Chaos Gameplay

I think that Champion units should figure prominently in playing human chaos civs. There would be 4 tiers of champions with tiers 2 through 4 obtainable through either long age requirements (for the AI really) and/or xp requirements.

Tier 1 Champion: Aspiring Champion- newly minted chaos leader who can spawn only basic warriors. Also has access to reward/mutation promotions.

Tier 2 Champion: Chaos Champion- After surviving the chance of being turned into a daemon or chaos spawn, the Champion can now spawn Axemen and also gains access to higher tiers of rewards/mutations.

Tier 3 Champion: Chaos Lord- This Champion can spawn Swordsman and gains access to even more rewards/mutations.

Tier 4 Champion: Chosen- The last tier, this Champion can spawn Royal Guardsman (well the Chaos UU anyway).

Upon upgrading to the next tier (which would be mandatory) the champion has a chance to turn into either a daemon (reward) or chaos spawn. Either way the unit ceases to function as a champion. To ease the sting of becoming Spawn, the unit would gain a truck load of mutations (6 maybe?). Turning into a daemon means the unit is replaced by a daemon of some type (preferably a UU of the Greater Daemons). Either way, a new Aspiring Champion unit is also generated to represent the previous Champion's successor.

FF's Chain of Command or History of the Three Kingdoms system could be used to keep track of a champion's personal warband (like summons) as they also generate XP for their champion when they win in combat.

As far as cities go, I favor limiting the pop to something like 6 or 8 and allowing the cities to work only the adjacent plots. This would represent the tribal life most chaos worshipping marauders live. It doesn't make sense lorewise for them to have massive cities (though I could see the shrine city being large). I am still trying to flesh out exactly how cities would work with the above system so suggestions are welcome!

Let me know what you guys think.

edit: Rewards would replace mutations to represent the chaos champions personal abilities (such as a penalty to attack cities base but rewards giving higher attack str). Also promotions could be used to represent the champion's personal retinue.

this is a really interesting concept and could play out quite fun for chaos civs, allowing them to take portable unit factories into the midst of a war.

i also really like the idea of turning the champions into chaos spawn and deamons and then being replaced by a new aspiring champion.

potentially we could use the Grigori Adventurer mechanic to spawn aspiring champions, and then events to spawn a new aspiring champion when they turn into chaos spawn.

However i think that the higher tier champions should be able to be turned into more powerful demons to give some incentive to nurturing them up to Chaos Lord.

Glad you like the idea PL

Definitely Champion's ascension into daemonhood should scale with their power level but they'd get to keep their promotions (not leader ones though) so a tier 3 daemon would be better than a lesser champion's version.

Having your unit randomly change into something else does suck though, so the change would need to be worthwhile for Chaos Spawnings as well. A truckload of promotions is what I think would work. A tier 3 chaos spawn would be scarier than a lesser one as well.

what are your thoughts on using the adventurer mechanic?

Psychic_Llamas said:

what are your thoughts on using the adventurer mechanic?

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I like it because it would encourage the cities development along certain lines. That is GPP based right? If so a different gp system could be used. Chaos GP could either spawn a unit or use regular mechanics. A chaotic great prophet probably wouldn't kick it in a chaotic city but instead spawn as a divine chaos champion. A chaotic sage would be a arcane champion etc.

What do you think about this?

i dunno how easy that would be to code, but it could be very interesting...

Psychic_Llamas said:

i dunno how easy that would be to code, but it could be very interesting...

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Sorry I get carried away most of the time

Seriously though I think the Grigori mechanic would be a cool way to get extra Champions with a unique promotion allowing them to become better than regular built Champions.

Well, I'm highly suspicious as always
Cool ideas, but there are some issues with practicalities.

My biggest worries are:
a) It would be very hard to balance spawning of free warriors as a mechanic. It could easily be overpowered or underpowered. It would also need to rely on: game turn, game difficulty level, AI or human controller.
b) There are problems in general with taking behavior out of the core engine of cities that get stuff and build units. The Civ AI knows how to use this engine. It knows how to adjust its cities and improvements to get more of what it needs. It knows how to build units in cities that fit its needs; facing lots of cavalry? Build spearmen. Want to start an invasion? Build catapults.
You lose a lot of this AI power when you move to non-constructed methods of city building
c) The chaos factions are still reliant on the same civ engine form of economy for paying upkeep and getting beakers for researching tech. Limiting them to size-1 cities capped at size 8 can *severely* mess up their economy, meaning they won't actually get to research the interesting late-game chaos techs.
The AI might also not understand the cap. It might think; I have lots of extra happiness capacity, so I need to proritize growth, so I will build more farms and work more food tiles, not realizing that this is useless because its growth is capped.


Part of this problem is really core; Civilization, as a game, is BY DEFINITION about cities. So the Civ engine is never going to be very good at modeling nomadic rural societies.

I would suggest that there are some alternative ways of including some of the flavor of these ideas without meddling too severely with the game's mechanics.

One or more of the Chaos heroes (maybe the Khorne one), could get some kind of Recruiter ability, like the Bannor hero has in FFH.

When chaos warrior units (the chaos faction tier3 infantry unit) reach a certain level, they could gain a promotion (like how FF monks do at certain levels) that lets them cast an "attempt accension" spell, once. This spell changes their race to demon, and either turns them into a chaos spawn (changes their model to a spawn and adds 3-4 random mutation promotions) or gives them a "champion of chaos" promotion.

Another idea:
I think the aspiring champion/exalted champions probably fit better as promotions; these represent squad leaders.
We don't want the chaos civs wandering around with just a bunch of champions as their military units.

So we could have a series of promotions available only to chaos units.
Aspiring champion gives +5% strength, +10% vs melee (or something else)
Exalted champion requires Aspiring champion and gives +5% strength +15% vs melee.
A unit with an exalted Champion that is at least level 4 can cast an "ascension attempt" with either
a) mutates the unit and removes aspiring and exalted champion OR
b) Adds ascended champion promotion that gives +1 strength.

Ahriman said:

Another idea:
I think the aspiring champion/exalted champions probably fit better as promotions; these represent squad leaders.
We don't want the chaos civs wandering around with just a bunch of champions as their military units.

So we could have a series of promotions available only to chaos units.
Aspiring champion gives +5% strength, +10% vs melee (or something else)
Exalted champion requires Aspiring champion and gives +5% strength +15% vs melee.
A unit with an exalted Champion that is at least level 4 can cast an "ascension attempt" with either
a) mutates the unit and removes aspiring and exalted champion OR
b) Adds ascended champion promotion that gives +1 strength.

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Promotions aren't a bad way to go. What about if we keep the chaos civ city gameplay more or less normal but use PLs idea of having them spawn Champions instead of building them.

Stupid AI.

I dunno about the adventurer mechanic.

I think the great generals mechanic would make more sense. Rather than getting generic great generals, they could get FFH-style great commanders as champions.
Much like we intend greenskins to work with Warbosses.

Ahriman said:

I dunno about the adventurer mechanic.

I think the great generals mechanic would make more sense. Rather than getting generic great generals, they could get FFH-style great commanders as champions.
Much like we intend greenskins to work with Warbosses.

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I don't think the chaos players should get normal GP either really. I guess bards and merchants could be left alone just for sanity's sake. I can't imagine a Chaos Great Prophet kicking it with the childrens preaching and working.

Maybe Sages and Prophets could also be promotion Addons granting benefits to the unit like Channeling (for sages) and err well something else for Prophets.

edit: Another idea, not sure if the AI would get it, would be to spread Chaos to cities with other religions to cause problems like the Cult of Dragons or cities with Order and Ashen Veil in FFH2.

Dude, deadliver, I like it. Good idea.

rocklikeafool said:

Dude, deadliver, I like it. Good idea.

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Thanks rlaf. Any ideas on Great Prophets? There are so many possibilities. Can't be the same as Sages, for shame. How about if they gave the Command promotion?

I dont' see why chaos civs shouldn't be able to get great people any more than most other civs.
A chaos great engineer is just somebody with the force of will and power to draft a big enough portion of the population to rapidly work on a particular project (think Pharoahs and pyramids).

A great cleric could just be some insane raving chaos-infected loon - but the population could still fear and revere him and he could still attract a bunch of followers.

A great sage could be some minion of Tzeentch, that is able to slash through old ways of doing things (literally!) and force people to adopt new ideas.

GPPs are a pretty core engine mechanic, it would be a hard mechanic to remove anyway and I see little gain from doing so.

We still need to work on Great clerics in general. currently they're useless. We're thinking about having Cathedral style buildings that they can produce.

edit: Another idea, not sure if the AI would get it, would be to spread Chaos to cities with other religions to cause problems like the Cult of Dragons or cities with Order and Ashen Veil in FFH2.

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Yes, we already have this intended. There are/will be more disruption events that can occur only if chaos is present in the city.
The AI automatically spreads its religion with missionaries (though chaos missionaries will be invisible but very expensive), and there are events with things like chaos cults that pop up in cities.
We're also intending to increase the unhappy penalty for presence of non-state religions. Warhammer is all about intolerance.

deadliver said:

Thanks rlaf. Any ideas on Great Prophets? There are so many possibilities. Can't be the same as Sages, for shame. How about if they gave the Command promotion?

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Huh...maybe that or some sorta insane promotion. I mean it's safe to assume that Chaos followers are half insane anyway, being possessed by the Chaos so much. But I'd say don't make the insane promotion like the FfH version, where the player can lose control of the unit. Instead, make it give some sorta bonus, since "the Chaos gods guide your hand" kinda thing.

Ahriman said:

GPPs are a pretty core engine mechanic, it would be a hard mechanic to remove anyway and I see little gain from doing so.

We still need to work on Great clerics in general. currently they're useless. We're thinking about having Cathedral style buildings that they can produce.

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The GP system would be very easy to modify really because you would just need to change the GP Units, add a merging spell to them and perhaps another promotion.

The real issue would be whether or not the AI understands it could merge Great Sages or Prophets with units like it does (allegedly) with Great Commanders and doing it in an intelligent fashion. I do not know whether it would.

I like the idea of lesser religious buildings buildable through prophet sacrifice though.

I was thinking the other day btw about the AI in general. Does anyone know how easy it would be to change the chaos leaders into raving, war loving lunatics who make terrible terrible neighbors? I guess the guts of this are in the LeaderHeadInfos?

I know next to nothing about AIs, but there is definitely an Aggression value attached to leaders, which would be toned up for chaos factions and greenskins.
There is also a "backstabbing" parameter too IIRC.
These effect how likely an AI is to start a war based on relative strengths (high aggression will start a war even against enemies with reasonable armies; low aggression AIs will only pick on the weak), and how deterred they are from starting that war with someone they have positive diplomatic relations with.

This is why in vanilla Ghenghis Khan and Napoleon make a lousy neighbors and Ghandi makes a pretty decent one.

deadliver said:

The GP system would be very easy to modify really because you would just need to change the GP Units, add a merging spell to them and perhaps another promotion.

The real issue would be whether or not the AI understands it could merge Great Sages or Prophets with units like it does (allegedly) with Great Commanders and doing it in an intelligent fashion. I do not know whether it would.

I like the idea of lesser religious buildings buildable through prophet sacrifice though.

I was thinking the other day btw about the AI in general. Does anyone know how easy it would be to change the chaos leaders into raving, war loving lunatics who make terrible terrible neighbors? I guess the guts of this are in the LeaderHeadInfos?

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Since WHFB uses (or is being reworked to use) FF 051, why not use a mechanic similar to Donal Lugh? A hero unit that can command units? Or rather, tweak it to fit the purpose here, so that it acts as a unit factory instead of commanding units. I guess I'm just suggesting that the mechanics attached to the FF hero Donal Lugh could be tweaked to fit Chaos Champions.

I like the idea of eventually having some Commander-type units that serve a leadership role in their armies similar to tabletop WH.. We should probably just focus on cranking out the already designed units/techs XML etc for now; but that idea of potentially using some Great People to act as the lower-level generic Champions/Heroes etc prevalent in WH is worth a thought for later (just settling them for various production boni can be rather dull). I think Xienwolf is now focusing his work on extending advanced AI handling of current FF features (another benefit of sticking to standard FF codebase so we can update it easily); so hopefully this might be a workable/fun game feature in future.

I was thinking the other day btw about the AI in general. Does anyone know how easy it would be to change the chaos leaders into raving, war loving lunatics who make terrible terrible neighbors? I guess the guts of this are in the LeaderHeadInfos?

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Absolutely! This doc ->
http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4LeaderHeadInfos
is a treasure trove of leaderhead tweaks, enabling plenty of scope for scheming Skaven (iDemandRebukedSneakProb), rabidly intolerant Estalians (iDifferentReligionAttitudeChange), Dwarves with ridiculously long memories (crank up those MemoryDecays and MemoryAttitudePercents etc), raving/warmongering Chaos, and all kinds of other assorted goodness (and badness). Ahriman as you were asking about tech Flavors, leaders can have different preferences toward the Flavors (Economy, Military, Magic etc) coded here; I think that's largely the extent of what flavors do.
Not much changed about leaderheads in FF, but a few new tags from FfH are documented here as well:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=238077