OK. I'm going through and turning all these passages RED in the original summary - otherwise it'd be impossible to find out what needs to be changed after a couple rounds of quoting.
Awesome, thank you!
This is tackled somewhat towards the end, but I think it could be clarified. I'll go ahead and lay it out here.
Based on the Lore and what we've already determined (covering shadow units in general):
Trollocs: spawn throughout game
Myrddraal: spawn throughout game, though in lower numbers
Draghkar: spawn throughout game, though in lower numbers
Samma N'Sei: spawn only during LB, and perhaps only in Blight.
Gray Men: spy-like assassin function. Available during LB
Dreadlords: spawn in LB AND Trolloc Wars (there definitely seem to be these guys during the Trolloc Wars)
Darkhounds: could theoretically spawn throughout game, but probably either only in LB or in LB/Trolloc Wars. Not sure which.
Gholam: Not sure how to handle him.... Should only occur in the LB. I'm thinking maybe he is a forsaken-like unit, popping up and terrorizing a city for a few turns, then disappearing.
Forsaken: appear only in LB, EXCEPT for Ishamael, who could also appear in Trolloc Wars (following the lore)
Jumara (Worm): maybe appear throughout game, Blight-Only. This would be the don't-go-in-the-blight monster without us having to have there be an insane amounts of other shadowspawn, slowing down the game due to their AI.
Also, will there be any wild/dangerous grolm and stuff? I assume not.
Awesome, I'm good with all of this.
In terms of the still open stuff - I'm fine with leaving Darkhounds for just the Trolloc Wars and Last Battle.
With the gholam, I think he would need to be quite distinct from the Forsaken in terms of capabilities, and then it's questionable whether it's worth including him in that manner for such a tiny slice of gameplay. I think we should include the gholam somehow, but I don't know if it should be more than flavor dressing on some the Shadow side objectives?
This one definitely crosses over for me into "let's handle this later," since will probably warrant a full-on brainstorm and such.
Speaking generally, I can see us going in one of two ways with this:
1) bonuses can be essentially any yield
2) bonuses are essentially confined to one yield
The nice thing about the second option is it could let us make the alignment stuff feel consistent and predictably linked to game outcomes. If they all had to do with production, let's say. Or population.
That said, this would also have the problem of making it feel too predictable - too much of a mechanic that is manipulated, taking over much more than we originally sought.
I'm curious what kinds of things you were thinking for these.
I'm fine with coming back to this later for a full brainstorming session. I'm thinking these quests are the primary driver of alignment changes in the game, and so we probably want to make them quite engaging. I also wonder if there's room for actual on-map objectives with these, but I'm not sure if there is.
I think restricting the rewards to one yield could make them a bit predictable, and be in danger of being much more useful to some victory types than others.
A mod that someone linked to much earlier in the thread was
sukritact's Events & Decisions, which has a system that is probably conceptually similar to this. Stuff happens to your civ, you choose how to respond, and are rewarded correspondingly. This was effectively a feature of Civ4 that didn't come over to CiV and I think a lot of people miss it. We'd be tailoring it much more narrowly to Alignment though, rather than general events. Though they would have similarly far-reaching rewards. (Far-reaching in the "type of bonus" sense, rather than the power of those bonuses.)
As far as how fast they'd move through the ranks... I'm thinking that for a good part of the game, the differences between civs should be very slight. This should ramp us as the game progresses. I don't see this progression as being linear, I guess. That said, I never want these prompts to be an "all the time" thing - the alignment choices should feel somewhat rare and special.
That sounds good that alignment is mostly very close together for the first part (half?) of the game and become a much bigger factor later on.
I'm less sure about making the alignment choices rare - I'd been thinking these would be our primary driver for alignment shifts. So what else can players do that affect their alignment?
Yes, I think under the hood this should be a sliding numerical value.
That said, from a player perspective, I don't know, maybe three dark ones and three light ones? Is that enough? I don't think I should take the time right now to try to brainstorm any specific words, though.
Yeah, no need for specific words yet. Three is what I've put in now, but I can easily see there being significantly more than that. I would imagine they get farther apart at higher values - I can even see as many as seven or eight for each side.
There are some places where we need to draw lines, like which civs can see the Shadow Turning the Tower objectives, which civs are considered "very Light" by the Shadow AI, which cities are considered for razing for the Shadow objectives (seems like the Shadow really cares about alignment more than Light). It's useful to use the tiers for this. If we have eight, I'd say we could use the upper and lower 4 tiers as the thresholds for "significantly Light" and "significantly Shadow", leaving the middle 8 tiers as more debatable territory.
I don't think the High King situation should affect Alignment. But it should probably affect Pattern, though...
I agree about Alignment. The High King thing will definitely affect score, through which it will affect Pattern at the moment. Just to recap from before - I'm right in thinking that currently we don't plan to separate Pattern from score at all?
As far as the Trolloc Wars, though, we obviously don't have anything systematic yet. I don't think that period warrants any "big deal" cooperation - there's no Lightside alliance, or anything. Some ideas:
1) Set of Global Projects (pre-Compact?) that allow people to contribute hammers towards certain civs. Which ones?
2) option to send one-sided trade-routes that are stronger for the recipient than they would otherwise be.
3) periodic AI-determined "quests" that pop up based on the game's analysis of the situation. If a civ is under siege, for instance, it would decide to ask all the other civs for donations of units, gold, etc.
Otherwise, I don't know. I like the idea of a "top performer" during the Trolloc wars, but I can't see how we can enable it. What do you think?
I like the idea of a top performer in the Trolloc Wars too, but I don't know if we want to introduce any new mechanics for it. I think we should keep back the one-sided trade routes and global projects until the Last Battle. I think we want to layer the tracking on top of how players already interact with the waves and waves of Trollocs.
Something that I've thought of as a part of this and also the Blight spreading discussion later on in the post - the Shadow can capture cities, right? They can't necessarily build buildings and become a proper civ, but I think it's effective if they can do that - it makes them much more of a threat to the player. If those cities could build units only (Trollocs and such), that would be a good incentive for players to attack them or in the case of Shadow-captured CSes - likely liberate them.
Despite what you've said below, I'm not sure that the Trolloc Wars involves Shadowspawn
spawning outside the Blight. What
I've read (and remember) suggests that it was an actual invasion, stemming from the Blight, rather than the rampant emergence from Waygates across the land that we saw in the Last Battle. I think this is a good distinction between the two, but it does complicate things a bit, because it will be inherently localized by geography and where the Blight ends up.
We'll want to make some changes so that the Shadow AI is more aggressive - it has nothing to lose, no reason to defend any "homeland" because its homeland is unassailable. (The Blight can't be killed/captured.)
This means some players will lose a lot of stuff. Some tempting measures of success:
1. Number of cities lost.
2. Number of units lost.
3. Number/strength of Shadowspawn killed.
Geography makes #1 and #2 difficult. One civ who's all along the Blight might have courageously fought off all of the Trollocs. He's clearly MVP, but he'll have lost the most cities - because no one else lost any. We know Seanchan wasn't affected by the Trolloc Wars and depending on how our map scripts work, I can definitely see us ending up with maps where some continents, or at least islands, don't have a Blight. (I don't think the Shadowspawn have a navy.)
I'm actually warming to the whole number of Shadowspawn killed idea. Players who are farther away are inherently safer and unless they go out of their way to send their armies over to fight the Shadow, the guys who have to deal with the rampaging hordes of Trollocs are the ones who get the Trolloc Wars-related bonuses. This seems like a good combination. We had difficulty with "number of Shadowspawn killed" for events like Cleansing Saidin, but that was mainly because we had to limit it in some way. The Trolloc Wars can just track kills globally for the duration of the Wars.
Now, rather than just track kills straight up, we could have
some penalties for losing cities. The guy who lost 4 cities and killed 15 Trollocs is clearly worse than the guy who lost 1 city and killed 13 Trollocs. And I mentioned Number/Strength (rather than just number) because Myrddraal and Draghkar are presumably worth more to kill than Trollocs.
As far as False Dragons and stuff... I'm not sure. I suppose killing one at all could count for the light, but I don't think we want to get complicated enough to have it track how many kills you make and stuff, at least not for these purposes. I don't think we need anything official like the "war of the second dragon."
Agreed, I don't think we want to do a "war of the second dragon" or anything like that either. Now I'm thinking this one could also be tracked by kills. A False Dragon spawns
with several other Dragonsworn units around him. Killing (or even just damaging) any of those units that spawned together, is worth some contribution to the False Dragon event. Players are rewarded when the event ends based on their contribution to the kills.
Does the event end when all of those units are killed or just the False Dragon? The latter leads to situations where players want to keep the False Dragon alive so they get bonuses from killing the Dragonsworn in interim, which is weird. Unless the False Dragon is strong enough to make it too risky to leave him alive.
Alternatively, we could make it even simpler and these units that spawn with the False Dragon (and the False Dragon himself) yield Alignment for being killed. Just that simple, no tracking involved.
Also, do we necessarily want killing False Dragons to yield Light Alignment? I feel like it should flavor wise, but if a False Dragon shows up at your door, you should try to kill him, even if you're going Shadow, otherwise he'll kill all your stuff. Is the difference just that Shadow players would only get involved if forced to by proximity and Light players would hunt them down?
Is it worth more Light points to Gentle the False Dragon? That seems really good to me, since it's a voluntary player action. If that causes a significant difference, it may solve the above. Killing the False Dragon yields minor Light, but Gentling him yields major Light. The Shadow players will just always kill him. Doesn't help us with his followers, unless they're all male channelers too (nooooo, though one or two could be?). I'd imagine killing them was always going to yield significantly less Light though.
All of this would be in addition to the Prestige bonus that the player who kills the False Dragon would receive otherwise. Since the Prestige bonus is the actual thing players will want - Alignment isn't useful in and of itself, except to guide the player toward the side they want.
I'd say a big part of the Trolloc Wars is that trollocs have the potential to spawn OUTSIDE of the blight - though not to the same extent as in the LB. Also, a few dreadlords pop up, maybe darkhounds, maybe even Ishamael. But nothing showing any "new" mechanics. Don't think I can take the time for any blow-by-blows tonight, but these are the kinds of things I'm thinking: lots of pressure from the blight, plus weird stuff happening elsewhere as well.
What I said above about spawning patterns applies here. Good point on the Dreadlords and Darkhounds, they're a "new" thing the player won't have seen before the Trolloc Wars. We could make Ishamael pop up in some games, but not all? Everything I've read hints at him being there, but he was never running around using his powers in the open, which we'd have to do if we put his unit on the board.
So, blow by blow! Small map - so 6 players. Split into two continents, 4 civs on one, 2 on the other. Civs are:
Continent 1: Aiel, Andor, Tear, Seanchan
Continent 2: Illian, Shienar
Both continents have a Blight, but Continent 2's is significantly smaller.
It's turn 75 and the Trolloc Wars begin!
On Continent 1, Tear and Seanchan border the Blight in the north, Andor's all the way on the south coast, and the Aiel are in the middle. For the first five turns, Tear and the Seanchan are suddenly dealing with a lot of angry enemies pounding on their border cities.
Another 5 turns and they've lost a city each. Two city-states near the Blight have been captured. The Aiel start to see some stray Shadowspawn units entering their lands from the north, but they can fight them off.
Already, what this has made me think, is that the Shadowspawn AI should prioritize trying to reach the opposite end of the continent from the Blight, during the Trolloc Wars (or the middle if there is Blight at both ends). This makes it much less likely that the players on the border will just be totally screwed and everyone else untouched.
10 turns later, the Aiel are dealing with significant numbers and having trouble with it. Even Andor's seeing a couple of Shadowspawn, but not all that many. Seanchan and Tear are seeing a lot of units funneled past them, but haven't necessarily lost more than 3 cities between them - just enough to open a corridor. When they Wars end, they'll likely be able to reclaim the cities, since there will be much fewer Shadowspawn (though if the cities are reclaimed by their original owners is up for grabs).
Meanwhile, on Continent 2, Shienar had a good defensive position against the southern Blight, funneling Shadowspawn units toward a city in a gap in a mountain range. They haven't lost any cities, but have lost a fair amount of units and the Shadowspawn spilling around the mountain range has meant they've got to defend another border. Illian is way north and with Shienar's success, their lands see few, if any, Shadowspawn. However, Illian's the human player and they want to play Light this game.
Shadowspawn during the Trolloc Wars yield Light Alignment for being killed (?) - so Illian's army treks down south and actually fights the Shadowspawn.
What do we think? Is this how we plan for it to play out? Would the Light yield be annoying if you're a Shadow civ by the Blight? (Yes.) Can anything be done to mitigate that?
Wait, so those secret Black quests - are we still doing them? I forgot where we ended up with that. But yes, many of these mechanics seem to no longer exactly apply. It is reasonable, though, to assume that Turning the Tower would net you darkside points....
I am not sure if we're still doing those. Turning would definitely net you Shadow points - I'd say completing any of the Shadow objectives individually gives you a decent lump of Shadow points (as long as you could see it) and completing the whole thing nets you a ton.
The Black Ajah quests and Forsaken quests were something we discussed for a while. I think we liked the Forsaken quests and I think those had some good narrative choices. (Do self-destructive things because the Forsaken tell you to.) But do they still have a corresponding payoff?
I would be fine dropping the Black Ajah quests, given how we've changed the Turning the Tower mechanic.
Yes, Darkfriend spies do not appear to exist anywhere. I am fine with this. The Gray Man has taken over for the assassination aspect.
Sounds good to me, Darkfriend spies, as their own concept, dropped.
That said, we do appear to be left with a hole. The whole Darkfriend Citizen thing (you mention it below), do we now have no way of fighting against them or creating more of them (in another civ or your own)? Is this why we needed this spy-like darkfriend? Or, is there a simpler way to do this?
I just did a quick forum search for "darkfriend citizen" and found several posts where we got pretty far into it (
here is one of them). I don't have the time tonight (this is already hour number two of doing this tonight) to look into it more deeply, but suffice it to say, I'd mostly forgotten about it. A lot of this stuff seemed pretty cool though, so we should investigate further and decide how it still makes sense, if it indeed does.
Right, I've reread that post and several more around it to get a better idea of what we were thinking for the Darkfriend citizen stuff. I think the last iteration we liked involved "Darkfriend" being a label that could be applied to citizens within a city, rather than having Darkfriend as a citizen type. I think this is a good approach, as it reduces players' ability to metagame around them and also means we don't need to balance a new citizen against all of the existing types.
Also,
citizens working tiles are candidates for Darkfriend-ifying as well. We don't have to stick only with Specialists if we don't want to.
So, something we never
really decided on: are Darkfriend citizens a cause of Alignment change or a symptom? From our discussions above, I think we have a lot of potentially flavorful ways of generating Light Alignment, but not nearly as many for Shadow. I think the decision events are the only ones so far that could really generate significant Shadow, and you've suggested we'd like to make them rare. So we'll need other significant sources of Shadow alignment. I think the Darkfriend citizens could fill that roll? They actually yield Shadow Alignment, in addition to their normal yields?
A few other questions come up: Where do they come from? How can you cause them to happen for yourself, if you want to? How can you cause them to happen to your enemies, to make your Bloodknives and Gray Men more effective? (I'm thinking Bloodknives, though not themselves Shadow, gain effectiveness in cities with more Darkfriends? What other effects do we think should be modified by the presence of Darkfriend citizens?) And how can you get rid of them if you don't want them from your own cities?
The first question - "Where do they come from?" - is a big one. If they're a primary source of Shadow Alignment, you need to be able to make them without already being very Shadow-y. The events could be our starting point - whenever you choose a "Shadow" response to an event, a citizen in one of your cities becomes a Darkfriend? Does that happen often enough to fill out the ranks in such a way that a player could Shadow-ify themselves intentionally? (Which we want.) (How do we choose which city and which citizen? Just let the player choose? Weighted in some way?)
How you can give them to your enemies could feed into the above. Is the answer to both just production? Is there a Darkfriend unit that can be expended at a city (yours or otherwise) to make one of the citizens a Darkfriend? Can they be produced infinitely? Are they gated on a tech? (They'd be civilians, right?) If they're limited somehow, what informs the limit?
And yet another separate question - how do you get rid of them if you don't want them? Does accruing Light Alignment cause them to disappear? Not
having Light Alignment, but
gaining it. Every time you gain 100 Light Alignment, one of your citizens that is a Darkfriend goes back to normal. Would the player choose which one? (This seems quite apt, there are likely key places that are contributing more Shadow points than others due to citizen allocation.)
A sufficiently production-mad Shadow civ could then corrupt its neighbors, almost against their will? Is there any way of giving the Light players some more agency?
The general concept of Shadow Alignment being generated primarily by normal folk who do evil things seems quite flavorfully apt. Rather than a series of grand, sweeping gestures, Shadow is something that slowly seeps into the facets of a civilization from within, from the people themselves.
EDIT: Alternative way of assigning Darkfriend citizens that avoids all meta-gaming (which we don't like): make one of the city's population a Darkfriend, instead of one of its citizen slots. No matter where that citizen works (even if he's unemployed), he's a Darkfriend a generates Shadow Alignment. Most of the rest of the above still applies if we like that idea.
I say "no" to the double jeopardy of this. Low Faith output is enough.
Sounds good to me - dropped. Faith purchase costs are unaffected by Alignment.
What do you mean by having them "scale to offset the loss of Path"? Meaning, not only are they more common if you are high-darkness, but they are better?
I could go either way on this. They should feel unpredictable though. Are the boons distinct from any actual "rewards" you'd get for following your orders, or are those the rewards?
Did you play Bioshock? Remember how you can kill the little girls or let them live? It's a bad moral choice mechanic, because killing them - to harvest their power - doesn't carry the weight of sacrifice, because if you're nice to them all game, they end up giving you a huge gift of their power anyways.
I mention that because I don't want this to be like that. If you sacrifice something, we should make it actually a real sacrifice (though it should be balanced against potential benefit).
In general, though, it does seem to make sense that a heavy shadow playstyle would be high risk, high reward. Maybe the boons reflect that.
EDIT: Bah, I blocked out the quote for this first time through and forgot to respond. I'll make this part of tomorrow's post!
Hmmm... probably not. If there are penalties though, I'd say they shouldn't be across the board, instead being something very specific and consistent. Like maybe a hit to Faith or something.
I'm happy to have no middle ground, enough unhappiness causes rebellions on its own anyway.
Not much, but in the one these are shadowspawn units gifted to the player, but in the other, the Shadow Civ will conduct its operations in your favor - and Forsaken super-units will spawn in your defense, etc.
Ok, cool.
ok, mostly with you here. Definitely need to add the word ORIGINAL into the mix. But I'm not sure I see the need for the "currently living" part. If the Shadow wholly eliminate a light civ, I think it's reasonable that they should maintain control of their capital, right?
Good point, I was trying to avoid including any civs that were already dead when the Last Battle started. A better ruling is probably: "All original capitals of civilizations that declared for the Light must be controlled by the Shadow." That way everyone who made it to the start of the Last Battle is included and no one from before.
Yes, that is as I remember it. So, add this to the summary? Should it go here, or in some other section detailing the city?
I think you could modify the bit that you mention in your next post (after the one I'm quoting now) where we're talking about Dragon-only capture. I think we'll go for other units
can capture Thakan'dar, but it's really, really, really difficult to do.
I agree. Separate it from the Culture sites. Not worth the confusion and unforeseen relationship of variables, etc.
Sounds good.
OK, so there is no longer the whole "spend research to discover the location of a seal," right? The research is to discover the validity of a seal only, right? You just find them around town, right, with an Era of the Dragon tech giving the location of some/most/all of the unfound seals. right?
So it's just random, then? Wander around (with this unit) until you find them? This seems... rather unfun.
In any case, I think we should unify this mechanic with the Hunt for the Horn system. The units that find the Horn should also be the units that find seals. Otherwise, having Seal-guys, Hunters, AND historians... that's way too much specialization for what COULD be one unit.
I do agree that they shouldn't be the Historians, though - let's not crowd that space too much.
So how can we unify it with the Horn? Is there a specific Hunter unit people use for it, or can ANY unit find it? And, again, it's just a random wander-the-earth-til-you-find-them thing?
Also, recall that there's a Blue ability (right) that makes a higher likelihood of finding the horn - we might wanna extend that to the Seals.
Agreed that there's no research component to
finding the Seals. I'm thinking now that the Seal Sites should be more like the Antiquity Sites (not connected to them, just mechanically similar). After a certain technology they become visible things on the map that players can go to. (If a player has built a city on top of one, they get the "unconfirmed" Seal when they research the tech.) As you say, wandering aimlessly around the map is not fun.
I'm not sure if we should unify the Seal-guys with the Horn Hunters though. "Hunter for the Horn" is such a good, flavorful unit and has such an appropriate task in finding the Horn. I don't think Hunters should find Seals though. I can see the Seal-guys also being able to find the Horn, but then why would you ever build Hunters? Unless Hunters are also viable combat units, where Seal-guys are clearly civilians.
I'm also not sure if we should make the Horn a more visible thing. Like, does it ever become a "Site of the Horn" like an Antiquity Site, that you eventually see and just dig up? I'm thinking the Horn might not be found in every game, and the only way to do that is make it something you can't see directly. I think there could be some mechanic of narrowing down its location though. (Could there be red herrings for that too?)
I think we originally proposed having the Blue ability affect the Seals as well, but didn't want to make the diplo victory dependent on the Last Battle victory.
However, the role of the Tower in the diplo victory has changed since then - the internal workings of the Tower aren't all that relevant to the diplo victory anymore, only how the Tower votes in the Compact. So we have room to create some more dependencies here. It does make that ability monumentally less useful if the Last Battle victory condition is off. Then again, I imagine
most players will play with all victories on. We could make it so that Blue Sisters can discover Seals
and the Horn? Definitely flavorful. Is it useful enough? Sisters are certainly harder to kill than any civilian Seal-guy or normal combat Hunter.
So, a quick brainstorm of what our Seal-guys could be:
- Sealfinders (the blazingly direct)
- Heroes (Not of the Horn variety, though that's probably an association people will make, making this not a great option.)
- Ta'veren (Since that tends to be the case in the books. Producing these by production is weird, but we'd need to if they were the Seal-guys.)
- Chronicler (grabbing our previous candidate for the Archaeologists' rename)
I'm afraid that's all I have time for tonight. I'm going to try to do some coding for the mod this evening!
Still only really relevant for the LB though, so they could coexist.
EDIT: WOAH, the smilies changed from the Christmas ones to the normal ones while I was writing this post. I feel like I've caught a moment in history somehow. Or maybe my browser had the Christmas ones cached and all my frantic moving through the topic convinced it to pull them down from CivFanatics again. Certainly more likely, but less exciting.
I will look through our discussions about doubling up and conquest and such to make sure nothing's been missed.
