Ritual Cooldown Mechanic

[Vehem]

I'm going to use this post to just quickly explain how the "cooldown" Xienwolf added for 042 Patch N works, as sooner or later people are going to wonder about the exact mechanics.

Certain rituals have an unlimited number of uses, but can only be used so many times within a certain time period. For instance, a ritual might have 3 "uses", and a 200 turn cooldown.

Imagine a player uses the ritual on Turn 75, then again on Turn 125, then again on turn 150. He has now used the ritual 3 times, so his "Team Instances Available" for the ritual is now 0 (the same display you see when another city is building the wonder you want to build). However, in turn 275 (200 turns since the first use) he will get 1 instance back. On turn 325 (200 turns since the second use) he will get another, and the third use is available again on turn 350 (200 turns after the final use).

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There is now also a very cheap ritual that causes a "mana surge", disrupting all rituals belonging to the casting player and any other player with whom they are at war. That will reset the ritual production to 0.

The strategy comes from the fact that the ritual has limited uses and a long cooldown - so you must try to time the use of the ritual to disrupt hostile rituals such as "Curse the Land" when they are almost complete (causing the most production and time to be wasted by the opponent). Casting it too soon might mean that your opponent has chance to complete the ritual before your cooldown is over, which would be bad.

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This is still an early version of the ritual mechanics - we've also discussed options for cities to be affected individually by hostile rituals and to allow cities resistance against the effects of the rituals (so that you could build a decent defense against Curse the Lands or others in certain cities - Pagan Temples for instance could grant a small amount of resistance, as might larger cities or other religious structures - agnostics would have a different mechanic of course). There's likely to be a lot of change to this area over the next few versions, until we can stabilize it into something that is fun and potent.

 

[Sarisin]

I'm going to use this post to just quickly explain how the "cooldown" Xienwolf added for 042 Patch N works, as sooner or later people are going to wonder about the exact mechanics.

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This is a great idea and I am anxious to see how it works. The AI was just getting too crazy building Chosen of Esus and Curse the Lands in all its cities.

Thanks for this!

 

[Brokenbone]

The cheap "Surge" thing is imported as is into the next iteration of FF, may need some slight rethinking due to how well it would cripple a lot of the new goodies the Illians have. Illians are basically ritual junkies if seeking Ascension, and at some late game point, they're at war with everyone.

It'd be kind of like being able to sabotage vanilla Civ spaceships with a cheapie building... anyhow, I guess just a thought that crossed my mind.

 

[xienwolf]

Yes, it will need some balancing, but remember how few you get access to in a relatively long period of time. Plus we will be introducing other rituals at some point which shall also make you want to reserve your interrupts for them, and a mechanic for rituals to be resisted on a per city/other target basis.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

well an easy way to handle this would be to make some rituals un-surgeable. the Illian rituals probably should not be affected by the Surge, it would screw them big time I guess

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

speaking of rituals, something that I feel would enhance a lot their mechanics would be to let multiple cities work on them simultaneously to speed up the process. to balance this out, most rituals should probably have a building prereq in order for the city to be able to join into the ritual. mage guilds for most rituals I guess, but some of them could have other building prereqs ( like groves for nature's revolt, temple of the hand for illian rituals, etc. )

 

[xienwolf]

It had been reccomended a few times recently. And it is an amazingly easy thing to set up. Just hard to decide on precisely how to balance and if it is the approach we want to take. Could be worth a test sometime though (however, I will state now that it is a good thing Vehem and I planned on not releasing for a while after 34, because we are both quite busy these weeks)

 

[zup]

I don't find building pre-reqs much of an issue since I build all building before touching rituals.

But cooldown really solves many things. Sure I can do Birthright Regained in one turn but if I use my world spell right away, I can't use it again for some time. Will the cooldown be affected by game speed? If it is only balanced for normal, it is rather meaningless on marathon.

 

[xienwolf]

Yes, I am fairly careful to tie gamespeed and/or handicap settings into all the additions that I make.