Orbis - Questions and Suggestions

[Valkrionn]

Well, for me there is 5 type of religions :
- really good (make the leader good) : Order
- good (evil->neutral, neutral->good) : RoK, Empyreans
-neutral (no changement) : FoL
- evil (good->neutral, neutral->evil) : OO, Esus
- really evil (make the leader evil) : AV

I don't know where to place the White Hand... evil, really evil ?
The Ordo Machinarum may be neutral...

White Hand would be evil, not really evil like AV. It was designed with the Lawful axis in mind, though... So it hurts the symmetry.

The way I see the Ordo (which again, is slotted for removal anyway) is neutral, but with lawful evil tendencies. Lots of hubris involved there, and the people have a tendency to become too full of themselves.

 

[AgentTBC]

When playing without BA, it's slightly different but I tried to keep it close; For example, the "Slightly X" shift will move you one step. Evil becomes Neutral, Neutral becomes Good, etc.

That chart makes perfect sense to me but a bunch of Civpedia stuff needs to be updated to reflect it. I know Civipedia isn't fun and sexy but at some point somebody needs to go in and fix/update/add info on many things to render Orbis accessible to someone who hasn't been following along OO sure seems a lot more evil flavor-wise than you'd expect from that chart, though. In some ways worse than Ashen Veil.

Esus did shift me to Evil from Neutral when playing Lanun but your chart says it shouldn't shift that way. Of course I adopted Undercouncil... so was the alignment shift due to Undercouncil rather than Esus?

Lastly, it looks to me like OO doesn't shift you a step evil but perhaps I'm misreading the XML file.

 

[Apeiron]

White Hand would be evil, not really evil like AV. It was designed with the Lawful axis in mind, though... So it hurts the symmetry.

The way I see the Ordo (which again, is slotted for removal anyway) is neutral, but with lawful evil tendencies. Lots of hubris involved there, and the people have a tendency to become too full of themselves.

I agree.

But we can imagine other possibilities than the 5 I gave. For example to switch half of the alignements. We can imagine than the Leaves (or maybe the Ordo, to reflect their distance face to the battle between good and evil) make a leader neutral instead of doing nothing. And a religion may switch a good to neutral but keep the neutral unchanged.

 

[Apeiron]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=351559

I like the base idea to build special academy with great sages, which are able to provide mana or other bonus. We can imagine to reimplace the normal academy by magic academy, which give less science but mana or free magic promotions ?

 

[Ahwaric]

The religions alignments and main themes in Orbis are (the minor tendencies in parenthesis):

Order - lawful good (lawful neutral) - crusade against wrong-does, absolute obedience
Empyrean - neutral good (chaotic good) - happines & enlightement
Runes of kilmorph - lawful neutral (lawful good) - hard work, perfection
Fellowship of leaves - true neutral - preserve natural world, respect the laws of nature but apart form that live as you want
Old Ones - Chaotic nuetral - seek the obscure knowledge, seek your own path, dreams will guide you
The white Hand - lawful evil - follow the laws and you will survive, stasis
Council of esus - nuetral evil - deception, lies, secret ogranizations
Ashen Veil - chaotic evil - let the world burn, demons on the loose

So, in short:
Order, Empy and (partially) RoK - good
FoL, OO - neutral
WH, CoE, AV- evil

You need to understand the difference between chaos & evil and between law & good. It is sometimes hard (that is why WotC butchered all depth from D&D and removed law-chaos axis as game developers sometimes have problem with that), but is there.

I do not plan to introduce law-chaos axis to game mechanics - it does not introduce that much IMHO, so I will keep it just flavour for now.

 

[Apeiron]

Old Ones - Chaotic nuetral - seek the obscure knowledge, seek your own path, dreams will guide you

Well, it is nightmares and the Old Ones lead to the madness and pacts withs the undeads... it is evil.

 

[Wauthan]

Well, it is nightmares and the Old Ones lead to the madness and pacts withs the undeads... it is evil.

He does have a point. Perhaps OO could use some "good dreams" as well? Not sure how one would go about tying that into the setting though. Lovecraft, despite his name, didn't really put much effort into making his creations appear benign or friendly.

Though others have made an effort to put a positive spin on things.

 

[AgentTBC]

Yep, I understand the logic behind OO being neutral on the good-evil axis, I'm just pointing out that at present the flavor text, technologies, etc do not support that interpretation, only out-of-game knowledge does. I know that flavor isn't the biggest priority but there's no way somebody new is going to be able to figure out that OO isn't pure evil. Right now it looks as evil as Ashen Veil. I mean the tech for Slumbering Coven is Mind Stapling. Mind Stapling! That's as evil as it gets.

Hell, just rename "Mind Stapling" to "Whatever Visions" or "Dream something" and change the flavor text and it would go a long way. I know little things like this dont annoy other people as much as me but I can't help it. I can't help it!!!

 

[AgentTBC]

Oh quick question:

What are the 4 CapitalCommerceModifiers in order used in the Civic definitions. Gold/Hammers/Influence/????. Is the 4th one great person rate? I want to increase the capital great person rate for God King by 25%. Getting rid of the 50% commerce boost was needed but I'm wondering if adding a 25% Great Person rate to the capital might be a good idea so I want to test it. I guess I could just set the 4 rates to 100/75/50/25 temporarily so I can load up the game and see what they are myself. I assume it wont explode or anything.

 

[Valkrionn]

The four commerces are Gold, Science, Culture, and Espionage.

 

[AgentTBC]

doh! Forgot about espionage. Is there a way to increase GPP in the capital only via Civ4CivicInfos?

 

[Valkrionn]

I'm not sure, honestly. It wouldn't be difficult to add a new tag, but I'm not sure if it exists currently.

 

[AgentTBC]

Okay. I'll just do that then.

 

[Lark]

1.0b: Two things I wish you'd remove or tone down:
-Workers get a free Air/Earth/Water Ancestry promo, so you can take out all your neighbors with a Worker Rush.
-The "A spy was caugth" (sic) event gives you +1 in all your cities and +1 in all of an opponent's. Permanently.


And some ideas I'd like to see implemented somewhere someday.
-Mayors a la MoO - something like Adventurers with builder promos for Builder Civs.
-Quests. Since the Gods are meddling anyhow (events, religions, etc.), why not allow open bargains with them? Quests seem to me to fit into the FfH world better than into regular Civ, though I know Kael didn't like them.
-Merchants. Like Guild of the Nine for items, resources and diplomacy (and maybe you could sell or trade as well as buy). I think you were looking for something else for guilds to do; maybe this would work?
-Dungeons - multiple levels, where you actually have to fight - to replace all but the most minor lairs and goody huts. I think someone did this, but I didn't have the right FfH version to try it out.


Just had my fastest Civ win ever - a Religious Victory on turn 124. I didn't even know I was close. So I have spare time to annoy you.

 

[Kalina]

Is it possible to make inquisition work like Bankers ? I mean, removing only one religion at time, in addition to removing all non-state religions ?
Many times I wanted to remove specific religion (AV to lower AC, CoE so my city is no longer visible to CoE founder, or just to weaken specific religion) but didn't want to remove other religions, especially those that I build temples for

 

[Brokenbone]

I've been giving Orbis a spin lately, last played several versions ago. A lot of good fun, great work!

A question - is there any interest in using something like (let me get this right) "Denev's Multiple Production Modcomp"? Net of it is that overflow hammers go towards the next item in a build queue. So perhaps your city of 200 hammers can do a whole stack of workboats in a single turn, or several guild-guys, disciples, or other cheap disposable units to go out and spread a guild or religion, things of that nature.

I've found the Orbis elements relating to guilds and a lot of cool military national wonders can lead to highly specialized cities with some pretty stunning production output, it just gets sad/wasteful to have a production juggernaut knock out Prospectors one at a time with all kinds of squandered hammers.

I recognize that micromanagement of hammers is a part of a strategy game, but the multiple production business feels pretty "handy", especially in terms of spreading guilds quickly, or spreading around other sorts of cheap units, especially if you've got crazy amounts of gold on hand (i.e., build three warriors at once and upgrade to something better all at once since you've got cash to burn).

 

[Valkrionn]

I've been giving Orbis a spin lately, last played several versions ago. A lot of good fun, great work!

A question - is there any interest in using something like (let me get this right) "Denev's Multiple Production Modcomp"? Net of it is that overflow hammers go towards the next item in a build queue. So perhaps your city of 200 hammers can do a whole stack of workboats in a single turn, or several guild-guys, disciples, or other cheap disposable units to go out and spread a guild or religion, things of that nature.

I've found the Orbis elements relating to guilds and a lot of cool military national wonders can lead to highly specialized cities with some pretty stunning production output, it just gets sad/wasteful to have a production juggernaut knock out Prospectors one at a time with all kinds of squandered hammers.

I recognize that micromanagement of hammers is a part of a strategy game, but the multiple production business feels pretty "handy", especially in terms of spreading guilds quickly, or spreading around other sorts of cheap units, especially if you've got crazy amounts of gold on hand (i.e., build three warriors at once and upgrade to something better all at once since you've got cash to burn).

Link to the modcomp - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=326545

Now, my opinions... Take them for what you will.

Honestly, I'm iffy on it as a general mechanic, at least in FfH. Particularly for Fallow civs (Trust me on this, I've tried it out... ). I like the mechanic, and have merged it for the next version of RifE, but I tied it to traits. That way certain leaders/civs can use it, but you can keep others from ever using it.

 

[Brokenbone]

I agree that it could be iffy in certain contexts. Civs or playstyles that focus on a few high production cities, as opposed to lots of average cities, could unduly benefit from multiple production. I'll take your word for it on Fallow, I can picture "Dis" having 50 citizens, most of whom are actually Great Engineers under the right civics, and cranking out lots of disposable hordes. I could picture a few Kurio megacities pumping out three centaurs at a time, or few-and-far-between core/powerful Scion cities creating big legions to go and conquer cities, since they're so hard to grow on your own. A high production Clan city with a Warrens could produce maybe double digit numbers of disposable troops in a turn I suppose too.

I'm ignorant on how you'd tie things to a Trait, but maybe you could have a midgame economic "ritual", tied to some economic tech or other, and maybe even to required resources, to get you that Trait, heh. This would prevent creating a group of Warriors in the early game all at once, but late game if you want four Architects to go to the four points of the compass from their home city in the same turn, have at it.

 

[Evalis]

The Luchiurp really blow in this version. Any chance they could get a few more replacement buildings to auto add things like combat and drill? It's tough to compete with other nations that can all pump out level 4 and 6 units in one turn.

 

[Evalis]

One of the things that really baffles me about this mod, is both how darned easy and how hard it is to defend cities. Any nutjob archebus can get a 105% chance to inflict 85% damage to attackers. So.. basily anything attacking you will be reduced to 3 attack power at best, vs 5 or more first strikes.. The funny thing is.. all it takes is level 1 shadow mana to negate both of these things.

The computer doesn't understand this, and pointlessly sends it's units in to die.. so... are cities supposed to be easy or hard to take down? If they are supposed to be hard there shouldn't be such an easy fix for it, if it's supposed to be easy, why add in all that emphasis on defensive strikes in the first place?