An idea for AV; sacrificing cities

[Ace Royale]

I was reading "Out of the Darkness" from Harry Turtledove, and there was an idea that seemed to suit AV; involving genocide of a race in order to fight a war. semms very AV to me.

following the AV theme, if you researched INFERNAL PACT or some other tech, AV civs can build a ritual (about 200 , and possibly builds faster with Evil mana like Death or Entropy) which creates a building in the city Sacrifical Circle or whatever and grants all units in the city a spell; Sacrifical Ritual which razes the city and gives you 100 per pop that was in the city as well as, possibly granting 1 AC per pop.

Thematically when I'm RPing Sheaim I see razing cities as a waste; why just kill them? Why not sacrifice the whole population to Agares or some other demon in exchange for power? You can commit mass genocide of an inferior race (like the tree-hugging Lijos or the good-two-shoes Elohim) to help your civ and help turn Erebus into Hell. (muhahaha)

If the AI can't use this properly (they can't use Pax Diablois properly, I can see them razing every one of their own cities for some beakers..) it can just be made human-only, I like more MOAR, as long as the AI can play, it's fine. (now about navies... that's a different thread)

So any feedback?

 

[Honor]

Hey there Ace, welcome to the forums!

I believe FF already has a city-sacrifice mechanic in place. It is used for making peace with Agares and his hellspawns.

 

[Ace Royale]

heh, thanks.

My intention was to go deeper than that. right now, playing as AV doesn't really seem that evil. You get random demon spawns in your land and summon Hyborem who squats in a isolated corner for the rest of the game even if you beeline Infernal Pact.
It just doen't give off that demonic blood theme. With this, I think it would add to the flavour a bit, in lore of trading souls for knowledge, and I suppose this would add a steamroll mechanic, as you capture more cities you get more tech, allowing you to pump out stronger armies, etc.

 

[Vermicious Knid]

If you are going with the full-on Turtledove feel it should be a Ritual that requires the sacrifice of a large number of slaves.


For the city-razing aspect you could have a city spawn 1 slave per population when you raze it, with appropriate prereqs (Evil alignment? Slavery civic? Malevolent Designs?)


The Ritual itself should be a nuke. Pure and simple. Have it create hell terrain instead of fallout.

 

[Brokenbone]

The Demon's Altar building provides a "lose unit, get research" function, and in the theme of using existing mechanics, maybe an idea like the above "spawning of slaves on raze", force marching them to your nearest Demon's Altar and wiping them out, would work.

That said, I don't think spawning "slaves" (cheap workers) would necessarily be a fair mechanic. Spawning some kind of useless, unpromoteable "prisoner" units might make better sense. It would prevent using a "flavor" thing like marching hordes of prisoners to your evil cities, as "oh I got 12 slaves, I am going to have them build me some mines."

I guess an alternate implementation would be a ritual available in your cities to smoke 'em for research. Still, for a captured city, you have to contend with several turns of revolt, before what, you start asking them to build your "Sacrifice Everyone" ritual there? Again, kind of strange.

Net, I think there's something interesting about the general idea of laying waste to a city benefiting the AV, other than just the normal AC boost. Maybe "AC boost + research boost" is a little much though, hmm. Oh well.