Making the Doviello more unique

played a couple games with the doviello, I like their character but I think that they really lack that unique feel that makes FFH2 so good. so I did a bit of brainstorming after reading some lore about them and came up with a couple ideas I happily hand over to the team for them to pick from if they happen to like them.

1) doviello cities can reach max X population ( where X is determined by game balance of course ) , and/or they can work only the first ring of plots ( extreme, but gives the feeling of small tribal cities very well imho )
2) to offset this, they get reduced/no city manteinance so that they can spam a lot of small cities
3) it might be needed to give them a production boost if it's noticed that it takes ages to build anything.
4) reduced cultural output, immune to flipping from cultural pressure ( they only care about brute force, ugh! )
5) to make them more flavourful, give them a bonus from tundra so that it is actually profitable to build there for them. ( this should be expanded to the malakim with deserts and illians with ice imho ) . the easy route is to give them like, +1 food from tundra. but that's not really exciting, right?
the cool idea is to have each tundra plot in their cultural border a small chance to spawn a HN wolf. make it forest+tundra only with a higher chance if that seems better. it would probably be better to have the chance of a wolf spawning scale with the number of tundra/tundra+forest plots under your cultural influence, so that you actually get something out of it even with 1 city only, and it doesn't get outrageous when you got a huge empire.

well, that's it for now. hope I managed to tickle your brains a lil' bit

I sort of thought that they shouldn't be allowed to have farms, but they would get additional benefits from animal pastures (perhaps additional food + production from animals - ie; no qualms about eating Beaver (or penguin..), and they use every bit of the animal.

The lack of farms would (presumably) result in the smaller cities

...but then, at the risk of turning them into cowboys, perhaps they could have an option where they could 'rustle' animals from the other civ's allowing them to add new pastures to their own cities?

and perhaps the Dov could pen wolves in a city, which would provide an additional food/production source (and perhaps spawn new wolf units)?

Skitters said:

...but then, at the risk of turning them into cowboys, perhaps they could have an option where they could 'rustle' animals from the other civ's allowing them to add new pastures to their own cities?

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That still sorta seems like a Hippus thing, dontcha think? But they don't really need much in the way of help...

Doviello are strong because don't need training yards to make his axemens,but very good idea for some defence or movement bonus in tundra and snow and with +1 more food and even +1 hammer from tundra ,the same situation with Illians I think.With Flavour start they are always on the poorest lands.Everytime when I playing Illians and Doviello I move my capitol to the other regions than origins when i conquer some other nation.

Nice idea Gekko to upgrade "coldest nation"

This sorta also applies to Malakim & deserts... maybe deserts and tundra need to go the other way... make them a LOT more dangerous to other races.

Thematically, it should be plausible to have Illians/Malakim and other cold/hot races survive in the tundra/desert as extremely hardy people but with small populations. There's no real reason they should magically be able to feed millions of people in tundra/desert after all. On the other hand, units that have lived their whole life in the tropics should be dropping dead in these extremely adverse climates.

Maybe tundra/arctic/desert needs something a lot more extreme... like ocean travel with triremes in previous civs... give them a high % chance to just die trying to cross a desert. Esp if you consider that each turn is a year, its unrealistic that you'd have foreign units survive in the desert for years at a time. Maybe have it tied in to unit level so that high level units survive but some 0 exp warrior probably wont.

I don't like that, it's not fun to see your troops die just because they tried to cross unfavourable terrain I'd love to see civs with a "favourite" terrain type actually doing better in their favourite terrain than others, instead of having everyone always looking for grasslands which is boring imho.

The one issue with that is that it doesn't actually encourage the Malakim/Dov/Illians to neccessarily settle in their thematic terrain, it just discourages other races not to (...and would there be an issue with things like floodplains and oasis?)

Having said that, I like the idea - or at least have unadapted units take damage each time they are in terrain (I was thinking of something similar earlier - but in relation to ships where they would take damage each turn outside cultural borders/in a friendly port, with a 'Citrus' resource reducing the effect)

Pls not compare Malakim and their desert origin - best tiles like flood plains,oasis and many gold with very poor tiles Doviello's and Illian's

Many of Malakim problems just solve water mana node and spring spell to upgrade their terriotry to plains without loosing their best tiles.

i like this idea...

Sounds good. Kinda reminds me of the Mongols back in Civ I.

Could be interesting to set the Doviello to only be able to work 1 ring, not have worker units, and always get a set yield from any tile, regardless of what the yield from the tile should be (so basically they don't care WHERE they settle). Combine this with a massively reduced (or non-existant) Number of Cities maintenance (but keep the City Distance penalty)

Due to no workers, all resources in their territory would have to auto-connect. And speaking of territory, they should get a Culture penalty. Either direct -50%, or just remove access to a ton of buildings which provide culture.


Overall, I'd picture them not having many buildings possible at all. Best would probably be to deny all buildings, then go through and hand pick a few which seem appropriate (like Elder Lodge) and create a Unique Building or 2 to fill the gaps in game mechanics which they miss without all the other buildings.


National Wonders/World Wonders would be VERY hard to get with the Doviello this way, since you cannot breed yourself a super city very easily on the production side of things. That is appropriate though.


A final interesting tweak I would propose is to replace all/most Great People with Unique Unit variants. They can keep Great Prophets, but Merchants, Engineers and Bards aren't entirely appropriate for the Civ (Great engineer somewhat is with the War Machine and all that - to block the non-great specialists from being assigned, just don't allow any buildings/civics which give access to that specialist type). Swap these out for Great Beasts, along the lines of Gurid and Fiacra. Then you can have your cities building Totems to the Great Beasts (which provide you with GPP, and eventually Beast Units). The Beasts would ideally be fairly slow and have Strength & Defense values different from each other. One at Tier 3 levels (10 or so) and the other at Tier 2 Levels (6 or so). This way you can make use of them for the entire game, but due to being slow you won't dominate using them in the early stages, in the middle stages they are multi-purpose (both stats are decent), and in the late stages they are specific use (only one stat is high enough to be worth trying to use. So the Turtle stays home to guard a city, while the Dire Wolf attacks cities, but sticks close to some friends who can guard it).


EDIT: As an addition for the Great Beasts idea: Allow the Doviello to lump all of their GPP from each city into the capitol. Since the concept will be to have a lot of cities with small output, resulting in an empire that can produce units as quickly as your rival, even though you have cities which cannot, GPP will be hard to come by (ideally probably only 2 points per Totem, thus at best maybe 8 points from each city, if you don't care which Beast you are working on). With such small output per city, Beasts would be very far between and you'd not see more than 3 or 4 per game.

Skitters said:

The one issue with that is that it doesn't actually encourage the Malakim/Dov/Illians to neccessarily settle in their thematic terrain, it just discourages other races not to (...and would there be an issue with things like floodplains and oasis?)

Having said that, I like the idea - or at least have unadapted units take damage each time they are in terrain (I was thinking of something similar earlier - but in relation to ships where they would take damage each turn outside cultural borders/in a friendly port, with a 'Citrus' resource reducing the effect)

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Well, part of this is that this allows the Doviello to continue expanding after the main lands are filled... So, even without explicitly encouraging them to build in the tundra, they still will have many cities in the tundra.

I'd probably be against a passive food bonus in tundra, mainly because cities can survive with access to even one good food resource.... but a production bonus in the tundra would be good.

With innate defense and a production bonus, you could have a series of 1-4 size cities out in the tundra that are difficult to attack and can still generate attackers to conduct raids.

Marchwik said:

Pls not compare Malakim and their desert origin - best tiles like flood plains,oasis and many gold with very poor tiles Doviello's and Illian's

Many of Malakim problems just solve water mana node and spring spell to upgrade their terriotry to plains without loosing their best tiles.

Click to expand...

The essential problem is the same... its not necessarily mechanics but rather the Malakim are thematically incorrect because they want to eventually change all their desert cities into plains.

Regarding the floodplains, the idea would be that any civ can follow a stream/river into the desert without penalty. This allows all civs to settle in verdant floodplains without any penalties other than not being able to send units too far away into empty desert (still makes sense, they're still surrounded by deserts). The oasis is comparable to fishing resources that are near tundra/arctic starts.

wow, I like xienwolf's ideas. I feel like Fall Further is going to become even better in the future ...

fuzzy bunnies, wouldn't it be easier to just make deserts impassable by default ( like peaks ) and then give a promotion that allows to cross them to the correct units? it sounds a lot easier than deserts dealing damage, I kinda like the idea of riverside walking though. I'm not sure that this change would be actually good for the gameplay, but it sounds nice. that said, let's get back to the topic please, this thread is about doviello and their tundra, not malakim's deserts, eheh. there's a topic about that already, let's continue the related discussion in there

Tons of great ideas here:
Doviello

xienwolf said:

Could be interesting to set the Doviello to only be able to work 1 ring, not have worker units, and always get a set yield from any tile, regardless of what the yield from the tile should be (so basically they don't care WHERE they settle). Combine this with a massively reduced (or non-existant) Number of Cities maintenance (but keep the City Distance penalty)

Due to no workers, all resources in their territory would have to auto-connect. And speaking of territory, they should get a Culture penalty. Either direct -50%, or just remove access to a ton of buildings which provide culture.


Overall, I'd picture them not having many buildings possible at all. Best would probably be to deny all buildings, then go through and hand pick a few which seem appropriate (like Elder Lodge) and create a Unique Building or 2 to fill the gaps in game mechanics which they miss without all the other buildings.


National Wonders/World Wonders would be VERY hard to get with the Doviello this way, since you cannot breed yourself a super city very easily on the production side of things. That is appropriate though.


A final interesting tweak I would propose is to replace all most Great People with Unique Unit variants. They can keep Great Prophets, but Merchants, Engineers and Bards aren't entirely appropriate for the Civ (Great engineer somewhat is with the War Machine and all that - to block the non-great specialists from being assigned, just don't allow any buildings/civics which give access to that specialist type). Swap these out for Great Beasts, along the lines of Gurid and Fiacra. Then you can have your cities building Totems to the Great Beasts (which provide you with GPP, and eventually Beast Units). The Beasts would ideally be fairly slow and have Strength & Defense values different from each other. One at Tier 3 levels (10 or so) and the other at Tier 2 Levels (6 or so). This way you can make use of them for the entire game, but due to being slow you won't dominate using them in the early stages, in the middle stages they are multi-purpose (both stats are decent), and in the late stages they are specific use (only one stat is high enough to be worth trying to use. So the Turtle stays home to guard a city, while the Dire Wolf attacks cities, but sticks close to some friends who can guard it).

Click to expand...

Xienwolf you make me cry. I think Im getting all finished with FfH2 and then you make posts like this that make me rethink everything. Great ideas though, it may be to late in the process to make a switch this big but Im going to be chewing on it for the next few days and see what can be done.

oh boy I'm so glad I opened this thread

[to_xp]Gekko;7231515 said:

fuzzy bunnies, wouldn't it be easier to just make deserts impassable by default ( like peaks ) and then give a promotion that allows to cross them to the correct units? it sounds a lot easier than deserts dealing damage, I kinda like the idea of riverside walking though. I'm not sure that this change would be actually good for the gameplay, but it sounds nice. that said, let's get back to the topic please, this thread is about doviello and their tundra, not malakim's deserts, eheh. there's a topic about that already, let's continue the related discussion in there

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To bring it back on topic, most of what applies to deserts can apply for tundra... I sort of like the vanishing idea (At the beginning of the turn, triremes had a chance to simply vanish if sitting on an ocean tile) just because it gives you a chance if you're desperate of spamming 10 warriors across the desert to take out a key city if you need to. And/or use luck to try and get a settler across a desert to settle a key location. There are more strategic options and risk vs reward compared to simply blocking travel.

Making the Doviello the CivRev civ (no workers, set yield) and having tile yields improve with techs is an absolutely fantastic idea.

@fuzzy: well I have to say I never played Civ3 ( I suck I know ) so I don't really know how that would work. but I don't think having units disappear on unfavourable terrain would be fun really :\ I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one