.

Yes, I don't think it's too radical a path to take... instead of choosing which Elf civ you want to be on the main screen, you make that choice in the first tech that you discover. That does of course make difficulties in what the actual civ would be (Can the city list be controlled afterwards? Leader name?), but I'm sure it's easily modded... "if civ discovers forestry, change leadername to Orion"; it can probably even be done with leaderhead images too, and assuming that custom images will be made for the elves, we could have one generic elf leader image and a different wood/ dark/ high elf variant based therein...

But yeah, this is all long way off down the line kinda stuff...
 
It should definitly be possible even later than the first tech(It's possible to switch civs, convert cities and units to that new civ like in Rhyes' Mod we just would have to adjust that code to our preferences), which I would prefer-so you can make the ancient elves also in interesting part of the game to play.
 
Its an interesting dilema about how much freedom to offer players. There is no right answer, at the end of the day its just personal preference. I'll list a few of things that we talked through when we considered the options. Hopefully to add an additional perspective (and hopefully not muddy the waters).

Players should have access to multiple viable options. If they feel like they are being railroaded down one path it will be the game playing them instead of them playing the game and they won't enjoy it. Likewise offering 3 options and having one be more efficient than the other two is no real choice. Instead all you have built is a "noob trap" (where inexperienced players are punished for their inexperience by being presented with less viable options). Noob traps are inevitable in play decisions, but they should be minimized in build decisions. For every player that wants to play inefficently and build an orcish intellectual society there will be 10 that do it without real consideration and suffer for it. It will also be frustrating to be presented with an option for Johnny^1 players to have an ineffcient option sitting in their build lists.

But I agree with Lord Olleus initial assertion, the game has to develop differently than a specific storyline if you want to have any sort of replayability. The evil civs can become good in FfH and the good civs can become evil. Each faction should have strengths and weaknesses and if you decide that research is the weakness of the orcs then maybe they shouldnt have libraries. But they still need to have multiple other paths that can follow to victory. Can they excel as a religious civilization? How about world exploration? Culture? Military? Naval? Etc etc. Let them work under multiple viable builds, but maybe not all builds.

As for the civ specific wonders. We have gone around and around on them. We havent added them because once you make a wonder civ specific there is no challenge to building it anymore. The player will get it regardless of the actions of the other civs, since they will never have access to it. In FfH we start each civ with a resource (mana type) and a lot of wonders require mana to be built. So in effect we dispose certain civs to certain wonders, but they can always be beat to them by other civs who go through the extra effort to gain the required resource. Your idea of having wonders that are available to a set of factions is good too, but it make fall into the first scenrio (only one civ can build) in maps where only one civ in that group exists.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Please dont take it as anything more than the ramblings of someone who loves talk about game design.

Kaelspeak:

^1 Johnny: One of the 3 player archetypes, Johnny's want to build the most efficient empire possible and delight in beating the game at ever increasing difficulty levels.
 
Johnny?!:lol:
Great! Yeah lot of these guys are out there and very likly I count myself to them too:mischief:
I too don't like having options to build that are ineffective to my civ that's why I don't like orclibraries. It's difficult though to find something for orcs other than conquest that fits their flavor(well conquest and domination:( ).
I wouldn't mind having only this option for them. They are simply THE perfect race for Warmongerers!
Chaos shares the warmongering but there I don't see any problem going for religios and even techconquest.
Imo I still vote for that single option for orcs. Players who like to win with other options than conquest would choose another race anyway I'd say! That doesn't mean winning wars should be easy for the orcplayer on the contrary it should be a really hard challenge.

About the three options I guess you mean the elves changing to their respective race after the ancient era. I'm not sure if we really need to avoid any thinkable noobtrap here. For noobs it will possibly be the choice of flavor more than strategy anyway. That's exactly what I think should suffice for noobs - flavor. I prefer (considering gamemechanics) designing a game that finally will get some approvement by more advanced players to be true than by noobs only. I don't know yet how we will get to that stage since the gameplaydesign imo isn't really started yet but on the long run that's my egoistic conclusion here - better make it hard for noobs than boring for advanced gamers since it's got to be a game at least I/we want to play:crazyeye:
That's of course if's no balance possible to satisfy both.
 
Ploeperpengel said:
Johnny?!:lol:
Great! Yeah lot of these guys are out there and very likly I count myself to them too:mischief:
I too don't like having options to build that are ineffective to my civ that's why I don't like orclibraries. It's difficult though to find something for orcs other than conquest that fits their flavor(well conquest and domination:( ).
I wouldn't mind having only this option for them. They are simply THE perfect race for Warmongerers!
Chaos shares the warmongering but there I don't see any problem going for religios and even techconquest.
Imo I still vote for that single option for orcs. Players who like to win with other options than conquest would choose another race anyway I'd say! That doesn't mean winning wars should be easy for the orcplayer on the contrary it should be a really hard challenge.
Click to expand...

The problem with a civ that is tuned to one goal is that it offers the players only one real option (which is the same as no real options). Therefor the civ becomes boring to play. Players may have the option to try different strategies by picking different starting civs but thats like saying that if you develop a boardgame with only one options players have multiple options as they can select to play different board games. Thats probably a bad example but I hope it makes some sense.

You may want to find another goal for the orcs, to give them more depth. Im not sure what victory conditions you have planned, but if the orcs are as able to accomplish other ones besides domination it may go a ways toward making them more versatile.

About the three options I guess you mean the elves changing to their respective race after the ancient era. I'm not sure if we really need to avoid any thinkable noobtrap here. For noobs it will possibly be the choice of flavor more than strategy anyway. That's exactly what I think should suffice for noobs - flavor. I prefer (considering gamemechanics) designing a game that finally will get some approvement by more advanced players to be true than by noobs only. I don't know yet how we will get to that stage since the gameplaydesign imo isn't really started yet but on the long run that's my egoistic conclusion here - better make it hard for noobs than boring for advanced gamers since it's got to be a game at least I/we want to play:crazyeye:
That's of course if's no balance possible to satisfy both.
Click to expand...

I wasnt refering to the 3 elven types, I think thats a really cool idea. "Noob traps" aren't appreciated by anyone. For inexperienced players it makes the game harder than it need be, for experienced players the bad option just clutters up their menus. So I agree with your statement that you can find options that appeal to both sorts.
 
Ok think I understood better now what you mean with noob traps(sorry for my english again-first read I sometimes only undertand half of what's written:blush: ). And I agree largly with what you said about that. Civs should have more than one way to win and each way should be interesting to go.
I still disagree about that with you refering to orcs though. I think the mod will be in general more focused on war than FFH(it's Warhammer after all) so what we got to do is make war in civ more interesting by opening more (and diverse) ways to win them- tactics must be important not sheer numbers(even for orcs).
I still can't think of any other way for the orcs to win the game than warfare(that's simply their nature) other races should and no doubt will have other options too. But what we can do with orcs is maybe make them the most interesting civ for warfare. They have the most diverse coretroops of all WH-races at least of what I know. So it might be interesting to indeed merge them with the goblins totally and make up some choices in game which will greatly affect their tactical options. Will they rely only on their gods powers and stay savages(Savage orcs could get stronger with growing confidence in religion and get wartattoo-upgrades) will they adopt limited techadvancement and gain better weapons but loose a bit of their divine powers or will they be dominated by they crazed nightgoblin culture which opens again other options of getting lots of crazy stuff to throw at the enemy but neither have the power of religion nor many strong orcs.

1. Savages
Strong magic
average fighting
2. orcs
weak magic
strong fighters
3.Nightgoblins
average magic
crazed beserk tactic fighting
(strong attack-weak defense)
 
I really like your O&G idea Ploeperpengel, but imo one choice shouldn't seclude the other. One of the great things about the O&G is indeed the diversity in the army. The option to choose a specific cult is a good one, but if you choose a Night Goblin Cult, it should still be possible to build the other units too. Otherwise the fraction will be far more boring than it could and should be!

The armybook gives some nice examples. In the back different flavoured armies are described in alternative army lists (try-outs). This lists represent nightgoblin hordes, orc hordes, hill hordes etc. Whatever the flavour, most troops are available, BUT flavoured troops are less expensive (special and rare instead of core) than not-flavoured troops. It think that should be a better option.

Another way to approach it is the region approach. In Orc civilization (can you call it that? :)) every region/hold/valley/etc has different fighting techniques and different troops. Maybe we can add something like that. For example: - Night Goblins can only be build near mountains. That city will then become a Night Goblin Hold. Then it would even be kewl to really choose for a night-goblin-only-city by building some improvement that only lets you build Night Goblins (which it not good because you want choices and diversity) but increases the speed they are build with (which is good abviously). In this way the player can decide with every city what city it becomes (neutral/normal-speed unitbuilding or flavoured/high-speed unitbuilding).
 
Ploeperpengel said:
That's a really nice idea that last one, DJ! I'm not sure why it shouldn't be possible either. A programmer would have to define that there must be a mountain in the city radius to build a night goblin in it. I love that!
Click to expand...

It cold be implemented on other species too:
- Savage Orcs are savage because of the heat in the desert, it gives them a (even more) lack of intelligence and more furiousity. We could do the some for them as for the NG, only then when a desert is in radius.
- Forests for Forest goblins. (You can even plant a forest to get them! ;))

But my main point is the city idea .. (i kinda like that :mischief: ). Every O&G city can build every common unit. In addition they need certain environment for certain units. If the city has access to this environment it can choose to be a specific cult/hold/city/whatever to build the special units faster, but make some common units impossible (in that city only!). Do you like anything in this idea?
 
Ploe, DJ, I really like those ideas about Orcs and Goblins. they force the player to make tactical decisions and not to only pump out unit after unit to accomplish his warmongering Victory-Conditions.

The units that can be build should be defined by buildings maybe. Buildings that are needed for Nightgoblins for example could only be buildable if the City has 1 or 2 peaks or Hills in its city-radius, same for Savageorcs with deserts and Forestgoblins with Fotrests - I think you get the idea.
 
sounds great! i think we can get more diversity in other civs easily... We could create many options by techs also, so you dont exclude night goblins and savage orcs or advanced weapons, but it simply will take longer to research bot trees...

btw is it possible to define a very general tree which has different effects on different civs ?! or even different techtrees?!
 
Lord Olleus said:
Maybe we should more types of military victories:

1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)

That way, even orcs have a choice of victory !
Click to expand...

Sounds nice to me, especially the pillaging variant :goodjob:

BTW Olleus, if we want to do the things with certain "types" of Orc units becoming cheaper with buildings we would need even more UNIT_COMBAT types... that leads me to another question: did you start working on adding those UNIT_COMBAT tags for artillery and other groups (Archer etc.) for the BuildingInfos.xml, or are you still working on the magic-system?
 
Edit: This is mostly a response to the first several posts in the thread, I didn't follow through with the discussion.

I see your point Olleus (I live in a democracy so I don't recognize your title ;)) but I think that it's dangerous to go too far with that. I mean if you think about it, you can't let every civ do everything the same way (i.e. giving them freedom to do things any way they want) without basically making them the same. In fact, I think that's one of the weak points of vanilla civ - not enough difference between civilizations (oh and did you notice how many mods exist that give religions more flavor, same thing). The UUs only last for an age or so, and the traits are, well just not enough. At least personally, many of my games felt (and even to an extent developed) the same way, not in a turn-by-turn way, but in the larger picture definitely.

Now as you point out, in vanilla one of the beauties of the game is alternate history and so while I still feel the civs could have had more differences, it's not a big deal. Given that all civs are humans, that are essentially the same, it's easy to accept that alternate version of civs.

Warhammer universe however presents a completely different picture. For one, there are many more differences between the civs thematically, i.e. different races and even different existential states (the undead ;)). The conflicts and the differences are also much more fleshed out and somewhat exaggerated because being a fantasy setting that's the idea (yeah a good story will always have shades of grey rather than black and white, but I think it's better to have "256" shades of grey instead of "65,000", if you know what I mean). In fact, the whole warhammer universe could be viewed as somewhat of an alternate history.

In the end though, whatever my or your opinions are on the topic of (for example) allowing orcs to write poetry, it all comes down to the perception of most players and how it affects the fun factor of the game. When people load a Warhammer mod they do it with certain expectations - one of them is that orcs are savage "people" that would rather stick your head on a pole than talk to you about philosophy. Of course that doesn't mean you have to force them to be at war always, but if I were to open a city window while playing with orcs, and see there an option to build a university I would probably go "hmmm, that's odd *shrug*", and it will probably take away a tiny bit of immersion.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents (well more like a quarter really ;)) on the topic.
 
I like that new victory types.
1 - conquest - same as before
2 - Land domination - requires 75% of land mass
3 - Population Domination - requires 75% of world population
4 - Pillager - rased $$$$ from pillaging cities and tile improvements
5 - Power - Your power is greqter than the combined power of all the other civs combined AND your power is 2x greater than the second most powerful civ (stops it being to easy on small maps)
and 6
City razer:goodjob:
Way to go for me.

I'm not sure about having prereq buildings for EVERY unit. If it's doable I prefer the terrain idea at least for some. An alternative would be also a resource(for Nightgoblins-Mushrooms, for other civs mushrooms just provide food) that must be within cityradius to build units. Forestgoblins could go with a building maybe though(venomous-spider farming is what they do)

@seZ
it's already possible to have different effects for different techs by techs(UUs, Unique buildings) but I think there's no way around unique techs for some of the civs.
 
Ploeperpengel said:
I'm not sure about having prereq buildings for EVERY unit. If it's doable I prefer the terrain idea at least for some. An alternative would be also a resource(for Nightgoblins-Mushrooms, for other civs mushrooms just provide food) that must be within cityradius to build units. Forestgoblins could go with a building maybe though(venomous-spider farming is what they do)
Click to expand...

Didn´t mean that every unit has a prereq building, only some special units, which we should decide upon. And if the Player has to construct a building first (and I understood that you want it to be tough for players to build those, because they have a constant need for units and therefore can only construct buildings from time to time) he really has to do some tactical decisions, that are harder than "just" building a city in the right place and by that way getting the option to train certain units.

And remember one point: in my suggestion the buildings for some units would require the things that the units would require in the case of no prereq buildings (does that make sense :confused: ).

The City-Razer thing would be nice for some of the "evil races", especially Chaos.
 
well, if you want you could go with the humans and elves like that: be almost the same in the ancient era, then come to a point where you have to build a wonder, if you build the death king pyramid you become the tomb kings, if you build the great forge, you get sigmars hammer and become the emporer of the empire ;) if you build the altar of the chaos gods you become corrupted... or if you do another thing you become cathay, nippon etc. what ever... no idea how this would develop ;)

thats the same with the elves, differentiating by somethng else...

or you let the races be the race from start on and do that buildings thing, what duke mentioned etc... i wouldnt have a problem with having preset races
 
Im sorry, but i really dont like this whole "Humans and elves start out identical" thing. thats why you can choose what civ you want at the start. What if you were racing towards the 'Woodelf' tech or whatever, and then one turn away, some other elven sect got there first? then you would have no choice in what civ you will get. same with humans.
if this idea is implemented, i will be forced to stop with this mod. it will remove all fun from the game for me.

I think that, if you REALLY must have civs splitting up all over the place, you could make random events, like great people popping up called "revolutionaries", who run around converting your cities to another elven civ. for example if you are woodelves, and you have met the darkelves, and a 'revolutionary' happens to pop up, then he can run around converting your cities to the dark elf cause.
Mind you i really hate this idea also, and i have no idea why i just typed it all up:crazyeye:

On the Orc dispute:
Befor i start i just want to say that i agree with Ploe and DJ on this one.

Orcs are a very misunderstood race i think. just because thay are a bit tougher and uglyer and cruder dosnt mean they are idiots. there have actually been quite a few intelegent orcs around (sure thay got killed because of thier ideas, but what if they weren't killded??) I think Orc definately have the potential to be an intelegent race if they really put some effort into it. Who was it that said something like "an orc paints himself red in order to make himself faster, because they believe red things to be fast?" any way it was something like that. I say just rename the orc univercities and other educational and scientific buildings to things like:

Library: Cave of Carving
Uni: The Great Green (places where shamans can gather thier energy an education)
Research buildings: Shaman Council / Council of elders / Shaman Gathering / Stone of Gork / Stone of Mork etc etc

Goblins are also very misunderstood, and i believe that whoever said that Gobbos had an advanced civ at one point in history is correct, though i have no evidence of this.

I like the idea of the mountains = night gobbos, desert = savages etc thing, and think that would work very well


I also think that this mod and the current layout of the civ is not too restricting on players and i think that there is plenty of diversity.
(end of my rant ;) )
 
I'm still no friend of orcuniversities even not renmed ones as long they receive something like that from the same techs. I really prefer making some greenskin techs and let unitdiversity come from the terrain mainly. Unitstrength could be altered by the strenght of the whaaagh.(currently only two different techs that represent that in the mod: whaaagh! and whaaagh!!!) But I think we could pimp that up a bit.

@seZ and PL
I never meant we should ONLY have generic ancients. But there are some civ where this idea makes sense for me:

Elves->High-, Wood-, Darkelves

Unberogen->Empire, Bretonnia(?), Estalia(?), Tilea(?), Sylvanians!

Dwarfs->Dwarfs, Chaos Dwarfs

btw: PL it shouldn't be a problem to have premapscenarios where everything is set up from the beginning even if we ever come to include some of his ideas. Maybe it even would be possible to have a config file for it for noobs to use and choose to enable this option or not. Any way it's future talk but we can decide on this subject with a poll later.
 
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