Master of Mana 1.3 - Specialists

Sephi

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Specialists were one of the new mechanics in Civilization IV and MoM is going to further expand on them.

Great People

The types of Great People are the same in vanilla, but they have more abilities. The idea is to give them unique and different abilities and make the choice how to use them really interesting.

Great Merchant
- Settle in City (gives gold per turn, very useful in a city that has a high level of Gold Specialisation)
- Trade Mission (must be performed in foreign city, gives some gold like in vanilla, but also gives you a resource that the foreign city has access to. Very useful if you need a resource like iron or horse, but also nice for other resources as allmost all give a bonus proportional to how many you have)
- Discover Food Resource (Farm resource on grassland, pasture resource on plains, sea resource in a city with a harbor. If you have many coastal cities, sea resources are great as they give you gold for every harbor you have. The food resources on land allow you to build farmers markets and smokehouses in a city with a merchant district, so they are handy as well in case you have only few food resources)

Great Sage:
- Discover (random) Spell: a bit of a gamble. It's useful if you look for more ways to spend your mana and don't want to invest into arcane buildings too much
- Discover mana node (requires that no other mana node is nearby): this is quite useful if you have bad luck and the land you are has little to no mana nodes.
- Settle: provides Research per turn. If your city has lots of +research% and a high research specialisation level this can net you lots of research and even more than an academy would
- Academy: gives +25% research and 2 scientist slots. Very useful if you want to further specialise your city into science. Nice synergie with settled great sages
Great Engineer:
- Rush Building (useful for wonders in low production cities. In other cases stone is better to rush buildings)
- Discover Mining Resource (requires Hill. very handy if you want to increase your metal income, use it near a city that has already invested into buildings that increase metal income like mining guild, etc.)
- Invent new Equipment (if your strategy is about conquest, this is probably your best choice. Better Equipment is never wrong. Exploration of Dungeons can also give you new Equipment, but Engeneers are more reliable (and expensive)
- Settle: adds some hammers to the City. Useful in the early game and if you want to specialize a city to train military

Great Bard:
- Culture Bomb (same as vanilla, nice if you are going for a cultural victory or in border cities)
- Golden Age (only Bards can start a golden age)
- Settle (can be useful in a city with a merchant district, as your abilites to gain culture there are limited. Useful if you want to create many great merchants)
- tale of legends: will be used for a new trait mechanic

Great Priest:
- Pilgrimage: gain influence with the Holy City
- Divine Intervention: gain 2000 Faith
- Settle: lots of faith per turn, useful in combination with the Oracle building (which can only be build in a city near incense)
- Construct holy building

Specialists:
In Vanilla CIV specialists are either crap (just use them in 1-2 GP Cities), or great (specialist economy). In MoM Specialists are in general more useful. They have lower yields compared to tiles, but provide specialisation points to the city (a good way to manage what specialization levels the city will gain) and of course Great Person points. While in Vanilla Civ you will get 0-1 Specialists in most Cities and you can't do much about it, in MoM the amount of Great Persons a city produces depends a lot on its Population and Culture. So a specialist Economy is more focused around getting Great Persons rather than yields from specialists (although civics that improve specialist yields still exist). There are also no civics that allow unlimited specialists, thus making buildings that grant specialists more important (and sometimes you might want to build a building just for the specialist slots). Also the mechanic from CIV V that every Specialist has its own counter is being used, so no more random great persons. Very annoying if you want a great scientist and you get a great artist that had a 4% chance to be born.
 
Also the mechanic from CIV V that every Specialist has its own counter is being used, so no more random great persons. Very annoying if you want a great scientist and you get a great artist that had a 4% chance to be born.
awesome :)

your plans looks really good, although i hope the way that great person spawn now happens is not some arcane formula that nobody understands :p


edit:
Golden Age (only Bards can start a golden age)
can we start more than two golden ages with bards now?
 
Great Priest:
- Pilgrimage: gain influence with the Holy City
- Divine Intervention: gain 2000 Faith
- Settle: lots of faith per turn, useful in combination with the Oracle building (which can only be build in a city near incense)
- Construct holy building

So does this mean that if we spam Great Priests and do pilgrimages to a specific Holy City, that we can convert it peacefully?

If so, :evil:
 
awesome :)

your plans looks really good, although i hope the way that great person spawn now happens is not some arcane formula that nobody understands :p

True, very true :lol:

How about bulbing tech? Will Great People (of all kind) be able to do this?

And Altar of Luonnatar for Great Priest? Will you remove it? Or will the Altar include in "Holy Buildings"?

[a little bit OOT : in future Xtended, I have the plan to reintroduce Code of Junil etc, the religious shrine for each religions, but without needing the holy cities. Instead, the shrines will need a city with the religion, state religion, 8 temples and the last (or maybe second to last) Sacred Knowledge.]
 
So does this mean that if we spam Great Priests and do pilgrimages to a specific Holy City, that we can convert it peacefully?

If so, :evil:

basically, yes

True, very true :lol:

How about bulbing tech? Will Great People (of all kind) be able to do this?

And Altar of Luonnatar for Great Priest? Will you remove it? Or will the Altar include in "Holy Buildings"?

[a little bit OOT : in future Xtended, I have the plan to reintroduce Code of Junil etc, the religious shrine for each religions, but without needing the holy cities. Instead, the shrines will need a city with the religion, state religion, 8 temples and the last (or maybe second to last) Sacred Knowledge.]

probably no bulbing. the mechanic what tech can be bulbed isn't intuitive at all. The Altars are still around
 
This looks great, does this only show changes? Have not played this yet and did not see Warlord/General they are great people, correct?
 
Is there a chance you could give us a writeup for the GP spawning system?

I understand that GP generation takes city pop/culture into consideration, but some specifics (numbers) would help a lot.
 
This looks great, does this only show changes? Have not played this yet and did not see Warlord/General they are great people, correct?

this shows only a very very very small and tiny part of this modmod... we moved to another forum and are here only because it broke down.

What do you mean with "did not see Warlord/General they are great people, correct?"
 
i would not mind if great generals are totally replaced with battle captains, there too much of an overlap between the two imho.
 
Battle captain can not be attached as Great General :D But of course, we can make Battle captain's combat aura gives promotion with +1 str and +1 exp as effect. At that point, Battle captain can not be distinguished with Great General.

If we are eliminating Great General, I have one concern : currently there is only one way to get Battle captain (by adopting Military State, iirc). I think this need to be redone, at the very least open several ways to gain Battle captain, while Military State gives huge discount to exp needed to spawn Battle captain.
 
So there is only one way to get a Battle Commander then? I hope they fix this or change it, I highly rely on them to promote my units...
 
So there is only one way to get a Battle Commander then? I hope they fix this or change it, I highly rely on them to promote my units...

Battle Captains are available with a military civic, but can also be spawned via the great person mechanic, I received one recently thru this method as well.
 
Battle Captains are available with a military civic, but can also be spawned via the great person mechanic, I received one recently thru this method as well.

it only happened once for me that i can recall, during some heavy heavy fighting, i received a great general and a battle captain, maybe it was not intended for me to do so, but i do recall it happening, and going woohoo
 
[to_xp]Gekko;10729590 said:
are the starting spots for the holy cities fixed yet? it's the only thing that's really bugging me right now :(

that do you think needs to be improved?

Is there a chance you could give us a writeup for the GP spawning system?

I understand that GP generation takes city pop/culture into consideration, but some specifics (numbers) would help a lot.

well, system is still under construction ;) you can get some details if you mouseover the GP bar in the city view

So there is only one way to get a Battle Commander then? I hope they fix this or change it, I highly rely on them to promote my units...

Battlecommander yes, unless you play bannor, then you can also get him with crusade. But there are more ways to get a great commander. Several buildings give great Commander great person points.

it only happened once for me that i can recall, during some heavy heavy fighting, i received a great general and a battle captain, maybe it was not intended for me to do so, but i do recall it happening, and going woohoo
or maybe you played Bannor :D
 
Gekko: "are the starting spots for the holy cities fixed yet? it's the only thing that's really bugging me right now."
Sephi: "that do you think needs to be improved?"

I too think that the holy city placement needs to be improved. They often end up in a corner where at least 50% of the tiles are simply not existant... therefore they start totally fu**ed up.

Another thing would be the UF-placement (f. e. Tomb of Succelus, Yggdrasil, Pyre of Seraphic, etc.): they tend to be all very near each other, sometimes only at a three tiles distant, always in one corner of the map. Some aren't amassed, like the pyre of seraphic is often in the desert, the guardians of the pristin pass is in the mountains near a chokepoint, etc., but the others... and what about there guardians? Why do some of them have a guardian and some not? Iirrc, stonethingy (earthmana) has an earthelemental, the letum frigus has an ice elemental, yggdrasil has a faun, but that's it - or does the tomb of succellus has an angel? They pyre has nothing (fire elemental would fit), the tower of eyes has nothing (I don't know what would fit... a mage?), the broken sepulchre has, afaik, nothing (Lich! Barbatos!!!), the mount kelshakk has nothing (some nasty dwarfen defender with heavy equipment would be cool), but some "normal" body mana has a vampire as guard.

Do all the "normal" non rare mana knodes have still mana guardians? Or are they instantly killed by raiding barbs and animals? If so, let mana guardians please be on default at peace with barbs and animals.

Greez,

Tschuggi
 
what tschuggi said. I only use ErebusContinent, and it's obvious that the holy cities are using a different city placement routine compared to "regular" civs.

for one, there's no code that "improves" their starting terrain if they get spawned with a bunch of crappy land, which can gimp many of them a lot.

they also do have a tendency to spawn in some forgotten corner, where crappy land is highly likely. and they often get placed pretty clumped together in those forgotten corners.

plus they seem to have no "flavour" for where they'll be placed. IIRC I've seen the Empy one spawn in desert kinda often, but the others are usually sitting in jungle. it would be cool to have for example RoK in plains/hilly terrain, OO on the coast, FoL near ancient forests etc :)

so no matter how awesome the holy cities mechanic is, you see it's hard to enjoy it when most of the time 4/5 out of 6 of them are all sitting in some crappy marshland in the distant south :crazyeye:
 
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