S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

counterpoint · Aug 4, 2014

S3rgeus said:
The way I have Governors set up now is that any GP (or any one set by XML - check out the Unit_GovernorClasses table in this file) can become a Governor in a city in the same way that they activate their other abilities. The type of GP determines the type of Governor created (as specified in that XML file). I hadn't yet decided whether or not Governors could "revert" to being GPs later, but that idea is sounding more attractive given all of the content you've suggested. I plan to have Governors gain EXP/Levels, which would link well to GPs having a similar system (which you discuss below).

The idea of any GP becoming a Governor is interesting, and may work great. In some ways, it's like a mobile and non-permanent great improvement. I can't tell whether that's good or bad - why build an academy when you can just station the Scholar there (and not consume the tile). The bonus might have to be slight or something, especially if they aren't consumed. I do think it's interesting to think of the strategic implications - "use" the GP now, or get (minor) continuous benefits for now and "use" it later. There would, of course, need to be a specific bonus tied to each GP (e.g. happiness, etc.).

S3rgeus said:
With regards to the Ogier Stonemasons, I was thinking of having them as units that are gifted by Stedding to their allies (kind of like Militaristic City states) but that they're superpowered workers. I do like the flavorful way this uses Ogier though, and I'm not sure how useful upgraded workers will be. This is the same kind of thing as Gleemen (which I'll discuss specifically when I get to that part of your post), where I've added these very WoT-specific characters as new units, but that they actually could make good GP substitutes instead.

The super-worker use of Ogier is also a pretty cool idea. One thing about it, though, in terms of flavor, is that the ogier were usually building cool buildings and artsy stuff -not usually tilling fields and building mines. I could see, instead of a normal GP, the Stonemason could be a sort of unique GP-like unit, that was gifted by stedding as you say, but only does one or two speicific and weird things (waygates and groves, for instance). The production-oriented aspects of the GP I proposed would ideally be shifted elsewhere.
I was thinking similarly about Gai'shan as a sort of super-worker for the aiel - they willingly work, essentially, as slaves, for a year. This is a pretty lame UA or UU, though, so perhaps its better used as a social policy or something.

S3rgeus said:
If we go with a very GP-focused system, I'm wary that we'll need to balance the game a bit so that wide empires don't suffer for their comparative weakness in GP generation.

Ah, this is tricky, and you are of course right. That's probably a reason not to tie Aes Sedai to GP. But, in any case, it works for Civ, right? My goal in proposing those GPs is *not* to make "better" GPs than Civ has - instead, make them different. If GP balance fine in Civ, the goal should be to make our GPs be just as useful as those (no more), just in different ways.

counterpoint · Aug 4, 2014

S3rgeus said:
The mod does use G&K and I've been considering some espionage-related features. (Assassinate the Amyrlin to upset the balance of power in the Tower?) Religion is something I've been quite conflicted about. Worshipping the Light is really all we have in the traditional sense. But stretching the definition a bit, The Way of the Leaf, Ji'e'Toh, the Shadow, I remember the Sea Folk having some unique beliefs, and the Seanchan's omens could flesh out the numbers for choices. That's still too few for all of the religions on a huge map though.

Alright, as I said in the first of these replies, Faith *could* be incorporated into the production of Aes Sedai units and other channelers. This idea could be explored more.
The key things that seems to define faith and religion in civ are 1) interchangeability and 2) spreadability.
In Civ, christian civs can build mosques if you choose that belief. In Wot, some of these are extremely loaded with notions of what they mean - Ji'e'Toh, for instance. I think Civ was trying to *avoid* actually evoking a clear version of a religion, but here, the goal would not be anything like that (Ji'e'toh should really mean something), since we're trying to create a feel for the Civ.
Consequently, I think those things are better used as social policies or ideologies - the Religions here need to be essentially just "tags" that allow for some further customization - and spread between different civs. Remember, it needs to make sense to have your civ have a few religions spread without it, if that's how things work out. The Aiel warrior societies are an example of this.... but they obviously only make sense for the Aiel.

So what from the WoT mythos could be spreadable, and can be somewhat "flavorless"? I think whether we use Faith to build channelers needs to be decided before this can really be tackled. If it is tied to channeling, it also needs to make sense for Civs that go for the Tear or Far Madding route.

Weird as this sounds (and it *is* weird), maybe Faith is rebranded as "Culture" or something. Think about it. It spreads around, it doesn't really matter, fudnamentally. But Andor culture could, quite easily, spread to native civs. Our current Cultural victory is already moving in a different direction anyway - as are our great works. This could be a terrible idea, but its *an* idea.

S3rgeus said:
This is pure gold, I love this idea. There are even already techs that tie into this kind of system, despite my not having considered it. It's very WoT-ish and also should play well. I'll say that I'm a huge fan of BNW's cultural victory and I think we should keep the core gameplay of that. I think there's a fair amount to differentiate the Cultural and Diplomatic victories with this kind of approach.

I've been thinking the Diplomatic victory is more about the Ideologies - which I've been thinking of as the different ways that nations treat their channelers. That inevitably has an effect on their relationship to Tar Valon. I figure the three pillar choices are: complete freedom (channelers do what they like, with no central authority, a la Age of Legends, White Tower isn't happy about this, but they tolerate it), authority of the Tower (the Aes Sedai and Westlands from the books, all formally trained channelers come from the Tower, the Tower obviously likes Civs that choose this), and throw them in chains (like the Seanchan, they're weapons, less than people who should be captured and caged for their own and others' safety, the Tower hates Civs that choose this and tries to sabotage them). Since players support Ajahs and their actions can affect Ajahs' influence, the ones participating in the Diplo victory (options 1 & 2) are trying to get their supported Ajah into a position of power where they can be voted into a "World Leader" type position. The ones who chose option 3 (like Order in the main game) are trying to conquer the Tower (or everyone else) before an election causes someone else to have undeniable control over the world's politics (winning the game).

So, ok with the proposed Great Works, then?

I like the three ideologies, but it does make me wonder what you were planning on doing for branched of regular-old social policies. The social-policies and Ideologies don't feel particularly unified in Civ (obviously BNW was an addition later), but they do functionally work quite well. If that's our cultural victory, the SPs need to fit within that, too. Of course, maybe that's where we get the Ji'e'tohs and such.

I think I might suggest we tweak the three you've proposed slightly. The "throw them in chains" one is rather hardcore, and, obviously, is associated primarily with the Seanchan. And since ideologies are late-game only, that means the 'chan aren't themselves for the first half. I think that degree of hardcoreness should perhaps be a UA instead (more on those at a later date). In general "Disrust" or "Supsicion" or "Hatred" might be a better way of looking at these. That way, a Tear-like Civ could also choose the same path,a nd not necessarily be declaring war on the world like the Seanchan seem to want to do.
Also, are there examples of the First types (freedeom) in the WoT books? Maybe that one needs some tweaking too. Obviously all of this comes down to what the actual abilities of these ideologies end up, so we've got quite a ways to go before this is fleshed out.

S3rgeus said:
This is interesting and I think I like your version of the Ogier stonemason more than mine now. (Thankfully mine is not implemented, so no loss of work!) As you've said, I've put the Ways as a wonder and Waygates as late game buildings already. I think they parallel airports from normal CiV quite well, but with an added chance of everything going horribly wrong when you use them. They'll also have drawbacks during Tarmon Gai'don, where the Shadowspawn can move armies directly through the Ways.

OK, this might need to be put into a later convo, but I wanted to talk about the whole AoL tech thing. Put simply, I am concerned that having tech progress to AoL level things is perhaps a mistake. I know you're trying to work in all the cool and sexy things that exist[ed] in the WoT world, but I wonder if it might open up a can of worms. My thoughts and reasoning.

1) Put simply, there's a whole, whole lot of space between the tech level (and magic-level) of the WoT present-tense and the Age of Legends. They have planes, for example. We have very little content from the AoL - sho-wings, jo-cars, shock-lances, and a few other techs - most of which has only barely been mentioned. Consequently, you'd need to essentially invent a whole lot of content, connecting those dots (you can't go from Dragons to hover-cars in one era), and for obvious reasons none of it would have the immediate "feel" of WoT. Obviously, this would also be a lot of work. I know you were planning on ending in the Industrial Era, but in reality, the WoT Tarmon Gaidon takes place in the renaissance - and even then, just barely. That's a whole lot to either skip or dream up.

2) There's also the cosmological argument that may support this. Some fans theorize that the First Age (i.e., the age before the AoL) is *our* time. Thom mentions some legends that are thought to be references to contemporary Earth http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/First_Age. That means the AoL could be OUR future, and thus a LOT of changes happened in the interim. The AoL was a utopia that had forgotten war and such - the end-game of your mod is Tarmon Gaidon, definitely nothing like the AoL. Remember, I'm looking to provide the "feel" of the books.

3) Coming off of that note, the tech from the AoL is iconic in people's heads as things that came from the distant past. Having them be things hanging around, waiting to be discovered, fits the mythos better, IMO.

Earlier posters have left some terrific ideas. I love the ideas of certain things being discovered as Natural Wonders, for instance. Hidden Antiquity sites (or something like them) could be all AoL.
You can still have a Tech "Waygates," but it wouldn't be *building* waygates. It would be discovering them, or figuring out how to use them. "Cuendillar" and "ter'angreal" could still exist as techs, but it would probably be more along the lines of "learning wtf ter'angreal are" rather than building them, which would probably be in the middle of the tech tree, not the end (I understand, of course, that Elayne does discover how to make them in the book (sort of), but that's another story). In short, I'm thinking more along the lines of "discovering america" - something that was already there, rather than "building america." I don't think jo-cars are a good idea (but you could maybe find an old one!)

I have some thoughts on different eras and such that I will share another time.

One crazy, crazy idea that is so WoT - and probably impossible - would be to somehow make your next game use your previous game as its backstory. Time is a wheel, after all. The earth would be altered due to some sort of a breaking, but artifacts and ruins and stuff would be based on a previous game. Obviously not at all in Civ's code (and not really worth adding), but a cool idea nonetheless.

As far as all my GP, glad you like em. I think the key is going to be choosing the right abilities for balancing purposes - obviously we can't use them all. Something to revisit.

S3rgeus · Aug 5, 2014

counterpoint said:
Alright, so as I mentioned, there are a lot of ideas swimming around in my head about how channeling might work Many of that concerns levelling them and saidin and whatnot, but for now I think one thing to start considering is *how* you earn them, since it seems fundamentally important to the way this mod works.. I'll keep thinking on it and codify some thoughts in a later post, but for now, I'll merely say some of the things I've been mulling over.

For me, there are a few things that make Aes Sedai complicated - things that, IMO, would be good to implement somehow.

1) Aes Sedai are almost never directly affiliated with a given nation. Thus, producing them as normal seems antithetical to how they operate.
2) Aes Sedai transcend era and tech - with some exceptions, the Aes Sedai in the After breaking era would be just as powerful (perhaps more powerful) as those fighting in Tarmon Gaidon. Thus tying them to a tech tree seems problematic - although, of course, certain upgrades and such would occur over time, as things are (re)discovered or support systems are put in place.
3) Aes Sedai are tremendously powerful. In the last book, they kill trollocs and soldiers by the thousands. They should not be common, for balancing purposes.

All these apply most definitely to Aes Sedai specifically, but also apply to a certain extent to all channelers

The things I'm thinking might lead to a civ gaining an Aes sedai (or limit their production of them) are:

1) Consumption of a particularly rare strategic resource, say, "Old Blood," "Angreal," or other things we can come up with - essentially, a story-flavored cap on AE production. The resources need not be strictly tied to worked tiles (i.e., could be based on buildings and such).

2) Being gifted them by Tar Valon. This would necessitate TV being able to be the "ally" of multiple nations. Perhaps the most "realistic," but also not as strategically significant, as it would be somewhat random.

3) Produced like GP are - a city might pump out an AE every X turns due to resources present, buildings there, wonders, etc. This could definitely be interesting as a means of producing a channeler of any type, since it feels similar to how channeling people just sort of appear in the books. Unfortunately, the drawback to this method is that the production of GP might already get cluttered with all the different types we've been dreaming up.

4) Produced/Purchased via a replacement for Faith. I'm not sure what this would be yet, but I'll think on it. Could be, again, something like the "Old Blood" (you know, how so many Two Rivers Folks were channelers or Ta'veren) or Tower Influence or something more abstract.

One of these mechanisms could work for Aes Sedai (and Ashaman, maybe), while another could work for channelers in general. A Wisdom would obviously not need the White Tower favor to exist - All non Aes Sedai/Asha'man channelers could work similarly to other normal units. Perhaps multiple conditions would need to be met for certain units to be produced (e.g., proper Faith AND relations with TV to build an Aes Sedai).

I'll keep thinking on this, but I'm curious which methods you prefer. Again, I'm not a fan of it being just strict production, at least not at the moment.

Sorry, my post was ambiguous here. When I referred to "this", I meant your idea. I'm not the biggest fan of the Aes Sedai as a normal unit on the tech tree either, but for right now it works and can be easily removed for a more complex system like you suggest - which makes it a good candidate for iterative improvement later on in development. That will depend on how much overlap the Aes Sedai system(s) have with others (like GPs). If they share a lot of it, then it's not much work to change them over when the majority of those systems work.

From the four options you outline, I like the flavor of 3, but as you've said, it's got some gameplay drawbacks. I think linking them to a strategic resource would play well, and agree about GP cluttering with idea 3.

I feel I should note that units which drastically overpower others in their given era/time of usage favor human players over AIs, since we're better at protecting and prioritizing individual units and putting that power to use against key targets.

counterpoint said:
The idea of any GP becoming a Governor is interesting, and may work great. In some ways, it's like a mobile and non-permanent great improvement. I can't tell whether that's good or bad - why build an academy when you can just station the Scholar there (and not consume the tile). The bonus might have to be slight or something, especially if they aren't consumed. I do think it's interesting to think of the strategic implications - "use" the GP now, or get (minor) continuous benefits for now and "use" it later. There would, of course, need to be a specific bonus tied to each GP (e.g. happiness, etc.).

Maybe this is just my play style, but I only ever use the GP improvements for GPs that I get very early in the game (like Babylon's GS at Writing). Come later in the game, +8 beakers per turn vs. 2000 right now is no contest - the game would have to go on well beyond when someone has won already for the numbers to even out. Maybe the multipliers really do make up the difference though - someone who plays at a higher difficulty may be able to advise on this. I'd be much more inclined to use a non-consuming (or even consuming) Governor system than the tile improvements in general. There is room for abuse here - undoubtedly turning a GP back into a unit and using a different ability will create some fun gameplay quirk I haven't thought of yet that gives that player a serious advantage.

counterpoint said:
Alright, as I said in the first of these replies, Faith *could* be incorporated into the production of Aes Sedai units and other channelers. This idea could be explored more.
The key things that seems to define faith and religion in civ are 1) interchangeability and 2) spreadability.
In Civ, christian civs can build mosques if you choose that belief. In Wot, some of these are extremely loaded with notions of what they mean - Ji'e'Toh, for instance. I think Civ was trying to *avoid* actually evoking a clear version of a religion, but here, the goal would not be anything like that (Ji'e'toh should really mean something), since we're trying to create a feel for the Civ.
Consequently, I think those things are better used as social policies or ideologies - the Religions here need to be essentially just "tags" that allow for some further customization - and spread between different civs. Remember, it needs to make sense to have your civ have a few religions spread without it, if that's how things work out. The Aiel warrior societies are an example of this.... but they obviously only make sense for the Aiel.

So what from the WoT mythos could be spreadable, and can be somewhat "flavorless"? I think whether we use Faith to build channelers needs to be decided before this can really be tackled. If it is tied to channeling, it also needs to make sense for Civs that go for the Tear or Far Madding route.

Weird as this sounds (and it *is* weird), maybe Faith is rebranded as "Culture" or something. Think about it. It spreads around, it doesn't really matter, fudnamentally. But Andor culture could, quite easily, spread to native civs. Our current Cultural victory is already moving in a different direction anyway - as are our great works. This could be a terrible idea, but its *an* idea.

I think the examples I gave fit quite well into the CiV notion of religions though - the main "stretch" is to our notion of religion in reality. The actual religions in base CiV do, in reality, have their own flavors to them, but CiV separates that flavor into the beliefs and lets you mix and match as you choose. In the same way that you can have Catholicism building Mosques in CiV or Shinto that worships Poseidon, I'd say the WoTMod should allow for a Ji'e'toh that is wary of owls hooting at dawn (Seanchan omen in the books).

This ties in to what I'll say about the Ideologies next. While the Civs' uniques will lend them towards particular strategies (because that often is what makes Civs fun), some of the flavor of real world Civs have been extracted and put into the ideologies, so you can mix and match. You can pick Autocracy with Gandhi and try to conquer the world. India's UA will work against you - but it's still possible and interesting. I don't think the disconnection there is an issue, and is inherently what makes CiV fun and replayable - something I envision this mod trying to accomplish, just with WoT instead of Earth.

counterpoint said:
So, ok with the proposed Great Works, then?

I'll try to take a closer look and consider further, but from a first glance, yeah.

counterpoint said:
I like the three ideologies, but it does make me wonder what you were planning on doing for branched of regular-old social policies. The social-policies and Ideologies don't feel particularly unified in Civ (obviously BNW was an addition later), but they do functionally work quite well. If that's our cultural victory, the SPs need to fit within that, too. Of course, maybe that's where we get the Ji'e'tohs and such.

I've always thought of the old style Social Policies as the general characteristics of your CiV in this particular game - where their focus lies. The Ideologies define government types and diplomatic affiliation, which meshes the diplo victory's connection to Tar Valon well with Ideologies being outlooks on channelers for the nations.

counterpoint said:
I think I might suggest we tweak the three you've proposed slightly. The "throw them in chains" one is rather hardcore, and, obviously, is associated primarily with the Seanchan. And since ideologies are late-game only, that means the 'chan aren't themselves for the first half. I think that degree of hardcoreness should perhaps be a UA instead (more on those at a later date). In general "Disrust" or "Supsicion" or "Hatred" might be a better way of looking at these. That way, a Tear-like Civ could also choose the same path,a nd not necessarily be declaring war on the world like the Seanchan seem to want to do.
Also, are there examples of the First types (freedeom) in the WoT books? Maybe that one needs some tweaking too. Obviously all of this comes down to what the actual abilities of these ideologies end up, so we've got quite a ways to go before this is fleshed out.

Following on from what I said above about mixing and matching - I don't think having "throw them in chains" as an ideology detracts from the Seanchan for the start of the game. This is mainly because I don't think the Civ itself should be so prescriptive about how the player chooses to play it. I think a Seanchan that chooses to worship the Light and embrace channelers and grant them every freedom should be a valid gameplay option (and analogous to Autocracy Gandhi). Maybe the UA will work against that (depends on the UA), but the player should still be able to choose it.

The three main game Ideologies I've always thought of as crystallizations of particular major superpowers from the 20th century. Autocracy is Nazi Germany, Order is the USSR, and Freedom is USA - all very loosely. There are ancient Civs that never participated in any particular part of that triangle - but I still feel like it works when they reach the modern era. (Eg. Carthage, Shaka)

WoT presents two major outlooks on channelers - as you've noted "complete freedom" is a fabrication on my part - Tar Valon and the Seanchan. I think having 3 choices is important because it keeps variety in the 'tourism' influences in the modern era. There might be room to create the third ideology from the differences between Tar Valon and Salidar when the Tower was divided - but I don't particularly remember any stark ideological differences between the two - it was mainly about actual personal leadership and how to deal with Rand.

counterpoint said:
OK, this might need to be put into a later convo, but I wanted to talk about the whole AoL tech thing. Put simply, I am concerned that having tech progress to AoL level things is perhaps a mistake. I know you're trying to work in all the cool and sexy things that exist[ed] in the WoT world, but I wonder if it might open up a can of worms. My thoughts and reasoning.

1) Put simply, there's a whole, whole lot of space between the tech level (and magic-level) of the WoT present-tense and the Age of Legends. They have planes, for example. We have very little content from the AoL - sho-wings, jo-cars, shock-lances, and a few other techs - most of which has only barely been mentioned. Consequently, you'd need to essentially invent a whole lot of content, connecting those dots (you can't go from Dragons to hover-cars in one era), and for obvious reasons none of it would have the immediate "feel" of WoT. Obviously, this would also be a lot of work. I know you were planning on ending in the Industrial Era, but in reality, the WoT Tarmon Gaidon takes place in the renaissance - and even then, just barely. That's a whole lot to either skip or dream up.

2) There's also the cosmological argument that may support this. Some fans theorize that the First Age (i.e., the age before the AoL) is *our* time. Thom mentions some legends that are thought to be references to contemporary Earth http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/First_Age. That means the AoL could be OUR future, and thus a LOT of changes happened in the interim. The AoL was a utopia that had forgotten war and such - the end-game of your mod is Tarmon Gaidon, definitely nothing like the AoL. Remember, I'm looking to provide the "feel" of the books.

3) Coming off of that note, the tech from the AoL is iconic in people's heads as things that came from the distant past. Having them be things hanging around, waiting to be discovered, fits the mythos better, IMO.

Earlier posters have left some terrific ideas. I love the ideas of certain things being discovered as Natural Wonders, for instance. Hidden Antiquity sites (or something like them) could be all AoL.
You can still have a Tech "Waygates," but it wouldn't be *building* waygates. It would be discovering them, or figuring out how to use them. "Cuendillar" and "ter'angreal" could still exist as techs, but it would probably be more along the lines of "learning wtf ter'angreal are" rather than building them, which would probably be in the middle of the tech tree, not the end (I understand, of course, that Elayne does discover how to make them in the book (sort of), but that's another story). In short, I'm thinking more along the lines of "discovering america" - something that was already there, rather than "building america." I don't think jo-cars are a good idea (but you could maybe find an old one!)

I have some thoughts on different eras and such that I will share another time.

Glad to see some feedback on this that mirrors my own thought process. I don't know if I've mentioned in this topic before, but I've largely moved away from having the Age of Legends as one of the playable eras in the tech tree. Like you said, they're a good source of relics for Archaeology and fit well into the game that way. I think the Last Battle is a very compelling way to end the game and the disparity between the Age of Legends era and the Last Battle starting made that all very strange.

I think a few of the wonders are worth breaking flavor for though. They present great in-universe end-game content (The Choedan Kal springs to mind) and I feel like discovering them (via project/'building') would be underwhelming.

counterpoint said:
One crazy, crazy idea that is so WoT - and probably impossible - would be to somehow make your next game use your previous game as its backstory. Time is a wheel, after all. The earth would be altered due to some sort of a breaking, but artifacts and ruins and stuff would be based on a previous game. Obviously not at all in Civ's code (and not really worth adding), but a cool idea nonetheless.

As far as all my GP, glad you like em. I think the key is going to be choosing the right abilities for balancing purposes - obviously we can't use them all. Something to revisit.

This idea sounds really fun! I like it a lot. I mean, it requires a fairly monstrous amount of work, so it's a "far in the future" kind of deal, but it's remarkably flavorful and lends itself well to gameplay.

counterpoint · Aug 5, 2014

S3rgeus said:
From the four options you outline, I like the flavor of 3, but as you've said, it's got some gameplay drawbacks. I think linking them to a strategic resource would play well, and agree about GP cluttering with idea 3.

I feel I should note that units which drastically overpower others in their given era/time of usage favor human players over AIs, since we're better at protecting and prioritizing individual units and putting that power to use against key targets.

Alright, well I'll keep thinking on this, and should be able to drum up a few proposals in the near future. I'll try to follow a few of these ideas further, so we have some options.

As far as Aes Sedai being overpowered - I think the Three Oaths (at least as I'm considering them) will help counter that. Wilders and other channelers will likely be more balanced in-era. And, of course, male channelers have their own set of checks-and-balancing (i.e., madness).

S3rgeus said:
Maybe this is just my play style, but I only ever use the GP improvements for GPs that I get very early in the game (like Babylon's GS at Writing). Come later in the game, +8 beakers per turn vs. 2000 right now is no contest - the game would have to go on well beyond when someone has won already for the numbers to even out. Maybe the multipliers really do make up the difference though - someone who plays at a higher difficulty may be able to advise on this. I'd be much more inclined to use a non-consuming (or even consuming) Governor system than the tile improvements in general. There is room for abuse here - undoubtedly turning a GP back into a unit and using a different ability will create some fun gameplay quirk I haven't thought of yet that gives that player a serious advantage.

Yes, your play style is exactly the same as mine. I think, though, based on some of the GP abilities I've proposed, enough of these have unusual situational effects (i.e., not just numbers) that might end up more compelling than the simple value decision we make when building early-game GPs in base Civ.

S3rgeus said:
I think the examples I gave fit quite well into the CiV notion of religions though - the main "stretch" is to our notion of religion in reality. The actual religions in base CiV do, in reality, have their own flavors to them, but CiV separates that flavor into the beliefs and lets you mix and match as you choose. In the same way that you can have Catholicism building Mosques in CiV or Shinto that worships Poseidon, I'd say the WoTMod should allow for a Ji'e'toh that is wary of owls hooting at dawn (Seanchan omen in the books).

While I agree with you in theory - yes, of course, we could definitely make the "religions" of WoT totally interchangeable and swappable, like religions in base civ, the issue is in function. In Civ, while religious beliefs do offer minor benefits (some extra happiness, gold, etc.), a huge part of them is merely self-sustaining - better religion = more faith = more spreading of your religion = better religion. This of course changes a bit once Faith is used to buy GP and stuff like that - but even then, this is mostly true.

This is, for me, somewhat problematic with regards to some of the "Philosophies" you've listed, because they seem like they *could* potentially have more real ramifications on a given civ, and not just exist to help spread themselves around. Examining a few, very briefly (Again, these are really more philosophies and stuff than religions)

Way of the Leaf - bonuses while at peace (penalties when at war), perhaps some economic/trade implications
Ji'e'toh - honor-based combat discipline (culture from kills, combat bonuses, etc.), gai'shan servant class (production bonuses?)
Daes Dae'mar - diplomatic bonuses, etc.
Way of the Light (children) - bonuses vs darkfriends, shadowspawn, corruption (in theory, we know that didn't work well in practice)

I don't know, but to me those "feel" a little bit more like Social Policy categories. Obviously we can't have it be that if your civ follows the Leaf, they must be pacifists, but the social policies allow for more diverse perks than what I associate with religions in civs (+1 faith for every desert tile, 25% missionary range, etc.). Also, it lets us have social policies categories that feel very in-universe.

Also, the story of earth has very much been about the spread of religions (at least for large parts of its history), while WoT really comes down to Light v Shadow - which is an extremely interesting thing, especially considering the Last Battle Victory type (that's another conversation, though).

So what were you planning on doing with the social policies, if not this kind of thing? Of course, that doesn't help get me any closer to finding a use for religion. If you think the religious beliefs could actually have more of an in-game impact, then it could work. And I don't think we'd need the full set civ has, since only 5 are allowed per game. Still, hard to find more than just a few....

S3rgeus said:
This ties in to what I'll say about the Ideologies next. While the Civs' uniques will lend them towards particular strategies (because that often is what makes Civs fun), some of the flavor of real world Civs have been extracted and put into the ideologies, so you can mix and match. You can pick Autocracy with Gandhi and try to conquer the world. India's UA will work against you - but it's still possible and interesting. I don't think the disconnection there is an issue, and is inherently what makes CiV fun and replayable - something I envision this mod trying to accomplish, just with WoT instead of Earth.

I absolutely agree - all civ-strategy combos should be viable. I didn't mean to imply that the Seanchan would have to do anything, I merely was stating that since Ideologies are late-game only (what is it, three factories needed or something?) that the Seanchan wouldn't necessarily get to "Be themselves" until then. But then again, The US in Civ doesn't get to really "be themselves" until 1776 rolls around...

S3rgeus said:
I've always thought of the old style Social Policies as the general characteristics of your CiV in this particular game - where their focus lies. The Ideologies define government types and diplomatic affiliation, which meshes the diplo victory's connection to Tar Valon well with Ideologies being outlooks on channelers for the nations.

WoT presents two major outlooks on channelers - as you've noted "complete freedom" is a fabrication on my part - Tar Valon and the Seanchan. I think having 3 choices is important because it keeps variety in the 'tourism' influences in the modern era. There might be room to create the third ideology from the differences between Tar Valon and Salidar when the Tower was divided - but I don't particularly remember any stark ideological differences between the two - it was mainly about actual personal leadership and how to deal with Rand.

I agree with your perspective here, though I'll note that here we have again the blurriness between ours and Civ's victory types. Ideologies do play a roll in diplo, of course... but ultimately, they are earned via culture, on the path to a cultural victory. Kind of a weird thing, but it's true, at least in terms of game mechanics.

Yeah, I think your Three are good, and they actually somewhat map on to the Civ ones somewhat. Were you thinking that this solely concerned the viewing/treatment of channelers, or would it concern the culture/gov as a whole? The reason I ask is because if we take Tear and Seanchan as too examples, they would both adopt the same Ideology with regards to channelers (Distrust or whatever it is ultimately called), in that channeling is strictly not allowed (freely) in either.. Obviously, though, they're larger cultures and social systems, though, are quite different, as Seanchan seems more like a totalitarian regime, while Tear is more or less a oligarchy/monarchy/feudal kind of thing.

Shara might be the only example I can think of in the WoT-era of the "Freedom" one, in that the Ayyad women seem to kind of have the run of the place. But again, that's just their attitude on channelers - the rest of their society seems to be somewhat imperial like the 'chan. It's likely that there are some "historical" nations that would also adopt this philosophy.

As far as the differences in philosophy between Elaida's Tower and the Salidar tower , one main thing concerns inclusiveness and a larger "channeler community." Egwene was all about bringing any female channeler into their fold, great or weak. So the elitism/exclusivism of the white/Ivory Tower isn't same as an inclusive, open community. Also, they do disagree on Rand, as you mentioned - the treatment of male channelers is another potential angle here (especially once the Black Tower pops up).

counterpoint · Aug 8, 2014

So I've been putting a lot of thought (and some research) into how we might be able to accommodate Faith in this mod. As stated previously, the issue with Religion in the WoT universe is that there is little organized religion in Randland, and even inasmuch as there is, there are very few varieties of that religion.
What I've tried to do here is branch out and try to come up with things that could be used instead of a strict interpretation of Religion. What I was searching for were things from the WoT universe that, ideally:
A) Have appropriate variety (there are 13 Religions in Civ. While of course only 5 are in a given game, it would be nice to have more than the minimum of 5)
B) are not better used as other mechanics of this mod
C) are not explicitly and necessarily tied to a particular WoT Civ
D) Are "flavorless," in that they don't automatically prescribe certain things about your Civ (e.g., a "Worships the Dark One" Religion would consequently not be appropriate.)
E) Are "spreadable"

Not all of the ideas I came up with necessarily satisfy all of the above. Most of the time, I will note when that is the case.
Note: I'm not really tackling what we would do with these religions whether the Founders perks, or the "purchases" you can make with Faith. This issue seems difficult that I think we should solve this before we worry about that comparably easy problem.
Note 2: I'm putting in a few ideas that I actually don't like and wasn't able to properly flesh out, just in case they spark some ideas.

Anyways:

CONCEPT 1 RELIGIONS/BELIEF SYSTEMS

This is probably not going to work, due to the lack of sufficient options (and the fact that several are very problematic). Also, some of these aren't really religions at all, more like all-encompassing customs.
The "yeild" of these would likely be Faith, or some other synonym of it.

1 - Way of the Light (whitecloak founding beliefs) Unfortunately adds a lot of automatic faction affiliation to your Civ. Also, likely better used elsewhere as a Social Policy option, Project or something, or even UA for Amadicia [who don't have much to characterize them in WoT aside from the Whitecloak "residency" there])
2 - Ji'e'Toh (Aiel system of honor) Almost the identical issues as above possibly best used as a Social Policy or Aiel UA. Also not really a religion.
3 - Way of the Leaf (from Tuatha'an) Not really a religion. Possibly should be used elsewhere as a Policy or some other thing.
4 - Omenology (Seanchan superstition) can't think of a better name for this.
5 - Solstice Festivals (Two Rivers etc.) - again, don't have a better name for this. I'm thinking of the T.R. Celebration of Bel Tine, Winternight, Sunday, etc.
6 - Cult of the Dragon (Masema, the Prophet's religion) Don't know if there's a better way to put it. This is difficult because the Barbarians you are considering are Dragonsworn.
7 - The Water Way (Amayar, the natives of Tremalking) we know very little of this (or its people), other than that it is similar to the Way of the Leaf.
8 - The Shadow problematic for obvious reasons concerning the Last Battle and such. Definitely better used elsewhere.
9 Messiah Prophesy not sure what else to call this. The prophesies and beliefs surrounding Demandred's rise in Shara.
10 Prophesy of the Cooramoor too closely aligned with the Sea Folk
11 Prophesy of the Car'a'carn too closely associated with the Aiel.

CONCEPT II CUSTOMS

This is a generalized extrapolation of the Religions above. Put simply, these are the idiosyncracies of the various cultures of the game. Some of these are definitely better used elsewhere int he Mod. One nice thing, though, is that many of these are rather flavorless and inconsequential, but still cool seeming.
The "yield" of these could either be Faith, or Tradition, or fealty, or fidelity, or something
Note: many of these are, of course, repeats of above (listed first). Many are also, "reaches."

1 Way of the Light see above for issues
2 Ji'e'toh see above for issues
3 Way of the Leaf see above for (very slight) issues
4 Omenology
5 Solstice Festivals
6 The Water Way
7 Caste System (Thinking Seanchan and Shara) perhaps too much connotation
9 Daes Dae Mar (Cairhienin uber-politics) perhaps best left for elsewhere in the game, such as Social Policy, espionage, or the Cairhienin UA.
10 Deuling Tradition (Ebou Dar) some possibility this could be used instead as a component of Altara's UA. (or even UU!)
11 Bargaining Tradition (a la the Sea Folk) again, some possibility this could be used as either a Social Policy or Sea Folk UA.
12 Warrior Tradition (a la Shienar) got to be a better way to name this. Also, likely to be associated with Shienar as a U.A.
13 Plural Marriage/Polygamy (Aiel) that's right!
14 Feast of Lights (Caihrien) possibly already included as a part of the solstice festivals
15 Village Council (a la Two Rivers)
16 Matriarchy (Saldaea) rather weird, I confess
17 Familial War (Saldaea) kind of weird, but I'm referring to how the wives and family join the husbands in war, helping out however they can.
18 Code of Honor (Arafel) couldn't think of a better name for it. Arafellans, apparently, self-inflict punishment on themselves for perceived faults. Very similar to Ji'e'toh
19 Mating Rites (Saldaea, Arad Doman) this is stupid. I'm referring to the sa'sara dance and the Domani seduction stereotype.
20 Peace Bonding (Far Madding) referring to how everybody in the city must bind their weapons to keep the peace. Kind of cool, but a slight possibility that this would be used elsewhere.
21 Slavery (Seanchan and Shara) not likely one many will want to choose...
22 Segregation (Shara) similar to above, and similarly distasteful. Sharans keep the channelers separate from society.
23 Naming Tradition (Seanchan) need a better phrase to describe their conferring of new names to people, etc.

CONCEPT III FACTIONS

This exercise was largely a failure I was digging and seeing what non-nation factions there were. These are all problematic in that they intersect with other parts of the game.
Also, its not likely that we could justify the dissonance of, say, Tear ending up converted to the White Tower or something, when player is playing them as anti-channeling.
If this were to somehow work (which it won't), "yield" would likely be Loyalty or something.

1 Children of the Light
2 Dragonsworn
3 White Tower (specific Ajahs, even. Obviously used in your diplo system)
4 Rebel White Tower
5 Black Tower (definitely needed elsewhere)
6 The Kin (likely needed elsewhere)
7 The Illuminators (needed elsewhere, I'm sure)

CONCEPT IV FASHION/STYLE

In some ways this concept is perfect. It is completely bland in the sense of any bad connotations it might have (i.e. no problematic contradictions). Also, this stuff is highly unlikely to occur or be needed elsewhere in the game.
Also, it is VERY in keeping with the style of the books, which go on and on and on (and on) about how people dress and such. Mention the Domani to anybody who reads WoT and they'll immediately say "tight dresses!" This seems like the aspect of Culture RJ was most interested in (instead of music, art, and writing).
Also, mechanically this works great, when it comes to spreading it along, that is. With regards to "spending" Faith though, it's a bit odd buy a great engineer because your people are so stylish!?
On the other hand, it's also pretty stupid. It doesn't feel that awesome to have "Forked beards" associated with your civ. I guess the Kandori were ok with it, though. That said, perhaps we could find a selection of these that work ok.
The "yield" here would likely be something weird like "Popularity," "Culture," "Tradition," or something. This is tricky, as "Faith" seems kind of dumb.
So yeah, very odd, but honestly one of the better Concepts I think. Some of these are much more iconic in the minds of WoT readers (and thus better choices)

1) Forked Beards (Kandor)
2) Cylindrical Caps (Tarabon)
3) Veils (Tarabon.... and the Aiel)
4) Cadin sor (Aiel)
5) Braids (Two Rivers)
6) Wool (Two Rivers)
7) Top Knots (Shienar)
8) Shaved Heads (Seanchan)
9) Tatoos (Shara and the Sea Folk)
10) Tight Clothing (Arad Doman)
11) Earrings (Sea Folk)
12) Hadori (Malkieri leather headband thing
13) Ki'sain (Malieri "dot" thing Nyneave wears)
14) Marriage Knives (Ebou Dar/Altara)
15) Oiled, Pointed Beards (Tear
16) Bells in Hair (Arafel)
17) Stripes (Cairhien)
18) Powdered Hair (Cairhien)
19) Handlebar Mustaches (Sadlaea)
20) Velvet Bows (Amadicia)
21) Curly Mustaches (Murandy)
22) High-necked dresses (Far Madding)
23) Wooden Buttons (Gheadan)
24) Beards with no mustache (Illian)

Before you ask, no, I didn't do that off the top of my head. Many I had to look up (who remembers anything about Arafel?)

CONCEPT VI LINEAGE

This one is most likely also a failure. It's not well-developed, but considering the notion of "old blood" in WoT and stuff, I thought it might be an option to just have a random people or city signifier, indicating that your people descend from that lineage. Kind of odd.
"Yield" would be "purity" or something weird like that.
In any case, the way I look at it, there are really only a couple options:

1) The Ten Nations this is problematic because Manetheren is apparently a Civ you are planning on using (these Nations are all post-breaking). Kind of cool, though. The other 9 nations aren't likely to be used by us (and we could decide on Two Rivers instead of Manetheren if this became a huge problem).
2) Cities from the Age of Legends there are about a dozen of them that have been named, apparently. Not iconic to WoT readers, though, as they are only mentioned in random flashbacks and forsaken-talk and stuff.

Anyways, that's what I got!

S3rgeus · Aug 11, 2014

Sorry for the delay getting back on here, I was away for the weekend. I see you there's a lot to catch up on! I've only picked out some parts of your posts here (and hopefully have covered all of the questions, but if I've missed any feel free to point me back at them) but I don't want to give the impression that I'm skimming over stuff or dismissing any parts of what you've said. It's super awesome that you've put so much thought into this and I think the mod can be a lot better for it.

counterpoint said:
While I agree with you in theory - yes, of course, we could definitely make the "religions" of WoT totally interchangeable and swappable, like religions in base civ, the issue is in function. In Civ, while religious beliefs do offer minor benefits (some extra happiness, gold, etc.), a huge part of them is merely self-sustaining - better religion = more faith = more spreading of your religion = better religion. This of course changes a bit once Faith is used to buy GP and stuff like that - but even then, this is mostly true.

This is, for me, somewhat problematic with regards to some of the "Philosophies" you've listed, because they seem like they *could* potentially have more real ramifications on a given civ, and not just exist to help spread themselves around. Examining a few, very briefly (Again, these are really more philosophies and stuff than religions)

This is something I aimed to fix. Like you say, a lot of the religious beliefs only make it easier to spread more religion, which isn't in and of itself all that helpful (except for some diplo bonuses with ideologies and the AI in general). However, I think Firaxis went in the right direction with a couple of beliefs and those have turned out to be the dramatically most effective ones.

Example: Tithe. +1 gold for each 4 followers of this religion. If you get Tithe, then you can finance your army on the influx of gold from spreading your religion. (Which, flavor-wise, I love - you've effectively created a crusading army.) I'd thought some beliefs could increase faith (something needs to be the faith generator to keep the religion going), but we'd focus primarily on cross-feature gameplay benefits that make most beliefs of a similar power to Tithe.

counterpoint said:
So what were you planning on doing with the social policies, if not this kind of thing?

I hadn't given a massive amount of thought to social policies yet. My hazy planning for that was something along the lines of governance systems like you mentioned about the Seanchan being an empire, whereas Tear is more feudal.

counterpoint said:
I agree with your perspective here, though I'll note that here we have again the blurriness between ours and Civ's victory types. Ideologies do play a roll in diplo, of course... but ultimately, they are earned via culture, on the path to a cultural victory. Kind of a weird thing, but it's true, at least in terms of game mechanics.

I'm a bit unclear on this one, because cultural and diplomatic victories seem quite distinct in my mind. We've got a similar sort of divide as CiV. The flavor of Prestige (rather than tourism) layered on top of new Great Work types (Prophecies, etc, that you listed) based on GPs and some wonders, are the primary drivers of the cultural victory.

Ideology and relationship with the Tower - forming alliances and pushing influences with supported Ajahs much like players vote in the World Congress - drives the diplomatic victory.

counterpoint said:
Yeah, I think your Three are good, and they actually somewhat map on to the Civ ones somewhat. Were you thinking that this solely concerned the viewing/treatment of channelers, or would it concern the culture/gov as a whole? The reason I ask is because if we take Tear and Seanchan as too examples, they would both adopt the same Ideology with regards to channelers (Distrust or whatever it is ultimately called), in that channeling is strictly not allowed (freely) in either.. Obviously, though, they're larger cultures and social systems, though, are quite different, as Seanchan seems more like a totalitarian regime, while Tear is more or less a oligarchy/monarchy/feudal kind of thing.

I think having the three ideologies as channeling outlook meshes well with the structure of the victories and also gives us more to do with social policies. If we shift the form of governance into social policies, then we can create the differences you outline here.

counterpoint said:
CONCEPT IV FASHION/STYLE

In some ways this concept is perfect. It is completely bland in the sense of any bad connotations it might have (i.e. no problematic contradictions). Also, this stuff is highly unlikely to occur or be needed elsewhere in the game.
Also, it is VERY in keeping with the style of the books, which go on and on and on (and on) about how people dress and such. Mention the Domani to anybody who reads WoT and they'll immediately say "tight dresses!" This seems like the aspect of Culture RJ was most interested in (instead of music, art, and writing).
Also, mechanically this works great, when it comes to spreading it along, that is. With regards to "spending" Faith though, it's a bit odd buy a great engineer because your people are so stylish!?
On the other hand, it's also pretty stupid. It doesn't feel that awesome to have "Forked beards" associated with your civ. I guess the Kandori were ok with it, though. That said, perhaps we could find a selection of these that work ok.

I think the end of this quote is quite important, because I think I'd be quite underwhelmed as a player to have these as spreadable 'religions' (particularly coming from their flavor importance in base CiV). However, I think there is a lot of great content here (I'm not quoting the list for brevity, but there are entries that immediately remind me of those nations). WoT devotes a lot of time to this and it would be remiss to skip over it entirely. I'm not sure if it's something that should come up in text - DoM screens, Civilopedia entries, and custom diplomacy responses - rather than gameplay though.

Here I'll go through a few of the 'religious beliefs' you mentioned (picking from sections 2 and 3) with what I was thinking regarding the beliefs' effects, and how they fit into the flavor/with other combinations. I think the actual names could go to religions and then corresponding beliefs give those religions whatever bonuses. (You could make a "Light" religion that is benefited more by siding with the Shadow, if you want.)

counterpoint said:
1 - Way of the Light (whitecloak founding beliefs) Unfortunately adds a lot of automatic faction affiliation to your Civ. Also, likely better used elsewhere as a Social Policy option, Project or something, or even UA for Amadicia [who don't have much to characterize them in WoT aside from the Whitecloak "residency" there])

I'm thinking along the lines of the religion being called "Way of the Light" (or just "Light") and the belief being "Bane of Shadow" or something along those lines. (Beliefs and religions aren't necessarily connected - though one inspires the other in this case, much as Mosques are associated with Islam in reality, but can be adopted by any religion that chooses the belief).

Combat bonus against Shadowspawn and gain faith when you kill their units.

This is a faith generator that has a potentially very relevant gameplay effect as well. (If you start near the Blight you'll be fighting Shadowspawn for most of the game.) But what if the Last Battle rolls around and you decide to side with the Shadow? I don't think that's inherently a problem. You sacrifice the bonus this belief gives you, but you might decide that's a worthy trade-off. Your civ may have the holy city for the Light-worshipping religion, but your government might still be run by darkfriends.

counterpoint said:
2 - Ji'e'Toh (Aiel system of honor) Almost the identical issues as above possibly best used as a Social Policy or Aiel UA. Also not really a religion.

So the religion to pick from could be called Ji'e'Toh, but I see multiple separable beliefs:

"Gai'shain" - Optionally capture opposing defeated combat units as civilian units. (If we include more powerful civilians like Settlers, then it might be wise to restrict this to working on other civs that also follow the religion with this belief - encouraging the player to spread it. Making it a follower belief would also mean other players who adopt it are encouraged to spread it too.)

"Fulfilling toh" - Happiness (+ faith?) bonus when another civ requests your help and you fulfill their request. (Possibly a bit niche - this doesn't happen that often and only the AI is able to make requests rather than demands - but then again we could fix that. Could expand to include any trade where you receive nothing in return. Need to make sure the diplo AI understands this deal to prevent player abuse by receiving tiny ongoing trade deals with AIs for the happiness bonus the AI can't otherwise see.)

"Spit in Sightblinder's Eye" - Sacrifice a unit that can channel saidin in exchange for an in place faith (and culture or prestige?) bonus. (Should probably do either/both of only in your territory/in the Blight to prevent sacrificing channeling units when they're going to die anyway in a war.)

counterpoint said:
3 - Way of the Leaf (from Tuatha'an) Not really a religion. Possibly should be used elsewhere as a Policy or some other thing.

Again, "Way of the Leaf" as the religion name, something like "Peaceful Wanderers" as the belief name.

Static +4 happiness and +4 faith while the empire is not at war. (I'm doubling up faith bonuses with other gameplay bonuses to make these beliefs useful for more than just spreading religion, without sacrificing the ability to actually spread it. All numbers are pending serious balancing.)

counterpoint said:
5 - Solstice Festivals (Two Rivers etc.) - again, don't have a better name for this. I'm thinking of the T.R. Celebration of Bel Tine, Winternight, Sunday, etc.

I think this makes a great belief name as it is (rather than a religion).

+1 Faith from farms. (Have to be careful adding yields to farms - I considered +1 Food as well, but farms are ubiquitous in any long running game and increasing their yields can quickly snowball into craziness.)

counterpoint said:
6 - Cult of the Dragon (Masema, the Prophet's religion) Don't know if there's a better way to put it. This is difficult because the Barbarians you are considering are Dragonsworn.

Just a little tweaking and it works really well with the Dragonsworn as barbs though!

Gain faith and possibly capture Dragonsworn combat units when you kill them. (This is the kind of early game religion accelerant that can help a warmongering civ by bolstering their army at the same time. It's proved underwhelming as a UA on Suleiman and Bismarck, but I think as a religious belief (which are often drastically much less powerful than UAs) it should be much more appropriate.)

counterpoint said:
9 Daes Dae Mar (Cairhienin uber-politics) perhaps best left for elsewhere in the game, such as Social Policy, espionage, or the Cairhienin UA.

I had been thinking of this as the Cairhienin UA as well, but I've yet to come up with a good way to apply a "diplo bonus" to the game in a meaningful way. Their effectiveness with manipulating Ajah influence could be increased, but that feels kind of boring for a UA. Maybe there's room for a belief like this.

counterpoint said:
21 Slavery (Seanchan and Shara) not likely one many will want to choose...

I disagree that people will err away from selecting slavery just because of what it is. There are whole mods based on adding slavery mechanics and previous civs (CivIV at least) have had slavery as options in their governing systems. I'm inclined to group this one into social policies, because it's more of a policy than a belief. I think an effective way to model this is to grant a production bonus in exchange for a happiness penalty. The main problem is we don't want to force it on people as a single policy in a tree, so there would need to be an "oppression" kind of policy tree that provided enough bonuses to be viable in terms of gameplay, but be primarily trade-off based due to its content.

I could pick out more and come up with some more beliefs, but I'm interested in some feedback first.

We need a crazy number of beliefs compared to religions for the faith system to work like it does in base CiV. I think pilfering the various in-universe belief systems for these kinds of flavorful beliefs can be a great source. The super cool thing about all of these is that they're something concrete I can implement - like right now. I've been working on coding structure and rearranging my source repository for the last couple of days (sensible-izing the way I build the project, potentially avoiding a bug in Seven-Zip-Sharp that makes compiling the mod a pain in the face when I add big files (like the DLL), and collapsing it into one repository since most of my commits come in pairs with the current setup), but I can jump straight on these beliefs once I'm done that. What do you think of the beliefs I've outlined above? Does that kind of approach change your mind about using Ji'e'toh and such as 'religions'? (We can rebrand "religions" and "faith" in the same way as turning "tourism" into "prestige".)

counterpoint said:
Before you ask, no, I didn't do that off the top of my head. Many I had to look up (who remembers anything about Arafel?)

I think this kind of thing is a great reason to extract some of the flavor from the more developed civs in the series and making them more general systems that are part of core gameplay. The Aiel, Andor, and the Seanchan provide more flavorful features than we can attribute to them in uniques, but not all of them will scale up to external features (obvious UUs like Dragons and Maidens of the Spear for example) - so it makes sense to extract what we can first. That means civs like Arafel (I'm not sure if they're a full civ yet) won't feel under-flavored when you play them.

counterpoint · Aug 12, 2014

S3rgeus said:
Example: Tithe. +1 gold for each 4 followers of this religion. If you get Tithe, then you can finance your army on the influx of gold from spreading your religion. (Which, flavor-wise, I love - you've effectively created a crusading army.) I'd thought some beliefs could increase faith (something needs to be the faith generator to keep the religion going), but we'd focus primarily on cross-feature gameplay benefits that make most beliefs of a similar power to Tithe.

Yeah, I agree. We have to be careful reinventing the wheel all the way, though - Civ 5 is a pretty good game, IMO. Probably really easy to mess up the balance... This will require, of course, tons of play testing.

S3rgeus said:
I'm a bit unclear on this one, because cultural and diplomatic victories seem quite distinct in my mind. We've got a similar sort of divide as CiV. The flavor of Prestige (rather than tourism) layered on top of new Great Work types (Prophecies, etc, that you listed) based on GPs and some wonders, are the primary drivers of the cultural victory.

I think I was being unclear before. All I was trying to state is that there's game-mechanical blur between these concepts in base civ, and this will be preserved in our game. For instance, accumulating culture gives you social policies and ideologies, which really have little to do with culture, and actually aid your diplomatic victory.

S3rgeus said:
I think having the three ideologies as channeling outlook meshes well with the structure of the victories and also gives us more to do with social policies. If we shift the form of governance into social policies, then we can create the differences you outline here

Cool. It will be very fun to help come up with this stuff.

S3rgeus said:
However, I think there is a lot of great content here (I'm not quoting the list for brevity, but there are entries that immediately remind me of those nations). WoT devotes a lot of time to this and it would be remiss to skip over it entirely. I'm not sure if it's something that should come up in text - DoM screens, Civilopedia entries, and custom diplomacy responses - rather than gameplay though.

I was trying to throw out as many ideas as possible, because I didn't feel 100% about any of them. But yes, if we can figure out a way to bring in some of this stuff elsewhere in the game (especially the more iconic ones) it would be good flavor. Also, what is DoM? Am I being dumb?

S3rgeus said:
Here I'll go through a few of the 'religious beliefs' you mentioned (picking from sections 2 and 3) with what I was thinking regarding the beliefs' effects, and how they fit into the flavor/with other combinations. I think the actual names could go to religions and then corresponding beliefs give those religions whatever bonuses. (You could make a "Light" religion that is benefited more by siding with the Shadow, if you want.)

I think I was being unclear, I wasn't presenting beliefs, but possible RELIGIONS - or rather, replacements for the concept of religions. I still worry that there aren't enough valid religions to fill out the game, so I looked for an alternate, "customs" or something.

You may have totally got that, already, but I wanted to make sure.

I totally get that mosques go with Taoism in Civ 5 and stuff, but the difference is that (thankfully) in real life, there isn't a clear Good and Bad religion, and stuff. Having a "Darkfriend" religious option, in particular, just seems to be really weird. First of all, there aren't really any darkfriend civs in-universe - just darkfriends within it. So, that eliminates a few of the potentially viable ones.

Additionally, "Light" is so generic as to seem almost useless. There don't seem to be enough clear variations of that light-following "religion" the WoT world seems to follow. And the others (Way of the Leaf, Ji'e'toh) aren't really religions, but sets of customs and philosophies - those peoples still, I think, follow the "Light" religion, whatever that means. Even the Way of the Light is really just a doctrine, much like, say, a political treatise or something like that in our world. So it feels a little weird to me to mix a few sort-of-religions with other sorts of philosophies.

I guess what I'd like to know is: What would your list of Religions be, given the proposals made here and floating around before? I think coming up with beliefs for them (or whatever we call them) will be doable, if a bit tricky, but in order to do that, we will need to know what the big options are - even if those are merely "coloristic" and aren't married to specific beliefs. For me, that's the big sticking point - can we create a list that feels right? Than the beliefs will come, IMO. There's a few here, but I'm curious what the whole list would be.

S3rgeus said:
I'm thinking along the lines of the religion being called "Way of the Light" (or just "Light") and the belief being "Bane of Shadow" or something along those lines.

Combat bonus against Shadowspawn and gain faith when you kill their units.

This is a faith generator that has a potentially very relevant gameplay effect as well. (If you start near the Blight you'll be fighting Shadowspawn for most of the game.) But what if the Last Battle rolls around and you decide to side with the Shadow?

OK, so brief semi-relevant rant/stream of consciousness before I answer your thoughts: so I was planning on saying more on this later (and still will), but I'll ask right here - what do you think about there being a "darkfriend" mechanic *before* the last battle approaches. The idea of turning good or bad at the end for the LB is cool, but I'm not sure it really reflects the way the darkfriends work in the books.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but what do you think about a mechanic where a civ can do things to before the LB's select-light-or-dark that somewhat pre-determines which side you're on? What I'm nervous about with the current LB design is that many people will do it as a simple value/odds judgement, based on the civs left in the game, etc. What if it weren't that simple? What we want is crazy betrayals, surprises, and/or epic whole-world alliances to fight the dark.
In the books (spoiler), Shara fights for the dark one. They do so because, apparently, a Chosen infiltrated them and became their messiah. Not possible to represent here, but I'm reminded about the way things often work with darkfriends in general: 1) They want something, 2) they are promised that thing, 3) later, they are called upon to return the favor. Sort of like the Godfather.
So what if, throughout the game, your civ coould make choices, privately, that gave you certain bonuses (or just *changes*, even if they aren't actually bonuses) by selling out the dark one, or whatever. Later, come time for the LB... you might not really have a choice, will you? You've sold yourself through and through. The Sharan people didn't stand a chance really - for some reason, their civ was primed to be taken over by a chosen.
How this could manifest itself... well, having darkfriend influence with the Ajahs, for one. Having an espionage system that has spies and diplomats, but also darkfriends who do terrible things for you (assassinations, etc.) But, again, you pay the price in that you become the vassal of the dark one.
Anyways, just an initial "ping" to see your thoughts on something like that. Would not be simple to balance, I'm sure. Anyways, I have more thoughts on this kind of stuff that i will approach later.

Regarding your Way of Light beliefs, I think they are mostly fine. I think a Child of the Light unit might make an interesting faith-puchase-only unit. Like a swordman or something, but also grants faith when killing shadowspawn or something. REally, though, the Children are usually used to combat Darkfriends and channelers, not shadowspawn (amadicia is really rather far from the blight) - depending on the darkfriend system we develop (if any), they could tie in with that.
Additionally, what if its like a combat-ready missionary? Probably too weird.
Other things that tie to the children... Well, their inquisitors would be the Hand of the Light, which would be perhaps better (and more terrible) than normal ones?
Again, though, all of this depends on whether or not we need Amadicia's UA or UU to be Children related. This is, to me, a huge issue, as the Children have taken up residence there for something like a thousand years.

S3rgeus said:
So the religion to pick from could be called Ji'e'Toh, but I see multiple separable beliefs:

"Gai'shain" -
"Fulfilling toh" -
"Spit in Sightblinder's Eye" - Sacrifice a unit that can channel saidin in exchange for an in place faith (and culture or prestige?) bonus. (Should probably do either/both of only in your territory/in the Blight to prevent sacrificing channeling units when they're going to die anyway in a war.)

Interesting beliefs, definitely. As implied before, I'm a bit uncomfortable with ji'e'toh as a religion, per se, but i'd have to see what the other religions are to determine if it fits. I reserve judgement for now.
As far as gai'shain, I think it would have to work with other civs that have that religion, since that's kind of the point of ji'e'toh. Only the Shaido break this tenant (I'm assuming you aren't setting up the Shaido as a separate civ, since that seems a bit more era-focused than you're aiming for). The problem of course is that the way the diplo system works (by my understanding), you're supposedly less likely to go to war with similar religions, yes? So this might not come up, much.
Additionally, could be a super-worker purchased with Faith, yes?

I think, considering what 'toh' is int he books, it might be best for it to revolve around righting some wrong you've committed. Kind of odd, but, say, if you attacked them or something, or did something that the diplo system says makes people mad, you could somehow right the wrong and gain faith or culture or happiness. Not continuing to settle near them, that kind of thing. Again, kinda weird.

The sightblinder's eye thing is cool, BUT, I would say that it kind of has to come back to bite the forces of the light in the end, yes? I mean, that's what happened in the books (the male Aiel were "turned" and fought against the forces of light). Again, I have more developed thoughts on the Shadow and such that I'll work on after I'm thought more about it.

I think the Aiel customs also maybe cry for something like the Aztec UA - faith or culture after kills (or capturing or w/e).

S3rgeus said:
Again, "Way of the Leaf" as the religion name, something like "Peaceful Wanderers" as the belief name.

A happiness bonus makes sense, but one thing about the tinkers is that they *won't* go to war. It's hard to imagine a religion doing this (as opposed to a UA or something), but really, a city that is all Leafy shouldn't be able to produce units, or should have unhappiness when doing so. That would really suck as a Belief, though.
I'm not sure what the mechanics would be, but flavor-wise, a belief that centers around searching for the "Song" might be cool, too.

S3rgeus said:
Gain faith and possibly capture Dragonsworn combat units when you kill them. (This is the kind of early game religion accelerant that can help a warmongering civ by bolstering their army at the same time. It's proved underwhelming as a UA on Suleiman and Bismarck, but I think as a religious belief (which are often drastically much less powerful than UAs) it should be much more appropriate.)

Again, this will be part of a larger e-mail I'll write later, but I'm not quite sold on the Dragonsworn=barbs thing. To me, it's very era dependent. Masema did his thing for about a year, and then got killed. True, there are false dragons that arrive with armies, but that's a much bigger deal, and much rarer (this is a thing that should definitely happen). Furthermore, in the last battle, the dragonsworn are totally the good guys (as in, all of Rand's armies).
In short, I don't love the idea of barbarians=dragonsworn. I think they could be, sometimes, but shouldn't always be. More on this later.
Making Dragonsworn into something more meaningful obviously throws this religion into question a bit

S3rgeus said:
I had been thinking of this as the Cairhienin UA as well, but I've yet to come up with a good way to apply a "diplo bonus" to the game in a meaningful way. Their effectiveness with manipulating Ajah influence could be increased, but that feels kind of boring for a UA. Maybe there's room for a belief like this.

Yeah, I'm not sold on this as a religion. I think Cairhien's UA should involve this somehow, because its such a big deal in the book, but it could be merely some *enhancement* of the Game of houses mechanic already present elsewhere. Will think on this.

S3rgeus said:
I could pick out more and come up with some more beliefs, but I'm interested in some feedback first.

What do you think of the beliefs I've outlined above? Does that kind of approach change your mind about using Ji'e'toh and such as 'religions'? (We can rebrand "religions" and "faith" in the same way as turning "tourism" into "prestige".)

I'd say start top-level. If you have a good idea, say what your Religions list is. Then we can formulate a few beliefs per religion.
In general your approach is good. I think we should almost consider creating a set of religions with a set of beliefs that would work together to form that religion in "real life," and then let the player mix and match them. That way somebody could actually create a "real" Ji'e'toh' civ if they wanted, but wouldn't have to (like the "Cha Faile" who adopted random tenants of Ji'e'toh).

S3rgeus said:
I think this kind of thing is a great reason to extract some of the flavor from the more developed civs in the series and making them more general systems that are part of core gameplay. .......That means civs like Arafel (I'm not sure if they're a full civ yet) won't feel under-flavored when you play them.

Yeah, we'll see, when push comes to shove, how hard it is to come up with flavorful stuff for most of the civs in the Universe. Ideally the flavor can be spread well enough, but ultimately it's going to come down to the uniques. Nobody would ever play Murandy just for flavor, since they're kidn of non-actors in the books, but they will if they are a good, fun civ!
I'm trying to get through the "mechanical" and higher level ideas I have before I try to jump in the UUs and UAs. Seems like kind of a big task, and I'd hate to suggest a bunch of stuff that we then end up using as other mechanics.

counterpoint · Aug 12, 2014

OK, I've been putting off replying to previous posts, but now is the time...

S3rgeus said:
The Horn of Valere
I lead with this one even though it doesn't change that much in the game because it's basically already implemented! As people who've read the books know, the Horn of Valere is a magical item that allows its bearer (and only its bearer) to summon the Heroes of the Horn from outside the Pattern to fight for them. How does this translate to CiV? The Horn is located somewhere on the map and cannot be seen. It can be discovered by units with the Horn Hunter promotion (yes Hunters of the Horn have it by default) ending their turn near it. A unit possessing the Horn can sound it (with a cooldown) to summon the Heroes, which are extremely powerful units. But the Heroes can't stay within the Pattern permanently, so they take damage every turn (and don't heal) so they only stick around for a short time. If a melee unit kills the Hornblower, that unit becomes the new Hornblower. If a Hornblower unit is killed at range, it drops the Horn onto the square it died on.

OK, my thoughts on this, both in terms of balance and the WoT Universe:
I worry that the game would devolve into a capture-the-hornsounder fest once it was found (actually, that could be an awesome Scenario). This is not "right," I think. The truth is, the horn was NEVER found until right before the last battle - Mat and Olver are the only hornsounders, ever. So, I think it should probably be a rare thing. 'm wondering if it might be best to make the Heroes summon ONCE and then the horn goes back to being hidden again (maybe only reappearing when another civ does the Project)?

I'm going to give some specific comments of Civs and Uniques below, but I'll retackle all of this later. If I don't mention a particular proposal, I'm still thinking on it and will come back to it.

kidshowbusiness said:
Illian

Ruler - Mattin Stepaneos

UA - The Council of Nine: The members of the council spend so much time watching and interfering with each other, and the King, and vice versa, that Illian's people are largely left to govern themselves. The effects of Governors in cities are increased by X%. In addition, Illian receives all the bonuses granted by The Great Square of Tammaz wonder. These bonuses are doubled if Illian actually builds the wonder itself.

UU - Companion: A cheaper, slightly weaker, replacement for the longswordsman that receives free promotions and can be upgraded to a Hunter for the Horn once Illian completes The Great Hunt for the Horn civ project. The Companion receives the following promotions for free - Elite Formation: Any unit with Elite Formation receives...

OK, I'm not really a fan of using the Kings We Know (from the books) necessarily as the Leaders. The thing is, wasn't Mattin Stepaneos kind of ineffectual? According to the Internet, Illian was founded by Nicoli Merseneos den Ballin, whose family ruled for 300 years. To me, that makes much more sense.

The problem I have with Illian getting higher odds of finding the horn is that Illian never found the horn. To me, it absolutely makes sense that they get extra *culture* or something from searching for it and/or calling the Hunt, but to me the Hunt in WoT is generally flavored by the fact that the people who found it weren't even looking for it. That's my take, at least.

I don't love how so many of the proposed UU's use the "Elite Formation" promotion. I mean, it seems like a cool promotion, but it seems to me that only one of the UUs should feature it - as it stands, many of these look like clones of each other.

I don't think Illian is lagooney, per se. They are surrounded by Marshes, though - but also mountains, olive groves, etc.

kidshowbusiness said:
Andor

Ruler - Morgase Trakand

May I propose we use Ishara Casalain instead of either Trakands? To me, Morgase is a good choice, but kind of loses it because of the compulsion by Rahvin thing. Elayne is obviously super epic, but, at the same time, I think she's almost too central to the plot. I don't mean she's OP or anything, just, I dunno, she's one of the main 5 characters. Also, she's the queen of Cairhien as well. You know how Civ tends to not use super-modern leaders? Yeah, that.
Also, there are some civs where we're going to have to use "modern" ones - because we don't know any old ones. So maybe we should try to mix it up when we can.

I like Ishara (I think that's the right one) because I believe she's the first queen, the one who rode in to battle all pregnant, and the one that started tons of the traditions of Andor. I'd have to look up more, but I think she's kind of the George Washington of Andor.

For the record, I'm with S3rgeus that balance is the most important thing, here. Elayne being OP is irrelevant, all civs should be equivalent in strength. Obviously, the USA is a more powerful civ in real life than, say, the Shoshone (sorry, that's kind of a sad example, actually), but in Civ, they are the same power. Realism isn't important in that regard.

kidshowbusiness said:
Cairhien

Ruler - Galldrian Riatin (Laman Damodred? They all seem kind of similar)

UA - Daes Daemar: The noble houses of Cairhien all strive to outdo each other in every possible way. When there's a vogue for libraries, every house must have a grand library, with the Royal Library being the grandest of all. When towers are all the rage, you get the Topless Towers of Cairhien. If ancient statues are the new fad, the King has to excavate the biggest statue ever discovered... Each city receives a 15% bonus to building construction. Can build circuses without nearby horses or ivory.

UB - Foregate: Replaces the market. With the destruction wrought in the Aiel War, most of eastern Cairhien is uninhabited, these refugees have set up semi-permanent camp before the cities' gates, requiring the King to import food to feed them and gleemen to keep them amused. +25% gold, +1 gold, +2 gold per incoming trade route (+1 gold for the owner of the trade route), +1 food, +1 happiness.

UB - Illuminator's Guild Chapterhouse:

OK, I'm a bit of a broken record, but I don't love this Leader. Wasn't he terrible? Like, assassinated because he was useless? Part of me wants to do Laman because he's the most famous, and was quite powerful, but he was obviously kind of an idiot as well. Maybe Matraine Colmcille, the first king?

I agree that Daes Daemar might make a good UA. However, I don't think this is it. I think added production is not the right idea. If anything, it might be less production. Remember the Topless Towers? Yeah, they were destroyed twenty years ago and still were never rebuilt. I think constant political infighting is the reason why.
Not sure what to suggest at this point (better diplo?), but I don't think its this. Also, Cairhien might make sense to have an economic or trade-based UA, since they were the ones trading with the Aiel and such.
That said, I don't love the Foregate as a +gold building - wasn't the foregate a slum?
I think this is mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but Illuminators should probably be a national wonder or something. There are multiple chapterhouses (at least one in Tanchico as well).

kidshowbusiness said:
Seanchan

Ruler - Fortuona Athaem Devi Paendrag

UA - The Ever Victorious Army: The Seanchan may not raze cities and receive diplomatic and cultural (tourism) penalties in their dealings with all other civs. In addition they cannot influence Ajahs in the Hall of the Tower. However, as long as they control the capitol of a rival civ, they gain that civ's UA and can build their UU's and UB's.

UB - Seanchan Patrol Station: Replaces Courthouse. Eliminates extra unhappiness from occupied cities. +1 happiness if city has a connection to the capitol. Cost 75 (3/4 of Courthouse). Maintenance 2 Gold per turn (1/2 of Courthouse).

UU - Deathwatch Guards: Receives Elite Formation promotion for free. Gets a 10% combat bonus against other units with the Elite Formation promotion.

UU - Exotics:

UU - Sul'dam:

Again, I don't see why we should use Tuon. She's been empress for five seconds. Maybe there's nobody better - will look into it.

Regarding this UA... I think this is potentially game breaking. Taking UA, UU, etc..... how would ever really playtest and balance that adequately? Seems like some UAs might even conflict and create weird things that would make our heads hurt.

Similar in principle, but more practical, might be simply that captured cities can produce the UUs and UBs of the native civ. You know, they were conscripting Altaran soldiers into their army... but they weren't using Altaras UA (whatever that is).
Or, similarly, we could consider them a Puppeteer, or sorts. This ties in with the flavor from the books - they allow conquered cities to run themselves. What if Puppetted cities randomly spat out units (semi-regularly)? Maybe even UUs.

Of course capturing channelers is a central tenant to this civ. I'm still thinking about whether I think it makes more sense to have a sul'dam unit (or damane), or just to have Seanchan units have a chance to capture channelers they fight. Will think on this.
I'm not sure I agree with an automatic diplo penalty. I think it should be possible to win diplo as Seandar. The thing is, their UA/UUs suggest you should play a domination style, so of course you will naturally incur loathing... but why make it automatic? Same with culture/tourism/prestige. The Seanchan are interesting in that, obviously, they have trouble spreading their beliefs, but they also seem extremely resistant to others' beliefs influencing them.
I like the effects of the police station - very flavorful. As far as the uniques and such... yeah, they have a lot of cool potential UUs (don't forget the bloodknives), but we can't have them all. Will think more on this.

S3rgeus said:
I really like including Manetheren because it makes it feel much more like a game of Civ that we can have these empires from completely different times square off.

I agree with this in principle, but practically it may be difficult. We know essentially nothing of these old civs. I think it would only "feel right" if you have more than just the one old civ - we'd need more.
Also, I'm realizing that I have no idea what Hawkwing's empire is called.....
How are you planning on dealing with the Two Rivers? It's own Civ? Kind of weird, since it's really just a province of Andor. But part of andor is weird, because.... and part of Manetheren is weird, because....

kidshowbusiness said:
Tear

Ruler - High Lord/King Darlin Sisnera

UB - Oil Press: Replaces workshop. Is basically a workshop that also provides +1 gold and +10% city gold production.

OK, OK, I might be ok with Darlin. Sure, he seems like kind of a jackass, but Tear doesn't really have Kings (until now). Maybe there's a really famous High Lord I can dig up.
As far as the UB and stuff, yes, Tear has Oil. But it's also definitely one of the big fishing/sea-trade civs. So that could be considered.
Also, I wonder what's happening with Mayene. They're obviously a city state, but that didn't stop Venice from existing in Civ 5, right? Anyways, Mayene is rich (and independent, despite Tairen ambitions) because of their secret Oilfish Shoals, which they sell and Profit. I mention this now simply because this UB sets up tear and its association with oil, but really that flavor belongs more to mayene (though fish oil, not olive!)

That's it for tonight!

shaglio · Aug 12, 2014

I just stumbled upon this thread today, and I am thrilled to see somebody putting so much effort into my favorite book series. I was wondering how you were planning to handle each civ's city list. I thought of a couple options:

1) Prohibit each civ from being able to build Settlers (ala Venice) and requiring "expansion" to be done solely by conquest. This would leave a lot of wide open tracts of land on the map (just like in the books, so FLAVOR!) and allow for more room for armies to battle between territory instead of just city sieges.

2) If it's even possible from a programming standpoint, only allow civs to build Settlers based on how many cities are on their list. This will add more cities to the map instead of a virtual OCC game, but some civs will have 1 city (Illian, Mayene) while others will have quite a few (Andor has 7 based on this map! 8 if you include Aridhol. More if you include Emond's Field, Taren Ferry, Deven Ride, Watch Hill on Andor's list instead of Manetheren's).

counterpoint · Aug 12, 2014

shaglio said:
I just stumbled upon this thread today, and I am thrilled to see somebody putting so much effort into my favorite book series. I was wondering how you were planning to handle each civ's city list. I thought of a couple options:

1) Prohibit each civ from being able to build Settlers (ala Venice) and requiring "expansion" to be done solely by conquest. This would leave a lot of wide open tracts of land on the map (just like in the books, so FLAVOR!) and allow for more room for armies to battle between territory instead of just city sieges.

2) If it's even possible from a programming standpoint, only allow civs to build Settlers based on how many cities are on their list. This will add more cities to the map instead of a virtual OCC game, but some civs will have 1 city (Illian, Mayene) while others will have quite a few (Andor has 7 based on this map! 8 if you include Aridhol. More if you include Emond's Field, Taren Ferry, Deven Ride, Watch Hill on Andor's list instead of Manetheren's).

These are certainly interesting ideas, to say the least. And it looks like the city-list thing has been noted as a difficult issue already.

I personally don't love the idea of re-conceiving the entire expansion mechanic for all the civs to accommodate this. The conquest-only mechanic is problematic to me because it forces a civ to play Tall (*very* tall) if they want to stay out of war and domination-type victories.

True, we don't know much about the other cities in many of these countries, but we do know that there *are* more cities. Mayene is of course a notable exception, as you indicate - it is, indeed a "City-State." So is Far Madding. If either of these were made into Civs, they probably should use some mechanics you have described (or be otherwise similar to Venice).

I think for the other ones, though - Illian, notably - this shouldn't be the case. Illian is most definitely [at least I think so] described as a *country*, with rather significant military power, and a significant chunk of land it controls. True, we only ever hear the name of its Capitol city, but we are left to assume that there *are* other cities. So, to me, limiting the civs in city-number based on the ones described in the books makes us a slave to the narrow, Andor-Caihrien focus of their narrative. We have reason to assume that these other countries have other cities - and countless villages. We've only heard of the ones that matter to the story - Four Kings, Hinderstap (spelling?) are tiny and insignificant, but we know their names because the WoT characters did stuff in those towns. The assumption should be (again, except when a civ is described as a city-state) that there are plenty of cities/towns in the country.

The question, then, is how we find names for them. Illian seems to be the hardest - most civs have, buried in the text, 5-8 cities we can draw from, but Illian has none (as far as I can find). What to do beyond the 5-8 (or for Illian?). I was thinking we could use the names of Noble Houses in the kingdom (when available). This makes some sense to me, since those nobles undoubtedly control estates out in the countryside, which would likewise have communities around them.
Otherwise, I was thinking they could be based on rulers/famous kings/lords (similar to above, using the known members of the council of nine for illian), or famous locations within the city. We could, for example, have a city called Tammaz in Illian. This isn't elegant, but IMO it's preferable to artificially limited the number of cities Illian could have.

As far as open tracts of land, I actually don't think that's really WoT-specific flavor - rather, it's just a product of the "era of civilization" the books are sort of approximating. Earth was like that too in the middle ages and Renaissance (and "filled up" later). Similarly, Civ games don't necessarily fill up until mid-late game. So I think it's fine to leave that alone.

so much to consider!

S3rgeus · Aug 13, 2014

counterpoint said:
Also, what is DoM? Am I being dumb?

Dawn of Man - the narrated screens with information about your Civ that pop up while the game is loading.

counterpoint said:
I think I was being unclear, I wasn't presenting beliefs, but possible RELIGIONS - or rather, replacements for the concept of religions. I still worry that there aren't enough valid religions to fill out the game, so I looked for an alternate, "customs" or something.

You may have totally got that, already, but I wanted to make sure.

Sorry, yeah, I did get that, but I went off on a tangent about the beliefs and didn't really circle back around.

counterpoint said:
I totally get that mosques go with Taoism in Civ 5 and stuff, but the difference is that (thankfully) in real life, there isn't a clear Good and Bad religion, and stuff. Having a "Darkfriend" religious option, in particular, just seems to be really weird. First of all, there aren't really any darkfriend civs in-universe - just darkfriends within it. So, that eliminates a few of the potentially viable ones.

Additionally, "Light" is so generic as to seem almost useless. There don't seem to be enough clear variations of that light-following "religion" the WoT world seems to follow. And the others (Way of the Leaf, Ji'e'toh) aren't really religions, but sets of customs and philosophies - those peoples still, I think, follow the "Light" religion, whatever that means. Even the Way of the Light is really just a doctrine, much like, say, a political treatise or something like that in our world. So it feels a little weird to me to mix a few sort-of-religions with other sorts of philosophies.

I guess what I'd like to know is: What would your list of Religions be, given the proposals made here and floating around before? I think coming up with beliefs for them (or whatever we call them) will be doable, if a bit tricky, but in order to do that, we will need to know what the big options are - even if those are merely "coloristic" and aren't married to specific beliefs. For me, that's the big sticking point - can we create a list that feels right? Than the beliefs will come, IMO. There's a few here, but I'm curious what the whole list would be.

I've been rereading your posts and my overall impression that our primary issue is the association of the term "religion" with more "customs" from the books like Way of the Leaf and Ji'e'toh? I'm cool with rebranding religion as "Customs" like in your section 2 in this post.

The first thing that strikes me about that is "faith" is an unusual yield for establishing and maintaining "customs". The list of customs I have in mind:

Way of the Light - I'm considering this as a general belief in the "Light" and "Creator", rather than any association with the Children. Subscribing to a set of morals based on the image the Creator shaped the world in and such.
Way of the Leaf
Ji'e'toh
Water Way
Cult of the Dragon
Omenology - The Seanchan superstition, I'm using the name you mentioned - I'm also not sure what this should be called.

That's only 6, which is a bit annoying, but I'm reluctant to abandon Firaxis' general "beliefs" sections of the game for a couple of reasons:

It's the primary non-combat way of interacting with other civilizations in the early game, which makes that part of the game more engaging.
Firaxis' actual implementation of faith is atrocious and ripping it out is a ton of work. Verifying I've done it correctly is even harder than doing it in the first place.

The reason I chose the above 6 is because they're primarily defined by beliefs of characters, rather than governmental institutions. (Differentiates a caste system from ji'e'toh.) Are there any more from the books that I'm missing?

counterpoint said:
OK, so brief semi-relevant rant/stream of consciousness before I answer your thoughts: so I was planning on saying more on this later (and still will), but I'll ask right here - what do you think about there being a "darkfriend" mechanic *before* the last battle approaches. The idea of turning good or bad at the end for the LB is cool, but I'm not sure it really reflects the way the darkfriends work in the books.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but what do you think about a mechanic where a civ can do things to before the LB's select-light-or-dark that somewhat pre-determines which side you're on? What I'm nervous about with the current LB design is that many people will do it as a simple value/odds judgement, based on the civs left in the game, etc. What if it weren't that simple? What we want is crazy betrayals, surprises, and/or epic whole-world alliances to fight the dark.
In the books (spoiler), Shara fights for the dark one. They do so because, apparently, a Chosen infiltrated them and became their messiah. Not possible to represent here, but I'm reminded about the way things often work with darkfriends in general: 1) They want something, 2) they are promised that thing, 3) later, they are called upon to return the favor. Sort of like the Godfather.
So what if, throughout the game, your civ coould make choices, privately, that gave you certain bonuses (or just *changes*, even if they aren't actually bonuses) by selling out the dark one, or whatever. Later, come time for the LB... you might not really have a choice, will you? You've sold yourself through and through. The Sharan people didn't stand a chance really - for some reason, their civ was primed to be taken over by a chosen.
How this could manifest itself... well, having darkfriend influence with the Ajahs, for one. Having an espionage system that has spies and diplomats, but also darkfriends who do terrible things for you (assassinations, etc.) But, again, you pay the price in that you become the vassal of the dark one.
Anyways, just an initial "ping" to see your thoughts on something like that. Would not be simple to balance, I'm sure. Anyways, I have more thoughts on this kind of stuff that i will approach later.

I really like this idea - make joining the Shadow a slippery slope rather than a one-time choice. Were you thinking of having opportunities to do both good and evil throughout the game - for varying bonuses and penalties? I think the two options are, from a gameplay perspective, relatively balanced in isolation as they stand now (and are a good combination of flavor and gameplay). If following the Light primarily involved turning down bonuses that would later require committing your civ to the Shadow, I don't think that would work from a balance perspective. I'd say a decent number of people would play the Light choices for flavor, but if you want pure advantage - Shadowspawn all the way - particularly if you're going for a conquest victory, since you get to be the only winner on the Shadow side, instead of sharing it.

The other thing that jumps to my mind about this idea is that it looks to be monstrously complicated to implement. Not only is there gameplay logic of presenting these decisions to players, but making the AI effectively evaluate its long/short term objectives against specific immediate bonuses and eventual association with a side in the Last Battle is enormous. I'd like to hear more about it and I think it's something that we could include, but it sounds like a post-release feature addition to me.

counterpoint said:
Regarding your Way of Light beliefs, I think they are mostly fine. I think a Child of the Light unit might make an interesting faith-puchase-only unit. Like a swordman or something, but also grants faith when killing shadowspawn or something. REally, though, the Children are usually used to combat Darkfriends and channelers, not shadowspawn (amadicia is really rather far from the blight) - depending on the darkfriend system we develop (if any), they could tie in with that.
Additionally, what if its like a combat-ready missionary? Probably too weird.
Other things that tie to the children... Well, their inquisitors would be the Hand of the Light, which would be perhaps better (and more terrible) than normal ones?
Again, though, all of this depends on whether or not we need Amadicia's UA or UU to be Children related. This is, to me, a huge issue, as the Children have taken up residence there for something like a thousand years.

Exactly, I was thinking the Children of the Light would be associated with Amadicia's uniques, because that's definitely what stands out most about that country in the books. A combat ready missionary could be very useful for spreading religion into hostile territory (war basically cuts off non-pressure-spread as it is now) - but we'd have to cut a balance between it being too weak to make a difference that it's a combat unit and being strong enough that you wouldn't want to lose it by using it up to spread your religion.

counterpoint said:
Interesting beliefs, definitely. As implied before, I'm a bit uncomfortable with ji'e'toh as a religion, per se, but i'd have to see what the other religions are to determine if it fits. I reserve judgement for now.
As far as gai'shain, I think it would have to work with other civs that have that religion, since that's kind of the point of ji'e'toh. Only the Shaido break this tenant (I'm assuming you aren't setting up the Shaido as a separate civ, since that seems a bit more era-focused than you're aiming for). The problem of course is that the way the diplo system works (by my understanding), you're supposedly less likely to go to war with similar religions, yes? So this might not come up, much.

You have a small (but ongoing) diplo (and tourism) bonus with AIs that share a religion with you, but I've found that's often outweighed by bigger negative factors (you built my wonders, I want your land, I am Shaka and will beat your face).

counterpoint said:
Additionally, could be a super-worker purchased with Faith, yes?

That's very doable, I already did some work generalizing the 'purchase with faith' code for SiegeMod, and extending it is no problem.

counterpoint said:
I think, considering what 'toh' is int he books, it might be best for it to revolve around righting some wrong you've committed. Kind of odd, but, say, if you attacked them or something, or did something that the diplo system says makes people mad, you could somehow right the wrong and gain faith or culture or happiness. Not continuing to settle near them, that kind of thing. Again, kinda weird.

I thought of this as well, but I didn't feel like it meshed well with the way CiV works. Tracking what makes other players angry/disadvantaged is really difficult because of the numbers of complex interactions the game presents. Plus it would necessarily layer AI logic on top of an opposing human player (no multiplayer mod support, but I think worth thinking about a little) which would be very annoying for both players.

I went with the 'opposite' way around, where you're rewarded for making up for your toh (seeing as only the toh's possessor should say when and how much toh they have).

counterpoint said:
The sightblinder's eye thing is cool, BUT, I would say that it kind of has to come back to bite the forces of the light in the end, yes? I mean, that's what happened in the books (the male Aiel were "turned" and fought against the forces of light). Again, I have more developed thoughts on the Shadow and such that I'll work on after I'm thought more about it.

In terms of flavor it did, but I think that's a bit unfair from a gameplay perspective. One person choosing this belief (and making good use of it) penalizes all Light side players, and then the original believer might even join the Shadow, turning the drawback into a further bonus. It's also strange to have a single belief have such a long-term ramification where the rest are persistent effects.

counterpoint said:
A happiness bonus makes sense, but one thing about the tinkers is that they *won't* go to war. It's hard to imagine a religion doing this (as opposed to a UA or something), but really, a city that is all Leafy shouldn't be able to produce units, or should have unhappiness when doing so. That would really suck as a Belief, though.

Exactly, I think that kind of restriction would be ideal for a Tuatha'an civ. I'm thinking about scenarios (planned for the far distant future where the mod has been released and is stable/balanced-ish) which are set during specific series events where we can set the player up in specific roles - so more focused, flavorful things like this that don't fit into the larger "randomized game" gameplay can be awesome when used there.

counterpoint said:
I'm not sure what the mechanics would be, but flavor-wise, a belief that centers around searching for the "Song" might be cool, too.

Definitely, I'd forgotten about that! Sounds awesome.

counterpoint said:
Again, this will be part of a larger e-mail I'll write later, but I'm not quite sold on the Dragonsworn=barbs thing. To me, it's very era dependent. Masema did his thing for about a year, and then got killed. True, there are false dragons that arrive with armies, but that's a much bigger deal, and much rarer (this is a thing that should definitely happen). Furthermore, in the last battle, the dragonsworn are totally the good guys (as in, all of Rand's armies).
In short, I don't love the idea of barbarians=dragonsworn. I think they could be, sometimes, but shouldn't always be. More on this later.
Making Dragonsworn into something more meaningful obviously throws this religion into question a bit

I think the Dragonsworn work really well as the barbarians. As you said, other false dragons throughout history give us a historical jumping off point to brand these lawless followers of the dragon as standing against any other nation. We've got two "barbarian" factions in the mod as it stands now, and they are at war with each other. I think that reflects the dynamic in the books quite well - the Dragonsworn fight the Shadowspawn, but also the nations around them. I don't think of them being the barbarians as making them "evil", just in conflict with the established civilizations.

counterpoint said:
I'd say start top-level. If you have a good idea, say what your Religions list is. Then we can formulate a few beliefs per religion.
In general your approach is good. I think we should almost consider creating a set of religions with a set of beliefs that would work together to form that religion in "real life," and then let the player mix and match them. That way somebody could actually create a "real" Ji'e'toh' civ if they wanted, but wouldn't have to (like the "Cha Faile" who adopted random tenants of Ji'e'toh).

Sounds like a good plan. Are we planning to maintain the two founder, two follower belief structure from base CiV? I figured we would. I'm also eager to have something new to implement - I'm getting towards the end of my source control restructuring and I was basically treading water on tweaking White Tower UI before that.

counterpoint said:
I'm trying to get through the "mechanical" and higher level ideas I have before I try to jump in the UUs and UAs. Seems like kind of a big task, and I'd hate to suggest a bunch of stuff that we then end up using as other mechanics.

Definitely, I think it's good to nail down most of the "main game" of the mod before deciding on uniques for the civs, otherwise some systems may be under-utilized or we might end up redoing work, like you said.

counterpoint said:
OK, my thoughts on this, both in terms of balance and the WoT Universe:
I worry that the game would devolve into a capture-the-hornsounder fest once it was found (actually, that could be an awesome Scenario). This is not "right," I think. The truth is, the horn was NEVER found until right before the last battle - Mat and Olver are the only hornsounders, ever. So, I think it should probably be a rare thing. 'm wondering if it might be best to make the Heroes summon ONCE and then the horn goes back to being hidden again (maybe only reappearing when another civ does the Project)?

I'm inclined to agree - more on the capture-the-hornsounder fest point. While Mat and Olver are the only hornblowers in the books, I think the Horn of Valere has great mechanical presence for CiV to swing the tide in an otherwise losing war - which was its role in the books too. I like the idea of the Horn disappearing again after it's been used - waiting to be found again. I could make it so that the project can only be completed/worked on while the Horn is "hidden". I haven't written any code for placement of the Horn in a given game (plan is to have that as a part of the mapscripts), so it should be possible to hook into that to "re-randomize" its position. That eliminates the stuff I've written for passing the Horn along, but that's not much code.

counterpoint said:
OK, I'm not really a fan of using the Kings We Know (from the books) necessarily as the Leaders. The thing is, wasn't Mattin Stepaneos kind of ineffectual? According to the Internet, Illian was founded by Nicoli Merseneos den Ballin, whose family ruled for 300 years. To me, that makes much more sense.

I have to say I'd go completely the opposite way with this. I think using the leaders we know from the books is hugely important - where they exist. A big aspect of playing this mod is having read the books and wanting to "play" some portion of that. There's a point of view that the work we're doing to randomize and CiV-ify the WoT flavor runs counter to that, but I think "playing as the WoT leaders you know" is a huge draw. And as a counterpoint (

) I think using older leaders like Nicoli Merseneos den Ballin and Ishara Casalain will put off a lot of players. (I know I'd be a bit put off by it.) While I recognize the name Ishara Casalain, I don't particularly associate much in the way of character to her and I didn't even know Nicoli's name before now.

The choices of real-life leaders in base CiV tends towards older ones to avoid being political, but they definitely picked leaders that define some recognized characteristic of that nation. Everyone knows Washington, Elizabeth, Gandhi, and Caesar and associates a certain kind of leadership and nation to them. Given we don't have the political restrictions (since none of the WoT leaders carry any real world politics), I think it makes sense to embrace the era of the books as our primary inspiration for leaders.

Like we said above, thinking about specific uniques for civs is well placed for after we've nailed the main game of the mod down, but I'll probably make some specific examples below as well while discussing previous posts about specific civs - just because it makes the context of the post work right.

counterpoint said:
The problem I have with Illian getting higher odds of finding the horn is that Illian never found the horn. To me, it absolutely makes sense that they get extra *culture* or something from searching for it and/or calling the Hunt, but to me the Hunt in WoT is generally flavored by the fact that the people who found it weren't even looking for it. That's my take, at least.

That's a very good point that I hadn't really considered. I was thinking more along the lines that, given a randomized world settings, Illian's prevalency of Hunters, and the Hunt's integration into their society, the greater the chances that they would be the ones to find the Horn. I can definitely see a change that meshes well with the "disappearing" Horn discussed above - Illian could gain a culture/prestige bonus as long as the "Hunt is on" - so while the Horn is "hidden". Then Illian is in the unique position of wanting to kill the Hornblower to get their bonus back.

counterpoint said:
OK, I'm a bit of a broken record, but I don't love this Leader. Wasn't he terrible? Like, assassinated because he was useless? Part of me wants to do Laman because he's the most famous, and was quite powerful, but he was obviously kind of an idiot as well. Maybe Matraine Colmcille, the first king?

I'm a fan of Laman as the leader for Cairhien as well (I've actually already put him in as one of the civs I needed to populate the mod with - all use placeholder UAs, but I put in artwork for civs and leaders of Cairhien, Andor, Illian, Seanchan, Manetheren, Amadicia, and the Aiel). If asked for a leader of Cairhien off the top of my head (skipping the obvious Elayne) - Laman is my immediate next step. He's related to Moiraine among other events of the story that we heard about him for (lol Aiel War).

counterpoint said:
That said, I don't love the Foregate as a +gold building - wasn't the foregate a slum?

I agree and I've actually already got the Foregate in as a wonder that increases population once it's completed. (Bumps it up by 4 for now, but that number is completely changeable.)

counterpoint said:
I think this is mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but Illuminators should probably be a national wonder or something. There are multiple chapterhouses (at least one in Tanchico as well).

It's like you're reading my mind, I've already done exactly that!

counterpoint said:
I agree with this in principle, but practically it may be difficult. We know essentially nothing of these old civs. I think it would only "feel right" if you have more than just the one old civ - we'd need more.
Also, I'm realizing that I have no idea what Hawkwing's empire is called.....
How are you planning on dealing with the Two Rivers? It's own Civ? Kind of weird, since it's really just a province of Andor. But part of andor is weird, because.... and part of Manetheren is weird, because....

I've found the biggest block with Manetheren is city names, but as you discuss in a moment that's not exclusive to them. I'm strongly in favor of Two Rivers just being a city in Andor. While they were definitely separatist-like in the books, there was never any actual rebellion, they were still uncontestedly claimed by Andor's government, and their ruling Lord (Perrin - for the duration of the time they were sufficiently large to merit separate consideration) made it clear he had no plans for secession.

Base CiV has multiple precedents for this kind of overlap with Manetheren as well - Byzantium, Rome, Italy, Greece, Carthage, Persia, and Babylon - a lot of base game civs overlap the same geographical and ethnic areas where their primary differentiator is the time in which they existed. I think with the Compact of Ten Nations, the fall of Aridhol (that's Manetheren, right?), King Aemon being betrayed when fighting the Shadowspawn, the original Band of the Red Hand, and such that we've definitely got enough content to make a Manetheren civ. Flavor wise, I feel like they stood out compared to a lot of other historical civilizations in WoT.

I've always thought of Hawkwing's empire (the rise thereof) as a great setting for a scenario - casting the player as Hawkwing.

counterpoint said:
Also, I wonder what's happening with Mayene. They're obviously a city state, but that didn't stop Venice from existing in Civ 5, right? Anyways, Mayene is rich (and independent, despite Tairen ambitions) because of their secret Oilfish Shoals, which they sell and Profit. I mention this now simply because this UB sets up tear and its association with oil, but really that flavor belongs more to mayene (though fish oil, not olive!)

Mayene is currently in as a city-state, but that's literally just a string with no flavor attached. They had a big role in the books and like you said, Venice made it into BNW. I think they'd be a great post-release add-on. They've also got an epic leader, Berelain is one of my favorite characters - it still annoys me that (spoilers) she ends up with Galad.

shaglio said:
I just stumbled upon this thread today, and I am thrilled to see somebody putting so much effort into my favorite book series.

Always glad to see another fan on here! Hopefully there will actually be something to play sometime!

shaglio said:
I was wondering how you were planning to handle each civ's city list.

With great difficulty!

shaglio said:
I thought of a couple options:

1) Prohibit each civ from being able to build Settlers (ala Venice) and requiring "expansion" to be done solely by conquest. This would leave a lot of wide open tracts of land on the map (just like in the books, so FLAVOR!) and allow for more room for armies to battle between territory instead of just city sieges.

I think this could be really effective in a scenario but it's too prescriptive for the randomized games in terms of how the player then has to play the game. I'm largely in agreement with counterpoint here and he's made a lot of the points I would have listed here.

shaglio said:
2) If it's even possible from a programming standpoint, only allow civs to build Settlers based on how many cities are on their list. This will add more cities to the map instead of a virtual OCC game, but some civs will have 1 city (Illian, Mayene) while others will have quite a few (Andor has 7 based on this map! 8 if you include Aridhol. More if you include Emond's Field, Taren Ferry, Deven Ride, Watch Hill on Andor's list instead of Manetheren's).

From a programming standpoint this is possible but error-prone. Firaxis haven't really centralized unit creation in a way that lends itself to this kind of substitution/restriction, and there are a lot of ways to get settlers aside from the obvious build/buy. The Merchant of Venice for Venice is, unfortunately, completely hard-coded replacements. While I could take the same approach, it doesn't scale well. I'm also in agreement with counterpoint about our assumptions on the remaining populations we "don't see" in the nations in the books.

counterpoint said:
Otherwise, I was thinking they could be based on rulers/famous kings/lords (similar to above, using the known members of the council of nine for illian), or famous locations within the city. We could, for example, have a city called Tammaz in Illian. This isn't elegant, but IMO it's preferable to artificially limited the number of cities Illian could have.

I hadn't really considered this and I think base CiV even sets a precedent with this for us. I believe the cities for the Shoshone and Iroquois are based on the names of tribes (I'm not sure if entities like "the shoshone" were ever countries in a formal sense rather than alliances across peoples).

counterpoint said:
so much to consider!

So much! I think that we can even have these conversations at such depth about WoT speaks volumes (ha!) about the depth of the series. It's a great candidate for this kind of mod!

shaglio · Aug 14, 2014

S3rgeus said:
From a programming standpoint this is possible but error-prone. Firaxis haven't really centralized unit creation in a way that lends itself to this kind of substitution/restriction, and there are a lot of ways to get settlers aside from the obvious build/buy. The Merchant of Venice for Venice is, unfortunately, completely hard-coded replacements. While I could take the same approach, it doesn't scale well. I'm also in agreement with counterpoint about our assumptions on the remaining populations we "don't see" in the nations in the books.

I was thinking along the lines of how Caravans & Cargo Ships are restricted to having an available Trade Route. But, it would be too unbalanced to have several civs with 1 or 2 cities while others get to build a handful. I guess counterpoint's suggestion is the best that can be done with the material available from the books (I assume you're also using "The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time" for reference).

S3rgeus · Aug 14, 2014

shaglio said:
I was thinking along the lines of how Caravans & Cargo Ships are restricted to having an available Trade Route. But, it would be too unbalanced to have several civs with 1 or 2 cities while others get to build a handful. I guess counterpoint's suggestion is the best that can be done with the material available from the books (I assume you're also using "The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time" for reference).

The restrictions on building/purchasing trade units are hard coded in the DLL and can't be directly ported to any other unit or restriction type. I can write new logic which restricts building/purchasing quite quickly, but there are a lot of other ways to get settlers I'd need to intercept, which is a problem Firaxis didn't have with trade units, but did with the Merchant of Venice.

I've read the World of the Wheel of Time before and I should definitely pull it down from my shelf to go over again for some more sources for this mod. Maybe they'll list some more customs that I haven't remembered.

counterpoint · Aug 14, 2014

S3rgeus said:
I've been rereading your posts and my overall impression that our primary issue is the association of the term "religion" with more "customs" from the books like Way of the Leaf and Ji'e'toh? I'm cool with rebranding religion as "Customs" like in your section 2 in this post.

The first thing that strikes me about that is "faith" is an unusual yield for establishing and maintaining "customs".

Well, to me it looks like we have a choice here. Do we include "The Light" as one of the "religions", or do we assume that ALL of these are following the Light. To me, the latter is starting to make sense. Much like Eastern Orthodox, Catholocism, and Protestantism in Civ are all Christianity, all of the Peoples of the world (though not individual humans, because of darkfriends) (at least that we've been exposed to) fully believe that they are on the side of the Creator, and the Light. Seanchan craziness? Still think they follow the Light. Aiel? Follow the Light.

So I'm wondering if, maybe, we don't call them customs, and that instead we call religions "Path to the Light" or something like that. To me, that works pretty well. Then, we call the "Beliefs" "customs," since that'll work well with the variety contained therein.

And then Faith, I think, still works fine as a yield. Though I'd be open to it being something else.

As far as your list, I'd feel much, much better if we had a set of 8 or more. That way a given game could have 5 of them, and 3 unused. I, for one, choose my civ's religions (when possible) based on the religion that Civ actually had, for RP reasons. I'm sure some people like to choose their irl religion - in any case, choices are best, IMO. My specific comments on them.

Way of the Light - I don't think we should consider this the "generic Light-following" faith. First of all, this is a very specific thing in-Universe: The Way of the Light is a book written by Some Dude that led to the foundation of the Children. It's not a generic thing. It basically holds the truth that Channeling the One power led to the breaking, and so is the work of the DO, and thus all aes sedai are DF.
I'm happy with this being a Path (or w/e we call it), even in a Civ with channelers. IMO, we *have* to be ok with that, if we're ok with a Way of the Leaf civ going to war. Adopting this religion just means your population believes this stuff - in real world religions, we've many times seen a "civ" have a religion or philosophy that conflicts with their actions.
Also, you have already outlined beliefs that suggest we are indeed interpreting this as having an association with the children (though they can of course be adopted by others instead). My one hesitation here is that we might run into issues when building Amadors UA - let's make sure with "save them" something good.
Way of the Leaf - fine here.
Ji'e'toh - This is mostly fine, though I am again concerned that we might steal the thunder from the Aiel UA (maybe they have "The Fifth"?). Let's use caution.
Water Way - This is fine, but very much not detailed in the books. They have a prophecy concerning the female choeden kal (recall they all committed mass suicide when it melted! wtf RJ...). Maybe there is a belief/custom option that gives bonus faith/happiness from natural wonders (like some AoL ruins, etc.?). I think many people will assume this has to do with the Sea Folk (which it only tangentially does), and I also think this is probably a Path most people won't feel an immediate attraction to, because of its obscurity.
Cult of the Dragon - this is fine, though I suspect we should probably find a better term, since Cult = bad = association with barbarians. Karaethonism?!
Omenology - We'll find a better term. T

I think we should try to find a couple more. Some thoughts below. Again, I am assuming "The Light" isn't one of them, since these are all really subsets of that.

I really like the idea of somehow working in the sort of farm-town, white-bread, down-home, two-rivers kind of religion. You know, with all the solstice festivals (a custom, certainly), Wisdoms, and the catechism ("The Dark One and the Forsaken were bound by the creator ...etc."). The kind of innocent, not-sure-how-much-they-believe-it kind of religion many of the characters were raised with. I'm not sure what to call it,but I think this would help us fill out a slot, and serves a role as a sort of "generic" version of the religion.
What about secularism/humanism/Reason/Logic or something like that? I'm thinking along the lines of the kind of thing likely popular in the AoL.
What if we had something like "Followers of Jendai." I'm not sure who Jendai is, but the Jendai Prophesies are the prophs of the Cooramoor. This would be sort of a loose, blanket-way of covering
Ideally, we can come up with a phrase referring to the Sharan philosophies and Path. We know almost nothing about them, but certainly they have customs - if we can come up with a decent name it might be worth adding it just to flavor things up (especially if we have a Sharan civ, which we probably should, given aMoL's events...)

I need to go for the moment. The rest of my responses will be made later.

counterpoint · Aug 14, 2014

S3rgeus said:
I really like this idea - make joining the Shadow a slippery slope rather than a one-time choice. Were you thinking of having opportunities to do both good and evil throughout the game - for varying bonuses and penalties? I think the two options are, from a gameplay perspective, relatively balanced in isolation as they stand now (and are a good combination of flavor and gameplay). If following the Light primarily involved turning down bonuses that would later require committing your civ to the Shadow, I don't think that would work from a balance perspective. I'd say a decent number of people would play the Light choices for flavor, but if you want pure advantage - Shadowspawn all the way - particularly if you're going for a conquest victory, since you get to be the only winner on the Shadow side, instead of sharing it.

The other thing that jumps to my mind about this idea is that it looks to be monstrously complicated to implement. ....

I think the simple get-a-bonus tradeoff is a shallow choice, especially considering the LB only happens if you fail to win the game before then. I'm not sure how best to tackle this, and will need to think on it.

On a related note, I've been thinking about the eras of the Third Age, and how they were generally defined by world-altering and cataclysmic events. I seem to recall you were still unsure how you were going to name the ages, incidentally. I find this to be somewhat interesting, and might provide some gameplay for us, and help us with this darkfriend thing.

After the Breaking.... led to the 10 Nations period. This could be one era.
Then come the Trolloc Wars
Out from that comes the Free Years (I think they're called), and then Hawkwing's empire
...which then Collapses with (if I recall correctly), the War of the Hundred Years
... and emerges with the New Era, where the current countries are formed.

So, whether that'd divided into 4 or 5 eras, I don't know, but what's specifically interesting to me in this conversation is the Trolloc Wars. What if, during the second phase of the game (the "classical" era), there was a little mini tarmon Gaidon? Suddenly, those Trollocs that are hanging out in the blight start moving south, and are finally accompanied by Dreadlords as well. It's possible you could remain totally safe from it (weren't the Seanchan?), but perhaps we could have huge bonuses for those who stand and fight - probably Prestige, Faith, etc. So, if you're the Sea Folk and want to stay out of it, you can, and you'll be safer for it, but you might find your comfortable Cultural Victory lead shrink if a lucky Shienar manages to kill the most dreadlords, capture the Eye of the World, or whatever. You get the picture.
This offers an opportunity for some mid-game Darkfriendliness. I'm not sure what exactly it would be, but you could perhaps secretly build Projects that actually create Shadowpawn, or trade your channelers in to become dreadlords. or something. Maybe they would give you some benefits, but most importantly, they'd make things harder for the Light Forces.

This kind of mechanic, I think, adds some real uniqueness to the flow of time in the game. Of course, maybe the Trolloc Wars don't have to always be in the same era - it could be random. Similarly, though, we could create similar "world events" that somehow mirror the other major events that happened in the WoT universe (some diplo event concerning the arrival of a possible High King?)
A simple argument against this is, of course, that this is based too much on the way the Third Age really went, and that this Mod isn't trying to recreate that. To that I say that Civ 5 does the same thing. The eras of Civ specifically mirror a very euro-centric view of history, and one that couldn't have gone down if things had worked out differently - who's to say if the wars of the middle ages were replayed and ended differently, Italy would ever have time to devote to a rennaissance of art and science? I consider this in the same vein, but of course including some bigger in-game significance.
End rant! But, that's one example of a way we could have a civ sell your soul early on, via some key choices you make throughout the flow of the game.

S3rgeus said:
I went with the 'opposite' way around, where you're rewarded for making up for your toh (seeing as only the toh's possessor should say when and how much toh they have).

Yeah, in general I'm also not in favor of adding some complicating mechanic that applies to only one civ.

So no possibility of multiplayer support? I was looking forward to an epic Marathon-length game (in honor of the series itself) with the development staff of this mod...

S3rgeus said:
In terms of flavor it did, but I think that's a bit unfair from a gameplay perspective. One person choosing this belief (and making good use of it) penalizes all Light side players, and then the original believer might even join the Shadow, turning the drawback into a further bonus. It's also strange to have a single belief have such a long-term ramification where the rest are persistent effects.

OK, I understand and agree. I would say we have two options. On would be allowing them to have a choice and voluntarily "donating them" - one of our Darkfriend Mechanics - for some bonus. This could be an interesting twist - having some of the Beliefs have "corruptions" available.
The other, probably better option, is to just ignore it entire, and still have these evil Aiel channelers come back during the LB (because they're cool), but have it have zero to do with actually how many people sent their male channelers into the blight.
That said, some sort of "Turning" mechanic for male and female channelers IS an interesting possible component for the shadowspawn/darkfriends to have, especially since it occupies a huge role in the later books. You know, if a channeler is killed by a Myrdraal or channeler, there's a chance they are turned, etc.

S3rgeus said:
I think the Dragonsworn work really well as the barbarians. As you said, other false dragons throughout history give us a historical jumping off point to brand these lawless followers of the dragon as standing against any other nation. We've got two "barbarian" factions in the mod as it stands now, and they are at war with each other. I think that reflects the dynamic in the books quite well - the Dragonsworn fight the Shadowspawn, but also the nations around them. I don't think of them being the barbarians as making them "evil", just in conflict with the established civilizations.

I love the idea of, periodically, a False Dragon appearing amongst the Dragonsworn. A mini world-event type of thing, probably once per era. Probably screws over once civ close to where he spawns, but if they beat him, they'd get some sort of bonus. Also allows for some interesting diplo-related things, like Gifting units to the Civ dealing with them or something.
Part of me thinks the barbs should just be "Bandits" or something, and then become dragonsworn when a False Dragon appears (since there really aren't Dragonsworn around for hundreds of years in between FDs), but I understand the simplicity of what you suggest.

S3rgeus said:
Sounds like a good plan. Are we planning to maintain the two founder, two follower belief structure from base CiV? I figured we would.

I think so. Seeing that the "beliefs" of our "religions" appear to be moving towards being more significant, we could rethink how this works, somewhat. Like more follower beliefs (or stronger ones) than founder, since it would really blow to be left "holding the back" if the religions are really powerful.

S3rgeus said:
I have to say I'd go completely the opposite way with this. I think using the leaders we know from the books is hugely important - where they exist. A big aspect of playing this mod is having read the books and wanting to "play" some portion of that. There's a point of view that the work we're doing to randomize and CiV-ify the WoT flavor runs counter to that, but I think "playing as the WoT leaders you know" is a huge draw. And as a counterpoint ( ) I think using older leaders like Nicoli Merseneos den Ballin and Ishara Casalain will put off a lot of players. (I know I'd be a bit put off by it.) While I recognize the name Ishara Casalain, I don't particularly associate much in the way of character to her and I didn't even know Nicoli's name before now.

Alright, I'm with you. I did state, after all, that making it "feel like WoT" was one of my highest priorities. I do feel, though, that with some of the Civs, the current-era leaders are only known for their terribleness - we should probably find replacements for them. Its not like anybody's attached to Mattin Stepaneos or anything.
This leaves me... kind of on the Morgase bandwagon, though, as I still feel weird with a main character being a leader. Not a big deal, though.

S3rgeus said:
That's a very good point that I hadn't really considered. I was thinking more along the lines that, given a randomized world settings, Illian's prevalency of Hunters, and the Hunt's integration into their society, the greater the chances that they would be the ones to find the Horn. I can definitely see a change that meshes well with the "disappearing" Horn discussed above - Illian could gain a culture/prestige bonus as long as the "Hunt is on" - so while the Horn is "hidden". Then Illian is in the unique position of wanting to kill the Hornblower to get their bonus back.

I think, fundamentally, it's going to come down to what "type" of Civ we want Illian to play like. Bonuses to the odds of actually *finding* the horn leads to a domination-type civ. Culture/Faith/gold bonuses when it is found, or when the hunt is on, as you said, are an entirely different matter.

S3rgeus said:
Base CiV has multiple precedents for this kind of overlap with Manetheren as well - Byzantium, Rome, Italy, Greece, Carthage, Persia, and Babylon - a lot of base game civs overlap the same geographical and ethnic areas where their primary differentiator is the time in which they existed. I think with the Compact of Ten Nations, the fall of Aridhol (that's Manetheren, right?), King Aemon being betrayed when fighting the Shadowspawn, the original Band of the Red Hand, and such that we've definitely got enough content to make a Manetheren civ. Flavor wise, I feel like they stood out compared to a lot of other historical civilizations in WoT.

Manetheren is indeed one of the Ten Nations, but so is Aridhol. It's a different nation. Cities would definitely be a problem,e specially since those nations often seem to be described, somewhat, as city states, in a sense.
Certainly there's a lot of flavor to work with with that Civ, though I wonder if it cannibalizes other things we want to do, like incorporated the Band of the Red Hand (maybe their UA?) into the game as an independent military force or something. As far as the Two Rivers, yes, I totally get what you mean. There is some great "flavor" there, though - would Longbowmen be an Andoran UU, or a Manetherenan (?) UU?

S3rgeus said:
I've always thought of Hawkwing's empire (the rise thereof) as a great setting for a scenario - casting the player as Hawkwing.

Right, but if you're trying to work in "historical Civs" as well, shouldn't the most significant civilization in the history of the Age be one of them? Or does it not count as *one* civ?

S3rgeus said:
Mayene is currently in as a city-state, but that's literally just a string with no flavor attached. They had a big role in the books and like you said, Venice made it into BNW. I think they'd be a great post-release add-on. They've also got an epic leader, Berelain is one of my favorite characters - it still annoys me that (spoilers) she ends up with Galad.

Better Galad than Gawyn...
Still, once thing I'll say about this is, due to the perspective of the books, Mayene (i.e. Berelein) is much more "important" and has that "WoT Feel" much more than some of the other "real" nations (Murandy, etc.). So I could imagine them going in there earlier, instead of some other civs, because of that.

That said, maybe we're on the path to just having really cool, super unique city states. It's maybe already shaking out to be that way. Consider:

- Tar Valon - unique, enough said.
- Steddings - maybe have unique quests/units. No channeling
- Far Madding - no channeling, maybe something else
- Shadar Logoth - Mashadar and death factory
- Falme - maybe a naval or trade powerhouse?
- Mayen (if a C.S.) - economically oriented, has unique resource.

So, maybe, the better path is just to give the City States tons of flavor and affect the game in more varied ways.

Re: the World of RJ's WoT. I read it awhile back. It might have some stuff we're missing, but the reality is the research I'm doing is through combing the wikis and such online, and I'm pretty sure most of the stuff from the "Big White Book of Bad Art" is probably already included in them.

S3rgeus · Aug 15, 2014

Sorry, just dropping in for a quick message. I'm going away for this weekend, so I'll be back on here on Monday evening! I'll reply in detail to the above stuff then!

S3rgeus · Aug 18, 2014

counterpoint said:
Well, to me it looks like we have a choice here. Do we include "The Light" as one of the "religions", or do we assume that ALL of these are following the Light. To me, the latter is starting to make sense. Much like Eastern Orthodox, Catholocism, and Protestantism in Civ are all Christianity, all of the Peoples of the world (though not individual humans, because of darkfriends) (at least that we've been exposed to) fully believe that they are on the side of the Creator, and the Light. Seanchan craziness? Still think they follow the Light. Aiel? Follow the Light.

So I'm wondering if, maybe, we don't call them customs, and that instead we call religions "Path to the Light" or something like that. To me, that works pretty well. Then, we call the "Beliefs" "customs," since that'll work well with the variety contained therein.

And then Faith, I think, still works fine as a yield. Though I'd be open to it being something else.

This sounds really cool. Were you thinking this could tie into the 'slippery slope' darkfriends mechanic? If receiving boons from the Shadow cost the civ in terms of the Path to the Light then I think that balances those choices quite a bit. There would need to be appropriate rewards on both sides for the major victory types - otherwise Domination might always go Shadow and Culture always Light, for example.

counterpoint said:
As far as your list, I'd feel much, much better if we had a set of 8 or more. That way a given game could have 5 of them, and 3 unused. I, for one, choose my civ's religions (when possible) based on the religion that Civ actually had, for RP reasons.

I play exactly the same way - though I don't go for religion early very often any more and I so I don't usually get my civ's religion! I'd definitely like to have more, there's a long weekend coming up that I can use to do some good research on the other beliefs in WoT and which might be formalized for use here.

counterpoint said:
I'm sure some people like to choose their irl religion - in any case, choices are best, IMO. My specific comments on them.

Way of the Light - I don't think we should consider this the "generic Light-following" faith. First of all, this is a very specific thing in-Universe: The Way of the Light is a book written by Some Dude that led to the foundation of the Children. It's not a generic thing. It basically holds the truth that Channeling the One power led to the breaking, and so is the work of the DO, and thus all aes sedai are DF.
I'm happy with this being a Path (or w/e we call it), even in a Civ with channelers. IMO, we *have* to be ok with that, if we're ok with a Way of the Leaf civ going to war. Adopting this religion just means your population believes this stuff - in real world religions, we've many times seen a "civ" have a religion or philosophy that conflicts with their actions.
Also, you have already outlined beliefs that suggest we are indeed interpreting this as having an association with the children (though they can of course be adopted by others instead). My one hesitation here is that we might run into issues when building Amadors UA - let's make sure with "save them" something good.

I had completely forgotten that was the name of the Children's founding literature. I'm reconsidering now and yeah, since the Children of the Light definitely fulfill the kind of flavor and content we're going for with these Paths then it'll be good to go for it. Like you said, we'll have to balance Amadicia's uniques with what we use up on these beliefs - I'd planned Amadicia's UA and at least one UU to be Children-centric, but a bit of research and there sohuld be some more uniqueness to that nation to find!

counterpoint said:
Ji'e'toh - This is mostly fine, though I am again concerned that we might steal the thunder from the Aiel UA (maybe they have "The Fifth"?). Let's use caution.

I think the Aiel are much less of an issue than Amadicia because there's a lot more content and uniqueness that sets them apart from other nations. Definitely worth keeping track of though - we don't want to hamstring them.

counterpoint said:
Water Way - This is fine, but very much not detailed in the books. They have a prophecy concerning the female choeden kal (recall they all committed mass suicide when it melted! wtf RJ...). Maybe there is a belief/custom option that gives bonus faith/happiness from natural wonders (like some AoL ruins, etc.?). I think many people will assume this has to do with the Sea Folk (which it only tangentially does), and I also think this is probably a Path most people won't feel an immediate attraction to, because of its obscurity.

Agreed, it's a much smaller part of the story.

counterpoint said:
Cult of the Dragon - this is fine, though I suspect we should probably find a better term, since Cult = bad = association with barbarians. Karaethonism?!

Karaethonism or something like it could work, the beliefs based off it could potentially interact with the Dragonsworn as well.

counterpoint said:
I think we should try to find a couple more. Some thoughts below. Again, I am assuming "The Light" isn't one of them, since these are all really subsets of that.

I really like the idea of somehow working in the sort of farm-town, white-bread, down-home, two-rivers kind of religion. You know, with all the solstice festivals (a custom, certainly), Wisdoms, and the catechism ("The Dark One and the Forsaken were bound by the creator ...etc."). The kind of innocent, not-sure-how-much-they-believe-it kind of religion many of the characters were raised with. I'm not sure what to call it,but I think this would help us fill out a slot, and serves a role as a sort of "generic" version of the religion.

I really liked this one as well and almost put it in my previous list as well. I'm not sure what to call it, but it comes up a lot in the books and is the right kind of "belief".

counterpoint said:
What about secularism/humanism/Reason/Logic or something like that? I'm thinking along the lines of the kind of thing likely popular in the AoL.

I'm less into this one, though I think it would be well placed in an AoL scenario. I think the immediate parallel for the user is atheism (drastic oversimplification/misclassification of those philosophies, but I think the connotation is there), which doesn't seem to fit into the WoT timeline we're covering.

counterpoint said:
What if we had something like "Followers of Jendai." I'm not sure who Jendai is, but the Jendai Prophesies are the prophs of the Cooramoor. This would be sort of a loose, blanket-way of covering

I'd completely forgotten about the Jendai prophecies, but once you mention it it's definitely memorable from the books. Sounds like a plan.

counterpoint said:
Ideally, we can come up with a phrase referring to the Sharan philosophies and Path. We know almost nothing about them, but certainly they have customs - if we can come up with a decent name it might be worth adding it just to flavor things up (especially if we have a Sharan civ, which we probably should, given aMoL's events...)

This sounds good, and paves the way for us to include Shara as an 'expansion' civ later on (which I've had in the back of my head as a plan for a while). Like a few others, I'm not sure what to name it. You mentioned Messiah Prophecy earlier, which once the two have been purposefully linked, I think makes sense.

counterpoint said:
I think the simple get-a-bonus tradeoff is a shallow choice, especially considering the LB only happens if you fail to win the game before then. I'm not sure how best to tackle this, and will need to think on it.

So, related to what I said above, what do you think of the idea of having the Paths to the Light being on the opposite end of the scale from the Shadow's secret boons? If giving in to the Shadow cost you faith/components of your Path, I think that goes a way toward balancing the ongoing benefit/cost of choosing one over the other.

I'm still a fan of allowing the player (and AI) choose which side they're on at the last moment - almost (but not quite) regardless of their decisions up until then, but then have their starting position in the Last Battle be affected by how their ongoing attitude and final decisions meshed. The Last Battle choice screen can offer a summary of the kinds of penalties you'll receive for choosing "against type" based on what you've done so far, but that might still be an acceptable penalty.

The first thing that springs to mind for me is rebellions in civs that side drastically against their ongoing choices. Darkfriends insight rebellion in a Light-choosing civ that allowed them to prosper. People rise up against a government that chooses the Shadow despite their alliance with the Light. Choosing Light at the last moment also makes me think the Shadowspawn would direct more armies your way during the ensuing war.

counterpoint said:
On a related note, I've been thinking about the eras of the Third Age, and how they were generally defined by world-altering and cataclysmic events. I seem to recall you were still unsure how you were going to name the ages, incidentally. I find this to be somewhat interesting, and might provide some gameplay for us, and help us with this darkfriend thing.

After the Breaking.... led to the 10 Nations period. This could be one era.
Then come the Trolloc Wars
Out from that comes the Free Years (I think they're called), and then Hawkwing's empire
...which then Collapses with (if I recall correctly), the War of the Hundred Years
... and emerges with the New Era, where the current countries are formed.

So, whether that'd divided into 4 or 5 eras, I don't know, but what's specifically interesting to me in this conversation is the Trolloc Wars. What if, during the second phase of the game (the "classical" era), there was a little mini tarmon Gaidon? Suddenly, those Trollocs that are hanging out in the blight start moving south, and are finally accompanied by Dreadlords as well. It's possible you could remain totally safe from it (weren't the Seanchan?), but perhaps we could have huge bonuses for those who stand and fight - probably Prestige, Faith, etc. So, if you're the Sea Folk and want to stay out of it, you can, and you'll be safer for it, but you might find your comfortable Cultural Victory lead shrink if a lucky Shienar manages to kill the most dreadlords, capture the Eye of the World, or whatever. You get the picture.
This offers an opportunity for some mid-game Darkfriendliness. I'm not sure what exactly it would be, but you could perhaps secretly build Projects that actually create Shadowpawn, or trade your channelers in to become dreadlords. or something. Maybe they would give you some benefits, but most importantly, they'd make things harder for the Light Forces.

This kind of mechanic, I think, adds some real uniqueness to the flow of time in the game. Of course, maybe the Trolloc Wars don't have to always be in the same era - it could be random. Similarly, though, we could create similar "world events" that somehow mirror the other major events that happened in the WoT universe (some diplo event concerning the arrival of a possible High King?)
A simple argument against this is, of course, that this is based too much on the way the Third Age really went, and that this Mod isn't trying to recreate that. To that I say that Civ 5 does the same thing. The eras of Civ specifically mirror a very euro-centric view of history, and one that couldn't have gone down if things had worked out differently - who's to say if the wars of the middle ages were replayed and ended differently, Italy would ever have time to devote to a rennaissance of art and science? I consider this in the same vein, but of course including some bigger in-game significance.
End rant! But, that's one example of a way we could have a civ sell your soul early on, via some key choices you make throughout the flow of the game.

This sounds really cool, I like the idea of a Trolloc Wars kind of push and the way it ties in to making the Last Battle less of a black/white choice. It does make the timeline much more WoT-centric, which I think is a good way of differentiating from base CiV while still keeping true to the idea of the game.

I like your proposed eras, though I think splitting After Breaking and a Ten Nations-equivalent into 2 eras would be a good idea. I think there are a couple of good reasons for that. Trolloc Wars in a classical era equivalent (that lived up to their namesake) would be really difficult for a player to deal with and would prescribe a military focus for the first part of the game. Moving it to the mid/end-medieval era would give civs doing non-military strategies more time to have some standing army while still 'focusing' on their core victory. Flavor wise I think After Breaking can be about rediscovering the basics of human civilization, where the Ten Nations era is the first one where true countries come together and diplomacy actually takes place. (Players have a few cities and tend to have the techs that unlock the first few diplo options.)

Also, if we use the World Congress-style "world era" setup where events occur when either half of the civilizations reach a certain era or one reaches the era beyond, I think that makes for some very interesting gameplay. A devious player could use a few strategic free techs/some beelining down the tree to trigger the Trolloc Wars before the other civs are expecting to have to deal with it.

I think that kind of approach lends itself to being fixed in time on the tech tree.

Also, I think having fewer eras than BNW-CiV is a good idea. Like you said earlier, technology in WoT only really gets to an Earth-equivalent of the early Renaissance era, so it makes sense to have the tech tree be wider but not as long as the base CiV tree. Eras last longer that way and while we don't necessarily have fewer techs than CiV, 'science' will progress more slowly (when units of time are turns).

counterpoint said:
Yeah, in general I'm also not in favor of adding some complicating mechanic that applies to only one civ.

I don't think the toh stuff is too complicated - those kinds of deals are proposed (not necessarily taken) relatively often, and a player with that bonus needs to account for the extra bonus they'll get for taking a normally disadvantageous trade (like William and his trading away last copies of luxuries).

counterpoint said:
So no possibility of multiplayer support? I was looking forward to an epic Marathon-length game (in honor of the series itself) with the development staff of this mod...

I would love to support multiplayer, but there's no official ways to do so. There are some workarounds that other modders have got going, but I haven't looked into them much yet and I gather they require setup per-mod author and the install process doesn't look too great for the end users. But maybe I'm misreading that, we'll see!

counterpoint said:
OK, I understand and agree. I would say we have two options. On would be allowing them to have a choice and voluntarily "donating them" - one of our Darkfriend Mechanics - for some bonus. This could be an interesting twist - having some of the Beliefs have "corruptions" available.
The other, probably better option, is to just ignore it entire, and still have these evil Aiel channelers come back during the LB (because they're cool), but have it have zero to do with actually how many people sent their male channelers into the blight.
That said, some sort of "Turning" mechanic for male and female channelers IS an interesting possible component for the shadowspawn/darkfriends to have, especially since it occupies a huge role in the later books. You know, if a channeler is killed by a Myrdraal or channeler, there's a chance they are turned, etc.

I like the second option, the Aiel channelers were definitely really cool. I was looking for more variety in the Shadowspawn to add during the Last Battle and that's a good one. (I've been making this mod for too long - the original Shadowspawn unit list predates AMoL.)

counterpoint said:
I love the idea of, periodically, a False Dragon appearing amongst the Dragonsworn. A mini world-event type of thing, probably once per era. Probably screws over once civ close to where he spawns, but if they beat him, they'd get some sort of bonus. Also allows for some interesting diplo-related things, like Gifting units to the Civ dealing with them or something.
Part of me thinks the barbs should just be "Bandits" or something, and then become dragonsworn when a False Dragon appears (since there really aren't Dragonsworn around for hundreds of years in between FDs), but I understand the simplicity of what you suggest.

I love the idea of False Dragons popping up at random as well - and bonuses for quelling False Dragon rebellions sounds really cool. I actually took a look at this the first time I ever started up the mod (a few years ago) and ran into some weird limitations. (A text entry that starts with the word "True" or "False" is always treated as a boolean, so any unit called "False Dragon" in the DB will be named "0" in game. I've yet to dig in to see how I can fix this.)

I think we can go for simplicity here to start with, but there's nothing to stop us tweaking the barbs into bandits when there are False Dragons and Dragonsworn otherwise post-release. We've got a big feature set and I like the flavor of this, but I don't think it has a big impact on how the game plays right away.

counterpoint said:
Manetheren is indeed one of the Ten Nations, but so is Aridhol. It's a different nation. Cities would definitely be a problem,e specially since those nations often seem to be described, somewhat, as city states, in a sense.
Certainly there's a lot of flavor to work with with that Civ, though I wonder if it cannibalizes other things we want to do, like incorporated the Band of the Red Hand (maybe their UA?) into the game as an independent military force or something. As far as the Two Rivers, yes, I totally get what you mean. There is some great "flavor" there, though - would Longbowmen be an Andoran UU, or a Manetherenan (?) UU?

I thought Aridhol might be separate but didn't remember on the spot. I think it's better to have a very flavorful civ like Manetheren use an element from the books like the Band of the Red Hand than to add another system on top of what we've got already. I was thinking "Two Rivers Bowmen" would be an Andoran UU, because the whole Two Rivers longbows stuff happened at the time when Andor was the country in the area.

counterpoint said:
Right, but if you're trying to work in "historical Civs" as well, shouldn't the most significant civilization in the history of the Age be one of them? Or does it not count as *one* civ?

A bit of both - but I wouldn't say including Manetheren precludes Hawkwing eventually. Like with Shara, I'd also thought Hawkwing would make a good 'expansion' civ. When choosing the initial 14 civs planned for initial release (which is a very large number of civs even as a project unto itself, let alone all the WoT systems we're layering on top!) I first tried to cover the major players and nations that we encountered in the books, but I wanted to include at least one historical civ to leave the door open for more in the future. If asked for a historical civ from WoT, Manetheren always comes to mind first for me, despite Hawkwing's Empire being bigger - probably due to the connection with the main characters.

For a quick shortlist of civs I thought would make for a good 'expansion':

Shara
Hawkwing's Empire
Arafel
Kandor
Saldaea
Malkier
Murandy

Basically also promoting the rest of the Borderlands to full civs, whereas only Shienar's in the base mod. Definitely open to suggestions here. I'd originally thought Mayene might be promote-able, but depending on the stuff you mention below, we might not go with that.

counterpoint said:
Better Galad than Gawyn...

:O :O :O I much preferred Gawyn to Galad. Gawyn got a bit annoying in the last two books, but overall I liked him as a character. I had a particular hatred for Galad for most of the series. (Don't think he's a bad character, he just annoyed me.)

counterpoint said:
Still, once thing I'll say about this is, due to the perspective of the books, Mayene (i.e. Berelein) is much more "important" and has that "WoT Feel" much more than some of the other "real" nations (Murandy, etc.). So I could imagine them going in there earlier, instead of some other civs, because of that.

That said, maybe we're on the path to just having really cool, super unique city states. It's maybe already shaking out to be that way. Consider:

- Tar Valon - unique, enough said.
- Steddings - maybe have unique quests/units. No channeling
- Far Madding - no channeling, maybe something else
- Shadar Logoth - Mashadar and death factory
- Falme - maybe a naval or trade powerhouse?
- Mayen (if a C.S.) - economically oriented, has unique resource.

So, maybe, the better path is just to give the City States tons of flavor and affect the game in more varied ways.

This is interesting and like I said above, might mean leaving Mayene as a civ-style CS could still work. (but then people might want to play as Berelain?) A couple of the things you mention I've already started on getting into the mod, actually. Stedding already block channeling of saidin and saidar. I was planning to have the Guardian from Far Madding be a wonder that had a channeling-dampening effect, and since that's a duplicate effect I don't know if we want to go with that for Far Madding, though I'd definitely still like to include them as a CS. Shadar Logoth is also already in there and a placeholder Mashadar unit that hangs out in the city occasionally eating units if they get too close.

I hadn't thought of Falme. I think the main drawback there is taking a city name away from Arad Doman/Tarabon. (but then which of them do we give it to? Maybe CS is better.)

I think we need more than a unique resource for Mayene to stand out, since base CiV has CS-only resources already. I'll think more on this as well.

Civitar · Aug 18, 2014

S3rgeus: It doesn't appear you got my PM, so posting it here:

Remember I had said I might be able to do some units for your mod? Well, I haven't forgotten entirely about that, I've just been really freaking busy! First of all I don't know anything about that universe, and have no intention of reading the books to find out - while the idea of reading a new series of fantasy novels is always attractive, I just finished Raymond E. Feist's ~~Sorcery~~ Magician, whoops and want to move on to whatever the next one is. While I hope that the fantasy units I've done over the past few months have been somewhat useful to you, I know that the Shadowspawn units you wanted haven't shown up yet. So here goes:

Trollocs: Should be fairly easy, you probably want multiple models? Are you all right with one version that is a ram-headed satyr? I ask because that's what the future WHFB Beastman Gor will look like. Nomad or What has also done a Werewolf that you may find useful. If you have a specific idea of what a Trolloc should look like, it's your mod. Tell me what you want!
Myrddraal: What's the matter with Murphy's Vampire Swordsmen? Or do you need "mage" versions of that? Either way is easy, I'll remember to skin off the eyes.
Draghkar: I might be able to jigsaw a new model from Civ4 parts and using the animations from Nomad's Eagle Warrior for the flying... he'd have to have a spear though. And there would be no kissing. None.
Darkhounds: You are spoiled for choice here sir! Do you want the Wolf body or the Warg body? A black, red-eyed Warg exists already (and it is scary as h***). A black, red-eyed Wolf would also be easy and may already exist.
Heroes: This tends to get out of hand, so I'd rather not get into it at all for now.

In return for these, do you suppose you could help out with WHFB a bit? I'm short on coders, I really need a regular Lua and possibly C++ coder... Pazyryk, Nutty, and Bouncymischa have all helped out, but none can be counted on to give a snippet right away (plus Paz is trying to get v7 of Éa out and I broke my v6 so I really want to let him be). And none of them are DLL modders, which are really what I need.
Cheers
Civitar

So... interested? I really do need coders, and not just for Warhammer it seems.

counterpoint · Aug 19, 2014

S3rgeus said:
This sounds really cool. Were you thinking this could tie into the 'slippery slope' darkfriends mechanic? If receiving boons from the Shadow cost the civ in terms of the Path to the Light then I think that balances those choices quite a bit. There would need to be appropriate rewards on both sides for the major victory types - otherwise Domination might always go Shadow and Culture always Light, for example.

Yes, my hope is that we could simply make the benefits of a given side be merely "different" but not necessarily better. The "moral choices" in modern gaming are usually too cliche and end up simple value decisions more all but the most serious RPers.
The thing is, it can't just be so simple as "you get more stuff for being a DF" because way more people would be DFs in the WoT universe if that were the case. True, there are many of them, but selling yourself to evil incarnate isn't a light decision made because you want a few extra Science per turn.

One thing I was thinking that's sort of related to this is that maybe the Last Battle is a sort of second ("real") victory scenario.
Sure, you LB still occurs as a sort of nobody-won-but-it's-2050 (or whatever) -scenario, but in addition, "winning" one of the other victories causes your civ some sort of big time benefit in the LB.
This would need to be set up such that the civs who didn't win would still have incentive to play - they could "win" the last battle still, or at least still play an interesting role in it.

Perhaps each "victory" type gave an appropriate effect when it came time to fight the LB - which would vary of course based on which side you end up on.
- Cultural - based on "presitge," this means you are elected leader/commander of the Battle (for light side, at least). Obviously this doesn't mean you control all other civs, but you'd be able to make some key decisions or something.
- Diplomatic - similar maybe, but you'd get some sort of white-tower-based benefit, or channelers would be better or something (get some angreal,e tc.)
- Domination - this one's weird, obviously. Some sort of extra military might, or something
- Science - I'm still holding out on the whole sealing-the-bore is the science victory thing, for reasons stated before regarding the AoL. What if it is, instead, *breaking* the seals? After all, it took research to determine that that was what had to happen. In any case, the winner here could get an easier time accessing Thakan'dar or something.

And of course, flip-side versions of that for the dark side.

The key thing is of course to try to offer incentive for the non-winners to not quit the game once that first person "wins." Maybe we can offer second and third-place benefits. You know, like in those games where you only have on SS part left to build, and somebody wins a cultural game? Well, maybe here you'd still finish the SS a few turns later, and get a lesser version of the benefit above.

Anyways, just an idea.

S3rgeus said:
I had completely forgotten that was the name of the Children's founding literature. I'm reconsidering now and yeah, since the Children of the Light definitely fulfill the kind of flavor and content we're going for with these Paths then it'll be good to go for it. Like you said, we'll have to balance Amadicia's uniques with what we use up on these beliefs - I'd planned Amadicia's UA and at least one UU to be Children-centric, but a bit of research and there sohuld be some more uniqueness to that nation to find!

Yeah, probably any one of the beliefs you came up with could be sacrificed to become a much cooler UA. Agree that the Aiel are easier to deal with.

S3rgeus said:
Karaethonism or something like it could work, the beliefs based off it could potentially interact with the Dragonsworn as well.

I really liked this one as well and almost put it in my previous list as well. I'm not sure what to call it, but it comes up a lot in the books and is the right kind of "belief".

I'm less into this one, though I think it would be well placed in an AoL scenario. I think the immediate parallel for the user is atheism.

I'd completely forgotten about the Jendai prophecies, but once you mention it it's definitely memorable from the books. Sounds like a plan.

This sounds good, and paves the way for us to include Shara as an 'expansion' civ later on (which I've had in the back of my head as a plan for a while).

So I took the liberty of posting a thread in a couple WoT fan forums to see what ideas people had. Nothing groundbreaking, but I thought I'd share some of the interesting thoughts.

- For our Omen religion, some possible names tossed out were Omen Reading (which I had previously mentioned) and Augury. That last one is the correct word, I think, but it'd kind of arcane and isn't specifically mentioned in the books, so might not have the right "feel."

- coming up with a name for the "white bread" religion was tricky, though somebody did remind me of the "listening to the wind" concept, that would probably make a cool belief (or wisdom ability?) One person brought in the word "Abram," as in the Feast of Abram, one of the holidays. Definitely we could go in a direction like this, naming it after one of the holidays or something.

- one person reminded me of the "Watchers over the Waves," who are in the Great Hunt. They're the people who were supposedly supposed to be watching and waiting, ready for the return of hawkwing's armies. They were punished for somehow failing that. Not sure if it really counts, but it might be awfully close for our purposes. Could have some sort of coastal belief or something (they built watchtowers).

- one person wasn't a fan of the Sea Folk's religion being Jendai-based, since, in their opinion, it didn't really have much to do with their way of life. They did seem to only begrudgingly follow Rand, after all. Another person suggested "Wind Seekers" be a sort of made-up name for their stuff.

- one user suggested that we might just adopt similar nomenclature for all of them: Way of the Leaf, Light, way of the Ravens (seanchan), way of the sea, etc. This has elegance to it - but it also limits the associations a bit (Ravens is so obviously seanchan-related).

- no bright ideas about the Sharans, though one person did point out how they are very isolationist and also think themselves superior (like the seanchan). The messiah thing is interesting, but it'd odd because all the Dragon ones are sort of similar.... but this messiah is actually a bad guy. Cult of the Wyld?

S3rgeus said:
So, related to what I said above, what do you think of the idea of having the Paths to the Light being on the opposite end of the scale from the Shadow's secret boons? If giving in to the Shadow cost you faith/components of your Path, I think that goes a way toward balancing the ongoing benefit/cost of choosing one over the other.

Sure, I think this will all require a lot of very specific talk and design - like really getting int their and crunching numbers and such. Obviously, playtesting as well.

S3rgeus said:
The first thing that springs to mind for me is rebellions in civs that side drastically against their ongoing choices. Darkfriends insight rebellion in a Light-choosing civ that allowed them to prosper. People rise up against a government that chooses the Shadow despite their alliance with the Light. Choosing Light at the last moment also makes me think the Shadowspawn would direct more armies your way during the ensuing war.

This is great. Darkfriend rebellions and such.

S3rgeus said:
I like your proposed eras, though I think splitting After Breaking and a Ten Nations-equivalent into 2 eras would be a good idea. I think there are a couple of good reasons for that. Trolloc Wars in a classical era equivalent (that lived up to their namesake) would be really difficult for a player to deal with and would prescribe a military focus for the first part of the game. Moving it to the mid/end-medieval era would give civs doing non-military strategies more time to have some standing army while still 'focusing' on their core victory. Flavor wise I think After Breaking can be about rediscovering the basics of human civilization, where the Ten Nations era is the first one where true countries come together and diplomacy actually takes place.

all good, though we'll have to think carefully about what "special events" might occur in these eras. If we call it the Ten Nations era... there obviously won't be just 10 nations, but there will have to be something that happens to justify it.

Also, I'm on board with all the era-length and number-of-eras thoughts you had.

S3rgeus said:
I love the idea of False Dragons popping up at random as well - and bonuses for quelling False Dragon rebellions sounds really cool. I actually took a look at this the first time I ever started up the mod (a few years ago) and ran into some weird limitations. (A text entry that starts with the word "True" or "False" is always treated as a boolean, so any unit called "False Dragon" in the DB will be named "0" in game. I've yet to dig in to see how I can fix this.)

wow, what a funny limitation. Well, instead of making them called False Dragon, couldn't we just name them? Like Mazrim Taim or w/e, similar to the way they do it for GP? There probably wouldn't be so many of them that we couldn't find a list of a handful of them from the WoT histories.

S3rgeus said:
I thought Aridhol might be separate but didn't remember on the spot. I think it's better to have a very flavorful civ like Manetheren use an element from the books like the Band of the Red Hand than to add another system on top of what we've got already. I was thinking "Two Rivers Bowmen" would be an Andoran UU, because the whole Two Rivers longbows stuff happened at the time when Andor was the country in the area.

Right, BUT we might "need" the longbow to be for Manetheren, since we obviously don't have a lot of UU ideas for them.

S3rgeus said:
For a quick shortlist of civs I thought would make for a good 'expansion':

Shara

Hawkwing's Empire

Arafel

Kandor

Saldaea

Malkier

Murandy

Right, so as far as the Civs, I was thinking about it, and I think a few of these Expansion ones might deserve to be First launch ones, and a few of the initial launch ones aren't as important. Specifically:

- Why Ghealdan? I mean, they should be there eventually, but I don't recall spending enough time there to get a clear sense of the culture? Was one of the [middle, forgettable] books there?

- I feel somewhat similarly about Arad Doman. Also, somewhat, Tarabon, but I know Tanchico was a bigger deal.

- I think Shara deserves to be in it first-launch. The reason is because they are so different, and we could likely come up with a pretty cooky UA. I feel like RJ made a lot of different countries, and there's a bit of "sameness" to them - the Sharans would help that a lot.

- Somewhat leaning towards Saldea being there, since we know so many characters from there, and have some UUs ready-made (heavy cavalry, etc.)

- MAyene I'm torn about. They're obviously a CS, but Berelain is a major character and pretty cool, and they might provide for some cool UA stuff.

S3rgeus said:
:O :O :O I much preferred Gawyn to Galad. Gawyn got a bit annoying in the last two books, but overall I liked him as a character. I had a particular hatred for Galad for most of the series. (Don't think he's a bad character, he just annoyed me.)

Right, I was in middle school when I first read the first group of books, and Gawyn was much more relatable. But, man does he get so annoying towards the end. Galad's attack of demandred felt at least slightly more reasonable than Gawyn's.

counterpoint · Aug 19, 2014

I was thinking about the whole Last Battle and darkfriends and moral choice and all that, and I thought of a new way of looking at it.

Some assumptions/issues:
- First off, I think balancing the LB *could* be nye-impossible, especially if people are "gaming" the system and betraying at the last minute to make it all lopsided. Of course, *some* betray could be cool.
- In the books, essentially the entire world is rallied against the Shadow. Some are not-on board with the when/where/how (i.e. the Seanchan), but their on the same side. The notable exception is the Sharans who - not by choice - ended up fighting for the DO.

The LB is likely easiest to balance if we have 0-2 civs on the side of the Dark - it could be any number, the point being simply a *narrow* number.

What if, then, the main choice was taken out of most of our DF/corruption moments? Your civs all stand for the light, at least in principle, but there are undoubtedly darkfriend elements trying to gain power. The natural example of this, as described before, would be rebellions, but I think the unhappiness metric wouldn't be the only way this would happen - maybe using certain abilities too much and such would also increase their power, espionage, etc.

So certain buildings and such could better arm your civ against DF, much in the way constabularies work in Civ. Children could also do this, in theory, though in practice they are terrible at this (1 population point lost for every DF captured lol)

The thing is, though, the Darkfriend victories, while bad, would also grant you some positives - maybe some gold, maybe a unit, maybe shadowspawn leave you alone, etc., reflecting the "gifts" received by the DO in exchange for service.

By the end of the game (or, at an earlier point, during the trolloc wars), your civ has either successfully fended off the Shadow, or has succumbed to it in some way.

Perhaps we can still leave the final choice of who to fight for to the players, but your civ's condition up until that point could effect it.

For the Lightside:
During the battle (or perhaps in general), if your civ is totally hardcore pro-Light, you might:
- be especially resistant to darkfriend espionage, sabotage, trollocs travelling through waygates, etc.
- attract more aes sedai support
- be a larger target of the shadowspawn
- be more resistant to influences from darkside players, whatever that means (maybe you can be turned?)

And if you're much less light-dedicated, or even slightly dark (but still chose light):
- much less likely to be attacked by shadowspawn
- much more likely to have generals and units turned (think the great captains in aMoL
- much less resistant to darkside players, etc.

And for the Dark:
If you're civ has totally been run by darkfriends the whole time, whether by design or by accident, you might:
- gain control of shadowspawn units
- be a huge target for the lightside
- remain more-or-less autonomous from the shadow.

But if you're a last-minute convert, or barely dark:
- get far fewer, or no shadowspawn to control
- be much less a target for the lightside
- probably have much less autonomy, being untrusted by the DO. Maybe some of your cities are even puppetted, or some similar mechanic.

My aim here is to try to come up with ways that the LB could still be fun, regardless of your choices/allegiances mid-game - by having some advantages/disadvantages throughout. By taking away alot of the decision-making from the DF corruption process, it emerges as a bit more of a wildcard factor, making the very-late game super exciting and worth-getting into, perhaps regardless of who wins via normal means. I mean, think of the possibilities: the Cultural-victory winner (lightside leader) is actually heavily corrupted, etc.

Again, I should state that it should be balanced so only one, maybe 2 civs, can join the DO, which somewhat necessitates us taking out some of the final choice of the matter. The reason being that the LB should probably be winnable, but still challenging, if ALL civs are Light, right? But it should be extremely difficult for them if there are more than 1 Dark civs - but we don't want that aspect causing weird game decisions, like people jockeying for position in the LB-choice moment, and we end up with 6 darkside civs and 2 light. It should feel special, IMO.

Plus, I think by taking out all the "choice" elements, and making it somethat that evolves organically based on other things your civ does, we make your coding way easier, and allow the AI to actually be a part of this.

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