S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

TrevorVerges · May 13, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Awesome, there is a Wheel of Time wikia for you to browse! Definitely no tight deadlines - while we're working at a fair clip to get things designed, this is a big project so we'll be here a while! As counterpoint says, we'd like to have something within a year.

Based on our feature set and what it looks like we're going to be designing in the remaining sections, (assuming we don't take on more programmers) I'd be quite happy if our public beta happened within that time!

Also as counterpoint has said, we're at 14 civs intended for launch. The civs themselves all exist within the context of the mod's other changes - we're more of a total conversion than a civ pack. We're overhauling some of the existing victories, adding a new one, stripping out and replacing the tech tree, units, buildings, and policies, as well as adding quite a few new mechanics. As you can see - tons of new artwork and icons between all of those! The civs are of course one of our biggest player facing things (and likely the first pieces of WoTMod artwork that the player will see when they start the mod!) so your enthusiasm to have those looking awesome is great!

Hey man just message me when you want me to start workin on stuff!! Happy to help in what spare time I have

S3rgeus · May 14, 2015

counterpoint said:
Sorry for the absence. My document HD has been on the fritz, and it's been all I can do to recover those files in my free time and try to get things back up and running (currently halfway through putting everything back.

I hate being in this weird middle ground with tech. I know enough to install my own stuff, set it all up, and make things run, but I don't *really* know what I'm doing.... so everytime something goes wrong, goodbye 12 hours.... At least I get it working eventually. I do have the tech support phone people beat in that regard, I guess.

On that note, anybody ever had the problem where a large drive (2TB+ is only showing 746 GB capacity.) Now *that* was a waste of time today....

Anyways, here I am. Sorry for the lapse - unfortunately it's not like this is going to be an epic response worth waiting for....

No worries, I hope it's all back up and running now! A large drive only giving you less space than expected would usually be a partitioning error, unless the drive is a complete lost cause. Even then I would expect the drive to just become unavailable rather than report different sizes.

counterpoint said:
I remember tossing around the word "Customs" as a possible alternative for Beliefs. Don't remember settling though.

OK, so I'm happy to set up a Paths Summary, or you can. I'd do it now, but my docs are still being backed up so I don't have access to the list I made many months ago. I can probably take care of it tomorrow once things are back to normal.

let's keep this quote block alive until this gets done, so we know to put these beliefs in the summary.

- Friendly Heralds are twice as effective
- Foreign Heralds are half as effective.
- Governors produce double alignment (see below!)
- + X alignment points for every city following this path (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- X building produces +Y Alignment (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- allows construction of <Alignment Building> based on direction of your overall alignment, that produces more alignment, plus other things (e.g., Evil Pagoda).

Yeah, Customs rings a bell and sounds good.

If you could do the Path Summary that would be awesome. No rush, make sure all your files are safe first!

counterpoint said:
OK, there's a LOT there, most of it very cool seeming, but.... I kind of feel like I cant really respond to all of it, because it feels a little premature to do so. I think we probably need to start "at the beginning" with regards to governors, before we'll be able to really work out levelling mechanics and such. Sorry for yet another Respond-to-an-epic-Wall-of-Text-with-one-paragraph (TM).

I will say, though, generally, that from a flavor perspective I did like the idea of you choosing the gov's "nature" at creation. So that gov just WAS Cruel. Instead of choosing it at a later time as a promotion. This of course means that such alignment yields would be in *addition* to their normal bonuses.

Now, if there is advancement, I'm not sure currently if I want the alignment to be a choice as you've described, or simply just level up with the governor, like all their yields (don't forget, certain Aes Sedai provide bonuses to govs as well). That is the thing I'm not yet ready to really comment on.

Also, I'll say that mathematically I think I am in line with you.I think a +1 as a base. MAybe +5 is fine for end-game, but it's possible it is too high, based on the numbers you are crunching. Maybe it's fine, but probably it'd be the case that not all of your govs would be at +5. Now, what I'm not sure of is how exactly these advances happen - is it by promotion, era, city-size, etc. These are the things to hash out later.

Basic totals, though, I'm with you.

Cool, let's discuss the mechanics of how we want to do that when we do Governors in more detail then. Sounds like the numbers are in the right place!

counterpoint said:
Right. For buildings, I'm thinking a +1 could be good, or else the more indirect ways you are suggestion. Either way.

Cool, something for us to keep in mind when we're deciding what the buildings are and where they go in the tree.

counterpoint said:
let's preserve these for quote blocking purposes. When we settle them I'll add things to the summary.

These all look good to me, though I'm thinking we will likely add Wisdoms as well (see below). I could see Govs being perhaps lowered to accommodate that.

Cool, preserved. Wisdom stuff below.

counterpoint said:
8400! You forgot Cleansing of Saidin, which your earlier post said was 500 (one guy gets 1000, others get 200, or something)

These others look fine, though I could also imagine Ogier ending up lower if need be.

Yes, 8400!

counterpoint said:
Yeah, adding Cleansing back in there actually makes the Shadow stuff BEHIND the light. I can see FQuests or TtT being even more to accommodate.

Yeah, Forsaken Quests or turning the Tower are both easily beefed up and it makes sense for them to provide significant Alignment as well. Looks like we should tweak it to accommodate that.

So, some adjustments based on this:

Symmetrical sources:

Threads: ~3800
Paths: ~500
Citizens: ~500
Governors: ~1200
Buildings: ~500

Asymmetrical Light:

Ogier Quests: ~500
Cleansing Saidin: ~500
Gentling False Dragons: ~500
Killing Shadowspawn: ~200
Trolloc Wars: ~200

Asymmetrical Shadow:

Forsaken Quests: ~1500
Turning the Tower: ~700

This gives us ~8400 Light and ~8700 Shadow - with Shadow ahead to compensate for some unavoidable Light sources.

counterpoint said:
Alright, so what flavor direction do you enjoy?

but yeah, gating via tech seems reasonable.

The second one you suggested, with "cleansing or corrupting influences" - rather than having the buildings have direct association with Darkfriends or the Creator. Also completely agree that Hell, while in-universe, will be remarkably confusing - I didn't remember that one.

counterpoint said:
Wait, so which thing is Option 1?

Option 1 was having Wisdoms always produce Light.

counterpoint said:
As much as I like the coolness of specific citizens being DFs, I am concerned that it will be weird from a player experience. I think I, as a player, will expect it to mean something if I see a Scientist, and he's a darkfriend, or I see a guy working a farm, and he's normal. We know there's no difference, but I feel like by visually distinguishing specific citizens like this, we will be making people think that it *does* matter.

More importantly to the topic at hand, though, I don't think the "manage which alignment your wisdom is" is a fun mechanic at all. Seems like it would be really tedious to ever have to worry about this.

So, I could go for specific citizens being DFs and such, but we'd need to make very careful accommodations to make it make sense. A number to the player is more boring, but it is more intuitive, perhaps.

Is there a way to split the difference? Have some sort of graphical representation of citizens, some of them being dark, but not have those citizens literally BE the citizens you can manipulate in citizen management?

I see what you mean here and I think you're right. It's both more CiV-like and causes fewer consistency issues to have the DFC count be a number rather than attributed to be specific citizens.

In terms of a graphical representation, if we wanted to make DFCs visible in more places than a number on the city banner, we could Have some of the UI elements that refer to citizens (the green circle with the head, who pops up in notifications and on the city screen) be partially filled with purple/Shadow-color to represent DFC proportion. (So we wouldn't do this on the instances of the green head that represent individual citizens.) The way CiV graphics work also means it's difficult to have a blended fillable icon like that. (We would likely need to have a tiered set of icons to swap out based on proportion.) I don't think we'll be able to decide on this kind of nuance until we're working on UI polish though. It's more of a visual detail now that we agree above, rather than added information for the player.

counterpoint said:
I think the answer to both of these questions is "no," we don't want to link such things. That said, I think we CAN link WoT GPs to *Alignment* in general.

I could be in favor of having wisdoms generate Alignment of varying types - based on either the alignment of the city or your civ overall (but NOT the alignment of a specific citizen), generating, say, +1 Alignment in whatever direction. I don't think having them be Light only makes sense based on the balance above.

or, you know, put them back to Faith only. As you say, maybe we don't need them.

I'm thinking we're not really short on Alignment sources at the moment, but this is a good one to note down if we find we need to increase the payouts across the board or if we want to scale back an existing one and add more source variety. Just Faith sounds like a plan for now.

counterpoint said:
OK, so it strikes me that we're essentially done here, barring some nuances. Shall we move on? Where are we at?

I believe we were thinking we'd go on to Forsaken Quests next, at least a few pages ago. I think a couple of other topics have opened up that could also be candidates for us to discuss next:

Governors - we talked quite a bit about them in this section and they came up in the Domination section. They don't have a known mechanical framework like things we're adapting from base CiV do, so it might help us in other sections to have a clearer idea about these guys.

Artwork - Trevor's joined up! There are still a lot of unknowns for what we'll need in terms of art - a lot of techs/buildings/units that don't exist yet. But I think there are some known quantities: Aes Sedai (all 7 variants), the various Shadowspawn. There are probably more we could say now will definitely be a part of the mod. We could go through these and find some resources for stylistic inspiration and flavor information for Trevor to work from!

Paths - Came up above and we're putting up a Path summary at least as a stub for us to come back to. We could fill it out now, if we wanted. This would likely lead to a similar idea generation as Threads did, where we need to come up with all of the Customs.

GPs is also a pending "high level next topic" that we discussed several pages earlier.

Given that it's fresh and we have a solid target of ~1500 Shadow in a game (unless we want to tweak that, which we should do first), I think Forsaken Quests make a good next step. The other above are probably near-term subjects once we finish those.

But before we move on, we discussed quite a few things at length in the last few pages, are all of the decisions captured in the Summaries? I feel like the False Dragon section of the Misc Summary should have more stuff than just what I added a couple of posts ago, or was everything pretty much Alignment-related? I've just added the "25% of Gentling bonus value as Light" to the summary.

TrevorVerges said:
Hey man just message me when you want me to start workin on stuff!! Happy to help in what spare time I have

Will do! We'll need to nail down what pieces of artwork we're sure we need, since most of the design work so far has been on the system level, rather than individual end pieces like units/leaders/techs that individually need art. Hopefully we'll have some stuff for you soon!

Thanks again for the help!

counterpoint · May 14, 2015

(created 5/14/2015, updated 1/4/2016)

Paths to the Light Summary

CONTENTS

1 - GENERAL
2 - LINEAGE
3 - PATHS TO THE LIGHT
4 - FOUNDER CUSTOMS
5 - FOLLOWER CUSTOMS
6 - ENHANCER CUSTOMS
7 - RENEWAL CUSTOMS
8 - UNITS AND FAITH PURCHASES
9 - MISCELLANEOUS

GENERAL

Religions have be renamed Paths to the Light
Pantheons have been renamed Lineage
Beliefs are now called Customs
A Path is still Enhanced (i.e. the name remains the same)
Reformation has been renamed Renewal
The Path-spreading unit will be called the Herald
The Path-defending unit will be called the Truthspeaker
A Path's Holy City is now called its Home City.

2 - LINEAGE
Curators +2 Faith for each Gems or Pearls resource
Border Settlers 15% faster border growth
Children of Dragonmount +4 Faith from Natural Wonders
Miners +1 Faith for each Alum, Copper, and Salt resource
Devoted to Prophecy +1 Culture from Shrines
Festive Society Culture and +1 Faith for each Wine and Incense
Fishermen +1 Production from Fishing Boats
Friends of the Ogier +15% Production of Wonders from the Era After Breaking and Era of Nations
Hardy Folk +1 Faith from Tundra tiles without Forest
Herbal Healers +30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city
Honored Smiths +1 Production in cities with Population of 3+
Hunter Society +1 Food from Camps
City Folk Happiness from cities with Population of 6+
Loyal Bannermen Palace provides +1 Culture, Faith, Gold, Production, and Science
Masters of Harvest +1 Food for each Bananas, Zemai, and Wheat resource
Merchant Elite +1 Culture and +1 Faith for each Gold and Silver
Mountain Folk +2 Faith from Quarries
River Traders +1 Happiness from cities on rivers
Shepherds +1 Culture from Pastures
Soldier Community Gain Faith if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city
Stalwart Defenders +30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength
Thriving Peoples 10% faster Growth rates
Traveling Scholars +2 Science in cities with a City Connection
Water Seekers +1 Faith from Desert tiles
Woodland Folk +1 Culture from Jungle tiles
Dreamers - +2 Faith from Dreamwards
Devoted Leaders - +2 Faith from Governors
Unyielding Sentinels - +2 Faith, +2 Production from Blight
Adherents of Saidin - +30 Faith when a Male Channeler is born within 4 hexes of your city

3 - PATHS TO THE LIGHT
Descendants of the Blood
Symbol:

Ji'e'Toh
Symbol:

Stewards of the Dragon
Symbol:

Vanguard of the Wyld
Symbol:

Watchers Over the Waves
Symbol:

Water Way
Symbol:

Way of the Leaf
Symbol:

Way of the Light
Symbol:

Westlands Lore
Symbol:

4 - FOUNDER CUSTOMS

Accept Tributes
+1 Gold for every 4 followers of this Path

Fierce Bargaining
+3 Gold for each city following this Path

Deference to the Blood
+X Faith for every city following this Path that has a Governor

Festival of Birds
+1 Happiness for every city following this Path

Fragile Artificing
+X Happiness for each luxury resource your civilization receives from City-States following this Path.

Gai'shain
When you kill an enemy unit, gain +2 Production in your nearest city for every foreign city following this Path.

Indoctrination
X% chance to spawn a Herald when you defeat a Dragonsworn or Lawless unit for every city following this Path.

Lively Debate
Gain Science when a Herald spreads this Path to cities of other Paths

Omens
+2 Faith for each of your cities following this path, and +1 Faith for each foreign city following this path

Respect for Borders
+25 resting influence with City-States following this Path (not including Tar Valon)

Legends of the Tower
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance X% more quickly for each of your cities following this Path

Search for the Song
+1 Happiness for every 4 followers of this Path in non-enemy foreign cities.

Wanderlust
+1 Culture for every 5 followers of this Path in other civilizations

Welcoming to Ogier
+X Science for every 5 followers of this Path in Stedding

5 - FOLLOWER CUSTOMS

Aesceticism
<Shrine Equivalent> provides +1 Happiness in cities with 3 follower

Await the Corenne
+X Culture for cities on the coast.

Bel Tine
+5 Food and +2 Local Happiness on every turn divisible by X

Colorful Motley
<Early faith building> provides +4 Culture in cities with 4 of more followers.

Depositories
Use Faith to purchase Depositories (Cathedrals equivalent, +1 Faith, +1 Culture, +1 Happiness, 1 Legendary Craft or Relic slot)

Devoted Children
Can purchase Whitecloaks and any military unit before the New Beginnings era with Faith

Drink Before Battle
+10 Gold and +10 Faith when this city attacks (+25 Gold and +25 Faith if the unit is on a tile with Zemai)

Dueling Tradition
+X Culture whenever a unit dies within 3 tiles of this city.

Emblematic Tattoos
+30% Production when building melee units if the city has a Governor

Esteem for Sisters
Aes Sedai have +X% combat strength near cities following this Path.

Feast of Lights
<Shrine Equivalent> and <Temple Equivalent> provide +1 Food each in city

The Fifth
Double yield from international trade routes with civilizations that you have annexed a city from.

High Chasaline
<Temple equivalent> provide +2 Happiness in cities with 5 followers

Keepers of Sakarnen
Shadowspawn move more slowly when within 4 tiles of this city.

Liturgical Drama
<Amphitheaters Equivalents> provide +2 Faith in cities with 3 followers

Local Legends
Each World Wonder provides +2 Faith in city

Marriage Knives
Sources of Gems and Iron produce +1 Culture for every 4 followers of this Path

Meeting Toh
Can purchase settlers, workers, and Questioners with Faith

Nomadic Wagons
+X Culture from international land trade routes

Oaths of Fealty
Questioners are 50% less effective against this city.

Pacifism
15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war

Peace Bonding
+1 Happiness from <Armory equivalent>

Peace Gardens
<Garden equivalent> provide +2 Happiness in city

Religious Art
<Hermitage Equivalent> provides +5 Culture and +5 Tourism

Sister-Wives
+15% Growth rate while the city is producing military units and buildings

Skilled Da'covale
+1 Production per Specialist

Spring Poles
Use Faith to purchase Spring Poles (Pagodas equivalent, +2 happiness, +2 culture, +2 faith)

Sweat Tents
Use Faith to purchase Sweat Tents (Monastery equivalent, +2 culture, +2 faith, +1 culture and +1 faith per zemai and incense.)

Study with Ogier
+1% Production for each follower (Max +15%)

Tall Tales
+100 Gold and +X Golden Age points when each city first converts to this Path

Time of Illusion
+X Production in cities with population less than 5.

Village Councils
+2 Production and +1 Happiness in cities without Governors

Walkers of Angarai'la
+X Faith per turn from cities on rivers

Watchtowers
Use Faith to purchase Watchtowers (Mosque equivalent, +1 happiness, +2 culture, +3 faith)

Women's Circle
-15% Eyes and Ears stealing rate in this city

6 - ENHANCER CUSTOMS

Battle Lore
Units gain +X EXP per kill near cities following this Path.

Council of the Anointed
+X Faith when a Questioner is used on a city following this Path.

End of Illusion
-X Population in foreign cities when this Path first spreads there.

Fiercely Independent
Path spreads to City-States at double rate

Figure of Renown
Visionaries 25% stronger and earned with 25% less Faith

Influential Sojourn
Herald conversion strength +25%

Inspirational Teachings
Gain 100 Faith each time a Legendary Person is expended

Talkative Travelers
Path spreads to cities 30% further away

Telling of History
+X Pressure for each World Wonder residing in a city of this Path

Universal Creed
Path spreads 25% faster (50% with <Printing Press equivalent>

Volunteer Tradition
Heralds and Truthspeakers cost 30% less Faith

Warriors' Cadin'sor
+20% Combat Strength near cities that follow this Path

7 - RENEWAL CUSTOMS

Custodians of Karaethon
The Dragon is X% more effective in cities that follow this Path. (Applies to Randspy mode, would benefit each ability in a specific way.) Seals can be researched X% faster in cities following this Path. (Just the researching part, not breaking)

Inventive Spirit
Use Faith to purchase any type of Legendary Person starting in Era of New Beginnings

Famed Monuments
All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Prestige each

Gifting Tradition
Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%

Legion of the Dragon
Gain one free unit for every 30 foreign followers in civs declared for the Light whenever you gain control of the Dragon.

Lews Therin's Legacy
May purchase channeling units with Faith. (Not including Aes Sedai or Male Channelers)

Persistent Ideas
Truthspeakers and Visionaries reduce this Path's presence by half (instead of eliminating it)

Seekers for Truth
Your Eyes and Ears exert Path pressure on the cities they occupy

Tolerance
Heralds convert adjacent Lawless and Dragonsworn units to this civilization

Woolheadedness
Heralds' Spread Path action erodes existing pressure from other Paths

Zealotry
Use Faith to purchase Era of New Beginnings (and later) land units and Lords Captain.

Zest for Learning
May build <Universities equivalent>, <Public Schools equivalent>, <Research Labs equivalent>, and Sealbearers with Faith.

8 - UNITS AND FAITH PURCHASES

A Whitecloak unit can be purchased via a follower custom. It is a combat unit that is slightly stronger than units available at the time civs are likely to gain their first Custom.
A Lord Captain unit can be purchased via a Renewal custom. It is a powerful melee unit that captures units it destroys

9 - MISCELLANEOUS

counterpoint · May 15, 2015

S3rgeus said:
No worries, I hope it's all back up and running now! A large drive only giving you less space than expected would usually be a partitioning error, unless the drive is a complete lost cause. Even then I would expect the drive to just become unavailable rather than report different sizes.

All looks good now.

Apparently, though, the 746 GB thing has to do with me having too-old a chipset driver, as my mobo is from the Second Age.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, Customs rings a bell and sounds good.

If you could do the Path Summary that would be awesome. No rush, make sure all your files are safe first!

Paths Summary started!

The new Customs are obviously in red, but there are also a couple Lineage pieces that are. Specifically, many of the Pantheon beliefs are associated with resources. We have added some, and moved some to other terrain types, etc. Should we shift around some of the resources associated with Pantheons? Should we add some? Worthy of specific note is the whole "Copper, Iron, and Salt" one, made unusual now because Copper is now a strategic resource. Might matter, but might not.

Additionally, these are of course simple translations of existing panths from CiV? - do we want to add more based on some of our new systems?

Of course, I don't suggest we answer these questions now, since we aren't on that topic yet - simply stating some of the issues that came up when I was making the summary.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, Forsaken Quests or turning the Tower are both easily beefed up and it makes sense for them to provide significant Alignment as well. Looks like we should tweak it to accommodate that.

So, some adjustments based on this:

Symmetrical sources:

Threads: ~3800
Paths: ~500
Citizens: ~500
Governors: ~1200
Buildings: ~500

Asymmetrical Light:

Ogier Quests: ~500
Cleansing Saidin: ~500
Gentling False Dragons: ~500
Killing Shadowspawn: ~200
Trolloc Wars: ~200

Asymmetrical Shadow:

Forsaken Quests: ~1500
Turning the Tower: ~700

This gives us ~8400 Light and ~8700 Shadow - with Shadow ahead to compensate for some unavoidable Light sources.

I agree with these estimates! I put them into the alignment summary. Please take a look at the new stuff and see that they feel right (first bits of the Alignment summary)

I do think the "beefed up" FQuests and TtT stuff seems to make flavor sense. It seems to me that the truly terrible Darkfriends are such because they were asked to do crazy things in specific moments, while the Creator is essentially a non-actor (and thus the "Light" forces don't have as much flashy stuff to show for it).

S3rgeus said:
The second one you suggested, with "cleansing or corrupting influences" - rather than having the buildings have direct association with Darkfriends or the Creator. Also completely agree that Hell, while in-universe, will be remarkably confusing - I didn't remember that one.

OK. agreed. So, let's take care of these guys when we do buildings and such in general.

Yeah, a "Hell" is the <insert nation name I can't remember> word for a really seedy bar, where everybody's all rough. Don't remember where it pops up, one of the later books, but Mat is definitely the one who visits one.

S3rgeus said:
Option 1 was having Wisdoms always produce Light.

I see what you mean here and I think you're right. It's both more CiV-like and causes fewer consistency issues to have the DFC count be a number rather than attributed to be specific citizens.

In terms of a graphical representation, if we wanted to make DFCs visible in more places than a number on the city banner, we could Have some of the UI elements that refer to citizens (the green circle with the head, who pops up in notifications and on the city screen) be partially filled with purple/Shadow-color to represent DFC proportion. (So we wouldn't do this on the instances of the green head that represent individual citizens.) The way CiV graphics work also means it's difficult to have a blended fillable icon like that. (We would likely need to have a tiered set of icons to swap out based on proportion.) I don't think we'll be able to decide on this kind of nuance until we're working on UI polish though. It's more of a visual detail now that we agree above, rather than added information for the player.

OK, this kind of thing could work, for sure. Definitely don't need to discuss UI now, especially if Wisdoms are no longer a factor in alignment (which is probably the safest route).

Is there a way to do the specific-citizen approach (assuming wisdoms don't complicate it) without making it confusing?

S3rgeus said:
I'm thinking we're not really short on Alignment sources at the moment, but this is a good one to note down if we find we need to increase the payouts across the board or if we want to scale back an existing one and add more source variety. Just Faith sounds like a plan for now.

yes. very much agreed.

S3rgeus said:
I believe we were thinking we'd go on to Forsaken Quests next, at least a few pages ago. I think a couple of other topics have opened up that could also be candidates for us to discuss next:

Governors - we talked quite a bit about them in this section and they came up in the Domination section. They don't have a known mechanical framework like things we're adapting from base CiV do, so it might help us in other sections to have a clearer idea about these guys.

Artwork - Trevor's joined up! There are still a lot of unknowns for what we'll need in terms of art - a lot of techs/buildings/units that don't exist yet. But I think there are some known quantities: Aes Sedai (all 7 variants), the various Shadowspawn. There are probably more we could say now will definitely be a part of the mod. We could go through these and find some resources for stylistic inspiration and flavor information for Trevor to work from!

Paths - Came up above and we're putting up a Path summary at least as a stub for us to come back to. We could fill it out now, if we wanted. This would likely lead to a similar idea generation as Threads did, where we need to come up with all of the Customs.

GPs is also a pending "high level next topic" that we discussed several pages earlier.

Given that it's fresh and we have a solid target of ~1500 Shadow in a game (unless we want to tweak that, which we should do first), I think Forsaken Quests make a good next step. The other above are probably near-term subjects once we finish those.

I do agree. Let's do FQuests "next" (see below). So how many do you think we need? Should we do a flavor dive for forsaken-specific info, or do you think we probably only need 1 or 2 quests per 'saken (which should be flavorfully relatively easy to figure out)? So, process?

As far as governors, I think they might be good to do after the FQuests, and directly preceeding the GPs, since they may be related. In any case, we have to hammer out the Govs. Paths and Policies/Philosophies can follow that, I suppose.

As far as artwork, I think we should actually do that now, "that" being likely a very short convo - see below.

S3rgeus said:
But before we move on, we discussed quite a few things at length in the last few pages, are all of the decisions captured in the Summaries? I feel like the False Dragon section of the Misc Summary should have more stuff than just what I added a couple of posts ago, or was everything pretty much Alignment-related? I've just added the "25% of Gentling bonus value as Light" to the summary.

I think I'm all caught up in the Alignment summary. Looking over the misc summary, I think that looks ok, though the "rate" values aren't really specified here, which they probably should be.

S3rgeus said:
Will do! We'll need to nail down what pieces of artwork we're sure we need, since most of the design work so far has been on the system level, rather than individual end pieces like units/leaders/techs that individually need art. Hopefully we'll have some stuff for you soon! Thanks again for the help!

Right. You and I should probably figure out a good Mission for him before you PM him (assuming he may not be regularly checking the thread).

I definitely got the impression Trevor was most interested in doing the Leader portraits. But as far as things we already know we need and can "label" for sure:

- Aes Sedai icons, ogier icons, Shadowspawn icons (those last are just for the civilopedia, right? that makes them low priority). I'm wary of doing other units at this time, because we aren't 100% sure what we'll need.
- techs sort of needs to wait til we've figured things out. I mean, we have a good idea of many of them, but it seems a bit scary to just decide on some quickly - too much of a chance of wasting his time.
- icons for various missions we've invented (aes sedai abilities, etc.) and other UI things.

- So Leaders. The tricky thing is that, I think, we aren't 1000% sure what each of the leaders will be. Perhaps it's worth deciding, solidly, at least a *few* of these, so he can at least get a'researchin'.

So, which civs are we 100% sure will make the mod, and among those, are there a few leaders we are absolutely certain of?

Opening up my ready-to-be-posted-whenever-we're-ready document on the various possible civs, I see somewhere between 12-16 civs that seem to be pretty good candidates for inclusion at first launch. Of those, the following seem to me to be totally obvious, "must-haves":

The Aiel
Andor
The Sea Folk
Cairhien
Illian
Seanchan
Tear

I'm being conservative, of course. Some others are extremely likely to make first cut, of course (Altara, Manetheren, Hawkwing's empire, etc.).

Of those, which of them are obvious from a Leader perspective? I'm not doing any research right now - just seeing what "pops out"

The Aiel - this one is definitely not obvious.....
Andor - Elayne is the current frontrunner, though there have been votes for Morgase, and even Ishara, in the past.
The SF - we could do the "current" mistress of the ships, but she's by no means iconic
Cairhien - very much unsure here. The most famous (at least in the books) leaders are also inept.
Illian - Same problem as with Cairhien
Seanchan - similar conundrum as to Andor. Fortuona could mjake sense, but, like Elayne, feels a bit odd.
Tear - difficult, since until Darlin there is no king.

The other thing I'm considering is to try to recommend he start with something a little less "crazy," in order to set Trevor up for success while he gets familiar with the source material. There will obviously need to be some research put in to the look of each character, but asking for something like Fortuona right off the bat might be just asking for some visual "inaccuracies" that hardcore fans will hate us for.

Of all the civs, even including those that aren't "guaranteed" to make the cut, there are very few that have obvious Leaders. Hawkwing is a notable case (his civ is quite likely to amke it, I'd say). The Shaido are unlikely, but would either be Couladin or Savahna (can't remember the spelling). Mayene is unlikely, but would be Berelain, I'd guess. Ghealdan is a maybe, probably, and is obviously Masema ONLY if we decide to go with "horribly messed up, but familiar to the readers, Ghealdan" instead of "normal boring Ghealdan from 90% of its history".

So... how to decide this? I suppose we have to decide on at least 2 or 3 leaders of rhim to have something to work on... unless you think it's best to request the unit and tech stuff for now.

counterpoint · May 15, 2015

OK, I had some real down time at work this morning, so did a little exploration...

This is certainly way more than in necessary, but if nothing else, this can serve as inspiration for some of the FQuests, especially those that are tied to specific forsaken (which matters only for flavor, IMO).

Also, reading through this stuff definitely makes it clear which ones stand out in my head and which ones don't. Some of these guys just sort of.... exist and are briefly forgotten. Be'lal, I'm looking at you. Also, some of them, like Graendal, are present for merely all of the Forsaken Social Hours, but ultimately do almost nothing in the grand scheme of the story.

Ishamael - Ba'alzamon - Moridin
- elan Morin Tedronai - philosopher and theologian. Logical
- eternal struggle with Lews Therin
- joined because logic said the DO would win
- in the end, wanted to die completely
- half-sealed in bore. potentially "spun out" periodically. every 1000 years, for 40 years.
- Once in Trolloc Wars, - destroyed Manetheren
- once in Artur Hawkwing's court (as Jalwin Moerad) - helped lead to downfall
- harassing Rand in Dreams, then fight in skies above Falme.
- Killed with Callandor in Heart of the Stone.
-reborn as Nae'blis. used mostly True power (saa in his eyes).
- "Watcher" of other forsaken,
- "Wanderer" - "crossed streams" of balefire with Rand against mashadar - linked from that point.
- controlled Cyndane and Moghedian via mindtrap
- dreamwalker

Aginor/Osan'gar -
- Ishar Morrad Chuain - famous biologist
- created the Shadowspawn constructs
- Second in strength
- Sealed close to the surface - aged terribly
- killed by rand at EotW
- resurrected as Osan'gar, disguised as Corlan Dashiva (Asha'man)
- tried to balefire Rand near Shadar Logoth. killed by a black sister (didn't know who he was)

Demandred/Bao the Wyld
- Barid Bel Medar - always in Lews' shadow. skilled leader and commander
- traveled to Shara to find D'jedt/Sakarnen (sa'angreal)
- led slave rebellion, freed male ayyad, became Bao the Wyld
- Leads Shara against the light. attacked by Gawyn, Galad, Logain, and finally Lan (who kills him).

Sammael
- Tel Janin Aellinsar - famous warrior. better general than ruler
- Took power in Illian as Lord Brend
- as Caddar, tricked Shaido into going all shaido on the westlands
- killed by Rand at Shadar Logoth

Rahvin
- Ared mosinel - good with diplomacy (and later compulsion)
- As Lord Gaebril, seduced Morgase and took power in Andor.
- Rand assaulted Caemlyn when hearing of Morgase's supposed death. Rand and Nynaeve balefired him in Tel'aran'rhiod.

Lanfear/Cyndane/Moonhunter
Mierin Eronaile - love of Lews Therin, then bitterness. Created the Bore searching for the True Power
- most powerful female channeler. big lust for power, good with Tel'aran.
- sought out Rand as Selene and later other disguises - Else Grinwell, Silvie, Keille Shaogi.
- Sent through doorframe with Moaraine and captured by eelfinn and killed by moridin.
- ressurected as Cyndane and mindtrapped.
- Compels Perrin as he hunts slayer, but he breaks free and kills her.

Graendal/Hessalam
- Kamarile Maradim Nindar - an ascetic and psychology
- became exactly the opposite - hedonistic
- sows chaos in Arad Doman as Lady Basene
- various alliances with chosen. various machinations.
- Rand tries to kill her at her hiding place in Natrin's Barrow. she survives
- fails to kill perrin - killed by Shaidar Haran - ressurected as Hessalem
- manipulates the Great Captains in their dreams to make them make bad decisions.
- Tries to compel Aviendha, it backfires, and she ends up *her* thrall.

Balthamel/Aran'gar
- Eval Ramman - historian with famous temper
- sealed close to the surface and wasted away.
- Killed by Somestha at the Eye of the World
- resurrected as Aran'gar, a saidin-channeling woman
- desguised as Halima Saranov and attaches herself to Egwene. rescues Moghedian from the Adam.
- stays with Graendal at Natrim's Barrow - killed in rand's balefire strike.

Semirhage
- Nemene Damendar Boann - famous healer
- then became obsedded with pain and torture. discovered Turning.
- masqueraded as a Truthspeaker named anath Dorje. accompanied Tuon.
- murdered Empress Radhanan
- disguised as Tuon in an attempt to kill Rand. uncovered by Cadsuane
- imprisoned and gruadually humbled by Cadsuane.
- freed by Shaidar Haran. Tried to control Rand with Domination Band - tried to get him to kill Min. He drew True Power and killed her with Balefire.

Be'lal
- Duram Laddel Cham - famous swordsman. manipulator
- because High Lord Samon of Tear.
- Tried to lure Rand to Stone to attack him and take Callandor
- Killed with Balefire by Moiraine

Mesaana
- Saine Tarasind - a teacher and researcher. later organized schools for the dark one.
- meets with Alviarin and pulls strings in White tower as Donelle of the Brown Ajah
- avoids direct battle - including the big one at Shadar Logoth
- Confronted by Egwene and various allies in Tel'aran during the Battle in the WT. Her mind is broken in that battle.

Asmodean
- Joar Addam - famous composer. served as a governor for the shadow
- as gleeman Jasin Natael, follows Rand into the Waste. Creates fake Dragons on Couladin's arms
- Battles Rand at Rhuidian. Rand severs his link to the DO.
- Joins rand, and trains him in saidin. Killed by Graendal

Moghedien
- Lilen Moiral - investment advisor
- master of Tel'aran'rhiod. "The Spider". Spying. weakest channeler
- Disguises as Gyldin, a darkfriend merchant, to watch black ajah in tanchico. later takes control of Liandrin
- confronted by Nynaeve and Birgitte in T'a'r, severs Birgitte from the dream world
- As Marigan, spies in Salidar, captured by Nynaeve in an Adam. they learn from her.
- freed by Aran'gar. mindtrapped by Moridin
- commands the sharans after Demandred dies. caputred by a sul'dam

M'hael
- Mazrim Taim - was a false dragon
- given amnesty by Rand and put in charge of the Black Tower
- sends ashaman to kill Rand in Cairhien
- Turns a bunch of Asha'man to the shadow
- Possesses seals to DO's prison
- battles Egwene during LB. goes nuts with Balefire, but finally killed by Egwene's Flame of Tar Valon

S3rgeus · May 15, 2015

counterpoint said:
All looks good now.

Apparently, though, the 746 GB thing has to do with me having too-old a chipset driver, as my mobo is from the Second Age.

Ah, makes sense! I had a great chicken-and-egg problem when I built my current PC - my motherboard needed a BIOS update to support Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, and my CPU was Ivy Bridge. So I couldn't start the computer to apply the update because it didn't support the CPU yet. In the end I borrowed the CPU off one of my flatmate's PCs and gave it back once I'd upgraded the BIOS!

counterpoint said:
Paths Summary started!

Awesome, thank you!

I've linked to it from the first post.

counterpoint said:
The new Customs are obviously in red, but there are also a couple Lineage pieces that are. Specifically, many of the Pantheon beliefs are associated with resources. We have added some, and moved some to other terrain types, etc. Should we shift around some of the resources associated with Pantheons? Should we add some? Worthy of specific note is the whole "Copper, Iron, and Salt" one, made unusual now because Copper is now a strategic resource. Might matter, but might not.

Additionally, these are of course simple translations of existing panths from CiV? - do we want to add more based on some of our new systems?

Of course, I don't suggest we answer these questions now, since we aren't on that topic yet - simply stating some of the issues that came up when I was making the summary.

Great, these all sound like good questions for us to answer. Just before we move on, these guys:

counterpoint said:
- Governors produce double alignment (see below!)
- X building produces +Y Alignment (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- allows construction of <Alignment Building> based on direction of your overall alignment, that produces more alignment, plus other things (e.g., Evil Pagoda).

Should they be Follower Customs?

counterpoint said:
I agree with these estimates! I put them into the alignment summary. Please take a look at the new stuff and see that they feel right (first bits of the Alignment summary)

There's a stray "]" before the Turning of the Tower in the Shadow sources section.

Do we want to mark the "selected nature of the Governor" in red until we decide on the mechanism Governors acquire natures/if it is a nature like that?

All else looks good to me!

counterpoint said:
I do think the "beefed up" FQuests and TtT stuff seems to make flavor sense. It seems to me that the truly terrible Darkfriends are such because they were asked to do crazy things in specific moments, while the Creator is essentially a non-actor (and thus the "Light" forces don't have as much flashy stuff to show for it).

Agreed, this makes sense from both angles, flavor and mechanical.

counterpoint said:
OK. agreed. So, let's take care of these guys when we do buildings and such in general.

Yeah, a "Hell" is the <insert nation name I can't remember> word for a really seedy bar, where everybody's all rough. Don't remember where it pops up, one of the later books, but Mat is definitely the one who visits one.

Sounds good!

counterpoint said:
OK, this kind of thing could work, for sure. Definitely don't need to discuss UI now, especially if Wisdoms are no longer a factor in alignment (which is probably the safest route).

Is there a way to do the specific-citizen approach (assuming wisdoms don't complicate it) without making it confusing?

If Wisdoms don't yield any different Alignment from other citizens we could go back to picking specific citizens. I think the only point of confusion might be players who would expect to be able to do something to that citizen if they're a known darkfriend to the player.

counterpoint said:
I do agree. Let's do FQuests "next" (see below). So how many do you think we need? Should we do a flavor dive for forsaken-specific info, or do you think we probably only need 1 or 2 quests per 'saken (which should be flavorfully relatively easy to figure out)? So, process?

Forsaken Quests! We want to have ~1500-ish Shadow contributed to a focused player on Forsaken Quests, so that's a yield output target for us. Reading ahead, I've gone through your Forsaken flavor sources and those look awesome - I think we've definitely got enough flavor to have some

So, some Forsaken Quests info that's relatively concrete, but we haven't signed off on:

What are they?
- Secret, instanced objectives given to individual players to complete or ignore of their own volition.
What should the quests ask players to do?
- Self-destructive objectives were popular when we discussed this previously. These include: disbanding units, giving away tradeable goods, declaring war on other civs, denouncing other civs. Are there more?

Some related things to that, which we've discussed but not decided on (along with some thoughts from me):

What makes them available to certain players?
- ~~Becoming available from Shadow tier 2 onwards makes sense to me.~~ I don't think we want Forsaken Quests to be popping up for players who are any way Light, or haven't expressed at least some tendency toward Shadow. (Note tier 2 Shadow is 500 net Shadow points.)
- We will probably want to have a separate threshold for a Trolloc Wars-time Forsaken Quest, since players will have low Alignment then.
- If we want to make this a more late-game thing (which, considering, we probably do) then we could gate on tier 4. There shouldn't be any actually focused Shadow players falling short of tier 4 by the endgame, but it would prevent anyone from seeing them very early.
What are their rewards?
- Beyond Shadow points. I'm writing this point last because I realized it didn't have its own question. I mention elsewhere in this post that we've talked before about the rewards all going to the Shadowspawn civ, which I think has some pretty cool implications. Do we want/need there to be any reward for the player directly?
Do rewards scale with the player's Shadow leaning? (More Shadow-y players get better rewards?)
- I think so, but I'm not completely sold on this. There are definitely benefits to it - it matches up with the flavor and also encourages players to be extreme with their Alignment, which we want. Are there any unexpected ramifications of this?
What kind of rewards do we want to give out, beyond Shadow points?
- I do not know. There's significant risk of treading on Threads here, if we go for a similar style of reward. I think we'd want to make it quite distinct. We previously discussed having all non-Shadow-points bonuses go to the Shadowspawn civ, which I thought was a pretty good plan. We discussed it in more detail at the time.
Do they "expire"?
- I'd say they almost have to. Without some kind of time limit on the quests, the player can much more easily set themselves up to complete them at almost no cost to themselves. And there are also the weird flavor implications of leaving it uncompleted for thousands of years. Relatively short timeouts maximizes the sacrifice aspect of the quests - within 20 or 30 turns is relatively immediate? Maybe even 10?
How many should a player see during a single game?
- Probably not that many. Certainly not nearly as many as they'll see Threads. I'd say Light and Neutral players see none. (Players who remain very close to the middle of the scale, or go off down the Light side to any extent.)
- I'd say maybe 5 over the course of a game for a Shadow player?
- We previously discussed whether higher tier Shadow players should see more Forsaken Quests. I can see a good argument for this, but I'm not sure if we want to do it. This also affects our decision about rewards - high Shadow players get more Quests and better rewards makes each bonus better than either of them isolation.
- At 5 per player per game, each quest should probably pay out around 400 Shadow points. This is a big splashy number and leads to a maximum of 2000 Shadow from this source. Depending on how the quests turn out (some might end up being super difficult for a specific player, or they might have done something that means they only see 4, instead of 5, lots of dependencies on our other design choices here), this should average about the ~1500 we want for focused players.
How many Forsaken Quests should there be?
- This obviously depends on the previous question. At 5 per player per game, having two per Forsaken would give us a whole 28 (13 + Taim), which I think is enough. We may want to give Ishamael an extra 2 if he's always the source for the TW-time Forsaken Quests, so a total of 30. Based on your flavor assessment of the Forsaken, we're not at all short on flavor for this, it's more about the mechanical decisions of what kinds of tasks/rewards do we want to offer.
When should those players see those quests?
- I like the idea of one popping up during the Trolloc Wars ("one" from a single player's perspective, multiple players may see a Quest at this time). As mentioned above, this one would probably need a different mechanism/threshold for deciding who can see the rest of the Quests, which are more later-game. Tier 1 Shadow? Or some specific objective during the TW? (Might be a bit early to introduce any objectives like that.)
- Frequency and incidence questions are always fun! Given all the unknowns above, I don't think we can comment on incidence rate quite yet - or even if there is an "incidence rate" - it might be that we just fix a number and distribute that relatively evenly across a given X turns of the game. (Pick turn Y at game start, which might be like 200-ish, for the next X turns after Y there will be a Forsaken Quest for every Shadow player who qualifies every Z turns, where X and Z are baked in by us during development, per gamespeed.)

counterpoint said:
As far as governors, I think they might be good to do after the FQuests, and directly preceeding the GPs, since they may be related. In any case, we have to hammer out the Govs. Paths and Policies/Philosophies can follow that, I suppose.

Sounds like a good plan.

counterpoint said:
As far as artwork, I think we should actually do that now, "that" being likely a very short convo - see below.

This conversation might not be too short, but we'll see below!

counterpoint said:
I think I'm all caught up in the Alignment summary. Looking over the misc summary, I think that looks ok, though the "rate" values aren't really specified here, which they probably should be.

Very true! I've adjusted the misc summary accordingly. The False DRagon section was becoming a bit unwieldy, so I split it into three subsections, much like some of the other longer ones are. Please check and make sure I've got all those rates in right!

counterpoint said:
Right. You and I should probably figure out a good Mission for him before you PM him (assuming he may not be regularly checking the thread).

I definitely got the impression Trevor was most interested in doing the Leader portraits. But as far as things we already know we need and can "label" for sure:

- Aes Sedai icons, ogier icons, Shadowspawn icons (those last are just for the civilopedia, right? that makes them low priority). I'm wary of doing other units at this time, because we aren't 100% sure what we'll need.
- techs sort of needs to wait til we've figured things out. I mean, we have a good idea of many of them, but it seems a bit scary to just decide on some quickly - too much of a chance of wasting his time.
- icons for various missions we've invented (aes sedai abilities, etc.) and other UI things.

- So Leaders. The tricky thing is that, I think, we aren't 1000% sure what each of the leaders will be. Perhaps it's worth deciding, solidly, at least a *few* of these, so he can at least get a'researchin'.

So, which civs are we 100% sure will make the mod, and among those, are there a few leaders we are absolutely certain of?

Opening up my ready-to-be-posted-whenever-we're-ready document on the various possible civs, I see somewhere between 12-16 civs that seem to be pretty good candidates for inclusion at first launch. Of those, the following seem to me to be totally obvious, "must-haves":

The Aiel
Andor
The Sea Folk
Cairhien
Illian
Seanchan
Tear

I'm being conservative, of course. Some others are extremely likely to make first cut, of course (Altara, Manetheren, Hawkwing's empire, etc.).

Of those, which of them are obvious from a Leader perspective? I'm not doing any research right now - just seeing what "pops out"

The Aiel - this one is definitely not obvious.....
Andor - Elayne is the current frontrunner, though there have been votes for Morgase, and even Ishara, in the past.
The SF - we could do the "current" mistress of the ships, but she's by no means iconic
Cairhien - very much unsure here. The most famous (at least in the books) leaders are also inept.
Illian - Same problem as with Cairhien
Seanchan - similar conundrum as to Andor. Fortuona could mjake sense, but, like Elayne, feels a bit odd.
Tear - difficult, since until Darlin there is no king.

The other thing I'm considering is to try to recommend he start with something a little less "crazy," in order to set Trevor up for success while he gets familiar with the source material. There will obviously need to be some research put in to the look of each character, but asking for something like Fortuona right off the bat might be just asking for some visual "inaccuracies" that hardcore fans will hate us for.

Of all the civs, even including those that aren't "guaranteed" to make the cut, there are very few that have obvious Leaders. Hawkwing is a notable case (his civ is quite likely to amke it, I'd say). The Shaido are unlikely, but would either be Couladin or Savahna (can't remember the spelling). Mayene is unlikely, but would be Berelain, I'd guess. Ghealdan is a maybe, probably, and is obviously Masema ONLY if we decide to go with "horribly messed up, but familiar to the readers, Ghealdan" instead of "normal boring Ghealdan from 90% of its history".

So... how to decide this? I suppose we have to decide on at least 2 or 3 leaders of rhim to have something to work on... unless you think it's best to request the unit and tech stuff for now.

It is very interesting how different our thoughts on the civs are. I do agree on your picks for "locked-in" civs. Out of those 7, I'd say we have fairly clear winners for leaders for three of them:

Andor: Elayne. We talked about this literal eons ago, back around the time you first joined up with WoTMod and my opinion is much the same as it was then. While I can see some value in Morgase or Ishara, I think Elayne is iconic and extremely flavorful, a character that gives us a lot to draw from, but isn't "the protagonist" like Rand, Mat, or Perrin, who would be problematic as leaders due to their positions in the books.

Seanchan: Fortuona. Much the same reasons as above - she's someone we have loads of information about who's an iconic leader of her civ and is sufficiently part of the world as a non-protagonist.

The Aiel: I think Rhuarc is a great choice here. I can see fans saying that Rhuarc wasn't the leader of all of the Aiel, only the Taardad, but Firaxis have given us direct analogues for Rhuarc in G&K and BNW in the form of Hiawatha and Pocatello. Both of them are iconic leaders of "civilizations" that are made up of multiple tribes, where they themselves were the leader of one. Rhuarc's position as coordinator of the Aiel under Rand adds credence to him being considered above the others historically, much like Hiawatha as one of the founders of the Iroquois confederacy.

The other four I've got suggestions, but I'm less convinced of:

Cairhien: Laman Damodred - out of these latter four he is my most-convinced-about one. He's an iconic Cairhienin leader, even if for his defeat rather than success, and even most casual fans of the book will recognize his name - either directly for his role in the Aiel War, or via his last name as a connection to Moiraine/Galad.

The Sea Folk: Are problematic. I'd probably go with Zaida din Parede, but mainly because she's the only Sea Folk leader-ish person whose name I can remember.

Illian: Mattin Stepaneos' name is certainly recognizable, but his ineptitude is directly experienced in the book (instead of just viewed as a part of history, like Cairhien), which makes him a bigger problem than Laman, IMO. I think he could certainly work.

Tear: As you've mentioned, Darlin Sisnera is the first king. He's certainly a candidate, though if there were particularly historically influential High Lords or Ladies then I'd be happy with them either.

For the other ones - Hawkwing is nicely obvious, but I'm not 100% sure he's planned to be a launch civ - of all we've mentioned he'd be the one I'd most expect not to make it. (Bar Ghealdan, which I believe we tentatively agreed to swapping for Shara.) I do remember us discussing trying to get more historical civs in like Manetheren, but don't remember what we decided on that topic exactly.

Speaking of which, Aemon al Thorin is a relatively clear choice for Manetheren.

Anyway, I could go into tons more detail on the other stuff you brought up. And loads more new suggestions about other civs!

But I'm not sure this is a short conversation and also not sure if we really want to decide these now. I also agree that the look of the leaders is iconic and something fans will be very attached to, so we want to be sure Trevor has had time to get into the WoT lore before diving into some very recognizable characters like Elayne or Tuon (or whoever, regardless of what we pick).

Units seem the safest at the moment, though you're right that Trevor's excitement centered around leaders! Do we think any 2 or 3 leaders rise from the pack above or elsewhere? This is basically exactly what you asked and if I were picking alone I'd be fairly confident in my "top 3" above. Getting accustomed to the style and lore is I think the biggest reason to steer clear of leaders temporarily, but only if that works for Trevor.

In terms of units, sounds like we're on the same page with Aes Sedai and Shadowspawn. Not sure what we'd request with Ogier yet - do we know enough about what those units will be, to say what they should look like? (Beyond being Ogier)

Aes Sedai and Shadowspawn are also very describable, even in a non-universe manner, and have some great existing concept pieces from other artists online. The Shadowspawn icons aren't pedia-only, the unit icon is displayed in the combat preview when the human player considers attacking an enemy unit. Shadow-declared players will control some of these units so they'll see them large in the bottom left of the screen when those units are selected and in the city screen when choosing to produce them.

Aes Sedai + Shadowspawn make up a fair number of icons between them. 7 Aes Sedai types. Trollocs, Myrddraal, Draghkar, Dreadlords, and Darkhounds - that makes 12 icons. Does that seem like a good starting point?

UI elements like new missions and stuff are a good point. Suktritact contributed an icon to this mod way back on like page 2 and also gave a brief description of how he imitates the CiV style so effectively, which could be helpful! Those are actually 3D models though, more similar to unit models, Trevor seemed to indicate he prefers to work on 2D content. (The mission icon itself is a 2D texture captured from a 3D model arranged in a 3D editor like Blender, at least with Sukritact's approach.)

counterpoint · May 16, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Ah, makes sense! I had a great chicken-and-egg problem when I built my current PC - my motherboard needed a BIOS update to support Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, and my CPU was Ivy Bridge. So I couldn't start the computer to apply the update because it didn't support the CPU yet. In the end I borrowed the CPU off one of my flatmate's PCs and gave it back once I'd upgraded the BIOS!

Yeah, this time around, I was saved by a linux-based boot disc. apparently windows was unable to partition it the right size.

S3rgeus said:
Great, these all sound like good questions for us to answer. Just before we move on, these guys:

- Governors produce double alignment
- X building produces +Y Alignment (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- allows construction of <Alignment Building> based on direction of your overall alignment, that produces more alignment, plus other things (e.g., Evil Pagoda).

Should they be Follower Customs?

Hmmm... I suppose follower beliefs are all bonuses TO the city, while founder ones are bonuses BECAUSE of cities, right?

If that's the case, then yes, I think the Gov one is definitely a follower belief.
Do you think we need both the second and third ones? The third one may be redundant now that we have actual alignment buildings.

S3rgeus said:
There's a stray "]" before the Turning of the Tower in the Shadow sources section.

Do we want to mark the "selected nature of the Governor" in red until we decide on the mechanism Governors acquire natures/if it is a nature like that?

fixed, and done.

S3rgeus said:
If Wisdoms don't yield any different Alignment from other citizens we could go back to picking specific citizens. I think the only point of confusion might be players who would expect to be able to do something to that citizen if they're a known darkfriend to the player.

right. i'm not sure which to do, then. Originally I was pictured them not-attached to specific citizens, but with you describing the UI, the specific-citizen approach does seem coolor... but potentially misleading. Which do you prefer?

I guess, the truth is, a DFC DOES do something - it has a nice +1 Shadow with it.

S3rgeus said:
Forsaken Quests! We want to have ~1500-ish Shadow contributed to a focused player on Forsaken Quests, so that's a yield output target for us. Reading ahead, I've gone through your Forsaken flavor sources and those look awesome - I think we've definitely got enough flavor to have some

yeah, I think you maybe didn't finish this sentence. I agree, regardless!

S3rgeus said:
So, some Forsaken Quests info that's relatively concrete, but we haven't signed off on:

What are they?

Secret, instanced objectives given to individual players to complete or ignore of their own volition.

true story
S3rgeus said:
- What should the quests ask players to do?
  
  Self-destructive objectives were popular when we discussed this previously. These include: disbanding units, giving away tradeable goods, declaring war on other civs, denouncing other civs. Are there more?
Click to expand...
Well, I think there may be room for some "real" stuff as well. Stuff that benefits the shadow in a more obvious way. I'd say if there are any normal-ish objectives, though, they should probably be pretty hard, compared to other quest objectives out there. In any case, should probably feel sort of arbitrary at times. Maybe assassinate someone, that kind of thing.

Of course, once the LB is going, these quests could continue, and then could directly target light and neutral civs.
S3rgeus said:
Some related things to that, which we've discussed but not decided on (along with some thoughts from me):
- What makes them available to certain players?
  
  ~~Becoming available from Shadow tier 2 onwards makes sense to me.~~ I don't think we want Forsaken Quests to be popping up for players who are any way Light, or haven't expressed at least some tendency toward Shadow. (Note tier 2 Shadow is 500 net Shadow points.)
  
  We will probably want to have a separate threshold for a Trolloc Wars-time Forsaken Quest, since players will have low Alignment then.
  
  If we want to make this a more late-game thing (which, considering, we probably do) then we could gate on tier 4. There shouldn't be any actually focused Shadow players falling short of tier 4 by the endgame, but it would prevent anyone from seeing them very early.
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I've been thinking about this and I'm actually wondering why we shouldn't have them be available to most-everyone. Maybe anybody with less than 3 or 4 tiers of light. Ba'alzamon was all about tempting Rand, who was clearly moderately light at the time. Lanfear does it thrice daily.

Below I'm going to essentially advocate that we make the shadow yield the only reward, so what's the harm in allowing a light civ an opportunity to reverse course and become more shadow? Certainly a neutral civ should have this opportunity to sell out to the shadow - for no real bonus except being more evil.

I suppose (more on this below, surely) that such temptation moments shoudl be much more rare the more light you are. In any case, I can understand the flavor of somebody needing to be "worthy" of the Chosen's attention, but I also feel like we can get away making these available to all but the "real light" civs - I'd imagine the ruler of an empire would be a worthy prize for any forsaken.

In any case, if we do get rid of the alignment tier gate, we'd need to use turn number or techs as a gate instead.

But yes, agreed on the separate conditions for the trolloc wars.
S3rgeus said:
- What are their rewards?
  
  Beyond Shadow points. I'm writing this point last because I realized it didn't have its own question. I mention elsewhere in this post that we've talked before about the rewards all going to the Shadowspawn civ, which I think has some pretty cool implications. Do we want/need there to be any reward for the player directly?
- Do rewards scale with the player's Shadow leaning? (More Shadow-y players get better rewards?)
  
  I think so, but I'm not completely sold on this. There are definitely benefits to it - it matches up with the flavor and also encourages players to be extreme with their Alignment, which we want. Are there any unexpected ramifications of this?
- What kind of rewards do we want to give out, beyond Shadow points?
  
  I do not know. There's significant risk of treading on Threads here, if we go for a similar style of reward. I think we'd want to make it quite distinct. We previously discussed having all non-Shadow-points bonuses go to the Shadowspawn civ, which I thought was a pretty good plan. We discussed it in more detail at the time.
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I'm thinking now that we should keep it so the only real rewards are for the SSpawn civ, and the player merely receives a dump of +Shadow. While I liked the idea of this sort of mix-bag reward - you might get something terrible or you might get something amazing - that kind of randomness doesn't fit the game well, and as you say, it does somewhat tread on Threads.

But just to clarify - what kind of benefits to the SSPawn civ? Yield bonuses? Should these be related to the Quest, or just random? Or, alternatively, identical for every quest?

So, I'm actually thinking that your Shadow-ness maybe should NOT affect how many points you receive. I know I probably proposed that, but it does seem to be sort of redundant - having shadow points = getting shadow points. Not the funnest mechanic. What I am suggesting - see below.
S3rgeus said:
- Do they "expire"?
  
  I'd say they almost have to. Without some kind of time limit on the quests, the player can much more easily set themselves up to complete them at almost no cost to themselves. And there are also the weird flavor implications of leaving it uncompleted for thousands of years. Relatively short timeouts maximizes the sacrifice aspect of the quests - within 20 or 30 turns is relatively immediate? Maybe even 10?
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Yes. They should expire. I don't know how many turns - that will probably depend on the kinds of quests we make. 20 is probably a good starting point if we're thinking of things like "capture a city." But, looking at things like "kill your own worker" or something like that, definitely 10 is a good number. But this ties into the # of instances per game thing below - if it's 10 turns, that means these might go by kind of quickly.
S3rgeus said:
- *]How many should a player see during a single game?
  
  Probably not that many. Certainly not nearly as many as they'll see Threads. I'd say Light and Neutral players see none. (Players who remain very close to the middle of the scale, or go off down the Light side to any extent.)
  
  I'd say maybe 5 over the course of a game for a Shadow player?
  
  We previously discussed whether higher tier Shadow players should see more Forsaken Quests. I can see a good argument for this, but I'm not sure if we want to do it. This also affects our decision about rewards - high Shadow players get more Quests and better rewards makes each bonus better than either of them isolation.
  
  At 5 per player per game, each quest should probably pay out around 400 Shadow points. This is a big splashy number and leads to a maximum of 2000 Shadow from this source. Depending on how the quests turn out (some might end up being super difficult for a specific player, or they might have done something that means they only see 4, instead of 5, lots of dependencies on our other design choices here), this should average about the ~1500 we want for focused players.
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First off, I agree that having a high-tier player see them more is sort of like double jeopardy, which isn't great.

I think something like 5 over the course of a game could work well. Maybe a little more, depending on how the player responds.

So what I'm thinking might be cool is, instead of having things be based on your Alignment or whatever, have the frequency of their incidence (not necessarily the number of turns, but the total occurrences) - and the amount of rewards you get - be based on whether you completed a prior quest.

So, say you are Light Tier 1, and are offered a quest. If you are at all light, you'll probably ignore it. If you do, that may mean you are never offered another. Or maybe one more attempt.

If you complete the quest, though, that means eventually you'll be offered another, perhaps at a sooner date then otherwise. Additionally, and most importantly, that second one will be worth more alignment. So, instead of a 400x5 approach, I think the more evil you do for the forsaken, the more they reward you. So, a spread more akin to 200 - 300 - 400 - 500 - 600 (still 2000), or something like that.

If you were to do two of the quests, then ignore or fail a third, maybe the next opportunity will come a bit later than it normally would, and would of course only pay as much as a third attempt.

This of course puts a lot of pressure on being successful in each quest - which I like, in that it makes these feel unique. Also, while it's kind of swingy, in that a Tier 1 Light player could swing epicly to the Shadow.... that's not much different than a shadow player deciding to go all in on Cleansing Saidin and Ogier quests and stuff.

Thoughts?
S3rgeus said:
- How many Forsaken Quests should there be?
  
  This obviously depends on the previous question. At 5 per player per game, having two per Forsaken would give us a whole 28 (13 + Taim), which I think is enough. We may want to give Ishamael an extra 2 if he's always the source for the TW-time Forsaken Quests, so a total of 30. Based on your flavor assessment of the Forsaken, we're not at all short on flavor for this, it's more about the mechanical decisions of what kinds of tasks/rewards do we want to offer.
Click to expand...
Right, mechanics will be super important.

I like the 30 idea, but... I do also think we need to have some that might be generic and can be applied to any forsaken. If forsaken start dying in the LB, we don't want a situation where every player is getting the same Quest, or a player runs out of quests, because only Mesaana is alive - Mesaana should be able to then provide a few "random" quests that don't necessarily tie into her mythos. Pillaging units and such will likely be this way.
S3rgeus said:
- When should those players see those quests?
  
  I like the idea of one popping up during the Trolloc Wars ("one" from a single player's perspective, multiple players may see a Quest at this time). As mentioned above, this one would probably need a different mechanism/threshold for deciding who can see the rest of the Quests, which are more later-game. Tier 1 Shadow? Or some specific objective during the TW? (Might be a bit early to introduce any objectives like that.)
  
  Frequency and incidence questions are always fun! Given all the unknowns above, I don't think we can comment on incidence rate quite yet - or even if there is an "incidence rate" - it might be that we just fix a number and distribute that relatively evenly across a given X turns of the game. (Pick turn Y at game start, which might be like 200-ish, for the next X turns after Y there will be a Forsaken Quest for every Shadow player who qualifies every Z turns, where X and Z are baked in by us during development, per gamespeed.)
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One during the TW sounds good. I don't have a problem with this one being alignment locked - probably to Shadow or Neutral players. I'm not sure Izzy would bother with a light player this early.

S3rgeus said:

Very true! I've adjusted the misc summary accordingly. The False DRagon section was becoming a bit unwieldy, so I split it into three subsections, much like some of the other longer ones are. Please check and make sure I've got all those rates in right!

Click to expand...

whew! Looks good. Mighty complicated - I'm glad the FD points are invisible to players.

S3rgeus said:

It is very interesting how different our thoughts on the civs are. I do agree on your picks for "locked-in" civs. Out of those 7, I'd say we have fairly clear winners for leaders for three of them:

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm not sure we're all that different. Looks like only Hawkwing is a point of divergence. I literally have a document waiting to tackle these very issues, when we're ready. Now ain't that time.

S3rgeus said:

Andor: Elayne. We talked about this literal eons ago, back around the time you first joined up with WoTMod and my opinion is much the same as it was then. While I can see some value in Morgase or Ishara, I think Elayne is iconic and extremely flavorful, a character that gives us a lot to draw from, but isn't "the protagonist" like Rand, Mat, or Perrin, who would be problematic as leaders due to their positions in the books.

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I'd argue that they were only *figurative* eons. Literal epochs, maybe...

But yeah, it was one of my first posts. I did a quote fest where I responded to everybody's preceeding comments, and one of the then-regulars and you had gotten into it, so I chimed in.

I'm pretty much ok with it being Elayne. I suppose most of the hesitation I have stems mostly from being scared to commit to ANY of these right now.

S3rgeus said:

Seanchan: Fortuona. Much the same reasons as above - she's someone we have loads of information about who's an iconic leader of her civ and is sufficiently part of the world as a non-protagonist.

Click to expand...

I have the same thoughts on her as I do on Elayne. mostly just afraid to commit. That said, I think Fortuona might be even more of a slam dunk because we don't really have any other options.

S3rgeus said:

The Aiel: I think Rhuarc is a great choice here. I can see fans saying that Rhuarc wasn't the leader of all of the Aiel, only the Taardad, but Firaxis have given us direct analogues for Rhuarc in G&K and BNW in the form of Hiawatha and Pocatello. Both of them are iconic leaders of "civilizations" that are made up of multiple tribes, where they themselves were the leader of one. Rhuarc's position as coordinator of the Aiel under Rand adds credence to him being considered above the others historically, much like Hiawatha as one of the founders of the Iroquois confederacy.

Click to expand...

Your logic is very sound. Still afraid to commit, but I think Rhuarc is probably the guy. Another poster made a case for Rand a month or so ago, of course, but that has lots of issues. Probably this ends up like Fortuona - no other options! Well, Couladin, but.... not the best idea.

S3rgeus said:

The other four I've got suggestions, but I'm less convinced of:

Cairhien: Laman Damodred - out of these latter four he is my most-convinced-about one. He's an iconic Cairhienin leader, even if for his defeat rather than success, and even most casual fans of the book will recognize his name - either directly for his role in the Aiel War, or via his last name as a connection to Moiraine/Galad.

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This one makes me feel kind of yucky. Yes, he's visible, but.. yeah. If anything, I think this one might be worth digging a little more to see if instead we need to do some more obscure "First King of Cairhien" king of thing just to be a little nonconfrontational.

S3rgeus said:

The Sea Folk: Are problematic. I'd probably go with Zaida din Parede, but mainly because she's the only Sea Folk leader-ish person whose name I can remember.

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You're probably right, though this is another one where a little research may turn up some legendary Mistress or something from hundreds of years ago. If so, we should probably go with her.

S3rgeus said:

Illian: Mattin Stepaneos' name is certainly recognizable, but his ineptitude is directly experienced in the book (instead of just viewed as a part of history, like Cairhien), which makes him a bigger problem than Laman, IMO. I think he could certainly work.

Click to expand...

I think with this guy, we're most definitely going to want to find some earlier historical king instead of using Stepaneos.

S3rgeus said:

Tear: As you've mentioned, Darlin Sisnera is the first king. He's certainly a candidate, though if there were particularly historically influential High Lords or Ladies then I'd be happy with them either.

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Crazy idea - what if it was the Council of Nine? What if the diplo screen was a whole group of people? Is there a reason why we couldn't do this "leader" as an oligarchy? Seems that would be kind of cool, actually. King Darlin does seem sort of lame.

S3rgeus said:

For the other ones - Hawkwing is nicely obvious, but I'm not 100% sure he's planned to be a launch civ - of all we've mentioned he'd be the one I'd most expect not to make it. (Bar Ghealdan, which I believe we tentatively agreed to swapping for Shara.) I do remember us discussing trying to get more historical civs in like Manetheren, but don't remember what we decided on that topic exactly.

Speaking of which, Aemon al Thorin is a relatively clear choice for Manetheren.

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I remember nothing about Aemon. If he's the guy in charge before the fall and all that, I suppose that makes sense. Hawkwing and the others we can work on later. I don't want to make decisions on anything but the really obvious ones now.

S3rgeus said:

Anyway, I could go into tons more detail on the other stuff you brought up. And loads more new suggestions about other civs!

But I'm not sure this is a short conversation and also not sure if we really want to decide these now. I also agree that the look of the leaders is iconic and something fans will be very attached to, so we want to be sure Trevor has had time to get into the WoT lore before diving into some very recognizable characters like Elayne or Tuon (or whoever, regardless of what we pick).

Units seem the safest at the moment, though you're right that Trevor's excitement centered around leaders! Do we think any 2 or 3 leaders rise from the pack above or elsewhere? This is basically exactly what you asked and if I were picking alone I'd be fairly confident in my "top 3" above. Getting accustomed to the style and lore is I think the biggest reason to steer clear of leaders temporarily, but only if that works for Trevor.

Click to expand...

I think there is the rub. On the one hand, I think I could be convinced to go with Elayne, Fortuona and Rhuarc as commitments, but on the other hand, those might be a lot of pressure for Trevor. With Elayne and Fortuona, we're talking sort of iconic characters that need to be "right." And with Fortuona, and Rhuarc, we're also talking very very unusual visual styles as well.

Doing your top three is possible, but the annoying irony is that a random westlands King nobody knows too much about - e.g. Aemon or some old Illianer - would be far far easier for Trevor to start with.

S3rgeus said:

In terms of units, sounds like we're on the same page with Aes Sedai and Shadowspawn. Not sure what we'd request with Ogier yet - do we know enough about what those units will be, to say what they should look like? (Beyond being Ogier)

Aes Sedai and Shadowspawn are also very describable, even in a non-universe manner, and have some great existing concept pieces from other artists online. The Shadowspawn icons aren't pedia-only, the unit icon is displayed in the combat preview when the human player considers attacking an enemy unit. Shadow-declared players will control some of these units so they'll see them large in the bottom left of the screen when those units are selected and in the city screen when choosing to produce them.

Aes Sedai + Shadowspawn make up a fair number of icons between them. 7 Aes Sedai types. Trollocs, Myrddraal, Draghkar, Dreadlords, and Darkhounds - that makes 12 icons. Does that seem like a good starting point?

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As far as Aes Sedai, will we need 7 different icons? Will they be palette swaps, or will they be unique?

For Ogier, well, I know we'll have SOME civilian unit - probably a GP (GP could be something he starts soon, since we'll tackle them soon, adn those will be fun, I'd bet), and some military unit. The question is, is that unit just the Ogier axe guy defending the CS, or are we talking about a Gardener of the 'chan. We should probably hold off on any military one.

As far as shadowspawn, yeah, those sound great. Don't forget the Samma N'sei, and also the Jumara (Worms) in the blight! Additionally, what about Forsaken - will there be simply two (one male one female) or will we want separate icons?

Oh, and the dragon! And false dragons!

But yeah, unit icons is probably the best place to start. If anything, maybe he starts on those, and can also start tinkering on the more long-term diplo art slowly.

S3rgeus said:

UI elements like new missions and stuff are a good point. Suktritact contributed an icon to this mod way back on like page 2 and also gave a brief description of how he imitates the CiV style so effectively, which could be helpful! Those are actually 3D models though, more similar to unit models, Trevor seemed to indicate he prefers to work on 2D content. (The mission icon itself is a 2D texture captured from a 3D model arranged in a 3D editor like Blender, at least with Sukritact's approach.)

Click to expand...

Good point. If that stuff is 3d, maybe we look elsewhere, unless he decides he'd like to take up that kind of thing.

ok!

S3rgeus · May 17, 2015

counterpoint said:
Yeah, this time around, I was saved by a linux-based boot disc. apparently windows was unable to partition it the right size.

Linux boot discs are awesome, I've been saved by them a few times now. I'm actually going to need one tomorrow - I'm adding a new HDD to my home server's raid array and need to resize the file system it boots from, so it'll need to be done from a live CD. (It's currently growing the array onto the new drive, which, depending on which estimate you believe, will take 15-30 hours.) That's also what's delayed me from getting this post up yesterday! On to WoT!

counterpoint said:
Hmmm... I suppose follower beliefs are all bonuses TO the city, while founder ones are bonuses BECAUSE of cities, right?

If that's the case, then yes, I think the Gov one is definitely a follower belief.
Do you think we need both the second and third ones? The third one may be redundant now that we have actual alignment buildings.

I think we could still keep them - it's sort of like Temples vs Pagodas, both produce faith even though one is a faith-purchased belief-unlocked building and the other is just on a tech.

counterpoint said:
right. i'm not sure which to do, then. Originally I was pictured them not-attached to specific citizens, but with you describing the UI, the specific-citizen approach does seem coolor... but potentially misleading. Which do you prefer?

I guess, the truth is, a DFC DOES do something - it has a nice +1 Shadow with it.

This is a very good point, there's a yield attached to being a DFC (and a non-DFC), which makes attributing them to specific citizens make more sense. (Otherwise players will only see the total production of a city and not be able to break down where it came from.) I prefer the specific citizen-approach in general, and I think this is a very good reason to go with it as well.

counterpoint said:
yeah, I think you maybe didn't finish this sentence. I agree, regardless!

Yep, totally forgot to go back to that! Glad the gist of it was clear!

counterpoint said:
Well, I think there may be room for some "real" stuff as well. Stuff that benefits the shadow in a more obvious way. I'd say if there are any normal-ish objectives, though, they should probably be pretty hard, compared to other quest objectives out there. In any case, should probably feel sort of arbitrary at times. Maybe assassinate someone, that kind of thing.

Of course, once the LB is going, these quests could continue, and then could directly target light and neutral civs.

Cool, do we want to go through what kinds of tasks players can be asked to do, before we go on to specific quests? Currently we've got:

Disband target unit(s) (quest picks a unit or units and the player must disband those to complete it)
Declare war on civ X
Trade away X GPT/target resource for nothing in exchange
Denounce civ X
Capture target city (could be raze, but I think that's a more Turning-objective thing?)
Assassinate the Governor in target city (this is quite difficult mainly because of how infrequently players have Bloodknives/Grey Men)
What else?

counterpoint said:
I've been thinking about this and I'm actually wondering why we shouldn't have them be available to most-everyone. Maybe anybody with less than 3 or 4 tiers of light. Ba'alzamon was all about tempting Rand, who was clearly moderately light at the time. Lanfear does it thrice daily.

Below I'm going to essentially advocate that we make the shadow yield the only reward, so what's the harm in allowing a light civ an opportunity to reverse course and become more shadow? Certainly a neutral civ should have this opportunity to sell out to the shadow - for no real bonus except being more evil.

I suppose (more on this below, surely) that such temptation moments shoudl be much more rare the more light you are. In any case, I can understand the flavor of somebody needing to be "worthy" of the Chosen's attention, but I also feel like we can get away making these available to all but the "real light" civs - I'd imagine the ruler of an empire would be a worthy prize for any forsaken.

In any case, if we do get rid of the alignment tier gate, we'd need to use turn number or techs as a gate instead.

I like the mechanics of this, it makes sense for not-very-Light civs to be able to reverse course and Forsaken Quests being a part of that makes flavorful sense. We'll have to keep this in mind for the flavor of the actual quests themselves, because how the Forsaken address the player in the text will need to be applicable to both full-maxed-out-Shadow civs and marginally Light civs. But I think we can make that work.

Below tier 4 Light sounds like a good threshold for that.

counterpoint said:
I'm thinking now that we should keep it so the only real rewards are for the SSpawn civ, and the player merely receives a dump of +Shadow. While I liked the idea of this sort of mix-bag reward - you might get something terrible or you might get something amazing - that kind of randomness doesn't fit the game well, and as you say, it does somewhat tread on Threads.

But just to clarify - what kind of benefits to the SSPawn civ? Yield bonuses? Should these be related to the Quest, or just random? Or, alternatively, identical for every quest?

So, I'm actually thinking that your Shadow-ness maybe should NOT affect how many points you receive. I know I probably proposed that, but it does seem to be sort of redundant - having shadow points = getting shadow points. Not the funnest mechanic. What I am suggesting - see below.

Totally agree with all you've said here. I like the idea of the only reward for the player being Shadow points. Also agree with having more Shadow-ness not affect how many points the player receives.

In terms of what bonuses we could give the Shadowspawn civ, the Shadowspawn civ is more Barbarian-like, so it doesn't benefit from yield bonuses or things that help normal civs. The only way yield bonuses could even be applied would be if the Shadowspawn currently owned a city, but even then I'd imagine Shadowspawn cities don't work like normal civ cities. (They don't build up into an empire or try for a victory or anything - they just produce more Shadowspawn.)

The most obvious bonus we can give them is units, which I think is what we'll want to do in the majority of cases. We can introduce variety through the types of units that get given to them. But as you've suggested, having the bonus always be the same is very doable. Bonuses to the Shadowspawn civ aren't visible to players except in very unusual circumstances, so they can't tell that it's the same thing every time. This makes me think simply giving them units every time a player completes a Forsaken Quest will work out well.

counterpoint said:
Yes. They should expire. I don't know how many turns - that will probably depend on the kinds of quests we make. 20 is probably a good starting point if we're thinking of things like "capture a city." But, looking at things like "kill your own worker" or something like that, definitely 10 is a good number. But this ties into the # of instances per game thing below - if it's 10 turns, that means these might go by kind of quickly.

The rate at which they expire doesn't need to be connected to the rate that they spawn. Some quests can just be available for a short period of time and other may be available long enough to overlap - I think that's ok. Calibrating it per quest seems like a good idea, because as you've said, some objectives need more time than others, and some are only really sacrifices if done on a short time frame.

counterpoint said:
First off, I agree that having a high-tier player see them more is sort of like double jeopardy, which isn't great.

I think something like 5 over the course of a game could work well. Maybe a little more, depending on how the player responds.

So what I'm thinking might be cool is, instead of having things be based on your Alignment or whatever, have the frequency of their incidence (not necessarily the number of turns, but the total occurrences) - and the amount of rewards you get - be based on whether you completed a prior quest.

So, say you are Light Tier 1, and are offered a quest. If you are at all light, you'll probably ignore it. If you do, that may mean you are never offered another. Or maybe one more attempt.

If you complete the quest, though, that means eventually you'll be offered another, perhaps at a sooner date then otherwise. Additionally, and most importantly, that second one will be worth more alignment. So, instead of a 400x5 approach, I think the more evil you do for the forsaken, the more they reward you. So, a spread more akin to 200 - 300 - 400 - 500 - 600 (still 2000), or something like that.

If you were to do two of the quests, then ignore or fail a third, maybe the next opportunity will come a bit later than it normally would, and would of course only pay as much as a third attempt.

This of course puts a lot of pressure on being successful in each quest - which I like, in that it makes these feel unique. Also, while it's kind of swingy, in that a Tier 1 Light player could swing epicly to the Shadow.... that's not much different than a shadow player deciding to go all in on Cleansing Saidin and Ogier quests and stuff.

Thoughts?

This kind of system would definitely make the Forsaken Quests feel unique, and that kind of punishing feedback loop is flavorfully well connected to the Forsaken. I do worry about fairness for the player though. Some of the quests will end up being so much harder for some players than others. If all quests were worth the same then they can look at that and say "I can't do that one" - but now there's a second problem of "I can't do that one and now because I can't all of the remaining ones are worse." That feels pretty bad from a player experience point of view.

We'll have all seen this with CS quests in BNW. Sometimes they ask you to do completely crazy things (please build a road to my capital, all the way over here a billion miles from your cities, spread your religion to my city on the opposite side of the globe). And those are all things that were going to benefit you anyway (the CS' quests are never really sacrifices, like the Forsaken Quests are planned to be), but we still ignore them because they're impractical. Imagine if a CS canceling a quest meant you gained less influence from other quests/gold gifts with them. That would be super frustrating and I think the Forsaken Quests would end up doing the same kind of thing.

Our set of objectives above sort of exacerbate this problem, because they tend to create situations with dramatically varying difficulty. Sometimes you'll need to take a city that you were already planning to attack. Sometimes you'll need to declare war on a behemoth civ that's also your next door neighbor. Other times some dude on the opposite side of the world that you can make peace with before it gets out of hand. Or possibly even someone who's your friend - making other civs hate you for it.

I think the punishing nature of that variation plays well with the Forsaken, but there's an element of double jeopardy in making the quests' value or frequency dependent on each other. It's a shame, because I do like the way it would make this system distinct. Do you think there's a way around that?

Related to the progressive payouts, a progression system with each quest like 200/300/400/500/600 would need to pay out more total to achieve the same average as a uniform per quest pay out. (As it is, this progression probably averages around ~1200 rather than ~1500 for a focused player.) Adding 100 to each tier should work for that part.

counterpoint said:
Right, mechanics will be super important.

I like the 30 idea, but... I do also think we need to have some that might be generic and can be applied to any forsaken. If forsaken start dying in the LB, we don't want a situation where every player is getting the same Quest, or a player runs out of quests, because only Mesaana is alive - Mesaana should be able to then provide a few "random" quests that don't necessarily tie into her mythos. Pillaging units and such will likely be this way.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea - say we have 5 extras that are Forsaken-agnostic?

Do we want to connect the availability of Forsaken Quests to the lives of the units during the Last Battle? We could have them be completely disconnected and the Forsakens' tendency to come back from the dead used as an explanation. It's especially appropriate since the units aren't unique unit types, but are just names on a generic Forsaken unit, which makes dishing out those quests have a very strange dependency.

counterpoint said:
One during the TW sounds good. I don't have a problem with this one being alignment locked - probably to Shadow or Neutral players. I'm not sure Izzy would bother with a light player this early.

Sounds good - tier 1 Shadow as the threshold for this one then?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I'm not sure we're all that different. Looks like only Hawkwing is a point of divergence. I literally have a document waiting to tackle these very issues, when we're ready. Now ain't that time.

I'd argue that they were only *figurative* eons. Literal epochs, maybe...

But yeah, it was one of my first posts. I did a quote fest where I responded to everybody's preceeding comments, and one of the then-regulars and you had gotten into it, so I chimed in.

I'm pretty much ok with it being Elayne. I suppose most of the hesitation I have stems mostly from being scared to commit to ANY of these right now.

I have the same thoughts on her as I do on Elayne. mostly just afraid to commit. That said, I think Fortuona might be even more of a slam dunk because we don't really have any other options.

Your logic is very sound. Still afraid to commit, but I think Rhuarc is probably the guy. Another poster made a case for Rand a month or so ago, of course, but that has lots of issues. Probably this ends up like Fortuona - no other options! Well, Couladin, but.... not the best idea.

This one makes me feel kind of yucky. Yes, he's visible, but.. yeah. If anything, I think this one might be worth digging a little more to see if instead we need to do some more obscure "First King of Cairhien" king of thing just to be a little nonconfrontational.

You're probably right, though this is another one where a little research may turn up some legendary Mistress or something from hundreds of years ago. If so, we should probably go with her.

I think with this guy, we're most definitely going to want to find some earlier historical king instead of using Stepaneos.

Crazy idea - what if it was the Council of Nine? What if the diplo screen was a whole group of people? Is there a reason why we couldn't do this "leader" as an oligarchy? Seems that would be kind of cool, actually. King Darlin does seem sort of lame.

I remember nothing about Aemon. If he's the guy in charge before the fall and all that, I suppose that makes sense. Hawkwing and the others we can work on later. I don't want to make decisions on anything but the really obvious ones now.

I think there is the rub. On the one hand, I think I could be convinced to go with Elayne, Fortuona and Rhuarc as commitments, but on the other hand, those might be a lot of pressure for Trevor. With Elayne and Fortuona, we're talking sort of iconic characters that need to be "right." And with Fortuona, and Rhuarc, we're also talking very very unusual visual styles as well.

Doing your top three is possible, but the annoying irony is that a random westlands King nobody knows too much about - e.g. Aemon or some old Illianer - would be far far easier for Trevor to start with.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said here. (Also awesome idea re Council of the Nine - yes, let's do that!)

I think the idea of committing to the leaders this early is our primary concern, because there's some much stuff that the leaders are going to be building off of that doesn't exist yet. Shall we hold off on confirming these for now then? The last thing we want is for Trevor to do loads of work on one of these leader scenes and then we end up realizing we need to use a different leader!

counterpoint said:
As far as Aes Sedai, will we need 7 different icons? Will they be palette swaps, or will they be unique?

We could do palette swaps, but I think it would be quite compelling to have them as actually separate icons that demonstrated something of the character of each Ajah. Palette swaps could certainly be somewhere to start, if we find there's enough other confirmed content at the moment.

counterpoint said:
For Ogier, well, I know we'll have SOME civilian unit - probably a GP (GP could be something he starts soon, since we'll tackle them soon, adn those will be fun, I'd bet), and some military unit. The question is, is that unit just the Ogier axe guy defending the CS, or are we talking about a Gardener of the 'chan. We should probably hold off on any military one.

I think for now we don't really know enough about what those units are to ask for artwork. I agree we'll have a civilian unit, but a worker-like unit and a GP-like unit would look very different, and even subsets of GP-likeness would have very different icons. If we have a military unit, then I think the axe guys are likely to be our choice for them, but we need to discuss whether or not there are any military units first, before deciding if we even want to use the axe guys afterwards.

counterpoint said:
As far as shadowspawn, yeah, those sound great. Don't forget the Samma N'sei, and also the Jumara (Worms) in the blight! Additionally, what about Forsaken - will there be simply two (one male one female) or will we want separate icons?

Samma N'sei and Jumara, definitely those should be in there!

I think since we're only having male/female variants of the Forsaken unit types, we should stick with just two icons for them. What do we want them to look like, loosely? Is it possible to create an "average" Forsaken? This might be a good argument for having individual icons, but that drastically increases the number of icons needed for just single units. (Presumably we'd need icons for their reborn forms which look different, Moridin, Cyndane, Osan'gar, etc. - meaning each icon might not even be seen in a given game.)

Blight will also need an icon - for the strategic view and the "show features" option that has the little hovering bubbles. (That shows stuff like forests and jungles, right?)

counterpoint said:
Oh, and the dragon! And false dragons!

Yeah, very true! What do we want the Dragon to look like? Should he look like Rand? (I don't think so.) Or should his unit art be more abstract, a shadow of a figure standing in light? The dragon tattoos on his arms visible somehow, or the dragons used in the background are possible.

Same re False Dragons, what do we want them to look like? A man using Saidin to pull up a big chunk of the ground seems appropriate? Or a more close up of him screaming up at something? I figure the False Dragons should look aggressive.

counterpoint said:
But yeah, unit icons is probably the best place to start. If anything, maybe he starts on those, and can also start tinkering on the more long-term diplo art slowly.

Cool, so once we decide on a general idea of what we want the requested icons to look like, I'll send Trevor a message. (And if you're reading this Trevor, feel free to chip in with your opinions on what we should do with the icons!)

TrevorVerges · May 18, 2015

Aha! I ctrl+F'd my name and read the general areas that concerned me. I dont really know how to do 3D content whatsoever. No program for it :\

But~! I am vastly comfortable with 2D stuff. I am excited about the leaders just because its a glorified piece of the job, but in no way does that make my enthusiasm for good icons or UI stuff any less prominent. As I work on the portraits, I'll glady post sketches and deconstructions and WIPs, so the people super interested in WoT can get an idea of what I'm seeing in my head. I also don't care a lick whether i get spoilers so I'll be shotgunning a lot of random research and fanart as I start designing the shots haha.

counterpoint · May 18, 2015

sorry for the delay. family fest this weekend!

S3rgeus said:
Linux boot discs are awesome, I've been saved by them a few times now. I'm actually going to need one tomorrow - I'm adding a new HDD to my home server's raid array and need to resize the file system it boots from, so it'll need to be done from a live CD. (It's currently growing the array onto the new drive, which, depending on which estimate you believe, will take 15-30 hours.) That's also what's delayed me from getting this post up yesterday! On to WoT!

Yeah, RAID has thankfully been something I haven't had to deal with (my chipset won't support it... well, at least), which is all for the better, as I have terrible luck with setting up new tech. good luck.

S3rgeus said:
I think we could still keep them - it's sort of like Temples vs Pagodas, both produce faith even though one is a faith-purchased belief-unlocked building and the other is just on a tech.

ok, sounds good. paths summary updated.

S3rgeus said:
This is a very good point, there's a yield attached to being a DFC (and a non-DFC), which makes attributing them to specific citizens make more sense. (Otherwise players will only see the total production of a city and not be able to break down where it came from.) I prefer the specific citizen-approach in general, and I think this is a very good reason to go with it as well.

ok! i've come around to this approach - let's tag specific citizen's alignment!

S3rgeus said:
Cool, do we want to go through what kinds of tasks players can be asked to do, before we go on to specific quests? Currently we've got:

Disband target unit(s) (quest picks a unit or units and the player must disband those to complete it)

Declare war on civ X

Trade away X GPT/target resource for nothing in exchange

Denounce civ X

Capture target city (could be raze, but I think that's a more Turning-objective thing?)

Assassinate the Governor in target city (this is quite difficult mainly because of how infrequently players have Bloodknives/Grey Men)

What else?

ok, I think these sound good. Some thoughts:

First off, I should note that some of these seem much easier to do than others. More on that below.

I do think that perhaps the assassination will be too difficult and unpredictable. But, if a failure on a FQuest isn't the end of the world (see below), maybe that's ok.

We also talked about "pillage your own improvements". A good way to do this is something like "pillage 3 luxury improvements (simultaneously) or something like that., or "for 3 turns" or something. Or strategic/GP improvements.

Also, what about "trade away a city"? This is obviously pretty big. Yeah, people might found a city just to trade it away, but still, that's kind of a pain - AND it telegraphs your alignment, which in general is bad, but for "sell your soul" situations like this, I think it's fine.

What about "disband a GP"? "fire" a governor?

Sell X buildings of <type>?

Break all City Connections for X turns? (i.e., nuke your Harbor and pillage roads)

Declare War on a Stedding?

Change your ideology?

Steal Territory from a civ you aren't at war with?

Vote X on Y resolution? (perhaps too complex to make a "sacrifice")

I do think we should allow the flavor to guide these. We may find in creating quests that we come up with a few new ones, and I think that's fine, if we can somewhat balance them.

S3rgeus said:
I like the mechanics of this, it makes sense for not-very-Light civs to be able to reverse course and Forsaken Quests being a part of that makes flavorful sense. We'll have to keep this in mind for the flavor of the actual quests themselves, because how the Forsaken address the player in the text will need to be applicable to both full-maxed-out-Shadow civs and marginally Light civs. But I think we can make that work.

Below tier 4 Light sounds like a good threshold for that.

ok. great. I hope it's ok, but I started a Forsaken Quests section in the Alignment section. This will summarize the rules and tendencies, but probably won't include a master list, as that probably won't fit in the summary. we can obviously do that later.

So, agreed on below light tier 4.

Question - when would these unlock (not including during the TW)? Something like Era of New Beginnings, or is that too early? I suppose it has to do with how often they are offered and such. From a balancing perspective, I figure a diligent civ should be able to get through all of them if they're crazy enough, BUT, we do not want players to be able to simply let them expire and wait around until they find quest objectives that aren't too damaging to them. Well, they can, but they shouldn't be able to maximize their Shadow Points if they do that. So, maybe Encroaching blight or something? Stability?

S3rgeus said:
Totally agree with all you've said here. I like the idea of the only reward for the player being Shadow points. Also agree with having more Shadow-ness not affect how many points the player receives.

In terms of what bonuses we could give the Shadowspawn civ, the Shadowspawn civ is more Barbarian-like, so it doesn't benefit from yield bonuses or things that help normal civs. The only way yield bonuses could even be applied would be if the Shadowspawn currently owned a city, but even then I'd imagine Shadowspawn cities don't work like normal civ cities. (They don't build up into an empire or try for a victory or anything - they just produce more Shadowspawn.)

The most obvious bonus we can give them is units, which I think is what we'll want to do in the majority of cases. We can introduce variety through the types of units that get given to them. But as you've suggested, having the bonus always be the same is very doable. Bonuses to the Shadowspawn civ aren't visible to players except in very unusual circumstances, so they can't tell that it's the same thing every time. This makes me think simply giving them units every time a player completes a Forsaken Quest will work out well.

Yeah, the only other thing I can think of besides units might be combat bonuses. It could be a +X% bonus for Y turns. The other idea, inspired by the Badass Ranks in Borderlands 2, is super tiny bonuses that add up over time. Like, +1% combat bonus, permanently for shadowspawn ever time a player completes one (maybe becoming +2% in the second quest, etc.).

Also, bubbles of evil could pop up, but that's a bit odd and tramples a bit on Seals and Balefire and such.

If we end up with units, I do think they should be variable - later, more rewarding quests should yield more. One tricky thing about units is of course in the mid game or TW - these shadowspawn will most certainly hassle the player that "spawned" them! (or, should we make them necessarily spawn far away?

S3rgeus said:
The rate at which they expire doesn't need to be connected to the rate that they spawn. Some quests can just be available for a short period of time and other may be available long enough to overlap - I think that's ok. Calibrating it per quest seems like a good idea, because as you've said, some objectives need more time than others, and some are only really sacrifices if done on a short time frame.

OK, for sure. Agreed. Put into the summary.

S3rgeus said:
This kind of system would definitely make the Forsaken Quests feel unique, and that kind of punishing feedback loop is flavorfully well connected to the Forsaken. I do worry about fairness for the player though. Some of the quests will end up being so much harder for some players than others. If all quests were worth the same then they can look at that and say "I can't do that one" - but now there's a second problem of "I can't do that one and now because I can't all of the remaining ones are worse." That feels pretty bad from a player experience point of view.

We'll have all seen this with CS quests in BNW. Sometimes they ask you to do completely crazy things (please build a road to my capital, all the way over here a billion miles from your cities, spread your religion to my city on the opposite side of the globe). And those are all things that were going to benefit you anyway (the CS' quests are never really sacrifices, like the Forsaken Quests are planned to be), but we still ignore them because they're impractical. Imagine if a CS canceling a quest meant you gained less influence from other quests/gold gifts with them. That would be super frustrating and I think the Forsaken Quests would end up doing the same kind of thing.

Our set of objectives above sort of exacerbate this problem, because they tend to create situations with dramatically varying difficulty. Sometimes you'll need to take a city that you were already planning to attack. Sometimes you'll need to declare war on a behemoth civ that's also your next door neighbor. Other times some dude on the opposite side of the world that you can make peace with before it gets out of hand. Or possibly even someone who's your friend - making other civs hate you for it.

I think the punishing nature of that variation plays well with the Forsaken, but there's an element of double jeopardy in making the quests' value or frequency dependent on each other. It's a shame, because I do like the way it would make this system distinct. Do you think there's a way around that?

Related to the progressive payouts, a progression system with each quest like 200/300/400/500/600 would need to pay out more total to achieve the same average as a uniform per quest pay out. (As it is, this progression probably averages around ~1200 rather than ~1500 for a focused player.) Adding 100 to each tier should work for that part.

OK, so these are great thoughts. Short answer: yes, I think there's a way around that! Yes, this is flavorfully AND mechanically unique, but it's also problematic. Worth doing, if we can figure it out, though

Long answer (via a proposal). I propose:

Note: this assumes a regular spawn rate, that is not at all dependent on the length of turns you have to complete a quest. For this to work, though, I think we can't have overlap - the length of a given quest needs to be at least one turn less than your next spawn point. For this reason, we either need to have a fixed spawn rate, or at least have a "buffer zone" that allows us some wiggle room (e.g., the longest Quest is 20 turns, and you could get a new one 21-30 turns after it is given).
Perhaps overlap is possible and desired, but if we do that, we'll have to tweak a bit of what I'm proposing, re: the Stages of difficulty.

- Instead of a negative feedback loop that's crippling in the way you describe it, let's make it more of an opportunity-cost thing. If you fail or ignore a Quest, you'll get another one offered at the next interval - no harm done - but if you do that more than a couple times, you're mos definitely not going to be able to complete "all of them".
I'd think if you wait around for the "easy quests" or the ones most convenient to you, you'll probably only ever complete maybe 3 of them over the course of the game.

- I'd say we can make the total possible Shadow Points available from FQuests be quite high, higher than we were previously estimating, but make completing all of the quests be essentially impossible. Sort of like single-handedly Turning the Tower or gentling all the false Dragons.
I suggest we plan on 5 Quests for a serious Shadow player, and maybe 7 for somebody who literally hits every Quest opportunity (this person either had a lot of Light points to overcome, or else now has way too much Shadow). These "extra" quests (# 6 and 7) might only create the same yield as Q#5 would,
I also suggest, though, we "cap" a player on quests - once they hit 7 (or whatever the max is), these quests stop, I think (unless turn number makes this guaranteed to happen anyways).

- I'd say we do need to have *some* way for them to stop being offered, if you ignore them. We want that Light Tier 3 guy to basically only get asked a couple times, and then be given up on.
Should we set it up that if you fail or miss two *consecutive* quests, you are given up on? I know this is sort of that mean feedback loop, but since we're allowing Light and neutral players to try these, it makes sense.
Maybe this "cancellation" only happens if you are Light or neutral alignment? Maybe after only one quest if you're Light?

- Additionally, in order to offset the fact that some of these Quests are far more difficult than others, let's have different "Stages" of difficulty (avoiding the word Tiers!).
By difficulty I mean either actual difficulty (capturing a city is no guarantee), and also sacrifice (disbanding two soldiers is not nearly as bad as disbanding a GP).
I suggest after you complete more quests, the quests offered to you become more difficult, and also the rewards increase (as previously discussed). This prevents somebody from getting that impossible quest first and having no chance.
Maybe every two or three quest successes, you switch up which group of quests you'll be offered. So, say we do every 3, your first quest would be randomly selected from the pool of "stage 1 quests." Complete one, and another one is offered, from the same pile but with a higher Alignment yield. Fail, another one is offered. Succeed, another. Succeed - now you have 3 successes - and another is offered, this one coming from the next tier.
So, maybe unlock a new set of quests after three successes? Alternately, we could do it after 2, and then 4 successes. The nice thing about having only two categories is that we can then have one of each Stage for each Chosen, and maybe 5 generic ones per stage as well.

How does that all feel? To summarize:

FQuests are not punishing if you fail, but if you fail/skip them, you'll be missing out in the long run, significantly
Quests will stop coming if you ignore them
there are two or three Stages of quest, separated by difficulty/sacrifice, that become available after you have completed a few of them.

S3rgeus said:

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea - say we have 5 extras that are Forsaken-agnostic?

Do we want to connect the availability of Forsaken Quests to the lives of the units during the Last Battle? We could have them be completely disconnected and the Forsakens' tendency to come back from the dead used as an explanation. It's especially appropriate since the units aren't unique unit types, but are just names on a generic Forsaken unit, which makes dishing out those quests have a very strange dependency.

Click to expand...

I think 5 could work if they don't depend on who is alive.. Maybe 10 is smarter, if we do depend on current global situation

As far as the availability of quests connecting to lives, I should be clear - it doesn't mean the UNIT has to be present. I'd say, basically, any forsaken is available, providing that unit hasn't been killed with BALEFIRE. For flavor perspective, once certain forsaken have been killed by non balefire, we should just change up the name (e.g. Moridin). Otherwise, they can jsut be "resurrected", even if the unit itself hasn't been.

S3rgeus said:

Sounds good - tier 1 Shadow as the threshold for this one then?

Click to expand...

Yes. Good.

If we go with my proposal above, or something like it, I suggest this one sort of stands alone. It should have its own alignment yield (likely lower) and shouldn't count for the mechanics described above.

Did we already say that Ishamael should probably have a few extra quests to offset this moment? Potentially half or more of the civs will get one, and they'll ALL come from ishamael. That'll burn through his quests. (these could be more generic kinds of things though).

S3rgeus said:

I agree with pretty much everything you've said here. (Also awesome idea re Council of the Nine - yes, let's do that!)

Click to expand...

OK, we'll figure out the implications of this later!

S3rgeus said:

I think the idea of committing to the leaders this early is our primary concern, because there's some much stuff that the leaders are going to be building off of that doesn't exist yet. Shall we hold off on confirming these for now then? The last thing we want is for Trevor to do loads of work on one of these leader scenes and then we end up realizing we need to use a different leader!

Click to expand...

Yeah, more on this - and what he should do, later.

S3rgeus said:

We could do palette swaps, but I think it would be quite compelling to have them as actually separate icons that demonstrated something of the character of each Ajah. Palette swaps could certainly be somewhere to start, if we find there's enough other confirmed content at the moment.

Click to expand...

I agree. I'd say start with one/palette swaps, but ideally we can get one per ajah (+black).

S3rgeus said:

I think for now we don't really know enough about what those units are to ask for artwork. I agree we'll have a civilian unit, but a worker-like unit and a GP-like unit would look very different, and even subsets of GP-likeness would have very different icons. If we have a military unit, then I think the axe guys are likely to be our choice for them, but we need to discuss whether or not there are any military units first, before deciding if we even want to use the axe guys afterwards.

Click to expand...

yes. hold off on these guys.

S3rgeus said:

Samma N'sei and Jumara, definitely those should be in there!

I think since we're only having male/female variants of the Forsaken unit types, we should stick with just two icons for them. What do we want them to look like, loosely? Is it possible to create an "average" Forsaken? This might be a good argument for having individual icons, but that drastically increases the number of icons needed for just single units. (Presumably we'd need icons for their reborn forms which look different, Moridin, Cyndane, Osan'gar, etc. - meaning each icon might not even be seen in a given game.)

Blight will also need an icon - for the strategic view and the "show features" option that has the little hovering bubbles. (That shows stuff like forests and jungles, right?)

Click to expand...

re: blight. We'll also need icons for our new resources (ice peppers, etc.), yes?

I'd say it would be awesome, awesome, to have unique forsaken icons. People will love it. However, this is super duper super duper low priority. I'd say start with generic male/female, then once the game is in beta, if there's time, do the rest.

As far as who represents "generic" ones... I dunno. Could just do a black-robed creepy mage? Or else pull some iconic imagery - mistiness or sexiness from Mesaana and Graendal/Lanfear, messed up face or fiery eyes from Balthamel/Aginor and Ishamael. that kind of thing.

S3rgeus said:

Yeah, very true! What do we want the Dragon to look like? Should he look like Rand? (I don't think so.) Or should his unit art be more abstract, a shadow of a figure standing in light? The dragon tattoos on his arms visible somehow, or the dragons used in the background are possible.

Click to expand...

I actually have no problem with him kind of looking like rand. Even if he's not rand, he's supposed to be born of an Aiel and a wetlander, right? So a red haired dude would work well. I mean, what *else* should he look like.

But a dude holding callandor, tDR-cover style, would be awesome.

But otherwise, could be the dragon banner, or something. The arms could work, but I'm not sure how well those will "project."

S3rgeus said:

Same re False Dragons, what do we want them to look like? A man using Saidin to pull up a big chunk of the ground seems appropriate? Or a more close up of him screaming up at something? I figure the False Dragons should look aggressive.

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Well, the saidin-rock or magic-blast thing could work, but this also might be where we go for any saidin users.

Agressive, yes, but perhaps we want them somehow "powerful" and commanding as well. Leader-like. Maybe holding an arm up barking and order, sort of like a channeling GGeneral.

S3rgeus said:

Cool, so once we decide on a general idea of what we want the requested icons to look like, I'll send Trevor a message. (And if you're reading this Trevor, feel free to chip in with your opinions on what we should do with the icons!)

Click to expand...

You haven't sent him a msg yet, have you? I suggest that if he wants, he can start "tinkering" with "The 3" we have MOSTLY agreed on. But I'd suggest this stay at tinkering for now, because of <see above conversation>. In the meantime, if he's willing, units and resources (icons, not models) and such would be super great.

If he's not willing/interested in that stuff... I'm not sure what to suggest. Jumping into the Leaders in earnest right now is kidn of scary!

TrevorVerges · May 19, 2015

Nah, I'm cool with unit art, resources, techs, resources, etcetera.

You can hold off on the leaders until whenever. Question: Anything I do here, can I post on my blog? or is it "spoilers" for the mod?

counterpoint · May 19, 2015

TrevorVerges said:
Nah, I'm cool with unit art, resources, techs, resources, etcetera. You can hold off on the leaders until whenever. Question: Anything I do here, can I post on my blog? or is it "spoilers" for the mod?

Awesome. Sorry to make you wait four the now exciting stuff! these icons are super needed though, even if they aren't as fun to make.

As a point of comparison, I'm a music composer, and THAT kind of thing won't get to happen here for a looong time.

As fart as posting you're art, you're talking about showcasing your portfolio and work you've done, right? I can't speak for s3rgeus, but I'd say absolutely yes. This is a public development, after all. If you do stuff here that you like, and you think it will help show off your skills before the game launches, that sounds good to me

S3rgeus · May 19, 2015

TrevorVerges said:
Aha! I ctrl+F'd my name and read the general areas that concerned me. I dont really know how to do 3D content whatsoever. No program for it :\

But~! I am vastly comfortable with 2D stuff. I am excited about the leaders just because its a glorified piece of the job, but in no way does that make my enthusiasm for good icons or UI stuff any less prominent. As I work on the portraits, I'll glady post sketches and deconstructions and WIPs, so the people super interested in WoT can get an idea of what I'm seeing in my head. I also don't care a lick whether i get spoilers so I'll be shotgunning a lot of random research and fanart as I start designing the shots haha.

No worries about the 3D stuff - there's plenty of 2D art needed! Seamas Gallagher has done some great work on a variety of WoT characters and beasts, which could be a cool way for you to get a visual impression of the characters. I believe he also did some officially licensed artwork as well.

The actual CiV artwork is also relevant since I think we want to achieve a similar kind of theme to the CiV artwork. (And their gratuitous use of starbursts.) And it also shows off the sizes we have to work with, so that icons are recognizable even when very small.

TrevorVerges said:
Nah, I'm cool with unit art, resources, techs, resources, etcetera. You can hold off on the leaders until whenever. Question: Anything I do here, can I post on my blog? or is it "spoilers" for the mod?

Awesome!

Definitely go ahead and post anything that you work on here on your blog if you want. As counterpoint says, we're public development (all the code is public too), so feel free.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, RAID has thankfully been something I haven't had to deal with (my chipset won't support it... well, at least), which is all for the better, as I have terrible luck with setting up new tech. good luck.

All up and running now with an additional 2TB of space. You can do software-based RAID that's not dependent on having a hardware controller that supports it - the trade-off is the RAID synchronization calculations are done on the main CPU, but depending on the load on your server (never maxed out in a home server situation) that might not matter. It's what I do, but definitely only worth it if you want/need the space and redundancy.

counterpoint said:
ok! i've come around to this approach - let's tag specific citizen's alignment!

Awesome, sounds good.

counterpoint said:
ok, I think these sound good. Some thoughts:

First off, I should note that some of these seem much easier to do than others. More on that below.

I do think that perhaps the assassination will be too difficult and unpredictable. But, if a failure on a FQuest isn't the end of the world (see below), maybe that's ok.

We also talked about "pillage your own improvements". A good way to do this is something like "pillage 3 luxury improvements (simultaneously) or something like that., or "for 3 turns" or something. Or strategic/GP improvements.

Yep, pillaging improvements sounds good. With Quests like these, do we want to ask the player to "pillage 3 luxury improvements" of their choice, or make it targeted like "pillage these three improvements"? I can see advantages to both. The former will be easier on average but more consistent, meaning the latter has a higher difficulty variability.

Also agreed, assassinating a Governor is too specific.

counterpoint said:
Also, what about "trade away a city"? This is obviously pretty big. Yeah, people might found a city just to trade it away, but still, that's kind of a pain - AND it telegraphs your alignment, which in general is bad, but for "sell your soul" situations like this, I think it's fine.

What about "disband a GP"? "fire" a governor?

Sell X buildings of <type>?

Break all City Connections for X turns? (i.e., nuke your Harbor and pillage roads)

Declare War on a Stedding?

Change your ideology?

Steal Territory from a civ you aren't at war with?

Vote X on Y resolution? (perhaps too complex to make a "sacrifice")

I do think we should allow the flavor to guide these. We may find in creating quests that we come up with a few new ones, and I think that's fine, if we can somewhat balance them.

I agree that voting on resolutions is too complex for us to make it a sacrifice. (Too hard to tell what will be good and bad for the player.)

Changing your Ideology has never been something the player could do manually - it can only be forced by Tourism in BNW. Do we want to introduce that?

Disbanding GPs, sacrificing Governors, and trading away cities (!) sound like good top-end quest objectives, based on your proposed system below.

counterpoint said:
ok. great. I hope it's ok, but I started a Forsaken Quests section in the Alignment section. This will summarize the rules and tendencies, but probably won't include a master list, as that probably won't fit in the summary. we can obviously do that later.

So, agreed on below light tier 4.

Sounds good - yeah, we'll probably need a master list to be separate! I don't think we'll need to split it into as many posts as the Threads one though!

counterpoint said:
Question - when would these unlock (not including during the TW)? Something like Era of New Beginnings, or is that too early? I suppose it has to do with how often they are offered and such. From a balancing perspective, I figure a diligent civ should be able to get through all of them if they're crazy enough, BUT, we do not want players to be able to simply let them expire and wait around until they find quest objectives that aren't too damaging to them. Well, they can, but they shouldn't be able to maximize their Shadow Points if they do that. So, maybe Encroaching blight or something? Stability?

Era of New Beginnings or Stability are both good candidates. New Beginnings is our analogue for the Industrial era, which is when Spies pop up in BNW. Spies are similar in that they are a purposefully late-game system. We do have one more era than BNW, which makes Stability similar to BNW Industrial in terms of "distance from the end." I think we can say New Beginnings is a good one for now - based on our previous math of a game length of ~350 turns and eras every 41 turns, that would be around turn 200.

For our crazy maxed out person (which you discuss below) who sees 7 Quests, this is about one every 21 turns. That seems like a sensible maxed out cadence that makes the Quests still feel like they're something special. For the more normal players who see 5, it's about 30 turns between them. For the Light-tending players who ignore them, they'll see two or three, so 50-75 turns apart, though this end of the extreme are likely to be weighted toward the front.

These values also work well with our proposed expiry times for the quests falling into the 10-30-ish turn range, depending on Quest type.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, the only other thing I can think of besides units might be combat bonuses. It could be a +X% bonus for Y turns. The other idea, inspired by the Badass Ranks in Borderlands 2, is super tiny bonuses that add up over time. Like, +1% combat bonus, permanently for shadowspawn ever time a player completes one (maybe becoming +2% in the second quest, etc.).

Yes, combat bonuses sound like a good idea too. So combat bonuses and additional units for the Shadowspawn civ seem like our winners for "rewards."

counterpoint said:
Also, bubbles of evil could pop up, but that's a bit odd and tramples a bit on Seals and Balefire and such.

I agree this tramples on other systems.

counterpoint said:
If we end up with units, I do think they should be variable - later, more rewarding quests should yield more. One tricky thing about units is of course in the mid game or TW - these shadowspawn will most certainly hassle the player that "spawned" them! (or, should we make them necessarily spawn far away?

Making them spawn far away sounds like a good idea - it serves a double purpose. It prevents the situation you've described - where a player is disadvantaged by the Shadowspawn that they helped spawn. It also means that other players are less likely to be able to associate high Shadowspawn spawn rates with any particular set of players' Shadow Alignment - preventing players from being able to estimate foreign Shadow-ness by extensively surveiling the Blight.

counterpoint said:
OK, so these are great thoughts. Short answer: yes, I think there's a way around that! Yes, this is flavorfully AND mechanically unique, but it's also problematic. Worth doing, if we can figure it out, though

Long answer (via a proposal). I propose:

Note: this assumes a regular spawn rate, that is not at all dependent on the length of turns you have to complete a quest. For this to work, though, I think we can't have overlap - the length of a given quest needs to be at least one turn less than your next spawn point. For this reason, we either need to have a fixed spawn rate, or at least have a "buffer zone" that allows us some wiggle room (e.g., the longest Quest is 20 turns, and you could get a new one 21-30 turns after it is given).
Perhaps overlap is possible and desired, but if we do that, we'll have to tweak a bit of what I'm proposing, re: the Stages of difficulty.

- Instead of a negative feedback loop that's crippling in the way you describe it, let's make it more of an opportunity-cost thing. If you fail or ignore a Quest, you'll get another one offered at the next interval - no harm done - but if you do that more than a couple times, you're mos definitely not going to be able to complete "all of them".
I'd think if you wait around for the "easy quests" or the ones most convenient to you, you'll probably only ever complete maybe 3 of them over the course of the game.

- I'd say we can make the total possible Shadow Points available from FQuests be quite high, higher than we were previously estimating, but make completing all of the quests be essentially impossible. Sort of like single-handedly Turning the Tower or gentling all the false Dragons.
I suggest we plan on 5 Quests for a serious Shadow player, and maybe 7 for somebody who literally hits every Quest opportunity (this person either had a lot of Light points to overcome, or else now has way too much Shadow). These "extra" quests (# 6 and 7) might only create the same yield as Q#5 would,
I also suggest, though, we "cap" a player on quests - once they hit 7 (or whatever the max is), these quests stop, I think (unless turn number makes this guaranteed to happen anyways).

- I'd say we do need to have *some* way for them to stop being offered, if you ignore them. We want that Light Tier 3 guy to basically only get asked a couple times, and then be given up on.
Should we set it up that if you fail or miss two *consecutive* quests, you are given up on? I know this is sort of that mean feedback loop, but since we're allowing Light and neutral players to try these, it makes sense.
Maybe this "cancellation" only happens if you are Light or neutral alignment? Maybe after only one quest if you're Light?

- Additionally, in order to offset the fact that some of these Quests are far more difficult than others, let's have different "Stages" of difficulty (avoiding the word Tiers!).
By difficulty I mean either actual difficulty (capturing a city is no guarantee), and also sacrifice (disbanding two soldiers is not nearly as bad as disbanding a GP).
I suggest after you complete more quests, the quests offered to you become more difficult, and also the rewards increase (as previously discussed). This prevents somebody from getting that impossible quest first and having no chance.
Maybe every two or three quest successes, you switch up which group of quests you'll be offered. So, say we do every 3, your first quest would be randomly selected from the pool of "stage 1 quests." Complete one, and another one is offered, from the same pile but with a higher Alignment yield. Fail, another one is offered. Succeed, another. Succeed - now you have 3 successes - and another is offered, this one coming from the next tier.
So, maybe unlock a new set of quests after three successes? Alternately, we could do it after 2, and then 4 successes. The nice thing about having only two categories is that we can then have one of each Stage for each Chosen, and maybe 5 generic ones per stage as well.

How does that all feel? To summarize:

FQuests are not punishing if you fail, but if you fail/skip them, you'll be missing out in the long run, significantly

Quests will stop coming if you ignore them

there are two or three Stages of quest, separated by difficulty/sacrifice, that become available after you have completed a few of them.

Awesome! Patented respond-to-wall-of-text-a-short-paragraph: works for me!

It sounds like we need to group the different types of objectives we discussed above into Stages? If a single player sees at most 7, three Stages sounds appropriate:

Stage 1:

Disband units
Trade away GPT
Pillage strategic resource improvements
Denounce civ X

Stage 2:

Sell buildings (is this sell a specific type from anywhere? a specific building in a specific city? X of any building?)
Pillage luxury resource improvements
Declare war on civ X
Capture target city
Steal territory from a peaceful foreign civ (this will be impossible for some civs relatively often, we'll probably want to make sure they have foreign borders first)

Stage 3:

Trade away a city
Sacrifice a GP
Sacrifice a Governor (is this something players can do normally?)
Declare war on a Stedding

This does have implications for our "which Forsaken are alive" assessment and their consideration as sources for the quests. If Graendal only has stage 2 and 3 quests, are we fine with her never popping up for players who only see stage 1? And the same sentiment for other combinations.

As you've said, more popping up when we're going through the flavor is fine. I think these provide us a nice guiding framework to avoid them all ending up too similar as well.

So, I'm thinking a sensible prompting progression goes something like:

Start at Stage 1: first Quest pops up when the player reaches the Era of New Beginnings. The next one shows up 30 turns later.

If the player is Light tier 2+ and completes neither of the first two, then they don't get any more.

The third one turns up 25 turns later than the second. Any other players who have ignored/missed all 3 will no longer see any more quests.

The fourth one, and first Stage 2 Quest, pops up 20 turns later. The fifth (and final Stage 2 Quest) pops up 20 turns after that. Players who have only completed two or fewer quests will not see more than 5.

The sixth (first Stage 3 Quest) pops up 20 turns later. If the player completes the sixth quest, a seventh one (also Stage 3) pops up 15 turns later.

How does that sound? How much, if any, variance do we want to introduce to those turn numbers? (Game speed obviously modifies them all in some baked-in way.) With this timing, the sixth Quest likely takes place shortly after the start of the Last Battle, the seventh into the later half of it.

counterpoint said:
I think 5 could work if they don't depend on who is alive.. Maybe 10 is smarter, if we do depend on current global situation

As far as the availability of quests connecting to lives, I should be clear - it doesn't mean the UNIT has to be present. I'd say, basically, any forsaken is available, providing that unit hasn't been killed with BALEFIRE. For flavor perspective, once certain forsaken have been killed by non balefire, we should just change up the name (e.g. Moridin). Otherwise, they can jsut be "resurrected", even if the unit itself hasn't been.

Ok, we can record which, if any, Forsaken have been killed with balefire and then exclude their quests from the rotation.

10 generic quests sounds good.

counterpoint said:
Yes. Good.

If we go with my proposal above, or something like it, I suggest this one sort of stands alone. It should have its own alignment yield (likely lower) and shouldn't count for the mechanics described above.

Yes, this is an independent quest source.

counterpoint said:
Did we already say that Ishamael should probably have a few extra quests to offset this moment? Potentially half or more of the civs will get one, and they'll ALL come from ishamael. That'll burn through his quests. (these could be more generic kinds of things though).

Yes, we put Ishamael at double the others (so 4 instead of 2). We could allow the generic quests to be given out at that time too? And given that there's no reason to avoid overlap between separate players, even just 4 should provide a decent variety.

counterpoint said:
re: blight. We'll also need icons for our new resources (ice peppers, etc.), yes?

Yes, the new resources will need icons too!

counterpoint said:
I'd say it would be awesome, awesome, to have unique forsaken icons. People will love it. However, this is super duper super duper low priority. I'd say start with generic male/female, then once the game is in beta, if there's time, do the rest.

Definitely super low priority, as this would require code changes too! This would be the first time a unit portrait varied based on the name of a unit, not its type or progression through the game. It should definitely be possible - a variant on the system that changes the worker's icon as the game goes on - but I'd need to look into how.

counterpoint said:
As far as who represents "generic" ones... I dunno. Could just do a black-robed creepy mage? Or else pull some iconic imagery - mistiness or sexiness from Mesaana and Graendal/Lanfear, messed up face or fiery eyes from Balthamel/Aginor and Ishamael. that kind of thing.

I'm having difficulty making a recommendation here, because the Forsaken are all quite unique. It might be worth going full hog on choosing one of the actual Forsaken and just making the icon for their corresponding gender an image of them. If we eventually have Forsaken-specific icons, then awesome - we've already got two of them.

So, for that, would we pick Lanfear and Moridin?

counterpoint said:
I actually have no problem with him kind of looking like rand. Even if he's not rand, he's supposed to be born of an Aiel and a wetlander, right? So a red haired dude would work well. I mean, what *else* should he look like.

But a dude holding callandor, tDR-cover style, would be awesome.

But otherwise, could be the dragon banner, or something. The arms could work, but I'm not sure how well those will "project."

I'm liking the Callandor idea visually. The only issue might be if Callandor were a part of the game in some other way (a GW, wonder, anything like that) - it becomes "why does he have Callandor? Callandor's all the way over there."

I think if he's clearly visible, a similarity to Rand is the way to go. But the more distant approaches - a man on a hill surrounded by dragon banners, with a sunburst behind him or things like that - could sell the books-timeline-agnostic approach well.

counterpoint said:
Well, the saidin-rock or magic-blast thing could work, but this also might be where we go for any saidin users.

Agressive, yes, but perhaps we want them somehow "powerful" and commanding as well. Leader-like. Maybe holding an arm up barking and order, sort of like a channeling GGeneral.

We do also have Male Channelers - the unit type! The only other non-UU saidin users are Asha'men, right? I think Asha'men have a distinct enough look that their unit icon can literally just be a picture of them. That leaves Male Channelers and False Dragons.

Do we want to characterize all Male Channeler units as aggressive? I'd think quite a few of them would end up being relatively non-violent, flavorfully, which would steer us away from the saidin-rock for them.

I think the main point with False Dragons is they should appear powerful and dangerous - which is probably up to Tevor's sensibilities about how best to achieve that!

Assuming most of the above is relatively agreed, I'll try to come up with some Quests with my next post. Also, I'm going away for a long weekend starting this weekend - so I won't be able to post on Friday-Wednesday - so my last post before then will be this Thursday (21st) and I'll be back again on the following Thursday (28th).

counterpoint · May 19, 2015

S3rgeus said:
The actual CiV artwork is also relevant since I think we want to achieve a similar kind of theme to the CiV artwork. (And their gratuitous use of starbursts.) And it also shows off the sizes we have to work with, so that icons are recognizable even when very small.

Yes. Agree with the idea of making the icons still feel "civ" even though they're fantasy. There isn't a consistent artstyle among the WoT crowd, or anything, anyways (many people hate a lot of the official art!).

S3rgeus said:
l free.
Yep, pillaging improvements sounds good. With Quests like these, do we want to ask the player to "pillage 3 luxury improvements" of their choice, or make it targeted like "pillage these three improvements"? I can see advantages to both. The former will be easier on average but more consistent, meaning the latter has a higher difficulty variability.

Also agreed, assassinating a Governor is too specific.

I am fine with specifically targeted luxuries, as long as those are luxuries that civ has. Also, if possible, I'd like them to be ones the civ is "using", i.e. either only have one of, or have traded away some such that they "need" the one their pillaging.

S3rgeus said:
Changing your Ideology has never been something the player could do manually - it can only be forced by Tourism in BNW. Do we want to introduce that?

No. I was misinformed about that. Recall that that had never happened to me, so I just assumed it could be manual.

S3rgeus said:
Disbanding GPs, sacrificing Governors, and trading away cities (!) sound like good top-end quest objectives, based on your proposed system below.

nice!

S3rgeus said:
Sounds good - yeah, we'll probably need a master list to be separate! I don't think we'll need to split it into as many posts as the Threads one though!

oy! I hope not. After all, the amount of text per entry should be much lower.

S3rgeus said:
Era of New Beginnings or Stability are both good candidates. New Beginnings is our analogue for the Industrial era, which is when Spies pop up in BNW. Spies are similar in that they are a purposefully late-game system. We do have one more era than BNW, which makes Stability similar to BNW Industrial in terms of "distance from the end." I think we can say New Beginnings is a good one for now - based on our previous math of a game length of ~350 turns and eras every 41 turns, that would be around turn 200.

OK, I'm not totally sure on which one, but I'm happy to go with EoNB as you suggest, here.

For our crazy maxed out person (which you discuss below) who sees 7 Quests, this is about one every 21 turns. That seems like a sensible maxed out cadence that makes the Quests still feel like they're something special. For the more normal players who see 5, it's about 30 turns between them. For the Light-tending players who ignore them, they'll see two or three, so 50-75 turns apart, though this end of the extreme are likely to be weighted toward the front.

These values also work well with our proposed expiry times for the quests falling into the 10-30-ish turn range, depending on Quest type.[/quote]

See below for more on this. I don't really see why we need to have the turn count necessarily scale by success. Maybe it should just be by era and be done with it, with a max of 7 attempts, for players who are succeeding at least part of the time.

S3rgeus said:
Yes, combat bonuses sound like a good idea too. So combat bonuses and additional units for the Shadowspawn civ seem like our winners for "rewards."

ok, do you like the bonus/turn thing, or the gradually increasing +1 thing?

S3rgeus said:
Making them spawn far away sounds like a good idea - it serves a double purpose. It prevents the situation you've described - where a player is disadvantaged by the Shadowspawn that they helped spawn. It also means that other players are less likely to be able to associate high Shadowspawn spawn rates with any particular set of players' Shadow Alignment - preventing players from being able to estimate foreign Shadow-ness by extensively surveiling the Blight.

great

S3rgeus said:
Awesome! Patented respond-to-wall-of-text-a-short-paragraph: works for me!

It sounds like we need to group the different types of objectives we discussed above into Stages? If a single player sees at most 7, three Stages sounds appropriate:

Stage 1:

Disband units

Trade away GPT

Pillage strategic resource improvements

Denounce civ X

ok, looks good. Obviously the amount of GPT would need to be figured out, to prevent +1/turn situations.

What about trade away strategics?

S3rgeus said:
Stage 2:

Sell buildings (is this sell a specific type from anywhere? a specific building in a specific city? X of any building?)

Pillage luxury resource improvements

Declare war on civ X

Capture target city

Steal territory from a peaceful foreign civ (this will be impossible for some civs relatively often, we'll probably want to make sure they have foreign borders first)

As far as the buildings, I'd say we can be targeted about it. Sell a specific type of building, I think. X of them, probably.

what about trading away luxuries?

In general, I think we might want to use variables on these, to let the AI or randomness determine some of it - frankly, I think a lot of these variables should be skewed to be "whatever is worst for the player." Like, declaring war on a foreign puny nation is not the same as an ally or a behemoth neihbor.

I think we can throw declare-war on CS here too.

S3rgeus said:
Stage 3:

Trade away a city

Sacrifice a GP

Sacrifice a Governor (is this something players can do normally?)

Declare war on a Stedding

How do we frame the trading of a city? Should they be allowed to get something in return?

Not sure yet about governors. In principle it makes sense - same with "Kill a Spy," but I'm not sure whether we'll have a mechanism to do so yet.

I'm not adding any of these to the summary, btw - it will be self-evident once we have an actual list, right?

Im fine with 3 stages. Part of me thinks 2's simplicity is nice, but I don't have a problem with 3.

S3rgeus said:
This does have implications for our "which Forsaken are alive" assessment and their consideration as sources for the quests. If Graendal only has stage 2 and 3 quests, are we fine with her never popping up for players who only see stage 1? And the same sentiment for other combinations.

I don't see a reason for Graendal (or anybody) to only have Stage 2 and 3 quests. Why not all 3? This is an argument for only two stages - less content to worry about.

Alternately, we could just have all Stage 1 quests (not counting the Ishamael TW ones) be "generic."

S3rgeus said:
As you've said, more popping up when we're going through the flavor is fine. I think these provide us a nice guiding framework to avoid them all ending up too similar as well.

So, I'm thinking a sensible prompting progression goes something like:

Start at Stage 1: first Quest pops up when the player reaches the Era of New Beginnings. The next one shows up 30 turns later.

If the player is Light tier 2+ and completes neither of the first two, then they don't get any more.

The third one turns up 25 turns later than the second. Any other players who have ignored/missed all 3 will no longer see any more quests.

The fourth one, and first Stage 2 Quest, pops up 20 turns later. The fifth (and final Stage 2 Quest) pops up 20 turns after that. Players who have only completed two or fewer quests will not see more than 5.

The sixth (first Stage 3 Quest) pops up 20 turns later. If the player completes the sixth quest, a seventh one (also Stage 3) pops up 15 turns later.

How does that sound? How much, if any, variance do we want to introduce to those turn numbers? (Game speed obviously modifies them all in some baked-in way.) With this timing, the sixth Quest likely takes place shortly after the start of the Last Battle, the seventh into the later half of it.

I think this could be fine, though it is a little more complicated - at least in appearance - than I imagined. I was figuring that the Stages wouldn't just "plod along" with time, that they'd be dependent on actually being successful.

The small issue I have with this is that you can suceed on, say, only the first 2 (stage 1) ones, and then fail all the Stage 2 ones, and then be provided with an opportunity to do a Stage 3 one, and get a much huger yield payout. This feels odd.

I'm happy with the turn breakdown (30, 30, 25, 20....), though the random 25 in the middle feels a little weird. But I do feel like maybe which stage you are on should simply be based on success, not just time. I suggest, instead, that you stay in a given stage until you have SUCCEEDED in TWO quests of that stage - however long it takes. This prevents the weird Stage 1-jump-to-3 thing above, but also ensures that a player will continue to get appropriate-difficulty Quests - as long as they get one of the first 2 Stage 1 Quests, they'll have a bunch of tries on the "easy" stage 1 ones, without being forced to do the much scarier hard ones.

Of course, that means players that fail enough won't ever see Stage 3 Quests. I say, great.

So, under this model, the timing would be the same, but which Quest is which would vary by player. An "ideal" player would be (using your turn counts for now, though we should probably reevaluate them):

AoNB: Stage 1 (success)
30 turns later: Stage 1 (success)
25(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)

we could of course cap it so they don't get so many dips into Stage 3 if we wanted.
Now, here's another player, who fails some. Still 7 tries, still same turn count.

AoNB: Stage 1 (success)
30 turns later: Stage 1 (fail)
25(?) turns later: Stage 1 (success)
20(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 2 (fail)
20 turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (fail)
NO MORE TRIES

I think I like that better.

I think the "Light Tier 2+" thing is a little overly "precious", since we only allow these for up to Light Tier 3, anyways. Let's just simplify it and say anybody in the Light Tiers is "out" after missing the first two.

In general, I think maybe we should do it so any player taking more than four tries on a given Stage is "out."

thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Ok, we can record which, if any, Forsaken have been killed with balefire and then exclude their quests from the rotation.

10 generic quests sounds good.

ok. good.

S3rgeus said:
Yes, we put Ishamael at double the others (so 4 instead of 2). We could allow the generic quests to be given out at that time too? And given that there's no reason to avoid overlap between separate players, even just 4 should provide a decent variety.

Yeah, I'm fine with this.

S3rgeus said:
Definitely super low priority, as this would require code changes too! This would be the first time a unit portrait varied based on the name of a unit, not its type or progression through the game. It should definitely be possible - a variant on the system that changes the worker's icon as the game goes on - but I'd need to look into how.

ok. super low priority!

S3rgeus said:
I'm having difficulty making a recommendation here, because the Forsaken are all quite unique. It might be worth going full hog on choosing one of the actual Forsaken and just making the icon for their corresponding gender an image of them. If we eventually have Forsaken-specific icons, then awesome - we've already got two of them.

So, for that, would we pick Lanfear and Moridin?

Sure

S3rgeus said:
I'm liking the Callandor idea visually. The only issue might be if Callandor were a part of the game in some other way (a GW, wonder, anything like that) - it becomes "why does he have Callandor? Callandor's all the way over there."

I think if he's clearly visible, a similarity to Rand is the way to go. But the more distant approaches - a man on a hill surrounded by dragon banners, with a sunburst behind him or things like that - could sell the books-timeline-agnostic approach well.

any of these solutions are fine by me! I'm not worried about the Callandor meta-ness in the slightest. All the Forsaken look alike! This is clearly minor.

S3rgeus said:
We do also have Male Channelers - the unit type! The only other non-UU saidin users are Asha'men, right? I think Asha'men have a distinct enough look that their unit icon can literally just be a picture of them. That leaves Male Channelers and False Dragons.

Do we want to characterize all Male Channeler units as aggressive? I'd think quite a few of them would end up being relatively non-violent, flavorfully, which would steer us away from the saidin-rock for them.

In this game, there is no such thing as a non-violent saidin user. They are a military unit. They have zero use except in military. I'm not worried about swordsmen that are also pacifists. I am not at all concerned with this flavor.

S3rgeus said:
I think the main point with False Dragons is they should appear powerful and dangerous - which is probably up to Tevor's sensibilities about how best to achieve that!

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Assuming most of the above is relatively agreed, I'll try to come up with some Quests with my next post. Also, I'm going away for a long weekend starting this weekend - so I won't be able to post on Friday-Wednesday - so my last post before then will be this Thursday (21st) and I'll be back again on the following Thursday (28th).

Sure. makes sense. I think there's definitely some to hash out above, but I don't think any of that will prevent you from making Quests.

I'll be out of town Sunday-Wed. I'll try to get a response to your thursday post in before I leave.

S3rgeus · May 21, 2015

counterpoint said:
Yes. Agree with the idea of making the icons still feel "civ" even though they're fantasy. There isn't a consistent artstyle among the WoT crowd, or anything, anyways (many people hate a lot of the official art!).

I've definitely found the official artwork on a lot of the covers lacking. I'm a big fan of the much simpler covers - those are the editions I picked up!

counterpoint said:
I am fine with specifically targeted luxuries, as long as those are luxuries that civ has. Also, if possible, I'd like them to be ones the civ is "using", i.e. either only have one of, or have traded away some such that they "need" the one their pillaging.

I'm wondering if we should go farther than picking the luxury and actually pick a luxury (or set of them) on the map that the player controls. We'll definitely want to filter by luxuries they have with either approach. And targeting luxuries they only have one copy of sounds like a good idea!

counterpoint said:
oy! I hope not. After all, the amount of text per entry should be much lower.

True, but we're going to have 40 of them at least - and some of our discussions below may lead to more. I think it will probably help to break them out into a list even if they do fit within the character count of the summary post.

counterpoint said:
OK, I'm not totally sure on which one, but I'm happy to go with EoNB as you suggest, here.

Cool, sounds good!

counterpoint said:
ok, do you like the bonus/turn thing, or the gradually increasing +1 thing?

Gradually increasing +1 sounds like a cool idea - sets the Quests apart in another way mechanically and lets players unknowingly work together to create a stronger Shadow for the Last Battle.

counterpoint said:
ok, looks good. Obviously the amount of GPT would need to be figured out, to prevent +1/turn situations.

Yeah, GPT could probably be in Stage 2 as well, just with higher amounts? Or gold sums could be in stage 2?

counterpoint said:
What about trade away strategics?

Sounds good - into stage 1?

counterpoint said:
As far as the buildings, I'd say we can be targeted about it. Sell a specific type of building, I think. X of them, probably.

Depending on the building, X of them could end up being quite costly compared to the other stage 2 ones. We'd probably want to keep it to 2 or 3 max.

counterpoint said:
what about trading away luxuries?

Also sounds good! Stage 2 as well?

counterpoint said:
In general, I think we might want to use variables on these, to let the AI or randomness determine some of it - frankly, I think a lot of these variables should be skewed to be "whatever is worst for the player." Like, declaring war on a foreign puny nation is not the same as an ally or a behemoth neihbor.

Yeah, we can skew each of these objectives so that they tend towards more difficulty targets.

counterpoint said:
I think we can throw declare-war on CS here too.

That sounds good - stage 2 as well?

counterpoint said:
How do we frame the trading of a city? Should they be allowed to get something in return?

They probably shouldn't get anything in return, because the diplo AI is likely to offer them a different city in exchange if they like them enough - which isn't really what we want! Trade it away for nothing in exchange?

counterpoint said:
Not sure yet about governors. In principle it makes sense - same with "Kill a Spy," but I'm not sure whether we'll have a mechanism to do so yet.

Yeah, let's table that one for now and consider again if one of the Quests provides particularly relevant flavor for it (Rahvin probably does, now that I think about it) or when we're doing Governor mechanics.

counterpoint said:
I'm not adding any of these to the summary, btw - it will be self-evident once we have an actual list, right?

Yeah, totally, no need to put the available tasks in the summary, just the final Quests.

counterpoint said:
Im fine with 3 stages. Part of me thinks 2's simplicity is nice, but I don't have a problem with 3.

I don't see a reason for Graendal (or anybody) to only have Stage 2 and 3 quests. Why not all 3? This is an argument for only two stages - less content to worry about.

Alternately, we could just have all Stage 1 quests (not counting the Ishamael TW ones) be "generic."

I think 3 gives us more range to create variable payouts for the player. I like the idea of the stage 1 quests all being the generic ones, and Ishamael's extra two also being stage 1 all fits in very nicely!

counterpoint said:
I think this could be fine, though it is a little more complicated - at least in appearance - than I imagined. I was figuring that the Stages wouldn't just "plod along" with time, that they'd be dependent on actually being successful.

I figure the stages were also to do with what the Forsaken are dealing with - that they have more epic tasks to give to people as the Last Battle looms closer and actually gets started.

counterpoint said:
The small issue I have with this is that you can suceed on, say, only the first 2 (stage 1) ones, and then fail all the Stage 2 ones, and then be provided with an opportunity to do a Stage 3 one, and get a much huger yield payout. This feels odd.

They'd need to succeed in all 3 stage 1 Quests to see a stage 3 without completing a stage 2, rather than just two, but I see what you mean about "skipping" a stage. I like your suggestion below anyway, so it's a moot point.

counterpoint said:
I'm happy with the turn breakdown (30, 30, 25, 20....), though the random 25 in the middle feels a little weird. But I do feel like maybe which stage you are on should simply be based on success, not just time. I suggest, instead, that you stay in a given stage until you have SUCCEEDED in TWO quests of that stage - however long it takes. This prevents the weird Stage 1-jump-to-3 thing above, but also ensures that a player will continue to get appropriate-difficulty Quests - as long as they get one of the first 2 Stage 1 Quests, they'll have a bunch of tries on the "easy" stage 1 ones, without being forced to do the much scarier hard ones.

Of course, that means players that fail enough won't ever see Stage 3 Quests. I say, great.

So, under this model, the timing would be the same, but which Quest is which would vary by player. An "ideal" player would be (using your turn counts for now, though we should probably reevaluate them):

AoNB: Stage 1 (success)
30 turns later: Stage 1 (success)
25(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (success)

we could of course cap it so they don't get so many dips into Stage 3 if we wanted.
Now, here's another player, who fails some. Still 7 tries, still same turn count.

AoNB: Stage 1 (success)
30 turns later: Stage 1 (fail)
25(?) turns later: Stage 1 (success)
20(?) turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 2 (fail)
20 turns later: Stage 2 (success)
20 turns later: Stage 3 (fail)
NO MORE TRIES

I think I like that better.

I like this system, it's got a nice player progression to it. The turn counts were devised to end around turn 350 when starting at about turn 200 and to have them generally be closer together as the game went on, while still never getting "too close."

We can also tweak the turn counts easily enough if we find they're coming too fast or too slow when playtesting.

counterpoint said:
I think the "Light Tier 2+" thing is a little overly "precious", since we only allow these for up to Light Tier 3, anyways. Let's just simplify it and say anybody in the Light Tiers is "out" after missing the first two.

This makes it sound like they're quite close together, but there's quite an Alignment difference between those two levels. 2+ is 500 Light and above. Up and including tier 3 is up to 1900 Light - so there's a fair middle ground of Light-ish players there.

The other reason is Neutral players, who I think we want to see these more than Light, are likely to bounce between Shadow and Light tier 1 relatively often, since they're close together - we wouldn't want to cut them off because they happened to be Light tier 1 at the wrong time.

counterpoint said:
In general, I think maybe we should do it so any player taking more than four tries on a given Stage is "out."

thoughts?

I like the "succeed on two at each stage to advance" approach - sounds like a good plan. I still think filtering Light 2+ after two fails rather than Light 1+ is a good idea, but that's a fairly minor detail.

counterpoint said:
any of these solutions are fine by me! I'm not worried about the Callandor meta-ness in the slightest. All the Forsaken look alike! This is clearly minor.

Eh, not really, all of the Forsaken looking alike isn't the same kind of weirdness. That's clearly an intentional decision on our part. Having Callandor in some artwork when it might be somewhere else in the current game looks more like we just didn't think about it. This all depends on if we do have Callandor elsewhere, which we don't know for sure yet.

Either way, I think I like the distance approach - a commanding shadow on a hilltop surrounded by Dragon banners.

counterpoint said:
In this game, there is no such thing as a non-violent saidin user. They are a military unit. They have zero use except in military. I'm not worried about swordsmen that are also pacifists. I am not at all concerned with this flavor.

I don't think it's quite that clear-cut, being a military unit means it can attack something, but it doesn't mean the player will do that. The swordsman and a variety of other CiV military units aren't shown attacking things in their icons, mostly with the potential to do so. I think if we do use saidin-rock or a similar approach it characterizes the unit as very aggressive - which will be accurate for a lot of male channeler units, but not necessarily all of them.

I definitely see what you mean and it's totally fine if we want to characterize male channelers that way, but we should consider the other side as well.

Awesome, time for some Quests! I'll go through and make one stage 2 Quest for each Forsaken to start with.

General Format:

<Forsaken Name (or 'Generic')>, Stage <Number>
Flavor: <flavor description>
Objective: <what the player must do>
Restriction: (if any) <prerequisite for a player to ever receive this Quest>

One question that I've just thought of - do we want to link specific Shadowspawn bonuses to specific quests? Or just randomly pick a bonus from a pool based on the Stage of the completed Quest, when the player completes it?

Also, is the amount of Shadow given out based solely on the Stage or is it unique within some Stage-based range for each Quest?

I'll leave out Shadow point rewards and Shadowspawn bonuses below and we can add them in if they need to be specified per Quest.

I think things that require the player to sacrifice things should only pop up if the player is capable of making that sacrifice. (So a quest that asks the player to declare war on a borderlander civ can only be given to a player that has met a borderlander civ.)

Ishamael, Stage 2
Flavor: The people of your nation are much too enraptured with the Creator - they can be cured of that.
Objective: Sell two <shrine equivalent> within 5 turns

Aginor, Stage 2
Flavor: <Borderlander civ> is becoming a nuisance - distract them from a Blight for a time.
Objective: Declare war on <borderlander civ> within 10 turns
Restriction: Must have met a Borderlander civ

Demandred, Stage 2
Flavor: Men in your time should take a firmer hand on saidin.
Objective: Do not attempt to Gentle any units for 45 turns

(Not on the list, what do we think of this one? Enough for a stage 2? Useful elsewhere? You might sometimes be doing this anyway, which could be a problem?)

Sammael, Stage 2
Flavor: There are some generals in your time that could do with a harsh lesson in tactics.
Objective: Lose 4 units in combat in the next 15 turns.

Rahvin, Stage 2
Flavor: I think I quite fancy the look of that plot of land over there.
Objective: Capture <border plot> from a nearby peaceful civ (without declaring war on them) within 20 turns
Restriction: Must have at least one <GP type that steals land>

(Probably need to filter this on the player having whatever GP grabs land already - otherwise it will just be impossible quite often.)

Lanfear, Stage 2
Flavor: Conquest is such an ugly world. Think of it as liberating the folk from their current leaders.
Objective: Capture <foreign city> within 45 turns

Graendal, Stage 2
Flavor: I have need of some baubles you currently possess.
Objective: Pillage <luxury resource you own> within 5 turns

Balthamel/Aran'gar, Stage 2
Flavor: The Sisters in the Tower have need of a distraction for a time.
Objective: Declare war on the Tower within 10 turns

(Should possibly be stage 3?)

Semirhage, Stage 2
Flavor: I need some information on the behavior of people who are deprived of food.
Objective: Starve <city you own> for 10 turns within the next 15 turns.

Be'lal, Stage 2
Flavor: There is a particular location we need access to.
Objective: Capture a foreign within 20 turns

Mesaana, Stage 2
Flavor: <Civilization> has become bold in their advances. Show them that their allies are not safe.
Objective: Declare war on a city state allied with <civilization> within 10 turns

(It's a shame tech trading isn't a thing - it would be ideal for Mesaana. I can't think of a way to have the player "let" a foreign civ steal a tech from them reliably.)

Asmodean, Stage 2
Flavor: There's a certain merchant caravan in <civilization> that would benefit from <luxury resource you have>.
Objective: Trade <luxury> to <civilization> for nothing in exchange within 10 turns

Moghedian, Stage 2
Flavor: Your spies can be useful to me for a time.
Objective: Send a spy to <foreign city with a low science score> for 30 turns.

M'hael, Stage 2
Flavor: A friend needs a moment of respite from your aggressions.
Objective: Do not damage, kill, or Gentle <False Dragon currently in your territory> for 5 turns.

(I could almost see this one being a stage 3 Quest.)

This would actually be all of our stage 2 quests (unless some move to 3) so if there are more flavorful tasks/more 'fun' objectives that should go into stage 2, then let's by all means swap some of them for lesser quests above. One I thought of but didn't work in was "pillage a resource you are trading to someone else" - so you get the resource and trade penalty out of that.

And that's all for this evening! I shall return next Thursday! Until then, have a good weekend!

counterpoint · May 24, 2015

S3rgeus said:
I'm wondering if we should go farther than picking the luxury and actually pick a luxury (or set of them) on the map that the player controls. We'll definitely want to filter by luxuries they have with either approach. And targeting luxuries they only have one copy of sounds like a good idea!

Yes. this sounds fine.

S3rgeus said:
Gradually increasing +1 sounds like a cool idea - sets the Quests apart in another way mechanically and lets players unknowingly work together to create a stronger Shadow for the Last Battle.

ok, added to the summary. Just to be clear, though - is this the only benefit, or do they also get units? Also, is the bonus capped (e.g., cannot get higher than +20 or something)?

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, GPT could probably be in Stage 2 as well, just with higher amounts? Or gold sums could be in stage 2?

I think we've already established Gold as a somewhat inconsistent method of establishing "level of sacrifice," so I think I'd feel better about it being just Tier 1. But I think that the values we choose will need to have a minimum value, perhaps somewhat randomized.

The counterargument to this, of course, is that giving away fre gold is potentially a MAJOR alignment telegraph, so having iit as stage 1 (i.e., earlier in the game) is somewhat problematic.

S3rgeus said:
Sounds good - into stage 1?

Sure. trading strategics is a good stage 1 generic thing.

S3rgeus said:
Depending on the building, X of them could end up being quite costly compared to the other stage 2 ones. We'd probably want to keep it to 2 or 3 max.

agreed.

S3rgeus said:
Also sounds good! Stage 2 as well?

Sure (re: trading luxuries).

S3rgeus said:
That sounds good - stage 2 as well?

yes (declare war on CS),

S3rgeus said:
They probably shouldn't get anything in return, because the diplo AI is likely to offer them a different city in exchange if they like them enough - which isn't really what we want! Trade it away for nothing in exchange?

Yes, for sure, trade city for nothing. a major telegraph - but perhaps, who cares, since as stage 3 its quite late game.

one cool thing about this is that, late game, you'll be likely trading to one of your "allies" on Shadow.... but then they'll just use it against you.

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, let's table that one for now and consider again if one of the Quests provides particularly relevant flavor for it (Rahvin probably does, now that I think about it) or when we're doing Governor mechanics.

Yeah. Though, we already have Threads that have "a governor dies", so if we want to set one up for Rahvin or something, we can do it now and see how it all fits later (and change if there is no answer).

S3rgeus said:
I think 3 gives us more range to create variable payouts for the player. I like the idea of the stage 1 quests all being the generic ones, and Ishamael's extra two also being stage 1 all fits in very nicely!

sure. Generic = stage 1.

S3rgeus said:
I figure the stages were also to do with what the Forsaken are dealing with - that they have more epic tasks to give to people as the Last Battle looms closer and actually gets started.

Right, I understand that logic, but I think that looking at it a different way we could draw the other conclusion:

It's true that big deal stuff get's done closer to the LB, but on the flipside, that big deal stuff is only "trusted" to those who have proven themselves to the forsaken. Thus, generic quests from random 'saken, and then more seemingly "important" and "in-character" ones once they trust you.

random clarification - Starts at EoNB: is this civ era or world era?

S3rgeus said:
They'd need to succeed in all 3 stage 1 Quests to see a stage 3 without completing a stage 2, rather than just two, but I see what you mean about "skipping" a stage. I like your suggestion below anyway, so it's a moot point.

yeah, the point is moo.

S3rgeus said:
I like this system, it's got a nice player progression to it. The turn counts were devised to end around turn 350 when starting at about turn 200 and to have them generally be closer together as the game went on, while still never getting "too close."

We can also tweak the turn counts easily enough if we find they're coming too fast or too slow when playtesting.

OK, put into the summary.

I'm ok with the turn number overall, it just feels weird to have 30 and then 25 and then a bunch of 20s. Feels like it wants more predictability in the "countdown" (like two 25s or something), but that's just a "feeling," not necessarily something that's logical.

S3rgeus said:
This makes it sound like they're quite close together, but there's quite an Alignment difference between those two levels. 2+ is 500 Light and above. Up and including tier 3 is up to 1900 Light - so there's a fair middle ground of Light-ish players there.

The other reason is Neutral players, who I think we want to see these more than Light, are likely to bounce between Shadow and Light tier 1 relatively often, since they're close together - we wouldn't want to cut them off because they happened to be Light tier 1 at the wrong time.

I understand. It's still a bit precious, but I'm fine with it.

S3rgeus said:
I like the "succeed on two at each stage to advance" approach - sounds like a good plan. I still think filtering Light 2+ after two fails rather than Light 1+ is a good idea, but that's a fairly minor detail.

Right. that's fine.

S3rgeus said:
Eh, not really, all of the Forsaken looking alike isn't the same kind of weirdness. That's clearly an intentional decision on our part. Having Callandor in some artwork when it might be somewhere else in the current game looks more like we just didn't think about it. This all depends on if we do have Callandor elsewhere, which we don't know for sure yet.

Either way, I think I like the distance approach - a commanding shadow on a hilltop surrounded by Dragon banners.

Difference of opinion, I guess. I think these kinds of visual contradictions are simply a part of civ. The diplo Leader art, for instance, obviously transcends place, time, and game specifics.

S3rgeus said:
I don't think it's quite that clear-cut, being a military unit means it can attack something, but it doesn't mean the player will do that. The swordsman and a variety of other CiV military units aren't shown attacking things in their icons, mostly with the potential to do so. I think if we do use saidin-rock or a similar approach it characterizes the unit as very aggressive - which will be accurate for a lot of male channeler units, but not necessarily all of them.

I definitely see what you mean and it's totally fine if we want to characterize male channelers that way, but we should consider the other side as well.

Hmm, I see what you're saying, but I think this is a chiefly semantic thing that doesn't matter enough to really worry about. I say do whatever looks good.

S3rgeus said:
Awesome, time for some Quests! I'll go through and make one stage 2 Quest for each Forsaken to start with.

General Format:

<Forsaken Name (or 'Generic')>, Stage <Number>
Flavor: <flavor description>
Objective: <what the player must do>

I think some of these need a "Restriction" too (e.g., must know a borderlander civ).

S3rgeus said:
One question that I've just thought of - do we want to link specific Shadowspawn bonuses to specific quests? Or just randomly pick a bonus from a pool based on the Stage of the completed Quest, when the player completes it?

Right. So I touched on this above. We talked about giving both units and bonuses. When for each?

part of me is thinking we should make this super simple. Let's just go +X% overall combat bonus, every time, no matter what. No units, no variability in kinds of bonus. Simplicity.

Now, I think +1% per FQ could work. It's rather useless with one person, but also rather terrifying when done with like 7 civs. I could also see it be +Stage% (so a Stage 3 would yield +3%). Would that be too crazy?

Or, I say it's maybe a +1% and a unit spawn. The unit spawn can be based on the Stage completed, perhaps with some randomness attached.

S3rgeus said:
Also, is the amount of Shadow given out based solely on the Stage or is it unique within some Stage-based range for each Quest?

I suggest we do one of two things: either 1) based on the Stage, or 2) based on the Stage, with some extra "resolution" based on how many you've completed.

With the proposed system, you can by definition only complete 2 of each stage (until stage 3).

So, option one, something like:
Stage 1 - 200
Stage 2 - 400
Stage 3 - 600

or something

Option 2, something like:
Stage 1, Quest 1 - 200
Stage 1, Q2 - 300
Stage 2, Q1 - 400
Stage 2, Q2 - 500
Stage 3 (any) - 600

or something. The jumps between Stages could be more, of course. I'm not sure on the numbers of course - note, Option two would pay a whopping 3200 points if you suceeded in every FQ offered to you.

S3rgeus said:
I think things that require the player to sacrifice things should only pop up if the player is capable of making that sacrifice. (So a quest that asks the player to declare war on a borderlander civ can only be given to a player that has met a borderlander civ.)

That seems logical. That said, I think I may be in favor of making things pretty generically possible in most cases.

S3rgeus said:
Ishamael, Stage 2
Flavor: The people of your nation are much too enraptured with the Creator - they can be cured of that.
Objective: Sell two <shrine equivalent> within 5 turns

I think this is fine.

S3rgeus said:
Aginor, Stage 2
Flavor: <Borderlander civ> is becoming a nuisance - distract them from a Blight for a time.
Objective: Declare war on <borderlander civ> within 10 turns

This one MIGHT be a little too specific (with the borderlander thing), but I'm not sure. Also, why for Aginor?

also, needs a Restriction.

S3rgeus said:
Demandred, Stage 2
Flavor: Men in your time should take a firmer hand on saidin.
Objective: Do not attempt to Gentle any units for 45 turns

(Not on the list, what do we think of this one? Enough for a stage 2? Useful elsewhere? You might sometimes be doing this anyway, which could be a problem?)

OK. I like the IDEA of this, because it feels cool, but it does feel problematic, because some civs will see this as a "free FQ" because they already use tons of saidin units. Perhaps this one needs a Restriction that requires this civ to be one that usually DOES gentle male channelers.

Also, much more importantly, I no longer enjoy the potentiality of any Quest having a time limit longer than 20 turns - the minimum distance between two Quests. The reason for this is the success of a given quest determines A) the stage of your next Quest, and B) whether you're even given another Quest at all (in some cases). To me, this essentially requires us to eliminate overlap like this. If that's a problem, then we have to make them longer than 20 turns apart, IMO. But I don't think it's that big a problem.

Now, in this case, I think that might make this quest too easy - nearly cutting it in half. Perhaps downgrade it to level 1?

S3rgeus said:
Sammael, Stage 2
Flavor: There are some generals in your time that could do with a harsh lesson in tactics.
Objective: Lose 6 units in combat in the next 15 turns.

This is quite cool. Pretty harsh, though, and hard to do. Love it, I think. 6 is a lot, though!

S3rgeus said:
Rahvin, Stage 2
Flavor: I think I quite fancy the look of that plot of land over there.
Objective: Capture <border plot> from a nearby peaceful civ (without declaring war on them) within 30 turns

(Probably need to filter this on the player having whatever GP grabs land already - otherwise it will just be impossible quite often.)

Yeah, needs that GP restriction. Also, must be shorter number of turns.

S3rgeus said:
Lanfear, Stage 2
Flavor: Conquest is such an ugly world. Think of it as liberating the folk from their current leaders.
Objective: Capture <foreign city> within 45 turns

Needs to be shorter turns, which makes this pretty tricky.

A bigger issue, though, is that Stage 2 also has "declare war on somebody" as a possible Quest, right? well, that's not balanced with this. Here, you have to declare war AND take a city. Way, way harder. So, this needs to be Stage 3.

UNLESS this is only for a civ you're already at war with.

OR we tweak it so that this one is made more generic - take ANY foreign city or something - and thus easier to pull off in short time.

S3rgeus said:
Graendal, Stage 2
Flavor: I have need of some baubles you currently possess.
Objective: Pillage <luxury resource you own> within 5 turns

Well, I think in order to even come close to approximating the other ones of this stage, I think this should probably be 1) a few luxuries, and 2) for a given amount of turns. Like, probably can't pillage and then immediately repair. I thin kthe happiness bonus shoudl be felt for a little bit.

S3rgeus said:
Balthamel/Aran'gar, Stage 2
Flavor: The Sisters in the Tower have need of a distraction for a time.
Objective: Declare war on the Tower within 10 turns

(Should possibly be stage 3?)

I think if the Tower are implacable enemies, then yes, we might want to do this as Tier 3. If it's sort of like a regular CS war (they don't invade you, etc.) Stage 2 is fine.

S3rgeus said:
Semirhage, Stage 2
Flavor: I need some information on the behavior of people who are deprived of food.
Objective: Starve <city you own> for 10 turns.

love this one! Should probably say "within the next X turns" though.

S3rgeus said:
Be'lal, Stage 2
Flavor: There is a particular location we need access to.
Objective: Capture <foreign city> within 45 turns

Right, so this is like that Lanfear one. Same issues,

S3rgeus said:
Mesaana, Stage 2
Flavor: <Civilization> has become bold in their advances. Show them that their allies are not safe.
Objective: Declare war on a city state allied with <civilization> within 10 turns

(It's a shame tech trading isn't a thing - it would be ideal for Mesaana. I can't think of a way to have the player "let" a foreign civ steal a tech from them reliably.)

Sure.

S3rgeus said:
Asmodean, Stage 2
Flavor: There's a certain merchant caravan in <civilization> that would benefit from <luxury resource you have>.
Objective: Trade <luxury> to <civilization> for nothing in exchange within 10 turns

Yeah, I think this is acceptable as only one luxury (as opposed to Graendal's) because it 1) helps an opponent, 2) telegraphs your alignment, which hurts you, and 3)is guaranteed to be for 30 turns.

S3rgeus said:
Moghedian, Stage 2
Flavor: Your spies can be useful to me for a time.
Objective: Send a spy to <foreign city with a low science score> for 30 turns.

sure.

S3rgeus said:
M'hael, Stage 2
Flavor: A friend needs a moment of respite from your aggressions.
Objective: Do not damage, kill, or Gentle <False Dragon currently in your territory> for 5 turns.

(I could almost see this one being a stage 3 Quest.)

definitely needs a restriction of having a FD terrorizing your cities. I think 5 turns is probably fine, but it's possible it needs to be longer. Maybe don't attack him OR his forces for five turns?

As far as Stage 3. Maybe. This could be pretty hard/destructive. It's hard to say. Then again, is the restriction too problematically limited?

S3rgeus said:
This would actually be all of our stage 2 quests (unless some move to 3) so if there are more flavorful tasks/more 'fun' objectives that should go into stage 2, then let's by all means swap some of them for lesser quests above. One I thought of but didn't work in was "pillage a resource you are trading to someone else" - so you get the resource and trade penalty out of that.

And that's all for this evening! I shall return next Thursday! Until then, have a good weekend!

cool, so I'm going to take a little time now to propose some Forsaken-tied ones, but this is somewhat tricky, since some of these are getting bumped up or down a stage. I guess I'll leave the round to you, or until after we've addressed some of those issues.

OK, so I'll try for a bit of generics.

I'll be out of town until Wed. evening. My access to the internet while gone will be spotty, to say the least - highly unlikely i'll be able to post until after I'm back.

counterpoint · May 24, 2015

Generic Forsaken Quests (All Stage 1)

Ishamael 1
Flavor: You must exert your independence over those who seek to control you.
Objective: Send 1 Aes Sedai you control back to the Tower within the next 5 turns.
Restriction: Trolloc Wars only. Must have oneAes Sedai

(should that be 1 AS only? How bad this is does somewhat depend on how quickly AS are replenished by the tower. Also, will people even have 2 of them this early in the game?)

Ishamael 2
Flavor: The Trolloc hordes will surely turn back if they can satisfy their appetites...
Objective: Allow 2 civilian units to be captured by Shadowspawn within the next 15 turns.
Restriction: Trolloc Wars only.

Generic 1
Flavor: The Great Lord has need of some new recruits.
Objective: Disband 3 military units within the next 10 turns.

Generic 2
Flavor: Your funds would be better spent elsewhere.
Objective: Trade X GPT to another civ for nothing in return, in the next 10 turns.

(still don't know exactly how much it should be)

Generic 3
Flavor: The Forgers of Thakan'dar require a donation. Make your yields available to them.
Objective: Pillage 2 <strategic resource> for at least 5 turns, in the next 10 turns.
Restriction: must have access to <strategic resource>

Generic 4
Flavor: True service of the Great Lord should require no specialized goods. Dispense of such things.
Objective: Trade 3 <strategic resource> to another civ for nothing in return, in the next 10 turns.
Restriction: must have access to <strategic resource>

Generic 5
Flavor: It would amuse me to see you make some enemies.
Objective: Denounce a Friendly civilization within the next 5 turns.
Restriction: must be Friendly with a civ.

(also considered making this denouncing any TWO civs, since this one feels a bit easy).

Generic 6
Flavor: What's the worst that could happen?
Objective: Sell <Walls equivalent> in <city> within 5 turns..
Restriction: Must have <Walls equivalent> in <city>. <City> must have an enemy unit (at war or barbarian) within 5 hexes.

Generic 7
Flavor: These men serve you well. Punish them for it.
Objective: Attempt to Gentle (via the Tower or your own Aes Sedai) 2 saidin units within the next 15 turns.
Restriction: Must have at least 2 saidin units that are 10 or more turns old.

(the point to the restriction is to make it so this is a civ who has chosen to keep them around.

Generic 8
Flavor: Your forces grow idle. Perhaps you will better know their power when staring at their swordpoints.
Objective: Gift one military unit to 2 different civilizations within the next 10 turns.

Generic 9
Flavor: Some of your great thinkers presume too much. Halt their petty progress.
Objective: Put one <Great Person> to sleep for 10 consecutive turns, in the next 20 turns.
Restriction: Must have a Great Person, or be likely to spawn one within the next 10 turns.

(weird? This obviously needs a restriction, but is it possible to do one based on GP potential? Like "GP will be born soon"? Also, this should probably exclude GCaptains, right (assuming they often are idle like in civ5)?

Generic 10
Flavor: Foolish ideas flow too close to your seat of power. Cut them off.
Objective: Sever all land-based city connections to your capital for 3 consecutive turns in the next 15 turns.
Restriction: must have at land-based city connection with at least 3 cities.

(obviously, this would necessitate selling of harbors in many cases).

S3rgeus · May 28, 2015

Hello! It's been a long time! My weekend away was very refreshing, over too soon as always. But now there's time for some more WoT design!

counterpoint said:
ok, added to the summary. Just to be clear, though - is this the only benefit, or do they also get units? Also, is the bonus capped (e.g., cannot get higher than +20 or something)?

Based on what you've said below, I'd say let's go with both permanent bonus and unit spawning. We could leave the bonus uncapped for now and introduce a cap if we find it getting out of control.

counterpoint said:
I think we've already established Gold as a somewhat inconsistent method of establishing "level of sacrifice," so I think I'd feel better about it being just Tier 1. But I think that the values we choose will need to have a minimum value, perhaps somewhat randomized.

The counterargument to this, of course, is that giving away fre gold is potentially a MAJOR alignment telegraph, so having iit as stage 1 (i.e., earlier in the game) is somewhat problematic.

Yeah, it is a bit of a telegraph. I can't think of a situation beyond propping up an enemy's enemy that a player would do this normally. Do we think it's a big problem? Since it's early game, the player will have had ample time to switch sides before the choosing happens.

counterpoint said:
Yeah. Though, we already have Threads that have "a governor dies", so if we want to set one up for Rahvin or something, we can do it now and see how it all fits later (and change if there is no answer).

Ok, sounds like a plan.

counterpoint said:
Right, I understand that logic, but I think that looking at it a different way we could draw the other conclusion:

It's true that big deal stuff get's done closer to the LB, but on the flipside, that big deal stuff is only "trusted" to those who have proven themselves to the forsaken. Thus, generic quests from random 'saken, and then more seemingly "important" and "in-character" ones once they trust you.

random clarification - Starts at EoNB: is this civ era or world era?

Yeah, that makes sense too. Civ era, I'd say - the Quests are local to the player already so, letting players who are ahead be rewarded by seeing them makes sense. It's also one of the ways they can make it more likely that they'll see them all. (If a couple of civs are pulling ahead on separate continents, the game may end earlier than turn 350.)

counterpoint said:
Difference of opinion, I guess. I think these kinds of visual contradictions are simply a part of civ. The diplo Leader art, for instance, obviously transcends place, time, and game specifics.

I agree that there are usually contradictions in civ, but there are consistencies as well. The diplo leader art is visibly a consequence of the "immortal leaders" weirdness - it feels like having Callandor in two places at once isn't something that's necessary since it can be avoided relatively simply. (For the leaders example, avoiding the out-of-time element of their 3D leader scene would require a series of 3D leader scenes over the eras, which is clearly expensive in terms of developer work.)

counterpoint said:
Hmm, I see what you're saying, but I think this is a chiefly semantic thing that doesn't matter enough to really worry about. I say do whatever looks good.

I disagree that this doesn't matter so much though. While there are clearly different scales of importance for stuff like the major features and design decisions that go into them - they have the potential to derail literally everything else in the game. While we're discussing artwork in order to give Trevor some direction to work with, I think it's important that we consider things like this, because it's that consistent look and feel and what it communicates to the player that is the layer of polish we want to have. It's much more expensive for Trevor to do work and then we find we don't think it communicates some essence of the WoT flavor, than for us to be more usefully specific up front.

We're effectively skipping ahead - in our normal flow of work I don't think the specifics of what certain units should look like would have come up for a long time yet. But when they did come up, these would be the kinds of things we'd consider - which, if we're deciding on appearances now, I'd say we should do the same as we would do later.

The crux of what you're saying is of course true - that we should do what looks good. As the WoT experts I think Trevor would want us to provide some specific direction for icons about what they represent and the kind of scene that accurately portrays the building/unit/tech/etc. Some will be more and less specific, depending on how WoT-y they are (male channelers, Aes Sedai, and False Dragons are very WoT-y, other things like more generic unit types that are clear analogues of real world ones are much less so).

So, the core of the male channeler stuff, we've got a few ideas floating around for that and we came to a relative end of the appearance decisions for False Dragons, Aes Sedai, and Shadowspawn (we did do Shadowspawn, right?). Are we in a position to compile a list of recommendations for their icons' appearance?

counterpoint said:
I think some of these need a "Restriction" too (e.g., must know a borderlander civ).

Agreed, leaving the restriction as implicit could be confusing for some where we want to constrain the player more, or Quests that have difficult to assess prerequisites.

counterpoint said:
Right. So I touched on this above. We talked about giving both units and bonuses. When for each?

part of me is thinking we should make this super simple. Let's just go +X% overall combat bonus, every time, no matter what. No units, no variability in kinds of bonus. Simplicity.

Now, I think +1% per FQ could work. It's rather useless with one person, but also rather terrifying when done with like 7 civs. I could also see it be +Stage% (so a Stage 3 would yield +3%). Would that be too crazy?

Or, I say it's maybe a +1% and a unit spawn. The unit spawn can be based on the Stage completed, perhaps with some randomness attached.

+1% and a unit spawn, where the unit is determined by the stage of the completed Quest sounds like a good approach to me!

counterpoint said:
I suggest we do one of two things: either 1) based on the Stage, or 2) based on the Stage, with some extra "resolution" based on how many you've completed.

With the proposed system, you can by definition only complete 2 of each stage (until stage 3).

So, option one, something like:
Stage 1 - 200
Stage 2 - 400
Stage 3 - 600

or something

Option 2, something like:
Stage 1, Quest 1 - 200
Stage 1, Q2 - 300
Stage 2, Q1 - 400
Stage 2, Q2 - 500
Stage 3 (any) - 600

or something. The jumps between Stages could be more, of course. I'm not sure on the numbers of course - note, Option two would pay a whopping 3200 points if you suceeded in every FQ offered to you.

I like the format of option 1 - fixed amounts for each stage. That pays out a maximum of 3000 Shadow though - should we lower that a bit? Completing all of them will be difficult but quite doable for some players, and that plus Threads alone gets them to tier 7.

We wanted Forsaken Quests to give us ~1500 on average, which makes it difficult to pull down the maximum when the rewards are top-heavy (especially since the player sees 3 stage 3 Quests in that case). A progression like: stage 1, 200; stage 2, 300; stage 4, 400; would give us a maximum of 2200, which is a bit safer, but pulls the average down to about ~800. Do we want to make the Turning objectives more lucrative to compensate? Or possibly make the Quest payouts more uniform across stages?

counterpoint said:
I think this is fine.

Related to adding restrictions, do we think we should allow this Quest only for players that already have 2 or more Shrine equivalents? Or should we just give it to anyone and let them build them and then sell them?

counterpoint said:
This one MIGHT be a little too specific (with the borderlander thing), but I'm not sure. Also, why for Aginor?

also, needs a Restriction.

I think there should be some civs by the Blightborder in most games. Often civs will grow towards the Blight as well, since Forsaken Quests happen relatively late. Borderlander civs isn't the in-universe set of Borderlanders, but any civ who borders on a Blight tile.

It's Aginor because he's testing out some new breeds of Shadowspawn and wants the Borderlanders to stop killing his test subjects for a little while.

Do we want a Master list to save out changes to? I'll go back and edit my previous post for now to add the explicit restriction.

counterpoint said:
OK. I like the IDEA of this, because it feels cool, but it does feel problematic, because some civs will see this as a "free FQ" because they already use tons of saidin units. Perhaps this one needs a Restriction that requires this civ to be one that usually DOES gentle male channelers.

Also, much more importantly, I no longer enjoy the potentiality of any Quest having a time limit longer than 20 turns - the minimum distance between two Quests. The reason for this is the success of a given quest determines A) the stage of your next Quest, and B) whether you're even given another Quest at all (in some cases). To me, this essentially requires us to eliminate overlap like this. If that's a problem, then we have to make them longer than 20 turns apart, IMO. But I don't think it's that big a problem.

Now, in this case, I think that might make this quest too easy - nearly cutting it in half. Perhaps downgrade it to level 1?

I totally agree, the flavor is really nice, but the mechanics of it work out that it's a free Quest for some civs.

The earlier Forsaken Quests have longer intervals (30 turns), right? I'd be fine limiting the duration of a Quest to the interval before the next one. As you've said, overlaps no longer work since we can't dispense the next Quest until the previous one has been completed or missed. So stage 1 max 30, stage 2 and 3 max 20?

Downgrading to stage 1 sounds like a good plan. Would this be in addition to your 10 suggested below, or do you have one in mind to remove?

counterpoint said:
This is quite cool. Pretty harsh, though, and hard to do. Love it, I think. 6 is a lot, though!

6 is a lot, we could definitely go lower. I put 2 in first, but figured that might be happening naturally. 4 sound better?

counterpoint said:
Yeah, needs that GP restriction. Also, must be shorter number of turns.

Done

counterpoint said:
Needs to be shorter turns, which makes this pretty tricky.

A bigger issue, though, is that Stage 2 also has "declare war on somebody" as a possible Quest, right? well, that's not balanced with this. Here, you have to declare war AND take a city. Way, way harder. So, this needs to be Stage 3.

UNLESS this is only for a civ you're already at war with.

OR we tweak it so that this one is made more generic - take ANY foreign city or something - and thus easier to pull off in short time.

Take any foreign city sounds much better. I was never particularly happy with this Quest though - it doesn't feel very flavorfully linked to Lanfear. Even though she has so much good flavor, it was difficult to link a macro-level objective to her specifics.

counterpoint said:
Well, I think in order to even come close to approximating the other ones of this stage, I think this should probably be 1) a few luxuries, and 2) for a given amount of turns. Like, probably can't pillage and then immediately repair. I thin kthe happiness bonus shoudl be felt for a little bit.

Definitely agree on "for X turns" (though players will mostly repair them and then leave them one turn from repaired until the time runs out and repair them instantly, it still enforces some additional unhappiness time, which is the point).

I'm less sure about a few luxuries. For the AI, neither arrangement is going to affect them that much in most cases. For the player, if we're playing on an appropriate difficulty, we're usually hovering just above the positive happiness threshold - one would tip most humans quite often, I'd say. It's easy to change either way, if we do find it's too easy.

counterpoint said:
I think if the Tower are implacable enemies, then yes, we might want to do this as Tier 3. If it's sort of like a regular CS war (they don't invade you, etc.) Stage 2 is fine.

I think the diplo ramifications are the big kicker - declaring war on the Tower will have a big effect on the player's Tower influence. (Did we decide influence snaps back after wars with the Tower like normal CSes?) Other civs that like the Tower should definitely have serious negative diplo modifiers against civs at war with it.

counterpoint said:
love this one! Should probably say "within the next X turns" though.

Totally, changed!

counterpoint said:
Right, so this is like that Lanfear one. Same issues,

In this case, since Be'lal has so much less flavor available than Lanfear, I'd be fine with "any foreign city."

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think this is acceptable as only one luxury (as opposed to Graendal's) because it 1) helps an opponent, 2) telegraphs your alignment, which hurts you, and 3)is guaranteed to be for 30 turns.

The player can pillage the resource to cut the trade short once they've completed the Quest, so it's not a guaranteed 30 turns. (This is one of the major reasons lump sum gold was moved behind a DoF gate.) It still sounds good though!

counterpoint said:
definitely needs a restriction of having a FD terrorizing your cities. I think 5 turns is probably fine, but it's possible it needs to be longer. Maybe don't attack him OR his forces for five turns?

As far as Stage 3. Maybe. This could be pretty hard/destructive. It's hard to say. Then again, is the restriction too problematically limited?

I'd say 5 turns is already dangerously high - the Quest is intended to target a False Dragon already in your land. Not attacking him for 5 whole turns is craziness - a powerful unit like that would definitely be slammed down with focused fire from many units right away by most players, to kill him within a couple of turns, otherwise he'll do a ton of unit killing and infrastructure damage (and city capturing, since he's a good siege weapon). I had 2 initially, but that did seem like it could slip by in a big empire with large distances between their outer borders and their cities. (The player also needs to kill/Gentle him after the time runs out, which is likely to take turns too.)

It's a very good point about this being quite restrictive - players won't have False Dragons in their territory at the same time as a Forsaken Quest is given out very often. (Since I would imagine False Dragons in major civ territory tend to die quite quickly.) Might be worth reconsidering this one, despite its nice flavor crossover with M'Hael.

S3rgeus · May 28, 2015

counterpoint said:
Ishamael 1
Flavor: You must exert your independence over those who seek to control you.
Objective: Send 2 Aes Sedai you control back to the Tower within the next 5 turns.
Restriction: Trolloc Wars only. Must have two Aes Sedai

(should that be 1 AS only? How bad this is does somewhat depend on how quickly AS are replenished by the tower. Also, will people even have 2 of them this early in the game?)

I think it should be 1 - this early in the game players won't have many.

counterpoint said:
Ishamael 2
Flavor: The Trolloc hordes will surely turn back if they can satisfy their appetites...
Objective: Allow 2 civilian units to be captured by Shadowspawn within the next 15 turns.
Restriction: Trolloc Wars only.

Sounds good! 2 seems like a good number.

counterpoint said:
Generic 1
Flavor: The Great Lord has need of some new recruits.
Objective: Disband 3 military units within the next 10 turns.

Sounds good.

counterpoint said:
Generic 2
Flavor: Your funds would be better spent elsewhere.
Objective: Trade X GPT to another civ for nothing in return, in the next 10 turns.

(still don't know exactly how much it should be)

Around 15 GPT maybe?

counterpoint said:
Generic 3
Flavor: The Forgers of Thakan'dar require a donation. Make your yields available to them.
Objective: Pillage 2 <strategic resource> for at least 5 turns, in the next 20 turns.
Restriction: must have access to <strategic resource>

Should we tighten the pillaged time vs Quest time limit - to say 5 within 10?

counterpoint said:
Generic 4
Flavor: True service of the Great Lord should require no specialized goods. Dispense of such things.
Objective: Trade <strategic resource> to another civ for nothing in return, in the next 10 turns.
Restriction: must have access to <strategic resource>

We should specify how many they should trade, or is it just 1? I think 3 or 5 would be ok.

counterpoint said:
Generic 5
Flavor: It would amuse me to see you make some enemies.
Objective: Denounce a Friendly civilization within the next 5 turns.
Restriction: must be Friendly with a civ.

(also considered making this denouncing any TWO civs, since this one feels a bit easy).

This depends, is this "Friendly" the diplo attitude, or a civ you've got a DoF with? If it's the latter, this is one of the hardest quests already with just 1 - it's easy to do, but all of the AIs will hate you for many many turns for doing it, which costs a lot in trade and untimely wars.

counterpoint said:
Generic 6
Flavor: What's the worst that could happen?
Objective: Sell <Walls equivalent> in <city>.
Restriction: Must have <Walls equivalent> in <city>. <City> must have an enemy unit (at war or barbarian) within 5 hexes, within 5 turns.

Is the "within 5 turns" intended to apply to the objective, rather than the restriction? We can't tell whether there will be an enemy unit within 5 hexes of a city in the future.

counterpoint said:
Generic 7
Flavor: These men serve you well. Punish them for it.
Objective: Attempt to Gentle (via the Tower or your own Aes Sedai) 2 saidin units within the next 15 turns.
Restriction: Must have had at least 2 saidin units for the past 10 consecutive turns.

(the point to the restriction is to make it so this is a civ who has chosen to keep them around.

A similar restriction is much easier to assess:

Restriction: Must have at least 2 saidin units that are 10 or more turns old.

Every unit knows what turn number it was spawned, so we can assess that when we go to give out the Quest. Knowing whether a player had at least 2 saidin units for the last 10 turns requires us to keep track of and record all players' saidin unit count at all times.

counterpoint said:
Generic 8
Flavor: Your forces grow idle. Perhaps you will better know their power when staring at their swordpoints.
Objective: Gift one military unit to 2 different civilizations within the next 10 turns.

Nice, this one sounds cool!

counterpoint said:
Generic 9
Flavor: Some of your great thinkers presume too much. Halt their petty progress.
Objective: Put one Great Person to sleep for 10 consecutive turns, in the next 20 turns.

(weird? This obviously needs a restriction, but is it possible to do one based on GP potential? Like "GP will be born soon"? Also, this should probably exclude GCaptains, right (assuming they often are idle like in civ5)?

We could choose a specific GP type with each instance of the Quest, and exclude Great Captains that way? So, if we want to give a player an instance of this Quest, and they have a Great Scientist, then we can ask them to sleep a Great Scientist for 10 turns.

counterpoint said:
Generic 10
Flavor: Foolish ideas flow too close to your seat of power. Cut them off.
Objective: Sever all city connections to your capital for 3 consecutive turns in the next 15 turns.
Restriction: must have a city connection with at least 3 cities.

(obviously, this would necessitate selling of harbors in many cases).

Mm, selling harbors is a big cost for a stage 1 quest. Shall we make the restriction that the capital must not have a harbor as well? That way the player can always break the connections by pillaging roads (even if there are harbors connecting other cities).

In terms of stage 3 Quests, I'll try to address those in my next post/over the weekend.

counterpoint · May 28, 2015

S3rgeus said:
Based on what you've said below, I'd say let's go with both permanent bonus and unit spawning. We could leave the bonus uncapped for now and introduce a cap if we find it getting out of control.

and

S3rgeus said:
+1% and a unit spawn, where the unit is determined by the stage of the completed Quest sounds like a good approach to me!

OK, I've put these in the summary, and having it so the Shadowspawn units don't necessarily scale to Stage.

But, just so we're clear, this means a single civ could provide up to a +15% bonus. Are we ok with this?

S3rgeus said:
Yeah, it is a bit of a telegraph. I can't think of a situation beyond propping up an enemy's enemy that a player would do this normally. Do we think it's a big problem? Since it's early game, the player will have had ample time to switch sides before the choosing happens.

actually, based on both the telegraphing issue AND the hard-to-balance issue, I think I am in favor of just axing the GPT thing entirely.

Maybe an alternate way to do something very similar is to have a Quest that makes the player sit with unused trade route slots (assuming they have most of them full to start with)? Force them to not renew, say, two trade routes?

S3rgeus said:
I agree that there are usually contradictions in civ, but there are consistencies as well. The diplo leader art is visibly a consequence of the "immortal leaders" weirdness - it feels like having Callandor in two places at once isn't something that's necessary since it can be avoided relatively simply. (For the leaders example, avoiding the out-of-time element of their 3D leader scene would require a series of 3D leader scenes over the eras, which is clearly expensive in terms of developer work.)

To be clear, I feel no great urge to have callandor on the dragon unit... it's just sort of an iconic image, is all.

S3rgeus said:
I disagree that this doesn't matter so much though. While there are clearly different scales of importance for stuff like the major features and design decisions that go into them - they have the potential to derail literally everything else in the game. While we're discussing artwork in order to give Trevor some direction to work with, I think it's important that we consider things like this, because it's that consistent look and feel and what it communicates to the player that is the layer of polish we want to have. It's much more expensive for Trevor to do work and then we find we don't think it communicates some essence of the WoT flavor, than for us to be more usefully specific up front.

We're effectively skipping ahead - in our normal flow of work I don't think the specifics of what certain units should look like would have come up for a long time yet. But when they did come up, these would be the kinds of things we'd consider - which, if we're deciding on appearances now, I'd say we should do the same as we would do later.

The crux of what you're saying is of course true - that we should do what looks good. As the WoT experts I think Trevor would want us to provide some specific direction for icons about what they represent and the kind of scene that accurately portrays the building/unit/tech/etc. Some will be more and less specific, depending on how WoT-y they are (male channelers, Aes Sedai, and False Dragons are very WoT-y, other things like more generic unit types that are clear analogues of real world ones are much less so).

OK, OK. I see your point and withdraw my previous world view.

That said, you're not actually trying to imply that *this* choice has "the potential to derail literally everything else in the game" are you?

S3rgeus said:
So, the core of the male channeler stuff, we've got a few ideas floating around for that and we came to a relative end of the appearance decisions for False Dragons, Aes Sedai, and Shadowspawn (we did do Shadowspawn, right?). Are we in a position to compile a list of recommendations for their icons' appearance?

OK, first off, I don't really care so much about the specifics here, so I'm happy to follow your lead, but yes, I think we're ready for recommendations.

As far as shadowspawn.... I think sending him to existing art is probably the best bet. The only weird one, I think, might be the Jumara, as there isn't really much out there. I've always pictured either Dune or Beetlejuice things, or perhaps the worms from Alpha Centauri.

We don't suppose Civitar has made progress on any of this, right? If so, we'd want to make sure his models line up with Trevor's icon. If he hasn't started, then this would probably be very helpful to get him to inform his models.

S3rgeus said:
I like the format of option 1 - fixed amounts for each stage. That pays out a maximum of 3000 Shadow though - should we lower that a bit? Completing all of them will be difficult but quite doable for some players, and that plus Threads alone gets them to tier 7.

We wanted Forsaken Quests to give us ~1500 on average, which makes it difficult to pull down the maximum when the rewards are top-heavy (especially since the player sees 3 stage 3 Quests in that case). A progression like: stage 1, 200; stage 2, 300; stage 4, 400; would give us a maximum of 2200, which is a bit safer, but pulls the average down to about ~800. Do we want to make the Turning objectives more lucrative to compensate? Or possibly make the Quest payouts more uniform across stages?

OK, well first off, sure, let's make the payout the same per stage.

As far as the huge total... well, one thing we could do is not allow that seventh Quest. After two completions of Stage 3, the Quests have ended.

I see the mathematical purpose of making the payout more uniform, but I feel like it works against us in terms of the desired effect - I feel these do in fact need to be top heavy. I'm not in love with 200/300/400. Perhaps a little less uniformity would fix the problem.

Also, don't forget that 1 (or 2) Stage 1 Quests will appear "for free" during the TW.

I'll hold off on updating the summary until we get a final answer.

S3rgeus said:
Related to adding restrictions, do we think we should allow this Quest only for players that already have 2 or more Shrine equivalents? Or should we just give it to anyone and let them build them and then sell them?

Good question. I'd say make the restriction. Less confusing that way.

S3rgeus said:
I think there should be some civs by the Blightborder in most games. Often civs will grow towards the Blight as well, since Forsaken Quests happen relatively late. Borderlander civs isn't the in-universe set of Borderlanders, but any civ who borders on a Blight tile.

It's Aginor because he's testing out some new breeds of Shadowspawn and wants the Borderlanders to stop killing his test subjects for a little while.

I understand that you aren't talking about Shienar, but "Sea Folk that happen to live next to Blight," for instance. If you think it'll be pretty universally true that people will be there, then sure.

S3rgeus said:
Do we want a Master list to save out changes to? I'll go back and edit my previous post for now to add the explicit restriction.

Yes, master list! Your list is a little wordier than mine, because it is specific to Forsaken, and also more numerous - you want to copy-paste to create the master list?

S3rgeus said:
I totally agree, the flavor is really nice, but the mechanics of it work out that it's a free Quest for some civs.

The earlier Forsaken Quests have longer intervals (30 turns), right? I'd be fine limiting the duration of a Quest to the interval before the next one. As you've said, overlaps no longer work since we can't dispense the next Quest until the previous one has been completed or missed. So stage 1 max 30, stage 2 and 3 max 20?

We are still interpreting the turn thing differently, and I've tried and failed two times to get us on the same page.

Here's what I'm thinking. If this is not what you like, please convince me I am wrong. So far we've been agreeing on two very different approaches!

I've been conceiving of the Quests appearing on a "schedule" that is completely independent of your success (except for when you fail enough that your Quests cease coming). The first Quest happens, and the second one comes 30 turns after that. Then the next 25 after that (so said your original turn-map), regardless of whether it is Stage 1 or 2. This contrasts with what you're presenting here, which ties Quest spawning to Stage.

I prefer "my" method for a few reasons:

1) It accommodates the "time compression" that happens in the later game, and, more importantly, the super long turns in the late game.

2) It allows us to predict precisely how many quests a civ will receive, assuming they succeed a minimum number of times.

3) It avoids the double jeopardy that would come from spending too long on Stage 1, only to get fewer quests because the subsequent quests come slower.

Of course, "my" method has one clear disadvantage:

1) Quest-lengths all have to be 20 turns or fewer (19?), to accommodate a timely Stage-selection of the subsequent Quest (and whether it comes at all).

All told, I prefer my way. Thoughts?

S3rgeus said:
Downgrading to stage 1 sounds like a good plan. Would this be in addition to your 10 suggested below, or do you have one in mind to remove?

Well, I'm no longer loving the GPT quest anymore (see above), so assuming we don't fix that one, I'd say this one can replace it. If we DO fix it, then this one can be in addition, I suppose.

S3rgeus said:
6 is a lot, we could definitely go lower. I put 2 in first, but figured that might be happening naturally. 4 sound better?

4!

S3rgeus said:
Take any foreign city sounds much better. I was never particularly happy with this Quest though - it doesn't feel very flavorfully linked to Lanfear. Even though she has so much good flavor, it was difficult to link a macro-level objective to her specifics.

Well, I'm thinking this actually ends up pretty darn similar to the Bel'al one anyways, so if we can come up with something more in-universe for her, I'd be in support of it.

What about something like:

Lanfear 2 (perhaps we should designati them by Quest Stage, so all the ones at stage one should Read Ishamael 1a, 1b, etc., instead of 1,2,3...)
Flavor: You should have no need of the pathetic women of your Age.
Objective: Disband 4 saidar units within 10 turns.
Restriction: must have at least 4 saidar units.

S3rgeus said:
Definitely agree on "for X turns" (though players will mostly repair them and then leave them one turn from repaired until the time runs out and repair them instantly, it still enforces some additional unhappiness time, which is the point).

I'm less sure about a few luxuries. For the AI, neither arrangement is going to affect them that much in most cases. For the player, if we're playing on an appropriate difficulty, we're usually hovering just above the positive happiness threshold - one would tip most humans quite often, I'd say. It's easy to change either way, if we do find it's too easy.

ok, can agree with that.

S3rgeus said:
I think the diplo ramifications are the big kicker - declaring war on the Tower will have a big effect on the player's Tower influence. (Did we decide influence snaps back after wars with the Tower like normal CSes?) Other civs that like the Tower should definitely have serious negative diplo modifiers against civs at war with it.

Right. So... as far as the influence snapping back... I dunno. Shouldn't there be a comparable permanent penalty that one would get from a civ? The WT diplo relationship is more complex than those of the CSs, which is fine, so I think this could respond accordingly.

S3rgeus said:
In this case, since Be'lal has so much less flavor available than Lanfear, I'd be fine with "any foreign city."

sure.

S3rgeus said:
The player can pillage the resource to cut the trade short once they've completed the Quest, so it's not a guaranteed 30 turns. (This is one of the major reasons lump sum gold was moved behind a DoF gate.) It still sounds good though!

Should we make it so the trade route must be maintained for X turns, then?

S3rgeus said:
I'd say 5 turns is already dangerously high - the Quest is intended to target a False Dragon already in your land. Not attacking him for 5 whole turns is craziness - a powerful unit like that would definitely be slammed down with focused fire from many units right away by most players, to kill him within a couple of turns, otherwise he'll do a ton of unit killing and infrastructure damage (and city capturing, since he's a good siege weapon). I had 2 initially, but that did seem like it could slip by in a big empire with large distances between their outer borders and their cities. (The player also needs to kill/Gentle him after the time runs out, which is likely to take turns too.)

It's a very good point about this being quite restrictive - players won't have False Dragons in their territory at the same time as a Forsaken Quest is given out very often. (Since I would imagine False Dragons in major civ territory tend to die quite quickly.) Might be worth reconsidering this one, despite its nice flavor crossover with M'Hael.

I'd say 5 turns is fine, then.

As far as the restriction, I think it's fair to have the restriction simply be that an FD is "near" the civ (perhaps spawned BY the civ). If we stretch out the length of the quest, then we can just make the Objective to allow the FD to go unmolested for 5 consecutive turns near some city. A civ could then "lure" him to a city, and we don't have such a restrictive... restriction.

S3rgeus said:
I think it should be 1 - this early in the game players won't have many.

sure. fuxed,

S3rgeus said:
Around 15 GPT maybe?

see discussion above! This one should maybe be axed or replaced with a similar effect but not this exact mechanic.

S3rgeus said:
Should we tighten the pillaged time vs Quest time limit - to say 5 within 10?

fine with me. changed.

S3rgeus said:
We should specify how many they should trade, or is it just 1? I think 3 or 5 would be ok.

I'd say 3. Also, should this route be maintained for some amount of turns?

S3rgeus said:
This depends, is this "Friendly" the diplo attitude, or a civ you've got a DoF with? If it's the latter, this is one of the hardest quests already with just 1 - it's easy to do, but all of the AIs will hate you for many many turns for doing it, which costs a lot in trade and untimely wars.

Definitely just "friendly" attitude. Not the DoF.

S3rgeus said:
Is the "within 5 turns" intended to apply to the objective, rather than the restriction? We can't tell whether there will be an enemy unit within 5 hexes of a city in the future.

bah. ugly. That's supposed to be tied to the objective.

S3rgeus said:
A similar restriction is much easier to assess:

Restriction: Must have at least 2 saidin units that are 10 or more turns old.

Every unit knows what turn number it was spawned, so we can assess that when we go to give out the Quest. Knowing whether a player had at least 2 saidin units for the last 10 turns requires us to keep track of and record all players' saidin unit count at all times.

much better!

S3rgeus said:
We could choose a specific GP type with each instance of the Quest, and exclude Great Captains that way? So, if we want to give a player an instance of this Quest, and they have a Great Scientist, then we can ask them to sleep a Great Scientist for 10 turns.

hmm.... the issue here is that I don't really think people usually keep their GP hanging around, right (except for Captains)? So how would it know which to give? If we're doing it based on "GP that is likely to spawn" then yes, we could simply do it based on whichever specific GP is about to spawn. What do you think?

newer version:

Generic 9
Flavor: Some of your great thinkers presume too much. Halt their petty progress.
Objective: Put one <Great Person> to sleep for 10 consecutive turns, in the next 20 turns.
Restriction: Must have a Great Person, or be likely to spawn one within the next 10 turns.

S3rgeus said:
Mm, selling harbors is a big cost for a stage 1 quest. Shall we make the restriction that the capital must not have a harbor as well? That way the player can always break the connections by pillaging roads (even if there are harbors connecting other cities).

well, maybe not that the capital CANT have a harbor, but that the capital doesn't rely on them for a CConnection.

Maybe, instead, it reads like this:
Generic 10
Flavor: Foolish ideas flow too close to your seat of power. Cut them off.
Objective: Sever all land-based city connections to your capital for 3 consecutive turns in the next 15 turns.
Restriction: must have at land-based city connection with at least 3 cities.

S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

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