S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

OK, so here's a proposed list, subject to amendment, of course.

Key:

Original, and probably fine (but open to change)
Original, and in need of change IMO
Previously suggested by others
New Suggestion by me


Devoted to Prophecy - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines)
Hardy Folk OR Mountain Folk OR Stubborn Folk (The TR association with this final one is unfortunate, but might still be fine)- Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest)
Nomadic People OR Survivors OR Water Seekers (I understand that the latter is the translation of an Aiel Warrior Society, but it might be obscure enough to be fine) - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles)
Craftsmen - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource)
Zealots - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city)
Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates)
Honored Smiths - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+)
Horse Traders OR Shepherds (either fine with me) - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures)
Fisherman - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats)
Crusaders OR Warrior Society (unless that's too evocative of the Aiel) OR Soldier Community- God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city)
Festive Society - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense)
Bustling Community OR Organized Society - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+)
Guardian Class OR Kinsman Defenders OR Stubborn Folk (the latter only if not used above) - Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength)
Hunter Society - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps)
Loyal Subjects OR Bannermen - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S)
Traveling Scholars - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection)
Builder People OR Friends of the Ogier - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders)
Children of Dragonmount - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders)
Landed Gentry - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations)
Merchant Elite - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver)
Prospectors - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth)
Woodland Folk OR Friends of the Ogier (as long as the latter is not used elsewhere - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles)
River Traders - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers)
Mining Tradition or Mountain Folk (must not be used above) - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries)
Masters of Harvest - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource)
Artisans - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource)

Please help with cleaning this up....

After this is settled, I can move on to the actual Customs. How do you prefer I go about this? Should I be preserving the CiV Beliefs (though amplifying them when desired), or create a new batch of nine? Or keep the CiV ones and add additional ones on top of that?
 
I understand your reasonning.

About forsakens and age of the dragon....
I dunno how you want to do it, but for me, there should be a "worsening" of the shadow situation before the actual LB.
for two reasons:
-lore (rand was not born during the LB, and most high-tech/faith projects are from the Age of Dragon, before the LB : Cleansing Saidin, Getting repetable X-Bows, Ashamens, Inventing Dragons... re-discovering ter-angreal fabrication / travelling / skimming, advanced healing, finding the keystones, liberating the Sword-Angreal ...Etc
... and there is already much trolloc / myrdhal action before the LB (if you really want to spice things up)... think of the trollocs raiding the two-rivers.. twice, of trollocs hords (how many thens of thousands?? that rushed Rand's manor..etc

I definitely think that the Shadowspawn will be part of the game for its entire duration - the Blight will be placed as a part of the map script at the beginning of the game and Shadowspawn are mechanically similar to Barbarians for civs near the Blight. It makes sense to ramp up Shadowspawn presence as we approach the Last Battle - it will prompt players to prepare more organically due to their own needs, rather than just knowing they need to do so and everything happening at once on a single turn.

-Game: I think that it would be interesting to be able to actively play shadow (even if hidden from other civs) in the mid-late game... before the LB / further, trying a Black-Ajah diplo victory would be a long-terme project (starting mid game at latest), and being able to act with darkfriends only during the LB would be too late.

I agree here, I think it makes sense to extend the Black Ajah victory back into the main body of the game, rather than just the Last Battle. I'm going to add a quote for a very relevant part of counterpoint's posts here, because my answers to both share a lot of information:

Right idea in the sense that I do agree that a Black option should exist.

What I mean by Black being more difficult is that its not the conventional method of diplomacy, so should probably require a bit more process, luck, and skill to pull off. Its kind of like winning ascience victory by stealing techs (an assyrian science win, for example). Definitely odd. An option, but odd and not guaranteed to work.

So I guess its all relative - if you have the means to win black ajah (like assyria has the means to be a tech stealin machine) maybe it's no more difficult. But these means should probably not be easy to come by - remember, somebody only becomes full-on-bad-guy towards the very end of the game, whereas the "regular" diplo civs have been building up CS relations, then world congress, for the entire game.

Note, I'm not talking about a "bad guy winning" - if somebody is evil and has still managed to do the necessary stuff to get influence, etc., good for them. What i'm talking about is subverting the whole system - trivializing everybody's political machinations - by doing crazy stuff (killing sitters, staging a coup, fake votes, whatever). That stuff should be hard to pull off. Otherwise it undermines the diplo system for everybody else, right?

Like Calavente suggested above, I'd thought that the Black Ajah approach to the diplo victory would be an ongoing process throughout the majority of the game - likely tied into determining each civ's 'leaning' toward the Light/Shadow. I agree that it would be unfair for the Black Ajah to be able to unseat other players' diplo work at the last second, but only if the Black Ajah is only a factor at the end of the game. If it's something that players can work for (and against) over the course of the whole game, then I think difficulty parity between the two sides makes a lot of sense.

If the Black Ajah is a part of the diplo victory all the time and the Light players haven't addressed it properly for most of history, I think they've failed to address a key component of that victory. Then it makes sense that their efforts are undone during the Last Battle.

now, I had a crazy bundle of ideas... or a bundle of crazy ideas.
I want to share them here.
however, please note that I know they are crazy, and maybe un-moddable.
so please, in your comments on it, limit you to the positive "this is nice / interesting". and limit your negative comments to "you were right it is too crazy" :p

I think it's really difficult for us to just say nice/interesting vs crazy. There have to be shades of grey, because you've presented a lot of ideas and I quite like some of them, but wouldn't take any just *as they are*. (Not a problem with your ideas themselves, I don't think we're taking anyone's exactly as they are when first proposed, they all get discussed and evolve as we iron out the details.) Plus it seems really dismissive to just quote a chunk of text and say "too crazy." I'll try to keep my responses brief though.

I propose that early game there are Channelers in game… to reflect all this.
But those channelers can be a boon and a risk… and thus the players / AI are pushed toward one of the 3 options we know of : WT, Aiels/SF isolationnisme, Adam.

Early game you get quite powerful channelers
(unit that you can build / randomly appearing units / GP-like units / depending on your faith..etc whatever )
The world doesn't know that male can go mad.
Your channelers thus have a small chance to go berserk, increased each time you use them
Once berserk, they become barbarian-suicidal… destroying units/improvements/killing pops.

This behaviour lasts until you discover that Saidin in Tainted and male channelers should be disposed of (or another civ you meet knows it) (early tech ? policy ? belief ? building bought with faith ? …Etc)

In parallel, Channelers (female) are also dangerous and middly appreciated in cities (see Seanchans lands).

So your channelers (even female) get all a chance/risk of "being chased by population"
-either they die
Or they "turn against you":
When they turn, they go barbarian… or join a fictive civ/CS : Wandering AesSedai.
With 4 possibilities:
Turning barb they turn nearby units to their cause and can rush cities
Turning barb they turn nearby units to their cause and go join a barb camp and upgrade it into a city.

If in city (as governor), there is a chance they turn a non-capital city into barb-land, if in capital, they can turn a non-capital city.
Or, in city, they turn some nearby units to their cause (Wandering AesSedai), reduce pop of nearby cities by 1 or 2 and get a settler ; they flee and create a city of the Wandering AesSedai Faction nearby.

Deleting a Channeler is impossible : it makes him/her defecting to the Wandering AesSedai Faction

The Channelers have a chance of being "chased by population" that is decreasing over time, and their strength decreases over time.
And their chance to resist the chase and turning against you is 1/3rd of the "chased chances" and increase with level of the unit. (33%+4*lvl): lvl 5 chaneler get 53% chances to turn (if chased by population).

(exemple: magical str = X+ 1000/(50+2*t) with t = turn number : early game: 30 magical str ; turn 25 : 20 magical str, turn 50: 16)
Chances of being chased: 20%-(10+2*t)/1000; early game: every 5 turns your channeler risk being chased; 2/3 chances dying, 1/3 chances turning barbarian.
At turn 45, you have 10% chance of a channelers being chased, at turn 95, you have 0% chance of channelers being chased
Maybe the amount of faith you have can affect this too and reduce risks of being chased (Aiels? )

I think this leans a bit toward the crazy end. ;) I'd worry that this kind of system would completely take over the early game and people would do nothing but this for the first X turns. Anything that can potentially capture entire cities at such an early time can completely redefine a civ's strategy for the entire game, which is hugely difficult to do with any randomized element without unbalancing the game.

Thus, while a boon, you quickly want a way to treat the issue:
1) forbids channelers : quite harsh, but attainable early game / issues : you can "convert" to the WT creed, but only later later and it is expensive.
2) play so as to isolate channelers/ give them as wanderers asap, in "safe" conditions
3) Create the WT : you can tech to the WT tech/creed /faith-bought tech.
Then you have 2 options:
-offer the tech to a wandering Aes-Sedai city: it auto-build the WT
-create yourselves a Rod of Oath unit which enables "Create the WT"

"Create the WT" : either you cast it in a city  it becomes the WT capital city.
(You get the option to become leader of the WT.. more on this later)
Otherwise, the WT is a CS.
-All "wandering AesSedai" of the continent of the WT change faction to become "WT AesSedai".
-All "wandering AesSedai" cities on continent abandon their cite, become WT AesSedai and leave the city as a barb city with weak defenses… with a delay/chance depending on distance with the WT.

Creating the White Tower in-game (opposed to pre-placed as a CS) is difficult on a couple of fronts. This would have to happen quite quickly, due to the way time works (faster) at the beginning of the game. Most of the players don't have vision on the majority of the world at this point, so any world-spanning events like this will seem very random.

It's also very difficult, from a technical perspective, to add new players to the game once the game has started. I can probably make it work, but it's only worth it if it adds a lot to the value of the mod.

Having relation with of the WT: enables to give all channelers to WT (no more risks), and get AesSedai units in exchange / bought by faith/relation/influence/tourisme…Etc;
You can use faith (%of channeler chance) to buy good relations with WT, and diminish the risks of wilder appearance.

Even if no civ get to the WT tech, Wandering AesSedai cities tries to tech to the WT.
However : they can be slower than you, so you are bothered longer.
Plus: the WT only affects its continent.. so you might want to ensure that the WT is on your continent so that there are no more wandering AesSedai that turns your units/cities

After that, the WT works exactly as you have proposed it to function.


4) adopte the "hide the channelers" solution: option available somehow quickly: not as harsh as "forbids", but not as quick. You are not able to get much out of your relation with the WT, + you don't get any channelers units until mid-late game. (Aiels / SeaFolks)

5) Capture the channelers: more mid-game-ish: you have to create the Adam, using faith.
No more channeler generation, but can build damane units/capture channelers into damane:
Units which cannot gain xp (learn more spell/become more powerful), which are mid powerful and have 3 spells: mid-level-heal, mid-level-attack, SkyFlowers: Happyness +culture in city.
All civs with good relations with the WT automatically have bad relations with you.

I'm not sure if we've directly linked faith and Paths to the White Tower, and by extension the diplo victory, yet. While pursuit of the Black can affect a civ's leaning, I think there's a big difference between the input and output ends of the Light/Shadow leaning. Faith is a very limited resource if you're trying to spread your Path (at least in base CiV), so splitting its use either means we need to generate a lot more or make its use cheaper, which favors players that go all in on one side. Paths are primarily useful for their own bonuses and their contributions to the Last Battle. They run parallel to the White Tower systems and too much crossover links pursuing one of those victories with the other very heavily, which makes them very similar.

Also, I remember that you've said you don't have BNW. The differing approaches to channelers that we talked about earlier in this thread are adaptations of BNW's Ideologies, which I think you should look into a little bit. Having adaptable approaches to channelers that build up over the course of the game (and having more than 3 choices) doesn't mesh very well with the ideology system. Maybe we can make it do so, but it's a lot of work.


WT AesSedai, Hidden Channelers and damane all have a "trained Channeler" promotion that makes them unable to "turn"
WT AesSedai (and Damane made from a captured AesSedai) get a 3 Oaths promotion that disallow attack spells, unless against trollocs/myrdhal

So WT advantages/issues: early solution, still gain access to channelers, but limited to 3Oaths and to your relation with the WT, AesSedai units may leave your nation at times (channelers units are only "on lease").

Damane advantages: no 3Oaths, no need of WT relation, can capture channelers BUT: channeler don't learn new spells/utilities (or only on a nation-wide manner), bad relation with WT-friendly / hide-the channelers nations, you have to manage your channelers in some ways until you invent the Adam (mid-game).

Hide the Channeler: (hidden tenet, at least at first): no 3Oaths, no need of WT relation, channelers presence boost the cities/empire by enabling buildings/units/social policies.
Issues: when you know the WT, you have few means to become friendly with WT (few faith / few influence), you cannot train much channelers units until much later (limited to healers), until a early-mid-game tech/policy, you don't know how to train wilder: you have a high death rate of channelers.

AesSedai of the WT:
The WT generates "AesSedai" units, which wanders the lands:
-can impose peace treaties, (gray only)
-can heal (yellow do better)
-can fight trollocs (green do better)
-can enter all borders
The WT can lease AesSedai to nations
-same actions + can try to improve relationships with CS/civs
-can take actions in cities (or govern cities??) boost health-food (yellow), science (White), help tourism / artifacts (brown), trade routes (Gray), anti-spy/anti-darkfriend/corruption (green), improve governance/happies/corruption (?) (blue), boost ? (red)
-can quite your empire if recalled by WT (because you refused a quest / have not enough faith/relation with WT)
-can quite your empire anyway.

I think there are some good ideas here about allegiance of Aes Sedai units and that we should model that complexity in some way. There's some crossover here with the Ideology stuff I mentioned above. I'm not sure how (or if) we'll do differentiation between the Ajahs for the actual units on the map - there would need to be a lot of Aes Sedai units in the game for patterns to be visible to the player and some of these systems are quite complex for things that won't necessarily show up in a lot of games.

I think I like the idea of the "seal the bore" global project. Sure. I do think we would still benefit from the smaller "break the seal" projects existing in the game. That way we could have the world gradually descend into decay and such, as salivated over in previous posts.

Also, wouldn't this project only be available once Rand is in place?

I'm also in favor of individual 'break the seal' projects for the same reason. Sounds like we all like global 'Seal the Bore' as a project. In place as in captured Thakan'dar? I would say so, we can't Seal the Bore before then.

I think I am in favor of the seals being breakable at the start of the Age of the Dragon.

A moment of clarification, as I know this very topic comes up later in this thread: The LB and the AotD shouldn't be entirely mutually inclusive, right? I like the idea of the Dragon being born, and "coming of age" and the LB beginning approximately 20 turns after that point. During this time, people have alittle time to prepare as the "countdown" begins (maybe this could be somewhat randomized if you guys don't like the idea of a predictable LB). They can start maneuvering, figure out their plans, push for their individual victories. Also, this would be a ripe time for shadow/light espionage things, breaking of seals [on topic], and stuff like that. The Dragon may even be available in some limited way, depending on what we decide he is able to do (simulating, for example, the things going on in the first 13 books).

This allows for the possibility that several of the seals were already broken - as depicted in the books - without making it be some super long arc that takes 1000s of years (and takes over your game). Maybe a limited number can be found before the AotD, and some more pop up then, or something - essentially preventing all of them from being cracked within the first 10 turns of something). Maybe *none* of them appear until the AotD starts, making it only *possible* that some would be broken, depending on people's luck at finding them.

I've suggested a mechanic for where we should 'spawn' the Dragon for a given game elsewhere. (Honestly, I have many tabs of reply posts open and have lost track of where, chronologically, that suggestion is.) I think that addresses the want for a 'build up' you mention here.

After the Dragon is in play (some fixed time (number of turns) after his birth) we can have him become active with the mechanics we discuss. I think having a 'turn order' where all nations are able to have a chance at controlling the Dragon in the period before the Last Battle makes sense. Clarification: I'm not suggesting every player get to control the Dragon at some point in every game. I suggest it becomes Light-side civs only after the Last Battle actually begins. Because of the relationship between Light leaning and faith production (and faith production determines turn order), Light side civs will tend to control the Dragon first in the pre-LB period. Depending on how quickly everyone techs up and triggers the Last Battle, none of the neutral/Shadow civs may have a chance to move him at all. But if a Shadow civ does get a chance, particularly if they're one of the last/the last person to do so before the Last Battle starts, they could put him in a dangerous position for the Light, which I think is good strategy.

I think we'll need to decide on how Seals are discovered before addressing if we can break them prior to the Last Battle, because there's a lot of overlap with that here. I agree that if we can, it should be during the 'build up' phase after the Dragon is born. I'm not sure how finding some Seals already broken matches up with the rest of this, mechanically?

I'm not sure yet about the mobility of the seals. Certainly the "rebasing" thing could work, but we need to make sure they can't just be tossed around, teleporter-style, between towns - it would be impossible to capture them, this way. I do think espionage and tech may be more interesting options than yet another capture the unit mechanic (especially since those are closer to how things happen in the books).

We could have the Seals rebase with distance restrictions like planes (prevents teleporting) but also have a time (X turns) spent 'moving' (like spies). In the time that they're 'moving,' they're treated as in the city of origin? That way you can't move them at the drop of a hat if it looks like the city will be captured. However, I still don't see why you'd ever (as a Light player) keep a Seal close to the war's frontline. I think the only way the Shadow players could capture it is then to have the Light civs 'surrounded.' I'm not sure how often it will happen that there are Shadow civs on all sides or if the world will tend towards creating a united front between two big factions.

In response to a S3rgeus comment later, regarding the "fake seals", I don't think we need to specifically tell people when a "real seal" has been destroyed. Perhaps, periodically, the players receive word that "the dark one's influence has spread" or something. Perhaps a number of things cause this (including the simple passage of time), such that it won't make it obviously clear whether you've really broken the correct seal. You know, maybe.

I'm not sure, CiV is usually very explicit and public with this kind of victory-relevant information. When anyone completes a spaceship part, everyone gets a notifications that "Civilization X has completed part Y of their spaceship," which tells you fairly accurately how close they are to finishing it, so you can plan accordingly. I think "Civilization X has broken one of the Seals of the Dark One's prison" is very much the same kind of information. We'll want that to be public so that victories don't 'surprise' players - where they could have taken some action to prevent an opposing victory, but didn't just because they weren't aware that that victory was impending.

Yes, let's destroy option 3. I don't like it either. Also, it was boring to create. Also, I think it (uniquely among these options) gives us a few options for Customs elsewhere). Also.... there are no more alsos.

Option 3 is dead! Only one left to kill!


Alright, my thoughts on this were shared somewhat in the discussion from a couple days ago. I'm relatively torn. Some initial points (none of them new):

On the one hand:
1) Lineage is more in line with our Paths.
2) Lineage more closely follows the bonuses

While on the other hand
1) Style is more quintessentially RJ and WoT
2) There appears to be less that is confusing and/or ambiguous about this - it's sort of half-serious to begin with, which gives it a certain extra suspension of disbelief in my opinion. I'm not going to question why a braid makes you get bonuses to rivers, but I most definitely WILL question why an Ogier Friend gets a Jungle bonus and not a Forest bonus.

Yes, believe you me, it was tricky. That said, I was surprised I got them as connection (albeit tangentially) as I did!

Alright, I'm swaying back and forth here, and I think you're swaying me currently back to Lineage. I think, following Calavante's line of logic and restricting our conception to "formative post-breaking traits" or something, we should be able to do it without too much awkwardness. My hopes, then (were we to adopt this):

1) We can find at least a handful of them to give more specific WoT references, so the list as a whole "feels right," even if many of them are rather random and original.
2) We make sure this list is not nation-specific, and feels appropriately post-breaking

...

Anyways, if we can satisfy these conditions (at least 1 and 2), I'm on board with Lineages.

Should we call them Traditions, instead? Or is lineage more properly evoking of the WoT "bloodline" thing?

Based on this and later posts, I think we're headed towards Lineage, which works for me, for a variety of the reasons we've all stated, I think Lineage comes out on top. Will have more specific suggestions for the last post that classifies each Lineage by color! I think I like Lineages as a name.

3) We find another place to implement some (or all) of the styles. Many of them are really rather iconic to the series.

What if for #3 we simply just allowed people to adopt some iconography. Something either separate from religion or layered on top it. I don't mean choose their flag or anything, but select a style that somehow follows that nation around the whole game. Maybe it spreads? Maybe it does nothing and is only cosmetic? Maybe it spreads when you have become influential?

I'm reluctant to layer another spreadable system on top of the mechanics we already have. CiV is already complicated and we're adding a lot. I'm in favor of finding a place for the iconographies though, they're definitely a big part of the flavor!

There's also the notion of these styles being great works or something. "Your Great Artist has invented Beards!". I know, weird, but it IS wot...

"Your Great Artist has invented Beards!" - should definitely be a great work easter egg

Sounds like something we can and should work in somewhere then! I'm sure we'll need a lot of variety for the Great Works when we come to flesh them out.

I can see it going both ways here.

Scenario 1: "Oh, cool, I've founded a Lineage! Oh... that's... random. OK, I guess I'm a "mountain folk. Is this the right game?"
Scenario 2: "Oh, cool, I've founded a... style? What? Braids? This is really, really stupid.

Although the style thing is the most in-universe of all of these, its so silly, and to me it would possibly feel lame to have that be your first immersive experience in the game. I wouldn't want people posting on message boards "Oh yeah, they redid the religions and turned them into FASHION!" because they didn't go far enough to see the real system.

So, I guess I think Styles might actually be worse here. I feel like they would be cool to bring in later, so the player goes "hey, cool! That reminds me of the book!" instead of "Is that the best they could come up with?"

That's why its important to try to get some more flavor in the Lineage ones - that way there is at least the illusion that these fit the universe.

This is a good point and I think a major one in Lineages' favor.

Obviously this would be better as forest. But I'm pretty sure there's a reason it ISN'T forest in CiV (your reason is correct, I bet), so us changing it is a risky endeavor. I could be convinced to make the Ogier one the Wonder one, as calavante suggested... but it does involve a little bit of suspension of disbelief. It might be worth it, though. And "Woodland Folk", while flavorless, doesn't cause anybody's eyebrows to raise due to thoughts of jungle ogier and such...

I think the Ogier as wonder production bonus will make sense to most people as a part of the world - even if it's a bit time-shifted.

Sure, though I could imagine it also being such that one pole has the blight - it could be random which one. I think what you suggest is the most balanced... I just hope people aren't put off by it. The blight is what it is, because that's the area surrounding the hole intot he DO's prison.... are there two holes, now?

Well it's where the Pattern is thinnest and the Dark One's influence is most felt. I think the books make the point specifically that the Blight and Thakan'dar aren't physically closer in a space/distance manner to the Dark One's prison, right? It's just where the Pattern is thinnest, and differing thinness could be anywhere. I think this is something we should discuss on a per-mapscript basis anyway. I know I play Continents a lot, and sometimes there is 0 land near one pole - we wouldn't want to put the only Blight there because then there'd be no Blight. The opposite to that is the Great Plains map type, which is all land. Blight in both poles might be overwhelming there.

TR Folk are often considered stubborn, yes? Is that the word, or am I misremembering some synonym. That *sounds* like a good replacement for Hardy folk ("Stubborn Folk"), but unfortunately the TR have nothing to do with Tundra. Perhaps "Guardian Class" - one of the least universe-friendly, certainly - could be replaced by Stubborn folk, or "Stubborn Defenders" or something.

A couple other reconsiderations, now that I'm no longer thinking about the AoL.

Industrious workers is kind of clunky.. maybe we make it about smithing instead? Friends of the Forge? Forge Workers? Is this too similar to the "craftsmen" one (and is that a problem)?

Maybe Zealots isn't the best term, either. I don't know what to do with this one. I don't want to do something like "Healers" though.

Crusaders is also not appropriately in-universe. Could use a suggestion here that isn't too evocative. This *could* be the Duelists one, but I did kinda like the idea of that being a Custom.

Ritualists... maybe this should directly mention Festivals, but not specific festivals. Not sure an elegant way to do this, though.

Explorers may perhaps be best as "Travelers, i.e. Jain farstrider. "Traveling scholars" should be renamed to dissociate them, if we do that.

Landed Gentry - we just need a synonym of this that is more WoT friendly. I don't recall "gentry" ever popping up. Bannermen? Does that have enough to do with this?

Prospectors... meh. Sounds to American Gold Rush. Refugees?

Quoting to say I haven't skipped over this part, but will respond in detail to the color-coded post!
 
First off, I need to try SiegeMod, and will, hopefully sooner than later.

I hope you enjoy it! There's actually still a little work I could do on that one in terms of text to explain stuff, but I think it's mechanically complete.

As far as the icons - can these icons remain visible throughout the game? Pantheon lightning bolts disappear when a city takes a religion, so the neatness factor would disappear rather early in the game.

Pantheon icons are only really visible later on through the belief breakdown in the religion overview - which isn't very visible. We could make them visible, but they'd clutter up things like the city banner, which needs to portray a lot of information in a small space. Might not be worth making the distinction.

Oy, this is making my head hurt. I'm basically fine with any sort of representation of this, as long as we are somehow able to show the passage of eras similarly to the books. Maybe AB is the way to go.

As far as the Farede-only option.... would you then suggest the game starts in (for example) -4000 Farede? How would we sync to year 0, though? Wouldn't that need to be in or around the point at which the world enters the New era?

Sorry if this response is falling flat... I'm not sure what else to suggest. I think perhaps I'd need to see it layed out, which rough techs and stuff, to really make any sort of qualitative judgement of these various options.

How shall we proceed with this issue, then?

We don't need to sync to year 0 - just like in base CiV, you can reach the Information Era in 1800 if you're fast at researching new techs. The actual date in the corner of the screen doesn't impact what stage of the game we're at - only how many turns it has gone on for. They're correlated, but nothing keeps them together. That's the kind of relationship I meant when I said before that it wouldn't be possible to keep the calendars and eras in sync, when we were discussing the lengths of eras.

I think the main question that comes out of the calendar stuff I brought up is: do we want to use After Breaking, the Free Years, and New Era as names of eras on the tech tree or calendars in the date system? (We can only choose one) It seemed like we were moving away from those 3 names for eras by subdividing 'time' into smaller chunks (to make the eras progressively shorter, in terms of in-universe time) and giving those smaller chunks flavorful names (i.e. Era of the High King). This would let us use the AB, FY, and NE calendars for the date (unrelated to tech), which, from a purist perspective, I think makes the most sense. So I'm in favor of the latter choice. It does mean we need to go back and make an updated era list though.

This is extremely tricky and I'm not sure how best to handle it, honestly. I think we need to do a focused brainstorm (or more systematic approach) on this, since this issue has sadly been mostly tangential, despite its importance.

I think, actually, that the how-to-divide-up-roles will probably come into focus once we know what the various team contributions are. I don't have the time on this post to dedicate any more to doing so now, but we should probably throw out possible ideas for how civs could assist the war effort based on various game aspects (both AI friendly and AI hell):

- Military - Kill the Shadowspawn and defend other nations
- Production - There's a limited distinction between this and military, because someone with high production output can produce a lot of units (and conversely, military civs will tend to have high prod. to replenish their armies). But there can be some projects that provide overall benefits to the Light side that only high production yield players could complete in a reasonable time.
- Culture/Prestige - A bit more nebulous. Can you convert Shadow civs (or at least their cities) with Prestige? There's a role for creating Great Captains, if we don't link them to unit EXP like base CiV does with Great Generals?
- Gold - The other CSes need some love here, I think, but I'm not sure how yet.
- Diplomacy - Being able to more effectively engage the White Tower in the Last Battle seems like it could be a big factor. They've got a lot of good units and it makes sense that good diplo relations with them would let you direct the Aes Sedai more explicitly. This probably ties in a lot with 'how channelers work' as a system.
- Espionage - I think I've warmed to the idea of stealing Seals via espionage, having read your later discussion about the Dragon.
- Technology - Breaking the Seals as a research project makes a lot of sense to me.
- Faith - I'm surprised that nothing jumps out at me for this one. It would make logical sense for the Shadowspawn to target high Faith (strong Light Path) civs, but it might not make mechanical sense. Can this tie into Prestige in the same way that a shared religion helps tourism in BNW?
- Happiness - Gut reaction here is that everyone is probably very unhappy for most of the Last Battle. Not rebellions unhappy, but not highly positive. This also, oddly, would heavily favor the AI, because they have huge happiness bonuses as the difficulties go up. Which is an interesting point, if we make this a role that we want the AIs to take up, then that will occur most of the time - it's rare that the player is happier than the AI.

Obviously let's not expect to use all of these, but if we can come up with a few good options for each of those, then we can really get in there and decide which ones really fit with what we're trying to do. Then the whole Leader thing will be easier, I think. I can think on this and try to tackle this in a later post, but this sounds like a good way to go.

Responses inline in bold! :D

I think I'm liking the idea of having any sort of 'Leader' on the Light side less and less. While it might be advantageous for the player to be able to dictate things as a leader, I think it adds a lot of complications and we'd be better off just having these informal roles. Otherwise we're completely designing around the AI, which, while it's a big part of what's possible and we should consider, I don't think we should shoehorn in something like the notion of a 'leader' to deal with it.

Ooh, interesting. I think this all comes down to the balance and pace of it all. I think what we want is that when he does trigger, they have to use him with some guided purpose and urgency - it shouldn't just be "oh, Rand's here, let's go win Domination against the shadow civs." So he probably needs to trigger pretty late.

I'm wondering how possible it is to provide at least the ""illusion" of Rand being a badass unit players can control at other points as well. While I really like the RandSpy style for the reasons we've both pointed out, it does lack a certain flair. Some ideas (perhaps none of these are good):

1) Perhaps he appears and random, unpredictable intervals, near cities or near battles, lasting for a few turns, not unlike hunters for the horn.
2) Perhaps, in lieu of the "super powerful Ranged Defenses for Cities" we've said, you instead got Rand the Plane - a powerful unit that could strike at targets within a certain range... but couldn't actually leave the city and go invading.

I'm surprisingly in favor of the Dragon as a spy mechanic now, despite some drawbacks in flair. I think the drawback is flair is only perceived, rather than something that would actually crop up in-game. I think if we went with the Dragon-as-unit approach, it would be very difficult and frustrating for the player, which would be much worse. Unfortunately, the player can't see that we evaluated that while they're actually playing the mod.

I prefer #1 of these two, possibly going back to the 'simpler Last Battle' that you suggested elsewhere. (Also, is this a suggestion for how we change the Horn? ;) ) I think the spy route makes him a bit more involved though.

I think #2 would be difficult to work that way - in practice, planes are great siege units. All you need is a city in range of your target and they're an unstoppable barrage if you've got enough to overcome the enemy's AA units. In the end-game in base CiV, most of my damage to cities is done by bombers. We could make the Dragon unable to attack cities, but that seems kind of cheap.

I think this is a discussion for later, but by having Darkfriend spy variants, we can really cook things up. Assassinate a Governor? Sabotage production?

Assassinate the Amyrlin? :D :D (I like the Governor assassination idea, I hadn't thought of that, but it's a great, lower impact of the Amyrlin version.)

I do think that having Rand be the only thing that can find seals might be a mistake... might stall the whole thing if instead he's stuck defending cities.

Thinking on it, I agree with you here. We don't want the primary use of the Dragon to be stationing him in a Shadow city and having him just wait there.

I feel like Rand should also have diplomatic/geopolitical repercussions. Considering that some 8-10 of the books appear to be essentially dedicated to him gradually conquering much of the westlands, it seems this element needs to be there somehow. Maybe the whole dragons peace moment only happens after the dragon has achieved a certain amount of influence and/or prestige... But who controls this? What must he do? But in any case, sending rand to Tear for a few turns before the LB starts sounds awfully lot like him taking the stone, etc. Maybe there's something to this.

This is very interesting. Can the Dragon sway Shadow leaning civs to the Light - like he did with Illian? This is obviously a big problem if he tries to sway the player (who's trying to go Shadow) to the Light against their will, so it has to be combatable. But it can't be overly obvious combat either - the war hasn't started yet.

Another possibility with regards to diplo repercussions - how does the Dragon interact with the Tower? There's a lot of design room there, but we should be wary of linking the Last Battle and diplo victories too much. Also, we want to avoid the 'cheapness' of last minute upheavals that you mentioned in the discussion about the Black Ajah.

I think he shouldn't truly die except for in very specific situations, probably only happening once the shadow has mostly won the game. But, aside form incapacitating him, beating him should probably cause things to happen that aid the shadow's cause:

1) major happiness penalty for light civs
2) something about the seals... learning their location or something
3) consequences related to the bonuses the light team is getting from one another (probably temporary)

I like all three of these. Sounds good!

Also, side note - how long would you envision the LB taking? Both in terms of turns and years. Epic wars like this take MANY turns... are going to do a turn a month or something?

How long (in years) does the Last Battle take in the books? I think it's measured in months, from actual start of combat to the end of book 14? There's a lot of build-up, but I don't remember it being long (like War of Hundred Years) in in-universe time.

I think something like 50 turns makes sense for the duration of the whole thing? We can compress time as much as we like really. We could go all the way down to one day per turn (we have the names of the days to show in the date at the top of the screen! :D ), though my gut reaction is a week per turn might be more reasonable.

Turns with a massive amount of war take drastically longer than peaceful turns, so maybe even 50 is too many. I think this will be something we should balance more on playable builds, so we've got a feel for how long it takes to achieve the goals we set the player/civs.

Unfortunately this whole thing does make so much more sense in MP. if only for the simple fact that players will be chatting and figuring out their plans. That being said...

I think any co-operative venture will always make more sense in MP. I agree, it does create some difficulties.

I think my favorite of your ideas is either to do weighted voting or weighted turn-sequence. So, depending on your light value ( i suppose, though there could be additional factors), you either get extra say in deciding where he goes and who controls him, or you get more moves controlling him

...


As far as your specific turn order example... I wish you'd mentioned the specific math of it. I understand it all in theory and very much like it, but don't quite follow how you determined each civ's number of turns.

The specific turn order is determined by using the player with the lowest Faith per turn as the baseline. In a single round (a round is a full progression of the sequence through all of the players), the player with the lowest Faith per turn moves once and they move last. Everyone else gets moves determined by their relative faith per turn to the other players. If you have double or more faith per turn than another player, you get two turns for each of their one. This applies to every civ, not only the guy in last. Example:

Aiel, 11
Andor, 5
Amadicia, 2

Order:

  1. Aiel
  2. Aiel
  3. Andor
  4. Aiel
  5. Aiel
  6. Andor
  7. Amadicia

But if we tweak the faith per turn values:

Aiel, 11
Andor, 6
Amadicia, 2

Order:

  1. Aiel
  2. Andor
  3. Aiel
  4. Andor
  5. Aiel
  6. Andor
  7. Aiel
  8. Aiel
  9. Amadicia

Aiel's 11 vs Amadicia's 2 gives Aiel 5 moves per Amadicia's 1. Andor's 6 vs Amadicia's 2 gives Andor 3 for Amadicia's 1. And the Aiel's 11 vs Andor's 6 means the Aiel go first in sequence, but have no additional turns against them. Note that the Aiel do get a double move at the end to make up their difference for the entire round, and how we distribute 'extra' moves like that (where one relative sequence (Andor vs Amadicia in this case) is completed, but another isn't (Aiel vs Amadicia)) doesn't have to be done exactly that way.

This also means that eliminating players can potentially affect the turn order of the next round quite significantly (particularly if the player in last has drastically less faith than everyone else and he is eliminated), which is an opportunity for good strategy.

Hopefully that makes more sense, it's a difficult turn order to write out in text, but I think it's very fair overall. Additional factors can be integrated into the turn order as long as all factors can be aggregated into a number we can compare the civs against each other with. (Hypothetical example, not suggesting we use this, but if we wanted to use Prestige to determine the order as well, we could use the sum of each player's faith per turn and Prestige per turn as their comparison number.)

A barrier to this might be expressing it to the player in game so they understand how the order is chosen. It could be presented to them more simply: more faith == more turns controlling the Dragon. They don't necessarily have to understand the exact mechanic of how the order is chosen, which CiV does with some of its other more complex systems (e.g. GP production - most players don't really know how that works but still have a notion of the best way to produce GPs). The more complex explanation could be available (in the Civilopedia or mod docs) for more hardcore players who want to optimize their strategy.

This whole thing does seem sort of weird without some way of communicating strategy and intentions, right? Like, to me it seems that the real important move is to have a "Mission" or "game plan" be established. This would either be set by the leader or voted on. So, stuff like:

- The Shadow are attacking Tear. Dragon's priority is to defend tairen cities
- Dragon is making a push towards the final seals, and should ignore city defense.

Is this kind of thing possible? It seems, chat or no chat, that the turn-flipping could be pretty willy-nilly and seemingly random. Like, if we're doing voting, why would I vote for Tear? Maybe I don't know they're being invading. Similarly, if its not voting, but instead a simply rotating turn order, would I necessarily know that Tear's defense is my top priority?

Kinda weird, but maybe there's a turn order or something, but actions that concern the major mission could somehow cut in line? This seems complicated.

I agree that having completely disjointed turns without a facility to communicate 'intent' to the other players may make the Dragon's usage quite 'flip-flop'-y. However, communicating intent to the AI is where we run into one of the big AI limitations. It doesn't really understand 'grand strategy' all that well and how to slot individual actions into working towards a larger goal (and there are cases where the short-term results are more important), bar a few key exceptions. We need to codify every single permutation of 'reasonable thing to do to achieve goal X,' which I don't think we'll be able to do satisfactorily.

This seems like something we could layer on later (post release) if we're happy with this approach to using the Dragon in general. It may be a bit flip-flop-y at first, but as overall strategies emerge in more balanced, playable builds, we can 'teach' the AI to deal with those main cases first, which is a much more effective use of time than trying to cater for potential strategies now, when we're not sure what players will favor/what makes the most sense to do in a given situation.

Actually, all of this seems complicated, but it also seems like the kind of thing we might need to pull of to get it to work.

Hmm... what about... What if the dragon could be in multiple places at once. He does Travel, and we're talking about Years, or months, at least, per turn. What if he could do something espionagey, something military, and something diplomatic or something, per turn. Different people would rotate into thos various roles, and control the dragon in those regards. Its a bit funny, having him spying on the whitecloaks while he's killing sharans, but it might make sense if we can somehow frame it in a way that's easy to swallow (these things would probably happen in a set turn order, as he travels around). I don't know, a nascent idea - thoughts?

This ties in to what I mentioned above, but I figured we would compress time per turn to much smaller than that during the Last Battle, a week per turn makes sense, possibly even a day. Having the Dragon in multiple places at once is harder to explain in those cases.

This also comes back around to how we define roles for the Light players in the Last Battle. I thought roles wouldn't be quite as formal as 'you have this role in controlling the Dragon.' I thought we would have avenues to help in the Last Battle, each of which may be easier to pursue for players who are specializing in a different 'victory type,' but that each player would be able to pursue whichever option they wanted at any given time. I think I've changed to this kind of thinking since my last post, when it looked like I was suggesting a more formal system, with a 'leader' and such. Not a big fan of that approach anymore. What do you think about the roles?

Overall I'm unsure about the Dragon being in 'multiple places at once.' It gives us flexibility to make some of his tasks take time, which is good and would otherwise be difficult if he can only be one place at a time. I'll think more on it, but I can't quite articulate why I'm more in favor of the 'one place at a time' system right now.

Hmmm... honestly, now I'm totally unsure about how/when he spawns. I think we should figure out what he does more fully first. Well, at least that would help me (if you think you've figured it out, by all means let me know).

I had a few thoughts about this last time, but didn't put them into words. I think they're a bit more formed now. What if the Dragon is born in the first civ to reach the Age of the Dragon? I think that solves a huge number of our timing issues here. The Dragon is born in a place that can be affected by the player's actions - awesome they're contributing. The Dragon is born before the Last Battle - great that matches the flavor. The Dragon is given time to "grow up" before the Last Battle - also realistic, and lets us use some Dragon mechanics before the war gets started, like you and Calavente suggested above.

The first civ reaching the Age of the Dragon will happen a variable amount of time before the war (depends on how fast the other civs are teching), which I think is a fine 'randomization' element.



For me, the simple fact that shadow civs are all working towards their own personal victories creates automatic competitiveness, for sure

One issue with that, though, is that fighting the LB seems like it would negatively impact people working on Domination way more than, say, Culture. The domination guy kind of has to fight the LB, because, ultimately, he can use the shadowspawn to help dominate the light guys (who he has to eventually conquer anyways). What's to stop the culture/science victory people from just turtling and hoping contributing minimally? Of course, they need to win the LB in order to validate their win and be Naebliss, but it does seem like we could end up with a "What? *You* won?! But I did all the work!" kind of situation. Maybe turtling is simply impossible because, if you do, *then* you'll get attacked by your "friends." Oh, and maybe every shadow civ has a seal or something, by definition (maybe all civs do?), which forces Light attention on them, even if they aren't really participating in the war.

That's odd, because I always thought that the structure of the Last Battle favored Shadow Domination civs. When you're going for Domination, the challenge is usually getting 'just enough' of the world to like you so that you can progressively conquer everyone but not have to fight everyone at once until you're ready. The Last Battle removes that barrier - the Shadowspawn are there to distract everyone else and you're free to go on a conquest spree. When I go for a Domination victory, I target the civs most likely to achieve a different victory first. Anyone who completes a space ship part, for example, jumps to the top of my list for next conquest.

Yeah, don't want to emasculate the dragon. That said, i also don't want the dragon to be tied up for 30 turns searching for seals... So some other unit/espionage option is probably a good idea.

Definitely, fully agree on this one!

You do, however, highlight an issue that I've been struggling with in my head - how do we deal with the fact that quite powerful channelers exist in year 1 AB, doing important stuff. Something to be tackled in a future page of this thread, I think.

I'm not necessarily saying that I think we should ignore this problem, but I think we should 'ignore' it. There are powerful channelers during the Breaking itself, but I think this brings up the question: when does our game of WoT CiV start, chronologically?

I always thought After Breaking, which means the Breaking is done. There are still channelers and the madness of men is poorly understood, but the the channelers who ripped the world apart are already dead. The knowledge that is lost in the Breaking is already gone and the channelers who remain are the 'shadows' of their Age of Legends counterparts.

This means that our early game channelers can be appropriately 'weak' units for this portion of the game.

I feel like you need separate threads for each issue. A victory conditions. A last battle. A religions. A general thread (incorporating Civ uniques, and stuff) otherwise everything seems so cluttered.

I feel like this is a good point, though I wouldn't really want to create them in the base modding forum. There's a lot of cross-pollination between the subjects as well. But this would let us respond to specific parts of the discussion without having to write out everything at once, which would be good, I think.

Ask a mod for a Project subforum...

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you need to have a more demonstrable need for it than we do (i.e. players reporting bugs and such). We don't have anything near a finished product and Pazyryk has only recently gotten a subforum for Ea, which has been playable for many months (maybe even a year?). I'll check with the moderators though.
 
Finally my response to the color-coded post! I've put my suggestion inline in yellow - where I've 'yellowed' an option in a list, it means I prefer that option, otherwise I've replaced proposed 'should be changed' entries.

OK, so here's a proposed list, subject to amendment, of course.

Key:

Original, and probably fine (but open to change)
Original, and in need of change IMO
Previously suggested by others
New Suggestion by me
Inline suggestion by S3rgeus


Devoted to Prophecy - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines)
Hardy Folk OR Mountain Folk OR Stubborn Folk (The TR association with this final one is unfortunate, but might still be fine)- Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest) (I'm not a big fan of "Stubborn Folk" in general, I think there are too many negative connotations to being stubborn)
Nomadic People OR Survivors OR Water Seekers (I understand that the latter is the translation of an Aiel Warrior Society, but it might be obscure enough to be fine) - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles)
Craftsmen - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource)
Herbal Healers - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city) (I don't want to use the word "Wisdom" because that's Two Rivers, but that's the kind of thing I'm going for. The Age of Legends had formal medicine, like we do now, but after the Breaking, 'normal' people had to rediscover practical application of plants in the wild for treating illnesses, even more so in WoT than reality would because WoT's developed healing procedures would rely on magic.)
Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates) (I'm having difficulty coming up with a better one for this, but I'll keep thinking on it)
Honored Smiths - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+)
Horse Traders OR Shepherds (either fine with me) - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures)
Fishermen - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats) (the rest are plural)
Crusaders OR Warrior Society (unless that's too evocative of the Aiel) OR Soldier Community- God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city)
Festive Society - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense)
Bustling Community OR Organized Society - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+)
Guardian Class OR Kinsman Defenders OR Stubborn Folk (the latter only if not used above) OR Staunch Defenders- Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) (I think Kinsman is too closely associated with the Kin, the channelers (even though that's Kinswomen, it's similar) though this might be a bit too "Stone of Tear"?)
Hunter Society - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps)
Loyal Subjects OR Loyal Bannermen - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S) (I think Bannermen is very WoT-y, and loyalty is an important part of this bonus - best of both!)
Traveling Scholars - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection)
Builder People OR Friends of the Ogier - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders)
Children of Dragonmount - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders)
Recognized Nobility - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations)
Merchant Elite - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver)
Border Settlements - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) (Not so sure about this one)
Woodland Folk OR Friends of the Ogier (as long as the latter is not used elsewhere - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles)
River Traders - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers)
Mining Tradition or Mountain Folk (must not be used above) - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries)
Masters of Harvest - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource)
Artisans - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource)

Any that aren't part of a choice list and I haven't highlighted sound good to me!

Please help with cleaning this up....

I think I've made it messier, but hopefully my preferences are clear-ish!

After this is settled, I can move on to the actual Customs. How do you prefer I go about this? Should I be preserving the CiV Beliefs (though amplifying them when desired), or create a new batch of nine? Or keep the CiV ones and add additional ones on top of that?

I'd say keep some of the more powerful CiV beliefs (with new names) like Tithe, Religious Texts, and Itinerant Preachers, but mostly replace the existing beliefs. I've found that ones that provide happiness are always useful, gameplay-wise, so that's worth considering.

I'd say we don't need to stick to the sets of 9 in the end, but it would be a good place to start, particularly when we're replacing rather than rebranding.
 
Like Calavente suggested above, I'd thought that the Black Ajah approach to the diplo victory would be an ongoing process throughout the majority of the game - likely tied into determining each civ's 'leaning' toward the Light/Shadow. I agree that it would be unfair for the Black Ajah to be able to unseat other players' diplo work at the last second, but only if the Black Ajah is only a factor at the end of the game. If it's something that players can work for (and against) over the course of the whole game, then I think difficulty parity between the two sides makes a lot of sense.

If the Black Ajah is a part of the diplo victory all the time and the Light players haven't addressed it properly for most of history, I think they've failed to address a key component of that victory. Then it makes sense that their efforts are undone during the Last Battle.

This all makes sense to me, but the potential issue I still see (with Black Ajah stuff going on for years and years) is that half-way through the game, players may not really be "bad" yet. You know, they haven't been corrupted yet. I suppose I just think that throwing support behind the Black Ajah in 1400 AD (equivalent) , when essentially your civ isn't "overrun by darkfriends" until much later. Remember, I'm imagining (and I thought we were all on similar pages on this) a huge part of the "going Shadow" process to involve either involuntary or reactionary mechanics, until near the end, and machinations with the BA for most of the game seems to work against that philosophy. It's hard to set it up as the series of interesting dilemmas and situations we proposed earlier when it's something like this. Unless I'm misunderstanding it.

It's also very difficult, from a technical perspective, to add new players to the game once the game has started. I can probably make it work, but it's only worth it if it adds a lot to the value of the mod.

I'm not sure if we've directly linked faith and Paths to the White Tower, and by extension the diplo victory, yet. While pursuit of the Black can affect a civ's leaning, I think there's a big difference between the input and output ends of the Light/Shadow leaning. Faith is a very limited resource if you're trying to spread your Path (at least in base CiV), so splitting its use either means we need to generate a lot more or make its use cheaper, which favors players that go all in on one side. Paths are primarily useful for their own bonuses and their contributions to the Last Battle. They run parallel to the White Tower systems and too much crossover links pursuing one of those victories with the other very heavily, which makes them very similar.

I think I may be on the record as not wanting the Paths to really have much to do with any victories in any direct way (much like Religion). Of course, they play a role - easing diplomacy (with like-Pathed civs), choosing your LB side, etc.). But I agree with you that making it super important to winning favor with the WT isn't ideal (barring the obvious Black Ajah issue, and any LB connected phenomena).

Also worthy of mention is that, I think, we were hoping the LB could be something that could be disabled if somebody wanted a "normal" game of WoT Civ. Thus, the darkside mechanic would likely be removed as well - so it shouldn't be essential to any of our normal victories, right?

I'm also in favor of individual 'break the seal' projects for the same reason. Sounds like we all like global 'Seal the Bore' as a project. In place as in captured Thakan'dar? I would say so, we can't Seal the Bore before then.

agreed.

After the Dragon is in play (some fixed time (number of turns) after his birth) we can have him become active with the mechanics we discuss. I think having a 'turn order' where all nations are able to have a chance at controlling the Dragon in the period before the Last Battle makes sense. Clarification: I'm not suggesting every player get to control the Dragon at some point in every game. I suggest it becomes Light-side civs only after the Last Battle actually begins. Because of the relationship between Light leaning and faith production (and faith production determines turn order), Light side civs will tend to control the Dragon first in the pre-LB period. Depending on how quickly everyone techs up and triggers the Last Battle, none of the neutral/Shadow civs may have a chance to move him at all. But if a Shadow civ does get a chance, particularly if they're one of the last/the last person to do so before the Last Battle starts, they could put him in a dangerous position for the Light, which I think is good strategy.

OK. We are of one mind on this now, I think.

I think we'll need to decide on how Seals are discovered before addressing if we can break them prior to the Last Battle, because there's a lot of overlap with that here. I agree that if we can, it should be during the 'build up' phase after the Dragon is born. I'm not sure how finding some Seals already broken matches up with the rest of this, mechanically?

Right, so in talks with our LB conditions, it has been proposed that destroying the Seals be a research project. The issue with this is, of course, that they make a lot of sense also as Tech projects. To me, breaking them with research actually makes less sense than discovering their location with research. But, then again, we wanted to use espionage and/or map wandering as a means of divining their locations, so maybe that's fine. Still, I don't love the color of "destroying with science."

Maybe, instead, we reflavor the Destruction-with Science as "Determining whether the seals are authentic or fake." This makes sense as a science victory, I think. If they're determined to be fake, they disappear (and maybe you get some bonus of some sort as a reward for your wasted time). If they're determined to be real, then perhaps the actual destruction is trivial - you just destroy them and "poof," there they go. or, since they're cuendillar, maybe there needs to be some sort of more significant thing - bring them to a capital, or to a city with a particular Building or Governor. In any case, the point is the rebranding of the science-related action.

As far, then as how they're discovered, there seem to be two possibilities here:

1) Seals always exist in cities/with civs.
2) Seals exist in the world, and are found, and then exist with Civs/cities.

I'm actually unsure of which I like more. I'm nervous about the endless-hunt aspect to number 2, but if somehow it could be balanced such that its essentially guaranteed that by the AotD the seals will be found, at least, that could be a fun aspect to it.

I mentioned once that maybe every civ started with a seal (or discovered one through some automatic point in the game). Maybe some number of these are fake, by design.. So, maybe 1/2*total number of civs + 1 are real, and all else are fake, or something like that.

We could have the Seals rebase with distance restrictions like planes (prevents teleporting) but also have a time (X turns) spent 'moving' (like spies). In the time that they're 'moving,' they're treated as in the city of origin? That way you can't move them at the drop of a hat if it looks like the city will be captured. However, I still don't see why you'd ever (as a Light player) keep a Seal close to the war's frontline. I think the only way the Shadow players could capture it is then to have the Light civs 'surrounded.' I'm not sure how often it will happen that there are Shadow civs on all sides or if the world will tend towards creating a united front between two big factions.

Right, I think the whole circle-the-wagons-around-the-seals approach seems kind of meta and not in keeping with the spirit of the last battle. The truth is, they were actually kind of ignored.. people thought they were safe in the WT or something. I'm fine with them living in cities, but I think we need to think long and hard about whether we want that to dominate the LB's battles - it seems to me that it could easily become the focus of everybody's attention. Maybe this is fine, but we should decide if its what we want.

I'm not sure, CiV is usually very explicit and public with this kind of victory-relevant information. When anyone completes a spaceship part, everyone gets a notifications that "Civilization X has completed part Y of their spaceship," which tells you fairly accurately how close they are to finishing it, so you can plan accordingly. I think "Civilization X has broken one of the Seals of the Dark One's prison" is very much the same kind of information. We'll want that to be public so that victories don't 'surprise' players - where they could have taken some action to prevent an opposing victory, but didn't just because they weren't aware that that victory was impending.

You're right. Actually my comment was mostly in response to what I perceived as you not liking that fact, and me trying to come up with a solution for it. Not a big problem for me.

I'm reluctant to layer another spreadable system on top of the mechanics we already have. CiV is already complicated and we're adding a lot. I'm in favor of finding a place for the iconographies though, they're definitely a big part of the flavor!

Gosh, any ideas then on where they could go?

Sounds like something we can and should work in somewhere then! I'm sure we'll need a lot of variety for the Great Works when we come to flesh them out.

OK, so I'm having to go back and check to see which GW types I proposed way back when... Wow, early August. That wasn't that long ago, actually. Anyways, I proposed:

Prophesies
Epics/Legends/Stories
Crafts

Maybe the styles get merged with/replace Crafts?

Well it's where the Pattern is thinnest and the Dark One's influence is most felt. I think the books make the point specifically that the Blight and Thakan'dar aren't physically closer in a space/distance manner to the Dark One's prison, right? It's just where the Pattern is thinnest, and differing thinness could be anywhere. I think this is something we should discuss on a per-mapscript basis anyway. I know I play Continents a lot, and sometimes there is 0 land near one pole - we wouldn't want to put the only Blight there because then there'd be no Blight. The opposite to that is the Great Plains map type, which is all land. Blight in both poles might be overwhelming there.

Wow, yeah. So you're going into territory I know little about. But yes, you're absolutely right that it is simply where the pattern is thinnest. But I think that's because thats where they made the Bore, yes? Not just a random location. It should be noted here, that the blight seems to appear on both major continents in Randland, so ours should probably too.

Would we be replacing Ice with a Blight tile? Blasted Land? Tundra should still be viable, right?
 
Pantheon icons are only really visible later on through the belief breakdown in the religion overview - which isn't very visible. We could make them visible, but they'd clutter up things like the city banner, which needs to portray a lot of information in a small space. Might not be worth making the distinction.

Fair enough.

We don't need to sync to year 0 - just like in base CiV, you can reach the Information Era in 1800 if you're fast at researching new techs. The actual date in the corner of the screen doesn't impact what stage of the game we're at - only how many turns it has gone on for. They're correlated, but nothing keeps them together. That's the kind of relationship I meant when I said before that it wouldn't be possible to keep the calendars and eras in sync, when we were discussing the lengths of eras.

I think the main question that comes out of the calendar stuff I brought up is: do we want to use After Breaking, the Free Years, and New Era as names of eras on the tech tree or calendars in the date system? (We can only choose one) It seemed like we were moving away from those 3 names for eras by subdividing 'time' into smaller chunks (to make the eras progressively shorter, in terms of in-universe time) and giving those smaller chunks flavorful names (i.e. Era of the High King). This would let us use the AB, FY, and NE calendars for the date (unrelated to tech), which, from a purist perspective, I think makes the most sense. So I'm in favor of the latter choice. It does mean we need to go back and make an updated era list though.[/QUOTE]

OK, I finally think I truly get what you're saying. So the calendars progress regardless of the actual era. Meaning, if tech was somehow at a standstill, we could theoretically be looking at FY 1000 when the civs were all technically still in the "After the Breaking" year. Is that correct?

I get it (if in fact that is what you mean), and I think it's mostly fine. How would the time compression in later years trigger? Also, it is also a bit odd to have FY one start in the middle of the trolloc wars, or something, or before them, or 300 years later, just because its based solely on turn count. I guess its a bit like AD 1 (using the old school Anno Domine definition of AD) happening three hundred years before Christ is born. Of course, in Civ, this matters little, because (aside from the founding of Christianity, which we'll ignore), Christ's birth is irellevant to Civ. Unfortunately, the calander-shifting dates in WoT (end of the trolloc wars, end of the 100 years war) most definitely DO matter to us. Unless... wait, now I'm not sure I understand you again...

Do you mind throwing in a couple of examples, just to clear up my stupid confusion?

In any case, I am not totally opposed to simply counting the whole game from 0 AB, ignoring the other calendars, and using the other names as era names. Ugh.

Responses inline in bold! :D

Military - Kill the Shadowspawn and defend other nations

Right, and attack the shadow nations.

- Production - There's a limited distinction between this and military, because someone with high production output can produce a lot of units (and conversely, military civs will tend to have high prod. to replenish their armies). But there can be some projects that provide overall benefits to the Light side that only high production yield players could complete in a reasonable time.

Right, I think circumstances could create a distinction, though. I've played Cultural games where I win because I'm a production powerhouse (wonders, etc.). Imagine a Tall civ like India, but being really rather far removed, isolated on an island or something. I think they should be able to help with the war effort by doing stuff beyond just fighting the war. Maybe it's simply gifting units, but that seems somewhat uninspired. Espeicially since a somewhat pacifist Hammer civ might not have a great military foundation (barracks, etc.) Sending hammers via trade-route-like mechanics might work well here, as has been mentioned. Or something like dumping hammers in to "upgrade their equipment" or something - giving free on-production promotions to a City's new units. Hard to see if the AI would embrace this, though.

- Culture/Prestige - A bit more nebulous. Can you convert Shadow civs (or at least their cities) with Prestige? There's a role for creating Great Captains, if we don't link them to unit EXP like base CiV does with Great Generals?

Yes, this one is certainly difficult. I do wonder if the territory thing might still be a path to look into here. A culture-bomb like mechanic? Or maybe you could shift your territory - sacrifics some territory in one location to spread towards the fronts? Kind of weird, and not really in the spirit of what culture and prestige really mean (similarly to how the culture bomb is kind of a dumb idea in CiV vanilla). MAybe it's more a GM concert tour kind of thing - maybe impacting the happiness of your enemies or something through culture-oriented actions?

- Gold - The other CSes need some love here, I think, but I'm not sure how yet.

Perhaps its as simple as the CSs' loyalty can be bought, similarly to how it is in Base CiV.Kinda weird to have them switch sides though, so maybe this is harder to do, or at least can only happen once.

Also, as I stated in an earlier post, trade-route-like setups would be cool - spread your gold around the other civs on your team.

- Diplomacy - Being able to more effectively engage the White Tower in the Last Battle seems like it could be a big factor. They've got a lot of good units and it makes sense that good diplo relations with them would let you direct the Aes Sedai more explicitly. This probably ties in a lot with 'how channelers work' as a system.

Yes, that's probably good. Get channelers. Unless they're Turned, the WT should probably be lightside, and your diplomatic relations with them determine (perhaps) how much AS support a given civ receives?

but yes, once this gets settled a bit more, we're due to dive into the channeling I think.

- Espionage - I think I've warmed to the idea of stealing Seals via espionage, having read your later discussion about the Dragon.

Yeah, and this one is more of a "thing everybody will be doing," since (with rare exception), I don't think civs can really "focus" on spies so much. It's not like that's a role one guy will have and be happy filling it.

- Technology - Breaking the Seals as a research project makes a lot of sense to me.

Yes. See my previous discussion on this.

- Faith - I'm surprised that nothing jumps out at me for this one. It would make logical sense for the Shadowspawn to target high Faith (strong Light Path) civs, but it might not make mechanical sense. Can this tie into Prestige in the same way that a shared religion helps tourism in BNW?

I think this wraps up, perhaps, with the Culture thing above - happiness or something... This is of course discounting the real benefits of things you can buy with faith (whitecloaks, etc.) and the benefits provided already by your path.

When I think about it, the fundamental issue here is whether your people believe in the thing you are fighting for. If you are lightside, and have epic faith, that means your people really like the Light, right? So maybe that could effect happiness... or maybe that's already worked into the system by means of the benefits you already get for having high faith.

- Happiness - Gut reaction here is that everyone is probably very unhappy for most of the Last Battle. Not rebellions unhappy, but not highly positive. This also, oddly, would heavily favor the AI, because they have huge happiness bonuses as the difficulties go up. Which is an interesting point, if we make this a role that we want the AIs to take up, then that will occur most of the time - it's rare that the player is happier than the AI.

Right. good point. I think happiness will likely tie into the other things already mentioned... not necessary to have a "Happy factory" civ or anything.

I think I'm liking the idea of having any sort of 'Leader' on the Light side less and less. While it might be advantageous for the player to be able to dictate things as a leader, I think it adds a lot of complications and we'd be better off just having these informal roles. Otherwise we're completely designing around the AI, which, while it's a big part of what's possible and we should consider, I don't think we should shoehorn in something like the notion of a 'leader' to deal with it.

Yeah, I think I agree. Need to find some sort of benefit for Prestige, though.

I prefer #1 of these two, possibly going back to the 'simpler Last Battle' that you suggested elsewhere. (Also, is this a suggestion for how we change the Horn? ;) ) I think the spy route makes him a bit more involved though.

Nope, not explicitly a suggestion about the horn... haven't even thought of it that way (but it could be, I dunno).

I think what I mean here is that he would be a spy AND would randomly pop up and do cool stuff as a unit for you...

Thinking on it, I agree with you here. We don't want the primary use of the Dragon to be stationing him in a Shadow city and having him just wait there.

OR a light city. Say it takes 10 turns for him to root out a DF or something.... and the first few civs choose to do this 5 times in a row... that's the whole LB.

This is very interesting. Can the Dragon sway Shadow leaning civs to the Light - like he did with Illian? This is obviously a big problem if he tries to sway the player (who's trying to go Shadow) to the Light against their will, so it has to be combatable. But it can't be overly obvious combat either - the war hasn't started yet.

Shouldn't this all be wrapped up in Faith and Prestige, etc.? compleeex....

Basically Illian was a sort of conquest, right? Or a coup, more like. The Illian "player" lost the game, I think, and his cities became controlled by Rand's civ (Tear, or the Aiel, I guess?)

The big issue, I guess, is do we want anything epic dragon-related to go down before the dragon-peace? i.e., the first 13 books.......I mean, it does kind of make sense that the dragon's pre-LB actions could at least SWAY the player's "alignment."

Another possibility with regards to diplo repercussions - how does the Dragon interact with the Tower? There's a lot of design room there, but we should be wary of linking the Last Battle and diplo victories too much. Also, we want to avoid the 'cheapness' of last minute upheavals that you mentioned in the discussion about the Black Ajah.

The only thing I've got here is that maybe player's interactions with teh dragon have effects on Ajah power/influence...? Like, the Red is suspicious of the Dragon, etc. But I can't figure out how this would work mechanically - essentially, everybody on team Light is using the dragon, so it'll kinda come out in the wash.

Before I mentioned people getting "extra votes," for controlling him, similar to being the Host of the WC in CiV, but it looks like that mechanic is gone (controlling him, I mean).

How long (in years) does the Last Battle take in the books? I think it's measured in months, from actual start of combat to the end of book 14? There's a lot of build-up, but I don't remember it being long (like War of Hundred Years) in in-universe time.

Oh, I'm not sure, but I think ti's really only a couple of months.

I think something like 50 turns makes sense for the duration of the whole thing? We can compress time as much as we like really. We could go all the way down to one day per turn (we have the names of the days to show in the date at the top of the screen! :D ), though my gut reaction is a week per turn might be more reasonable.

Turns with a massive amount of war take drastically longer than peaceful turns, so maybe even 50 is too many. I think this will be something we should balance more on playable builds, so we've got a feel for how long it takes to achieve the goals we set the player/civs.

Yeah, would probably need to be tested, but I think this could work.

The specific turn order is determined by using the player with the lowest Faith per turn as the baseline. In a single round (a round is a full progression of the sequence through all of the players), the player with the lowest Faith per turn moves once and they move last. Everyone else gets moves determined by their relative faith per turn to the other players. If you have double or more faith per turn than another player, you get two turns for each of their one. This applies to every civ, not only the guy in last. Example:

Aiel, 11
Andor, 5
Amadicia, 2

Order:

  1. Aiel
  2. Aiel
  3. Andor
  4. Aiel
  5. Aiel
  6. Andor
  7. Amadicia

But if we tweak the faith per turn values:

Aiel, 11
Andor, 6
Amadicia, 2

Order:

  1. Aiel
  2. Andor
  3. Aiel
  4. Andor
  5. Aiel
  6. Andor
  7. Aiel
  8. Aiel
  9. Amadicia

Aiel's 11 vs Amadicia's 2 gives Aiel 5 moves per Amadicia's 1. Andor's 6 vs Amadicia's 2 gives Andor 3 for Amadicia's 1. And the Aiel's 11 vs Andor's 6 means the Aiel go first in sequence, but have no additional turns against them. Note that the Aiel do get a double move at the end to make up their difference for the entire round, and how we distribute 'extra' moves like that (where one relative sequence (Andor vs Amadicia in this case) is completed, but another isn't (Aiel vs Amadicia)) doesn't have to be done exactly that way.

This also means that eliminating players can potentially affect the turn order of the next round quite significantly (particularly if the player in last has drastically less faith than everyone else and he is eliminated), which is an opportunity for good strategy.

Hopefully that makes more sense, it's a difficult turn order to write out in text, but I think it's very fair overall. Additional factors can be integrated into the turn order as long as all factors can be aggregated into a number we can compare the civs against each other with. (Hypothetical example, not suggesting we use this, but if we wanted to use Prestige to determine the order as well, we could use the sum of each player's faith per turn and Prestige per turn as their comparison number.)

OK, this makes perfect sense. Thanks for the clarification.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like it might make more sense to use Prestige as the determining factor here. I mean, isn't that what prestige is? Either that, or a diplomatic measure... though if the diplo system is WT centric, that might not make the most sense.

Maybe the higest faith output should be best left for other things... The Whitecloaks had tons of faith, but Rand certainly wasn't allying with them until he needed to.

A barrier to this might be expressing it to the player in game so they understand how the order is chosen. It could be presented to them more simply: more faith == more turns controlling the Dragon. They don't necessarily have to understand the exact mechanic of how the order is chosen, which CiV does with some of its other more complex systems (e.g. GP production - most players don't really know how that works but still have a notion of the best way to produce GPs). The more complex explanation could be available (in the Civilopedia or mod docs) for more hardcore players who want to optimize their strategy.

No problem at all with leaving it abstract from a player perspective.

I agree that having completely disjointed turns without a facility to communicate 'intent' to the other players may make the Dragon's usage quite 'flip-flop'-y. However, communicating intent to the AI is where we run into one of the big AI limitations. It doesn't really understand 'grand strategy' all that well and how to slot individual actions into working towards a larger goal (and there are cases where the short-term results are more important), bar a few key exceptions. We need to codify every single permutation of 'reasonable thing to do to achieve goal X,' which I don't think we'll be able to do satisfactorily.

This seems like something we could layer on later (post release) if we're happy with this approach to using the Dragon in general. It may be a bit flip-flop-y at first, but as overall strategies emerge in more balanced, playable builds, we can 'teach' the AI to deal with those main cases first, which is a much more effective use of time than trying to cater for potential strategies now, when we're not sure what players will favor/what makes the most sense to do in a given situation.

OK. This might be an "it is what it is" moment...

This also comes back around to how we define roles for the Light players in the Last Battle. I thought roles wouldn't be quite as formal as 'you have this role in controlling the Dragon.' I thought we would have avenues to help in the Last Battle, each of which may be easier to pursue for players who are specializing in a different 'victory type,' but that each player would be able to pursue whichever option they wanted at any given time. I think I've changed to this kind of thinking since my last post, when it looked like I was suggesting a more formal system, with a 'leader' and such. Not a big fan of that approach anymore. What do you think about the roles?

OK, sure. just looking for ways to make the cooperation AI proof...

I had a few thoughts about this last time, but didn't put them into words. I think they're a bit more formed now. What if the Dragon is born in the first civ to reach the Age of the Dragon? I think that solves a huge number of our timing issues here. The Dragon is born in a place that can be affected by the player's actions - awesome they're contributing. The Dragon is born before the Last Battle - great that matches the flavor. The Dragon is given time to "grow up" before the Last Battle - also realistic, and lets us use some Dragon mechanics before the war gets started, like you and Calavente suggested above.

Ok, this is great. Question, though - what does this mean for that civ? Do they get anything, or its just a timing thing?

The reason I mention it is because it matters in WoT that Rand is from the TR, in that it created a sort of de facto alliance with Andor. This of course is weird if it turns out he's born in a shadow civ.... ideas?

That's odd, because I always thought that the structure of the Last Battle favored Shadow Domination civs. When you're going for Domination, the challenge is usually getting 'just enough' of the world to like you so that you can progressively conquer everyone but not have to fight everyone at once until you're ready. The Last Battle removes that barrier - the Shadowspawn are there to distract everyone else and you're free to go on a conquest spree. When I go for a Domination victory, I target the civs most likely to achieve a different victory first. Anyone who completes a space ship part, for example, jumps to the top of my list for next conquest.

I guess I should clarify that what I really mean by negatively impacting domination players is: Domination players are the only ones essentially forced to do good stuff for the Team and the Cause. Considering theyre required to fight the lightside guys, they're helping the whole group, whereas a Shadow Culture guy could more easily stick his middle finger up and the group and just harvest prestige.

INcidentally, one possible benefit of Anti-Faith (i.e. being really bad) could be getting extra shadowspawn to control?

I'm not necessarily saying that I think we should ignore this problem, but I think we should 'ignore' it. There are powerful channelers during the Breaking itself, but I think this brings up the question: when does our game of WoT CiV start, chronologically?

Yeah, I'll be working on this soon enough, I think.

I always thought After Breaking, which means the Breaking is done. There are still channelers and the madness of men is poorly understood, but the the channelers who ripped the world apart are already dead. The knowledge that is lost in the Breaking is already gone and the channelers who remain are the 'shadows' of their Age of Legends counterparts.

This means that our early game channelers can be appropriately 'weak' units for this portion of the game.

Yes, true, a late game AS should be better maybe than an early-days AS, but the fact is that an early game AS should likely be MUCH more powerful relative to contemporary units than a late game AS. Consider: dude with axe versus early AS.... as opposed to Dragon (the cannon) vs late game AS. Sure, the AS probably wins both battles, but the dude with an axe doesn't even stand a chance.

AS do kinda need to exist in some formidable force even in the early day - some of the ten nations had AS queens, but the balance is important.
 
Finally my response to the color-coded post! I've put my suggestion inline in yellow - where I've 'yellowed' an option in a list, it means I prefer that option, otherwise I've replaced proposed 'should be changed' entries.

Oh man, you're killing me with that yellow! My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!

OK, this isn't final or anything, but I've cut down the ones you didn't like, and left the ones you do like, unless I had a thought/comment (inline) about it.

Devoted to Prophecy - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines)
Hardy Folk - Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest) (I understand what you mean about stubbornness, but isn't that a word used throughout eh books a lot?)
Water Seekers - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles)
Craftsmen - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource)
Herbal Healers - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city) (Well, Wisdoms are often channelers, so I think avoiding that word is good. This is fine.)
Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates)
Honored Smiths - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+)
Shepherds (either fine with me) - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures)
Fishermen - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats) (I really had this singular before...? terrible...)
Soldier Community - God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city)
Festive Society - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense)
Bustling Community OR Organized Society - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+) (wait which one do you prefer?)
Guardian Class OR Kinsman Defenders OR Stubborn Folk (the latter only if not used above) OR Staunch Defenders- Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) ( I think I maybe don't like any of these. What about Protectors?)
Hunter Society - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps)
Loyal Bannermen - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S)
Traveling Scholars - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection)
Friends of the Ogier - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders)
Children of Dragonmount - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders)
Recognized Nobility - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations) (I don't love the word Recognized.... also, when put that way, it starts really drifting away from the whole plantation thing. I think the idea is that plantations (rich guy farms!) house lots of peasants and stuff and a rich culture stems from that (that is the logic of Oral Tradition, I guess, in CiV). So here, our nobles need ot somehow help culture...by having people work their farms. Hmmm...)
Merchant Elite - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver)
Border Settlements - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) (The problem here is just the wording. "settlements" are things. Needs to be Border Settlers or something like that, but that in particular is kind of weird because Settlers are units. Frontiersmen? I like the "border" word being first, but the second word needs to represent people somehow.)
Woodland Folk (as long as the latter is not used elsewhere - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles)
River Traders - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers)
Mining Tradition or Mountain Folk (must not be used above) - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries) (so which one do you like?)
Masters of Harvest - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource)
Artisans - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource)

I'd say keep some of the more powerful CiV beliefs (with new names) like Tithe, Religious Texts, and Itinerant Preachers, but mostly replace the existing beliefs. I've found that ones that provide happiness are always useful, gameplay-wise, so that's worth considering.

I'd say we don't need to stick to the sets of 9 in the end, but it would be a good place to start, particularly when we're replacing rather than rebranding.

OK, understood, and agreed.
 
I think the main question that comes out of the calendar stuff I brought up is: do we want to use After Breaking, the Free Years, and New Era as names of eras on the tech tree or calendars in the date system? (We can only choose one) It seemed like we were moving away from those 3 names for eras by subdividing 'time' into smaller chunks (to make the eras progressively shorter, in terms of in-universe time) and giving those smaller chunks flavorful names (i.e. Era of the High King). This would let us use the AB, FY, and NE calendars for the date (unrelated to tech), which, from a purist perspective, I think makes the most sense. So I'm in favor of the latter choice.
Similar to how the Mayans have a clanedar change, could you tie a calendar change in with when you reach one of the later ages, so your displayed calendar changes to FY XXX after reaching that Tech era? I dont know if it possible to have them start from 0 at that pojtn though.

Now onto some of the 'lineages'

Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates) - I like this name.

Guardian Class OR Kinsman Defenders OR Stubborn Folk (the latter only if not used above) OR Staunch Defenders- Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) ( I think I maybe don't like any of these. What about Protectors?) - Vigilant Protectors?

Border Settlements - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) (The problem here is just the wording. "settlements" are things. Needs to be Border Settlers or something like that, but that in particular is kind of weird because Settlers are units. Frontiersmen? I like the "border" word being first, but the second word needs to represent people somehow.) -Expansive? I do like Frontiersmen though.

We don't need to sync to year 0 - just like in base CiV, you can reach the Information Era in 1800 if you're fast at researching new techs. The actual date in the corner of the screen doesn't impact what stage of the game we're at - only how many turns it has gone on for. They're correlated, but nothing keeps them together. That's the kind of relationship I meant when I said before that it wouldn't be possible to keep the calendars and eras in sync, when we were discussing the lengths of eras.
I think it should start some years after the breaking, when all the "breakers" have died, and the common people are starting to get their stuff together to reform society, and have managed to found a city. (especially true if we change the starting loadouts of civs, like a starting scout, or certain buildings being in the capital).



Rand wasn't controlled by any of the civs. Could the Dragon cause a series of events to happen, and that civs can petition him for aid (like a world congress, but only light aligned civs are a part of it) rather than being a controllable unit/spy/force.
Some events could be
"Rally to the Dragon" - xyz Civ gets +happiness for some turns and spawns a few free units.
"Warriors of the Dragon" Gain a channeler unit
"The Dragon Strikes" You get a one use "nuke" to fire that delas damage in an area
"Better deals. The dragon 'encourages' merchants to help xyz Civ to help them fight the last battle" xyz Civ gains gold and/or strategic resources
"Popular Resistance - the Dragon's arrives shores up hope for victory" XYZ civ gets bonus health and defence on its cities for X turns.

I admit that programming the ai to choose good options for the team would be hard. The dragon could also cause random shadowspawn units to take damage.


For bubles of evil, could they be randomly spawning pockets of radiation? The radiation would also pillage the tile it spawned on? Breaking a seal could also cause a bubble to appear near that city (3 tiles). So you want to break the seals to win, but saving breaking them till later. If a shadow aligned civ breaks a seal, then the bubble might have a chance to appear on another civ's city?
 
I think it should start some years after the breaking, when all the "breakers" have died, and the common people are starting to get their stuff together to reform society, and have managed to found a city. (especially true if we change the starting loadouts of civs, like a starting scout, or certain buildings being in the capital).

Oh, right. I meant to say this before.

The Years "After the Breaking" in-universe is supposed to mark the time after the death of the last remaining male Aes Sedai. So, the world isn't "Breaking," anymore, it is "broken." This ends the time of madness, which is probably around a hundred years long.

Thus, I think AB 1 is a totally fine place to start - this is humanity's chance to rise from the wreckage. I'd prefer to keep the start comparable to CiV's, and I think this makes sense - we wouldn't really have any cities, per se, but there would be settlements and such popping up.

Rand wasn't controlled by any of the civs. Could the Dragon cause a series of events to happen, and that civs can petition him for aid (like a world congress, but only light aligned civs are a part of it) rather than being a controllable unit/spy/force.
Some events could be
"Rally to the Dragon" - xyz Civ gets +happiness for some turns and spawns a few free units.
"Warriors of the Dragon" Gain a channeler unit
"The Dragon Strikes" You get a one use "nuke" to fire that delas damage in an area
"Better deals. The dragon 'encourages' merchants to help xyz Civ to help them fight the last battle" xyz Civ gains gold and/or strategic resources
"Popular Resistance - the Dragon's arrives shores up hope for victory" XYZ civ gets bonus health and defence on its cities for X turns.

I admit that programming the ai to choose good options for the team would be hard. The dragon could also cause random shadowspawn units to take damage.

Honestly, I can see the appeal in the dragon being an independent actor. Takes away some ofthe gamesmanship and strategy to the LB, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Certainly makes things harder from an AI perspective - for the dragon - but easier on an AI perspective - as a CiV. Might cure some issues, but also might back us into weird corners where we have a rogue AI who won't do anything productive (or dominates the game).

Despite the compellingness of this, (and I am sort of predicting S3rgeus' response here), it does take away a huge piece of player agency. People may very well expect him to be playable somewhat, and thus might be disappointed.
 
I really should be working... but I just had an idea. Or rather, a clarification on some ideas we've been tossing around.

What if, instead of using your Faith or Happiness to "aid the war effort" as a light-side LB civ, those were your reward for aiding the effort.

Imagine, at the bottom of a cities production options, after Research and Wealth (where the World's Fair Goes), there were options to "Support the War Effort."

A city could elect to forgo the entire production of a certain type of thing and "donate" it to an ally's cities. I'm thinking that hammers, surplus food, gold, and maybe culture would be possible (Science seems possible too, but it's a little odd, maybe). In my head I'm tossing around the possibility that you would choose three cities, and each would get something like 40% of that total value - making it slightly more *efficient* than merely giving away gold in a trade or something (toying with upping this to 50%, but that might be too good).

In exchange, that civ receives Faith or happiness - or maybe even prestige - in compensation. The benefit should be less than you gave away, to discourage abuse, but this way a civ gets something back for their support of the other civs doing the actual fighting.

As an example, my city gets +6 total food per turn. I choose to donate the food, and end up with +0 per turn, but three cities of my choosing get +2 Food each. In exchange, I get some Faith (or happiness, or something), say +2 or +3. The payoff maybe should be roughly comparable to the proportion when choosing Research or Wealth (what is it, 1/4?).

I don't know yet whether the cities you choose need to be in your trade network, whether these links can be severed/pillaged, and whether a civ can change the target cities every turn.

As far as the possible benefits:

If we chose Faith: how useful this is depends on our uses for faith, but it sounds like a civ might be able to do some cool things with Faith - maybe even get the Dragon more often.
If we chose Happiness: this one makes sense, but might be weird, in that the civs that aren't doing the actual fighting might not need happiness benefits as much as the ones always at war. Still, happiness helps with GAs, etc.
If we chose Prestige: this one makes intuitive sense, but on the other hand, I don't know yet what the point of it would be. What would this need prestige for?

I will say, considering these things makes me feel like the Dragon Peace needs to be totally binding, in terms of one's membership in it. We can't have civs dumping resources into one civ, only to have that civ turn around and invade them. I still think you maybe should be able to vote OUT or IN a civ, but I don't think that a CiV should be able to leave once in. (We americans don't love secessionists, I guess....)
 
This all makes sense to me, but the potential issue I still see (with Black Ajah stuff going on for years and years) is that half-way through the game, players may not really be "bad" yet. You know, they haven't been corrupted yet. I suppose I just think that throwing support behind the Black Ajah in 1400 AD (equivalent) , when essentially your civ isn't "overrun by darkfriends" until much later. Remember, I'm imagining (and I thought we were all on similar pages on this) a huge part of the "going Shadow" process to involve either involuntary or reactionary mechanics, until near the end, and machinations with the BA for most of the game seems to work against that philosophy. It's hard to set it up as the series of interesting dilemmas and situations we proposed earlier when it's something like this. Unless I'm misunderstanding it.

I think this can still work with an involuntary or 'slippery slope' system - it's just that some "Shadow" actions specifically help the Black Ajah, which develops over the course of the game. Rather than have the Black Ajah not exist until we ramp up the Last Battle stuff.

We kind of moved past this in the last few pages, but I feel we should clarify what "involuntary" means in this case, because based on the examples we outlined previously, I don't think the system we proposed is very involuntary. I see "involuntary" as being something that *happens to the player* like a natural disaster - they have no input that it occurred and it occurring was determined by random chance. We're still planning to present the player with options, right? (not bringing up the choosing a side thing - but like "X has happened, what do you do?" kind of scenarios) Reactionary is very different from involuntary. Even if those events don't happen in explicit little dialog boxes - the player might have to do something in-game (move a unit somewhere, pay someone, anything like that). If there's any player choice involved then people (humans) will inevitably "choose" to go Light or Shadow in a given game, by making decisions that move their civ toward that end, which I think is good.

Also worthy of mention is that, I think, we were hoping the LB could be something that could be disabled if somebody wanted a "normal" game of WoT Civ. Thus, the darkside mechanic would likely be removed as well - so it shouldn't be essential to any of our normal victories, right?

Good point, we can disable individual victory conditions, so they need to not break the rest of the game if they don't exist!

Right, so in talks with our LB conditions, it has been proposed that destroying the Seals be a research project. The issue with this is, of course, that they make a lot of sense also as Tech projects. To me, breaking them with research actually makes less sense than discovering their location with research. But, then again, we wanted to use espionage and/or map wandering as a means of divining their locations, so maybe that's fine. Still, I don't love the color of "destroying with science."

What's the distinction between a Research Project and a Tech Project?

One difficulty with this whole approach is the concept of a "Research Project" doesn't exist in base CiV. There are Projects (Manhattan Project, Apollo Program) and Global Projects (World Fair, International Space Station) and both of those use production in a very specific way, but that's all there is. We can add a concept of Research Projects, that's fine, but we need to consider how we present these to the player. Are they on the Tech tree? We can add them dynamically when they become available if we don't want disabled 'techs' lying around on it.

Players can't research techs while doing research projects, right? Because their science output is going into the project.

Maybe, instead, we reflavor the Destruction-with Science as "Determining whether the seals are authentic or fake." This makes sense as a science victory, I think. If they're determined to be fake, they disappear (and maybe you get some bonus of some sort as a reward for your wasted time). If they're determined to be real, then perhaps the actual destruction is trivial - you just destroy them and "poof," there they go. or, since they're cuendillar, maybe there needs to be some sort of more significant thing - bring them to a capital, or to a city with a particular Building or Governor. In any case, the point is the rebranding of the science-related action.

Do you mean as a science participation role in the Last Battle or the actual Science victory that we've yet to replace? I assume the former, since it's part of the whole Last Battle stuff.

I like the idea of research to work out if the Seals are fake or not, but I still think destroying them should be a bit production-y focused. Not massively, where only the world's largest cities can destroy them in a reasonable amount of time, but still something that you "build" in a city.

I think restricting destruction to Governors could be difficult because a player without a Governor of that type (they didn't use that GP type for Governors for example) will be unable to do anything with the Seal.

As far, then as how they're discovered, there seem to be two possibilities here:

1) Seals always exist in cities/with civs.
2) Seals exist in the world, and are found, and then exist with Civs/cities.

I'm actually unsure of which I like more. I'm nervous about the endless-hunt aspect to number 2, but if somehow it could be balanced such that its essentially guaranteed that by the AotD the seals will be found, at least, that could be a fun aspect to it.

I mentioned once that maybe every civ started with a seal (or discovered one through some automatic point in the game). Maybe some number of these are fake, by design.. So, maybe 1/2*total number of civs + 1 are real, and all else are fake, or something like that.

I'm a big fan of #2. I think we can prevent an endless hunt by having one of the techs reveal the locations of the Seals still buried in the map to the researcher. (so each civ will discover the remaining unguarded Seals as they hit that tech - if there are any left.) A purpose built unit that is expended to unearth the Seal (like Archeologists with artifacts/antiquity sites) seems like a good way to do that. Once all of the Seals are found (dug up by someone - doesn't matter who or how scattered between civs), it's up to Espionage and Conquest (and trade? - being able to trade the Seals you control away could allow for some great betrayals) to gather them all.

This does bring up a question I hadn't thought of yet: how many Seals are there? Obviously there are a fixed number in the books, but I think it makes sense to scale it, like you suggest, with the size of the game. We can scale by either number of players or map size. Either scaling mechanic is identical in all cases except where the game is set up to have fewer than the maximum allowable civs for a given map size.

I think it makes sense to have the number determined by map size, so that even if you start with two civs on a Huge map, you'll have an amount of hunting to do proportional to your clearly massive end-game empires. There are a known number of map sizes, so we can just hard code number of Seals against each map size. (Duel is always 4, Small always 9, etc. - numbers include fakes)

Right, I think the whole circle-the-wagons-around-the-seals approach seems kind of meta and not in keeping with the spirit of the last battle. The truth is, they were actually kind of ignored.. people thought they were safe in the WT or something. I'm fine with them living in cities, but I think we need to think long and hard about whether we want that to dominate the LB's battles - it seems to me that it could easily become the focus of everybody's attention. Maybe this is fine, but we should decide if its what we want.

I think this is fine. In practice, leaving the Seals in the White Tower to be protected in the books is 'circling the wagons,' - Tar Valon is seen as the best defended location for the Light in the books (at least to those that have Seals). And the Seals Taim had, I believe he obtained through Espionage? Which ties in well with our mechanics.

I suggest the 'movement radius' for Seals from cities to prevent one Light player from stashing the Seals off on an island somewhere the Shadow players wouldn't go to, which is definitely against the spirit of the game. (Though with a satellites-like tech, I imagine at least one Shadow player would go poke the tiny little totally-not-important-don't-look-over-here city.)

Given how the breaking of the Seals determines the final result of the Last Battle and its ongoing effect on the war, I think it makes sense that they're the focal point of some invasions. In the books, several of the 'frontlines' were chosen by the Shadow in order to cripple key Light forces - which I think will happen anyway if Shadow players want to reduce the Light's chances of being able to grab any Seals the Shadow civs haven't yet broken.

Gosh, any ideas then on where they could go?

I think the Great Works stuff you discuss later probably stands in well here! I remember Crafts was something we thought we could change if something better comes up?

OK, so I'm having to go back and check to see which GW types I proposed way back when... Wow, early August. That wasn't that long ago, actually. Anyways, I proposed:

Prophesies
Epics/Legends/Stories
Crafts

Maybe the styles get merged with/replace Crafts?

Merging into Crafts sounds like a good idea, and seems quite appropriate in-game as well. I don't know if we'll go full on "you invented Beards!" - probably a bit more tactful, but it's that general idea.

Wow, yeah. So you're going into territory I know little about. But yes, you're absolutely right that it is simply where the pattern is thinnest. But I think that's because thats where they made the Bore, yes? Not just a random location. It should be noted here, that the blight seems to appear on both major continents in Randland, so ours should probably too.

Would we be replacing Ice with a Blight tile? Blasted Land? Tundra should still be viable, right?

When you say you're not familiar, do you mean you don't usually change the default map type you're playing on or you play with it set to random? There's a huge variety (many more added on the advanced screen when setting up a game) and they drastically affect how the game plays out. (The map types are like Continents, Pangaea, Archipelago, etc. - I think there are only 5 on the default setup screen.)

I don't think we should replace Ice, because I believe there are still polar caps in WoT? The area around the Blight is just oddly hot for its latitude due to the Dark One's influence.

I think there should be sections of Tundra, which is analogous to the territories controlled by the Borderlands in the books.

Defining how I propose we put it in requires a bit of knowledge about how CiV classifies its terrains and such - I'm not sure how much you've looked into this before? I propose we make Blight a feature (despite technical drawbacks that imposes - I'll go into this in a moment), so it's like Forest, Jungle, Ice, and Atolls. This means that Blight can be layered on top of any Terrain type (terrain types are Plains, Grassland, Desert, Tundra, Coast, Ocean - I don't propose seafaring Blight though), resource (Iron, Furs, Citrus, Sheep, etc.), or improvement (Plantation, Camp, Fort, Farm, etc.).

That makes Blight and Forest mutually exclusive (a given plot can only have one Feature at a time) - but I think it makes sense to have a "Blighted Forest" or something to that effect as a Feature as well.

Now, to those technical limitations. We don't have the source code for CiV's graphics engine and that's a bit of a problem in this case. You can dynamically add features in the middle of the game (so we might want to have the Blight spread) and the gameplay will update (meaning yields will change and the plot will act like it has that feature) but it won't change in appearance until the player reloads the game (caveat: unless you're adding one of the original 8 features).

The long and short of that is that we might want to make Blight an improvement if we want it to 'spread' during the game. This would make Blight mutually exclusive with all improvements, but I think having spreading Blight destroy improvements is not a terrible idea. We'd just be forced into that. Blight would also then be shown as an 'improvement' in the tooltips and Civilopedia, but we can do some Lua hackery to get around that if we must.

If that's not very clear, I did some work on custom feature art a bit over a year ago (for Blight!) and came to some surprising conclusions about how that works (or doesn't) in CiV. It is a bit technical, but I discuss the overall limitations towards the end (specifically in response to Pazyryk here) once I'd tested things out more completely. Also, for reference, Pazyryk got the terrain graphics looking much nicer for something like Blight here.
 
OK, I finally think I truly get what you're saying. So the calendars progress regardless of the actual era. Meaning, if tech was somehow at a standstill, we could theoretically be looking at FY 1000 when the civs were all technically still in the "After the Breaking" year. Is that correct?

Yes, definitely correct!

I get it (if in fact that is what you mean), and I think it's mostly fine. How would the time compression in later years trigger? Also, it is also a bit odd to have FY one start in the middle of the trolloc wars, or something, or before them, or 300 years later, just because its based solely on turn count. I guess its a bit like AD 1 (using the old school Anno Domine definition of AD) happening three hundred years before Christ is born. Of course, in Civ, this matters little, because (aside from the founding of Christianity, which we'll ignore), Christ's birth is irellevant to Civ. Unfortunately, the calander-shifting dates in WoT (end of the trolloc wars, end of the 100 years war) most definitely DO matter to us. Unless... wait, now I'm not sure I understand you again...

Do you mind throwing in a couple of examples, just to clear up my stupid confusion?

In any case, I am not totally opposed to simply counting the whole game from 0 AB, ignoring the other calendars, and using the other names as era names. Ugh.

Bold bit is where the confusion is coming from I think. Assuming we keep base CiV's distinctions, the dates don't matter to us. Exactly like you said, the birth of Christ (year 0) is at a specific point in our world's calendar, which corresponds to a specific stage of technological progression in human history. CiV breaks that association.

Say (purely for argument's sake - this isn't historically accurate) that compasses were invented in 200BC on Earth, in actual human history. In CiV, you could finish researching Compass (the tech - so you invent compasses) in 800BC if you were fast. You might complete it in 100AD if you're slow - it will vary not only per game but also per player within each game, because tech progression is individual.

Hopefully that example makes it clearer! :D

So, a related point to this:

Similar to how the Mayans have a clanedar change, could you tie a calendar change in with when you reach one of the later ages, so your displayed calendar changes to FY XXX after reaching that Tech era? I dont know if it possible to have them start from 0 at that pojtn though.

I hadn't thought of this and it is possible (I think - we should be able to hijack the system that presents it to the Mayans). At first I really liked it, but then it does present a bit of a problem. In base CiV, the date is universal (even the Mayans have the 'real' date in the tooltip). If we do this, that won't be the case anymore. That might not in itself be a problem - the turn number will still be universal, but I think it's a bit weird.

So, I'm still leaning towards the proposal I had in my last post. I think I should provide a fully worked example to make this more clear. Turn numbers are approximate and subject to balancing. So, here we go:

Turn 0 to 130: AB0 to AB1000
Turn 131-260: FY0 to FY1000
Turn 261+: NE0 onwards (just keep counting up from here - we have a full calendar specification so we can go on forever)

Era list, in "chronological" order (the order you progress through them as you're playing the game):

  1. After Breaking
  2. Ten Nations
  3. <- Trolloc Wars happen here
  4. Era of Reconstruction (recovering from Trolloc Wars - name up for grabs)
  5. Era of the High King (parallel to Hawkwing - but it's not a specific reference that he exists right now in this game)
  6. Era of Consolidation (parallel to Seanchan, as mentioned before)
  7. Era of Encroaching Blight (Name up for grabs - reference to the Blight swallowing several Stedding and Malkier in this time frame)
  8. Age (Era?) of the Dragon
  9. The Fourth Age

Note that I've used "After Breaking" (in bold) as the name of the first era, despite that being the same name as the calendar, which I've avoided elsewhere. There are a couple of factors here. The reason we want to avoid the era names and calendar names overlapping is situations like this: "Elayne has entered the Free Years era" in FY250 - that's weird.

However, that's not a problem with "After Breaking" - the game starts here, so everyone has to be at that point at the same time. (Or the game was set up to start in a later era, in which case it doesn't matter.) The eras and calendars will tend to diverge toward the end of the game, when people's science progression has affected their rate of movement through the tech tree.

So, given that it avoids our primary concern with overlapping names, and "After Breaking" is also a very recognizable and descriptive name for that first era, I think we can use just that one in both places.

Hopefully this makes more sense! :D It's a difficult thing to get your head around and hard to write out in text, but I think the way it works will be quite transparent and understandable to the player - it's essentially the same system used by base CiV.

Right, I think circumstances could create a distinction, though. I've played Cultural games where I win because I'm a production powerhouse (wonders, etc.). Imagine a Tall civ like India, but being really rather far removed, isolated on an island or something. I think they should be able to help with the war effort by doing stuff beyond just fighting the war. Maybe it's simply gifting units, but that seems somewhat uninspired. Espeicially since a somewhat pacifist Hammer civ might not have a great military foundation (barracks, etc.) Sending hammers via trade-route-like mechanics might work well here, as has been mentioned. Or something like dumping hammers in to "upgrade their equipment" or something - giving free on-production promotions to a City's new units. Hard to see if the AI would embrace this, though.

Right, I see what you mean! We could do the production trade routes between civs - I already know what to change to get that mechanic to work due to a similar change in SiegeMod. We could also have some static 'global' projects that only the Light side can contribute to "Military Recruitment," "Scientific Focus," or things like that - where there are thresholds for total production per turn going into them. For example, if more than 50 hammers per turn go into "Military Recruitment" across all Light civs, then all units trained by Light civs start with +15XP. Things like that?

Yes, this one is certainly difficult. I do wonder if the territory thing might still be a path to look into here. A culture-bomb like mechanic? Or maybe you could shift your territory - sacrifics some territory in one location to spread towards the fronts? Kind of weird, and not really in the spirit of what culture and prestige really mean (similarly to how the culture bomb is kind of a dumb idea in CiV vanilla). MAybe it's more a GM concert tour kind of thing - maybe impacting the happiness of your enemies or something through culture-oriented actions?

I think base CiV moved the 'culture bomb' onto the Great General because it's more of a Domination mechanic, wanting to steal other people's territory. We touched on a territories thing a few pages back, where the Shadow could claim individual tiles from civs as a part of the Last Battle and we could use Prestige/the Ogier to reclaim it?

I like the idea of affecting opposing civs' happiness - that's something that happens in base CiV as well and it makes a lot of sense. Once you get to a certain amount of unhappiness your people rebel and in the late-game your cities can join other civs that follow Ideologies they prefer - we could do the same with Light/Shadow at the extreme of unhappiness on one side? I believe liked the idea of Shadowspawn uprisings as a part of the Last Battle anyway, so maybe this just connects and runs in paralle with that?

Perhaps its as simple as the CSs' loyalty can be bought, similarly to how it is in Base CiV.Kinda weird to have them switch sides though, so maybe this is harder to do, or at least can only happen once.

I think we're better off scaling the price of things rather than setting a hard limit of "once only." It might be prohibitively expensive after the first time, but if a specific CS is super important, someone might pour all their money into it to flip them back. Also keep in mind that most (but not quite all) CSes are Stedding, if there's any specific flavor we could use there.

Also, as I stated in an earlier post, trade-route-like setups would be cool - spread your gold around the other civs on your team.

A more mutually profitably trade route we can definitely do!

Yes, that's probably good. Get channelers. Unless they're Turned, the WT should probably be lightside, and your diplomatic relations with them determine (perhaps) how much AS support a given civ receives?

That sounds good. Depending on the overall channeling system, support with individual Ajahs may come into play as well (more Sisters of Ajah X for civ Y).

Yeah, and this one is more of a "thing everybody will be doing," since (with rare exception), I don't think civs can really "focus" on spies so much. It's not like that's a role one guy will have and be happy filling it.

Coolio - unless we go for spy units, in which case you could specialize! We should probably come back to that later?

I think this wraps up, perhaps, with the Culture thing above - happiness or something... This is of course discounting the real benefits of things you can buy with faith (whitecloaks, etc.) and the benefits provided already by your path.

When I think about it, the fundamental issue here is whether your people believe in the thing you are fighting for. If you are lightside, and have epic faith, that means your people really like the Light, right? So maybe that could effect happiness... or maybe that's already worked into the system by means of the benefits you already get for having high faith.

Still nothing jumping out at me for this one - maybe it is best to factor it into the bonuses of the Path and let those extra bonuses be what you get from it.

I think what I mean here is that he would be a spy AND would randomly pop up and do cool stuff as a unit for you...

Ah, I see. I think this depends on what "cool stuff as a unit" is. The properties that differentiate a unit from a spy (movement on the map, combat) are the ones that we can't afford to give the AI control of if the Dragon were to crop up somewhere. I mean, we can have him *visually* appear on the map when he's doing - like if one of his 'moves' was attacking a unit, he could have a 3D model that appears on a tile nearby.

OR a light city. Say it takes 10 turns for him to root out a DF or something.... and the first few civs choose to do this 5 times in a row... that's the whole LB.

Definitely, we want to avoid situations like that. I think we have to make the Dragon's 'moves' take a few turns at most, but then it's a balancing act between making them fair and avoiding being underwhelming.

Shouldn't this all be wrapped up in Faith and Prestige, etc.? compleeex....

Basically Illian was a sort of conquest, right? Or a coup, more like. The Illian "player" lost the game, I think, and his cities became controlled by Rand's civ (Tear, or the Aiel, I guess?)

Yeah, this makes sense. Having him able to 'convert' civs/cities creates a lot of problems, so let's drop that then!

The big issue, I guess, is do we want anything epic dragon-related to go down before the dragon-peace? i.e., the first 13 books.......I mean, it does kind of make sense that the dragon's pre-LB actions could at least SWAY the player's "alignment."

I think we should go through and define all of the things that the Dragon can actually *do* here, because that list is still a bit nebulous. I think we like the 'turn order' solution where civs get to choose moves in a round-based order? We're still discussing what yield determines that order, but this ranking priority system seems good? (Regardless of whether we use Faith/Prestige/anything else)

So, possible actions the Dragon can take, regardless of *how* we choose which actions he takes (taking some from Illianor's post too), all up for debate, just to list them all in one place:

  • Steal a Seal from the Shadow - Do we still want to include this as well as letting spies do it? I imagine the Dragon would be more effective at it.
  • Root out Darkfriends - Remove Shadow influence from a Light city in some way?
  • Attack Shadowspawn - Only Shadowspawn or units of Shadow civs too? Do we want to include this mechanic? He acts mechanically like a plane?
  • Influence with the Tower - How does the Dragon interact with the Tower, if at all? Do we want to get into 'stationing' him there for a few turns to do something specific?
  • Ta'veren Probability Manipulation - Wherever he is, probability stretches to the extremes. How do we want to model this? CiV is generally much less about sudden happenings than gradually building yields, in terms of city management. Random production/food boosts/losses?
  • Winning the Last Battle - The Dragon captures Thakan'dar, then the Light civs break the (remaining) Seals, and they win the Last Battle victory. This seems to be the most popular action! But how does he do it? Become a unit and move across the map to attack the Thakan'dar 'city'? This has AI problems which we discussed before, but I think it's definitely the coolest when it works.
  • Boost City Combat Strength/HP - Basically statically make the city he's in stronger, which I think makes a lot of sense. It's also relatively easy to implement and for the player to understand.
  • Dragon Bomb - Use the Dragon as our replacement for nukes. I'm not sure about the balance and gameplay implications of this, but it is freakin' cool.
  • Asha'man Recruitment - (Renamed from Warriors of the Dragon) Gain a (presumably male) channeling unit - a bit of a selfish move, but a flavorful one that has a powerful gameplay effect without disadvantaging the player if the AI picks it and can be very helpful to the player.
  • Rally to the Dragon - Happiness bonus and spawn new units. Not sure about this one, it's a little generic.
  • Dragon Mercantilism - Gain gold or strategic resources. Also a bit generic I think, though 'claiming' resources in some way could be interesting?
  • Popular Resistance - Boost all cities' strength/HP - though this is global rather than individual, I think this kind of effect is covered by the Dragon's static effect to do this to whichever city he's stationed in.

Am I missing anything? Any other ideas for what he might do?

OK, this makes perfect sense. Thanks for the clarification.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like it might make more sense to use Prestige as the determining factor here. I mean, isn't that what prestige is? Either that, or a diplomatic measure... though if the diplo system is WT centric, that might not make the most sense.

Maybe the higest faith output should be best left for other things... The Whitecloaks had tons of faith, but Rand certainly wasn't allying with them until he needed to.

I see what you mean here, I think I like the Prestige-for-the-Dragon idea then! I think Light-leaning as represented by Faith still plays a role though - Rand works with the other nations that he does (rather than conquer, like Illian) because they are aligned with the Light. How about, given approximate base CiV rates of Tourism and Faith, we choose turn order using the metric:

Faith per turn + (4 * Prestige per turn)

Or something similar to that? It adds a little complexity, but it's not really a burden on the player. Prestige is the most effective way to get more turns controlling the Dragon, but Faith can also help. We can present the order to the player in a UI popup that they can refer back to as well.

OK. This might be an "it is what it is" moment...

Yeah, I think that's where we are with the AI for now. All depends on what we decide above now!

OK, sure. just looking for ways to make the cooperation AI proof...

This is where the weirdness of the way the AI works is difficult to explain. Explicitly locked in roles will force the AI into strange positions, because it's unable to truly assess which of the options it's long-term more suited for. Letting them do whichever one is best for them at the time is probably less optimal overall, but will likely result in more reasonable behavior.

Ok, this is great. Question, though - what does this mean for that civ? Do they get anything, or its just a timing thing?

The reason I mention it is because it matters in WoT that Rand is from the TR, in that it created a sort of de facto alliance with Andor. This of course is weird if it turns out he's born in a shadow civ.... ideas?

I think some bonuses to overall yields/some kind of immediate reward makes a lot of sense. The possibility he could be born in a Shadow civ means we probably don't want to always weight his bonuses toward the Light - we don't want to punish Shadow players who tech quickly. We could provide different bonuses going forward depending on which side they end up on though? If they're Light side, they could gain some boost in choosing moves for the Dragon. If they're Shadow, they gain control of extra Shadowspawn during the war to root out the 'sacred' blood in their people?

I guess I should clarify that what I really mean by negatively impacting domination players is: Domination players are the only ones essentially forced to do good stuff for the Team and the Cause. Considering theyre required to fight the lightside guys, they're helping the whole group, whereas a Shadow Culture guy could more easily stick his middle finger up and the group and just harvest prestige.

I see what you mean, but I think this is a prime example of where a Shadow player would (and should) turn on his 'ally.' To the Dark One, that civilization is holding off *just in case* the Shadow doesn't come out on top. He's got no time for those kinds of shenanigans, so he sends one of his other minions to stamp them into line.

INcidentally, one possible benefit of Anti-Faith (i.e. being really bad) could be getting extra shadowspawn to control?

Yeah, that sounds good, I think I saw that suggested a few pages back.

Yes, true, a late game AS should be better maybe than an early-days AS, but the fact is that an early game AS should likely be MUCH more powerful relative to contemporary units than a late game AS. Consider: dude with axe versus early AS.... as opposed to Dragon (the cannon) vs late game AS. Sure, the AS probably wins both battles, but the dude with an axe doesn't even stand a chance.

AS do kinda need to exist in some formidable force even in the early day - some of the ten nations had AS queens, but the balance is important.

Agreed, I think the relative powers should be greater in the beginning, but can be balanced, at least with men, by madness. More content for the channeling discussion, I think!

Now onto some of the 'lineages'

Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates) - I like this name.

I think I'm with Illianor on this one, I thought Thriving Populace was the best of the 'red' ones.

Guardian Class OR Kinsman Defenders OR Stubborn Folk (the latter only if not used above) OR Staunch Defenders- Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) ( I think I maybe don't like any of these. What about Protectors?) - Vigilant Protectors?

Not as sure about this one, I think I still prefer Staunch Defenders here.

Border Settlements - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) (The problem here is just the wording. "settlements" are things. Needs to be Border Settlers or something like that, but that in particular is kind of weird because Settlers are units. Frontiersmen? I like the "border" word being first, but the second word needs to represent people somehow.) -Expansive? I do like Frontiersmen though.

I think Frontiersman is very much associated with the American Frontier, which isn't really what we want. I agree with what counterpoint is saying about "Border Settlements" not being 'a people.' I think "Border Settlers" might work though - there isn't really any crossover between belief selection/use and units, so there's not much opportunity to be confused with the unit.

We could also rename the Settler unit? I'm not suggesting doing it specifically to enable this belief, but most other units are being at least renamed, if not replaced.

Also, while I think of it, I really want to add a late-game Settler unit that founds partially developed cities (I want a prebuilt Granary, please) - I think it's a big oversight that you can't do this in base CiV.

For bubles of evil, could they be randomly spawning pockets of radiation? The radiation would also pillage the tile it spawned on? Breaking a seal could also cause a bubble to appear near that city (3 tiles). So you want to break the seals to win, but saving breaking them till later. If a shadow aligned civ breaks a seal, then the bubble might have a chance to appear on another civ's city?

We wouldn't use the actual radiation/fallout name or art, but I like this idea. We could even have it pillage a certain number of tiles over a given radius (or an uneven scattering within a specific area - rather like a nuke). Bubbles of evil don't traditionally involve actual Shadowspawn though, right? It's tempting to want to spawn Shadowspawn then too.

Makes sense that Shadow civs breaking the Seals would send the bubbles to Light civs - we wouldn't want to hinder them for actively pursuing their own victory condition!

Rand wasn't controlled by any of the civs. Could the Dragon cause a series of events to happen, and that civs can petition him for aid (like a world congress, but only light aligned civs are a part of it) rather than being a controllable unit/spy/force.

Despite the compellingness of this, (and I am sort of predicting S3rgeus' response here), it does take away a huge piece of player agency. People may very well expect him to be playable somewhat, and thus might be disappointed.

I think the loss of player agency here is the biggest factor. From a glance I think it would be a bit easier in terms of AI, but not much; it's more of a change in context for the problem than avoiding the limitations the AI has. With that in mind, I think the player will be disappointed that they never have a part in actually directing the Dragon - it's quite a different experience to be voting on his actions than personally deciding them, even if you don't always have the deciding authority. Particularly when we're already moving the diplo a step away from direct player control, (probably part of the diplo victory fleshing out discussion) we don't want to be doing that more.
 
I really should be working... but I just had an idea. Or rather, a clarification on some ideas we've been tossing around.

What if, instead of using your Faith or Happiness to "aid the war effort" as a light-side LB civ, those were your reward for aiding the effort.

Imagine, at the bottom of a cities production options, after Research and Wealth (where the World's Fair Goes), there were options to "Support the War Effort."

A city could elect to forgo the entire production of a certain type of thing and "donate" it to an ally's cities. I'm thinking that hammers, surplus food, gold, and maybe culture would be possible (Science seems possible too, but it's a little odd, maybe). In my head I'm tossing around the possibility that you would choose three cities, and each would get something like 40% of that total value - making it slightly more *efficient* than merely giving away gold in a trade or something (toying with upping this to 50%, but that might be too good).

In exchange, that civ receives Faith or happiness - or maybe even prestige - in compensation. The benefit should be less than you gave away, to discourage abuse, but this way a civ gets something back for their support of the other civs doing the actual fighting.

As an example, my city gets +6 total food per turn. I choose to donate the food, and end up with +0 per turn, but three cities of my choosing get +2 Food each. In exchange, I get some Faith (or happiness, or something), say +2 or +3. The payoff maybe should be roughly comparable to the proportion when choosing Research or Wealth (what is it, 1/4?).

I don't know yet whether the cities you choose need to be in your trade network, whether these links can be severed/pillaged, and whether a civ can change the target cities every turn.

As far as the possible benefits:

If we chose Faith: how useful this is depends on our uses for faith, but it sounds like a civ might be able to do some cool things with Faith - maybe even get the Dragon more often.
If we chose Happiness: this one makes sense, but might be weird, in that the civs that aren't doing the actual fighting might not need happiness benefits as much as the ones always at war. Still, happiness helps with GAs, etc.
If we chose Prestige: this one makes intuitive sense, but on the other hand, I don't know yet what the point of it would be. What would this need prestige for?

I will say, considering these things makes me feel like the Dragon Peace needs to be totally binding, in terms of one's membership in it. We can't have civs dumping resources into one civ, only to have that civ turn around and invade them. I still think you maybe should be able to vote OUT or IN a civ, but I don't think that a CiV should be able to leave once in. (We americans don't love secessionists, I guess....)

It says something about the length of these posts that I can be ninja'd by a post from 45 minutes ago! :p

I think I arrived at a very similar idea as a part of my posts above, with 'global' projects that the Light side can participate in. Great minds thinking alike and all that jazz! So I like this one!

In terms of voting civs in and out, that requires a lot of technical work to make that possible. We run up against our favorite AI restrictions then as well - what if the AI decides you're not helping because it hasn't properly assessed the situation? Getting voted out then is a bad experience for the player. But it's something we should consider, getting locked into mechanics like this completely opens up avenues for exploits as well.
 
What's the distinction between a Research Project and a Tech Project?
.

really quick clarification: there is no difference. I'm using them interchangeably. Sorry to be confusing, I totally misspoke here. The key thing is not the distinction between Research and Tech, but *discovering* and *breaking*.

Here is my original text, with new added emphasis (and a correction).

"Right, so in talks with our LB conditions, it has been proposed that destroying the Seals be a research project. The issue with this is, of course, that they also make a lot of sense also as production projects. To me, breaking them with research actually makes less sense than discovering their location with research. But, then again, we wanted to use espionage and/or map wandering as a means of divining their locations, so maybe that's fine. Still, I don't love the color of "destroying with science.""

my bad, then. You might make more sense of my whole rant on this if you reread it now.
 
In regards to the breaking of the seals, could "researching the seals" be a light side only global project? And similarly "The breaking of the seals" also be a global project? The first could actually be a research/tech project, where the city sacrifices it's science (+ 25-50% of its production?).

If I play Tall, am I going to be low in faith and so not strongly "light aligned"? Am I then not going to have much agency in controlling the dragon, especially if there is a very wide, faith focused civ? How does making shadow/light decisions relate to this during the game? Compare if I had only chosen light aligned actions, but the wide civ barely scraped in.
Will this necessitate faith/population and % increases to help tall Civs participate in controlling the dragon?

The idea behind the "rally to the Dragon" was that he arrives, walks through the street, gives a rousing speech etc.
 
So, I'm still leaning towards the proposal I had in my last post. I think I should provide a fully worked example to make this more clear. Turn numbers are approximate and subject to balancing. So, here we go:

Turn 0 to 130: AB0 to AB1000
Turn 131-260: FY0 to FY1000
Turn 261+: NE0 onwards (just keep counting up from here - we have a full calendar specification so we can go on forever)

Era list, in "chronological" order (the order you progress through them as you're playing the game):

  1. After Breaking
  2. Ten Nations
  3. <- Trolloc Wars happen here
  4. Era of Reconstruction (recovering from Trolloc Wars - name up for grabs)
  5. Era of the High King (parallel to Hawkwing - but it's not a specific reference that he exists right now in this game)
  6. Era of Consolidation (parallel to Seanchan, as mentioned before)
  7. Era of Encroaching Blight (Name up for grabs - reference to the Blight swallowing several Stedding and Malkier in this time frame)
  8. Age (Era?) of the Dragon
  9. The Fourth Age

Note that I've used "After Breaking" (in bold) as the name of the first era, despite that being the same name as the calendar, which I've avoided elsewhere. There are a couple of factors here. The reason we want to avoid the era names and calendar names overlapping is situations like this: "Elayne has entered the Free Years era" in FY250 - that's weird.

However, that's not a problem with "After Breaking" - the game starts here, so everyone has to be at that point at the same time. (Or the game was set up to start in a later era, in which case it doesn't matter.) The eras and calendars will tend to diverge toward the end of the game, when people's science progression has affected their rate of movement through the tech tree.

So, given that it avoids our primary concern with overlapping names, and "After Breaking" is also a very recognizable and descriptive name for that first era, I think we can use just that one in both places.

Hopefully this makes more sense! :D It's a difficult thing to get your head around and hard to write out in text, but I think the way it works will be quite transparent and understandable to the player - it's essentially the same system used by base CiV
What about using "world Era" for imposing the moment for switching from one calendar to the other ?

Another Idea I had was to propose "Heros" / World unique UU for each civ (as in FFH or 3kingdom (civ4 mod)) + some for each
Those could be special GP-like units or "normal" units / channeler (mostly) or not.
but this would take up some names that you might have wanted for the GP.

However It could be a nice way to get to play with the characters of the books, and still play the world.

I think we could arrive to one per civ:
Andor: Elayne
Manetheren : Perrin (or Mat for the Red Hand)
Caihrien : Maybe Mat ? (he came into command of the Red Hand there iirc) / or Aldura ?
Aiels: Aviendha
Tear: Moiraine
Saldea : Fail Bashere or her father
SeanChan: Tuon / ...?
FarMadding : Caldsuane (or was she from another place?)
Malkier : Lan Mandragoran
WT : a Forsaken or Egwene depending on orientations of the WT
Illian ?

realtionship in the books could represent "alliance / peace-treaties, whatever" between those nations.

Maybe those special UU could get a "special treatment": means to ge them to change civ owner under some conditions (to reflect that aldura and mat went somehow into Andor's service in the books)
(conditions to be determined: faith/prestige higher than civ owner by x factor? + something else because we do not want high prestige civ to steal all heros)

Maybe each of those "heros" could get individual abilities (related to the book) that upgrade or come into play with : xp and/or techs/policies, to reflect the story of the book.

NB: possibility : add Rhuarc as a Great Capitain (even if he is not known as one... indeed the title of great capitain was only given to westlanders)
 
I think this can still work with an involuntary or 'slippery slope' system - it's just that some "Shadow" actions specifically help the Black Ajah, which develops over the course of the game. Rather than have the Black Ajah not exist until we ramp up the Last Battle stuff.

We kind of moved past this in the last few pages, but I feel we should clarify what "involuntary" means in this case, because based on the examples we outlined previously, I don't think the system we proposed is very involuntary. I see "involuntary" as being something that *happens to the player* like a natural disaster - they have no input that it occurred and it occurring was determined by random chance. We're still planning to present the player with options, right? (not bringing up the choosing a side thing - but like "X has happened, what do you do?" kind of scenarios) Reactionary is very different from involuntary. Even if those events don't happen in explicit little dialog boxes - the player might have to do something in-game (move a unit somewhere, pay someone, anything like that). If there's any player choice involved then people (humans) will inevitably "choose" to go Light or Shadow in a given game, by making decisions that move their civ toward that end, which I think is good.

You're right, as usual. I chose a bad word here. Involuntary isn't correct. Perhaps, "indirect" is more what I mean. I think we are on the same page here. Reacting to stuff. I'll say though that I do think there should be some that feel very "I don't think I'm being a bad guy here" or at least "I don't want to do this, but I think I have to," so some civs end up properly feeling like the "ended up" with the shadow without being "evil" (story-wise, obviously the players can have whatever motivation they want).

One difficulty with this whole approach is the concept of a "Research Project" doesn't exist in base CiV. There are Projects (Manhattan Project, Apollo Program) and Global Projects (World Fair, International Space Station) and both of those use production in a very specific way, but that's all there is. We can add a concept of Research Projects, that's fine, but we need to consider how we present these to the player. Are they on the Tech tree? We can add them dynamically when they become available if we don't want disabled 'techs' lying around on it.

Players can't research techs while doing research projects, right? Because their science output is going into the project.

I don't feel strongly that there needs to be a true research project (global or local). This all could just be technology... but how would that work. Is there a separate tree? Does the tree change when somebody discovers one? Maybe it's a future-tech kind of thing, that's infinitely re-usable. I don't have the answers here.

Maybe a global project thing is a smart way to approach it - but it seems like we may end up with too many of these (one for production, research, etc.).

Do you mean as a science participation role in the Last Battle or the actual Science victory that we've yet to replace? I assume the former, since it's part of the whole Last Battle stuff.

I like the idea of research to work out if the Seals are fake or not, but I still think destroying them should be a bit production-y focused. Not massively, where only the world's largest cities can destroy them in a reasonable amount of time, but still something that you "build" in a city.

Yes, sure.

I'm a big fan of #2. I think we can prevent an endless hunt by having one of the techs reveal the locations of the Seals still buried in the map to the researcher. (so each civ will discover the remaining unguarded Seals as they hit that tech - if there are any left.) A purpose built unit that is expended to unearth the Seal (like Archeologists with artifacts/antiquity sites) seems like a good way to do that. Once all of the Seals are found (dug up by someone - doesn't matter who or how scattered between civs), it's up to Espionage and Conquest (and trade? - being able to trade the Seals you control away could allow for some great betrayals) to gather them all.

Mostly right with you.

That said, about those betrayals... How do you see that working? We've decided that light civs have to basically be locked into a team.. So... who exactly is betraying who?

This does bring up a question I hadn't thought of yet: how many Seals are there? Obviously there are a fixed number in the books, but I think it makes sense to scale it, like you suggest, with the size of the game. We can scale by either number of players or map size. Either scaling mechanic is identical in all cases except where the game is set up to have fewer than the maximum allowable civs for a given map size.

I think it makes sense to have the number determined by map size, so that even if you start with two civs on a Huge map, you'll have an amount of hunting to do proportional to your clearly massive end-game empires. There are a known number of map sizes, so we can just hard code number of Seals against each map size. (Duel is always 4, Small always 9, etc. - numbers include fakes)

Yeah, map size makes sense to me, then. Fewer variables that way, I'd guess. Sounds like a good thing to me

I think this is fine. In practice, leaving the Seals in the White Tower to be protected in the books is 'circling the wagons,' - Tar Valon is seen as the best defended location for the Light in the books (at least to those that have Seals). And the Seals Taim had, I believe he obtained through Espionage? Which ties in well with our mechanics.

OK, sure. Definitely don't feel so strongly about this. Just don't want it to totally take it over, is all.

I suggest the 'movement radius' for Seals from cities to prevent one Light player from stashing the Seals off on an island somewhere the Shadow players wouldn't go to, which is definitely against the spirit of the game. (Though with a satellites-like tech, I imagine at least one Shadow player would go poke the tiny little totally-not-important-don't-look-over-here city.)

Given how the breaking of the Seals determines the final result of the Last Battle and its ongoing effect on the war, I think it makes sense that they're the focal point of some invasions. In the books, several of the 'frontlines' were chosen by the Shadow in order to cripple key Light forces - which I think will happen anyway if Shadow players want to reduce the Light's chances of being able to grab any Seals the Shadow civs haven't yet broken.

Yeah, I guess the one thing that has me hesitant about all this (and the circling of the wagons) is that the seals just kind of weren't a big deal to 99.9% of the population of the world in the books. Only a couple main characters even had any idea what was going on with them. It was sort of just a rand thing, plus the few people he brought into it.

Obviously the seals WERE a big deal, ultimately. But strategically they weren't. Nobody was invading to get seals. Nobody was defending against an army of shadowspawn to protect a seal. Really, they were just a MacGuffin. So I'm kind of hesitant about them becoming a huge element. Them being a tech-based thing, sure - that represents the research Min et al were doing with them. But the centerpiece of invasions... just doesn't really feel very WoT to me. And I'm not sure it adds all that much - we already have a lot going on.

Not sure what to suggest though, aside from relying on espionage and other things for it. Huh, maybe culture/prestige has something to do with it (stealing them, that is)? Maybe that's how that aspect works into the LB?

I think the Great Works stuff you discuss later probably stands in well here! I remember Crafts was something we thought we could change if something better comes up?

Well that's that then! Victory for the Light..... unless,..... are you Light?

Merging into Crafts sounds like a good idea, and seems quite appropriate in-game as well. I don't know if we'll go full on "you invented Beards!" - probably a bit more tactful, but it's that general idea.

More tactful, it is. Less rude, then? Oh, so like "hey man, you've got something on your chin..."

When you say you're not familiar, do you mean you don't usually change the default map type you're playing on or you play with it set to random? There's a huge variety (many more added on the advanced screen when setting up a game) and they drastically affect how the game plays out. (The map types are like Continents, Pangaea, Archipelago, etc. - I think there are only 5 on the default setup screen.)

I meant I really have no idea about the map scripting and how all that works.

Though, now that you mention it, I do almost always play continents. I WANT to try the others, but I get cold feet. Do I really want to play all plains? Or a world with low resources? Maybe I do, but I am afraid of change.

I don't think we should replace Ice, because I believe there are still polar caps in WoT? The area around the Blight is just oddly hot for its latitude due to the Dark One's influence.

I think there should be sections of Tundra, which is analogous to the territories controlled by the Borderlands in the books.

Right. Honestly, I have no idea about the polar ice caps in Randland. This is.... not covered by the books. But since the world still seems to mostly feature the laws of physics.... I assume they exist.

Defining how I propose we put it in requires a bit of knowledge about how CiV classifies its terrains and such - I'm not sure how much you've looked into this before? I propose we make Blight a feature (despite technical drawbacks that imposes - I'll go into this in a moment), so it's like Forest, Jungle, Ice, and Atolls. This means that Blight can be layered on top of any Terrain type (terrain types are Plains, Grassland, Desert, Tundra, Coast, Ocean - I don't propose seafaring Blight though), resource (Iron, Furs, Citrus, Sheep, etc.), or improvement (Plantation, Camp, Fort, Farm, etc.).

That makes Blight and Forest mutually exclusive (a given plot can only have one Feature at a time) - but I think it makes sense to have a "Blighted Forest" or something to that effect as a Feature as well.

Nope. I don't know much about this at all. But what you're proposing makes perfect sense. Like, awesomely perfect. It can recede and grow, and such. And, obviously no improvement is possible. This is all fine and dandy like sour candy, as Ned would say.

Now, to those technical limitations. We don't have the source code for CiV's graphics engine and that's a bit of a problem in this case. You can dynamically add features in the middle of the game (so we might want to have the Blight spread) and the gameplay will update (meaning yields will change and the plot will act like it has that feature) but it won't change in appearance until the player reloads the game (caveat: unless you're adding one of the original 8 features).

The long and short of that is that we might want to make Blight an improvement if we want it to 'spread' during the game. This would make Blight mutually exclusive with all improvements, but I think having spreading Blight destroy improvements is not a terrible idea. We'd just be forced into that. Blight would also then be shown as an 'improvement' in the tooltips and Civilopedia, but we can do some Lua hackery to get around that if we must.

If that's not very clear, I did some work on custom feature art a bit over a year ago (for Blight!) and came to some surprising conclusions about how that works (or doesn't) in CiV. It is a bit technical, but I discuss the overall limitations towards the end (specifically in response to Pazyryk here) once I'd tested things out more completely. Also, for reference, Pazyryk got the terrain graphics looking much nicer for something like Blight here.

Cool! I liked Pazyryk's stuff. I always pictured the blight as more white/beige badlands or salty looking, whereas this is more of a black Mordor look. But I have no reason to believe it is one way and not the other, though.
 
Bold bit is where the confusion is coming from I think. Assuming we keep base CiV's distinctions, the dates don't matter to us. Exactly like you said, the birth of Christ (year 0) is at a specific point in our world's calendar, which corresponds to a specific stage of technological progression in human history. CiV breaks that association.

Say (purely for argument's sake - this isn't historically accurate) that compasses were invented in 200BC on Earth, in actual human history. In CiV, you could finish researching Compass (the tech - so you invent compasses) in 800BC if you were fast. You might complete it in 100AD if you're slow - it will vary not only per game but also per player within each game, because tech progression is individual.

Right. I gotcha. I do think that the calendar changes are more "formative" to our game than Christ's birth is to CiV. It's like if the spread of christianity was the point of CiV... then it'd be more relevant. That said, I understand the issues we're up against and know there may not be a better solution.

Hopefully that example makes it clearer! :D

I hadn't thought of this and it is possible (I think - we should be able to hijack the system that presents it to the Mayans). At first I really liked it, but then it does present a bit of a problem. In base CiV, the date is universal (even the Mayans have the 'real' date in the tooltip). If we do this, that won't be the case anymore. That might not in itself be a problem - the turn number will still be universal, but I think it's a bit weird.

I recall you not thinking it would work when we discussed this option before.
The problem with this method as I recall - though, in theory, I love this idea - is with the "time compression," right? Like, how would we change the year-increment per turn when how many turns per era isn't standardized. Isn't that the problem? If not, and this is possible, this is the best option, IMO.

So, I'm still leaning towards the proposal I had in my last post. I think I should provide a fully worked example to make this more clear. Turn numbers are approximate and subject to balancing. So, here we go:

Turn 0 to 130: AB0 to AB1000
Turn 131-260: FY0 to FY1000
Turn 261+: NE0 onwards (just keep counting up from here - we have a full calendar specification so we can go on forever)

Right, OR the fourth age starts after NE 1000 or something. Don't like this, but its an idea.

Don't forget the option of just calling everything AB something. I think that might be viable in that it completely ignores the issue and wont have any contradictions (e.g. FY 1 being in the middle of the trolloc wars)

Era list, in "chronological" order (the order you progress through them as you're playing the game):

  1. After Breaking
  2. Ten Nations
  3. <- Trolloc Wars happen here
  4. Era of Reconstruction (recovering from Trolloc Wars - name up for grabs)
  5. Era of the High King (parallel to Hawkwing - but it's not a specific reference that he exists right now in this game)
  6. Era of Consolidation (parallel to Seanchan, as mentioned before)
  7. Era of Encroaching Blight (Name up for grabs - reference to the Blight swallowing several Stedding and Malkier in this time frame)
  8. Age (Era?) of the Dragon
  9. The Fourth Age

Note that I've used "After Breaking" (in bold) as the name of the first era, despite that being the same name as the calendar, which I've avoided elsewhere. There are a couple of factors here. The reason we want to avoid the era names and calendar names overlapping is situations like this: "Elayne has entered the Free Years era" in FY250 - that's weird.

OK, one problem with the use of the word "Consolidation" here is that it refers to both the conquest of Seanchan (a NE thing), and the conquest of the westlands by hawkwing (before that). The Seanchan invasion is also called The Conquest, which might be better - though that name does feel rather generic, despite it being a real thing.

The thing is, you're looking for the era of the high king to be what, around 500 years? It's only a few decades.

Also, the era of encroaching blight... does that really happen for hundreds of years, or is that more of a Dragon era thing? I mean, malkier was swallowed right before Lan was born, so... 50 years ago or something? Certainly the age of the dragon could be extended to include things like the whitecloak war, if we needed to stretch that out so its a hundred years or so.

However, that's not a problem with "After Breaking" - the game starts here, so everyone has to be at that point at the same time. (Or the game was set up to start in a later era, in which case it doesn't matter.) The eras and calendars will tend to diverge toward the end of the game, when people's science progression has affected their rate of movement through the tech tree.

Honestly, I don't really see a problem, given the calendar setup you propose, with using the "real" terms throughout. I don't think changing the names saves us from the contradictions, really, since the FYs will be beginning during the Trolloc Wars anyway (in theory). I suppose it is somewhat worse, though.

Hand on a second.... the "True to Story" starting points of the different calendar eras do not have to do with tech. Not at all. They have to do with global events. And all CiVs would be linked in time with those. Coming off of what Illianor was saying - when the Trolloc Wars end - whenever that is - reset the clock to zero and spit out FY instead of AB. Is that possible? Same would happen after the 100 years war event (whatever that is). Would that answer our problems?

Of course, then we'd really have to try to come up with nice names for the eras, because then the contradictions really would be felt, since verything else would feel so aligned. Hmmm...

  1. After Breaking
  2. Era of Nations - maybe this is better, in that its more generic. Since we obviously won't have Ten exact nations. More just about embodying the fact that nations are popping up at this time.
  3. <- Trolloc Wars happen here
  4. Era of Recovery/ Era of Freedom - Reconstruction is somewhat a loaded term in the US. Means the period after our Civil War. Doesn't quite fit here. I don't love these names, but Freedom at least somewhat evokes the Free Years thing.
  5. Era of Consolidation/ Imperial Era/Era of the High King) Hmm... Maybe this could be the Era of Consolidation? I mean, I know his son settles to Seanchan in like 969... near the end of the era, but still, both events sort of take place in this period. It sounds more like an era name, and it seems somehow more generic - I can understand the "consolidation" of power being something that took a few hudnred years, whereas the high king himself was only around for a small bit. Imperial era is no better than yours, but I throw it out here nonetheless.
  6. Era of Consolidation/ Era of the Conquest/ Era of Fragmentation/ Era of New Nations - I don't know about this one.... all of these have problems.
  7. Era of Encroaching Blight - I can be ok with this one, it certainly is nice and ominous, but I don't know if it's too ominous. I mean, this is almost our "Modern Era," right ( relatively)? Is there a name for it that somehow corresponds to that?
  8. Age (Era?) of the Dragon
  9. The Fourth Age

Right, I see what you mean! We could do the production trade routes between civs - I already know what to change to get that mechanic to work due to a similar change in SiegeMod. We could also have some static 'global' projects that only the Light side can contribute to "Military Recruitment," "Scientific Focus," or things like that - where there are thresholds for total production per turn going into them. For example, if more than 50 hammers per turn go into "Military Recruitment" across all Light civs, then all units trained by Light civs start with +15XP. Things like that?

In fact, I think this is definitely thew ay to do it! The threshold thing is awesome, mostly. I don't want it to get too min-maxy though. Like, people obsessing over not "wasting" their production (like I am with the World's Fair). That's the advantage of doing it on a city-by-city basis. My city's production creates upgrades in X number of cities. That makes the effects more obviously tangible. Is there a way to take out the weird gamesmanship of the pot-of-gold method you described? I like it, but I would hate situations where the team is sitting at 49 hammers (needing 50) and the AI won't pop in the extra one, etc.

I think base CiV moved the 'culture bomb' onto the Great General because it's more of a Domination mechanic, wanting to steal other people's territory. We touched on a territories thing a few pages back, where the Shadow could claim individual tiles from civs as a part of the Last Battle and we could use Prestige/the Ogier to reclaim it?

The ogier? Was this a mechanic someone proposed? sounds interesting. I don't remember it.

I like the idea of affecting opposing civs' happiness - that's something that happens in base CiV as well and it makes a lot of sense. Once you get to a certain amount of unhappiness your people rebel and in the late-game your cities can join other civs that follow Ideologies they prefer - we could do the same with Light/Shadow at the extreme of unhappiness on one side? I believe liked the idea of Shadowspawn uprisings as a part of the Last Battle anyway, so maybe this just connects and runs in paralle with that?

What do you mean by shadowspawn uprisings? In the ligh civs? There aren't really shadowspawn around to rebel.

Personally, I feel like a Dark civ probably is always unhappy. I guess it's possible they could be happy, but it'd take some serious brainwashing. Think the townspeople in that thakandar town from aMoL... they're either all turned or constantly horrified... or Slayer.

But yes, cities switching sides beased on presitge - which was in Civ 3 and 4, if I recall, may be an option here.

I think we're better off scaling the price of things rather than setting a hard limit of "once only." It might be prohibitively expensive after the first time, but if a specific CS is super important, someone might pour all their money into it to flip them back. Also keep in mind that most (but not quite all) CSes are Stedding, if there's any specific flavor we could use there.

Are really most of them stedding? It seems like we have a handful of CSs that are somewhat essential, without them. Mayene. WT, Far Madding, Falme. OK, maybe that's only four. Still, I don't know if we have that many more stedding than that.

Still nothing jumping out at me for this one - maybe it is best to factor it into the bonuses of the Path and let those extra bonuses be what you get from it.

Right. I'm still liking the idea that Faith is your REWARD for doing stuff in the LB (helpin the team and all).


Ah, I see. I think this depends on what "cool stuff as a unit" is. The properties that differentiate a unit from a spy (movement on the map, combat) are the ones that we can't afford to give the AI control of if the Dragon were to crop up somewhere. I mean, we can have him *visually* appear on the map when he's doing - like if one of his 'moves' was attacking a unit, he could have a 3D model that appears on a tile nearby.

Yeah, maybe that's all it is, a model that appears. Still, you mentioned before that some people will want to control Rand. They just don't know that we considered it and that this is probably better - my thought is merely that we might try to create a sort f illusion that he IS there, so nobody complains.

I think we should go through and define all of the things that the Dragon can actually *do* here, because that list is still a bit nebulous. I think we like the 'turn order' solution where civs get to choose moves in a round-based order? We're still discussing what yield determines that order, but this ranking priority system seems good? (Regardless of whether we use Faith/Prestige/anything else)

So, possible actions the Dragon can take, regardless of *how* we choose which actions he takes (taking some from Illianor's post too), all up for debate, just to list them all in one place:

Running out of time tonight. So just a few thoughts on these.

  • Steal a Seal from the Shadow - Gosh, I just don't know anymore. Golly! Gee whiz! This is tricky. MAybe this isn't a great use of his time? Or maybe it's simply that he does it way faster than a spy can?
  • Root out Darkfriends - Yeah sure. This makes sense if there is the mechanic of a city switching sides... which seems crazy to implement, but cool.
  • Attack Shadowspawn - Yeah, I think he's a Randplane. And I think he can attack anybody... maybe not neutral units, though. Not sure on this. Depends, is this Zen rand of aMoL or bad Rand of 11-13?
  • Influence with the Tower - Yeah, doing *something* there, for sure. Researchy stuff? I really don't know.
  • Ta'veren Probability Manipulation - Yeah, the randomness seems cool... but ould anybody really ever choose to do it? I think honestly its just a consequence wherever he goes. As in, not something you choose to do. And maybe its not always, just sometimes, randomly.
  • Winning the Last Battle - I think probably - Dragon captures the City is the answer here. What else could it be.
  • Boost City Combat Strength/HP - Yes
  • Dragon Bomb - Totally agree. I mean, this is the same as shadowspawn attack, though, right? Just stronger? What's the difference?
    Holy crash - what if he used balefire? Could it be a nuke but that there's a chance of some crazy stuff happening, like unraveling the pattern? I don't know what that would be, but... maybe we think on it? Radiation?
  • Asha'man Recruitment - I don't think I like this, really. Aren't ashaman going to be a separate mechanic? I mean, maybe the dragon can help you get them faster. Haven't figured out ashaman yet... so maybe table this one
  • Rally to the Dragon - yeah, I can see this as being sort worth it, rarely. Not so exciting though.
  • Dragon Mercantilism - same as above. I'm not sure the dragon should be able to help every facet of the game, right?
  • Popular Resistance - Yeah this seems to powerful.

I see what you mean here, I think I like the Prestige-for-the-Dragon idea then! I think Light-leaning as represented by Faith still plays a role though - Rand works with the other nations that he does (rather than conquer, like Illian) because they are aligned with the Light. How about, given approximate base CiV rates of Tourism and Faith, we choose turn order using the metric:

Faith per turn + (4 * Prestige per turn)

Sure! Both is fine with me. I will say, though, that Illianor's comments later, and some thought of my own, is making me not love the whole idea of Light-leaning as faith.

They should be related. Certainly. But I think they're related int he opposite direction: Light Leaning creates Faith. Not faith leads to light leaning.

I think if you are heavily light leaning, you should get faith bonuses. Heavily shadow leaning = faith minuses, etc. Maybe a few gradations along the way (or percentages or something).

To me this is an important distinction because its still possible to have a high faith shadow civ - they chose certain Path tenants, buildings, got lots of Prophets, their UA, etc. They should still have high faith... but less high than if they were light. Perhaps significantly so.

But, then, we wouldn't use Faith to determine the dragon, then. A super light-leaning civ could have never done much infrastructure, or could be Tall (Illianor indicates that this causes less faith), and would be penalized in terms of dragon awesomeness. This Light civ should also still be a primary target for shadowspawn (or other consequences of being light),d espite perhaps having a lower total faith output than a Wide, but less Lighty, civ.

Perhaps there needs to be a separate variable - your "brightness" so to speak - that just tracks Light and Shadow.

Perhaps the shadow calculation is then just Light and Prestige. OR Light and Prestige AND faith, all together

Thoughts?


This is where the weirdness of the way the AI works is difficult to explain. Explicitly locked in roles will force the AI into strange positions, because it's unable to truly assess which of the options it's long-term more suited for. Letting them do whichever one is best for them at the time is probably less optimal overall, but will likely result in more reasonable behavior.

I think some bonuses to overall yields/some kind of immediate reward makes a lot of sense. The possibility he could be born in a Shadow civ means we probably don't want to always weight his bonuses toward the Light - we don't want to punish Shadow players who tech quickly. We could provide different bonuses going forward depending on which side they end up on though? If they're Light side, they could gain some boost in choosing moves for the Dragon. If they're Shadow, they gain control of extra Shadowspawn during the war to root out the 'sacred' blood in their people?

Cool. Also, it could just be a standard Diplo bonus, like being the host.


I see what you mean, but I think this is a prime example of where a Shadow player would (and should) turn on his 'ally.' To the Dark One, that civilization is holding off *just in case* the Shadow doesn't come out on top. He's got no time for those kinds of shenanigans, so he sends one of his other minions to stamp them into line.

Point taken

I think I'm with Illianor on this one, I thought Thriving Populace was the best of the 'red' ones.

OK. the people hath spoken!

Not as sure about this one, I think I still prefer Staunch Defenders here.

OK. The reason I don't love these names is they don't feel WoT to me at all. Like, I want an adjective that is more in-unverse. Barring that, I do think I like Stalwart Defenders/Protectors better than Staunch. Staunch is just a weird one, for me.

I think Frontiersman is very much associated with the American Frontier, which isn't really what we want. I agree with what counterpoint is saying about "Border Settlements" not being 'a people.' I think "Border Settlers" might work though - there isn't really any crossover between belief selection/use and units, so there's not much opportunity to be confused with the unit.

Wow, no idea about changing the settler name. To what?

Border Settlers could work, at least for the time being.

Also, while I think of it, I really want to add a late-game Settler unit that founds partially developed cities (I want a prebuilt Granary, please) - I think it's a big oversight that you can't do this in base CiV.

Well, then! Interesting. What would you call that, in-universe?

We wouldn't use the actual radiation/fallout name or art, but I like this idea. We could even have it pillage a certain number of tiles over a given radius (or an uneven scattering within a specific area - rather like a nuke). Bubbles of evil don't traditionally involve actual Shadowspawn though, right? It's tempting to want to spawn Shadowspawn then too.

Right. The bubbles are just crazy stuff happening. Axes flying around, etc. I like this idea, I think! (ignoring the balefire thing for now) I don't know if you shoudl really be targeting specific civs. They're random aren't they? Couldn't they smack the shadow civs as well? I mean, the decline of the world does negatively impact the shadow civs too.

It says something about the length of these posts that I can be ninja'd by a post from 45 minutes ago! :p

I think I arrived at a very similar idea as a part of my posts above, with 'global' projects that the Light side can participate in. Great minds thinking alike and all that jazz! So I like this one!

In terms of voting civs in and out, that requires a lot of technical work to make that possible. We run up against our favorite AI restrictions then as well - what if the AI decides you're not helping because it hasn't properly assessed the situation? Getting voted out then is a bad experience for the player. But it's something we should consider, getting locked into mechanics like this completely opens up avenues for exploits as well.

Right, the key distinction I was trying to highlight was that Faith (maybe hapiness or prestige) would be a direct reward for helping out the team.

OK, maybe we currently stay with permanent alliance - no voting - and see how much it sucks.

In regards to the breaking of the seals, could
If I play Tall, am I going to be low in faith and so not strongly "light aligned"? Am I then not going to have much agency in controlling the dragon, especially if there is a very wide, faith focused civ? How does making shadow/light decisions relate to this during the game? Compare if I had only chosen light aligned actions, but the wide civ barely scraped in.
Will this necessitate faith/population and % increases to help tall Civs participate in controlling the dragon?

Yeah, I think I'm with you here. Spoke more of that above.

What about using "world Era" for imposing the moment for switching from one calendar to the other ?

You mean world era as distinct from era for the player civ, right? Makes sense.

I think there's a specific reason why this doesn't work, according to S3rg. Not remembering why, though....

Another Idea I had was to propose "Heros" / World unique UU for each civ (as in FFH or 3kingdom (civ4 mod)) + some for each
Those could be special GP-like units or "normal" units / channeler (mostly) or not.
but this would take up some names that you might have wanted for the GP.

However It could be a nice way to get to play with the characters of the books, and still play the world.

I think we could arrive to one per civ:
Andor: Elayne
Manetheren : Perrin (or Mat for the Red Hand)
Caihrien : Maybe Mat ? (he came into command of the Red Hand there iirc) / or Aldura ?
Aiels: Aviendha
Tear: Moiraine
Saldea : Fail Bashere or her father
SeanChan: Tuon / ...?
FarMadding : Caldsuane (or was she from another place?)
Malkier : Lan Mandragoran
WT : a Forsaken or Egwene depending on orientations of the WT
Illian ?

realtionship in the books could represent "alliance / peace-treaties, whatever" between those nations.

Maybe those special UU could get a "special treatment": means to ge them to change civ owner under some conditions (to reflect that aldura and mat went somehow into Andor's service in the books)
(conditions to be determined: faith/prestige higher than civ owner by x factor? + something else because we do not want high prestige civ to steal all heros)

Maybe each of those "heros" could get individual abilities (related to the book) that upgrade or come into play with : xp and/or techs/policies, to reflect the story of the book.

NB: possibility : add Rhuarc as a Great Capitain (even if he is not known as one... indeed the title of great capitain was only given to westlanders)

I'm not sure I love this. I think, in general, it might pull us too far "off base." I was drawn to this mod first and foremost because it would be cool to play a game of civ in the WoT universe. Of course, playing as the characters could be cool, but Civ games are quite removed from characters and stuff - the characters are the leaders you play as. Heroes and other rpg elements might take away from that. I don't know, it's a "vibe" thing to me. UUs, UAs, and UBs are probably enough to differentiate the Civs.

I'm open to it, though.

Also, probably really hard to balance - one unit could throw the whole game off, yes?

Plus, on a specific level, your list shows how Andor biased are characters really are. Especially since the vast majority of the characters really have no real sense of loyalty to their nations - they left to become AS, to follow Rand, etc.

Maybe our characters just make the best sense as cameo Great People?
 
anotherthing that is really important for the WoT feel:
-the sword-stances-names:
"arc of the moon" "heron snatches the silverfish" ...Etc
I think it should be worthwhile to add them somehow.

-"heron-swordmen"

I have multiple ideas about that

heron swordman:
-heron swordmen replace a type of GP: great capitain ?
-heron swordmen are a new type of GP-like unit but not GP: gathered from cumulative experience from units: first at 50, second at 110 third, at 160...etc (counting free xp, GC xp, combat xp ..etc)
-heron swordmen can raise randomly from melee units after a fight : a promotion that appear on the unit after the fight (chance of promotion depends on level of unit, level of ennemy unit, other factors... some promotions? ...Etc) heron-promotion gives... more str ? more moral to nearby units? possibility of dueling ? opens access to new promotion paths?

"sword stances"
-replace the belief/religion/lineage system : however that's not logical / wouldn't have any link with the more "tile / building /improvement bonus"
-promotions for great capitains / heron-swordmen / normal swordmen units
promotions can be bought with xp (mid-gains) or
free promotion for units with GC/training ground nearby or being heron swordman :small chance of appearing randomly on units / or given for free at each level : very small bonus : 2%morale / 2%defense / 2%attack / 2%vs range..etc, but by adding themselves they some nice effect)
-actions for elite units: great capitains, heron swordmen, other elite units: actions as in the "spells/abilties" of FFH : (but then you"ll get use of only few stances)

-used only to rename the promotions related to combat (IMO flavorful, but it will get some times to get used to it)

well, those were a bit random, but I think they are one of the thing the most flavorful of the WoT.


regarding heros:

counterpoint: I understand your vision, but really, you should have a try at fall from heaven. You'll see that having heroes (which are in fact UU or world-wonder-UU) is flavorful, doesn't break balance if you take them into account early in the conception of the civs, doesn't make it "un-civ-like".
 
s3rgeus:

Quick question regarding Customs. We'd spoken of "beefing them up" a bit so they play a larger role.

Was the idea to bulk up the Follower Customs, or the Founder Customs (relative to CiV)?

On the one hand, it would be cool to have buff Founder custums, but obviously that kind of thing would really be lame if you missed out on the set of 5 Paths.

Thoughts?
 
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