Mob Rule: of Tree Huggery

Chandrasekhar said:
I don't think I'm really sold on the specific victory conditions. It might add flavor, yes, but not a whole lot of real gameplay value. I'd much prefer to be able to go for the Tower as elves, instead of having to learn all about some obscure mechanic.

Well the "alternative" could be anything. The idea is to get races away from the normal "conquer the universe" mentality that everything seems to fall into. IF certain races have different ends, then they will issue different behaviors. Instead of a maruading conquering band of elves, they might act more...elflike and secluded. Instead of vast and expansive dwarven empires, mayhap they keep to the mountains and their "own goals." The idea here is that we create purposes for some races that are outside of normal CIV aims. In this resources might be fought over for different reasons, instead of the same "i want more land and territory" reasons. I would love it if some of the different leaders in the game AVOIDED power. And were more isolationist. Also, if everyones after the same thing, everyone is going to go after it (generallY) in the same way - more cities, better cities, more production, better units and techonolgy.................Squish the opposition. Should not some races avoid this?
-Qes
 
Your rhetoric is skillful, but it cannot dispel the simple truth that Civ is a game about conquering territory, building armies, obtaining resources, and establishing yourself as the primary world power. I believe that, even if these alternate victory conditions are used, the game will still gravitate towards these aspects so much that the alternate victory conditions will prove unworkable. Even the most basic elements of Civ make such abstract ways of winning not viable. Perhaps in another mod for another game, but not here.
 
Xuenay said:
Hmm... now that you present it that way, I sorta like the idea. I'm just not very sure of what might be good, unique victory conditions.

Ya, being as im not an endless font of ideas (hurricane, not font), It'd be great if others could come up with specifics to flesh this out....but i too am just blank.
-Qes
 
QES said:
The theme is one of light and dark. Ljos i think is deemed to be pronounsed without the L or as a combinations of sounds. THe J makes a [Ya] sound. LYos

Yos, Los combine the two. LYos. Yohs-al-fahr.
I think its norsk? Not sure.
-Qes

Actually it`s not norsk (norwegian), it`s almost norrønt (Ancient nordic).

Ljos is an old form of Lys (Light). It is still used in the form of norsk which is called Nynorsk (Bokmål is the main form of norwegian, and yes, we`re 4,6 million inhabitants, so we need to forms of one language:crazyeye: )

Alfar comes from the old word Alf (elf) plural: Alfr/Alfar (should have been a strange R here, but it`s not on my keyboard....) In "modern" norwegian it`s Alv.

Svartalfar on the other hand has just used the modern norwegian word for black (svart).
 
lorgen said:
Actually it`s not norsk (norwegian), it`s almost norrønt (Ancient nordic).

Ljos is an old form of Lys (Light). It is still used in the form of norsk which is called Nynorsk (Bokmål is the main form of norwegian, and yes, we`re 4,6 million inhabitants, so we need to forms of one language:crazyeye: )

Alfar comes from the old word Alf (elf) plural: Alfr/Alfar (should have been a strange R here, but it`s not on my keyboard....) In "modern" norwegian it`s Alv.

Svartalfar on the other hand has just used the modern norwegian word for black (svart).

Despite where I'm from, I know very little about norweigen language and heritage. (There are quite a few decendants of Norway here in Minnesota). Whenever Norweigen royalty travels in country, they always visit us. Its nice. But, since I'm Danish in decent, I usually just tease my norwegien brethren.
I'm glad someone out there knows the histories and language evolutions :).
-Qes
the Sveltalfar. (Or suave-elf).
 
Sureshot said:
That's right. I had problems with it til i started breaking it down lol.
think J-Lo like Jennifer Lopez but reversed, then SAL like Salad, than FAR like distant. Ljo-sal-far.

Thanks to a long stint playing Dark Age of Camelot, I now know 'alf' to be the Nordic spelling of 'elf'. -ar is often the equivalent of the English suffix -er. So, Ljo's Elfers. :)

EDIT: Sheesh ... I shoulda read this thread from the back to the front.

lorgen said:
Actually it`s not norsk (norwegian), it`s almost norrønt (Ancient nordic).

Ljos is an old form of Lys (Light). It is still used in the form of norsk which is called Nynorsk (Bokmål is the main form of norwegian, and yes, we`re 4,6 million inhabitants, so we need to forms of one language:crazyeye: )

Alfar comes from the old word Alf (elf) plural: Alfr/Alfar (should have been a strange R here, but it`s not on my keyboard....) In "modern" norwegian it`s Alv.

Svartalfar on the other hand has just used the modern norwegian word for black (svart).

Dark Age also used the term Svartalfar. And after a couple expansions, you started seeing 'alfar' in the names all over the place.

Signed, the former Ovi Fisklutar
 
Xuenay said:
The problem with unique victory conditions is that they'll probably become a pain to track if you have very many players. Those of you who have played Illuminati know that even with a relatively small number of players - say, 4-5 - you'll constantly have to be checking how close the others are to their victory conditions so that they can be thwarted in time. Now imagine playing an FfH with, say, 12 other civilizations... there'd either have to be regular warnings of the other players getting closer to their goals (which'd probably get annoying quick) or a risk of you losing a game because you simply forgot to keep on eye on somebody. "Oh, I was just about to launch my big invasion but my game's over since I didn't realize the Khazad would accumulate 10 000 gold this turn" isn't very fun.

I loved Illuminati. One of the best game systems ever invented, IMO. No game plays alike, tricky new strategems are always cropping up. But an easy game to play? A game to rely upon luck? Oh, no sir. That it wasn't.

It would be quite the project to design a unique victory condition for each civ, and to keep them in balance. The first half of that sentance is easy, the second half is the catch.

Perhaps a victory condition for each religion, plus one for the agnostics?

Just pbrainstorming.
 
Changing the ljosalfar (soar j fall?) / ancient forest synergy is a way negative thinking. When all civs are finished they will certainly be more balanced.

I played evil for last few games and elves always happened to appear next to me so I enjoyed a lot of elf slaying.
 
The thing about not beating dead horses is ... what if that's the only thing from stopping them from arising as Undead horses and taking over the world? Can we afford to take that chance? In that spirit I present yet another Nerf Crusade of them pesky elves.

I differ (I think) from Conventional Opinion in that I don't think the imbalance lies in teh endgame condisions, so much, as it lies in the very early game. Ljosalfar elves get to combine movement/exploration bonues with production/growth bonuses that combine for significant development advantages in teh early game. Just as acceleration often counts for more than raw top speed in a race, development speed in the early game pays off handomely in Civ endgames.

To test this, I had to make several assumptions. (Herein lies the problem doing such comparisons. There are so many potential conditions, how to determine "typical" startingconditions.

Assumptions: Aggressive Barbarians played towards thehigh end of the skill slider. In these games Workers don't start improving for while. The player has to fend off the Barbs first, to a reasonable extent. So, I compared two cities starting off just as they got their 5th population point.

Players can gegenerate the starting map to ensure they have at least some terrain they like. So I assumed at least a few of most any sort of desireable tiles are available. This would be especially true for the largest, capitol civ.

There are too many different resources to test, so I assumed the presence of none. This being the early game, the needed techs are often unavilable. And all civilizations can exploit them, more or less equally.

All civs can make roads, farms, and mines.

The Ljosalfar srat off building Cottages in every nearby forest tile (four Grassland/Forest tiles) then they build a frmin a Flood Plain, a mine in a (riverless) hill, and finally a Cottage in a riverless Grasslands.

The Control civ builds Cottages in 2 Flood Plains, then Mines in two hills (w/rivers), then a Farm/Cottage in Plains(w/river), and lastly begins a Cottage in a Grassland without river. The COntrol player also makes use of nearby Grassland/Forest, often exploiting these Forest tiles while improvements finish in, e.g., Hills. In contrast, once the Elf player starts exploiting a tile, no micromanagement occurs.

The Elves do not build roads in Woods, as roads have no effect at all for Elves in Woods at this stage of the game. Control builds roads after finishing each tile's improvements. So do Elves in non-Woods tiles.

Elves do not worship Fellowship. No new forests emerge. No Forests mature to Ancient.

Cities have finished building their workers on turn 1. So they start "working" turn 2.

Turn ...... Elf / Control City Size ......... Cumulative Elf / Control Production
01 ................ 5/5 ...................... 0 :food: 0 :hammers: 0 :commerce: / 0 :food: 0 :hammers: 0 :commerce:
21 ................ 6/5 ...................... 273 - 119 - 77 / 252 - 84 - 119
41 ................ 6/6 ...................... 541 - 259 - 281 / 532 - 202 - 296
61 ................ 7/7 ...................... 853 - 435 - 581 / 831 - 399 - 539
81 ................ 8/7 .................... 1,201 - 615 - 996 / 1,131 - 580 - 847

Of course, there's all sorts of other ways to sequence the builds. Are the Elves smarted building a farm on their Flood Plain first? Should Control forget about the 2nd Mine? I dunno.

And Control could pass on road-building to speed up economic developments some. But that would leave Control the need to go back later to build the roads. And unlike Ljosaflar, movement would be severely hampered should a crisis emerge. So it's sort of a matter of choose your poison.

There are a lot of little things that add up for the Elves. Their worker can enter a forest (1MP) and start building that very turn. Control has to wait a turn to start building. Elf does not need or want the road, so that saves three turns. Cottage #2 is begun the turn after Cottage #1 is finished. Control takes 8 turns to build his cottages in Flood Plains, so Elf is done with his 3rd Cottage (18 turns) about the same moment Control has finihshed 2 Cottages and a road (20 turns in flood plain). Plus, Elf is now extracting all three basic goods from most of his tiles. Control must micromanage to ensure neither :food: :hammers: nor :commerce: production lags too far behind the others.

In this example, then non-Fellowship Elves built 6 Cottages 1 Farm and one Mine. Control built 3 Cottages, 2 Farms, and 2 Mines. Elf out-produced Control by about

Food 6%
Hammers 6%
Commerce 18%

This is for one worker with one city. Giving a 2nd Worker to each civ would tend to favor Elf, given Elf's demonstrated higher efficiency.

Again, in a game featuring exponential growth rates, getting a fast start turns a small early advantage to a large end-game advatage. There is reason for concern. Elf's :food: & :hammers: could be said to be essentially the same as Control's. But the :commerce: advantage is significant. The problem is, Elf can achieve this :commerce: advantage without having had to sacrifice :food: or :hammers:. (And again, they do this without Fellowship of the Leaves effects.) The player has to make fewer choices, fewer tradeoffs. IMO this is a sign for balance concern.

Fortunatley for players who like the Elf end-game as it is now, the only required change might be to slow down development. If Elves can build Cottages/Farms/etc in Forsts, there is nothing saying they can do this quickly. Makes such structures take twice as long to build, and much of the early development surge can be attenuated.

The design team might also want to consider removing the Elf movement advantage in forests. That would also bring their development speed more in line with other civs, or at least give the Elf player more tradeoffs to consider, while retaining their combat advatage in Forests.

Questions or comments?
 
Might be worth mentioning that I doubt the team is going to take away the x2 movement in forests for elves. Flavor and all that.

And regarding the point of view that all the Civs will be balanced eventually... perhaps we should then just weaken the Ljosalfar until the other Civs can compete with them?
 
elves get 1 more production out of cottages and farms (if they build it on a forest), sorry that isnt convincing me they get special benefits (lanun get 1 more food on all water tiles)
elves get 2 movement on forests, dwarves get 2 movement on hills and peaks (if they ever get access to peaks)

anyone can get a promotion which helps them kill elves, no such thing exists for humans
elves have worse city defenders and generally weaker attack units
elves have no siege engines



claims of their initial growth output? thats insanity, my lanun get 3 food and 3 commerce per lake tile with no improvements necessary, and untouchable by barbarians, and with conquest i can output units faster than anyone else early game. and thats without any weakened units or any resources (which they also get 1 special that no one else can even see).

i've played through many of the civs, and Ljo isn't anything spectacular. If i want to laze around and make peace with everyone, i can out build so long as i win all my gambles (need fellowship, need forests, need open land, need no wars, need space to expand without fighting, need Spring spell, need priests of leaves with their bloom spell, need vitalize from commune with nature tech).

taking steps backwards is not only ruining a fun civ, its a waste of time and its detracting from things that could be done to make other civs fun, and its misrepresenting a civ that will be crippled and not even capable of fulfilling its builder role with any success if any of these additional nerfs are considered.
 
Sureshot said:
elves get 1 more production out of cottages and farms (if they build it on a forest), sorry that isnt convincing me they get special benefits (lanun get 1 more food on all water tiles)
elves get 2 movement on forests, dwarves get 2 movement on hills and peaks (if they ever get access to peaks)

anyone can get a promotion which helps them kill elves, no such thing exists for humans
elves have worse city defenders and generally weaker attack units
elves have no siege engines



claims of their initial growth output? thats insanity, my lanun get 3 food and 3 commerce per lake tile with no improvements necessary, and untouchable by barbarians, and with conquest i can output units faster than anyone else early game. and thats without any weakened units or any resources (which they also get 1 special that no one else can even see).

i've played through many of the civs, and Ljo isn't anything spectacular. If i want to laze around and make peace with everyone, i can out build so long as i win all my gambles (need fellowship, need forests, need open land, need no wars, need space to expand without fighting, need Spring spell, need priests of leaves with their bloom spell, need vitalize from commune with nature tech).

taking steps backwards is not only ruining a fun civ, its a waste of time and its detracting from things that could be done to make other civs fun, and its misrepresenting a civ that will be crippled and not even capable of fulfilling its builder role with any success if any of these additional nerfs are considered.

My post was intended more to establish that there is indeed a difference in the Ljo development curve, using something a little more unbiased than passionate rhetoric. I spent a significant amount of time runing sme numbers, and I had no idea what the numbers would reveal when I began. And yes, if the numbers had run counter to my guesses I would have been just as happy to post the results.

If you feel the math is wrong, by all means run your own analysis. I agree 100% that other civs should go through the same sort of camparisons. Until then no firm conclusions can be reached. A careful reading of my post will reveal terms like 'concern', 'possible', 'the developmers might'. I've made no claim other than saying there's smoke in sight. It will take more work to prove there is a fire.

But when the numbers indicate an area of concern, the concern should recieve some comparison. But just getting angry at me and insisting there is no issue at all leaves me rather unpersuaded, compared to the numbers. Sorry.

I'm not sure why you think adding a few turns to the construction cycle for building, say, cottages in forests would destroy all the joy of playing the civilization. I thought my idea was rather mild, as it did nothing at all to alter the endcome conditions. It seemed like a decent mechanism retain all the beloved "flavor".

Well, I suspect we just have different philosophies. I think a game can be made more fun by subtraction as well as by adding. But I've played enough MMORPGs to know there's a whole universe of players who have a mortal opposition to anything resembling a 'nerf'. Like East and West the two will never quite see eye-to-eye.
 
Chandrasekhar said:
Might be worth mentioning that I doubt the team is going to take away the x2 movement in forests for elves. Flavor and all that.

And regarding the point of view that all the Civs will be balanced eventually... perhaps we should then just weaken the Ljosalfar until the other Civs can compete with them?

I expect your first point is right. Personally, I think giving them movement and combat bonuses both for Forests is a bit much. Apparantly someone agreed with this way of thinking when it came time to designing the Khazad, as they have only a movement bonus in Hills. But it's not such a big deal. I made the comment really to try to get people to think how something "unrelated" to economic concerns can actually have a measureable effect. Elven woods movement actually helps speed up their economy too. That's not an obvious cause-and-effect, I'd venture.

I will admit that when I first started writing on this board (like a few weeks ago) I was under the assumption that most of the features were already in the game and running. Now that I realize how many modules await activation, I don't feel the same sense of urgency. ;) Once the AI starts casting ranges spells, using Spring to rid itself of Deserts, and the like, I'm sure we'll come up with a whole new crop of 'balance' complaints. :p
 
those numbers you bring up are trivial, and you can't just make assumptions of terrain and play methods. cottages are great, they also take a long time to grow and are easily plundered.

stringing together a random bunch of assumptions and numbers does little to explain a point, you've only shown how given several false assumptions and imperfect tests that one can 'prove' what was obvious in the beginning.

and the results have only shown what is true, Ljo compared to a 'controlled" (i.e vanilla civ) is a better builder. thats a given, since they can build cottages on forests, thats +1 commerce that can grow into +4 (if you would have used the forested tile instead of a non-forested one solely on the elven structures ability to build on forests) or +1 production (if you would have relied on cottages and now are able to build them on forested tiles), we don't need tests to see that that is the case.

its been said several times that civs aren't balanced in every category, some are better at some things, its what makes them interesting. Ljo are good with their land, but bad with their units (generally speaking). why go through murky results to 'prove' they are better yielders? and then make claims they should be further weakened for it?

when i bring up several actual reasons (none of which are based on heavily assumed tests) you call it rhetoric? try to look at the big picture, Ljo isn't equal to forested cottages while everyone else is equal to non-forested cottages; just like Lanun aren't equal to +1 food water tiles and thus better than every other civ.
 
Sureshot said:
those numbers you bring up are trivial, and you can't just make assumptions of terrain and play methods. cottages are great, they also take a long time to grow and are easily plundered.

They're sure a lot tougher to pillage when you can defend them from a forest...
 
If your enemies are at the point where they're attacking your cities en masse, you've probably done something wrong. A well planned and well prepared for war is about minimizing the impact to your economy, you shouldn't even be worrying about how many cities you're going to lose. And if you can make the enemies burn their units trying to slog through forested improvements, all the better.

I'm not entirely certain where you're getting the elves' terrible city defense from. Sure, their archery units don't start with an inherant city defense bonus, but those can be bought. Further, they have an archer hero at the archery tech, which I think would help you out at that early stage of the game.

Combine that with the fact that they do have faster early game production and tech advancement, and they really don't have that much to worry about.
 
raging barbs means ive done something wrong? war (in a game based around conquest and building) means you've done something wrong? the elves are better than everyone else because the game is about never being at war, and losing means someone declared war on me? and i thought units cost maintenance? i guess excessive amounts of units to cover all the tiles surrounding your city doesn't detract from your commerce somehow, and their production cost is nonexistent for this imaginary scenario.

their terrible city defense is the lack in city defense in the city defense unit, called archers, so maybe thats where im getting the idea from.

and they don't have faster early game production or tech advancement than Lanun.
1 food is better than 1 production, according to you, and according to me, as they can get conquest for production of units and several civics/religions for building from commerce or population. the elves also don't have the reliability of non-pillageable commerce sources.
and unless im missing something, their cottages don't yield any more than normal cottages commercewise, so i fail to see how they can be claimed as having more commerce (and hence more tech advancement). no, all they're getting is +1 production in forest tiles when they build a cottage there, and they miss out on the production boosts from cutting down forests.

and they definately do have something the worry about, like being able to take over other civs cities with any reliability.

Lanun > Ljosalfar
the logick of yield math says so
 
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