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Adventurer
No, I don't believe so. Check out R.E.D. WWII though.
S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod
- Thread starter S3rgeus
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No, I don't believe so. Check out R.E.D. WWII though.
counterpoint
King
I did it! I won a game on Emporer! My third attempt with Portugal.
I think my victory ultimately stemmed from me having a very production rich capital. It allowed me to snag a couple very important early wonders. by the time the WC was founded, I already had about half of the alliances with CSs.
Totally went up against the Unit Carpet of Doom you mentioned before. Catherine tried to take the capital. But, luckily, the terrain got in her way enough that I was able to buy units and get them there in time. Later, she tried again, but a well-timed surge of Foreign Legion (via ideology) allowed me to turn back and take her capital for her insolence. I think I got lucky in that most of the rest of the world ended up fighting amongst themselves the whole time.
Do you guys also find that choosing Freedom seems to almost unfairly harsh diplomatically. I was "Freindly" with everybody not named Catherine until I chose Freedom, and suddenly nobody will trade and they all talk about how pathetic my empire is.
Is there a reason the AI seems to take Freedom more rarely? Also, is there truth to the fact that Freedom appears so maligned by the AI, or is this just in my head?
I think my victory ultimately stemmed from me having a very production rich capital. It allowed me to snag a couple very important early wonders. by the time the WC was founded, I already had about half of the alliances with CSs.
Totally went up against the Unit Carpet of Doom you mentioned before. Catherine tried to take the capital. But, luckily, the terrain got in her way enough that I was able to buy units and get them there in time. Later, she tried again, but a well-timed surge of Foreign Legion (via ideology) allowed me to turn back and take her capital for her insolence. I think I got lucky in that most of the rest of the world ended up fighting amongst themselves the whole time.
Do you guys also find that choosing Freedom seems to almost unfairly harsh diplomatically. I was "Freindly" with everybody not named Catherine until I chose Freedom, and suddenly nobody will trade and they all talk about how pathetic my empire is.
Is there a reason the AI seems to take Freedom more rarely? Also, is there truth to the fact that Freedom appears so maligned by the AI, or is this just in my head?
S3rgeus
Emperor
Apologies for the delay, I've broken a massive streak of activity on here! It's been a crazy week, but normal operations should resume (except I'm not here on Saturday) from here on. (I will also get back to that Misc summary - it's on my list of things to do!)
Awesome, I'll check that out!
That's a lot of calculations and I'll start by saying I thought the difference would be a lot bigger. I think this is encouraging for the population-based approach. And the potential to use a modifier (either based on number of cities or individual city population) to increase or decrease each approach's (Tall or Wide) Alignment output makes me think this is something we could tweak while playtesting to find the right balance.
A few points about things that came up - I don't think we want the Alignment tiers to be linear, with the same difference between each tier at every level. I'd say they should get wider as you get farther from Neutral. So the Neutral tier is 200 wide (-100 to +100). The first Light/Shadow tier could be 300 or 400 wide and they could be increasingly farther apart from there. This resolves the issue you brought up that 43 Shadow points per turn would bring a civ to max Shadow quite quickly - they would need much more than that.
A quick example of where we could put the tiers (quoted number is the closest value to 0 that causes a civ to enter the quoted tier):
-8: -7000
-7: -5500
-6: -4100
-5: -2900
-4: -1900
-3: -1100
-2: -500
-1: -100
0: 0
Then just reflect that for the Light levels. This progression is created by each tier being 200 points "wider" than the previous tier closer to 0. I tried doubling up the width of the tiers (instead of adding 200) but -8 ended up at something like -50,000 - which seemed like a bit overkill. But we could tweak the progression to make them a bit farther apart. I'm thinking the only people who get to -8 are the ones who truly dedicate themselves to the Shadow (or Light for +8) for the entire game and also get lucky with several other Alignment sources. Only for the Shadow-y-est of customers.
Another thing to discuss is the ongoing output of Shadow Alignment. It makes sense that this is something Light civs need to "fight against" to become more Light, but we need to be sure that it's possible to fend off without having to be dedicated to it for the whole game, otherwise most civs will end up Shadow. Given the scales we're discussing, what kind of amounts of Alignments do we expect the "Threads of the Pattern" to be generating? (We've discussed it varying by era, which definitely sounds good.) We mentioned +1 Light for killing Shadowspawn, but it seems like that could be bumped up? Killing one Shadowspawn per turn would be seriously impressive even for a Blightborder civ, and that would fall massively short of the Shadow Alignment production we're talking here. (Which might be fine, but we should make the Shadowspawn killing -> Light smaller by conscious decision.)
Discussing cities being 95% full of Darkfriends, I think the population-based approach provides a good abstraction for that. Each citizen is usually interpreted by the player (I think, anyway) as a "population unit" rather than explicitly a single person or group of people. If you look at the Demographics screen in civ, the quoted populations are massive numbers that are presumably derived from our actual city populations. But the fact that the "citizen population units" are majority Darkfriends in a given city doesn't necessarily communicate to the player that that exact % of that city's population are Darkfriends. So we never need to present the % we're tracking (which we use to derive how many citizens should be Darkfriends) to the player - which gets rid of a significant portion of the weirdness with people doubting there could ever be "cities full of Darkfriends". It's not gone completely, but it's lessened.
Awesome, Darkfriend is the citizen label, Friend of the Dark is the unit!
Cool, sounds like a plan!
This is a very good point. I think we can use a combination of map layers, trade unit-like stacking, and submarine-like invisibility to create invisible units that never see or interact with units from other civs.
It may be possible to take a different approach and do what Privateers did in Civ4 - foreign players can't see who controls the unit. (You could do some guessing based on geography, but depending on the number of other players, this may be someone farther away deliberately misleading you.) This would give us the "missionary kill" back, but I'm unsure of the technical limitations here. I've seen some suggestion that this is surprisingly complicated and Firaxis may have tried to do it for Privateers again, but gave up on it.
I'm thinking it will have to be mostly blind. I don't think we could give away much Alignment information about any foreign cities without pretty much revealing the Alignment of the player. That should be fine I think.
Awesome, Friends of the Dark only work in foreign cities!
Since players can't see the Alignment production of each individual city, I think we should make inquisitors global - if you're +4 or above Light tier, then they shift you more Light. If we want players to be able to see the Alignment production of each city broken down, then I think we could have Inquisitors vary by city.
Awesome sauce!
Awesome, I've written this into the misc summary so it can be slotted into the relevant section when I get to write it in more detail!
I think taking on the misc summary all at once is taking me forever, so I've started adding pieces as I go for this!
Ok, let's go with Hunter for the Horn for now and see how weird it feels - this is easy to change later. Also noted in the misc summary!
Cool, I'm fine with working out how Illian fits in later on.
Noted in the misc summary!
I think distinct unit types - there's a "Birgitte" unit type and a "Hawkwing" unit type, and so on. Allows them to have distinct stats and art. (I don't think we'd give any special abilities to some and not others though, beyond some being ranged and some being melee units.)
I'm thinking the unit that found it hangs onto it. If that unit is killed by a melee unit, then the attacking unit gains control of it. If they hornbearer is killed from range, they drop the Horn onto the hex they're standing on. (How should be represent that? We can't really spawn a Seal Site since that would destroy improvements/resources/something.)
The unit with the Horn can blow it (with a cooldown) and that summons the Heroes at their location. The cooldown is still up for grabs - like 30 turns? You could only use it once per war, realistically, and at most twice during the Last Battle, both of which sound like good measures?
That's how it works at the moment (this works in-game), though we can definitely change it if we want to take a different approach.
Definitely, good idea bringing this up again, because I think the context change from being Seals-only to Seals+Horn makes a big difference. "Mythic Sites" is my preferred of those two. I still see the temptation of "Legendary Sites" which we discussed before, but it still clashes with "Legends" as a GW type.
Good question and I think it probably has to. This is unusual - I can't think of another occasion where a military unit is consumed by an action? Not necessarily a bad thing though.
Yeah, definitely!
The only difficulty with this is that all of the other tier one abilities are incremental bonuses to the corresponding Sister type. If we swap this with the tier zero Blue ability (Governors within 3 hexes produce +2 faith) then the Blue and the Brown will be following the same format: 0 - excavate stuff, 1 - Sister bonus, 2 - nearby city bonus, 3 - civ-wide bonus. I think that's a good thing.
Yes, let's do that - Blues are slower than Hunters and have a cooldown.
Maybe a specialist!
No worries about responding with brevity - still lots for me to write! Glad you're on board! Yes, I think that we should make heavy use of the tutorial system to explain this in some detail to players. Not the depth of the mechanics, but the overarching objectives that they want to achieve, and let people dig into specifics if they want (through the advisors and Civilopedia, most likely).
Not aside from them having more allies (since the Shadowspawn are at peace with Shadow civs). They don't get production bonuses when "building" Shadowspawn or anything. (Or do they?)
I don't think we need to do expanding Blight. Increasing the spawn rate of the more powerful Shadowspawn types sounds good - but are we worried of upsetting the relative numbers of the different types?
We could gate the Forsaken spawning (the units) on Seals broken? As I remember, more Forsaken started escaping as Seals were broken. No Forsaken at 0 Seals broken? All of them by half way?
Ok, with bubbles of Evil producing negative food already, let's drop global food spoilage for now. If, when playtesting, we find we want to ramp up more when Seals are being broken then we can layer this on afterwards.
Awesome "Your Eyes and Ears failed to find any information about any Seals in <civ>" it is!
Scaling well is definitely good!
Based on what we've said below (below in your post, rather than in this one I'm writing right now), I think only "discovered" Seals can be stolen. This lets us control the flow more and make sure it's balanced - so no one never ends up in endless-hopscotch situations.
Very definitely! Lots of these systems sound like they will. We may need a dedicated manual test team. Hopefully enough forum members will volunteer!
National Projects like the Apollo Program and the Manhattan Project are only worked on by one city at a time, so I think we could do it like that? It lets us balance against the production output of a single city, which has a lot less variance than being able to dedicate multiple cities to it, as you've said.
Yep, no re-authentication sounds good!
This is about Spies/Eyes and Ears, I've added some info to the Espionage section of the misc summary, but it's not complete yet!
Awesome, sounds good!
This seems a bit punishing - hinging the victory on probability at the last moment. I think the Dragon is successful after a fixed X turns (5? 10?).
Permanent disorder makes sense.
Awesome, I'll check that out!
That's a lot of calculations and I'll start by saying I thought the difference would be a lot bigger. I think this is encouraging for the population-based approach. And the potential to use a modifier (either based on number of cities or individual city population) to increase or decrease each approach's (Tall or Wide) Alignment output makes me think this is something we could tweak while playtesting to find the right balance.
A few points about things that came up - I don't think we want the Alignment tiers to be linear, with the same difference between each tier at every level. I'd say they should get wider as you get farther from Neutral. So the Neutral tier is 200 wide (-100 to +100). The first Light/Shadow tier could be 300 or 400 wide and they could be increasingly farther apart from there. This resolves the issue you brought up that 43 Shadow points per turn would bring a civ to max Shadow quite quickly - they would need much more than that.
A quick example of where we could put the tiers (quoted number is the closest value to 0 that causes a civ to enter the quoted tier):
-8: -7000
-7: -5500
-6: -4100
-5: -2900
-4: -1900
-3: -1100
-2: -500
-1: -100
0: 0
Then just reflect that for the Light levels. This progression is created by each tier being 200 points "wider" than the previous tier closer to 0. I tried doubling up the width of the tiers (instead of adding 200) but -8 ended up at something like -50,000 - which seemed like a bit overkill. But we could tweak the progression to make them a bit farther apart. I'm thinking the only people who get to -8 are the ones who truly dedicate themselves to the Shadow (or Light for +8) for the entire game and also get lucky with several other Alignment sources. Only for the Shadow-y-est of customers.
Another thing to discuss is the ongoing output of Shadow Alignment. It makes sense that this is something Light civs need to "fight against" to become more Light, but we need to be sure that it's possible to fend off without having to be dedicated to it for the whole game, otherwise most civs will end up Shadow. Given the scales we're discussing, what kind of amounts of Alignments do we expect the "Threads of the Pattern" to be generating? (We've discussed it varying by era, which definitely sounds good.) We mentioned +1 Light for killing Shadowspawn, but it seems like that could be bumped up? Killing one Shadowspawn per turn would be seriously impressive even for a Blightborder civ, and that would fall massively short of the Shadow Alignment production we're talking here. (Which might be fine, but we should make the Shadowspawn killing -> Light smaller by conscious decision.)
Discussing cities being 95% full of Darkfriends, I think the population-based approach provides a good abstraction for that. Each citizen is usually interpreted by the player (I think, anyway) as a "population unit" rather than explicitly a single person or group of people. If you look at the Demographics screen in civ, the quoted populations are massive numbers that are presumably derived from our actual city populations. But the fact that the "citizen population units" are majority Darkfriends in a given city doesn't necessarily communicate to the player that that exact % of that city's population are Darkfriends. So we never need to present the % we're tracking (which we use to derive how many citizens should be Darkfriends) to the player - which gets rid of a significant portion of the weirdness with people doubting there could ever be "cities full of Darkfriends". It's not gone completely, but it's lessened.
Awesome, Darkfriend is the citizen label, Friend of the Dark is the unit!
Cool, sounds like a plan!
This is a very good point. I think we can use a combination of map layers, trade unit-like stacking, and submarine-like invisibility to create invisible units that never see or interact with units from other civs.
It may be possible to take a different approach and do what Privateers did in Civ4 - foreign players can't see who controls the unit. (You could do some guessing based on geography, but depending on the number of other players, this may be someone farther away deliberately misleading you.) This would give us the "missionary kill" back, but I'm unsure of the technical limitations here. I've seen some suggestion that this is surprisingly complicated and Firaxis may have tried to do it for Privateers again, but gave up on it.
I'm thinking it will have to be mostly blind. I don't think we could give away much Alignment information about any foreign cities without pretty much revealing the Alignment of the player. That should be fine I think.
Awesome, Friends of the Dark only work in foreign cities!
Since players can't see the Alignment production of each individual city, I think we should make inquisitors global - if you're +4 or above Light tier, then they shift you more Light. If we want players to be able to see the Alignment production of each city broken down, then I think we could have Inquisitors vary by city.
Awesome sauce!
Awesome, I've written this into the misc summary so it can be slotted into the relevant section when I get to write it in more detail!
I think taking on the misc summary all at once is taking me forever, so I've started adding pieces as I go for this!
Ok, let's go with Hunter for the Horn for now and see how weird it feels - this is easy to change later. Also noted in the misc summary!
Cool, I'm fine with working out how Illian fits in later on.
Noted in the misc summary!
I think distinct unit types - there's a "Birgitte" unit type and a "Hawkwing" unit type, and so on. Allows them to have distinct stats and art. (I don't think we'd give any special abilities to some and not others though, beyond some being ranged and some being melee units.)
I'm thinking the unit that found it hangs onto it. If that unit is killed by a melee unit, then the attacking unit gains control of it. If they hornbearer is killed from range, they drop the Horn onto the hex they're standing on. (How should be represent that? We can't really spawn a Seal Site since that would destroy improvements/resources/something.)
The unit with the Horn can blow it (with a cooldown) and that summons the Heroes at their location. The cooldown is still up for grabs - like 30 turns? You could only use it once per war, realistically, and at most twice during the Last Battle, both of which sound like good measures?
That's how it works at the moment (this works in-game), though we can definitely change it if we want to take a different approach.
Definitely, good idea bringing this up again, because I think the context change from being Seals-only to Seals+Horn makes a big difference. "Mythic Sites" is my preferred of those two. I still see the temptation of "Legendary Sites" which we discussed before, but it still clashes with "Legends" as a GW type.
Good question and I think it probably has to. This is unusual - I can't think of another occasion where a military unit is consumed by an action? Not necessarily a bad thing though.
Yeah, definitely!
The only difficulty with this is that all of the other tier one abilities are incremental bonuses to the corresponding Sister type. If we swap this with the tier zero Blue ability (Governors within 3 hexes produce +2 faith) then the Blue and the Brown will be following the same format: 0 - excavate stuff, 1 - Sister bonus, 2 - nearby city bonus, 3 - civ-wide bonus. I think that's a good thing.
Yes, let's do that - Blues are slower than Hunters and have a cooldown.
Maybe a specialist!
No worries about responding with brevity - still lots for me to write! Glad you're on board!
Yes, I think that we should make heavy use of the tutorial system to explain this in some detail to players. Not the depth of the mechanics, but the overarching objectives that they want to achieve, and let people dig into specifics if they want (through the advisors and Civilopedia, most likely).Not aside from them having more allies (since the Shadowspawn are at peace with Shadow civs). They don't get production bonuses when "building" Shadowspawn or anything. (Or do they?)
I don't think we need to do expanding Blight. Increasing the spawn rate of the more powerful Shadowspawn types sounds good - but are we worried of upsetting the relative numbers of the different types?
We could gate the Forsaken spawning (the units) on Seals broken? As I remember, more Forsaken started escaping as Seals were broken. No Forsaken at 0 Seals broken? All of them by half way?
Ok, with bubbles of Evil producing negative food already, let's drop global food spoilage for now. If, when playtesting, we find we want to ramp up more when Seals are being broken then we can layer this on afterwards.
Awesome "Your Eyes and Ears failed to find any information about any Seals in <civ>" it is!
Scaling well is definitely good!
Based on what we've said below (below in your post, rather than in this one I'm writing right now), I think only "discovered" Seals can be stolen. This lets us control the flow more and make sure it's balanced - so no one never ends up in endless-hopscotch situations.
Very definitely! Lots of these systems sound like they will. We may need a dedicated manual test team. Hopefully enough forum members will volunteer!
National Projects like the Apollo Program and the Manhattan Project are only worked on by one city at a time, so I think we could do it like that? It lets us balance against the production output of a single city, which has a lot less variance than being able to dedicate multiple cities to it, as you've said.
Yep, no re-authentication sounds good!
This is about Spies/Eyes and Ears, I've added some info to the Espionage section of the misc summary, but it's not complete yet!
Awesome, sounds good!
This seems a bit punishing - hinging the victory on probability at the last moment. I think the Dragon is successful after a fixed X turns (5? 10?).
Permanent disorder makes sense.
S3rgeus
Emperor
Yes, the Dragon will be "defeated" in this case, but not killed. He'll "respawn" after X turns (5? 10? 15?). Where does he respawn? Do we give him back to the same player?
Feeding into below, if a Seal is stolen by the Shadow in the midst of this, he'll respawn in "spy form".
Nothing happens with the Dragon specifically, but now the Light need to steal that Seal back and break it, keeping control of Thakan'dar all the while. Should be quite difficult!
Automatically liberated sounds like a good plan.
Sounds good!
We already have the "Rand in a box" Edict (Red Ajah section, "Capture the Dragon").
I'm afraid I don't have time to dive in on creating new ones of these tonight, I'll kick it off in my next posting session!
We hit the Age of the Dragon World Era and the Shadowspawn spawn rate starts to ramp up in the Blight. After X turns, everyone chooses their alignment. Once every player has chosen, Alignments are announced for all players, the Light coalition forms, and the wars start. (all at once) The Shadowspawn spawn rate steadily climbs from there and out-of-Blight spawning begins the turn after Alignments are declared.
The value of X is determined by map size:
Duel: 15
Tiny: 10
Small: 7
Standard+: 5
Awesome, and I think it's really good that that gating wasn't obvious. It means that we've got some inbuilt balance in the system but it shouldn't feel restrictive for players.
I think our objective with any system is to make it decay over time so that players can't just reach a lump sum and "leave it alone" - keeping the bonus indefinitely. How about the bonuses "consume" production that has been accumulated against the project every time? So everyone is dropping hammers into a shared bucket and the project is pulling hammers out in order to provide the bonus.
This means one small-time player could build up enough hammers over several turns to provide a bonus, even if he couldn't pass the threshold by himself. It would only realistically provide the bonus for one turn though - if it were consuming more than a single turn's worth of production. The main use of this approach would be several players could contribute during a "lull" in fighting (caused by some geography or something) and their contributions could persist for a time.
A problem with this is tiers - does the project always "consume" at the highest rate it can in order to give the highest tier bonus? Or can players somehow select they'd like to receive only a lower tier bonus, but for a longer time without any production input needed? (Since, at a lower tier, it will consume the stockpiled hammers more slowly.) I don't really see a neat way to do that.
I think I'm leaning toward the hammer-per-turn-threshold approach (#1 in your post).
This does work well with the hammer-per-turn-threshold approach. I think the tech gating is simpler for now though, and players will already understand how it works without us having to tell them. (How they unlock the projects anyway, not necessarily how to use them.)
Yes, +X EXP for created military units sounds good to me.
Let's stick with 50% for Neutrals and see how it goes. Very true, this belongs in the diplo summary. I've edited it in! It's in the Turning the Tower section - can you take a quick look and make sure I've got all the details right? I highlighted the Tower-remains-Light-but-Light-lose-some-Sisters percentage cap in red because I don't think we've discussed it, but it should exist. Does 25% sound good to you?
I think the weirdness falls under the abstraction umbrella - units that live forever and such things.
I think it should be in the Channeling summary, but the rest of the Sister abilities are listed in full in the Diplo summary (mostly because diplo influence determines which abilities players have). I've added it to the diplo summary at the end of the Turning the Tower section. Can you check and make sure I've got the details right on the abilities?
Ok, let's reset the influences of any civs that are declared for the opposite side of the Last Battle from the Tower. Neutral civs retain the usual relations, regardless of which side the Tower chooses.
I'm thinking now that the archetypal abilities for each side are really the tier zero abilities - they're the ones that are functionally useful for the other victory types, right? (Especially if we swap Blues so that Seals are at tier zero.) Let's do an actual reset for the civs on the "wrong" side of the war, from the Tower's perspective, and put them back at tier zero. This is just a consequence of choosing to fight against the Tower.
Woops, I messed up with the formatting and this fell through! Sorry, original text was:
Risky proposition, but let's go with no, they're not replaced. If you're the Shadow and the Tower is Light, you're going to get other channelers - Dreadlords (maybe a good argument for being able to produce these instead of just gift, like we said before?) and potentially Forsaken fighting by your side. There are only so many Black Ajah Sisters and now that they're out in the open, when they die, they're gone.
The reverse for the Light, if the Tower has Turned then the Shadow has gone to a lot of trouble to deprive the Light of one of their greatest representatives - Tar Valon. Light civs retain some of their Aes Sedai, but no new ones are being trained for them. No new Sisters can show up. So they're uber valuable now. (This might be a good argument for them keeping all or more of their Sisters than we've said so far?)
Yeah, sounds like taking on the name of the last instance spun out by the Wheel makes sense. But as you've said, every fantasy world only stretches so far, Robert Jordan may not have considered how the specifics of the legendary personalities work with respect to who they are when they're not active in the Pattern.
Awesome, let me know if you find any cool tricks when using it!
The weird spacing made it harder to pull the post apart into quotable blocks, since there were no empty lines between paragraphs. This time it's definitely been easier!
I don't understand what I was asking either. I probably meant to ask: which abilities are unlimited? Normal attack sounds sensible. Are all of the others one time use per "Dragon turn"?
Very true, let's fix him in place for the duration of the player's "Dragon turn" then. The player can move him when they gain control of him (if they want to).
"Proclaim a Field of Battle" works for me!
Ok, if we do include him, I think it would be fairly easy to include a single named Myrddraal (use the same model or just scaled up a bit) with boosted combat strength.
There's opportunity for flavor here, but we don't have resurrection names for all of the Forsaken, since they didn't all get revived in the books, and any of them might die in a given game. I'm thinking we could restrict the maximum number of simultaneous Forsaken to the *actual number* (so 13) but use original and revived names in a completely unrelated fashion. (So Lanfear and Cyndane can coexist, if that's a resurrected pair, I don't remember.)
Blight damage and such. Does this go in the LB summary? Or misc section or something?
I've built basically 0 forts too, mostly because they're not that helpful. Citadels gained the "landstealing" ability at some point (I think for G&K) and that made them better. Traditional frontlines in CiV move too much for forts to be a good investment, but since the Blightborder will be a fixed combat zone for the whole game, forts make sense! And making them play into the spread of Blight is awesome.
Agreed, no Blight recession.
Yeah, we could have it *either* destroy resources or improvements. I think improvements makes the most sense. And as you've said - that makes the covered resources inaccessible, despite still existing.
Yeah, the name sounds good for now. I think we can address the model later, in case we decide on switching out the name. That it mechanically produces +1 Spark is the important part to the code.
All sorts of crazy! Blue!
I see what you mean, but I think there's a visible progression over the whole 8, each way. There's some room for transposing some elements in the list, but since the player will progress through them one by one (and presumably spend decent enough time at each level), they should get an understanding of the order that way, even if taking the words in isolation would be ambiguous in some cases.
I'm good with these changes. I like Diabolical - if the -8 tier is sufficiently difficult to get to then the player should feel some achievement for reaching it, and becoming "Diabolical" definitely sounds very evil!
I do sort of miss Resplendent for the Light side (at some tier, not necessarily the highest), but I do like your selections.
Somehow working out a name for this led me down a rabbit hole reading the Turian article in the Mass Effect wiki (because I thought there was a good descriptor word for a militaristic society like the Turians in the Mass Effect journal voice overs, which we could use here, but it didn't jump out at me).
Anyway, Province of Discipline works for now. Easy to change later if we find a different one.
Cool, the Tower aren't associated with any of the High King Provincial Bonuses.
Still haven't had time to track down the post you made about significant/mediocre/poor number breakdowns for the High King Provincial Bonuses. I'll look some more another time! (We can keep quoting this block until we find it.)
If they raze at the normal rate (1 pop per turn) and this is only turn 100-ish (so the cities won't be too big) it will take an absolute maximum of 10-ish turns (and most often less than that - like 5) for the cities to be razed (since some pop is lost on capture too). I don't think it will take less time than that for the Trolloc armies to pull back into the Blight, unless the civs were already doing a very good job of keeping them corralled (in which case, being able to recapture the cities makes sense). We could start the razing before the Wars end if we thought it necessary though.
I have actually gotten to play a little bit between other stuff! (Promise I wasn't ignoring you guys to play!) Attila and I might actually be able to take on Casimir if we strike now. When I start up the game next, that's my plan. (I found a lot of my happiness problems were coming from large puppet cities - annexing put me deeper into unhappiness in the short term, but the courthouses and intelligent building choices brought me back into positive at long last!) Either Attila and I succeed in this epic, world-spanning war against a ~2000 score Casimir (I'm at ~1200 and Attila's at ~1500) or he'll kill us, since he's chosen Autocracy and seems to be capturing capitals left and right.
Carthage and Sweden may seem like bit players at ~900 score, but they've got like 20 cities each and are currently having a massive fight with each other. Byzantium is being very quiet with her 4 cities and is blatantly going to try to win a culture victory. Hopefully not before Casimir kills us or is overthrown!
Have you had a chance to play while waiting for me to reply?
EDIT: I see you have!
I say if a Shadowspawn unit captures a city controlled by you, you get a Settler when it's all done, regardless of what happened to that city after. It might have been razed, you might have recaptured it (with significantly less pop since some is least with each capture), or someone else might have grabbed it.
I don't think capturing other players' former (or current, if you're at war with them during the TW) affects the Settler bonus in any way. (For attacker or defender)
I'm thinking Gentling him if no one else has ever dealt damage to him is a special case - where you get both the Gentling bonus and the full yield breakdown. In all other cases (any player has dealt damage to the False Dragon), Gentling only gives you the Gentling bonus, and the yields are divided based on other damage as normal (the False Dragon's remaining health isn't considered at all).
The reason for this special case is - if we don't have a special case, and no one has dealt damage to the False Dragon and you want to Gentle him, it actually becomes more efficient to attack him first and then Gentle him. It doesn't matter what you attack him with - if you deal at least one damage (which all combat does, regardless how one-sided) then you've dealt "100%" of the damage. Having to do that first for maximum benefit is bizarre and won't make sense to players. (We humans and our "logic" that isn't logical!!)
So:
I deal him 20 damage. You deal him 20 as well. I Gentle him. I get 50% of the yield payout and the Gentling bonus.
You deal him 20 damage. I Gentle him (no damage). You get 100% of the yield payout. I get the Gentling bonus.
He takes 0 damage ever. You Gentle him. You get 100% of the yield payout and the Gentling bonus.
That sound sensible?
I think I need to address this in more depth than I can go into now, I'm afraid. This is a big question that we should give some thought to, because water-based maps are a big part of CiV, even if most people play on Continents!
It's not really normalizing the bonuses because they "run past each other" - each plays only to the strengths of a certain type of civ. If Tall and Wide players were to swap policies, they would be less effective for both of them. The bonuses we're discussing here are also primarily against Shadowspawn, which doesn't really affect the relative effectiveness against other players, since those bonuses don't apply against other players.
I think buildings/eras work well to complement the policies. I think we can leave the specifics of what these do until we're deciding on buildings and policies, just need to keep a note that some Shadowspawn-related stuff should be at this point in the civ progression to deal with the Trolloc Wars!
Awesome, choosing with-type for the Last Battle gives happiness bonuses then.
Something unrelated, I was talking to Civitar about some unit artwork stuff and he mentioned this unit might be of use to us. Do they look like suitable Dragonsworn to you?
Phew! I've managed to fit this one into two posts and stay within the character limits, so they are getting shorter! I'm glad we're hammering out so many more details for the Last Battle though.
Awesome, congrats! Sounds intense!
I don't know if the AI in general takes Freedom more rarely - it might be that the leaders you're playing against choose Freedom less often. When AI civs stay small and go for Culture wins, they tend to take Freedom, in my experience.
And Ideology differences have huge diplo modifiers, so the AI will hate you if you've chosen a different one from them! It does mean that the others that share your Ideology should be good friends though. And converting someone to your Ideology is always very satisfying.
counterpoint
King
Right, though I mechanically prefer the % method, I'm happy to go with a population-based approach for the synergy it provides. I think we can tweak it so it works.
I think I'm fine with this approach. Again, we're going to have to crunch some numbers and play some games to see how these values work, but I like it as of now.
One minor thing, though - shouldn't level 8 be -7100? Tier 7 is 5500 to 4100, which is a spread of 1400. Shouldn't the next one be a spread of 1600, thus -7100?
Right, this is a certainly a big issue, and it's one that appears to have several levels to it.
1) Certainly I can imagine bumping up the amount of Light yeild generated by shadowspawn kills, but this then has the (unintended?) effect of then making intended-shadow civs want to avoid killing shadowspawn throughout most of the game, which is something that's somewhat counterintuitive, especially during things like the Trolloc Wars, where we have tons of them, yet offer no real way to "be shadow" so early in the game and compensate for it/take advantage of the shadowspawn in some ways.
By taking this path, it seems we're essentially prescribing that all borderlander (geographically, I mean) civs must be light, or else be only modestly shadow. Furthermore, this hamstrings us somewhat, in that if we create any civs that have shadowspawn-related UUs or UAs, we are also essentially determining that that civ is also Light. I don't think we want to do either of those things.
Essentially, I'm most fine with Light-from-Shadowspawn-killing being only a small yield. Doesn't have to be exactly 1, but still, something small. If we want to, we can figure out a way to toss in one Forsaken Quest during the Trolloc Wars to make up for any shadow-bound civs that have to kill a bunch of shadowspawn, but I'd prefer the gulf they have to make up for to not be particularly large
2) I do see one issue with "making up for" the DF citizens with Threads in the Pattern. If we were to do that, that would seem to suggest that we'd make the Light-side choices be worth more Light than the Dark-side choices would be worth Shadow. For instance, the "good" option netting 200 Light and the "bad" netting only 100. The reason for this is simple economics, of a sort - we have to provide more "padding" for the light side.
But to me this feels a little odd, and in the most simple good-vs-bad choices, I think I'd prefer that they would be (or at least could be) balanced and equal in terms of reward. Also, since we'd hoped to have some choices that weren't so binary - good vs really good or bad vs really bad - and that we'd likely randomize some of the occurrence of these Threads, I can't see how we'd regulate these in relation to DF citizens in any consistent way. It seems to me that the best we can hope to do is balance the Light choices against the Shadow ones on average - but that ignores other factors, and doesn't allow us to "make up ground" on the DF citizens.
EDIT - I am realizing now that the above isn't strictly speaking a problem, since we'd previously decided that choosing Shadow will often net you some other rewards (Gold, etc.), which gives us something else to be considering for balance (though that shouldn't necessarily suggest that you'd receive fewer Shadow points as well...)
3) To me, it seems, we need o make one primary decisions on how we want the DF citizens' shadow point accumulation to operate.
It could be either
A) something the Light is constantly struggling against. The Shadow is corrupting our cities! We must hold it back. When left to their own devices, men are evil and will head towards the Shadow.
or
B) Shadow is mostly held at bay by simply "being" Light. Make Light choices and your cities will mostly stay light - unless you are corrupted by another civ. At the start of the game, a city is born with a DF citizen or two, but assuming no outside interference and no Threads, that city/civ will stay neutral indefinitely.
4) If we prefer B above (I think I do), what about the possibility of having regular citizens create *light points*. So, essentially DF citizens and "LF" citizens. A neutral city would have both, and left to its own devices, it will stay that way, with citizens producing a certain amount of Light AND shadow points per turn that cancel each other out - until the balance is tipped one way or another.
Obviously the system above would seem to suggest that a neutral civ would start with 50% DF citizens and 50% normal citizens. But we could tweak it so the "neutral" line of DFs is more like previously described (20% or something), but have each DF be worth more Shadow points. So each DF citizen yielded 5 Shadow, while each regular one only yielded 1 Light.
Now, the tricky thing with this is how it synergizes with population/citizen breakdown. If you gain a new DF, say, every third citizen (based on your current alignment), that means for the two citizens you accumulate in the interim would be pushing you further Light. Would we balance this by making up for it in other cities (your second city might gain it's 2nd DF earlier, or something)?
The above definitely would work much easier with a % system!
Yes, I could be fine with this logic. Though I still remain in mild preference for phrasing in slightly differently (I liked corruption, but maybe if we went with "Shadow Touched" or something it would make more sense).
until you let me convince you otherwise...Awesome, Darkfriend is the citizen label, Friend of the Dark is the unit!
I'd rather you not have to try to do the impossible on such a small thing.
Which method do you prefer? the combo of all those things?
agreed!
What should we call the Light missionaries btw? Should we hold off til we know the UUs/Faith units, and such. Candidates:
Prophets (prob. confusing)
Hand of the Light (possibly best used for faith unit or UU)
Questioner (same as above)
Inquisitor (super confusing if we choose this...)
Seeker of Truth (perhaps best for faith unit?)
What do we do?
Why can't players see the alignment production on a city? Shouldn't it be evident by the amount of DFs working it?
Couldn't it be more terraced than that? Like, if you are between 1 and 4 light, it removes X DFs, and between 4-8, it removes 2X DFs, etc?
In any case, it can be fine with it being based on the global alignment, though it is weird to spawn a Light Inquisitor from one of your cities that has recently been turned into a hive of DFs. Definitely not how Civ handles religion.
looks good.
Noted in the misc summary!
Right, this should be fine... providing we end up able to grab distinct unit models and such. Problem with Hawkwing though: he will be one of the Civ Leaders.... For the same reason, we probably can't use Elayne Sedai as a Green sister if we have her as the ruler of Andor (or at least she cannot spawn in a game with Andor, or the Hawkman can't spawn in any game that features him).
Wait, just to be clear, when you say the "unit that found it," you mean a Hunter for the horn? Or a Blue Sister, as well, obviously. So those two unit types can be hornblowers, then? So in that case, and only in that case, the Hunter is not consumed when digging? What happens if the hornblowing hunter then digs again, and is consumed?
As far as the turn count and such, I think this method could certainly work, though I definitely don't want it to be too huge a part of the game. The horn is only blown twice in the books, ever (I think). So whatever we do about turn-cooldown, I think it should be mostly conservative. I think this goes for the back-and-forth of the horn, as well. I don't want the "go kill the hornblower!" to be this gigantic part of the game. I'd say if you capture the horn, the cooldown does *not* restart.
So, 30 turns *could* work, but I could also see it be longer. I guess let's decide this: how many times, on average, would you want the horn to be blown in a typical game? What about a game in which it is found super early?
So "hornblower" is a promotion, then? This is invisible to opponents (the fact that the unit is the blower, I mean)? Obviously if you see a bunch of heroes, and a hunter / blue sister nearby, that's not that hard to figure out.
As far as how to represent the lost horn, why don't we just say whatever unit kills the hornblower becomes the hornblower, regardless if they are a melee unit.
I'd say if you're killed by a barb or shadowspawn something else (like Blight or something) the Horn should be lost once again. What if there are no Seal Sites remaining?
If the hornblower is killed while the Heroes are out, what happens?
Mythic Sites!
Good, though note the weirdness above re: hornblowing.
OK, I could be happy with swapping all that around. Note, though, that means both of these sisters have Tier 0 abilities that are useless for 60-75% of the game. Are we ok with that?
they sure are!
part of me is looking forward to working on the civilopedia... but I know it'll be insane how much it'll need.No worries about responding with brevity - still lots for me to write! Glad you're on board!
Eh, i'd say they don't. Just let the Shadowspawn civ get better.
I'd say expanding the spawn rate *will* increase the presence of more powerful shadowspawn, right? Like, if we have a Darkhound spawn for every 30 trollocs, that number of trollocs will be reached more often. Thus more Dhounds.
I like the idea of linking forsaken to broken seals. I don't like that "spread" so much, though. I'd say a few should break free no matter what - Izzy and maybe one or two more - but we probably don't bring in 13 until all of them are shattered, or close to it. The idea of each light civ sort of having "their Forsaken" or two they are responsible for killing is pretty cool - also, similarly, each shadow civ could be somewhat adopted by certain Chosen.
so dropped.
But it's a bubble, so it kind of just floated down to the floor. Not so dramatic.
This is somewhat radical design philosophy, but I definitely suggest we try to scale things well whenever possible. We should only ruin the game with bad balance rarely, if ever. I'd say, only 1d20 times per line of code.Scaling well is definitely good!
OK, good. But the "state" of the seal persists!
We'll certainly need people. Preferably some who know the books and some who don't!
Oh, right. I was thinking of them as like the international games. Of course, one city it is.
Looked through and it looks good to me. Regarding a few of the red items:
Um..... perhaps max level is too harsh. Level 2 or something?
Regarding the BK skills... what else *can* they do besides kill? Nothing, right?
Sure, I'm fine with this. As far as turns... It doesn't likely matter much if the Light still hasn't broken the seals - they're going to have to hold the city for a long time anyways. I could do 5 or 10.
Does T'D remain in the Shadow's possession while he's in there, shooting and stuff, or is it officially taken over even when he's in there? If so, what's the point in the turn-delay?
Right. So to be clear, is it "friendly" territory, in terms of healing rate and upgrades and stuff? It's still Blight, obviously.
OK, stop there. Will try to finish tonight or tomorrow!
EDIT: I was thinking about how you were planning on assembling either a Threads list or Forsaken Quest list (I can't remember which), and I'm starting to think we should wait on that. We're in the middle of a bunch of stuff right now, and these threads have been multi-topic monstrosities for a month or so now. I'm thinking we should probably finalize some things and begin the next topics "fresh." I'm also not sure we need to do the Threads/Forsaken stuff soon anyways - it seems to me they don't mechanically impact the rest of the game much at all. I'd probably prefer to focus on the flavor and writing of them later, when it can be the main focus, and work through some of the more pressing matters first. For now, we could probably create placeholders for testing ("do you select GOOD (100 Light) or KINDA BAD (50 Shadow and 30 Hammers)")? What do you think? Of course, if you're halfway through a post...
Still hope to finish my responses tonight.
counterpoint
King
I'd say he can respawn five turns later if Thakan'dar is retaken. But I'd say he moves on to the next player.
And just to be clear, if the Shadow re-steals a Seal, does that mean Thakan'dar is also returned immediately to the Shadow? Or does that mean that the Light would hold T'd, but there'd be a spy Dragon floating around? If the first, I wonder if that's too easy a way to retake T'd. I think your statements on this seem to contradict one another, though I might be misinterpreting things.
sounds good. Can Neutral civs take it, though? Is there any point to this? Does taking T'd actually slow the shadow at all? The blight still produces units, but are certain units produced by the city itself?
Ah. Well, cool. I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with.
added!
The value of X is determined by map size:
Duel: 15
Tiny: 10
Small: 7
Standard+: 5
Good. I just think we need to make the LB compelling enough so that people don't get frustrated when it pops up because they were close to a regular victory or something.
OK, I was right with you and in agreement, but at the end there, you said you wanted it to be hams/turn, so now I'm not sure exactly where you stand.
I actually like the "bucket" idea you proposed. Honestly, I don't see a problem with a lack of tiers. I don't think they're needed, really. Why not keep things simple? Maybe it's fine if more production=more turns.
In any case, I'm fine with whatever you decide. Just indicate how I should put it, and I'll put it in the summary.
all good.
looks good. Just to be clear, when people lose sisters due to the tower's alignment, i'd think they should keep random sisters. We could do it so their highest tier ones stick around, but otherwise i'd say it should be random.
done! Things look good to me.
K, this works for me, though I could also be convinced of the opposite. I could see the victory-helping abilities be higher up on the chain.
That said, the truth is, in the LB sisters are fundamentally most useful for combat anyways.
You are very clear to say it resets their influence to zero. Is there some way they can increase it once again, or is it permanently there, like a CS at war?
Got it. Sounds good to me. This and the bit above about resetting influence should probably be put int he diplo summary.
Actually, I think I'm fine with this as described, no need to give the Light more sisters. The truth is, Sisters aren't replaced very quickly anyways, so if a civ had all their Sisters wiped out, I doubt the LB would last long enough for them to get them all back anyways. So I think this drawback is significant, but not hugely so.
Also, I'd suggest that Dreadlords should cost Spark. yes?
added to the LB summary.
For sure, cap it at 13. Don't have astrong opinion about whether we need to be realistic about the Moridin/Izzy thing, Cyndane/Lanfear, etc. We can jumble them all together. Although, I could also see us making it so Moridin could only appear after Ish died, or something (etc.).
I've added it to the LB summary.
Yes! Sid Meier, we demand a royalty.
This was about the ice peppers, and whether they are icy or even peppers. How much would people hate us if we just broke the fourth wall and totally went really far with the whole "lost in translation" thing, and made Ice peppers jars of peanut butter or something totally unrelated....All sorts of crazy! Blue!
yeah, i'm happy to go with this.
Hmmm... I kind of don't like resplendent, because it seems to connote something different. Well, *light* really. Like brilliance or radiance or something. Holiness, I guess it could imply, but seems to be a little different from the other names on the list, which appear to be more about behavior and attitude.. You can convince me though.
I did remember that I had previously forgotten to include Just, which was a name I liked. I could see it replacing Pure, or maybe put Pure where Devoted is, and put Just next.
In any case, I've put this current version in the LB summary.
Dang. Now *that's* tangential research. Maybe I'll look at Sonic the Hedgehog mangas next time we need a good flavorful name for something that makes a unit fast.
Summary-ize it!
Quoting this block to keep the dream alive! (numbers breakdowns of the High King provincial bonuses).
Well, if you think the Trolloc Wars ending is more of a "wind down" instead of them all turning and running in one turn, then yes, I'd say we're fine having the Razing commence when they "end." Perhaps the game decides they end, but to the players, they're really still going, but winding down, for a bit.
how'd this all turn out?
Speaking of Atilla. Dang. I started another game on Emporer, and my first time as Atilla. Conquered THREE civs by 500 BC. About to strike the fourth, the final foe on my continent. Will probably only take 20 turns or so. This is crazy. I kind of got lucky to have so many people on my continent so close to me, but, sheesh, Battering Rams...
Only three civs would be left at that point, but then the chickens will come home to roost, i think. My infrastructure is *bad*. I am far behind in improvements, tech, everything. And these battering rams won't still work once I'm able to travel the oceans....
agreed!
I *think* that sounds sensible. In your second example above, when you say 100% of the yield payout, you of course mean that it'd be 100% of 20 damage-worth of payout, right?
I think I'm ok with this, but it does seem a little weird that it is more fruitful to kill the False dragon than to gentle him, right? Aren't we trying to reward gentling, which is supposedly a more complicated affair?
Yeah, definitely going to follow your lead here. Looking forward to hearing some more evolved thoughts so we can work out a solution.
great. There's a note about it in the TW section of the LB summary, awaiting further decision.
bah... now I'm starting to think this is overkill. I'm thinking there might already be enough incentive to be strong-light or strong shadow, right?
Yeah, those look great! All of them.
If you're talking about the Tribesman, I definitely like the guys in the middle. I think the guys with the various masks might be a little too "tribal" for what we're doing, though. Our guys are really more like ruffians, right? I think they could work fine, but maybe with head-changes they'd be best.
Nice. Definitely there's been a lot of "ok, sounds good" happening in these posts, and a lot going into the sUmmaries. Honestly, I think we just need to figure out the DF citizen stuff. Everything else is pretty much already on its way home.
S3rgeus
Emperor
Cool, sounds like population-based is the approach we're going for then.
Yes, it should be -7100! Argh, I got carried away because -7000 would be a nice round number to end on and it was exactly 1500 away from the previous tier (which is irrelevant, as you point out). These numbers will be easily configurable later if we decide we want to tweak them, so shall we go for these tiers as they are for now?
I agree that we don't want to force Blightborder civs to be Light. I think we discussed earlier in the thread that a tendency toward Light for such civs wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Constantly fighting the manifestations of the Shadow binds people together in opposition of the Dark One. Not to say it should be impossible - even if we bump up the Light yield to 5 per kill (400% increase!) - killing 20 units nets 100 Light points. Based on the proposed tier distances, a single Alignment-decision would probably be worth a similar if not greater amount. (By the end of the game, 100 should be a fairly minor move for most Light or Shadow civs.)
I agree with your edit that this isn't much of an issue, since the Shadow options are often accompanied by other yield bonuses.
I prefer the approach from B as well. It would be easier math-wise with a pure % system, but I think population-based is much more CiV-like.
I like the idea of normal citizens producing Light points, and also that Darkfriends produce more Shadow points. (So 5 normal citizens balances out one Darkfriend.)
I don't think we want to have inter-city dependencies on which citizens go for which Alignment - that will get crazy complicated really fast. (Not so much for the player, but for us, to work out what changes we can make to have some desired effects later on. Say we want to make Shadow accumulate a bit more slowly, it would be really hard to work out how to do that.) I think we should aim for a progression based on global Alignment that can be followed by each city. (E.g. if you're tier 4 Shadow, you get Darkfriends/Light citizens in a pattern like: D/L/L/D/L/L/D/L/L ... etc - each cycle is adding a net production of 3 Shadow per turn, since 1 DF = 5 Shadow per turn and 1 L = 1 Light per turn.) That means there are technically optimal population numbers for each side and I think that's fine (but is definitely reserved for the realm of crazy optimizers, the difference between optimal and non-optimal will be marginal at most). Given the other benefits of population, optimizing for Alignment will not be a good idea anyway, in almost all cases.
So we could have a separate progression for each tier (some may have identical progressions to others adjacent to them on the scale). All of this is if the city is growing in isolation - any changes caused by Light or Shadow missionaries just apply on top - the next citizen to be spawned will follow the progression regardless of the state of the citizens that already existed.
If you like the concept of the above (which I think is very similar to what you've said in your post), I can go through and create the progression for the 17 tiers next time.
In terms of choosing numbers, I am happy with either 5-to-1 or even 10-to-1 for DF Shadow production vs normal citizen Light production. Obviously which one we choose will change what the progressions should be. But as with a lot of things we're working on, the actual numbers are easily tweakable when we're playing as long as we agree that the underlying system of how they get doled out is something we like. For example, it's easy to change how much Shadow a single DF citizen generates, also relatively easy to change the order of the progressions at each tier (D/L/L/L/D/L/L/L vs D/L/L/D/L/L), but dramatically more difficult to switch to a % based system once we've gone in on the population stuff.
I think Darkfriend makes sense in that it's the same granularity as "Scientist" and "Engineer" - which are vocational descriptions of an individual person.
We shall see!
This is about Friend of the Dark and Light Missionary units being invisible to other civs. The combination of existing mechanics approach definitely has less unexplored territory in it. We would still lose the "kill the missionary" style defense, but if we're happy with that, it should be possible. I've done relatively little work with map layers, invisibility, or stacking so far, so I can't say with absolute authority what's possible yet. Stacking is changed by other mods, so it's definitely no problem to stack units infinitely (well, not technically infinite, but a maximum large enough that it doesn't matter). There may yet be some weirdness to the invisibility, but we'll see. I'm happy to go with the combo approach for now and we'll discuss again if it doesn't pan out.
I agree with your assessment of each of these names as potentially confusing or better used elsewhere. I'm not sure what to call the Light missionary. We could go much more mundane with it, and go with "Peddler" like Padan Fain (in his original incarnation) - someone who travels to places and brings news with him? Doesn't seem very Light-y though.
I don't think we want to do anything that evokes the Children of the Light.
So no solid ideas - I suppose we can come back to this when we have a better idea of how we've used some of this flavor elsewhere. So a red mark in the summary for now.
I was under the impression we wanted to hide the exact yields from players - they could see they were Light and a descriptive word which identified their tier, but not the underlying value. It would make Light and Shadow much more yield-like if we were to present it in the top-panel like Gold and Culture though. If we do that, then we can show the exact breakdown for a given city. (If we show the city breakdown and not the overall, then we are giving the overall information to the players, just making it inconvenient for them to access it, which is bad.)
If we hide the numbers, players will be able to get an impression of the Alignment production from the number of Darkfriends in a city, but without knowing what amounts each citizen produces, they have no good way of saying what effect a given number of Darkfriends will actually have (except from personal experience, which will be inexact). And as soon as we introduce any modifiers, the number of Darkfriend citizens no longer directly corresponds to any specific amount of Alignment production, only a trend. (Not to mention missionaries for either side, Inquisitors, Shadowspawn kills, and Alignment quests modifying the underlying amount with lump sums, instead of incremental production, so you might be a Light civ now because of your decisions, but actually be trending Shadow in terms of per-turn Alignment yield.)
All of that is making me think we should be more transparent with the user and possibly even show them the underlying numbers. (I can see an inevitable modmod that just exposes these numbers to the UI and does nothing else, because players want to see what's actually changing and affecting their Alignment.) What do you think?
Yeah, definitely. This sounds good to me!
I think our decision here depends on how transparent we are with the yields. If players can track the Alignment produced by each city, then let's use that - which makes it more like religion. If they can't, I think we have to use global, because the player can't accurately assess which city is best for the Alignment they want. This makes it more like Culture/Tourism - the artists/musicians/writers are unaffected by the Culture/Tourism yields of the cities they spawn in.
Very true, we might be best filtering Hawkwing out of any game that he's in. It's a bit of a strange thing to have to do, but he's a very prominent Hero when summoned by the Horn - one of the few that actually speaks to the PoV characters in those times. Alternatively we could completely ignore the weirdness - CiV does this quite a lot often to the amusement of its players, with Great People and such. (I saw a great thread where someone had gotten Hernan Cortez as a Great General while playing as the Aztecs.) Hawkwing summoning Hawkwing to fight some Shadowspawn seems like the right kind of bizarre CiV-ness, but I'd be fine avoiding it if we decided we didn't like that.
Bargh, I'd forgotten about the unit being consumed. This makes things more complicated. If the Hunter is ever being consumed by the process, it should probably always be consumed. I do like the idea of the Hornblower being a unit though - that there's an inherent risk in the Horn in that it can be taken and used against you if its bearer dies (which was part of the ordeal of the Horn in the books and given the way the Horn works, mythology-wise, seems like it should be a problem for the bearer regardless of which timeline you're playing).
This means it may make more sense for the player to "attain" the Horn when the Site is explored - where that's a player-wide state. And then be able to elect a unit as a Hornblower or train one or something.
I believe one of your suggestions from a few posts ago was a Hornblower unit? What do we think of that? It's particularly risky if it's a civilian, which could be pretty cool, and might prevent Horn-spamming (more on that below) in non-essential combat scenarios. (Wars you'll win anyway without the Heroes.)
Agreed on the cooldown not restarting. Also agreed that we don't want a tug-of-war for the Horn to be a focal point of the game.
I would want to see it blown at most 4 times in a single game. The Mythic Sites are revealed by a tech in the Era of Encroaching Blight, which is our equivalent of the Modern Era, right? (There are two after it, which correspond to Atomic and Information respectively.)
Say a civ got super lucky - their first Mythic Site right next to their home turf has the Horn in it. A cooldown of 30 turns means that to blow it four times would take 120 turns. That sounds like it's about the remaining length of a game that runs long? Or do you think the players should be able to use it fewer times? Or possibly that it should take longer than 120 for 4?
If we go for existing units, then yes, a promotion that's visible to other players. (Most humans won't notice a promotion.) If there's a distinct unit type then it's clear from that.
That sounds fine, depending on how Hornblowers exist, as being discussed above! I could be fine with Hornblower being a unit type but other units could become Hornblowers as well by killing him.
This is difficult. We could spawn another Mythic Site, but there's no guarantee there's any free land left to do so. The likelihood of there not being any is relatively small, but it still exists. (In which case I suppose we drop it into somebody's territory.) Even if all existing Mythic Sites had been explored, since players can only see Mythic Sites either when they are first revealed by the tech or when they gain vision over a hex, they'd need to look for it. (In the same way you see enemy lands without improvements if you haven't actually had vision there for a long time, except in reverse.)
Nothing unusual, I don't think. The Heroes remain until they would have disappeared anyway, which won't be too long. (A few turns at most, most likely less since they're in a combat zone.)
I've edited this into the misc summary. (and it no longer needs to be red in the LB summary)
Hmm, good point. The trade off the other way is that at tier 2 only X civilizations can have the bonus at once, would we want to restrict the victory-relevant abilities that way? (Arguably the player going for that victory should knowingly prioritize those two Ajahs?)
How about we leave them where they are and see if the lack of that ability is a problem for the Shadow? They can always build more Hunters and this could be just one consequence of fighting against the Tower.
I've written the details of the ability into the diplo summary (and marked the cooldown duration in red, does 30 turns sound reasonable?).
Lots and lots of text. I'm hoping many people will be able to contribute to the Civilopedia and we'll be doing more copyediting and consistent-ifying writing style. More because I think we'll be occupied with a lot of other stuff!
Cool, no production bonus on Shadowspawn for Shadow civs after Seals are broken.
I thought you meant the relative spawn rate, rather than the overall numbers. Yes, increasing global spawn rate will cause there to be more Myrddraal, but not more Myrddraal per Trolloc, unless we wanted those spawn rates to scale differently as the Seals break.
Do we want to tie in specifically that Ishamael is one of the first ones to escape? I can see why we would - we're also working from the Age of Legends, so they're all already sealed up and Ishamael was closest to the living world. But I can see value in switching it up a bit too - it makes the game a bit more unpredictable. This is pure flavor at this point, since the Forsaken are mechanically interchangeable.
I think the AI considerations of specific Forsaken choosing and focusing on certain civs would be very complex. Making them do that sensibly (knowing when to just give up on an enemy or ally, etc) would be difficult.
bloop bloop
The function that generates random numbers takes a "reason" for generating it as a parameter. That's usually used to say why you need the random number, but "1d20 worth of bad balance" is also a valid string!
Yes, sounds good!
It will be interesting to see how people who haven't read the books find the mod. And possibly if they pick up the books after playing it!
Awesome sauce.
Level 2, edited in!
Yep, nothing but kill folks. What about 45 turns as the lifespan of a Bloodknife? Sound right?
Woops, very good point. There is no point in a turn delay. If the Light control Thakan'dar and all of the Seals are broken, they win the game immediately!
Thakan'dar remains under Light control (more details below) until it is recaptured, like any normal city.
Yes, friendly territory, but still Blight!
This makes a lot of sense. I hadn't started on it yet, so I'll hold off on any Light/Shadow Decisions until later. Placeholders sound like a plan.
S3rgeus
Emperor
Sorry, my middle sentence from this quote was meant to describe the situation where the Shadow steals a Seal and then recaptures Thakan'dar. We were discussing the Dragon respawning, so I figured we should note that if he would respawn, but the Light no longer controlled all of the Seals, he respawned as a spy instead of a unit.
If the Shadow steal a Seal while the Light controls Thakan'dar it has no direct effect on anything else. The Light must recapture that Seal if they want to win the game, but their position in control of Thakan'dar and the Dragon remains unchanged by the stealing action. (The stealing may become relevant, as shown above, if other actions take place, such as the Shadow recapturing Thakan'dar.)
The simplest description:
If all Seals are broken and the Light control Thakan'dar, the Light win the game.
The Dragon's primary relevance is his ability to capture Thakan'dar - the fact that he's "fighting" inside Shayol Ghul is flavor dressing so that the Light can't use him to defend the city.
I'd say Neutral civs can capture it if they want. If they feel they'd be better able to defend it against the Light alliance, this might be a very unusual but useful-on-rare-occasions strategy. The Shadowspawn's spawn rates are unaffected (though the Shadowspawn will attack the city to try to reclaim it, which will distract them). I don't think we need the city itself to manually produce units - Shadowspawn spawn more like barbarians around it and throughout the Blight (and across the world), except much faster.
This was about Alignment Decisions, so we'll come back to it another time!
Awesome! Bullets two and three of the "General description" section both end with "the Last Battle commences" but describe situations X turns apart. I think you can drop bullet 2, add "world era" to bullet 1, and have (the current) bullet 3 say "X turns after world era reaches Era of the Dragon" (or just "X turns later").
Yes, definitely.
I basically talked myself out of my own alternative proposal in the process of writing it. As I see it, contributing to buckets can only work in two ways:
1. Each project only has one "bonus" and it's a fixed amount of *something* (where *something* is determined by which project it is - so one provides Science per turn, one exp for units, etc.). This likely scales with map size and number of Light players. It wants to consume a X hammers every turn to provide that bonus. If there are less than that X, it provides no bonus. If there are more than X hammers in the bucket, it consumes X of them and the Light civs get that bonus for another turn. Light players only consistently have the bonus if they're throwing more than X hammers into the bucket every turn. But if there's more than 2X hammers in the bucket, they can all "not contribute" to it and will receive the bonus for 2 turns. And so on for multiples of X.
2. There are tiers of bonuses for each project, where each tier consumes a different amount of hammers per turn. Players need to be able to specify which tier they want for each project. This approach is significantly more complex, since the player needs a UI system to enter their choices in. The AI needs knowledge of it and to consider which bonuses are appropriate for them. And since the bonuses are Light-side-wide, there should probably be some form of voting involved - so that all players on the Light side have a voice in the decision.
The complexity of option 2 put me off the idea of buckets, because I preferred tiers to the bonuses. But if we're ok with having only a single bonus 'level' for each project, then the bucket approach works very well. If we'd like to have tiers (so there can be a threshold where the Light gets science per turn, and then another higher one where the Light gets more science per turn) then hammers per turn is better.
More production buying you more turns of the bonus is good in the general case, but the Last Battle is a short-term affair. I can see value in everyone being able to pump hammers into one thing in order to supercharge a specific component of the Light civs' abilities.
I'm open to either approach though - both have positives and negatives!
I can definitely see the flavor in random - it might be a bit harsh. Let's start with random and if it's too frustrating we can switch!
Yeah, this is a good point - that players going for those victory conditions should knowingly prioritize those Ajahs. We're discussing this above, but it's very relevant to our choice here.
Reset all of their Ajah influences to 0 and their overall Tower influence to -60 (or equivalent, like city-states, it's locked into the minimum value). They can't participate in any of the actions that would normally give them positive influence with the Ajahs, so they're stuck at those Ajah influence values. The overall Tower influence won't change as long as they're at war, which should be the remainder of the game.
I've added this to the diplo summary! (At the end of the "Crossover with the Last Battle" section)
Awesome, all in the diplo summary now!
Yes, let's have Dreadlords cost Spark.
We could do the death/rebirth cycle stuff as it was in the books, but it's oddly specific - we can only do it for some of them so it would be more effective (from the Light point of view) to kill Forsaken that can't be resurrected, since it would decrease their overall numbers. I think we should just let them all be jumbled together and respawn so that there are 13 or until we run out of names. I'm assuming we're including M'Hael?
Peanutbutter as ice peppers! Free the vegetables! The Dark One has poisoned everyone's minds!
I can see what you mean about resplendent being quite different - I was thinking of it more along the lines of brightness and stuff, but you're right that the others are mostly morality. I think "Just" could take the place of "Righteous"? There are some negative connotations to righteous ("righteous indignation" vs "righteous fury") that we could avoid that way.
I know there's something good in the voiceover, but I can't remember it! The codex voiceovers in Mass Effect were awesome though, I won't mind listening to those again. Actually, that sounds like an all right commute soundtrack for a few days. BRB!
This is the High King bonuses. I've done that - added a list to the High King section of the diplo summary. I made two little bits red because I thought some changes made sense. I also changed all concrete numbers into X or %, since the values from the bonus will change depending on which powerful/significant/meager slot they're dropped into.
The dream lives on! No progress on it today though.
I think they will all turn and run, but they'll still have to physically move across the map. Given their numbers and that they'll be traversing the forest-y part going up to the Blight, it will take them a while to all get back there.
I haven't had a chance to play this game again yet. Though I did have a friend over at the weekend and we played a game on Quick - managed to finish it in one sitting! I won a diplo victory at the end by doing a serious beeline up the top of the tech tree. I had Globalization and the Internet, but not Dynamite. It was quite unusual, but quite effective.
Battering rams are deadly early game. Those infrastructure problems will haunt you though! Keep us posted going forward - I'd like to see if the gains from owning those cities ends up helping more.
You know, we should probably play a game of CiV sometime, timezones allowing!
Nope, 100% of the yield total. (So 200 in the Ancient Era) 20-damage-worth of payout isn't something that can be evaluated in isolation. Because the False Dragon may be healed, his maximum health isn't considered when working out the yield payout. It's damage as a proportion of total damage dealt to the False Dragon. (This is why, since Gentling him doesn't damage him, but does "kill" him for the purposes of when people get rewarded, the civ who damages him gets the default yield bonus.)
I'm not sure what you mean - Gentling is only worse (for the player doing the Gentling) than killing him if someone else has already dealt damage to him and you have the capability to deal more damage than them before he is killed (or even before you attempt to Gentle him), but choose to Gentle him before dealing that damage instead.
If no one has dealt damage to him or just you have, then Gentling is all upside - it's a yield bonus on top of the normal yield payout you would have gotten.
If someone else has dealt some damage and you've dealt some damage, Gentling him is better than letting the other player kill him on their next turn. Less damage is dealt to the False Dragon total, so your current amount of damage is worth more default yield payout and you get the Gentling bonus.
If someone else has already done a lot of damage to the False Dragon, then the amount of damage you can deal before he dies is comparatively small (and likely worth only a small portion of the default yield). Gentling, even having dealt no damage previously, provides a better payoff for you. (If you can damage him first without killing him and then Gentle him, that will have a marginally better payoff in total, since you'll get some of the default yield as well. Whether you do that likely depends on if you have appropriately strong units within range aside from the Sister.)
In most cases, since damaging the False Dragon also increases your Gentling success chances, you're going to want to damage him first (much like a Pokemon!), without killing him. If you and another player are competing on damage to the False Dragon and you can bring him to low health before trying to Gentle him, it's to your advantage on all fronts to do so. (Except possibly in the case where you fail to Gentle him, the other civ also has a Sister in range who Gentles him afterwards, and that Sister wouldn't have succeeded in Gentling him without your damage helping. But whether or not that situation occurred is impossible to determine from the player's perspective since they can't see the underlying random rolls, they just see success or failure. There may be an element of "I softened him up for you" - but it's not based on numbers.)
The only time you might not want to try to Gentle a False Dragon that is within move-then-Gentle range of one of your Aes Sedai would be if you were worried the Sister would die from combat damage if she failed and the False Dragon (or his cronies) got to attack her.
As with most situations in CiV, there are a lot of subtly different scenarios, but on the whole, Gentling has a better payout than killing him.
This is about water-based maps and how the Shadowspawn are going to deal with them. This can become another long-lived quote-block for now, until we've wound down some more of these discussions so I have more time to address it!
Cool, we'll know to come back to it when we see that again later!
Faith bonuses is the primary thing that comes to mind. The discussion here was about happiness bonuses for choose with-type during the Last Battle, so as other players' Alignment missionaries spreading in your lands would create an opportunity cost of that lost happiness.
Yeah, I see what you mean. We can mix and match the models between them easily enough, possibly making use of some Clansmen as well. I've linked to the unit art thread from the misc summary so we can re-evaluate it later when we know exactly what units will make up the Dragonsworn armies.
Yeah, the Darkfriend citizen stuff is definitely the most open-ended at this point, but we're getting there! Stuff is hopefully winding down on all others, but it's still a monolithic back and forth at the moment!
Also also, code! You might have noticed that I started up another thread in the C++/Lua forum looking for some advice on a problem that sounds suspiciously like Warders' Shadowspawn detection ability. Whoward was totally on point with that one and has pointed me towards a Firaxian example of what I'm trying to get working there!
So I've been mostly working on Warders since I last posted about implementation progress. The dynamics of the Aes Sedai Warder bond mechanics, as we've described them, have involved several separate things. The discrete tasks were loosely:
- Figure out how Firaxis do "selection modes" in the UI (like the player choosing where to bombard with a ranged unit), despite there being a single "MISSION_RANGED_ATTACK" mission that seemed to magically already know what plot it was targeting. This was probably the longest single piece of work. The UI is still very WIP, but I've worked out what Firaxis did in the general case (which, as usual, they didn't implement in a very general-case way), each mission that requires some selection from the user has a corresponding InterfaceMode, where the UI is explicitly selecting what components are involved with that mission being performed. This was to allow human players to select which unit to bond with an Aes Sedai. The AI will (does not yet) invoke the mission directly, since it will "already know" what it wants to target and doesn't need to go through the UI. The UI I've put in is very WIP, but it works.
Caveat: There's a bug - if you select left click a unit that can swap places with your selected Aes Sedai, they will swap places instead of be bonded. For some reason, the default left click selection handler is being invoked, I've yet to work out why. (For the moment, workaround is fortifying the intended Warder first, so swapping isn't possible.) I will come back to this. - Allow Aes Sedai units to perform the Bond Warder mission!
- Make the mission itself actually convert the targeted unit into a Warder and record some information on both the Sister and Warder objects so that they know who they are bonded to.
- Restrict the mission so that it can only be performed on fully upgraded units.
- Restrict the number of Warders a Sister can bond to 1 in all cases.
- Allow promotions to affect how many Warders a Sister can bond, so that all Sisters now start with a promotion that lets them bond 1 Warder. (But that limit of 1 is now due to the promotion, not fixed in all cases.)
Side note: The Green Ajah's tier zero ability is now trivial to implement, but I haven't put the DB entries in yet. - Allow Warders to have specific promotions for the duration of the time they are bonded (default CiV only gives us a table for free promotions for a given unit type at all times). They gain them when bonded and lose them when unbonded.
- Give Warders a promotion which ignores terrain movement costs, while they are bonded. (Trivially done, just give them the same promotion Scouts have using the above only-when-bonded system)
- Allow promotions to enhance units' combat strength when wounded. (The Japanese UA is implemented in terms of a player-wide trait bonus, so couldn't be reused for a single unit. It wasn't difficult to add a new field to promotions and have it do the same thing as the trait bonus, just for only that unit, but I hadn't expected to have to do that.)
Side note: The way the UA (and my new promotion field) works actually means that they would stack. So a unit owned by a civ with the Japanese UA (or any UA that sets FightsWellDamaged to true) that has the FightsWellDamaged promotion will get stronger after it takes damage. - Give Warders one of those new enhanced-combat-when-wounded promotions. (Same system as above, easily done.)
- Create thread on forum about the Shadowspawn detection stuff, because the UI requirements for that were complicated and there might be existing modders who are more familiar with the C++/Lua boundary. Thanks to whoward, we now have a plan of attack!
- Start work on the penalties Sisters and Warders receive when the other half of their bonded pair dies. They both recover from these in unrelated ways, but I'm currently working on a system that can give them "promotions" when the bond is broken, which apply the negative effects discussed in the Channeling summary.
And that's where we are at the moment!
It occurs to me that it would be good to mark what's been implemented in some way as well. At the moment I just remember what I've done, but that doesn't scale all that well. Having to re-highlight everything in a new color as we go is a pain in the face though. There might be some value in turning the summary items into Github issues (attributed to milestones named after the summaries) as they're broken down into actual implementation tasks.
I'll think more on what the best workflow is for that before we do anything for it, but just thought I'd mention it here!
counterpoint
King
Have some time again tonight. Hopefully I can get halfway through your responses.
OK, I don't love that this is very "leveled", and that there would be min-max-able population points, but all in all I think this is probably the best path. You are right that inter-city stuff would get crazy.
I know that was just an example (D/L/L...), but I would say I don't like the idea of the D showing up first in a 1 pop city, except obviously for heavily-shadow civilizations. If you wanted 1/3 of a city's population to be DFs, it makes sense for it to be L/D/L or L/L/D, I think.
As to the 5 DFs=1 regular, the example above was 1/3 DFs. This is moderately shadow, right, since there's a net accumulation of Shadow Points? If we go with 5 DFs=1 regular, that means by definition a neutral civ would create 1 DF for every 4 regulars, right (like L/L/D/L/L, repeating)? That way they'd balance out to zero alignment increase. Do we like that number? 4 DFs in a size 20 city? That doesn't give a ton of room to grow (shrink, really) for the Light civs, though.
Definitely need to find a use for Peddler... but I don't think this is it, since that doesn't connote Light to me (especially since the one peddler we get to know well in the books is a DF.
Some other, non-canonical, but potentionally ok ideas:
Emissary (which you've mentioned often, decent but also ver diplo-seeming)
Herald
Champion
Zealot
Devotee
Altruist
Volunteer
Patron
Another interesting thing about this we may want to consider. We talked about folding the "Inquisitor" of Paths into the one that neutralizes Alignment change - might we consider doing the same for missionaries, so the one that spreads Path is also the one that spreads Alignment?
Of course, than we'd have to make it visible, but since it's also spreading religion, it makes it a little less obvious who exactly spread the naughty alignment to you... maybe.
Anyways, just a thought. not necessarily a good one.
Also, are these units bought with faith? If so, that gives the Light the ability to make them more easily, right? Is that ok?
I agree with transparency, in this case. If we're trying to create a meta-game involving spreading your Alignment and protecting your own alignment, I think it's important that the players can easily see the effect DFs have on their cities and their total Alignment yields.
In terms of how to represent this in the top bar, I think we should probably think of it more like Happiness and less like Gold. As the end-game replay graphs tell me, unhappiness and happiness are tracked separately, and aren't necessarily directly correlated. But the user sees one value, which they also call happiness. If you highlight that value, it breaks it down for you. I think we can do something similar. No need to show one Shadow value and one Light value. Just show "-154 Mischievous", and when they highlight it, they'll see all the various components to that (36 Shadow from Darkfriend Citizens, 1508 Shadow from Threads, 1118 Light from Threads). That kind of thing.
EDIT: I mean it would be like Happiness in that it would be a composite-yield - it's showing you where you currently stand in Light vs Shadow. It would ALSO show you how much of Shadow or Light you are currently getting per turn, unlike Happiness. I guess my point is we wouldn't really need to show both +4 Shadow and +5 Light per turn, we could simply show the net (+1 Light).
Does that work?
Speaking of meta-game, I've just thought of something that I'm sure you've already been thinking. We seem to be rewarding people for being extreme in their alignments, unless they plan on going Neutral in the LB. I've just realized that it's also a super viable strategy to remain neutral so as to "keep your options open," if it becomes (more) clear on the eve of the LB which side will be stronger.
Is this actually the right way to do it? Instead of subtracting or adding DFs, should we instead just have it move it closer to what it's "supposed to be" in a given city? Not necessarily 100% reset, but maybe we could have the city move halfway between where it is now and where it "should" be?
We should also decide whether the Emisaries/Friends increase/decrease a flat amount, or if they too do some sort of "average"
I think it might actually be best to have the Friends/Emisaries (and Inquisitors) adjust a city's alignment in terms of Tiers. This might make things easier for us, actually. Consider a civ that is Light Tier 4. If he gets bombarded by a Friend of the Dark, instead of adding some amount of DF citizens, we could have, instead, that city change tier, effectively. Like, either slide over a few Tiers in the direction of the missionary, or else adopt that missionary's Tier, or move halfway to it, or something. What do you think?
On that note, does the alignment of a city drift back over time? Like if I'm strong light, and you shadow-nuke my city, will that city, over many turns, eventually make its way back to epic lightness?
Is there going to be pressure from trade routes and such, as well?
That said, how to implement this isn't so simple. If we allow people to simply flag any unit as a Hornblower, I wonder if we might create weird situations where the hornblower is too strong - an asha'man, a Sister who can never be attacked, that kind of thing. This might be acceptable, but it feels like there might end up weird problems iwth it. In any case,
It could be that the nearest military unit becomes the hornblower after the hunter is consumed? Or maybe the hunter is replaced by a random military unit?
I'd say we don't need to be as crazy as you're suggesting. We could simply have it cap at 13, and dole them out essentially randomly, BUT if Lanfear is dead and it's time to add one, it could be Asmodean or something OR it could be Cyndane. You know what I mean?
As far as the civ-connections, I guess I was thinking of something very simple. Like, if the Forsaken periodically spawn on the map, you could have the same ones spawn in the same places. Simultaneously, that'd be the one appearing in Forsaken quests, or something. Just flavor.
And that's all my time for tonight!
yup! already in the summary.
I'm fine going with this, and seeing how it works out in the end.
OK. It's alright if some of the choices reward with more light and shadow, then.
OK, I don't love that this is very "leveled", and that there would be min-max-able population points, but all in all I think this is probably the best path. You are right that inter-city stuff would get crazy.
I know that was just an example (D/L/L...), but I would say I don't like the idea of the D showing up first in a 1 pop city, except obviously for heavily-shadow civilizations. If you wanted 1/3 of a city's population to be DFs, it makes sense for it to be L/D/L or L/L/D, I think.
Yes, that's very important. We need this to just be the base that can be modified over time.
please do!
As to the 5 DFs=1 regular, the example above was 1/3 DFs. This is moderately shadow, right, since there's a net accumulation of Shadow Points? If we go with 5 DFs=1 regular, that means by definition a neutral civ would create 1 DF for every 4 regulars, right (like L/L/D/L/L, repeating)? That way they'd balance out to zero alignment increase. Do we like that number? 4 DFs in a size 20 city? That doesn't give a ton of room to grow (shrink, really) for the Light civs, though.
Right, though our Scientists could also be DFs, of course.
OK, let's see what shakes up, then!
Definitely need to find a use for Peddler... but I don't think this is it, since that doesn't connote Light to me (especially since the one peddler we get to know well in the books is a DF.
Some other, non-canonical, but potentionally ok ideas:
Emissary (which you've mentioned often, decent but also ver diplo-seeming)
Herald
Champion
Zealot
Devotee
Altruist
Volunteer
Patron
Another interesting thing about this we may want to consider. We talked about folding the "Inquisitor" of Paths into the one that neutralizes Alignment change - might we consider doing the same for missionaries, so the one that spreads Path is also the one that spreads Alignment?
Of course, than we'd have to make it visible, but since it's also spreading religion, it makes it a little less obvious who exactly spread the naughty alignment to you... maybe.
Anyways, just a thought. not necessarily a good one.
Also, are these units bought with faith? If so, that gives the Light the ability to make them more easily, right? Is that ok?
hmm, a lot to think about! Honestly I had forgotten that we/if we had decided to hide all this (though I do remember of course hiding it from OTHER players).
I agree with transparency, in this case. If we're trying to create a meta-game involving spreading your Alignment and protecting your own alignment, I think it's important that the players can easily see the effect DFs have on their cities and their total Alignment yields.
In terms of how to represent this in the top bar, I think we should probably think of it more like Happiness and less like Gold. As the end-game replay graphs tell me, unhappiness and happiness are tracked separately, and aren't necessarily directly correlated. But the user sees one value, which they also call happiness. If you highlight that value, it breaks it down for you. I think we can do something similar. No need to show one Shadow value and one Light value. Just show "-154 Mischievous", and when they highlight it, they'll see all the various components to that (36 Shadow from Darkfriend Citizens, 1508 Shadow from Threads, 1118 Light from Threads). That kind of thing.
EDIT: I mean it would be like Happiness in that it would be a composite-yield - it's showing you where you currently stand in Light vs Shadow. It would ALSO show you how much of Shadow or Light you are currently getting per turn, unlike Happiness. I guess my point is we wouldn't really need to show both +4 Shadow and +5 Light per turn, we could simply show the net (+1 Light).
Does that work?
Speaking of meta-game, I've just thought of something that I'm sure you've already been thinking. We seem to be rewarding people for being extreme in their alignments, unless they plan on going Neutral in the LB. I've just realized that it's also a super viable strategy to remain neutral so as to "keep your options open," if it becomes (more) clear on the eve of the LB which side will be stronger.
This is in response to me suggesting the Inquisitors would be more powerful with 4-8 tier Light guys, for example.
Is this actually the right way to do it? Instead of subtracting or adding DFs, should we instead just have it move it closer to what it's "supposed to be" in a given city? Not necessarily 100% reset, but maybe we could have the city move halfway between where it is now and where it "should" be?
We should also decide whether the Emisaries/Friends increase/decrease a flat amount, or if they too do some sort of "average"
I think it might actually be best to have the Friends/Emisaries (and Inquisitors) adjust a city's alignment in terms of Tiers. This might make things easier for us, actually. Consider a civ that is Light Tier 4. If he gets bombarded by a Friend of the Dark, instead of adding some amount of DF citizens, we could have, instead, that city change tier, effectively. Like, either slide over a few Tiers in the direction of the missionary, or else adopt that missionary's Tier, or move halfway to it, or something. What do you think?
On that note, does the alignment of a city drift back over time? Like if I'm strong light, and you shadow-nuke my city, will that city, over many turns, eventually make its way back to epic lightness?
Is there going to be pressure from trade routes and such, as well?
Since it looks like we're going with transparency, I think we should do it based on each city.
Right. I'd say part of it has to do with whether we "need him" to always be there as a Hero. If there's an identical unit we can swap him with, as a backup, then it's truly only a flavor consideration. But if he fills a specific role in the Heroes, that'd be bad to eliminate (like if we got rid of Brigitte and thus had no archer).
I'd prefer not to create yet another unit type. I already feel like we're adding a bunch of them. I'd definitely prefer the Hornblower promotion be attached to another unit.
That said, how to implement this isn't so simple. If we allow people to simply flag any unit as a Hornblower, I wonder if we might create weird situations where the hornblower is too strong - an asha'man, a Sister who can never be attacked, that kind of thing. This might be acceptable, but it feels like there might end up weird problems iwth it. In any case,
It could be that the nearest military unit becomes the hornblower after the hunter is consumed? Or maybe the hunter is replaced by a random military unit?
yes, we have it as a stand-in for Modern. But that has the Fourth Age equaling the Information age. Is that right? Or should the Fourth age be parallel to the Future Age? If that's the case, we need one more...
I think that's probably fine. But, of course, it depends on how good the horn is!
OK, so definitely you want it to be visible, then? Probably fine, though we might find the easy-target thing is problematic. Especially during the 30 turn cooldown, it means you pretty much can't use the unit, for fear of people focusing fire on him. It's like, if everybody knew Mat was the hornblower (even though he technically wasn't), he'd have died a long time ago. Should we try to preserve that somehow?
dang... so.. .what do you suggest, then?
ok, good! The heroes remain even if the HB dies.
I agree. let's leave them alone for now.
eh... maybe 20. 30 is pretty limiting. Even could be 15.
I was thinking about this. What about the wikis? Is it worth considering having the histories and such just be taken from one of the wikis (and credited to it, of course)? It would be cool to have original content, but... yeah...
huh. honestly don't remember what I meant. Yeah, let's leave the scale alone, Id' say.
Sure, Ish should be the first, though I don't know if he was actually the closest - wasn't the burned-up one the one that was closest (Aginor? Balthamel?) Isn't that why he was all scarred?
I'd say we don't need to be as crazy as you're suggesting. We could simply have it cap at 13, and dole them out essentially randomly, BUT if Lanfear is dead and it's time to add one, it could be Asmodean or something OR it could be Cyndane. You know what I mean?
As far as the civ-connections, I guess I was thinking of something very simple. Like, if the Forsaken periodically spawn on the map, you could have the same ones spawn in the same places. Simultaneously, that'd be the one appearing in Forsaken quests, or something. Just flavor.
Yeah. That's not enough to kill 2 people, right? But it's enough to lie in wait and such, move cities, and then kill. Yes?
good. makes sense.
And that's all my time for tonight!
counterpoint
King
ok, some time to work on this now. not sure how far i'll get...
EDIT:
I've been thinking about this, especially since I'm going through the LB summary again.
What's the point in having the dragon die permanently? It just makes us have to deal with some of the weirdness of having T'd able to *technically* be taken over by normal units.
Why not just say that, yes, T'D can only be taken by the Dragon. But have the Dragon never die. He just keeps getting defeated and the Light keeps suffering for that - happiness penalties, perhaps other stuff. But looking at the Shadow victory conditions in the LB summary, why is it necessary that he is perma-killed? Why not just "defeated" while all the other conditions are also met?
Why don't we just do it as a standing project that anybody can dump hammers into, and when it's completed, all Light Civs get X bonus for X number of turns. I know you're having it deduct the bonus per turn, and such, but I feel like it would feel more "special," and less tedious, for it to be for a number of turns. This way, civs could dump a lot of hammers for a few turns towards a production boost, strategically, and then switch all their cities to build units to take advantage of the boost, for instance. Or, alternatively, one civ dedicates itself to this, and then everybody swaps for X turns to take advantage.
So, i'd think something like getting the bonus for 5 or 10 turns. The project hangs around until enough hammers are put into it, and then it resets (though "overflow" would hang around for the next time).
good. agreed.
OK, this is crazy, but I have to go. Finish later!
makes perfect sense. agreed.
EDIT:
I've been thinking about this, especially since I'm going through the LB summary again.
What's the point in having the dragon die permanently? It just makes us have to deal with some of the weirdness of having T'd able to *technically* be taken over by normal units.
Why not just say that, yes, T'D can only be taken by the Dragon. But have the Dragon never die. He just keeps getting defeated and the Light keeps suffering for that - happiness penalties, perhaps other stuff. But looking at the Shadow victory conditions in the LB summary, why is it necessary that he is perma-killed? Why not just "defeated" while all the other conditions are also met?
ok, so T'd is just a prize... that fires back.
actually, this wasn't about Alignment Decisions (which have been tabled). This was about Dragon-centric Edicts and Quests - stuff that pops up during the EotD in order to "flavor" the birth of the dragon more interestingly.
Fixed!
I vote for option 1. There is already Research and Wealth and stuff like that, and a per turn thing feels a lot like that, which isn't so exciting. Also, it can get way more complex.
Why don't we just do it as a standing project that anybody can dump hammers into, and when it's completed, all Light Civs get X bonus for X number of turns. I know you're having it deduct the bonus per turn, and such, but I feel like it would feel more "special," and less tedious, for it to be for a number of turns. This way, civs could dump a lot of hammers for a few turns towards a production boost, strategically, and then switch all their cities to build units to take advantage of the boost, for instance. Or, alternatively, one civ dedicates itself to this, and then everybody swaps for X turns to take advantage.
So, i'd think something like getting the bonus for 5 or 10 turns. The project hangs around until enough hammers are put into it, and then it resets (though "overflow" would hang around for the next time).
good. agreed.
OK, this is crazy, but I have to go. Finish later!
counterpoint
King
works for me. Point of clarification, though: does this happen whenever you are at war with the tower? do all your Sisters lose their high tier abilities?
not sure if that belongs in any of our summaries, really - let's try to remember.
right, I think I addressed this above (probably missing the point of what you were saying above, actually). I'd say, jumble them together. I think we can preserve the "accuracy" of the resurrection names, in that Ishamael can never coexist with Moridin, but that doesn't mean he's "better" or something. He'd just take two of the 13's slots.
Yes, we can use M'Hael, the jerk.
This is all nice, except that I totally only have seven names... the fact that there's no comma after Pure in the original list suggests to me that I deleted one and forgot to type it in. I suspect that one was "Just." So, put in Just there? Do I still need to remove Righteous?
right. And I assume they'd still attack if molested, right?
Never actually played Quick. I can't imagine how you'd ever win a Domination Victory. Seems like a war would last a whole era.
So far it's not looking like I'm benefiting a whole lot from the cities themselves. The AI put them in stupid, stupid places. I mean, they're good resource-wise, but only one is coastal, but two out of the other three are one tile away from the coast, which is super frustrating. At this point, it's looking like the benefit I'm receiving is essentially just not having to worry about anybody else.
So weird, though, the whole UA thing where it takes city names from other Civs. Seems kind of pointless. Of course, I probably won't be using it, since I'm already Wide enough because of my conquests.
This seems pretty obvious, now that you mention it. It's funny that it's only recently that this thread has included any real discussion of CiV, the game. If that makes any sense.
In any case, will be sending you a PM about such things!
[/quote]
Right, this all makes sense.
To me, I guess the only sticky issues - and it's no big deal - is that I think I don't love the presumption that a civ should try to damage a FD as much as possible before they attempt to gentle him. Let's assume for purpose of argument that another civ has dealt exactly 1 damage to the FD - thus, getting rid of the best-case scenario of getting everything yourself.
In this case, it's too your advantage to whittle the guy down and then gentle him. Not just is this advantageous in that it makes the gentling easier - that's obvious - but also you will receive a better yield payout if you do. This isn't something I love. Gentling a guy when he's almost dead is no impressive feat. Gentling him when he's still half-powerful is much more impressive, and to me should be rewarded. At the very least, it shouldn't be discouraged - providing you're willing to risk the failure chance. As it is, we're rewarding the player playing very conservatively and min-maxing quite a bit.
Again, not a big deal. But that's where it feels a little *off* to me.
Part of me wants the *Gentling Bonus* to be based in some part off of how much health he had when he was gentled. If the bonus was some other yield or configuration of yeilds, this would be more meaningful.
I've been thinking about this! No great insights yet, though.
I think it does bear keeping in mind that we don't need the Shadowspawn to replace barbarians. The dragonsworn can have ships, and such. The big issue, of course, is that without water travel there's no real way to threaten those players during the TW and LB.
What if we lean more heavily on Waygates and such in water maps? In other words, Trollocs appearing at your doorstep, even if you're super far away from the Blight.
Right. I'm just wondering if perhaps punishing people for "breaking alignment" is perfectly good enough. Maybe no need to ALSO reward them for being super-inline with their alignment (meaning they're really shadow and choose shadow). We already have plenty of things that might reward them for doing such things.
Looking great! Awesome how systematic your approach is. I'm glad most things appear to be working out. Weird about some of those caveats though.... hopefully the bonding bud works out.
Sorry I'm not a coder....
For sure you should probably figure out a way to mark things as done. You could put a symbol in the summaries, of course. Is doing it on the Github better?
Cool. And that's that! I'm going to go through the LB summary and un-red some stuff!
S3rgeus
Emperor
I think some min-maxing can be good, as long as the advantage from it isn't too drastic - it needs to be something for crazy optimizing players to eke out incremental advantage. In this case, I think the added science from additional population seriously outweighs any Alignment considerations.
I agree with your order on spawning citizens - if going for 1/3 then L/L/D makes more sense. Although, I'm thinking we might modify this for each tier - see below.
Chronologically I should have done this quote block below the next one, but it makes more sense to address this first.
As you've said, room to modify the number of Darkfriends in high-Light cities pushes us towards having a smaller difference between the two types of citizen. I'm thinking that 3-to-1 might make more sense then, a size 24 would have 8 Darkfriends to produce a net zero Alignment change. Are we happy with that proportion?
The other side of the coin for having fewer, more influential Darkfriend citizens is that it makes the label matter more. Getting rid of a single Darkfriend is a bigger deal if that Darkfriend was generating more Shadow.
Considering that having fewer, more influential Darkfriends gives us more problems with granularity for smaller cities though - I think the lower ratio makes more sense. So 3-to-1 for a single DF vs a single normal citizen. I'm going to use this ratio in my calculations for the population progressions below, so hopefully that sounds good!
Awesome sauce, progression for the 17 tiers. At each level, there's a "cycle yield" - which is the total net yield a single cycle (the non-repeating sub-sequence that makes up the larger loop) of citizens are producing. For example, in Neutral civs, the cycle yield is 0. This is achieved by:
L/L/D/L
One of the things I mentioned above is that we might want to tweak the progression order for the tiers. As you very rightly pointed out, leading with the Darkfriend citizen will make Neutral civs tend Shadow on average over time, even if they produce a linear number of citizens, because they will be net Shadow while the cycles are incomplete.
But we also know that citizen production is non-linear - it takes more food to make each subsequent citizen. So putting the Darkfriend at the end of the sequence means that Neutral civs will tend Light.
A potential solution to this would be to introduce a uniform randomness over the course of a single cycle. (So within a cycle you know how many DFs and normal citizens a given civ will get, based on their Alignment tier, but not what the order will be.) But I think we could also modify the order based on the Alignment tier to make it a sort of feedback loop, where civs that are more Light tend towards Light-ness because all of their normal citizens come first. Shadow civs tend towards Shadow-ness because their DFs come first. So, with this in mind:
Neutral: L/L/D/L (+0 per cycle, tending marginally Light, since citizen 3 costs more than 2. Balanced a little by citizen 4 costing more than 3, but not completely.)
Light tier 1 & 2: L/L/D/L/L (+1 per cycle)
Light tier 3 & 4: L/L/D/L/L/L (+2 per cycle)
Light tier 5 & 6: L/L/L/L/D/L/L (+3 per cycle, notable that no part of the cycle is the player net Shadow)
Light tier 7 & 8: L/L/L/L/L/L/L/D (+4 per cycle)
Shadow tier 1 & 2: L/L/D (-1 per cycle)
Shadow tier 3 & 4: L/L/D/L/D/L (-2 per cycle)
Shadow tier 5 & 6: L/D/L/D/L (-3 per cycle)
Shadow tier 7 & 8: D/L/D/L (-4 per cycle, and this one is the first time where Shadow spends no part of the cycle gaining Light)
Also, one thing that will happen is players will change tiers while they are part of the way through the progression. I think each population point that spawns should consider only the player's current Alignment tier, and treat it as if the current tier's progression were extrapolated from the city's total population. (Example: if a third citizen spawns in a city owned by a civ in Shadow tier 4, that citizen will always be a Darkfriend.)
I can see Herald working quite well. It's not specifically in-universe, but it does fit the WoT time period. The others I like less, for some separate reasons. Zealot and Devotee is more religious. Champion is more military, Patron economic. Altruist and Volunteer sound very like normal citizenry descriptions. Emissary might be my second pick, but I believe Emissary was used in Shadow-related context somewhere in the books?
I'm assuming this replaces both sides of the equation, Light and Shadow? This does give us back the "kill the missionary" defensive tactic, which is quite nice. It does mean we can no longer restrict the spreading of Alignment to foreign cities, since players need to be able to spread their own Path within their own lands.
It also seems a bit strange to spread Shadow Alignment via a Path to the Light (though one could argue the Children of the Light did exactly that).
Purchase with Faith does give them that Light-side advantage, which isn't great. We could go for production instead?
Awesome, I'm totally cool with this approach. Usually the yield breakdowns show what's contributing to yield per turn though, not what contributed to your current total. (So Threads would be absent, since they produce lump sums of Alignment yield.)
Yes, this is exactly how I think it should work too. This is actually how it's tracked already in-game!
Shadow and Light are two separate yields and the overall Alignment value is found by subtracting Shadow from Light.In terms of what we could show to the player exactly, I'm thinking we show the total as "positive" whichever side it's on and color code it and the "Tier name" to show whether it's Light or Shadow. Then we show the yield per turn as relative to whichever side they're on. (A Shadow player will see +1 Light as -1 Shadow, a Light player will see +1 Shadow as -1 Light.)
I suggest that primarily because "negative yields" are generally bad in CiV, so going for the Alignment extremes is positive in both cases.
Yeah, and I think that flexibility is a reward in itself. You can choose whichever side looks like a good idea at the time, without any penalties either way. I imagine we would also have some buildings/one or two wonders that reward Neutrality, as well as the Alignment extremes?
I think this would make keeping track of Alignment significantly more complicated. Having to track tiers per city instead of per player introduces a lot of complexity in how the Alignment yield produced by citizens meshes with lump sums provided by Alignment Decisions. It's also unclear which cities, if any, should be affected by the Light yield created by killing Shadowspawn. I suppose we could associate the Shadow yield when a Shadow-missionary is expended (the yield received by the controller) to the city that spawned the Shadow-missionary, but that has become quite disconnected from its current actions.
If there are some sources of Alignment that don't affect the tiers of individual cities, then it becomes difficult to actually have the tiers diverge significantly from Neutral. Or we risk it being much easier to go one way than another. Or even some playstyles, which prioritize certain kinds of Alignment gains over others, could be more or less effective at changing city tiers at the same time. That means there's no guaranteed correlation between civ-wide Alignment leaning and the leaning of any given city, which could be very confusing for the player. (Knowing where to spawn their missionaries and inquisitors - wondering why some of the Alignment units are unavailable in certain cities.)
I think we're better off leaving the cities as just a source of yield. The tiers only matter at the player level. (Unlike religion, we don't have a "majority Alignment" in a given city. One city may just be "dragging you down" after someone spread a bunch of Darkfriends there.)
This makes me think again that Alignment missionaries should be based on player tier, not on which city they end up being spawned in. I think the difference from religion is that we don't have a direct, clear representation of "this is a Shadow city" (which isn't a sensible thing to do in a Light civ anyway, IMO), whereas there is a clear majority religion for missionaries and inquisitors to be based off. (Even that catches a lot of players out first time through - I've seen a few people who expected all missionaries and inquisitors they purchase to follow the religion they have the holy city for.)
I think the progressions above would make the city tend toward the Alignment of the player. As the cycles continue they will gain Alignment yield in the favor of the side they're already leaning towards.
I didn't think we were going to model "pressure" at all for Alignment. I'm thinking of this as quite different from the religion meta-game, so it's more of a source of yield than something that players compete over directly. A system of pressure and dependent units makes this meta-game significantly more complicated than a simple progression system based on the player's overall leaning. Given that the player's overall leaning will fluctuate significantly externally to the effects of DF and normal citizens (as we decided on before) I think it makes sense for the overall value to be the more important one. The citizens are just one part of a larger Alignment whole.
After going through some stuff above, I'm not as sure about this. The player can see the yield breakdown for a given city, but do we want to go as far as labeling cities with "Light" and "Shadow" (presumably only visible to the player that controls them, though capturing foreign cities would now give the conqueror significant information about the defender's Alignment)? That seems like it would be necessary to make it clear what the player would get from an Inquisitor from a given city.
Right, I see what you mean. I think the Heroes will only really vary in ranged vs melee, so any other Hero who fights with a melee weapon could replace Hawkwing.
Asha'men or highly upgraded Sisters could gain control of the Horn by killing the Hornblower though, so that problem could arise even if we don't let the player give it to them directly. (In which case, it's arguably better to be attacking the guy who finds the Horn, since you get to choose which unit has it and he doesn't - though there is some limitation in having to deal the killing blow with the unit.)
What if the player wants to disband the hornblower unit? (Because that's technically a valid move, even if it's not that smart.)
The nearest military unit (controlled by the same player) becoming the Hornblower seems like the cleanest approach.
The Future Era was removed going into BNW - Information is the last one!
Cool, I've put this in the misc summary but left the turn number red until we decide on the above!
I'm not sure if it's necessary. We can make the AI disregard that information very easily. Well, we don't actually have to do anything for that to happen - they ignore the promotion already! Actually, I'm not sure a human player is able to see the promotions on a foreign unit directly. They can see what bonuses and penalties it has in combat, some of which come from promotions (and there are bugs in that UI which mean some bonuses and penalties are not included), but you can't select enemy units, right? In which case it would actually be hidden.
Respawning a new Mythic Site seems like all we can do. We'll try to find a place on the map that no player can see, but if we can't we'll just have to drop one into plain sight. I've edited this into the misc summary for now, unless we come up with another plan!
Edited into the summary!
Awesome, sounds good.
I worry that 20 or 15 might not be limiting enough though - we want a civ that has one or two Blue Sisters to still have to use Hunters (right?). It can often take 10-ish turns to walk to Antiquity Sites that aren't right next to your spawn point (and Mythic Sites will be more spread out since there will be less of them than Antiquity Sites), so 15-ish turns wouldn't really be a restriction. By the time the Sister reaches some Mythic Sites, the cooldown will have worn off.
Certainly possible. The wikis do contain a decent amount of grammatical errors and poor phrasing though, which I wouldn't be keen on dropping into the Civilopedia. You're right that it's a big burden to pull in all of that history. I think this is definitely something we'll do completely last - when all else is finished. And I think we're both quite good at writing large quantities of text!
And
But if we connect the life/death names from the books (and include M'Hael) we have 14 distinct Forsaken that can be active simultaneously. For clarity's sake, say all of the original 13 were used as our first "batch." None of the Forsaken have died and there are 13 on the map at once.
Then someone kills Sammael. He was never revived in the books. So we can slot M'Hael in his place to make up the 13 again. But now M'Hael dies. All of our remaining names are names of resurrected Forsaken who are currently alive in the game already, but we're only at 12 total. The two pre- and post-resurrection now need to coexist, otherwise we can't replenish the ranks.
Do you mean if we just happen to have the name available when one of the right Forsaken dies, we should tend to use the correct replacement? If so, I can see that working.
Good point on the closest to the Pattern, yeah, I think it was Aginor who emerged at the end of the Eye of the World and Rand roasted him?
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, we can do that!
Well, a Bloodknife can't kill two people because it dies when it succeeds as well as when it fails! 45 turns is just intended to give the player flexibility in deciding where they want to strike, while still giving them a time limit to make Bloodknives not long-lived things.
S3rgeus
Emperor
This is a very good point. I think I agree, this does solve a lot of problems with unwinnable game states. Having to defeat the Dragon at the end (since he doesn't remain defeated normally) after a Shadow civ has won a "normal victory" also associates that victory more with the Last Battle. In that case (when a Shadow civ wins) he dies, but not before then!
I'm assuming the Dragon should also die if all Light civs are eliminated?
Argh, very true! I should've done that over the weekend.
I don't have time to do this tonight, but I'll try to come back to it tomorrow.
This is equivalent, isn't it? It's just consuming the hammers every 5 or 10 turns instead of every turn. There are some knock-on effects of a different consumption cadence though: it's more difficult for the Light players to change tack quickly. They need to build up 5 turns' worth of hammers before they see the benefit. It's less for them to manage, once they have the bonus, it's guaranteed for 5 turns. It's also less granular - they might not need the bonus for that whole duration, but they can't have less. As you've brought up, it's easier to "switch" so that you get the maximum benefit from the bonus (though doing so likely means the bonus runs out after the 5 turns).
I imagine that the Light side will want some of these bonuses long term (or as long term as the LB gets) and that they would want to put enough hammers into those projects that they have the bonuses perpetually (unless something very drastic happened). The two approaches should be pretty much the same for a Light team that's trying to keep the bonuses going all the time.
I've edited this into the diplo summary!
I think we can treat the Shadow declaration and normal wars separately. Normal wars put the civilization at -60 overall influence, but don't affect the Ajahs. Or would we prefer consistency? Declaring war on the Tower should be the prospect of madmen really, but do we want it to potentially have a huge impact on other players' relative influences, by cutting out the attacker? Would we drop them back into where they were when the war ended, like normal CS influence? (Potentially upending other players' relative influences again. This could cause super weird situations where declaring war could cause you to gain relative influence when the war ended if something happened to lower everyone else's while the war was on.)
What if the Tower declares war on someone?
Based on the above, I think we're better leaving the Ajah influences alone for normal wars.
Yeah, I think as a produceable (though only in specific cases) channeling unit, it's implicit that it costs Spark.
Haha, woops, I didn't notice that! I noticed the missing comma but didn't count the number of entries. Just works fine for me in that slot, we can leave Righteous where it is.
Yep, or if anything was in between them and the Blight.
War is definitely less effective, but there's still enough time to kill everybody if you really go for it!
The AI's city placement needs some serious work! I think the CivUP and Artificial Unintelligence mods go some way to correcting these kinds of problems.
This part of the UA was actually Firaxis being super cheap. All civs have this ability - it happens when the civ founds too many cities and runs out of names. The Huns just have the one city name, so it happens right away!
Ah, I see what you mean! We can make the Gentling bonus scale based on the remaining health of the False Dragon, that's totally cool. (In the case where another player has dealt 1 damage to him, you're still better off attacking the False Dragon for a tiny amount of damage first, but hopefully this is a very uncommon edge case!)
Yeah, the Trolloc Wars and the Last Battle are our primary pinch points on water maps. The LB can rely more on Waygates, but the TW are still a bit stuck.
What are our rewards for being far to one side of the Alignment spectrum? The Shadow have the produceable Shadowspawn and Forsaken quest rewards, but the Light? They have the faith bonus, but the Light alliance bonuses work for all Light civs regardless of their underlying Alignment. I may be forgetting something though? Given happiness makes more sense for the Light anyway, we could have a Happiness bonus for choosing with-type for the Light, but not the Shadow?
No worries about not being a coder, you've been monumentally critical in shaping the mod.
Github has some advantages for tracking the issues there. It lets me refer to specific tasks from commits (individual bits of code that I've decided work as intended) and create a relationship between them on there. One design task will often split out into multiple implementation tasks too - so there will often be sub-objectives in getting specific features working (some of which may be useful to other features, as we saw with Warders in general building into the Green Ajah tier zero ability). It's also the more sensible place for bugs to reside (since those won't end up in the summaries), and there will often be links between bugs and features.
I'm thinking it would be best for me to break the feature specifications down into individual implementation tasks on Github as I go (once I've got some idea of how we can approach a given feature). This means Github issues would only exist for tasks that are slightly ahead of where I've gotten to with the code, but would act as a good history of what's done. (So, right now, for example, I could write a few more about the parts I'm working on and some others that I've approached and left suspended, like the Shadowspawn detection which was waiting on a forum thread update on CivFanatics.)
I'm still not sure if that gives us the best connection back to the summaries though, so if I come back from a week of holiday and need to pick something up again, I don't want to accidentally redo something I'd done a few weeks before. I'll keep thinking on it!
Lordoflinks
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2015
- Messages
- 35
Can there be a chance for certain Forsaken to turn to the light, the main one is of course Asmodean but another may be Lanfear?
counterpoint
King
Interesting!
Maybe. It seems like it would be pretty complicated though. Like, we'd have to devise some sort of system where the Forsaken can be interacted with in a level beyond just "kill them" (for the light civs, I mean).
I feel like if it did happen, it should probably be through the agency of the Dragon, right? I mean, Asmodean and Lanfear both were Snape-ish because of their BFF time with Rand. Also, if it's possible, it should be pretty Easter-eggy and rare.
On that note, do you guys think Asmodean was really a "good guy"? I wanted Asmodean to have turned good (fellow composer pride and all that), but I figured he wasn't. And I don't think the fact that Graendel killed him really proves much, since as the wikis remind me she was reprimanded for that by Shaidar Haran.
counterpoint
King
I think, mechanically, I like the 3-to-1 ratio. Visually and aesthetically, I certainly enjoy the 5-to-1 more. I say go with the 3-to-1 for now. The consequence of that, as you've noted, is that even neutral cities will be 1/4 DFs... this isn't ideal,, aesthetically. It's fine, but I don't love it.
Thus, I will make one final [probably] attempt to tweak our branding here: can we consider saying the citizens have been "Touched by the Shadow" or "Touched by the Dark One" instead of calling them actual DFs? Seems in-universe, and makes things feel more realistic. Also, it frees up the term "Darkfriend" to be used elsewhere (probably in place of the Friend of the Dark). Lastly, then we have citizens that are either touched by the shadow or not, which feels a little better than citizens that are either Darkfriends or... not darkfriends.
Don't have to go with that, though. If you find it too clunky, I gotcha.
This all sounds great and thank you for putting it together. This seems like it will work quite well. Of course, it's hard to know right now if every tier is exactly configured how it should be (in terms of order). I don't see any glaring issues, though. It is interesting how even fully-shadowed cities are only 50% DFs. That's not how I *thought* it would turn out (which makes the "these people are actual Darkfriends" notion less troubling).
One question, though, just so I'm clear: If you're alignment changes in a turn, all of your cities will change *all* of their cycles immediately, right? (and then any extra stuff from missionaries would go on top of that) Right?
OK, I can dig it. What do you think of "Herald of Light", or is that too epic sounding
Yeah. I'm struggling with this. On the one hand, merging this with the Path system seems somewhat elegant and makes it simpler... but it also forever links it to the Path system, which is problematic in that it would seem to lower civ's options. Civs that don't found religions should still be encouraged to go nuts with Alignment, for instance.
I think, elegance aside, it's probably best if we separate it. Should we separate it completely - eliminate the whole dual function of the Inquisitor?
Actually, is it necessarily the case that we need two Alignment-maintenance units (one analogous to the Missionary, and one to the Inquisitor)? Can we achieve all we need with one unit?
I think I'll hold off on passing judgement as to faith vs hammers until we figure out exactly how these units will work. I don't have a very negative reaction to using faith, actually.
Definitely. Framing it as a positive value makes sense to me, for sure.Awesome, I'm totally cool with this approach. Usually the yield breakdowns show what's contributing to yield per turn though, not what contributed to your current total. (So Threads would be absent, since they produce lump sums of Alignment yield.)
Yes, this is exactly how I think it should work too. This is actually how it's tracked already in-game!
In terms of what we could show to the player exactly, I'm thinking we show the total as "positive" whichever side it's on and color code it and the "Tier name" to show whether it's Light or Shadow. Then we show the yield per turn as relative to whichever side they're on. (A Shadow player will see +1 Light as -1 Shadow, a Light player will see +1 Shadow as -1 Light.)
I suggest that primarily because "negative yields" are generally bad in CiV, so going for the Alignment extremes is positive in both cases.
hmm... I guess so. Honestly, hadn't thought much about whether we'd be having alignment-tied buildings and wonders and such. Maybe not so much that we actually have buildings that generate alignment, but rather buildings/wonders that are unlocked when a civ has obtained a specific alignment.
I didn't understand Inquisitors at all for a great many playthroughs. It was only recently that I figured out that camping in a city with an Inq prevents foreign missionaries. Way more confusing than is necessary.
Good point about the ambiguity, as opposed to religion. I do think, whatever we do, that we'd need to have there be some intuitive way in the city screen to tell exactly how far the city was "off" of your alignment. Just having more or fewer DFs in the city will not be immediately clear to most players, especially in small cities, or those with neutral alignments. We'd probably need to go with some clear indicator that there are two EXTRA darkfriends, or two too few, for instance. Suggestions?
Right, but what happens, specifically. Say I have a city that is "at home"with a cycle of L/L/D/L/L, and I'm currently at population 5. You drop a Friend there, and it turns into L/L/D/L/D (let's say. Does that switch back eventually, over time? My overall Alignment accumulation globally is still leaning light. Sure, the next citizens should add on as if the city is still whatever tier I am, but does that extra D ever flip back to being an L? Or does it necessarily require the expenditure of your own Alignment unit?
I'm happy to eliminate any notion of "pressure." That way, Alignment spreading is something that has to be consciously attempted. You can't just rely on proximity and such to spread your alignment.
Oh, I don't think it's necessary to label a city "Light" or "Shadow." I simply mean that a player would be able to specifically see how many DFs they had, and how many Shadow points and Light points they are accumulating in that city per turn. Doen'st need a label, though.
As far as how this affects Inqs... yeah, depends on what they do. If we totally separate it from religion, it for sure frees us up to do whatever we want - you could have to build them only in the capital, for instance (not suggesting that, it's just an example).
I think the nearest military unit is the best bet. Might be really rather far away in some cases, but I thin kthat's ok.
I think disbanding the unit can't be possible. Right? Otherwise, it'd be quite viable to just disband him right before an opponent is about to kill him (and take the horn). We could handle it like the barbarians, where it is Lost and shows up in another Mythic site, but, again, people would elect to do this in order to prevent an easy capture by an opponent.
OK, this is weird, then. That means the final age in the game is called the 4th Age? I don't like that. I thought the 4th Age was like some placeholder word that was for techs past a certain threshold, but that people weren't really ever "in" it? Can the World Era become the 4A?The Future Era was removed going into BNW - Information is the last one!
Also, it breaks the "Era of" pattern, which my artistic brain doesn't like.
Am I missing something?
OK. well, if the hornblower promotion isn't visible, I think that's good.
Can we force the player to put him in harm's way by making it so the heroes must stay within a certain number of tiles of him? That way, you can't just camp him in your capital and then them off (unless they're defending the capital). Unless you think the short life of the heroes does that already. I guess I want it to be realistically possible to capture the horn, is all.
Yeah, for now, let's.
Right. Happy to go with your guy here. I guess I'm just coming from the perspective of "how many Sites can they explore before the game is over" - that value shouldn't be too small.
Yeah. let's cross that bridge when we get there. Adapting things is potentially the best bet.
OK, I see where we're mixing each other up.
I'm saying there would only be 13 Forsaken, *ever*. Not 13 at once, but 13 throughout the course of the LB. So in the example you described, if Sammy died... there'd only be 12.
I'm imagining them popping in and out of existence, not hanging around until they are killed. So Ish my pop in, harass you, and - if he can - disappear for a few turns (or run into the blight or something). If the light team is good, they can kill some of the Forsaken as they go, they can keep the number manageable. But if they don't, by the time the Seals are all broken, there's a full 13 running around.
Make sense? Of course, we know that there are many more in the books - 13+M'hael + ressurections. But we just wouldn't necessarily use all of them per game. I'm fine with that.
The other thing is that there could be a Shadow Wonder or something they can do that could resurrect a Chosen, and that'd be the thing that brings about the O'sangars and such of the world. (and thus make more than 13 total possible).
Well, I don't remember who he fried, but I was actually referring to the chosen pre-Rand. One of them was near to the hole of the bore, and got disfigured or something.
wikis.... yep. Aginor AND Balthamel. Not burned, super-Aged. And yeah, Aginor was burned by Rand. Balthamel tree-hugged.
Good. Let's do that then. It's definitely possible there's some mechanical reason we decided he needed to be perma-dead, but I don't remember it.
And yeah, he dies when the Light die.
alright!
It's equivalent, mechanically, but not in terms of feel and presentation for the player, I think. I like having it last for a few turns (and take awhile to accumulate) for reasons we've stated.
As far as civs who want it to essentially last forever. Well, they'd probalby just leave some cities *always* producing this project. That's fine.
Shall we do this, then? 5 turns or 10?
Also, weird loop here. If you do the production bonus, can that bonus be used to fuel more rapid Project completion? Or are they exempt (or the prod. bonus only applies to buildings and units)? Sort of lame to have the whole team boost hammers, team wide, and then knock out 4 more Projects in half the time over the next few turns.
yeah... wow, based on all of that, definitely in favor of leaving them alone for normal wars. I think keeping the Ajah's separate from the Tower is sort of built in to how we've designed WT interactions. So we should preserve that.
I founded a city! There was this one spot with THREE gems that I had to take because of serious economic turmoil. It inherited a Spanish name.
Wait, when you run out of cities, it borrows names from civs already in the game? Why wouldn't they borrow names from civs *not* in the game?
This civ seems fun to play, but if your civilization is such that they can't think of *one* city name ("Attila's Court," really?), IMO they don't really belong as a civ. If they're supposed to represent the "barbarian civ," which is kind of cool, they should probably have a city scheme that reflects that (based on camps or something, much how Venice is the "CS-civ.")
By the way, the empire is rather stable now that I'm in the renaissance. Amazingly, I can even grab some wonders and stuff. The AIs have done their fair share of conquering, and now there's only two civs left. Not sure if that's good or bad. Probably bad, since it means I can't just rush for the capitals (since one guy has two capitals). Thus begins the slow wait for artillery (I think).
ok. let's do that, then!
Well... it's possible we won't find a perfect solution. It's possible the TW will be an unbalanced mess on water maps.
Is there any, any way we can justify shadowspawn boats?
Based on the LB summary, the more Light you are, the:
- more Shadow civs will hate and attack you (bad)
- more Light-allied AIs will help you - white tower help, steddings,
- the more Sisters you get (didn't we just decide that)
- faith bonuses (stated above)
- A factor in your rank and frequency in controlling the Dragon
- low vulnerability to city defection - this is something we should talk about!
The more shadow you are (as a shadow civ)
- more light AIs will hate you
- unlocking higher level shadow spawn
- the more the forsaken and shadowspawn will hang out around your place
- your quality of rewards from the Forsaken
- low vulerability to defection
I think that's a handful of semi-significant stuff. I don't the happiness thing comes from Light vs Shadow, right? Doesn't it come from "breaking Alignment" in your alliance?
Though, I could definitely understand a flat happiness modifier just by virtue of taking light or shadow - light civs SHOUJLD be happier, right?
A friend of mine was going to try to teach me Unity. Basically so I could learn more about gaming tech in general and thus better enable me to take a stab at game composing (something i've wanted to do since I was a kid, but sadly haven't done). We both got way too busy and it sort of fell through, though. I hope to dig in again someday.
Definitely, you need to adopt a system that is most useful to you. Whichever that is will work well for the rest of us.
As far as the design stuff (i.e., non-code), I think the in-thread summaries seem to work well. We should probably pull some of them offline or at least hold some of this stuff in a different location as well (e.g. Dropbox). Is there a non-zero chance that something terrible happens at civfanatics, or you get banned or something, and this thread becomes inaccessible?
S3rgeus
Emperor
We were down to one big post, but now I've hit the character limit in this one!
And
I'm thinking along the same lines as counterpoint here that doing this would probably have something to do with the Dragon, since it was his interaction with Asmodean and Lanfear that made them at least ambiguous about their evil-ness.
I don't think we'd want to have a simple "try to convert Forsaken" ability on the Dragon-spy or Dragon-unit that he can use on Forsaken with some % chance of success, that seems a bit mundane for what's a much more gradual and character-driven process.
It seems we'd want to model the Dragon spending some significant time with specific Forsaken for this to even become a possibility. Do we want to have anything to do with the world of Dreams here? (Where Rand spent some time with Lanfear, right? Never directly as a Dreamer, but through his dreams?) This would let us use some of Wise One and Dreamer-esque mechanics in other circumstances, which is good.
Another approach would be to have the Dragon's proximity affect (or have a chance of affecting) the Forsaken in some way. But given the Shadowspawn can see where the Dragon is, there would be no reason for them to not "just avoid him" with the Forsaken units.
I got the impression that Asmodean was genuinely trying to help Rand by the end, even if he was somewhat reluctant about it.
I've been giving this serious consideration (so much so that I've written the rest of this post and come back to this, because I couldn't make a decision at the time). I still think Touched by the Shadow or Corrupted sounds like a cop-out on our part, that we couldn't find a good name for these people within the cities. Darkfriend is the right kind of descriptor and it's in-universe. (Because not all Darkfriends were important, a lot were normal folks doing evil things because they thought they could gain from it - which meshes well with them being citizens.)
I'm still on the Darkfriend-as-citizen-label side of the fence.
Yeah, whenever a city gains a population, it uses the cycle for the player's current Alignment tier. What that player's historical tier was has no effect.
It sounds a bit epic. Do we think players might get confused with Herald of the Light vs Path to the Light? The two sound like they should be related, but they don't have anything in common. Herald by itself could work too.
Awesome, I'm in agreement here that we're best off avoiding tying this in with the Paths system. And yeah, I think we can have one unit per side - we don't need an Inquisitor equivalent. So Herald and Friend of the Dark.
Cool, this is on hold for the moment. Requoted to keep it alive.
Just thinking about this while writing some of the sections below - creating new Alignment missionaries may be a relatively frequent thing. Do we want to drain players' faith buying these instead of spreading their Path? I find I'd often like more Faith when working on spreading a religion and this would split the focus of faith even more.
Yeah, that's what I mean. A building producing Alignment is a bit weird, but being unlocked by certain tiers makes a bit more sense for some.
Haha, I didn't know Inquisitors prevented foreign missionaries and prophets from spreading religion to a city! Oh, that will be fun. A properly road-wise connected empire could hold off an AI prophet indefinitely with an inquisitor!
I think this depends on our previous notion of only spreading Alignment abroad. I'm beginning to think that we shouldn't restrict the Alignment missionaries to foreign cities only so that players have a way to interact with all of the numbers we're discussing here.
I'm also not sure what represents "off" a player's Alignment - if cities are only a source of yield, then we can't make any assertions about where a city should be for a given player. We could compare it to their current Alignment tier, but since they won't have started the game on that tier and the tiers don't slot evenly into each other, every city will have "extra" to "missing" Darkfriends.
If players can use the Alignment missionaries in their own lands, then I don't think we need to give the player more information than the number of (and which) citizens are Darkfriends, so that they can use their Alignment missionaries accordingly. Light players will focus on converting Darkfriends into normal citizens and Shadow players the opposite way around. (In the same way that a player would use a missionary on their own city which had a marginal foreign religion majority.)
In terms of actual UI, I think this is something we could present on the city banner. The population number is there, so some smaller number (most likely in dark purple or some such) that shows how many citizens are Darkfriends.
I think it requires using your own Alignment missionary to turn it back the other way. Otherwise we'd need a notion of "internal pressure" to say how quickly the population is moving one way or another.
So, one other thing we should discuss is what the direct effect of Alignment missionaries are when they are used in a specific city. We previously liked the idea of players who are "higher" tier Alignment having more effective Alignment missionaries. (This makes sense for Neutral-aiming civs as well, since they'll want to make smaller fine-tuning changes most of the time.)
Also, since we're following a fixed, citizen-based progression for spawning new Darkfriends or non-Darkfriends, we don't need to track any internal fractional measurements (like religion does with pressure and how specific tiered numbers cause population-religion-following changes). We can operate directly on population numbers, which is simpler to understand. I'm thinking Alignment missionaries for tiers up to +3 (this is the tier of the civ who controls the missionary) remove a single "opposing" citizen and replace them with their citizen. (So Heralds remove Darkfriends and replace with normal citizens, Friends of the Dark do the opposite) Tiers 4-8 swap out two citizens.
We also discussed that using an Alignment missionary produces a lump sum of the corresponding Alignment yield for the player that controlled the unit. This still seems like a good idea to me.
Awesome, this sounds good to me.
Totally agree, the player can see how many Darkfriends they have from the city banner. If they want more details, the city summary screen can provide a breakdown of which citizens are Darkfriends and the total Alignment yield output of the city in the yield breakdown in the top left corner.
Cool, it looks like we've separated Alignment from Paths above. We'll probably want to come back to "where can we purchase and/or build Heralds and Darkfriends" when we decide on some of the other stuff above.
Noted in the summary!
Cool, I agree. I've edited this into the summary. (Hornblowers can't be disbanded.)
EDIT: I missed an era-based difference from base CiV (back on page 10) when we were deciding on the era order last time. Anyway, resuming normal text for a moment, then I'll come back in with another edit.
It was my understanding that this is what we decided on before. In order for the Fourth Age to affect the world era as we want (triggering the Last Battle on Era of the Dragon), then it must be an era as well. The techs in the Fourth Age are the "future" technologies that are hinted at in the books, but never became widespread or recognized in WoT-verse civilizations until after the Last Battle.
The world era could become the Fourth Age, but I would expect someone to have won the game before then in most cases. That would require half of the world's civs to reach the Fourth Age (since there is no era beyond it to trigger the change due to one player being far ahead). So either there are very few civs (duel map, or mostly-conquered map) and one player constitutes "half" of the living players, or there are many players all up to the final few techs in the tree. The latter very rarely happens because one player will usually win first.
In terms of naming, I think "Era of the Fourth Age" actually works quite well. It may sound like it doubles up at first, but it's not quite like that. With the way we've broken down eras, an Era is (considerably) shorter than an Age. The Fourth Age will presumably go on for a similar amount of time to the Third Age - which is all the way from the Breaking to the Last Battle.
So, at the time of the "Era of the Fourth Age" - the defining characteristic is that the Fourth Age has begun. But this Era is only the first of many within that Age. (So, if the timeline were to continue, we might have an "Era of Peace" some time after the Era of the Fourth Age. The Era of Peace is also a part of the Fourth Age.)
An alternative could be to use the "Era of the Dragon's Peace" - since that seems to be a defining characteristic of the time described in many of the visions of the future from Aviendha in Rhuidean. The Dragon's Peace does exist before and after the Last Battle, so interleaving the two makes some in-universe sense. We would be naming two consecutive eras after the Dragon, and it does seem strange to be able to mix an era named after a peace treaty with the military slaughterhouse of the Last Battle.
EDIT: I see now (working on the misc summary) that I missed this distinction (Future not existing in base CiV) when we were finalizing the era stuff before. If we want to use the Fourth Age more as a "final gate" at the end of the tree, with just a few technologies in it, then we could introduce a ninth era to do that? (And have our future tech equivalent be the farthest right in the Fourth Age.)
Done!
I think the lifespan on the Heroes does that already - I was thinking they would take considerable damage every turn, say 20 or so. So if you didn't summon them basically on the battlefield, they would be very unlikely to make it to a fight with any significant health left.
Edited into the summary!
Yeah, the Sites are being revealed in the Era of Encroaching Blight, so that's approximately 150-200 turns before the end of the game? At one every 30 turns this seems fine that a single Sister could explore up to five Sites.
Ah, right! Awesome sauce, yes. Having only 13 *total* for the whole game makes this all work very nicely!
Sounds awesome. I think we might want to have some kind of double-edged wonder that does this though - so if a Shadow player finishes it they get a Forsaken back, but if a Light player finishes it, something else happens. Otherwise it's just a matter of time until the Shadow player finishes it. Or are we fine with that?
Coolio, all sounds good!
Right, Dragon-related Edicts and Compact Resolutions. The Edict numbers are already balanced by Ajah, so I'm going to say the below are all Generic Edicts. Let's start with 3 Edicts and 3 Resolutions.
Some of these have actually ended up being more Last-Battle-related than Dragon-related. Given the Tower can Turn and then have no influence over the Dragon, it seemed appropriate to have some Edicts that work all the time. We could introduce more Dragon-y ones if we like though?
Edicts
Watchers of the Seals
All Sisters can explore Mythic Sites for 30 turns. (Does this trod on the Blue Ajah too much?)
Shepherd of the Dragon
Cities the Dragon-spy is located in produce +50 Light and +50 Faith per turn.
Curing the Madness (this is very Yellow)
All saidin units lose a single madness tier.
Compact Resolutions (Resolutions that fit easily in your pocket! )
Seat of Stewardship
This resolution nominates a civilization to act as the Dragon's Steward. (So whoever proposes it chooses which civ to nominate.) The nominated civilization controls the Dragon every other "Dragon turn" in addition to the normal turn order. (This will have to do nothing if proposed before the Last Battle and the winning civ chooses Shadow. Unless we want to force the winning civ Light? That could actually be cool, but it's risky given our hands-off approach to choosing a side thus far.)
Denounce the *Side*
There are three variants of this: Denounce the Light, Denounce the Shadow, Denounce the Isolationists. Each one, the side being denounced has -10 Happiness (civ-wide penalty), and others have +20 Happiness. (Denounce the Isolationists is aimed at Neutral, it probably needs a better name.)
Find the Seals
Every civilization receives two Hunters of the Horn.
Cool, 5 turns sounds good to me then!
Looking back at where we discussed the bonuses, the only production bonus is for making units, so that won't affect projects. Definitely agree we don't want to create a loop and I think we've avoided it!
Awesome sounds good. I think this is already captured in the diplo summary - overall influence has described actions that affect it, including war, and only the crossover with the Last Battle discusses resetting the influence of civs with the Ajahs when they choose the against-Tower side.
Because those civs don't exist in the world you're playing. I don't know what it does if every civ in a game all run out of city names.
Yeah, I'd say they were limited by how much they wanted to fundamentally change the game. Attila was G&K and they only really got comfortable with more radical UAs for BNW, like Venice. As you've said, Attila should probably be even more non-standard than Venice is, which Firaxis probably didn't want to do.
Nice one, sounds like you'll have 'em all roasted before the end!
My game against Casimir has become very interesting. I couldn't convince Attila to attack Casimir and was worried we'd just lose because of it. Then Casimir declared war on Attila. That made things easier.
The war is intense - I've never wanted to have AA guns so much. Not very helpful that I don't have the tech for AA guns. Casimir's ahead in tech, but not so far that all of his units are better, and I've got a nice human tactical advantage. The former Morocco is where most of the fighting is going down, so I've not a nice insular on-land trade network with Attila and Theodora which Casimir currently can't reach.
Worryingly, Attila is doing quite well against Casimir - he's captured several outlying cities, but Casimir's main base of operations is still off across the sea on the continent he owns by himself. And then I got the notification that Attila is the first civ in the game to attain dominant culture over another civ... me. (Luckily we're both Order.) So if the war with Casimir drags on too long, Attila might win a cultural victory. Casimir's also finished the Apollo Program, so my hopes are slim. It's all a mess! But it's a fun mess.
I've totally cheated and noted that down in the misc summary with no context. I need to go back through and write that summary out - hopefully this weekend!
EDIT: I've taken a stab at the misc summary and left some things that I think are still undecided in red!
I think we can definitely justify Shadowspawn boats. We'd want the artwork for them to show them as fairly rickety and pieced together, but without them water maps are literally impossible for the Shadowspawn to deal with properly. I think the main thing we'll do here is assess whether or not to give Shadowspawn embarkation abilities based on how much of the map is accessible from the Blight without crossing the water, with a particular emphasis on civ starting locations.
Awesome, these all look good. Yes, we just decided the Sister thing! I'm glad we have the summaries because I am legit forgetting things as we go.
And
I'm thinking along the same lines as counterpoint here that doing this would probably have something to do with the Dragon, since it was his interaction with Asmodean and Lanfear that made them at least ambiguous about their evil-ness.
I don't think we'd want to have a simple "try to convert Forsaken" ability on the Dragon-spy or Dragon-unit that he can use on Forsaken with some % chance of success, that seems a bit mundane for what's a much more gradual and character-driven process.
It seems we'd want to model the Dragon spending some significant time with specific Forsaken for this to even become a possibility. Do we want to have anything to do with the world of Dreams here? (Where Rand spent some time with Lanfear, right? Never directly as a Dreamer, but through his dreams?) This would let us use some of Wise One and Dreamer-esque mechanics in other circumstances, which is good.
Another approach would be to have the Dragon's proximity affect (or have a chance of affecting) the Forsaken in some way. But given the Shadowspawn can see where the Dragon is, there would be no reason for them to not "just avoid him" with the Forsaken units.
I got the impression that Asmodean was genuinely trying to help Rand by the end, even if he was somewhat reluctant about it.
I've been giving this serious consideration (so much so that I've written the rest of this post and come back to this, because I couldn't make a decision at the time). I still think Touched by the Shadow or Corrupted sounds like a cop-out on our part, that we couldn't find a good name for these people within the cities. Darkfriend is the right kind of descriptor and it's in-universe. (Because not all Darkfriends were important, a lot were normal folks doing evil things because they thought they could gain from it - which meshes well with them being citizens.)
I'm still on the Darkfriend-as-citizen-label side of the fence.
Yeah, whenever a city gains a population, it uses the cycle for the player's current Alignment tier. What that player's historical tier was has no effect.
It sounds a bit epic. Do we think players might get confused with Herald of the Light vs Path to the Light? The two sound like they should be related, but they don't have anything in common. Herald by itself could work too.
Awesome, I'm in agreement here that we're best off avoiding tying this in with the Paths system. And yeah, I think we can have one unit per side - we don't need an Inquisitor equivalent. So Herald and Friend of the Dark.
Cool, this is on hold for the moment. Requoted to keep it alive.
Just thinking about this while writing some of the sections below - creating new Alignment missionaries may be a relatively frequent thing. Do we want to drain players' faith buying these instead of spreading their Path? I find I'd often like more Faith when working on spreading a religion and this would split the focus of faith even more.
Yeah, that's what I mean. A building producing Alignment is a bit weird, but being unlocked by certain tiers makes a bit more sense for some.
Haha, I didn't know Inquisitors prevented foreign missionaries and prophets from spreading religion to a city! Oh, that will be fun. A properly road-wise connected empire could hold off an AI prophet indefinitely with an inquisitor!
I think this depends on our previous notion of only spreading Alignment abroad. I'm beginning to think that we shouldn't restrict the Alignment missionaries to foreign cities only so that players have a way to interact with all of the numbers we're discussing here.
I'm also not sure what represents "off" a player's Alignment - if cities are only a source of yield, then we can't make any assertions about where a city should be for a given player. We could compare it to their current Alignment tier, but since they won't have started the game on that tier and the tiers don't slot evenly into each other, every city will have "extra" to "missing" Darkfriends.
If players can use the Alignment missionaries in their own lands, then I don't think we need to give the player more information than the number of (and which) citizens are Darkfriends, so that they can use their Alignment missionaries accordingly. Light players will focus on converting Darkfriends into normal citizens and Shadow players the opposite way around. (In the same way that a player would use a missionary on their own city which had a marginal foreign religion majority.)
In terms of actual UI, I think this is something we could present on the city banner. The population number is there, so some smaller number (most likely in dark purple or some such) that shows how many citizens are Darkfriends.
I think it requires using your own Alignment missionary to turn it back the other way. Otherwise we'd need a notion of "internal pressure" to say how quickly the population is moving one way or another.
So, one other thing we should discuss is what the direct effect of Alignment missionaries are when they are used in a specific city. We previously liked the idea of players who are "higher" tier Alignment having more effective Alignment missionaries. (This makes sense for Neutral-aiming civs as well, since they'll want to make smaller fine-tuning changes most of the time.)
Also, since we're following a fixed, citizen-based progression for spawning new Darkfriends or non-Darkfriends, we don't need to track any internal fractional measurements (like religion does with pressure and how specific tiered numbers cause population-religion-following changes). We can operate directly on population numbers, which is simpler to understand. I'm thinking Alignment missionaries for tiers up to +3 (this is the tier of the civ who controls the missionary) remove a single "opposing" citizen and replace them with their citizen. (So Heralds remove Darkfriends and replace with normal citizens, Friends of the Dark do the opposite) Tiers 4-8 swap out two citizens.
We also discussed that using an Alignment missionary produces a lump sum of the corresponding Alignment yield for the player that controlled the unit. This still seems like a good idea to me.
Awesome, this sounds good to me.
Totally agree, the player can see how many Darkfriends they have from the city banner. If they want more details, the city summary screen can provide a breakdown of which citizens are Darkfriends and the total Alignment yield output of the city in the yield breakdown in the top left corner.
Cool, it looks like we've separated Alignment from Paths above. We'll probably want to come back to "where can we purchase and/or build Heralds and Darkfriends" when we decide on some of the other stuff above.
Noted in the summary!
Cool, I agree. I've edited this into the summary. (Hornblowers can't be disbanded.)
EDIT: I missed an era-based difference from base CiV (back on page 10) when we were deciding on the era order last time. Anyway, resuming normal text for a moment, then I'll come back in with another edit.
It was my understanding that this is what we decided on before. In order for the Fourth Age to affect the world era as we want (triggering the Last Battle on Era of the Dragon), then it must be an era as well. The techs in the Fourth Age are the "future" technologies that are hinted at in the books, but never became widespread or recognized in WoT-verse civilizations until after the Last Battle.
The world era could become the Fourth Age, but I would expect someone to have won the game before then in most cases. That would require half of the world's civs to reach the Fourth Age (since there is no era beyond it to trigger the change due to one player being far ahead). So either there are very few civs (duel map, or mostly-conquered map) and one player constitutes "half" of the living players, or there are many players all up to the final few techs in the tree. The latter very rarely happens because one player will usually win first.
In terms of naming, I think "Era of the Fourth Age" actually works quite well. It may sound like it doubles up at first, but it's not quite like that. With the way we've broken down eras, an Era is (considerably) shorter than an Age. The Fourth Age will presumably go on for a similar amount of time to the Third Age - which is all the way from the Breaking to the Last Battle.
So, at the time of the "Era of the Fourth Age" - the defining characteristic is that the Fourth Age has begun. But this Era is only the first of many within that Age. (So, if the timeline were to continue, we might have an "Era of Peace" some time after the Era of the Fourth Age. The Era of Peace is also a part of the Fourth Age.)
An alternative could be to use the "Era of the Dragon's Peace" - since that seems to be a defining characteristic of the time described in many of the visions of the future from Aviendha in Rhuidean. The Dragon's Peace does exist before and after the Last Battle, so interleaving the two makes some in-universe sense. We would be naming two consecutive eras after the Dragon, and it does seem strange to be able to mix an era named after a peace treaty with the military slaughterhouse of the Last Battle.
EDIT: I see now (working on the misc summary) that I missed this distinction (Future not existing in base CiV) when we were finalizing the era stuff before. If we want to use the Fourth Age more as a "final gate" at the end of the tree, with just a few technologies in it, then we could introduce a ninth era to do that? (And have our future tech equivalent be the farthest right in the Fourth Age.)
Done!
I think the lifespan on the Heroes does that already - I was thinking they would take considerable damage every turn, say 20 or so. So if you didn't summon them basically on the battlefield, they would be very unlikely to make it to a fight with any significant health left.
Edited into the summary!
Yeah, the Sites are being revealed in the Era of Encroaching Blight, so that's approximately 150-200 turns before the end of the game? At one every 30 turns this seems fine that a single Sister could explore up to five Sites.
Ah, right! Awesome sauce, yes. Having only 13 *total* for the whole game makes this all work very nicely!
Sounds awesome. I think we might want to have some kind of double-edged wonder that does this though - so if a Shadow player finishes it they get a Forsaken back, but if a Light player finishes it, something else happens. Otherwise it's just a matter of time until the Shadow player finishes it. Or are we fine with that?
Coolio, all sounds good!
Right, Dragon-related Edicts and Compact Resolutions. The Edict numbers are already balanced by Ajah, so I'm going to say the below are all Generic Edicts. Let's start with 3 Edicts and 3 Resolutions.
Some of these have actually ended up being more Last-Battle-related than Dragon-related. Given the Tower can Turn and then have no influence over the Dragon, it seemed appropriate to have some Edicts that work all the time. We could introduce more Dragon-y ones if we like though?
Edicts
Watchers of the Seals
All Sisters can explore Mythic Sites for 30 turns. (Does this trod on the Blue Ajah too much?)
Shepherd of the Dragon
Cities the Dragon-spy is located in produce +50 Light and +50 Faith per turn.
Curing the Madness (this is very Yellow)
All saidin units lose a single madness tier.
Compact Resolutions (Resolutions that fit easily in your pocket!
)Seat of Stewardship
This resolution nominates a civilization to act as the Dragon's Steward. (So whoever proposes it chooses which civ to nominate.) The nominated civilization controls the Dragon every other "Dragon turn" in addition to the normal turn order. (This will have to do nothing if proposed before the Last Battle and the winning civ chooses Shadow. Unless we want to force the winning civ Light? That could actually be cool, but it's risky given our hands-off approach to choosing a side thus far.)
Denounce the *Side*
There are three variants of this: Denounce the Light, Denounce the Shadow, Denounce the Isolationists. Each one, the side being denounced has -10 Happiness (civ-wide penalty), and others have +20 Happiness. (Denounce the Isolationists is aimed at Neutral, it probably needs a better name.)
Find the Seals
Every civilization receives two Hunters of the Horn.
Cool, 5 turns sounds good to me then!
Looking back at where we discussed the bonuses, the only production bonus is for making units, so that won't affect projects. Definitely agree we don't want to create a loop and I think we've avoided it!
Awesome sounds good. I think this is already captured in the diplo summary - overall influence has described actions that affect it, including war, and only the crossover with the Last Battle discusses resetting the influence of civs with the Ajahs when they choose the against-Tower side.
Because those civs don't exist in the world you're playing.
I don't know what it does if every civ in a game all run out of city names.Yeah, I'd say they were limited by how much they wanted to fundamentally change the game. Attila was G&K and they only really got comfortable with more radical UAs for BNW, like Venice. As you've said, Attila should probably be even more non-standard than Venice is, which Firaxis probably didn't want to do.
Nice one, sounds like you'll have 'em all roasted before the end!
My game against Casimir has become very interesting. I couldn't convince Attila to attack Casimir and was worried we'd just lose because of it. Then Casimir declared war on Attila. That made things easier.
The war is intense - I've never wanted to have AA guns so much. Not very helpful that I don't have the tech for AA guns. Casimir's ahead in tech, but not so far that all of his units are better, and I've got a nice human tactical advantage. The former Morocco is where most of the fighting is going down, so I've not a nice insular on-land trade network with Attila and Theodora which Casimir currently can't reach.
Worryingly, Attila is doing quite well against Casimir - he's captured several outlying cities, but Casimir's main base of operations is still off across the sea on the continent he owns by himself. And then I got the notification that Attila is the first civ in the game to attain dominant culture over another civ... me. (Luckily we're both Order.) So if the war with Casimir drags on too long, Attila might win a cultural victory. Casimir's also finished the Apollo Program, so my hopes are slim. It's all a mess! But it's a fun mess.
I've totally cheated and noted that down in the misc summary with no context. I need to go back through and write that summary out - hopefully this weekend!
EDIT: I've taken a stab at the misc summary and left some things that I think are still undecided in red!
I think we can definitely justify Shadowspawn boats. We'd want the artwork for them to show them as fairly rickety and pieced together, but without them water maps are literally impossible for the Shadowspawn to deal with properly. I think the main thing we'll do here is assess whether or not to give Shadowspawn embarkation abilities based on how much of the map is accessible from the Blight without crossing the water, with a particular emphasis on civ starting locations.
Awesome, these all look good. Yes, we just decided the Sister thing! I'm glad we have the summaries because I am legit forgetting things as we go.
S3rgeus
Emperor
Interesting, I think this was originally intended to be linked into cultural stuff. Much like how cities can flip over to other civs who have a different Ideology and dominant Tourism over them, we wanted Prestige-influential-civs to be able to flip cities from the opposing sides of the Last Battle. This line suggests that civs who are slightly-Light (or even slightly-Shadow) that have declared for the Light are more likely to have their cities go over to the Shadow if a Shadow civ has dominant Prestige over them. (This is separate from the rebellions that occur if a civ chooses against-type when picking a side.)
"unlocking" high level Shadowspawn is more "allowed to train Shadowspawn", right? Then specific tiers unlock specific Shadowspawn units.
We've already discussed a happiness penalty for choosing against-type (A Light leaning civ choosing Shadow or vice versa), which I think makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. I could see value in this being non-symmetrical, so only Light leaning civs choosing Light get Happiness, not Shadow leaning civs choosing Shadow. It seems like there are more tangible rewards on the Shadow side at the moment.
Unity's quite a cool engine - a load of stuff can be done directly in the editor without code. And all of the code you write for a Unity game is in C#, which is nice because C# is an awesome language. (I miss C# when writing C++ - particularly CiV which is locked in C++ from 2008!)
If you'd like to try out some CiV modding stuff, there are definitely layers in WoTMod - XML stuff doesn't require much of a computer science background compared to brand new C++ gameplay code. We'd want to have a faster feedback loop for me to help out on any problems you encounter there than we do on these posts though - writing out programming help in text takes forever!
Totally agree that the in-thread summaries are doing a great job for the design content. Also very good point about keeping a backup, there is indeed a nonzero chance that CivFanatics could disappear! In the (supremely unlikely, I hope!) event I get banned I'm sure I could find another PC/location to visit the forum and copy the contents of the summaries. The website itself disappearing is possible though!
As for Github, if you'd like to try out some modding changes, then issues are there could be helpful for that too. Issues can be assigned to users, so we could pick stuff up to mark it as "I'll do this".
counterpoint
King
Very interesting possibilities. I can't help but feel, reading through these ideas, that it might be a little bit more effort than it's worth for a rarely-used mechanic. Once you're throwing out the world of dreams and.... yeah, it kind of makes my head hurt.
Also, I'm reminded of how we decided not to allow the Dragon to go Shadow. I feel like these things are related. Having convertible Chosen sort of screams out for a convertible Dragon. I'm not saying we should do that, though.
LordofLinks - any ideas as to how to implement this idea?
I hereby withdraw Senate Bill SB1288: Re-name the Darkfriends.
right, that's what I though.
OK. Let's go with Herald for now. Definitely, let's keep an eye out for something better, though. This might be something that our flavor-diving for beliefs and such later will turn up.
I'm enjoying that term. Flavor Diving. Flavor Mining? Flavor Grinding?
OK! Herald and Friend of the Dark!
Just thought of a really stupid solution... Friend of the Dark and Friend of the... Light.
Yeah, I don't like it, but there is certainly *something* to like about it.
I'm definitely starting to feel like Faith is a bad idea, as well.
But I'm also wondering if we might take an opportunity to not use hammers. Weird idea: what if we used Gold? That would keep it as a purchace-only unit, like the Faith ones. I dunno, but I could justify the flavor in some ways, I suppose. I don't know if we like the game implications of it being gold, but we *could* like them.
OK. I've noted this in the LB Sum. Obviously not going to figure out what they are, exactly, for awhile.
I was shocked to learn it. It seems kind of cheap. I guess the logic is the civ does have to blow the faith cost to produce all those Inqs. Still feels like cheating, though.
But this is a case in point about how unintuitive the religion system is, and how badly it's explained. You didn't know about this. You!
Still, your lack of knowledge may be just enough to knock you back down to S2rgeus.
OK, so I think we're again at a point where we're still somehow thinking about this slightly differently.
Begin walloftext:
When I say "off" a player's alignment, I mean that a player has a given Tier of light or shadow, and that Tier prescribes a certain distribution of Dark Friend Citizens (DFCs) and Normal Citizens (NCs), which I'll say is "Alignment Stable". If a given city has a different spread of Citizens, that city could be thus said to be "Off Alignment." The civ can then correct this using either a Herald or a FotD.
Remember the discussion above about whether DFCs are *primarily* a source of Alignment change, or *primarily* a manifestation of Alignment? We ended up agreeing that they should be primarily a manifestation, with their Alignment generation being secondary (I think our system so far is upholding that aspect). This is relevant here, IMO, with regards to the whole "using on your own cities" thing. The Heralds/FotD should absolutely be used to *correct* a civ's "off alignment" cities - by pulling that city closer to (or all the way to) its "Stable" position.
The problem with allowing a civ to use its own Heralds/FotD to push a given city beyond the "Stable" place prescribed by the civ's global Tier (e.g., a Light civ creating more and more NC's to generate more Light points), is that we've then set things up so the primary "point" of these Citizens is to *generate*, not reflect, Alignment. A civ will do what we decided we didn't like: pump out unit after unit trying to make themselves deeper and deeper Light or Shadow. This makes things crazy hard to balance for us, and also doesn't seem like a fun playstyle that we should incentivize.
So, to me, the Heralds/FotD serve to pull Alignment "home," even if they're used in foreign cities. But it only works in one direction, and only in cities that are already "off." (An odd scenario: if you were a Light civ and some other civ turned a city MORE light - which you'd probably be fine with - does a Herald do anything? Would you be able to build a Friend of the Dark to counter it? I'd assumed you can only build one of each, but perhaps that's not the case.)
But I do wonder - what about the Neutral civs? According to this logic, it would seem that they don't have particularly glamorous Heralds/FotD (assuming they can build both). Their main use would be to pull other civs neutral, which might make sense strategically, in some cases. And of course pulling their own cities that had been made to be "Off".
The Neutral situation above does seem to suggest that, in actuality, we're better off just having one Alignment-altering unit, that "normalizes" (at least part-way) your cities. Maybe it's just called the "Herald." Because, think about it: you're a neutral civ, and one city has been made Shadowey, and one Lightey. You want neither. Above, you'd have to build one Herald, and move him to the right place, and build one FotD, and move him to the right city. Don't mix them up! If it's a single unit, then you'd just build two of them and get to work - they're doing the exact same thing: pulling your city back to Stability.
Also, making the unit alignment-neutral helps with the issue above of the Light civ that want's to "darken" a city that was made TOO light. Also, it makes the "Herald" name better, since it doesn't need to sound Light, necessarily. Though, we could resurrect "Emisary" for this purpose... or find something else (if it doesn't have to be specifically Light, we might find some other options).
Next:
As far as how these work, mechanically, I can see it going in the direction you had - "middle" alignments adjusting by 1 citizen, and Tier 4 or Higher adjusting by 2. This probably works fine.
I could also see it working as a function of how far apart the civs are, or something. Like, s Tier 8 Shadow civ would produce +2 FotDs. But, should that civ really be able to add 2 DFCs to a Tier *7* Shadow neighbor? That seems like an absurdly easy way to make big changes in somebody's alignment. To me, the greater change would be felt by, for instance, a Neutral Civ - that FotD would have much more success there, IMO. This is especially of concern during the LB, where the Light team will directly benefit by having everybody be heavily light (more Sisters, etc.). Suddenly the game turns into an orgy of Heralds as a bunch of Tier 5 civs push themselves up to Tier 8. This seems way to meta, IMO.
So I'm thinking maybe we can do it based on either 1) how different your civ is from theirs, or 2) how far you are from zero, and how far they are from zero. I explain below.
Number 1 suggests that Tier 8 Shadow civs would do nothing much against other strong Shadow civs, but should do good work against Neutral civs, but it also, unfortunately means they can also easily corrupt extremely LIGHT civs. This I think is problematic.
Number 2 suggests that Tier 8 Shadow civ would have success (i.e. +2 citizens of some type, let's say) against neutral civs, and moderately shadow or light civs, but NOT against other strong shadow OR Light civs. To me, this makes the most sense, actually.
I think I prefer the second option, actually. I was just about to write up a huge proposal and such, but I figured at this point I really need to see what you think of all this.
Note that for all of this I'm simply going by the difference between the civ's global alignments, NOT the alignments of the cities. It's probably too complex to have it calculate based on the city itself. That said, it does seem cheap to just pepper one city over and over again until it's crazy Shadow or Light. I'd say each city can only stretch so far from it's Stable Alignment. How far should that be? This way, it encourages a Spreading civ to actually have to try to affect *different* cities, which is more fun and interactive - and realistic. Then again, since these are just blobs of Yield, maybe that doesn't matter at all.
Also, this all presumes, I think, that we're back to invisible units! Right?
And on that note, one weird issue this all creates is that you don't know what the other civ's alignments are. If you are at the same tier as them, and their city is "Stable," your Herald should really do nothing at all, right (just like it would do in one of your Stable cities)? This makes sense, but it's also a wasted Herald. But disallowing you to spend the Herald informs you too much of their alignment. But letting it always be a +1 Shadow or +1 Light is also bad - it lets people push others towards extreme alignments without actually being extreme yourself. Two Tier 2 shadow civs shouldn't really be able to beef each other up to tier 5 easily, IMO.
As far as Pressure... yeah, I'm with you that we probably shouldn't have that. Although, I could see it existing over long periods of time, simply through Points accumulation. Like, accumulate 1000 poitns and all cities move one Citizen back towards "Stable." Something like that. Thoughts?
I like the idea of the lump-sum thing, but this becomes really interesting when considering all of the above. What if you are neutral and pull a shadow civ light-wise, or a light civ shadow-wise? Would you get light points with one and shadow in the other? What if you are moderately light but pull a heavy light civ DOWN to you - that gives you shadow points? kind of weird, isn't it? Keep in mind, you don't know what the other civ's alignments are!
What do you think of all this? That was *not* supposed to be that long! And on that note, I have to go! Will tackle the rest tomorrow, I hope.
Lordoflinks
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2015
- Messages
- 35
Forsaken Resurrection and Redemption:
- A Forsaken can be killed in three ways: Balefire, Betrayel (Redemption) and normally.
- When a Forsaken is killed by Balefire or in Retribution for Turning to the Light they cannot be resurrected by the Dark One, and are removed from the game
- However additional Forsaken can be created if there are openings by using huge amounts of Spark, the names of them can be M'Heal, Logain, Taim and various False Dragons and Aes Sedi (Sheriman, Lindrian, Elidia), these are weaker than the originals. These cannot be resurrected
- If they are resurrected and a cannon name exists we can use that, otherwise we can name them by their true names and/or objects from the AoL, they take X amount of turns or spark to resurrect and retain their power.
- Forsaken can interact with the Dragon through Alignment choices by Light and Dark players and through abilities/actions
-Some choices include take a Civ as their own, sits in your capital provides bonuses, Tempt the Dragon: Reduces the Dragons dedication score, when it hits Zero it becomes a Dark unit and must be recaptured by the light, Sever a hero: If the Horn has been blown a random hero spawns in the world as Mortal, no longer is a HotH, Attacks the Dragon: Obvious, has a chance to incapictate the Dragon or turn him if his Dedication is low enough, but may become his teacher and cease to be a physical unit, Slay the Teacher: Has a chance to slay the Dragons Teacher, if fails forced into a duel with the Dragon, has no Dedication effect,
- Different Forsaken are better at different actions, for example Lanfear is very good at tempting the dragon but not so good at attacking him
- Actions could occur randomly or Forsaken could be controlled by a Shadow Civ or perhaps have the possibility of a playable Dark One Civ (Similar to Venice but with no science or Culture)?
-Each time a Forsaken does one of the preeceding actions their dedication can drop for Non-Dragon actions and will drop for Dragon, representing them feeling remorse. Only one can become the Dragons teacher and he must be male, this conveys a huge dedication drop per turn
-When their dedication reaches Zero they turn to the light, this means that if atteacher can be slain before he turns he can be ressurected
- The teacher can grant a promotion to the dragon each turn as he grows closer to the light these become more frequent and powerful (This could also vary on the Forsaken, Dameodred may be a better teacher than Asomodean), when he turns he can become a physical unit or remain a teacher, this could apply to female Aes Sedi and Female Forsakens
- The Dragon can have actions to affect the decdication of the Forsaken, these occur randomly and depend on the Forsaken only originals can become teachers (Examples: Meet, persuade, plead)
- Original Forsaken have set values (Egs. Asomedan: Low, Semhirange: Very High), new have randomly generated but tend to be high
-False Dragons can become Forsaken if they survive or can offer their services to the Dragon Reborn or if they are gentled and survive to the time when healing severing they can also Serve the Dragon Reborn
-The dedication of the Dragon may be lowered by non Forsaken actions and may go down as you win, for example I would say in game turns Rand was at one dedication when he bale fired Grendal's castle
How is that?
One further idea:
Because Verin is one of my Favorite characters (Siaun and Lene are two others) can a Brown Adjah Edict be infiltrate the Black Adjah
- A Forsaken can be killed in three ways: Balefire, Betrayel (Redemption) and normally.
- When a Forsaken is killed by Balefire or in Retribution for Turning to the Light they cannot be resurrected by the Dark One, and are removed from the game
- However additional Forsaken can be created if there are openings by using huge amounts of Spark, the names of them can be M'Heal, Logain, Taim and various False Dragons and Aes Sedi (Sheriman, Lindrian, Elidia), these are weaker than the originals. These cannot be resurrected
- If they are resurrected and a cannon name exists we can use that, otherwise we can name them by their true names and/or objects from the AoL, they take X amount of turns or spark to resurrect and retain their power.
- Forsaken can interact with the Dragon through Alignment choices by Light and Dark players and through abilities/actions
-Some choices include take a Civ as their own, sits in your capital provides bonuses, Tempt the Dragon: Reduces the Dragons dedication score, when it hits Zero it becomes a Dark unit and must be recaptured by the light, Sever a hero: If the Horn has been blown a random hero spawns in the world as Mortal, no longer is a HotH, Attacks the Dragon: Obvious, has a chance to incapictate the Dragon or turn him if his Dedication is low enough, but may become his teacher and cease to be a physical unit, Slay the Teacher: Has a chance to slay the Dragons Teacher, if fails forced into a duel with the Dragon, has no Dedication effect,
- Different Forsaken are better at different actions, for example Lanfear is very good at tempting the dragon but not so good at attacking him
- Actions could occur randomly or Forsaken could be controlled by a Shadow Civ or perhaps have the possibility of a playable Dark One Civ (Similar to Venice but with no science or Culture)?
-Each time a Forsaken does one of the preeceding actions their dedication can drop for Non-Dragon actions and will drop for Dragon, representing them feeling remorse. Only one can become the Dragons teacher and he must be male, this conveys a huge dedication drop per turn
-When their dedication reaches Zero they turn to the light, this means that if atteacher can be slain before he turns he can be ressurected
- The teacher can grant a promotion to the dragon each turn as he grows closer to the light these become more frequent and powerful (This could also vary on the Forsaken, Dameodred may be a better teacher than Asomodean), when he turns he can become a physical unit or remain a teacher, this could apply to female Aes Sedi and Female Forsakens
- The Dragon can have actions to affect the decdication of the Forsaken, these occur randomly and depend on the Forsaken only originals can become teachers (Examples: Meet, persuade, plead)
- Original Forsaken have set values (Egs. Asomedan: Low, Semhirange: Very High), new have randomly generated but tend to be high
-False Dragons can become Forsaken if they survive or can offer their services to the Dragon Reborn or if they are gentled and survive to the time when healing severing they can also Serve the Dragon Reborn
-The dedication of the Dragon may be lowered by non Forsaken actions and may go down as you win, for example I would say in game turns Rand was at one dedication when he bale fired Grendal's castle
How is that?
One further idea:
Because Verin is one of my Favorite characters (Siaun and Lene are two others) can a Brown Adjah Edict be infiltrate the Black Adjah