I've tried out a new way of writing these quote-heavy posts (which I don't think I'll do again) involving many tabs, which turned out to be a bit confusing. If I've wholesale missed any posts, let me know.
My my, I close my eyes for three days and look at the novel you guys have written!
And now you've written one too!
Your response is making me regret this proposition. My aim wasn't to make things super complicated or anything, just more "cool." If it's going to throw the balance all off... might not be a great idea. The goal was definitely not to make a cultural victory more difficult.
I'm not sure if it will make it significantly more difficult - I just think we should investigate what effect it might have before adding more things that use the antiquity sites.
That said, it could work to just make each artifact more powerful for culture, right? To compensate for less availability? Though, again, that needs to be rebalanced....
We could do that, and like you said we'd need to balance it. (Add to the long list!)
Ha! I was being facetious about the prime number thing... doesn't really seem to fit the WoT universe much.
I didn't think the prime numbers were, but what about divisible by 13?
I guess one difficult thing about this, from an RP perspective, is us trying to somehow unify the given Style Tradition with a bonus that makes sense for that civ. For example, a hardcore RPer for the Shienar civ would choose top-knots, and would probably expect that that Tradition would have something to do with Shienar - combat, the blight, whatever - and not something random.
Come to think of it, maybe that makes it easier to pick stuff...
Hopefully easier, since those attributes will be associated with civs that evoke the kinds of bonuses we're looking for!
Well, if we're trying to map the ages to Randland more-or less accurately, one other thing is we could have a deceleration happen, also, during a few other key times - Trolloc Wars, for instance. This assumes the TW are only only started by a calendar date, and not a tech thing. Seems like that changes how Civ's time periods work. What's the simplest thing to do here?
Absolute simplest is to ignore era length and just use in-universe names, divorcing them from the actual calendar time period that they occurred in. (That dissociation will likely happen anyway, because of the way time works in CiV.) I think starting the Trolloc Wars by tech makes a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective, we want it to start at a specific progression, not too early or too late.
Also, how do we deal with the whole calendar change thing? Like, FY 1 is at the end of the TW, for instance (and FY1 has a different turn-count date every game, consequently)?
I haven't looked much into how the calendar system works with the whole slowing down from weeks/months/years and how the game decides what to display to the user. (All of this scales with selected game speed.) I would think we should be able to present whatever arbitrary dates we want to the player, so no problem switching calendars part of the way through.
This is a bit strange compared to original CiV. The 'turn timer' date in base CiV is the Gregorian Calendar and progresses through dates as turns pass. The 'eras' progress based on player tech, regardless of the 'date' in game. WoT links the changing of calendars to specific portions of history/technological progress, which is problematic. The era 'Free Years' may occur (for some civs) before or after FY1, depending on how many turns it took them to get there. I don't know if we can avoid this while still using in-universe era names
and calendars. Maybe we're approaching eras wrong? We're using the calendars and 'time' names, which, in reality, would really just be B.C. and A.D. (for modern humans, using our calendar). There are no other obvious divisions. Are there progressive evolutions of technology in WoT that defined civilizations there, like 'Classical,' 'Industrial,' etc.?
Have to say though, I really like this problem, it's quite fun because I'd never even thought of it. It's just that kind of little thing that most players wouldn't notice but that really makes the immersion!
Yeah, unless I'm misremembering, we did say that - and I thought it was weird then, too. I guess the issue is that once we changed Tourism to Prestige, that kind of outcome appeared to be the natural result of being super Prestigious in the WoT world. Doesn't have to be that, though. Having it be identical to the end result of Tourism doesn't quite make sense either.
Probably worth us coming back to after our Last Battle and Path stuff is more firm then!
As far as sending units to train, I'll remind you of the notion I had earlier that this can also be tied to promotions for channeling units (study with the Yellows at learn to heal, etc.) - more on this later, when I get to it.
Sounds like a plan!
One thing I find iffy about base Civ's diplo victory is the ability to snipe so easily. Like, just gather your gold, then blow tons of it one turn before the world leader election.... I don't mind diplo being the "gold" victory, but this seems kind of unfair, yes? Thoughts?
Possibly, though the AI doesn't do that (because it isn't programmed to) and I think even they may not have enough gold to buy out everyone they need to win completely unexpectedly. By the end of the game (when elections are happening) most civs will have very high influence with the few city states near them since they'll have been completing their quests for the whole game. Buying them out is much more expensive for a 'sniper.'
A candidate that's already well ahead will be able to buy out a few key votes at the last minute, but he was already winning to make that possible. It can be reversed as well, buying out a few key votes at the last minute to prevent a victory, since number of votes each civ has is public information. The biggest upsets are if you can convince another civ to vote for you (particularly if they have a decent number of votes) since that can't be 'sniped.'
I'm not sure what my conclusion is really, I've found diplomacy a lot better since BNW.
Sorry to waste code! Not knowing the way you currently have it, though, it's hard for me to say either way if we should change it.
The way it is now each Ajah accumulates influence for itself, rather than each player with each Ajah (need to store that data in a different way, because who gave what influence to each Ajah isn't stored as I have it now, just which Ajah has how much.) Hopefully that makes sense. Basically, there are however many Ajahs, I'll just use three for an example. Under the surface, each has 'influence points' which represents how much influence that Ajah has, and their overall influence is determined as a percentage of the whole. Example:
Blue: 50
Red: 40
Green 30
Blue has 50/(50+40+30) = ~42%
Red has 40/(50+40+30) = ~33%
Green has 30/(50+40+30) = 25%
You can see from there that we have no concept of player influence, only the amount for each Ajah. But that can change, it's not too much work and if we come up with something better, I'm all for it.
WHA? Mind blown again. The ideologies in BNW *lock* you out of victories? I always thought that the icons by each choice just represented which victory types are most suited for that ideology.
See, occasionally I'm, apparently, making things up. I did a bit of checking and you're right, you're not
locked by the ideology, they're just not very helpful for the last victory type. So I guess our Seanchan-ish dudes should be able to win a diplo victory, though with some more difficulty!
I don't know how I feel about that.... maybe the "capture channelers" should still be able, through difficulty, to manipulate the White tower to do their bidding?
I assume we don't want to funnel them into the Shadow way of winning a diplo victory through the Black Ajah? (which we haven't finalized exists yet, but seems to make sense and I haven't seen anyone reluctant about the idea)
First thing that springs to mind is capturing the Tower and running your own 'rigged' election, but that's rife with problems. It makes the diplo victory military focused and makes it monstrously more difficult for civs that are geographically far from the Tower on the map.
If we go with an influence-per-player approach, these kinds of policies could inflict static penalties on you when dealing with the Tower? You could still talk to them if you weren't too serious about it (a la Tear) or you could go full on 'capture them all' and the influence penalties would stack up (a la Seanchan).
What I mean by "cap" is simply that I like the first option, with an ending "on top" to be the choice you prefer.
It sounds like you just said "they're really difficult to implement - let's try both!" Is that what you mean? That seems somewhat self-punishing of you....
Not quite! I mean that the biggest parts of what needs to be implemented for either system is the same, so if we go with one, we'll have mostly implemented the other as well in the process. Who knows, we could even make it a game option when you're setting up the game whether or not you can 'choose' a side at the end.
OK, so it looks like LB-as-just-an-event is scrapped, then?
Yeah, seems like neither of us are big fans of that one and it comes with its share of problems. One down, one to go!
Right. You know the AI limitations much better than I do. Still... I've been thinking about this since I wrote this, and I'm really starting to think this is the best option. It, really, gives us both what we're aching for - you the idea of still doing your old-school victory (neutral and shadow players, or alliance-resistant light players), and me the elimination of silly stuff by putting in a "system" that rewards "doing the LB for realz" for those who want it. Anyways, it looks like Calavante suggested some things that are rather close to these ideas, anyways, so I'll look again and what he suggested and how you took those ideas.
Regarding the AI, my thoughts:
1) Maybe by having more-or-less clearly-defined roles, this can make the AI not so dumb? Like, either certain civs always default to certain behavior, or it is all prescribed by the elected Leader (putting aside disobedience for now)
2) Maybe this is balanced by the shadow guys all fighting each other and/or not cooperating?
The difficulties with the AI are a bit more systemic - they're really bad at optimizing for something that's a "good idea." They just tend to do stuff and then react to the position they end up in. They 'understand' threats from other players like nearby military units, people competing for city-states, and the value of specific trades. The things in common there are that they're quite immediate value judgements that can be quantified and compared, so it does that.
Getting them to do a specific series of actions in a optimal way is very difficult and frustrating for the player. Example, you give a science-y civ a Seal and it needs to build a project in a city, but its best cities are occupied doing something else that's important to
it. So it starts building it in a worse city - which takes longer than it would have taken you. Now you need a mechanism to demand it back.
If the AI had control of the Dragon and needed to get him safely to a specific (war-torn) position on the map, you might as well kiss the Dark One's boots now. The AI is supremely terrible at getting specific (individual) units to do anything sensible. It'd be embarking him within range of enemy siege units, or taking massive circuitous routes (that include unnecessary backtracking because its own and particularly other players' units are in the way) that take way too long to reach Thakan'dar.
I'm not criticizing this concept as an idea, I think it would be quite good and in an MP game it would play awesome. I should be able to make the AI 'better' at things like this so it's
less frustrating for the player, but CiV is way too complex of a game for the AI to consider so many variables as quickly as a human does. We may not make 'optimal' moves most of the time, but we always make sensible ones. How we do that is a bit crazy, because there are hundreds of options to consider for something as simple as 'where do I move this unit,' we just immediately discount all the 'obviously' unhelpful ones. The AI has to evaluate those obviously terrible options just as much as the good ones, and we have to restrict its decision making so that it completes in a reasonable amount of time.
So it is a lot of work to make this kind of system work correctly for the AI. It's also not 'obvious' work in the finished mod - the game just goes more smoothly, which the player doesn't really notice. (They don't notice a
lack of bugs.)
However, saying all of that, I find AI work really interesting. I haven't looked much at the CiV AI code yet, but there might be room for a different approach that's more performant
and smart than the simple 'if these conditions, take these actions' approach Firaxis seems to have used.
There's a very appropriate comment in the CiV source code about the pre-BNW cultural victory (where you had to complete five social policy trees and then build the Utopia Project). In a function that the AI uses to evaluate how much it wants to do the cultural victory, one of the Firaxis devs said:
// If we somehow got to 5 branches...
And then just returned a big number to make the AI change strategy.
I wonder if maybe the key here is not that the Shadow civs must Dominate the other civs, but that they must Win some sort of Victory, in addition to beating the light. Meaning, you've gotta kill the light and do whatever we decide that is (kill Rand, etc.), but you also need to either win culture, science (shadow science), diplo, domination, etc. This supports the notion I expressed earlier about the naebliss not necessarily just being the guy who kills the most dudes. I suspect if the LB ended and still nobody had pulled off a victory, either we keep going until they do, or the DO shakes his (etherial) head in shame.
Requiring a second victory balances against the inherent easiness to the shadow, and definitely discourages (possibly unbalancing) large numbers of shadow civs.
So, according to that, the LB victory conditions would be:
1) Lightside - work together and best the Shadow (various conditions must be fulfilled) - other Victories are locked). Huge target from shadowspawn and shadow civs, but benefits from working together. Team Victory.
2) Shadowside - beat the light (various conditions must be fulfilled) AND win some victory condition. Can control Shadowspawn (and don't get attacked by them, unless they are sent to you from another shadow player). Solo victory
3) Neutral - win victory condition (No LB-specific stuff needed). Likely a lesser target of the shadowspawn... but potentially a huge target from both Shadow and Light civs if they feel you are a threat by being close to victory. Solo victory - most viable, likely, for civs quite close to victory as the LB starts, and/or those geographically removed from the Blight and other civs.
I didn't mean to imply that I'm not a "fan" of neutrality as a game-mechanic. I think it serves to allow the solo-victory in that normal Civ way you've been hoping for. But by setting up the dragon peace, we offer the immersive "True LB" experience. Heck, maybe most games the majority of players choose neutral.
Emphasis added because when I read that, the way I considered 'neutral' and the whole context of the Last Battle flipped on its head. I'm completely on board, neutral sounds like an awesome idea! I'm not quite sure if I can articulate the change in how I'm thinking about this.
Despite being the advocate for 'all victories are independent,' I'd still been thinking of the Last Battle as the 'end of the game.' Having 'neutrality' makes it much more like the other victories, which I think is really awesome. It's something that civs can choose to participate in, but which affects everyone. Hope that make sense.
I'm not sure about is locking the Light players to only the Last Battle victory, but I think I can see the logic behind it - it's what makes 'neutral' a sensible choice and means 'non-participaters' won't join the Light side to mess it up, because it will prevent them from winning like they'd planned. Nice, I like the symmetry. I said I wasn't sure, actually this seems pretty cool.
I'm still stewing over the Shadow players needing to win 'another' victory as well. However, we can come back to that in a moment.
I'm going to go into some details/theorizing/questions about the Last Battle here, using some information from later posts as well, so I'll 'skip' those sections when I come to quoting them.
I'm good with merging the Sealing the Bore into the Last Battle (that you mention later) and using something else for the science victory. This gives us some fun to have with the different sides having control of the Seals.
For the Shadow players, what do we think the objectives are for the Last Battle? Killing the Dragon seems to come up a lot here, as does the Light using the Dragon in a battle at Thakan'dar. So, shall we say that the Dragon is 'revealed' when the Last Battle starts? He(/she?) can be a unit, controlled by one of the Light side civs. How do we choose which one?
He can be a fairly powerful combat unit. The Shadow's objective is relatively simple: find the Dragon and kill him. If the Dragon Reborn is dead, the Last Battle cannot be won by the Light. This is a bit of a risky avenue to go down - the way combat is structured in CiV isn't very amenable to protecting a single, game-defining unit. AI issues exist here too - the player is a much better tactician than the AI and can 'snipe' a victory by attacking just the Dragon in an effective manner. I don't think that means this idea is dead, but it has these kinds of limitations that we might be able to work around.
Maybe 'killing' the Dragon is more complex than taking out one unit? I'm not sure about how though. The other objective is to keep the Seals from the Light civs. In the books (spoilers) Taim had several of the Seals for a while, if I remember correctly. I'm unclear on why he didn't break them right away - isn't that bringing the Dark One closer to being released?
How about the Shadow are trying to break all of the Seals during the Battle? The Light are trying to get them all and protect them
until the Dragon takes Thakan'dar. Then breaking them wins the game for the Light side. (press a 'break the Seals' button by the player who has them? Is it even necessary to that then - they've won but just need to press a thing? Maybe breaking the Seals is something that requires production?) The more Seals are broken during the war, the more Shadowspawn appear, the more static penalties to the land. (Offshoot - we can have food penalties across the board to simulate the whole 'spoiling food' thing. Happiness can plummet too. These can get worse as Seals are broken.)
So, the Light are trying to capture Thakan'dar with the Dragon. Thakan'dar as a city in the Blight seems to be a good idea and I think most of us like it? So, how does the Light attack it? Fighting in the Blight is difficult for non-Shadowspawn, so the Blight can damage and slow down other units that enter Blight hexes. We want the Light to
have to use the Dragon. So, what if only the Dragon can capture the city? But then you can barrage it down to 0 health while the Dragon is safely outside the Blight, then bring him in the for the finishing blow. Is this valid?
If not, we can make it so that 'normal' units only do tiny amounts of damage to Thakan'dar and the only 'reasonable' way to damage it is with the Dragon. (Think 'Shadowslayer' promotion - +500% damage against Thakan'dar, or something to that effect.)
This also means Light civs will need all the Seals before this will work. I'm warming to the idea of breaking the Seals taking production to do - it makes it more difficult to 'snipe' them. A weirdness is that since the Shadow civs are breaking Seals as the war goes on, they're making this easier for the Light civs to win at the very end - which may not in itself be a problem, it's a trade off for them. They can hang onto them and force the Light to come to them to get them back if the Shadow civs don't immediately need more Shadowspawn reinforcements. This means it's also in the interest of neutral civs that have Seals to hang onto them and keep them safe, so neither side can win. Obviously makes you a big target.
I think the biggest issue here is how 'snipeable' the Dragon is as a single unit for the Shadow civs to kill. Can the Dragon 'respawn' after a certain amount of time? ('Ha, that one was an imposter!' or 'The Dragon is reborn anew. Again.') That way the Shadow civs
also need to break all of the Seals, which isn't nearly as 'snipeable.'
Or, how about the Dragon doesn't respawn? What if he's dead and you have to try to take Thakan'dar without his bonus? Unlikely but possible, and I think it works all right, mechanically. It'd a bit punishing if the AI controls the Dragon and does something stupid with him, but there will be AI difficulties with this system regardless.
I love the idea of the Seals as in-game things that move between cities. (Do they move as units? Any unit? Or like planes?)
A lot of questions above and the idea 'evolves' a bit throughout, so I'd be interested what you think! Hopefully if you read it like a 'conversation with myself' (I'm not mad, I promise) then the prevalent ideas come through as a consistent system - there are a lot of "devil's advocate" thoughts in there too.
I actually don't think Dragons need be a UU... especially since they're only associated with Andor because of the stuff going down during the LB. I think they might make the most sense as, as I mentioned before, a late-game unit maybe available once a civ has built an illuminator's guild or something. That said, maybe Andor's UU is a better "Band Dragon" or something. Or they have the Dragons, and everybody else just has "Cannons" or something.
Yes, sorry, I was unclear there. I meant that out of the options presented, I could see the Dragons as a UU but not the other ones. I think we agree on Dragons being a standard siege unit now anyway!
Also, GPs are slowed by wide empires, right? But the more citizens you have, the more likely you are to get channelers, i'd think, right?
The way GPs traditionally work is based on 'GP-points' which is produced on a per-city basis, so tall empires with more developed cities tend to generate more GPs. A GP being born also increases the cost of that GP type for your entire empire (I think). I think there are also relations between some GP types, like a scientist being born also makes engineers more expensive, or something like that. I should probably look into more of this before we change.
However, all of that said, there's nothing stopping us from giving players GP units in completely unrelated ways to the above systems. They're units just like any other that can be spawned from code for each player for any arbitrary condition. So we could make channeler GPs a function of total empire population (though tall empires also tend to be more populous, because of the way CiV populations work).
Smells like a social policy to me!
Very true! I haven't been thinking about them enough, this is a good one.
Interesting, I'll try to check it out after I've won my current game as Attila!
I agree with the issue of "too much sameness".
but, on the other hand, it only ADDS one UU/UA/UB to the group... so the civs are all as much different as without this, there is just one other layer of differences : which "people" do you belong with.
Good point, it's adding on top. I think we'll definitely keep this in mind when we're working on uniques for the individual civs in more detail. If we can, it would be great to create more differentiation.
in the books, no Aiel civ ("bunch of wilder-savages") would be chosen by the WT as world leader..)
Only because of the way the Aiel set up their civ in that game.
but IMO for AesSedai... you should/could allow other path of greatness than AesSedai for female Channelers (as opposed to "standard channelers").
On channelers:
IMO, Channelers could be of 4 types (at the same time in-game):
-basic units that you build/ buy with faith / buy to WT...Etc all Damane, most AesSedai, most WiseOnes/Windmistresses/most Ashaman (and remember, if there were few AesSedai in each nations... there were a lot of Wise Ones channelers in Aiel Clans... a lot of windmistresses, and a LOT of Damane... In fact, only the western lands were starved of channelers.... as those all got to the WT and came back by 1 and 2)
-basic non-chan units/workers that randomly become "wilder". Nyneave is a Healer that becomes Chan (or a wisdom) and join the WT in the Yellow Ajah.
-Channeler GP units : Caldsuane / Verin / Moiraine / Egwene ...etc
-normal GP Unit that evolve to Channeler (think Rand: Commander+Chan / Elayne: Scientist + Chan / Aviendha : Warrior+Chan ...etc) :
the combination of
-basic unit
-dual type unit
-GP
-dual GP
could allow for a lots of mechanics to balance different creeds of gaining channelers.
Channeling will clearly be one of the most important aspects of defining the new units for this mod. I share counterpoint's reluctance about other units becoming channeling units mid-game, though I do like the flavor of it. It would be quite complicated for the player to manage. There is definitely a lot of overlap between channelers and non-channelers in terms of roles (like you said, Rand was a commander and King, Aviendha was a warrior), the ability to channel mainly determines how they go about those tasks.
yeah. agreed. The nuance of these ideologies will likely have to wait, I'm afraid... (as in specific game mechanics). I'm still not 100% positive this is the absolute best way to go, but I'm something like 85%! The question is, S3rgeus, is your personal UA such that City-State Influence Increases or decreases over time? If we put off ideologies for awhile, will I be 80% sure next week, or 90%?
Exactly 87.5%.
We should discuss it now if the idea gets worse over time though.
You do make an interesting point, perhaps unintentionally, about the Aiel being a collection of nations rather than one unified force. This is of course somewhat problematic from a Civ perspective - should the Shaido, perhaps, be their own Civ? For me, though, I think this can be justified by the fact that the Aiel represent one CIVILIZATION, if not one "country." I think CiV is a bit silly in this regard, especially as the games have progressed and they've tried to do new things - really, a VENICE civilization? Isn't that just a city-state in Italy? But, I think, to that point, the logic still holds up - perhaps the "American" Civilization could be said to also represent Canada, or something? Perhaps Ethiopia also represents Djibouti?
A Venice civilization makes some kind of sense - particularly given the way their UA makes them actually behave like real Venice, which is very interesting.
CiV already has a precedent for 'a people as a civilization,' even several peoples that aren't necessarily the 'same,' which some players do get annoyed about. I've heard a lot of players asking about the validity of Polynesia, since it's apparently an amalgam of various nations/peoples in Oceania and Hawaii.
The Iroquois and Shoshone are similar to the Aiel - they were (as far as I know) loose confederations of tribal nations acting as a single body.
Of course, ultimately, while the Shaido might a fun "bad" Aiel, civ, nobody is interested in having there be different Civ types for each particular Clan, are they? Although, this might make a cool scenario - Fight for the Oasis!
Definitely a scenario I've had in mind! The Shaido are a candidate 'expansion' civ as well, I'd say.
I would argue that this seanchan diplo victory is actually more of a domination victory.
Interesting, then maybe 'conquering' the Tower like I mentioned above might work here?