S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

I'm thinking it will mostly be an "if you have channelers, choose X, if not, choose Y". Related to what we were saying about the naval branches before that that dichotomy isn't necessarily a problem. Particularly for channeling, I'd say, where the player has mostly made that choice themselves, rather than being forced by their map position or other external factors.

Right. I guess it's a little disappointing that these particular branches will A) always be associated with certain Philosophies, and not others, and B) often be associated with certain civs, and not others (though this last one is less of an issue). It's likely to very often be Liberation = channeler side, for instance.

Also, are we ok with the fact that this tree pops up right before the other "channeling-related trees", aka the Philosophies? We'd need to make sure we keep the functionality of this branch rather distinct from any channeler-related stuff we'd be doing in tenets themselves... basically, steer it clear of Lib/Auth territory.

That doesn't mean we can't have it have some stuff for "make Science work for you", though I think we'd do that via channeling mechanics, if we go this way. (Example: "Weaves Research: Channeling units you control gain X EXP every time you research a technology.")

I'm thinking that having the channeling branch be "another way to be good at science" is actually what we want. But looking at what you've mentioned about Politics, I think I'm just thinking about the phrasing differently and we're mostly on the same page. Such a channeling branch would totally have different fringe benefits from its opposition branch, and I'd say both branches should help toward the common goal of being "better at Science" - much like Politics's two sides make you better at Diplo in different ways.

yeah, that makes sense.

I'm thinking a channeling branch in Scholarship is my preferred option at the moment. Do we have any others that we haven't considered yet, that might compete with a more traditional Science branch opposition? A bookish Ogier branch? One about uncovering AoL secrets?

I think that's the leading option, right now. I think there isn't enough mechanical presence of the ogier (that isn't diplo-related) or the AoL to create meaningful *branches* out of them. I'd say both of those are prime candidates for flavor (if not actual policy mechanics) for Scholarship, though - I'd say we could probably justify this for *either* the channeling or non-channeling branches

A lot of our decisions from this stage aren't really being summary-ized because they're not final yet, just stepping stones for the next part of the discussion. Jumping forward a bit, that makes me think we should go on to specific Policies before we sojourn to Threads so that these decisions are fresh in our minds!

yeah, agreed. At the end of this post, I'll summarize where I think we've landed.

What about a Policy that adds a new but identical option to all Threads that simply generates Medium of the opposite to your current Alignment? If you're Light, "Forsake Your Duty: Medium +Shadow", if you're Shadow "Let the Creator decide: Medium +Light". I struggle to find a universally "good" way to say "refuse to decide" to generate +Light for the Shadow option. (Maybe each Thread could provide unique flavor text, even if the yield is always the same.)

Is that too strong as well though? And it makes Threads extremely easy to avoid as an Alignment source overall.

First off, I think this is moot. We're going with Light vs Shadow, not Controlled vs Aggressive, right? A policy like this has no place in such a tree, right? I suppose we could do one that does the opposite - always offering a +Medium on your side choice.

But yeah, I think a policy like this could work, in a world where we went with a Controlled branch. Possibly too strong, but we could always downgrade it - "Medium" is just a term for us, not the player (it could always just be "Medium - 20%" or something)

An extra choice that's unique to each Thread could work, though it is a lot of work for us. (And continues to be as we add new Threads.)

agreed

As for boosting or lowering the Alignment yield on a case by case basis, what if we added the capability to make Thread choices but receive only X% of that choice's Alignment in exchange for receiving only X% of the non-Alignment bonus. (Only a viable option for choices that can be portioned somehow - you can't give someone X% of a single citizen.)

this one's again not likely to be useful without a Controlled branch.

I see how this could work, but it also seems kind of un-fun. Yes, it tempers your Alignment, but also takes away the main benefits of threads (the yields). To me the more viable strategy would seem to be just take alternating Alignments on each thread, always seeking to even them out (e.g. +Med Production +Hi Shadow one time, and then +Lo Faith +Hi Light next time).

Not even if Y is 2 maybe?

[/quote]I guess we'd have to have this whole conversation over again... To me that sounds heads and shoulders better than gaining a single free Great Artist

This is all very true - a complete commitment to naval is much less common than just having access to bodies of water on most map types. And also true about the BNW Policies, the caravans one is particularly weakened by maps like Archipelago! And lacking an alternative way to play Wide, when we *have* provided an alternative way to play Tall isn't cool.

I'm convinced we shouldn't have a fully committed naval branch for Ambition then!

No, Ambition, no naval branch for you!

Agreed about that flavor difficulty, it's difficult to see how we'd connect those up! Based on what you mentioned above, it seems like the best way to fuse these would be to have one or two Policies that are expansionist via mechanics that work with the coastal/bodies of water mechanics. The presence of that Policy doesn't necessarily make the branch non-competitive in as many situations as I'd originally feared!

good!

I think without the more naval focus option in Ambition above, we need the more focused naval Policies to live somewhere, so Wealth seems like a good place for it! We'll be retaining the general structure of the Commerce tree from BNW, but separating the naval parts so that the *other* branch might be more competitive for players who don't have ocean access, whereas in BNW you'd mostly ignore the Commerce tree in that case!

I'd say we could make the more naval-y parts to be Gold related, since we're putting them into the Wealth tree. For example, it could be as simple as "Dockyard Financing: You can purchase naval units for X% less Gold." - both very naval-y and Gold-y.

ok, good. I'd expect this'd inherit and adopt some things from Commerce, and, of course, from Exploration.

It's an unbranched policy in this tree that uncovers Reflections, right?

I like the idea of combining both 2 and 4 - those abilities could be expressed together as "trade ships can travel along rivers". That captures the flavor the best to me.

ok, so ships can use rivers. We can see about finding a policy space for that. We do have to see if it ends up "fitting," since that is a very different "feel" of policy than all the others.

OK, so I think it's time to line up what we have and zoom back out. First, mechanics-based:

Unity - Era 1, Convergent - Two ways to be tall
Tradition-esque - building tall productive cities
Governors - using governors on tall cities

Ambition - Era 1, Convergent - two ways to be wide
Liberty-esque - using luxuries to aid in the expansion of your civ
Bonus - using bonus resources and other traits to settle into less-than-viable locations

War - Era 1, Convergent/Divergent - different foci to combat
Lawless - specializing in fighting people, especially barbs
Shadowspawn - specializing in fighting shadowspawn

Myth - Era 1, Divergent - two applications of Faith
Piety-esque - be a better Path Founder
Path/Alignment - use faith and Alignment to boost one another

Power - Era 2, Divergent - two approaches to dealing with channeling
Pro Channeling - bonuses to using channelers
Anti-Channeling - bonuses for not using channelers

Creativity - Era 2, divergent - two approaches to using/generating culture
Aesthetics-esque (worst word ever) - assist in Culture VC
Work-for-You - boost culture and use it to boost other mechanics as well

Politics - Era 3, Convergent - two approaches to being good at diplo
Tower - boost relations with the White Tower and CSs
Stedding - boost relations with steddings and CSs

Wealth - Era 3, convergent/divergent - two approaches to generating gold and/or exploring
Commerce-esque - generating gold and capitalizing on it
Exploration-esque - generating gold through the sea, and boosting navy

Scholarship - Era 4, convergent - two approaches to generating science
Rationalism-esque - boosting conventional science and steering towards the science VC
Channeling science - boosting science through channeling and channeling through science

Alignment - Era 4, divergent - boosting alignment output and benefits from Alignment
Light - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
Shadow - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it

Does that all look right? OK, a look at Flavor, then. Inserting the names we'd previously used, and evaluating each.

Unity
Loyalty - I think this probably needs to change. Stability? Strength? Identity? Kinship? Others?
Leadership - I think this is fine

Ambition
Prosperity - this one could work. could maybe do better but it fits reasonably well. Something less money-ish? Extensive?
Expansion - this kind of works, but is sort of odd. Perhaps Opportunity (borrowed from the former-exploration substitute) fits better? Versatility? Flexibility?

War
Justice - this one seems a little random, but isn't bad. (fits better here than on other branch). not sure where to go, though.
Valor - this one seems random too. Fine, but random. Courage/Bravery could also work. Also not sure where to go

Myth
Folklore - this could still work, but could also work for alignment-related branch. not sure where else to go though.
Dreams - obviously no longer works. Belief? Dogma?

Power
Acceptance - good
Fear - good

Creativity
Inspiration - this could be fine. Legacy could also work for this - perhaps better. Any number of such words could work
Legacy - I wonder if Inspiration might actual work better here. Ideas?

Politics
Diplomacy - this is ok, but possibly not great because the term itself is used elsewhere. Agency? Partnership? Mediation? Compromise?
Friendship - I think this one is probably fine.

Wealth
Fortune - probably fine
Opportunity - maybe no longer fine. Possible, though. might need to trade with Ambition on a few things here... I'm unsure.

Scholarship
Resolve - this one is kind of weird. Maybe "Insight" is better. learning? Study? Wisdom?
Insight - don't think this one works so well. Wisdom? Lore (if we don't use Folklore)? Spirit? Mystery?

Alignment - This can't work. Morality? Ethics? Principle? Values?
Light - Courage? Integrity? Honor? Grace? Virtue? Generosity? Charity? Trying to go with "traits" of a civilization and not of a "human being", since this is a social policy.
Shadow - Selfishness? Pride? Ego? Conceit? Vanity? Ambition? Impulse? Instinct? Primacy? Prime? Nature? Same caveat as above. Would prefer not to be overtly "bad" or "evil".

ok!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm not sure. Either? I suppose after Policies overall makes sense intuitively, but if you think we need to get a scope of the Thread system again before we do the Policies, that could work. We could, of course, ultimately decide to leave out policies that relate to this (which doesn't have to exclude adding this element to threads).

I've finally caught up to this quote block that I mentioned in my previous post! In keeping with what I said there, I think we should finish up Policies first since we're not summary-izing everything for it yet! Although in keeping with "jumping ahead" you summary is very effective at summarizing our current position!

Right. I understand the difference now. Yeah, I don't think the TW rewards really fit in with flipping, as you say. I could see it working flavor-wise if you have cities conquered by the Shadowspawn, and then saved, but that's kind of a different thing. I say leave as it is.

Ok, so no citizenflipping as a part of the end of the TW then?

Right. Borderlander civs might already be nominally light because of all the + X Light they'll be getting by constantly killing Shadowspawn.

Do you think we should take it a step further and go with SSp attacks/conquests pushing you further light? I suppose this could be tackled in the larger discussion on "game events/behavior" causing alignment shifts (below).

Yeah, this will play into the wider discussion below. As for the specific example of Light and Borderlander civs, I think it's ok to push them a bit further Light this way. Like you said about the scarcity of top-tier-Light-razing-warmongers being extremely infrequent, I think top-tier-Shadow-Borderlanders seems unlikely. Shadow Borderlander civs shouldn't be uncommon, but extremely unredeemably evil ones should be.

Yes I agree that the "factory" approach wouldn't be desirable, and we'd like Alignment to end up "realistic." I think the flavor is a key part of it. I also think the Alignment system grew out of a few things. First, a desire to link a larger system to the LB, so the choice at the end wasn't wholly random. I suppose making it random or factory-like doesn't fight terribly with that. But second, it was to add some level of immersion, I'd say. As I recall, the threads were the first meaty thing we came up with for Alignment. Those are, fundamentally, just bonus-selection, but they are bonus selection that's supposed to be guided by some kind of morality or feeling of how your civ would behave. Anything we can do to keep people focused on that "moral choice" and not just the "mechanical choice" reinforces the immersible element of Alignment. I think that design priority should echo throughout the Alignment system, if possible.

That sounds like a good guiding principle - trying to make it more about reflecting the morals of player's choices rather than presenting them with ways to just create Alignment purely mechanically.

I think these are excellent counterarguments, and I'm glad to be reminded of them. I'd say these would be reasons to keep the playstyle's share of the Alignment game relatively limited. warmongering (with razing) shouldn't mean you "are Shadow". It would just be one of several components that contribute to Shadowness. A ruthless warmonger might also be doing some things (to be determined [soon?]) that are logical playstyle choices that might actually be Light actions. Not sure what these would be, though.

In any case. Yes, playstyle shouldn't limit Alignment, nor should it telegraph Alignment. However, it's probably unlikely you'd see a lot of max-tier Light players that spent the whole game burning down cities and breaking treaties. They'd probably end up mid-tier or something.

Totally agreed, the dominating factor should be what the player chooses. If they go in saying "I'm going to be Light" and work reasonably toward that goal, regardless of that game's specific circumstances then they shouldn't be able to "fail to be Light". But their circumstances may mean they couldn't get to the upper echelons of Lightness. And the same for Shadow.

Yes, I agree. I think Alignment, like T'a'r, was originally proposed as a kind of transparency we'd layer on top of the existing mechanics. I know I didn't want either to be "a big deal," in that they'd redefine the whole game. I still feel that way, broadly, but the effect of that approach was that those systems are a little disjointed, and thus, pointless. I think we've woven T'a'r back into the fold a bit, and it feels appropriate to do the same with Alignment.

Also agreed, I think we know now that we want to weave these systems together so that they co-operate as a part of the CiV whole!

I see arguments both ways, too. I suppose I'm landing on the "allow these actions to control Alignment, but only moderately." Finding the balance there will be tricky. Your examples of similar systems in BNW are good ones, though I do think this goes a little bit further than that. I think the important thing, regardless of the actual mechanics, is to make the Alignment consequences of the players actions both feel "real", but at the same not, not feel "constraining." They should be somewhat impact, but I don't really want players who have an early game war shrugging their shoulder's and feeling like they "have" to play Shadow, nor do we want peaceful players sort of assuming they "have" to play Light. This should be the case even with he aforementioned Borderlanders. A BLander civ who chooses the "right" Threads (and later, forsaken, quests, etc.) should feel very empowered to be a Shadow civ, despite the push their map position might make towards Light.

Seems like we're on the same page then! It'll be a bit of a balancing act, but it seems like this will give players the best experience when it works!

sure, that's fine. When shall we revisit this, though? Post-policies or after we wrap up this mini Alignment discussion here?

I'm thinking we should revisit this when we come back to Threads and such after Policies. In fact, we seem to have enough content here that we want to change that that could be more of a broad "Alignment" discussion.

Do we need some of the decisions from this Alignment discussion to be able to reason properly about the Alignment tree?

Also, interesting to note that, had we gone with Controlled vs. Aggressive, this aspect could have provided us with some Policy options - i.e. Diplomatic choices yield less Alignment change (or more), for instance. Still could happen, I suppose ("Light In-Game Actions provide double Alignment. Shadow In-Game actions provide half Shadow"), though that might kill the immersion anyway.

I think we still have some options for those. Options like the one you proposed don't have to kill the immersion if they're framed properly with flavor.

Yeah, I guess you're right. I hadn't reviewed all that. Not sure why I assumed they were Light-until-proven-otherwise. I think stedding are, though, right?

I remember us discussing making Stedding tend Light overall, but I can't find anything about it specifically in the summaries. Did the last Stump involve choosing a side for all of the Stedding?

The Tower is certainly Light by default - it chooses Shadow only when the Turning objectives have been completed.

totally agree. I feel like people will feel compelled to decrypt all of this, and get to the bottom of who is what Alignment. And that spelunking is not particularly fun. I think I'd prefer the clues to be embedded elsewhere in the game. So, no to trade route and influence stuff, then.

Sounds good.

I think the kinds of things we're already working with here (playstyle stuff) might be enough.

As far as leakage, in general I prefer the "airtight" approach for most of the game (barring deduction and such), but perhaps in the later stages of the pre-LB game, we could loosen things a little and let some info out?

Based on some of your suggestions below, I think letting more information come out via mechanics that unlock close to the start of the LB is actually really cool. That could create some great gameplay moments where players are suddenly scrambling in the endgame to deal with unexpected Alignments.

This is a good question. I'd hoped to have some time to posit some ideas to how we might make this a little more fun. I do think perhaps it is time that we briefly dive back into the Questioners' functionality in order to make them a little more fun. What could we change? Use them sort of like CiVI spies? Make them "embed" within a city and do stuff? The Faith bonus was what we originally came up with, but that's only valuable if you care about Faith (and also not that fun).

I have not actually used spies yet in CiVI! Haven't had time to even finish a game, so I'd need to play that more to know for sure.

EDIT

I could've sworn this post was shorter the last time I read it.

OK, so thought about this a little bit. I do think one of the "problems" we're having is that the flavor of Questioner means a whole lot more than what we're having them do.

...

Ok, that's where I stop!

/EDIT

I'm going to be a huge pain in the face and suggest that we come back to the Alignment stuff as a whole after we finish Policies. We've both got a lot of stuff that we want to suggest here, since these sections keep getting longer!

I really like a lot of what you suggest here, particularly about unlocking more information about how effective Questioners are over the course of the game. And it seems like Questioners definitely need this overhaul to make them fun!

I think running through this Alignment stuff together once Policies are wrapped up will give us more time to focus on it, rather than try to squeeze it in in the middle!

hmmmm , I understand. I'm not sure that'll "feel" right, though. I can see that driving up demand for Q's, but, again, is that demand "fun"? Seems more like tedious maintenance (moreso than normal).

Agreed, this would not be great for the player experience, because it's a purely mechanical disadvantage that you end up saddled with by doing well, which isn't cool.

Right. I guess it's a little disappointing that these particular branches will A) always be associated with certain Philosophies, and not others, and B) often be associated with certain civs, and not others (though this last one is less of an issue). It's likely to very often be Liberation = channeler side, for instance.

Also, are we ok with the fact that this tree pops up right before the other "channeling-related trees", aka the Philosophies? We'd need to make sure we keep the functionality of this branch rather distinct from any channeler-related stuff we'd be doing in tenets themselves... basically, steer it clear of Lib/Auth territory.

I think as long as we don't have any specific overlaps we should be ok. I think it would be remiss not to have the Tower come up at all in any of these, given its position as a knowledgeable location in the canon, even if that does come close to Auth territory. We wouldn't want the same bonus in a Tenet and Policy, but as long they don't do exactly the same thing then it should be fine. Also, even though we're calling it the "channeling branch" to differentiate it from its opposing branch, it's important to note that it's still a Science branch primarily, just through the channeling mechanics as a vehicle for that. So that should provide a guiding mechanical through line in this branch that helps keep it separate from the Tenets.

I don't think Liberation will necessarily always choose this side. The Tower Policy(ies) may not help them much at all if they haven't done any Tower-ing (which is an option for Liberation civs), which pushes them towards the other branch. They may just otherwise be a very Science-y focused civ with lots of Science buildings that benefits more from the opposing branch.

And the inverse, an Oppression civ might have tons of channelers if their uniques provide a way to do that, which our quintessential Oppression civ (Seanchan) does in the sul'dam. The Policies that interact with these may actually end up helping them more, depending on how those Policies work.

I think that's the leading option, right now. I think there isn't enough mechanical presence of the ogier (that isn't diplo-related) or the AoL to create meaningful *branches* out of them. I'd say both of those are prime candidates for flavor (if not actual policy mechanics) for Scholarship, though - I'd say we could probably justify this for *either* the channeling or non-channeling branches

I could see an AoL branch that turns a lot of the more Culture-y stuff into Science. But you're right that both the Ogier and AoL are good sources of flavor for the branches that we're looking at now anyway! So let's stick with pure Science vs channeling Science.

First off, I think this is moot. We're going with Light vs Shadow, not Controlled vs Aggressive, right? A policy like this has no place in such a tree, right? I suppose we could do one that does the opposite - always offering a +Medium on your side choice.

I don't think this is totally moot. Your suggestion from your last post (the one I replied to at the beginning of this post) of a variant of this Policy that works in the Light vs Shadow tree means that we could use a Policy like this if we wanted to provide a bonus in the form of more flexible Alignment output from Threads. However, we do have simpler options available to us now as well!

But yeah, I think a policy like this could work, in a world where we went with a Controlled branch. Possibly too strong, but we could always downgrade it - "Medium" is just a term for us, not the player (it could always just be "Medium - 20%" or something)

Totally, yeah, those values are the complete range, so we don't have to stick to the specific values we've chosen for Low/Med/High.

this one's again not likely to be useful without a Controlled branch.

Same as above, we could use a variant of this in a Light vs Shadow tree, so still works!

I see how this could work, but it also seems kind of un-fun. Yes, it tempers your Alignment, but also takes away the main benefits of threads (the yields). To me the more viable strategy would seem to be just take alternating Alignments on each thread, always seeking to even them out (e.g. +Med Production +Hi Shadow one time, and then +Lo Faith +Hi Light next time).

It's always optional though - you can choose on each Thread to take the lowered version of both yields (on choices where that option is available) or instead take the normal result.

Totally, if you're aiming for Neutrality, then switching back and forth on the Alignment of your choices will definitely be a big part of your strategy. I figure things will happen to these players though that tilts them one way or the other and they need to keep choosing the same way. And this approach is also to help players who are aiming for specific thresholds - they might want to be exactly in the Neutral tier which is very small, so small increments help them a lot. For comparison, by the end of the game, the high yield Thread choices give you more than twice as much Alignment (500-580) as the entire width of the Neutral tier (100 Shadow to 100 Light, so total width 200). An unlucky set of choices for their last few Threads could otherwise easily push a player out of their intended tier.

I guess we'd have to have this whole conversation over again... To me that sounds heads and shoulders better than gaining a single free Great Artist

Yeah, this is just circular, because now I'm talking about population requirements and flexibility again. I'd say given how easy this is to tweak it seems like the best way to work it out is to try them both.

ok, good. I'd expect this'd inherit and adopt some things from Commerce, and, of course, from Exploration.

It's an unbranched policy in this tree that uncovers Reflections, right?

Yep!

ok, so ships can use rivers. We can see about finding a policy space for that. We do have to see if it ends up "fitting," since that is a very different "feel" of policy than all the others.

Yeah, we'll try to get that kind of stuff in in the next stage, which looks like it will start quite soon!

OK, so I think it's time to line up what we have and zoom back out. First, mechanics-based:

Awesome, thanks for going through all of these and putting them together! It's good to have a source of truth to work from for the next stage!

Unity - Era 1, Convergent - Two ways to be tall
Tradition-esque - building tall productive cities
Governors - using governors on tall cities

Ambition - Era 1, Convergent - two ways to be wide
Liberty-esque - using luxuries to aid in the expansion of your civ
Bonus - using bonus resources and other traits to settle into less-than-viable locations

War - Era 1, Convergent/Divergent - different foci to combat
Lawless - specializing in fighting people, especially barbs
Shadowspawn - specializing in fighting shadowspawn

All good!

Myth - Era 1, Divergent - two applications of Faith
Piety-esque - be a better Path Founder
Path/Alignment - use faith and Alignment to boost one another

I think the comparison here should be the use of Faith on both sides, Piety-esque is "use Faith to be better at founding/managing Paths" and the Faith/Alignment branch is "use Faith to be better at Alignment mechanics".

Power - Era 2, Divergent - two approaches to dealing with channeling
Pro Channeling - bonuses to using channelers
Anti-Channeling - bonuses for not using channelers

Creativity - Era 2, divergent - two approaches to using/generating culture
Aesthetics-esque (worst word ever) - assist in Culture VC
Work-for-You - boost culture and use it to boost other mechanics as well

Politics - Era 3, Convergent - two approaches to being good at diplo
Tower - boost relations with the White Tower and CSs
Stedding - boost relations with steddings and CSs

Looks good!

Wealth - Era 3, convergent/divergent - two approaches to generating gold and/or exploring
Commerce-esque - generating gold and capitalizing on it
Exploration-esque - generating gold through the sea, and boosting navy

Seeing these side by side now, should we make the first tree more about land-based stuff specifically? Like the channeling branch in the Scholarship tree, it would still be primarily a Gold branch, but its differentiating factor from the Exploration-esque branch would be that it's got a land-based slant to it. (Doesn't mean every Policy in such a "land-based" branch should not work for a naval civ.)

Scholarship - Era 4, convergent - two approaches to generating science
Rationalism-esque - boosting conventional science and steering towards the science VC
Channeling science - boosting science through channeling and channeling through science

Alignment - Era 4, divergent - boosting alignment output and benefits from Alignment
Light - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
Shadow - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it

Looks good!

Does that all look right? OK, a look at Flavor, then. Inserting the names we'd previously used, and evaluating each.

Awesome!

Unity
Loyalty - I think this probably needs to change. Stability? Strength? Identity? Kinship? Others?
Leadership - I think this is fine

Big fan of Kinship actually! That fits really well with the whole "Two Rivers" rural flavor to this branch.

Ambition
Prosperity - this one could work. could maybe do better but it fits reasonably well. Something less money-ish? Extensive?
Expansion - this kind of works, but is sort of odd. Perhaps Opportunity (borrowed from the former-exploration substitute) fits better? Versatility? Flexibility?

Luxury resources are also a trading thing, which is quite money-ish, so Prosperity fits quite well into that.

For Expansion, my ideas here are a bit at risk of overlapping with the name for the first branch in the Unity tree. Would something like Community be too close to Kinship? I figure the flavor of this branch is a lot about people pulling together in harsh/unwelcoming conditions.

War
Justice - this one seems a little random, but isn't bad. (fits better here than on other branch). not sure where to go, though.
Valor - this one seems random too. Fine, but random. Courage/Bravery could also work. Also not sure where to go

I think Justice feels a bit virtuous, considering this is the branch that warmongers would pick most often. I'm thinking things like: Victory, Duty, Discipline, or Might.

Valor sounds good for the other. "Stand up against the Shadow" and all that, quite valorous.

Myth
Folklore - this could still work, but could also work for alignment-related branch. not sure where else to go though.
Dreams - obviously no longer works. Belief? Dogma?

If we want other options for Folklore: Heritage, Scripture, or... that's all I've got.

For the Faith/Alignment branch: Morality, Dedication, Doctrine, or Scripture (if not used above). Also quite like Dogma, though that's a bit negative.

Power
Acceptance - good
Fear - good

Agreed.

Creativity
Inspiration - this could be fine. Legacy could also work for this - perhaps better. Any number of such words could work
Legacy - I wonder if Inspiration might actual work better here. Ideas?

For the first one, some options in addition to Legacy: Enlightenment, Artistry, Appreciation, Excellence.

Inspiration does fit better than Legacy on the second one, I think. If we want more options: Ingenuity, Adaptability, Incidentalism (this is not a word, but it sounds fun).

Politics
Diplomacy - this is ok, but possibly not great because the term itself is used elsewhere. Agency? Partnership? Mediation? Compromise?
Friendship - I think this one is probably fine.

Mediation could work. Other options: Sisterhood (very direct), Respect, Negotiation.

Good with Friendship.

Wealth
Fortune - probably fine
Opportunity - maybe no longer fine. Possible, though. might need to trade with Ambition on a few things here... I'm unsure.

Fine with Fortune.

For Opportunity: Seafaring, Mercantilism, Regulation. Opportunity could work though.

Scholarship
Resolve - this one is kind of weird. Maybe "Insight" is better. learning? Study? Wisdom?
Insight - don't think this one works so well. Wisdom? Lore (if we don't use Folklore)? Spirit? Mystery?

For Resolve, Learning seems like a good candidate. Other options: Ingenuity (if not used above), Innovation, Experimentation, Institution.

I don't think we want Insight to feel "mystical" really, because it should be about channeling advancing Science and the understanding of channeling itself, which is something that has concrete study to it. Some options: Source, Understanding, Deliberation, Artificing. Don't feel like I'm quite hitting the flavor I'm looking for yet though.

Alignment - This can't work. Morality? Ethics? Principle? Values?
Light - Courage? Integrity? Honor? Grace? Virtue? Generosity? Charity? Trying to go with "traits" of a civilization and not of a "human being", since this is a social policy.
Shadow - Selfishness? Pride? Ego? Conceit? Vanity? Ambition? Impulse? Instinct? Primacy? Prime? Nature? Same caveat as above. Would prefer not to be overtly "bad" or "evil".

Morality or Ethics for the name of the tree works for me!

I'm liking Integrity for Light and Conceit for Shadow!

 

[counterpoint]

Ok, so no citizenflipping as a part of the end of the TW then?

correct!

Yeah, this will play into the wider discussion below. As for the specific example of Light and Borderlander civs, I think it's ok to push them a bit further Light this way. Like you said about the scarcity of top-tier-Light-razing-warmongers being extremely infrequent, I think top-tier-Shadow-Borderlanders seems unlikely. Shadow Borderlander civs shouldn't be uncommon, but extremely unredeemably evil ones should be.

sounds good.

That sounds like a good guiding principle - trying to make it more about reflecting the morals of player's choices rather than presenting them with ways to just create Alignment purely mechanically.

good!

Totally agreed, the dominating factor should be what the player chooses. If they go in saying "I'm going to be Light" and work reasonably toward that goal, regardless of that game's specific circumstances then they shouldn't be able to "fail to be Light". But their circumstances may mean they couldn't get to the upper echelons of Lightness. And the same for Shadow.

agreed!

(lots of short responses here!)

Also agreed, I think we know now that we want to weave these systems together so that they co-operate as a part of the CiV whole!

or the CiV(I) whole, to be more accurate!

Seems like we're on the same page then! It'll be a bit of a balancing act, but it seems like this will give players the best experience when it works!

player actions have moderate effect on Alignment!

#Alignment (discuss it later!)

I'm thinking we should revisit this when we come back to Threads and such after Policies. In fact, we seem to have enough content here that we want to change that that could be more of a broad "Alignment" discussion.

Do we need some of the decisions from this Alignment discussion to be able to reason properly about the Alignment tree?

Yeah, I'm fine with #Alignment on this... but I do wonder if *some* of this stuff will come up when we do the Alignment tree. It's possible that what we have is general enough to allow for at least general Policy creation. If we have to go back to the policies briefly, once the Alignment system is updated, that's fine.

I remember us discussing making Stedding tend Light overall, but I can't find anything about it specifically in the summaries. Did the last Stump involve choosing a side for all of the Stedding?

The Tower is certainly Light by default - it chooses Shadow only when the Turning objectives have been completed.

Hmmm, I definitely do remember that stedding are light, pretty much exclusively. They have soldiers and stuff. I could be wrong on this. Maybe it depends, just like the CSs? They certainly are flavorfully much more likely to be light.

I have not actually used spies yet in CiVI! Haven't had time to even finish a game, so I'd need to play that more to know for sure.

jury's out on them. I don't like that they have to be produced. But they can do some cool things, I guess. I worry that counter-spying is too clunky, though. You have to defend a specific *district*. So it'd take like four spies to realistically cover your capital city....

Also... if you capture a spy... you can keep it. When a spy get's captured, they have to be returned only via trade negotiations. The AI's usually sell mine back to me. But, I've kind of been never giving them back their spies... ever. And it's not like they try to sweeten the deal or anything. I think it might permanently reduce their max number of spies. Design oversight, for sure.

I'm going to be a huge pain in the face and suggest that we come back to the Alignment stuff as a whole after we finish Policies. We've both got a lot of stuff that we want to suggest here, since these sections keep getting longer!

I really like a lot of what you suggest here, particularly about unlocking more information about how effective Questioners are over the course of the game. And it seems like Questioners definitely need this overhaul to make them fun!

I think running through this Alignment stuff together once Policies are wrapped up will give us more time to focus on it, rather than try to squeeze it in in the middle!

Right. #Alignment, then.

Same deal as above, though - this might come up in policies. So let's be wary of that, I guess.

Also, don't forget to refer back here later!

I think as long as we don't have any specific overlaps we should be ok. I think it would be remiss not to have the Tower come up at all in any of these, given its position as a knowledgeable location in the canon, even if that does come close to Auth territory. We wouldn't want the same bonus in a Tenet and Policy, but as long they don't do exactly the same thing then it should be fine. Also, even though we're calling it the "channeling branch" to differentiate it from its opposing branch, it's important to note that it's still a Science branch primarily, just through the channeling mechanics as a vehicle for that. So that should provide a guiding mechanical through line in this branch that helps keep it separate from the Tenets.

ok, let's see how it goes, then!

I don't think Liberation will necessarily always choose this side. The Tower Policy(ies) may not help them much at all if they haven't done any Tower-ing (which is an option for Liberation civs), which pushes them towards the other branch. They may just otherwise be a very Science-y focused civ with lots of Science buildings that benefits more from the opposing branch.

And the inverse, an Oppression civ might have tons of channelers if their uniques provide a way to do that, which our quintessential Oppression civ (Seanchan) does in the sul'dam. The Policies that interact with these may actually end up helping them more, depending on how those Policies work.

ok, let's choose the policies carefully then. The challenge is going to be to make things that are useful to all of these kinds of civs.

I could see an AoL branch that turns a lot of the more Culture-y stuff into Science. But you're right that both the Ogier and AoL are good sources of flavor for the branches that we're looking at now anyway! So let's stick with pure Science vs channeling Science.

I don't think this is totally moot. Your suggestion from your last post (the one I replied to at the beginning of this post) of a variant of this Policy that works in the Light vs Shadow tree means that we could use a Policy like this if we wanted to provide a bonus in the form of more flexible Alignment output from Threads. However, we do have simpler options available to us now as well!

likely!

It's always optional though - you can choose on each Thread to take the lowered version of both yields (on choices where that option is available) or instead take the normal result.

yes, it's optional... but optional-ness doesn't make it more fun.

Totally, if you're aiming for Neutrality, then switching back and forth on the Alignment of your choices will definitely be a big part of your strategy. I figure things will happen to these players though that tilts them one way or the other and they need to keep choosing the same way. And this approach is also to help players who are aiming for specific thresholds - they might want to be exactly in the Neutral tier which is very small, so small increments help them a lot. For comparison, by the end of the game, the high yield Thread choices give you more than twice as much Alignment (500-580) as the entire width of the Neutral tier (100 Shadow to 100 Light, so total width 200). An unlucky set of choices for their last few Threads could otherwise easily push a player out of their intended tier.

the other thing to remember about neutered players is that they'll often choose to neuter themselves when the LB starts. They might be moderately light or shadow, assuming they'll go one way or the other... but then in-game circumstances suggest that they might have a better chance pursuing a victory condition on their own. So it may be that the "typical" castrated player won't really be "playing neutral" the whole game.

Yeah, this is just circular, because now I'm talking about population requirements and flexibility again. I'd say given how easy this is to tweak it seems like the best way to work it out is to try them both.

let's start the development of the mod over!

I think the comparison here should be the use of Faith on both sides, Piety-esque is "use Faith to be better at founding/managing Paths" and the Faith/Alignment branch is "use Faith to be better at Alignment mechanics"

mostly agree, though I think there will be some things that do purely boost Faith in this branch, that may or may not relate to Alignment as well.

Oh, and on this tweaking of verbiage - let's remember this stuff so we can redo these temp-master-lists once we're settled on the names.

Seeing these side by side now, should we make the first tree more about land-based stuff specifically? Like the channeling branch in the Scholarship tree, it would still be primarily a Gold branch, but its differentiating factor from the Exploration-esque branch would be that it's got a land-based slant to it. (Doesn't mean every Policy in such a "land-based" branch should not work for a naval civ.)

I guess so. Not sure it's that important to distinguish. Should there be *no* water-related policies (taken liberally) in that branch?

Big fan of Kinship actually! That fits really well with the whole "Two Rivers" rural flavor to this branch.

yeah, is it too evocative of "the Kin" though? Other possibility: Clan. Identity.

Luxury resources are also a trading thing, which is quite money-ish, so Prosperity fits quite well into that.

For Expansion, my ideas here are a bit at risk of overlapping with the name for the first branch in the Unity tree. Would something like Community be too close to Kinship? I figure the flavor of this branch is a lot about people pulling together in harsh/unwelcoming conditions.

Prosperity is fine.

Community is too close to Kinship.... and is the name of a Tech. So, we should probably go elsewhere.

Adaptability? Tenacity?

I think Justice feels a bit virtuous, considering this is the branch that warmongers would pick most often. I'm thinking things like: Victory, Duty, Discipline, or Might.

Valor sounds good for the other. "Stand up against the Shadow" and all that, quite valorous.

Duty and Discipline are techs, I think....

Might, I like! Might is right!

Valor is fine.

If we want other options for Folklore: Heritage, Scripture, or... that's all I've got.

For the Faith/Alignment branch: Morality, Dedication, Doctrine, or Scripture (if not used above). Also quite like Dogma, though that's a bit negative.

scripture is too laden with Earth-meaning. Heritage is a tech.

What about just "Lore"? Is that taken elsewhere in the game? Wisdom is also not bad.

For the right side, Morality could work, but it's too similar to whatever we choose for Alignment, IMO. It is good, though. Otherwise, I'd go with Doctrine.

For the first one, some options in addition to Legacy: Enlightenment, Artistry, Appreciation, Excellence.

Inspiration does fit better than Legacy on the second one, I think. If we want more options: Ingenuity, Adaptability, Incidentalism (this is not a word, but it sounds fun).

I like I like Legacy the most of those.

I say Inspiration for the second one! Could be Ingenuity, though - something nice about the universality of the bonuses on that branch that is nice.

Mediation could work. Other options: Sisterhood (very direct), Respect, Negotiation.

Good with Friendship.

Respect might be the frontrunner, for me. I actually like the idea of Deference, because it feels like a "cultural trait." And it's a nice counterpoint to friendship. But does that sit too close to "Authority", in that it feels flavor-weird for some civs that might take that branch.

Friendship.

Fine with Fortune.

For Opportunity: Seafaring, Mercantilism, Regulation. Opportunity could work though.

Seafaring too literal. Mercantilism has popped up several times in this thread, and still is a rather specific economic policy on earth that I don't think we should casually evoke... regulation is kind of loaded.... Opportunity, then?

For Resolve, Learning seems like a good candidate. Other options: Ingenuity (if not used above), Innovation, Experimentation, Institution.

I don't think we want Insight to feel "mystical" really, because it should be about channeling advancing Science and the understanding of channeling itself, which is something that has concrete study to it. Some options: Source, Understanding, Deliberation, Artificing. Don't feel like I'm quite hitting the flavor I'm looking for yet though.

Innovations are a thing in the game already. I think Ingenuity might be my favorite. If used above, learning, I guess.

I understand your issues with those. Lore still could work, though (if not used above). To me, Source feels very very mystical.... since the TSource is this thing people can scarcely define.... Hmmm... Scrutiny? Experimentation? Inquiry? Analysis?

Morality or Ethics for the name of the tree works for me!

I'm liking Integrity for Light and Conceit for Shadow!

Hmmm.... I guess I'd go with Ethics. Morality could be used in Myth above, theoretically.

Integrity is fine.

Conceit is fine. I kind of like Pride - it's a "strong" word.

 

[S3rgeus]

Sorry for the delay! I meant to put it on my last post that I wouldn't be home on Friday/Saturday, but forgot!

Lots of finalizing decisions here, so we should be able to move on to specific Policies shortly! (Possibly even below, I'll see what it's like once I write more!)

or the CiV(I) whole, to be more accurate!

Indeed!

player actions have moderate effect on Alignment!

#Alignment (discuss it later!)

Sounds good!

Yeah, I'm fine with #Alignment on this... but I do wonder if *some* of this stuff will come up when we do the Alignment tree. It's possible that what we have is general enough to allow for at least general Policy creation. If we have to go back to the policies briefly, once the Alignment system is updated, that's fine.

Agreed, that sounds good. There might be some overlap, but as you've said we can tweak both in sequence until we get to the right place!

Hmmm, I definitely do remember that stedding are light, pretty much exclusively. They have soldiers and stuff. I could be wrong on this. Maybe it depends, just like the CSs? They certainly are flavorfully much more likely to be light.

Looking back through the thread backup, I see a post from April 2015 (man, we've been at this a long time) where we've said that Stedding are "solidly Light-aligned". We use this as a basis for establishing them as a Light-side-exclusive Alignment source. However, "Shadow-declared Stedding" is something that comes up later in the topic as well.

It seems to me that having Stedding lean Light, but not exclusively be Light makes the most sense. If left to their own devices, then they would all choose Light, but if there's a Stedding that's had 3 Shadow allies for 1000 years, then it seems strange that it wouldn't be affected like other CSes.

The fact that they give out Light for some quests (did we formalize that in a summary? I can't seem to find it!) is still fine, even if those particular Stedding later choose Shadow during the LB. (As long as they stop giving out Light at that point.) Up until the decision they've all had the same external appearance of Stedding goodness regardless.

jury's out on them. I don't like that they have to be produced. But they can do some cool things, I guess. I worry that counter-spying is too clunky, though. You have to defend a specific *district*. So it'd take like four spies to realistically cover your capital city....

Also... if you capture a spy... you can keep it. When a spy get's captured, they have to be returned only via trade negotiations. The AI's usually sell mine back to me. But, I've kind of been never giving them back their spies... ever. And it's not like they try to sweeten the deal or anything. I think it might permanently reduce their max number of spies. Design oversight, for sure.

Weird, hopefully the diplomacy of that gets better soon! I've read complaints about spies very similar to what you're saying here, about defending specific districts and such. They also made a change in the first patch that made defending with a spy less laborious, right? Previously you had to keep telling them to do it every few turns or something?

Also, don't forget to refer back here later!

I won't! I figure when we get back to this I'll pick up straight from the part I quoted last time.

yes, it's optional... but optional-ness doesn't make it more fun.

Right, I thought the un-fun was coming from the fact that it would reduce the yields of such choices because you thought it wasn't optional. I don't think it's un-fun, it can give the player really cool yield line ups with any objectives they might have with Alignment. "If I pick the Policy version of this choice, I'll get exactly into the range I want!" It's additional flexibility for them with that mechanic, which will lead to more situations where it does exactly what they want it to.

the other thing to remember about neutered players is that they'll often choose to neuter themselves when the LB starts. They might be moderately light or shadow, assuming they'll go one way or the other... but then in-game circumstances suggest that they might have a better chance pursuing a victory condition on their own. So it may be that the "typical" castrated player won't really be "playing neutral" the whole game.

This is definitely true, and it does suggest that this kind of player would want to make precise adjustments to their Alignment in short periods of time toward the end of the game, when Thread yields are at their highest. Such players would specifically benefit from this kind of Policy since Threads are the portion of Alignment generation most completely left up to the player's choices. It lets them compensate for the other parts of their Alignment output they no longer have time to change, or get into more specific ranges with a single choice rather than needing to carefully balance and then rebalance their current Alignment output to "adjust the needle" of their current position without continuing to tilt one way or the other.

let's start the development of the mod over!

So I've got this idea for a mod for Civ5...

mostly agree, though I think there will be some things that do purely boost Faith in this branch, that may or may not relate to Alignment as well.

Yes, some Policies may be like that.

Oh, and on this tweaking of verbiage - let's remember this stuff so we can redo these temp-master-lists once we're settled on the names.

Definitely, I'll put another copy of the list updated with the changes we like at the bottom of this post!

I guess so. Not sure it's that important to distinguish. Should there be *no* water-related policies (taken liberally) in that branch?

I didn't think we'd end up having any ocean-related Policies in that branch anyway. If water-related includes access to fresh water, which would be a reasonable definition, then I'd say that's orthogonal to a pair of branches that are divided by naval/land - it could appear in either/both/neither. It was more to give the left branch some mechanical through line that guides it, rather than just have it be "more Gold" which will inspire more disparate Policies.

yeah, is it too evocative of "the Kin" though? Other possibility: Clan. Identity.

Yeah, I thought about this and they are close. But I think Kinship is enough of a standalone word that the crossover with the Kin isn't really a problem. Particularly since the Kin aren't a major mechanic anymore, just an Altaran UU, and the Kin flavor doesn't use the word Kinship specifically (I don't think they do? Like it would be a problem if they referred to themselves as a "Kinship of channelers" or something).

Community is too close to Kinship.... and is the name of a Tech. So, we should probably go elsewhere.

Adaptability? Tenacity?

Good point! We want to avoid clashing with techs.

What about Dedication?

Duty and Discipline are techs, I think....

Might, I like! Might is right!

Might it is!

scripture is too laden with Earth-meaning. Heritage is a tech.

What about just "Lore"? Is that taken elsewhere in the game? Wisdom is also not bad.

I think Folklore is fine, rather than Lore, if we go with that flavor route.

For the right side, Morality could work, but it's too similar to whatever we choose for Alignment, IMO. It is good, though. Otherwise, I'd go with Doctrine.

Based on what you've said below with the Alignment tree, it looks like Morality is free for us to use here? Or would you prefer Doctrine since we're moving towards Ethics for Alignment?

I like I like Legacy the most of those.

I say Inspiration for the second one! Could be Ingenuity, though - something nice about the universality of the bonuses on that branch that is nice.

Done! I figure Inspiration for the second one works here because it lets us use Ingenuity below.

Respect might be the frontrunner, for me. I actually like the idea of Deference, because it feels like a "cultural trait." And it's a nice counterpoint to friendship. But does that sit too close to "Authority", in that it feels flavor-weird for some civs that might take that branch.

I also considered Deference, which makes it a good candidate since we both came up with it separately. It certainly fits into the Aes Sedai's desired diplomatic stance with other nations. I left it off in the end because I figured the Tower wouldn't actually fully respect and give advantage to a purely deferential nation. That makes me come back around to Respect, which you've also called out here. Shall we go with Respect?

Seafaring too literal. Mercantilism has popped up several times in this thread, and still is a rather specific economic policy on earth that I don't think we should casually evoke... regulation is kind of loaded.... Opportunity, then?

I've looked into this a bit more and I've realized why we're often seeing different things with the word Mercantilism. There's the economic policy you refer to here, but there's also the definition for the word as a non-proper noun, which is just "things have to do with mercantile matters" or "stuff related to merchants" which I think is the more recognizable of the two. I think that definition fits this branch very well.

Innovations are a thing in the game already. I think Ingenuity might be my favorite. If used above, learning, I guess.

Ingenuity it is!

I understand your issues with those. Lore still could work, though (if not used above). To me, Source feels very very mystical.... since the TSource is this thing people can scarcely define.... Hmmm... Scrutiny? Experimentation? Inquiry? Analysis?

Yeah, Source is too mystical as well. Inquiry feels like it's going the right way. Is Knowledge too broad for this?

Hmmm.... I guess I'd go with Ethics. Morality could be used in Myth above, theoretically.

Ethics it is!

Conceit is fine. I kind of like Pride - it's a "strong" word.

Yeah, good point, Pride was definitely a close second for me. I'd be fine going with Pride.


Current list (stuff in red is undecided):

Unity - Era 1, Convergent - Two ways to be tall
Kinship - building tall productive cities
Leadership - using governors on tall cities

Ambition - Era 1, Convergent - two ways to be wide
Prosperity - using luxuries to aid in the expansion of your civ
Expansion - using bonus resources and other traits to settle into less-than-viable locations

War - Era 1, Convergent/Divergent - different foci to combat
Might - specializing in fighting people, especially barbs
Valor - specializing in fighting shadowspawn

Myth - Era 1, Divergent - two applications of Faith
Folklore - use Faith to be better at founding/managing Paths
Morality - use Faith to be better at Alignment mechanics

Power - Era 2, Divergent - two approaches to dealing with channeling
Acceptance - bonuses to using channelers
Fear - bonuses for not using channelers

Creativity - Era 2, divergent - two approaches to using/generating culture
Legacy - assist in Culture VC
Inspiration - boost culture and use it to boost other mechanics as well

Politics - Era 3, Convergent - two approaches to being good at diplo
Respect - boost relations with the White Tower and CSs
Friendship - boost relations with steddings and CSs

Wealth - Era 3, convergent/divergent - two approaches to generating gold and/or exploring
Fortune - generating gold over land
Opportunity - generating gold through the sea, and boosting navy

Scholarship - Era 4, convergent - two approaches to generating science
Ingenuity - boosting conventional science and steering towards the science VC
*word* - boosting science through channeling and channeling through science

Ethics - Era 4, divergent - boosting alignment output and benefits from Alignment
Integrity - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
Pride - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it

 

[counterpoint]

Sorry for the delay! I meant to put it on my last post that I wouldn't be home on Friday/Saturday, but forgot!

no problem! Now's a great time - I just shoveled snow for over four hours and I could use some down time!

Looking back through the thread backup, I see a post from April 2015 (man, we've been at this a long time) where we've said that Stedding are "solidly Light-aligned". We use this as a basis for establishing them as a Light-side-exclusive Alignment source. However, "Shadow-declared Stedding" is something that comes up later in the topic as well.

It seems to me that having Stedding lean Light, but not exclusively be Light makes the most sense. If left to their own devices, then they would all choose Light, but if there's a Stedding that's had 3 Shadow allies for 1000 years, then it seems strange that it wouldn't be affected like other CSes.

The fact that they give out Light for some quests (did we formalize that in a summary? I can't seem to find it!) is still fine, even if those particular Stedding later choose Shadow during the LB. (As long as they stop giving out Light at that point.) Up until the decision they've all had the same external appearance of Stedding goodness regardless.

yeah, I'm fine with all this. Light until proven otherwise - but perhaps with a higher threshold to turn them shadow. Not that different from the Tower, perhaps.

I imagine their lightness in their quests may not be in the normal broad summaries, but in the archive of the quests themselves.

Weird, hopefully the diplomacy of that gets better soon! I've read complaints about spies very similar to what you're saying here, about defending specific districts and such. They also made a change in the first patch that made defending with a spy less laborious, right? Previously you had to keep telling them to do it every few turns or something?

I finished my second game this morning (and in the middle of the science VC cinematic, my computer blue screened....), and yeah, overall I'm kind of annoyed with spies. I can't speak as to whether the situation is better now, as I never used them in my previous game.

As far as I can tell, they're too awesome. That's cool when you're on offense, but ultimately annoying. Every ten turns or so (I think that's around how long their missions take, or something), I was stealing 500 or so gold from various cities. Sometimes stealing tech boosts as well (though I was in the tech lead after awhile, so this stopped). So, that's cool.

But man, that "sabotage" is ridiculous. There were multiple civs who had spies in my capital (and 2nd biggest city) in their Industrial district, sabotaging it. When a district is sabotaged, all the buildings there need to be repaired. So that's 1 turn for the workshop, 2 for the factory, and 2 or 3 for the power plant. I was building spaceship parts, and sabotage would occur. I'd repair the stuff, and five turns later, sabotage *again*. Rinse, repeat. Eventually I just stopped repairing, because the production loss was just not worth it.

I turned to be defensive with my spies. At one point I had four spies defending one city. *two* in the industrial district! Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I caught or killed the spies almost every time, but their sabotage missions were still usually successful - it might be that the success rate of the job might not lower much when you counterspy. Thus, by the end of the game, I just gave up on it, and used my spies for offense only - the counter-spying just wasn't worth it. I got very lucky that nobody thought to sabotage my spaceports (where you build the ss parts). I don't know what happens when they do, but I assume it would have cost me the game (I won in like 2035).

That said, by the end of the game, I also had like 6 enemy spies as permanent captives, so I'm sure that did help (few spies to work against me!). Still, that's obviously an exploit.

So overall, I'd say the system is pretty broken.

....although, the spy shenanigans was essentially the only semi-interesting thing happening in the final hundred or so turns of the game. Otherwise it was a whole bunch of "next turn".

Come on CiVI.... waiting for you to convert me.

Right, I thought the un-fun was coming from the fact that it would reduce the yields of such choices because you thought it wasn't optional. I don't think it's un-fun, it can give the player really cool yield line ups with any objectives they might have with Alignment. "If I pick the Policy version of this choice, I'll get exactly into the range I want!" It's additional flexibility for them with that mechanic, which will lead to more situations where it does exactly what they want it to.

ok, I think I'm misunderstanding this, then. I thought it added an option that was *only* alignment. Does that extra option *also* have a yield?

The unfun thing is the notion that "using" the policy (i.e. choosing the extra choice) only nets alignment, not any other yield - which is kind of lame.

Is this not the case?

This is definitely true, and it does suggest that this kind of player would want to make precise adjustments to their Alignment in short periods of time toward the end of the game, when Thread yields are at their highest. Such players would specifically benefit from this kind of Policy since Threads are the portion of Alignment generation most completely left up to the player's choices. It lets them compensate for the other parts of their Alignment output they no longer have time to change, or get into more specific ranges with a single choice rather than needing to carefully balance and then rebalance their current Alignment output to "adjust the needle" of their current position without continuing to tilt one way or the other.

cool. Sounds good.

I didn't think we'd end up having any ocean-related Policies in that branch anyway. If water-related includes access to fresh water, which would be a reasonable definition, then I'd say that's orthogonal to a pair of branches that are divided by naval/land - it could appear in either/both/neither. It was more to give the left branch some mechanical through line that guides it, rather than just have it be "more Gold" which will inspire more disparate Policies.

right. this all makes sense.

Yeah, I thought about this and they are close. But I think Kinship is enough of a standalone word that the crossover with the Kin isn't really a problem. Particularly since the Kin aren't a major mechanic anymore, just an Altaran UU, and the Kin flavor doesn't use the word Kinship specifically (I don't think they do? Like it would be a problem if they referred to themselves as a "Kinship of channelers" or something).

ok. Kinship is fine. Can change o ut later if need be!

What about Dedication?

hmmmm... dedication seems a little too quasi-religious or military (recall that Dedicated is a rank of Asha'man.

You don't like Tenacity? I kind of like it. Resolve?

I think Folklore is fine, rather than Lore, if we go with that flavor route.

sounds good.

Based on what you've said below with the Alignment tree, it looks like Morality is free for us to use here? Or would you prefer Doctrine since we're moving towards Ethics for Alignment?

tough choice! I kind of like Morality as a word more. Doctrine is a little more policy-ish than branch-ish. That said, overlap with Ethics.... Ethics is a little more "rules-ey", while morality is more broad and touchy-feely. If you think that discrepancy is enough to led them stand separate? If so, I say morality. If not, doctrine. (or dedication?)

Done! I figure Inspiration for the second one works here because it lets us use Ingenuity below.

cheers

I also considered Deference, which makes it a good candidate since we both came up with it separately. It certainly fits into the Aes Sedai's desired diplomatic stance with other nations. I left it off in the end because I figured the Tower wouldn't actually fully respect and give advantage to a purely deferential nation. That makes me come back around to Respect, which you've also called out here. Shall we go with Respect?

sure!

I've looked into this a bit more and I've realized why we're often seeing different things with the word Mercantilism. There's the economic policy you refer to here, but there's also the definition for the word as a non-proper noun, which is just "things have to do with mercantile matters" or "stuff related to merchants" which I think is the more recognizable of the two. I think that definition fits this branch very well.

hmmmm, it's possible that it's just because I'm an academic, but I think Mercantilism is perhaps a more widely used term than mercantilism here. Also possible it's a Stateside thing (not that we all talk about Mercantilism, but that we don't talk about mercantilism ever).

Now, "mercantile" is a word that is used sometimes. But you can't really turn that into the right part of speech without adding the ism. Also, the "ism" doesn't seem to fit with tree names/branch names, well.

Also, I'm not sure it fits that branch particularly well - would make sense with the left side better, mayhaps.

Opportunity is still ok. Enterprise? What about something like Connection? Affiliation? Looking for something that connotes both trade and the spread-out "network" of this.

Yeah, Source is too mystical as well. Inquiry feels like it's going the right way. Is Knowledge too broad for this?

I like "Inquiry" more as a branch name... but not up against Ingenuity. Feels too similar for competing branches.

I guess Knowledge might be fine. It's the brilliance (left) versus accumulation of learning (right).




A few modifications to the list (stuff in red is undecided):

Unity - Era 1, Convergent - Two ways to be tall
Kinship - building tall productive cities
Leadership - using governors on tall cities

Ambition - Era 1, Convergent - two ways to be wide
Prosperity - using luxuries to aid in the expansion of your civ
Resolve/Tenacity - using bonus resources and other traits to settle into less-than-viable locations

War - Era 1, Convergent/Divergent - different foci to combat
Might - specializing in fighting people, especially barbs
Valor - specializing in fighting shadowspawn

Myth - Era 1, Divergent - two applications of Faith
Folklore - use Faith to be better at founding/managing Paths
Morality/Doctrine - use Faith to be better at Alignment mechanics

Power - Era 2, Divergent - two approaches to dealing with channeling
Acceptance - bonuses to using channelers
Fear - bonuses for not using channelers

Creativity - Era 2, divergent - two approaches to using/generating culture
Legacy - assist in Culture VC
Inspiration - boost culture and use it to boost other mechanics as well

Politics - Era 3, Convergent - two approaches to being good at diplo
Respect - boost relations with the White Tower and CSs
Friendship - boost relations with steddings and CSs

Wealth - Era 3, convergent/divergent - two approaches to generating gold and/or exploring
Fortune - generating gold over land
*word* - generating gold through the sea, and boosting navy

Scholarship - Era 4, convergent - two approaches to generating science
Ingenuity - boosting conventional science and steering towards the science VC
Knowledge - boosting science through channeling and channeling through science

Ethics - Era 4, divergent - boosting alignment output and benefits from Alignment
Integrity - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
Pride - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it

 

[S3rgeus]

no problem! Now's a great time - I just shoveled snow for over four hours and I could use some down time!

That sounds brutal! I am very glad it never snows that much here (though global warming might have us yet!). But it does mean 1 inch of snow and everything grinds to a halt.

yeah, I'm fine with all this. Light until proven otherwise - but perhaps with a higher threshold to turn them shadow. Not that different from the Tower, perhaps.

Sounds good. I've added that to the Diplo summary, under where we mention CSes choosing sides. It's a bit woolly at the moment, but mostly because the base mechanic of "points accumulated by CSes" doesn't have numbers yet!

I imagine their lightness in their quests may not be in the normal broad summaries, but in the archive of the quests themselves.

The Stedding exclusive quests are listed in the Diplo summary and don't seem to note anything about Light yields. We probably wouldn't want to make just the Stedding exclusive quests yield Light though, since the Stedding still have all the normal quests that they can give out, so (given the proportion of Stedding exclusive quests to normal) they would give out an unstable amount of Alignment (as in it would vary a lot between games, due to randomness of how they choose quests).

Shall I add a note that all quests given out by Stedding include some nominal Light Alignment as a part of their rewards?

I finished my second game this morning (and in the middle of the science VC cinematic, my computer blue screened....), and yeah, overall I'm kind of annoyed with spies. I can't speak as to whether the situation is better now, as I never used them in my previous game.

As far as I can tell, they're too awesome. That's cool when you're on offense, but ultimately annoying. Every ten turns or so (I think that's around how long their missions take, or something), I was stealing 500 or so gold from various cities. Sometimes stealing tech boosts as well (though I was in the tech lead after awhile, so this stopped). So, that's cool.

But man, that "sabotage" is ridiculous. There were multiple civs who had spies in my capital (and 2nd biggest city) in their Industrial district, sabotaging it. When a district is sabotaged, all the buildings there need to be repaired. So that's 1 turn for the workshop, 2 for the factory, and 2 or 3 for the power plant. I was building spaceship parts, and sabotage would occur. I'd repair the stuff, and five turns later, sabotage *again*. Rinse, repeat. Eventually I just stopped repairing, because the production loss was just not worth it.

I turned to be defensive with my spies. At one point I had four spies defending one city. *two* in the industrial district! Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I caught or killed the spies almost every time, but their sabotage missions were still usually successful - it might be that the success rate of the job might not lower much when you counterspy. Thus, by the end of the game, I just gave up on it, and used my spies for offense only - the counter-spying just wasn't worth it. I got very lucky that nobody thought to sabotage my spaceports (where you build the ss parts). I don't know what happens when they do, but I assume it would have cost me the game (I won in like 2035).

That said, by the end of the game, I also had like 6 enemy spies as permanent captives, so I'm sure that did help (few spies to work against me!). Still, that's obviously an exploit.

So overall, I'd say the system is pretty broken.

....although, the spy shenanigans was essentially the only semi-interesting thing happening in the final hundred or so turns of the game. Otherwise it was a whole bunch of "next turn".

Come on CiVI.... waiting for you to convert me.

That sounds rough! I'm currently playing a lot of Stellaris (or at least trying to!). They have a few interesting ways to deal with this kind of endgame "I've already won" problem, though the Stellaris community seems to think it isn't quite enough yet.

They have "fallen empires" that start the game super powerful but have receded from their former glory and abandoned any galactic ambitions. They have enormous fleets and can give even some late game players a run for their money if they do any of the specific things that annoy them.

There are also endgame "crises" that tries to divide the galaxy in a variety of ways in the late game. (Some sound quite similar to our Last Battle - ending up with a massive two side war that everyone needs to choose a side they think most likely to win.) There are also "external" threats (extradimensional horrors, AI uprisings) that try to unite the galaxy against them.

We seem to have done some of the above, so it's nice to see that there are other games that show some of these concepts work in general! 10 days until the Aztecs become free and our next best chance at getting some modding tools. I'll need to play a bunch of Civ6 if we decide to switch then!

ok, I think I'm misunderstanding this, then. I thought it added an option that was *only* alignment. Does that extra option *also* have a yield?

The unfun thing is the notion that "using" the policy (i.e. choosing the extra choice) only nets alignment, not any other yield - which is kind of lame.

Is this not the case?

There are two Policy options that we were considering:

• Adding an extra choice that is just a diminished Alignment option - no other yields.
• Giving the player the ability to "choose low" on a subset of all Thread choices, where they choose an existing available choice, but receive a lower Alignment yield in exchange for also receiving less of the corresponding non-Alignment yields. (This is available where such choices can be divided - you can give the player a proportion of 56 Gold, but not of 1 Population.)

I thought this quote block was about the latter, because we'd decided the former ended up being unexciting/a decent amount of work for little payoff. That one seems like it could be good fun and would only require us to mark choices as "portionable", rather than come up with flavor for any new choices.

hmmmm... dedication seems a little too quasi-religious or military (recall that Dedicated is a rank of Asha'man.

You don't like Tenacity? I kind of like it. Resolve?

Tenacity can work!

tough choice! I kind of like Morality as a word more. Doctrine is a little more policy-ish than branch-ish. That said, overlap with Ethics.... Ethics is a little more "rules-ey", while morality is more broad and touchy-feely. If you think that discrepancy is enough to led them stand separate? If so, I say morality. If not, doctrine. (or dedication?)

I'm fine going with Morality here and Ethics below!

hmmmm, it's possible that it's just because I'm an academic, but I think Mercantilism is perhaps a more widely used term than mercantilism here. Also possible it's a Stateside thing (not that we all talk about Mercantilism, but that we don't talk about mercantilism ever).

Now, "mercantile" is a word that is used sometimes. But you can't really turn that into the right part of speech without adding the ism. Also, the "ism" doesn't seem to fit with tree names/branch names, well.

Also, I'm not sure it fits that branch particularly well - would make sense with the left side better, mayhaps.

Opportunity is still ok. Enterprise? What about something like Connection? Affiliation? Looking for something that connotes both trade and the spread-out "network" of this.

Good point, the other branches aren't isms, we seem to have dropped all of those from BNW! It might just be different circles yeah, mercantilism has always just been mercantile turned into a noun when I've seen it, until now!

Enterprise sounds pretty good! There's also a nice "ship" nod in there.

I like "Inquiry" more as a branch name... but not up against Ingenuity. Feels too similar for competing branches.

I guess Knowledge might be fine. It's the brilliance (left) versus accumulation of learning (right).

Sounds good!

The (final for now?) list:

Unity - Era 1, Convergent - Two ways to be tall
Kinship - building tall productive cities
Leadership - using governors on tall cities

Ambition - Era 1, Convergent - two ways to be wide
Prosperity - using luxuries to aid in the expansion of your civ
Tenacity - using bonus resources and other traits to settle into less-than-viable locations

War - Era 1, Convergent/Divergent - different foci to combat
Might - specializing in fighting people, especially barbs
Valor - specializing in fighting shadowspawn

Myth - Era 1, Divergent - two applications of Faith
Folklore - use Faith to be better at founding/managing Paths
Morality - use Faith to be better at Alignment mechanics

Power - Era 2, Divergent - two approaches to dealing with channeling
Acceptance - bonuses to using channelers
Fear - bonuses for not using channelers

Creativity - Era 2, divergent - two approaches to using/generating culture
Legacy - assist in Culture VC
Inspiration - boost culture and use it to boost other mechanics as well

Politics - Era 3, Convergent - two approaches to being good at diplo
Respect - boost relations with the White Tower and CSs
Friendship - boost relations with steddings and CSs

Wealth - Era 3, convergent/divergent - two approaches to generating gold and/or exploring
Fortune - generating gold over land
Enterprise - generating gold through the sea, and boosting navy

Scholarship - Era 4, convergent - two approaches to generating science
Ingenuity - boosting conventional science and steering towards the science VC
Knowledge - boosting science through channeling and channeling through science

Ethics - Era 4, divergent - boosting alignment output and benefits from Alignment
Integrity - boosting Light generation and benefits from it
Pride - boosting Shadow generation and benefits from it


Looks like we're mostly done. I can start us off on specific Policies based on your treatment and the stuff we've discussed so far in my next post. I won't be around tomorrow or Wednesday though, so will start that off on Thursday!

Do we want to approach all of the trees at once, or split it up? One tree at a time? Or two/three? Some will have much fewer changes from your treatment than others, I'd say. Though I'd like to get some of the "stranger" Policies in there for some of the ones that do already "work".

Do we want a first run through of the Alignment tree first, so it gets a second pass after we do the others?

 

[counterpoint]

That sounds brutal! I am very glad it never snows that much here (though global warming might have us yet!). But it does mean 1 inch of snow and everything grinds to a halt.

yeah, it's not usually this bad... I had to do two houses this time!

Sounds good. I've added that to the Diplo summary, under where we mention CSes choosing sides. It's a bit woolly at the moment, but mostly because the base mechanic of "points accumulated by CSes" doesn't have numbers yet!

that should work for now. Basically just reminds us later!

The Stedding exclusive quests are listed in the Diplo summary and don't seem to note anything about Light yields. We probably wouldn't want to make just the Stedding exclusive quests yield Light though, since the Stedding still have all the normal quests that they can give out, so (given the proportion of Stedding exclusive quests to normal) they would give out an unstable amount of Alignment (as in it would vary a lot between games, due to randomness of how they choose quests).

Shall I add a note that all quests given out by Stedding include some nominal Light Alignment as a part of their rewards?

yes, good point. It's not just the exclusive quests (though, we could do that to limit the light payout). Yes, I think that note is a good idea.

That sounds rough! I'm currently playing a lot of Stellaris (or at least trying to!). They have a few interesting ways to deal with this kind of endgame "I've already won" problem, though the Stellaris community seems to think it isn't quite enough yet.

They have "fallen empires" that start the game super powerful but have receded from their former glory and abandoned any galactic ambitions. They have enormous fleets and can give even some late game players a run for their money if they do any of the specific things that annoy them.

There are also endgame "crises" that tries to divide the galaxy in a variety of ways in the late game. (Some sound quite similar to our Last Battle - ending up with a massive two side war that everyone needs to choose a side they think most likely to win.) There are also "external" threats (extradimensional horrors, AI uprisings) that try to unite the galaxy against them.

We seem to have done some of the above, so it's nice to see that there are other games that show some of these concepts work in general! 10 days until the Aztecs become free and our next best chance at getting some modding tools. I'll need to play a bunch of Civ6 if we decide to switch then!

hmmm, that game sounds really interesting! I'm very behind in gamin in general, and haven't played anything newer than around 2014, CiVI excepted.... Definitely sounds like they have some good ideas.

Started a game of CIV recently... holy crap that game's turns move faster than VI (on my machine at least).

There are two Policy options that we were considering:

• Adding an extra choice that is just a diminished Alignment option - no other yields.
• Giving the player the ability to "choose low" on a subset of all Thread choices, where they choose an existing available choice, but receive a lower Alignment yield in exchange for also receiving less of the corresponding non-Alignment yields. (This is available where such choices can be divided - you can give the player a proportion of 56 Gold, but not of 1 Population.)

I thought this quote block was about the latter, because we'd decided the former ended up being unexciting/a decent amount of work for little payoff. That one seems like it could be good fun and would only require us to mark choices as "portionable", rather than come up with flavor for any new choices.

yes, the latter! I was referring to the former. The latter makes more sense as a policy, for sure. It's somewhat less fun because of the low yields, but it's better than no yields.

Enterprise sounds pretty good! There's also a nice "ship" nod in there.

holy crap, you're right!

Sounds good!

The (final for now?) list:

cool. Looks good! I've updated the SP Summary. There's no policies in there, but I think it's good to put what we've decided so far in at least.

Looks like we're mostly done. I can start us off on specific Policies based on your treatment and the stuff we've discussed so far in my next post. I won't be around tomorrow or Wednesday though, so will start that off on Thursday!

Do we want to approach all of the trees at once, or split it up? One tree at a time? Or two/three? Some will have much fewer changes from your treatment than others, I'd say. Though I'd like to get some of the "stranger" Policies in there for some of the ones that do already "work".

Do we want a first run through of the Alignment tree first, so it gets a second pass after we do the others?

cool, please do! I'm flexible - handle it however you wish. I did them one at a time, but I was also necessarily not posting for about a month. I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise. Fine with me if you want to do it a la carte - it will certainly keep the post sizes tame. Also, feel free to start at the "top," or with Ethics.

 

[S3rgeus]

Apologies for the delay, I ended up getting home very late this evening as well. I'm probably going to be out tomorrow night (provided I'm not too ill to leave the house by then - coming down with a cold atm ). All else fails I'll be back to follow up on the Policy stuff on Saturday!

 

[S3rgeus]

At last, I have returned!

yeah, it's not usually this bad... I had to do two houses this time!

We actually had some snow this week in the end! About an inch of it, so there was much crashing of folks into ditches and ensuing traffic. I don't know how you guys deal with actual significant amounts of snow!

yes, good point. It's not just the exclusive quests (though, we could do that to limit the light payout). Yes, I think that note is a good idea.

I've added this to the Diplo summary.

hmmm, that game sounds really interesting! I'm very behind in gamin in general, and haven't played anything newer than around 2014, CiVI excepted.... Definitely sounds like they have some good ideas.

Another thing I realized recently is that there a lot of people playing civ (the whole series) who would like a victory condition that can be won by multiple players working together (not necessarily just who started on the same team) which we've done with the Light LB victory!

In the interests of having even more games that last for a really long time, I would wholeheartedly recommend the Witcher 3. I've played a lot of it in 2016 and it's up there as one of my favorite games ever now.

Our Threads are also a good translation (I think) of "random events" from earlier in civ's history. Sukritact's Events & Decisions mod also adds a similar system. Stellaris has a sort of related system, but theirs are actually triggered by stuff you find on the map.

Started a game of CIV recently... holy crap that game's turns move faster than VI (on my machine at least).

Wow, yeah, CIV is more than 11 years old now! Crazy how long that's been. I haven't played it in years, I suppose it would be very snappy on a modern PC. The newer games chug toward the endgame on my laptop, so it makes a big difference when playing on my desktop!

yes, the latter! I was referring to the former. The latter makes more sense as a policy, for sure. It's somewhat less fun because of the low yields, but it's better than no yields.

Awesome sauce, I'll put a variant of this into the running below!

cool. Looks good! I've updated the SP Summary. There's no policies in there, but I think it's good to put what we've decided so far in at least.

Awesome, looks good!

cool, please do! I'm flexible - handle it however you wish. I did them one at a time, but I was also necessarily not posting for about a month. I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise. Fine with me if you want to do it a la carte - it will certainly keep the post sizes tame. Also, feel free to start at the "top," or with Ethics.

Awesome, I'll start with Ethics since we've had a first pass at the other trees already, but not this one, so otherwise we'd be seeing it for the first time at the end of this part, whereas the others we're tweaking based on what we discussed above. This way we can do a similar second-pass on Ethics after we finish the specific Policies for the other trees.


So, first pass at that:

Ethics
Unlock: Era 4
Branches: Integrity (Light) and Pride (Shadow)

Policy: Opener (Ethics)
Branch: None
Requires: None
Leads to: Dogmatic Morality
Effect: Threads occur 50% more often. A new Thread occurs. Unlocks wonder.

Policy: Dogmatic Morality
Branch: None
Requires: None
Leads to: Peaceful Sleep, Dedication, Conspiracies, Dreamspying
Effect: +100% Alignment from Citizens and Threads.

Policy: Peaceful Sleep
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Dogmatic Morality
Leads to: Research League, Solidarity
Effect: +10 Light per turn from your Dreamwards. Questioners used on cities affected by your Dreamwards are 90% less effective.

Policy: Dedication
Branch: None
Requires: Dogmatic Morality
Leads to: None
Effect: +2 Happiness for each Alignment tier away from Neutral.

Policy: Conspiracies
Branch: Pride
Requires: Dogmatic Morality
Leads to: Hidden Knowledge
Effect: +100% Shadow from Turning the Tower objectives. A Golden Age begins.

Policy: Dreamspying
Branch: Pride
Requires: Dogmatic Morality
Leads to: None
Effect: Projections gain an ability that reveals 4 hexes of main layer sight around them

Policy: Research League
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Peaceful Sleep
Leads to: None
Effect: +25% Seal research speed. +10% Science for each other civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Policy: Solidarity
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Peaceful Sleep
Leads to: None
Effect: Can purchase Ogier combat units with Faith after declaring for the Light.

Policy: Hidden Knowledge
Branch: Pride
Requires: Conspiracies
Leads to: None
Effect: Can purchase Shadowspawn with Faith & Gold after declaring for the Shadow. Costs 10% less for each civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Policy: Finisher (Integrity)
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Integrity
Leads to: None
Effect: Dragon's Peace and internal trade routes provide their yields to the source city as well as destination city. Sisters with Faith after declaring for the Light.

Policy: Finisher (Pride)
Branch: Pride
Requires: Pride
Leads to: None
Effect: +30% Gray Men and Bloodknives success rate. Black Sisters with Faith after declaring for the Shadow.

I've also added a copy of the spreadsheet to the DropBox which makes the dependencies much easier to see. I figure we can update that sheet as we go through specific policies this round. Some descriptions are shortened (almost to the point of ambiguity) in the Excel doc for brevity. Also Excel doesn't like cells that start with "+" and are not valid formulae!

With the Ethics tree, I pretty much decided to go with an approach that means Neutral players shouldn't pick this tree. While it's possible to make a tree that can work for them too, I found the options for bonuses when we're focusing on generating more Alignment were a lot more compelling.

Some of the best Policies from the Controlled/Aggressive approach are dropped in as unbranched Policies. Each set of branched Policies has three major components:

• A Policy that boosts your generation of the Alignment of the side you've chosen. (Peaceful Sleep, Black Ajah Supporters)
• A Policy that helps you during the LB based on how many people have chosen each side. (Research League, Aginor Scholars)
• A Policy that grants a "special ability" that's flavorfully connected to the branch's side's mechanics. (Borderland Raiders, Dreamspying)

T'a'r also ended up popping up in both sides.

Firstly, what do you think of the overall structure of these bonuses and how the Light/Shadow mechanics break down? (Before going into the individual Policies, though we should totally do that too.)

Should we try more to make this a viable choice for Neutral players?

Are there any Policies from our previous discussions that I haven't included that you think should be in the runnings? (I looked through all of our startup discussions for the Alignment tree and cut it down to the ones I thought fit best, but there were still quite a few left!)

 

[counterpoint]

sorry for the delay! We moved at the end of last week, and there's been tons of craziness (carbon monoxide was one...). Haven't had a chance to come up for air. Will get to this asap!

 

[S3rgeus]

sorry for the delay! We moved at the end of last week, and there's been tons of craziness (carbon monoxide was one...). Haven't had a chance to come up for air. Will get to this asap!

Man, that sounds serious, glad you're ok! Good luck with the move and there is definitely no rush! I'm going to be away until all the way to next Thursday (27th) so take all the time you need!

 

[counterpoint]

At last, I have returned!

as have I! Move completed and computer finally set up. Boiler no longer spewing deadly gas!

We actually had some snow this week in the end! About an inch of it, so there was much crashing of folks into ditches and ensuing traffic. I don't know how you guys deal with actual significant amounts of snow!

This city deals OK, crazy traffic excepted. I, however, am from southern california...

Another thing I realized recently is that there a lot of people playing civ (the whole series) who would like a victory condition that can be won by multiple players working together (not necessarily just who started on the same team) which we've done with the Light LB victory!

very much agree.

In the interests of having even more games that last for a really long time, I would wholeheartedly recommend the Witcher 3. I've played a lot of it in 2016 and it's up there as one of my favorite games ever now.

yeah, it's on the list! Haven't gotten to it yet. Although, super long games aren't productive in terms of helping me get through the back-log...

Wow, yeah, CIV is more than 11 years old now! Crazy how long that's been. I haven't played it in years, I suppose it would be very snappy on a modern PC. The newer games chug toward the endgame on my laptop, so it makes a big difference when playing on my desktop!

oops! That was a typo! I meant CiV, not CIV. A game of CIV for me would likely not be that fast, since I have played the least of that one (out of the main series, I mean), by far, so don't understand its mechanics nearly as well.

Awesome, I'll start with Ethics since we've had a first pass at the other trees already, but not this one, so otherwise we'd be seeing it for the first time at the end of this part, whereas the others we're tweaking based on what we discussed above. This way we can do a similar second-pass on Ethics after we finish the specific Policies for the other trees.

yeah, that's a good policy

let me state here that I'm not really going to tackle flavor/names of these policies, unless to point out a possible overlap conflict.

Ethics
Unlock: Era 4
Branches: Integrity (Light) and Pride (Shadow)

Policy: Opener (Ethics)
Branch: None
Requires: None
Leads to: None
Effect: Threads occur 50% more often. A new Thread occurs. Unlocks wonder.

Hmmm, I like the idea of this one. Right to the point. I will say, though, perhaps 50% is going to be too powerful. Can be tweaked.

Also, I'd note that the "Leads To" should probably state "Moral Edicts" or any other first-available policy.

Policy: Moral Edicts
Branch: None
Requires: None
Leads to: Peaceful Sleep, Dedication, Black Ajah Supporters, Dreamspying
Effect: +100% Alignment from Citizens and Threads.

Interesting! I like the effect. STraightforward and to the point. However, again, might be too powerful.

Note about the name - it's possible Edicts is problematic, since Edicts are a thing here (from the WT), and I don't think we want people to assume this has anything to do with that.

Policy: Dedication
Branch: None
Requires: Moral Edicts
Leads to: None
Effect: +2 Happiness for each Alignment tier away from Neutral.

This one is good, assuming we go with the "who cares about neutral players" thing, which we may need to do just as a central conceit. Not sure on the balancing - probably the +2 is a good amount. I like that it compounds with Moral Edicts

I should also state that the "summary" format that I used, that you've adopted here (and that we'll likely use in some form for the policy summary) would suggest that Peaceful Sleep should go before Dedication, in terms of the order. This is super minor, and mostly pointless, but I went top-to-bottom and left-to-right. That way, somebody could reasonably sketch the tree while following the summary.

Policy: Peaceful Sleep
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Moral Edicts
Leads to: Research League, Borderland Raiders
Effect: +10 Light per turn from your Dreamwards. Cities affected by your Dreamwards are immune to foreign Questioners.

Cool, also. The +Light value can be tweaked of course. Does this mean that all dreamwards give you this, or only those active on your cities? Like, if i've dropped one on a CS, do I still get light? Do they get Light?

Also, I tend to not be in favor of immunity, and such - I'd rather something like Questioners are X% less effective or something (even if this number is high).

Policy: Research League
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Peaceful Sleep
Leads to: None
Effect: +25% Science for each other civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Like the idea of this one. Wonder if there should be some other element to it that is still helpful, even if you are alone in the dragon peace. Maybe include you as one of the civs? Also, that number is rather high, especially once it compounds with, say, 8 civs....

Also, this is definitely weird if somebody who doesn't join the DP in the LB chooses this tree.

Again, in the order of things, this one should be after BA Supporters and Dreamspying. We can change the format I did before, if need be, but I feel like it works pretty well. I understand you're going Both-Left-Right, but that's unlikely to work intuitively on all trees (look at the current Politics, for example)

Policy: Borderland Raiders
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Peaceful Sleep
Leads to: None
Effect: Units heal for 30% of their max health after killing a Shadowspawn unit.

OK, cool. I feel like this could work well for Valor, too. I wonder if there's some other spice that should be in this one in order to differentiate it.

Policy: Finisher (Integrity)
Branch: Integrity
Requires: Integrity
Leads to: None
Effect: Dragon's Peace trade routes provide their yields to you as well as recipient. Wolfbrother with Faith after Era 5.

This one has the same issue if you are lonely in the Dragon Peace. I'd suggest a tweak that might let it stand alone somehow.

Also, I should note, broadly, that the flavor of these don't really have much to do with Integrity. They're light things, and that's fine, but Integrity? Not so much. I think, if anything, the neutral ones fit better with that. I'd suggest we reconsider that in the future - at least *one* should seem to tie into it.

The same is true with the Pride on the right side. I like that you've coined a term for "looking at stuff in T'a'r" (dreamspying), but something should actually relate to pride somehow.

Policy: Black Ajah Supporters
Branch: Pride
Requires: Moral Edicts
Leads to: Aginor Scholars
Effect: +100% Shadow from Turning the Tower objectives. A Golden Age begins.

The GA probably makes this worth it. Otherwise it might not be awesome enough - other civs could very much be stealing your Shadow by turning the tower for you, right? Or does everybody get shadow when an objective is completed?

Policy: Dreamspying
Branch: Pride
Requires: Moral Edicts
Leads to: None
Effect: Projections can attack main layer units.

Like the flavor name. The mechanics are crazy, and somewhat unflavorful also. Without venturing too far into whether allowing this is a good idea, I do question whether allowing it only for shadow players is a good idea. If we like this ability, I wonder if it needs to exist elsewhere in the policies. Not sure, though - it definitely does feel like something that would be "evil."

It's also weird because projections have no combat stats. Creating them to be on par with their creating unit seems like it'd be rather complicated and hard to track. Also, really annoying for light players...

Policy: Aginor Scholars
Branch: Pride
Requires: Black Ajah Supporters
Leads to: None
Effect: Can purchase Shadowspawn with Faith & Gold after the LB starts. Costs 10% less for each civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Can't Shadow players already purchase Shadowspawn with Faith? Or are they produced? The dragon peace element is interesting.

Also, this is highly bizarre if the civ doesn't actually choose shadow. A light or even neutral civ could buy shadowpawn, which is bad. very bad, i'd say.

Policy: Finisher (Pride)
Branch: Pride
Requires: Pride
Leads to: None
Effect: +30% Gray Men and Bloodknives success rate. Black Sisters with Faith during the LB.

Interesting ability, though perhaps a little niche. The Gray Man element does of course directly link it to the shadow, which is nice.

I am somewhat concerned with the Black Sisters with Faith, though. It seems like that might be too powerful... or, not powerful enough in some scenarios, as the quota of black sisters could be quite low if the tower isn't turned. Why not just have it be WBr with Faith? It seems like shadow players should still have access to that unit, right? I know it's flavorfully weird.

also, a neutral civ getting these is a bad thing....

I've also added a copy of the spreadsheet to the DropBox which makes the dependencies much easier to see. I figure we can update that sheet as we go through specific policies this round. Some descriptions are shortened (almost to the point of ambiguity) in the Excel doc for brevity. Also Excel doesn't like cells that start with "+" and are not valid formulae!

can't you tell excel not to try to compute those cells? set to "Text" I think.

With the Ethics tree, I pretty much decided to go with an approach that means Neutral players shouldn't pick this tree. While it's possible to make a tree that can work for them too, I found the options for bonuses when we're focusing on generating more Alignment were a lot more compelling.

yeah, I'd say really only the Dedication policy is totally useless to them. Moral Edicts obviously would pull you away from neutrality, but some of the other policies are actually useful, still. I do think we need to steer away from policies that break the game if you don't side with corresponding side in the LB. I think we should probably scheme this tree to technically work (even if it's rather inefficient) even if people join the "wrong" side in the LB after completing the branch. So, bonuses that go to waste if you choose "wrong"? Fine. Extra abilities you get when you choose wrong (or neutral)? no.

Some of the best Policies from the Controlled/Aggressive approach are dropped in as unbranched Policies. Each set of branched Policies has three major components:

• A Policy that boosts your generation of the Alignment of the side you've chosen. (Peaceful Sleep, Black Ajah Supporters)
• A Policy that helps you during the LB based on how many people have chosen each side. (Research League, Aginor Scholars)
• A Policy that grants a "special ability" that's flavorfully connected to the branch's side's mechanics. (Borderland Raiders, Dreamspying)

• fine with the first, obviously.

The second is fine, in theory, but does present some problems if thats *all* the bonus is. It is true we want to reward people for recruiting civs to their side, but R. League, for instance, isn't useful if you're alone (Aginor's S is).

The third works in theory, but is also sort of problematic, potentially, if people who aren't of the correct side choose the branch. Also, Dreamspying is much more of a "special ability" than B Raiders, which is really more of a bonus. I find that somewhat suspect, as noted above.

T'a'r also ended up popping up in both sides.

yeah, not a bad idea.

Firstly, what do you think of the overall structure of these bonuses and how the Light/Shadow mechanics break down? (Before going into the individual Policies, though we should totally do that too.)

Yeah, I did, above! Structurally, I'm fine with it, broadly. I do think we sort of need to reexamine the three "roles" you suggested, with an eye towards the fact that some civs will go against type. Acceptance and Fear, for example, are set up to be viable when paired with any combination of Lib/Auth/Opp. In fact, I had a lot of fun imagining what the weird pairings would be. We obviously don't need to go out of our way to make all possibilities equally viable here (Integrity plus max tier shadow, etc.), but we need to recognize that they are possible, and in some cases might be actually effective. We most certainly need to prevent abuse.

Should we try more to make this a viable choice for Neutral players?

yeah, relating to things above. Right now, we have a set up that is sort of a contradiction. On the one hand, it has a useless ability (Dedication), but on the other hand, it grants free abilities that would make it very attractive for a neutral player to choose (especially the shadow side, since it doesn't rely on the light alliance).

We have to head to the middle on this. I think we should probably recognize that there are viable reasons for a neutral player to choose Ethics, either because of a last minute switch to *not* be neutral, or because of insurmountable pressure during the LB (i.e., having to win against an overly powerful Light Alliance or proximity to the Blight, or something). IT's fine if some of the "boost your Alignment" policies aren't entirely worthwhile, but the other policies probably should be - but in a way that doesn't give the neutral player unfair benefits they shouldn't have.

Also, we should probably consider, in theory, Light players choosing Pride, and vise versa. Are we ok with this? It's kooky, and I'd probably be ok with the rare civ doing it in order to support some unusual strategy or in-game scenario (in some ways, it'd kind of flavorful - the Seanchan might be more "Pride" than "Integrity" for example). But I don't want it to provide game-breaking elements.

Are there any Policies from our previous discussions that I haven't included that you think should be in the runnings? (I looked through all of our startup discussions for the Alignment tree and cut it down to the ones I thought fit best, but there were still quite a few left!)

hmmmm, not sure if there's much we've missed. The truth is, we need to look a little more at some of these broad issues, first. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, at least.

Man, that sounds serious, glad you're ok! Good luck with the move and there is definitely no rush! I'm going to be away until all the way to next Thursday (27th) so take all the time you need!

Ah, well I appreciated the catch-up time, then. Next Thurs is quite a long time! Hopefully you get some time to think on the other trees that are up next!

 

[S3rgeus]

Back again! I've been away for a series of birthday events (it was my birthday on Tuesday) and now things are slightly more back to normal! What were we doing again?

as have I! Move completed and computer finally set up. Boiler no longer spewing deadly gas!

Phew, that's good!

This city deals OK, crazy traffic excepted. I, however, am from southern california...

What I would do for warm weather again! there hasn't been much snow since last time here, but it's unbelievably cold outside right now.

yeah, it's on the list! Haven't gotten to it yet. Although, super long games aren't productive in terms of helping me get through the back-log...

Yeah, I plan to play a bunch of Telltale games after I finish all the Witcher 3 DLCs for something a bit shorter!

oops! That was a typo! I meant CiV, not CIV. A game of CIV for me would likely not be that fast, since I have played the least of that one (out of the main series, I mean), by far, so don't understand its mechanics nearly as well.

Ah ok! Yeah, I suppose CiV is ~7 years old now! Crazy!

yeah, that's a good policy

let me state here that I'm not really going to tackle flavor/names of these policies, unless to point out a possible overlap conflict.

Sounds good!

Hmmm, I like the idea of this one. Right to the point. I will say, though, perhaps 50% is going to be too powerful. Can be tweaked.

Agreed, all of the numbers will probably need tweaking.

Also, I'd note that the "Leads To" should probably state "Moral Edicts" or any other first-available policy.

I changed this one intentionally, because the Openers don't really lead to the first policies, right? If anything it's sort of the other way (getting the first policy unlocks the opener.) I figured just leaving the (Opener) tag on it made it more clear.

Interesting! I like the effect. STraightforward and to the point. However, again, might be too powerful.

Note about the name - it's possible Edicts is problematic, since Edicts are a thing here (from the WT), and I don't think we want people to assume this has anything to do with that.

Same on tweaking for power.

Agreed on Edicts, I wanted to come up with a better name for this one, but couldn't at the time!

Some other possibilities:
Moral Teachings
Ethical Study
Radical Morality

This one is good, assuming we go with the "who cares about neutral players" thing, which we may need to do just as a central conceit. Not sure on the balancing - probably the +2 is a good amount. I like that it compounds with Moral Edicts

Sounds good!

I should also state that the "summary" format that I used, that you've adopted here (and that we'll likely use in some form for the policy summary) would suggest that Peaceful Sleep should go before Dedication, in terms of the order. This is super minor, and mostly pointless, but I went top-to-bottom and left-to-right. That way, somebody could reasonably sketch the tree while following the summary.

Awesome, I did wonder what the criteria were for the order you used before! This makes a lot of sense, I've swapped the order around.

Cool, also. The +Light value can be tweaked of course. Does this mean that all dreamwards give you this, or only those active on your cities? Like, if i've dropped one on a CS, do I still get light? Do they get Light?

Good questions, I could see us going a few ways with this. Most would probably want some rewording for it.

Either: "Your cities affected by your Dreamwards produce +10 Light" That would mean it's a function of city coverage, not the Dreamwards themselves.

Or: "+10 Light for each Dreamward you control", which is more obviously 10 per Dreamward, regardless of location.

We could also go with "+10 Light for each city affected by your Dreamwards", which is again city coverage, but also includes foreign cities this time. Since some applications of Dreamwards involve covering foreign cities, that might make the most sense.

And of course based on your last question, we could go with "Cities affected by your Dreamwards produce +10 Light" which would affect the owner of the city!

Also, I tend to not be in favor of immunity, and such - I'd rather something like Questioners are X% less effective or something (even if this number is high).

Agreed, I've tweaked this to be a 90% penalty on the Questioner's effectiveness.

Like the idea of this one. Wonder if there should be some other element to it that is still helpful, even if you are alone in the dragon peace. Maybe include you as one of the civs? Also, that number is rather high, especially once it compounds with, say, 8 civs....

It does become quite strong as the Dragon's Peace gains more members. They're all winning together though, so that's less of a problem, I think.

Also, this is definitely weird if somebody who doesn't join the DP in the LB chooses this tree.

I figured it just wouldn't work. Someone who picks this Policy clearly intends to join the Light side and invest in it heavily (team-locked victory after all), so some massive upheaval must have occurred for them to choose otherwise. That's also why this Policy isn't a prereq for anything non-Light-LB-related (except the WBr with Faith?), so it can be ignored by players who aren't 100% going that way.

OK, cool. I feel like this could work well for Valor, too. I wonder if there's some other spice that should be in this one in order to differentiate it.

I think this one has a problem with its comparison to Dreamspying, in that it doesn't do nearly as much to engage the player in a new way of playing with an existing mechanic. Suggestions for rectifying that below!

This one has the same issue if you are lonely in the Dragon Peace. I'd suggest a tweak that might let it stand alone somehow.

This could apply to internal trade routes as well and then it works even if it's just one player - you can use trade units as a "double boost" to two cities?

Also, I should note, broadly, that the flavor of these don't really have much to do with Integrity. They're light things, and that's fine, but Integrity? Not so much. I think, if anything, the neutral ones fit better with that. I'd suggest we reconsider that in the future - at least *one* should seem to tie into it.

The same is true with the Pride on the right side. I like that you've coined a term for "looking at stuff in T'a'r" (dreamspying), but something should actually relate to pride somehow.

Are you thinking different bonuses or just different names? I definitely had a tough time with some of the names! (Dreamspying was one of the better ones!)

Something like "Aginor Scholars" could be "Aginor's Conceit" to be more prideful, though that's a bit less of a policy.

The GA probably makes this worth it. Otherwise it might not be awesome enough - other civs could very much be stealing your Shadow by turning the tower for you, right? Or does everybody get shadow when an objective is completed?

I put it with the Golden Age since I figured it's a very fun ability, but wouldn't stand on its own because of the infrequency of Turning objectives. Other players could certainly complete them before you after you pick this, but I figure that plays into the whole Shadow competitiveness flavor quite well.

I don't actually see mentioned in the Diplo summary how many Turning objectives there usually are in a single game. We did note that only 4 of them can ever be known to the Light through spying, but not how many there are in total. Are there like 6 or 7 then? (Possibly not always the same number?)

Like the flavor name. The mechanics are crazy, and somewhat unflavorful also. Without venturing too far into whether allowing this is a good idea, I do question whether allowing it only for shadow players is a good idea. If we like this ability, I wonder if it needs to exist elsewhere in the policies. Not sure, though - it definitely does feel like something that would be "evil."

It's also weird because projections have no combat stats. Creating them to be on par with their creating unit seems like it'd be rather complicated and hard to track. Also, really annoying for light players...

We can make the combat stats easy to track by just putting the strength of the host unit in the UI when the player has the projection selected. (Making it clear it isn't a normal combat strength indicator.)

Is it unflavorful because the flavor of the name is spying, but the mechanic is attacking? I can sort of see that. I couldn't find a canonical word for the "damaging" effects the Forsaken and co. do to the real world from T'a'r.

I feel like it's a nicely evil ability and will stand out a lot, a lot of fun for Shadow players and something that should change their game quite a bit. I think the Light alternative ability (30% heal when killing Shadowspawn) is a bit underwhelming by comparison, so we may want to change that.

I figure we'd want there to be same way to fight against it from within T'a'r. That should stop it from being annoying for Light players, since if they're getting sniped by it then it's their own lack of T'a'r coverage that's causing that. Can they not attack units covered by friendly Dreamwards, perhaps?

Can't Shadow players already purchase Shadowspawn with Faith? Or are they produced? The dragon peace element is interesting.

From the Alignment summary, it looks like Shadow players produce Shadowspawn like normal units.

Also, this is highly bizarre if the civ doesn't actually choose shadow. A light or even neutral civ could buy shadowpawn, which is bad. very bad, i'd say.

Like the Light one, I figured this wouldn't work for players who don't choose Shadow. (That's also why this Policy is a leaf node Policy.) I should have put that into the summary form of this, I ended up cutting a lot of words out of the descriptions to fit them into the boxes in Excel! I've clarified this now.

Like the Light one, choosing this Policy demonstrates a very strong intent to choose Shadow, so if some massive upheaval comes about before that happens and causes the player to switch, then I think they would be understanding of some of their previous choices not working for them.

Interesting ability, though perhaps a little niche. The Gray Man element does of course directly link it to the shadow, which is nice.

Yeah, I was concerned about Gray Men being a bit of a niche mechanic here, though as you've said, them being Shadow-only is a nice connection. Is there a better way to give them more meaning? Possibly allow the player to have more than one, rather than giving them a success rate boost?

I am somewhat concerned with the Black Sisters with Faith, though. It seems like that might be too powerful... or, not powerful enough in some scenarios, as the quota of black sisters could be quite low if the tower isn't turned. Why not just have it be WBr with Faith? It seems like shadow players should still have access to that unit, right? I know it's flavorfully weird.

WBr with Faith would also be the only time we've duplicated the "LP with Faith" finisher in any tree, which I think we should avoid if we can. (Assuming that we won't still use the WBr in what used to be the Dreams branch of the Myth tree, since that's been reflavored.)

I think we'd want to see if the Black Sisters with Faith is a problem before we design around it. This is only happening during the LB, which isn't very long to accumulate a lot of Faith. If their cost scales up like LP Faith costs do, then it will be several extra, but not a factory of them to swing the whole war.

also, a neutral civ getting these is a bad thing....

Same as above and with the Light finisher (non-Light players can't use Dragon's Peace trade routes), these wouldn't let players who can't normally have Black Sisters obtain them.

can't you tell excel not to try to compute those cells? set to "Text" I think.

I tried that, but it still seemed to be complaining. That does seem like it should stop it though.

yeah, I'd say really only the Dedication policy is totally useless to them. Moral Edicts obviously would pull you away from neutrality, but some of the other policies are actually useful, still. I do think we need to steer away from policies that break the game if you don't side with corresponding side in the LB. I think we should probably scheme this tree to technically work (even if it's rather inefficient) even if people join the "wrong" side in the LB after completing the branch. So, bonuses that go to waste if you choose "wrong"? Fine. Extra abilities you get when you choose wrong (or neutral)? no.

I think I've covered the choosing "wrong" above - the intention was that these were wasted choices on that player's part. We can tighten up the phrasing so that it becomes clear they only work for the corresponding sides of the LB, like I've hopefully done with Aginor's Scholars! So those are additional Policies that Neutral players get no benefit from.

I've been considering this some more and I think overall I'm fine with the general idea that Neutral players will probably be uninterested in this tree. The optional nature of Policy trees is a great way for us to have these kinds of mechanics in here without forcing them on players whose strategy would be disadvantaged by them.

The second is fine, in theory, but does present some problems if thats *all* the bonus is. It is true we want to reward people for recruiting civs to their side, but R. League, for instance, isn't useful if you're alone (Aginor's S is).

Agreed, and I think that's more of a problem with the specifics of R. League. How about this change?

Sealbearers have an 85% chance of retreating from combat with units controlled by the Shadowspawn civ, instead of being captured. +10% Science for each other civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Like Aginor Scholars, the first part of the ability is always useful for the Light civ, regardless of how many Light civs there are, and the latter scales with the size of the Dragon's Peace.

I pondered making Sealbearers combat units with this Policy, but then I figured they'd all end up like that, which would make the Seals system less like we'd intended.

Is there anything that's less defensive for this bonus? We could boost the research speed for researching whether Seals are authentic or not?

The third works in theory, but is also sort of problematic, potentially, if people who aren't of the correct side choose the branch. Also, Dreamspying is much more of a "special ability" than B Raiders, which is really more of a bonus. I find that somewhat suspect, as noted above.

I think B Raiders needs some love to make this a more balanced comparison. Dreamspying is a cool ability that should be fun to use and fits in with the flavor well, so there must be some corresponding thing for the Light with that.

A few ideas:

Industrious Builders
Killing a Shadowspawn unit on an Improvement that has been pillaged in Light territory repairs that Improvement.

Following the Pattern
Projections reveal foreign Eyes and Ears when within 3 hexes of them.

(The name Dreamspying might fit that ability better.)

Armed Stonemasons
Can produce <Ogier combat unit>. -10% production cost for each Stedding you are allied with.

(Would we give this unit some kind of ability?)

Any of those going the right direction?

Yeah, I did, above! Structurally, I'm fine with it, broadly. I do think we sort of need to reexamine the three "roles" you suggested, with an eye towards the fact that some civs will go against type. Acceptance and Fear, for example, are set up to be viable when paired with any combination of Lib/Auth/Opp. In fact, I had a lot of fun imagining what the weird pairings would be. We obviously don't need to go out of our way to make all possibilities equally viable here (Integrity plus max tier shadow, etc.), but we need to recognize that they are possible, and in some cases might be actually effective. We most certainly need to prevent abuse.

With the above clarifications, do we have any remaining combinations that are abusable? It doesn't look like any of them give out any new abilities to players that otherwise shouldn't have them. Some against-type Policies will be wasted choices for the opposing combinations, but others will still have some effects that may be useful.

yeah, relating to things above. Right now, we have a set up that is sort of a contradiction. On the one hand, it has a useless ability (Dedication), but on the other hand, it grants free abilities that would make it very attractive for a neutral player to choose (especially the shadow side, since it doesn't rely on the light alliance).

With the clarifications above, I think this is much less of a problem. The Dreamspying Policy is the only one of the Shadow side that a Neutral player might want, the other 3 are unhelpful compared to other trees/branches that will help their own objectives more. (Golden Age in B.A. Supporters may be useful, but that's also agnostic of Alignment choices.) Dreamspying may be strong, but we could even make B.A. Supporters a prereq of Dreamspying and it seems unlikely they'd want to spend 3 Policies to get that ability.

Overall as I've said above, I think Neutral players being left out of this tree is ok.

We have to head to the middle on this. I think we should probably recognize that there are viable reasons for a neutral player to choose Ethics, either because of a last minute switch to *not* be neutral, or because of insurmountable pressure during the LB (i.e., having to win against an overly powerful Light Alliance or proximity to the Blight, or something). IT's fine if some of the "boost your Alignment" policies aren't entirely worthwhile, but the other policies probably should be - but in a way that doesn't give the neutral player unfair benefits they shouldn't have.

I think the "giving them unfair benefits" part is sorted now?

If a Neutral player needs to change Alignment suddenly, then the unbranched Policies are a good way to do that, as well as the corresponding "boost" Policy on each side (Peaceful Sleep and B.A. Supporters), which are helpfully the first Policies in each branch. If there's insurmountable LB pressure though, the choice is still down to them in the end. They don't need to have accumulated any specific amount of Alignment, they can just choose the side they think is best. (And possibly adopt the Policies after if they're suddenly much better than when they considered them last, due to that kind of changed decision.)

That player isn't really a Neutral player anymore then, right? It seems like the Ethics tree is then providing a valid function for them when they've decided to go for one side or the other.

Also, we should probably consider, in theory, Light players choosing Pride, and vise versa. Are we ok with this? It's kooky, and I'd probably be ok with the rare civ doing it in order to support some unusual strategy or in-game scenario (in some ways, it'd kind of flavorful - the Seanchan might be more "Pride" than "Integrity" for example). But I don't want it to provide game-breaking elements.

Yeah, this is an option for players, definitely.

So a Shadow player choosing Integrity might get some mileage out of fighting other Shadow civs' Shadowspawn (but they don't need to fight the Shadowspawn civ anymore, which takes the oomph out of that Policy). The Questioner resistance in Peaceful Sleep might offset the Light output of the Dreamwards if they're have particular problems with pesky Light Questioners. Research League and the Finisher are mostly dead for them, though the Wolfbrother with Faith could be some use.

I don't see any big breakages on that one.

A Light player choosing Pride actually gets a bit more mileage. The Dreamspying ability is just useful. The Shadow from the Turning objectives can't be obtained by them since they can't see the objectives, but the Golden Age helps. Aginor's Scholars is a dead Policy for them. They do benefit a bit from the Bloodknives bonus, but Gray Men and Black Sisters don't help them at all since they can't get them.

No big breakages there, right?

If we make B. Raiders more competitive it may bring Integrity for Shadow players a bit back into balance with Pride for Light players.

Were you thinking of making it so that more of the Policies were like B.Raiders/Dreamspying, that would be useful across the board?

Ah, well I appreciated the catch-up time, then. Next Thurs is quite a long time! Hopefully you get some time to think on the other trees that are up next!

I've mostly been running straight from work to one event after another! I think the other trees will be much less about the big pictures, since we've sorted that with our first pass on them already. More specific Policy stuff, which we might get into by the end of the weekend, depending on the Alignment stuff above.

 

[alesci89]

Here just to give you encouragement. I`m reading the books for the first time and i love them, wish there was already some alpha to play with

 

[counterpoint]

Back again! I've been away for a series of birthday events (it was my birthday on Tuesday) and now things are slightly more back to normal! What were we doing again?

sorry for the delay. Still swamped. Have a little bit of time - hopefully I can finish.

I changed this one intentionally, because the Openers don't really lead to the first policies, right? If anything it's sort of the other way (getting the first policy unlocks the opener.) I figured just leaving the (Opener) tag on it made it more clear.

Hmmm... am I crazy. I thought you unlock the tree, and gain the opener bonus and only the opener bonus. I don't think you unlock a policy that first time. So yeah... the opener leads to the first policy options.

Same on tweaking for power.

Agreed on Edicts, I wanted to come up with a better name for this one, but couldn't at the time!

Some other possibilities:
Moral Teachings
Ethical Study
Radical Morality

I think this is a place where Dogma could fit in. I use that word in my treatment, but we maynot even be using that policy anymore.

Or like "Moral Framework" or something.

Good questions, I could see us going a few ways with this. Most would probably want some rewording for it.

Either: "Your cities affected by your Dreamwards produce +10 Light" That would mean it's a function of city coverage, not the Dreamwards themselves.

Or: "+10 Light for each Dreamward you control", which is more obviously 10 per Dreamward, regardless of location.

We could also go with "+10 Light for each city affected by your Dreamwards", which is again city coverage, but also includes foreign cities this time. Since some applications of Dreamwards involve covering foreign cities, that might make the most sense.

And of course based on your last question, we could go with "Cities affected by your Dreamwards produce +10 Light" which would affect the owner of the city!

either of the final two work for me. +10 per city affected is simplest probably. The last one is cool if we want it to be something that you can somewhat weaponize....

Agreed, I've tweaked this to be a 90% penalty on the Questioner's effectiveness.

ok, can tweak later.

It does become quite strong as the Dragon's Peace gains more members. They're all winning together though, so that's less of a problem, I think.

that's true.

I figured it just wouldn't work. Someone who picks this Policy clearly intends to join the Light side and invest in it heavily (team-locked victory after all), so some massive upheaval must have occurred for them to choose otherwise. That's also why this Policy isn't a prereq for anything non-Light-LB-related (except the WBr with Faith?), so it can be ignored by players who aren't 100% going that way.

OK, I think that's fine. Need to make sure it won't work in the description, then.

This could apply to internal trade routes as well and then it works even if it's just one player - you can use trade units as a "double boost" to two cities?

hmmmm, ok. I think that could work.

Are you thinking different bonuses or just different names? I definitely had a tough time with some of the names! (Dreamspying was one of the better ones!)

Something like "Aginor Scholars" could be "Aginor's Conceit" to be more prideful, though that's a bit less of a policy.

I think the names should flavorfully reflect not only the bonus they confer but the Branch they're on. These are societal traits, not necessarily what side you're on, though they are related of course. Aginor is a reference to an obviously evil forsaken figure. It doesn't feel civ like to make reference to that, as if you have a societal structure that is "be a darkfriend scientist, since your civ is likely to be at least nominally claiming to be good guys.

I feel like the goal should be that the Integrity policies should somehow relate to integrity - maybe not all of them, but enough of them that the name of the branch makes sense. And the Pride side should concern itself with selfishness or ego, not "being evil." Again, doesn't have to be all of them. So, some ideas:

Peaceful Sleep - this one is extremely difficult. Maybe ok as it is. "Sleep of the Just."
Black Ajah Supporters - also tough. Self-Righteousness?
Dreamspying - not sure how this one would work, might need to remain unrelated
Research League - this one might sort of work already. Could be better, though. Something that connotes honesty or international cooperation? "Research Standards" or something.
Borderland Raiders - unrelated. Might need to stay that way. Some connection would be better, though. No ideas right now!
Aginor Scholars - no ideas here, which is bad because this one might be the most problematic! The bonus is kind of odd for a policy - much more like a closer - which makes this hard.

Overall, I just think we need the branch names to make some semblance of sense with regard to the specific policies.

I put it with the Golden Age since I figured it's a very fun ability, but wouldn't stand on its own because of the infrequency of Turning objectives. Other players could certainly complete them before you after you pick this, but I figure that plays into the whole Shadow competitiveness flavor quite well.

I don't actually see mentioned in the Diplo summary how many Turning objectives there usually are in a single game. We did note that only 4 of them can ever be known to the Light through spying, but not how many there are in total. Are there like 6 or 7 then? (Possibly not always the same number?)

I... totally don't remember.... and it's not in the LB summary either. Does this need to be a fixed number? Something like 6 or 7 sounds good, though.

We can make the combat stats easy to track by just putting the strength of the host unit in the UI when the player has the projection selected. (Making it clear it isn't a normal combat strength indicator.)

Is it unflavorful because the flavor of the name is spying, but the mechanic is attacking? I can sort of see that. I couldn't find a canonical word for the "damaging" effects the Forsaken and co. do to the real world from T'a'r.

It's unflavorful because I don't think humans being attacked by people's projections in T'a'r is grounded in the reality of using T'a'r, right? I mean, you can die if you are killed while in t'a'r in the flesh, but there's no way for someone in t'a'r to kill a regular ol' person, is there? Thus, kind of a stretch.

I feel like it's a nicely evil ability and will stand out a lot, a lot of fun for Shadow players and something that should change their game quite a bit. I think the Light alternative ability (30% heal when killing Shadowspawn) is a bit underwhelming by comparison, so we may want to change that.

I figure we'd want there to be same way to fight against it from within T'a'r. That should stop it from being annoying for Light players, since if they're getting sniped by it then it's their own lack of T'a'r coverage that's causing that. Can they not attack units covered by friendly Dreamwards, perhaps?

those ideas could work, but... honestly, I'm not sure this is a good idea. I'm not sure policies are the place for this kind of change. This is far beyond adding an ogier unit or providing a bonus. This changes key strategic points of the game and, considering the flavor we're talking about, I find it not necessarily to be the best idea.

From the Alignment summary, it looks like Shadow players produce Shadowspawn like normal units.

ah. This does still feel like a closer more than anything...

Yeah, I was concerned about Gray Men being a bit of a niche mechanic here, though as you've said, them being Shadow-only is a nice connection. Is there a better way to give them more meaning? Possibly allow the player to have more than one, rather than giving them a success rate boost?

or maybe give it a shorter duration of the mission, so it feels like they can use them more, or are encouraged to do so more.

WBr with Faith would also be the only time we've duplicated the "LP with Faith" finisher in any tree, which I think we should avoid if we can. (Assuming that we won't still use the WBr in what used to be the Dreams branch of the Myth tree, since that's been reflavored.)

well, maybe this should be a Dreamwalker, then? Or don't use WBr in the earlier tree...

I think we'd want to see if the Black Sisters with Faith is a problem before we design around it. This is only happening during the LB, which isn't very long to accumulate a lot of Faith. If their cost scales up like LP Faith costs do, then it will be several extra, but not a factory of them to swing the whole war.

I sort of feel like "buy shadowspawn with faith" would be the most compelling closer here. It lacks the issues that policy has as a policy, and it lacks the issues that Black sisters would have as a closer....

Same as above and with the Light finisher (non-Light players can't use Dragon's Peace trade routes), these wouldn't let players who can't normally have Black Sisters obtain them.

right.

I think I've covered the choosing "wrong" above - the intention was that these were wasted choices on that player's part. We can tighten up the phrasing so that it becomes clear they only work for the corresponding sides of the LB, like I've hopefully done with Aginor's Scholars! So those are additional Policies that Neutral players get no benefit from.

I've been considering this some more and I think overall I'm fine with the general idea that Neutral players will probably be uninterested in this tree. The optional nature of Policy trees is a great way for us to have these kinds of mechanics in here without forcing them on players whose strategy would be disadvantaged by them.[/quote[yeah, I've been thinking about it, too. I think I'm ok with some of these non-essential policies being useless to people of a different side.

Agreed, and I think that's more of a problem with the specifics of R. League. How about this change?

Sealbearers have an 85% chance of retreating from combat with units controlled by the Shadowspawn civ, instead of being captured. +10% Science for each other civ in the Dragon's Peace.

Like Aginor Scholars, the first part of the ability is always useful for the Light civ, regardless of how many Light civs there are, and the latter scales with the size of the Dragon's Peace.

I pondered making Sealbearers combat units with this Policy, but then I figured they'd all end up like that, which would make the Seals system less like we'd intended.

Is there anything that's less defensive for this bonus? We could boost the research speed for researching whether Seals are authentic or not?

hmmm, not a bad idea. I think speeding up the research time is a little more in keeping with the flavor and the overall science thing. Could do both...?

I think B Raiders needs some love to make this a more balanced comparison. Dreamspying is a cool ability that should be fun to use and fits in with the flavor well, so there must be some corresponding thing for the Light with that.

A few ideas:

Industrious Builders
Killing a Shadowspawn unit on an Improvement that has been pillaged in Light territory repairs that Improvement.

Following the Pattern
Projections reveal foreign Eyes and Ears when within 3 hexes of them.

(The name Dreamspying might fit that ability better.)

Armed Stonemasons
Can produce <Ogier combat unit>. -10% production cost for each Stedding you are allied with.

(Would we give this unit some kind of ability?)

Any of those going the right direction?

This is all a little odd since above I'm suggesting that Dreamspying not exist in its current form... but assuming we need to beef up BRaiders, for now...

IBuilders is also a little niche, in that it might be annoyingly hard to trigger.
FtP is kind of cool. Not sure what you'd do with that info, though, other than station a counterspy there. (or if that gave you some kind of bonus to counterspying, though detecting a spy isn't an established thing in the game). But yes, this would be the better use of the Dreamspying flavor
AStone could work. I find that less troubling than the increased functionality of DSpying

I think either of the last two could be cool. Depends on what happens with Dspying...

With the above clarifications, do we have any remaining combinations that are abusable? It doesn't look like any of them give out any new abilities to players that otherwise shouldn't have them. Some against-type Policies will be wasted choices for the opposing combinations, but others will still have some effects that may be useful.

I think with a little massaging, there rest should be fine. Also, keep in mind that this is supposed to be the first pass. I think if we get the main ideas across, we can tweak later.

I think the "giving them unfair benefits" part is sorted now?

If a Neutral player needs to change Alignment suddenly, then the unbranched Policies are a good way to do that, as well as the corresponding "boost" Policy on each side (Peaceful Sleep and B.A. Supporters), which are helpfully the first Policies in each branch. If there's insurmountable LB pressure though, the choice is still down to them in the end. They don't need to have accumulated any specific amount of Alignment, they can just choose the side they think is best. (And possibly adopt the Policies after if they're suddenly much better than when they considered them last, due to that kind of changed decision.)

That player isn't really a Neutral player anymore then, right? It seems like the Ethics tree is then providing a valid function for them when they've decided to go for one side or the other.

Yeah, they aren't exactly neutral if they ultimately choose a side. I think this is all fine.

Yeah, this is an option for players, definitely.

So a Shadow player choosing Integrity might get some mileage out of fighting other Shadow civs' Shadowspawn (but they don't need to fight the Shadowspawn civ anymore, which takes the oomph out of that Policy). The Questioner resistance in Peaceful Sleep might offset the Light output of the Dreamwards if they're have particular problems with pesky Light Questioners. Research League and the Finisher are mostly dead for them, though the Wolfbrother with Faith could be some use.

I don't see any big breakages on that one.

A Light player choosing Pride actually gets a bit more mileage. The Dreamspying ability is just useful. The Shadow from the Turning objectives can't be obtained by them since they can't see the objectives, but the Golden Age helps. Aginor's Scholars is a dead Policy for them. They do benefit a bit from the Bloodknives bonus, but Gray Men and Black Sisters don't help them at all since they can't get them.

No big breakages there, right?

If we make B. Raiders more competitive it may bring Integrity for Shadow players a bit back into balance with Pride for Light players.

Were you thinking of making it so that more of the Policies were like B.Raiders/Dreamspying, that would be useful across the board?

I think the destiny of AScholars and Dreamspying flip this whole thing upside down... so it's hard to judge until we've tweaked or reschemed those.

 

[counterpoint]

Here just to give you encouragement. I`m reading the books for the first time and i love them, wish there was already some alpha to play with

Thanks for the moral support! Yes, an alpha would be nice. We're almost done with the heavy foundation work, though!

 

[alesci89]

Very nice! You guys are making the Creator's work! ;-)

 

[S3rgeus]

Here just to give you encouragement. I`m reading the books for the first time and i love them, wish there was already some alpha to play with

Thanks for the support! Always glad to see another fan that's excited for what we're working on!

sorry for the delay. Still swamped. Have a little bit of time - hopefully I can finish.

No problem! Scheduling related, I won't be around tomorrow, so no rush!

Hmmm... am I crazy. I thought you unlock the tree, and gain the opener bonus and only the opener bonus. I don't think you unlock a policy that first time. So yeah... the opener leads to the first policy options.

You know what, yeah. I don't know what I'm talking about.

I think this is a place where Dogma could fit in. I use that word in my treatment, but we maynot even be using that policy anymore.

Or like "Moral Framework" or something.

Moral Dogma sounds good, the flavor ties in well with being committed to generating more Alignment.

either of the final two work for me. +10 per city affected is simplest probably. The last one is cool if we want it to be something that you can somewhat weaponize....

Let's go with the last one then and see how it goes!

OK, I think that's fine. Need to make sure it won't work in the description, then.

This is about Research League. I think this one works as described then, "other" means you need to be a member yourself.

I think the names should flavorfully reflect not only the bonus they confer but the Branch they're on. These are societal traits, not necessarily what side you're on, though they are related of course. Aginor is a reference to an obviously evil forsaken figure. It doesn't feel civ like to make reference to that, as if you have a societal structure that is "be a darkfriend scientist, since your civ is likely to be at least nominally claiming to be good guys.

I feel like the goal should be that the Integrity policies should somehow relate to integrity - maybe not all of them, but enough of them that the name of the branch makes sense. And the Pride side should concern itself with selfishness or ego, not "being evil." Again, doesn't have to be all of them. So, some ideas:

Peaceful Sleep - this one is extremely difficult. Maybe ok as it is. "Sleep of the Just."
Black Ajah Supporters - also tough. Self-Righteousness?
Dreamspying - not sure how this one would work, might need to remain unrelated
Research League - this one might sort of work already. Could be better, though. Something that connotes honesty or international cooperation? "Research Standards" or something.
Borderland Raiders - unrelated. Might need to stay that way. Some connection would be better, though. No ideas right now!
Aginor Scholars - no ideas here, which is bad because this one might be the most problematic! The bonus is kind of odd for a policy - much more like a closer - which makes this hard.

Overall, I just think we need the branch names to make some semblance of sense with regard to the specific policies.

All good points, so some alternatives for these:

Peaceful Sleep is all about people being able to rest properly because T'a'r (and therefore their dreams) is well guarded. "Guards in the Dream"? "Dreamguards" (more fabricated flavor)?

Black Ajah Supporters is about gaining from supporting the Black Ajah, even though they're still secret. "Powerful Allies"? "Secretive Meetings"? "Invisible Support"?

Dreamspying will depend on what we change it to (more on that below).

Research League I think I still quite like as it is.

Borderland Raiders will also depend on what it changes to.

Aginor Scholars is about doing forbidden research on what Aginor did to make Shadowspawn and finding your own ways of using that. So "Forbidden Research"? "Stolen Knowledge"? "Ancient Experiments"?

I... totally don't remember.... and it's not in the LB summary either. Does this need to be a fixed number? Something like 6 or 7 sounds good, though.

It doesn't need to be a fixed number. We'd probably want there to be more objectives on a larger map? (Since there are more potential Shadow players to complete them.) I'll add a note about 6-7 to the Diplo summary in red for now. (Also had to do some careful pruning of unnecessary text to get the Diplo summary back under 30,000 characters once I added that line!)

It's unflavorful because I don't think humans being attacked by people's projections in T'a'r is grounded in the reality of using T'a'r, right? I mean, you can die if you are killed while in t'a'r in the flesh, but there's no way for someone in t'a'r to kill a regular ol' person, is there? Thus, kind of a stretch.

those ideas could work, but... honestly, I'm not sure this is a good idea. I'm not sure policies are the place for this kind of change. This is far beyond adding an ogier unit or providing a bonus. This changes key strategic points of the game and, considering the flavor we're talking about, I find it not necessarily to be the best idea.

All good points, let's swap this to something a bit more flavorful then!

Dreamspying
Units controlled by the Shadowspawn civilization provide you active sight after you declare for the Shadow.

(Flavor is that the Forsaken use T'a'r to co-ordinate military action over long distances, this taps into that intel.)

The problem with this one is that it's more of a Shadow-side ability (duplicates with Aginor Scholars), rather than a general ability that is inspired by Shadow flavor.


I've actually been trying to come up with something else for this for almost an hour now, so I'll need to revisit it!

or maybe give it a shorter duration of the mission, so it feels like they can use them more, or are encouraged to do so more.

We could do both with this, faster and more effective!

well, maybe this should be a Dreamwalker, then? Or don't use WBr in the earlier tree...

I'm assuming we're not using the Wolfbrother earlier in the tree, since the Dreams branch has changed flavor. This quote block was about the Pride branch, but the WBr is already on the finisher for the Integrity branch (where I think it makes more sense). For the Dreamwalker, it's at the end of the Opportunity branch already, though that may change. The Dreamwalker certainly could be a good fit here if we keep the T'a'r connection with the Shadow ability, even if we're changing what it does from above.

I sort of feel like "buy shadowspawn with faith" would be the most compelling closer here. It lacks the issues that policy has as a policy, and it lacks the issues that Black sisters would have as a closer....

I don't think we really know whether the latter is an issue. I think it could be really compelling to be able to purchase Black Ajah Sisters like that. It might be way too powerful, but I don't think we know yet. What's the issue with it being a Policy? Seems like Black Ajah Sisters purchaseable through a policy makes flavorful sense - bribing and working with them and the like? Given that Shadowspawn can already be produced by these players at will, I feel like the purchasing ability for them is much less forced into being a finisher. All of the other "purchase with Faith" are purchases of units the player otherwise would only have very infrequent access to.

hmmm, not a bad idea. I think speeding up the research time is a little more in keeping with the flavor and the overall science thing. Could do both...?

My only concern with speeding up the research is it might throw all of the spying stuff out of whack, but let's see what happens with how the stealing all works out.

With all 3 abilities it seems like a bit of a crowded Policy though, right? Should we go with just the research speed boost and +Science based on Dragon's Peace members? The Sealbearer retreat chance is sort of niche anyway.

This is all a little odd since above I'm suggesting that Dreamspying not exist in its current form... but assuming we need to beef up BRaiders, for now...

I think even with the changes above, this Policy should be made a bit better as a balance to any of our options above!

IBuilders is also a little niche, in that it might be annoyingly hard to trigger.
FtP is kind of cool. Not sure what you'd do with that info, though, other than station a counterspy there. (or if that gave you some kind of bonus to counterspying, though detecting a spy isn't an established thing in the game). But yes, this would be the better use of the Dreamspying flavor
AStone could work. I find that less troubling than the increased functionality of DSpying

I think either of the last two could be cool. Depends on what happens with Dspying...

The idea being the FtP idea is that EaE and particularly their specific positions become a lot more important during the LB since they're used to steal Seals and the Light are much more likely to want to defend Seals until later. This ability would let players evade Seals being stolen from them more effectively. (Avoid cities that already have spies in them, for example.) I like the Ogier one, but I'm finding the spying one is rising up to be one of my favorites. How strong it is will be determined largely by how big the "game" becomes with spies during the LB, depending on how our new mechanics play out there.

 

[counterpoint]

Moral Dogma sounds good, the flavor ties in well with being committed to generating more Alignment.

That's mostly fine, but it feels liek there's something "off" about the phrasing. Like those two words aren't quite supposed to go together. In that form, I mean. Should it be like Dogma of Morals? Dogmatic Morality? I think that's better.

Let's go with the last one then and see how it goes!

sure!

This is about Research League. I think this one works as described then, "other" means you need to be a member yourself.

right. sure.

All good points, so some alternatives for these:

individual comments below, but bigger-picture comments immediately follow...

Peaceful Sleep is all about people being able to rest properly because T'a'r (and therefore their dreams) is well guarded. "Guards in the Dream"? "Dreamguards" (more fabricated flavor)?

Hmmm, I'd rather see something more directly related to the culture. This is awful, but "Legendary Dreams" or "Dreaming Procedures". Those won't work, but they give some idea of what I'm looking for. The reason for the whole "Sleep of the Just" thing was that the Integrity itself provides contentment, and safety in dreams. Ties in to my general comments below.

Black Ajah Supporters is about gaining from supporting the Black Ajah, even though they're still secret. "Powerful Allies"? "Secretive Meetings"? "Invisible Support"?

points below notwithstanding, these could work. Maybe Secretive Meetings? Considering this is for Pride, and provides a Golden Age, I'd like this to somehow be about your civilization taking lots and lots of pride in its accomplishments, evil or not. I can't come up with anything that has a slight shadow link, while still fitting the bill of the branch.

Dreamspying will depend on what we change it to (more on that below).

Research League I think I still quite like as it is.

Yeah, it's fine, I suppose.

Borderland Raiders will also depend on what it changes to.

right.

Aginor Scholars is about doing forbidden research on what Aginor did to make Shadowspawn and finding your own ways of using that. So "Forbidden Research"? "Stolen Knowledge"? "Ancient Experiments"?

At first I was thinking we should go along the lines of "Unethical Research," which is a bad title, but the right flavor for what you're talking about. You know, the "man playing god" thing.

But then I realized that we may have gone too far into the research thing for a policy that actually has little to do with that, actually. It's a shadowspawn-buy policy. Taking away Aginor (which I think we should), then makes the research link rather tenuous...

So, my larger point. In suggesting specific options before, I seem to have led us astray, and we're still missing the forest for the trees. My main issue with all of these is that they had nothing to do with the branch concept. Assuming we like Integrity and Pride (and I think I do), we should make some overtures to making the flavor/names of the policies at least somewhat related to that concept. That appears to pretty solidly be the case in BNW (which is far easier to do, given the lack of branching), and I went out of my way to do so in my treatment. Not necessarily for *every* policy, but there's at least one, usually two, that are safely rationalized within the concept of the Branch title, and by extension, the Tree title. I think this is a rather notable point.

Looking at the stuff we've been working with, we're on shaky ground, but ground nonetheless, with Integrity. As mentioned before, Research League is tenuous but through some mental gymnastics does work alright (I'd prefer a tweak, though). Borderland Raiders is completely unconnected to the concept. Peaceful Sleep is mostly unconnected. So, my final evaluation on Integrity is a D. It might be close to acceptable, but likely isn't right now. This might be somewhat easier to pull off with this branch, since Integrity is a vague "good" concept and these are vague "good" policies.

Pride is by far the much bigger problem. As far as I can tell, exactly zero of any of the policy's flavors tie into the pride concept. Black Ajah Supporters (or describing connection to them)? Nope. Aginor's Scholar's? nope (though the "man playing god concept *does*, which is why I like it..... but it has little to do with the mechanics). Dreamspying? Nope.

So yeah, I view that as a problem. These fit, more or less, with a "Shadow Stuff" branch. But that's not actually what this is. It's that, mechanically, but we're framing it in a more organic, "realistic" way.

It doesn't need to be a fixed number. We'd probably want there to be more objectives on a larger map? (Since there are more potential Shadow players to complete them.) I'll add a note about 6-7 to the Diplo summary in red for now. (Also had to do some careful pruning of unnecessary text to get the Diplo summary back under 30,000 characters once I added that line!)

Right. I think that's fine. Though, actually, thinking about it... it's possible some of the turning objectives becomes more difficult with more players, so we might not want to assume, categorically, that we'll always increase the number of them with # of players.

I hate that 30k word limit! I think the Alignment Summary (LB summary?) is up against the same.

All good points, let's swap this to something a bit more flavorful then!

Dreamspying
Units controlled by the Shadowspawn civilization provide you active sight after you declare for the Shadow.

(Flavor is that the Forsaken use T'a'r to co-ordinate military action over long distances, this taps into that intel.)

The problem with this one is that it's more of a Shadow-side ability (duplicates with Aginor Scholars), rather than a general ability that is inspired by Shadow flavor.

I think this is kind of cool. I see the issue with it, though.

This makes me wonder if any of the abilities we're working with here should scale based on Shadow Tier? Like, for instance, for this one, it'd be units you can build provide sight. So high tier civs get more vision. The Aginor Scholar would allow purchase of only shadowspawn you can build, which is a similar scale.

Should we implement the notion of scaling into both branches, if at all?

I've actually been trying to come up with something else for this for almost an hour now, so I'll need to revisit it!

Is the idea that we have to preserve Dreamspying? We could very much port that flavor over to Integrity (for peaceful sleep... though that flavor doesn't have much Integrity..... perhaps it brings us back to the Dreamguards thing?) and just move on. Because, yes, it's difficult coming up with good mechanics that use this flavor!

So.. should we look to a different concept entirely?

We could do both with this, faster and more effective!

sure

I'm assuming we're not using the Wolfbrother earlier in the tree, since the Dreams branch has changed flavor. This quote block was about the Pride branch, but the WBr is already on the finisher for the Integrity branch (where I think it makes more sense). For the Dreamwalker, it's at the end of the Opportunity branch already, though that may change. The Dreamwalker certainly could be a good fit here if we keep the T'a'r connection with the Shadow ability, even if we're changing what it does from above.

right, I see now what you mean.

I actually don't think it's essential that two branches can't have the same Faith unlock. A Great Scientist in BNW is a pretty important Faith buy. I don't necessarily see why the two branches of our version of that tree shouldn't both have that as one component of the finisher. In BNW, the faith buy is usually the second of two aspects to a finisher. I see nothing wrong with having both branches of a tree both have the same faith buy, but being different in other respects. So, here, they could both be WBr, but have some additional aspect.

Of course, they could also not be the same, which could be fine, but then we're specifically linking WBr and Lightness. I know that's true in the flavor, but from a mechanical perspective, I'm not sure we want to make it so only light players have easy access to that unit, should they choose it. You'd have to work really hard to get it as a shadow player - choosing Integrity despite most of it being useless to you

I suppose while I might be ok with, say, the Dreamwalker only living in one branch of a tree, it seems a little risky here to align a GP to two diametrically opposed sides of a branch. In the former situation, the two halves of Wealth aren't opposed to one another. Here (and in Power), they are, so it's a specific type of civ/player that will choose one, and not the other.

thoughts?

I don't think we really know whether the latter is an issue. I think it could be really compelling to be able to purchase Black Ajah Sisters like that. It might be way too powerful, but I don't think we know yet. What's the issue with it being a Policy? Seems like Black Ajah Sisters purchaseable through a policy makes flavorful sense - bribing and working with them and the like? Given that Shadowspawn can already be produced by these players at will, I feel like the purchasing ability for them is much less forced into being a finisher. All of the other "purchase with Faith" are purchases of units the player otherwise would only have very infrequent access to.

This is with the intention of making it feel like how BNW works. As I recall, all the Faith buys in BNW are Finishers. Right? The only similar policy that I can think of is the Landsnecks via gold, which is only sort of similar. So, to me, the shadowspawn thing feels very different from policies, and feels much more like a finisher.

That said, you are correct that they can already be produced consciously, unlike LP, so that is an point against their Finisher-ness and I can't completely overrule this as a possible policy because of that.

My only concern with speeding up the research is it might throw all of the spying stuff out of whack, but let's see what happens with how the stealing all works out.

With all 3 abilities it seems like a bit of a crowded Policy though, right? Should we go with just the research speed boost and +Science based on Dragon's Peace members? The Sealbearer retreat chance is sort of niche anyway.

yeah, I agree. The sealbearer things'a little more random.

The idea being the FtP idea is that EaE and particularly their specific positions become a lot more important during the LB since they're used to steal Seals and the Light are much more likely to want to defend Seals until later. This ability would let players evade Seals being stolen from them more effectively. (Avoid cities that already have spies in them, for example.) I like the Ogier one, but I'm finding the spying one is rising up to be one of my favorites. How strong it is will be determined largely by how big the "game" becomes with spies during the LB, depending on how our new mechanics play out there.

yeah, I think the spying one might be cooler. Maybe some other secondary effect as well?

 

[S3rgeus]

That's mostly fine, but it feels liek there's something "off" about the phrasing. Like those two words aren't quite supposed to go together. In that form, I mean. Should it be like Dogma of Morals? Dogmatic Morality? I think that's better.

Dogmatic Morality it is!

Switching around some quote block ordering:

So, my larger point. In suggesting specific options before, I seem to have led us astray, and we're still missing the forest for the trees. My main issue with all of these is that they had nothing to do with the branch concept. Assuming we like Integrity and Pride (and I think I do), we should make some overtures to making the flavor/names of the policies at least somewhat related to that concept. That appears to pretty solidly be the case in BNW (which is far easier to do, given the lack of branching), and I went out of my way to do so in my treatment. Not necessarily for *every* policy, but there's at least one, usually two, that are safely rationalized within the concept of the Branch title, and by extension, the Tree title. I think this is a rather notable point.

Looking at the stuff we've been working with, we're on shaky ground, but ground nonetheless, with Integrity. As mentioned before, Research League is tenuous but through some mental gymnastics does work alright (I'd prefer a tweak, though). Borderland Raiders is completely unconnected to the concept. Peaceful Sleep is mostly unconnected. So, my final evaluation on Integrity is a D. It might be close to acceptable, but likely isn't right now. This might be somewhat easier to pull off with this branch, since Integrity is a vague "good" concept and these are vague "good" policies.

Pride is by far the much bigger problem. As far as I can tell, exactly zero of any of the policy's flavors tie into the pride concept. Black Ajah Supporters (or describing connection to them)? Nope. Aginor's Scholar's? nope (though the "man playing god concept *does*, which is why I like it..... but it has little to do with the mechanics). Dreamspying? Nope.

So yeah, I view that as a problem. These fit, more or less, with a "Shadow Stuff" branch. But that's not actually what this is. It's that, mechanically, but we're framing it in a more organic, "realistic" way.

I totally see what you mean here, and I figured that's what we were moving towards in our last set of posts - a set of names that linked more into the flavor of the names of the branches. I don't think we need to be nearly as rigid as you're suggesting here though. Take the Integrity example: we have 3 Policies. I think Research League is pretty good relation to integrity (can't have a "league" of associated research contributions if folks don't act with integrity, it just falls apart). Peaceful Sleep less so, but we're still iterating on that name below (was above, until I reordered it). Borderland Raiders you're totally right, but only because we're scrapping that Policy and replacing it, right? So we're not trying to connect it to the notion of integrity, we need to do that with whatever replaces it.

Pride I can totally see how we connect the concept of these mechanics to Pride-ful words that will communicate that to the player. We haven't found the right ones yet, but I'm confident we will. And in a forest-for-the-trees sense, aren't we just iterating on individual names of Policies to fix this issue? I totally agree with the overall objective of tying back to the flavor of what the branch means, but at this stage don't we just want to establish that the overall flavorful and mechanical direction of the things we want to do in the branch can be brought into line with that?

I would also say that overall, the flavor of Integrity and Pride, in the context of a tree called Ethics, is very broad and not necessarily as restrictive as you're suggesting. Pride can be about conceit to do things people shouldn't, not just about the more personal definition of Pride in taking pleasure in achieving something. I think even the connection to several Shadow mechanics in themselves makes these things prideful, something that a civ that's truly obsessed with its own power would choose to do, despite the obvious risks of universal destruction.

And if we're working on the flavor that we can connect a given mechanic back to the flavor of the branch it's in, that's working under the assumption that we're going to leave those mechanics the same. Which is already not the case for several of them (which is why we've stopped trying to make those flavor connections for Dreamspying and Borderland Raiders). Either mechanics or flavor can lead on any given Policy, and I feel like I've mostly started with mechanics here (mostly because this tree is one of the few Alignment-specific mechanics around, giving us a chance to make those a better part of the larger whole, and a lot of obvious flavor is covered in other mechanics in WoTMod so far). So it would make sense that we would decide on what relevant mechanics we like and then pull them back into the right flavorful naming. Which seems to be what we're doing now, though there's a good argument that should be phase 2.

Unless of course there is prevailing flavor for the notions of Integrity and Pride within WoT that I've not thought of when making these. Are there any specifically that come to mind? We can totally try to get some of those in here if there are.

Now I'll go back to the usual ordering, so here are more specifics about the Policies we're still naming.

individual comments below, but bigger-picture comments immediately follow...
Hmmm, I'd rather see something more directly related to the culture. This is awful, but "Legendary Dreams" or "Dreaming Procedures". Those won't work, but they give some idea of what I'm looking for. The reason for the whole "Sleep of the Just" thing was that the Integrity itself provides contentment, and safety in dreams. Ties in to my general comments below.

I see what you mean about wanting to link it back to the flavor of Integrity.

I will say I don't think Peaceful Sleep is so bad, the notion of someone who "sleeps peacefully" is someone who feels they don't have regrets, which is a way to see a person with integrity. (The idealized version, rather than someone who doubts whether they're always doing the good they wanted, which is much more grey.)

Mostly the flavor of what this Policy is is that the civ is using wards on Dreams to preserve the happiness/goodness of its people. (Keeping the Shadow's temptations at bay and the like.)

Something literal like "Dream Sentries"? "Universal Warding" - implying the Dreamwards are allowed to help everyone, where they would normally be reserved for more "important" defensive targets?

points below notwithstanding, these could work. Maybe Secretive Meetings? Considering this is for Pride, and provides a Golden Age, I'd like this to somehow be about your civilization taking lots and lots of pride in its accomplishments, evil or not. I can't come up with anything that has a slight shadow link, while still fitting the bill of the branch.

Yeah, I was brainstorming on this same concept last time as well. There's definitely an avenue there for taking pride in things that are clearly nefarious and secretive, it's just hard to condense into a couple of words. I think this is our usual process though - go through a ton of options until we find the one that pulls the flavor and the mechanics together right.

More brainstorming:

Clandestine Support
Unseen Allies

At first I was thinking we should go along the lines of "Unethical Research," which is a bad title, but the right flavor for what you're talking about. You know, the "man playing god" thing.

But then I realized that we may have gone too far into the research thing for a policy that actually has little to do with that, actually. It's a shadowspawn-buy policy. Taking away Aginor (which I think we should), then makes the research link rather tenuous...

I like the "man playing god" flavor and yeah, that was definitely the avenue I was pursuing in my last post. I do think the Policy is about that. It's establishing some process that allows these creatures that are twisted abominations to be bought and supplied at the drop of a hat. This implies some kind of ability to very quickly recruit them directly from the Shadow or somehow make them yourself, either of which ties into the notion of learning about how Shadowspawn tick. It doesn't need to be connected directly to Aginor, it's just that in the books timeline he's the person who worked out how to do these kinds of things. (And since he did that in the AoL that is the state of our WoTMod world as well, since we pick up After Breaking.) Even without Aginor, the flavor is the same notion of trying to understand the twisted workings of Shadowspawn.

Right. I think that's fine. Though, actually, thinking about it... it's possible some of the turning objectives becomes more difficult with more players, so we might not want to assume, categorically, that we'll always increase the number of them with # of players.

Possibly, we'll need to come back to this since it's red in the summary.

I hate that 30k word limit! I think the Alignment Summary (LB summary?) is up against the same.

Yeah, and breaking the Diplo or Alignment summaries up wouldn't be very easy! The misc summary has fragmented a few times, but that's fine since it has some quite disparate sections.

I think this is kind of cool. I see the issue with it, though.

This makes me wonder if any of the abilities we're working with here should scale based on Shadow Tier? Like, for instance, for this one, it'd be units you can build provide sight. So high tier civs get more vision. The Aginor Scholar would allow purchase of only shadowspawn you can build, which is a similar scale.

Should we implement the notion of scaling into both branches, if at all?

Restricting the purchase to units you can otherwise build sounds like a good call. And that does create a scaling factor with Alignment tier. Our unbranched Policies certainly push players toward having higher tiers, which it would be good if the branches took advantage of that.

I also like the scaling on the sight ability.

Some of the Integrity ones are less scalable, like Research League, since that would get our of hand if it compounded with Light tier as well. Peaceful Sleep could produce more Light based on the player's tier, which seems quite reasonable. If we go with FtP on the last Integrity Policy, then we can extend the discovery range at certain tiers.

Maybe 2/3 scalable on both sides would be reasonable?

Is the idea that we have to preserve Dreamspying? We could very much port that flavor over to Integrity (for peaceful sleep... though that flavor doesn't have much Integrity..... perhaps it brings us back to the Dreamguards thing?) and just move on. Because, yes, it's difficult coming up with good mechanics that use this flavor!

So.. should we look to a different concept entirely?

We don't have to preserve it, I was basically trying to come up with whole new "Shadow-style" abilities that we could use instead, related or not, but it just wasn't working for me on Tuesday night! I do figure the T'a'r link is a good idea if we can keep it somehow, but no particular guiding principles aside from that.

Dreamcatchers
Your Projections can enter the areas affected by Dreamspikes.

Dream Warriors
Your Projections can be expended, inflicting X% extra damage to the host in order to forcibly awaken an enemy Projection within range (which would cause the "killed" expiration damage) (This ability would be called "Tear from the Dream" or something.)

There are lots of options for generating Shadow through T'a'r actions, but we already have a Policy that boosts Shadow production. Would we want to dobule dip, since Turning objectives are infrequency?

Merciless Dreamers
Gain +30 Shadow whenever you force an enemy Projection our of T'a'r. +50 for killing non-Projection enemies in T'a'r, or Dreamspikes.

I actually don't think it's essential that two branches can't have the same Faith unlock. A Great Scientist in BNW is a pretty important Faith buy. I don't necessarily see why the two branches of our version of that tree shouldn't both have that as one component of the finisher. In BNW, the faith buy is usually the second of two aspects to a finisher. I see nothing wrong with having both branches of a tree both have the same faith buy, but being different in other respects. So, here, they could both be WBr, but have some additional aspect.

Of course, they could also not be the same, which could be fine, but then we're specifically linking WBr and Lightness. I know that's true in the flavor, but from a mechanical perspective, I'm not sure we want to make it so only light players have easy access to that unit, should they choose it. You'd have to work really hard to get it as a shadow player - choosing Integrity despite most of it being useless to you

I suppose while I might be ok with, say, the Dreamwalker only living in one branch of a tree, it seems a little risky here to align a GP to two diametrically opposed sides of a branch. In the former situation, the two halves of Wealth aren't opposed to one another. Here (and in Power), they are, so it's a specific type of civ/player that will choose one, and not the other.

thoughts?

Agreed, I think that association of WBr/Light and DWalker/Shadow isn't great. Which would push back against having both as opposing finisher rewards on the Ethics tree. The WBr is also more about Alignment (not specifically Light or Shadow) through his Thread ability, so he could fit into the Faith/Alignment branch of the Myth tree. There is no pure T'a'r branch as we discussed before, which is where the Dreamwalker would probably fit best.

Just in terms of counting, we have 11 LP types and 20 branch finishers, which is close to 1/2 (which would fit perfectly into having 2 of each).

Looking back at the earlier trees, I really hadn't noticed how many finishers unlocked the same LP on both branches. I thought we'd been actively avoiding that, but apparently that's not the case.

I also don't think that putting the WBr on the Integrity tree makes him a definitively Light mechanic. I don't think WBrs should be strong enough that any Shadow civ to take Integrity (which has several dead Policies for them) for that unlock. And Shadow civs can still make them through T'a'r dominance. And of course, moving the WBr onto one branch of the Myth tree could also resolve this, if we did think that association was too strong. (Given there's already a flavor association, as you've said.)

I mostly come back around to thinking that I don't really see why we would avoid Black Sisters with Faith at this stage. It could be an awesome mechanic, and for Shadow players it will be something that really stands out as unique for them. They fulfill the same style of "scarce non produceable units that have really strong effects" as the other LP finishers and given we have so many more finishers than BNW, I think the main benefit of that is diversity of the kinds of bonuses we can give out with them.

This is with the intention of making it feel like how BNW works. As I recall, all the Faith buys in BNW are Finishers. Right? The only similar policy that I can think of is the Landsnecks via gold, which is only sort of similar. So, to me, the shadowspawn thing feels very different from policies, and feels much more like a finisher.

That said, you are correct that they can already be produced consciously, unlike LP, so that is an point against their Finisher-ness and I can't completely overrule this as a possible policy because of that.

I wouldn't say the landsknecht Policy is so different. Initially I was going to suggest this Policy as just a Gold purchase option (like that one), but I figured that could use a bit of a boost. (There's also a bit of a problem with Shadow players having a built in Faith penalty, which may be relevant elsewhere as well.)

It's not that I don't think this could be a finisher, I agree it totally could. But I think the Black Sisters option is more compelling and this one has these properties that still make it appropriate to include as a Policy. Or if, at the next stage, we look at this Policy and come up with a better one that fulfills goals for the Pride tree, then we can swap them out then.

yeah, I think the spying one might be cooler. Maybe some other secondary effect as well?

Related to the above, would it be enough of an extra to make this scalable? So higher Light tier players reveal spies at a larger distance?



Also, not sure where this fits into the discussions above, but what about the ability to purchase Sealbearers somehow (on some Policy)? (With Faith, since it's much more finite than Gold?) That could make a huge difference to stealing strategies.