reverend mother mechanics

[davidlallen]

The easiest way to make spell AI work (and I think the way the FFH AIs do it?) is to give each spell a priority rating based on power and effect, and then have the unit check which spells it can cast that have legitimate targets each turn (subject to a few restrictions) and cast the one with the highest value.

To me, choosing among combat spells is not the hard part. If one unit has a possible role in buffing cities and spying and also standard attacks, how does the AI decide how many to build, and where to send them? For example, an attack stack has a wizard, but a nearby friendly city has become unhappy. Divert the wizard from the attack to cast inspire?

This problem statement may include its own solution. Perhaps we need several different RM type units, one for attacks, one for spying, one for city buffing.

 

[Ahriman]

I don't think the AI is ever intelligently able to move its mages around based on what its spells can do; I don't think the FFH AI really does it. I don't think thats a realistic AI hope either; the civ AI just isn't that great at managing its units.

About the best you can hope to do is to give the wizards medic AI so that they accompany stacks around and then cast whatever spells are appropriate.

 

[koma13]

Adding spells is too much work imho. Why don't we make it rm unit's regular attack? AI would know how to use it and always choose the best defender as a target, which is pretty useful.

 

[davidlallen]

This isn't quite to the top of my to-do list, but close. My current design for the Reverend Mother unit is:

* National unit, limit 5
* Relatively low strength (2?), move 2, default AI UNITAI_COUNTER which should force it to travel in attack stacks
* Requires Little Maker resource, some mid-game tech like Water Of Life
* Flag bRivalTerritory, which allows exploring rival territory
* Each turn, when stacked with friendly units, small chance that one unit will get a free promotion of Combat N+1, or Drill N+1. If it already had say Combat 3, it would get Combat 4 or Drill 1. This represents training the unit in the Weirding Way.
* New promotion Prescience, like "Sentry 2", giving an additional +1 visibility range beyond Sentry. This is not available for any other unit, but the RM starts with it. This promotion does not operate when in territory owned by Spacer Guild.

This last point seems somewhat odd. I really want to get at the effect where one prescient person may see a "blind spot" around another one. I cannot find any way to produce "fog of war" around a unit; that was my first choice. My second choice was to make the prescience promotion not work when nearby to other units which also use spice; that is possible, but performing that search may be time consuming in python. So my third choice is fast to evaluate; any time inside the territory of another spice-using civ, the promotion does not work. This may be either too rare or overly abstract, but I cannot think of anything better.

Please comment.

 

[Deliverator]

* Each turn, when stacked with friendly units, small chance that one unit will get a free promotion of Combat N+1, or Drill N+1. If it already had say Combat 3, it would get Combat 4 or Drill 1. This represents training the unit in the Weirding Way.

Why not give First Strikes promotions?

 

[davidlallen]

Drill is the name of the promotion that gives first strikes.

 

[Deliverator]

Ah, stupid me.

 

[davidlallen]

My current design for the Reverend Mother unit is:

* National unit, limit 5
* Relatively low strength (2?), move 2, default AI UNITAI_COUNTER which should force it to travel in attack stacks
* Requires Little Maker resource, some mid-game tech like Water Of Life
* Flag bRivalTerritory, which allows exploring rival territory
* Each turn, when stacked with friendly units, small chance that one unit will get a free promotion of Combat N+1, or Drill N+1. If it already had say Combat 3, it would get Combat 4 or Drill 1. This represents training the unit in the Weirding Way.
* New promotion Prescience, like "Sentry 2", giving an additional +1 visibility range beyond Sentry. This is not available for any other unit, but the RM starts with it. This promotion does not operate when in territory owned by Spacer Guild.

Implemented in 1.3.6 except for "not operating in SG territory", I decided not to bother. Plus, check out the screenshot of the unit by Chuggi, reskin by Lord Tirian and Deliverator!

 

[Deliverator]

Here's a screenshot of the 1.3.6 Reverend Mother in game. She looks great thanks to Lord Tirian's reskinning, but I think we can find some better animations for her in time.

 

[davidlallen]

Lighting up this thread again. In July I added the Reverend Mother unit as described two posts back. It has a training ability and a long range sentry ability. Due to some changes and then some bugs, nobody has built a lot of them and there hasn't been much feedback.

Recently there was a comment that Reverend Mothers should not have prescience, but they should have something related to the Voice ability from the books. It has been suggested many times that the Bene Gesserit in general should have diplomacy abilities, the ability to manipulate others behind the scenes. This could possibly be spy missions based on the existing Super Spies code that DW has inherited through RevDCM. I have now spent a few hours looking through the SS code and I have some idea about how it works, so I may be able to add things. I have been adding UU and UB for all the other civs, but I haven't been able to find any good ideas for Bene Gesserit.

So, let's brainstorm about how to make Bene Gesserit more interesting. Hopefully we will come up with ideas which I can implement.

Possible unit names: Sayyadina, Reverend Mother, Initiate, Truthsayer, Kwisatz Haderach.

The BG have a breeding program which has generated a number of "almost" KH. Perhaps this can be represented by a multi-stage project or private tech tree. As you progress in these stages, you can train better KH units, or unlock promotions which can go onto your existing KH. I'm not sure what the increasing powers of the KH might be.

Today spies can affect religion, civics and many other things, but not diplomacy. Perhaps the BG can have a spy mission carried out in another civ's city which gives a +4 permanent diplomatic reaction from that civ to BG. This would be like signing some kind of treaty, or more likely some behind the scenes exertion of Voice.

Another spy mission might show you a picklist of all the other civs, you select one, and the mission gives the target a permanent -4 diplomatic penalty against that civ. For example, you have a spy in a Corrino city, you execute this mission, and you pick Atreides. This would cause the Atreides ambassador in that city to do something embarrassing, or create the appearance that he did. Corrino would get a -4 change in reaction to Atreides. You could use this to soften up Atreides to stop cooperating with Corrino.

In the diplomacy screen, there are often suggestions you can make such as "stop trading with X", or "Declare war on X", or "Make peace with X". When I play, these options are all usually greyed out because I don't spend too much time making friends. But, maybe somehow we can give the BG a bonus here. One obvious way is to just give BG a permanent +4 diplomacy with everybody. But I'd rather make the player work for it somehow. There are spy missions that give +8 unhappiness which wears off over 8 turns. Maybe a spy mission could give a +8 diplomatic bonus which wears off over 8 turns, or gets used up after one action in the diplomacy menu.

The Super Spies code has a promotion line "Escape Artist" which allows the spy to escape death on failure. This can be highly useful. Also, normally a spy returns to your capitol upon success. Perhaps another promotion or BG skill would be to stay in the city after carrying out the action, succeed or fail. This seems more like a diplomat; a plan might have failed, but the diplomat is not forced to leave.

Any reactions?

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

i really like all of the above

 

[Slvynn]

I like ideas, though i want to warn again about use of mechanics that fall our normal plane of UU/UR/UB differencies.
This will be cool one, but:
Such abilities should not be aviable 1 time at game per each one. Perhaps they should replace Trait and give special options in diplomacy.
There is no such big power of RM in dune lore. Also more than 1 time using such abilities - its just a game breaker. There should not be "sure" victories. So those things are awesome, but only 1 time per game.

I also have ideas about Breed - by sacrificing Riverend mother and hight exp unit you may be able to produce on same unit with number of prootions ecual to lowest number of promotions among their parents (Mahdi Zealot have 4 promotions and RM have 3 that will create new Mahdi Zealot with 3 promotions and 0 xp) - will reset his expirience counter. So if you work hard you able to produce really crazy promoted units.
That breed promotion can grow with time by adding more promotions to RM. Better experienced RM - better is their breed. Lets say after certain tech palace will giv +1 new promotion to RM. That mean final produced unit will have +1 promotion. And so forth. I think best intepritation of KH will be unit that with 10xp have 15 promotions.

We have still limitations of game called Civ4. Also limitatious of book lore.

 

[Hived]

Yeah, the breeding program is one part of the main theme of the BG.
According to this, I personally prefer the idea of David: Give them one world unit, with different upgrades (such as "pre-KH, semi-KH, nearly-KH and finally THE KH!).

Maybe you could implement their search for "good gene-material" by a "Kwiz-counter".
You could make them "collect" Experience points from highly promoted enemy/allied/own? units. This could happen as follows:
RM is "spy-unit" and has to share a tile with the High-XP-unit. By pressing the "steal gene-material-button" the RM gives all XP of that unit in the "Kwiz-counter". RM is used up, doing this (to prevent players from always taking the same unit, the units XP can be reduced and one or two random promotions taken away) depending.

To make it more "searchy", you can let her only steal XP-5 (or 8, 10... x) points, so units with 5 or less xp aren't interesting for the BG. You then could also "reset" enemy XP down to five (and maybe kill promos)... Also you could give the RM a success-rate depending on the RM-level and the units level, so really high units are kind of safer.

Hard to code, I suppose

My idea about the voice is still, to use them vs. regular units, such as Harkonnen-thopter pilots
Give them a "break" until next turn (or even longer, depends on RM-exp.) or even damage/kill/convert enemy units could be thought of. As said in the other thread, I do not suppose to voice a whole army, but every army has its leaders... those can be voiced ... at night after taking their semen (see above) and there still can be a success-rate on such missions. Promotions such as "immune vs. voice" or "high voice-resistance" let us think of Paul in the beginning or Alia in the end of the film.

Greetz Hived!

 

[Slvynn]

I think multi-breeding is more coorect.

1 World unit is cool but what if you lose it? Makeing to powerfull - is not good, to limited -too, how you'll improve it? Stealthy spy unit stealing promotions? - it cant be cvombat then. further more it breaks steal/spy mechanics and lore. There is no such thing as stealth unit stealing abilities in books.
But there are mothers that breed with different people, producing better results. There is no 1. There are multiple lines, and rules of breeding.

They never got their program woked completely, best result was Leto II who was pre-born , abomination, and then via inner struggle brought him self to God state.

 

[Hived]

sorry... i'm not that firm with civ-terms.
World unit should mean a "National Unit" where only one is allowed. Maybe you could also say: pre-KH: 10 allowed, semi-KH 5, "nearly-KH" 3, THE KH 1.
And you're right, they led their program on different lines... but they also were sure, that only ONE KH will appear.
Just because they didn't achieve their aims in the film, that doesn't restrict the options in this mod
I also didn't mean stealthy spy units, but "visible" ones. I just wanted to figure out, that they can enter hostile territories and share tiles with enemy-units (such as missionaries).
Maybe they can also be regular units, that steal the promos when "attacking"... but so they can use it only vs. hostile units... that doesn't seem to me breeding program-like.

I also like the actual ability of giving units on same tile XP... although I'd prefer "direct-teaching", so giving the knowledge to only ONE unit and not a whole stack.

What about the voice?

Slvynn also proposed, to make voice/prescience as traits... here's the link to the discussion.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=326273&page=8

What do you think?

Greetz, Hived!

 

[Slvynn]

Voice is good as trai imo that allow 1 time (aka Trust) options to influence politics + charm (from FFH) spell that deny few adjacent units to aatack

Breeding is best baaned when it hard, and KH is just one crazy unit which get 20 promotions at level 4
perhaps at this term one should be able to get a KH promotion.

 

[davidlallen]

The idea of literally breeding a unit from existing ones is certainly something I had not thought of! Raising of children is a little hard in Civ games because of the variable number of years in a game turn. In vanilla, early turns span a hundred years, and late turns span 1 year. So say 15 years to raise a child is 1/6 of a turn at the beginning or 15 turns at the end. Of course, we have to overlook some things to have a GP or a civ leader last hundreds of turns anyway. In DW, each turn is one year; we could revisit that choice but it seems less like something which spans generations.

If we had a KH type unit, we could build it from a tech tree. This forces the player to put something into it, beakers in this case. These could represent different branches of the potential KH family tree; cousins, for example, born at slightly different times in the past. Rather than upgrading one unit, you could have one new, stronger unit appear, with no opportunity of building another. If you lose the unit, you have nothing until you achieve the next tech level in the breeding program.

I like the idea of "forcing success" in the diplomacy screen, but I think of the Voice as something that happens in person rather than by radio or however LH conduct diplomacy. I also like the idea of a mission to break up other peoples' alliances, by giving a -4 between two other civs. I'll see if I can implement a Super Spy mission to give me, or some third party, a diplomatic modifier. If it works, we can see how interesting it is to play. A big bonus which lasts 1 turn can be equivalent to a "forced success" in the diplomacy screen.

 

[Slvynn]

Just to note - long term diplo penalty for repeatable action is way too strong.
That need to be tuned down alot to point where it will be slight, but good bonus, in order to preserve game balance.

 

[davidlallen]

Just to note - long term diplo penalty for repeatable action is way too strong.
That need to be tuned down alot to point where it will be slight, but good bonus, in order to preserve game balance.

The spy missions like poison water give 8 unhappiness which wears off at one per turn. I could make the diplomacy benefit work like that. That is more complicated because I have to add a delay counter and make sure it counts down. Given this mechanic, as a player, I would plant three spies in three cities of the enemy and pop this mission three times all in the same turn, to get a pretty big bonus for diplomacy the same turn. I am pretty sure that the AI would not figure this out.

Perhaps we should discuss this a little more to find something which is fun, *and* the AI can use it, *and* I can figure out how to implement it.

 

[Hived]

Perhaps we should discuss this a little more to find something which is fun, *and* the AI can use it, *and* I can figure out how to implement it.

What about a permanent +1diplo for each witch?! You have to "sacrifice" her (leave her as steady advisor), to get this bonus. Maximum bonus is +4 (or more, as you like).

Pro:
Easier to implement (no counter)
not so easy "cheatable"
AI should know, how to use... although there's no use vs. the human player.

Contra:
That's advisory, not voice
(Maybe) not possible to "force" success, as the diplo-difference doesn't improve that much.
Not clear how to use to shatter an enemy alliance.

Go on... the discussion just starts!

Greetz, Hived!