S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

It's not that I think it's better in general, but that as a single unique it pushes Alignment harder than the LP one does, because it's more available. I'm happy with it as an OR, so like so:

UA: Foreign Indoctrination
UU: Hundredman's Battery
UU: Hand of the Light (LP) OR Hand of the Light (path)
UB: Dome of Truth (pressure) or Hand of the Light (LP)

I removed Bannerman as an OR from slot 3 - is that the right place to do that? I figured we wouldn't want 3 ORs for the same unit by adding it to slot 1. (They're not exactly the same, but we'd never choose more than one of them.) And I didn't want to go into triple-UU style again on slot 4.

I'm fine with removing the Bannerman. It could be an Alternate to the Hundredman, but of course they serve different purposes.

Argh! But this is the last civ and we've gotten it down to 2 on all of the other ones!

good point!

I agree on the Spymaster UA. And actually looking at the non-UA options in that set, it doesn't have nearly as much of the "centerpiece" flavor that calls out Amadicia. These factors combined make me think we should drop that set and keep the other 2.

fine with dropping it.

That would leave us with (potentially some changes remaining on other quote blocks on this post:

UA: Foreign Indoctrination
UU: Hundredman's Battery
UU: Hand of the Light (LP) OR Hand of the Light (path)
UB: Dome of Truth (pressure) or Hand of the Light (LP)

UA: Adherents to Scripture
UU: Hundredman OR Hundredman's Battery
UU: Hand of the Light (LP)
UI: Disputed Border Encampment OR UB: Dome of Truth (Pressure)

Seems to represent them well? Should we get the Guardian of the Gate in there somewhere?

The guardian of the gate, mechanically, is somewhat like the Bannerman, in that it's "just" a combat unit (though the Ban is a little more obviously flavorful). That said, the *flavor* of the Guardian is "real" flavor, which makes it a little more compelling to use.

Without the possibility of a triple-UU set, or three-option-on-one-slot, I don't see how it's possible to put those in, though. The first UU in the first set, and the second UU in the second set seem to occupy rather specific functions, mechanically, such that I'm not sure we can OR these guys there. That bums me out, a little - the Guardian for flavor reasons, and the Bannerman for mechanical reasons.

I think we could also theoretically rename things to accommodate the Guardian flavor, though I'm we don't need to decide that now. The first UA could theoretically be called "Guardians of the Gate" or something. The Hundredman stuff could also be renamed to that.

Not sure how to work in the Bannerman. Oh well!

As far as the lack of Spymaster flavor that I previously lamented - we could always just use that flavor as a generic name for our Spy 2 building, if we don't use it with this civ.

I meant it pops up the "wonder has been built in a foreign land" and stops wonder production for a foreign player who has the Amadician spymaster in their city - that's his effect. To make the player think the wonder has been built abroad, when actually they've just been sabotaged. They wouldn't be able to tell that apart from it happening normally, which gets rid of the meta aspect of it. But we'd need to lock that player out of building that wonder, even though no one else has constructed it yet (otherwise they could still meta it) and the ability would become all about wonders.

hmmm, sorry to say that I don't really like this. Put simply, having a civ be locked out of building a wonder (even just in one city) perpetually seems really, really sucky. Not sure what else to say but that.

Siphoning off production sounds like something that could work! "Every time the city the Spymaster is stationed in finishes producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city."? That works with the flavor and doesn't tip off the opponent about what it does.

I suppose this is the way to go, then! I do feel like some other element besides just production might make it feel more fun, so I added the last thing about the Questioner effect. This might be too minor, though.... Also, if we're considering this as an option for one or both of our sets, if it's in a set that also includes one of the Hands of the Light, we should probably change this bonus, since this effect (rare as it is) sort of intrudes on their value. If it is the OR to the Hand of the Light in the third set, though, that's not a big problem.

I wouldn't be inclined to keep it around if we're not going to use it. I agree that it's unique, but we should find an effective way to use that uniqueness, rather than increase the number of factors we need to consider when deciding on final uniques for the civs without cause.

this is about the UEaE, right? If we keep it, it'll be in a newer form, as discussed.

I think this one is a bit too epic - it does a whole bunch of very different things. And it suffers from the same issue we had with some of the older uniques and spying, in that it rewards you for everything to do with Espionage, rather than playing a specific way.

ok.


Recap!

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, replaces Spy2, this city receives the benefits from all Follower Customs from Paths that have any followers in this city, instead of just the majority.
• Spymaster's Backroom, replaces Spy2, trade routes established in or trading to this city secretly provide Amadicia with +X Culture and +Y Science per turn.
• Spymaster's Den, replaces Spy1, whenever a technology is stolen from this city, Amadicia receives a free technology that the stealing civ has but Amadicia doesn't (if there are any).

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (sabotage), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. When stationed in a city of a major civilization, the Spymaster has X% chance to sabotage the production of that city (modified by the Spymaster's level as well as Eyes and Ears and buildings present in that city) every Y turns. Successfully sabotaging production lowers accumulated production by W and provides +Z production (high) in the Amadician capital. If the Spymaster is killed, he is reborn at level one.
• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).

Spymaster's Misdirection takes the Spymaster flavor and uses it for Path stuff.

first off, name confuses me, as it's not a building or something like a building. Didn't this ability exist earlier in Amadicia? Like, possibly as one of the first-round offerings? I feel like it intrudes a bit too much on the likely policy or tenet or whatever it is that also grants this.

In case we have enough Path stuff, Spymaster's Backroom provides a very different kind of bonus, using the flavor of "siphoning off secrets" from traders in the city. By "secretly" that means it doesn't show up in the list of yields when a foreign player is choosing where to send a trade route (so it won't influence their decision). It's also a Culture ability, which could be useful since it fits!

flavor link is a little odd, but this is ok. The ability feels a little random for what the overall trajectory of this civ, is. I'd rather see something that's at least tangentially connected to espionage. Doesn't make much sense attached to a building like this.

Spymaster's Den relates more specifically to the Espionage mechanics. I went with Spy1 instead of Spy2 to give it more time to be activated. It may be that this is too dependent on enemies though, that people just won't spy on Amadicia. It's not a visible bonus to the foreign players though - they can't see Amadicia gain the tech.

Interesting, I like that this connects to espionage. It is rather tied to foreign players' actions, though. I'd think people will mostly avoid stealing from Amadicia for this reason. Also, this kind of thing feels like it might end up not working most of the time. You have to be behind that civ in a key area, so you have something to steal, but ahead in another era, so that you have something they can steal. I suppose it encourages you to beeline or something (to military techs, likely), to provide for this, but I'm not sure we want to go that way. Kind of a weird situation, like Assyria, but at least with Assyria, they don't have to be ahead of any of the other civs in any direct science way (they simply have to be better militarily).

I think this one has potential. I'd really rather see there be some way to work in the actual Amadician EaE, though, and not in a way that forces them to camp at home. True that my Den might have been too powerful.... but might there still be a way to have a Spy building that rewards some things they're doing?

 

[S3rgeus]

Tonight! It unlocks tonight! There are already some interesting things on the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum. Based on Rob (R8XFT)'s posted Anno Domini mod, it looks very similar to CiV with its XML/SQL/Lua (he made this mod impressively fast). Firaxis will need to release the tools for us to know if we've got the game source in C++, which we'd need for WoTMod to be possible (unless they've expanded the capabilities of the scripting systems dramatically, which seems unlikely).

Art mods are also allegedly impossible at present in CiVI, but I imagine that will be rectified or discovered to be incorrect shortly.

The guardian of the gate, mechanically, is somewhat like the Bannerman, in that it's "just" a combat unit (though the Ban is a little more obviously flavorful). That said, the *flavor* of the Guardian is "real" flavor, which makes it a little more compelling to use.

Without the possibility of a triple-UU set, or three-option-on-one-slot, I don't see how it's possible to put those in, though. The first UU in the first set, and the second UU in the second set seem to occupy rather specific functions, mechanically, such that I'm not sure we can OR these guys there. That bums me out, a little - the Guardian for flavor reasons, and the Bannerman for mechanical reasons.

I think we could also theoretically rename things to accommodate the Guardian flavor, though I'm we don't need to decide that now. The first UA could theoretically be called "Guardians of the Gate" or something. The Hundredman stuff could also be renamed to that.

Not sure how to work in the Bannerman. Oh well!

Yeah, I don't see how best to put those guys in either. Let's leave them out for now and we'll see how we go when we come back around to Amadicia!

As far as the lack of Spymaster flavor that I previously lamented - we could always just use that flavor as a generic name for our Spy 2 building, if we don't use it with this civ.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like the Espionage system is doing us many favors when trying to come up with a unique! We could always go with something very straightforward that adds a yield to one of the Spy buildings?

hmmm, sorry to say that I don't really like this. Put simply, having a civ be locked out of building a wonder (even just in one city) perpetually seems really, really sucky. Not sure what else to say but that.

I'm don't much like it either, so let's leave it out!

I suppose this is the way to go, then! I do feel like some other element besides just production might make it feel more fun, so I added the last thing about the Questioner effect. This might be too minor, though.... Also, if we're considering this as an option for one or both of our sets, if it's in a set that also includes one of the Hands of the Light, we should probably change this bonus, since this effect (rare as it is) sort of intrudes on their value. If it is the OR to the Hand of the Light in the third set, though, that's not a big problem.

That seems like a good addition. I'd say even with that ability he could co-exist with the Hand of the Light (LP). It's not his primary function to provide the Questioner effect, and when he does it's still a little boost. Might let Amadicia expend the LP in a different city if they thought the Spymaster was doing enough work in the city he's in.

this is about the UEaE, right? If we keep it, it'll be in a newer form, as discussed.

Yep, sounds good.

first off, name confuses me, as it's not a building or something like a building. Didn't this ability exist earlier in Amadicia? Like, possibly as one of the first-round offerings? I feel like it intrudes a bit too much on the likely policy or tenet or whatever it is that also grants this.

It's the same name as a UA. For all three of these suggestions, I was very much just throwing concepts at the wall to see if any stick or inspired anything better. (I should have mentioned that last time!)

Wasn't the biggest fan of this one. Gone!

flavor link is a little odd, but this is ok. The ability feels a little random for what the overall trajectory of this civ, is. I'd rather see something that's at least tangentially connected to espionage. Doesn't make much sense attached to a building like this.

It makes a lot of flavor sense, spies often operate through trade. But I agree that it's a very different mechanical approach to what we're going for for Amadicia, so let's scrap it for that!

Interesting, I like that this connects to espionage. It is rather tied to foreign players' actions, though. I'd think people will mostly avoid stealing from Amadicia for this reason. Also, this kind of thing feels like it might end up not working most of the time. You have to be behind that civ in a key area, so you have something to steal, but ahead in another era, so that you have something they can steal. I suppose it encourages you to beeline or something (to military techs, likely), to provide for this, but I'm not sure we want to go that way. Kind of a weird situation, like Assyria, but at least with Assyria, they don't have to be ahead of any of the other civs in any direct science way (they simply have to be better militarily).

I think the situation where this triggers will be available more often than it may seem. I can often steal at least one tech from civs who steal from me, and even just one tech is a free tech, which is a significant boost.

I don't like the dependency on enemy actions though. You're right that other players, if they're smart, won't spy on Amadicia unless it's an absolute last resort (in which case the situation above is less likely to occur than usual).

Red!

I think this one has potential. I'd really rather see there be some way to work in the actual Amadician EaE, though, and not in a way that forces them to camp at home. True that my Den might have been too powerful.... but might there still be a way to have a Spy building that rewards some things they're doing?

The spying mechanics have made this difficult so far! Let's take a quick look at what EaE are used for and maybe that will bring us back to something that we can change about them:

• Steal techs from players over X turns
• Initiate coups in City-States
• Become Diplomats and create Tourism + allow negotiating for Compact votes
• Provide information about wonders being built in cities
• Provide intrigue (plot to surprise attack, etc.) on player being spied on

What about a completely bananas new idea? Suggestion below.


Recap!

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.
• Spymaster's Backroom, replaces Spy2, trade routes established in or trading to this city secretly provide Amadicia with +X Culture and +Y Science per turn.
• Spymaster's Den, replaces Spy1, whenever a technology is stolen from this city, Amadicia receives a free technology that the stealing civ has but Amadicia doesn't (if there are any).

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).
• Spymaster (betrayal), one Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Can "Incite Rebellion" in a foreign city. Rebellions have an X% chance of succeeding, where X is determined by Amadicia's Cultural influence over the host civ or Influence with the City-State, and the defensive strength of the city. When a rebellion succeeds, the city is captured by Amadicia as if through military conquest and, if the host civ is still in the game, Amadicia immediately declares war on them. When a rebellion fails, the Spymaster dies (the next Eyes and Ears Amadicia receives will be a new Spymaster) and there is a Y% chance the host civ will discover Amadicia's connection to the event.

Spymaster (betrayal) - straight up steal cities from people. You can use it on major civs or CSes, which is what some of the disambiguation is for ("if the host civ is still in the game" - CSes most often won't be). Using this on a CS that has an ally (other than yourself) would cause a big negative diplo modifier (as if Amadicia had attacked the CS). (Using it on your own ally would be similar to attacking an allied CS, would make other CSes dislike you.) And the whole "Y%" chance thing is for having a chance to have a massive negative diplo modifier even if the ability fails, seeing as there needs to be some kind of balancing factor preventing Amadicia from just doing it all the time. (They need to be able to back up the new war as well - they can't just grab a city willy-nilly since the civ will presumably take it back if Amadicia doesn't move in to defend.) The list of factors that affect X% isn't exhaustive - we'd probably want to consider Population, if there are any garrisoned units (and how strong), whether it's a major civ's capital, etc.

 

[counterpoint]

Tonight! It unlocks tonight! There are already some interesting things on the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum. Based on Rob (R8XFT)'s posted Anno Domini mod, it looks very similar to CiV with its XML/SQL/Lua (he made this mod impressively fast). Firaxis will need to release the tools for us to know if we've got the game source in C++, which we'd need for WoTMod to be possible (unless they've expanded the capabilities of the scripting systems dramatically, which seems unlikely).

Art mods are also allegedly impossible at present in CiVI, but I imagine that will be rectified or discovered to be incorrect shortly.

ok... we'll have to wait and see!

Obviously I haven't installed mine yet, but, thankfully, I think my gaming hiatus will likely be able to end very soon, as I'm almost done with an epic project at work! Hmmm.. this weekend, maybe?

Yeah, I don't see how best to put those guys in either. Let's leave them out for now and we'll see how we go when we come back around to Amadicia!

Yeah, it doesn't seem like the Espionage system is doing us many favors when trying to come up with a unique! We could always go with something very straightforward that adds a yield to one of the Spy buildings

yeah, we could do that. It's not so inspired, though... would we really choose it over one of the others?

It's the same name as a UA. For all three of these suggestions, I was very much just throwing concepts at the wall to see if any stick or inspired anything better. (I should have mentioned that last time!)

Wasn't the biggest fan of this one. Gone!

ok, gone! I knew it was the name from the UA, but it... still didn't seem like a building to me

It makes a lot of flavor sense, spies often operate through trade. But I agree that it's a very different mechanical approach to what we're going for for Amadicia, so let's scrap it for that!

yeah, and it's not that I can't see a connection between trade and spies, its that I can't see a clear one between trade and Amadician Spymasters. When I think of that piece of flavor, trade mechanics is most definitely not the first thing that comes to mind.

I think the situation where this triggers will be available more often than it may seem. I can often steal at least one tech from civs who steal from me, and even just one tech is a free tech, which is a significant boost.

I don't like the dependency on enemy actions though. You're right that other players, if they're smart, won't spy on Amadicia unless it's an absolute last resort (in which case the situation above is less likely to occur than usual).

Red!

:nukeemojithatdoesn'texist:

The spying mechanics have made this difficult so far! Let's take a quick look at what EaE are used for and maybe that will bring us back to something that we can change about them:

• Steal techs from players over X turns
• Initiate coups in City-States
• Become Diplomats and create Tourism + allow negotiating for Compact votes
• Provide information about wonders being built in cities
• Provide intrigue (plot to surprise attack, etc.) on player being spied on

What about a completely bananas new idea? Suggestion below.

Spymaster (betrayal) - straight up steal cities from people. You can use it on major civs or CSes, which is what some of the disambiguation is for ("if the host civ is still in the game" - CSes most often won't be). Using this on a CS that has an ally (other than yourself) would cause a big negative diplo modifier (as if Amadicia had attacked the CS). (Using it on your own ally would be similar to attacking an allied CS, would make other CSes dislike you.) And the whole "Y%" chance thing is for having a chance to have a massive negative diplo modifier even if the ability fails, seeing as there needs to be some kind of balancing factor preventing Amadicia from just doing it all the time. (They need to be able to back up the new war as well - they can't just grab a city willy-nilly since the civ will presumably take it back if Amadicia doesn't move in to defend.) The list of factors that affect X% isn't exhaustive - we'd probably want to consider Population, if there are any garrisoned units (and how strong), whether it's a major civ's capital, etc.

I think this is ridiculous.

I also like it, though!

i'm not sure, really, if we can do this, but we might be able to actually do this. First off, let's look at the flavor: are we justified in this? There isn't anything direct in the flavor that suggests this... Maybe we could reframe it as some kind of fundamentalist takeover? That actually makes me think that one of the big modifiers should be whether a civ is of the same Path as Amadicia - or perhaps even Alignment, which is an unusual turn on the whole notion that usually civs of the same path/alignment as a civ are usually friendly towards that civ... until they steal your cities. This also very much syncs up with the Path/Alignment/Culture possibilities of this civ, encouraging them to go all out in these sectors of the game.

Mechanically, I'm pretty torn on this. On the one hand, it's quite unique and, especially if it synergizes with Paths and stuff like that, syncs with the civ in general quite well. On the other hand, though...

- it's a little weird to give them a "bloodless domination" route, when, fundamentally, they pretty much make sense as a "not bloodless domination" civ. I don't know if there's a real way to rectify that, though.

- I wonder if this would actually be *fun*. I worry that it's really a whole bunch of waiting around, crossing your fingers, and reloading your game if your Spy dies. I know that's technically cheating, but I do a fair bit of reloading if I'm in a situation where "bad decision = game over," like five turns into a late-game war and I lose my capital and all my units, or one turn left for early-game wonder and it's sniped. With something *this* big - the possibility of getting a free city (a capital!) or not, it feels like we've created such an all-or-nothing event that it's hard to balance. It's either bad news or ridiculous, potentially game-winning news. In other words, waiting around + stress.

- Because of the above, this seems super hard to balance. The percentage would need to be relatively low, or else its too good, but then you've got the possibility of going a whole game and stealing exactly zero cities. That's tough news.

- I wonder what it'd be like from the perspective of everybody else. Boom. Your city is gone. Boom, your capital is gone. Yes, it might be a low percentage, but what does that matter when it's happening to you? Makes the existence of Amadicia in a game really hard to deal with. And to that end, defending against it... Presumably all the anti-spy stuff would work, plus resisting culture, paths, alignment, etc. I suppose it's just a hard balance to strike between it being too unfair and good, and being to easy to block.

This is tough! I think this is a pretty cool idea, but it is also kind of freaky...

Recap!

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).
• Spymaster (betrayal), one Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Can "Incite Rebellion" in a foreign city. Rebellions have an X% chance of succeeding, where X is determined by Amadicia's Cultural influence over the host civ or Influence with the City-State, and the defensive strength of the city. When a rebellion succeeds, the city is captured by Amadicia as if through military conquest and, if the host civ is still in the game, Amadicia immediately declares war on them. When a rebellion fails, the Spymaster dies (the next Eyes and Ears Amadicia receives will be a new Spymaster) and there is a Y% chance the host civ will discover Amadicia's connection to the event.

 

[S3rgeus]

Apologies for the delay! I've been CiVIing! It's so much fun!

ok... we'll have to wait and see!

Obviously I haven't installed mine yet, but, thankfully, I think my gaming hiatus will likely be able to end very soon, as I'm almost done with an epic project at work! Hmmm.. this weekend, maybe?

Awesome, glad you'll have more time for it soon! What do you think of it so far?

I'm a big fan of what I've played! I haven't finished a game yet, but I played a chunk of it yesterday, and a big 6 player multiplayer game on Friday (we didn't get to the end of that either). It's very strange having to relearn so much stuff! Housing seems to be my biggest problem at the moment, my cities frequently run short of housing for quite a while. It's also really nice to need a bigger army with the more aggressive AI and Barbarians. Even when playing peaceful I need to roam some units around.

I'd also say I'd need to play a lot to be able to reason about how to turn it into a mod like WoTMod!

yeah, we could do that. It's not so inspired, though... would we really choose it over one of the others?

Only if we really wanted to include the Spymaster flavor. But I'm liking the (betrayal) guy below as a possible solution to having a Spymaster option.

I think this is ridiculous.

I also like it, though!

i'm not sure, really, if we can do this, but we might be able to actually do this. First off, let's look at the flavor: are we justified in this? There isn't anything direct in the flavor that suggests this... Maybe we could reframe it as some kind of fundamentalist takeover? That actually makes me think that one of the big modifiers should be whether a civ is of the same Path as Amadicia - or perhaps even Alignment, which is an unusual turn on the whole notion that usually civs of the same path/alignment as a civ are usually friendly towards that civ... until they steal your cities. This also very much syncs up with the Path/Alignment/Culture possibilities of this civ, encouraging them to go all out in these sectors of the game.

Yep, using the Path majority as a major modifier sounds good. In fact, making it a requirement would go quite a ways to solving some of the issues below. The spread of Amadicia's Path is something that a "defending" player can knowingly take a risk on. If they know Amadicia can't flip their cities without converting it, they can work really hard to hold Amadicia's Path back. Conversely, Amadicia can put effort in to ensuring they have the opportunity to use the Spymaster unique using their other uniques (and the main game mechanics). This lets us make the probability of success higher (read: not incredibly tiny), which makes the ability more interesting since it's impactful more often.

Mechanically, I'm pretty torn on this. On the one hand, it's quite unique and, especially if it synergizes with Paths and stuff like that, syncs with the civ in general quite well. On the other hand, though...

- it's a little weird to give them a "bloodless domination" route, when, fundamentally, they pretty much make sense as a "not bloodless domination" civ. I don't know if there's a real way to rectify that, though.

I don't think this is an issue really. It's all about the flavor set dressing of how the ability is presented. It shouldn't be "bloodless domination" - it should be sudden rebellious violence that kicks off a war, that's the intended flavor of the ability. Note that success always leads to war with the other player (and failure does sometimes as well) so it should make them quite an aggressive civ, which fits with this flavor.

Particularly if combined with a Path requirement, since it means Amadicia will want to aggressively spread their Path to other civs.

- I wonder if this would actually be *fun*. I worry that it's really a whole bunch of waiting around, crossing your fingers, and reloading your game if your Spy dies. I know that's technically cheating, but I do a fair bit of reloading if I'm in a situation where "bad decision = game over," like five turns into a late-game war and I lose my capital and all my units, or one turn left for early-game wonder and it's sniped. With something *this* big - the possibility of getting a free city (a capital!) or not, it feels like we've created such an all-or-nothing event that it's hard to balance. It's either bad news or ridiculous, potentially game-winning news. In other words, waiting around + stress.

I think the Path requirement helps this a bit, because it makes the ability to use this ability something that can be interacted with by players on both sides.

Just to be clear on this, I'm thinking this would be an ability that the player chooses to activate (like CS coups, which is probably the most similar mechanic to this in BNW), rather than having a % chance to activate over time. So there shouldn't be much waiting around if Amadicia has decided on a target.

As for stress, I see it as an "edge of your seat" thing, rather than a stressful thing. But that will vary from player to player.

And for save scumming (reloading saves to get different results), CiV seems to be fairly permissive of that in general, because if people do that there will always be some advantage in it as long as the game contains elements of randomness in it. One of CiV's options ("new random seed on reload" or whatever it's called) even specifically enable save scumming by making it so that the same sequence of random events won't necessarily produce the same outcomes when performed again in the same order. There are things we can do to make reloading less effective on this ability (calculating the results at known intervals and persisting it in the save game rather than at the time of the attempt, things like that), but I'm not sure if it's worth it, since there will be players who just want to do that and players who won't do it no matter its benefits.

The city won't be free either - it's a conquest city, so it will bring a lot of unhappiness with it, and have all the usual citizens die, buildings destroyed, etc as if Amadicia had walked a military unit into it. (With the added possibility that there are a bunch of now enemy units surrounding it, since Amadicia presumably was doing this because they weren't about to capture the city by force anyway.)

- Because of the above, this seems super hard to balance. The percentage would need to be relatively low, or else its too good, but then you've got the possibility of going a whole game and stealing exactly zero cities. That's tough news.

I think the Path following requirement helps this a lot, since it reduces Amadicia's available targets in a way that can be helped by them and hindered by their opponents. So there's a visible mechanic they can use to jostle back and forth on that. That means we can make the chance of success a bit higher, so Amadicia won't go through games without the ability ever working (unless they're not using it).

- I wonder what it'd be like from the perspective of everybody else. Boom. Your city is gone. Boom, your capital is gone. Yes, it might be a low percentage, but what does that matter when it's happening to you? Makes the existence of Amadicia in a game really hard to deal with. And to that end, defending against it... Presumably all the anti-spy stuff would work, plus resisting culture, paths, alignment, etc. I suppose it's just a hard balance to strike between it being too unfair and good, and being to easy to block.

Also helped by the Path requirement! The anti-spy stuff would definitely become more important, but the first line of defense is keeping away Amadicia's Path. That will probably be hard to do, which is where the anti-spy stuff comes in, but it also means Amadicia may use it to create footholds in wars against strong opponents (since it's easier to convert border cities than entrenched foreign-Path capitals), which is a cool usage of this ability.

This is tough! I think this is a pretty cool idea, but it is also kind of freaky...

Hopefully the above helps out a bit!

If we like this guy, I could see him taking the Hand of the Light (LP) slot in set 1 (ORed with the Hand of the Light (path)) and/or ORed onto the final slot in set 1.



Recap!

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).
• Spymaster (betrayal), one Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Can "Incite Rebellion" in a foreign city that has the same majority Path as the majority of Amadicia's cities. Rebellions have an X% chance of succeeding, where X is determined by Amadicia's Cultural influence over the host civ or Influence with the City-State, and the defensive strength of the city. When a rebellion succeeds, the city is captured by Amadicia as if through military conquest and, if the host civ is still in the game, Amadicia immediately declares war on them. When a rebellion fails, the Spymaster dies (the next Eyes and Ears Amadicia receives will be a new Spymaster) and there is a Y% chance the host civ will discover Amadicia's connection to the event.

 

[counterpoint]

Awesome, glad you'll have more time for it soon! What do you think of it so far?

I'm a big fan of what I've played! I haven't finished a game yet, but I played a chunk of it yesterday, and a big 6 player multiplayer game on Friday (we didn't get to the end of that either). It's very strange having to relearn so much stuff! Housing seems to be my biggest problem at the moment, my cities frequently run short of housing for quite a while. It's also really nice to need a bigger army with the more aggressive AI and Barbarians. Even when playing peaceful I need to roam some units around.

I'd also say I'd need to play a lot to be able to reason about how to turn it into a mod like WoTMod!

Yeah, so I started a game earlier today. Into the Classical era is as far as a got. I was trying to read through the manual in pieces over the past few days. Unfortunately, I only really got through the combat stuff, which is rather similar to CiV... so upon seeing Housing and Districts and all this, didn't have any knowledge of how it all worked. And I have it set to "New to Civ VI" and not "New to Civ" and am getting very little help...

So, in other words, it's hard to really evaluate any of this new stuff. I like how the things you do give you boosts to learning techs and civics. That's a nice touch. Can't say I really get the Districts yet. I also like what I see so far on diplo, as least as far as the surprise wars vs. formal wars, etc.

Who have you played as? I'm playing as Gilgamesh, and have found his UA sort of absentee... its something to do with goodie huts or barb encampments, and I'm not sure it's really done much. He has a UU, though, which I've been using.

Been thinking the whole time about WotModability, mostly in terms of "how different is this from what we've committed to?" It's hard to say. Some of the things potentially would be a nice fit - Districts and such scream "Rahad" and "Foregate" (Unique Districts). Not clear yet how much we'd have to go back to the drawing board,though, which is not idea (looks like with Civics, we would).

It also feels like it's slow going, which makes it a little unexciting at this stage. However, I suspect that is due to one of two things, or perhaps both: 1) my old, sad computer, and 2)the fact that I've played civ5 with animations of all sorts disabled since, like, my second game (I'm trying to experience how this all looks for now before I likely do the same...)

Yep, using the Path majority as a major modifier sounds good. In fact, making it a requirement would go quite a ways to solving some of the issues below. The spread of Amadicia's Path is something that a "defending" player can knowingly take a risk on. If they know Amadicia can't flip their cities without converting it, they can work really hard to hold Amadicia's Path back. Conversely, Amadicia can put effort in to ensuring they have the opportunity to use the Spymaster unique using their other uniques (and the main game mechanics). This lets us make the probability of success higher (read: not incredibly tiny), which makes the ability more interesting since it's impactful more often.

I agree!

I don't think this is an issue really. It's all about the flavor set dressing of how the ability is presented. It shouldn't be "bloodless domination" - it should be sudden rebellious violence that kicks off a war, that's the intended flavor of the ability. Note that success always leads to war with the other player (and failure does sometimes as well) so it should make them quite an aggressive civ, which fits with this flavor.

Particularly if combined with a Path requirement, since it means Amadicia will want to aggressively spread their Path to other civs.

yeah, I think we can name it impressively to make it fit!

I think the Path requirement helps this a bit, because it makes the ability to use this ability something that can be interacted with by players on both sides.

Just to be clear on this, I'm thinking this would be an ability that the player chooses to activate (like CS coups, which is probably the most similar mechanic to this in BNW), rather than having a % chance to activate over time. So there shouldn't be much waiting around if Amadicia has decided on a target.

ok, great.That makes sense. I had it in my head that it was an "every X turns" thing like other spy actions, despite you making it pretty clear that it wasn't that way...

As for stress, I see it as an "edge of your seat" thing, rather than a stressful thing. But that will vary from player to player.

And for save scumming (reloading saves to get different results), CiV seems to be fairly permissive of that in general, because if people do that there will always be some advantage in it as long as the game contains elements of randomness in it. One of CiV's options ("new random seed on reload" or whatever it's called) even specifically enable save scumming by making it so that the same sequence of random events won't necessarily produce the same outcomes when performed again in the same order. There are things we can do to make reloading less effective on this ability (calculating the results at known intervals and persisting it in the save game rather than at the time of the attempt, things like that), but I'm not sure if it's worth it, since there will be players who just want to do that and players who won't do it no matter its benefits.

I think, in any case, that's not something we need to decide here. Whether we "lock the rolls" when people save or not doesn't need to be a part of the ability's fundamentals

The city won't be free either - it's a conquest city, so it will bring a lot of unhappiness with it, and have all the usual citizens die, buildings destroyed, etc as if Amadicia had walked a military unit into it. (With the added possibility that there are a bunch of now enemy units surrounding it, since Amadicia presumably was doing this because they weren't about to capture the city by force anyway.)

Right, that's a good point. What about any units living *on* it? Garrisons, civilians, and <gasp> those five air units? Destroyed? Captured?

I think the Path following requirement helps this a lot, since it reduces Amadicia's available targets in a way that can be helped by them and hindered by their opponents. So there's a visible mechanic they can use to jostle back and forth on that. That means we can make the chance of success a bit higher, so Amadicia won't go through games without the ability ever working (unless they're not using it).

sure. makes sense.

Also helped by the Path requirement! The anti-spy stuff would definitely become more important, but the first line of defense is keeping away Amadicia's Path. That will probably be hard to do, which is where the anti-spy stuff comes in, but it also means Amadicia may use it to create footholds in wars against strong opponents (since it's easier to convert border cities than entrenched foreign-Path capitals), which is a cool usage of this ability.

yeah, I agree!

What do we think of the flavor of Amadicia just razing these cities to the ground once the rebellion happens? That seems... interesting... and is probably what would happen, often.

Hopefully the above helps out a bit!

If we like this guy, I could see him taking the Hand of the Light (LP) slot in set 1 (ORed with the Hand of the Light (path)) and/or ORed onto the final slot in set 1.

sure, either of those sound fine. Should he also be ORed to the Hand of the Light (LP) in Set 2? I do feel like it'd be cool to provide an opportunity for this thing to exist at the same time as some kind of HotL unit, though.

I'm flexible.

Recap!

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).
• Spymaster (betrayal), one Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Can "Incite Rebellion" in a foreign city that has the same majority Path as the majority of Amadicia's cities. Rebellions have an X% chance of succeeding, where X is determined by Amadicia's Cultural influence over the host civ or Influence with the City-State, and the defensive strength of the city. When a rebellion succeeds, the city is captured by Amadicia as if through military conquest and, if the host civ is still in the game, Amadicia immediately declares war on them. When a rebellion fails, the Spymaster dies (the next Eyes and Ears Amadicia receives will be a new Spymaster) and there is a Y% chance the host civ will discover Amadicia's connection to the event.

And with that, it looks like we're done with the final civ in our first pass of civilization designs!

So, what's the next step, boss?

 

[S3rgeus]

Yeah, so I started a game earlier today. Into the Classical era is as far as a got. I was trying to read through the manual in pieces over the past few days. Unfortunately, I only really got through the combat stuff, which is rather similar to CiV... so upon seeing Housing and Districts and all this, didn't have any knowledge of how it all worked. And I have it set to "New to Civ VI" and not "New to Civ" and am getting very little help...

Yes, the "new to Civ6" doesn't really tell you much!

It took me forever to realize that techs have "generic" abilities that don't show up as icons on the techs, and are only visible in the tooltip. I wondered when I'd unlocked embarking when I suddenly discovered I could do it!

So, in other words, it's hard to really evaluate any of this new stuff. I like how the things you do give you boosts to learning techs and civics. That's a nice touch. Can't say I really get the Districts yet. I also like what I see so far on diplo, as least as far as the surprise wars vs. formal wars, etc.

Yes, I'm definitely liking the Cassus Belli stuff! I do find it unlocks a bit late though - I want liberation wars in the early game when someone kills my friendly CS!

The Eureka bonuses are also cool - it makes the situation in the game have a much bigger impact on any build order plan you've got.

Districts take a bit of wrangling, but I mostly see them as permanent yield sources. They can't be removed (I don't think?) and you can build other useful stuff on them. It seems to encourage specializing cities since there isn't enough time to build them all, at least as far as I've gotten. Some are especially tactically useful (like the Harbor allowing land cities to produce naval units). And the Encampment doubles up usefulness in Housing and military presence. Cities take a bit more forethought and I still don't have enough info ready at hand to recall to plan them properly from the early game.

Who have you played as? I'm playing as Gilgamesh, and have found his UA sort of absentee... its something to do with goodie huts or barb encampments, and I'm not sure it's really done much. He has a UU, though, which I've been using.

I've been playing as Brazil in my single player game and I played as Kongo in the multiplayer one. I definitely didn't know what to do with Kongo - I totally didn't use his uniques correctly.

Brazil I've been finding pretty cool - mostly GP bonuses and the Entertainment Complex replacement is cheaper and helpful for Amenities.

I've heard good things about Gilgamesh from other players - that his early game aggression is really strong. His ability gives you bonuses for clearing Barbarian camps and then the civ ability gives you EXP from your allies, right? Seems like you need to be aggressive to make use of either!

Been thinking the whole time about WotModability, mostly in terms of "how different is this from what we've committed to?" It's hard to say. Some of the things potentially would be a nice fit - Districts and such scream "Rahad" and "Foregate" (Unique Districts). Not clear yet how much we'd have to go back to the drawing board,though, which is not idea (looks like with Civics, we would).

A quick run through of our major systems:

I think the LB and Alignment stuff still all seems very applicable - as a new victory condition it's relatively unaffected by the changes in other systems. We'd need to tweak some things, but I think the crux of it would remain the same.

LP stuff also seems good. If anything Civ6's approach to GPs would make our LP changes more consistent with the base game (disparate LP sources). Unique abilities on each person is interesting, not sure what we'd do with that, but it would be an "addition" to what we've done already, not a rework.

T'a'r, like LB, seems fine mostly as is. Some tweaks because Civ6's entrypoints to the system have changed a bit, but the core of it would still work.

Channeling could remain much the same.

Paths also seem like they could survive. I haven't used religion much in Civ6, but tying it to a victory condition in WoTMod would be weird. It's not that important in the canon. We might need to do some heavy lifting there.

The Compact is... gone. This is unfortunate, relative to the Paths stuff. The World Congress as the Compact fit much better with Wheel of Time than Paths do as a victory. Compact still isn't the quintessential WoT victory, but it made sense. I expect we'd need to make some new Diplo system here. I think we'd be best served by something different from Civ5, since Firaxis removed Diplo as the newly-weakest-VC since Culture was improved.

The Tower is affected by the loss of the Compact, but otherwise still works with its Sisters and abilities, influence tiers, etc. These would be tied to Diplomats rather than influence points at the Tower Influence level, probably.

I haven't reached the endgame in Civ6, so I have no hands on experience with the new tech victory. From what I've heard, our changes should port over fairly simply.

Threads, Waygates, False Dragons, Era/Calendars, Ogier, and the Horn would all port over fairly easily.

Surprisingly our Espionage changes look like they would port ok, despite Civ6 Espionage being quite different.

Resources would need a bit of shuffling since there are different resources in 6, but the general idea remains the same.

Techs and uniques seem like they'd be a mostly lost cause. We can draw a lot of inspiration from what we've done here, but I think we'd need to build from the ground up on these.

Governors would port ok as well. They would interact with Amenities rather than Happiness, but otherwise still make the same sense.

Some new Civ6 systems and how they might work for us:

Districts, as you've mentioned, work well with the WoT canon. This is mostly a mechanical change to how cities work that I think we'd leave the same.

Government types could also mesh well, that could play into our channeling systems quite a bit. Same with all the cards.

The Tech/Civics split causes us a lot of pain with the work we've done already, but it does seem to me like it represents WoT better. WoT is a lot more about culture than tech, and a slowed tech tree with fewer techs works well with that. Letting Culture unlock stuff makes a lot of sense.

Cassus Belli makes sense in WoT. We'd probably change some (Holy War), but they have good substitutes (channeler belief, etc).

And while we're rebuilding things, if we ever are, it occurs to me that many of the armies in WoT are levied. We may want to change the lifecycle of units in general to reflect this in some way. I have ideas for that, but it's a whole other conversation. I never considered this kind of change until we'd mostly committed to the Civ5 tech tree structure, at which point we were a bit entrenched.

Deliverator has also found some good early signs of what working with graphics might be like in Civ6. This might be the thing that pushes us over to Civ6 in the end, if getting new units/animations into the game is much easier in Civ6. It's a massive pain in the face in Civ5, and the pool of artists working on doing so is only going to shrink. We need a lot of new models (and preferably some shiny new animations) to make WoTMod properly immersive, so this would be a big win for us.

It also feels like it's slow going, which makes it a little unexciting at this stage. However, I suspect that is due to one of two things, or perhaps both: 1) my old, sad computer, and 2)the fact that I've played civ5 with animations of all sorts disabled since, like, my second game (I'm trying to experience how this all looks for now before I likely do the same...)

Interesting, I've always played with animations on!

I do feel like the game is a bit slower paced than Civ5, but that might just be because I'm used to already knowing what I want to do!

Right, that's a good point. What about any units living *on* it? Garrisons, civilians, and <gasp> those five air units? Destroyed? Captured?

I'd say the same as if the city had been captured - so, destroyed!

What do we think of the flavor of Amadicia just razing these cities to the ground once the rebellion happens? That seems... interesting... and is probably what would happen, often.

Seems like that's all right with the flavor. Amadicia/the Children seem like that kind of people.

sure, either of those sound fine. Should he also be ORed to the Hand of the Light (LP) in Set 2? I do feel like it'd be cool to provide an opportunity for this thing to exist at the same time as some kind of HotL unit, though.

I don't think we can OR anything with Hand of the Light (LP) in set 2, because that's needed to pair with the UA to avoid the Wolfbrother mechanical synergy (if that synergy exists, we force Amadicia to use Wolfbrothers to play optimally, which contradicts their flavor).

We could OR him onto the final slot in set 2, if we wanted to make sure he was represented there? The previous 2 slots seem like they achieve much needed mechanical functions in that set.

And with that, it looks like we're done with the final civ in our first pass of civilization designs!

We are! And hilariously, Amadicia pushes the second design list post over the 30,000 character limit, so I've put them in another post (linked to from the other two) all by their lonesome below this.

So, what's the next step, boss?

After much digging (I read many pages to find the right discussions), it seems like we've got two things left that we want to possibly do together:

• final unique selection for the civs
• Policy/Tenet rework

The latter would be a nice break from uniques for a short while, and then we could come back to the former. However, we did flag this as something you could do an initial proposal on while I was implementing stuff and then we could reconvene on that. I'm not sure if that proposal would take enough time to be worth it to do it that way? Would it take more than a week or so? (About how long it would take me to get new changes up and running that are significant in any way.)

Or we could dive straight back into the final decisions on civ uniques. This we definitely need to do together, as we noted when we discussed this before. (That conversation starts here to make finding it again a bit easier.)

I'm conscious of the fact that both of these are in the "build again from the ground up" section of the switch to Civ6, and based on Firaxis's Civ5 tools release timeline, we'll get the Civ6 tools at the end of this week or next. Still, nothing particularly large happens in the scope of a week really, so no harm in diving deeper on either of these in that time.

You have a preference for one over the other?

 

[S3rgeus]

Other parts of this list: Part 1, Part 2.

Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)

UAs:

• Channeling Ban, Amadicia cannot produce Female1 units. Any channeling unit killed by Amadicia within Amadician territory spawns an Amadician Questioner. +X% combat strength against channeling units. +Y% growth in Amadician cities whenever there are no channeling units within Z hexes of the city.
• Foreign Indoctrination, when Amadicia captures a city that follows the majority Path in Amadicia, none of the buildings in the city are destroyed and only X% (like 50) of the usual Population is lost. Captured cities stay in resistance for Y fewer turns.
• Spymaster's Misdirection, when an Amadician Eyes and Ears would be killed spying on an enemy civilization, instead Amadicia gains +X Science and that Eyes and Ears is returned to the Amadician capital. Amadician units receive +X% combat strength when attacking cities that have an Amadician Eyes and Ears stationed in them.
• Adherents to Scripture, Threads encountered by Amadicia have additional response options to do with putting some participants in that Thread to the Question, providing different outcomes from the existing choices.

UUs:

• Hundredman, replaces Era 5-9 Melee unit, +X% combat strength. Each attack against cities generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city. This Pressure increases to +Z if the Hundredman captures the city.
• Bannerman, replaces anti-channeler, all channeling units within two hexes of the Bannerman suffer -X% to their ranged combat strength.
• Guardians of the Gate, replaces Era 5-8 Ranged, when attacked with a melee attack while within Amadician territory or the territory of a civilization bordering Amadicia, the Guardians make a ranged attack on the attacking unit before the melee attack takes place.
• Hundredman's Battery, replaces era 5-8 siege unit, +X% defense against Ranged attacks. When attacking enemy cities, generates +Y Path pressure of the majority Path of Amadicia in that city.
• Hand of the Light (path), replaces the Questioner. Also spreads the Path of the city it was spawned in, with a strength of X (like 500), when it influences the Alignment of a city.
• Hand of the Light (LP), replaces the Wolfbrother. Spawned by the use of Questioners by Amadicia, instead of T'a'r points. Creates the Sage Governor type, instead of the Ta'veren. Has two abilities:
  • Put to the Question - 2 uses, must be used adjacent to a city. Converts up to X citizens to the Alignment of the Amadician player's choice.
  • Call an Inquisition - Amadicia encounters a new Thread immediately and this unit is expended.

UBs:

• Dome of Truth (strength), replaces Defense 3, +X% city defense against channelers. +Y% ranged combat strength against Shadowspawn and channelers.
• Hundredman's Garrison, replaces EXP3, +X additional Experience for units produced in this City for every Alignment Tier away from neutral Amadicia occupies.
• Dome of Truth (pressure), replaces Culture4, +X Faith. This building's theming bonus exerts Path pressure on all other cities on the same continent as this city.

UIs:

• Disputed Border Encampment, can only be built on Luxury resources that are adjacent to an Amadician hex and are in another civilization's territory. Amadicia gains access to the Luxury as though it had improved it. Pillaging or destroying the Encampment is an act of war against Amadicia.

UEaEs:

• Spymaster (theft), One Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Every time a foreign city in which the Spymaster is stationed finished producing something, an Amadician city of Amadicia's choice gains +X Production, where X is Y% of the cost of the item produced in the foreign city. If the Spymaster successfully steals a technology from the city, the effects of a Questioner are felt in that city (including the Faith yield for Amadicia).
• Spymaster (betrayal), one Amadician Eyes and Ears becomes the Spymaster. Can "Incite Rebellion" in a foreign city that has the same majority Path as the majority of Amadicia's cities. Rebellions have an X% chance of succeeding, where X is determined by Amadicia's Cultural influence over the host civ or Influence with the City-State, and the defensive strength of the city. When a rebellion succeeds, the city is captured by Amadicia as if through military conquest and, if the host civ is still in the game, Amadicia immediately declares war on them. When a rebellion fails, the Spymaster dies (the next Eyes and Ears Amadicia receives will be a new Spymaster) and there is a Y% chance the host civ will discover Amadicia's connection to the event.

Sets:
Pathians
UA: Foreign Indoctrination
UU: Hundredman's Battery
UEaE: Spymaster (betrayal) OR UU: Hand of the Light (path)
UB: Dome of Truth (pressure) or Hand of the Light (LP)

Well Aligned
UA: Adherents to Scripture
UU: Hundredman OR Hundredman's Battery
UU: Hand of the Light (LP)
UI: Disputed Border Encampment OR UB: Dome of Truth (Pressure) OR UEaE: Spymaster (betrayal)

 

[counterpoint]

Yes, I'm definitely liking the Cassus Belli stuff! I do find it unlocks a bit late though - I want liberation wars in the early game when someone kills my friendly CS!

Oh, dang, that's something that unlocks? <rethinks the war he's about to start with Germany over Stockholm>

Districts take a bit of wrangling, but I mostly see them as permanent yield sources. They can't be removed (I don't think?) and you can build other useful stuff on them. It seems to encourage specializing cities since there isn't enough time to build them all, at least as far as I've gotten. Some are especially tactically useful (like the Harbor allowing land cities to produce naval units). And the Encampment doubles up usefulness in Housing and military presence. Cities take a bit more forethought and I still don't have enough info ready at hand to recall to plan them properly from the early game.

The thing I'm finding, and Districts seem to make this way worse, is that I'm way, way behind in producing things I want to produce. I know you can't build everything, fine, but I also feel like I can't build *anything*. Builders being three-and-then-done is also a part of this, but the Districts in particular seem to take a very long time to build. And, when one gets pillaged... there's another 5 turns or so of production to repair it. I understand and accept that this might be "better" mechanically, somehow, but it feels sort of rotten to always feel very profoundly behind.

I've been playing as Brazil in my single player game and I played as Kongo in the multiplayer one. I definitely didn't know what to do with Kongo - I totally didn't use his uniques correctly.

Brazil I've been finding pretty cool - mostly GP bonuses and the Entertainment Complex replacement is cheaper and helpful for Amenities.

I've heard good things about Gilgamesh from other players - that his early game aggression is really strong. His ability gives you bonuses for clearing Barbarian camps and then the civ ability gives you EXP from your allies, right? Seems like you need to be aggressive to make use of either!

I swear Gilg's ability isn't doing anything. Supposed to also give you a goodie hut when you capture a barb outpost. If that's happening, they certainly aren't telling me. I... have no idea what the civ ability does, really. No allies yet!

A quick run through of our major systems:

I think the LB and Alignment stuff still all seems very applicable - as a new victory condition it's relatively unaffected by the changes in other systems. We'd need to tweak some things, but I think the crux of it would remain the same.

LP stuff also seems good. If anything Civ6's approach to GPs would make our LP changes more consistent with the base game (disparate LP sources). Unique abilities on each person is interesting, not sure what we'd do with that, but it would be an "addition" to what we've done already, not a rework.

Right. So, I don't particularly love the idea of making a whole bunch of versions of each LP... Partially because of the work involved, but also because of the flavor wall we will hit, very, very, very early on.

T'a'r, like LB, seems fine mostly as is. Some tweaks because Civ6's entrypoints to the system have changed a bit, but the core of it would still work.

Channeling could remain much the same.

Paths also seem like they could survive. I haven't used religion much in Civ6, but tying it to a victory condition in WoTMod would be weird. It's not that important in the canon. We might need to do some heavy lifting there.

no comment yet! Still no religion in my game. Very much agree that the VC is weird for our game, though. Sort of feels at odds with the LB

The Compact is... gone. This is unfortunate, relative to the Paths stuff. The World Congress as the Compact fit much better with Wheel of Time than Paths do as a victory. Compact still isn't the quintessential WoT victory, but it made sense. I expect we'd need to make some new Diplo system here. I think we'd be best served by something different from Civ5, since Firaxis removed Diplo as the newly-weakest-VC since Culture was improved.

I hadn't realized that yet! That's crazy. True that diplo wasn't so awesome, but that's still a rather big part of the game to delete.

I think what scares me about making our own Diplo system is that this kind of thing seems highly likely to be added in a subsequent expansion. Would be really crappy to build our own and then have them pop out a "real one" weeks before launch or something. That's, honestly, the scariest thing about converting to CiVI for me. If the game was more or less "done" now, that'd be one thing, but the notion of the "full" game not being out for three years or so sort of kills me.

The Tower is affected by the loss of the Compact, but otherwise still works with its Sisters and abilities, influence tiers, etc. These would be tied to Diplomats rather than influence points at the Tower Influence level, probably.

I haven't reached the endgame in Civ6, so I have no hands on experience with the new tech victory. From what I've heard, our changes should port over fairly simply.

Threads, Waygates, False Dragons, Era/Calendars, Ogier, and the Horn would all port over fairly easily.

Surprisingly our Espionage changes look like they would port ok, despite Civ6 Espionage being quite different.

haven't really seen any of this stuff yet!

Resources would need a bit of shuffling since there are different resources in 6, but the general idea remains the same.

Techs and uniques seem like they'd be a mostly lost cause. We can draw a lot of inspiration from what we've done here, but I think we'd need to build from the ground up on these.

yeah, that's depressing.

Governors would port ok as well. They would interact with Amenities rather than Happiness, but otherwise still make the same sense.

Some new Civ6 systems and how they might work for us:

Districts, as you've mentioned, work well with the WoT canon. This is mostly a mechanical change to how cities work that I think we'd leave the same.

yeah, agreed.

Government types could also mesh well, that could play into our channeling systems quite a bit. Same with all the cards.

The Tech/Civics split causes us a lot of pain with the work we've done already, but it does seem to me like it represents WoT better. WoT is a lot more about culture than tech, and a slowed tech tree with fewer techs works well with that. Letting Culture unlock stuff makes a lot of sense.

so is the tech tree in CiVI actually smaller? I wasn't sure if the civics thing was an addition or a kind of replacement.

Yeah, this is kind of nuts for us, in terms of an overhaul.. ugh.

What do you think of the Government/social policy thing? I've only just reached my first gov choice, and that's all fine. But I've sort of felt like there are a bit too many civic choices. For my first playthrough, I kind of don't want to have 20 options while only in the Classical era. I'm sure that, technically, this might not be that different from what happens in CiV, but in CiV you're shuffled down paths that make it feel a little less overwhelming.

Cassus Belli makes sense in WoT. We'd probably change some (Holy War), but they have good substitutes (channeler belief, etc).

is this something we could graft on to the mechanics of CiV, out of curiosity?

And while we're rebuilding things, if we ever are, it occurs to me that many of the armies in WoT are levied. We may want to change the lifecycle of units in general to reflect this in some way. I have ideas for that, but it's a whole other conversation. I never considered this kind of change until we'd mostly committed to the Civ5 tech tree structure, at which point we were a bit entrenched.

Interesting. I think we could talk about this at some point. I wonder if it's necessary, though. It's true that this is the case in WoT, but it's also the case for most of human history. CiV has pulled that aspect out for playability, I think. We could put it back in, but I think it'd kind of been abstracted out of existence on purpose.

Deliverator has also found some good early signs of what working with graphics might be like in Civ6. This might be the thing that pushes us over to Civ6 in the end, if getting new units/animations into the game is much easier in Civ6. It's a massive pain in the face in Civ5, and the pool of artists working on doing so is only going to shrink. We need a lot of new models (and preferably some shiny new animations) to make WoTMod properly immersive, so this would be a big win for us.

ah, well, we'll find out then, right? If that's kind of a deal breaker for CiV...

Not sure where I really land on all of this!

I don't think we can OR anything with Hand of the Light (LP) in set 2, because that's needed to pair with the UA to avoid the Wolfbrother mechanical synergy (if that synergy exists, we force Amadicia to use Wolfbrothers to play optimally, which contradicts their flavor).

We could OR him onto the final slot in set 2, if we wanted to make sure he was represented there? The previous 2 slots seem like they achieve much needed mechanical functions in that set.

right! I'd forgotted about that aspect.

I'm fine with that solution.

We are! And hilariously, Amadicia pushes the second design list post over the 30,000 character limit, so I've put them in another post (linked to from the other two) all by their lonesome below this.

oy. i hate it so much

After much digging (I read many pages to find the right discussions), it seems like we've got two things left that we want to possibly do together:

• final unique selection for the civs
• Policy/Tenet rework

The latter would be a nice break from uniques for a short while, and then we could come back to the former. However, we did flag this as something you could do an initial proposal on while I was implementing stuff and then we could reconvene on that. I'm not sure if that proposal would take enough time to be worth it to do it that way? Would it take more than a week or so? (About how long it would take me to get new changes up and running that are significant in any way.)

Or we could dive straight back into the final decisions on civ uniques. This we definitely need to do together, as we noted when we discussed this before. (That conversation starts here to make finding it again a bit easier.)

I'm conscious of the fact that both of these are in the "build again from the ground up" section of the switch to Civ6, and based on Firaxis's Civ5 tools release timeline, we'll get the Civ6 tools at the end of this week or next. Still, nothing particularly large happens in the scope of a week really, so no harm in diving deeper on either of these in that time.

You have a preference for one over the other?

I'm flexible. I do think we could benefit from a short break from the Uniques, so if I did it on preference alone (and not necessarily on "best interest of the mod,") I'd do that (though the two aren't necessarily different).

As far as how long it'd take me to do a treatment of the policies, I'm not sure, but definitely no less than a week. I'm not quite as insanely swamped at work, but it's still crowded up in my brain, so don't know how much I'll be able to get on it. In any case, I'd say it'd give you a fair amount of time to get some coding done

IF we do swap to CiVI, 1) when would we make that decision, and 2) which of these two topics is worse to do now in the "throwing good money after bad" department?

 

[S3rgeus]

Oh, dang, that's something that unlocks? <rethinks the war he's about to start with Germany over Stockholm>

Yeah, and surprisingly late! It's on the Civics tree.

The thing I'm finding, and Districts seem to make this way worse, is that I'm way, way behind in producing things I want to produce. I know you can't build everything, fine, but I also feel like I can't build *anything*. Builders being three-and-then-done is also a part of this, but the Districts in particular seem to take a very long time to build. And, when one gets pillaged... there's another 5 turns or so of production to repair it. I understand and accept that this might be "better" mechanically, somehow, but it feels sort of rotten to always feel very profoundly behind.

I think that's a more general problem with production feeling much slower than Civ5. I think Firaxis want more specialized cities, but that means each city can't have enough production to build everything (otherwise you won't specialize). We're used to Civ5 where you should build all buildings in all cities (most of the time). They may have gone too far the other way, where now it feels like there's never time to build units because we're so far behind on structures.

I also think we haven't got a good handle on how to optimize for production yet. Sometimes I find some specific buildings and units really easy to build, and I think it's due to government/civ/civic bonuses that I don't understand yet. Being able to control those properly may let us build the things we want faster.

I swear Gilg's ability isn't doing anything. Supposed to also give you a goodie hut when you capture a barb outpost. If that's happening, they certainly aren't telling me. I... have no idea what the civ ability does, really. No allies yet!

Yeah, you might only get a quick pop-up like "+X Gold" from some villages, so it would be easy to miss those with everything else that's happening when you capture a barbarian camp. Or it may just be bugged and not showing up! I've certainly encountered a few UI bugs.

Right. So, I don't particularly love the idea of making a whole bunch of versions of each LP... Partially because of the work involved, but also because of the flavor wall we will hit, very, very, very early on.

Most of their abilities are very similar, with subtle differences between them, so I don't think it's a big mechanical thing. Flavor wise maybe - we'll need a list of all named characters and start from there!

no comment yet! Still no religion in my game. Very much agree that the VC is weird for our game, though. Sort of feels at odds with the LB

I don't feel like the religious victory is at odds with the LB specifically so much as it doesn't really fit the WoT canon. Religion isn't a big deal in WoT, and the victory condition is already a bit of a stretch in Civ6 itself, so it's even bigger for WoT.

I hadn't realized that yet! That's crazy. True that diplo wasn't so awesome, but that's still a rather big part of the game to delete.

I think what scares me about making our own Diplo system is that this kind of thing seems highly likely to be added in a subsequent expansion. Would be really crappy to build our own and then have them pop out a "real one" weeks before launch or something. That's, honestly, the scariest thing about converting to CiVI for me. If the game was more or less "done" now, that'd be one thing, but the notion of the "full" game not being out for three years or so sort of kills me.

Yeah, the World Congress is gone in Civ6. I think it was a good call for them to take it out, given how civ works. If I were to recommend removing any VC, it would've been that one after BNW. I do agree they'll probably add it back.

As for Civ6 being a moving target, that's definitely something to consider. I don't think we'd be able to do all of this up front design in that kind of world, we'd need to iterate with the game. If we tried to plan out everything then the game will keep moving and we won't make progress. Compatibility with new expansions/DLC is always a consideration for mods as they release. And we'll definitely have time after each thing releases where we don't support it yet.

The flipside of course is that the audience is biggest in this part of the game's lifecycle - when Firaxis is actively adding new content as well. We can benefit from their changes, instead of being locked into problems with the game. (There are issues with Civ5, particularly the graphics stuff, that we know will never be fixed.)

so is the tech tree in CiVI actually smaller? I wasn't sure if the civics thing was an addition or a kind of replacement.

Seems to be mostly an addition actually, you're right. The Civ6 tech tree has 13 fewer techs than the BNW one. (Though the BNW tree does have 6 more techs than the vanilla Civ5 tree, so the "launch to launch" difference could be considered only 7.)

Yeah, this is kind of nuts for us, in terms of an overhaul.. ugh.

Think of it as a new opportunity to adapt what we've learned so far!

What do you think of the Government/social policy thing? I've only just reached my first gov choice, and that's all fine. But I've sort of felt like there are a bit too many civic choices. For my first playthrough, I kind of don't want to have 20 options while only in the Classical era. I'm sure that, technically, this might not be that different from what happens in CiV, but in CiV you're shuffled down paths that make it feel a little less overwhelming.

I really like it, though I do agree we're overwhelmed with choices really quickly. I think part of that is the UI used to display the cards is super dense and not very easy to deal with (hard to see which cards are new, difficult to know which ones are the ones you've seen before at a glance).

I like the idea of different government systems throughout the ages though, and how that affects diplo relationships between civs. (Even if that's a bit extreme atm.) The cards and different governments having different slot types also means that you can have very different approaches to the same government type, but all governments of the same type will have a common thread to them, which is also quite cool.

is this something we could graft on to the mechanics of CiV, out of curiosity?

Indeed we could!

Interesting. I think we could talk about this at some point. I wonder if it's necessary, though. It's true that this is the case in WoT, but it's also the case for most of human history. CiV has pulled that aspect out for playability, I think. We could put it back in, but I think it'd kind of been abstracted out of existence on purpose.

Agreed, let's discuss that at some point!

ah, well, we'll find out then, right? If that's kind of a deal breaker for CiV...

I dunno if it's a dealbreaker, but if Civ6 does it much better, that will be a big push to move over. We'll have to see! When they release the tools (hopefully this week), then I can make some initial assessments on whether what we want to do is technically possible. We'll need full source, which they may not release right away, so that's the earliest we would want to move over. (Took them 1.5 years to release it for Civ5, but there are some folks at Firaxis who'd like to do it straight away for Civ6.)

I'm flexible. I do think we could benefit from a short break from the Uniques, so if I did it on preference alone (and not necessarily on "best interest of the mod,") I'd do that (though the two aren't necessarily different).

As far as how long it'd take me to do a treatment of the policies, I'm not sure, but definitely no less than a week. I'm not quite as insanely swamped at work, but it's still crowded up in my brain, so don't know how much I'll be able to get on it. In any case, I'd say it'd give you a fair amount of time to get some coding done

I'm now thinking a short break from uniques is definitely in order! This post has been surprisingly refreshing, not coming up with a bunch of new uniques in it!

I'm not going to be home tomorrow, but I can pick up the work I was doing a long time ago on getting Threads into the game on Thursday. I figure a general pattern would be for me to work on implementing stuff one day and then posting about progress on the next, alternating back and forth that way. That means there will be a constant stream of progress updates (avoiding extended periods of silence!) and time for us to sync up on any design considerations.

I'm not sure if it will work, since I imagine there would be many evenings that don't lead to visible progress ("spent the night chasing down bug X, still don't know the cause"), but it's a place to start! There will certainly be times when we'll want to stop and have a design discussion when I find an ambiguity/unconsidered implication of the decisions we've made thus far.

Following this pattern, I would be replying to your response to this post on Friday (which I imagine would be quite brief, unless you have some very different ideas about how we could structure this!). I'll of course read your response on Thursday and keep on replying if that's more appropriate than picking up implementation, based on the content of your post.

So if you could put together an initial treatment of Policies and what we want to change with them, that would be awesome! We can pick that up via post again at the end of next week or so, whenever you're done with it. (No rush, since I have no shortage of things to do!)

IF we do swap to CiVI, 1) when would we make that decision, and 2) which of these two topics is worse to do now in the "throwing good money after bad" department?

When Firaxis release the mod tools for Civ6 would be the earliest time we could make real assessments of whether we should switch over. They might lock us out completely (what we want to do is impossible) or make new things possible (graphics modding might be much easier, terrain changes mid-game might work), and we'll need to know which way they go on that.

Neither of our remaining topics are much worse off in the "wasted effort" department, because both are pretty bottom of the barrel. They're both completely undone by the differences between 5 and 6, so any work on either of them would be abandoned if we switch! So might as well do the one that works best for us now!

 

[counterpoint]

Most of their abilities are very similar, with subtle differences between them, so I don't think it's a big mechanical thing. Flavor wise maybe - we'll need a list of all named characters and start from there!

I think what makes the flavor tough is with things like Wofbrother and such, where we have, what... 3 characters that fit the bill? Even things like Merchant Lord might be tricky.

Yeah, the World Congress is gone in Civ6. I think it was a good call for them to take it out, given how civ works. If I were to recommend removing any VC, it would've been that one after BNW. I do agree they'll probably add it back.

As for Civ6 being a moving target, that's definitely something to consider. I don't think we'd be able to do all of this up front design in that kind of world, we'd need to iterate with the game. If we tried to plan out everything then the game will keep moving and we won't make progress. Compatibility with new expansions/DLC is always a consideration for mods as they release. And we'll definitely have time after each thing releases where we don't support it yet.

The flipside of course is that the audience is biggest in this part of the game's lifecycle - when Firaxis is actively adding new content as well. We can benefit from their changes, instead of being locked into problems with the game. (There are issues with Civ5, particularly the graphics stuff, that we know will never be fixed.)

yeah, the audience thing is huge. If it weren't for that, I'd probably just nix the porting-over idea. But that is essentially the biggest factor, potentially...

As far as evolving with the game, yeah, that's a benefit, sure. That said, I don't really think we'll be up for developing this mod for another five years...

Seems to be mostly an addition actually, you're right. The Civ6 tech tree has 13 fewer techs than the BNW one. (Though the BNW tree does have 6 more techs than the vanilla Civ5 tree, so the "launch to launch" difference could be considered only 7.)

yeah, hopefully the flavor and such - and general progression - would be mostly portable. Obviously mechanically we'd have to redo it all.

Coming up with flavors for civics on top of social policies is a big deal though.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, we lose the three-opposed-philosophy thing, right?

I really like it, though I do agree we're overwhelmed with choices really quickly. I think part of that is the UI used to display the cards is super dense and not very easy to deal with (hard to see which cards are new, difficult to know which ones are the ones you've seen before at a glance).

Yeah, it's also hard at this point to really know which ones are actually good for what's going on in-game. Some of them feel powerful, relative to others, but aren't really applicable to what appears to be my in-game scenario

I like the idea of different government systems throughout the ages though, and how that affects diplo relationships between civs. (Even if that's a bit extreme atm.) The cards and different governments having different slot types also means that you can have very different approaches to the same government type, but all governments of the same type will have a common thread to them, which is also quite cool.

not quite far enough to really comment on the different governments (about to unlock my second, I think)

I'm not sure the progressive development of govt wholly fits wot, though. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not like it is in Earth history.

I dunno if it's a dealbreaker, but if Civ6 does it much better, that will be a big push to move over. We'll have to see! When they release the tools (hopefully this week), then I can make some initial assessments on whether what we want to do is technically possible. We'll need full source, which they may not release right away, so that's the earliest we would want to move over. (Took them 1.5 years to release it for Civ5, but there are some folks at Firaxis who'd like to do it straight away for Civ6.)

well, hopefully we'll at least know an ETA very soon!

I'm now thinking a short break from uniques is definitely in order! This post has been surprisingly refreshing, not coming up with a bunch of new uniques in it!

agreed, if somewhat depressing also (considering the port). I remember when the SNES came out, part of me was excited, but I was actually mostly kind of depressed. I knew damn well I wasn't going to be able to get one, so it just meant I was essentially cut off from console gaming (which incidentally remained true until around 2004...)

I'm not going to be home tomorrow, but I can pick up the work I was doing a long time ago on getting Threads into the game on Thursday. I figure a general pattern would be for me to work on implementing stuff one day and then posting about progress on the next, alternating back and forth that way. That means there will be a constant stream of progress updates (avoiding extended periods of silence!) and time for us to sync up on any design considerations.

I'm not sure if it will work, since I imagine there would be many evenings that don't lead to visible progress ("spent the night chasing down bug X, still don't know the cause"), but it's a place to start! There will certainly be times when we'll want to stop and have a design discussion when I find an ambiguity/unconsidered implication of the decisions we've made thus far.

Following this pattern, I would be replying to your response to this post on Friday (which I imagine would be quite brief, unless you have some very different ideas about how we could structure this!). I'll of course read your response on Thursday and keep on replying if that's more appropriate than picking up implementation, based on the content of your post.

So if you could put together an initial treatment of Policies and what we want to change with them, that would be awesome! We can pick that up via post again at the end of next week or so, whenever you're done with it. (No rush, since I have no shortage of things to do!)

ok, sounds like a good plan. I'll start working towards something on policies soon.

When Firaxis release the mod tools for Civ6 would be the earliest time we could make real assessments of whether we should switch over. They might lock us out completely (what we want to do is impossible) or make new things possible (graphics modding might be much easier, terrain changes mid-game might work), and we'll need to know which way they go on that.

Neither of our remaining topics are much worse off in the "wasted effort" department, because both are pretty bottom of the barrel. They're both completely undone by the differences between 5 and 6, so any work on either of them would be abandoned if we switch! So might as well do the one that works best for us now!

I think Policies is the correct choice for now, if only because it's a break from civs. As far as which of these topics is more of a waste, I agree that it's sort of a wash. I actually think that a huge portion of what we've already done for civs can be salvaged. A lot of the game - especially combat - seems to be relatively similar. I'd say many of our uniques can exist in more or less the same form (especially UUs). What would need to happen would be an abbreviated version of what we did before. Id's ay we would go back and:

1) axe abilities that no longer work
2) tweak abilities so that they fit new mechanics
3) add additional abilities based on new CiVI mechanics

What I wouldn't suggest is that we "open it up" all the way again, with full scale brainstorms. We can afford, at this point, to be pretty targeted, I'd think. Say, we know a Rahad UD would be cool, so make a couple of those and see if they stick. But no need to reconceive all of Altara. After all, we only need *one* set per civ!

What that does mean, though, is that the "final pass" through civs now would be a total waste, were we to port to CiVI. So, since that's a bigger job than policies (I think), I do think we should hold off on it - even though, actually, a greater percentage of Policies will be totally thrown out if we port over.

I will state that I don't think we can really "wait" 1.5 years to decide whether we're going to port over, or even to start working on a CiVI version. If they aren't giving us what we need to know by then, we're sticking with CiV, right? I mean, we want to be launched by then!

I should also mention one key thing that we'll need to consider: do we like CiVI? Obviously, I'm unsure of it at this point, but that happens pretty much with every new iteration. CiV I hear had major backlash at first. I'm guessing I'll get comfortable with it, and will enjoy it, but it is something to think about - it's technically possible that CiV is simply a better game. If so, is that something to weigh heavily, despite numbers of players? I'm concerned of course with our own opinions - I wouldn't be hear if I hadn't simultaneously become really into both WoT and CiV - since working on a game we don't love would be agony. But I'm also chiefly concerned with the community as a whole - will CiVI be embraced and have an active mod community and good longevity? I guess I just don't want to jump on with what turns out to be "the bad one" or something. I'm not predicting that, by any means, but it does happen in game series.

All of this is hovering around the gut feeling I have that, despite the depression it suggests, we probably "should" be working with CiVI... That doesn't mean its the right decision, though.

 

[S3rgeus]

Advance warning, I won't be here tomorrow because I'm doing a crazy 10k obstacle race and then going to a Halloween party (or collapsing and sleeping for 14 hours, depending on how the race goes).

I think what makes the flavor tough is with things like Wofbrother and such, where we have, what... 3 characters that fit the bill? Even things like Merchant Lord might be tricky.

True, that would be tough! We'd probably need to change the flavor dressing of the system so that we didn't need individual names.

yeah, the audience thing is huge. If it weren't for that, I'd probably just nix the porting-over idea. But that is essentially the biggest factor, potentially...

I think audience and art are the big things. There are a lot of graphical limitations to Civ5 that it would be great to be able to avoid. I think we can make WoTMod look good, but we'll have to make visual compromises in places and it will take a lot longer than it would for a game with more sensible tooling.

As far as evolving with the game, yeah, that's a benefit, sure. That said, I don't really think we'll be up for developing this mod for another five years...

We've already been at it for 2, what's 5 more?

Coming up with flavors for civics on top of social policies is a big deal though.

Civics replace Policies, though, right? Or you mean the government cards as well? (Are those called Policies?)

Also, unless I'm mistaken, we lose the three-opposed-philosophy thing, right?

Yeah, unless we make them the three final government types. I think we'd make channeling attitude a different kind of mechanic of its own. Or make it part of Civics.

Yeah, it's also hard at this point to really know which ones are actually good for what's going on in-game. Some of them feel powerful, relative to others, but aren't really applicable to what appears to be my in-game scenario

I think Firaxis wanted Civ6 to be a lot more "about the map" so that the game is quite different each time. That means some of these not being applicable is probably good - there will be times when they're perfect!

I'm not sure the progressive development of govt wholly fits wot, though. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not like it is in Earth history.

I think there's enough diversity in the WoT governments for us to represent it though. The WoT civs certainly went through different government types over their history. It feels to me like a generally better model of how a country/civilization evolves over time, and that translates for the WoT fictional ones as well.

agreed, if somewhat depressing also (considering the port). I remember when the SNES came out, part of me was excited, but I was actually mostly kind of depressed. I knew damn well I wasn't going to be able to get one, so it just meant I was essentially cut off from console gaming (which incidentally remained true until around 2004...)

That sucks! 2004 would have been the GCN/PS2/Xbox generation, which did you get?

ok, sounds like a good plan. I'll start working towards something on policies soon.

Awesome, thanks!

I think Policies is the correct choice for now, if only because it's a break from civs. As far as which of these topics is more of a waste, I agree that it's sort of a wash. I actually think that a huge portion of what we've already done for civs can be salvaged. A lot of the game - especially combat - seems to be relatively similar. I'd say many of our uniques can exist in more or less the same form (especially UUs). What would need to happen would be an abbreviated version of what we did before. Id's ay we would go back and:

1) axe abilities that no longer work
2) tweak abilities so that they fit new mechanics
3) add additional abilities based on new CiVI mechanics

What I wouldn't suggest is that we "open it up" all the way again, with full scale brainstorms. We can afford, at this point, to be pretty targeted, I'd think. Say, we know a Rahad UD would be cool, so make a couple of those and see if they stick. But no need to reconceive all of Altara. After all, we only need *one* set per civ!

Yeah, definitely, we can take that stuff forward as a guideline for how we want the civ to function, and work out what that looks like in Civ6.

What that does mean, though, is that the "final pass" through civs now would be a total waste, were we to port to CiVI. So, since that's a bigger job than policies (I think), I do think we should hold off on it - even though, actually, a greater percentage of Policies will be totally thrown out if we port over.

Sounds fine to me.

I will state that I don't think we can really "wait" 1.5 years to decide whether we're going to port over, or even to start working on a CiVI version. If they aren't giving us what we need to know by then, we're sticking with CiV, right? I mean, we want to be launched by then!

Definitely, we can't wait that long. We're in a position now where we should have a lot more information in the next few weeks, which puts us in a kind of limbo, but it should be resolved in the short term.

I should also mention one key thing that we'll need to consider: do we like CiVI? Obviously, I'm unsure of it at this point, but that happens pretty much with every new iteration. CiV I hear had major backlash at first. I'm guessing I'll get comfortable with it, and will enjoy it, but it is something to think about - it's technically possible that CiV is simply a better game. If so, is that something to weigh heavily, despite numbers of players? I'm concerned of course with our own opinions - I wouldn't be hear if I hadn't simultaneously become really into both WoT and CiV - since working on a game we don't love would be agony. But I'm also chiefly concerned with the community as a whole - will CiVI be embraced and have an active mod community and good longevity? I guess I just don't want to jump on with what turns out to be "the bad one" or something. I'm not predicting that, by any means, but it does happen in game series.

All of this is hovering around the gut feeling I have that, despite the depression it suggests, we probably "should" be working with CiVI... That doesn't mean its the right decision, though.

I have only played 12 hours, but I do really like CiVI so far! I feel like it takes a lot of the best parts of 5 forward and improves on many of the other things that I hadn't even placed were lacking before. I'm a big fan of the Tech/Civic structure, multiple leaders, and government type representations.

CiV's initial release was a lot less rosy than this. CiVI has had a very nice first few days, CiV got roasted once the community started to get into it because it had a good core, but dropped so much content compared to CIV.

I do feel like we'll have more opportunities with CiVI as long as Firaxis support it well. And that last part is what we need more information on soon. The initial state of the mod tools will give us a good idea of what it's going to be like, and the kinds of things we can change.

I'm not actually very upset about the potential of migrating to CiVI. We have to redesign a bunch of stuff, but we also "started" very late in the CiV life cycle. I feel like we'd be getting ahead of the curve with CiVI and have a mod available much earlier in the game's life cycle, when there are many more people to play it. Of course, civ games survive well compared to most other games, so CiV likely has some decent longevity in it. But that also means CiVI likely has a very long lifespan left.




As for progress updates, I mentioned last time about not having much to show after an evening, and here we are! I added one new Thread, which was fairly easy since its effects were all variants of ones that existing already. The last thing I did, before putting it down when I did some implementing earlier this year, was add support for thread choices providing Prestige as a yield, which this new Thread used.

Then I moved on to the "Famine Near <city you own here>" Thread. This is the first thread that "picks a city" that the player owns, which was a new concept the Thread system didn't support before. It meant that there was data that persisted with the lifetime of a single Thread instance. Previously, all choices had been "receive X of yield Y" which is static information - if the player chooses that choice the game can just give them that amount of that yield. But now it matters which city is associated with a given instance of a Thread - Andor may get Whitebridge and Seanchan Seandar - so that "chosen city" needs to be available to be queried for that individual civ about that time they have encountered that Thread. I got part of the way through making the data structures to persist that information as the Thread is made available (and will be used for other per-Thread data, like <resource you have> and <CS near the Blight> etc).

Depending on how alive I am on Sunday, I'll try to reply here and move on with this a bit as well!

 

[counterpoint]

Advance warning, I won't be here tomorrow because I'm doing a crazy 10k obstacle race and then going to a Halloween party (or collapsing and sleeping for 14 hours, depending on how the race goes).

Cool, have fun! I love 10k's, that's kind of my ideal distance (just did a half-marathon, and that is *not ideal*). Never done the obstacles though! I would expect sheer calf and hamstring terror the next morning.... hope it went well!

Civics replace Policies, though, right? Or you mean the government cards as well? (Are those called Policies?)

as I understanding, civis are the "techs," while policies are the little cards (and governments are the combinations of card-slots).

Yeah, unless we make them the three final government types. I think we'd make channeling attitude a different kind of mechanic of its own. Or make it part of Civics.

interesting. I'm not sure we'd be able to do it with any consistently with civics. we'll see.

That sucks! 2004 would have been the GCN/PS2/Xbox generation, which did you get?

Well, in either late 2003 or early 2004, some girl I worked with gave her her unused Playstation (1) (in retrospect, I think she may have been telling me something). I bought a used ps2 in '04 and started the long, long catch up process that only really concluded about a year or two ago (just in time for new consoles to come out, that I don't yet have, and for my computer to start showing its age...)...

Definitely, we can't wait that long. We're in a position now where we should have a lot more information in the next few weeks, which puts us in a kind of limbo, but it should be resolved in the short term.

good.

I have only played 12 hours, but I do really like CiVI so far! I feel like it takes a lot of the best parts of 5 forward and improves on many of the other things that I hadn't even placed were lacking before. I'm a big fan of the Tech/Civic structure, multiple leaders, and government type representations.

you know what's awesome - naming your units that reach level 3!

CiV's initial release was a lot less rosy than this. CiVI has had a very nice first few days, CiV got roasted once the community started to get into it because it had a good core, but dropped so much content compared to CIV.

Right. CiV "complete" might be terrific (IMO it's probably the best one I've played), but Vanilla does appear to have been maligned.... So who knows where we end up with this one!

I do feel like we'll have more opportunities with CiVI as long as Firaxis support it well. And that last part is what we need more information on soon. The initial state of the mod tools will give us a good idea of what it's going to be like, and the kinds of things we can change.

I'm not actually very upset about the potential of migrating to CiVI. We have to redesign a bunch of stuff, but we also "started" very late in the CiV life cycle. I feel like we'd be getting ahead of the curve with CiVI and have a mod available much earlier in the game's life cycle, when there are many more people to play it. Of course, civ games survive well compared to most other games, so CiV likely has some decent longevity in it. But that also means CiVI likely has a very long lifespan left.

I guess it's just time to wait a bit and see!

As for progress updates, I mentioned last time about not having much to show after an evening, and here we are! I added one new Thread, which was fairly easy since its effects were all variants of ones that existing already. The last thing I did, before putting it down when I did some implementing earlier this year, was add support for thread choices providing Prestige as a yield, which this new Thread used.

Then I moved on to the "Famine Near <city you own here>" Thread. This is the first thread that "picks a city" that the player owns, which was a new concept the Thread system didn't support before. It meant that there was data that persisted with the lifetime of a single Thread instance. Previously, all choices had been "receive X of yield Y" which is static information - if the player chooses that choice the game can just give them that amount of that yield. But now it matters which city is associated with a given instance of a Thread - Andor may get Whitebridge and Seanchan Seandar - so that "chosen city" needs to be available to be queried for that individual civ about that time they have encountered that Thread. I got part of the way through making the data structures to persist that information as the Thread is made available (and will be used for other per-Thread data, like <resource you have> and <CS near the Blight> etc).

Depending on how alive I am on Sunday, I'll try to reply here and move on with this a bit as well!

cool! Not much to say, but nice to see the progress. An impressive amount of work for one thread.

I've been starting on policies. Made an excel version of the BNW tree as a reference. Gonna try to get on it for a bit now.

 

[S3rgeus]

Cool, have fun! I love 10k's, that's kind of my ideal distance (just did a half-marathon, and that is *not ideal*). Never done the obstacles though! I would expect sheer calf and hamstring terror the next morning.... hope it went well!

It's mostly my knee that's killing me at the moment. It was a great event though! I wouldn't be up for running 10k straight out (yet) - the obstacles helped break that up quite a bit!

as I understanding, civis are the "techs," while policies are the little cards (and governments are the combinations of card-slots).

Right, that makes sense. I sort of see it as a bit of both - "Policies" as existed in CiV have had their flavor/mechanics distributed between civics and the cards.

Well, in either late 2003 or early 2004, some girl I worked with gave her her unused Playstation (1) (in retrospect, I think she may have been telling me something). I bought a used ps2 in '04 and started the long, long catch up process that only really concluded about a year or two ago (just in time for new consoles to come out, that I don't yet have, and for my computer to start showing its age...)...

Did you get a PS3 between '04 and a year ago, then? The current consoles have had a few price cuts since they first came out, so they're a good buy at the moment - especially with the hardware refresh they both did during the summer. And despite being much maligned, the Wii U has some awesome Nintendo games!

you know what's awesome - naming your units that reach level 3!

Yeah, that's a really nice touch! Since the unit has to have leveled up twice, they have their own "identity" by the time you're naming them, which was a really good call.

Right. CiV "complete" might be terrific (IMO it's probably the best one I've played), but Vanilla does appear to have been maligned.... So who knows where we end up with this one!

Yep, hopefully CiVI gets even better!

I guess it's just time to wait a bit and see!

Friday has come and gone with no CiVI SDK. Fingers crossed for some time next week!

cool! Not much to say, but nice to see the progress. An impressive amount of work for one thread.

Yeah, I'm trying to focus on Threads that do something unique (focus on a single city, for example), since once I make the Thread system support that, then any others that do the same thing are simple XML variants of the first.

I've been starting on policies. Made an excel version of the BNW tree as a reference. Gonna try to get on it for a bit now.

Awesome, sounds good!

I haven't worked on any implementation yet today, so no updates there yet!

 

[counterpoint]

It's mostly my knee that's killing me at the moment. It was a great event though! I wouldn't be up for running 10k straight out (yet) - the obstacles helped break that up quite a bit!

congrats!

Yeah, I'm cure climbing a rope ladder is great "rest" in between each mile...

Did you get a PS3 between '04 and a year ago, then? The current consoles have had a few price cuts since they first came out, so they're a good buy at the moment - especially with the hardware refresh they both did during the summer. And despite being much maligned, the Wii U has some awesome Nintendo games!

Around '08 or something I got a Wii. That lead to the year-long Gamecube catch up, followed by the spattering of worthy Wii games. I got a PS3 probably in 2011 or 2010 or something, which started that catch up...

I'm now profoundly out of the loop, unfortunately. Combination of being busy and some of the gaming podcasts I frequented calling it quits. So I hardly even know what games are out and which are good!

Friday has come and gone with no CiVI SDK. Fingers crossed for some time next week!

crossed!

EDIT

Any idea how to search the thread in the new forum?

EDIT2

Think I figured it out. Not as easy as in the last forum

 

[S3rgeus]

congrats!

Yeah, I'm cure climbing a rope ladder is great "rest" in between each mile...

Thanks! It surprisingly is!

Around '08 or something I got a Wii. That lead to the year-long Gamecube catch up, followed by the spattering of worthy Wii games. I got a PS3 probably in 2011 or 2010 or something, which started that catch up...

I'm now profoundly out of the loop, unfortunately. Combination of being busy and some of the gaming podcasts I frequented calling it quits. So I hardly even know what games are out and which are good!

I can make a slew of recommendations for current gen, if you're interested!

EDIT

Any idea how to search the thread in the new forum?

EDIT2

Think I figured it out. Not as easy as in the last forum

How do you do it? I've used the global search box in the top right, but it's not that helpful when you specifically want to search an individual topic!


Progress wise, I've been doing more of the same as last time! I'm about to start tweaking the way the UI window (seen in previous screenshots) works so that it can deal with the new structure of instances Threads.

Also, advance notice progress wise, I won't be home tomorrow evening. But also quite importantly, tomorrow is the first day of NaNoWriMo! That means I'll have very little free time during the week, so I'll mostly be WoTModding at the weekend during November.

 

[counterpoint]

I can make a slew of recommendations for current gen, if you're interested!

when the time comes!

How do you do it? I've used the global search box in the top right, but it's not that helpful when you specifically want to search an individual topic!

The search field on the top right, yep. Correct that it isn't nearly as helpful.

Progress wise, I've been doing more of the same as last time! I'm about to start tweaking the way the UI window (seen in previous screenshots) works so that it can deal with the new structure of instances Threads.

Also, advance notice progress wise, I won't be home tomorrow evening. But also quite importantly, tomorrow is the first day of NaNoWriMo! That means I'll have very little free time during the week, so I'll mostly be WoTModding at the weekend during November.

cool. Best of luck on nanowrimo

I'm slowing chugging along on the policies. Trying to flavor them as I go, but it's not easy. We had a few flavor dumps previously where we had some miscellaneous flavor that might be helpful later.... sadly, I can't find any of it (and the search function isn't helping). So most of this is rather unspecific when it comes to WoT at this point.

 

[counterpoint]

quick update.

So, I'm through a draft of the first four policy trees (Unity, Ambition, War, and Myth). So that's nearing halfway.

The modus operandi for this draft has been to preserve the effects in BNW. In the four trees I've done so far, this has meant that there are a few shared policies that both branches of a tree have, and then a divergence of 3 (I think it's always three) policies on each branch that are mutually exclusive. In these four cases, one of those branches has been essentially a BNW copy (though sometimes with minor tweaks) with the other having new stuff.

Not saying that's the way it has to be. But it felt like the natural way to start, given the magnitude of all these moving parts. I think this is good to see, and then it will give us an idea of whether or not that approach works in general.

 

[counterpoint]

Just finished my first CiVI game. Gilgamesh, Prince, standard pace and map. Dom victory.

It's kind of ridiculous, actually. I played emperor in CiV, but I don't understand this game very well, and it was sort of absurd in the end. I built some early game units, leveled them up to max during some early conquests, and then camped until I could upgrade (not until uranium since I couldn't find any oil). Then, started the wars and steamrolled everybody.

I don't get it. Why did all the other civs still have medieval units when I was on future tech? Is this just how Prince is? Is it like that in CiV? I thought prince was the "balanced" one (but unbalanced due to AI, stupidity). What's up with this? I mean, I quite literally was one-shotting cities with my tanks, and attacking cities with my rangers. So, what's up with this? I was also rolling in money, and faith.

Also, very weird that I ended up with like 26 cities, and no real apparent downside. yes, I was low on amenities and housing and such, but... what exactly were the consequences of that?

Also, yes, the barbs *were* yielding goodie huts, for me, so that worked and was a cool ability. However, never once got to try the alliance ability... nobody liked me, at all, even when it seemed they should (the early warmongering was long done before I met half the civs), so never got to test it!

Also, still don't have a good sense of culture, at all. Never really manipulated any of it!

Any games wrapped up for you?

 

[S3rgeus]

The search field on the top right, yep. Correct that it isn't nearly as helpful.

Argh, that's a shame! I'm a bit late with this suggestion, but it's also possible to search the thread backup. That's often what I do when I've been trying to find topics we've discussed before. It won't have the content since we moved over to the new forum, but anything before civilizations and uniques will be relatively complete. I use Notepad++ search, but any good text editor would work!

cool. Best of luck on nanowrimo

Thanks, it's been intense so far! I have a lot less free time than I did last year, so I completely missed yesterday and wrote almost 5,000 today to pull ahead to where I want to be word-count-wise!

quick update.

So, I'm through a draft of the first four policy trees (Unity, Ambition, War, and Myth). So that's nearing halfway.

The modus operandi for this draft has been to preserve the effects in BNW. In the four trees I've done so far, this has meant that there are a few shared policies that both branches of a tree have, and then a divergence of 3 (I think it's always three) policies on each branch that are mutually exclusive. In these four cases, one of those branches has been essentially a BNW copy (though sometimes with minor tweaks) with the other having new stuff.

Not saying that's the way it has to be. But it felt like the natural way to start, given the magnitude of all these moving parts. I think this is good to see, and then it will give us an idea of whether or not that approach works in general.

I like the names!

This sounds like a good approach. It's coming back to me now, the branching trees that we discussed about Policies before!

Just finished my first CiVI game. Gilgamesh, Prince, standard pace and map. Dom victory.

It's kind of ridiculous, actually. I played emperor in CiV, but I don't understand this game very well, and it was sort of absurd in the end. I built some early game units, leveled them up to max during some early conquests, and then camped until I could upgrade (not until uranium since I couldn't find any oil). Then, started the wars and steamrolled everybody.

I don't get it. Why did all the other civs still have medieval units when I was on future tech? Is this just how Prince is? Is it like that in CiV? I thought prince was the "balanced" one (but unbalanced due to AI, stupidity). What's up with this? I mean, I quite literally was one-shotting cities with my tanks, and attacking cities with my rangers. So, what's up with this? I was also rolling in money, and faith.

Nicely done, seems like you pulled far ahead! Not sure re AI progress, I did generally find in CiV on Prince that I'd pulled ahead by the mid-game and got crazy far by the end game. There were usually one or two other civs who at least reached the modern era though!

Also, very weird that I ended up with like 26 cities, and no real apparent downside. yes, I was low on amenities and housing and such, but... what exactly were the consequences of that?

I think just reduced productivity in those cities? (Compared to a large city that had all the housing and amenities it could ask for.) That's offset by your capacity to parallelize building stuff though. I've seen a lot of discussion on the civ subreddit that Tall vs Wide isn't a strategic choice anymore in CiVI like it was in CiV. I'm generally quite happy with that - I want to keep expanding as long as there's space! - so it should make that kind of strategy more about the map than a player's fixed strategy.

Also, yes, the barbs *were* yielding goodie huts, for me, so that worked and was a cool ability. However, never once got to try the alliance ability... nobody liked me, at all, even when it seemed they should (the early warmongering was long done before I met half the civs), so never got to test it!

Good re the Barbarians! Sad about the lack of alliances! I should try asking for alliances with some of the civs that are my friends in my current game, I haven't tried it yet.

Also, still don't have a good sense of culture, at all. Never really manipulated any of it!

Any games wrapped up for you?

Not yet! I've been NaNoWriMo-ing all week so haven't played any CiVI. Same re WoTModding unfortunately, I haven't done any more implementing since my last post.

I've been keeping an eye on the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum, and on Steam, but no sign of the CiVI mod tools yet.

 

[counterpoint]

I like the names!

This sounds like a good approach. It's coming back to me now, the branching trees that we discussed about Policies before!

yeah, and just to be clear, these names were decided by us a year or two ago! I've kept them intact for now, and tried to make mechanics and policies that fit with those concepts.

Nicely done, seems like you pulled far ahead! Not sure re AI progress, I did generally find in CiV on Prince that I'd pulled ahead by the mid-game and got crazy far by the end game. There were usually one or two other civs who at least reached the modern era though!

yeah, was surprised that I didn't see at least somebody who could stand against me. I think this was a bit more surprising given how little I understand the game at this point....

I think just reduced productivity in those cities? (Compared to a large city that had all the housing and amenities it could ask for.) That's offset by your capacity to parallelize building stuff though. I've seen a lot of discussion on the civ subreddit that Tall vs Wide isn't a strategic choice anymore in CiVI like it was in CiV. I'm generally quite happy with that - I want to keep expanding as long as there's space! - so it should make that kind of strategy more about the map than a player's fixed strategy.

I suspect that I'm in the minority, but I actually like the tall/wide choice. It put me off majorly when I first started ciV, but over time I appreciated the strategic element it presented. I feel like, ultimately, in civ 3 and 4, I felt somewhat encouraged to make sprawling empires that ultimately were too big to work well. The rather draconian happiness cap kind of made it easier to be restrained.

Good re the Barbarians! Sad about the lack of alliances! I should try asking for alliances with some of the civs that are my friends in my current game, I haven't tried it yet.

also, I'm super confused, ultimately, about the casus belli. I like the idea in theory, but found that I was essentially declaring one (usually colonization or religion) when I was, essentially, just doing a surprise war. I don't quite understand why you'd ever *not* do a CB war...