S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[Civitar]

You're the man, Civitar! That's awesome that you've made so much progress with the process! Do you do requests for terrain models as well, like new resources or features? I'll definitely drop into your workshop this weekend with a list of units! Thank you!

Geez, you don't make it easy on us ordinary posters do ya?

New features are not possible I'm afraid. Even edits of existing features seem to be off-limits. There are a couple of things I want to try (namely, reskinning forests and jungles in the way Horem has done with his plant resources), but if those don't work "true" features are out. I suppose you could add improvements as dummy features... in which case nothing is out of bounds. For direct improvement/resource conversions from Civilization IV (i.e. Fall From Heaven, Master of Mana, Rhye's and Fall, etc), there are two threads already where you can ask: Danmacsch's (he only does improvements, I believe) and Bouncymischa's (who does resources as well). So I'd advise you to talk to those two for direct conversions from Civ4. However, if you need a brand-new model I'm occasionally willing to do those (though I'm working on a set of Warhammer improvements atm so...).
Hope to see you soon in the Unit Workshop!

 

[S3rgeus]

Geez, you don't make it easy on us ordinary posters do ya?

New features are not possible I'm afraid. Even edits of existing features seem to be off-limits. There are a couple of things I want to try (namely, reskinning forests and jungles in the way Horem has done with his plant resources), but if those don't work "true" features are out. I suppose you could add improvements as dummy features... in which case nothing is out of bounds. For direct improvement/resource conversions from Civilization IV (i.e. Fall From Heaven, Master of Mana, Rhye's and Fall, etc), there are two threads already where you can ask: Danmacsch's (he only does improvements, I believe) and Bouncymischa's (who does resources as well). So I'd advise you to talk to those two for direct conversions from Civ4. However, if you need a brand-new model I'm occasionally willing to do those (though I'm working on a set of Warhammer improvements atm so...).
Hope to see you soon in the Unit Workshop!

I'll quote your post first this time so it's easier to find.

Custom features are definitely possible but making new custom features appear or spread mid-game is impossible without a dummy improvement, as you suggest. (Unless Firaxis have fixed the graphics engine side of it since I ran those tests, but I doubt it.) I'll take a look at those other topics too, thanks!


There are a few WoT-specific units that would be awesome if you could do a new model for. I'll post more specific requests in your thread.

Counterpoint, I'm right in thinking these are primarily Shadowspawn units at the moment, right? A lot of others could be created by repurposing CiV unit models, but Trollocs, Draghkar, and Myrddraal have very distinctive appearances.

Right, well I wanted to reiterate here that the DF citizens are still definitely *a* cause for Shadow points, just not the primary one.

Yes, I'm on board with this!

Well, this is certainly a challenge. I can think of a few ways to approach this problem:
1) Make DF-presence a simple % number, instead of an actual citizen. So a city of size ten, let's say, would have 20% Corruption instead of 2 DF citizens. We'd have to attach Shadow accumulation points to this value, probably based on total output as well. The main drawback of this method is that it doesn't fit as elegantly with the other civ systems, which seem to focus on changes that occur at the population-point level. However, the benefit to this is that we could make the % be whatever you want, and totally non-literal, which would help the realism a bit - we could have that city of population 10 have 2% Darfriends, and still have that provide a yield of 2 Shadow points (for instance).
2) Additionally, this doesn't help the resolution problem, but we could have the other citizens (or all other citizens) be actively "Light". So a Wide empire, which would have more native shadow citizens, would also have Light citizens to counteract that.
3) Lastly, we could leave it alone, and hope that the resolution problem corrects the Tall/Wide problem. It's true that every city would have DFs, but that would only manifest in a meaningful way once population reached a certain point. So a wide empires 2 point cities wouldn't be generating any significant shadow presence. One way we could tweak the balance of this is by adjusting the rounding accordingly. Obviously a 1 size city wouldn't have a single DF, but... what about a 3?

I'm surprising myself by finding that I'm kind of liking the % idea best. It also allows us to potentially think a bit more outside the box as far as any drawbacks that come with a city being heavily corrupted.

I have all of the rest of my posts queued up to go live and this is the last section I'm writing. It's a hard one, I'm not sure which approach I prefer. The per-citizen is a lot more CiV-like but the % approach gives us more mechanical flexibility.

I'm erring toward the per-citizen approach still because it fits with the CiV style, but it has problems, which are the ones we've been discussing.

I honestly don't know. I prefer the per-citizen approach, but I don't know how to solve the problems it presents with tall vs wide and small city populations. This is not particularly helpful of me.

Wow. Sounds realistic, but its not in line with what we're talking about. Funny, though, that there were like 200 Black Sisters, which is far greater than those %.
Aside from option 1 above, we could conceivably compensate for this by renaming these citizens as "Corrupted" instead of actual Darkfriends. That way its more like these people have been messed-with by the Shadow, not necessarily like they're actually DF agents. Also, this might clear up the naming confusion.

I'm fine with not using the percentages from the books. I'm not sure about "Corrupted" - that sounds more like a description for people who live in the Town in the Blight rather than normal Darkfriend-folk in the Westlands.

Hmmm... maybe "Darkfriend Agent" could be a way to do this. Aside from the "corruption" idea, I could be fine with keeping them the same, or having the unit be a Friend of the Dark. Also, there was a distinct hierarchy to DFs, maybe we make the unit some sort of Leader or Recruiter or something.

I can see Friend of the Dark working. Seeing as Darkfriend and Friend of the Dark are in-universe synonyms, it might seem a bit strange to people that they're functionally different, but it's better than having exactly the same name.

Right, though I think it might be best to set it up simply as "Defense." That is, Shadow Alignment is resistant to Light missionaries, and vise-versa. I don't necessarily like the idea of Shadow Civs being particularly prone to Shadow missionaries (or the flipside with Light), I think I'd like to keep the self-nuking of your own alignment to a minimum. Seems sort of non-interactive and lame... kinda like using missionaries on your Holy City.... To me, Neutral and Shadow civs should provide the same resistance, at least in theory (to Shadow missionaries).

I didn't mean Shadow was more susceptible to becoming more Shadow, but that Shadow missionaries owned by Shadow civs that are very Shadow-y are more effective (they convert more of the target civilization). That way Light resilience to Shadow would play off against it. I'm fine with having symmetrical defensive modifiers instead though.

That said, a truly neutral civ would still be producing Light points, yes? Those Light points might then serve as some kind of defense, I would imagine.that said, I'm personally kind of liking the idea of Neutral civs being the "sweet spot" where missionaries of either side can be particularly useful. I find the idea of civs trying to bring one another to a given side more interesting than some civ just spending all their Faith building DFs to become super evil. Especially if we have some drawbacks for extreme shadow alignment.

Do we want to make it so that Darkfriend Agents and Light Emissaries only work in foreign cities? Using them to spread your Alignment changes your Alignment leaning appropriately, but you have to affect someone else as well (and deal with the diplo ramifications of that). That means that you'd never be in a situation where a civ is just spending their Faith to become super evil - that may be their objective, but it has knock on effects for other players.

Ah, I was actually suggesting that maybe this unit would do the Path stuff AND the Alignment stuff. I think this could work, since Inquisitors are by definition only to be used on the home civ. So a neutral Inq would still do something, it just wouldn't really do much *alignment* stuff (only Path). Inquisitors serve to make a city more like the rest of your empire, so we could have the inquisitor pull that city towards either the "mean" Alignment of your empire, or the Alignment of the city in which it is born. I don't have a problem with the inquisitor being a disappointment on Alignment for a neutral civ. If you want to *changE* alignment, you should use a missionary. The Inq is to defend against other people's mainpulations.... sorta like how it'd be kinda disappointing to use an inquisitor in base CiV on one of your cities that had little to no foreign pressure.

Right, I can see this working, I think. I've had very few occasions to use Inquisitors in CiV, but this sounds like it would give them another niche. Currently Alignment is tracked player-wide (like culture) rather than at the city level (like production). I like the idea of the Inquisitor pulling its target toward the Alignment of the city it was purchased in (adds strategy to the purchasing location), but I'm not sure if it would confuse players, since they can't directly track which city is producing how much Alignment.

I should say that this is turning into a rather large thing. Are we totally sure we want this as a part of the LB summary? In any case, I'm not updating it until we get some more things straight.

I agree this is has gotten quite large, but I'm not sure where we separate Alignment from Last Battle. The two are quite intertwined. Holding off modifying the summary until we're sure on a final plan sounds like a good idea.

I think I could like this. Seems to make sense. But on the other hand, I could also be convinced that heavy shadow would make you always more prone to such things - especially if we view it as "corruption." They're often assassinating each other, after all.
I'd also be fine with making it have nothing to do with alignment, or not a whole lot, at least.

The Shadow are often assassinating each other, which demonstrates their primary weakness. (They definitely have the practical advantages, they just can't work together properly.) How about we drop the Alignment modifier for Bloodknives and Grey Men and revisit it later if we think something is missing from the process?

Well, had the hunt been called throughout the AB and FY periods, though? If it hasn't been called in 400 years, that doesn't mean it hadn't been called several times before then. Of course, it wasn't FOUND until the end of the NE.
I could go either way with this. I did like the idea of it being possible for various nations to call a hunt for the horn throughout history, but I can see it also making sense as a lateish game phenomenon only (encroaching blight, or before that?), adding to the late game crazy If we have the horn in an actual fixed and viewable place - i.e. a Site of Power - that means it WILL be found in most games, even if it takes a long time. So we shouldn't bring it up too early, for that reason.
The only other thing is we'll have to be careful how we treat Illian's uniques if they have something to do with the Horn. I guess that makes Illian a late-game unique civ, for the most part.

The Hunt was presumably called a few times earlier on in history. I think I remember it being a relatively "regular" (in the cadence sense, rather than normality) event at some point in the past, but it fell out of favor until Illian revived it. Era of Encroaching Blight works for me as a time it starts to appear. The Horn being found earlier on in history would definitely have changed a lot in the past - the ability to summon the Heroes being controlled by humans outside the context of the Last Battle and such.

Which summary will these Horn mechanics be housed within?

Seems like a good thing to go into misc? Or it could have its own? I'll edit a header into the misc summary for now.

Well, we could have a universal Hunter combat unit - for all civs- and a VERSION of it that is unique to Illian (Hunter of Tammaz or Oathtaker or whatever) that is far superior. That way all civs would use Aes Sedai and that combat unit. Also there's something kind of cool about these guys all being combat units, makes them feel different from archs. I like how this complicates the whole "digging up other people's territory" thing, because you're actually bringing war units close or into somebody's turf... potentially a scarier thing. As far as civs that are "less significant" to the WT and thus have fewer Aes Sedai... I say "tough."

I think I like having Hunters and Aes Sedai as the only way to discover Seals.

It makes more in-universe sense for Hunters to be produce-able everywhere, since Hunters for the Horn come from all nations in the Westlands in the books. There are some implications for our other discussions - placing the Horn in either Sites of Seals/Power would mean Hunters could work either, which is bizarre. So we'd have to go with placing it in the Site of a Seal only or some other discovery mechanism.

I'm also liking the idea of having to move combat units into other people's territory to dig up Seals (particularly powerful ones like Aes Sedai), it definitely makes it more tense.

Yeah, we can do better.

Though if we don't have a civilian unit, then we don't have to!

So do you think the horn should be able to pop up in both kinds of sites? I'm thinking it might be best to just have it be the Seal Sites> I don't knwo why I think that, though.

Just Seal Sites works with the Hunters above - otherwise the Hunters wouldn't be able to interact with the Horn if it was in a Site of Power, which is super weird! As you've mentioned elsewhere, this does make the Horn much more likely to be found than originally planned. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it will depend on what role the Horn actually fulfills.

Shall we go through what we want the Horn to actually do? Then we'll know more about how often we should see it and how finding it should be balanced. As it stands now, the original concept of the Horn was to have it summon the Heroes to the map when blown. The Heroes are powerful combat units, but are tenuously linked to the Pattern - they don't heal and take damage every turn until they disappear again. So you can't have a standing army of Heroes, you can just summon them for use in pivotal battles.

Is that still the kind of thing we want to do? Might we want to separate it from the Sites of Power and Seals and just have Hunters interact with some other system as well? (What's the link between Hunters and the Seals then, that has us using them to dig up the Seal Sites?)

Oh, and I'm not loving the name for the Seal Sites. We didn't think of a better one?

I don't think we did, we didn't really discuss the name for this one beyond when I brought it up here. I think Site of a Seal is nicely alliterative (as I said there) but I'm definitely open to better names.

There didn't seem to be any unifying theme in where the Seals were found in the books. Several of them were already in the possession of human owners when the characters first encountered them. They were scattered after the Bore was closed, but I haven't seen any mention of how they were scattered or who did it.

Also, in the LB summary we mention that a late-game tech will reveal seal locations. Are we still doing that, or is the revelation of the SITES enough?

Revealing the Sites is enough, I think it can work like Archaeology does for Antiquity Sites. Though we could have a first tech that reveals the Sites and then a later one that says where any yet undiscovered real Seal is hidden?

Yeah, I'm all for differentiation. So Blue Sisters can do it. Otherwise you need Hunters. I'd say let's leave Browns to the Sites of Power.
But how exactly are Blues better at this? There's no longer a "discovery chance," right? Aren't they just revealed by a tech? Or am I missing something here? Do they just dig it faster? That's kinda lame in that it's similar to the Browns. Oh, well, though.
Also, as far as Blues being less useful when the LB is disabled... Oh well. Blues are less useful in a world that doesn't care about epic stuff, right?

I think it's fine if they're similar to the Browns in this way - we have some other Ajah mechanics that are reflections of each other (like ranged offense vs defense between Green and Red, Science vs Culture in White and Brown). I don't think there's any speed modifier, Blue Sisters can just investigate Seal Sites to find Seals, though it is something that takes a few turns. Or did you mean that Blues could all have that ability, but the Tier Two bonus could be increased speed?

Also fine with Blues being less useful when there's no Last Battle.

Could/should Sites of Power ALSO have some sort of rare "surprise" thing you dig up?

I don't think we need to do that yet, unless something flavorful crops up for it.

I'm sorta leaning away from having a civilian at all...

That works for me. I'll find something to call Chronicler eventually.

I wouldn't expect the penalties to really be penalties. More like you weren't given what was promised, or it has a weird bad side to it. Like being gifted a few units all with 1 HP, or three missionaries... of a different Path. That kind of thing.
I'd be fine with stuff starting to ramp up during the Era of Encroaching Blight. Thing of all the machinations already well underway when Rand was born, and all that.

Right, I see what you mean. Three missionaries from a different Path are essential a non-reward. I like the idea overall.

Well, we might wanna consider this for a moment. Are there reasons why the Shadow might hold onto them? Obviously a Seal has to be held onto at least til the LB starts (because there is no "Shadow" side yet), but Is this process tech-gated at all? So, like, a Shadow civ has a seal, but can't start the breaking process yet for whatever reason.

This is something that was missing from my Seals stealing description because I'd forgotten about the "Light must control all the Seals" mechanism.

The Shadow would hold onto them to stop the Dragon from spawning. If they just willy-nilly break all of the Seals they find, then they need to contend with the Dragon unit. This is where Light-side stealing becomes more relevant, and it means that both sides have a dilemma to consider. As long as at least one Shadow player controls a Seal, the Light can't win the game. But breaking the Seals makes the Shadowspawn stronger - so it makes it more likely that they'll win longer term. This relates to some of your concerns below too.

The ideal game for the Light team is they find all of the Seals first. The Shadowspawn are at their weakest because all Seals are in tact and the Light control the Dragon. They sweep through the Shadow, Shadowspawn, and take Thakan'dar. While doing that (because it will take a while), they research all of the Seals so they know which ones they need to break and which are just decoys. Then they break all of the Seals and win the game.

The ideal game for the Shadow also starts with them finding all of the Seals. Then they break all but one of them and protect that last one as best they can. The Shadowspawn are monstrously more powerful with 6/7 Seals broken and with their help, the Light is overrun. The Shadow players now effectively have the final stages of a normal game of CiV to win, except for the whole permanent war thing.

Those are the two extremes of ideal games. (Neutral's ideal game is simpler - everyone else is slower than they are and they win a victory.) In reality, no game will happen exactly like either of the two ideal scenarios.

The Shadow's quandary is that they want to break as many Seals as they can to make the Shadowspawn stronger (since the Light fight unified and the Shadow don't, each Shadow civ is likely at a military disadvantage by themselves). But if they break all the Seals they have and the Light have the rest - now the Light can win. So how many do they break? Add into the mix that if they keep only one back, it can be stolen, it's even more risky.

The Light's challenge is to gain control of all of the Seals simultaneously, without breaking too many of them (to start with). If they break a Seal, they don't need to worry about keeping it safe anymore, but it makes it more difficult to capture Thakan'dar. The more Seals you have, the easier it is for your enemy to steal at least one of them. Interestingly, one Light civ keeping control of all Light Seals is effective against a single, very powerful Shadow civ (since searching the single civ must be done sequentially at the capital, when all searches are being performed by the same player), whereas distributing the Seals is more effective against multiple Shadow civs (since their spies can overlap with each other, expanding the search area becomes more effective).

Neutral civs also pose a significant threat to both sides, since the Alignment victory paths are more complex than a Neutral civ's, the Neutrals have more time to win before the Last Battle ends.

 

[S3rgeus]

I mention this because I think we do want the lightside to be able to steal, right? Otherwise, it's "Steal them all in the first 20 turns or your life will get a lot harder," so we might need to artificially add some mechanic that makes them last, or else provide some benefit for the Shadow to holding off.

Definitely, and I think that's covered above.

On that note, should we bring back the discussion about the "Dark Ones Touch" when seals are broken? I know we talked about shadowspawning rate increasing, and bubbles of evil popping up as each seal is broken, but shall we get more specific?

Yes, definitely. So Shadowspawn spawn rate is a big one and I imagine one of the biggest deciding factors. If all of the Seals are broken, I'm thinking that the Shadowspawn would be basically unmanageable for any single civ, unless it was a worldspanning monstrosity itself.

More bubbles of evil also sounds good.

We also discussed food spoilage and that stuff - so some decreases in global food yields? This would likely cause a lot of large cities to begin to starve. Since the Last Battle is largely a short-term operation (compared to the whole game), and CiV's starvation doesn't have a huge short-term impact, I think that's ok.

What else would we like to add?

I can live with the Sealbearer. Just hope it doesn't create too much clutter. Name can work for now.

Question: what happens when the seal is FOUND on the map? Does it go straight to a city or does the discovering unit (hunter or whatever) *Become* a Sealbearer?
By the way, trying to add all this into the "Seals" section of the LB summary. Please check and advise!

I think with what we're discussing above about Hunters and Aes Sedai finding the Seals, we don't want those units to become Sealbearers (who are civilians). It would also make finding Seals in place far from home very difficult, which I don't think we want to create barriers against?

I've looked through the summary and it's looking good! One thing that jumped out at me that I'll come onto later is option 2 for the "Search for a Seal" mission results - I wasn't thinking we would make that misinformation quite so explicit. That it would be more like "Your spy fails to find any information about Seals in Andor" - rather than "There are none." It's just flavor dressing rather than any mechanical difference, but it doesn't mislead the player. They can just never tell if there are actually Seals in their targeted civ.

This is tricky. I'd say that since the power of the various civs going against each other, as well as the Shadowspawn civ and the Tower (usually), the LB is likely to have a reasonable "minimum" length due to it taking a decent amount of time for people to conquer and such. Thus, to me the bigger concern is keeping the Seals thing from making it too painfully *long*.
Yes, I'd say we should probably scale the research length my map size, and *also* scale the steal time. Right? Keep them lock-step with one another.
Of course, if there's one shadow civ versus 15 light civs...

Also, we could just universally shrink the research time, instead extending and varying the *destruction* time. That way there wouldn't be as much of a research bottleneck.

Yes, let's scale stealing time and research length with map size. I agree that we don't want the actual ongoing process of breaking the Seals to be the thing that makes the Last Battle victory take longer - it should take more turns if it's physically more difficult to kill your enemies on the map.

In the 1 Shadow civ versus 15 Light civs situation - ignoring the obvious "they'll just kill him" result - one civ could be remarkably effective at stealing and breaking multiple Seals if he was smart about it or the Light civs distributed them in a non-useful way.

to clarify, we're both imagine it telling you "there are no seals" when that's incorrect. What about the opposite? Will it tell you "a seal is in Whitebridge" which no such thing is true?

I say this above, I'll just mark here for clarity, I was thinking more along the lines of "You find no information" rather than incorrectly telling the player "There are none."

I don't think we want to do the inverse, the player will waste a lot of turns following that which would be pure frustration.

Agreed. Espionage in general is a bit of randomness already in CiV.

It sounds like we like the idea of not having a failure chance for the actual steal mission. In this case, more randomness for the length of the Steal a Seal mission makes sense! I'll go over numbers below.

OK, I'm a little confused by your first sentence. These cities are usually close together, but that just means you only rarely will have to move the sealbearer very far, right?

Depends on if we go with "must have been discovered" or "works for any in the same city" with stealing Seals. In the latter case, you're better off moving far if your enemies have sight on the Sealbearer, which will often mean moving away from your high production cities, since they're usually in the same place.

OK, this could work, but I also am wondering if we should shorten the research length and extend some other phases in the process. That is a LOT for 7 seals! (plus or minus).

Very true and this makes a lot of sense. Research is super important and skipping out on techs to do other stuff puts your drastically behind. Let's shorten the research component and make the breaking part more difficult.

hmmm.... so... broken record here... what do you think of making the research shorter but the production longer?

This would have the interesting effect of making it much more likely that you're stealing a *real* seal, since the longer it sits in its home city, unsealed, eventually it's authenticity will be discovered (probably). This might speed things up a bit, by making more stealing actually fruitful. Of course... you still have to Authenticate it yourself. What if it's a seal you previously had, and are restealing?

Side effect of making it heavier on the production - a production heavy civ would now be the best Seal-crusher, rather than the science civ. Do we not like that? Of course, it could be that we have a science civ start the process, and then transfer it to an ally.

Ach! Head hurts.

We could justify re-verifying because the other civ has had the Seal for a time. You don't know they haven't swapped it out for a fake. Still, that's a lot of lost research between the two sides in the process of the Seals being stolen back and forth. I think we can keep the proven "state" with the Seal itself, rather than in a per-player fashion. This is simpler to track for the player and for us.

I think it's fine if production powerhouses are the best sealbreakers.

Right, but now I'm wondering if in fact you need to start your own authentication when you steal it. If your enemy did the work for you, should you benefit?

I think so, otherwise a Seal that's stolen back and forth will cause both sides to waste a ton of research. That might be what we want? I do also think that keeping it consistent for a single Seal within the game will be simpler for players to understand too.

sweet! I will start using it. What do we say, then? The Eyes and Ears have stolen a technology? The Eye and Ear have?

"Your Eyes and Ears have stolen a technology"? Does it still make sense to promote Eyes and Ears to Bloodknives?

I think mechanically i agree with you - shouldn't matter if the player knows which city it's in. This makes things much easier for us to balance.

I think we can help remove the frustrating aspect with flavor, though. Instead of the Eyes and Ears discovering a seal is in a city, they can be specific: "Bode Cauthon has discovered that a Seal has been hidden away in the Sewers of Salidar!" That kind of thing.

Very good idea, I like this. It makes perfect sense - the Seal isn't in an obvious location, so it's only with the foreknowledge that it is in the city that your Eyes and Ears can be targeted enough to find it.

Him getting weaker when Seals are stolen seems a little odd to me. I can't really think of anything better, though...

OK, so you're talking about things as if the typical path would be for the Dragon/Light to take Thakan'dar and *then* break the seals. I don't like this, I don't think. I understand why you're suggesting it, I think, but I think it takes away some of the compelling end-game stuff we were talking about before.

I recall the whole when-to-break-the-seals thing to be a tricky cost-benefit equation. For the Shadow, it's obviously that way - the Shadow gets stronger when you break one, which is good, but the Light wins a little bit when you do that. But from the Light's perspective, that "game" is absent - wait til the last minute, always.

I remember us talking about how the light would be faced with a tricky endgame, where they must breakt he seals - and make the shadow stronger before the Strike at Shayol Ghul. One last, risky mission.

To me, having the Seals broken after T'D is taken seems kind of anticlimactic.

And with this in mind, I still see some problems with the Dragon unit being allowed to exist in unit form forever. While I understand how any turn they aren't hitting T'D is a turn they're letting a Shadow player win, but I imagine the strike at T'D will be very challenging. If the Light were to essentially neutralize each of the Shadow civs - or even the neutral civs before that strike, the final assault would be made MUCH easier, with only the Shadowspawn civ left with any meaningful resistance. Essentially, having Rand in unit form - an offensive, not defensive weapon - makes the taking of Shadow capitals much easier, I'd imagine. The "capability to win the game" is not the same as the "situation with the highest *probability* of winning the game.*

I think a lot of the stuff I said above is relevant here. There are also some more specific points.

I'm not sure if we want the Light to have to break the Seals first. Then the Light and Shadow objectives are the same, which is weird. It's also not quite how the Light really wants things to play out. The books give us a good example, in that Rand and Rodel Ituralde had captured Thakan'dar and been fighting Shadowspawn there (the Light needs to fight to keep it - the Shadowspawn don't stop spawning or even slow down) to keep them out. They succeeded when Logain broke the last of the Seals - then Rand was able to defeat Moridin and seal away the Dark One.

I don't think it's an anticlimax to capture Thakan'dar first. Once the Light have captured Thakan'dar, they need to hold onto it for the duration of the time it takes them to break the Seals. (This may be difficult.) If they break some and the Shadowspawn take it back, then they've helped make it even harder for themselves.

If the Light are confident they will take Thakan'dar, but haven't done it yet, they might break them early. The best case scenario for that is breaking all of the remaining Seals and capturing Thakan'dar in the same turn, but that's almost impossible to time correctly.

The "game" for the Light, for the start of the Last Battle, is to fight the war itself into a position where they can strike at Thakan'dar, while also trying to gain control of all of the Seals.

In the specific situation you describe, yes, it may be more effective long term for the Light to clean up all of the neutral and Shadow civs first. (In general it will be.) The variance here is whether that's possible for them to do. That will depend entirely on how the game has played out up until now. If the victories are balanced right and there are multiple players doing well (those are two preconditions, rather than one being a consequence of the other), there won't be enough time to wipe out all Shadow and Neutral civs before someone else wins.

In some cases, the Light might walk all over everybody and win the game that way. (Though I imagine the Shadowspawn would still put up a significant fight about it.) It's inevitable because of the way CiV works that sometimes the Alignments will be lopsided. Some games will have two extremely powerful civs that rule the whole world between them - and both choose Light. Or sometimes there will be a worldspanning empire (Poland in my current Emperor game) who chooses Shadow and crushes everyone underfoot by himself.

The Last Battle back-and-forth really comes into play when the players end up on relatively evenly matched sides. In most games, not many civs can take on the majority of the rest of the world at once. It's in those situations, where no one player is powerful enough to win outright on their own, that rushing to complete the Last Battle objectives becomes important and eliminates the "clear out" style you've described. The clearing out happens more when one civ can just win at its leisure.

Now one thing that I thought of when writing this is that defending Thakan'dar is much easier if the Dragon can defend it. What about the Dragon being busy once you capture the city? He heads inside Shayol Ghul to confront the Dark One and you're left filling Rodel Ituralde's role of defending him until he's done.

Yeah, could do this. But should it cap, or something? What if there are dozens of these?

This is to do with the bonus received when finishing researching a fake Seal. If players have to re-research the Seal each time it changes hands then yes, we definitely need a cap. But I think I prefer the notion of the Seal only being proven once - in which case we could stick with just having that bonus since it has a built in maximum, which is the number of Seals.

Should probably less if we do scale down the research time (as I mused on above)

I think it's still fine, a single luxury amounts to being able to found another city in my book, usually, but at this stage of the game, it's largely offsetting other potential negative happiness modifiers, since new cities won't be useful before the world ends.

OK, a few things here. I think we're pretty much thinking the Dragon won't do much. As the LB gets closer, I'd imagine essentially all of the Threads in the Pattern will have something to do with him, likely involving either he or the forsaken directly. Maybe we can have some Edicts or Compact Resolutions pop up that concern him or something.

Yes, this sounds good. Do we want to go through what those Edicts and Resolutions are now?

A weird timing issue.... at that point in the game, isn't it likely that each turn will be one year? Are we ok with the possibility of the Dragon fighting in the LB as a five-year old? If the civs are close in tech prowess, this will happen. This also doesn't allow much time for the ramp-up.

It will only really happen on small maps. Half of the players would need to advance into the Era of the Dragon on or around the same turn. There's usually significant variance here of like ~10 turns at least. Sometimes it might be triggered by one runaway reaching the Fourth Age, which means he researched every tech in between, so the Dragon would have more turns to age correctly.

As for small maps, there is weirdness. On a duel map, world era is equal to the best era between the two players. We could make the lead in time longer after the world era change. My main concern is going too far - players are approaching the end of the tree and we need to have 50-ish turns of combat before they win their victories, otherwise it becomes always more efficient to go Neutral and head for a traditional victory type.

As far as specific new things that start in the WE of the EotD... well, it's that Ramp-up, right? More Threads, some unlocked edicts and stuff. That stuff isn't all civ-era specific, is it?

Lastly, I'm not sure I have a problem with victory being realistically possible before the LB. I think that is fine. Not every game, maybe, but if you're doing really well, yes. Enabling some non-LB victories in order to make the EotD a bit more fleshed out seems to be worth it to me.

Definitely, I agree. If one player is racing ahead, they're better off just going Neutral and winning before the Last Battle truly gets up to pace. The way we'd discussed it before, it would be impossible to win the science victory before the Last Battle even started, because it requires Fourth Age techs, and any reaching the Fourth Age triggers the Last Battle. But like we've discussed, the Last Battle shouldn't be an on/off switch, so a science player who's way ahead should be able to win the game comfortably before the Shadowspawn become a problem.

Diplo is gated on when the world leader elections start occurring. Which should be the Era of the Dragon, right? (Since that's our Modern equivalent?) So the Last Battle will trigger before anyone can win that, but someone who owns all of the city-states will just win the first election and be done.

Culture take radically different amounts of time depending on your opponents. If a civ is good enough at producing Prestige and everyone else is terrible at Culture, they might win long before the Last Battle starts. Without somehow gating Cultural influence on tech (which I don't think we want to do, as BNW didn't), I don't see this being changeable. Given how unlikely it is, I think it's fine.

So would these all be available immediately? Or would people have to vote them in somehow? or would somebody have to build something to initiate them? It seems perhaps a little overwhelming to have them all sitting there. Also maybe is a little too easy - everybody just camps for awhile and buffs up early in the LB, and then goes crazy.

The bonuses are intended to be an ongoing threshold thing - having contributed hammers in the past doesn't help anyone in the present. Each project has levels of bonuses that are unlocked by when "X hammers per turn" are being contributed to that project. This prevents the "keep back and buff up" approach from being effective, though we could go with sums of production instead of measuring against per-turn, if we thought there were good reasons to do so.

I agree it could be overwhelming to have them all available at once. I'd be reluctant to introduce another set of voting mechanics or anything like that though - they become quite complex quite fast. We could gate each project on specific techs? So a few are available by default, but only the civs beyond a certain tech can contribute to others? This means only very science-y, already-winning civs (who optimality-wise shouldn't have picked Light since they would win as Neutral faster) would have them all available at once.

These sound good, mechanically. But would these be competitive beyond the Faith bonus? Like top contributor gets more Gold or whatever? Seems kind of weird.I think that's what you were saying.

I think this is a confusion about the mechanics of these projects vs the World's Fair and stuff like that? I don't think we want there to be any ranking of contributors. Once over a certain production threshold for a certain project, all Light civs have the bonus for that threshold until the production being put into that project is reduced. (This would happen when civs change their cities to build something else.) That's more in the spirit of the cooperative nature of the Light-side alliance.

As far as the names, I like:

Research: "Scholarly Cooperation"
Unit training speed: "Hold Back the Shadow" - I think we should save the Legion and the "Spit" for other flavor
Gold : "Time of Need"
Culture: "Festival of Life" is ok. Don't love it. Not thinking of anything better though....
Spark: "Nurturing the Spark", "
Shadowspawn rate: "Closing the Ways"

Those names work for me.

Also, just thought of something else for the Misc Summary - cleansing Saidin...... or was that in the Channeler one?

It's in the Channeling one, under "Saidin - General".

OK, so a few issues here. As far as the numbers. Yes, I'd say the "victor" can just keep their Sisters. That seems fine. The Black proportions seem fine - do it based on a percentage of completed Turning objectives. I'd say it should never exceed 50% of your quota though.

Why not exceed 50% if they got very close to Turning the Tower? They will still be losing Sisters.

As far as the Light... hmmmm.... I'd say we probably just have to decide an arbitrary percentage. What else can we do? That percentage should likely be less than the best scenario for the Black, but much better than the worst.

That's what I'm thinking too - there isn't really a sensible measure of how many Light Sisters should be remaining. Keeping 75% seems sensible to me, but that conflicts with the Shadow 50% max above.

So what about Neutrals, though? It's totally intuitive for them to lose them all but... that kind of blows. Should they keep half or something?

Losing half of your Sisters seems like a good compromise. Whether the Tower chooses Light or Shadow, they will be suitably annoyed at any civ that decides to sit back and watch the conflict.

OK, as far as the Black skills, I'm torn here. On the one hand, I'm very much tempted to just say "sucks to be you!" about the Shadow civs. You choose Shadow, you lose functionality. To me, that is acceptable.

But then I remember that the Shadow civs are actually still playing for a specific victory type. To them, Browns are actually still useful for digging up archaeo ruins. To the lightside, several of these secondary abilities become useless - who cares about enhanced trade with Grays when you already have this whole new trade template? To the Lightside, the Sisters become weapons. This is probably mostly true with the Shadow too, but there's certainly the possibility of more. This makes me unhappy about forcing the Shadow civs to lose their sisters.

But, if we do go this way, I'd like to make the Black sister abilities be very slight. The ability to break the Oaths is the primary one. Other than that, I'd say compulsion, and that's it. And even then, I'm not sure I we need that.

Oaths + Compulsion on top of whatever they usually had works for me. I completely agree about Shadow civs needing the variety of abilities for the Sisters, so let's make Black Ajah a layer on top of their existing units (the ones they keep anyway). This gives the player more continuity too - their cadre of Aes Sedai isn't being replaced by a whole new suite of units, it's just that some of their existing ones revealed they share an allegiance to the Shadow.

A couple extra things I'm thinking of now:
We treat Ajah influence as independent to Tower influence. What happens during War? If the Tower stays Light, can the Shadow civs maintain their high-tier Sisters, or are all of them reset back to Tier one, since their relationship with the Ajah (via the Tower) is terrible now?

Argh! Mechanically nothing resets them at the moment and doing so would have some interesting ramifications for which Ajahs had majority in the Tower. Resetting them would also run counter to the way we're handling diplomacy - you can do stuff that annoys the Tower in general without losing influence with your Ajahs, you just get modifiers on any future influence that makes it difficult to maintain your current standing. But there's no more "extended future" at this point in the game.

I'm thinking we could reset the Ajah influences of players on the opposite side of the Last Battle from the Tower, but their Aes Sedai could maintain tier two bonuses (the extra abilities)?

Similarly, what happens if a Losing-side sister dies? Are they replaced? It is somehow different? These sisters fled and joined your side. There's no "quota" from the Tower anymore.

Well, I'd say it'd be obvious if it was those two, and not a choice. Not important, though. Also, you sure Mat isn't just a Great Captain?

I will say that this bit of flavor very much conflicts with your notion below of being Agnostic to the specifics of this iteration of the Drag.

We're not being that specific - the choices include the two that represent Mat and Perrin, but those aren't the only choices. This is very similar to what I'm saying about the Dragon - if in different timelines a different Dragon were born, he would be born with different companions that work with him. Maybe a Min-like seer from the start.

First off, I'll say I agree with your conclusion - let's just call him the Dragon.

But, I know I'm sounding overly pedantic here, I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the timeline. I don't think Logain or Taim could have been the Dragon. Neither had an Aiel mother, for example. For somebody else to be the Timeline, all the prophesies have to change to accommodate that. That's fine, but if all of those change... than this isn't really the same Age, is it? It seems to me that in this age, Rand is the Dragon. The History of the Age seems hurtling towards that.

But again, no problem with it just saying "The Dragon!"

This wouldn't be Logain or Taim as they exist in the books timeline. It may not be any of them - it might be someone who was never born in the books timeline. They're just close enough examples of people who wouldn't need history to be that different for them to become the Dragon. Other people would need more drastic divergences, but they're still possible.

I think it would still be the same Age - the Dragon rises up, a reincarnation of Lews Therin (since the Age of Legends has already happened in any of our available game-timelines) who defeats the Dark One and reseals him. (Or fails and the Pattern unravels. In which case... the game uninstalls itself? There can be no future timelines! ) So the Dragon is just whoever the Wheel spins out as the reincarnation of Lews Therin. That was Rand in the book timeline, but an alternate timeline may have different prophecies, as you've said, or just different people being born in circumstances that fulfill the same prophecies.

There is something I've wondered about quite a bit. The Heroes call Rand by Lews Therin, since he's the reincarnation of Lews Therin. But Artur Hawkwing is a *role* that the Wheel spins out into the Pattern when it needs to make changes to the overall weave - this is what the Wheel uses all of the Heroes for. And yet, Artur Hawkwing was the name of the guy who became High King and ruled the Westlands. (Lews Therin is obviously not Rand's name.) So is Artur Hawkwing the recurring role, or the man? Or does the spirit of the recurring role become the mortal who occupied that role last? So in the Fourth Age, when the Wheel needs to spin him out again, is there no longer a Lews Therin role, and instead there's a Rand al'thor role? But that Rand al'thor role is fulfilled by <insert other name>. And once he's fulfilled his role, that role takes on his name?

Gaidal Cain and Birgitte Silverbow seem to imply that the role name is constant, taking on different monikers each time they become mortal. (In which case, Rand al'Thor will die and Lews Therin will continue to exist as the role the Pattern spins out - occasionally choosing to make the role and the mortal the same actual person.) Unless their roles are remaining the same and Birgitte and Gaidal were the names of their last incarnations.

Back on topic - we do agree! Let's call him "the Dragon". I find the theory conversation very interesting though!

All conjecture, I'm just not sure how it works.

 

[S3rgeus]

How is that working out? It sounds like something I should be using... I've done all of these posts today outside of the forum form... you scared me.

It seems to be pretty good - I've got a new option on my right-click menu when I right click a form that expands to contain all of the text I've written into that form. (truncated so they fit, so they all just say "

..." )

I believe it only keeps the text for a day, so it's not filling up the DB on your hard disk all the time. I definitely feel much safer writing in the forum page than I did before!

And that you wrote your posts externally explains the spacing! It's not visible when reading the actual post, but when quoting it there were much fewer line breaks than usual. I imagine that's because an actual text editor applied some nice formatting so as many newlines weren't needed.

I'm thinking no cooldowns. Let's make the turns short - 5 turns could work, but honestly 3 could be good. Keep that guy moving! But no cooldowns. Make there be a couple actions that are unlimited - or mayb ejust the basic attack. But everything else is a one-use thing.

Sounds good to me - what do we think the limits should be for each ability?

Do super short turns make it essentially impossible to kill him, though? Or is the deal that you'd try to set up GM/BK traps for him or something? Obviously 5 turns enables killing him via city capture more feasible than 3... but it still isn't easy.

We could make it so that the Dragon can't move every time? Or moving him is something that can only be done once per player and they have to consume a CiV turn of their "Dragon turn" doing it? I'd say a lot of players would elect to leave him where he was if it meant he couldn't act that turn and he was making a difference - unless they were in dire need of his abilities.

KILL IT WITH FIRE.

The Dragon no longer steals Seals! It's only just occurred to me that him being able to do so would make the Seals discussion even more complicated - glad we've avoided that!

cool. bueno, as they say in Altara.
So are we axeing the "ta'veren" randomness effect, then? We are, right?

Yes, let's axe that.

An interesting mechanic idea! I can see that being worthwhile. Flavor-wise, though, what the heck would we do with this?

There are a few flavor options:

"Elect a Field of Battle" (Like he did with the Field of Merrilor - choosing a location in which to mount an offensive against the Shadow)
"Build a Palace" (This makes less sense since it's repeatable - but he's choosing a seat of ruling)
"Become a King" (Makes even less repeatability sense, but like he became King of Illian, he's becoming King of this civ. Also question why the player is still the leader then.)
"Appoint a Steward" (Makes more repeatability sense, the Dragon is choosing someone to watch over this land that he will return to check on, like Darlin Sisnera or Berelain.)

I think "Elect a Field of Battle" makes the most sense. "The Dragon declares this the site of a gathering of forces against the Shadow and will return here when the Seals have been brought under the protection of the Light"?

Good thinking with the Draghkar!

And yes, gating them seems reasonable. Are Myrd and Draghs at the same gate-level? Let's say Drags are the highest level?

Awesome, yes, Draghkar can be the highest level one.

Let's go with Dreadlords are rarely and randomly gifted to high-Shadow-point civs.

Sounds good.

Another thing I've just thought of - do we want to do anything with super-Myrddraal like Shaidar Haran?

Ah... resource-kill. That's harsh. I think it works, though, providing Blight doesn't spread too far. Again, don't want people restarting if they end up on the borderlands!

Yes, let's keep the spread from being too aggressive. Not every game will have a civ be consumed by the Blight like Malkier.

As far as the damage thing... This definitely makes Blight expeditions really impractical. I'd say there should be a promotion available that changes this, though. Maybe all Warders have it. What about Aes Sedai? In any case, storming Thakan'dar at the end will be a pain...

Agreed on a promotion to get rid of the damage. Warders and Aes Sedai sound like a good place to start with those abilities. Possibly some of the borderlander civ UUs. I think things like this that make Thakan'dar difficult to capture are good - even with the terrain advantage, it's very difficult to defend a single city from multiple players working together to attack it.

Hmm.... I don't love your first idea because I think it has the opposite flavor-effect from what we want. We should not be incentivizing city construction right up against the blight, IMO. Wouldn't borderlanders find that insane?

What if it was Forts? Like, a manned fort slows blight spread in adjacent squares?

A reason to build forts, hallelujah! I love this idea, forts are almost always a waste of time in base CiV and this actually gives them a clear and useful bonus. The combat bonus is relevant too, since the Blight will be a known hostile border for the majority of the game.

Hmm.... as far as recessing... maybe let's just say that there is a little bit of this that happens naturally at fixed points in the game. Let's say at some point shortly after the TWars end, maybe a few hexes of Blight go away. But, this land can't have resources, right?

From a technical perspective it would be much easier if the Blight never receded, because of the limitations in the way features work graphically. Having the Blight recede like this is possible, but requires a degree of fudging with fake improvements and stuff.

We could make it so it didn't have resources, but we wouldn't have to. Resources can coexist with Blight, just improvements can't.

Let's go with 5. I like that number! It's a good, honest number.

5 it is! I'll put this into the misc summary when I write it.

Right. The angreals would make them stronger. But... so what? We need something, right? The only thing that would truly make sense is if you found a region full of people with the "old blood." But this makes no sense as a resource. Everything else is just fudging it.

If we made this turn back into a specific resource/unit correspondence (instead of generic spark), but made it tie specifically with Asha'man, does that somehow help? Not really, right?

Not really, let's go for it. Angreal cache, then?

But... but they appear on a whole three pages of the books!

LOGIC! There's no evidence to say they're peppers at all, though, is there?

Googling it, I found this. Of course, this person doesn't say anything more than "Ice Peppers are just spicy peppers. Nothing special about them." But then somebody else says they are different in coloring. But they spelled that last word with the "u" in it, so I became suspicious of them, naturally...

In other words, I know nothing concrete. I REGRET NOTHING

That link leads me to a post about wolf pigs, which is somewhat hilarious. (Apparently they're "capar".) We have some evidence that they're peppers from the name. Or do you mean that peppers might not even mean the same thing in WoT as in reality? *mindblown*

Sure. Be my guest. I might suggest you let us wrap up some of these bigger issues before you do though. This'll probably involve some research - trying to remember the weird crap the 'saken were doing throughout the books (most of it Very Mysterious and cryptic to the reader).

Sure, let's hold off for a bit until these back and forths get a bit shorter!

Yes, it maybe says "A Thread in the Pattern" or something.

Sounds good to me!

OK, I hate to say it like this but.. show me. I remain a little skeptical that the English language is rich enough in meaningful distinction to cover 8 points per side. But if it can be done, for sure let's do it!

I was speaking more mechanically - that we'd want a resolution higher than 4 grades of "evilness". But I can try for the full list now!

In the middle (+/- 100): Neutral

In order (moving away from Neutral), for the Shadow: Mischievous, Suspicious, Distrusted, Vicious, Hateful, Corrupted, Damned, Malevolent

(Optional others for the final few: Villainous, Diabolical, Evil. Some that might fit lower down: Nefarious, Malicious, Vile.)

In order (moving away from Neutral), for the Light: Wholesome, Honest, Honorable, Devoted, Righteous, Virtuous, Venerated, Resplendent

(Others for the end: Holy (left off for religious connotations), Divine (same). Potential for lower down the list: Revered.)

The general theme of how they were chosen is the first 4 on each side are the kind of usual progressions you see in actual people who exhibit good and bad moral behavior. The latter four on each side embody more supernatural implications of the morality in question - words that would only be used to describe the best or worst of humanity, and much more often used to describe fantastical creatures or beings.

I can see arguments to shuffle some of them around, but I think once there's a defined order, players will get used to it quite quickly.

Well, maybe we should separate Industry and Crafts by making one be units and one be buildings of all types? I guess I was thinking of Cultural buildings or something.

Ok, that sounds good. Is Crafts Units and Industry Buildings? Or the other way around?

Eh... I don't know. The High King was notoriously at odds with the Tower. Maybe we shouldn't as a nod to flavor. If so, I'd say it'd be Spark or something, not a direct +1 to quota. Either isn't so useful for twenty turns, though.

Very true, they don't build up over the short time and help you going forward - they just temporarily make you better, which isn't quite the idea. We could add a modifier to Ajah and Tower influence gains, but I'd be fine with leaving the Tower out of it.

Absolutely, I really enjoyed the significant/mediocre/poor/none thing. Let's keep doing that. Your example of 5 civs seems right, but I should mention that in larger games they wouldn't be "balanced like that (1/1/1/1). A game with 9 provinces would have something more like 2/3/3/1 or something, right? Or 1/4/3/1... or 1/3/4/1...

Agreed, it won't be evenly distributed for other player numbers. I think you did a full breakdown of what numbers we could use for each player count somewhere before. I'll have a look for that after I finish this post!

How they are assigned is a good question. When I came up with this idea back then I was thinking that it was all to be selected by the HK, but honestly, reading it here, it does seem a little bit better to have the computer assign the "matches" and simply let the HK decide who gets what. I think it would lead to more game variety. Otherwise, I feel like players will seize upon one of them as the "best" and "worst" and assign them appropriately - probably often providing the "worst" of the significant ones, for example.

Very good point. Yes, let's make it so that which bonuses are available for each significant/mediocre/poor slot is chosen automatically and the High King just chooses which ones of those to give out to the Provinces based on the slots available to him.

I've edited the diplo summary.

Wait, disabling victories disables the *yields*? There's no science production with no science victory? How does that work?

I always play with all of the victories on except time, so I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm fine keeping things separate.

Cool, Alignment, Trolloc Wars, and High King are all separate disableable thing'ems much like "No Barbarians". I've edited the High King section of the diplo summary to reflect that.

I like this. They raze, but it only finishes when the war ends. Does the city's population decline more slowly? What if they capture a city right before the Wars end? Will it raze in like two turns?

You mean we should wait for the wars to end to trigger the razing? I think I quite like that plan actually - it allows the cities to change hands without necessarily being lost during the course of the war.

Let's let the razing continue at normal speed when the Trolloc Wars end.

How about actually 20-30? Like, an element of randomness?

Sure, the game can decide on a length when it starts (but not reveal that info to the player).

Well, now I'm on attempt number 4.... Trying as Maria. I chose her because I usually find the diplo victory easiest of them. But I hadn't played as Portugal before, and I'm finding it still quite a challenge. I will say I'm not having happiness problems (Feitoras...), but I gave up on my previous attempt when I lost my capital in the modern era, while Persia controlled 60% of the CSs solidly, and I had like 3...

I didn't know it gave you happiness penalties - I thought it just gave the AI tons of free happiness. Again, I've only played as a very happy civ though (at that skill level).

You are tough though. I don't think I could play to the endgame that far behind.

I've never played as Maria before, I'm steadily working my way through all of the leaders for the achievements. Yeah, the penalties and bonuses are inversely related to difficulty - Prince is the "no change" level. Settler and Chieftain give you happiness bonuses (among other things), and King and above give you penalties. The AI gets penalties/bonuses the opposite way around when you choose a difficulty.

Poland's got a tech lead, but it's not too far - if I can take over Attilla-land then I should be able to out-tactics him in a war. I'll probably lose before it gets to that though. He's already captured some cities on my continent from Japan. :O

Are you suggesting one settler per city lost? That could make sense. It'd definitely help!

Yes, I think we could do one settler per city lost. There's still a definite loss for the player - an established city is much more valuable than a settler, but it at least helps them get back on their feet a bit.

If we keep the settlers as a part of the rewards, maybe we do this:
Gold: free GP
Silver: 500 Faith
Bronze: a free settler and a free worker

Something like that? If the settlers are given freely, maybe the bronze reward is two workers or something. Or maybe its Faith.

Two workers on bronze and the rest all sounds good to me!

Oh, that's an interesting idea. I say, yeah. They retreat into the blight and disappear. Don't want somebody to wander into the blight and find TW-era only units hanging out.

Sounds like a plan!

I like this! I can't really comment on your specific numbers/era. They look good to me, but I don't know how to determine if they're actually going to work well in practice.

Cool. They should be easy enough to tweak once we playtest it since these numbers will be loaded out of the DB, the code will just dole out whatever yield it reads in from there.

The problem I have with this is the idea of people chipping the guy down needlessly just to end up with a larger reward. Like, assume you're the only civ fighting this guy. You have upgraded Reds so you COULD gentle him easy. But instead, you do tons of damage so you can end up with a huge payout (+50% of 95% of his possible payout, versus only 20%). Does this make sense?
I'm tempted to just say flat-rate for gentling. But the other contributors still get their share.

Oh, I was thinking this would be percentage of damage dealt, not of his total HP. Otherwise it falls apart if the False Dragon ever gets healed (because more damage was dealt to him than he has total HP). So there would be no reason to whittle him down first - Gentling off full health (which probably has a low success rate) when no one else had ever attacked him would give you the full yield divided as normal, plus the Gentling bonus. If anyone else had attacked him first, they would get their normal reward (when you successfully Gentle him) as if he'd been killed.

So say a False dragon pops up and you deal 20 damage to him. Then I come along, deal 10 damage to him and then Gentle him. You get 67% of the "normal" reward. I get 33% of it and the Gentling bonus.

Sound good?

I wonder if this stuff doesn't belong in the LB summary. These unit details. Should we create a "Unit List" that can house this stuff as we figure it out?

Yeah, a unit list post makes sense.

As far as the islands... I don't know, that's a very big problem, IMO. Maybe, again, they can only do so when accompanied by a Myrddraal.... Kind of weird, though. How hard would that be to make happen? Barbarians don't usually travel the world embarked.

It would be quite strange, because what if they became separated while out on the water? What if the Myrddraal is killed after they make landfall somewhere? Now they're stranded?

We could simply enable embarkation for the Shadowspawn on known water-logged map types.

What if we made it a component of the Liberty and Tradition replacements? Essentially everybody takes them. Maybe We add shadowspawn functionality to one of the later policies of each tree. Not necessarily replacing the tenet itself, but adding to it. Maybe each of these trees features a slightly different shadowspawn-related bonus.... that would somehow befit tall or wide empires, respectively.

Very good call, yes. Let's make it a part of each of the starting policy trees, that there's some policy that's good against Shadowspawn for the relevant type of civ that should adopt each policy.

We could... but I think we'd be kind of pulling out of thin air. Some horseman or something?

I'm not sure - let's come back to it when we do the tree.

K. So no negative effects whatsoever? Is there a reason why Light civs would want to get rid of them in their own cities, though?

Not aside from affecting their Light-ness I suppose? Choosing against-type for the Last Battle gives you penalties, does choosing in line with your actiuons give you bonuses (could be just happiness)? It could be an opportunity cost that way.

 

[counterpoint]

I'll quote your post first this time so it's easier to find.
Counterpoint, I'm right in thinking these are primarily Shadowspawn units at the moment, right? A lot of others could be created by repurposing CiV unit models, but Trollocs, Draghkar, and Myrddraal have very distinctive appearances.

really quick response:

There's also the Aes Sedai! and other channelers.

Oh, and don't forget Ogier!

As far as the seanchan beasts... we'll need to wait to see which ones we'll be needing.

 

[Civitar]

I'll quote your post first this time so it's easier to find.

Custom features are definitely possible but making new custom features appear or spread mid-game is impossible without a dummy improvement, as you suggest. (Unless Firaxis have fixed the graphics engine side of it since I ran those tests, but I doubt it.) I'll take a look at those other topics too, thanks!


There are a few WoT-specific units that would be awesome if you could do a new model for. I'll post more specific requests in your thread.

Counterpoint, I'm right in thinking these are primarily Shadowspawn units at the moment, right? A lot of others could be created by repurposing CiV unit models, but Trollocs, Draghkar, and Myrddraal have very distinctive appearances.

Easier to find??!!

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(Pardon me, I'm trying to process that. Error 404 and all that.)

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OK, I think I've got it. You quoted me... at the top... of a blinking Tower of Babel of text! Which, might I mention, I am automatically directed to the BOTTOM of upon viewing the latest post in this thread from My Account page.

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Joking aside, I owe you a very big thank you for rescuing Nexus Buddy.
Do you intend to have features spreading ingame? (I know, blight example and all that. But I know Pazyryk worked around that at least, since I've got an Éa save game where all my cities got surrounded by blight. So I dunno if you're using that as well - no I will NOT go looking back through the older pages to see what your plans for blight and whatnot are!)

You are correct that Shadowspawn would appear to be the sort of units you would need custom models for. But "repurposing" civ5 models is also the sort of thing you can request in my thread, if you need different textures. Say you need coats of arms on the civ5 Knight for example.

 

[counterpoint]

I have all of the rest of my posts queued up to go live and this is the last section I'm writing. It's a hard one, I'm not sure which approach I prefer. The per-citizen is a lot more CiV-like but the % approach gives us more mechanical flexibility.

I'm erring toward the per-citizen approach still because it fits with the CiV style, but it has problems, which are the ones we've been discussing.

I honestly don't know. I prefer the per-citizen approach, but I don't know how to solve the problems it presents with tall vs wide and small city populations. This is not particularly helpful of me.

Gosh. So.... what do we do?

I guess we have to throw together some examples and see if the math can work with the population point thing. I'll start.

Before

So, below I throw out some numbers and stuff. No idea if these are good, but what's important is that they can serve as a Tall/Wide comparison, and give us a feel for how this might look/work.

1) So, first of all, it's hard to do this without having some basis of how common DFs should be. For the purpose of this, I'll be throwing out our concerns for in-universe realism and just assume there are a billion of these.

2) Also, I'm going to be rounding in the "normal" way, where .5+ rounds up.

3) For the purpose of this thought experiment, I'm going to say -1000 is "extreme shadow" and +1000 is "extreme light," (these values should probably also be maximum for each side).

4) I will also arbitrarily assume that super-DF cities will have a "base" darkfriend rate of be 95% (leaving a little room for missionaries to do their magic), which is obviously preposterous (thus the idea to potentially redefine it as corruption or something), and extreme Light is 0%. I don't know if either is a good idea, but this is what I'm doing. I decided on such a huge range in order to provide for actual differentiation between Alignments.

5) I've also decided for this experiment that Pure Neutral (0 Alignment) shouldn't be right in the middle in terms of DF % (i.e. 45%), but instead should be smaller - 30%. This means that the shadow side ramps up the DF citizens at a faster rate than the Light side eliminates them. This may not be the best idea, but I'm doing it here. For every 100 points of Light above neutral, your civ loses 2.5% DF citizens per city. For every 100 points of Shadow "above" neutral, your civ gains 7% DF citizens. Either of these could be changed to something non-linear, of course.

This creates the following spread. I would imagine these would be a sliding scale - 550 points would be midway between 500 and 600 in terms of DF%.

-1000 (extreme shadow) - 95% DFs
-900 - 88
-800 - 81
-700 - 74
-600 - 67
-500 - 60
-400 - 53
-300 - 46
-200 - 39
-100 - 32
0 (pure neutral) -25% DFs
100 - 22.5
200 - 20
300 - 17.5
400 - 15
500 - 12.5
600 - 10
700 - 7.5
800 - 5
900 - 2.5
1000 (extreme) - 0% DFs

6) I'm going to decide, arbitrarily, that each DF citizen produces 1 Shadow Points per turn. No idea what this will end up meaning, but it will clearly produce a whole lot of Shadow Points. This is potentially problematic, of course.

Comparison 1
So here is a Tall civ with two big cities (36 and 25) and two medium-sized cities (18 and 12), with a total population of 91. They are somewhat shadowy, sitting at -300 Alignment (46% DFs)

36 city - 16.56 -> 17 DF citizens.
25 city - 11.5 -> 12 DF citizens
18 city - 8.28 -> 8 DF citizens
12 city - 5.52 -> 6 DF citizens.

These combine to produce a whopping 43 Shadow Points per turn (which is obviously preposterous, as he'd be at max shadow in a very short while!)

Now a Wide civ. I'm going to make the total population points also equal 91, though I don't know if that's a common or realistic thing. They have 10 cities, 4 medium (19, 16, 13, and 10 and 6 small (8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. They also sit at -300 Alignment (46%).

19 city - 8.74 -> 9 DFs
16 city - 7.36 -> 7 DFs
13 city - 5.98 -> 6 DFs
10 city - 4.6 -> 5 DFs
8 city - 3.68 -> 4 DFs
7 city - 3.22 -> 3 DFs
6 city - 2.76 -> 3 DFs
5 city - 2.3 -> 2 DFs
4 city - 1.84 -> 2 DFs
3 city - 1.38 -> 2 DFs

This civ is producing 43 Shadow Points per turn. This is predictably equal to the Tall civ - the rounding didn't matter much at this level.

Comparison 2
Now let's try the same civs, but with a mostly-Light Alignment - both are at +400, with 15% DF rate.

Tall Civ
36 city - 5 DFs
18 city - 3 DFs
12 city - 2 DFs

This civ is producing 10 Shadow points per turn.

Wide Civ
19 city - 3 DFs
16 city - 2 DFs
13 city - 2 DFs
10 city - 2 DFs
8 city - 1 DF
7 city - 1 DF
6 city - 1 DF
5 city - 1 DF
4 city - 1 DF
3 city - 0 DF

This civ is producing 14 Shadow points per turn, which is certainly more than the Tall civ. This is due to the rounding mattering a whole lot at such a small level - the 4,5, and 6 cities all rounded up to 1.


I'm fine with not using the percentages from the books. I'm not sure about "Corrupted" - that sounds more like a description for people who live in the Town in the Blight rather than normal Darkfriend-folk in the Westlands.

Conclusions
So, I obviously don't have a large enough sample size to say that Wide Empires will necessarily produce more Shadow Points, but they certainly have more *chances* to produce Shadow Points.

I don't know how I feel about that. One thing we could do is apply some sort of modifier to your overall alignment based on your total number of cities. Or skew it so that high population cities also produce more, relatively.

Also, this exercise has shown me that we'll probably need kind of preposterous % of DFs in a city to provide an appreciable difference between the various levels of Shadow and Light. I don't love this, but it seems to be the case.

I reserve judgement on the weird offset I did (25% being neutral, not 45) and the linear progression of Alignment.

So, thoughts?

 

[counterpoint]

ok, let's see how far I get on the real post.

I'm fine with not using the percentages from the books. I'm not sure about "Corrupted" - that sounds more like a description for people who live in the Town in the Blight rather than normal Darkfriend-folk in the Westlands.

Yeah, for me this will depend wholly on how many we have. I know we don't need to stick to the books, but if it does turn out that some cities are at 95%.... I don't know that I like the feel of that meaning the city is 95% full of DFs.

I can see Friend of the Dark working. Seeing as Darkfriend and Friend of the Dark are in-universe synonyms, it might seem a bit strange to people that they're functionally different, but it's better than having exactly the same name.

Can go with this.

I didn't mean Shadow was more susceptible to becoming more Shadow, but that Shadow missionaries owned by Shadow civs that are very Shadow-y are more effective (they convert more of the target civilization). That way Light resilience to Shadow would play off against it. I'm fine with having symmetrical defensive modifiers instead though.

Oh, yeah... totally misunderstood that.

I actually like your idea better! Seems less complicated.

So, just though of something that I'm embarrassed hasn't come up yet:

These units are all invisible, right? It's very, very important, IMO, that you don't know other civ's alignments until the LB starts (though you may suspect). I think that means the missionaries and inquisitors need to be invisible, right? You just get a message saying "The Dark One has recruited followers in Four Kings" or something.

But then, you can't defend against it with the old "missionary kill," then? Is that ok? We'll have to have some other way to do so - and I don't think it will work to have Inquisitors sitting in your cities block all conversion (seems too cheap).

On the same note, I think we also need to have you be unable to divine a civ's alignment, or the alignment of their cities. MAybe spies can give you vague information, but I think it would ruin some of what we're doing to reveal too much. So, how do you decide how/who to spread your Alignment to? Is it all blind? Is that perfectly ok?

Do we want to make it so that Darkfriend Agents and Light Emissaries only work in foreign cities? Using them to spread your Alignment changes your Alignment leaning appropriately, but you have to affect someone else as well (and deal with the diplo ramifications of that). That means that you'd never be in a situation where a civ is just spending their Faith to become super evil - that may be their objective, but it has knock on effects for other players.

Oh, yeah. I like that. They should only work in foreign cities. You can't just use them to pad your alignment.

Right, I can see this working, I think. I've had very few occasions to use Inquisitors in CiV, but this sounds like it would give them another niche. Currently Alignment is tracked player-wide (like culture) rather than at the city level (like production). I like the idea of the Inquisitor pulling its target toward the Alignment of the city it was purchased in (adds strategy to the purchasing location), but I'm not sure if it would confuse players, since they can't directly track which city is producing how much Alignment.

Well, maybe it's just based on the civ that created it, then. Like, you would use it in a city that has had its alignment messed up and it would reset it to the "base" DF number prescribed by your civ's overall alignment?

I think the weird thing is if you build one if that "messed up" city - it would probably need to be a weird alignment, right? Like if you were a light civ but had a city that had been blasted into darkness.

Maybe we should lock the alignment-shift functionality for any Inqs produced in cities that are too far away from the "mean" of your city. Is that too unintuitive?

I agree this is has gotten quite large, but I'm not sure where we separate Alignment from Last Battle. The two are quite intertwined. Holding off modifying the summary until we're sure on a final plan sounds like a good idea.

OK. started to add some of this stuff into the LB summary.

The Shadow are often assassinating each other, which demonstrates their primary weakness. (They definitely have the practical advantages, they just can't work together properly.) How about we drop the Alignment modifier for Bloodknives and Grey Men and revisit it later if we think something is missing from the process?

agreed.

The Hunt was presumably called a few times earlier on in history. I think I remember it being a relatively "regular" (in the cadence sense, rather than normality) event at some point in the past, but it fell out of favor until Illian revived it. Era of Encroaching Blight works for me as a time it starts to appear. The Horn being found earlier on in history would definitely have changed a lot in the past - the ability to summon the Heroes being controlled by humans outside the context of the Last Battle and such.

While I like the flavor of an early-history Hunt, I definitely do not like the flavor of or the mechanics of an early-history *finding of the Horn*. So yeah, let's say Era of Encroaching Blight. Or, really, whenever we choose to reveal the Sites of a Seal.

Seems like a good thing to go into misc? Or it could have its own? I'll edit a header into the misc summary for now.

Right. great.

I think I like having Hunters and Aes Sedai as the only way to discover Seals.

It makes more in-universe sense for Hunters to be produce-able everywhere, since Hunters for the Horn come from all nations in the Westlands in the books. There are some implications for our other discussions - placing the Horn in either Sites of Seals/Power would mean Hunters could work either, which is bizarre. So we'd have to go with placing it in the Site of a Seal only or some other discovery mechanism.

I'm also liking the idea of having to move combat units into other people's territory to dig up Seals (particularly powerful ones like Aes Sedai), it definitely makes it more tense.

OK, Hunters and Aes Sedai it is! (Maybe only blues, more on that later).

I do like the name Hunters for the Horn for the unit, for flavor reasons, even though their primary use will be digging up seals. I could go with Hunter though.

I'd say, as far as Illian, that we can just figure out how they fit into this later. As I mentioned months ago, Illian didn't actually find the horn, so we don't really need them to be better at finding it or something. If they have a UU that is horn-related, it might simply accrue extra culture when digging, or something. If that's the case, we can come up with a name later. But I'm not convinced it has to be a UU - the Horn stuff could go into their UA or UB.

Though if we don't have a civilian unit, then we don't have to!

DIE, CIVILIANS.

Just Seal Sites works with the Hunters above - otherwise the Hunters wouldn't be able to interact with the Horn if it was in a Site of Power, which is super weird! As you've mentioned elsewhere, this does make the Horn much more likely to be found than originally planned. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it will depend on what role the Horn actually fulfills.

Yeah, just Seal Sites.

Shall we go through what we want the Horn to actually do? Then we'll know more about how often we should see it and how finding it should be balanced. As it stands now, the original concept of the Horn was to have it summon the Heroes to the map when blown. The Heroes are powerful combat units, but are tenuously linked to the Pattern - they don't heal and take damage every turn until they disappear again. So you can't have a standing army of Heroes, you can just summon them for use in pivotal battles.

Yeah, I think that sounds right to me. So these are actual distinct units (e.g. a Brigitte unit), or they're just promoted-up regular units?

So, once the Horn is found, what happens? Can you save it for later? Does your Hunter/Sister hold it, or does it go to your capital (to be stolen unless moved!). Do you build a Hornblower unit that blows it, or do you just click where you want the units to appear?

How often can you blow it? How can another civ take it from you?

Is that still the kind of thing we want to do? Might we want to separate it from the Sites of Power and Seals and just have Hunters interact with some other system as well? (What's the link between Hunters and the Seals then, that has us using them to dig up the Seal Sites?)

I don't have a problem with the flavor of the Hunters looking for Seals. They're looking for the Horn, but they might find a seal along the way. This leads me to want to change the Seal Site name - see below.

I don't think we did, we didn't really discuss the name for this one beyond when I brought it up here. I think Site of a Seal is nicely alliterative (as I said there) but I'm definitely open to better names.

There didn't seem to be any unifying theme in where the Seals were found in the books. Several of them were already in the possession of human owners when the characters first encountered them. They were scattered after the Bore was closed, but I haven't seen any mention of how they were scattered or who did it.

I think I don't like the Seal Site or Site of Seal because of the Horn relationship. Also, it's preposterous to look at a place and say "oh, there's a seal there" - will it be real or fake?

Why don't we call them "Mythic Sites" or "Mysterious Sites" or something like that?

I know you said no to this, but maybe there's a chance you won't find a Seal or a Horn when you dig them up. Maybe they're the late-game equivalent of Ruins, and you can find other random stuff (though they should be pretty minor). That way we can make Seals (fake or real) more uncommon, and make the Horn quite rare, without having to make there only be a handful of these.

Does diggin up a Seal Site consume the Hunter?

Revealing the Sites is enough, I think it can work like Archaeology does for Antiquity Sites. Though we could have a first tech that reveals the Sites and then a later one that says where any yet undiscovered real Seal is hidden?

Yeah, I'd say a 4th age tech could reveal where the rest of them are. a "Hurry up, guys!" tech.

I think it's fine if they're similar to the Browns in this way - we have some other Ajah mechanics that are reflections of each other (like ranged offense vs defense between Green and Red, Science vs Culture in White and Brown). I don't think there's any speed modifier, Blue Sisters can just investigate Seal Sites to find Seals, though it is something that takes a few turns. Or did you mean that Blues could all have that ability, but the Tier Two bonus could be increased speed?

Also fine with Blues being less useful when there's no Last Battle.

Oh, right! This isn't the tier 0 ability of the Blues. Maybe we should make it the tier one bonus (doing it at all), and put their +2 Sight at Tier 2.

Do they work more slowly than the hunters (if the hunters are consumed in the process)?

That works for me. I'll find something to call Chronicler eventually.

a citizen of a chronicled CS!

This is something that was missing from my Seals stealing description because I'd forgotten about the "Light must control all the Seals" mechanism.

The Shadow would hold onto them to stop the Dragon from spawning. If they just willy-nilly break all of the Seals they find, then they need to contend with the Dragon unit. This is where Light-side stealing becomes more relevant, and it means that both sides have a dilemma to consider. As long as at least one Shadow player controls a Seal, the Light can't win the game. But breaking the Seals makes the Shadowspawn stronger - so it makes it more likely that they'll win longer term. This relates to some of your concerns below too.

The ideal game for the Light team is they find all of the Seals first. The Shadowspawn are at their weakest because all Seals are in tact and the Light control the Dragon. They sweep through the Shadow, Shadowspawn, and take Thakan'dar. While doing that (because it will take a while), they research all of the Seals so they know which ones they need to break and which are just decoys. Then they break all of the Seals and win the game.

The ideal game for the Shadow also starts with them finding all of the Seals. Then they break all but one of them and protect that last one as best they can. The Shadowspawn are monstrously more powerful with 6/7 Seals broken and with their help, the Light is overrun. The Shadow players now effectively have the final stages of a normal game of CiV to win, except for the whole permanent war thing.

Those are the two extremes of ideal games. (Neutral's ideal game is simpler - everyone else is slower than they are and they win a victory.) In reality, no game will happen exactly like either of the two ideal scenarios.

The Shadow's quandary is that they want to break as many Seals as they can to make the Shadowspawn stronger (since the Light fight unified and the Shadow don't, each Shadow civ is likely at a military disadvantage by themselves). But if they break all the Seals they have and the Light have the rest - now the Light can win. So how many do they break? Add into the mix that if they keep only one back, it can be stolen, it's even more risky.

The Light's challenge is to gain control of all of the Seals simultaneously, without breaking too many of them (to start with). If they break a Seal, they don't need to worry about keeping it safe anymore, but it makes it more difficult to capture Thakan'dar. The more Seals you have, the easier it is for your enemy to steal at least one of them. Interestingly, one Light civ keeping control of all Light Seals is effective against a single, very powerful Shadow civ (since searching the single civ must be done sequentially at the capital, when all searches are being performed by the same player), whereas distributing the Seals is more effective against multiple Shadow civs (since their spies can overlap with each other, expanding the search area becomes more effective).

Neutral civs also pose a significant threat to both sides, since the Alignment victory paths are more complex than a Neutral civ's, the Neutrals have more time to win before the Last Battle ends.

Right. So you have a way of making all this sound very cool when you describe it. These end-game scenarios.

So yeah, I'm back on board with all of this. Sorry to reply to this epic stuff with such brevity, but yeah, I like this framing scenarios.

I know we shouldn't dictate strategy to our players, but this is kinda trippy and complex. We should probably lay some of this out to them as the LB begins.

 

[counterpoint]

Definitely, and I think that's covered above.

For sure.

Yes, definitely. So Shadowspawn spawn rate is a big one and I imagine one of the biggest deciding factors. If all of the Seals are broken, I'm thinking that the Shadowspawn would be basically unmanageable for any single civ, unless it was a worldspanning monstrosity itself.

It doesn't effect the Shadow civs does it, this higher shadowspawn rate?

I don't suppose the Blight will expand or the more hardcore *types* of shadowspawn will show up more, right?

I'm starting to wonder if the food spoilage and all that is just too much. I mean, Bubbles of Evil are kind of our pollution, right? Maybe we should just leave it at that?

If we do have food spoilage, I say it's just a straight food penalty per city, per seal.

I think with what we're discussing above about Hunters and Aes Sedai finding the Seals, we don't want those units to become Sealbearers (who are civilians). It would also make finding Seals in place far from home very difficult, which I don't think we want to create barriers against?

I've looked through the summary and it's looking good! One thing that jumped out at me that I'll come onto later is option 2 for the "Search for a Seal" mission results - I wasn't thinking we would make that misinformation quite so explicit. That it would be more like "Your spy fails to find any information about Seals in Andor" - rather than "There are none." It's just flavor dressing rather than any mechanical difference, but it doesn't mislead the player. They can just never tell if there are actually Seals in their targeted civ.

OH. That's much better!

Yes, let's scale stealing time and research length with map size. I agree that we don't want the actual ongoing process of breaking the Seals to be the thing that makes the Last Battle victory take longer - it should take more turns if it's physically more difficult to kill your enemies on the map.

In the 1 Shadow civ versus 15 Light civs situation - ignoring the obvious "they'll just kill him" result - one civ could be remarkably effective at stealing and breaking multiple Seals if he was smart about it or the Light civs distributed them in a non-useful way.

Very interesting how the number of civs makes a very appreciable difference here. Like, say it is 1 v 15. The spy mechanics will be approximately just as hard or as easy, regardless if that 1 civ is the worst civ in the game, or the best.

Depends on if we go with "must have been discovered" or "works for any in the same city" with stealing Seals. In the latter case, you're better off moving far if your enemies have sight on the Sealbearer, which will often mean moving away from your high production cities, since they're usually in the same place.

OH! I get it now.

So, which do you prefer?

Very true and this makes a lot of sense. Research is super important and skipping out on techs to do other stuff puts your drastically behind. Let's shorten the research component and make the breaking part more difficult.

OK. Will need some heavy playtesting!

One thing I am realizing now is that, unlike the Science one, the production time is highly variable based on how the player chooses to handle it. Since it's a national project, they could dedicate all their cities to it and wrap it up very quickly, or put one one it and take forever. How should we balance/calibrate it against the Stealing - with the "all cities" method?

We could justify re-verifying because the other civ has had the Seal for a time. You don't know they haven't swapped it out for a fake. Still, that's a lot of lost research between the two sides in the process of the Seals being stolen back and forth. I think we can keep the proven "state" with the Seal itself, rather than in a per-player fashion. This is simpler to track for the player and for us.

I think it's fine if production powerhouses are the best sealbreakers.

I think so, otherwise a Seal that's stolen back and forth will cause both sides to waste a ton of research. That might be what we want? I do also think that keeping it consistent for a single Seal within the game will be simpler for players to understand too.

OK. No re-verification, then? This has the added effect of accellerating the end of the game, I think. Eventually all the seals floating around will be widely known to be authentic, and that lack of decoys means their theft may be more likely. So people will be more likely to hustle and break them.

"Your Eyes and Ears have stolen a technology"? Does it still make sense to promote Eyes and Ears to Bloodknives?

It does!

Very good idea, I like this. It makes perfect sense - the Seal isn't in an obvious location, so it's only with the foreknowledge that it is in the city that your Eyes and Ears can be targeted enough to find it.

Nice. glad this will work.

I think a lot of the stuff I said above is relevant here. There are also some more specific points.

I'm not sure if we want the Light to have to break the Seals first. Then the Light and Shadow objectives are the same, which is weird. It's also not quite how the Light really wants things to play out. The books give us a good example, in that Rand and Rodel Ituralde had captured Thakan'dar and been fighting Shadowspawn there (the Light needs to fight to keep it - the Shadowspawn don't stop spawning or even slow down) to keep them out. They succeeded when Logain broke the last of the Seals - then Rand was able to defeat Moridin and seal away the Dark One.

I don't think it's an anticlimax to capture Thakan'dar first. Once the Light have captured Thakan'dar, they need to hold onto it for the duration of the time it takes them to break the Seals. (This may be difficult.) If they break some and the Shadowspawn take it back, then they've helped make it even harder for themselves.

If the Light are confident they will take Thakan'dar, but haven't done it yet, they might break them early. The best case scenario for that is breaking all of the remaining Seals and capturing Thakan'dar in the same turn, but that's almost impossible to time correctly.

The "game" for the Light, for the start of the Last Battle, is to fight the war itself into a position where they can strike at Thakan'dar, while also trying to gain control of all of the Seals.

In the specific situation you describe, yes, it may be more effective long term for the Light to clean up all of the neutral and Shadow civs first. (In general it will be.) The variance here is whether that's possible for them to do. That will depend entirely on how the game has played out up until now. If the victories are balanced right and there are multiple players doing well (those are two preconditions, rather than one being a consequence of the other), there won't be enough time to wipe out all Shadow and Neutral civs before someone else wins.

In some cases, the Light might walk all over everybody and win the game that way. (Though I imagine the Shadowspawn would still put up a significant fight about it.) It's inevitable because of the way CiV works that sometimes the Alignments will be lopsided. Some games will have two extremely powerful civs that rule the whole world between them - and both choose Light. Or sometimes there will be a worldspanning empire (Poland in my current Emperor game) who chooses Shadow and crushes everyone underfoot by himself.

The Last Battle back-and-forth really comes into play when the players end up on relatively evenly matched sides. In most games, not many civs can take on the majority of the rest of the world at once. It's in those situations, where no one player is powerful enough to win outright on their own, that rushing to complete the Last Battle objectives becomes important and eliminates the "clear out" style you've described. The clearing out happens more when one civ can just win at its leisure.

Now one thing that I thought of when writing this is that defending Thakan'dar is much easier if the Dragon can defend it. What about the Dragon being busy once you capture the city? He heads inside Shayol Ghul to confront the Dark One and you're left filling Rodel Ituralde's role of defending him until he's done.

I think a bit of my previous assertations was based on some misremembering of exactly how things went down in the books. You're totally right that Ituralde and others were fighting an endless (and kind of losing) battle while Rand was taking his time inside, and THEN they broke the seals.

So yeah, another brief response. But I'm definitely in agreement here. What you are describing sounds very, very fun.

But yes, I love the idea that the Dragon disappears to go Fight Moridin and the DO when he takes Thakan'dar.

So, about that.

1) Can he "lose" to Moridin/DO? Is there a chance after X turns that he'll be killed again (hopefully not permanently, since the seals aren't all gone), or at least spit out?
2) Is Thakan'dar usable by the capturing civ? Or is it perpetually in disorder? Do the squares around it become Friendly? Obviously they are still blight, though.
3) What happens to the Dragon if T'd is retaken? Is he defeated?
4) I assume if steals are stolen, nothing happens, specifically?
5) can a Shadow Civ capture Thakan'dar, or is it automatically Liberated?

This is to do with the bonus received when finishing researching a fake Seal. If players have to re-research the Seal each time it changes hands then yes, we definitely need a cap. But I think I prefer the notion of the Seal only being proven once - in which case we could stick with just having that bonus since it has a built in maximum, which is the number of Seals.

proven once, so a total possible hapiness bonus of +4x# of seals. Alright.

I think it's still fine, a single luxury amounts to being able to found another city in my book, usually, but at this stage of the game, it's largely offsetting other potential negative happiness modifiers, since new cities won't be useful before the world ends.

right. good.

Yes, this sounds good. Do we want to go through what those Edicts and Resolutions are now?

Sure..... any ideas? Should be stuff like "denounce dragon" and stuff like that, right? Or claim he is a fraud and stuff.

Red Ajah tries to put Rand in a box!

It will only really happen on small maps. Half of the players would need to advance into the Era of the Dragon on or around the same turn. There's usually significant variance here of like ~10 turns at least. Sometimes it might be triggered by one runaway reaching the Fourth Age, which means he researched every tech in between, so the Dragon would have more turns to age correctly.

As for small maps, there is weirdness. On a duel map, world era is equal to the best era between the two players. We could make the lead in time longer after the world era change. My main concern is going too far - players are approaching the end of the tree and we need to have 50-ish turns of combat before they win their victories, otherwise it becomes always more efficient to go Neutral and head for a traditional victory type.

OK, at this point I'm totally going to have to just trust that you understand the mechanics, and say that we'll see how it all pans out in playtesting.

So remind me specifically the turn sequence your suggesting, for the summary?

And yes, let's go ahead and tweak for Duel maps.

Definitely, I agree. If one player is racing ahead, they're better off just going Neutral and winning before the Last Battle truly gets up to pace. The way we'd discussed it before, it would be impossible to win the science victory before the Last Battle even started, because it requires Fourth Age techs, and any reaching the Fourth Age triggers the Last Battle. But like we've discussed, the Last Battle shouldn't be an on/off switch, so a science player who's way ahead should be able to win the game comfortably before the Shadowspawn become a problem.

Diplo is gated on when the world leader elections start occurring. Which should be the Era of the Dragon, right? (Since that's our Modern equivalent?) So the Last Battle will trigger before anyone can win that, but someone who owns all of the city-states will just win the first election and be done.

Culture take radically different amounts of time depending on your opponents. If a civ is good enough at producing Prestige and everyone else is terrible at Culture, they might win long before the Last Battle starts. Without somehow gating Cultural influence on tech (which I don't think we want to do, as BNW didn't), I don't see this being changeable. Given how unlikely it is, I think it's fine.

Wow, I'd never really thought about how most of the victories have gates that essentially preclude them from ever occuring pre-LB. So, it's impossible for a civ to be planning on going Light and win a Science victory before the LB even starts. I get this, but it also kinda bums me out. I don't love the idea of a civ having to go neutral and potentially violate their roleplaying in order to win. But, then again, if they were really really roleplaying, they'd put aside the desire for an empty science victory and demand a role in winning the LB.

So yeah, I'm on board, I think.

The bonuses are intended to be an ongoing threshold thing - having contributed hammers in the past doesn't help anyone in the present. Each project has levels of bonuses that are unlocked by when "X hammers per turn" are being contributed to that project. This prevents the "keep back and buff up" approach from being effective, though we could go with sums of production instead of measuring against per-turn, if we thought there were good reasons to do so.

I agree it could be overwhelming to have them all available at once. I'd be reluctant to introduce another set of voting mechanics or anything like that though - they become quite complex quite fast. We could gate each project on specific techs? So a few are available by default, but only the civs beyond a certain tech can contribute to others? This means only very science-y, already-winning civs (who optimality-wise shouldn't have picked Light since they would win as Neutral faster) would have them all available at once.

Oh, right. I understand much better now. I can see it working either of the two ways. So, either:
1) hammers/turn put into something = that benefit for those turns.
2) hammer stockpile creates bonus for some number of turns.

I'm kind of torn on this. Number one makes sense and will certainy prevent abuse, but it also means that many cities will be forever tied up in providing a bonus for everybody. Also, there's the issue of one guy trying to provide the bonus, but nobody else is cooperating, so he's wasting his hammers as he's never able to make the threshold.

I think the sum method can be made to be less abuse-able by making it short bursts of time. Like you unlock a bonus for ten turns, or something.

I don't know. which do you prefer?

As far as gating each project individually. Yeah, I think that's fine. The other option is to have them on a rotating basis, which has synergy with the "per turn" method. Every ten turns, we could randomly draw four or five different projects to offer, or something like that.

I think this is a confusion about the mechanics of these projects vs the World's Fair and stuff like that? I don't think we want there to be any ranking of contributors. Once over a certain production threshold for a certain project, all Light civs have the bonus for that threshold until the production being put into that project is reduced. (This would happen when civs change their cities to build something else.) That's more in the spirit of the cooperative nature of the Light-side alliance.

Yeah, i was for sure getting confused. Don't know what i was thinking about faith bonuses and such.

Those names work for me.

OK, let's hope we can come up with a better cultural one sometime.

Also, what if we changed the Hold Back the Shadow one to not be improved unit training speed - to me, that's just trading hammers for hammers. What if, instead, it was +X EXP to created military units?

Why not exceed 50% if they got very close to Turning the Tower? They will still be losing Sisters.

That's what I'm thinking too - there isn't really a sensible measure of how many Light Sisters should be remaining. Keeping 75% seems sensible to me, but that conflicts with the Shadow 50% max above.

Losing half of your Sisters seems like a good compromise. Whether the Tower chooses Light or Shadow, they will be suitably annoyed at any civ that decides to sit back and watch the conflict.

OK. I'd say let's have the Black sisters cap at 66% or something like that. I'd say if they didn't complete a single turning objective it should be like 1 or 2 sisters, though.

I'd say let's have the Light keep 50% if they lose. 75% seems way too good.

As far as Neutrals... hmmm... 50 could be good. I could also imagine it being slightly less.

This should go in the diplo summary, right? Not he LB?

Oaths + Compulsion on top of whatever they usually had works for me. I completely agree about Shadow civs needing the variety of abilities for the Sisters, so let's make Black Ajah a layer on top of their existing units (the ones they keep anyway). This gives the player more continuity too - their cadre of Aes Sedai isn't being replaced by a whole new suite of units, it's just that some of their existing ones revealed they share an allegiance to the Shadow.

OK. This is good... though a bit weird in flavor (those Aes Sedai couldn't *all* be black, right?)

Is this in the Diplo summary or the Channeling? Where is best?

Argh! Mechanically nothing resets them at the moment and doing so would have some interesting ramifications for which Ajahs had majority in the Tower. Resetting them would also run counter to the way we're handling diplomacy - you can do stuff that annoys the Tower in general without losing influence with your Ajahs, you just get modifiers on any future influence that makes it difficult to maintain your current standing. But there's no more "extended future" at this point in the game.

I'm thinking we could reset the Ajah influences of players on the opposite side of the Last Battle from the Tower, but their Aes Sedai could maintain tier two bonuses (the extra abilities)?

Hmmm... so torn on this. I can see the rationale behind both sides.

Part of me wants to keep them where they are. But then, those relationships will likely deteriorate very quickly since the civ has such a terrible overall relationship with the tower.

An flavor argument could be made to justify the huge immediate changes in tower influence-composition due to the mass reseting of all shadow civs: those ajahs lost a lot of influence because a bunch of their sisters fled as darkfriends. Makes sense.

Also, resetting has the effect of potentially making several ajahs "up for grabs" again. Do we like this?

What about neutral civs? Do they still have the ability to interact with the tower as normal?

In any case, I could see us just "freezing" a Losing-side's Aes Sedai abilities at the point they were when the LB started. Does that work.

Similarly, what happens if a Losing-side sister dies? Are they replaced? It is somehow different? These sisters fled and joined your side. There's no "quota" from the Tower anymore.

OK. you wrote this here like it was your comment, but this was actually something I wrote that you didn't respond to, and must have unquoted somehow. This is actually a pretty important thing to figure out though. Whatever we decide about % of sisters that stay around should largely depend on whether those sisters would ever come back when killed.

Same question should be asked of Neutral civs as well.

We're not being that specific - the choices include the two that represent Mat and Perrin, but those aren't the only choices. This is very similar to what I'm saying about the Dragon - if in different timelines a different Dragon were born, he would be born with different companions that work with him. Maybe a Min-like seer from the start.

Alright. that could work.

This wouldn't be Logain or Taim as they exist in the books timeline. It may not be any of them - it might be someone who was never born in the books timeline. They're just close enough examples of people who wouldn't need history to be that different for them to become the Dragon. Other people would need more drastic divergences, but they're still possible.

I think it would still be the same Age - the Dragon rises up, a reincarnation of Lews Therin (since the Age of Legends has already happened in any of our available game-timelines) who defeats the Dark One and reseals him. (Or fails and the Pattern unravels. In which case... the game uninstalls itself? There can be no future timelines! ) So the Dragon is just whoever the Wheel spins out as the reincarnation of Lews Therin. That was Rand in the book timeline, but an alternate timeline may have different prophecies, as you've said, or just different people being born in circumstances that fulfill the same prophecies.

There is something I've wondered about quite a bit. The Heroes call Rand by Lews Therin, since he's the reincarnation of Lews Therin. But Artur Hawkwing is a *role* that the Wheel spins out into the Pattern when it needs to make changes to the overall weave - this is what the Wheel uses all of the Heroes for. And yet, Artur Hawkwing was the name of the guy who became High King and ruled the Westlands. (Lews Therin is obviously not Rand's name.) So is Artur Hawkwing the recurring role, or the man? Or does the spirit of the recurring role become the mortal who occupied that role last? So in the Fourth Age, when the Wheel needs to spin him out again, is there no longer a Lews Therin role, and instead there's a Rand al'thor role? But that Rand al'thor role is fulfilled by <insert other name>. And once he's fulfilled his role, that role takes on his name?

Gaidal Cain and Birgitte Silverbow seem to imply that the role name is constant, taking on different monikers each time they become mortal. (In which case, Rand al'Thor will die and Lews Therin will continue to exist as the role the Pattern spins out - occasionally choosing to make the role and the mortal the same actual person.) Unless their roles are remaining the same and Birgitte and Gaidal were the names of their last incarnations.

Back on topic - we do agree! Let's call him "the Dragon". I find the theory conversation very interesting though!

All conjecture, I'm just not sure how it works.

Wow, yeah. The truth is, I have a feeling this all frankly doesn't make any sense, logically, when strained. RJ had some cool ideas, but like most sci-fi/fantasy, they create a lot of loopholes and stuff.

It is weird that everybody calls him Lews Therin, and people talk of him as the "original" dragon, but elsewhere people talk about things endlessly repeating, and this battle raging for countless ages. So obviously Lews wasn't the original, then, was he? Merely the last. That gives creedence to your idea that the previous age's name and personality is what is embraced by the wheel. That's kind of silly, though. With that in mind, there's really no reason to expect that Brigitte has really always been of that name, though - it's just what she's been known by for "recent" history, and besides, I get the idea that she (like Hawkwing) is perhaps a Third Age being, historically. Who knows what she was like during the AoL or before.

 

[counterpoint]

It seems to be pretty good - I've got a new option on my right-click menu when I right click a form that expands to contain all of the text I've written into that form. (truncated so they fit, so they all just say

I've installed it!

So, to be clear, was the weird spacing I had a good thing or a bad thing?

Sounds good to me - what do we think the limits should be for each ability?

this is in regards to the Dragon abilities. I don't understand the question, though - I am thinking one use per player turn.

We could make it so that the Dragon can't move every time? Or moving him is something that can only be done once per player and they have to consume a CiV turn of their "Dragon turn" doing it? I'd say a lot of players would elect to leave him where he was if it meant he couldn't act that turn and he was making a difference - unless they were in dire need of his abilities.

Ah, right. So you're thinking the player can move him around and still maintain control of him. I was thinking that you put him in a city, and he's stuck there until your turn is up. I can see the coolness of what you're doing, but it seems nye impossible to catch him if he can spend an action moving.

There are a few flavor options:

"Elect a Field of Battle" (Like he did with the Field of Merrilor - choosing a location in which to mount an offensive against the Shadow)
"Build a Palace" (This makes less sense since it's repeatable - but he's choosing a seat of ruling)
"Become a King" (Makes even less repeatability sense, but like he became King of Illian, he's becoming King of this civ. Also question why the player is still the leader then.)
"Appoint a Steward" (Makes more repeatability sense, the Dragon is choosing someone to watch over this land that he will return to check on, like Darlin Sisnera or Berelain.)

I think "Elect a Field of Battle" makes the most sense. "The Dragon declares this the site of a gathering of forces against the Shadow and will return here when the Seals have been brought under the protection of the Light"?

OK, I like this, but I might suggest we tweak it a little. Something about the word "elect" seems ill-fitting.

"Proclaim a Field of Battle?" "Appoint a Base of Operation" something like that? What about something like "Appoint a Standardbearer" or something a bit more outside of the box?

Another thing I've just thought of - do we want to do anything with super-Myrddraal like Shaidar Haran?

Ah, if so, I'd say he's a one-off thing, hanging out near Thakan'dar. Just a really powerful Myrddraal, maybe. Kind aweird, though, because really he meets his end inside the Pit with Rand and Moridin. And we don't appear to be representing that battle at all.

How many forsaken do we expect to appear? Will some be ressurected with new names?

Agreed on a promotion to get rid of the damage. Warders and Aes Sedai sound like a good place to start with those abilities. Possibly some of the borderlander civ UUs. I think things like this that make Thakan'dar difficult to capture are good - even with the terrain advantage, it's very difficult to defend a single city from multiple players working together to attack it.

nice

A reason to build forts, hallelujah! I love this idea, forts are almost always a waste of time in base CiV and this actually gives them a clear and useful bonus. The combat bonus is relevant too, since the Blight will be a known hostile border for the majority of the game.

I confess I have built zero forts in CiV. You may recall that my disinterest in forts was so great that I didn't build a single citadel until you informed me of its land-stealing abilities.

From a technical perspective it would be much easier if the Blight never receded, because of the limitations in the way features work graphically. Having the Blight recede like this is possible, but requires a degree of fudging with fake improvements and stuff.

We could make it so it didn't have resources, but we wouldn't have to. Resources can coexist with Blight, just improvements can't.

OK, your call. No blight recession, then?

Oh, totally misunderstood - I thought you said it destroyed resources. But, I guess if it doesn't recede, this is irrelevant - you can't get the resource if you can't build an improvement on it).

Not really, let's go for it. Angreal cache, then?

Cool. Is that the name we like?

How shall we do that model?

That link leads me to a post about wolf pigs, which is somewhat hilarious. (Apparently they're "capar".) We have some evidence that they're peppers from the name. Or do you mean that peppers might not even mean the same thing in WoT as in reality? *mindblown*

Well, it is rather odd that they know American English. What are the odds? Especially since the Old tongue doesn't appear to be linguistically related at all.

I'd say we can go with icy blue or red (green would be too boring). Depends on how crazy we feel when the time comes!

I was speaking more mechanically - that we'd want a resolution higher than 4 grades of "evilness". But I can try for the full list now!

In the middle (+/- 100): Neutral

In order (moving away from Neutral), for the Shadow: Mischievous, Suspicious, Distrusted, Vicious, Hateful, Corrupted, Damned, Malevolent

(Optional others for the final few: Villainous, Diabolical, Evil. Some that might fit lower down: Nefarious, Malicious, Vile.)

In order (moving away from Neutral), for the Light: Wholesome, Honest, Honorable, Devoted, Righteous, Virtuous, Venerated, Resplendent

(Others for the end: Holy (left off for religious connotations), Divine (same). Potential for lower down the list: Revered.)

The general theme of how they were chosen is the first 4 on each side are the kind of usual progressions you see in actual people who exhibit good and bad moral behavior. The latter four on each side embody more supernatural implications of the morality in question - words that would only be used to describe the best or worst of humanity, and much more often used to describe fantastical creatures or beings.

I can see arguments to shuffle some of them around, but I think once there's a defined order, players will get used to it quite quickly.

OK, thanks for doing this. Many of these look good.

I still assert that these names don't really articulate how evil or good you are, on a specific level. True, Mischievous is less back than Malevolent, but is it entirely intuitive to a player that Righteous is *less* good than Virtuous?

That issue is what I've been trying to get at. It's not that we can't find a bunch of words, its that I don't think said words are immediately meaningful to a plyer - they have to memorize the sequence. A set of four (instead of 8) would probably lead us to a set of words that were very clearly ordered in goodness/badness.

As far as the lists themselves, I'd suggest only the following tweaks, based mostly on words I find more compelling, and seem a bit more ordered in a line. I found this most challenging with Light.

Shadow: Mischievous, Dishonest, Selfish, Malicious, Notorious, Vicious, Malevolent, Diabolical

I could see Dishonest being put back to Suspicious, and Diabolical simply being Evil. Could also work Damned back in to the last few if you want it to be more supernatural.

Neutral is fine.

Light: Wholesome, Honest, Devoted, Pure Righteous, Benevolent, Enlightened

Ok, that sounds good. Is Crafts Units and Industry Buildings? Or the other way around?

I'd say we need a new name for crafts. Industry is good for buildings. Crafts, IMO, evokes our GW.

How about "Province of Training" or something? Too stupid? Province of Expertise? Province of Discipline?

Very true, they don't build up over the short time and help you going forward - they just temporarily make you better, which isn't quite the idea. We could add a modifier to Ajah and Tower influence gains, but I'd be fine with leaving the Tower out of it.

I say leave them out of it.

Agreed, it won't be evenly distributed for other player numbers. I think you did a full breakdown of what numbers we could use for each player count somewhere before. I'll have a look for that after I finish this post!

Yeah, I think I maybe did.... I tried searching and couldn't find it though!

Very good point. Yes, let's make it so that which bonuses are available for each significant/mediocre/poor slot is chosen automatically and the High King just chooses which ones of those to give out to the Provinces based on the slots available to him.

I've edited the diplo summary.

nice!

Cool, Alignment, Trolloc Wars, and High King are all separate disableable thing'ems much like "No Barbarians". I've edited the High King section of the diplo summary to reflect that.

nice

You mean we should wait for the wars to end to trigger the razing? I think I quite like that plan actually - it allows the cities to change hands without necessarily being lost during the course of the war.

Let's let the razing continue at normal speed when the Trolloc Wars end.

Eh.... Actually, that's not what I mean. I kind of like your suggestion, though, but it creates a big problem - those cities will be very easy to recapture at that point, as all the Trollocs will flee and it'll be defenseless again.

I was just saying the razing could start whenever, but that it would move very slowly, set up to only finish when the Wars ended.

Maybe it's a good idea to have them all trigger to raze a few turns *before* they end. Certainly, if a city was captured by the Shadowspawn on the final turn of the TW, though, it would have to do a normal razing cycle.

Sure, the game can decide on a length when it starts (but not reveal that info to the player).

great.

I've never played as Maria before, I'm steadily working my way through all of the leaders for the achievements. Yeah, the penalties and bonuses are inversely related to difficulty - Prince is the "no change" level. Settler and Chieftain give you happiness bonuses (among other things), and King and above give you penalties. The AI gets penalties/bonuses the opposite way around when you choose a difficulty.

Poland's got a tech lead, but it's not too far - if I can take over Attilla-land then I should be able to out-tactics him in a war. I'll probably lose before it gets to that though. He's already captured some cities on my continent from Japan. :O

haven't played in a few days. No updates

Why, you ask?

What free time can there be with such rampant Wotmod posting?

Yes, I think we could do one settler per city lost. There's still a definite loss for the player - an established city is much more valuable than a settler, but it at least helps them get back on their feet a bit.

Two workers on bronze and the rest all sounds good to me!

OK. I like it. To be clear, this is one settler per city lost because of the shadowspawn. civ-wars don't count.

Also, what if your city is captured by another civ? Do you still get a settler?

Or what if you lose one, but capture somebody else's city? Do you still get one?

Cool. They should be easy enough to tweak once we playtest it since these numbers will be loaded out of the DB, the code will just dole out whatever yield it reads in from there.

great!

Oh, I was thinking this would be percentage of damage dealt, not of his total HP. Otherwise it falls apart if the False Dragon ever gets healed (because more damage was dealt to him than he has total HP). So there would be no reason to whittle him down first - Gentling off full health (which probably has a low success rate) when no one else had ever attacked him would give you the full yield divided as normal, plus the Gentling bonus. If anyone else had attacked him first, they would get their normal reward (when you successfully Gentle him) as if he'd been killed.

So say a False dragon pops up and you deal 20 damage to him. Then I come along, deal 10 damage to him and then Gentle him. You get 67% of the "normal" reward. I get 33% of it and the Gentling bonus.

Sound good?

OK, I *think* that sounds good, but let me make sure. What happens if you *do* gentle him when he is at 100% health? How much would you get?

What if you do 20 damage to him, and then I gentle him without doing any damage at all? What do I get?

Is gentling counting his remaining HP as "damage" you've caused?

It would be quite strange, because what if they became separated while out on the water? What if the Myrddraal is killed after they make landfall somewhere? Now they're stranded?

We could simply enable embarkation for the Shadowspawn on known water-logged map types.

hmm... how do you want to handle this?

The truth is, waterworld maps don't gel well with our mod, I'd guess. There simply aren't very many sea-based civs. We're going to have to "force it" to get enough naval UUs, I think (Tear, Illian, care to take one for the team, ladies?).

Very good call, yes. Let's make it a part of each of the starting policy trees, that there's some policy that's good against Shadowspawn for the relevant type of civ that should adopt each policy.

Bueno. Should we also have era appropriate units and/or the boost to Walls? Or... maybe that's what these are? Maybe the tradition one is a defensive thing adn the Liberty one is offensive?

We do need to be careful, though. If we do it this way, it's essentially the same as "normalizing" those bonuses, since every player would likely have at least one of them. If we wanted something more localized to the TW itself, we need to do era-units/buildings.

Not aside from affecting their Light-ness I suppose? Choosing against-type for the Last Battle gives you penalties, does choosing in line with your actiuons give you bonuses (could be just happiness)? It could be an opportunity cost that way.

OK, sounds good.

Dang! Uber posts done!

 

[S3rgeus]

Quick reply about artwork!

Easier to find??!!

...

(Pardon me, I'm trying to process that. Error 404 and all that.)

...

OK, I think I've got it. You quoted me... at the top... of a blinking Tower of Babel of text! Which, might I mention, I am automatically directed to the BOTTOM of upon viewing the latest post in this thread from My Account page.

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...

Joking aside, I owe you a very big thank you for rescuing Nexus Buddy.
Do you intend to have features spreading ingame? (I know, blight example and all that. But I know Pazyryk worked around that at least, since I've got an Éa save game where all my cities got surrounded by blight. So I dunno if you're using that as well - no I will NOT go looking back through the older pages to see what your plans for blight and whatnot are!)

You are correct that Shadowspawn would appear to be the sort of units you would need custom models for. But "repurposing" civ5 models is also the sort of thing you can request in my thread, if you need different textures. Say you need coats of arms on the civ5 Knight for example.

A "Tower of Babel of text" - I really like that description!

No problem about NexusBuddy, I'm glad to see it's been put to such good use by the community.

I saw the Pazyryk was using a feature called Blight, but I didn't know he'd gotten it to spread ingame! He did a lot more tweaking with height maps to make it conform to the ground better than the examples I made on the Custom Feature Art thread. Is Pazyryk's Blight in Éa? I'll have to take a look at what he did on there.

The plan for WoTMod is to have Blight be a feature that spreads at some times throughout the game. If it's possible to have actual features spread then that would be ideal, but if not I'm happy to fudge it with improvements, since it makes sense in the Wheel of Time-verse that Blight would destroy improvements.

I've posted a few requests on your unit workshop thread, whenever you have time to look at them that would be awesome.

really quick response:

There's also the Aes Sedai! and other channelers.

Oh, and don't forget Ogier!

As far as the seanchan beasts... we'll need to wait to see which ones we'll be needing.

I've requested the Shadowspawn in Civitar's thread - I wanted to have a quick back and forth about the appearance we want for these units before making a request for a model!

The Aes Sedai: In-universe the Aes Sedai are only Ajah color-coded by their shawl, not their entire outfit, and even then only when they're within the Tower. I think a shawl-colored-only model could be quite hard to differentiate from CiV's camera perspective - do we want to go for a colored-coded dress instead? I could see us going for the shawl-only approach though, if we think it will be visible enough. But if the shawl is color coded, what color dress should they wear?

Ogier: what are the Ogier units? Do we want a worker-style unit? What about Ogier with axes like the Seanchan use? I think our best source for an Ogier's appearance will be Seamas Gallagher's portrait of Loial. In fact, Seamus Gallagher's Wheel of Time work is pretty awesome across the board.

 

[counterpoint]

Quick reply about artwork!
I've requested the Shadowspawn in Civitar's thread - I wanted to have a quick back and forth about the appearance we want for these units before making a request for a model!

Yeah, saw a look at what you posted. All looks good. Any other shadowspawn that we decide to use (Worms, etc.) can happen way later.

The Aes Sedai: In-universe the Aes Sedai are only Ajah color-coded by their shawl, not their entire outfit, and even then only when they're within the Tower. I think a shawl-colored-only model could be quite hard to differentiate from CiV's camera perspective - do we want to go for a colored-coded dress instead? I could see us going for the shawl-only approach though, if we think it will be visible enough. But if the shawl is color coded, what color dress should they wear?

hmmm.... I'm definitely tempted to go with whole-dress coloring instead of the shawl. Of course, not all sisters wear dresses of their ajah color, but it seems even fewer wear their shawls when their out and about. And some of the most visible sisters - nyneave, moaraine, many reds - do seem to dress in their colors.

I can see us doing the shawls, and then I guess white or some other boring color would fit the dress. But I think I prefer the whole clothes be color swapped. I assume they will be the same model, right?

What about Black Sisters? Could they have like a black shall or some black something appear on top of their normal coloring?

Ogier: what are the Ogier units? Do we want a worker-style unit? What about Ogier with axes like the Seanchan use? I think our best source for an Ogier's appearance will be Seamas Gallagher's portrait of Loial. In fact, Seamus Gallagher's Wheel of Time work is pretty awesome across the board.

Yeah, that guys art looks great!

As far as ogier. Yeah, we'll definitely need a worker-style unit that we can use for GP or something. As far as the seanchan... I'm not sure if we'll have Gardeners as a UU. We certainly could, though. And I think they would use axes, right?
But I imagine we would need some sort of ogier combat unit for defense of the Steddings themselves. I recall use deciding that if you *do* go to war with the stedding, they have some cool defenses.

What are we doing about the "regular units'? Are we going to recycle the WoT art, or are we going to modify it, or have new ones created? What about GP and stuff?

 

[Civitar]

OK, so I'm unfamiliar with the whole Aes Sedai thing but I'd like to clarify some things...
Is each Ajah (the alignment of an Aes Sedai, right??) it's own city-state or something like that?
In which case, there is only one model needed because I can give her a teamcolor cape and hood or something. If not, I can still make the teamcolor version, then artificially fill in the colors.

I would advise for best color display to make the dress white, then give her a colored cape and hood (assuming they wear hoods that is).

 

[counterpoint]

OK, so I'm unfamiliar with the whole Aes Sedai thing but I'd like to clarify some things...
Is each Ajah (the alignment of an Aes Sedai, right??) it's own city-state or something like that?
In which case, there is only one model needed because I can give her a teamcolor cape and hood or something. If not, I can still make the teamcolor version, then artificially fill in the colors.

I would advise for best color display to make the dress white, then give her a colored cape and hood (assuming they wear hoods that is).

Good questions!

the Ajahs are basically the sub-factions within the Aes Sedai. But practically speaking, they're various "specialties" among magic-users. Like the Yellows are the healers, the Greens are the warriors, the Browns are the historians, etc.

But they aren't separate in any large way in-game - no different city-states or anything, and they'll never war with one another.

In-game, when the player gets an Aes Sedai unit, they'll simply choose which Ajah they'd like, based on which abilities they'd like. So the color differentiation is essentially so you know which kind of Aes Sedai unit you're dealing with when one walks by.

There will also be influence-tracking with the various Ajahs, but that will most definitely not matter for the units.

the only other thing is that some of the Aes Sedai are "evil," and known as the "Black Ajah" - but these are still considered part of their other Ajah, they're just ALSO black. So, like, you'd be Green AND Black. How could we show that visually?

 

[Civitar]

Good questions!

the Ajahs are basically the sub-factions within the Aes Sedai. But practically speaking, they're various "specialties" among magic-users. Like the Yellows are the healers, the Greens are the warriors, the Browns are the historians, etc.

But they aren't separate in any large way in-game - no different city-states or anything, and they'll never war with one another.

In-game, when the player gets an Aes Sedai unit, they'll simply choose which Ajah they'd like, based on which abilities they'd like. So the color differentiation is essentially so you know which kind of Aes Sedai unit you're dealing with when one walks by.

There will also be influence-tracking with the various Ajahs, but that will most definitely not matter for the units.

the only other thing is that some of the Aes Sedai are "evil," and known as the "Black Ajah" - but these are still considered part of their other Ajah, they're just ALSO black. So, like, you'd be Green AND Black. How could we show that visually?

Alright - after looking through the WoT wiki it appears to me that the Aes Sedai just wear robes of the same color as their Ajah; while this may not be 100% accurate to the books, it will be easier to distinguish ingame. Since all civs can acquire Aes Sedai units the teamcolor approach is blown out of the water.
So I'd say to basically make Aes Sedai a woman in a teamcolor dress with a cape and hood matching her Ajah. Evil Aes Sedai can have a black dress instead.
Sound good?

 

[S3rgeus]

Good questions!

the Ajahs are basically the sub-factions within the Aes Sedai. But practically speaking, they're various "specialties" among magic-users. Like the Yellows are the healers, the Greens are the warriors, the Browns are the historians, etc.

But they aren't separate in any large way in-game - no different city-states or anything, and they'll never war with one another.

In-game, when the player gets an Aes Sedai unit, they'll simply choose which Ajah they'd like, based on which abilities they'd like. So the color differentiation is essentially so you know which kind of Aes Sedai unit you're dealing with when one walks by.

There will also be influence-tracking with the various Ajahs, but that will most definitely not matter for the units.

the only other thing is that some of the Aes Sedai are "evil," and known as the "Black Ajah" - but these are still considered part of their other Ajah, they're just ALSO black. So, like, you'd be Green AND Black. How could we show that visually?

and

Alright - after looking through the WoT wiki it appears to me that the Aes Sedai just wear robes of the same color as their Ajah; while this may not be 100% accurate to the books, it will be easier to distinguish ingame. Since all civs can acquire Aes Sedai units the teamcolor approach is blown out of the water.
So I'd say to basically make Aes Sedai a woman in a teamcolor dress with a cape and hood matching her Ajah. Evil Aes Sedai can have a black dress instead.
Sound good?

Thanks for looking into this further, Civitar - awesome that you're reading the wiki too. (I'd highly recommend the books if you like Fantasy!)

Quick gameplay detail that affects this though, I thought we were doing the Black Ajah as an add-on to the existing Ajahs, which would make it a promotion rather than a separate unit type? A separate unit type would require new art, but a promoted unit wouldn't necessarily. (Though I think we can swap out unit art styles at runtime? Not sure about that one.) A separate unit type for Black Ajah Sisters wouldn't be ideal because then you'd need all the combinations: Green Black Sister, Blue Black Sister, etc. (Anything that relied on unit type would need to be doubled up for all combinations in order for them to have the same common abilities. A bunch of knock on effects that create new work and easy-to-misconfigure bugs.)

Do we need a visual differentiation between Black Ajah Sisters and their corresponding normal Ajah ones? I can see some value in being able to immediately recognize a unit that can use Compulsion, but I think that wouldn't be too hard to track based purely on its owners Last Battle choice. If we can swap out the unit's model without replacing it with a different type of unit type, then having a unique appearance for the Black Ajah would make more sense. (Even then we'd probably need an additional 7 - one to cover each combination of Black + normal Ajah, because the normal Ajah will greatly affect the unit's capabilities as well and players should be able to tell them apart at a glance.)

I like the idea using both teamcolor and Ajah-colored skins. I'd forgotten about teamcolor - it definitely plays a big part in making the units vary! I wonder if a teamcolor dress would become the emphasized color for the unit though (particularly if a player's teamcolor were also a color for a different Ajah) - would we consider a teamcolor cape and hood, with an Ajah-colored dress? Arguably Ajah-colored hood/cape could evoke the shawl, but an Ajah-colored dress would be more recognizable from a distance. Counterpoint, do you have any opinions on which approach you think fits Aes Sedai better?

Also, it would be awesome if the Aes Sedai's attacking animation could be throwing fireballs (something like the catapult city attack, possibly). I gather this is possible by setting up the right animation bones in the model, but I never got it working.

 

[counterpoint]

and
Do we need a visual differentiation between Black Ajah Sisters and their corresponding normal Ajah ones? I can see some value in being able to immediately recognize a unit that can use Compulsion, but I think that wouldn't be too hard to track based purely on its owners Last Battle choice. If we can swap out the unit's model without replacing it with a different type of unit type, then having a unique appearance for the Black Ajah would make more sense. (Even then we'd probably need an additional 7 - one to cover each combination of Black + normal Ajah, because the normal Ajah will greatly affect the unit's capabilities as well and players should be able to tell them apart at a glance.)

I like the idea using both teamcolor and Ajah-colored skins. I'd forgotten about teamcolor - it definitely plays a big part in making the units vary! I wonder if a teamcolor dress would become the emphasized color for the unit though (particularly if a player's teamcolor were also a color for a different Ajah) - would we consider a teamcolor cape and hood, with an Ajah-colored dress? Arguably Ajah-colored hood/cape could evoke the shawl, but an Ajah-colored dress would be more recognizable from a distance. Counterpoint, do you have any opinions on which approach you think fits Aes Sedai better?

Also, it would be awesome if the Aes Sedai's attacking animation could be throwing fireballs (something like the catapult city attack, possibly). I gather this is possible by setting up the right animation bones in the model, but I never got it working.

Definitely I don't think the Black Ajah differentiation is worth making extra unit models for. A given "Shadow" civ would only have Black Sisters, so I suppose it'd be obvious enough that that is the case.

Is it maybe possible to add black color to the unit icon thingy (you know, the one floating above the model)? If not, I say don't worry about it.

Totally never noticed teamcolor before. I'm only figuring out what it means reading both of you talk about it here! Yes I agree that that sounds like it would be cool to work in.

I have no thoughts as to how we should best color-scheme the Sisters. I'll leave it in the hands of Civitar, an actual artist, who knows of such things. I say just do whichever looks *best* (if that's not vague enough!). I tend to be helpful in offering feedback on visual stuff, but am usually kind of unhelpful in planning it out.

Ask me to create a complex interrelationship between the audio and musical cues of the various Ajahs, and I'm your man!
(don't ask me to do that, though, please...)

 

[S3rgeus]

Definitely I don't think the Black Ajah differentiation is worth making extra unit models for. A given "Shadow" civ would only have Black Sisters, so I suppose it'd be obvious enough that that is the case.

Is it maybe possible to add black color to the unit icon thingy (you know, the one floating above the model)? If not, I say don't worry about it.

Totally never noticed teamcolor before. I'm only figuring out what it means reading both of you talk about it here! Yes I agree that that sounds like it would be cool to work in.

I have no thoughts as to how we should best color-scheme the Sisters. I'll leave it in the hands of Civitar, an actual artist, who knows of such things. I say just do whichever looks *best* (if that's not vague enough!). I tend to be helpful in offering feedback on visual stuff, but am usually kind of unhelpful in planning it out.

Ask me to create a complex interrelationship between the audio and musical cues of the various Ajahs, and I'm your man!
(don't ask me to do that, though, please...)

Cool, sounds like we don't need a Black Ajah variant of the unit model then!

We could put a black marking in the unit's hovering icon (which has a name, that I forget) but by convention all of those are only two colors - both of which are determined by the civ that owns the unit. I don't think we'd want to break that convention.

Teamcolor is one of those things that you only notice subconsciously if you're not looking for it. I've seen some custom units that don't have teamcolor and at first they looked unusual, it was difficult to realize what was different!

I can see good arguments either way for the teamcolor/Ajah-color arrangement for the dress/hood-cape. I think I'm in favor of Ajah-color dress and teamcolor hood-cape, but Civitar's the expert - if you think the other way will look better, Civitar, then let's go with that!

 

[Civitar]

(S3rgeus, I sent you a PM this afternoon. I seem to recall you aren't that great about checking your inbox, hence this reminder.)

Geez, guys, gimme time to answer.

If the only difference between Black Ajah Aes Sedai and other Aes Sedai is a promotion, then there is no point in making a different unit graphic.
I wholeheartedly request that you not mess with the colors on the icon above the unit, because that is the main way of telling what civ it comes from. It is possible, however, to put a little 16x16 promotion icon (the ones without the background, just the gold symbol) around the edges of the unit flag (that's what we call the icon floating above their heads). You might want to look into that, if there is a particular emblem of the Black Ajah you could use that to mark them in that way.

Teamcolor is like the artistic touch on unit models. Particularly if the unit model gets used by more than one civ. Many vanilla units do not display it very prominently - notice the Longswordsman, who only has a teamcolor feather on his helmet and nothing else... My elf pack is just now halfway updated with TC.

Teamcolor is usually in the form of a subtle accent color - for example, the vanilla Civ5 Warrior has it as a sash and the Great General has it in his flag. I generally prefer to make the teamcolor more visible, as in the uniforms of Riflemen and whatnot (how I hate dealing with camo units...). So I'd really rather go with the Ajah-color cape+hood and teamcolor dress. Particularly as the cape and hood is all you'll see half the time - remember how small these models are for most people playing at normal modification. And to my mind, which Ajah a unit belongs to is more important than what team it belongs to, which can already be seen in the unit flag.

 

[S3rgeus]

(S3rgeus, I sent you a PM this afternoon. I seem to recall you aren't that great about checking your inbox, hence this reminder.)

Sorry I missed that earlier, I've sent you a reply! Thanks for the reminder!

Geez, guys, gimme time to answer.

If the only difference between Black Ajah Aes Sedai and other Aes Sedai is a promotion, then there is no point in making a different unit graphic.
I wholeheartedly request that you not mess with the colors on the icon above the unit, because that is the main way of telling what civ it comes from. It is possible, however, to put a little 16x16 promotion icon (the ones without the background, just the gold symbol) around the edges of the unit flag (that's what we call the icon floating above their heads). You might want to look into that, if there is a particular emblem of the Black Ajah you could use that to mark them in that way.

Teamcolor is like the artistic touch on unit models. Particularly if the unit model gets used by more than one civ. Many vanilla units do not display it very prominently - notice the Longswordsman, who only has a teamcolor feather on his helmet and nothing else... My elf pack is just now halfway updated with TC.

Teamcolor is usually in the form of a subtle accent color - for example, the vanilla Civ5 Warrior has it as a sash and the Great General has it in his flag. I generally prefer to make the teamcolor more visible, as in the uniforms of Riflemen and whatnot (how I hate dealing with camo units...). So I'd really rather go with the Ajah-color cape+hood and teamcolor dress. Particularly as the cape and hood is all you'll see half the time - remember how small these models are for most people playing at normal modification. And to my mind, which Ajah a unit belongs to is more important than what team it belongs to, which can already be seen in the unit flag.

Awesome, that all sounds good to me. Teamcolor dress + Ajah-color hood-cape it is! You're very correct that the Ajah color is the more important of the two.

A promotion-like icon around the unit flag (thank you for the name!) is very interesting - does BNW do that for any of the base game units?