Pre-EkoNES: Fall From Heaven

[Ekolite]

Civic and Unit Quality info is up.

About time, Kol. Looks interesting.

Sadly, I'm not yet positive if I will join this latest FFHNES endeavor. I'd like to, but time constraints will most likely keep me at a limit of two nations at a time. Perhaps that will change as you get closer to actually releasing, though.

Yeah, this is why I was thinking about waiting until after one of the other NESes concludes. I don't plan on starting this NES for at least a month and possibly even longer so hopefully you will be available to play.

If not, open slots allow us the opportunity to get new players into FFHNESing, so either way is fine.

 

[Immaculate]

1)[tab]Can you explain how your productivity statistic works?
[tab]I'm confused by it since you are doing it in a new way?


2)[tab]I was thinking of your workforces and specialists.
[tab]You may want to consider five types: 'farmers' (including fishermen and hunters), 'craftsmen' (including anyone involved in domestic industry like making dye or brewing ale, etc), 'tradesmen' (merchants mostly),'miners' (including blacksmiths and quarry workers, etc), and lastly 'governors and leaders' (which could be assigned to government buildings, temples, etc). you may find this catch all term for governors especially, useful. Anyway, something to think about.

i.

 

[Ekolite]

1). .. .. .. .. .Can you explain how your productivity statistic works?
. .. .. .. .. .I'm confused by it since you are doing it in a new way?


2). .. .. .. .. .I was thinking of your workforces and specialists.
. .. .. .. .. .You may want to consider five types: 'farmers' (including fishermen and hunters), 'craftsmen' (including anyone involved in domestic industry like making dye or brewing ale, etc), 'tradesmen' (merchants mostly),'miners' (including blacksmiths and quarry workers, etc), and lastly 'governors and leaders' (which could be assigned to government buildings, temples, etc). you may find this catch all term for governors especially, useful. Anyway, something to think about.

i.

1) Ok sure. ''Productivity'', or ''Production'', represents the nation's ability to build and produce. It is provided by mines and other Industrial Improvements, think raw materials, buildings like Forges, think manufacturing here, and specialists like engineers, the people with the appropriate skills.

Each of these factors provide a certain amount of Production, which is significantly easier to come by then Gold. I haven't decided upon the exact mechanics yet, but what will probably happen is that each building will have a Production cost, and you pay your Production to it each turn until it is completed. Some buildinbgs will also have an additional gold cost. This represents specific things that the building requires that have to be specially produced or imported.

Production from these sources form a national pool, which can them be spent on buildings anywhere in your nation. Additional Production will be able to be bought from other nations when a certain tech is discovered. This represents importing the labour or resources needed to construct the building.

Production cannot be stored like Gold can be. Therefore any production you have remaining at the end of the turn is wasted, unless it is invested into a certain project, such as constructing an Aqueduct.

2) Temples actually provide Priest ''slots'', which represent the fact that priests work there. For this reason, they may not require Leader workforces. However, I do agree with the idea in general. I think that will be very useful.

Specialist Slots are like optional workforces. You can have the temple without the Priest Specialists but you get additional benefits is you do have them.

 

[merciary]

I'm in. I agree that we should try and get some new people into a FFHNES, because I think were starting to learn each others styles and someone new would mix it up.

 

[LDiCesare]

The more workforces of a certain type you have the more it costs to train a new one of that type

specialist is: (number of specialists+1)x10

Per city or civ-wise?

Espionage is going to be more structured then it was in previous games. It is funded solely by Espionage points, and you cannot at any point spend money directly on espionage missions.

May I suggest that trade automatically provide some (albeit few) espionage points between the trading partners?

Recon units aren't a combat group unto themselves. Is this deliberate?

What will the duration/scope of updates be? Will the game span over generations? Will there be Interesting/Boring Times? This is important in order to know whether to invest stories about individuals. The same question about leaders. TheJopa's NES allowed to use leaders from FFH, whereas Immac's didn't. Depending on the race and duration of the updates, choices will vary. For instance, dwarves and elves are long-lived, so using Cassiel, Beeri Bawl or Faenyl Viconia would work even for an update of 10 or 50 years, but using Thessa or Falamar wouldn't. It's also important concerning Negotiable Characters/Great Persons (I am thinking Grigori heroes in particular). If they can last a few updates or "permanently", they are more interesting than if they last only one update.
So I'm interested, but the duration of updates would influence which civ I pick and whether I try to have recurrent characters in the stories or have stories that are just snapshots of the situation at a given time.

 

[Ekolite]

Per city or civ-wise?

May I suggest that trade automatically provide some (albeit few) espionage points between the trading partners?

Recon units aren't a combat group unto themselves. Is this deliberate?

What will the duration/scope of updates be? Will the game span over generations? Will there be Interesting/Boring Times? This is important in order to know whether to invest stories about individuals. The same question about leaders. TheJopa's NES allowed to use leaders from FFH, whereas Immac's didn't. Depending on the race and duration of the updates, choices will vary. For instance, dwarves and elves are long-lived, so using Cassiel, Beeri Bawl or Faenyl Viconia would work even for an update of 10 or 50 years, but using Thessa or Falamar wouldn't. It's also important concerning Negotiable Characters/Great Persons (I am thinking Grigori heroes in particular). If they can last a few updates or "permanently", they are more interesting than if they last only one update.
So I'm interested, but the duration of updates would influence which civ I pick and whether I try to have recurrent characters in the stories or have stories that are just snapshots of the situation at a given time.

1) I may make Espionage slightly cheaper if you have trade routes with the target player but this isn't definite yet.

2) It is deliberate. Being part of a combat group allows for units to specialise against that group. As recon units compose of a whole range of different things it would be difficult to train a troop to combat them effectively. It also gives Recon units a little extra use in combat, where they would otherwise be fairly lacking.

3) I understand your concerns. It's a difficult problem. What I will probably do is make the first two turns encompass a very large amount of time, say 50 to 100 years, but after this point bring it very sharply down. Alternately I may just attempt to glaze over the problem by making turns take no definite period of time. I'm open to ideas on this problem.

 

[LDiCesare]

Alternately I may just attempt to glaze over the problem by making turns take no definite period of time.

I'm strongly against this as it leads to a lot of inconsistencies. For instance, in TheJopa's NES, you have the Amurites who give hints that generations have passed, and in the same turns, you can read stories about Lanun and Hippus characters who should have aged and maybe died to be consistent with the Amurite stories.

I don't mind if the turns take a lot of time or not, I just want them to take a definite amount of time so we can know what stories to write. If you want to infiltrate a spy into a foreign nation, it makes sense to write a story about the individual. If at the same time another player hints some young characters died of old age, the whole story becomes inconsistent.

Here's a proposal: Have turns of 50 years, and under certain conditions, have "Golden Ages" or "Interesting Times" in which turns would be cut down to f.e. 5 or 10 years. A trigger for such interesting times or golden ages could be :
-a war between nations (because 50 or 100 years for a single war is rare);
-mod-decided event (like the Armageddon Counter reached 50 or Orthus has been sighted);
-player-request (other than through war, like in order to exploit a Great Person or story-based, the mod having the final say on next turn duration).

Note that if a war lasts 20 or 25 years, it becomes no longer something exceptional, and the times can revert to 50-year turns since the war has already dragged for a long time.

 

[Ekolite]

I think only the first few turns will be as long as 50 years. By about turn 3 or 4 they will be cut to 25 years, and then by turn 8 or so it will be down to 10 years, where it will probably stay from then on.

Players will not get any more use out of Great People depending on the duration of the turns they are active in, despite the fact that some Great people will last several turns.

 

[Ekolite]

Technology

Ok, I'm having some slight trouble over technologies. Firstly, I'm wondering how many to have. At the moment I'm aiming for between 50 and 60, more then Jopa but less then Immy. I'm thinking having 5 ''tiers'', with costs of 25, 50, 75, 100 and 175 TPs. The last tier is a real specialisation tier, and you are not expected to get huge amounts of these.

I'm also considering allowing players to essentially create their own techs. They would come up with the idea for a discovery or development, and I would decide on the stats and slot it into a tier, this tech would then become available for other players to research - although possibly only if the researcher player has an ''open'' economy, if I use open/closed economies.

I urgently need opinions on this.

 

[Immaculate]

If people are going to be able to build research-improving structures (which produce points as opposed to giving a percent rebate) then you'll need to increase the cost of tier 3+ techs or they will come too quickly.

There should be a bit of an exponential increase in the cost of almost everything with a matched exponential increase in the production of pretty much everything.

So a latter tech may provide a build that produces 8 gold and cost 160 tech points
a medium tech may provide a build that produces 4 gold and cost 80 tech points
and a early tech may provide a build that produces 2 gold adn costs 40 tech points.

I think thats how it works... more experienced MODers will have to correct me- Where's Masada when you need him?

I.


EDIT: Hey- pshh. HEY! PSH!!!! (whispers) If you decide to make techs secret, you don't really need to fill out exactly what the higher tier techs do right now- just what they are called. You'll get an idea for what is needed as the game progresses (took me forever to decide where to put a 'leather-worker').

 

[LDiCesare]

I also think that a linear model for tech costs may not work well if you have research point generating buildings. I'd rather see a geometric model (e.g. double the cost at each tier: 25, 50, 100, 200, 400).

I like the idea of player-proposed techs, but I'd also like to add that in real life, a whole lot of technical and scientific progress came to be by mistake or as a by-product of other research, or wasn't organised by the Princes but the population for their own good. For instance mathematics, and algebra in particular, got better because merchants needed to compute their money. For serendipitous discoveries: Galvani's frog legs lead to better understanding of nerves, or check this: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/science_surfing/89414 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity
Tech points should be generated not only by active research but also, if not more, by what your civ is focusing on: Losing some control of what you research would let you research more. e.g. You can close your economy and control schools to get 3 tech points on whatever you like or let an open economy and free schools so you'd have only 1 tp where you want but you'd earn maybe 3 or 4 in some unknown areas as dictated by the current economical/philispophical desires of your population.

I guess I started by saying I liked player-defined tech and ended up proposing that techs should be discovered faster if the player isn't in control of what his people seek. Actually, the few points the player decides upon cab go into something weird but specific like for instance war-rabbit breeding. It may or may not succeed, but the player who tries to breed war-rabbits is taking a risk. He doesn't know for sure the tech will be successful (I mean, we all know war rabbits can beat knights, but are they strong enough to kill a dragon?) and so should spend some points before his researchers tell him of the grim truth (war rabbits are extremely strong but uncontrollable, and the whole city where the experiment was running has been razed by enraged rabbits) and the tp's are lost. Or not, and he gets a great new tech that others will have some trouble copying (more tech points needed, but they are sure of the success). If you don't like lost tp's, use the serendipity: Instead of getting a war-rabbit army, you can research the animal husbandry tech at lower cost (i.e. you learn the tech exists and the tp's you spent are redirected towards this new tech).

 

[Ekolite]

What I'm considering now is having a loose tech system, where there are various lines (about 8 or 9). Each of these must be invested in with RP's and you get various perks at intervals along the lines. You don't get actual techs, but just things like +1 gold from temples, new buildings and units, civics, civic boosts, events, that kind of thing.

 

[Immaculate]

I don't know if you did your map yet but you should probably do a pangea-like (at least all connected)- i sort of wish i had done that with my map (at least in the early stages)

 

[Immaculate]

You should put a notice in your thread when you update the rules and state what you changed so we don't end up reading the whole thing again.
I just had a read through and it looks like you updated the tech category descriptions- i think the rest was there before... yes?

Also- did you think about what i said about maps? You had said before there would be more regions and thefore more room to expand. Is that still true.

Immac.

PS: I am going to repost this in your thread to move Ekoness thread discussion to the Ekoness thread.

ten characters

 

[Ekolite]

Ok, spent some time on the spreadsheet tonight and I have it all worked out pretty well. Just need the forumlas sorting. This is major progress as it will mean I can finally start playing with the stats of buildings and such.

Tax rate is updated with a new more sense-making method.

 

[Ekolite]

Latest Addition:

Minor Towns

I've always disliked the ''cottage'' line of improvements in civ 4/FFH. I've never understood how some obscure village could make such an important contribution to the funds of a nation. EkoNES will therefore be experimenting with a new ''Minor Towns'' mechanism. Minor Towns are built just like cities, but for a lower cost. They are not improvements and do not require workforces.

Minor Towns can be upgraded in ''levels'', they start on level 1 and can be upgraded up to level 4 by using food, Production and gold. You can upgrade a level 4 town to a city for a similiar cost.

As the town's level increases, so does it's ouput of gold, and it's need for food. At level 2, you may train a workforce to work on a low levelled improvement in the town. At level 4 you gain another workforce which can be used either for another improvement, an upgraded improvement (one that requires 2 workforces), or a specialist. The amount of buildings available in minor towns is limitted, but the number of minor towns you can have is not, except for the obvious need for land and resources.

Overall, it is usually approximately the same price to build a new city or to upgrade one from a minor town, however minor towns help offset their cost by providing resources, and it allows you to upgrade a city exactly when you need it. Also, when upgrading a city from a minor town, much of the cost will have been paid in productivity and food which are easier to get then gold, when building a city from scratch, most of the cost is in gold.

Notes:
- Minor towns can be upgraded by 1 level each turn.
- Minor Towns maty not produce units.
- Minor towns can be captured/pillaged/destroyed by invaders.
- Minor towns are a large investment to upgrade to cities, but their static cost allows for many minor towns, which means that many cheap improvements are potentially available.
- Minor towns are not a culture divisor, whereas cities are.

I'm hoping this will provide a very interesting mechanic. They are cheap enough in their early levels for teh player to want to mass-produce them where ever they can, which means they need more land, and tehy are expensive enough on their late levels to make real prizes for an invading nation. It also allows for a huge amount of events which is something that makles me very, very happy.

 

[Immaculate]

I am not sure i understand minor towns. Will you have provinces? if so, willl you be allowing a city and a minor town in the same province? if so, will you be able to upgrade the minor town to a second city in the province?

thanks,
i.

 

[Ekolite]

No there probably wont be provinces. You will be allowed a certain number of minor towns based on your total population, and there will be a rough radius around each where you cannot place another minor town.

They are a basically like cottage improvements, but not an actual improvement.

 

[Ekolite]

My Aim is to be starting the first turn of EkoNES by the 1st of March, 4 weeks exactly from today.

I am currently accepting reservations from players who took part in one or both of the previous NESes at some point. Reservations for people outside of this group will not be allowed until the 15th of February.

Basic concept information about the NES is my next objective.

 

[Tyrs]

I'm torn between wanting to play this, not knowing if I could handle three NES's, and kinda wanting to give outside players a chance to get in on this. Count me as a maybe