Advance warning, I won't be around tomorrow, so I'll be back on Thursday!
I should note first that it was pretty darn hard to come up with non-Children related stuff for this nation! Very tough to find a lot of flavor that isn't related to their Children-HQ.
You've got a lot of stuff on here though, and I like the direction of it!
Hopefully people are OK with, say, Amadicia adopting Ji'eh'toh as a path and still building Hundredmen, while Andor has the Way of the Light (and the Altarans have the Way of the Leaf, but have chosen the "Whitecloak" unit as one of their Customs)!
This sounds like a very CiV situation. Exactly what we're going for!
Luckily, though, it does allow us to use some children stuff that wouldn't make much sense as Path customs (spies, etc.)
Sounds good!
Anyways, this is the last one of these, so I decided I'd try to do it right - here's some stuff!
So much stuff! And yeah, last one! I'm quite excited about the next few phases, we're very near implementing stuff!
Dedicated Mission is a Children-heavy UA. It's meant to encourage conquests and spreading your Path, and using the faith to presumably spread your path around more, which continues to generate faith, etc.... I went for the bonus faith when the city is of the same path because I felt like Ghealdan was more about the fight-your-religious-enemies, and this is mechanical contrast, and also sort of fits the Children, somehow. Open to the opposite, though. Also, the clarification in the beginning is to prevent people from getting this bonus over and over again, or when recapturing cities, etc.
Also, this ability doesn't explicitly require that it's *your* religion you adopt - +faith can be useful to anybody, as long as you're spreading A religion.
I like the contrast and this encourages the right stuff for Amadicia.
Dogmatic Domination is pretty straightforward, but actually takes the opposite approach as DM above - here, it provides bonuses against *other* paths. This could easily be flipped to the exact opposite.
Also works well. A bit straightforward, but will be useful quite often.
Spymasters network is a UA way to turn espionage into an aid to domination. Pretty straightforward. Too simplistic?
This is a bit simple, I think I could see it combined with one of the UEaE options below and that would be fine.
Overwhelming Dedication is weird. It sounds like it might be ridiculously overpowered (and it might be), but on the other hand, any civilization you're successfully invading is probably not long for this world, and thus probably will have its Path's influence fade over time (thus, founder bonuses would diminish to nothing). Also, not sure if this kind of thing is compatible with all the Founder Customs. I considered doing Follower instead, but that seemed actually too good since they don't rely on the larger health of the Path (and also overlaps with existing tenets or customs or something I can't remember)
Yeah, I see what you mean about the Path diminishing after its founder has lost their capital. I'm also not too keen on a UA that requires you to capture foreign capitals to work, unless it does something super explosive. (Like the Seanchan option that lets you build opposing uniques - that can be huge.) It's something that won't be effective most of the time. And worth noting (even for the explosive ones) that it will never come into play on a Duel map.
Prosperity in Belief is meant to encourage rigorous defense of a city's Alignment. This one might be too easy, though, in that its only challenging if people are going after your alignment (of course, you *would* go after Amadicia's alignment if they had this UA). Is there a better version of this? Part of me want to reward them for being zealous in their alignment - having a city that's either too extreme light or too extreme shadow. Not sure how to pull that off, though
Interesting, this is a mechanic we haven't really interacted with in any of our previous uniques. It's good to cover it here!
I really don't have a good handle on whether keeping an individual city Stable will be something that's very difficult. So I'm fine with leaving considerations for over- or under-poweredness until we know more about that.
Are we ok with this requiring players to better understand the progression of citizen Alignment creation? That's not a particularly obvious system, but the details of it are largely unimportant unless they need to optimize an ability like this.
We could reward players in much the same fashion for extreme Lightness or Shadowness (or just "extent away from Stable") - we'd have a modifier that's based on the number of citizens they have that put their city Alignment farther from Stable. So if a Stable city, for them, is two Light citizens and a Darkfriend, and they have 3 Light citizens, they have an extent of 1 away. A difficulty with this though is that the harder they commit to their overall Alignment, the more difficult it becomes to keep that extent large, since the proportion of citizens tilts towards the Alignment they've invested in (so there are fewer "intended" slots of the opposing Alignment to get ahead of the Stable curve).
The Troubles is based on their battles with Altara (which they didn't win). Kind of weird since it encourages harassment and such, instead of conquest, which might be appropriate if you were going for Culture.
Interesting, though I think a bit niche for a UA. You could certainly move to make it happen more often, but by comparison, the Aztecs have a straight up "culture from all kills" UA that isn't particularly exciting - and it's guaranteed to happen all the time.
Legendary Conquests is intended to support a conquest-oriented culture victory. All of the abilities are pretty minor alone (I imagine X and Y are pretty low), but together might be useful.
I see the intent of the LW ability, but I think that would be super annoying to play against. They just need to sneak one unit close enough and then there's nothing you can do about it when the whole army comes marching in.
Same as above about capturing original capitals.
Channeling Ban - I know no channeler producing might be too harsh, but I did eliminate Males from this (that'd be too convenient) and also the "ubers" (Aes Sedai and Asha'man), as well as the Gateway unit which to me seem to kind of be a different thing. Perhaps that messes up the ability somewhat. In any case, a way to lock down and spread your alignment while dominating opposing channelers. Might not be worth it.
I very much like the idea of making Amadicia a non-channeler civ in this way, and giving them something very distinctive and powerful in exchange. I also like that the combat bonus applies against more units than the ones Amadicia can't build itself. (Also works on Aes Sedai, False Dragons, etc.) I'm not sure if the Questioner is a strong enough feedback mechanism for killing channelers, but it makes a lot of flavor sense.
The Hundredman is meant to synergize with Dedicated Mission. You use these convert cities, and then get massive bonuses to faith upon capture.
That's good synergy! Both are useful in their own right and work very well together too.
The Bannerman takes away the one true "defense" of channeling units - their offense. Combine this with the native bonuses for the anti-channeler units, and this guy is strong against A'M and AS. However, note that the aura affects all channelers - friendly, enemy, and domestic. That might hurt balanced unit composition, in a sense, but it also helps discourage the use of the late game uber channeling units, which makes sense for this civ.
Interesting, I like the way it encourages Amadicia to not use channelers, without actually disallowing them.
The Hand of the Light is meant to help with culture while encouraging aggressive spreading of your alignment AND your path.
Nice, this is a good mechanic to have uniques for!
The Guardians of the gate (Spawn) provides a mid-late game vehicle for the maintenance of alignment and path, through killing of channelers and shadowspawn. Pretty straightforward - synergizes pretty well with a few UAs, I'd guess
Yep, straightforward enough and has some good bonuses.
The Guardians of the Galaxy (counter) gives you an automatic counterattack when you're close to home or in adjacent territory (which helps promote a kind of slow crawl domination). Too powerful? Kind of weird that it happens on the opponent's turn? Makes them essentially best killed by range or channelers.
More seriously, what does "fires an immediate counter-attack" mean here? Ranged units do usually fight back when attacked in melee. Is it another ranged attack afterwards? How would that work visually if they'd been killed?
The Lord Captain's Battery is a unit that benefits from the whole spread-your-path-than-conquer setup. Could of course be flipped to benefit from *different* paths
I like the idea of spread your Path and then conquer in its wake, that does feel like what Amadicia does (or at least what the Children do) in the canon. This is a simple enough unit that accomplishes that.
The Hundredman's Battery is a unit that *aids* in the spread-your-path-than-conquer setup.
Similar to the Hundredman with generating Pressure by attacking, though siege units will usually attack a city a lot more, so this one will probably result in more spreading of Path.
The Fortress of the Light is a straightforward prepare-you-for-the-endgame-wars defense building. Probably problematic, in that this building is likely needed for a Wonder, and it's not easy to turn "generic" like some other such buildings.
Yeah, the flavor for this should probably be a Wonder.
Also a straightforward building that helps in the endgame.
The Dome of Truth (Culture) has the same problem as far as Wonder-ness, but "Dome" is more easily extrapolated into a per-city structure. This one is meant to reward diligent production of Amadician Alignment. I wonder if it needs to be tweaked such that it only rewards you when the Questioner *does* something (should it be effective if it's used on a Stable city?), but that might rely too much on opponent's actions? Also, the production benefit being based on Faith might be too National Wonderey - thoughts?
Replacing the Alignment building, which is quite late, I think this needs to do something explosive. The bonus is fine for an earlier building, but unlocking alongside Prestige1 and the like, there isn't as much time to utilize an ongoing bonus like this.
As it is now, it's kind of a Culture factory based on how quickly you can produce Questioners, which I don't think will be very fun. It also rewards intentionally deviating cities and then pushing them back towards Stable, if we choose to use distance-from-stable as a modifier (which makes sense, otherwise you just machine gun all these cities with as many Questioners as you can).
The DoT (Kill) simply provides alignment (in the direction of the alignment created by the building, meaning there are two possible versions of the Building) and Faith. pretty straight forward
Same as above, I feel like this should be more explosive given how late it unlocks. It will happen a lot during the LB, I suppose though.
I considered a Faith-building-based Dome of Truth as well, but that would put it much earlier in the tech tree, which I wanted to avoid.
At this late in the game we would probably want to base the ability off of Faith production, rather than produce more Faith from the building. That could work, though I don't have any specific new ones to do that below.
Related to above, obviously the Alignment of our Faith buildings is going to be hidden from enemies. So that means we probably won't have actual *different* buildings for alignment. What if somebody captures a city (pre-LB)? We shouldn't reveal it then, right? So would the capturing city be able to determine the "side" of the building they've captured?
Good point, these buildings (the alignment ones in general) should probably always be destroyed when a player captures them, to avoid revealing the Alignment of the previous owner. (Though you could double bluff - the AI would never do that correctly, so it's not really something we should consider as a primary strategy.) The player might be able to guess - if the city was 100% Darkfriends because the previous owner was crazy evil, then all of the remaining citizens would presumably be Darkfriends.
Which would oddly pull that player more Shadow. This is something I hadn't considered before, though it does make some flavor sense. We could, of course, mitigate that by converting some citizens closer to the norm of the capturing civ when a city is taken.
The Spymaster's Quarters provides two kinds of benefits, one that relies on using your EaE protectively (and rewards you with Happiness - should it also help with Alignment?) and the other that gives you a benefit if people are spying on you (which of course relies on the actions of others)
I very much like the Unhappiness part of this building - it does make it super strong, which is good for a late game building. It will end up tying up EaE, which are a relatively limited resource, but still. It can be a good stopgap when working towards more overall Happiness, or to offset a temporary problem like razing a city.
Yeah, it could help Alignment - would that be by modifying the yield of the building or the citizens? ("Darkfriends and Light citizens produce +X of their respective Alignment"?)
The Hundredman's Garrison is meant to reward extreme Alignment. I considered a variant where it rewards this city for being closest to the "true" alignment of Amadicia, but that felt a bit too easy to achieve.
This one is really cool, I like that it actively encourages dedication to either side. It's straightforward but still accomplishes a lot.
The Spymaster (sabotage) is meant to provide for some dickishness on the part of Amadicia. I'd imagine the production bonus would be flat, so as to not provide a huge boon if you stop a Wonder, and a useless one if you stop turn one of a Worker. I'd imagine it'll be pretty decent. Do you think this is powerful enough? too powerful? I decided not to permit this in CSs because I figure there are times you want to be in a CS for a coup, but don't want to also destroy their work...
I sort of feel like these could just be UAs. They don't wholesale replace the EaE (you only get 1), which makes them much more like an ability. Though, of course, it does mean we can use the UA slot for something else.
I also think for this and the UEaE below, the Spymaster EaE could be provided in
addition to the EaEs they would get usually. England get a free spy in BNW as part of their UA (not even the whole UA), so I think with this kind of unique it's fine to just add to it.
As for sabotaging production, I love the idea. This will probably make Amadicia good at wonder sniping. What about facing off against an AI Amadicia though? Will this be too frustrating for players if their one-turn-away Wonder gets sabotaged and they get nothing for it? That's an enormous setback - though unlocking in the Renaissance does make it less so since civs will all have grown and diversified a bit by then.
This is also Tall-favoring with the bonus-in-capital, whereas we've marked Amadicia as Wide. However, I'd say Amadicia are fairly borderline on the Tall/Wide scale, so this isn't a big issue.
Spymaster (infiltrate) is super super dickish. I considered adding a provision where he's a little more easy to catch. Otherwise this could be pretty mean... or else useless if we don't make the % high enough.
I don't really feel like this will be very strong. Reducing the HP of the city is unlikely to win a battle that the attacking player wouldn't have won anyway. (Unless it reduces it crazy low - but then there's nothing the defender can really do about that, which would be really annoying.) They will likely get it a bit faster, but this unique feels like it should have a bigger impact than that.
note that the following flavor normally associated with the Children exists elsewhere in our game, currently:
- Whitecloak (faith unit via custom)
- Lord Captain (faith unit via custom, captures unit)
- Questioner (alignment unit)
- Council of Anointed (Path custom, +faith when using questioners)
For those reasons, I haven't included these bits of flavor in the above. However, if we really want to bring these items in, it's likely that some of the flavor proposed above could be swapped for these items' usage elsewhere in the mod.
Sounds good, it looks like there's a lot of good Children flavor still left for us to work with!
Recap! And new stuff!
Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul)
UAs:
- Dedicated Mission, +X (high, based on Population) Faith the first time Amadicia takes control of a foreign city, double when that city follows the majority Path of Amadicia.
- Dogmatic Domination, Amadician units receive +X combat strength against cities following Paths other than the majority Path in Amadicia.
- Spymaster's Network, Amadician units receive +X combat strength when attacking any city in which an Amadician Eyes and Ears is stationed
- Overwhelming Dedication, If Amadicia controls the original capital of a civilization that has founded a Path, Amadicia gains 50% of the benefit from that Path's Founder Custom.
- Prosperity in Belief, Amadician cities of Stable alignment produce +X% culture per turn.
- The Troubles, Initiating a battle with a unit belonging to a major civilization that shares a border with Amadicia, while in that civilization's territory, generates +X Culture.
- Legendary Conquests, Every original capital controlled by Amadicia after <tech> provides +X Prestige and +Y Faith per turn. Upon conquering a foreign city, Culture buildings are never destroyed. An enemy civilization can never move Legendary Works from a city that has an Amadician unit within three hexes of it.
- Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 and Female2 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units.
- Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost.
- Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital.
UUs:
- Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
- Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, All channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
- Hand of the Light, replaces the Questioner, +X Culture when affecting alignment in a foreign city. After <tech> +Y Prestige when affecting alignment in a foreign city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia.
- Guardians of the Gate (spawn), replaces Era 5-8 Melee, Ranged, Mounted, or Polearm unit, +X% combat strength. Z% to spawn a Herald when killing Shadowspawn in Amadician territory. Z% chance to spawn a Questioner when killing an enemy channeling unit.
- Guardians of the Gate (counter), replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, When attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, fires an immediate counter-attack on the attacking unit, even if the Guardian is killed by that unit's attack.
- Lord Captain's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, Receives +X% combat strength against cities following the majority Path of Amadicia.
- Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
- Hand of the Light (foreign), replaces the <BNW Inquisitor equivalent>, can be used on foreign cities as well.
UBs:
- Fortress of the Light, replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
- Dome of Truth (Culture), replaces Alignment, +X Culture whenever an Amadician Questioner is expended in this city. +Y% Production towards Questioners in this city for every Z Faith generated per turn in Amadicia.
- Dome of Truth (Kills), replaces Alignment, +X Alignment and +Y Faith whenever this cities destroys an enemy unit.
- Spymaster's Quarters, replaces Spy2, Stationing Eyes and Ears in this city reduces Unhappiness in this city by X%. Enemy Eyes and Ears caught in this city generate +Y Faith and +Z Prestige for Amadicia.
- Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
- Questioner's Quarters, replaces Alignment, Darkfriend citizens in this city produce double Alignment. This city can "Produce Righteousness", which removes switches 1 citizen from Darkfriend to Light citizen every X production.
UEaEs:
- Spymaster (sabotage), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. When stationed in a city of a major civilization, the Spymaster has X% chance to sabotage the production of that city (modified by the Spymaster's level as well as Eyes and Ears and buildings present in that city) every Y turns. Successfully sabotaging production resets all accumulated production in that city to zero and provides +Z production (high) in the Amadician capital. If the Spymaster is killed, he is reborn at level one.
- Spymaster (infiltrate), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. When stationed in a foreign city, the city's Hit Points are lowered by X% and the city's Combat Strength is lowered by Y% for every Z Faith produced per turn by Amadicia. When stationed in an Amadician city, that city's Hit Points are raised by W.
New stuff!
Foreign Indoctrination also works with the "spread your Path and then conquer in its wake" approach. This lets Amadicia use that strategy to have much more productive captured cities more quickly, so a long series of conquests won't be as draining on their resources. (Though they will take larger Happiness hits when capturing cities, since that unhappiness is based on Population.)
Spymaster's Indirection is a nod to the Children's use of a fall-man spymaster, who thinks he's the spymaster but actually isn't. Oddly, this would make Amadicia relatively Science-y, in a sort of way. A Science boost plays quite well with the flavor, and given the way EaEs work (steal techs the other player has that you don't) it would generally benefit a play style where Amadicia focuses on military/Culture, rather than going for a tech lead. (So it wouldn't make them a "stereotypical" Science civ, unlike what we did with Cairhien.)
Hand of the Light (foreign) is a replacement for the equivalent of the BNW Inquisitor. I can't remember if we decided to fuse the Missionary and the Inquisitor? I couldn't find mention of a final decision either way searching the thread backup. Anyway, assuming we do still have an Inquisitor equivalent, this lets Amadicia use them abroad, which is a significantly more effective way of spreading their Path. (It might make sense to allow these units to only work on cities that don't follow the Path of the unit itself - so the Herald would still have a role for Amadicia that way.)
Questioner's Quarters possibly unlocks a bit late, given what it does. I like the idea of letting Amadicia swing far towards one end or the other of the Alignment scale. This would let them go deep on Shadow or Light - they can easily use the extra Shadow from Darkfriends to go very Shadow, or deliberately pump Production into Light to get rid of them completely.
There could be an alternate version of this that's a UA that just applies to all cities all the time. This may be better in that it lets Amadicia get started earlier on pushing hard one way or the other, but it may push Amadicia quite Shadow-y early on since Production is less available at those stages. (Though we could counteract that by scaling X with Population size of a city, much like Food cost of a new Citizen changes with Population size.)
I'm part of the way through my reply to the Altara stuff below, so I'll be back tomorrow to finish that off!
Though rereading my post I see how it looked like that!
