S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

counterpoint · Dec 16, 2014

S3rgeus said:
Woah! I had no idea there were so many FY nations to choose from. Then yeah, seems like we've not nearly as short on names as I thought! Having only a small number of Stedding on a given map works for me then.

Cool. Agreed.

I think most of those FY nations are just footnotes - we know essentially nothing about them.

S3rgeus said:
I do kinda love this idea. (It also gives us Aridhol back as a CS name.) This is pretty awesome. Yeah, let's do it!

great.

S3rgeus said:
This distribution of bonuses sounds good to me - unique Stedding-y stuff at Friends and CS bonuses (determined by Stump outcome) at Ally. That prevents Stedding from being "dead space" to certain players.

good. good.

S3rgeus said:
Interesting stuff. I thought that some of the groves in some nations' capital cities used to be Stedding? Any channeling works there in the current day of the Westlands.

OK, I think you're mistaken on the Groves. The Groves (the ones not in stedding, that is) were planted to help the Stonemasons fight off the Longing - basically, give them a place to hang out with trees while they were away with home. They have no anti-magical properties. I don't think there are any former-stedding in any cities.

S3rgeus said:
About razing, CiV doesn't allow capital cities (even of CSes) to be razed. We can change that, but it messes with the consistency of counting how many civs were in a given game. (And you can't liberate a razed city.) There are some technical shenanigans in the way Firaxis has done player slots/counts that requires all original capitals remain in the game indefinitely. I might be able to "fix" that, but it lies close to the sections of PreGame code that we can't modify that effectively (because it loads before the mod does). Just a note that this may be significantly more work that it looks (and may be impossible, depending on what Firaxis have done behind the scenes).

We could make it so that Stedding are completely unconquerable? We'd have to make them non-miltaristic then (but that's largely accurate anyway), otherwise they're an unkillable thorn in your side if they take a disliking to you.

A big part of why civs weren't capturing Stedding for strategic value may have been the channeling set up in the Westlands though. There were very few channelers directly involved in wars, so having defensible positions where channeling didn't work wasn't as important. Given our usage of combat-related female channelers, Seanchan (the continent) is probably a better analog for our typical usage of Stedding. And given the Ogier are part of the Seanchan army, I'm assuming they integrated into the empire via cities and such?

However, maybe the Westlands' lack of channeling in war answers our question. Civilizations won't have that much Spark to build *loads* of channeling units. Maybe it's fine that civs can capture lands where channeling doesn't work? Attackers then have to use old fashioned units, which will presumably make up the bulk of a military-leaning civilization's army anyway?

Or maybe the channeling-blocking effect slowly dissipates after the Stedding is captured? It could disappear one tile at a time every few turns?

I've been thinking about this alot, and I think I may have an interesting solution. First off, you make a good point about the anti-razing thing. That is an obvious Problem. I think a way to make this work is by tweaking how Stedding operate - which makes them flavorfully distinct from other CSs that makes invading them really, really stupid.

1) Military
- Stedding are essentially non-military, except in self-defense.
- A Allied Stedding will *not* go to war with its allies enemies. The enemy must deliberately declare war on the stedding - probably this "enemy" can't move into the stedding without a DoW while fighting a war with the stedding's ally though.
- Dragonsworn will not attack the stedding.
- Shadowspawn will, and frequently do, attack the steddings.
- Each steading will have a couple units on hand for defense. These are very powerful units - perhaps the strongest melee units in the game.

2) Diplomatic
- if you attack a stedding, *every stedding on the map declares war on you* and will aggressively pursue that war, likely gaining some "Free" units."
- If you attack a stedding, the steddings will likely make a proclamation at the next stump that is quite damaging and unrefusable - embargos, prestige-hits, etc.
- If you attack a stedding, you receive a massive diplo hit with other civs and the White Tower.
- Potentially, if you attack a stedding, any stedding will request its allies declare war on you - ceasing to be allied with that civ if they refuse.

3) Rewards/Consequences
- If you can take over a stedding, the anti-magic field does indeed stay intact.
- All Stedding are perpetually at war with you until the city is Liberated (perhaps it can be voluntarily liberated by the civ).

What do you think? To me, that seems realistic. Its kind of an international incident to mess with the Ogier,b ut it is possible, and could be worthwhile in very specific warmongering cases. The Seanchan may indeed be this case - its unclear whether or not they took over the Stedding or somehow forged an alliance with them.

What do you think?

S3rgeus said:
I see, so the High King isn't receiving a significant relative bonus? I think it would be cool if it made that player noticeably better, if they were considered in isolation (that way it's fun when you're High King), but if the bonuses he gives out also keep the other civs on par, a global boost becomes a global wash. (Except for the one poor guy who got left out.) That's the idea?

Right. I do think being the HK should be "better" than the bonuses received by other civs, but not game-breakingly better. Something like twice the benefit, maybe - and the power to control other people's bonuses.

S3rgeus said:
I like the multiple objectives (the "first to any of the above") approach! That lets players create a true race for the High Kingship without forcing players to play against their chosen strategy. Awesome, let's do that. Shall we make a list of the conditions we're thinking for this? I'll do it in my next post if you like.

Yeah, great. I'm kind of out of time for now, though. Any thoughts on what kinds of conditions could work well?

S3rgeus · Dec 17, 2014

counterpoint said:
Sorry for the delay. I was really hoping to get the posts moving quickly - we'll never finish at this rate! - but I got sorta stuck trying to dream up a bunch of resolutions.... Anyways, here are my responses.

I should be apologizing, my last post took like 5 days! Faster this time!

counterpoint said:
right. right. Well, do you ultimately think this is worth doing, or too problematic? Maybe it's only wonders, then? Not cultural buildings? Is that too awesome?

Given that Ramses' UA revolves around that wonder production bonus (and that's only ancient wonders, right?), it's quite powerful. Maybe we could even pare it down to just wonders with culture yield? (Though that's less useful across the board.) We can probably calibrate this as needed when the mod is playable though. Adding or removing any of these components (just wonders with culture yields, just wonders, and wonders + culture buildings) are all relatively easily substituted in once the mission itself is in place.

counterpoint said:
Oh yeah, I'm solidly King on CiV but... CIV, I still have yet to win a single game on warlord... I think I simply don't understand the mechanics well enough.

I started a game on Emperor on CiV a while ago (haven't finished it) and it's been very difficult! I'm definitely not winning at the moment, but I do have suspicions about being able to overtake the AI by the end.

counterpoint said:
I'm liking how in a relatively short time we're developing mechanics that make the WT feel unique and highly important to the game - without necessarily being the center of it.

Yeah, definitely.

counterpoint said:
Regarding the frequency, I think maybe we go with a staggered approach, not unlike the CSs (at least as I perceive them). Maybe they don't all have requests out at once, but maybe every 10 turns a different Ajah will through out a request. And yes, a powerful ajah might have a chance to throw out another before their first one is up. What if it's simply a function of their % of control? Like, every 10 turns a Quest pops up, and whose quest it is is randomly determined - if the Ajah is 40% red, the quest has a 40% chance of being a Red quest. Is that too avalanchey, though? Red gets more powerful, which makes it more powerful... Certainly, we'd need a minimum and maximum odds for any one ajah (no matter how wimpy the yellow got, they'd always have a 10% chance, or something). Thoughts?

I believe that CSes cap out at 3 active quests at a time. Some quests are global objectives (finish the most techs in 30 turns) and are visible to all players. Some are targeted and only available to a single player or subset of all players (they want your religion). So given that every player has some ongoing targeted quests with most CSes at a given time and most CSes have at least one "global" quest running at a time, most individual CSes will have something like numPlayers * 0.75 + 1 (75% = most) quests stored and running at once. (Direct example, on a huge map, that's about 9 active quests.) I would think Tar Valon should be more quest-prolific than most other CSes.

So, from a single player's perspective, I would expect to see up to 6 quests running at once from Tar Valon (double a standard CS). A high volume of quests will also result in more fluctuating influence within the Tower - one Ajah is less likely to pull ahead when many different quests are being completed relatively often.

I agree that minimum and maximum odds for each Ajah giving out a new quest makes sense in a situation where Tar Valon only gives out a quest every X turns, so an Ajah must be chosen for that quest to come from. What if each Ajah effectively acted as an independent source of quests? The rate at which they accrue influence genuinely reflects how much people want to/can complete their quests. If we have a "baseline" quest rate (every 10 turns say) that each Ajah gives out a quest at (likely randomized a bit, so they aren't all giving them out at the same time) then it's impossible to be "starved" for quests for a specific Ajah. An Ajah becoming extremely influential could boost the rate they give out quests, but other Ajahs are then unaffected.

Can there be quests given out by the Amyrlin directly? Could be interesting if she had her own pool of quests to draw from as well as that of her original Ajah.

counterpoint said:
One additional question - would these quests run throughout the whole game? Only once the WT is discovered by a given civ? Do they start at one era in particular?

I think we can work similarly to CSes - quests start at the beginning of the game, global quests are dispatched and their progress tracked independently of who the city has met, and targeted quests are only given to players that have met the city. We discussed a relatively early game tech previously that causes the player to meet Tar Valon (regardless of map placement) so even distant players shouldn't be without Ajah influence for too long.

counterpoint said:
I'm thinking on this and I think it may not make sense to have the "Spectrum" used in CSs apply to ajahs. For a few reasons:

1) No ajah will ever independently declare war on a civ (right?)
2) It's hard to think of things that would antagonize the ajahs. Sure, Reds are easy - use male channelers. But, what would piss off the whites? Maybe the reds could be an exception.

I do think the *tower* itself should have the spectrum. How much the tower likes you should be, in part, an aggregate of your Ajah influence, as you say, but it should also include some other factors, IMO:

1) Social Policies, Ideology, etc.
2) Your Alignment
3) Your use of Male channelers (probably always frowned upon
4) Direct antagonism of Aes Sedai units
5) Diplomatic actions
6) Gifts to the tower, aggregate of Ajah influence, etc.

I don't necessarily think Tower opinion itself should "rest at zero" like CSs. I do think, however, that some of the individual items above *would* rest at zero. If you antagonize an AS, for example, the ill will for that might slowly go away over time.

This all sounds good to me. I don't think Ajahs can ever declare war independently, I think the Tower tries to always present a united outward front, whatever their internal squabbles (though not always with complete success, for the majority of history they were externally viewed as a single entity with unified goals). Interesting related question though: does the Tower declare war of its own accord?

Completely agree on all of the other factors that should affect the Tower's opinion of a given civ. I like the distinction here too - where the Tower's overall opinion of a civ (which includes the factors you listed) can become negative, while influence with an Ajah is an always-positive stat.

I think we can modify transient ill will (like attacking a Sister once) through modifiers to the player's Ajah influence actions. If you attack an Aes Sedai and then complete a quest for the Greens that would normally have given you 20 influence, it gives you 15 instead (thin air numbers). In fact, the Tower's overall opinion of a civilization could also act as a modifier to all of that civilization's influence gains. That makes it difficult for a civilization that the Tower hates to become overly influential with its Ajahs, which makes sense.

counterpoint said:
Additionally, I *do* think Ajah influence should slowly decrease. You can't just make nice with the Greens in Era 2 and sit on it forever. But I don't think it would ever go negative, right?

Interesting, agreed that it wouldn't go negative, but I'm not sure if the player's influence ever needs to decrease like normal CS's. Influence that you already have is inherently devalued by other players accruing influence, even if your underlying number value doesn't change. (You are the only player with influence with the Reds and you have 10 points: 100%. Another player gains 10 influence with the Reds: you're now at 50% with no change in underlying points.) As the game goes on, if influence doesn't decay, it becomes more and more difficult to suddenly swing support of one Ajah toward or away from any given player. (Because all total everyone has 700 influence, say, with the Blues and you gaining 50 all at once makes a lot less difference than it did when there was only 100 influence total.) I think this is what we want, where the Ajahs stick by their convictions of who they believe to be worthwhile.

counterpoint said:
Can you think of lots of specific occasions for and reasons for including actions that deliberately antagonize an ajah? Say, the Blue?

I definitely can't think of a lot off hand. For the Blues, I'd say acting against the Dragon would cost influence with them. (Doesn't mesh well in a game where the Blue Ajah is Shadow-y.) I would think thought that you could lose influence with any Ajahs you have influence with through some of the actions you outlined above. Choosing the Oppression Ideology should cost a civilization a decent chunk of its influence with all of the Ajahs it's got points with.

counterpoint said:
Right, I agree, then. Interesting how these mechanics will all tie together. Remember, the WT allocates # of AS partially based on how Awesome and Important a civ is.... interested to see the ebb and flow this creates - a civ becomes prominent, gets more attention from the WT, pisses off the WT, loses influence and loses global importance, becomes less prominent...

Hopefully it will work that way, that's very flavorfully White Tower!

counterpoint said:
These are all cool ideas. I have no issue with them having trade routes, but I will say that that kind of thing isn't really readily-available info to the players, though? If we have the WT behave like a civ (maybe they ARE a civ), there's less transparency in their operations, right? Is that ok?

We can announce Tar Valon trade routes if we want to make them more visible. (Notification that says: Tar Valon has established a trade route with your city of WhiteBridge.) I think keeping the Tower as a CS is still useful - we don't have to exclude irrelevant portions of the major civ AI that way, and I think, despite their influence, their relatively small land area and general historical characteristics are more city-state-ish. Especially since we're not setting them up as a player that is capable of winning the game, which is one of the big distinctions for major civs.

counterpoint said:
that makes a lot of sense, mechanically. Is this info available to the player?

I think the player can't see the numbers, but has a graphical representation of the Ajahs' influences and the breakdown of influence per civ within each Ajah. Conceptually like the following graph (with no axes):

Spoiler :

counterpoint said:
So when would the Black quests start popping up? The era before Dragon? Two eras before?

At first I was thinking one era before the Dragon, but two eras might be better - it gives us more time to have multiple quests for a given player. The first few quests can be quite "secretive", whispers-style stuff, with the more flashy stuff closer to the Last Battle.

counterpoint said:
Is there any "struggle" going on, even under the covers, before those final eras before the LB?

I don't think so. It's too difficult to keep that completely internal and not make it too predictable and not too random.

counterpoint said:
I think most of those quests sound cool. Just to be clear, though, these are BA-specific? i.e., *not* the same as ones given from the Forsaken, etc.? Or should there be overlap there?

Interesting, I'd been just thinking of the Black Ajah. I think there can be some overlap between the Black Ajah and the Forsaken quests.

counterpoint said:
I kinda like the idea of the quests being kind of random, from a player perspective, but having some significant consequences. Like:

Pillage a civ's improvements
Pillage your *own* improvements
Let your own city starve
Demand tribute of a CS
give away a resource to another civ for no compensation
Disband a unit.

Stuff that seems sorta bad to do, without any obvious benefit, but it (somehow, in theory) benefits the Black Ajah/Forsaken.

Maybe the "bad for you" ones are the kinds of things not from the Black, but from the Chosen? I dunno, to me it just seems kinda flavorful - you're doing this crappy thing, and you *think* you'll get rewarded later. Also, it might be a way that attentive civs could tell who's going Shadow.

Awesome, I love this idea. Sounds really cool and really flavorful! This sounds like a good distinction between purely-Forsaken and purely-Black-Ajah quests, that the Forsaken ones ask civilizations to do things that are clearly not in their own best interests.

counterpoint said:
No, I don't think the BA can be measured "directly" against the others. It gives the others too big a head start, but alternatively might seem kind of cheap if it does happen - Green has been in charge for 4000 years and then suddenly, POOF, Black!

This is tricky, though. Quests make sense, but we have to make the Black taking over *very* challenging - probably relying on something like half (or more) of the attention paid to the tower being pro-Black (whether through one dominant civ, or several others). It shouldn't be very common, IMO.

One way to deal with this is to have the quests be 1) somewhat counterproductive (gain you enemies, waste your resources, etc.) and 2) the rewards not be so great in the short term - Turning the tower is the very definition of the "long con."

Hmmm... you're right to be suspicious of Shadow-players-equals-shadow-tower. I don't think shadow-leaning players automatically turn the tower Shadow. Remember, we like the idea of most of a civ's Aes Sedai *leaving* when the LB starts if they declare for the shadow.

I do kind of like the idea of each Ajah having a proportion of Shadow influence, though. Like, the Red is at 30%, the Blue at 90%, etc. The tower turns (or a black amyrlin is elected) when the majority of the Ajah's (i.e 4/7) or the majority of the total "power" (i.e., one dominant Ajah) goes Black. The question then remains as to how exaclty an individual Ajah goes Black... Hmmm... this is tricky.

I think the books show this kind of thing happening, when the Black almost took over. The Red (who, despite Elaida not being a DF, had a fair number of DFs in their ranks) led a coup for their own political reasons, but part of the reason they were success was through a kind of alliance with the White, who we could consider to be heavily Black, since one of their prominent members (Alvarin) got selected as Keeper.

I do think player's Alignment could have *some* effect. Of course, Alignment lowers the favor of the WT, right? But, pre-LB, if a Shadow-leaning player, who still has *some* AS allocation, repeatedly does quests for, and selects, the White Ajah, should not the White be skewed Shadow, somewhat?

counterpoint said:
Also, it does make intuitive sense that the stronger the Shadow becomes, the stronger the Black presence would be. So, by doing a lot of quests for the Chosen (i.e., not just the Black Ajah), the influence of the Black in the WT should increase, at least somewhat. So, intuitively it does appear to be the case that a game full of shadow players (who are presumably hanging out with the Chosen alot) would produce a more Blackish Tower - perhaps not enough to turn the Tower, though.

Creeping influence from a strong Shadow alignment into the strength of the Black Ajah makes sense. Like you've said, it shouldn't be the deciding factor in the Tower Turning, but having more Shadow players should give those players an inherent advantage more than just the aggregate of their contributions to the Black.

counterpoint said:
Regarding the Amyrlin, I wonder if it would be a once-per-era thing (World Era, that is). The Hall does a vote,a nd they select which Ajah will Raise an Amyrilin. Obviously, the dominant Ajah would have a high chance of being elected, but the truth is a majority would only really happen when Ajah's support candidates outside of their Ajah. Maybe a candidate is raised from the top three Ajahs in terms of influence? The others must vote for one of those three? How to determine which? Well, I suppose a lot of this could be pre-programmed predilections based on the alliances described in the books - Blue and Green, for example - as well as the rivalries (Blue/Red, most notably). OTherwise, I suppose there could be some "reaction" to the state of the world, though I know this would get complicated.

Once per era by World Era is nice and flexible - it won't always be a predictable, set turn number when the election happens. I would like to include a facility for elections more often in specific circumstances though. Is there a sequence of events that leads to an Amyrlin being deposed? I would think one of the endgame Shadow quests could involve assassinating the Amyrlin? (A new one would need to be elected shortly afterwards.)

Raising candidates from the top 3 Ajahs influence wise and then each Ajah voting between those 3 seems like a good internal selection mechanism. I don't think the players would ever see *how* the Amyrlin was elected in game though? Just which Ajah she came from and that the election *has happened*.

counterpoint said:
Of course, heavily Black ajahs would probably support each other.

What happens if the two most influential ajahs are, say, Blue and Green, who tend to be allied? Do they split the vote, allowing for the 3rd ajah to take control, or would they join forces and make an unbeatable block? The same goes for if two of the Top 3 Ajahs were Black - would they fight each other, or work together to keep the Light Amyrlin out?

I think all of this is tweakable enhancements to the Ajahs' voting AI once we have a playable mod. Once the systems are in place for all of the voting to take place and the Amyrlin be elected and all of its corresponding effects, making the AI make more intelligent voting decisions is an incremental improvement process. There will inevitably be strategies that we haven't considered and it's better to see how those shape up and have the AI act accordingly.

counterpoint said:
OK, in general I like this idea. I do like having some Edicts be Ajah based - eg., one specifically comes from the Red.

I think one way we can do this is to have, maybe, every second Edict be Ajah-chosen, while the others are Global. Or maybe there are more Ajah ones than global. In any case, I think it's too much to have 8 separate "streams" (i.e., one for the WT, and one for each Ajah) each doing Edicts on their own calendar, so there's a bunch going on at once.

Better, I think, is to just have it display an edict, and say "The White Ajah has passed an Edict through the Hall of the Tower!" or something. Maybe there's a % chance that an Edict will be global, and a % chance that one will be any one Ajah.

I do think they can be pretty frequent, though this might need to change with era - 10 turns in the early-ish game is really rather often. I think maybe we start with 20 or 30 turns, and then pick up the pace in later eras. That way, additionally, at the beginning only one would be in force at a time, but by the end you'd have 2-3, depending on how long they last and how much they overlap. Thoughts?

I should clarify, while there are Edicts associated with Ajahs, I figured the Tower would declare all Edicts as a single entity. Players would start to see the patterns over time, but I wasn't thinking we would attribute a given Edict to any Ajah in a visible way. "The Tower has issued an Edict: Heritage Catalog"

I definitely agree that, unlike quests which we're discussing above, there should be only one "stream" of Edicts from the Tower. I like the % chance of being global/individual Ajah at every "new Edict" interval. And ramping up the speed (every 20-30 turns at the beginning of the time, every 10 by the end) also sounds like a good plan.

counterpoint said:
I see your point. I'd say that the yeilds-over-time ones, etc., don't make sense as refusable. But some of the more immediate ones - Embargoes, for example - could maybe be.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Embargoes, forcing peace (this is a great prisoner's dilemma), Channeling Recruitment, and forcing hex ownership transfer are all really good candidates for refusable Edicts.

counterpoint said:
You mention that some might apply only to the allies of the Ajah.... I think that that might be getting too complex. Especially since some of these are sort of bad for certain players anyways. That said, I could be convinced of this if this kind of thing became the main benefit of Ajah affiliation.

Eh, I think I agree that it's too complex. There are a lot of feedback systems here, and it seems like this might open up avenues for accumulating way too much influence.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I like this one. I do wonder if there's a way to tweak it so it isn't just "same-as-the-WC-but-refusable." Like, some other element that is embargoed, as well, spark hit, etc.

I see what you mean. I'm not sure if we want to do Spark since Aes Sedai are the one channeling unit that doesn't consume Spark and a Tower Edict forbidding trade with your civilization won't affect your channeler birth rate. I think the association with Ajah influence distinguishes it from the WC a bit - refusing to Embargo the player costs you influence with the Tower, and just being the target presumably costs that player a lot of influence.

counterpoint said:
This are all cool. Question, though: continents aren't named, so how would we express that to the player? Why not make it global?

I didn't want to make them global so that Tar Valon could specifically target civs it did(n't) like. The continents are separated by their art style (the appearance of mountains/forests/terrain is different on different continents), and it generally lines up with players' conceptual idea of where the "continents" are. It's just occurred to me that it completely fails on non-continent-driven maps (like Lakes, Great Plains, Four Corners). Maybe Tar Valon can pick a hex and it works for a certain radius outwards?

counterpoint said:
Also, why would the tower create a drought? This seems like more of an unintended random consequence of the Bowl of Winds.

I think that if the Tower can create a boon of good crop for their allies, they should be able to do a similar-but-opposite effect to their enemies.

counterpoint said:
This one seems intense. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen, though. This is very likely to be refused I would imagine.

I'm not sure - I see the repercussions for refusal as being quite significant (otherwise civilizations will just refuse everything that isn't convenient). Not being able to build them for just 30 turns only really matters if you're at war right now (and need that extra punch to win) - otherwise it might be annoying, but something you can plan around.

counterpoint said:
Re: the culture players and the first one... That's tricky. I think that effect may not be in the spirit of the Edict, right? What we don't want is a player minmaxing this - when they see the edict pop up, change all your workers/specialist to maximize culture output... to maximize science. Not really what the White is going for, is it?

Maybe there's a different way to go about this. I mean, it could just be 10% of culture and 10% of science (not necessarily equivalent amounts), but it could also be something weirder. Having trouble thinking of a way to do this without disproportionately rewarding culture. I mean, maybe a little of that is fine - we'd just have to tweak it such that it's still more beneficial to actually have Science production than to get it through the backdoor culture method.

I see what you mean. I think 10% boost for science and -10% for culture works then? High culture means you lose more points-per-turn, and high science means you gain more points-per-turn.

counterpoint said:
re: the first one. You mean unused sites, then? Interesting. What about landmarks?

Yeah, unused sites. We can definitely have something for Landmarks - though that might be more Blue since it's GP-like?

counterpoint said:
I'm fine with these, though I do worry that we're hitting the brown=culture thing a little hard. Maybe they should have some science or some unrelated effects, as well. They aren't really "cultural," just more philosophical and historic.

Totally see what you mean!

counterpoint said:
Both are cool. Probably a Green Ajah unit. Would it be permanent?

I think so yeah. It would still contribute toward that civ's "Aes Sedai cap" but it would otherwise not affect their normal Aes Sedai gift schedule.

counterpoint said:
I like these. Not sure if Land Brokerage is refusable.... I do think Tile is better than city (in this case). Is the mediated treaty refusable? I mean, warmongers might not care about a diplo hit, so would they all just ignore it?

I think there's more than a diplo hit when you refuse a Tower Edict. How about inverting trade route yields for X turns after refusing an Edict? (Establisher gets receiver yields, receiver gets Establisher yields.) Warmongering civs are often lacking in cash since they're paying upkeep on units, so they couldn't just refuse at the drop of a hat.

So I think Mediated Treaty is refusable. But how refusable, exactly? I see two possibilities: war continues if either player refuses, or war continues only if both players refuse.

Knock on effects of the two configurations:

War if either refuses: Allows a single player with a powerful economy to avoid the Treaty and soak up the financial losses.

War if both refuse: This will almost never happen. Both sides would need to be economically powerful enough to soak up the refusal drawbacks and both sides would need to think they were going to win this war.

I think the former makes more sense overall.

S3rgeus · Dec 17, 2014

counterpoint said:
What about non-Asha'man channelers? Freed? "Male Channelers"? Would this affect the incidence of male channeler occurrence at all?

I'd say only Asha'man units are affected at all. They're our endgame all-powerful units, so being able to legislate against them specifically is what we want I think. I don't think we want to turn off civs' UUs like (like the Freed) and normally spawning Male Channelers are generally more of an obstacle than a help. Flavor-wise, you're preventing the Black Tower from recruiting, rather than stopping male channelers from gaining their powers.

counterpoint said:
Both cool, though I think "Academies" might be the appropriate in-flavor word.

That's the one! Couldn't think of it when I was writing.

counterpoint said:
I'm honestly not sure if I agree or disagree with you here. On the one hand, this one almost never effects me, but that's usually because I almost never have a natural wonder. So, part of me thinks that by beefing this one up, it suddenly becomes really good for a few players, and useless for the others - instead of more useful overall.

True, Prestige is primarily useful to players going for the Culture victory. I think +5 Culture from Natural Wonders is generally very underwhelming, so an alternative yield would be cool.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm... not sure where we need more than one version of it. I suppose it depends on whether we use this for Customs elsewhere, right? I think one of them is probably fine here.

Do we think we'll have the Customs elsewhere? I remember you drawing up a prototype for Customs where we've settled on the Path to the Light (religion substitute), but I thought we moved away from those. (Might be remembering wrong and they might have become beliefs?)

counterpoint said:
Not sure about this last one... Need to figure out the Science Victory first.

Yeah, that makes sense.

counterpoint said:
This is nuts. I love it. Just have to make sure it isn't easy for a diplo player to unfairly ruin a dom-players game, though - this is much more significant than the Standing Army Tax or an Embargo, right......

Definitely, there need to be serious diplo repercussions to this one! You should have to sell your soul to get anyone else to vote for it in all but the most extreme circumstances.

counterpoint said:
As far as it being an Edict.... I suppose the main difference is that it would be refusable.... Would anybody not refuse it? I mean, what's the point of following it? If you follow it, you keep good ties with the tower... but who cares? You can't use Aes Sedai!

Good point, this one shouldn't be refusable!

counterpoint said:
Actually, I kind of think the Light Alliance is something that automatically happens once the LB starts. I don't think we can wait for somebody to propose it or anything. I think it's more of a separate prompt - "The Last Battle Dawns. Choose a Side!".

I mean, if we want to synthesize the whole (pretty cool) "summit" that happened right before the LB in the books, we could, but I don't think a Resolution is the way to do that. I mean, it doesn't matter who votes for the thing - all that matters is who chooses the Light (automatically in the Federation) and who chooses the Shadow (automatically on Shadow), right?

I do think a cool approximation of the summit could be in order, though. Like, we talked a lot about various things/benefits for being on the Lightside - maybe there could be a WF-like thing that pops up, where each player votes on which perks they'd like to have this time around.

Yeah, I remember us discussing multiple stages to a Light side alliance. That all players on the Light can't declare war with each other by default, but that they could also optionally co-operate on a supernational level to get some ongoing bonuses to those Light civs that choose to be involved. We could use the Compact as the vehicle to distribute those bonuses?

counterpoint said:
OK, here are some that I've come up with. I did do some Googling to see what Resolutions people thought would be cool additions to the game, so a few of these are inspired by those. I was hoping to find a Resolution Mod we could cannibalize, but was shocked - shocked! - to see that no such mod existed.

Mostly because almost any changes to the WC resolutions require C++ - the existing resolutions are basically just tags per-resolution ("IsEmbargo" and tags to that effect) so it isn't possible to mix and match the existing effects in any way without writing the new logic yourself. The lack of compatibility (only one DLL mod can be active at once) and availability of existing DLL mods that provide so many other good features, has made WC resolution mods very scarce.

counterpoint said:
On that note, let me just say that I find there to be way, way too few good resolutions in the WC in CiV. There's usually 2-3 I'm interested in per game, and the rest are very "whatever." So expanding this is a good idea, IMO.

Completely agree - if I'm the host of the WC then it's a lot less fun than it should be. In fact, the voting is probably more fun than most of the resolutions - scrambling to accrue enough votes to keep the host seat. I've had some fun elections - where I'm stuck at 8 votes, the host has 9, but there's a third civ with 5 votes. I can't beat the host if I vote for myself because they get the bonus +2 delegates for being host. But I can vote for the guy in third and then beat him next time because I have the highest "raw" delegates. That was a fun election.

Back on track! Yes, the existing WC resolutions are either very "meh" or very polarizing and can't be forced through most of the time.

counterpoint said:
Global Tower Edicts

Free City
Demands the return of a captured city to its founding civilization

This one could also be a Resolution, though as an Edict, it allows for its refusability.

Restock the Collections
All strategic resources provide one less yield for 20 turns.

Awesome, I like these!

counterpoint said:
Ban Strategic Resource
All Civilizations are reduced to zero stock of a given Strategic Resource for 20 turns.

This one might be a little too crazy.

Not too crazy, sounds great!

counterpoint said:
Ajah Edicts

Blue

Tracing the Old Blood
Civilizations that have adopted the "Acceptance" Social Policy Tree get +2 Spark for 30 turns.

Counterpart to your Fear one.

The Way to Tarmon Gai'don
All alterations to Alignment over the next 30 turns will have twice the effect.

This one essentially pulls people out of the middle as the LB approaches

Trusted Rulers
Capital cities receive +2 Faith for each governor used within the Civilization over the next 30 turns.

This could be Global instead, but felt right as Blue.

All great, very Blue!

counterpoint said:
White Ajah

Triumph of Rationality
All Founder and Follower beliefs are half as effective for 20 turns.

An attempt to do something with the White that isn't squarely science-based

Logical Paradigm
All Lineage [former Pantheon] bonuses are suspended for 20 turns

Nice, this is a good way to have some non-Science White Ajah stuff.

counterpoint said:
Brown Ajah

History in the Making
All Wonders constructed within 30 turns provide a one-time yield of +20 Prestige [value taken out of thin air]

Scholastic Fellowship
Civilizations receive a one-time yield of +10 Prestige [thin air] when signing a Research Agreement within the next 30 turns.

Perhaps the value is too low?

Prestige in big lumps is fine given the way it builds up. And given the infrequency of Research Agreements and that this is only active for a small window of time, we could go with something like +500 Prestige.

counterpoint said:
Philosophical Exchange
Missionaries can spread a Path one extra time for the next 30 turns

Prized Collections
Theming bonuses are 50% larger for 30 turns.

Awesome!

counterpoint said:
Red Ajah

Search for the False Dragon
All Dragonsworn camps within 10 hexes of a Civilization's territory are revealed to that Civilization for 20 turns.

Cleansing the Populace
All Saidin units consume one extra Spark for 30 turns.

Love the Spark one!

counterpoint said:
Green Ajah

Shadow Tracking
All units receive +1 Sight and +1 movement while in the Blight for 30 turns.

Very cool!

counterpoint said:
Defense of the Homeland
Shadowspawn suffer -1 to movement while within a Civilization's territory for 30 turns.

Need a better name and/or flavor

"Shadow's Bane"? And only active in Light civilization's territory?

counterpoint said:
Gift of the Gaidin
Warders gain an additional attack per turn for 20 turns

Yeah, I was trying to make a Warder-y one!

counterpoint said:
Yellow Ajah

Vision of Health
Each city gains +1 Faith for each 5 Food surplus for 30 turns

Nice.

counterpoint said:
Gray Ajah

Bonds of Peace
Each Declaration of Friendship results in +5 Global Happiness for 30 turns.

Global Cooperation
Each international trade route provides +1 Local Happiness in its city of origin for 45 turns.

All good!

counterpoint said:
Resolutions

Time of Need
A Project - send Gold, Food, and/or Production to a selected Civilization

This one's tricky. The point is to offer a way to fight your rivals by boosting your allies or slowing a warmonger down.

I like it. It can be tricky, but I think it's a good inclusion.

counterpoint said:
Culling the Spark
A Civilizations lose 6 Spark.

Counterpart to your +6 Spark Resolution

Nice one!

counterpoint said:
Tariffs
All international trade routes provide -2 Gold for the originating city and an addition +2 Gold for the recipient city.

Dear lord, needs a better name. Basically makes trade more universally beneficial

"Mercantile Equality"?

counterpoint said:
No Proposal
Propose nothing at the WC this session. I hate having to choose a random luxury to ban, or something I know I'll vote against.

I'm not as sure about this - I think if we have enough, varied resolutions available then players should never be in a situation where they want to pick this.

counterpoint said:
OK, I think you're mistaken on the Groves. The Groves (the ones not in stedding, that is) were planted to help the Stonemasons fight off the Longing - basically, give them a place to hang out with trees while they were away with home. They have no anti-magical properties. I don't think there are any former-stedding in any cities.

That does ring a bell - good explanation for me.

counterpoint said:
I've been thinking about this alot, and I think I may have an interesting solution. First off, you make a good point about the anti-razing thing. That is an obvious Problem. I think a way to make this work is by tweaking how Stedding operate - which makes them flavorfully distinct from other CSs that makes invading them really, really stupid.

1) Military
- Stedding are essentially non-military, except in self-defense.
- A Allied Stedding will *not* go to war with its allies enemies. The enemy must deliberately declare war on the stedding - probably this "enemy" can't move into the stedding without a DoW while fighting a war with the stedding's ally though.
- Dragonsworn will not attack the stedding.
- Shadowspawn will, and frequently do, attack the steddings.
- Each steading will have a couple units on hand for defense. These are very powerful units - perhaps the strongest melee units in the game.

2) Diplomatic
- if you attack a stedding, *every stedding on the map declares war on you* and will aggressively pursue that war, likely gaining some "Free" units."
- If you attack a stedding, the steddings will likely make a proclamation at the next stump that is quite damaging and unrefusable - embargos, prestige-hits, etc.
- If you attack a stedding, you receive a massive diplo hit with other civs and the White Tower.
- Potentially, if you attack a stedding, any stedding will request its allies declare war on you - ceasing to be allied with that civ if they refuse.

3) Rewards/Consequences
- If you can take over a stedding, the anti-magic field does indeed stay intact.
- All Stedding are perpetually at war with you until the city is Liberated (perhaps it can be voluntarily liberated by the civ).

What do you think? To me, that seems realistic. Its kind of an international incident to mess with the Ogier,b ut it is possible, and could be worthwhile in very specific warmongering cases. The Seanchan may indeed be this case - its unclear whether or not they took over the Stedding or somehow forged an alliance with them.

What do you think?

A suped up version of the CS diplo consequences as they are now, which sounds good - even the relatively minor CS penalties (when compared to the Ogier gang-up) deter most players from going for those cities first.

Interesting idea, separating war with a Stedding from war with its ally, that sounds pretty cool. Most CSes that aren't killed by Mongolia are usually caught in the crossfire of a major civ war, so that also makes Stedding less of a target this way.

Allowing the player to liberate the city later also sounds good.

It's interesting that this does create a kind of "challenge" for the player. We're clearly steering things to make it so that attacking and capturing Stedding is advantageous, overall, in normal play. But players who are looking for that extra challenge and want the world pitted against them have an avenue to try that out.

counterpoint said:
Right. I do think being the HK should be "better" than the bonuses received by other civs, but not game-breakingly better. Something like twice the benefit, maybe - and the power to control other people's bonuses.

Sounds like a good relative scale. The power to give other players bonuses that don't directly help their strategy could still render some of those bonuses ineffective, but I'm thinking the bonuses will be mostly globally useful? Shall we go through what we intend the bonuses to be for all of the parties involved (made up numbers again)?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, great. I'm kind of out of time for now, though. Any thoughts on what kinds of conditions could work well?

I still like the DoF idea as one of the conditions, mostly because it's how CiV expresses diplomatic success. We could alternatively have a totally new type of diplomatic treaty, some kind of "Accord" between major civs that is only ever signed by close allies - giving bonuses to both sides. Something that provides sight to both players from the others' cities (not units as well), so it makes it more difficult to betray them? Turning your back on an Accord means no one trusts you ever again. I'm not sure how many of these could be signed so quickly in a given game though.

And multiplayer will always deadlock on the HK threshold if it comes down to relationships between human players.

So aside from DoF/Accord (whichever we like more), I think this is somewhere we can focus on the victory strategies individually. We discussed gating the HK's "latest" possible time by world era - we could have a technology right at the end of the section where the HK is available that makes the first researcher High King. That way, if all civs are close together in research, world era will "cut off" the High King before anyone reaches that tech - it's only by taking a significant lead that you can get there first. (Assuming no other triggers are hit in time.)

Then there's the culture player: "High King's Palace" can be a wonder (unlocked by an earlier tech than the one that gets you High King straight away). If no one has been elected High King, then anyone can build it - otherwise only the High King can. Building it causes you to be elected High King.

And of course we've got warmongers: capture numPlayers/2 (rounded up) original capitals.

So we've covered: Diplomatic, Scientific, Cultural, and Conquest. There's also the Last Battle victory condition. The Shadow players will have to be specializing in one of the "base" victory conditions anyway, so they can use one of the other triggers. Light players will be pumping out Faith and building up their Path. Do we want to have a Path belief (available on "Enhancement" or whatever we called that level of growth) that makes the Player the High King? The player uses up the long-running bonus of the belief to become High King now.

If we work in a similar way to BNW CiV's religion though, that last one might be a bit problematic. It's normally a trade-off between buying more Faith units to spread your religion and waiting until your second Great Prophet is born (at 600+ Faith) to enhance your religion. Because of the value in being High King, saving is better to start with, which centralizes the Paths much more so than religions were (at least until one civ becomes High King and then it goes back to normal).

But there's another thing! Diplomatic, as you've mentioned before, is often very gold-oriented, and having tons and tons of gold doesn't help you with any of the above. So there needs to be a use for that. We could tie the High King trigger to the most common cause of having tons of gold, which is an abundance of trade routes. How about: have an active trade route with every foreign capital in the world at the same time. That's actually logistically quite difficult to do, but the actual effects involves are all upside (capitals normally give better yields) so it's the secondary consequences (the people you need to annoy/conquer in order to get your cities close enough to other capitals) that cause the difficulty.

S3rgeus · Dec 17, 2014

And finally:

counterpoint said:
yes. Please do come up with more.

Global Edicts

Recalled to the Tower
Targeted Aes Sedai immediately returns to the Tower. (Removes it from control of a major civ.)

Chart the Skies
Center the minimap for all players.

Tribute to the Tower
Civilizations must pay X gold per turn to the Tower for 15 turns (where X is higher for civs Tar Valon likes less).

Traveling Monopoly
+2 Maintenance cost on Traveling Grounds for 30 turns.

Ajah Edicts

Blue Ajah

Inspired by the Dragon
Dragonsworn units spawn twice as fast for 30 turns. (The Blue Ajah caused the Dragon to have the presence to inspire others - causing the Dragonsworn to be more zealous. A bit of a stretch?)

Ta'veren Guidance
+4 Faith per turn from GP tile improvements for 30 turns

Brown Ajah

Chronicles of History
+3 Science per turn from World Wonders. (research/knowledge about the wonders being cataloged)

Keepers of Stories
Inns (or some other building) produce +2 Happiness for 30 turns.

Red Ajah

Captive Dragon
The Dragon can take no actions for 15 turns.

Sister's Assistance
Units controlled by targeted player have +50% combat strength against male channelers and Dragonsworn for 30 turns.

Green Ajah

Sister Nimble (Sister Quick)
All Aes Sedai units have +2 movement for 20 turns. (Needs an actual name.)

Color-Changing Cloak
Warders are invisible to foreign players unless they have an adjacent unit for 45 turns.

Sister's Wrath
Destroy targeted non-Forsaken Shadowspawn.

Yellow Ajah

Advise the Locals
Wisdom Specialists produce +1 Faith and +1 Food for 30 turns. (Needs a better name.)

Grey Ajah

Disputed Route
Targeted trade route is discontinued - its establisher regains their trade unit. A new trade route between its participants cannot be established for 5 turns. (Tower can use this to discourage trade with their enemies.)

Land Tax
+2 Maintenance on plantations.

And something we haven't considered: what about when the Tower Turns? The Black Ajah can issue Edicts, right? There's a bit of weirdness in, why would Light players ever agree to any of these? Do they still suffer the normal refusal penalties? Is the Tower going over to the Shadow more subtle than other civs - the Tower just works against the Light within the existing framework of government, instead of a public declaration? What if there is no "The Tower turns to Shadow" notification for Light players and these Edicts just start cropping up then, among the normal ones? Or is that too anticlimactic for such a difficult event? (We can show stuff to just Shadow players.)

To get us started, if this sounds like a good idea:
Black Ajah

Shadow and Truth
Path to the Light beliefs provide no yields for 30 turns.

Traveling Mishap
All units adjacent to targeted Traveling Ground (or any Traveling ground? maybe all units adjacent to a Traveling Ground in a target civilization? maybe all three options are separate instances of this same Edict?) immediately Travels to another random Traveling Ground that can be reached from there.

Unfortunately I think ideas for quests from the Tower will have to wait until next time!

Civitar · Dec 18, 2014

I don't know if you guys have seen this yet, but I think the random events system and/or the decisions system could come in handy when dealing with your White Tower/Ajahs/Dragon issues.
Sukritact's Events & Decisions
Since it's possible IIRC to limit when random events happen by era and by player (maybe by more but this is all I know of), and decisions all have conditions and benefits attached to them, it could offer you a much better alternative to the World Congress. Of course then the whole voting thing is out, but...

counterpoint · Dec 19, 2014

OK, going out of town tomorrow morning, so trying to knock these responses out today! Here's part 1.

S3rgeus said:
Given that Ramses' UA revolves around that wonder production bonus (and that's only ancient wonders, right?), it's quite powerful. Maybe we could even pare it down to just wonders with culture yield? (Though that's less useful across the board.) We can probably calibrate this as needed when the mod is playable though. Adding or removing any of these components (just wonders with culture yields, just wonders, and wonders + culture buildings) are all relatively easily substituted in once the mission itself is in place.

Right, I gotcha here. It should be pretty weak, for sure. But before you had mentioned that making it culture-specific might make the Browns only useful for cultural players - are we ok with this?

S3rgeus said:
I believe that CSes cap out at 3 active quests at a time. Some quests are global objectives (finish the most techs in 30 turns) and are visible to all players. Some are targeted and only available to a single player or subset of all players (they want your religion). So given that every player has some ongoing targeted quests with most CSes at a given time and most CSes have at least one "global" quest running at a time, most individual CSes will have something like numPlayers * 0.75 + 1 (75% = most) quests stored and running at once. (Direct example, on a huge map, that's about 9 active quests.) I would think Tar Valon should be more quest-prolific than most other CSes.

So, from a single player's perspective, I would expect to see up to 6 quests running at once from Tar Valon (double a standard CS). A high volume of quests will also result in more fluctuating influence within the Tower - one Ajah is less likely to pull ahead when many different quests are being completed relatively often.

I agree that minimum and maximum odds for each Ajah giving out a new quest makes sense in a situation where Tar Valon only gives out a quest every X turns, so an Ajah must be chosen for that quest to come from. What if each Ajah effectively acted as an independent source of quests? The rate at which they accrue influence genuinely reflects how much people want to/can complete their quests. If we have a "baseline" quest rate (every 10 turns say) that each Ajah gives out a quest at (likely randomized a bit, so they aren't all giving them out at the same time) then it's impossible to be "starved" for quests for a specific Ajah. An Ajah becoming extremely influential could boost the rate they give out quests, but other Ajahs are then unaffected.

Can there be quests given out by the Amyrlin directly? Could be interesting if she had her own pool of quests to draw from as well as that of her original Ajah.

Alright, I think I'm going to defer to your intuition here, since you have a much better handle of how the "engine" works - so many CS proposals obviously go out without my knowledge (to the other civs) that I don't have as keen an idea what's really going on.

I guess my gut tells me that the WT will probably be about as active as 2-3 CSs? That sounds pretty in line with what you're doing, right?

As far as the Amyrlin given specific quests.... I don't know about that, seems like it might be too much. What in, instead, there was simply a quest or two associated with a given Ajah that could only ever be offered if the Amyrlin is from that Ajah?

S3rgeus said:
I think we can work similarly to CSes - quests start at the beginning of the game, global quests are dispatched and their progress tracked independently of who the city has met, and targeted quests are only given to players that have met the city. We discussed a relatively early game tech previously that causes the player to meet Tar Valon (regardless of map placement) so even distant players shouldn't be without Ajah influence for too long.

good, good!

S3rgeus said:
This all sounds good to me. I don't think Ajahs can ever declare war independently, I think the Tower tries to always present a united outward front, whatever their internal squabbles (though not always with complete success, for the majority of history they were externally viewed as a single entity with unified goals). Interesting related question though: does the Tower declare war of its own accord?

Completely agree on all of the other factors that should affect the Tower's opinion of a given civ. I like the distinction here too - where the Tower's overall opinion of a civ (which includes the factors you listed) can become negative, while influence with an Ajah is an always-positive stat.

I think we can modify transient ill will (like attacking a Sister once) through modifiers to the player's Ajah influence actions. If you attack an Aes Sedai and then complete a quest for the Greens that would normally have given you 20 influence, it gives you 15 instead (thin air numbers). In fact, the Tower's overall opinion of a civilization could also act as a modifier to all of that civilization's influence gains. That makes it difficult for a civilization that the Tower hates to become overly influential with its Ajahs, which makes sense.

That's a really important question - can the WT declare war. I'm tempted to say "yes," but only in specific situations - really low favor, a civ declares for the shadow, etc. Right?

I definitely like the idea of the overall-WT-opinion acting as a modifier to the amount of influence you gain with the Ajahs, and I think it solves a few issues below.. That said, I wonder if that might just be a front-end version of doing the more intuitive choice: the total opinion you have with the WT colors the *benefits* you get from each Ajah. I think each of these makes sense from a flavor-perspective. Which way do you like it better?

S3rgeus said:
Interesting, agreed that it wouldn't go negative, but I'm not sure if the player's influence ever needs to decrease like normal CS's. Influence that you already have is inherently devalued by other players accruing influence, even if your underlying number value doesn't change. (You are the only player with influence with the Reds and you have 10 points: 100%. Another player gains 10 influence with the Reds: you're now at 50% with no change in underlying points.) As the game goes on, if influence doesn't decay, it becomes more and more difficult to suddenly swing support of one Ajah toward or away from any given player. (Because all total everyone has 700 influence, say, with the Blues and you gaining 50 all at once makes a lot less difference than it did when there was only 100 influence total.) I think this is what we want, where the Ajahs stick by their convictions of who they believe to be worthwhile.

You make valid points, but how/why is this different from normal CSs? Presumably, in normal CiV, other civs are gaining influence with the CSs - yet they still have influence decay with them? So, what's the difference here? I think the reason for the decay in ciV is not so much to make the competition between civs more important, but because of the bonuses at Friendship. If you didn't decay, you'd sit at 50 influence (or w/e if is) with every CS on the map, for the Friend bonuses (assuming you didn't care about being their ally/diplo victory).

I think the same is true here. We don't want somebody levelling up blue in 1000 BC (equivalent) to the point where they get a bonus (unlocked ability or something) and then ignoring them for the whole game, right? Similarly, everybody will likely jump to the Green Ajah during the Trolloc Wars - come time for the LB, though, you'd better have done something since then to still be good with them.

Makes sense, right? Maybe WT influence in general doesn't decay though?

S3rgeus said:
I definitely can't think of a lot off hand. For the Blues, I'd say acting against the Dragon would cost influence with them. (Doesn't mesh well in a game where the Blue Ajah is Shadow-y.) I would think thought that you could lose influence with any Ajahs you have influence with through some of the actions you outlined above. Choosing the Oppression Ideology should cost a civilization a decent chunk of its influence with all of the Ajahs it's got points with.

Right, so here's where the multiplier comes in, like you proposed. I'm not sure it's necessary to lower every Ajah's opinion if a civ chooses Oppression - shouldn't we just lower the Tower relationship overall? Which, in turn, lowers the payouts of each Ajah (on the backend) or the accumulation of influence (on the frontend)? Maybe the WT influence acts as a multiplier not to accruing influence, but to the value of influence itself. Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
We can announce Tar Valon trade routes if we want to make them more visible. (Notification that says: Tar Valon has established a trade route with your city of WhiteBridge.) I think keeping the Tower as a CS is still useful - we don't have to exclude irrelevant portions of the major civ AI that way, and I think, despite their influence, their relatively small land area and general historical characteristics are more city-state-ish. Especially since we're not setting them up as a player that is capable of winning the game, which is one of the big distinctions for major civs.

right. CS it is. I don't know if announcing the trade routes is necessary - I'm not sure most players will care. Maybe it's enough to just have that info available by clicking on the tower or something.

S3rgeus said:
I think the player can't see the numbers, but has a graphical representation of the Ajahs' influences and the breakdown of influence per civ within each Ajah. Conceptually like the following graph (with no axes):

For sure.

S3rgeus said:
At first I was thinking one era before the Dragon, but two eras might be better - it gives us more time to have multiple quests for a given player. The first few quests can be quite "secretive", whispers-style stuff, with the more flashy stuff closer to the Last Battle.

Hmmmm, I don't really have an opinion as to which era is better. I think we can go with whatever your gut says, and playtest it later. But yeah, start them off more low-key, certainly.

S3rgeus said:
I don't think so. It's too difficult to keep that completely internal and not make it too predictable and not too random.

Interesting, I'd been just thinking of the Black Ajah. I think there can be some overlap between the Black Ajah and the Forsaken quests.

Awesome, I love this idea. Sounds really cool and really flavorful! This sounds like a good distinction between purely-Forsaken and purely-Black-Ajah quests, that the Forsaken ones ask civilizations to do things that are clearly not in their own best interests.

Good. And, I think this'll be what makes this all "feel" different from playing Light.

S3rgeus said:
Once per era by World Era is nice and flexible - it won't always be a predictable, set turn number when the election happens. I would like to include a facility for elections more often in specific circumstances though. Is there a sequence of events that leads to an Amyrlin being deposed? I would think one of the endgame Shadow quests could involve assassinating the Amyrlin? (A new one would need to be elected shortly afterwards.)

Raising candidates from the top 3 Ajahs influence wise and then each Ajah voting between those 3 seems like a good internal selection mechanism. I don't think the players would ever see *how* the Amyrlin was elected in game though? Just which Ajah she came from and that the election *has happened*.

Hmmm... I don't think the deposition of an Amyrlin is a necessary mechanic, especially if we have the tower elect a new one every so often. Assassination could be a thing though.

Yeah, I can see the value in hiding all the voting from the player. That said, it might make things more interesting if they can see which Ajahs are the most powerful, how they are related, etc. Maybe you need to spy to get the info? Or you know the voting of the Ajah's you are friendly with?

S3rgeus said:
I should clarify, while there are Edicts associated with Ajahs, I figured the Tower would declare all Edicts as a single entity. Players would start to see the patterns over time, but I wasn't thinking we would attribute a given Edict to any Ajah in a visible way. "The Tower has issued an Edict: Heritage Catalog"

OK, sure. I should clarify something too. I was being stupid when reading/suggestion edicts - I didn't get that you intended the edicts to only apply to one player. I assumed they were global. I know you had a category called "Global Edicts", which obviously implies the rest of them are *not* global. As I said, I was being stupid. I interpreted the global ones to simply mean "the ones coming from the tower, generically, not from a specific Ajah."

So on that note, I kinda think most of these work globally applied - even those fromt he Ajahs. Certainly the ones that I proposed were created with that in mind. I do think that a handful of them make sense as "targeted" at a specific civ (or tile, unit, etc.), and those are usually mentioned as such. But things like "Heritage Catalog" and most of the other ones - why wouldn't they just apply to the entire world? I think that's what makes them interesting. That said, it also might suggest that we have them pop up less often.

What do you think?

S3rgeus said:
I definitely agree that, unlike quests which we're discussing above, there should be only one "stream" of Edicts from the Tower. I like the % chance of being global/individual Ajah at every "new Edict" interval. And ramping up the speed (every 20-30 turns at the beginning of the time, every 10 by the end) also sounds like a good plan.

cool. Agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Embargoes, forcing peace (this is a great prisoner's dilemma), Channeling Recruitment, and forcing hex ownership transfer are all really good candidates for refusable Edicts.

Right. I think, essentially, the things that involve actions - as opposed to affect yields, bonuses, etc. - can be refusalbe.

What's the mechanism for this, though? Do you refuse it upon its annunciation? Or do you refuse it later, when you "break the rule"?

Like, as an example, if you force peace on me, do I say "no" immediately, or do I sneak attack the civ two turns later? That's sort of easy to see iether way. A trickier case: if you demand Channeling Recruitment, do I refuse outright, or can I, say, 5 turns in, tell them "no" and get my spark back (or whatever that one was)?

Obviously, having it be immediate is simplest.

S3rgeus said:
I see what you mean. I'm not sure if we want to do Spark since Aes Sedai are the one channeling unit that doesn't consume Spark and a Tower Edict forbidding trade with your civilization won't affect your channeler birth rate. I think the association with Ajah influence distinguishes it from the WC a bit - refusing to Embargo the player costs you influence with the Tower, and just being the target presumably costs that player a lot of influence.

ok, that sounds fine.

S3rgeus said:
I didn't want to make them global so that Tar Valon could specifically target civs it did(n't) like. The continents are separated by their art style (the appearance of mountains/forests/terrain is different on different continents), and it generally lines up with players' conceptual idea of where the "continents" are. It's just occurred to me that it completely fails on non-continent-driven maps (like Lakes, Great Plains, Four Corners). Maybe Tar Valon can pick a hex and it works for a certain radius outwards?

Right, I think you're kind of missing my main question, though. In content, this makes perfect sense - Tower can do mean stuff to its enemies. Cool.

I'm talking about literally the names of each continent. Like, on our world, the WT could say "Asia is embargoed!" or in the WoT, they could say "The Westlands are Embargoed!" But no such continent names (or numbers, labels, etc.) exist in CiV.

If the WT applies an edict to one continent, how would this be expressed to the player? "The WT punishes any Civs on Continent............D?"

S3rgeus said:
I think that if the Tower can create a boon of good crop for their allies, they should be able to do a similar-but-opposite effect to their enemies.

Right, I guess that I just don't get that the Tower can create a boon of good crop.... Didn't you say this was a result of the Bowl of Winds? So wasn't all that temp swing unintentional?

I guess maybe this has to do with the global vs targeted thing.

S3rgeus said:
I see what you mean. I think 10% boost for science and -10% for culture works then? High culture means you lose more points-per-turn, and high science means you gain more points-per-turn.

Good. Let's do that, then!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, unused sites. We can definitely have something for Landmarks - though that might be more Blue since it's GP-like?

Right. Could be Blue or any of them, really - probably depends on the yield.

S3rgeus said:
I think so yeah. It would still contribute toward that civ's "Aes Sedai cap" but it would otherwise not affect their normal Aes Sedai gift schedule.

Hmmm.... 2 free Greens doesn't seem so cool if it counts against your cap. I mean, wouldn't civs mostly be right up against their cap? If they wanted to fill them with Greens, wouldn't they have already done so?

Maybe instead they should be temporary, and *not* count against the cap?

S3rgeus said:
I think there's more than a diplo hit when you refuse a Tower Edict. How about inverting trade route yields for X turns after refusing an Edict? (Establisher gets receiver yields, receiver gets Establisher yields.) Warmongering civs are often lacking in cash since they're paying upkeep on units, so they couldn't just refuse at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, definitely more than diplo.... The inverted trade thing seems to me, though, to be a little weird. Like kind of unintuitive and tricky to explain - also, sort of hard to flavorfully justify how the tower can accomplish that...

Thoughts? What else could it be?I guess, looking at the books, what would/does the WT do to nations that it doesn't like?

S3rgeus said:
So I think Mediated Treaty is refusable. But how refusable, exactly? I see two possibilities: war continues if either player refuses, or war continues only if both players refuse.

Knock on effects of the two configurations:

War if either refuses: Allows a single player with a powerful economy to avoid the Treaty and soak up the financial losses.

War if both refuse: This will almost never happen. Both sides would need to be economically powerful enough to soak up the refusal drawbacks and both sides would need to think they were going to win this war.

I think the former makes more sense overall.

Yeah,m for sure the former. I can't imagine the last time I was in a war that *both sides* wanted to be in!

OK, that's it for now, meeting starting in 2 minutes!

counterpoint · Dec 19, 2014

S3rgeus said:
I'd say only Asha'man units are affected at all. They're our endgame all-powerful units, so being able to legislate against them specifically is what we want I think. I don't think we want to turn off civs' UUs like (like the Freed) and normally spawning Male Channelers are generally more of an obstacle than a help. Flavor-wise, you're preventing the Black Tower from recruiting, rather than stopping male channelers from gaining their powers.

Right. I will say though, that we shouldn't forget about Male Channelers post-cleansing. They'll be more useful then. That said, that also means this one would be a pretty lame thing for the Red to do since the men aren't mad anymore.

S3rgeus said:
True, Prestige is primarily useful to players going for the Culture victory. I think +5 Culture from Natural Wonders is generally very underwhelming, so an alternative yield would be cool.

I should clarify, I'm not saying it isn't useful to enough players because Prestige isn't useful, I'm saying it isn't useful because most players don't have Natural Wonders. Doesn't have to matter, but I'm just pointing out that the balance of this one is a bit off anyways because it applies to only a few of the civs in a given game.

S3rgeus said:
Do we think we'll have the Customs elsewhere? I remember you drawing up a prototype for Customs where we've settled on the Path to the Light (religion substitute), but I thought we moved away from those. (Might be remembering wrong and they might have become beliefs?)

My use of the word Customs is as it was defined earlier in the thread - our version of Beliefs. You are correct that one early draft of "Religions" was various customs from around RandLand, but here I'm talking about the beliefs.

So, all I mean here is that perhaps some of the bonuses we're creating here might end up being useful elsewhere as Follower Customs.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I remember us discussing multiple stages to a Light side alliance. That all players on the Light can't declare war with each other by default, but that they could also optionally co-operate on a supernational level to get some ongoing bonuses to those Light civs that choose to be involved. We could use the Compact as the vehicle to distribute those bonuses?

I don't have a strong opinion on this. My intuition states actually that it should not be Compact associated - the Shadow Civs and Neutral Civs shouldn't be seeing the voting and actions of the Light Alliance, IMO.

S3rgeus said:
Mostly because almost any changes to the WC resolutions require C++ - the existing resolutions are basically just tags per-resolution ("IsEmbargo" and tags to that effect) so it isn't possible to mix and match the existing effects in any way without writing the new logic yourself. The lack of compatibility (only one DLL mod can be active at once) and availability of existing DLL mods that provide so many other good features, has made WC resolution mods very scarce.

OK, so where does that leave us, then? I assume you're ready and able to work the C++, but are there any other DLL mods we'll need to be using?

S3rgeus said:
Completely agree - if I'm the host of the WC then it's a lot less fun than it should be. In fact, the voting is probably more fun than most of the resolutions - scrambling to accrue enough votes to keep the host seat. I've had some fun elections - where I'm stuck at 8 votes, the host has 9, but there's a third civ with 5 votes. I can't beat the host if I vote for myself because they get the bonus +2 delegates for being host. But I can vote for the guy in third and then beat him next time because I have the highest "raw" delegates. That was a fun election.

Back on track! Yes, the existing WC resolutions are either very "meh" or very polarizing and can't be forced through most of the time.

What I like about the things we're adding here - the WT, Steddings, etc. - is that the votes will depend on more than just buying CSs a turn before the vote.

S3rgeus said:
Prestige in big lumps is fine given the way it builds up. And given the infrequency of Research Agreements and that this is only active for a small window of time, we could go with something like +500 Prestige.

Oh, wow, ok!

S3rgeus said:
"Shadow's Bane"? And only active in Light civilization's territory?

Like the name! And, yes, Light and neutral only makes sense - assuming this is an edict during the LB.

S3rgeus said:
"Mercantile Equality"?

Also, kind of modern-economics-ey.... but, could work. Maybe just "Trade Equality"?

S3rgeus said:
I'm not as sure about this - I think if we have enough, varied resolutions available then players should never be in a situation where they want to pick this.

You may be right. Is there a specific reason why having the " no proposal" option would be a bad idea, though? I suppose it leaves the possibility of really boring WC sessions.

S3rgeus said:
A suped up version of the CS diplo consequences as they are now, which sounds good - even the relatively minor CS penalties (when compared to the Ogier gang-up) deter most players from going for those cities first.

Right. I think the Ogier make sense as remaining more neutral throughout the game - they won't go to war for you, nor will they become your exclusive ally.

S3rgeus said:
Interesting idea, separating war with a Stedding from war with its ally, that sounds pretty cool. Most CSes that aren't killed by Mongolia are usually caught in the crossfire of a major civ war, so that also makes Stedding less of a target this way.

OK, explain this to me. I don't really understand why it's in Mongolia's best interest to take over a bunch of CSs. I mean, I know their UA suggests that they can, but why would they want to, beyond one or two that are of strategic importance?Obviously, I udnerstand that the AI don't have Happiness problems from sprawling empires (hello Hiawatha's 20 cities!), but from a Player perspective, I still don't get it.

S3rgeus said:
It's interesting that this does create a kind of "challenge" for the player. We're clearly steering things to make it so that attacking and capturing Stedding is advantageous, overall, in normal play. But players who are looking for that extra challenge and want the world pitted against them have an avenue to try that out.

I think you either mistyped here or we are completely on different pages here. I'm trying to make it disadvantageous to hassle the Stedding unless you really really want one.

S3rgeus said:
Sounds like a good relative scale. The power to give other players bonuses that don't directly help their strategy could still render some of those bonuses ineffective, but I'm thinking the bonuses will be mostly globally useful? Shall we go through what we intend the bonuses to be for all of the parties involved (made up numbers again)?

What do you mean when you say the bonuses would be globally useful? I figured they would be Civ specific - like the HK grants Andor a +5% production bonus for 20 turns or something, *not* all civs.

Just dashing off a few (general) thoughts as to the bonuses that could exist:

- Province of Industry - + % Production, or + hammers per turn, to capital city
- Province of Crafts - +% Production when building X unit or Y building
- Province of Wealth - +1 Gold yield from Strategic Resources/Luxury Resources (or something)
- Province of Exploration - +1 movement for naval units
- Province of Belief - +1 Faith per city
- Province of Learning - +1 Science per 3 population in the capital
- Province of Honor - +15% Experience from killing Shadowspawn and Dragonsworn
- Province of Invention - +5 culture per international trade route
- Province of Sacrifice - no bonus

Again, I think some of them could be specifically "better" than others - in fact, maybe we randomize the values, at least somewhat. Well, not randomize the values, but randomize which ones get to be "good" and which ones are "mediocre." Like the first one could be +10% in some games, +5% in others.

S3rgeus said:
I still like the DoF idea as one of the conditions, mostly because it's how CiV expresses diplomatic success. We could alternatively have a totally new type of diplomatic treaty, some kind of "Accord" between major civs that is only ever signed by close allies - giving bonuses to both sides. Something that provides sight to both players from the others' cities (not units as well), so it makes it more difficult to betray them? Turning your back on an Accord means no one trusts you ever again. I'm not sure how many of these could be signed so quickly in a given game though.

Ah, a kind of super-alliance. Not a bad idea. Would this replace the DoF or be in addition to it? If it replaces it, I do agree that a new name would be a good idea. Accord is ok, but maybe a bit meh.

S3rgeus said:
So aside from DoF/Accord (whichever we like more), I think this is somewhere we can focus on the victory strategies individually. We discussed gating the HK's "latest" possible time by world era - we could have a technology right at the end of the section where the HK is available that makes the first researcher High King. That way, if all civs are close together in research, world era will "cut off" the High King before anyone reaches that tech - it's only by taking a significant lead that you can get there first. (Assuming no other triggers are hit in time.)

Yeah, this one is probably functionally not unlike the 2050 score victory. Like, ok guys, nobody wants to be HK...? fine, I'll give it to the guy with the science!

S3rgeus said:
Then there's the culture player: "High King's Palace" can be a wonder (unlocked by an earlier tech than the one that gets you High King straight away). If no one has been elected High King, then anyone can build it - otherwise only the High King can. Building it causes you to be elected High King.

Yeah, this is fine, though a little cheesy. Like building a palace gives you control over an empire...

S3rgeus said:
And of course we've got warmongers: capture numPlayers/2 (rounded up) original capitals.

yeah, if anybody already has half the capitals....... they deserve to be the HK. Honestly, I think that's too hard. Way harder than the other things, right?

S3rgeus said:
So we've covered: Diplomatic, Scientific, Cultural, and Conquest. There's also the Last Battle victory condition. The Shadow players will have to be specializing in one of the "base" victory conditions anyway, so they can use one of the other triggers. Light players will be pumping out Faith and building up their Path. Do we want to have a Path belief (available on "Enhancement" or whatever we called that level of growth) that makes the Player the High King? The player uses up the long-running bonus of the belief to become High King now.

If we work in a similar way to BNW CiV's religion though, that last one might be a bit problematic. It's normally a trade-off between buying more Faith units to spread your religion and waiting until your second Great Prophet is born (at 600+ Faith) to enhance your religion. Because of the value in being High King, saving is better to start with, which centralizes the Paths much more so than religions were (at least until one civ becomes High King and then it goes back to normal).

Eh.... don't love this. First of all, I wouldn't want to put it in terms of the LB and light/shadow. This is happening way, way before anybody knows what side they'll be on.

I can see Paths being there somehow, but I do agree that it is problematic due to the trade-off that's normally present. I do think, if we were to make a choice, I think the HK makes more sense for a civ whos Path has spread the most - not necessarily the one who is best evolved.

S3rgeus said:
But there's another thing! Diplomatic, as you've mentioned before, is often very gold-oriented, and having tons and tons of gold doesn't help you with any of the above. So there needs to be a use for that. We could tie the High King trigger to the most common cause of having tons of gold, which is an abundance of trade routes. How about: have an active trade route with every foreign capital in the world at the same time. That's actually logistically quite difficult to do, but the actual effects involves are all upside (capitals normally give better yields) so it's the secondary consequences (the people you need to annoy/conquer in order to get your cities close enough to other capitals) that cause the difficulty.

Yeah, I like this in theory, but I will say that this one is a bit weird because it seems like something people will only try to do in order to become the HK. To me it seems like the rest of these things are thing a civ will try to do ovre the course of their game anyway - building cities on random islands for proximity to capitals is a bit of a big ask for some civ, IMO. Is there another challenging gold-feat that isn't going to make somebody do really weird stuff with their game plan?

counterpoint · Dec 20, 2014

S3rgeus said:
Global Edicts

Recalled to the Tower
Targeted Aes Sedai immediately returns to the Tower. (Removes it from control of a major civ.)

right, so this is where we find the issue of whether you actually mean these to be "global" or not. See, it sounds like you're targetting one civ's AS... how is that global, then? Unless you mean each civ gives up one. That would make sense to me - if the Tower disliked a civ, wouldn't that dislike lower the amount of AS they'd have anyways?

remember, though, i've stated that I kind of want most of these to be global anyways.

S3rgeus said:
Chart the Skies
Center the minimap for all players.

Actually. Totally don't know what you mean by this.... I assume it reveals stuff to people. What does it mean to "center" it?

S3rgeus said:
Tribute to the Tower
Civilizations must pay X gold per turn to the Tower for 15 turns (where X is higher for civs Tar Valon likes less).

like it.

S3rgeus said:
Traveling Monopoly
+2 Maintenance cost on Traveling Grounds for 30 turns.

Kinda random. Nothing wrong with that, though.

S3rgeus said:
Ajah Edicts

Blue Ajah

Inspired by the Dragon
Dragonsworn units spawn twice as fast for 30 turns. (The Blue Ajah caused the Dragon to have the presence to inspire others - causing the Dragonsworn to be more zealous. A bit of a stretch?)

Well, similar to with the stuff with the Droughts... Why would the Blue Ajah make a policy that causes more dragonsworn to pop up? I mean, if we view these as actual "edicts" passed on from the tower, this one makes no sense.

S3rgeus said:
Ta'veren Guidance
+4 Faith per turn from GP tile improvements for 30 turns

yep

S3rgeus said:
Brown Ajah

Chronicles of History
+3 Science per turn from World Wonders. (research/knowledge about the wonders being cataloged)

Keepers of Stories
Inns (or some other building) produce +2 Happiness for 30 turns.

cheers

S3rgeus said:
Red Ajah

Captive Dragon
The Dragon can take no actions for 15 turns.

Sister's Assistance
Units controlled by targeted player have +50% combat strength against male channelers and Dragonsworn for 30 turns.

The first one is crazy, in that it's very flavorful, but totally stupid. Like, assuming the Red Ajah is Lightside, why the heck would they ever want to - oh, they tried that in the books...

S3rgeus said:
Green Ajah

Sister Nimble (Sister Quick)
All Aes Sedai units have +2 movement for 20 turns. (Needs an actual name.)

Color-Changing Cloak
Warders are invisible to foreign players unless they have an adjacent unit for 45 turns.

Sister's Wrath
Destroy targeted non-Forsaken Shadowspawn.

I think all of these are cool. The first one's name... hmmm. not sure.

The second one seems a bit overpowered, right? I mean, couldn't that really upset the balance of the whole AS thing? I'm having trouble figuring out how, but it seems like it might be a bit crazy. Then again, everybody would have it. Flavorful, though!

S3rgeus said:
Yellow Ajah

Advise the Locals
Wisdom Specialists produce +1 Faith and +1 Food for 30 turns. (Needs a better name.)

Maybe something about Training the Wise Women or something? Training the Locals? Something about herbs?

S3rgeus said:
Grey Ajah

Disputed Route
Targeted trade route is discontinued - its establisher regains their trade unit. A new trade route between its participants cannot be established for 5 turns. (Tower can use this to discourage trade with their enemies.)

Land Tax
+2 Maintenance on plantations.

both are fine, though the second is kidna random - why Plantations?

S3rgeus said:
And something we haven't considered: what about when the Tower Turns? The Black Ajah can issue Edicts, right? There's a bit of weirdness in, why would Light players ever agree to any of these? Do they still suffer the normal refusal penalties? Is the Tower going over to the Shadow more subtle than other civs - the Tower just works against the Light within the existing framework of government, instead of a public declaration? What if there is no "The Tower turns to Shadow" notification for Light players and these Edicts just start cropping up then, among the normal ones? Or is that too anticlimactic for such a difficult event? (We can show stuff to just Shadow players.)

Actually, I think the whole Edict system sorta breaks down a little bit once the LB starts. The truth is, it's a state of open War. I can imagine that neither the WT Edicts nor Compact Resolutions actually function during the LB. Again, it's open war. I know they need to in order to enable the diplomatic victory, but... why would a shadow player follow a resolution adopted by light players?

I do think a case could be made for leaving the Compact intact, but making it so that civs are more encouraged to refuse an enemy white tower. I guess this would be worked into it already - if Diplo hits with the tower are a main drawback of refusal, that's not really a problem anymore - you already have no Aes Sedai!

Assuming we leave it all intact, I do think it's best to keep the structures of the WT similar once the Tower Turns. It's not something that'll happen so often, so it's not worth inventing new stuff. I do think a few resolutions would cease to e available, and a few new ones would pop up, though. But, again, I'd assume that Light civs would be refusing essentially everything were this to happen.

S3rgeus said:
To get us started, if this sounds like a good idea:
Black Ajah

Shadow and Truth
Path to the Light beliefs provide no yields for 30 turns.

Traveling Mishap
All units adjacent to targeted Traveling Ground (or any Traveling ground? maybe all units adjacent to a Traveling Ground in a target civilization? maybe all three options are separate instances of this same Edict?) immediately Travels to another random Traveling Ground that can be reached from there.

Unfortunately I think ideas for quests from the Tower will have to wait until next time!

First one is nice. Second one... quite weird. Chaotic. I like it.

Civitar said:
I don't know if you guys have seen this yet, but I think the random events system and/or the decisions system could come in handy when dealing with your White Tower/Ajahs/Dragon issues.
Sukritact's Events & Decisions
Since it's possible IIRC to limit when random events happen by era and by player (maybe by more but this is all I know of), and decisions all have conditions and benefits attached to them, it could offer you a much better alternative to the World Congress. Of course then the whole voting thing is out, but...

interesting! Don't know enough about how all this works together, but after perusing the description, I do see how it could work sort of instead of the Edicts system - definitely i'd like to keep voting intact for the Compact, though. Thoughts, S3rg?

ldragogode297 · Dec 20, 2014

If I may (once again) weigh in, perhaps have the Amyrlin elections tied to researchs? Say, you research Archery, perhaps, and an election comes in. 20-30 turns later, another player has already reached Forgery (or whatever it is) and there's an election then. That's just my thoughts on it, though.

S3rgeus · Dec 20, 2014

Civitar said:
I don't know if you guys have seen this yet, but I think the random events system and/or the decisions system could come in handy when dealing with your White Tower/Ajahs/Dragon issues.
Sukritact's Events & Decisions
Since it's possible IIRC to limit when random events happen by era and by player (maybe by more but this is all I know of), and decisions all have conditions and benefits attached to them, it could offer you a much better alternative to the World Congress. Of course then the whole voting thing is out, but...

counterpoint said:
interesting! Don't know enough about how all this works together, but after perusing the description, I do see how it could work sort of instead of the Edicts system - definitely i'd like to keep voting intact for the Compact, though. Thoughts, S3rg?

That's a very interesting mod! I think differences in flavor and contextual relationships to other WoTMod systems generally prevent us from pulling in other mods completely unmodified, but I'd definitely be interested in looking at how sukritact has made that mod and (with his permission) use some of the underlying structure to help make the Edicts system. A cursory look shows me it isn't a DLL mod, so I doubt we would/could use the same underlying "game mechanics" application as he does. But it would be really nice to be able to use his new UI windows because those take forever to design right. (Constantly restarting the game to check visual changes look "sensible" to the human eye.)

It's also awesome that they've got their own wiki! Looks like a very cool mod. To be expected though, sukritact is an awesome modder.

counterpoint said:
Right, I gotcha here. It should be pretty weak, for sure. But before you had mentioned that making it culture-specific might make the Browns only useful for cultural players - are we ok with this?

I think unless we come up with a better approach, then primarily culture usage will have to stick for the Brown Ajah Sisters for now. Wonders that produce culture can be useful in other ways to non-culture players, but you're right that this makes the Brown the "culture" Ajah.

counterpoint said:
Alright, I think I'm going to defer to your intuition here, since you have a much better handle of how the "engine" works - so many CS proposals obviously go out without my knowledge (to the other civs) that I don't have as keen an idea what's really going on.

I guess my gut tells me that the WT will probably be about as active as 2-3 CSs? That sounds pretty in line with what you're doing, right?

Yeah, that's about the activity we should aim for, I think.

counterpoint said:
As far as the Amyrlin given specific quests.... I don't know about that, seems like it might be too much. What in, instead, there was simply a quest or two associated with a given Ajah that could only ever be offered if the Amyrlin is from that Ajah?

Yeah, I think your approach is better - having an entirely separate quest stream is a bit much. So a few Amyrlin-only quests for each Ajah are in order! I'll do a quest-list-proposal below, so I'll mark a few of them that are appropriate as Amyrlin-only.

counterpoint said:
That's a really important question - can the WT declare war. I'm tempted to say "yes," but only in specific situations - really low favor, a civ declares for the shadow, etc. Right?

Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

counterpoint said:
I definitely like the idea of the overall-WT-opinion acting as a modifier to the amount of influence you gain with the Ajahs, and I think it solves a few issues below.. That said, I wonder if that might just be a front-end version of doing the more intuitive choice: the total opinion you have with the WT colors the *benefits* you get from each Ajah. I think each of these makes sense from a flavor-perspective. Which way do you like it better?

I think we've shifted slightly in our notion of overall Tower influence for a given player. Originally we were saying that a player's overall Tower influence was based on the sum of their influences with all of the Ajahs, with some modifiers applied onto that for the "state" of their empire (choice of Ideology, policies). You're suggesting here that we track overall influence separately? Is overall influence contributed to solely through external actions, rather than the Ajah quests?

I thought we would have it set up that overall influence didn't need to be tracked separately. If you take the influences a given civilization has with each of the Ajahs, knowing the current state of their empire (what policies/ideologies/technologies they have) you can perform some mathematical operation on their Ajah influences and the result will be their overall influence. If overall influence can be modified in such a way that we're not just stacking on another state (example of another state: you selected Oppression so your influence modifier is now -10% from what it was before) without any Ajah influences changing at the same time, then overall influence needs to be tracked separately.

That's not a bad thing, but it's a very big distinction in terms of what overall influence with the Tower means.

In terms of how we apply that overall influence as a modifier, changing the yields of the Ajahs is significantly more complex than changing the rate of influence being accrued. Rate of influence being accrued we can modify very easily since it's simple math on the player's would-be influence gains. But the value of Ajah influences varies depending on the effects those Ajahs provide, and how to vary them is unique for each type of bonus each Ajah has. I think they achieve very similar things (earning less influence means you get fewer bonuses, your bonuses being less valuable means they're less useful to you), so I think we can go for the simpler option in this case.

counterpoint said:
You make valid points, but how/why is this different from normal CSs? Presumably, in normal CiV, other civs are gaining influence with the CSs - yet they still have influence decay with them? So, what's the difference here? I think the reason for the decay in ciV is not so much to make the competition between civs more important, but because of the bonuses at Friendship. If you didn't decay, you'd sit at 50 influence (or w/e if is) with every CS on the map, for the Friend bonuses (assuming you didn't care about being their ally/diplo victory).

I think the same is true here. We don't want somebody levelling up blue in 1000 BC (equivalent) to the point where they get a bonus (unlocked ability or something) and then ignoring them for the whole game, right? Similarly, everybody will likely jump to the Green Ajah during the Trolloc Wars - come time for the LB, though, you'd better have done something since then to still be good with them.

Makes sense, right? Maybe WT influence in general doesn't decay though?

It's different from normal CSes because all players are contributing to the same pot of influence with a given Ajah. With a normal CS, Egypt gaining influence doesn't affect France's influence on that same CS. But in our case, Manetheren gaining influence with the Blue Ajah makes the influence Andor already has with the Blue worth less.

The other difference is that CS rewards are based on the raw points numbers that each player has with that CS. So the values need to decrease over time or, as you've said, you can have enough for a bonus you want and then never have to interact with that CS again. But with the Ajahs, we can have the bonuses at percentage influence values. You get the bonus Blue Sisters ability if you've got 30%+ influence with the Blue Ajah, say. You want that ability so you go straight for it toward the beginning of the game. At that time, not many people have influence with the Tower, so you've got 50 'points' of influence with the Blue, which amounts to 50% of the influence with that Ajah. Awesome, that means you have the extra ability.

But if you never contribute to the Blue for the rest of the game, someone else will. And in the spirit of CiV, the underlying influence numbers players can generate increase as the game goes on. (Start of the game, you can get 50 influence by doing a quest, which requires a lot of your resources to go kill some Shadowspawn. By the end of the game, you've got loads of cities to work with and can complete a lot more Tower quests a lot faster, accruing more points.) So your 50 influence points from the start of the game is only 4% influence with that Ajah by the end of the Era of the High King - because other players have contributed hundreds of influence to the Ajah.

Now, we could model this more like the CSes, where the influences degrade, and get a similar system. But it would make the Tower more likely to swing back and forth as players contribute because everyone will have less influence in total. By making it build up over the course of the game, the Tower becomes more stable in its opinions the longer it goes on, which I think makes a lot of sense.

It also means that in order to "overthrow" someone who was influential with an Ajah, you would need to work at it consistently over a period of time - rather than the sudden gold buyouts that we see with CSes in base CiV.

counterpoint said:
Right, so here's where the multiplier comes in, like you proposed. I'm not sure it's necessary to lower every Ajah's opinion if a civ chooses Oppression - shouldn't we just lower the Tower relationship overall? Which, in turn, lowers the payouts of each Ajah (on the backend) or the accumulation of influence (on the frontend)? Maybe the WT influence acts as a multiplier not to accruing influence, but to the value of influence itself. Thoughts?

In that last section, you mean the value of influence when converting from the underlying points to the % you have with the Ajah? That we can do, it makes the math underneath a bit harder to follow, but it shouldn't change understandability for the player. The rest of this sort of ties into what I was asking above, about overall Tower influence being tracked separately from the total Ajah influence.

Conceptually, I think we would do "both" when a player chooses Oppression. They lose some of the influence they have with each Ajah (which, in turn, makes influence other players have more valuable). Then the player has a penalty when they try to gain any influence back (this is the "overall" influence, being affected by the state of the player's empire). Picking a number, Oppression players could gain 25% less influence for equivalent actions as players who haven't declared an Ideology.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm... I don't think the deposition of an Amyrlin is a necessary mechanic, especially if we have the tower elect a new one every so often. Assassination could be a thing though.

Yeah, I can see the value in hiding all the voting from the player. That said, it might make things more interesting if they can see which Ajahs are the most powerful, how they are related, etc. Maybe you need to spy to get the info? Or you know the voting of the Ajah's you are friendly with?

I think players can see which Ajahs are the most powerful in the normal course of events through the "Tower summary" page. You've got a big bar chart with all of the Ajahs and the Ajah with the biggest bar has the most influence. (That bar is subdivided by the amount of influence individual players have with that Ajah.) This is a bit hard to write out in text - would it help if I produced a mock-up influence graph?

counterpoint said:
OK, sure. I should clarify something too. I was being stupid when reading/suggestion edicts - I didn't get that you intended the edicts to only apply to one player. I assumed they were global. I know you had a category called "Global Edicts", which obviously implies the rest of them are *not* global. As I said, I was being stupid. I interpreted the global ones to simply mean "the ones coming from the tower, generically, not from a specific Ajah."

So on that note, I kinda think most of these work globally applied - even those fromt he Ajahs. Certainly the ones that I proposed were created with that in mind. I do think that a handful of them make sense as "targeted" at a specific civ (or tile, unit, etc.), and those are usually mentioned as such. But things like "Heritage Catalog" and most of the other ones - why wouldn't they just apply to the entire world? I think that's what makes them interesting. That said, it also might suggest that we have them pop up less often.

What do you think?

Ah, you were right the first time!

Poor choice of terminology on my part, "Global Edicts" are only distinguished from "Ajah Edicts" in that they can be proposed regardless of which Ajahs are currently influential in the Tower. I agree, a lot of these definitely are intended to be "global" in the traditional sense - in that they apply to all players. Only those with descriptions for targeted objects (like the tile ownership one) are otherwise. I'm borrowing terminology for "targeting" objects from Magic: The Gathering, which has very accurate rules definitions for terms like that and I should have explained that was what I was doing.

counterpoint said:
Right. I think, essentially, the things that involve actions - as opposed to affect yields, bonuses, etc. - can be refusalbe.

What's the mechanism for this, though? Do you refuse it upon its annunciation? Or do you refuse it later, when you "break the rule"?

Like, as an example, if you force peace on me, do I say "no" immediately, or do I sneak attack the civ two turns later? That's sort of easy to see iether way. A trickier case: if you demand Channeling Recruitment, do I refuse outright, or can I, say, 5 turns in, tell them "no" and get my spark back (or whatever that one was)?

Obviously, having it be immediate is simplest.

I think immediate makes sense, but we could have some forewarning for players that *an* Edict was going to be issued soon, though they wouldn't know which one. That way it doesn't quite come out of the blue.

So for the examples, if force peace is issued, then the players have to either accept now (peace commences immediately) or refuse now (war continues as before).

For the channeling recruitment, when that's issued, the players either need to pick which unit(s) to send (those units disappear right away) or refuse and they can keep all of the units they have.

Given how different all of the Edicts are, it would be very complicated to allow players to renege on their word after accepting the Edict, since that would mean performing a different operation for each Edict.

counterpoint said:
Right, I think you're kind of missing my main question, though. In content, this makes perfect sense - Tower can do mean stuff to its enemies. Cool.

I'm talking about literally the names of each continent. Like, on our world, the WT could say "Asia is embargoed!" or in the WoT, they could say "The Westlands are Embargoed!" But no such continent names (or numbers, labels, etc.) exist in CiV.

If the WT applies an edict to one continent, how would this be expressed to the player? "The WT punishes any Civs on Continent............D?"

We don't need to use the name, we can have a notification that says "Tower Bounty" ("The White Tower has used the Bowl of Winds to produce a bountiful harvest.") and has its location set to somewhere in the middle of that continent (if you click the notification, the camera moves to that location). If the player is being affected, we can produce a notification per affected city and let them see that city by clicking on the notification.

counterpoint said:
Right, I guess that I just don't get that the Tower can create a boon of good crop.... Didn't you say this was a result of the Bowl of Winds? So wasn't all that temp swing unintentional?

I guess maybe this has to do with the global vs targeted thing.

The Bowl was used to control the weather and fight off some of the Dark One's pestilence, right? With enough research, it seems like the Aes Sedai would be able to use it to influence crops, since they can affect weather patterns with it.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm.... 2 free Greens doesn't seem so cool if it counts against your cap. I mean, wouldn't civs mostly be right up against their cap? If they wanted to fill them with Greens, wouldn't they have already done so?

Maybe instead they should be temporary, and *not* count against the cap?

Are most civs usually right up against their cap? This probably ties into the discussion of quality vs. quantity with regards to Tower influence and how players get Aes Sedai. We were saying that most civs get Aes Sedai depending on a variety of factors about their empire composition, but the quality of those Aes Sedai varies depending on their influence with the Tower. In that case, yeah, they're probably up close to the cap.

Giving them temporarily and cap-free makes sense in that case. Players will use them differently then though. They're a lot more disposable if they're going away anyway after X turns, so players will use them in more risky, destructive ways. That seems to be in the spirit of this - helping to finish off a single war?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, definitely more than diplo.... The inverted trade thing seems to me, though, to be a little weird. Like kind of unintuitive and tricky to explain - also, sort of hard to flavorfully justify how the tower can accomplish that...

Thoughts? What else could it be?I guess, looking at the books, what would/does the WT do to nations that it doesn't like?

I think the trade thing makes a lot of sense. The Tower is integral to trade around the world and if they directed their efforts against a specific civilization then it could easily affect how well that nation could trade not just with the Tower, but also whoever the Tower can influence. It also is a much better representation of the Tower dealing with its enemies indirectly - making them wither and become less significant via political maneuvering, rather than destroying them outright with magic.

The books' approach to this is largely about nuanced diplomatic relationships. While we can model that with the diplo hit, we don't have nearly as fine a control as the narrative does through influential figures in well defined nations (our nations will be different each playthrough). I think economic consequences are a suitable discouragement because they can ripple through to other parts of the game. ("I can't refuse this Edict because I'm barely making any money as it is - if this flips over my units will start disbanding and I'll lose my war with the Aiel!")

counterpoint said:
Right. I will say though, that we shouldn't forget about Male Channelers post-cleansing. They'll be more useful then. That said, that also means this one would be a pretty lame thing for the Red to do since the men aren't mad anymore.

Definitely, they'll still be powerful, but Asha'man units will be stronger, right? So if this resolution is put in place, civs that haven't yet got any Asha'man units are significantly disadvantaged in battle against enemies that already have them.

counterpoint said:
I should clarify, I'm not saying it isn't useful to enough players because Prestige isn't useful, I'm saying it isn't useful because most players don't have Natural Wonders. Doesn't have to matter, but I'm just pointing out that the balance of this one is a bit off anyways because it applies to only a few of the civs in a given game.

We might be able to help with that a bit - some of base CiV's natural wonders are cool, but impractical (e.g. Krakatoa). They've got useful yields but their placement algorithms make it almost impossible to get a city close enough to work them (early enough in the game for it to make a difference). If our natural wonders are more landlocked and accessible, then we should have more players with access to them in each game.

counterpoint said:
My use of the word Customs is as it was defined earlier in the thread - our version of Beliefs. You are correct that one early draft of "Religions" was various customs from around RandLand, but here I'm talking about the beliefs.

So, all I mean here is that perhaps some of the bonuses we're creating here might end up being useful elsewhere as Follower Customs.

Ah, ok! Cool, yeah, that's possible.

counterpoint said:
I don't have a strong opinion on this. My intuition states actually that it should not be Compact associated - the Shadow Civs and Neutral Civs shouldn't be seeing the voting and actions of the Light Alliance, IMO.

Yeah, that's fine with me to keep them separate.

counterpoint said:
OK, so where does that leave us, then? I assume you're ready and able to work the C++, but are there any other DLL mods we'll need to be using?

Yeah, the mod as it stands already has a lot of C++ code in it. We're incompatible with all other DLL mods, but there's not much we can do about that. If there are features we want from other mods and they have published their source code, I can integrate the changes into ours (with the original owner's permission). I'd likely have to make some changes to WoT-ify the concepts from the other mod, and that makes taking updates from the other modder more difficult. But that's also unavoidable. I think we'll have mostly unique code for WoTMod and won't be taking other mods in directly.

A good example of another mod that was really cool to pull in though, was Barathor's More Luxuries. He created some awesome new resources with high quality artwork, some of which were definitely part of the WoT-verse (Tobacco became Tabac, for example). I talked to him a while back and pulled in a copy of his mod and made some small cosmetic changes (just naming) to WoT-ify those resources. More Luxuries doesn't have any C++ which certainly made it easier.

counterpoint said:
What I like about the things we're adding here - the WT, Steddings, etc. - is that the votes will depend on more than just buying CSs a turn before the vote.

Definitely, that is a nice change!

counterpoint said:
Also, kind of modern-economics-ey.... but, could work. Maybe just "Trade Equality"?

I've always thought Mercantile was quite a old-style sounding word - more economics-y would be like Transactional. Isn't Trade Equality the term used today?

counterpoint said:
You may be right. Is there a specific reason why having the " no proposal" option would be a bad idea, though? I suppose it leaves the possibility of really boring WC sessions.

Yeah, I'd just be worried that the WC would be left not doing anything for a significant amount of time. I figure it should always be having some additional effect on the game so that players are always wary of it.

counterpoint said:
Right. I think the Ogier make sense as remaining more neutral throughout the game - they won't go to war for you, nor will they become your exclusive ally.

Yep, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
OK, explain this to me. I don't really understand why it's in Mongolia's best interest to take over a bunch of CSs. I mean, I know their UA suggests that they can, but why would they want to, beyond one or two that are of strategic importance?Obviously, I udnerstand that the AI don't have Happiness problems from sprawling empires (hello Hiawatha's 20 cities!), but from a Player perspective, I still don't get it.

I was more talking about the AI - the way Mongolia is configured for the AI means it tends to bulldoze CSes as it expands. Definitely, that primarily works because the AI has magic happiness.

counterpoint said:
I think you either mistyped here or we are completely on different pages here. I'm trying to make it disadvantageous to hassle the Stedding unless you really really want one.

Oops, yes, typo! Disadvantageous is the word.

counterpoint said:
What do you mean when you say the bonuses would be globally useful? I figured they would be Civ specific - like the HK grants Andor a +5% production bonus for 20 turns or something, *not* all civs.

I used the word global to mean a lot of different things in that post. :crazyeye:

By "globally useful" I meant that the bonus would be useful to any civ, regardless of what that civ was trying to do to win the game.

counterpoint said:
Just dashing off a few (general) thoughts as to the bonuses that could exist:

- Province of Industry - + % Production, or + hammers per turn, to capital city
- Province of Crafts - +% Production when building X unit or Y building
- Province of Wealth - +1 Gold yield from Strategic Resources/Luxury Resources (or something)
- Province of Exploration - +1 movement for naval units
- Province of Belief - +1 Faith per city
- Province of Learning - +1 Science per 3 population in the capital
- Province of Honor - +15% Experience from killing Shadowspawn and Dragonsworn
- Province of Invention - +5 culture per international trade route
- Province of Sacrifice - no bonus

Again, I think some of them could be specifically "better" than others - in fact, maybe we randomize the values, at least somewhat. Well, not randomize the values, but randomize which ones get to be "good" and which ones are "mediocre." Like the first one could be +10% in some games, +5% in others.

A golden age for one of the bonuses could be cool.

I like the idea of having variable amounts for each reward in each game - so the industry one might be better one time, the culture one the next.

What are the High King civ's bonuses? Does he get to give one of the above to himself as well? When there are fewer civs than bonuses, how do we pare down the list so that they're equal? (Or do we even want to?)

counterpoint said:
Ah, a kind of super-alliance. Not a bad idea. Would this replace the DoF or be in addition to it? If it replaces it, I do agree that a new name would be a good idea. Accord is ok, but maybe a bit meh.

I was thinking in addition to DoF. It's a fairly significant new piece of content though (to get the dpilo AI to use it correctly), so it's only we think it add significantly to the game. I'm not how much it does that DoF doesn't.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this one is probably functionally not unlike the 2050 score victory. Like, ok guys, nobody wants to be HK...? fine, I'll give it to the guy with the science!

I was thinking that in the case where no one pulls ahead to get the tech, no one becomes High King. It's only if one player pulls far enough ahead in tech and reaches the "High King tech" before the world era reaches the "no more High King" threshold that they become High King through science.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this is fine, though a little cheesy. Like building a palace gives you control over an empire...

If you build it, then they will come!

S3rgeus · Dec 20, 2014

counterpoint said:
yeah, if anybody already has half the capitals....... they deserve to be the HK. Honestly, I think that's too hard. Way harder than the other things, right?

Depends on the map size - if there are only 4 players then that's only one capital on top of your own. (On duel maps you've already got it.) The Domination victory is known to be harder on larger map sizes, I'm not sure if we need to compensate for that. This is happening towards the end of era 4, right? So just before the Industrial Era in base CiV? On a continents map, there will often be players consolidating control of a single continent around that time. And it should be something to work towards, rather than achieve incidentally. Like you say below, it shouldn't make you do weird stuff, but it might make you prioritize certain actions differently.

We could go for number of cities taken though? Or we could scale the number of capitals needed down on larger map sizes?

counterpoint said:
Eh.... don't love this. First of all, I wouldn't want to put it in terms of the LB and light/shadow. This is happening way, way before anybody knows what side they'll be on.

Good point, hadn't thought of that!

counterpoint said:
I can see Paths being there somehow, but I do agree that it is problematic due to the trade-off that's normally present. I do think, if we were to make a choice, I think the HK makes more sense for a civ whos Path has spread the most - not necessarily the one who is best evolved.

I think that just creates the opposite effect on the normal trade-off - now it's better to spend your faith to spread your Path since that leads to being High King as well. (I do agree that that's a better flavor representation of being High King though.) Perhaps we should leave off Path from the High King triggers?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I like this in theory, but I will say that this one is a bit weird because it seems like something people will only try to do in order to become the HK. To me it seems like the rest of these things are thing a civ will try to do ovre the course of their game anyway - building cities on random islands for proximity to capitals is a bit of a big ask for some civ, IMO. Is there another challenging gold-feat that isn't going to make somebody do really weird stuff with their game plan?

True, the other objectives are logical extensions of the actions players want to be performing anyway. While capital trade routes are often lucrative, the drawbacks in spreading yourself thin trying to get them all are significant.

I'd be reluctant to make the High Kingship something "purchaseable" if you had enough gold, because that seems kinda cheap.

I'm not sure what other way we could make gold contribute to becoming High King. Could we do something with one-sided gold trades? Trade away X gold in diplo trades with other civs?

counterpoint said:
right, so this is where we find the issue of whether you actually mean these to be "global" or not. See, it sounds like you're targetting one civ's AS... how is that global, then? Unless you mean each civ gives up one. That would make sense to me - if the Tower disliked a civ, wouldn't that dislike lower the amount of AS they'd have anyways?

remember, though, i've stated that I kind of want most of these to be global anyways.

Yeah, my use of global here was quite confusing.

In terms of the specifics of this Edict - I made it intentionally target a single Aes Sedai. I don't think that the Tower would even always use it against civilizations they don't like. We've already got the "Channeler Recruitment" Edict which pulls in channelers from everybody. The Aes Sedai are flavorfully supposed to be free agents, and answer to the Tower before the nation they are currently working within/for. I was aiming this Edict to be the Tower "reassigning" an Aes Sedai from her current duties. It would free up a slot for that player to get another Aes Sedai from the Tower. (Speaking of which, what's the instigating event that causes the "Choose a Sister" dialog to pop up again? Like, in general.)

counterpoint said:
Actually. Totally don't know what you mean by this.... I assume it reveals stuff to people. What does it mean to "center" it?

The same thing that Stonehenge does in base CiV. (This definitely only affects the human player.) Normally the minimap expands as you explore the fog of war and reveal the map, growing to accommodate whatever lands you can see. Depending on how you explore the map, the resulting meridian may be different. (To see this in action, play a multiplayer game and compare the human players' minimaps once they've revealed a significant amount of the world. Different parts of the world will be in the "middle" of the minimap for each player.) Centering the minimap lines it up with the actual underlying (entire) map, putting the edge of the minimap in line with the map seam (where co-ordinates wrap around to 0 again), and showing the player how big the world is.

counterpoint said:
Well, similar to with the stuff with the Droughts... Why would the Blue Ajah make a policy that causes more dragonsworn to pop up? I mean, if we view these as actual "edicts" passed on from the tower, this one makes no sense.

Yeah, this doesn't really map well to being "issued" by the Tower, it's more of a consequence of their actions.

counterpoint said:
The first one is crazy, in that it's very flavorful, but totally stupid. Like, assuming the Red Ajah is Lightside, why the heck would they ever want to - oh, they tried that in the books...

Ah, how we hate Elaida.

counterpoint said:
The second one seems a bit overpowered, right? I mean, couldn't that really upset the balance of the whole AS thing? I'm having trouble figuring out how, but it seems like it might be a bit crazy. Then again, everybody would have it. Flavorful, though!

I'm not sure if it would be overpowered - you'd have to be very strategic about your movements to not be visible on an actual battlefield. If you move the warder off separately, the other player could narrow his location down fairly quickly when you pillage tiles. Warders would make very good scouts for a time though.

counterpoint said:
Maybe something about Training the Wise Women or something? Training the Locals? Something about herbs?

Herbalist Advisement?

counterpoint said:
both are fine, though the second is kidna random - why Plantations?

Mostly because they seemed to be the improvements that most represented "owning land". And they're also only used to improve resources, so civs won't just pillage them for the duration of the Edict. We could pick a building type instead though?

counterpoint said:
Actually, I think the whole Edict system sorta breaks down a little bit once the LB starts. The truth is, it's a state of open War. I can imagine that neither the WT Edicts nor Compact Resolutions actually function during the LB. Again, it's open war. I know they need to in order to enable the diplomatic victory, but... why would a shadow player follow a resolution adopted by light players?

I definitely agree about the Tower - its Edicts are really only relevant to the side that the Tower goes with in the Last Battle.

The Compact is more troublesome. Shadow players need to be able to win a diplo victory. But flavor wise, how would you ever get these governments to co-operate on anything? Even in participation in a global Compact? It might be that we just ignore the disparity, because we need the Compact mechanics to persist into the Last Battle. Maybe this is where refusable Compact resolutions might make sense?

counterpoint said:
I do think a case could be made for leaving the Compact intact, but making it so that civs are more encouraged to refuse an enemy white tower. I guess this would be worked into it already - if Diplo hits with the tower are a main drawback of refusal, that's not really a problem anymore - you already have no Aes Sedai!

I think we could even encode that directly. There are no penalties for refusing a Tower Edict when you're declared for the opposite side in the Last Battle?

counterpoint said:
Assuming we leave it all intact, I do think it's best to keep the structures of the WT similar once the Tower Turns. It's not something that'll happen so often, so it's not worth inventing new stuff. I do think a few resolutions would cease to e available, and a few new ones would pop up, though. But, again, I'd assume that Light civs would be refusing essentially everything were this to happen.

Cool, that sounds good to me.

I'm afraid it's gotten quite late! Quests from the Tower will have to wait until tomorrow!

S3rgeus · Dec 22, 2014

In a world where Monday comes after Saturday.

Tower Quests
Each Ajah is its own "stream" of quests, allowing players to gain favor with that Ajah by performing some action(s) to help them. The reward for any of these quests is influence with the Ajah that gave that quest. Some quests are "requests" for actions that the player could have taken anyway - much like the "CS requests gold" quest in base CiV. These are to encourage player interaction with the Tower by giving them a short window of time in which that interaction is more profitable for them.

Quests come in two forms:

Targeted: The quest is given to a single player by a single Ajah and that instance of the quest is only visible to that player. Multiple instances of the same quest may be given to different players by the same Ajah (or multiple different Ajahs may give the same player separate instances of the same quest). This is analogous to the "CS wants your religion" quest in base CiV.

Global: In the true sense of the word this time, global quests are visible to all players that have met the Tower. A single Ajah can only have a single instance of a global quest running at once, and that same instance is participated in by all players. These are sometimes competitive objectives that reward the player completing a specific objective before all other players. This is analogous to the "research the most techs in 30 turns" CS quest in base CiV. Sometimes these are incremental rewards for actions that are universally available to all players, limited by a time frame in which those rewards take place. (No base CiV analog, as far as I remember.)

Further, Amyrlin Quests require the current Amyrlin to have been raised from that Ajah in order for the Ajah to propose the marked quest. Amyrlin quests are often massive global objectives that help the Ajah more than the players. (Giving all players influence with an Ajah gives no player a relative advantage over another, but does make that Ajah drastically more influential within the Tower.)

And related to all quests - numbers will need to scale with map size and difficulty.

So, let's get started with some quests!

Common Quests
Common Quests may be given by any Ajah - they are equally applicable to any Ajah, regardless of its philosophies, strengths, and weaknesses. By completing the quest's objective, you gain influence with whichever single Ajah distributed the quest.

Recruit a Novice
The Ajah requests that the player send them a non-Aes Sedai female channeling unit to become a Sister. Targeted quest.

Assist the Tower
Gain influence with the proposing Ajah in exchange for declaring war against a civilization currently at war with the Tower. Targeted Quest.

Recall Sisters
Players may return Sister units from the proposing Ajah to the Tower in exchange for influence with that Ajah for 30 turns. Global quest.

Center of the World
The proposing Ajah will reward you for connecting a road from the Tower to your capital. Targeted quest.

Free from Tyranny
The proposing Ajah will reward you for liberating a city originally owned by a player that has chosen the Authority Ideology. (Worth a lot of influence, since it's quite difficult to do.) Targeted quest.

Channeling Dogma
The proposing Ajah will reward the player that captures targeted city owned by a civilization following the Oppression Ideology. Global quest. (Or should this be any city owned by an Oppression civ and be a targeted quest? That way we could give it mainly to civs following Authority.)

Tower Schism
A single global instance of this quest exists at once but is associated with two Ajahs. Players may return Sisters to either Ajah in exchange for influence with that Ajah. Other quests completed for either Ajah give you bonus influence, but costs you influence with the other Ajah. Lasts for 40 turns. Global quest.

Blue Ajah

Ta'veren Watchers
The civilization that produces the most Great People in the next 30 turns will win this quest (ties are allowed). Global quest.

Seals Unbroken
The Blue Ajah will reward the player that keeps a Seal of the Dark One safe in their capital for the highest number of turns out of the next 30. (Having multiple Seals counts multiple times - if you've got two in your capital, you get two "keep safe turns" every turn.) Global quest. (Only enabled when Last Battle is enabled.)

Hold back the Shadow
The Blue Ajah will reward the player that generates the most faith in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Stand by the Dragon
All participating civilizations gain favor with the Blue Ajah if Saidin is Cleansed in the next 45 turns. (This may be too Last-Battle-ish or circumstantial.)

Telamon's Legacy
The Blue Ajah will reward the civilization that controls the Dragonmount Natural Wonder tile in 30 turns. Global quest.

Brown Ajah

Study an Artifact
The Brown Ajah requests that the player send them a Great Work to study. (Is this just for a time - so the player gets it back? Or do we want the Tower to trade you another Great Work in exchange?) Targeted quest.

Gatherers of Relics
The Brown Ajah will reward the player that excavates the most Antiquity Sites in the next 30 turns (ties are allowed). Global quest.

Intriguing Specimen
The Brown Ajah will reward the player that excavates targeted Antiquity Site in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Scrollwork Shelving
The Brown Ajah will reward you for building an inn/library/building-that-stores-books in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

Red Ajah

Gentle an Offering
The Red Ajah will reward you if you send them a male channeler to Gentle in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

Plague Upon the Land
The Red Ajah will reward any civilization that destroys targeted Dragonsworn encampment (encampment may be far from the Tower). Global quest.

Quell the Uprisings
All civilizations gain favor with the Red Ajah if three or more False Dragons are killed in the next 45 turns. (Influence portioned out based on who killed the False Dragons and their units?) Amyrlin quest.

Green Ajah

Recruit a Warder
The Green Ajah requests a powerful warrior from you, who will act as a Warder for one of its Sisters. (Send the Tower a male unit with 3 or more promotions.) Targeted quest.

Blighted Foe
The Green Ajah will reward players for killing Shadowspawn for the next 30 turns. (+5 influence per unit, for example.) Global quest.

Battle Ajah
All civilizations gain favor with the Green Ajah if Green Sister units kill a global total of 100 (arbitrary number) Shadowspawn units in the next 45 turns. Amyrlin quest.

Yellow Ajah

Respect for Injury
The Yellow Ajah rewards any civilizations that fortify their units to heal during the next 30 turns. (Very small amount, +1 per unit per turn or something.) Global quest.

Combat the Plague
The Yellow Ajah will reward you for building a Wisdom's Cottage/health-related-building in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

Gray Ajah

Entreaty for Peace
The Gray Ajah will reward you for making peace with civilization X (who you are currently at war with) in the next 5 turns. Targeted quest.

Diplomatic Consequences
The Gray Ajah will reward you for denouncing civilization X (who the Tower doesn't like) in the next 10 turns. Targeted quest.

Trade
The Gray Ajah will reward you for establishing a trade route with the Tower in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

National Accords
The Gray Ajah will reward the player that signs the most declarations of friendship/accords in the next 45 turns. Global quest.

Our Wishes
The Gray Ajah will reward you for voting in tandem with the Tower on the next Compact resolution. Targeted quest.

Global Armistice
Every civilization is rewarded by the Gray Ajah if there is any single turn in the next 30 turns where there are no active wars. Amyrlin quest.

White Ajah

Research Fellowship
The White Ajah rewards any player that puts more than half of their cities into a science focus for at least 25 of the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Unnecessary Beliefs
The White Ajah will reward any player that disbands a missionary (substitute in whatever we call the Path-spreading unit) for the next 20 turns.

Honor the Luminaries
The White Ajah will reward the player that researches the most technologies in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Hour of Progress
The White Ajah will reward you for progressing into a new era in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

Shared Intelligence
All civilizations gain favor with the White Ajah if 5 or more Research Agreements are signed in the next 45 turns. (Or possibly just those civilizations that signed the agreements.) Amyrlin quest.

And that's all for now. I think we'd like to have more than what I've outlined above, but I think this is a good starting point. We're also still missing Amyrlin quests for the Blue, Yellow, and Brown Ajahs. I'll be thinking on these and would welcome suggestions!

counterpoint · Dec 24, 2014

ldragogode297 said:
If I may (once again) weigh in, perhaps have the Amyrlin elections tied to researchs? Say, you research Archery, perhaps, and an election comes in. 20-30 turns later, another player has already reached Forgery (or whatever it is) and there's an election then. That's just my thoughts on it, though.

Sorry, maybe this is me, but I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you mean here. You're saying the timing of the elections are tech-gated, or the voting itself?

S3rgeus said:
I think unless we come up with a better approach, then primarily culture usage will have to stick for the Brown Ajah Sisters for now. Wonders that produce culture can be useful in other ways to non-culture players, but you're right that this makes the Brown the "culture" Ajah.

OK, agreed for now, then.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I think your approach is better - having an entirely separate quest stream is a bit much. So a few Amyrlin-only quests for each Ajah are in order! I'll do a quest-list-proposal below, so I'll mark a few of them that are appropriate as Amyrlin-only.

Nice. "High Level" quests unlocked via Amyrlin, it is!

S3rgeus said:
I think we've shifted slightly in our notion of overall Tower influence for a given player. Originally we were saying that a player's overall Tower influence was based on the sum of their influences with all of the Ajahs, with some modifiers applied onto that for the "state" of their empire (choice of Ideology, policies). You're suggesting here that we track overall influence separately? Is overall influence contributed to solely through external actions, rather than the Ajah quests?

Yes, I am proposing that we have there be a Total Influence value - this one will look like a CS slider, with negative being a possibility - though I didn't know I was proposing it, since I thought that's what we were doing.

For me, the main reason for this is just what was written above - the negative value, which we'd determined wasn't possible with the Ajahs.

I think Ajah influence should feedback into the Total Influence - increasing with an Ajah does slightly raise your WT Influence. I'm not sure it needs to go the other way, though - gaining influence with the WT will already reflect on your Ajah gains since it will function as a Modifier on them, right?

I think Ajah influence is determined by contributions of units/money/population to that Ajah, certain Social Policies, friendships with other Ajahs, choosing their Aes Sedai, and Quests.

I think Overal WT influence is determined by your global diplomatic actions, certain Social Policies, your military actions, your trade actions with the Tower, All-WT quests, and to a much lesser extent, everything above that effects the Ajahs.

S3rgeus said:
I thought we would have it set up that overall influence didn't need to be tracked separately. If you take the influences a given civilization has with each of the Ajahs, knowing the current state of their empire (what policies/ideologies/technologies they have) you can perform some mathematical operation on their Ajah influences and the result will be their overall influence. If overall influence can be modified in such a way that we're not just stacking on another state (example of another state: you selected Oppression so your influence modifier is now -10% from what it was before) without any Ajah influences changing at the same time, then overall influence needs to be tracked separately.

OK, I think I gotcha mostly, but I don't quite see what makes this system better than what I'm suggesting. To me, the mechanisms for altering an Ajah's influence don't seem the same as those of the WT as a whole. Would like to hear what you think about what I wrote above.

Truthfully, though, I can be swayed either way.

S3rgeus said:
That's not a bad thing, but it's a very big distinction in terms of what overall influence with the Tower means.

Right, though I guess I'd like to hear what you think it does mean, in each of those cases.

S3rgeus said:
In terms of how we apply that overall influence as a modifier, changing the yields of the Ajahs is significantly more complex than changing the rate of influence being accrued. Rate of influence being accrued we can modify very easily since it's simple math on the player's would-be influence gains. But the value of Ajah influences varies depending on the effects those Ajahs provide, and how to vary them is unique for each type of bonus each Ajah has. I think they achieve very similar things (earning less influence means you get fewer bonuses, your bonuses being less valuable means they're less useful to you), so I think we can go for the simpler option in this case.

Ok. I think you're right - if we do set up a modifier, its simpler to scale gains of influence instead of bonuses.

S3rgeus said:
It's different from normal CSes because all players are contributing to the same pot of influence with a given Ajah. With a normal CS, Egypt gaining influence doesn't affect France's influence on that same CS. But in our case, Manetheren gaining influence with the Blue Ajah makes the influence Andor already has with the Blue worth less.

huh...am I being dumb here or something? That still seems the same as a normal CS to me.

If Egypt gains +100 influence with Kathmandu, it most certainly does effect France's *effective* influence with Kathmandu - they not how to be 100 points higher in order to become Kathmandu's ally, right? To me this seems the same - there are certain set values that create bonuses for the player (i.e., unlocked abilities) which are analogous to the "Friends" CS thing, but the ultimate benefit (swaying their votes, etc.) is analogous to CS Alliances, and adjusts based on how much influence the other Players have.

S3rgeus said:
The other difference is that CS rewards are based on the raw points numbers that each player has with that CS. So the values need to decrease over time or, as you've said, you can have enough for a bonus you want and then never have to interact with that CS again. But with the Ajahs, we can have the bonuses at percentage influence values. You get the bonus Blue Sisters ability if you've got 30%+ influence with the Blue Ajah, say. You want that ability so you go straight for it toward the beginning of the game. At that time, not many people have influence with the Tower, so you've got 50 'points' of influence with the Blue, which amounts to 50% of the influence with that Ajah. Awesome, that means you have the extra ability.

But if you never contribute to the Blue for the rest of the game, someone else will. And in the spirit of CiV, the underlying influence numbers players can generate increase as the game goes on. (Start of the game, you can get 50 influence by doing a quest, which requires a lot of your resources to go kill some Shadowspawn. By the end of the game, you've got loads of cities to work with and can complete a lot more Tower quests a lot faster, accruing more points.) So your 50 influence points from the start of the game is only 4% influence with that Ajah by the end of the Era of the High King - because other players have contributed hundreds of influence to the Ajah.

Now, we could model this more like the CSes, where the influences degrade, and get a similar system. But it would make the Tower more likely to swing back and forth as players contribute because everyone will have less influence in total. By making it build up over the course of the game, the Tower becomes more stable in its opinions the longer it goes on, which I think makes a lot of sense.

It also means that in order to "overthrow" someone who was influential with an Ajah, you would need to work at it consistently over a period of time - rather than the sudden gold buyouts that we see with CSes in base CiV.

OK, I finally do see the end point here - the constant increasing makes it so the rapid swings of the diplo system are different.

Alright, alright. I do think we need to frame it differently that how influence is framed in CiV, though - otherwise, people will expect it to operate the same as it does for CSs.

I'd say the only other issue with this is it is a little less transparent seeming for the player - it's not always clear how much of an effect something will have.

S3rgeus said:
In that last section, you mean the value of influence when converting from the underlying points to the % you have with the Ajah? That we can do, it makes the math underneath a bit harder to follow, but it shouldn't change understandability for the player. The rest of this sort of ties into what I was asking above, about overall Tower influence being tracked separately from the total Ajah influence.

Conceptually, I think we would do "both" when a player chooses Oppression. They lose some of the influence they have with each Ajah (which, in turn, makes influence other players have more valuable). Then the player has a penalty when they try to gain any influence back (this is the "overall" influence, being affected by the state of the player's empire). Picking a number, Oppression players could gain 25% less influence for equivalent actions as players who haven't declared an Ideology.

To this, I simply direct you to my comments above, which seem to be simultaneously responding to this bit.

S3rgeus said:
I think players can see which Ajahs are the most powerful in the normal course of events through the "Tower summary" page. You've got a big bar chart with all of the Ajahs and the Ajah with the biggest bar has the most influence. (That bar is subdivided by the amount of influence individual players have with that Ajah.) This is a bit hard to write out in text - would it help if I produced a mock-up influence graph?

Nah. Not worth your time. I can see what you mean, and I think that works well.

S3rgeus said:
Ah, you were right the first time! Poor choice of terminology on my part, "Global Edicts" are only distinguished from "Ajah Edicts" in that they can be proposed regardless of which Ajahs are currently influential in the Tower. I agree, a lot of these definitely are intended to be "global" in the traditional sense - in that they apply to all players. Only those with descriptions for targeted objects (like the tile ownership one) are otherwise. I'm borrowing terminology for "targeting" objects from Magic: The Gathering, which has very accurate rules definitions for terms like that and I should have explained that was what I was doing.

Well, I'd say we should swap out the term global, considering it's used elsewhere in Civ. General? Tower Edicts?

S3rgeus said:
I think immediate makes sense, but we could have some forewarning for players that *an* Edict was going to be issued soon, though they wouldn't know which one. That way it doesn't quite come out of the blue.

I like this, especially since it makes the Edicts more of a "thing" that way.

S3rgeus said:
So for the examples, if force peace is issued, then the players have to either accept now (peace commences immediately) or refuse now (war continues as before).

For the channeling recruitment, when that's issued, the players either need to pick which unit(s) to send (those units disappear right away) or refuse and they can keep all of the units they have.

Given how different all of the Edicts are, it would be very complicated to allow players to renege on their word after accepting the Edict, since that would mean performing a different operation for each Edict.

OK, immediate it is!

S3rgeus said:
We don't need to use the name, we can have a notification that says "Tower Bounty" ("The White Tower has used the Bowl of Winds to produce a bountiful harvest.") and has its location set to somewhere in the middle of that continent (if you click the notification, the camera moves to that location). If the player is being affected, we can produce a notification per affected city and let them see that city by clicking on the notification.

ok. got it.

S3rgeus said:
The Bowl was used to control the weather and fight off some of the Dark One's pestilence, right? With enough research, it seems like the Aes Sedai would be able to use it to influence crops, since they can affect weather patterns with it.

alright. you seem to like this one. It survives the day!

S3rgeus said:
Are most civs usually right up against their cap? This probably ties into the discussion of quality vs. quantity with regards to Tower influence and how players get Aes Sedai. We were saying that most civs get Aes Sedai depending on a variety of factors about their empire composition, but the quality of those Aes Sedai varies depending on their influence with the Tower. In that case, yeah, they're probably up close to the cap.

I figure that civs are either up against their cap, or at least working towards it. Like, if I have four Sisters currently and 7 as my potential total, I figure the Tower will gift them to me periodically, at a rate faster than I'd be able to raise my potential total to 8. Obviously, when they all die, it would take a large number of turns to repopulate them, but a healthy empire is likely close to "full."

S3rgeus said:
Giving them temporarily and cap-free makes sense in that case. Players will use them differently then though. They're a lot more disposable if they're going away anyway after X turns, so players will use them in more risky, destructive ways. That seems to be in the spirit of this - helping to finish off a single war?

OK, your points make sense. I figure this edict would probably only really happen during wartime and such.

S3rgeus said:
I think the trade thing makes a lot of sense. The Tower is integral to trade around the world and if they directed their efforts against a specific civilization then it could easily affect how well that nation could trade not just with the Tower, but also whoever the Tower can influence. It also is a much better representation of the Tower dealing with its enemies indirectly - making them wither and become less significant via political maneuvering, rather than destroying them outright with magic.

The books' approach to this is largely about nuanced diplomatic relationships. While we can model that with the diplo hit, we don't have nearly as fine a control as the narrative does through influential figures in well defined nations (our nations will be different each playthrough). I think economic consequences are a suitable discouragement because they can ripple through to other parts of the game. ("I can't refuse this Edict because I'm barely making any money as it is - if this flips over my units will start disbanding and I'll lose my war with the Aiel!")

Wait, so you had delusions that you'd ever be able to win a war with the Aiel?

OK, I see your logic. Obviously the Tower doesn't act as a ruler of Trade, but as an abstraction this could work, especially given the nice fact that this isn't just a diplo hit.

I am concerned that it's kind of unintuitive though - might it be similar to just provide a penalty to trade benefits? The flip thing seems weird - won't people just stop trading, or in team games, do it on purpose to make one player super rich?

S3rgeus said:
Definitely, they'll still be powerful, but Asha'man units will be stronger, right? So if this resolution is put in place, civs that haven't yet got any Asha'man units are significantly disadvantaged in battle against enemies that already have them.

yep. definitely

S3rgeus said:
We might be able to help with that a bit - some of base CiV's natural wonders are cool, but impractical (e.g. Krakatoa). They've got useful yields but their placement algorithms make it almost impossible to get a city close enough to work them (early enough in the game for it to make a difference). If our natural wonders are more landlocked and accessible, then we should have more players with access to them in each game.

That would be great. Nat Wonders feel like a cool idea that never matters, as is.

What kinds of things would we be doing as natural wonders? I remember the idea of AoL ruins/features being them would be cool - but it seems like we might need some of those as Wonders.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, the mod as it stands already has a lot of C++ code in it. We're incompatible with all other DLL mods, but there's not much we can do about that. If there are features we want from other mods and they have published their source code, I can integrate the changes into ours (with the original owner's permission). I'd likely have to make some changes to WoT-ify the concepts from the other mod, and that makes taking updates from the other modder more difficult. But that's also unavoidable. I think we'll have mostly unique code for WoTMod and won't be taking other mods in directly.

A good example of another mod that was really cool to pull in though, was Barathor's More Luxuries. He created some awesome new resources with high quality artwork, some of which were definitely part of the WoT-verse (Tobacco became Tabac, for example). I talked to him a while back and pulled in a copy of his mod and made some small cosmetic changes (just naming) to WoT-ify those resources. More Luxuries doesn't have any C++ which certainly made it easier.

cool. thanks for the clarification. Obviously, you lead here!

S3rgeus said:
I've always thought Mercantile was quite a old-style sounding word - more economics-y would be like Transactional. Isn't Trade Equality the term used today?

Yeah, Mercantilism is a 17th century (age of englightment) concept. Old, but not maybe old enough. Also, taken through the lens of mercantilism, "Mercantile Equality" is somewhat of an oxymoron. Nobody cares, though. I could accept it

Guilds and that kind of thing feel really old... not sure how to spin it into a name, though. Guild Partnership? International Guild Network?

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'd just be worried that the WC would be left not doing anything for a significant amount of time. I figure it should always be having some additional effect on the game so that players are always wary of it.

OK, I understand, but at the same time, if we put enough good stuff in, people will probably choose it. If they choose not to, maybe its part of some cool stall-progress strategy....?

S3rgeus said:
I was more talking about the AI - the way Mongolia is configured for the AI means it tends to bulldoze CSes as it expands. Definitely, that primarily works because the AI has magic happiness.

but seriously, I still don't quite understand the point of the mongol UA... Use tribute to fuel invasions or something?

S3rgeus said:
Oops, yes, typo! Disadvantageous is the word.

Ah, I figured. Amazing how much damage three letters can do.

S3rgeus said:
I used the word global to mean a lot of different things in that post. By "globally useful" I meant that the bonus would be useful to any civ, regardless of what that civ was trying to do to win the game.

Good. I'm very glad we were on the same page here.

S3rgeus said:
A golden age for one of the bonuses could be cool.

I like the idea of having variable amounts for each reward in each game - so the industry one might be better one time, the culture one the next.

Great. Both of those things.

S3rgeus said:
What are the High King civ's bonuses? Does he get to give one of the above to himself as well? When there are fewer civs than bonuses, how do we pare down the list so that they're equal? (Or do we even want to?)

Interesting. I think the High King might actually be cool as a kind of Tax - the HK chooses want they want - Gold, hammers, etc. - and everybody else has to provide it, maybe?

I think it would be important to pare down the list at least somewhat - we want somebody to be left with nothing, though. Maybe the best way to do it is, instead of actually limiting the options, we limit them by category. Allow me to explain:

Say you have ten bonuses, and each is randomly determined to be Good, Average, or Poor - probably 2-4 of each type. If you have 10 civs, you'd be giving out each of them - making sure that the last civ got Nothing.

But if you had only 4 civs, we could leave the same 10, but limit the number of each category that can be given - one good, one average and one poor (or maybe just the Nothing), instead of three of the top ones, for example.

What do you think of that?

S3rgeus said:
I was thinking in addition to DoF. It's a fairly significant new piece of content though (to get the dpilo AI to use it correctly), so it's only we think it add significantly to the game. I'm not how much it does that DoF doesn't.

Ah, I see. I'm in favor of this, in theory, because clearly the DoF doesn't appear to be compelling enough for me to even know much about how it works.... Not necessarily a reason to do it though. I'm not sure what the additional bonuses would specifically be.

S3rgeus said:
I was thinking that in the case where no one pulls ahead to get the tech, no one becomes High King. It's only if one player pulls far enough ahead in tech and reaches the "High King tech" before the world era reaches the "no more High King" threshold that they become High King through science.

ok. sounds good.

S3rgeus said:
If you build it, then they will come!

ooh, ooh! an 80s movie reference! my turn!

Ray, if somebody asks you if you're a God, YOU SAY YES.

counterpoint · Dec 24, 2014

S3rgeus said:
Depends on the map size - if there are only 4 players then that's only one capital on top of your own. (On duel maps you've already got it.) The Domination victory is known to be harder on larger map sizes, I'm not sure if we need to compensate for that. This is happening towards the end of era 4, right? So just before the Industrial Era in base CiV? On a continents map, there will often be players consolidating control of a single continent around that time. And it should be something to work towards, rather than achieve incidentally. Like you say below, it shouldn't make you do weird stuff, but it might make you prioritize certain actions differently.

We could go for number of cities taken though? Or we could scale the number of capitals needed down on larger map sizes?

OK, yeah, I see your points, here. I think we can try it and see how it goes. # of cities makes intuitive sense, but it might reward too highly those players who are next to wimpy but very wide civs.

S3rgeus said:
I think that just creates the opposite effect on the normal trade-off - now it's better to spend your faith to spread your Path since that leads to being High King as well. (I do agree that that's a better flavor representation of being High King though.) Perhaps we should leave off Path from the High King triggers?

Ah, yeah... It does seem to always be the case that Faith-systems don't play nicely with regular ol' game mechanics in CiV....

S3rgeus said:
True, the other objectives are logical extensions of the actions players want to be performing anyway. While capital trade routes are often lucrative, the drawbacks in spreading yourself thin trying to get them all are significant.

I'd be reluctant to make the High Kingship something "purchaseable" if you had enough gold, because that seems kinda cheap.

I'm not sure what other way we could make gold contribute to becoming High King. Could we do something with one-sided gold trades? Trade away X gold in diplo trades with other civs?

the more we talk about this, the more I'm ok with it being pretty hard to become the high king. Maybe it shouldn't be every time. Maybe its fine that some of these are tricky - it'll make some players "go for it" and others completely ignore it, sorta like the WF and International Games. And maybe that's fine - that's certainly how it is in real life (when was the last time the Swiss tried to take over Europe?)

S3rgeus said:
In terms of the specifics of this Edict - I made it intentionally target a single Aes Sedai. I don't think that the Tower would even always use it against civilizations they don't like. We've already got the "Channeler Recruitment" Edict which pulls in channelers from everybody. The Aes Sedai are flavorfully supposed to be free agents, and answer to the Tower before the nation they are currently working within/for. I was aiming this Edict to be the Tower "reassigning" an Aes Sedai from her current duties. It would free up a slot for that player to get another Aes Sedai from the Tower. (Speaking of which, what's the instigating event that causes the "Choose a Sister" dialog to pop up again? Like, in general.)

ok, definitely makes sense. I'm fine with this.

Re: the instigating event.... doesnt the Tower offer one? If you're due one (due to your cap), maybe the Tower offers them to you on a schedule that is somewhat randomized? I'm not sure it needs to be triggered by anything specific (barring some cases, techs, etc.).

S3rgeus said:
The same thing that Stonehenge does in base CiV. (This definitely only affects the human player.) Normally the minimap expands as you explore the fog of war and reveal the map, growing to accommodate whatever lands you can see. Depending on how you explore the map, the resulting meridian may be different. (To see this in action, play a multiplayer game and compare the human players' minimaps once they've revealed a significant amount of the world. Different parts of the world will be in the "middle" of the minimap for each player.) Centering the minimap lines it up with the actual underlying (entire) map, putting the edge of the minimap in line with the map seam (where co-ordinates wrap around to 0 again), and showing the player how big the world is.

I thought stonehenge just gave you faith and stuff?

OK, I do understand what you mean now, though.

S3rgeus said:
I'm not sure if it would be overpowered - you'd have to be very strategic about your movements to not be visible on an actual battlefield. If you move the warder off separately, the other player could narrow his location down fairly quickly when you pillage tiles. Warders would make very good scouts for a time though.

Interesting. Definitely willing to try it!

S3rgeus said:
Herbalist Advisement?

Getting there...... still kinda clunky..?

S3rgeus said:
Mostly because they seemed to be the improvements that most represented "owning land". And they're also only used to improve resources, so civs won't just pillage them for the duration of the Edict. We could pick a building type instead though?

No, they could be fine, though of course this targets some civs more than others - jungle ones, for example.

S3rgeus said:
I definitely agree about the Tower - its Edicts are really only relevant to the side that the Tower goes with in the Last Battle.

The Compact is more troublesome. Shadow players need to be able to win a diplo victory. But flavor wise, how would you ever get these governments to co-operate on anything? Even in participation in a global Compact? It might be that we just ignore the disparity, because we need the Compact mechanics to persist into the Last Battle. Maybe this is where refusable Compact resolutions might make sense?

I definitely think the Compact should stay intact - the Tower Edicts are the thing that could mostly go away (or the Tower spends the LB passing edicts that only help the Light or something).

As far as refusable compact resolutions... eh, I don't think I like it. The thing is, if everybody hates you, they'll always vote in your worst interest. Then you'll disobey them, and you'll get a diplo hit... and they'll hate you more. Just seems needlessly redundant. I'd rather leave it alone. Passing anything during the LB will certainly be difficult.

So, I imagine the CSs turn to various sides based on the alignment of their Allies? Does that mean a CS that is "sniped" before a vote could switch from Shadow to Light? That's so weird. Suggestions?

S3rgeus said:
I think we could even encode that directly. There are no penalties for refusing a Tower Edict when you're declared for the opposite side in the Last Battle?

Yeah, that's why I think I'm suggesting they may stop entirely - or only apply to their side.

counterpoint · Dec 24, 2014

S3rgeus said:
Tower Quests
Each Ajah is its own "stream" of quests, allowing players to gain favor with that Ajah by performing some action(s) to help them. The reward for any of these quests is influence with the Ajah that gave that quest. Some quests are "requests" for actions that the player could have taken anyway - much like the "CS requests gold" quest in base CiV. These are to encourage player interaction with the Tower by giving them a short window of time in which that interaction is more profitable for them.

Quests come in two forms:

Targeted: The quest is given to a single player by a single Ajah and that instance of the quest is only visible to that player. Multiple instances of the same quest may be given to different players by the same Ajah (or multiple different Ajahs may give the same player separate instances of the same quest). This is analogous to the "CS wants your religion" quest in base CiV.

Global: In the true sense of the word this time, global quests are visible to all players that have met the Tower. A single Ajah can only have a single instance of a global quest running at once, and that same instance is participated in by all players. These are sometimes competitive objectives that reward the player completing a specific objective before all other players. This is analogous to the "research the most techs in 30 turns" CS quest in base CiV. Sometimes these are incremental rewards for actions that are universally available to all players, limited by a time frame in which those rewards take place. (No base CiV analog, as far as I remember.)

Further, Amyrlin Quests require the current Amyrlin to have been raised from that Ajah in order for the Ajah to propose the marked quest. Amyrlin quests are often massive global objectives that help the Ajah more than the players. (Giving all players influence with an Ajah gives no player a relative advantage over another, but does make that Ajah drastically more influential within the Tower.)

And related to all quests - numbers will need to scale with map size and difficulty.

So, let's get started with some quests!

OK. Let's! Looks good so far.

S3rgeus said:
Common Quests
Common Quests may be given by any Ajah - they are equally applicable to any Ajah, regardless of its philosophies, strengths, and weaknesses. By completing the quest's objective, you gain influence with whichever single Ajah distributed the quest.

Recruit a Novice
The Ajah requests that the player send them a non-Aes Sedai female channeling unit to become a Sister. Targeted quest.

Assist the Tower
Gain influence with the proposing Ajah in exchange for declaring war against a civilization currently at war with the Tower. Targeted Quest.

Recall Sisters
Players may return Sister units from the proposing Ajah to the Tower in exchange for influence with that Ajah for 30 turns. Global quest.

Center of the World
The proposing Ajah will reward you for connecting a road from the Tower to your capital. Targeted quest.

Free from Tyranny
The proposing Ajah will reward you for liberating a city originally owned by a player that has chosen the Authority Ideology. (Worth a lot of influence, since it's quite difficult to do.) Targeted quest.

All of these are cool, though I'll note that this last one means, interestingly, that choosing Authority has a slight military benefit to other ideologies - the tower will stick up for you! Makes sense, of course.

S3rgeus said:
Channeling Dogma
The proposing Ajah will reward the player that captures targeted city owned by a civilization following the Oppression Ideology. Global quest. (Or should this be any city owned by an Oppression civ and be a targeted quest? That way we could give it mainly to civs following Authority.)

opposite point here, obviously.

I think it should be a targeted city, like you have - I wouldn't want it to be incidentally done by a civ already at war, I think. Plus, it should mirror the Free from Tyranny one, I think

very cool!

I should say you aren't putting in anything here about sending your women there as novices. Of coures, this can simply be non-AS channeling units, but we also discussed the possibility of Novices and Accepted living within the WT, providing influence, yes? Perhaps its time to discuss this some more - in any case, I think sending them (population points?) could be a Common Quest.

S3rgeus said:
Tower Schism
A single global instance of this quest exists at once but is associated with two Ajahs. Players may return Sisters to either Ajah in exchange for influence with that Ajah. Other quests completed for either Ajah give you bonus influence, but costs you influence with the other Ajah. Lasts for 40 turns. Global quest.

very cool!

I should say you aren't putting in anything here about sending your women there as novices. Of coures, this can simply be non-AS channeling units, but we also discussed the possibility of Novices and Accepted living within the WT, providing influence, yes? Perhaps its time to discuss this some more - in any case, I think sending them (population points?) could be a Common Quest.

S3rgeus said:
Blue Ajah

Ta'veren Watchers
The civilization that produces the most Great People in the next 30 turns will win this quest (ties are allowed). Global quest.

Seals Unbroken
The Blue Ajah will reward the player that keeps a Seal of the Dark One safe in their capital for the highest number of turns out of the next 30. (Having multiple Seals counts multiple times - if you've got two in your capital, you get two "keep safe turns" every turn.) Global quest. (Only enabled when Last Battle is enabled.)

Hold back the Shadow
The Blue Ajah will reward the player that generates the most faith in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Stand by the Dragon
All participating civilizations gain favor with the Blue Ajah if Saidin is Cleansed in the next 45 turns. (This may be too Last-Battle-ish or circumstantial.)

Telamon's Legacy
The Blue Ajah will reward the civilization that controls the Dragonmount Natural Wonder tile in 30 turns. Global quest.

all very cool and creative. The "Stand by the Dragon" one may indeed be too circumstantial, though - perhaps there are enough rewards for cleansing saidin as well?

S3rgeus said:
Brown Ajah

Study an Artifact
The Brown Ajah requests that the player send them a Great Work to study. (Is this just for a time - so the player gets it back? Or do we want the Tower to trade you another Great Work in exchange?) Targeted quest.

I'd say temporarily. That's harsh, giving it permanently - never know whether you might need it. Temporary could be fine, though - essentially, its a culture/prestige hit (especially if you're breaking a theme bonus.

S3rgeus said:
Gatherers of Relics
The Brown Ajah will reward the player that excavates the most Antiquity Sites in the next 30 turns (ties are allowed). Global quest.

Intriguing Specimen
The Brown Ajah will reward the player that excavates targeted Antiquity Site in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Scrollwork Shelving
The Brown Ajah will reward you for building an inn/library/building-that-stores-books in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

all cool.

S3rgeus said:
Red Ajah

Gentle an Offering
The Red Ajah will reward you if you send them a male channeler to Gentle in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

Plague Upon the Land
The Red Ajah will reward any civilization that destroys targeted Dragonsworn encampment (encampment may be far from the Tower). Global quest.

Quell the Uprisings
All civilizations gain favor with the Red Ajah if three or more False Dragons are killed in the next 45 turns. (Influence portioned out based on who killed the False Dragons and their units?) Amyrlin quest.

All great, thoguh I should ask - will there be that many False Dragons active at a time?

S3rgeus said:
Green Ajah

Recruit a Warder
The Green Ajah requests a powerful warrior from you, who will act as a Warder for one of its Sisters. (Send the Tower a male unit with 3 or more promotions.) Targeted quest.

Blighted Foe
The Green Ajah will reward players for killing Shadowspawn for the next 30 turns. (+5 influence per unit, for example.) Global quest.

Battle Ajah
All civilizations gain favor with the Green Ajah if Green Sister units kill a global total of 100 (arbitrary number) Shadowspawn units in the next 45 turns. Amyrlin quest.

great!

S3rgeus said:
Yellow Ajah

Respect for Injury
The Yellow Ajah rewards any civilizations that fortify their units to heal during the next 30 turns. (Very small amount, +1 per unit per turn or something.) Global quest.

Combat the Plague
The Yellow Ajah will reward you for building a Wisdom's Cottage/health-related-building in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

That first one is so dorky. I think it's fine though - is it kind of exploitable, though? Like, we hsould cap it at once per unit, right? i.e., don't wake them up next turn only to do it again, right?

S3rgeus said:
Gray Ajah

Entreaty for Peace
The Gray Ajah will reward you for making peace with civilization X (who you are currently at war with) in the next 5 turns. Targeted quest.

Diplomatic Consequences
The Gray Ajah will reward you for denouncing civilization X (who the Tower doesn't like) in the next 10 turns. Targeted quest.

Trade
The Gray Ajah will reward you for establishing a trade route with the Tower in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

National Accords
The Gray Ajah will reward the player that signs the most declarations of friendship/accords in the next 45 turns. Global quest.

Our Wishes
The Gray Ajah will reward you for voting in tandem with the Tower on the next Compact resolution. Targeted quest.

Global Armistice
Every civilization is rewarded by the Gray Ajah if there is any single turn in the next 30 turns where there are no active wars. Amyrlin quest.

All very, very cool. That last one, wonder how hard it'll be to get.

S3rgeus said:
White Ajah

Research Fellowship
The White Ajah rewards any player that puts more than half of their cities into a science focus for at least 25 of the next 30 turns. Global quest.

Unnecessary Beliefs
The White Ajah will reward any player that disbands a missionary (substitute in whatever we call the Path-spreading unit) for the next 20 turns.

Honor the Luminaries
The White Ajah will reward the player that researches the most technologies in the next 30 turns. Global quest.

great

S3rgeus said:
Hour of Progress
The White Ajah will reward you for progressing into a new era in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest.

OK, will it be totally obvious which techs to beeline to for this? This could be fine, but it also might help people kind of randomly - what if you just advanced to an era the turn before?

S3rgeus said:
Shared Intelligence
All civilizations gain favor with the White Ajah if 5 or more Research Agreements are signed in the next 45 turns. (Or possibly just those civilizations that signed the agreements.) Amyrlin quest.

And that's all for now. I think we'd like to have more than what I've outlined above, but I think this is a good starting point. We're also still missing Amyrlin quests for the Blue, Yellow, and Brown Ajahs. I'll be thinking on these and would welcome suggestions!

For that last one.... I think there's something nice about it going to everybody. On the one hand, of course only the people who do the Agreements should get te bonus. But on the other hand, then it becomes sort of obvious - everybody will go do one. This way, it's kind of a game of chicken - you probably should do one, but do you *have* to? Should you do 4? Or maybe the fact that it can be difficult to find a partner for an Agreement is enough of a complicating factor to suggest we should change it to only reward those who actually do the Agreements. What do you think?

OK, overall, these are awesome. Good work. very flavorful, and good names as well!

Right, obviously we need more Amyrlin quests, but do you want each Ajah to have the same number of quests? Yellow has very few for example - will they just cycle, or are we aiming to make them all equivalent? If so, what's the target-number of quests per Ajah?

I don't have any to add right now, but I will keep thinking on them!

S3rgeus · Dec 30, 2014

Sorry for the delay, Christmas and traveling and such! I'm traveling again tomorrow, but I'll be back from the 2nd onwards.

ldragogode297 said:
If I may (once again) weigh in, perhaps have the Amyrlin elections tied to researchs? Say, you research Archery, perhaps, and an election comes in. 20-30 turns later, another player has already reached Forgery (or whatever it is) and there's an election then. That's just my thoughts on it, though.

Sorry I missed your post first time through! This would be triggered by the first player to reach each of these technologies? We could do this, but I don't know if it has advantages over triggering by world era.

counterpoint said:
Yes, I am proposing that we have there be a Total Influence value - this one will look like a CS slider, with negative being a possibility - though I didn't know I was proposing it, since I thought that's what we were doing.

For me, the main reason for this is just what was written above - the negative value, which we'd determined wasn't possible with the Ajahs.

I think Ajah influence should feedback into the Total Influence - increasing with an Ajah does slightly raise your WT Influence. I'm not sure it needs to go the other way, though - gaining influence with the WT will already reflect on your Ajah gains since it will function as a Modifier on them, right?

I think Ajah influence is determined by contributions of units/money/population to that Ajah, certain Social Policies, friendships with other Ajahs, choosing their Aes Sedai, and Quests.

I think Overal WT influence is determined by your global diplomatic actions, certain Social Policies, your military actions, your trade actions with the Tower, All-WT quests, and to a much lesser extent, everything above that effects the Ajahs.

Cool, ok, this sounds good to me. Agreed about Ajah quests increasing your overall influence and that we don't need to have direct feedback the other way because of the multiplier!

counterpoint said:
OK, I think I gotcha mostly, but I don't quite see what makes this system better than what I'm suggesting. To me, the mechanisms for altering an Ajah's influence don't seem the same as those of the WT as a whole. Would like to hear what you think about what I wrote above.

Truthfully, though, I can be swayed either way.

Not sure if it's better, but it's simpler to make. I don't think the difference in difficulty is big though.

Having overall influence separate from the individual Ajahs' could lead us to situations where some Ajahs like you but the Tower doesn't (weird, but probably not bad?). That is unlikely though - given the way the two feed back into each other.

Also, given what you've said about players being able to have negative overall influence with the Tower, I think your suggestion (tracking the two separately) makes more sense.

counterpoint said:
Right, though I guess I'd like to hear what you think it does mean, in each of those cases.

The main difference between the two is how associated the opinions of the Ajah and the opinions of the Tower are. In the track-only-Ajah-influences approach, the Tower's overall opinion can't be discordant with the Ajahs' opinion of a player because the overall opinion is directly inferred from the Ajah ones. When we track them separately, it's possible for certain sequences of player actions to cause the Tower and its Ajahs to disagree, but we're discussing that above and it doesn't seem too bad.

It's a big difference underneath, in terms of what needs to be implemented to track what, so definitely good to choose now!

counterpoint said:
huh...am I being dumb here or something? That still seems the same as a normal CS to me.

If Egypt gains +100 influence with Kathmandu, it most certainly does effect France's *effective* influence with Kathmandu - they not how to be 100 points higher in order to become Kathmandu's ally, right? To me this seems the same - there are certain set values that create bonuses for the player (i.e., unlocked abilities) which are analogous to the "Friends" CS thing, but the ultimate benefit (swaying their votes, etc.) is analogous to CS Alliances, and adjusts based on how much influence the other Players have.

OK, I finally do see the end point here - the constant increasing makes it so the rapid swings of the diplo system are different.

Alright, alright. I do think we need to frame it differently that how influence is framed in CiV, though - otherwise, people will expect it to operate the same as it does for CSs.

I'd say the only other issue with this is it is a little less transparent seeming for the player - it's not always clear how much of an effect something will have.

I think this will be quite clear to the player as long as the UI presents the information differently. With the base CSes, each player just fills up a bar and how far along that bar you get is affected only by how many influence points you have with that CS. (We might track overall Tower influence this way though?)

With the Ajahs, there's one bar (per Ajah) and every player sees the same bar. They never see how many 'points' of influence they have under the hood - they just see what % influence they have with that Ajah, and how that compares to other civilizations' influence with that Ajah.

The non-swing-y diplo relationship is one consequence, but we've also got definite consequences on the friend-like bonuses as well. Since they're tied to % values (not underlying point values) only a certain number of players can ever have each bonus with each Ajah. That's because any other player gaining enough influence to obtain the bonus will have made one of the others' influence worth less than the bonus's requirement.

For example, if there's a bonus for an Ajah at 51% then only one player can ever have that bonus at a time. If it's at 40%, then the maximum is two players, and so on.

counterpoint said:
Well, I'd say we should swap out the term global, considering it's used elsewhere in Civ. General? Tower Edicts?

General or Tower Edicts works for me. These are really just for us to refer to, right? I don't see the players having access to the list of which Edicts are available from which Ajah.

counterpoint said:
I like this, especially since it makes the Edicts more of a "thing" that way.

Sounds good, we can have a rolling countdown for them, like the WC.

counterpoint said:
I figure that civs are either up against their cap, or at least working towards it. Like, if I have four Sisters currently and 7 as my potential total, I figure the Tower will gift them to me periodically, at a rate faster than I'd be able to raise my potential total to 8. Obviously, when they all die, it would take a large number of turns to repopulate them, but a healthy empire is likely close to "full."

Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
Wait, so you had delusions that you'd ever be able to win a war with the Aiel?

Wetlanders forever! Wetlanders reign supreme!

counterpoint said:
OK, I see your logic. Obviously the Tower doesn't act as a ruler of Trade, but as an abstraction this could work, especially given the nice fact that this isn't just a diplo hit.

I am concerned that it's kind of unintuitive though - might it be similar to just provide a penalty to trade benefits? The flip thing seems weird - won't people just stop trading, or in team games, do it on purpose to make one player super rich?

I was thinking that players wouldn't stop trading because they couldn't - after BNW it's usually trade routes keeping civs in positive gold. Even when those routes yield a lot less, they'll still be a major contributing factor - the fact that it helps other civs more than you is something that you have to consider when refusing the Tower's Edicts.

Team games is a very good point, but there's significant drawback for the "losing" player in that arrangement. In general they'd be better off both working the best economies they could and then gifting the gold for whatever big buyout they're planning. (Doesn't lock them into which player does it and such.)

We could go with a bigger penalty rather than a reversal (nice part about the reversal is we don't need to "penalize" the player all the way down to almost 0 gold from the route in order to layer on the disadvantages), but once the gold becomes insignificant then civs will stop trading, which we want to avoid. Reversed trade routes mean civs will often trade with others that are far behind, to lessen the immediate impact, but potentially help that civ recover as a consequence.

counterpoint said:
That would be great. Nat Wonders feel like a cool idea that never matters, as is.

What kinds of things would we be doing as natural wonders? I remember the idea of AoL ruins/features being them would be cool - but it seems like we might need some of those as Wonders.

Yeah, I think things that are "constructed" even from the AoL will probably be needed as Wonders. In terms of Natural Wonders, Dragonmount and Shayol Ghul have been mentioned already.

I'm not sure if we want to make the two Choedan Kal natural wonders and have civs be able to create Access Keys toward the end of the game? Building the Choedan Kal themselves seems really cool though.

I'm not sure what else to suggest off the top of my head, I think I need to do some more wiki reading.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, Mercantilism is a 17th century (age of englightment) concept. Old, but not maybe old enough. Also, taken through the lens of mercantilism, "Mercantile Equality" is somewhat of an oxymoron. Nobody cares, though. I could accept it

Guilds and that kind of thing feel really old... not sure how to spin it into a name, though. Guild Partnership? International Guild Network?

We're going to have Guilds in the form of the Illuminators though - which I don't think this Edict crosses over with.

counterpoint said:
OK, I understand, but at the same time, if we put enough good stuff in, people will probably choose it. If they choose not to, maybe its part of some cool stall-progress strategy....?

Maybe - if a civ that isn't going for the diplo victory has gained significant pull in the Compact, they might be able to steer it towards inaction? I'm not sure if we want to make that an option though - diplomacy seems like it should be doing *something* all the time.

counterpoint said:
but seriously, I still don't quite understand the point of the mongol UA... Use tribute to fuel invasions or something?

Mongolia is well set up for hit and run attacks, so they can bully a lot of CSes without killing them this way. But CSes do get the next-best starting points compared to major civs - capturing their cities early could make quite powerful cities once they've developed for you. But generally the CS portion of the Mongolian UA isn't all that helpful.

counterpoint said:
Interesting. I think the High King might actually be cool as a kind of Tax - the HK chooses want they want - Gold, hammers, etc. - and everybody else has to provide it, maybe?

Awesome, that sounds good. Does the HK get to select a different 'tax' at a certain interval until they're dethroned? So they're not locked into the same bonus for the duration of their reign. You mentioned Golden Age-like bonuses before as well - that makes sense to me in addition to this.

counterpoint said:
I think it would be important to pare down the list at least somewhat - we want somebody to be left with nothing, though. Maybe the best way to do it is, instead of actually limiting the options, we limit them by category. Allow me to explain:

Say you have ten bonuses, and each is randomly determined to be Good, Average, or Poor - probably 2-4 of each type. If you have 10 civs, you'd be giving out each of them - making sure that the last civ got Nothing.

But if you had only 4 civs, we could leave the same 10, but limit the number of each category that can be given - one good, one average and one poor (or maybe just the Nothing), instead of three of the top ones, for example.

What do you think of that?

Yeah, this sounds good - it gives you a range of bonuses each time, regardless of how many players there are. So for numbers of players that don't divide evenly into the good/average/poor + 1 distribution, we would have known numbers set up? So, in order of Good/Average/Poor, for 5 players we'd have 1/2/2? Seven players would be 2/2/3?

counterpoint said:
Ah, I see. I'm in favor of this, in theory, because clearly the DoF doesn't appear to be compelling enough for me to even know much about how it works.... Not necessarily a reason to do it though. I'm not sure what the additional bonuses would specifically be.

Currently the benefits of DoF are: allows trading lump sums of gold; allows research agreements. I think that's it aside from the diplo ramifications of other actions (if an AI asks you for help and you've got a DoF with them and you say no, you get a diplo penalty. If you declare war with someone you have a DoF with, everyone hates you.)

Accords could provide benefits to trade routes between the two civs? We could actually prevent declarations of war, instead of just having diplo consequences. They could act as Defensive Pacts rolled in? Or what about them being Offensive Pacts too? (If you declare war with someone, anyone you have an Accord with must do so as well.)

That does make some AIs bad Accord-buddies, but maybe that's something you have to deal with if you're their ally. We could make that war refusable, breaking the Accord and giving you a massive diplo hit with the other Accord member? Not sure if that's in the spirit of it though - Defensive Pacts aren't optional and that's quite intentional on Firaxis' part.

counterpoint said:
ooh, ooh! an 80s movie reference! my turn!

Ray, if somebody asks you if you're a God, YOU SAY YES.

Have to say I had to look this up. :blush:

counterpoint said:
the more we talk about this, the more I'm ok with it being pretty hard to become the high king. Maybe it shouldn't be every time. Maybe its fine that some of these are tricky - it'll make some players "go for it" and others completely ignore it, sorta like the WF and International Games. And maybe that's fine - that's certainly how it is in real life (when was the last time the Swiss tried to take over Europe?)

So trade routes with every capital then? Do we want to change any of the others to make them a bit more challenging?

counterpoint said:
Re: the instigating event.... doesnt the Tower offer one? If you're due one (due to your cap), maybe the Tower offers them to you on a schedule that is somewhat randomized? I'm not sure it needs to be triggered by anything specific (barring some cases, techs, etc.).

Yeah, we could have it on a schedule. That would definitely be in keeping with our discussion from earlier about civs generally keeping toward the higher end of the allocated Aes Sedai slots. Linking them to techs or something else that "progresses" through the game would make them more scarce though - potentially more valuable? Players would be more inclined to keep them safe if it's difficult to regain them after.

counterpoint said:
I thought stonehenge just gave you faith and stuff?

It used to just do that - they added the map center to it somewhere along the way!

counterpoint said:
Getting there...... still kinda clunky..?

Herbalist Knowledge?

counterpoint said:
I definitely think the Compact should stay intact - the Tower Edicts are the thing that could mostly go away (or the Tower spends the LB passing edicts that only help the Light or something).

As far as refusable compact resolutions... eh, I don't think I like it. The thing is, if everybody hates you, they'll always vote in your worst interest. Then you'll disobey them, and you'll get a diplo hit... and they'll hate you more. Just seems needlessly redundant. I'd rather leave it alone. Passing anything during the LB will certainly be difficult.

Sounds good to me - Compact resolutions remain and are unrefusable. Won't the tendency towards voting as a group with Alignments make resolutions succeed more often during the Last Battle though?

counterpoint said:
So, I imagine the CSs turn to various sides based on the alignment of their Allies? Does that mean a CS that is "sniped" before a vote could switch from Shadow to Light? That's so weird. Suggestions?

Yeah, that is weird. We could keep the CS ties the same as how they work now, and CSes can switch back and forth between the Alignments? Declaring for the Light/Shadow doesn't automatically make them the embodiment of either, and given the secondary nature of CSesm I can see them being bought and sold to both sides. Because of the way influence works, a "sniped" CS would have to be won over by a neutral civ and then re-acquired by its "original" ally afterwards during the Last Battle for an "Alignment swap" to actually happen. (Since Light/Shadow are at war.)

Or do we want to track alignment for each CS independently? Seems like they wouldn't have that many Alignment-relevant decisions. We could track a CS's Alignment based on the alignment of its allies over time? It might be annoying if you've locked in a CS 20 turns ago and it chooses the other side of the Last Battle because of its previous ally though?

counterpoint said:
All of these are cool, though I'll note that this last one means, interestingly, that choosing Authority has a slight military benefit to other ideologies - the tower will stick up for you! Makes sense, of course.

opposite point here, obviously.

I think it should be a targeted city, like you have - I wouldn't want it to be incidentally done by a civ already at war, I think. Plus, it should mirror the Free from Tyranny one, I think

It isn't the mirror of the Free Tyranny one then though - Free Tyranny is liberating *any* city (not a targeted one) that used to belong to an Authority civ. I think this makes sense - the Tower likes it when anyone does that, regardless of the politics of who did the liberating.

Capturing the Oppression city is less overall-liked by the Tower. A second Oppression civ benefiting from it is kind of weird, right?

counterpoint said:
I should say you aren't putting in anything here about sending your women there as novices. Of coures, this can simply be non-AS channeling units, but we also discussed the possibility of Novices and Accepted living within the WT, providing influence, yes? Perhaps its time to discuss this some more - in any case, I think sending them (population points?) could be a Common Quest.

Do we want to make Novices a unit that civs can train in order to send to the Tower? (They could be like trade units, so they aren't useful for anything else - you'd just train them to do this.) Once the Novice reaches the Tower, the civ chooses which Ajah the Novice is aligned with.

That is a bit non-canonical, since Novices and Accepted don't have affiliation with Ajahs in the books, but gameplay wise I think we have to make that the player's choice, otherwise it's all a bit random. Unless, when the Novice eventually becomes a Sister (more on that in a moment), she does join a "random" Ajah, gaining you influence with that Ajah. Having the Common Quest "send a Novice" would allow players to gain influence with specific Ajahs that way, immediately on the Novice joining the Tower. But making the Novices' ascension random will mean that most players will have *some* influence with quite a few Ajahs, which is good! Lots of small contributors can skew the percentages for the major players within an Ajah.

So, about Accepted. If we track each civ sending Novices to the Tower and those Novices' eventual ascension to being Aes Sedai, then Accepted seems like the middle rank that those tracked Novices reach after X (random, weighted?) turns. Maybe the original sender civ gains overall Tower influence when their trainee goes from Novice to Accepted? Do we want the civ to do anything to cause that to happen? (I'm not sure - I think just time's passage makes sense - makes it more difficult to "rush" for influence, and is more in keeping with Tar Valon's isolationist approach to trainees.)

counterpoint said:
all very cool and creative. The "Stand by the Dragon" one may indeed be too circumstantial, though - perhaps there are enough rewards for cleansing saidin as well?

Thanks! Yeah, Cleansing Saidin probably has enough rewards as it is - we can drop that one.

counterpoint said:
I'd say temporarily. That's harsh, giving it permanently - never know whether you might need it. Temporary could be fine, though - essentially, its a culture/prestige hit (especially if you're breaking a theme bonus.

Cool, but there is the other option of having the Tower gift you a different GW in return? That could actually be quite valuable, since I often find I'm short on foreign GWs when going for culture.

counterpoint said:
All great, thoguh I should ask - will there be that many False Dragons active at a time?

I'm not sure, probably depends on the progression through the game at the time. I imagine there are usually quite a few in the run up to the Last Battle. We could have this quest scale with time as well as map size?

counterpoint said:
That first one is so dorky. I think it's fine though - is it kind of exploitable, though? Like, we hsould cap it at once per unit, right? i.e., don't wake them up next turn only to do it again, right?

I figured they were getting the bonus every turn with each unit, until it was fully healed (that's why I went as low as +1). To abuse it they'll need a repeatable source of damage, which if they've got, they probably need to attack it in some way. It's only really an incremental gain to prevent that being too lucrative.

counterpoint said:
All very, very cool. That last one, wonder how hard it'll be to get.

Yeah, I'm not really sure. It's obviously much easier on smaller maps with fewer players.

counterpoint said:
OK, will it be totally obvious which techs to beeline to for this? This could be fine, but it also might help people kind of randomly - what if you just advanced to an era the turn before?

I think if you've just advanced an era, then that's just unfortunate. Most of the quests are better at certain times than others, depending on what you've done. If you've just beelined for a far-ahead tech, it's much easier to win the "most techs in 30 turns" because you have a bunch of low-cost ones to finish quickly. (Also helps to finish a tech on turn 1 or 2 of that quest.)

The quest is targeted at a single player, so they have the same era progression requirements as normal - research any tech from the next era. Which one they should beeline for will vary depending on which techs they've already finished when the quest is given.

counterpoint said:
For that last one.... I think there's something nice about it going to everybody. On the one hand, of course only the people who do the Agreements should get te bonus. But on the other hand, then it becomes sort of obvious - everybody will go do one. This way, it's kind of a game of chicken - you probably should do one, but do you *have* to? Should you do 4? Or maybe the fact that it can be difficult to find a partner for an Agreement is enough of a complicating factor to suggest we should change it to only reward those who actually do the Agreements. What do you think?

I find that finding partners is the difficult part with Research Agreements. You need to have a DoF with them and then they need to have enough money to afford it.

The game of chicken sounds good though - I think rewarding everyone is more in keeping with the way the Amyrlin Quests work.

counterpoint said:
OK, overall, these are awesome. Good work. very flavorful, and good names as well!

Thank you!

counterpoint said:
Right, obviously we need more Amyrlin quests, but do you want each Ajah to have the same number of quests? Yellow has very few for example - will they just cycle, or are we aiming to make them all equivalent? If so, what's the target-number of quests per Ajah?

Yeah, I think it makes sense for each Ajah to have the same number of quests available. The Yellow Ajah was really difficult to come up with quests for, that's the main reason they had so few. I think we want to go for like 6-8 for each Ajah + an Amyrlin quest? A few of the quests available to each Ajah should be easily "recyclable" as well - like "destroy that Dragonsworn Camp" has the same requirement every time, but the context of where that Camp is can make the quest quite different.

counterpoint · Jan 1, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Cool, ok, this sounds good to me. Agreed about Ajah quests increasing your overall influence and that we don't need to have direct feedback the other way because of the multiplier!

Not sure if it's better, but it's simpler to make. I don't think the difference in difficulty is big though.

Having overall influence separate from the individual Ajahs' could lead us to situations where some Ajahs like you but the Tower doesn't (weird, but probably not bad?). That is unlikely though - given the way the two feed back into each other.

Also, given what you've said about players being able to have negative overall influence with the Tower, I think your suggestion (tracking the two separately) makes more sense.

OK, let's definitely try to go with tracking the two separately. I definitely don't see a problem in a player having a positive relationship with an Ajah, but a negative one with the Tower overall. Imagine a civ who totally rocks at destroying shadowspawn, but is otherwise pretty terrible - maybe the Green would like them, but the tower as a whole wouldn't.

S3rgeus said:
The main difference between the two is how associated the opinions of the Ajah and the opinions of the Tower are. In the track-only-Ajah-influences approach, the Tower's overall opinion can't be discordant with the Ajahs' opinion of a player because the overall opinion is directly inferred from the Ajah ones. When we track them separately, it's possible for certain sequences of player actions to cause the Tower and its Ajahs to disagree, but we're discussing that above and it doesn't seem too bad.

It's a big difference underneath, in terms of what needs to be implemented to track what, so definitely good to choose now!

Right. I suppose I should ask, for your sake - is it substantially more difficult/painful to implement the dual-tracking system, from a modding perspective?

S3rgeus said:
I think this will be quite clear to the player as long as the UI presents the information differently. With the base CSes, each player just fills up a bar and how far along that bar you get is affected only by how many influence points you have with that CS. (We might track overall Tower influence this way though?)

With the Ajahs, there's one bar (per Ajah) and every player sees the same bar. They never see how many 'points' of influence they have under the hood - they just see what % influence they have with that Ajah, and how that compares to other civilizations' influence with that Ajah.

The non-swing-y diplo relationship is one consequence, but we've also got definite consequences on the friend-like bonuses as well. Since they're tied to % values (not underlying point values) only a certain number of players can ever have each bonus with each Ajah. That's because any other player gaining enough influence to obtain the bonus will have made one of the others' influence worth less than the bonus's requirement.

For example, if there's a bonus for an Ajah at 51% then only one player can ever have that bonus at a time. If it's at 40%, then the maximum is two players, and so on.

Right. All in the UI. I think one of our main goals that we've established is to make this all very intuitive and simple - at least in presentation. Otherwise, this mod will be overwhelming.

Ah, I was under the understanding, from previous parts of the thread, that you wanted the Ajah bonuses to be available to all players who hit a certain mark - at least some of the bonuses at least. I see the merit in running things on this sliding scale - like a CS Alliance, not like a CS Friendship - but I do caution us on the flavor of it. While certainly an Ajah would only let their "main civ" affect their policy and such, probably they would grant some abilities/benefits to any civ that worked well with them.

In any case, I don't feel very strongly about it.

S3rgeus said:
General or Tower Edicts works for me. These are really just for us to refer to, right? I don't see the players having access to the list of which Edicts are available from which Ajah.

OK, let's call them Generic Edicts, I guess.

S3rgeus said:
I was thinking that players wouldn't stop trading because they couldn't - after BNW it's usually trade routes keeping civs in positive gold. Even when those routes yield a lot less, they'll still be a major contributing factor - the fact that it helps other civs more than you is something that you have to consider when refusing the Tower's Edicts.

Team games is a very good point, but there's significant drawback for the "losing" player in that arrangement. In general they'd be better off both working the best economies they could and then gifting the gold for whatever big buyout they're planning. (Doesn't lock them into which player does it and such.)

We could go with a bigger penalty rather than a reversal (nice part about the reversal is we don't need to "penalize" the player all the way down to almost 0 gold from the route in order to layer on the disadvantages), but once the gold becomes insignificant then civs will stop trading, which we want to avoid. Reversed trade routes mean civs will often trade with others that are far behind, to lessen the immediate impact, but potentially help that civ recover as a consequence.

Incidentally, I've found myself paying much more attention to the actual numbers in my trade routes since this this section of the thread began.

OK, I'm mostly fine with the reversed trade routes as a penalty. I'm struck, though, by binary nature of it. If you disobey an edict, you get the penalty, right? So, what's stopping you from disobeying 5 edicts? What more could/would they do?

I agree with your issues with a flat penalty, but the problem with the reversal is that it doesn't appear to be scalable. What do we do to differentiate a Tear (who disobeys a few key Tower policies, but in general follows them, and is in turn cooperated with) from a Seanchan (who spits in the face of the Tower, and consequently is not cooperated with)?

It's tricky, because if you make it too scalable, the balance is tricky - how would we make a one-refusal penalty appropriately harmful, without making a five-refusal one impossibly so? The truth is, from a flavor perspective, the "scale" doesn't actually exist, at least not across the whole spectrum.. Tear is on the "scale," and are penalized. Seanchan is off the scale. They won't play the "game" and consequently the Tower holds little power over them.

Ack!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I think things that are "constructed" even from the AoL will probably be needed as Wonders. In terms of Natural Wonders, Dragonmount and Shayol Ghul have been mentioned already.

I'm not sure if we want to make the two Choedan Kal natural wonders and have civs be able to create Access Keys toward the end of the game? Building the Choedan Kal themselves seems really cool though.

I'm not sure what else to suggest off the top of my head, I think I need to do some more wiki reading.

Not sure about the Choedan Kal. I definitely think some AoL (or earlier) wonders would be cool if they were "sacred" and existed without a civ building them.

A quick scan of the wiki for some geographical features - some of these aren't exactly as awesome as CiV ones... Also, some of these are bigger than what i'd assume a single tile would be.... Interesting.

- Shayol Ghul
- Dragonmount
- Bay of Remara (by Mayene - too big?)
- Kabal Deep (by Altara - same issue as above)
- Blinder's Peak, Favlend Mountain, and Mount Sardlen - various points around Andor/Murandy
- The Drowned Lands (too big?)
- Haddon Mirk (too big?)
- Garen's Wall (ridge by Ghealdan)
- Jangai Pass
- Tarwin's Gap
- Kinslayer's Dagger
- Windbiter's Finger (peninsula in extreme SW of westalands)
- various Rivers
- Alcair Dal (canyon where the Aiel Clan Chiefs meet)
- Alianelle Spring (oasis Gawyn and Younglings hung out at... perhaps too minor)
- Cliffs of Dawn (northeastern edge of Aiel Waste)
- Great Rift (canyon at south end of cliffs of dawn)
- Eldrene's Veil (waterfall in Two Rivers)
- Field of Merrilor (place they signed the Dragon Peace)
- Lake Somal (largest lake in westlands, in the west)
- Molvaine Gap (in Altara, pass through Damona Mountains)
- Malvide Narrows (narrowest point in Molvaine Gap in Altara)
- Shadow's Lance - weird southward extension of the blight into Kandor and Arafel

Looks like regular civ has 17 different Natural Wonders.

A question just popped into my head.... we aren't incorporating Portal Stones into this mod, are we?

S3rgeus said:
We're going to have Guilds in the form of the Illuminators though - which I don't think this Edict crosses over with.

Ah... what's your current opinion, then?

S3rgeus said:
Maybe - if a civ that isn't going for the diplo victory has gained significant pull in the Compact, they might be able to steer it towards inaction? I'm not sure if we want to make that an option though - diplomacy seems like it should be doing *something* all the time.

if you don't want inaction to be a part of it, I'm fine with that. I mentioned it here because it does seem like something people request from the CiV WC.

S3rgeus said:
Awesome, that sounds good. Does the HK get to select a different 'tax' at a certain interval until they're dethroned? So they're not locked into the same bonus for the duration of their reign. You mentioned Golden Age-like bonuses before as well - that makes sense to me in addition to this.

It might be as simple as giving them an actual, regular Golden Age, and then applying whatever "tax" they choose. Thoughts?

How long would you anticipate their "reign" lasting? Maybe I could see them swapping their bonus once. Also, the reign ends "naturally" right? (i.e., whether they like it or not)

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, this sounds good - it gives you a range of bonuses each time, regardless of how many players there are. So for numbers of players that don't divide evenly into the good/average/poor + 1 distribution, we would have known numbers set up? So, in order of Good/Average/Poor, for 5 players we'd have 1/2/2? Seven players would be 2/2/3?

yes. this looks good. I do think it might be best to reframe is as Good/Average/Poor/Nothing, though, and maybe create distributions like 1/2/1/1 and 2/2/2/1, or something.

S3rgeus said:
Currently the benefits of DoF are: allows trading lump sums of gold; allows research agreements. I think that's it aside from the diplo ramifications of other actions (if an AI asks you for help and you've got a DoF with them and you say no, you get a diplo penalty. If you declare war with someone you have a DoF with, everyone hates you.)

Accords could provide benefits to trade routes between the two civs? We could actually prevent declarations of war, instead of just having diplo consequences. They could act as Defensive Pacts rolled in? Or what about them being Offensive Pacts too? (If you declare war with someone, anyone you have an Accord with must do so as well.)

That does make some AIs bad Accord-buddies, but maybe that's something you have to deal with if you're their ally. We could make that war refusable, breaking the Accord and giving you a massive diplo hit with the other Accord member? Not sure if that's in the spirit of it though - Defensive Pacts aren't optional and that's quite intentional on Firaxis' part.

hmmm... The more I think about this, the more I start wondering if it's a bit out-of-universe. I mean, this isn't a Song of Ice and Fire. There isn't much int he way of alliances, up until the very end. I'm fine with all of this from a mechanical perspective (though I think I'd opt to make it a bit simpler), but I wonder in general if this kind of super-alliance is really in keeping with the WoT feel.

S3rgeus said:
Have to say I had to look this up.

your nerd card has been revoked.... though perhaps you not being an estadounidiense is *some* excuse. I suppose such excuse would not be valid for Dr. Who references, though (which I would fail at, actually)...

S3rgeus said:
So trade routes with every capital then? Do we want to change any of the others to make them a bit more challenging?

OK, looking at them again:

- accumulation of DoFs
- trade route with every capital
- HK's palace
- capture half of the capitals (or X number or cities or something)
- hit some technology

Is that all of them? Honestly, it's hard to say if they're too easy or not - I suppose playtesting will tell. The Tech one would have to be thing the kind of thing where just beelining to it is probably a pretty bad idea, overall.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, we could have it on a schedule. That would definitely be in keeping with our discussion from earlier about civs generally keeping toward the higher end of the allocated Aes Sedai slots. Linking them to techs or something else that "progresses" through the game would make them more scarce though - potentially more valuable? Players would be more inclined to keep them safe if it's difficult to regain them after.

I like the idea of there being some element of randomness to it - like, if it's on a Turn schedule, maybe it's somewhat unpredictable. I feel like it should probably be global, though - or do we want some civs getting their Sisters *faster* (instead of just more of them)?

I do think it is best for us to pace it in a way such that you do definitely want to keep your sisters alive - if you lose 4 of them in a war, it's be awhile before you get new ones. In fact, letting them die should probably cost you Tower influence!.

S3rgeus said:
Herbalist Knowledge?

Herbalist Training?

S3rgeus said:
Sounds good to me - Compact resolutions remain and are unrefusable. Won't the tendency towards voting as a group with Alignments make resolutions succeed more often during the Last Battle though?

Well, I do suppose the Compact will vary hugely based on how the LB divides. A game that has a majority of players (or, Diplo votes, at least) on the Light will have a lot of easy votes - since all other victory conditions are locked, everybody's only working towards winning the LB. Games with a large number of Shadow and Neutral civs, though, this wouldn't be the case, as each of these civs still needs to hit their own victory conditions to win, and thus might do stuff against the best interest of their colleagues.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, that is weird. We could keep the CS ties the same as how they work now, and CSes can switch back and forth between the Alignments? Declaring for the Light/Shadow doesn't automatically make them the embodiment of either, and given the secondary nature of CSesm I can see them being bought and sold to both sides. Because of the way influence works, a "sniped" CS would have to be won over by a neutral civ and then re-acquired by its "original" ally afterwards during the Last Battle for an "Alignment swap" to actually happen. (Since Light/Shadow are at war.)

Or do we want to track alignment for each CS independently? Seems like they wouldn't have that many Alignment-relevant decisions. We could track a CS's Alignment based on the alignment of its allies over time? It might be annoying if you've locked in a CS 20 turns ago and it chooses the other side of the Last Battle because of its previous ally though?

Wow, this is a challenge!

I do think the neutral middle-ground is important to us. I think we should probably let the allegiance of CSs remain fluid, even during the LB - otherwise it changes the mechanics of the diplo victory hugely, right? - but I do think using Neutrality as a middle ground we can lessen the impact of the swingy-ness of this. Maybe, if a CS is shadow, and is bought buy a Light civ in the LB, the CS goes neutral for 10 turns, or something. In this period, neither civ is an ally. Of course, neutral civs are somewhat by definition the enemy of the Shadow civs, though (and to a lesser extent the light ones).

Is there a way to make something like this work, considering the impossibility of negotiations while at War with a CS's ally? What should we do?

S3rgeus said:
It isn't the mirror of the Free Tyranny one then though - Free Tyranny is liberating *any* city (not a targeted one) that used to belong to an Authority civ. I think this makes sense - the Tower likes it when anyone does that, regardless of the politics of who did the liberating.

Capturing the Oppression city is less overall-liked by the Tower. A second Oppression civ benefiting from it is kind of weird, right?

ok, this makes more sense to me now.

S3rgeus said:
Do we want to make Novices a unit that civs can train in order to send to the Tower? (They could be like trade units, so they aren't useful for anything else - you'd just train them to do this.) Once the Novice reaches the Tower, the civ chooses which Ajah the Novice is aligned with.

That is a bit non-canonical, since Novices and Accepted don't have affiliation with Ajahs in the books, but gameplay wise I think we have to make that the player's choice, otherwise it's all a bit random. Unless, when the Novice eventually becomes a Sister (more on that in a moment), she does join a "random" Ajah, gaining you influence with that Ajah. Having the Common Quest "send a Novice" would allow players to gain influence with specific Ajahs that way, immediately on the Novice joining the Tower. But making the Novices' ascension random will mean that most players will have *some* influence with quite a few Ajahs, which is good! Lots of small contributors can skew the percentages for the major players within an Ajah.

So, about Accepted. If we track each civ sending Novices to the Tower and those Novices' eventual ascension to being Aes Sedai, then Accepted seems like the middle rank that those tracked Novices reach after X (random, weighted?) turns. Maybe the original sender civ gains overall Tower influence when their trainee goes from Novice to Accepted? Do we want the civ to do anything to cause that to happen? (I'm not sure - I think just time's passage makes sense - makes it more difficult to "rush" for influence, and is more in keeping with Tar Valon's isolationist approach to trainees.)

OK, I'm liking where this is going. Some expanded thoughts on this.

I'm not sure the Novices need to be units, per se, since that's a little weird, but given that it is an established concept in the game, that could work.

I was previously thinking it would be based on Population, but I'm thinking now that we already have a perfectly good abstraction of that to use - Spark. I think you should be able to send 1 Novice for every 1 Spark you have. Should it cost you anything else besides a little production time (if that?)? Also, should they all happen at once, or incrementally over time, like a Spy? Monitoring the novice situation does seem somewhat like a Spy menu, which might suggest we not use a trade unit.

Some civs would invariably refuse to do this, right? Any benefits to doing this? (the population point loss thing is a potential thing).

I'm kind of liking the novice thing to be something essentially out of the control of the player, maybe even with some randomness. Consider:

- Player sends X number of novices to the tower (whether all at once or over time). This raises Overall Tower Influence, not Ajah influence (donating female channeler units is the way to raise Ajah influence). Your number of novices in the tower acts as a sort of cushion-offset to your Tower Influence - it's "resting influence" is higher, as long as they are there (sort of like the Sea Folk Sisters, maybe).
- After X number of turns (or a range), the Novice(s) have a % chance to A) drop out of the Tower, or B) advance to Accepted.
- If the Novice drops out of the tower, the civ can send another, but the process starts over
- If the Novice advances to become an Accepted, a significant boost to overall Tower Influence is given (and a higher resting influence)
- After some amount of turns, an Accepted either A) drops out, B) remains an Accepted, or c) becomes an Aes Sedai
- If the Accepted drops out, the civ can send another *Novice*.
- An accepted who advances to become a sister will choose an Ajah, mostly randomly, though there could be slight percentage modifications based on the affiliations of the parent civ. Whichever Ajah she chooses provides a good deal of thumbs up to the parent civ.
- we could additionally have their be a certain % chance that your sisters are elected to the Hall of the Tower and/or the Amyrlin Seat.

I'm also assuming that these are abstractions, and that these sisters don't literally do anything in the game - like, they don't get killed or anything).

S3rgeus said:
Thanks! Yeah, Cleansing Saidin probably has enough rewards as it is - we can drop that one.

S3rgeus said:

Cool, but there is the other option of having the Tower gift you a different GW in return? That could actually be quite valuable, since I often find I'm short on foreign GWs when going for culture.

Click to expand...

Eh.... I think having it be a swap is sort of a non-sacrifice. like, why wouldn't everybody immediately complete the quest? Will it be a really specific artifact?

S3rgeus said:

I'm not sure, probably depends on the progression through the game at the time. I imagine there are usually quite a few in the run up to the Last Battle. We could have this quest scale with time as well as map size?

Click to expand...

Yes, I think that makes sense.

S3rgeus said:

I figured they were getting the bonus every turn with each unit, until it was fully healed (that's why I went as low as +1). To abuse it they'll need a repeatable source of damage, which if they've got, they probably need to attack it in some way. It's only really an incremental gain to prevent that being too lucrative.

Click to expand...

Alright. Should be fine.

S3rgeus said:

I think if you've just advanced an era, then that's just unfortunate. Most of the quests are better at certain times than others, depending on what you've done. If you've just beelined for a far-ahead tech, it's much easier to win the "most techs in 30 turns" because you have a bunch of low-cost ones to finish quickly. (Also helps to finish a tech on turn 1 or 2 of that quest.)

The quest is targeted at a single player, so they have the same era progression requirements as normal - research any tech from the next era. Which one they should beeline for will vary depending on which techs they've already finished when the quest is given.

Click to expand...

Sure. that makes sense. I guess all quests have a degree of luck associated with when they are offered.

S3rgeus said:

Yeah, I think it makes sense for each Ajah to have the same number of quests available. The Yellow Ajah was really difficult to come up with quests for, that's the main reason they had so few. I think we want to go for like 6-8 for each Ajah + an Amyrlin quest? A few of the quests available to each Ajah should be easily "recyclable" as well - like "destroy that Dragonsworn Camp" has the same requirement every time, but the context of where that Camp is can make the quest quite different.

Click to expand...

Cool. We'll be able to get that many for each Ajah, I think. The Yellow is weird, which is somewhat surprising considering they have a very video-gamey area of interest.

OK, that's it. We're almost done with diplo, yes?

Happy New Year everyone!

S3rgeus · Jan 4, 2015

Happy New Year, all!

counterpoint said:
OK, let's definitely try to go with tracking the two separately. I definitely don't see a problem in a player having a positive relationship with an Ajah, but a negative one with the Tower overall. Imagine a civ who totally rocks at destroying shadowspawn, but is otherwise pretty terrible - maybe the Green would like them, but the tower as a whole wouldn't.

Sounds good to me.

counterpoint said:
Right. I suppose I should ask, for your sake - is it substantially more difficult/painful to implement the dual-tracking system, from a modding perspective?

Not significantly more difficult - just different! As long as we're decided, that's cool.

counterpoint said:
Right. All in the UI. I think one of our main goals that we've established is to make this all very intuitive and simple - at least in presentation. Otherwise, this mod will be overwhelming.

Ah, I was under the understanding, from previous parts of the thread, that you wanted the Ajah bonuses to be available to all players who hit a certain mark - at least some of the bonuses at least. I see the merit in running things on this sliding scale - like a CS Alliance, not like a CS Friendship - but I do caution us on the flavor of it. While certainly an Ajah would only let their "main civ" affect their policy and such, probably they would grant some abilities/benefits to any civ that worked well with them.

In any case, I don't feel very strongly about it.

Very true about what we discussed earlier. I think the majority of bonuses would have relatively low percentage requirements so that multiple players could have them at once. We may need to scale the requirements based on the number of players then though - otherwise it's more difficult in larger games? Is that too confusing?

counterpoint said:
OK, let's call them Generic Edicts, I guess.

Generic Edicts works for me!

counterpoint said:
Incidentally, I've found myself paying much more attention to the actual numbers in my trade routes since this this section of the thread began.

OK, I'm mostly fine with the reversed trade routes as a penalty. I'm struck, though, by binary nature of it. If you disobey an edict, you get the penalty, right? So, what's stopping you from disobeying 5 edicts? What more could/would they do?

I agree with your issues with a flat penalty, but the problem with the reversal is that it doesn't appear to be scalable. What do we do to differentiate a Tear (who disobeys a few key Tower policies, but in general follows them, and is in turn cooperated with) from a Seanchan (who spits in the face of the Tower, and consequently is not cooperated with)?

It's tricky, because if you make it too scalable, the balance is tricky - how would we make a one-refusal penalty appropriately harmful, without making a five-refusal one impossibly so? The truth is, from a flavor perspective, the "scale" doesn't actually exist, at least not across the whole spectrum.. Tear is on the "scale," and are penalized. Seanchan is off the scale. They won't play the "game" and consequently the Tower holds little power over them.

Ack!

Argh, I hadn't thought of this. I think the Seanchan are in a unique position in terms of CiV in the books. They effectively own their own entire continent and are economically self-sufficient there. None of the existing Westlands nations trade with them and they're fine with that because they can take what they want by force. I think if one of the existing nations, before the Seanchan showed up, tried to stand in open defiance of the Tower (say Tarabon did) then they'd be politically isolated and eventually destroyed by the Tower's machinations.

With that in mind, we can probably make the penalties economically destructive to the point that they would essentially bury most civs, but only if they're relying on external sources of gold. We could start by upping the penalties on trade routes for successive refusals. Affected players will stop trading after two stacked penalties, I'd say, because it no longer makes significant difference to their income and continuing helps their enemies.

I think the flavor of the bonuses is that we want external relationships to become difficult when a civ refuses a Tower Edict. So we can't do stuff like "city connections produce 1 less gold per turn" because that's internal to the civ. We could make their CS relationships start to decay faster? Does that interact well with the Ogier being CSes too?

After a certain number of refusals, we could have AI civs automatically declaring war? Those that are closely aligned with the Tower could be used for that purpose. We'd likely want to warn players about that - tooltip when they hover over the "Refuse" button that says "Elayne will declare war on you" in red, or something to that effect. Maybe just list the effects below the button on the screen.

counterpoint said:
Not sure about the Choedan Kal. I definitely think some AoL (or earlier) wonders would be cool if they were "sacred" and existed without a civ building them.

A quick scan of the wiki for some geographical features - some of these aren't exactly as awesome as CiV ones... Also, some of these are bigger than what i'd assume a single tile would be.... Interesting.

- Shayol Ghul
- Dragonmount
- Bay of Remara (by Mayene - too big?)
- Kabal Deep (by Altara - same issue as above)
- Blinder's Peak, Favlend Mountain, and Mount Sardlen - various points around Andor/Murandy
- The Drowned Lands (too big?)
- Haddon Mirk (too big?)
- Garen's Wall (ridge by Ghealdan)
- Jangai Pass
- Tarwin's Gap
- Kinslayer's Dagger
- Windbiter's Finger (peninsula in extreme SW of westalands)
- various Rivers
- Alcair Dal (canyon where the Aiel Clan Chiefs meet)
- Alianelle Spring (oasis Gawyn and Younglings hung out at... perhaps too minor)
- Cliffs of Dawn (northeastern edge of Aiel Waste)
- Great Rift (canyon at south end of cliffs of dawn)
- Eldrene's Veil (waterfall in Two Rivers)
- Field of Merrilor (place they signed the Dragon Peace)
- Lake Somal (largest lake in westlands, in the west)
- Molvaine Gap (in Altara, pass through Damona Mountains)
- Malvide Narrows (narrowest point in Molvaine Gap in Altara)
- Shadow's Lance - weird southward extension of the blight into Kandor and Arafel

Looks like regular civ has 17 different Natural Wonders.

Nice, those look good! Even Haddon Mirk we could represent as a single tile with a swamp/forest kind of aesthetic (visually differentiated from the default ones). The Bay of Remara should be awesome, that again we can do as one "coast-like" hex. The NWs are placed in base CiV by generating the whole map and then searching afterwards for locations that satisfy some requirement for the NW. (Gibraltar must be on a peninsula, for example.) So we can look for mountain ranges for wonders like Tarwin's Gap and the Molvaine Gap. The Field of Merrilor could be places basically anywhere flat and temperate, which is awesome (but may make it a relatively common NW - we might have to weight against that.)

Some of the others that may be too big could be multi-hex wonders, like the Great Barrier Reef is.

counterpoint said:
A question just popped into my head.... we aren't incorporating Portal Stones into this mod, are we?

I had completely forgotten about Portal Stones. They had largely fallen into disrepair by the end of the Third Age, right? I think most were broken over time? We could certainly make them land features/NWs that could move units across the map at random (to other Portal Stones)?

counterpoint said:
Ah... what's your current opinion, then?

What about something like "Foreign Levies"? Or "Outlander" instead of "Foreign"?

counterpoint said:
if you don't want inaction to be a part of it, I'm fine with that. I mentioned it here because it does seem like something people request from the CiV WC.

After having gone through all of my opposition to having an inaction resolution - I'm realizing now that this is actually really easy to try out in playable builds and see how it works. It's just a resolution that causes no effects and can be passed/proposed as many times as we like, which would be easy to turn on/off. Shall we put it in and see how it goes?

counterpoint said:
It might be as simple as giving them an actual, regular Golden Age, and then applying whatever "tax" they choose. Thoughts?

How long would you anticipate their "reign" lasting? Maybe I could see them swapping their bonus once. Also, the reign ends "naturally" right? (i.e., whether they like it or not)

Definitely, their reign ends no matter what they do. I'd think it would last about 25 turns maybe? Enough to switch the tax once at 12/13?

Regular golden age bonuses sound good - a 25 turn golden age is significant in itself. Golden ages are clearly very helpful for getting gold, which is useful for diplo and also potentially for military. Golden ages also produce a lot of extra culture, so culture victory players will definitely like being High King.

counterpoint said:
yes. this looks good. I do think it might be best to reframe is as Good/Average/Poor/Nothing, though, and maybe create distributions like 1/2/1/1 and 2/2/2/1, or something.

Good point, one should always be allocated to Nothing to that the High King can leave somebody out!

counterpoint said:
hmmm... The more I think about this, the more I start wondering if it's a bit out-of-universe. I mean, this isn't a Song of Ice and Fire. There isn't much int he way of alliances, up until the very end. I'm fine with all of this from a mechanical perspective (though I think I'd opt to make it a bit simpler), but I wonder in general if this kind of super-alliance is really in keeping with the WoT feel.

This is a good point. The Compact of Ten Nations was quite a significant diplomatic union, but it didn't really work out when things got difficult. As you've said, the majority of the nations we see in the books don't work together that well for the most part. I think adding Accords as we've discussed them will be quite complicated - would it be best to drop them for now and see if we need them later?

counterpoint said:
your nerd card has been revoked.... though perhaps you not being an estadounidiense is *some* excuse. I suppose such excuse would not be valid for Dr. Who references, though (which I would fail at, actually)...

I'd be terrible at Dr. Who references as well.

Just never been much of a Ghostbusters fan!

counterpoint said:
OK, looking at them again:

- accumulation of DoFs
- trade route with every capital
- HK's palace
- capture half of the capitals (or X number or cities or something)
- hit some technology

Is that all of them? Honestly, it's hard to say if they're too easy or not - I suppose playtesting will tell. The Tech one would have to be thing the kind of thing where just beelining to it is probably a pretty bad idea, overall.

I think that's all of them. Yeah, each one can be tweaked to make it harder/easier in its own way. Agreed about the tech one - so we'll need to make sure the tree is structured accordingly around it. Something we'll keep in mind when planning the tree!

counterpoint said:
I like the idea of there being some element of randomness to it - like, if it's on a Turn schedule, maybe it's somewhat unpredictable. I feel like it should probably be global, though - or do we want some civs getting their Sisters *faster* (instead of just more of them)?

Cool, so there's a schedule underneath but we put in some variance each time. Global is interesting - do all civs get Sisters at once? Or does the Tower cycle through each civ (from the Tower's perspective, this approach would happen much more often) and give Sisters to just that civ each time? If the latter, do we want the cycle order to be a simple loop through all of the players or should the Tower jump back and forth between several major players - only considering minor ones less often?

So if we go for all at once, something like every 15 +/- 3 turns?

counterpoint said:
I do think it is best for us to pace it in a way such that you do definitely want to keep your sisters alive - if you lose 4 of them in a war, it's be awhile before you get new ones. In fact, letting them die should probably cost you Tower influence!

Agreed and good idea! Let's do that.

counterpoint said:
Herbalist Training?

That's the one! I like this one.

counterpoint said:
Well, I do suppose the Compact will vary hugely based on how the LB divides. A game that has a majority of players (or, Diplo votes, at least) on the Light will have a lot of easy votes - since all other victory conditions are locked, everybody's only working towards winning the LB. Games with a large number of Shadow and Neutral civs, though, this wouldn't be the case, as each of these civs still needs to hit their own victory conditions to win, and thus might do stuff against the best interest of their colleagues.

Very true - so a majority Shadow/Neutral leads to a much more normal Compact during the Last Battle. Majority Light leads to a single block that will tend to force through legislation.

counterpoint said:
Wow, this is a challenge!

I do think the neutral middle-ground is important to us. I think we should probably let the allegiance of CSs remain fluid, even during the LB - otherwise it changes the mechanics of the diplo victory hugely, right? - but I do think using Neutrality as a middle ground we can lessen the impact of the swingy-ness of this. Maybe, if a CS is shadow, and is bought buy a Light civ in the LB, the CS goes neutral for 10 turns, or something. In this period, neither civ is an ally. Of course, neutral civs are somewhat by definition the enemy of the Shadow civs, though (and to a lesser extent the light ones).

Is there a way to make something like this work, considering the impossibility of negotiations while at War with a CS's ally? What should we do?

A Light civ would never be able to buy a Shadow civ's ally CS though - they can't open up negotiations to gain any influence (and even then they're at -60). This is because Light civs and Shadow civs are always all at war with each other. This means that sniping CSes at the last minute is very effective, unfortunately. (Though did we decide on a visible countdown to the LB? I don't remember exactly. Without a visible countdown, sniping is no longer useful because you don't know when to snipe.)

A CS could eventually switch sides from Light -> Shadow (or vice versa) if a Neutral civ became their ally first. Then the opposing side civ could make peace with the CS and negotiate as normal. That's good, right? We don't want CSes to be able to switch sides in the LB at ease. It is dependent on a Neutral civ that cares about that CS though.

counterpoint said:
OK, I'm liking where this is going. Some expanded thoughts on this.

I'm not sure the Novices need to be units, per se, since that's a little weird, but given that it is an established concept in the game, that could work.

I was previously thinking it would be based on Population, but I'm thinking now that we already have a perfectly good abstraction of that to use - Spark. I think you should be able to send 1 Novice for every 1 Spark you have. Should it cost you anything else besides a little production time (if that?)? Also, should they all happen at once, or incrementally over time, like a Spy? Monitoring the novice situation does seem somewhat like a Spy menu, which might suggest we not use a trade unit.

Some civs would invariably refuse to do this, right? Any benefits to doing this? (the population point loss thing is a potential thing).

Thinking it over, I think I like the Spy-like menu approach to this as well. (We can make it another piece of the existing window for the Tower - another "tab" - so that players can keep track of their Novices/Accepted?)

I like the idea of your total Spark being your Novice cap. (But Novices don't consume Spark, do they?) Working from what you've said, I'm thinking "Send a Novice to the Tower" could be a "trainable/buildable" thing (it's probably a repeatable project) that players can do after a certain tech (probably the same one that causes them to meet the Tower). While the "Send a Novice" project is "under construction" it freezes growth in the city like Settlers do, and when it finishes, the population in the city decreases by one and the player gets a Novice at the Tower. Cue your suggestions below:

counterpoint said:
I'm kind of liking the novice thing to be something essentially out of the control of the player, maybe even with some randomness. Consider:

- Player sends X number of novices to the tower (whether all at once or over time). This raises Overall Tower Influence, not Ajah influence (donating female channeler units is the way to raise Ajah influence). Your number of novices in the tower acts as a sort of cushion-offset to your Tower Influence - it's "resting influence" is higher, as long as they are there (sort of like the Sea Folk Sisters, maybe).
- After X number of turns (or a range), the Novice(s) have a % chance to A) drop out of the Tower, or B) advance to Accepted.
- If the Novice drops out of the tower, the civ can send another, but the process starts over
- If the Novice advances to become an Accepted, a significant boost to overall Tower Influence is given (and a higher resting influence)
- After some amount of turns, an Accepted either A) drops out, B) remains an Accepted, or c) becomes an Aes Sedai
- If the Accepted drops out, the civ can send another *Novice*.
- An accepted who advances to become a sister will choose an Ajah, mostly randomly, though there could be slight percentage modifications based on the affiliations of the parent civ. Whichever Ajah she chooses provides a good deal of thumbs up to the parent civ.
- we could additionally have their be a certain % chance that your sisters are elected to the Hall of the Tower and/or the Amyrlin Seat.

I like all of this. It's something that's very manageable for the player, gives them another avenue to work with the Tower, and makes sense in universe. Randomness in the process also makes it less likely that players will "divide up" the Ajahs to avoid competing with each other, which would be unflavorful.

counterpoint said:
I'm also assuming that these are abstractions, and that these sisters don't literally do anything in the game - like, they don't get killed or anything).

Definitely, I think we're keeping the actual Sister units completely separate from this.

counterpoint said:
Eh.... I think having it be a swap is sort of a non-sacrifice. like, why wouldn't everybody immediately complete the quest? Will it be a really specific artifact?

Good point. They might not have the type of GW the Tower requested. It could request specific nationalities or work types, like you said. Like it might want any artifact. Or possibly any Andoran GW. Things like that? That way players may go off hunting for it.

counterpoint said:
Cool. We'll be able to get that many for each Ajah, I think. The Yellow is weird, which is somewhat surprising considering they have a very video-gamey area of interest.

Yeah, I think the problem is that the Ajah's focus is something that's managed more by the individual civilizations' actions than bonuses that affect them overall.

counterpoint said:
OK, that's it. We're almost done with diplo, yes?

Indeed, we're almost there! I believe when we discussed "next topics" last time, the science victory was up next after diplo? That still seems like a good next step to me. Not sure if we should start discussing it yet, but our first question on the topic is probably: What is the science victory actually going to be? In base CiV it's leaving the Earth, but we need something quite different.

counterpoint · Jan 5, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Very true about what we discussed earlier. I think the majority of bonuses would have relatively low percentage requirements so that multiple players could have them at once. We may need to scale the requirements based on the number of players then though - otherwise it's more difficult in larger games? Is that too confusing?

Yeah, I'd worry that it might be too complicated to have it scale based on who's in the game - either it's under the hood and a mystery to players, or it's all transparent and may appear to be a bit complicated and/or unpredictable.

Why again shouldn't we have it work like CSs for the low-level abilities? You've made the case generally speaking, but as far as the minor abilities/perks, what's the harm in making it a flat value? Then, we can have the good one(s) go to whoever has the most with the Ajah (above a certain value, that is). I dunno, just seems the simplest. If you have a more elegant solution, please share it, because it's looking like this has become too complicated for what is a rather small mechanic.

S3rgeus said:
Generic Edicts works for me!

nice.

S3rgeus said:
Argh, I hadn't thought of this. I think the Seanchan are in a unique position in terms of CiV in the books. They effectively own their own entire continent and are economically self-sufficient there. None of the existing Westlands nations trade with them and they're fine with that because they can take what they want by force. I think if one of the existing nations, before the Seanchan showed up, tried to stand in open defiance of the Tower (say Tarabon did) then they'd be politically isolated and eventually destroyed by the Tower's machinations.

With that in mind, we can probably make the penalties economically destructive to the point that they would essentially bury most civs, but only if they're relying on external sources of gold. We could start by upping the penalties on trade routes for successive refusals. Affected players will stop trading after two stacked penalties, I'd say, because it no longer makes significant difference to their income and continuing helps their enemies.

This has me thinking a bit more on the whole way the 'chan are different from the Westlands. First off, I was thinking that it could be a part of their UA - independence from tower policy - but then I figured we probably have cooler things to do with their UA, and also that then prevents them from being Pro-Tower if a player so decides.

But, what if this kind of thing was a factor in your Philosophy (i.e. Ideology)? Like, maybe refusal penalties effect Authority Players financially more than the other choices, but it keeps their diplomatic life intact. Maybe Oppression civs have less of an effect, but have huge diplo hits.... Eh... that's probably too weird. One thing could be that Oppression civs could trade with each other with a reduced penalty, or something? I dunno, maybe to complex, but I'm throwing it out there. In any case, trying to figure out a way to capture that big-picture difference between the seanchan and the tarabon example you mentioned.

S3rgeus said:
I think the flavor of the bonuses is that we want external relationships to become difficult when a civ refuses a Tower Edict. So we can't do stuff like "city connections produce 1 less gold per turn" because that's internal to the civ. We could make their CS relationships start to decay faster? Does that interact well with the Ogier being CSes too?

After a certain number of refusals, we could have AI civs automatically declaring war? Those that are closely aligned with the Tower could be used for that purpose. We'd likely want to warn players about that - tooltip when they hover over the "Refuse" button that says "Elayne will declare war on you" in red, or something to that effect. Maybe just list the effects below the button on the screen.

Yeah, I think the key thing here is that they wouldn't hurt your internal sources of revenue. A Seanchan-type civ could essentially ignore them and use their trade routes as only internal things. I think the CS decay thing is fine, as well - could be Ogier as well (Loial was never eager to anger the Aes Sedai). But your scaling idea is fine - I think we don't want people refusing this most of the time, so refusing two or three should be a big deal, not for the faint of heart.

I don't know about the automatic declaration of war. What I would say is that if you refuse, the Tower starts sending friendly civs Quests to do bad stuff to you. The more you refuse, the more they do it.

S3rgeus said:
Nice, those look good! Even Haddon Mirk we could represent as a single tile with a swamp/forest kind of aesthetic (visually differentiated from the default ones). The Bay of Remara should be awesome, that again we can do as one "coast-like" hex. The NWs are placed in base CiV by generating the whole map and then searching afterwards for locations that satisfy some requirement for the NW. (Gibraltar must be on a peninsula, for example.) So we can look for mountain ranges for wonders like Tarwin's Gap and the Molvaine Gap. The Field of Merrilor could be places basically anywhere flat and temperate, which is awesome (but may make it a relatively common NW - we might have to weight against that.)

Some of the others that may be too big could be multi-hex wonders, like the Great Barrier Reef is.

Cool! Glad many of these will work. For sure, let's scale their yeilds based on how common they'll be.

S3rgeus said:
I had completely forgotten about Portal Stones. They had largely fallen into disrepair by the end of the Third Age, right? I think most were broken over time? We could certainly make them land features/NWs that could move units across the map at random (to other Portal Stones)?

Eh, I don't think we should have people teleport with them or anything. They don't link up to other places on the map - they link up to other dimensions (which I don't think we want to tackle). I mean, we could have Grolm come out of them or something, but that's kind of cheesy. I think probably they might make the most sense only as flavor. Maybe natural wonders. Maybe one of the Ruins options (rebranding of a culture or tech boost or something).

S3rgeus said:
What about something like "Foreign Levies"? Or "Outlander" instead of "Foreign"?

I think Outlander Levies could be cool.

S3rgeus said:
After having gone through all of my opposition to having an inaction resolution - I'm realizing now that this is actually really easy to try out in playable builds and see how it works. It's just a resolution that causes no effects and can be passed/proposed as many times as we like, which would be easy to turn on/off. Shall we put it in and see how it goes?

I say "yep" to this.

S3rgeus said:
Definitely, their reign ends no matter what they do. I'd think it would last about 25 turns maybe? Enough to switch the tax once at 12/13?

Yeah, I like that.

S3rgeus said:
Regular golden age bonuses sound good - a 25 turn golden age is significant in itself. Golden ages are clearly very helpful for getting gold, which is useful for diplo and also potentially for military. Golden ages also produce a lot of extra culture, so culture victory players will definitely like being High King.

Yeah, maybe the Golden Age is the majority of the perk. The "tax" is good, too, but that is offset by the fact that the other civs (most of them) get some kind of bonus as well.

S3rgeus said:
This is a good point. The Compact of Ten Nations was quite a significant diplomatic union, but it didn't really work out when things got difficult. As you've said, the majority of the nations we see in the books don't work together that well for the most part. I think adding Accords as we've discussed them will be quite complicated - would it be best to drop them for now and see if we need them later?

I hate to stifle what is a pretty neat idea, but I'm tempted to drop it and see if it is needed later.

S3rgeus said:
I'd be terrible at Dr. Who references as well. Just never been much of a Ghostbusters fan!

Alas, nobody's perfect :lol:

S3rgeus said:
I think that's all of them. Yeah, each one can be tweaked to make it harder/easier in its own way. Agreed about the tech one - so we'll need to make sure the tree is structured accordingly around it. Something we'll keep in mind when planning the tree!

Yeah, the tree in general seems like it'll be kinda crazy to build... maybe will be a fun change of pace after all this "high level" stuff.

S3rgeus said:
Cool, so there's a schedule underneath but we put in some variance each time. Global is interesting - do all civs get Sisters at once? Or does the Tower cycle through each civ (from the Tower's perspective, this approach would happen much more often) and give Sisters to just that civ each time? If the latter, do we want the cycle order to be a simple loop through all of the players or should the Tower jump back and forth between several major players - only considering minor ones less often?

So if we go for all at once, something like every 15 +/- 3 turns?

I think fundamentally how we do this should depend on how we want to gameplay to occur. Two scenarios:

1a) Andor is trying to take the Aiel capital. Andor gets a new sister and easily takes it (assuming the sister is attacked blah blah blah).
1b) Andor is trying to take the Aiel capital. Aiel get a new sister and successful defend and fight back the Andoran forces.
2) Andor is trying to take the Aiel capital (Aielville D.C.). Both civs get a new sister. They kill each other and its as if nothing happened.

Which versions of this is what we're looking for?

I think option 1 (cycling through the civs) is a little more swingy, in the sense that there will potentially be brief windows where one civ might have the upper hand. This could be a neat element, but we should acknowledge that it exists.

Option 2 (everybody at once) is a bit more boring but also more "fair" in that there isn't the possibility of weird opportunism due to when you get your AS.

That said, probably not a big difference, right? Unless we're talking one civ getting one now and the other waiting 30 turns, it shouldn't matter either way, I don't think. I'll will say I do like some degree of randomness to it, so people don't meta it too hard.

S3rgeus said:
Very true - so a majority Shadow/Neutral leads to a much more normal Compact during the Last Battle. Majority Light leads to a single block that will tend to force through legislation.

Sounds good, and makes sense, IMO.

S3rgeus said:
A Light civ would never be able to buy a Shadow civ's ally CS though - they can't open up negotiations to gain any influence (and even then they're at -60). This is because Light civs and Shadow civs are always all at war with each other. This means that sniping CSes at the last minute is very effective, unfortunately. (Though did we decide on a visible countdown to the LB? I don't remember exactly. Without a visible countdown, sniping is no longer useful because you don't know when to snipe.)

Yeah, yeah, this is tough. On the countdown, I could go either way, certainly. I like it being slightly unpredictable, but at the same time, you've made a pretty good case for transparency as a virtue in civ. Would be kinda lame to be 1 turn away from something big happening only being forced into a perpetual war the next turn - without knowing it's coming and planning accordingly.

S3rgeus said:
A CS could eventually switch sides from Light -> Shadow (or vice versa) if a Neutral civ became their ally first. Then the opposing side civ could make peace with the CS and negotiate as normal. That's good, right? We don't want CSes to be able to switch sides in the LB at ease. It is dependent on a Neutral civ that cares about that CS though.

I don't like the idea of relying on a Neutral civ - I feel like neutral civs won't always even exist (it takes a particularly strong civ, and they won't really want to help somebody else in that regard will they?). I mean, having the neutral civ act as a transition is a fine mechanic - and will happen sometimes, the way civ works - but i don't want to hold it up as any real consistent aspect or strategy.

I will say that the problem I have with (essentially) permanent LB alliances is that it will mess up the WC (more than it already is) and make a diplo victory either nye impossible, or way too easy (if a Shadow civ, for instance, has a bunch of the CSs in their pocket at the start - remember Shadow civs need a second victory type in addition to the LB victory). Also, it takes away a whole aspect of the game - dealing with CSs and stuff - for a long time.

i know all of that already happens in regular CiV, but the difference here is that the LB is quite long, and mandatory. In regular games,f you're going for a diplo victory and can't negotiate with a CS because you are at war, well, you can always sue for peace, etc. Here, even if your civ needs a 10-turn breather to rebuild, there are no peace treaties, and thus no interval where alliances could change. I think this is a problem - sniping is a potential weakness in the diplo system, and this makes it even more powerful (even if it is slightly random).

I think it might be worth creating a slightly new mechanic for the LB allegiance of CSs. Some ideas:

- CSs could choose a side based on their own alignment - which is partially randomly determined, and partially determined by the civ's they've allied with historically. You were right to point out that this could suck if you'd worked really hard and finally nabbed that alliance - only to see the CS go to the other team as soon as the LB starts. Still, I think we could weight the decision in a way that appropriately deals with that.
- connecting to that, there should be a way to undermine and change a CSs alignment - at least partially - and alliances through other means: maybe using spies, Gray sisters, GP, etc. Non-standard diplomatic techniques.
- Maybe the spy-things above could work even if civs don't have alliances - maybe CSs choose sides based on current alliances (as originally envisioned) but there are ways civs can undermine those alliances and change the CS over to the opposing side through hard work and stuff.

thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Thinking it over, I think I like the Spy-like menu approach to this as well. (We can make it another piece of the existing window for the Tower - another "tab" - so that players can keep track of their Novices/Accepted?)
I like that

I like the idea of your total Spark being your Novice cap. (But Novices don't consume Spark, do they?) Working from what you've said, I'm thinking "Send a Novice to the Tower" could be a "trainable/buildable" thing (it's probably a repeatable project) that players can do after a certain tech (probably the same one that causes them to meet the Tower). While the "Send a Novice" project is "under construction" it freezes growth in the city like Settlers do, and when it finishes, the population in the city decreases by one and the player gets a Novice at the Tower.

Cool. No, I'd say they don't consume spark, but I like the idea of a short project (like building a caravan or something) that takes some population and/or freezes growth.

Question: how repeatable is this? Can civs keep doing it from all their cities? How many times? Or is this only in response to a Quest asking for it?

S3rgeus said:
Cue your suggestions below:

I like all of this. It's something that's very manageable for the player, gives them another avenue to work with the Tower, and makes sense in universe. Randomness in the process also makes it less likely that players will "divide up" the Ajahs to avoid competing with each other, which would be unflavorful.

Right. that's a good point.

S3rgeus said:
Good point. They might not have the type of GW the Tower requested. It could request specific nationalities or work types, like you said. Like it might want any artifact. Or possibly any Andoran GW. Things like that? That way players may go off hunting for it.

That could work. I don't feel any strong feelings about this particular quest. Trusting your wisdom/inclinations here.

S3rgeus said:
Indeed, we're almost there! I believe when we discussed "next topics" last time, the science victory was up next after diplo? That still seems like a good next step to me. Not sure if we should start discussing it yet, but our first question on the topic is probably: What is the science victory actually going to be? In base CiV it's leaving the Earth, but we need something quite different.

short intro thoughts on that below!

counterpoint · Jan 5, 2015

OK, just wanted to throw out a couple idea's I'd had recently about the Science Victory.

I recall in the past you desired the Science Victory to be more interactive. This was a great reason to consider using the Seals as the science victory, but, of course, those got coopted into the LB victory. Fine.

Another thing that was thrown around was Rand's academies and such. Of course, Academies are likely to be in the game elsewhere - either as a GP improvement or national wonder or something - but nonetheless I find myself drawn to them for this purpose.

Of course, the Science Victory in Civ is absurd - how do you "win" with science" (much in the same way the cultural one is sort of silly). Why space? Why not Gunpowder? Computers? Any other important tech? The thing about the space race is it represents a kind of "way forward," the unknown. A paradigm shift.

There's something about Rand's efforts with the academies in the books that mirrors this, I think. He's trying to create a body of knowledge that can move the world into the 4th age. His legacy being these techs and stuff. That sounds kinda science victory-ish to me.

We've spoken (and debated!) some of the late-game techs (4th age techs, I guess), and whether they should be units and such. I'm thinking the science victory could be wrapped up in these. Also, I think this provides us with an opportunity for some interaction.

First off, according to the wikis, here are the techs being developed at the School of Cairhien:

- Giant Crossbow
- Lightning Jar (lamp, I guess?)
- Glider
- paddlewheel riverboat
- steam engine
- Telescope (crazy this didn't already exist)

So my idea right now has to do with developing these things, call them Innovations, let's say (maybe "Inventions"), and sharing them with some other civs/all other civs. That's the Science Victory.

Also, note that the Civ5 science victory has 7 parts that need to be constructed (4 different types, with 3 SS Bosters). They also come from 4 techs, I think. There are 6 things on the list above, so we could have it be 7, or eliminate some of them. They could be spread from 7 techs, or be only from 4 like in CiV.

Consider:

1) Andor discovers the 4th-age tech Steam Engine. This allows +1 movement on roads (let's say it's too late in the game to bring in actual railroad construction). Andor gets this benefit immediately.
2) Andor now has the option to build a "Showcase Steam Engine Innovation" project in any one of their cities.
3) Upon completion of the project, Andor selects one civ to share the tech with. That civ gets the use of the Steam Engine tech. I don't know if they just get the benefit of the +1 on Roads, or if they get the actual tech itself.
4) When Andor researches Lenses and can build telescopes (Science boost and +1 sight for naval units?), they can do this all again, but they must select a different civ to share with. Thus, to complete a science victory, you must share with your enemies/competitors!
5) The Science victory is achieved when all of these Innovations are successfully showcased by one civ.

How much would this mess things up, being able to "gift" people techs out of order (if they hadn't yet researched the prereqs for Steam Engine, for example). Of course, the alternative is that by Showcasing an innovation, maybe its just a one time science boost for the civ (maybe even for both civs), and not the actual tech. Or maybe the receiving civ gets the tech's bonuses temporarily only? Or maybe, if they're units and such, it just gifts a few units or something. Or builds a railroad, creates a GW, etc. I do like the idea of a litle bit of sacrifice for the SV-seeking civ - hopefully they don't help their enemies get a science victory first!

Also, we could decide that the civ must share the tech with the whole world.

One big question that I haven't resolved is what happens to competitors also competing for a science victory. If you share Telescopes with them, do they still have to research it themselves, even if they already have the bonuses( just to go through the project and the act of sharing it with another civ)? Maybe there are more Innovation options than are required, so civs would be able to choose ones that had already been "taken" by other civs. That's a bit weird though.

In any case, this still has issues, but what I like about it is the flavor, the theme, as also the semi-interactiveness of it all.

Thoughts?

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

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