Nomadic Devourer Civilisation for Erebus - Panivo

Taking a break for a couple of weeks from xml and python. I'll have a look at the unit issue when I get back to it.

The lack of plantations/wineries is denying the Panivo sources of happiness as well as sources of health. I was considering that all the food bonuses which the Panivo can not establish permanent supplies of (cows, rice, bananas, etc.) would be regarded as luxuries.

They would therefore each provide happiness whenever available. This would encourage use of the culling fields and also trade.

I could either make these happy bonuses automatic for the CIV or else link it to a CIV specific building, Mammon's Banquet. If using Mammon's Banquet approach, it would have an ongoingcost of 1 food and would give a negative happy (and no happiness from the bonuses) if there is starvation in the city.


Another possibility to encourage culling fields would be a building which gives a hammer production boost for unit production based on how many culling fields are in it's fat cross.

Updating to 0.7

ChangeLog
PromotionInfos: Devourer promotion updated to exclude subdue animals and beasts. Reduced Sidestepper bonus moves by 1 (giving mobility 1 at same time)
FlavourInfo added - dimensional mana preference, salt/crab secondary preference
CivilizationInfos - disabled mounted related techs
BuildingInfos - rings give an extra health
SpellInfos - Openings, Disperse, Add to City and Rot on Branch added.
Text: Updated to identify technologies of particular interest to Panivo in the Civilization description and include added promotions/spells.
CivilizationInfos, UnitInfos and UnitClassInfos - moved Diaspora into settler class and starved into catapult class to get rid of excess pedia messages for other civilizations


python
SpellPanivo: changed to give mobility1 on successfully navigating the maze. WorldSpell Openings now working. Rot On Branch Spell now working. Disperse and Add to City spells added. Wither the One added (but doesn't include negative effects for FoL yet)
onUnitKilled: Herd created on tiles without a bonus if a rustler who is transporting a herd is killed on it
onBeginPlayerTurn: Slitinn has weak promotion when in Panivo territory

Hadn't meant to update this again so soon but when I replaced the standard settler with just the Diaspora I forgot to remove Cartography as a pre-requisite.

Changes in 0.8
xml
ImprovementInfos: Poisons and Tracking techs both give +1 food for Initial Exploitation
LeaderInfos:Removed Barbarian trait from the Panivo leaders - their actions may be barbaric but they're more likely to kill and cook an orc than befriend it
UnitInfos: removed cartography as prereq for the Diaspora

python
spellPanivo: Allow for effect of Expansive trait on Disperse spell and amended population cost to reflect cost of building Diaspora

Food-based happiness bonuses idea does fit Panivo perfectly.

My compliments!

And yes, first sentence was a challenge to write down both for me & for english language...

Food-based happiness bonuses idea does fit Panivo perfectly.

My compliments!

And yes, first sentence was a challenge to write down both for me & for english language...

Thanks to Cool3a2's thread I can now do dds in GIMP. The next version will have distinct buttons for the added spells, promos, builds, etc.
Leonid Kozienko has kindly given permission to use his The Last Warrior image. I plan to use it for the Nihilist and it's attached here. If this image is already in use somewhere in the Pedia, could someone let me know?
If anyone has suggestions for artists/particular pictures that would suit the Panivo, please send me a link.

Hi,

It might be because Dale Farm has been in the news lately but I've been considering adding a Squatter's Claim spell for the Panivo Diaspora.

Planned Pedia Entry


The basic idea is that once the Panivo have mastered Deception, their Diaspora will be able to found cities within an enemy civilization's cultural borders, at least two tiles distant from all other cities. At least three combat units need to be with the Diaspora to enable the casting of the spell. These would all get the Held promotion for 1 turn. The Panivo would become the owners of the tile and found a city on it. The spell would trigger war with the original owner of the land.

Does anyone know how I can trigger founding of a city from within the python for the spell?


--

On a separate note I'm removing the Run the Maze spell from the next version. I can't think of an occasion when a player would use it, so it must be fluff. Anyone with the Sidestepper will be able to gain Dimensional 1 through experience instead. This is more useful, more likely to be used and seems a better fit.

i am going to download this and hope it is as fun as it looks.

I've updated most of the promotion/spell buttons for the Module. Examples are in the thumbnail.



Cool3a2's thread, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=315966 got me started on the whole process. Asioasioasio's buttonmaker, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=201747 made the button making extremely easy (once I knew what to create/had source material).


The Ceridwens Maze/Enter the Maze button is based on Crackpot Papercraft’s 3D paper version of Escher’s Relativity, http://www.flickr.com/photos/crackpotcreative/2700827899/in/photostream/.

The Sentient Feast is based on PaiVerde’s Crazy Cannibal, http://paiverde.deviantart.com/art/Crazy-Cannibal-108362930.

The Nihilist button is based on Leonid Kozienko’s, The Last Warrior, http://agnidevi.deviantart.com/art/The-Last-Warrior-76143734.

The Starved button is based on Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The Gorger button is based on a Mega City One League of Fatties Protester, painted by Uncle Phil, http://www.cheddarmongers.org. ( I'm still waiting to hear back from Uncle Phil, so this may change in the final version.)

The ghetto button is based on Il Quartiere Degli Israeliti a Venezia by Telemaco Signorini.

Some of the buttons, e.g. Culling Field, Wither the One Tree, Mammon's Banquet are based on images that I found on the net but where the sites did not include information about who took/created the picture.

Several are based on existing buttons within FFH/RifE, e.g. Openings, Ceridwen's Chosen.

In some cases, I've assigned suitable existing buttons to the new promotion, e.g. Blinding Headache promotion uses the Mind 1 promotion (lightning on a brain) button.

The unit buttons while created are not apparent when playing the mod as I haven't been able to get the Unit Art Defines to work for me. Similarly, I haven't mastered the Improvement Art Defines. These will use similar buttons to the build buttons but with roman numerals for the various stages of exploiotation and mobile camps.

There's been a good few changes in this version. To make it easier for anyone who wants to try out the mod, without piecing together what's in from what version and what's just a glimmer in my eye, I'm adding a spoiler in the first post which outlines the features that are included in the module so far.

Version 0.9 Changes


If there's a quick way to include the unit and improvement buttons, I'll put them in version 0.10.
I'll probably look at making the mod compatible with the RifE SVN for version 0.10. Not only will this allow someone playing the Panivo to take advantage of the other improvements to RifE in the SVN but it should also allow me to include the Temple of Triumvirate varying happiness and the Beast Slayer's Glory Hunter promotion.

Thanks for the update - downloading now.

downloading now - and one criticism.

it can be a bit tough to move cities because the new site might not be developed and starve, and i like its city spell to sac pop for a settler. Overall, i like this module.

thadian said:

downloading now - and one criticism.

it can be a bit tough to move cities because the new site might not be developed and starve, and i like its city spell to sac pop for a settler. Overall, i like this module.

Click to expand...

Thanks for trying it and for the feedback.

You'll often see the Panivo starve for a while if they relocate into a new city from a large one and the tiles around the new city are not developed. Occasional starvation does fit their obsession with food.

To avoid taking a hit from this:
Try to move when you've a good stockpile of food in the original city so that you won't lose a population point.
Remember to relocate back when some of the exploited tiles of the city from which you have relocated have recovered to dormant.
Exploiting tiles is a relatively quick task for a forager, so moving a forager over to exploit a tile can solve the problem before you lose population.

Losing a population point to starvation isn't necessarily the end of the world for the Panivo as they can often quickly recover it through exploitation.

---

One possibility for the Panivo would be to have a city devoted purely to production with absolutely none of its own food, specifically for churning out the non-mobile wonders. All food and population would be supplied be surrounding cities devoted to exploiting land for growth. I haven't tried this model yet, it's still only theoretical.

Just signed up to tell you how much I enjoyed this civ, I had a hard time figuring out the trick to playing it, but once you get into it and build some momentum, you can really get going. I started to top the scoreboard when I had two pairs of cities, though that might just be the difficulty level showing.

One thing I noticed is that ironically, coastal cities can be good for the Panivo, as once you get a lighthouse going, the food from the vast quantities of kelp tiles found on most coasts can be enough to support a decent population without bothering with your over exploited land tiles. Then again, without FoL the Panivo don't have access to kelp forests, balancing it out somewhat. It's not really a problem unless you can grab a Heron Throne city with tons of reef/kelp tiles and ocean resources, but if you think the Panivo shouldn't be able to support permanent settlements in any way there could be a lighthouse UB and/or work boat UU that simulates overfishing somehow?

One thing I found confusing is the way you lost resources over time. The culling fields I can understand, they become dormant after being worked for 15 turns, but what about culling fields that are outside your BFC or that you avoid working? And what about other resources/terrain degradation? Are resources lost when terrain degrades? Is terrain degraded on all exploitation tiles or only when they are being worked? I was pleasantly surprised when I found the obvious ways of abusing the rustling mechanic didn't work for me, and found if very tedious trying to avoid working the culling field tiles to keep my Banquet happiness up. One idea I had was to have a settlement somewhere dedicated to collecting culling fields that it will never work just for the health and happiness bonuses. This could possibly be avoided if the culling field timer went down regardless of whether the city worked it, more similar to a fort than a cottage? I enjoy having semi-permanent animal resources and would probably exploit the tiles they're standing on to get a small bonus indefinitely rather than a large fifteen turn bonus, but it seems contradictory to play the Panivo so carefully and try to maintain your resources. Something that would give me an incentive to build culling fields would be if some of the Panivo units (Gorger?) had an affinity for herd resources.

The other thing I was curious about was the relocation mechanics. I really didn't experiment with this enough yet, I haven't even completed a game with them, but how quickly does the exploited terrain recover? To me it seemed like it became dormant immediately, which would pose obvious problems, but more important are the trading posts, which I'm almost certain went from abandoned to the next size tier as soon as you relocated back, which could have been a single turn after the first migration. And as much as I don't want to part with my toys, I can't help but feel that massive trading posts are far too powerful to be easily achivable. There should definitely be a downtime on the relocation, linked together with a downtime on dispersion so you can't just hit disperse ten turns in a row then move to a completely undeveloped city with ten settlers and wait until you have the food and happy cap to add them back to the population. At that, there should probably be a time needed for deserted trading posts to grow to the next size tier while they're in an off season city, maybe 20 or so turns on normal gamespeed? Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, maybe I'm suggesting something impossible, but with the current mechanics the trading posts feel like a system with the potential to be very rewarding and encourage timing the relocations, but at the moment it's simply a bit too easy to get +10 over base yield megatiles. This seems to make up very easily for the fact that they need roughly double the cities other civs need, as they quickly become economic supergiants.

I haven't tried going AV and using cull the weak yet, but it seems to me that it would be incredibly powerful, halving the number of food tiles you need to work and letting you concentrate on your trading post economy/doubling the time you can spend in a city before having to relocate. Even hell terrain isn't a bit threat to the Panivo, since base yield doesn't really matter to them as much, it's all about abusing the temporary +8 food.

The other strategy I want to try next is to is to create a huge specialist economy using my vast amounts of food and flexible happy cap. Ironically, cull the weak comes in useful here as well, letting you keep your population a lot more stable, especially since you can run pacifism to offset the effect on great people production, that is, unless you're going religion and spamming temples to keep your happycap ridiculous.

Also, when I got the constellation event with the 'Sucellus is dead' option, I couldn't select it, and when I moused over it didn't display a requirement.

And finally, the racial: I feel it would be justified to increase bonuses against mounted and animals units - being able to fight off animals in the early game would make up for their loss of the barbarian trait, and a bonus against mounted only seems fair when they can't produce mounted units themselves. Alternatively, or additionally, the racial could authorise them to gain a second tier of cannibalize, which would both be powerful and fit very well with the Panivo theme.

SlugAdvisor said:

Just signed up to tell you how much I enjoyed this civ

Click to expand...

SlugAdvisor said:

One thing I noticed is that ironically, coastal cities can be good for the Panivo, as once you get a lighthouse going, the food from the vast quantities of kelp tiles found on most coasts can be enough to support a decent population without bothering with your over exploited land tiles. Then again, without FoL the Panivo don't have access to kelp forests, balancing it out somewhat. It's not really a problem unless you can grab a Heron Throne city with tons of reef/kelp tiles and ocean resources, but if you think the Panivo shouldn't be able to support permanent settlements in any way there could be a lighthouse UB and/or work boat UU that simulates overfishing somehow?

Click to expand...

I had considered that the Panivo would overfish also. I decided against it as it's one way for them to continue to get . Laying waste to all the land around them should be enough without emptying the seas also. A coastal city with lots of Kelp/Fish, combined with a lighthouse and Heron Throne is good for any civilization. It's not especially beneficial for the Panivo.

My intention with the Panivo wasn't to force players to constantly relocate but rather encourage it through the possibility of better improvements (bigger trading posts) or worse improvements (degradation of Exploited improvements) and extra happiness on moving. If a player sets up a permanent coastal city that works well, then I've no objection.

SlugAdvisor said:

One thing I found confusing is the way you lost resources over time. The culling fields I can understand, they become dormant after being worked for 15 turns, but what about culling fields that are outside your BFC or that you avoid working? And what about other resources/terrain degradation? Are resources lost when terrain degrades? Is terrain degraded on all exploitation tiles or only when they are being worked? I was pleasantly surprised when I found the obvious ways of abusing the rustling mechanic didn't work for me, and found if very tedious trying to avoid working the culling field tiles to keep my Banquet happiness up. One idea I had was to have a settlement somewhere dedicated to collecting culling fields that it will never work just for the health and happiness bonuses. This could possibly be avoided if the culling field timer went down regardless of whether the city worked it, more similar to a fort than a cottage? I enjoy having semi-permanent animal resources and would probably exploit the tiles they're standing on to get a small bonus indefinitely rather than a large fifteen turn bonus, but it seems contradictory to play the Panivo so carefully and try to maintain your resources.

Click to expand...

Culling Fields within the cultural control but not being worked was a problem I wasn't sure how to fix. I'll take a look at how the fort timer works and try to use it for them.

The Panivo shouldn't be able to get the bonus for domestic herds without using the Culling Field. If there is another way that you were able to get the bonus from a domesticated herd let me know.

The Panivo can also use Camps to hunt wild herds. There's an event to remove the herd due to extinction of the herd due to overhunting but hunting camps should provide herd bonuses for longer.

Exploitation will provide a grain/fruit bonus during Initial Exploitation but the bonus should be removed when the improvement upgrades.

One fix I need to put in is to delete herds, fruit and grains if the Panivo player founds a city on top of them.

--

SlugAdvisor said:

Something that would give me an incentive to build culling fields would be if some of the Panivo units (Gorger?) had an affinity for herd resources.

Click to expand...

An affinity for the Gorgers might actually encourage players to hoard the herds for longer as the Gorgers are a late game unit. It might be an idea for a unit that is available earlier though.

I included Mammon's Feast which will give extra happiness from bonus food resources that the Panivo can only get temporarily through Culling Fields/Exploitation and food resources that they have no means of acquiring directly themselves.
I had considered including a UB (Slaughter House?) to give a boost to unit production if there is a Culling Field in the BFC of the city. Alternatively, the UB could provide a specific promo (even better attacks against animals/mounted units) to units trained, while there's an active Culling Field in the BFC.

SlugAdvisor said:

The other thing I was curious about was the relocation mechanics. I really didn't experiment with this enough yet, I haven't even completed a game with them, but how quickly does the exploited terrain recover? To me it seemed like it became dormant immediately, which would pose obvious problems, but more important are the trading posts, which I'm almost certain went from abandoned to the next size tier as soon as you relocated back, which could have been a single turn after the first migration. And as much as I don't want to part with my toys, I can't help but feel that massive trading posts are far too powerful to be easily achivable. There should definitely be a downtime on the relocation, linked together with a downtime on dispersion so you can't just hit disperse ten turns in a row then move to a completely undeveloped city with ten settlers and wait until you have the food and happy cap to add them back to the population. At that, there should probably be a time needed for deserted trading posts to grow to the next size tier while they're in an off season city, maybe 20 or so turns on normal gamespeed? Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, maybe I'm suggesting something impossible, but with the current mechanics the trading posts feel like a system with the potential to be very rewarding and encourage timing the relocations, but at the moment it's simply a bit too easy to get +10 over base yield megatiles. This seems to make up very easily for the fact that they need roughly double the cities other civs need, as they quickly become economic supergiants.

Click to expand...

Exploited terrain outside of the BFC of an On-Season Panivo city has a random chance of changing to Dormant. If the player constantly relocates and the tile is never expoited beyond Initial Exploitation, then there is a high chance (90%) that the tile will revert to Dormant each turn after the city Relocates elsewhere.
The chance of returning to Dormant lessens the more the tile is exploited. Ruined land has only a 10% chance of returning to Dormant each turn.
When the tile reverts to Dormant, the underlying terrain may also be changed (Grassland->Plains->Desert). This chance increases the more the land was exploited, starting at 10% for Initial Exploitation and rising to 90% for Ruined Land.

I realised that the ability to quickly grow the Trading Camps was a potential player-exploit. In the next version, I'm removing the ability to upgrade "New" trading camps to the next tier so there will be a minimum amount of turns that a city must work the improvement to allow it to upgrade.

Another addition in the next tile will be a 2 turn delay on the Relocation. I initially put this in to prevent the player-exploit of rapidly relocating between to cities to quickly develop the trading posts. I'm going to leave this in as it seems reasonable that some time needs to be invested in preparing to move an entire population (even if the basic justification for the mechanic is Ceridwen lets them do it).

[edit]The population cost for casting Disperse varies from 1 to 3 based on the city size and whether the leader has the Expansive trait. It's slightly more expensive to create Diaspora through casting Disperse than it is to build them normally.
The intention of Disperse was to allow the Panivo to move some of the population out to avoid ill health, due to the Panivo lack of resources. It's also to reflect the ability of a nomadic community to move as smaller groups, aside from the mass migration associated with Relocate.

SlugAdvisor said:

I haven't tried going AV and using cull the weak yet, but it seems to me that it would be incredibly powerful, halving the number of food tiles you need to work and letting you concentrate on your trading post economy/doubling the time you can spend in a city before having to relocate. Even hell terrain isn't a bit threat to the Panivo, since base yield doesn't really matter to them as much, it's all about abusing the temporary +8 food.

Click to expand...

Yes, I think that Ashen Veil is the way for them to go. Hopefully it won't be OP but it does fit with the lore.

SlugAdvisor said:

The other strategy I want to try next is to is to create a huge specialist economy using my vast amounts of food and flexible happy cap. Ironically, cull the weak comes in useful here as well, letting you keep your population a lot more stable, especially since you can run pacifism to offset the effect on great people production, that is, unless you're going religion and spamming temples to keep your happycap ridiculous.

Click to expand...

Let me know how you get on.

SlugAdvisor said:

Also, when I got the constellation event with the 'Sucellus is dead' option, I couldn't select it, and when I moused over it didn't display a requirement.

Click to expand...

I'll take a look at this. I think I've tied it to currently researching astronomy, which is a bit too limiting. I may amend the event so it reduces what ever beakers are currently stored and change the event text to, "Sucellus is dead. Have these so called sages flogged for their lies."

SlugAdvisor said:

And finally, the racial: I feel it would be justified to increase bonuses against mounted and animals units - being able to fight off animals in the early game would make up for their loss of the barbarian trait, and a bonus against mounted only seems fair when they can't produce mounted units themselves. Alternatively, or additionally, the racial could authorise them to gain a second tier of cannibalize, which would both be powerful and fit very well with the Panivo theme.

Click to expand...

I'll double the racial boosts against animals and mounted units in the next version.

Thanks for all your feedback. I won't be issuing the next version til after Christmas but if you've further suggestions I'll try to include them.

Lplate said:

Yes, I think that Ashen Veil is the way for them to go. Hopefully it won't be OP but it does fit with the lore.

Click to expand...

What about CyberForte's planned 'Chosen of Ceridwen' religion? That seems like a good fit if it's completed (I made a Pedia entry for its hero last month, but no one's commented yet).

I think Chosen of Ceridwen would fit them lorewise. If the religion does get developed, I'll be retitling the Ceridwen's Chosen promotion in the Panivo mod.

Now if only I could find out where CyberForte has gone off to.

Thanks for replying so quickly, Lplate, I just got back and will probably continue my game this evening, I'll report on anything I find and hopefully try the AV strategy (had to go Order previously because I was unlucky enough to spawn on a continent where no one was evil or chaotic). I wanted to mention some things I forgot to include in my post yesterday though.

First, my recon units had the option to select subdue animal, though I didn't select it because the Civilopedia entry listed all the animal buildings as blocked. I'm not entirely sure, but I thought it was mentioned somewhere in the thread that the Panivo should be blocked from gaining subdue animal and subdue beast? That also got me thinking, if they're allowed to keep it, is it possible to replace the animal buildings with buildings that give a temporary boost on some kind? (food, most likely, maybe deer for stags) And to reduce the strenght of their animals? Perhaps their promotion could be called something like capture animal to illustrate the difference.

And I noticed that their camps had a counter down to becoming a yaranga, which I thought was only available to the doviello? It's fitting for the Panivo to also have a similar for camps, but perhaps a little backwards given the general tendency of their improvements to degrade?