why wouldn't we just offset all of it? If we were going to originally have them spawn at, say, 100 FD points and then 200 (or whatever), and we staggered the first one so it started at 150, why not just make the 2nd 250?
remember, we've been discussing number of turns, but that is just a colloquial abstraction - we're really talking point accumulation. And we can make the trigger points wherever we want.
Right, I see what you mean. Yeah, we could stagger the whole progression for each player.
It occurs to me that some players are disadvantaged by a staggered start since they have to deal with False Dragons sooner than others, just by default, not because of anything they've done. It does seem like the wave is a worse alternative to that though.
I've noted it in the misc summary.
Right, I think we've reached an impasse on this one. However, there's a section later on in your post that I think we agree on - I'll come to that below!
right. So, I'm thinking we might be best off just saying only generic things. Maybe "Logain Ablar has been defeated!" Maybe we can also say "Logain Ablar has been defeated by Andor" or something like that. Not sure about that.
I'd say the specifics of how he was defeated don't need to be shared.
That sounds good to me. Noted in the misc summary.
This does bring up an interesting thing, though. You've made mention of there being big deal FDs and "minor" ones lost in history. Will this exist? Is there variability in the power of FDs? As it is, if there supposed to be powerful but not destroy-the-civ-powerful, there isn't really room for a Guaire Amalasan is there?
We could allow the Dragonsworn to capture cities. A suitably well placed False Dragon may go on to become a global power of sorts, but this would be extremely infrequent. (Happen once every 100 games or something - many things would have to align for it to be possible.) I think that's the only avenue for Guaire Amalasan-like False Dragon armies. In almost all cases, the civ will be able to fend the False Dragon off. In the rare cases where they can't, another neighboring civ would take him out - since a perpetual-war neighbor is just new land calling out to be captured.
OK, first, regarding the Spark thing. I'd say, first of all, if he goes rogue he is Dragonsworn, I think (flavors better than rogue, right? but it doesn't matter). But in terms of his combat bonus to determine the likelihood of your gentling.... can't we just make it ignore that value, when trying to gentle friendly units? I mean, civ doesn't let you attack friendlies normally anyways, so I'd guess this mission would need to be special in some way (in terms of the programming). Can we ignore combat strength and use other things to determine the likelihood of success on friendly units? Because it is lame to fail to gentle your dudes because you have Wonders that make your channelers better... such things should probably work against your enemies, mostly.
Very good point - accidentally making Gentling harder by making your channelers better is a crazy side effect. We can ignore combat strength - shall we effectively make Gentling a random roll for friendly units? It's a weighted random roll for enemy units, taking into account the comparative power of the units and the stuff we've discussed before. We could derive that value from a baseline that's in effect for friendly units. Obviously some bonuses would apply to both (+10% Gentling effectiveness, if anything ever gives that) but making combat strength only a factor for foreign units makes flavor sense too. The friendly unit isn't treating the Gentler as an enemy combatant already, so it makes sense that units which are doing so are more difficult to Gentle.
Do we want to make madness tier contribute to the Gentling difficulty? It seems like more mad channelers would be more difficult to get into position to Gentle them. I imagine this would be a smaller modifier than the combat one for foreigners.
OK, as far as incidence rates, I'm somewhat surprising myself here, but considering the base of 120 turns - which is a lot! - we're going to need to make the variation appropriately... varied. A super oppression civ, as described above, would get them every 150 points, so twice per game. A super liberation would get one every 90, which is only 3 (just barely not 4) times per game. I think this is an unacceptable difference. The only perceived effect would be the oppression civ getting them LATER, which isn't necessarily a positive. If we're going to reduce oppression's spark, it seems to me we should make this more distinct.
Granted, I'm talking a subtle difference, but a single FD is significant. If normal (authority, likely) is, say, 3 per game, oppression should probably be 2, and liberation 4. Make these differences count.
Just making sure that we're using Oppression vs Liberation as a general signpost for the civ acting that way for the whole game, right? Because Philosophies are adopted late game they don't have as much room to affect this variation.
4 vs 3 vs 2 for the three Philosophical approaches to the game sounds like a good number to me mechanically. I do wonder if players will notice the distinction though. Given the way FDs are characterized in both the books and the way we plan to represent them in game, I don't think we can afford to up the spawn rate in order to provide a more obvious difference between them.
What if it was 5 vs 3 vs 1? At the super extreme ends of the spectrum - a super Liberation/Tolerance civ that uses every channeling unit they can get their hands on - all of the Aes Sedai they can manage, constantly maxing out their Spark and finding more via Angreal Caches. At the other end a super Oppression/Fear civ that never builds a single channeling unit, Gentles all of their male channelers immediately, and uses their Aes Sedai solely for abilities, not combat (even against Shadowspawn).
If the average is at 120 turns, I think we'll have a fair idea about the civ's trajectory by turn 150-ish, when they'll have delayed their first FD to. Then they have
even more chances to make
even bigger reductions to their FD rate in the latter half of the game (Philosophy playing a big role in that), which would let them delay that second FD long enough to outlast the game.
The super Liberation civ would have a similar accelerated trajectory - where their later game choices affect the rate more significantly as they go on, if the first one were compressed to 90 turns, they might bring the interval to the second one down to 80, then 70, then 50, then 40, then end of game.
Of course, at the male-channeler level, these differences are way more perceivable, and as such I think for now your suggested rates look fine.
Cool, do you want to note the male channeler rate in the Channeling Summary?
I could be fine with these beliefs. I could also be fine with lowering the FQuests down to ~1500.
One thing I will make note of, though: a belief like this would definitely make a civ a target for Heralds. You could really Eff their alignment-production up by herald-bombing their cities. Much more than in other civs.
Yeah, citizens may not be the best way to modify their Alignment production - possibly a modifier to Thread yield or something like that!
OK, so I've edited Light civs choosing Shadow 5-6 and 7-8 to reflect the rebellions.
Before, you said: "Maybe rebels and the like to occupy the rebelled cities? and also spawning in some other places? Temporary interruption of research, like the "Anarchy" when switching Ideologies.". What specifically are you suggesting here?
Mm, it occurs to me that the rebel thing doesn't work so well, because the cities around joining another civ, not becoming Lawless. We could however spawn Lawless units in other places the civ still controls, much like what happens when a civ is super unhappy, except more widespread (and all at once).
In BNW, if a civ with a different Ideology from you has serious tourism on you and your civ is unhappy enough, then you are eventually forced to switch Ideologies to that of the influential civ - which is punctuated by a turn or two of Anarchy. We could trigger that Anarchy state for a couple of turns for civs at the highest tiers choosing the opposite Alignment (tier 8 Shadow chooses Light and vice versa). When in Anarchy, the civ doesn't produce any beakers or gold, and all production queues in their city halt. (Anarchy was also in pre-BNW when switching between mutually exclusive policy trees.)
Additionally, I wanted to comment on a curiosity that bugs me: there's no benefit to being Light 6 over 5 (and 4 over 3, etc.). In shadow sides, if you choose Light, you get -5 happiness per tier, but the Light side gets happiness bonuses (and penalties) in clumps of two. Why not differentiate it every tier, so it's increments of 5 per tier, instead of 10 per two tiers?
Originally I liked the idea of the two being distinct in some way, but given the width of the tiers and what we've been discussing since, let's change this so that they're symmetrical. 5 per tier (bonus and penalty) sounds good.
I think one per game is probably likely. Not sure it would always be there, though.
I understand what you are saying (below, mostly) about how if you set your mind to something at an easy skill level, you should achieve it. I guess that's fine. But, isn't reaching Tier 8 something akin to building that wonder you are shooting for? It's easier to do on Warlord than Emporer, but by no means is it a guarantee. And by the same token, it really doesn't matter if you miss it. That's the big difference, I'd say - on chieftain, it won't impact you in the slightest if you play Light when you're Tier 3 Shadow - on Diety, though, you couldn't possibly afford those happiness penalties.
So, yeah, I see what you mean, but I don't think easy skill levels needs to mean people can easily prescribe their alignments - truly, many of our alignment systems appear to work in isolation of difficulty level. That said, forsaken quests, turning the tower, killing FDs, stedding quests, killing shadowspawn - these things will all become much. much easier on easy skill levels.
I don't think aiming for an Alignment tier is quite like aiming for a wonder. The wonder is one portion of many things that you do to achieve a specific goal, often related to your planned victory condition. The tier is more like the victory condition itself - it's a goal rather than a single component - something that defines what your civ is.
I'm also not sure if our currently isolated Alignment systems should operate independently of difficulty. I figured we were generally working on designing for standard gamespeed and Prince - the default game state - just keeping in mind that things would need to scale. Then when we've got that in a place we like, we'd go through and do a gamespeed and difficulty pass, deciding how each of those systems would scale (or not for some, maybe Alignment would be like that) with game speed and difficulty.
I'm a bit confused here, because you say here that you were surprised my suggestion was so high, and then go on about how it's way too low...
I figured you'd go lower, but I still think it's not high enough.
But actually, this started out as an agreement and I ended up rewriting it, this bit got confused.
So, again, I don't quite follow your logic here. You say people will ignore it. Weren't we happy with the gentling mechanic before I even suggested we have false dragon defeats provide light? Weren't the yields enough to be kind of fun and worth doing? how does adding some (pretty decent) light yield make them more ignorable?
Totally, we were happy with FD Gentling before it generated Light and I think as a system by itself it works fine. But we've since discussed needing additional sources of Light, because we've discussed more detail about what values we want to reach and where we want those numbers to come from. I was saying people will not prioritize the Light output from FDs because it's a much lower effort to Light gained ratio than other sources, if we reduce it (more on this specifically in a moment). This means that the amounts most players will get from it are lower than previously represented. When the Light payout was high, it was worth Light civs investing more effort in it - so coordinated Light civs would get a larger proportion of the theoretical maximum Light yield than when the Light payout is smaller.
A made-up numbers example is that if the high payout Light has an average payout for a player who's paying attention that's 40% of the theoretical maximum, a lower payout system, in addition to having a lower theoretical maximum payout, the average payout for a player who's paying attention would fall, to say 30%. So it has a doubled up effect - making the yield smaller makes it less worth while to concentrate on for Light, making the players earn a smaller portion of that smaller total.
If you mean that then they'd no longer become a "thing" people do *solely for the light associated with it*, then, to that I say: "fine." I don't see that as a problem. Not in the slightest. It's more tightly wrapped in other systems than most of the other alignment-mechanics are, so it's probably perfectly fine for the alignment aspect of this one to be of secondary concern for players.
This is where I think we can agree! If we have a compelling alternative source of Light then making FD Light incidental is fine with me. My concerns before hinged on a lack of compelling alternatives, so it's worth us spending some time, as you've started below, in exploring how else we could find non-Thread sources of Light.
OK, I guess I don't exactly get what you mean by high difficulty. You mean King and higher? OK, sure. As I stated above, I don't see why it is a design priority for, even on chieftain, alignment to be able to be a "gimme." What alignment you end up affects the player to such a small degree on such easy difficulties. And, again, many of the alignment systems will be easier to take advantage of on easy difficulties. It should be easy enough if only because your civ is just so much better than everybody else's, without us needing to go out of our way.
On the lowest difficulties, I think the player's overall objectives are pretty much a "gimme." The point of those difficulties is just for players who want to cruise and enjoy the scenery, doing what they want for other motivations aside from gameplay optimization. But as you've said, the ease of doing that should come from the fact that they're so much better than everyone else. My concern here is that we risk calibrating the FD yields in such a way that tier 8 is unattainable, if we don't beef up other sources. So beefing up other sources, discussed way below!
Well, I should stop you there, and put in that I've never quite got why we needed to cap the number of people who can reach Level 2 rewards in any of these things. It doesn't happen in the WF, does it? And if we're concerned with number of players, why wouldn't we just scale the number of civs eligible (if it isn't unlimited) to reflect the fact that there are, say, 16 civs. Heck, we could allow 2 top performers if we wanted. I think these kinds of things are so easily changeable (from a design perspective, making no comment on the actual coding) that they should hardly be reasons to change other, bigger, design components.
I'm still sitting here not seeing why the Turning of the tower, cleansing and such, shouldn't be a big part of a player's reasonable chance of attaining tier 8. As you've demonstrated, the math lines up such that they kind of *are* needed, as things stand.
It does happen with the WF. The World's Fair requires X total production between all civs to be completed and Y production per player to reach tier 2 (where X is Y * number of players). So it's theoretically possible for all civs to reach tier 2 in that system, though obviously extremely unlikely. The more hammers an individual civ contributes beyond Y, the fewer other civs can have each bonus.
We could certainly change that so that more players are eligible, but it seems like a system that rewards effort quite effectively at the moment. Having a "winner" is also quite compelling for the player. I think the ease of changeability of a single component is misleading, because we'll always need to make all of the pieces fit together to achieve the overall goals of things like the Alignment system and that will always involve one subsystem changing vs the other (or the larger system) - it's a question of which changes give us the most value.
You're very right that mathematically the points average from things like the Trolloc Wars and Cleansing Saidin are included in the amounts needed to reach tier 8, which I'm now thinking is a problem, at least with how I did the averages before. But more on that below:
right. yeah, don't think I agree here. If cleansing saidin represents 500 points, say, that's 500 points. Those points are important, whether they come from that, or steddings or whatnot. It's seeming like you kind of need to "max out" your light points throughout the game to hit tier 8. This makes sense to me - it is sort of "special. However you get there is your business.
"However you get there is your business" is totally what I want player's to be doing as well. The problem of course with any of these estimates is that they're estimates. Very few players will actually get the average payout from any of these systems in a given game, they'll usually have some that diverge one way or the other. (A particularly aggressive neighbor Herald-bombing your citizens cuts your average net Alignment in the direction you want to go significantly, a superpower across the sea wiping a continent clean of Shadowspawn reduces your TW payout, production powerhouse reduces Saidin payout, etc. for all sources. And there are of course the opposites - you spawn on the Blight and win the TW handily because you see so much more Shadowspawn, you're the production powerhouse so you easily Cleanse Saidin, etc.)
I'm thinking that one of the above negatives happening to you shouldn't by itself deny you from reaching tier 8, the same way one of the positives shouldn't guarantee you reach it. That's why I'm think the top performer bonus for the one-shot Alignment things should be considered relatively separately from the other sources of Alignment. If you happen to be the top Cleansing contributor, then that should make tier 8 easier for you (if you're aiming for it) but just because you're not, shouldn't mean tier 8 is almost impossible.
I think you are vastly underestimating the potential challenge we have ready for us in Forsaken Quests AND in Turning the tower. We know the Turning will be pretty darn hard. And the forsaken quests can be whatever we want - not only may some be hard, but some will be literally self-destructive. I am not worried at all that the shadow path to tier 8 will be easier. If anything, it may make sense to make it *harder* - after all, turning the tower and completing forsaken quests carry with them significant rewards as well.
And again, I'm under no strong compulsion that we need to make gentling FDs "worth it" for light players. You get other yields, and you DO have to get rid of them anyways, don't you? Might as well pick up some light points along the way. And, if you're gunning for Light points, why wouldn't you try to do so?
I don't think I'm underestimating those, because FDs have competition, where none of the others do. There are other players actively competing for the same rewards. (Turning objectives even have players effectively co-operating, hence why they need to be so much harder on an individual level.) This is the same kind of thing as the top performer above - someone else being better shouldn't make it impossible for you, though it might make it harder. What should make it impossible to reach tier 8 is a player actually doing badly (in terms of Alignment).
In terms of FDs being worth it, the previous averages were based on players seeking out FDs because they paid out significant Light, in order to get that Light. If a player only dealt with FDs that were right on their doorstep, I would expect that value to be much lower. (I would only expect a single player to
have to interact with 25%-ish of the FDs they're aware of.)
I too don't feel like Ogier quests need to be particularly big. From a flavor perspective, they have the same problem as FD gentling does. Some quests (again, maybe a few only-gives-you-light Quests) should give healthy Light, but not "most Lightey action you could possibly do" levels. I feel the same way about FD gentling, as you know.
Why are we forgetting about Shadowspawn killing? I know this is designed to be trivial, but does it have to be? A LOT of shadowspawn will be killed during the LB, and this has a chance to provide a LOT of extra light yield, especially considering Shadow civs will not be fighting shadowspawn (and will no longer be forced to absorb some Light points by killing them).
--scalable Shadowspawn kills--
I don't know, I could see something like this working.
I can definitely see this working mechanically, but it has implications that we discussed before. If Shadowspawn is a major source, then high Light civs must be militaristic, which doesn't seem like a good connection. The flavor's also a bit weird - why is it more good for a Light civ to kill a given Shadowspawn than a Shadow civ?
Also, once again, there's the diplo stuff... gold gifts, DoFs. It would seem reasonable to provide light in these instances.
I don't think we should use DoFs because they're the avenue to Research Agreements, which oddly hamstrings Shadow civs on Science. I think the gate on RAs (or whatever we decide to reflavor co-operative Science contributions to) of DoFs should remain. RAs weren't gated by DoFs pre-BNW and it made the game a bit crazy for prioritizing Science. It was all about gaming the AI just enough to sign an RA, whereas DoFs make it so you can't just spam RAs all over the world if you're rich.
Gold gifts I can see working - there's no reason to do this other than to be "helpful". There's a bit of flavor weirdness if you're helping someone who's clearly evil or doing it out of self-interest (propping up an enemy's rival).
I feel I should note that these kinds of consequences are why I think FD Gentling is a good fit. Because the player can achieve all of the same goals (deal with FDs that are threatening them and advance their civ with the yield payout) with or without generating Light - it's totally up to them.
So, from what we've discussed and liked previous to this post, we've got a bunch of symmetrical sources of Alignment - ones that have to pay out similar amounts to each side of Light vs Shadow for reasons individual to them. Some are due to telegraphing, others due to balance, others to player experience. These are the symmetrical sources at the moment:
Threads
Paths
Citizens
Asymmetrical sources are reserved for one side, they're either hidden in some way or only make sense contributing to one side of the battle.
Asymmetrical sources on the Light side:
Ogier quests
Gentling False Dragons
Killing Shadowspawn
Trolloc Wars
Asymmetrical sources on the Shadow side:
Turning the Tower
Forsaken Quests
The root of the problem we have right now is that the asymmetrical Shadow choices are worth more Shadow than any of the corresponding asymmetrical Light sources are worth Light. Symmetrical sources are providing approximately 5000 Alignment (with Threads contributing about 75% of that).
Note of detail about Turning the Tower as a Shadow source - I was figuring that each Turning objective would grant the civ that completes it Shadow when they complete it (or possibly a per turn yield as long as they have completed it, since some are relatively temporary and lump sum payouts would be abusable that way). With this happening regardless of whether or not they succeed in the Turning in the end. (Though I imagine succeeding in the Turning could be worth some?) Was this similar to what you were thinking?
At a previous estimate of 1500 for Forsaken Quests and 500-1000 from Turning objectives, Shadow players have a possible but difficult time reaching 7100. (The averages are all for players that are focusing on these objectives, so they need to focus on all of them.) If a player excels at some stuff and don't have any big drags the other way, they should be able to make it. The fact that Shadowspawn kills will hinder all Shadow civs is worth considering here, we might want to make Forsaken Quests or Turning objectives worth a bit more. But that's probably something we could approach if we find players regularly falling short (while trying) on playtests.
We pegged Shadowspawn kills at 500 before. Might that be lower at +5 per kill? That's 100 units - I would say a lot of players kill less than 100 units total per game in BNW, and a lot of our added kills are LB related. If we take your suggestion for scalable Light from Shadowspawn kills 500 is probably more accurate.
Ogier quests at 500 is basically arbitrary on our part - we can have these pay out what we think is appropriate for them. Does 500 sound like a good objective for a player who focuses on completing them?
FDs are our favorite, of course.
They range from less than 500-ish average to 1000-ish average between all of our various approaches to the problem.
TW is relatively small on average, which makes sense since it's early game, at a 200-ish.
Light comes out lower overall. Depending on our FD preference, either significantly (500-1000-ish below) to marginally (a couple of hundred difference, or possibly marginally ahead if we go for the lower end of the Shadow averages).
I saw in a post from a few pages back while writing this one that you mentioned the potential fora Light-only GP type. We were discussing potential rewards for being very Light, but could a Light GP help us here somehow? A GP that is generated by having high Light, that somehow boosts your Lightness?
The Horn of Valere is another potential source, but it's difficult because there's only one.
What are some other WoT elements that are indicative of particularly Light-like people/civilizations?
Is there anything that we can mechanically unlock for Light players in the same way Forsaken Quests and Turning objectives unlock as you progress through the Shadow tiers? The WoT lore lends itself to Shadow-oriented rewards for things like this because the Dark One is so much more hands on than the Creator.
What about Prophecies, which we discussed in a very different form so long ago? What if, as you progress through the Light tiers, you could unlock Prophecies, which if fulfilled would provide you with Light? (As well as other benefits?) A sort of mirror for Forsaken Quests, since we can make the Prophecies lead to things that fans will recognize as circumventing the Dark One's plans.
If we could introduce something else like this then I'd be happy to make FD Gentling Light generation more incidental.
In fact if we thought Prophecies were compelling and could be made to seem really Light and should make up a bigger proportion overall, we could drop FD Light generation.
The Turning objectives are working towards a specific end goal - Turning the Tower - do we want/could we have Prophecies work towards any end goal? What if they revealed the Horn of Valere? I think the Dragon's mechanics are all already settled enough that we don't need to unearth them to connect this to them.
View Thread will probably be fine.
Changed!
Ice-colored text is probably fine. Maybe light purple for Shadow?
Light purple could be quite similar to Culture. There are no red yields yet. We probably wouldn't want to go fire engine red since that's used to indicate negative values and stuff, but something deeper maroon-ish?
So when you say you're emphasizing the flame of TV or the dragon's fang, do you mean making it glow or something?
Yeah, like highlighted within the image, either with a glow or putting it in the foreground and the other in the back.
Luckily, I think we won't be needing much in the way of umlauts and such!
All hail ASCII!
I could do icons or diplomacy images for it.
