S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

S3rgeus · Jan 17, 2015

counterpoint said:
Wow, looks like good old 'lomacy is about wrapped up!

Almost!

counterpoint said:
do we think that's a problem, though? The other perks seem to be at least a little more universal.

At first I was thinking it was definitely a problem, but I'm beginning to reconsider. Raw science is useful for everyone (regardless of victory) and could make the White Ajah 'too popular'. This way the White Ajah is still science-y, but is targeted at civilizations going for the science victory.

Then again, that risks them becoming "science exclusive" - so there's rarely any competition for the Ajah's favor.

Is something like "Trade routes between you and the Tower produce +5 (arbitrary) Science per turn" too narrow? It's more available than the Innovation one. Maxing out science with this would require the player to set up several trade routes with the Tower (from several different cities). Potentially very powerful, though geographically restricted.

A flat science boost sounds very plain next to the other Ajahs' bonuses.

We could unlock a "science trade route" for internal use? In the same way that there are food and production ones?

counterpoint said:
right, I'm almost ready to go with this one... but, the potential issue here is that some civs will definitely *not* want that to happen, based on their playstyle (wanting more male channelers to spawn, especially post-cleansing). Of course, they could avoid making nice with the red, but, sometimes accidents happen in civ (I didn't *mean* to generate more culture than everybody else!).

I don't think that's a problem - there should be enough other players who are gaining enough influence with each Ajah that it would be difficult to become the highest and above the ally threshold when a civ is actively trying to avoid it.

counterpoint said:
Enumerate? But it's Thursday - that's a Wednesday word if I ever heard one...

Programmer, I am! Collections are enumerated to get their values. :lol:

counterpoint said:
Maybe something like these:

Blue: +X% melee combat strength (kinda random, I know), OR +1 or +2 sight
Red: +X% Ranged defense (aka, protect against the channelers)
Green: +X% ranged combat strength
Yellow: increased healing rate, OR slight splash damage on targeted heals
Brown: +10% experience earned (is this possible?) or Culture on Kill (though that's more of a 2nd ability) or ???
White: +1 or +2 sight or Science on kill? (though that's more of a 2nd ability)
Gray: +1 or +2 movement

I like +2 sight on the Blue Ajah and Increased Healing rate on the Yellow (this is their "Medic-like" promotion, right? So it stacks with the Edict to make Yellow Sisters remarkably effective healers, which is good!).

Also like +X% ranged defense on Reds (15%?) sounds good.

Green +X% ranged combat strength is also good (+15% as well?)

+10% exp earned on the Browns is definitely possible, I like this one.

Also like +2 movement for Grays.

Less sure about the White now. We could invert the relationship between them and science for this bonus - instead of them making your science better, they get better proportional to how good at science you are? Something like White Sisters have +30% combat strength (melee and ranged) for 5 turns after you research a new technology?

So if we decide on both of the above, we're still left with a red pending next to second abilities for Sisters at level 2 influence? We discussed "stronger without Warders" for Red and "bonding male channelers" for Green. What are our favorites for the other Ajahs?

counterpoint said:
I suppose it can work just like the CSs - though I must confess, I don't know exactly how that mechanic works? Is it actually a swap? So, you should ideally send a spy to a CS you have LOW influence over?

It depends on your plan - if you just leave the spy in the CS (and he outranks all other spies other players have in that CS/wins the random tie-break) then your influence will rise every election and the current leader's (or possibly all other players', not 100% sure) will fall. But if you start a coup (via the Espionage menu) and succeed, then you switch influence values with the current ally. In the latter case, you're better going for a CS you have low relationship with. In the former, you're better going for CSes where it's a closer race.

Since spies are in the city - Tar Valon - but there are multiple Ajahs there, I'm not sure how/if we want to model the first interaction. Do we want the civ that controls the spy to just pick an Ajah to spy on? That lets us do basically the same thing as base CiV.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I misspoke here. I meant to say that Androl (is that his name) had bonded Pevara in ADDITION to her bond of him.

anyways, we can try it, and watch the balance for how awesome it is. Of course, the "channeling warder" will be its own unit (not actually an Asha'man), right? So, he can be as strong or as weak as we'd like.

Yeah, "Channeling Warder" or whatever we call him will be its own unit type, so we can customize them completely separately from Asha'man units.

counterpoint said:
Re: the Tower Embassy, I think it's prereq buildings would be... one of the buildings we create that'll be channeling-related... not sure what those will be. Wisdom's hut, etc.... Depository?

Depository could work, we'll be doing more work on buildings when doing the tech tree, I'd imagine.

counterpoint said:
for sure, this could work, though the preference would be to be consistent with Civ's design aesthetic. What about a Channeling governor? Like, they might spawn in any city that is governed by a channeler?

Interesting, that makes a lot of flavorful sense as well. Our only source of channeling Governors is the two Ajah Sister units, right? So those two Ajahs (Blue and White, I think it was) become useful for directing other Sisters later on. I like this idea.

counterpoint said:
Well, the problem (IMO) of them being "less severe" is that I'm not sure the Oppression penalty is technically less severe. True, they can't limit your trade with 2/3 of the world, but trade with Authority is 100% blocked. In many situations, that would be as if nothing bad had happened at all, but in others, it would be crippling (suddenly losing all your trade routes, etc.). So, while it's certainly likely to be less severe, that's not necessarily true. It would be nice if the Liberation one had that duality too - perhaps less severe broadly, but in certain situations, it could be even worse. Certainly, the Tower won't trade with you, right (while Authority civs could still trade with the WT, even when they've refused)?

Agreed that the Tower won't trade with Liberation civs after a refusal, but will still trade with Authority (after the first one only, I think).

We could make the Liberation civ's penalties dependent on the proximity of their capital to Tar Valon? Makes sense that the Tower has more strength closer to home, but then civs might feel "doomed" by their location.

We could make the Liberation civs start losing their Ajah bonuses on refusals? Lose the level one abilities after the first refusal, level two after the second, level three after the third, then on to "weakened" Authority-like penalties? (This is in addition to losing the ability to trade with the Tower at level 1.) For civs who don't care about the Tower, this doesn't matter. For civs that do, it tears their game apart. (I'm assuming this is coupled with big penalties in overall Tower influence.)

counterpoint said:
I like the careful consideration one! The concept behind Ogier Speed was similar. I guess, I would define "no action" as not moving any units, attacking, etc. - healing and all that is fine. The question of course is what of workers. But the "Next Turn" turns are what I'm thinking of.

Cool, I've added the Ogier quests to the summary. Quick question about A Good Book though - it strikes me that should have something to do with a Great Work of Writing from its name? Do we want a GW Ogier quest as well/instead? Should we rename this one to something like Studious Nature?

I think "no action" turns are a bit of UI smoke and mirrors under the hood. You can opt in to having some things that are definitely actions automated (like build queues in cities, worker actions, scouting with units, researching technologies) and it's difficult to define for the player what they should and shouldn't do to contribute towards the quest. You might be in situations where you're just pressing "Next turn" but getting no reward for it, because something that's an "action" you started up ages ago is still going on in the background.

counterpoint said:
For sure, let's grab some now, if you have ideas. I'm honestly not sure where the "need" is at this point, so I'm curious where you're at with it.

Just integration with our new systems, so that the quests don't feel like they're stuck in base CiV's context. So new systems include:

Channeling
Alignment (includes Last Battle)
Governors
Horn of Valere
Shadowspawn (existing quests deal with Barbarians, so Dragonsworn)

I think our other new mechanics all operate within the framework of existing victories and yield objectives, so the existing quests interact with those. The above ones are completely absent from CS quests. We may only need one for each, and not all of them may need a CS quest.

City State Quests
City state quests don't actually have "names" like resolutions and policies, do they? They generally only have summaries and icons. So the names are just summarization, though we could include them if we like.

Channeler Gift
City-State will reward a player for gifting a (female?) channeling unit to them. Targeted quest.

Alignment Shift
City-state will reward the player who generates the most Alignment change in the next 30 turns. (This is akin to the Blue Ajah quest. Usually these CS quests show the value for the leader, we can just show "change" though, rather than exposing whether it's Light or Shadow.) Global quest.

Governorship
City-state will reward you for instating a Governor of <insert governor type> in one of your cities. (We can use each available governor type/a subset of those types as separate instances of this quest, choosing the appropriate type for the appropriate CS trait.) Targeted quest.

Participate in the Hunt
City-state will reward you for producing 3 (arbitrary) Hunters of the Horn units. (Went with multiple instead of just 1 since it isn't a GP. Didn't want to tie the quest to finding/using the Horn itself since it's rare.) Targeted quest.

Fight back the Shadow
Much like the "invading barbarians" cry for help, except with Shadowspawn. Global quest.

counterpoint said:
I wish there was a way to give the Tuatha'an a CS.

I can see the possibility of a Tuatha'an civilization. We'd have to make their UA uber unusual and make the player play quite differently from the city-centric default. (A similar magnitude of change as Venice.)

counterpoint said:
Maritime - celebratory, ritualistic, ceremonial, or going in a different direction - Agrarian, Agricultural
Cultural - Learned, Scholarly, Intellectual, refined?
Militaristic - like the idea of Borderlander... but do they have to be on the Border? Otherwise, Militant, Warlike, Defensive, Martial,
Religious - Enlightened? Since Paths aren't strictly religious, I kinda like this angle. Inspired could work too.
Mercantile - I'd say maybe Wealthy, Prosperous, or something? Or also ritualisitc and ceremonial

I'm liking Militaristic -> Borderlander (I don't think we need to restrict them to bordering the Blight).
Religious -> Enlightened is also awesome.
Mercantile -> Prosperous sounds good.

The others I'm not sure which to pick. I think my favorite for Maritime is Ceremonial or Bountiful. My main reservation about Ceremonial is it doesn't seem to link into their Food-based bonus.

For Cultural, I think Intellectual and Scholarly sound like they should go on a Science-based CS (despite those not existing). I'm still a fan of Chronicled or Historical for this one.

counterpoint said:
Well, then, I guess I'm just crossing my fingers that you know how to do that!

So am I!

I'm kidding.

I'm confident I'm capable of making these changes, the main question is how long it will take and how feasible it is to spend that much time on AI improvements. I'd imagine overall "the AI is better" improvements will take a back seat to making the AI understand our new mechanics.

counterpoint said:
Right. This all makes sense. I do wonder if, as the LB dawns, we should give every civ an opportunity to reassign their trade route destinations. Otherwise, the timing could really hurt some civs (especially if a partner goes a different direction than you expected). And it's kind of boring if everybody turtles with CSs for the last whole part of the game to prevent this. Thoughts?

We could make Last Battle-incited declarations of war give players their trade units back? That eliminates the risk involved in trading with those civs - players will just get to reassign those trade routes if they choose a competing Alignment. Does that take some of the risk that we want out of the whole thing though?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think most of the Black stuff was discussed more recently than the Chanelling stuff. It looks like this is the largest discussion:

...

updated thoughts?

So, some of our primary concerns from before is that we want the Tower turning to be a rare event that requires a concerted effort from multiple players. We want there to be player involvement, but we don't want a simple relationship between more Shadow players == Shadow Tower.

Drawing on a lot of what we said before, we like the idea of "quests" from the Black that pop up to individual players in secret. We agree that comparing the influence of the Black Ajah directly against the other seven isn't tenable for a variety of reasons. We like the idea of the Black Ajah "corrupting" the existing 7 Ajahs.

The first idea I had (which I started to write out and subsequently decided against) involved using the majority influential civs in Ajahs, if those civs were leaning Shadow, to dispatch "counterproductive" secret quests to those civs to increase the Black Ajah's hold. But that suffers from some of the problems we said above.

We've also got to remember that some Shadow leaning doesn't necessarily mean that civ will declare for the Shadow. They might go Neutral, heck they might choose Light in exchange for some penalties. And it would be almost impossible to appropriately dole out these quests based on those civs' perceived intentions.

That means the players need to be the initiators in the interactions with the Black Ajah. We can't have the Black going to them with quests, the players need to go to the Tower with the intention of finding and helping the Black Ajah.

So what about this:

Players who are over a certain Shadow threshold see a new button on the Tower UI which brings them to a Black Ajah summary page. (Equivalent for AIs is just unlocking the ability to take the actions I'm about to describe.)

On this summary page is a series of objectives. These objectives are big ticket items, customized to the world of the current game:

Raise 1000 (arbitrary) Gold. (Donate it to the Black.)
Raze Whitebridge. (It picks a prominent non-capital city in a civ over a certain Light leaning threshold. There are probably several instances of this objective for separate cities, deliberately spread across the map.)
Pass resolution X in the Compact.
Achieve X influence with Y Ajah.
Achieve X influence with W Ajah.
Achieve X influence with Z Ajah.
Construct/Control the <insert World Wonder here>.
Kill X Aes Sedai. (Doesn't matter which player owned them)
Control X cities.

If all of the above objectives are completed by players over the Shadow threshold, then the Tower Turns. Each objective only needs to be completed once globally and can be completed by any Shadow player (who's over the threshold). The intention is to make a set of objectives that can only be achieved by a group of players - almost never a single player (unless they're a worldspanning monstrosity civ). But those players don't necessarily know how close the other Shadow players already are to completing them. (I have 1000 gold, but why should I do this for everyone? That guy is probably Shadow and he's rolling in it! Why doesn't he do that objective?)

I'd say each player can see which objectives have been completed, but not by whom. They have no feedback on anyone's progress toward each objective except their own.

What do you think of the general idea of this system? Do we want more objectives? Should they be more difficult?

counterpoint said:
please do! I'm running out of ideas - I'm also worried we're going to use up all the cool mechanics we could use on social policies and tenets...

I think social policies and tenets have inherently different types of bonuses - we reward the player for different types of things, or boost different ways. The Tower's Edicts are all dependent on an external entity being able to modify the things that it gives out bonuses/penalties for. For tenets and policies, I think we deal a lot more with the internal structure of the player's cities (rewards for specific buildings, for example) and army (giving you specific units, the Tower's unit giveaways are all channelers, and they take units on several occasions).

Even for effects that overlap between the two, we can have them stack and I'm sure players will be glad for the bonuses. The Tower Edicts are necessarily time limited, whereas Policies/Tenets are for good once adopted - so if an Edict is keeping you in positive Happiness, you appreciate it, but it's not going to last. If you find a policy that does the same thing then you'll take it immediately.

Anywho, here are some more:

Generic Edicts

Recruit the Newcomers
Accepted that gain the Shawl in the next 30 turns join the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from. (Or we could just announce an Ajah and they all go to that one?)

Blue Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

A Helping Hand (R)
City state rebellions (by just Authority civs?) are 30% more likely to be successful for 30 turns. (Spying and eyes and ears.) (Refusing means the bonus does not affect CSes you are allied with. Does it make sense to be able to refuse this? It's not really anything to do with what you do that makes it work.)

Proper Leadership
Governors produce +3 local Happiness for the next 30 turns.

Through Greatness
Each time a Great Person is expended in the next 30 turns, its controller receives +100 Faith.

White Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Veritable Distraction
Buildings that produce Science also produce +2 Great Scientist(/Scholar/whatever) points for the next 20 turns.

Speak the Truth (R)
Diplomatic promises are mechanically binding for the next 30 turns. (If you say you won't settle near someone, it is impossible for you to do so - Settlers just plain old don't work there.)

(I think I've only just understood what you were asking before about diplomatic promises, counterpoint! As a quest it feels more Gray, but as an Edict it seems White? This edict is also quite complicated - each promise needs to be individually related to what behaviors it affects and we need ways to modify those available behaviors so that the player is incapable of performing them. Probably more trouble than it's worth.)

Sister's Keeper (pun-tastic name)
Civilizations with influence points with the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from also receive an additional (their influence) / 10 Science per turn.

Brown Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 0

Red Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Gentle Instruction
Gentling has a 20% higher success rate for the next 15 turns.

Unnecessary Distraction (R)
Warders have -20% combat strength for the next 30 turns. (Refusing means Warder units you control are unaffected.)

Wilders to Heel (R)
Non-Aes-Sedai female channeling units have -10% ranged combat strength for 30 turns.

Green Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 1

Learning from Men
Aes Sedai units deal splash damage like Saidin units for the next 30 turns.

Yellow Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Far and Wide
Aes Sedai's "Medic-like" promotion has +1 range for 30 turns.

A Cure for Stilling
Civilizations have +1 Spark (+2?) for the next 30 turns.

Blood and Bone
If a unit would die within a 3 hex radius of an Aes Sedai unit, there is a 20% chance it will remain at 1 health instead.

Gray Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 2

Alliance in Truth (R)
Declarations of Friendship also act as Defensive Pacts for the next 30 turns. (Each player must choose up front if they wish to refuse for the duration - regardless of whether or not war does end up happening in that time. Existing DoFs are included.)

Bonds of Trust
Civilizations may trade lump sum gold gifts without Declarations of Friendship for 30 turns. (Might be unbalancing on higher difficulties, not 100% clear on whether a player can make effective use of this in a small window of time.)

counterpoint said:
Right... though I don't think this one would reveal the map.

But I want to unlock RAM Usage!

S3rgeus · Jan 17, 2015

counterpoint said:
OK, finally getting a chance to respond to the Science stuff!

Same here!

counterpoint said:
OK, all good points, and you've given me a lot to stew over. Before I respond fully, I wanted to check to make sure I'm hearing and addressing all the issues. This is what you brought up (that I'm hopefully addressing):

- Dealing with small numbers of civs/maps
- Dealing with civs at war
- Sharing with one civ vs sharing with the whole world
- related, easiness of simply sharing with the weakest civs
- lack of any meaningful interaction - possibility of Scientist Envoy
- possibility of civs voluntarily coming to "get" your innovation.
- problem with overlap of techs and repeatability of Innovation sharing.

OK, so here are my evolved thoughts. I'm presenting this as a proposal, but putting in discussion and stuff in-line. So, it's not really a proposal at all, I guess.

Yeah, I think that covers everything I brought up!

counterpoint said:
1)As presented before, there is a set of Innovations (7, 8?) that must be Showcased. Each one has a late-game tech associated with it (maybe some of them are found on the same tech). It's certainly likely that these techs will also serve different functions as well (units, buildings, etc.) Each Innovation can only be Showcased once by a particular civ.

8 sounds good to me. Having them on a tech (like buildings/units/generic bonuses) on the tree is also good.

A good reference for how they should be placed on the tree exists in the old diplomatic victory vs the old science victory (pre-BNW, when the diplo victory changed). You used to have to build the UN to trigger the world leader elections. (Someone had to build it, not necessarily the winner.) The UN tech was on the same horizontal placement as the spaceship parts - in the last few techs on the tree. But if you clicked on the UN tech at the beginning of the game, you'd see it had somewhere in the region of 50 prereqs before you could reach it. Getting all of the spaceship parts required 75 or so techs. So we want the science victory to be as tech-intensive as we can (to the point where it is balanced) by "spreading out" the techs that unlock the innovations - so that they pull in more prereqs.

counterpoint said:
2) In order to Showcase an Innovation, the civ must produce a non-rushable Envoy unit. (called an Envoy, an Academic, Scholar?). This unit is non-combat, but it is not technically speaking a civilian. The Showcase unit can be rebuilt if it is destroyed.

I definitely like the idea of the Envoy. You're absolutely right that was I had before was merely the *illusion* of interactivity.

I thought a lot on the notion that other civs could come to get them. I think it would cause a major logjam - the prisoner's dilemma notion you speak of is compelling, but honestly I just don't think it would happen. Close to the end of the game, I'd imagine nobody would be eager to give anybody an advantage. Also, it does take too much out of the hands of the Science Player, IMO. If the AIs are suckers for it, but humans aren't... that's a problem - a Player should be able to LOSE to an AI getting a Science win, right?

The unit can't attack or anything, but I note that it is not a civilian simply to suggest that it not be a one-hit kill. I don't know how strong it is - not strong, probably -but it can probably survive a couple hits.

Completely agree that the whole "go to a civ for a bonus that might make them win" would lead to a deadlock. Dang players and their wanting others not to win the game!

On the topic of the Envoy, making a unit that's a civilian-but-not-quite is actually extremely complicated. CiV's combat system is based on the assumption that civilian units have no combat strength. (That's how it tells them apart underneath - units with 0 combat strength are civilians, all others are military.) We have the full source for all of this, but it's a lot of work extracting that assumption from the existing code and replacing it to gain a not-quite-military classification.

I think having the Envoy as a civilian unit makes sense even without considering the above. They're extremely valuable and should be properly defended - allowing them to stack with military units but having them die in a single hit (like GGs) models that quite well. Then considering the difficulties above, I think a civilian makes even more sense.

counterpoint said:
3)Each Envoy unit is either A)[/B ]unique to a particular Innovation (e.g., build a "Steam Power Envoy) or B)generic, allowing the Civ to select which Innovation to Showcase once it has been brought to the proper location.

This depends mostly on the aesthetic we're looking for. I think having a single unit, with choices, is a little more elegant, but it's also perhaps more confusing and difficult to implement - how many could a civ have active or under-construction at a particular time? Having a specific unit is easier to control - no backup units allowed! - but also means we could have a rather long list of Envoys on the Production screen. I think that's probably OK, though.

In any case, the civ is certainly limited in the number they can build - essentially, one at a time of each type (whether it's actually a unique unit or not) unless it gets destroyed.

I'm in favor of the Envoy being unique per Innovation. As you talk about later, players can optimize and compensate for "bad defending" in the case where the Envoy is generic. I think Bad Defending should be punished quite harshly here (so they need to wait until they can rebuild that specific Envoy).

The available Envoys will only be visible as the player heads into the end of the game, so it won't clutter up the production screen when they're not relevant.

In terms of implementation difficulty, a unit per Innovation is easier! Simpler relationships between missions, units, and what those missions do.

counterpoint said:

4)The envoy must be brought into another civ's A)territory or B) city (adjacent tile, like a Missionary), and must perform the Showcase mission. Envoys can move freely within any civ's borders.

It seems to me that this is an essential component, regardless of whether the eventual bonus/yield is global or civ specific. To me, this is where the interactivity comes in.

Presumably, unless you're sending into territory adjacent to your own, you'd need to escort your Envoy unit. Even your allies (not multiplayer team members) would have every reason to kill your ally.

As far as territory vs city.... if we think City isn't too impossible, I prefer that. Territory seems kinda cheap - suddnetly an envoy is in their view and then BAM it showcases - Gr Musician style. Is getting to a city too hard, though? I do think it should be ANY city, though - making it the capital seems way too challenging.

Obviously an escort would be unable to enter borders without an open borders agreement or a war declaration. Thus, the non-civilian status of the Envoy.

I think war doesn't have to change this at all, really - nor would the last battle. You still have to get a unit close to the city safely.

Click to expand...

Awesome about Envoys moving freely through borders and the status of Innovations during war - those are good solutions!

I'm unsure about the target location though, I think even city is too easy. Territory is definitely very easy. This is going to be happening in the endgame, when civs have sprawled out across the map. Some civs may have individual cities that they've traded for/converted/captured isolated and far away on the map, and almost no one has enough units to patrol their every single border against a single incoming unit. Humans will be able to game the AI at this very effectively as well - working out their scouting patterns and darting in with just the Envoy in between.

All of the small satellite cities in a large civilization make reaching territory vs reaching city very similar as well. (The AI enjoy their cities on single-hex islands.) Even with a standard movement range of 2, reaching a city from an external hex, if planned well, won't take more than 2 turns. And the defending player can't see the Envoy until after that first move - so they either already have a unit in range, or there's nothing they can do. (Ranged attacks, including cities, don't 1-hit-kill civilians.)

I can see some argument against capital as well though - a very large civ that has expanded radially has made its capital very hard to get to (stealthily) without the Envoy being killed. Now, I'd say the BNW Culture victory gives us a good comparison here though. If you're going for culture and there's one other player who's also gone in on culture and been quite successful, dominating his culture will take forever (if it's even possible). In this case, the best way to pursue the Culture victory is the kill the one civ you can't gain cultural influence over.

I'd say the turtled-up-against-Envoys civ is in a similar position - they've structured their entire civilization so that in the late game, it's difficult to get an Envoy to them. But if you're going for the Science victory, you should have superior units (because you have a tech lead). There's now one player you need to kill, rather than just out-Science. And in the Envoy's case, you don't even need to exterminate them/cut them down enough to reduce their culture output (like BNW culture victory) you just need to get a single unit to their capital - you can cut a swath of destruction straight for it.

A disadvantage of this system is smaller (particularly Duel) maps. If you can get a game-winning non-combat unit to your enemy's capital, why not just conquer it and win? But then that's a problem on those map sizes anyway, the inverse of the Science victory not scaling (it doesn't get harder for larger maps, while Domination does) is that Domination is far and away the easiest and fastest way to win a Duel map for all but the most evenly matched opponents.

Alternatively we could place a population threshold on the cities you can demonstrate Innovations at. That way players can't use tiny, undefended satellite cities to demonstrate Innovations - they have to go for the core ones each civ has been developing for some time. From the defender's point of view, it's almost impossible to make sure that none of your 'big' cities are on an external border, without meticulous game-long planning. (And if a player has managed that, then good job to them! It should make things more difficult for the Envoy-er, because the defender went to a lot of trouble for it.)

I'm generally in favor of the capital approach though.

In fact, if we say that you can only demonstrate at original capitals, then we don't need to worry about how many players are still alive at the end of the game, and it tells us which civ we can demonstrate to multiple times (by who owns which capital) for free.

counterpoint said:

5)The Showcasing civ can only send an Envoy to a civ that, roughly speaking, hasn't received an Envoy from the Showcasing civ before. In some map sizes, a civ may Showcase to the same civ multiple times.

Here is where I try to tackle the balance issues you wisely brought up.

I think that, roughly speaking, you have to share to everybody - note, this doesn't address who is actually receiving the BONUS, just who receives the showcase. This is to present a civ from simply storming a single weak neighbor. This forces the civ out into the world, defending their units and scouting for good cities to surprise-Showcase.

Of course, the two main issues here are small maps and big maps. My suggestion is that the amount of Showcases you can do with a single civ (and thus, the number of different civs you must interact with) should be a function of how many civs are on that map. I'm thinking that (assuming there are 8 Showcases, to make the math elegant, each civ can receive your showcase a number of times equal to 16 / Total # of civs (round up or down? see 12 civs below)

So:

Duel Map (2 civs) - 8 possible shares (only need to share with one civ)
4 civs - 4 possible shares per civ (only need to share with 2 civs, can ignore one enemy)
8 civs - 2 possible shares per civ (need to share with 4 civs, can ignore three enemies)
12 civs - 1 or 2? shares per civ (need to share with either 8 or 4 civs, so could ignore either 3 or 7 enemies). My hunch says 1.
16 civs - 1 share per civ (need to share with 8 civs, so can ignore 7 enemies).

Any of these values could of course be adjusted arithmetically for balancing purposes, or, alternatively, we could allow only a certain number of civs to be Showcased a second time. For example, in an 8 civ game (only need to share with 4 distinct civs according to the above), maybe we could make it so only 2 of the civs could be Showcased a second time - forcing the civ to share with a minimum of 6 different civs - only letting them ignore 1 enemy. Or, it could be 3, which would allow them to ignore two enemies. Thoughts?

Should the Total # of civs be based on the map creation and the game start (probably not), or based on who'se currently left (probably best) -like if Cairhien is trying to win Science in a formerly 16-civ game, but the Seanchan have eliminated all other civs, Cairhien can Showcase to Seanchan 8 times, right?

Also, should we allow people to Showcase to the same civ consecutively, or (not counting Duel maps) should they have to Showcase to a second civ before they do the first again. Essentially, this would prevent the "sneak attack", since a civ might be ready and expecting the second Envoy.

The idea here, again, is to make the player find new places to find their victory. They couldn't really turtle. That said, by allowing them flexibility as to who exactly they want to share with. It's not so simple that every civ will immediately declare war on the civ - nobody knows exactly where they'll send the Envoy.

Obviously, a Duel map would be quite hard, but I can't see a way around that. And I do like that this makes victory on a huge map a little less easy than the CiV science victory, which, as you note, doesn't "scale up" as well as diplo and dom do.

Click to expand...

I like this - doubling up only when necessary makes sure that you've always got to interact with the maximum number of civs possible. And like you've said, this makes the science victory (like domination and diplo) more difficult on larger maps. As long as all difficulties are doing that, it's making it more balanced.

Also completely on board with the idea that you can't double up on one civ until you've demonstrated another Innovation elsewhere. Makes it more difficult to "surprise demonstrate" (that sounds like something that gets people arrested) to one civ all at once, which we want to avoid.

Your numbers all sound good to me - on the ones with options I'd go for the combination that lets the Science player ignore fewer opponents.

We will also need to deal with all of the numbers that don't divide well, since the Advanced Setup menu lets you choose any number of civs (equal or less than the maximum for your chosen map size). In the case where the player will need to double up on some opponents, but not all, the science civ can demonstrate to any of the valid ones they want, right? (They need to demonstrate 8 times, but there are >= 3 enemies they can demonstrate 3 times each to - they can choose whoever they want to demonstrate only twice to?)

counterpoint said:

6)Upon completion of the Showcase, A) the receiving civ, or B) all civs receive a certain bonus.

Whether the bonus is global or specific should depend entirely on the nature of the bonus, as well as the parameters we defined above (how many civs, etc.).

Certainly it makes intuitive sense that it should be civ-specific, but you are correct in that this would encourage a Civ to merely target the weakest civs. That said, if they are forced to interact with a large number of civs (see above), then this ideally shouldn't be much of a problem.

A global bonus is compelling for its elegance, especially if the bonuses are yield based or something like that. It's certainly the most pain-free, and there's no problem with figuring out who's received which bonuses, etc. - everybody would receive all the bonuses.

One nice thing about making them civ specific is that - coupled with the limited number of times you can give a bonus to a civ - is that it does present some strategic possibility. You might want to give a certain civ the science boost Bonus, and another the gold boost, etc.

With a global bonus, the Showcasing civ receives the bonus as well, right? Does the Showcasing civ receive anything if its a localized bonus (aside from inching towards a science victory)?

Lastly, if we go with Local bonuses, can one civ receive the same Showcase from different civs at different times, or is that Showcase "locked" for that civ once they've received it. My hunch is "no" - that could theoretically make a science victory impossible under certain situations, right?

Click to expand...

After the set up you've described above about distributing who an individual civ can demonstrate to, I think bonuses for the receiving civ only make sense. Also cool, like you've said here, that those bonuses can be targeting a specific yield/playstyle, so the demonstrating player can be smart about who they give science/culture/faith to.

Also agreed that a Showcase bonus shouldn't be "locked" once it's been demonstrated to a given civ by anyone - exactly like you said, that can make the science victory impossible to accomplish in some cases.

That does mean that all of the bonuses need to be usefully stackable. Civ A demonstrating Innovation X to Civ C shouldn't let Civ B also demonstrate X at C with no foreign civ receiving any benefits from it. So we can't unlock new abilities for units/buildings/players from the Showcases, because then we need 11 (max enemy civs) * number of Innovations unlockable abilities for each consecutive Showcase to also add something to the "defending" civ.

So civ-wide yield bonuses seem like something that scale well that way? Static bonuses like a permanent +50 (arbitrary) science/culture/gold per turn. (Happiness works too, though that's not "per turn".) That works for the "civ-wide" yields that are aggregated - but things like Food and Production are a bit more distributed. All sources of Food produce an additional +1 Food would break the universe. All cities have static +5 Food makes more sense, now that I think about it.

So then each instance of the same Showcase at each civ just stacks on the same bonus again. (So it's at total +100 science per turn after the second one, for example.)

I don't think the player performing the Showcase gets anything beyond progress towards the Science victory. The spaceship parts are completely useless (in fact they're a liability) until you've won, so I think we want to do the same thing with the Innovations. (The techs themselves obviously have bonuses for the player researching them.)

counterpoint said:

7)The bonuses received by the civ(s) should be thematically appropriate for the Innovation, likely either A)a science dump, B)some appropriate yield, or minor ability or C)whatever ability originally conferred by that tech. (production of a unit, etc.). Options B and C should be for a limited number of turns.

I am partial to B, the thematically appropriate yield or minor ability. Science dump seems rather bland - and somewhat lame, as winning a Science victory helps others win their science victory - and The tech-based ability has lots of problems, as previously discussed in this thread.

I'm thinking these abilities/yields would last for a certain amount of turns (20?), and could potentially be stackable as local bonuses (multiple civs Showcasing the same Innovation to one civ) and would by necessity be stackable if we chose global bonuses. Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I knew you'd already mentioned some stuff in this post similar to what I was writing above! Here it is. Time limits go a ways to making abilities possible, but there are still difficulties if the civs doing the Showcasing (say there are multiple close to winning) Demonstrate in quick succession. The first one conferred an ability to a foreign civ, which disadvantaged the Demonstrator, but the second and third only extended that ability by a few turns - not nearly as much of a disadvantage.

Yield bonuses do scale and stack well, and I'm thinking they could be permanent? The game will be ending soon - if someone's close on science then there should be other players close on other victories - so make it more of a dilemma for the Demonstrator. We can scale back to turn-limited if it turns out to be too unbalancing, but I suspect permanent will work.

counterpoint said:

Based on the list I threw out before, I could see these kinds of yields/bonuses.

- Giant Crossbow - weird... maybe +1 range for ranged units for awhile? +X% damage from ranged units? Granting the construction of a G. Crossbow unit for awhile?
- Lightning Jar - production bonus, probably
- Glider - hmmm.... extend sight range of territory/units? Reveal map? Provide glider unit for awhile?
- Paddlewheel riverboat - +gold/range of trade routes along rivers? All trade routes?
- Steam Engine - + production? +gold of trade routes? faster movement on roads?
- telescope - +science

Note, I'd figure that these bonuses would not be the same as the bonuses you'd get from researching the tech itself (e.g., an actual steam-powered unit)

Click to expand...

I'm sorely tempted by slotting +1 range into the permanent stackable stuff discussing above so that we can make intercontinental ballistic crossbows.

I think before we can select from this we should decide on yields vs abilities and time limiting and that stuff. My favorites here will vary depending on what we choose there. I agree with the overall flavor of them and definitely agree that we want suitable bonuses for the flavor of what Innovation is being Showcased. Also agree on steam-powered unit from the tech vs gold/production bonus from being "Showcased at" by that Innovation.

counterpoint said:

8)The science victory is completed when all Innovations have been Showcased by a single civ.

OK, new thoughts on these... new thoughts?

Click to expand...

Very cool! I feel like I've been quite critical above, but I very much like this idea! Nice one!

I'll also note that I've used Demonstrating and Showcasing intermingled above as terminology for "showing an Innovation" to another civ. The two terms are interchangeable, I just didn't pick one and stick with it.

counterpoint · Jan 18, 2015

reading this first section (on White Ajah) was a highly emotionally up-and-down journey. You made a series of good points, all which convinced me... and didn't agree with one another... Consider:

S3rgeus said:
At first I was thinking it was definitely a problem, but I'm beginning to reconsider. Raw science is useful for everyone (regardless of victory) and could make the White Ajah 'too popular'. This way the White Ajah is still science-y, but is targeted at civilizations going for the science victory.

you're right! Flat science would be too good. This is probably better.

S3rgeus said:
Then again, that risks them becoming "science exclusive" - so there's rarely any competition for the Ajah's favor.

oh crap, you're right. The Science V people will just run away with it!

Is something like "Trade routes between you and the Tower produce +5 (arbitrary) Science per turn" too narrow? It's more available than the Innovation one. Maxing out science with this would require the player to set up several trade routes with the Tower (from several different cities). Potentially very powerful, though geographically restricted.[/quote]

Hmmm... this is a pretty good idea. Maybe the rewards for repetition are scalable and diminish with multiple cities? Then again, science V is much easier with fewer cities, right? So maybe it's not likely those players can abuse this... unless it makes the S.Victory too easy for wide civs...

S3rgeus said:
A flat science boost sounds very plain next to the other Ajahs' bonuses.

totally right.

S3rgeus said:
We could unlock a "science trade route" for internal use? In the same way that there are food and production ones?

This is a great idea! I like this. But.... wait, what's the big advantage for sharing your science between cities?

You see what you're putting me through, right?

This is very difficult.

Honestly, I'm not sure which is best, though I am more keen on the "special effect" ones.

Oh wait, weird idea - what if it upgrades "Research" in the production menu. Like performing "Research" provided 10% (arbitrary) extra science output. Not likely to be totally abused, right?

S3rgeus said:
I don't think that's a problem - there should be enough other players who are gaining enough influence with each Ajah that it would be difficult to become the highest and above the ally threshold when a civ is actively trying to avoid it.

oh dang. of course. We're talking highest-level abilities here. Makes sense.

I like this. Though, it should probably be pretty significant, right?

S3rgeus said:
Programmer, I am! Collections are enumerated to get their values.

Hah! Well... uh... hexachordal combinitoriality!

S3rgeus said:
I like +2 sight on the Blue Ajah and Increased. Healing rate on the Yellow (this is their "Medic-like" promotion, right? So it stacks with the Edict to make Yellow Sisters remarkably effective healers, which is good!).

Also like +X% ranged defense on Reds (15%?) sounds good.

Green +X% ranged combat strength is also good (+15% as well?)

+10% exp earned on the Browns is definitely possible, I like this one.

Also like +2 movement for Grays.

Less sure about the White now. We could invert the relationship between them and science for this bonus - instead of them making your science better, they get better proportional to how good at science you are? Something like White Sisters have +30% combat strength (melee and ranged) for 5 turns after you research a new technology?

OK, ready to settle on most of these. Regarding the yellow - I'm actually talking about their targeted healing ability - do the yelows have a medic ability that's any better than normal aes sedai? I thought their main perk was their uber heal spell?

re: values for reds and greens, 15 sounds good, though I'm also tempted now to make the Green one a +% bonus against shadowspawn only (maybe a higher bonus?)

That's really cool, for the white! I like it. Super weird.

S3rgeus said:
So if we decide on both of the above, we're still left with a red pending next to second abilities for Sisters at level 2 influence? We discussed "stronger without Warders" for Red and "bonding male channelers" for Green. What are our favorites for the other Ajahs?

Alright, so let's take a look. I'm listing their primary ability here for reference purposes in () and stat boost in []

Blue (advising the governor, producing Presige or Faith) [+2 sight] - we spoke of them aiding the search for the Horn of Valere somehow. I think that's cool, though it's not yet clear how big a deal the horn search will be. Seems neat though.

Greens (second Warder) [+15% ranged strength.. possibly against shadowspawn]- allowing a channeler-warder seems cool.

Yellows (targeted healing power) [increase healing rate... how much] - we didn't really have much in the way of discussion on a second ability here - any ideas were mostly alternatives to the primary ability. Hmmm.... Any ideas? Weird one: maybe workers in adjacent tiles work 20% faster? You know, healthy and all that? Is worker-speed pointless relatively late in the game (when someone's likely to get this? There's also the splash healing thing. Like, combine targeted healing and the medic healing - when they use the targeted one (needs a name!) surrounding units also heal - makes them kinda one-trick ponies, though.

Reds (enhanced gentling chance) [15% combat defense against male channelers] - looks like big bonuses to warderless fighting - what should it be? probably a bonus to melee defense, and combat str. vs male channelers? how much?

Whites (advise governor, producing science) [big bonus after tech is researched?] - Again, here we don't seem to have a lot of ideas. Seems to me like we're kind of overloading on the science department though - might be nice to make it slightly different... honstly, no ideas here.

Grays (unclear which was the primary ability. we have ignore borders and "Create binding trade agreement" written in the summary) [+2 movement] - so are both of those abilities at level 1, or does one of them unlock at level 2? If not one of these, than what?

Browns (work antiquity sites quickly, with cooldown - I think) [+10% exp] - hmmm... not sure what to do here either.

S3rgeus said:
It depends on your plan - if you just leave the spy in the CS (and he outranks all other spies other players have in that CS/wins the random tie-break) then your influence will rise every election and the current leader's (or possibly all other players', not 100% sure) will fall. But if you start a coup (via the Espionage menu) and succeed, then you switch influence values with the current ally. In the latter case, you're better going for a CS you have low relationship with. In the former, you're better going for CSes where it's a closer race.

Since spies are in the city - Tar Valon - but there are multiple Ajahs there, I'm not sure how/if we want to model the first interaction. Do we want the civ that controls the spy to just pick an Ajah to spy on? That lets us do basically the same thing as base CiV.

um.... uh.... :wallbash:

I.... never knew about the coup option. So, yeah.

But, in any case, I do think it can work similarly to how it does in CiV. That said, I don't think you should be able to dump 7 spies into the WT - should have to choose one Ajah, right? Or... are we talking Tower overall influence?

S3rgeus said:
Interesting, that makes a lot of flavorful sense as well. Our only source of channeling Governors is the two Ajah Sister units, right? So those two Ajahs (Blue and White, I think it was) become useful for directing other Sisters later on. I like this idea.

hmmm... I wasn't sure that the sisters WERE the governors - I thought maybe they were "advisers," sorta sitting near the city. Either works for me.... though we'll have to flesh out all those mechanics of course.

S3rgeus said:
Agreed that the Tower won't trade with Liberation civs after a refusal, but will still trade with Authority (after the first one only, I think).

We could make the Liberation civ's penalties dependent on the proximity of their capital to Tar Valon? Makes sense that the Tower has more strength closer to home, but then civs might feel "doomed" by their location.

We could make the Liberation civs start losing their Ajah bonuses on refusals? Lose the level one abilities after the first refusal, level two after the second, level three after the third, then on to "weakened" Authority-like penalties? (This is in addition to losing the ability to trade with the Tower at level 1.) For civs who don't care about the Tower, this doesn't matter. For civs that do, it tears their game apart. (I'm assuming this is coupled with big penalties in overall Tower influence.)

Oh, this is interesting, them losing their bonuses. That certainly makes a lot of sense. Here's the thing, though, is this kind of redundant and/or double-jeapardy? Refusals will obviously cost you influence and provide a hit to your relations with the Ajah's, right? That would likely cause that civ to lose their friend status with the Ajah, right?

Also, we could take away sisters, right?
I was also thinking we could just provide a flat penalty (not an inversion) to their trade with the Tower and Authority civs, instead of precluding it.

In any case, your suggestion could work, I just wonder if the coupling of WT-penalties and extra effects is a bit overkill.

S3rgeus said:
Cool, I've added the Ogier quests to the summary. Quick question about A Good Book though - it strikes me that should have something to do with a Great Work of Writing from its name? Do we want a GW Ogier quest as well/instead? Should we rename this one to something like Studious Nature?

I think "no action" turns are a bit of UI smoke and mirrors under the hood. You can opt in to having some things that are definitely actions automated (like build queues in cities, worker actions, scouting with units, researching technologies) and it's difficult to define for the player what they should and shouldn't do to contribute towards the quest. You might be in situations where you're just pressing "Next turn" but getting no reward for it, because something that's an "action" you started up ages ago is still going on in the background.

Fine on changing the name to Studious Nature - and creating a GW quest. Probably isn't a Great Writing work, so... one of the great Stories, I guess? (legends, w/e we call it).

Not trying to cause a scandal with the Next Turn thing, just seemed kind of silly and flavorful. Totally not necessary. But it could be a "reward the player who moves the fewest military units over X turns" for similar effect.

S3rgeus said:
Just integration with our new systems, so that the quests don't feel like they're stuck in base CiV's context. So new systems include:

Channeling

Alignment (includes Last Battle)

Governors

Horn of Valere

Shadowspawn (existing quests deal with Barbarians, so Dragonsworn)

I think our other new mechanics all operate within the framework of existing victories and yield objectives, so the existing quests interact with those. The above ones are completely absent from CS quests. We may only need one for each, and not all of them may need a CS quest.

Liking the way you're approaching this.

S3rgeus said:
City State Quests
City state quests don't actually have "names" like resolutions and policies, do they? They generally only have summaries and icons. So the names are just summarization, though we could include them if we like.

Channeler Gift
City-State will reward a player for gifting a (female?) channeling unit to them. Targeted quest.

Alignment Shift
City-state will reward the player who generates the most Alignment change in the next 30 turns. (This is akin to the Blue Ajah quest. Usually these CS quests show the value for the leader, we can just show "change" though, rather than exposing whether it's Light or Shadow.) Global quest.

Governorship
City-state will reward you for instating a Governor of <insert governor type> in one of your cities. (We can use each available governor type/a subset of those types as separate instances of this quest, choosing the appropriate type for the appropriate CS trait.) Targeted quest.

Participate in the Hunt
City-state will reward you for producing 3 (arbitrary) Hunters of the Horn units. (Went with multiple instead of just 1 since it isn't a GP. Didn't want to tie the quest to finding/using the Horn itself since it's rare.) Targeted quest.

Fight back the Shadow
Much like the "invading barbarians" cry for help, except with Shadowspawn. Global quest.

All look good. You're right that the Alignment shift is a little close to the blue. Should be OK, though.

Some other ideas:

Help with Male Channeler
City-state will reward you for gentling their male channeling unit. Global quest.

Choosing a Side
City-state will reward you for choosing X side as the Last Battle dawns. Targeted quest. This one is weird, as it might telegraph which side they're taking too much.

Snubbing the Tower
City-state will reward you for refusing a Tower Edict in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest. For the insane.

S3rgeus said:
I can see the possibility of a Tuatha'an civilization. We'd have to make their UA uber unusual and make the player play quite differently from the city-centric default. (A similar magnitude of change as Venice.)

Yeah, like a no-city civ. Only units that spawn.... how impossible that would be...

But yeah, would probably be like the Anti-Venice or Anti-India. Numerous, small, undeveloped cities. And... no military? Sign me up!

S3rgeus said:
I'm liking Militaristic -> Borderlander (I don't think we need to restrict them to bordering the Blight).
Religious -> Enlightened is also awesome.
Mercantile -> Prosperous sounds good.

The others I'm not sure which to pick. I think my favorite for Maritime is Ceremonial or Bountiful. My main reservation about Ceremonial is it doesn't seem to link into their Food-based bonus.

For Cultural, I think Intellectual and Scholarly sound like they should go on a Science-based CS (despite those not existing). I'm still a fan of Chronicled or Historical for this one.

Sure, let's do Borderlander, Englightened, Prosperous, Bountiful, and Chronicled.

Why not? I mean, nobody cares if this mod is good or anything...

S3rgeus said:
So am I! I'm kidding. I'm confident I'm capable of making these changes, the main question is how long it will take and how feasible it is to spend that much time on AI improvements. I'd imagine overall "the AI is better" improvements will take a back seat to making the AI understand our new mechanics.

I was just talking to my game-developer friend about this mod, and his eyes went all sideways when I mentioned that you were going to do AI improvements....

Obviously some AI tweaks are essential to the mod's functionality, but I'm wondering if, perhaps, the overall improvement kinds of tweaks might wait til post-release. You know, they're coming in the same time we're getting all the DoM art, full voice work (in the proper accents!) and CG intro cutscene. Well, maybe not all of those things.

S3rgeus said:
We could make Last Battle-incited declarations of war give players their trade units back? That eliminates the risk involved in trading with those civs - players will just get to reassign those trade routes if they choose a competing Alignment. Does that take some of the risk that we want out of the whole thing though?

I like that idea a lot. I don't find the risk of losing your trade routes to be super compelling at the start of the LB - no big loss. Besides, if *everybody* loses trade routes, it's a net-zero effect anyways.

S3rgeus said:
So, some of our primary concerns from before is that we want the Tower turning to be a rare event that requires a concerted effort from multiple players. We want there to be player involvement, but we don't want a simple relationship between more Shadow players == Shadow Tower.

Drawing on a lot of what we said before, we like the idea of "quests" from the Black that pop up to individual players in secret. We agree that comparing the influence of the Black Ajah directly against the other seven isn't tenable for a variety of reasons. We like the idea of the Black Ajah "corrupting" the existing 7 Ajahs.

The first idea I had (which I started to write out and subsequently decided against) involved using the majority influential civs in Ajahs, if those civs were leaning Shadow, to dispatch "counterproductive" secret quests to those civs to increase the Black Ajah's hold. But that suffers from some of the problems we said above.

We've also got to remember that some Shadow leaning doesn't necessarily mean that civ will declare for the Shadow. They might go Neutral, heck they might choose Light in exchange for some penalties. And it would be almost impossible to appropriately dole out these quests based on those civs' perceived intentions.

That means the players need to be the initiators in the interactions with the Black Ajah. We can't have the Black going to them with quests, the players need to go to the Tower with the intention of finding and helping the Black Ajah.

So what about this:

Players who are over a certain Shadow threshold see a new button on the Tower UI which brings them to a Black Ajah summary page. (Equivalent for AIs is just unlocking the ability to take the actions I'm about to describe.)

On this summary page is a series of objectives. These objectives are big ticket items, customized to the world of the current game:

Raise 1000 (arbitrary) Gold. (Donate it to the Black.)
Raze Whitebridge. (It picks a prominent non-capital city in a civ over a certain Light leaning threshold. There are probably several instances of this objective for separate cities, deliberately spread across the map.)
Pass resolution X in the Compact.
Achieve X influence with Y Ajah.
Achieve X influence with W Ajah.
Achieve X influence with Z Ajah.
Construct/Control the <insert World Wonder here>.
Kill X Aes Sedai. (Doesn't matter which player owned them)
Control X cities.

If all of the above objectives are completed by players over the Shadow threshold, then the Tower Turns. Each objective only needs to be completed once globally and can be completed by any Shadow player (who's over the threshold). The intention is to make a set of objectives that can only be achieved by a group of players - almost never a single player (unless they're a worldspanning monstrosity civ). But those players don't necessarily know how close the other Shadow players already are to completing them. (I have 1000 gold, but why should I do this for everyone? That guy is probably Shadow and he's rolling in it! Why doesn't he do that objective?)

I'd say each player can see which objectives have been completed, but not by whom. They have no feedback on anyone's progress toward each objective except their own.

What do you think of the general idea of this system? Do we want more objectives? Should they be more difficult?

OK, OK. Really like this. Your logical pathway to this kind of system is sound and I'm totally on board. A few questions, though:

What if some of these things happen accidentally? Like, some poor light civ razes Whitebridge in their ill-timed war with Andor - could they Turn the Tower? Or do you have to "select" the quest?

When would this all unlock? Era of the Dragon? Before that?

Is there anything Light Civs/prospective Light civs can do to block it? Is there some kind of anti-Black contingent in the Tower?

How does the LB affect this? It's all still possible once everybody's declared their sides?

First look, it all looks great, but definitely looks like it might be a bit easy to do. Especially once the LB actually starts, it's much easier to communicate with the other Shadow civs - war or not - and just say "hey, i'll take Whitebridge, you get that resolution passed"

We talked earlier about how some Forsaken quests would be self-destructive in exchange for alignment/long term rewards. Should we institute that too? Like, some of the objectives could be harmful to one of the shadow civs, or even all of them (but serve some benefit for the Black)?

cool, though!

S3rgeus said:
I think social policies and tenets have inherently different types of bonuses - we reward the player for different types of things, or boost different ways. The Tower's Edicts are all dependent on an external entity being able to modify the things that it gives out bonuses/penalties for. For tenets and policies, I think we deal a lot more with the internal structure of the player's cities (rewards for specific buildings, for example) and army (giving you specific units, the Tower's unit giveaways are all channelers, and they take units on several occasions).

Even for effects that overlap between the two, we can have them stack and I'm sure players will be glad for the bonuses. The Tower Edicts are necessarily time limited, whereas Policies/Tenets are for good once adopted - so if an Edict is keeping you in positive Happiness, you appreciate it, but it's not going to last. If you find a policy that does the same thing then you'll take it immediately.

Alright. We should be fine then.

S3rgeus said:
Anywho, here are some more:

Generic Edicts

Recruit the Newcomers
Accepted that gain the Shawl in the next 30 turns join the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from. (Or we could just announce an Ajah and they all go to that one?)

cool. Kind of interesting in that it doesn't benefit any of the civs, really, but certainly would benefit that Ajah. Either way on the Amyrlin/Ajah quesiton.

S3rgeus said:
Blue Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

A Helping Hand (R)
City state rebellions (by just Authority civs?) are 30% more likely to be successful for 30 turns. (Spying and eyes and ears.) (Refusing means the bonus does not affect CSes you are allied with. Does it make sense to be able to refuse this? It's not really anything to do with what you do that makes it work.)

Proper Leadership
Governors produce +3 local Happiness for the next 30 turns.

Through Greatness
Each time a Great Person is expended in the next 30 turns, its controller receives +100 Faith.

eh.... I'd say refusing A Helping hand doesn't really make sense. I see why you put it there, but it's a little odd. All these are good, though.

S3rgeus said:
White Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Veritable Distraction
Buildings that produce Science also produce +2 Great Scientist(/Scholar/whatever) points for the next 20 turns.

Speak the Truth (R)
Diplomatic promises are mechanically binding for the next 30 turns. (If you say you won't settle near someone, it is impossible for you to do so - Settlers just plain old don't work there.)

(I think I've only just understood what you were asking before about diplomatic promises, counterpoint! As a quest it feels more Gray, but as an Edict it seems White? This edict is also quite complicated - each promise needs to be individually related to what behaviors it affects and we need ways to modify those available behaviors so that the player is incapable of performing them. Probably more trouble than it's worth.)

Sister's Keeper (pun-tastic name)
Civilizations with influence points with the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from also receive an additional (their influence) / 10 Science per turn.

first one's totally fine.

regarding the second. Yeah, it still feels a little Gray to me, the whole binding-resolutions thing. It could be fine, though. Just a little weird.

The last one, I like this edict, but am having trouble linking it to the White (aside from the yield it provides).

S3rgeus said:
Brown Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 0

Red Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Gentle Instruction
Gentling has a 20% higher success rate for the next 15 turns.

Unnecessary Distraction (R)
Warders have -20% combat strength for the next 30 turns. (Refusing means Warder units you control are unaffected.)

Wilders to Heel (R)
Non-Aes-Sedai female channeling units have -10% ranged combat strength for 30 turns.

All great! Especially the new Brown ones!

S3rgeus said:
Green Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 1

Learning from Men
Aes Sedai units deal splash damage like Saidin units for the next 30 turns.

wow. going to be nuts. seems a little mechanically funky though. Like, how could they ordain that the nature of saidar would change... oh well, will be fun.

S3rgeus said:
Yellow Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 3

Far and Wide
Aes Sedai's "Medic-like" promotion has +1 range for 30 turns.

A Cure for Stilling
Civilizations have +1 Spark (+2?) for the next 30 turns.

Blood and Bone
If a unit would die within a 3 hex radius of an Aes Sedai unit, there is a 20% chance it will remain at 1 health instead.

now we're talking! Also, maybe you've just found your Second ability for the Yellows - Blood and bone!

re: the Spark one. So, what happens after the 30 turns are up, you're in negative spark? Does that cause a penalty (a la -3 iron), or it just means you can't build any more til you lose two?

S3rgeus said:
Gray Ajah
Edicts needed to reach nine: 2

Alliance in Truth (R)
Declarations of Friendship also act as Defensive Pacts for the next 30 turns. (Each player must choose up front if they wish to refuse for the duration - regardless of whether or not war does end up happening in that time. Existing DoFs are included.)

Bonds of Trust
Civilizations may trade lump sum gold gifts without Declarations of Friendship for 30 turns. (Might be unbalancing on higher difficulties, not 100% clear on whether a player can make effective use of this in a small window of time.)

I love the Alliance one. It's honestly one of the first ones I feel might get refused relatively often. The civs with a bunch of DoFs tend to also be the civs who don't want to jump into war.... so, end your DoFs or piss off the tower?

counterpoint · Jan 18, 2015

S3rgeus said:
A good reference for how they should be placed on the tree exists in the old diplomatic victory vs the old science victory (pre-BNW, when the diplo victory changed). You used to have to build the UN to trigger the world leader elections. (Someone had to build it, not necessarily the winner.) The UN tech was on the same horizontal placement as the spaceship parts - in the last few techs on the tree. But if you clicked on the UN tech at the beginning of the game, you'd see it had somewhere in the region of 50 prereqs before you could reach it. Getting all of the spaceship parts required 75 or so techs. So we want the science victory to be as tech-intensive as we can (to the point where it is balanced) by "spreading out" the techs that unlock the innovations - so that they pull in more prereqs.

Ah, very good point. Yeah, makes sense to me.

S3rgeus said:
Completely agree that the whole "go to a civ for a bonus that might make them win" would lead to a deadlock. Dang players and their wanting others not to win the game!

On the topic of the Envoy, making a unit that's a civilian-but-not-quite is actually extremely complicated. CiV's combat system is based on the assumption that civilian units have no combat strength. (That's how it tells them apart underneath - units with 0 combat strength are civilians, all others are military.) We have the full source for all of this, but it's a lot of work extracting that assumption from the existing code and replacing it to gain a not-quite-military classification.

I think having the Envoy as a civilian unit makes sense even without considering the above. They're extremely valuable and should be properly defended - allowing them to stack with military units but having them die in a single hit (like GGs) models that quite well. Then considering the difficulties above, I think a civilian makes even more sense.

Ah, let me explain my not-civilian rationale a bit better. Open borders agreements and all that are great friends to the Showcaser. They can bring in their military to defend the envoy.

But with a science victory imminent, nobody's going to grant that civ an open borders agreement, right? So these envoys will be totally unprotected, and highly snipe-able, right? I was looking for a solution to that issue - maybe you could buy at least a turn or two of movement somehow before death. I don't think we want the science victory people having to declare war so they can bring in escort -maybe the showcase-recipient civ will declare war in defense anyways - but let THEM take the diplo hit for being the aggressor.

Maybe it is NOT a civilian, but a military unit that can't attack (like the Assyrian Seige Towers, without the city-attack)?

S3rgeus said:
I'm in favor of the Envoy being unique per Innovation. As you talk about later, players can optimize and compensate for "bad defending" in the case where the Envoy is generic. I think Bad Defending should be punished quite harshly here (so they need to wait until they can rebuild that specific Envoy).

The available Envoys will only be visible as the player heads into the end of the game, so it won't clutter up the production screen when they're not relevant.

In terms of implementation difficulty, a unit per Innovation is easier! Simpler relationships between missions, units, and what those missions do.

ok, agreed!

S3rgeus said:
Awesome about Envoys moving freely through borders and the status of Innovations during war - those are good solutions!

I'm unsure about the target location though, I think even city is too easy. Territory is definitely very easy. This is going to be happening in the endgame, when civs have sprawled out across the map. Some civs may have individual cities that they've traded for/converted/captured isolated and far away on the map, and almost no one has enough units to patrol their every single border against a single incoming unit. Humans will be able to game the AI at this very effectively as well - working out their scouting patterns and darting in with just the Envoy in between.

All of the small satellite cities in a large civilization make reaching territory vs reaching city very similar as well. (The AI enjoy their cities on single-hex islands.) Even with a standard movement range of 2, reaching a city from an external hex, if planned well, won't take more than 2 turns. And the defending player can't see the Envoy until after that first move - so they either already have a unit in range, or there's nothing they can do. (Ranged attacks, including cities, don't 1-hit-kill civilians.)

I can see some argument against capital as well though - a very large civ that has expanded radially has made its capital very hard to get to (stealthily) without the Envoy being killed. Now, I'd say the BNW Culture victory gives us a good comparison here though. If you're going for culture and there's one other player who's also gone in on culture and been quite successful, dominating his culture will take forever (if it's even possible). In this case, the best way to pursue the Culture victory is the kill the one civ you can't gain cultural influence over.

I'd say the turtled-up-against-Envoys civ is in a similar position - they've structured their entire civilization so that in the late game, it's difficult to get an Envoy to them. But if you're going for the Science victory, you should have superior units (because you have a tech lead). There's now one player you need to kill, rather than just out-Science. And in the Envoy's case, you don't even need to exterminate them/cut them down enough to reduce their culture output (like BNW culture victory) you just need to get a single unit to their capital - you can cut a swath of destruction straight for it.

A disadvantage of this system is smaller (particularly Duel) maps. If you can get a game-winning non-combat unit to your enemy's capital, why not just conquer it and win? But then that's a problem on those map sizes anyway, the inverse of the Science victory not scaling (it doesn't get harder for larger maps, while Domination does) is that Domination is far and away the easiest and fastest way to win a Duel map for all but the most evenly matched opponents.

Alternatively we could place a population threshold on the cities you can demonstrate Innovations at. That way players can't use tiny, undefended satellite cities to demonstrate Innovations - they have to go for the core ones each civ has been developing for some time. From the defender's point of view, it's almost impossible to make sure that none of your 'big' cities are on an external border, without meticulous game-long planning. (And if a player has managed that, then good job to them! It should make things more difficult for the Envoy-er, because the defender went to a lot of trouble for it.)

I'm generally in favor of the capital approach though.

In fact, if we say that you can only demonstrate at original capitals, then we don't need to worry about how many players are still alive at the end of the game, and it tells us which civ we can demonstrate to multiple times (by who owns which capital) for free.

wow, ok. very exhaustive deconstruction of that there topic. There's a lot to consider here.

You've pretty much swayed me on capitals. I think that makes sense. And to the turtle players.... in most decently-large maps, you won't have to necessarily Showcase to that one civ anyways...

Yeah, capitals is fine. Population Threshold could be cool too. I could go either way on that. As far as original capitals... hmmm, I don't know. it messes with the how-many-times-per-civ thing a bit. Again, could go either way on this.

It feels weird to follow it up with such a short response, but, basically, yeah, I'm on board with any of these.

S3rgeus said:
I like this - doubling up only when necessary makes sure that you've always got to interact with the maximum number of civs possible. And like you've said, this makes the science victory (like domination and diplo) more difficult on larger maps. As long as all difficulties are doing that, it's making it more balanced.

Also completely on board with the idea that you can't double up on one civ until you've demonstrated another Innovation elsewhere. Makes it more difficult to "surprise demonstrate" (that sounds like something that gets people arrested) to one civ all at once, which we want to avoid.

Your numbers all sound good to me - on the ones with options I'd go for the combination that lets the Science player ignore fewer opponents.

We will also need to deal with all of the numbers that don't divide well, since the Advanced Setup menu lets you choose any number of civs (equal or less than the maximum for your chosen map size). In the case where the player will need to double up on some opponents, but not all, the science civ can demonstrate to any of the valid ones they want, right? (They need to demonstrate 8 times, but there are >= 3 enemies they can demonstrate 3 times each to - they can choose whoever they want to demonstrate only twice to?)

Great. Glad you think this will work. I do think we should be careful on the values though - I don't want it to be too easy.

Regarding the doubling up, I should clarify that you don't *need* to double up. If you hae to showcase 8 innovations on an 8 player map, you COULD show to each of the seven civs once (and twice to one civ, to make 8). I don't mean to suggest that you HAVE to show to 4 civs 2x each. So, to answer [what i think is your] quesiton - i'd leave it up to the civ.

S3rgeus said:
After the set up you've described above about distributing who an individual civ can demonstrate to, I think bonuses for the receiving civ only make sense. Also cool, like you've said here, that those bonuses can be targeting a specific yield/playstyle, so the demonstrating player can be smart about who they give science/culture/faith to.

Also agreed that a Showcase bonus shouldn't be "locked" once it's been demonstrated to a given civ by anyone - exactly like you said, that can make the science victory impossible to accomplish in some cases.

That does mean that all of the bonuses need to be usefully stackable. Civ A demonstrating Innovation X to Civ C shouldn't let Civ B also demonstrate X at C with no foreign civ receiving any benefits from it. So we can't unlock new abilities for units/buildings/players from the Showcases, because then we need 11 (max enemy civs) * number of Innovations unlockable abilities for each consecutive Showcase to also add something to the "defending" civ.

So civ-wide yield bonuses seem like something that scale well that way? Static bonuses like a permanent +50 (arbitrary) science/culture/gold per turn. (Happiness works too, though that's not "per turn".) That works for the "civ-wide" yields that are aggregated - but things like Food and Production are a bit more distributed. All sources of Food produce an additional +1 Food would break the universe. All cities have static +5 Food makes more sense, now that I think about it.

So then each instance of the same Showcase at each civ just stacks on the same bonus again. (So it's at total +100 science per turn after the second one, for example.)

I don't think the player performing the Showcase gets anything beyond progress towards the Science victory. The spaceship parts are completely useless (in fact they're a liability) until you've won, so I think we want to do the same thing with the Innovations. (The techs themselves obviously have bonuses for the player researching them.)

You're right that the setup kind of demands the bonuses be civ-specific. After all the complexity of the Showcase system, I feel like it would be rather unintuitive to the player to find that the bonuses are indeed global.

Yes, stackability makes sense.

I know this disagrees with what I said before, but I'm starting to thing that making these one-time dumps is ideal. Not a yield/turn thing, but a dump. A pile of science, faith, production, happiness, gold, etc. Food is tricky though for obvious reasons. The dump just seems a bit less "intrusive" and hard to keep track of for the receiving player. Oh, cool, science! Right?

S3rgeus said:
I knew you'd already mentioned some stuff in this post similar to what I was writing above! Here it is. Time limits go a ways to making abilities possible, but there are still difficulties if the civs doing the Showcasing (say there are multiple close to winning) Demonstrate in quick succession. The first one conferred an ability to a foreign civ, which disadvantaged the Demonstrator, but the second and third only extended that ability by a few turns - not nearly as much of a disadvantage.

Yield bonuses do scale and stack well, and I'm thinking they could be permanent? The game will be ending soon - if someone's close on science then there should be other players close on other victories - so make it more of a dilemma for the Demonstrator. We can scale back to turn-limited if it turns out to be too unbalancing, but I suspect permanent will work.

right, I suppose permanence could be fine - though that, again, makes me want to just do a fixed amount of the yield, instead of a yeild per turn thing. Please tell me why I'm wrong, because this thought is definitely in disagreement with last-week-counterpoint.

S3rgeus said:
I'm sorely tempted by slotting +1 range into the permanent stackable stuff discussing above so that we can make intercontinental ballistic crossbows.

I think before we can select from this we should decide on yields vs abilities and time limiting and that stuff. My favorites here will vary depending on what we choose there. I agree with the overall flavor of them and definitely agree that we want suitable bonuses for the flavor of what Innovation is being Showcased. Also agree on steam-powered unit from the tech vs gold/production bonus from being "Showcased at" by that Innovation.

wow, yeah, 1+1+1+1+1+1 range on a ballistae. nice. Too bad they have a sight of 2...

ok, as stated before, I'm down for yields. Either a dump (ideally as I think right now) or a per-turn thing.

permanence is also fine.

But I think some of these are sort of "abilities" are sort of yield-like, in that they are stackable. like +1 gold per river trade route.... could easily turn into +2 or +3 gold when stacked. Does this one count as a "yeild" or an ability?

S3rgeus said:
Very cool! I feel like I've been quite critical above, but I very much like this idea! Nice one!

good. Glad for that. Won't take as long as diplo, maybe!

S3rgeus said:
I'll also note that I've used Demonstrating and Showcasing intermingled above as terminology for "showing an Innovation" to another civ. The two terms are interchangeable, I just didn't pick one and stick with it.

ah... hmmm. no preference for which. I think Showcasing is more meaningful to the player, but perhaps also a bit more out of universe....

S3rgeus · Jan 20, 2015

Sorry for the delay and there will unfortunately be another one before I can post after this! Between visitors and traveling this weekend, I'll be back to posting next Monday (26th).

counterpoint said:
reading this first section (on White Ajah) was a highly emotionally up-and-down journey. You made a series of good points, all which convinced me... and didn't agree with one another... Consider:

you're right! Flat science would be too good. This is probably better.

oh crap, you're right. The Science V people will just run away with it!

Hmmm... this is a pretty good idea. Maybe the rewards for repetition are scalable and diminish with multiple cities? Then again, science V is much easier with fewer cities, right? So maybe it's not likely those players can abuse this... unless it makes the S.Victory too easy for wide civs...

totally right.

This is a great idea! I like this. But.... wait, what's the big advantage for sharing your science between cities?

You see what you're putting me through, right? This is very difficult.

Honestly, I'm not sure which is best, though I am more keen on the "special effect" ones.

Oh wait, weird idea - what if it upgrades "Research" in the production menu. Like performing "Research" provided 10% (arbitrary) extra science output. Not likely to be totally abused, right?

Very true, I was feeling very roller-coastered (technical term) while writing them out too. Quick point about the trade routes though - internal trade routes don't cost the origin city anything. The "shared" science/production/food is magic free yield that just shows up at the destination city (this is how CiV does it already). The "cost" of this is not having the international trade route you could establish instead - hence less money.

I don't know if players would use the production -> research conversion from the production menu, there's usually something better for you to build. It favors Tall civs, since they're more likely to have big cities with "nothing to do" to gain from this.

In terms of trade routes with the Tower yielding science - yeah, it does favor wide civs, but only particularly if they're near-ish to the Tower. Proximity to the city will make a lot more difference, which will largely be determined by starting location.

There I go not agreeing with myself again - all of the above are positives for mutually exclusive suggestions. I don't know what to say here - they all have merits?

counterpoint said:
oh dang. of course. We're talking highest-level abilities here. Makes sense.

I like this. Though, it should probably be pretty significant, right?

Yeah, to offset the loss of map coverage and flexibility of the Warder (and the combat strength and separate health pool) it needs to be pretty beefy.

counterpoint said:
OK, ready to settle on most of these. Regarding the yellow - I'm actually talking about their targeted healing ability - do the yelows have a medic ability that's any better than normal aes sedai? I thought their main perk was their uber heal spell?

The Yellows have the same healing "medic-like" ability as other Sisters by default, but we could use this to make them stand out? The main perk is the targeted healing spell. The targeted healing spell will already be like +50 (like the promotion) by default? That's a pretty awesome heal on the spot, I think being able to support multiple units in addition to that (by just being nearby) would make the Yellow Sisters seriously stand out.

counterpoint said:
re: values for reds and greens, 15 sounds good, though I'm also tempted now to make the Green one a +% bonus against shadowspawn only (maybe a higher bonus?)

I think it's nice that there's some symmetry between Green and Red. Shadowspawn also isn't useful for as many civs.

counterpoint said:
That's really cool, for the white! I like it. Super weird.

Awesome!

Once we've decided on all of them (from your section below most likely) then I'll edit them into the summary.

counterpoint said:
Alright, so let's take a look. I'm listing their primary ability here for reference purposes in () and stat boost in []

Yes! Glad to see these all in one place, I was beginning to lose track of what went where!

counterpoint said:
Blue (advising the governor, producing Presige or Faith) [+2 sight] - we spoke of them aiding the search for the Horn of Valere somehow. I think that's cool, though it's not yet clear how big a deal the horn search will be. Seems neat though.

Blue Sister units can discover the Horn of Valere? How good that is depends on how/if we plan to change the Horn.

counterpoint said:
Greens (second Warder) [+15% ranged strength.. possibly against shadowspawn]- allowing a channeler-warder seems cool.

Channeler warder sounds good to me!

counterpoint said:
Yellows (targeted healing power) [increase healing rate... how much] - we didn't really have much in the way of discussion on a second ability here - any ideas were mostly alternatives to the primary ability. Hmmm.... Any ideas? Weird one: maybe workers in adjacent tiles work 20% faster? You know, healthy and all that? Is worker-speed pointless relatively late in the game (when someone's likely to get this? There's also the splash healing thing. Like, combine targeted healing and the medic healing - when they use the targeted one (needs a name!) surrounding units also heal - makes them kinda one-trick ponies, though.

Depending on what we decide above, but imagine if a player had a Yellow Sister with all of the healing bonuses at once. A "Medic-like" promotion with a range of two and a targeted heal with "splash damage". They'd make any army they supported invulnerable!

But it looks like one of the Edicts from later on caught your eye for this ability? Blood and Bone could be the Yellow's second ability? I'll create a new Edict to replace it below!

Changing worker rate is an interesting one though! We should be able to use that elsewhere.

counterpoint said:
Reds (enhanced gentling chance) [15% combat defense against male channelers] - looks like big bonuses to warderless fighting - what should it be? probably a bonus to melee defense, and combat str. vs male channelers? how much?

Could just be all combat strength - ranged and melee? 50%? 75%?

counterpoint said:
Whites (advise governor, producing science) [big bonus after tech is researched?] - Again, here we don't seem to have a lot of ideas. Seems to me like we're kind of overloading on the science department though - might be nice to make it slightly different... honstly, no ideas here.

Technologies cannot be stolen from cities within 3 hexes of a White Sister? (When the same player controls the Sister and the city. Though could be fun if it was universal - any White Sister with this ability can affect any city? Plays into both the science and the lying aspects of the White!)

counterpoint said:
Grays (unclear which was the primary ability. we have ignore borders and "Create binding trade agreement" written in the summary) [+2 movement] - so are both of those abilities at level 1, or does one of them unlock at level 2? If not one of these, than what?

I think both ignore borders and binding trade were intended to be the primary ability - but I'm thinking we might split them up. Are Gray Sisters combat units? We discussed them being civilians at some point, but I think we've moved away from that? If they're combat units then we can separate these - ignore borders is powerful on a combat unit. But if they're civilians then they need to keep both as a primary ability - there's not much for them to do otherwise.

counterpoint said:
Browns (work antiquity sites quickly, with cooldown - I think) [+10% exp] - hmmm... not sure what to do here either.

Right about working Antiquity sites.

GWs dug up by Brown Sisters have an additional civilization source option? (So you might dig up a site and get the choice: Tar Valon, Andor, or Shienar artifact, instead of just two. (Plus the usual lump of Culture option.)) It only really adds to the first ability though - and might completely usurp archeologists then?

counterpoint said:
um.... uh.... I.... never knew about the coup option. So, yeah.

Didn't the AI ever try to stage a coup in your city states?

counterpoint said:
But, in any case, I do think it can work similarly to how it does in CiV. That said, I don't think you should be able to dump 7 spies into the WT - should have to choose one Ajah, right? Or... are we talking Tower overall influence?

I think we're talking Ajah - being able to swap overall Tower influence with other players could be weird. (Leads to Oppression civs with massively positive influence when they unseat a well liked Authority civ.) So yeah, only one spy per civ in Tar Valon and that spy must choose an Ajah to spy on. Edited into the summary!

counterpoint said:
hmmm... I wasn't sure that the sisters WERE the governors - I thought maybe they were "advisers," sorta sitting near the city. Either works for me.... though we'll have to flesh out all those mechanics of course.

Yeah, I don't remember what we ended up deciding on this - I remember we talked it through for a while.

counterpoint said:
Oh, this is interesting, them losing their bonuses. That certainly makes a lot of sense. Here's the thing, though, is this kind of redundant and/or double-jeapardy? Refusals will obviously cost you influence and provide a hit to your relations with the Ajah's, right? That would likely cause that civ to lose their friend status with the Ajah, right?

Also, we could take away sisters, right?
I was also thinking we could just provide a flat penalty (not an inversion) to their trade with the Tower and Authority civs, instead of precluding it.

In any case, your suggestion could work, I just wonder if the coupling of WT-penalties and extra effects is a bit overkill.

Taking away Sisters is a good one. Would the player choose which ones ("You must give up 2 Sisters") or would the Tower choose ("X has returned to the Tower.")? Does this happen to Authority civs too or is it just a differentiation for Liberation?

I could see a flat penalty with Authority civs and the Tower working too!

counterpoint said:
Fine on changing the name to Studious Nature - and creating a GW quest. Probably isn't a Great Writing work, so... one of the great Stories, I guess? (legends, w/e we call it).

I've changed the name.

In terms of a GW quest:

A Good Book
The Stedding will reward you for creating a Great work of Writing. (substitute what we rename GW to.) Targeted quest.

counterpoint said:
Not trying to cause a scandal with the Next Turn thing, just seemed kind of silly and flavorful. Totally not necessary. But it could be a "reward the player who moves the fewest military units over X turns" for similar effect.

Of course, no worries. I think the human player would almost always win the military units thing though - the AI moves its units around for no reason very often.

counterpoint said:
All look good. You're right that the Alignment shift is a little close to the blue. Should be OK, though.

Some other ideas:

Help with Male Channeler
City-state will reward you for gentling their male channeling unit. Global quest.

Choosing a Side
City-state will reward you for choosing X side as the Last Battle dawns. Targeted quest. This one is weird, as it might telegraph which side they're taking too much.

Snubbing the Tower
City-state will reward you for refusing a Tower Edict in the next 30 turns. Targeted quest. For the insane.

I like all of these! I've added yours and mine to the summary.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, like a no-city civ. Only units that spawn.... how impossible that would be...

But yeah, would probably be like the Anti-Venice or Anti-India. Numerous, small, undeveloped cities. And... no military? Sign me up!

UA: Way of the Leaf: You cannot build settlers or military units. Every time one of your civilian units is killed a settler appears in your capital. Declaring war on the Tuatha'an also declares war on all civilizations that border the Tuatha'an. (Bordering civ is anyone whose culture borders touch yours.)

UB: Tinker Camp: Replaces the Inn (or some other basic building) +2 Happiness. Generates (5 - City Population) * 4 Global (civ wide) Happiness.

UU: Tinker Caravan: Replaces the Caravan. Cannot establish gold trade routes with other civs. Can establish international food and production trade routes.

And that is a civ that should play a ton of small cities that, despite not having a military, doesn't roll over at the mention of war!

counterpoint said:
Sure, let's do Borderlander, Englightened, Prosperous, Bountiful, and Chronicled.

Cool, edited in!

counterpoint said:
Why not? I mean, nobody cares if this mod is good or anything...

Do you not like the CS name choices?

counterpoint said:
I was just talking to my game-developer friend about this mod, and his eyes went all sideways when I mentioned that you were going to do AI improvements....

Obviously some AI tweaks are essential to the mod's functionality, but I'm wondering if, perhaps, the overall improvement kinds of tweaks might wait til post-release. You know, they're coming in the same time we're getting all the DoM art, full voice work (in the proper accents!) and CG intro cutscene. Well, maybe not all of those things.

Definitely, overall improvements are a super stretch goal. AI is crazy complicated but it makes so much of the game better. A "better AI" mod is its own separate entity anyway - and it's a big mod by itself. We're certainly not taking on all of that. It's just something I've always wanted to do - if I didn't start up WoTMod I probably would have done an AI mod instead.

All of this reminds me that we are in dire need of artists. But that tends to be less of a problem when there's something functional to play!

counterpoint said:
I like that idea a lot. I don't find the risk of losing your trade routes to be super compelling at the start of the LB - no big loss. Besides, if *everybody* loses trade routes, it's a net-zero effect anyways.

Sounds good - should that go into the LB summary rather than the diplo one? We have a crossover section in the diplo summary, but this feels more like a general property of the Last Battle.

counterpoint said:
OK, OK. Really like this. Your logical pathway to this kind of system is sound and I'm totally on board. A few questions, though:

What if some of these things happen accidentally? Like, some poor light civ razes Whitebridge in their ill-timed war with Andor - could they Turn the Tower? Or do you have to "select" the quest?

If that was the last remaining quest, then yes, a Light civ could do it unwittingly. There are multiple cities-to-be-razed though, and many other objectives. If the Shadow civs are that close then I'd say they were going to make it anyway - the purpose of the razing is to spread the Shadow's armies thin across the map if they want to do this - attack the whole world and without retaining the benefits of a large, well developed city.

counterpoint said:
When would this all unlock? Era of the Dragon? Before that?

World Era, Age of the Dragon? Or it could become available to civs over the Shadow threshold as they individually move into the Age of the Dragon?

counterpoint said:
Is there anything Light Civs/prospective Light civs can do to block it? Is there some kind of anti-Black contingent in the Tower?

I'm not sure. I'm thinking not - the Tower is Light by default and remains that way unless the Shadow succeeds. But I see what you mean about mechanically wanting the Light players to be able to fight back. I think generally playing well is a good defense though. Don't let your cities be captured, keep high influence with Ajahs in the Tower.

counterpoint said:
How does the LB affect this? It's all still possible once everybody's declared their sides?

I think so - if it's all achieved after the start of the Last Battle then the Tower can switch sides at the eleventh hour, dooming the Light. That sounds too cool not to do.

counterpoint said:
First look, it all looks great, but definitely looks like it might be a bit easy to do. Especially once the LB actually starts, it's much easier to communicate with the other Shadow civs - war or not - and just say "hey, i'll take Whitebridge, you get that resolution passed"

How difficult razing the cities (multiple cities to raze) is will depend a lot on how strong the Light is. If there are a few or even just one really strong Light players, they could make Turning the Tower almost impossible. And since the Ajahs ones are constantly in flux (and all objectives need to be completed at once), Light players gaining influence in the Tower could undo a Shadow player's completion of those objectives.

Compact resolutions probably get harder after the Last Battle starts. If Light players see Shadow players voting in a block, they'll want to block that resolution at all costs. (Or repeal it.)

But we definitely want it to be hard. What other objectives make sense? "Exterminate civilization X"?

What if the "raze city" one didn't only target Light civs? What if sometimes the Shadow civs had to sacrifice a while city for the greater Darkness? (And since you can't raze your own cities, that starts a Shadow civil war - unless the target civ is very devoted and just trades it away.)

counterpoint said:
We talked earlier about how some Forsaken quests would be self-destructive in exchange for alignment/long term rewards. Should we institute that too? Like, some of the objectives could be harmful to one of the shadow civs, or even all of them (but serve some benefit for the Black)?

cool, though!

Definitely had this in mind for Forsaken quests and we can do it here too. I didn't want to just duplicate them (pillage your own improvements and such). What other counterproductive things could we ask players to do?

counterpoint said:
cool. Kind of interesting in that it doesn't benefit any of the civs, really, but certainly would benefit that Ajah. Either way on the Amyrlin/Ajah quesiton.

Let's go for Ajah for now! I've edited it into the master list.

counterpoint said:
eh.... I'd say refusing A Helping hand doesn't really make sense. I see why you put it there, but it's a little odd. All these are good, though.

Awesome, I've removed the (R) and edited them in!

counterpoint said:
first one's totally fine.

regarding the second. Yeah, it still feels a little Gray to me, the whole binding-resolutions thing. It could be fine, though. Just a little weird.

The last one, I like this edict, but am having trouble linking it to the White (aside from the yield it provides).

The second one is a bit of a crazy one from a technical perspective too. How about we replace it with:

Exposing Lies
Police Stations (obviously we will rename these) can be built 30% faster for the next 30 turns. (Thwarting spies portrayed as exposing truth again.)

The last one isn't particularly linked to the White itself, but more to Alviarin - Keeper from the White to a Red Amyrlin. The yield is the only real connection to the core ideals.

counterpoint said:
All great! Especially the new Brown ones!

I put extra thought into the Brown ones.

counterpoint said:
wow. going to be nuts. seems a little mechanically funky though. Like, how could they ordain that the nature of saidar would change... oh well, will be fun.

I was thinking the Aes Sedai were using different styles of weaves that put to use what they'd seen Saidin users do, rather than changing how Saidar worked.

counterpoint said:
now we're talking! Also, maybe you've just found your Second ability for the Yellows - Blood and bone!

Second ability it is! So we need a replacement Edict:

Traveling Provisions
Food Trade routes provide an additional +10 Food per turn for 30 turns.

counterpoint said:
re: the Spark one. So, what happens after the 30 turns are up, you're in negative spark? Does that cause a penalty (a la -3 iron), or it just means you can't build any more til you lose two?

I think it has a penalty, like -3 iron. Eliminate it either by disbanding units or somehow gaining more Spark.

counterpoint said:
I love the Alliance one. It's honestly one of the first ones I feel might get refused relatively often. The civs with a bunch of DoFs tend to also be the civs who don't want to jump into war.... so, end your DoFs or piss off the tower?

Yeah, definitely! There's no way to end a DoF that's already agreed though (I think?) so you just need to wait for it to expire. Risky when that could drag you into a war!

I've edited all of the discussed Edicts above into the master list, the last two replacements are left out until we've both seen them!

S3rgeus · Jan 20, 2015

counterpoint said:
Ah, let me explain my not-civilian rationale a bit better. Open borders agreements and all that are great friends to the Showcaser. They can bring in their military to defend the envoy.

But with a science victory imminent, nobody's going to grant that civ an open borders agreement, right? So these envoys will be totally unprotected, and highly snipe-able, right? I was looking for a solution to that issue - maybe you could buy at least a turn or two of movement somehow before death. I don't think we want the science victory people having to declare war so they can bring in escort -maybe the showcase-recipient civ will declare war in defense anyways - but let THEM take the diplo hit for being the aggressor.

Maybe it is NOT a civilian, but a military unit that can't attack (like the Assyrian Seige Towers, without the city-attack)?

Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense! Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
wow, ok. very exhaustive deconstruction of that there topic. There's a lot to consider here.

You've pretty much swayed me on capitals. I think that makes sense. And to the turtle players.... in most decently-large maps, you won't have to necessarily Showcase to that one civ anyways...

Yeah, capitals is fine. Population Threshold could be cool too. I could go either way on that. As far as original capitals... hmmm, I don't know. it messes with the how-many-times-per-civ thing a bit. Again, could go either way on this.

It feels weird to follow it up with such a short response, but, basically, yeah, I'm on board with any of these.

Cool, capitals sounds good. Original capitals shouldn't interfere with the how-many-times-per-civ, it just becomes how-many-times-per-original-capital and otherwise stays the same, right?

Being able to avoid the civs that have built a strong turtle position is a good point though. I like the idea of doubling up when we need to on different map sizes, but having considered a bit longer, I'm not sure if we want to allow any players to be ignored? The culture victory is good because you need to overcome every other player, so any of them could become a threat to that. If you can avoid interacting with the civ that creates a good defensive position, then all that civ has really done is deprive themselves of the Showcase bonus - the Science player isn't really inconvenienced until several players create good defensive positions. That's not awesome - other players doing badly shouldn't make your chances of victory worse.

Is there a way to distribute the Showcases so that you always have to demonstrate to everyone? Then the problem becomes the largest map sizes instead of the smallest. What if you have to Showcase until you've Showcased all techs and to every civ? That would mean you Showcase some twice (at 8 total Showcases available you'd never need to do it more than twice unless the player maximum were increased).

counterpoint said:
Great. Glad you think this will work. I do think we should be careful on the values though - I don't want it to be too easy.

Regarding the doubling up, I should clarify that you don't *need* to double up. If you hae to showcase 8 innovations on an 8 player map, you COULD show to each of the seven civs once (and twice to one civ, to make 8). I don't mean to suggest that you HAVE to show to 4 civs 2x each. So, to answer [what i think is your] quesiton - i'd leave it up to the civ.

Cool this sounds good - I think all of my thoughts related to doubling up vs player numbers are above!

counterpoint said:
You're right that the setup kind of demands the bonuses be civ-specific. After all the complexity of the Showcase system, I feel like it would be rather unintuitive to the player to find that the bonuses are indeed global.

Yes, stackability makes sense.

I know this disagrees with what I said before, but I'm starting to thing that making these one-time dumps is ideal. Not a yield/turn thing, but a dump. A pile of science, faith, production, happiness, gold, etc. Food is tricky though for obvious reasons. The dump just seems a bit less "intrusive" and hard to keep track of for the receiving player. Oh, cool, science! Right?

I'm not sure, the receiving player doesn't really need to keep track of the bonuses. They'll just be better at stuff. Their units/buildings will build faster, or their techs will research faster, or their cities will grow faster, but it doesn't require input from them. It would be represented in the yields "breakdown" on the tooltip when you hover over the menu for that yield at the top of the screen.

I think that yield per turn starts a snowball for the player trying to win the Science victory. They've got to be committed to it if they're going to go for it - otherwise they're just making their enemies better. Dumps of yields can make critical differences (like whether or not you finish a given Wonder first or win a CS science quest) but usually only when deployed strategically by the person receiving them.

It also means that the more players are close to winning the Science victory, the more even the playing field will become at the end of the game, as everyone gets ongoing boosts from the Showcases. (Which could be impressive, there's usually a fairly clear winner emerging.)

At the same time, the game will end soon. The total amount you'd get from a yield dump is likely more than the amounts that would be generated in the remainder of the game from the per turn bonuses. Per turn bonuses are still more direct-able by the receiving civ though.

counterpoint said:
wow, yeah, 1+1+1+1+1+1 range on a ballistae. nice. Too bad they have a sight of 2...

Give them the indirect fire promotion and you're golden! It'd be super weird, they would be able to fire across big gaps of fog-of-war if you had another unit/city to spot for them nearer the target.

counterpoint said:
But I think some of these are sort of "abilities" are sort of yield-like, in that they are stackable. like +1 gold per river trade route.... could easily turn into +2 or +3 gold when stacked. Does this one count as a "yeild" or an ability?

Yeah, +1 gold per river trade route is definitely a stackable yield. It's not global, but it's easier to arithmetically scale for multiple instances of the Showcase!

counterpoint said:
good. Glad for that. Won't take as long as diplo, maybe!

Shouldn't do, looks like we've got a lot of it down already!

counterpoint said:
ah... hmmm. no preference for which. I think Showcasing is more meaningful to the player, but perhaps also a bit more out of universe....

I've been using Showcasing this time - I think I prefer it to Demonstrating. No better names have come to mind yet!

counterpoint · Jan 26, 2015

All right! Well here I am. I know you're posting on Monday... hopefully I get this in in time (it's very much still Sunday here, but is already Monday in "the old country").

S3rgeus said:
Very true, I was feeling very roller-coastered (technical term) while writing them out too. Quick point about the trade routes though - internal trade routes don't cost the origin city anything. The "shared" science/production/food is magic free yield that just shows up at the destination city (this is how CiV does it already). The "cost" of this is not having the international trade route you could establish instead - hence less money.

I don't know if players would use the production -> research conversion from the production menu, there's usually something better for you to build. It favors Tall civs, since they're more likely to have big cities with "nothing to do" to gain from this.

In terms of trade routes with the Tower yielding science - yeah, it does favor wide civs, but only particularly if they're near-ish to the Tower. Proximity to the city will make a lot more difference, which will largely be determined by starting location.

There I go not agreeing with myself again - all of the above are positives for mutually exclusive suggestions. I don't know what to say here - they all have merits?

ok, duh about the internal trade routes thing.

Also, yeah, you're right - nobody ever uses "Research."

OK, so it looks like it's between "Science from Internal Trade Routes" and "Science from Trade Routes with the Tower." hmmm....

I'm tempted to go with the former, actually, if only because it seems kind of "different." But, honestly, either of these works fine. Your call.

S3rgeus said:
The Yellows have the same healing "medic-like" ability as other Sisters by default, but we could use this to make them stand out? The main perk is the targeted healing spell. The targeted healing spell will already be like +50 (like the promotion) by default? That's a pretty awesome heal on the spot, I think being able to support multiple units in addition to that (by just being nearby) would make the Yellow Sisters seriously stand out.

right. that makes sense. The huge targeted spell probably doesn't need to be increased - better medic it is!

S3rgeus said:
I think it's nice that there's some symmetry between Green and Red. Shadowspawn also isn't useful for as many civs.

ok, no shadowspawn then. Kill them with fire!

S3rgeus said:
Blue Sister units can discover the Horn of Valere? How good that is depends on how/if we plan to change the Horn.

I can't tell what kind of question this is? I'm not sure if they do or should do so - I'm merely reporting what we already discussed. That said, I think it could be cool, I guess. It's interesting that the two blue abilities - governor/advisor and Valere - both concern game mechanics we haven't fully settled on.

So, if you like the idea of it being *something* Horn related, then I say let's just leave it as "Something horn related" and we'll figure it out later? (should probably be left in red, of course.)

This latest series of posts is the first where we've been linking to the old summaries. Is it smart for us to make a place (almost a table of contents) where we say where some of the big stuff can be found in the thread (and maybe with links). By my recollection, we've so far:

- Last Battle Summary: page 9
- Channeling Summary: page 15
- Diplomatic/Tower Summary: page 17

We're likely to very shortly have a Science Victory summary, then a cultural one, GP...... seems advisable to write down where this stuff is, right? Any suggestions? Should you add it to the end of your post on page one?

S3rgeus said:
Depending on what we decide above, but imagine if a player had a Yellow Sister with all of the healing bonuses at once. A "Medic-like" promotion with a range of two and a targeted heal with "splash damage". They'd make any army they supported invulnerable!

But it looks like one of the Edicts from later on caught your eye for this ability? Blood and Bone could be the Yellow's second ability? I'll create a new Edict to replace it below!

Changing worker rate is an interesting one though! We should be able to use that elsewhere.

Yeah, you're now scaring me that I was kind of making the yellows too good. Blood and Bone sounds great though!

Let's save the worker thing for later, then.

S3rgeus said:
Could just be all combat strength - ranged and melee? 50%? 75%?

we're talking just against males, right? I'd say 50% sounds good. It should certainly make them better against men than a levelled up green would be), and by a significant margin.

S3rgeus said:
Technologies cannot be stolen from cities within 3 hexes of a White Sister? (When the same player controls the Sister and the city. Though could be fun if it was universal - any White Sister with this ability can affect any city? Plays into both the science and the lying aspects of the White!)

This is weird, but I think I like it! It feels "different," which is good. Makes them a kind of science inquisitor. Maybe let's "Great Firewall it", though - like 99% or something. Maybe let's go with 90 or 95%, actually.

Potentially very good if you're turtle-ing (and have theoretically no need for a combat sister). Here's a question, though: the primary ability of the white is to "advise" or be the governor in order to produce science, right? Can they do both simultaneously? Does the governor thing take them off the grid? That seems sorta sucky. But let's just make sure they aren't too ridiculously amazing.

S3rgeus said:
I think both ignore borders and binding trade were intended to be the primary ability - but I'm thinking we might split them up. Are Gray Sisters combat units? We discussed them being civilians at some point, but I think we've moved away from that? If they're combat units then we can separate these - ignore borders is powerful on a combat unit. But if they're civilians then they need to keep both as a primary ability - there's not much for them to do otherwise.

Yeah, I think they're all combat units, all sisters I mean. So let's go with ignore borders as the primary. It's pretty cool, but not unfair - after all, they can't just attack anybody (oaths and all that).

What about their warders? ignore borders? (it rhymes!)

S3rgeus said:
Right about working Antiquity sites.

GWs dug up by Brown Sisters have an additional civilization source option? (So you might dig up a site and get the choice: Tar Valon, Andor, or Shienar artifact, instead of just two. (Plus the usual lump of Culture option.)) It only really adds to the first ability though - and might completely usurp archeologists then?

Eh... yeah, I don't like that. LEave the archaeologists alone!

I'm inspired by your new White idea though - why not do something like "if a brown sister is within three hexes of a city, that city produces +1 prestige per fully-stocked great-work building" (or maybe +1 per theming bonus)? Something like that?

Honestly, now that we're talking about all this "within three hexes" stuff, I'm wondering if we should just unify it with the governor thing, like, make a choice. Either:

A) do away with the advise the governor thing, and just make such things a yield that occurs do to Aes Sedai proximity (Blue=faith, White=science, and then no tech stealing, Brown = prestige bonus from GWs)
B) do away with the proximity thing, and attach it to the adviser thing (whatever that is): (Blue=as described previously, White = science as described previously, and the no-tech stealing becomes an added feature of the Adviser/governor, and Brown gains the second level ability of advising, creating prestige

Or we leave it as previously discussed...

S3rgeus said:
Didn't the AI ever try to stage a coup in your city states?

They *did*. And I went, "oh, ok. The game is flavorfully describing their spy activity as a coup." - I never stopped to check to see how much influence change was really ocurring. In retrospect, it does explain some annoying out of nowhere war CS declarations and such.

S3rgeus said:
I think we're talking Ajah - being able to swap overall Tower influence with other players could be weird. (Leads to Oppression civs with massively positive influence when they unseat a well liked Authority civ.) So yeah, only one spy per civ in Tar Valon and that spy must choose an Ajah to spy on. Edited into the summary!

ok. makes sense.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I don't remember what we ended up deciding on this - I remember we talked it through for a while.

Right. Here's what I am thinking. Let's just leave it ambiguous for now and revisit it soon - we need to talk about governors in general (probably when we do GP), so we can figure it out then. Probably a band idea to jump into that right this second.

S3rgeus said:
Taking away Sisters is a good one. Would the player choose which ones ("You must give up 2 Sisters") or would the Tower choose ("X has returned to the Tower.")? Does this happen to Authority civs too or is it just a differentiation for Liberation?

I could see a flat penalty with Authority civs and the Tower working too!

I *want* to go with the tower choosing your sister, but that seems potentially kinda mean, if you have some awesome one who has like 5 level-ups and stuff. I say let the player choose. right?

As far as authority vs oppression/liberation, etc. I'd say you lose a sister whenever your Sister Quota count is lowered, which happens through a variety of means - regardless of Philosophy. Specifically, during an edict refusal, I could see that penalty only applying to Liberation and Oppression civs. That said, this is all a little weird, since the Sister Quota will be based in part on diplomatic things, anyways, and presumably youll suffer a diplo hit for a refusal - is this just "piling on" to that unnecessarily?

Heh, maybe it's as simple as Liberation (and Oppression, of course) civs lose their ability to *choose* sisters when they violate. Like, sisters might get called back, adn it would be random (or AI-determined), whereas an Authority civ could still choose. An idea?

Anyways, I'm starting to think we're getting in over our head at this juncture. We're setting up these somewhat complex differences between each Philosophy - with some significant gameplay repercussions - without having set up any of the ideological tenets. Presumably, if we make one Philosophy have X diplo penalty with the Tower, and Y punishment upon refusal, such things should be balanced by the kinds of tenets we have, right?

So, essentially, I'd say you put the things we've come up with in the summary, but we not worry too much about making them perfect at this point - we'll need to really lay out the Philosophies at a future date, and conceive of them in a big-picture way in order to make appropriate balancing decisions.

IMO, at least.

S3rgeus said:
I've changed the name. In terms of a GW quest:

A Good Book
The Stedding will reward you for creating a Great work of Writing. (substitute what we rename GW to.) Targeted quest.

looks good!

S3rgeus said:
Of course, no worries. I think the human player would almost always win the military units thing though - the AI moves its units around for no reason very often.

Ok, ok. you're right. you win. Forget I said it.

No seriously. Forget. FORGET.

S3rgeus said:
I like all of these! I've added yours and mine to the summary.

nice.

S3rgeus said:
UA: Way of the Leaf: You cannot build settlers or military units. Every time one of your civilian units is killed a settler appears in your capital. Declaring war on the Tuatha'an also declares war on all civilizations that border the Tuatha'an. (Bordering civ is anyone whose culture borders touch yours.)

UB: Tinker Camp: Replaces the Inn (or some other basic building) +2 Happiness. Generates (5 - City Population) * 4 Global (civ wide) Happiness.

UU: Tinker Caravan: Replaces the Caravan. Cannot establish gold trade routes with other civs. Can establish international food and production trade routes.

And that is a civ that should play a ton of small cities that, despite not having a military, doesn't roll over at the mention of war!

wow, just wow. I'm impressed. I'm also kind of unsure how serious you are...

The truth is, it seems like it could almost work. Now, I'm not
sure which exact victory type they'd have a hope of achieving (maybe diplo, but without lots of Gold...) but still, kinda cool.

I think you are nuts. But, honeslty, I could almost imagine something like this working - probably should be an "expansion civ" or something.

Or, you're just being facetious...

S3rgeus said:
Do you not like the CS name choices?

No! I do like them. I was being stupid and/or sarcastic. Times like these I wish the sarcasm font had taken off...

S3rgeus said:
Definitely, overall improvements are a super stretch goal. AI is crazy complicated but it makes so much of the game better. A "better AI" mod is its own separate entity anyway - and it's a big mod by itself. We're certainly not taking on all of that. It's just something I've always wanted to do - if I didn't start up WoTMod I probably would have done an AI mod instead.

All of this reminds me that we are in dire need of artists. But that tends to be less of a problem when there's something functional to play!

OK, AI later then.

But dang, artists.... Something tells me what we're going to end up doing is "release" a game in beta form that's totally playable and awesome and stuff. Hopefully that attracts interests of some artists who can help us finish it for the final release. Meanwhile, perhaps we're filling in civilopedia entries, digging up quotes, I'm doing a score, you're tweaking the AI, heading towards a hopefully "final" version. Something like that.

S3rgeus said:
Sounds good - should that go into the LB summary rather than the diplo one? We have a crossover section in the diplo summary, but this feels more like a general property of the Last Battle.

I'd say put it in both! I've added it to the "general" section of the LB summary. Just to clarify, though - we're talking the reassignment only of conflicting trade routes, right? Like, you don't get to reassign ALL of them, do you?

I've decided not to put in the CS-LB stuff for now - seemed a bit complex, and maybe best left for the diplo summary (where it currently lives). Thoughts on that?

S3rgeus said:
If that was the last remaining quest, then yes, a Light civ could do it unwittingly. There are multiple cities-to-be-razed though, and many other objectives. If the Shadow civs are that close then I'd say they were going to make it anyway - the purpose of the razing is to spread the Shadow's armies thin across the map if they want to do this - attack the whole world and without retaining the benefits of a large, well developed city.

Yeah, I guess the light should just not let Whitebridge get taken, eh? Sounds good to me. But yeah, excellent point on it having to be *razed*.

S3rgeus said:
World Era, Age of the Dragon? Or it could become available to civs over the Shadow threshold as they individually move into the Age of the Dragon?

Yep, world era: dragon. I think since the LB is triggered chiefly by world era (right?), this should be the same. If a slow-tech civ is slow to develop, they're still dragged into the LB, so I'd say they should have an opportunity here too.

S3rgeus said:
I'm not sure. I'm thinking not - the Tower is Light by default and remains that way unless the Shadow succeeds. But I see what you mean about mechanically wanting the Light players to be able to fight back. I think generally playing well is a good defense though. Don't let your cities be captured, keep high influence with Ajahs in the Tower.

OK, I'm in agreement, then.

S3rgeus said:
I think so - if it's all achieved after the start of the Last Battle then the Tower can switch sides at the eleventh hour, dooming the Light. That sounds too cool not to do.

seriously. Anything that creates some surprise hair-pulling can't be bad!

S3rgeus said:
How difficult razing the cities (multiple cities to raze) is will depend a lot on how strong the Light is. If there are a few or even just one really strong Light players, they could make Turning the Tower almost impossible. And since the Ajahs ones are constantly in flux (and all objectives need to be completed at once), Light players gaining influence in the Tower could undo a Shadow player's completion of those objectives.

Compact resolutions probably get harder after the Last Battle starts. If Light players see Shadow players voting in a block, they'll want to block that resolution at all costs. (Or repeal it.)

But we definitely want it to be hard. What other objectives make sense? "Exterminate civilization X"?

Yeah, I think "hard" is the overall target. I think you're right that having such a variety of objectives makes it hard more-or-less automatically. Can all be tweaked later.

Hmmm... don't like "exterminate civ X", sorta because that seems sorta lame for that player (assuming its'a player) - the computer randomly decides to offer extra incentives to ruin your game...

That said, maybe conquering CSs, taking ogier cities (which is really bad news to normally do), stopping the cleansing, etc. could be cool.

S3rgeus said:
What if the "raze city" one didn't only target Light civs? What if sometimes the Shadow civs had to sacrifice a while city for the greater Darkness? (And since you can't raze your own cities, that starts a Shadow civil war - unless the target civ is very devoted and just trades it away.)

Yeah, that's crazy. I can see that working. Since these will be semi random (at least inasmuch as you'll have a different "batch" each time), it does seem cool to have the cooky ones show up sometimes.

Random aside. Like, seriously random - you reminded me of this.

A few days ago I won a game as Catherine, finally winning domination against China. I did the "one more turn" and offered peace and exchanged all my cities (sans capital) for all her cities (sans capital). This ended up way, way in favor of China. Obviously she agreed (gained a bunch of original capitals in the process).

It had me thinking - would any real life country ever accepted this trade (as China). Like, I'm question human nature here. So, take a small country - maybe a perfectly fine one, but a small one. Say, Belgium. If the EU said "hey, Belgium, we'll give you ALL OF EUROPE, but you have to surrender ALL OF BELGIUM." Would they do it? What wins - the human tendency towards green and power, or the human tendency to fiercely defend one's turf? Would the UK surrender the UK ("home") for all of the US (*not* home, but potentially more "valuable" turf)?

Ah civ. The things you do to me!

S3rgeus said:
Definitely had this in mind for Forsaken quests and we can do it here too. I didn't want to just duplicate them (pillage your own improvements and such). What other counterproductive things could we ask players to do?

well, as I said above - hassle the ogier. Maybe reject a totally innocuous tower edict? Remain under capacity in trade routes? Send back your aes sedai?

I suppose one question is whether we want these things to ever "telegraph" to the other players what alignment you are. Like, when some civ randomly invades an ogier city in the age of the dragon....

S3rgeus said:
The second one is a bit of a crazy one from a technical perspective too. How about we replace it with:

Exposing Lies
Police Stations (obviously we will rename these) can be built 30% faster for the next 30 turns. (Thwarting spies portrayed as exposing truth again.)

The last one isn't particularly linked to the White itself, but more to Alviarin - Keeper from the White to a Red Amyrlin. The yield is the only real connection to the core ideals.

OK, I like Exposing lies!

I'm fine with the Alviarin one. Sort of random, but not *bad* necessarily. I guess just sort of hard to see why the white would actually Proclaim an Edict about that (unless they were the Amyrlin, of course). But, in lieu of anything better, I'm fine with it.

S3rgeus said:
I was thinking the Aes Sedai were using different styles of weaves that put to use what they'd seen Saidin users do, rather than changing how Saidar worked.

OK, let's try it. I will remain unsurprised if we ultimately decide it kind of breaks the game, though...

S3rgeus said:
Second ability it is! So we need a replacement Edict:

Traveling Provisions
Food Trade routes provide an additional +10 Food per turn for 30 turns.

Wow. that seems like a lot! But, I guess... so what, right?

S3rgeus said:
I think it has a penalty, like -3 iron. Eliminate it either by disbanding units or somehow gaining more Spark.

good!

counterpoint · Jan 26, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense! Sounds good!

OK, no-attack military units, then!

S3rgeus said:
Cool, capitals sounds good. Original capitals shouldn't interfere with the how-many-times-per-civ, it just becomes how-many-times-per-original-capital and otherwise stays the same, right?

well, it think it depends on who's left in the game. If a game had a max of 2 Showcases per civ, and then one player took over half the original capitals, it would still be 2 showcases per civ. If a player were ELIMINATED, though, then that number would potentially change. Right?

S3rgeus said:
Being able to avoid the civs that have built a strong turtle position is a good point though. I like the idea of doubling up when we need to on different map sizes, but having considered a bit longer, I'm not sure if we want to allow any players to be ignored? The culture victory is good because you need to overcome every other player, so any of them could become a threat to that. If you can avoid interacting with the civ that creates a good defensive position, then all that civ has really done is deprive themselves of the Showcase bonus - the Science player isn't really inconvenienced until several players create good defensive positions. That's not awesome - other players doing badly shouldn't make your chances of victory worse.

Is there a way to distribute the Showcases so that you always have to demonstrate to everyone? Then the problem becomes the largest map sizes instead of the smallest. What if you have to Showcase until you've Showcased all techs and to every civ? That would mean you Showcase some twice (at 8 total Showcases available you'd never need to do it more than twice unless the player maximum were increased).

yeah, you do make good points here.It does seem lame to be able to ignore people.

But, I'm not sure the Culture comparison is exactly fitting. True, you must overcome every civ's culture, but there isn't a whole lot of *specific* stuff a civ can do to stop it in the short term. Sure, they can build more culture, and the can refuse open borders agreements and such, slowing your tourism, but essentially there's not much they can do - I think declaring war to snipe a great musician is only going to happen in dire circumstances.

In this situation, though, it seems really rather easy to block a Showcase if you know it's coming - which you probably would, if a few Showcases had already dropped. Simply surround your capital with units - even civilians - and force the person to declare war on you if they want a chance to Showcase.

That situation above isn't necessarily *bad*, but it's very, very different from the cultural victory.

I'm torn on this. I see your points, but I also feel like the doubling-up allows the potential, at least, for some more "sneaking up on people." Like, they already Showcased once, and the receiving civ has a choice - do I "waste" resources on preventing a second showcase that's probably not even coming, or do I relax... and get Showcased on again? That's kind of a cool metagame, I think.

I definitely don't love the last idea, where you have to keep duplicating a Showcase to complete every civ... Seems sort of overkill, maybe. 16-civ games are probably hard enough to win as is. Maybe you could convince me, though.

So, I'm wondering if a middle ground is appropriate? Like allow *some* doubling on decent-sized maps, for example. So, maybe something like this:

(assuming 8 showcases)
2 civs - showcase to 1 (everybody but you) 8x max per civ
4 civs - showcase to 3 (everybody but you) - 3x max per civ
6 civs - showcase to 4 (everybody but you and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
8 civs - showcase to 6 (everybody but you (and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
10 civs - showcase to 7 (everybody but you and two other civs) (1 civ can be doubled)
12 civs - showcase to 8
16 civs - showcase to 8.

Just rought stuff, that is. In any case, a bit more restrictive than my earlier version, as I recall.

Alternatively, there's the possibility of making it random - a civ doesn't get to choose who they must showcase to. This could end up doubling up, or it could not.
Maybe they can choose WHAT they showcase, though.

This is tricky, though!

S3rgeus said:
I'm not sure, the receiving player doesn't really need to keep track of the bonuses. They'll just be better at stuff. Their units/buildings will build faster, or their techs will research faster, or their cities will grow faster, but it doesn't require input from them. It would be represented in the yields "breakdown" on the tooltip when you hover over the menu for that yield at the top of the screen.

I think that yield per turn starts a snowball for the player trying to win the Science victory. They've got to be committed to it if they're going to go for it - otherwise they're just making their enemies better. Dumps of yields can make critical differences (like whether or not you finish a given Wonder first or win a CS science quest) but usually only when deployed strategically by the person receiving them.

It also means that the more players are close to winning the Science victory, the more even the playing field will become at the end of the game, as everyone gets ongoing boosts from the Showcases. (Which could be impressive, there's usually a fairly clear winner emerging.)

So, I'm fine with either yield dump or per turn. If you want to go with per turn, that's fine.

What I'm starting to think, though, is that, regardless, it shouldn't be too much of a bonus. After all, none of the other victory-paths help the other players at all. So, this is in there in order to add some strategic depth, and maybe make science a little less easy - but not to cost you the game. This isn't a spiked koopa shell or anything...

S3rgeus said:
Give them the indirect fire promotion and you're golden! It'd be super weird, they would be able to fire across big gaps of fog-of-war if you had another unit/city to spot for them nearer the target.

wow. just like in real life!

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, +1 gold per river trade route is definitely a stackable yield. It's not global, but it's easier to arithmetically scale for multiple instances of the Showcase!

S3rgeus said:
I've been using Showcasing this time - I think I prefer it to Demonstrating. No better names have come to mind yet!

Cool, so what should we name the unit then?

Lordoflinks · Jan 27, 2015

S3rgeus said:
I've been using Showcasing this time - I think I prefer it to Demonstrating. No better names have come to mind yet!

Hello!
I have read the whole Wheel of Time saga in one go, and I really like the idea of this mod.
As such I would like to make a suggestion:
Perhaps use exhibits, why? Whenever I think of showcasing I think of movies, however
exhibits remind me of the Industrial Revolution and inventors exhibiting their work. Also it sounds better in universe. As for the name of the exhibiting units perhaps divide the
exhibits into abstract and mechanical groups. Scholars (Or Academics) showcase abstract and Inventors showcase mechanical.
I hope this is of benefit to you.
EDIT: Perhaps you could hide what the showcase or exhibit is from other players bar their group type if they grant unique bonuses by exhibiting.

S3rgeus · Jan 27, 2015

counterpoint said:
All right! Well here I am. I know you're posting on Monday... hopefully I get this in in time (it's very much still Sunday here, but is already Monday in "the old country").

Apologies for the delay, I've been sick today and yesterday. I won't have time for a full post this evening, but I'll get through as much as I can.

counterpoint said:
ok, duh about the internal trade routes thing.

Also, yeah, you're right - nobody ever uses "Research."

OK, so it looks like it's between "Science from Internal Trade Routes" and "Science from Trade Routes with the Tower." hmmm....

I'm tempted to go with the former, actually, if only because it seems kind of "different." But, honestly, either of these works fine. Your call.

Science from international trade routes it is!

counterpoint said:
right. that makes sense. The huge targeted spell probably doesn't need to be increased - better medic it is!

Done!

counterpoint said:
ok, no shadowspawn then. Kill them with fire!

counterpoint said:
I can't tell what kind of question this is? I'm not sure if they do or should do so - I'm merely reporting what we already discussed. That said, I think it could be cool, I guess. It's interesting that the two blue abilities - governor/advisor and Valere - both concern game mechanics we haven't fully settled on.

So, if you like the idea of it being *something* Horn related, then I say let's just leave it as "Something horn related" and we'll figure it out later? (should probably be left in red, of course.)

It was a suggestion question. I think you're right though, let's leave it at *something Horn related* and come back to it when the Horn is better defined!

counterpoint said:
This latest series of posts is the first where we've been linking to the old summaries. Is it smart for us to make a place (almost a table of contents) where we say where some of the big stuff can be found in the thread (and maybe with links). By my recollection, we've so far:

- Last Battle Summary: page 9
- Channeling Summary: page 15
- Diplomatic/Tower Summary: page 17

We're likely to very shortly have a Science Victory summary, then a cultural one, GP...... seems advisable to write down where this stuff is, right? Any suggestions? Should you add it to the end of your post on page one?

Very good point! An index would definitely be very helpful. I've edited the very first post to add links to these posts to it. And I've updated it a bit to be less hilariously out of date regarding most of our discussions!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, you're now scaring me that I was kind of making the yellows too good. Blood and Bone sounds great though!

Let's save the worker thing for later, then.

Awesome, sounds good! Definitely, we'll want to keep that worker thing in mind cuz it'll be useful!

counterpoint said:
we're talking just against males, right? I'd say 50% sounds good. It should certainly make them better against men than a levelled up green would be), and by a significant margin.

I was thinking against everybody, being one unit vs 2 is a big loss in mobility and attacks per turn (and other strategic stuff like zone of control). This way a single Red Sister with no Warder would be very powerful (the most powerful Aes Sedai unit) but she would necessarily be alone - a single upgraded Green fighting against her may be individually weaker, but she's also got 2 Warders - 3 attacks per turn vs 1.

counterpoint said:
This is weird, but I think I like it! It feels "different," which is good. Makes them a kind of science inquisitor. Maybe let's "Great Firewall it", though - like 99% or something. Maybe let's go with 90 or 95%, actually.

95% works for me.

counterpoint said:
Potentially very good if you're turtle-ing (and have theoretically no need for a combat sister). Here's a question, though: the primary ability of the white is to "advise" or be the governor in order to produce science, right? Can they do both simultaneously? Does the governor thing take them off the grid? That seems sorta sucky. But let's just make sure they aren't too ridiculously amazing.

I'll reply to this below about the more general within-3-tiles vs adviser!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think they're all combat units, all sisters I mean. So let's go with ignore borders as the primary. It's pretty cool, but not unfair - after all, they can't just attack anybody (oaths and all that).

What about their warders? ignore borders? (it rhymes!)

Cool, and good point about the warders. Let's go with they ignore borders too and see how it pans out!

counterpoint said:
Eh... yeah, I don't like that. LEave the archaeologists alone!

I'm inspired by your new White idea though - why not do something like "if a brown sister is within three hexes of a city, that city produces +1 prestige per fully-stocked great-work building" (or maybe +1 per theming bonus)? Something like that?

Honestly, now that we're talking about all this "within three hexes" stuff, I'm wondering if we should just unify it with the governor thing, like, make a choice. Either:

A) do away with the advise the governor thing, and just make such things a yield that occurs do to Aes Sedai proximity (Blue=faith, White=science, and then no tech stealing, Brown = prestige bonus from GWs)
B) do away with the proximity thing, and attach it to the adviser thing (whatever that is): (Blue=as described previously, White = science as described previously, and the no-tech stealing becomes an added feature of the Adviser/governor, and Brown gains the second level ability of advising, creating prestige

Or we leave it as previously discussed...

To make a decision here, I'd say let's go with B.

However, I might reconsider A if we wanted to have these abilities affect any city within range, rather than just those owned by the controller of the Sister unit. There's some ups and downs here - moving your Sister units through enemy territory helps them, which players would like to avoid. However, it does let you explicitly help another player on the map, which is unusual and quite cool (you can usually only help by "interfering" with an enemy's movement).

I'm happy with either approach. I agree that we should be consistent though, so switching the Blue/White/Brown abilities to all use the same "system" from above is good.

counterpoint said:
Right. Here's what I am thinking. Let's just leave it ambiguous for now and revisit it soon - we need to talk about governors in general (probably when we do GP), so we can figure it out then. Probably a band idea to jump into that right this second.

Cool, yeah, this sounds good. There are a lot of unknowns so we'll be able to make a better decision later.

counterpoint said:
I *want* to go with the tower choosing your sister, but that seems potentially kinda mean, if you have some awesome one who has like 5 level-ups and stuff. I say let the player choose. right?

As far as authority vs oppression/liberation, etc. I'd say you lose a sister whenever your Sister Quota count is lowered, which happens through a variety of means - regardless of Philosophy. Specifically, during an edict refusal, I could see that penalty only applying to Liberation and Oppression civs. That said, this is all a little weird, since the Sister Quota will be based in part on diplomatic things, anyways, and presumably youll suffer a diplo hit for a refusal - is this just "piling on" to that unnecessarily?

Heh, maybe it's as simple as Liberation (and Oppression, of course) civs lose their ability to *choose* sisters when they violate. Like, sisters might get called back, adn it would be random (or AI-determined), whereas an Authority civ could still choose. An idea?

Anyways, I'm starting to think we're getting in over our head at this juncture. We're setting up these somewhat complex differences between each Philosophy - with some significant gameplay repercussions - without having set up any of the ideological tenets. Presumably, if we make one Philosophy have X diplo penalty with the Tower, and Y punishment upon refusal, such things should be balanced by the kinds of tenets we have, right?

So, essentially, I'd say you put the things we've come up with in the summary, but we not worry too much about making them perfect at this point - we'll need to really lay out the Philosophies at a future date, and conceive of them in a big-picture way in order to make appropriate balancing decisions.

IMO, at least.

Agreed re player choosing which Sister disappears, for exactly the reasons you've brought up. Otherwise, much like above, yeah. We've got a lot of unknowns with the contents of the tenets, so let's shelve this for now.

counterpoint said:
looks good!

I've added it to the diplo summary.

counterpoint said:
Ok, ok. you're right. you win. Forget I said it.

No seriously. Forget. FORGET.

Spoiler :

counterpoint said:
wow, just wow. I'm impressed. I'm also kind of unsure how serious you are...

The truth is, it seems like it could almost work. Now, I'm not
sure which exact victory type they'd have a hope of achieving (maybe diplo, but without lots of Gold...) but still, kinda cool.

I think you are nuts. But, honeslty, I could almost imagine something like this working - probably should be an "expansion civ" or something.

Or, you're just being facetious...

It started out as being facetious, but then it was surprisingly easy to come up with fun, flavorful mechanics that make them play in a very unique way. I'm quite happy with them being an expansion civ!

I think the science victory might be their best hope of victory. Not sure how they handle the Last Battle (or the Trolloc Wars) though.

counterpoint said:
No! I do like them. I was being stupid and/or sarcastic. Times like these I wish the sarcasm font had taken off...

I figured, just wanted to be sure!

counterpoint said:
OK, AI later then.

But dang, artists.... Something tells me what we're going to end up doing is "release" a game in beta form that's totally playable and awesome and stuff. Hopefully that attracts interests of some artists who can help us finish it for the final release. Meanwhile, perhaps we're filling in civilopedia entries, digging up quotes, I'm doing a score, you're tweaking the AI, heading towards a hopefully "final" version. Something like that.

Definitely, I think that's how it will end up as well. Artists who work on mods like this are in high demand, so it's much easier to be able to show them something playable where their work will make a big difference.

counterpoint said:
I'd say put it in both! I've added it to the "general" section of the LB summary. Just to clarify, though - we're talking the reassignment only of conflicting trade routes, right? Like, you don't get to reassign ALL of them, do you?

Cool, I've added it to the diplo summary. Yes, only trade routes that would have been destroyed are "respawned".

counterpoint said:
I've decided not to put in the CS-LB stuff for now - seemed a bit complex, and maybe best left for the diplo summary (where it currently lives). Thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's fine to remain in the diplo summary only.

counterpoint said:
Yep, world era: dragon. I think since the LB is triggered chiefly by world era (right?), this should be the same. If a slow-tech civ is slow to develop, they're still dragged into the LB, so I'd say they should have an opportunity here too.

I'd say the other side to that is by allowing each civ to unlock it separately, civs that are doing well have opportunities to work towards Turning the Tower for longer (they don't need to wait for X other civs to catch up). That would allow powerful Shadow civs to make Turning more likely. Whether or not we like that depends on if we want that relationship to exist though - powerful Shadow civs (more so than numerous) making it more likely to Turn the Tower.

Yeah, the Last Battle is triggered by world era.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think "hard" is the overall target. I think you're right that having such a variety of objectives makes it hard more-or-less automatically. Can all be tweaked later.

Hmmm... don't like "exterminate civ X", sorta because that seems sorta lame for that player (assuming its'a player) - the computer randomly decides to offer extra incentives to ruin your game...

That said, maybe conquering CSs, taking ogier cities (which is really bad news to normally do), stopping the cleansing, etc. could be cool.

Good point about wiping out a civ - that sucks for the target. Taking Stedding is a good one!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, that's crazy. I can see that working. Since these will be semi random (at least inasmuch as you'll have a different "batch" each time), it does seem cool to have the cooky ones show up sometimes.

Awesome, Shadow cities are included as well!

counterpoint said:
Random aside. Like, seriously random - you reminded me of this.

A few days ago I won a game as Catherine, finally winning domination against China. I did the "one more turn" and offered peace and exchanged all my cities (sans capital) for all her cities (sans capital). This ended up way, way in favor of China. Obviously she agreed (gained a bunch of original capitals in the process).

It had me thinking - would any real life country ever accepted this trade (as China). Like, I'm question human nature here. So, take a small country - maybe a perfectly fine one, but a small one. Say, Belgium. If the EU said "hey, Belgium, we'll give you ALL OF EUROPE, but you have to surrender ALL OF BELGIUM." Would they do it? What wins - the human tendency towards green and power, or the human tendency to fiercely defend one's turf? Would the UK surrender the UK ("home") for all of the US (*not* home, but potentially more "valuable" turf)?

Ah civ. The things you do to me!

Interesting, no idea! It's such an unusual hypothetical, I definitely think that refused or accepted, it would make political waves for a long time.

I have to say that my "one more turn" is usually nuking everybody.

counterpoint said:
well, as I said above - hassle the ogier. Maybe reject a totally innocuous tower edict? Remain under capacity in trade routes? Send back your aes sedai?

I suppose one question is whether we want these things to ever "telegraph" to the other players what alignment you are. Like, when some civ randomly invades an ogier city in the age of the dragon....

Rejecting Edicts is an interesting one - that only works before the Last Battle, since the Tower Edicts are restricted to the Tower's side of the war once the LB starts.

It could telegraph a bit, but there's still room for doubt. Around that time in the game, civs will be getting to the endgame techs where it's much easier to deal with smaller foes. (Or more accurately, it's much more difficult to fend an opponent off without relatively even numbers.) So it's the kind of time that civs could capture Stedding if they wanted to.

counterpoint said:
OK, I like Exposing lies!

I'm fine with the Alviarin one. Sort of random, but not *bad* necessarily. I guess just sort of hard to see why the white would actually Proclaim an Edict about that (unless they were the Amyrlin, of course). But, in lieu of anything better, I'm fine with it.

Edited Exposing Lies into the master list.

I see what you mean about the Alviarin one. As you've said, we'll stick with it until something better comes up!

counterpoint said:
OK, let's try it. I will remain unsurprised if we ultimately decide it kind of breaks the game, though...

Sure, it's only temporary though! Shouldn't be too bad.

counterpoint said:
Wow. that seems like a lot! But, I guess... so what, right?

Cool, edited it into the master list!

That's all I can do for tonight, I'm afraid! But I'll be back tomorrow (illness allowing)! (And I'll do a more comprehensive summary update then too.)

S3rgeus · Jan 28, 2015

counterpoint said:
OK, no-attack military units, then!

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
well, it think it depends on who's left in the game. If a game had a max of 2 Showcases per civ, and then one player took over half the original capitals, it would still be 2 showcases per civ. If a player were ELIMINATED, though, then that number would potentially change. Right?

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, because Showcases take place at the civ's current capital (not necessarily their original one), that is different. I think there are good points to either approach here.

A player who has captured other original capitals will tend to be doing well - so Showcasing to them is more difficult (since they're better able to defend themselves). However, those captured original capitals are unlikely to be at the core of the aggressor's empire, and so are probably less well defended than some of their other cities.

On the flipside, the player whose capital has been captured is doing badly. They'll be less able to defend their new capital (because they presumably lost most of their units defending the old one), so can't defend as effectively against Envoys. Still, it's more likely that their capital city will be their primary defensive concern. (But there's a possibility that a far-off city ends up being their new capital.)

I think original capitals is more difficult on average for the civ sending the Envoys, though it won't always be. Opinions either way?

counterpoint said:
yeah, you do make good points here.It does seem lame to be able to ignore people.

But, I'm not sure the Culture comparison is exactly fitting. True, you must overcome every civ's culture, but there isn't a whole lot of *specific* stuff a civ can do to stop it in the short term. Sure, they can build more culture, and the can refuse open borders agreements and such, slowing your tourism, but essentially there's not much they can do - I think declaring war to snipe a great musician is only going to happen in dire circumstances.

In this situation, though, it seems really rather easy to block a Showcase if you know it's coming - which you probably would, if a few Showcases had already dropped. Simply surround your capital with units - even civilians - and force the person to declare war on you if they want a chance to Showcase.

That situation above isn't necessarily *bad*, but it's very, very different from the cultural victory.

I'm torn on this. I see your points, but I also feel like the doubling-up allows the potential, at least, for some more "sneaking up on people." Like, they already Showcased once, and the receiving civ has a choice - do I "waste" resources on preventing a second showcase that's probably not even coming, or do I relax... and get Showcased on again? That's kind of a cool metagame, I think.

I definitely don't love the last idea, where you have to keep duplicating a Showcase to complete every civ... Seems sort of overkill, maybe. 16-civ games are probably hard enough to win as is. Maybe you could convince me, though.

I think building culture buildings is a good comparison though. If a civ is going to win the cultural victory, but one civ has the production power, that defending civ can pump out culture buildings to stem (and even reverse) the flow of tourism. By doing that, that one player is able to save themselves. To overcome a cultural investment, the "attacking" culture player needs to have a culture-related tech lead or complete some significant task like the WC resolutions that double tourism output. (Or pass one of the resolutions like world religion which increases their tourism output.)

If players can be ignored for the science envoy victory, the only way another powerful civ can interact with the potential science-victor is to attack them with military. That's not necessarily bad (the existing science victory is completely turtle-able and ours is all upside by interactivity comparison) but the BNW Culture victory is one of the most fun ones now (I think anyway) and this is a key element of it.

However, the comparison to the culture victory doesn't capture the fact that you only need to overcome every other civ in a *menu-driven* manner - you don't need to physically do anything to them on the map, which is different from our science Envoy setup. You don't need to dig up an artefact belonging to every civ, for instance.

Do we want an element like the Tourism vs Culture in the science victory?

I'm still worried that a civ which makes itself difficult to Showcase to (because it creates a good defensive setup) is only depriving itself of the Showcase bonus - the Science civ will just Showcase elsewhere at no loss to their own progress.

counterpoint said:
So, I'm wondering if a middle ground is appropriate? Like allow *some* doubling on decent-sized maps, for example. So, maybe something like this:

(assuming 8 showcases)
2 civs - showcase to 1 (everybody but you) 8x max per civ
4 civs - showcase to 3 (everybody but you) - 3x max per civ
6 civs - showcase to 4 (everybody but you and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
8 civs - showcase to 6 (everybody but you (and one other civ) (2 civs can be doubled)
10 civs - showcase to 7 (everybody but you and two other civs) (1 civ can be doubled)
12 civs - showcase to 8
16 civs - showcase to 8.

Just rought stuff, that is. In any case, a bit more restrictive than my earlier version, as I recall.

Alternatively, there's the possibility of making it random - a civ doesn't get to choose who they must showcase to. This could end up doubling up, or it could not.
Maybe they can choose WHAT they showcase, though.

This is tricky, though!

Very interesting thought about making it random! "You must Showcase to: Andor, Aiel, Seanchan, Amadicia". That prompt would need to be reshown as civs are eliminated, but we could do that. Would players feel cheated by this sometimes? The choice of target civ could make the victory much easier (anticlimactic) or harder (unfair) and it's only known to the player a long way into the game.

counterpoint said:
So, I'm fine with either yield dump or per turn. If you want to go with per turn, that's fine.

What I'm starting to think, though, is that, regardless, it shouldn't be too much of a bonus. After all, none of the other victory-paths help the other players at all. So, this is in there in order to add some strategic depth, and maybe make science a little less easy - but not to cost you the game. This isn't a spiked koopa shell or anything...

Very good point, we run the risk of making science the most difficult victory condition. I'll actually say let's go for yield dump for now. Thinking it through, that's easier to implement and it wouldn't hamper us from doing a bit more work to make it yield per turn if we decided that was better later on.

counterpoint said:
Cool, so what should we name the unit then?

This got me thinking about some related things to the name. We've decided on one Envoy unit type per Showcase. There are some techs that unlock multiple Showcases. Do we think that there's value in having one Envoy unit type per technology? That makes it more like the normal unit types we see on the tech tree and gives the player a bit more flexibility with bad defending. Or do we prefer the one-per-Showcase approach?

Anywho, the below are applicable to either approach.

I quite like Envoy, seeing as that's what we sort of arrived at naturally.

There's significant naming crossover here with what we end up calling Great Scientists. Quoting out of order, for relevance:

Lordoflinks said:
As for the name of the exhibiting units perhaps divide the exhibits into abstract and mechanical groups. Scholars (Or Academics) showcase abstract and Inventors showcase mechanical.

We've discussed the possibility of renaming the Great Scientist to the Great Scholar before and I think Scholar works well in either position. But we should only use it for one. Any opinions on which it's better for, GS or Envoy?

Academics is also an interesting one. My perception of the word Academic is something more modern than WoT (think university professor), but it does mesh very well with the fact that Rand's research buildings are called Academies.

Lordoflinks said:
Hello!
I have read the whole Wheel of Time saga in one go, and I really like the idea of this mod.

Hi! Always great to see another WoT fan on here. Glad you like the ideas for the mod! And thank you very much for providing yours too.

Lordoflinks said:
As such I would like to make a suggestion:
Perhaps use exhibits, why? Whenever I think of showcasing I think of movies, however
exhibits remind me of the Industrial Revolution and inventors exhibiting their work. Also it sounds better in universe.

I think I have a different impression of the word Showcasing - I see it more along the lines of ornamental displays behind glass viewing panels. (Think like the crown jewels in the Tower of London.)

Exhibitions is a good one - it's definitely got a museum-related vibe to it. I'm not sure which I prefer, but neither is jumping out at me immediately as a "must be" answer.

Lordoflinks said:
EDIT: Perhaps you could hide what the showcase or exhibit is from other players bar their group type if they grant unique bonuses by exhibiting.

This depends on how much we want the defending player to be able to optimize for the Showcases. If they can see what type of unit the Envoy is, they'll know what kind of bonus it will give (and can prepare). It's definitely better for the defending player if they can see what its unit type is. For example, if they know the bonus is a production dump, they'll switch the city to produce a Wonder before the Envoy reaches it. Who knows, they might even let the Envoy through intentionally to get the bonus? That could be a valid strategy on the part of the Envoy-sender - choose the civs that want the bonus so that they might accept it.

I'm also not sure how difficult it would be to have hidden unit types based on which player is trying to view a unit. I don't think any existing CiV units do that. The Privateer used to in Civ4, but that was dropped going into CiV.

Lordoflinks · Jan 29, 2015

[\QUOTE]We've discussed the possibility of renaming the Great Scientist to the Great Scholar before and I think Scholar works well in either position. But we should only use it for one. Any opinions on which it's better for, GS or Envoy?

Academics is also an interesting one. My perception of the word Academic is something more modern than WoT (think university professor), but it does mesh very well with the fact that Rand's research buildings are called Academies.
[/QUOTE]
I think it makes sense to have the envoys be Scholar or Academic (Got that from "The Edge Chronicles", starts off light but gets dark, very dark), seeing as you would expect the inventors to show off their inventions, perhaps GS could be Great Philosopher, representing how before Rand came there was very little scientific advancement, hence fitting the entire game.

[/QUOTE]Hi! Always great to see another WoT fan on here. Glad you like the ideas for the mod! And thank you very much for providing yours too.

I think I have a different impression of the word Showcasing - I see it more along the lines of ornamental displays behind glass viewing panels. (Think like the crown jewels in the Tower of London.)

Exhibitions is a good one - it's definitely got a museum-related vibe to it. I'm not sure which I prefer, but neither is jumping out at me immediately as a "must be" answer.[/QUOTE]
I just prefer it because of "The Great Exhibition" where inventors were be doing what you are doing in the game

[/QUOTE]This depends on how much we want the defending player to be able to optimize for the Showcases. If they can see what type of unit the Envoy is, they'll know what kind of bonus it will give (and can prepare). It's definitely better for the defending player if they can see what its unit type is. For example, if they know the bonus is a production dump, they'll switch the city to produce a Wonder before the Envoy reaches it. Who knows, they might even let the Envoy through intentionally to get the bonus? That could be a valid strategy on the part of the Envoy-sender - choose the civs that want the bonus so that they might accept it.

I'm also not sure how difficult it would be to have hidden unit types based on which player is trying to view a unit. I don't think any existing CiV units do that. The Privateer used to in Civ4, but that was dropped going into CiV.[/QUOTE]
Would it be possible to have unique names and bonus for each showcase\exhibit, bonus that would make them viable for everyone in the game. Some ideas:

Nature of the Dark One: Reveals X amount of seals (Based on Min's professors knowledge)
Steam-wagon: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To represent other nations becoming aware of them and a increase in trade)
Improved Paper: Grants X amount of science
Road Paving: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To show with better roads comes more trade)
Improved Loom: Grants X amount of some luxury resource related to fabric
Astronomical Telescopes: Grants X amount of Science
Bio fuel: Grants X amount of production (Increased lighting)
Electricity: Grants X amount of production (Same as above)

I got these from: http://13depository.blogspot.com.au/2002/03/inventions-from-rands-academies.html
I trust the aim is to include quotes in the civpedia?
Anyhow military and farming improvements should be integrated into the Tech tree so the researching civ gets them, also I found no way to logically include a 'city gets gold' bonus. X is a number you can pick, I have no concept of balance

Ignore my hidden idea I thought the exhibiting/showcasing civ got the bonuses.

counterpoint · Jan 30, 2015

Hope you're feeling better, S3rgeus!

S3rgeus said:
Science from international trade routes it is!

Not sure if this is a typo on your part, but I thought we were talking about INTERNAL trade routes, not international ones. For me, I think I'd only like the idea if it's INTERNAL - international ones are already good enough!

S3rgeus said:
Very good point! An index would definitely be very helpful. I've edited the very first post to add links to these posts to it. And I've updated it a bit to be less hilariously out of date regarding most of our discussions!

Checking back at the first page or so of this thread is a trip. So many unfamiliar names to me. So much focus on governors and UI (which I find funny, since governors feel like something we've been problematically putting off for a long time...)

S3rgeus said:
I was thinking against everybody, being one unit vs 2 is a big loss in mobility and attacks per turn (and other strategic stuff like zone of control). This way a single Red Sister with no Warder would be very powerful (the most powerful Aes Sedai unit) but she would necessarily be alone - a single upgraded Green fighting against her may be individually weaker, but she's also got 2 Warders - 3 attacks per turn vs 1.

Alright, well I think I disagree with you here, so we should probably get on the same page on this.

I 100% agree with what you're saying from a pure mechanic perspective - no warder needs to equal a buff sister. But, the thing is, the buff, warrior sisters are supposed to be the Green sisters. I don't want people going "ooh, I want an awesome fighter, let's go Red!." Because that really has no basis in the story, I think.

What we want is the warderless reds to be awesome SAIDIN KILLERS, right? To me, that seems the goal. So, I'd accept the warderless red to be, overall, a sacrifice over a red with a warder - if it make her a ridonkulous saidin slayer.

So, maybe, not +50% against saidin. Maybe more like +100%. Or, instead, I had another idea. What if the ability was as simple as, "Warderless Red Sisters have an X% chance to gentle any saidin user any time they ATTACK". Not Gentle. ATTACK.

What do you think? In any case, I don't know that I can get behind an overall combat bonus. Just feels too out of universe for me.

S3rgeus said:
95% works for me.

S3rgeus said:
To make a decision here, I'd say let's go with B.

However, I might reconsider A if we wanted to have these abilities affect any city within range, rather than just those owned by the controller of the Sister unit. There's some ups and downs here - moving your Sister units through enemy territory helps them, which players would like to avoid. However, it does let you explicitly help another player on the map, which is unusual and quite cool (you can usually only help by "interfering" with an enemy's movement).

I'm happy with either approach. I agree that we should be consistent though, so switching the Blue/White/Brown abilities to all use the same "system" from above is good.

huh, hearing you write about it, now I'm inclined to enjoy "A" more - solely based on proximity. If this allows for some interesting strategy (helping others, accidentally helping your enemies), this is a net positive IMO. Plus, I feel like the governors are going to be kind of a "special" thing as is - putting an extra mechanic caused by another unit or units seems like it might get kinda unintuitive.

So, it could be as simple as if the sister is on a tile that is worked, that title will gain whatever the sister's yield is. Does that work, mechanically?

S3rgeus said:
Spoiler :

my question? Is that knife made out of ivory? If so, that is one hardcore elephant.

S3rgeus said:
It started out as being facetious, but then it was surprisingly easy to come up with fun, flavorful mechanics that make them play in a very unique way. I'm quite happy with them being an expansion civ!

I think the science victory might be their best hope of victory. Not sure how they handle the Last Battle (or the Trolloc Wars) though.

well, it seems to me that "just surviving" is kind of the only hope they have during heavy periods of war, which... is pretty in keeping with the Tinkers, I'd say.

S3rgeus said:
I'd say the other side to that is by allowing each civ to unlock it separately, civs that are doing well have opportunities to work towards Turning the Tower for longer (they don't need to wait for X other civs to catch up). That would allow powerful Shadow civs to make Turning more likely. Whether or not we like that depends on if we want that relationship to exist though - powerful Shadow civs (more so than numerous) making it more likely to Turn the Tower.

Yeah, the Last Battle is triggered by world era.

OK, let's do it individually, then. If anything, it seems it would technically make it harder for the shadow, which might not be bad. You know, because the lame shadow civs wouldn't have much time to help.

S3rgeus said:
I have to say that my "one more turn" is usually nuking everybody.

just like in real life, I'm sure!

S3rgeus said:
Rejecting Edicts is an interesting one - that only works before the Last Battle, since the Tower Edicts are restricted to the Tower's side of the war once the LB starts.

It could telegraph a bit, but there's still room for doubt. Around that time in the game, civs will be getting to the endgame techs where it's much easier to deal with smaller foes. (Or more accurately, it's much more difficult to fend an opponent off without relatively even numbers.) So it's the kind of time that civs could capture Stedding if they wanted to.

regarding edicts... hmmm, you're right, but that then means that we can' use anything that's specifically Tower-Related in order to turn the tower, right (because the tower becomes inaccessible to some players during the LB). This seems a bit odd. Shouldn't there be things like "subvert this Ajah" or "kill the amyrlin" or things like that?

counterpoint · Jan 30, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, because Showcases take place at the civ's current capital (not necessarily their original one), that is different. I think there are good points to either approach here.

A player who has captured other original capitals will tend to be doing well - so Showcasing to them is more difficult (since they're better able to defend themselves). However, those captured original capitals are unlikely to be at the core of the aggressor's empire, and so are probably less well defended than some of their other cities.

On the flipside, the player whose capital has been captured is doing badly. They'll be less able to defend their new capital (because they presumably lost most of their units defending the old one), so can't defend as effectively against Envoys. Still, it's more likely that their capital city will be their primary defensive concern. (But there's a possibility that a far-off city ends up being their new capital.)

I think original capitals is more difficult on average for the civ sending the Envoys, though it won't always be. Opinions either way?

Eh, I could go either way, and I'd suppose we won't really know until we try it. That said, I'm inclined to go with "current capital." I'm totally fine with a bad player having more trouble stopping an Envoy because their new capital sucks, etc.

More to the point, though, I feel like it's too much pressure on the Dominating civ, to block the science victory. Imagine an 8-civ game, and one civ is 5 capitals into a dom victory. It's a bit much to expect that one civ to be able to block 5 envoys. Kind of a lot of pressure on them, and it puts the fate of the whole game in their hands - and not because *their* winning it. You know?

S3rgeus said:
I think building culture buildings is a good comparison though. If a civ is going to win the cultural victory, but one civ has the production power, that defending civ can pump out culture buildings to stem (and even reverse) the flow of tourism. By doing that, that one player is able to save themselves. To overcome a cultural investment, the "attacking" culture player needs to have a culture-related tech lead or complete some significant task like the WC resolutions that double tourism output. (Or pass one of the resolutions like world religion which increases their tourism output.)

Your culture building comparison is pretty good, certainly. What this science situation still has that's super different, though, is the immediacy of it. Like, HE'S THERE RIGHT NOW, STOP HIM!... which is obviously not possible in the cultural victory.

S3rgeus said:
If players can be ignored for the science envoy victory, the only way another powerful civ can interact with the potential science-victor is to attack them with military. That's not necessarily bad (the existing science victory is completely turtle-able and ours is all upside by interactivity comparison) but the BNW Culture victory is one of the most fun ones now (I think anyway) and this is a key element of it.

However, the comparison to the culture victory doesn't capture the fact that you only need to overcome every other civ in a *menu-driven* manner - you don't need to physically do anything to them on the map, which is different from our science Envoy setup. You don't need to dig up an artefact belonging to every civ, for instance.

Do we want an element like the Tourism vs Culture in the science victory?

I'm still worried that a civ which makes itself difficult to Showcase to (because it creates a good defensive setup) is only depriving itself of the Showcase bonus - the Science civ will just Showcase elsewhere at no loss to their own progress.

First off, no, I don't think we need or should want a Tourism vs/ culture kind of thing in this victory. I like how this one will stand out as distinct. Adding another yield-based (well, beyond the acquisition of all those Beakers for the past 6000 years...) or menu-driven setup seems to take something away from that.

You are right that good Science defense would just end up hurting the defending civ - some other poor civ would end up getting Envoyed anyways, and thus end up with the bonus.

I'm starting to think we should maybe make it be every civ, after all. though I'm still a little afraid of what that means for a 16-civ game. Mostly, I'm worried that it would be painfully boring and/or tedious to redo the same envoys multiple times, and that it would simply take forever - especially since you can't make a bunch of them at once. Again, a difference between this and the cultural victory - culture spreads simultaneously (mostly).

Let's put that aside for a moment - assume an 8 civ game, and you'd be showing to... seven civs, obviously (though I have no idea what's happening with the 8 showcase we've discussed). I was thinking that this could be made to be not-impossible through Tenets. Just like there are some level-three tenets that are very empowering for the victory types, we could have some here that do the same. Like, "can build more than one envoy of each type at a time" or "Can Showcase a technology up to two tiles AWAY from a city" or something like that? In any case, maybe it's not tenets (maybe they're too easy to get, amybe it should be wonders or something), but in some way provide some late-game perks that do allow a civ to overcome an impenetrable civ.

Still, so what about the number of techs/envoys? Like, in a 4-civ game, are you still showing 8 times total? Or is it just the three of them? If so, which techs would it be? And, again, what about 16 civs? Showing to all 16 seems too much. This is production-based - like the science victory normally is - so I think scaling that production amount based on # of civs is weirdly punitive. Still, not sure what to do though.

I like the *idea* of the 8 required showcases, but doing that necessarily creates 1) doubling-up for few-civ games, 2) avoidability for many-civ games, and 3) that weird 8th one for 8 civ games (only 7 civs to show to). #3 alone might justify making the number of showcases 7...

bah!

S3rgeus said:
Very interesting thought about making it random! "You must Showcase to: Andor, Aiel, Seanchan, Amadicia". That prompt would need to be reshown as civs are eliminated, but we could do that. Would players feel cheated by this sometimes? The choice of target civ could make the victory much easier (anticlimactic) or harder (unfair) and it's only known to the player a long way into the game.

I think there's definitely something compelling to the randomness. Maybe it's something that's only semi-random. Like, it must include at least one of the top two civs in score, and may only include one (max) of the bottom two civs in score (few-civ games excepted). You know, fudge the numbers a bit.

Additionally, maybe the civs could be "rolled" out in "chunks." Assuming 8 showcases, maybe the game tells you four of them, and then another 4 once you finish them... or maybe adds one every time you complete one.

S3rgeus said:
Very good point, we run the risk of making science the most difficult victory condition. I'll actually say let's go for yield dump for now. Thinking it through, that's easier to implement and it wouldn't hamper us from doing a bit more work to make it yield per turn if we decided that was better later on.

OK, yield dump then. On what level, then? Like, 100 gold kind of thing? or like 1000 gold? (assuming gold, which would likely only be the case for one of them)

S3rgeus said:
This got me thinking about some related things to the name. We've decided on one Envoy unit type per Showcase. There are some techs that unlock multiple Showcases. Do we think that there's value in having one Envoy unit type per technology? That makes it more like the normal unit types we see on the tech tree and gives the player a bit more flexibility with bad defending. Or do we prefer the one-per-Showcase approach?

Hmmm, I must confess I'm not sure I understand you 100%. Or, what I think I'm understanding seems a little more minor than your presentation here seems to suggest. In any case, one-yield per tech could totally be fine.

S3rgeus said:
Anywho, the below are applicable to either approach.

I quite like Envoy, seeing as that's what we sort of arrived at naturally.

There's significant naming crossover here with what we end up calling Great Scientists. Quoting out of order, for relevance:

We've discussed the possibility of renaming the Great Scientist to the Great Scholar before and I think Scholar works well in either position. But we should only use it for one. Any opinions on which it's better for, GS or Envoy?

Academics is also an interesting one. My perception of the word Academic is something more modern than WoT (think university professor), but it does mesh very well with the fact that Rand's research buildings are called Academies.

Part of this discourse, of course, comes from Lordoflinks.

Hmmm......I don't think it's worth having an additional fancy name for each different type of unit, as per lordoflinks' first suggestion. In terms of terminology in general.

- Scientist - this word feels alien to WoT
- Scholar - I like this. I think I like it a lot for the GS-replacement.
- Academic - this one seems a little bland, considering we're bound to have - "academies." Feels sorta uninspired, like we couldn't think of this.
- Philosopher - I don't like this, mainly because in this mod, we're calling "Philosophies" our ideologies... sort of a weird overlap that is not supported mechanically or thematically.
- Inventor - this could work, but it only seems to make sense for late-game techs or engineering techs in general.

- Envoy - I'm fine with this one. Not so glamorous, but it's alright. I think, since envoy is a generic term, we should probably call them "_____ envoys." So either they're all "Science Envoys" or "Scholarly Envoys", or else we have different ones for each tech.
- Showcase - I don't have any of the movie-associations that lordoflinks has, but I'm not sure I'm in love with this either.
- Exhibition/Exhibit - I definitely do like this word. Calls to mind world's fairs and stuff. Museums, etc. That said, we also might need these as a culture building, though...

So, I'd guess my preferences are probably to call the GS a "Great Scholar" or something, call the units Envoys, and the "event" an Exhibition, though I'm also fine with Showcase.. That said, I could also imagine the units ALSO being exhibitions, so you move the exhibition and... exhibit it. In any case, don't feel particularly strongly about this.

Lordoflinks said:
Would it be possible to have unique names and bonus for each showcase\exhibit, bonus that would make them viable for everyone in the game. Some ideas:

Nature of the Dark One: Reveals X amount of seals (Based on Min's professors knowledge)
Steam-wagon: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To represent other nations becoming aware of them and a increase in trade)
Improved Paper: Grants X amount of science
Road Paving: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To show with better roads comes more trade)
Improved Loom: Grants X amount of some luxury resource related to fabric
Astronomical Telescopes: Grants X amount of Science
Bio fuel: Grants X amount of production (Increased lighting)
Electricity: Grants X amount of production (Same as above)

I got these from: http://13depository.blogspot.com.au/2002/03/inventions-from-rands-academies.html
I trust the aim is to include quotes in the civpedia?
Anyhow military and farming improvements should be integrated into the Tech tree so the researching civ gets them, also I found no way to logically include a 'city gets gold' bonus. X is a number you can pick, I have no concept of balance
Ignore my hidden idea I thought the exhibiting/showcasing civ got the bonuses.

First off, as S3rgeus said, "Welcome!" and thanks. FYI, on this forum no "\" is necessarily at the start of a QUOTE. You're making me chuckle, though, which I appreciate, since your name is lordofLINKS and the links aren't working!

Thanks for linking to the 13th depository. I'd found a similar list in the wikis earlier (you can see what I proposed a page or so back in the thread), but there's definitely some here that we weren't previously considering. Once we figure out how many we actually need, we can figure out which ones should be Showcases/Exhibits, and which ones just end up regular 4th-era techs.

I should mention (re "Nature of the Dark One" that we considered the Seal stuff interacting with the science victory, but ultimately decided it was a bad idea. That said, you DO use science to find the seals - just as you said, in reference to Min's professor buddy - but it doesn't specifically overlap with the science victory itself.

regarding the others mentioned here, mostly makes sense. Though I'll say it's looking like we'll be doing a "yield dump" instead of a per turn thing, which makes things like extra trade routes problematic (they're also probably too good, as well).

Lordoflinks · Jan 30, 2015

counterpoint said:
First off, as S3rgeus said, "Welcome!" and thanks. FYI, on this forum no "\" is necessarily at the start of a QUOTE. You're making me chuckle, though, which I appreciate, since your name is lordofLINKS and the links aren't working!

Thanks for linking to the 13th depository. I'd found a similar list in the wikis earlier (you can see what I proposed a page or so back in the thread), but there's definitely some here that we weren't previously considering. Once we figure out how many we actually need, we can figure out which ones should be Showcases/Exhibits, and which ones just end up regular 4th-era techs.

I should mention (re "Nature of the Dark One" that we considered the Seal stuff interacting with the science victory, but ultimately decided it was a bad idea. That said, you DO use science to find the seals - just as you said, in reference to Min's professor buddy - but it doesn't specifically overlap with the science victory itself.

regarding the others mentioned here, mostly makes sense. Though I'll say it's looking like we'll be doing a "yield dump" instead of a per turn thing, which makes things like extra trade routes problematic (they're also probably too good, as well).

I did mean a resources dump, otherwise I would put a /turn. If trade roues don't work we could change them to gold or force a trade route between the two civs (If possible). I included NotDO so the exhibits/showcases are not just viable to give to powerhouse, a light civ may appreciate the seal more. Failing that or when the LB is disabled it could be more science.

S3rgeus · Jan 31, 2015

Lordoflinks said:
I think it makes sense to have the envoys be Scholar or Academic (Got that from "The Edge Chronicles", starts off light but gets dark, very dark), seeing as you would expect the inventors to show off their inventions, perhaps GS could be Great Philosopher, representing how before Rand came there was very little scientific advancement, hence fitting the entire game.

I agree with counterpoint that Great Philosopher overlaps with our changes to religion. I think it also sounds more culture-related than Science-related. When we drill down on this, I think I'm preferring Scholar for the GS replacement too. Inventor vs Envoy was hard to pick from - but I think I like Envoy because it also makes the name informative for the function of the unit.

Lordoflinks said:
I just prefer it because of "The Great Exhibition" where inventors were be doing what you are doing in the game

Sounds like Exhibition is the one we all like for the name of the "event"!

Lordoflinks said:
Some ideas:

Nature of the Dark One: Reveals X amount of seals (Based on Min's professors knowledge)
Steam-wagon: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To represent other nations becoming aware of them and a increase in trade)
Improved Paper: Grants X amount of science
Road Paving: Grants X amount of additional trade routes for both parties (To show with better roads comes more trade)
Improved Loom: Grants X amount of some luxury resource related to fabric
Astronomical Telescopes: Grants X amount of Science
Bio fuel: Grants X amount of production (Increased lighting)
Electricity: Grants X amount of production (Same as above)

I got these from: http://13depository.blogspot.com.au/2002/03/inventions-from-rands-academies.html

That blog post is a great source, nice one.

As counterpoint said, I think we'll steer clear of the Seals given their usage in the Last Battle victory condition. We don't want the mechanics of the other victories to change when one victory is disabled.

Before we choose values for X and which Exhibitions we want to use, I think we'll need to decide on the number of Exhibitions and which techs unlock them (or at least how the Exhibitions are grouped by tech).

Lordoflinks said:
I trust the aim is to include quotes in the civpedia?

Yeah, new meaningful quotes are always good! That blog post is a great source of them, thanks!

Lordoflinks said:
Anyhow military and farming improvements should be integrated into the Tech tree so the researching civ gets them, also I found no way to logically include a 'city gets gold' bonus. X is a number you can pick, I have no concept of balance

I think we'll want to have some military-related and food-related bonuses for some of the Exhibitions. All of the bonuses provided by the Exhibitions (as I understand what we've discussed so far) are related to similarly themed benefits that the researching player will receive for actually researching the technologies in the first place.

counterpoint said:
Hope you're feeling better, S3rgeus!

Thanks! I'm basically back to normal now - started feeling much better yesterday!

counterpoint said:
Not sure if this is a typo on your part, but I thought we were talking about INTERNAL trade routes, not international ones. For me, I think I'd only like the idea if it's INTERNAL - international ones are already good enough!

Woops! Yes, unlocking an internal science trade route it is!

I've edited the diplo summary to include all 3 levels of Ajah bonuses. I've just left the Red's final bonus (discussed below) out until we're agreed.

Please check I've done it right! There are a lot of posts on this and I've only realized when I went back to put it together that it's quite confusing. :lol:

Unhelpfully, I missed the Gray Ajah out when listing the tier-3 bonuses previously.

counterpoint said:
Checking back at the first page or so of this thread is a trip. So many unfamiliar names to me. So much focus on governors and UI (which I find funny, since governors feel like something we've been problematically putting off for a long time...)

Back then I wasn't talking design with anyone, so it was mostly just progress updates! All very just-in-time designing, it's nice to have more up front now.

counterpoint said:
Alright, well I think I disagree with you here, so we should probably get on the same page on this.

I 100% agree with what you're saying from a pure mechanic perspective - no warder needs to equal a buff sister. But, the thing is, the buff, warrior sisters are supposed to be the Green sisters. I don't want people going "ooh, I want an awesome fighter, let's go Red!." Because that really has no basis in the story, I think.

What we want is the warderless reds to be awesome SAIDIN KILLERS, right? To me, that seems the goal. So, I'd accept the warderless red to be, overall, a sacrifice over a red with a warder - if it make her a ridonkulous saidin slayer.

So, maybe, not +50% against saidin. Maybe more like +100%. Or, instead, I had another idea. What if the ability was as simple as, "Warderless Red Sisters have an X% chance to gentle any saidin user any time they ATTACK". Not Gentle. ATTACK.

What do you think? In any case, I don't know that I can get behind an overall combat bonus. Just feels too out of universe for me.

I didn't think the objective was to make warderless Red Sisters specifically awesome saidin killers - just that we wanted to provide warderless Red Sisters with bonuses as a nod to the flavor of Reds not bonding warders in the books.

I totally agree that we don't want people to go for the Red because they want to do well militarily. But I don't think an overall combat bonus for warderless Red Sisters will cause that to happen. This is the second level bonus for the Red Ajah, so only some players can have it at a time. (Also means it should be flashy.) Even when in use, a single powerful unit has definite disadvantages against 3 less powerful (but of similar magnitude) ones.

The extra Warder is available to all Green Sisters all the time, regardless of the controlling civ's influence with the Green Ajah. And given that Greens get a combat bonus as their first upgraded Green ability (the first tier of influence with the Green Ajah, which can be obtained by many players and is easier to get), they're still the choice for overall military use.

To run some example numbers (these won't be final, but they give an idea of the relative power levels), say a baseline Sister unit has 45 ranged strength and 10 combat strength. A baseline warder has 30 combat strength.

A warderless Red Sister (controlled by a civ with > 80 influence with the Red Ajah) has a ranged strength of 68 and combat strength of 15 now.

A Green Sister (controlled by a civ with > 40 influence with the Green Ajah influence) has 52 ranged strength and 2 warders.

The difference in ranged power isn't huge and the Green Sister has two warders (both of whom can melee attack the Red Sister favorably). The Red Sister would be the more reliable "siege weapon" if defended by other units, but the Green can bring her own defenses. And if you fall out of favor with the Red Ajah, the warderless Red Sisters are suddenly very much weaker.

counterpoint said:
huh, hearing you write about it, now I'm inclined to enjoy "A" more - solely based on proximity. If this allows for some interesting strategy (helping others, accidentally helping your enemies), this is a net positive IMO. Plus, I feel like the governors are going to be kind of a "special" thing as is - putting an extra mechanic caused by another unit or units seems like it might get kinda unintuitive.

So, it could be as simple as if the sister is on a tile that is worked, that title will gain whatever the sister's yield is. Does that work, mechanically?

Proximity works for me - being able to affect other players' cities as well makes it a much more flexible mechanic. I think having an area of effect that just works if it includes the city is good - it's more clear when you're affecting other civs (since you can't see how they allocate their citizens without a spy in that city).

counterpoint said:
well, it seems to me that "just surviving" is kind of the only hope they have during heavy periods of war, which... is pretty in keeping with the Tinkers, I'd say.

Yeah, sounds like them!

counterpoint said:
OK, let's do it individually, then. If anything, it seems it would technically make it harder for the shadow, which might not be bad. You know, because the lame shadow civs wouldn't have much time to help.

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
regarding edicts... hmmm, you're right, but that then means that we can' use anything that's specifically Tower-Related in order to turn the tower, right (because the tower becomes inaccessible to some players during the LB). This seems a bit odd. Shouldn't there be things like "subvert this Ajah" or "kill the amyrlin" or things like that?

I'm all in favor of assassinate the Amyrlin missions!

That's something spies can do, or just Gray Men? We could make this a consistent last step? When all other missions are completed, assassinate the Amyrlin in order to Turn the Tower? Having to simultaneously complete all of the missions (as in, they are all in completed state at the same time - since some can go back to being incomplete) and then succeed in assassinating the Amyrlin during the time you can keep all of the missions completed - that sounds suitably difficult.

I think "subvert this Ajah" is gaining influence with them (the influencing civ is working for the Shadow after all) or was there a mechanical difference you had in mind? A different kind of mission?

We can't use the Edicts for this - but we can use the Tower's presence on the map. "Pillage 3 Improvements belonging to the White Tower"? Do they have to be *currently pillaged* for the quest to be completed? (So if the Tower repairs enough improvements, the quest goes back to incomplete, like the Ajah ones can.)

S3rgeus · Jan 31, 2015

counterpoint said:
Eh, I could go either way, and I'd suppose we won't really know until we try it. That said, I'm inclined to go with "current capital." I'm totally fine with a bad player having more trouble stopping an Envoy because their new capital sucks, etc.

More to the point, though, I feel like it's too much pressure on the Dominating civ, to block the science victory. Imagine an 8-civ game, and one civ is 5 capitals into a dom victory. It's a bit much to expect that one civ to be able to block 5 envoys. Kind of a lot of pressure on them, and it puts the fate of the whole game in their hands - and not because *their* winning it. You know?

Very good point! Current capital it is.

counterpoint said:
Your culture building comparison is pretty good, certainly. What this science situation still has that's super different, though, is the immediacy of it. Like, HE'S THERE RIGHT NOW, STOP HIM!... which is obviously not possible in the cultural victory.

I see what you mean about the immediacy on the map, but there's an element of gradual build up in the science one too. As more Exhibitions are completed, it's clear that one civ is getting closer to winning - but there may still be quite a few left to intercept.

counterpoint said:
First off, no, I don't think we need or should want a Tourism vs/ culture kind of thing in this victory. I like how this one will stand out as distinct. Adding another yield-based (well, beyond the acquisition of all those Beakers for the past 6000 years...) or menu-driven setup seems to take something away from that.

I didn't mean specifically yield-like like Culture/Tourism, more like something adversarial that requires the player to overcome all other civs in some way.

I see that you don't like the idea of another menu-driven interaction, but what about something like requiring the science civ to establish Academies (or whatever we choose to call a science-related-to-winning building) in every capital in the world. Having a foreign Academy in your capital wouldn't necessarily be voluntary - it might happen when another civ has X more technologies than you (including instances of our "Future Tech" so it doesn't eventually become impossible), or produces X more science per turn than you. (This is separate from the Exhibitions - just another prereq for the Science victory.)

Part of me thinks that Envoys should be able to found Academies in foreign capitals then, but that kind of usurps the whole victory condition.

Maybe we don't like the above at all, but I've written it out now, so I'll share it anyway.

counterpoint said:
You are right that good Science defense would just end up hurting the defending civ - some other poor civ would end up getting Envoyed anyways, and thus end up with the bonus.

I'm starting to think we should maybe make it be every civ, after all. though I'm still a little afraid of what that means for a 16-civ game. Mostly, I'm worried that it would be painfully boring and/or tedious to redo the same envoys multiple times, and that it would simply take forever - especially since you can't make a bunch of them at once. Again, a difference between this and the cultural victory - culture spreads simultaneously (mostly).

Let's put that aside for a moment - assume an 8 civ game, and you'd be showing to... seven civs, obviously (though I have no idea what's happening with the 8 showcase we've discussed). I was thinking that this could be made to be not-impossible through Tenets. Just like there are some level-three tenets that are very empowering for the victory types, we could have some here that do the same. Like, "can build more than one envoy of each type at a time" or "Can Showcase a technology up to two tiles AWAY from a city" or something like that? In any case, maybe it's not tenets (maybe they're too easy to get, amybe it should be wonders or something), but in some way provide some late-game perks that do allow a civ to overcome an impenetrable civ.

Still, so what about the number of techs/envoys? Like, in a 4-civ game, are you still showing 8 times total? Or is it just the three of them? If so, which techs would it be? And, again, what about 16 civs? Showing to all 16 seems too much. This is production-based - like the science victory normally is - so I think scaling that production amount based on # of civs is weirdly punitive. Still, not sure what to do though.

I like the *idea* of the 8 required showcases, but doing that necessarily creates 1) doubling-up for few-civ games, 2) avoidability for many-civ games, and 3) that weird 8th one for 8 civ games (only 7 civs to show to). #3 alone might justify making the number of showcases 7...

bah!

Many interlinked things here! One thing:

From what I understand so far, there's nothing to stop you building multiple Envoys simultaneously (except production capacity in your cities). You can never build more instances of the same Envoy than you need to reach the target number of Exhibitions. So if you need to Exhibit Steamworks (or whatever it's called) once then you can only ever build one Steamworks Envoy (at a time, and can't build any if you already have one). But you can build a Roadbuilding Envoy at the same time as a Steamworks Envoy (if you haven't already got either and still need to do both Exhibits, and this is in two separate cities, because they're separate production items).

Moving on to bonuses and stuff. I like the idea of there being tenets/wonders that target this victory - just like there are for the victory conditions in base CiV.

Exhibiting from 2 tiles away is definitely powerful - I can see this on a tenet or wonder. Do we want to go *all the way* and allow Exhibiting to any city in a civ, not just the capital? That bonus would have to be a wonder, we wouldn't want more than one civ to be able to do that. Completing that wonder makes that civ a serious science threat. But from the discussions we had before, do we think that even isolated to one player per game, it makes the Science victory too easy? (If we do think it makes it too easy, do we want to have a wonder that allows Exhibiting at capital or any city > X population?)

There could be a wonder that allows you to perform an Exhibition at your own capital? (Modding in this wonder isn't mutually exclusive with modding in either of the suggested above.) That gives us a place for the 8th Exhibition in 8 civ games (but only available to one civ).

I would also be fine with dropping down to 7 Exhibitions total to handle the 8 civ case (which is the default for Standard size maps). We could do that with or without the wonder for Exhibiting at your own capital.

Related to how we want to handle doubling up - I think doubling up until you've completed all Exhibitions is a good idea. (And restricting doubling up to the minimum possible - so you can never exhibit multiple times if there are any civs you haven't exhibited to yet.)

Related to the resurgence of global vs local bonuses. Good point. Global bonuses do solve the "defending well is bad for you" problem. It has effects on the other portions of the victory too. The Envoy-sending civ no longer cares who he Exhibits to - he should go directly for whichever civs have the most accessible capitals. Map-wise it makes it easier - just do what's easiest. It does make it harder in terms of competition - even your greatest enemy gets the bonuses.

I'm not sure which I prefer. Despite the "defending is bad for you" problem, I think I still prefer local bonuses. There's a whole metagame about "who should I Exhibit to" (which should be quite fun) that completely disappears if we use global bonuses. It also feels weird that the victory condition cares where you Exhibit despite the results of those Exhibitions not being different in each place.

One thing I've just considered is if the Envoys should have a chance of failure when they perform the Exhibition - but that will get old very fast. It turns the whole thing into a dice roll, which is bad. At best it's unnecessary repetition for the player - at worst it's the player losing a game they should have won (after they've played for 10+ hours) because the AI rolled better on a few one-time-only randomness checks.

counterpoint said:
I think there's definitely something compelling to the randomness. Maybe it's something that's only semi-random. Like, it must include at least one of the top two civs in score, and may only include one (max) of the bottom two civs in score (few-civ games excepted). You know, fudge the numbers a bit.

Additionally, maybe the civs could be "rolled" out in "chunks." Assuming 8 showcases, maybe the game tells you four of them, and then another 4 once you finish them... or maybe adds one every time you complete one.

I think even weighted it would vary a lot. Sometimes it might choose all civs whose capitals are really difficult to navigate to - other times they might all be easy. Given the time the player has already invested, I'd be reluctant to introduce that kind of randomness (even weighted), despite the idea sounding good. It seems like the kind of thing players could feel very cheated or disappointed by.

counterpoint said:
OK, yield dump then. On what level, then? Like, 100 gold kind of thing? or like 1000 gold? (assuming gold, which would likely only be the case for one of them)

1000 gold kind of region - something that makes a big immediate difference.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm, I must confess I'm not sure I understand you 100%. Or, what I think I'm understanding seems a little more minor than your presentation here seems to suggest. In any case, one-yield per tech could totally be fine.

Sorry, I can explain this better by example! I didn't mean anything to do with the yields, just with how Envoys are associated with Exhibitions.

So, example, what we're doing already, one Envoy per Exhibition type, one or more Exhibitions unlocked by individual technologies.

Technology Steam unlocks: Steamworks and Roadbuilding Exhibitions

That means after researching Steam, a player can now build a Steamworks Envoy and a Roadbuilding Envoy.

Alternative I didn't explain well last time:

Technology Steam unlocks: Steamworks and Roadbuilding Exhibitions

After researching Steam, a player can now build up to two Steam Envoys - which can each perform either the Steamworks of Roadbuilding Exhibitions (or only one, if you only need one).

Small difference, it's more related to the old conversation we had about relating Envoys to Exhibitions.

counterpoint said:
Part of this discourse, of course, comes from Lordoflinks.

Hmmm......I don't think it's worth having an additional fancy name for each different type of unit, as per lordoflinks' first suggestion. In terms of terminology in general.

- Scientist - this word feels alien to WoT
- Scholar - I like this. I think I like it a lot for the GS-replacement.
- Academic - this one seems a little bland, considering we're bound to have - "academies." Feels sorta uninspired, like we couldn't think of this.
- Philosopher - I don't like this, mainly because in this mod, we're calling "Philosophies" our ideologies... sort of a weird overlap that is not supported mechanically or thematically.
- Inventor - this could work, but it only seems to make sense for late-game techs or engineering techs in general.

- Envoy - I'm fine with this one. Not so glamorous, but it's alright. I think, since envoy is a generic term, we should probably call them "_____ envoys." So either they're all "Science Envoys" or "Scholarly Envoys", or else we have different ones for each tech.
- Showcase - I don't have any of the movie-associations that lordoflinks has, but I'm not sure I'm in love with this either.
- Exhibition/Exhibit - I definitely do like this word. Calls to mind world's fairs and stuff. Museums, etc. That said, we also might need these as a culture building, though...

So, I'd guess my preferences are probably to call the GS a "Great Scholar" or something, call the units Envoys, and the "event" an Exhibition, though I'm also fine with Showcase.. That said, I could also imagine the units ALSO being exhibitions, so you move the exhibition and... exhibit it. In any case, don't feel particularly strongly about this.

I'm in agreement on naming here now - "Great Scholar" for the Great Scientist. Envoy for the unit and Exhibition for the event. For a lot of the reasons you stated and some I've mentioned above!

I think Envoy for the unit is definitely a suffix. Depending on what we like above, it would either be "<Technology> Envoy" or "<Exhibition> Envoy" - because they will be distinct unit types and should be differentiable easily by name on the map.

counterpoint said:
Once we figure out how many we actually need, we can figure out which ones should be Showcases/Exhibits, and which ones just end up regular 4th-era techs.

Good point here that the remaining concepts will become 4th age technologies. Even the ones we choose as Exhibitions will likely need some related technology umbrella to unlock them.

counterpoint · Feb 2, 2015

I'll say first that it's starting to feel a little bit like we're playing tennis with a few of these diplo issues. Let's just settle on something on these outstanding things, I think. Probably should move on soon.

S3rgeus said:
I agree with counterpoint that Great Philosopher overlaps with our changes to religion. I think it also sounds more culture-related than Science-related. When we drill down on this, I think I'm preferring Scholar for the GS replacement too. Inventor vs Envoy was hard to pick from - but I think I like Envoy because it also makes the name informative for the function of the unit.

just to clarify, while "philosophy" overlaps with our "Paths to the Light" thematically, in terms of literal terminology, "philosophies" overlap with Ideologies (in that we have renamed them to this), not religions.

Yeah, new meaningful quotes are always good! That blog post is a great source of them, thanks!

S3rgeus said:
I've edited the diplo summary to include all 3 levels of Ajah bonuses. I've just left the Red's final bonus (discussed below) out until we're agreed.

Please check I've done it right! There are a lot of posts on this and I've only realized when I went back to put it together that it's quite confusing. Unhelpfully, I missed the Gray Ajah out when listing the tier-3 bonuses previously.

looking over them now.... and looks good.

Under tier 3 of the Red, though, you do have some weird phrasing there. Also, I'm not 100% sure that half as often is the final value. I think we'll have to wait and see how things work out.

regarding the reds... wasn't it supposed to be a bonus to ranged combat str. against male channelers? (that's what it was listed as in this post). or at least channelers in general? not overall? Again, I see some iffy bleed with greens here.... that said, maybe it's not so bad. Of course, if it's just against male channelers, the % should likely be higher than 15%.

I'm pretty sure you are not in favor of that, as your points on the second ability elsewhere would suggest. That said, if it isn't male-channeler focused, the reds are turning into the second "combat ajah," which I find somewhat problematic.

re: the brown's second-tier ability... that's too high, right? +1 for each GW? That's... +100% GW production in that city. Isn't that too much? I'd intended it to be a +1 for each theming bonus, or each building, or something.

Also, I was thinking of the weird GW-gift for the brown's top tier, and how it was problematically intermittent - you either got the GW or you didn't. What if, instead, we just had it be a +% bonus to GW-associated GP production? Like, the Blues, just different GP-types?

otherwise looks great. Part of me thinks the starting abilities of each ajah should be listed here too. Not because it's directly related to diplo, but because it'll help keep things clear. I found myself reading them and thinking, for example "wait, don't the blues have a 3-hex proximity ability? oh, wait, that's their starting ability..." etc.[/quote]

S3rgeus said:
I didn't think the objective was to make warderless Red Sisters specifically awesome saidin killers - just that we wanted to provide warderless Red Sisters with bonuses as a nod to the flavor of Reds not bonding warders in the books.

I totally agree that we don't want people to go for the Red because they want to do well militarily. But I don't think an overall combat bonus for warderless Red Sisters will cause that to happen. This is the second level bonus for the Red Ajah, so only some players can have it at a time. (Also means it should be flashy.) Even when in use, a single powerful unit has definite disadvantages against 3 less powerful (but of similar magnitude) ones.

The extra Warder is available to all Green Sisters all the time, regardless of the controlling civ's influence with the Green Ajah. And given that Greens get a combat bonus as their first upgraded Green ability (the first tier of influence with the Green Ajah, which can be obtained by many players and is easier to get), they're still the choice for overall military use.

To run some example numbers (these won't be final, but they give an idea of the relative power levels), say a baseline Sister unit has 45 ranged strength and 10 combat strength. A baseline warder has 30 combat strength.

A warderless Red Sister (controlled by a civ with > 80 influence with the Red Ajah) has a ranged strength of 68 and combat strength of 15 now.

A Green Sister (controlled by a civ with > 40 influence with the Green Ajah influence) has 52 ranged strength and 2 warders.

The difference in ranged power isn't huge and the Green Sister has two warders (both of whom can melee attack the Red Sister favorably). The Red Sister would be the more reliable "siege weapon" if defended by other units, but the Green can bring her own defenses. And if you fall out of favor with the Red Ajah, the warderless Red Sisters are suddenly very much weaker.

OK, so first of all, I did think the object was to make them good saiding killers, seeing that that is the objective of the Ajah as a whole.

In any case, whether we make this specific ability (warderlessness) saidin-linked or not is a smaller issue to me than their ability set in general. As it stands, it appears that of the "boosts" you receive, *both* of them would have nothing to do with saidin. I find that not awesome. I'm very much fine with one of them being unrelated (probably this one), but both of them? Again, I don't want them to be Green Ajah, part 2.

Regarding Warders, I should remind us that they're "just units." Like, they will be good, I'm sure, but probably not insanely good. The civ will have to sacrifice a unit to get them, after all. I mention this because, in the big scheme of things, the difference between an AS with a warder and without one may not be much - people might just pair their Red sisters with "not warders" (i.e. regular units who aren't bonded) without much loss in functionality.

That said, I can be fine with the warderless red sisters having the trait you've described, if you feel strongly about it. I don't love them being "Siege weapons", since I don't love any Aes Sedai being siege weapons, but I understand your meaning.

So, I guess I ask... why all around combat strength? So, we want to reward them for having no warders.... Does that bonus have to be all around combat strength? To me, that feels somewhat generic, and - again - intrudes on the space of the Green. If you want to compensate for a Warder's ability, maybe we should be thinking primarily in defensive terms. Their Tier 1 ability is a bonus to ranged combat str (debated somewhat by me above)... maybe the 2nd tier could be a huge bonus to melee defense (recall that all female channelers have terrible melee defense). I can see the Red sisters justified as "defensive," flavor-wise. This way, they won't end up as siege weapons, necessarily, but sisters that are really hard to kill.

S3rgeus said:
Proximity works for me - being able to affect other players' cities as well makes it a much more flexible mechanic. I think having an area of effect that just works if it includes the city is good - it's more clear when you're affecting other civs (since you can't see how they allocate their citizens without a spy in that city).

good. let's do that, then.

S3rgeus said:
I'm all in favor of assassinate the Amyrlin missions! That's something spies can do, or just Gray Men? We could make this a consistent last step? When all other missions are completed, assassinate the Amyrlin in order to Turn the Tower? Having to simultaneously complete all of the missions (as in, they are all in completed state at the same time - since some can go back to being incomplete) and then succeed in assassinating the Amyrlin during the time you can keep all of the missions completed - that sounds suitably difficult.

I think "subvert this Ajah" is gaining influence with them (the influencing civ is working for the Shadow after all) or was there a mechanical difference you had in mind? A different kind of mission?

We can't use the Edicts for this - but we can use the Tower's presence on the map. "Pillage 3 Improvements belonging to the White Tower"? Do they have to be *currently pillaged* for the quest to be completed? (So if the Tower repairs enough improvements, the quest goes back to incomplete, like the Ajah ones can.)

Alright, regarding assassination... hmmm, I'm thinking probably that *is* only a Gray Man Mission - or, maybe also a Bloodknives thing, if we wanted to waste a Seanchan Unique on them... Assassination is just not something that pops up that much.

That said, "Depose the Amyrlin" or something could be something I could see at least *initiated* by a spy. Maybe not achieved, but initiated. Obviously the Hall has to vote an amyrlin out, but maybe a spy could cause a scandal that provokes an amyrlin re-vote mid era? Or, maybe changes the voting numbers for the next vote? I would say this kind of thing would be something that could be done even by non-Shadow civs.

Certainly it does seem that the amyrlin needs to be ousted at some point in the turning process..

You're right that subverting the Ajah = gaining influence. The problem is that, during the LB, the shadow civs no longer can enter normal negotiations with the Tower - right? If that's the case, how would they ever gain influence? Sorta like how you don't gain influence with CSs while at war.

hmmm... interesting question regarding the chronology of pillaging, etc. I'm not sure. It seems a little ticky-tack either way. I'd say, in any case, we need to be consistent. If any of them could be "reversible," we need to make sure all of them need to remain in place (or, decide that *none* need to remain in place at turn-time.).

S3rgeus said:
I didn't mean specifically yield-like like Culture/Tourism, more like something adversarial that requires the player to overcome all other civs in some way.

I see that you don't like the idea of another menu-driven interaction, but what about something like requiring the science civ to establish Academies (or whatever we choose to call a science-related-to-winning building) in every capital in the world. Having a foreign Academy in your capital wouldn't necessarily be voluntary - it might happen when another civ has X more technologies than you (including instances of our "Future Tech" so it doesn't eventually become impossible), or produces X more science per turn than you. (This is separate from the Exhibitions - just another prereq for the Science victory.)

Part of me thinks that Envoys should be able to found Academies in foreign capitals then, but that kind of usurps the whole victory condition.

Maybe we don't like the above at all, but I've written it out now, so I'll share it anyway.

Hmmm... an interesting idea. I'm not sure what it really adds, though. If it's created via envoys, then it seems somewhat redundant to the exhibition model. If it is created via a tech-lead... I don't know. I like to think that you don't need to have a tech lead to win the science victory. Consider 2 civs that are neck and neck in science, but one simply doesn't have the production, or map position to be able to disseminate envoys. That civ should lose. If a tech "lead" was necessarily, these civs would appear to be locked in a stalemate. It's true that such a thing can happen with a culture victory attempt, but that whole system is designed around that culture/tourism = defense/offense dichotomy. Here, it would pop up at the end only, and, I guess I just don't see how much it adds.

That said, from a flavor-only perspective, I could see it. For example, if you successfully envoy to a civ, that civ then has an Academy or something. Sort of a permanent marker of your interaction. Not important, though.

S3rgeus said:
Exhibiting from 2 tiles away is definitely powerful - I can see this on a tenet or wonder. Do we want to go *all the way* and allow Exhibiting to any city in a civ, not just the capital? That bonus would have to be a wonder, we wouldn't want more than one civ to be able to do that. Completing that wonder makes that civ a serious science threat. But from the discussions we had before, do we think that even isolated to one player per game, it makes the Science victory too easy? (If we do think it makes it too easy, do we want to have a wonder that allows Exhibiting at capital or any city > X population?)

definitely like the idea of one bonus allowing more exhibition options besides the capital. I do think the >X population option is the way to go though. ANY city seems a bit crazy to me.

S3rgeus said:
There could be a wonder that allows you to perform an Exhibition at your own capital? (Modding in this wonder isn't mutually exclusive with modding in either of the suggested above.) That gives us a place for the 8th Exhibition in 8 civ games (but only available to one civ).

huh. Maybe we should always make your own capital an option. If you think about it, that's just what the civ science victory currently is. Plus, it would allow you to select your own civ to be the recipient of one of the bonuses, which is cool. What I don't like, though, is the prospect of a Duel game where you are exhibiting in your own capital 4 times... probably your own capital should be capped at once. This could also be fine as a wonder, though it's not that awesome of one, maybe (but so what?). Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
I would also be fine with dropping down to 7 Exhibitions total to handle the 8 civ case (which is the default for Standard size maps). We could do that with or without the wonder for Exhibiting at your own capital.

yeah, i'm still pretty unsure as to what the exact number should be. If I recall correctly, CiV requires 7 currently.

S3rgeus said:
Related to how we want to handle doubling up - I think doubling up until you've completed all Exhibitions is a good idea. (And restricting doubling up to the minimum possible - so you can never exhibit multiple times if there are any civs you haven't exhibited to yet.)

yes, definitely agree.

S3rgeus said:
Related to the resurgence of global vs local bonuses. Good point. Global bonuses do solve the "defending well is bad for you" problem. It has effects on the other portions of the victory too. The Envoy-sending civ no longer cares who he Exhibits to - he should go directly for whichever civs have the most accessible capitals. Map-wise it makes it easier - just do what's easiest. It does make it harder in terms of competition - even your greatest enemy gets the bonuses.

I'm not sure which I prefer. Despite the "defending is bad for you" problem, I think I still prefer local bonuses. There's a whole metagame about "who should I Exhibit to" (which should be quite fun) that completely disappears if we use global bonuses. It also feels weird that the victory condition cares where you Exhibit despite the results of those Exhibitions not being different in each place.

I'm inclined to agree and prefer local bonuses as well. The biggest problem with global ones is what you mentioned - the whole system *seems* like it's based on individual civs, so a global bonus would seem sort of unintuitive.

S3rgeus said:
One thing I've just considered is if the Envoys should have a chance of failure when they perform the Exhibition - but that will get old very fast. It turns the whole thing into a dice roll, which is bad. At best it's unnecessary repetition for the player - at worst it's the player losing a game they should have won (after they've played for 10+ hours) because the AI rolled better on a few one-time-only randomness checks.

eh, I'd say no randomness for the same reasons you've mentioned here.

S3rgeus said:
I think even weighted it would vary a lot. Sometimes it might choose all civs whose capitals are really difficult to navigate to - other times they might all be easy. Given the time the player has already invested, I'd be reluctant to introduce that kind of randomness (even weighted), despite the idea sounding good. It seems like the kind of thing players could feel very cheated or disappointed by.

right. that idea is fired! go home, idea, nobody wants you here.

S3rgeus said:
1000 gold kind of region - something that makes a big immediate difference.

I've been thinking about this and I'm starting to think that that's way too much. Here's the thing: this is the only victory type that helps your opponents. I mean, there are some tangential benefits that *can* happen in the diplo victory path, but this is a direct bonus a civ gets because another civ is *winning*. I like it from the perspective of adding a strategic element (who should get what, etc.), but the bonuses themselves shouldn't be very big, I think.

If the main purpose for making them big is to make the science victory harder, I'd say let's introduce other means to make it more difficult (longer production time for envoys, for example).

1000 gold is more than a typical GM trade mission, right? That's a lot. I'm starting to think the amount should be more along the lines of an "oh, that's nice" for the recipient, and not a potential momentum shifter. Maybe 100 is too little, but maybe something more like 500.

Again, I guess I'm sort of struggling to wrap my head around the game design implications of "science victory = helping other civs." I understand them from a thematic perspective, of course (i.e., sharing the techs to usher in the fourth age, rand style, etc.).

S3rgeus said:
Sorry, I can explain this better by example! I didn't mean anything to do with the yields, just with how Envoys are associated with Exhibitions.

So, example, what we're doing already, one Envoy per Exhibition type, one or more Exhibitions unlocked by individual technologies.

Technology Steam unlocks: Steamworks and Roadbuilding Exhibitions

That means after researching Steam, a player can now build a Steamworks Envoy and a Roadbuilding Envoy.

Alternative I didn't explain well last time:

Technology Steam unlocks: Steamworks and Roadbuilding Exhibitions

After researching Steam, a player can now build up to two Steam Envoys - which can each perform either the Steamworks of Roadbuilding Exhibitions (or only one, if you only need one).

Small difference, it's more related to the old conversation we had about relating Envoys to Exhibitions.

Alright. Gotcha. Makes perfect sense.

That said, I'm not sure it matters, really. I'd say, just make each exhibition have it's own envoy unit. Also, I'm not sure we need to have one tech yield multiple envoys, anyways. It could happen, but not essential IMO.

S3rgeus said:
I'm in agreement on naming here now - "Great Scholar" for the Great Scientist. Envoy for the unit and Exhibition for the event. For a lot of the reasons you stated and some I've mentioned above!

I think Envoy for the unit is definitely a suffix. Depending on what we like above, it would either be "<Technology> Envoy" or "<Exhibition> Envoy" - because they will be distinct unit types and should be differentiable easily by name on the map.

cool. I like both of those too!

S3rgeus said:
Good point here that the remaining concepts will become 4th age technologies. Even the ones we choose as Exhibitions will likely need some related technology umbrella to unlock them.

Right. So when should we be actually lining them up and figuring out which does what? Now (or at least once we decide on how many of them there are, and how strong the bonuses are), or wait till we build the tech tree? Between the original set I listed and what lordoflinks posted, we should be able to choose the 7-8 that feel most deserving of envoys (as opposed to simply being techs).

I should say that this topic, like diplo, does seem like it's starting to loop around on itself. We've come up with a rather impressive amount in a pretty short time, but for me at least, I feel like my ideas are slowing down. Hopefully we can wrap it up soon and move on.

S3rgeus · Feb 3, 2015

counterpoint said:
I'll say first that it's starting to feel a little bit like we're playing tennis with a few of these diplo issues. Let's just settle on something on these outstanding things, I think. Probably should move on soon.

I think we're 99% of the way there on most of them!

counterpoint said:
Under tier 3 of the Red, though, you do have some weird phrasing there. Also, I'm not 100% sure that half as often is the final value. I think we'll have to wait and see how things work out.

Very true, fixed the phrasing! I couldn't find an actual number that we decided on for the reduction in male channeler spawning rate, so I ballparked it. Totally up for changing it or just waiting and doing so after some playtesting.

counterpoint said:
regarding the reds... wasn't it supposed to be a bonus to ranged combat str. against male channelers? (that's what it was listed as in this post). or at least channelers in general? not overall? Again, I see some iffy bleed with greens here.... that said, maybe it's not so bad. Of course, if it's just against male channelers, the % should likely be higher than 15%.

The summary used to read "ranged combat defense" but I've removed the word "combat" to make it less ambiguous. From that post it looks like the Red ability changed between the previous posts and the mini-summary! I was under the impression it was +15% ranged defense because that covered attacks from male channelers but was also favorable for some other units.

counterpoint said:
re: the brown's second-tier ability... that's too high, right? +1 for each GW? That's... +100% GW production in that city. Isn't that too much? I'd intended it to be a +1 for each theming bonus, or each building, or something.

Yeah, +1 per GW is craaazy. I've changed it to be +1 per full GW building. (For single slot GW buildings those are the same though - and in BNW there are a lot of single slot buildings! Do we think that could be an issue? Is "Theming bonuses in cities within 3 hexes of a Brown Sister provide +1 Prestige" better?)

counterpoint said:
Also, I was thinking of the weird GW-gift for the brown's top tier, and how it was problematically intermittent - you either got the GW or you didn't. What if, instead, we just had it be a +% bonus to GW-associated GP production? Like, the Blues, just different GP-types?

Done!

counterpoint said:
otherwise looks great. Part of me thinks the starting abilities of each ajah should be listed here too. Not because it's directly related to diplo, but because it'll help keep things clear. I found myself reading them and thinking, for example "wait, don't the blues have a 3-hex proximity ability? oh, wait, that's their starting ability..." etc.

I totally see what you mean, I had to think carefully about that when writing them too. The Blue's main ability almost ended up in two of the slots. I've updated the list with the Tier Zero abilities!

counterpoint said:
OK, so first of all, I did think the object was to make them good saiding killers, seeing that that is the objective of the Ajah as a whole.

In any case, whether we make this specific ability (warderlessness) saidin-linked or not is a smaller issue to me than their ability set in general. As it stands, it appears that of the "boosts" you receive, *both* of them would have nothing to do with saidin. I find that not awesome. I'm very much fine with one of them being unrelated (probably this one), but both of them? Again, I don't want them to be Green Ajah, part 2.

Regarding Warders, I should remind us that they're "just units." Like, they will be good, I'm sure, but probably not insanely good. The civ will have to sacrifice a unit to get them, after all. I mention this because, in the big scheme of things, the difference between an AS with a warder and without one may not be much - people might just pair their Red sisters with "not warders" (i.e. regular units who aren't bonded) without much loss in functionality.

That said, I can be fine with the warderless red sisters having the trait you've described, if you feel strongly about it. I don't love them being "Siege weapons", since I don't love any Aes Sedai being siege weapons, but I understand your meaning.

So, I guess I ask... why all around combat strength? So, we want to reward them for having no warders.... Does that bonus have to be all around combat strength? To me, that feels somewhat generic, and - again - intrudes on the space of the Green. If you want to compensate for a Warder's ability, maybe we should be thinking primarily in defensive terms. Their Tier 1 ability is a bonus to ranged combat str (debated somewhat by me above)... maybe the 2nd tier could be a huge bonus to melee defense (recall that all female channelers have terrible melee defense). I can see the Red sisters justified as "defensive," flavor-wise. This way, they won't end up as siege weapons, necessarily, but sisters that are really hard to kill.

I see what you mean here. I think given the above, that the Red's Tier One ability is a +15% ranged defense bonus, we shouldn't just stack the same bonus.

Given our debate here and what you've said about overlap with the Greens and the objectives of the Ajah/ability, I'm leaning more towards your previous suggestion of warderless Red Sisters have a chance to Gentle male channelers that they attack. 30% chance?

counterpoint said:
Alright, regarding assassination... hmmm, I'm thinking probably that *is* only a Gray Man Mission - or, maybe also a Bloodknives thing, if we wanted to waste a Seanchan Unique on them... Assassination is just not something that pops up that much.

That said, "Depose the Amyrlin" or something could be something I could see at least *initiated* by a spy. Maybe not achieved, but initiated. Obviously the Hall has to vote an amyrlin out, but maybe a spy could cause a scandal that provokes an amyrlin re-vote mid era? Or, maybe changes the voting numbers for the next vote? I would say this kind of thing would be something that could be done even by non-Shadow civs.

Certainly it does seem that the amyrlin needs to be ousted at some point in the turning process..

Assassination doesn't come up that often in the history of the Tower, but Gray Men only become available to Shadow players at the end of the game. We saw several attempts on the Amyrlin that were very close to successful over the course of the books. (I'm thinking of the poisoned arrow in Fal Dara in book 1 or 2, and the Gray Man in the Tower somewhere in the latter third of the series.) It's easy to see alternate histories where one of those attempts succeeded. This would definitely lock us into the Gray Men as our primary avenue to assassinate the Amyrlin.

Related to that though, you mention Bloodknives. I don't think we want to use up a Seanchan unique for them, but we could associate Bloodknives with the Oppression Ideology instead? Oppression players have a spy replaced by a Bloodknife, who is capable of trying to assassinate the Amyrlin?

I'm fine with trying to have the Amyrlin deposed being the "spy mission" at the Tower, if people choose to use it. What affects a spy's effectiveness at this mission? Rank seems sensible. Do we want the controlling player's influence with various Ajahs to play a role? Their overall Tower influence? Something more specific like their influence with the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from?

counterpoint said:
You're right that subverting the Ajah = gaining influence. The problem is that, during the LB, the shadow civs no longer can enter normal negotiations with the Tower - right? If that's the case, how would they ever gain influence? Sorta like how you don't gain influence with CSs while at war.

Good point. We can't really have the Tower still giving out quests to civs that are declared for the Shadow. Maybe Turning the Tower has to be done before the Last Battle? That does make this sequence simpler to manage. We might want to move back to the era before the Age of the Dragon for Shadow players to see the objectives then though. That also means we can have the Tower "declare" Turning when all of the civs have chosen their alignment, which could be really cool. It's a super surprise upset if the Tower declares for the Shadow.

counterpoint said:
hmmm... interesting question regarding the chronology of pillaging, etc. I'm not sure. It seems a little ticky-tack either way. I'd say, in any case, we need to be consistent. If any of them could be "reversible," we need to make sure all of them need to remain in place (or, decide that *none* need to remain in place at turn-time.).

Cool, given that we want this to be quite difficult, let's go for they must be complete *at the same time* - so events that can be undone like Ajah influence and pillaging improvements must remain completed so that assassinating the Amyrlin is the final straw.

counterpoint said:
Hmmm... an interesting idea. I'm not sure what it really adds, though. If it's created via envoys, then it seems somewhat redundant to the exhibition model. If it is created via a tech-lead... I don't know. I like to think that you don't need to have a tech lead to win the science victory. Consider 2 civs that are neck and neck in science, but one simply doesn't have the production, or map position to be able to disseminate envoys. That civ should lose. If a tech "lead" was necessarily, these civs would appear to be locked in a stalemate. It's true that such a thing can happen with a culture victory attempt, but that whole system is designed around that culture/tourism = defense/offense dichotomy. Here, it would pop up at the end only, and, I guess I just don't see how much it adds.

That said, from a flavor-only perspective, I could see it. For example, if you successfully envoy to a civ, that civ then has an Academy or something. Sort of a permanent marker of your interaction. Not important, though.

I think mechanically it adds quite an important element of player participation. I agree that requiring a tech lead isn't really what we want to do, that was the mechanism that came to mind to achieve the desired goal. What it adds is a way for any player to "defend themselves" - to deliberately take some actions beyond military force that can prevent another player from winning (if they do those actions well).

That element is the most important part of the suggestion here, I wasn't a big fan of the specifics of how it was achieved in my latest suggestion either though.

counterpoint said:
definitely like the idea of one bonus allowing more exhibition options besides the capital. I do think the >X population option is the way to go though. ANY city seems a bit crazy to me.

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
huh. Maybe we should always make your own capital an option. If you think about it, that's just what the civ science victory currently is. Plus, it would allow you to select your own civ to be the recipient of one of the bonuses, which is cool. What I don't like, though, is the prospect of a Duel game where you are exhibiting in your own capital 4 times... probably your own capital should be capped at once. This could also be fine as a wonder, though it's not that awesome of one, maybe (but so what?). Thoughts?

If we didn't have to cap it at one for smaller map sizes, I'd be on board with this. But I think being capped at one for your own capital and not for other capitals, while mechanically it makes sense, is confusing for the player. I think as a wonder ability it can stand separate. Otherwise it's a rule with an exception - you can Exhibit at your own capital a maximum of once, and foreign capitals X times depending on how many other players are still alive. If the rule is just: X times per foreign capital based on player numbers, then players can just follow that. But the wonder can introduce "you can Exhibit at your capital once" as a separate thread - it's a part of that ability rather than the rule.

It could be a pretty awesome wonder since it might win the game! I'd say it would have other science-related yield bonuses too though.

counterpoint said:
yeah, i'm still pretty unsure as to what the exact number should be. If I recall correctly, CiV requires 7 currently.

Let's stick with 8. If it's too confusing on Standard size maps or we find some other reason to drop to 7, then we can tweak it then.

counterpoint said:
I'm inclined to agree and prefer local bonuses as well. The biggest problem with global ones is what you mentioned - the whole system *seems* like it's based on individual civs, so a global bonus would seem sort of unintuitive.

Cool, local bonuses are still our preferred!

counterpoint said:
I've been thinking about this and I'm starting to think that that's way too much. Here's the thing: this is the only victory type that helps your opponents. I mean, there are some tangential benefits that *can* happen in the diplo victory path, but this is a direct bonus a civ gets because another civ is *winning*. I like it from the perspective of adding a strategic element (who should get what, etc.), but the bonuses themselves shouldn't be very big, I think.

If the main purpose for making them big is to make the science victory harder, I'd say let's introduce other means to make it more difficult (longer production time for envoys, for example).

1000 gold is more than a typical GM trade mission, right? That's a lot. I'm starting to think the amount should be more along the lines of an "oh, that's nice" for the recipient, and not a potential momentum shifter. Maybe 100 is too little, but maybe something more like 500.

Again, I guess I'm sort of struggling to wrap my head around the game design implications of "science victory = helping other civs." I understand them from a thematic perspective, of course (i.e., sharing the techs to usher in the fourth age, rand style, etc.).

Yeah, I totally see what you mean here. In some ways the culture victory can help other civs (you're signing open borders with everybody and trading specifically with other nations that are likely to be quite strong), but it's not nearly as direct as the Exhibitions. I'm fine with paring the bonuses down to something more like 500.

counterpoint said:
Alright. Gotcha. Makes perfect sense.

That said, I'm not sure it matters, really. I'd say, just make each exhibition have it's own envoy unit. Also, I'm not sure we need to have one tech yield multiple envoys, anyways. It could happen, but not essential IMO.

Well, if each Exhibition has its own Envoy, then unless no two Exhibitions are unlocked by the same tech, those techs must unlock multiple Envoys, right? I'm fine with either approach, Envoy per tech or Envoy per Exhibition.

counterpoint said:
Right. So when should we be actually lining them up and figuring out which does what? Now (or at least once we decide on how many of them there are, and how strong the bonuses are), or wait till we build the tech tree? Between the original set I listed and what lordoflinks posted, we should be able to choose the 7-8 that feel most deserving of envoys (as opposed to simply being techs).

I think we have a general concept of the kinds of bonuses we'd like to create and good flavor sources for deciding how to allocate those bonuses. But I think choosing the specific "technologies" and concepts to use from the book requires us to choose which techs we're associating them with. And that means we need to know where those techs are going to go on the tree, and probably what other roles those techs will be fulfilling at the same time. (Since the lategame techs usually fulfill multiple uses depending on the civ.)

All of that requires us to choose the order for techs, which means the whole tree leading up to the lategame needs to be roughly in place (though not necessarily final). I think that's something we're going to need to come back to later.

counterpoint said:
I should say that this topic, like diplo, does seem like it's starting to loop around on itself. We've come up with a rather impressive amount in a pretty short time, but for me at least, I feel like my ideas are slowing down. Hopefully we can wrap it up soon and move on.

All with the moving on! We must savor the moment! We're so close to closing off another victory condition!

Related to that, our next topic up for discussion is, I believe, the culture victory? According to the rough guidelines from here. (Though I do remember us reorganizing the order a little after that?)

And once we finish the culture victory, we've defined all of the victory types.

Then it's moving on to more specifics like GP types, Path beliefs, techs, buildings, and units. Awesome stuff!

So, in terms of the culture victory, I think this one needs to change the least from BNW to WoTMod. We're reflavoring Tourism as Prestige, but I very much enjoy the mechanics involved in that victory. Is there anything specific we want to add that WoT-ifies the way culture works?

counterpoint · Feb 4, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Very true, fixed the phrasing! I couldn't find an actual number that we decided on for the reduction in male channeler spawning rate, so I ballparked it. Totally up for changing it or just waiting and doing so after some playtesting.

Yeah, no idea what the number should really be. We'll have a better idea once we figure out what the normal spawn rate is.

S3rgeus said:
The summary used to read "ranged combat defense" but I've removed the word "combat" to make it less ambiguous. From that post it looks like the Red ability changed between the previous posts and the mini-summary! I was under the impression it was +15% ranged defense because that covered attacks from male channelers but was also favorable for some other units.

OK, i'm definitely in agreement with leaving this one as 15% ranged defense (generally) while making the other one more specific (see below).

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, +1 per GW is craaazy. I've changed it to be +1 per full GW building. (For single slot GW buildings those are the same though - and in BNW there are a lot of single slot buildings! Do we think that could be an issue? Is "Theming bonuses in cities within 3 hexes of a Brown Sister provide +1 Prestige" better?)

I'm drawn to "Theming bonuses in cities within 3 hexes of a Brown Sister provide +1 Prestige." Minor, yet, but seeing that it could probably be doubled and whatnot by tenets and other things, this could be significant.

S3rgeus said:
I totally see what you mean, I had to think carefully about that when writing them too. The Blue's main ability almost ended up in two of the slots. I've updated the list with the Tier Zero abilities!

Looks great! It doesn't matter here, but in later iterations we should definitely specify that Gray *warders* can move through enemy territory as well.

S3rgeus said:
I see what you mean here. I think given the above, that the Red's Tier One ability is a +15% ranged defense bonus, we shouldn't just stack the same bonus.

Given our debate here and what you've said about overlap with the Greens and the objectives of the Ajah/ability, I'm leaning more towards your previous suggestion of warderless Red Sisters have a chance to Gentle male channelers that they attack. 30% chance?

OK, definitely in favor of going ahead and making the Red Tier One ability a +15% ranged defense (against any ranged attack) and making the Tier Two ability the gentling upon attack chance.

As far as the chance, well, I think 30% is too high, since they only have a 60% chance via a typical "Gentling" action (30% for non-Reds). 20% seems better - good chance of happening, but significantly less than a "targeted" Gentling attack. I think it's important we don't totally neutralize their Level 0 ability, right? That said, if there's a design reason I'm missing, let me know.

S3rgeus said:
Assassination doesn't come up that often in the history of the Tower, but Gray Men only become available to Shadow players at the end of the game. We saw several attempts on the Amyrlin that were very close to successful over the course of the books. (I'm thinking of the poisoned arrow in Fal Dara in book 1 or 2, and the Gray Man in the Tower somewhere in the latter third of the series.) It's easy to see alternate histories where one of those attempts succeeded. This would definitely lock us into the Gray Men as our primary avenue to assassinate the Amyrlin.

Right. That's cool. Gholam, I guess, are just random uber-powerful shadowspawn, right? Because they were also sort of used as assassins, in a way, as I recall.

But Gray Men could likely be able to be put in any city to assassinate a governor, right?

S3rgeus said:
Related to that though, you mention Bloodknives. I don't think we want to use up a Seanchan unique for them, but we could associate Bloodknives with the Oppression Ideology instead? Oppression players have a spy replaced by a Bloodknife, who is capable of trying to assassinate the Amyrlin?

Hmmm.... well, maybe the Bloodknife can also assassinate governors, right? I can see them being more generic than simply a 'chan UU. That said, what's the difference between them and the Gray Men? Is there a gameplay difference? There should be, or they seem kinda pointless.

Crazy idea, what if a spy can *become* a bloodknife? Recall that the ter'angreal that creates a bloodknife eventually kills the assassin. What if you selected a spy and made them a bloodknife. This unlocked assassinations as a mission for them, and/or made their next mission have a higher success rate and/or occur much faster. But, it also killed them - resetting their level. In order to prevent abuse (sending level one spies to die), we could say there's a minimum level they had to be.

Also, are we sure we want the differentiation between Philosophies to be so great as to allow different unit types/actions? So far, we've already expanded upon the differences already in CiV - the difference between Refusal Penalties - but this kind of thing does seem to push that to the next level. Maybe it's ok, but are we sure it's worth it, considering it will likely complicate balance quite a bit? Also, can we think of enough other stuff to "fill in" these kinds of things for each of the Philosophies. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but I'm saying we *maybe* shouldn't.

I could understand the bloodknives being theoretically available to anybody - especially if there's a "cost" like I described above. There's no reason a Liberation civ wouldn't be as likely to try to kill an opposing ruler or something. That said, getting caught with them is likely tantamount to an international incident. Now, an Authority civ probably wouldn't go and try to Assassinate the *amyrlin* though - but why not a governor?

S3rgeus said:
I'm fine with trying to have the Amyrlin deposed being the "spy mission" at the Tower, if people choose to use it. What affects a spy's effectiveness at this mission? Rank seems sensible. Do we want the controlling player's influence with various Ajahs to play a role? Their overall Tower influence? Something more specific like their influence with the Ajah the Amyrlin was raised from?

As most things with the tower, I'd suspect it'd be several things. Spy level, influence all seem to make sense to me. I'm not sure it needs to get as detailed as the Amyrlin Ajah or anything like this, though.

again though, probably this kind of thing is best used as something "set in motion" by the player - the spy doesn't actually depose the amyrlin, but prompts a vote, or sways that vote, or something.

S3rgeus said:
Good point. We can't really have the Tower still giving out quests to civs that are declared for the Shadow. Maybe Turning the Tower has to be done before the Last Battle? That does make this sequence simpler to manage. We might want to move back to the era before the Age of the Dragon for Shadow players to see the objectives then though. That also means we can have the Tower "declare" Turning when all of the civs have chosen their alignment, which could be really cool. It's a super surprise upset if the Tower declares for the Shadow.

Yes, it does seem the Tower needs to turn before the LB. Also, yeah, let's open the turning an era earlier.

But yeah, keeping it hidden til the declaration - awesome! That said, civ is usually transparent in many facets - is it possible for Light civs to gain any insight into how far along the effort is?

S3rgeus said:
Cool, given that we want this to be quite difficult, let's go for they must be complete *at the same time* - so events that can be undone like Ajah influence and pillaging improvements must remain completed so that assassinating the Amyrlin is the final straw.

sounds good.

S3rgeus said:
I think mechanically it adds quite an important element of player participation. I agree that requiring a tech lead isn't really what we want to do, that was the mechanism that came to mind to achieve the desired goal. What it adds is a way for any player to "defend themselves" - to deliberately take some actions beyond military force that can prevent another player from winning (if they do those actions well).

That element is the most important part of the suggestion here, I wasn't a big fan of the specifics of how it was achieved in my latest suggestion either though.

OK, I suppose I am not seeing how this includes any defending-player agency or action? You mentioned before it would be prompted by a tech lead (which I know you aren't attached to), but that is still Science-pursuing civ centric. If it's just another thing the science-civ does... then it's somewhat redundant.

I gather, in general, what you're suggesting is that some precondition must be met with each civ before that civ can be Exhibited to, and that that precondition may be in some ways affected by a recipient civ, right?

I can get behind this in theory, as long as it isn't too tedious. That said, I have essentially no idea what it could be, short of things that help a civ prevent the Envoys from being successful (we could have an improvement that gives them a failure chance... even though we already hated this idea before).

"Realistically" (i.e. not concerned with game design), it would seem that a civ would be vulnerable to an envoy if they 1) traded resources with the civ recently, 2) had a trade route with the civ recently, 3) entered into an open borders agreement with the civ, 4) entered into research agreements with the civ, and 5) shared a Philosophy with the civ.

I'm not sure how useful that all is, though. It essentially would mean that you couldn't ever exhibit to a sworn enemy.

I'm guess I'm struggling to figure out how the establishment of an Academy in a civ has anything to do with the recipient civ specifically (and their ability to defend).

S3rgeus said:
If we didn't have to cap it at one for smaller map sizes, I'd be on board with this. But I think being capped at one for your own capital and not for other capitals, while mechanically it makes sense, is confusing for the player. I think as a wonder ability it can stand separate. Otherwise it's a rule with an exception - you can Exhibit at your own capital a maximum of once, and foreign capitals X times depending on how many other players are still alive. If the rule is just: X times per foreign capital based on player numbers, then players can just follow that. But the wonder can introduce "you can Exhibit at your capital once" as a separate thread - it's a part of that ability rather than the rule.

OK, totally agree here. I wonder... which wonder? "School of Cairhien" is sort of logical, except for the obvious naming problem. Obviously, can tackle it later.

S3rgeus said:
Let's stick with 8. If it's too confusing on Standard size maps or we find some other reason to drop to 7, then we can tweak it then.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, I totally see what you mean here. In some ways the culture victory can help other civs (you're signing open borders with everybody and trading specifically with other nations that are likely to be quite strong), but it's not nearly as direct as the Exhibitions. I'm fine with paring the bonuses down to something more like 500.

ok. let's do that, then.

S3rgeus said:
Well, if each Exhibition has its own Envoy, then unless no two Exhibitions are unlocked by the same tech, those techs must unlock multiple Envoys, right? I'm fine with either approach, Envoy per tech or Envoy per Exhibition.

Each exhibition should require its own envoy. I don't feel strongly about this, but I don't really see it as a problem either.

S3rgeus said:
I think we have a general concept of the kinds of bonuses we'd like to create and good flavor sources for deciding how to allocate those bonuses. But I think choosing the specific "technologies" and concepts to use from the book requires us to choose which techs we're associating them with. And that means we need to know where those techs are going to go on the tree, and probably what other roles those techs will be fulfilling at the same time. (Since the lategame techs usually fulfill multiple uses depending on the civ.)

All of that requires us to choose the order for techs, which means the whole tree leading up to the lategame needs to be roughly in place (though not necessarily final). I think that's something we're going to need to come back to later.

OK, totally agree. Let's do it later. We can make a general list for when we throw together a Science Victory Summary.

S3rgeus said:
All with the moving on! We must savor the moment! We're so close to closing off another victory condition!

So close!

S3rgeus said:
Related to that, our next topic up for discussion is, I believe, the culture victory? According to the rough guidelines from here. (Though I do remember us reorganizing the order a little after that?).

And once we finish the culture victory, we've defined all of the victory types. Then it's moving on to more specifics like GP types, Path beliefs, techs, buildings, and units. Awesome stuff!

Yes, let's do Culture Victory next!

Although, I feel like we should at least stop and seriously consider the Domination Victory and whether anything needs to be changed. I haven't had any ideas, but I also hadn't thought about it at all. In any case, I simply suggest we reserve a moment/post to consider the possibility. After Culture, though.

S3rgeus said:
So, in terms of the culture victory, I think this one needs to change the least from BNW to WoTMod. We're reflavoring Tourism as Prestige, but I very much enjoy the mechanics involved in that victory. Is there anything specific we want to add that WoT-ifies the way culture works?

I agree with you. It won't change much from BNW (though, perhaps, Domination will change even less).

Well, I would like to take some time to dive in and discuss some aspects of this - the GWs,a nd any special aspects to them, ancient ruins and any special aspects to them. That kind of thing. I don't have the time to jump in tonight, though. Plus, we're so close to finishing both Diplo and science!

OK, so two things that should happen as we wrap up science and diplo: A) a science summary post, and B) "opening arguments" on culture victory, with ideas and general proposals and such (not unlike what happened with the previous two victory types).

Which of those two would you like to do? I'll do the other.

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

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