Challenge Mode ideas

[Psychic_Llamas]

Age of Magic: doubles number of mana nodes, all spells deal twice as much damage, doubles the number of summons per summon (including for summoning civs), all units have at least a base 10% magic resistance and all natural resistances are doubled.

Age of Despare: Infernals start with a large empire, (1 or 2 cities+defenders / other ai civ?) as well as the AV holy city, all AI bar infernals are at peace with each other and have large diplo modifyers to keep it that way (however war can be declared), all teams are at war with the Infernals, peace can not be declared with infernals. World starts covered in hell terrain, terraforming disabled (no spread of snow or desert etc), armageddon counter starts at 100. all non evil civs are bared from adopting AV, if an evil civ adopts AV they get peace with infernals and war with everyone else. cannot be selected in conjunction with the 'end of winter' option.

Deadly Seas: number of sea monsters spawned trippled. 1% chance to auto cast tsunami on every sea square every turn.

Walking Woods. Ancient forests have a 1% chance to turn into barbarian tree men everyturn. all forests have a chance to become ancient forest.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Somnium, King of Games -- Whenever you encounter an enemy civilization, you are forced to play somnium with them. If you lose, they automatically declare war on you. In addition, you can only get peace via a diplomacy option 'play for peace' wherein you play a game of Somnium and victory will bring about peace. (Failure gives a 10 turn no contact with that leader).

Men at no Arms: You cannot build warriors, axemen, or Champions.

The Chosen: Whenever a non hero unit you control has 10 or more experience, it immediately changes to a different civ, and is moved to that civ's capital.

Slow and Steady: Your units have -1 movement on roads (as in, no bonus on roads until engineering, where they work as normal).

Make the Bannor Look Good: Your civ choice is irrelevant, you instead play a civ with no unique units, world spells, or abilities, and a leader with no traits.

Dragon Attack: Acheron has +2 Movement, and is no longer a world unit.

Barbarian Empire: All AI's gain the Barbarian trait, the player loses it if they would normally have it.

Peace Keeper: Any human controlled city that starts the turn with more unhappiness than happiness goes into revolt for 2 turns.

Life Giver: Any human controlled city that starts the turn with more unhealth than health, loses 1 population.

Final Countdown: All AI capitals start with Ashen Veil religion. Human players' cities cannot gain Ashen Veil as a religion.

Tomorrow is the Future: Every 50 turns, each AI is given a Future Tech.

Power Builder: Whenever an AI researches a tech, each city they control gets all buildings that tech enables.

 

[Mamamia]

I noticed that when you start building the Tower of Mastery, the AI is a lot more like to suddenly declare war against you. Sometimes, all of them declare war against you at the same time. I think a similar concept could be applied when you start getting ahead of the other civilizations. For instance, if your score gets 5% above your nearest follower, this should make the AI more like to declare war against you. Then, if you reach say 10 %, most of them would declare war against you. And by the time you reach 15%, they would all be at war against you.

Let’s face it. The main problem in this game is that when a clever and experienced player starts getting ahead of the AI, there is usually very little doubt about the final outcome and the game can quickly get boring as you start mopping up your rivals one after another. Instead of being more likely to attack you, the AI will be less likely to attack you because by then you will have the largest army.

Making the AI much more aggressive when a player starts winning would definitely make the game more interesting without spoiling any of the gameplay.

 

[seZereth]

I noticed that when you start building the Tower of Mastery, the AI is a lot more like to suddenly declare war against you. Sometimes, all of them declare war against you at the same time. I think a similar concept could be applied when you start getting ahead of the other civilizations. For instance, if your score gets 5% above your nearest follower, this should make the AI more like to declare war against you. Then, if you reach say 10 %, most of them would declare war against you. And by the time you reach 15%, they would all be at war against you.

Let’s face it. The main problem in this game is that when a clever and experienced player starts getting ahead of the AI, there is usually very little doubt about the final outcome and the game can quickly get boring as you start mopping up your rivals one after another. Instead of being more likely to attack you, the AI will be less likely to attack you because by then you will have the largest army.

Making the AI much more aggressive when a player starts winning would definitely make the game more interesting without spoiling any of the gameplay.

I totally agree here...

 

[Blackmantle]

@ Zechnophobe: Some of those sound really fun. If they don't make it into the main game someone should! mod them in.

I'm especially eyeing Dragon attack (that's definately the most fun-sounding one in a rather solid list...
Perhaps Drifna, Erubarates and Abishai should be added to the list of Dragons the barbarians can build then + be made cheaper. In form of double units though to prevent Kuoritates / Illians / Sheiam to get to much of a profit from the whole thing if that is! seen as a problem.),
Somnium, King of Games
and Man at no Arms here.
(and those sadly somehow feel unlikely to be included into the main mod for various reasons...
Oh, and you better don't! have Kael read the effect of Dragon attack.
Better spoilerize that one fast (i mean it!) and warn Kael not! to read it. Could be extended into reimplementing Barbatos, autoplacing the sepulcher feature at start and having him start with Mobility 1+2 and have one spawn all 20 turns or so... )
Perhaps put that one into the thread for Marnok's modmod as well maybe he will find some way to put something like that into the game... (most likely place for an timely implementation. )

Barbarian Empire is easily doable allready without adding an extra option (just ally all civs by putting them into one team and then pre-setting one of the civs as either Shelba, Jonas or Chardaron while still leaving the rest being random.
In unrestricted leaders it even works out with all civs and the choice of traits should be acceptable between those 3 for the one leader you have to pre-set without feeling all to much restraint.).
Adding an option just to save a few clicks in a game that will possibly last several hours hardly seems like a good use of the teams resources.



@ Mamamia: Wouldn't that be a serious kind of rubber-band mechanics badly punishing good players though? As an option sure it sounds OK.
But i would seriously hate if that would be forced or opt-out...

In that case i would think it by far the better option to improve the AI ability overall (or adding other general perks like the free XP by handicap recently added.) to make it compete better. The result is something similar but it feels much less cheesy and forced.
As in: that sucks (which might in turn not be everyone's cup of tea...).
Having the game prevent you winning by any means possible and in a glaringly obvious way shouldn't be the be all end all of what the game is about and how it's designed imo...

I could even make sense out of that if aggressive AI would be changed into what you suggested though...
I'm not sure it works out in a good way in its current form and the result would be something similar yet feels a bit more elegant... No need to clutter the startup with redundant options... (in my book aggressive AI would feel redundant then though. Not your suggestion... )

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

I'll second mamamia here. that mechanic should work even if an AI is getting way above all the others though, otherwise the feeling of "the AI doesn't give a crap about winning, it just wants ME not to win" would ruin the fun

 

[Jabie]

Neap / Ebb Tides.

All players start on an archipelago map and techs which allow the crossing of the seas are disabled. Each turn there is a random chance that the Coast will be converted into some kind of land. Thus, players slowly run into the AI and vice versa.

This scenario can be reversed "Escape from Atlantis" style whereby players start on a Pangaea and the plains and grasslands turn to ocean and coast, whilst mountains crumble away into hills, which then turn into plains, which then turn into Oceans.

 

[Bringa]

Playing with Open Cards: the entire map is always revealed to all players, as are the technologies everyone is researching and the stuff they're building. (This is probably more interesting as a multiplayer mode since against AI it would heavily favour the player)

Culture Wars: Culture Output x5 (maybe even more for the AI)

Blitzkrieg: all unit movement tripled, cost for technologies halved

This is the Dawning of the Age of Hybo-ri-em: Hyborem enters the world in round 50, no matter if anyone's got the required techs or not. Behave as if the civ on place 1 summoned him. (Or last place? I'm not sure. I still think Hyborem is a curse rather than a blessing)

Battle of the Rubber-bands: Any technology researched by the civs ranked one and two is given to the player in the last place (check whenever a new tech is researched by either #1 or #2). Furthermore, the player in the top slot has to pay a stipend equal to 10% of his GNP (Science + Gold before maintenance) to the player in the last rank.

 

[wig]

This one would probably become a permanent choice for me.

Soldiers Eat, Too: Restrict the number of units to the Civ's total population, +3. An additional unit can be built for each health bonus in the Capital City.

Upkeep doesn't really do a good job of limiting troop numbers. Having a hard cap would make build decisions more critical, make offensive actions more risky, and streamline the endgame which gets bogged down by ridiculous numbers of troops.

 

[Maksim]

A simple but interesting challenge might be:

Scorched Earth - all cities auto-raze on capture. This will let AC rise faster, and change the nature of warfare (more likely to settle in the preferred spots, rather than just taking what is there).

Another one, possibly used in combination with others:

No Turning Back - Armageddon Counter can only rise, not fall. There is be an overall feeling of inevitability and dread as you see the number slowly tick away to the end of the world.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

I realize this is probably way to much coding but something that came up on the Rapture mod thread as well as the Resurrecting the Aifons forum got me thinking. Would it be possible that you'd start the game as generic civ's based on race and then due to a combination of your actions and events, you would end up with your Civ?

I always like the 'blind research' function of old Sid Mieir's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) because it made being the human a bit harder and you could play on the lower difficulties easier because the AI wasn't able to 'cheat' as bad but you the human play had issues as well.

Now obviously certain races like the Grigori or the Kuriotates, this wouldn't work for, but I can see a breakdown like this:
* Kingdom of Man
* Kingdom of Elves
* Kingdom of Dwarves
* Kingdom of Orcs
So you start with a generic civ of Orcs say, and during the course of the first 50 or so turns, could would be presented with leaders coming forward or you finding leaders during your explorations.

Maybe if you built a pagan temple early, Jonas would come forward as a leader. Maybe you find a goody village that is ruled by Vampire lords and thus you could go Calabim.

I mean for most Civs, it takes awhile for there to be any significant difference between the Civs. Lacking a leader early in the game could represent how hard it is right after the Age of Winter.

Plus if the game starts with minor Civs, that would give the human player, as s/he conquers these civs, another option to get a leader. Are you Kingdom of Man and have available horse resources? Maybe you could go Hippus.

I'm sure it would be a major reworking of the game, but maybe the entire "Ancient" level of the game could be the very early part of Erebus history, when the world is again warming up (having that flagged would probably be good too) and a lot of the various survivors are coming together. It's at this time that the leaders will begin to surface.

Perhaps depending on your 'kingdom' - you could pick who you want by being the first to build a palace of which civ you want if you meet the criteria. Again I know the Hippus don't need horse resources in vanilla FfH, but maybe if you have access to them, you can build their palace and thus become that Civ. Maybe multiple palaces could be build so the first person/AI who builds the palace gets to pick their leader, then the second palace would go to which ever leaders is left.

Obviously there would have to be tweaks. I mean the dwarves would only build dwarven workers until the break between Khazad and Lurchirp happens, but I think that's doable.

Another option is that you could have one Civ, but depending on your actions or events, you get access to certain leaders, regardless of the Civ so maybe you end up with Jonas leading the Malakim. I mean they followed an Elf, why not an Orc?

Anyway, I'm sure there are way to many problems with this, but I think it brings up some options/ideas for this mod.

I read this in another thread and quite liked it

 

[Demus]

survival mode:
All AI's are teamed, you're only allowed to have one city, and always war is on.

 

[ShadowDrgn]

King of the mountain (someone can probably come up with a better name)
As soon as a nation becomes first in the score all other nations declare war on number one. As soon as someone else becomes number one all other nations form peace with the previous number one and declare war on the current leader. To win you must remain number one for a set number of turns, not sure on how many though.

I'd actually play this one, although having the Elohim in the game would be unfair.

 

[Farmer Bobathan]

This one would probably become a permanent choice for me.

Soldiers Eat, Too: Restrict the number of units to the Civ's total population, +3. An additional unit can be built for each health bonus in the Capital City.

Upkeep doesn't really do a good job of limiting troop numbers. Having a hard cap would make build decisions more critical, make offensive actions more risky, and streamline the endgame which gets bogged down by ridiculous numbers of troops.

I would play with this option permanently on if it excluded limited (world/national) units.

 

[thewyrm]

This one would probably become a permanent choice for me.

Soldiers Eat, Too: Restrict the number of units to the Civ's total population, +3. An additional unit can be built for each health bonus in the Capital City.

Upkeep doesn't really do a good job of limiting troop numbers. Having a hard cap would make build decisions more critical, make offensive actions more risky, and streamline the endgame which gets bogged down by ridiculous numbers of troops.

This idea is absolutely fantastic.

 

[Kael]

This one would probably become a permanent choice for me.

Soldiers Eat, Too: Restrict the number of units to the Civ's total population, +3. An additional unit can be built for each health bonus in the Capital City.

Upkeep doesn't really do a good job of limiting troop numbers. Having a hard cap would make build decisions more critical, make offensive actions more risky, and streamline the endgame which gets bogged down by ridiculous numbers of troops.

This would be a "double win" mechanic (it rewards players in the lead and punishes losing players, making overturns less likely). Some people dislike double win mechanics as they tend to be unbalanced, but I like to use them to get the games over with quick (to let the winner win rather than slop through the grind of proving it). So double wins are good in some situations. I would worry a bit about this just from population effecting abilites (especially river of blood).

But we could as easily make this a "rubber band" mechanic. Rubber band mechanics reward losing players and punish winning players. For example if we were to limit all players to a fixed amount of units, lets say 40 units (not counting workers and settlers) on a standard map. That would mitigate some of the production power of the leading player, make diplomacy much more important (since dogpiles are lethal) and make individual battles more important. Of course it isn't so strong that it completely upsets the ranking, that would be a horrible rubber band mechanic, but does adjust the odds a bit. On the downside this would significantly curtail the amount of cities the player can defend and force him to really thin out defensive units in areas he considers safe (no more dumping 3-4 units in an interior city with the plan being to upgrade them if the city becomes threatened).

Which ways better?

 

[wig]

I much prefer the rubber band approach, Kael. I'm looking for something to take some of the drag out of the end game, not give me an easy win when I'm already ahead.

How about basing it on the number of cities owned, instead of a static number or population? Say, 30 units + 1 per city owned on a standard map? Would that fall more into the rubber band category than the double win? It would give each civ the same number of 'active' forces while still making some small allowance for a larger empire to defend itself.

I'm glad you're interested in it the idea, but there are a few issues to work out. Will the AI be able to cope with a hard cap on its troop numbers? Also, there are various way to get more troops than the cap without actually building them (March of Trees and For The Horde are two example). Can you make it work so that these units can still appear, but that a civ won't be able to build new units until they are under the cap again?

This would be a "double win" mechanic (it rewards players in the lead and punishes losing players, making overturns less likely). Some people dislike double win mechanics as they tend to be unbalanced, but I like to use them to get the games over with quick (to let the winner win rather than slop through the grind of proving it). So double wins are good in some situations. I would worry a bit about this just from population effecting abilites (especially river of blood).

But we could as easily make this a "rubber band" mechanic. Rubber band mechanics reward losing players and punish winning players. For example if we were to limit all players to a fixed amount of units, lets say 40 units (not counting workers and settlers) on a standard map. That would mitigate some of the production power of the leading player, make diplomacy much more important (since dogpiles are lethal) and make individual battles more important. Of course it isn't so strong that it completely upsets the ranking, that would be a horrible rubber band mechanic, but does adjust the odds a bit. On the downside this would significantly curtail the amount of cities the player can defend and force him to really thin out defensive units in areas he considers safe (no more dumping 3-4 units in an interior city with the plan being to upgrade them if the city becomes threatened).

Which ways better?

 

[Kael]

I'm glad you're interested in it the idea, but there are a few issues to work out. Will the AI be able to cope with a hard cap on its troop numbers? Also, there are various way to get more troops than the cap without actually building them (March of Trees and For The Horde are two example). Can you make it work so that these units can still appear, but that a civ won't be able to build new units until they are under the cap again?

I dont think it can be a hard limit. There has to be some units that dont count, like workers, work boats, settlers and any unit with a duration. Permanent summons (like skeletons) become a bad deal in this sort of a game, but thats okay.

The AI would play normally in the beginning but when it hits its limit it would start to turtle up (since it prioritizes defense over attack it would begin pulling all units back for defense). I suppose the best way to deal with that would be to limit the AI to a certain number of cities so it stays aggressive (though humans could expand as much as they want).

 

[Skitters]

...alternatively you could have the limit on human players only?

 

[Kael]

...alternatively you could have the limit on human players only?

Yeap, that would make good sense since its a challenge mode.