S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

S3rgeus · Aug 22, 2016

On to Cairhien!

With our intention to make Cairhien into a Science-y civ, since it's one of the few that has good flavor for it, it's worth mentioning that the main Science civs from BNW (Korea and Babylon) have only one unique each that relates to Science (their UAs). So we don't need to hit the Science mechanics too hard in a given set to turn them into a Science civ!

Also, Culture does seem like it could fit well with Cairhien's flavor. Given the number of Culture civ options we have already, it seems unlikely that we'd make it Cairhien's focus though. I say this mostly because having one unique that's Culture-y could also work, especially given the above that Cairhien can be a Science civ without most, or even more than one, of its slots going to Science uniques.

counterpoint said:
ksb's D D'm I think kind of missed the mark. He argues that its because the nobles are constantly striving to show off and outdo each other, so build stuff. To me I feel like it might actually lead to *less* efficient production. Also, not a very fun ability. The reference to Luca is ok, I guess. Don't think we need it for a civ, though

Agreed, it doesn't make them stand out much.

counterpoint said:
Foregate (gold) is brokenly powerful, probably. Also, I don't really get the foregate providing gold. Isn't it kind of a slum?

It doesn't seem to be just a slum, from what I've read in the Companion. It seems more like a low-class part of town, but it's more circus/market than slum. I'm still more toward the Foregate, flavor wise, being a wonder, since it's one of the few recognizable unique, single-instance "structures" that are built in the latter part of our intended timeline.

This UB is also outside the intended time window for Cairhien (Gold 1 is too close to the start of the tree). I find it's a bit too much of just a bunch of yields, rather than them working together specifically.

counterpoint said:
KSB's Illuminator, mechanically, might be fine. Simple science and hap bonus. I don't think we'll want this flavor used this way, though. Assuming we actually want the illuminator's guild's to have any civ-specific ties (we know they're going to be generic, but we could have theoretically a "special" one in one of the two cities that have them in the lore [was the other Tanchico?]), we definitely don't want it to be a random building. It'd need to be a replacement of the Nat Wonder we already know we want (Factory replacement).

Agreed, we'd need to reflavor this once we know how the Illuminators are represented elsewhere (which I think we have briefly discussed before). The mechanics of it seem ok.

counterpoint said:
Calavente's UA (which he didn't name) is a duplication of Rome, so we won't want that. Put here for posterity.

Agreed, we don't want a duplicate of Rome.

counterpoint said:
Your old Foregate is kind of nuts. No idea what building it replaces. Not sure if we want something this big, but it is a mechanical dimension we could consider.

I like the 2 Population instead of 1 idea - I'll come back to this below.

counterpoint said:
OK, my stuff now. I found coming up with UUs to be very very difficult. There isn't much flavor there. I think this might be a civ where a UU we use might be more "generic," sort of just a different kind of footman or something, without much direct reference. That's not terrible. For me these first-round passes are mostly about flavor capturing, so there are certainly more UU options, mechanically, that could be suitable, that are simply not here now.

Agreed, there doesn't seem to be much UU flavor to go on. I've read several wikis and looked through the Cairhien entry in the Companion and you've got most of it here already. I think with what we have we could fit most mechanics we might want into that flavor somehow though - I wouldn't be inclined to include something completely generic here just because flavor is scarce (rather than non-existent).

counterpoint said:
Daes Dae'mar (theft) is meant to change the way you play with spies. The idea is that, if we set Cairhien up to have a tech lead, people won't be able to resist spying on them. Cairhien then can gain science from that. I can't figure out how to balance the % capture thing, though. I don't *want* to boost the kill chance, since then people won't spy on you, but I want a way to make this pay off often. Probably not a good ability since it relies on other civs' actions too much.

I really like this one at first glance, but the dependence on other players' actions will make it much less fun than it first appears. It's also only helpful if Cairhien is already winning, which isn't great. I'm going to mark this red.

counterpoint said:
D D'm (Gold) is also probably not a good ability. The idea is that you're spying on yourself instead of others. Not a very compelling mechanic, but I put it here in case it inspires something else.

Possible, it's simple and makes spies be used a bit differently.

counterpoint said:
D D'm (CS Balance) is weird and probably bad. Tries to approximate the whole piss-off-one-person while you make someone else happy thing. Maybe an idea there....

I think players would find this very frustrating, since it would make it much more of a juggling act to keep CSes happy. It feels like your own actions are defeating you, which isn't very fun.

counterpoint said:
Daes Dae'mar (specialist) might not be possible. Meant to reward really huge cities with big yield payouts, but majorly cut into your happiness. Not sure how to make this one work.

Noble produces an appropriate yield for the building it is in, then? Do only buildings that have at least one Specialist slot provide a Noble slot, or do *all* of them? (The latter is kind of crazy.)

counterpoint said:
I actually really struggled with D D'm stuff that felt flavorful and *not* a huge penalty. There's probably a better diplo answer somewhere...

I agree that the Daes Dae'mar flavor is definitely the strongest we have for a UA though, so good that we're trying so many! I've got some new ones below as well.

counterpoint said:
can't figure out the Silk Path one. It's either too good or kind of lame...

This one is pretty cool and quite evocative of the flavor.

counterpoint said:
Note that I also considered a "Class Divisions" UA, but decided against it because it was likely to yield similar mechanics to the D D'm stuff. The flavor's there, though.

Also looked through this, but I feel like there are more defined classes in some other civs (Shara, Seanchan) that didn't make the cut there and would be a better fit for the kinds of mechanics this suggests.

counterpoint said:
King's Gift is weird. Would need to be paired with something that fuels science... Another "build big" ability (funny how we're doing all the tall civs back-to-back)

This is pretty cool, although X, Y, and Z might have to be quite low given how many technologies there are. We could make it splashier by taking a cue from Poland and putting it on the era boundaries?

counterpoint said:
The Con is the little square banners the 'hien use to state which house they are with. My unit is pretty lousy, I know. Not a lot to go on, here.

Mm, not a big fan of this one because it doesn't feel particularly special, compared to other uniques we've seen before.

counterpoint said:
Noble Cavalry is a super weird bonus... Not sure how to balance this...

This does feel a bit strange - it's difficult to see how this bonus works in the world of CiV. Like, I see how the mechanics could work, but what's the flavor mechanism for sending the food back? Any basis in flavor for these units sending back food?

counterpoint said:
for Master of the Lances, (apparently a flavor thing), I decided to go with the GC thing. I think it's somewhat problematic, though, in that it's probably hard to keep these guys close enough to the GC to make it work. Also, it encourages horse carpeting.

Agreed, I don't think this one works out too well, for the reasons you've stated.

counterpoint said:
Academic (historian) is a way to turn what would be a Culture process into a science one.

This one is awesome! I love this UU because it turns Cairhien's approach to Culture and Science completely on its head, without denying them any of the standard options. This unique alone can turn them into a Science civ without the others even touching Science.

counterpoint said:
School of Cairhien might be a Wonder, but we could reframe it to work this way as well. Meant to add onto the free tech you already get with that wonder.

Like above, this will produce a lot of Gold and Food since there are so many techs. It's a good concept though, encourages Tall quite well.

counterpoint said:
the Topless Tower is another likely wonder - we could frame it appropriately. This one is designed to encourage tall, but im' not sure how to make it useful in non-trading cities (maybe it isn't). This would be in addition to normal happiness bonuses, though.

Influence with City-States, I assume? With the CS at the trade route destination?

Should this also replace a later Happiness building since Cairhien is supposed to be an NE civ?

Also agreed, the Topless Towers seem like good candidates to be wonders rather than uniques.

counterpoint said:
DW Gate is another trade-route-does-something-else building.

Not big and splashy, but does some interesting stuff.

counterpoint said:
Foregate (population) is kind of complicated. The idea is you'd build the city really huge, and get benefits, but also get some drawbacks. Not sure if it'd work.

I think this is a bit of double jeopardy - particularly with the Unhappiness at the top end. Increasing Food output and having a high Populaiton will already create Unhappiness, and the hard part of using the ability would be managing that. I don't think it would be very fun for the ability to also work against its most difficult challenge.

counterpoint said:
For the illumination one (obviously not a real name), I've lost track of *which* nat wonder the chapterhouses are. I sort of thought it was associated with Sulfer. But I see that "Gold (Nat)" is the one on Fireworks. Is that right? I had an idea of a third component to add to this that would add some depth (and happiness), but then completely forgot the mechanic. Oh well.

I've found one of the times we discussed it before in the backup file, and it seems to be the most recent one. (Next mentions of Illuminators after it are in Tarabon's flavor dive.) We basically decided to wait and see which NWs or other aspects of the game would be best suited for the Illuminator flavor. The specifics of this UB would depend on our choices there, but we can throw some mechanics at it for now and, if needed, rework them later.

This one is fairly straightforward at the moment, I assume because of the idea you forgot!

counterpoint said:
Royal Library might be flavorfully weak, but it's an interesting fusion of money and knowledge

Yeah, I like the way the two work together, and it also emphasizes Cairhien as a Science civ without actually increasing their Science output, so it combines well with other Science uniques.

counterpoint said:
The academic provides a kind of weird bonus, turning science into population, which presumably leads to more science. Definitely not mutually exclusive to the Philosopher (the other science gov).

This will be crazy strong as it is. Like crazy strong. An early Governor that reaches upgrade 2 around turn 125 will contribute ~50 Population to a city before Cairhien reaches the end of the tree (researches all techs). Still, we can tone that down to a Food bonus, but that's a bit less interesting. Like one of the others above, this might work well as an era bonus, where it could give multiple Population at once. It would create a bit of an Unhappiness problem though - a sudden spike on the era boundaries.

Recap! And some new stuff!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (production), Each city receives +15% production towards buildings. Can build <Happiness (horse)> in all cities (kidshowbusiness)
Better Production, +25% building construction if building is already in the capital (Calavente)
Daes Dae'mar (theft), +X% to capturing foreign Eyes and Ears. If a foreign Eyes and Ears is captured, Cairhien may steal a technology from that civilization, or, if no such technologies are available, +Y Science.
Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (CS balance), Completing quests and giving gifts to City-States produces X% (high, like 200%) more influence, but causes Cairhien to lose Y Influence with all other City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking).
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (culture), Cairhien gets +X Science and +Y Happiness per level of cultural influence each foreign civilization has in Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), completing a trade deal with another civilization grants Cairhien +X influence with all City-States allied with that civilization.

UUs:

Con Bannerman, replaces era 5-8 unit, Increased combat strength. When earning a promotion, gains a yield of X Gold (high).
Noble Cavalry, replaces era 5-8 Mounted, +X% (high) combat strength against Melee units. Pillaging worked enemy tiles produces Y Food in the Cairhienin capital.
Master of the Lances, replaces Great Captain. +X Movement. Mounted units within 2 hexes of the Master of the Lances can pillage without consuming movement, ignore enemy zone of control, and gain +X% combat strength against Melee units (all units gain the standard Great Captain bonus)
Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).

UBs:

Foregate (gold), replaces Gold 1, +25% gold, +1 Gold, +2 Gold per incoming trade route (+1 Gold for the owner of the trade route), +1 food, +1 happiness. (kidshowbusiness)
Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness
Foregate (big pop), replaces <building>, The city gains 2 population points each time it gains population.
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold (high) and +Y Food (high) in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 2, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
Foregate (population), replaces Gold National Wonder, every point of population above X generates +Y Food. Every point of population above Z (higher) generates +W Gold and -V Production (low). A population greater than U (highest) provides +T% to science, but -S Happiness.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (Pop explosion), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever a technology is acquired, this city gains one population point." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

UTs:

Academics, in Era 8 column 1, depends on Wells. When Cairhien researches this technology, a Scholar appears near the Cairhienin capital. Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation and grants +X permanent Happiness. If another civilization steals this technology, they receive a permanent +Y (lower) Happiness (and none of the other effects).

So, all of the various Daes Dae'mars here:

(culture) tries to turn enemy Prestige influence against them toward a Cairhienin Science victory. However, this will encourage Cairhien players to keep their Culture low, which is weird, and it's also dependent on enemy actions.

(trade) is a straight up Science bonus through trade, but also denies enemies Science (note: only when Cairhien is establishing the trade route are enemies denied, they get their normal Science from their own trade routes, but Cairhien also gets extra.) This may make other players trade with Cairhien less though.

(diplomacy) is similar to your (Gold), the two could be merged if we wanted. I like the idea of letting Cairhien negotiate Compact votes all the time, since that will make them quite a different presence in the Compact. Aside from that, it's a simple later-game Science bonus.

A "trade deal" in this case is anything like accepting embassies, trading gold for resources, anything that pops up the leader screen basically. I really like the mechanic, but the difficulty here is avoiding abuse - players constantly gifting the AI 1 Gold to get the bonus and the like. Even if we only allow for trades that involve exchanges (both sides must give something), there is a decent chunk of stuff the AI will have that the player wouldn't normally trade for that could trigger this. Still, maybe that part wouldn't be a problem. The AI can know that Cairhien benefits from this, and value their own stuff more accordingly.

Royal Academy completely changes how Cairhien approaches the Science victory, and allows them to grab benefits from other players on occasion as well. (The crux of the bonus is the first part, the ability to Exhibition at home.) It still gives the usual free tech that this building does.

Foregate (Pop explosion) is an evolution of my original idea for the Foregate doing double-Population-increased each time. But it ties into the last section, which I'll go into first:

Academics is a unique technology, that only Cairhien can research. National Wonder (Food) is not a building that exists in BNW (or at least I don't intend it to be - if it does then this is National Wonder (Food) 2). The tech does three things:

Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation early, which reduces the number of techs Cairhien needs to win the game via Science (by about 5). We could pick a different Innovation if we wanted to reduce that number less or more, or pick one of the non-leaf-node Innovations if we just wanted to give them a head start, but still need the same number of total techs.

It unlocks the Food National Wonder, which normally creates a normal Food bonus, as you would expect from buildings like the other national wonders.

It also gives Cairhien a Scholar, to partially offset the Science they've lost researching a tech that no one else can research (other civs catch up in that time, so we don't want it to just be a sunk cost, but we could adjust this - make it a Science dump, or even take it away, if it was too strong).

Academics can be stolen by other civs - hence the existence of the non-unique national wonder (other civs can build it that way). It also makes spying on Cairhien much more enticing in the late game, if any of Cairhien's other uniques particularly want that.

Another balance point for this tech would obviously be moving it to elsewhere on the tree, if we found its current position problematic.

So that's how the tech could work. The Foregate (Pop explosion) unique is a big, very late game UB that needs to have a massive and splashy effect to be worth it. Doubling might be too high, but that's the general idea - a ton of new Population at once. The difficulty is in how much the Unhappiness spike would be manageable for that.

And then there are the two Feast of Lights Celebration UIs. I figure this is like some kind of festival grounds Improvement. The idea with both is that it has a very significant yield output, but fades away after some time. What I was trying to avoid was making that busywork for the player ("Oh, I've got to go make the Feasts again"), and also restrict it so that it doesn't scale based on land (otherwise it would favor Wide).

I'm not sure if (culture) hits the mark. It's for a more cultural approach to Cairhien, which I think could work with their flavor, as mentioned above. But I think (science) is a much stronger candidate since the mechanic is much more helpful, and unlocking in the endgame it doesn't have much time to become busywork before the LB stomps on everybody, or somebody wins.

And now I'm out of time! I'll come back on the planning stuff tomorrow!

counterpoint · Aug 23, 2016

S3rgeus said:
On to Cairhien!

how do you choose to pronounce this civ? The glossaries seem to indicate its something like kai ree en but the glossaries are inconsistent...

S3rgeus said:
With our intention to make Cairhien into a Science-y civ, since it's one of the few that has good flavor for it, it's worth mentioning that the main Science civs from BNW (Korea and Babylon) have only one unique each that relates to Science (their UAs). So we don't need to hit the Science mechanics too hard in a given set to turn them into a Science civ!

noted.

S3rgeus said:
Also, Culture does seem like it could fit well with Cairhien's flavor. Given the number of Culture civ options we have already, it seems unlikely that we'd make it Cairhien's focus though. I say this mostly because having one unique that's Culture-y could also work, especially given the above that Cairhien can be a Science civ without most, or even more than one, of its slots going to Science uniques.

Right. makes sense.

S3rgeus said:
It doesn't seem to be just a slum, from what I've read in the Companion. It seems more like a low-class part of town, but it's more circus/market than slum. I'm still more toward the Foregate, flavor wise, being a wonder, since it's one of the few recognizable unique, single-instance "structures" that are built in the latter part of our intended timeline.

This UB is also outside the intended time window for Cairhien (Gold 1 is too close to the start of the tree). I find it's a bit too much of just a bunch of yields, rather than them working together specifically.

ok, agree to red this one.

S3rgeus said:
I really like this one at first glance, but the dependence on other players' actions will make it much less fun than it first appears. It's also only helpful if Cairhien is already winning, which isn't great. I'm going to mark this red.

ok, that's fine with me.

S3rgeus said:
I think players would find this very frustrating, since it would make it much more of a juggling act to keep CSes happy. It feels like your own actions are defeating you, which isn't very fun.

yeah, I can see what you mean. Agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Noble produces an appropriate yield for the building it is in, then? Do only buildings that have at least one Specialist slot provide a Noble slot, or do *all* of them? (The latter is kind of crazy.)

is it? If it's all buildings, true, you could put one in every building, but if there aren't specialists otherwise in those buildings, you get nothing (this increases specialist yields, not simply yields). Maybe that's an acceptable balancing act - getting the right amount of "modifiers" (with their unhappiness) mixed with the actual producers.

S3rgeus said:
Also looked through this, but I feel like there are more defined classes in some other civs (Shara, Seanchan) that didn't make the cut there and would be a better fit for the kinds of mechanics this suggests.

fair enough. no need.

S3rgeus said:
This is pretty cool, although X, Y, and Z might have to be quite low given how many technologies there are. We could make it splashier by taking a cue from Poland and putting it on the era boundaries?

yeah, I feel like the nice thing about techs though is that its a more direct relationship to science. If we had an ability that helps science, that ability would feed this ability. True, eras rely on science, too, but in a way that zooms way out and feels less direct. Plus, this is more unique, I suppose. I'd be fine with the yields being relatively small - can also scale by era.

S3rgeus said:
Mm, not a big fan of this one because it doesn't feel particularly special, compared to other uniques we've seen before.

not special flavor-wise, or not special mechanically? I agree with the latter. Regarding the flavor, though, this is kind of the only combat UU option for this civ that utilizes a proper noun, so I think we need to try to come up with an option for it. I'm fine redding this, but I'll try for another below.

S3rgeus said:
This does feel a bit strange - it's difficult to see how this bonus works in the world of CiV. Like, I see how the mechanics could work, but what's the flavor mechanism for sending the food back? Any basis in flavor for these units sending back food?

no flavor basis. This is simply a tall-mechanic oriented ability. Should it be axed or changed to something else (gold?)

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, I don't think this one works out too well, for the reasons you've stated.

ok, I'm redding it, then. Should we try for another MoL unit?

S3rgeus said:
This one is awesome! I love this UU because it turns Cairhien's approach to Culture and Science completely on its head, without denying them any of the standard options. This unique alone can turn them into a Science civ without the others even touching Science.

Are we ok with this allowing the player to "attack" other culture civs by seeking out and destroying relics? In all other cases, if a civ gets to a SoP before you, you can always recapture the relic by capturing their city.

Also, this is without limitation, number-wise. In CiV, you can only realistically explore SoP as often as you have slots to hold the relics (excepting ones in range of your cities or CSs, where you'd build Portal Stones). Here, it seems a somewhat viable strategy to build *tons* of academics, as soon as you can, and mount a huge science lead in Era 5. This is also particularly epic when paired with Hidden Sites of Power, which I think we still have. That would make that social policy tree essentially a second rationalism, based on the potential science payout!

In other words, should this be limited somehow? Based on your relic slots? Create an actual science-only-producing relic? Diminishing returns? It seems like we might want some kind of balancing agent.

S3rgeus said:
Like above, this will produce a lot of Gold and Food since there are so many techs. It's a good concept though, encourages Tall quite well.

ok, maybe not (high) then?

S3rgeus said:
Influence with City-States, I assume? With the CS at the trade route destination?

Should this also replace a later Happiness building since Cairhien is supposed to be an NE civ?

Also agreed, the Topless Towers seem like good candidates to be wonders rather than uniques.

agreed on all, and adjusted.

S3rgeus said:
I think this is a bit of double jeopardy - particularly with the Unhappiness at the top end. Increasing Food output and having a high Populaiton will already create Unhappiness, and the hard part of using the ability would be managing that. I don't think it would be very fun for the ability to also work against its most difficult challenge.

ok, red.

S3rgeus said:
I've found one of the times we discussed it before in the backup file, and it seems to be the most recent one. (Next mentions of Illuminators after it are in Tarabon's flavor dive.) We basically decided to wait and see which NWs or other aspects of the game would be best suited for the Illuminator flavor. The specifics of this UB would depend on our choices there, but we can throw some mechanics at it for now and, if needed, rework them later.

This one is fairly straightforward at the moment, I assume because of the idea you forgot!

yeah, no idea... I'm not promising it was earth-shatteringly good, though.

S3rgeus said:
This will be crazy strong as it is. Like crazy strong. An early Governor that reaches upgrade 2 around turn 125 will contribute ~50 Population to a city before Cairhien reaches the end of the tree (researches all techs). Still, we can tone that down to a Food bonus, but that's a bit less interesting. Like one of the others above, this might work well as an era bonus, where it could give multiple Population at once. It would create a bit of an Unhappiness problem though - a sudden spike on the era boundaries.

what do you think, ultimately? change to food? Change to era? or just nuke it? I think one pop per era is *too* small...

S3rgeus said:
So, all of the various Daes Dae'mars here:

(culture) tries to turn enemy Prestige influence against them toward a Cairhienin Science victory. However, this will encourage Cairhien players to keep their Culture low, which is weird, and it's also dependent on enemy actions.

eh, redding it because of the dependency issue.

S3rgeus said:
(trade) is a straight up Science bonus through trade, but also denies enemies Science (note: only when Cairhien is establishing the trade route are enemies denied, they get their normal Science from their own trade routes, but Cairhien also gets extra.) This may make other players trade with Cairhien less though.

you mean people will trade less with Cairhien in order to deny them the science? Like a morocco thing?

Also, what do you mean at least X science?

S3rgeus said:
(diplomacy) is similar to your (Gold), the two could be merged if we wanted. I like the idea of letting Cairhien negotiate Compact votes all the time, since that will make them quite a different presence in the Compact. Aside from that, it's a simple later-game Science bonus.

The negotiation for votes thing might be fine, but also is quite minor - if anything, it feels like one of those abilities that will be good inasmuch as you can exploit the AI's stupidity with it. Selling them Iron and Horses in Era 9 for a compact vote... So, not totally sold here.

I think the EaE aspect is interesting, though somewhat redundant to the tech-theft aspect. I wonder if that takes off its luster, especially since this lets you leech science from any civ, not just ones with the tech lead.

Also, I'm wondering if these EaE-provide-X ones should be framed to include diplomats in some complementary way. I think the diplomats make as much sense as a part of D D'm flavor as do the EaE.

S3rgeus said:
A "trade deal" in this case is anything like accepting embassies, trading gold for resources, anything that pops up the leader screen basically. I really like the mechanic, but the difficulty here is avoiding abuse - players constantly gifting the AI 1 Gold to get the bonus and the like. Even if we only allow for trades that involve exchanges (both sides must give something), there is a decent chunk of stuff the AI will have that the player wouldn't normally trade for that could trigger this. Still, maybe that part wouldn't be a problem. The AI can know that Cairhien benefits from this, and value their own stuff more accordingly.

I want to like this ability. It seems pretty neat and fun when used appropriately. However, I feel pretty sure this will not be used appropriately - again, an ability who's usefulness (and balance) is dependent upon really stupid AI practice. We'll be forced to balance it such that using it "honestly" won't be all that effective (since we have to set the values so abuses such as described by you don't mean auto-win"

Maybe we limit it by civ, or something? Like, only one active trade deal per civ counts? Still, that would encourage you to keep "maintenance trades" of minor stuff, even when civs aren't offering you anything good.

Not sure how, if at all, we can save this one.

S3rgeus said:
Royal Academy completely changes how Cairhien approaches the Science victory, and allows them to grab benefits from other players on occasion as well. (The crux of the bonus is the first part, the ability to Exhibition at home.) It still gives the usual free tech that this building does.

Hmmm.... I assume you can only exhibit in this capital the same number of times you could exhibit in any other capital, right?

I think this one has potential, but I worry about such uber-late-game bonuses. They're useful for such a short period, and, in this case, *only* if you're pursuing the SVC - if you're going diplo, or culture, it's useless. In that case, its just a simple +%science.

The last ability is also kind of scary, and rather dependent on others' actions.

Is this combination of words direct flavor, or are you recombining existing proper nouns?

S3rgeus said:
Academics is a unique technology, that only Cairhien can research. National Wonder (Food) is not a building that exists in BNW (or at least I don't intend it to be - if it does then this is National Wonder (Food) 2). The tech does three things:

Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation early, which reduces the number of techs Cairhien needs to win the game via Science (by about 5). We could pick a different Innovation if we wanted to reduce that number less or more, or pick one of the non-leaf-node Innovations if we just wanted to give them a head start, but still need the same number of total techs.

It unlocks the Food National Wonder, which normally creates a normal Food bonus, as you would expect from buildings like the other national wonders.

It also gives Cairhien a Scholar, to partially offset the Science they've lost researching a tech that no one else can research (other civs catch up in that time, so we don't want it to just be a sunk cost, but we could adjust this - make it a Science dump, or even take it away, if it was too strong).

Academics can be stolen by other civs - hence the existence of the non-unique national wonder (other civs can build it that way). It also makes spying on Cairhien much more enticing in the late game, if any of Cairhien's other uniques particularly want that.

Another balance point for this tech would obviously be moving it to elsewhere on the tree, if we found its current position problematic.

ok, doing this out of order, talking about the tech first.

OK, overall not totally sold on having a UT. It feels a little wonky. I'm open to it, it's certainly interesting, but it's also... kind of wonky.

Logistical question: how many Unique slots does this take up, considering its a Tech and a UB?

Similarly, you say below that Foregate *replaces* the food national wonder. aren't they one and the same, since no-one else but Cairhien would be able to build it (though they could capture it via conquest)? Or are you saying that "normal food bonus" is one Unique slot, and "pop explosion" would take two.

In terms of the overall effects of the tech, I think overall it's fine. Just not totally sold on its existence.

S3rgeus said:
Foregate (Pop explosion) is an evolution of my original idea for the Foregate doing double-Population-increased each time. But it ties into the last section, which I'll go into first:

So that's how the tech could work. The Foregate (Pop explosion) unique is a big, very late game UB that needs to have a massive and splashy effect to be worth it. Doubling might be too high, but that's the general idea - a ton of new Population at once. The difficulty is in how much the Unhappiness spike would be manageable for that.

OK, so I think this is a pretty cool idea. I'd like to actually divorce it somewhat from the tech idea, so it'd be possible even if we didn't do it.

Doubling might be too high, but if it's late enough in the game, it might be awesome.

We might need to couple it with a unique that helps with happiness in the late-game, to offset this problem.

since it's a one-time thing, it's (unlike most buildings) not simply something you want ASAP, possibly (to maximize your free population). Do you think this will create a clunky metagame of people trying to pick the perfect moment to build it, or is that fine? I hate this aspect of Oxford University.

S3rgeus said:
And then there are the two Feast of Lights Celebration UIs. I figure this is like some kind of festival grounds Improvement. The idea with both is that it has a very significant yield output, but fades away after some time. What I was trying to avoid was making that busywork for the player ("Oh, I've got to go make the Feasts again"), and also restrict it so that it doesn't scale based on land (otherwise it would favor Wide).

I'm not sure if (culture) hits the mark. It's for a more cultural approach to Cairhien, which I think could work with their flavor, as mentioned above. But I think (science) is a much stronger candidate since the mechanic is much more helpful, and unlocking in the endgame it doesn't have much time to become busywork before the LB stomps on everybody, or somebody wins.

Interesting, mechanically! The culture one might be hitting the culture a little too high - we could theoretically adjust it so it provides science instead of Prestige (but probably not that high).

The science one is kind of nuts, but might be fun.

Recap! And some new stuff!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking).
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (culture), Cairhien gets +X Science and +Y Happiness per level of cultural influence each foreign civilization has in Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (trade deal), completing a trade deal with another civilization grants Cairhien +X influence with all City-States allied with that civilization.

UUs:

Noble Cavalry, replaces era 5-8 Mounted, +X% (high) combat strength against Melee units. Pillaging worked enemy tiles produces Y Food in the Cairhienin capital.
Master of the Lances, replaces Great Captain. +X Movement. Mounted units within 2 hexes of the Master of the Lances can pillage without consuming movement, ignore enemy zone of control, and gain +X% combat strength against Melee units (all units gain the standard Great Captain bonus)
Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.

UBs:

Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness)
Foregate (big pop), replaces <building>, The city gains 2 population points each time it gains population.
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold (high) and +Y Food (high) in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 3, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence with the destination City-State for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
[*]Foregate (population), replaces Gold National Wonder, every point of population above X generates +Y Food. Every point of population above Z (higher) generates +W Gold and -V Production (low). A population greater than U (highest) provides +T% to science, but -S Happiness.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (tech pop), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever a technology is acquired, this city gains one population point." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

UTs:

Academics, in Era 8 column 1, depends on Wells. When Cairhien researches this technology, a Scholar appears near the Cairhienin capital. Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation and grants +X permanent Happiness. If another civilization steals this technology, they receive a permanent +Y (lower) Happiness (and none of the other effects).

The new Con Bannerman is meant to be bolstered by huge cities, and as such pairs well with the Foregate building. Could be based, instead, on the pop of the capital, not the producing city. And, could additionally have some other unaffiliated bonus (increased strength or something) so it isnt just a generic unit with high exp.

The new foregate is simply a way to get your mechanic without using Academics as a UT. It could be either the spy wonder, if we want era 6 (and probably limit the bonus), or the very late Prestige wonder (era 8), where we'd let the bonus be massive.

S3rgeus · Aug 23, 2016

counterpoint said:
Duh. I was launching the file called "IndieStoneTechEditor.exe" thinking it was, you know, an exe, when in fact that was the XML (file extensions are hidden in explorer for me). i'm lame.

I always make file extensions visible, otherwise there are surprises like this! Plus I often need to change file extensions (which Windows really wants to warn you about) for files that accidentally got saved with the wrong one.

counterpoint said:
ok. we can go with the strength-increases-based-on-MS-exploration thing.

Awesome, I've added this to Illian in the design list.

counterpoint said:
yeah, though it might be a niche use, it's still a niche use that promotes really weird behavior (traveling around with two hunters doing explorations).

I think the problem with the *not* consuming thing is that then it *forces* you to have the Hunter be the hornblower, which is good if he gets bonuses, but bad if you want to disguise your intentions from the enemy. I fear it might make them too obvious, as previously discussed.

Should it be an option? Maybe Illian would have the option of sending the horn to the nearest unit or the nearest Hunter unit? (or, this could be merged with the no-consumption such that you had the choice of "this unit" or "nearest unit").

I should remind us, though, that there isn't a lot of flavor basis for illian being better *with* the horn. I find I quite like rewarding them for searching for it - or for its existence like that UA did - but rewarding a specific unit for being the hornblower isn't really grounded in flavor. I suppose the combat bonus for Hunters could be amplified if Illian controls the horn at all - then it coiuld be like a "morale" boost or something.

The option is probably the closest to working, but if the Hunter offers a bonus for it and the other unit is only useful for indirection, I feel like Illian will always choose the Hunter, which makes it not much of a choice.

Your point about Illian's flavor not making them specifically good at using the Horn is a good one. I suppose I'm mainly thinking that it's odd for our mechanics to encourage the player to go after something that isn't an "objective" in itself (the various victory conditions are their own objectives, for example), and then not reward them differently from other players who do it normally. Still, maybe that isn't a problem - the Horn is still quite an event and pretty strong as well.

I was thinking the niche-ness is more of a consideration for the power of the unit (reducing the Horn's cooldown doesn't make the unit much better in the grand scheme of things since there are so few Hornblowers in any game), we'd totally need to address the odd behavior as an orthogonal issue to the niche-ness.

Maybe we just stick with the combat bonus? I still feel like there should be some s way to do a Hornblower bonus in this unit somewhere though.

counterpoint said:
I dunno. The issue I have witth this is that it kind of limtis our options somewhat with the launch civs. All the logic that led us to decide to do the 21 or so of them is still there, I'd say. The new data doesn't remove that, it just makes it more of a pain. I still don't want to feel stuck with the ones we have, and would appreciate a few options.

Honestly, for me, I look at it a bit like "which civs would people expect to see"? To me, I'd say Amadicia and Altara might make that cut. I think Ghealdan is good for our previously mentioned reasons. I think we both want Mayene, but I think people would accept that as a CS. Tarabon is arguable.

So, part of me thinks we should consider maybe doing Ghealdan, Amadicia, and Altara, and stop for there?

... but we could also just stop.

I think the reasons we discussed before are good guidelines for now, but we had to make them with only theoretical knowledge of what it would mean to design the civs involved. I think we can make a more informed decision now that we've done the ones so far, so we shouldn't feel beholden to the civs we chose before. I know that I specifically avoided pruning the list further because we would have this chance to re-evaluate after we'd done a chunk of civs.

However, as you mentioned last time, Cairhien makes the 13th civ we've designed, and if our launch line up is 14 civs, then we need at least one more! I'd be inclined to be put Ghealdan in that slot.

Based on what you've mentioned here about civs that players will "expect to see", I'd say going past our intended target by 2 (so, also designing Amadicia and Altara) will give us some good wiggle room. We'll be able to consider a selection of civs on a mechanical necessity basis ("we have no Faith civs", "there are too few Science civs", "there are too many Culture civs", and that kind of thing) without needing to design new civs to introduce new options. We'll also cover more of the civs that are a major part of the flavor.

So, Ghealdan, Amadicia, then Altara and we're done with this phase?

counterpoint said:
So, what's next? Yeah, Policies and Tenets, actual decisions on civs and uniques, and flavor for the techs, units, etc.. After that, I think it's all tweaking and uber-specific flavor.

I'd say a good deal of these things can happen whilst you're implementing. I think the question is how much you want to split your work. While you're doing the main programming, I can make myself useful with other things. So, I suppose the question is: which things would be good for counterpoint to do while S3rgeus implements? In other words, what things are important enough to do soon (e.g., probably not compose music and such), but not important enough that I need to pretty much "work it out" with you in real time (i.e. "post time"). Obviously, there's a whole lot of "flavor text" that needs to be done (not even counting the civilopedia), but that kind of thing isn't super useful at this point, right?

I think the answer to that question helps us decide when you should start on implementation.

Agreed that a bunch of the flavor text isn't necessarily very useful now. In our initial set up, it's fine for us to have placeholders everywhere. The difficulty with finding flavor text this early is that if the design changes underneath them, then it becomes wasted work.

Still, there are some that are quite visible and less likely to change. The flavor of the techs, for example, can lead to quotes, and that involves digging into the books. Same with Diplo responses, if we have any actual quotes from the leaders we choose that are appropriate to CiV situations.

You mention some other stuff below that we don't need to resolve in real time - flavor for non-unique units and buildings and the like. You could do a wonders-pass proposal as well, everywhere that we've just marked "wonder" on the tree needs us to choose something to fill that spot. We do also need to choose mechanics for a lot of those as well - I'm assuming we won't take the abilities over straight from BNW, just us them as structural inspiration?

I'm sure there will be more if we sit down to work this out at length when we're done with civs and uniques.

counterpoint said:
As far as the specific things you've called out as next:

1) final civ decisions and uniques: This one needs to absolutely be done together, I'd say. Should probably be done pre-implementation. However:
1a) flavor of the civs - leaders, city names, etc., I could probably make proposals more or less on my own. Can be done while doing implementation
2) Policies and Tenets. I think the Tenets might largely remain unchanged, and might need some new flavor, and other tweaking, plus additions from our new mechanics. I can probably handle leading this on my own, and can thus probably be done while you're implementationing. But...
2a) Policies, specifically, is trickier. We spoke about maybe launching it vanilla-style (i.e. BNW-style) and tweaking later, but given the split paths and such, that's a little complex and might be good to have in place at launch. However, we could assign this to me, and leave me to come up with a proposal of sorts, that I build while you're doing other implementation.
3) Tech flavor,a s well as units, buildings, etc. - This doesn't need to be done pre-implementation. As far as who does it, based on how the tech tree went, it probably would end up of the highest quality if we do it in tandem, but in the interest of efficiency, it might be best if I take the lead here, and come up with proposals, not unlike what I did for a few of the early tech tree eras

Totally agree on #1, we'll want to go through that together and before implementing stuff, while we're in the design groove.

For 1a, I would like to be a part of the leaders decisions - we could even do that while doing #1 a whittling it down to our final set for each civ. I do agree with the crux of your 1a point though, that there's a lot of other flavor that we need to gather that you can do while I'm implementing stuff.

I would like to change Tenets for WoTMod, since they'll otherwise stand out as left alone where we changed everything else. Still, that's not something we need to necessarily deal with first. You've mentioned here that we discussed leaving the Policies BNW style to start with, and it's worth saying that we're not committed to *not* designing anything else, once we start an implementation phase. We can put a bunch of stuff in the game and then come back to designing the changes to Policies.

I'd say I'd like to be involved with the overall decisions of Policies that knock on from the whole "mutually exclusive trees" approach we decided on before. And of course I'm happy with you getting us started with a proposal. Given the scope of the changes that we've already defined though, I wouldn't think there would be enough content for you to do a Channeling-starting-post-style proposal for the Policies, which would need to take a similar amount of time to give me time to get anything into the game in the interim.

Totally agree on #3, that we make better stuff together, but it will be significantly faster to parallelize this aspect of the process, since there's such a huge chunk of flavor-izing to do on the tech tree.

However, one thing I would like to bring up here is: do we plan to use exact mechanical mirrors of BNW's buildings and such? Like, will our Granary equivalent have the same effect as the Granary, just different name and icon? I would love to make even these basic buildings and units different in some mechanical way as well. It's a large undertaking, but I feel like our reshuffling of the tech tree will already have unbalanced Firaxis' calibrated effects, so the balancing requirements will be similar even if we make these kinds of changes.

Obviously a lot of the buildings do fairly fundamental things that we can't avoid being similar to. (The Food buildings need to help Food yield in the city somehow, etc. for each feature of the basic buildings.) I think we can definitely be much more "pedestrian" than we've been with any uniques, but even small tweaks that end up as a mechanical wash will make the player experience notably different from BNW in the mod.

counterpoint said:
As far as the other stuff - strengh of units, etc., I figure we'll hold off on that stuff, and deal with that as things actually come together big-picture. And then there's the more specific "Flavor" stuff - art, music, text. I'm good with all of it except the art.

I do really hope we can find an artist! The best way of doing that seems to be to demonstrate a working mod, so that's our pitch to them!

Once again I've run out of time midway through my Cairhien reply, so I'll try to finish that up tomorrow. I'm going to be home late, but there isn't too much left, so it should be doable.

counterpoint · Aug 23, 2016

S3rgeus said:
The option is probably the closest to working, but if the Hunter offers a bonus for it and the other unit is only useful for indirection, I feel like Illian will always choose the Hunter, which makes it not much of a choice.

Your point about Illian's flavor not making them specifically good at using the Horn is a good one. I suppose I'm mainly thinking that it's odd for our mechanics to encourage the player to go after something that isn't an "objective" in itself (the various victory conditions are their own objectives, for example), and then not reward them differently from other players who do it normally. Still, maybe that isn't a problem - the Horn is still quite an event and pretty strong as well.

I was thinking the niche-ness is more of a consideration for the power of the unit (reducing the Horn's cooldown doesn't make the unit much better in the grand scheme of things since there are so few Hornblowers in any game), we'd totally need to address the odd behavior as an orthogonal issue to the niche-ness.

Maybe we just stick with the combat bonus? I still feel like there should be some s way to do a Hornblower bonus in this unit somewhere though.

I think the whole increased-bonus-per-mythic-site-explored thing is the way to go. However, we could also give it some bonus that is active whenever the Horn is in Illian's possession, or whenever Illian summons with the horn, etc. We had a UA that did that well, but this unit doesn't have that. MAybe, it'd be a non-domination-related bonus (since using a scout for war is weird anyways, maybe, though with the strength bonus, maybe not), though I'm not sure how to swing that with a UU.

S3rgeus said:
I think the reasons we discussed before are good guidelines for now, but we had to make them with only theoretical knowledge of what it would mean to design the civs involved. I think we can make a more informed decision now that we've done the ones so far, so we shouldn't feel beholden to the civs we chose before. I know that I specifically avoided pruning the list further because we would have this chance to re-evaluate after we'd done a chunk of civs.

However, as you mentioned last time, Cairhien makes the 13th civ we've designed, and if our launch line up is 14 civs, then we need at least one more! I'd be inclined to be put Ghealdan in that slot.

Based on what you've mentioned here about civs that players will "expect to see", I'd say going past our intended target by 2 (so, also designing Amadicia and Altara) will give us some good wiggle room. We'll be able to consider a selection of civs on a mechanical necessity basis ("we have no Faith civs", "there are too few Science civs", "there are too many Culture civs", and that kind of thing) without needing to design new civs to introduce new options. We'll also cover more of the civs that are a major part of the flavor.

So, Ghealdan, Amadicia, then Altara and we're done with this phase?

oh, ok, so that's a list of 16 civs to consider. I think that's probably fine for now. I'm not sure any of the ones we'd be leaving out would cause people to cry foul (maybe, maybe Tarabon/Arad Doman, even though they ain't all that exciting, IMO...)

Cool! What order should we hit them? Maybe break up the two faith civs, or at least have a different one of us lead off on them?

S3rgeus said:
Agreed that a bunch of the flavor text isn't necessarily very useful now. In our initial set up, it's fine for us to have placeholders everywhere. The difficulty with finding flavor text this early is that if the design changes underneath them, then it becomes wasted work.

Still, there are some that are quite visible and less likely to change. The flavor of the techs, for example, can lead to quotes, and that involves digging into the books. Same with Diplo responses, if we have any actual quotes from the leaders we choose that are appropriate to CiV situations.

yeah, you're right that some of the stuff would be problematic to come up with now, while some are much safer.

S3rgeus said:
You mention some other stuff below that we don't need to resolve in real time - flavor for non-unique units and buildings and the like. You could do a wonders-pass proposal as well, everywhere that we've just marked "wonder" on the tree needs us to choose something to fill that spot. We do also need to choose mechanics for a lot of those as well - I'm assuming we won't take the abilities over straight from BNW, just us them as structural inspiration?

I'm sure there will be more if we sit down to work this out at length when we're done with civs and uniques.

So as far as Wonders, I'd been thinking that we probably would generally keep them similar to how they are in BNW. Part of that is likely because I haven't thought much about it. I think it might be kind of like the tech tree, maybe - keep the same general abilities, but shuffle them around between specific wonders. i.e., change the overall strategy of their implementation, without having to come up with tons of abilities.

In any case, if I did a "wonder pass," I'd probably start with the flavor, then try to fit the BNW wonders in them as a template, and then adjust them to better fit the flavor, and sweeten the mechanics a bit.

S3rgeus said:
Totally agree on #1, we'll want to go through that together and before implementing stuff, while we're in the design groove.

agreed on civ decisions.

S3rgeus said:
For 1a, I would like to be a part of the leaders decisions - we could even do that while doing #1 a whittling it down to our final set for each civ. I do agree with the crux of your 1a point though, that there's a lot of other flavor that we need to gather that you can do while I'm implementing stuff.

FYI, I'm not suggesting I really make many *decisions* here, anyways, so much as propose suggestions. Still, I have no desire/need to do much more than propose some options for Leaders - should be a team decision, for sure. But cities and all that are a bit different.

S3rgeus said:
I would like to change Tenets for WoTMod, since they'll otherwise stand out as left alone where we changed everything else. Still, that's not something we need to necessarily deal with first. You've mentioned here that we discussed leaving the Policies BNW style to start with, and it's worth saying that we're not committed to *not* designing anything else, once we start an implementation phase. We can put a bunch of stuff in the game and then come back to designing the changes to Policies.

I'm thinking, again, of doing a kind of "reshuffle" for the Tenets. Keep a lot of the same things around, but tweak them and recombine them. Would probably start with BNW as a framework, then merge with the relevant flavor, and tweak abilities and/or fill in the gaps. Sort of like what we did we Path customs - include many of the same, but tweak and add more.

S3rgeus said:
I'd say I'd like to be involved with the overall decisions of Policies that knock on from the whole "mutually exclusive trees" approach we decided on before. And of course I'm happy with you getting us started with a proposal. Given the scope of the changes that we've already defined though, I wouldn't think there would be enough content for you to do a Channeling-starting-post-style proposal for the Policies, which would need to take a similar amount of time to give me time to get anything into the game in the interim.

Well, this proposal isn't an epic framing post, it'd be a proposal. So, if I came up with something, it'd more likely resemble the tech tree discussions, rather than the channeling or Uniques and Civs framing posts. We have already, as you suggest here, "framed" this issue quite well. It'd just a matter of inserting actual policies. Again, I'd be inclined to try to work in most of the BNW mechanics somewhere. But here, with the split-paths, we have room for much more.

S3rgeus said:
Totally agree on #3, that we make better stuff together, but it will be significantly faster to parallelize this aspect of the process, since there's such a huge chunk of flavor-izing to do on the tech tree.

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
However, one thing I would like to bring up here is: do we plan to use exact mechanical mirrors of BNW's buildings and such? Like, will our Granary equivalent have the same effect as the Granary, just different name and icon? I would love to make even these basic buildings and units different in some mechanical way as well. It's a large undertaking, but I feel like our reshuffling of the tech tree will already have unbalanced Firaxis' calibrated effects, so the balancing requirements will be similar even if we make these kinds of changes.

Obviously a lot of the buildings do fairly fundamental things that we can't avoid being similar to. (The Food buildings need to help Food yield in the city somehow, etc. for each feature of the basic buildings.) I think we can definitely be much more "pedestrian" than we've been with any uniques, but even small tweaks that end up as a mechanical wash will make the player experience notably different from BNW in the mod.

Interesting, I suppose for units and buildings I'd been thinking we were going to *mostly* mirror them, but I do quite like the idea of "mixing it up a bit," especially given that we've mixed up things a bit (though, even though the tree is different, keeping things the same *would* be the safest and simplest solution, I'd say)

So, again, I think I might suggest we "match" them to BNW buildings first, assign flavor, and then come up with alternate versions of them. Either a different way of getting the same overall effect (e.g. instead of +X yield it's +Y% of the yield, or something), or else mixing in some other stuff (having the "circus" provide faith from pastures instead of production, or something), or swapping building-functionality (taking the specialist slots from one building, and putting them on another, but taking one of the second building's other bonuses and putting htem on the first). That kind of thing. In any case, I'd figure if I did a "building pass," I'd probably present two versions of each building - the Prime Form, and the Secondary (modified) Form.

Units, I'd say would be similar. Start with things mirroring BNW, but adjust as we want to fit the flavor (a "Sniffer" melee unit gets some extra sight, etc.) and/or changes in the tech tree (less prereqs = weaker unit, etc.). Again, probably two versions of each unit.

What say you about all that?

S3rgeus said:
I do really hope we can find an artist! The best way of doing that seems to be to demonstrate a working mod, so that's our pitch to them!

Yeah, that, and connecting to the WoT community. I'd say some kind of introduction may be in order sort of soon. Probably once we have a beta might be too late...

Also, since we're talking process, I did want to bring up CiVI again. Any more word on mod support or the feature set? We've been assuming that it'd be "vanilla" and won't have most of what we'd need, but I thought I'd ask since it's release is nearing... If we want to jump ship and consider designing it for that game, we should probably aim to do so before you start hardcore implementation, I'd guess (you know, maybe all our design would be portable, after X months of adaptation work, etc.).

S3rgeus · Aug 24, 2016

More advanced warning, I'm going to be traveling this weekend. And I'll be leaving straight from work on Friday, so I need to do a bunch of preparation tomorrow. I'll try to get to the planning post tomorrow evening, but I don't think I'll be able to do another round on Cairhien before I go. I'll be back on Tuesday (bank holiday Monday here)!

counterpoint said:
how do you choose to pronounce this civ? The glossaries seem to indicate its something like kai ree en but the glossaries are inconsistent...

I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. I read it as "care-hee-en" when reading the books, so that pronunciation is stuck in my head now. What about you?

counterpoint said:
is it? If it's all buildings, true, you could put one in every building, but if there aren't specialists otherwise in those buildings, you get nothing (this increases specialist yields, not simply yields). Maybe that's an acceptable balancing act - getting the right amount of "modifiers" (with their unhappiness) mixed with the actual producers.

Aha, I see what you mean, the Noble Specialist has no yields unto itself (oddly appropriate). Does it provide any LP points, since other Specialists normally do?

I would say, since the Noble primarily/only (depending on the above) affects the yields of other Specialists, we'd only want to put them in buildings that already have Specialists, otherwise players could unknowingly waste their Population by putting them into Noble slots that are alone on a building. I don't think we want to present the player with an option that's all downside.

counterpoint said:
yeah, I feel like the nice thing about techs though is that its a more direct relationship to science. If we had an ability that helps science, that ability would feed this ability. True, eras rely on science, too, but in a way that zooms way out and feels less direct. Plus, this is more unique, I suppose. I'd be fine with the yields being relatively small - can also scale by era.

I dunno, I feel like eras relate quite directly to Science. Particularly when playing Poland and other civs that care about era changes, I plan out my tech path to maximize the usefulness of their UA, which is quite Science-y. I mainly suggest it because we could make X, Y, and Z quite a bit larger with eras as the triggers, and they would be more appreciable bonuses for most players.

counterpoint said:
not special flavor-wise, or not special mechanically? I agree with the latter. Regarding the flavor, though, this is kind of the only combat UU option for this civ that utilizes a proper noun, so I think we need to try to come up with an option for it. I'm fine redding this, but I'll try for another below.

Totally agreed on retrying with the same flavor. I wanted to suggest one with the same name last time but ran out of time to brainstorm!

counterpoint said:
no flavor basis. This is simply a tall-mechanic oriented ability. Should it be axed or changed to something else (gold?)

I'd be inclined to go with red for this one, it doesn't feel like there's a good flavor connection between the mechanics and the flavor of what the unit does in game.

counterpoint said:
ok, I'm redding it, then. Should we try for another MoL unit?

Yeah, that's good flavor. I've suggested another one below.

counterpoint said:
Are we ok with this allowing the player to "attack" other culture civs by seeking out and destroying relics? In all other cases, if a civ gets to a SoP before you, you can always recapture the relic by capturing their city.

Also, this is without limitation, number-wise. In CiV, you can only realistically explore SoP as often as you have slots to hold the relics (excepting ones in range of your cities or CSs, where you'd build Portal Stones). Here, it seems a somewhat viable strategy to build *tons* of academics, as soon as you can, and mount a huge science lead in Era 5. This is also particularly epic when paired with Hidden Sites of Power, which I think we still have. That would make that social policy tree essentially a second rationalism, based on the potential science payout!

In other words, should this be limited somehow? Based on your relic slots? Create an actual science-only-producing relic? Diminishing returns? It seems like we might want some kind of balancing agent.

Hmmm, this is a good point. The existing limitation on Historians presented by the number of Artifact slots a civ has left does prevent one civ from running away with all of the world's Sites of Power, and this unique would lead Cairhien do that. We also probably don't want to use Artifact slots as our proxy limiting factor for this unique, since that's a Wide-encouraging mechanic (more cities to build buildings that have LW slots).

I do agree that some kind of limit would be useful here. I'm trying to think of ways to make it so that it's not something too direct ("only one can be alive at once" is a bit direct), but something that builds the limitation into the mechanic of how they're used.

Ah, we could make them consume one of the strategic resources? Sulfur (if that's at the right part of the tree)?

counterpoint said:
ok, maybe not (high) then?

Yeah, let's not do (high).

counterpoint said:
what do you think, ultimately? change to food? Change to era? or just nuke it? I think one pop per era is *too* small...

One Pop per era would definitely be too small - I'm thinking something like 5 per era.

counterpoint said:
eh, redding it because of the dependency issue.

Works for me.

counterpoint said:
you mean people will trade less with Cairhien in order to deny them the science? Like a morocco thing?

Also, what do you mean at least X science?

I mean players would trade with Cairhien less because trade routes they establish with Cairhien give Cairhien more Science, yes, sort of like Morocco. This plays into your question - normally trade routes provide Science to the players on both ends based on the tech differences between those players. The more techs one side has that the other doesn't, the more Science the other gets. This effect would mean Cairhien gets X + normal differential Science, so they have a baseline Science yield from all trade routes. For all other civs, X is 0, they get only the differential.

counterpoint said:
The negotiation for votes thing might be fine, but also is quite minor - if anything, it feels like one of those abilities that will be good inasmuch as you can exploit the AI's stupidity with it. Selling them Iron and Horses in Era 9 for a compact vote... So, not totally sold here.

I don't think this is a problem for this unique, because this is just a general problem. The AI being bad at negotiating votes is something the player can already abuse through Diplomats (targeting the civs with the most votes). You can already get the majority of the "abuse" bonus without this bonus, so I don't see it as a detriment to the unique. I've also found that the AI is actually ok at valuing their own votes quite highly - I'm rarely able to get them to vote directly against themselves, and if I do it's usually at significant cost (a few luxuries I would rather have kept and such).

counterpoint said:
I think the EaE aspect is interesting, though somewhat redundant to the tech-theft aspect. I wonder if that takes off its luster, especially since this lets you leech science from any civ, not just ones with the tech lead.

Also, I'm wondering if these EaE-provide-X ones should be framed to include diplomats in some complementary way. I think the diplomats make as much sense as a part of D D'm flavor as do the EaE.

I think that's the good part about the EaE bonus though - you're always getting some kind of bonus from them even if they eventually fail to steal the tech. The existing tech steal doesn't diminish the value of the Science you get otherwise, in the same way that it doesn't diminish the usefulness of Science buildings at home. It's also good that it lets Cairhien exploit players who it has pulled ahead of, since a Science civ will tend to do that and we don't want their unique to stop working because they're doing well.

I think the EaE-provides-X abilities in general could include Diplomats quite effectively, but I don't think it fits well on this one, since that competes with the negotiate-with-anybody part of the ability (EaE are more useful since they give the Science bonus and you don't need the Diplomat to negotiate for votes, so giving a bonus to Diplomats on top of that fights against the first two).

counterpoint said:
I want to like this ability. It seems pretty neat and fun when used appropriately. However, I feel pretty sure this will not be used appropriately - again, an ability who's usefulness (and balance) is dependent upon really stupid AI practice. We'll be forced to balance it such that using it "honestly" won't be all that effective (since we have to set the values so abuses such as described by you don't mean auto-win"

Maybe we limit it by civ, or something? Like, only one active trade deal per civ counts? Still, that would encourage you to keep "maintenance trades" of minor stuff, even when civs aren't offering you anything good.

Not sure how, if at all, we can save this one.

Yeah, agreed. I can't think of any way to do this ability where using it properly will be rewarding and abusing it doesn't break the game. Red, then, I guess!

counterpoint said:
Hmmm.... I assume you can only exhibit in this capital the same number of times you could exhibit in any other capital, right?

I think this one has potential, but I worry about such uber-late-game bonuses. They're useful for such a short period, and, in this case, *only* if you're pursuing the SVC - if you're going diplo, or culture, it's useless. In that case, its just a simple +%science.

The last ability is also kind of scary, and rather dependent on others' actions.

Yes re the number of Exhibits.

I think it's a good way of doing this kind of late game bonus though, because the National Wonder (Science) 2 is something that every Tall civ will definitely want to build, so this just adds value on top of that. We're not enticing a player to do something new here, we're making something new happen when they do something that would be a part of their plan anyway, which I think is generally a fine way to include a bonus.

I think the dependency on other players is fine for the last part, because of the context of the system it's in. Other players can't deny Cairhien this bonus because of the way Exhibitions work, or at least must specifically compensate for it, which gives Cairhien strength in the endgame Science race. It's not the crux of the building's effect, so it doesn't matter so much if it comes into play in a given game, the uniqueness aspect is still useful (self-Exhibition and the added Science bonus).

counterpoint said:
Is this combination of words direct flavor, or are you recombining existing proper nouns?

Royal Academy.

I'm just combining existing proper nouns.

counterpoint said:
ok, doing this out of order, talking about the tech first.

OK, overall not totally sold on having a UT. It feels a little wonky. I'm open to it, it's certainly interesting, but it's also... kind of wonky.

Logistical question: how many Unique slots does this take up, considering its a Tech and a UB?

I wasn't intending to suggest the UB and UT as a necessarily packaged deal - I've linked these instances together because it works well, but we could do either in isolation, as you've done below with the UB. So choosing both of these uniques would be two slots.

counterpoint said:
Similarly, you say below that Foregate *replaces* the food national wonder. aren't they one and the same, since no-one else but Cairhien would be able to build it (though they could capture it via conquest)? Or are you saying that "normal food bonus" is one Unique slot, and "pop explosion" would take two.

Other players can steal the Academics tech, which would unlock the normal National Wonder (Food) for them. This is why I mentioned it would also combine well with some kind of bonus that relies on foreign EaE in Cairhien, since players would be encouraged to steal from Cairhien as the only way to get that tech (which would help them a lot). I mentioned in the tech suggestion below that the other player wouldn't receive the full bonus of the tech if they stole it, but thinking back on this, I wonder if it would be better if they got the same effect? This would make it much more like other technologies - it does a thing once it's been unlocked by a civ, regardless of who they are.

The normal National Wonder (Food) is just a normal building, like any other. Nothing special about how it itself works and it is not a UB. It's just unlocked by a tech that most players can't research, making it inaccessible most of the time. (Hence why it's a National Wonder that I added, so it's not a foundational one the game needs as seen in BNW.) The Cairhienin UB, if we package them together this way, would replace that building, as we would normally replace any other building, so would be one unique slot.

counterpoint said:
In terms of the overall effects of the tech, I think overall it's fine. Just not totally sold on its existence.

I think it's an interesting potential unique. How it works is quite simple, it just requires the player to consider splitting apart some of the notions that the default techs allow players to conflate, even though they don't need to be related. (Like the lack of uniqueness of National Wonder (Food) above.)

counterpoint said:
OK, so I think this is a pretty cool idea. I'd like to actually divorce it somewhat from the tech idea, so it'd be possible even if we didn't do it.

Doubling might be too high, but if it's late enough in the game, it might be awesome.

We might need to couple it with a unique that helps with happiness in the late-game, to offset this problem.

since it's a one-time thing, it's (unlike most buildings) not simply something you want ASAP, possibly (to maximize your free population). Do you think this will create a clunky metagame of people trying to pick the perfect moment to build it, or is that fine? I hate this aspect of Oxford University.

Interesting, I actually really like that aspect of the Oxford University - trying to finish it at exactly the right time to get an expensive tech for free. I think this would create a similar sort of thing, but mostly where the player needs to ensure they have enough Happiness to deal with the sudden Population increase.

I'm fine with a version of this that doesn't use the unique tech, I had intended for it to be a separate consider-able unique.

counterpoint said:
Interesting, mechanically! The culture one might be hitting the culture a little too high - we could theoretically adjust it so it provides science instead of Prestige (but probably not that high).

The science one is kind of nuts, but might be fun.

Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of the arbitrary limit on the Culture one of how many can be constructed. I'd almost like it if you could only start construction on them on turn numbers divisible by 7 or something like that?

counterpoint said:
The new Con Bannerman is meant to be bolstered by huge cities, and as such pairs well with the Foregate building. Could be based, instead, on the pop of the capital, not the producing city. And, could additionally have some other unaffiliated bonus (increased strength or something) so it isnt just a generic unit with high exp.

I like the idea of basing it off the city it's produced in - keeps the bonus easily understandable in the context of choosing what a single city should build and still works really well with a Tall strategy.

counterpoint said:
The new foregate is simply a way to get your mechanic without using Academics as a UT. It could be either the spy wonder, if we want era 6 (and probably limit the bonus), or the very late Prestige wonder (era 8), where we'd let the bonus be massive.

Looks good!

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking).
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (trade deal), completing a trade deal with another civilization grants Cairhien +X influence with all City-States allied with that civilization.
Daes Dae'mar (Happiness), Cairhien gains +X Happiness for each City-State it is allied with and for each level of influence it has with the Tower. Declarations of Friendship and Defensive Pacts provide Cairhien with +Y Happiness.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Noble Cavalry, replaces era 5-8 Mounted, +X% (high) combat strength against Melee units. Pillaging worked enemy tiles produces Y Food in the Cairhienin capital.
Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.

UBs:

Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness)
Foregate (big pop), replaces <building>, The city gains 2 population points each time it gains population.
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold (high) and +Y Food (high) in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 3, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence with the destination City-State for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (tech pop), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever a technology is acquired Cairhien enters a new era, this city gains one X (like 5) Population points." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

UTs:

Academics, in Era 8 column 1, depends on Wells. When Cairhien researches this technology, a Scholar appears near the Cairhienin capital. Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation and grants +X permanent Happiness. If another civilization steals this technology, they receive a permanent +Y (lower) Happiness (and none of the other effects).

Some more new stuff!

I've found that a lot of our Tall mechanics often center on making the player Taller, and letting them deal with the Happiness in their own way. So I figured some options that let Tall players generate *extra* Happiness (or less Unhappiness) would also work well.

Daes Dae'mar (Happiness) tries to create a Happiness-related ability that connects to Diplomacy.

(specHapp) (since both Specialist and Happiness names are taken) uses the Noble Specialist idea from your (specialist) to create a Tall-favoring Happiness mechanic. The idea is that Nobles make the Specialists they work with not produce Unhappiness, but any Specialists that *don't* have Nobles to work with (in the same building) produce significantly more Unhappiness, based on how many other Nobles are in the city. This encourages specialization, putting Specialists only where you can also put Nobles, for most efficient Happiness.

Master of the Lances is a nod to the flavor of the Masters being noble (as in noble lineage, rather than noble of character) co-ordinators, rather than necessarily great warriors. So they can direct away oncoming attacks sometimes. Not sure if this hits the flavor mark though.

S3rgeus · Aug 25, 2016

Woop, I managed to get another post in! Now I'm off for the weekend, so I'll see you on Tuesday!

counterpoint said:
I think the whole increased-bonus-per-mythic-site-explored thing is the way to go. However, we could also give it some bonus that is active whenever the Horn is in Illian's possession, or whenever Illian summons with the horn, etc. We had a UA that did that well, but this unit doesn't have that. MAybe, it'd be a non-domination-related bonus (since using a scout for war is weird anyways, maybe, though with the strength bonus, maybe not), though I'm not sure how to swing that with a UU.

The unit could generate a yield when the Horn is blown, or something like that? Ir's a bit strange though. Progress towards a Great Captain? Still feels like a more building/ability effect though, than a unit.

We could stick with just the combat bonus and see if we need to add more?

counterpoint said:
oh, ok, so that's a list of 16 civs to consider. I think that's probably fine for now. I'm not sure any of the ones we'd be leaving out would cause people to cry foul (maybe, maybe Tarabon/Arad Doman, even though they ain't all that exciting, IMO...)

Agreed, I think they're the ones fans will call out first as missing. But I think that's ok - wanting diversity in the timeline is easy to explain and we figured those were the least important and interesting of the modern day civs. They'll come to the mod eventually, but just not a part of the initial crop!

counterpoint said:
Cool! What order should we hit them? Maybe break up the two faith civs, or at least have a different one of us lead off on them?

Good point about breaking up the two Faith civs - shall we do Ghealdan, then Altara, and then Amadicia? I have some ideas already on Ghealdan so I can start us off on them once we're done with Cairhien.

counterpoint said:
So as far as Wonders, I'd been thinking that we probably would generally keep them similar to how they are in BNW. Part of that is likely because I haven't thought much about it. I think it might be kind of like the tech tree, maybe - keep the same general abilities, but shuffle them around between specific wonders. i.e., change the overall strategy of their implementation, without having to come up with tons of abilities.

In any case, if I did a "wonder pass," I'd probably start with the flavor, then try to fit the BNW wonders in them as a template, and then adjust them to better fit the flavor, and sweeten the mechanics a bit.

I think the wonders are the ones I'd be more inclined to diverge from BNW's specifics. The general themes (this wonder helps Culture, this one helps Science) are good signposts, but given that only one player gets each one in each game, they never become the foundational part of how the game is balanced. They're the ";eaf nodes" of a lot of the balancing problems, which makes shaking them up have fewer knock-on effects in the rest of the game. Individual wonders become objectives for certain playstyles/game objectives, and that's a lot about their specific effects, but I don't think we're really tied to the BNW wonder effects as long as we cover the more general bases of their roles in the game.

Totally agree that starting with flavor is where we'd want to go - look and see what we have available and what kinds of abilities that incites.

counterpoint said:
FYI, I'm not suggesting I really make many *decisions* here, anyways, so much as propose suggestions. Still, I have no desire/need to do much more than propose some options for Leaders - should be a team decision, for sure. But cities and all that are a bit different.

Yeah, gathering together leaders for us to decide would be a good call, that would be good.

counterpoint said:
I'm thinking, again, of doing a kind of "reshuffle" for the Tenets. Keep a lot of the same things around, but tweak them and recombine them. Would probably start with BNW as a framework, then merge with the relevant flavor, and tweak abilities and/or fill in the gaps. Sort of like what we did we Path customs - include many of the same, but tweak and add more.

Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about the feel of the system - it should feel like a quite different experience from BNW to the player. Even if the goals are the same, I'd like it if they couldn't draw direct parallels like "this is the new Space Procurements" and "this is the new Iron Curtain".

counterpoint said:
Well, this proposal isn't an epic framing post, it'd be a proposal. So, if I came up with something, it'd more likely resemble the tech tree discussions, rather than the channeling or Uniques and Civs framing posts. We have already, as you suggest here, "framed" this issue quite well. It'd just a matter of inserting actual policies. Again, I'd be inclined to try to work in most of the BNW mechanics somewhere. But here, with the split-paths, we have room for much more.

Re framing post vs proposal, that's what I'm saying - a framing-post-sized endeavor parallelizes better because it gives me more time to implement stuff, but the framing of the Policies discussion that we've already done makes such a framing post not really viable.

Still, yes, I'd be totally up for you doing proposals for Policies. As you've said, we're mostly inserting actual Policies at this point, rather than deciding on the structure of the system, and the split-paths gives us a lot of uniqueness. I would mostly say that I'd want the Policies to feel quite different to the BNW ones, even if they do achieve the same goals.

counterpoint said:
Interesting, I suppose for units and buildings I'd been thinking we were going to *mostly* mirror them, but I do quite like the idea of "mixing it up a bit," especially given that we've mixed up things a bit (though, even though the tree is different, keeping things the same *would* be the safest and simplest solution, I'd say)

So, again, I think I might suggest we "match" them to BNW buildings first, assign flavor, and then come up with alternate versions of them. Either a different way of getting the same overall effect (e.g. instead of +X yield it's +Y% of the yield, or something), or else mixing in some other stuff (having the "circus" provide faith from pastures instead of production, or something), or swapping building-functionality (taking the specialist slots from one building, and putting them on another, but taking one of the second building's other bonuses and putting htem on the first). That kind of thing. In any case, I'd figure if I did a "building pass," I'd probably present two versions of each building - the Prime Form, and the Secondary (modified) Form.

Units, I'd say would be similar. Start with things mirroring BNW, but adjust as we want to fit the flavor (a "Sniffer" melee unit gets some extra sight, etc.) and/or changes in the tech tree (less prereqs = weaker unit, etc.). Again, probably two versions of each unit.

What say you about all that?

Starting with a mirror and moving on to a modified version sounds like a very good call. The default buildings and units need to provide foundational aspects of the game, and so there aren't many ways to do those basic yields and such differently without making it really difficult to play the game properly. (Complex abilities on these would be difficult to keep up with and make the player jump through too many hoops to make their normal buildings/units work.)

counterpoint said:
Yeah, that, and connecting to the WoT community. I'd say some kind of introduction may be in order sort of soon. Probably once we have a beta might be too late...

I dunno, we don't have much to show the community at the moment. There's a certain amount of building buzz and word of mouth that would be a part of this, but I think player-created ventures like mods live by playability, which is still a ways off for us. I doubt the design concept would capture many people's attention long enough to keep them interested to play many months from now when there's something more to see. I would be inclined to start reaching out when we have early playable builds, but maybe even after that. Mods' audiences tend to spread by recommendation, and people can only recommend a mod that works. We get more players from "Go play this awesome thing here!" than "Keep an eye on this awesome concept" - especially since players are (understandably) more skeptical of mods that aren't yet released than full games that aren't yet released.

counterpoint said:
Also, since we're talking process, I did want to bring up CiVI again. Any more word on mod support or the feature set? We've been assuming that it'd be "vanilla" and won't have most of what we'd need, but I thought I'd ask since it's release is nearing... If we want to jump ship and consider designing it for that game, we should probably aim to do so before you start hardcore implementation, I'd guess (you know, maybe all our design would be portable, after X months of adaptation work, etc.).

Firaxis have released statements and such, but I don't think we'll know for sure until the game comes out and the mod tools are released. I'll certainly take a look at them as soon as they are made available and see what kinds of things are possible - whether the kind of overhaul this mod requires is possible in CiVI as well. We may get some more specific news about the mod tools before the game comes out, but it's not actually too long before CiVI comes out, and it's also common for the mod tools to be released after the game (months sometimes), so we may have to wait a bit there.

I do think we'd also need to play a fair bit of CiVI ourselves to be able to shift our design over to it. A lot of my recommendations in this thread are based on experience from playing hundreds of hours of CiV!

That said, if CiVI has the right tools, switching over does have a lot of upsides. Even if it does take us X months to sweep through and redesign a lot of the foundational stuff, CiVI will have a longer lifetime (from present day) and a better potential for shiny new features that can help us overcome some of the challenges CiV presents. And I'm looking forward to seeing if new art content is easier to create and import in CiVI than it is in CiV, because that's a super painful process at the moment!

counterpoint · Aug 28, 2016

S3rgeus said:
More advanced warning, I'm going to be traveling this weekend. And I'll be leaving straight from work on Friday, so I need to do a bunch of preparation tomorrow. I'll try to get to the planning post tomorrow evening, but I don't think I'll be able to do another round on Cairhien before I go. I'll be back on Tuesday (bank holiday Monday here)!

Yeah, well I was out of town this weekend, and have been insanely busy besides. Truthfully I probably shouldn't be doing this post right now.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon of posting-frequency might be coming to a rapid end, on my end, at least for a bit. I'll try to keep up the pace, but I'm not sure. Basically school (i.e. work) starts next week and I have a whole bunch more on my plate this time 'round. Translation: much less of a chance to sneak in a post here and there.

Hopefully it won't mess everything up. Will do my best.

S3rgeus said:
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. I read it as "care-hee-en" when reading the books, so that pronunciation is stuck in my head now. What about you?

last read-through I tried for the glossary pronunciation. My first few read-throughs, though, I think I was more like Care-Hine

S3rgeus said:
Aha, I see what you mean, the Noble Specialist has no yields unto itself (oddly appropriate). Does it provide any LP points, since other Specialists normally do?

Hmmm.... I'd say no. What do you think?

S3rgeus said:
I would say, since the Noble primarily/only (depending on the above) affects the yields of other Specialists, we'd only want to put them in buildings that already have Specialists, otherwise players could unknowingly waste their Population by putting them into Noble slots that are alone on a building. I don't think we want to present the player with an option that's all downside.

Yeah, that makes sense. There'd be no point to having them in, say, a granary.

S3rgeus said:
I dunno, I feel like eras relate quite directly to Science. Particularly when playing Poland and other civs that care about era changes, I plan out my tech path to maximize the usefulness of their UA, which is quite Science-y. I mainly suggest it because we could make X, Y, and Z quite a bit larger with eras as the triggers, and they would be more appreciable bonuses for most players.

ok. This could be an option, then.

S3rgeus said:
I'd be inclined to go with red for this one, it doesn't feel like there's a good flavor connection between the mechanics and the flavor of what the unit does in game.

ok. fine with red for this one.

S3rgeus said:
Hmmm, this is a good point. The existing limitation on Historians presented by the number of Artifact slots a civ has left does prevent one civ from running away with all of the world's Sites of Power, and this unique would lead Cairhien do that. We also probably don't want to use Artifact slots as our proxy limiting factor for this unique, since that's a Wide-encouraging mechanic (more cities to build buildings that have LW slots).

hmm... yeah, it is wide-favoring, especially due to museums. But isn't the likelihood of wonders (with LW slots) in a tall civ a bit of a compensation for that? Or is the Relic type specifically still disadvantaged in Tall civs?

S3rgeus said:
I do agree that some kind of limit would be useful here. I'm trying to think of ways to make it so that it's not something too direct ("only one can be alive at once" is a bit direct), but something that builds the limitation into the mechanic of how they're used.

Ah, we could make them consume one of the strategic resources? Sulfur (if that's at the right part of the tree)?

I'm kind of stuck on this one! I think the problem with the suggestions you made (one at a time or strategic resource-need) is that they also inhibit the ability for the Academic to be used as a normal historian. I'd say it's reasonable for the Historian to be able to periodically grab a regular Relic, or, perhaps more likely, build a Portal Stone. These kinds of limitations prevent that from even being an option, which makes the UU actually *worse* than the Historian in certain ways. That's a problem, I think.

I'd say that limiting the use of the *ability* itself, or its benefits, is the pat we have to follow. I feel like there are three paths that stand out:

1) tie it to regular Relic use (takes up Relic slots, or something like that)
2) limit the use of the specific ability (cooldown, etc.)
3) limit the benefits of the ability (diminishing returns, etc.

Each of these has its own key problems. 1 is somewhat unintuitive and somewhat defeats the purpose, I think. 2 might be pretty clunky. 3 doesn't prevent people from still harvesting them all just to screw the other players.

I don't have any good ideas really.... I want this one to work, though.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, let's not do (high).

ok

S3rgeus said:
One Pop per era would definitely be too small - I'm thinking something like 5 per era.

ok, sounds good.

S3rgeus said:
I mean players would trade with Cairhien less because trade routes they establish with Cairhien give Cairhien more Science, yes, sort of like Morocco. This plays into your question - normally trade routes provide Science to the players on both ends based on the tech differences between those players. The more techs one side has that the other doesn't, the more Science the other gets. This effect would mean Cairhien gets X + normal differential Science, so they have a baseline Science yield from all trade routes. For all other civs, X is 0, they get only the differential.

ah, got it.

S3rgeus said:
I don't think this is a problem for this unique, because this is just a general problem. The AI being bad at negotiating votes is something the player can already abuse through Diplomats (targeting the civs with the most votes). You can already get the majority of the "abuse" bonus without this bonus, so I don't see it as a detriment to the unique. I've also found that the AI is actually ok at valuing their own votes quite highly - I'm rarely able to get them to vote directly against themselves, and if I do it's usually at significant cost (a few luxuries I would rather have kept and such).

Yeah, you're right that it's a general problem. I guess the diplo system is kind of broken to me in general, so it's hard for me to get that excited about basing a unique around it....

S3rgeus said:
I think that's the good part about the EaE bonus though - you're always getting some kind of bonus from them even if they eventually fail to steal the tech. The existing tech steal doesn't diminish the value of the Science you get otherwise, in the same way that it doesn't diminish the usefulness of Science buildings at home. It's also good that it lets Cairhien exploit players who it has pulled ahead of, since a Science civ will tend to do that and we don't want their unique to stop working because they're doing well.

I think the EaE-provides-X abilities in general could include Diplomats quite effectively, but I don't think it fits well on this one, since that competes with the negotiate-with-anybody part of the ability (EaE are more useful since they give the Science bonus and you don't need the Diplomat to negotiate for votes, so giving a bonus to Diplomats on top of that fights against the first two).

ok. I'm fine with this then.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, agreed. I can't think of any way to do this ability where using it properly will be rewarding and abusing it doesn't break the game. Red, then, I guess!

yes.

S3rgeus said:
Yes re the number of Exhibits.

I think it's a good way of doing this kind of late game bonus though, because the National Wonder (Science) 2 is something that every Tall civ will definitely want to build, so this just adds value on top of that. We're not enticing a player to do something new here, we're making something new happen when they do something that would be a part of their plan anyway, which I think is generally a fine way to include a bonus.

I think the dependency on other players is fine for the last part, because of the context of the system it's in. Other players can't deny Cairhien this bonus because of the way Exhibitions work, or at least must specifically compensate for it, which gives Cairhien strength in the endgame Science race. It's not the crux of the building's effect, so it doesn't matter so much if it comes into play in a given game, the uniqueness aspect is still useful (self-Exhibition and the added Science bonus).

I definitely take no issue with using this specific building - yes, this is a must-build for Tall civs. As mentioned, I just feel like the ability is a little narrow-focused towards the Science VC, instead of Science in general, which I don't love. Also, I feel like it gives help to that Science VC that isnt necessarily more fun than other help we could give. It doesn't make them better it just makes them have to do less. You know?

S3rgeus said:
I wasn't intending to suggest the UB and UT as a necessarily packaged deal - I've linked these instances together because it works well, but we could do either in isolation, as you've done below with the UB. So choosing both of these uniques would be two slots.

ok, Understood.

S3rgeus said:
Other players can steal the Academics tech, which would unlock the normal National Wonder (Food) for them. This is why I mentioned it would also combine well with some kind of bonus that relies on foreign EaE in Cairhien, since players would be encouraged to steal from Cairhien as the only way to get that tech (which would help them a lot). I mentioned in the tech suggestion below that the other player wouldn't receive the full bonus of the tech if they stole it, but thinking back on this, I wonder if it would be better if they got the same effect? This would make it much more like other technologies - it does a thing once it's been unlocked by a civ, regardless of who they are.

The normal National Wonder (Food) is just a normal building, like any other. Nothing special about how it itself works and it is not a UB. It's just unlocked by a tech that most players can't research, making it inaccessible most of the time. (Hence why it's a National Wonder that I added, so it's not a foundational one the game needs as seen in BNW.) The Cairhienin UB, if we package them together this way, would replace that building, as we would normally replace any other building, so would be one unique slot.

OK, I should start by saying I misinterpreted the NW (Food) as being available to anybody who steals the tech. You said somewhere before that the stealing civ only got Y happiness upon theft - I thought you meant that the happiness was literally all they got for the tech ("they receive a permanent +Y Happiness and none of the other effects)"

So I'm still a little unclear on this tech, since it's not even clear that it unlocks NW (Food) from the ability description (unless combo'd with Foregate (tech pop). So, what, specifically, are you proposing thieves get upon theft? Literally everything (not counting a UB)? I think this is problematic, actually. The thing is, it's rather easy to steal from somebody. Assuming you can block Cairhien from building the Wonder that blocks most stealing, it seems reasonable that people would be stealing this tech, and making it a high priority to do so - since you can choose which tech to steal, it's kind of only a matter of time. Mechanically fair or not, it allows all civs the ability to steal a civ's unique, which is really rather strange. That kind of thing should be very special, and this makes it not all that special, and it kind of turns the game into a "everybody start stealing from Cairhien as soon as we think they've researched that tech", which is quite weird, meta-wise (and flavor-wise). I don't feel like that's intended.

I think if we allow it to be stolen at all - which maybe we don't want - it should provide a different effect - lump science, happiness, or something. But I'm not convinced this is the best way to go with a Unique anyways.

S3rgeus said:
I think it's an interesting potential unique. How it works is quite simple, it just requires the player to consider splitting apart some of the notions that the default techs allow players to conflate, even though they don't need to be related. (Like the lack of uniqueness of National Wonder (Food) above.)

correct. It is interesting. That may not be enough, though.

S3rgeus said:
Interesting, I actually really like that aspect of the Oxford University - trying to finish it at exactly the right time to get an expensive tech for free. I think this would create a similar sort of thing, but mostly where the player needs to ensure they have enough Happiness to deal with the sudden Population increase.

I'm fine with a version of this that doesn't use the unique tech, I had intended for it to be a separate consider-able unique.

Yeah, I guess I hate it when I have to break immersion so much to meta-game. For example, I hate switching up my citizen management to take advantage of food accumulation not mattering when you're producing a settler. I hate further that I feel compelled to do it. I hate the idea that I have Oxford one turn away, but a tech 2 turns away, and I should probably finish that first tech first and then let the oxford complete. It breaks the flow and feels like I'm cheating.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of the arbitrary limit on the Culture one of how many can be constructed. I'd almost like it if you could only start construction on them on turn numbers divisible by 7 or something like that?

Maybe it's better to just say that a city can only work one at a time or something like that?

I wonder what the "point" of these UIs is, though. Is our goal to require the player to "maintain" their improvements, rebuilding them every X turns to keep them live? It seems kind of weird, once I think about it, gameplay-wise. It's basically a pretty good improvement, but one you have to keep bringing back. Kind of tedious - certainly not specifically fun-enhancing.

Is there a way to turn the "decay" of the improvement into a mechanic that promotes fun and interactivity, instead of maintenance?

Also, could we/should we consider linking up the Feast of Lights flavor with We Love the Kind day somehow?

S3rgeus said:
Some more new stuff!

I've found that a lot of our Tall mechanics often center on making the player Taller, and letting them deal with the Happiness in their own way. So I figured some options that let Tall players generate *extra* Happiness (or less Unhappiness) would also work well.

Daes Dae'mar (Happiness) tries to create a Happiness-related ability that connects to Diplomacy.

You're quite right that I've been putting out a lot of "Tall-making" mechanics. I guess I feel like those were otherwise kind of absent. We wouldn't want them for all the Tall civs, though.

I find, as a Tall civ, I usually have way too much Happiness, though. So, if we do a pro-hap ability, let's pair it with an ability that takes advantage of it somehow (with specialists or something).

DD'm (happiness) is relatively straightforward. Perhaps too much so. Might work, though.

S3rgeus said:
(specHapp) (since both Specialist and Happiness names are taken) uses the Noble Specialist idea from your (specialist) to create a Tall-favoring Happiness mechanic. The idea is that Nobles make the Specialists they work with not produce Unhappiness, but any Specialists that *don't* have Nobles to work with (in the same building) produce significantly more Unhappiness, based on how many other Nobles are in the city. This encourages specialization, putting Specialists only where you can also put Nobles, for most efficient Happiness.

(spechap) is actually a pretty nifty incorporation of the DD'm flavor, at least if you look at it sideways. That said, I worry that it's a little too complicated. A little two unwieldy, such that people will be tempted to just leave it on autopilot - it makes the unwieldy specialist system even more so (this is a problem with (specialist) as well, but I think it might be worse here). And I guess an ability like this that would be left to autopilot kind of defeats the purpose of its existence.

I don't know about this one. I think it might be moving in the right direction, flavor-wise.

S3rgeus said:
Master of the Lances is a nod to the flavor of the Masters being noble (as in noble lineage, rather than noble of character) co-ordinators, rather than necessarily great warriors. So they can direct away oncoming attacks sometimes. Not sure if this hits the flavor mark though.

Interesting. I think it hits the flavor decently, actually - hits that noble elitism well. Does it apply to other MotL's as well?

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin specialist buildings have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking).
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (Happiness), Cairhien gains +X Happiness for each City-State it is allied with and for each level of influence it has with the Tower. Declarations of Friendship and Defensive Pacts provide Cairhien with +Y Happiness.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.

UBs:

Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness)
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 3, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence with the destination City-State for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (tech pop), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever Cairhien enters a new era, this city gains X (like 5) Population points." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

UTs:

Academics, in Era 8 column 1, depends on Wells. When Cairhien researches this technology, a Scholar appears near the Cairhienin capital. Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation and grants +X permanent Happiness. If another civilization steals this technology, they receive a permanent +Y (lower) Happiness (and none of the other effects).

Some more new stuff!

I've found that a lot of our Tall mechanics often center on making the player Taller, and letting them deal with the Happiness in their own way. So I figured some options that let Tall players generate *extra* Happiness (or less Unhappiness) would also work well.

Daes Dae'mar (Happiness) tries to create a Happiness-related ability that connects to Diplomacy.

(specHapp) (since both Specialist and Happiness names are taken) uses the Noble Specialist idea from your (specialist) to create a Tall-favoring Happiness mechanic. The idea is that Nobles make the Specialists they work with not produce Unhappiness, but any Specialists that *don't* have Nobles to work with (in the same building) produce significantly more Unhappiness, based on how many other Nobles are in the city. This encourages specialization, putting Specialists only where you can also put Nobles, for most efficient Happiness.

Master of the Lances is a nod to the flavor of the Masters being noble (as in noble lineage, rather than noble of character) co-ordinators, rather than necessarily great warriors. So they can direct away oncoming attacks sometimes. Not sure if this hits the flavor mark though.[/QUOTE]

counterpoint · Aug 28, 2016

S3rgeus said:
The unit could generate a yield when the Horn is blown, or something like that? Ir's a bit strange though. Progress towards a Great Captain? Still feels like a more building/ability effect though, than a unit.

We could stick with just the combat bonus and see if we need to add more?

Maybe it gains some experience?

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, I think they're the ones fans will call out first as missing. But I think that's ok - wanting diversity in the timeline is easy to explain and we figured those were the least important and interesting of the modern day civs. They'll come to the mod eventually, but just not a part of the initial crop!

Yeah, I'd recommend we list the remaining civs in the Civ Designs "summary," for reference and to make it clear that they're next.

I also recommend we add the Tuatha'an to that list. They "scored" high but were categorically eliminated from FLC contention. This extra list is a bunch of SLCs, so I think that civ can get back in line.

S3rgeus said:
Good point about breaking up the two Faith civs - shall we do Ghealdan, then Altara, and then Amadicia? I have some ideas already on Ghealdan so I can start us off on them once we're done with Cairhien.

Sounds good. Which one(s) should I do?

S3rgeus said:
I think the wonders are the ones I'd be more inclined to diverge from BNW's specifics. The general themes (this wonder helps Culture, this one helps Science) are good signposts, but given that only one player gets each one in each game, they never become the foundational part of how the game is balanced. They're the ";eaf nodes" of a lot of the balancing problems, which makes shaking them up have fewer knock-on effects in the rest of the game. Individual wonders become objectives for certain playstyles/game objectives, and that's a lot about their specific effects, but I don't think we're really tied to the BNW wonder effects as long as we cover the more general bases of their roles in the game.

Totally agree that starting with flavor is where we'd want to go - look and see what we have available and what kinds of abilities that incites.

What do you mean by ";eaf nodes"?

<using knowledge of the human hand, and google, I have determined that you meant leaf nodes, and now know what those are!>

I think some of the wonders are way bigger than others, in terms of knock on effects, in BNW. That's actually likely a problem though...

In any case, I'm mostly fine with this, though I do think it'll be trickier to design. I'm not sure how easy it'll be for me to come up with all of this myself, if they're totally unique. I mean, I could, but keeping it all consistent, in a proverbial vacuum...

For starters, I'd probably dive for flavor and come up with likely Tech pairings for that flavor.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about the feel of the system - it should feel like a quite different experience from BNW to the player. Even if the goals are the same, I'd like it if they couldn't draw direct parallels like "this is the new Space Procurements" and "this is the new Iron Curtain".

Yeah, I don't come down as hard on this as you. I thinkjt he third-tier tenets, for example, are pretty good, for the most part, in BNW, and don't feel like we have to change them for the sake of it. But I'm open to it, surely.

S3rgeus said:
Re framing post vs proposal, that's what I'm saying - a framing-post-sized endeavor parallelizes better because it gives me more time to implement stuff, but the framing of the Policies discussion that we've already done makes such a framing post not really viable.

Still, yes, I'd be totally up for you doing proposals for Policies. As you've said, we're mostly inserting actual Policies at this point, rather than deciding on the structure of the system, and the split-paths gives us a lot of uniqueness. I would mostly say that I'd want the Policies to feel quite different to the BNW ones, even if they do achieve the same goals.

ok. I'll try!

S3rgeus said:
Starting with a mirror and moving on to a modified version sounds like a very good call. The default buildings and units need to provide foundational aspects of the game, and so there aren't many ways to do those basic yields and such differently without making it really difficult to play the game properly. (Complex abilities on these would be difficult to keep up with and make the player jump through too many hoops to make their normal buildings/units work.)

ok. agreed.

S3rgeus said:
I dunno, we don't have much to show the community at the moment. There's a certain amount of building buzz and word of mouth that would be a part of this, but I think player-created ventures like mods live by playability, which is still a ways off for us. I doubt the design concept would capture many people's attention long enough to keep them interested to play many months from now when there's something more to see. I would be inclined to start reaching out when we have early playable builds, but maybe even after that. Mods' audiences tend to spread by recommendation, and people can only recommend a mod that works. We get more players from "Go play this awesome thing here!" than "Keep an eye on this awesome concept" - especially since players are (understandably) more skeptical of mods that aren't yet released than full games that aren't yet released.

Yeah, points noted. You certainly know more about this than I. I think, though, that our audience for this is different than other mods, in that we have the potential WoT community, and not just the civ modding community. You're right, we need to wow them and not give them a half-baked game, but a fully-playable game with no art will seem half-baked to them. I'm not sure how we can get an artist in early, but I think we need to have one to get the response you're describing.

S3rgeus said:
Firaxis have released statements and such, but I don't think we'll know for sure until the game comes out and the mod tools are released. I'll certainly take a look at them as soon as they are made available and see what kinds of things are possible - whether the kind of overhaul this mod requires is possible in CiVI as well. We may get some more specific news about the mod tools before the game comes out, but it's not actually too long before CiVI comes out, and it's also common for the mod tools to be released after the game (months sometimes), so we may have to wait a bit there.

I do think we'd also need to play a fair bit of CiVI ourselves to be able to shift our design over to it. A lot of my recommendations in this thread are based on experience from playing hundreds of hours of CiV!

That said, if CiVI has the right tools, switching over does have a lot of upsides. Even if it does take us X months to sweep through and redesign a lot of the foundational stuff, CiVI will have a longer lifetime (from present day) and a better potential for shiny new features that can help us overcome some of the challenges CiV presents. And I'm looking forward to seeing if new art content is easier to create and import in CiVI than it is in CiV, because that's a super painful process at the moment!

Yeah, this is really tough. Looking at Steam, I've played a preposterous 659 hours of CiV (probably around 600 or so of that in single player, regular games), and, according to my achievements, have yet to beat the game with 14 civs (which means, effectively, that I haven't played those last civs much at all)! That's insane. It would take a looong time to get that far with CiVI.

Ugh...I guess we just have to wait and see. I just want this thing to have an audience. But I also want it to be completed!

S3rgeus · Aug 30, 2016

counterpoint said:
Yeah, well I was out of town this weekend, and have been insanely busy besides. Truthfully I probably shouldn't be doing this post right now.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon of posting-frequency might be coming to a rapid end, on my end, at least for a bit. I'll try to keep up the pace, but I'm not sure. Basically school (i.e. work) starts next week and I have a whole bunch more on my plate this time 'round. Translation: much less of a chance to sneak in a post here and there.

Hopefully it won't mess everything up. Will do my best.

No worries, I've certainly gone through a few periods of time where I had to reply a lot less often, particularly the tail end of 2015! We'll make it work!

counterpoint said:
Hmmm.... I'd say no. What do you think?

I would be inclined to go with yes. Every other Specialist produces LP points and it generally lines up the Tall/Specialists/LPs trinity of related mechanics, which makes me think this one should abide by that.

If they do produce LP points, then they could either all produce the same LP points, or could produce different LP points depending on the other Specialist types in the same building. I could see either working from a flavor or mechanics perspective - do you see an advantage to one or the other? Are there other options for types of LP points they could generate, if they do?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, that makes sense. There'd be no point to having them in, say, a granary.

Exactly, yeah.

counterpoint said:
ok. This could be an option, then.

Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
hmm... yeah, it is wide-favoring, especially due to museums. But isn't the likelihood of wonders (with LW slots) in a tall civ a bit of a compensation for that? Or is the Relic type specifically still disadvantaged in Tall civs?

I'm kind of stuck on this one! I think the problem with the suggestions you made (one at a time or strategic resource-need) is that they also inhibit the ability for the Academic to be used as a normal historian. I'd say it's reasonable for the Historian to be able to periodically grab a regular Relic, or, perhaps more likely, build a Portal Stone. These kinds of limitations prevent that from even being an option, which makes the UU actually *worse* than the Historian in certain ways. That's a problem, I think.

I'd say that limiting the use of the *ability* itself, or its benefits, is the pat we have to follow. I feel like there are three paths that stand out:

1) tie it to regular Relic use (takes up Relic slots, or something like that)
2) limit the use of the specific ability (cooldown, etc.)
3) limit the benefits of the ability (diminishing returns, etc.

Each of these has its own key problems. 1 is somewhat unintuitive and somewhat defeats the purpose, I think. 2 might be pretty clunky. 3 doesn't prevent people from still harvesting them all just to screw the other players.

I don't have any good ideas really.... I want this one to work, though.

Agreed, this one is difficult. I agree with all of your misgivings about those three options. Wonders do offset the Wide advantage on artifact slots a bit, but it's not a particularly reliable offset, given that you need specific wonders and are competing with other players for a single instance of them.

Some other possible approaches:

Allow the Academic to create a new Improvement that produces Science (this would be a new option, next to "create artifact" and "create Portal Stone"). This provides a built-in territory limitation and means it can't be used to screw over other players... but it encourages Wide for Cairhien, which is not ideal.

Make the amount of Science in the resulting Science dump dependent on the number of artifacts collected by other players. Screwing everyone over is counterproductive then. But it's extremely reliant on the actions of other players, which is really annoying, and if the base Science yield is high enough, it has the same core problem as the original.

I think the strategic resource could still work. It does provide a limitation on using the Academic as a normal Historian, but that's not unheard of in BNW. Some uniques introduce trade-offs to offset their own significant utility. Turtle Ship not being able to cross the ocean, Gandhi getting more Unhappiness from number of cities, and many others (often increased production cost). Strategics are often used here, but often as the benefit (no longer requiring a strategic that the unit it replaces does, like the African Forest Elephant), so the inverse is within the design space we're using.

Another approach would be to just go with it and see if this is a problem. There's certainly an opportunity cost in producing a ton of Academics, since Historians aren't cheap to produce. So a whole bunch of units and buildings/wonders will go unconstructed because Cairhien is building a ton of Academics instead. It can be a part of the balance of how much Science that produces about whether this approach is a useful trade-off.

We could make them cost Science, instead of Production? Then it's a question of whether you'll sacrifice short term progress toward your current research to create an Academic that will yield you more total Science long term. Not to mention you're competing with other players for the artifacts, so the Academic may not pay off. It also means the player can't parallelize them massively across multiple cities since you can only put your Science into one thing at a time, which takes care of the Wide problem.

The ability could create a permanently locked Scholar Specialist, in addition to the Science dump? (Add a Population to a city and lock one Pop from that city into a scholar Specialist slot in that city.) It creates a limitation in that Cairhien needs to have more scholar Specialist slots in order to be able to continue doing the mission. I'm having difficulty working out if it might be too Wide though - availability of Specialist slots is arguably more of a Wide thing, Tall excels in the ability to fill Specialist slots, but this approach wouldn't care about whether those slots were fillable, just how many were available, which doesn't help. Rather than adding a Population, it could just lock the Population into being a scholar? This is more Tall-oriented - Tall civs can afford to lock their Population into being scholar Specialists, but Wide civs can't, otherwise their Production and Food will suffer. And this approach still provides the limitation on how many Academics Cairhien could use in a given game, and in a way that grows over the course of the game, which is in line with what we see with Historians.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, you're right that it's a general problem. I guess the diplo system is kind of broken to me in general, so it's hard for me to get that excited about basing a unique around it....

I wouldn't be inclined to avoid that area of the game because of such problems though. It just makes that area of the game even more broken. I'd also find a negotiating unique like this quite exciting anyway, since going for the Diplo victory I often want to trade votes with many civs, but have to focus on a few.

counterpoint said:
I definitely take no issue with using this specific building - yes, this is a must-build for Tall civs. As mentioned, I just feel like the ability is a little narrow-focused towards the Science VC, instead of Science in general, which I don't love. Also, I feel like it gives help to that Science VC that isnt necessarily more fun than other help we could give. It doesn't make them better it just makes them have to do less. You know?

I see what you mean, but I think narrower abilities like this can still be strong candidates. The objective isn't to be necessarily more fun than any other approach to the same victory, but to create variety between the civs. If we don't consider modifying the VC mechanics around specific VCs, then those mechanics will always play out the same way across all of the civs, which makes them more boring. I'd say including them in our design options goes a long way to making civs feel very different from each other.

In terms of fun, I'd find this engaging, probably because of how I consider the game an optimization problem. This changes how I need to consider who to send my Envoys to, which lets me exclude more players - part of the plotting that lets me approach the victory differently. That's primarily how I'd use it. And it also has a massive fringe benefit that will be really satisfying when it does work out (the foreign Exhibitions part). I wouldn't be relying on that, but it's one of those great sudden-burst abilities that changes your whole plan for the better.

counterpoint said:
OK, I should start by saying I misinterpreted the NW (Food) as being available to anybody who steals the tech. You said somewhere before that the stealing civ only got Y happiness upon theft - I thought you meant that the happiness was literally all they got for the tech ("they receive a permanent +Y Happiness and none of the other effects)"

So I'm still a little unclear on this tech, since it's not even clear that it unlocks NW (Food) from the ability description (unless combo'd with Foregate (tech pop). So, what, specifically, are you proposing thieves get upon theft? Literally everything (not counting a UB)? I think this is problematic, actually. The thing is, it's rather easy to steal from somebody. Assuming you can block Cairhien from building the Wonder that blocks most stealing, it seems reasonable that people would be stealing this tech, and making it a high priority to do so - since you can choose which tech to steal, it's kind of only a matter of time. Mechanically fair or not, it allows all civs the ability to steal a civ's unique, which is really rather strange. That kind of thing should be very special, and this makes it not all that special, and it kind of turns the game into a "everybody start stealing from Cairhien as soon as we think they've researched that tech", which is quite weird, meta-wise (and flavor-wise). I don't feel like that's intended.

I think if we allow it to be stolen at all - which maybe we don't want - it should provide a different effect - lump science, happiness, or something. But I'm not convinced this is the best way to go with a Unique anyways.

Hmmm, going through more of this I find I agree. Given the way Science and techs work, this creates a bit too much in the way of "main systems" to facilitate the unique, so let's scrap this one. Unique techs sound like they could work well in a Scenario, but I have no idea what Scenario that would be in WoT right now!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I guess I hate it when I have to break immersion so much to meta-game. For example, I hate switching up my citizen management to take advantage of food accumulation not mattering when you're producing a settler. I hate further that I feel compelled to do it. I hate the idea that I have Oxford one turn away, but a tech 2 turns away, and I should probably finish that first tech first and then let the oxford complete. It breaks the flow and feels like I'm cheating.

I guess I feel like I approach civ much more like a game (rather than a narrative). An optimization problem as mentioned above. Though I don't do the citizen shuffling when producing Settlers (because I'm lazy), I do like the concept of that kind of optimization - knowing that there are better times to yield some benefits than others. I certainly don't feel like that's a cheat, just another level of available optimizing in making your own civ better in a given game.

counterpoint said:
Maybe it's better to just say that a city can only work one at a time or something like that?

I wonder what the "point" of these UIs is, though. Is our goal to require the player to "maintain" their improvements, rebuilding them every X turns to keep them live? It seems kind of weird, once I think about it, gameplay-wise. It's basically a pretty good improvement, but one you have to keep bringing back. Kind of tedious - certainly not specifically fun-enhancing.

Is there a way to turn the "decay" of the improvement into a mechanic that promotes fun and interactivity, instead of maintenance?

Also, could we/should we consider linking up the Feast of Lights flavor with We Love the Kind day somehow?

Agreed, we don't want this kind of UI to become a chore for the player to keep it working, which it risks doing. This is part of what makes me like the Science one better - late game so there isn't as much time for it to be a chore, and a whole free tech is a massive bonus that players will be happy to make an individual push for each time.

We could connect it to We Love the King Day as a way of limiting its use, which we're otherwise looking for. It could be constructable only on a hex worked by a city currently celebrating We Love the King day?

Only being able to work one at a time could work, but kind of falls into the realm of arbitrary limits, which I'd prefer to avoid if we can.

counterpoint said:
You're quite right that I've been putting out a lot of "Tall-making" mechanics. I guess I feel like those were otherwise kind of absent. We wouldn't want them for all the Tall civs, though.

I find, as a Tall civ, I usually have way too much Happiness, though. So, if we do a pro-hap ability, let's pair it with an ability that takes advantage of it somehow (with specialists or something).

If you've got too much Happiness as Tall then you need more Food! I find that whatever Happiness I get given, I can find a way to consume it, Tall or Wide. Tall is easier to manage, but it's certainly doable to consume it all. Loads of extra Happiness doesn't net much gain, so more Farms and more Food buildings all the way.

And totally, we want variety, so we wouldn't want to have any of these kinds of mechanics (Tall-making, Tall-advantaging, etc.) present in all of our civs that are trying to achieve a similar thing.

counterpoint said:
(spechap) is actually a pretty nifty incorporation of the DD'm flavor, at least if you look at it sideways. That said, I worry that it's a little too complicated. A little two unwieldy, such that people will be tempted to just leave it on autopilot - it makes the unwieldy specialist system even more so (this is a problem with (specialist) as well, but I think it might be worse here). And I guess an ability like this that would be left to autopilot kind of defeats the purpose of its existence.

I don't know about this one. I think it might be moving in the right direction, flavor-wise.

I don't see autopilot as defeating the purpose of it existing, in either case. It effectively becomes a flat bonus if allowed to autopilot, as long as we make the citizen AI understand it correctly. (Which will be essential for the AI civs to be able to use it anyway.) It's just another layer of available optimization for the player (I seem to be coming back to that a lot in this post - probably because Science is a game-long feat of optimization) that they don't have to engage with if they don't want to. Similarly, a player who automates their workers won't explicitly use a UI, but will still benefit from it.

counterpoint said:
Interesting. I think it hits the flavor decently, actually - hits that noble elitism well. Does it apply to other MotL's as well?

You mean can the same instance of damage chain across multiple MotL redirections? I don't think so. That would be hard to keep track of and would encourage MotL carpets, to a certain extent.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking).
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired/era is reached, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (Happiness), Cairhien gains +X Happiness for each City-State it is allied with and for each level of influence it has with the Tower. Declarations of Friendship and Defensive Pacts provide Cairhien with +Y Happiness.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.
Nobles' Garrison, replaces an era 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. Can be purchased for X% less Gold (high, like 75) in cities that have been attacked by or have attacked an enemy unit in the last Y (like 3) turns.
Nobles' Attendant Corps, replaces an era 7-9 non-ranged unit. Has an X% chance of triggering a Cairhienin coup in a City-State when attacking its capital.

UBs:

Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness)
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 3, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence with the destination City-State for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (tech pop), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever Cairhien enters a new era, this city gains X (like 5) Population points." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

UTs:

Academics, in Era 8 column 1, depends on Wells. When Cairhien researches this technology, a Scholar appears near the Cairhienin capital. Unlocks the Lightning Jars Innovation and grants +X permanent Happiness. If another civilization steals this technology, they receive a permanent +Y (lower) Happiness (and none of the other effects).

Are we at the stage for culling or sets? I find it looks like we are, but I feel like there should still be a bit more variety. We've concentrated a lot on giving Cairhien good Science options, since we have limited Science civs, but I think we also need some other good options since we don't want all of their uniques to be Science-driven. It would also be nice to have some more UU options.

I'm attempting to add a few more above to help out with this.

Nobles' Garrison is relatively straightforward. I'm not sure if it's too dependent on enemy actions (having enemy units attacking or near Cairhien's cities).

Nobles' Attendant Corps is an attempt to use the flavor of a diplomatic revolutionary of some kind being used to infiltrate a CS during wartime. It would let Cairhien use war to flip CSes in pursuit of a Diplo victory. If the coup was triggered, it would operate as normal, so may still fail.

S3rgeus · Aug 30, 2016

counterpoint said:
Maybe it gains some experience?

Yeah, let's do that. I've added it to the design list entry.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I'd recommend we list the remaining civs in the Civ Designs "summary," for reference and to make it clear that they're next.

I also recommend we add the Tuatha'an to that list. They "scored" high but were categorically eliminated from FLC contention. This extra list is a bunch of SLCs, so I think that civ can get back in line.

Agreed, we'll want to keep a note of those civs for reference. I don't think the majority of players who would be asking about this would read the summaries from this topic though - only the most dedicated will. So how we present that will depend a lot on how we're interacting with players when it's the mod is a thing that can be played.

The Tuatha'an do seem like good candidates for an early-ish post release civ. Something we can discuss then, I think!

counterpoint said:
Sounds good. Which one(s) should I do?

I think if I start 2 of the 3 and you start 1 of them, then we should end up having started the same number of civs each in total at the end? I haven't counted to be sure though.

counterpoint said:
What do you mean by ";eaf nodes"?

<using knowledge of the human hand, and google, I have determined that you meant leaf nodes, and now know what those are!>

I think some of the wonders are way bigger than others, in terms of knock on effects, in BNW. That's actually likely a problem though...

In any case, I'm mostly fine with this, though I do think it'll be trickier to design. I'm not sure how easy it'll be for me to come up with all of this myself, if they're totally unique. I mean, I could, but keeping it all consistent, in a proverbial vacuum...

For starters, I'd probably dive for flavor and come up with likely Tech pairings for that flavor.

Woops, sorry about the ;eaf! Well tracked down!

Yeah, like Policies this would probably be a proposal-style thing, so we could still create that consistency afterwards by working together.

Some wonders are bigger than others, but I'm mainly thinking that none of them are reliably linchpins of a particular strategy, because of the way they can never really be guaranteed to be available. I think this should make it less destructive to swap them out completely. Obviously, like buildings in general, there are some overall aims of what wonders are trying to do that will make them similar to their BNW counterparts.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I don't come down as hard on this as you. I thinkjt he third-tier tenets, for example, are pretty good, for the most part, in BNW, and don't feel like we have to change them for the sake of it. But I'm open to it, surely.

I don't see it so much as being for the sake of it, but more because as a total conversion mod, anything we leave mostly alone stands out a lot. In the example of Space Procurement (can purchase Spaceship parts with Gold), I would be inclined to avoid a very direct translation like "can purchase Envoys with Gold".

counterpoint said:
Yeah, points noted. You certainly know more about this than I. I think, though, that our audience for this is different than other mods, in that we have the potential WoT community, and not just the civ modding community. You're right, we need to wow them and not give them a half-baked game, but a fully-playable game with no art will seem half-baked to them. I'm not sure how we can get an artist in early, but I think we need to have one to get the response you're describing.

I don't think the WoT audience makes us very different - a high percentage of mods are based around the notion of bringing IPs from other universes into the domain of a given game (fictional-but-probably-exists-example: Star Wars: Total War), and therefore also have fans of that IP to bring in. They still live and die mostly on being fun for players to pick up and play now, even if they're not actually feature complete.

If we can find an artist early then that would be awesome, but one of the best ways to get an artist on board is to be able to show them the mod working to some extent. There are loads of mods that die before ever becoming anything playable (I would say the majority of mods that "start" never get anywhere), and that can mean wasted work if an artist is on board too early, from their perspective. Plus relative scarcity means they can pick and choose, but I've found the artists who do work with CiV to be very inclusive with their time for one-offs and the like. It's getting a permanent team member that we need to impress people for!

In terms of the WoT community, I agree that a working mod with no art will not be good for them. Which is why I say that I don't think we have much we can show them yet, because we're so far off the stage where we're likely to recruit an artist to do such work. (If we do, then awesome, that moves up the schedule, but I see that as the less likely outcome.)

I think our first audience will be the CivFanatics modding community. They're already invested in the game and enjoy mods overall. They have an appreciation of how a mod develops and will deal with issues that other players find unacceptable (plus will tell us about them more often so we can fix them).

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this is really tough. Looking at Steam, I've played a preposterous 659 hours of CiV (probably around 600 or so of that in single player, regular games), and, according to my achievements, have yet to beat the game with 14 civs (which means, effectively, that I haven't played those last civs much at all)! That's insane. It would take a looong time to get that far with CiVI.

Ugh...I guess we just have to wait and see. I just want this thing to have an audience. But I also want it to be completed!

Agreed, I have 754 hours on CiV and I know it's missed out a lot of time (some entire games) where I've played offline. It will take a long time to get to that level of expertise with CiVI, as you've said. It does seem like we'll need to wait and see! Only when we have the tools in hand will we know how much of CiVI is moddable and how it might affect the availability of modders here, particularly artists.

counterpoint · Aug 31, 2016

S3rgeus said:
I would be inclined to go with yes. Every other Specialist produces LP points and it generally lines up the Tall/Specialists/LPs trinity of related mechanics, which makes me think this one should abide by that.

If they do produce LP points, then they could either all produce the same LP points, or could produce different LP points depending on the other Specialist types in the same building. I could see either working from a flavor or mechanics perspective - do you see an advantage to one or the other? Are there other options for types of LP points they could generate, if they do?

You're definitely correct that it's probably best to make them consistent with other Specialists.

I think what makes this ability compelling is the flexibility of having it be on autopilot, but also being very targeted and manual - I'd say the most interesting and deep option is to let the LP points be dictated by the type of building it is in. However, I'd say we should calibrate the bonus % LP yield they create in a manner that doesn't let the fact that they themselves produce LP points become too powerful - maybe they don't affect their own LP point generation.

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, this one is difficult. I agree with all of your misgivings about those three options. Wonders do offset the Wide advantage on artifact slots a bit, but it's not a particularly reliable offset, given that you need specific wonders and are competing with other players for a single instance of them.

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Some other possible approaches:

Allow the Academic to create a new Improvement that produces Science (this would be a new option, next to "create artifact" and "create Portal Stone"). This provides a built-in territory limitation and means it can't be used to screw over other players... but it encourages Wide for Cairhien, which is not ideal.

Yeah, I definitely view that as a big problem.

S3rgeus said:
Make the amount of Science in the resulting Science dump dependent on the number of artifacts collected by other players. Screwing everyone over is counterproductive then. But it's extremely reliant on the actions of other players, which is really annoying, and if the base Science yield is high enough, it has the same core problem as the original.

Yeah, agreed. Way too reliant on others.

S3rgeus said:
I think the strategic resource could still work. It does provide a limitation on using the Academic as a normal Historian, but that's not unheard of in BNW. Some uniques introduce trade-offs to offset their own significant utility. Turtle Ship not being able to cross the ocean, Gandhi getting more Unhappiness from number of cities, and many others (often increased production cost). Strategics are often used here, but often as the benefit (no longer requiring a strategic that the unit it replaces does, like the African Forest Elephant), so the inverse is within the design space we're using.

I think this one could be an option. I don't love it, though. The main problem with it is that these are consumable units. While there is precedent in CiV for resource-attachment to otherwise resource-less uniques (Elephants, turtles, other animal-units...), those are units you tend to leave hanging around. Requiring, say, Sulfur, to build these would only somewhat slow down your production, not really cap it. In a lot of cases, you could have a Historian at its dig site by the time the next historian was produced. Assuming a reasonable amount of Sulfur, you'd essentially have an endless supply. Don't love it

What if, instead of providing diminishing science returns (which still encourages you to devour all of them), the dig time became longer for each iteration of it you did? For the science-dig, not for a regular relic dig. So, for each one you commence, any subsequent ones increase in dig time by 1, or 2, or something. That keeps things in check better, right?

Weird alternate idea: when you do this, it doesn't actually consume the SoP. Maybe it locks Cairhien out of interacting with the Site further (including Relic hunting), but leaves it alone for everybody else. Alternatively, we could still allow Cairhien to dig there, and combine it with the diminishing returns thing as well (less science per dig, but doesn't destroy the site).

Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Another approach would be to just go with it and see if this is a problem. There's certainly an opportunity cost in producing a ton of Academics, since Historians aren't cheap to produce. So a whole bunch of units and buildings/wonders will go unconstructed because Cairhien is building a ton of Academics instead. It can be a part of the balance of how much Science that produces about whether this approach is a useful trade-off.

Yeah, I'd prefer we try for some solution, though. Science victories often involve turtling and such, which would make all those academics easier to pump out...

S3rgeus said:
We could make them cost Science, instead of Production? Then it's a question of whether you'll sacrifice short term progress toward your current research to create an Academic that will yield you more total Science long term. Not to mention you're competing with other players for the artifacts, so the Academic may not pay off. It also means the player can't parallelize them massively across multiple cities since you can only put your Science into one thing at a time, which takes care of the Wide problem.

I'm open to this kind of thing. Seems a bit counter intuitive at first, though. The main issue I see with this is the effect it would have on normal Relic-hunting Cairhien, though... Science for Relics is *not* a good thing.

S3rgeus said:
The ability could create a permanently locked Scholar Specialist, in addition to the Science dump? (Add a Population to a city and lock one Pop from that city into a scholar Specialist slot in that city.) It creates a limitation in that Cairhien needs to have more scholar Specialist slots in order to be able to continue doing the mission. I'm having difficulty working out if it might be too Wide though - availability of Specialist slots is arguably more of a Wide thing, Tall excels in the ability to fill Specialist slots, but this approach wouldn't care about whether those slots were fillable, just how many were available, which doesn't help. Rather than adding a Population, it could just lock the Population into being a scholar? This is more Tall-oriented - Tall civs can afford to lock their Population into being scholar Specialists, but Wide civs can't, otherwise their Production and Food will suffer. And this approach still provides the limitation on how many Academics Cairhien could use in a given game, and in a way that grows over the course of the game, which is in line with what we see with Historians.

interesting... do you like this ability? I find it's a bit over-complex, to be honest. I feel like it would be hard to explain in a one-sentence description.

S3rgeus said:
I wouldn't be inclined to avoid that area of the game because of such problems though. It just makes that area of the game even more broken. I'd also find a negotiating unique like this quite exciting anyway, since going for the Diplo victory I often want to trade votes with many civs, but have to focus on a few.

Fair enough. I don't love this ability, but I can't argue against its validity.

S3rgeus said:
I see what you mean, but I think narrower abilities like this can still be strong candidates. The objective isn't to be necessarily more fun than any other approach to the same victory, but to create variety between the civs. If we don't consider modifying the VC mechanics around specific VCs, then those mechanics will always play out the same way across all of the civs, which makes them more boring. I'd say including them in our design options goes a long way to making civs feel very different from each other.

In terms of fun, I'd find this engaging, probably because of how I consider the game an optimization problem. This changes how I need to consider who to send my Envoys to, which lets me exclude more players - part of the plotting that lets me approach the victory differently. That's primarily how I'd use it. And it also has a massive fringe benefit that will be really satisfying when it does work out (the foreign Exhibitions part). I wouldn't be relying on that, but it's one of those great sudden-burst abilities that changes your whole plan for the better.

Right. Again, while this is an ability that I don't particularly like, I can't really argue that it shouldn't be a viable choice. Your points are solid.

S3rgeus said:
Hmmm, going through more of this I find I agree. Given the way Science and techs work, this creates a bit too much in the way of "main systems" to facilitate the unique, so let's scrap this one. Unique techs sound like they could work well in a Scenario, but I have no idea what Scenario that would be in WoT right now!

Oooh!

The Strike at Shayol Ghul
The War of the Hundred Years
The Conquest
The Trolloc Wars
The Defense of the Two Rivers
Chasing the Shaido
etc...

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, we don't want this kind of UI to become a chore for the player to keep it working, which it risks doing. This is part of what makes me like the Science one better - late game so there isn't as much time for it to be a chore, and a whole free tech is a massive bonus that players will be happy to make an individual push for each time.

Yeah, I think the Science one is more justified. However, it's still potentially a bit lopsided. Tons of hills = game win. No hills in capital = no UI.

S3rgeus said:
We could connect it to We Love the King Day as a way of limiting its use, which we're otherwise looking for. It could be constructable only on a hex worked by a city currently celebrating We Love the King day?

Only being able to work one at a time could work, but kind of falls into the realm of arbitrary limits, which I'd prefer to avoid if we can.

Yeah, I suppose the WLtKD thing could work. How would you adjust things to make that aspect work?

S3rgeus said:
If you've got too much Happiness as Tall then you need more Food! I find that whatever Happiness I get given, I can find a way to consume it, Tall or Wide. Tall is easier to manage, but it's certainly doable to consume it all. Loads of extra Happiness doesn't net much gain, so more Farms and more Food buildings all the way.

And totally, we want variety, so we wouldn't want to have any of these kinds of mechanics (Tall-making, Tall-advantaging, etc.) present in all of our civs that are trying to achieve a similar thing.

dang. I guess I need more food, then....

S3rgeus said:
I don't see autopilot as defeating the purpose of it existing, in either case. It effectively becomes a flat bonus if allowed to autopilot, as long as we make the citizen AI understand it correctly. (Which will be essential for the AI civs to be able to use it anyway.) It's just another layer of available optimization for the player (I seem to be coming back to that a lot in this post - probably because Science is a game-long feat of optimization) that they don't have to engage with if they don't want to. Similarly, a player who automates their workers won't explicitly use a UI, but will still benefit from it.

Yeah, I guess considering it's a UA, it's fine - UAs are often auto-pilotey, after all.

S3rgeus said:
You mean can the same instance of damage chain across multiple MotL redirections? I don't think so. That would be hard to keep track of and would encourage MotL carpets, to a certain extent.

I actually just meant "do other MoL units suffer damage when adjacent to a MotL that suffers damage." And, actually, the answer should be yes, I think, since otherwise it'd encourage carpets. I agree with what you said, too (no to damage chain).

S3rgeus said:
Nobles' Garrison is relatively straightforward. I'm not sure if it's too dependent on enemy actions (having enemy units attacking or near Cairhien's cities).

I think this needs a new name. Doesn't make sense as a unit name (or name placeholder). Suggestion below.

This is kind of like the Illianer City Watch, mechanically. I think it could work. It's a little weird though - kind of a domination-like ability, for sure. Well, city-capture ability, at least.

S3rgeus said:
Nobles' Attendant Corps is an attempt to use the flavor of a diplomatic revolutionary of some kind being used to infiltrate a CS during wartime. It would let Cairhien use war to flip CSes in pursuit of a Diplo victory. If the coup was triggered, it would operate as normal, so may still fail.

I think this is pretty cool, mechanically, but would be better off for a non-diplo civ. Like, a civ that we designed to use CSs to support some other efforts. As it is, true that you might incite a rebellion, but all the constant CS fighting will make all the other CSs hate your guts. I'm redding it.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (Gold), Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in Cairhienin cities generate +X Gold and +Y Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking). The Noble produces LP points of the type associated with the building in which it is placed.
Keepers of the Silk Path, Land trade routes have X% increased range. If the destination city has a resource not currently produced by Cairhien or gained through another Silk Path trade route, Cairhien gains a copy of that resource.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired/era is reached, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (Happiness), Cairhien gains +X Happiness for each City-State it is allied with and for each level of influence it has with the Tower. Declarations of Friendship and Defensive Pacts provide Cairhien with +Y Happiness.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but produces +X Science (very high).
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.
Nobles' Bannerman, replaces an era 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. Can be purchased for X% less Gold (high, like 75) in cities that have been attacked by or have attacked an enemy unit in the last Y (like 3) turns.[/COLOR]
Nobles' Attendant Corps, replaces an era 7-9 non-ranged unit. Has an X% chance of triggering a Cairhienin coup in a City-State when attacking its capital.

UBs:

Illumination Shop, replaces Happiness 2, +3 Happiness, +1 science (kidshowbusiness)
School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Topless Tower, replaces Happiness 3, Trade routes from this city to City-States produce +X Science and +Y Influence with the destination City-State for every Z points of population in this city.
Dragonwall Gate, replaces Defense 2, Each trade routes based in this city produce +X additional Gold, and raises the city's HP by Y and combat Strength by Z.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (tech pop), unlocks on Academics (see below), replaces National Wonder (Food). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever Cairhien enters a new era, this city gains X (like 5) Population points." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

S3rgeus said:
Are we at the stage for culling or sets? I find it looks like we are, but I feel like there should still be a bit more variety. We've concentrated a lot on giving Cairhien good Science options, since we have limited Science civs, but I think we also need some other good options since we don't want all of their uniques to be Science-driven. It would also be nice to have some more UU options.

First off, Locks. What would you say for Cairhien? I think Daes Dae'mar is the only one. I think something academy-related could fit, but I'd say it isn't really a Lock.

I agree that it might be helpful to have a few more options. Sadly, I haven't had much time for brainstorming this week... Do you have any ideas.? Also, I think some of these abilities could be more or less preserved, but could do without the science aspect (e.g. the Illuminator's HQ), assuming they're paired with science abilities.

In the meantime, I do think we can cull a little bit, though. I've decided to be somewhat ruthless here, but some of these I don't feel super strongly about.

(Gold) seemed a little too boring, compared to the others.

I like "Keepers," But it seems to me that it's might not be characteristic enough for this civ. Not sure.

I'd like to Red one of (Happiness) or (SpecHapp). I might want to axe specHapp, but decided I wouldn't for now since I sort of said I wouldn't above... What do you think?

The Noble's Garrison/Bannerman, I considered redding, but like above, won't because I said I'd keep it in contention for now.

(ksb's) Illumination building isn't quite fun enough.

I feel like the Topless Tower might be too limited in its usability. Same with Dragonwall Gate

Tempted to red Royal academy. But I know you like it.

I want to red one of the first three National Wonder ones (School of Cairhein, Illuminator's HAQ, or Royal Academy. Not sure which.

Redding (tech pop) foregate. No longer needed.

I would red Feast of Lights (culture), except I wanted to give you an opportunity to make a suggestion on it, regarding WLtKD. Tempted to kill the Science one, too, but am fine with leaving it.

OK! Where to go from here?

counterpoint · Aug 31, 2016

S3rgeus said:
I think if I start 2 of the 3 and you start 1 of them, then we should end up having started the same number of civs each in total at the end? I haven't counted to be sure though.

sounds about right!

S3rgeus said:
Woops, sorry about the ;eaf! Well tracked down!

Yeah, like Policies this would probably be a proposal-style thing, so we could still create that consistency afterwards by working together.

Some wonders are bigger than others, but I'm mainly thinking that none of them are reliably linchpins of a particular strategy, because of the way they can never really be guaranteed to be available. I think this should make it less destructive to swap them out completely. Obviously, like buildings in general, there are some overall aims of what wonders are trying to do that will make them similar to their BNW counterparts.

yeah. And also, because of their swappability, there isn't as much pressure when creating a set of proposals. Its not like the tech tree, where changing one thing can mess everything up. I could make proposals without feeling like I was ruining something if they weren't great.

S3rgeus said:
I don't see it so much as being for the sake of it, but more because as a total conversion mod, anything we leave mostly alone stands out a lot. In the example of Space Procurement (can purchase Spaceship parts with Gold), I would be inclined to avoid a very direct translation like "can purchase Envoys with Gold".

yeah. Understood.

S3rgeus said:
I don't think the WoT audience makes us very different - a high percentage of mods are based around the notion of bringing IPs from other universes into the domain of a given game (fictional-but-probably-exists-example: Star Wars: Total War), and therefore also have fans of that IP to bring in. They still live and die mostly on being fun for players to pick up and play now, even if they're not actually feature complete.

If we can find an artist early then that would be awesome, but one of the best ways to get an artist on board is to be able to show them the mod working to some extent. There are loads of mods that die before ever becoming anything playable (I would say the majority of mods that "start" never get anywhere), and that can mean wasted work if an artist is on board too early, from their perspective. Plus relative scarcity means they can pick and choose, but I've found the artists who do work with CiV to be very inclusive with their time for one-offs and the like. It's getting a permanent team member that we need to impress people for!

In terms of the WoT community, I agree that a working mod with no art will not be good for them. Which is why I say that I don't think we have much we can show them yet, because we're so far off the stage where we're likely to recruit an artist to do such work. (If we do, then awesome, that moves up the schedule, but I see that as the less likely outcome.)

I think our first audience will be the CivFanatics modding community. They're already invested in the game and enjoy mods overall. They have an appreciation of how a mod develops and will deal with issues that other players find unacceptable (plus will tell us about them more often so we can fix them).

not much to say here! I'm tempted to trust your judgement on this, for obvious reasons. We'll see what happens.

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, I have 754 hours on CiV and I know it's missed out a lot of time (some entire games) where I've played offline. It will take a long time to get to that level of expertise with CiVI, as you've said. It does seem like we'll need to wait and see! Only when we have the tools in hand will we know how much of CiVI is moddable and how it might affect the availability of modders here, particularly artists.

I'm historically a "late adopter" of games (still haven't played BE yet!). Probably can't justify that with CiVI, though... (but I'm not done with V yet!)

S3rgeus · Sep 3, 2016

Sorry for the delays! I was out D&Ding and at the movies Thursday and Friday!

counterpoint said:
You're definitely correct that it's probably best to make them consistent with other Specialists.

I think what makes this ability compelling is the flexibility of having it be on autopilot, but also being very targeted and manual - I'd say the most interesting and deep option is to let the LP points be dictated by the type of building it is in. However, I'd say we should calibrate the bonus % LP yield they create in a manner that doesn't let the fact that they themselves produce LP points become too powerful - maybe they don't affect their own LP point generation.

From the way the ability is written right now, it seems like Nobles only affect the yields of other Specialists in the building, so a positive feedback loop with their own LP yields shouldn't be a problem.

I agree that LP points based on the building type make sense.

Just looking back over this one as whole - do we need the Happiness penalty? The effect resolves to being a yield bonus specific to a particular building, for which Happiness seems like a pretty steep cost to pay. The additional slots means that a higher Population city will have more to do, but a higher Population will already produce a lot of Unhappiness because of that Population.

counterpoint said:
I think this one could be an option. I don't love it, though. The main problem with it is that these are consumable units. While there is precedent in CiV for resource-attachment to otherwise resource-less uniques (Elephants, turtles, other animal-units...), those are units you tend to leave hanging around. Requiring, say, Sulfur, to build these would only somewhat slow down your production, not really cap it. In a lot of cases, you could have a Historian at its dig site by the time the next historian was produced. Assuming a reasonable amount of Sulfur, you'd essentially have an endless supply. Don't love it

What if, instead of providing diminishing science returns (which still encourages you to devour all of them), the dig time became longer for each iteration of it you did? For the science-dig, not for a regular relic dig. So, for each one you commence, any subsequent ones increase in dig time by 1, or 2, or something. That keeps things in check better, right?

Weird alternate idea: when you do this, it doesn't actually consume the SoP. Maybe it locks Cairhien out of interacting with the Site further (including Relic hunting), but leaves it alone for everybody else. Alternatively, we could still allow Cairhien to dig there, and combine it with the diminishing returns thing as well (less science per dig, but doesn't destroy the site).

Thoughts?

Aha! The weird alternate idea arrives to save the day! That solves the biggest problem of using the Cairhienin ability as a method of denying the other players access to Sites of Power, while still giving Cairhien a scalable Science bonus.

I think we can allow them to have a "Study Relic" ability that produces Science when finished, doesn't consume the Site of Power, and does consume the Academic. The cost of needing to produce more Academics is enough that I think we can still allow them to dig up that Site (if they send a second Academic there). (Though obviously we don't want to allow them to Study the same Site more than once.)

I can also see another variant, where the Studying doesn't actually produce any Science. Instead, all Relics owned by Cairhien produce +X Science (in addition to their normal yields) for each Site of Power that an Academic has studied. (We'd keep the can-only-study-once, studying-consumes-Academic, etc. stuff from above.) This creates a balancing act mechanic for Cairhien, where they want to gather some Relics for the bonus, but also Study as many as possible.

What do you think of those?

counterpoint said:
I'm open to this kind of thing. Seems a bit counter intuitive at first, though. The main issue I see with this is the effect it would have on normal Relic-hunting Cairhien, though... Science for Relics is *not* a good thing.

Very true, that would make the Cultural victory much harder for them.

counterpoint said:
interesting... do you like this ability? I find it's a bit over-complex, to be honest. I feel like it would be hard to explain in a one-sentence description.

I don't like it nearly as much as your idea above, so I'd say we can axe it.

counterpoint said:
Oooh!

The Strike at Shayol Ghul
The War of the Hundred Years
The Conquest
The Trolloc Wars
The Defense of the Two Rivers
Chasing the Shaido
etc...

Oh, definitely, there are tons of Scenarios that fit really well with WoT, but I don't know if any of them particularly call out for unique techs!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think the Science one is more justified. However, it's still potentially a bit lopsided. Tons of hills = game win. No hills in capital = no UI.

True, that's quite problematic. With this and some other stuff you mention below, I've redded both Feasts of Lights. I think the whole "Improvement you need to rebuild" thing isn't going to be fun for players overall.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I suppose the WLtKD thing could work. How would you adjust things to make that aspect work?

Related to this, I've come up with a new idea for how we could use the "temporary Improvement" vibe with the Feast of Lights without it being a maintenance burden, and connected to We Love the King Day!

counterpoint said:
I actually just meant "do other MoL units suffer damage when adjacent to a MotL that suffers damage." And, actually, the answer should be yes, I think, since otherwise it'd encourage carpets. I agree with what you said, too (no to damage chain).

Yeah, they would suffer that damage if the MotL being hit succeeded in redirecting the damage. A given MotL would function the same way regardless of the unit types of the adjacent units. I've made a small addition to clear up this ambiguity.

counterpoint said:
I think this needs a new name. Doesn't make sense as a unit name (or name placeholder). Suggestion below.

Yep, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
This is kind of like the Illianer City Watch, mechanically. I think it could work. It's a little weird though - kind of a domination-like ability, for sure. Well, city-capture ability, at least.

This doesn't seem like a city-capture ability. It allows Cairhien to purchase these units cheap from cities that have been attacked or have attacked an enemy. My main concern is that it's primarily defensive.

counterpoint said:
I think this is pretty cool, mechanically, but would be better off for a non-diplo civ. Like, a civ that we designed to use CSs to support some other efforts. As it is, true that you might incite a rebellion, but all the constant CS fighting will make all the other CSs hate your guts. I'm redding it.

Oh yeah, this isn't what I'd intended to target this UU at. I totally agree that the way it is now, it encourages Genghis-like CS aggression, which wasn't what I meant to do. I was thinking about stealing allies from other civs. I've amended this to work when Cairhien is at war with the current ally, so that it's used for that, instead of generic CS aggression (and therefore doesn't trigger the CS diplo penalties).

counterpoint said:
First off, Locks. What would you say for Cairhien? I think Daes Dae'mar is the only one. I think something academy-related could fit, but I'd say it isn't really a Lock.

Daes Dae'mar is a good lock, but our only options for that seem to be UAs. Daes Dae'mar is the majority of our UA choices, but there are still others. Well, actually, there's only one other: King's Gift. Are we fine with removing that and making our UA choices all Daes Dae'mar variants? I think if we want to capture the well known flavor of Cairhien, then Daes Dae'mar is the only real option for a UA, in the end.

counterpoint said:
I agree that it might be helpful to have a few more options. Sadly, I haven't had much time for brainstorming this week... Do you have any ideas.? Also, I think some of these abilities could be more or less preserved, but could do without the science aspect (e.g. the Illuminator's HQ), assuming they're paired with science abilities.

Yeah, some are adjustable that way. I agree that it would be good to have more non-Science options (I think we've got the Science stuff covered). I've suggested some new additions for those roles below!

counterpoint said:
In the meantime, I do think we can cull a little bit, though. I've decided to be somewhat ruthless here, but some of these I don't feel super strongly about.

(Gold) seemed a little too boring, compared to the others.

Agreed.

counterpoint said:
I like "Keepers," But it seems to me that it's might not be characteristic enough for this civ. Not sure.

Yeah, I'm fine with removing this one.

counterpoint said:
I'd like to Red one of (Happiness) or (SpecHapp). I might want to axe specHapp, but decided I wouldn't for now since I sort of said I wouldn't above... What do you think?

Probably (Happiness). The difficulty with that UA is that it's potentially useful for a Wide civ as well - the Happiness isn't tied to having Tall-er cities, so it doesn't encourage Tall.

counterpoint said:
(ksb's) Illumination building isn't quite fun enough.

Agreed.

counterpoint said:
I feel like the Topless Tower might be too limited in its usability. Same with Dragonwall Gate

Agreed on these, though it does reduce our non-Science options. I'll try to suggest some others below.

counterpoint said:
Tempted to red Royal academy. But I know you like it.

I want to red one of the first three National Wonder ones (School of Cairhein, Illuminator's HAQ, or Royal Academy. Not sure which.

One difficulty I'm having with all of these UBs (less so the Illuminators one, since it doesn't have to produce Science) is that the Academic UU is so awesome by comparison. Related to what I mentioned early on with Cairhien, they can become a Science civ with just the one Science unique and given the overall power of Science-boosts, it's difficult to have multiple Science uniques in a single set without the civ being too strong. That means I'd be inclined to include the Academic (unit) in both of our sets, which doesn't really leave room for these.

counterpoint said:
Redding (tech pop) foregate. No longer needed.

Yep

counterpoint said:
I would red Feast of Lights (culture), except I wanted to give you an opportunity to make a suggestion on it, regarding WLtKD. Tempted to kill the Science one, too, but am fine with leaving it.

Suggestions made below! And old Feasts of Lights redded.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking). The Noble produces LP points of the type associated with the building in which it is placed.
King's Gift, every time a new technology is acquired/era is reached, gain X Food in all cities, Y Gold, and +Z Influence with all known Maritime and Mercantile City-States.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (Happiness), Cairhien gains +X Happiness for each City-State it is allied with and for each level of influence it has with the Tower. Declarations of Friendship and Defensive Pacts provide Cairhien with +Y Happiness.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which destroys the Site (and its relic), but doesn't remove the Site and produces +X Science (very high). Cairhien cannot Study the same Site more than once.
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage from an enemy attack, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.
Nobles' Bannerman, replaces an era 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. Can be purchased for X% less Gold (high, like 75) in cities that have been attacked by or have attacked an enemy unit in the last Y (like 3) turns.
Nobles' Attendant Corps, replaces an era 7-9 non-ranged unit. Has an X% chance of triggering a Cairhienin coup in a City-State when attacking its capital and Cairhien is at war with that City-State's current ally.

UBs:

School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate (no tech pop), replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Silk Path Trading Post, replaces Gold3. Luxury resources worked by this city produce +X Gold. Double Gold yield from resource diversity from trade routes connected to this city.

UIs:

Feast of Lights Celebration (culture), unlocks late in the game, can only be built on open Hills (no Forest or Jungle) within workable range of a Cairhienin city. Must be worked by the city. Produces +X Prestige and +Y Culture per turn (both high). Disappears after Z turns. Only W different hexes can ever have a Feast of Lights Celebration on them in a single game.
Feast of Lights Celebration (science), unlocks very late in the game, can only be built on open Hills within the workable radius of the Cairhienin capital. Produces +X Culture (high) per turn. After Y turns, the Improvement disappears and Cairhien receives a free technology.
Feast of Lights, cannot be built by Workers. Whenever a city enters "We Love the King Day", a random Trading Post within the workable radius of the city becomes a Feast of Lights until "We Love the King Day" ends in that city. Feasts of Lights produce +X Culture, +Y Food, +Z Gold (higher than Trading Post), and +W Happiness (low, like 1 or 2).

UGs:

Academic (Governor), spawned from the Scholar, Yield is Science, Upgrade 2 ability is "Whenever Cairhien enters a new era, this city gains X (like 5) Population points." Relevant LP for Upgrade 3 is the Scholar.

counterpoint said:
OK! Where to go from here?

Some sets would be useful at this stage, probably. Here are a couple I like:

UA: Daes Dae'mar (specialist)
UU: Academic (unit)
UU: Master of the Lances
UI: Feast of Lights

Academic provides our science focus and Daes Dae'mar provides Tallness.

UA: Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy)
UU: Academic (unit) OR UB: Royal Academy
UU: Con Bannerman
UB: Foregate

In this one, the UA hits Diplo, the Academic Science, and the last two hit Tall. However, given how late both Foregate and Con Bannerman are, this set doesn't really make Cairhien very Tall. So despite what I mentioned above, I've also put an alternative in for the Academic to encourage Tall at the same time as the Science bonus!

Another thing I'm struck by when considering the Academic (Governor) is that it does seem to have a very large overlap with the Philosopher (default Science Governor). Without a bonus yield to Science or Scholar generation, the only difference between them is the function of their Upgrade 2 ability. While that does affect how they work, it effectively makes that upgrade a non-choice, which isn't really compelling. And the majority of their functionality is the same (the first 100 turns), which feels a underwhelming for a unique replacement. I've marked this as red.

counterpoint said:
yeah. And also, because of their swappability, there isn't as much pressure when creating a set of proposals. Its not like the tech tree, where changing one thing can mess everything up. I could make proposals without feeling like I was ruining something if they weren't great.

About wonders, agreed!

counterpoint said:
I'm historically a "late adopter" of games (still haven't played BE yet!). Probably can't justify that with CiVI, though... (but I'm not done with V yet!)

You're not missing much with BE - I went back to CiV after playing it for a while. It had a lot of interesting ideas, but the factions didn't feel very compelling by comparison to CiV, which meant I wasn't as excited about the games.

I'll definitely pick up CiVI close to release!

counterpoint · Sep 3, 2016

S3rgeus said:
Sorry for the delays! I was out D&Ding and at the movies Thursday and Friday!

S3rgeus said:
From the way the ability is written right now, it seems like Nobles only affect the yields of other Specialists in the building, so a positive feedback loop with their own LP yields shouldn't be a problem.

I agree that LP points based on the building type make sense.

Just looking back over this one as whole - do we need the Happiness penalty? The effect resolves to being a yield bonus specific to a particular building, for which Happiness seems like a pretty steep cost to pay. The additional slots means that a higher Population city will have more to do, but a higher Population will already produce a lot of Unhappiness because of that Population.

the

happiness penalty was mostly flavor-derived. There's definitely a lame side to the whole DD'M thing, and I think some :c5unhappy:

unhappiness reflected that well. I figured we'd compensate with a better yield boost.

That said, penalties in general feel lame, so it might not be worth it. Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Aha! The weird alternate idea arrives to save the day! That solves the biggest problem of using the Cairhienin ability as a method of denying the other players access to Sites of Power, while still giving Cairhien a scalable Science bonus.

I think we can allow them to have a "Study Relic" ability that produces Science when finished, doesn't consume the Site of Power, and does consume the Academic. The cost of needing to produce more Academics is enough that I think we can still allow them to dig up that Site (if they send a second Academic there). (Though obviously we don't want to allow them to Study the same Site more than once.)

I can also see another variant, where the Studying doesn't actually produce any Science. Instead, all Relics owned by Cairhien produce +X Science (in addition to their normal yields) for each Site of Power that an Academic has studied. (We'd keep the can-only-study-once, studying-consumes-Academic, etc. stuff from above.) This creates a balancing act mechanic for Cairhien, where they want to gather some Relics for the bonus, but also Study as many as possible.

What do you think of those?

Interesting. Part of me wants to go with the simplest option, just the straight + :c5science:

science yield when you Study, but it is perhaps a little less deep from a gameplay perspective. I wonder if the + :c5science:

science-to-Relics thing might pose some problems, though. First, it relies on a decent :c5culture:

culture game to get going, and, more importantly, it seems like it really makes you micromanage that :c5culture:

culture game. Namely, since it's a cumulative, stacking bonus, it seems like you'd have to ensure that each and every SoP you dug up was first Studied. I suppose that's true in either option, but here it sort of feels like you have a bit more of a "timer" about the whole thing - every turn that you haven't maximized your + :c5science:

science per turn is a wasted turn. I dunno. MAybe they both have this problem - for some reason, the second variant makes it more obvious, though.

The mirror image of that variant would be to have a one-time :c5science:

science yield, but make it based on how many Relics you have (still shares the same :c5culture:

culture requirement, though).

Also, I imagine this is, in fact, just Relics, and not all :greatwork:

LWs?

S3rgeus said:
True, that's quite problematic. With this and some other stuff you mention below, I've redded both Feasts of Lights. I think the whole "Improvement you need to rebuild" thing isn't going to be fun for players overall.

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Related to this, I've come up with a new idea for how we could use the "temporary Improvement" vibe with the Feast of Lights without it being a maintenance burden, and connected to We Love the King Day!

Interesting. I mostly like this! Not sure we'll pick it, but I like it. It relies on a kind of fringe mechanic (wltkd), which is both a negative and a positive. I prefer it to the true UIs, though!

on that note, though, it kind of feels like this is a UA, and not a UI... Justify, plz?

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, they would suffer that damage if the MotL being hit succeeded in redirecting the damage. A given MotL would function the same way regardless of the unit types of the adjacent units. I've made a small addition to clear up this ambiguity.

good change.

S3rgeus said:
This doesn't seem like a city-capture ability. It allows Cairhien to purchase these units cheap from cities that have been attacked or have attacked an enemy. My main concern is that it's primarily defensive.

wires crossed... I somehow ended up thinking it was getting combat bonuses against cities that have been attacked. Buying units cheap obviously doesn't help offense (when triggered by this). I feel like this is kind of fringe, though. I'm redding it.

S3rgeus said:
Oh yeah, this isn't what I'd intended to target this UU at. I totally agree that the way it is now, it encourages Genghis-like CS aggression, which wasn't what I meant to do. I was thinking about stealing allies from other civs. I've amended this to work when Cairhien is at war with the current ally, so that it's used for that, instead of generic CS aggression (and therefore doesn't trigger the CS diplo penalties).

Still a little weird, in that it relies on war for diplo gain (does that feel like Cairhien?), but it's certainly better this way.

S3rgeus said:
Daes Dae'mar is a good lock, but our only options for that seem to be UAs. Daes Dae'mar is the majority of our UA choices, but there are still others. Well, actually, there's only one other: King's Gift. Are we fine with removing that and making our UA choices all Daes Dae'mar variants? I think if we want to capture the well known flavor of Cairhien, then Daes Dae'mar is the only real option for a UA, in the end.

I mostly like this UA, but I do agree that DD'M pretty much has to take up a UA slot, so I think cutting it is the right idea. I'm not sure it easily translated into a UB, so... down it goes.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, some are adjustable that way. I agree that it would be good to have more non-Science options (I think we've got the Science stuff covered). I've suggested some new additions for those roles below!

This is just the Silk Path one, right? This one is pretty tame, but I think it's probably a fine option for some :c5gold:

gold.

S3rgeus said:
Probably (Happiness). The difficulty with that UA is that it's potentially useful for a Wide civ as well - the Happiness isn't tied to having Tall-er cities, so it doesn't encourage Tall.

ok. agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Agreed on these, though it does reduce our non-Science options. I'll try to suggest some others below.

I only see one new one - any others?

S3rgeus said:
One difficulty I'm having with all of these UBs (less so the Illuminators one, since it doesn't have to produce Science) is that the Academic UU is so awesome by comparison. Related to what I mentioned early on with Cairhien, they can become a Science civ with just the one Science unique and given the overall power of Science-boosts, it's difficult to have multiple Science uniques in a single set without the civ being too strong. That means I'd be inclined to include the Academic (unit) in both of our sets, which doesn't really leave room for these.

I don't think that's a deal breaker, though. IMO, we haven't committed to using the Academic by any means. I do agree we probably wouldn't want the Academic plus a building in the same build, though.

S3rgeus said:
Another thing I'm struck by when considering the Academic (Governor) is that it does seem to have a very large overlap with the Philosopher (default Science Governor). Without a bonus yield to Science or Scholar generation, the only difference between them is the function of their Upgrade 2 ability. While that does affect how they work, it effectively makes that upgrade a non-choice, which isn't really compelling. And the majority of their functionality is the same (the first 100 turns), which feels a underwhelming for a unique replacement. I've marked this as red.

Yeah, I hadn't intended it to be so similar. Agreed to red.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking). The Noble produces LP points of the type associated with the building in which it is placed.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which doesn't remove the Site and produces +X Science (very high). Cairhien cannot Study the same Site more than once.
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage from an enemy attack, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.
Nobles' Bannerman, replaces an era 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. Can be purchased for X% less Gold (high, like 75) in cities that have been attacked by or have attacked an enemy unit in the last Y (like 3) turns.
Nobles' Attendant Corps, replaces an era 7-9 non-ranged unit. Has an X% chance of triggering a Cairhienin coup in a City-State when attacking its capital and Cairhien is at war with that City-State's current ally.

UBs:

School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate, replaces Spy National Wonder OR Prestige National Wonder. When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Silk Path Trading Post, replaces Gold3. Luxury resources worked by this city produce +X Gold. Double Gold yield from resource diversity from trade routes connected to this city.

UIs:

Feast of Lights, cannot be built by Workers. Whenever a city enters "We Love the King Day", a random Trading Post within the workable radius of the city becomes a Feast of Lights until "We Love the King Day" ends in that city. Feasts of Lights produce +X Culture, +Y Food, +Z Gold (higher than Trading Post), and +W Happiness (low, like 1 or 2).

Not sure the Academic needs a (very high) bonus anymore.

For the foregate - Spy or Prestige?

S3rgeus said:
Some sets would be useful at this stage, probably. Here are a couple I like:

UA: Daes Dae'mar (specialist)
UU: Academic (unit)
UU: Master of the Lances
UI: Feast of Lights

Academic provides our science focus and Daes Dae'mar provides Tallness.

Yeah, I like this one pretty well. I guess I might made an adjustment:

UA: Daes Dae'mar (specialist)
UU: Academic (unit)
UU: Master of the Lances OR Con Bannerman
UI: Feast of Lights

I guess I kind of like the CB because it further reinforces Tallness.

S3rgeus said:
UA: Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy)
UU: Academic (unit) OR UB: Royal Academy
UU: Con Bannerman
UB: Foregate

In this one, the UA hits Diplo, the Academic Science, and the last two hit Tall. However, given how late both Foregate and Con Bannerman are, this set doesn't really make Cairhien very Tall. So despite what I mentioned above, I've also put an alternative in for the Academic to encourage Tall at the same time as the Science bonus!

I mostly like this one, actually. I'm not sure which, overall, I prefer. Both are likely fine.

I kind of like the Royal Library building, and wish we'd squeezed it in somewhere. I know it's sort of Wide-favoring, it seems - I just like how it doubles up on :c5science:

science and :c5gold:

gold.

Overall, feel pretty goodly about these though.

S3rgeus · Sep 4, 2016

counterpoint said:
the happiness penalty was mostly flavor-derived. There's definitely a lame side to the whole DD'M thing, and I think some unhappiness reflected that well. I figured we'd compensate with a better yield boost.

That said, penalties in general feel lame, so it might not be worth it. Thoughts?

I think it would be fine to leave this penalty off.

counterpoint said:
Interesting. Part of me wants to go with the simplest option, just the straight +science yield when you Study, but it is perhaps a little less deep from a gameplay perspective. I wonder if the +science-to-Relics thing might pose some problems, though. First, it relies on a decent culture game to get going, and, more importantly, it seems like it really makes you micromanage that culture game. Namely, since it's a cumulative, stacking bonus, it seems like you'd have to ensure that each and every SoP you dug up was first Studied. I suppose that's true in either option, but here it sort of feels like you have a bit more of a "timer" about the whole thing - every turn that you haven't maximized your +science per turn is a wasted turn. I dunno. MAybe they both have this problem - for some reason, the second variant makes it more obvious, though.

The mirror image of that variant would be to have a one-time science yield, but make it based on how many Relics you have (still shares the same culture requirement, though).

I think you've got it right on this one, that having to explore the Site afterwards exposes might not be as much fun for the player. Let's stick with the +Science dump and we can change it later if we want to add more pizazz!

counterpoint said:
Also, I imagine this is, in fact, just Relics, and not all LWs?

Yes, just Relics.

counterpoint said:
Interesting. I mostly like this! Not sure we'll pick it, but I like it. It relies on a kind of fringe mechanic (wltkd), which is both a negative and a positive. I prefer it to the true UIs, though!

on that note, though, it kind of feels like this is a UA, and not a UI... Justify, plz?

Justification is mostly that it's all mechanically centered around the Improvement itself, similar to a unit that makes itself cheaper to purchase when a certain condition is met. If it were a UA, given the way it works, the Feast of Lights would still need to occupy a UI a slot (unless we pulled the bonus out of the Improvement altogether), which squanders the UA, since the actual bonus comes from the UI.

I would be up for adding the spawning part to whatever UA we picked with this in the set though.

counterpoint said:
wires crossed... I somehow ended up thinking it was getting combat bonuses against cities that have been attacked. Buying units cheap obviously doesn't help offense (when triggered by this). I feel like this is kind of fringe, though. I'm redding it.

Yeah, let's scrap this one.

counterpoint said:
Still a little weird, in that it relies on war for diplo gain (does that feel like Cairhien?), but it's certainly better this way.

Agreed, it feels like a better fit for Tear really! Red.

counterpoint said:
This is just the Silk Path one, right? This one is pretty tame, but I think it's probably a fine option for some gold.

Yeah, I tried to brainstorm some more, but nothing was particularly forthcoming! I forgot to go back and modify this quote block accordingly.

counterpoint said:
I only see one new one - any others?

Same as above.

counterpoint said:
I don't think that's a deal breaker, though. IMO, we haven't committed to using the Academic by any means. I do agree we probably wouldn't want the Academic plus a building in the same build, though.

We haven't committed to using the Academic, but I would be hard pressed to see us choosing one of the buildings over the Academic given the choices now.

counterpoint said:
Not sure the Academic needs a (very high) bonus anymore.

I'd say we can leave that for now, for Cairhien the value conversion from Production to Academic to Science is still the same as it was originally.

counterpoint said:
For the foregate - Spy or Prestige?

I'd say let's go with Prestige. Given the craziness of the effect, we want it to be the later one.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I like this one pretty well. I guess I might made an adjustment:

UA: Daes Dae'mar (specialist)
UU: Academic (unit)
UU: Master of the Lances OR Con Bannerman
UI: Feast of Lights

I guess I kind of like the CB because it further reinforces Tallness.

Yep, looks good!

counterpoint said:
I mostly like this one, actually. I'm not sure which, overall, I prefer. Both are likely fine.

Same, the two sets feel much more competitive with each other on Cairhien than they have on a lot of civs we've done already.

counterpoint said:
I kind of like the Royal Library building, and wish we'd squeezed it in somewhere. I know it's sort of Wide-favoring, it seems - I just like how it doubles up on science and gold.

Yeah, this building was the one I was closest to including in set 2.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X, but lowers Happiness by Y (both stacking). The Noble produces LP points of the type associated with the building in which it is placed.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic (unit), replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which doesn't remove the Site and produces +X Science (very high). Cairhien cannot Study the same Site more than once.
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage from an enemy attack, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.
Nobles' Attendant Corps, replaces an era 7-9 non-ranged unit. Has an X% chance of triggering a Cairhienin coup in a City-State when attacking its capital and Cairhien is at war with that City-State's current ally.

UBs:

School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate, replaces Spy National Wonder OR National Wonder (Prestige). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Silk Path Trading Post, replaces Gold3. Luxury resources worked by this city produce +X Gold. Double Gold yield from resource diversity from trade routes connected to this city.

UIs:

Feast of Lights, cannot be built by Workers. Whenever a city enters "We Love the King Day", a random Trading Post within the workable radius of the city becomes a Feast of Lights until "We Love the King Day" ends in that city. Feasts of Lights produce +X Culture, +Y Food, +Z Gold (higher than Trading Post), and +W Happiness (low, like 1 or 2).

counterpoint said:
Overall, feel pretty goodly about these though.

Same, and we seem to be mostly done! I don't feel the need to cull any of our remaining options - it seems like an appropriately pared down list. Shall I add Cairhien to the design list and start us off on Ghealdan?

counterpoint · Sep 4, 2016

S3rgeus said:
I think it would be fine to leave this penalty off.

k

S3rgeus said:
I think you've got it right on this one, that having to explore the Site afterwards exposes might not be as much fun for the player. Let's stick with the +Science dump and we can change it later if we want to add more pizazz!

yeah, and balance later!

S3rgeus said:
Yes, just Relics.

k

S3rgeus said:
Justification is mostly that it's all mechanically centered around the Improvement itself, similar to a unit that makes itself cheaper to purchase when a certain condition is met. If it were a UA, given the way it works, the Feast of Lights would still need to occupy a UI a slot (unless we pulled the bonus out of the Improvement altogether), which squanders the UA, since the actual bonus comes from the UI.

I would be up for adding the spawning part to whatever UA we picked with this in the set though.

ok. agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, it feels like a better fit for Tear really! Red.

S3rgeus said:
We haven't committed to using the Academic, but I would be hard pressed to see us choosing one of the buildings over the Academic given the choices now.

yeah, I think a UU civilian is cool in at least one civ, too.

S3rgeus said:
I'd say we can leave that for now, for Cairhien the value conversion from Production to Academic to Science is still the same as it was originally.

ok. It's still marked red. I'll unred it.

S3rgeus said:
I'd say let's go with Prestige. Given the craziness of the effect, we want it to be the later one.

ok

S3rgeus said:
Same, the two sets feel much more competitive with each other on Cairhien than they have on a lot of civs we've done already.

Yeah, that's likely because we had much more laser focus with this civ, mechanically.

Recap!

Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Science/Diplomatic)

UAs:

Daes Dae'mar (specialist), All Cairhienin buildings that have at least one Specialist slot have an additional slot for a Noble specialist. Filling the Noble slot increases yield production of all other Specialists of that type in the city by X. The Noble produces LP points of the type associated with the building in which it is placed.
Daes Dae'mar (trade), Cairhien receives at least X Science from international trade routes (including with City-States). Other civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes established by Cairhien.
Daes Dae'mar (diplomacy), Cairhien can negotiate for Compact votes with civilizations it doesn't have a Diplomat in the capital of. Cairhienin Eyes and Ears stationed in other civilizations generate +X Science per turn.
Daes Dae'mar (specHapp), adds a slot for a Noble Specialist to any building that already has a Specialist slot. Non-Noble Specialists produce no Unhappiness when in the same building as a Noble, but X% more Unhappiness (like 50) when in a building without a Noble, per Noble in other buildings in this city. Nobles produce +Y Ambassador points and +Z (low) Culture.

UUs:

Academic, replaces the Historian, When exploring a Site of Power, has the option of Studying the Relic, which doesn't remove the Site and produces +X Science (very high). Cairhien cannot Study the same Site more than once.
Con Bannerman, replaces era 7-9 unit, spawns with +X EXP for every Y population in the producing city.
Master of the Lances, replaces an eras 7-9 unit, has increased combat strength. When a Master of the Lances takes damage from an enemy attack, there is an X% chance that that damage will be dealt to an adjacent Cairhienin unit with Y or more (like 75) total health remaining instead.

UBs:

School of Cairhien, replaces Science National Wonder 2, Each time Cairhien acquires a new technology, +X Gold and +Y Food in this city.
Illuminator's HQ, replaces <Illuminator Nat. Wonder>, +X Science. +Y Gold for each worked Sulfur tile.
Royal Library, replaces Science 3, X% of the Science produced in this city is provided as Gold.
Royal Academy, replaces National Wonder (Science) 2 can only be built in the capital, additional +X% Science per turn. Cairhien can Exhibit at the city this building is constructed in. Foreign Exhibitions performed at this city also count as a Cairhienin Exhibition of the same type.
Foregate, replaces National Wonder (Prestige). When this building is constructed, the city's Population doubles.
Silk Path Trading Post, replaces Gold3. Luxury resources worked by this city produce +X Gold. Double Gold yield from resource diversity from trade routes connected to this city.

UIs:

Feast of Lights, cannot be built by Workers. Whenever a city enters "We Love the King Day", a random Trading Post within the workable radius of the city becomes a Feast of Lights until "We Love the King Day" ends in that city. Feasts of Lights produce +X Culture, +Y Food, +Z Gold (higher than Trading Post), and +W Happiness (low, like 1 or 2).

S3rgeus said:
Same, and we seem to be mostly done! I don't feel the need to cull any of our remaining options - it seems like an appropriately pared down list. Shall I add Cairhien to the design list and start us off on Ghealdan?

nah, we're done culling. That's 14 abilities, which is a fine number.

Cairhien done! Ghealdan next! :goodjob:

S3rgeus · Sep 4, 2016

counterpoint said:
nah, we're done culling. That's 14 abilities, which is a fine number.

Cairhien done! Ghealdan next!

Awesome, sounds good! I've added Cairhien to the design list!

On to Ghealdan! Land of the Prophet!

Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

Repurposed Faith, Ghealdan may always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist, and may choose Customs that have already been chosen by other Paths.
Dedicated Followers, purchasing units with Faith (including LPs in the late game) costs Ghealdan X% less (like 50).
Followers of the True Dragon, Ghealdan's units do X% extra damage (like 50) to False Dragons and get Y% more rewards for killing False Dragons, but do not receive an extra bonus for Gentling them.

UUs:

Fanatical Warriors, replaces era 7/8 melee unit, Dragonsworn and Shadowspawn killed by this unit become Heralds for the Path you founded.
Exiled Queen, replaces the Ambassador, gives the player 2 quota free Sisters per "Meet with the Amyrlin," instead of 1, and grants you +X influence with the Ajah of your choice.
Zealot (capture), replaces era 5/6 military unit, higher combat strength and converts cities to the Path you founded when it captures them.
Zealot (spread), replaces the Herald, has a combat strength of X. Generates +Y Culture when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (offense), replaces the Herald. Generates +X Culture and deals Y damage to the city (if it is foreign) when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (encampment), replaces era 5/7 military unit, higher combat strength. Can construct Dragonsworn Encampments (see below).

UBs:

Queen's Refuge, National Wonder (Culture), on construction: pick an Ajah, +X influence per turn with that Ajah.
Prophet's Pilgrimage Site, replaces Culture1. This city produces +X Faith (like 5) when it attacks a Dragonsworn or Shadowspawn unit.

UIs:

Dragonsworn Encampment, can only be built in unclaimed territory. Spawns Dragonsworn like a normal Encampment. Disappears after X turns.

Repurposed Faith allows Ghealdan to always play the Path game, regardless of how their early game goes. It also allows a lot of the other uniques to care more directly about the Path that Ghealdan founded, since that option is always available. (Rather than needing to get the player to keep track of a majority/capital majority/something not as obvious.) It allows them to always pick the Customs that best suit their situation, regardless of what other players are doing. It nods to the flavor of Masema twisting the following the Dragon into something very different. It's also very helpful in that it's not a targeted early game ability (unlike a building that unlocks on one of the first few techs), so it doesn't go against their flavor of being an era 5-9 civ, but still helps Ghealdan in the race to get a Path, avoiding the Byzantium problem.

Dedicated Followers is a relatively straightforward way to encourage Ghealdan to play a very Faith-based game and be very effective at it.

Followers of the True Dragon nods to the flavor of Masema again - being dedicated to the real Dragon and no others.

Fanatical Warriors can produce a ton of Heralds if used correctly, which is the idea. Paths are less dominant in the late game (though not so diminished as Religions in BNW), so this very late game unit needs to have a strong Path effect to make it impactful.

Exiled Queen is a reference to Alliandre. Her flavor fits quite nicely into this mechanic, though there would be "multiple" Queens. The flavor for that is that the CiV game takes place over a much longer time period than the books, and the Prophet-like folks are in charge for all of that time, so they would exile many Queens over the course of that. 2 Sisters might be a bit strong, and could be adjusted down by a % chance of that happening if we found it so.

All of the Zealots! En taro!

(capture) is a Domination focused unique that also advances the Path approach.

(spread) is a combination Domination (combat strength) and Culture (generates Culture) replacement for the Herald.

(offense) lets Ghealdan use Zealots to soften up enemies before attacking them, participating in an invasion with Herald-replacements, or even intervening in foreign wars at opportune moments. (Using this ability would not DoW.)

(encampment) connects to the Dragonsworn Encampment UI, which I'll go into below. There are tons of variants of this (this one similar-ish the Roman Legion - a military unit that can build a specific Improvement - but we could also have a Herald-replacement that could expend a Spread to create it, etc.) if we want other ways to do it.

Queen's Refuge is again a reference to Alliandre and her eventual closeness to the Tower. It still has the normal functions of National Wonder (culture).

Prophet's Pilgrimage Site lets Ghealdan get started on the Path/Faith game very quickly, helping them set up a Path, and connects to their Dragonsworn flavor. Related to what I said with Repurposed Faith though, where this unlocks is very outside Ghealdan's intended active range of eras.

Dragonsworn Encampment lets Ghealdan annoy other players (and themselves if they're bad at placing them) without actually declaring war on them. I think this Improvement works much better as one that disappears, because otherwise you could carpet the area near a civ with them, which isn't what we want! It's also notable that there should be a Diplo penalty with AI civs who find that Ghealdan has been doing this near them.

counterpoint · Sep 4, 2016

S3rgeus said:
Repurposed Faith allows Ghealdan to always play the Path game, regardless of how their early game goes. It also allows a lot of the other uniques to care more directly about the Path that Ghealdan founded, since that option is always available. (Rather than needing to get the player to keep track of a majority/capital majority/something not as obvious.) It allows them to always pick the Customs that best suit their situation, regardless of what other players are doing. It nods to the flavor of Masema twisting the following the Dragon into something very different. It's also very helpful in that it's not a targeted early game ability (unlike a building that unlocks on one of the first few techs), so it doesn't go against their flavor of being an era 5-9 civ, but still helps Ghealdan in the race to get a Path, avoiding the Byzantium problem.

OK, I think there's a lot to like about this one, but also one big problem. I think this is a nifty mechanic that seems appropriate for the civ, early-game or otherwise, and adds a neat dimension to certain kinds of Path runs...

However, What I don't like about this is that if you play well, you get zero benefit from it. Or, at least, if you play in a way that is typically good for religion-seeking - gathering Faith in the early game in order to snag a Path. If you do that, and get your first choice of the Path and customs, you get what appears to be zero bonus from this UA. I think that might be unique among all UAs (here or in BNW), and I think that's a big problem.

What this encourages, it seems, is a playstyle in which you pretty much ignore early :c5faith:

faith in favor of dealing with it later. I guess that's kind of cool, except in doing so, you're also missing out on the other benefits of having early :c5faith:

faith - actually getting to *use* the path, and also an increased global religious presence. So I'm not sure that's necessarily something we want to seek out.

Is there a way around this? I want to like an ability like this, but I'm not sure how to.

S3rgeus said:
Dedicated Followers is a relatively straightforward way to encourage Ghealdan to play a very Faith-based game and be very effective at it.

A decent ability. Possibly very strong. Isn't this redundant to some Customs and possibly even some policies, though? It's certainly more powerful, but it still feels like it might not be splashy enough.

S3rgeus said:
Followers of the True Dragon nods to the flavor of Masema again - being dedicated to the real Dragon and no others.

Yeah, interesting. This might be too niche to be worth it. But it also could be paired with rather powerful other uniques to make it worthy.

S3rgeus said:
Fanatical Warriors can produce a ton of Heralds if used correctly, which is the idea. Paths are less dominant in the late game (though not so diminished as Religions in BNW), so this very late game unit needs to have a strong Path effect to make it impactful.

Yeah, this could be crazy. I'm down, though. With Dragonsworn alone, it'd be too weak, given the rarity of them late-game. With SS, thoug... whoah.

What about lawless?

S3rgeus said:
Exiled Queen is a reference to Alliandre. Her flavor fits quite nicely into this mechanic, though there would be "multiple" Queens. The flavor for that is that the CiV game takes place over a much longer time period than the books, and the Prophet-like folks are in charge for all of that time, so they would exile many Queens over the course of that. 2 Sisters might be a bit strong, and could be adjusted down by a % chance of that happening if we found it so.

Hmmmm... I wonder if it's a little weird having a U-LP that is only better when using one specific ability. I guess it just feels like a very, very specialized bonus. It's also kind of random-seeming flavorwise. What is the big deal with her, tower-wise? She becomes a follower of Perrin, but I don't seem to remember much in the way of Aes Sedai connection.

In general, I'd say it feels kind of weird to have Ghealdan have a Tower-related ability. We previously discussed them possibly being either oppression or liberation....

S3rgeus said:
All of the Zealots! En taro!

For adun!

Have you played LotV yet?

S3rgeus said:
(capture) is a Domination focused unique that also advances the Path approach.

very cool unit! what happens if you didn't found a Path?

S3rgeus said:
(spread) is a combination Domination (combat strength) and Culture (generates Culture) replacement for the Herald.

Is X going to be high? Because it's only good for dom if it's high, I'd guess. Good idea overall, though.

S3rgeus said:
(offense) lets Ghealdan use Zealots to soften up enemies before attacking them, participating in an invasion with Herald-replacements, or even intervening in foreign wars at opportune moments. (Using this ability would not DoW.)

very trippy. I like the idea of it, for sure. It's so evil.

Is it too evil, though? Fanatics are civilians, so it'd be really hard to kill this guy if he was with a bunch of military units. Is the amount of damage likely to be high?

S3rgeus said:
(encampment) connects to the Dragonsworn Encampment UI, which I'll go into below. There are tons of variants of this (this one similar-ish the Roman Legion - a military unit that can build a specific Improvement - but we could also have a Herald-replacement that could expend a Spread to create it, etc.) if we want other ways to do it.

Interesting! I think this is also quite evil. It's definitely a cool mechanic. I also wonder if it specifically helps the player enough to use it? It's one thing if the unit is otherwise good enough to make it worth it, but if the encampment is the main draw, I could see it being a fun unit, but not necessarily a *good* unit, since dragonsworn might annoy your enemies, but doesn't really payoff for you much.

S3rgeus said:
Queen's Refuge is again a reference to Alliandre and her eventual closeness to the Tower. It still has the normal functions of National Wonder (culture).

still not totally on board with the flavor here...

The ability's fine - just not sure it fits for this Civ.

S3rgeus said:
Prophet's Pilgrimage Site lets Ghealdan get started on the Path/Faith game very quickly, helping them set up a Path, and connects to their Dragonsworn flavor. Related to what I said with Repurposed Faith though, where this unlocks is very outside Ghealdan's intended active range of eras.

Yeah, it is way outside, especially since DSworn are so much more common early on. It doesn't have to be a deal-breaker, though. It's also a kind of niche ability, so it makes itself useful by being available for so long.

S3rgeus said:
Dragonsworn Encampment lets Ghealdan annoy other players (and themselves if they're bad at placing them) without actually declaring war on them. I think this Improvement works much better as one that disappears, because otherwise you could carpet the area near a civ with them, which isn't what we want! It's also notable that there should be a Diplo penalty with AI civs who find that Ghealdan has been doing this near them.

Yeah, I think this is something that's definiteyl worth pursuing. I assume it doesn't have to be built in your territory, but can it be build in foreign territory?

What's to stop you from carpeting them anyways? I think the only way to do that is to limit its usage in a very specific way - either via a Herald Spread or a "use it X times and then you can't, per unit" thing (like the Nau's shipping mission or something).

It's also worth noting that this ability is somewhat overlapping with the LP ability (belonging to the Dreamwalker, I think) that somewhat undermines its specialness.

RECAP, with new stuff!

Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

Repurposed Faith, Ghealdan may always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist, and may choose Customs that have already been chosen by other Paths.
Dedicated Followers, purchasing units with Faith (including LPs in the late game) costs Ghealdan X% less (like 50).
Followers of the True Dragon, Ghealdan's units do X% extra damage (like 50) to False Dragons and get Y% more rewards for killing False Dragons, but do not receive an extra bonus for Gentling them.
Unmatched Zeal, X% of Gold gained on city capture is also earned as Faith. This amount is doubled if the city is of the same Path as a Path founded by Ghealdan. If the city is of a different Path, then the city is converted to a Path founded by Ghealdan.
Oaths of Fealty, Benefits due to Alignment are doubled during the Last Battle. Penalties due to Alignment are halved.
Ravaging Fanatics, can purchase Dragonsworn units with Faith, which are controlled by Ghealdan but appear to other players to be owned by the Dragonsworn civilization.

UUs:

Fanatical Warriors, replaces era 7/8 melee unit, Dragonsworn and Shadowspawn killed by this unit become Heralds for the Path you founded.
Exiled Queen, replaces the Ambassador, gives the player 2 quota free Sisters per "Meet with the Amyrlin," instead of 1, and grants you +X influence with the Ajah of your choice.
Zealot (capture), replaces era 5/6 military unit, higher combat strength and converts cities to the Path you founded when it captures them.
Zealot (spread), replaces the Herald, has a combat strength of X. Generates +Y Culture when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (offense), replaces the Herald. Generates +X Culture and deals Y damage to the city (if it is foreign) when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (encampment), replaces era 5/7 military unit or Herald, higher combat strength. Can construct Dragonsworn Encampments (see below).
Legionnaire of the Wall (faith heal), replaces era 5-8 melee, polearm, or ranged unit. Increased combat strength. X% of Ghealdan's Faith per turn is restored to the Legionnaire in HP.
Legionnaire of the Wall (disband), replaces era 7-8 melee, polearm, or ranged unit. Can be purchased for X Faith. If disbanded, provides Y Faith (lower than X). At any point, can be reinstated for Z Faith (something like X+# of turns since disbanding).
Prophet of the Dragon, replaces the Visionary, can Spread one additional time. When Spreading a Path in foreign territory, creates Dragonsworn that yield X Gold to Ghealdan for every tile they pillage, and Y Faith to Ghealdan for every unit they kill or city they capture.

UBs:

Queen's Refuge, National Wonder (Culture), on construction: pick an Ajah, +X influence per turn with that Ajah.
Prophet's Pilgrimage Site, replaces Culture1. This city produces +X Faith (like 5) when it attacks a Dragonsworn or Shadowspawn unit.
Alum Smelter, replaces Production (Copper), can be built in a city with Copper, Iron, or Alum. Every Copper, Iron, or Alum resource worked by this city produces a +X Production (greater than default bonus). +Y Prestige (after <tech>) for each copy of Alum owned by Ghealdan.
Garen's Wall Bastion, replaces Defense 3, +X Culture for every Hill tile worked by the City, and +Y HP to the city for every Forest tile within the city's workable radius.
Prophet's Hostel, replaces Alignment 1, Citizens of the Alignment opposed to this building generate X% fewer Alignment points. +Y Culture in this city if Ghealdan has less than Z total happiness.

UIs:

Dragonsworn Encampment, can only be built in unclaimed territory. Spawns Dragonsworn like a normal Encampment. Disappears after X turns.

Unmatched Zeal is a UA adaptation of your Zealot (capture) ability, fused with an idea I had a billion years ago for an Amadicia ability, that'd work fine here. The founding stuff could be changed to majority, if need be.

Oaths of Fealty is weird, I know. I originally intended something like this for Amadicia - a more obvious LB-related civ - but upon thinking of Alliandre and such, I figured this made more sense than a strictly Diplo-related interpretation of fealty (nobody wants an ability that give syou bonuses for Defensive pacts and stuff, and Ghealdan were typically neutral). So, I dunno, an idea. Maybe better with the Children...

I don't know if Ravaging Fanatics is even possible, but I like the flavor of it - Masema's people do tons of crazy stuff, and he just shrugs about it and acts like he can't control them. To clarify, this would mean that Ghealdan would control actual Dragonsworn units, or at least units that would be *colored* like Dragonsworn units. Thus allowing them to harass other civs without a DoW. Alternatives to this would be a UI encampment that generates such units, or some other production method besides faith. I considered a UU, but figured by its very nature that would ruin the disguise...

I wanted to find a UA use of the "Crown High Council" flavor, but couldn't come up with anything. Any thoughts?

The first Legionnaire ability is odd, of course. I also considered it to be a bonus to :c5strength:

combat strength instead of healing. MEant to reward the player for faith and such.

The second Legionnaire is obviously even crazier. I'm not sure something like this would even make strategic sense. This is based on the flavor that Masema disbanded the Legion of the Wall, and then Alliandre tried to revive it, and then it apparently was revived later under Perrin's watch. So, I suppose the strategy here would be disbanding your military to save on maintenance or something, and then getting it back in one fell swoop. Or something.

The Prophet unit is obviously very all-in on the dragonsworn thing. Not sure how useful it'd actually end up, in game.

There's also flavor space for Lancers in green armor. They apparently came from Ghealdan and joined the legion of the dragon, I think. Couldn't think of a good ability, though.

Ghealdan is apparently one of the countries with sources of "First Grade Alum." This is meant to open up the forge-equivalent to more cities, make it stronger, and even provide some :tourism:

prestige.

Garen's Wall Bastion is intended to address the geography of Ghealdan, and provide some easy :c5culture:

culture.

The Prophet's hostel is meant to help Ghealdan lock into an alignment, and also provide a flavorful basis for some :c5culture:

culture generation through having a kind of lame civ and :c5unhappy:

unhappy people. I figured this number would be pretty darn close to 0, or maybe narrowly positive.

So, we have Ghealdan as Tall - none of our abilities really enforce this or support it? is that ok?

S3rgeus · Sep 5, 2016

counterpoint said:
OK, I think there's a lot to like about this one, but also one big problem. I think this is a nifty mechanic that seems appropriate for the civ, early-game or otherwise, and adds a neat dimension to certain kinds of Path runs...

However, What I don't like about this is that if you play well, you get zero benefit from it. Or, at least, if you play in a way that is typically good for religion-seeking - gathering Faith in the early game in order to snag a Path. If you do that, and get your first choice of the Path and customs, you get what appears to be zero bonus from this UA. I think that might be unique among all UAs (here or in BNW), and I think that's a big problem.

What this encourages, it seems, is a playstyle in which you pretty much ignore early faith in favor of dealing with it later. I guess that's kind of cool, except in doing so, you're also missing out on the other benefits of having early faith - actually getting to *use* the path, and also an increased global religious presence. So I'm not sure that's necessarily something we want to seek out.

Is there a way around this? I want to like an ability like this, but I'm not sure how to.

You're right, this ability should change something of the way about how Ghealdan's Path itself works as well, rather than just how they obtain it. I don't think it's bad that it doesn't help them as much when they're ahead, because we don't want the ability to double-down and cause them to snowball a lead. It shouldn't be completely useless either though, as you've said!

I've made an addition to this UA that should make it more useful for those cases. (The points are pressure points - the default Herald generates 1000 if unaffected by attrition.)

And your comments here have also made me think about the role of the Path for Ghealdan. What if we could create a civ that benefits from Founding its Path in the mid-game instead of early game? There are probably several ways to do that, but I think it could be quite fun and different.

I've also proposed a new semi-related UA to this one.

counterpoint said:
A decent ability. Possibly very strong. Isn't this redundant to some Customs and possibly even some policies, though? It's certainly more powerful, but it still feels like it might not be splashy enough.

Yeah, we've got enough bananas ideas that are really fun that I don't think we'll consider this one. Fine with red.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this could be crazy. I'm down, though. With Dragonsworn alone, it'd be too weak, given the rarity of them late-game. With SS, thoug... whoah.

What about lawless?

I'd be fine including Lawless too. I'd say the main difficulty, given when they unlock, is having enough turns use the Heralds, so giving them more targets should be ok to start with.

counterpoint said:
Hmmmm... I wonder if it's a little weird having a U-LP that is only better when using one specific ability. I guess it just feels like a very, very specialized bonus. It's also kind of random-seeming flavorwise. What is the big deal with her, tower-wise? She becomes a follower of Perrin, but I don't seem to remember much in the way of Aes Sedai connection.

In general, I'd say it feels kind of weird to have Ghealdan have a Tower-related ability. We previously discussed them possibly being either oppression or liberation....

Huh, I'm apparently mis-remembering my canon. I thought Alliandre traveled with Elayne and Egwene for a time, but apparently that's not the case. Who am I confusing her with? Red.

counterpoint said:
For adun!

Have you played LotV yet?

Nope, I don't know if I will in the end. I own Heart of the Swarm but am only a few missions in. I stopped playing it sometime last year. Still, Blizzard do a lot of cross-promoting, so you never know! I play a bit of Heroes of the Storm so it might connect me back to it eventually. The Protoss have always been my favorite Starcraft race.

counterpoint said:
very cool unit! what happens if you didn't found a Path?

If the UA we pick doesn't guarantee it in some way, then I'd say we could adjust all of these to be city-majority (Path that is a majority in the majority of Ghealdanin cities) or capital-majority (majority Path in Ghealdan's capital).

counterpoint said:
Is X going to be high? Because it's only good for dom if it's high, I'd guess. Good idea overall, though.

I think it should be of a value that it's slightly stronger than the best melee unit of the time when most civs would start producing Heralds.

counterpoint said:
very trippy. I like the idea of it, for sure. It's so evil.

Is it too evil, though? Fanatics are civilians, so it'd be really hard to kill this guy if he was with a bunch of military units. Is the amount of damage likely to be high?

I think the damage would be about 15 or so? With that damage, if it's hard to kill him because there are a bunch of military units around, then those units could already have done that much damage anyway.

counterpoint said:
Interesting! I think this is also quite evil. It's definitely a cool mechanic. I also wonder if it specifically helps the player enough to use it? It's one thing if the unit is otherwise good enough to make it worth it, but if the encampment is the main draw, I could see it being a fun unit, but not necessarily a *good* unit, since dragonsworn might annoy your enemies, but doesn't really payoff for you much.

You make a good point about Dragonsworn not paying off, I'll address that below. I figure the main point of this guy is that he's a fine UU (better than what he replaces) but also does the encampment thing. As long as the encampment is a well balanced UI (strong enough to be worth it, not overpowering), then that will make this guy fair too.

counterpoint said:
still not totally on board with the flavor here...

Same mixed up flavor, so red!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, it is way outside, especially since DSworn are so much more common early on. It doesn't have to be a deal-breaker, though. It's also a kind of niche ability, so it makes itself useful by being available for so long.

Agreed, I like the mechanics of it, but I'm not sure it fits with our intentions for Ghealdan flavorfully. Still, let's leave it in for now and we'll see!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think this is something that's definiteyl worth pursuing. I assume it doesn't have to be built in your territory, but can it be build in foreign territory?

What's to stop you from carpeting them anyways? I think the only way to do that is to limit its usage in a very specific way - either via a Herald Spread or a "use it X times and then you can't, per unit" thing (like the Nau's shipping mission or something).

It's also worth noting that this ability is somewhat overlapping with the LP ability (belonging to the Dreamwalker, I think) that somewhat undermines its specialness.

"Unclaimed territory" is hexes not owned by anyone, I don't think we want to allow them to be built in players' territory. The disappearing after X turns is to combat carpeting. Given the time it takes to build the encampment, even if the player does nothing but that, it doesn't form a carpet because the encampments keep disappearing. It would also be very hard to do that - the Dragonsworn would tend to capture the worker. And if you send a unit to defend him, you'll end up fighting the Dragonsworn, which defeats the point of putting it near an enemy.

I don't feel like the overlap with the Dreamwalker diminishes this ability. They're quite different approaches, this one is much more of a slow-and-steady burn, whereas the Dreamwalker is a sudden burst of units right on top of an enemy. The Dreamwalker also doesn't spawn the Dragonsworn directly through his own ability, it's only after he transports himself to T'a'r (one way process), so it's overall quite different.

Related to what you said above about making this worth it, I've adapted one of your ideas from Prophet of the Dragon into this to give it more of a bonus, rather than just messing with your opponents.

counterpoint said:
Unmatched Zeal is a UA adaptation of your Zealot (capture) ability, fused with an idea I had a billion years ago for an Amadicia ability, that'd work fine here. The founding stuff could be changed to majority, if need be.

This one is pretty cool. We could take the other pieces that are present here and not on Zealot (capture) and add them to a UU as well. (Obviously the bonuses scale differently when only on one unit vs on all units, so both are good options!).

This is a nice Domination/Faith bonus.

counterpoint said:
Oaths of Fealty is weird, I know. I originally intended something like this for Amadicia - a more obvious LB-related civ - but upon thinking of Alliandre and such, I figured this made more sense than a strictly Diplo-related interpretation of fealty (nobody wants an ability that give syou bonuses for Defensive pacts and stuff, and Ghealdan were typically neutral). So, I dunno, an idea. Maybe better with the Children...

Yeah, this does feel more like an Amadicia ability than Ghealdan. I'll mark it as red.

counterpoint said:
I don't know if Ravaging Fanatics is even possible, but I like the flavor of it - Masema's people do tons of crazy stuff, and he just shrugs about it and acts like he can't control them. To clarify, this would mean that Ghealdan would control actual Dragonsworn units, or at least units that would be *colored* like Dragonsworn units. Thus allowing them to harass other civs without a DoW. Alternatives to this would be a UI encampment that generates such units, or some other production method besides faith. I considered a UU, but figured by its very nature that would ruin the disguise...

I also don't know if this is possible. I would have to try it to find out. Like the other unique we considered a while back (I think for the Sea Folk) I wouldn't count that against this UA at this stage though. Assuming it is possible to hide nationality, then this could totally be a UU. It would just need to appear like a normal Dragonsworn to other civs.

counterpoint said:
I wanted to find a UA use of the "Crown High Council" flavor, but couldn't come up with anything. Any thoughts?

Suggested below!

counterpoint said:
The first Legionnaire ability is odd, of course. I also considered it to be a bonus to combat strength instead of healing. MEant to reward the player for faith and such.

I would say this would just make him really, really hard to kill. You'd need to burst him down to dead all at once, and it would be hard to choose a value of X because of how much Faith output varies throughout the game. (Very low to start, much higher later on.)

counterpoint said:
The second Legionnaire is obviously even crazier. I'm not sure something like this would even make strategic sense. This is based on the flavor that Masema disbanded the Legion of the Wall, and then Alliandre tried to revive it, and then it apparently was revived later under Perrin's watch. So, I suppose the strategy here would be disbanding your military to save on maintenance or something, and then getting it back in one fell swoop. Or something.

This one I think might be quite confusing. In what context would you be able to un-disband this unit? Like, would that be done from the city he was trained in, or the tile he was disbanded on? It's also a diminishing returns mechanic - it minimizes loss rather than providing a gain (makes needing to disband them cost you less), which doesn't seem very fun. I'll mark this as red.

counterpoint said:
The Prophet unit is obviously very all-in on the dragonsworn thing. Not sure how useful it'd actually end up, in game.

Awesome! I'm a big fan of this guy, he's really cool. The only drawback I see is that Ghealdan can't use its Visionaries peacefully - they have to antagonize people with them. Still, that's not a big problem, and I like the way this guy works.

counterpoint said:
There's also flavor space for Lancers in green armor. They apparently came from Ghealdan and joined the legion of the dragon, I think. Couldn't think of a good ability, though.

I'm not seeing any references to this in the wiki - is it in the Companion somewhere? I'd want to get a bit more familiar with the flavor before suggesting something for this one.

counterpoint said:
Ghealdan is apparently one of the countries with sources of "First Grade Alum." This is meant to open up the forge-equivalent to more cities, make it stronger, and even provide some prestige.

Fairly straightforward and hits the right flavor.

counterpoint said:
Garen's Wall Bastion is intended to address the geography of Ghealdan, and provide some easy culture.

Also straightforward and a nicely different building.

counterpoint said:
The Prophet's hostel is meant to help Ghealdan lock into an alignment, and also provide a flavorful basis for some culture generation through having a kind of lame civ and unhappy people. I figured this number would be pretty darn close to 0, or maybe narrowly positive.

With this as a late game building and Happiness being civ-wide, I'm not sure this works so well. Culture as the defensive part of the Culture Victory also means that the bonus isn't very essential to Ghealdan winning the game (particularly late game), so they're more likely to avoid it due to the Happiness problem.

counterpoint said:
So, we have Ghealdan as Tall - none of our abilities really enforce this or support it? is that ok?

I think that's fine. I don't feel like Ghealdan's flavor pushes us to ensure that they're Tall, so I'm fine with leaving their options open on that front.

Recap!

Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

Repurposed Faith, Ghealdan may always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist, and may choose Customs that have already been chosen by other Paths. When Ghealdan founds a Path, it immediately becomes the majority in all of Ghealdan's cities. The Ghealdanin Path is spread by X influence points to a city whenever a Shadowspawn or Dragonsworn pillages a tile that city is working.
Dedicated Followers, purchasing units with Faith (including LPs in the late game) costs Ghealdan X% less (like 50).
Followers of the True Dragon, Ghealdan's units do X% extra damage (like 50) to False Dragons and get Y% more rewards for killing False Dragons, but do not receive an extra bonus for Gentling them.
Unmatched Zeal, X% of Gold gained on city capture is also earned as Faith. This amount is doubled if the city is of the same Path as a Path founded by Ghealdan. If the city is of a different Path, then the city is converted to a Path founded by Ghealdan.
Oaths of Fealty, Benefits due to Alignment are doubled during the Last Battle. Penalties due to Alignment are halved.
Ravaging Fanatics, can purchase Dragonsworn units with Faith, which are controlled by Ghealdan but appear to other players to be owned by the Dragonsworn civilization.
Faith of the True Dragon, Ghealdan does not select Path Customs when founding or enhancing a Path. Ghealdan can always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist in the game. Each time Ghealdan kills a False Dragon, Ghealdan may choose an additional Custom to add to their Path, including those already chosen by other Paths. Ghealdan receives +X Faith when killing Dragonsworn and Lawless. Ghealdan generates +Y Prestige (large, like 20) for each Custom in their Path.
Disciples of the Dragon, cities following the Path founded by Ghealdan cannot be attacked by Dragonsworn or captured by Shadowspawn. Ghealdan's Path gains an extra Custom when the Dragon is born: "Every time the Dragon uses his Balefire Nuke or Proclaims a Field of Battle, a random Legendary Person spawns in this Path's holy city."
Crown High Council, Governors in Ghealdanin cities gain X turns toward their next upgrade whenever Ghealdan spawns a Visionary.

UUs:

Fanatical Warriors, replaces era 7/8 melee unit, Dragonsworn, Lawless, and Shadowspawn killed by this unit become Heralds for the Path you founded.
Exiled Queen, replaces the Ambassador, gives the player 2 quota free Sisters per "Meet with the Amyrlin," instead of 1, and grants you +X influence with the Ajah of your choice.
Zealot (capture), replaces era 5/6 military unit, higher combat strength and converts cities to the Path you founded when it captures them.
Zealot (spread), replaces the Herald, has a combat strength of X. Generates +Y Culture when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (offense), replaces the Herald. Generates +X Culture and deals Y damage to the city (if it is foreign) when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (encampment), replaces era 5/7 military unit or Herald, higher combat strength. Can construct Dragonsworn Encampments (see below).
Legionnaire of the Wall (faith heal), replaces era 5-8 melee, polearm, or ranged unit. Increased combat strength. X% of Ghealdan's Faith per turn is restored to the Legionnaire in HP.
Legionnaire of the Wall (disband), replaces era 7-8 melee, polearm, or ranged unit. Can be purchased for X Faith. If disbanded, provides Y Faith (lower than X). At any point, can be reinstated for Z Faith (something like X+# of turns since disbanding).
Prophet of the Dragon, replaces the Visionary, can Spread one additional time. When Spreading a Path in foreign territory, creates Dragonsworn that yield X Gold to Ghealdan for every tile they pillage, and Y Faith to Ghealdan for every unit they kill or city they capture.

UBs:

Queen's Refuge, National Wonder (Culture), on construction: pick an Ajah, +X influence per turn with that Ajah.
Prophet's Pilgrimage Site, replaces Culture1. This city produces +X Faith (like 5) when it attacks a Dragonsworn or Shadowspawn unit.
Alum Smelter, replaces Production (Copper), can be built in a city with Copper, Iron, or Alum. Every Copper, Iron, or Alum resource worked by this city produces a +X Production (greater than default bonus). +Y Prestige (after <tech>) for each copy of Alum owned by Ghealdan.
Garen's Wall Bastion, replaces Defense 3, +X Culture for every Hill tile worked by the City, and +Y HP to the city for every Forest tile within the city's workable radius.
Prophet's Hostel, replaces Alignment 1, Citizens of the Alignment opposed to this building generate X% fewer Alignment points. +Y Culture in this city if Ghealdan has less than Z total happiness.

UIs:

Dragonsworn Encampment, can only be built in unclaimed territory. Spawns Dragonsworn like a normal Encampment. Dragonsworn from this encampment provide Ghealdan with +X Gold when they pillage foreign lands and +Y Gold (higher) if they capture foreign civilians. Disappears after X turns.

Faith of the True Dragon is the spin on Repurposed Faith that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It aims to change the way Ghealdan approaches Paths and Faith entirely - gaining Customs through killing False Dragons (and possibly gaining more than other civs) while also helping them towards the Cultural Victory.

Disciples of the Dragon is a middling Path bonus throughout the game that turns into an explosive bonus during the LB (regardless of which side Ghealdan chooses). It's also notable that since this ability affects cities with a majority of Ghealdan's Path, it would affect foreign cities too (making it a nonbo with the other uniques that rely on Dragonsworn annoying Ghealdan's enemies). We could make it just Ghealdanin cities if we wanted to change that, or leave it as it is and have it as a strong diplomatic tool. (The Diplo AI would presumably take this into account when considering Ghealdan's Path in their territory.)

Crown High Council is actually a semi-Tall ability, that hits on the flavor of Ghealdan's Council having to elect new rulers from amongst themselves (making them more powerful in the short term), whenever the Prophet deposed the previous ruler. Mechanically, it would let Ghealdan upgrade Governors noticeably faster.

counterpoint · Sep 5, 2016

S3rgeus said:
You're right, this ability should change something of the way about how Ghealdan's Path itself works as well, rather than just how they obtain it. I don't think it's bad that it doesn't help them as much when they're ahead, because we don't want the ability to double-down and cause them to snowball a lead. It shouldn't be completely useless either though, as you've said!

I've made an addition to this UA that should make it more useful for those cases. (The points are pressure points - the default Herald generates 1000 if unaffected by attrition.)

And your comments here have also made me think about the role of the Path for Ghealdan. What if we could create a civ that benefits from Founding its Path in the mid-game instead of early game? There are probably several ways to do that, but I think it could be quite fun and different.

I've also proposed a new semi-related UA to this one.

I'll comment on the new path later. As far as your changes:

I like them, I think! The path spread thing is minor, but I think it's not insignificant. Does this require the civ to have met Ghealdan? I assume it does

Would probably work well when coupled with one of the DSworn-related abilities...

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, we've got enough bananas ideas that are really fun that I don't think we'll consider this one. Fine with red.

rojoso!

S3rgeus said:
I'd be fine including Lawless too. I'd say the main difficulty, given when they unlock, is having enough turns use the Heralds, so giving them more targets should be ok to start with.

k good

S3rgeus said:
Huh, I'm apparently mis-remembering my canon. I thought Alliandre traveled with Elayne and Egwene for a time, but apparently that's not the case. Who am I confusing her with? Red.

A queen that followed Elayne and company around? Is that somehting that Tylin (Altara) does or something?

I do recall being surprised you thought Alliandre was quite as awesome as you do...

S3rgeus said:
Nope, I don't know if I will in the end. I own Heart of the Swarm but am only a few missions in. I stopped playing it sometime last year. Still, Blizzard do a lot of cross-promoting, so you never know! I play a bit of Heroes of the Storm so it might connect me back to it eventually. The Protoss have always been my favorite Starcraft race.

Yeah, I need to be careful with games like Heroes of the Storm.... I've already got one endless game right now (civ), and not enough time to play it...

S3rgeus said:
If the UA we pick doesn't guarantee it in some way, then I'd say we could adjust all of these to be city-majority (Path that is a majority in the majority of Ghealdanin cities) or capital-majority (majority Path in Ghealdan's capital).

Sure. Doesn't need to be locked now.

S3rgeus said:
I think it should be of a value that it's slightly stronger than the best melee unit of the time when most civs would start producing Heralds.

makes sense.

S3rgeus said:
I think the damage would be about 15 or so? With that damage, if it's hard to kill him because there are a bunch of military units around, then those units could already have done that much damage anyway.

that seems reasonable. Scalable, too.

S3rgeus said:
You make a good point about Dragonsworn not paying off, I'll address that below. I figure the main point of this guy is that he's a fine UU (better than what he replaces) but also does the encampment thing. As long as the encampment is a well balanced UI (strong enough to be worth it, not overpowering), then that will make this guy fair too.

sure. no problems with that.

S3rgeus said:
"Unclaimed territory" is hexes not owned by anyone, I don't think we want to allow them to be built in players' territory. The disappearing after X turns is to combat carpeting. Given the time it takes to build the encampment, even if the player does nothing but that, it doesn't form a carpet because the encampments keep disappearing. It would also be very hard to do that - the Dragonsworn would tend to capture the worker. And if you send a unit to defend him, you'll end up fighting the Dragonsworn, which defeats the point of putting it near an enemy.

OK, yeah, I wasn't thinking of this as something that would take several turns to complete (of course it would), so that makes sense.

Even just planting one of them, why wouldn't you just lose your settler immediately?

Also, considering some civs and playstyles thrive off of farming camps (especially earlier in the game), would this ability all too often actually help your foes (given that barbs aren't usually that hard to deal with)?

S3rgeus said:
I don't feel like the overlap with the Dreamwalker diminishes this ability. They're quite different approaches, this one is much more of a slow-and-steady burn, whereas the Dreamwalker is a sudden burst of units right on top of an enemy. The Dreamwalker also doesn't spawn the Dragonsworn directly through his own ability, it's only after he transports himself to T'a'r (one way process), so it's overall quite different.

Related to what you said above about making this worth it, I've adapted one of your ideas from Prophet of the Dragon into this to give it more of a bonus, rather than just messing with your opponents.

Yep. like the change!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, this does feel more like an Amadicia ability than Ghealdan. I'll mark it as red.

sure.

S3rgeus said:
I also don't know if this is possible. I would have to try it to find out. Like the other unique we considered a while back (I think for the Sea Folk) I wouldn't count that against this UA at this stage though. Assuming it is possible to hide nationality, then this could totally be a UU. It would just need to appear like a normal Dragonsworn to other civs.

Well, I disagree that it could be a UU. If it's truly a UU, then it would be a unique unit type - immediately apparent that it comes from Ghealdan. Allowing the construction of barbarian unit types (hammer dude, etc.) feels more UA to me - especially given the large number of them, and the fact that they completely overlap with regular civ units later in the game.

S3rgeus said:
I would say this would just make him really, really hard to kill. You'd need to burst him down to dead all at once, and it would be hard to choose a value of X because of how much Faith output varies throughout the game. (Very low to start, much higher later on.)

well, we could scale it, right? Make it a % heal or something, instead of a flat amount. Also, it doesn't have to be heal, could be some kind of other boost. What do you think?

I do think we should try to create a good option for this flavor - it is some "real" flavor for a UU from "real" Ghealdan (as in, not prophet-ghealdan).

S3rgeus said:
This one I think might be quite confusing. In what context would you be able to un-disband this unit? Like, would that be done from the city he was trained in, or the tile he was disbanded on? It's also a diminishing returns mechanic - it minimizes loss rather than providing a gain (makes needing to disband them cost you less), which doesn't seem very fun. I'll mark this as red.

Yeah, I like the idea of something like this, because it theoretically syncs well with the flavor, but I agree that mechanically its kind of a mess. interface would be lousy.

S3rgeus said:
Awesome! I'm a big fan of this guy, he's really cool. The only drawback I see is that Ghealdan can't use its Visionaries peacefully - they have to antagonize people with them. Still, that's not a big problem, and I like the way this guy works.

I mean, I suppose we could provide an option to not spawn them... or make it a % chance instead of a guarantee (but that only hurts Ghealdan). Maybe it's fine.

The other thing is that this would create them for CSs as well, which is possibly not always a good thing... except that those :c5citystate:

CSs might ask for help via quests that you can complete!

S3rgeus said:
I'm not seeing any references to this in the wiki - is it in the Companion somewhere? I'd want to get a bit more familiar with the flavor before suggesting something for this one.

This must be in the companion. Hang on.

in "Ghealdan": "Ghealdanin common soldiers had green streamers on their lances that had a foot-long steel point, and wore green breastplates and green conical helmets with barred faceguards."

No mention of the LotDragon. Wonder where I got that. Maybe I misread LotWall.

S3rgeus said:
With this as a late game building and Happiness being civ-wide, I'm not sure this works so well. Culture as the defensive part of the Culture Victory also means that the bonus isn't very essential to Ghealdan winning the game (particularly late game), so they're more likely to avoid it due to the Happiness problem.

what if it was :tourism:

Prestige?

S3rgeus said:
Faith of the True Dragon is the spin on Repurposed Faith that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It aims to change the way Ghealdan approaches Paths and Faith entirely - gaining Customs through killing False Dragons (and possibly gaining more than other civs) while also helping them towards the Cultural Victory.

Very, very interesting. I'm not sure this will totally work, but it's a pretty neat idea. The hesitations I'd have are due to the relative balance of it all - it could easily really blow (no Customs at first... and not many ever if you get unluky with FD's), or be way, way too good if you end up with, like 7 Customs or something. See that, Byzantium?

It also very much interacts with our policies/philosophies. Obviously it encourages Tolerance over Fear (higher FD spawn rate, right?), which I'm not totally sure of. Prophet-Ghealdan might feel like Fear+Liberation, but it also might be Tolerance+Oppression. I'm not totally sure. This seems to encourage Tolerance+Liberation, for the max FD rate,a nd I'm not 100% sure that makes flavorful sense. What do you think?

Definitely a cool idea, with lots of promise. I'm normally skeptical of the "change the whole way you play " uniques, and I'm skeptical of aspects of this one, but not the larger whole.

S3rgeus said:
Disciples of the Dragon is a middling Path bonus throughout the game that turns into an explosive bonus during the LB (regardless of which side Ghealdan chooses). It's also notable that since this ability affects cities with a majority of Ghealdan's Path, it would affect foreign cities too (making it a nonbo with the other uniques that rely on Dragonsworn annoying Ghealdan's enemies). We could make it just Ghealdanin cities if we wanted to change that, or leave it as it is and have it as a strong diplomatic tool. (The Diplo AI would presumably take this into account when considering Ghealdan's Path in their territory.)

Hmmm. Also interesting. What made you choose those two Dragon actions as triggers? I think this idea also has promise. I like that aspect of it, for sure.

I'm not 100% sure the Dragonsworm/SSpawn immunity quite works. The former is probably too tame, and the latter.... probably way, way too good. That makes you pretty much "immune" during the TW, and also during the LB, in a sense. Shadow civ? No other shadow players can get you! Light civ? Immune to the shadowspawn civ completely (in some ways, it's kind of unfair if you choose light, since your eventual city capture is the only way you could ever lose, and your foes have lost their big advantage)... I dunno, not quite feeling it.

S3rgeus said:
Crown High Council is actually a semi-Tall ability, that hits on the flavor of Ghealdan's Council having to elect new rulers from amongst themselves (making them more powerful in the short term), whenever the Prophet deposed the previous ruler. Mechanically, it would let Ghealdan upgrade Governors noticeably faster.

Yeah, I thought of a gov ability. I wasn't sure it fit the flavor. I could see it going both ways. On the one hand, Gheal seems to have a weak central government, which suggests perhaps strong governors. But on the other hand, those governors can be used to make a strong central gov in our game....

Recap!

Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

Repurposed Faith, Ghealdan may always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist, and may choose Customs that have already been chosen by other Paths. When Ghealdan founds a Path, it immediately becomes the majority in all of Ghealdan's cities. The Ghealdanin Path is spread by X influence points to a city whenever a Shadowspawn or Dragonsworn pillages a tile that city is working.
Followers of the True Dragon, Ghealdan's units do X% extra damage (like 50) to False Dragons and get Y% more rewards for killing False Dragons, but do not receive an extra bonus for Gentling them.
Unmatched Zeal, X% of Gold gained on city capture is also earned as Faith. This amount is doubled if the city is of the same Path as a Path founded by Ghealdan. If the city is of a different Path, then the city is converted to a Path founded by Ghealdan.
Ravaging Fanatics, can purchase Dragonsworn units with Faith, which are controlled by Ghealdan but appear to other players to be owned by the Dragonsworn civilization.
Faith of the True Dragon, Ghealdan does not select Path Customs when founding or enhancing a Path. Ghealdan can always found a Path, regardless of how many already exist in the game. Each time Ghealdan kills a False Dragon, Ghealdan may choose an additional Custom to add to their Path, including those already chosen by other Paths. Ghealdan receives +X Faith when killing Dragonsworn and Lawless. Ghealdan generates +Y Prestige (large, like 20) for each Custom in their Path.
Disciples of the Dragon, cities following the Path founded by Ghealdan cannot be attacked by Dragonsworn or captured by Shadowspawn. Ghealdan's Path gains an extra Custom when the Dragon is born: "Every time the Dragon uses his Balefire Nuke or Proclaims a Field of Battle, a random Legendary Person spawns in this Path's holy city."
Crown High Council, Governors in Ghealdanin cities gain X turns toward their next upgrade whenever Ghealdan spawns a Visionary.

UUs:

Fanatical Warriors, replaces era 7/8 melee unit, Dragonsworn, Lawless, and Shadowspawn killed by this unit become Heralds for the Path you founded.
Zealot (capture), replaces era 5/6 military unit, higher combat strength and converts cities to the Path you founded when it captures them.
Zealot (spread), replaces the Herald, has a combat strength of X. Generates +Y Culture when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (offense), replaces the Herald. Generates +X Culture and deals Y damage to the city (if it is foreign) when it spreads a Path.
Zealot (encampment), replaces era 5/7 military unit or Herald, higher combat strength. Can construct Dragonsworn Encampments (see below).
Legionnaire of the Wall (faith heal), replaces era 5-8 melee, polearm, or ranged unit. Increased combat strength. X% of Ghealdan's Faith per turn is restored to the Legionnaire in HP.
Prophet of the Dragon, replaces the Visionary, can Spread one additional time. When Spreading a Path in foreign territory, creates Dragonsworn that yield X Gold to Ghealdan for every tile they pillage, and Y Faith to Ghealdan for every unit they kill or city they capture.

UBs:

Prophet's Pilgrimage Site, replaces Culture1. This city produces +X Faith (like 5) when it attacks a Dragonsworn or Shadowspawn unit.
Alum Smelter, replaces Production (Copper), can be built in a city with Copper, Iron, or Alum. Every Copper, Iron, or Alum resource worked by this city produces a +X Production (greater than default bonus). +Y Prestige (after <tech>) for each copy of Alum owned by Ghealdan.
Garen's Wall Bastion, replaces Defense 3, +X Culture for every Hill tile worked by the City, and +Y HP to the city for every Forest tile within the city's workable radius.
Prophet's Hostel, replaces Alignment 1, Citizens of the Alignment opposed to this building generate X% fewer Alignment points. +Y Culture and +Z Prestige (after <tech>) in this city if Ghealdan has less than W total happiness.

UIs:

Dragonsworn Encampment, can only be built in unclaimed territory. Spawns Dragonsworn like a normal Encampment. Dragonsworn from this encampment provide Ghealdan with +X Gold when they pillage foreign lands and +Y Gold (higher) if they capture foreign civilians. Disappears after X turns.

Sorry, no time for any new ideas tonight!

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

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