Ahriman
Tyrant
Rhombur Vernius should probably be Industrious/Mechanized, not Creative(=Political)/Mechanized.
Civilizations, Leaders and Traits
- Thread starter Deliverator
- Start date
Deliverator
Graphical Hackificator
(I need to update the opening post of this thread sometime...)
Harkonnen Ideas/Thoughts from the 1.7 thread:
We now have the Howitzer and the Death Hand missile (although it is not area effect - perhaps that is not particularly useful anyway). I still like the idea of a Traitor unit or renaming the riot causing spy mission to Turn Traitor and make it exclusive to the Harkonnen - strong theme.
I also think that the Harkonnen should be the best spice extractors, perhaps even having +4 spice from their palace, with some other penalty to offset it.
Also, it has been pointed out by Ajidica that Charismatic is not really and appropriate trait for Irulan and I agree. Perhaps we could switch her to Protective?
Harkonnen Ideas/Thoughts from the 1.7 thread:
Ajidica said:
Deliverator said:
davidlallen said:
Deliverator said:
Ahriman said:
We now have the Howitzer and the Death Hand missile (although it is not area effect - perhaps that is not particularly useful anyway). I still like the idea of a Traitor unit or renaming the riot causing spy mission to Turn Traitor and make it exclusive to the Harkonnen - strong theme.
I also think that the Harkonnen should be the best spice extractors, perhaps even having +4 spice from their palace, with some other penalty to offset it.
Also, it has been pointed out by Ajidica that Charismatic is not really and appropriate trait for Irulan and I agree. Perhaps we could switch her to Protective?
Ahriman
Tyrant
One change we had consensus on a while ago but was never implemented; boost slaves to 2 movement points and let them cross deserts, like workers. Increases utility significantly - and lets you use them as worm food 
I don't think the Death Hand needs area of effect, collateral damage is all that is needed. A MIRV-style graphic animation would be cool.
They should still have Devastators too, no?
I think resource depletion or losing water points is not going to be fun.
Bonus spice from the palace is tricky.
First, it has the potential to be incredibly unbalancing in the early game.
I could see us replacing the core +8 commerce with say +2 spice +2 commerce, or +3 spice -1gold -1 beaker.
So this way the extra spice would benefit only through spice silo building and the 3 wonders that give spice benefits.
However, this won't work if we make palace spice give gold from spice instead of commerce (they have to have commerce in order to fund early game research).
Making them favor spice somehow is good in principle, but we'd have to think of a good way to do it. Yield bonus on harvesters for a Harkonnen-only slavery civic is doable.
A UB that gives hammer or gold bonus in exchange for unhealth seems doable.
Currently the slave pit building is pretty boring, we could work with that somehow.
I like the idea of making slavery a Hark-only civic. Then what we could do is make it give nothing but allow whipping, but we could significantly boost the gains from whipping population (eg 50% more hammers than current).
Protective sounds fine for Irulan.
On Turn Traitor type things, perhaps people could give thoughts on my espionage comments:
Too many missions available means the AI ends up using none of them well. It also lets us focus on making cheap/powerful missions that are available only to particular factions and match that faction's flavor.
I think we should eliminate any spy missions except those that have major and flavorful impacts.
Less is more.
So if we're going to have an improvement destruction ability, it should be on the Ordos saboteur only, and it should be almost free in terms of EPs.
Similarly, if we're going to have steal treasury (raiding for spice, or water?) it could be Fremen only, and again be almost free.
I don't think the Death Hand needs area of effect, collateral damage is all that is needed. A MIRV-style graphic animation would be cool.
They should still have Devastators too, no?
I think resource depletion or losing water points is not going to be fun.
Bonus spice from the palace is tricky.
First, it has the potential to be incredibly unbalancing in the early game.
I could see us replacing the core +8 commerce with say +2 spice +2 commerce, or +3 spice -1gold -1 beaker.
So this way the extra spice would benefit only through spice silo building and the 3 wonders that give spice benefits.
However, this won't work if we make palace spice give gold from spice instead of commerce (they have to have commerce in order to fund early game research).
Making them favor spice somehow is good in principle, but we'd have to think of a good way to do it. Yield bonus on harvesters for a Harkonnen-only slavery civic is doable.
A UB that gives hammer or gold bonus in exchange for unhealth seems doable.
Currently the slave pit building is pretty boring, we could work with that somehow.
I like the idea of making slavery a Hark-only civic. Then what we could do is make it give nothing but allow whipping, but we could significantly boost the gains from whipping population (eg 50% more hammers than current).
Protective sounds fine for Irulan.
On Turn Traitor type things, perhaps people could give thoughts on my espionage comments:
Too many missions available means the AI ends up using none of them well. It also lets us focus on making cheap/powerful missions that are available only to particular factions and match that faction's flavor.
I think we should eliminate any spy missions except those that have major and flavorful impacts.
Less is more.
So if we're going to have an improvement destruction ability, it should be on the Ordos saboteur only, and it should be almost free in terms of EPs.
Similarly, if we're going to have steal treasury (raiding for spice, or water?) it could be Fremen only, and again be almost free.
(Some more ideas, most from other mods, that will probably not be included, but will hopefully jig the modder's minds somewhat. )
Faster slaves seems nice. Giving them a fall from heaven type ability to rush buildings would also be useful.
For slave pits, perhaps slave pits could increase the production gains from whipping, and/or slave unit sacrifice. I could also see slaves being addable as specialists (sort of like great person specialists that add some production, perhaps. Or they might just add a free citizen equivalent.)
Extra production from unhappy citizens in most games might also make sense as an effect (Like genejack factories or the Calabim building.), although the populations don't usually seem to grow enough to actually have much unhappiness (at least when I play non-terraformer.)
)Faster slaves seems nice. Giving them a fall from heaven type ability to rush buildings would also be useful.
For slave pits, perhaps slave pits could increase the production gains from whipping, and/or slave unit sacrifice. I could also see slaves being addable as specialists (sort of like great person specialists that add some production, perhaps. Or they might just add a free citizen equivalent.)
Extra production from unhappy citizens in most games might also make sense as an effect (Like genejack factories or the Calabim building.), although the populations don't usually seem to grow enough to actually have much unhappiness (at least when I play non-terraformer.)
Ahriman
Tyrant
Here is how I could imagine this working (design not quite complete, suggestions welcome):
Faction-unique espionage.
Design goal: Make espionage a more interesting part of the game, by making the espionage options available to each faction both powerful and flavorful.
Some factions will have "better" missions than others, and so espionage will be a stronger faction strength for them.
Each unit can have a trio of promotions (Facedancer 1, 2, 3) that give improved benefits; these could be better for some units than others, and there could be just generic ones used for the "non-espionage-based" factions.
The idea here is that the basic Infiltrator unit will be removed, and these will be the *only* espionage missions available to each faction. Most of the vanilla ones are either weak and/or uninteresting.
Harkonnen
Theme: Treachery
Unit: Traitor
Missions: Lower defenses (put city into unrest for 1 turn like current foment unrest mission)
Corrino
Theme: Assassination, political power
Unit: (Is there anything used to describe Fenring? That's who we'd be modelling here.)
Missions: Assassinate (assassinates a great person), Add culture (adds friendly culture to city - maybe something else, this one is pretty weak.
Ordos
Theme: Sabotage
Unit: Saboteur
Missions: Destroy improvement (weak, but almost free mission), destroy building
Bene Gesserit
Theme: Intrigue, manipulation
Units: Sister, Truthsayer
Missions:
Sister: Force friendship (as current),
Truthsayer: Purchase city mission (as current), Civ-wide anarchy (as current)
Fremen
Theme: Raiders
Unit: Razzia Commando
Missions:
Some kind of water theft mission would be ideal
Otherwise, just a cheap steal treasury.
Atreides
Theme: Upright, virtuous, loyal
Unit: none, but UBs with higher EP output (maybe an Internment camp replacement?) so that passive benefits are gained faster and enemy missions are made more expensive.
Tleilaxu
Theme: Biology
Unit: Facedancer
Missions: Improved version of Poison water (higher unhealth). Plague (expensive ability, actually kills population)
Promotions increase mission success chance.
Ecaz
Theme: Bribery
Unit: Agent
Missions:
Ix
Theme: Technology
Unit: Infiltrator
Missions: Steal tech, ?
Deliverator
Graphical Hackificator
I do really like this concept. Making espionage flavourful like this is a great idea, and it will make gameplay more focused too.
I've been thinking about Ecaz a bit recently. Their theme is not that well developed so far. The Smuggler unit is OK. The Elaccan gladiator I don't like too much, I think gladiators and drugged up slaves belongs more to the Harkonnen.
I had a few ideas for them. The theme for them in my mind is not just traders, but narcotics suppliers - aristocratic drug barons if you like. Also, as I mentioned in this post, I'd still really like to make the rich plant life of Ecaz a strong part of their theme. I would potentially like to see them have 4 or 5 bonus resources when they get reconnected with Ecaz at Offworld Trade. Only a couple of these would be happy/health resources the rest would enable promotions or provide other interesting benefits. Things like Krimskell Fiber could be a promotion with a bonus against Melee units for example.
Anyway, on your civ-specific espionage missions, I'd already had an idea for Ecaz to make Semuta slightly more interesting than just a super happy bonus. You could have an Espionage mission Establish Semuta Den which creates a Semuta Den building in the target city, this would somehow syphon off a portion of that's cities gold, negative gold in the city and positive gold for Ecaz. Just a rough idea.
I also thought about leader Semuta addiction causing diplomatic bonuses - in Dune the Baron knows he can rely on and manipulate Nefud because he is a Semuta addict - so potentially leaders could become addicted to Semuta as well.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Great! Hopefully by limiting the available missions to only powerful and flavorful options, the AI will feel like its doing a better job.
I agree. I'm not sure if we should keep or drop the gladiator unit, but its not great flavorwise.
I'll try and think of some options.
Interesting, not clear how we would implement it though.
How would we code getting gold from a building in someone else's city? And even more difficult; how would we display it to the player?
More feasible would be to say create a building that gave a -15% hammer penalty in the city (and the building was destroyed 100% probability if the city was captured).
I remember we discussed this sort of thing a long time ago, and rejected it as David thought it wouldn't be fun for a player to have a permanent penalty that you couldn't get rid of.
I like the idea in general, its just implementing that is hard.
This doesn't feel right. Loyalty bonuses for underlings, sure, but you shouldn't be addicting leaders of other factions. Besides, diplomacy bonuses starts stepping on other faction benefits; good relations shouldn't be in character for drug lords.
Jester Fool
Emperor
Perfect idea. Dr. Yueh comes to mind.
Fenring was an assassin for all practical purposes and he was highly skilled in political blackmail. The unit could be called 'Court Assassin' perhaps? Assassinate fits. Instead of add culture, how about blackmail leader - can only perform in enemy capital; prevents civ from declaring war on House Corrino for 10 turns; causes civ to vote the same as House Corrino in Landsradd elections for 10 turns.
Since the theme for Ordos (at least in the civ description) is wealth, how about the following -
Theme: Wealth
Unit: Mercantile Raider
Missions: improvided steal treasury - could be possible to make treasury go negative, thereby impacting target civ's overall economy; pilfer resource - cause enemy tile to flip culture (e.g. mine on ore) thereby giving Ordos access to it? Or if not possible to code, maybe just remove resource from map entirely.
It would probably be better to just have 1 unit type IMO. I think that would be more uniform. Civ-wide anarchy is extremely powerful with purchase city mission not far behind. Maybe access to these missions could be related to promotions somehow.
The Fremen did attack spice operations in the book. Might I suggest pillage improvement instead. I think that fits the theme for them pretty well.
The loyalty theme I like a lot. My suggestion - make Duke's Bench also give a free promotion to all military units built in the city. Call it 'Diehard Loyalist' or some such, giving a 50% defense against bribery missions. See Ecaz suggestion below.
I like the Plague mission so that should be kept. Instead of poison water, why not 'Infiltrate Garrison' which would destroy an enemy unit. Basically, unless stumbled upon first, the Facedancer kills the target unit, takes on their appearance, and then flees when safe (success) or is found out and killed (partial success). In the Dune books that is what Facedancers actually did.
Here's how you could do Ecaz -
Theme: Bribery
Unit: Turncoat Handler
Missions: Bribe military unit - if successful causes unit to become Ecaz unit but with experience reset to 0; cost should be based on unit level; promotions would be: I - reduce cost by 20%, II- increase success by 20% and III- retain 20% of experience.
Steal tech would probably be good enough. Since the espionage cost would probably be high (judging by vanilla civ), promotions could focus on bringing the cost of the mission down, otherwise the unit would eventually have nothing it could do. Destroy buildings (such as factory, refinery etc.) would fit the theme however. Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Maybe. I still think there is a better name out there somewhere.
How about "Imperial Operative"?
Preventing war sounds possible... voting sounds hard to code. Also, Landsraad is problematic because the resolutions (other than war) are so weak, and because the AI is terrible at deciding which things it should vote for or against.
I've proposed the idea of Corrino getting 2 votes in Landsraad as a faction advantage, but I think we should keep this separate from espionage.
The problem is that we want abilities that are not "niche". The AI is never any good at deciding when to use niche abilities.
The Harkonnen "treason ability" is already likely to suffer from this; the AI won't know to use it the turn before it attacks.
Assassinate is already very niche, so the second ability needs to be something that is always useful.
Add culture is lame, I agree... but we need something *generalist".
Maybe if the blackmail ability both prevents them from declaring war on you for 10 turns, and also acts as the "counterespionage" mission that makes enemy missions more expensive?
The Ordos were created for the Dune 2 computer game, and a Saboteur was their unique advantage there. So its a nice shoutout for fans of the games to include things like that when its possible. So Saboteur makes the most sense for Ordos.
The nice thing about Building destruction is that its always useful.
An improved version of steal treasury works fine, but we have to decide where it fits.
That's not fun to have used against you. Losing a critical resource forever is a no-no.
One of the problems we face is that we have to use the existing espionage AI.
The AI doesn't use espionage missions on water tiles, so we're never really going to be able to get the AI use espionage missions on
So improvement sabotage is going to be limited to land tiles, where I think it makes more sense to be used by Ordos Saboteur.
I suggest we leave harvester raiding for the Raider unit, that can have an auto-pillage ability.
Its reasonable, but I don't know if we have the ability to code this kind of thing.
Killing 1 unit is generally useful and probably isn't too powerful, though facedancers are more assassins than able to take out an entire regiment.
I think removing a unit from an enemy *and* giving it to you might be too much... I dunno. Might be ok. I don't know if this kind of thing is codeable. We can see what David thinks.
We'd probably also want a cheap secondary mission of some kind.
Jester Fool
Emperor
That has my vote.
That seems logical.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Ok, some thoughts on Ecaz.
First, we have to be careful about offworld goods. If we just let them get more offworld goods, then they can pick the normal ones, and deprive everyone else of them.
So we need to either create an entirely separate list of Ecaz-only ones, or more realistically use some other mechanism.
Second, the most obvious pharmaceutical benefits are health and happy, but we need to be careful. We have Ecaz as the most pro-spice civ, but happy and health mostly benefit Terraformers.
We can tie resources into existing buildings. Eg: we can have a resource that is a gold booster, by making it boost the Merchant Quarter, or other buildings.
I think loyalty from drug addiction is probably best modeled through espionage points. Can we have a building that gives +EPs from a given resource? Might require sdk, but you guys can do that now
I like the name "Semuta Den". Can we have buildings that require a resource to build? The building shouldn't do anything without the resource, but we don't want anyone constructing the building without the resource, but if its a trade good we need non-Ecaz players to be able to build it.
It would be good to have *something* with some kind of combat implication.
Something like a fibre should be pretty weak. But it could be widespread. Perhaps we could have something where if you had Krimskell Fibre, then all newly constructed melee and guardsmen units you construct (or perhaps just all melee units) could get a promotion with a +5% bonus vs melee units.
First, we have to be careful about offworld goods. If we just let them get more offworld goods, then they can pick the normal ones, and deprive everyone else of them.
So we need to either create an entirely separate list of Ecaz-only ones, or more realistically use some other mechanism.
Second, the most obvious pharmaceutical benefits are health and happy, but we need to be careful. We have Ecaz as the most pro-spice civ, but happy and health mostly benefit Terraformers.
We can tie resources into existing buildings. Eg: we can have a resource that is a gold booster, by making it boost the Merchant Quarter, or other buildings.
I think loyalty from drug addiction is probably best modeled through espionage points. Can we have a building that gives +EPs from a given resource? Might require sdk, but you guys can do that now
I like the name "Semuta Den". Can we have buildings that require a resource to build? The building shouldn't do anything without the resource, but we don't want anyone constructing the building without the resource, but if its a trade good we need non-Ecaz players to be able to build it.
It would be good to have *something* with some kind of combat implication.
Something like a fibre should be pretty weak. But it could be widespread. Perhaps we could have something where if you had Krimskell Fibre, then all newly constructed melee and guardsmen units you construct (or perhaps just all melee units) could get a promotion with a +5% bonus vs melee units.
dscarron
Chieftain
Atreides
Theme: Upright, virtuous, loyal
Unit: none, but UBs with higher EP output (maybe an Internment camp replacement?) so that passive benefits are gained faster and enemy missions are made more expensive.
That's easy. Call it a Mentat and have it perform counter-espionage.
Theme: Upright, virtuous, loyal
Unit: none, but UBs with higher EP output (maybe an Internment camp replacement?) so that passive benefits are gained faster and enemy missions are made more expensive.
That's easy. Call it a Mentat and have it perform counter-espionage.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Hi Dscaron, welcome to DuneWars. Thanks for providing feedback.
We already have mentats in the game, availalble to all factions. Its easier if we just have passive counter-espionage for Atreides through buildings than to create a unit that does the same thing.
We already have mentats in the game, availalble to all factions. Its easier if we just have passive counter-espionage for Atreides through buildings than to create a unit that does the same thing.
dscarron
Chieftain
Hurphm.
I like the trainer option best that is in place for the Bene Gesserit. And give the BG's a Spy that can see (and therefore attack) invisible units...
I suppose the last option is an Atreides until that doubles the effect of combat based culture shifts. Call it a War Leader. The difficulty is how does one have an honorable espionage unit?
I like the trainer option best that is in place for the Bene Gesserit. And give the BG's a Spy that can see (and therefore attack) invisible units...
I suppose the last option is an Atreides until that doubles the effect of combat based culture shifts. Call it a War Leader. The difficulty is how does one have an honorable espionage unit?
Ahriman
Tyrant
Except that its far too powerful atm
I've been toying with ideas like this, it does seem interesting and appropriate for a Truthsayer unit.
But its dangerous in terms of breaking espionage for every other faction. If BG can see a spy unit, then they (and any other unit near you) can (when at war) attack and totally protect you from enemy espionage.
Maybe it was national limit 1 or 2, so it can only operate in a couple of places?
I think this would be difficult to code, and of pretty low value. I think its better for them to just have better espionage defense.
dammitbiscuit
Chieftain
- Joined
- May 3, 2010
- Messages
- 19
They might not be characters from the movie replete with portraits, but surely there are other Fremen in the first book alone that could be made leaders. Liet-Kynes being 1 of the 2 when he's not really an original native is... yeah, he should be outnumbered by real Fremen.
I'd have to read the book again to get names, it's been over a decade since I last read it. All I can think of right now are Harah and Chani, but I coulda swore there were some other fremen who were actually leaders and not merely connected to Paul.
Is there a way to make leaders mutually exclusive? I know I'm kinda contradicting myself by talking about another "import" Fremen, but it's too cool not to mention:
Paul Atreides for house atreides, but The MF'ing Muad'Dib for the Fremen - they are mutually exclusive, so choosing one bars the other.
This probably isn't "possible", sadly, but I've usually found that if there isn't a way to do it "right", there's usually a hack or workaround that simulates the effect.
I'd have to read the book again to get names, it's been over a decade since I last read it. All I can think of right now are Harah and Chani, but I coulda swore there were some other fremen who were actually leaders and not merely connected to Paul.
Is there a way to make leaders mutually exclusive? I know I'm kinda contradicting myself by talking about another "import" Fremen, but it's too cool not to mention:
Paul Atreides for house atreides, but The MF'ing Muad'Dib for the Fremen - they are mutually exclusive, so choosing one bars the other.
This probably isn't "possible", sadly, but I've usually found that if there isn't a way to do it "right", there's usually a hack or workaround that simulates the effect.
Ahriman
Tyrant
But Liet-Kynes really is the closest thing the Fremen ever had to an actual unifying leader before Muad'Dib.
The Fremen revere him as a demigod. He was born on Arrakis and spends his entire life there.
He definitely qualifies as a Fremen leader.
Not easily, I'm guessing. Its just not something the engine was designed to handle.
We used to have Paul as Atreides, but decided he fit better as Fremen.
3 leaders for a faction (Leto I, Leto II, Alia/ Liet-Kynes, Stilgar, Muad'Dib) is fine IMO.
We were thinking of making Alia an "insane" (like in Fall From Heaven) Abomination, where she randomly changes traits every few turns.
dammitbiscuit
Chieftain
- Joined
- May 3, 2010
- Messages
- 19
I am not yet familiar with the leaders, so I was going off of the pictures in the OP and I thought there were still only two Fremen.
I like the insane idea a lot. I haven't played FFH yet, it's on my to-do list. When school is over and the summer starts, some friends and I will all play FFH2 at the same time, so that none of us has an advantage over the others in terms of experience.
My thoughts on Crazy Alia:
From what I saw of her in the first Dune book, she didn't actually believe anything religious, she simply served as a religious figurehead for power over the people. As such, to make it easier to play her, she could randomly cycle between any personality at any time, EXCEPT she can never wind up as Spiritual. To make things more feasible for the player, however, who has to constantly change civics in order to keep up with (and make use of) her switches, she permanently has a No Anarchy trait, because she's so convincing that her people will do anything she says.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Spiritual in this mod doesn't mean you believe in religions, its means you're good at using them as a tool. The Bene Gesserit are quite spiritual....
Religion as a tool to control the masses is one of the main themes of Dune.
Syagrius
Warlord
Choices of leaders is very good as it is, I really like having the choice for more than one leader for a faction.
