S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

Miscellaneous Summary

This summary contains decisions and changes to CiV made for WoTMod that don't fall under the purview of any other summaries in the topic. Any outstanding issues are marked in red.

Espionage

  • Spies have been rebranded as Eyes and Ears.
  • Level 2 or higher Eyes and Ears can be promoted to Bloodknives after researching a technology.
  • Bloodknives die 45 turns after becoming Bloodknives.
  • Bloodknives can no longer Steal Technologies, Gather Intrigue, Stage Coups, Affect City-State Elections, or Act as Diplomats.
  • Bloodknives can attempt to assassinate Governors or the Amyrlin. They have a percentage chance of success, modified based on:
    • Presence of a defending spy in the city
    • Buildings or wonders in the city may affect assassination success rate
    • In the case of the Amyrlin, the relative influence of the Ajah she was raised from
  • Bloodknives stationed in foreign cities have a 5% chance of being discovered (and killed) each turn. Modifiers to this value include:
    • Presence and rank of an enemy spy in the same city
    • Any buildings that increase the Governor's security
  • When a Bloodknife succeeds in assassinating a target, it dies as well. (If it fails, it is killed in the process.)

Gray Men

  • Gray Men are functionally similar to Bloodknives, available only to civilizations that have declared for the Shadow during the Last Battle. They share the characteristics of Bloodknives unless stated otherwise below.
  • Each civilization that declares for the Shadow gets a single Gray Man for free (in addition to their existing Eyes and Ears) at the time when they make their declaration.
  • Gray Men do not die if they are successful in assassinating their target.
  • A single civilization may not have more than one Gray Man at a time.
  • A civilization may "train" a new Gray Man, much like they would a unit, but they cost a significant amount of hammers.

Resources

The fundamental mechanical role of resources is unchanged from base CiV, but what resources are present in the game has changed, as outlined below. New resources are highlighted in blue (with the replaced resource, if any, in green, and notes about what 3D model can be used in brackets). Any resource which has different tile requirements from the resource it replaces is mentioned specifically.

Bonus
  • Bananas
  • Wheat
  • Sheep
  • Deer
  • Cattle
  • Salmon (replaces Fish, uses a reskinned fish model)
  • Stone
  • Zemai (replaces Bison, adapt the Wheat model, present on Plains)
  • Shellfish (re-purpose of Crabs model)

Luxury
[two gold]
  • Cotton
  • Spices
  • Sugar
  • Furs
  • S'redit (replaces Ivory)
  • Silk
  • Dyes
  • Incense
  • Wine
  • Gold
  • Silver
  • Marble
  • Pearls
  • Lopar (replaces Truffles, re-skin either Truffles or Bison, whichever works better)
  • Tabac (use the model from Barathor's "More Luxuries", present on Plains and Grassland)
  • Ice Peppers (use reskinned banana model, present on Tundra)
  • Firedrops (replaces Jewelry, CS exclusive)
  • Moonstones (replaces Porcelain, CS exclusive)
  • Sung Wood (Stedding exclusive)

NOTE: Nutmeg, Cloves, and Pepper have not been replaced (and won't be unless we create a civ UA that needs them)

[one gold, one food]
  • Silverpike (replaces Crab, adapted from the fish model - reskinned and resized if possible)
  • Salt
  • Oilfish (replaces Whales, model adapted from Fish - hopefully resized)
  • Apples (replaces Citrus, re-purpose the Citrus model, present in Forest)
  • Kaf (replaces Cocoa, use the model from Barathor's "More Luxuries")
  • Olives (use the model from Barathor's "More Luxuries", present in Jungle)

[three gold]
  • Gems
  • Alum (replaces Copper (though this is moved to three gold), use Aluminum model)

Strategic
  • Horses
  • Copper ("replaces" iron)
  • Iron ("replaces" Coal)
  • Sulfur ("replaces" Aluminum, re-skin the Coal model)
  • Peat ("replaces" Oil, re-purpose the Oil model)
  • Angreal Cache ("replaces" Uranium, create a new model that represents stasis boxes where the angreal are found)

Eras and Calendars

Eras
  • The number of eras in WoTMod has increased by one compared to base CiV, but the slices of "technological time" they represent will change. The new eras (with their old counterpart in brackets) are:
    • Era After Breaking (Ancient) - 500 Years
    • Era of Nations (Classical) - 500 Years
    • Era of Freedom (Medieval) - 500 Years
    • Era of Consolidation (Renaissance) - 500 Years
    • Era of New Beginnings (Industrial) - 500 Years
    • Era of Stability (Modern) - 300 Years
    • Era of Encroaching Blight (Atomic) - 170 Years
    • Era of the Dragon (Information) - 30 Years
    • Era of Turmoil (Beyond) - 1 Year

Calendars
  • The three Wheel of Time calendars are going to be used in WoTMod at turn intervals that will usually map well to players' progression through the technological eras. Still, calendars are based purely on turn number and game speed, not technology.
  • The three calendars are: AB, FY, and NE - After Breaking, Free Years, and New Era.
  • AB0 to AB1000 occurs between turns 0 and 100.
  • FY0 to FY1000 occurs between turns 101 and 200.
  • NE0 onwards occurs from turn 201 onwards. (This is the Farede Calendar.)
  • World era is an internal measurement device used by WoTMod to gauge the players' progression for a variety of other mechanics. The world era beings in the Era After Breaking. It advances when half of the civs reach the next era, or one reaches the era beyond that. (The same mechanism is used by the World Congress in BNW.)

False Dragons and Dragonsworn

Role

  • The Dragonsworn are an additional Barbarian-like civilization that control False Dragons and the units that spawn alongside them.
  • False Dragons are male channeling units. Their strength is scaled in a similar manner to Barbarians in base CiV - largely related to tech progress of the world and more significantly by nearby players.
  • Any civilization that has met the civilization that spawned the False Dragon is notified that the False Dragon has declared himself. When a False Dragon is defeated, the set of civilizations that have met the original spawner are notified of his defeat, but not any details about the mechanism through which he was defeated.
  • This thread contains a possible source of artwork for Dragonsworn.
  • Black/Gold is the current frontrunner for the Dragonsworn civilization colors.

Spawning
  • Each civilization accrues invisible (never presented to the player) "False Dragon points" through the following actions (in addition to a baseline population-driven value):
    • Policy choices (Fear vs Acceptance)
    • Philosophy choice (Liberation boosts FD point generation, Authority leaving it unaffected, and Oppression reducing it)
    • All male channeling units (saidin users) generate +1 False Dragon point per turn
    • Female channeling units have a 5% chance of generating 1 False Dragon point each turn.
    • When any channeling unit attacks, there is a chance it will generate 1 False Dragon point. Male channelers have a 90% chance, females 5%.
    • Certain wonders
    • Threads of the Pattern
    • Happiness:
      • -20 or lower Unhappiness: 200% False Dragon rate
      • Less than 0 Happiness: 150% False Dragon rate
      • +10 or more Happiness: 75% False Dragon rate
      • +20 or more Happiness: 50% False Dragon rate
  • The amount of False Dragon points required to spawn a False Dragon is offset for each player. It is calibrated from a baseline value, where a player who played in an "average" way with respect to False Dragon rate would spawn their first False Dragon around turn 120. This baseline is then adjusted downwards for each player with a randomness factor, so that all False Dragons will spawn, if the players play in a completely "average" manner, between turns 30 and 90.
  • When a civilization accumulates that amount of False Dragon points, their count is reset to 0 (with overflow) and a False Dragon, along with several Dragonsworn units, spawns near that civilization.
  • Players who take all False Dragon delaying choices would, in the pathological case, expect to spawn only one or possibly two False Dragons over the course of a single game.
  • Players who take all False Dragon hastening choices would, in the pathological case, expect to spawn five or possibly four False Dragons over the course of a single game.
  • The rate of change of False Dragon spawning increases over the course of the game - delaying players delay more effectively and hastening players hasten more effectively - resulting in endgame spawn rate extremes of every 40 turns to every 150 turns.
  • False Dragons stop appearing after Saidin has been Cleansed.

Dealing with Them

  • Defeating a False Dragon rewards the civilizations that contribute to his defeat. This is portioned out based on the damage dealt to the False Dragon before he dies or is Gentled.
  • The reward for killing a False Dragon is a lump sum of yield in total, which is divided into 3 yields by six parts: Gold/Culture/Faith in parts 3/2/1.
  • The total value of the lump sum scales by world era, as follows:
    • After Breaking: 200
    • Nations: 300
    • Freedom: 400
    • Consolidation: 500
    • New Beginnings: 700
    • Stability: 900
    • Encroaching Blight: 1100
    • the Dragon: 1300
    • Fourth Age: 1500
  • Example yield breakdown: Civ A deals 50 damage to the False Dragon. then Civ B deals another 50, and the False Dragon dies. It is the Ancient Era. Each Civ A and B receives 100 total yield each, divided up as 50 Gold, 33 Culture, and 17 Faith.
  • False Dragons can be Gentled, much like any other saidin-wielding unit. Gentling a False Dragon rewards the Gentling civilization with an additional bonus of 50-75% of the current era's yield reward. (The value from 50-75 is proportioned based on the False Dragon's remaining health: more health == higher reward.) The Gentling player also receives an amount of Light yield equal to 25% of the total value of the Gentling bonus.
  • When a False Dragon is gentled, the normal yield reward is still portioned out as usual based on any damage the False Dragon took before being Gentled. (If he took no damage, the Gentling civilization receives all rewards, a sum total of 175% of the numbers shown above.)

The Horn of Valere

  • The Horn of Valere is a mystical item that can be discovered in a Mythic Sites (along with Seals of the Dark One's prison). When the Horn is discovered, the nearest military unit controlled by the same player becomes a Hornblower (which is a promotion that allows that unit to blow the Horn).
  • The Hornblower promotion allows the unit to summon the Heroes of the Horn to the map to fight for their controller for a short time.
  • A full list of Heroes available is pending.
  • The Hunt for the Horn project becomes available in the Era of Encroaching Blight, around the same time the Last Battle's Seals become visible. (Its effects are pending)
  • If the Hornblower unit is killed, the unit that killed it becomes the new Hornblower. Unless that unit is a Dragonsworn or Shadowspawn, in which case a new Mythic Site is spawned on the map (in a location no players can see, if such a location is available), with the Horn in it.
  • Hornblowers cannot be disbanded.
  • The Horn of Valere has a cooldown of 30 turns after each use, before it can be used again.
  • When the Horn is blown, any other civilizations that have active vision on the Hornblower unit are notified which unit blew the Horn.
  • The Heroes of the Horn summoned by the Horn of Valere cannot be bonded as Warders by Aes Sedai.
  • The Heroes' combat strength degrades as they move farther from the Hornblower, becoming weaker than most late game units once they are beyond 3 hexes away.

Threads of the Pattern

  • Threads of the Pattern are Alignment-driven decisions presented to each civilization every 14-16 turns.
  • Each Thread presents a flavorful description of a situation and two or more choices that the civilization's leader can make to deal with that situation.
  • Each choice causes the player to gain (and some have associated costs) something of value, in addition to a lump sum of Alignment yield that reflects the morality of their choice.
  • Some Threads have prerequisites - requiring the player to have a certain unit, have reached a certain era, chosen a certain policy tree, or other such restrictions.
  • Some Threads are globally restricted to a single instance within a single game.
  • Each Thread can only be seen once by each player in a given game.
  • A master list of Threads can be found in three parts, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Shadar Logoth

  • Shadar Logoth is not present at the beginning of the game.
  • When the Trolloc Wars ends, a City-State is selected to become Shadar Logoth using the following priorities:
    1. a City-State that was captured by Shadowspawn
    2. a City-State that has no ally (also tie-breaks for #1)
    3. a City-State that lost many units to Shadowspawn, maybe 5+ or 10+ (also tie-breaks for #2)
    4. a random City-State (last-case tie-breaker)
  • In games with 6 or fewer City-States, the player will be warned during game setup that Shadar Logoth will consume one of them.
  • The presence of Shadar Logoth can be disabled as a pre-game option.
  • Shadar Logoth controls a single Mashadar unit, which is a powerful melee unit.
  • When Saidin is Cleansed, Shadar Logoth is destroyed.

Mashadar

  • Mashadar is a very powerful unit - difficult to kill with even endgame units and almost impossible in the early game.
  • If Shadar Logoth is captured by another player, Mashadar respawns near the city every X turns and attempts to recapture it for Shadar Logoth.
  • Mashadar will seek out and attack any foreign units that end their turn on Shadar Logoth territory.
  • When there are no foreign units in the city-state's territory, Mashadar will fortify on the city hex.
  • If Mashadar is killed while the Shadar Logoth City-State still controls its own city, Mashadar respawns on Shadar Logoth's next turn.
  • If the Cleansing Saidin project is completed by the pro-Cleansing side (as discussed in the Channeling summary) then Mashadar's respawn rate permanently decreases to once every 3-4 turns.
  • If Saidin is Cleansed, Mashadar stops respawning.

Waygates

  • Waygates are Features that are placed on the map as a part of generating the map before the game begins.
  • Waygates produce +X Culture when worked.
  • Recon and Settler units can perform a Custom mission when on or adjacent to a Waygate tile, causing them to Explore the Ways.
    • Exploring the Ways always gives the player a small (single digit) yield dump of Shadow.
    • Exploring the Ways has a % chance of rewarding the player with a small yield dump (Gold, Culture, so on), of a similar magnitude to Ancient Ruins.
    • If a reward is not found, then the unit has a % chance of being teleported to another Waygate that the player has previously discovered, and a % (very small, around 1%) of being teleported to any random Waygate on the map.
    • There is also a % chance that the unit will become lost in the Ways and will not return.
    • In the event that the unit emerges, there is a % chance that the unit will take X damage.
    • Each time any player finds a reward in a Waygate, the chances of any player finding any future rewards in that Waygate decreases, and the chance of units entering that Waygate being transported to other Waygates rises to compensate.
  • Shadowspawn emerge from Waygates during the Trolloc Wars and the Last Battle (appear on and around the Waygate tile).
    • The rate that these Shadowspawn spawn is used as a balancing mechanism to spread the threat of these events across the map.
    • More Shadowspawn spawn from Waygates farther from Blights.
    • More Shadowspawn spawn from Waygates that are farther from the territory of major civilizations.
    • Fewer Shadowspawn spawn from Waygates that are near Stedding.
    • During map generation, Waygates are intentionally placed within range of players who are isolated from Blights, to ensure that they are affected by the Shadowspawn components of the Trolloc Wars and Last Battle.
  • Waygate keys can be used to lock Waygates shut, preventing Shadowspawn from spawning at that Waygate.
  • Waygate keys are obtained from Mythic Sites or by completing a global Quest for Stedding City-States (once Mythic Sites have been revealed to the player).
  • Any unit can unlock a locked Waygate by standing on that same tile and performing the "Unlock Waygate" custom mission.


Miscellaneous Flavor

  • Golden Ages will be renamed to pending
  • The Barbarian civilization has been renamed to the Lawless civilization.
  • Anarchy has been renamed to Chaos.
  • We are considering renaming Science to Knowledge, in an attempt to broaden its scope (take in flavor that's more present in the books, where scientific advancement is slower) and make it feel more fantasy-esque.
  • Diplomats have been renamed to Emissaries.

Achievements

WoTmod will have its own internal achievements system! Similar to Steam achievements, they reward the player for performing unusual, challenging, or flavorfully inspired actions.

The following is a provisional list of achievements we are considering.

  • Hold Shadar Logoth for X turns
  • Purchase 13 Depositories
  • Gentle the Dragon unit with a Red Ajah Sister
  • Win the Diplomatic Victory without the support of the White Tower
  • Kill a Whitecloak unit in Andor with a Wolfbrother
  • Trade for a Porcelain Legendary Craft of the Sea Folk Nationality
  • Move the Dragon unit onto a tile with Sheep and a Pasture Improvement
  • Use a Yellow Ajah Sister to Heal a <Malkieri Warder replacement UU> that is standing within 3 tiles of Blight
  • Have a <Malkieri Warder UU>'s bond passed from a Blue to Green and finally to a Yellow Sister.
  • While declared for the Light, use a <Malkieri Warder UU> to kill a Sharan Wyld.
  • As Andor, use a Green Ajah Sister to bond a Hero of Horn, who has been ripped from the Pattern by a Thread, as a Warder.
 
Back for more! I'm amazingly falling behind, despite posting every day or two!

abridging your quotes here to fit it all in one post!

Picking up on the section I accidentally skipped over last time.

And I am writing this section last.

...

Choosing the "Shadow option" in alignment decisions has its own actual rewards, so it's not filling in for that. Where does that leave us with Forsaken quests, if we drop Boons?

This is why you were right to bring this discussion (the LB, alignment) back into the fold now. Some preconceptions we had have changed.

Essentially, I think we don't need Boons anymore. Basically, it seems to me that these overlap almost completely with Forsaken Quests, and the rewards for them. I think for most of the game, the Shadow player is essentially just a regular player, who happens to get less Faith... but they get the benefit of sometimes more immediately-useful consequences from the Alignment Choices, as well as whatever benefits you might get from Darkfriend Citizens.

I'd say the Forsaken start appearing via specialized quests in the Era of the Dragon, or perhaps earlier than that, very intermittently. Maybe there's one in the Trolloc Wars or something. These serve a dual purpose - drawing players further into the Shadow, and thus clarifying the sides, and also providing an opportunity for Rewards.

So I see these quests as being a mix of straightforward "mean" stuff, and self-destructive stuff. Some should definitely be bad for the Light, but some would also be bad for the shadow, as we've described. Your rewards, the Boons, should be fickle - maybe sometimes they're great, but sometimes the Forsaken are kind of screwing you over a bit. Is that too harsh? In any case, doing them entrenches you more firmly into the Shadow, which probably makes your chances of a "good" reward better.

Yes, coups are instantaneous. I know I've already mentioned this, but I figured it would be good to note that information explicitly as a part of this quote block.

Defining how we want the Seals cat-and-mouse to work is key to this, you're right.

...

And for the time it takes to break a Seal, the Shadow civs should be wary of Light espionage stealing it too - to keep it safe or otherwise.
OK. Totally with you so far. I do note that you seem to be framing around the scenario of the Shadow trying to steal it from the Light. Of course, the opposite will be just as likely (and don't forget neutral civs).

So, I have a proposal! Seals are stored in a city, as we've already said. Having a Seal is a "state" for a city - it may have some bonuses and effects (that's a separate discussion), but having a Seal doesn't affect your ability to have anything else there. (Doesn't interact with buildings, units placed on the city hex, aircraft if we have any, nothing like that.)
OK. Got it. Agreed. Seal just sits there, not interacting.

If the Seal hasn't been "researched" to see if it's real or not, the Research is linked to which city it's in. "Research Seal in Whitebridge" "Research Seal in Bandar Eban" If it has been researched and is real, then the project to break it is linked to city.

...

Removing a Seal from a city resets research and production progress towards verifying and breaking the Seal. (So if you move the Seal out of Whitebridge after 10/15 turns of research, you'll need to do 15 more in its new home.)

OK, with you here. I should say I'm not wild about the idea of creating yet another "game mechanics" unit. We already have envoys, historians, the sealfinders, etc. That said, I definitely see how this makes the movement of the seals simpler. I'm ok with the process.

As far as the name, I could be fine with this, but I really wish we could find something that was more directly referential in-universe. I can't think what it would be, but *something*. The wikis claim that Logain was dubbed "Sealbreaker" by one of the Aes Sedai when he broke the seals. Simple - and obviously quite similar - but also directly from the books. Of course, these units don't actually break the seals...

I was just struck by a thought that we should check this whole process, and the balance of it, with our science victory. Seals-research will be time consuming. Obviously it doesn't matter to Light forces, as they are locked out of Science, but if a Shadow civ wants to help with seals, and go for an eventual Science win (post light-killing), they'll fall a little behind. Maybe this is great - that's the consequence for trying to "work together".

When you trying to find a Seal controlled by an enemy, you move one of your spies into their capital city. After the spy has established surveillance (3 turns, though we can make that vary if we wish), he can "Search for a Seal". Searching for a Seal takes ~3 turns. (What are some good modifiers to the length/success of this?) Searching can fail, it has three possible outcomes:

Modifiers to the spy's "Search for Seals" attempt:
- presence of counterspy in the capital
- anti-spy buildings and wonders owned by the defending civ
- Level of the Spy

Of these, I think they'd mostly affect success rate. What affects length-of-time for spy stuff in CiV?

other than that... hmmm.. Do we think alignment or anything like that would matter? Like strong shadow or strong light civs would be more difficult to infiltrate. Maybe your science versus their science could be a factor? Also, I can imagine Ideological tenets that might affect this.

1. The player controlling the spy is told about one city (if any) that contains a Seal in the defending civilization. (If the defender has multiple Seals, it picks the geographically closest one and only tells the spy player about that one.)

2. The spy fails to find any relevant information and no Seals are revealed to the spy civ. (We could make this result look the same as the "no Seals" one to make that even more tense "Do I move on? Are there really none here?")

3. The spy is discovered and killed.

OK, those all sound good to me. The misinformation thing is crazy (#2).... how would that feel as a player? It seems like it's a good thing to have, but would it be frustrating?

Assuming success to go through the rest of the story, the spy then needs to move to the city with the Seal. After establishing surveillance (another 3 turns, so ~9 turns have passed since first targeting the Seal-controlling civ with a spy) the spy can try to steal the Seal. Stealing takes multiple turns. When the spy civ selects "Steal" the defending civ is notified that a theft is underway. Stealing takes variable numbers of turns (good modifiers for this?).

I can't think of anything that would affect the number of turns here that wasn't affecting the discovery time as well. If we wanted to modify one of them, this is the one to modify, though.

This definitely needs a huge piece of randomness too, right?

The defending civ now has a few options. If they are trying to protect the Seal, they need to move it. So this city needs to produce a Sealbearer now. Will the Sealbearer finish before the Seal is stolen?

...

If they finish researching it and it's real then they also need to move it once they're done - or it will be stolen!
Ah, interesting. I think I like this.

Question: why wouldn't people always put the Seals in their high-production cities? There doesn't seem to be any strategic benefit to putting them in unusual places. Am I right?

While it seems a little meta to tell the defending civ that the seal is being stolen, this seems to create a very nice game of chicken that should play out nicely. Depends a lot on the range of how long we think this should take though.

Can you buy Sealbearers, or must they be produced? What about great engineer-rushing them?

That's the crux of the plan, but there are some numbers and reasoning to back up some of the above decisions. I'm thinking a Seal will take ~20 turns to break if the civ trying to break it is doing all right at the game. ~9 turns from first entering the civ to trying to steal the Seal means that even Light civs might be able to grab Seals from Shadow civs who are trying to break it immediately. We could compress the whole timeline if we thought ~20 turns was too long.
I think the 20 turn thing could be fine, but what about games where there's only one civ on a given side? Even if that civ is super powerful, breaking seven seals will take a long, LONG time. What do we think of this?

Also, I'm wondering if the time line would make it too easy to steal them. consider four light and four shadow civs. The light civs are trying to steal from the shadow. If every civ put their spies in a capital on the same turn, it seems to me that it would be highly likley they'd find the location of the seal pretty quickly. Essentially, it seems like civs might rearely be "left alone" long enough to break one.

The cat and mouse game can be compelling, but I don't think we want an endless "chase," where nobody ever really has a chance to break one.

A few more notes: Sealbearers are civilians. If a Sealbearer holding a Seal is captured then the Seal goes with him. (He becomes a Sealbearer controlled by the attacking player and now he can choose which city to drop the Seal into.) This makes attacking cities with Seals on the map viable as well.
Yeah. wow. you'd better protect them.

Question about this, though: If you literally watch the enemy march a sealbearer into a city, can you just send a spy to that city and start stealing, or do you have to move back to the capital and divine its location, even though you know its there?

Also, can you drop the sealbearer off at an allied city? Or gift the sealbearer, maybe?

Another thing you might have thought of - what's to stop the Light players who are trying to protect the Seals (for a time) from offloading it onto a Sealbearer and hiding him somewhere off on the edge of the map? I'd say the Seals have a ripple effect in the Pattern and can be seen by other players from a distance after being in the open for too long. (So after X turns, Sealbearers are highlighted on the map for enemies, regardless of fog of war distance.) That makes squirreling him away a bad idea.
This makes a lot of gameplay sense, but very little flavor sense. I could imagine it instead being that the sealbearer "dies" and loses the seal - which then goes back into "hiding." This makes flavor sense, but would make the game take a LONG time. I suppose your suggestion is fine. Still, I do think some players will decide to send their sealbearers off with a small fleet of units and circle the world. True, they'd get caught, but they could delay their opponent a LOT.
Part of me wants it to be that when X number of turns pass, their movement is also halved or something.

You might also be wondering why Sealbearers are units instead of an Espionage-style menu system. Partially because of the map and military implications, which seem fun. But also because it forces the city to stop producing whatever it's working on right now. That might be something important (like a wonder, or a combat unit that's needed for a war) that the player than misses out on because of the turns spent training the Sealbearer. That's awesome work on the part of the spying civ.
This is also the only thing that prevents the light from just moving their seals every single turn they're allowed. They *could*, but it would end up quite a bit of wasted hammers to be constantly building sealbearers.

And we also need to mention the experience for the defending civ! It's not all doom and gloom for civs trying to protect the Seals. Searching can only take place in a civilization's capital - so if you successfully move a Seal after a "stealing mission" starts, the spy needs to go back to your capital to see where you've moved the Seal to. (And he might be totally wasting his time doing that - you can drop the Seal into a neighboring Light city.) Once there, the spy has another opportunity to fail in his search, in which case the attacking spy player needs to get another spy to send at you (since two spies from the same civ can't coexist in a city). In that time, you will be able to finish your research (unless he succeeds again - in which case it's probably moving time - unless you're super-science-dude! But you'll only know to move it when the stealing starts!).
OK, you've clarified a bit here. Some of my questions above are now less pressing.

An implication of this is that researching/breaking Seals in your capital city is a bad plan. The spy, if they succeed, are already when they need to be and their full loop to try again is much shorter than either your research or breaking time. I think this is fine.
Yes, makes sense! So you could do it in your "high production" city... as long as it isn't your capital.

I'm thinking that since the defending player was notified and the spy player has already overcome time and the search failure chance, stealing can't fail if it reaches its requires number of turns. It just seems way too punishing to attach another failure probability there, and seems like it makes the defender's life way too easy.
I can see why there shouldn't be a fail chance... but it also maybe takes away an opportunity to enhance the "game of chicken." Yeah, move that seal... unless you're cocky and figure the spy will fail. Still, I see the reasoning.

Does the Spy learn what phase the Seal is in? No, right? I ask, because learning that a seal is being BROKEN would provoke a greater deal of attention than just learning one was there being researches. I'm inclined to say none of this info is given.

When a Seal is successfully stolen, the player who stole it can choose which of their cities they want it immediately transferred to. (We could move the spy there too, for flavor fun, but it isn't really important if we do that.)
It does seem a little cheap that the defending civs need a sealbearer, but spies are automatic. Oh well.

I don't have an opinion as to whether we should move the spy, too.

Also, are we renaming Spies? Should we just go ahead and call them Eyes and Ears?

Once the Sealbearer is produced (which immediately transfers the Seal to the bearer), the spying player is told that their attempt to steal the Seal has failed. The defending player might troll and drop the Seal back in the same city again to get maximum turns working on research or breaking (the defending player is assuming the enemy spy has moved back to their capital to start searching again - this is more viable with the former of the two approaches suggested in the next paragraph).
Well, if you have a spy in a city, you can see that cities vision, right? So, shouldn't you be able to tell what the sealbearer is doing (moving or expending right there)?

Also, I'm not quite sure on this last part, but I think only "revealed" Seals (found by searching) can be stolen. Even if a spy is in a city with a Seal, they can't tell if that Seal hasn't been revealed to them. Otherwise, visibility on the map of the Sealbearer unit moving could give the stealing civ an enormous advantage and possibly start a game of Seal hopscotch (which we don't want to become a perpetual-must-do thing). However, I could be sold on the idea of spies being able to start a steal mission in any enemy city they share an Seal with. That being able to provoke a game of hopscotch and potentially win it is a consequence of having really good surveillance. (And the player physically knowing where the Seal is and having to do something else first - potentially causing them to lose - could be seriously frustrating.)

K, this is also addressing a question I asked above (sorry, but this section is really epic and it was hard to recall which things popped up where!).

I'm finding myself a bit confused by your wording in the middle here, but you're suggesting that if you have a spy hanging out in a city, they wouldn't know a seal is there unless they do the "SEarch" mission in the capital. The next bit I'm a bit confused on ("I could be sold on the idea", that sentence). Please clarify, if you don't mind. Sorry if it's obvious.

Yeah, the whole watching-the-sealbearer but being unable to do anything about it thing does seem a little iffy to me. Therein lies one of the problems with making it a unit.

Also want to say, with the above (particularly if the last paragraph goes for "any enemy city with a Seal and your spy can be stolen from" instead of "only revealed ones"), the Blue Ajah Edict that gives players sight on enemy cities becomes potentially more powerful. That's super cool!
Makes sense with the Blue ajah, IMO! Well, good for the light (or whichever side gets the Aes Sedai)

What do you think? There are a lot of words above, but I think that's mostly enumerating all possibilities of both sides in combination - I think it will be quite easy to follow as a player.

...

That's an important distinction from the Dragon spawning when all of the Seals are broken! And makes it a much more back-and-forth process at the end (which is good).

This could work, but it's quite possible that means he'll be in unit form for quite a long time - as the light civs figure out a way to kill all the seals. what happens if one gets stolen back? Does he disappear?

Also, do we want a situation in which the light civ can simply avoid killing the seals so as to use the Dragon to do crazy stuff in unit form? You know, thining the ranks of the shadow units to make a strike at thakandar easier. This seems a little meta to me.

Is all of the above OK?

Awesome, let's go for team-local researching.
fixes in summary.

Good point, we do want the sacrifice to matter! How about a lump sum of Prestige and a permanent happiness bonus?
ok, happiness with prestige could work, but i'd say it would be a small amount of happiness.

I think we did discuss this at some length before. I remember being in favor of the National Project approach and I think I still am. Since it's only contributed to by a single player it gives them more fine grained control.

...

Just did some digging and it looks like we liked the single-city (National Project) approach last time too.
Alright. We'll just need to make sure that the AI elects to actually go and do this whole Seal business from time to time.

I think we hit the Age of the Dragon World Era and the Shadowspawn spawn rate starts to ramp up in the Blight. After ~3 (5?) turns, everyone chooses their alignment. Once every player has chosen, Alignments are announced for all players, the Light coalition forms, and the wars start. (all at once) The Shadowspawn spawn rate steadily climbs from there and out-of-Blight spawning begins the turn after Alignments are declared.
Era of the Dragon...

Also, what, if anything, is happening related to this during the "Era of Encroaching Blight"? Is the blight expanding, but no shadowspawn increase?

I think this seems like this could be too soon. There are other things we have happening that are gated by Era of the Dragon. The birth of the dragon, for instance. Do we want him around for only 5 turns before the LB starts? Should it be longer? 3-5 turns seems really short.

Let's hold off on defensive pacts - otherwise Neutral civs are basically restricted to attacking other Neutrals and Shadow civs unless the Light is very weak in a given game. I would imagine diplo implications would seriously favor war from the other Light civs if a Neutral attacked one Light civs, unless they were otherwise swamped by Shadow.
ok. good deal.

I have read upwards of 6 pages of this topic trying to find this post, but no luck. (I found several other posts relevant to other parts of this discussion, so it wasn't wasted time.) I also remember discussing these projects but I cannot find where. The closest thing I've seen is this discussion about AI roles on the Light side for the Last Battle, but I don't think we want to do that anymore.
OK, so let's reopen the discussion, then. Do you have ideas for what kinds of projects there would be? I'm not really thinking of any right now. Then again, I might still be kind of thinking about this in the wrong way.

I say let's make it one sided trade routes for now as it reduces the complexity of an already very complex situation. It's opportunity cost rather than a deduction, which is fine.

right. good.

Cool, so for the trade routes we can have the receiving civ get whatever yield we want and the sending civ gets Faith actually from the trade route. That means we don't need to find another mechanism for delivering that yield.

The projects (when we finally find the post with the summary of them, as mentioned above) can provide lump sums of Faith when completed (in addition to their other effects).

Sound like sensible mechanisms for delivering those Faith bonuses?
Ah, so the trading civ gets a faith bonus. makes sense. Not sure what specifically to say on the Projects, though.

I think it could be higher, but only for the highest/top two Light civs. (And that would depend on the Shadow not getting too far Turning the Tower - see below.) Once the Tower declares for a side, the quota for all civs on that side can be bumped up according to their alignment leaning in that direction. But it will also decrease due to the proportions, so it may remain the same for some, go down for others, and rise for a select few.

Do we need a better name? Is the actual quota ever visible to the player? If it's not, we don't really need to name it. There's just a general concept of some civs getting more Sisters than others. We might want to mention it in the depths of the civilopedia though - for those crazy optimizers who want to understand the actual math of the underlying mechanics.
Alright, I'm fine with keeping the mechanics as previously described. Based on your quote and the Turning status, you might gain or lose sisters. So if the Tower was ALMOST turned, we'd have like 4/10 or 5/10 sisters defect to black. Still, the Lightside would retain the actual tower, its armies, etc.

Updating this in the summary. So, the amount of sisters that defect is based solely on the turning process, NOT on the influence in each Ajah, right? So, like, the shadow players could control most of the ajahs, but if they hadn't hit any turning conditions (save maybe the one that requires you to control the ajahs), they'd end up with very few sisters. Is this correct? Or would it be swayed by that too?

Urgh, was that the old plan? No, let's not do that. How about Neutral civs' Aes Sedai allocation is unaffected?
and
I remember some of the details of what a Black Ajah Sister had for her abilities and they were awesome. (Some were shared with the Forsaken - we should probably put a list of the Forsaken abilities in the LB summary somewhere, and a list of the Black Ajah Sister abilities into the Tower/Diplo summary.)

Let's use the proportion of completed objectives to represent the portion of the Tower that has been corrupted and give Shadow players Black Ajah Sisters to replace their Aes Sedai accordingly. This is good because it gives Shadow civs an incentive to participate in some of the objectives even if they don't plan on going all the way on Turning the Tower.

How do we work out how many Sisters the Light civs keep if the Tower does Turn? Do they just keep them all? (That's certainly easiest.)
OK, now I'm seeing some logical issues. At least I think I am.

First off, if some sisters flee, that means most Light civs will LOSE sisters. Even if we give them a boost, some will certainly flee. This assumes a few of the Turning conditions were met (i.e. there are *some* black sisters).

So, if that's true, how could we leave the Neutral civs with their full cadre of sisters? That seems highly unfair to Light civs. If we kept the Neutrals the same, but then gave the light civs MORE sisters... does that make sense, or have we just created sisters out of nothing?

So, say 75% of the Turning conditions were met. Does that mean like half the sisters will defect to the Black? Slightly less than that?
I absolutely think if the Tower is turned, the opposite effect should happen: Light civs should be left with the minority of sisters.

But where does that leave Neutral civs? There's no way they should be left alone when everybody else is losing sisters, right?

A GP of your choice! That sounds like a very appropriate and useful bonus. We could limit it to WoT GP types if we liked?

Or, or, or, flavor opportunity. 2 WoT GPs of your choice? (Who are totally not Mat and Perrin.)
I can see the appeal of the 2 WoT GP thing,b ut I also think the flavor will be lost on most people.

That said, the WoT GP thing might be a good idea (even if its only one), since these GP are those designed not to mess up the game too much. So, which is it?

If we're going to do a popup about it, I think it has to reflect actual stuff. The player won't particularly care if it's just text - it has to mean something in-game. I think making the alignment decisions flavored by the Dragon is a good answer here. (Related note: the Dragon isn't always Rand, right? I've been thinking he would be "the Dragon" in all cases. A bit more on this for ldragogode's post later on.)
OK, so the Dragon only exists within the Alignment Choices? Is there anything else that will include him?

Well, in WoT, the dragon *was* Rand, so I don't know exactly what you mean. You mean how in another era it was Lews Therin? It could be somebody else, theoretically. I'm not sure it matters much, though. We could call him Dragon, or Rand. I don't mind either way.

I hadn't thought of that, but yes, that's awesome.
good!

After some reading for another section of this post, I found the in depth turn order from ages ago. I think that's the "most recent" one that we liked both. (It's in the middle of the post.) We just swap out Faith for a "Prestige and Faith aggregate that favors Prestige" since that's what we've decided we like.
OK, right. Should I put this in the summary though? In full detail?

Agreed re-enabling normal victories could destroy the way the Light victory works. Having thought more about it, I'm even more in favor of being able to take Thakan'dar with sheer numbers. It just needs to be so difficult without the Dragon that it's impossible for all but the most powerful Light civs/alliances.

I thought our "DO kills everyone" was effectively removing the Time Victory. I've yet to meet a CiV player that likes the Time Victory, but it's a necessary evil because the game isn't balanced into infinity. Using the Dark One as an endgame, we can avoid that whole concept by saying "everybody loses" after a certain point. I don't think this is a victory for any player. So I don't think it helps us with the powerful Light player who's gotten the Dragon killed.
OK, Thakand'ar is killable by everyone! (and I probably mean that literally... it would take everyone to kill thakandar).

In this case, I was just referring to spies controlled by Shadow-aligned civilizations. I think we should do that (interacts well with the Seal mechanic above - you can use the Dragon to defend a Seal you're working on if you control the Dragon at the right time). We should be explicit in the summary that that's what we mean though.

In regards to citizens, if we do decide to go for "Darkfriend citizens" as a layer over existing citizens, this seems like a very cool ability. (Turn a bunch of them back into normal citizens.)
got it. updated!

Mostly range - I think it would be relatively unimpressive if he had the same range as a city, and the bombers in CiV are effectively an endgame extension to city ranged attacks. Barring use of raken and their ilk, I don't think we'll have any other use for the existing plane mechanics, which seems a shame.
Right.

The whole Raken thing is interesting..... Man, the Seanchan are overflowing with UUs. But, essentially, we'd be introducing a plane mechanic for exactly one civ...

OK, that's were I must stop tonight!
 
Quick post during some downtime! This should have me all caught up with your old LB posts.... hopefully tonight I'll be able to catch up on some of the other, non-LB stuff.

Yes, we can straight up give the player a score penalty every time they use the balefire ability, if we want to.
Sure. I feel like this won't mean much though unless Pattern means something. Since we're disabling the Time Victory, we should come up with *something* that it does.

Yes, definitely, there should be a cooldown (varying per ability, right?). Sounds like instantaneous effects is looking good. I'm also a fan of him being limited to moving every X (5?) turns. I think we liked the movement-frequency-limit last time too (I read it somewhere when searching for the above) because it allows the city he's in to be attacked by the Shadow.
Hmmm... interesting. Well, he switches around which CiV controls him. I'm wondering if it'd be simplest to make it so he actually *can't* switch cities while owned by somebody. Maybe it's only when that person's "turn" ends that he'd move to another city... I'm just trying to keep it from getting really complicated.

Five turns could work, though. But, again, how long is a civ's turn anyways? If it's only 10, then we could just make it a simple "You may move the dragon" halfway through their cycle.

As far as variable cooldowns, this makes mechanical sense, but I'm concerned about complexity, especially as it is viewed by the player. Will this be a pop-up menu? or will he appear to them as a unit in the city, with stuff listed as command icons on the left? If we do the latter, displaying cooldown times will not be elegant.

I want to figure out more precicely how this will work before i put it in the summary.

Why not just his current location? The Dragon-spy is in a city somewhere, let's spawn the unit in that city. (If he's dead, he spawns when he would have come back and in the city he would have been dropped in. Which... we have defined somewhere right? The capital of the next player in the turn order to control him?)
Yes, I like this. Just spawn him right by that city. Although, this assumes that the Dragon can only sit in Light cities, which I think we like (which, of course, limits his spy-like activities to "defensive" ones, as opposed to stealing Seals, etc.). If he's dead, yes, let's have him spawn in the next player in the turn order's capital. I think, normally, that player would be asked "which city would you like to place the dragon", but in this case, capital is fine.

On that note, though, when he's in spy mode, can you place him in allies' cities?

I feel like the players should be able to "do" something to determine which civ controls the unit. That way if there's ever a human on the Light team, they can make sure they do that first so they can control the Dragon. Since, realistically, I think we almost always want the human to control the Dragon if the human is Light. (But I don't think we should automatically gift it to the Light human player. And such a system also completely breaks down in multiplayer.)
Definitely agree here, on all points. What would this thing they "do" be? Prestige+Light value? Would the players switch control after some amount of turns? Or, perhaps, if he is defeated? And then, it goes to the next highest value?

Or, we could use Pattern.

It could also be a vote, of course, but that seems like it'd be a little weird.

For now, let's give the players free reign with him and add restrictions if we find craziness happening.
ok!

Agreed on players only ever controlling Trollocs, Myrddraal, and Dreadlords. I'd be fine leaving Draghkar to just the Shadow civ for now.

I might actually be ok with allowing them to build Draghkar, if only to allow for an air unit. So this might actually be a reason *not* to do it (same with Raken for the 'chan).

I'm finding myself actually now disliking the Dreadlord thing. Those should be the Shadow Civ's channelers. Sorta like mini-forsaken.

The Shadow players already have tons of channeling unit options - Black Ajah AS, kin, asha'man - there doesn't seem to be a need for Dreadlords also. Technically speaking, many of the Black Sisters and Asha'man were dreadlords - all it means is a channeler-commander in the army. IMO, let's just have the Shadow civ have them. No need for the shadow players.

Maybe the players can be Gifted the Dreadlords, but I think it's pointless as a produced unit. Also, I'm iffy on the Gifting too, because of Spark and all that.

On that note, we might need to start using a different word for the Dark One's Shadow Civ, since I think we are colloquially using "shadow civs" to mean the civs that CHOOSE the shadow. What should we call it?

Let's give the players agency in this and let them train the Shadowspawn units in any city with a Waygate once they're over a certain Shadow alignment threshold. (The flavor justification of this is them working with the Shadow to bring them through the Ways.) Under that threshold, Shadow players receive some Shadowspawn units at intervals, rather like militaristic CSes, but otherwise that's it.

OK, I like this. I'd say your Alignment would determine how often you are gifted a unit.

Going by the above, I'm a fan of letting it be captured by anyone, but making it monstrously difficult for non-Dragon units.
Yeah, we covered this elsewhere and I'm right with you.

How about Blight and borders just don't interact? Blight can spread into your lands. We discussed potentially cleansing Blight with a lategame Ogier-related thing. I don't know if we still want to do this?

Regardless, this lets us have Malkier-like stuff happen in the actual games. Blight in your territory is bad for you because it has terrible yields and means Shadowspawn spawn inside your borders. Not for the faint of heart!

I think flipping back and forth with the Blight would just end up going on for the entire duration of the game and be a waste of that city's culture and its controller's time managing it.
OK! So Blight is a feature (right) that can occur in and out of your borders. I like bad yields and shadowspawn spawning, but I'd also add that you can't heal at the accelerated in-territory rate while sitting on it.

Does it destroy your improvements? What about resources it covers up, are they going to come back?

I do think we need to figure out how to remove it. It could be an Ogier thing, but that certainly isn't universe-accurate. You're right that it shouldn't "waste" a civs culture (acquiring tiles), but we could still use Culture, potentially, to combat it. Maybe Pattern makes it recede?

I do think something simple like a Worker cleanup probably doesn't make sense, but I think there should be some way that doesn't necessarily rely solely on Ogier relationships and stuff. Any other ideas?

Also, what determined when/where the Blight advances? I know there are certain points in history when this wll happen, but is there anything else to it? If shadowspawn are allowed to be in your territory for to long, or allowed to live too long? What can you do (if anything) to stop its spread in the first place?

OK, hopefully back tonight to get totally caught up!
 
Unbelievably, I still need to go back to page 20 to block quote the post I haven't yet responded to! But first:

OK, hopefully back tonight to get totally caught up!

Not if I post another wall of text first! :p

Actually, I'm going to jump forward to something that I think is relevant to a lot of past discussions:

Sure. I feel like this won't mean much though unless Pattern means something. Since we're disabling the Time Victory, we should come up with *something* that it does.

This is something I'm a bit worried about with Pattern as Score. We don't seem to have any systems that rely on it in a significant way. Do we really need Pattern as a distinct thing? We're taking on a decent chunk of work to incorporate other pieces of the game into Score and rebrand it as Pattern, but I'm not sure if it's really adding anything. I like that we're using the cosmological "Pattern" notion that the world is a vast weave of threads, but it doesn't seem to be fulfilling a gameplay need. Given the scope of our other changes, I'd be inclined to hold off on Pattern as a concept unless we have clear player experience benefits from putting it in.

Anyway, back to page 20, where there are a pile of things I haven't responded to yet!

I can be fine with that use of the Gholam, though, again, we haven't yet pieced through exactly what "Shadow side objectives" will look like. I've added the rest of this to the LB summary.

I think the only remaining Shadow-objectives-like-thing is the Forsaken Quests now. We can involve the gholam in some of those?

Right. I can see us using something like sukritact's system here. I haven't played that, but I did look through it when it was referenced a few months back.

I think you're probably right about spreading the effects out to multiple yields.

As far as on-map objectives.... it seems to me we should probably avoid that, as we already have a lot of other things going on in that regards. It would be cool, but those strike me a lot more as "quests" than choices. I'd rather players be making decisions, and then having there be consequences for those, instead of them being things you work towards.

Essentially, I would like to think of these choices as something you do to flavorfully set yourself into position during the endgame, not necessarily goals in and of themselves.

What should we call these events, btw?

Awesome, I agree here, we should avoid on-map objectives. A thing pops up that says:

Stuff has happened! What do you do?
  • Option A: Kill everybody
  • Option B: Save the universe
  • Option C: Meh

Though in more morally grey grounds than that and with significantly more gravitas. Each option has rewards that correspond to the conceptual action taken by selecting it and also tilts the player's Alignment in one direction or the other. ("Meh" doesn't necessarily need to represent a Neutral choice.)

Sounds like the right kind of framework?

Now for a name! Alignment Choices is the obvious, flavorless option. The answer to this probably depends on if we're going to keep the name "Alignment" going forward. We've been using that for a while but initially we expressed that we wanted one a bit more exciting. I've yet to come up with a good alternative though. :(

A few options for the events:

  • Events (Works for sukritact! I believe this is was they were called in the old civ games too)
  • Opportunities (The civ has an opportunity to take an action to do something - this may flavorfully limit the kind of things we can do though?)
  • Wrinkle in the Pattern (This came up before for the Antiquity Sites, but I think it's significantly more appropriate here. Also nicely in-universe.)

Was there ever an in-universe name for junction points in the Pattern where the choice of a single thread could snowball into many different outcomes? That rings a bell, but I can't find it. If that word does exist, it sounds like a good one.

Ah, I suppose we should clarify what "rare" means. I'm thinking maybe every 20-30 turns, or something? maybe less often in the early game, and more often in the Era of the Dragon. More than that, and I worry it would become a bit bothersome.

Oh, right! Every 20-30 turns sounds good. Less often in the early game also fits into our "Alignment doesn't vary much" early on idea.

One thing about that though - this means Alignment will be a late-game yield much like Tourism in BNW. Do we think there will be enough sources of Alignment to create a breadth of players in each game? It doesn't always need to be evenly distributed, but we wouldn't want to get to the Last Battle with most players close to the middle because they haven't had too many chances to move one way or the other. (Or if only a couple of actions in the "opposite" way to where they intended place them back in Neutral land.)

Oh, and in thinking about this more, I definitely am starting to think this Alignment stuff will need its own summary - the LB summary would get a little clunky with a list of choices in it and such.

I said this in a post you haven't replied to yet, but it's worth noting here too. I think the LB summary could link to a list of choices like the Diplo summary does with Edicts, Resolutions, and Quests. Alignment is intrinsically linked to the Last Battle, since I imagine the whole thing disappears when the Last Battle victory condition is disabled? It could go in a separate summary if you feel strongly about it though.

I see what you're saying, mechanically, but I still think that 17 positions (8 on each side, plus a neutral) is a bit more resolution than we'd know what to do with. You mentioned a couple "tiers" which would matter (e.g. which civs can see Shadow Turning objectives), but how many of these do you think would really be mechanically necessary? I'd guess we could probably be fine something like three steps "fully" in the alignment, then two neutral-leaning steps on either side, plus a neutral. Something like that, so, like, 9 or 10 or 11 or something. I think I'd like 9.

The thing is, you're correct that some of these steps are "gates" unlocking something, but everything else can be considered as a sliding scale. The game doesn't need these categories - it can make decisions based on the actual raw Alignment score. The categories are useful to humans as a mental guide (excepting a few "gate" points), and more than a few on each side is more information than I think people will know what to do with.

Yes, most mechanics will be based on underlying Alignment score. There are some things that need these specific thresholds, but most modifiers are scaled from the underlying integer representation.

Agreed that we want an odd number so that we can have a "center" spot.

If we go for having 17 then I don't think all of them will be mechanically distinct. The only real difference is how much of a feeling players can get for "how Shadow" or "how Light" they are. A lower number of thresholds makes it disappointing that you can't "pull ahead" in Alignment. I think there should be some that are up at the crazy end of the scale - where people can shoot for if they really want to go all in on that Alignment and see how far they get. The only thing we really need to do to add more tiers is give them names. I can see 11 working, but I'd prefer to go for more rather than just enough.

Well... I agree that we won't separate score from pattern, providing we adjust the Score calculation to include some stuff it doesn't currently include (alignment, for instance). If we have things occur that affect pattern specifically, I suppose they'd also be affecting score.

This ties in mostly to what I started this post with. As soon as we want anything to affect only Pattern and not Score, we incur a whole host of tracking costs in managing that value separately from Score. We don't seem to have cases for that now, but unless we get rid of the notion of Score entirely and replace it with Pattern, we have a tenuous dependency between the two that potentially creates a lot of work to unravel later. (If we decide on exactly what we want Pattern to do later and then find that doesn't quite mesh with the notion of Score.)

I agree. Let's make the TWs more about fighting... a War with Trollocs. As much as possible, I'd say we should pretty much go as far as making Alignment have nothing to do with it. I mean, you can do stuff to shift your alignment throughout the wars, but it won't make a difference now. Everybody will get hit (geography permitting).

But yes, leave all that fancy stuff out until later (barring what you're talking about below).

Oh, the Trolloc Wars are a good candidate for something to go in that Miscellaneous Summary. Oh, and the High King stuff as well!

The High King stuff is already in the diplo summary. Did we finalize what the exact bonuses were going to be for the High King provinces? If so I should add it there!

Given the Trolloc Wars is a Last Battle event - I'd say it could go in the Last Battle summary. (Similar to Alignment, I assume the Trolloc Wars doesn't happen if the Last Battle Victory is turned off? Or can it be switched off separately?)

When you say you can shift your Alignment during the Trolloc Wars, do you mean there are specifically Trolloc-Wars-related things you can do? Or just all of the normal Alignment stuff continues to happen during that time? (If the former, what do we plan those things to be?)

Also completely agree that the Trollocs don't consider Alignment when choosing who/where to attack.

Yes, for sure. The Shadow should be capturing cities, absolutely. That said, flavor seems to suggest that they would be highly likely to raze cities. This seems appropriate, right? But is that too "hardcore" and mean, though?

It does seem appropriate, but players have a very limited span of time to recapture their cities if the Shadowspawn capture them. Shadowspawn could start razing X turns after they capture each city? Razing the cities plays well with your suggestion below, where the Trolloc Wars can only end if the Shadowspawn control no cities. I do have a specific concern about that, but I'll get into it below.

OK. Yeah, you're right. Having it all from the Blight would complicate the balance of the event for us, but at the same time, it'll give us fewer variables to worry about. And, as you say, it'll differentiate it from the LB.

Awesome, attacking from the Blight it is!

Right, and what I said above, about Razing, fits this bill.

I just realized something, though. Shadow forces will have no siege units, right? Well, a few dreadlords. This means city capture won't be all that easy - just a buttload of units. This strikes me that a highly likely outcome of a round of TW in a typical game is that most civ's cities are intact, but that everybody's UNITS will be absolutely decimated. To me, that fits all right.

They have no siege units, but enough normal military units certainly does the job. If you play a game on one of the highest difficulties (just for kicks, the AI cheats), carpets of warriors capture cities surprisingly quickly. (Where a "carpet" of units fills all available spaces and is primarily slowed by the inability to walk over each other, more so than any enemy.) I lost on turn 55 of one game on Emperor because Sweden walked out of the fog with about 10 warriors and 5 archers and ate my cities.

I do agree that in general units will take the biggest hit though. Players close to the Blight will lose a lot of workers.

Yeah, for sure I'm liking the idea of using Shadowspawn killed as the primary measure of success.

Awesome, sounds like a plan!

Why don't we attach this also to the trigger that ENDS the wars. Let's say they go for some amount of turns, but that they can be prematurely ended if X number of Shadowspawn are killed (it is probably a number that's slightly higher than what would normally be killed throughout the entire wars).

I'm not sure if we'll be able to practically do that. I'd say the primary limitation on Shadowspawn spawn rate will be the surface area of the Blight, so on a given map there is an absolute maximum to the number of Shadowspawn that can spawn in X turns. (And the practical maximum is likely lower than the theoretical one since some units will end their turn in the Blight.) We'd need to estimate based on the size of the Blight? There's a lot of room for a general solution to result in very weird behavior (unexpectedly early ends on some maps, impossible "premature objectives" on others) on different maps.

Does the Top Performer reap the reward only? What about 2nd and third place? Are the lower places simply a rank, or are they "threshold-based" like World's Fair rankings and CS friendship?

Depends on the bonuses, but I think there should definitely be some bonuses for the people who contributed some but didn't end up on top. Do we have a full list of what the bonuses actually are for being Top Performer in the Trolloc Wars? We've always leaned towards Prestige in the past, but given how early we are in the game, that doesn't seem particularly appropriate.

Faith is useful to both Alignments, we could use that at all levels, in varying amounts. We could also give Settlers and/or Workers to the top tier contributors? ("People flock to the victors who stood against the Shadow") That could help replace lost cities and goes a ways to mitigating the damage done by proximity to the Blight, provided you put the effort into the fight.

How about:

  • First Tier (the top performer): 2 Settlers and 200 faith
  • Second Tier (the guy in second, and third on maps > 8 players): 1 Settler and 100 Faith
  • Third Tier (third for <= 8 players, fourth, and {fifth for > 8 players}): 1 Worker and 50 Faith

Regarding the cities-lost thing... I'm not sure I agree that your cities lost should count against you. You lost a city. that's bad enough, IMO. To me, the "Top Performer" here shouldn't be who is the "best", but who did the most to *push back the Shadow.* If you lost 70% of your cities, but saved the world in the process by killing 70% of the Shadowspawn, you deserve that reward... which will likely *not* be worth it.

Good point! Losing cities is punishment enough.

That said, I'm wondering if perhaps the Trolloc invasion can't end until all cities have been liberated from the Shadow. We don't want shadow cities hanging out, all civ-like, do we? So, the cities either must be recaptured/stolen/liberated, or else the Trollocs will raze them by the end of things.

If we don't make the Shadow raze-happy, that would create an interesting situation - the other civs know the only way the Wars will end is by helping you capture that city. If they capture it... should they liberate it, or take it for themselves?

Actually, I'm starting to like the whole War-doesn't-end-if-the-shadow-has-cities, since it seems like it might force the other players not on the Blightborder to get involved. That siad, I'm not sure if the Shadow should raze or not.

I'm not sure we can do the War-doesn't-end-if-the-shadowspawn-have-cities though - it creates perilous situations where the Shadowspan... win? What if they conquer a whole continent? The guys on the other continent have to deal with endless hordes of enemies for the rest of the game, or at least until they tech up to Navigation (replace with equivalent) and can spare an army to clear out the other continent.

I think end-only-when-no-Shadowspawn-cities only works if the Shadowspawn raze cities. Even then, do we want to increase the odds of them eliminating players? Once it becomes a serious problem for the civs farther away from the Blight (so they'd send units), the civs closer are overrun.

Also, since you can't raze original capitals, the previously-far-from-the-Blight-civs now need to fight their way up to the Shadowspawn-controlled original capitals, capture them, and all of that while dealing with waves of enemies from the Blight. I think time as the only limitation and making the Trolloc Wars not too long is our main way of preventing them from permanently destroying several players. As you said later, we don't want players to see that they spawn near the Blight and restart the game because being far away is better. (I'm unsure how we can achieve that completely though!)

OK, reading through this, I'm pretty sure we don't need to do any tracking or "contribution" stuff.

Honestly, I'm tempted to go as simple as possible, and just say the False Dragon himself is all that matters - not killing his lackeys, even. Just makes things simpler. That said, I don't love the idea of somebody sniping your False Dragon kill (rolling in when he's at 10% and killing him in one hit), so we might want to divide the bonus based on actual contributions. Thoughts?

Awesome, that sounds good to me. We can have him divide up his yield based on who dealt damage to him.

As far as alignment... I dunno. I'm starting to feel like it shouldn't really have anything to do with it. Shadow civs don't want False Dragons anymore than Light Civs. Keep in mind, throughout most of the game, there are no Shadow Civs anyways. Those civs want to kill the False Dragon as much as anybody.

Honestly, to me that extends even to Gentling. I don't think Gentling is more light, mainly because that's a very Red thing to do, and the Reds appear to have a lot of Blacks among them, right? I understand that it's sort of humane and stuff, but doesn't that tie in to your Philosophy and Fear/Tolerance mostly - things we've decided aren't correlated to Alignment?

Say you get Prestige from a FD kill - I'd say, give you more if you Gentle him. As simple as that, IMO.

On that note, though, I'm thinking Prestige might not be enough, seeing that it's essentially only useful to Culture players (right?), and is kind of odd (and useless) early in the game anyways. Maybe it should be Culture, maybe some Gold or Faith, and then maybe a little Prestige on top - maybe the Prestige only pops up if you Gentle him?

All very good points. I'm also liking the idea of moving away from Prestige as the reward for this - Prestige is only useful for culture players, as you've said, and it's ended up being quite ubiquitous in our rewards for stuff! Culture, Gold, and Faith all sound good - some of each? In what proportion?

We could drop Prestige from this entirely, given its narrow usage. Gentling could just double up the yields you get, plus a flat bonus? (In case you didn't damage him, just hit "Gentle" and it worked.)

Very much OK with Ishamael being "Oh crap not now, Izzy!" thing that only happens in unlucky games.

Awesome, sounds good.

First off, in general I definitely like the flow of this.

I think the "try to reach the opposite coast" is an interesting trick to try to get everybody in on the action. Hopefully it doesn't make them too erratic and suicidal though.

The Trollocs are erratic and suicidal in CiV terms though, right? They win by wave tactics - keep throwing units at your enemy until they're dead, winning by sheer weight of numbers. I think it's fine if the Trollocs don't individually make the best decisions (then they can use the default tactical AI! :p ), even that there are so many of them will be a huge hazard for relatively early game civs.

As far as kills=Light... hmmm, I think that's probably a bit "too much." I'd say the "Top Performers" thing definitely could yield some Light, but by rewarding each Kill, I feel like we'd be sending all our civs to the Light side just by virtue of their geographic location. It's true, playing Shadow as a Borderlander should be harder - you have to kill a bunch of Shadowspawn all the time - but it shouldn't be impossible.

That said, I'd be ok with the Light yield if it was small, like +1, and the scale we were dealing with was rather large. Like, thing 1 gold or Faith, and how much that matters, versus 1 happiness, which matters a whole lot.

Very good points! So here we should discuss orders of magnitude for Alignment. I'm thinking Alignment is more like Gold than Happiness. +1 Alignment is almost nothing - the Neutral tier is something like +/- 100 and the tiers get steadily wider (higher range) from there. So it sounds like +1 Light for each kill is very workable - most civs wouldn't even get out of Neutral with that.

In any case, let's be cautious about that. I'd say Illian's army wouldn't go defend Shienar for Light points from kills, but to try to become a "top performer" (if not *the* top performer) and/or to bring an end to the Wars.

Awesome, sounds good. The primary motivator for going off and fighting somewhere else is the bonuses for top performer.

Lastly, are we sure we want this amount of city capture to be typical? Like, the blight people always lose cities. It makes sense, but at the same time, losing a city when your opponents done can be a HUGE blow you may never recover from, right? I don't want a situation when people boot up our game, see that they are placed on the Blight, and then Restart automatically because it's too much of a disadvantage. I think some of this is fine, but I do feel like a Unit Apocalypse might be better for this point in the game - especially since that then sets up some interesting potential inter-civ activity once the Wars end.

The civs fighting against the Shadowspawn are only at the end of the second era, so I think if we spawn any reasonably number of Shadowspawn then this level of city capture will be inevitable. Unless we make the Shadowspawn AI specifically avoid taking cities, which I'm not sure how hard it is to do.

I agree that we don't want players to auto-restart if they find they're next to the Blight. I think there will need to be ways to be targetedly better at fighting Shadowspawn. Like one of the first few policy trees gives you a significant leg up against Shadowspawn. At the same time, we don't want to force Blightborder civs to take a specific policy tree. Making early-game buildings have more city fortifications available makes wars less viable universally in the early, which isn't awesome. (And hoses civs with early game UUs.)

Are there any other kinds of things we can do that allow players to take action against the Shadowspawn when they find themselves near the Blight, without forcing all Blight-near civs to do the same stuff?
 
Yes, Darkfriend is a flag on existing citizens. That seems best.

Awesome, done!

Yes, this seems important so as not to bias towards Tall civs turning to the Shadow.

Also good! :D

I remember discussing this quite a bit. I'm still tempted to say that they are primarily a symptom, but are also a cause, in that they will also generate Shadow points.

My primary concern here is sources of Alignment. I'm not sure if there are enough consistent, ongoing sources of Alignment to create the differences between civilizations that we want to see at the end of the game. We will definitely scale the Alignment Choices to make players move along the scale more later on, but do we want to do it to such an extent that one decision at the Era of the Dragon is worth 5x as much as one in the Era of the High King? Without ongoing sources of Alignment (we seem to have more for Light, though it would help to enumerate them for both) we'll have to make the Alignment Choices count for a lot. And they're very swingy and up to interpretation by the user (since they don't see which is the "evil" option, they just see the actions they can take).

This ties into some stuff you suggest below, but I think using Darkfriends as a primary source of Shadow Alignment solves a lot of problems for us. Players who are "going Shadow" need to be able to reach a critical mass of Shadow points that unlocks the "big ticket" items like Turning objectives for the Tower and quests for the Forsaken, which, if I'm reading this correctly, should be the biggest individual sources of Shadow Alignment?

I don't know that I agree about Bloodknives being better with Darkfriends present. Why them, and not all spies? Why them, and not attacking Keshiks? I don't really follow it. I feel like BK, if we treat them as neutral, should be neutral in this regard. What affects Spy success? Should probably be the same as that.

That said, if you did this the effect would be that BK become a weapon that is more effective for the Light forces, since they'll be able to assassinate governors in shadow cities at a higher rate. That could be cool, but I'm not sure that's the effect you intended. It's certainly not what you intended with Gray Men!

Very good point, it does the opposite of what I'd intended! :lol: Agreed on keeping the Bloodknife success modifiers the same as the default spy. You go through some of the modifiers for stealing a Seal on page 21 and I think two of those apply here: presence of a defending spy and buildings in the city (including wonders). Since Bloodknives don't have levels (they're all created from max level spies, right? So there's only one level of Bloodknife since they die after use) that doesn't make sense as a modifier for them.

So, about Darkfriends, is there any reason to want to spread them beyond creating more Shadow-y-ness in other players or yourself?

OK, what I'm thinking here is that Darkfriend Citizens are not in and of themselves a "primary" source of Shadow. They are a symptom first, and a source second. To me, the Primary force - in the early game, before you have big-deal stuff like Turning the Tower and Forsaken quests - should be your Alignment Choices (need a flavorful name!). But I'm not thinking it needs to be set up in as direct a way as you've suggested here (one choice = +1 darkfriend).

I'm worried about this though - both the Forsaken quests and Turning the Tower are gated by a civ already having a certain amount of Shadow-ness (likely significant). Do we want to rely primarily on the Alignment Choices for that? One result of that is that Shadow players may be obligated to pick the evil answer every time in order to unlock their late-game Shadow mechanics. Then it isn't really a choice at all.

I've heard some criticism of Mass Effect's Paragon vs Renegade for this reason - if you wanted to use the late-game options for Paragon or Renegade, you had to have a massive number of points for that side. Which basically meant you always needed to pick the response for the side you wanted in the end, regardless of if you thought it fit for the current situation.



I'm afraid I'm out of time! I'll have to come back again tomorrow! There's so much left to cover! :crazyeye:
 
Figured I'd do a single post addressing this issue so ldragogode297 doesn't have to go combing through the LB stuff

Oh, when I meant looking into uniques, I meant specifically looking into uniques, and making a suggestion or two. I wasn't planning on designing an entire 7 factions all by myself simply so that neither of you two could do that! And I just really wanted to be able to contribute in a way that I understand and can actually assist. I'll be the first to admit that I know very little.

If we're getting into why I subscribed to this thread, it would be when I was wandering the internet a year ago and found another thread that looked like a failed mod, until I saw pictures for the successful implementations, and I knew then that this wasn't going to just off and die.
and
I'd say there are a bunch of things to consider here. I think we definitely can steer the topic in a specific direction, but at the same time we don't want to shut people out of proposing their ideas. We're certainly in a better place to discuss uniques now than we were in the past, but I think the systematic approach has been very successful for us thus far, and we've yet to reach the point where we want to dive full in on the uniques yet.

...[bunch of unquoted text]...

Hopefully that answers everybody's questions! If anyone disagrees with the above sentiments or topic structure, do of course say so.

And I think I've got a different assessment of the glamorous parts of CiV. I quite like all of this underlying framework stuff. At risk of being labeled very strange, possibly more so than the civs' uniques. Anyways! Normal programming resumes below.

OK. Seems like we're all on mostly the same page. I may have overanalyzed what was being proposed by quite a bit...

In any case, I definitely agree with S3rgeus's suggestions, ldrago. Go ahead and move forward in a way that feels right. I'm sure we'll all find a way to make it work.

If you're open to specific suggestions, one interpretation of "looking in to" I think might be very helpful is mining for flavor. S3rgeus is right that the actual choosing of abilities might not happen until we can have a larger discussion of game balance and how we want each civ to play. But what we need *before* that is lots of content. It will be easy to come up with rough ideas of Seanchan UUs, for example (through probably very difficult deciding which specific ones to choose, and how they work!), but for most civs this is certainly not the case.

What might be really helpful for when we finally truly do dive in is to create collections of "flavor bits" about each civ, to help guide us in defining a UA, as well as the specifics of UUs. For example, I've started doing this periodically over the course of the last several months, casually, and here's a quick list I assembled for Altara:
Lack of centralized control via “Throne of the Winds” in Tarasin Palace
Female social dominance
Duels
Marriage knives
Kin and Daughters of Silence
Port on the bay
Rahad district
canals with boats
Large gates – Moldaine Gate, Three Towers Gate, and Dal Eira Gate
Squares throughout city, e.g. Mol Hara
It's certainly not exhaustive, but it's some basic info that might be useful to us. In that list, we have some potential UA directions, maybe one UU, and even a potential UB (or UI?).

This kind of thing would be very helpful when we sit down to actually build the UUs. The above is based solely on the WoT wiki, but there are other sites out there that have stuff that isn't found there.

In any case, by no means to you have to do this, but I mention it just in case you were looking for direction on how to proceed. Of course, again, we'd be happy to have you in the present discussion as well.

Oh, and S3rgeus, I don't mean to imply that I'm not enjoying hashing through all this stuff. Obviously I am or I wouldn't have helped get this thread to page 21. But to me the uniques do "pop" more than most of these topics, and are in some ways the most "fun." At least on the surface. I may find that in practice that isn't the case!
 
OK! Trying finish page 20! I think after this I will be caught up on the "last round" of LB talks, and will then be able to tackle your responses to my responses....

Very good point. Ok, let's introduce a turn by turn "discovery chance" when the Bloodknife/Grey Man is in a foreign city.
ok. I don't suppose it should be a very high chance, though.

At the bottom of this page. More precisely, Chapter 36 of A Crown of Swords.
Well, that explains it. ACoS is right at the start of my "blackout" period of WoT - the few books in the middle that I really don't remember. I've forgotten Tanchico existed before for essentially the same reason.

Awesome, ok. I'll make a placeholder post for the misc. summary after this post and fill it in as I can this week.
bueno

Cool, Grolm might be involved with the Seanchan specifically. Otherwise they feel more like a strategic (replacement for Horses, but we definitely don't want to replace Horses).
No we don't, though we could split horses into multiple different strategic resources, to be super RJ-like. We could have "Dapple Mares" and "Bay geldings" and "dun stallions." Oh, and "Shaggy Brown Mares," but they die when you find the Horn (but it's ok, because she's actually a personification of the Creator)


Let's just leave it as bananas for now, but if we can come up with anything else then we'll do the swap later.
OK, updated.[/quote]

Aha, things like the Eye of the World are definitely much more resource-able than the ones Cadsuane has in her hair. Would it be too big of a thing to have pools of the One Power lying around the map though? There was only one Eye.
Yeah, this is a bit of an iffy thing flavor wise. I do think the Spark generating strategic resource is a good idea, though. So you definitely don't want it to be a cache of angreals or something like that?

Also, tossing this in: are we going to do anything with the Green Man and/or Nym in general.

Awesome, thank you!

EDIT: While I remember! Olives - we said we wanted to include them as a luxury at some point as well? (They're already in Barathor's More Luxuries too! :D )
Bah! Can't believe I forgot it. Fixed. Its one gold one food, right?

OK, now we have a lot of them!

Yeah, repurposing bananas sounds like a plan - we turn the yellow parts a nice chilly blue and we're golden!
well, do we have any reason to suppose they're blue? Do we have any reason to think they aren't green or red like most fun loving peppers here on earth?

Yes, I can see that working. I could also see us just using ter'angreal and angreal instead. Eh, more variety, let's go with the three words and see how it works.
Sure. Fine by me.

Yes, let's do this. This also makes sense in the context of the ter'angreal and angreal ("unearth" or "discover"). I'd say it's fine that they generate culture.
cool. updated it in the summary!

It could work like the diplo summary (with Edicts, Resolutions, and Quests) - link to a separate post that's a list of the choices. I just feel like alignment is quite tied into the Last Battle victory - that's primarily what it's there for.
Right. This could definitely go into the LB summary, though I could go either way on this. I'll add a section in once we decide some of the stuff that's still in discussion.


aaand, wow, done with that page, I am!
 
Have a little more time tonight, so I'm going to try to keep going since I won't be free to do more for the next few days.

Not if I post another wall of text first! :p
Yeah, if you keep writing this fast you're going to get promoted to S4rgeus before we know it!

Actually, I'm going to jump forward to something that I think is relevant to a lot of past discussions:

This is something I'm a bit worried about with Pattern as Score. We don't seem to have any systems that rely on it in a significant way. Do we really need Pattern as a distinct thing? We're taking on a decent chunk of work to incorporate other pieces of the game into Score and rebrand it as Pattern, but I'm not sure if it's really adding anything. I like that we're using the cosmological "Pattern" notion that the world is a vast weave of threads, but it doesn't seem to be fulfilling a gameplay need. Given the scope of our other changes, I'd be inclined to hold off on Pattern as a concept unless we have clear player experience benefits from putting it in.

Anyway, back to page 20, where there are a pile of things I haven't responded to yet!
I'm definitely OK with nuking Pattern as linked to Score. I'm also ok with nuking pattern at ALL. I like the idea of it, but I do think you are right that we shouldn't just add stuff for the sake of it. We're already adding a LOT here.

So, I say for now, kill it and see if anybody has any great ideas in the future.

I think the only remaining Shadow-objectives-like-thing is the Forsaken Quests now. We can involve the gholam in some of those?
Sure! Not sure how, but we can figure it out, I'm sure.

Awesome, I agree here, we should avoid on-map objectives. A thing pops up that says:

Stuff has happened! What do you do?
  • Option A: Kill everybody
  • Option B: Save the universe
  • Option C: Meh

Though in more morally grey grounds than that and with significantly more gravitas. Each option has rewards that correspond to the conceptual action taken by selecting it and also tilts the player's Alignment in one direction or the other. ("Meh" doesn't necessarily need to represent a Neutral choice.)

Sounds like the right kind of framework?
Yes, I like it. I like the idea of having three options, but not necessarily having them all be super obviously good-neutral-bad. We could have some be good-saintly-neutral or even bad-rock-hardplace and such, just to make things more realistic and unpredictable for the player.

Now for a name! Alignment Choices is the obvious, flavorless option. The answer to this probably depends on if we're going to keep the name "Alignment" going forward. We've been using that for a while but initially we expressed that we wanted one a bit more exciting. I've yet to come up with a good alternative though. :(

A few options for the events:

  • Events (Works for sukritact! I believe this is was they were called in the old civ games too)
  • Opportunities (The civ has an opportunity to take an action to do something - this may flavorfully limit the kind of things we can do though?)
  • Wrinkle in the Pattern (This came up before for the Antiquity Sites, but I think it's significantly more appropriate here. Also nicely in-universe.)

Was there ever an in-universe name for junction points in the Pattern where the choice of a single thread could snowball into many different outcomes? That rings a bell, but I can't find it. If that word does exist, it sounds like a good one.
Well, I think you've hit it on the head at the end there. "Threads in the Pattern" or something could work very well. Wrinkle could be find too. I prefer these to the bland, clinical "Events" and "opportunities".

I think Chapter Titles are probably a good source for things like this, actually.

Oh, right! Every 20-30 turns sounds good. Less often in the early game also fits into our "Alignment doesn't vary much" early on idea.

One thing about that though - this means Alignment will be a late-game yield much like Tourism in BNW. Do we think there will be enough sources of Alignment to create a breadth of players in each game? It doesn't always need to be evenly distributed, but we wouldn't want to get to the Last Battle with most players close to the middle because they haven't had too many chances to move one way or the other. (Or if only a couple of actions in the "opposite" way to where they intended place them back in Neutral land.)

I see your concern, and agree with most of your suggestions below that deal with it. But I do think it isn't an innate problem that Alignment is predominantly a late-game thing. Personally, I don't want it to "get in the way", so I'd be happy to have it not matter much for the first 60% of the game. I imagine most players can go about their business for most of the game, and then as the last few eras pop up, start to buckle down and choose a side.

You are right that some players will want to go hardcore and max out Shadow and stuff. Fine. Let's enable that. But I'm very much fine with most players being in the middle for most of the game. The Tower Turning, for instance, is intended to be relatively rare and difficult, so it'd take some "hardcore" players to make it happen anyways.

I said this in a post you haven't replied to yet, but it's worth noting here too. I think the LB summary could link to a list of choices like the Diplo summary does with Edicts, Resolutions, and Quests. Alignment is intrinsically linked to the Last Battle, since I imagine the whole thing disappears when the Last Battle victory condition is disabled? It could go in a separate summary if you feel strongly about it though.
Yeah, fine with running this all through the LB summary. Linked-to might be better than literally housing all the info in the actual LB summary, as you say.

Yes, most mechanics will be based on underlying Alignment score. There are some things that need these specific thresholds, but most modifiers are scaled from the underlying integer representation.

Agreed that we want an odd number so that we can have a "center" spot.

If we go for having 17 then I don't think all of them will be mechanically distinct. The only real difference is how much of a feeling players can get for "how Shadow" or "how Light" they are. A lower number of thresholds makes it disappointing that you can't "pull ahead" in Alignment. I think there should be some that are up at the crazy end of the scale - where people can shoot for if they really want to go all in on that Alignment and see how far they get. The only thing we really need to do to add more tiers is give them names. I can see 11 working, but I'd prefer to go for more rather than just enough.
I'm willing to go with you on this because it seems like you feel more strongly about it than I do. It does seem like we have kind of opposite views. To me, too many levels becomes less informative. Could we even come up with 17 different names that really show a clear spectrum? If you've got em, I'm fine with it.

This ties in mostly to what I started this post with. As soon as we want anything to affect only Pattern and not Score, we incur a whole host of tracking costs in managing that value separately from Score. We don't seem to have cases for that now, but unless we get rid of the notion of Score entirely and replace it with Pattern, we have a tenuous dependency between the two that potentially creates a lot of work to unravel later. (If we decide on exactly what we want Pattern to do later and then find that doesn't quite mesh with the notion of Score.)
Again, fine with scrapping this whole thing, though now I do have a question:

It seems from what you're saying here and before that we won't be tinkering with score calculations much. Does that mean our new features (including alignment) can't factor in to score?

The High King stuff is already in the diplo summary. Did we finalize what the exact bonuses were going to be for the High King provinces? If so I should add it there!
Ah, that it is!

I don't think we finalized the bonuses. This post posited some, though:
- Province of Industry - + % Production, or + hammers per turn, to capital city
- Province of Crafts - +% Production when building X unit or Y building
- Province of Wealth - +1 Gold yield from Strategic Resources/Luxury Resources (or something)
- Province of Exploration - +1 movement for naval units
- Province of Belief - +1 Faith per city
- Province of Learning - +1 Science per 3 population in the capital
- Province of Honor - +15% Experience from killing Shadowspawn and Dragonsworn
- Province of Invention - +5 culture per international trade route
- Province of Sacrifice - no bonus

Given the Trolloc Wars is a Last Battle event - I'd say it could go in the Last Battle summary. (Similar to Alignment, I assume the Trolloc Wars doesn't happen if the Last Battle Victory is turned off? Or can it be switched off separately?)
I've added a Trolloc Wars Section. Please take a look and see what else I should add or what is incorrect.

Hmmm, I guess you can switch it off. I imagine you could switch EVERYTHING off. But I can also imagine just one master toggle "Events" that swtches off Alignment, the LB, the TW, and the HAwkwing stuff.

When you say you can shift your Alignment during the Trolloc Wars, do you mean there are specifically Trolloc-Wars-related things you can do? Or just all of the normal Alignment stuff continues to happen during that time? (If the former, what do we plan those things to be?)

Also completely agree that the Trollocs don't consider Alignment when choosing who/where to attack.
What I mean is that normal Alignment stuff will keep happening. BUT, it is probably best for us to increase the frequency of Choices (Wrinkles? Threads?) during that window. This makes flavorful sense, and also allows the wannabe shadow civs an opportunity to compensate for some Light they might be forced to accumulate during this period

It does seem appropriate, but players have a very limited span of time to recapture their cities if the Shadowspawn capture them. Shadowspawn could start razing X turns after they capture each city? Razing the cities plays well with your suggestion below, where the Trolloc Wars can only end if the Shadowspawn control no cities. I do have a specific concern about that, but I'll get into it below.

It's a little hard to tell, are you agreeing that we should have the Shadow be primarily razing cities? We do need the TWs to end without a whole bunch of Shadow cities, as you say below.

I do think the Razing should happen after a certain amount of turns, though - unless the wars are almost done, at which point it should begin immediately, probably.

What happens if the wars end and the city isn't done razing? Do they give it back, or do they keep razing?

How many turns do you want the wars to last, btw (since we don't appear to be using other triggers to end them)?

They have no siege units, but enough normal military units certainly does the job. If you play a game on one of the highest difficulties (just for kicks, the AI cheats), carpets of warriors capture cities surprisingly quickly. (Where a "carpet" of units fills all available spaces and is primarily slowed by the inability to walk over each other, more so than any enemy.) I lost on turn 55 of one game on Emperor because Sweden walked out of the fog with about 10 warriors and 5 archers and ate my cities.

I do agree that in general units will take the biggest hit though. Players close to the Blight will lose a lot of workers.
Yeah, currently on my third attempt to actually win a game on emperor...

I'm not sure if we'll be able to practically do that. I'd say the primary limitation on Shadowspawn spawn rate will be the surface area of the Blight, so on a given map there is an absolute maximum to the number of Shadowspawn that can spawn in X turns. (And the practical maximum is likely lower than the theoretical one since some units will end their turn in the Blight.) We'd need to estimate based on the size of the Blight? There's a lot of room for a general solution to result in very weird behavior (unexpectedly early ends on some maps, impossible "premature objectives" on others) on different maps.
OK, nix that idea, then!

Depends on the bonuses, but I think there should definitely be some bonuses for the people who contributed some but didn't end up on top. Do we have a full list of what the bonuses actually are for being Top Performer in the Trolloc Wars? We've always leaned towards Prestige in the past, but given how early we are in the game, that doesn't seem particularly appropriate.
I don't think we have any list of what the Top Performer gets.

Faith is useful to both Alignments, we could use that at all levels, in varying amounts. We could also give Settlers and/or Workers to the top tier contributors? ("People flock to the victors who stood against the Shadow") That could help replace lost cities and goes a ways to mitigating the damage done by proximity to the Blight, provided you put the effort into the fight.

How about:

  • First Tier (the top performer): 2 Settlers and 200 faith
  • Second Tier (the guy in second, and third on maps > 8 players): 1 Settler and 100 Faith
  • Third Tier (third for <= 8 players, fourth, and {fifth for > 8 players}): 1 Worker and 50 Faith
I like this, mostly. A problem I see, though, is that Settlers aren't very useful to Tall playing civs (assuming they didn't lose their cities). I wouldn't want the reward to be something a player would theoretically just get rid of. Also, the settler thing seems to be largely set up as compensation for losses during the TW. But that doesn't serve to incentivize a civ really far away to jump in and help the civs on the blightborder. I think the Rewards need to be enticing to them as well.

Also, I wonder if the yield is a little too low? At that point int he game thats, what, 1 missionary? Seems a little weak sauce. Hardly worth losing tons of units over.

I think I could be fine with this, but maybe let's consider not making both the top two be settlers. Maybe one of them is a lot of culture? or some gold, maybe? The way these work, isn't the top performer also supposed to get the 2nd and 3rd place rewards?

I'm not sure we can do the War-doesn't-end-if-the-shadowspawn-have-cities though - it creates perilous situations where the Shadowspan... win? What if they conquer a whole continent? The guys on the other continent have to deal with endless hordes of enemies for the rest of the game, or at least until they tech up to Navigation (replace with equivalent) and can spare an army to clear out the other continent.

I think end-only-when-no-Shadowspawn-cities only works if the Shadowspawn raze cities. Even then, do we want to increase the odds of them eliminating players? Once it becomes a serious problem for the civs farther away from the Blight (so they'd send units), the civs closer are overrun.

Also, since you can't raze original capitals, the previously-far-from-the-Blight-civs now need to fight their way up to the Shadowspawn-controlled original capitals, capture them, and all of that while dealing with waves of enemies from the Blight. I think time as the only limitation and making the Trolloc Wars not too long is our main way of preventing them from permanently destroying several players. As you said later, we don't want players to see that they spawn near the Blight and restart the game because being far away is better. (I'm unsure how we can achieve that completely though!)
It sounds like we want the ending to the TW to be pre-written. Essentially, what the civs do doesn't matter, except as it relates to them competing with each other. I think, overall, this is the right way to look at it. It may be the case that the "real" Trolloc Wars were gearing up to be a sort of Last Battle, but we most definitely aren't looking for that.

So yeah, let's make it simply gated by number of turns (how many, I can't recall). Again, what happens to currently captured cities when this happens? What about the units? Do they turn around and run, or is it simply that the unit spawn rates return to normal? The latter is more organic, but it also allows for the possibility of a huge Trolloc army surviving for another thousand years.

All very good points. I'm also liking the idea of moving away from Prestige as the reward for this - Prestige is only useful for culture players, as you've said, and it's ended up being quite ubiquitous in our rewards for stuff! Culture, Gold, and Faith all sound good - some of each? In what proportion?
This is regarding False Dragons.

Yeah, we seem to have made prestige our "go to" reward. I think this is simply us being tricked by the name we invented. It *sounds* like something you'd be earning. We should probably only be using in situations that are decidedly late-game.

Yeah, Culture, Gold, and Faith. I'd unsure as to whether Culture or Gold should be the biggest, though I feel pretty sure Faith should be the least.

Also, which summary is going to be about False Dragons, Barbarians, and such? The Misc one?

We could drop Prestige from this entirely, given its narrow usage. Gentling could just double up the yields you get, plus a flat bonus? (In case you didn't damage him, just hit "Gentle" and it worked.)
If we're doing that, we might as well simply make gentling be a flat bonus, and not even need to double the other rewards. But yeah, doesn't need to be prestige.... though it does make sense. Culture and Faith bonus definitely makes sense. Gold less so, but it's ok.

The Trollocs are erratic and suicidal in CiV terms though, right? They win by wave tactics - keep throwing units at your enemy until they're dead, winning by sheer weight of numbers. I think it's fine if the Trollocs don't individually make the best decisions (then they can use the default tactical AI! :p ), even that there are so many of them will be a huge hazard for relatively early game civs.
Is it possible to make Trollocs behave differently in the presence of a Myrddraal (not flee, etc.)? Maybe the best bet is to have the Myrrdraal be something of a Great General, and make trollocs (and only trollocs) fight better when he's around?

Also, flavor: Trollocs are afraid of water, right? Huge penalty when attacking over rivers? Maybe negated by Myrrdraal. Also, probably no embarking.

Very good points! So here we should discuss orders of magnitude for Alignment. I'm thinking Alignment is more like Gold than Happiness. +1 Alignment is almost nothing - the Neutral tier is something like +/- 100 and the tiers get steadily wider (higher range) from there. So it sounds like +1 Light for each kill is very workable - most civs wouldn't even get out of Neutral with that.
OK. Agreed. Just to be clear, is the +1 Light for the whole game, or just in the TW?

Awesome, sounds good. The primary motivator for going off and fighting somewhere else is the bonuses for top performer.
Right, which is why we should choose that bonus carefully.

The civs fighting against the Shadowspawn are only at the end of the second era, so I think if we spawn any reasonably number of Shadowspawn then this level of city capture will be inevitable. Unless we make the Shadowspawn AI specifically avoid taking cities, which I'm not sure how hard it is to do.
Right. I understand. The truth is, I think we need to differentiate the shadowspawn in "feel" from the Dragonsworn. Barbarians tend to usually just wander around pillaging, taking workers, etc. If the shadowspawn were more aggressive - actually going for your cities - this would feel very different. But... it sounds like you may not even have control over this.

I agree that we don't want players to auto-restart if they find they're next to the Blight. I think there will need to be ways to be targetedly better at fighting Shadowspawn. Like one of the first few policy trees gives you a significant leg up against Shadowspawn. At the same time, we don't want to force Blightborder civs to take a specific policy tree. Making early-game buildings have more city fortifications available makes wars less viable universally in the early, which isn't awesome. (And hoses civs with early game UUs.)

Are there any other kinds of things we can do that allow players to take action against the Shadowspawn when they find themselves near the Blight, without forcing all Blight-near civs to do the same stuff?
Well, I'd say there are a few things we can do with this. Definitely, the former-Honor tree could have policies that enhance your shadowspawn fighting abilities.

As far as buildings, we could make the Walls replacement, or some other building have a specific bonus against Shadowspawn, but *none* against other civs. This way, civs can war with each other (and barbs) but defend more successfully against the shadow... yet still lose a million units. Maybe it's a building that makes your city ranged attack super good at shadow.

Don't forget about Aes Sedai, also! Didn't we say era two was when Aes Sedai are first unlocked for players? This is a big deal, as they are great against them. Also, we can have the White Tower have its people all up there killing shadowspawn as well.

Additionally, there could be a tech-gated, universally available unit that pops up near that era that is good against shadowspawn, specifically.

My primary concern here is sources of Alignment. I'm not sure if there are enough consistent, ongoing sources of Alignment to create the differences between civilizations that we want to see at the end of the game. We will definitely scale the Alignment Choices to make players move along the scale more later on, but do we want to do it to such an extent that one decision at the Era of the Dragon is worth 5x as much as one in the Era of the High King? Without ongoing sources of Alignment (we seem to have more for Light, though it would help to enumerate them for both) we'll have to make the Alignment Choices count for a lot. And they're very swingy and up to interpretation by the user (since they don't see which is the "evil" option, they just see the actions they can take).

This ties into some stuff you suggest below, but I think using Darkfriends as a primary source of Shadow Alignment solves a lot of problems for us. Players who are "going Shadow" need to be able to reach a critical mass of Shadow points that unlocks the "big ticket" items like Turning objectives for the Tower and quests for the Forsaken, which, if I'm reading this correctly, should be the biggest individual sources of Shadow Alignment?
Hmmm... I think this is tough. I'll say right now that I'm ok going with whatever you decide you want to do, of course.

I'm not going to say too much about this now, because it looks like you didn't quite finish moving through my thoughts on this matter.

I understand your concerns, though. I think one of the main reasons that I want the darkfriends to be a mostly under-the-table process (growing and shrinking primarily in an organic manner) is that I don't want this metagame to take over. It's one thing to command somebody's attention for a moment as they make a Choice, but it's another to have them monitor darkfriends all the time, knowing they need to create them and such in order to move along. I understand that my proposals had DF creation and stuff, but these weren't necessarily the greater portion of a civ's alignment - their *actions* were.

Also, while I understand the need to allow a player to get all crazy about being Shadow, I also really like the idea of a player sort of ending up Shadow unintentionally. They made some tough choices, didn't nip the problem in the bud, and got some "help" from a shady neighbor, and they find themselves fighting on the side of the Dark One. Of course they did - 40% of their citizens are DFs! That's why I enjoy the idea of the DF citizens are primarily a reflection (though, again, they do spread darkness as well), it allows the process to be mostly organic.

If we can preserve that feeling with the emphasis as you have it, then we're probably fine.

I do think, though, if our main concern is allowing people to reach critical mass, there might be other ways we can achieve that.

So, about Darkfriends, is there any reason to want to spread them beyond creating more Shadow-y-ness in other players or yourself?
Well, I don't know. Do they have any other effect as a citizen (besides generating Shadow points)?

Intuitively, th emain reason you'd do this is to essentially "guide" the player into joining the shadow in the end - either they do, or they are play for Light and are low on the totem pole).

But also it makes sense that spreading shadow would generate a lot of Shadow points for your civ as well.

I'm worried about this though - both the Forsaken quests and Turning the Tower are gated by a civ already having a certain amount of Shadow-ness (likely significant). Do we want to rely primarily on the Alignment Choices for that? One result of that is that Shadow players may be obligated to pick the evil answer every time in order to unlock their late-game Shadow mechanics. Then it isn't really a choice at all.
What you're talking about is a player that knows they want to play shadow. So much they want Shadow, that they are trying to *turn the tower*, something we have decided is very difficult, and potentially rare. These players are hardcore Shadow, and will not balk at picking evil every time. And even then, we can set it up that it doesn't have to be *literally* every time.

Consider, also, that the Forsaken quests shouldn't be "gated." The forsaken should *try* to get even mild LIGHT players to do their bidding. I think your Alignment will determine the frequency of these, though, and, as I mentioned before, potentially the scale of your rewards. But once you do one, you become more shadow, which makes them more likely to ask you again, etc.

The same is true for Turning. It's not a hard-fast gate. If we open a couple of the objectives to even nominally-Shadow players, those players can seek to meet those objectives. When they do, they'll get huge payouts of Shadow Points that then unlock the next set, etc.

I guess I'm trying to illustrate that the "snowball" effect can still happen starting in the late eras, as long as your civ is at least "leaning" in one direction.

And the truth is, if you've been choosing the "good guy" choice in a bunch of the Choices, you aren't that evil, and probably shouldn't be a High Level Darkfriend. (or we've designed the choices poorly). You can play on the Shadow team, but you'll be sitting on the proverbial bench for the first part of the first half.

I've heard some criticism of Mass Effect's Paragon vs Renegade for this reason - if you wanted to use the late-game options for Paragon or Renegade, you had to have a massive number of points for that side. Which basically meant you always needed to pick the response for the side you wanted in the end, regardless of if you thought it fit for the current situation.
Agreed. I don't think we're going down that direction, though.

AAAAND.... I am all caught up! I think... Please let me know if I missed something!
 
I feel so far behind - so much for me to reply to! I'm going to break the universe by quoting out of order for a moment.

Hmmm... I think this is tough. I'll say right now that I'm ok going with whatever you decide you want to do, of course.

I'm not going to say too much about this now, because it looks like you didn't quite finish moving through my thoughts on this matter.

I understand your concerns, though. I think one of the main reasons that I want the darkfriends to be a mostly under-the-table process (growing and shrinking primarily in an organic manner) is that I don't want this metagame to take over. It's one thing to command somebody's attention for a moment as they make a Choice, but it's another to have them monitor darkfriends all the time, knowing they need to create them and such in order to move along. I understand that my proposals had DF creation and stuff, but these weren't necessarily the greater portion of a civ's alignment - their *actions* were.

Also, while I understand the need to allow a player to get all crazy about being Shadow, I also really like the idea of a player sort of ending up Shadow unintentionally. They made some tough choices, didn't nip the problem in the bud, and got some "help" from a shady neighbor, and they find themselves fighting on the side of the Dark One. Of course they did - 40% of their citizens are DFs! That's why I enjoy the idea of the DF citizens are primarily a reflection (though, again, they do spread darkness as well), it allows the process to be mostly organic.

If we can preserve that feeling with the emphasis as you have it, then we're probably fine.

I do think, though, if our main concern is allowing people to reach critical mass, there might be other ways we can achieve that.


What you're talking about is a player that knows they want to play shadow. So much they want Shadow, that they are trying to *turn the tower*, something we have decided is very difficult, and potentially rare. These players are hardcore Shadow, and will not balk at picking evil every time. And even then, we can set it up that it doesn't have to be *literally* every time.

Consider, also, that the Forsaken quests shouldn't be "gated." The forsaken should *try* to get even mild LIGHT players to do their bidding. I think your Alignment will determine the frequency of these, though, and, as I mentioned before, potentially the scale of your rewards. But once you do one, you become more shadow, which makes them more likely to ask you again, etc.

The same is true for Turning. It's not a hard-fast gate. If we open a couple of the objectives to even nominally-Shadow players, those players can seek to meet those objectives. When they do, they'll get huge payouts of Shadow Points that then unlock the next set, etc.

I guess I'm trying to illustrate that the "snowball" effect can still happen starting in the late eras, as long as your civ is at least "leaning" in one direction.

And the truth is, if you've been choosing the "good guy" choice in a bunch of the Choices, you aren't that evil, and probably shouldn't be a High Level Darkfriend. (or we've designed the choices poorly). You can play on the Shadow team, but you'll be sitting on the proverbial bench for the first part of the first half.


Agreed. I don't think we're going down that direction, though.

It seems strange to quote such a huge block of text for a small response here, but I think I've done a 180 since my last post. Basically, I agree with you now. :D I'm not quite sure exactly what changed my mind, but I think I can see the flow of Dark/Light being driven primarily by the decisions in a sensible way now. It's all subject to some balancing to make sure it's fun, but I'm fine with that being a major contributor, rather than the DF citizens.

Anyway, back to quoting in order!

OK, what I'm thinking here is that Darkfriend Citizens are not in and of themselves a "primary" source of Shadow. They are a symptom first, and a source second. To me, the Primary force - in the early game, before you have big-deal stuff like Turning the Tower and Forsaken quests - should be your Alignment Choices (need a flavorful name!). But I'm not thinking it needs to be set up in as direct a way as you've suggested here (one choice = +1 darkfriend).

They way i'm looking at it is that Darkfriends just are. Everybody has them, except the most impossibly Light-loving civ. I'd say there's a "base level" of DF in *every one of your cities*, based on a few factors:
Your Alignment is the biggie (as determined initially by your Choices). All alignments will start with some amount of Darkfriends. Only the heavy Light side alignments will have a zero DF. I'd say something like a purely neutral city would have a base level of 1/10 citizens, or maybe 2/10. Your heavy shadow city would have maybe 6/10 or something, with appropriate gradation between. Your middle light cities would probably have 0.5/10 (rounding I'm unsure of), with these distinctions becoming much more apparent in large cities.
Additionally, your civ's Happiness, and maybe some social policies and such would also affect this "Base Level" of DF presence.
If you wonder if having a wide empire might make you more prone to Shadow, because you'd necessarily have more cities with that extra DF in them due to your simple proportions, I think it might be balanced by the fact that a huge Tall city would likely have a handful of them, regardless of how awesome your lightness is.
But, I would say this suggestion works best when coupled with an Alignment system that deals in large numbers - we don't want +1 shadow created by an unintentional DF to be a very significant thing. An actual Shadow Choice would yield much, much more of it.

On top of that, each city could have things that modify its DF presence. Occupied cities might have more. Cities with tons of local happiness might have fewer. A city peppered with DF-conversion units from an opponent would have tons of DFs (maybe "Four Kings" style). Another city might have been "cleansed" and had the DFs rooted out. That kind of thing. But, just like CS influence, these cities might also slowly regress back to your baseline level - although, of course, these DFs, while there, generate Shadow Points, which might keep them there.

So, in summary, I feel like we just start each city with a small seed of DFs and see if they grow that seed or eradicate it, and if their neighbors allow it. I see a baseline percentage, which is then modified by individual city factors.

Ok, I'm liking this now! I'm not sure how we're planning to deal with wide civs though. You mention this, but if every city has a seed of Darkfriends, then wide civs will always be Shadow-er than equivalently Light-making civs of similar "strength." When a Darkfriend is a single population it's also difficult to do those proportions for small cities. 20% is the minimum resolution of changes for a city with 5 population and I'm not sure how we plan to actually do the math to say how many Darkfriends there are in cities of that size.

Interesting side note, one of the many wiki articles I've read about Darkfriends in the last few weeks mentioned that Darkfriend rate was approximately 0.5%-1% of the population in the Westlands in the time of the books. We're by no means beholden to that, but it's a nice figure to have.

Yes, I think we need a sort of Darkfriend Missionary. What should we call this thing? Darkfriend is lame if we then call the Citizen that. Or maybe we call it a Darkfriend, but then just say a citizen is "Corrupted" or something (could also use one of the synonyms, "Shadowrunners, etc.")? But yeah, I think a unit could make a citizen a DF, but should it be one always? Could it be somewhat variable?

Things like "Emissary of the Great Lord" sound a bit more important than we intend for this guy, right? I think Darkfriend is good for the citizen. I'm not completely sure it would be bad to have the citizen and the unit named the same thing - they're never really on the screen together to be confused with one another. I agree it would be better if there's a good, distinct name for each though.

We could use the older "Friend of the Dark" for one and Darkfriend for the other?

The number of citizens converted could vary depending on the Alignments of the players? Very Light players get fewer from an enemy "DF missionary" and very Shadow civs cause more to be spawned when they expend their "DF missionaries."

So, again, the base-line would certainly be a variable thing. So yes, accumulating Light - pushing your alignment - would affect the amount of DF citizens you had.
Beyond that, I do think we could consider a kind of Cleansing unit, but it shoudl be easier to create DFs than dispell them, at least through these kinds of means. What would this unit be, though? We could certainly have an Inquisitor/Hand of the Light/Questioner (all the same thing, I think), but we'll probably be needing them to be 1) Inquisitors! and 2) potential Amadician UUs, and 3) potential Faith-buy units if you choose Children-associated beliefs. So we'd probably need something else. Thief Taker?

It's possible that our Inquisitor unit (whatever we call it) would also serve to slightly "correct" your Citizens. If you are mostly neutral, they do nothing (except normal Religion/Path things), but if you are heavily light, they will root out DFs. If you are heavily Shadow, they will create DFs. This is highly flavorful, IMO, since the likes of Jaichim Carridin were actually DFs all along, and putting Light folks to the Question, etc. Again, though, this assumes all civs can build these units.

So, maybe there's a dedicated DF-spreading unit, and then a Faith-buy "correction" unit attached to the inquisitor (and maybe the missionary too, though it'd only work on your cities)?

There's a threshold between "marginally Light" and "very Light" (and a corresponding one for Shadow) where the Inquisitor could be annoying if expended and it didn't do anything, even though the player expected it to. It's easy enough to actually gate the mission though - so that there is, effectively, a "spread Shadow in my lands" mission, but the Inquisitor can only perform it once the player reaches a critical mass of Shadow points.

Yes. That's why I like it to be a most organic process. Mostly based on your choices, buy also the big ebb and flow of your citizens as well.

Sounds good!

Yeah, totally. Not connected to actual citizens. Just a proportion of your population.

Now, what are the specific Effects of this? Shadow Points, obviously. Maybe % success of spy success/assassination success (discussed above). What else?

Does it affect yields? Positively/negatively? We know Faith production is effected by alignment - but could it be technically affected by the number of DFs instead? Why would a Light civ want to get rid of DFs aside from just to avoid the Shadow accumulation? Do they do bad things? Hurt you somehow? Similarly, why might a Shadow civ want more of them, aside from just helping to accumulate shadow?

As you pointed out about Grey Men and such, making Darkfriends positively affect assassination chances bizarrely makes those weapons more effective against the Shadow, which I don't think is what we want. It could be an inverse relationship here - the affect on assassination chance varies by your Alignment. Being Shadow makes DFs decrease assassination chances in your city, while being Light makes it increase. This would be a sliding scale thing - so they don't affect assassination chances much for Neutral civs, make very-Shadow civs very difficult to kill in, and if a very-Light civ somehow has a lot of Darkfriends in a particular city, then it makes it significantly easier to assassinate someone (Governor, Amyrlin) there.

Hmm.... regarding Hunters, I'd say they are definitely a combat unit. Probably in the Melee unit (perhaps cavalry) tree. Essentially, a swordsmen or something that also can discover the Horn. Probably becomes available around the same time as the Call the Hunt Project becomes available.

This makes me think that in other eras, you end up needing to use the Civilian Unit to find either the Horn or the Seals or, more likely, an Aes Sedai. I'd say All sisters can do it, but the Blues have a higher chance of success due to their special ability.

The civilian unit could be a "Treasure Hunter" or something. Sealfinder could work, but I definitely don't see the need to keep them separate from the Hunters. I can imagine the Hunter combat unit can't find the seals, but I don't see why the civilian one can't find the horn. Besides, the Hunters would probably be at a tech period when the Seals aren't even really being chased, right?

On the other hand, I could imagine them being called "Hunters", and then having an Illian UU be called Hunter of Tammaz or something. I dunno.

Then again, we could go in a weird direction here, and call them Sniffers or something... though that's breaking lore a bit.

On that note, though, the other option could be that Any GP could discover them. Obviously, youa ren't going to send around your Scientists, but Generals, Wolfbrothers, Admirals, etc? Maybe.

So, I'm thinking Aes Sedai for sure. Maybe GP as well. And then a Hunter combat unit, probably either tech-gated or an Illian UU, and then a civilian unit. What do you think?

I can even see us making the Illianer UU "Hunter for the Horn" where the others are just "Hunter." Agreed on the Hunter being a combat unit. I also like the idea of Aes Sedai being able to find Seals, but I'm not sure about it being any Ajah.

Also, good point re the Horn being in one of the Sites of Power or Site of a Seal! It looks no different from another one so it might take a long time to find, but it also makes it a much rarer thing to find.

You've mentioned Hunters being around at a time when the Seals aren't active and I was thinking about them that way as well. But they don't necessarily need to be - the Hunt for the Horn is reopened by Illian in 998NE (for the first time 400 years according to this wiki article). We could use the Hunters in a closer-to-modern-Westlands kind of context?

I'm not as sure about GPs finding Seals/the Horn (or was this directed just at the Horn?). It seems unusual to be using GPs as exploratory units.

If we do the Hunter combat unit and Aes Sedai, do we need the dedicated civilian unit anymore? Depends on if we think the "smaller players" on the map wouldn't have enough Aes Sedai to participate in the Seals stuff. It might also be annoying for large players who have the capacity to explore more Seal sites but are held back by their Aes Sedai quota. Ok, civilian unit, then!

I'm still not sure what name we could use for it. "Treasure Hunter" could work, as you've said elsewhere, it would be nice to have more in-universe names for some of these things.

A big "I don't know" for all of this. What we do here depends simply on how much a part of the game we want the horn to be. We talked a looong time ago about Illian's UUs having *something* to do with it - not necessarily making them more likely to get it, but giving them a huge culture boost if they should find it, or something - so it stands to reason that it should maybe be a part of most, if not all games.

But we could decide it's totally luck based. Like, no Site or anything. But then that makes it essentially impossible to use as a part of a UA.

Then again, we could elect to just make the horn a possible thing you find in any Seal Site, or any Site of Power....

I think making them part of the Sites is a good idea. It does mean that any unique that wants to deal with the Horn needs to be able to interact with both types of Site though - which otherwise doesn't seem like it would ever be necessary?

Yeah, I'm thinking maybe all sisters can, but the Blues are better than most. But when you say "discover", I'm picturing that they help you find it. But what about once they've been discovered via late-game tech? Does a Blue "dig it up" faster?

I'm thinking now that with Seals having their own Sites that there's no way to "discover" them earlier, the same way as for Antiquity Sites in BNW. Mainly because that's kind of how the underlying system of revealing and "working" things that occupies a hex is designed and it will be easy for players to follow.

All Sisters being able to discover the Seals does seem to detract from the targeted nature of it - everyone will have at least some Aes Sedai. Blues is flavorful and also gives us a tier 2 ability for them (though we could swap it around and make it tier one if we like). This means a given player is less likely to have the capability to interact with the Seal sites completely incidentally - they have to have taken some action to get there. (I think having to build the Archaeologists is a big part of the culture victory that makes it work - since these Sites are a part of the Last Battle victory, we should aim for a similar interaction.)

Also, if the Horn is in either a Seal or Horn site, that means either Blue or Brown Sisters could find it (it's effectively predetermined which Ajah can find the Horn once the Horn is placed, but no player has that information).

Right. I obviously spoke a bit on this above. Don't love Heroes. Feel like we could use Ta'veren elsewehre (though this ties into the GP-can-find-them-thing). Chronicler could work, but I'm not sure this is quite right.

Chronicler as frontrunner! :D We'll use the name for something.

Back for more! I'm amazingly falling behind, despite posting every day or two!

And yet I'm still four posts back! Argh! :p

This is why you were right to bring this discussion (the LB, alignment) back into the fold now. Some preconceptions we had have changed.

Essentially, I think we don't need Boons anymore. Basically, it seems to me that these overlap almost completely with Forsaken Quests, and the rewards for them. I think for most of the game, the Shadow player is essentially just a regular player, who happens to get less Faith... but they get the benefit of sometimes more immediately-useful consequences from the Alignment Choices, as well as whatever benefits you might get from Darkfriend Citizens.

Awesome, Boons are dead! Long live Boons! (Though we may recycle the name, since it comes up below.)
 
I'd say the Forsaken start appearing via specialized quests in the Era of the Dragon, or perhaps earlier than that, very intermittently. Maybe there's one in the Trolloc Wars or something. These serve a dual purpose - drawing players further into the Shadow, and thus clarifying the sides, and also providing an opportunity for Rewards.

So I see these quests as being a mix of straightforward "mean" stuff, and self-destructive stuff. Some should definitely be bad for the Light, but some would also be bad for the shadow, as we've described. Your rewards, the Boons, should be fickle - maybe sometimes they're great, but sometimes the Forsaken are kind of screwing you over a bit. Is that too harsh? In any case, doing them entrenches you more firmly into the Shadow, which probably makes your chances of a "good" reward better.

I'm liking this - rewards for the Forsaken Quests that are dependent on how Shadow you are. As long as the "penalty-like" things aren't too harsh it should be fine.

We might want to consider making Forsaken Quests start appearing earlier than the Era of the Dragon (aside from the few in the Trolloc Wars, which makes sense to me) since the Last Battle is so close at that point. Flavor wise it is the right time though.

OK. Totally with you so far. I do note that you seem to be framing around the scenario of the Shadow trying to steal it from the Light. Of course, the opposite will be just as likely (and don't forget neutral civs).

Yeah, that was the default scenario I had in mind, but I think it generalizes quite well for the other Alignment configurations. I had originally forgotten the "Light must control all Seals to spawn the Dragon" and was thinking the Shadow would always be breaking Seals straight away, making the opposite (Light stealing from Shadow) less likely. But it's a definite possibility!

OK, with you here. I should say I'm not wild about the idea of creating yet another "game mechanics" unit. We already have envoys, historians, the sealfinders, etc. That said, I definitely see how this makes the movement of the seals simpler. I'm ok with the process.

Cool, I think this guy is a good addition. We've got quite a few, but I think they fulfill valuable roles. Firaxis seemed to be moving more towards unit- and map-based mechanics as the expansions came out, which improved the game a lot, but we should be wary of a tipping point where it becomes confusing. (Which I think applies to the Seals discovery conversation, as you pointed out above.)

As far as the name, I could be fine with this, but I really wish we could find something that was more directly referential in-universe. I can't think what it would be, but *something*. The wikis claim that Logain was dubbed "Sealbreaker" by one of the Aes Sedai when he broke the seals. Simple - and obviously quite similar - but also directly from the books. Of course, these units don't actually break the seals...

I've been reading more about this to see if anything relevant comes up but beyond Sealbreaker, which, as you've said, doesn't describe the units correctly, I haven't seen any useful names. It looks like the people who carried Seals during the books were primarily named characters rather than any ceremonial position - Rand, Logain, Egwene, Taim, and High Lord Turak.

I'm good with Sealbearer for this one - I think it's less of a problem than the "sealfinder"-type unit, since Sealbearer at least sounds quite WoT-ish.

I was just struck by a thought that we should check this whole process, and the balance of it, with our science victory. Seals-research will be time consuming. Obviously it doesn't matter to Light forces, as they are locked out of Science, but if a Shadow civ wants to help with seals, and go for an eventual Science win (post light-killing), they'll fall a little behind. Maybe this is great - that's the consequence for trying to "work together".

This also varies with map size. Seeing as there are a fixed number of Seals (which I can't currently remember), each player has less work to do on larger maps. Maybe 20 turns is too long to research a single Seal given that researching and breaking will probably take a similar-ish amount of time. Research being civ-wide makes that more of a bottleneck though - and not researching any techs for 20 turns is a big hit, even if proving some Seals are fake gives you a significant bonus. We can accelerate the whole timeline of my proposal above so that everything takes less time. The only externally fixed value is the "establishing surveillance" 3 turns, which seems to be a sweet spot to stop people constantly moving spies and being able to get too much information (in general, not just about Seals) too quickly.

Modifiers to the spy's "Search for Seals" attempt:
- presence of counterspy in the capital
- anti-spy buildings and wonders owned by the defending civ
- Level of the Spy

Of these, I think they'd mostly affect success rate. What affects length-of-time for spy stuff in CiV?

I referenced this post what seems like eons ago, I can't believe I'm just getting to it now!

The only thing that has a variable time length in base ciV is stealing technologies - that's modified by much the same stuff as you've said here, plus the science output of the defending civilization.

other than that... hmmm.. Do we think alignment or anything like that would matter? Like strong shadow or strong light civs would be more difficult to infiltrate. Maybe your science versus their science could be a factor? Also, I can imagine Ideological tenets that might affect this.

That's only really bad for Neutral civs, which doesn't seem that great. Science also seems a bit unrelated - it's to do with proving the Seal is real or not, but isn't really conceptually related to hanging onto it or how easy it is to steal. Ideological tenets sounds possible.

OK, those all sound good to me. The misinformation thing is crazy (#2).... how would that feel as a player? It seems like it's a good thing to have, but would it be frustrating?

I'm not 100% sure, but this is very easily changeable. We'd only have to swap out some text, so I'd say let's keep the misinformation to start with and if we don't like it, we can change it.

I can't think of anything that would affect the number of turns here that wasn't affecting the discovery time as well. If we wanted to modify one of them, this is the one to modify, though.

This definitely needs a huge piece of randomness too, right?

How much randomness we use for the length of the process probably depends on if it can fail, which we're discussing below. If stealing can't fail, then more randomness is good - if it can fail then I think we can have less randomness. Either way, it should be more significant in this mechanic than it is for a lot of others.

Ah, interesting. I think I like this.

Question: why wouldn't people always put the Seals in their high-production cities? There doesn't seem to be any strategic benefit to putting them in unusual places. Am I right?

While it seems a little meta to tell the defending civ that the seal is being stolen, this seems to create a very nice game of chicken that should play out nicely. Depends a lot on the range of how long we think this should take though.

Can you buy Sealbearers, or must they be produced? What about great engineer-rushing them?

Yeah, high production non-capital cities are good candidates for Seal-keeping locations, but they're usually quite close together, so the player may be prompted to move farther once they have to move the Seal.

I'm thinking Sealbearers can only be produced, not bought or rushed.

I'm a big fan of the game of chicken this creates too! :D

I think the 20 turn thing could be fine, but what about games where there's only one civ on a given side? Even if that civ is super powerful, breaking seven seals will take a long, LONG time. What do we think of this?

I think ~20 would be a civ who's doing all right, but the game-leader could do it faster. There is usually a significant difference in science output between civs in games where one is pulling ahead. And normal technologies scale in cost by map size (I did not know this until recently) so we could make Seals behave similarly, but possibly more exaggerated, since they need to be "broken" in sequence and smaller maps mean individual players need to research and break more Seals. That does mean stealing Seals is harder on smaller maps though. But then there are less places the search.

Also, I'm wondering if the time line would make it too easy to steal them. consider four light and four shadow civs. The light civs are trying to steal from the shadow. If every civ put their spies in a capital on the same turn, it seems to me that it would be highly likley they'd find the location of the seal pretty quickly. Essentially, it seems like civs might rearely be "left alone" long enough to break one.

The cat and mouse game can be compelling, but I don't think we want an endless "chase," where nobody ever really has a chance to break one.

This is a good argument for only being able to steal "discovered" Seals - so those other civs having that information doesn't do you any good. But is that in the spirit of the mechanics? I also don't think we can make the researching/breaking vs stealing timeline comparatively much shorter without making stealing impossible.

If the two activities take the same amount of time then stealing is impossible (because the research or break will always finish first). Even in this case - 20 turns vs 9 + ~4 (~4 for the time taken to steal, thin air number), a researching or breaking player only needs an average 6 turn lead on somebody trying to find a Seal (and succeeding) in his civ before it becomes inevitable that he'll research/break it first.

Yeah. wow. you'd better protect them.

Question about this, though: If you literally watch the enemy march a sealbearer into a city, can you just send a spy to that city and start stealing, or do you have to move back to the capital and divine its location, even though you know its there?

I'll address this below!

Also, can you drop the sealbearer off at an allied city? Or gift the sealbearer, maybe?

I'm thinking the Sealbearer can drop the Seal off at any city you're not at war with the owner of. (Or at least have open borders with.)

This makes a lot of gameplay sense, but very little flavor sense. I could imagine it instead being that the sealbearer "dies" and loses the seal - which then goes back into "hiding." This makes flavor sense, but would make the game take a LONG time. I suppose your suggestion is fine. Still, I do think some players will decide to send their sealbearers off with a small fleet of units and circle the world. True, they'd get caught, but they could delay their opponent a LOT.
Part of me wants it to be that when X number of turns pass, their movement is also halved or something.

I think it could definitely be made to make flavorful sense. The Seals were drawn to times and locations of great conflict - one was at the bottom of the Eye of the World, Turak potentially brought one all the way from Seanchan to a war, Taim was given one (or two?), they were kept by various people in power and frequently moved between them. This is the Pattern making sure the Seals are a part of the saga of the Last Battle. This "highlight" is the Pattern ensuring that the Seals are still a part of that saga - not sequestered away in some tower at the end of the world.

That's the kind of thing I'd use to explain it.

This is also the only thing that prevents the light from just moving their seals every single turn they're allowed. They *could*, but it would end up quite a bit of wasted hammers to be constantly building sealbearers.

Yep, that's the idea!

OK, you've clarified a bit here. Some of my questions above are now less pressing.

The potential failure loop for the player trying to steal the Seal also contributes to the timings. If only a 6 turn head start is necessary to make researching/breaking inevitable, dropping the Seal off at another player becomes very effective. The spy will waste a minimum of 6 turns finding "no Seal" at the civ they were trying to steal from before. Depending on how long it takes the Sealbearer to reach a foreign city, that could be a serious advantage.

Yes, makes sense! So you could do it in your "high production" city... as long as it isn't your capital.

Indeed!


I can see why there shouldn't be a fail chance... but it also maybe takes away an opportunity to enhance the "game of chicken." Yeah, move that seal... unless you're cocky and figure the spy will fail. Still, I see the reasoning.

Yeah, I can see what you mean here. I think that creates too many failure chances in the stealing player's loop though. The schedule is already tight to keep ahead of the researcher/breaker.

Does the Spy learn what phase the Seal is in? No, right? I ask, because learning that a seal is being BROKEN would provoke a greater deal of attention than just learning one was there being researches. I'm inclined to say none of this info is given.

I agree, I don't think the player trying to steal the Seal can see any of that. They just see a "Seal in city X". If they're successful in stealing it, then they obviously see what stage it's at then, but not before.

It does seem a little cheap that the defending civs need a sealbearer, but spies are automatic. Oh well.

I think that's ok because of the work the spy had to do to steal the Seal. If we wanted the stealing player to use a Sealbearer, then they would also need some kind of military presence - since they now have a civilian in enemy territory - which I don't think is the intention of this system.

I don't have an opinion as to whether we should move the spy, too.

Let's move him too, then, it seems cool. :D

Also, are we renaming Spies? Should we just go ahead and call them Eyes and Ears?

Yeah, Eyes and Ears is a good in-universe name!

Well, if you have a spy in a city, you can see that cities vision, right? So, shouldn't you be able to tell what the sealbearer is doing (moving or expending right there)?

You can only see the hexes adjacent to the city, rather than its whole sight. This depends on how the turns are playing out. If the Sealbearer has no movement when it spawns (like a purchased unit), then the spy will presumably move away before the Sealbearer's first on-map movement. At which point the Sealbearer-player might elect to just drop it into the same city again. But they don't know if the spy just stuck around.

K, this is also addressing a question I asked above (sorry, but this section is really epic and it was hard to recall which things popped up where!).

I'm finding myself a bit confused by your wording in the middle here, but you're suggesting that if you have a spy hanging out in a city, they wouldn't know a seal is there unless they do the "SEarch" mission in the capital. The next bit I'm a bit confused on ("I could be sold on the idea", that sentence). Please clarify, if you don't mind. Sorry if it's obvious.

Yeah, the whole watching-the-sealbearer but being unable to do anything about it thing does seem a little iffy to me. Therein lies one of the problems with making it a unit.

Sorry, that was quite confusing! I meant there are two approaches to this:

"A spy can only steal a Seal from a city that has been revealed as a 'Seal location' to the player controlling the spy by investigating that player's capital."

"If a spy is in an enemy city at the same time as a Seal, he can steal it."

The former protects the players who have the Seals from being mobbed by opponents who share information, which could potentially make researching and/or breaking the Seals significantly more difficult. But it also creates situations where the human player may know where a Seal is at a crucial time but be unable to do anything about it.

The latter avoids the player frustration - but more heavily favors the stealing civs. Perhaps this could combine well with a shortening of the timeline for researching/breaking, but there's a very fine tipping point in the relative time between these two activities. It's relatively easy to make one or the other impossible when playing against a skilled opponent. That may just be a question of careful balancing though.

I was saying that I could be convinced either way, but I'm leaning towards the former approach.

Makes sense with the Blue ajah, IMO! Well, good for the light (or whichever side gets the Aes Sedai)

Awesome, sounds good!

This could work, but it's quite possible that means he'll be in unit form for quite a long time - as the light civs figure out a way to kill all the seals. what happens if one gets stolen back? Does he disappear?

Disappearing seems strange. He could get steadily weaker?

I think it's ok for him to stay in unit form for a while if the Light have taken Thakan'dar and are scrambling to break the Seals. The safest path to victory for the Light is to have all of the Seals, then take Thakan'dar, and then start breaking them.

Also, do we want a situation in which the light civ can simply avoid killing the seals so as to use the Dragon to do crazy stuff in unit form? You know, thining the ranks of the shadow units to make a strike at thakandar easier. This seems a little meta to me.

The only situation Light civs will want to break Seals in is when they've either already captured or are confident they are about the capture Thakan'dar. It doesn't make sense to do it earlier (for them) since that only makes the Shadowspawn stronger. Using the Dragon to make attacking Thakan'dar easier seems to be the point of the whole process, I don't think it's a meta thing. I'm assuming he doesn't retain his spy-period abilities (like balefire-nuke) - he's just a very powerful ranged unit. He's still vulnerable to being killed without support.

And if the Light civs are just using the Dragon to clean up the map, they're really only wasting their own time. They have the capability to win the game, so there's no reason for them not to. They're potentially leaving the door open for a Neutral civ to win while they don't pursue capturing Thakan'dar. Even if there aren't any Neutral civs left, this is roughly the equivalent of not building the last spaceship part once you have the tech, so that you can finish off some wars. It could be good fun, but it's not efficient and someone might surprise you with another victory.

ok, happiness with prestige could work, but i'd say it would be a small amount of happiness.

Yeah, like +4? About the same as one luxury?

Alright. We'll just need to make sure that the AI elects to actually go and do this whole Seal business from time to time.

Definitely, they'll need to do that!

Era of the Dragon...

Also, what, if anything, is happening related to this during the "Era of Encroaching Blight"? Is the blight expanding, but no shadowspawn increase?

Yeah, the Blight expansion then seems sensible to me. I think we can leave Shadowspawn rate the same.

I think this seems like this could be too soon. There are other things we have happening that are gated by Era of the Dragon. The birth of the dragon, for instance. Do we want him around for only 5 turns before the LB starts? Should it be longer? 3-5 turns seems really short.

Did we decide what the Dragon is going to do for the time before the Last Battle? I think we were erring on the side of not very much.

The Dragon is born in the first civ to reach the Era of the Dragon, which happens significantly earlier than World Era becoming Era of the Dragon. What else do we trigger on the Era of the Dragon start?

Remember that World Eras aren't publicized directly. I don't think there's too much triggering for us to use 5-ish turns there. There's a risk of waiting too long and too many players reaching the endgame before the Last Battle starts on the other side.

OK, so let's reopen the discussion, then. Do you have ideas for what kinds of projects there would be? I'm not really thinking of any right now. Then again, I might still be kind of thinking about this in the wrong way.

I remember discussing projects that players could contribute hammers towards and that each project had better bonuses at certain thresholds. (This way the human player can optimize for the thresholds by taking into account the AI contributions and putting in just enough to reach the next threshold.)

So things that we could have this modify, from a mechanical usefulness perspective:

Research speed (helps to break the Seals)
Unit training speed (helps to fight off the Shadow)
Gold generation rate (helps buy units or buildings for the war)
Culture generation rate (helps fend off opposing Culture wins)
Spark (increasing Light-side available Spark in tiers could make many more channelers available for the Light)
Lowering Shadowspawn spawn rate in Light cities (obviously helpful)

So, flavorful name possibilities for these projects:

Research: "Scholarly Cooperation", "Worldwide Academies"
Unit training speed: "Legion of the Dragon", "Hold Back the Shadow", "Arm the People", "Spit in Sightblinder's Eye"
Gold : "Time of Need", "Enforced Concessions"
Culture: "Festival of Life", "
Spark: "Channeler Breeding Program", "Nurturing the Spark", "
Shadowspawn rate: "Closing the Ways"

Ah, so the trading civ gets a faith bonus. makes sense. Not sure what specifically to say on the Projects, though.

Just saying how we want to deliver that faith bonus to the player, but that doesn't mesh with the notion above of the projects being fixed things that you can contribute to. Easily fixed though - we can provide faith bonuses at each tier of the projects in addition to that project's primary effects.

Alright, I'm fine with keeping the mechanics as previously described. Based on your quote and the Turning status, you might gain or lose sisters. So if the Tower was ALMOST turned, we'd have like 4/10 or 5/10 sisters defect to black. Still, the Lightside would retain the actual tower, its armies, etc.

Updating this in the summary. So, the amount of sisters that defect is based solely on the turning process, NOT on the influence in each Ajah, right? So, like, the shadow players could control most of the ajahs, but if they hadn't hit any turning conditions (save maybe the one that requires you to control the ajahs), they'd end up with very few sisters. Is this correct? Or would it be swayed by that too?

I think let's stick with the Turning objectives for simplicity for now. I think we're crossed wires here a bit on Sisters fleeing though - I'll talk about that below.

OK, now I'm seeing some logical issues. At least I think I am.

First off, if some sisters flee, that means most Light civs will LOSE sisters. Even if we give them a boost, some will certainly flee. This assumes a few of the Turning conditions were met (i.e. there are *some* black sisters).

So, if that's true, how could we leave the Neutral civs with their full cadre of sisters? That seems highly unfair to Light civs. If we kept the Neutrals the same, but then gave the light civs MORE sisters... does that make sense, or have we just created sisters out of nothing?

So, say 75% of the Turning conditions were met. Does that mean like half the sisters will defect to the Black? Slightly less than that?
I absolutely think if the Tower is turned, the opposite effect should happen: Light civs should be left with the minority of sisters.

But where does that leave Neutral civs? There's no way they should be left alone when everybody else is losing sisters, right?

Maybe we shouldn't modify the Sister count for the Alignment that got the Tower. If the Tower stays Light, the Light players keep their Sisters, but the Shadow players have theirs replaced with Black Sisters according to how far they got in the Turning objectives.

The flipside is less clear though - if the Tower Turns, how do we work out how many Sisters the Light side civs keep? Is it a fixed percentage? When this happens, Shadow civs just have their Sisters replaced like-for-like with Black Sisters.

It occurs to me that there's quite a gulf of lost functionality from the other Ajahs' abilities if the Shadow civs only have access to the Black Ajah though. Was the notion of replacing the Shadow civs' Sisters with Black Ajah Sisters was discussed before we came up with the series of bonuses for the other Ajahs? We did discuss have "Black Ajah" as a "promotion" on existing Sisters that gave them extra abilities, but decided against it for complexity reasons (for the player), right?

It seems like having your existing Sister units become Black Ajah would be more useful for the Shadow and more intuitive for the player, despite the unit being a bit more complex. (And they're presumably accustomed to the Sister's normal capabilities by this late stage in the game.) It's also simpler in terms of keeping them comparable to their enemies (Light side Sisters).

I can see the appeal of the 2 WoT GP thing,b ut I also think the flavor will be lost on most people.

That said, the WoT GP thing might be a good idea (even if its only one), since these GP are those designed not to mess up the game too much. So, which is it?

Do you think most people wouldn't see it? "The Dragon is born in <location>. And now you may choose two GPs to spawn at the same city, from the following types:", where the types include Wolfbrother and "Probability man". I think people will pick up on it. I'm a fan of the 2 WoT GP idea.

OK, so the Dragon only exists within the Alignment Choices? Is there anything else that will include him?

The Forsaken quests probably include him at this point, but it's only flavor dressing, nothing mechanical.

Well, in WoT, the dragon *was* Rand, so I don't know exactly what you mean. You mean how in another era it was Lews Therin? It could be somebody else, theoretically. I'm not sure it matters much, though. We could call him Dragon, or Rand. I don't mind either way.

Rand was the Dragon in the books, but we're playing the world. In an alternate timeline, Logain or Taim might have ended up being the Dragon. Or maybe Guaire Amalasan could be born at a different time and become the Dragon.

Since we're starting from the After Breaking time, I think the Age of Legends is locked in as our history - so Lews Therin already was the Dragon in the previous Age (during the mod, as well as in the books).

I think it's easier and more timeline agnostic to always refer to the Dragon just as "the Dragon" and not give him a name.

OK, right. Should I put this in the summary though? In full detail?

You could link to it and just mention that we're using Prestige (important) + Faith (less important) instead of just Faith.

OK, Thakand'ar is killable by everyone! (and I probably mean that literally... it would take everyone to kill thakandar).

Yeah, it'll take a true unit carpet to lay siege to that place!

Right.

The whole Raken thing is interesting..... Man, the Seanchan are overflowing with UUs. But, essentially, we'd be introducing a plane mechanic for exactly one civ...

Yeah, the Seanchan have so many differences that are so distinctly to do with them. It's quite annoying that their stuff doesn't fit as well if we try to generalize it. (Like if we gave raken to everybody, that'd just be weird.)



I'm afraid that's where I have to stop for the evening!
 
Hello again!
I heave been rereading the WoT books and am up to The Shadow Rising and had a idea, could there be a miniscule chance (Enabled in options) of the Dragon being turned to the Shadow?
 
Just great. I just lost 3 hours of posting (which would have brought me up to date) to a Windows update. Will return tomorrow.

Bah! That sucks.

I was gonna do a post tonight but... I just can't do that to ya. I'm going to let you catch up. I'll be back tomorrow.
 
Hey, S3rgeus: If you'd like me to start working on some unit graphics for you, you might want to pop over to my Workshop (last link in my signature) before I get utterly buried in requests.:) The problems I mentioned last fall (lack of animations and suitable models) are no longer a problem, as I've learned how to make both.:D
 
Bah! That sucks.

I was gonna do a post tonight but... I just can't do that to ya. I'm going to let you catch up. I'll be back tomorrow.

Thank you so much, I don't know if I could have survived if I fell another day behind because of that! :eek:

I've since installed a Firefox extension called Lazarus which should save me from any future browser-form-data-related shenanigans.

So, back to the beginning of yesterday's post! If it sounds like I'm being quite terse in places, it's mostly because I'm rewriting rather than writing the first time. I think I remember the general gist of what I wrote last time for most topics.

Thankfully, it was actually much quicker to rewrite.

Hmmm... interesting. Well, he switches around which CiV controls him. I'm wondering if it'd be simplest to make it so he actually *can't* switch cities while owned by somebody. Maybe it's only when that person's "turn" ends that he'd move to another city... I'm just trying to keep it from getting really complicated.

Five turns could work, though. But, again, how long is a civ's turn anyways? If it's only 10, then we could just make it a simple "You may move the dragon" halfway through their cycle.

As far as variable cooldowns, this makes mechanical sense, but I'm concerned about complexity, especially as it is viewed by the player. Will this be a pop-up menu? or will he appear to them as a unit in the city, with stuff listed as command icons on the left? If we do the latter, displaying cooldown times will not be elegant.

I want to figure out more precicely how this will work before i put it in the summary.

This is actually the only section I hadn't written a response to yesterday when everything fell apart.

I think if we show options on the left the cooldowns won't be too bad - things that aren't available yet are just greyed out like normal unavailable missions, with the remaining cooldown in the tooltip? Or we could go all out and put a little number in the corner of the button (like the icon for workers has if you select them while they're building something).

I think the length of a player's turn should make sense in the context of the Last Battle. If the Last Battle itself is like 50 turns long, right? We'll probably want to be quite snappy - maybe 5 turns per player? Maybe even shorter? Even only 5 turns per player is a total of 10 changes of hands during the whole Last Battle. Depending on the number of Light civs, some might only control him once. (Though that may not be a problem in itself.)

Shorter turn times could also mean we don't need to deal with cooldowns. You just can't use the same ability more than once during your turn?

Yes, I like this. Just spawn him right by that city. Although, this assumes that the Dragon can only sit in Light cities, which I think we like (which, of course, limits his spy-like activities to "defensive" ones, as opposed to stealing Seals, etc.). If he's dead, yes, let's have him spawn in the next player in the turn order's capital. I think, normally, that player would be asked "which city would you like to place the dragon", but in this case, capital is fine.

Yes, sounds good for the Dragon to have primarily a defensive role while he's in Spy mode. Are we ok with him losing the Steal a Seal ability then?

On that note, though, when he's in spy mode, can you place him in allies' cities?

Yeah, let's say you can place him in any Light city you like, because some players may be too far from the fighting (at times) for some of his abilities to work.

Definitely agree here, on all points. What would this thing they "do" be? Prestige+Light value? Would the players switch control after some amount of turns? Or, perhaps, if he is defeated? And then, it goes to the next highest value?

It could also be a vote, of course, but that seems like it'd be a little weird.

I agree that a vote is weird. I don't think we want to use something like Prestige+Alignment, because there's nothing short term that the player can do to change that situation. Who has the most Seals is tempting, but I'm not sure if that reflects what we want either.

One cool thing might be to have an action you can take while he's in spy form that means you'll control him when he becomes a unit, and the last person to use that ability gets him. This is inspired by a similar mechanic in a board game called Lords of Waterdeep, where there's a move you can make which means you go first in the next round, but the drawback is it doesn't do anything else now. We could even make the AI do this very infrequently, if at all.

I might actually be ok with allowing them to build Draghkar, if only to allow for an air unit. So this might actually be a reason *not* to do it (same with Raken for the 'chan).

I'm thinking Draghkar would be more like paratroopers than planes, so I think it's fine if players could build those over a certain Shadow threshold. (We could even gate each unit separately, so only the most Shadow-devoted civ could ever build Myrddraal and Draghkar, but more civs could build Trollocs.)

I'm finding myself actually now disliking the Dreadlord thing. Those should be the Shadow Civ's channelers. Sorta like mini-forsaken.

The Shadow players already have tons of channeling unit options - Black Ajah AS, kin, asha'man - there doesn't seem to be a need for Dreadlords also. Technically speaking, many of the Black Sisters and Asha'man were dreadlords - all it means is a channeler-commander in the army. IMO, let's just have the Shadow civ have them. No need for the shadow players.

Maybe the players can be Gifted the Dreadlords, but I think it's pointless as a produced unit. Also, I'm iffy on the Gifting too, because of Spark and all that.

I'm fine with leaving Dreadlords as a gift-only unit or even reserving them for the Shadowspawn civ. Whichever you prefer.

On that note, we might need to start using a different word for the Dark One's Shadow Civ, since I think we are colloquially using "shadow civs" to mean the civs that CHOOSE the shadow. What should we call it?

Ever since I first read this post (many ages ago when I was still replying to half of page 20) I've been trying to refer to the civ that controls the Shadowspawn and Thakan'dar as the Shadowspawn civ and the civs that have chosen the Shadow for the Last Battle as the Shadow civs. That seems like a good colloquial distinction.

OK, I like this. I'd say your Alignment would determine how often you are gifted a unit.

Yes, sounds good.

OK! So Blight is a feature (right) that can occur in and out of your borders. I like bad yields and shadowspawn spawning, but I'd also add that you can't heal at the accelerated in-territory rate while sitting on it.

Does it destroy your improvements? What about resources it covers up, are they going to come back?

Due to the limitations with adding features mid-game (argh, Firaxis!) we'll need Blight to destroy something as it spreads. Improvements seems sensible to me. And that would mean any resources covered by Blight are lost forever, since you can't build the improvement you need on them.

Also, what about non-Shadowspawn units that end their turn on Blight taking damage, as well as not healing? Could be something small like 5 damage, just so it builds up over time.

I do think we need to figure out how to remove it. It could be an Ogier thing, but that certainly isn't universe-accurate. You're right that it shouldn't "waste" a civs culture (acquiring tiles), but we could still use Culture, potentially, to combat it. Maybe Pattern makes it recede?

I do think something simple like a Worker cleanup probably doesn't make sense, but I think there should be some way that doesn't necessarily rely solely on Ogier relationships and stuff. Any other ideas?

Also, what determined when/where the Blight advances? I know there are certain points in history when this wll happen, but is there anything else to it? If shadowspawn are allowed to be in your territory for to long, or allowed to live too long? What can you do (if anything) to stop its spread in the first place?

I'm thinking that the Blight spreads more slowly through claimed land than unclaimed (as in, within culture borders) just by default. So the only real way to slow down the Blight is to build cities in its way.

I agree cleaning by worker is weird. I'm wondering if cleansing the Blight should be possible at all? There don't seem to be any examples of it in the history from the books. The Blight receded at some points in the past in WoT, but never significantly and never because someone did something to it.

Oh, and S3rgeus, I don't mean to imply that I'm not enjoying hashing through all this stuff. Obviously I am or I wouldn't have helped get this thread to page 21. But to me the uniques do "pop" more than most of these topics, and are in some ways the most "fun." At least on the surface. I may find that in practice that isn't the case!

I know what you mean, a lot of the mods that are civ packs rather than total conversions jump straight in on the uniques and that can be a lot of fun. I'm more of a frameworks guy in general - my favorite part of any system is usually the underlying parts that enable the general cases, rather than the specifics which are the things the player sees. There's plenty of both for WoTMod though!

OK! Trying finish page 20! I think after this I will be caught up on the "last round" of LB talks, and will then be able to tackle your responses to my responses....

And then we keep going until there's no red left in the summary! Now that my posts can rise from the dead in the event of catastrophic browser meltdown, I feel much safer writing this long post.

ok. I don't suppose it should be a very high chance, though.

Related to Bloodknives and Grey Men being detected in foreign cities. I agree, something like 3% so that, on average, they'll be caught within ~33 turns? Or do we want to make it a bit shorter? 5% gives us (on average) within 20 turns.

No we don't, though we could split horses into multiple different strategic resources, to be super RJ-like. We could have "Dapple Mares" and "Bay geldings" and "dun stallions." Oh, and "Shaggy Brown Mares," but they die when you find the Horn (but it's ok, because she's actually a personification of the Creator)

I laughed out loud at this when I read it first. I love the fan theories that Bela is the Creator watching the world through a horse.

Yeah, this is a bit of an iffy thing flavor wise. I do think the Spark generating strategic resource is a good idea, though. So you definitely don't want it to be a cache of angreals or something like that?

Arguably a cache of angreals should make your channelers better, rather than allow you to have more of them, but I can see the link. (The same could be said of wells.) I'm not sure.

Also, tossing this in: are we going to do anything with the Green Man and/or Nym in general.

Let's say no for now, but we might consider coming back to it some other time.


Bah! Can't believe I forgot it. Fixed. Its one gold one food, right?

Yes, Olives, one gold and one food!

OK, now we have a lot of them!

Awesome! :D

well, do we have any reason to suppose they're blue? Do we have any reason to think they aren't green or red like most fun loving peppers here on earth?

No particular reason, "ice peppers" just seems to suggest a frosty blue color to me, kind of like this. We have no evidence that says they should be blue. Then again, there's no evidence to say they're not blue. Eh? Eh?

Sure. Fine by me.

Awesome, GW artifact types, summary-able! :D

cool. updated it in the summary!

This is to with Landmarks. Thanks! There's a stray [/color] at the end of that line.
 
I'm definitely OK with nuking Pattern as linked to Score. I'm also ok with nuking pattern at ALL. I like the idea of it, but I do think you are right that we shouldn't just add stuff for the sake of it. We're already adding a LOT here.

So, I say for now, kill it and see if anybody has any great ideas in the future.

Cool, Pattern, as its own separate concept, axed.

Sure! Not sure how, but we can figure it out, I'm sure.

Sounds good - we'll probably want to start off on an idea-spree for the Forsaken Quests and Alignment Choices sometime. I'm happy to kick that off if we think we're ready for that?

Yes, I like it. I like the idea of having three options, but not necessarily having them all be super obviously good-neutral-bad. We could have some be good-saintly-neutral or even bad-rock-hardplace and such, just to make things more realistic and unpredictable for the player.

Yes, I think this played a role in swaying me on the issue - that sometimes there would be no good option and sometimes no bad one.

Well, I think you've hit it on the head at the end there. "Threads in the Pattern" or something could work very well. Wrinkle could be find too. I prefer these to the bland, clinical "Events" and "opportunities".

Threads in the Pattern works for me. So each one shows up as an individual "Thread in the Pattern" on-screen.

I think Chapter Titles are probably a good source for things like this, actually.

Very good call on this one, sounds like a great source!

I see your concern, and agree with most of your suggestions below that deal with it. But I do think it isn't an innate problem that Alignment is predominantly a late-game thing. Personally, I don't want it to "get in the way", so I'd be happy to have it not matter much for the first 60% of the game. I imagine most players can go about their business for most of the game, and then as the last few eras pop up, start to buckle down and choose a side.

You are right that some players will want to go hardcore and max out Shadow and stuff. Fine. Let's enable that. But I'm very much fine with most players being in the middle for most of the game. The Tower Turning, for instance, is intended to be relatively rare and difficult, so it'd take some "hardcore" players to make it happen anyways.

I think I included this in my skip-ahead many posts ago, but just in case, I should write here that I agree with these sentiments now.

I'm willing to go with you on this because it seems like you feel more strongly about it than I do. It does seem like we have kind of opposite views. To me, too many levels becomes less informative. Could we even come up with 17 different names that really show a clear spectrum? If you've got em, I'm fine with it.

I just think that with only 4 levels per side there can be a big difference in Alignment between two players who are both quite Shadow (or quite Light) and yet the descriptors wouldn't show you that. I think 8 each side + "Neutral" should be doable.

Again, fine with scrapping this whole thing, though now I do have a question:

It seems from what you're saying here and before that we won't be tinkering with score calculations much. Does that mean our new features (including alignment) can't factor in to score?

I haven't looked into how score is calculated, but I'm 95% sure we can change it, so we can definitely have stuff like Alignment modify score.

Ah, that it is!

I don't think we finalized the bonuses. This post posited some, though:
- Province of Industry - + % Production, or + hammers per turn, to capital city
- Province of Crafts - +% Production when building X unit or Y building
- Province of Wealth - +1 Gold yield from Strategic Resources/Luxury Resources (or something)
- Province of Exploration - +1 movement for naval units
- Province of Belief - +1 Faith per city
- Province of Learning - +1 Science per 3 population in the capital
- Province of Honor - +15% Experience from killing Shadowspawn and Dragonsworn
- Province of Invention - +5 culture per international trade route
- Province of Sacrifice - no bonus

I had ideas for this one last time, hopefully I'm remembering all of them.

How would we choose X and Y for the buildings and units one? This province seems much more specific than the others, which have widely useful bonuses.

Do we want a bonus that is related to Aes Sedai?

Province of Tower Relations - Player receives 1 Aes Sedai

I remember we liked the idea of all of the bonuses being scalable so that they could be dropped into significant/mediocre/poor (+ 1 non-existent) buckets. Then having the High King only able to give out a certain number of significant/mediocre/poor/none bonuses, and which bonuses were in which bucket would vary from game to game.

So, to demonstrate, say there were 5 players in the game - the High King needs to give out 4 Provincial Bonuses. He can give out 1 significant, 1 mediocre, 1 poor, and 1 non-bonus. In this game Invention and Industry are significant, Learning and Belief are mediocre, and others are poor. So he must give out either Invention or Industry to one Province. And so on.

Or we could simply allow the High King to slot whichever bonus into which tier he likes and the resulting benefit to the Province player scales based on which slot the High King used.

I've added a Trolloc Wars Section. Please take a look and see what else I should add or what is incorrect.

Looks like everything that's still red in that section is being discussed below. Amazing how few words summarizes such long discussions!

Hmmm, I guess you can switch it off. I imagine you could switch EVERYTHING off. But I can also imagine just one master toggle "Events" that swtches off Alignment, the LB, the TW, and the HAwkwing stuff.

I'm not sure if we want to do the grouping that way. The Last Battle is a victory type and there's a section already for disabling specific victories. That usually disables their corresponding yields, right? So I'm thinking disabling the Last Battle also disables Alignment, because Alignment doesn't make any sense without it. And probably the Trolloc Wars as well.

We could have the High King disable with the diplo victory. Or we could have it as a separate thing (like "no Barbarians"). Trolloc Wars could work either way too.

What I mean is that normal Alignment stuff will keep happening. BUT, it is probably best for us to increase the frequency of Choices (Wrinkles? Threads?) during that window. This makes flavorful sense, and also allows the wannabe shadow civs an opportunity to compensate for some Light they might be forced to accumulate during this period

Yeah, this sounds good.

It's a little hard to tell, are you agreeing that we should have the Shadow be primarily razing cities? We do need the TWs to end without a whole bunch of Shadow cities, as you say below.

I do think the Razing should happen after a certain amount of turns, though - unless the wars are almost done, at which point it should begin immediately, probably.

What happens if the wars end and the city isn't done razing? Do they give it back, or do they keep razing?

I'm not sure if they should raze cities. It's a bit punishing, but it does solve our needing to not have Shadowspawn cities hanging around after it ends. If they've captured an original capital, they'll just have to hang onto it (producing Shadowspawn units, though more slowly) until someone comes and captures it back.

Let's have them finish razing if the war ends.

How many turns do you want the wars to last, btw (since we don't appear to be using other triggers to end them)?

I'm thinking 20-30 turns? Say 25? I think we'll need to playtest and tweak this. Too short and players far from the Blight are unaffected. Too long and players close to the Blight are overrun.

Yeah, currently on my third attempt to actually win a game on emperor...

My current game is probably going to end with Casimir killing us all - he's at score ~1300 and I'm at ~700. My friendly newly-neighboring Attilla is the biggest presence on my continent at ~800 score and I think I'll have to fight him. I'm playing as Pocatello, what about you?

I'm not sure if I really enjoy Emperor, because the happiness penalties mean that even maxed out on Zoos and everything, I've ended up at like -12 happiness. It doesn't really feel like I get to actually play CiV.

I like this, mostly. A problem I see, though, is that Settlers aren't very useful to Tall playing civs (assuming they didn't lose their cities). I wouldn't want the reward to be something a player would theoretically just get rid of. Also, the settler thing seems to be largely set up as compensation for losses during the TW. But that doesn't serve to incentivize a civ really far away to jump in and help the civs on the blightborder. I think the Rewards need to be enticing to them as well.

Also, I wonder if the yield is a little too low? At that point int he game thats, what, 1 missionary? Seems a little weak sauce. Hardly worth losing tons of units over.

I think I could be fine with this, but maybe let's consider not making both the top two be settlers. Maybe one of them is a lot of culture? or some gold, maybe? The way these work, isn't the top performer also supposed to get the 2nd and 3rd place rewards?

I'm thinking that the players who lost cities are at a serious disadvantage and we should go some way to helping them recover (provided they participated). We could be very direct about it though and give settlers to players who lost cities.

I was originally thinking that 200 is about the faith you need to found a religion, but this is actually a bit later in the game than that. Maybe something along the lines of 400? 600?

A GP of your choice also seems like a good bonus. Good point about the top performer getting place 2 and 3 bonuses as well. (That does happen with the World Games and stuff, right?)

It sounds like we want the ending to the TW to be pre-written. Essentially, what the civs do doesn't matter, except as it relates to them competing with each other. I think, overall, this is the right way to look at it. It may be the case that the "real" Trolloc Wars were gearing up to be a sort of Last Battle, but we most definitely aren't looking for that.

So yeah, let's make it simply gated by number of turns (how many, I can't recall). Again, what happens to currently captured cities when this happens? What about the units? Do they turn around and run, or is it simply that the unit spawn rates return to normal? The latter is more organic, but it also allows for the possibility of a huge Trolloc army surviving for another thousand years.

Covered cities above, I'll talk about units here. We will definitely return the spawn rate to normal. We could have the Shadowspawn from during the Trolloc Wars do a kind of reverse-Barbarian and have them despawn when no player has sight on the units. We could also have them retreat into the Blight, which would make it much more likely for that to happen relatively soon.


This is regarding False Dragons.

Yeah, we seem to have made prestige our "go to" reward. I think this is simply us being tricked by the name we invented. It *sounds* like something you'd be earning. We should probably only be using in situations that are decidedly late-game.

Yeah, Culture, Gold, and Faith. I'd unsure as to whether Culture or Gold should be the biggest, though I feel pretty sure Faith should be the least.

Yes, I'm good with moving away from Prestige as an across-the-board reward.

So for the False Dragon rewards, how about the False Dragon gives out a total yield, portioned base on the damage done to him, and that's divided up into six parts: Gold/Culture/Faith in 3/2/1 style. The total yield could scale by world era, so that it doesn't become irrelevant later on and isn't overpowered at the start.

To put some numbers to it:

Ancient: 200
Classical: 300
Medieval: 400
Renaissance: 600
Industrial: 800
Atomic: 1000
Modern: 1200
Information: 1500

As an example, say it's the ancient era and two civs did exactly 50% damage each (because it makes the math easy) to a False Dragon before he died. Each player would receive a total of 100 yield, divided up as 50 Gold, 33 Culture, and 17 Faith. And so on for the other eras.

Also, which summary is going to be about False Dragons, Barbarians, and such? The Misc one?

I've edited the misc summary to remove Pattern and add this in its place.

If we're doing that, we might as well simply make gentling be a flat bonus, and not even need to double the other rewards. But yeah, doesn't need to be prestige.... though it does make sense. Culture and Faith bonus definitely makes sense. Gold less so, but it's ok.

I'm fine with Gentling having a flat-but-scaled-by-world-era bonus. Say half of the total yield for that era, divided the same way as above? Or would a quarter be better?

Is it possible to make Trollocs behave differently in the presence of a Myrddraal (not flee, etc.)? Maybe the best bet is to have the Myrrdraal be something of a Great General, and make trollocs (and only trollocs) fight better when he's around?

Great general effect for Trollocs from Myrddraal is very doable. Making them actually make smarter decisions when Myrddraal are around would be quite a bit more difficult. The difference would also be very subtle.

Also, flavor: Trollocs are afraid of water, right? Huge penalty when attacking over rivers? Maybe negated by Myrrdraal. Also, probably no embarking.

I think I agree on no embarking. But then how do the Shadowspawn deal with island-y maps?

Nice one on attacking across rivers - yes Trollocs can have a large penalty there. We can also take it away in the presence of a Myrddraal.

OK. Agreed. Just to be clear, is the +1 Light for the whole game, or just in the TW?

Let's say for the whole game.

Right. I understand. The truth is, I think we need to differentiate the shadowspawn in "feel" from the Dragonsworn. Barbarians tend to usually just wander around pillaging, taking workers, etc. If the shadowspawn were more aggressive - actually going for your cities - this would feel very different. But... it sounds like you may not even have control over this.

I completely agree. AI changes are subtle for the player and difficult to develop, but in this case I think we'd get significant return for it. I haven't actually looked through the AI at length, but it should be possible to do this - it's just a question of how difficult it is. I do agree it's worth doing.

Well, I'd say there are a few things we can do with this. Definitely, the former-Honor tree could have policies that enhance your shadowspawn fighting abilities.

Definitely, but we don't want to force Blightborder civs to take Honor. And we don't want Honor to be useless to civs far from the Blight.

As far as buildings, we could make the Walls replacement, or some other building have a specific bonus against Shadowspawn, but *none* against other civs. This way, civs can war with each other (and barbs) but defend more successfully against the shadow... yet still lose a million units. Maybe it's a building that makes your city ranged attack super good at shadow.

Yeah, this sounds really cool - we could even have Walls (or our equivalent... if we replace Walls) just be better against Shadowspawn.

Don't forget about Aes Sedai, also! Didn't we say era two was when Aes Sedai are first unlocked for players? This is a big deal, as they are great against them. Also, we can have the White Tower have its people all up there killing shadowspawn as well.

Definitely yeah, they'll be really good for this!

Additionally, there could be a tech-gated, universally available unit that pops up near that era that is good against shadowspawn, specifically.

Yeah, sounds good. Do we want to decide what that unit is now, even without knowing what the tech tree is like in that time?

Well, I don't know. Do they have any other effect as a citizen (besides generating Shadow points)?

Intuitively, th emain reason you'd do this is to essentially "guide" the player into joining the shadow in the end - either they do, or they are play for Light and are low on the totem pole).

But also it makes sense that spreading shadow would generate a lot of Shadow points for your civ as well.

I left this out of my skip-ahead last time since it seemed more to do with the Darkfriends in general than them as a primary source of alignment.

I'll say that I'm a huge fan of spreading Darkfriends generating Shadow Alignment for the spreader. That adds some more player agency to the process. I think that means we don't need the Darkfriend citizens to do anything aside from whatever they normally would + Shadow. (No other yield changes for us to balance or anything.)

They're primarily there as a mechanism for Shadow players to become Shadowy-er and potentially corrupt their neighbors.

Hello again!
I heave been rereading the WoT books and am up to The Shadow Rising and had a idea, could there be a miniscule chance (Enabled in options) of the Dragon being turned to the Shadow?

Welcome back! I hope you're enjoying the books! I think as we've planned it thus far, the Dragon is quite entrenched in the mechanisms the Light team use to win the game. I don't know if we could swap him over and handle it elegantly.

Hey, S3rgeus: If you'd like me to start working on some unit graphics for you, you might want to pop over to my Workshop (last link in my signature) before I get utterly buried in requests.:) The problems I mentioned last fall (lack of animations and suitable models) are no longer a problem, as I've learned how to make both.:D

You're the man, Civitar! That's awesome that you've made so much progress with the process! Do you do requests for terrain models as well, like new resources or features? I'll definitely drop into your workshop this weekend with a list of units! Thank you! :D
 
Will hit these first so they're easier to find:
Hello again!
I heave been rereading the WoT books and am up to The Shadow Rising and had a idea, could there be a miniscule chance (Enabled in options) of the Dragon being turned to the Shadow?

I love that one!

I was thinking about this. I think S3rgeus is right that it's not realistic for this to end up a regular old mechanic. But I was thinking that maybe we could set it up as a kind of Easter egg. Something that rarely happened, and only popped up in games that were already crazy-lopsided.

Maybe, for instance, if it was a game (with, say, 8 civs, minimum) were every civ chose shadow by some chance, I could see the Dragon being on their side. But here's the catch - he still has to die for them to win, in the end!

Hey, S3rgeus: If you'd like me to start working on some unit graphics for you, you might want to pop over to my Workshop (last link in my signature) before I get utterly buried in requests.:) The problems I mentioned last fall (lack of animations and suitable models) are no longer a problem, as I've learned how to make both.:D

This is so very cool, Civitar. Thanks for helping!

It seems strange to quote such a huge block of text for a small response here, but I think I've done a 180 since my last post. Basically, I agree with you now. :D I'm not quite sure exactly what changed my mind, but I think I can see the flow of Dark/Light being driven primarily by the decisions in a sensible way now. It's all subject to some balancing to make sure it's fun, but I'm fine with that being a major contributor, rather than the DF citizens.
Anyway, back to quoting in order!
Right, well I wanted to reiterate here that the DF citizens are still definitely *a* cause for Shadow points, just not the primary one.
Ok, I'm liking this now! I'm not sure how we're planning to deal with wide civs though. You mention this, but if every city has a seed of Darkfriends, then wide civs will always be Shadow-er than equivalently Light-making civs of similar "strength." When a Darkfriend is a single population it's also difficult to do those proportions for small cities. 20% is the minimum resolution of changes for a city with 5 population and I'm not sure how we plan to actually do the math to say how many Darkfriends there are in cities of that size.
Well, this is certainly a challenge. I can think of a few ways to approach this problem:
1) Make DF-presence a simple % number, instead of an actual citizen. So a city of size ten, let's say, would have 20% Corruption instead of 2 DF citizens. We'd have to attach Shadow accumulation points to this value, probably based on total output as well. The main drawback of this method is that it doesn't fit as elegantly with the other civ systems, which seem to focus on changes that occur at the population-point level. However, the benefit to this is that we could make the % be whatever you want, and totally non-literal, which would help the realism a bit - we could have that city of population 10 have 2% Darfriends, and still have that provide a yield of 2 Shadow points (for instance).
2) Additionally, this doesn't help the resolution problem, but we could have the other citizens (or all other citizens) be actively "Light". So a Wide empire, which would have more native shadow citizens, would also have Light citizens to counteract that.
3) Lastly, we could leave it alone, and hope that the resolution problem corrects the Tall/Wide problem. It's true that every city would have DFs, but that would only manifest in a meaningful way once population reached a certain point. So a wide empires 2 point cities wouldn't be generating any significant shadow presence. One way we could tweak the balance of this is by adjusting the rounding accordingly. Obviously a 1 size city wouldn't have a single DF, but... what about a 3?

I'm surprising myself by finding that I'm kind of liking the % idea best. It also allows us to potentially think a bit more outside the box as far as any drawbacks that come with a city being heavily corrupted.
Interesting side note, one of the many wiki articles I've read about Darkfriends in the last few weeks mentioned that Darkfriend rate was approximately 0.5%-1% of the population in the Westlands in the time of the books. We're by no means beholden to that, but it's a nice figure to have.
Wow. Sounds realistic, but its not in line with what we're talking about. Funny, though, that there were like 200 Black Sisters, which is far greater than those %.
Aside from option 1 above, we could conceivably compensate for this by renaming these citizens as "Corrupted" instead of actual Darkfriends. That way its more like these people have been messed-with by the Shadow, not necessarily like they're actually DF agents. Also, this might clear up the naming confusion.
Things like "Emissary of the Great Lord" sound a bit more important than we intend for this guy, right? I think Darkfriend is good for the citizen. I'm not completely sure it would be bad to have the citizen and the unit named the same thing - they're never really on the screen together to be confused with one another. I agree it would be better if there's a good, distinct name for each though.
We could use the older "Friend of the Dark" for one and Darkfriend for the other?
Hmmm... maybe "Darkfriend Agent" could be a way to do this. Aside from the "corruption" idea, I could be fine with keeping them the same, or having the unit be a Friend of the Dark. Also, there was a distinct hierarchy to DFs, maybe we make the unit some sort of Leader or Recruiter or something.
The number of citizens converted could vary depending on the Alignments of the players? Very Light players get fewer from an enemy "DF missionary" and very Shadow civs cause more to be spawned when they expend their "DF missionaries."
Right, though I think it might be best to set it up simply as "Defense." That is, Shadow Alignment is resistant to Light missionaries, and vise-versa. I don't necessarily like the idea of Shadow Civs being particularly prone to Shadow missionaries (or the flipside with Light), I think I'd like to keep the self-nuking of your own alignment to a minimum. Seems sort of non-interactive and lame... kinda like using missionaries on your Holy City.... To me, Neutral and Shadow civs should provide the same resistance, at least in theory (to Shadow missionaries).
That said, a truly neutral civ would still be producing Light points, yes? Those Light points might then serve as some kind of defense, I would imagine.that said, I'm personally kind of liking the idea of Neutral civs being the "sweet spot" where missionaries of either side can be particularly useful. I find the idea of civs trying to bring one another to a given side more interesting than some civ just spending all their Faith building DFs to become super evil. Especially if we have some drawbacks for extreme shadow alignment.
There's a threshold between "marginally Light" and "very Light" (and a corresponding one for Shadow) where the Inquisitor could be annoying if expended and it didn't do anything, even though the player expected it to. It's easy enough to actually gate the mission though - so that there is, effectively, a "spread Shadow in my lands" mission, but the Inquisitor can only perform it once the player reaches a critical mass of Shadow points.
Ah, I was actually suggesting that maybe this unit would do the Path stuff AND the Alignment stuff. I think this could work, since Inquisitors are by definition only to be used on the home civ. So a neutral Inq would still do something, it just wouldn't really do much *alignment* stuff (only Path). Inquisitors serve to make a city more like the rest of your empire, so we could have the inquisitor pull that city towards either the "mean" Alignment of your empire, or the Alignment of the city in which it is born. I don't have a problem with the inquisitor being a disappointment on Alignment for a neutral civ. If you want to *changE* alignment, you should use a missionary. The Inq is to defend against other people's mainpulations.... sorta like how it'd be kinda disappointing to use an inquisitor in base CiV on one of your cities that had little to no foreign pressure.
I should say that this is turning into a rather large thing. Are we totally sure we want this as a part of the LB summary? In any case, I'm not updating it until we get some more things straight.
As you pointed out about Grey Men and such, making Darkfriends positively affect assassination chances bizarrely makes those weapons more effective against the Shadow, which I don't think is what we want. It could be an inverse relationship here - the affect on assassination chance varies by your Alignment. Being Shadow makes DFs decrease assassination chances in your city, while being Light makes it increase. This would be a sliding scale thing - so they don't affect assassination chances much for Neutral civs, make very-Shadow civs very difficult to kill in, and if a very-Light civ somehow has a lot of Darkfriends in a particular city, then it makes it significantly easier to assassinate someone (Governor, Amyrlin) there.
I think I could like this. Seems to make sense. But on the other hand, I could also be convinced that heavy shadow would make you always more prone to such things - especially if we view it as "corruption." They're often assassinating each other, after all.
I'd also be fine with making it have nothing to do with alignment, or not a whole lot, at least.
I can even see us making the Illianer UU "Hunter for the Horn" where the others are just "Hunter." Agreed on the Hunter being a combat unit. I also like the idea of Aes Sedai being able to find Seals, but I'm not sure about it being any Ajah.
Also, good point re the Horn being in one of the Sites of Power or Site of a Seal! It looks no different from another one so it might take a long time to find, but it also makes it a much rarer thing to find.
You've mentioned Hunters being around at a time when the Seals aren't active and I was thinking about them that way as well. But they don't necessarily need to be - the Hunt for the Horn is reopened by Illian in 998NE (for the first time 400 years according to this wiki article). We could use the Hunters in a closer-to-modern-Westlands kind of context?
Well, had the hunt been called throughout the AB and FY periods, though? If it hasn't been called in 400 years, that doesn't mean it hadn't been called several times before then. Of course, it wasn't FOUND until the end of the NE.
I could go either way with this. I did like the idea of it being possible for various nations to call a hunt for the horn throughout history, but I can see it also making sense as a lateish game phenomenon only (encroaching blight, or before that?), adding to the late game crazy If we have the horn in an actual fixed and viewable place - i.e. a Site of Power - that means it WILL be found in most games, even if it takes a long time. So we shouldn't bring it up too early, for that reason.
The only other thing is we'll have to be careful how we treat Illian's uniques if they have something to do with the Horn. I guess that makes Illian a late-game unique civ, for the most part.

Which summary will these Horn mechanics be housed within?
I'm not as sure about GPs finding Seals/the Horn (or was this directed just at the Horn?). It seems unusual to be using GPs as exploratory units.
sure.
If we do the Hunter combat unit and Aes Sedai, do we need the dedicated civilian unit anymore? Depends on if we think the "smaller players" on the map wouldn't have enough Aes Sedai to participate in the Seals stuff. It might also be annoying for large players who have the capacity to explore more Seal sites but are held back by their Aes Sedai quota. Ok, civilian unit, then!
Well, we could have a universal Hunter combat unit - for all civs- and a VERSION of it that is unique to Illian (Hunter of Tammaz or Oathtaker or whatever) that is far superior. That way all civs would use Aes Sedai and that combat unit. Also there's something kind of cool about these guys all being combat units, makes them feel different from archs. I like how this complicates the whole "digging up other people's territory" thing, because you're actually bringing war units close or into somebody's turf... potentially a scarier thing. As far as civs that are "less significant" to the WT and thus have fewer Aes Sedai... I say "tough."
I'm still not sure what name we could use for it. "Treasure Hunter" could work, as you've said elsewhere, it would be nice to have more in-universe names for some of these things.
Yeah, we can do better.
I think making them part of the Sites is a good idea. It does mean that any unique that wants to deal with the Horn needs to be able to interact with both types of Site though - which otherwise doesn't seem like it would ever be necessary?
So do you think the horn should be able to pop up in both kinds of sites? I'm thinking it might be best to just have it be the Seal Sites> I don't knwo why I think that, though.
Oh, and I'm not loving the name for the Seal Sites. We didn't think of a better one?

Also, in the LB summary we mention that a late-game tech will reveal seal locations. Are we still doing that, or is the revelation of the SITES enough?
I'm thinking now that with Seals having their own Sites that there's no way to "discover" them earlier, the same way as for Antiquity Sites in BNW. Mainly because that's kind of how the underlying system of revealing and "working" things that occupies a hex is designed and it will be easy for players to follow.
All Sisters being able to discover the Seals does seem to detract from the targeted nature of it - everyone will have at least some Aes Sedai. Blues is flavorful and also gives us a tier 2 ability for them (though we could swap it around and make it tier one if we like). This means a given player is less likely to have the capability to interact with the Seal sites completely incidentally - they have to have taken some action to get there. (I think having to build the Archaeologists is a big part of the culture victory that makes it work - since these Sites are a part of the Last Battle victory, we should aim for a similar interaction.)
Also, if the Horn is in either a Seal or Horn site, that means either Blue or Brown Sisters could find it (it's effectively predetermined which Ajah can find the Horn once the Horn is placed, but no player has that information).
Yeah, I'm all for differentiation. So Blue Sisters can do it. Otherwise you need Hunters. I'd say let's leave Browns to the Sites of Power.
But how exactly are Blues better at this? There's no longer a "discovery chance," right? Aren't they just revealed by a tech? Or am I missing something here? Do they just dig it faster? That's kinda lame in that it's similar to the Browns. Oh, well, though.
Also, as far as Blues being less useful when the LB is disabled... Oh well. Blues are less useful in a world that doesn't care about epic stuff, right?
Could/should Sites of Power ALSO have some sort of rare "surprise" thing you dig up?
Chronicler as frontrunner! :D We'll use the name for something.
I'm sorta leaning away from having a civilian at all...
 
I'm liking this - rewards for the Forsaken Quests that are dependent on how Shadow you are. As long as the "penalty-like" things aren't too harsh it should be fine.

We might want to consider making Forsaken Quests start appearing earlier than the Era of the Dragon (aside from the few in the Trolloc Wars, which makes sense to me) since the Last Battle is so close at that point. Flavor wise it is the right time though.
I wouldn't expect the penalties to really be penalties. More like you weren't given what was promised, or it has a weird bad side to it. Like being gifted a few units all with 1 HP, or three missionaries... of a different Path. That kind of thing.
I'd be fine with stuff starting to ramp up during the Era of Encroaching Blight. Thing of all the machinations already well underway when Rand was born, and all that.

Yeah, that was the default scenario I had in mind, but I think it generalizes quite well for the other Alignment configurations. I had originally forgotten the "Light must control all Seals to spawn the Dragon" and was thinking the Shadow would always be breaking Seals straight away, making the opposite (Light stealing from Shadow) less likely. But it's a definite possibility!
Well, we might wanna consider this for a moment. Are there reasons why the Shadow might hold onto them? Obviously a Seal has to be held onto at least til the LB starts (because there is no "Shadow" side yet), but Is this process tech-gated at all? So, like, a Shadow civ has a seal, but can't start the breaking process yet for whatever reason.

I mention this because I think we do want the lightside to be able to steal, right? Otherwise, it's "Steal them all in the first 20 turns or your life will get a lot harder," so we might need to artificially add some mechanic that makes them last, or else provide some benefit for the Shadow to holding off.

On that note, should we bring back the discussion about the "Dark Ones Touch" when seals are broken? I know we talked about shadowspawning rate increasing, and bubbles of evil popping up as each seal is broken, but shall we get more specific?

Cool, I think this guy is a good addition. We've got quite a few, but I think they fulfill valuable roles. Firaxis seemed to be moving more towards unit- and map-based mechanics as the expansions came out, which improved the game a lot, but we should be wary of a tipping point where it becomes confusing. (Which I think applies to the Seals discovery conversation, as you pointed out above.)

I've been reading more about this to see if anything relevant comes up but beyond Sealbreaker, which, as you've said, doesn't describe the units correctly, I haven't seen any useful names. It looks like the people who carried Seals during the books were primarily named characters rather than any ceremonial position - Rand, Logain, Egwene, Taim, and High Lord Turak.

I'm good with Sealbearer for this one - I think it's less of a problem than the "sealfinder"-type unit, since Sealbearer at least sounds quite WoT-ish.
I can live with the Sealbearer. Just hope it doesn't create too much clutter. Name can work for now.

Question: what happens when the seal is FOUND on the map? Does it go straight to a city or does the discovering unit (hunter or whatever) *Become* a Sealbearer?
By the way, trying to add all this into the "Seals" section of the LB summary. Please check and advise!

This also varies with map size. Seeing as there are a fixed number of Seals (which I can't currently remember), each player has less work to do on larger maps. Maybe 20 turns is too long to research a single Seal given that researching and breaking will probably take a similar-ish amount of time. Research being civ-wide makes that more of a bottleneck though - and not researching any techs for 20 turns is a big hit, even if proving some Seals are fake gives you a significant bonus. We can accelerate the whole timeline of my proposal above so that everything takes less time. The only externally fixed value is the "establishing surveillance" 3 turns, which seems to be a sweet spot to stop people constantly moving spies and being able to get too much information (in general, not just about Seals) too quickly.
This is tricky. I'd say that since the power of the various civs going against each other, as well as the Shadowspawn civ and the Tower (usually), the LB is likely to have a reasonable "minimum" length due to it taking a decent amount of time for people to conquer and such. Thus, to me the bigger concern is keeping the Seals thing from making it too painfully *long*.
Yes, I'd say we should probably scale the research length my map size, and *also* scale the steal time. Right? Keep them lock-step with one another.
Of course, if there's one shadow civ versus 15 light civs...

Also, we could just universally shrink the research time, instead extending and varying the *destruction* time. That way there wouldn't be as much of a research bottleneck.

I referenced this post what seems like eons ago, I can't believe I'm just getting to it now!

The only thing that has a variable time length in base ciV is stealing technologies - that's modified by much the same stuff as you've said here, plus the science output of the defending civilization.
That's only really bad for Neutral civs, which doesn't seem that great. Science also seems a bit unrelated - it's to do with proving the Seal is real or not, but isn't really conceptually related to hanging onto it or how easy it is to steal. Ideological tenets sounds possible.
alright. got it!

I'm not 100% sure, but this is very easily changeable. We'd only have to swap out some text, so I'd say let's keep the misinformation to start with and if we don't like it, we can change it.
to clarify, we're both imagine it telling you "there are no seals" when that's incorrect. What about the opposite? Will it tell you "a seal is in Whitebridge" which no such thing is true?

How much randomness we use for the length of the process probably depends on if it can fail, which we're discussing below. If stealing can't fail, then more randomness is good - if it can fail then I think we can have less randomness. Either way, it should be more significant in this mechanic than it is for a lot of others.
Agreed. Espionage in general is a bit of randomness already in CiV.

Yeah, high production non-capital cities are good candidates for Seal-keeping locations, but they're usually quite close together, so the player may be prompted to move farther once they have to move the Seal.

I'm thinking Sealbearers can only be produced, not bought or rushed.

I'm a big fan of the game of chicken this creates too! :D
OK, I'm a little confused by your first sentence. These cities are usually close together, but that just means you only rarely will have to move the sealbearer very far, right?

I think ~20 would be a civ who's doing all right, but the game-leader could do it faster. There is usually a significant difference in science output between civs in games where one is pulling ahead. And normal technologies scale in cost by map size (I did not know this until recently) so we could make Seals behave similarly, but possibly more exaggerated, since they need to be "broken" in sequence and smaller maps mean individual players need to research and break more Seals. That does mean stealing Seals is harder on smaller maps though. But then there are less places the search.
OK, this could work, but I also am wondering if we should shorten the research length and extend some other phases in the process. That is a LOT for 7 seals! (plus or minus).

This is a good argument for only being able to steal "discovered" Seals - so those other civs having that information doesn't do you any good. But is that in the spirit of the mechanics? I also don't think we can make the researching/breaking vs stealing timeline comparatively much shorter without making stealing impossible.

If the two activities take the same amount of time then stealing is impossible (because the research or break will always finish first). Even in this case - 20 turns vs 9 + ~4 (~4 for the time taken to steal, thin air number), a researching or breaking player only needs an average 6 turn lead on somebody trying to find a Seal (and succeeding) in his civ before it becomes inevitable that he'll research/break it first.
hmmm.... so... broken record here... what do you think of making the research shorter but the production longer?

This would have the interesting effect of making it much more likely that you're stealing a *real* seal, since the longer it sits in its home city, unsealed, eventually it's authenticity will be discovered (probably). This might speed things up a bit, by making more stealing actually fruitful. Of course... you still have to Authenticate it yourself. What if it's a seal you previously had, and are restealing?

Side effect of making it heavier on the production - a production heavy civ would now be the best Seal-crusher, rather than the science civ. Do we not like that? Of course, it could be that we have a science civ start the process, and then transfer it to an ally.

Ach! Head hurts.

I'm thinking the Sealbearer can drop the Seal off at any city you're not at war with the owner of. (Or at least have open borders with.)
agreed.

I think it could definitely be made to make flavorful sense. The Seals were drawn to times and locations of great conflict - one was at the bottom of the Eye of the World, Turak potentially brought one all the way from Seanchan to a war, Taim was given one (or two?), they were kept by various people in power and frequently moved between them. This is the Pattern making sure the Seals are a part of the saga of the Last Battle. This "highlight" is the Pattern ensuring that the Seals are still a part of that saga - not sequestered away in some tower at the end of the world.

That's the kind of thing I'd use to explain it.
Enough for me!

The potential failure loop for the player trying to steal the Seal also contributes to the timings. If only a 6 turn head start is necessary to make researching/breaking inevitable, dropping the Seal off at another player becomes very effective. The spy will waste a minimum of 6 turns finding "no Seal" at the civ they were trying to steal from before. Depending on how long it takes the Sealbearer to reach a foreign city, that could be a serious advantage.
OK, guaranteed success, I'm thinking.

I agree, I don't think the player trying to steal the Seal can see any of that. They just see a "Seal in city X". If they're successful in stealing it, then they obviously see what stage it's at then, but not before.
Right, but now I'm wondering if in fact you need to start your own authentication when you steal it. If your enemy did the work for you, should you benefit?

I think that's ok because of the work the spy had to do to steal the Seal. If we wanted the stealing player to use a Sealbearer, then they would also need some kind of military presence - since they now have a civilian in enemy territory - which I don't think is the intention of this system.
sure. I'm with you.

Let's move him too, then, it seems cool. :D
So moved!

Yeah, Eyes and Ears is a good in-universe name!
sweet! I will start using it. What do we say, then? The Eyes and Ears have stolen a technology? The Eye and Ear have?

You can only see the hexes adjacent to the city, rather than its whole sight. This depends on how the turns are playing out. If the Sealbearer has no movement when it spawns (like a purchased unit), then the spy will presumably move away before the Sealbearer's first on-map movement. At which point the Sealbearer-player might elect to just drop it into the same city again. But they don't know if the spy just stuck around.
OK. Right. Practically, it's quite unlikely you'd learn anything useful.

Sorry, that was quite confusing! I meant there are two approaches to this:

"A spy can only steal a Seal from a city that has been revealed as a 'Seal location' to the player controlling the spy by investigating that player's capital."

"If a spy is in an enemy city at the same time as a Seal, he can steal it."

The former protects the players who have the Seals from being mobbed by opponents who share information, which could potentially make researching and/or breaking the Seals significantly more difficult. But it also creates situations where the human player may know where a Seal is at a crucial time but be unable to do anything about it.

The latter avoids the player frustration - but more heavily favors the stealing civs. Perhaps this could combine well with a shortening of the timeline for researching/breaking, but there's a very fine tipping point in the relative time between these two activities. It's relatively easy to make one or the other impossible when playing against a skilled opponent. That may just be a question of careful balancing though.

I was saying that I could be convinced either way, but I'm leaning towards the former approach.
I think mechanically i agree with you - shouldn't matter if the player knows which city it's in. This makes things much easier for us to balance.

I think we can help remove the frustrating aspect with flavor, though. Instead of the Eyes and Ears discovering a seal is in a city, they can be specific: "Bode Cauthon has discovered that a Seal has been hidden away in the Sewers of Salidar!" That kind of thing.
Disappearing seems strange. He could get steadily weaker?

I think it's ok for him to stay in unit form for a while if the Light have taken Thakan'dar and are scrambling to break the Seals. The safest path to victory for the Light is to have all of the Seals, then take Thakan'dar, and then start breaking them.

The only situation Light civs will want to break Seals in is when they've either already captured or are confident they are about the capture Thakan'dar. It doesn't make sense to do it earlier (for them) since that only makes the Shadowspawn stronger. Using the Dragon to make attacking Thakan'dar easier seems to be the point of the whole process, I don't think it's a meta thing. I'm assuming he doesn't retain his spy-period abilities (like balefire-nuke) - he's just a very powerful ranged unit. He's still vulnerable to being killed without support.

And if the Light civs are just using the Dragon to clean up the map, they're really only wasting their own time. They have the capability to win the game, so there's no reason for them not to. They're potentially leaving the door open for a Neutral civ to win while they don't pursue capturing Thakan'dar. Even if there aren't any Neutral civs left, this is roughly the equivalent of not building the last spaceship part once you have the tech, so that you can finish off some wars. It could be good fun, but it's not efficient and someone might surprise you with another victory.

Him getting weaker when Seals are stolen seems a little odd to me. I can't really think of anything better, though...

OK, so you're talking about things as if the typical path would be for the Dragon/Light to take Thakan'dar and *then* break the seals. I don't like this, I don't think. I understand why you're suggesting it, I think, but I think it takes away some of the compelling end-game stuff we were talking about before.

I recall the whole when-to-break-the-seals thing to be a tricky cost-benefit equation. For the Shadow, it's obviously that way - the Shadow gets stronger when you break one, which is good, but the Light wins a little bit when you do that. But from the Light's perspective, that "game" is absent - wait til the last minute, always.

I remember us talking about how the light would be faced with a tricky endgame, where they must breakt he seals - and make the shadow stronger before the Strike at Shayol Ghul. One last, risky mission.

To me, having the Seals broken after T'D is taken seems kind of anticlimactic.

And with this in mind, I still see some problems with the Dragon unit being allowed to exist in unit form forever. While I understand how any turn they aren't hitting T'D is a turn they're letting a Shadow player win, but I imagine the strike at T'D will be very challenging. If the Light were to essentially neutralize each of the Shadow civs - or even the neutral civs before that strike, the final assault would be made MUCH easier, with only the Shadowspawn civ left with any meaningful resistance. Essentially, having Rand in unit form - an offensive, not defensive weapon - makes the taking of Shadow capitals much easier, I'd imagine. The "capability to win the game" is not the same as the "situation with the highest *probability* of winning the game.*

Yeah, like +4? About the same as one luxury?
Yeah, could do this. But should it cap, or something? What if there are dozens of these?

Should probably less if we do scale down the research time (as I mused on above)

Did we decide what the Dragon is going to do for the time before the Last Battle? I think we were erring on the side of not very much.

The Dragon is born in the first civ to reach the Era of the Dragon, which happens significantly earlier than World Era becoming Era of the Dragon. What else do we trigger on the Era of the Dragon start?

Remember that World Eras aren't publicized directly. I don't think there's too much triggering for us to use 5-ish turns there. There's a risk of waiting too long and too many players reaching the endgame before the Last Battle starts on the other side.
OK, a few things here. I think we're pretty much thinking the Dragon won't do much. As the LB gets closer, I'd imagine essentially all of the Threads in the Pattern will have something to do with him, likely involving either he or the forsaken directly. Maybe we can have some Edicts or Compact Resolutions pop up that concern him or something.

A weird timing issue.... at that point in the game, isn't it likely that each turn will be one year? Are we ok with the possibility of the Dragon fighting in the LB as a five-year old? If the civs are close in tech prowess, this will happen. This also doesn't allow much time for the ramp-up.

As far as specific new things that start in the WE of the EotD... well, it's that Ramp-up, right? More Threads, some unlocked edicts and stuff. That stuff isn't all civ-era specific, is it?

Lastly, I'm not sure I have a problem with victory being realistically possible before the LB. I think that is fine. Not every game, maybe, but if you're doing really well, yes. Enabling some non-LB victories in order to make the EotD a bit more fleshed out seems to be worth it to me.

I remember discussing projects that players could contribute hammers towards and that each project had better bonuses at certain thresholds. (This way the human player can optimize for the thresholds by taking into account the AI contributions and putting in just enough to reach the next threshold.)

So things that we could have this modify, from a mechanical usefulness perspective:

Research speed (helps to break the Seals)
Unit training speed (helps to fight off the Shadow)
Gold generation rate (helps buy units or buildings for the war)
Culture generation rate (helps fend off opposing Culture wins)
Spark (increasing Light-side available Spark in tiers could make many more channelers available for the Light)
Lowering Shadowspawn spawn rate in Light cities (obviously helpful)

So, flavorful name possibilities for these projects:

Research: "Scholarly Cooperation", "Worldwide Academies"
Unit training speed: "Legion of the Dragon", "Hold Back the Shadow", "Arm the People", "Spit in Sightblinder's Eye"
Gold : "Time of Need", "Enforced Concessions"
Culture: "Festival of Life", "
Spark: "Channeler Breeding Program", "Nurturing the Spark", "
Shadowspawn rate: "Closing the Ways"
So would these all be available immediately? Or would people have to vote them in somehow? or would somebody have to build something to initiate them? It seems perhaps a little overwhelming to have them all sitting there. Also maybe is a little too easy - everybody just camps for awhile and buffs up early in the LB, and then goes crazy.

These sound good, mechanically. But would these be competitive beyond the Faith bonus? Like top contributor gets more Gold or whatever? Seems kind of weird.I think that's what you were saying.

As far as the names, I like:

Research: "Scholarly Cooperation"
Unit training speed: "Hold Back the Shadow" - I think we should save the Legion and the "Spit" for other flavor
Gold : "Time of Need"
Culture: "Festival of Life" is ok. Don't love it. Not thinking of anything better though....
Spark: "Nurturing the Spark", "
Shadowspawn rate: "Closing the Ways"
Also, just thought of something else for the Misc Summary - cleansing Saidin...... or was that in the Channeler one?

Maybe we shouldn't modify the Sister count for the Alignment that got the Tower. If the Tower stays Light, the Light players keep their Sisters, but the Shadow players have theirs replaced with Black Sisters according to how far they got in the Turning objectives.

The flipside is less clear though - if the Tower Turns, how do we work out how many Sisters the Light side civs keep? Is it a fixed percentage? When this happens, Shadow civs just have their Sisters replaced like-for-like with Black Sisters.

It occurs to me that there's quite a gulf of lost functionality from the other Ajahs' abilities if the Shadow civs only have access to the Black Ajah though. Was the notion of replacing the Shadow civs' Sisters with Black Ajah Sisters was discussed before we came up with the series of bonuses for the other Ajahs? We did discuss have "Black Ajah" as a "promotion" on existing Sisters that gave them extra abilities, but decided against it for complexity reasons (for the player), right?

It seems like having your existing Sister units become Black Ajah would be more useful for the Shadow and more intuitive for the player, despite the unit being a bit more complex. (And they're presumably accustomed to the Sister's normal capabilities by this late stage in the game.) It's also simpler in terms of keeping them comparable to their enemies (Light side Sisters).
OK, so a few issues here. As far as the numbers. Yes, I'd say the "victor" can just keep their Sisters. That seems fine. The Black proportions seem fine - do it based on a percentage of completed Turning objectives. I'd say it should never exceed 50% of your quota though.

As far as the Light... hmmmm.... I'd say we probably just have to decide an arbitrary percentage. What else can we do? That percentage should likely be less than the best scenario for the Black, but much better than the worst.

So what about Neutrals, though? It's totally intuitive for them to lose them all but... that kind of blows. Should they keep half or something?
OK, as far as the Black skills, I'm torn here. On the one hand, I'm very much tempted to just say "sucks to be you!" about the Shadow civs. You choose Shadow, you lose functionality. To me, that is acceptable.

But then I remember that the Shadow civs are actually still playing for a specific victory type. To them, Browns are actually still useful for digging up archaeo ruins. To the lightside, several of these secondary abilities become useless - who cares about enhanced trade with Grays when you already have this whole new trade template? To the Lightside, the Sisters become weapons. This is probably mostly true with the Shadow too, but there's certainly the possibility of more. This makes me unhappy about forcing the Shadow civs to lose their sisters.

But, if we do go this way, I'd like to make the Black sister abilities be very slight. The ability to break the Oaths is the primary one. Other than that, I'd say compulsion, and that's it. And even then, I'm not sure I we need that.

A couple extra things I'm thinking of now:
We treat Ajah influence as independent to Tower influence. What happens during War? If the Tower stays Light, can the Shadow civs maintain their high-tier Sisters, or are all of them reset back to Tier one, since their relationship with the Ajah (via the Tower) is terrible now?

Similarly, what happens if a Losing-side sister dies? Are they replaced? It is somehow different? These sisters fled and joined your side. There's no "quota" from the Tower anymore.

Do you think most people wouldn't see it? "The Dragon is born in <location>. And now you may choose two GPs to spawn at the same city, from the following types:", where the types include Wolfbrother and "Probability man". I think people will pick up on it. I'm a fan of the 2 WoT GP idea.
Well, I'd say it'd be obvious if it was those two, and not a choice. Not important, though. Also, you sure Mat isn't just a Great Captain?

I will say that this bit of flavor very much conflicts with your notion below of being Agnostic to the specifics of this iteration of the Drag.

Rand was the Dragon in the books, but we're playing the world. In an alternate timeline, Logain or Taim might have ended up being the Dragon. Or maybe Guaire Amalasan could be born at a different time and become the Dragon.

Since we're starting from the After Breaking time, I think the Age of Legends is locked in as our history - so Lews Therin already was the Dragon in the previous Age (during the mod, as well as in the books).

I think it's easier and more timeline agnostic to always refer to the Dragon just as "the Dragon" and not give him a name.
First off, I'll say I agree with your conclusion - let's just call him the Dragon.

But, I know I'm sounding overly pedantic here, I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the timeline. I don't think Logain or Taim could have been the Dragon. Neither had an Aiel mother, for example. For somebody else to be the Timeline, all the prophesies have to change to accommodate that. That's fine, but if all of those change... than this isn't really the same Age, is it? It seems to me that in this age, Rand is the Dragon. The History of the Age seems hurtling towards that.

But again, no problem with it just saying "The Dragon!"
 
I've since installed a Firefox extension called Lazarus which should save me from any future browser-form-data-related shenanigans.
How is that working out? It sounds like something I should be using... I've done all of these posts today outside of the forum form... you scared me.

This is actually the only section I hadn't written a response to yesterday when everything fell apart.

I think if we show options on the left the cooldowns won't be too bad - things that aren't available yet are just greyed out like normal unavailable missions, with the remaining cooldown in the tooltip? Or we could go all out and put a little number in the corner of the button (like the icon for workers has if you select them while they're building something).

I think the length of a player's turn should make sense in the context of the Last Battle. If the Last Battle itself is like 50 turns long, right? We'll probably want to be quite snappy - maybe 5 turns per player? Maybe even shorter? Even only 5 turns per player is a total of 10 changes of hands during the whole Last Battle. Depending on the number of Light civs, some might only control him once. (Though that may not be a problem in itself.)

Shorter turn times could also mean we don't need to deal with cooldowns. You just can't use the same ability more than once during your turn?
I'm thinking no cooldowns. Let's make the turns short - 5 turns could work, but honestly 3 could be good. Keep that guy moving! But no cooldowns. Make there be a couple actions that are unlimited - or mayb ejust the basic attack. But everything else is a one-use thing.

Do super short turns make it essentially impossible to kill him, though? Or is the deal that you'd try to set up GM/BK traps for him or something? Obviously 5 turns enables killing him via city capture more feasible than 3... but it still isn't easy.

Yes, sounds good for the Dragon to have primarily a defensive role while he's in Spy mode. Are we ok with him losing the Steal a Seal ability then?
KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Yeah, let's say you can place him in any Light city you like, because some players may be too far from the fighting (at times) for some of his abilities to work.
cool. bueno, as they say in Altara.
So are we axeing the "ta'veren" randomness effect, then? We are, right?

I agree that a vote is weird. I don't think we want to use something like Prestige+Alignment, because there's nothing short term that the player can do to change that situation. Who has the most Seals is tempting, but I'm not sure if that reflects what we want either.

One cool thing might be to have an action you can take while he's in spy form that means you'll control him when he becomes a unit, and the last person to use that ability gets him. This is inspired by a similar mechanic in a board game called Lords of Waterdeep, where there's a move you can make which means you go first in the next round, but the drawback is it doesn't do anything else now. We could even make the AI do this very infrequently, if at all.
An interesting mechanic idea! I can see that being worthwhile. Flavor-wise, though, what the heck would we do with this?

I'm thinking Draghkar would be more like paratroopers than planes, so I think it's fine if players could build those over a certain Shadow threshold. (We could even gate each unit separately, so only the most Shadow-devoted civ could ever build Myrddraal and Draghkar, but more civs could build Trollocs.)

I'm fine with leaving Dreadlords as a gift-only unit or even reserving them for the Shadowspawn civ. Whichever you prefer.
Good thinking with the Draghkar!

And yes, gating them seems reasonable. Are Myrd and Draghs at the same gate-level? Let's say Drags are the highest level?

Let's go with Dreadlords are rarely and randomly gifted to high-Shadow-point civs.
Ever since I first read this post (many ages ago when I was still replying to half of page 20) I've been trying to refer to the civ that controls the Shadowspawn and Thakan'dar as the Shadowspawn civ and the civs that have chosen the Shadow for the Last Battle as the Shadow civs. That seems like a good colloquial distinction.
excellent.

Due to the limitations with adding features mid-game (argh, Firaxis!) we'll need Blight to destroy something as it spreads. Improvements seems sensible to me. And that would mean any resources covered by Blight are lost forever, since you can't build the improvement you need on them.

Also, what about non-Shadowspawn units that end their turn on Blight taking damage, as well as not healing? Could be something small like 5 damage, just so it builds up over time.
Ah... resource-kill. That's harsh. I think it works, though, providing Blight doesn't spread too far. Again, don't want people restarting if they end up on the borderlands!

As far as the damage thing... This definitely makes Blight expeditions really impractical. I'd say there should be a promotion available that changes this, though. Maybe all Warders have it. What about Aes Sedai? In any case, storming Thakan'dar at the end will be a pain...

I'm thinking that the Blight spreads more slowly through claimed land than unclaimed (as in, within culture borders) just by default. So the only real way to slow down the Blight is to build cities in its way.

I agree cleaning by worker is weird. I'm wondering if cleansing the Blight should be possible at all? There don't seem to be any examples of it in the history from the books. The Blight receded at some points in the past in WoT, but never significantly and never because someone did something to it.
Hmm.... I don't love your first idea because I think it has the opposite flavor-effect from what we want. We should not be incentivizing city construction right up against the blight, IMO. Wouldn't borderlanders find that insane?

What if it was Forts? Like, a manned fort slows blight spread in adjacent squares?

Hmm.... as far as recessing... maybe let's just say that there is a little bit of this that happens naturally at fixed points in the game. Let's say at some point shortly after the TWars end, maybe a few hexes of Blight go away. But, this land can't have resources, right?

Related to Bloodknives and Grey Men being detected in foreign cities. I agree, something like 3% so that, on average, they'll be caught within ~33 turns? Or do we want to make it a bit shorter? 5% gives us (on average) within 20 turns.
Let's go with 5. I like that number! It's a good, honest number.

Arguably a cache of angreals should make your channelers better, rather than allow you to have more of them, but I can see the link. (The same could be said of wells.) I'm not sure.
Right. The angreals would make them stronger. But... so what? We need something, right? The only thing that would truly make sense is if you found a region full of people with the "old blood." But this makes no sense as a resource. Everything else is just fudging it.

If we made this turn back into a specific resource/unit correspondence (instead of generic spark), but made it tie specifically with Asha'man, does that somehow help? Not really, right?

Let's say no for now, but we might consider coming back to it some other time.
But... but they appear on a whole three pages of the books!

No particular reason, "ice peppers" just seems to suggest a frosty blue color to me, kind of like this. We have no evidence that says they should be blue. Then again, there's no evidence to say they're not blue. Eh? Eh?
LOGIC! There's no evidence to say they're peppers at all, though, is there?

Googling it, I found this. Of course, this person doesn't say anything more than "Ice Peppers are just spicy peppers. Nothing special about them." But then somebody else says they are different in coloring. But they spelled that last word with the "u" in it, so I became suspicious of them, naturally...

In other words, I know nothing concrete. I REGRET NOTHING
 
Cool, Pattern, as its own separate concept, axed.
Gimli would be proud!

Sounds good - we'll probably want to start off on an idea-spree for the Forsaken Quests and Alignment Choices sometime. I'm happy to kick that off if we think we're ready for that?
Sure. Be my guest. I might suggest you let us wrap up some of these bigger issues before you do though. This'll probably involve some research - trying to remember the weird crap the 'saken were doing throughout the books (most of it Very Mysterious and cryptic to the reader).

Threads in the Pattern works for me. So each one shows up as an individual "Thread in the Pattern" on-screen.
Yes, it maybe says "A Thread in the Pattern" or something.

I just think that with only 4 levels per side there can be a big difference in Alignment between two players who are both quite Shadow (or quite Light) and yet the descriptors wouldn't show you that. I think 8 each side + "Neutral" should be doable.
OK, I hate to say it like this but.. show me. I remain a little skeptical that the English language is rich enough in meaningful distinction to cover 8 points per side. But if it can be done, for sure let's do it!

I haven't looked into how score is calculated, but I'm 95% sure we can change it, so we can definitely have stuff like Alignment modify score.
And if not... good thing nobody will care!

I had ideas for this one last time, hopefully I'm remembering all of them.

How would we choose X and Y for the buildings and units one? This province seems much more specific than the others, which have widely useful bonuses.
Well, maybe we should separate Industry and Crafts by making one be units and one be buildings of all types? I guess I was thinking of Cultural buildings or something.
Do we want a bonus that is related to Aes Sedai?

Province of Tower Relations - Player receives 1 Aes Sedai
Eh... I don't know. The High King was notoriously at odds with the Tower. Maybe we shouldn't as a nod to flavor. If so, I'd say it'd be Spark or something, not a direct +1 to quota. Either isn't so useful for twenty turns, though.

I remember we liked the idea of all of the bonuses being scalable so that they could be dropped into significant/mediocre/poor (+ 1 non-existent) buckets. Then having the High King only able to give out a certain number of significant/mediocre/poor/none bonuses, and which bonuses were in which bucket would vary from game to game.

So, to demonstrate, say there were 5 players in the game - the High King needs to give out 4 Provincial Bonuses. He can give out 1 significant, 1 mediocre, 1 poor, and 1 non-bonus. In this game Invention and Industry are significant, Learning and Belief are mediocre, and others are poor. So he must give out either Invention or Industry to one Province. And so on.

Or we could simply allow the High King to slot whichever bonus into which tier he likes and the resulting benefit to the Province player scales based on which slot the High King used.
Absolutely, I really enjoyed the significant/mediocre/poor/none thing. Let's keep doing that. Your example of 5 civs seems right, but I should mention that in larger games they wouldn't be "balanced like that (1/1/1/1). A game with 9 provinces would have something more like 2/3/3/1 or something, right? Or 1/4/3/1... or 1/3/4/1...

How they are assigned is a good question. When I came up with this idea back then I was thinking that it was all to be selected by the HK, but honestly, reading it here, it does seem a little bit better to have the computer assign the "matches" and simply let the HK decide who gets what. I think it would lead to more game variety. Otherwise, I feel like players will seize upon one of them as the "best" and "worst" and assign them appropriately - probably often providing the "worst" of the significant ones, for example.

I'm not sure if we want to do the grouping that way. The Last Battle is a victory type and there's a section already for disabling specific victories. That usually disables their corresponding yields, right? So I'm thinking disabling the Last Battle also disables Alignment, because Alignment doesn't make any sense without it. And probably the Trolloc Wars as well.

We could have the High King disable with the diplo victory. Or we could have it as a separate thing (like "no Barbarians"). Trolloc Wars could work either way too.
Wait, disabling victories disables the *yields*? There's no science production with no science victory? How does that work?

I'm fine keeping things separate.

I'm not sure if they should raze cities. It's a bit punishing, but it does solve our needing to not have Shadowspawn cities hanging around after it ends. If they've captured an original capital, they'll just have to hang onto it (producing Shadowspawn units, though more slowly) until someone comes and captures it back.

Let's have them finish razing if the war ends.

I like this. They raze, but it only finishes when the war ends. Does the city's population decline more slowly? What if they capture a city right before the Wars end? Will it raze in like two turns?

I'm thinking 20-30 turns? Say 25? I think we'll need to playtest and tweak this. Too short and players far from the Blight are unaffected. Too long and players close to the Blight are overrun.
How about actually 20-30? Like, an element of randomness?

My current game is probably going to end with Casimir killing us all - he's at score ~1300 and I'm at ~700. My friendly newly-neighboring Attilla is the biggest presence on my continent at ~800 score and I think I'll have to fight him. I'm playing as Pocatello, what about you?

I'm not sure if I really enjoy Emperor, because the happiness penalties mean that even maxed out on Zoos and everything, I've ended up at like -12 happiness. It doesn't really feel like I get to actually play CiV.
Well, now I'm on attempt number 4.... Trying as Maria. I chose her because I usually find the diplo victory easiest of them. But I hadn't played as Portugal before, and I'm finding it still quite a challenge. I will say I'm not having happiness problems (Feitoras...), but I gave up on my previous attempt when I lost my capital in the modern era, while Persia controlled 60% of the CSs solidly, and I had like 3...

I didn't know it gave you happiness penalties - I thought it just gave the AI tons of free happiness. Again, I've only played as a very happy civ though (at that skill level).

You are tough though. I don't think I could play to the endgame that far behind.
I'm thinking that the players who lost cities are at a serious disadvantage and we should go some way to helping them recover (provided they participated). We could be very direct about it though and give settlers to players who lost cities.

I was originally thinking that 200 is about the faith you need to found a religion, but this is actually a bit later in the game than that. Maybe something along the lines of 400? 600?

A GP of your choice also seems like a good bonus. Good point about the top performer getting place 2 and 3 bonuses as well. (That does happen with the World Games and stuff, right?)
Are you suggesting one settler per city lost? That could make sense. It'd definitely help!

If we keep the settlers as a part of the rewards, maybe we do this:
Gold: free GP
Silver: 500 Faith
Bronze: a free settler and a free worker

Something like that? If the settlers are given freely, maybe the bronze reward is two workers or something. Or maybe its Faith.

Covered cities above, I'll talk about units here. We will definitely return the spawn rate to normal. We could have the Shadowspawn from during the Trolloc Wars do a kind of reverse-Barbarian and have them despawn when no player has sight on the units. We could also have them retreat into the Blight, which would make it much more likely for that to happen relatively soon.
Oh, that's an interesting idea. I say, yeah. They retreat into the blight and disappear. Don't want somebody to wander into the blight and find TW-era only units hanging out.

Yes, I'm good with moving away from Prestige as an across-the-board reward.

So for the False Dragon rewards, how about the False Dragon gives out a total yield, portioned base on the damage done to him, and that's divided up into six parts: Gold/Culture/Faith in 3/2/1 style. The total yield could scale by world era, so that it doesn't become irrelevant later on and isn't overpowered at the start.

To put some numbers to it:

Ancient: 200
Classical: 300
Medieval: 400
Renaissance: 600
Industrial: 800
Atomic: 1000
Modern: 1200
Information: 1500

As an example, say it's the ancient era and two civs did exactly 50% damage each (because it makes the math easy) to a False Dragon before he died. Each player would receive a total of 100 yield, divided up as 50 Gold, 33 Culture, and 17 Faith. And so on for the other eras.
I like this! I can't really comment on your specific numbers/era. They look good to me, but I don't know how to determine if they're actually going to work well in practice.

I'm fine with Gentling having a flat-but-scaled-by-world-era bonus. Say half of the total yield for that era, divided the same way as above? Or would a quarter be better?
The problem I have with this is the idea of people chipping the guy down needlessly just to end up with a larger reward. Like, assume you're the only civ fighting this guy. You have upgraded Reds so you COULD gentle him easy. But instead, you do tons of damage so you can end up with a huge payout (+50% of 95% of his possible payout, versus only 20%). Does this make sense?
I'm tempted to just say flat-rate for gentling. But the other contributors still get their share.

Great general effect for Trollocs from Myrddraal is very doable. Making them actually make smarter decisions when Myrddraal are around would be quite a bit more difficult. The difference would also be very subtle.

I think I agree on no embarking. But then how do the Shadowspawn deal with island-y maps?

Nice one on attacking across rivers - yes Trollocs can have a large penalty there. We can also take it away in the presence of a Myrddraal.
I wonder if this stuff doesn't belong in the LB summary. These unit details. Should we create a "Unit List" that can house this stuff as we figure it out?

As far as the islands... I don't know, that's a very big problem, IMO. Maybe, again, they can only do so when accompanied by a Myrddraal.... Kind of weird, though. How hard would that be to make happen? Barbarians don't usually travel the world embarked.

I completely agree. AI changes are subtle for the player and difficult to develop, but in this case I think we'd get significant return for it. I haven't actually looked through the AI at length, but it should be possible to do this - it's just a question of how difficult it is. I do agree it's worth doing.
OK. Hope it works out.

Definitely, but we don't want to force Blightborder civs to take Honor. And we don't want Honor to be useless to civs far from the Blight.
What if we made it a component of the Liberty and Tradition replacements? Essentially everybody takes them. Maybe We add shadowspawn functionality to one of the later policies of each tree. Not necessarily replacing the tenet itself, but adding to it. Maybe each of these trees features a slightly different shadowspawn-related bonus.... that would somehow befit tall or wide empires, respectively.

Yeah, this sounds really cool - we could even have Walls (or our equivalent... if we replace Walls) just be better against Shadowspawn.
cool.

Yeah, sounds good. Do we want to decide what that unit is now, even without knowing what the tech tree is like in that time?
We could... but I think we'd be kind of pulling out of thin air. Some horseman or something?

I left this out of my skip-ahead last time since it seemed more to do with the Darkfriends in general than them as a primary source of alignment.

I'll say that I'm a huge fan of spreading Darkfriends generating Shadow Alignment for the spreader. That adds some more player agency to the process. I think that means we don't need the Darkfriend citizens to do anything aside from whatever they normally would + Shadow. (No other yield changes for us to balance or anything.)

They're primarily there as a mechanism for Shadow players to become Shadowy-er and potentially corrupt their neighbors.
K. So no negative effects whatsoever? Is there a reason why Light civs would want to get rid of them in their own cities, though?
 
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