S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

counterpoint · Oct 17, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Being Tall and not choosing Freedom because you're going for the Domination victory is kind of the inverse relationship. The main idea is that Freedom will help you be powerful as a Tall civ (it makes all of your Specialists better, which, as a Tall civ, you have more of, so you gain more from). But Autocracy helps with war, so if you're going for Domination, that makes Autocracy a viable choice regardless of if you're Tall or Wide. This is the consequences of the "all bonuses" system - the Tall-helping choice isn't the only choice for Tall civs in all situations, because it's just opportunity cost, not penalties.

got it.

S3rgeus said:
I'd also be less inclined to associate the Science victory with Tall civs. Pure Science output has always favored Wide civs and BNW introduced a tech cost increase upon founding a city to combat that. There's some great math in this thread about when cities are Science-positive to found.

Huh, I've always thought that specialists and such - as well as the tech cost increase - made science more tall-favoring.

S3rgeus said:
Overall I think this is a good approach. I'd say we should err more towards lessening the T/W-specific bonuses in each Philosophy, rather than mixing the Tenets around so that each Philosophy has some Tall stuff and some Wide stuff. The main reason is this would mean players could reject a lot of the T/W Tenets out of hand based on their Tallness/Wideness, which reduces the player's choices of Tenets.

another good point. Probably best just to phase out those kinds of tenets.

S3rgeus said:
I don't know how possible it will be to provide the "general bonuses" without being Tall or Wide favoring in a majority of cases, but it's worth taking a stab at!

Do we want to decide on the other Tenets before we decide on any specifics for the tier 3 ones that determine victory association? Should we do that now?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. Decide the other tenets of what?

Whatever it is, though, I'm fine with deciding it if you think we should.

S3rgeus · Oct 22, 2015

Apologies for the monumental delay on this post. I had an almost finished post on Tuesday evening when I was violently ill (food poisoning, bleh). Been recovering since then and am now back at about 80%! Suitable for finishing my Tuesday evening thoughts!

counterpoint said:
The main thing that I saw as really different, when it comes to Fear/Acc, is that it seemed we'd be giving somewhat arbitrary bonuses in order to pigeon-hole policies into the two categories. Essentially, I couldn't think of any actual *policies* that belonged there. You've made some good suggestions below, so actually I think I can mostly safely withdraw this concern.

OK, I see what you have here and think it's the right direction to go in. Clearly, when we think of Fear/Acc policies as things that feedback into the how-you-use-channelers system, I think it can work well.

Coolio, glad we're on the same page!

counterpoint said:
I do think there is something uncharacteristically negative about the Fear options. I like the unused-spark one, but the other two are almost a little two oppression-ey, IMO. Something we can work on.

Totally agree, the unused Spark one was my favorite of the three as well. We can definitely adjust to less oppression-y mechanics.

counterpoint said:
this is a very solid explanation and I agree with it.

Awesome sauce!

counterpoint said:
OK, so considering all this, I do think the best way to deal with these static effects is to eliminate them, at least as we previously considered them. The truth is, before, they were essentially just mini-versions of the Ideologies, which served the purpose of setting the player's "tone" early in the game, but also felt rather uninspired. Viewing them as bonuses that reward the player for doing certain things (in the sense) achieves the same goal without the literal repetition we originally had.

Awesome, I totally agree - eliminating the static effects makes sense given the new context.

counterpoint said:
So, to that end, I suggest we use the opener of the branch (if such is even possible, and if these are even branches, see below) to provide the equivalent of the static effect. Something like:

Fear - minus X FD spawn rate
Acceptance - plus X Spark

IMO, the other things need not be addressed, I think. Tower influence was the third big thing, but that's associated with Authority, which is sort of the "middle ground" between Lib and Opp, which, like Fear and Acc, are the extremes on the spectrum. We need not represent that middle ground here - especially when we have a nice patronage tree branch hanging out, waiting for some Tower-related policies. That said, we could work in, theoretically, a Tower-related policy in, potentially even into Fear (+X tower influence when you send a male channeler to the tower for gentling or something).

Yep, these both seem like very sensible Policies for the individual branches. Whether or not they can work as openers will probably depend on the wider discussion we're having below about the nature of Branches and how they'll be structured.

Totally agree about the Tower influence stuff - we can put Policies into Fear/Acceptance if we want to, but there's no external necessity and there should be room in Patronage.

counterpoint said:
I think giving Acc civs a penalty to FD spawn rate, and Fear civs a penalty to Spark may be unnecessary, as this being a mutually exclusive branch, the opportunity cost is the same as a penalty.

Totally agree - removing these penalties and having Policies that provide the inverse bonus makes a lot of sense. It's very similar to what we did with Threads.

counterpoint said:
Male Channeler spawn rate is the one thing that isn't captured here, but the truth is, that's probably totally fine. In fact, if we set up the policies right, we might *want* the Fear civ to have just as many male channelers. A policy that rewards them for getting rid of their males, or one that raises the success rate of your attempts to get rid of them, or something, is only beneficial if you are getting an opportunity to actually get rid of a MC. Then, come time for Philosophies, we can actually make late game static modifiers that do effect MC spawn rate.

Also totally agree here, having a lower MC spawn rate for Fear actually creates quite a few problems with designing MC-related Fear Policies, because anything that provides a bonus from doing X with an MC is worse for Fear than it would be for Acceptance because Fear would have fewer MCs. Eliminating the MC spawn rate modifier makes that go away quite handily, and, as you've said, lets the Philosophies have a more unique effect on the game.

counterpoint said:
OK, the one weird thing I still see how to do with the number of policies and trees, and how doing what you're suggesting kind of throws a wrench in our "keep the amount of culture needed the same" plan. It was seeming likely, to me, that we were going to be able to incorporate all of our new cool ideas into sub-branches of existing trees, probably having one tree (exploration, I'd guess) be outright replaced or redistributed to accommodate such things.

To me, the Fear/Acc thing kind of throws that out of whack. First off, are these branches under a new tree? If so, what is that tree called? What kind of policies does it have that aren't on either branch (i.e., shared between the two)? Does each branch have a separate finisher, or do they share a finisher? If they aren't separate branches, and their separate trees, does that seem to synergize well with the branch system we have for the rest of the policies?

Probably most important is the issue of what we'd axe to make room for an entirely new policy tree. This is exacerbated based on the fact that, presumably, we'd allow this to be an ancient-era tree, of which there are already four - if we were to eliminate the exploration or commerce trees to make room for this one, we've now left a bit of a hole in terms of trees that unlock in the mid-early game.

In short, how do we make room for this policy tree? It feels a bit like it's trying to be foundational, almost like Trad/Lib, so what does it replace?

All right, a couple of pieces here!

Internal Structure of a Tree
This is one is very interesting - I've been thinking that there wouldn't be any Policies in common between the two Branches. That each Tree would be two mutually exclusive Branches, each of which is a set of 6 Policies (5 normal + opener).

I think this could be easier for the player to reason about, but a point you bring up later about complementary, related Policies makes shared Policies between Branches quite advantageous. It would also mean we don't need quite as many Policies, which is probably good. However, it does mean that the two Branches need to be directly mechanically linked (or at least linked in such a way that there are common mechanical bonuses that help both Branches), which isn't necessarily the case, depending on how we want to make things mutually exclusive.

Fear/Acceptance as a Tree
I'm thinking that Fear and Acceptance make a lot of sense as two Branches of the same, new Policy Tree. They both focus on the same facets of the game and represent concepts that we want to be mutually exclusive. More detail on the specifics of this follows below.

As for a name for this Tree, it could be the "One Power" Tree? Or simply the "Power" Tree?

Ordering Trees
I totally agree that our new Tree wants to be foundational - unlocked in the Ancient Era. I think there are a couple of ways we can approach that. As we've mentioned before and you've called out below, we've flagged up Exploration as one of the Trees we could potentially remove and replace with our own, redistributing the mechanical role of Exploration between other Trees. This removes a Medieval era Tree and adds an Ancient Era one.

But that doesn't have to be a big problem - pre-BNW, everything from Piety "up" was unlocked an era later than it is now. We could make Piety a Classical Era Tree again, and shift up the other Trees until they all slot into place below Rationalism. So we'd have Tradition, Liberty, Honor, and Power in the Ancient Era.

Another alternative would be to consider the Exploration-replacement separately (or if it even needs to happen, depending on what we decide about the roles we want to fulfill in the Medieval-ish Era). We could make space in the Ancient Era by making Tradition and Liberty two Branches of the same Tree, rather than two separate Trees. Effectively we have a Tall Branch and a Wide Branch, which is how Tradition and Liberty are often (though not always) used in BNW. This would work a bit better with the no-Policies-in-common approach to Branching.

counterpoint said:
I understand what you're saying, and now agree, in theory, that optionality isn't necessarily a bad thing.

However, at the same time, I do wonder if it being optional will sink this tree into obscurity. The nice thing about the proto-ideology setup was that it required you to make a decision about a mechanic that is somewhat on the fringe. If we conceive of this as foundational, as I said above, do we really imagine people taking this tree relatively early in the game? They're certainly not going to choose it instead of lib/trad, and I wonder that the kinds of things associated with these trees won't necessarily be more compelling that the other "bide your time until Rationalization appears" trees, *especially* if we revise them and add branches to make them more viable.

So, in short, I'm in agreement with how you want to do Fear/Acc, but I still very much question how we'll make people want to use it. Suggestions?

I think the important thing to make the Power Tree competitive is that it has comparable mechanical bonuses - that there are relatively prevalent strategies that benefit most from the Policies in the Power Tree. This falls to the specifics of what the Policies do to make it work - it's a matter of finding flavorfully justifiable reasons to give bonuses that reward players for playing like Fear/Acceptance civs should that is more beneficial for some players than the Tradition/Liberty bonuses.

counterpoint said:
OK, so by #1, you mean "come up with a skeleton of a Partial Renovation"? I ask because I had multiple things labeled #1 (in different parts of the quote). If so, I am in agreement.

Yep, that's what I meant! Sounds like a plan, which it looks like we're beginning to start on above.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, you have a good point. I think my overall sentiment still feels right to me, though.

Yeah, I don't think we'll say "the mod is done!" but still have BNW Policies in there and treat new Policies as "patches", more like "this is version 1.0 - it's playable and very WoT-y!" and then we can continue adding Policies, among other things, in additional versions.

counterpoint said:
yes, definitely. Your last line is especially true, since the Fear/Acceptance trees themselves appear to be playing on somebody else's lawn, as far as culture cost and such.

Cool, it looks like this discussion is sort of starting above, so we can follow that through up there.

counterpoint said:
teach one laugh.

Like the above quote block, it seems when we unlock which Tree is becoming a conversation above!

counterpoint said:
I think that point you make at the end is going to be a thorn in our side in this process, as it'll make it really hard to determine how to set up the branches. For instance, Alignment stuff sort of makes sense on an intuitive level as a part of Piety, but then that means you can't have both an epic religion and a strong alignment, which is quite odd. I think its fine when we're talking Tower-vs-CSs or shadowspawn-vs-lawless, but not quite as good when it's big picture as my example and yours (gold vs CS).

Yes, some related-and-complementary concepts that could be made into branches will necessitate them not being mutually exclusive. I think we'll have to see where the pain points are with this in a couple of posts once we've done a bit of planning on the Trees above.

counterpoint said:
Huh, I've always thought that specialists and such - as well as the tech cost increase - made science more tall-favoring.

Yeah, the tech cost increase per city was introduced to try to swing it back the other way, since Science used to favor Wide pre-BNW. (Not to the extent that Tall could never win, of course, we humans are much better at that than the AI!) It's much more comparable now, but I think it does favor Wide somewhat.

And on a human multiplayer note, the Science victory is much easier when you can build all of the spaceship parts at once! If you finish three of them, then everybody kills you. But if you only finish the Apollo Program, and then are suddenly about to win the game, you can usually hold everyone off for long enough!

counterpoint said:
another good point. Probably best just to phase out those kinds of tenets.

Yep, if we can!

counterpoint said:
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. Decide the other tenets of what?

Whatever it is, though, I'm fine with deciding it if you think we should.

I mean go through and detail what all of the actual Tenets will do for each of the Philosophies, like we did for Threads, Tower Quests, and Pantheons. I'm not sure if this is something we want to do yet given that we're not going to decide Policies?

counterpoint · Oct 22, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Apologies for the monumental delay on this post. I had an almost finished post on Tuesday evening when I was violently ill (food poisoning, bleh). Been recovering since then and am now back at about 80%! Suitable for finishing my Tuesday evening thoughts!

ugh! that's the worst. glad you're mostly back to normal.

S3rgeus said:
Yep, these both seem like very sensible Policies for the individual branches. Whether or not they can work as openers will probably depend on the wider discussion we're having below about the nature of Branches and how they'll be structured.

hmm, I wasn't so sure we were going to do them as separate branches of the same tree. Depending on what we decide on how branches work in general (see below), that could work.

I definitely do like the idea of making the Fear/Acc choice unified with the rest of the social policies (which having them be separate *independent* trees would definitely fail to do).

S3rgeus said:
Also totally agree here, having a lower MC spawn rate for Fear actually creates quite a few problems with designing MC-related Fear Policies, because anything that provides a bonus from doing X with an MC is worse for Fear than it would be for Acceptance because Fear would have fewer MCs. Eliminating the MC spawn rate modifier makes that go away quite handily, and, as you've said, lets the Philosophies have a more unique effect on the game.

great. We need to keep the MC generation separate, then.

S3rgeus said:
All right, a couple of pieces here!

Internal Structure of a Tree
This is one is very interesting - I've been thinking that there wouldn't be any Policies in common between the two Branches. That each Tree would be two mutually exclusive Branches, each of which is a set of 6 Policies (5 normal + opener).

I think this could be easier for the player to reason about, but a point you bring up later about complementary, related Policies makes shared Policies between Branches quite advantageous. It would also mean we don't need quite as many Policies, which is probably good. However, it does mean that the two Branches need to be directly mechanically linked (or at least linked in such a way that there are common mechanical bonuses that help both Branches), which isn't necessarily the case, depending on how we want to make things mutually exclusive.

I think I prefer that we have the branches represent only parts of the tree, instead of the entire tree, if at all possible. The reasons you mention are definitely there - fewer total policies, and such.

Beyond that, though, I'd argue that having the each branch of a tree be 100% separate from its pair defeats the purpose of a branch in a first place. In fact, it isn't a branch, it's simply a fully-realized policy tree of its own. Up until this point, I was imagining that Fear/Acc would be this (wholly separate, exclusive trees) while the rest of them would be only semi-independent.

I think fully exclusive trees could work, but I think having only subsets of the trees be mutually exclusive and separate is more elegant. You have suggested the opposite, that fully-exclusive trees will be more intuitive, but I think the player would wonder why we've set them up as "branches" when they're wholly separate trees.

Just to be totally clear of what I'm talking about, since we haven't been on the same wavelength, apparently, consider the Honor tree. The opener would be one and the same for each branch, and the first two (or three) policies would be shared - not identical on two paths, but literally one path that hasn't yet separated). One path would head towards, say, the current final two or three policies, while the other path would present an alternative set, bonuses vs./or using shadowspawn, for instance. They could have wholly-unique finishers, or else the same finishers, or perhaps the finishers would be similar in some ways but unique in others (e.g. both provide faith-buy for GCaptains, but only provides Gold-on-kill and the other provides something different).

Certainly, the shared-mechanical link aspect would be challenge to make work in some trees, but I think, actually, we might be able to pull it off. Truthfully, though, I don't think we'll know until we create a rough map of what the main trees are, as well as the branches contained within each tree. If we can make a skeleton that feels like it we'll work, we're in business - if not, we probably need to abandon the idea.

Aside from the shared-mechanic aspect, which is unique to this conception of branching paths (where they share some policies), there's also the challenge with making certain things mutually exclusive, which is present in *both* conceptions of branching trees. Making an Honor civ specialize in some degree is fine, but as has been mentioned, making somebody choose between diplomacy and gold would *not* be fine, as those are designed to be able to work together. I think, though, from a user-experience perspective, *if* we can flavor the branches properly, and solve the shared-mechanics problem described above, the partially-separate trees will be "easier to swallow" than the wholly-separate trees you are suggesting.

In the case of Tradition and Liberty, it makes logical sense that they'd be fully exclusive, as could be, maybe, Piety and Rationalism or something, but for the rest of them, which are not likely to be diametrically opposed, this wouldn't be the case. I think if, say, a tree started out in piety and then branched into either finishing piety, or beginning T'a'r, players would accept that and we'd probably be able to flavor it as somewhat logical. However, making the full Piety Tree exclusive to the T'a'r tree would probably feel more arbitrary, and might be more frustrating. I think if we do full-exclusivity, we need to make darn sure they feel like they *should* be exclusive

Lastly, partial-trees feels somewhat like a new, fresh mechanic, with some strategic depth. Wholly-separate trees feels somewhat like we just made too many policy trees and are trying to crowd them in. This is despite the fact that this last point is somewhat true of both versions.

These makes me feel that, we should try to aim for partial branches, and see if it's possible. I just think we'll like it better, *if* we can get it to work. In the interest of that, I think we need to try to model some of the possibilities here, to stress test both of these possible paths.

Some thoughts on that will follow below. I'm not confident we'll be able to make it work nicely in either method, unfortunately.

S3rgeus said:
Fear/Acceptance as a Tree
I'm thinking that Fear and Acceptance make a lot of sense as two Branches of the same, new Policy Tree. They both focus on the same facets of the game and represent concepts that we want to be mutually exclusive. More detail on the specifics of this follows below.

As for a name for this Tree, it could be the "One Power" Tree? Or simply the "Power" Tree?

"Power" sounds good to me. As far as whether they are fully-mutually exclusive, or only partially so, while I've shared general thoughts on this above, of course this particular pair of trees does feel better ass fully-mutually exclusive. That said, I think we could actually figure out a way to give them some shared policies. They wouldn't obviously have to do with Fear vs/Acceptance, per se, but would have something to do with channeler-production or such things.

S3rgeus said:
Ordering Trees
I totally agree that our new Tree wants to be foundational - unlocked in the Ancient Era. I think there are a couple of ways we can approach that. As we've mentioned before and you've called out below, we've flagged up Exploration as one of the Trees we could potentially remove and replace with our own, redistributing the mechanical role of Exploration between other Trees. This removes a Medieval era Tree and adds an Ancient Era one.

But that doesn't have to be a big problem - pre-BNW, everything from Piety "up" was unlocked an era later than it is now. We could make Piety a Classical Era Tree again, and shift up the other Trees until they all slot into place below Rationalism. So we'd have Tradition, Liberty, Honor, and Power in the Ancient Era.

I agree that it isn't necessarily a big problem. Unlocking trees earlier has less potential negative fallout than pushing them later would, I think. I don't know now that we'd need to push piety back. Would have to seriously consider the ramifications of that - clearly there's a reason they moved it to ancient.

In fact, I'm about 80% through a game in which I unlocked Piety first. I'm playing as Theodora. She gets a free belief, but the problem is that the Byz UA doesn't actually help you produce faith to actually GET an early religion (to take advantage of that free belief). Thus the early Piety (also, that way you can get an early Reformation belief). The problem, of course, is to not have Trad/Lib until later...

EDIT:
I actually won this game, though only narrowly. Was originally going for culture, but ended up winning science only a few turns ahead of Bismarck. I found Byz to be pretty challenging. The early Piety ended up not mattering hugely, but if i'd managed to win culturally (Germany had too many wonders) it would have been because of all the early tourism I'd netted from my faith buildings (via that one reformation belief)

In any case, it's a case in point that we might not want to move Piety back, especially if we have some faith-oriented UAs.

S3rgeus said:
Another alternative would be to consider the Exploration-replacement separately (or if it even needs to happen, depending on what we decide about the roles we want to fulfill in the Medieval-ish Era). We could make space in the Ancient Era by making Tradition and Liberty two Branches of the same Tree, rather than two separate Trees. Effectively we have a Tall Branch and a Wide Branch, which is how Tradition and Liberty are often (though not always) used in BNW. This would work a bit better with the no-Policies-in-common approach to Branching.

Right, Trad/Lib is the other case where full-exclusivity makes more sense. I'm not sure we could figure out a way to have them to have shared policies. Also, I'm not sure we should necessarily prevent people from choosing both.

I think we could potentially put some branching into these trees, though it might be tricky - and I'm not sure it would be by smashing them together. Can explore a bit more below.

S3rgeus said:
I think the important thing to make the Power Tree competitive is that it has comparable mechanical bonuses - that there are relatively prevalent strategies that benefit most from the Policies in the Power Tree. This falls to the specifics of what the Policies do to make it work - it's a matter of finding flavorfully justifiable reasons to give bonuses that reward players for playing like Fear/Acceptance civs should that is more beneficial for some players than the Tradition/Liberty bonuses.

Right. If there are some shared policies, we can come up with a few pretty good things to open up the tree that won't have to be 100% related to Fear or Acceptance.

By the way, I was also just struck that, in theory, we could elect to have the shared ones be at the *end* of the tree, if need be.

S3rgeus said:
Like the above quote block, it seems when we unlock which Tree is becoming a conversation above!

yeah, looks like we're finally going to talk about it!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, the tech cost increase per city was introduced to try to swing it back the other way, since Science used to favor Wide pre-BNW. (Not to the extent that Tall could never win, of course, we humans are much better at that than the AI!) It's much more comparable now, but I think it does favor Wide somewhat.

huh. I've always felt that I lagged in science when I built wide. I've only ever won Science in a tall civ, but then again, I don't play for SVic often, so that might have been a function of those games having UAs that helped science.

S3rgeus said:
I mean go through and detail what all of the actual Tenets will do for each of the Philosophies, like we did for Threads, Tower Quests, and Pantheons. I'm not sure if this is something we want to do yet given that we're not going to decide Policies?

Well, if we aren't going through the policies, we don't *need* to go through the ideologies. It would feel a little weird to do so. But, then again, it probably wouldn't hurt, as the systems are somewhat separate. Up to you.

We do need to try to hammer out some possible trees, though, in order to assist our final decision, IMO. So, some attempts at gathering thoughts. These don't necessarily assume either full-or-partial branching, but in the interest of supporting both, I've tried to find things that are:

1) somewhat related mechanically or flavorfully
OR
2) mutually exclusive mechanically or flavorfully
BUT
3) not meant to be complementary

TRADITION AND LIBERTY
Could be together as a part of a "size" tree, of some sort, but could alternately be spun to remain independent, but have brnaching including our new mechanics. For example:

Tradition branching into normal Tall stuff vs some Governor stuff (feedbacking on the relative ease of a Tall empire LP-generation

Liberty branching into normal expansion stuff vs some Governor stuff (this time, compensating for the relative difficulty of Wide empire LP-generation)
OR
Liberty branching into normal expansion stuff vs some stuff ripped from the former Exploration , though definitely not the hidden sites.

OR
Tradition AND Liberty BOTH have Fear and Acceptance branches, which provide Tall/Wide variations on the previously-discussed potential Fear/Acc bonuses. We'd have to make sure that if a civ did elect to do both of these trees, they wouldn't become insanely powerful by either doubling up on Fear, or mixing Fear and Acc.

FEAR/ACCEPTANCE
See above for ideas and see: Piety or Trad/Lib

HONOR
See above for idea about having normal dom-assisting path vs shadowspawn
OR
perhaps things are flipped around so that the alternate paths are lawless/dragonsworn versus shadowspawn, while the dom-assist stuff is universal to both.

PIETY
This could theoretically branch into normal Piety vs Alignment. This is flavorfully a bit suspect, and is also a bit mechanically suspect, but it's not entirely terrible.
OR
Piety branching into normal piety versus T'a'r stuff, though probably not hidden sites. A bit odd, yes
OR
Piety merging with Fear/Acceptance, such that halfway through the tree the policies also start affecting the things we previously associated with Fear/Acc.
OR
See Rationalism below

PATRONAGE
This could branch into two paths, the tower versus all other CSs
OR
it could branch into the tower and stedding versus all other CSs
OR
it could branch into The tower and CSs vs Stedding and CSs
OR
could branch into Tower/CSs vs Governors, which is flavorfully nice, but doesn't make much mechanical sense
OR
could branch into Tower/CSs vs some misc stuff from exploration

AESTHETICS
This one is hard. Could theoretically branch into normal Aesthetics and T'a'r, though not hidden sites, which could make this one potentially useful for non-culture-victory players, which could be nice.
OR
Branch into normal aesthetics and Alignment stuff, which, while mechanically linked, is probably pretty OK for flavor. The mutual-exclusivity of Culture bonuses and Alignment bonuses is iffy, though (but that will be present for any tree we attach alignment stuff to)

COMMERCE
This one is interesting, because it could probably be flavorfully linked to a great many things, but doesn't necessarily attach particularly easily to any one thing.

Could be regular Commerce vs exploration stuff (perhaps including hidden sites)
OR
could be regular commerce vs T'a'r stuff
OR
could be regular commerce vs Govs, which is suspect, but might be ok flavor
OR
could be regular commerce vs Alignment, which also is suspect, but might be ok flavor
OR
could be regular commerce vs Stedding or the Tower, reinforcing the money-diplo link

EXPLORATION
See other entries, as this one will probably be carved up into others,
OR
could be regular exploration vs T'a'r
OR
could be regular exploration vs Alignment, which makes little flavor sense

RATIONALISM
This one's tricky, in part because it's pretty much good for everybody.

Could be regular Rationalism against Alignment, which makes good flavor sense, I think, but may not hold water mechanically
OR
Could be regular rationalism vs Piety, though that messes with the era unlock of piety in a problematic way.
OR
Could be regular rationalism vs T'a'r

Thoughts? Any way to make sense of all this? Did I forget any obvious options?

S3rgeus · Oct 26, 2015

I'm doing terribly on the scheduling front here! I'll see if I can get back into the usual rhythm now.

counterpoint said:
hmm, I wasn't so sure we were going to do them as separate branches of the same tree. Depending on what we decide on how branches work in general (see below), that could work.

I definitely do like the idea of making the Fear/Acc choice unified with the rest of the social policies (which having them be separate *independent* trees would definitely fail to do).

Cool, it sounds like this will be decided below!

counterpoint said:
great. We need to keep the MC generation separate, then.

Yep, MC generation separate from Policies!

counterpoint said:
I think I prefer that we have the branches represent only parts of the tree, instead of the entire tree, if at all possible. The reasons you mention are definitely there - fewer total policies, and such.

Beyond that, though, I'd argue that having the each branch of a tree be 100% separate from its pair defeats the purpose of a branch in a first place. In fact, it isn't a branch, it's simply a fully-realized policy tree of its own. Up until this point, I was imagining that Fear/Acc would be this (wholly separate, exclusive trees) while the rest of them would be only semi-independent.

I think fully exclusive trees could work, but I think having only subsets of the trees be mutually exclusive and separate is more elegant. You have suggested the opposite, that fully-exclusive trees will be more intuitive, but I think the player would wonder why we've set them up as "branches" when they're wholly separate trees.

Just to be totally clear of what I'm talking about, since we haven't been on the same wavelength, apparently, consider the Honor tree. The opener would be one and the same for each branch, and the first two (or three) policies would be shared - not identical on two paths, but literally one path that hasn't yet separated). One path would head towards, say, the current final two or three policies, while the other path would present an alternative set, bonuses vs./or using shadowspawn, for instance. They could have wholly-unique finishers, or else the same finishers, or perhaps the finishers would be similar in some ways but unique in others (e.g. both provide faith-buy for GCaptains, but only provides Gold-on-kill and the other provides something different).

Certainly, the shared-mechanical link aspect would be challenge to make work in some trees, but I think, actually, we might be able to pull it off. Truthfully, though, I don't think we'll know until we create a rough map of what the main trees are, as well as the branches contained within each tree. If we can make a skeleton that feels like it we'll work, we're in business - if not, we probably need to abandon the idea.

Aside from the shared-mechanic aspect, which is unique to this conception of branching paths (where they share some policies), there's also the challenge with making certain things mutually exclusive, which is present in *both* conceptions of branching trees. Making an Honor civ specialize in some degree is fine, but as has been mentioned, making somebody choose between diplomacy and gold would *not* be fine, as those are designed to be able to work together. I think, though, from a user-experience perspective, *if* we can flavor the branches properly, and solve the shared-mechanics problem described above, the partially-separate trees will be "easier to swallow" than the wholly-separate trees you are suggesting.

In the case of Tradition and Liberty, it makes logical sense that they'd be fully exclusive, as could be, maybe, Piety and Rationalism or something, but for the rest of them, which are not likely to be diametrically opposed, this wouldn't be the case. I think if, say, a tree started out in piety and then branched into either finishing piety, or beginning T'a'r, players would accept that and we'd probably be able to flavor it as somewhat logical. However, making the full Piety Tree exclusive to the T'a'r tree would probably feel more arbitrary, and might be more frustrating. I think if we do full-exclusivity, we need to make darn sure they feel like they *should* be exclusive

Lastly, partial-trees feels somewhat like a new, fresh mechanic, with some strategic depth. Wholly-separate trees feels somewhat like we just made too many policy trees and are trying to crowd them in. This is despite the fact that this last point is somewhat true of both versions.

These makes me feel that, we should try to aim for partial branches, and see if it's possible. I just think we'll like it better, *if* we can get it to work. In the interest of that, I think we need to try to model some of the possibilities here, to stress test both of these possible paths.

Some thoughts on that will follow below. I'm not confident we'll be able to make it work nicely in either method, unfortunately.

The part about why they're separate Branches when they're wholly separate Trees is determined by our choices of what is mutually exclusive (as you mention, things that are mutually exclusive should feel like they need to be mutually exclusive) and presentation. Even if they are wholly separate "Trees", the screen that presents the Policies can group them in such a way that the player will easily see the associations and exclusivities.

However, I'm now thinking that there may be an alternative that lets us have our cake and eat it too. It's a subtle shift from the partial exclusivity approach: mutually exclusive Branches that have Policies in common, but not quite in the same way as the option we're already discussing. You've gone through with more detail on how you've been thinking about partial exclusivity and I'm totally with you on that - that's how I've been thinking about it too.

But what if we had two totally separate Branches that could just have some common Policies? By separating the Branches completely, we remove the necessity to have common Policies (which is a problem for Fear/Acceptance and Tradition/Liberty Branches, but not for Lawless/Shadowspawn Branches). Example:

Honor Branch 1 has an opener, and three Policies: Policy A, B, and C. C requires you to have adopted A and B. Honor Branch 2 has an opener and three Policies: Policy D, C, and E. E requires D and C.

Without the necessity to sync up dependencies between the two Branches, we have a lot more room to design Branches that are complement a common base (Lawless/Shadowspawn both complement militaristic foundations) and Branches that actively compete where we've got diametrically opposed mechanical priorities (Tradition/Liberty and Fear/Acceptance encourage the player to do things that would be unhelpful for players who have chosen the other Branch).

We basically just have duplicates. What do you think? As I mentioned above, very similar to the partial exclusivity, but gives us the flexibility of both approaches (full exclusivity when we want it, fewer Policies to achieve the same goal when the Branches have things in common).

This also means we keep the strategic depth you mentioned about partial exclusivity, because our "separate Branches" no longer need to represent things that are clear binary choices.

In addition to all of the above, after considering some of the Branches toward the end of this post, a supplementary option could be that we have Branches in only some Trees? And other Trees, which don't divide as sensibly, could remain single options?

counterpoint said:
I agree that it isn't necessarily a big problem. Unlocking trees earlier has less potential negative fallout than pushing them later would, I think. I don't know now that we'd need to push piety back. Would have to seriously consider the ramifications of that - clearly there's a reason they moved it to ancient.

In fact, I'm about 80% through a game in which I unlocked Piety first. I'm playing as Theodora. She gets a free belief, but the problem is that the Byz UA doesn't actually help you produce faith to actually GET an early religion (to take advantage of that free belief). Thus the early Piety (also, that way you can get an early Reformation belief). The problem, of course, is to not have Trad/Lib until later...

EDIT:
I actually won this game, though only narrowly. Was originally going for culture, but ended up winning science only a few turns ahead of Bismarck. I found Byz to be pretty challenging. The early Piety ended up not mattering hugely, but if i'd managed to win culturally (Germany had too many wonders) it would have been because of all the early tourism I'd netted from my faith buildings (via that one reformation belief)

In any case, it's a case in point that we might not want to move Piety back, especially if we have some faith-oriented UAs.

I think Piety moving back into Ancient is less about Piety itself and more about all of the Policy Trees being shifted back. With Ideologies taking up the role of Culture-sink the late game in BNW, Policies needed to all be grouped together more closely in the early game. Given the number of Trees didn't go down, they had to move everything back and they pretty much just shifted them all back in order.

So I don't think there's any mechanical problem with us shifting Piety up one era - the Classical era is still very close to the start of the game - if it serves our purposes. If we're removing Exploration, adding Power, and shifting up Piety, then the Policy system still unlocks the same number of Policies in each era as it did in BNW, which will still fit in with Philosophies as it did for Ideologies.

counterpoint said:
Right, Trad/Lib is the other case where full-exclusivity makes more sense. I'm not sure we could figure out a way to have them to have shared policies. Also, I'm not sure we should necessarily prevent people from choosing both.

I think we could potentially put some branching into these trees, though it might be tricky - and I'm not sure it would be by smashing them together. Can explore a bit more below.

I actually quite like some of your Tradition and Liberty Branching, more on that below!

counterpoint said:
Right. If there are some shared policies, we can come up with a few pretty good things to open up the tree that won't have to be 100% related to Fear or Acceptance.

By the way, I was also just struck that, in theory, we could elect to have the shared ones be at the *end* of the tree, if need be.

Totally, shared Policies could definitely go at the end of the Tree for some Trees and the start for others. Some maybe in the middle!

counterpoint said:
Well, if we aren't going through the policies, we don't *need* to go through the ideologies. It would feel a little weird to do so. But, then again, it probably wouldn't hurt, as the systems are somewhat separate. Up to you.

Cool, let's leaves the specific Tenets for now and come back to them when we're doing specific Policies.

counterpoint said:
We do need to try to hammer out some possible trees, though, in order to assist our final decision, IMO. So, some attempts at gathering thoughts. These don't necessarily assume either full-or-partial branching, but in the interest of supporting both, I've tried to find things that are:

1) somewhat related mechanically or flavorfully
OR
2) mutually exclusive mechanically or flavorfully
BUT
3) not meant to be complementary

Seems like a good system! And I like looking for the combinations here that work well with partial and complete exclusivity between Branches, since the ones that are most prevalent can help us feed back and make a decision there.

I think one of the things we should also keep in mind is what we want the mechanical effects to be of each Branching side of a single Tree. For example, if we had a "Size" Tree, the Tradition side's mechanical effect is "encourages the civ to be Tall" and for the Liberty side it's "encourages the civ to be Wide".

counterpoint said:
TRADITION AND LIBERTY
Could be together as a part of a "size" tree, of some sort, but could alternately be spun to remain independent, but have brnaching including our new mechanics. For example:

Tradition branching into normal Tall stuff vs some Governor stuff (feedbacking on the relative ease of a Tall empire LP-generation

Liberty branching into normal expansion stuff vs some Governor stuff (this time, compensating for the relative difficulty of Wide empire LP-generation)
OR
Liberty branching into normal expansion stuff vs some stuff ripped from the former Exploration , though definitely not the hidden sites.

OR
Tradition AND Liberty BOTH have Fear and Acceptance branches, which provide Tall/Wide variations on the previously-discussed potential Fear/Acc bonuses. We'd have to make sure that if a civ did elect to do both of these trees, they wouldn't become insanely powerful by either doubling up on Fear, or mixing Fear and Acc.

I'm not a big fan of Fear/Acceptance being the Branches for Tradition/Liberty - I think we have enough mechanics that they can work on their own, and this is one of our biggest discrete pieces. And it also means that we'd end up with certain kinds of Fear/Acceptance playstyles that are skewed towards Tall/Wide players, when those playstyles may not actually be otherwise connected to size. The potential to mix Fear and Acceptance also doesn't sound like we'd want to do that.

Though I'm quite liking the separate Tradition and Liberty Trees here actually! Tradition having normal Tall bonuses vs Governor bonuses sounds good - they're two distinct mechanical ways for a player to achieve the same kind of objective, but with a different style.

Same re Liberty having Wide stuff vs Exploration stuff - both encourage the civ to spread out but in different ways that will be appropriate at different times. I'm a big fan of these two.

Both of them mesh well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

counterpoint said:
FEAR/ACCEPTANCE
See above for ideas and see: Piety or Trad/Lib

-above-

"Power" sounds good to me. As far as whether they are fully-mutually exclusive, or only partially so, while I've shared general thoughts on this above, of course this particular pair of trees does feel better ass fully-mutually exclusive. That said, I think we could actually figure out a way to give them some shared policies. They wouldn't obviously have to do with Fear vs/Acceptance, per se, but would have something to do with channeler-production or such things.

I think I still like Power as its own Tree that has two Branches.

The main mechanical objectives of the Fear side is to have a civ that is rewarded for a low channeler count, a frosty relationship with the Tower, a low tolerance for Dragonsworn, and a tendency to deal with male channelers quickly.

For Acceptance, it's about higher channeler counts, better Tower relations, and a tendency to mitigate rather than destroy male channelers. Possibly also a warm relationship with the Ogier?

Those seem relatively opposed to me, and tend to lend themselves toward the "have your cake" and mutually exclusive approaches.

counterpoint said:
HONOR
See above for idea about having normal dom-assisting path vs shadowspawn
OR
perhaps things are flipped around so that the alternate paths are lawless/dragonsworn versus shadowspawn, while the dom-assist stuff is universal to both.

So the two mechanical sides of our proposed Honor Tree, from what I see, are:

Lawless/Dragonsworn: Aggressive military expansion early - able to gain advantage from threatening nearby CSes and other players
Shadowspawn: Effective military bonuses that encourage the player to actively police the Blight.

We also specifically called out, many, many eons ago, the want for early game Policies that help players deal with or even take advantage of starting near the Blight, so that it isn't an auto-restart for a human player in that situation, and so that it is still a fun experience. We did also specifically call out that we didn't want to force Blightborder civs into taking Honor to defend themselves, so we'll probably want some early Policies that provide Blightborder-relevant help in all of the Ancient era Trees, but that the Shadowspawn Branch of Honor rewards the player for actively policing the Blight and being a "true Borderlander-like" civ, like those in the books.

These have a common thread of military strength but provide us with a distinct flavor to each side. For the "have our cake" approach (that is now its official name) and the partial exclusivity approach, this feels like a great fit. I think we can have some powerful Policies on both sides that players will want.

counterpoint said:
PIETY
This could theoretically branch into normal Piety vs Alignment. This is flavorfully a bit suspect, and is also a bit mechanically suspect, but it's not entirely terrible.
OR
Piety branching into normal piety versus T'a'r stuff, though probably not hidden sites. A bit odd, yes
OR
Piety merging with Fear/Acceptance, such that halfway through the tree the policies also start affecting the things we previously associated with Fear/Acc.
OR
See Rationalism below

Isn't Piety vs Alignment self-defeating because of the relationship between Light and Faith? Being good at Alignment should help at developing a Path.

Piety vs T'a'r is strange, but possible. There doesn't seem to be anything that should play them off against each other (unlike Tradition/Liberty, which encourage opposing playstyles), nor do they have anything particularly in common (like Lawless/Dragonsworn vs Shadowspawn). Having a strong Path doesn't make it more difficult to capitalize on T'a'r (whereas being Tall makes it difficult to be Wide), and I would say we'd probably have some T'a'r-related Customs, though not many.

Piety vs T'a'r seems like they wouldn't have any Policies in common, so works best with the "have your cake" and mutually exclusive approaches.

Alternatively, what about making this one into the Alignment Tree? We have a common base of the Path, but then we can have Light and Shadow Branches (effectively, though not so stark). Bonuses associated with Emissaries, Customs, Ogier, the TW. (Though a TW Policy would likely necessitate that Piety remain in the Ancient Era so that players can adopt it soon enough.) The difficulty here is that most of the more pronounced Alignment stuff is late game, but this can have simple enough feedback. "+2 Happiness for each Shadow Alignment Tier" and the like.

Common base between the two makes this work well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

counterpoint said:
PATRONAGE
This could branch into two paths, the tower versus all other CSs
OR
it could branch into the tower and stedding versus all other CSs
OR
it could branch into The tower and CSs vs Stedding and CSs
OR
could branch into Tower/CSs vs Governors, which is flavorfully nice, but doesn't make much mechanical sense
OR
could branch into Tower/CSs vs some misc stuff from exploration

I'm very much liking the Tower and CSes vs Stedding and CSes. Playing off the two major diplomatic entities against one another (Stump vs Tower) seems like it could be really cool. I think the important thing there is that the diplomatic victory should still feel attainable, and in fact not particularly hindered, by a player's lack of control in one of those two areas. However, it does allow a second player who's also pursuing the diplomatic victory and has chosen the opposite focus to be more competitive.

Quick examples, because I don't think that was too clear, but I'm not sure how to rephrase it. If Andor picks the Tower side and goes all in on being chums with the Tower while going for the diplo victory, their attempt at that victory shouldn't feel hampered by a lack of influence with the Stump.

Likewise, if the Aiel see that Andor are going Tower diplo, they may choose to focus on the Stumps, and use the added diplomatic clout that gives them to be more competitive than they would have been otherwise.

Having the common base of CS relationship bonuses/help makes this combination a good match for the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity options.

counterpoint said:
AESTHETICS
This one is hard. Could theoretically branch into normal Aesthetics and T'a'r, though not hidden sites, which could make this one potentially useful for non-culture-victory players, which could be nice.
OR
Branch into normal aesthetics and Alignment stuff, which, while mechanically linked, is probably pretty OK for flavor. The mutual-exclusivity of Culture bonuses and Alignment bonuses is iffy, though (but that will be present for any tree we attach alignment stuff to)

Writing this out of order, so this is quite like my suggestion for the Rationalism Tree below. Culture has two main approaches:

Culture for Culture's sake - winning the Culture victory
Culture to enable something else - buying useful Policies and defending from foreign Culture victories

These two play off against each other quite well - it's unlikely that players will want to focus on the bonus provided by the other side, if they're inclined to pick one or the other. We could even frame this as the exploration of self for the Culture victory folks and the exploration of the world for the others - allowing us to pull in some of the Exploration Tree stuff (the parts that don't significantly overlap with the Culture victory objectives).

This could probably fit into any of the approaches well.

counterpoint said:
COMMERCE
This one is interesting, because it could probably be flavorfully linked to a great many things, but doesn't necessarily attach particularly easily to any one thing.

Could be regular Commerce vs exploration stuff (perhaps including hidden sites)
OR
could be regular commerce vs T'a'r stuff
OR
could be regular commerce vs Govs, which is suspect, but might be ok flavor
OR
could be regular commerce vs Alignment, which also is suspect, but might be ok flavor
OR
could be regular commerce vs Stedding or the Tower, reinforcing the money-diplo link

I'm finding that I want to have the regular Commerce stuff be a common base between T'a'r and the Exploration stuff (so those would be the Branches), though I'm not sure exactly how. This seems like it fills in gaps left by the suggestions we're discussing elsewhere - does it?

I also feel like the gold-diplo link you mention here has gone a bit by the wayside in our system of Trees and Branches - is that particularly better represented in the BNW Policies than it is in the formative topics of ours? Looking at it a bit closer, it seems like it might not actually be much of an issue and something we can address on the actual per-Policy level.

counterpoint said:
EXPLORATION
See other entries, as this one will probably be carved up into others,
OR
could be regular exploration vs T'a'r
OR
could be regular exploration vs Alignment, which makes little flavor sense

Yeah, I'm thinking Exploration's getting the axe. We do want to ensure that the "maritime civ" bonuses still exist though!

counterpoint said:
RATIONALISM
This one's tricky, in part because it's pretty much good for everybody.

Could be regular Rationalism against Alignment, which makes good flavor sense, I think, but may not hold water mechanically
OR
Could be regular rationalism vs Piety, though that messes with the era unlock of piety in a problematic way.
OR
Could be regular rationalism vs T'a'r

This is the one that made me go back up and mention the alternative of leaving some Trees without Branches. Rationalism doesn't oppose or divide mechanically nearly as well as any of the others, because of how core Science is to every playstyle and victory.

However, if we do go ahead and decide to split all of them into Branches, I think there are two distinct approaches to Science we might be able to use as Branches:

Science for Science's sake - the Scientific victory.
Science to enable something else - all other victories.

I'm not sure exactly how, but if we can provide Science-victory-specific bonuses on one Branch, then that at least introduces some variety into the most popular Tree in the game! The common base of Science generation means this works well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

counterpoint said:
Thoughts? Any way to make sense of all this? Did I forget any obvious options?

I don't think we've missed anything obvious and it looks like some sense should be emerging from the chaos soon!

After a polling of the above sections, (as was intended by my suggestion), the "have your cake" approach provides us with a way to deal with all of the combinations above. In a close second is partial exclusivity, which, with the removal of a Tradition/Liberty "Size" Tree, only really struggles with Fear/Acceptance and Piety/T'a'r.

counterpoint · Oct 26, 2015

S3rgeus said:
I'm doing terribly on the scheduling front here! I'll see if I can get back into the usual rhythm now.

Yeah, man, we're slipping. No matter, I'm responding now - no time for a delay!

S3rgeus said:
The part about why they're separate Branches when they're wholly separate Trees is determined by our choices of what is mutually exclusive (as you mention, things that are mutually exclusive should feel like they need to be mutually exclusive) and presentation. Even if they are wholly separate "Trees", the screen that presents the Policies can group them in such a way that the player will easily see the associations and exclusivities.

However, I'm now thinking that there may be an alternative that lets us have our cake and eat it too. It's a subtle shift from the partial exclusivity approach: mutually exclusive Branches that have Policies in common, but not quite in the same way as the option we're already discussing. You've gone through with more detail on how you've been thinking about partial exclusivity and I'm totally with you on that - that's how I've been thinking about it too.

But what if we had two totally separate Branches that could just have some common Policies? By separating the Branches completely, we remove the necessity to have common Policies (which is a problem for Fear/Acceptance and Tradition/Liberty Branches, but not for Lawless/Shadowspawn Branches). Example:

Honor Branch 1 has an opener, and three Policies: Policy A, B, and C. C requires you to have adopted A and B. Honor Branch 2 has an opener and three Policies: Policy D, C, and E. E requires D and C.

Without the necessity to sync up dependencies between the two Branches, we have a lot more room to design Branches that are complement a common base (Lawless/Shadowspawn both complement militaristic foundations) and Branches that actively compete where we've got diametrically opposed mechanical priorities (Tradition/Liberty and Fear/Acceptance encourage the player to do things that would be unhelpful for players who have chosen the other Branch).

We basically just have duplicates. What do you think? As I mentioned above, very similar to the partial exclusivity, but gives us the flexibility of both approaches (full exclusivity when we want it, fewer Policies to achieve the same goal when the Branches have things in common).

I think this idea has a lot of promise, and may work out. However, there are still some issues that I can see with it:

1) it somewhat forces the player to make an early decision. The thing I like about the Partial idea is that you can buy a couple policies in the tree before you are forced, irrevocably, down a given path. Here that decision would need to be made early, which is less than ideal, IMO.
2) doing it this way - and taking advantage of its flexibility - seems a bit less cohesive and unified than most of the rest of the game. Some branches having policies in common, some not. some having three in common, some 4, etc. It feels a little less like a unified system, and a little more like a piecemeal solution.
3) This is related to above. I'm pretty sure in BNW, you can't highlight the specific policies and see their effects in BNW before you've unlocked it. I guess my concern is that with fully-exclusive policies, the player has to make an irreversible decision without being able to *see* the choices. As the trees are in BNW, you can see the policies before you unlock a tree, right? I can't remember. In any case, the need to see what you're getting into seems way more important in this case, since you make a permanent decision about it - I question whether we'll be able to provide enough visual info with it still looking "right."
4) the illusion of choice. There are some ideology tenets that are equal in the different branches in BNW, just with different names. That's weird, but probably fine because they are one of many choices. This Cake method, unfortunately, amplifies that a bit. The players will *think*, at first look, that they're getting different things, and it won't be immediately apparently pre-unlocking that half the tree, for instance, is identical. Not a deal breaker, but weird nonetheless. On the other hand, what you're suggesting saves us from having to come up with a policy name that somehow makes sense for two disparate concepts, though.

I think this could work - it's certainly superior to pure-mutual-exclusivity, I think - but these issues will have to be dealt with, I think. Certainly, the Fear/Acc issue makes a grand case for this or for mutual exclusivity. I do feel like the Partial set-up helps with a lot of the issues above, though.

S3rgeus said:
This also means we keep the strategic depth you mentioned about partial exclusivity, because our "separate Branches" no longer need to represent things that are clear binary choices.

mostly, though the forced-early-decision compromises that, to an extent.

S3rgeus said:
In addition to all of the above, after considering some of the Branches toward the end of this post, a supplementary option could be that we have Branches in only some Trees? And other Trees, which don't divide as sensibly, could remain single options?

I think, if we toss out the desire for unity, this could be fine. I think, ultimately, that aim is below good mechanics in priority, so, for instance, non-branching Rationalism is better than waste-everybody's-time-for-the-sake-of-a-branch Rationalism.

Similarly, I don't think having Fear/Acc stand alone as mut-exclu. among a sea of Partials, is great, but it's probably not that bad - especially if we make it really clear how/why.

S3rgeus said:
I think Piety moving back into Ancient is less about Piety itself and more about all of the Policy Trees being shifted back. With Ideologies taking up the role of Culture-sink the late game in BNW, Policies needed to all be grouped together more closely in the early game. Given the number of Trees didn't go down, they had to move everything back and they pretty much just shifted them all back in order.

So I don't think there's any mechanical problem with us shifting Piety up one era - the Classical era is still very close to the start of the game - if it serves our purposes. If we're removing Exploration, adding Power, and shifting up Piety, then the Policy system still unlocks the same number of Policies in each era as it did in BNW, which will still fit in with Philosophies as it did for Ideologies.

By my count, I think we're actually more classical-heavy, if we do that.

BNW:
Ancient: Trad, Lib, Honor, Piety
Classical: Aesthetics, Patronage
Medieval: Commerce, Explo
Renaissance: Rationalism

WotMod:
Ancient: Trad, Lib, Honor, Power
Classical: Piety, Aesthetics, Patronage
Medieval: Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

I'm not really in favor of pushing back Aesthetics or Patronage just as collateral damage - especially when we're essentially already doing exactly that for piety. I understand what you're saying about the policies being moved up to accommodate Ideology, but here we're only pushing *some* of them back. That will do weird things, I think, *especially* if we elect to push Aesthetics back. So, leaving Aesthetics where it is means the classical era has more unlocks than the medieval. Maybe not the end of the world, but definitely not equal to BNW, as far as I can tell.

S3rgeus said:
Totally, shared Policies could definitely go at the end of the Tree for some Trees and the start for others. Some maybe in the middle!

I think this idea works aesthetically better with the Cake method than the Partial. Starting out with a branch and ending unified seems a little weird in the Partial set up - starting unified seems to make the most sense in that case.

S3rgeus said:
Cool, let's leaves the specific Tenets for now and come back to them when we're doing specific Policies.

ok, tabled for later.

S3rgeus said:
Seems like a good system! And I like looking for the combinations here that work well with partial and complete exclusivity between Branches, since the ones that are most prevalent can help us feed back and make a decision there.

I think one of the things we should also keep in mind is what we want the mechanical effects to be of each Branching side of a single Tree. For example, if we had a "Size" Tree, the Tradition side's mechanical effect is "encourages the civ to be Tall" and for the Liberty side it's "encourages the civ to be Wide".

I think that's an excellent way to view it!

S3rgeus said:
I'm not a big fan of Fear/Acceptance being the Branches for Tradition/Liberty - I think we have enough mechanics that they can work on their own, and this is one of our biggest discrete pieces. And it also means that we'd end up with certain kinds of Fear/Acceptance playstyles that are skewed towards Tall/Wide players, when those playstyles may not actually be otherwise connected to size. The potential to mix Fear and Acceptance also doesn't sound like we'd want to do that.

Though I'm quite liking the separate Tradition and Liberty Trees here actually! Tradition having normal Tall bonuses vs Governor bonuses sounds good - they're two distinct mechanical ways for a player to achieve the same kind of objective, but with a different style.

Same re Liberty having Wide stuff vs Exploration stuff - both encourage the civ to spread out but in different ways that will be appropriate at different times. I'm a big fan of these two.

Both of them mesh well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

OK, I think we're in agreement, then!

Tradition -> Tall building OR Governors
Liberty -> wide building OR Exploration

what kind of exploration? Naval travel/coastal stuff? happiness? gold stuff? they really are quite naval (except for the finisher!)

any way to make this not so obviously maritime?

I think, to clarify that question, let's go to your Objectives:

Tradition - > going Tall in order to build big and have lots of population
OR
Tradition - > going Tall in order to build big cities with specialized outputs and abilities (via governors)
or what? what's that second objective?

and

Liberty - > going Wide in order to build lots of cities without crippling your happiness/culture
OR
Liberty - > going Wide in order to... explore the world quickly? Claim resources? what?

How would you clarify the objectives of these branches?

S3rgeus said:
I think I still like Power as its own Tree that has two Branches.

The main mechanical objectives of the Fear side is to have a civ that is rewarded for a low channeler count, a frosty relationship with the Tower, a low tolerance for Dragonsworn, and a tendency to deal with male channelers quickly.

For Acceptance, it's about higher channeler counts, better Tower relations, and a tendency to mitigate rather than destroy male channelers. Possibly also a warm relationship with the Ogier?

Those seem relatively opposed to me, and tend to lend themselves toward the "have your cake" and mutually exclusive approaches.

This one definitely doesn't fit well with the Partial set-up, as you've concluded.

I think your objectives are pretty in-line. Not sure I want to bring the Ogier into Acceptance, though I could understand it from a flavor point of view. Maybe only in there as flavor (i.e. not have it have mechanical relationship to the ogier).

If we decide on Partial in general, I think we could get away with making this one be mutually exclusive. If we make it pretty enough, people won't mind.

S3rgeus said:
So the two mechanical sides of our proposed Honor Tree, from what I see, are:

Lawless/Dragonsworn: Aggressive military expansion early - able to gain advantage from threatening nearby CSes and other players

Shadowspawn: Effective military bonuses that encourage the player to actively police the Blight.

Just to be clear, which of those is going to aid a domination victory? The first? Or both? Because right now, the Honor tree does do that (though perhaps not as much as it should). Is the first option the "normal" honor tree?

S3rgeus said:
We also specifically called out, many, many eons ago, the want for early game Policies that help players deal with or even take advantage of starting near the Blight, so that it isn't an auto-restart for a human player in that situation, and so that it is still a fun experience. We did also specifically call out that we didn't want to force Blightborder civs into taking Honor to defend themselves, so we'll probably want some early Policies that provide Blightborder-relevant help in all of the Ancient era Trees, but that the Shadowspawn Branch of Honor rewards the player for actively policing the Blight and being a "true Borderlander-like" civ, like those in the books.

Hmmm, I think we can use the policies to help with this, but I also recall us deciding that relying on policies too much for this was not great, because it forced the players' hands in their policy adoption too much.

I recall us liking the idea of certain era-appropriate anti-shadowspawn Walls and units as being an elegant way to make a civ be able to withstand the trolloc assault withou having to build their whole civ around it.

S3rgeus said:
These have a common thread of military strength but provide us with a distinct flavor to each side. For the "have our cake" approach (that is now its official name) and the partial exclusivity approach, this feels like a great fit. I think we can have some powerful Policies on both sides that players will want.

Yeah, I think this tree would work in either method.

S3rgeus said:
Isn't Piety vs Alignment self-defeating because of the relationship between Light and Faith? Being good at Alignment should help at developing a Path.

yeah. I don't like this idea anymore.

S3rgeus said:
Piety vs T'a'r is strange, but possible. There doesn't seem to be anything that should play them off against each other (unlike Tradition/Liberty, which encourage opposing playstyles), nor do they have anything particularly in common (like Lawless/Dragonsworn vs Shadowspawn). Having a strong Path doesn't make it more difficult to capitalize on T'a'r (whereas being Tall makes it difficult to be Wide), and I would say we'd probably have some T'a'r-related Customs, though not many.

Yeah, I also don't love the idea of these two being linked. Feels like it doesn't quite add up, IMO.

S3rgeus said:
Piety vs T'a'r seems like they wouldn't have any Policies in common, so works best with the "have your cake" and mutually exclusive approaches.

Right. Though that's part of the reason this doesn't feel like a great fit.

S3rgeus said:
Alternatively, what about making this one into the Alignment Tree? We have a common base of the Path, but then we can have Light and Shadow Branches (effectively, though not so stark). Bonuses associated with Emissaries, Customs, Ogier, the TW. (Though a TW Policy would likely necessitate that Piety remain in the Ancient Era so that players can adopt it soon enough.) The difficulty here is that most of the more pronounced Alignment stuff is late game, but this can have simple enough feedback. "+2 Happiness for each Shadow Alignment Tier" and the like.

Common base between the two makes this work well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

Eh. Really don't like the idea of light and shadow branches. It seems to work very much against the way we've designed alignment. You never "choose" your alignment - until the very end of the game (the LB). Your alignment "happens" over the course of hundreds of turns. You might plan on being heavy Light and end up neutral, or mildly shadow, due to circumstance, a neighbor, etc. I very much don't think it's wise to essentially ask players to "choose" so early.

Also, the truth is, while Shadow/Light are of course diametrically opposed, the policies themselves don't need to be. We know these policies won't *generate* alignment points (we don't want that messing up our math!) - instead, they're going to deal with your Heralds, provide you bonuses based on your alignment, etc. To me, it seems like there's little reason to make a branch alignmnet-speciifc. A policy could say "foreign heralds are half as effective" or "gain 2 gold when a herald is expended" or such things - none of those need be tied to Light or Shadow.

Actually, the truth is, I'm starting to think that for both Alignment and T'a'r, we might be better off sprinkling policies relating to them throughout the other trees. For example:

- A exploration-oriented t'a'r ability in Liberty
- A faith-related t'a'r ability in Piety
- An alignment-from trade-routes in Commerce
- A heralds-are-move-effective in Patronage.

I'm starting to think that Alignment and T'a'r are a bit esoteric to deserve their own trees, and they're certainly not playing nice as branches with the other Trees. However, they should definitely be a part of our social policy system - but maybe they should be a part through other means, such as this. Also, this is the perfect thing to let you "beef" up some branches that are a little weak.

Of course, this means you can't "min max" alignment and t'a'r as much - you can't pump culture into making yourself better at those things, since the bonuses will be spread throughout a great many trees, and not concentrated into one. But, to that, I say: 1) there are other ways to beef these things up, and 2) both T'a'r and Alignment are intended to be primarily-interactive in terms of game-experience. Their mechanics are about going out and doing stuff. Maybe we don't need so many "bonuses".

Of course, that leaves us with what to do with Piety... Ugh... Well, we could just leave it alone, which isn't the end of the world.

That said, using your "Objectives" way of viewing it, I could imagine something like:

Piety - use faith to make your religion stronger
OR
Piety - use faith to make your civ better at somebody else's religion.

The first being the normal Piety, and the second being a piety option for if you *don't* found a religion - boost your pantheon bonus, get partial bonuses from a religion's founder bonus, etc.

or

Piety - use faith to make your religion stronger
OR
Piety - use faith to spread your religion

Maybe kind of treads on some beliefs, but kind of interesting.

Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
I'm very much liking the Tower and CSes vs Stedding and CSes. Playing off the two major diplomatic entities against one another (Stump vs Tower) seems like it could be really cool. I think the important thing there is that the diplomatic victory should still feel attainable, and in fact not particularly hindered, by a player's lack of control in one of those two areas. However, it does allow a second player who's also pursuing the diplomatic victory and has chosen the opposite focus to be more competitive.

Quick examples, because I don't think that was too clear, but I'm not sure how to rephrase it. If Andor picks the Tower side and goes all in on being chums with the Tower while going for the diplo victory, their attempt at that victory shouldn't feel hampered by a lack of influence with the Stump.

Likewise, if the Aiel see that Andor are going Tower diplo, they may choose to focus on the Stumps, and use the added diplomatic clout that gives them to be more competitive than they would have been otherwise.

Having the common base of CS relationship bonuses/help makes this combination a good match for the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity options.

Yeah, I like all this. I'll just say, though, that it's not particularly easy to "see that Andor are going Tower diplo." I mean, they could have good tower influence, but in early/mid game, civs are sometimes still figuring out what they're doing. Maybe Andor just completed a quest randomly, or something. So, playing in opposition to somebody else's social policy choices seems pretty risky to me. As far as I know, they aren't public like ideologies.

S3rgeus said:
Writing this out of order, so this is quite like my suggestion for the Rationalism Tree below. Culture has two main approaches:

Culture for Culture's sake - winning the Culture victory

Culture to enable something else - buying useful Policies and defending from foreign Culture victories

These two play off against each other quite well - it's unlikely that players will want to focus on the bonus provided by the other side, if they're inclined to pick one or the other. We could even frame this as the exploration of self for the Culture victory folks and the exploration of the world for the others - allowing us to pull in some of the Exploration Tree stuff (the parts that don't significantly overlap with the Culture victory objectives).

This could probably fit into any of the approaches well.

Interesting. I could see this working.

But I could also see us keeping Culture as a solo, if need be. I suppose the main issue I have here is that some of these things feel like they may more fittingly be Philosophical Tenets (the same is especially true with the Rationalism ideas).

It could work, though. Neither of these is the original one, right? They are both split from the original BNW version?

I'm not sure I can really see somebody doing a tree essentially just for culture-defense, though. It seems a little inefficient - maybe yo'ure better off just winning the game.

Alternatively, I could even see something like this:

Aesthetics - Culture for culture's sake - winning the culture victory/getting policies
Aesthetics - Culture to fuel other things - turning culture into other things.

The second one could turn culture output into other yields, and such. Kind of weird, don't think I like it.

S3rgeus said:
I'm finding that I want to have the regular Commerce stuff be a common base between T'a'r and the Exploration stuff (so those would be the Branches), though I'm not sure exactly how. This seems like it fills in gaps left by the suggestions we're discussing elsewhere - does it?

I also feel like the gold-diplo link you mention here has gone a bit by the wayside in our system of Trees and Branches - is that particularly better represented in the BNW Policies than it is in the formative topics of ours? Looking at it a bit closer, it seems like it might not actually be much of an issue and something we can address on the actual per-Policy level.

Gold-diplo link is fine as it's been, I think.

T'a'r versus Exploration could work, though I'm also liking the idea of keeping T'a'r separate (see above). I don't feel like going T'a'r and going gold need to be linked, but it's certainly not bad - Commerce is somewhat neutral in terms of who'll go for it.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm thinking Exploration's getting the axe. We do want to ensure that the "maritime civ" bonuses still exist though!

So, the iffy thing I do see is that we'll be splitting the maritime stuff up, presumably, into a few different places. This is fine to a certain extent, but it does mean if you want to be awesome in the ocean you have to adopt a bunch of policy-trees. That is most certainly *not* good, especially since civ already making naval stuff sort of tough to deal with. We need to preserve the viability of navy and such - is making the commerce branch the way you suggested the best thing to do?

S3rgeus said:
This is the one that made me go back up and mention the alternative of leaving some Trees without Branches. Rationalism doesn't oppose or divide mechanically nearly as well as any of the others, because of how core Science is to every playstyle and victory.

However, if we do go ahead and decide to split all of them into Branches, I think there are two distinct approaches to Science we might be able to use as Branches:

Science for Science's sake - the Scientific victory.

Science to enable something else - all other victories.

I'm not sure exactly how, but if we can provide Science-victory-specific bonuses on one Branch, then that at least introduces some variety into the most popular Tree in the game! The common base of Science generation means this works well with the "have your cake" and partial exclusivity approaches.

Yeah, I do see this as one that might be better off without a branch. The science-victory-only stuff does seem super Philosophy-tenet-like to me. Doesn't seem to fit so well as social policies. So I'm not so inclined to do that, especially if we're talking about things that boost your envoys and such. Is there anything else we should be considering?

S3rgeus said:
I don't think we've missed anything obvious and it looks like some sense should be emerging from the chaos soon!

yeah, getting there, but new issues keep popping up!

S3rgeus said:
After a polling of the above sections, (as was intended by my suggestion), the "have your cake" approach provides us with a way to deal with all of the combinations above. In a close second is partial exclusivity, which, with the removal of a Tradition/Liberty "Size" Tree, only really struggles with Fear/Acceptance and Piety/T'a'r.

Yeah, I think we can make it work with Cake or Partial. Cake still has the problems above, and Partial has the Fear/Acc problems.

Other than that, the key issue is all this branching, and who branches with what!

S3rgeus · Oct 27, 2015

counterpoint said:
I think this idea has a lot of promise, and may work out. However, there are still some issues that I can see with it:

1) it somewhat forces the player to make an early decision. The thing I like about the Partial idea is that you can buy a couple policies in the tree before you are forced, irrevocably, down a given path. Here that decision would need to be made early, which is less than ideal, IMO.
2) doing it this way - and taking advantage of its flexibility - seems a bit less cohesive and unified than most of the rest of the game. Some branches having policies in common, some not. some having three in common, some 4, etc. It feels a little less like a unified system, and a little more like a piecemeal solution.
3) This is related to above. I'm pretty sure in BNW, you can't highlight the specific policies and see their effects in BNW before you've unlocked it. I guess my concern is that with fully-exclusive policies, the player has to make an irreversible decision without being able to *see* the choices. As the trees are in BNW, you can see the policies before you unlock a tree, right? I can't remember. In any case, the need to see what you're getting into seems way more important in this case, since you make a permanent decision about it - I question whether we'll be able to provide enough visual info with it still looking "right."
4) the illusion of choice. There are some ideology tenets that are equal in the different branches in BNW, just with different names. That's weird, but probably fine because they are one of many choices. This Cake method, unfortunately, amplifies that a bit. The players will *think*, at first look, that they're getting different things, and it won't be immediately apparently pre-unlocking that half the tree, for instance, is identical. Not a deal breaker, but weird nonetheless. On the other hand, what you're suggesting saves us from having to come up with a policy name that somehow makes sense for two disparate concepts, though.

I think this could work - it's certainly superior to pure-mutual-exclusivity, I think - but these issues will have to be dealt with, I think. Certainly, the Fear/Acc issue makes a grand case for this or for mutual exclusivity. I do feel like the Partial set-up helps with a lot of the issues above, though.

mostly, though the forced-early-decision compromises that, to an extent.

Re #3, you can definitely see what all of the Policies do before you've unlocked anything, via the tooltips when the you hover over the individual Policy icons. (Even before you've adopted the opener in the Tree you're mousing over.) There's even a "mode" for that screen that displays all of the icons for all Trees all the time. So we can definitely expose that information to the player beforehand so that they can make an informed choice.

#4 is possibly unexpected, but I don't think it's in a bad way. At worst some players will be disappointed that the Branches aren't completely divergent, but by that point they're playing a second game, so they probably liked the mod overall! I'd say most players would recognize the want for common bonuses between the two, and many would probably like it if their favorite bonuses were available in other Branches.

#1 is very true, players will have to decide which side they're going for earlier. There are certainly very specific corner cases where the difference in time between these two approaches would mean individual players might make a different decision, but I would think that would usually come with sudden upheavals (unexpected invasions and the like) where a player would expect to have to rapidly change strategy in a non-long-term-optimal manner. If we're sticking with having finishers on the Trees as well, then this is also less of a problem, because completing partial Trees has significantly less value when investing in specific Trees effectively gives you "free Policies" in the form of the finishers.

#2 I see what you mean. I don't think it will be very pronounced, because the experience in a single game will only be the adoption down one Branch of a Tree, so you don't encounter the duplication directly until you have multiple playthroughs. Even then, the duplication could be seen as an asset by some players who find certain common bonuses very useful to their preferred playstyle. It also lets us change the strategic value of the same bonus by modifying its dependencies in alternate Branches where it may be more or less effective. There won't be as much of an over-arching "this is how the Policies work" in terms of structural underpinning, but it's still progression through a dependency tree for the player, which should be quite familiar and CiV-like.

counterpoint said:
I think, if we toss out the desire for unity, this could be fine. I think, ultimately, that aim is below good mechanics in priority, so, for instance, non-branching Rationalism is better than waste-everybody's-time-for-the-sake-of-a-branch Rationalism.

Similarly, I don't think having Fear/Acc stand alone as mut-exclu. among a sea of Partials, is great, but it's probably not that bad - especially if we make it really clear how/why.

This is making me think that Aesthetics and Rationalism can probably avoid Branching. As you've mentioned below, as long as we make it look pretty and consistent, then players should be ok with it! And if we find that it doesn't work, the fact that the Branching system is there means it's relatively low impact to switch two Trees from nonBranching to Branching.

counterpoint said:
By my count, I think we're actually more classical-heavy, if we do that.

BNW:
Ancient: Trad, Lib, Honor, Piety
Classical: Aesthetics, Patronage
Medieval: Commerce, Explo
Renaissance: Rationalism

WotMod:
Ancient: Trad, Lib, Honor, Power
Classical: Piety, Aesthetics, Patronage
Medieval: Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

I'm not really in favor of pushing back Aesthetics or Patronage just as collateral damage - especially when we're essentially already doing exactly that for piety. I understand what you're saying about the policies being moved up to accommodate Ideology, but here we're only pushing *some* of them back. That will do weird things, I think, *especially* if we elect to push Aesthetics back. So, leaving Aesthetics where it is means the classical era has more unlocks than the medieval. Maybe not the end of the world, but definitely not equal to BNW, as far as I can tell.

I think this idea works aesthetically better with the Cake method than the Partial. Starting out with a branch and ending unified seems a little weird in the Partial set up - starting unified seems to make the most sense in that case.

I would've totally said we could move back one of the others - shift the whole thing along so that we've used the same slots as BNW, but Piety and probably Patronage have moved to an era later. (Patronage and Commerce used to be the Medieval Era Trees pre-BNW.) I don't view it as collateral damage, I'd say we're reprioritizing the Tree unlock order. As you've said, having a big clump of them early on is problematic; this is mainly because it doesn't provide the player with a sense of progression. There are cases where players will want specific Policies at certain times, but I don't think those times are that fixed that these era shifts will just help to guide some of the many strategies that prioritize certain techs in order to get certain Policy unlocks in a certain order. For most players, they pick the best of what's there whenever they unlock a new Policy, and we're not reducing their options, we're just changing them. So the new order would be:

Ancient: Tradition, Liberty, Honor, Power
Classical: Piety, Aesthetics
Medieval: Patronage, Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

counterpoint said:
OK, I think we're in agreement, then!

Tradition -> Tall building OR Governors
Liberty -> wide building OR Exploration

what kind of exploration? Naval travel/coastal stuff? happiness? gold stuff? they really are quite naval (except for the finisher!)

any way to make this not so obviously maritime?

For Liberty, I think it being obviously maritime is fine - this is the Branch that an expansionist civ would adopt if they wanted to spread easily across/around the sea. I think the naval travel/coastal expansion stuff could be good. ("Coastal cities start with +1 Population", or similar.) I think we can leave the naval gold stuff out of here and have that pop up in Commerce.

counterpoint said:
I think, to clarify that question, let's go to your Objectives:

Tradition - > going Tall in order to build big and have lots of population
OR
Tradition - > going Tall in order to build big cities with specialized outputs and abilities (via governors)
or what? what's that second objective?

I think with this one, both Branches have the same objective: create an empire with a small number of very productive cities. But they go about achieving it in two different ways - one invests in city-wide bonuses that make bigger cities easier to maintain and produce more yields. The other invests in Governor bonuses that allow a Governor to make a large city significantly more productive than a Governor would usually be able to.

counterpoint said:
and

Liberty - > going Wide in order to build lots of cities without crippling your happiness/culture
OR
Liberty - > going Wide in order to... explore the world quickly? Claim resources? what?

How would you clarify the objectives of these branches?

Same as above, the objective of both Branches is the same: have an empire that covers a lot of land with many cities to benefit from parallelizable effort across those cities and economies of scale. So the first one helps going Wide in the traditional sense - making more cities easier to found and helping bootstrap new cities into being useful. The other encourages the player found many cities and expand in order to find new things (likely bonuses for resource diversity, natural wonders, possibly some trade routes).

counterpoint said:
This one definitely doesn't fit well with the Partial set-up, as you've concluded.

I think your objectives are pretty in-line. Not sure I want to bring the Ogier into Acceptance, though I could understand it from a flavor point of view. Maybe only in there as flavor (i.e. not have it have mechanical relationship to the ogier).

If we decide on Partial in general, I think we could get away with making this one be mutually exclusive. If we make it pretty enough, people won't mind.

Yeah, whether we involve the Ogier will probably depend on the appropriateness of having a single Policy or something that benefits relationships with them in some way, when we come back to do the individual Policies.

the rest all sounds good!

counterpoint said:
Just to be clear, which of those is going to aid a domination victory? The first? Or both? Because right now, the Honor tree does do that (though perhaps not as much as it should). Is the first option the "normal" honor tree?

Arguably the first helps the Domination victory and the second helps the Light side of the LB victory, though there's enough of an overlap between the two in terms of mechanical usefulness of an individual civ that we help each victory with either side. Yes, the first option is the "normal" Honor Tree.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm, I think we can use the policies to help with this, but I also recall us deciding that relying on policies too much for this was not great, because it forced the players' hands in their policy adoption too much.

Definitely, we don't want to force Blightborder civs into adopting Honor. However, it's probably difficult to have an anti-Shadowspawn Branch and not have it be remarkably effective for Blightborder civs. The important thing is that non-Honor civs can still play enjoyably near the Blight without feeling like they're significantly handicapped.

counterpoint said:
I recall us liking the idea of certain era-appropriate anti-shadowspawn Walls and units as being an elegant way to make a civ be able to withstand the trolloc assault withou having to build their whole civ around it.

Definitely, that sounds like a good way of us addressing it through buildings. I do think Policies may come in use here too, but this is another thing that's largely about the specifics of what individual Policies do, so we'll come back to it!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think this tree would work in either method.

Coolio.

counterpoint said:
yeah. I don't like this idea anymore.

Yeah, I also don't love the idea of these two being linked. Feels like it doesn't quite add up, IMO.

Right. Though that's part of the reason this doesn't feel like a great fit.

I agree that Piety vs T'a'r in an oppositional setup is counter-intuitive and has a lot of problems, however! See below for a possible twist that might make it better.

counterpoint said:
Eh. Really don't like the idea of light and shadow branches. It seems to work very much against the way we've designed alignment. You never "choose" your alignment - until the very end of the game (the LB). Your alignment "happens" over the course of hundreds of turns. You might plan on being heavy Light and end up neutral, or mildly shadow, due to circumstance, a neighbor, etc. I very much don't think it's wise to essentially ask players to "choose" so early.

Also, the truth is, while Shadow/Light are of course diametrically opposed, the policies themselves don't need to be. We know these policies won't *generate* alignment points (we don't want that messing up our math!) - instead, they're going to deal with your Heralds, provide you bonuses based on your alignment, etc. To me, it seems like there's little reason to make a branch alignmnet-speciifc. A policy could say "foreign heralds are half as effective" or "gain 2 gold when a herald is expended" or such things - none of those need be tied to Light or Shadow.

Actually, the truth is, I'm starting to think that for both Alignment and T'a'r, we might be better off sprinkling policies relating to them throughout the other trees. For example:

- A exploration-oriented t'a'r ability in Liberty
- A faith-related t'a'r ability in Piety
- An alignment-from trade-routes in Commerce
- A heralds-are-move-effective in Patronage.

I'm starting to think that Alignment and T'a'r are a bit esoteric to deserve their own trees, and they're certainly not playing nice as branches with the other Trees. However, they should definitely be a part of our social policy system - but maybe they should be a part through other means, such as this. Also, this is the perfect thing to let you "beef" up some branches that are a little weak.

Of course, this means you can't "min max" alignment and t'a'r as much - you can't pump culture into making yourself better at those things, since the bonuses will be spread throughout a great many trees, and not concentrated into one. But, to that, I say: 1) there are other ways to beef these things up, and 2) both T'a'r and Alignment are intended to be primarily-interactive in terms of game-experience. Their mechanics are about going out and doing stuff. Maybe we don't need so many "bonuses".

I'm fine with treating Alignment this way, and in fact it seems like a good idea overall. I think the role Alignment plays in the Last Battle victory condition makes it important enough (plus the many systems that interact with it already) that it already has a serious influence over the game and players will prioritize it as a part of their game plan if they so wish.

T'a'r is a bit more isolated - I'm thinking that we should have some way of converting T'a'r dominance into more traditional bonuses ("Gain Culture from killing projections" or whatever) would go a ways to making it a much better integrated system into the wider CiV ecosystem. It also means players are more likely to be able to make T'a'r a significant part of their strategy - sort of like you can with religion. (In the same way, you totally wouldn't be obligated to invest much in T'a'r, but I just think there should be the opportunity for gains if a player invests in it wisely.) Policies seem like a very good place for us to provide that feedback to the player and present the perfect kinds of bonuses for attaching to T'a'r actions that would have otherwise been purely a part of the actual internal T'a'r system loops. (Get more glimmers to get more GPs to be better at T'a'r, and so on.)

In order to do that, I think allowing a player to invest directly in T'a'r is valuable (rather than have them having to pick up Policies from a bunch of disparate Trees). You've mentioned the drawbacks of this in your post, and I think your conclusion of the system being otherwise consistent and useful enough externally so it doesn't need its own dedicated Tree is definitely the case for Alignment.

This leaves us with the question of what do we do with T'a'r - how do we make it a Branch of another Tree? Even though we've dismissed Piety vs T'a'r above, what if we took a similar approach to what we've got with Tradition and Liberty? What if the T'a'r Branch helped you use T'a'r to develop a powerful Path, or benefited your T'a'r capabilities based on the strength of your Path? It could use that to feed back into all other systems.

So we would have two Branches, both of which have the same objective: develop a powerful Path to the Light and spread it to many places in order to receive bonuses.

One branch is the traditional Piety Tree (makes you beliefs better, helps you get Faith from doing normal stuff), the other is a T'a'r Branch that helps your Path. We can provide Faith bonuses for T'a'r actions and also provide T'a'r benefits for Path actions ("+4 glimmer points per turn for each city following your Path" or some such).

This also has the extremely nice side effect of resolving our difficulties with finding something to do with Piety!

counterpoint said:
Of course, that leaves us with what to do with Piety... Ugh... Well, we could just leave it alone, which isn't the end of the world.

That said, using your "Objectives" way of viewing it, I could imagine something like:

Piety - use faith to make your religion stronger
OR
Piety - use faith to make your civ better at somebody else's religion.

The first being the normal Piety, and the second being a piety option for if you *don't* found a religion - boost your pantheon bonus, get partial bonuses from a religion's founder bonus, etc.

or

Piety - use faith to make your religion stronger
OR
Piety - use faith to spread your religion

Maybe kind of treads on some beliefs, but kind of interesting.

Thoughts?

I've mentioned above how I think we can reconcile the Piety vs T'a'r stuff, but in response to these specifics, I think these choices look a lot like what I suggested for Aesthetics and Rationalism and after reading your post, I think I'm in agreement with your sentiment on those that we might be best off leaving them as unBranched Trees.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I like all this. I'll just say, though, that it's not particularly easy to "see that Andor are going Tower diplo." I mean, they could have good tower influence, but in early/mid game, civs are sometimes still figuring out what they're doing. Maybe Andor just completed a quest randomly, or something. So, playing in opposition to somebody else's social policy choices seems pretty risky to me. As far as I know, they aren't public like ideologies.

Yeah, you can't track other players accurately by Policy, the Aiel would have to go by Andor's Tower and Ajah influences and make a guess.

counterpoint said:
Interesting. I could see this working.

But I could also see us keeping Culture as a solo, if need be. I suppose the main issue I have here is that some of these things feel like they may more fittingly be Philosophical Tenets (the same is especially true with the Rationalism ideas).

It could work, though. Neither of these is the original one, right? They are both split from the original BNW version?

I'm not sure I can really see somebody doing a tree essentially just for culture-defense, though. It seems a little inefficient - maybe yo'ure better off just winning the game.

Alternatively, I could even see something like this:

Aesthetics - Culture for culture's sake - winning the culture victory/getting policies
Aesthetics - Culture to fuel other things - turning culture into other things.

The second one could turn culture output into other yields, and such. Kind of weird, don't think I like it.

Like I've mentioned above, I think you've made good points here on how we're kind of Branching for Branching's sake on this Tree and Rationalism. These two Policy Trees are the ones that are most "targeted" towards a victory type, and that makes splitting them difficult, because it precludes players going for that victory type from pursuing the mechanics that help them with that victory as effectively as they could have otherwise.

counterpoint said:
Gold-diplo link is fine as it's been, I think.

T'a'r versus Exploration could work, though I'm also liking the idea of keeping T'a'r separate (see above). I don't feel like going T'a'r and going gold need to be linked, but it's certainly not bad - Commerce is somewhat neutral in terms of who'll go for it.

And I think this could benefit from a similar recategorization as Piety could - gaining Gold through T'a'r as one Branch, and gaining Gold through other methods. Those other methods being naval, probably? (Not exclusively, just some) This is where we could grab the other half of the former Exploration Tree for the naval stuff on one Branch, and including the hidden Sites stuff on the T'a'r Branch, which makes total sense since our hidden sites are T'a'r sites!

counterpoint said:
So, the iffy thing I do see is that we'll be splitting the maritime stuff up, presumably, into a few different places. This is fine to a certain extent, but it does mean if you want to be awesome in the ocean you have to adopt a bunch of policy-trees. That is most certainly *not* good, especially since civ already making naval stuff sort of tough to deal with. We need to preserve the viability of navy and such - is making the commerce branch the way you suggested the best thing to do?

True, we'll be splitting up the maritime stuff, but I've never felt that a "martime civ" is a useful focus for a civ to work towards. It's always a subset of a way to achieve a certain objective, and given we'd be fitting the naval stuff into optional Branches of the Liberty and Commerce Trees, that seems quite good to me - a player on the coast could take advantage of all of them like they did before, and other players aren't burdened by useless naval Policies in their landlocked empires.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I do see this as one that might be better off without a branch. The science-victory-only stuff does seem super Philosophy-tenet-like to me. Doesn't seem to fit so well as social policies. So I'm not so inclined to do that, especially if we're talking about things that boost your envoys and such. Is there anything else we should be considering?

Yep, Rationalism as an unBranching Tree sounds good to me.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think we can make it work with Cake or Partial. Cake still has the problems above, and Partial has the Fear/Acc problems.

Looks like we're getting there!

counterpoint said:
Other than that, the key issue is all this branching, and who branches with what!

And then, oddly, we'll be done, right? What's our next topic?

counterpoint · Oct 27, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Re #3, you can definitely see what all of the Policies do before you've unlocked anything, via the tooltips when the you hover over the individual Policy icons. (Even before you've adopted the opener in the Tree you're mousing over.) There's even a "mode" for that screen that displays all of the icons for all Trees all the time. So we can definitely expose that information to the player beforehand so that they can make an informed choice.

OK, so it's just a UI thing, then. Do you think we can make them ALL show up in a way that they could be "auditioned" before it was selected?

S3rgeus said:
#4 is possibly unexpected, but I don't think it's in a bad way. At worst some players will be disappointed that the Branches aren't completely divergent, but by that point they're playing a second game, so they probably liked the mod overall! I'd say most players would recognize the want for common bonuses between the two, and many would probably like it if their favorite bonuses were available in other Branches.

Right. This one is acceptable, I think.

S3rgeus said:
#1 is very true, players will have to decide which side they're going for earlier. There are certainly very specific corner cases where the difference in time between these two approaches would mean individual players might make a different decision, but I would think that would usually come with sudden upheavals (unexpected invasions and the like) where a player would expect to have to rapidly change strategy in a non-long-term-optimal manner. If we're sticking with having finishers on the Trees as well, then this is also less of a problem, because completing partial Trees has significantly less value when investing in specific Trees effectively gives you "free Policies" in the form of the finishers.

My issue with the "early decision" doesn't have to do with whether they finish the tree, it has more to do with which tree they take. In any case, I think this is an acceptable casualty, though of these 4 concerns, this is still probably my largest.

S3rgeus said:
#2 I see what you mean. I don't think it will be very pronounced, because the experience in a single game will only be the adoption down one Branch of a Tree, so you don't encounter the duplication directly until you have multiple playthroughs. Even then, the duplication could be seen as an asset by some players who find certain common bonuses very useful to their preferred playstyle. It also lets us change the strategic value of the same bonus by modifying its dependencies in alternate Branches where it may be more or less effective. There won't be as much of an over-arching "this is how the Policies work" in terms of structural underpinning, but it's still progression through a dependency tree for the player, which should be quite familiar and CiV-like.

Again, I think this might be an acceptable loss.

S3rgeus said:
This is making me think that Aesthetics and Rationalism can probably avoid Branching. As you've mentioned below, as long as we make it look pretty and consistent, then players should be ok with it! And if we find that it doesn't work, the fact that the Branching system is there means it's relatively low impact to switch two Trees from nonBranching to Branching.

mostly agree - some minor caveats on Aesthetics are below.

S3rgeus said:
I would've totally said we could move back one of the others - shift the whole thing along so that we've used the same slots as BNW, but Piety and probably Patronage have moved to an era later. (Patronage and Commerce used to be the Medieval Era Trees pre-BNW.) I don't view it as collateral damage, I'd say we're reprioritizing the Tree unlock order. As you've said, having a big clump of them early on is problematic; this is mainly because it doesn't provide the player with a sense of progression. There are cases where players will want specific Policies at certain times, but I don't think those times are that fixed that these era shifts will just help to guide some of the many strategies that prioritize certain techs in order to get certain Policy unlocks in a certain order. For most players, they pick the best of what's there whenever they unlock a new Policy, and we're not reducing their options, we're just changing them. So the new order would be:

Ancient: Tradition, Liberty, Honor, Power
Classical: Piety, Aesthetics
Medieval: Patronage, Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

I think this is probably fine. The one potentially issue I do see is simply to do with Piety - completing piety "unlocks" a game mechanic, of sorts - the Reformation belief. This is unique, since the other trees don't really add an "ability" like this. By moving it back to Classical, we are making it so there won't be the possibility of opening with Piety - which, while it may be rare, is certainly something that happens sometimes (see: Byzantium). Maybe an acceptable loss.

Although, on the other hand, I could actually see Power being Classical. I don't suppose it'll have any "new mechanics" in the same way that piety does. Do we see strategies where people will want it as their FIRST tree, really? It's true, we want people to be able to accumulate its effects over as much time as possible, but the same could be true of Piety - especially if piety is also tied to T'a'r. Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
For Liberty, I think it being obviously maritime is fine - this is the Branch that an expansionist civ would adopt if they wanted to spread easily across/around the sea. I think the naval travel/coastal expansion stuff could be good. ("Coastal cities start with +1 Population", or similar.) I think we can leave the naval gold stuff out of here and have that pop up in Commerce.

Yeah, I see the connection. The remaining issue, then, is that we'd be preventing people from completing both the "Wide" tree and the "maritime" tree -now they'd be completing the "pretty wide and maritime" tree if they want those bonuses. Probably fine, but certainly there are plenty of situations in BNW where a civ would want to finish both Lib and Explo - now that wouldn't be strictly possible (they would sacrifice some Lib policies if they chose the Maritime branch).

S3rgeus said:
I think with this one, both Branches have the same objective: create an empire with a small number of very productive cities. But they go about achieving it in two different ways - one invests in city-wide bonuses that make bigger cities easier to maintain and produce more yields. The other invests in Governor bonuses that allow a Governor to make a large city significantly more productive than a Governor would usually be able to.

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Same as above, the objective of both Branches is the same: have an empire that covers a lot of land with many cities to benefit from parallelizable effort across those cities and economies of scale. So the first one helps going Wide in the traditional sense - making more cities easier to found and helping bootstrap new cities into being useful. The other encourages the player found many cities and expand in order to find new things (likely bonuses for resource diversity, natural wonders, possibly some trade routes).

right. Good.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, whether we involve the Ogier will probably depend on the appropriateness of having a single Policy or something that benefits relationships with them in some way, when we come back to do the individual Policies.

the rest all sounds good!

alright - Power seems pretty done then!

S3rgeus said:
Arguably the first helps the Domination victory and the second helps the Light side of the LB victory, though there's enough of an overlap between the two in terms of mechanical usefulness of an individual civ that we help each victory with either side. Yes, the first option is the "normal" Honor Tree.

Got it. Agreement on Honor too!

S3rgeus said:
Definitely, we don't want to force Blightborder civs into adopting Honor. However, it's probably difficult to have an anti-Shadowspawn Branch and not have it be remarkably effective for Blightborder civs. The important thing is that non-Honor civs can still play enjoyably near the Blight without feeling like they're significantly handicapped.

right. exactly. In any case, we'll probably want one of the first (shared?) policies of the tree to be 'spawn related, due to the dating of the TW, even though the branching (and thus 'spawn focus) would normally probably happen at the end of the tree. Might be as simple as making the +barb bonus at opener apply to Spawn as well (you know, the 90s comic character)

S3rgeus said:
I'm fine with treating Alignment this way, and in fact it seems like a good idea overall. I think the role Alignment plays in the Last Battle victory condition makes it important enough (plus the many systems that interact with it already) that it already has a serious influence over the game and players will prioritize it as a part of their game plan if they so wish.

Great. Bullet dodged! No alignment tree.

S3rgeus said:
T'a'r is a bit more isolated - I'm thinking that we should have some way of converting T'a'r dominance into more traditional bonuses ("Gain Culture from killing projections" or whatever) would go a ways to making it a much better integrated system into the wider CiV ecosystem. It also means players are more likely to be able to make T'a'r a significant part of their strategy - sort of like you can with religion. (In the same way, you totally wouldn't be obligated to invest much in T'a'r, but I just think there should be the opportunity for gains if a player invests in it wisely.) Policies seem like a very good place for us to provide that feedback to the player and present the perfect kinds of bonuses for attaching to T'a'r actions that would have otherwise been purely a part of the actual internal T'a'r system loops. (Get more glimmers to get more GPs to be better at T'a'r, and so on.)

In order to do that, I think allowing a player to invest directly in T'a'r is valuable (rather than have them having to pick up Policies from a bunch of disparate Trees). You've mentioned the drawbacks of this in your post, and I think your conclusion of the system being otherwise consistent and useful enough externally so it doesn't need its own dedicated Tree is definitely the case for Alignment.[/quote]yeah. definitely see how a T'a'r tree would be nice, at least in theory, as a way to make it all "matter" a bit more.

S3rgeus said:
This leaves us with the question of what do we do with T'a'r - how do we make it a Branch of another Tree? Even though we've dismissed Piety vs T'a'r above, what if we took a similar approach to what we've got with Tradition and Liberty? What if the T'a'r Branch helped you use T'a'r to develop a powerful Path, or benefited your T'a'r capabilities based on the strength of your Path? It could use that to feed back into all other systems.

So we would have two Branches, both of which have the same objective: develop a powerful Path to the Light and spread it to many places in order to receive bonuses.

One branch is the traditional Piety Tree (makes you beliefs better, helps you get Faith from doing normal stuff), the other is a T'a'r Branch that helps your Path. We can provide Faith bonuses for T'a'r actions and also provide T'a'r benefits for Path actions ("+4 glimmer points per turn for each city following your Path" or some such).

This also has the extremely nice side effect of resolving our difficulties with finding something to do with Piety!

First off, I should point out that you had also proposed something like T'a'r crossing over with Commerce, which isn't a terrible idea. Seems to have a little less sparkle than this, but in some ways, it may be the safer option. anyways...

The issue I have with this - not irreconcilable - is that it then presumes you have to have a religion to delve deeply into T'a'r - otherwise you're really missing out. Note, I'm not saying tying faith and religion to T'a'r as being necessarily terrible - we'd have to tie T'a'r to *something*, and whatever that is would feel somewhat arbitrary. What I'm concerned about is tying it to having an actual religion. The way you have framed your sample policy "... cities following YOUR path," for example, is problematic.

My suggestion before was to have one branch of Piety exist for civs that want faith production, but don'thave a religion - that Reformation belief is a wasted policy for them.

So, I think I'd be fine with this idea (mixing T'a'r and piety), but I think it's important that the policies in question be useful even for civs who don't have a Holy City. Faith production is useful to anybody. Better follower bonuses are useful to anybody. Reformation beliefs... no. "...cities following your path..." not useful.

It should be noted that the first few policies in BNW piety are certainly useful to anybody - not just founders. That last one... definitely not. Still, in general, this has most to do with the new one's we'd create - clearly "normal piety branch" is going to be based around Founders, and that's probably fine.

So, new suggestion: make the "T'a'r Branch" be follower-ready policies only. Thus, a non-founder civ can feel like they can invest in T'a'r without wasting their time on Path stuff they can't use (or don't use much, since they don't mess with Paths much). Additionally, Piety can now be attractive to non-religion-founding civs, who may not care about T'a'r hugely, but want some boosts to their faith (without wanting to waste that Reformation policy).

Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, you can't track other players accurately by Policy, the Aiel would have to go by Andor's Tower and Ajah influences and make a guess.

OK, so Patronage: agreed!

S3rgeus said:
Like I've mentioned above, I think you've made good points here on how we're kind of Branching for Branching's sake on this Tree and Rationalism. These two Policy Trees are the ones that are most "targeted" towards a victory type, and that makes splitting them difficult, because it precludes players going for that victory type from pursuing the mechanics that help them with that victory as effectively as they could have otherwise.

Right. So the one caveat with us keeping this one-branch is that it would be nice if we could get a branch in there that helped culture but didn't have to do with the culture victory so much. i.e., exactly what you suggested before. Is there a way to do that without getting all up in the face of Philosophies?

What would it be? Super bonuses to border growth? Social policy acquisitions?

I could accept leaving it alone, though. But, like Piety to a certain extent, this tree feels super specialized, almost to a fault. Then again, we can always just tweak a few of the policies.

S3rgeus said:
And I think this could benefit from a similar recategorization as Piety could - gaining Gold through T'a'r as one Branch, and gaining Gold through other methods. Those other methods being naval, probably? (Not exclusively, just some) This is where we could grab the other half of the former Exploration Tree for the naval stuff on one Branch, and including the hidden Sites stuff on the T'a'r Branch, which makes total sense since our hidden sites are T'a'r sites!

are you still in favor of leaving some T'a'r stuff (hidden sites, etc.) into the Commerce tree, even if T'a'r gets its branch with piety? Just trying to be clear.

I suppose a culture player trying to go all-out with it would have a lot to do. Aesthetics, Commerce (for the Sites), AND Piety to make them more likely to get to those sites easily. Right? Is that too much work for a player for Sites? (noting that we'd previously decided that the Sites won't be a finisher anymore)

S3rgeus said:
True, we'll be splitting up the maritime stuff, but I've never felt that a "martime civ" is a useful focus for a civ to work towards. It's always a subset of a way to achieve a certain objective, and given we'd be fitting the naval stuff into optional Branches of the Liberty and Commerce Trees, that seems quite good to me - a player on the coast could take advantage of all of them like they did before, and other players aren't burdened by useless naval Policies in their landlocked empires.

yeah, in agreement.

S3rgeus said:
Yep, Rationalism as an unBranching Tree sounds good to me.

probably the way to go.

S3rgeus said:
And then, oddly, we'll be done, right? What's our next topic?

Well, should we try for names for these Trees and for the branches? It looks like we're close to having our set, so we should probably start naming them, right? I know we could wait, but I think we might as well come up with stuff now, and let it sit for awhile

S3rgeus · Oct 28, 2015

Now that we're back on scheduling track, I figure I should mention that I'm doing NaNoWriMo in November, which will suck up a ton of the time I usually use to post here! (This topic is very good preparation for writing a 50,000 word novel!) I'll try to keep up to date, but I may be slower than usual during November. Sorry again for the delays!

counterpoint said:
OK, so it's just a UI thing, then. Do you think we can make them ALL show up in a way that they could be "auditioned" before it was selected?

Yeah, I think we'll definitely be able to (and want to) display the details of what all of the Policies do to the player if they request that information before they adopt any Policies. It may be through tooltips or some other method, but that information is definitely key to them being able to make a decision about which Trees and Branches to select.

counterpoint said:
Right. This one is acceptable, I think.

My issue with the "early decision" doesn't have to do with whether they finish the tree, it has more to do with which tree they take. In any case, I think this is an acceptable casualty, though of these 4 concerns, this is still probably my largest.

Again, I think this might be an acceptable loss.

For the second one, what kind of situations would the choose-at-the-start vs choose-after-X-Policies result in different choices for specific players? I can see it happening if a player has a sudden change of strategy in the intervening turns, but I think they'd expect their previous choices to be non-optimal at that point anyway.

counterpoint said:
I think this is probably fine. The one potentially issue I do see is simply to do with Piety - completing piety "unlocks" a game mechanic, of sorts - the Reformation belief. This is unique, since the other trees don't really add an "ability" like this. By moving it back to Classical, we are making it so there won't be the possibility of opening with Piety - which, while it may be rare, is certainly something that happens sometimes (see: Byzantium). Maybe an acceptable loss.

Although, on the other hand, I could actually see Power being Classical. I don't suppose it'll have any "new mechanics" in the same way that piety does. Do we see strategies where people will want it as their FIRST tree, really? It's true, we want people to be able to accumulate its effects over as much time as possible, but the same could be true of Piety - especially if piety is also tied to T'a'r. Thoughts?

When we discussed Power previously we figured it would be fairly foundational to the way a civ works. I do see our reasoning then, but I also see that most of our channeling mechanics don't spin up immediately on the start of the game (unles I'm forgetting some component of them), whereas Faith and Paths definitely do. And the Classical era really is quite close to the beginning of the game for a lot of players. I'd be fine with Power being a Classical era Tree - though it means that players wouldn't open with it as a foundational way to how their civ works. Which is pretty much our issue with Piety as well, right?

Thinking this through now, I think Power in Classical and Piety remaining in Ancient is my preference, but it's not a strong one. Then again, it's easy to change later if we don't like it.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I see the connection. The remaining issue, then, is that we'd be preventing people from completing both the "Wide" tree and the "maritime" tree -now they'd be completing the "pretty wide and maritime" tree if they want those bonuses. Probably fine, but certainly there are plenty of situations in BNW where a civ would want to finish both Lib and Explo - now that wouldn't be strictly possible (they would sacrifice some Lib policies if they chose the Maritime branch).

I see what you mean here and I think we can avoid the problem of excluding those players with careful Policy selection. I think we want a civ on the coast/on islands that is being expansionist to gain as much if not more expansionist bonuses from the wide/naval Branch as they would have from the pure Wide Branch, just manifested in a different way. The other parts of Exploration that that player may have picked will be available from other Trees, so there's no loss for them.

counterpoint said:
right. exactly. In any case, we'll probably want one of the first (shared?) policies of the tree to be 'spawn related, due to the dating of the TW, even though the branching (and thus 'spawn focus) would normally probably happen at the end of the tree. Might be as simple as making the +barb bonus at opener apply to Spawn as well (you know, the 90s comic character)

Yes, probably. I'm thinking we might even want on 90s comics character Policies in the first few of the other Ancient era Trees - but that's something we can deal with when we're deciding specific Policies!

counterpoint said:
Great. Bullet dodged! No alignment tree.

Agreed, no Alignment Tree!

counterpoint said:
yeah. definitely see how a T'a'r tree would be nice, at least in theory, as a way to make it all "matter" a bit more.

Definitely, that's one of the main driving forces for trying to keep it as a Branch!

counterpoint said:
First off, I should point out that you had also proposed something like T'a'r crossing over with Commerce, which isn't a terrible idea. Seems to have a little less sparkle than this, but in some ways, it may be the safer option. anyways...

The issue I have with this - not irreconcilable - is that it then presumes you have to have a religion to delve deeply into T'a'r - otherwise you're really missing out. Note, I'm not saying tying faith and religion to T'a'r as being necessarily terrible - we'd have to tie T'a'r to *something*, and whatever that is would feel somewhat arbitrary. What I'm concerned about is tying it to having an actual religion. The way you have framed your sample policy "... cities following YOUR path," for example, is problematic.

My suggestion before was to have one branch of Piety exist for civs that want faith production, but don'thave a religion - that Reformation belief is a wasted policy for them.

So, I think I'd be fine with this idea (mixing T'a'r and piety), but I think it's important that the policies in question be useful even for civs who don't have a Holy City. Faith production is useful to anybody. Better follower bonuses are useful to anybody. Reformation beliefs... no. "...cities following your path..." not useful.

It should be noted that the first few policies in BNW piety are certainly useful to anybody - not just founders. That last one... definitely not. Still, in general, this has most to do with the new one's we'd create - clearly "normal piety branch" is going to be based around Founders, and that's probably fine.

So, new suggestion: make the "T'a'r Branch" be follower-ready policies only. Thus, a non-founder civ can feel like they can invest in T'a'r without wasting their time on Path stuff they can't use (or don't use much, since they don't mess with Paths much). Additionally, Piety can now be attractive to non-religion-founding civs, who may not care about T'a'r hugely, but want some boosts to their faith (without wanting to waste that Reformation policy).

Thoughts?

Totally agree with this - I hadn't really considered the mechanical implications of that Policy. Yeah, we totally want to avoid requiring the player to have a Path on this Branch, otherwise it conflates some T'a'r bonuses with the necessity to have a Path, which, as you've outlined here, is a problem.

Your suggestion sounds like a good one - let's do that!

counterpoint said:
OK, so Patronage: agreed!

W00t!

counterpoint said:
Right. So the one caveat with us keeping this one-branch is that it would be nice if we could get a branch in there that helped culture but didn't have to do with the culture victory so much. i.e., exactly what you suggested before. Is there a way to do that without getting all up in the face of Philosophies?

What would it be? Super bonuses to border growth? Social policy acquisitions?

I could accept leaving it alone, though. But, like Piety to a certain extent, this tree feels super specialized, almost to a fault. Then again, we can always just tweak a few of the policies.

I'm not sure about this, mainly because a Culture-victory-specific Tree does make quite a bit of sense. It's a bit of a Culture sink for Culture players since they have a lot of it - so they effectively get to adopt all of the usual bonuses that other players in their situation would from other Trees and the Aesthetics Tree as well that helps them with Culture, since they adopt X more Policies than everyone else.

Social Policy acquisitions would be a primary driver for something like this in general, but as a Policy itself it's a bit self-defeating. A player who adopts that Policy could have used that Culture to adopt a whole other Policy, so it would need to scale quite aggressively in order to remain competitive. (Not to mention they've had to start a specific Tree for it.)

Border growth is certainly possible. I think those are the main uses of Culture covered? Policies (above), Border growth, and defending from Prestige (discussed before as stepping on the toes of Philosophies). We could attach other bonuses to GWs, which could increase competition for Sites and give players ancillary bonuses for the Culture GPs they generate. But that still feels like a conciliatory bonus rather than one that players would work towards.

counterpoint said:
are you still in favor of leaving some T'a'r stuff (hidden sites, etc.) into the Commerce tree, even if T'a'r gets its branch with piety? Just trying to be clear.

I suppose a culture player trying to go all-out with it would have a lot to do. Aesthetics, Commerce (for the Sites), AND Piety to make them more likely to get to those sites easily. Right? Is that too much work for a player for Sites? (noting that we'd previously decided that the Sites won't be a finisher anymore)

Yeah, I'm still in favor of having a T'a'r Branch on Commerce - so we'd have two T'a'r Branches, one on Piety and one on Commerce.

That doesn't seem like too much work, mainly because it's only a Culture player who would want to do all of these (and especially since Sites aren't a finisher), and they're the best players at adopting lots of Policies. It might mean that they could consider focusing Piety instead of Tradition or Liberty, which could be a nice change of pace from BNW.

counterpoint said:
yeah, in agreement.

Awesome, spread maritime-iness it is!

counterpoint said:
probably the way to go.

Cool, unBranched Rationalism!

counterpoint said:
Well, should we try for names for these Trees and for the branches? It looks like we're close to having our set, so we should probably start naming them, right? I know we could wait, but I think we might as well come up with stuff now, and let it sit for awhile

Yes, let's name the Trees and Branches next. However, let's do that once the last few quote blocks above have wrapped up - otherwise we'll end up using a mixture of the two naming conventions and it will be very confusing!

Once we're done the naming, is the tech tree up next? I'm not sure if there was anything else on our "next topics" post from an eon or two ago? (Back when we were planning to discuss Governors, GPs, Shadar Logoth, then Policies.)

counterpoint · Oct 28, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Now that we're back on scheduling track, I figure I should mention that I'm doing NaNoWriMo in November, which will suck up a ton of the time I usually use to post here! (This topic is very good preparation for writing a 50,000 word novel!) I'll try to keep up to date, but I may be slower than usual during November. Sorry again for the delays!

Awesome! That's like 2/3 the length of the Channeling Dissertation, if I recall correctly!

Seriously, though. Good luck. That's pretty epic. Hopefully you don't disappear completely.

S3rgeus said:
For the second one, what kind of situations would the choose-at-the-start vs choose-after-X-Policies result in different choices for specific players? I can see it happening if a player has a sudden change of strategy in the intervening turns, but I think they'd expect their previous choices to be non-optimal at that point anyway.

I'm concerned chiefly with the beginning-of-game policies that unlock in the Ancient era. The later policies are obviously not as big of an issue - it's not terribly likely that between the time one opens Patronage-Tower and gets to the unique Tower stuff, one has decided they really want to focus on the Ogier instead. It could happen, but it's not likely to be a big deal.

Consider what we're proposing for Liberty, though. Deciding you're necessarily going navy-focus at the point of your first policy (after what, 20 culture?) is kind of a big deal. What if that first expo spot you wanted gets snatched by somebody, and you end up landlocked or something? Not likely to happen on an archipelago map, but on continents it's potentially more of an issue - it's awful early to commit to that. It makes me think people would always choose the "normal" route. The time between Unlocking and, say, policy 4, is quite a big difference in the early game.

Similarly, consider Piety, as we're now conceiving of it. What if I choose Piety-Piety (instead of Piety-T'a'r) because I'm really hoping for a religion of my own, but one or two policies in, I end up not getting a religion at all. Given the choice, at that point you'd certainly select Policy-T'a'r, if the branch hadn't occurred yet.

See what I mean?

S3rgeus said:
When we discussed Power previously we figured it would be fairly foundational to the way a civ works. I do see our reasoning then, but I also see that most of our channeling mechanics don't spin up immediately on the start of the game (unles I'm forgetting some component of them), whereas Faith and Paths definitely do. And the Classical era really is quite close to the beginning of the game for a lot of players. I'd be fine with Power being a Classical era Tree - though it means that players wouldn't open with it as a foundational way to how their civ works. Which is pretty much our issue with Piety as well, right?

Thinking this through now, I think Power in Classical and Piety remaining in Ancient is my preference, but it's not a strong one. Then again, it's easy to change later if we don't like it.

Sweet, agreed.

To recap:

Ancient: Tradition, Liberty, Honor, Piety
Classical: Power, Aesthetics
Medieval: Patronage, Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

Is it weird having Patronage/Commerce unlock at the same time, since those are both likely for a diplo-focused player? Like, there wouldn't be much of a progression for them, as they'd likely want both, and wouldn't have them unlock in an order that makes that feel right. This is likely why Patronage was Classical in BNW... ugh. I don't love that.

maybe put it in Classical and let Commerce stand alone in Medieval?

S3rgeus said:
I see what you mean here and I think we can avoid the problem of excluding those players with careful Policy selection. I think we want a civ on the coast/on islands that is being expansionist to gain as much if not more expansionist bonuses from the wide/naval Branch as they would have from the pure Wide Branch, just manifested in a different way. The other parts of Exploration that that player may have picked will be available from other Trees, so there's no loss for them.

right. Considering we were going to beef up some of the Explo policy options anyways, that should be fine.

S3rgeus said:
Yes, probably. I'm thinking we might even want on 90s comics character Policies in the first few of the other Ancient era Trees - but that's something we can deal with when we're deciding specific Policies!

ok, so Carnage, I'm assuming, will be in Honor, then. And also [comic knowledge extinguished]

S3rgeus said:
Totally agree with this - I hadn't really considered the mechanical implications of that Policy. Yeah, we totally want to avoid requiring the player to have a Path on this Branch, otherwise it conflates some T'a'r bonuses with the necessity to have a Path, which, as you've outlined here, is a problem.

Your suggestion sounds like a good one - let's do that!

great. like that a lot, then!

S3rgeus said:
I'm not sure about this, mainly because a Culture-victory-specific Tree does make quite a bit of sense. It's a bit of a Culture sink for Culture players since they have a lot of it - so they effectively get to adopt all of the usual bonuses that other players in their situation would from other Trees and the Aesthetics Tree as well that helps them with Culture, since they adopt X more Policies than everyone else.

Social Policy acquisitions would be a primary driver for something like this in general, but as a Policy itself it's a bit self-defeating. A player who adopts that Policy could have used that Culture to adopt a whole other Policy, so it would need to scale quite aggressively in order to remain competitive. (Not to mention they've had to start a specific Tree for it.)

Border growth is certainly possible. I think those are the main uses of Culture covered? Policies (above), Border growth, and defending from Prestige (discussed before as stepping on the toes of Philosophies). We could attach other bonuses to GWs, which could increase competition for Sites and give players ancillary bonuses for the Culture GPs they generate. But that still feels like a conciliatory bonus rather than one that players would work towards.

definitely agree. It would be rather foolish, and inefficient to invest in a tree simply for the purpose of speeding through policies.... I think the border expansion thing is probably not important enough during the mid-late game (when a non-culture player would ever bother to do a tree like this) to justify its existence. As far as tourism, resistance, that sounds like a cool Tenet. The truth is, such a "defensive" strategy feels sort of un-civ-like - you should play to win, not to block an potential opposing culture victory. A tenet doing that is fine (I've grabbed Volunteer army when I totally didn't plan to, because somebody invaded me), but choosing a whole policy tree because somebody *might* have powerful culture later? You should just grab rationalism and win the darn game.

Culture - single-tree. This is also better, aesthetically (pun semi-intended), because then there are *two* trees that are monobranchial (lol that's a word, it seems... though it has nothing to do with this), instead of rationalism standing alone, feels more consistent, I guess.

...I guess.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm still in favor of having a T'a'r Branch on Commerce - so we'd have two T'a'r Branches, one on Piety and one on Commerce.

ok, so that means the T'a'r branch on piety is faith/t'ar, while the one on Commerce is exploration/t'a'r, right? (I recall we were also going to borrow from exploration for commerce as well, right?)

S3rgeus said:
That doesn't seem like too much work, mainly because it's only a Culture player who would want to do all of these (and especially since Sites aren't a finisher), and they're the best players at adopting lots of Policies. It might mean that they could consider focusing Piety instead of Tradition or Liberty, which could be a nice change of pace from BNW.

ok, so just to be clear, it's the Commerce-->exploration/t'a'r path that has hidden sites, right?

Also, I wanted to ask here (it came to me when writing the blurb below) - are we going to make Honor/'Spawn have only bonuses pertaining to combat against shadowspawn? Will it also double as providing bonuses for when you use them? I can see both ways. It might be more "fair" to do it the second way, but the truth is, using them yourself is so late-game, such that it makes more sense as a tenet (which we've already discussed). Also, even if you are shadow, you'll still likely be fighting *against* shadowspawn (since the other shadow players might kill you). So... just vs. Shadowspawn?

OK, so let's recap. Tell me if I have this right:

Tradition (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - [ small number of productive cities through city-wide bonuses
2 - Governor Branch - small number of productive cities through powerful governor bonuses

Liberty (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - large number of cities that are still productive and functional
2 - Exploration Branch - large number of cities that are easier to found and more productive (especially if on coast)

Honor (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - Aggressive military expansion and assistance in dealing with Lawless and Dragonsworn
2 - Shadowspawn Branch - Effective combat versus shadowspawn and in the Blight

Piety (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - Creating a powerful religion with a bonus belief (Reformation) and that helps "pay for itself"
2 - Tel'aran'rhiod Branch - Make the most of your faith and Path (even if you didn't found it), in part through the use of T'a'r.

Power (Classical)
1 - Fear Branch - gain bonuses for a low channeler count (especially males), and protect yourself against Dragonsworn
2 - Acceptance Branch - gain bonuses from a high channeler count (including males)

Aesthetics (Classical)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize culture and tourism output

Patronage (Medieval??)
1 - Tower Branch - Improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the White Tower
2 - Ogier Branch - improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the Ogier

Commerce (Medieval)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize economic power
2 - Exploration Branch - Enhance economic power and culture output, in part through expansion, exploration, and T'a'r

Rationalism (Renaissance)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize science output and benefits from that output.

thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Yes, let's name the Trees and Branches next. However, let's do that once the last few quote blocks above have wrapped up - otherwise we'll end up using a mixture of the two naming conventions and it will be very confusing!

Yeah, are we basically ready, then? Any ideas? Will we have a name for the "overall" tree (e.g. Power) anymore, or will it just be a named branch?

Also, we should probably start referring to the eras by their real names....

S3rgeus said:
Once we're done the naming, is the tech tree up next? I'm not sure if there was anything else on our "next topics" post from an eon or two ago? (Back when we were planning to discuss Governors, GPs, Shadar Logoth, then Policies.)

I don't think tech tree is next. You seem pretty consistently excited about skipping these two things, as you tend to forget them:

1 - Paths
2 - Uniques

I think we do those, and THEN hit the tech tree. A case could be made that we could save some individual Path Customs for later (like social policies), but i think we do need to hit it at least in the big picture first. The same is true for the Uniques - we don't need to figure out the stats of actual UUs now, but figuring things out roughly should probably happen before the tech tree.

Ya?

S3rgeus · Oct 29, 2015

counterpoint said:
Awesome! That's like 2/3 the length of the Channeling Dissertation, if I recall correctly!

Seriously, though. Good luck. That's pretty epic. Hopefully you don't disappear completely.

Thanks! I've done it three times before and been successful, though this is only the second time I've gone into it not knowing what I'm going to write!

counterpoint said:
I'm concerned chiefly with the beginning-of-game policies that unlock in the Ancient era. The later policies are obviously not as big of an issue - it's not terribly likely that between the time one opens Patronage-Tower and gets to the unique Tower stuff, one has decided they really want to focus on the Ogier instead. It could happen, but it's not likely to be a big deal.

Consider what we're proposing for Liberty, though. Deciding you're necessarily going navy-focus at the point of your first policy (after what, 20 culture?) is kind of a big deal. What if that first expo spot you wanted gets snatched by somebody, and you end up landlocked or something? Not likely to happen on an archipelago map, but on continents it's potentially more of an issue - it's awful early to commit to that. It makes me think people would always choose the "normal" route. The time between Unlocking and, say, policy 4, is quite a big difference in the early game.

Similarly, consider Piety, as we're now conceiving of it. What if I choose Piety-Piety (instead of Piety-T'a'r) because I'm really hoping for a religion of my own, but one or two policies in, I end up not getting a religion at all. Given the choice, at that point you'd certainly select Policy-T'a'r, if the branch hadn't occurred yet.

See what I mean?

Right, I definitely see what you mean for the Ancient Era Trees. I think this will be mitigated by the kinds of bonuses we give out. Though we classify Liberty as the expansion Tree, a good portion of its bonuses are still quite useful to Tall civs, and I'd say that was definitely purposeful on Firaxis's part to allow players to adapt to changing circumstances like this. We should make a similar effort to be both encouraging of our intended playstyle and to be useful across the board for the early game Trees!

We'll have a lot of different things pulling us every which way when it comes to deciding specific Policies!

counterpoint said:
Sweet, agreed.

To recap:

Ancient: Tradition, Liberty, Honor, Piety
Classical: Power, Aesthetics
Medieval: Patronage, Commerce
Renaissance: Rationalism

Yep, totally agree with this!

counterpoint said:
Is it weird having Patronage/Commerce unlock at the same time, since those are both likely for a diplo-focused player? Like, there wouldn't be much of a progression for them, as they'd likely want both, and wouldn't have them unlock in an order that makes that feel right. This is likely why Patronage was Classical in BNW... ugh. I don't love that.

maybe put it in Classical and let Commerce stand alone in Medieval?

I don't think this is much of a problem - diplo players will have picked one of the earlier Trees to expand into to start with and are unlikely to make their decision between these two based on which unlocks earlier. This was also the arrangement pre-BNW, which gives us a good precedent.

counterpoint said:
right. Considering we were going to beef up some of the Explo policy options anyways, that should be fine.

Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
ok, so Carnage, I'm assuming, will be in Honor, then. And also [comic knowledge extinguished]

Tempting as it is to make a series of increasing obscure comic references guised as Policies, I'm finding that takes longer than I'd expected to make them make sense.

counterpoint said:
great. like that a lot, then!

Cool, T'a'r as the focus of the Piety Branch, hinged off Paths, but not being the founder!

counterpoint said:
definitely agree. It would be rather foolish, and inefficient to invest in a tree simply for the purpose of speeding through policies.... I think the border expansion thing is probably not important enough during the mid-late game (when a non-culture player would ever bother to do a tree like this) to justify its existence. As far as tourism, resistance, that sounds like a cool Tenet. The truth is, such a "defensive" strategy feels sort of un-civ-like - you should play to win, not to block an potential opposing culture victory. A tenet doing that is fine (I've grabbed Volunteer army when I totally didn't plan to, because somebody invaded me), but choosing a whole policy tree because somebody *might* have powerful culture later? You should just grab rationalism and win the darn game.

Culture - single-tree. This is also better, aesthetically (pun semi-intended), because then there are *two* trees that are monobranchial (lol that's a word, it seems... though it has nothing to do with this), instead of rationalism standing alone, feels more consistent, I guess.

...I guess.

Yeah, I think this is fine and the fact that we end up with two Branch-less Trees definitely makes Rationalism less of an odd Tree out!

counterpoint said:
ok, so that means the T'a'r branch on piety is faith/t'ar, while the one on Commerce is exploration/t'a'r, right? (I recall we were also going to borrow from exploration for commerce as well, right?)

ok, so just to be clear, it's the Commerce-->exploration/t'a'r path that has hidden sites, right?

Yes, an exploration/T'a'r Branch on the Commerce Tree sounds good. And yes, it contains the hidden sites Policy. I think we should err toward the maritime gold bonuses (like Explorations + :c5gold:

for Harbors, Seaports, and Lighthouses, and its +4 :c5gold:

for naval trade routes) to maintain the link to Commerce as an overarching theme of the whole Tree.

counterpoint said:
Also, I wanted to ask here (it came to me when writing the blurb below) - are we going to make Honor/'Spawn have only bonuses pertaining to combat against shadowspawn? Will it also double as providing bonuses for when you use them? I can see both ways. It might be more "fair" to do it the second way, but the truth is, using them yourself is so late-game, such that it makes more sense as a tenet (which we've already discussed). Also, even if you are shadow, you'll still likely be fighting *against* shadowspawn (since the other shadow players might kill you). So... just vs. Shadowspawn?

Yeah, I think just vs Shadowspawn, for all the reasons you've said here.

counterpoint said:
OK, so let's recap. Tell me if I have this right:

Tradition (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - [ small number of productive cities through city-wide bonuses
2 - Governor Branch - small number of productive cities through powerful governor bonuses

Liberty (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - large number of cities that are still productive and functional
2 - Exploration Branch - large number of cities that are easier to found and more productive (especially if on coast)

Honor (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - Aggressive military expansion and assistance in dealing with Lawless and Dragonsworn
2 - Shadowspawn Branch - Effective combat versus shadowspawn and in the Blight

Piety (Ancient)
1 - Normal Branch - Creating a powerful religion with a bonus belief (Reformation) and that helps "pay for itself"
2 - Tel'aran'rhiod Branch - Make the most of your faith and Path (even if you didn't found it), in part through the use of T'a'r.

Power (Classical)
1 - Fear Branch - gain bonuses for a low channeler count (especially males), and protect yourself against Dragonsworn
2 - Acceptance Branch - gain bonuses from a high channeler count (including males)

Aesthetics (Classical)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize culture and tourism output

Patronage (Medieval??)
1 - Tower Branch - Improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the White Tower
2 - Ogier Branch - improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the Ogier

Commerce (Medieval)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize economic power
2 - Exploration Branch - Enhance economic power and culture output, in part through expansion, exploration, and T'a'r

Rationalism (Renaissance)
1 - Normal Branch - Maximize science output and benefits from that output.

thoughts?

All looks right to me!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, are we basically ready, then? Any ideas? Will we have a name for the "overall" tree (e.g. Power) anymore, or will it just be a named branch?

Indeed, it seems we're at that time! I think we'll keep overall Tree names (like Power), that seems like a good classification for players to be able to refer to. I'm not sure if we should have Branch names? I could see us presenting them just as two "options" beneath each Tree.

I also assume we're going to rename the existing Trees? Are there sources we could use from the books? Is there some kind of classification of entities from the books that doesn't necessarily correspond to government types that we could use?

Some quick ideas:

Tradition
Autonomy (fits more with the Governor Branch)

Liberty
Expansionist (very direct)

Honor
Justice
Valor

Piety
Devotion
Mysticism

Patronage
Alliances
Diplomacy (very direct)

Commerce
Mercantilism

Rationalism
Scholarship
Objectivity

counterpoint said:
Also, we should probably start referring to the eras by their real names....

I can never remember what order our Eras are in.

I remember After Breaking is Ancient and then it all falls apart - we've both just played enough CiV that the BNW era progression is burned into our brains!

counterpoint said:
I don't think tech tree is next. You seem pretty consistently excited about skipping these two things, as you tend to forget them:

1 - Paths
2 - Uniques

I think we do those, and THEN hit the tech tree. A case could be made that we could save some individual Path Customs for later (like social policies), but i think we do need to hit it at least in the big picture first. The same is true for the Uniques - we don't need to figure out the stats of actual UUs now, but figuring things out roughly should probably happen before the tech tree.

Ya?

I do indeed keep forgetting about Paths! Do we want to do uniques before the tech tree? I would've thought uniques would be the thing we'd do last because they're explicitly "variants within a framework" and the framework is the base game techs, buildings, and units. I can see some value in getting a handle on the kinds of playstyles we want the civs to capture, but we won't be able to go very deep without knowing what most of the techs/buildings/units look like.

That aside, Paths being next sounds good!

counterpoint · Oct 29, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Thanks! I've done it three times before and been successful, though this is only the second time I've gone into it not knowing what I'm going to write!

Write the novelization of the mod of the wheel of time!

S3rgeus said:
Right, I definitely see what you mean for the Ancient Era Trees. I think this will be mitigated by the kinds of bonuses we give out. Though we classify Liberty as the expansion Tree, a good portion of its bonuses are still quite useful to Tall civs, and I'd say that was definitely purposeful on Firaxis's part to allow players to adapt to changing circumstances like this. We should make a similar effort to be both encouraging of our intended playstyle and to be useful across the board for the early game Trees!

We'll have a lot of different things pulling us every which way when it comes to deciding specific Policies!

ok. So, your point is that we should just make all the policies good enough so that it's not so bad if you *do* choose "wrong"?

see below, re: Cake vs Partial.

S3rgeus said:
I don't think this is much of a problem - diplo players will have picked one of the earlier Trees to expand into to start with and are unlikely to make their decision between these two based on which unlocks earlier. This was also the arrangement pre-BNW, which gives us a good precedent.

I still think this is kind of shady, but I think it should be ok. We'd need to make sure the classical era trees are worth doing for a diplo player -I know when I play diplo, patronage is the 2nd tree I open, pretty much every time (now it'd maybe be 3rd).

S3rgeus said:
Yes, an exploration/T'a'r Branch on the Commerce Tree sounds good. And yes, it contains the hidden sites Policy. I think we should err toward the maritime gold bonuses (like Explorations + for Harbors, Seaports, and Lighthouses, and its +4 for naval trade routes) to maintain the link to Commerce as an overarching theme of the whole Tree.

ok, so the other ones would go into Liberty 2.0, or we'd be simply making new ones that are explo-ish for that tree?

Ah landsknechts...

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I think just vs Shadowspawn, for all the reasons you've said here.

kay.

S3rgeus said:
All looks right to me!

well, damn. that's half-way to a summary, then.

S3rgeus said:
Indeed, it seems we're at that time! I think we'll keep overall Tree names (like Power), that seems like a good classification for players to be able to refer to. I'm not sure if we should have Branch names? I could see us presenting them just as two "options" beneath each Tree.

I also assume we're going to rename the existing Trees? Are there sources we could use from the books? Is there some kind of classification of entities from the books that doesn't necessarily correspond to government types that we could use?

1)OK, so this is what makes me dig up Partial vs. Cake, again. Your suggestion that the branches don't need names feels very much like a Partial thing. If they're wholly separate trees - with no common policies (though perhaps common policy *effects*), then to me they absolutely need names, as they won't really be branches at all, but totally independent entities. How does one "choose" otherwise - right and left?

Which leads me to... I'm struck by the fact that I don't believe we ever officially decided on Cake, though it appears as if we are (mostly, though your suggestions in this bit are somewhat confusing that) operating with the assumption that we chose Cake. Did I miss that moment somehow?

The truth is, now that we have our set of branches, to me the Partial path becomes once again quite viable - honestly, even the Power path seems to work pretty appropriately well. So, sorry to do this, but I'm throwing Partial back in the ring, as I think it does solve some of the issues in my previous post (forcing civs into early-choosing, etc.). Consider:

Tradition, Liberty - these trees would absolutely be fine with 1, 2, or even 3 policies before the branch starts. In fact, this solves the aforementioned problem.

Honor - I think this one could handle two or three in common, but as previously mentioned, having the branch occur early in the tree could be useful. Perhaps a policy in common, then a split for a few, and then ending together again could work? Or, it could be similar to the other trees.

Piety - depending on where we go with all the T'a'r stuff, this could clearly have at least two policies in common and work both in flavor and mechanics.

Power - honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, we totally could have one, perhaps even two policies in common between Fear and Acceptance. Consider a policy like "Gain 10 culture every time a male channeler is born" or something like that. Clearly establishes the commonality of the tree, and doesn't impede on either world view. It doesn't have to be male channeler related,but that may be the kind of thing that has the right amount of neutral to make this idea work.

Aesthetics - N/A

Patronage - this one would be easy to have two or even three policies in common - namely, focusing on CSs instead of the other kinds of entities.

Commerce - this one could go a few ways, depending on how deep we want the t'a'r stuff to go. One or two policies in common would be easy. Three is doable but might be too much.

To me, this would be the preferred system, for reasons that have been beaten into oblivion in my previous posts. What's the bad aspect to doing it this way instead of the Cake system?

2) Regarding the effect this has on names:
I think if we go with "Cake," we would benefit from having, primarily, branch names, perhaps in addition to overall names. When you unlock a whole tree, i think you'd want to see that thing be named when you make the selection. Furthermore, I could see the "category" being named as well (e.g. Power - Fear vs Power - Acceptance). I could even see them spun into a phrase (eg "Fear of Power" vs "Acceptance of Power," and such). To me, the branches need names, though.

If we go with Partial, I mostly think the opposite. The trees absolutely need names, since what we'd have is really quite similar, at the start, to the BNW system. As far as naming the branches... I could go either way. I do like the notion of them having names - I think that would be more fun, and would be helpful to the player, as long as the selection of the branch feels intuitive. So, I guess, ideally, we'd also use both here, too.

Certainly for our purposes, we'll be wanting names for the trees and the branches just to ease the rest of the design process!

3)Somewhat off topic: I was thinking about openers and finishers, which relates to this, and how they might work, and this is where I'm at:

"cake" method - perhaps distinct openers, though perhaps with some commonality. Definitely distinct finishers, though perhaps with some commonality.

"Partial" method - shared openers. Definitely distinct finishers, likely with some commonality.

Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Some quick ideas:

Tradition
Autonomy (fits more with the Governor Branch)

Liberty
Expansionist (very direct)

Honor
Justice
Valor

Piety
Devotion
Mysticism

Patronage
Alliances
Diplomacy (very direct)

Commerce
Mercantilism

Rationalism
Scholarship
Objectivity

OK, so obviously I've thrown a wrench in this by bringing up all of that above....

I like some of these, for sure. I will say that they don't all feel like the "same kind of thing," though, in that some of them feel a bit more "clinical" or modern (e.g. Autonomy" while some feel more general - e.g. valor. I'm feeling like going more with the latter. To me, the "ism" approach taken for most of the BNW trees doesn't feel right here (to say nothing of the fact that we don't have isms for some of these things). I'm taking a cue from "Power" and aiming for words like that.

I'll throw out a few suggestions for both the categories and the branches (recycling some of yours, of course!). (some I like pretty well are in italics)

Tradition Category - Law, Ethics, Unity, Balance
Normal Branch - Prosperity, Progress, Abundance, Unity, Welfare
Governor Branch - Leadership, Expertise, Law, Ethics, Unity, Command, Ambition

Liberty Category - Expansion, Breadth, Independence, Ambition, Balance
Normal Branch - Efficiency, Freedom, Prosperity, diversity,
Exploration Branch - Expansion, Breadth, Choice

Honor Category - War, Warfare,
Normal Branch - Justice, Courage
Shadowspawn Branch - Courage, Valor, Heroism

Piety Category - Ethics, Wisdom, Lore, Myth, Truth, Mind
Normal Branch - Folklore, Ritual, Hope, Devotion
Tel'aran'rhiod Branch - Lore, Folklore, Wisdom, Dream

Power Category - Power
Fear Branch - Fear
Acceptance Branch - Acceptance, Tolerance

Aesthetics Category - Affect, Art, Artistry, Creativity, Mastery, Talent

Patronage Category - Diplomacy, Negotiation, Politics
Tower Branch - Diplomacy, Negotiation, Poise, Confidence, Tact
Ogier Branch - Charm, Grace, Friendship,

Commerce Category - Wealth, Prosperity, Fortune,
Normal Branch - Profit, Wealth, Fortune,
Exploration Branch - Opportunity, Possibility, Ambition, Desire, Initiative

Rationalism Category - Theory, Genius, Scholarship, Wisdom, Insight

Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
I can never remember what order our Eras are in. I remember After Breaking is Ancient and then it all falls apart - we've both just played enough CiV that the BNW era progression is burned into our brains!

Era After Breaking (Ancient) - 500 Years
Era of Nations (Classical) - 500 Years
Era of Freedom (Medieval) - 500 Years
Era of Consolidation (Renaissance) - 500 Years
Era of New Beginnings (Industrial) - 500 Years
Era of Stability (Modern) - 300 Years
Era of Encroaching Blight (Atomic) - 170 Years
Era of the Dragon (Information) - 30 Years
Era of Prophesy (Beyond) - 20 Years

yay summaries!

S3rgeus said:
I do indeed keep forgetting about Paths! Do we want to do uniques before the tech tree? I would've thought uniques would be the thing we'd do last because they're explicitly "variants within a framework" and the framework is the base game techs, buildings, and units. I can see some value in getting a handle on the kinds of playstyles we want the civs to capture, but we won't be able to go very deep without knowing what most of the techs/buildings/units look like.

That aside, Paths being next sounds good!

Sure, Paths next.

EDIT: Given your obligations, I'll obviously do both the Policy Summary and the Paths Framing Post. /EDIT

As far as uniques... I suppose I could see either way. If we do do uniques first, it would probably be a rough map, something like 1) UAs, 2) general options for UUs and UBs, especially in terms of flavor and possible eras (example: Illian will have Companions, whch will be a mid-game horse unit with bonus damage, Seanchan will have Seeker's Lodge, a courthouse replacement, which blah blah blah).

That said, I can see why it might be simpler to start with the tech tree.I guess, the main question: is there any way in which we might benefit from exploring the UUs first? Would it shape our tech tree at all? If not, then, yes, we should definitely do the tech tree, at least roughly, first.

I suppose the reason I've been thinking about doing the tech tree later in the process is because I equate that to doing some really nitty gritty, detailed design - figuring out how much damage a Blademaster does, deciding on the alignment buildings we invent, etc. If you think that the tech tree we'd design at this point is still a step removed from that (so, we're saying "archer upgrade here," and maybe naming it, etc.), then I think that's probably fine. Getting into all the units and stuff at this time... I don't know if we want to throw that in yet, right?

thoughts? In any case, Paths are probably safe to do next - though there will be some postulating about UUs we may need to do/accommodate while we're doing them (e.g., if we think we might have a faith-related Whitecloak UU, for example). Those things should be the minority enough that it's probably safe to do Paths next.

S3rgeus · Oct 31, 2015

counterpoint said:
Write the novelization of the mod of the wheel of time!

It all begins tomorrow!

I've actually got the start of an idea now, which is good!

counterpoint said:
ok. So, your point is that we should just make all the policies good enough so that it's not so bad if you *do* choose "wrong"?

see below, re: Cake vs Partial.

Yeah, exactly, the off-objective Policies should still be useful in a general way, but not necessarily geared towards exactly what you're trying to do if you ended up changing strategy.

counterpoint said:
I still think this is kind of shady, but I think it should be ok. We'd need to make sure the classical era trees are worth doing for a diplo player -I know when I play diplo, patronage is the 2nd tree I open, pretty much every time (now it'd maybe be 3rd).

Sounds fine. Would you usually unlock a second Tree before then? I usually finish either Tradition or Liberty first, which wouldn't usually happen until the Medieval era.

counterpoint said:
ok, so the other ones would go into Liberty 2.0, or we'd be simply making new ones that are explo-ish for that tree?

Yep, that's the idea!

counterpoint said:
Ah landsknechts...

That always struck me as an astoundingly bizarre Policy. Especially since Landsknechts were the German UU pre-BNW.

counterpoint said:
well, damn. that's half-way to a summary, then.

Awesome!

counterpoint said:
1)OK, so this is what makes me dig up Partial vs. Cake, again. Your suggestion that the branches don't need names feels very much like a Partial thing. If they're wholly separate trees - with no common policies (though perhaps common policy *effects*), then to me they absolutely need names, as they won't really be branches at all, but totally independent entities. How does one "choose" otherwise - right and left?

Which leads me to... I'm struck by the fact that I don't believe we ever officially decided on Cake, though it appears as if we are (mostly, though your suggestions in this bit are somewhat confusing that) operating with the assumption that we chose Cake. Did I miss that moment somehow?

The truth is, now that we have our set of branches, to me the Partial path becomes once again quite viable - honestly, even the Power path seems to work pretty appropriately well. So, sorry to do this, but I'm throwing Partial back in the ring, as I think it does solve some of the issues in my previous post (forcing civs into early-choosing, etc.). Consider:

Tradition, Liberty - these trees would absolutely be fine with 1, 2, or even 3 policies before the branch starts. In fact, this solves the aforementioned problem.

Honor - I think this one could handle two or three in common, but as previously mentioned, having the branch occur early in the tree could be useful. Perhaps a policy in common, then a split for a few, and then ending together again could work? Or, it could be similar to the other trees.

Piety - depending on where we go with all the T'a'r stuff, this could clearly have at least two policies in common and work both in flavor and mechanics.

Power - honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, we totally could have one, perhaps even two policies in common between Fear and Acceptance. Consider a policy like "Gain 10 culture every time a male channeler is born" or something like that. Clearly establishes the commonality of the tree, and doesn't impede on either world view. It doesn't have to be male channeler related,but that may be the kind of thing that has the right amount of neutral to make this idea work.

Aesthetics - N/A

Patronage - this one would be easy to have two or even three policies in common - namely, focusing on CSs instead of the other kinds of entities.

Commerce - this one could go a few ways, depending on how deep we want the t'a'r stuff to go. One or two policies in common would be easy. Three is doable but might be too much.

To me, this would be the preferred system, for reasons that have been beaten into oblivion in my previous posts. What's the bad aspect to doing it this way instead of the Cake system?

You don't need to apologize for bringing back a discussion if you think it still has value.

I've been thinking about this as well when we were discussing the difficulty with early choices in the Ancient era, particularly Tradition and Liberty.

You make a lot of good points here and address all of the Tree/Branch combos that we've decided on, so I'm good with going with Partial. A component of that, which you've touched on here, is a variable number of Policies at the start of each Tree, which I think adds a lot. If we only need a minimum of one common Policy, then that can make the Power Tree work, as you've pointed out.

counterpoint said:
2) Regarding the effect this has on names:
I think if we go with "Cake," we would benefit from having, primarily, branch names, perhaps in addition to overall names. When you unlock a whole tree, i think you'd want to see that thing be named when you make the selection. Furthermore, I could see the "category" being named as well (e.g. Power - Fear vs Power - Acceptance). I could even see them spun into a phrase (eg "Fear of Power" vs "Acceptance of Power," and such). To me, the branches need names, though.

If we go with Partial, I mostly think the opposite. The trees absolutely need names, since what we'd have is really quite similar, at the start, to the BNW system. As far as naming the branches... I could go either way. I do like the notion of them having names - I think that would be more fun, and would be helpful to the player, as long as the selection of the branch feels intuitive. So, I guess, ideally, we'd also use both here, too.

Certainly for our purposes, we'll be wanting names for the trees and the branches just to ease the rest of the design process!

I have a variety of points about how we could represent the Branching in the Cake system without names and it still be easily interpretable for players, but they're all moot at this point since we're going for Partial!

Even for Partial, I still think it will depend on how we present the Trees and Branches to the players whether we'll need names for the Branches, but that's much more of a UI layout/user experience thing, which we can iterate on in-game. And given that you've gone through and made some great names for this below, names for the Branches will at least help us refer to them!

counterpoint said:
3)Somewhat off topic: I was thinking about openers and finishers, which relates to this, and how they might work, and this is where I'm at:

"cake" method - perhaps distinct openers, though perhaps with some commonality. Definitely distinct finishers, though perhaps with some commonality.

"Partial" method - shared openers. Definitely distinct finishers, likely with some commonality.

Thoughts?

Shared openers and distinct finishers sounds like a plan!

counterpoint said:
OK, so obviously I've thrown a wrench in this by bringing up all of that above....

I like some of these, for sure. I will say that they don't all feel like the "same kind of thing," though, in that some of them feel a bit more "clinical" or modern (e.g. Autonomy" while some feel more general - e.g. valor. I'm feeling like going more with the latter. To me, the "ism" approach taken for most of the BNW trees doesn't feel right here (to say nothing of the fact that we don't have isms for some of these things). I'm taking a cue from "Power" and aiming for words like that.

I'll throw out a few suggestions for both the categories and the branches (recycling some of yours, of course!). (some I like pretty well are in italics)

Tradition Category - Law, Ethics, Unity, Balance
Normal Branch - Prosperity, Progress, Abundance, Unity, Welfare
Governor Branch - Leadership, Expertise, Law, Ethics, Unity, Command, Ambition

Liberty Category - Expansion, Breadth, Independence, Ambition, Balance
Normal Branch - Efficiency, Freedom, Prosperity, diversity,
Exploration Branch - Expansion, Breadth, Choice

Honor Category - War, Warfare,
Normal Branch - Justice, Courage
Shadowspawn Branch - Courage, Valor, Heroism

Piety Category - Ethics, Wisdom, Lore, Myth, Truth, Mind
Normal Branch - Folklore, Ritual, Hope, Devotion
Tel'aran'rhiod Branch - Lore, Folklore, Wisdom, Dream

Power Category - Power
Fear Branch - Fear
Acceptance Branch - Acceptance, Tolerance

Aesthetics Category - Affect, Art, Artistry, Creativity, Mastery, Talent

Patronage Category - Diplomacy, Negotiation, Politics
Tower Branch - Diplomacy, Negotiation, Poise, Confidence, Tact
Ogier Branch - Charm, Grace, Friendship,

Commerce Category - Wealth, Prosperity, Fortune,
Normal Branch - Profit, Wealth, Fortune,
Exploration Branch - Opportunity, Possibility, Ambition, Desire, Initiative

Rationalism Category - Theory, Genius, Scholarship, Wisdom, Insight

Thoughts?

My preferences in yellow!

I think the ones I've diverged from your italicized options are for the Piety Tree and Tower Branch of the Patronage Tree. I like Wisdom as a general descriptor for the Tree, but I don't think it works as well when combined with the Branch names we've got. It also overlaps with Wisdom (like Nynaeve), which may have been the point, but lacking a direct relationship I think that may be confusing.

For the Tower Branch, the two italicized options felt a lot more like personal descriptors rather than Policy level ones.

counterpoint said:
Era After Breaking (Ancient) - 500 Years
Era of Nations (Classical) - 500 Years
Era of Freedom (Medieval) - 500 Years
Era of Consolidation (Renaissance) - 500 Years
Era of New Beginnings (Industrial) - 500 Years
Era of Stability (Modern) - 300 Years
Era of Encroaching Blight (Atomic) - 170 Years
Era of the Dragon (Information) - 30 Years
Era of Prophesy (Beyond) - 20 Years

yay summaries!

Indeed, I refer back to the summaries whenever I need some info like this, but the eras are needed so often it's a chore to keep opening it when we both know the BNW ones already!

counterpoint said:
Sure, Paths next.

EDIT: Given your obligations, I'll obviously do both the Policy Summary and the Paths Framing Post. /EDIT

Awesome, and thank you very much!

counterpoint said:
As far as uniques... I suppose I could see either way. If we do do uniques first, it would probably be a rough map, something like 1) UAs, 2) general options for UUs and UBs, especially in terms of flavor and possible eras (example: Illian will have Companions, whch will be a mid-game horse unit with bonus damage, Seanchan will have Seeker's Lodge, a courthouse replacement, which blah blah blah).

That said, I can see why it might be simpler to start with the tech tree.I guess, the main question: is there any way in which we might benefit from exploring the UUs first? Would it shape our tech tree at all? If not, then, yes, we should definitely do the tech tree, at least roughly, first.

I suppose the reason I've been thinking about doing the tech tree later in the process is because I equate that to doing some really nitty gritty, detailed design - figuring out how much damage a Blademaster does, deciding on the alignment buildings we invent, etc. If you think that the tech tree we'd design at this point is still a step removed from that (so, we're saying "archer upgrade here," and maybe naming it, etc.), then I think that's probably fine. Getting into all the units and stuff at this time... I don't know if we want to throw that in yet, right?

thoughts? In any case, Paths are probably safe to do next - though there will be some postulating about UUs we may need to do/accommodate while we're doing them (e.g., if we think we might have a faith-related Whitecloak UU, for example). Those things should be the minority enough that it's probably safe to do Paths next.

I think there will be some value in either tech or uniques first, but I'd be inclined to do the more general tech overview first. Your latter suggestion "archer upgrade here" and things like that would be a good first pass, since it would give us a context to reason about how the uniques for the civs would work.

When we do get to uniques, I imagine the first step will be "what are the civs?"!

counterpoint · Oct 31, 2015

S3rgeus said:
It all begins tomorrow! I've actually got the start of an idea now, which is good!

awesome! Well, good luck!

Looks like we'll be just about ready to transition to a new topic, which tends to slow things down anyways. Hopefully we'll be able to wrap this one up today or tomorrow.

S3rgeus said:
Sounds fine. Would you usually unlock a second Tree before then? I usually finish either Tradition or Liberty first, which wouldn't usually happen until the Medieval era.

hmmm... now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure I would always be onto number 2 before Medieval. I usually do try to finish Trad/Lib, but sometimes it is worth grabbing an opener in the interim.

S3rgeus said:
That always struck me as an astoundingly bizarre Policy. Especially since Landsknechts were the German UU pre-BNW.

Hmm... I don't think I've built a single 'necht...

In related news, I just noticed that "build every unit" achievement, and now I'm bummed, because I'm certain I've played as some civs and skipped right by their UUs while attempting to turtle.... too bad I have no idea which UUs I skipped.

S3rgeus said:
You don't need to apologize for bringing back a discussion if you think it still has value.

I've been thinking about this as well when we were discussing the difficulty with early choices in the Ancient era, particularly Tradition and Liberty.

You make a lot of good points here and address all of the Tree/Branch combos that we've decided on, so I'm good with going with Partial. A component of that, which you've touched on here, is a variable number of Policies at the start of each Tree, which I think adds a lot. If we only need a minimum of one common Policy, then that can make the Power Tree work, as you've pointed out.

well, darn, that was easy then! I guess it was really clarifying to come up with the branches, then!

S3rgeus said:
I have a variety of points about how we could represent the Branching in the Cake system without names and it still be easily interpretable for players, but they're all moot at this point since we're going for Partial!

Even for Partial, I still think it will depend on how we present the Trees and Branches to the players whether we'll need names for the Branches, but that's much more of a UI layout/user experience thing, which we can iterate on in-game. And given that you've gone through and made some great names for this below, names for the Branches will at least help us refer to them!

Right. At the very least, it'll be useful for us during the design process. I think it's more fun to show the names, but as you say, that's a UI/visual thing - it's possible that would look totally terrible. TBD later!

S3rgeus said:
Shared openers and distinct finishers sounds like a plan!

do you like the idea of the ifnishers being somewhat related, though? E.g., Honor-regular gives you GC-buy-with-faith and Gold-killed for each enemy unit, while Honor-shadow gives you GC-buy-with-faith and +Science for every shadowspawn killed (an example, not a proposal)?

S3rgeus said:
My preferences in yellow!

I think the ones I've diverged from your italicized options are for the Piety Tree and Tower Branch of the Patronage Tree. I like Wisdom as a general descriptor for the Tree, but I don't think it works as well when combined with the Branch names we've got. It also overlaps with Wisdom (like Nynaeve), which may have been the point, but lacking a direct relationship I think that may be confusing.

For the Tower Branch, the two italicized options felt a lot more like personal descriptors rather than Policy level ones.

OK, looking through them, I'm thinking that it's somewhat important that the branch-names feel somewhat like "two sides of the same coin," not necessarily in opposition, but certainly on the same "scale" in a sense. Ideally, The two branches are a "part" of the larger whole. I think many of these work well for that. There's a few I don't like. So:

"Tradition" - Unity - fine by me
Normal - Abundance
Governor - Leadership

I like Unity and I like Leadership. To me, Abundance sticks out a little bit here. I don't feel like it is necessarily a "component" of Unity. Also, it feels very close to Prosperity in "Liberty". How about, as alternatives, either Support or Loyalty or Duty or Trust?

"Liberty" - Ambition
Normal - Prosperity
Exploration - Expansion

I think these ones are fine!

"Honor" - War
Normal - Justice
Shadowspawn - Valor

Pretty good. I kind of like Courage for Shadowspawn, though. Either is fine.

"Piety" - Lore
Normal - Devotion
Tel'aran'rhiod - Dream

This one feels a little iffy to me. A few issues: Lore is somewhat reminiscent of "Westlands Lore", which is one of our Paths. Not terrible, but since this is Path-related, it's kind of iffy. We could change WL to something else, but that one wasn't eas to come up with.
Also, "Devotion" and "Dream" don't seem to be on the same plane, really. I don't like that. I think, in order to make something mesh well with Dream, we'd have to change Devotion to something else... but I like Devotion plenty.

So, assuming we keep Lore as it is (you're totally right about Wisdom, btw.... ), I think Folklore could work, though that's also a sort of different plane and is obviously close to "Lore...". Ones that might work in better connection to "Devotion" could be: "Imagination," which is probably too long, "Hope," sort of, "Will," sort of, "Whim," sort of, and "Intention." I dunno.

There's also changing "Lore to something else" - then we could actually use Lore or Folklore for the T'a'r branch. Some alternatives that might work well for the Tree, while fitting well with Devotion and Lore, potentially, could be: Truth, Conviction, or Doctrine, This solution may be the superior one.

Power
Fear
Acceptance

done! Dead horse no longer needs to be beaten!

"Aesthetics" - Creativity

fine by me.

"Patronage" - Politics
Tower - Diplomacy
Ogier - Friendship

I like these, and think they actually are a good example of "these two things are two aspects of the larger whole".

"Commerce" - Wealth
Normal - Fortune
Exploration - Opportunity

Great!

"Rationalism" - Scholarship

This one's ok. Feels a little blah in comparison with those above. Maybe something like "Learning" fits the universe a bit better?

OK, so let's get those names settled, and I'll put together a summary (while you start your novella!)

S3rgeus said:
I think there will be some value in either tech or uniques first, but I'd be inclined to do the more general tech overview first. Your latter suggestion "archer upgrade here" and things like that would be a good first pass, since it would give us a context to reason about how the uniques for the civs would work.

When we do get to uniques, I imagine the first step will be "what are the civs?"!

Yeah, I think we can do a general tech/era overview first. Probably would be helpful, and might prevent us from stumbling when doing the Civs.

As far as the uniques and civs and such... yeah, I actually have a pretty big "framing" thing that I started several months ago (during a lull in posting for whatever reason) that I'll probably just drop. it's a frame, but also some initial thoughts - essentially I went Flavor Mining for the civs and came up with thoughts as to whether they should be in the mod, and if so, how. Unless you're opposed, I'd like to start that discussion, though unfortunately it'll be through somewhat epic means again - though nothing close to the channeling stuff, just not as bare-bones and "neutral" as the rest of the Frames - I guess it's kind of like I'd be Framing it and "go first" also...

counterpoint · Nov 1, 2015

Created 11/1/15, last edited 1/10/17

As always, unresolved issues are indicated in red.

Social Policies and Ideologies Summary

Introduction

The name of Social Polices in general will not be changed. Each individual item will still be called a Policy.
The general mechanics of the acquisition of and cost of Social Policies will remain the same as in BNW.
Ideologies have been re-branded as Philosophies.
Individual Philosophical items are still called Tenets.

Social Policies - Structure

The total number of Policy Trees from BNW has been preserved.
Most trees (all but two) include two distinct Branches. After opening the tree and progressing through its first one, two, or three policies, the player will choose between two paths through the Tree. Two Branches within the same Tree are flavorfully and mechanically related.
Branches within a single Tree are mutually-exclusive - choosing a Branch locks the policies in the opposing Branch.
A civ can at any time elect to switch branches, though this causes a short period of anarchy, as well as the loss of any policies (and spent culture) on th current branch.
Each Branch will lead to a distinct "Finisher", though the Finishers of the two Branches from one Tree may be related.
All Faith purchase of each Legendary Person (including those new to the mod) will be able to be unlocked via Tree Finishers.
Players will be able to evaluate the Policies from each Branch before choosing which Branch to follow..
Alignment does not receive its own Tree or Branch. Rather, Alignment-related Policies will be spread throughout the other Trees.
Most BNW Policies will be represented. BNW Trees generally held to be under-powered (e.g. Honor, Piety, Commerce) will be augmented appropriately in their WotMod incarnations. The Policies of Exploration have been redistributed throughout other Trees.

Social Policies - Trees and Policies

Specific Policies and pathways/requirements from Policy to Policy (including Branching points) are still to be determined.
Unity Tree (based in part on Tradition from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era After Breaking (Ancient)
- Kinship Branch - small number of productive cities through city-wide bonuses
- Leadership Branch - small number of productive cities through powerful governor bonuses
- Policies: to be determined.
Ambition Tree (based in part on Liberty from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era After Breaking (Ancient)
- Prosperity Branch - leveraging luxuries to create a large number of cities that are still productive and functional
- Tenacity Branch - using bonus resources and other traits to create a large number of cities in less-than-viable locations
- Policies: to be determined.
War Tree (based in part on Honor from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era After Breaking (Ancient)
- Might Branch - Aggressive military expansion and assistance in dealing with humans, especially Lawless and Dragonsworn
- Valor Branch - Effective combat versus shadowspawn and in the Blight
- Policies: to be determined.
Myth Tree (based in part on Piety from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era After Breaking (Ancient)
- Folklore Branch - Using Faith to create a powerful Path with a bonus belief (Renewal)
- Morality Branch - Using Faith to improve use of Alignment mechanics.
- Policies: to be determined.
Power Tree
- Unlocks in Era of Nations (Classical)
- Acceptance Branch - gain bonuses for using channelers and from a high channeler count (including males)
- Fear Branch - gain bonuses for a low channeler count (especially males)
- Policies: to be determined
Creativity Tree (based in part on Aesthetics from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era of Nations (Classical)
- Legacy - maximize Culture and Prestige output
- Inspiration - boost Culture and leverage it to improve other yields
- Policies: to be determined
Politics Tree (based in part on Patronage from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era of Freedom (Medieval)
- Respect Branch - Improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the White Tower
- Friendship Branch - improve relations with and benefit from City-States and the Ogier
- Policies: to be determined
Wealth Tree (based in part on Commerce and Exploration)
- Unlocks in Era of Freedom (Medieval)
- Fortune Branch - Maximize economic power on land (based in part on Commerce from BNW)
- Enterprise Branch - Enhance economic and military power in the sea (based in part on Exploration from BNW)
- Policies: to be determined
Scholarship Tree (based in part on Rationalism from BNW)
- Unlocks in Era of Consolidation (Renaissance)
- Ingenuity - boosting conventional Science output and benefits from that output
- Knowledge - boosting Science through channeling and channeling through Science
- Policies: to be determined
Ethics Tree
- Unlocks in Era of Consolidation (Renaissance)
- Integrity - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
- Pride - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it
- Policies: to be determined.

Philosophies - General

Philosophies represent a society's attitude towards and degree of regulation of channeling and channelers.
Liberation represents civilizations that allow channelers to be generally unrestricted (e.g. the Aiel or the Atha'an Miere). In some cases, channelers may face some restrictions, but have achieved a controlling influence in society (e.g. Shara).
- Civilizations who select Liberation receive bonuses to Spark and penalties to False Dragon Spawning Rate (meaning they get more of them). Their relations with the White Tower are unaffected.
Authority represents civilizations who defer to an outside power on matters of channeling: the White Tower. These societies tend to show respect towards this authority, whether they have a positive and open regard for channelers (e.g. Andor, Sheinar), or a fearful attitude (e.g. Tear).
- Civilizations who select Authority receive a positive modifier to any White Tower Influence they gain. False Dragon spawn rate and Spark are unchanged.
Oppression represents civilizations who strictly regulate, persecute (e.g. Amadicia), or enslave (e.g. Seanchan) their channelers. They do not accept outside authority on channeling, nor do they respect the autonomy of foreign channelers.
- Civilizations who select Oppression receive bonuses to False Dragon spawn rate (meaning they spawn less often), +1 Happiness per domestic Male Channeler they Execute, and a 60% chance to successfully Execute a domestic MC. They recieve penalties to Spark and White Tower Influence decays as quadruple rate and rests at -20.
Each Philosophy will have a fourth Tier 3 Tenet that will aid in a Last Battle Victory
Liberation will be aligned towards the following Victory Conditions (and will consequently have one Tier 3 Tenet for each): Culture, Last Battle, Diplomacy, Domination
Authority will be aligned towards the following Victory Conditions (and will consequently have one Tier 3 Tenet for each): Culture, Last Battle, Diplomacy, Science.
Oppression will be aligned towards the following Victory Conditions (and will consequently have one Tier 3 Tenet for each): Culture, Last Battle, Domination, Science
Diplomatic and Tourismmodifiers between the various Philosophies will be the same as they are in BNW.
Philosophies will become unlocked at a similar point as they are in BNW: when a civilization builds 3 <factory equivalents> or when the World Era reaches the Era of Stability (Modern), whichever comes first.
Early-Adopter bonuses will remain as they are in BNW (2 Tenets for first adoption)

Philosophies - Tenets

The Victory Conditions aligned to each Philosophy suggests direct correlations to those of BNW: Liberation=Autocracy, Authority=Freedom, and Oppression=Order. However, the Tenets contained within the WotMod Philosophies will not necessarily correspond to those of the analogous BNW Ideologies.
Since Philosophies have been made represent something specific and focuses (channeling), efforts will be made to minimize the number of Tenets that prescribe Tall or Wide play.
Some potential Tier 3 Tenets associated with the Last Battle Victory are:
- A Tenet related to the discovery or destruction of Seals
- A Tenet related to increasing the bonuses (or decreasing the penalties) associated with a civ's Alignment during the Last Battle.
- Something concerning the Dragon - perhaps extra power against him and when using him (so it works for both sides)
- A Tenet related to providing some sort of bonuses when in proximity to Shadowspawn or the Dragon (should these be separate Tenets?)
[*]Liberation - Level 1
- to be determined
[*]Liberation - Level 2
- to be determined
[*]Liberation - Level 3
- to be determined
[*]Authority - Level 1
- to be determined
[*]Authority - Level 2
- to be determined
[*]Authority - Level 3
- to be determined
[*]Oppression - Level 1
- to be determined
[*]Oppression - Level 2
- to be determined
[*]Oppression - Level 3
- to be determined

S3rgeus · Nov 1, 2015

counterpoint said:
awesome! Well, good luck!

Looks like we'll be just about ready to transition to a new topic, which tends to slow things down anyways. Hopefully we'll be able to wrap this one up today or tomorrow.

Thanks, I'm off to a good start with 2200+ words for today! (1667 words per day reaches the 50,000 by the end of the month.)

counterpoint said:
hmmm... now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure I would always be onto number 2 before Medieval. I usually do try to finish Trad/Lib, but sometimes it is worth grabbing an opener in the interim.

It'll be fun to see what strategies emerge when we can actually play the mod! I'm sure with all of our changes that a lot of the BNW strategies won't work as expected.

counterpoint said:
Hmm... I don't think I've built a single 'necht...

In related news, I just noticed that "build every unit" achievement, and now I'm bummed, because I'm certain I've played as some civs and skipped right by their UUs while attempting to turtle.... too bad I have no idea which UUs I skipped.

Good thing the game can tell you which units you've missed!

The text file ends up in your logs directory.

counterpoint said:
well, darn, that was easy then! I guess it was really clarifying to come up with the branches, then!

Definitely, it was very worth doing that now!

counterpoint said:
do you like the idea of the ifnishers being somewhat related, though? E.g., Honor-regular gives you GC-buy-with-faith and Gold-killed for each enemy unit, while Honor-shadow gives you GC-buy-with-faith and +Science for every shadowspawn killed (an example, not a proposal)?

Ah, I see, a mechanical relationship as well? I think that's something we'd be better off deciding when we go through and make the Policies and see what kinds of bonuses lend themselves to each side. Some of them may not go together well, which may push us one way or the other, much like Branch naming has led us back to Partial!

counterpoint said:
OK, looking through them, I'm thinking that it's somewhat important that the branch-names feel somewhat like "two sides of the same coin," not necessarily in opposition, but certainly on the same "scale" in a sense. Ideally, The two branches are a "part" of the larger whole. I think many of these work well for that. There's a few I don't like. So:

"Tradition" - Unity - fine by me
Normal - Abundance
Governor - Leadership

I like Unity and I like Leadership. To me, Abundance sticks out a little bit here. I don't feel like it is necessarily a "component" of Unity. Also, it feels very close to Prosperity in "Liberty". How about, as alternatives, either Support or Loyalty or Duty or Trust?

Totally on board with Loyalty, Abundance was my least favorite of my choices in this section! As you've said here, Loyalty feels a lot more like part of the larger Unity whole.

counterpoint said:
"Liberty" - Ambition
Normal - Prosperity
Exploration - Expansion

I think these ones are fine!

Done!

counterpoint said:
"Honor" - War
Normal - Justice
Shadowspawn - Valor

Pretty good. I kind of like Courage for Shadowspawn, though. Either is fine.

I think I prefer Valor, let's go with that!

counterpoint said:
"Piety" - Lore
Normal - Devotion
Tel'aran'rhiod - Dream

This one feels a little iffy to me. A few issues: Lore is somewhat reminiscent of "Westlands Lore", which is one of our Paths. Not terrible, but since this is Path-related, it's kind of iffy. We could change WL to something else, but that one wasn't eas to come up with.
Also, "Devotion" and "Dream" don't seem to be on the same plane, really. I don't like that. I think, in order to make something mesh well with Dream, we'd have to change Devotion to something else... but I like Devotion plenty.

So, assuming we keep Lore as it is (you're totally right about Wisdom, btw.... ), I think Folklore could work, though that's also a sort of different plane and is obviously close to "Lore...". Ones that might work in better connection to "Devotion" could be: "Imagination," which is probably too long, "Hope," sort of, "Will," sort of, "Whim," sort of, and "Intention." I dunno.

There's also changing "Lore to something else" - then we could actually use Lore or Folklore for the T'a'r branch. Some alternatives that might work well for the Tree, while fitting well with Devotion and Lore, potentially, could be: Truth, Conviction, or Doctrine, This solution may be the superior one.

I'd say of the three here, Dream is my favorite of the names actually, which kind of scuppers the plan to use (Folk)Lore in its place.

What about Myth as the name of the Tree? Dream fits a lot better with that, given the rarity of Dreamers in various times throughout the WoT history. Then Folklore could fit into the other Branch - the lore of the people feeding into the myths of the past and future?

counterpoint said:
Power
Fear
Acceptance

done! Dead horse no longer needs to be beaten!

W00t, it's part of a summary at last!

counterpoint said:
"Aesthetics" - Creativity

fine by me.

Done!

counterpoint said:
"Patronage" - Politics
Tower - Diplomacy
Ogier - Friendship

I like these, and think they actually are a good example of "these two things are two aspects of the larger whole".

Awesome, agreed!

counterpoint said:
"Commerce" - Wealth
Normal - Fortune
Exploration - Opportunity

Great!

Done!

counterpoint said:
"Rationalism" - Scholarship

This one's ok. Feels a little blah in comparison with those above. Maybe something like "Learning" fits the universe a bit better?

I was also tempted by Theory from your first list, does that fit better? Learning feels a bit simple, like it describes a concept that's more about schooling rather than discovery/history.

counterpoint said:
OK, so let's get those names settled, and I'll put together a summary (while you start your novella!)

Novellas are usually up to 40,000 words, so I'm planning on heading straight into full-scale novel territory!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think we can do a general tech/era overview first. Probably would be helpful, and might prevent us from stumbling when doing the Civs.

Cool, sounds like a good post-Paths plan!

counterpoint said:
As far as the uniques and civs and such... yeah, I actually have a pretty big "framing" thing that I started several months ago (during a lull in posting for whatever reason) that I'll probably just drop. it's a frame, but also some initial thoughts - essentially I went Flavor Mining for the civs and came up with thoughts as to whether they should be in the mod, and if so, how. Unless you're opposed, I'd like to start that discussion, though unfortunately it'll be through somewhat epic means again - though nothing close to the channeling stuff, just not as bare-bones and "neutral" as the rest of the Frames - I guess it's kind of like I'd be Framing it and "go first" also...

Interesting stuff, I've got some ideas about civs that I've been mulling over for a few actual years now! It's mostly what you see in this topic and the contents of the civs I put in the mod way back when. Having been around so long, I'm definitely open to changing any and all pieces of that content where it makes sense! So yep, I'm fine with you framing this one when we get started with it. I'm sure we'll have a spirited debate!

counterpoint said:
Social Policies and Ideologies Summary

Awesome, thanks for creating this summary! All's looking good and I see basically all of the red is either something we need to decide later or are currently discussing above.

I just wanted to call out two quick things:

counterpoint said:
Branches within a single Tree are mutually-exclusive - choosing a Branch locks the policies in the opposing Branch. This decision is irreversible.

We decided on irreversible for the non-Policy Fear/Acceptance decision (which no longer exists), but did we decide to keep that for the Branches? I vaguely recall something about the ability to switch being a pure addition, so there's no lost work by making it permanent at least to start with.

counterpoint said:
Players will be able to evaluate the Policies from each Branch before choosing which Branch to follow, provided that this is practical in the user interface.

I don't think we need the red here, players will definitely need that information in order to be able to make a decision. How we present it is definitely up for grabs, but I don't think we could keep the players in the dark on the Policy specifics until after they've committed to a Branch. (Otherwise the best approach is something like: Save -> pick branch, explore Policies -> reload save -> pick other Branch, etc. Not great!)

All else is great, thanks again!

counterpoint · Nov 1, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Thanks, I'm off to a good start with 2200+ words for today! (1667 words per day reaches the 50,000 by the end of the month.)

Wow! Ahead of schedule!

S3rgeus said:
Good thing the game can tell you which units you've missed! The text file ends up in your logs directory.

wow!

S3rgeus said:
Ah, I see, a mechanical relationship as well? I think that's something we'd be better off deciding when we go through and make the Policies and see what kinds of bonuses lend themselves to each side. Some of them may not go together well, which may push us one way or the other, much like Branch naming has led us back to Partial!

ok, to be determined. clarified in the summary.

S3rgeus said:
Totally on board with Loyalty, Abundance was my least favorite of my choices in this section! As you've said here, Loyalty feels a lot more like part of the larger Unity whole.

agreed!

S3rgeus said:
I think I prefer Valor, let's go with that!

sure.

S3rgeus said:
I'd say of the three here, Dream is my favorite of the names actually, which kind of scuppers the plan to use (Folk)Lore in its place.

What about Myth as the name of the Tree? Dream fits a lot better with that, given the rarity of Dreamers in various times throughout the WoT history. Then Folklore could fit into the other Branch - the lore of the people feeding into the myths of the past and future?

OK, so:

Myth Tree
Folklore Branch (piety stuff)
Dream(s) Branch (t'a'r stuff).

Do you prefer Dream or Dreams? I think I prefer the "s" on the end.

Actually, the whole "folklore" thing kind of emphasizes that these things aren't religion, right? But on the other hand, Folklore sort of seems like a good name for a specific Policy. Broad enough? You like? If we go with Lore instead, we should probably rename Westlands Lore.

S3rgeus said:
W00t, it's part of a summary at last!

amazing how long that little nugget has been hibernating.

S3rgeus said:
I was also tempted by Theory from your first list, does that fit better? Learning feels a bit simple, like it describes a concept that's more about schooling rather than discovery/history.

hmmm... maybe. Theory is a little clinical. Also it's part of speech, while correct, *feels* weird. Think of "THEORY" sitting there next to "CREATIVITY" and "WEALTH." A little odd, right?

I'd prefer learning, but that is sort of underwhelming. BAH, any other suggestions?

I think I prefer Scholarship to Theory, maybe. The probably with scholarship is it is so close to "Scholars"... Bah!

S3rgeus said:
Interesting stuff, I've got some ideas about civs that I've been mulling over for a few actual years now! It's mostly what you see in this topic and the contents of the civs I put in the mod way back when. Having been around so long, I'm definitely open to changing any and all pieces of that content where it makes sense! So yep, I'm fine with you framing this one when we get started with it. I'm sure we'll have a spirited debate!

awesome!

S3rgeus said:
We decided on irreversible for the non-Policy Fear/Acceptance decision (which no longer exists), but did we decide to keep that for the Branches? I vaguely recall something about the ability to switch being a pure addition, so there's no lost work by making it permanent at least to start with.

ok, so how to reverse it... Keep in mind that this would include allowing Fear/Acc swapping - I'd see no reason to disallow such things.

I guess we could simply allow the swapping of to the other Branch penalty-free right? But, you'd lose all your spent Culture, right? Not like you'd receive any of it back. I don't see a big problem with allowing that - in case somebody wants to jump ship after one policy or something.

I'd say once you finish the tree, it's too late, though. What say you?

By the way, the reason the blurbs under "Philosophies - General" are still red (the ones about Spark and such) is because I wasn't sure we'd committed to them, yet. The only reason I'm somewhat hesitant is because, for instance, Oppression only gets a bonus to FD stuff, and a few penalties, while the others receive more.

Can we figure out a way to make this somehow more fair? Where each one gets one thing they're good at, one they're average at, and one their bad at? Suggestions?

Or, alternatively, are we just weighing the penalties/bonuses such that it doesn't matter if somebody gets "more" (e.g. them getting a HUGE bonus to FD rate)

Also, under "Philosophies - Tenets" there's that bit at the end about the tenets regarding the shadowspawn and dragon? Should i leave it there for now, or do you have thoughts as to whether that should be split up? I mean, we're only going to be looking for three total tenets anyways... so, save for later?

S3rgeus said:
I don't think we need the red here, players will definitely need that information in order to be able to make a decision. How we present it is definitely up for grabs, but I don't think we could keep the players in the dark on the Policy specifics until after they've committed to a Branch. (Otherwise the best approach is something like: Save -> pick branch, explore Policies -> reload save -> pick other Branch, etc. Not great!)

very much agreed.

S3rgeus said:
All else is great, thanks again!

cool. can you link to it on page one?

counterpoint · Nov 2, 2015

Paths to the Light Framing Post

This post serves as an introduction to the discussion on Paths to the Light.

Terminology

Are we still choosing to call Religions Paths to the Light? The only argument I could see being raised would be due to the use of the word "Light," and the alignment that would seem to imply.

We previously decided to rename Pantheon as Lineage, choosing to characterize it as the cultural history of your people - is this still correct?

We previously discussed renaming Beliefs into Customs. Are we still in favor of this?

Will we still refer to Founder and Follower customs by the same names? What about Enhancer customs (it's surprising that they never gave this a more flavorful name)?

What will we call Reformation customs in the mod (which is a flavorful name for Earth history)? Note that this will connect to what we choose to call the [final?] policy in the Myth/Folklore tree.

Mechanics

Are the general mechanics about Paths, the methods of Faith acquisition, and how Paths spread going to be preserved in the mod?

Is the faith buy cost of units, LPs and buildings going to progress in the same manner as in BNW?

Will the possible number of Paths per game be the same as in BNW?

Is the way pressure works, and how city conversion occurs, the same as in BNW?

Paths
The Paths previously adopted were:

Descendants of the Blood
Ji'e'Toh
Stewards of the Dragon
Vanguard of the Wyld
Watchers Over the Waves
Water Way
Way of the Leaf
Way of the Light
Westlands Lore

Are these still what we'd like?
The only one of these that may pose some issues is "Westlands Lore," which might present some confusing overlap with a "lore-related" name of the Path-focused Policy tree (still under discussion)

Units

The Great Prophet has previously been renamed the Visionary

Will the Missionary and Inquisitor still exist in the same capacity as in BNW?

Will the Missionary's role still be the same - spreading Path 2x?

Will the Inquisitor's role still be the same - eliminating foreign Paths and instilling the player's Path, as well as "blocking" foreign unit-based conversion attempts?

Will Faith units still suffer attrition in the same manner?

What will the mod's version of Missionaries be called? The text suggests some options (there are probably more):

Peddler (obviously not quite related)
Truthspeakers (from the Seanchan)

What will the mod's version of Inquisitors be called? The text suggests some options (there are probably more):

Inquisitor (from the Children)
Child of the Light (from the Children)
Whitecloak (from the Children)
Hand of the Light (from the Children, synonymous with Inquisitor)
Questioner (from the Children, synonymous with Inquisitor)
Seeker for Truth (from Seanchan)
Listener (from Seanchan)

Certainly, terms could be selected from outside of the universe (e.g. regular English) as well.

Of course, the issue with many of the above is that they are tied to specific civs in the universe. Will some of these be best reserved as possible units (even UU faith units, a weird concept, of course) for some certain civs (Seanchan, Amadicia, etc.)? Perhaps synonyms are useful to us here (e.g. Questioner and Hand of the Light, Child and Whitecloak).

Similarly, should any of the above be made available, not as Faith units, but as Faith-buy Military units available to all civs (or available to civs that select a particular custom)?

Lineage

The following list was created as a means of adapting the Pantheons from BNW into Lineage, without changing the mechanics:

Artisans – +2 Faith for each Gems or Pearls resource
Border Settlers – 15% faster border growth
Children of Dragonmount – +4 Faith from Natural Wonders
Craftsmen – +1 Faith for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource
Devoted to Prophecy – +1 Culture from Shrines
Festive Society – Culture and +1 Faith for each Wine and Incense
Fishermen – +1 Production from Fishing Boats
Friends of the Ogier – +15% Production of Wonders from the Era After Breaking and Era of Nations
Hardy Folk – +1 Faith from Tundra tiles without Forest
Herbal Healers – +30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city
Honored Smiths – +1 Production in cities with Population of 3+
Hunter Society – +1 Food from Camps
Keepers of History – Happiness from cities with Population of 6+
Loyal Bannermen – Palace provides +1 Culture, Faith, Gold, Production, and Science
Masters of Harvest – +1 Food for each Bananas, Apples, and Wheat resource
Merchant Elite – +1 Culture and +1 Faith for each Gold and Silver
Mountain Folk – +2 Faith from Quarries
River Traders – +1 Happiness from cities on rivers
Shepherds – +1 Culture from Pastures
Soldier Community – Gain Faith if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city
Stalwart Defenders – +30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength
Thriving Populace – 10% faster Growth rates
Traveling Scholars – +2 Science in cities with a City Connection
Water Seekers – +1 Faith from Desert tiles
Woodland Folk – +1 Culture from Jungle tiles

should any of the above be removed? Should any be renamed?

Would we like to add any more, including any that might tie into the new systems of the mod (Alignment, channeling, etc.)

Items above marked with Orange are done so to indicate that the name should be reaffirmed, as it may (or does) present a current conflict. These should be either fixed, or else affirmed.

Artisans - name currently taken by the Master Artisan LP
Craftsmen - name currently taken by Specialist tied to Master Artisan
Honored Smiths - very similar to the Smith Governor Type
Keepers of History - might be too similar to Historians (our Archaeologists)
Loyal Bannermen - no current conflict, but it is possible that Bannermen may develop as a UU (I'm thinking Cairhien, for the flag-and-colors wearing officers... but these could be called something else)
Merchant Elite - potentially too close to Merchant Lord
Thriving Populace - Might fit with tone/tense of other Lineages if it was called "Thriving Peoples" or something like that

Entries in Red may need to be changed for other reasons.

Copper, Iron, and Salt - Copper in BNW is a lux (hills), as is Salt (desert), while Iron is a strategic. In the mod, Copper's lux role was taken by Alum, and Copper became a Strategic (in the place of Iron). Iron has then replaced Coal. Salt remains the same. Should this Lineage refer to Alum, Copper, and Salt, or Copper, Iron, and Salt?
Camps - Bison (a camp-bonus resource) is being replaced by Zemai, which would eliminate one camp-elligible resource. Is there anything that should be done to compensate?
Bananas, Apples, and Wheat - Should Zemai be added to this? Oranges (which Apples have replaced), are a jungle resource, while Apples (if we're being accurate), should be a cold-or-temperate (forest?) resource - should the Lineage be adjusted? What about Ice Peppers? (presumably a cold-terrain resource)

Relationship to New Systems
As hinted at above, should our Paths system tie into other new mechanics? Such as:

Channeling
Male Channelers
the LB
Alignment
The Tower
The Ogier
Governors
The Horn
Shadowspawn
Dragonsworn
The TW
The High King

If so, how? Via Customs?

The Paths summary has (in red), some ideas for how Paths might connect to some systems (some of these may be not obsolete from later decisions):

Founder Belief ideas
- Friendly Heralds are twice as effective
- Foreign Heralds are half as effective.

Follower Belief ideas
- Governors produce double alignment
- + X alignment points for every city following this path (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- X building produces +Y Alignment (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- allows construction of <Alignment Building> based on direction of your overall alignment, that produces more alignment, plus other things (e.g., Evil Pagoda).

Customs/Beliefs

Will any beliefs from BNW be removed? Will any be added? Will any be rebalanced?

Obviously, most/all will be renamed - what shall we name them?

The beliefs from BNW are copied here, with flavor included, for our reference:

EDIT: Beliefs that have been copied exactly are in blue, those that have been changed are in green, those that have been cut are in red, and those that have not yet been accounted for are in normal font.

Founder Beliefs
Ceremonial Burial +1 Happiness for every 2 Cities following this religion
Church Property +2 Gold for each City following this religion
Initiation Rites +100 Gold when each City first converts to this religion
Interfaith Dialogue Gain Science when a Missionary spreads this religion to cities of other religions
Papal Primacy +15 to Influence resting point with City-States following this religion
Peace Loving +1 Happiness for every 8 followers of this religion in non-enemy foreign cities
Pilgrimage +2 Faith for each foreign City following this religion
Tithe +1 Gold for every 4 followers of this religion
World Church +1 Culture for every 5 followers of this religion in other civilizations

Follower Beliefs
Asceticism Shrines provide +1 Happiness in cities with 3 followers
Cathedrals Use Faith to purchase Cathedrals
Choral Music Temples provide +2 Culture in cities with 5 followers
Divine Inspiration Each World Wonder provides +2 Faith in city
Feed the World Shrines and Temples provide +1 Food each in city
Guruship +2 Production if city has a Specialist
Holy Warriors Use Faith to purchase pre-Industrial land units
Liturgical Drama Amphitheaters provide +1 Faith in cities with 3 followers
Monasteries Use Faith to purchase Monasteries
Mosques Use Faith to purchase Mosques
Pagodas Use Faith to purchase Pagodas
Peace Gardens Gardens provide +2 Happiness in city
Religious Art Hermitage provides +8 Culture in city
BNW-only Hermitage provides +5 Culture and +5 Tourism
Religious Center Temples provide +2 Happiness in cities with 5 followers
Religious Community +1% Production for each follower (Max +15%)
Swords into Plowshares 15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war

Enhancer Beliefs
Defender of the Faith +20% Combat Strength near friendly cities that follow this religion
Holy Order Missionaries and Inquisitors cost 30% less Faith
Itinerant Preachers Religion spreads to cities 30% further away
Just War +20% Combat Strength near enemy cities that follow this religion
Messiah Prophets 25% stronger and earned with 25% less Faith
Missionary Zeal Missionary conversion strength +25%
Religious Texts Religion spreads 25% faster (50% with Printing Press)
Religious Unity Religion spreads to friendly City-States at double rate
Reliquary Gain 50 Faith each time a Great Person is expended

Reformation Beliefs
Charitable Missions Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%
Evangelism Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions
Heathen Conversion Missionaries convert adjacent Barbarian units to this civilization
Jesuit Education May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith
Religious Fervor Use Faith to purchase Industrial (and later) land units
Sacred Sites All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each
To the Glory of God Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era
Underground Sect Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy
Unity of the Prophets Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it)

Note: I'll be leaving town for the weekend starting Wed. night. As before, I have no idea my internet availability - might be able to post, might not.

S3rgeus · Nov 3, 2015

counterpoint said:
OK, so:

Myth Tree
Folklore Branch (piety stuff)
Dream(s) Branch (t'a'r stuff).

Do you prefer Dream or Dreams? I think I prefer the "s" on the end.

Actually, the whole "folklore" thing kind of emphasizes that these things aren't religion, right? But on the other hand, Folklore sort of seems like a good name for a specific Policy. Broad enough? You like? If we go with Lore instead, we should probably rename Westlands Lore.

Dreams with an s sounds good to me!

Yeah, I think differentiating Paths from religion is something we should call out when we can, since most players will be in the BNW religion mindset. Folklore sounds good - let's avoid renaming Westlands Lore for now!

counterpoint said:
hmmm... maybe. Theory is a little clinical. Also it's part of speech, while correct, *feels* weird. Think of "THEORY" sitting there next to "CREATIVITY" and "WEALTH." A little odd, right?

I'd prefer learning, but that is sort of underwhelming. BAH, any other suggestions?

I think I prefer Scholarship to Theory, maybe. The probably with scholarship is it is so close to "Scholars"... Bah!

I think Theory could work with those other names, but I'm fine with Scholarshop as well. The closeness to scholars doesn't have to be a problem since they're both themed towards the same victory, right?

I'm trying to come up with alternatives, but I'm finding that any names that use our "expanded" definition of Science as just Knowledge tends to make the name too Culture-y. (Crosses over with our Historian stuff.)

counterpoint said:
ok, so how to reverse it... Keep in mind that this would include allowing Fear/Acc swapping - I'd see no reason to disallow such things.

I guess we could simply allow the swapping of to the other Branch penalty-free right? But, you'd lose all your spent Culture, right? Not like you'd receive any of it back. I don't see a big problem with allowing that - in case somebody wants to jump ship after one policy or something.

I'd say once you finish the tree, it's too late, though. What say you?

Yeah, giving up the Policies in the Branch they're leaving behind is a good "cost" to switching later on, and should make sense to players. If we have a short period of anarchy, then we can just straight up use the mutually exclusive Policy Tree stuff that was in pre-BNW, which a decent number of players should be familiar with.

I don't think we need to special case players having completed the Branch - if they want to give up a whole Branch for one Policy on the opposing side, then let's let them do that. (Adopting the first Policy on the other side causes the other Branch to be discarded.)

counterpoint said:
By the way, the reason the blurbs under "Philosophies - General" are still red (the ones about Spark and such) is because I wasn't sure we'd committed to them, yet. The only reason I'm somewhat hesitant is because, for instance, Oppression only gets a bonus to FD stuff, and a few penalties, while the others receive more.

Can we figure out a way to make this somehow more fair? Where each one gets one thing they're good at, one they're average at, and one their bad at? Suggestions?

Or, alternatively, are we just weighing the penalties/bonuses such that it doesn't matter if somebody gets "more" (e.g. them getting a HUGE bonus to FD rate)

given the potential to be affected by FDs from neighboring civilizations, a reduced FD rate isn't that powerful of a bonus, so we'd probably need to be very aggressive with the rate change to make it competitive with a Spark bonus (extra channelers is a good bonus).

If we could universally classify a lower MC rate as a bonus, then that would help Oppression a bit, but that's not the case given how some other systems interact with MCs. They are still largely loose cannons though - only people who build into MC bonuses would ever really see them as positives, and those kinds of players seem unlikely to pick Oppression?

Acceptance and Authority feel well balanced against each other from what I can see. What Oppression lacks is a good bonus to accompany its penalties. (We can make its two penalties less severe than Auth/Lib's individual ones, so that that is comparable.) We don't really want to introduce something like a happiness bonus for X MC deaths or anything like that, because the static effects aren't really supposed to serve that kind of role.

It feels like we have three major pillars of the channeling systems: Aes Sedai, non-Tower female channelers, and male channelers. Authority has an Aes Sedai bonus, Liberation has a non-Tower female channeler bonus, so is there any way for us to have an MC-related bonus still be on-flavor for Oppression? Aside from dramatically reduced MC and FD spawn rate, I'm not sure what we can do with that that makes sense with the Oppression flavor.

counterpoint said:
Also, under "Philosophies - Tenets" there's that bit at the end about the tenets regarding the shadowspawn and dragon? Should i leave it there for now, or do you have thoughts as to whether that should be split up? I mean, we're only going to be looking for three total tenets anyways... so, save for later?

I figure that's something we're going to discuss later and so we'll edit the summary to reflect our final decisions once we've made them. That seems like a fine place for them to live until we've come back to do that, since we can't miss them when we're actually working on the summary later!

counterpoint said:
cool. can you link to it on page one?

Done!

And that's all I have time for tonight, I'm afraid! Writing to do!

counterpoint · Nov 5, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Dreams with an s sounds good to me!

done

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I think differentiating Paths from religion is something we should call out when we can, since most players will be in the BNW religion mindset. Folklore sounds good - let's avoid renaming Westlands Lore for now!

done!

S3rgeus said:
I think Theory could work with those other names, but I'm fine with Scholarshop as well. The closeness to scholars doesn't have to be a problem since they're both themed towards the same victory, right?

I'm trying to come up with alternatives, but I'm finding that any names that use our "expanded" definition of Science as just Knowledge tends to make the name too Culture-y. (Crosses over with our Historian stuff.)

let's go with Scholarship!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, giving up the Policies in the Branch they're leaving behind is a good "cost" to switching later on, and should make sense to players. If we have a short period of anarchy, then we can just straight up use the mutually exclusive Policy Tree stuff that was in pre-BNW, which a decent number of players should be familiar with.

I don't think we need to special case players having completed the Branch - if they want to give up a whole Branch for one Policy on the opposing side, then let's let them do that. (Adopting the first Policy on the other side causes the other Branch to be discarded.)

a short period of anarchy is fine, to prevent any weird abuse-loopholes that might exist.
decide how long it is later?

S3rgeus said:
given the potential to be affected by FDs from neighboring civilizations, a reduced FD rate isn't that powerful of a bonus, so we'd probably need to be very aggressive with the rate change to make it competitive with a Spark bonus (extra channelers is a good bonus).

If we could universally classify a lower MC rate as a bonus, then that would help Oppression a bit, but that's not the case given how some other systems interact with MCs. They are still largely loose cannons though - only people who build into MC bonuses would ever really see them as positives, and those kinds of players seem unlikely to pick Oppression?

Acceptance and Authority feel well balanced against each other from what I can see. What Oppression lacks is a good bonus to accompany its penalties. (We can make its two penalties less severe than Auth/Lib's individual ones, so that that is comparable.) We don't really want to introduce something like a happiness bonus for X MC deaths or anything like that, because the static effects aren't really supposed to serve that kind of role.

It feels like we have three major pillars of the channeling systems: Aes Sedai, non-Tower female channelers, and male channelers. Authority has an Aes Sedai bonus, Liberation has a non-Tower female channeler bonus, so is there any way for us to have an MC-related bonus still be on-flavor for Oppression? Aside from dramatically reduced MC and FD spawn rate, I'm not sure what we can do with that that makes sense with the Oppression flavor.

right. this is tricky! I'd actually prefer not to gimp the Oppression *penalties* too much - I feel lke these are kind of central to it "feeling" like Oppression.

Why don't we do, in addition to FD spawn rate (or instead of), some sort of static bonus "against" MCs? This could be a way of idirectly affecting their MC "rate," without denying them the benefits of spawning them they may have acrued via social policies. So, one of (or some combination of):

1) combat bonuses against MCs (helps defend you against foes, obviously)
2) increased gentling chance (perhaps greatly increased, perhaps nearly 100%)
3) increased chance of success when sending MCs to the tower.

The first feels fitting in flavor, but doesn't feel fitting mechanically, in that that is something that may make more sense as a tenet or a social policy under Fear. Still, ths one does make good flavor sense.

the second is somewhat good for both flavor and mechanics, but unfortunately relies on the civ's having channelers at all. According to the Channeling Summary, only Aes Sedai can gentle. Of course, Oppression civs wil be granted *some* Aes Sedai (despite some flavor issues with that), but certanly they will have less of them. but of course, mechanically, ANY civ that doesn't want to have a bunch of MCs running around would *need* to have some sort of gentling force hanging around. So... that needs to be Aes Sedai, right? I guess this one's pretty good, but does have some iffy-ness mechanically and flavor-wise.

the third is mechanically nice, I suppose, but quite awful from a flavor perspective. They shouldn't be dealing with the WT directly, to say the least (which impacts number two above as well).

Whether anyof these is as good as +Spark or +wt influence is debatable - perhaps we need a combination. these are the ideas i have, though!

S3rgeus said:
I figure that's something we're going to discuss later and so we'll edit the summary to reflect our final decisions once we've made them. That seems like a fine place for them to live until we've come back to do that, since we can't miss them when we're actually working on the summary later!

left red!

S3rgeus said:
And that's all I have time for tonight, I'm afraid! Writing to do!

hope it's going well!

S3rgeus · Nov 7, 2015

Dramatic delays and all, but I'm at 16,037 words, so NanoWriMo is going well! Apologies that I haven't been on during the week, it's difficult to do both in an evening!

counterpoint said:
a short period of anarchy is fine, to prevent any weird abuse-loopholes that might exist.
decide how long it is later?

Sounds like a plan, let's come back to that later.

counterpoint said:
right. this is tricky! I'd actually prefer not to gimp the Oppression *penalties* too much - I feel lke these are kind of central to it "feeling" like Oppression.

Why don't we do, in addition to FD spawn rate (or instead of), some sort of static bonus "against" MCs? This could be a way of idirectly affecting their MC "rate," without denying them the benefits of spawning them they may have acrued via social policies. So, one of (or some combination of):

1) combat bonuses against MCs (helps defend you against foes, obviously)
2) increased gentling chance (perhaps greatly increased, perhaps nearly 100%)
3) increased chance of success when sending MCs to the tower.

The first feels fitting in flavor, but doesn't feel fitting mechanically, in that that is something that may make more sense as a tenet or a social policy under Fear. Still, ths one does make good flavor sense.

the second is somewhat good for both flavor and mechanics, but unfortunately relies on the civ's having channelers at all. According to the Channeling Summary, only Aes Sedai can gentle. Of course, Oppression civs wil be granted *some* Aes Sedai (despite some flavor issues with that), but certanly they will have less of them. but of course, mechanically, ANY civ that doesn't want to have a bunch of MCs running around would *need* to have some sort of gentling force hanging around. So... that needs to be Aes Sedai, right? I guess this one's pretty good, but does have some iffy-ness mechanically and flavor-wise.

the third is mechanically nice, I suppose, but quite awful from a flavor perspective. They shouldn't be dealing with the WT directly, to say the least (which impacts number two above as well).

Whether anyof these is as good as +Spark or +wt influence is debatable - perhaps we need a combination. these are the ideas i have, though!

I feel like Oppression should be leaning towards killing their MCs rather than Gentling them, which should avoid the general flavor problem you call out in #2. That does mean that an overall combat bonus against MCs would make mechanical sense, in that it would encourage players to play like Oppression civs. I see what you mean about a Fear Policy or Oppression Tenet, but we could even have it in both places? If it stacks then that could make some civs quite good at this, but I don't think it would give them an unfair advantage, since even the most MC-loving civ won't be able to field an army that's mostly MCs, since MC spawn rates and timings are relatively out of their control.

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

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