Bezeri Awakening

As some of you may have noticed in the Lore thread, I'm planning an Aquatic civilization. Now that I have the basic mechanics planned out, I'm going to open this thread up for discussion.

Civilization: Bezeri
Leaders:
Alignment: They are good, but also arrogant, viewing the 'lesser' races with disdain. They have a slight predisposition towards slavery, if only because of their views. I could see them as Lawful Neutral, rather than Good, but we don't have that alignment.

Race: Toads/Skinks.World Spell: Favorable Tide

• Lasts 20 turns
• All water (Coast, Ocean, Deep Ocean) tiles on the map gain 2 , while all water territories within the player's control have an X% chance of gaining a random resource, where X depends on your current Faith level.

Religion: They are opposed to both the White Hand, representing the death of their lands and many of their people, lost to the ice, and the Overlords, which they view as a spreading corruption in the Oceans. All other religions are open to them, barring the Ordo Machinarum... Rather than fire and steam, they use biological systems. Hannah will not like them, Falamar will as long as he's not OO.

Unique units and Heroes: Basically, agressive archers and defensive mounted, with a few Arcane units in the mix. Workboat UU rather than a worker, Worker UU that is able to sacrifice itself to turn land into coast. Hero should be a Horse Archer, representing the epitome of their combat prowess.

Quite a few of these can be done via promotions, but I'm not sure about that... Would be cleaner, but wouldn't list them in the pedia.

• Melee-Either a very weak or nonexistant melee line. I want to emphasize less used lines.
• Archery- I want the Archery line to be the attack force. I'm thinking either begin with coral javilineers, progressing to using tamed/manipulated marine life, or two completely seperate lines to make up for the loss of the melee line. In that case, the 'normal' line will be javilineers and net casters, with the other using animals.
• Mounted- Stack/City defense. Does not gain terrain defense, and has low withdrawal, but gains a higher defensive strength and bonuses vs melee, recon, and most importantly, Naval. I envision them riding serpents into battle... Aquatic snakes can transition to land pretty well, so I think it works better than sea horses. I think I'll switch Knights and Horse Archers for them as well, seeing as they'd be a combination of their two best lines.
• Arcane- These are the toads... The Slann, if you will. Large and slow, but with incredible arcane ability... Start with twincast, and have high defence. To balance it, they are limited in number... 12 adepts, 8 mages, and 4 arch-mages. They will, at the least, have a unique water line... Special water magic, like body/corpus. This is because water is the one magic they HAVE to have, yet spring and waterwalking are useless to them. I'm thinking some buffs rather than attack magic... Extra first strikes, defense, etc. Ideas here would be nice. I think a nature line could work as well, representing their biomagic.
• Hero- Preliminary idea, by armyofwhispers. Likely to change at least slightly.
  • Spoiler :

    Deep beneath the waves no light nor sound breaks the oppressive stillness. The hunt was on. Long had Skaa'ral and his men waited and watched this beast and now was their chance. As the rest of the hunters look on, Skaa'ral waves them off and enters the submerged cave alone, armed only with a mithril javalin he had stolen on a surface raid mere days before.
    
    As the hours pass, hope fades and the group is forced to reflect on the circumstances that brought them here. Many recall the massive beast that time and time again defeated the defenses of even the mighty Bezer'ej itself to rob it's supplies. Others recall the voice of Skaa'raj with his call to arms to remove the threat.
    
    After half a day most have given up hope of their leaders return, and the group prepares to return to the city to mourn their loss. Yet even as they turn to leave, Skaa'raj emerges from the cave... but not alone.
    
    Covered in wounds that still flow freely, Skaa'raj does not swim, but rides triumphantly from the cave mouth mounted on a sea serpent that would give even the great leviathan pause.
    
    As Skaa'raj gives the signal to go home, only one of the group notices that the beast seems strangly subdued and responds to commands as if trained from birth to do so... As they turn for home once again he wonders what could possibly have occured in the cave...

Buildings: Not a complete list by any means, just beginning on this.

• Palace - Generic palace benefits. Reduces Distance maintenance by a large amount, enabling you to place your few cities around the world ocean. I'm thinking Water/Nature/Body magic, to fit the feel of the civ... Nature and Body represent their alteration of themselves.
  • This should REALLY help rake in the trade benefits... Which is why they won't be gaining much, if any, commerce increases from terrain. No need to add it.
• Forge - Growth Chamber - +10%, +1, +10% stored at size increase

Water Magic:

• Capsize: 1 turn buff, gives first strikes and withdrawal + bonus vs. naval
• Stealth on the water
• AoE style attack, wrecks improvements, chance to reduce population, area effect Vitalize. Hurts the enemy, but helps them in the long run if they fight you off. Probably work in some kind of weighting, making it less likely to destroy upgraded improvements, especially forts.

Nature Magic: Bio-magic, C'naatat. Want a full line here, as their nature magic is rather... different... from the normal line.

• Nature 3: Uplifted Sage (Need a better name, this gets the basic idea across though) - Lich-analog, unable to move but gets spell-casting boosts.

Water/Nature Cross-Sphere Magic:

• Water/Nature 1: Tame Beast - Mezmerize clone only affecting sea creatures.
• Water/Nature 2: Grow Kelp - Plants Kelp on the tile. 5-turn delay.
• Water/Nature 3: Summon the Deep - Improved Elemental with Water and Nature affinities.

Features

• 4 city max, 3 square reach. Kuriotates of the sea. No settlements. Can permanently improve their cities using a series of buildings (as in Arctic's idea).
• Extra yield from ocean, gains Seafaring tech.
• Units gain 1 water attack, lose 1 strength on all land terrain other than Marsh, losing 2 additional strength in Desert.
• Can not use metal weapons, instead gain additional strength with the melee line(otherwise nearly useless for them).
• Most, if not all, units have access to the Kraken's 'Submerge' ability.
  • This will most likely be granted upon reaching a certain level... How does level 4 sound?
• Possibly 'Production Fallow'. No hammers, builds and grows with food. Seeing as they have no real competition for growing space I think forcing them to choose pop or units would be nice, and fits with the aquatic theme... How do you use normal industry without fire?
  • Current plan here is to adapt the Commerce->Research slider to be Food->Production. This slider will be invisible to all leaders who do not have the *ignore production* modifier, activated by traits like Fallow. I will have to figure out how to apply it to one city only, and to have a separate slider for each city. Once the hard part is taken care of, I'll set it to automatically set itself at 100% for any city training a unit marked *build with food*, and set itself back to 0 for any other units, assuming the leader does not have the necessary trait. If they do, it will be visible and capable of being manually set for each city.
• Entirely unique series of aquatic improvements.
• Unique Forge, Smokehouse, all other fire-based buildings.

Fighting the Bezeri:

• Will add a ritual granting a water-walking promotion to all a civ's units. The promotion will wear off when no longer on water, and not at war with the Bezeri.

Other:

• Need to bring in Kelp, which means I'll have to distribute custom mapscripts.... Need to do this anyway, to enable them to start in the ocean. Will have to check with Jean to see how to edit FlavourMod for that as well.
• Allow Fish to spawn in oceans, possibly the other seafood resources.
• Plenty of other things I'm not thinking of atm.

Saved for expansions.

Reserved for future use.

*Grins.* I don't know what I look forward to more... playing as them, or teaching them to fear Patria Reborn... it may be a while, I suppose, before their AI is ready to put up a proper fight.
Anyways, how are they supposed to get more mana, aside from trade or coastal cities? Or is this a sacrifice you intend for them to make in exchange for being better able to harness the spheres of Water, Body and Nature? Perhaps they could build relatively expensive, unique National Wonders that grant them mana.

World Spell: Bountiful Harvest-
5% chance to spawn each water resource in their culture (So a 25% chance in all to get a resource in a tile)

water / nature:

• (water 2/ nature 2) grow kelp: 7 turn cast with once/mage limit. (this works out to 12 cast total without liches / destroying units)
• (water 3/ nature 3)Summon the Deep: upgraded version of water elemental with affinity to both water and nature mana.

I'd almost say for the cross-over spells just make three. For instance is you use my two, plus your mesmorize at water 1/ nature 1

Also, don't forget about submerged mana nodes.

Edit: Forge UB: forced growth chamber - +10%, +1, +10% stored at size increase
All units should also have the amphibious promotion

Edit 2: (I keep coming up with extra stuff) Submerged mana nodes could be worked by either water walking mages or arcane barges from non-bezeri/lanun civs

how do u want to solve the "conquer the seaciv with landpeople"-issue?

if they conquer your cities they are close to useless to them by default (land conquers sea i mean ^^) so there has to be some benefit for them. also there should have to be some terrain where landunits can stand on or everyones unique units will be useless against seapeople.

I'm assuming Berenzi-anyone wars will be Scorched Earth by definition. Valkrionn has also already mentioned a water-walking granting ritual, although treating Berenzi cities as both land and sea would work as well.

Hero should be a Horse Archer, representing the epitome of their combat prowess.

Click to expand...

for your consideration:

KillerClowns said:

*Grins.* I don't know what I look forward to more... playing as them, or teaching them to fear Patria Reborn... it may be a while, I suppose, before their AI is ready to put up a proper fight.
Anyways, how are they supposed to get more mana, aside from trade or coastal cities? Or is this a sacrifice you intend for them to make in exchange for being better able to harness the spheres of Water, Body and Nature? Perhaps they could build relatively expensive, unique National Wonders that grant them mana.

Click to expand...

Seafood resources, or at the least Fish, and Mana,will be allowed to spawn in the Ocean. I'll also add at the least Kelp as a feature, which will mean distributing custom mapscripts. Will likely add some Haunted Lands to the maps while I'm at it, as well. Of course, Mana will be more numerous on land... Going to have to play with that carefully, as there's not as much in the ocean.

FireBlaze said:

World Spell: Bountiful Harvest-
5% chance to spawn each water resource in their culture (So a 25% chance in all to get a resource in a tile)

Click to expand...

I could work with that... The only issue I see is the utility doesn't last long. They only have 4 cities, which you'll be able to get out quite early.. Anything beyond that and you might as well use it.

armyofwhispers said:

water / nature:

• (water 2/ nature 2) grow kelp: 7 turn cast with once/mage limit. (this works out to 12 cast total without liches / destroying units)
• (water 3/ nature 3)Summon the Deep: upgraded version of water elemental with affinity to both water and nature mana.

I'd almost say for the cross-over spells just make three. For instance is you use my two, plus your mesmorize at water 1/ nature 1

Also, don't forget about submerged mana nodes.

Edit: Forge UB: forced growth chamber - +10%, +1, +10% stored at size increase
All units should also have the amphibious promotion

Edit 2: (I keep coming up with extra stuff) Submerged mana nodes could be worked by either water walking mages or arcane barges from non-bezeri/lanun civs

Click to expand...

I like those. I could actually see making them into FoL followers, honestly... Not really big on forests as we would imagine, but Kelp Forests should count.

I like that forge as well... And all units will have waterwalking as part of their racial. Kind of important if they settle on the water.

That's a good idea there... Mages can't really improve mana for the AI, but barges will be able to.

Pohlmann said:

how do u want to solve the "conquer the seaciv with landpeople"-issue?

if they conquer your cities they are close to useless to them by default (land conquers sea i mean ^^) so there has to be some benefit for them. also there should have to be some terrain where landunits can stand on or everyones unique units will be useless against seapeople.

Click to expand...

KillerClowns said:

I'm assuming Berenzi-anyone wars will be Scorched Earth by definition. Valkrionn has also already mentioned a water-walking granting ritual, although treating Berenzi cities as both land and sea would work as well.

Click to expand...

KillerClowns has it right. Any land city the Bezeri capture will be razed, and vice-versa.

Atm, there will be a ritual available for civs at war with the Bezeri granting Water-Walking, which will only wear off A)Once you're no longer at war with the Bezeri, and B)Once the unit is on land again, to prevent accidental death. The AI can already use water-walking well enough, so it will work for now.

My end goal is rather more complex... Change the current water-walking to be available adepts, with an improved version at mage-level granting it to the entire stack. Then, when at war with the Bezeri, tell the AI to first prioritize water mana, then get a mage with water 2, then build kill stacks centered on that mage.

armyofwhispers said:

for your consideration:

Spoiler :

Deep beneath the waves no light nor sound breaks the oppressive stillness. The hunt was on. Long had Skaa'ral and his men waited and watched this beast and now was their chance. As the rest of the hunters look on, Skaa'ral waves them off and enters the submerged cave alone, armed only with a mithril javelin he had stolen on a surface raid mere days before.

As the hours pass, hope fades and the group is forced to reflect on the circumstances that brought them here. Many recall the massive beast that time and time again defeated the defenses of even the mighty Bezer'ej itself to rob it's supplies. Others recall the voice of Skaa'raj with his call to arms to remove the threat.

After half a day most have given up hope of their leaders return, and the group prepares to return to the city to mourn their loss. Yet even as they turn to leave, Skaa'raj emerges from the cave... but not alone.

Covered in wounds that still flow freely, Skaa'raj does not swim, but rides triumphantly from the cave mouth mounted on a sea serpent that would give even the great leviathan pause.

As Skaa'raj gives the signal to go home, only one of the group notices that the beast seems strangely subdued and responds to commands as if trained from birth to do so... As they turn for home once again he wonders what could possibly have occurred in the cave...

Click to expand...

Oooh... I like that.


Edit: One important idea I forgot to mention... To help keep them balanced vs other civs, I'm considering having all Tier 3 and up units limited. Say, 32 total for tier 3? Spread between 4 cities, that's 8 units each. Makes for a limited attack/defense force, which should help... Worried about how it would play vs a human though.

A few things.

First, water walking only works on coast tiles. Somehow I doubt that you would be able to put a city with 3 workable rings around it all in coast. Therefore, if you want to be able to attack using water walking you need to change it so that it works in ocean tiles as well.

Second, your idea for a unit limit. The kurotaes don't have one - why should these people? Your biggest limit is going to be that you only have 4 cities, only able to produce with food, while I'm going to have possibly a dozen or more as just about any other civ. In a human vs human game my VERY simple solution is to just spam ships and start blockading. With ships blockading everywhere within their movement range around themselves, it would be startlingly easy to send a large stack of ships and be able to reduce the cities to uselessness just by putting them nearby and clicking blockade.

Third, with them being production fallow, how are you going to modify it so that priests and engineers don't give production but are still useful? You don't want them to get food, because then you could run into the problem that the city can support itself by not working any sea tiles and only working specialists. Or the problem of the city that can grow indefinitely to massive sizes. The other MAJOR problem is that larger cities aren't going to be able to produce as much as smaller cities. And unless you add water improvements, getting a bunch of 2 food 1 commerce ocean tiles is quickly going to make someone want to play a different race.

Fourth, as I just brought up, commerce. You can't run an economy off of trade alone, and ocean tiles produce 1 commerce. You need to add something so that late game they can still stay up with the kurotaes enclave spam, without being severly OP in the early game.

Fifth, food. With both production and city growth being run with food you need to give tiles more than 1 food at the start of the game.

Now I'm going to start speculating on things you could do. To start, give every water square 2 food instead of 1 - just like the lanuan. Then change the lighthouse to instead of adding 1 more food, add 1-2 commerce for every sea tile. Next, with kelp, (i'm assuming it normally adds 1 food for all races), give them a bonus to kelp so that they get 1 extra food from kelp. Then, make FoL their primary religion. Special unit, speakers of the waves or some such, allow them to plant kelp. Then, going along with the ancient forest mechanics, have kelp eventually turn into coral reefs (-1 additional movement, takes 3 moves to go through instead of 2 for kelp or 1 for ocean, +1 more food, +2 commerce). This would give them on an ocean tile with coral reef and lighthouse +5 food, +4-5 commerce (depending upon whether you add +1 or +2 commerce from lighthouse).

Then, you can also make a spell or a workboat ability to raise the oceans, turning an ocean tile to a coast tile for +1 more commerce. If you make it a spell, consider making it an earth spell, rather than a nature or water spell. After all - what good is a wall of stone when your city is underwater.

If you don't want to go with kelp-coral reef, you will need to find some other way to improve the tiles around them. Even with that, you probably want to find some other way to improve it if you want it to be possible to use them with a religion other than FoL.

Anyways, if I come up with more later I'll add on.

-Colin

Edit: Also, you will have to find some other way than water walking to attack them if you want the khazid to be able to take them on. Khazid can't get mages, and if lvl 1 water allows water walking as per the lvl 2 spell, the khazid would be forced to attack with adepts... aka, fail. Otherwise, you need to allow the khazid to build submarines or something, as I'm assuming you don't want ships to be able to take out these guys. As the ships are generally more powerful than regular units of the same teir, that might be a bit OP attacking them.

Water Walking works for all water everywhere. Drowns are personally restricted to not be allowed in the Oceans, and are thus the only Water Walking unit incapable of going into the Ocean. But they are also the most common water walking unit currently, so I can understand the confusion.

Aslo, he's adding a ritual, so even Mechanos and Khazad will e able to war with them properly.

Ahh, I hadn't been aware that drowns were the ones restricted to costal tiles - I thought it was all water walking. Of course, this could be a fall further thing and FFH only allows costal tile walking. I haven't played FF recently because I am forced to be on 3.19.

-Colin

xienwolf said:

Water Walking works for all water everywhere. Drowns are personally restricted to not be allowed in the Oceans, and are thus the only Water Walking unit incapable of going into the Ocean. But they are also the most common water walking unit currently, so I can understand the confusion.

Click to expand...

Any change I could convince you to allow promotions to modify a units TerrainImpassibles, FeatureImpassibles, TerrainPassables, and FeaturePassables in the next version of FF? I'd find that very useful for my modmod, but am pretty sure t is above my C++ skills..

Not for 051, and probably not for a while. I don't have as much coding time as I used to and I have a lot of projects which I really need to get done because I have been stupid enough to advertise them and now people are waiting for their implementation.

readercolin said:

Ahh, I hadn't been aware that drowns were the ones restricted to costal tiles - I thought it was all water walking. Of course, this could be a fall further thing and FFH only allows costal tile walking. I haven't played FF recently because I am forced to be on 3.19.

-Colin

Click to expand...

Jotnar Tritons use waterwalking and since I've had them out past coasts I believe this is universal.

readercolin said:

A few things.

First, water walking only works on coast tiles. Somehow I doubt that you would be able to put a city with 3 workable rings around it all in coast. Therefore, if you want to be able to attack using water walking you need to change it so that it works in ocean tiles as well.

Click to expand...

This was already answered, but waterwalking does work on ocean tiles.

readercolin said:

Second, your idea for a unit limit. The kurotaes don't have one - why should these people? Your biggest limit is going to be that you only have 4 cities, only able to produce with food, while I'm going to have possibly a dozen or more as just about any other civ. In a human vs human game my VERY simple solution is to just spam ships and start blockading. With ships blockading everywhere within their movement range around themselves, it would be startlingly easy to send a large stack of ships and be able to reduce the cities to uselessness just by putting them nearby and clicking blockade.

Click to expand...

Kuriotates do not have one, because they are still on land and more vulnerable to attack. The Bezeri would be able to build up a massive stack basically unaffected by anyone else, and then attack from the sea... But I'm probably not going to use it. Mostly for multiplayer balance reasons.

readercolin said:

Third, with them being production fallow, how are you going to modify it so that priests and engineers don't give production but are still useful? You don't want them to get food, because then you could run into the problem that the city can support itself by not working any sea tiles and only working specialists. Or the problem of the city that can grow indefinitely to massive sizes. The other MAJOR problem is that larger cities aren't going to be able to produce as much as smaller cities. And unless you add water improvements, getting a bunch of 2 food 1 commerce ocean tiles is quickly going to make someone want to play a different race.

Click to expand...

Honestly, they'll probably get commerce.

As for the other point, they'll have an entire chain of unique water improvements.

readercolin said:

Fourth, as I just brought up, commerce. You can't run an economy off of trade alone, and ocean tiles produce 1 commerce. You need to add something so that late game they can still stay up with the kurotaes enclave spam, without being severly OP in the early game.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about that, personally. Oceans already produce commerce, as do coastal tiles... They'll have a town-type improvement, so I'm not adding anything to them. They should have a massive trade empire.

readercolin said:

Fifth, food. With both production and city growth being run with food you need to give tiles more than 1 food at the start of the game.

Click to expand...

I'll be adding food to Oceans, Coasts, and Kelp.

readercolin said:

Now I'm going to start speculating on things you could do. To start, give every water square 2 food instead of 1 - just like the lanuan. Then change the lighthouse to instead of adding 1 more food, add 1-2 commerce for every sea tile. Next, with kelp, (i'm assuming it normally adds 1 food for all races), give them a bonus to kelp so that they get 1 extra food from kelp. Then, make FoL their primary religion. Special unit, speakers of the waves or some such, allow them to plant kelp. Then, going along with the ancient forest mechanics, have kelp eventually turn into coral reefs (-1 additional movement, takes 3 moves to go through instead of 2 for kelp or 1 for ocean, +1 more food, +2 commerce). This would give them on an ocean tile with coral reef and lighthouse +5 food, +4-5 commerce (depending upon whether you add +1 or +2 commerce from lighthouse).

Click to expand...

They're already going to get the Lanun food bonus, but I like the Lighthouse change.

Kelp bonus is in too, and you're right about the normal food... Just like in Orbis.

I'm considering making them FoL followers already too.

readercolin said:

Then, you can also make a spell or a workboat ability to raise the oceans, turning an ocean tile to a coast tile for +1 more commerce. If you make it a spell, consider making it an earth spell, rather than a nature or water spell. After all - what good is a wall of stone when your city is underwater.

If you don't want to go with kelp-coral reef, you will need to find some other way to improve the tiles around them. Even with that, you probably want to find some other way to improve it if you want it to be possible to use them with a religion other than FoL.

Anyways, if I come up with more later I'll add on.

-Colin

Edit: Also, you will have to find some other way than water walking to attack them if you want the khazid to be able to take them on. Khazid can't get mages, and if lvl 1 water allows water walking as per the lvl 2 spell, the khazid would be forced to attack with adepts... aka, fail. Otherwise, you need to allow the khazid to build submarines or something, as I'm assuming you don't want ships to be able to take out these guys. As the ships are generally more powerful than regular units of the same teir, that might be a bit OP attacking them.

Click to expand...

Khazad already have an Ironclad UU, actually... Should be more than strong enough.

Darksaber1 said:

Aslo, he's adding a ritual, so even Mechanos and Khazad will e able to war with them properly.

Click to expand...

And the Mechanos have flying ships, so they should be able to attack as well even without a ritual.

Then, going along with the ancient forest mechanics, have kelp eventually turn into coral reefs (-1 additional movement, takes 3 moves to go through instead of 2 for kelp or 1 for ocean, +1 more food, +2 commerce).

Click to expand...

I like this idea actually, but what would spawn defensively to replace the Ents?

Third, with them being production fallow, how are you going to modify it so that priests and engineers don't give production but are still useful? You don't want them to get food, because then you could run into the problem that the city can support itself by not working any sea tiles and only working specialists. Or the problem of the city that can grow indefinitely to massive sizes.

Click to expand...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't those give no more than +2? In which case converting that to food production would give no benefit at all beside GPP and each additional pop would still add and

The biggest power boost for these guys would be AV with sacrifice the weak. Although with no access to land-based health resources except through trade, would curtail growth quite powerfully.