Civilizations, Leaders and Traits

[davidlallen]

I think this works fine; the biggest challenge is in what happens to the slaves once they're created.

I didn't give any more details besides pointing at the modcomp I took the idea from. In that modcomp, slaves are workers who work 1.5x *faster* but they are killed when they finish the improvement. Working the slave to death definitely adds to the feel. The original modcomp did this by cloning all the build actions and using an existing flag to kill the unit upon completion like a workboat. I implemented it differently with a python action upon completion of an improvement or removal of a feature.

I'd really want to make Bene Gesserit more espionage oriented than the Tliexu; there are surely more interesting ways to model their biological mastery than through espionage.

In the books, Face Dancers seem to be the perfect infiltrators; that is what I was working from. Maybe Fenring is the one who should get super duper spies, I was kind of stuck on what to do with him.

I want to come up with something related to prescience and the worm cycle for Bene Gesserit. I am thinking maybe a Reverend Mother would be a new specialist type you can only create once you have the Little Maker bonus.

You could also make infiltrators able to cross coastal sand tiles.

It is still very slow to travel to the first mission and travel back after the mission. I am thinking that after hover tech, an infiltrator can get a custom stealth hover and fly around pretty fast. That might be a UU for the Tleilaxu, or for everybody if it's too powerful.

Creating new espionage missions is pretty key though for more espionage to have any effect; my favorite suggestion (of my own, yes its crass) is the espionage mission that alters tile influence. I love the idea of the Bene Gesserit using espionage to expand their borders out into your territory while remaining at peace.

Super spies is an sdk only mod, which is too bad from my standpoint. It is nicely integrated into promotions and the espionage xml, but I don't have the ability to add missions. One co-author of that mod is Lord Tirian who has also been spotted around this sub-forum, so there is a possibility.

I understand what you mean about altering tile influence, but I don't see how the game effect would work. In vanilla, suppose I conquer one of your outlying cities and pop a great artist to immediately expand the cultural borders. It resets all the influence in all the tiles. Then suppose you conquer the city back. All the influence is reset again. Now suppose there was a Bene Gesserit affected tile in the middle somewhere. All the routines that do this setting and resetting need to treat this tile specially. I think this would be pretty odd looking.

In FFH, at least in a previous version, there is a hero Loki who can culture flip *cities*. It usually only works on small new cities, so he floats around the borders looking for new cities to flip. That should really annoy the former owner. But maybe there is an idea there.

One espionage mission I would like is "spread water". I could send spies to the deep desert inside your cultural borders, and have them ruin areas by spreading water. This would prevent little makers, so there would be no spice blows there. This would indirectly hurt your economy.

What other sorts of espionage missions would be good, if we had somebody to add them?

 

[Ahriman]

In that modcomp, slaves are workers who work 1.5x *faster* but they are killed when they finish the improvement. Working the slave to death definitely adds to the feel.

I don't think this works here. There are relatively few terrain improvements, and it feels like you need fewer workers than you do in vanilla - particularly if tubers get taken out and you don't have to spend time chopping forest or jungle, and there are no roads to build.

To make this work, you'd really need to add some superior terrain improvements that take a long time to build or increase improvement construction times across the board.

Basically, the times when you need a worker force to be building improvements are relatively rare in this mod, so mostly the slaves would be pretty useless. One-off hammer construction bonuses in cities are likely to be much more useful, and still could feel like working them to death. I think the Harks could work people to death as easily in a factory as they could building terrain improvements (which feels more like Mao really).
Another gruesome thought, from Dune + a tinge of Waterworld; if Fremen capture people, they could render them for water..... a 1-off bonus to food storage in that city?

Also on the current slave setup from the modcomp; this is of course exploitable by the human player. If you have a stack of slaves, they can all speed up the construction of a single improvement, but only one of them actually completes it and dies.

I want to come up with something related to prescience and the worm cycle for Bene Gesserit. I am thinking maybe a Reverend Mother would be a new specialist type you can only create once you have the Little Maker bonus.

Sounds interesting, but I think you also need to capture their meddling/influence peddling somehow. They're puppetmasters.
And there are already Truth Sayers, who are just a specialist kind of Reverend Mother.
Another thought for Fenring spies; they could have the chance to kill off settled great people in enemy cities (again with the assassination specialization idea), or to create a diplomacy penalty between two enemy factions (assassinating someone and framing another faction for it).

I understand what you mean about altering tile influence, but I don't see how the game effect would work.

I would think it would work the same as influence driven war; the effect of using the mission would be the same as the effect of winning a battle on that tile (or maybe a 2x or 3x multiple of this effect).

In FFH, at least in a previous version, there is a hero Loki

Hmm, yes this was related to another idea I had above; either the city flipping mechanic, or a spell caster who can reduce the culture output of a city.
Maybe a bene gesserit spy type unit can cast a spell in enemy cities that creates a building that gives say -30% culture in that city?
I don't know how easy it is to lift the FFH magic coding into another mod, but this would be trivial to do in the FFH engine.

This would indirectly hurt your economy.

This seems... inefficient. I can't imagine that in the Dune world (at least, pre-transformation into a non-desert world) that it could possibly be efficient to deliberately take water and spread it around in the desert in your enemies lands. Water is far too valuable to waste like that; it would take massive amounts of water to have any significant effect on a huge area of desert wasteland, and you'd be far better off using that water yourself.

 

[davidlallen]

Basically, the times when you need a worker force to be building improvements are relatively rare in this mod, so mostly the slaves would be pretty useless. ... I think the Harks could work people to death as easily in a factory as they could building terrain improvements

I can add an action button to the slave in a city, which converts into a hammer bonus. I like that. Also, there is the Arena building in FFH where a unit can gain experience or die. We often see Feyd killing slave gladiators, so maybe a slave can be turned into local unit XP also.

Another thought for Fenring spies; they could have the chance to kill off settled great people in enemy cities (again with the assassination specialization idea), or to create a diplomacy penalty between two enemy factions (assassinating someone and framing another faction for it).

Killing off GP is exactly what the current assassination mission does. Blaming another faction is an excellent idea but nobody has implemented it yet.

I would think it would work the same as influence driven war; the effect of using the mission would be the same as the effect of winning a battle on that tile (or maybe a 2x or 3x multiple of this effect).

Yes, but in IDW the idea is that you are making a visible line of attack with multiple combats, so you get a moving "front". A single RM with a single action would create a point, not a front.

Maybe a bene gesserit spy type unit can cast a spell in enemy cities that creates a building that gives say -30% culture in that city? I don't know how easy it is to lift the FFH magic coding into another mod, but this would be trivial to do in the FFH engine.

Careful with that "trivial" word, Mr wont-edit-an-xml-file

I agree the concept of creating fake buildings on cities, or fake promotions on units, is very helpful. Decreasing culture output should certainly be possible, given an SDK person to add the espionage mission. Diplomatic penalties are a great idea, but I do not know how deeply buried the hooks for that might be.

 

[Ahriman]

Yes, but in IDW the idea is that you are making a visible line of attack with multiple combats, so you get a moving "front". A single RM with a single action would create a point, not a front.

My concept was that the mission would be very cheap to perform, and so by repeating it over several turns you would eventually form a front advancing into enemy territory.

Careful with that "trivial" word, Mr wont-edit-an-xml-file

How about "straightforward"?

The way the buildings work in FFH is that the building stays in the city as long as the spellcaster who created it doesn't leave (or, more precisely, as long as there remains a unit in the city that can cast the spell that created it).
Creating a permanent building from an espionage mission could also work well; that sounds like a powerful effect, which is good, since most espionage is underpowered.

Its potentially a mechanic that could be repeated; you could create a building that gives a food or water or health penalty, or a hammer penalty, or a commerce penalty, or unhappiness or whatever.

spies from different factions might be able to create different such buildings. Maybe Atreides create an underground radio station or something that creates discontent in their enemies, while the trade guild or fremen sets up smugglers who siphon off water, and ordos set up saboteur teams who reduce hammer output.

All such buildings should be destroyed 100% when the city gets captured though, so you don't end up stuck with your own things.

 

[davidlallen]

One underlying behavior of the current espionage system is that when the mission is completed, the spy either dies (on failure) or returns to your capitol. I suppose this is to prevent a player from triggering many many espionages on the same city until the owner is finally able to send a counterspy there.

If we use espionage as the basis for this, the influence mission happens once and then there is at least a few turns pause until it can happen again. I had never used espionage very much because it takes so long for the spy to reposition. Or else you need enough spies to create an assembly line of sorts, with a new spy arriving every few turns.

A hidden spellcaster might be a better way, but then the first step is to reimplement all the existing espionage missions as spells, before we could add any new ones.

 

[Ahriman]

If we use espionage as the basis for this, the influence mission happens once and then there is at least a few turns pause until it can happen again. I had never used espionage very much because it takes so long for the spy to reposition. Or else you need enough spies to create an assembly line of sorts, with a new spy arriving every few turns.

I've never really used espionage much, cos I don't really like how its implemented in civ.

But I think the espionage points you have are a binding constraint too; you can't keep spamming missions because of the chance of failure and the cost in espionage points of performing a mission.

Possible fixes would be:
a) have the influence mission have a very low chance of failure or capture
b) increase the movement speed of spies (or UU spies of some factions that are more espionage-oriented). Particularly necessary because of the lack of roads in this mod (actually I think roads would work well late game; movement is still very limited because of the broken up nature of the mapscripts and the need for transports to cross sand).
I'd imagine a spy could easily have its own thoptor and move at 4 tiles per turn.

The influence mission should still take time; you perform the mission, succeed, get teleported back to capital, walk back to the front, perform it again, etc.
It shouldn't be too easy to advance a front out; this is potentially powerful ability, particularly if you use it to steal access to bonus tiles.

 

[davidlallen]

I have collected our suggestions about super spies and posted in the super spies thread. Please read at this link, for additional super spy suggestions.

 

[Deliverator]

From that thread it sounds like Lord Tirian can't do any work on Super Spies until August or so.

Vendettas (Kanly) and Alliances

What can we do to model this? The Fremen and Atreides should hate the Harkonnens etc. How do we make factions hate each other and or forge alliances against a shared enemy?

 

[koma13]

What can we do to model this? The Fremen and Atreides should hate the Harkonnens etc. How do we make factions hate each other and or forge alliances against a shared enemy?

You can try tweaking the CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml. FavoriteCivic/FavoriteReligion could be a good start.

 

[keldath]

hey guys,

if you wanna add more spy missions - johny smith added to one of dw early versions - super spies from woc - it adds around 10 new missions...

if you wish i can look into it and see if we can get it back in?


****
alright guys,
im moving on to adding civs,

write you suggestions,
i have some in mind:
House Richese
ix
House Ecaz
House Vernius
House Mutelli

if you have suggested leader head pics and units..go ahead...
i dont want to invent some from my wild imagination...hehe

 

[Ahriman]

I'd suggest that you make sure that any new faction have a clearly identified theme that is different from the other factions before adding it.

Like:
Atreides, diplomacy, loyal subjects
Harkonnen, slavery, exploitation
Ix, mechanical technology
etc.

Its better to have 8 factions that play differently (with 1-3 leaders each) than it is to have 14 factions that are basically the same.

Also, does it make sense to have separate Vernius and Ix factions?

 

[davidlallen]

Is there a document which lists the new woc spy missions? The super spies thread I mentioned has two new missions, assassinate and bribe.

I think we want to give each house a unique ability, like the slaves and hero spies I added in 1.2.3. If we add more houses, it will be harder to find these unique abilities. At least right now, I definitely think "More is not better".

 

[Deliverator]

I know Keldath really wants to add these factions so we better have a go at differentiating them.

Ix and Richese are both machine makers. We really need to make them specialise in different sorts of machine if they are going to be interesting.

One of my notes about the existing resources was going to be that Shigawire (native to Salusa Secundus) and Fogwood (native to Ecaz) shouldn't really be on Arrakis.

Fogwood is quite interesting in that it is shaped by thought. Ecaz is also the source of Semuta the addictive drug-music-combo thing that one of the Harkonnen captains is addicted to. Anyway, potentially Ecaz could revolve around drugs and shaping things with your mind or telekinesis.

The other two I believe are prequel Houses and I don't know much about them.

Edit: Leaderheads is going to be a challenge, to find something that doesn't look out of place compared to the others...

And Vernius and Ix sound like they don't warrant two factions as Ahriman says.

Why don't we just add Ix for now, until we have some better ideas for the others?

 

[keldath]

hey guys,

well your not into adding factions...hummm...

well - i agree to add just ix then...

i just like a bit veriety with houses - a normal-large-huge map with 10 of a kind seems to me abit boring,

but, i go with whatever you guys think is right,
but ix.....i likem - i rather they will be in - got some nice mech art for them

and the leaders will be a challenge, no doubt, im scouting wikipedia ...

 

[davidlallen]

Adding Ix brings us to 11, which is enough for a huge map with no duplication. I am sure it will have cool unit art. But there is nobody from Ix in the movies, so I cannot see where any leaderhead art would come from. Maybe a generic cyborg type guy, say like a Borg from Star Trek: Next Gen?

 

[keldath]

yeah - some cyborg could be nice.

heres a though, how about getting a pic of those dudes that helped carry the navigator in dune 1984? they had a speaking patch on then,
its not an ix, butits a character from dune

 

[Deliverator]

I can probably cobble together something reasonable for a Leaderhead. It probably wants to be from some more obscure movie/TV than the Borg from Star Trek - that will be a bit obvious and break the mood. I'll have a look through my DVDs...

 

[davidlallen]

I know the guys keldath is talking about from the dune miniseries. They are like the "interpreters" for the navigator. They definitely have funny eyewear. I don't think any of them are in close-ups. Unfortunately I rented the disks instead of buying them. But it may be worth a cruise through them to see if those guys could be used.

 

[Deliverator]

I've got the two miniseries if we need them, but I think I've got the perfect movie. Let me whizz through it and see...

 

[keldath]

yeah track down some sci fi b- movies hehe..thank god theres so much of these