Nature and Barbarians

[Lord Bayushi]

I was recently playing a game as the Devellio with the Barbarian trait. I did not expect the cease fire with the barbarians to effect the wildlife as well. I was somewhat confused by the fact that my forces could explore the badlands unhindered by orc or beast, while my nearest neighbor, the Lansofar (spelling?) elves, were attacked by wild beasts regularly, dispite thier peity to thier Fellowship of Leaves religon.
Later in the game, as my shamans discovered the wonders of the later technology, I lamented that the cool Nature's Wrath ritual was already useless due to the complete lack of uncontrolled territory on a map with locked boarders and infinite city sprawl.
The combination of these factors gave me an idea. I beleve that nature should be a seperate entity, distinct from the barbarian team/force/civ with similar behaviors. The animals should continue to be hidden nationality, but shouldn't distinguish between barbarian players or the rest of us (orc meat feeds bears just as well as human meat does). Somewhere down the line, Fellowship of Leaves civs should be able to attain a treaty with Nature, either through tech, a building or ritual, or just as a side effect of the Guardian of Nature civic.
In addition, there should be areas of the map covered in culture from the Nature player/team/civ. This wild culture should only be able to be beat back by superior culture from boardering cities, and should have a high enough value that these natural areas should survive into the late game. Within the wild culture zones, forests (regular and ancient) and jungles should run wild, as should animals and mabey even the occasional wild ranger or druid, to snack on would be explorers. Additional goody huts, rare resources, or other rewards should await those brave enough to explore and patient enough to populate these ancient wildernesses.
I don't know if it would be easy to implement, but I think that areas of semi-permanent wilderness fit the fantasy theme much better than the boarder locked urban sprawl covering every inch of land that is the Civ mid to late game.

 

[Silverkiss]

Separating the barbarian and the animals is not good because it would take another slot from the max 18 civilizations, and it is not wanted by the Team. About the wilderness, the Team has that on their to-do list alredy.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

I've suggested that the thresholds for cultural border expansions be increased, but the team didn't like it. You might want to consider playing with less players than the map size would dictate, though.

 

[Mesix]

I like the idea of having the animals separate from the barbarians. Perhaps there could be an option in the set-up screen to play with barbarians on/off, animals on/off, and the barbarians and animals combined. This would give players the option to play with new feature (which would decrease the maximum civs by one) or not. It would also give the player the option to play with only animals instead of orcs and such which would make the hunters and rangers more useful into the late game.

edit: Would it be possible to have the barbarians attack each other based on unit traits? Units with the orc trait would not attack other units with the orc trait, but they would fight undead and animals. Undead would attack everyone (accept other undead). The only down side that I see is that the orcs and undead might kill off all the animals which are already tough to capture before they become extinct.

 

[Mesix]

One idea to make the nature last a bit longer might be to nerf the spread of culture into jungle tiles. The sprawls of jungle terrain could spawn new animals for the player to hunt until they are eventually cut down. The suggestion to have more bonuses for the brave explorer of the jungle (tribal villages, ancient runes, etc.) also sounds like it would add fun to the game.

 

[Morganknight]

I have to comment on this, as I was just speaking with Sureshot about this the other day. (I promised I would post something in the forums, but never got around to it. )

Anyway,

My thoughts were very similar to Master Bayushi's in many respects, but with a few differences which I will list in no specific order.

1) Create a new terrain type like forest or jungle which i will refer to as Deep Wilderness.

2) As the map spawns, any forest or jungle plots that are completely surrounded on all sides by any combination of forests, jungles, mountains and coasts would have a chance to be Deep Wildernessat creation. As the game progresses, plots of this type that are outside cultural borders would have a small chance of becoming Deep Wilderness every turn. Deep Wilderness could spread to adjacent tiles much the same ways forests grow now, but perhaps more quickly...

3) Deep Wilderness would be impassable except for units with the Elven, Woodsman or Beast promotions and would take longer to move through even for those units , unless they had Woodsman II or Beast at which point, they could move through without penalty.

4) Deep Wilderness would be unworkable and provide no resources (except for perhaps one food if on a grasslands tile or one production if on a plains tile) until a certain tech was researched, say Way of the Forests or Commune with Nature or Sanitation, at which point they would provide the same resources as a normal forest. You could then also be able to cut them down if desired, taking twice as long and producing twice as much production as a normal forest or build normal lumbermills if you have the required technologys. For a Fellowship of Leaves player, Deep Wilderness within their cultural borders would have the same or higher chance of converting to Ancient Forests as normal forests. (Perhaps, they would convert to a different type of Ancient Forest that provided extra production instead of extra food...)

5) Deep Wilderness might have the ability to spawn Beasts much like barrows and temples do now with skeletons and lizardmen?

6) Deep Wilderness may have a 75% defense bonus but perhaps a 25-50% attack penalty for all units that do not have either the Beast or Woodsman II promotion; meaning Deep Wilderness would be amazing to defend in but difficult to attack from except for those creatures most at home there.

Now the cool part:

7) a)As the game currently progresses, barbarian cities will spawn. I propose that in addition to everything else I have mentioned, Deep Wilderness plots will have a very, very small chance to create cultural centers (think Fangorn Forest) that would be essentially barbarian(?) cities (for lack of a better mechanic) that would have the potential to grow culturally, and expand Deep Wilderness at a quicker rate within its borders. These cultural centers could be guarded by barbarian(nonaligned?) treants, beasts, centaurs, druids, etc.


b) Fellowship of Leaves would have a very high probabaility to spread to these cultural centers and in fact the rate at which these centers grow culturally could have a direct correspondence to the initial discovery of The Fellowship of Leaves and Hidden Paths techs...

...

I will be the first to admit that I know very little if anything about programming, so i don't know how feasible the ideas I have mentioned are. I know that the process of deciding what to include in the game consists of weighing how "fun" something will be with the amount of work involved to implement it. I have no idea how much work would be involved here, but I see a common theme in these forums about the lack of "Wilderness" in the late game, and feel that the "fun" factor of the ideas I bring up is fairly decent . Hopefully, you will share my perspective that treating Wilderness as its own cultural entity and implementing "Deep Wilderness" might help retain that early game flavor even through the long game.

Anyway, just my two cents, lol

 

[Kael]

Wilderness areas will be covered in "Shadow". The mechanics haven't been defined yet. We tend to think from a design need perspective, then move into mechanics. The design need for wilderness areas is to introduce dangerous areas that players cant expand into until they conquer them. I suspect they will turn out much as you guys are proposing, but let us get finished with this phase first.

 

[Mesix]

Now the cool part:

7) a)As the game currently progresses, barbarian cities will spawn. I propose that in addition to everything else I have mentioned, Deep Wilderness plots will have a very, very small chance to create cultural centers (think Fangorn Forest) that would be essentially barbarian(?) cities (for lack of a better mechanic) that would have the potential to grow culturally, and expand Deep Wilderness at a quicker rate within its borders. These cultural centers could be guarded by barbarian(nonaligned?) treants, beasts, centaurs, druids, etc.

Maybe one of these wilderness centers would appear on the map (with Fellowship of the Leaves already present) when the appropriate tech is researched (maybe Way of the Forests). It could be like a variation of the dragon hoard city which is well defended, but gives a bonus to the conquering player. Perhaps Fellowship of the Leaves players would benefit from it staying in the hands of the barbarians making it even more interesting (Leaves players might go to war to defend the natural city from the intrusion of civilized folk).

 

[Switchblock]

I like the idea of a "nature" civ, city mehanics used, just that the cities will be called something differant. "Wilderness" terrain could be spread much like hell terrain, complete with Living Forests (either a very high chance of spawning ents or allowing the ents to stay where they're spawned).

 

[jwin]

Separating the barbarian and the animals is not good because it would take another slot from the max 18 civilizations, and it is not wanted by the Team.

Could all animal units begin with hidden nationality? That way, you caould still attack them without being at war with the barbarians. It would, however, allow them to attack civs at peace with the barbs,

 

[Sureshot]

Could all animal units begin with hidden nationality? That way, you caould still attack them without being at war with the barbarians. It would, however, allow them to attack civs at peace with the barbs,

they already are lol