What about using "world Era" for imposing the moment for switching from one calendar to the other ?
And:
I recall you not thinking it would work when we discussed this option before.
The problem with this method as I recall - though, in theory, I love this idea - is with the "time compression," right? Like, how would we change the year-increment per turn when how many turns per era isn't standardized. Isn't that the problem? If not, and this is possible, this is the best option, IMO.
I don't think time compression would be a problem. Again "time compression" happens to both the calendar and the eras we're progressing through (on a conceptual level - the Medieval era was X00 years long, the Atomic Era was only about 30-40 years? - but they have a similar number of techs) separately. So one "slowing down" doesn't affect the other.
In effect, the "slowing down" mechanisms are separate for calendars and eras. Each era, as you move along the tree, represents a shorter slice of human history (in terms of actual real world time that history spent "in that era"), but has a similar number of techs in it to the previous one. So if it takes you approximately the same amount of time (number of turns) to research your next tech over the course of the game, this translates to "time" moving more slowly as you move along the tree.
To balance with this, the turn system causes a specific amount of time to pass each time you end your turn. At the very beginning of the game, the first turn (on Normal game speed) is 40 years. By the end (around 2050), each turn is a month.
Note that these two systems are calibrated to create approximately historical series of events in approximately the right times, but do not actually feed back into each other. (Which is what 'world era' would do - the calendar system is entirely dependent on the tech system.)
So, using the 'world era' is possible, and will, in general, cause the years to be more closely (but not exactly) linked with the eras as the game progresses. However, I don't think this is necessarily a good thing - I think it's a very confusing change from base CiV. Most of our alterations for the mod are obvious and clear to the player that they're part of the "WoT-ification" of CiV. But if we change this, then the difference from base CiV is subtle and difficult to notice, but might catch you out later (if you're trying to compare your wins in the Hall of Fame, for example).
It also might catch us out - I'm not entirely sure how 'world era' for dates would interact with variable game speed (remember you can set the speed - Normal vs Marathon vs Quick).
I think this sums up why I think we should keep the dissociation between calendar and tech era that base CiV has:
"Man, did you see that game I finished yesterday? I won a science victory in 1753!"
Even if you translate the date, this statement becomes meaningless if we use the 'world era' to progress the calendars - because when "1753"
is will vary from game to game. True, you can use turn number and that will still be universal, but I think date is a better "layman" marker for how far through the game you are. If things are happening "early" (you discover plastics in 200AD) then it's feedback that you're playing well.
Overall, I don't think that things happening at the "wrong time" is bad, because it's good feedback for the player. It's also a known quantity, since that's how base CiV does it. The thing about the dissociation in base CiV is that it's not very explicit about it and the exact way it keeps them apart isn't at all obvious unless you really dig into the mechanics like we're doing. But even without that fine-grained understanding, the CiV system "makes sense" on a conceptual level to a player, which we'd be sacrificing.
Right, OR the fourth age starts after NE 1000 or something. Don't like this, but its an idea.
I'm not sure, because I think this is part of our big sticking point here. There's no calendar for "the Fourth Age" (that we know of?) - I'd imagine that they keep using the Farede Calendar in the Westlands at least. This makes "the Fourth Age" much more like an era than a calendar progression, which is
exactly what we want if we put it on the tech tree.
Don't forget the option of just calling everything AB something. I think that might be viable in that it completely ignores the issue and wont have any contradictions (e.g. FY 1 being in the middle of the trolloc wars)
This option is simpler, but if we take the "all one calendar" approach, I think it makes sense to use the Farede Calendar the whole time and extrapolate back (like CiV does with the Gregorian Calendar, BC is effectively negative years - so it starts in year -4000) - otherwise we'd have difficulty breaking up a turn to be less than a year toward the end of the game.
But like I said above, FY1 during the Trolloc Wars isn't necessarily a problem. That's just the player (or everybody) being slow.
OK, one problem with the use of the word "Consolidation" here is that it refers to both the conquest of Seanchan (a NE thing), and the conquest of the westlands by hawkwing (before that). The Seanchan invasion is also called The Conquest, which might be better - though that name does feel rather generic, despite it being a real thing.
The thing is, you're looking for the era of the high king to be what, around 500 years? It's only a few decades.
I agree with what you're saying here (and later) about the Era of the High King not being "long enough" in in-universe time. Note that we don't want that era to be 500 years long though - that would make each of the first four eras approximately the same "length" in in-universe time. We want them to get "shorter."
We have approximately 3000 years (shorter than base CiV) to split into 8 eras. I haven't actually done this math before and it occurs to me that we might be approaching the eras we've named already incorrectly. We actually want something like:
- 1000 years
- 800 years
- 600
- 300
- 150
- 100
- 30
- 20
That's 3000 years divided into steadily shrinking slices. Working backwards:
Given that we're using "The Fourth Age" as our last era, I think 20 years works there (#8). (We're only modelling the tech for the universe up to 20 years after the Last Battle, in other words, like how CiV stops after "Nanotechnology" and "Nuclear Fusion" and other slightly futuristic things.)
The Age of the Dragon as representing 30 years of time (#7) also makes sense - Rand is in his early-to-mid-twenties during the Last Battle. So that's approximately his lifetime.
Encroaching Blight works for the previous 100 years (#6) - that's the right time frame for Malkier and those Stedding. Which addresses this:
Also, the era of encroaching blight... does that really happen for hundreds of years, or is that more of a Dragon era thing? I mean, malkier was swallowed right before Lan was born, so... 50 years ago or something? Certainly the age of the dragon could be extended to include things like the whitecloak war, if we needed to stretch that out so its a hundred years or so.
Because we've "divided up time" differently now.
That brings us back to #5. Conveniently, the Aiel War happens smack in the middle of this time frame. Can we use that in some way? Or is too "what happened in the books" rather than a property of the world?
And now #4: The only big things I see here are succession wars in Andor and the Aiel trade agreement with Cairhien to Shara. This is approximately 430NE to 730NE.
Then #3: Hawkwing and the War of Hundred Years are in the center of this era. I think "Era of the High King" sounds cool - but you're right that his lifetime represents only a small slice of this whole section. The latter half of this is also when Luthair arrives in Seanchan and conquers everybody there.
Then #2: Era of Freedom is tantalizingly close to "Free Years" but we might get away with this?
Then #1: After Breaking, it even lines up right! Almost as if we'd planned it all along.
I know this is a bit of a shift from how we were doing eras before, but I think it's a lot more accurate, the main variable is whether we can name #4 and #5 well.
I also feel I should note that I use a lot of Farede calendar dates to "describe" eras here, which may be considered to cross over with the discussion of calendars above. It doesn't really - I'm using reference dates so we know what we're talking about, like you would refer to the renaissance era as approximately 1300-1600 AD-ish, even though that has limited bearing on when any civ will reach the renaissance era in a given game of CiV. (Side note: this does affect the turn numbers I quoted for the calendars, they should actually be more like (very rough math) turn 0-50 is AB0-1000, turn 50-150 is FY0-1000, and turns 150+ are NE0+)
Enormous caveat. This brings back our ancient problem: The Trolloc Wars now occur at the end of the first era, which prescribes a military focus at the beginning of the game. If we're going to use 'world era' to trigger the Trolloc Wars (which I think is good) we'd have to trigger it going into the "Era of Freedom" - which isn't so bad. You'll only be forced to go military *early* if you're already behind on tech. Maybe that is kind of bad. Let me think on that. (Also note, there isn't a flavor problem here with "Trolloc Wars" taking placing during 'world era' "Era of Freedom" because, like in base CiV, I don't think we should broadcast the 'world era' transitions to players anyway.)
Honestly, I don't really see a problem, given the calendar setup you propose, with using the "real" terms throughout. I don't think changing the names saves us from the contradictions, really, since the FYs will be beginning during the Trolloc Wars anyway (in theory). I suppose it is somewhat worse, though.
I think this is a flavor thing. As I've said above, I don't think it matters if things happen at the "wrong time." However, I think it will matter if we name an era after a calendar and
then it doesn't match up.
Hand on a second.... the "True to Story" starting points of the different calendar eras do not have to do with tech. Not at all. They have to do with global events. And all CiVs would be linked in time with those. Coming off of what Illianor was saying - when the Trolloc Wars end - whenever that is - reset the clock to zero and spit out FY instead of AB. Is that possible? Same would happen after the 100 years war event (whatever that is). Would that answer our problems?
It's definitely possible, but I think it has other effects that I discussed above, which I think are big drawbacks.
Of course, then we'd really have to try to come up with nice names for the eras, because then the contradictions really would be felt, since verything else would feel so aligned. Hmmm...
- After Breaking
- Era of Nations - maybe this is better, in that its more generic. Since we obviously won't have Ten exact nations. More just about embodying the fact that nations are popping up at this time.
- <- Trolloc Wars happen here
- Era of Recovery/ Era of Freedom - Reconstruction is somewhat a loaded term in the US. Means the period after our Civil War. Doesn't quite fit here. I don't love these names, but Freedom at least somewhat evokes the Free Years thing.
- Era of Consolidation/ Imperial Era/Era of the High King) Hmm... Maybe this could be the Era of Consolidation? I mean, I know his son settles to Seanchan in like 969... near the end of the era, but still, both events sort of take place in this period. It sounds more like an era name, and it seems somehow more generic - I can understand the "consolidation" of power being something that took a few hudnred years, whereas the high king himself was only around for a small bit. Imperial era is no better than yours, but I throw it out here nonetheless.
- Era of Consolidation/ Era of the Conquest/ Era of Fragmentation/ Era of New Nations - I don't know about this one.... all of these have problems.
- Era of Encroaching Blight - I can be ok with this one, it certainly is nice and ominous, but I don't know if it's too ominous. I mean, this is almost our "Modern Era," right ( relatively)? Is there a name for it that somehow corresponds to that?
- Age (Era?) of the Dragon
- The Fourth Age
I've incorporated parts of this into the discussion above!
In fact, I think this is definitely thew ay to do it! The threshold thing is awesome, mostly. I don't want it to get too min-maxy though. Like, people obsessing over not "wasting" their production (like I am with the World's Fair). That's the advantage of doing it on a city-by-city basis. My city's production creates upgrades in X number of cities. That makes the effects more obviously tangible. Is there a way to take out the weird gamesmanship of the pot-of-gold method you described? I like it, but I would hate situations where the team is sitting at 49 hammers (needing 50) and the AI won't pop in the extra one, etc.
I'd say the player can tweak the focuses of their cities to avoid "wasting" production. If you're stuck just below a threshold (you have 49 and need 50), then set one of the contributing cities to be production focused. Otherwise if you're a bit over, you can gold focus one of them and the "extra" citizens still benefit you.
The ogier? Was this a mechanic someone proposed? sounds interesting. I don't remember it.
Not really proposed in depth, we just mentioned in briefly, here:
- I don't think Influence can really be a factor until the LB, since Tourism/Prestige doesn't really pop up until late game. However, there is something interesting out there with regards to Culture, and Diplo I think. The Trolloc Wars destroyed every nation, essentially. Unless I'm mixing it up, the 10 nations were no more after the wars ended. Maybe there's something about maintaining your borders with culture going on - like maybe the Wars shrink or disrupt your territory. This is weird, and I'm not sure I like it, but it might be an avenue to at least think of.
I agree about Prestige not being a factor at this point, at most people will be producing a few points per turn, I'd say. Interesting idea about border decay - the only way to actually lose territory (aside from the obvious conquest) in base CiV is via Great General (which I remember you mentioning eons ago - but yeah, the Great General is super helpful mainly because of this ability!). Would these hexes be claimed by the Shadowspawn civ then? I can see some mechanic linking Stedding to reclaiming these hexes, so you'd want to keep them alive to get your land back.
What do you mean by shadowspawn uprisings? In the ligh civs? There aren't really shadowspawn around to rebel.
I should have said Darkfriend Uprisings - the whole "choosing against your alignment" discussion, one of the points we liked was uprisings in nations that choose strongly against their actions thus far.
Personally, I feel like a Dark civ probably is always unhappy. I guess it's possible they could be happy, but it'd take some serious brainwashing. Think the townspeople in that thakandar town from aMoL... they're either all turned or constantly horrified... or Slayer.
I agree with this on a flavor level, but I think being permanently unhappy is a huge disadvantage - especially since the Shadow civs need to win another victory. Negative happiness drastically reduces food production, and food is population is science is winning, roughly. It would be less of a problem for Light civs since they only need to win the "here and now" of the Last Battle
But yes, cities switching sides beased on presitge - which was in Civ 3 and 4, if I recall, may be an option here.
It's been added back into CiV as well, though I think in a relatively recent patch. Civs that are drastically unhappy due to Ideology differences can flip to control by the civ that is exerting the Ideology (through Tourism) on them.
Are really most of them stedding? It seems like we have a handful of CSs that are somewhat essential, without them. Mayene. WT, Far Madding, Falme. OK, maybe that's only four. Still, I don't know if we have that many more stedding than that.
Exactly, there are those 4 "normal" CSes and
there are a lot of Stedding. A Huge map needs to have 24 city states and we don't want the ones it picks to always be the same, so I think it makes a lot of sense to use the Stedding for the rest. That begs the question of whether it would be worth having *only* Stedding as CSes, because that unified theme could give us options with how civs deal with them across the board? (We'd still want to include Mayene, Far Madding, etc. some other way - Tar Valon can easily be an exception since player dealings with them will be clearly differentiated.)
Probably something to discuss later!
Right. I'm still liking the idea that Faith is your REWARD for doing stuff in the LB (helpin the team and all).
Yes, I see what you mean about this distinction and I think I like it too!
Yeah, maybe that's all it is, a model that appears. Still, you mentioned before that some people will want to control Rand. They just don't know that we considered it and that this is probably better - my thought is merely that we might try to create a sort f illusion that he IS there, so nobody complains.
Sure, we can definitely do something like that.
Running out of time tonight. So just a few thoughts on these.
- Steal a Seal from the Shadow - Gosh, I just don't know anymore. Golly! Gee whiz! This is tricky. MAybe this isn't a great use of his time? Or maybe it's simply that he does it way faster than a spy can?
I think way faster is the way to go. We want a lot of options here and given the importance of the Seals (and that Shadow civs are trying to break them) - stealing in fewer turns might be very important.
- Root out Darkfriends - Yeah sure. This makes sense if there is the mechanic of a city switching sides... which seems crazy to implement, but cool.
I think switching sides makes sense as a Prestige thing - like switching in base CiV. So Rand could give you a massive Prestige bonus - which makes sense on a flavor level too.
- Attack Shadowspawn - Yeah, I think he's a Randplane. And I think he can attack anybody... maybe not neutral units, though. Not sure on this. Depends, is this Zen rand of aMoL or bad Rand of 11-13?
Randplane ftw! I think quite a few people like this idea then.
- Influence with the Tower - Yeah, doing *something* there, for sure. Researchy stuff? I really don't know.
Going to come back to this later because I'm also short on time. I'm not sure we could ever "station" him at Tar Valon though - because that wouldn't mesh with the events of the books.
- Ta'veren Probability Manipulation - Yeah, the randomness seems cool... but ould anybody really ever choose to do it? I think honestly its just a consequence wherever he goes. As in, not something you choose to do. And maybe its not always, just sometimes, randomly.
Yes, I think having this as a static effect rather than a 'move' makes sense - like the city strength enhancement. How do we want to model the probability changes though? I'm not sure what good/bad things we can do that won't feel like odd windfalls/vindictive.
- Winning the Last Battle - I think probably - Dragon captures the City is the answer here. What else could it be.
Awesome sauce, let's go with that.
- Dragon Bomb - Totally agree. I mean, this is the same as shadowspawn attack, though, right? Just stronger? What's the difference?
Holy crash - what if he used balefire? Could it be a nuke but that there's a chance of some crazy stuff happening, like unraveling the pattern? I don't know what that would be, but... maybe we think on it? Radiation?
I'm not sure what you mean by the same as a Shadowspawn attack? This is effectively using him like a Tactical Nuke - there should probably be a cooldown on this.
Balefire sounds like a good characterization for this - I'll think on it a bit more to see how we might model the Pattern unraveling.
- Asha'man Recruitment - I don't think I like this, really. Aren't ashaman going to be a separate mechanic? I mean, maybe the dragon can help you get them faster. Haven't figured out ashaman yet... so maybe table this one
Ok, yeah, we can come back to this. I was thinking that however we end up doing channeling that Asha'men would eventually be units of some kind - and producing one (or several, depending on how strong they are) is flexible, flavorful, useful, and doesn't punish the player if the AI decides to do it for themselves.
Sure! Both is fine with me. I will say, though, that Illianor's comments later, and some thought of my own, is making me not love the whole idea of Light-leaning as faith.
They should be related. Certainly. But I think they're related int he opposite direction: Light Leaning creates Faith. Not faith leads to light leaning.
I think if you are heavily light leaning, you should get faith bonuses. Heavily shadow leaning = faith minuses, etc. Maybe a few gradations along the way (or percentages or something).
To me this is an important distinction because its still possible to have a high faith shadow civ - they chose certain Path tenants, buildings, got lots of Prophets, their UA, etc. They should still have high faith... but less high than if they were light. Perhaps significantly so.
But, then, we wouldn't use Faith to determine the dragon, then. A super light-leaning civ could have never done much infrastructure, or could be Tall (Illianor indicates that this causes less faith), and would be penalized in terms of dragon awesomeness. This Light civ should also still be a primary target for shadowspawn (or other consequences of being light),d espite perhaps having a lower total faith output than a Wide, but less Lighty, civ.
Perhaps there needs to be a separate variable - your "brightness" so to speak - that just tracks Light and Shadow.
Perhaps the shadow calculation is then just Light and Prestige. OR Light and Prestige AND faith, all together
Thoughts?
I really like this and I think I'm on board with it. My only real reservation is that if we do it this way, I think we should present the 'leaning' to the player through the UI so that they know how they're being graded. Otherwise it's difficult for them to know how to best affect the Dragon's turn order. This was one of the advantages of using faith - players could realize late that they weren't doing too well at it, but still mitigate that rather than be locked into it. (Not completely recover and always be first, but at least pull themselves up out of last.) As long as we maintain the possibility of doing that for the player (e.g. there are 'brightness' rewards during the Last Battle for specific tasks) then I think yours is the better system.
That does cross over with our notion of falling into the Shadow being "indirect" though. I would suggest the player can only see their 'brightness' during the Last Battle, but then you've got no metric to "prepare" for the Dragon by.
OK. The reason I don't love these names is they don't feel WoT to me at all. Like, I want an adjective that is more in-unverse. Barring that, I do think I like Stalwart Defenders/Protectors better than Staunch. Staunch is just a weird one, for me.
Stalwart Defenders is good with me - it's the Defenders part that I'm most fond of there.
Wow, no idea about changing the settler name. To what?
Not sure yet!
Well, then! Interesting. What would you call that, in-universe?
Also not sure! It would make sense for this name to be an "upgrade" to the one above, so hopefully the inspiration will come as a pair.
Right. The bubbles are just crazy stuff happening. Axes flying around, etc. I like this idea, I think! (ignoring the balefire thing for now) I don't know if you shoudl really be targeting specific civs. They're random aren't they? Couldn't they smack the shadow civs as well? I mean, the decline of the world does negatively impact the shadow civs too.
I see what you mean here. I don't think any player would ever be able to 'target' a specific civ - but it seems backwards to cause a bubble of evil in a Shadow civ after it just broke a Seal. That civ is doing well - why are we punishing it for it?
Another very similar alternative is that the more Seals that are broken at a given time, the more common bubbles of evil are globally. This makes sense in universe and shouldn't feedback directly into "I did my correct victory condition thing and the game is killing me because of it."
Right, the key distinction I was trying to highlight was that Faith (maybe hapiness or prestige) would be a direct reward for helping out the team.
I didn't see this distinction last time, but I think I do now! Makes sense, given the discussions above.
OK, maybe we currently stay with permanent alliance - no voting - and see how much it sucks.
Like the "choose a side" for the Last Battle, we can effectively "try out" this way of doing it for free. Even if we go for a system where people can join/leave/be kicked, before implementing that I'd have to put in a "locked down" one and make sure that worked - then layer leaving on top of that.
