S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

S3rgeus · Feb 5, 2015

counterpoint said:
I agree with you. It won't change much from BNW (though, perhaps, Domination will change even less).

Well, I would like to take some time to dive in and discuss some aspects of this - the GWs,a nd any special aspects to them, ancient ruins and any special aspects to them. That kind of thing. I don't have the time to jump in tonight, though. Plus, we're so close to finishing both Diplo and science!

OK, so two things that should happen as we wrap up science and diplo: A) a science summary post, and B) "opening arguments" on culture victory, with ideas and general proposals and such (not unlike what happened with the previous two victory types).

Which of those two would you like to do? I'll do the other.

Apologies for the short reply, pressed for time this evening! I'll do the science summary, either on Sunday afternoon or Monday evening, time permitting. (I'll also respond to the rest of your post then!) Guests and traveling have me busy again until then.

Very good point that Domination may change even less, like you've said, I hadn't even considered how we might change that one either!

counterpoint · Feb 6, 2015

OK, So even though we're not quite wrapped up with Diplo and Science, I figured we were close enough that it might be worth getting the ball rolling on Culture. As S3rgeus mentioned, I do think this one will be left largely unchanged from BNW, at least as it pertains to big-picture game mechanics.

As I've done for the other "introduction"-type posts, here I'm going to try to mostly identify the main issues and paths we could take, rather than lay out a clear proposal or anything. I'll also try to lay out what I recall is the "plan" as it currently stands, based on previous discussions.

Note that there's nothing wrong, IMO, with several of the thoughts below receiving a simple, "nah, let's just leave it how it is." I'm throwing stuff out there just to see if anything sticks.

General Overview and Yields

It looks like the current conception was to keep the current mechanical system of BNW, where Culture accrues over the whole game, and serves the dual purpose of unlocking Policies, territory, and serving as "defense" against the cultural victory. The second yield, Tourism, is a late-game yield, being derived mostly from Great Works, and serves as the "offense" in the culture victory.

I don't see any problem with this in the big picture. We have previously decided on renaming Tourism, calling it Prestige. It does not seem that we were going to rename Culture. I'm mostly fine with this, as culture is a rather neutral word, and isn't horribly out-of-universe. And, most importantly, there isn't an obvious in-universe alternative. That said, if anybody does think of one, I probably would prefer to change Culture as well, since we're changing Tourism. No big deal, though. Anybody up for some brainstorming?

I imagine the victory itself will work exactly the same - overcome each civ's Culture with your Prestige and you win. Honestly, I don't feel any impulse to change this in order to accommodate the WoT world. It's not particularly flavorful, but a "culture victory" in WoT seems somewhat absurd in general, so I'm not sure we'll get anything better.

That said, please do throw something in the mix if you have any ideas as to ways to change it up.

Great Works and GPs

We previously discussed rescheming the three main GWs from BNW as such:

Prophecies - spawn likely from Dreamers, Doomseers, etc. Probably somewhat analogous to GW of Writing, in terms of which buildings they would be housed in. Note: these will be "mini" prophecies, and/or small pieces of larger prophecies, in terms of finding the book-content to populate the like (e.g., have a "Prophecy of the Stone" instead of a "Prophecy of the Dragon," the former being a small part of the latter in the books."

Stories or Epics or Legends - spawn likely from Gleemen/Bards, Historians, or other similar GP types. I'm unsure of which name to use, though I think Legends might be the coolest. That said, it seems to have some overlap in "vibe" with prophecy, IMO. Is that a problem? We would likely populate this by scouring the wikis for various tales and songs recited by Thom, or those mentioned by Mat and other characters steeped in lore. That said, we could also elect to take major events from the books and frame them as one of the legends (e.g., "Legend of Shadar Logoth" or "Tale of the Portal Stones"). Maybe like a GW of Music in terms of the buildings it would inhabit.

Crafts - spawn likely from Craftsmen, Artists, Artisans or something. This one is the least well-developed of all the ideas we previously discussed. This is meant to serve as a place for all the crafts at art in the WoT books (porcelain, tapestry, etc.). Also could potentially include some of the fashion customs I listed out before - at least the ones that include objects (e.g. "Hair Bells" or something, rather than "Forked Beard," which isn't really a craft so much). Definitely could/should consider a more inspiring name here. Probably most in line with the GW of Art in terms of where it would be housed.

Note, for now I'd suggest we avoid discussion of which GP creates which GW - let's worry about that when we tackle GPs in general. Similarly, I suggest we not worry about the Culture-Victory-related GP abilities either (i.e., the "concert tour" and "write political treatise"). It should suffice to say that these things will certainly exist - we just don't know which GP will have them.

In general, I think I could be fine with the above, though I could imagine swapping Crafts out for something more exciting, or otherwise shuffling things around. What do you think?

Additionally, we could change things up in a much bigger way, including changing the number of these. Specifically, we could consider having there be only two or as many as four different GW types. I don't necessarily think we should, but we could. Some possible reasons for this, as I think of it now, could be:

- to lower or raise the number of GPs required for GW-production
- to simplify the cultural victory in general, or make it more complex
- to keep it more efficient from a flavor perspective (i.e., no "weak links")
- some other reason?

In any case, I'm not sure it's necessary, but I am throwing it out as something we could at least consider.

Artifacts and Antiquity Sites

Additionally, there's the whole issue of Artifacts and Archaeologists, and how we want to handle them. When discussing the Brown Ajah, we seem to have been mostly keeping our mental conception of how these work similar to BNW. Again, it doesn't *have* to be. Some things to consider/address:

- What will be name and theme of the Antiquity Sites? We could, of course, leave them the same. However, we could look for another conception that might be more flavorful. Some options include:
1) "Relics (or Ruins) of the Age of Legends." This is flavorful, and might be a cool use of that flavor. Could still provide Artifacts, but could also provide ter'angreal, "relics," or cuendillar pieces. This would also be useful if we wanted Seals and/or the Horn to pop up in such places. That said, one potential major problem with this approach is the lack of "nationality" and Age. That said, theoretically we could change the Nationality into something else... maybe it's a different variable they all have, instead of the country-of origin? Like, the type of artifact? AoL-era nation? Of course, none of these would be cohesive with the nationality of the other GWs, but maybe that doesn't matter. And, as far as Age (useful additionally for Landmarks), we could theoretically also change that into some other variable.
2) This may or may not need to be a stand-alone name (meaning, we could just leave them as Antiquity sites), but if we decided to make the artifacts into ter'angreal or cuendillar or something, we could call it a ter'angreal horde or cuendillar deposit or something like that.
3) not very exciting, but we could just plain old change the name, just for the sake of it. You know, "Site of Legend" or "Historical Site" or something like that.

- Shall we preserve the name "Artifact"? We certainly could, but I could also see something like "Relics" being fun. As mentioned above, we could also go in a different direction: ter'angreal, cuendillar. Something like that. If we change the name of the sites themselves, this will likely need to correspond with that closely.

- What about Landmarks? Any better name? I suppose this would depend on whether we change the artifact names... a piece of cuendillar would obviously not lead to a monument's creation.

- What about the archaeologists? This is a 19th-century concept, so I think it certainly needs to change. "Historian" could be a cool alternative. Other than that.... "Treasure Hunter?" That seems silly, though.

- should the process surrounding arch's and artifacts and antiquities remain unchanged? They're revealed by tech/era the same way? Some rebranded social policy-tree completion yields "hidden" ones? Same general amount of time and rules associated with actually harvesting the artifacts? Any new thoughts on the Browns?

- In BNW, artifacts occupy the same buildings as Art. How should that work here? Which one should they cohabitate with? Or should they have their own places?

UI and Buildings

Some questions here:
- Should we adjust the way theming bonuses work? Is there some other logic we should be using, or will it continue to be by pairing age and nationality of the various objects? This does seem to be somewhat arbitrary, so we could adjust it to some other variable if that would seem to be more flavorful. Thoughts?

- any changes to the buildings themselves? should we use more buildings? fewer? Currently, wonders and museums are the other multi-work buildings. Keep that the same?

- I don't understand much about the inner-workings of the GW-swapping system. Should we leave it the same?

- Lastly, I do think we need to tweak the UI on the GW page - is that possible? The most annoying thing, to me, is that you can't visually differentiate between GWoA and Artifacts - they both look like the color palette thing. Can they have a different icon? The other thing I was wondering is if there was a way to use colors on the page to show nationality, and numbers/symbols to show Era. It really is highly annoying having to highlight each and every one all the time.

Matters effecting Culture and Prestige

I feel relatively confident that most of this could remain the same as in BNW. We can produce culture in essentially the same ways (plus special ones we've already discussed). Is the same true with Prestige and the spread of it? Affected by Ideology of course. What about alignment? Does that effect it? Before or only after the LB?

What I'm trying to do in this post is examine all the little "joints" in the culture system and try to make sure we at least consider each of them and whether they should remain unchanged. It does seem that the machinations of the culture victory are mostly "under the hood," so we should probably be careful when changing too much of the math willy nilly - but that doesn't mean we can't.

Is there anything I've forgotten? Anything that stands out as feeling very un-WoT? Or anything we should add that feels very WoT?

The only idea I had for anything "new", which isn't a fabulous one, was grounded in the notion of the fashions of each nation, and how they might be incorporated into culture. It's not a well developed idea, but I was thinking that at various stages of cultural development - maybe after completing a tree or something - the player could select a Style for their civ. Not sure exactly what it does, but probably nothing complex like a pantheon or anything like that. Maybe this does nothing specific, but maybe it spreads around, not unlike a religion, but maybe spread through essentially any interaction - trade, religion, war, etc. Maybe, unlike religion, there doesn't need to be one dominant Style in a city - maybe any one over a certain threshold is considered to be present in a given city. Maybe spreading your style around provides a minor modifier to Prestige-influence later in the game? What I don't know is how this is distinct and useful. But, I don't know, maybe we can think of something like this as a value-add that doesn't change how things work, but is an extra element (not unlike, say, the Ogier Stump).

Anyways, I can't really think of anything else to bring up to start our discussion. Let's do it!

S3rgeus · Feb 9, 2015

The Science Victory

In an effort to WoT-ify the Science Victory and also make it more interactive (similar to what Firaxis did with the Culture victory in BNW), we're planning some changes! Outstanding issues are highlighted in red.

Objectives

Like in base CiV, the Science Victory is heavily dependent on players' acquisition of technologies. Unlike base CiV, the Science Victory cannot be achieved by purely focusing on the territory you control.
There are approximately 5 Fourth Age technologies that unlock Envoys for the players to train.
Between these 5 technologies, there are 8 Innovations, each of which can be Exhibited by an associated Envoy.
The objective of the Science Victory is to perform Exhibitions of every Innovation. When one player has completed every Exhibition, they win the game.
Which technologies unlock which Innovations is awaiting deeper discussion on the contents of the tech tree. Sources for discussion on this topic can be found here and here.

Envoys

Envoys are relatively weak military units that cannot attack, pillage, or capture civilians.
There is a single Envoy unit type for each of the 8 Innovations.
Each Envoy unit type is restricted to one instance per player, in a similar manner to trade units being capped by players' trade route capacity. (No two can be in production at the same time, you cannot produce one if you already control one, one dying means you can start producing another.)
Each Envoy can perform a single Exhibition when adjacent to a foreign capital and is then consumed.
Players can "see" Envoys beyond the limit of the fog of war as a consequence of comparative sicence-per-turn output between themselves and the civilization that controls the Envoy. These Envoys are "highlighted" off in the fog, without revealing any additional tiles. The distance at which the player can detect Envoys is defined by the sight provided by their culture borders + (Envoy player science per turn - Defending player science per turn + 300) / 100 (300 offset means equaling the science output of a player going for the science victory gives you a defensive advantage)

Exhibitions

The number of Exhibitions that can take place in a given capital varies based on how many players are still alive in the game.
If the number of enemy players is equal to or more than the number of Exhibitions that must be completed, then each player can Exhibit a maximum of once at any single capital city.
If the number of enemy players is less than the number of Exhibitions that must be completed, each player may perform repeat Exhibitions at each capital once they have Exhibited to all enemy players. Calculations:
- One opponent: 8 Exhibitions at their capital
- Two opponents: 4 Exhibitions at each capital
- Three opponents: Up to 3 Exhibitions at each capital
- Four opponents: 2 Exhibitions at each capital
- Five opponents: At least one at each capital, with three more repeat Exhibitions at capitals of the player's choice
- Six opponents: At least one at each capital, with two more repeat Exhibitions at capitals of the player's choice
- Seven opponents: At least one at each capital, with one more repeat Exhibition at the capital of the player's choice
- Eight opponents: One at each capital
- Nine or more: One at 8 unique capitals of the player's choice
Exhibitions provide a nominal bonus to the civilization where the Exhibition took place (in the region of 500 Gold, specific bonuses pending the decision on which Innovations are unlocked by which technology)
Exhibitions performed by other players do not affect which cities you can perform Exhibitions at.
A player can never perform a repeat Exhibition at any capital if doing so would make the greatest difference in number they have performed between any two foreign capitals greater than one. (You must perform Exhibitions at every foreign capital before doing any repeats. You must perform one repeat at every capital before ever performing a third at a single capital. And so on.)

Also making a note here that we have discussed and liked the ideas of world wonders related to the above mechanics. Alongside expected yield bonuses, they will provide the following abilities (one each):

Your Envoys can perform Exhibitions from up to two hexes away from their target city.

Your Envoys can perform Exhibitions at any city with more than 10 Population. (The restrictions per capital now apply per civilization.)

You may host a single Exhibition at your capital from one of your Envoys.

S3rgeus · Feb 9, 2015

I've posted the science summary above, let me know if I've missed anything or anything is wrong!

EDIT: I've realized that I've converted the rules for doubling up incorrectly from counterpoint's last post. Fix incoming tomorrow! (Unless we like these ones!)

counterpoint said:
I'm drawn to "Theming bonuses in cities within 3 hexes of a Brown Sister provide +1 Prestige." Minor, yet, but seeing that it could probably be doubled and whatnot by tenets and other things, this could be significant.

Done!

counterpoint said:
Looks great! It doesn't matter here, but in later iterations we should definitely specify that Gray *warders* can move through enemy territory as well.

Good point, I've added it to the ability!

counterpoint said:
OK, definitely in favor of going ahead and making the Red Tier One ability a +15% ranged defense (against any ranged attack) and making the Tier Two ability the gentling upon attack chance.

As far as the chance, well, I think 30% is too high, since they only have a 60% chance via a typical "Gentling" action (30% for non-Reds). 20% seems better - good chance of happening, but significantly less than a "targeted" Gentling attack. I think it's important we don't totally neutralize their Level 0 ability, right? That said, if there's a design reason I'm missing, let me know.

Awesome sauce. I did pick 30% intentionally, but it's only really a ballpark. From the numbers we discussed before, it makes Reds equally as likely to Gentle male channelers when they attack as other Ajahs are when they Gentle explicitly, which I thought was cool. (We could give Reds 70% success by default, btw?)

I figured much below 30% might be quite underwhelming - on average the male channeler may be dead most of the time before the ability activates. (This way it's ~every third attack. If you're attacking with anything more than just the Red, it should be easy to kill him in under 3 turns.) Given the other Ajahs' abilities are quite reliable, I figured we'd want to weight this one on the high side.

counterpoint said:
Right. That's cool. Gholam, I guess, are just random uber-powerful shadowspawn, right? Because they were also sort of used as assassins, in a way, as I recall.

There was only one Gholam in the Third Age. Apparently there were 6 made originally, but we're not beholden to the exact series of WoT events in this case. I think given the usage of Grey Men and the crossover with their abilities, it would be fine to leave Gholam out, at least not make them something systematic like a "spy type," but instead as a one-off wonder/relic/thing.

counterpoint said:
But Gray Men could likely be able to be put in any city to assassinate a governor, right?

Yes, super cool!

counterpoint said:
Hmmm.... well, maybe the Bloodknife can also assassinate governors, right? I can see them being more generic than simply a 'chan UU. That said, what's the difference between them and the Gray Men? Is there a gameplay difference? There should be, or they seem kinda pointless.

Crazy idea, what if a spy can *become* a bloodknife? Recall that the ter'angreal that creates a bloodknife eventually kills the assassin. What if you selected a spy and made them a bloodknife. This unlocked assassinations as a mission for them, and/or made their next mission have a higher success rate and/or occur much faster. But, it also killed them - resetting their level. In order to prevent abuse (sending level one spies to die), we could say there's a minimum level they had to be.

Very, very cool, I love this idea! Yes, let's have a late-game tech that lets players promote a single third-level spy to a Bloodknife, who then dies X turns later (45?). Bloodknives can assassinate Governors and the Amyrlin (Governors with an on-average higher success rate, dependent on relevant buildings and the city's status, the Amyrlin dependent on Tower-y things like the strength of her Ajah and influence of the "attacking" player.)

counterpoint said:
Also, are we sure we want the differentiation between Philosophies to be so great as to allow different unit types/actions? So far, we've already expanded upon the differences already in CiV - the difference between Refusal Penalties - but this kind of thing does seem to push that to the next level. Maybe it's ok, but are we sure it's worth it, considering it will likely complicate balance quite a bit? Also, can we think of enough other stuff to "fill in" these kinds of things for each of the Philosophies. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but I'm saying we *maybe* shouldn't.

Very good point, I was a bit wary of this as well. Yeah, let's not make that big of a divide between the Philosophies, since CiV didn't do anything like that, and it would mean opening a whole can of worms to do with generating unique and cool bonuses for each one and then balancing them all against each other.

counterpoint said:
I could understand the bloodknives being theoretically available to anybody - especially if there's a "cost" like I described above. There's no reason a Liberation civ wouldn't be as likely to try to kill an opposing ruler or something. That said, getting caught with them is likely tantamount to an international incident. Now, an Authority civ probably wouldn't go and try to Assassinate the *amyrlin* though - but why not a governor?

Agreed via above, but there might be cases where an Authority civ could want to assassinate the Amyrlin! (Like they're choosing Shadow.) There might even be more situations - not sure what they are yet, but it should be awesome.

counterpoint said:
As most things with the tower, I'd suspect it'd be several things. Spy level, influence all seem to make sense to me. I'm not sure it needs to get as detailed as the Amyrlin Ajah or anything like this, though.

again though, probably this kind of thing is best used as something "set in motion" by the player - the spy doesn't actually depose the amyrlin, but prompts a vote, or sways that vote, or something.

Yeah, sounds good. Agreed about the "set in motion," but I think that's all flavor in how we present it. Functionally, the spy has a "Depose the Amyrlin" mission, but it's not labelled that and the dialog boxes describe what happens to be appropriate to the set-in-motion narrative. Or do you mean we would actually do internal voting like the actual Amyrlin elections? (There would presumably be one of those after a success.) I think that could all be abstracted away by an adjusted probability for the spy's success. (And given the player can't see the actual progress of an election anyway.)

counterpoint said:
Yes, it does seem the Tower needs to turn before the LB. Also, yeah, let's open the turning an era earlier.

Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
But yeah, keeping it hidden til the declaration - awesome! That said, civ is usually transparent in many facets - is it possible for Light civs to gain any insight into how far along the effort is?

Light civ spy mission? Investigate the Black Ajah sounds pretty cool and can give the player a one-time, incomplete glimpse at some of the objectives?

Looks like we've reached an almost-completed consensus on how we want Turning the Tower to work? I'll edit it into the Diplomatic Summary when I do my next post! (Probably the response to the start of the culture conversation!)

counterpoint said:
OK, I suppose I am not seeing how this includes any defending-player agency or action? You mentioned before it would be prompted by a tech lead (which I know you aren't attached to), but that is still Science-pursuing civ centric. If it's just another thing the science-civ does... then it's somewhat redundant.

I gather, in general, what you're suggesting is that some precondition must be met with each civ before that civ can be Exhibited to, and that that precondition may be in some ways affected by a recipient civ, right?

I can get behind this in theory, as long as it isn't too tedious. That said, I have essentially no idea what it could be, short of things that help a civ prevent the Envoys from being successful (we could have an improvement that gives them a failure chance... even though we already hated this idea before).

"Realistically" (i.e. not concerned with game design), it would seem that a civ would be vulnerable to an envoy if they 1) traded resources with the civ recently, 2) had a trade route with the civ recently, 3) entered into an open borders agreement with the civ, 4) entered into research agreements with the civ, and 5) shared a Philosophy with the civ.

I'm not sure how useful that all is, though. It essentially would mean that you couldn't ever exhibit to a sworn enemy.

I'm guess I'm struggling to figure out how the establishment of an Academy in a civ has anything to do with the recipient civ specifically (and their ability to defend).

The agency is that the "defending" player is able to do something about someone else winning the Science victory. By being good at science themselves (regardless of if they do Envoys or anything) they can hold the "winning" player off. (Possibly forcing the Science player to DoW them much like a high-culture enemy does with the Culture victory.)

There are a few flaws with using tech lead for it though. One is that there's an end to the tech tree. The flipside to being able to "defend" without war is that you should be able to "attack" without it as well, and you can't pull farther ahead if there are no techs left. (Even if we count instances of Future Tech separately, those get progressively more expensive, so it's not representative pulling the same number ahead in that case.) Science per turn makes more sense in this case, but it's relatively uninspired. Those and other reasons are why I'm not a big fan of tech lead as the mechanic for the "defending" player, but I still think the notion of being able to defend is very important. ("Oh look, this guy has done a bunch of Exhibitions on the other side of the world and won the game, even though you're doing really well and had nothing to do with that whole process." The base CiV science victory is very like this and the original culture victory was very like this. Maybe even if the player is doing well, someone else winning means they've been slow, but I can definitely understand feeling cheated in this circumstance.)

I think the improvement that introduces an Envoy failure chance will mainly be annoying for the attacker (since it takes so long to make a new Envoy and they can't buffer them because of the production limit, it boils down to a dice roll). I think you've come to the same conclusion about that?

Agreed that we don't want to blanket prevent Exhibitions to sworn enemies, because that's not very fun.

So, that brings me to this:

S3rgeus said:
What happens if a player performs an Exhibition at a foreign capital and the "defending" player is subsequently eliminated?

I hadn't considered this scenario until I wrote up the Science Summary, and now I'm feeling like there's design space here for us to involve other players aside from the "defenders" in the Exhibition process.

So, a couple of options related to what I'm thinking. Currently they all have some holes in them, so hopefully you see a good way to fill them in! They're much less destructive to the "structure" of the science victory than the whole "tech lead for Academies" was.

One: Exhibitions only count if the city they were performed at still exists. This means that if player A Exhibits at player B's capital, player C can subsequently raze player B's capital to prevent A from winning the game (more on original capitals in a moment). The method of intervention is still war, but it's quite a distinction that player C doesn't need to attack player A directly. (Player A might be very powerful, but unwilling to instigate a war with player C for diplomatic/geographical reasons.)

It also makes it less likely that players who are far away (player C above) from the Science civ (player A above) will be marginalized and unable to stop player A from winning the game, without resorting to a war all the way across the world. Player A is probably avoiding player C because C is one of their main competitors. But chances are that player A will need to perform an Exhibition at a civ somewhere near player C. Player C can use that to their advantage to make player A's life more difficult.

And since player C needs to raze the city, they're also sacrificing something (they clearly have the strength to capture it and it's one of player B's best cities, but they can't keep it) to slow down player A.

Now, drawbacks to this approach. Original capitals get in the way. Original capitals can't be razed and I don't think we should change that, because a variety of other things stop working correctly when Original capitals aren't guaranteed to survive the whole game. This means that player C wants to oust his nearby neighbors from their own capitals, but leave them alive, so he can raze their current capitals later. Is that kind of weird?

Another drawback. Say you're player A. Your Science victory now gets more difficult because player B is terrible at CiV, and that's not that awesome. However, that means targeting weaker civs is a bad idea, which we might actually like? And targeting original capitals is definitely a good strategy.

Two: Exhibitions only count as long as the same player controls the city the Exhibition took place at. This solves our "you can't raze original capitals" problem. But it's less intuitive for the player. It's also easier for player C to take advantage of this. This weights player A's strategies in such a way that it's usually a good idea to Exhibit to the most powerful opposing civs (first), since they're least likely to lose their capitals.

So does either of the above seem sensible? Are there changes that would make them better? The more I think about it, the more I like the first one above - it provides interesting and obvious objectives for all of the players involved, without removing or especially compounding the challenge from either side of the "competition." (It changes player A's "best choice" strategies, but I think those changes are potentially good ones.)

counterpoint said:
OK, totally agree here. I wonder... which wonder? "School of Cairhien" is sort of logical, except for the obvious naming problem. Obviously, can tackle it later.

Cool, I'm happy to come back the name later when we're deciding on the wonder list. I've added the effects into the Science summary for us to refer back to.

counterpoint said:
Each exhibition should require its own envoy. I don't feel strongly about this, but I don't really see it as a problem either.

Cool, sounds good to me.

counterpoint said:
OK, totally agree. Let's do it later. We can make a general list for when we throw together a Science Victory Summary.

Cool, I've linked back to the two places where we discussed which "techs" were possible from the summary!

EDIT 2:

Looking back at our discussions from the previous page on Science, there are a couple of quick topics I'd like to go over. This:

counterpoint said:
(assuming 8 showcases)
2 civs - showcase to 1 (everybody but you) 8x max per civ
4 civs - showcase to 3 (everybody but you) - 3x max per civ
6 civs - showcase to 4 (everybody but you and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
8 civs - showcase to 6 (everybody but you (and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
10 civs - showcase to 7 (everybody but you and two other civs) (1 civ can be doubled)
12 civs - showcase to 8
16 civs - showcase to 8.

Just rought stuff, that is. In any case, a bit more restrictive than my earlier version, as I recall.

And what I've got in the summary above are different and I'm not sure which I prefer. The reasoning before was that defending players can use walls units to completely block an Envoy and make Exhibitioning at that capital impossible. Is that something we want to specifically guard against at this level?

The other discussion was about a meta-game to do with repeat Exhibitions - some players not preparing for them and getting Exhibitioned at, others preparing even though it never happens. I can see the appeal of this, but I'd be inclined to think of repeat Exhibitions as a way of dealing with smaller player counts, rather than a component of how the Exhibitions are assigned in general.

Also, how does the above system with ignores work for odd numbers of players?

S3rgeus said:
A player can never perform a repeat Exhibition at any capital if doing so would make the greatest difference in number they have performed between any two foreign capitals greater than one. (You must perform Exhibitions at every foreign capital before doing any repeats. You must perform one repeat at every capital before ever performing a third at a single capital. And so on.)

I'm not 100% sure this is exactly what we meant when we discussed limitations on consecutive repeat Exhibitions on the previous page. Did we want to just say the player has to perform any Exhibition elsewhere, then they can do their repeat? The objective here is to avoid fast consecutive Exhibitions so that the defending player has time to react - but the Science player could stack up three Envoys (for different Innovations) at two separate capitals to achieve the same thing, if we only disallow until a single Exhibition has occurred elsewhere.

counterpoint · Feb 11, 2015

EDIT: have you seen this Wheel of Time TV pilot that just aired, supposedly? Don't have time for a discussion right now, but... a discussion could definitely be had, especially when considering some of the "stuff" that apparently is tied up in it.

S3rgeus said:
I've posted the science summary above, let me know if I've missed anything or anything is wrong!

EDIT: I've realized that I've converted the rules for doubling up incorrectly from counterpoint's last post. Fix incoming tomorrow! (Unless we like these ones!)

Summary looks GRRREAT.

Specific notes:
- I'm not "married" to the idea of 5 techs unlocking the envoys. It could be 8. Doesn't really matter. If we make the extra 3 be techs that are already en route to the other 5, I don't think it would negatively (or positively) effect the victory.
- comments on the player-elimination thing are below.

Regarding your interpretation of my doubling, see below (way below).

S3rgeus said:
Awesome sauce. I did pick 30% intentionally, but it's only really a ballpark. From the numbers we discussed before, it makes Reds equally as likely to Gentle male channelers when they attack as other Ajahs are when they Gentle explicitly, which I thought was cool. (We could give Reds 70% success by default, btw?)

I figured much below 30% might be quite underwhelming - on average the male channeler may be dead most of the time before the ability activates. (This way it's ~every third attack. If you're attacking with anything more than just the Red, it should be easy to kill him in under 3 turns.) Given the other Ajahs' abilities are quite reliable, I figured we'd want to weight this one on the high side.

eh, 30% is fine then. You're right. We don't want the guy to be dead before he gets gentled.

When you say giving them 70% success by default... what is it now, 60? I'm fine with it at 60. But I also might be fine with 70. Not sure yet... playtest needed?

S3rgeus said:
There was only one Gholam in the Third Age. Apparently there were 6 made originally, but we're not beholden to the exact series of WoT events in this case. I think given the usage of Grey Men and the crossover with their abilities, it would be fine to leave Gholam out, at least not make them something systematic like a "spy type," but instead as a one-off wonder/relic/thing.

I would like to see it/him appear in some capacity. I think a forsaken-like unique monster could be cool. Kind of a natural disaster-like spawn ("the Gholam has appeared near Emonds Field") or something. But he could be flavored otherwise, though, too.

S3rgeus said:
Very, very cool, I love this idea! Yes, let's have a late-game tech that lets players promote a single third-level spy to a Bloodknife, who then dies X turns later (45?). Bloodknives can assassinate Governors and the Amyrlin (Governors with an on-average higher success rate, dependent on relevant buildings and the city's status, the Amyrlin dependent on Tower-y things like the strength of her Ajah and influence of the "attacking" player.)

great. In terms of # of turns til death... I guess it depends on how long the assassination missions take. It does seem to me that, canonically, they'd only be able to kill one person, right?

S3rgeus said:
Agreed via above, but there might be cases where an Authority civ could want to assassinate the Amyrlin! (Like they're choosing Shadow.) There might even be more situations - not sure what they are yet, but it should be awesome.

Well, assuming success, a civ might want to kill an amyrlin so they can get one from their favorite Ajah elected, theoretically. That said, the negative blowback from failure and/or detection would almost certainly not be worth the benefit.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, sounds good. Agreed about the "set in motion," but I think that's all flavor in how we present it. Functionally, the spy has a "Depose the Amyrlin" mission, but it's not labelled that and the dialog boxes describe what happens to be appropriate to the set-in-motion narrative. Or do you mean we would actually do internal voting like the actual Amyrlin elections? (There would presumably be one of those after a success.) I think that could all be abstracted away by an adjusted probability for the spy's success. (And given the player can't see the actual progress of an election anyway.)

hmm... well, maybe I don't 100% know what I mean. We've said the amyrlin vote occurs once per era right? And that's a "real" vote, right (that the player has nothing to do with)? Couldn't a revote be called, then? Maybe with one ajah having a larger-than-normal amount of votes?

S3rgeus said:
Light civ spy mission? Investigate the Black Ajah sounds pretty cool and can give the player a one-time, incomplete glimpse at some of the objectives?

Yeah, that sounds good. Probably randomly determined objectives revealed. But I think it should be set up such that it would take a LOT of concentrated spying to reveal all or even most of them. Probably only revealing on objective at a time, and maybe we even cap it after a few. Truthfully, they only need to "block" ONE thing to prevent the victory, right?

S3rgeus said:
Looks like we've reached an almost-completed consensus on how we want Turning the Tower to work? I'll edit it into the Diplomatic Summary when I do my next post! (Probably the response to the start of the culture conversation!)

yeah, i'm feeling good about it.

S3rgeus said:
The agency is that the "defending" player is able to do something about someone else winning the Science victory. By being good at science themselves (regardless of if they do Envoys or anything) they can hold the "winning" player off. (Possibly forcing the Science player to DoW them much like a high-culture enemy does with the Culture victory.)

There are a few flaws with using tech lead for it though. One is that there's an end to the tech tree. The flipside to being able to "defend" without war is that you should be able to "attack" without it as well, and you can't pull farther ahead if there are no techs left. (Even if we count instances of Future Tech separately, those get progressively more expensive, so it's not representative pulling the same number ahead in that case.) Science per turn makes more sense in this case, but it's relatively uninspired. Those and other reasons are why I'm not a big fan of tech lead as the mechanic for the "defending" player, but I still think the notion of being able to defend is very important. ("Oh look, this guy has done a bunch of Exhibitions on the other side of the world and won the game, even though you're doing really well and had nothing to do with that whole process." The base CiV science victory is very like this and the original culture victory was very like this. Maybe even if the player is doing well, someone else winning means they've been slow, but I can definitely understand feeling cheated in this circumstance.)

I think the improvement that introduces an Envoy failure chance will mainly be annoying for the attacker (since it takes so long to make a new Envoy and they can't buffer them because of the production limit, it boils down to a dice roll). I think you've come to the same conclusion about that?

Agreed that we don't want to blanket prevent Exhibitions to sworn enemies, because that's not very fun.

OK, I see what you mean better now. I was focusing on the "embassy" thing - which seemed like something the Scientific "attacker" built, NOT the "defender," but what you're really talking about is simply the accumulation of *some* blocking mechanism over the course of the game. Yeah, I can definitely see why this would be nice.

But then again, maybe we can accept that as a part of the Science Victory, and part of what makes it unique. Sure, defend your lands, build up culture, maintain a diplo presence. But do not, do not let anybody get a science lead. I think the things we're tossing in with the envoys does perhaps do enough, IMO. I am open to adding more agency here, but it might be fine. To me, the science victory isn't the easiest - the diplo is - so the problem might not be so huge anyways.

If we decided we did need *something*, I do agree that tech-lead is problematic. It's both bland/redundant and has the weird issues with "Future Tech." Science/turn is unfortunately even more bland.

Other than that... very much not sure.

Maybe envoys don't "go off" instantly? And a civ's Science/Turn (or raw science total up until that point) determines how long the envoy takes? Not sure what the range would be (5-15 turns?), but this could at least delay the victory - which could be significant. Of course, it would just be a delay - it'd be too late to *stop* the exhibition. Again, an incentive to hit the powerful players (or those with high science) FIRST. And might give the other civs more time to react accordingly, and thus encourages the science-victory civ to "attack" with all their envoys all at once... which would be really pretty difficult to pull off.

thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
So, that brings me to this:

I hadn't considered this scenario until I wrote up the Science Summary, and now I'm feeling like there's design space here for us to involve other players aside from the "defenders" in the Exhibition process.

So, a couple of options related to what I'm thinking. Currently they all have some holes in them, so hopefully you see a good way to fill them in! They're much less destructive to the "structure" of the science victory than the whole "tech lead for Academies" was.

One: Exhibitions only count if the city they were performed at still exists. This means that if player A Exhibits at player B's capital, player C can subsequently raze player B's capital to prevent A from winning the game (more on original capitals in a moment). The method of intervention is still war, but it's quite a distinction that player C doesn't need to attack player A directly. (Player A might be very powerful, but unwilling to instigate a war with player C for diplomatic/geographical reasons.)

It also makes it less likely that players who are far away (player C above) from the Science civ (player A above) will be marginalized and unable to stop player A from winning the game, without resorting to a war all the way across the world. Player A is probably avoiding player C because C is one of their main competitors. But chances are that player A will need to perform an Exhibition at a civ somewhere near player C. Player C can use that to their advantage to make player A's life more difficult.

And since player C needs to raze the city, they're also sacrificing something (they clearly have the strength to capture it and it's one of player B's best cities, but they can't keep it) to slow down player A.

Now, drawbacks to this approach. Original capitals get in the way. Original capitals can't be razed and I don't think we should change that, because a variety of other things stop working correctly when Original capitals aren't guaranteed to survive the whole game. This means that player C wants to oust his nearby neighbors from their own capitals, but leave them alive, so he can raze their current capitals later. Is that kind of weird?

Another drawback. Say you're player A. Your Science victory now gets more difficult because player B is terrible at CiV, and that's not that awesome. However, that means targeting weaker civs is a bad idea, which we might actually like? And targeting original capitals is definitely a good strategy.

Two: Exhibitions only count as long as the same player controls the city the Exhibition took place at. This solves our "you can't raze original capitals" problem. But it's less intuitive for the player. It's also easier for player C to take advantage of this. This weights player A's strategies in such a way that it's usually a good idea to Exhibit to the most powerful opposing civs (first), since they're least likely to lose their capitals.

OK. lots here, and some cool suggestions. I think I can boil down my response into something simple.

At first glance, when I saw you mention this topic in the Science summary, my initial thoughts were that it *shouldn't matter*. In general, I'd say if you exhibit in Illian, you have successfully exhibited there. More to the point, that tech has already been successfully exhibited. For me, re-doing an exhibition shouldn't really ever be necessary - the exhibition is already done, right? The city is somewhat irrelevant at that point, maybe.

Now, bringing the "player agency" issue back to the table - which is why we're talking about this now, I'm still somewhat skeptical.
Regarding your first suggestion (the city they are performed at still exists). It certainly sounds like it'd work great, in theory. However, in practice, I do find that most civs retain their original capitals, most of the time. Unless someone is very close to a domination victory, it's likely that at least a handful of the civs - if not the majority - would still be in their original capitals. This is problematic for me, since we'd be relying on an unrelated game situation - namely, how successful the warmongers have been - to determine the difficulty of an unrelated victory type. That seems odd to me. I should note that I don't think we should "change the rules" and enable capital destruction. Also, since those originals aren't razable, that makes this a game mechanic that will only *sometimes* matter (if and only if you've already lost your capital). Seems sort of like a waste of mechanic.

Your second suggestion (the same player has to control the city for it to count) I actually like better, though I still see issues with it. First, I do still think it's somewhat unintuitive - the exhibition's already done, right? Secondly, I don't like the idea of (assuming it's not an original capital) a civ giving away their capital city to a weak civ in order to purposefully block a science victory. It's utterly inane, but it would be the only logical thing to do if faced with certain Science-defeat. Right? You can't give away your capital, right? But if you lost Caemlyn, and Whitebridge became your capital - and got envoyed - and then regained Caemlyn, you could totally sell of Whitebridge, right? Weird.

I dunno, I'm starting to like my exhibitions-take-time thing. How about this: If the city is lost while the exhibition is in progress, then the exhibition is blocked, right? I don't think you should be able to trade them away, though. Is this something that sounds good, or is this too exploitable? Don't want to create a huge meta game here.

S3rgeus said:
Cool, I've linked back to the two places where we discussed which "techs" were possible from the summary!

EDIT 2:

Looking back at our discussions from the previous page on Science, there are a couple of quick topics I'd like to go over. This:

And what I've got in the summary above are different and I'm not sure which I prefer. The reasoning before was that defending players can use walls units to completely block an Envoy and make Exhibitioning at that capital impossible. Is that something we want to specifically guard against at this level?

The other discussion was about a meta-game to do with repeat Exhibitions - some players not preparing for them and getting Exhibitioned at, others preparing even though it never happens. I can see the appeal of this, but I'd be inclined to think of repeat Exhibitions as a way of dealing with smaller player counts, rather than a component of how the Exhibitions are assigned in general.

Also, how does the above system with ignores work for odd numbers of players?

Ah! OK, definitely a difference.

I do think I prefer your method over my original one. What do you think? Something about yours seems more intuitive and.. yeah, I'm starting to think we shouldn't encourage doubling up unless it's specifically needed due to map size.

S3rgeus said:
I'm not 100% sure this is exactly what we meant when we discussed limitations on consecutive repeat Exhibitions on the previous page. Did we want to just say the player has to perform any Exhibition elsewhere, then they can do their repeat? The objective here is to avoid fast consecutive Exhibitions so that the defending player has time to react - but the Science player could stack up three Envoys (for different Innovations) at two separate capitals to achieve the same thing, if we only disallow until a single Exhibition has occurred elsewhere.

right, i think we have two options here:
1) player has to exhibit SOMEWHERE before they can come back
2) player has to exhibit EVERYWHERE before they can come back.

Hard to say, but I do think I may prefer option 2, the way you put it in the summary. Does it make things to predictable? ("oh, he just got me... I won't be hearing from him for a long while!") That's a little lame. But at the same time, that's sorta how it is for domination - he got my capital, now he'll probably ignore me. But, still potentially a problem.

On the other hand, option 1 is also lame, because somebody could do Civ A, then B, then A all in the same turn, right? Or, maybe in back to back turns. (assuming the envoys are in place, of course). This is not really in the spirit of the rule, I think, and that's a problem.

Should there be a split down the middle thing? Like, you can't re-exhibit with a civ again until you've exhibited at (# of Civs)/2 other civs in the interim? That could work, but it's not really going to make a huge difference, since we're only considering the doubling now in low-civ games, I think.

In that case, though, what happens when somebody is eliminated and/or liberated (and the total number of players changes)?

so close, but this bit is a little complex!

shaglio · Feb 11, 2015

counterpoint said:
EDIT: have you seen this Wheel of Time TV pilot that just aired, supposedly? Don't have time for a discussion right now, but... a discussion could definitely be had, especially when considering some of the "stuff" that apparently is tied up in it.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...r-a-wheel-of-time-series-starring-billy-zane/

Apparently they did a rush job just to get it out before they lost the rights to the series. I haven't watched it yet. I think it would work much better as a movie than a TV show. The first episode comprised just the Prologue of The Eye of the World. At that rate, each book will take roughly 2 seasons (@ 22 episodes a season) so the show would last for 28 years (barring cancellation of course).

ldragogode297 · Feb 12, 2015

It's bad enough that everyone in an uproar about that piece of crap, I think a discussion should be kept on the WoT forums/subreddit and not on a modpage.

S3rgeus · Feb 12, 2015

The weekend is coming! A weekend where I'm not going anywhere!

Longer postage incoming then, but for now:

counterpoint said:
EDIT: have you seen this Wheel of Time TV pilot that just aired, supposedly? Don't have time for a discussion right now, but... a discussion could definitely be had, especially when considering some of the "stuff" that apparently is tied up in it.

shaglio said:
http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...r-a-wheel-of-time-series-starring-billy-zane/

Apparently they did a rush job just to get it out before they lost the rights to the series. I haven't watched it yet. I think it would work much better as a movie than a TV show. The first episode comprised just the Prologue of The Eye of the World. At that rate, each book will take roughly 2 seasons (@ 22 episodes a season) so the show would last for 28 years (barring cancellation of course).

ldragogode297 said:
It's bad enough that everyone in an uproar about that piece of crap, I think a discussion should be kept on the WoT forums/subreddit and not on a modpage.

Yeah, it's looking like it's a rush to hold onto the rights for the show. Shame really - I'd like to see Wheel of Time done well in some other medium.

counterpoint said:
Summary looks GRRREAT.

Thank you!

counterpoint said:
Specific notes:
- I'm not "married" to the idea of 5 techs unlocking the envoys. It could be 8. Doesn't really matter. If we make the extra 3 be techs that are already en route to the other 5, I don't think it would negatively (or positively) effect the victory.

I don't have a particular reason to change away from 5. I figured it was a number that may be adjusted later by playtesting, so it was worth making it stand out.

counterpoint said:
eh, 30% is fine then. You're right. We don't want the guy to be dead before he gets gentled.

When you say giving them 70% success by default... what is it now, 60? I'm fine with it at 60. But I also might be fine with 70. Not sure yet... playtest needed?

Cool, 30% sounds good! Sure, let's leave the default chance at 60% until we've playtested it. Super easy to change if we don't like it.

Quick related question to this ability - if they succeed in Gentling the channeler, do they still deal damage? I'm thinking no, otherwise they might succeed and kill him at the same time, which sucks.

I've edited this into the diplo summary.

counterpoint said:
I would like to see it/him appear in some capacity. I think a forsaken-like unique monster could be cool. Kind of a natural disaster-like spawn ("the Gholam has appeared near Emonds Field") or something. But he could be flavored otherwise, though, too.

Yeah, that sounds cool!

counterpoint said:
great. In terms of # of turns til death... I guess it depends on how long the assassination missions take. It does seem to me that, canonically, they'd only be able to kill one person, right?

Good point! We can do up to 30 turns or until they kill someone - whichever is shorter. (Assuming they die already if they fail.)

counterpoint said:
Well, assuming success, a civ might want to kill an amyrlin so they can get one from their favorite Ajah elected, theoretically. That said, the negative blowback from failure and/or detection would almost certainly not be worth the benefit.

Yeah, it's definitely an edge case for a civ that's been backed into a serious corner.

counterpoint said:
hmm... well, maybe I don't 100% know what I mean. We've said the amyrlin vote occurs once per era right? And that's a "real" vote, right (that the player has nothing to do with)? Couldn't a revote be called, then? Maybe with one ajah having a larger-than-normal amount of votes?

I think we'd definitely have a vote for the new Amyrlin, but I thought you might be suggesting having a vote to remove the old Amyrlin to see if the mission is successful. Sounds like you weren't? I'm good with doing a "normal" election after the mission succeeds and the Amyrlin is deposed.

We could skew the vote one way based on the player's influence? Or based on which Ajah the deposing spy was spying on?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, that sounds good. Probably randomly determined objectives revealed. But I think it should be set up such that it would take a LOT of concentrated spying to reveal all or even most of them. Probably only revealing on objective at a time, and maybe we even cap it after a few. Truthfully, they only need to "block" ONE thing to prevent the victory, right?

Also very good point! Revealing just one at a time sounds like a plan.

counterpoint said:
yeah, i'm feeling good about it.

Cool, I'll edit that in this weekend.

counterpoint said:
OK, I see what you mean better now. I was focusing on the "embassy" thing - which seemed like something the Scientific "attacker" built, NOT the "defender," but what you're really talking about is simply the accumulation of *some* blocking mechanism over the course of the game. Yeah, I can definitely see why this would be nice.

But then again, maybe we can accept that as a part of the Science Victory, and part of what makes it unique. Sure, defend your lands, build up culture, maintain a diplo presence. But do not, do not let anybody get a science lead. I think the things we're tossing in with the envoys does perhaps do enough, IMO. I am open to adding more agency here, but it might be fine. To me, the science victory isn't the easiest - the diplo is - so the problem might not be so huge anyways.

If we decided we did need *something*, I do agree that tech-lead is problematic. It's both bland/redundant and has the weird issues with "Future Tech." Science/turn is unfortunately even more bland.

Other than that... very much not sure.

Maybe envoys don't "go off" instantly? And a civ's Science/Turn (or raw science total up until that point) determines how long the envoy takes? Not sure what the range would be (5-15 turns?), but this could at least delay the victory - which could be significant. Of course, it would just be a delay - it'd be too late to *stop* the exhibition. Again, an incentive to hit the powerful players (or those with high science) FIRST. And might give the other civs more time to react accordingly, and thus encourages the science-victory civ to "attack" with all their envoys all at once... which would be really pretty difficult to pull off.

thoughts?

Ah, so taking the Envoy "off the map" and having the Exhibition occur at that location over the course of 5-15 turns? (More science at target civ = more turns needed to complete Exhibiton, right?)

I'm not sure, this seems like something that would be quite exploitable (trading away cities and stuff like that). Unless the Exhibition goes on completely regardless of what happens to the city?

counterpoint said:
OK. lots here, and some cool suggestions. I think I can boil down my response into something simple.

At first glance, when I saw you mention this topic in the Science summary, my initial thoughts were that it *shouldn't matter*. In general, I'd say if you exhibit in Illian, you have successfully exhibited there. More to the point, that tech has already been successfully exhibited. For me, re-doing an exhibition shouldn't really ever be necessary - the exhibition is already done, right? The city is somewhat irrelevant at that point, maybe.

Now, bringing the "player agency" issue back to the table - which is why we're talking about this now, I'm still somewhat skeptical.
Regarding your first suggestion (the city they are performed at still exists). It certainly sounds like it'd work great, in theory. However, in practice, I do find that most civs retain their original capitals, most of the time. Unless someone is very close to a domination victory, it's likely that at least a handful of the civs - if not the majority - would still be in their original capitals. This is problematic for me, since we'd be relying on an unrelated game situation - namely, how successful the warmongers have been - to determine the difficulty of an unrelated victory type. That seems odd to me. I should note that I don't think we should "change the rules" and enable capital destruction. Also, since those originals aren't razable, that makes this a game mechanic that will only *sometimes* matter (if and only if you've already lost your capital). Seems sort of like a waste of mechanic.

Your second suggestion (the same player has to control the city for it to count) I actually like better, though I still see issues with it. First, I do still think it's somewhat unintuitive - the exhibition's already done, right? Secondly, I don't like the idea of (assuming it's not an original capital) a civ giving away their capital city to a weak civ in order to purposefully block a science victory. It's utterly inane, but it would be the only logical thing to do if faced with certain Science-defeat. Right? You can't give away your capital, right? But if you lost Caemlyn, and Whitebridge became your capital - and got envoyed - and then regained Caemlyn, you could totally sell of Whitebridge, right? Weird.

I dunno, I'm starting to like my exhibitions-take-time thing. How about this: If the city is lost while the exhibition is in progress, then the exhibition is blocked, right? I don't think you should be able to trade them away, though. Is this something that sounds good, or is this too exploitable? Don't want to create a huge meta game here.

Yeah, very good points here. Using control of the city is very exploitable and using the "city still exists" is a non-change in most circumstances. A bit more clarification above pending, I think I prefer the Exhibitions take time thing too.

counterpoint said:
Ah! OK, definitely a difference.

I do think I prefer your method over my original one. What do you think? Something about yours seems more intuitive and.. yeah, I'm starting to think we shouldn't encourage doubling up unless it's specifically needed due to map size.

Sounds good to me - having to reach as many players as we have Innovations should be good for interactivity and makes working out where they can perform Exhibitions simpler for the player.

counterpoint said:
right, i think we have two options here:
1) player has to exhibit SOMEWHERE before they can come back
2) player has to exhibit EVERYWHERE before they can come back.

Hard to say, but I do think I may prefer option 2, the way you put it in the summary. Does it make things to predictable? ("oh, he just got me... I won't be hearing from him for a long while!") That's a little lame. But at the same time, that's sorta how it is for domination - he got my capital, now he'll probably ignore me. But, still potentially a problem.

On the other hand, option 1 is also lame, because somebody could do Civ A, then B, then A all in the same turn, right? Or, maybe in back to back turns. (assuming the envoys are in place, of course). This is not really in the spirit of the rule, I think, and that's a problem.

Should there be a split down the middle thing? Like, you can't re-exhibit with a civ again until you've exhibited at (# of Civs)/2 other civs in the interim? That could work, but it's not really going to make a huge difference, since we're only considering the doubling now in low-civ games, I think.

In that case, though, what happens when somebody is eliminated and/or liberated (and the total number of players changes)?

so close, but this bit is a little complex!

Option 2 is also my vote. Exhibiting to civ a, then B, then A again in one turn is definitely a problem with the once-elsewhere case (though mitigated by the Exhibitions take time thing - you must complete one somewhere else gives the defender more breathing room). Still, I think it makes sense to say "must go everywhere else" first because it makes the player spread their attention (and bonuses) around the world before doing any repeats.

In the case where a player is eliminated I think we just count the Exhibitions done at their cities as "completed" but otherwise treat the game the same as we would if it had always had its current number of players.

Liberation is interesting - I hadn't thought about this. I think we do much like the above - treat it like this is a normal game with the current number of players (the number after the liberation). It does mean that for defending players, liberating a defeated civ makes an opposing science victory more difficult. Now that is awesome - I've very rarely seen a good reason to liberate a civ before, and I would love for there to be some.

Interesting edge case though:

Four civ game - civs A, B, C, and D.

A is going for the science victory. D is eliminated. A Exhibits twice each to B and C. B liberates D. Does A now need to Exhibit twice in a row at D? I think not? The tempting limitation is:

Players can perform a repeat Exhibit after they have Exhibited at every other civ in the game.

But that means that once you Exhibit to the penultimate civ, the remaining order is fixed. (As a repeating loop of the order you chose first.) I don't think we want it to be that predictable. (Though I am fine with it being "narrow down-able" towards the end of a single "loop" where the science player has only 1 or 2 valid targets - just not that the whole loop have to be redone in identical order for smaller map sizes.)

I think what we want (in many words) is:

You may begin repeat Exhibiting to civs you have Exhibited to before if the sequence of civilizations you last Exhibited to has every civilization currently alive in the game.

So if you have 3 enemies, B, C, and D. If the last three Exhibitions you performed was C -> B -> D, then you can start repeating again. (It "resets" after you complete every civ, allowing you to do any of them next.)

So D -> B -> C is also a valid order, as is B -> C -> D. Then, when you finish that sequence, you can start at whichever of B, C, or D you wish.

EDIT: I've written a section about Turning the Tower into the diplo summary. Let me know if anything looks out of place! There was something about Grey Men that I thought of when writing it (the rest of the red we'll come back to later):

S3rgeus said:
Turning the Tower

As players move into the era before the Age of the Dragon, options related to Turning the Tower to the Shadow become available to them.

Players with Shadow alignment over a certain threshold gain access to the Turning objectives. These are a set of tasks that must be completed (often by a Shadow civilization) in order for the Tower to be Turned.

Players with Light alignment over a corresponding threshold unlock the "Investigate the Black Ajah" spy mission that can be performed by spies at Tar Valon. If the mission succeeds, the Light player gets a one-time glimpse at one of the objectives the Shadow must succeed at to Turn the Tower.

Multiple Light players can perform the "Investigate the Black Ajah" spy mission (and the same civilization and even same spy can perform it multiple times) but no more than four of the Shadow objectives can ever be known to the Light.

All Shadow objectives must remain completed - for example, if an objective requires a Shadow player to have more than 50% influence with the Blue Ajah, that objective may be completed and then return to incomplete if a Light player gains sufficient influence with the Blue.

When all Shadow objectives are completed, the Tower can be Turned by assassinating the Amyrlin.

The Amyrlin can be assassinated by Grey Men (who are unavailable pre-Last-Battle?) or Bloodknives stationed in Tar Valon.

Shadow objectives include the following tasks. Some of them change appropriately depending on the state of the game.

Donate 1000 Gold to the Black.

Three raze city challenges, where the selected cities must be razed by any player. The cities are chosen as follows:

A high population city in a Light-leaning civilization.

A high population city in a Shadow-leaning civilization.

A high population city in an otherwise powerful civilization.

Pass resolution X in the Compact. (Value of X varies per game.)

Achieve greater than 40% influence with up to four Ajahs in the Tower. (This is up to four separate objectives - each can be completed by a separate Shadow player.)

Construct/Control the <insert World Wonder here>. (Which wonder is chosen varies per game.

Kill X Aes Sedai. (Doesn't matter which player owned them)

Control X cities.

Capture Stedding X, Y, and Z. (Which Stedding varies per game. This is up to three separate objectives that can be completed by separate players.)

Refuse a Tower Edict.

counterpoint · Feb 14, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, it's looking like it's a rush to hold onto the rights for the show. Shame really - I'd like to see Wheel of Time done well in some other medium.

You mean... like a CIV V MOD?

S3rgeus said:
Cool, 30% sounds good! Sure, let's leave the default chance at 60% until we've playtested it. Super easy to change if we don't like it.

Quick related question to this ability - if they succeed in Gentling the channeler, do they still deal damage? I'm thinking no, otherwise they might succeed and kill him at the same time, which sucks.

Right. That makes intuitive sense - gentling would occur before the death.

S3rgeus said:
I think we'd definitely have a vote for the new Amyrlin, but I thought you might be suggesting having a vote to remove the old Amyrlin to see if the mission is successful. Sounds like you weren't? I'm good with doing a "normal" election after the mission succeeds and the Amyrlin is deposed.

We could skew the vote one way based on the player's influence? Or based on which Ajah the deposing spy was spying on?

right. so i think my brain was trying very hard to make this simple, and I somehow missed the obvious fact that the deposing (deposition) is technically a distinct act from the election of the new amyrlin. Duh. I was thinking "oh, just trigger a new vote," but the fact is, while an amyrlin vote would require a mere plurality among the three nominated sisters, the act of deposing one would require, probably a majority, which is obviously much more difficult.

While we could make there actually be this first vote, it doesn't seem to make sense. Certainly not when considering AI. It seems ajahs would always vote to depose, in order to increase their overall power... so making the successful mission take care of that for us makes sense.

But then I wonder - how is this different from assassination? How is this "less evil" if they both accomplish the same thing?

It's making me wonder if it's worth including. But on the other hand, Siuan's ousting - and the subsequent schism - was a big part of the plot. Maybe it's only worth doing if we can do *both* of those things... and that might be more trouble than it's worth.

S3rgeus said:
Ah, so taking the Envoy "off the map" and having the Exhibition occur at that location over the course of 5-15 turns? (More science at target civ = more turns needed to complete Exhibiton, right?)

I'm not sure, this seems like something that would be quite exploitable (trading away cities and stuff like that). Unless the Exhibition goes on completely regardless of what happens to the city?

I could be OK with the exhibition continuing on despite what happens. It would be an interesting extra incentive to take a city, actually - take the city, get the yield dump when the exhibition completes.

It's making my head spin, though. A capital is hosting an exhibition. It is taken, and the exhibition continues in the city, under the banner of a new civ, right? Problem is, this city is no longer a capital, so it shouldn't be eligible for an exhibition at all. Does the exhibition cease for that reason? Or, what if the capturing civ had already been exhibited on - so they are no longer an eligible "victim"? Similarly, as mentioned previously, what if you exhibit in my current capital and I retake my original capital - does the exhibition continue in the old capital?

The simplest thing would be to cancel the exhibition when the city is seized, probably. That said, I don't know that I like the possibility of somebody trading away their city to prevent a science win. But, then again, is it possible to trade your capital?

S3rgeus said:
Sounds good to me - having to reach as many players as we have Innovations should be good for interactivity and makes working out where they can perform Exhibitions simpler for the player.

so say we all.

S3rgeus said:
Option 2 is also my vote. Exhibiting to civ a, then B, then A again in one turn is definitely a problem with the once-elsewhere case (though mitigated by the Exhibitions take time thing - you must complete one somewhere else gives the defender more breathing room). Still, I think it makes sense to say "must go everywhere else" first because it makes the player spread their attention (and bonuses) around the world before doing any repeats.

an added effect of this is that it necessarily makes the science-victory "rush" impossible in games that would require doubling up. You can't simply build a bunch of envoys at once and spam them - you'd have to wait for a second cycle's worth of turns...

On that note, I've just thought of something. But first: can multiple exhibitions take place in a city at once? By different civs? Same civ? I ask because it is relevant to games with very few players, where doubling is required. I have no problem with requiring a ci to wait til they've exhibited everywhere with 4 civs or something. But might it slow things down too much in games with only 2 or 3 civs? With 2 civs, if you CAN exhibit simultaneously, it wouldn't be a problem. But if not.... then you'd have to wait 10 turns. go again. 10 more turns. go again. 10 more, etc. Impossibly long, and that doesn't even consider production costs. With 3 civs (2 enemy) it's similar, though you'd at least have the option of exhibiting everywhere simultaneously.

thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
In the case where a player is eliminated I think we just count the Exhibitions done at their cities as "completed" but otherwise treat the game the same as we would if it had always had its current number of players.

Right, so just to run an example. Say there are 8 civs (including me). I have exhibited in all but one (six total civs). I need to get the last one, and then find somebody to double up on for the 8th envoy, right? Say that last civ gets clobbered - now I can immediately just go and double up, right?

S3rgeus said:
Liberation is interesting - I hadn't thought about this. I think we do much like the above - treat it like this is a normal game with the current number of players (the number after the liberation). It does mean that for defending players, liberating a defeated civ makes an opposing science victory more difficult. Now that is awesome - I've very rarely seen a good reason to liberate a civ before, and I would love for there to be some.

yeah. this does seem cool. I suppose the cultural victory could work similarly, right? Liberate a civ and then that is another one the cultural player has to influence, right? Though, doesn't really work out like that, since a civ weak enough to get eliminated probably is low on culture anyways.

S3rgeus said:
Interesting edge case though:

Four civ game - civs A, B, C, and D.

A is going for the science victory. D is eliminated. A Exhibits twice each to B and C. B liberates D. Does A now need to Exhibit twice in a row at D? I think not? The tempting limitation is:

Players can perform a repeat Exhibit after they have Exhibited at every other civ in the game.

But that means that once you Exhibit to the penultimate civ, the remaining order is fixed. (As a repeating loop of the order you chose first.) I don't think we want it to be that predictable. (Though I am fine with it being "narrow down-able" towards the end of a single "loop" where the science player has only 1 or 2 valid targets - just not that the whole loop have to be redone in identical order for smaller map sizes.)

I think what we want (in many words) is:

You may begin repeat Exhibiting to civs you have Exhibited to before if the sequence of civilizations you last Exhibited to has every civilization currently alive in the game.

So if you have 3 enemies, B, C, and D. If the last three Exhibitions you performed was C -> B -> D, then you can start repeating again. (It "resets" after you complete every civ, allowing you to do any of them next.)

So D -> B -> C is also a valid order, as is B -> C -> D. Then, when you finish that sequence, you can start at whichever of B, C, or D you wish.

Wow. OK. To me that looks like a highly simple idea that is, technically speaking, quite complicated. Well, in the sense that it makes sense intuitively, but when you boil it down, it's kind of complex. Maybe let's hide some of that from the player...?

S3rgeus said:
EDIT: I've written a section about Turning the Tower into the diplo summary. Let me know if anything looks out of place! There was something about Grey Men that I thought of when writing it (the rest of the red we'll come back to later)

cool. looks great.

Just for clarity's sake, isn't the Era before the Dragon one called "Era of Encroaching Blight?"

Also, I would like to officially petition to start calling it the Era of the Dragon, not the Age of the Dragon. All the others are eras (as they are in civ). Also, in WoT, "Age" means something quite specific.

re: Gray men being only during the LB. I can see that, but why, specifically? For mechanical reasons or flavor reasons?

I'm still having some trouble figuring out the difference between Gray Men and Bloodknives. I mean, in-game. I understand that GM are limited to shadow civs, and BK follow the mechanics we outlined last week, but... is there something else to it? Is the GM just a "free" BK all shadow civs get? only ONE shadow civ? Maybe they only pop up sometimes? Is there a point to using BK for a shadow civ? I would hope so, since they are so evil-seeming (the BK, I mean).

this is me being super picky, but it says you must Construct/Control a certain wonder. I'd say it should only say *control*. If you construct it, but then LOSE it, it shouldn't count. If you construct it, and don't lose it, you control it by definition. So "control" is what we want, I think.

nice!

S3rgeus · Feb 14, 2015

counterpoint said:
You mean... like a CIV V MOD?

Yeah, that's the stuff! I'm really looking forward to actually playing this mod sometime. :lol:

counterpoint said:
Right. That makes intuitive sense - gentling would occur before the death.

Cool, sounds good.

counterpoint said:
right. so i think my brain was trying very hard to make this simple, and I somehow missed the obvious fact that the deposing (deposition) is technically a distinct act from the election of the new amyrlin. Duh. I was thinking "oh, just trigger a new vote," but the fact is, while an amyrlin vote would require a mere plurality among the three nominated sisters, the act of deposing one would require, probably a majority, which is obviously much more difficult.

While we could make there actually be this first vote, it doesn't seem to make sense. Certainly not when considering AI. It seems ajahs would always vote to depose, in order to increase their overall power... so making the successful mission take care of that for us makes sense.

Cool, yes, it sounds like we're in agreement here!

counterpoint said:
But then I wonder - how is this different from assassination? How is this "less evil" if they both accomplish the same thing?

It's making me wonder if it's worth including. But on the other hand, Siuan's ousting - and the subsequent schism - was a big part of the plot. Maybe it's only worth doing if we can do *both* of those things... and that might be more trouble than it's worth.

I think there are two differences. One is the blowback for failure - trying to Depose the Amyrlin and failing seems like something that would cause a civ to lose face, have some diplo penalties and lose some influence. Trying to assassinate the Amyrlin (and failing) sounds like it would cause war. At least much more drastic consequences for failing. (It's also much harder to perform - I'd imagine depose has a higher success rate and can be done by any spy, assassinate is just Grey Men and Bloodknives.)

Also, it allows Light/Neutral players to interact with an Amyrlin they don't like without risking Turning the Tower in the process.

counterpoint said:
I could be OK with the exhibition continuing on despite what happens. It would be an interesting extra incentive to take a city, actually - take the city, get the yield dump when the exhibition completes.

It's making my head spin, though. A capital is hosting an exhibition. It is taken, and the exhibition continues in the city, under the banner of a new civ, right? Problem is, this city is no longer a capital, so it shouldn't be eligible for an exhibition at all. Does the exhibition cease for that reason? Or, what if the capturing civ had already been exhibited on - so they are no longer an eligible "victim"? Similarly, as mentioned previously, what if you exhibit in my current capital and I retake my original capital - does the exhibition continue in the old capital?

The simplest thing would be to cancel the exhibition when the city is seized, probably. That said, I don't know that I like the possibility of somebody trading away their city to prevent a science win. But, then again, is it possible to trade your capital?

Even if we can't trade away our capital, stopping the Exhibition also makes the "you can exhibit at cities with 10+ population" bonus less effective. That's not a gamebreaker, but just to consider.

I'm not sure about this overall, I think having the Exhibitions take time opens up a lot of new, weird edge cases where players can exploit the system. We also might be punishing the science player a bit too much - they might end up with a game of geographical whack-a-mole in order to win, which isn't that cool.

That said, I'm still drawing a blank on how else we could create a defensive element to the science victory for larger map sizes (since we've eliminated repeats for smaller map sizes, our old fashioned "kill the Envoy" works fine on those). Maybe it's best to try this all out and see if players feel left out on larger maps? Our system is already a drastic interactivity improvement over the CiV one. Powerful players that see an enemy on the road to the science victory have a similar reaction to base CiV - kill the Science player.

counterpoint said:
an added effect of this is that it necessarily makes the science-victory "rush" impossible in games that would require doubling up. You can't simply build a bunch of envoys at once and spam them - you'd have to wait for a second cycle's worth of turns...

Yes, this is definitely good! We don't want it to be an "explosion" of Exhibitions all at once and then they suddenly win the game.

counterpoint said:
On that note, I've just thought of something. But first: can multiple exhibitions take place in a city at once? By different civs? Same civ? I ask because it is relevant to games with very few players, where doubling is required. I have no problem with requiring a ci to wait til they've exhibited everywhere with 4 civs or something. But might it slow things down too much in games with only 2 or 3 civs? With 2 civs, if you CAN exhibit simultaneously, it wouldn't be a problem. But if not.... then you'd have to wait 10 turns. go again. 10 more turns. go again. 10 more, etc. Impossibly long, and that doesn't even consider production costs. With 3 civs (2 enemy) it's similar, though you'd at least have the option of exhibiting everywhere simultaneously.

thoughts?

In terms of foreign Exhibitions, I think Exhibitions from separate civs don't interact at all. No limits or orders are affected by another civ performing an Exhibition, regardless of where.

I think the same civ can definitely start up multiple Exhibitions (targeting separate enemy civs) simultaneously. Their main restrictions are on repeating (must do a cycle) and producing the Envoys (can only have one of each type alive/in production at once).

With small maps, say 2 opponents, you'd probably want to do Exhibitions in waves of 2. You can always produce the units (Envoys) for the later Exhibitions ahead of time (possibly position them strategically for quick follow-up Exhibitions as each wave finishes, but you'll need to defend them), it's just the actual Exhibitioning that's limited.

counterpoint said:
Right, so just to run an example. Say there are 8 civs (including me). I have exhibited in all but one (six total civs). I need to get the last one, and then find somebody to double up on for the 8th envoy, right? Say that last civ gets clobbered - now I can immediately just go and double up, right?

Exactly, yes.

counterpoint said:
yeah. this does seem cool. I suppose the cultural victory could work similarly, right? Liberate a civ and then that is another one the cultural player has to influence, right? Though, doesn't really work out like that, since a civ weak enough to get eliminated probably is low on culture anyways.

Yeah, like you've said, a civ weak enough to be eliminated will produce minimal culture and be overwhelmed by a Cultre-Victory-player's Tourism fairly quickly. But there are probably situations where that would extend the time taken to win - I believe the Culture-victory-player is starting from scratch with the liberated civ. I think our science victory gives an even greater incentive to liberate civs because the main difficulty for the Science player is geographical. They have no specific advantage against the liberated player just because that player is doing badly. (And the liberated player might have a very inconveniently placed capital.)

counterpoint said:
Wow. OK. To me that looks like a highly simple idea that is, technically speaking, quite complicated. Well, in the sense that it makes sense intuitively, but when you boil it down, it's kind of complex. Maybe let's hide some of that from the player...?

Yeah, it's one of those things that we humans understand quite easily, but is actually quite complicated! I think we can hide a lot of this complexity by telling the player where they can still perform Exhibitions (science summary screen just lists cities). Hardcore optimizers can come to understand the underlying pattern, but a fair portion of players can just be told you must "do it in waves against each of your enemies" and have a screen that tells them where's still valid. (In the event they get into one of our fun edge cases above, the screen should be able to just tell them where to go.)

counterpoint said:
Just for clarity's sake, isn't the Era before the Dragon one called "Era of Encroaching Blight?"

Yes, edited in! Also seems quite appropriate that the Blight expands when more Shadow-y options become available.

counterpoint said:
Also, I would like to officially petition to start calling it the Era of the Dragon, not the Age of the Dragon. All the others are eras (as they are in civ). Also, in WoT, "Age" means something quite specific.

"Era of the Dragon" is cool with me - it's definitely more consistent.

counterpoint said:
re: Gray men being only during the LB. I can see that, but why, specifically? For mechanical reasons or flavor reasons?

When we were discussing the Grey Men a while back, I thought we decided Grey Men would become available to Shadow-declared civs (one of their spies turns into a Grey Man). Since the Tower needs to be Turned before the Last Battle starts, Bloodknives are the only way to assassinate the Amyrlin, even though Grey Men technically have that capability. Is that weird?

counterpoint said:
I'm still having some trouble figuring out the difference between Gray Men and Bloodknives. I mean, in-game. I understand that GM are limited to shadow civs, and BK follow the mechanics we outlined last week, but... is there something else to it? Is the GM just a "free" BK all shadow civs get? only ONE shadow civ? Maybe they only pop up sometimes? Is there a point to using BK for a shadow civ? I would hope so, since they are so evil-seeming (the BK, I mean).

The Grey Men are repeatable is the main difference (aside from Shadow-only availability, as you've said). Bloodknives die after you use them - whether they succeed or fail. Bloodknives definitely seem very evil, but we're borrowing them from the Seanchan who fought for the Light in the end.

I think a Shadow civ would only use Bloodknives if they needed to perform several assassinations close together. They can only ever have one Grey Man (who might die?) but they can keep making new Bloodknives as long as they can find good ways to promote their spies.

counterpoint said:
this is me being super picky, but it says you must Construct/Control a certain wonder. I'd say it should only say *control*. If you construct it, but then LOSE it, it shouldn't count. If you construct it, and don't lose it, you control it by definition. So "control" is what we want, I think.

Very true, edited!

And now, waaaay back to the top of the page, I should respond to the Culture conversation!

counterpoint said:
General Overview and Yields

It looks like the current conception was to keep the current mechanical system of BNW, where Culture accrues over the whole game, and serves the dual purpose of unlocking Policies, territory, and serving as "defense" against the cultural victory. The second yield, Tourism, is a late-game yield, being derived mostly from Great Works, and serves as the "offense" in the culture victory.

I don't see any problem with this in the big picture. We have previously decided on renaming Tourism, calling it Prestige. It does not seem that we were going to rename Culture. I'm mostly fine with this, as culture is a rather neutral word, and isn't horribly out-of-universe. And, most importantly, there isn't an obvious in-universe alternative. That said, if anybody does think of one, I probably would prefer to change Culture as well, since we're changing Tourism. No big deal, though. Anybody up for some brainstorming?

All sounding good. So, brainstorming for alternatives to "Culture." We could reflavor it as "Pattern" or "Threads"/"Weaves" ("mad threads, yo!" :lol:

). Weaves is a bit close to the One Power. The idea behind those three is instead of representing a society's Cultural output (its art, music, language, sensibilities, etc.) it's representing that civilization's contribution to the Pattern and how they're affecting others. (In the same way that ta'veren cause threads in the Pattern to become entwined with them, a large group of people taking similar action would presumably have ripple-effects on the Pattern, but that's just me theory-izing in the WoT-verse.)

counterpoint said:
I imagine the victory itself will work exactly the same - overcome each civ's Culture with your Prestige and you win. Honestly, I don't feel any impulse to change this in order to accommodate the WoT world. It's not particularly flavorful, but a "culture victory" in WoT seems somewhat absurd in general, so I'm not sure we'll get anything better.

That said, please do throw something in the mix if you have any ideas as to ways to change it up.

I'm thinking the same way here, that we'll leave the overall mechanic unchanged.

counterpoint said:
Great Works and GPs

We previously discussed rescheming the three main GWs from BNW as such:

Prophecies - spawn likely from Dreamers, Doomseers, etc. Probably somewhat analogous to GW of Writing, in terms of which buildings they would be housed in. Note: these will be "mini" prophecies, and/or small pieces of larger prophecies, in terms of finding the book-content to populate the like (e.g., have a "Prophecy of the Stone" instead of a "Prophecy of the Dragon," the former being a small part of the latter in the books."

Stories or Epics or Legends - spawn likely from Gleemen/Bards, Historians, or other similar GP types. I'm unsure of which name to use, though I think Legends might be the coolest. That said, it seems to have some overlap in "vibe" with prophecy, IMO. Is that a problem? We would likely populate this by scouring the wikis for various tales and songs recited by Thom, or those mentioned by Mat and other characters steeped in lore. That said, we could also elect to take major events from the books and frame them as one of the legends (e.g., "Legend of Shadar Logoth" or "Tale of the Portal Stones"). Maybe like a GW of Music in terms of the buildings it would inhabit.

Crafts - spawn likely from Craftsmen, Artists, Artisans or something. This one is the least well-developed of all the ideas we previously discussed. This is meant to serve as a place for all the crafts at art in the WoT books (porcelain, tapestry, etc.). Also could potentially include some of the fashion customs I listed out before - at least the ones that include objects (e.g. "Hair Bells" or something, rather than "Forked Beard," which isn't really a craft so much). Definitely could/should consider a more inspiring name here. Probably most in line with the GW of Art in terms of where it would be housed.

Note, for now I'd suggest we avoid discussion of which GP creates which GW - let's worry about that when we tackle GPs in general. Similarly, I suggest we not worry about the Culture-Victory-related GP abilities either (i.e., the "concert tour" and "write political treatise"). It should suffice to say that these things will certainly exist - we just don't know which GP will have them.

In general, I think I could be fine with the above, though I could imagine swapping Crafts out for something more exciting, or otherwise shuffling things around. What do you think?

I agree that it feels like there's some crossover between Prophecies and Stories/Legends. They are inherently different - it just doesn't feel like as big a distance as art (in the painting sense) vs music vs writing.

I feel like there should definitely be some more WoT elements that we can fancy this up with. I'll need to do more reading on the subject! This kind of thing makes me think about reading the books again, but that would take an actual age and there are other, new books I like reading!

I'm fine with leaving GP -> GW relationships out until we're working on GPs and the same for the abilities.

Also agree that another name for Crafts would be good. This kind of encompasses the various "specialties" that a lot of nations had, being known for different types of luxury goods, right? Things like Sea Folk Porcelain? (I remember rugs being from a particular place, but don't remember where exactly. Tear?) Are we potentially encroaching on resources (luxuries in particular) with this GW classification?

counterpoint said:
Additionally, we could change things up in a much bigger way, including changing the number of these. Specifically, we could consider having there be only two or as many as four different GW types. I don't necessarily think we should, but we could. Some possible reasons for this, as I think of it now, could be:

- to lower or raise the number of GPs required for GW-production
- to simplify the cultural victory in general, or make it more complex
- to keep it more efficient from a flavor perspective (i.e., no "weak links")
- some other reason?

In any case, I'm not sure it's necessary, but I am throwing it out as something we could at least consider.

Interesting and very possible. I doubt we'd go down to two, but wouldn't completely count out the possibility yet. From a player's point of view, it might be nice to have to only manage two types of slots instead of 3, but then we could solve that without changing the number of GW types.

counterpoint said:
Artifacts and Antiquity Sites

Additionally, there's the whole issue of Artifacts and Archaeologists, and how we want to handle them. When discussing the Brown Ajah, we seem to have been mostly keeping our mental conception of how these work similar to BNW. Again, it doesn't *have* to be. Some things to consider/address:

- What will be name and theme of the Antiquity Sites? We could, of course, leave them the same. However, we could look for another conception that might be more flavorful. Some options include:
1) "Relics (or Ruins) of the Age of Legends." This is flavorful, and might be a cool use of that flavor. Could still provide Artifacts, but could also provide ter'angreal, "relics," or cuendillar pieces. This would also be useful if we wanted Seals and/or the Horn to pop up in such places. That said, one potential major problem with this approach is the lack of "nationality" and Age. That said, theoretically we could change the Nationality into something else... maybe it's a different variable they all have, instead of the country-of origin? Like, the type of artifact? AoL-era nation? Of course, none of these would be cohesive with the nationality of the other GWs, but maybe that doesn't matter. And, as far as Age (useful additionally for Landmarks), we could theoretically also change that into some other variable.
2) This may or may not need to be a stand-alone name (meaning, we could just leave them as Antiquity sites), but if we decided to make the artifacts into ter'angreal or cuendillar or something, we could call it a ter'angreal horde or cuendillar deposit or something like that.
3) not very exciting, but we could just plain old change the name, just for the sake of it. You know, "Site of Legend" or "Historical Site" or something like that.

Another element to Antiquity Sites is the way that they're placed. They aren't fixed on the map when the map is generated, they are invisibly "spawned" in the early game (long before anyone has Archaeology) when units die (or possibly even when they're damaged) in combat. This is what determines which nationalities the given artifacts can be.

That notion of spawning them kind of conflicts with using the Age of Legends as our source of artifacts, because there's no gameplay in that time period. However I do like the idea as using the Age of Legends as our artifacts. And I also like the idea of not using "nationality" if we can find a flavorful substitute. (And these two changes solve each others' problems, which is quite nice.)

So what can we use instead of Nationality? Are there enough of the Age of Legends civs for us to use those? Are they recognizable enough? (Off the top of my head, I can't name a single AoL civ.) I don't think we could create enough flavorful "types" (Cuendillar, Ter'angreal, Sa'angreal) to substitute for nationalities on big maps. (CSes are included in BNW CiV's nationalities list as well, so on a Huge map that's 36 discrete values.)

That volume of nationalities is based on their usage for theming bonuses though. If we change the way theming bonuses work, then we might not need as many, which would unlock new options for us to consider as replacements. (There's a stack of potentially-problem-solving-changes developing here.)

On a slightly different tack, can we associate the generation of Antiquity Sites with some other early-game activity, aside from combat? Or maybe associate it with combat in a different way?

In terms of the name, Antiquity Sites definitely feels very Earth, not WoT. Before we discuss a name we'll probably need to decide on the underlying mechanics above though!

counterpoint said:
- Shall we preserve the name "Artifact"? We certainly could, but I could also see something like "Relics" being fun. As mentioned above, we could also go in a different direction: ter'angreal, cuendillar. Something like that. If we change the name of the sites themselves, this will likely need to correspond with that closely.

Purely in isolation, I like Relics. Whether or not we can use that probably depends on how we change the nature of the Sites.

counterpoint said:
- What about Landmarks? Any better name? I suppose this would depend on whether we change the artifact names... a piece of cuendillar would obviously not lead to a monument's creation.

Same as above - not sure what we could change it to yet. There seem to be a lot of statues from ancient times in WoT - we could use that?

counterpoint said:
- What about the archaeologists? This is a 19th-century concept, so I think it certainly needs to change. "Historian" could be a cool alternative. Other than that.... "Treasure Hunter?" That seems silly, though.

"Historian" or "Chronicler" (matches up with our renamed Cultured CSes)? Treasure Hunter does sound a bit Indiana Jones. We could use "Sniffer" or something like that, unless they're intended as a GP type.

counterpoint said:
- should the process surrounding arch's and artifacts and antiquities remain unchanged? They're revealed by tech/era the same way? Some rebranded social policy-tree completion yields "hidden" ones? Same general amount of time and rules associated with actually harvesting the artifacts? Any new thoughts on the Browns?

Currently I think we can keep these how they are. But my opinion may change if we make some foundational changes to what artifacts actually are (discussion above).

counterpoint said:
- In BNW, artifacts occupy the same buildings as Art. How should that work here? Which one should they cohabitate with? Or should they have their own places?

I'm still not 100% sure why Firaxis decided to make those two GW types use the same slots. Maybe they found having them separate caused too much contention - having loads of spare slots of one type, but constantly running out of the other. The "things" you dig up out of ruins often end up being one of the most numerous GW subtypes a culture player has, so we'll want to take that into consideration.

Like you say below, we want to visually differentiate them at least, much more so than Firaxis did.

counterpoint said:
UI and Buildings

Some questions here:
- Should we adjust the way theming bonuses work? Is there some other logic we should be using, or will it continue to be by pairing age and nationality of the various objects? This does seem to be somewhat arbitrary, so we could adjust it to some other variable if that would seem to be more flavorful. Thoughts?

This connects to the discussion above. How theming bonuses work has ramifications for how we want to label GWs and separate them into categories. I'm drawing a blank on what we could use as alternatives for nationalities though.

counterpoint said:
- any changes to the buildings themselves? should we use more buildings? fewer? Currently, wonders and museums are the other multi-work buildings. Keep that the same?

I think we'd rename all of these buildings, but have a similar number of slots available to the player, regardless of what combination we choose to give them out in. Museums are the only non-wonder that can have theming bonuses, right? That was probably very intentional - wonders are a part of the culture victory and needing them for the Prestige output makes a lot of sense.

counterpoint said:
- I don't understand much about the inner-workings of the GW-swapping system. Should we leave it the same?

It's largely there (I think) so that the theming bonuses never become impossible to get even when all of the Antiquity Sites have been dug up. The AI is not great at working out which works it should trade and because of the way it "puts them up on offer" the player has a definite advantage in being able to pick and choose what they want to fulfill their own theming bonuses.

I wouldn't jump to remove it, but I wouldn't suggest changing it much to start with. Depending on what we decide above, the context of this system might change and some better ideas might reveal themselves.

counterpoint said:
- Lastly, I do think we need to tweak the UI on the GW page - is that possible? The most annoying thing, to me, is that you can't visually differentiate between GWoA and Artifacts - they both look like the color palette thing. Can they have a different icon? The other thing I was wondering is if there was a way to use colors on the page to show nationality, and numbers/symbols to show Era. It really is highly annoying having to highlight each and every one all the time.

Yes, so much yes. All UI is completely customizable (to the point we're willing to tweak it, the iteration time isn't great on changes). The GW screen is astoundingly terrible (both to use and how it's implemented underneath) and should be torn out and cleansed with fire. There are already a few mods that make it more usable/extendable, which we may want to repurpose here. Either way, I don't think we'll want to use Firaxis' UI screen as it is. Like you've said representing relevant information like nationality and era on each item without having to hover over it is a must.

S3rgeus · Feb 14, 2015

counterpoint said:
Matters effecting Culture and Prestige

I feel relatively confident that most of this could remain the same as in BNW. We can produce culture in essentially the same ways (plus special ones we've already discussed). Is the same true with Prestige and the spread of it? Affected by Ideology of course. What about alignment? Does that effect it? Before or only after the LB?

I don't think Alignment plays a direct role beyond possibly "unlocking" some wonders that may be useful. I don't think we want Shadow or Light players to have a direct culture bonus or anything like that.

counterpoint said:
What I'm trying to do in this post is examine all the little "joints" in the culture system and try to make sure we at least consider each of them and whether they should remain unchanged. It does seem that the machinations of the culture victory are mostly "under the hood," so we should probably be careful when changing too much of the math willy nilly - but that doesn't mean we can't.

Is there anything I've forgotten? Anything that stands out as feeling very un-WoT? Or anything we should add that feels very WoT?

It seems like this might be a good place to insert some of the WoT Pattern-related lore. Prophecies and such as GW types does some of that, but I'm wondering if there's anything more fundamental about the Pattern that we can integrate into the game? It's all about the notion that every life builds up a thread and all of those together make the universe. (I'm sure you know this, I'm just seeing if saying it helps spawn any ideas.)

Could we somehow associate Antiquity Site spawning with worldwide population density (where people "gather") rather than where they fight?

It also feels like ta'veren could be a part of all this, but I'm not sure how beyond the implication that most GPs are ta'veren.

counterpoint said:
The only idea I had for anything "new", which isn't a fabulous one, was grounded in the notion of the fashions of each nation, and how they might be incorporated into culture. It's not a well developed idea, but I was thinking that at various stages of cultural development - maybe after completing a tree or something - the player could select a Style for their civ. Not sure exactly what it does, but probably nothing complex like a pantheon or anything like that. Maybe this does nothing specific, but maybe it spreads around, not unlike a religion, but maybe spread through essentially any interaction - trade, religion, war, etc. Maybe, unlike religion, there doesn't need to be one dominant Style in a city - maybe any one over a certain threshold is considered to be present in a given city. Maybe spreading your style around provides a minor modifier to Prestige-influence later in the game? What I don't know is how this is distinct and useful. But, I don't know, maybe we can think of something like this as a value-add that doesn't change how things work, but is an extra element (not unlike, say, the Ogier Stump).

This is an interesting option. I can see the value in making it something that just layers on top. It's a significant amount of information to keep track of to accomodate a relatively small payout though. Would Style spread through a unit or just proximity? If just proximity, is it also based on Prestige output - can the player affect its spread rate actively (beyond picking policies etc. that make it spread faster)? Anything that requires action from the player risks becoming another religion metagame, which could create a lot of busywork. Anything that doesn't require action could end up being very predictable. (If it always spreads at a fixed rate, how well your Style does is largely determined by geography and when you "found" it, which is all set in stone fairly early on.)

I feel like I'm raising more questions than I'm answering on this Culture stuff, mainly because I'm having difficulty coming up with any great alternatives to the foundational "what should Antiquity Sites be" question. (And the related stuff about generating them based on early game actions.) A lot of the others are dependent on what we choose there.

So, another new thing to discuss. Code! I've wrapped up (or at least moved away from for now) some other programming projects (unrelated to WoTMod) that I've been working on and am starting to get back on task here!

I've started off with some of our simpler changes to get back into the CiV modding groove. So I've done the renaming of the Pantheon beliefs and the City-State traits. (CS traits I don't have a screenshot for yet, but the names are at the end of the diplo summary.) These were very simple XML changes, but I've also updated the mod to the newest C++ source code from Firaxis. (Predictably, they've updated the game and source code since this mod last changed many months ago.) That all went surprisingly well, despite a fun source control pickle I'd gotten us into. (Git is awesome.)

That's all I've changed for now, but I'm considering which of the systems we've outlined and decided on are best fleshed out on a "go make this now" level. And considering what we should do for the technical architecture of those changes (how we should efficiently represent Alignment per player and things like that).

EDIT: Exciting further code update! Players now have alignment that is tracked over the course of the game. The couple of words at the top are obviously placeholders (I'd imagine we'll use an icon with the descriptive string, not the words "Light" or "Shadow") as is the tooltip. The majority of the change here is behind the UI.

Currently, YIELD_SHADOW and YIELD_LIGHT are new yields that cause the player's alignment to shift in their respective direction. ALIGNMENT_SHADOW and ALIGNMENT_LIGHT are entries in a completely new DB table that are defined to reference the above yields, and defined to "counteract" each other. (So getting more Light points makes you less Shadow-y and vice versa.)

To test out that everything is counting correctly I hooked up the two yields to some buildings, but that's obviously not how we're going to do it going forward. (It was just fast to do, since I could hook into the existing "buildings produce yields" code and DB tables.) Alignment shifts are mostly an accumulation of individual instances of yield dumps due to player actions, not ongoing generation like, say, Culture, if I've remembered our discussions on the topic correctly. (I've been referring to the LB summary when working on this of course.) Those complexities are built on top of this, but for now, we have a foundational representation of Alignment for each player.

EDIT 2: The more things I try to actually implement, the more I fall over tiny holes in our discussions from ages ago! After significant reading through our eras/calendar discussions from pages 7-10, I've found a good one, about what to call one of the eras:

S3rgeus said:
So I'm completely on board with this system. I think the only remaining big question is what to call era #6. Nothing jumps out at me right away, but I'm short on time. I'll think on it!

counterpoint said:
Sweet! I'm find with Era of New Beginnings for now. Will think on #6 a bit more...

And then we never said anything more about it. We've had loads of time to think now, so what's the name for Era #6? (The full, final list of the rest is in this post.) This represents the time period between 500NE and 800NE. According to the WoT wiki timelines, absolutely nothing of any importance happened during these 300 years and that makes me sad. Some slightly less era-defining things that have happened and the player might remember though: the Aiel give the gift of Avendoraldera. ("Era of the Gift"? "Era of Avendesora"?) Cadsuane is born in this time period. ("Era of the Dragon's Shepherd"?) Corianin Nedeal (the last Aes Sedai Dreamer before Egwene) dies in this time period. I mainly mention this because two separate wikis do. ("Era of Dreamers' End"? "Era of Dreaming"?) The nation of Almoth collapses in this time period. Not sure if we can do anything with that.

There's an internal power struggle in the Tower in this era. Leads to a reshuffling of Sitters and an exiled Amyrlin, Shein Chunla. ("Era of the Tower's Disquiet"? "Era of the Amyrlin's Exile"?) The Daughters of Silence are disbanded by Tower intervention right at the end of the this time period. ("Era of Tower Law"?)

Any others?

I stumbled onto this problem trying to rename the era types in the Eras table to use them as reference points for an "events" table with the Trolloc Wars, High King, and Last Battle events in it.

counterpoint · Feb 16, 2015

S3rgeus said:
I think there are two differences. One is the blowback for failure - trying to Depose the Amyrlin and failing seems like something that would cause a civ to lose face, have some diplo penalties and lose some influence. Trying to assassinate the Amyrlin (and failing) sounds like it would cause war. At least much more drastic consequences for failing. (It's also much harder to perform - I'd imagine depose has a higher success rate and can be done by any spy, assassinate is just Grey Men and Bloodknives.)

Also, it allows Light/Neutral players to interact with an Amyrlin they don't like without risking Turning the Tower in the process.

So the variability blowback and odds of success? As in:

Depose = high success rate, low consequences
Assassinate = low success rate, high consequences

Right?

So I ask, why would you ever resort to assassination, then (outside of the Tower Turning)? As you mentioned, the 'chan chose do to it without any Shadow Allegiance.

There needs to be a way in which assassination creates a different effect. Maybe not a positive for the civ, but a negative for the Tower. Like the Seanchan, it's done primarily to cripple the tower, not necessarily just to sneak in a new amyrlin.

Maybe the tower can't do edicts for 30 turns once it's done? Something like that? All yields given to civs from the tower are weakened?

S3rgeus said:
Even if we can't trade away our capital, stopping the Exhibition also makes the "you can exhibit at cities with 10+ population" bonus less effective. That's not a gamebreaker, but just to consider.

I'm not sure about this overall, I think having the Exhibitions take time opens up a lot of new, weird edge cases where players can exploit the system. We also might be punishing the science player a bit too much - they might end up with a game of geographical whack-a-mole in order to win, which isn't that cool.

That said, I'm still drawing a blank on how else we could create a defensive element to the science victory for larger map sizes (since we've eliminated repeats for smaller map sizes, our old fashioned "kill the Envoy" works fine on those). Maybe it's best to try this all out and see if players feel left out on larger maps? Our system is already a drastic interactivity improvement over the CiV one. Powerful players that see an enemy on the road to the science victory have a similar reaction to base CiV - kill the Science player.

Yeah, this is getting hard to decide. Which is truly better?

I'm leaning towards preserving the exhibition-takes-time mechanic, but making the time not terribly long - maybe 3-10 turns, depending on the defending civ's total science throughout the game. Maybe there's a specific improvement you can buy that adds 5 turns to this time (in addition to producing science, probably).

In terms of capture, recapture, etc.... I'm tempted to say it doesn't matter. The exhibition is valid if began in a valid city. If that city is captured, it doesn't cancel it. However, it does change who the owner of the resultant bonus is.

However, if by some unusual city choice (one of the 10+ ones) the city is razed, that would in fact cancel the exhibition. Part of the risk of using the 10+ ability. But that seems fair to me, opening it to 10+ makes this way, way harder to defend.

S3rgeus said:
In terms of foreign Exhibitions, I think Exhibitions from separate civs don't interact at all. No limits or orders are affected by another civ performing an Exhibition, regardless of where.

I think the same civ can definitely start up multiple Exhibitions (targeting separate enemy civs) simultaneously. Their main restrictions are on repeating (must do a cycle) and producing the Envoys (can only have one of each type alive/in production at once).

With small maps, say 2 opponents, you'd probably want to do Exhibitions in waves of 2. You can always produce the units (Envoys) for the later Exhibitions ahead of time (possibly position them strategically for quick follow-up Exhibitions as each wave finishes, but you'll need to defend them), it's just the actual Exhibitioning that's limited.

Right. that works. But just to clarify: on a duel map, how would it work? Do you have to wait til they're done before starting another? That would make it quite difficult.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, like you've said, a civ weak enough to be eliminated will produce minimal culture and be overwhelmed by a Cultre-Victory-player's Tourism fairly quickly. But there are probably situations where that would extend the time taken to win - I believe the Culture-victory-player is starting from scratch with the liberated civ. I think our science victory gives an even greater incentive to liberate civs because the main difficulty for the Science player is geographical. They have no specific advantage against the liberated player just because that player is doing badly. (And the liberated player might have a very inconveniently placed capital.)

Right. And even though (if we do what I suggested above) there's no benefit for a science-defender to capture a city mid-exhibition, there is definitely incentive to capture the city (or liberate one) before.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, it's one of those things that we humans understand quite easily, but is actually quite complicated! I think we can hide a lot of this complexity by telling the player where they can still perform Exhibitions (science summary screen just lists cities). Hardcore optimizers can come to understand the underlying pattern, but a fair portion of players can just be told you must "do it in waves against each of your enemies" and have a screen that tells them where's still valid. (In the event they get into one of our fun edge cases above, the screen should be able to just tell them where to go.)

Right. It's there for the crazies, but simplified for the lazies.

S3rgeus said:
"Era of the Dragon" is cool with me - it's definitely more consistent.

OK, next affront to consistency: "After the Breaking." Shouldn't this be called "Era After the Breaking" or something like that?

S3rgeus said:
When we were discussing the Grey Men a while back, I thought we decided Grey Men would become available to Shadow-declared civs (one of their spies turns into a Grey Man). Since the Tower needs to be Turned before the Last Battle starts, Bloodknives are the only way to assassinate the Amyrlin, even though Grey Men technically have that capability. Is that weird?

Right. Good point. But if we do decide to make the assassination a more drastic negative event for the tower - more than just a re-vote - then using them mid-LB would definitely be a viable way to cripple one of the strongest Light forces. I think this is fine.

They can use bloodknives for the Turning. After all, it's not something that'll happen every game, so I don't worry that it'll be viewed as some horrible game breaking thing.

S3rgeus said:
The Grey Men are repeatable is the main difference (aside from Shadow-only availability, as you've said). Bloodknives die after you use them - whether they succeed or fail. Bloodknives definitely seem very evil, but we're borrowing them from the Seanchan who fought for the Light in the end.

I think a Shadow civ would only use Bloodknives if they needed to perform several assassinations close together. They can only ever have one Grey Man (who might die?) but they can keep making new Bloodknives as long as they can find good ways to promote their spies.

What if the Gray Men showed up periodically to be assigned a mission? Like, they weren't listed permanently on the spy page. Maybe they hopped from civ to civ. Or, even weirder, what if it was a "unit" bought with Faith or something, that you bought and spent once to assassinate somebody. Or, even weirder, they were produced like GP?

S3rgeus said:
And now, waaaay back to the top of the page, I should respond to the Culture conversation!

All sounding good. So, brainstorming for alternatives to "Culture." We could reflavor it as "Pattern" or "Threads"/"Weaves" ("mad threads, yo!" ). Weaves is a bit close to the One Power. The idea behind those three is instead of representing a society's Cultural output (its art, music, language, sensibilities, etc.) it's representing that civilization's contribution to the Pattern and how they're affecting others. (In the same way that ta'veren cause threads in the Pattern to become entwined with them, a large group of people taking similar action would presumably have ripple-effects on the Pattern, but that's just me theory-izing in the WoT-verse.)

This is really tricky. I like what you're suggesting in theory, but it does feel a little odd to me that the mechanisms for generating "Culture" would also generate this "Threads" yield. Buildings, Brown Sisters, etc... I don't know. There is something compelling about it, though.

Also, it seems a little weird to me that this would cause your borders to expand, but I could probably talk myself into that.

Part of me feels like we have it flipped, and "Threads" or "Pattern" should be the Tourism equivalent, and "Prestige" should be the base one. This makes the borders expansion thing make more sense as a result of the yield. And then, the hotels/airports equivalent (don't remember which building turns culture into tourism) would be some sort of unusual building - something that causes your society to effect the Pattern itself. I can definitely see the appeal in this - affecting the pattern does seem sort of epic, so having it be the thing that turns a civ to be under your influence does make some mechanical sense. But, then again, maybe it is a little lame to think of a civ in 4000 BC generating Prestige, and someone in the Age of the High King *not* generating Threads, is weird.... Definitely pros and cons to this from a "feel" perspective. Oh, and all of our previous posts would get really confusing (with Prestige now meaning something else).

In any case, either of these is compelling first and foremost because it allows us to integrate one of the central cosmological components of WoT into the game. That said, I do feel like if we do so, we have to take it a slight step further: it has to matter in some other way besides just what culture/prestige already do. Maybe after a certain amount of Thread build-up, you generate a Ta'veren GP? Maybe it has special unusual effects and can only be generated this way (what these effects are would depend on whether "Threads" replaces culture, which makes it an all-the-time thing, or Tourism, which makes it a late-game thing).

It doesn't have to be that, but I do feel like if we're going out of our way to include Pattern Manipulation as a yield of all things, there should be *some* manifestation of it, even if it's mostly incidental.

As far as names, I do agree that Weaves is out for its channeling connections. I can see the benefits of both Pattern and Threads. Not sure which I like better. Threads makes more mechanical sense in the lore - you're spinning threads and directing them. But Pattern is sort of cooler sounding, and somehow feels more meaningful. Not sure.

S3rgeus said:
I agree that it feels like there's some crossover between Prophecies and Stories/Legends. They are inherently different - it just doesn't feel like as big a distance as art (in the painting sense) vs music vs writing.

So, is your final evaluation that they are OK to exist, then? Or do we need to change one of them?

I do think if we keep them as they are, we should go out of our way to name them in a way as distinct as possible. Which of "Stories" "Legends" "Epics" and "Histories" feels the most distinct from Prophecy?

S3rgeus said:
I feel like there should definitely be some more WoT elements that we can fancy this up with. I'll need to do more reading on the subject! This kind of thing makes me think about reading the books again, but that would take an actual age and there are other, new books I like reading!

Oh, no. Not for me. It'll be a long while until I read again. Just did a full-read-through that took about a year...

S3rgeus said:
Also agree that another name for Crafts would be good. This kind of encompasses the various "specialties" that a lot of nations had, being known for different types of luxury goods, right? Things like Sea Folk Porcelain? (I remember rugs being from a particular place, but don't remember where exactly. Tear?) Are we potentially encroaching on resources (luxuries in particular) with this GW classification?

Yeah. Exactly. Things like Sea Folk Porcelain (make in Tremalking by the Amayar).

I'm not worried about luxuries so much - it's not like you "mine" tapestries and porcelain. I think most of our luxuries can be carried over from CiV. If we want to swap out a few, we should be able to use things like "Tabac" and "Oilfish" and such things. In any case, here I think we're talking man-made things.

So, as far as naming them..... hmm... I really don't know that we're going to find anything much more interesting. I don't think RJ really gave us anything here.... It could be worse - it's not like "Art" or "Music" are all so compelling.

S3rgeus said:
Interesting and very possible. I doubt we'd go down to two, but wouldn't completely count out the possibility yet. From a player's point of view, it might be nice to have to only manage two types of slots instead of 3, but then we could solve that without changing the number of GW types.

Yeah, I guess I don't feel a strong reason to do so, and it would create a bunch more balancing to be done.

S3rgeus said:
Another element to Antiquity Sites is the way that they're placed. They aren't fixed on the map when the map is generated, they are invisibly "spawned" in the early game (long before anyone has Archaeology) when units die (or possibly even when they're damaged) in combat. This is what determines which nationalities the given artifacts can be.

That notion of spawning them kind of conflicts with using the Age of Legends as our source of artifacts, because there's no gameplay in that time period. However I do like the idea as using the Age of Legends as our artifacts. And I also like the idea of not using "nationality" if we can find a flavorful substitute. (And these two changes solve each others' problems, which is quite nice.)

So what can we use instead of Nationality? Are there enough of the Age of Legends civs for us to use those? Are they recognizable enough? (Off the top of my head, I can't name a single AoL civ.) I don't think we could create enough flavorful "types" (Cuendillar, Ter'angreal, Sa'angreal) to substitute for nationalities on big maps. (CSes are included in BNW CiV's nationalities list as well, so on a Huge map that's 36 discrete values.)

That volume of nationalities is based on their usage for theming bonuses though. If we change the way theming bonuses work, then we might not need as many, which would unlock new options for us to consider as replacements. (There's a stack of potentially-problem-solving-changes developing here.)

first, a question on BNW: GWs and Artifacts all use nationality, but they don't interact, right? There aren't any theming bonuses that rely on you having a GWoA and Artifact together, so... it doesn't matter, right?

I ask this because the GWs operate with a field of relatively few options (just created by civs) while the Artifacts are way more - 36 as you said (potentially). If they *do* interact in some way, that makes this ratio important. I don't think it does, but I thought I'd ask.

If my assumption is correct, that means we could leave the GWs as Nationality-linked, but make the artifacts some different variable, right?

So as far as the AoL civs/cities... Yeah, the Wiki shows 9 different ones. Since "Paaran Disen" is supposedly the greatest one, and I've never heard of it, this is emblematic of the problem. These things were name-dropped in random Lews Therin rants or Forsaken prologues, and never reinforced for the reader.

I'm thinking that the simplest way for us to go with the "nationality" of something is to go with Material. I do think we could pretty easily come up with 36 potential construction materials, so... Doing it now to make sure it's possible:

1) Gold
2) Silver
3) Bronze
4) Steel
5) Iron
6) Copper
7) Platinum
8) Ruby
9) Sapphire
10) Diamond
11) Emerald
12) Garnet
13) Pearl
14) Amethyst
15) Topaz
16) Opal
17) Jade
18) Lead
19) Crystal
20) Coral
21) Amber
22) Ivory
23) Lapis Lazuli
24) Brass
25) Wood
26) Jet
27) Palladium
28) Sandstone
29) Marble
30) Clay
31) Tin
32) Obsidian
33) Bamboo
34) Bone
35) Granite
36) Limestone

OK, so this works if we are using artifacts to be literally artifacts. The goal was to prevent them from blurring too much with crafts, so I decided not to include things like Wool, Lace, porcelain, etc.

The list above could easily be used to make "artifacts" (e.g. Obsidian Mask or Crystal goblet) or even theoretically AoL stuff (e.g. Ivory Quill or Gold Graphics Processor).

If we decide materials blurs too much with crafts... hmmm... not sure what else to do. Color?

As far as the Age of it... I'm not sure I know how to replace that, if we go with the AoL type. Like, we can't do "from the Ancient Age", so we'd need yet another variable (with fewer variations).

S3rgeus said:
On a slightly different tack, can we associate the generation of Antiquity Sites with some other early-game activity, aside from combat? Or maybe associate it with combat in a different way?

Well, if they're AoL ones.... I'm bringing up that previously-mentioned idea that time is a wheel. Could we somehow use the previously played game (or completed game) to somehow "inspire" their placement? This is crazy, right?

Otherwise, it could be anything, right? The site of a unit killed, but also a barb camp cleared, a ruin cleared, etc. It's already pretty arbitrary, so couldn't it just be arbitrary? Like put one at the midpoint between two cities, created at the moment a treaty is signed, or a trade route is established, etc. This is much more of an under-the-hood thing, so I don't have strong opinions on it. Your population density thing could work too. Also, spawn near cities where GP were produced (or Ta'veren?)

S3rgeus said:
In terms of the name, Antiquity Sites definitely feels very Earth, not WoT. Before we discuss a name we'll probably need to decide on the underlying mechanics above though!

I'm happy with them either being AoL based or "ancient" like they are in civ.

S3rgeus said:
Purely in isolation, I like Relics. Whether or not we can use that probably depends on how we change the nature of the Sites.

I agree.

S3rgeus said:
Same as above - not sure what we could change it to yet. There seem to be a lot of statues from ancient times in WoT - we could use that?

Monument is a good word, too, though it has Civ allusions. Memorial. Milestone.

Also, it depends - are these things generating Prestige, or are they generating Pattern? (depends on the discussion above)? Those things all have to do with Prestige and Culture. Pattern... might need something weirder. No idea what though!

S3rgeus said:
"Historian" or "Chronicler" (matches up with our renamed Cultured CSes)? Treasure Hunter does sound a bit Indiana Jones. We could use "Sniffer" or something like that, unless they're intended as a GP type.

I think I prefer historian, but if we elect to name the GW Historian, let's call these guys Chronicler.

S3rgeus said:
Currently I think we can keep these how they are. But my opinion may change if we make some foundational changes to what artifacts actually are (discussion above).

sound good

S3rgeus said:
I'm still not 100% sure why Firaxis decided to make those two GW types use the same slots. Maybe they found having them separate caused too much contention - having loads of spare slots of one type, but constantly running out of the other. The "things" you dig up out of ruins often end up being one of the most numerous GW subtypes a culture player has, so we'll want to take that into consideration.

Like you say below, we want to visually differentiate them at least, much more so than Firaxis did.

probably safe to leave it alone - UI changes notwithstanding.

S3rgeus said:
This connects to the discussion above. How theming bonuses work has ramifications for how we want to label GWs and separate them into categories. I'm drawing a blank on what we could use as alternatives for nationalities though.

I figure we can keep this the same - probably just shift it based on how we shift the nationality-alternatives.

S3rgeus said:
I think we'd rename all of these buildings, but have a similar number of slots available to the player, regardless of what combination we choose to give them out in. Museums are the only non-wonder that can have theming bonuses, right? That was probably very intentional - wonders are a part of the culture victory and needing them for the Prestige output makes a lot of sense.

Right, Museums are the only ones with a theming bonus, but Libraries, etc. do house GWs, so we'd need to make their replacements make sense in that regard.

But yeah, making it wonder-heavy should be preserved, I say.

S3rgeus said:
It's largely there (I think) so that the theming bonuses never become impossible to get even when all of the Antiquity Sites have been dug up. The AI is not great at working out which works it should trade and because of the way it "puts them up on offer" the player has a definite advantage in being able to pick and choose what they want to fulfill their own theming bonuses.

I wouldn't jump to remove it, but I wouldn't suggest changing it much to start with. Depending on what we decide above, the context of this system might change and some better ideas might reveal themselves.

ugh, yeah. No idea how we'd change it, though it does favor the player big time. How does it work in multiplayer? I've only ever played multiplayer co-op games.

S3rgeus said:
Yes, so much yes. All UI is completely customizable (to the point we're willing to tweak it, the iteration time isn't great on changes). The GW screen is astoundingly terrible (both to use and how it's implemented underneath) and should be torn out and cleansed with fire. There are already a few mods that make it more usable/extendable, which we may want to repurpose here. Either way, I don't think we'll want to use Firaxis' UI screen as it is. Like you've said representing relevant information like nationality and era on each item without having to hover over it is a must.

For sure. let's do this.

counterpoint · Feb 16, 2015

S3rgeus said:
I don't think Alignment plays a direct role beyond possibly "unlocking" some wonders that may be useful. I don't think we want Shadow or Light players to have a direct culture bonus or anything like that.

Sorry, that's not what I meant. I was unclear. Not talking about the yields themselves.

I mean that alignment would provide a bonus to Prestige vs. a player. Like, if you are their alignment, you would be more influential, or less if their opponent. Exactly like Ideology, right? Or religion. This makes sense to me. A shadow civ shouldn't be as influential over a light civ.

S3rgeus said:
It seems like this might be a good place to insert some of the WoT Pattern-related lore. Prophecies and such as GW types does some of that, but I'm wondering if there's anything more fundamental about the Pattern that we can integrate into the game? It's all about the notion that every life builds up a thread and all of those together make the universe. (I'm sure you know this, I'm just seeing if saying it helps spawn any ideas.)

Could we somehow associate Antiquity Site spawning with worldwide population density (where people "gather") rather than where they fight?

It also feels like ta'veren could be a part of all this, but I'm not sure how beyond the implication that most GPs are ta'veren.

Right. I was talking about this above, forgetting that you'd mentioned it here!

So, the notion of a special "culture" GP could work here. The more "threads" you have, the more influence you have over the pattern: thus, Ta'veren are born. A Ta'veren could do weird stuff like increase positive yields or somehow cause good things to happen. Otherwise, yeah... not sure how to integrate the whole "Threads of the Pattern" thing into the gameplay.

S3rgeus said:
This is an interesting option. I can see the value in making it something that just layers on top. It's a significant amount of information to keep track of to accomodate a relatively small payout though. Would Style spread through a unit or just proximity? If just proximity, is it also based on Prestige output - can the player affect its spread rate actively (beyond picking policies etc. that make it spread faster)? Anything that requires action from the player risks becoming another religion metagame, which could create a lot of busywork. Anything that doesn't require action could end up being very predictable. (If it always spreads at a fixed rate, how well your Style does is largely determined by geography and when you "found" it, which is all set in stone fairly early on.)

I feel like I'm raising more questions than I'm answering on this Culture stuff, mainly because I'm having difficulty coming up with any great alternatives to the foundational "what should Antiquity Sites be" question. (And the related stuff about generating them based on early game actions.) A lot of the others are dependent on what we choose there.

Now that you've introduced the idea of the "Pattern" into things, to me that seems like the more worthwhile "extra thing" to add. The Style thing was really me grasping at straws for something that felt unique. If we can do something nice with the Pattern stuff, this is better. Plus, that leaves us all the flavor of the Styles to use as our Crafts.

Also, I too don't like adding another religion-like mechanic.

S3rgeus said:
So, another new thing to discuss. Code! I've wrapped up (or at least moved away from for now) some other programming projects (unrelated to WoTMod) that I've been working on and am starting to get back on task here!

I've started off with some of our simpler changes to get back into the CiV modding groove. So I've done the renaming of the Pantheon beliefs and the City-State traits. (CS traits I don't have a screenshot for yet, but the names are at the end of the diplo summary.) These were very simple XML changes, but I've also updated the mod to the newest C++ source code from Firaxis. (Predictably, they've updated the game and source code since this mod last changed many months ago.) That all went surprisingly well, despite a fun source control pickle I'd gotten us into. (Git is awesome.)

That's all I've changed for now, but I'm considering which of the systems we've outlined and decided on are best fleshed out on a "go make this now" level. And considering what we should do for the technical architecture of those changes (how we should efficiently represent Alignment per player and things like that).

This is awesome. Love that you're getting a chance to implement stuff.

S3rgeus said:
EDIT: Exciting further code update! Players now have alignment that is tracked over the course of the game. The couple of words at the top are obviously placeholders (I'd imagine we'll use an icon with the descriptive string, not the words "Light" or "Shadow") as is the tooltip. The majority of the change here is behind the UI.

Currently, YIELD_SHADOW and YIELD_LIGHT are new yields that cause the player's alignment to shift in their respective direction. ALIGNMENT_SHADOW and ALIGNMENT_LIGHT are entries in a completely new DB table that are defined to reference the above yields, and defined to "counteract" each other. (So getting more Light points makes you less Shadow-y and vice versa.)

To test out that everything is counting correctly I hooked up the two yields to some buildings, but that's obviously not how we're going to do it going forward. (It was just fast to do, since I could hook into the existing "buildings produce yields" code and DB tables.) Alignment shifts are mostly an accumulation of individual instances of yield dumps due to player actions, not ongoing generation like, say, Culture, if I've remembered our discussions on the topic correctly. (I've been referring to the LB summary when working on this of course.) Those complexities are built on top of this, but for now, we have a foundational representation of Alignment for each player.

I find the idea of an alignment building hilarious. Like, you have a "Tower of Evil" or a "Generosity Granary" or something. Glad this is working out.

S3rgeus said:
EDIT 2: The more things I try to actually implement, the more I fall over tiny holes in our discussions from ages ago! After significant reading through our eras/calendar discussions from pages 7-10, I've found a good one, about what to call one of the eras:

And then we never said anything more about it. We've had loads of time to think now, so what's the name for Era #6? (The full, final list of the rest is in this post.) This represents the time period between 500NE and 800NE. According to the WoT wiki timelines, absolutely nothing of any importance happened during these 300 years and that makes me sad. Some slightly less era-defining things that have happened and the player might remember though: the Aiel give the gift of Avendoraldera. ("Era of the Gift"? "Era of Avendesora"?) Cadsuane is born in this time period. ("Era of the Dragon's Shepherd"?) Corianin Nedeal (the last Aes Sedai Dreamer before Egwene) dies in this time period. I mainly mention this because two separate wikis do. ("Era of Dreamers' End"? "Era of Dreaming"?) The nation of Almoth collapses in this time period. Not sure if we can do anything with that.

There's an internal power struggle in the Tower in this era. Leads to a reshuffling of Sitters and an exiled Amyrlin, Shein Chunla. ("Era of the Tower's Disquiet"? "Era of the Amyrlin's Exile"?) The Daughters of Silence are disbanded by Tower intervention right at the end of the this time period. ("Era of Tower Law"?)

Any others?

I stumbled onto this problem trying to rename the era types in the Eras table to use them as reference points for an "events" table with the Trolloc Wars, High King, and Last Battle events in it.

OK, so yeah, we forgot about this one.

I'm actually thinking that this era isn't a good one to look for what happened... it's nothing interesting.

Maybe we focus on its inactivity? "Era of Stability" "Era of Balance." That kind of thing.

The other way to look is to use Civ's model, and go for the technology progress - like how the Renaissance is named.. I have no idea what techs will pop up in this era (it's the analogue to our Modern, which is irrelevant of course), but it could be a way to go. Like, if it's appropriate, "Era of Progress" or "Era of Building" or "Era of Discovery" or "Era of Lots of Religious Techs and National Wonders" or whatever. That I suppose we'd have to wait on, though.

S3rgeus · Feb 17, 2015

counterpoint said:
So the variability blowback and odds of success? As in:

Depose = high success rate, low consequences
Assassinate = low success rate, high consequences

Right?

Yeah, that sounds right.

counterpoint said:
So I ask, why would you ever resort to assassination, then (outside of the Tower Turning)? As you mentioned, the 'chan chose do to it without any Shadow Allegiance.

There needs to be a way in which assassination creates a different effect. Maybe not a positive for the civ, but a negative for the Tower. Like the Seanchan, it's done primarily to cripple the tower, not necessarily just to sneak in a new amyrlin.

Maybe the tower can't do edicts for 30 turns once it's done? Something like that? All yields given to civs from the tower are weakened?

I'm cool with this, yeah, it's a good point that there should be some weakening of the Tower when the assassination succeeds. No Edicts for 30 turns sounds good. Do we also want to affect the influence of players in any way? Decrease players' influence who have influence with the Ajah the Amyrlin was from? (We could "shrink" the late-Amyrlin Ajah without changing the relative positions of the players inside.)

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this is getting hard to decide. Which is truly better?

I'm leaning towards preserving the exhibition-takes-time mechanic, but making the time not terribly long - maybe 3-10 turns, depending on the defending civ's total science throughout the game. Maybe there's a specific improvement you can buy that adds 5 turns to this time (in addition to producing science, probably).

In terms of capture, recapture, etc.... I'm tempted to say it doesn't matter. The exhibition is valid if began in a valid city. If that city is captured, it doesn't cancel it. However, it does change who the owner of the resultant bonus is.

However, if by some unusual city choice (one of the 10+ ones) the city is razed, that would in fact cancel the exhibition. Part of the risk of using the 10+ ability. But that seems fair to me, opening it to 10+ makes this way, way harder to defend.

Razing could also occur due to civs losing their original capital.

I'm still unconvinced about Exhibitions taking time. It feels like we're just delaying the Science player, rather than changing what they have to consider. And as you mention below, it creates problems for small maps. For the defending players, it's some additional warning that the Science player is near to winning, but it doesn't really change the ways they can interact with that Science player. They can snipe bonuses, but as we mentioned before, the bonuses aren't going to be huge, so the cost of taking the city would often be higher.

counterpoint said:
Right. that works. But just to clarify: on a duel map, how would it work? Do you have to wait til they're done before starting another? That would make it quite difficult.

If the Exhibitions take time, I think they'd have to wait, otherwise we'd need different rule sets for different map sizes, which is way confusing. But if your opponent has fast science to make each Exhibition take 10 turns - that's 80 turns spent Exhibitioning, assuming a best case with no interruptions and always-consecutive setup. That's crazy - the other player will win some kind of victory in that time. The other player has defended successfully, but it's only successful because of the map size, not their skill.

counterpoint said:
Right. And even though (if we do what I suggested above) there's no benefit for a science-defender to capture a city mid-exhibition, there is definitely incentive to capture the city (or liberate one) before.

Yeah, liberating at strategic times is very valuable. If you know that the Science civ has Exhibitioned at (X - 1) / X living civs, liberating another civ far away from the final target could potentially cause the Science player to need to do a lot of extra walking.

counterpoint said:
Right. It's there for the crazies, but simplified for the lazies.

Well said!

counterpoint said:
OK, next affront to consistency: "After the Breaking." Shouldn't this be called "Era After the Breaking" or something like that?

"After Breaking Era"?

counterpoint said:
Right. Good point. But if we do decide to make the assassination a more drastic negative event for the tower - more than just a re-vote - then using them mid-LB would definitely be a viable way to cripple one of the strongest Light forces. I think this is fine.

They can use bloodknives for the Turning. After all, it's not something that'll happen every game, so I don't worry that it'll be viewed as some horrible game breaking thing.

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
What if the Gray Men showed up periodically to be assigned a mission? Like, they weren't listed permanently on the spy page. Maybe they hopped from civ to civ. Or, even weirder, what if it was a "unit" bought with Faith or something, that you bought and spent once to assassinate somebody. Or, even weirder, they were produced like GP?

I think a unit would run into problems with stealth and map placement. We could have Grey Men move through their own map layer, like we intend with Dreamers, I suppose. I'm not sure, I think I prefer them being part of the existing Espionage system.

My only concern with them appearing occasionally is that they would be seen very infrequently by the player then. Only when they picked Shadow, only after the LB starts, and then only at specific times/intervals. I think to make them worth adding (flavor wise I think they are) it's good if they're part of each Shadow players' arsenal.

counterpoint said:
This is really tricky. I like what you're suggesting in theory, but it does feel a little odd to me that the mechanisms for generating "Culture" would also generate this "Threads" yield. Buildings, Brown Sisters, etc... I don't know. There is something compelling about it, though.

Also, it seems a little weird to me that this would cause your borders to expand, but I could probably talk myself into that.

Part of me feels like we have it flipped, and "Threads" or "Pattern" should be the Tourism equivalent, and "Prestige" should be the base one. This makes the borders expansion thing make more sense as a result of the yield. And then, the hotels/airports equivalent (don't remember which building turns culture into tourism) would be some sort of unusual building - something that causes your society to effect the Pattern itself. I can definitely see the appeal in this - affecting the pattern does seem sort of epic, so having it be the thing that turns a civ to be under your influence does make some mechanical sense. But, then again, maybe it is a little lame to think of a civ in 4000 BC generating Prestige, and someone in the Age of the High King *not* generating Threads, is weird.... Definitely pros and cons to this from a "feel" perspective. Oh, and all of our previous posts would get really confusing (with Prestige now meaning something else).

In any case, either of these is compelling first and foremost because it allows us to integrate one of the central cosmological components of WoT into the game. That said, I do feel like if we do so, we have to take it a slight step further: it has to matter in some other way besides just what culture/prestige already do. Maybe after a certain amount of Thread build-up, you generate a Ta'veren GP? Maybe it has special unusual effects and can only be generated this way (what these effects are would depend on whether "Threads" replaces culture, which makes it an all-the-time thing, or Tourism, which makes it a late-game thing).

It doesn't have to be that, but I do feel like if we're going out of our way to include Pattern Manipulation as a yield of all things, there should be *some* manifestation of it, even if it's mostly incidental.

As far as names, I do agree that Weaves is out for its channeling connections. I can see the benefits of both Pattern and Threads. Not sure which I like better. Threads makes more mechanical sense in the lore - you're spinning threads and directing them. But Pattern is sort of cooler sounding, and somehow feels more meaningful. Not sure.

I know I suggested it, but I think Threads sounds kind of ridiculous. It's the colloquialism for clothing connotation that gets me, which is so very un-WoT. It's fine when written in context in prose, but just in isolation as a yield it looks really strange.

About producing the yield (I'll call it Pattern for brevity, as it's our other candidate), buildings that produce Pattern-altering effects seems quite non-canonical. There are some Pattern-affecting "wonders" in the WoT storyline, but we need to be able to produce the yield from "normal" buildings (like museums) as well. That sounds like something that could've been built in the Age of Legends, but not in the period After Breaking -> Tarmon Gai'don.

I think the flavor of Pattern as border expansion makes sense though. It's a literal representation of your empire's affect on the land, the very fabric of the world and therefore the Pattern. Especially since Third Age Westlands has a lot of unclaimed territory and the borders of most countries are quite hazy.

I can see what you mean about swapping Prestige/Pattern around, but I can see flavor justifications for doing it either way.

Also completely agree that this lets would let us integrate the core WoT cosmology more - the Pattern itself is relatively unrepresented in our mechanics thus far.

One problem with not using Culture as the yield is that Culture is a very overloaded term that means a lot of different things in different places in CiV, but is the unifying blanket for this victory type. Flavor-wise, it easily encapsulates all of the Archaeology, Artwork, Music, Writing, influence, etc. that it mechanically represents. Do we rename the Culture victory into the Pattern victory?

Pattern could be an effective blanket term though - it's the fabric of the universe, so it applies to most things.

counterpoint said:
So, is your final evaluation that they are OK to exist, then? Or do we need to change one of them?

I do think if we keep them as they are, we should go out of our way to name them in a way as distinct as possible. Which of "Stories" "Legends" "Epics" and "Histories" feels the most distinct from Prophecy?

I feel like we shouldn't make a call on this until we decide about the nature of how we might change Culture. The flavor of what the GWs do/are changes drastically if go for Pattern instead of Culture, even if they're mechanically the same.

Taken in isolation, I think "Histories" sounds most distinct, but "Legends" is a close second, and I prefer that one.

counterpoint said:
Yeah. Exactly. Things like Sea Folk Porcelain (make in Tremalking by the Amayar).

I'm not worried about luxuries so much - it's not like you "mine" tapestries and porcelain. I think most of our luxuries can be carried over from CiV. If we want to swap out a few, we should be able to use things like "Tabac" and "Oilfish" and such things. In any case, here I think we're talking man-made things.

So, as far as naming them..... hmm... I really don't know that we're going to find anything much more interesting. I don't think RJ really gave us anything here.... It could be worse - it's not like "Art" or "Music" are all so compelling.

Porcelain is already a resource in base CiV though (through Mercantile CSes), and as Sea Folk porcelain is such a defining, recognizable "man-made" luxury in WoT, I feel like that locks these kinds of things in as resources.

In terms of resources (this is probably a separate conversation from culture) I can see Tabac, Oilfish, Olives, and Zemai being resources, just off the top of my head. I'd be tempted to make Zemai a bonus resources (like Cows and Bananas), with Tabac, Oilfish, and Olives being luxury.

Back to Culture. I think Art and Music are relatively compelling though - they represent huge and distinct portions of expression. (Taking Art to be painting, again.)

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I guess I don't feel a strong reason to do so, and it would create a bunch more balancing to be done.

Sounds good, let's leave that the same.

counterpoint said:
first, a question on BNW: GWs and Artifacts all use nationality, but they don't interact, right? There aren't any theming bonuses that rely on you having a GWoA and Artifact together, so... it doesn't matter, right?

I ask this because the GWs operate with a field of relatively few options (just created by civs) while the Artifacts are way more - 36 as you said (potentially). If they *do* interact in some way, that makes this ratio important. I don't think it does, but I thought I'd ask.

Actually, Museums and the Louvre care. Museums give you a better theming bonuses if you use both-GWoA or both-Artifact. The Louvre explicitly wants 2 GWoA and 2 Artifacts, all from different civs and different eras.

The existing theming bonus system is very brittle though - so assuming we'll want to do some new stuff, enough will need to be rewritten under the hood that we could drop the Louvre-style theming bonus. Still, if we have two GW types that share a slot, it seems a shame to not have them crossover in any circumstances.

counterpoint said:
If my assumption is correct, that means we could leave the GWs as Nationality-linked, but make the artifacts some different variable, right?

So as far as the AoL civs/cities... Yeah, the Wiki shows 9 different ones. Since "Paaran Disen" is supposedly the greatest one, and I've never heard of it, this is emblematic of the problem. These things were name-dropped in random Lews Therin rants or Forsaken prologues, and never reinforced for the reader.

I'm thinking that the simplest way for us to go with the "nationality" of something is to go with Material. I do think we could pretty easily come up with 36 potential construction materials, so... Doing it now to make sure it's possible:

1) Gold
2) Silver
3) Bronze
4) Steel
5) Iron
6) Copper
7) Platinum
8) Ruby
9) Sapphire
10) Diamond
11) Emerald
12) Garnet
13) Pearl
14) Amethyst
15) Topaz
16) Opal
17) Jade
18) Lead
19) Crystal
20) Coral
21) Amber
22) Ivory
23) Lapis Lazuli
24) Brass
25) Wood
26) Jet
27) Palladium
28) Sandstone
29) Marble
30) Clay
31) Tin
32) Obsidian
33) Bamboo
34) Bone
35) Granite
36) Limestone

OK, so this works if we are using artifacts to be literally artifacts. The goal was to prevent them from blurring too much with crafts, so I decided not to include things like Wool, Lace, porcelain, etc.

The list above could easily be used to make "artifacts" (e.g. Obsidian Mask or Crystal goblet) or even theoretically AoL stuff (e.g. Ivory Quill or Gold Graphics Processor).

If we decide materials blurs too much with crafts... hmmm... not sure what else to do. Color?

As far as the Age of it... I'm not sure I know how to replace that, if we go with the AoL type. Like, we can't do "from the Ancient Age", so we'd need yet another variable (with fewer variations).

I think the outcome of all of this is also extremely dependent on Culture vs Pattern. What these should be depends on the flavor of what they're generating.

Another thing that I've thought of about this - a lot of (but not all) theming bonuses don't care about particular nationality, only that they're foreign. That's because it's so much easier to get GWs from your own civ from your GPs and foreign artifacts can only be found by sending Archaeologists abroad or trading for/capturing the GWs. I think if we do move away from nationality, we should move away wholesale and change all 3.5 GW types to use the same classification system.

If we go for Pattern, I'm liking the idea of Age of Legends relics that subtly affect the Pattern in some way.

counterpoint said:
Well, if they're AoL ones.... I'm bringing up that previously-mentioned idea that time is a wheel. Could we somehow use the previously played game (or completed game) to somehow "inspire" their placement? This is crazy, right?

I think it's crazy, but I'm not totally sure. This is one of those things that I'm not 100% sure is technically possible. Parts of the system that triggers loading a savegame, we don't have the source for. As far as I know, we have all of the source for the stuff that actually reads the file and it may be possible to hook up another "top" to that to manually trigger loading a different save just to harvest its data.

Given that we need to support first-time players with no prior saves and that the nature of what we're placing (artifact sites), it's a lot of work for limited payoff. Still, it is something that is very WoT. I'd like to shelve this as a feature we could add on later, and potentially have it interact with more parts of the game than antiquity sites. But I don't think it's a priority for the mod to be playable.

The feature will also be more useful later on in development when the mod is more stable. Early on, savegame compatibility is going to be fun even for reloading files to actually play. Someone would likely need to be locked into a specific version or a specific range of versions for multiple playthroughs to see any benefit from this feature.

counterpoint said:
Otherwise, it could be anything, right? The site of a unit killed, but also a barb camp cleared, a ruin cleared, etc. It's already pretty arbitrary, so couldn't it just be arbitrary? Like put one at the midpoint between two cities, created at the moment a treaty is signed, or a trade route is established, etc. This is much more of an under-the-hood thing, so I don't have strong opinions on it. Your population density thing could work too. Also, spawn near cities where GP were produced (or Ta'veren?)

I think unit killed and barb camp cleared are already possible triggers (as is city razed, apparently). Yeah, the placement of these could be totally arbitrary, but if we use Age of Legends as the flavor for what the artifacts are, I don't think early-game actions should particularly affect their placement. That lends itself more to being placed by the mapscript that generates the map (like resources). Then again, will players notice that distinction?

counterpoint said:
Monument is a good word, too, though it has Civ allusions. Memorial. Milestone.

Also, it depends - are these things generating Prestige, or are they generating Pattern? (depends on the discussion above)? Those things all have to do with Prestige and Culture. Pattern... might need something weirder. No idea what though!

Also depends on the discussion above! Possibly, we could freeze these sections temporarily (for a few posts) and have a focused discussion on Pattern vs Culture and potential alternatives?

It is a shame that Monument has its CiV definition, otherwise that would have been a really good one. Memorial seems more related specifically to honoring the dead. Milestone feels too modern for WoT.

counterpoint said:
I think I prefer historian, but if we elect to name the GW Historian, let's call these guys Chronicler.

Sounds good.

counterpoint said:
ugh, yeah. No idea how we'd change it, though it does favor the player big time. How does it work in multiplayer? I've only ever played multiplayer co-op games.

Interesting, I've played a few LAN multiplayer games but GW trading has never come up. Someone is usually going for a Domination victory and that becomes the focus.

counterpoint said:
Sorry, that's not what I meant. I was unclear. Not talking about the yields themselves.

I mean that alignment would provide a bonus to Prestige vs. a player. Like, if you are their alignment, you would be more influential, or less if their opponent. Exactly like Ideology, right? Or religion. This makes sense to me. A shadow civ shouldn't be as influential over a light civ.

Ah, right, I see! Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

counterpoint said:
Right. I was talking about this above, forgetting that you'd mentioned it here!

So, the notion of a special "culture" GP could work here. The more "threads" you have, the more influence you have over the pattern: thus, Ta'veren are born. A Ta'veren could do weird stuff like increase positive yields or somehow cause good things to happen. Otherwise, yeah... not sure how to integrate the whole "Threads of the Pattern" thing into the gameplay.

Flavor-wise, ta'veren are supposed to create balanced extremes of Pattern variances, right? So both good and bad things. But mechanically we don't want to punish the player for doing well. Still, general "randomness" is very hard to model in CiV because we don't have detail at the level seen in the books (people falling down stairs and being fine, marriages, collapsing handrails, etc).

counterpoint said:
Now that you've introduced the idea of the "Pattern" into things, to me that seems like the more worthwhile "extra thing" to add. The Style thing was really me grasping at straws for something that felt unique. If we can do something nice with the Pattern stuff, this is better. Plus, that leaves us all the flavor of the Styles to use as our Crafts.

Also, I too don't like adding another religion-like mechanic.

I'm not sure how we can avoid the religion-likeness without making the spread too predictable though. And if we introduce randomness to make it unpredictable (which makes flavor sense with it being Pattern), then it detracts from player agency. Some people get bonuses and others penalties (or at least opportunity cost) by pure chance.

counterpoint said:
I find the idea of an alignment building hilarious. Like, you have a "Tower of Evil" or a "Generosity Granary" or something. Glad this is working out.

These so need to be actual buildings.

A quick update on this, I went to do the Faith generation penalty/bonus based on Alignment and got caught up in a lot of terrible Firaxis code, which was making a relatively simple modifier much more complicated than it needed to be. That led to this change, which rips out all of Firaxis' ridiculous Faith-specific APIs and makes Faith (at least in the majority of cases) use Firaxis' own existing systems for Food/Production/Gold. (It boggles my mind why Firaxis didn't do it this way in the first place.)

In doing that, I found that Firaxis' main Food/Production/Gold system had already solved the specific problem I was tripping over (showing modifiers to the user as yield numbers without having to recalculate total faith generation multiple times in the process) and Firaxis had just chosen to ignore their own code. Oh well! It's better now (and easier to add Faith-related bonuses to most things too) and adding the Alignment Faith modifier will be a relatively simple change. (I'm off to do that once I'm finished here!)

EDIT: So Firaxis actually solved a subtly different problem with their existing code. And now the Lua for the UI is terrible. So much duplication! This is much more complicated than it needs to be.

counterpoint said:
OK, so yeah, we forgot about this one.

I'm actually thinking that this era isn't a good one to look for what happened... it's nothing interesting.

Maybe we focus on its inactivity? "Era of Stability" "Era of Balance." That kind of thing.

The other way to look is to use Civ's model, and go for the technology progress - like how the Renaissance is named.. I have no idea what techs will pop up in this era (it's the analogue to our Modern, which is irrelevant of course), but it could be a way to go. Like, if it's appropriate, "Era of Progress" or "Era of Building" or "Era of Discovery" or "Era of Lots of Religious Techs and National Wonders" or whatever. That I suppose we'd have to wait on, though.

Yeah, I'm fine with coming back to this once we know what will be going on technologically at that point in the tech tree. I've left it as ERA_MODERN in the tables for now. If nothing comes of the technology stuff, I'd be happy with "Era of Stability" or something like that too.

counterpoint · Feb 19, 2015

So, incidentally, I was procrastinating today, and did a google search for "civ wheel of time mod," which I hadn't done since that same search had led me here.

anyways, I found http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=376497&page=3, in which you post about abandoning your WoT mod... in 2011. Wow. So, to that I wonder at 1) how long you've been working on this thing, and 2) what inspired to get back into it after abandoning it...

S3rgeus said:
I'm cool with this, yeah, it's a good point that there should be some weakening of the Tower when the assassination succeeds. No Edicts for 30 turns sounds good. Do we also want to affect the influence of players in any way? Decrease players' influence who have influence with the Ajah the Amyrlin was from? (We could "shrink" the late-Amyrlin Ajah without changing the relative positions of the players inside.)

Hmmm.... interesting. Well, I'd say that a "deposition" of an Amyrlin should probably somewhat weaken her ajah, but an assassination should probably hit the whole tower, in some capacity, right? I could be on board with what you've described, but I also could imagine a hit of this kind happening to every ajah. It wouldn't affect relative influence, but it would potentially knock civs out of friend status, etc.

And yeah, no edicts sounds cool too.

S3rgeus said:
Razing could also occur due to civs losing their original capital.

I'm still unconvinced about Exhibitions taking time. It feels like we're just delaying the Science player, rather than changing what they have to consider. And as you mention below, it creates problems for small maps. For the defending players, it's some additional warning that the Science player is near to winning, but it doesn't really change the ways they can interact with that Science player. They can snipe bonuses, but as we mentioned before, the bonuses aren't going to be huge, so the cost of taking the city would often be higher.

If the Exhibitions take time, I think they'd have to wait, otherwise we'd need different rule sets for different map sizes, which is way confusing. But if your opponent has fast science to make each Exhibition take 10 turns - that's 80 turns spent Exhibitioning, assuming a best case with no interruptions and always-consecutive setup. That's crazy - the other player will win some kind of victory in that time. The other player has defended successfully, but it's only successful because of the map size, not their skill.

I'm happy to abandon the concept. I thought of it as a way to potentially add some new strategic elements, but if those aren't worth the costs, let's do away with it.

Just thought of another, low-impact option. What if a Civ's science production gave them a chance at spotting envoys at a healthy distance? Like, maybe your science/turn yielded a perentage chance to discover the wherabouts of an envoy, or notice when one has been produced or something. In other words, help enable your defense. Don't know what else to suggest.

S3rgeus said:
"After Breaking Era"?

I guess I'm just sort of bugged by all of them being "Era of X" except for this one... "Era of the Breaking" is problematic, though, since that sounds like it refers to the Time of Madness. If at all possible, though, I'd like to try to be consistent.

S3rgeus said:
I think a unit would run into problems with stealth and map placement. We could have Grey Men move through their own map layer, like we intend with Dreamers, I suppose. I'm not sure, I think I prefer them being part of the existing Espionage system.

My only concern with them appearing occasionally is that they would be seen very infrequently by the player then. Only when they picked Shadow, only after the LB starts, and then only at specific times/intervals. I think to make them worth adding (flavor wise I think they are) it's good if they're part of each Shadow players' arsenal.

I should clarify that I didn't mean a unit in the literal sense. Like, you'd buy him with faith or be given him, but then he would immediately show up in the spy window, not on the map. The faith-purchase thing seemed to make sense as I seemed to remember people potentially buying some shadowspawn with faith (understanding that most shadow civs would have lower amounts of faith).

As far as frequency, I don't see it as a problem if a player gets one opportunity per shadow game to wield the Gray Man.

S3rgeus said:
I know I suggested it, but I think Threads sounds kind of ridiculous. It's the colloquialism for clothing connotation that gets me, which is so very un-WoT. It's fine when written in context in prose, but just in isolation as a yield it looks really strange.

Oy, I wasn't even thinking of that definition of it.... yeah, awful. Pattern is the way to go, for now.

S3rgeus said:
About producing the yield (I'll call it Pattern for brevity, as it's our other candidate), buildings that produce Pattern-altering effects seems quite non-canonical. There are some Pattern-affecting "wonders" in the WoT storyline, but we need to be able to produce the yield from "normal" buildings (like museums) as well. That sounds like something that could've been built in the Age of Legends, but not in the period After Breaking -> Tarmon Gai'don.

I'm actually a little confused as to whether you have a problem with the hotel/airport "conversion" buildings, or ANY "culture buildings" that produce Pattern (i.e., an amphitheater equivalent). To me, both are problematic from the perspective of the canon, but I do think either could be rationalized as creating things "that are important", thus affecting the pull of your civ on the Pattern. If a GW could be said to affect the pattern, why not a monument? I'm not totally sold, but it could be rationalized.

Now, the counter argument to that would be to point out that conquests, great diplomacy, etc. would all help you affect the pattern and... that's a good point. Crazy Idea alert: we could, in fact, not have Pattern replace culture, instead having a new value, "Pattern" that was a kind of sum total of ALL your yields and your progress - this could be, essentially, your score. It could just sit there and look pretty, or it could cause stuff to happen (see: taveren, bubbles of evil, etc.).

S3rgeus said:
One problem with not using Culture as the yield is that Culture is a very overloaded term that means a lot of different things in different places in CiV, but is the unifying blanket for this victory type. Flavor-wise, it easily encapsulates all of the Archaeology, Artwork, Music, Writing, influence, etc. that it mechanically represents. Do we rename the Culture victory into the Pattern victory?

Pattern could be an effective blanket term though - it's the fabric of the universe, so it applies to most things.

Right, this is a good point. People would undoubtedly still think of it as the culture victory, regardless of what things happen.

In short, I'm definitely of two minds about all of this, which is lame because it is really rather important. Part of me wants to just keep it Culture/Prestige for simplicity, and part of me wants to go all in on Pattern/Prestige or Prestige/Pattern. I will say, if we do decide to go with Pattern, we need to pretty much just accept it, warts and all - there are guaranteed to be some weird things, no matter what we do.

I suppose there's till perhaps some more to consider, but essentially I'm willing to follow your lead on this one... I'm having trouble making a commitment.

The Pattern as a representation of score thing is interesting to me, though. Though perhaps not that useful.

S3rgeus said:
I feel like we shouldn't make a call on this until we decide about the nature of how we might change Culture. The flavor of what the GWs do/are changes drastically if go for Pattern instead of Culture, even if they're mechanically the same.

Taken in isolation, I think "Histories" sounds most distinct, but "Legends" is a close second, and I prefer that one.

ok, let's hold this thought until we figure out what our version of culture is. Though I will say, we should probably go where the flavor is... We have stories, and prophecies, and crafts, and stuff like that from the books to draw from for content. That in and of itself should count a lot for our decision as to what to go with here. It might be ok to stretch believability a bit for this reason.

S3rgeus said:
Porcelain is already a resource in base CiV though (through Mercantile CSes), and as Sea Folk porcelain is such a defining, recognizable "man-made" luxury in WoT, I feel like that locks these kinds of things in as resources.

In terms of resources (this is probably a separate conversation from culture) I can see Tabac, Oilfish, Olives, and Zemai being resources, just off the top of my head. I'd be tempted to make Zemai a bonus resources (like Cows and Bananas), with Tabac, Oilfish, and Olives being luxury.

Right, forgot about porcelain.... But still, that isn't a luxury resource you see sitting on the ground, right? It's one thing to create a CS-only lux that is essentially a luxury in mechanics only, and another to have it be actually "mineable." You are right that porcelain is flavorfully very well defined in WoT. Sung Wood would also fall into this category.

Your unique resources do sound good. Had to look up zemai. Definitely seems like it'd be bonus, since it's apparently corn-like. Not sure what else to suggest.

Other than those... were we going to consider "Cuendillar hordes" or something like that? Or even "angreal hordes", that kind of thing? We will be needing some new strategic resources, since we're not likely to use anything past coal (or even coal, really).

There's also the ones that *don't* make sense to consider using in the mod. Bison seems a little too "'murica" for WoT (should we replace it with a Seanchan animal or something?),and something like truffles seems a bit too random, since I dont think anything like them is mentioned once in the series (why the heck do truffles get to be a resource in Civ anyways?) Some of the spices also seem a little iffy, though they're probably fine.

S3rgeus said:
Back to Culture. I think Art and Music are relatively compelling though - they represent huge and distinct portions of expression. (Taking Art to be painting, again.)

obviously, art and music are compelling. I simply mean they aren't so compelling or inspiring as names. You know, dry and bland. Just like the word "History" or "craft."

S3rgeus said:
Actually, Museums and the Louvre care. Museums give you a better theming bonuses if you use both-GWoA or both-Artifact. The Louvre explicitly wants 2 GWoA and 2 Artifacts, all from different civs and different eras.

The existing theming bonus system is very brittle though - so assuming we'll want to do some new stuff, enough will need to be rewritten under the hood that we could drop the Louvre-style theming bonus. Still, if we have two GW types that share a slot, it seems a shame to not have them crossover in any circumstances.

bah... that's what I was worried of. And I was so happy with my list of materials! Definitely starting to come back around to not wanting to change so much of this stuff.

S3rgeus said:
I think the outcome of all of this is also extremely dependent on Culture vs Pattern. What these should be depends on the flavor of what they're generating.

Another thing that I've thought of about this - a lot of (but not all) theming bonuses don't care about particular nationality, only that they're foreign. That's because it's so much easier to get GWs from your own civ from your GPs and foreign artifacts can only be found by sending Archaeologists abroad or trading for/capturing the GWs. I think if we do move away from nationality, we should move away wholesale and change all 3.5 GW types to use the same classification system.

If we go for Pattern, I'm liking the idea of Age of Legends relics that subtly affect the Pattern in some way.

OK, all of this definitely makes me want to crawl back into our shell of Nationalities. It seems like coming up with a generic signifier - one that will be weighted the same way as home-civ/foreign-civ will be essentially impossible. It doesn't get any more generic than the "bulding materials" I listed previously, so I'm guessing there won't be a good answer. My vote is currently for preserving Nationality.

If that's the case, then that does sadly make the AoL thing a non-starter for our Artifacts, even though it would have fit well with Pattern, as you mentioned. There's just the aforementioned problem with the Nationality. Idea: What if the AoL ruins were simply the Ancient Ruins you find early game. That makes sense, right?

If we're really hoping for something super different from Antiquity Sites, we could cannibalize one of our proposed GW types - maybe you search ruins and find Prophecies, or Legends. That could work. I'm not sure I love the idea though, since to me we should probably use the best flavor on the "best" stuff (true GWs, not artifacts)

Again, throwing out something like "cuendillar artifacts" or something like that - something that's at least WoT-themed (though, strictly speaking, such things would also be necessarily AoL technology...)

S3rgeus said:
I think it's crazy, but I'm not totally sure. This is one of those things that I'm not 100% sure is technically possible. Parts of the system that triggers loading a savegame, we don't have the source for. As far as I know, we have all of the source for the stuff that actually reads the file and it may be possible to hook up another "top" to that to manually trigger loading a different save just to harvest its data.

Given that we need to support first-time players with no prior saves and that the nature of what we're placing (artifact sites), it's a lot of work for limited payoff. Still, it is something that is very WoT. I'd like to shelve this as a feature we could add on later, and potentially have it interact with more parts of the game than antiquity sites. But I don't think it's a priority for the mod to be playable.

The feature will also be more useful later on in development when the mod is more stable. Early on, savegame compatibility is going to be fun even for reloading files to actually play. Someone would likely need to be locked into a specific version or a specific range of versions for multiple playthroughs to see any benefit from this feature.

All good points. Filed away under "to do in sequel."

S3rgeus said:
I think unit killed and barb camp cleared are already possible triggers (as is city razed, apparently). Yeah, the placement of these could be totally arbitrary, but if we use Age of Legends as the flavor for what the artifacts are, I don't think early-game actions should particularly affect their placement. That lends itself more to being placed by the mapscript that generates the map (like resources). Then again, will players notice that distinction?

I think players won't notice the distinction, which is why I'm tempted to either leave it as it is, or totally just do whatever we want. I don't think people trace a given Site back to the incident that spawned its creation, so we could be arbitrary about this.

S3rgeus said:
Also depends on the discussion above! Possibly, we could freeze these sections temporarily (for a few posts) and have a focused discussion on Pattern vs Culture and potential alternatives?

It is a shame that Monument has its CiV definition, otherwise that would have been a really good one. Memorial seems more related specifically to honoring the dead. Milestone feels too modern for WoT.

Yeah, tabled.

S3rgeus said:
Flavor-wise, ta'veren are supposed to create balanced extremes of Pattern variances, right? So both good and bad things. But mechanically we don't want to punish the player for doing well. Still, general "randomness" is very hard to model in CiV because we don't have detail at the level seen in the books (people falling down stairs and being fine, marriages, collapsing handrails, etc).

Right, a Ta'veren's powers would be stupid, if taken literally. Because, as you say, it's a bunch of tiny stuff... and that stuff all tends to "even out" in the long run (one wedding, one accidental death, etc.).

we could have this effect the production of the "WoT type" of GPs, instead of or in addition to... whatever we were doing before (Wisdoms was one thing. If you think about it, the weirdos like Min and Perrin and Hurin are so rare they probably only pop up when there's some major pattern weirdness going on. Of course, if Pattern=culture, then that's yet another GP type tied to culture.

What if Pattern awesomeness made one less susceptible to Bubbles of Evil, or something like that? Some direct manifestation of the "fate is on your side" thing.

S3rgeus said:
I'm not sure how we can avoid the religion-likeness without making the spread too predictable though. And if we introduce randomness to make it unpredictable (which makes flavor sense with it being Pattern), then it detracts from player agency. Some people get bonuses and others penalties (or at least opportunity cost) by pure chance.

yes, I no longer like this idea.

S3rgeus said:
A quick update on this, I went to do the Faith generation penalty/bonus based on Alignment and got caught up in a lot of terrible Firaxis code, which was making a relatively simple modifier much more complicated than it needed to be. That led to this change, which rips out all of Firaxis' ridiculous Faith-specific APIs and makes Faith (at least in the majority of cases) use Firaxis' own existing systems for Food/Production/Gold. (It boggles my mind why Firaxis didn't do it this way in the first place.)

In doing that, I found that Firaxis' main Food/Production/Gold system had already solved the specific problem I was tripping over (showing modifiers to the user as yield numbers without having to recalculate total faith generation multiple times in the process) and Firaxis had just chosen to ignore their own code. Oh well! It's better now (and easier to add Faith-related bonuses to most things too) and adding the Alignment Faith modifier will be a relatively simple change. (I'm off to do that once I'm finished here!)

EDIT: So Firaxis actually solved a subtly different problem with their existing code. And now the Lua for the UI is terrible. So much duplication! This is much more complicated than it needs to be.

first off, so i'm surprised to hear about so much inefficient code in the main game. Doesn't Firaxis have people that are presumably good at their jobs? Were there problems with turnover, or too many cooks in the kitchen or something? Different teams doing different sections?

I suppose part of this must have been because of when Faith was added, right? Like, the G&K team didn't want to mess with the existing stuff, so just grafted faith on in some weird place....

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm fine with coming back to this once we know what will be going on technologically at that point in the tech tree. I've left it as ERA_MODERN in the tables for now. If nothing comes of the technology stuff, I'd be happy with "Era of Stability" or something like that too.

OK, let's come back to it, then.

S3rgeus · Feb 19, 2015

counterpoint said:
So, incidentally, I was procrastinating today, and did a google search for "civ wheel of time mod," which I hadn't done since that same search had led me here.

anyways, I found http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=376497&page=3, in which you post about abandoning your WoT mod... in 2011. Wow. So, to that I wonder at 1) how long you've been working on this thing, and 2) what inspired to get back into it after abandoning it...

Interesting, I'd forgotten about that topic!

A WoT mod for CiV is something I've wanted to do pretty much since CiV came out and I enjoyed it so much. (Far and away my most played game on Steam. Possibly highest individual hours of any one game, though it loses to Pokemon in aggregate.) I've been working on it very on and off though - a concerted effort for a few months early on in this topic's history (and slightly before) but then I moved away from it to other projects. It's been full steam ahead since you joined the team though, and that was a big part of what was missing before, overarching design and an avenue to discuss the pros and cons of *what to actually change and how* for the mod.

I abandoned the mod back in 2011 (this was before G&K) because Firaxis had yet to publish the C++ source code and our only ways of making changes were XML/SQL for database-related changes, and Lua, which was mostly targeted at UI but could be used to make some gameplay changes too. (A lot of very impressive mods are Lua-only.) But the scope of the changes I wanted to make for WoTMod weren't possible with just Lua, or were at least tremendously difficult due to limitations in the way the game's core code worked. Now, with the C++ source available, barring some graphical limitations and very high level "game management" stuff (some pregame data, loading saves), from a gameplay perspective, we can basically do anything we want. The release of that source code brought me back to the mod again for the session that answered question 1.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm.... interesting. Well, I'd say that a "deposition" of an Amyrlin should probably somewhat weaken her ajah, but an assassination should probably hit the whole tower, in some capacity, right? I could be on board with what you've described, but I also could imagine a hit of this kind happening to every ajah. It wouldn't affect relative influence, but it would potentially knock civs out of friend status, etc.

Yeah, I'm totally on board with this. Leaving the relative influences the same but reducing the total value for all Ajahs could cause several players to drop out of range of some of their bonuses and weakens the Tower overall. Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
I'm happy to abandon the concept. I thought of it as a way to potentially add some new strategic elements, but if those aren't worth the costs, let's do away with it.

Just thought of another, low-impact option. What if a Civ's science production gave them a chance at spotting envoys at a healthy distance? Like, maybe your science/turn yielded a perentage chance to discover the wherabouts of an envoy, or notice when one has been produced or something. In other words, help enable your defense. Don't know what else to suggest.

Cool, let's drop Exhibitions taking time.

Spotting Envoys is an interesting one - that definitely gives the civ a defensive advantage. It sounds like something that should be associated with spies and such, but I'm not sure exactly how. (Ideally the player would want to see where the Envoy is going - spies have an easy way to see where they're built, but not where they're headed to.)

We could highlight foreign Envoys at a distance based on your science output, that sounds quite reasonable. I can see the flavor justification of that being your people are well informed and have knowledge of such a vast new Innovation being moved across the map?

counterpoint said:
I guess I'm just sort of bugged by all of them being "Era of X" except for this one... "Era of the Breaking" is problematic, though, since that sounds like it refers to the Time of Madness. If at all possible, though, I'd like to try to be consistent.

We can get tantalizingly close with "Era After the Breaking"

. That way they all at least start with "Era"?

counterpoint said:
I should clarify that I didn't mean a unit in the literal sense. Like, you'd buy him with faith or be given him, but then he would immediately show up in the spy window, not on the map. The faith-purchase thing seemed to make sense as I seemed to remember people potentially buying some shadowspawn with faith (understanding that most shadow civs would have lower amounts of faith).

As far as frequency, I don't see it as a problem if a player gets one opportunity per shadow game to wield the Gray Man.

Ah, ok! I can totally see the Grey Man being something a Shadow player can purchase with faith to "unlock" it within their espionage window. That way players who aren't too enthused by it can ignore it, but it can be a cool feature for anyone who has a reason to use one. Are we thinking they're one-use-only or you buy them for a GP-like faith cost and then keep them for the rest of the LB/game?

counterpoint said:
I'm actually a little confused as to whether you have a problem with the hotel/airport "conversion" buildings, or ANY "culture buildings" that produce Pattern (i.e., an amphitheater equivalent). To me, both are problematic from the perspective of the canon, but I do think either could be rationalized as creating things "that are important", thus affecting the pull of your civ on the Pattern. If a GW could be said to affect the pattern, why not a monument? I'm not totally sold, but it could be rationalized.

Now, the counter argument to that would be to point out that conquests, great diplomacy, etc. would all help you affect the pattern and... that's a good point. Crazy Idea alert: we could, in fact, not have Pattern replace culture, instead having a new value, "Pattern" that was a kind of sum total of ALL your yields and your progress - this could be, essentially, your score. It could just sit there and look pretty, or it could cause stuff to happen (see: taveren, bubbles of evil, etc.).

...

The Pattern as a representation of score thing is interesting to me, though. Though perhaps not that useful.

Ah, ok, I was thinking that Pattern-affecting buildings were more in the realm of ta'veren-like effects enchanted into physical objects. But using it as a representation of a civ's "pull" on the Pattern makes sense.

Related question to the Pattern-as-score bonuses - are ta'veren distinct from the WoT GP types? We've discussed both before, but I'm not sure if we put them together. It seems to me that all GPs are effectively ta'veren, the WoT ones just reflect specific characters or known abilities from the books.

I've got some thoughts on bubbles of evil being redirected by Pattern later in the post. I think it would be a neat thing to add if we have a good usage for it, but we'd need a strongly defined purpose and set of bonuses for it, I think, to warrant keeping track of all these aggregate scores.

counterpoint said:
Right, this is a good point. People would undoubtedly still think of it as the culture victory, regardless of what things happen.

In short, I'm definitely of two minds about all of this, which is lame because it is really rather important. Part of me wants to just keep it Culture/Prestige for simplicity, and part of me wants to go all in on Pattern/Prestige or Prestige/Pattern. I will say, if we do decide to go with Pattern, we need to pretty much just accept it, warts and all - there are guaranteed to be some weird things, no matter what we do.

I suppose there's till perhaps some more to consider, but essentially I'm willing to follow your lead on this one... I'm having trouble making a commitment.

...

bah... that's what I was worried of. And I was so happy with my list of materials! Definitely starting to come back around to not wanting to change so much of this stuff.

...

OK, all of this definitely makes me want to crawl back into our shell of Nationalities. It seems like coming up with a generic signifier - one that will be weighted the same way as home-civ/foreign-civ will be essentially impossible. It doesn't get any more generic than the "bulding materials" I listed previously, so I'm guessing there won't be a good answer. My vote is currently for preserving Nationality.

All of this makes me think that the culture victory is mechanically teetering on a peak and changing one part of it unravels the whole thing. I think we're both converging toward the same sentiment - that we can leave the culture victory largely unchanged.

While Pattern is an attractive alternative to culture, like you've said, we'd need to commit to it 100% and I don't think we want to do that quite yet.

So, I propose we stick to the Culture/Prestige approach that we've referenced thus far in the thread, leaving the core mechanics of the culture victory the same as BNW.

Absolute worst case for this approach is that we later decide that we want to overhaul Culture into Pattern/Prestige or Prestige/Pattern. In that case, we'll need to do the work required to reinvent that system. But if we go ahead with Pattern/Prestige and later decide we preferred the BNW approach - it's a significant amount of work again to extract all of those changes and revert back to the BNW behavior (while preserving the rest of the mod).

counterpoint said:
ok, let's hold this thought until we figure out what our version of culture is. Though I will say, we should probably go where the flavor is... We have stories, and prophecies, and crafts, and stuff like that from the books to draw from for content. That in and of itself should count a lot for our decision as to what to go with here. It might be ok to stretch believability a bit for this reason.

After considering some more, I think I like this division of 3 (Legends, Prophecies, and Crafts). The only remaining question is what GW type comes from Antiquity Sites and which of the above types it shares a slot with. I'll come to that below!

counterpoint said:
Right, forgot about porcelain.... But still, that isn't a luxury resource you see sitting on the ground, right? It's one thing to create a CS-only lux that is essentially a luxury in mechanics only, and another to have it be actually "mineable." You are right that porcelain is flavorfully very well defined in WoT. Sung Wood would also fall into this category.

Very true, Sung Wood makes a good gift from the Stedding CSes.

Also, also, also. Super cool and super inconsequential thought. Since we've gone back to nationalities, if we include porcelain as one of the crafts, we can have a "Trade for Sea Folk Porcelain" achievement!

I love achievements, I think that genuinely sold me on the idea of porcelain as a craft type. :lol:

counterpoint said:
Your unique resources do sound good. Had to look up zemai. Definitely seems like it'd be bonus, since it's apparently corn-like. Not sure what else to suggest.

I mainly remember that one because I'm always fascinated by other writers who come up with good names for things in their stories - it's one of the things I get stuck on often when writing myself! That one's particularly good because it sounds quite foreign and Aiel-like, but "zemai" is an anagram of "maize" - so it's presumably exactly like corn!

counterpoint said:
Other than those... were we going to consider "Cuendillar hordes" or something like that? Or even "angreal hordes", that kind of thing? We will be needing some new strategic resources, since we're not likely to use anything past coal (or even coal, really).

I think we could include Cuendillar as a resource that's on the map, yeah. Most luxury resources are available to be worked from the very-early game - which makes me think that mechanically it should be a strategic resource unlocked towards the end of the tree.

Also, aluminum (by the name "alum") is specifically called out in the series. Elayne owned a significant quantity of it through her family lands (they owned some mining territory in northern Andor, I think) and it was one of the things she was counting on to help finance her efforts during the Succession War. So we could include that - but bizarrely it seems like more of a luxury in WoT? What could use it as a strategic?

counterpoint said:
There's also the ones that *don't* make sense to consider using in the mod. Bison seems a little too "'murica" for WoT (should we replace it with a Seanchan animal or something?),and something like truffles seems a bit too random, since I dont think anything like them is mentioned once in the series (why the heck do truffles get to be a resource in Civ anyways?) Some of the spices also seem a little iffy, though they're probably fine.

Yeah, we can swap out bison and truffles. We should clearly rename Ivory to S'redit. The Seanchan potentially give us Grolm, Lopar, Torm, Corlm, and the various raken (though that may be a UU). Lopar look like they could be approximated by reskinning the pigs from truffles.

counterpoint said:
obviously, art and music are compelling. I simply mean they aren't so compelling or inspiring as names. You know, dry and bland. Just like the word "History" or "craft."

Right, I see what you mean. I didn't mean the actual works themselves, I meant that as names, "art" and "Music" imply all those things immediately. But it's a moot point anyway!

counterpoint said:
If that's the case, then that does sadly make the AoL thing a non-starter for our Artifacts, even though it would have fit well with Pattern, as you mentioned. There's just the aforementioned problem with the Nationality. Idea: What if the AoL ruins were simply the Ancient Ruins you find early game. That makes sense, right?

AoL ruins as the Ancient Ruins makes flavorful sense, but the bonuses contained within those have to be appropriate for the very start of the game - getting players on their feet from a single city and very few units. AoL leftover tech seems like it should make a bigger difference, but then it doesn't necessarily have to.

counterpoint said:
If we're really hoping for something super different from Antiquity Sites, we could cannibalize one of our proposed GW types - maybe you search ruins and find Prophecies, or Legends. That could work. I'm not sure I love the idea though, since to me we should probably use the best flavor on the "best" stuff (true GWs, not artifacts)

Again, throwing out something like "cuendillar artifacts" or something like that - something that's at least WoT-themed (though, strictly speaking, such things would also be necessarily AoL technology...)

So, continuing a bit from above, I think Legends, Prophecies, and Crafts are good choices for the "primary" GW types. This brings us to decide what should be in the Antiquity Sites that are dug up by Archaeologists.

Cuendillar artifacts, ter'angreal, or angreal are tempting, but it's difficult to merge them with a concept of nationality as a differentiator between individual GWs.

One option is to leave them as relatively flavorless "relics" - CiV uses beads and other similar items, likely as a reference to them often popping up in archaeological dig sites relatively often.

And... I'm not sure what else to suggest as another option. :sad:

counterpoint said:
I think players won't notice the distinction, which is why I'm tempted to either leave it as it is, or totally just do whatever we want. I don't think people trace a given Site back to the incident that spawned its creation, so we could be arbitrary about this.

Cool, I'm fine with leaving this how it is. It was only when we started discussing it that I remembered this was how it worked - I've never actually remarked on it in-game.

counterpoint said:
Right, a Ta'veren's powers would be stupid, if taken literally. Because, as you say, it's a bunch of tiny stuff... and that stuff all tends to "even out" in the long run (one wedding, one accidental death, etc.).

we could have this effect the production of the "WoT type" of GPs, instead of or in addition to... whatever we were doing before (Wisdoms was one thing. If you think about it, the weirdos like Min and Perrin and Hurin are so rare they probably only pop up when there's some major pattern weirdness going on. Of course, if Pattern=culture, then that's yet another GP type tied to culture.

What if Pattern awesomeness made one less susceptible to Bubbles of Evil, or something like that? Some direct manifestation of the "fate is on your side" thing.

If we apply this to the notion of Pattern above, where it represents overall score, I can see the flavor sense in this. But we're also rewarding the player who's already ahead and punishing those falling behind, which makes one civ running away with the game more likely.

Affecting the production of WoT GP types could work - it's less of a tangible penalty for the civs falling behind. We've discussed a rew modifiers to the WoT GP rate thus far, though I don't remember them all off hand.

counterpoint said:
first off, so i'm surprised to hear about so much inefficient code in the main game. Doesn't Firaxis have people that are presumably good at their jobs? Were there problems with turnover, or too many cooks in the kitchen or something? Different teams doing different sections?

I suppose part of this must have been because of when Faith was added, right? Like, the G&K team didn't want to mess with the existing stuff, so just grafted faith on in some weird place....

I think you've got it right - the devs didn't want to touch a lot of the base game systems because they already knew it worked. A game like CiV has a stupendous amount of permutations of game states and testing them all is nigh impossible - particularly testing them repeatedly over multiple builds. And it's even worse since CiV is a traditionally slow game, so it takes X hours to play through to certain situations. (Though I'd imagine Firaxis have better tools than they've released in the modding SDK for mocking up games.)

From what I can see, they're relying mostly on manual testing as well, which is terrifying for a Civ-like game. I haven't seen any tests actually in the code. Though they may have elected not to include their tests in the released source code, what we've received doesn't seem very testable anyway. Enormous objects that only work when a whole pile of other stuff has already been initialized. Individual functions that are many hundreds of lines long.

And my favorite bit of Firaxis code (it's all commented out, so doesn't do anything):

Code:

/* JAR  - disabling this catch-all. It takes any non-specialized
          type, gets sizeof(T), then dumps it through a void *
		  producing a raw memory dump of the type in the stream.
		  Disabling this uncovered dozens of probably unknown bugs 
		  in serialization.

                                    ________
                              , -          ``~ ,
                          , -                    - ,
                        ,/                           :,
                     ,?                                 \,
                    /                                    ,}
                  /                               ,:`^`  }
                /                              ,:       /
               ?    __                        :`        /
              /__ (   ~-,_                 ,:`        /
             /(_  ~,_    ~,_             ,:`       _/
            {  _$;_  =,_    -,_     ,-~-,}, ~;/  }
             ((   *~_  =- _    ;,, /`  /          /
     ,,,___ \`~,     ~ ,           `     }         /
              (  `=-,,   `                 (  ;_,,-
              / `~,      `-                 \   /\
               \`~ *-,                       |, / \,__
  ,,_          } >- _\                      |         `=~-,
       `=~-,_\_      `\,                     \
                  `=~-,, \,                    \
                            `:,,                `\        __
                                `=-,            ,%`>--==``
                                   _\    _,-%       `\
                                 ,<`  _|_,-&``      `\

             P I C A R D    F A C E P A L M
Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn't work

template < class T >
inline void FDataStream::Write( const T& value )
{
	WriteIt( sizeof ( T ), &value );
}
template < class T >
inline void FDataStream::Read( T& value )
{
ReadIt( sizeof ( T ), &value );
}
*/

counterpoint · Feb 19, 2015

Look at us and this fast turnaround!

S3rgeus said:
Interesting, I'd forgotten about that topic!

A WoT mod for CiV is something I've wanted to do pretty much since CiV came out and I enjoyed it so much. (Far and away my most played game on Steam. Possibly highest individual hours of any one game, though it loses to Pokemon in aggregate.) I've been working on it very on and off though - a concerted effort for a few months early on in this topic's history (and slightly before) but then I moved away from it to other projects. It's been full steam ahead since you joined the team though, and that was a big part of what was missing before, overarching design and an avenue to discuss the pros and cons of *what to actually change and how* for the mod.

I abandoned the mod back in 2011 (this was before G&K) because Firaxis had yet to publish the C++ source code and our only ways of making changes were XML/SQL for database-related changes, and Lua, which was mostly targeted at UI but could be used to make some gameplay changes too. (A lot of very impressive mods are Lua-only.) But the scope of the changes I wanted to make for WoTMod weren't possible with just Lua, or were at least tremendously difficult due to limitations in the way the game's core code worked. Now, with the C++ source available, barring some graphical limitations and very high level "game management" stuff (some pregame data, loading saves), from a gameplay perspective, we can basically do anything we want. The release of that source code brought me back to the mod again for the session that answered question 1.

Ah, so that's how it went down. That'll all be a good primary source for whoever writes the wikipedia article about this project once it breaks every record on steam...

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm totally on board with this. Leaving the relative influences the same but reducing the total value for all Ajahs could cause several players to drop out of range of some of their bonuses and weakens the Tower overall. Sounds good!

ok, confirmed, then.

So, to recap:
- ousting an Amyrlin will provoke a revote AND lowers everybody's influence with her Ajah. Detection of the attempt causes diplo hit.
- assassinating an amyrlin provokes a revote AND lowers everybody's influence with ALL ajahs, AND prevents new edicts for 30 turns. Detection of the attempt causes a massive diplo hit and/or outright war with the tower.

just checking: will the tower ever oust an amyrlin on its own? I assume not.

S3rgeus said:
Cool, let's drop Exhibitions taking time.

Spotting Envoys is an interesting one - that definitely gives the civ a defensive advantage. It sounds like something that should be associated with spies and such, but I'm not sure exactly how. (Ideally the player would want to see where the Envoy is going - spies have an easy way to see where they're built, but not where they're headed to.)

We could highlight foreign Envoys at a distance based on your science output, that sounds quite reasonable. I can see the flavor justification of that being your people are well informed and have knowledge of such a vast new Innovation being moved across the map?

Well, I suppose we could do it like this. Certainly having a spy in a city would tell you if they were producing one, of course. But, let's say your science/turn provides you with a certain % chance to spot the location of an Envoy as it gets close-ish to your civ (or city? more on that below). Probably quite low when distant, but if you science/per turn is equal to or higher than the victory-pursuing civ, you'd probably be much more likely.

It could be overall science/turn, or science/turn of the city in question.

So, the question is, where is the detection occurring? Is this whenever it gets near your borders? Near your capital? or near any eligible city (meaning if the other civ had the wonder that allowed envoys in 10+ cities, it would be one of those)? We want the information to be useful when it is disseminated - not so far off that it's getting triggered by random envoys passing by.

I'd say having a defensive spy in your capital (or eligible city) boosts the detection chance.

S3rgeus said:
We can get tantalizingly close with "Era After the Breaking" . That way they all at least start with "Era"?

yep! that's the one i've been liking!

S3rgeus said:
Ah, ok! I can totally see the Grey Man being something a Shadow player can purchase with faith to "unlock" it within their espionage window. That way players who aren't too enthused by it can ignore it, but it can be a cool feature for anyone who has a reason to use one. Are we thinking they're one-use-only or you buy them for a GP-like faith cost and then keep them for the rest of the LB/game?

I'm torn on the single-use thing - it seems to make more sense with the "Faith-buy" thing. BUT, then that does seem to step on the toes of the bloodknives, mechanically, right?

Maybe the Gray Man is reusable, but completes his task slower? Does he have the same victory chance as the BKs?

Then again, having the Gray Man be one-time use does make it possible to have an increasing-cost-per-purchase thing like GPs, which could be cool.

S3rgeus said:
Ah, ok, I was thinking that Pattern-affecting buildings were more in the realm of ta'veren-like effects enchanted into physical objects. But using it as a representation of a civ's "pull" on the Pattern makes sense.

Related question to the Pattern-as-score bonuses - are ta'veren distinct from the WoT GP types? We've discussed both before, but I'm not sure if we put them together. It seems to me that all GPs are effectively ta'veren, the WoT ones just reflect specific characters or known abilities from the books.

I've got some thoughts on bubbles of evil being redirected by Pattern later in the post. I think it would be a neat thing to add if we have a good usage for it, but we'd need a strongly defined purpose and set of bonuses for it, I think, to warrant keeping track of all these aggregate scores.

Well, we haven't REALLY talked about the GPs yet, so it's difficult to say exactly what the ta'veren one does.

Obviously, many of the GPs could be Ta'veren, but in actuality, I'd guess that most are not. Consider that Mat, Perrin, and Rand, are, but... who else is? Artur Hawkwing, surely. But not Egwene (a Dreamer), or Min (Doomseer), or any of the Ogier (the Builders), or any of the Bards we know about, or any of the Historians. No, I don't think it's presumed that all of our GP are ta'veren.

So, we could have a distinct Ta'veren type, I think. But we also could decide against it - we could have a taveren ability on an existing GP type, if we wished.

S3rgeus said:
All of this makes me think that the culture victory is mechanically teetering on a peak and changing one part of it unravels the whole thing. I think we're both converging toward the same sentiment - that we can leave the culture victory largely unchanged.

While Pattern is an attractive alternative to culture, like you've said, we'd need to commit to it 100% and I don't think we want to do that quite yet.

So, I propose we stick to the Culture/Prestige approach that we've referenced thus far in the thread, leaving the core mechanics of the culture victory the same as BNW.

Absolute worst case for this approach is that we later decide that we want to overhaul Culture into Pattern/Prestige or Prestige/Pattern. In that case, we'll need to do the work required to reinvent that system. But if we go ahead with Pattern/Prestige and later decide we preferred the BNW approach - it's a significant amount of work again to extract all of those changes and revert back to the BNW behavior (while preserving the rest of the mod).

I agree. Given the issues we've been stumbling upon, this does seem the safest route.

S3rgeus said:
After considering some more, I think I like this division of 3 (Legends, Prophecies, and Crafts). The only remaining question is what GW type comes from Antiquity Sites and which of the above types it shares a slot with. I'll come to that below!

Good. So... Legends = better than Histories, right?

S3rgeus said:
Also, also, also. Super cool and super inconsequential thought. Since we've gone back to nationalities, if we include porcelain as one of the crafts, we can have a "Trade for Sea Folk Porcelain" achievement!

I love achievements, I think that genuinely sold me on the idea of porcelain as a craft type.

We have to find a way to have a braid-pulling achievement.

S3rgeus said:
I mainly remember that one because I'm always fascinated by other writers who come up with good names for things in their stories - it's one of the things I get stuck on often when writing myself! That one's particularly good because it sounds quite foreign and Aiel-like, but "zemai" is an anagram of "maize" - so it's presumably exactly like corn!

Ah, good catch. Didn't notice that. The other cool thing is that Asmodean is an anagram for A Mad Nose :lol:

S3rgeus said:
I think we could include Cuendillar as a resource that's on the map, yeah. Most luxury resources are available to be worked from the very-early game - which makes me think that mechanically it should be a strategic resource unlocked towards the end of the tree.

Also, aluminum (by the name "alum") is specifically called out in the series. Elayne owned a significant quantity of it through her family lands (they owned some mining territory in northern Andor, I think) and it was one of the things she was counting on to help finance her efforts during the Succession War. So we could include that - but bizarrely it seems like more of a luxury in WoT? What could use it as a strategic?

hmmm... the problem with cuendillar as strategic is that it's hard for them to really use it at all.....

We do need some new strategic ones, though.... Alum could work - we could probably require it for late-game naval units and cavalry (sort of like Oil, maybe). But the issues is that even the awesomest tech they have (Dragon cannons) basically just uses iron, right?

What if there was a strategic resource required to make gun powder units (including dragons)? Sort of like the uranium of our mod. Saltpeter? Sulfur? Charcoal?

Maybe we could replace coal with "Peat" or something more old-school seeming.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, we can swap out bison and truffles. We should clearly rename Ivory to S'redit. The Seanchan potentially give us Grolm, Lopar, Torm, Corlm, and the various raken (though that may be a UU). Lopar look like they could be approximated by reskinning the pigs from truffles.

Yeah, Lopar look like that, but... they aren't food-animals, I don't think. I'm not sure, though, are all the Seanchan beasts war animals, or are some just random livestock? Lopar might be the best bet.

Yeah, renaming Ivory to S'redit is a good flavor-nod, but, then again, Ivory probably still works - the resource isn't called "Elephants" after all, and I'm assume S'redit have teeth that are still made into ivory.

S3rgeus said:
AoL ruins as the Ancient Ruins makes flavorful sense, but the bonuses contained within those have to be appropriate for the very start of the game - getting players on their feet from a single city and very few units. AoL leftover tech seems like it should make a bigger difference, but then it doesn't necessarily have to.

Well, I don't know. I think we'd be fine doing it. Think about it this way: presumably there WERE some leftover ruins left behind. There had to be, right? The survivors post-breaking obviously looted those things to the best of their ability, but... what did that give them? Not much, apparently. Maybe some ter'angreal they couldn't use or something. It's not like anybody ended up with guns.

So I think it would work fine - we just assume that they aren't finding some Vault with all of the AoL secrets or anything like that.

S3rgeus said:
So, continuing a bit from above, I think Legends, Prophecies, and Crafts are good choices for the "primary" GW types. This brings us to decide what should be in the Antiquity Sites that are dug up by Archaeologists.

Cuendillar artifacts, ter'angreal, or angreal are tempting, but it's difficult to merge them with a concept of nationality as a differentiator between individual GWs.

One option is to leave them as relatively flavorless "relics" - CiV uses beads and other similar items, likely as a reference to them often popping up in archaeological dig sites relatively often.

And... I'm not sure what else to suggest as another option.

Oh, and what GW type should they share space with? Not sure which makes sense from a flavor perspective... or mechanically. Is there some game-balance reason that it's Art in CiV? Is it because there are more wonders that accommodate them or something?

But, anyways, not sure we have an excellently flavored option here, sadly...

It is unfortunate that nobody knew how to make angreal and stuff in this age... that certainly does make it hard to jive with the nationality thing. Anyways, I think we'll be able to find uses for cuendillar and angreals as techs, buildings, or resources anyways.

Relics could be fine. It's certainly not bad.

The other possibility is to go totally meta with this and make it very abstract. Name them "Ripples in the Pattern" or "Wrinkles in the Pattern" or "Relics of the Pattern" or something. (there's got to be a chapter title in there somewhere with a good name). Like, you find an artifact of some long-held battle, or event, and that event forever changes history. So, I suppose you'd be finding objects still - evidence of what transpired - but we'd be flavoring it in a much more epic way.

We could even choose to eschew "beads" and end up still going with ter'angreal and such. It's not that the civ in question MADE the item, it's that they USED it in some age-defining way. This list of "Items of Power" might be helpful.

What say you, Atreyu?

S3rgeus said:
If we apply this to the notion of Pattern above, where it represents overall score, I can see the flavor sense in this. But we're also rewarding the player who's already ahead and punishing those falling behind, which makes one civ running away with the game more likely.

Affecting the production of WoT GP types could work - it's less of a tangible penalty for the civs falling behind. We've discussed a rew modifiers to the WoT GP rate thus far, though I don't remember them all off hand.

Yeah, I think the key thing here would be that the GP-production bonus you'd get would be for the odd WoT GP, that don't have obvious uses in the standard Victory Paths. Like, they're useful, but not in the same immediate way that a Scientist or Musician is. If we did this, we'd have to make sure they're abilities were all very "special effecty" and not necessarily supremely impactful.

I think Wisdoms may be the only thing we'd said for sure would generate that GP production, but I could be misremembering.

S3rgeus said:
I think you've got it right - the devs didn't want to touch a lot of the base game systems because they already knew it worked. A game like CiV has a stupendous amount of permutations of game states and testing them all is nigh impossible - particularly testing them repeatedly over multiple builds. And it's even worse since CiV is a traditionally slow game, so it takes X hours to play through to certain situations. (Though I'd imagine Firaxis have better tools than they've released in the modding SDK for mocking up games.)

From what I can see, they're relying mostly on manual testing as well, which is terrifying for a Civ-like game. I haven't seen any tests actually in the code. Though they may have elected not to include their tests in the released source code, what we've received doesn't seem very testable anyway. Enormous objects that only work when a whole pile of other stuff has already been initialized. Individual functions that are many hundreds of lines long.

And my favorite bit of Firaxis code (it's all commented out, so doesn't do anything):

Code:

/* JAR - disabling this catch-all. It takes any non-specialized type, gets sizeof(T), then dumps it through a void * producing a raw memory dump of the type in the stream. Disabling this uncovered dozens of probably unknown bugs in serialization. ________ , - ``~ , , - - , ,/ :, ,? \, / ,} / ,:`^` } / ,: / ? __ :` / /__ ( ~-,_ ,:` / /(_ ~,_ ~,_ ,:` _/ { _$;_ =,_ -,_ ,-~-,}, ~;/ } (( *~_ =- _ ;,, /` / / ,,,___ \`~, ~ , ` } / ( `=-,, ` ( ;_,,- / `~, `- \ /\ \`~ *-, |, / \,__ ,,_ } >- _\ | `=~-, `=~-,_\_ `\, \ `=~-,, \, \ `:,, `\ __ `=-, ,%`>--==`` _\ _,-% `\ ,<` _|_,-&`` `\ P I C A R D F A C E P A L M Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn't work template < class T > inline void FDataStream::Write( const T& value ) { WriteIt( sizeof ( T ), &value ); } template < class T > inline void FDataStream::Read( T& value ) { ReadIt( sizeof ( T ), &value ); } */

I really, really hope some dev wasted the time actually typing in the ASCI picture, instead of copy-pasting it. Like, he/she spent three hours of work painstakingly reproducing the image....

S3rgeus · Feb 22, 2015

counterpoint said:
Look at us and this fast turnaround!

We'll be done before you know it!

counterpoint said:
Ah, so that's how it went down. That'll all be a good primary source for whoever writes the wikipedia article about this project once it breaks every record on steam...

Every single record is our objective!

counterpoint said:
ok, confirmed, then.

So, to recap:
- ousting an Amyrlin will provoke a revote AND lowers everybody's influence with her Ajah. Detection of the attempt causes diplo hit.
- assassinating an amyrlin provokes a revote AND lowers everybody's influence with ALL ajahs, AND prevents new edicts for 30 turns. Detection of the attempt causes a massive diplo hit and/or outright war with the tower.

Yes, that sounds good. I've edited that into the diplo summary.

counterpoint said:
just checking: will the tower ever oust an amyrlin on its own? I assume not.

No, I don't think so. It would be too complicated to make them do it sensibly. Also might feel a bit random from the player's point of view.

counterpoint said:
Well, I suppose we could do it like this. Certainly having a spy in a city would tell you if they were producing one, of course. But, let's say your science/turn provides you with a certain % chance to spot the location of an Envoy as it gets close-ish to your civ (or city? more on that below). Probably quite low when distant, but if you science/per turn is equal to or higher than the victory-pursuing civ, you'd probably be much more likely.

It could be overall science/turn, or science/turn of the city in question.

So, the question is, where is the detection occurring? Is this whenever it gets near your borders? Near your capital? or near any eligible city (meaning if the other civ had the wonder that allowed envoys in 10+ cities, it would be one of those)? We want the information to be useful when it is disseminated - not so far off that it's getting triggered by random envoys passing by.

I'd say having a defensive spy in your capital (or eligible city) boosts the detection chance.

I think we want the detection to occur beyond the visible section of the fog of war, because you don't have much vision beyond your borders unless the Envoy happens to pass by one of your scouting units.

I also figure we'll notify a player when an Envoy enters their territory.

So, like you've said, based on science output and positively modified by having a defensive spy in your capital, we could highlight hexes off in the fog and notify the player "there is an Envoy here, watch out."

counterpoint said:
I'm torn on the single-use thing - it seems to make more sense with the "Faith-buy" thing. BUT, then that does seem to step on the toes of the bloodknives, mechanically, right?

Maybe the Gray Man is reusable, but completes his task slower? Does he have the same victory chance as the BKs?

Then again, having the Gray Man be one-time use does make it possible to have an increasing-cost-per-purchase thing like GPs, which could be cool.

If anything I think the Gray Man would be faster than the Bloodknife. The Bloodknife is available to everyone, but the Grey Man is a specialization for Shadow civs. It lines up with their flavor really well and also specifically helps them complete some of their objectives (can Gray Men try to assassinate the Dragon as well as the Amyrlin/Governors? What about other spies?).

I think the role of Bloodknives for Shadow civs is simultaneity - if the Shadow civ wants to pull off multiple assassinations at once or in quick succession. They can also keep producing Bloodknives, whereas a single Gray Men is only available during the Last Battle (so only a relatively short number of turns).

counterpoint said:
Well, we haven't REALLY talked about the GPs yet, so it's difficult to say exactly what the ta'veren one does.

Obviously, many of the GPs could be Ta'veren, but in actuality, I'd guess that most are not. Consider that Mat, Perrin, and Rand, are, but... who else is? Artur Hawkwing, surely. But not Egwene (a Dreamer), or Min (Doomseer), or any of the Ogier (the Builders), or any of the Bards we know about, or any of the Historians. No, I don't think it's presumed that all of our GP are ta'veren.

So, we could have a distinct Ta'veren type, I think. But we also could decide against it - we could have a taveren ability on an existing GP type, if we wished.

Good point, yeah. It's probably best to keep the ta'veren classification (and whatever it entails) restricted to a subset of GPs.

counterpoint said:
I agree. Given the issues we've been stumbling upon, this does seem the safest route.

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
Good. So... Legends = better than Histories, right?

Yes, I think so. Do you prefer Histories?

counterpoint said:
We have to find a way to have a braid-pulling achievement.

Definitely!

counterpoint said:
Ah, good catch. Didn't notice that. The other cool thing is that Asmodean is an anagram for A Mad Nose

That explains a lot about him. :lol:

counterpoint said:
hmmm... the problem with cuendillar as strategic is that it's hard for them to really use it at all.....

We do need some new strategic ones, though.... Alum could work - we could probably require it for late-game naval units and cavalry (sort of like Oil, maybe). But the issues is that even the awesomest tech they have (Dragon cannons) basically just uses iron, right?

But what flavorful role does alum fulfill for those units? I didn't hear of alum being used specifically in any military capacity in the books.

counterpoint said:
What if there was a strategic resource required to make gun powder units (including dragons)? Sort of like the uranium of our mod. Saltpeter? Sulfur? Charcoal?

Maybe we could replace coal with "Peat" or something more old-school seeming.

Yeah, something akin to gunpowder or one of its ingredients would be cool. Charcoal would graphically be the easiest. Peat and saltpeter could be very interesting since we could make them appear in marshes, which otherwise are only useful to the Dutch.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, Lopar look like that, but... they aren't food-animals, I don't think. I'm not sure, though, are all the Seanchan beasts war animals, or are some just random livestock? Lopar might be the best bet.

It doesn't have to be a foodstuff, luxury resources can be anything that provides some society-driven gain, rather than a basic necessity. Apparently a lot of Seanchan kept lopar as pets, which could be a "high society" kind of thing, that definitely feeds into a similar flavor to the other luxuries.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, renaming Ivory to S'redit is a good flavor-nod, but, then again, Ivory probably still works - the resource isn't called "Elephants" after all, and I'm assume S'redit have teeth that are still made into ivory.

True, but by naming it S'redit, we're basically just reclassifying it for things like Valan Luca's Grand Traveling Show, rather than specifically the tusks. The animals themselves are the resource, rather than some component of them. (Rather like crabs or whales.)

counterpoint said:
Well, I don't know. I think we'd be fine doing it. Think about it this way: presumably there WERE some leftover ruins left behind. There had to be, right? The survivors post-breaking obviously looted those things to the best of their ability, but... what did that give them? Not much, apparently. Maybe some ter'angreal they couldn't use or something. It's not like anybody ended up with guns.

So I think it would work fine - we just assume that they aren't finding some Vault with all of the AoL secrets or anything like that.

Cool, that's a good point. Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
Oh, and what GW type should they share space with? Not sure which makes sense from a flavor perspective... or mechanically. Is there some game-balance reason that it's Art in CiV? Is it because there are more wonders that accommodate them or something?

From a flavor perspective in base CiV, I think the idea was that artwork and ancient artifacts were both things you could find in a traditional museum. Mechnically yes, there are more wonders that have slots of that type.

So, given the way WoT is laid out, it seems like we should unify artifacts with whatever we think will be the most prolific flavorful slot-holder wonders. I'm thinking that's probably Legends? There are a lot of places in WoT that have stores of old tomes and such. Putting them together with Crafts seems a bit weird. I could see an argument for Prophecies either.

counterpoint said:
But, anyways, not sure we have an excellently flavored option here, sadly...

It is unfortunate that nobody knew how to make angreal and stuff in this age... that certainly does make it hard to jive with the nationality thing. Anyways, I think we'll be able to find uses for cuendillar and angreals as techs, buildings, or resources anyways.

Relics could be fine. It's certainly not bad.

The other possibility is to go totally meta with this and make it very abstract. Name them "Ripples in the Pattern" or "Wrinkles in the Pattern" or "Relics of the Pattern" or something. (there's got to be a chapter title in there somewhere with a good name). Like, you find an artifact of some long-held battle, or event, and that event forever changes history. So, I suppose you'd be finding objects still - evidence of what transpired - but we'd be flavoring it in a much more epic way.

We could even choose to eschew "beads" and end up still going with ter'angreal and such. It's not that the civ in question MADE the item, it's that they USED it in some age-defining way. This list of "Items of Power" might be helpful.

What say you, Atreyu?

I'm liking that last idea, using ter'angreal and such with the justification that they were used by the civ in question at some time in the past (and presumably lost). There are a lot of minor items of power on that list we could use, and realistically we only need a couple - CiV just uses "beads" and I think two other variants?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think the key thing here would be that the GP-production bonus you'd get would be for the odd WoT GP, that don't have obvious uses in the standard Victory Paths. Like, they're useful, but not in the same immediate way that a Scientist or Musician is. If we did this, we'd have to make sure they're abilities were all very "special effecty" and not necessarily supremely impactful.

I think Wisdoms may be the only thing we'd said for sure would generate that GP production, but I could be misremembering.

Ok, Wisdoms alone is too few sources for WoT GP generation (aside from passive bonuses from buildings). How do we want to break down Pattern exactly, then? What's it a function of? Does it leave out any existing yields? For things like food and production, is it just an aggregate across the whole civ? How does military interact with it, beyond the acquisition of cities? (We could count military power in the same manner the AI considers it?)

So, further code update! Having reworked a portion of Firaxis' tooltip madness (and changed the way our modifiers are applied), the player can now see their alignment modifier! After that, looking through the Last Battle summary, there a lot of little bits and pieces that I can work on (happiness penalties for choosing opposing sides, uprisings, and such) but there are also a lot of unknowns in that summary. It might be worth us having a second pass through the unknowns there and seeing if we can make more specific decisions now that much more of the rest of the mod is well defined. In my next post, I'll try to quote through it and bring up things that would be good to decide.

So, I meandered on a bit from the Last Battle and arrived at the diplo section. The Aes Sedai abilities are all very well defined and have a clear hierarchy of when they should be applied and how that's triggered, which made them prime candidates for development in isolation.

I'm afraid I don't have screenshots for my work on the Aes Sedai abilities so far, most of it was under the hood work. The first step was getting an idea of the end to end "how we want to define those bonuses," which happened here. Those are just new DB tables that don't do anything (at that time). I added the minimum "vertical slice" of features to get something working, so that we know it works as intended. In this case, the objective is to give Blue Sister units owned by a player with >40 influence with the Blue Ajah a promotion, for as long as the player has >40 influence. This promotion will do nothing at first, then it needs to be made actually give the +2 faith to Governors within 3 hexes of the Sister unit. That it gets given at all (even with no effect) verifies the underlying system of giving bonuses when influence tiers are reached is working as expected.

Then I realized the Tower influence stuff that I'd done before (back on page 3 or so) was still the same as it was - tracking influence just per Ajah, not per player per Ajah. So I switched that over to track which players the influence had come from.

And after a little tinkering associating Ajahs with unit types (so the Blue Ajah knows that UNIT_BLUE_SISTER is its Sister unit type), we have a system that gives out promotions to corresponding Sister types when the players reach the right influence levels. A lot of the complexity comes from the fact that the player limits on each tier mean any civ gaining or losing influence with an Ajah can cause any arbitrary number of other players to gain or lose one or more tier bonuses. (It should handle that now.)

And the promotion was given out as expected!

Now that that works, what I'm working on today is making the NearbyGovernorsGiveFaith promotion actually do what it says on the box, and give that +2 faith to nearby Governors.

Most of the Tier 1 & 2 bonuses for the Ajahs are sensibly represented by promotions on their corresponding Sister units. The only work in getting them functioning is adding the XML entry and writing the code that makes their promotion work, it's already going to be distributed to the Sister units correctly. The Tier 3 bonuses tend to be civ-wide, so they'll slot in next to where it gives out the promotions and give out those bonuses to the player instead (rather than his/her units).

Some of the other basic abilities of Aes Sedai also become relevant to this work, and I'll probably do those in sequence as well. (Things like being able to bond warders and Gentle male channelers, seeing as some Tier abilities affect how those work.)

Let me know if you'd prefer the code updates be less detailed or less centered around Github commits or anything like that. (Sometimes there isn't much visible for a lot of changes, so linking to the code changes represents the flow of work.)

EDIT: And I can't read. The faith ability for Blue Sisters is tier zero, not one! No matter, I'll just give the "add faith to nearby governors" promotion as a free one for the Blue Sister unit type and use the promotion system for the actual tier one and two abilities.

counterpoint · Feb 23, 2015

Looks like this topic is wrapping up.

S3rgeus said:
I think we want the detection to occur beyond the visible section of the fog of war, because you don't have much vision beyond your borders unless the Envoy happens to pass by one of your scouting units.

I also figure we'll notify a player when an Envoy enters their territory.

So, like you've said, based on science output and positively modified by having a defensive spy in your capital, we could highlight hexes off in the fog and notify the player "there is an Envoy here, watch out."

Yes, I agree with all of your suggestions. I suppose I would just suggest that we make sure it feels significant. Like, if you are way behind your opponent in science, you'll suffer for it, and if you're ahead of them, it'll be much more difficult for them. It's hard to figure out exactly how to do that without making it have absurd sight-distances.

S3rgeus said:
If anything I think the Gray Man would be faster than the Bloodknife. The Bloodknife is available to everyone, but the Grey Man is a specialization for Shadow civs. It lines up with their flavor really well and also specifically helps them complete some of their objectives (can Gray Men try to assassinate the Dragon as well as the Amyrlin/Governors? What about other spies?).

I think the role of Bloodknives for Shadow civs is simultaneity - if the Shadow civ wants to pull off multiple assassinations at once or in quick succession. They can also keep producing Bloodknives, whereas a single Gray Men is only available during the Last Battle (so only a relatively short number of turns).

I can be OK with this. I guess. I suppose I just always prefer when a "niche" is more well-defined. Like, the Shadow player would use the GM in this situation... but in THAT situation, they'd choose the BK.

I definitely don't think I like the idea of the GM working FASTER. Flavor or not, I suggested *slower* for balancing reasons - so there was a purpose to the sacrifice of the spy that a BK requires. At the very least, they should be the same, IMO.

I don't see how we can mechanically make the Dragon be killable by GM, since he moves around so much. The Amyrlin should be possible, though.

Killing other spies... I don't think so. I wouldn't say they should do any of the other functions of a spy. Maybe that's the difference between them and a BK?

S3rgeus said:
Good point, yeah. It's probably best to keep the ta'veren classification (and whatever it entails) restricted to a subset of GPs.

OK, more on this when we get to GP!

S3rgeus said:
Yes, I think so. Do you prefer Histories?

No, I agree that Legends is better. Histories is better because it blurs less with prophecies... but it doesn't sound as good. Plus, I like "Historians" for the archaeologists.

S3rgeus said:
But what flavorful role does alum fulfill for those units? I didn't hear of alum being used specifically in any military capacity in the books.

I don't recall it being specified much at all. We need something though, right? If you'd prefer it as a luxury resources, great. That's a good one.

But we still need more strategics!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, something akin to gunpowder or one of its ingredients would be cool. Charcoal would graphically be the easiest. Peat and saltpeter could be very interesting since we could make them appear in marshes, which otherwise are only useful to the Dutch.

mmm... the thing about Charcoal is... it seems kind of like a cop-out. Us trying to change coal for the sake of it. It's not like they talk about charcoal in the books. Nor any of these other things though. Sulfur seems cool, to me, because it feels like it would be a part of gunpowder, you know? Could we just change the Coal image and make it yellow?

S3rgeus said:
It doesn't have to be a foodstuff, luxury resources can be anything that provides some society-driven gain, rather than a basic necessity. Apparently a lot of Seanchan kept lopar as pets, which could be a "high society" kind of thing, that definitely feeds into a similar flavor to the other luxuries.

Right. The thing about Lopar is, apparently, according to the wiki, "The lopar is the main combat animal of the Seanchan." So, not so much a luxury..... I dunno, we could do it, but it seems iffy to me.

The Corlm (ostrich ones) are the only ones that don't seem to be obvious cobat units (they use them as scouts). ?Not sure that helps though.

However, just found something, though: Kaf, which is Seanchan coffee-equivalent. I think that would be a good one, for sure.

S3rgeus said:
True, but by naming it S'redit, we're basically just reclassifying it for things like Valan Luca's Grand Traveling Show, rather than specifically the tusks. The animals themselves are the resource, rather than some component of them. (Rather like crabs or whales.)

Good point! Though I don't think I quite follow how the whale itself is the thing that was used (as opposed to its blubber, meat, etc.).

OK, so just running down the list of civ resources, and which ones we're using:

Bonus - 8 in CiV. Shall we preserve that number?
Bananas - should we use this? Replace it with something? We don't see a lot of things in the tropics in the books, so its hard to say what they're like.
Wheat
Sheep
Cattle
Fish
Stone
Bison - cut (all red mean this)
Zemai

"Peaches" are a fruit we could replace bananas with, since it's mentioned... but it's mentioned as being poisonous! What fruits do you remember them mentioning?

All of those above in civ are food, except for stone (hammers). I'm fine with that.
I assume zemai can grow on the same tiles as bison would have, so no balance problems there.

Luxury Resources (26 total)
[two gold]
Cotton
Spices
Sugar
Furs
Ivory - renamed S'redit
Silk
Dyes
Incense
Wine
Copper
Gold
Silver
Marble
Pearls
Truffles - cut for weirdness
Jewelry This one is a CS-exclusive. Should we replace it with Sung Wood? Or should we keep this as well for regular CSs? (and then add the wood)?
Porcelain - so, did we end with you definitely wanting this one, or is this popping up as GW?
Nutmeg - civ specific in CiV. Figure we'll only use it if we need civ-specific luxuries for one of our civs.
Cloves - same as above
Pepper - same as above
Tabac
Oilfish - I could imagine this actually being civ/CS exclusive to Mayenne.

[one gold, one food]
Crab - does this one feel weird to you?
Salt
Whales - does this also feel weird?
Citrus - not sure if this fruit exists... maybe it's alright, though. Apples or something more generic?
Cocoa Is this weird, flavor-wise? Does it exist in WoT?
Kaf

[three gold]
Gems
Alum - could be two gold instead of 3
Cuendillar Horde - are we doing this one? Also, this could be two gold instead of 3

So, a fair amount to settle above. Of course, we'd have to consider the balance changes that might occur if we eliminate, say, Whales, and don't replace it with another sea-based one.

Strategic Resources
Horses
Copper
Iron
Coal - could be left alone, or theoretically replaced by Charcoal, or Sulfur, or something.
Aluminum - theoretically could be replaced by Alum, though with some problems in flavor, of course.
Oil - cut because its too advanced. can be re-purposed into Peat or something
Uranium - cut because.. .yeah.
Peat or Tar
Angreal Horde

One possibility I thought of was adding Copper as a sort of "replacement" for Iron - for lower-tech weaponry, such as bronze - and then bringing in iron later in the game for higher-tech weapons. We'll have to come up with SOME way of making a resource-progression feel right, without having the huge tech leaps that happen in a normal game. Of course, the downside is that we'd then lose a luxury resource, and that players already associate it with luxuries - is there another, similar thing we could do?

I think Coal's replacement would need to end up the end of our resource line, right? That's the one that'll help you build gunpowder stuff/dragons, right?

I figure Peat or Tar or something could be used in shipbuilding and stuff, making sealants on the hulls, that kind of thing - not so much fuel.

The Angreal Horde, if we chose to do something like this, could be used to enable some advanced channeling units - or else provide bonuses and such. Otherwise, we'll need SOMETHING here.

EDIT: since I wrote this post last night, I've cleaned up a few typos and such that made things unclear.

S3rgeus said:
From a flavor perspective in base CiV, I think the idea was that artwork and ancient artifacts were both things you could find in a traditional museum. Mechnically yes, there are more wonders that have slots of that type.

So, given the way WoT is laid out, it seems like we should unify artifacts with whatever we think will be the most prolific flavorful slot-holder wonders. I'm thinking that's probably Legends? There are a lot of places in WoT that have stores of old tomes and such. Putting them together with Crafts seems a bit weird. I could see an argument for Prophecies either.

I agree. Legends. Prophecies could work too, but I prefer Legends.

So that means the Legends are the Art of our game? Are Prophecies the Writing? That makes Crafts the Music, which is odd....

S3rgeus said:
I'm liking that last idea, using ter'angreal and such with the justification that they were used by the civ in question at some time in the past (and presumably lost). There are a lot of minor items of power on that list we could use, and realistically we only need a couple - CiV just uses "beads" and I think two other variants?

OK, Items of Power then. Maybe we just call them that? ooh,,, "Relics of Power" ?
But yeah, we don't need much - could be more than three though.

S3rgeus said:
Ok, Wisdoms alone is too few sources for WoT GP generation (aside from passive bonuses from buildings). How do we want to break down Pattern exactly, then? What's it a function of? Does it leave out any existing yields? For things like food and production, is it just an aggregate across the whole civ? How does military interact with it, beyond the acquisition of cities? (We could count military power in the same manner the AI considers it?)

OK, so what helps create Great Artists (for example) in WoT? Specialists, buildings, and wonders, right? Anything else? If not, then it does seem to fit here - Wisdoms, a building, and some wonders, right?

Honestly, I could see us breaking Pattern down just the same as score. We could factor in more things than what CiV does, if you think it fits or is necessary. In any case, I'm not really sure how to approach it (don't really know much about how score is calculated, though i do see how complicated it is when I highlight it in-game).

S3rgeus said:
So, further code update! Having reworked a portion of Firaxis' tooltip madness (and changed the way our modifiers are applied), the player can now see their alignment modifier! After that, looking through the Last Battle summary, there a lot of little bits and pieces that I can work on (happiness penalties for choosing opposing sides, uprisings, and such) but there are also a lot of unknowns in that summary. It might be worth us having a second pass through the unknowns there and seeing if we can make more specific decisions now that much more of the rest of the mod is well defined. In my next post, I'll try to quote through it and bring up things that would be good to decide.

Cool. please do. Maybe some of that old stuff could be clarified a bit.

I won't quote the rest since I won't be responding to specific things. But I'm glad to see that things are happening, for sure. Sorry to hear the coding seems illogical at times, though.

In terms of whether you should post all the github details and such, I'll leave it all up to you. I certainly read it all, and try my best to follow it. I won't usually have that much to add or say, beyond words of encouragement and stuff. So, it's up to you - I'm consuming the goods and trying to learn from them, but I can't say necessarily that that's worth your time (since it obviously took quite a bit of time). That said, if there's a reason you want to post stuff here to keep track of your process and such, of course do so!

S3rgeus · Feb 24, 2015

counterpoint said:
Looks like this topic is wrapping up.

Yeah, we're mostly done. Would you like to do a summary or shall I?

Our next topic is the Domination victory, right? I imagine that will be quite a short one.

counterpoint said:
Yes, I agree with all of your suggestions. I suppose I would just suggest that we make sure it feels significant. Like, if you are way behind your opponent in science, you'll suffer for it, and if you're ahead of them, it'll be much more difficult for them. It's hard to figure out exactly how to do that without making it have absurd sight-distances.

Yeah, that sounds good. Absurd sight distances wouldn't be that much help for the defender, because after a certain distance you don't really know if the Envoy is coming towards you.

counterpoint said:
I can be OK with this. I guess. I suppose I just always prefer when a "niche" is more well-defined. Like, the Shadow player would use the GM in this situation... but in THAT situation, they'd choose the BK.

I definitely don't think I like the idea of the GM working FASTER. Flavor or not, I suggested *slower* for balancing reasons - so there was a purpose to the sacrifice of the spy that a BK requires. At the very least, they should be the same, IMO.

I definitely see what you mean here. We should note that the loss of a spy is only really a loss of rank and time though - not permanent spying capacity, since spies that die are always replaced after a few turns.

counterpoint said:
I don't see how we can mechanically make the Dragon be killable by GM, since he moves around so much. The Amyrlin should be possible, though.

They only need to occupy the same city at a time after the Gray Man has "established surveillance" (I assume we want a similar "movement cooldown" to normal spies). given the Dragon moves every 5-10 turns and some of his actions reveal his location to the Shadow, I think there's definitely time to try to assassinate him. I would envision this having a similar effect to the Shadow capturing the city the Dragon-spy is in - a temporary "injury" like Rand losing his hand. So the Dragon would just be unavailable for a certain number of turns.

counterpoint said:
Killing other spies... I don't think so. I wouldn't say they should do any of the other functions of a spy. Maybe that's the difference between them and a BK?

Interesting, yeah, this seems very sensible. I don't remember Gray Men ever doing any actual spying, just assassinations? That's a cool difference to me. Are we worried that we're handicapping Shadow civs' spying capacity then?

counterpoint said:
No, I agree that Legends is better. Histories is better because it blurs less with prophecies... but it doesn't sound as good. Plus, I like "Historians" for the archaeologists.

Cool, sounds good.

counterpoint said:
mmm... the thing about Charcoal is... it seems kind of like a cop-out. Us trying to change coal for the sake of it. It's not like they talk about charcoal in the books. Nor any of these other things though. Sulfur seems cool, to me, because it feels like it would be a part of gunpowder, you know? Could we just change the Coal image and make it yellow?

Totally agree here about charcoal, that would be kind of cheap of us. We could recolor coal for Sulfur - recoloring existing resources is very possible. That's more distance from base CiV than charcoal, but the others like Peat would have us making a whole new 3D model. It would be very cool for the user if we did it, but we've got a bit of a skill gap there. It would take me a long time to even try it, and a lot of trial and error.

counterpoint said:
Right. The thing about Lopar is, apparently, according to the wiki, "The lopar is the main combat animal of the Seanchan." So, not so much a luxury..... I dunno, we could do it, but it seems iffy to me.

The wiki article I read said they're usually placid, unless trained to fight. Seems like that could be a luxury.

counterpoint said:
The Corlm (ostrich ones) are the only ones that don't seem to be obvious cobat units (they use them as scouts). ?Not sure that helps though.

Might be in consideration as a UU, but I think the Seanchan have better candidates. They wouldn't be the best strategics since they were only ever really used by one civ.

counterpoint said:
However, just found something, though: Kaf, which is Seanchan coffee-equivalent. I think that would be a good one, for sure.

Sounds very cool - one of Barathor's More Luxuries is already Coffee, so we can use that!

counterpoint said:
Good point! Though I don't think I quite follow how the whale itself is the thing that was used (as opposed to its blubber, meat, etc.).

OK, so just running down the list of civ resources, and which ones we're using:

Bonus - 8 in CiV. Shall we preserve that number?
Bananas - should we use this? Replace it with something? We don't see a lot of things in the tropics in the books, so its hard to say what they're like.
Wheat
Sheep
Cattle
Fish
Stone
Bison - cut (all red mean this)
Zemai

"Peaches" are a fruit we could replace bananas with, since it's mentioned... but it's mentioned as being poisonous! What fruits do you remember them mentioning?

All of those above in civ are food, except for stone (hammers). I'm fine with that.
I assume zemai can grow on the same tiles as bison would have, so no balance problems there.

There's a Sheepherder achievement hiding in here somewhere.

These all look sensible to me. If the people of WoT think Peaches are poisonous then I don't think we should use them as a resource. That's a bizarre little bit of trivia!

Arguably zemai should grow in desert-ish kind of areas, right? Since it's an Aiel thing. But the balance of deserts in CiV doesn't really lean towards that, and plains are definitely the "closest" terrain type.

counterpoint said:
Luxury Resources (26 total)
[two gold]
Cotton
Spices
Sugar
Furs
Ivory - renamed S'redit
Silk
Dyes
Incense
Wine
Copper
Gold
Silver
Marble
Pearls
Truffles - cut for weirdness
Jewelry This one is a CS-exclusive. Should we replace it with Sung Wood? Or should we keep this as well for regular CSs? (and then add the wood)?
Porcelain - so, did we end with you definitely wanting this one, or is this popping up as GW?
Nutmeg - civ specific in CiV. Figure we'll only use it if we need civ-specific luxuries for one of our civs.
Cloves - same as above
Pepper - same as above
Tabac
Oilfish - I could imagine this actually being civ/CS exclusive to Mayenne.

I think Porcelain can be a GW. We could replace "Jewelry" with "Firedrops" or one of the other WoT specific jewels? I think we can keep Sung Wood as separate - part of the Stedding - and use Firedrops or whatever for the "normal" CSes. We'll need to break down which CSes are which types from the list we have at some time too.

I don't think Mayenne will have its own unique CS trait (until we do a Venice and promote it to a civ), so I don't think Oilfish should be restricted to just them. CS exclusive sounds good though.

Related to below, I think moving Copper to be strategic makes a lot of sense. That means we'd need a replacement. There are a few more WoT-specific gems aside from Firedrops, though Google is failing me at the moment in trying to find more. We could swap one of those in its place?

Using more types of WoT gems does kind of call into question the presence of a generic "gems" resource (also below) though.

counterpoint said:
[one gold, one food]
Crab - does this one feel weird to you?
Salt
Whales - does this also feel weird?
Citrus - not sure if this fruit exists... maybe it's alright, though. Apples or something more generic?
Cocoa Is this weird, flavor-wise? Does it exist in WoT?
Kaf

I agree about those three resources seeming weird. Totally cool with replacing citrus with Apples.

I do not remember if chocolate exists in the WoT-verse.

I feel like there should be some more WoT-specific sea-faring resources, either coming from the Sea Folk or the coastal Westlands nations, but I'm drawing a blank.

counterpoint said:
[three gold]
Gems
Alum - could be two gold instead of 3
Cuendillar Horde - are we doing this one? Also, this could be two gold instead of 3

Cuendillar Hoard btw. Horde of orcs, hoard of gold. Do we want to make it a cache of cuendillar artifacts though? That seems to encroach on Antiquity Sites. I would be fine with just "Cuendillar" in some ways. Even though it's more of a manmade thing.

Also fine with Alum as 3 gold.

Gems is an interesting one if we split off specific gem types as I mentioned above, but we probably don't want to remove it.

counterpoint said:
So, a fair amount to settle above. Of course, we'd have to consider the balance changes that might occur if we eliminate, say, Whales, and don't replace it with another sea-based one.

Yes, we definitely want to make sure there are enough sea resources that there's variety across the map. The base CiV numbers, for BNW, aren't hard and fast minimums though. Even Huge maps don't have all luxury types placed on them by default - there are too many. It's good to have more to introduce variety between playthroughs though.

counterpoint said:
Strategic Resources
Horses
Copper
Iron
Coal - could be left alone, or theoretically replaced by Charcoal, or Sulfur, or something.
Aluminum - theoretically could be replaced by Alum, though with some problems in flavor, of course.
Oil - cut because its too advanced. can be re-purposed into Peat or something
Uranium - cut because.. .yeah.
Peat or Tar
Angreal Horde

One possibility I thought of was adding Copper as a sort of "replacement" for Iron - for lower-tech weaponry, such as bronze - and then bringing in iron later in the game for higher-tech weapons. We'll have to come up with SOME way of making a resource-progression feel right, without having the huge tech leaps that happen in a normal game. Of course, the downside is that we'd then lose a luxury resource, and that players already associate it with luxuries - is there another, similar thing we could do?

I think Coal's replacement would need to end up the end of our resource line, right? That's the one that'll help you build gunpowder stuff/dragons, right?

I figure Peat or Tar or something could be used in shipbuilding and stuff, making sealants on the hulls, that kind of thing - not so much fuel.

The Angreal Horde, if we chose to do something like this, could be used to enable some advanced channeling units - or else provide bonuses and such. Otherwise, we'll need SOMETHING here.

EDIT: since I wrote this post last night, I've cleaned up a few typos and such that made things unclear.

We could possibly even leave in coal as our "endgame" technology-based unit resource - for things like steamwagons. I'm all for adding Sulfur earlier on as a gunpowder source, and therefore involved in Dragons and stuff like that.

I do agree that we should have a channeling-related strategic. We could have "Wells" if we don't use that as a tech/ability? When channelers are already restricted by Spark, which is effectively a strategic resource that isn't mined from the map, I don't think we want to make an end-game channeling unit that requires Spark and something else. Wells might be good in this circumstance then (as would Angreal Hoards) in that we could make a player's channelers better based on their access to that strategic. There needs to be a way to consume it though. Could we do that all through buildings? Or what about improvements that consume resources?

counterpoint said:
I agree. Legends. Prophecies could work too, but I prefer Legends.

So that means the Legends are the Art of our game? Are Prophecies the Writing? That makes Crafts the Music, which is odd....

That's fine with me. I don't think the concepts of the 3 types need to map across, it's just the function of their mechanics. Characterizing the 3 base CiV types, Music makes Tourism blasts - which is a Culture-attack tactic. Writing make Culture blasts - defensive tactic. And Art makes Golden Ages. If we're going to shuffle around the abilities anyway, I don't think the mapping means much anymore. Legends + Relics, Prophecies, and Crafts sounds good.

counterpoint said:
OK, Items of Power then. Maybe we just call them that? ooh,,, "Relics of Power" ?
But yeah, we don't need much - could be more than three though.

Relics of Power sounds good! So, how specific do we want to be, drawing from that list of Items of Power? I'm thinking we want to be a bit more generic than the actual entries in that list, but still recognizable. I'm liking:

Medallion
Figurine
Plaque
[One of the variations of] Rod
Disc

Any of the above would then be combined with a nationality to form a Relic?

Also: Antiquity Sites. I think we want to rename that. What do we choose instead?

counterpoint said:
OK, so what helps create Great Artists (for example) in WoT? Specialists, buildings, and wonders, right? Anything else? If not, then it does seem to fit here - Wisdoms, a building, and some wonders, right?

Having looked back at the Aes Sedai abilities during the coding work, we've also got the top level Blue Ajah bonus as a WoT GP generation bonus. That makes sense, and it's not a primary source since only one player will ever have it. Policies also contribute towards most GP types, but the bulk of natural generation is in Specialists, Buildings, and Wonders. That sounds good for the WoT GP types then.

counterpoint said:
Honestly, I could see us breaking Pattern down just the same as score. We could factor in more things than what CiV does, if you think it fits or is necessary. In any case, I'm not really sure how to approach it (don't really know much about how score is calculated, though i do see how complicated it is when I highlight it in-game).

I haven't looked into how Firaxis calculate score exactly, but I do know it doesn't consider how many units you have, at least not significantly. (So highly aggressive civs are often underscored for the first portion of the game, until they consume a few other civs.) It sounds like the easiest approach here would be to just use score until we have a better idea of if we want to make Pattern any different.

counterpoint said:
I won't quote the rest since I won't be responding to specific things. But I'm glad to see that things are happening, for sure. Sorry to hear the coding seems illogical at times, though.

In terms of whether you should post all the github details and such, I'll leave it all up to you. I certainly read it all, and try my best to follow it. I won't usually have that much to add or say, beyond words of encouragement and stuff. So, it's up to you - I'm consuming the goods and trying to learn from them, but I can't say necessarily that that's worth your time (since it obviously took quite a bit of time). That said, if there's a reason you want to post stuff here to keep track of your process and such, of course do so!

No worries about the illogicality, I sort of know to expect it now, having worked with CiV before, but every time I open up a new part of the game and find some crazy "solution" it has to surprise me. This time I've run into the code that puts all the little text in the "bonuses" columns when showing previews of combat damage. It is completely and utterly insane. Makes no sense - Firaxis made adding a new message tons more work (and more error prone) than they needed to. In most places I've erred on the side of restructuring Firaxis' code where possible rather than make the WoTMod additions more complicated and difficult to follow, but I couldn't really get into teasing apart EnemyUnitPanel.lua.

In terms of posting the details on here, it does help me to put things out in words on the forum, so I'll carry on with the code updates referencing commits then. (Helps me to see the structure of what I've done and in explaining it, make sure it makes sense.)

So, this time I've got a bunch of new stuff. Not many screenshots, just this one. In the bottom left, in tiny little text you can see "Bonus from research" which is the White Ajah Tier One ability in action.

In terms of actual implementation, I've got all 7 Ajahs' Tier One abilities working. (Plus Tier Zero for the Blue and White, from last time.) Tier One was probably the easiest tier, since most of those bonuses are variants on one that exist in the base game. (Meaning I didn't need to write new C++ to get the desired effects once the promotions were being given out to the right units, which works from the last update.)

So the changes are Blue, Green, Red, Brown, Gray, and Yellow. But where's the White? Well, our favorite ability, "White Sisters get +30% combat strength for 5 turns after you research a technology" actually ended up being quite complicated. That last one is the meat of the change. The second one is a bit misleading, that's me checking in one of Firaxis' files to replace their one with a modified version.

It turned out that nothing in the game core tracked how long it had been since a team finished researching a tech. I made a few false starts on the architecture for that one, but the final result seems sound and not too complex (performance wise) while still "doing what it looks like it should" from a DB columns perspective.

Due to their relationship to some of the other Tier Zero and Tier Two abilities, I'm thinking Warders and Gentling are up next.

Now, back to the Last Battle! I'll quote some of the sections I think we could use clarity on before we want to proceed with an implementation of the victory. I've started here mostly with questions to get a conversation started on each topic, rather than expecting the answers solved immediately, so don't feel like you need to answer everything on the spot! I've tried to include my opinion on what we can do wherever I can, but some quotes have just turned into a series of questions that don't necessarily have immediate answers. It helps to compare this to the LB summary to have context for some of the specific quotes.

counterpoint said:
Large numbers of shadowspawn appear, including new unit types and forsaken units.

This is when the Last Battle starts. Do we want to go through what the Shadowspawn unit types are exactly? Or should that wait until we have all of the normal units down?

counterpoint said:
Flavorful "what would you do?" situations where the player reacts to some ethical conundrum. Darkside choices may sometimes offer better rewards, or more short-term benefit, or even just a different (but comparable) reward to the lightside choice. Darkside options may or may not be obviously "evil" actions, but are certainly shady or otherwise unethical

Situations that affect alignment. Do we want to go through and create some of the actual circumstances for these? Not necessarily final text, but the kinds of bonuses and penalties. Also the speed at which we expect people to move through the "ranks" of the "Light/Shadow" scale as a result of these would be good to know.

Related to that, what are the "ranks" on the scale? How many levels of "Shadow/Light" are there? In general I think it's a sliding scale: modifiers scale with your underlying Alignment points, not in stepped, discrete increments. But at least for the player, who sees only a flavorful description, there are thresholds at which that description changes. I think some of the "how Shadow-y is this player"-based decisions become easier once there's a well defined scale. (Even with placeholder names for the levels.)

counterpoint said:
Chosing to support, or ignore, the forces of the Light during the Trolloc Wars, False Dragon battles, and other global events

How do we want to track this, exactly? Is it in number of kills during these events themselves? Are there any other global events aside from the High King? As a diplo event, does that necessarily contribute significantly to Alignment?

Raising the topic of the Trolloc Wars specifically, do we have more details on how we want that event to play out? Obviously we want more Shadowspawn and we want to shake up the players, but is there anything more to it than spawn a pile of units in the Blight every turn for X turns? I'm not suggesting we necessarily introduce new mechanics here, I think we've got enough of those in this space, but it would be cool to get a clear idea of the flow of the actual gameplay implications. A few blow-by-blows of some example Trolloc Wars would probably be a good idea.

counterpoint said:
The players use or lack of use of darkfriend-related units and features darkfriend spies, black ajah agents, etc.

Our design here seems to have shifted a lot from this idea. The Black Ajah is largely manifested through the Turning of the Tower mechanics we discussed in the last couple of pages, though we've still got secret quests from them up in the air? Should those quests be in one of the summaries?

Darkfriend spies no longer seem to exist as we thought about them here. Or has this become a post-start-of-LB-only notion - where Shadow civs' spies are corrupting Light civs?

Basically I think we're looking for our primary vehicles for players to gain Shadow points in this topic.

counterpoint said:
The player's suffering of "corruption" or Turning from opponent's darkfriend spies, etc.

I'm not sure what this represents exactly. I do remember the notion of a Darkfriend as a non-optional citizen at some point - did that make it into this system somewhere?

counterpoint said:
Player's position on the Scale provides them a modifier or multiplier to their Faith generation. Additionally, conventional Faith "purchases" may cost darkside players more than they would cost Lightside players.

The only outstanding question here, I think, is do we still want to make normal faith purchases cost more for Shadow players? The modifier to faith generation makes sense and so would a faith-purchase-cost-modifier. It was just left as a "maybe" so I think we should be sure before we put it in.

counterpoint said:
Darkside players will receive Boons to compensate for the lost faith. It is undetermined whether these are integrated into the rewards for the situations described above, or if these are additionally granted.

Boons, we discussed them quite a bit but I don't think we came down on a 100% idea of what their final form is. Do we want these to be given out by mysterious secret-Shadow-forces-popups at relatively random intervals, weighted by the player's Shadow alignment? How do we want them to scale to offset the loss of Path? (Do we want them to?)

counterpoint said:
While extreme positions on the Scale cannot "force" the player's hand in this choice, there are consequences to a player choosing a side that is at odds with how their civ has been played, most notably in penalties to happiness (and the possibility of their cities changing sides).

Are there other yield penalty middle grounds between rebellions and happiness penalties? (There don't have to be, there aren't in the Ideology system.)

counterpoint said:
For Shadow-allied civs, their position on the Scale may determine the following:

The amount or type of shadowspawn they are able to control

The amount of Darkside AI military support (eg. Forsaken forces) they receive.

Is there a significant distinction between these two rewards?

counterpoint said:
The strength of Boons granted fromt he Dark One.

Boons cropping up again, but in a different context - this time post-start-of-LB.

counterpoint said:
All Light-side capitals must be controlled by the Shadow (Neutral capitals are irrelevant). It is still unknown if Neutral civs controlling the Light capitals can trigger this. If one Light team members controlling each other's capitals (from previous wars), this will not count towards the Shadow victory.

Shadow victory condition. Commenting on the unknown here - I think it should be "All original capitals of currently living Light-side civilizations must be controlled by the Shadow." So if Ghealdan have declared for the Light, it doesn't matter if Neutral Seanchan controls the Ghealdanin capital, the Shadow still need to take it. Also means that any capital-exchanges from pre-LB intra-Light wars don't change anything.

counterpoint said:
The Dragon must "take" Thakan'dar

I remember discussing this in detail and I think I remember exactly how it works, but I think it's worth having as a part of the summary. Brief summary of what I remember:

Thakan'dar is a city, controlled by the Shadow civ.

It spawns deep in the Blight at the start of the Last Battle.

All units except the Dragon have significant penalties when attacking Thakan'dar and it is very well fortified (plus surrounded by Shadowspawn) so it is nigh impossible to take with brute military force.

The Dragon unit does bonus damage to Thakan'dar, making him the only reasonable way to capture the city.

counterpoint said:
The seals begin the game hidden throughout the map. It is still unknown if these are found within ruins, archaeological digs, or if certain units or technologies enable their discovery on the map.

This is a big one. We've just finished the culture victory, so what do we think about the Seals sharing the Antiquity Sites with the Relics? I think after our discussions, I'd be inclined to make the Seals completely separate. I think it makes the Antiquity Sites too busy and potentially interferes with the Culture victory if you can't tell them apart before excavating. Further, they'll need to be placed differently from Antiquity Sites, given what we've discussed about leaving Antiquity Sites' spawning mechanism alone, but we can't rely on that to place our required number of Seals+fakes.

So, that leads us to how do we dig up them up? What are the "things" called that we're digging up? ("Site of a Seal" is nicely alliterative. This is the Seal equivalent for Antiquity Sites.) Do we want a Seal-finder unit or should be use our Archaeologists stand-in? (If we want a unit, what should it be?)

I'm leaning towards a dedicated Seal-finder unit. Otherwise culture civs will be inherently good at the Last Battle victory OR everyone will build lots of Archaeologists and crowd the culture civs out. I think it's good to keep some mechanical distance between the victories that way.

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

Emperor

King

Emperor

Emperor

King

The Prince of Dorkness

Chieftain

Emperor

King

Emperor

Emperor

King

King

Emperor

King

Emperor

King

Emperor

King

Emperor

Similar threads