S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

Calavente · Sep 1, 2014

Sorry, didn't want to comment, but I'm forced to do it.. and, please : no need to respond to that… I know that you have made your choice.

counterpoint said:
But, when we're talking about playable *units* in the game, this isn't all that relevant. Remember that WO are not required to channel. This means, by definition, that, even though they may "catch" all the channeling girls in the Wastes, on average a WO's channeling ability will be less than an AS's. Remember, the WT is routinely criticized for being *too strict* when it comes to letting people in, which has hurt their total numbers. The wise ones, by contrast, are chosen for their personality/personal abilities, in addition to their channeling. So for every Aviendha, there's a Sorilea and a Sevannah.

To me, this means we have to treat the AS *unit* as more powerful in terms of game-mechanics as the WOs. Sure, maybe a WO unit can dreamwalk and do some other kinds of stuff that ASs can't (often, at least), but in terms of combat units (which most units are for in Civ), the AS are likely to be superior. The *benefits* of the WO can lie in other areas of the game, perhaps reflected by a specific unit, but also perhaps merely represented by the Aiel UA in general. I'd like to hear thoughts on this.

first of all, I agree with you for WindMistresses: they are boosts to their boats. End of discussion.

However in response to you : In the same way for AS : for every Elayne, there is a "what is her name, I don't recall her, she has so minimal power and never left the tower" brown /gray / white. And for every Elayne, there is an Elaida.
Then you count "average" of WO… but remember : the SHAIDO clan (one of many) had, by itself, almost as many Channelers than the whole tower, and all of those did not hesitate to fight for the clan using the One Power !!! 500 channelers ! the WT has what ? 500-700 chan (none of which can fight unless directly threatened)? and the aiels are not limited to shaido.

Then, as a combat unit… unless you speak about trollocs, AS value is null, the three oats does not allow them to.. unless their life is directly in danger.
Brown : almost never fight : try to gather knowledge,
White : almost never fight : try to understand things
Gray : might go outside and fight… but will try to reason the people before and try to negociate
Yellow: will not fight : will consider that healing the wounded is more important
So you say that AS are of more worth than WO as units (ie: to get field dominance) based on 3 Ajahs… one of which will only search for male channelers? … and in those ajah, most stay at home doing politicing?
And of those going outside, they are ALL (save Nyneave, Elayne and Egwene) useless as combat unit .. (save against trollocs).
And those are considered having more worth as units than Wise One ?
Don't kidd me…
WO have many non-channelers… and so what ? you don't need to represent as units the non-channelers… those can be represented by effects from a building, a policy…etc.
But once you get the tech/policy/whatever that says "Wise Ones are allowed to fight" … then the WO system ought to be able to produce more channelers than WT… and channelers able to fight even non-darkfriends units.

counterpoint said:
You are correct that the "fair" contribution to the cause is a potential problem. However, the Score victory is lame for reasons (both in principle and in practice). expressed well by S3rgeus.

Never played FFH - worth checking out?

I agree that score is kinda lame… but having a team victory is kinda lame too… you just have to bother everybody from reaching their personnal victory, push for LB, ally with light, then turtle, and let them win it for you.
IMO, in the case of LB, you need ways of incentive for fighting/supplying/teching for the last battle.

For FFH: you never tried it ? it's cIV, but … hell, it's a blast (many players still play it 6 years after the end of the official development&#8230

there are 5 "main" modmod and multiple other modmods…and those modmods themselves opened up dozens of modmodmods

counterpoint said:
My my that's a LOT of details! As S3rgeus said afterwards, I'm a bit afraid of too many details at this point, since we're in the middle of the epic LB discussion.... and the Religion discussion. But this will all be helpful later.

Well, obviously there are details, but keep in mind that for me, the details are more things that flesh out the system than real "I propose those" details. Take them more as "those are things that more accurately express the global idea I want to present".
So: if I were you, I wouldn't focus much on the details I present, but more on the general idea underneath all those details.

Re-"greater consensus" : I never said that it was 66%... I only said that "due to the greater consensus, the WT expresses only 1 choice (for world leader elections).
(then, as a topic unrelated to greater consensus, to make it fair, I think getting 66% of support inside the WT should be the thing… unless getting 51% is already very hard)
But maybe, for other things, you could get support of the tower, even if 30% agree with you : independence of the AS : (and more so of each Ajah): if one ajah support you, it might decide to help you even if the WT as a whole decide not to.

counterpoint said:
I disagree that the AS have no influence on the Aiel, the SF, and the 'chan.
- The Aiel are in the three fold land for the sole reason that they felt they had failed the AS and needed it as punishment.
- The SF's culture and secretive nature is in part due to their wanting to hide their channelers from the AS.
- The whole philosophy of the Seanchan, including their hatred of channelers, is all wrapped up in the AS and their perceived evils.

True, the WT doesn't have POSITIVE influence on these cultures, but it is extremely IMPORTANT to them. Yes?

IMO you are mixing up AesSedai and WT…
In the age of dragon, AS and WT are identical.
However, following the breaking: and thus, regarding Seanchans and Aiels, AS is not the "WT".
But the "Aiel failed the AS" … does not speak about the WT… but of the AoL AS… which were half male/half female…
The Seanchans: their hatred is related to the AS of the post-breaking .. in their continent: ie: the AS that were not inside the WT !.. In particular, those did not have the 3 Oaths…and that's why they became so murderous !
So, it is true that most of the lands have been influenced by AesSedai … but that comes from the age of legends, when AesSedai were creatures of legend, wisest and more powerful, and more benevolent than all ! Which is not how the "age of Dragon" AS are seen or even how they act anymore.
It is true that the WT is the decent of the AS of old… but somehow they are not as great.

ie: I'm bad with analogies but I'll try (I'm making a reference to FFH, and in particular the RifE modmod, and more knowledgeable may correct the mistakes I'm making here:
the Empire of Patria existed long ago, and was destroyed, the Ice Age arrived and departed, and now you have multiple descendants of Patria:
-the Scions of Patria: a faction of the imperial city that went into undeath and tries to revive the Patria of old and tries to summon old Patrian citizen into coming back into the current age.
-the Amurite: Kyrolin, on of the Mage Leaders of Patria led some people… and this civ revives the powerful magic of Patria
-the Clan of Ember: citizen of Patria that fell when their goddess fell into evil; they were changed into Orcs and goblins.
-the Bannor : citizen that fell with their goddess but escaped from the Fall… they claim that their purity and military power comes from following the precepts of Patria.).

For me, translated in the WoT, we have the AS of the AoL:
Then we have legacies of it: in most of the world, the channelers, following the great Breaking, thought themselves, and were called : AesSedai !

However, in our particular case it is complicated by the fact that one of the main "nation/factors" of the book kept the same name as those AesSedai of old...

However depending on nations /regions, it went differently:
-The seanchan AS : went "personnal" and dictatorial : were distrusted, destroyed and captured when Hawking came, and the adam was created (and the "perceived evils" of AS is no more "perceived" and "unjustified" than the "perceived evils" of Male channelers as seen by the WT. Even after saidin is cleasned they wants to control (as a puppet) the Dragon (which even Egwen want to place under "guidance" of the WT) and place AesSedai over all other channelers, be them wise ones or cleansed ashamans...(which stay an "abomination" for AesSedai of the WT for the whole book, even after saidin is cleansed). The AS of Seanchan were really evil.. so Seanchans are correct in their fear of uncontrolled Marathdamane.. However were they are lacking is that they cannot change their opinion and see that the WT is an institution made to control Marath'daman and made to forbid them from going into rampage, and that their fear/hatred becomes unjustified with regard to Marath'daman;.. but the contempt of WT AesSedai with regard to all other people in the world is as much unjustified).

-Aiels AS: due to the specific relation as former servants of the AS of the AoL, and specific prophecies, the Aiel channelers never thought of themselves as AS, while in fact they are, in all but name. Further, this history made them think that the WT AesSedai were the true descent of AesSedai of the AoL... quickly in the story of the WoT they do not follow that creed anymore.

-Westlands: the AS, after being distrusted and, maybe hunted…?, allied themselves, created a "channeler institution": the White Tower (by opposition to male channelers : black part of the AesSedai symbole), and took the three Oaths.

However, all this has no real value, as: you are already decided on that interpretation

being more constructive
Re-LB:
Idea :
-Once Thakan'dar is taken; all seals in Light Cities (maybe in cities with AS/Chaneler as governor) are "freely" destroyed, enabling to launch the "seal the bore" project.
-all game length (even during LB) : each seal "destroyed" increases power of the Thakan'dar CS (or the "Dark One" fictive CS), and/or increase trollocs/Myrdhal/Forsaken generation / random "bubble of evil" generation.
Seals are hard to destroy early/mid game, but easier to destroy during LB
-Allow a "trade the Seals" in-between Light players, if the seals is not in adequate city.

Seals are "common artifacts" revealed: by forsaken, or "special tech / policy / spell"
(maybe some 3-4 seals are automatically destroyed during early years of Age of Dragon : your artefact is revealed as "remains of a Great Seal")

So Light has an interest to gather and protect the seals (less power to DO), and thus all "AoL artifacts"
Shadow has an interest to gather and destroy seals, all game long, but especially during Age of Dragon / AoL.
Light/Shadow declare war / or send espionage heavy teams (AS/Ashamen/bloodblades) on neutral civs that have Seals but do not trade them/give them… (much easy once waygates/travelling has been discovered).

(maybe having 3-4 seals broken couldbe another way to trigger the LB)

Then maybe, if the Dragon is killed, on other T'avern can do the deed for sealing ? or another Channeler GP.

S3rgeus · Sep 1, 2014

counterpoint said:
First off, I decided to finish my pantheon ideas before I responded to any recent posts - will get to them in the next few days

Anyways, here are some sets of Pantheons I put together for our consideration. There are three distinct sets (the three that hadn't been completely ruled out before):

1) Lineage
2) Iconography
3) National Festival

As I said before, my plan was to do a mini-treatment based on a reduced set of the CiV pantheons' bonuses - I most certainly wasn't going to invent my own bonuses, since that would be an impractical use of time, especially since we seem to be leaning towards copying them in complete form as is.

Unfortunately (for my time!) as I started my work I realized that in fact the only way to expose the cracks in these proposals was to try to incorporate the full 26 Pantheons - it might be easy to come up with the first 8 names, but if we can't fill out the whole roster, the idea is a bust.

Thanks for going through all 3! I think I see more of the issues you were raising with options 2&3 now as well.

counterpoint said:
So here are my three versions, based on the CiV pantheons. It should go without saying that these can be adjusted in any number of ways: specific bonuses paired with them, precise name, etc.

For the purpose of clarity, C=Culture, F=Faith, P=Production, H=Happiness, FD=Food, G=Gold, and S=Science.

Also, each entry is written as:

Pantheon Name (any clarification) - CiV equivalent (benefit) [any further notes and justification about the connection]

1) Lineage

This wasn't one S3rgeus particularly enjoyed, but I wanted to set it forth because, in some ways, it's the "safest" in that the connections are relatively logical, and its all pretty intuitive. This is the only set that doesn't involve any eye-rolling connections between a concept and its bonus.
The idea is this is the "core" of your people, the kind of people they descended from. Specific to WoT, this can be interpreted to mean either what your people were like during the AoL, or what they were like/did during the Time of Madness. Perhaps the latter makes more sense (no "neurosurgeons" from the AoL here...)
Unfortunately (and this is a big unfortunately), this is completely devoid of any WoT-specific flavor, though the idea of a people have inherent traits is definitely in keeping with the WoT style.

Curators of Tradition - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines)
Hardy Folk - Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest)
Nomadic People - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles)
Craftsmen - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource)
Zealots - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city)
Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates)
Industrious Workers - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+)
Horse Traders - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures)
Fisherman - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats)
Crusaders - God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city)
Ritualists - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense)
Urban Society - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+)
Guardian Class - Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength)
Hunter Society - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps)
Loyal Subjects - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S)
Traveling Scholars - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection)
Builder People - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders)
Explorers - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders)
Landed Gentry - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations)
Merchant Elite - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver)
Prospectors - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth)
Woodland Folk - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles)
River Traders - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers)
Mining Tradition - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries)
Masters of Harvest - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource)
Artisans - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource)

2) Iconography

This probably needs a better name. Style Tradition or something. Suggestions?
This one seeks to bring in the various visual flair of the peoples of Randland. As such, its full of in-universe content, some of which more immediately recognizable than others.
Understandably, the connections between the style and the bonus is often tenuous at best. Instead of trying to dream up what possible benefits Beards could give a civilization, I instead tried to find benefits based on the culture's associated with that particular style - the Aiel are a warlike, desert people, so their styles should perhaps reflect that. This is nice if a player wanted to actually try to play an Aiel civ as Aiel as possible.
Some of these sound lamer than others. Some of them also have cool, in-universe names, while others sound awkward in their plainness (looking at you, Illian!).
One unfortunately thing if we choose this is that CiV doesn't associate an image with a pantheon - aside from the lightning bolt that is replaced by a religion. Would be cool if you could have an icon like that that would stay with you for the whole game - sort of like choosing your piece in a game of Monopoly (people who don't know that game, its a board game where each player's avatar can be one of a set of pretty random things, like a dog, a thimble, an iron, a car, etc.)
If these go unused, I don't yet know how/when we'd work these into the game.

Shawls (Aes Sedai) - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines) [the AS are quite concerned with ritual]
Hadori (Malkier) - Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest) [this is the cord Lan wears. Reference to the northern geographic location of the country]
Cadin sor (Aiel) - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles) [obvious ties to the Waste]
Velvet Bows (Amador) - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource) [reference to the mountains near to the country]
Ki'sain (Malkier) - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city) [very tangential. This is the malkieri dot wears, and is associated only through Nyneave being a healer]
Sheer Clothing (Arad Doman) - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates) [sensuality/mating rites = high birth rate]
Coats with Wooden Buttons (Ghealdan] - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+) [essentially chosen out of desperation. They must have some production there, though...]
Wool Coats (Two Rivers) - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures) [connection to the shepherding of the TR]
Earrings (Sea Folk) - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats) [SF live in the sea...]
Top-Knots (Shienar) - God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city) [reference to the war-culture of the nation]
Cylindrical Caps (Tarabon) - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense) [tangential reference to the wine shop(s) in Tanchico. Mat goes to one]
Marriage Knives (Altara) - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+) [trying to tangentially associate the matriarchy and marriage customs of Altara with a stable, contented population... that duels a lot]
Bells in Hair (Arafel) - Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) [reference to the country's Borderlanderness, and their fiery reputation]
Forked Beards (Kandor) - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps) [Kandor is noted for success in the trading of furs]
Shaved Heads (Seanchan) - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S) [Seanchan has, perhaps, the strongest central authority in WoT]
Powdered Hair (Cairhien) - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection) [reference to the academy in Cairhien]
High-Necked Dresses (Far Madding) - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders) [Reference to the Guiardian, which is obviously a sort of Wonder]
Veils (Aiel) - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders) [of all the peoples, they seemed to live in the most natural environs... there aren't many natural wonder-like things described in the books]
Beards without Mustaches (Illian) - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations) [reference to the marshlands that border Illian, which is topography that can yield plantation kinds of things]
Pointed Beards (Tear) - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver) [intended to reflect the wealth of the Tairen nation]
Clashing Colors (Tuatha'an) - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) [tinkers are nomadic and spread around]
Tatoos (Shara) - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles) [Not sure if there are jungles in Shara, but there might be. There certainly aren't in the westlands]
Braids (Two Rivers) - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers) [connected to the eponymous rivers]
Handlebar Mustaches (Saldaea) - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries) [reference to the rocky coast of the country]
Lacquered Nails (Seanchan) - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource) [tangential, but Seanchan is a very large place and I think there are some hot, subtropical places]
Kesiera (Cairhien) - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource) [this is Moiraine's and other Cairhienin's jeweled head-necklace thing. Jeweled and associated with nobility]

unused fashions (mentioned here if you'd like to swap some out):
- Murandian curled mustaches
- anything from non-TR Andor (what is there? somewhat modest dresses? those red things queen loyalists wore in the EotW?),
- any specifically military regalia,
- Cairhienin horizontal slashes on coats
- Tairen tightly-fit coats
- Kandori pearl earrings
- Altaran many-layered petticoats
- Amador bonnets
- any ashaman or whitecloak clothing

3) National Festival

This is attempting to suggest that each civ has a holiday that they view as most important. Many of the WoT holidays are, apparently, celebrated in a wide range of nations, though there are some that are city-specific (Ebou dar tends to have several), though this may be just due to bias from where the characters were.
Most of these have pretty absurd connections to their bonuses - moreso than with the Styles, because there I could at least associate it with a clear nation. You might look at something like Winternight being associated with Tundra, and think "hey, there's got to be something better for Winternight"... and there probably is. But then, I would say to you "Which one would you then choose to associate with Tundra? Also don't be so snarky." Catch my drift?
This stuff is of course all in-universe flavor, though with varying degrees of recognizability. Some are very much a part of the WoT experience, while some have literally no info but the fact that they exist (some of these are found in the big white book of bad art, and maybe only there).
If we don't use these, a few would likely make good Customs.

Amaetheon (day for the remembrance of the dead) - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines) [reference through ceremonial burial and such]
Winternight (last day of winter, spend time with friends, give gifts) - Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest) [cheating here - winter = tundra]
Low Chasaline (fasting) - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles) [random and cheap connection, but fasting=barren=desert?]
Swovan Night (decorate doors with pine, and dancing) - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource) [totally random]
Day of Repentance (no other info) - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city) [ repent and you shall be healed!...........]
Shaoman (appreciating children and such) - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates) [children come from fertility. I have proof of this]
Asadine (fasting) - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+) [pretty much random... fasting = dedication and discipline?]
Bel Tine (start of Spring) - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures) [shepherds, the Two Rivers, spring, etc.]
Feast of the Half Moon (no information) - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats) [this is 100% random]
Lamma Sor (Day of Remembrance, specifically for those taken by the Bligh) - God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city) [finally, one that makes sense. faith from the eulogizing of the wars you've fought]
Feast of Fools (day where people swap places and rank) - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense) [ sounded like a big party to me]
Feast of Lights (hanging lamps, loss of inhibitions) - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+) [lack of inhibition = big party and happiness]
Feast of Embers (no information) - Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength) [completely random, though embers to lead to mental associations with a rain of fiery arrows]
Feast of Thanksgiving (no info, but at the spring equinox) - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps) [chosen solely because it is as the spring equinox... so let's kill some animals]
Maddin's Day (celebrates the founding of Altara) - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S) [very problematic since it celebrates the founding of a specific civ, but, if extrapolating to a more general "nationalistic" independence day thing, it makes some sense]
Feast of Abram (concerns itself with travellers) - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection) [travelling = city connection]
Tirish Adar (people get one hour of sleep for weeks!) - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders) [seems like people would have to fill the time doing something...]
Tandar (reconciliation) - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders) [why not? this felts kind of zen, like a majestic landscape]
Feast of All Souls Salvation (no other info, but at the Autumn equinox) - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations) [this connection is solely based on the fact that it is in autumn, often when there is the harvest]
High Chasaline (day of reflection on your good fortune) - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver) [pretty random, but good fortune can equal money!]
Mabriam's Day (day off for everybody, people play tricks) - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth) [totally random, though this is a very likable holiday, so I figured maybe its influence/culture would spread]
Festival of Birds (people dress up in feathers, give away money) Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles) [birds tangentially leads me to jungle... somebody has to be jungle]
Sunday (festival with feast, dancing, and competition/games] - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers) [cheap connection, only via its importance in the two rivers]
Festival of Lanterns (build and hang paper lanterns) - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries) [absolutely random]
Chansein (gluttonous holiday) - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource) [producing food = epic feast]
Firstday (kinda hard to find, apparently the day after the Feast of Lights, known as a day to give alms) - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource) [pretty lame connection, but giving of wealth associates with jewels and wealth]

Unused holidays (to be swapped if desired):
- Bailene (no information)
- Dahan (celebrates the end of the trolloc wars) - could be useful for the military ones, but.... you need to actually fight and win the trolloc wars first, right?
- Danshu (no information)
- Feast of Freia (no information)
- Feast of Maia (no information)
- Feast of Neman (no information)
- Genshai (people wear ribbons)

ok, that took longer than i wanted. Which you like?

Again, awesome to see these all written out, thanks!

I'm not a big fan of 3 (National Festival) and I don't think it was your favorite either, just from what you've said here. Reading through this, the salient point from my thoughts is: I like option 2, but I think option 1 is better. I see what you mean about the characterizations working well with option 1.

Regarding icons for option 2, I think we should be able to do that - replace the default 'lightning bolt' with an icon for each iconography and use that instead. I added some new religion icons for SiegeMod, so it would be a similar style. (Helpfully simple style, so I can make relatively effective ones without an artist - depending on complexity of the symbol.) There should be a Lua file that goes to grab the icon (the city banner manager at least, and there are probably other places it's used), which we can replace.

So actually implementing these as a 'rebrand' of existing pantheon beliefs is actually very easy from a modding perspective. They're just text keys that I can swap out of the database (from XML) and the 'new names' will propagate to all uses in-game.

So, I'm a bit undecided, I want option 2 to work, but I think option 1 is working better as presented here. Counterpoint, you liked option 1, right? If so, I think we can go ahead with that one.

S3rgeus · Sep 1, 2014

counterpoint said:
I played my first game as the Mayas a few weeks back, and noticed how they totally changed the way the calendar counted, and show the gregorian date when you highlight it - though it was a simple translation or something, not nearly as complex as what we're doing. But that gets me thinking if there is a simpler way to do this.

Interesting, I've never actually played through as the Mayans (I do the achievements, so I'm steadily working my way through all of the leaders), but I just started up a quick industrial era game to get a look at it. As you say, it looks like they're doing a simple conversion. That's sort of what we're doing, but unfortunately we have calendars tied to eras, which doesn't work with CiV time.

counterpoint said:
This is terrible, but it might be a compromise - could we show two dates? Like, choose one calendar as our primary, like the AB date. This calendar counts upwards consistently, and should reach around 3000 years or so by the end of an average game. Then, we have a second date, either shown alongside the first one (ideal), or shown when highlighted, that shows the in-universe, tech-based "era" date. So, say after 1000 years, everybody advances to the second calendar era, we'll call it the FY for now. 50 years later (a couple turns, probably), the "real" date is AB 1050, but the secondary date is FY 50. In another game, however, the tech reaches the 2nd era after 1300 years. Fifty years later it would be AB 1350, but still 50 FY. Is this possible? If so, is it a good compromise.

When you say "the tech reaches the 2nd era," do you mean the 'world era' we've been discussing to trigger the Last Battle and such? (I think so, because players' eras progress independently of each other.) Traditionally, the CiV calendar is totally disconnected from the date. Though the Mayans are an interesting exception - their calendar takes over when the Mayan civ researches Calendar, right? Their change is purely cosmetic though (then again, so is ours).

I'd wonder if we need to display any dates (FY etc) except After Breaking XXXX? We could just count up from 0 and use the calendar names for the eras.

counterpoint said:
Since there's really only three "calendar"-based divisions in the Third age of WoT, and not really much divisions like classical, industrial, that we know of, maybe we need to free ourselves of this and subdivide the eras, fudging the numbers slightly. This is made more palatable if we're able to still somehow salvage the "real" pacing using a method described above.

-AB already seems to divide, with a Ten Nations period (we can rename) this occupying the last part. As described though, this actually is some 80% of the era - we could fudge the numbers and rename it such that its more like 50%.
-I'm not sure what to do with the FY, since there's not much about this int he books. Maybe the first half is rebuilding-oriented/named, and the second half is Hawkwing centric?
- Maybe the NE divides into three sections, with the first being the reformations post-hawkwing - or maybe we do it based on the Consolidation of Seanchan. The last era is of course the Dragon, but I'm not sure what to do with the middle.

This is iffy in that its much less in-universe sounding if we give these our own names (or semi-WoT based, but I'm not sure what the other options are.

Naming aside, this structure does make us more like base CiV, which is usually good. There's a bit of a Last Battle-related drawback though - I realize now that "The Age of the Dragon" being such a narrow slice of time (even slowed down), will make the Last Battle trigger closer to the end of the tech tree. That's really a matter of putting more techs into that era though - by making it a long era (high number of techs), we make it more difficult to beeline a victory before the Last Battle gets going in earnest.

So, overall, I quite like this era structure, because it does 'loosely' slow down as it gets closer to the end. It does bring us to the issue of naming. I think dividing them up based on in-universe "developments" is good, but it should remain ambiguous. For example, rather than use Hawkwing's name, it's the "Era of the High King" or something like that.

Side point! This frees up the actual names, "Free Years" and "New Era," if we use other tangentially related in-universe names for the eras. That means that (in direct contrast with what I suggested about counting up from AB0 above) we could use the calendars for the dates at the top of the screen. Despite requiring some imagination from us, I think this is more true to their original purpose.

One final calendar-related point, conceptually CiV does this slightly differently from how we're planning to do it. CiV uses the Gregorian Calendar for the duration of the game - including the portion of history before it was invented, instead using the 'modern' reference date for the time in question. We could do take a similar approach by using the Farede calendar for the entire game - if there are any reasonable ways of referring to dates before the calendar was created within its time scale? (Also, helpful) It has a specified length and a well defined series of weeks/months, so at worst we could manually do the math and extrapolate backward X000 years to approximately After Breaking. (We acknowledge that the switches between these calendars occur at undefined times in-universe - they occur because the world has lost track of the date, but I don't think we could/should ever reasonably simulate that.)

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I should note I didn't play CiV until BNW was already released. I have no idea what diplo looked like beforehand.

Helpfully (/s), the diplo victory is different in Vanilla, G&K, and BNW, so I think Firaxis were having flavor vs gameplay issues with this victory type as well. The changes from Vanilla to G&K were quite minor, but the World Congress only showed up (in its current form) in BNW.

counterpoint said:
I see, that's why you were concerned that sometimes the Ajah would do something you hate, when you've worked so hard to get it to be powerful. I definitely think the players should be able to influence them.

That said, I think the element you've created - boosting an Ajah's influence within the Hall itself is a great mechanic that could probably be useful to us. This ties in the Amyrlin elections and stuff like that. Ajahs are each influences (somewhat but maybe not wholly) by players, and each are also jockying for position.

Cool, but it sounds like you still like the idea of having per-player influence as well? I quite like that idea too and I can slot a per-player system 'underneath' this existing one (each Ajah's influence is the sum of the influences for each player with them) and keep both features.

counterpoint said:
I think you have the right idea. I'm fine with the Black thing, but I'll say that these methods - black ajah, invasion, etc. - should be balanced to be significantly more difficult than a "real" diplo victory - as you said, we don't want diplo rewarding the military strength of a player disproportionately (or their evilness).

Right idea with which idea? Conquest/Black/penalties?

Should we be making the Black Ajah route to diplo victory more difficult than the Light one? I would think your choice with the Last Battle, mechanically, shouldn't affect the difficulty of the diplo victory (since that's tied to ideologies and the Tower), just change it. I'm thinking that the Black Ajah route should be approximately the same difficulty as the 'default' Light diplo victory.

Fully in favor of conquest of the White Tower being more difficult - conquest is for the Domination victory (and good for science/gold sometimes). Tangential idea, what if the White Tower is un-conquerable? When you would capture it, you 'ransom' it like the barbarians do instead of capturing any city. Then you strong-arm one (or more?) of the Ajahs to gain influence that way. Just floating this idea, not sure if I like it - I would think it's a bit disappointing if you're dominating the whole world that it's mechanically impossible to capture the Tower.

Penalties for 'developing' the "capture" ideology makes a lot of sense to me. The penalties could stack up based on the number of tenets you add to your ideology - or possibly variable per tenet, depending on their severity?

counterpoint said:
This is a great point and reminds me that we aren't designing in a vacuum, unfortunately.

Maybe the answer here is to simplify the mechanics of the LB teamwork somewhat. This is tricky, though, because we don't want to make it too boring for the humans.

Maybe the seals, financing, culture contributions, whatever non-military "roles" don't have to be completely all-or-nothing. Like, for example, a civ contributes 50% of all its production (or science, etc.) towards some goal (if it elects or is ordered to complete that goal). This would take the "choice" away from a terrible AI, and lets, for instance, the Seal-cracking civ still be able to pump out units and fight, or do other random stuff in the LB.

Of course, we could say AI always follower player orders, and the leader is always human-controlled, but that breaks a lot of civ rules, and doesn't work if the player chooses shadow (and the light leader is, presumably, AI-controlled).

Agreed that player control of foreign civs is very un-CiV-like, I don't think we could do that one.

Having the non-military roles be global effects that the AI 'opts into' by choosing the Light in the Last Battle sounds like a good idea - it's definitely a lot simpler from the AI perspective. How would we classify which civs pick up which roles or would it be a volunteer process? We auto-classify based on overall yield output, but that's a bit 'meh.' The elected 'leader' for the Light (is there an elected Leader?) could delegate roles, which may come with diplo repercussions? I don't know how relevant diplo repercussions are at this stage of the game though - unless they can induce players to drop out, like you discuss below. But that could equally be frustrating because the AI might decide it "doesn't like its role" for some opaque reason and drop out - screwing over everyone else.

counterpoint said:
This is perhaps more relevant later in the post, but I think this AI issue actually might need to seriously impact the way we choose to use the dragon. Some thoughts:

1) The AI can't be trusted with him.
2) Rand is super powerful, potentially too powerful.
3) In the books, very rarely does Rand go all rambo on everybody - he spends the entirely of the LB in Thakandar
4) Not getting to control the dragon might be unfun.
5) Rand is often either in disguise, or has his location hidden from the shadow (and even his own people, at times)
6) Rand can travel, and does, anywhere, all the time.

Number 6 above suggests that we could perhaps just have him Airlift to various cities at will. This would preserve his life, potentially, but seems like something the AI would freak out over.

Also, similar to my previously expressed concerns about the Horn, I don't like the idea of the game becoming a big game of Capture the Rand. Everybody just chasing him around the map. Thats not how CiV is, and that's not how WoT is. Also, I don't really love the idea of him being an ultra powerful unit that is free to go wherever he wants. In order to be realistically powerful, he'd probably be unbalancing in any other fronts of the LB.

I wonder if instead of the Dragon being a regular unit, he's something else, maybe more like a Spy (in terms of mechanics) you move between locations. Perhaps, when the time is right, then the real unit appears and goes into Thakandar, fighting and Powering his way to victory for a few moments.

I don't think the Dragon needs to be "realistically" powerful in comparison to Rand in the books. I was thinking along the lines of XCom Squad vs Great War Infantry. The XCom Squad is clearly more powerful and will handily win that fight - but if you've got enough Great War Infantries, you can kill one XCom Squad. If the Dragon is that comparatively powerful against other end-game units, I don't think he would seriously affect the balance - he would tip the field wherever he fights, but couldn't win the war by himself, which I think is quite accurate.

But yes, AI is our limiting factor here - particularly if they control him. The more I think about the Dragon as a spy-like 'moveable,' the more I think I like the idea. My initial gut reaction is that it's not immediately as much fun, but I think we can mitigate that with some of the mechanics you suggest below - it also makes 'fighting' over him during the war less of a game of "Catch the Rand."

I heard a lot of complaints about CiV's espionage system when G&K came out (compared unfavorably to CIV where you had the spy units), but not many recently. I'm not sure if we'll suffer from a similar problem - where players will "expect" to control an actual unit.

Agreed that it makes sense for him to become a unit for the final fight at Thakan'dar - but what triggers that? When the Light civs obtain all of the remaining Seals? What if they lose one while he's moving across the map as a unit?

counterpoint said:
In the interim, maybe the Light team (or the "owner" civ or something) moves him to various locations, like a spy, and certain effects happen:

1) Rands crazy ultra Ta'veren-ness shows. Crazy good things and crazy bad things happen to that city. Don't know the mechanics of it, just the spirit of it. Bubbles of Good and Evil, etc.
2) He is "garrisoned" there, the effect being that that city has much stronger ranged defense/strength. I guess he isn't necessarily garrisoned, because htat would imply that another unit couldn't also be there.
3) Perhaps, if he's in a shadow city, he can do epic stuff there, but there's a chance he'd be caught (which probably makes this a bad idea). Maybe he can capture Seals? Root out DFs?

Rand would take a few turns to move between locations, as a spy, so he couldn't be everywhere at once. Shadow players could determine where he was through espionage, and also by noticing which city has crazy stuff happening to it and its stronger defenses. If they capture that city without him escaping, that's probably bad for the Light.

Yeah, this meshes well with the "Dragon as a spy" setup. I think this is a really awesome mechanic, actually. It makes a lot of sense in-universe, fulfills a useful and entertaining gameplay role, and doesn't upset the balance of the game. Nice one!

Capturing Seals from the Shadow cities makes sense - it would be a similar mechanic to stealing technologies. The act of moving him into and out of Shadow cities should probably have some risk of discovery, as well as the ongoing one while he's there. And since you'll need to move him into the same city as the Seal to steal, that presents good reason for that to be significant. (Also coolness - spies can locate Seals, so good espionage is rewarded? I've found in BNW that I don't move spies all that often, which isn't awesome - they're not really "involved" in the game much of the time.)

We say in a couple of places that the Shadow does something that is "bad" for the Dragon - finds him snooping in one of their cities or captures the Light city he's garrisoned in. What's the end result of this occurring? "The Dragon is injured" (like losing his hand?

) and becomes 'unassigned' and unable to take actions for X turns jumps out at me as an idea. Could be a game-changer near the end - especially if the Light had already kicked off breaking the Seals, anticipating that they'd be able to sync up the attack with the Seals shattering - now they have to wait and they've made the Shadowspawn stronger. Good tactics from the Shadow side there.

The other thing is the incentives for moving him/places you can move him to/who controls him. Do we want to go with a notion of a 'Leader' for the Light side and that's the civ that controls the Dragon? Makes sense that all of the Light civs can see where he is. We definitely want the other civs to have some input into how to control the Dragon - but we have a twofold problem here:

If the player is the 'Leader' and has 'primary' or 'first' control of the Dragon, then they don't want the AI's potentially dumb ideas hampering their ability to effectively do stuff.

If an AI is the 'Leader' etc., but the player is also on the Light side, we want them to be able to "shepherd" (heh) the AI away from its more irrational decisions.

So, one system that comes to mind:

The Dragon is controlled by the Light player that owns the city he is in
If sent to a Shadow city, the last Light player that controlled the Dragon maintains control
Sending the Dragon to another Light civ's city grants them control of him.

Drawbacks:

Why would you give him away once you have him? (bar imminent conquest by the Shadow)
not very 'co-operative'
The AI may not understand opportunities that you have to use him so waiting to be 'given' the Dragon may be frustrating

Positives:

We can have the AI eventually act altruistically and hand control of the Dragon to the player, so you're not locked into not having him by your Light-leaning not being high enough
If the player has him, they can hang onto him and play using the Dragon mechanics

This is less of a problem in MP - I think human players will manage him between each other in a way that meshes with their playstyles. If they want to mess with their friends, they'll hang onto him and all laugh about it. If they're hardcore going for the Last Battle on the higher difficulties, then they'll co-operate effectively to use him right.

Alternatively there's a queuing system, like you suggest:

Each Light side player can propose what they think the Dragon's next action should be
An ordered queue is formed of "next moves" for the Dragon from a consensus (more on that in a moment)
The Dragon executes his next movement at certain intervals (more on this in a moment too)

Positives:

Very co-operative and in the spirit of how the Light side 'should' work
Nobody is ever locked out of using the Dragon - no matter their Light-leaning extent

Drawbacks:

The AI will inevitably propose stupid moves at least some of the time
The player never has full control of the overall strategy

Now, there are two things I mentioned above that need to be fleshed out and may address some of these drawbacks.

How do we choose which moves of those proposed should be the Dragon's next move?
Some options (by no means exhaustive):

Queue all proposed moves up - ordered by Light-leaning of the civs that proposed them
This is a bit 'meh' - a lot of moves won't make sense out of sequence and all of the AI's stupid gets actually carried out.
Prune the list to the 'most' Light-leaning civs and take their moves only, still queued up
Better than the above, I think - there will be a shorter queue, so moves are likely to make more sense. Drawback is if the player has very low Light-leaning they might never get to do anything.
Weighted "choose one" out of all proposed moves.
We can use the civ's Light-leaning to choose just one of the proposed moves to carry out and discard the others - prompting for new moves when this one is going to expire. I think of this system as being similar to how Final Fantasy does turn order in combat. It's based on speed (Light-leaning), which gives you priority, but it does progress through everyone's choices eventually.

Simplified example of a 'turn' sequence using fabricated "Light-leaning" values to illustrate the order:

Three civs: Andor, Seanchan, Aiel
Andor Light leaning: 7
Aiel Light leaning: 5
Seanchan Light leaning: 3

Order in which moves for the Dragon is accepted from each civ's proposal (since it's predictable, we could just prompt each civ in turn, rather than have a vote):

Andor
Aiel
Andor
Seanchan
Repeat

If we change the Seanchan's Light-leaning to 2:

Andor
Aiel
Andor
Aiel
Seanchan
Repeat

Hopefully that makes sense - I think this solves some of all of the above issues, but I don't think any system will totally eliminate them. If a player really wants to having a defining role in the Last Battle, at least where the Dragon is concerned, they'll need to put some focus into their Path. This final system prevents tiny differences in Light-leaning from making a huge difference in who controls the Dragon.

Just a quick aside, I figured the Dragon could accept new moves every X turns or something - and possibly there could be a mechanism to trigger a new move if they 'need' to move him quickly? But the slowness of this prevents games of "Catch the Rand" where Light civs constantly move him away from an incoming invasion rather than using him strategically overall.

counterpoint said:
This would potentially made the Dragon a much less chaotic thing for the AI to manage. either one player determined its movements, or people could request him to move around (and form a queue of sorts), and/or vote on it,

Is this too much less fun than having a "real" unit? I do think this takes the sting away from not being the dragon owner.

I think the gut reaction is a bit less fun, but in practice the unit will actually be less fun unless we drastically improve the AI. This definitely helps with that.

counterpoint said:
As far as how he pops up, should it be based on how Light-ish a civ is? If he is born in a shadow civ, I suppose he needs to flee or something, but what if he was born in a neutral one? Personally, I like the idea of him being born a little bit before the LB starts (like in the books), ushering in the Age of the Dragon, causing civs to get ready and really decide their path. This would definitely mean he could be born in a civ that wasn't obviously light-allied. Implications?

The Light-leaning of the civ sounds like a good idea. Defined by Faith per turn? So it's not immovable - though that complicates the "move order" defined above. Simplest solution to that is fix the order for a round and then re-evaluate it when the whole round ends. That also prevents the whole order being 'set in stone' and frustrating the player - they can do something to have more effect if they want.

I think it makes sense for there to be a global 'notification' that the Dragon has been born when the game is progressing toward the tech boundary that triggers the Last Battle, but it hasn't quite reached it yet. Not sure about picking a civ then. (Can we pick CSes? What if it picks the Tower? Shadar Logoth? Ok, CSes are probably a bad idea.)

I think the Dragon only becomes mechanically significant at the nation level in the lead up to the Last Battle, not immediately after being born. Seeing as when the Last Battle begins (in-universe, not mechanically) is a bit nebulous, whether we want the Dragon mechanics to exist before the war starts is up for debate. We could move through a rotation of every civ using the above Light-leaning prioritization until the actual declarations are made - that will tend to be (but not always! potential coolness) the Light civs anyway. When he actually becomes mechanically significant could be weighted but randomized a bit, if we like.

If we go for 'appearing' when the Last Battle starts, we could have him spawn in the nation that 'triggered' the Last Battle with their final tech discovery (flip a coin for ties). This is slightly weird - if one civ is pulling ahead and reaches the Fourth age, then they (high science) will have caused it. If everyone is about even, then the civ that reached the Age of the Dragon last (last person to make up the half - lower science) will have caused it.

counterpoint said:
Well, Ill follow your lead, then, regarding the feasibility/worthiness of this stuff. I will say again, though, that I'm liking this set up the most, in terms of the concept about the LB? What about you? If you agree, than I think the priority is tweaking it so it is possible from an AI perspective, rather than scrapping it and finding a worse option. (IMO, at least)

Totally agree, this is my preferred set up as well, I think it's all about reining in complexity so that we can have it play well, rather than changing any of the core ideas behind it. Phew! Glad we've nailed that one down! There's still a lot to decide about this (as shown above!) but I like what's been decided thus far. Shall we formalize it in a doc, so we don't lose track?

counterpoint said:
I suppose my ideal is that there'd usually only be a couple civs that go neutral in a game - those really far away or those winning already. If it because something that people always thought was preferable, I think we've balanced things wrong.

Totally agree, it was just a mental representation change for me that made me see this idea from a different perspective.

counterpoint said:
I think locking the victories makes sense as the only way to make sure people cooperate - i don't think anybody's suggested a better way. That said can you leave the alliance? If so, there'd need to be some kind of penalty or something. Betrayal should maybe be possible, but it shouldn't be necessarily encouraged.

Betrayal and the consequences thereof can be layered on top of a working system later, unless we want to flesh it out now and be sure it meshes well? I'm fine either way. Locking the Light civs to the Last Battle victory makes a lot of sense, let's do that!

counterpoint said:
Similarly, I haven't seen a proposal that makes the Shadow civs not just "better" than the light civs, aside from this one.

I've seen the competitiveness as the Shadow's main drawback - that if you choose the Shadow you might have to deal with your big scary neighbor civ on the battlefield. Then again, it's all upside if you're a superior military force. I'm warming to the idea of an additional victory being required then!

counterpoint said:
I already stated some prelim thoughts on the dragon above. I'm not sure him being a unit is a good thing at all.

Agreed, the more I've considered it, the more I've moved toward the "Dragon as a spy" type approach.

counterpoint said:
Shadow objectives:

maybe its only 2 out of the 3 of the following:
1) kill (or capture) dragon
2) do... something with the seals.
3) take Light capitals
plus:
4) another victory condition.

The LB itself would be over once the first set happens. but the GAME wouldn't be ovr until the last one happens.

I can't really think of any other victory conditions that make a whole lot of sense for the shadow... maybe something like "corrupting" other capitals with DF?

#1 has some crossover with the stuff I mentioned above, so I'm interested to hear what you think there. I think breaking *all* of the Seals before the Light spawn the 'Dragon unit' (goes from spy to unit for attacking Thakan'dar) should be some form of victory-inducing something, but not necessarily a "win." Might come back to this in a bit, most of my energy went into the Dragon system above!

#3 Seems very sensible, and combined with them wanting to capture the Seals from the Light, that makes sense.

#4 I'm warming to. I'll keep trying to come up with edge cases for this one, but you're right, there probably needs to be some more balance to the Shadow. But then why would civs choose neutral over the Shadow? They can continue with their own victories either way, and with the Shadow they don't have to fight Shadowspawn. I'll think on this some more.

S3rgeus · Sep 1, 2014

counterpoint said:
I like this. the world falling to pieces is cool. Could results in penalties, even bubbles of evil and such. The whole everybody wants to break the seals thing feels weird, but it is the way it's supposed to be. I guess the game is about when they get broken - the light wants to wait til the last minute. I do like how the seals breaking makes the game harder for the light (maybe these things hurt the light more?) but ultimately help its victory. Hiding seals does seem natural for the neutral players, though there should be a non-military way to retrieve them, I guess.

And sure, production project or research project to break seals is fine.

Retrieving Seals with the Dragon seems fun, though it's also still open for there to be other avenues. I think stealing them via spy diminishes the value of the Dragon somewhat. Perhaps a non-combat unit like the Missionary can do something about this? Is expended next to an enemy city and has a chance of discovering if there is a Seal there and possibly capturing it for the owner of the unit.

counterpoint said:
This is somewhat like the New World conquest civ5 scenario, and its "treasure." Don't have strong opinions about it. If they are units, though....do we like the idea of them being able to float around the poles, far away from units?

I should play that scenario so I understand this - I've only actually played the Civil War scenario. (Very rare achievements, those ones.) Good point about floating the Seals around the poles. Moving them like airplanes seems like a good idea - they can only be stationed in cities (no aircraft carrier analogue in our setup) and only move a certain distance from where they are. Might make sense to also have an improvement that they can be stationed on. Would let player create more deliberate safe zones - and bridge gaps that may be unreachable between some cities. The improvement is obviously visible to the Shadow and if moving Seals is its primary use, then it's a great target for them, which is good gameplay, I'd say.

counterpoint said:
I'm still not quite sure what I think of this idea.

I figure we can consider it when doing the uniques, rather than having to decide now.

counterpoint said:
I seem to remember kind of hating the micromanagement required with CIV spies.... I could be convinced. Similar, you could have "darkfriend" units that do stuff. Or, I guess, what we could do is have multiple kinds of spies (CiV style) that have a darkfriend option. Definitely there will need to be some more tasks associated with espionage, because of all the systems we have. Another topic to tackle soon...

I remember quite enjoying moving spies on the map in CIV. It makes sense that Shadow-declared civs could make darkfriend units - though I don't think they could be civilian units - Shadow civs are at war with loads of people and they'd be captured very fast.

Agreed, topic for the queue of future ones! We should probably write down a 'currently discussing,' 'planned discussions,' and 'decided features' list.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think that's my fault...

A massive improvement over the graveyard it was before! I haven't posted this much on here or even given the mod so much directed thought in a long time!

Calavente said:
Sorry, didn't want to comment, but I'm forced to do it.. and, please : no need to respond to that I know that you have made your choice. first of all, I agree with you for WindMistresses: they are boosts to their boats. End of discussion.

However in response to you : In the same way for AS : for every Elayne, there is a "what is her name, I don't recall her, she has so minimal power and never left the tower" brown /gray / white. And for every Elayne, there is an Elaida.
Then you count "average" of WO but remember : the SHAIDO clan (one of many) had, by itself, almost as many Channelers than the whole tower, and all of those did not hesitate to fight for the clan using the One Power !!! 500 channelers ! the WT has what ? 500-700 chan (none of which can fight unless directly threatened)? and the aiels are not limited to shaido.

Then, as a combat unit unless you speak about trollocs, AS value is null, the three oats does not allow them to.. unless their life is directly in danger.
Brown : almost never fight : try to gather knowledge,
White : almost never fight : try to understand things
Gray : might go outside and fight but will try to reason the people before and try to negociate
Yellow: will not fight : will consider that healing the wounded is more important
So you say that AS are of more worth than WO as units (ie: to get field dominance) based on 3 Ajahs one of which will only search for male channelers? and in those ajah, most stay at home doing politicing?
And of those going outside, they are ALL (save Nyneave, Elayne and Egwene) useless as combat unit .. (save against trollocs).
And those are considered having more worth as units than Wise One ?
Don't kidd me
WO have many non-channelers and so what ? you don't need to represent as units the non-channelers those can be represented by effects from a building, a policyetc.
But once you get the tech/policy/whatever that says "Wise Ones are allowed to fight" then the WO system ought to be able to produce more channelers than WT and channelers able to fight even non-darkfriends units.

All I'll say here is that we're discussing the White Tower and the Aes Sedai as an institution being suited, both in-universe and mechanically, to the roles they're fulfilling as a part of the mod, regardless of specific comparisons of the usefulness of their doctrine. Even the most insignificant Aes Sedai has pull if they show up in a foreign nation simply because of the diplomatic force that the White Tower wields.

I definitely see where you're coming from, but the usage we've described here fulfills what would otherwise be a massive gameplay hole, while also maintaining great in-universe flavor that's instantly recognizable to readers of the books.

Calavente said:
I agree that score is kinda lame but having a team victory is kinda lame too you just have to bother everybody from reaching their personnal victory, push for LB, ally with light, then turtle, and let them win it for you.
IMO, in the case of LB, you need ways of incentive for fighting/supplying/teching for the last battle.

Totally agree, we definitely want to avoid players 'riding coattails' to victory on the Light side. But I think we should do that through in-game mechanics instead of offering arbitrary rewards.

Calavente said:
For FFH: you never tried it ? it's cIV, but hell, it's a blast (many players still play it 6 years after the end of the official development) there are 5 "main" modmod and multiple other modmodsand those modmods themselves opened up dozens of modmodmods

This is interesting, because I've been coding this mod so far to be amenable to modmodding - generalizing systems in simple ways like providing 'any yield' instead of the specific one I'm doing right now, which has already helped me out a few times.

Calavente said:
being more constructive
Re-LB:
Idea :
-Once Thakan'dar is taken; all seals in Light Cities (maybe in cities with AS/Chaneler as governor) are "freely" destroyed, enabling to launch the "seal the bore" project.

I think this is an interesting choice. A global project (e.g. International Space Station) vs a series of smaller Projects to break the individual Seals. The global projects in base CiV are usually time restricted though - rather than requiring a specific amount of production. It's more in the 'spirit of co-operation' for the Light side though.

Calavente said:
-all game length (even during LB) : each seal "destroyed" increases power of the Thakan'dar CS (or the "Dark One" fictive CS), and/or increase trollocs/Myrdhal/Forsaken generation / random "bubble of evil" generation.

It looks like we're moving towards this kind of system, I think counterpoint and I both liked this one?

Calavente said:
Seals are hard to destroy early/mid game, but easier to destroy during LB

I'm not sure if we should allow Seals to be destroyed before the Last Battle starts. If the feedback to destroying them is Shadowspawn-related, then I think it makes sense for that to be part of the war. Some players may not know which side they're going to be on either - which puts them at a bit of a disadvantage.

Calavente said:
-Allow a "trade the Seals" in-between Light players, if the seals is not in adequate city.

This is a good point related to the moving the Seals I mentioned above. Obviously the player that discovers the Seal gets the "Seal" 'plane-ish' unit at one of their cities, but how do they transfer control to another civ? I figure you can 'rebase' it into a foreign city and then that player will gain control of it.

Calavente said:
Seals are "common artifacts" revealed: by forsaken, or "special tech / policy / spell"

We need to do a bit of research into the cultural victory to see if making the Seals part of the whole antiquity site system would badly affect the balance of that victory. When you say revealed by Forsaken, what do you mean? I don't think we've got any mechanic that has the Forsaken play explicit roles beyond units in the Last Battle and the implicit knowledge that they're part of the corruption of Shadow-aligned civs and darkfriends in Light ones.

Calavente said:
(maybe some 3-4 seals are automatically destroyed during early years of Age of Dragon : your artefact is revealed as "remains of a Great Seal")

This is flavorful, but a bit difficult gameplay wise. I still really like the 'fake seals' idea as well, which means players will need to work out if one they have is real - and some being broken already adds another layer of complexity. We'd also presumably have to apply the Shadowspawn 'bonuses' when the Seals break, but defining when that is and notifying the player is a bit strange.

Calavente said:
So Light has an interest to gather and protect the seals (less power to DO), and thus all "AoL artifacts"
Shadow has an interest to gather and destroy seals, all game long, but especially during Age of Dragon / AoL.
Light/Shadow declare war / or send espionage heavy teams (AS/Ashamen/bloodblades) on neutral civs that have Seals but do not trade them/give them (much easy once waygates/travelling has been discovered).

Makes sense and gives us a good use for Grey Men as well, I think we're moving toward this kind of approach as well.

Calavente said:
Then maybe, if the Dragon is killed, on other T'avern can do the deed for sealing ? or another Channeler GP.

I'm a fan of the idea that the Dragon unit 'dying' or if the city hosting his 'spy' is captured that he's incapacitated for an amount of time, rather than having permanent death for him beyond extermination of the Light side civs. That way it has a significant gameplay role for both sides of the war without breaking the flavor of the Dragon being important to Sealing the Bore.

Calavente · Sep 2, 2014

some notes:
I too prefere option 2 (as more in-world), but think option 1 will be more neutral.
but IMO we may be able to render some more "ingame".
especially;
horse-traders : wouldn't "sheepherders" be more accurate (there are no horse traders in WoT, but sheeps, there are).

Builder People: Friend of Ogiers
Hardyfolk : borderlanders
Nomadic people: People of the Waste
Guardian Class: Bow Hunting Society (think two river longbows and their ability to gather many longbowmen quickly when the villages are threatened)
Urban Society : maybe something to do with the carnival in Cairhien or Tear where everybody wears masks and carouse a lot (when trollocs invaded the city… passing for people disguised as monsters)
Curators of Traditions: "Prophecy-bound" or using the name of one of the prophets : Follower of XXX. (think how many of the nations or people are bound to one prophecy or the other).

As it is lineage, there could also be references to the Old Blood… either the seanchans one or the two rivers one...etc
Maybe you could also mix in some few "nation characteristics" that don't go into other parts of the game : neither UU, UB, UA nor governments or policies:

Loyal subjects : Queen's people (or any other way you'll describe Andors system).
Zealot: something to do with the Wisdom, or the red-belts of Ebou-Dar. (unless you use the redbelts or wisdoms as channelers or healers UU)
You could have "duelists" .. but I don't see were to use that.

..Etc

Re-Seals and Forsaken
Normally, in WoT, Forsakens appear in the world roughly around the birth of Rand : ie: beginning of the age of the dragon.
However, the Last Battle, itself comes way later: it starts around book 13 !! (I'll see when I'll arrive there). Well, one may argue that the last battle starts with the first book, but I have a different opinion: in all the books I've read (1-12) they are still at : "the LB is coming ! / a strom is coming".
However, the Forsaken have started to appear, some countries have been heavily infiltrated, the whitcloaks are governed by a darkfriend, the black Ajah rapidly pushes for the breaking of the Tower, trollocs and myrddhal infest the ways and do raids in search of the Dragon…. And seals are found broken.
So, IMO, there could be a way, very difficult, to break seals before the age of the dragon (they are of cuendillar after all ! … but somehow, the forsaken, or maybe the DO himslef arrived to break a few). After that, during the age of the dragon, they are somewhat easy to break (see the 4 that we know of after book 7: they have to be handled with care, least they break).

Maybe the Age of Dragon world era could trigger the Dragon, and start the premices of the LB… but the LB itselfs (hords of trollocs quitting the blight) needs other actions before being starting.
Maybe breaking of all-but-one seals could be a trigger to the last phase of the LB.
… my 0.2

counterpoint · Sep 2, 2014

I'm obviously due for a much larger post later, but I saw this one and wanted to quickly respond as I think I may be being misunderstood. Also, I'm on hold with the US government right now... (they chose "bureaucracy" as their civic in civ4...)

Calavente said:
some notes:
I too prefere option 2 (as more in-world), but think option 1 will be more neutral.
but IMO we may be able to render some more "ingame".
especially;

I should clarify that I'm not trying to evoke specific nations. In fact, I feel like doing so kind of goes against the grain of what I'm trying to do. I'm thinking of this as what your people *start* as, based on what they did either during the AoL or the time of madness. Some of the suggestions, then, I think are too specific to the "modern" nations.

Essentially, it should make sense for ANY civ to choose these, regardless. Thus, the really specific connotations might be problematic. I'll elaborate a bit more below:

Calavente said:
horse-traders : wouldn't "sheepherders" be more accurate (there are no horse traders in WoT, but sheeps, there are).

I'm going to nitpick you here. There must definitely are horse traders. Mat's dad is one, for example. Other than that... I assume there are tens of thousands of them somewhere in the world. Yes, we have a lot of shepherds in the TR, but "horse traders" felt a little more generic, and could apply to many nations (without necessarily evoking the TR, which are the "shepherd" country). I should say I don't actually have a problem with it being "sheepherders" - but I also don't have a problem with horse traders!

Calavente said:
Builder People: Friend of Ogiers

This one could be fine, but I'm not sure it makes sense given what we're defining this as. The ogier only become stonemasons AFTER the breaking, when they couldn't find their stedding and were wandering around looking for something to do (on that note, it would be an interesting mechanic to have the steddings reappear midgame... though I don't think its worth the complications it causes). So this doesn't really make sense as a traid for ogier friends in year 1 AB. Friend of Ogier makes more sense as a tree thing... maybe we rebrand "Woodland Folk" to this? In fact that is excellent.

Calavente said:
Hardyfolk : borderlanders

I don't like this, because a borderlander implies your proximity to the blight. The seafolk shouldn't have issues with taking this pantheon, right? Not universal enough.

Calavente said:
Nomadic people: People of the Waste

Same exact problem. If Tear showed up near desert, they'd probably take this. Also, there was no Waste before the breaking (so it doesn't make sense).

Calavente said:
Guardian Class: Bow Hunting Society (think two river longbows and their ability to gather many longbowmen quickly when the villages are threatened)

Since I already had "Hunter Society" for the camps one, we shouldn't have this one as well, I don't think.

Calavente said:
Urban Society : maybe something to do with the carnival in Cairhien or Tear where everybody wears masks and carouse a lot (when trollocs invaded the city passing for people disguised as monsters)

That's the festival of lights, i think. I don't see this as making much sense, though, as it focuses on a latter-day holiday instead of something more "formative" like the rest of them.

Calavente said:
Curators of Traditions: "Prophecy-bound" or using the name of one of the prophets : Follower of XXX. (think how many of the nations or people are bound to one prophecy or the other).

I don't think I like the specific name, but I like the idea. OK, maybe the name's fine.

Calavente said:
As it is lineage, there could also be references to the Old Blood either the seanchans one or the two rivers one...etc

The issue with the Blood is the fact that we have a religion called "Descendants of the Blood", which will get confusing. Also, which pantheon bonus would it replace?

Calavente said:
Maybe you could also mix in some few "nation characteristics" that don't go into other parts of the game : neither UU, UB, UA nor governments or policies:

I see, though, again, I'm not looking for national characteristics, but something more generic than that.

Calavente said:
Loyal subjects : Queen's people (or any other way you'll describe Andors system).

Don't want to specific references to specific governments here.

Calavente said:
Zealot: something to do with the Wisdom, or the red-belts of Ebou-Dar. (unless you use the redbelts or wisdoms as channelers or healers UU)

I do, in fact, think we plan on using those elsewhere in the game. Also, again, the Kin in Ebou Dar as a specific Third age creation, which thus doesn't make sense here.

Calavente said:
You could have "duelists" .. but I don't see were to use that.

I hope this becomes a Custom, so I wouldn't want to waste it here.

Note, I'm totally in favor of coming up with some better in-universe terms for these things - let's keep trying! - but I'm not in favor of those that tie to closely to specific nations.

Think of it this way - did this thing exist in the AoL or at the start of the 3rd age? Could this thing apply to any number of different civs?

Illianor123 · Sep 2, 2014

I like counterpoint's pantheons as being their AoL heritage, that could apply to any civ in the game, rather than them being 3rd age specific civ bonuses. This is similar to how pantheons work in base civ, because none of them jump out as being part of a specific religion

Calavente · Sep 3, 2014

counterpoint said:
I'm going to nitpick you here. There must definitely are horse traders. Mat's dad is one, for example. Other than that... I assume there are tens of thousands of them somewhere in the world. Yes, we have a lot of shepherds in the TR, but "horse traders" felt a little more generic, and could apply to many nations (without necessarily evoking the TR, which are the "shepherd" country). I should say I don't actually have a problem with it being "sheepherders" - but I also don't have a problem with horse traders!

I meant : there is no "horse-trader-nation" nor any "horse-nation", nor any "horse-hereder-territory". while the two rivers is clearly a "sheepherder-territory" and two rivers, as you said, is emblematic to the WoT books

re-OgierFriend:
do you get pantheons since turn 1 ? or only when you get a religion (early game, but not immediatly after the breaking)...?
case 1 : you are right.
case 2 (as it is in civ, iirc): it doesn't matter if some "lineage" are in fact "during-the-breaking" or "just-after-the-breaking" lineage.

re-desert people:
there was no waste before the breaking... but not really any nomadic people either.
and most of all, the aiels, (which are clearly the "current" desert people) where not of the desert during the breaking, but servants to aes-sedai.

counterpoint said:
I don't like this, because a borderlander implies your proximity to the blight. The seafolk shouldn't have issues with taking this pantheon, right? Not universal enough.

if sea folks take this pantheon...then they are near the tundra (otherwise it is a stupid choice) and if near the tundra, they are near the blight ... then are borderlanders. I don't see the issue.

conclusion: I don't really see how you are doing it:
during the AoL there were not really horse traders or faithful or zealots or most of the lineage you cites: they had jo-cars and were a much advanced civilization...
the guardian-people used shock-lances
there was no real "hunters" unless for sport
there was no "tradition"
there were no nomadic people that we know of
there were no "hardy people" and few craftsmen of larborer (there are already not many of those in our western civilization... imagine what it would be in a much more technico-magical civilization)
...etc
so the lineage you defined are not linked to their job before the breaking.... at least not at a nation-wide custom.

in that case the Aiels should only be "reverous servant" : +1faith/ancient relic...

IMO, it makes more sense to have the lineage be of the immediate aftermaths of the breaking... and to start the game at "50 years after the breaking", to have time for the relics and jo-cars and shock-lances to be burried and almost forgotten.

counterpoint · Sep 3, 2014

Calavente said:
I meant : there is no "horse-trader-nation" nor any "horse-nation", nor any "horse-hereder-territory". while the two rivers is clearly a "sheepherder-territory" and two rivers, as you said, is emblematic to the WoT books

Really, no horse nation? What about all the talk of the epic heavy cavalry of saldaea and such? Kandori "razors" and whatnot. RJ uses so many words for horse (dapple, grey, etc.), that obviously horses are a huge part of the world there.

Calavente said:
re-OgierFriend:
do you get pantheons since turn 1 ? or only when you get a religion (early game, but not immediatly after the breaking)...?
case 1 : you are right.
case 2 (as it is in civ, iirc): it doesn't matter if some "lineage" are in fact "during-the-breaking" or "just-after-the-breaking" lineage.

I don't follow your logic. You still get your pantheon rather early in the game. I don't see a problem here. In the caes of the ogier, its not until the major cities are constructed (Caemlyn, which is after quite a while) that they are masons.

Calavente said:
re-desert people:
there was no waste before the breaking... but not really any nomadic people either.
and most of all, the aiels, (which are clearly the "current" desert people) where not of the desert during the breaking, but servants to aes-sedai.

Really, no desert before the breaking? No nomads? Don't we have desert in our times? Nomads? Yes, we do. I see no issue here.

Calavente said:
if sea folks take this pantheon...then they are near the tundra (otherwise it is a stupid choice) and if near the tundra, they are near the blight ... then are borderlanders. I don't see the issue.

The issue is that Borderlander is a third age, Nation-specific signifier. Not a generic term. And if a tundra civ might indeed be close to a blight (assuming the *south* pole has a blight too, which I don't know that it does), they would be borderlanders, yes? all of them, not just because they took this pantheon? And there definitely weren't borderlanders in the AoL, for obvious reasons.

Calavente said:
conclusion: I don't really see how you are doing it:
during the AoL there were not really horse traders or faithful or zealots or most of the lineage you cites: they had jo-cars and were a much advanced civilization...
the guardian-people used shock-lances
there was no real "hunters" unless for sport
there was no "tradition"
there were no nomadic people that we know of
there were no "hardy people" and few craftsmen of larborer (there are already not many of those in our western civilization... imagine what it would be in a much more technico-magical civilization)
...etc
so the lineage you defined are not linked to their job before the breaking.... at least not at a nation-wide custom.

in that case the Aiels should only be "reverous servant" : +1faith/ancient relic...

IMO, it makes more sense to have the lineage be of the immediate aftermaths of the breaking... and to start the game at "50 years after the breaking", to have time for the relics and jo-cars and shock-lances to be burried and almost forgotten.

What? No faithfuls? No horse traders? No laborers? No craftsmen? No *tradition*? Based on what? Did you read a 14-book series about the AoL? This is speculative, man. I'm having to "fill in the gaps" about it.

And I don't you realize that something like 80-90% of the population of our world (Earth I mean), are laborers! Of course we have craftsmen! I know an *iron worker*, of all things. Hunting is very much still a part of our world, as are nomads. We aren't all doctors and lawyers, and mod developers. True, the AoL was closer to a utopia than ours was, but.... does it really make sense to have your desert-tile pantheon be "solar power plant operators", when your civ is building grass huts in 2500 BC?

S3rgeus, what do you think? This is making me like #1 less and less, I can say. What calavante's criticism does is point out that this idea does have a problem "holding water" to scrutiny. Perhaps it does need to be reconceived as "foundational traditions your civ learns in the early period of its existance." If so, I'd want to go through again and maybe tweak them when appropriate. Still very much opposed to Lineages/Traditions that are too nation-specific.

Funny, though, as you guys are coming around to liking #1, I kinda came around to liking the Style one more.

Calavente · Sep 3, 2014

sorry

(dito for the horses... you are right :/ )

well, I see what you are saying... but those "founding job lineage dating from AoL" are less immersive and more "created to fit the mechanics" than really "telling".

Further, from what I understood of the AoL, it was a "all the world has a better than western-level of development", while most of the lineage have a feel of "a bonus for a classical/early-middle-age civ".

if used as "Post Breaking early adaptation trait" it can work more easily... thus all can be solved by changing the introduction text :
"Lineages reflects your People favouring the behaviour that helped your ancestors survive the Breaking"

Borderlanders exsited since the breaking and not only third age, even if they were not nation per se.
(however a +10%str in the blight could be a nice boost for a borderlander civ)

The most emblematic nomads of WoT are the Tinkers and the Aiels ... which ancestors were clearly NOT nomadic during the AoL.

Mountainers "lineage" could existes also (and be there since early times) (seen in Seanchan, and slightly in Manetheren): +15str if unit is adjacent with a mountain.

truth be told, I love the idea of the "Style"... but it is hard to explain the bonus then ..
especially as Cad'insor can be "desert-dwellers-thingy that improves life in desert" or "warrior-thingy-that-increases-fear-in-opponent"

maybe instead of "style", we could go with "customs" : mixing styles and customs deppending on what we find more relevant ?... and creating new effects

(additionnaly, I disagree that "Queens' people" : ie : focussing on havign specifically a Queen instead of a King or alternating depending on the "best successor" is a governement : it could easily be a "custom" ) (unless you need it for governement parts because WoT gives "few" variantes of goverment and you really want to differenciate Andor's Queens from Illians' Kings

S3rgeus · Sep 3, 2014

Calavente said:
do you get pantheons since turn 1 ? or only when you get a religion (early game, but not immediatly after the breaking)...?

Just to be clear, a player founds a pantheon when they reach a certain (small) amount of faith. How much they need depends on how many other players have already founded a pantheon in this game. The first player to reach 15 faith can found a pantheon - then the next player needs to get to 20. The amount increases by 5 each time someone founds a pantheon.

The first reliable source of faith is the Shrine (Stele for Ethiopia, UB replacing Monument, I think - and the Celts get free faith from unimproved forest hexes) - which is available at Pottery and provides +1 Faith per turn. Some Natural Wonders provide high faith output, but Natural Wonders are weighted to appear far from major civ starting locations, so someone usually uses the buildings/uniques to get there first.

counterpoint said:
S3rgeus, what do you think? This is making me like #1 less and less, I can say. What calavante's criticism does is point out that this idea does have a problem "holding water" to scrutiny. Perhaps it does need to be reconceived as "foundational traditions your civ learns in the early period of its existance." If so, I'd want to go through again and maybe tweak them when appropriate. Still very much opposed to Lineages/Traditions that are too nation-specific.

Funny, though, as you guys are coming around to liking #1, I kinda came around to liking the Style one more.

I agree that we want to avoid association with any of the nations of the Third Age for the 'pantheons.' I think we'll run into this kind of issue with anything where we have to use any imagination, unfortunately. The WoT books are massive and have a ton of backstory, but there are inevitably pieces missing for constructing a game of CiV from them, which we have to fill in somehow. From a player's perspective, particularly a fan's, it will just look "non-canon," which is an unfortunate eventuality.

Now, that's not to say we can't do something about the pantheons specifically. My first reaction is to step back and look at how pantheons relate to religions in CiV and how we fit into that pattern relating to Paths.

CiV pantheons are prototypical beliefs that are more usually associated with ancient times in human history, when people worshiped natural phenomena. So our religion analogue is Path to the Light, which is that civilization's chosen set of customs that express their way of showing fealty/devotion/whatever to the Light and the Creator. We have more specific examples of these through characters in the books, and is one of the reasons I think we should avoid evoking Third Age characteristics in the pantheons.

Styles doesn't really fit into this base CiV analogy, but that by itself doesn't discount it. It's very in-universe, but explaining the bonuses is a bit more problematic than I'd expected - it's easy to come up with a few good examples, but not so much a full 26.

Not to suggest a completely different design direction, but do we know much about the beliefs of WoT populations in the times shortly after the Breaking? I don't think we do, so if we want to keep to the CiV paradigm, we'll have to make some stuff up.

So, this brings us back around to option 1:

counterpoint said:
Also, each entry is written as:

Pantheon Name (any clarification) - CiV equivalent (benefit) [any further notes and justification about the connection]

1) Lineage

This wasn't one S3rgeus particularly enjoyed, but I wanted to set it forth because, in some ways, it's the "safest" in that the connections are relatively logical, and its all pretty intuitive. This is the only set that doesn't involve any eye-rolling connections between a concept and its bonus.
The idea is this is the "core" of your people, the kind of people they descended from. Specific to WoT, this can be interpreted to mean either what your people were like during the AoL, or what they were like/did during the Time of Madness. Perhaps the latter makes more sense (no "neurosurgeons" from the AoL here...)
Unfortunately (and this is a big unfortunately), this is completely devoid of any WoT-specific flavor, though the idea of a people have inherent traits is definitely in keeping with the WoT style.

Devoted to Prophecy - Ancestor Worship (+1 C from Shrines)
Hardy Folk - Dance of the Aurora (+1 F from Tundra tiles without Forest)
Nomadic People - Desert Folklore (+1 F from Desert tiles)
Craftsmen - Earth Mother (+1 F for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource)
Zealots - Faith Healers (+30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city)
Thriving Populace - Fertility Rites (10% faster Growth rates)
Industrious Workers - God of Craftsmen (+1 P in cities with Population of 3+)
Horse Traders - God of the Open Sky (+1 C from Pastures)
Fisherman - God of the Sea (+1 P from Fishing Boats)
Crusaders - God of War (Gain F if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city)
Ritualists - Goddess of Festivals (C and +1 F Faith for each Wine and Incense)
Urban Society - Goddess of Love (+1 H from cities with Population of 6+)
Guardian Class - Goddess of Protection (+30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength)
Hunter Society - Goddess of the Hunt (+1 FD from Camps)
Loyal Subjects - God-King (Palace provides +1 C, F, G, P, and S)
Traveling Scholars - Messenger of the Gods (+2 S in cities with a City Connection)
Builder People - Monument to the Gods (+15% P of Ancient/Classical Wonders)
Explorers - One with Nature (+4 F from Natural Wonders)
Landed Gentry - Oral Tradition (+1 C from Plantations)
Merchant Elite - Religious Idols (+1 C and +1 F for each Gold and Silver)
Prospectors - Religious Settlements (15% faster border growth)
Friends of the Ogier - Sacred Path (+1 C from Jungle tiles)
River Traders - Sacred Waters (+1 H from cities on rivers)
Mining Tradition - Stone Circles (+2 F from Quarries)
Masters of Harvest - Sun God (+1 FD for each Bananas, Citrus, and Wheat resource)
Artisans - Tear of the Gods (+2 F for each Gems or Pearls resource)

I've highlighted (in red), one of the things that I think explains why I felt swayed by this option when I read it. (Also, in blue, suggestions we've had since that I think we all agree on - specific phrasing up for grabs.) None of the above are explicitly WoT-ish, in terms of using specific lexicon from the books, but I felt that did evoke a kind of foundational WoT flavor. They define your population as a "people," but given the butter nature (spreadable) of religion in CiV, they also show how that intermixes over time. Religions inherit the pantheon belief from the civilization that founds them, though that's rarely a defining factor in their long-term effectiveness (in game).

They might not be explicitly WoT, but I think these names are evocative of either directly mentioned or at least implicit characteristics of the WoT universe. And, of course, they also make sense in terms of the bonuses you're receiving, which has to be a big part of this.

Another point to consider, the pantheon beliefs will be the first part of our religion system changes that a new player sees - and long before they see any of the big new late-game content. Are we risking losing players by not using canonical constructs so early in their experience? Honestly, pantheon beliefs become largely unimportant for the majority of the game, so I don't recommend we "waste" flavor on them, but it's worth thinking about.

So, overall, I'm in favor of tweaking the names of #1 to make them as WoT-ish as we can manage, unless anyone has convincing arguments otherwise? Alternatively, if there are good solutions to the disparity between the Styles in #2 and their bonuses, I'd be all for that. Another consideration is that "Styles" will clearly be Third Age evocatives, since that's all we have the information for, which may not mesh with the in-game time frame that 'pantheons' are adopted in? This may or may not be a problem though, substituting Styles in here makes sense in the way that it's good, readily verifiable, in-universe WoT information.

About "Friends of the Ogier," I'm not so sure about this one. Ogier are more forest-folk than jungle-folk, if I remember correctly, but this is a jungle bonus. We can change the bonus to work with forests, but it's likely that this gives a bonus to jungles *specifically* to give tropical civs options for faith generation.

We've had some discussion specifically about "Borderlander" as a candidate for one of these, but I don't think I like this one either. I don't think it's too specific though (most of these beliefs are geared toward specific geographies, which makes only a portion of them sensible for each player in a given game), I'm more concerned about it being too close to the 'present' of the books. Quoting the WoT Wiki:

Ten nations have been part of the Borderlands since the Breaking of the World, although the term did not come into use until at least the time of Artur Hawkwing, if not much later.

The concept has been around the whole time, but not the word. I think most people will associate it with the specific nations from the Westlands, which isn't what we want.

Side note about the location of the Blight, our maps are obviously going to be randomized so there has to be flexibility here. I think it makes sense to put Blight at both poles - there is often limited land area close to the poles, so restricting it to just one could often lead to very small total area of Blight, which isn't great for the flavor of the whole Shadowspawn system. Blight distribution can be customized per mapscript as well, so we can fine tune it for specific map types as we go on.

We've also been talking about "Queen's People" and I think it's my turn to jump in with "That would make a good social policy!"

Sounds like exactly the right kind of thing to include in a policy (not sure which tree - policies aren't well defined yet, but will come back to that in one of our many future posts). It defines a governmental structure and the benefits it offers its citizens, which slots right in there.

On some other topics:

Calavente said:
Re-Seals and Forsaken
Normally, in WoT, Forsakens appear in the world roughly around the birth of Rand : ie: beginning of the age of the dragon.
However, the Last Battle, itself comes way later: it starts around book 13 !! (I'll see when I'll arrive there). Well, one may argue that the last battle starts with the first book, but I have a different opinion: in all the books I've read (1-12) they are still at : "the LB is coming ! / a strom is coming".
However, the Forsaken have started to appear, some countries have been heavily infiltrated, the whitcloaks are governed by a darkfriend, the black Ajah rapidly pushes for the breaking of the Tower, trollocs and myrddhal infest the ways and do raids in search of the Dragon…. And seals are found broken.
So, IMO, there could be a way, very difficult, to break seals before the age of the dragon (they are of cuendillar after all ! … but somehow, the forsaken, or maybe the DO himslef arrived to break a few). After that, during the age of the dragon, they are somewhat easy to break (see the 4 that we know of after book 7: they have to be handled with care, least they break).

The Forsaken are clearly around before the Last Battle, we haven't really discussed if we want to represent that explicitly in-game yet. It makes sense to me that they could come up in some of the Boons offered by the Shadow (the ones that run counter to players' Paths) - though in what context I'm still not sure.

Calavente said:
Maybe the Age of Dragon world era could trigger the Dragon, and start the premices of the LB… but the LB itselfs (hords of trollocs quitting the blight) needs other actions before being starting.
Maybe breaking of all-but-one seals could be a trigger to the last phase of the LB.

I think these would happen far too late and players would tend to win other victories before the Last Battle became their primary concern. One of my main concerns about the Last Battle right now is ensuring that it occurs early enough to be a viable victory, given the mechanics we've planned, when compared to the individual ones.

Unrelated to all of the above, I want to clarify a few terms that we're defining as a part of the mod, because I've begun to lose track of them:

Path [to the Light] - Religion Replacement
Boon - Reward/Quest offered in secret by the Shadow to a civilization
Custom - Replacement for Belief?
We're obviously discussing what our pantheon replacement will be above
Policy - Same as base CiV, the policy trees you unlock with culture before ideologies show up (name subject to change when we nail down the concept further)

Can't think of more off the top of my head.

Calavente · Sep 4, 2014

I understand your reasonning.

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

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

Calavente · Sep 4, 2014

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

this is a mix of :
-start
-channelers
-white tower is important in the game

here we go:
There are holes in the idea… but lets see:

According to the books, Saindin being tainted only happened after the sealing of the bore….
The first main act of Madness was the Breaking.
After the breaking some people are in fear of channelers.
The WT was created a few years after the breaking, or at least the 3 Oaths, at a time when AesSedai of the West needed to ease the fear of "normal" people and show that they were not Tyrants and wannabee monsters.
In the Seanchan continent, AesSedai took it up themselves to conquer cities and small kingdom, by themselves, becoming Mage-Queens.
Aiels were in awe of AesSedai (due to their lineage of "servants") and did not consider themselves worthy of being AesSedai / joining the WT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

counterpoint · Sep 5, 2014

Hey folks. Sorry for the delay. I teach mornings *and* nights now, which is... interesting. Anyways, I thought this deserved a well though-out response since we're getting close to solidifying some big things, I think.

Calavente said:
Sorry, didn't want to comment, but I'm forced to do it.. and, please : no need to respond to that

OK, you've said things like "don't bother responding" all throughout this discussion, and I'm not sure why. That said, I think I'm inclined to follow your advice in this instance. I think we'd sort of talked this particular topic to death, and judging from your last response, I think there are some facts/interpretations from the books on which you might be mistaken, in addition to some things changing in the final book that you aren't aware of yet. In any case, I think the topic needs to move on.

Calavente said:
Re-LB:
Idea :
-Once Thakan'dar is taken; all seals in Light Cities (maybe in cities with AS/Chaneler as governor) are "freely" destroyed, enabling to launch the "seal the bore" project.

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

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

Calavente said:
Seals are hard to destroy early/mid game, but easier to destroy during LB
-Allow a "trade the Seals" in-between Light players, if the seals is not in adequate city.

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

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

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

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

Calavente said:
Seals are "common artifacts" revealed: by forsaken, or "special tech / policy / spell"
(maybe some 3-4 seals are automatically destroyed during early years of Age of Dragon : your artefact is revealed as "remains of a Great Seal")

I'm with S3rgeus here. This might work, but I think we need to table this issue, in terms of the specific mechanics of their discovery, until we know more about the cultural victory. I don't feel particularly drawn to this in any strong way that it'd be worth reconceiving our entire cultural victory for it.

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

Calavente said:
So Light has an interest to gather and protect the seals (less power to DO), and thus all "AoL artifacts"
Shadow has an interest to gather and destroy seals, all game long, but especially during Age of Dragon / AoL.
Light/Shadow declare war / or send espionage heavy teams (AS/Ashamen/bloodblades) on neutral civs that have Seals but do not trade them/give them (much easy once waygates/travelling has been discovered).

Right. Something like this.

I wanted to mention briefly that I find it fascinating the retranslations that appear to be happening here. It seems, if your profile is to be believed, that you are French. Did you read the books in French? (Incidentally, when I was staying in Nice, the landlady there was reading what I think was book 5 in the French translation)... I mention it here because of your mention of the "bloodblades." In the US English version of the books, they're called "bloodknives," and I wonder if when you say bloodblades, you're translating from the french term. If so, I'm curious what that french term is. Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

Calavente said:
Then maybe, if the Dragon is killed, on other T'avern can do the deed for sealing ? or another Channeler GP.

Yeah, I'm thinking that if the dragon is "killed," he is knocked out of the game for awhile, and some clear benefit is given to the shadow. Not sure what yet, but something nice.

S3rgeus said:
Thanks for going through all 3! I think I see more of the issues you were raising with options 2&3 now as well.

Again, awesome to see these all written out, thanks!

I'm not a big fan of 3 (National Festival) and I don't think it was your favorite either, just from what you've said here.

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

Oh yes, also, I am bringing in the quotes from the later part of the conversation here, where it seems appropriate.

S3rgeus said:
Reading through this, the salient point from my thoughts is: I like option 2, but I think option 1 is better. I see what you mean about the characterizations working well with option 1.

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
My first reaction is to step back and look at how pantheons relate to religions in CiV and how we fit into that pattern relating to Paths.

CiV pantheons are prototypical beliefs that are more usually associated with ancient times in human history, when people worshiped natural phenomena. So our religion analogue is Path to the Light, which is that civilization's chosen set of customs that express their way of showing fealty/devotion/whatever to the Light and the Creator. We have more specific examples of these through characters in the books, and is one of the reasons I think we should avoid evoking Third Age characteristics in the pantheons.

Styles doesn't really fit into this base CiV analogy, but that by itself doesn't discount it. It's very in-universe, but explaining the bonuses is a bit more problematic than I'd expected - it's easy to come up with a few good examples, but not so much a full 26.

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

I am in favor of your approach here, though. I prefer as many of our design decisions be made systematically (which is why I'm always tabling things for later and such).

S3rgeus said:
Not to suggest a completely different design direction, but do we know much about the beliefs of WoT populations in the times shortly after the Breaking? I don't think we do, so if we want to keep to the CiV paradigm, we'll have to make some stuff up.

Yeah, we don't know much, if anything.

S3rgeus said:
So, this brings us back around to option 1:

I've highlighted (in red), one of the things that I think explains why I felt swayed by this option when I read it. (Also, in blue, suggestions we've had since that I think we all agree on - specific phrasing up for grabs.) None of the above are explicitly WoT-ish, in terms of using specific lexicon from the books, but I felt that did evoke a kind of foundational WoT flavor. They define your population as a "people," but given the butter nature (spreadable) of religion in CiV, they also show how that intermixes over time. Religions inherit the pantheon belief from the civilization that founds them, though that's rarely a defining factor in their long-term effectiveness (in game).

They might not be explicitly WoT, but I think these names are evocative of either directly mentioned or at least implicit characteristics of the WoT universe. And, of course, they also make sense in terms of the bonuses you're receiving, which has to be a big part of this.

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

1) We can find at least a handful of them to give more specific WoT references, so the list as a whole "feels right," even if many of them are rather random and original.
2) We make sure this list is not nation-specific, and feels appropriately post-breaking
3) We find another place to implement some (or all) of the styles. Many of them are really rather iconic to the series.

What if for #3 we simply just allowed people to adopt some iconography. Something either separate from religion or layered on top it. I don't mean choose their flag or anything, but select a style that somehow follows that nation around the whole game. Maybe it spreads? Maybe it does nothing and is only cosmetic? Maybe it spreads when you have become influential?
There's also the notion of these styles being great works or something. "Your Great Artist has invented Beards!". I know, weird, but it IS wot...

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Another point to consider, the pantheon beliefs will be the first part of our religion system changes that a new player sees - and long before they see any of the big new late-game content. Are we risking losing players by not using canonical constructs so early in their experience? Honestly, pantheon beliefs become largely unimportant for the majority of the game, so I don't recommend we "waste" flavor on them, but it's worth thinking about.

I can see it going both ways here.

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

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Another consideration is that "Styles" will clearly be Third Age evocatives, since that's all we have the information for, which may not mesh with the in-game time frame that 'pantheons' are adopted in? This may or may not be a problem though, substituting Styles in here makes sense in the way that it's good, readily verifiable, in-universe WoT information.

I don't know. Maybe the braids were invented in the AoL...? Importantly, I don't think anybody cares.... Whereas people are more likely to tell with bigger things (Ogier history, etc.).

S3rgeus said:
About "Friends of the Ogier," I'm not so sure about this one. Ogier are more forest-folk than jungle-folk, if I remember correctly, but this is a jungle bonus. We can change the bonus to work with forests, but it's likely that this gives a bonus to jungles *specifically* to give tropical civs options for faith generation.

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

S3rgeus said:
Side note about the location of the Blight, our maps are obviously going to be randomized so there has to be flexibility here. I think it makes sense to put Blight at both poles - there is often limited land area close to the poles, so restricting it to just one could often lead to very small total area of Blight, which isn't great for the flavor of the whole Shadowspawn system. Blight distribution can be customized per mapscript as well, so we can fine tune it for specific map types as we go on.

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

S3rgeus said:
We've also been talking about "Queen's People" and I think it's my turn to jump in with "That would make a good social policy!" Sounds like exactly the right kind of thing to include in a policy (not sure which tree - policies aren't well defined yet, but will come back to that in one of our many future posts). It defines a governmental structure and the benefits it offers its citizens, which slots right in there.

Right. The enthusiasm for the queen and monarchy in general could also tie into an Andoran UA.

So I say we try to come up with some more in-universe names. I do agree with the ones you put in blue before (though perhaps the ogier one should be moved).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Regarding icons for option 2, I think we should be able to do that - replace the default 'lightning bolt' with an icon for each iconography and use that instead. I added some new religion icons for SiegeMod, so it would be a similar style. (Helpfully simple style, so I can make relatively effective ones without an artist - depending on complexity of the symbol.) There should be a Lua file that goes to grab the icon (the city banner manager at least, and there are probably other places it's used), which we can replace.

So actually implementing these as a 'rebrand' of existing pantheon beliefs is actually very easy from a modding perspective. They're just text keys that I can swap out of the database (from XML) and the 'new names' will propagate to all uses in-game.

First off, I need to try SiegeMod, and will, hopefully sooner than later.

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

counterpoint · Sep 5, 2014

S3rgeus said:
I'd wonder if we need to display any dates (FY etc) except After Breaking XXXX? We could just count up from 0 and use the calendar names for the eras.

Naming aside, this structure does make us more like base CiV, which is usually good. There's a bit of a Last Battle-related drawback though - I realize now that "The Age of the Dragon" being such a narrow slice of time (even slowed down), will make the Last Battle trigger closer to the end of the tech tree. That's really a matter of putting more techs into that era though - by making it a long era (high number of techs), we make it more difficult to beeline a victory before the Last Battle gets going in earnest.

So, overall, I quite like this era structure, because it does 'loosely' slow down as it gets closer to the end. It does bring us to the issue of naming. I think dividing them up based on in-universe "developments" is good, but it should remain ambiguous. For example, rather than use Hawkwing's name, it's the "Era of the High King" or something like that.

Side point! This frees up the actual names, "Free Years" and "New Era," if we use other tangentially related in-universe names for the eras. That means that (in direct contrast with what I suggested about counting up from AB0 above) we could use the calendars for the dates at the top of the screen. Despite requiring some imagination from us, I think this is more true to their original purpose.

One final calendar-related point, conceptually CiV does this slightly differently from how we're planning to do it. CiV uses the Gregorian Calendar for the duration of the game - including the portion of history before it was invented, instead using the 'modern' reference date for the time in question. We could do take a similar approach by using the Farede calendar for the entire game - if there are any reasonable ways of referring to dates before the calendar was created within its time scale? (Also, helpful) It has a specified length and a well defined series of weeks/months, so at worst we could manually do the math and extrapolate backward X000 years to approximately After Breaking. (We acknowledge that the switches between these calendars occur at undefined times in-universe - they occur because the world has lost track of the date, but I don't think we could/should ever reasonably simulate that.)

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

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

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

How shall we proceed with this issue, then?

S3rgeus said:
Cool, but it sounds like you still like the idea of having per-player influence as well? I quite like that idea too and I can slot a per-player system 'underneath' this existing one (each Ajah's influence is the sum of the influences for each player with them) and keep both features.

Yep, we're in agreement here.

S3rgeus said:
Right idea with which idea? Conquest/Black/penalties?

Should we be making the Black Ajah route to diplo victory more difficult than the Light one? I would think your choice with the Last Battle, mechanically, shouldn't affect the difficulty of the diplo victory (since that's tied to ideologies and the Tower), just change it. I'm thinking that the Black Ajah route should be approximately the same difficulty as the 'default' Light diplo victory.

Fully in favor of conquest of the White Tower being more difficult - conquest is for the Domination victory (and good for science/gold sometimes). Tangential idea, what if the White Tower is un-conquerable? When you would capture it, you 'ransom' it like the barbarians do instead of capturing any city. Then you strong-arm one (or more?) of the Ajahs to gain influence that way. Just floating this idea, not sure if I like it - I would think it's a bit disappointing if you're dominating the whole world that it's mechanically impossible to capture the Tower.

Penalties for 'developing' the "capture" ideology makes a lot of sense to me. The penalties could stack up based on the number of tenets you add to your ideology - or possibly variable per tenet, depending on their severity?

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

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Having the non-military roles be global effects that the AI 'opts into' by choosing the Light in the Last Battle sounds like a good idea - it's definitely a lot simpler from the AI perspective. How would we classify which civs pick up which roles or would it be a volunteer process? We auto-classify based on overall yield output, but that's a bit 'meh.' The elected 'leader' for the Light (is there an elected Leader?) could delegate roles, which may come with diplo repercussions? I don't know how relevant diplo repercussions are at this stage of the game though - unless they can induce players to drop out, like you discuss below. But that could equally be frustrating because the AI might decide it "doesn't like its role" for some opaque reason and drop out - screwing over everyone else.

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

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

- Military
- Production
- Culture/Prestige
- Gold
- Diplomacy
- Espionage
- Technology
- Faith
- Happiness

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

S3rgeus said:
Agreed that it makes sense for him to become a unit for the final fight at Thakan'dar - but what triggers that? When the Light civs obtain all of the remaining Seals? What if they lose one while he's moving across the map as a unit?

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Capturing Seals from the Shadow cities makes sense - it would be a similar mechanic to stealing technologies. The act of moving him into and out of Shadow cities should probably have some risk of discovery, as well as the ongoing one while he's there. And since you'll need to move him into the same city as the Seal to steal, that presents good reason for that to be significant. (Also coolness - spies can locate Seals, so good espionage is rewarded? I've found in BNW that I don't move spies all that often, which isn't awesome - they're not really "involved" in the game much of the time.)

Oh yeah, I totally leave my spies in place way too often in CiV. They're great if I'm behind in tech,b ut otherwise they don't end up a part of the game with much real strategy.

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
We say in a couple of places that the Shadow does something that is "bad" for the Dragon - finds him snooping in one of their cities or captures the Light city he's garrisoned in. What's the end result of this occurring? "The Dragon is injured" (like losing his hand? ) and becomes 'unassigned' and unable to take actions for X turns jumps out at me as an idea. Could be a game-changer near the end - especially if the Light had already kicked off breaking the Seals, anticipating that they'd be able to sync up the attack with the Seals shattering - now they have to wait and they've made the Shadowspawn stronger. Good tactics from the Shadow side there.

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

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

Also, side note - how long would you envision the LB taking? Both in terms of turns and years. Epic wars like this take MANY turns... are going to do a turn a month or something?
If an AI is the 'Leader' etc., but the player is also on the Light side, we want them to be able to "shepherd" (heh) the AI away from its more irrational decisions.

S3rgeus said:
So, one system that comes to mind:

I'm not going to quote all your propositions, but this is in response to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Just a quick aside, I figured the Dragon could accept new moves every X turns or something - and possibly there could be a mechanism to trigger a new move if they 'need' to move him quickly? But the slowness of this prevents games of "Catch the Rand" where Light civs constantly move him away from an incoming invasion rather than using him strategically overall.

Yes, this is essential. We can't have it be so easy for him to flee a city (without consequence) that's about to get killed. Would be too hard for the shadow. Although, maybe if he does flee, its the whole Arad Doman book 12-13 thing, where he's like "good luck guys, I give up" and they're screwed.

S3rgeus said:
The Light-leaning of the civ sounds like a good idea. Defined by Faith per turn? So it's not immovable - though that complicates the "move order" defined above. Simplest solution to that is fix the order for a round and then re-evaluate it when the whole round ends. That also prevents the whole order being 'set in stone' and frustrating the player - they can do something to have more effect if they want.

I think it makes sense for there to be a global 'notification' that the Dragon has been born when the game is progressing toward the tech boundary that triggers the Last Battle, but it hasn't quite reached it yet. Not sure about picking a civ then. (Can we pick CSes? What if it picks the Tower? Shadar Logoth? Ok, CSes are probably a bad idea.)

I think the Dragon only becomes mechanically significant at the nation level in the lead up to the Last Battle, not immediately after being born. Seeing as when the Last Battle begins (in-universe, not mechanically) is a bit nebulous, whether we want the Dragon mechanics to exist before the war starts is up for debate. We could move through a rotation of every civ using the above Light-leaning prioritization until the actual declarations are made - that will tend to be (but not always! potential coolness) the Light civs anyway. When he actually becomes mechanically significant could be weighted but randomized a bit, if we like.

If we go for 'appearing' when the Last Battle starts, we could have him spawn in the nation that 'triggered' the Last Battle with their final tech discovery (flip a coin for ties). This is slightly weird - if one civ is pulling ahead and reaches the Fourth age, then they (high science) will have caused it. If everyone is about even, then the civ that reached the Age of the Dragon last (last person to make up the half - lower science) will have caused it.

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

S3rgeus said:
Totally agree, this is my preferred set up as well, I think it's all about reining in complexity so that we can have it play well, rather than changing any of the core ideas behind it. Phew! Glad we've nailed that one down! There's still a lot to decide about this (as shown above!) but I like what's been decided thus far. Shall we formalize it in a doc, so we don't lose track?

Yeah, this is the way. I don't know if a doc is quite necessary yet - there's still some fundamental stuff needed to figure out. But yeah, we should put it down once we get another level of agreement.

I do have this sinking suspicion, though, that we're going to circle around back to things being somewhat simpler. In fact, perhaps all this crazy Dragon stuff is going to actually ultimately lead to a simpler LB..... I don't know how, though....

S3rgeus said:
I've seen the competitiveness as the Shadow's main drawback - that if you choose the Shadow you might have to deal with your big scary neighbor civ on the battlefield. Then again, it's all upside if you're a superior military force. I'm warming to the idea of an additional victory being required then!

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

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

S3rgeus said:
Retrieving Seals with the Dragon seems fun, though it's also still open for there to be other avenues. I think stealing them via spy diminishes the value of the Dragon somewhat. Perhaps a non-combat unit like the Missionary can do something about this? Is expended next to an enemy city and has a chance of discovering if there is a Seal there and possibly capturing it for the owner of the unit.

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

S3rgeus said:
Agreed, topic for the queue of future ones! We should probably write down a 'currently discussing,' 'planned discussions,' and 'decided features' list.

Yes, definitely. It's becoming very difficult to keep track of everything, especially with all the side topics orbiting around the LB.

S3rgeus said:
Unrelated to all of the above, I want to clarify a few terms that we're defining as a part of the mod, because I've begun to lose track of them:

Path [to the Light] - Religion Replacement

Boon - Reward/Quest offered in secret by the Shadow to a civilization

Custom - Replacement for Belief?

We're obviously discussing what our pantheon replacement will be above

Policy - Same as base CiV, the policy trees you unlock with culture before ideologies show up (name subject to change when we nail down the concept further)

Can't think of more off the top of my head.

Yeah, I think that's it, for now. I think its good to keep this list updated as we go.

Oh, also:

Prestige - Replacement for Tourism.

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

Ah, there's the patented calavante "don't comment on it" line. That is clearly *not* how this thread goes, as you've learned i'm sure by now.

In terms of my thoughts on your idea... I must confess, I think my brain is full. I think we've gotten so knee deep in the LB (while we were in the middle of doing the Paths!)
, which has, in turn, brought up extra important issues (diplo, science victories, etc.)... In short, it's becoming a bit crazy. Obviously, ideas are good, but at this point, I personally want to settle some things before I expand on chanelling and other such things any more. I think I've said it probably twenty times that I had lots of ideas for channeling when I first found this thread.... and I still haven't written them out, since things have gone off the deep end on other topics.

So, in other words, I don't really have clear thoughts on this issue, because I think my head will explode if I try to. That said, I will say that the early-game of Civ is my favorite part, for some reason It has been since the early 1990s. What you're suggesting seems to alter that in a significant way. It's definitely interesting what you're proposing, and in many ways fits WoT, but it might change the [early] game too much for my taste. I'll refrain from specific comments at this point.

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

Calavente · Sep 5, 2014

I wanted to mention briefly that I find it fascinating the retranslations that appear to be happening here. It seems, if your profile is to be believed, that you are French. Did you read the books in French? (Incidentally, when I was staying in Nice, the landlady there was reading what I think was book 5 in the French translation)... I mention it here because of your mention of the "bloodblades." In the US English version of the books, they're called "bloodknives," and I wonder if when you say bloodblades, you're translating from the french term. If so, I'm curious what that french term is. Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

well, in fact I read in english... but While I have a good memory of story plot, global meaning and social structures depicted, I've got a bad memory for names, spelling of names and actual clothing depicted.

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

"your Great Artists imposed the Double-spiked Beard Fashion, your gentry is embolden and feel proud of its country" : +1happy per XXX : eg "barber-shop".. ?

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

...what about something around blacksmiths ? : "honored Blacksmiths" or "Blood of the Blacksmiths", or something better worded: Aiels did that, and some few other countries too

counterpoint · Sep 5, 2014

Calavente said:
...what about something around blacksmiths ? : "honored Blacksmiths" or "Blood of the Blacksmiths", or something better worded: Aiels did that, and some few other countries too

Right, I thought of blacksmiths (perrin and all that), but since the bonus refers to salt, copper, and iron, and blacksmiths only work in iron, I figured that title was too limiting.

EDIT: clarification. I don't mean the name is *limiting* about nations and stuff - obviously, every single nation that has ever existed on Earth and in Randland has blacksmiths. I mean that it is limiting because "blacksmith" literally means "guy who works with iron (or steel)," just like goldsmiths work with gold, etc. So to me its somewhat limiting in that it ignores the salt/copper aspect.

Honored Smiths or something like that might be possible, though. /EDIT

EDIT 2!: OK, mea culpa. Totally misunderstanding you here. Being stupid. You aren't talking about the craftsmen one. You're talking about the "Industrious One," of course (that was the one I was talking about). Being a dumbass. Yes, this is good, I think./EDIT

Illianor123 · Sep 5, 2014

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

Illianor123 · Sep 6, 2014

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

Civitar · Sep 6, 2014

Ask a mod for a Project subforum...

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