Tarot: Land of Arcana (WIP)

[Plotinus]

Sure, astronomers were taking a beating by being excommunicated or under house arrest, but in roughly the same time period some German clergymen marginalized by the Vatican were publishing a witch-hunter's manual filled with conclusions arrived at with the best logic and reasoning to be mustered at the time. (I'm referring, of course, to the Malleus Maleficarum, available in pdf format online.)

Galileo's house arrest was 1633. The Malleus Maleficarum was written in 1486. Not really the same period. And the Malleus Maleficarum was hardly a model of reason and logic: it was this book that argued that witches do exist (contrary to the earlier mainstream Catholic view) and that they are agents of Satan.

You're right, though, that rational thought and magical thought co-existed. It's important to remember, for example, that the witch hunts mostly happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not in the Middle Ages or even the main period of the Renaissance. As a rule, when a new thought paradigm comes along, the old one is not displaced but remains. So the Renaissance, with all of its magic and occultism, did not displace the Aristotelian rationalism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which continued to exist alongside it. And when the Enlightenment, with its mechanistic and scientific rationalism, came along, the occultist thinking of the Renaissance also continued to exist, sometimes in the same people.

 

[Gray Wolf]

I cannot remember. Is Faust in your mod? Is he appropriate?

Faust is a perfect fit for a leader. Thanks, I'm going to add him to the list. He's perfect for the Pentacles.

 

[Gray Wolf]

What is that thing? I can't tell. It looks like an Angel/Trebuchet.

 

[Gray Wolf]

I'm attempting to point out that the Enlightenment was an era rich in mystical thought, religious imagery, and a fusion of long-held myths with newly-discovered scientific truths.

Excellent point. I have to agree with you on that. I've been wanting to add Newton to the mod because he wrote books on both alchemy and science. So it just goes to show that even scientists still engaged in mystical thought.

If I extend the age through the Enlightenment, it would end around 1789 (the French Revolution) and I could safely add in Newton and other people like Descartes and Voltaire. For some reason, I really like Voltaire.

So I sort of want to extend the last era to include both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but I don't know what to call it ... except maybe call it the Early Modern era... which sounds sort of boring.

 

[Gray Wolf]

As a rule, when a new thought paradigm comes along, the old one is not displaced but remains. So the Renaissance, with all of its magic and occultism, did not displace the Aristotelian rationalism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which continued to exist alongside it. And when the Enlightenment, with its mechanistic and scientific rationalism, came along, the occultist thinking of the Renaissance also continued to exist, sometimes in the same people.

I agree. Religion and occultism seem to always be present no matter how scientifically advanced society becomes.

 

[Blue Monkey]

It seems to me that you're trying too hard to make this stick to the "real history", when as you said earlier, it's as much of a fantasy scenario. So, for example, the last era could be called "The Rosicrucian Age". Think of the turns as steps in the Fool's Journey rather than as years on a calendar of history.

 

[Gray Wolf]

Think of the turns as steps in the Fool's Journey rather than as years on a calendar of history.

You are absolutely right. It's all about the Fool's Journey. And I don't have to make this historical. In fact, it's impossible to make this mod historical when there are only 4 civilizations and they are all related to Tarot cards.

It's almost like I need permission sometimes to break out of the right path and go down the left path (the occult/fantasy path) when I'm the one who chose to make this mod!

I'm going to use my imagination and come up with 4 different era names and not just one. Something that makes sense for Tarot.
That's my new assignment to work on for the day.

 

[Gray Wolf]

New Act Names (Era Names)
Innocence
Despair
Reflection
Triumph

Ok, what I'm trying to do here is make the mod seem like a play that has 4 Acts which represent the Fool's Journey through life. I tried to choose era names that are poetic and symbolic.

In the first Act, the Fool begins his journey in Innocence.

The second Act represents the Dark Ages and Despair.

The third Act is Reflection. It represents the Renaissance.

The final Act is Triumph. This is what everyone wants to achieve, but we each define 'Triumph' differently (Knowledge, Success, Power, Glory) and, therefore, the Fool can pursue different paths and achieve different outcomes.

 

[Erebras]

My previous post (just prior to Plotinus' above) was because it appeared you were dismissing science as incompatible with the magicness of this mod, but this pure-science view is, quite frankly, too modern. I don't want to steer your mod, Gray Wolf, but I'd hate for you to give up a good thing due to a post-Space Age, post-Atomic Age attitude which, unfortunately for Humanity, is very revisionist. In America, it's sad that schoolchildren think or are told that the contemporaries of Columbus -- the discoverer of America -- were afraid he was going to sail off the edge of the earth (like you would in Discworld), but misconceptions like this are commonplace, especially in the classroom. I'm peeved that present-day inhabitants of the world think all technology and scientific thinking happened only after the Industrial Revolution, and everyone before that were a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs digging in the dirt because they didn't have cellphones and televisions. It's modern snobbery and shortsightedness.

Ouch! (Just fell off my soapbox...)

(Brushing myself off...) Anyhow, thank you Plotinus for your points, which kind of back me up. (A lot of stuff can happen in 150 years, but I can still broadly lump the birth of heliocentrism and the publication of The Hammer of Witches into some sort of post-medieval, pre-industrial era.) And a lot of thinking went into that witch-hunting manual. It's a marvel of sound reasoning, building up precepts and principles, drawing upon the written works of famous theologians, tying in the folklore and myths of local cultures (like claiming Greek satyrs and Scandinavian trolls were the same demonic species), and so on and so on. Its basic premise that there was a vast network of witches in league with Satan working in tandem for the downfall of honest society was horrifically flawed, but once you accept this foundation as true, the huge scaffold of scientific-sounding explanations and postulated theories derived from them is as awesome to behold as seeing how Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, and Nikola Tesla worked out luminiferous aether.

And that angel-tower is a tech icon I created for Hermeticism, based on a Rosicrucian Wikipedia page. (Thanks, Blue Monkey, for the Rosicrucian plug that perhaps may be useful for Gray Wolf to consider in order to flesh out his tech tree.)

 

[Gray Wolf]

My previous post (just prior to Plotinus' above) was because it appeared you were dismissing science as incompatible with the magicness of this mod

Yes, I think you are right about that. I didn't realize how science and the occult both need to be in the game. They tug at each other and create tension. So thanks for getting on the soap box! I appreciate your comments.

Also, I just wanted to add that science and magic can appear to be the same thing. For example, gravity can be explained by science but it appears to be something so unbelievable that it makes you think that magic is behind it.

 

[Gray Wolf]

Ok, so now that I have 4 eras again, I'm trying to set the time scale settings in the scenario properties and this is turning out to be a major pain. For one thing, I'm not sure how many turns a typical game should have. 440, 500, 700, 1000? Who knows? The conquest.biq file has 440 turns:

25 turns for 50 units each
25 turns for 40 units each
40 turns for 25 units each
50 turns for 20 units each
100 turns for 10 units each
100 turns for 5 units each
100 turns for 2 units each

That's a total of 440 turns. And the Start Date is set at 4000 BC. But if you put that in a spreadsheet, and figure out the ending year of each step, you end up with the game ending in the year 1950...which doesn't seem right to me. It seems like I've played the epic game and saw the year 2000 before. So if there are only 440 turns, I wouldn't have been able to get that far. It would have ended in the year 1950. But I do remember clicking something saying to 'continue anyway' so maybe it just let me play on even though the game was over. I still don't think the default ending year is 1950 though. I'm going to find the conquest documentation and see what it says about the ending year.

Anyway, you have to know how many turns are "needed" to play a good game before you can set the time scale and value of each time unit...and make them coincide with each era.

So I should have scanned the blogs for answers first but I typed this first instead. I'll probably find information about this quickly because this game has been around for like 15 years now, right?

Edit: Ok, I quickly found the answer to this. The default total turns is actually 540 turns. The best way to explain this: After the 7th row of time units is finished, the game plays another 100 turns at 1 unit each. So the standard epic game ends in the year 2050 (instead of 1950).

Here's a link I found about it: http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/117568-Time-Scale-Question

I don't know if there are any other links about this ... but that sounds correct to me and I'm just going to go with it unless someone corrects me.

I'll just leave this info here in case it is useful to someone else in the future.

 

[Gray Wolf]

Ok, based on the standard game, each era has a certain amount of turns so dividing by the total turns (540) you can calculate the percentage of time the player plays each era:

Ancient Era Percentage: 50/540 = .0925
Medieval Era Percentage: 90/540 = .1667
Industrial Era Percentage: 200/540 = .3703
Modern Era Percentage: 200/540 = .3703

So I'm trying to determine how long I want the player to spend on each Act (Era) in the Tarot mod.

And I also have to use a spreadsheet and make sure that Turns * Time Unit = Exact Number of Years for the Era
so each Era ends at the correct time.

Innocence = 3500 BC - 700 BC (Ancient)
Hope = 700 BC - 1300 AD (Classical Antiquity and Middle Ages)
Reflection = 1300 AD - 1600 AD (Renaissance)
Triumph = 1600 AD - 1812 AD (Enlightenment, French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars)

So I came up with these times based on 539 Turns (close enough) and the yellow Percentages (how much time I want the player to play each era). It's only fitting that the Age of Triumph ends with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
I like it:



And each of the era's are at least 20% and/or close to 25%. And the mod ends before ugly train tracks start appearing all over the map which is one of my top requirements.

note: If anyone is looking at this, I recently changed the name of the Age of Hope to the Age of Despair.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

Wouldn't the length of time spent in an era be dependent on the length of time to research all the techs necessary for era advancement rather than the actual turns (unless the research times are all set to a specific amount)?

 

[Gray Wolf]

Wouldn't the length of time spent in an era be dependent on the length of time to research all the techs necessary for era advancement rather than the actual turns (unless the research times are all set to a specific amount)?

Yea, I thought about that. So I have to add up all of the shield costs for all of the required techs and somehow make sure they end about the same time as the end of the era...

It's all still a work in progress. I've never delved into the time table before. I've always just used the default time settings...

So any mathematical help people can give me on this would be appreciated. Otherwise, I foresee a lot of trial and error getting everything to play out right.

 

[Erebras]

It may be quite difficult to figure out how many turns in takes to research all the required techs in a given era, especially for the AI depending on the difficulty level. You probably need to go with what is typical for the games you play, but how can anyone predict how many turns or years someone takes to advance to the next era when you have difficulty bonuses for AI players, tech trading (unless you eliminated that), and the wild card variables of luxuries, declared wars, periods of anarchy, diseases, volcanic eruptions, and rampaging barbarians?

In my MagePunk scenario (based on earlier work on a Loslon/Dark Emperor scenario I never got to work) I realized the year was irrelevant on a non-Earth world, so I made each turn a year, and the game advanced turn by turn by a set number of months, so as each turn went by, the player would see the date as Egg Moon or Honey Moon or what have you. Here is an excerpt from the Labels.txt file:

Spoiler :

Old
Frost
Blood
Hay
Honey
Crow
Wolf
Oak
Corn
Grain
Milk
Egg
$NUM0 $BCAD0
$MONTH1 Moon

 

[Gray Wolf]

Erebras,

I'm glad you showed me the labels.txt file. That is very helpful and very clever actually. So I may do something like that. If I do, then I guess I won't have to worry about the years anymore at all...

 

[Gray Wolf]

Ok, so the standard conquest game has 18 required techs for the ancient tech screen which have a total cost of 130. The game only has 50 turns assigned for the Ancient Era. Therefore, the tech cost/turn ratio = 130/50 = 2.60

So my Ancient era has 108 turns and my total cost for all required techs should be:
x/108 = 2.60
x = 280.8

So my total cost for all of my required techs in the Age of Innocence (the Ancient Age) should be around 280. Then it should play out similar to the standard conquests game.

Has anyone played with formulas like these before or do they just wing it and try to make something playable via trial and error?

 

[Laurana Kanan]

Ok, so the standard conquest game has 18 required techs for the ancient tech screen which have a total cost of 130. The game only has 50 turns assigned for the Ancient Era. Therefore, the tech cost/turn ratio = 130/50 = 2.60

I'm not sure I understand where you got the 50 turns "assigned" to the Ancient Times. The first two time scale slots add up to 50 turns, but it could take a player more or fewer than that to move into the next era. There are several factors to consider when setting time scales like difficulty levels, tech trading, research bonuses, etc.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about fine tuning the time scales until towards the end of your mod development. When I set-up mine at the start I base it off the average time to research a tech times the number of techs in the era and that gives me a general number of turns it will take to make it through that era. I then play it through at Monarch level and make adjustments to tech costs and time scales as necessary. It's almost never going to play out perfectly though.

In a mod it's more difficult to get the timing down unlike a scenario such as SOE where each turn equals a month and if I remember correctly the techs have a min/max research time of 1 as well. I've never played around with it, but I suppose you could set the min/max research time to a higher amount like 10, set the research costs to 0 and the techs to non-tradeable. Problem then would be that all techs would take the same amount of time to research and buidings that give research bonuses would be worthless. Just kind of off the top of my head, so I don't know if this would work.

 

[Gray Wolf]

I'm not sure I understand where you got the 50 turns "assigned" to the Ancient Times. The first two time scale slots add up to 50 turns, but it could take a player more or fewer than that to move into the next era. There are several factors to consider when setting time scales like difficulty levels, tech trading, research bonuses, etc.

I was basically trying to simulate the same ratio of tech cost to turns that is in the standard game. That way, my mod would be highly similar on the rate of tech advancement per turn... and since all other factors are equal, I wasn't worried about how often a player might finish the era screen early or late... because I was assuming this unknown rate would be the same in my mod as in the standard game...

However, there are too many factors to control and I don't think there is a way to mathematically account for every factor, etc.

So I'll play the game and get a feel for what is needed and just adjust as I go along... because I was going to have to do that anyway...so I'm not losing anything.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about fine tuning the time scales until towards the end of your mod development.

Yea, I think you are right about this approach. And I'm not sure which techs I want in the game yet anyway ... and chances are I will probably add/delete some along the way.

if I remember correctly the techs have a min/max research time of 1 as well. I've never played around with it, but I suppose you could set the min/max research time to a higher amount like 10, set the research costs to 0 and the techs to non-tradeable. Problem then would be that all techs would take the same amount of time to research and buidings that give research bonuses would be worthless. Just kind of off the top of my head, so I don't know if this would work.

Yea, I agree, that defeats the purpose of even having a tech screen.

 

[Gray Wolf]

... tech trading (unless you eliminated that), and the wild card variables of luxuries, declared wars, periods of anarchy, diseases, volcanic eruptions, and rampaging barbarians

Yea, you are right. There are way too many spurious factors to deal with.