Picking up where I left off yesterday.
A quick note at the top of my post that we still haven't addressed a more formal definition of who/what/where/when for Boons. I'm writing this little note last, so I can't really expand more now, but I think it's worth coming back to, because it's quite important!
Ugh, I'm already hating this whole espionage thing. But then again, I'm one of those people who is honest all the time...
As far as the greediness, by this I mean something like the dragon lingering too long in one place, trying to get that extra DF or Seal. Or haunting one civ too much. The kind of thing that would allow the "Sauron's... er... the DO's gaze to fall on him"
I think I should follow up here by asking what you don't like about the espionage stuff? I think enumerating all of the edge cases is complex, but it should play well and be more straightforward in practice.
So here is my overall response to the whole GP things (responding here to several posts not quoted above).
Personally, I'd like to keep the total number of different GP types to around the same amount as in CiV (with BNW, of course). I think going in the direction you guys have been talking about might be a bit "too much," especially considering GP are apparently rather complicated to implement - and certainly kind of unpredictable from a balancing perspective. I'm not really a fan of the whole "Great Engineer can be upgraded to Great ?????" thing either.
I think it warrants mentioning that most of the GP i proposed way back in one of my first posts (something like page 3 or 4) were designed to be "replacements" or "reinterpretations" of the "standard" (and *necessary*) GP types of civ. Great Builders were basically the GEs of the game, but with some flavorful additions (planting groves or building waygates or something). In any case, through various combinations, we could end up with the "standard" abilities still intact (even though they may be more "spread out", with Hurry Production coming from one unit, and Build Manufactory coming from another).
Where the difficulty comes is with the "weird" ones that have expanded functionality not found in CiV - it doesn't make sense to replace, for example, a Great Artist with a Tel'aran'rhiod-type unit that would only be used in certain unusual situations. However, these units are important to figure in.
I wonder, then, if it's possible to sort of combine some of your ideas into a more simplified concept:
1) The could be a "Great Talent" (or something) GP. This unit would have predictable spawning patterns (though would maybe be designed to be more rare), and isn't intended to "replace" any of the main ones.
2) Upon creation, the unit can become one of the "weird" GP types (sniffer, wolfbrother, dreamwalker, ta'veren, etc.) - none of the GW-producing ones. None of the "Staple" ones we need for basic civ strategy (Scientists, etc.). Only the "odd" ones - and probably only a few options (4-5 probably)
3) Upon creation, this unit could be randomly born as a Great Wolfbrother, Great Ta'veren, or whatever. the choice would be out of the player's hands (though some features, like social policies, could effect it), reinforcing the unpredictability of these things. Since none of them are essential strategic tools, it isn't crippling to get a Wolf when you were hoping for a sniffer.
4) Alternatively, the player could select which type they want. This could be a promotion thing, but I think I'd prefer it to be a selection screen. I don't like the flavor of this option as much because I find the unpredictability compelling, and this is a bit too "meta." Either way, though.
The nice thing about this is that it reinforces the rareness of these units, offers a variety of unit-types without cluttering the GP-production system, and doesn't really impact the "normal" ones (Great Merchants, etc.).
Thoughts?
Before addressing the above, I'll just jump to:
I have no special thoughts on that as it is what I proposed
but made prettier. (my idea of GP getting random promotions and becoming old blood was an alternative
or variante)
Hopefully we should co-operate on here in a spirit of good faith - I think we've all recycled ideas from earlier in the thread (I've realized it about some of my own posts after writing them) or come up with very similar ideas that have already been mentioned. Sometimes it helps to retread those those if we're having difficulty on the mechanics concerned - a particular example for me was the Neutral alignment in the LB. It was a single specific phrasing from one post that flipped my understanding of using neutral and changed my mind, so even a fresh set of words on the same idea can be helpful.
So, I think we all mean well here - we're trying to make the mod better.
Back to the idea - separating the WoT GPs from analogous CiV GPs. I see now that we've discussed the promotion approach more after Calavente's post a few pages back. In a twist on our usual format, I'm going to quote myself:
I do like that this allows us to include a lot more of the flavorful, "one-shot" GP-like roles that come up in the WoT books (like Slayer and Min). However, I think we have a big strategy problem here. These GPs will presumably do quite different things and I can't see a player ever wanting to take the gamble of trying to get one they want when GPs are otherwise predictable in their specific usefulness. I don't think we can randomize our Great Scientist/Engineer/Merchant equivalents to make up for that - these are one of the primary ways tall empires compete with wide ones and they need to be able to reliably generate specific GP types.
Another concern I have, regarding complexity, is that I think the GP system is already one of the most complex parts of base CiV. I'm fairly sure most players don't properly understand exactly what goes into making GPs and what affects their costs (I've still got some grey areas) - it's more of a general *making GP points makes more GPs*. (Which is loosely true, but you can be more optimal than that.) Now, you could say that players will tend to produce these GPs "incidentally" instead of purposefully, like Great Admirals. (Aside question, what do we do with free GP-selection and this randomness? Putting in a "random WoT-like GP" option there is definitely bad - the other GPs are reliable and do what you want. Can the player choose from al our new GP types then? Might be too powerful if they're balanced for rarity? They can of course just not be available for "free GP" selection.)
You don't know what you're talking about, me! I think I misunderstood this suggestion the first time through - the above quote makes me think I was still mixing the spawn conditions/yields of these new GPs with the old ones and having to trade off against them. However, I think my angle might have been this one:
Traditionally GPs are generated by Specialists. Specialist slots become available in your cities through certain buildings/wonders. You can have an available citizen work as a Specialist (instead of working a tile on the map) and your city will get the yields from that Specialist slot (if unworked, Specialist slots produce nothing). One of the yields of Specialists is (often) GP points toward their respective GP (Scientist Specialists produce Great Scientist points, etc). The GP point rate can be additionally affected by a variety of building/policy modifiers, but Specialists and Wonders are the primary sources of GP points.
If we make this "WoT GP" use similar mechanics, then players would need their citizens to work whatever Specialists produced WoT GP points - sometimes at the exclusion of working "normal" Specialists. Given that "WoT GPs" aren't reliably useful for the player's specific situation, I was worried that players would always go for the "normal" Specialists because it's a guaranteed payoff.
HOWEVER, as I mentioned many pages ago (and what you guys might have been trying to tell me for the last page), we can generate GPs in any arbitrary way we like. We don't need to link WoT GPs to Specialists. They don't need to be a trade off against existing GP types that have "reliable" payoffs.
So, this might be what people have been discussing already, but what are our available triggering mechanisms?
Related to this:
Could the Old Talent Great People spawn similarly to how the Mayans spawn great people, every few years (or quite a lot actually) you get to choose one from a list of people (wolf brothers, sniffers etc) and can't choose the same one a second time until you have chosen all of them?
We could certainly do that, but as counterpoint has said a bit later, randomness is part of the flavor for these GP types and this approach is quite systematic.
I thought about it in a slightly different way - when you have 1 or more seals, each of your units gets "Morale" promotion: +10% strength when fighting shadowspawn/units controlled by shadow civs. This would encourage to give seals to other light civs.
That makes a lot more sense than a static EXP bonus!
OK, I think number two is certainly the coolest as described by you. That said, the specificity of them is quite problematic. I'm sure what I'm about to say has been said, but I guess I'm putting it in my own words to try and help make sense of it:
I could imagine this working if there were a few (randomly decided in each game?) prophesies that became evident toward the middle to end game. They could have flavorful names, but essentially they would be sort of not-too-specific task for civs to do. Such as:
1) [flavorful text that means] somebody needs to conquer a city with a naval vessel
2) [vflavorful text that means] somebody needs to build a super huge city of pop 35 or something
3) [flavorful text that means] somebody needs to strike down two false dragons.
Whatever. The point is these would all be (retroactively) associated with the dragon or something, flavorwise, though they wouldn't actually need to mechanically have anything to do with him. And these would be things that some civs would be doing anyways. End result is that, I guess, the real dragon would appear shortly after? I don't know, this is kinda lame. I don't know what happens if nobody does them, though....
I can see those kinds of things working. Do these slot well into the Alignment-affecting events that take place over the course of the game? I don't think we've discussed what we want the content of those "events" to be yet - just the general gist of how they're structured.
This approach leans towards Prophecies as separate entities (not GWs) - part of determining Alignment and therefore part of the Last Battle (the part of it that exists for the whole game). Also means they'd probably switch off with the Last Battle if it were disabled.
As we've discussed in the last few pages, I agree that specific GWs having in-game effects like prophecies (while other GWs don't) is weird. I think we should either change all GWs to have some effects like this or have none do that. Changing all GWs that way is a big ask. I'd be inclined to shelve that to revisit at a later date post-release - if we think the culture system needs more WoT-ification at that time.
But we like prophecies as GWs flavor wise. So, how about the following?
More generic prophetic objectives like counterpoint has here as a part of the Alignment system and therefore leading into the Last Battle. Conveniently, we could use this as a vehicle to drive non-combat participation in the lead up to the Last Battle? This brings over the WoT flavor of history being "prophesied" and that in each game the players are causing those to be fulfilled - eventually leading to the Last Battle cataclysm.
But the "actual" prophecies from the books (The Karaethon Cycle, the Jendai Prophecies, various Foretellings) are GWs - they produce culture and prestige like other GW types, but are a sub-classification of GW (like artifact vs artwork in base CiV).
So, that brings up a myriad of questions about the "generic" prophecies. On map objectives like "take a city with a ship" and "kill two false dragons" work in a similar way to city-state quests. What if the prophecies present options - or more specifically, that prophecies can be overturned and disproven? If it's a Shadow prophecy (flavor determines the prophecy's alignment), overturning it increases the player's Light alignment? The player would need to be able to tell how the Prophecies were aligned apart (as would the AI, but it's got a more practical advantage of being able to just look at the number which represents that prophecy's alignment result).
I think most prophecies would need to resolve themselves in some way after a certain amount of time - allowing them to be left unfinished makes keeping track of them very difficult, both for the player and for the game on an implementation complexity level (how certain prophecies overlap). It seems likely that tipping everyone's (or civs within a specific radius of some focal point) Alignment a specific way (which way is determined per-prophecy) would encourage specific players to engage with prophecies to avoid potential adverse affects on their own Alignment gameplans.
We would need a way to decide which prophecies are applicable on a given map and with a given game state. (Can't ask a player to take a city on a coast if there are no coastal cities on the map) These conditions are likely to be bespoke for each prophecy, which isn't ideal (I can't see a way of making this XML-configurable, where I can with most things we're doing), but I can't see how we avoid that.
The last big open question is how we decide (at runtime, for a given game) which prophecies are associated in what way with the Dragon. The only way I see that we can do that is having prebuilt "Dragon prophecies" that we know are linked in specific ways. ("The player who completes the most of the prophecies from this subset X of the set of all prophecies Y is the civ where the Dragon is born")
There's also the totally "smoke and mirrors" approach. Say somebody builds the Prophesy of Callandor. Just say "The Prophesy of Callandor has been fulfilled" at the right time in the right era....
This is possible, but I think it's a bit bland. I think we have good candidates for national projects and if these prophecies are available to be built like wonders, then they'll be built in every game, it's just a question of who builds them.
If you're still referring to them as GWs and just "completing" at a specific time in history, this is basically just a popup for the player. It might be cool, but I don't think it adds much to the experience.
I don't know, I'm still not totally sold on the GWs mattering. I do like the Prophesies as GWs, though - it seems quite flavorful. The problem with prophesy is.... free will, and.... randomness of a game. Prophesies are great in novels, not great in anything that is variable. I'd just as soon leave them as flavor and not integrate too much. It's one thing for the dragon to periodically fulfill prophesies, but to have them be real and actual game altering events... I dunno.
I'm in agreement that specific GWs mattering is weird. Hopefully what I've suggested above is a good way of avoiding that.
- The Paths being very much integrated into Alignment (which would be scrapped I'd imagine if people disabled the LB)
This was what I remembered in my post yesterday. I'm not sure if you're suggesting we disable Paths when the LB is disabled? I think they're suitably separated that we don't have to.
That said, even though the Aiel units are "modern" in the sense that they are still in use in the New Era, I think in our game the Aiel UU's (at least if they are combat-ones, not counting the Wise Ones) would quite likely be early-game units. Even though they're really powerful, it makes more sense that way, given the progression of technology that we'll be adopting. This is fine, though, as civ does it to - The Jaguar Warrior (that's the Aztec UU right?) is an Ancient Era unit, even though there were no aztecs until some 4000-5000 years later than the Ancient era!
And
the difference being that the aiels are the best warriors and best army of the Rand World and crush everyone when the Mesoamerican civ were way behind the conquistador and were crushed.
So that means that the old-fashion tech of the Aiels is in fact the most advanced one
which is contradictory
thus it means that the Aiels went very early to the mastery of the military tech tree (and commerce)
and stayed there, with technological stagnation after that.
that's unfair and you know it. You point a Dragon cannon to any of the armies of the westland and the get the same treatment as the Aiels.
And dragon cannon are .. dragon era techs..
We were speaking about aiels having reached in 1000years or so the peak of military tech until the dragon era
. (where of course cannon come into play)
Because we know (due to rand's visions) that they reached their military and political and "religious" structure about 1000 year after the breaking .. and didn't change much since then.
and how will you have this early Aiel UU
still be the most powerful unit of the Era of Dragon (save for channelers and cannon-dragon / and maybe DeathGuard and DragonLegion)
without some serious imbalance ?
For Aztecs, the civ game and tech tree is totally stupid and makes it that Aztec jaguars are (depending on which civ version : warrior UU, classical swordman UU, medieval swordman UU..etc)
I disagree that having the Aztec UU as an ancient era unit was a bad idea. Their UU, based on what we know about the actual Aztec warriors, clearly fits very effectively in the ancient era. CiV doesn't aim to mimic the placement in time of the civilizations it uses - this is the same disconnection from flavor that allows us to found an American Washington (the city) in 4000BC. The fact that Civ X actually only had technology Y by date Z isn't considered - just the unique component of what that civilization did with that particular technology. Then that unique component is placed in the "time-extracted" frame of worldwide progression wherever that happens to be. It's also the same kind of thing where CiV doesn't model the relative power levels of its civilizations - America, Rome, the Mongols, etc. have flavorful bonuses that push them towards their real actions, but aren't considerably better overall as civilizations, despite their grand successes in their respective time periods.
As counterpoint mentions in the next quote block I'll come to, we're short on older era units and I think I agree that it makes sense to have the Aiel UU be towards the beginning of the tech tree. Also mentioned elsewhere, having the Aiel UA grant them military advantages over other civilizations is a representation of the Aiel's superior individual warriors, compared to everyone else. A lot of wars in CiV aren't fought by UUs, so this is in many ways a more accurate representation of the Aiel's particular societal advantages.
I can see what Calavente means about the Aiel maxing out the military tree right away and there are certainly 4X games where that happens (Endless Space has 4 tech trees that all branch out from a central point - though in practice it's difficult to beeline up one tree).
I think we'll have significant opinions on mechanics like this when it comes to wonders - it seems like the same kind of flavor issue where I'm more in favor of fudging the flavor to make the game work better. Potentially controversial example (that we'll probably have to come back to later rather than discuss at length now) - I think civs should be able to build the Stone of Tear (just named the "The Stone" much like "The Great Wall" I'd imagine), and possibly relatively early. Because it passes up such a dramatic amount of in-universe-applicable roles that we need to fill in that time frame. But anyway, that specific case is more for when we're deciding on a wonder list - which needs the overarching game systems to be set fairly in stone.
This does bring up a problematic thing though, and one that stems from us only having "modern" civs - we have no ancient UUs and very few midgame UUs. MAnetheren and the Aiel may be the only real examples. In the interest of balance, this kind of thing may the reason we have to have a few other old civs at launch - to fill in those gaps in eras 1-4.
Revisiting Hawkwing as a launch civ?
I think I'm a bit more amenable to this reasoning though! Do we have other good candidates for historical civs that we didn't mention last time?
Yeah, I thought that we were planning on SOMETHING happening on a "global scale" around the Hawkwing era. A War of Hundred Years thing might not be a great idea - we already have a couple "mandated wars" in our timeline, and you can't exactly force all the civs to go to war. Some kind of diplomatic event, as you guys have been talking about, has seemed to me to be the way to go. I'm not suggesting anybody be elected high king, but we should be able to work something out - hey, doesn't this Era correspond with the Renaissance - so wouldn't a World Congress-y thing pop up around now?
Yes, we didn't really go into detail on what we wanted with Hawkwing at the time. I think the World Congress analogue is tied up in our diplo victory and the White Tower. I'd quite like to have a more non-combat world event to add to the TW and LB, but still unsure on what it should be composed of.
I know you guys are talking about how the identity of the real Dragon is really important to the books.... Honestly, I don't think it is. We learn Rand is the Dragon at the end of book 1. And we, as the reader, assume it to be true. Certainly the rest of the world needed to be convinced, but the Reader Experience was most definitely not about that - it was about him gaining power, growing as a person, and hurtling towards the eventual last battle (hurtling at like 3 mph at times....). In any case, all this detecting-the-correct dragon, competing prophesies, civs trying to guess right.... it seems like we're really trying to simulate something from the books, and in the process would be creating something that feels very foreign to WoT.
I'm less sold on the idea of having to manually determine the identity of the real Dragon - mostly because I'm not sure we could do it properly and in a repeatably interesting way over several games. If we were working within a scripted experience (like Elder Scrolls) then things more like the events of the books work better, but we have to make more changes for a framework like CiV.
I think not knowing who the Dragon is is part of the world vs book events. In the books, Rand, Moiraine, and Siuan work out the whole Dragon identity fairly fast, like you say. But in our case, we (the players) are the other guys - Mattin Stepaneos and his ilk who refuse to believe until it's stuffed into their faces in the form of widespread starvation and rampaging Trollocs. I think it makes sense flavor wise to "not know" where the real Dragon is in some ways, but it's mechanically difficult.
The dichotomy vanishes once the Last Battle starts because
then everyone and their uncle knows Rand is the Dragon. Our Dragon mechanics rely on the assumption that a "known Dragon" can take actions - which is the case during the Last Battle, less so beforehand.
There it is! I knew somebody had already made the suggestion I made a couple posts ago (the one that I don't really like anymore...)
I think I reread this whole thing like 5 times before I realized what you meant here
- that Calavente's post you're quoting is from a few pages back!
HEY GUYS, I think I figured it out. It seems to work, at least mostly.
First off, I use openoffic, because free. There's an addon called BBkoΔe I found (
http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/bbkode ) that will convert
documents into bbcode! Now, it does some weird things, in that it doesn't recognize the LIST tags and stuff like that, but it DOES do all the bolds and italics and stuff, which is really rather awesome.
Hilariously, I did a lot of googling and finally found the answer when I stumbled on this page - it's a brony site!
http://www.bronyville.org/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=3722 This guy is explaining this all very well.... to help people write brony fanfic. We'll use it for modding, thank you very much!
Interesting and strange! Useful though - I've taken a look and it looks like some people have done similar things for Word, though none are particularly polished. I'm not sure if bbcode is strictly standardized across different forum hosting software, which would make life difficult for people writing these kinds of add-ons!
Right. I don't really mean "what are you calling the archeo" so much as "is this unit going to be our archaeo unit, or is this an entirely separate unit that ONLY searches for seals?"
I think that's determined by whether or not we go for Seals-in-antiquity-sites. If we do, then our archeologist equivalent can do both. If Seals are separate "diggable" tiles, then I think we'd have a separate unit for Seals.
This kind of thing might just come down to programming specific conditional behavior, huh? Like, you force the AI to do X and Y in certain situations. Instead of actually making it "think" or anything. I know, of course, that all AI is this - I essentially just mean a more "heavyhanded" approach in this case.
The way the AI is done now is basically like this - though responsibility for specific game subsystems is handled separately (i.e. there's a citizen AI that assigns citizens for cities, which can be poked by the city production AI that decides what to build, but remains completely separate from the tactical AI that moves combat units - all within a single player). It responds to given situations in fixed ways, there are just so many variables in CiV that it's very difficult to tell
exactly what they'll do. In fact, if one were studious enough (going over the AI code and how it handles given circumstances) there are only some random elements (flavor system can introduce randomness though given enough time you could probably predict that too) that prevent you from making perfect predictions of what the AI will do.
Of course, predicting exactly what the AI will do based on its encoded behavior and the state of the game is a much more computationally intensive task (in some ways) that just letting it go ahead and finding out what happens.
This feels very relevant right now.
Right. I think whatever hawkwing-era thing happens should be smaller (diplo, etc.), not all-consuming like the TW or LB. On that note, probably the TW shouldn't really be all consuming, especially since it's so early. Just like barbarians times 10... ok maybe that's all consuming!
I think in terms of how much it impacts everyone, the Trolloc Wars should be felt everywhere and be most player's primary concern for a while. But I'm not sure if it should reshape the entire face of the world like it did in WoT (because we can't do the re-emerging different nations stuff). Whereas the Last Battle I'd say definitely - things should never be the same in that game again for anyone.
