to choose the same Alignment as you in the LB, to an extent. (And could elect specifically to *not* do that if your objective were to end up on the opposite side from a given civ.)

right.

Being out of balance will tend to happen right after the civ goes up to a new tier. The ratio of citizens that meant balanced on their previous tier is, on their new tier, unbalanced in the opposite direction. (If they have risen to Light 4, what was balanced on Light 3 is now unbalanced toward Shadow.)

true!

The New Tongue sounds good! We want it to be generally low-ish altitude, I think, since the endgame channeling/LB/Alignment stuff ends up on the bottom of the tree at the end.

I've updated the Editor tree in Dropbox!

agreed!

 

[S3rgeus]

But yeah, the "breadth" vs "specific" benefits of culture (and Prestige, I think getting something out of your Prestige might be even neater, since that really does *nothing* for you at all if you aren't playing for the Culture VC) is an important consideration. I see what you mean, that some of the stuff might end up kind of useless, especially if we target very specific mechanics (e.g. t'a'r dominance). But on the other hand, if we have it do <thing>, then we have the problem where it'd be totally useless to *most* players - only being useful for the subset of players who have/want a strong Culture but *won't* be playing for the Culture VC *and* want to excel at that <thing>. To me, providing bonuses to things that are generally useful - faith, gold, production, etc. - make the tree rather attractive, even if there's a "weird" one in there.

The other thing, is if it were Gold or something, then it'd feel like it should be a part of the Wealth tree. (etc.). This way, the culture connection is the most "present" in the tree.

Ok, sounds good! If we provide some more general bonuses that will be applicable to most civs on all of the Policies, then we'll do our best to avoid the problem where it isn't specialized enough to be useful.

I guess I feel like the "burden of proof" falls on why we should *change* it, not why it should stay. Science is one of the game's central mechanics, and all of those central mechanics (except for production and happiness, though in some ways Unity and Ambition are those) have trees - certainly all of the VCs of BNW at least. So I don't see a need to change that just because it's "too good." If it's too good, we can make it less good, or the other trees better. I think people will want there to be a science tree, and would expect it. That said, I'm fine with modifying it - if we split Rationalism between the two halfs, and the policies we add in replacement are tangentially related (i.e. not "straight line science",), that's definitely fine with me. The question what those two haves are, though (in terms of what makes them distinct) still remains, though!

Agreed, overall I think having a Science-related tree is the best approach, I just wanted to air the possibility of not having one in case that struck any chords!

so do you like the "make science work for you" thing, or does Science already do that enough? It sounds like you enjoy the Channeling-related system the best.

I think Science does already do quite a lot of that for you, since it unlocks ways to be better at most of the game's mechanics. I would prefer the channeling approach to that, but there's room for the two to work together, which I'll go into below.

yeah, I think I can get on board with this, especially once we open up "channeling" to include things that aren't necessarily combat-related. And we can, as you say, pull in one (or even two) policies from Rationalism as well, perhaps with some modifications.

Is it possible we could also somewhat incorporate the "make science work for you" element as well into this tree? The concern I have is just that it'll be a "if you have channelers, choose X, if not, choose Y," which feels somewhat bland from a player experience perspective, similar to the "if X, choose Naval branch" situation.

i do think the "worldly" side would be the one that makes the most sense for somebody pursuing a science VC - and maybe we can include a policy that is more direct in that regard. The channeling side should enable the VC as well, I suppose, if you have a lot of channeling stuff, but I'd also like to see it take on a slightly different *purpose* as well - not just "another way to be good at science," but "another way to use science" as well. This is of course how the Creativity tree is working, but also how the Politics tree seems to work as well - true, both sides help you towards diplo, but you also get other peripheral benefits along the way.

I'm thinking it will mostly be an "if you have channelers, choose X, if not, choose Y". Related to what we were saying about the naval branches before that that dichotomy isn't necessarily a problem. Particularly for channeling, I'd say, where the player has mostly made that choice themselves, rather than being forced by their map position or other external factors.

That doesn't mean we can't have it have some stuff for "make Science work for you", though I think we'd do that via channeling mechanics, if we go this way. (Example: "Weaves Research: Channeling units you control gain X EXP every time you research a technology.")

I'm thinking that having the channeling branch be "another way to be good at science" is actually what we want. But looking at what you've mentioned about Politics, I think I'm just thinking about the phrasing differently and we're mostly on the same page. Such a channeling branch would totally have different fringe benefits from its opposition branch, and I'd say both branches should help toward the common goal of being "better at Science" - much like Politics's two sides make you better at Diplo in different ways.

I'm thinking a channeling branch in Scholarship is my preferred option at the moment. Do we have any others that we haven't considered yet, that might compete with a more traditional Science branch opposition? A bookish Ogier branch? One about uncovering AoL secrets?

 

[S3rgeus]

ok, let's tentatively go with that then.

A lot of our decisions from this stage aren't really being summary-ized because they're not final yet, just stepping stones for the next part of the discussion. Jumping forward a bit, that makes me think we should go on to specific Policies before we sojourn to Threads so that these decisions are fresh in our minds!

yeah, having a choice of two threads is an interesting idea. It's possible it's too awesome, though, and not just necessarily only an alignment perspective - it gives an extra four choices. It'll also churn through our threads. We spoke earlier about having an extra choice on each thread (not sure if that was in this conversation, or with Uniques), and that could work as well - but is a rather large amount of work, since we'd have to calibrate each thread for that.

I feel like what it needs might not be realistic from a gameplay perspective - actual fine-control of the alignment yield you get from a thread. Like, you can choose to boost or lower the alignment you get from a thread on a case-by-case basis. This seems very clunky and complex on an interface level though, and also might be "abused" in that it would become the go-to for people who may not care about the alignment itself that much - it'd give them a kind of "free reign" on whichever non-alignment yield they want from their threads.

What about a Policy that adds a new but identical option to all Threads that simply generates Medium of the opposite to your current Alignment? If you're Light, "Forsake Your Duty: Medium +Shadow", if you're Shadow "Let the Creator decide: Medium +Light". I struggle to find a universally "good" way to say "refuse to decide" to generate +Light for the Shadow option. (Maybe each Thread could provide unique flavor text, even if the yield is always the same.)

Is that too strong as well though? And it makes Threads extremely easy to avoid as an Alignment source overall.

An extra choice that's unique to each Thread could work, though it is a lot of work for us. (And continues to be as we add new Threads.)

As for boosting or lowering the Alignment yield on a case by case basis, what if we added the capability to make Thread choices but receive only X% of that choice's Alignment in exchange for receiving only X% of the non-Alignment bonus. (Only a viable option for choices that can be portioned somehow - you can't give someone X% of a single citizen.)

Cool. Agreed on Light v Shadow! We'll need to come up with some cool names eventually... let's see how the policies stack up, I suppose.

Sounds good!

No, I've been essentially advocating free gov of any type since (near) the beginning. The thing that was too strong was giving the civ free govs in their first X cities. I had a problem with giving multiple LPs-worth of govs from one policy. "any type" is powerful, but not unbalancingly so.

Oh, I see! I totally missed that, sorry.

yes, though I don't think first Y cities is likely to work.

Not even if Y is 2 maybe?

ok, good. Besides, happiness bonuses there would make that sort of a wide policy...

Good point!

Hmmm, I do see what you mean. However, I think "civ with some access to water" is much more common than "totally naval civ" such that we're actually "serving" more players by going with the bonus+some-coastal than all-in-naval branches (I'd say landlocked civs are less common than civs that are fully-coastal and thus definitely would want such a branch).

The flip side of this is if the ambition branch is "all in on navy", then it's likely going to have a few policies that make it of little interest to many civs - essentially proving only one real "wide option" (the left side) I feel like this is a little bit less a problem for the wealth tree, if we went with that having a naval branch, since that's obviously a more "specialty" branch.

I feel like BNW has several policies spread throughout that don't apply to certain map situations or game situations (even on a "normal" map). Many civs have few land caravans by the time commerce unlocks, it seems. Several tall civs might be ignoring wonder production for the most part. I know science civs often have no possible or willing partners for research agreements, so that one is often moot as well. A naval civ that isn't going for culture (i.e. England or something) has little interest in Hidden Antiquity sites. Those are just off the top of my head. So, not exactly the same thing, but similar, I'd say. In any case, not totally damning if there's one policy that's a little "off," maybe.

This is all very true - a complete commitment to naval is much less common than just having access to bodies of water on most map types. And also true about the BNW Policies, the caravans one is particularly weakened by maps like Archipelago! And lacking an alternative way to play Wide, when we *have* provided an alternative way to play Tall isn't cool.

I'm convinced we shouldn't have a fully committed naval branch for Ambition then!

I do think we should try to find a way to fuse them somehow. Is there a way to make some policies that create benefits that are somehow broad in a way that's "mutually exclusive," in that it'd likely help a coastal civ AND a landlocked civ, without making a civ with both kinds of cities too powerful?

a bonus-resources-yield-production option might do something similar to the coastal-cities-production policy, but that'd make it all cities much better, which is probably too good. Also, we could do stuff like "+X <Yield> to coastal cities or cities with no access to water" to somehow capture both kinds of extreme conditions.The flavor for that one would be tricky, though.

Ideas?

Agreed about that flavor difficulty, it's difficult to see how we'd connect those up! Based on what you mentioned above, it seems like the best way to fuse these would be to have one or two Policies that are expansionist via mechanics that work with the coastal/bodies of water mechanics. The presence of that Policy doesn't necessarily make the branch non-competitive in as many situations as I'd originally feared!

Yeah, I find this one tough. We certainly could go with land/sea here and just move on to luxury/bonus only for Ambition. I think the one issue with that is that it wouldn't be totally land/sea, since there'd be *naval* stuff as well that isn't totally gold-related. Maybe that's fine, since landsnekts aren't totally gold related (though I suppose they are, and they're certainly not dom-related). I guess it just compromises the "balance or purpose" of the branches a little bit. Not terrible, though, and better here than elsewhere.

I guess the question here is "what else would we do?" Are there any other competing possibilities for wealth. The idea of "make your gold work for you" doesn't make much sense, since that's what gold already does...

I think without the more naval focus option in Ambition above, we need the more focused naval Policies to live somewhere, so Wealth seems like a good place for it! We'll be retaining the general structure of the Commerce tree from BNW, but separating the naval parts so that the *other* branch might be more competitive for players who don't have ocean access, whereas in BNW you'd mostly ignore the Commerce tree in that case!

I'd say we could make the more naval-y parts to be Gold related, since we're putting them into the Wealth tree. For example, it could be as simple as "Dockyard Financing: You can purchase naval units for X% less Gold." - both very naval-y and Gold-y.

Yeah, in coming up with my trees, I kept coming back to the Bayle Doman "River Boat Traders" idea, wanting to stick it in somewhere. I tended to think of doing so as it related to sea trade, since it was hard to come up with those names, but obviously that didn't make sense. I hadn't considered doing this "weird" of a mechanic at this stage.

We can talk about it later, but as I've thought about this, there are a few ways this could work:

- land caravans that travel along a river have extended range or yields (maybe this already happens?)
- trade ships can travel "on land", assuming those cities are connected by river (kind of limited?)
- trade ships can travel "on land" as long as there is some water in between them
- trade ships by sea can then travel "inland" to landlocked or inaccessible cities that are connected to the ocean by a river

what do you think?

I like the idea of combining both 2 and 4 - those abilities could be expressed together as "trade ships can travel along rivers". That captures the flavor the best to me.


And now I'm out of time, but I've at least finished the previous "round" so I'll be back tomorrow for more!