S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

OK, continuing on. There's some stuff i'm skipping without quoting here, regarding DFCs - I think I covered it all, content-wise, above.

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.

Right. this is good.

Cool, I agree. I've edited this into the summary. (Hornblowers can't be disbanded.)

good, good.

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.)

Right, so I think I first read this post, and your misc summary updates, before you
put these Edits in, and got quite confused....

OK, so I guess what I don't understand is how the Future Era is cut out of BNW. Is it 100% absent? Or do you mean simply that the player never "reaches" that era - and it's simply a "final gate" as you've described above? If the "gate" is what it is, that's definitely how I like it. The 4th age should be after our game, really - though some techs can be within it.

So, yes, I's suggest we rename the ninth era (Information Age) as something about the LB. You have the Dragon Peace, which is ok, but I don't love how it's right after another Dragon one.

"Era of Peace" - I think this makes sense actually as a name for the "gate" "era", that is, the era *after* the LB - as a fourth age replacement.

"Era of War" - not so glamorous, but pretty true.
"Era of Tarmon Gai'don" - a nice place to drop this name, since it appears we're always calling it the LB in-game

"Era of Fate" or "Era of Prophesy" or "Era of Destiny" - these are kind of nice, because they make sense, but also don't ignore the fact that somebody could be playing with the LB turned off. I like these, actually.

Done!

I love this quote out of context. I can imagine you just posting a... post... that just says "Done!" and that's that - no more posts or anything in the entire thread. Game released, no beta, nothing. perfect. 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.

right. goodly.

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.

OK. sure.

Ah, right! Awesome sauce, yes. Having only 13 *total* for the whole game makes this all work very nicely!

meant to ask: what does awesome sauce taste like? What is it's base? broth? tomatoes?

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?

I definitely like this idea! let's come back to that.

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.

OK, so I think some of these are for sure good - I'll comment below. Thanks for them. But I do think we had something lost in translation when we were talking about you developing new edicts.

What we were looking for when this idea first popped up was how to make the world different after the dragon is born, but before the LB starts. Ways to bring more "the dragon is doing stuff" flavor into the game in the time before he's actually out and about. The ones you have here all seem very much more LB-related. They're fine. We can keep them (though I don't think we really *need* them). What I thought we were looking for - we can look back through to posts to see if I'm misunderstanding, or you are, but I don't actually care either way - was how to flavor-out the EotD itself. Probably these potential edicts would start appearing not when the World Era became the EotD, but when ONE player entered the EotD - thus, the dragon is born. Or maybe a couple turns after, since we shouldn't have the dragon doing stuff when he's 3 years old. Does that make sense?

So, I'm thinking things like "Denounce the Dragon" and things like that could exist in this window. I think, truly, we're dealing with a relatively small window of time, though, so we're probably looking more at Edicts, Threads, and Forsaken quests, rather than resolutions, since the odds of a vote popping up in this era is relatively low. Thoughts?

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?)

eh... this does kind of step on the toes of the blues, IMO. I could accept it, but it's also sort of weird how we step on their toes, but not really on any other Ajahs. Blues are already narrow in their use

Shepherd of the Dragon
Cities the Dragon-spy is located in produce +50 Light and +50 Faith per turn.

sure!

Curing the Madness (this is very Yellow)
All saidin units lose a single madness tier.

that's VERY interesting. Quite powerful. That's temporary, though? This is interesting when coupled with the cleansing, since some units would already be - and stay, forever - mad even when saidin is cleansed.

Kinda makes me want to do a "cure gentling" one, but we aren't keeping track of gentled units.

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.)

I like it., but this does seem like something that would never pass. Why would the light agree to this? Is this for simply a time when one civ has a huge block of votes.
What if it was less powerful, like the Stweard had a turn that was 2x as long. Every other turn is kind of nuts... could be like 7X as much action. I just worry that your teammates would find this irritating.

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.)

OK, could be good. I'm not a fan of the denouncing side getting a +20 bonus, in addition to the -10 penalty for others. I'd keep it to the penalty.

What happens, specifically, when civs denounce you in CiV?

As far as the Isolationists.... that name almost works, not quite, though. I wonder if we should take something more negative. Something that accuses them of Inaction or something. hmmm...

Find the Seals
Every civilization receives two Hunters of the Horn.

great

Cool, 5 turns sounds good to me then!

ok! noted in LBSum

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.

le'cheim!

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.

Yeah, Firaxis definitely didn't have the balls to do the Tuatha'an.... and maybe we don't either.

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.

Dang, it sounds like you've got an uphill battle. Weird how sometimes the AI is lightyears ahead, and other tims, right with you, and I can't always see the clear reason why.

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!

looks good to me!

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.

I think the key issue here is really the Embarkation. We're really, really breaking flavor if we have the trollocs embark. If we have some newly invented boat unit, that's one thing (though where will it spawn? there are no ports?), and myrddraal, dreadlords, and tohers embark... but trollocs? This seems like it will annoy people. Also, barbs don't really embark so often anyways, do they?

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.)

I think you're right in that this is what that line in thes ummary suggests. But do you think we should do it that way? Do you like that kind of thing happening?

And how/why is it separate from the rebellions if you choose against type? Shouldn't we maybe unify the system?

"unlocking" high level Shadowspawn is more "allowed to train Shadowspawn", right? Then specific tiers unlock specific Shadowspawn units.

yes, yes. for sure.

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.

OK. i like it. Care to lay out a specific map of how it should look (who gets what, and such), and I'll finalize it in the summary? How much a penalty do you get for going against type? Does it vary based on how far against type you are? (and then does it change if you "correct" that alignment over time?)

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!

Interesting! Well, how about this. When we get to the end of the Big Design Period, there's likely going to be a lull when I'm kind of useless. We've designed everything and you're coding away. I figured I'd be doing a lot of Writing at that point (Threads, tutorials, civilopedia entries, etc.), but maybe then we can see if I can help with a little basic modding stuff, too! Would be good for me, I'm sure - though not necessarily worth your time teaching me....

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".

OK, well, let's look to off-loading some of these summaries once we settle on this stuff. Dropbox or something, I'd say.

OK. your move!

 

[S3rgeus]

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?

Flavor mining or diving sounds sensible!

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 see what you mean, the symmetry is quite nice. I think Herald still works better though.

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.

I'm not sure, the primary, basically mandatory gold sinks are currently unit upgrades and CS relationships (right?). Unit purchases are usually for when a civ is on the defensive. Building purchases are for the stupendously wealthy (or the very unhappy buying courthouses). At least that's been my experience. Do we want to split that focus?

A lot of CiV is generally about turning yields into hammers, hammers into stuff, and then that stuff into things that generate hammers faster. Expending hammers on things is certainly much more parallelizable for the player (they can do this in a city that has nothing to do at a particular time because it has the buildings they want until they tech up a bit). Gold all comes from a single pot and seems to run out fast. Gold is certainly better than Faith, in terms of dividing resources being too difficult, but I think hammers still works. Something along the lines of the Archaeologist again?

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.

I'll be back up to S5rgeus before we know it!

OK, so I think we're again at a point where we're still somehow thinking about this slightly differently.

Begin walloftext:

... wall of text ...

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.

Awesome, I think I see where we were thinking about this differently now! This sounds good to me. I'm also in favor of the second option (civs farther from 0 are more resilient to Alignment missionaries in general).

I think I also understand what you mean by Stable for a given city. We can say, based on the progression that, for example, a tier 5 Light civ's city that has 14 population should have 2 Darkfriends. Any deviation from that represents a "non-Stable" deviation that can be corrected by adding or removing Darkfriends until that city has exactly 2. (Regardless of which citizens would be swapped out.)

I also agree we don't want civs artificially pumping their Alignment at the last second before the Last Battle.

After several rereads of your suggestions (and a few rewrites of this response) I think I like the single-Alignment-missionary approach. This gets rid of the ambiguity between the citizen "Darkfriend" and the unit type. It also meshes well with "normalizing" the Alignment of the cities you use the Herald in. (I am fine with either Herald or Emissary as the name for these guys.)

The nice knock-on effect of this is that when you advance a tier, you may now have some cities that were previously Stable, that are now Unstable (have more or less Darkfriends than they would have if all of the population had appeared while you were on your new tier). This means you have a use for your Heralds domestically again.

So, in terms of using these guys abroad, I think it will be largely fire-and-forget. You're not sure what a foreign city will be like, but you can make some guesses based on the player's actions and assume that particularly city currently reflects their overall Alignment. And then modify it to be more like your own.

In terms of numbers for the distance from 0. What do you think the actual Darkfriend citizen changes will be for the different combinations of Heralds from specific Alignment tier civs being expended at cities in civs of other tiers? (Basically looking for the combinations.) If we have a base rate of 1 citizen converted from tiers 1 to 3 (either side), there's no room for that to shrink when used on tiers 4 and up (either side) without it becoming completely ineffective. Is that a problem?

Also, does this mean we're not having an Alignment yield feedback when expending the unit? Or is it just a nominal amount? Or do you think we could still have something like we'd planned for Heralds/Friends of the Dark?

Does the above sound in line with what you're thinking?

I'll go through and address some specific questions from your textwall!

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.

I don't think we need to encourage people to spread out. They won't be able to see foreign Alignment distributions anyway, so they wouldn't be able to track this. Even if they could, as you've said, as raw sources of yield, it doesn't matter which cities the Darkfriends are in, only how many of them there are. So I don't think we need to limit this beyond the obvious actual population of the city. (Can't have more than 4 Darkfriends in a 4 pop city.)

Also, this all presumes, I think, that we're back to invisible units! Right?

Yes, invisible units makes sense.

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.

Yeah, I think the loss of that Herald is fine. The player can't actually tell that it's "lost" anyway - they might think they've contributed to that civ choosing the same side as them. Whether or not it was any use at all to the player that sent the missionary depends on if it gives them any Alignment yield, which I asked about above.

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?

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. A very similar alternative: every 1000 Alignment points in each direction, all of your cities move one pop in that Alignment's direction. (A Neutral civ at 0 may have 20 Light and 20 Shadow or 2000 Light and 2000 Shadow - the latter would have caused population shifts when they reached the divisible-by-one-thousand thresholds for each side. Makes it harder to keep exactly balanced when you have a lot of both/either, which is good, IMO.)

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!

This is related to the lump sum stuff I discussed above, obviously! You make good points here, that if we do this, the player can't know what they're going to get out of it. Which seems terrible, from a CiV transparency and player experience point of view. And what yield they got will give them information about the target's Alignment! This makes me think we should drop it. But then I wonder why you would use Heralds abroad?


I'm afraid that's all I have time for tonight. I'm busy tomorrow evening, so I'll be back on Wednesday to reply to LordofLinks' next post!

 

[S3rgeus]

Sorry for the delay guys, but I'm under the weather today. I'll try to get a proper post up tomorrow!

 

[ldragogode297]

I'd like to put in my two cents and say that Herald works better than Lightfriend, because the canonic 'lightfriends' were the people who betrayed the dark to work for the light.

 

[S3rgeus]

Normal programming may now resume!

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

Interesting point about balefire here - the only mechanism for using it that we've covered thus far is via the Dragon's spy-mode ability. Did you have any other methods of using balefire in mind?

- 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

Interesting source of names for additional Forsaken in False Dragons and Black Ajah Aes Sedai. I think we may want to make the Forsaken more of an "event" than being able to replace them with other characters though. This is only a minor point about the names really.

In terms of using up Spark - Spark acts as a strategic resource in the CiV sense, so it would be unusual for players to be able to permanently consume it in exchange for something that then acts externally to them. (Coming to this below, but having the Forsaken controlled by the Shadowspawn civ makes a lot of sense, which wouldn't mesh well with players being able to control Forsaken, or the traditional things that players would expend strategic resources on.

- 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.

Age of Legends names is a very good idea if we need alternate names for the Forsaken. Same point here about Spark as above - strategic resources are usually statically consumed by units or buildings (or traded temporarily).

One of the things counterpoint and I mentioned, on page 22 I think, was a wonder that resurrects a Forsaken, which we thought was a good idea. We've shelved deciding on what that wonder might be flavor-wise, aside from noting the mechanic seems good.

- Forsaken can interact with the Dragon through Alignment choices by Light and Dark players and through abilities/actions

Would this involve more than descriptions of their involvement as a part of the Decision's text? Thus far we've discussed the results of decisions as being yield dumps or bonuses, but I think more exotic bonuses are very worthy of consideration. This might be what you're suggesting here - like one option on a (necessarily very rare decision) could result in 10 damage to the Dragon unit (obviously only possible while he was on the map, rather than in spy mode).

-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,

Just to be sure, you're also proposing that Dedication be a value that we track individually for each of the Forsaken and the Dragon? From here and a few other places below, that's the impression I'm getting.

I would be a bit worried about the complexity of such a system, when layered on top of everything else that's happening during the Last Battle. There is only a short window of time (in CiV terms) during which these mechanics are active, so complex series of interlinked actions (like a Forsaken becoming the Dragon's teacher) are a lot for the player to deal with. And also a lot of work to implement when they're relatively unlikely to happen in any single game. The Last Battle is also our most overloaded portion of the game at the moment. That's a balancing act - it should feel momentous and different, but we don't want the player to be overwhelmed or confused.

About using the Forsaken for specific actions, I see some value in this being somewhat a reflection of what the Dragon does for the Light. The plan for the Forsaken at the moment was they be controlled by the Shadowspawn civ. Given that it doesn't look like we want to have a permanent Forsaken representative for each Shadow civ (that doesn't seem all that flavorful), there would need to be a system for those Forsaken to transition to and from "spy-like" control of a given player.

Very interesting point about pulling Heroes of the Horn directly into the Pattern, like what happened to Birgitte. This seems like it could be tied into an Alignment Decision quite well - one result gives the player the weakened Hero as a normal, killable unit, the others are varying degrees of betraying that Hero to the Shadow.

- Different Forsaken are better at different actions, for example Lanfear is very good at tempting the dragon but not so good at attacking him

Considering this separately from having distinct actions for the Forsaken, counterpoint and I have discussed having variations between the individual Forsaken (Lanfear being better at some things, Rahvin at others, etc.) - it was a part of our original approach to the Forsaken for the Last Battle, I think. In the end we decided not to have those variations though. There's opportunity for flavor, but like the above, it's a lot of complexity in a very short period of time, which isn't the kinds of things that CiV tends to model well.

- 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)?

I'm thinking here I may have misunderstood part of how these actions are driven above - if it's possible for the Shadowspawn civ to actually be the directing force behind those actions. I'd say of these approaches, we'd probably tend toward that one, but then we're creating relatively complex mechanics that can never be used directly by the player, which isn't ideal.

I can see the appeal of playing a Dark-One-esque civ that plays very differently, like Venice, during the Last Battle, but it doesn't extend as well to the rest of the game. The civ should be able to interact with others as a civilization would - diplomacy, trading, etc. - but that is quite difficult for a Dark One civ to do without clashing with the flavor of what it represents, something that normal humans would never deal with so publicly.

-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

The system of teachers and the Dragon swapping back and forth over the course of the Last Battle sounds like will, like some of the above, introduce a lot more complexity into an already very complex endgame. One thing we've been conscious of when going through the mechanics for the Seals and the Dragon is that the Last Battle is more complex than the existing CiV victory types already, so one of the big fears is that players will ignore it or feel inconvenienced by it and always try to win another way. We'd like to encourage the Last Battle as a victory condition, since it's such a flavorful one.

Having the Dragon switch over the Shadow, while a flavorful alternate timeline, also introduces some difficulties with the way the Light wins the Last Battle. They've already got the defensive position with the Seals - they need to gain simultaneous control of all of them, which should be relatively difficult. Given the complexity of the Dragon's existing situation and his transition between spy mode and unit mode (and how long it took us to nail that down properly - it's been through many design iterations, as you've seen, I'm sure!) it seems like supporting his switching sides would make it much harder to balance Light vs Shadow.

-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

This feels like a good generalization of the two storylines of the main False Dragon characters during the Books, Logain and Taim. I think this opens up something that we've mentioned before, but not really discussed in detail. Do we want to model anything beyond the Gentling of a False Dragon over the course of the game?

We could take a similar approach to captured civilian units, where the new worker you get when you Gentle a male channeler remembers something of what it was before and that can affect what capabilities it has when a new condition arises. (In our cases, that would most likely be the tech/Edict/"Tower something" that represents Nynaeve's discovery of a weave that heals Stilling/Gentling.) We didn't pursue this when it came up before, but if this is something we can have exist over the course of the game, rather than isolated to the Last Battle, it seems more worthwhile.

-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 would we track winning, in this case? This is the Light being successful, which is primarily about gathering the Seals during the Last Battle. The Seals are relatively transient though - they can be stolen back and forth between the two sides, which makes an ongoing progression based on them quite difficult. (Unlike, say, the science victory, where we can track how many Exhibitions a player has performed, which can't be changed once they occur.)

How is that?

Very cool! Always great to have proposals from other people. You are of course welcome to disagree with any of my points above and convince me of the value of a different approach to them. A lot of my responses are concerning complexity, but it's possible I may be misunderstanding the division between flavor and mechanics in your suggestions. Hopefully the overall good design of the mod will emerge from all of us discussing possible features from different angles, so the back and forth is good for developing the ideas!

I imagine counterpoint will have some thoughts too, both on your suggestions and on my responses to them.

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

The edicts are currently balanced by numbers in terms of Ajah, but if we can come up with a good one and a candidate to swap out, then it's definitely possible. Originally, when the Black Ajah was influence-based, this would have been a bit easier, but now that Turning the Tower is based on the Turning objectives, it's a bit more abstract.

I'm also wondering if we should consider having the Tower dispatch quests that specifically target thwarting the Turning objectives. Not sure if that's too punishing for the Shadow players or too revealing, in that it gives non-Shadow players too much information about what the Shadow players are trying to do (in terms of which cities/Ajahs they need to take).

So, candidate Black-related Ajah edict (though marginally more Shadow-related than specifically Black Ajah related):

Infiltrate the Shadow
Darkfriend citizens produce +1 Culture for 30 turns.

It even uses one of our more recently decided features, that didn't exist when we did the Edicts. What do you guys think? Worthy to swap out any from the Edicts list? Or do you have any other suggestions?



I'm afraid that's all I have time for tonight, folks! I'll try to be back tomorrow (pending possibly not being home tomorrow until late), but at latest I'll post again on Saturday to respond to counterpoint's latest and ldragogode's next post.

 

[counterpoint]

Yo. So I've been holding off on a responding to S3rgeus's responses to my stuff, because I was hoping to wait until he got through the whole post - wanted to give him to opportunity to develop his thoughts better before I respond.

first:

I'd like to put in my two cents and say that Herald works better than Lightfriend, because the canonic 'lightfriends' were the people who betrayed the dark to work for the light.

Well, *that* I certainly didn't know about! Interesting. I'm googling it and it seems to be mostly a fan-coined term, right? Verin and whatnot.

Herald is indeed the current frontrunner - though Emisary is right there with it, I think.

In any case, I'll take this as an opportunity to address Lordoflinks's thoughts and S3rgeus's thoughts on them.

In general, I agree with S3rgeus, so I'm only chiming in when I have something constructive and new to add. I'll be quoting Lordoflinks's specific lines because doing both of you guys was getting too complicated.

I do echo S3rgeus's enthusiasm on having a new voice throwing in new ideas here (I say new, but I know you've been with the thread for awhile now). Look forward to more!

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

We've tentatively decided that 13 is the "total" cap of all possible Forsaken - including resurrection - but I think this discussion could theoretically be re-opened. I don't think it *needs* to be, but I can certainly see that, from a flavor perspective, the whole dichotomy between "death" and perma-death is compelling and very WoT.

From a Gameplay perspective, though, we need to be careful, since, as S3rg mentions, it's currently limited to the Dragon and the Forsaken for balancing purposes. With that in mind, that essentially means the Forsaken can only be killed by the dragon, which makes them particularly powerful.

I'm jumping ahead here, a bit, but a big part of me views the Redemption of the Forsaken as something similar to what I described about the Betrayal of the Dragon - something best reserved for extreme, almost easter-eggy cases. A game where the Shadow is insanely dominant? OK, maybe the Dragon turns for the cool factor of it all. A game where Light is totally dominant? Well, maybe half the forsaken Redeem and go nuts. In either case, not real mechanics so much as things that happen in extreme cases, for fun.

- 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

I think there's something to be said for generalizing all of this. In other parts of the mod we are making pains to not be specific - calling him the Dragon instead of Rand. Should we consider generalizing the forsaken too? Not something I'm suggesting, just something I'm struck by here.

I do think Elaida would take issue with being labeled a darkfriend, though...

- Forsaken can interact with the Dragon through Alignment choices by Light and Dark players and through abilities/actions

While I find S3rgeus's suggestion (the 10 damage dealt as a result of an Alignment choice) to be kind of interesting, I think it also confuses the issue a bit. We want people responding "in character" for these, right? If there's a clear benefit such as dealing damage to the dragon, people will simply answer the prompt in their "best interest," and it makes it into a non-choice, which we're trying hard to prevent.

-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,

I agree with S3rg here, re: complexity. I'll add that I'm not currently a fan of spinning HotH out of the pattern, a la Birgitte. It's cool, but a little too specific to be a generalized mechanic.

- Different Forsaken are better at different actions, for example Lanfear is very good at tempting the dragon but not so good at attacking him

I was originally totally advocating for this, but have since come over to S3rgeus's viewpoint.

- 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)?

I think having the Shadowspawn be AI controlled is part of what makes this mod unique. It's a giant, non-civ force that is at work in the game - like the barbarians on steroids. I like that.

I think a dark one civ would be great in a scenario, though!

-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

this is in regards to this point and S3rgeus's questions about expanding the roles of False Dragons post-defeat.

I could go either way on this. I can see the appeal, for sure. Having the False Dragons matter in some way in the end game is a neat idea, for sure.

At the same time, I definitely don't like the idea of, say, a False Dragon that was gentled really early in the game just being "saved" by a civ as a worker unit for thousands of years, just in case something cool happens with him during the last battle. That seems to meta to me.

I think most of this can be done simply with flavor, if not with an actual unit. We can have some of the thing that happen up to and including the Last Battle be altered by what happened with the recent False Dragons (e.g., any of them that occurred in the Era of the Dragon). For example:
Was one of them gentled? Well, later a male channeler unit will pop up under the control of the White Tower.
Did one of them survive too long, and eventually "escape," well, one of the forsaken will appear 10 turns earlier than they normally would (it's him)

That kind of stuff. Just flavor, really.

The edicts are currently balanced by numbers in terms of Ajah, but if we can come up with a good one and a candidate to swap out, then it's definitely possible. Originally, when the Black Ajah was influence-based, this would have been a bit easier, but now that Turning the Tower is based on the Turning objectives, it's a bit more abstract.

I'm also wondering if we should consider having the Tower dispatch quests that specifically target thwarting the Turning objectives. Not sure if that's too punishing for the Shadow players or too revealing, in that it gives non-Shadow players too much information about what the Shadow players are trying to do (in terms of which cities/Ajahs they need to take).

I like the idea of quests that counter the turning process, but I'm having trouble figuring out how exactly to implement them. Would they be direct? Like, "protect this city" or even "The Black Ajah is plotting to take this city" or much more vague "a city is under peril!." In both cases, how would you gauge success? All civs get the reward if the Shadow civs fail to accomplish the task?

In general, I do like the idea of the light being able to defend, but I sort of worry about the Shadow civs being "outed" (before they've even declared) because of this. If Whitebridge is reevealed as a Shadow target... what exactly does that say about the civs at war with Andor?
Tough!

So, candidate Black-related Ajah edict (though marginally more Shadow-related than specifically Black Ajah related):

Infiltrate the Shadow
Darkfriend citizens produce +1 Culture for 30 turns.

I can't help but question the mechanic here. So, you infiltrate the shadow, and are rewarded based on how shadowy your civ is? That seems weird to me. The mechanic is fine, but I don't think that really counts as infiltrating the shadow. To me, that name would fit more with getting a culture bonus from removing Darkfriends from your cities, or something.

That said, I do think we could throw in a few edicts that have something to do with converting other civs and such. Brown makes sense in very specific situations, but Blue probably makes the most sense in general.

 

[Lordoflinks]

Thank you for the feedback, I was not sure what systems there were in place for the last battle so I threw all my ideas out there.
I intended dedication to be a individual value.
By consuming spark I meant while the Forsaken is being resurrected you can't use it.
One use for Balefire, perhaps if you kill a unit with it and it has killed units this turn the most recently killed one is resurrected.
By the Dragon turning I meant he goes barbarian and is weakened and a light civ just has to capture him by defeating him to return him.
One question, will any of my ides be used or will they be filed away.
So i take it this mod won't have much flavor regarding the Dragon and the Forsaken in terms of uniqueness, due to game time, perhaps once the main mod is finished a submod could be created focusing on the last battle and incorporating some of my ideas and the DO civ. However the Teacher idea and Forsaken actions (The Dragon Ones) were more about flavor and yes I think gentled dragons should be tracked but not for thousands of years.
EDIT: Perhaps when the Dragon kills male Forsaken randomly he can get a promotion called "Student of a Forsaken" which grants him bonuses, and the Forsaken actions can be handled by random events. I suppose the rest could wait for the possibility of a submod such as the one I mentioned

 

[S3rgeus]

Right, so I think I first read this post, and your misc summary updates, before you
put these Edits in, and got quite confused....

OK, so I guess what I don't understand is how the Future Era is cut out of BNW. Is it 100% absent? Or do you mean simply that the player never "reaches" that era - and it's simply a "final gate" as you've described above? If the "gate" is what it is, that's definitely how I like it. The 4th age should be after our game, really - though some techs can be within it.

So, yes, I's suggest we rename the ninth era (Information Age) as something about the LB. You have the Dragon Peace, which is ok, but I don't love how it's right after another Dragon one.

The Future Era is totally absent in BNW. Check out the full tree. Future Tech is in the Information Era. So the 9th Era isn't the Information Era, in BNW there are only 8.

However, given the compression we've considered and the way we're "using" the final era as a gate, I think we can afford to add a 9th one. From somewhere earlier, I seem to remember wanting to have 4 Fourth Age technologies? Does anyone remember/want to look up why that was the case? (Or even if it was the case at all.) Anyway, that would mean we'd have 5 techs in the Fourth Age. Those 4 + a "Future Tech" equivalent.

Alternatively we don't need to have a Future Tech equivalent. The game already handles it if you've just straight up run out of things to research. But it seems bad that science-heavy players can't continue to use their beakers to their advantage. So I'd recommend sticking with some kind of Future Tech substitute.

"Era of Peace" - I think this makes sense actually as a name for the "gate" "era", that is, the era *after* the LB - as a fourth age replacement.

"Era of War" - not so glamorous, but pretty true.
"Era of Tarmon Gai'don" - a nice place to drop this name, since it appears we're always calling it the LB in-game

"Era of Fate" or "Era of Prophesy" or "Era of Destiny" - these are kind of nice, because they make sense, but also don't ignore the fact that somebody could be playing with the LB turned off. I like these, actually.

I think Era of Peace has the same problem as the Era of the Dragon's Peace, with regards to triggering the LB. If one player pulls ahead and they reach the Era of Peace before half reach the Era of the Dragon, then that will trigger the Last Battle. That seems bizarre, from a naming point of view.

The Era of Tarmon Gai'don actually makes a lot of sense. It will be out of place if the user has the Last Battle turned off, but in terms of timing, it's the only era that is guaranteed that every player who's in it will also have to deal with the Last Battle at the same time.

Era of Prophesy and Era of Destiny also sound good to me. Prophesy is more WoT, but there's a certain majesty to Destiny as well.

I love this quote out of context. I can imagine you just posting a... post... that just says "Done!" and that's that - no more posts or anything in the entire thread. Game released, no beta, nothing. perfect. Done!

Everything is finished! No bugs! Subforum plz, kthxbai.

meant to ask: what does awesome sauce taste like? What is it's base? broth? tomatoes?

Awesome sauce is strictly defined as Heinz Tomato Ketchup. It is the one true condiment, heir to all meals, and Bringer of the Lunch.

OK, so I think some of these are for sure good - I'll comment below. Thanks for them. But I do think we had something lost in translation when we were talking about you developing new edicts.

What we were looking for when this idea first popped up was how to make the world different after the dragon is born, but before the LB starts. Ways to bring more "the dragon is doing stuff" flavor into the game in the time before he's actually out and about. The ones you have here all seem very much more LB-related. They're fine. We can keep them (though I don't think we really *need* them). What I thought we were looking for - we can look back through to posts to see if I'm misunderstanding, or you are, but I don't actually care either way - was how to flavor-out the EotD itself. Probably these potential edicts would start appearing not when the World Era became the EotD, but when ONE player entered the EotD - thus, the dragon is born. Or maybe a couple turns after, since we shouldn't have the dragon doing stuff when he's 3 years old. Does that make sense?

That makes a lot of sense, in fact I almost wrote a note at the top of the Edicts section talking about this exact difference. When I went to make the Edicts for the Dragon, the relationship between those Edicts and the window of time they can exist in was a bit weird. The Tower can Turn and the Tower's Edicts only affect civs on the same side of the Last Battle as the Tower, so all of the Dragon-related-bonus Edicts make no sense for a Shadow Tower - meaning they'd only work during the lead-in time between one civ in EotD and world era EotD. I kind of veered off into more LB-like Edicts as a result.

However, that's ignoring the fact that the tower will be Light the majority of the time and we could simply disable these Edicts when they're on the Shadow side. So, more Dragon-specific Edicts incoming!

So, I'm thinking things like "Denounce the Dragon" and things like that could exist in this window. I think, truly, we're dealing with a relatively small window of time, though, so we're probably looking more at Edicts, Threads, and Forsaken quests, rather than resolutions, since the odds of a vote popping up in this era is relatively low. Thoughts?

Agreed that Resolutions are much less likely to happen in this time period. It's also worth noting that the Compact keeps going throughout the LB - it's probably worth having some resolutions that care about Alignment in this space, so that the two sides can work against each other diplomatically as well.

Threads and Forsaken Quests seem to still be undefined in terms of how we mold the flavor, so I won't do those here - let's do the more general ones before having Dragon-specific ones?

Anyway, those Dragon-y Edicts then, let's have three (first two only work once the Last Battle has started):

Condemn Balefire
Using the Dragon's balefire ability in the next 30 turns costs the controlling civilization one Aes Sedai quota. (Higher cost?)

Treat with the Dragon
For the next 30 turns, civilizations get a 50% bonus to influence boosts with the Tower and its Ajahs while that civilization controls the Dragon.

Uplift the Dragon's Homeland
The civilization that the dragon was born in produces an extra 50% Culture for the next 30 turns.

Would we prefer some more antagonistic ones too/instead?

eh... this does kind of step on the toes of the blues, IMO. I could accept it, but it's also sort of weird how we step on their toes, but not really on any other Ajahs. Blues are already narrow in their use

I agree, I was very unsure about this one. Let's axe it.

sure!

Edited into the list.

that's VERY interesting. Quite powerful. That's temporary, though? This is interesting when coupled with the cleansing, since some units would already be - and stay, forever - mad even when saidin is cleansed.

I'm not sure if it should be temporary. I'm picturing it as something the Aes Sedai go out and do for an amount of time - cure men of the madness from Saidin - and those people remain cured (or at least less mad) after they stop. If Saidin hasn't been Cleansed it will creep back, but this could potentially have large effects on the usefulness of existing channelers, with or without a Cleansed Saidin. If it's an endgame thing (unlocked after a specific world era) then the difference between temporary and permanent is also lessened - since the game will be over.

Kinda makes me want to do a "cure gentling" one, but we aren't keeping track of gentled units.

Relevant to our discussions below! I'll address this in more detail there.

I like it., but this does seem like something that would never pass. Why would the light agree to this? Is this for simply a time when one civ has a huge block of votes.
What if it was less powerful, like the Stweard had a turn that was 2x as long. Every other turn is kind of nuts... could be like 7X as much action. I just worry that your teammates would find this irritating.

2X as long works for me too.

These are mostly endgame resolutions that only unlock in its final stages, and looking at what BNW has, the resolutions for the endgame are actually quite targeted. Being able to sway the right number of allies or have enough volume of votes yourself should make a genuine difference in making that player more effective at winning the game. (Example: ISS is clearly created to make winning the science victory much easier. World Religion and World Ideology greatly help the Culture victory.) So I think with these final few resolutions, our object should be to tip the balance in the favor of a player that can make them pass "targeting" themselves or the victory they're attempting.

OK, could be good. I'm not a fan of the denouncing side getting a +20 bonus, in addition to the -10 penalty for others. I'd keep it to the penalty.

I'm not sure, the main function of the endgame resolutions should be making players win. The bonus happiness allows the affected players to capture more cities, which could make a serious difference to their plans. If we didn't want to have both, I'd be inclined to reflavor the resolution so we could have just the happiness bonus.

What happens, specifically, when civs denounce you in CiV?

Diplo penalty with civs who like the denounced player, bonus with civs who have also denounced him. Embassies between the two civs are removed. I think that's it, aside from the various secondary diplo relationship consequences ("Civs they like more than you have denounced you" etc.) and the AI's considerations for who it doesn't like.

As far as the Isolationists.... that name almost works, not quite, though. I wonder if we should take something more negative. Something that accuses them of Inaction or something. hmmm...

Agreed, that's what I wanted to do as well, but couldn't come up with one. Bystanders? Deserters?

great

Edited into the list!

Yeah, Firaxis definitely didn't have the balls to do the Tuatha'an.... and maybe we don't either.

That's as good a reason as any for us to do it! We just need to come up with a way that doesn't break the game or tread on other mechanics!

Dang, it sounds like you've got an uphill battle. Weird how sometimes the AI is lightyears ahead, and other tims, right with you, and I can't always see the clear reason why.

I think in my game, Casimir started on a continent by himself, or killed his only neighbor very early. Usually continents maps of this size break into two big continents, but this one actually separated into three - only of which is the Supreme Dominion of Poland. Attila and I have enough aeronautical and naval forces to be dealing with on our home turf, let alone sailing across the sea to reach him!

I haven't actually had a chance to play this game again yet, but I'll keep you updated!

looks good to me!

Awesome, any opinions on some of the rest stuff? What's the interval for spawning False Dragons? Did we decide on modifiers for the Bloodknives and Gray Men being discovered in foreign cities? We definitely did for assassinations, which I actually forgot to add.

...

Added that! It occurs to me there will never be a "defending" spy in Tar Valon, because CSes don't have spies. Do we care about that?

I've added another one specific to Amyrlin - the relative influence of the Ajah she was raised from. This sound good?

I think the key issue here is really the Embarkation. We're really, really breaking flavor if we have the trollocs embark. If we have some newly invented boat unit, that's one thing (though where will it spawn? there are no ports?), and myrddraal, dreadlords, and tohers embark... but trollocs? This seems like it will annoy people. Also, barbs don't really embark so often anyways, do they?

I didn't think barbarians could embark, but I've just checked and they actually can. I just think their AI doesn't use it very often. (They also need the tech, barbarians have a specific way of "obtaining" technology through a kind of osmosis from nearby civs. Since the barbs don't own any territory, any units made before they have that tech will never be able to embark.)

In terms of Trollocs crossing water, that is a specific point in the books that they don't do that. In all honesty we may have to just ignore that, but make some concessions to the flavor of it. We could make the boats look rickety and falling apart on the art side of things. (Is a toher a Draghkar somehow keyboard shifted to the right a bit?) They could also have super low embarked movement, like 1 or 2 spaces.

I think you're right in that this is what that line in thes ummary suggests. But do you think we should do it that way? Do you like that kind of thing happening?

I think so, it makes a lot of sense. It's very similar to the Ideology city-flipping already in BNW, it's a new manifestation using our mechanics. It makes in-universe sense that a civ under extreme cultural influence of an opposing-LB-side civ would have unrest as its people wanted to join the other side.

And how/why is it separate from the rebellions if you choose against type? Shouldn't we maybe unify the system?

They're not really very separate, after thinking about it a bit more. They're the same action being triggered by different pre-conditions. One is a manifestation of culture differences and related to the culture victory (though only in the presence of the LB victory). The other is a direct consequence of LB actions. They will look unified to the player, and likely share some code underneath for flipping cities to nearby Light civs. The main difference is how we choose which cities to flip, which is unique for each of the two causes.

OK. i like it. Care to lay out a specific map of how it should look (who gets what, and such), and I'll finalize it in the summary? How much a penalty do you get for going against type? Does it vary based on how far against type you are? (and then does it change if you "correct" that alignment over time?)

Sure. I'll address your last questions first, since their answers are also integrated into the table. Yes, being farther against-type creates more problems for the player. The issues are "standing penalties" (like X Unhappiness) that are considered based on the player's current position, so "correcting" their Alignment will reduce the penalties.

We may want to have some "straight-off" one-shot penalties/bonuses when players declare though. Do we? Some listed below actually are instantaneous.

In terms of standing bonuses, related to this ongoing discussion, let's use the Alignment tiers! They're actually coming in very useful.

Choosing Shadow
Shadow Tier 1-2: Build Trollocs
Shadow Tier 3-4: Build Myrddraal
Shadow Tier 5-6: Build Draghkar
Shadow Tier 7-8: Build Dreadlords
Neutral: -5 Happiness (people are inherently good!)
Each positive Light tier costs an additional -5 happiness (topping out at -45 for tier 8)
At Light tier 4-5: One city rebellion (random?)
At Light tier 6-7: Two city rebellions (random?)
At light tier 8: Three city rebellions (random?)

Keep in mind the boosts to Forsaken Quests are not captured here, since they do a wider variety of things.

Choosing Light
Shadow Tier 1-2: -10 Happiness (more static than Light - the Shadow are more "institutional" whereas the Light is "grassroots")
Shadow Tier 3-4: -20 Happiness
Shadow Tier 5-6: -30 Happiness (A Forsaken appears to try to kill you early, from here "down"?)
Shadow Tier 7-8: -40 Happiness
Neutral: Nothing
Light Tier 1-2: +1 Aes Sedai quota (assume Light Tower for all quotas boosts)
Light Tier 3-4: +5 Happiness, +2 Aes Sedai Quota
Light Tier 5-6: +15 Happiness, +3 Aes Sedai Quota
Light Tier 7-8: +25 Happiness, +4 Aes Sedai Quota

Choosing Neutral
Shadow Tier 1-3, Light Tier 1-3, and Neutral: Nothing
Light and Shadow Tier 4-6: -5 Happiness
Light and Shadow Tier 7-8: -15 Happiness

I could see all of these unhappiness penalties being significantly larger if we wanted. The Ideology happiness modifiers related to Tourism in BNW get crazy, and these seem like they act in a similar kind of space. (I've got a multiplayer game going where I'm on the only Order civ and the three other humans are Freedom - one of them has 15% influence over me and the others are negligible, and I already have -18 Happiness from it.)

Interesting! Well, how about this. When we get to the end of the Big Design Period, there's likely going to be a lull when I'm kind of useless. We've designed everything and you're coding away. I figured I'd be doing a lot of Writing at that point (Threads, tutorials, civilopedia entries, etc.), but maybe then we can see if I can help with a little basic modding stuff, too! Would be good for me, I'm sure - though not necessarily worth your time teaching me....

Sounds like a plan! I'm happy to help out teaching-wise, one of the great things about projects like this is that the people participating learn stuff. (I've been learning and refreshing my C++ knowledge in the process of this mod. And this thread has been very good for writing practice!)

OK, well, let's look to off-loading some of these summaries once we settle on this stuff. Dropbox or something, I'd say.

Dropbox sounds good.

OK. your move!

Cue Yu-Gi-Oh! soundtrack!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'd like to put in my two cents and say that Herald works better than Lightfriend, because the canonic 'lightfriends' were the people who betrayed the dark to work for the light.

Awesome, as counterpoint said, Herald is the frontrunner so this puts it even further ahead.




As counterpoint has done, I won't quote-block his whole reply, I'll only do sections that I have something specifically constructive to add.

We've tentatively decided that 13 is the "total" cap of all possible Forsaken - including resurrection - but I think this discussion could theoretically be re-opened. I don't think it *needs* to be, but I can certainly see that, from a flavor perspective, the whole dichotomy between "death" and perma-death is compelling and very WoT.

From a Gameplay perspective, though, we need to be careful, since, as S3rg mentions, it's currently limited to the Dragon and the Forsaken for balancing purposes. With that in mind, that essentially means the Forsaken can only be killed by the dragon, which makes them particularly powerful.

With LordOfLinks' suggestion for using the Forsaken's AoL real names where we don't have a resurrection name for them, I think re-approaching resurrection for the Forsaken has value. (Our previous problem with being more effective to kill certain Forsaken disappears if we can revive any of them.)

As you've brought up, the Forsaken becomes very powerful if only the Dragon can kill them permanently. One way to fix this would be to make balefire accessible in some other capacity. Any ideas for that? A tech that gives it to Sisters and Asha'men? Or a project/wonder? A mini-nuke, so the Nuclear Bomb explosion would be the normal unit, the Nuclear Missile one would be the Dragon. Or could we have targeted balefire in some way?

I'm jumping ahead here, a bit, but a big part of me views the Redemption of the Forsaken as something similar to what I described about the Betrayal of the Dragon - something best reserved for extreme, almost easter-eggy cases. A game where the Shadow is insanely dominant? OK, maybe the Dragon turns for the cool factor of it all. A game where Light is totally dominant? Well, maybe half the forsaken Redeem and go nuts. In either case, not real mechanics so much as things that happen in extreme cases, for fun.

I see the flavor opportunity of making this available in an easter-eggy way, but it seems like a lot of work that most players won't see.

I think there's something to be said for generalizing all of this. In other parts of the mod we are making pains to not be specific - calling him the Dragon instead of Rand. Should we consider generalizing the forsaken too? Not something I'm suggesting, just something I'm struck by here.

With the precedent of GPs having named units and a pool of Forsaken names to draw from (whereas the Dragon only canonically has one, Rand - two at a stretch if you made Lews Therin a possibility, but that doesn't make much sense) having the Forsaken just be male female variants but with the names seems like a good compromise between flavor and complexity. Simply having "Female Forsaken" as the unit type seems like it's taking it a bit far.

While I find S3rgeus's suggestion (the 10 damage dealt as a result of an Alignment choice) to be kind of interesting, I think it also confuses the issue a bit. We want people responding "in character" for these, right? If there's a clear benefit such as dealing damage to the dragon, people will simply answer the prompt in their "best interest," and it makes it into a non-choice, which we're trying hard to prevent.

Possibly related to the stuff about Compacts above, I think it makes more sense for the endgame Alignment Decisions to also be pushing players directly towards winning one way or another. I think if we avoid everything that makes certain Decisions a non-choice for some players, they will feel quite bland.

I agree with S3rg here, re: complexity. I'll add that I'm not currently a fan of spinning HotH out of the pattern, a la Birgitte. It's cool, but a little too specific to be a generalized mechanic.

I'm not sure if this is too specific to include in general. There are X Heroes and spinning them out not via a mechanic, but a Decision/Forsaken Quest would involve a lot less complexity. In either case, the result is simply a bonus for the Shadow if the Hero is betrayed in some way, or a unit for the controller if the Hero is somehow saved. All of that is flavor dressing, the choices are effectively:

Artur Hawkwing has been ripped from the World of Dreams and now exists in the Pattern, isolated in Shadowspawn territory.

Option A: Send soldiers to help him
Cost: -100 Gold, select X combined military strength of units to be destroyed
Result: Receive a melee Hero unit named Artur Hawkwing
(You could swap for Gaidal Cain or any other melee Hero via pure text. Other hero types (like Birgitte ranged) would only involve a unit type change for the reward.)

Option B: Abandon him to the Shadow
Cost: Nothing
Result: 400 Shadow points, (do we want any Decisions to have different results for differently aligned players? This result calls out for: Shadow players receive 2 Trolloc units, Light players have X fewer Shadowspawn spawn in their territory for 5 turns (they are busy killing Hawkwing instead of you).)

Option C: Rescue and Elevate Hawkwing in your Government
Cost: -400 Gold, select X combined military strength of units to be destroyed
Result: +100 Light, +5 Prestige per turn (culture players like this)

Something like that?

this is in regards to this point and S3rgeus's questions about expanding the roles of False Dragons post-defeat.

I could go either way on this. I can see the appeal, for sure. Having the False Dragons matter in some way in the end game is a neat idea, for sure.

At the same time, I definitely don't like the idea of, say, a False Dragon that was gentled really early in the game just being "saved" by a civ as a worker unit for thousands of years, just in case something cool happens with him during the last battle. That seems to meta to me.

I think most of this can be done simply with flavor, if not with an actual unit. We can have some of the thing that happen up to and including the Last Battle be altered by what happened with the recent False Dragons (e.g., any of them that occurred in the Era of the Dragon). For example:
Was one of them gentled? Well, later a male channeler unit will pop up under the control of the White Tower.
Did one of them survive too long, and eventually "escape," well, one of the forsaken will appear 10 turns earlier than they normally would (it's him)

That kind of stuff. Just flavor, really.

And

yes I think gentled dragons should be tracked but not for thousands of years.

I can understand the reluctance to have False Dragons be tracked over the course of the whole game, from both of you. It seems to make that this is kind of how CiV works though. Units persist over period of time that are humanly impossible, just because it doesn't make any gameplay sense to have to keep rebuilding them all of the time. I think it would be similar to this to track False Dragons the same way.

I'm not hugely attached to the idea, but I can see value in being able to recreate channelers in the endgame (regardless of whether the LB is active) from previously Gentled male channelers (provided the player has the Spark to spare), either via some tech or mission or something. Attaching an alternate method via a Tower Edict that becomes available after a certain point also seems like it could work well in tandem. Something like:

Cure for Gentling
One Gentled male channeler worker unit owned by each civilization becomes a male channeler again. (Civs with none receive nothing, civs who don't have enough Spark still get him, but go into "negative strategic resources mode" as with traded supplies.)

I understand if you guys don't think we should do that, but figured I'd bring it up again since it seems flavorful in the bigger picture, and quite CiV-y.

I like the idea of quests that counter the turning process, but I'm having trouble figuring out how exactly to implement them. Would they be direct? Like, "protect this city" or even "The Black Ajah is plotting to take this city" or much more vague "a city is under peril!." In both cases, how would you gauge success? All civs get the reward if the Shadow civs fail to accomplish the task?

In general, I do like the idea of the light being able to defend, but I sort of worry about the Shadow civs being "outed" (before they've even declared) because of this. If Whitebridge is reevealed as a Shadow target... what exactly does that say about the civs at war with Andor?
Tough!

Exactly what I was thinking too. I can't think of a way to have "defensive" objectives without revealing too much about other players' Alignment, or even making those objectives impossible. (Some are only really workable when players don't know what exactly they should be defending against, like the Ajah influence thresholds.) Then again, maybe that is just part of making it really hard to Turn the Tower. It still leaves us with the outing-Alignment issue though.

I can't help but question the mechanic here. So, you infiltrate the shadow, and are rewarded based on how shadowy your civ is? That seems weird to me. The mechanic is fine, but I don't think that really counts as infiltrating the shadow. To me, that name would fit more with getting a culture bonus from removing Darkfriends from your cities, or something.

Woops, totally true, I've gone and done things backwards again. That wasn't the intended effect at all. Gaining culture from expending Heralds does make more sense.

Thank you for the feedback, I was not sure what systems there were in place for the last battle so I threw all my ideas out there.

No worries, you've started off a lot of very valuable discussions!

By consuming spark I meant while the Forsaken is being resurrected you can't use it.

Ok, I see what you mean here then. I still think this provides difficulty with how strategics work. The cost of using that Spark is only temporary then, since players who have the extra spare can just do it by not building more channelers for a while. (Though that does create an opportunity cost.) It also means that players who are close to their Spark limit are just locked out, unless their channelers die or they disband them, which seems a strange first step in reviving a Forsaken.

One use for Balefire, perhaps if you kill a unit with it and it has killed units this turn the most recently killed one is resurrected.

This is possible, though difficult. We'd need to store information about every combat death on every unit for a turn (enough data to reconstruct the unit that died). We'd likely need to do that for the whole game, since the units don't know when the Dragon is active. I really like where you're going here though - balefire having some demonstrable "Pattern-unwinding" effect is very in-universe. And the data we need to hang onto is relatively short-lived (single turn).

By the Dragon turning I meant he goes barbarian and is weakened and a light civ just has to capture him by defeating him to return him.

Right, ok, this is less swing-y than him going over to the Shadow. I like the flavor of the Dragon flipping to lead the Dragonsworn, but I think the complexity of tracking a metric like Dedication on the Dragon that leads to that makes it a less attractive.

One question, will any of my ides be used or will they be filed away.

I think most ideas that come up in the topic are changed between being proposed and being decided on. Anything that goes into the summaries is a decided design that we'll eventually get to implementing as a part of the mod. Over the next few posts we would usually go back and forth about the specific ideas until we come down on an approach we agree on and then add that to the relevant summary, as we decide. From what I can see, from your post, the following discussions have spawned:

• Reconsidering the role of Gentled False Dragons
• Reconsidering how we handle resurrection for the Forsaken
• An expanded role for balefire
• An edict that represents Aes Sedai who infiltrate the Shadow/Black Ajah
• Heroes of the Horn entering the Pattern via some mechanic
• Renewed discussion of the Dragon changing sides (mentioned but not in detail a long time ago), and the possibility for the Forsaken

It's all still open discussions - there are a variety of flavor suggestions like the Forsaken AoL names that fit well into other places that we're already considering.

So i take it this mod won't have much flavor regarding the Dragon and the Forsaken in terms of uniqueness, due to game time, perhaps once the main mod is finished a submod could be created focusing on the last battle and incorporating some of my ideas and the DO civ.

Complexity that is involved in shorter time periods exactly like this is a great source for scenarios. One of the things we've earmarked for the mod are scenarios that act out some of the more historic parts of the actual WoT canon. The general game which is the core of CiV needs to be more abstracted from the 'actual' WoT history and fit into the game timescales, so it's necessarily farther from the source material in terms of flavor. (Just like normal BNW games don't accurately reflect history on Earth, we're more trying to capture the essence of it.)

In scenarios we want to be much more specific though! It's much more about acting out a specific moment or event that existed in time. So things like the War of Power, the actual Last Battle from the books, the rise/fall of Artur Hawkwing, and a variety of others. These scenarios can even have unique mechanics to them (much like the BNW Civil War scenario has a concept of troop supply for units, Empire of the Smoky Skies has the concept of hovering units and titles related to in-game actions, and the Wonders of the Ancient World attaches additional significance and bonuses to specific wonders).

I can see flipping the Dragon from Light to Shadow or the Forsaken back and forth becoming a core mechanic of a scenario - it's the right kind of thing for that context. Scenarios are a while away though, in terms of when we'll get to implementing or designing them, since there's so much left to do on the 'main' mod and the scenarios are necessarily based on what exists in the random games. (Even in the cases where they are different because of the absence of certain mechanics.)

EDIT: Perhaps when the Dragon kills male Forsaken randomly he can get a promotion called "Student of a Forsaken" which grants him bonuses, and the Forsaken actions can be handled by random events. I suppose the rest could wait for the possibility of a submod such as the one I mentioned

This sounds very possible. What should the effects of this promotion be? I'm thinking this only happens if the Dragon is in unit mode, rather than spy mode. I can see it providing a bonus when attacking Thakan'dar and possibly other Forsaken instead/as well.



Another thing I've been thinking about for a little while, which I just remembered when distinguishing between unit and spy mode above. Is the Dragon's spy mode really a spy mode? It seems to me that our intended behavior is actually much more like an aircraft than a spy. There are a lot of similarities:

• The Dragon doesn't leave cities.
• He's visible to foreign players that have vision on the city.
• He stacks with military units on the city hex.
• He can only move to other cities (though with more restrictions based on turn order).
• He even has a "plane-style" attack. (Balefire is quite plane-y as well)

On the other side, he's not really like a spy:

• He shares no abilities with spies. (Not since we got rid of Stealing Seals, all those eons ago.)
• He can't be stationed in enemy cities.
• It's completely non-essential that his movement be managed through a menu like spies - we could very much appropriate a mission like rebasing to enable his movement when the "Dragon turn"s switch over.

This is all related to what we've been calling spy mode thus far. I think unit mode still all makes sense as an actual unit. What do y'all think? Dragonplane vs Dragonspy? I'm thinking Dragonplane makes more sense given the changes we've made to his capabilities since Dragonspy was first decided. Are there compelling reasons for keeping Dragonspy that I'm forgetting? I should note I'm not proposing we use any flying animations or even the "garrisoned aircraft" UI popup to represent him visually, just a notional description of how we're using him that guides the player UI experience. (New missions that select target locations are also infinitely easier to make than new menu systems that allow the player to select cities, and they seem to accomplish the same thing in this case.)

 

[Lordoflinks]

Balefire:
I was thinking a "barrage" ability on Sisters, either unlocked by a tech, edict or Social Policy or a alternative Sister unit
Promotion:
I think a strength promotion would do for the main game
HotH:
I side with S3rgeus here, a alternative way to get GP
False Dragons:
Perhaps a compromise could be that they can stick around but every turn they remain gentled their chances of carking it increases, so they can last but often will not
Forsaken:
I think thirteen total in a game is a bit harsh, perhaps have the wonder be national and the potential Forsaken cap is dependent on the number of Shadow Civs, as for alternative names the Encyclopedia should give us a lot of old tongue words to use
EDIT:
A odd time to bring this up but we could rename the Angreal Cache to a Stasis Box and use the model of a box, that is red with a blue glowing orb set in the lid, buried in the ground

 

[counterpoint]

I'm not sure, the primary, basically mandatory gold sinks are currently unit upgrades and CS relationships (right?). Unit purchases are usually for when a civ is on the defensive. Building purchases are for the stupendously wealthy (or the very unhappy buying courthouses). At least that's been my experience. Do we want to split that focus?

...

Something along the lines of the Archaeologist again?

OK. I am very much fine with leaving it production based.

I definitely do kind of hate building archaeologists though. Not being able to rush build them, or faith build them, hurts every time. Maybe that's fine!

Awesome, I think I see where we were thinking about this differently now! This sounds good to me. I'm also in favor of the second option (civs farther from 0 are more resilient to Alignment missionaries in general).

I think I also understand what you mean by Stable for a given city. We can say, based on the progression that, for example, a tier 5 Light civ's city that has 14 population should have 2 Darkfriends. Any deviation from that represents a "non-Stable" deviation that can be corrected by adding or removing Darkfriends until that city has exactly 2. (Regardless of which citizens would be swapped out.)

I also agree we don't want civs artificially pumping their Alignment at the last second before the Last Battle.

After several rereads of your suggestions (and a few rewrites of this response) I think I like the single-Alignment-missionary approach. This gets rid of the ambiguity between the citizen "Darkfriend" and the unit type. It also meshes well with "normalizing" the Alignment of the cities you use the Herald in. (I am fine with either Herald or Emissary as the name for these guys.)

OK, please take a look at the LB summary Alignment section. I added a lot of this in. Check my work!

The nice knock-on effect of this is that when you advance a tier, you may now have some cities that were previously Stable, that are now Unstable (have more or less Darkfriends than they would have if all of the population had appeared while you were on your new tier). This means you have a use for your Heralds domestically again.

wait, really? But I thought change-of-Alignment automatically switched the Alignment of your cities (didn't we establish that above, a few posts back)? So, if the city is stable, it will stay stable, but adjust it's DF composition immediately. Similarly, if you have a city that is unstable (+2 DFCs), that should stay equally unstable (+2 DFCs) regardless of how your alignment changes.

I think we need to do it this way. Otherwise it seems like it won't be possible to change Tiers except through huge lump sums of Alignment points. If I'm at Neutral, if I advance to 1 Tier Shadow in a turn, but my cities remain Neutral, it seems those cities might pull be back up to Neutral due to them remaining neutral in composition.

So, in terms of using these guys abroad, I think it will be largely fire-and-forget. You're not sure what a foreign city will be like, but you can make some guesses based on the player's actions and assume that particularly city currently reflects their overall Alignment. And then modify it to be more like your own.

good. agreed.

In terms of numbers for the distance from 0. What do you think the actual Darkfriend citizen changes will be for the different combinations of Heralds from specific Alignment tier civs being expended at cities in civs of other tiers? (Basically looking for the combinations.) If we have a base rate of 1 citizen converted from tiers 1 to 3 (either side), there's no room for that to shrink when used on tiers 4 and up (either side) without it becoming completely ineffective. Is that a problem?

OK, I've been struggling with this, and I think maybe we just need to subtly adjust our base-line, here. I think by focusing not on flat numbers of DFs, but on the number of DFs for a city of a particular size, we'll find an answer.
Proposal:
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is close to the middle (Neutral and Tiers 1-2 on either side) can cause the city to gain or lose up to 3 Darkfriend citizens, being pulled closer to the number of DFCs that would be present in the Herald's civ for a city of that size.
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is further from the middle (Tiers 3-5 on either side) can cause the city to gain or lose up to 2 Darkfriend citizens, again based on the Herald's home civ.
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is far from the middle (Tiers 6-8 on either side) can only cause the city to gain or lose 1 Darkfriend citizen, based on the Herald's home civ.

At first read, that might seem crazy, but consider that the Herald Civ has to be very substantially different from the City Civ in terms of Alignment for it to ever be 3 DFCs moving. If we take a size 10 city, and the maximum disparity - a Herald from a Tier 8 Shadow civ being used in a Tier 2 Light civ (which would have 2 DFCs at size 10) - we do see that this city would in fact gain the full 3 Darkfriends, because a size 10 city at Shadow Tier 8 would have exactly 5 Darkfriend citizens. But that's a very extreme case. If we do something more common, like a Shadow Tier 5 civ (4 DFCs at size 10 trying to infect a Neutral civ (2 DFCs at size 10), we see that only 2 DFCs would be created, since that's the difference between the two stable alignments.

The nice thing about this is that, in that case where a Light civ's city has been knocked way, way out of Stability, they could easily rectify it with a single Herald.

Also, unintentionally or not, this does reinforce the notion of spreading to multiple cities and not one city. If your herald was effective enough to move a whole 3 DFCs up or down, a second herald would only have an effect at all if it were a large city (size 20, etc.). Of course, if the civ you're "attacking" is Shadow Tier 7, or something (and can only be moved 1 DFC at a time), then of course multiple uses would be fruitful. But the civ doesn't know this, so the multi-city strategy - or one that only assaults very large cities - is the most viable.

Also, note that if your civ has the same Stable configuration as the other civ, your Herald would do nothing (unless that city is out of Stability).

Lastly, note that a very small city (say population 4) would only really ever change one DFC, maybe two in extreme cases. Since we aren't just "dumping" DFCs - we're pulling it closer to the "Stable" configuration for the Herald civ's cities of that size, not just a flat 3 DFCs or anything.

This of course is rather complicated, but I don't think it's important that the Player really understand any of it, beyond that it's easier to sway civs that are in the middle, and easiest if you are yourself in one of the extremes. Remember, they won't see any of this happen.

I wonder as to how we represent this. Take that Light Tier 2 city of size 10 (L/L/D/L/L/L/L/D/L/L) that was gaining a whole 3 DFCs. Would they just be dumped at the end? (L/L/D/L/L/L/D/D/D/D)? To me this is somewhat clunky, especially considering what happens if the city gains or loses population. On the other hand, it's intuitive in that it looks very "off" to the player. I wrote a whole long paragraph about the coolness of switching the Tier of the city (into one that would "naturally" have 5 DFCs), but then I realized that that would mean a single Herald would have a huge effect on a city with a very large population.

Thoughts? Propose something else, if you think this is wonky.

Also, does this mean we're not having an Alignment yield feedback when expending the unit? Or is it just a nominal amount? Or do you think we could still have something like we'd planned for Heralds/Friends of the Dark?

Does the above sound in line with what you're thinking?

Why not go with Faith? It seems to me that going alignment would be problematic. Perhaps Faith is a nice alternative. Not a huge amount or anything, but something that rewards the intention, at least. That seems appropriate, maybe. I think it should be an amount of faith that is not, in and of itself, "worth" the hammers, though - if you're blasting Heralds left and right, just for faith, you're being very inefficient.

This would only work on opposing civs, right? No yield for your own cities?

If we *were* to try to figure out a way to make it be Alignment points, it is certainly a bit weird... I think the best option, though it isn't great, would simply be to reward people based in part on their own Tier. Like, if you're Tier 3 Light, you get some small amount of Light points. If you're Tier 8 Light, you get more light points. What about Neutral, though? Also, what happens in your own cities - again, no yield? I can imagine getting some yield in your own cities, and it could actually be direction-based in this case - if you pull your city dark, you get some Shadow (regardless of your actual Alignment) and the opposite if you pull it light. I don't love it, but it could work. Thoughts?

I don't think we need to encourage people to spread out. They won't be able to see foreign Alignment distributions anyway, so they wouldn't be able to track this. Even if they could, as you've said, as raw sources of yield, it doesn't matter which cities the Darkfriends are in, only how many of them there are. So I don't think we need to limit this beyond the obvious actual population of the city. (Can't have more than 4 Darkfriends in a 4 pop city.)

I agree with you in theory, though it looks like if we choose something like the mechanics I outlined above, the spread-out will be strategically the best option, especially since you *can't* usually just blast one city over an over again (well, not with any effect) - according to my model above, a Size 4 City *can't* have 4 DFs, since the max is D/L/D/L (Tier 8 Shadow). If that doesn't work for you, please go to the drawing board and help us find something that does.

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. A very similar alternative: every 1000 Alignment points in each direction, all of your cities move one pop in that Alignment's direction. (A Neutral civ at 0 may have 20 Light and 20 Shadow or 2000 Light and 2000 Shadow - the latter would have caused population shifts when they reached the divisible-by-one-thousand thresholds for each side. Makes it harder to keep exactly balanced when you have a lot of both/either, which is good, IMO.)

This seems maybe too complex. I think the yield-based "pressure" we're talking about here should probably be *corrective*. To be riding neutral the whole game (with Stable cities) and then, when you hit 1000 shadow, to have *every city* gain 1 entire DF (regardless of Size) is a HUGE effect, especially considering gaining an entire *Tier* towards shadow would have a much, much smaller effect.

I'd say the better way would be whenever you hit a thousand points in either yield, your cities that are *Unstable* in the opposite direction gain or lose the appropriate darkfriend. Does that work for you?

OK, this is highly lame, but I've run out of time for now! I really thought i'd be able to address ALL of S3rgeus's posts, but this first part obviously ran way too long. Kind of pathetic considering how short it is, but putting together that proposal, and working on the LB summary took almost two hours, preposterously. I guess it defeated the purpose of me waiting a few days for you to finish.

Oh well, will hopefully be back tomorrow.

 

[counterpoint]

The Future Era is totally absent in BNW. Check out the full tree. Future Tech is in the Information Era. So the 9th Era isn't the Information Era, in BNW there are only 8.

OK. Gotcha. I could go either way. I wonder, though - does it matter? If I'm recalling correctly, we're not *really* gating anything, right? It's just that we want some super-late-game techs, right?
In BNW, some of the last techs are essentially techs from the future - Death Robot, etc. - that stuff would be the equivalent of our steam power or guns and such, right? So I don't think we *need* to put them in a new era, right?

That said, I also don't really see the harm in it... aside from the somewhat questionable flavor of the 4th age beginning in the middle of the last battle (which it would, necessarily).

As far as the number of technologies, I don't recall if we ever really decided on anything. If we did, though, it doesn't matter, because it was so long ago that I'm highly suspect of our opinions from so long ago .

We should also keep in mind the Innovations of the Science Victory - some of those are supposed to be cutting edge (e.g. Steam Power, I think) such that I'm not sure the Fourth-Age era distinction is really necessary - unless we're talking about reeeally far in the future stuff.

I think Era of Peace has the same problem as the Era of the Dragon's Peace, with regards to triggering the LB. If one player pulls ahead and they reach the Era of Peace before half reach the Era of the Dragon, then that will trigger the Last Battle. That seems bizarre, from a naming point of view.

The Era of Tarmon Gai'don actually makes a lot of sense. It will be out of place if the user has the Last Battle turned off, but in terms of timing, it's the only era that is guaranteed that every player who's in it will also have to deal with the Last Battle at the same time.

Era of Prophesy and Era of Destiny also sound good to me. Prophesy is more WoT, but there's a certain majesty to Destiny as well.

I would be happy with Era of Tarmon Gai'don, Prophesy, or Destiny. I'm not sure which I like the best. Probably agree that Destiny is less in universe but sounds really cool. Your call, I think.

However, that's ignoring the fact that the tower will be Light the majority of the time and we could simply disable these Edicts when they're on the Shadow side. So, more Dragon-specific Edicts incoming!

Definitely, that's how it should go down. Simply disable them if the Shadow has the WT

Agreed that Resolutions are much less likely to happen in this time period. It's also worth noting that the Compact keeps going throughout the LB - it's probably worth having some resolutions that care about Alignment in this space, so that the two sides can work against each other diplomatically as well.

Threads and Forsaken Quests seem to still be undefined in terms of how we mold the flavor, so I won't do those here - let's do the more general ones before having Dragon-specific ones?

yes. definitely. I'd say just do the dragon ones alongside the regular ones.

Anyway, those Dragon-y Edicts then, let's have three (first two only work once the Last Battle has started):

Condemn Balefire
Using the Dragon's balefire ability in the next 30 turns costs the controlling civilization one Aes Sedai quota. (Higher cost?)

This one's good. But if it's supposed to be analogous to Nuclear Non-proliferation, shouldn't it be a full-on ban? Or is that more in the realm of a Compact Resolution, instead of an Edict.

Treat with the Dragon
For the next 30 turns, civilizations get a 50% bonus to influence boosts with the Tower and its Ajahs while that civilization controls the Dragon.

great

Uplift the Dragon's Homeland
The civilization that the dragon was born in produces an extra 50% Culture for the next 30 turns.

right! I could also see this one being that that civ gets a couple extra Aes Sedai for the next thirty turns (a la the extra attention paid the Two Rivers)

Would we prefer some more antagonistic ones too/instead?

I think so. Not necessarily Shadow ones, more like *Red* ones. On that note, are these tied to a given Ajah, or are these Generic ones.

OK, some attempts:

Dragonsworn Panic
For the next 30 turns, civilizations suffer a -10 penalty to Happiness when they control the Dragon.

Protest the Dragon (Pre-LB only)
For the next 30 turns, when a civilization controls the Dragon, all that civilization's Aes Sedai will be unable to perform combat-related or Ajah-specific missions.

I'm not sure if it should be temporary. I'm picturing it as something the Aes Sedai go out and do for an amount of time - cure men of the madness from Saidin - and those people remain cured (or at least less mad) after they stop. If Saidin hasn't been Cleansed it will creep back, but this could potentially have large effects on the usefulness of existing channelers, with or without a Cleansed Saidin. If it's an endgame thing (unlocked after a specific world era) then the difference between temporary and permanent is also lessened - since the game will be over.

sure. fine with me to go with that kind of thing!

2X as long works for me too.

These are mostly endgame resolutions that only unlock in its final stages, and looking at what BNW has, the resolutions for the endgame are actually quite targeted. Being able to sway the right number of allies or have enough volume of votes yourself should make a genuine difference in making that player more effective at winning the game. (Example: ISS is clearly created to make winning the science victory much easier. World Religion and World Ideology greatly help the Culture victory.) So I think with these final few resolutions, our object should be to tip the balance in the favor of a player that can make them pass "targeting" themselves or the victory they're attempting.

Alright. I see that I'm thinking of these slightly differently than you. You are right that the end-game ones are kind of crazy powerful. So, I'll follow your lead here.

Interesting, I always associated World Ideology and Religion as mostly Diplo-victory aiding (what with the +2 delegates). I see now that the Religion sets up a tourism bonus for the holy city, but what about Ideology?

I'm not sure, the main function of the endgame resolutions should be making players win. The bonus happiness allows the affected players to capture more cities, which could make a serious difference to their plans. If we didn't want to have both, I'd be inclined to reflavor the resolution so we could have just the happiness bonus.

right. again, I'll go with your instincts here.

Diplo penalty with civs who like the denounced player, bonus with civs who have also denounced him. Embassies between the two civs are removed. I think that's it, aside from the various secondary diplo relationship consequences ("Civs they like more than you have denounced you" etc.) and the AI's considerations for who it doesn't like.

Ah, so... are we gonna leave them the same here, then?

Agreed, that's what I wanted to do as well, but couldn't come up with one. Bystanders? Deserters?

I think Bystanders could work. Or even something like Spectators.

Or maybe we go with the Selfish angle instead.

Awesome, any opinions on some of the rest stuff? What's the interval for spawning False Dragons? Did we decide on modifiers for the Bloodknives and Gray Men being discovered in foreign cities? We definitely did for assassinations, which I actually forgot to add.

...

Added that! It occurs to me there will never be a "defending" spy in Tar Valon, because CSes don't have spies. Do we care about that?

I've added another one specific to Amyrlin - the relative influence of the Ajah she was raised from. This sound good?

Lol, took me three click-throughs of old threads to remember what the heck you're asking here. OK, Red items in Misc summary (that seem answerable now)...

I really don't know what other modifiers to the BK/GM detection. I'd imagine they might be the same as those for assassinations (which you should add, since I can't remember them). But they should probably be less, I think.

re: the model for the Angreal Cache.... I have no idea. Any way to retool the aluminum model or something so it looks like a bunch of pieces instead of of one big blob?

I think False Dragon spawning rate will be rather complicated. It will probably vary by era. Everything we've said up through this point suggests that it's also going to depend on the specific actions of the civs themselves, or at least the choices they make.

Considering we will probably hide this all from the player, I'm figuring we can afford it to be a bit complex. I'm thinking there might be a few ways to do this:
1) The process is essentially random
2) civs accumulate False Dragon "points" in an invisible manner, not unlike GPs, and after a certain amount (perhaps with some randomness applied), one is born somewhere near their civ's borders. The things that contribute to a civ's False Dragon points could be the amount of saidin units they use, their social policies and tenets (e.g. Fear verses Tolerance), their ideology (with Liberation creating the most), as well as wonders and such.
3) civs accumulate False Dragon points as above, but these go into a global "pot", and when a certain threshold is crossed, a false dragon is born *somewhere* in the world. Perhaps the location of its birth is random, but greatly influenced by who contributed the most points.

As far as how often in general, I'm expecting that it would vary quite widely. A Fear+Oppression civ who never uses Saidin units would seem to me to almost never get them, but the opposite type of civ would get them quite frequently.... I suppose *how* frequently depends on how awesome the FDs are. If they're essentially just beefy barbs, then it could be pretty frequent.

Regarding the Gentling rewards.... I honestly can't assess those values at this point. The whole Gentling bonus thing has already spun my head in knots in prior phases of this conversation. I'd say at this point I'd need to see how it lines up with other elements before I could really assess 50-75% as the bonus.

I should have more time shortly to work on this, but I'm stepping out for a bit and submitting now to prevent any loss of form data...

 

[counterpoint]

I didn't think barbarians could embark, but I've just checked and they actually can. I just think their AI doesn't use it very often. (They also need the tech, barbarians have a specific way of "obtaining" technology through a kind of osmosis from nearby civs. Since the barbs don't own any territory, any units made before they have that tech will never be able to embark.)

In terms of Trollocs crossing water, that is a specific point in the books that they don't do that. In all honesty we may have to just ignore that, but make some concessions to the flavor of it. We could make the boats look rickety and falling apart on the art side of things. (Is a toher a Draghkar somehow keyboard shifted to the right a bit?) They could also have super low embarked movement, like 1 or 2 spaces.

Well, I can see that we're probably going to have to make it so Trollocs can embark, but I do sort of hat that, for flavor reasons. I wish there was some way to make it so they only would/could do it with a Myrddraal present or something.

Otherwise, yeah, rickety graphics, particularly low HP, bad movement, maybe these are our tools.

tohers? They're actually one of the Seanchan beasties. Don't really appear much in the books, but they're probably mentioned in some of the doldrums novels (books 7-9 or something).... OR it's just a misspelling of "others." I can't remember (I often forge things from those middle books, like the entire city Tanchico).

Testing to see what a keyboard shifted Draghkar is: Ftshjlst

I think so, it makes a lot of sense. It's very similar to the Ideology city-flipping already in BNW, it's a new manifestation using our mechanics. It makes in-universe sense that a civ under extreme cultural influence of an opposing-LB-side civ would have unrest as its people wanted to join the other side.

They're not really very separate, after thinking about it a bit more. They're the same action being triggered by different pre-conditions. One is a manifestation of culture differences and related to the culture victory (though only in the presence of the LB victory). The other is a direct consequence of LB actions. They will look unified to the player, and likely share some code underneath for flipping cities to nearby Light civs. The main difference is how we choose which cities to flip, which is unique for each of the two causes.

These are about cities flipping sides in the LB. This all sounds good to me.

Have you seen cities flip sides very often? Seemed much more common in earlier civs. I've only had it happen to me once, and it was essentially the worst possible time, too. I was rushing to a very tenuous Dom victory (King, I think, though I can't remember who I was). I had one or two capitals to capture, only, but I had terrifyingly rampant unhappiness. One of my cities flipped sides, and it was a really bad choice and timing - Madrid, which I had just spent everything I had in capturing. So the only path to winning was to get into a war with the dominant civ at the time, who I was not ready to face. I don't remember it ending well.

Sure. I'll address your last questions first, since their answers are also integrated into the table. Yes, being farther against-type creates more problems for the player. The issues are "standing penalties" (like X Unhappiness) that are considered based on the player's current position, so "correcting" their Alignment will reduce the penalties.

We may want to have some "straight-off" one-shot penalties/bonuses when players declare though. Do we? Some listed below actually are instantaneous.

In terms of standing bonuses, related to this ongoing discussion, let's use the Alignment tiers! They're actually coming in very useful.

OK, I mostly like this, and think it's the right direction.

I'm actually leaving these here and commenting in-line, which will allow us to keep modifying this til we find a good version.

Choosing Shadow
Shadow Tier 1-2: Build Trollocs
Shadow Tier 3-4: Build Myrddraal
Shadow Tier 5-6: Build Draghkar
Shadow Tier 7-8: Build Dreadlords I actually kind of think we should make Tier 8 special somehow, right? Like maybe Trollocs are 1-3, Myrds are 4-5, Dragh are 6-7, and Dreadlords are 8. Maybe that's too hard to get, but *something* special should differentiate 7 from 8, right?
Neutral: -5 Happiness (people are inherently good!)
Each positive Light tier costs an additional -5 happiness (topping out at -45 for tier 8) good
At Light tier 4-5: One city rebellion (random?) it could be random, or one bordering a Shadow civ, or one that isn't Alignment Stable. It should be set up so that it isn't possible for somebody to just deflect it by building a crappy city right before the LB, knowing it'll defect - should be very possible for you to lose a good one. Also, do these happen immediately or over time (especially if there are multiple rebellions)
At Light tier 6-7: Two city rebellions (random?)
At light tier 8: Three city rebellions (random?)

Choosing Light
Shadow Tier 1-2: -10 Happiness (more static than Light - the Shadow are more "institutional" whereas the Light is "grassroots") I must confess I don't understand what you mean here.
Shadow Tier 3-4: -20 Happiness
Shadow Tier 5-6: -30 Happiness (A Forsaken appears to try to kill you early, from here "down"?) how early? How does this compare to normal Forsaken behavior?
Shadow Tier 7-8: -40 Happiness I think there should probably be the possibility of Rebellion here, as well, though probably not starting until the highest tiers. As compensation, maybe the hapiness penalties don't need to be as steep or something.
Neutral: Nothing
Light Tier 1-2: +1 Aes Sedai quota (assume Light Tower for all quotas boosts) I'm guessing no quota boosts for shadow players if the Tower turns? That sounds fine to me
Light Tier 3-4: +5 Happiness, +2 Aes Sedai Quota
Light Tier 5-6: +15 Happiness, +3 Aes Sedai Quota
Light Tier 7-8: +25 Happiness, +4 Aes Sedai Quota

Choosing Neutral
Shadow Tier 1-3, Light Tier 1-3, and Neutral: Nothing
Light and Shadow Tier 4-6: -5 Happiness
Light and Shadow Tier 7-8: -15 Happiness Again, I'm thinking we need a city-turning thing here - turning to *either* side. Being 8 Light and choosing neutral is pretty lame.

I could see all of these unhappiness penalties being significantly larger if we wanted. The Ideology happiness modifiers related to Tourism in BNW get crazy, and these seem like they act in a similar kind of space. (I've got a multiplayer game going where I'm on the only Order civ and the three other humans are Freedom - one of them has 15% influence over me and the others are negligible, and I already have -18 Happiness from it.)

Right, it's pretty hard for me to judge that. To me, -45 happiness seems pretty big, but I'm not as familiar with looking at all the stuff that goes into happiness.

Sounds like a plan! I'm happy to help out teaching-wise, one of the great things about projects like this is that the people participating learn stuff. (I've been learning and refreshing my C++ knowledge in the process of this mod. And this thread has been very good for writing practice!)

Cool, let's revisit this in a million months when we're there!

Cue Yu-Gi-Oh! soundtrack!

Alas, I think I'm a few years to old to know that tune. My cousins were into Yu-Gi-Oh, but I was already too "cool" for cartoons by then, and hadn't yet reached the age where I could engage with such things ironically or without self consciousness yet...

As you've brought up, the Forsaken becomes very powerful if only the Dragon can kill them permanently. One way to fix this would be to make balefire accessible in some other capacity. Any ideas for that? A tech that gives it to Sisters and Asha'men? Or a project/wonder? A mini-nuke, so the Nuclear Bomb explosion would be the normal unit, the Nuclear Missile one would be the Dragon. Or could we have targeted balefire in some way?

I admit I'm a bit concerned with making balefire accessible to everyone. It seems that, without it costing specific production (like nukes), it'll get kind of out of control - if every civ has 5-10 Sisters and some Asha'man, that's a LOT of potential nukes without anybody having to build anything.

If we're opening up the possibility for more balefire simply to enable non-permadeath for the Forsaken... eh, I think that's going way too far. That element of the Forsaken's flavor isn't worth *that* much to me.

Unfortunately, the things I can think of that make Balefire more feasible to "normal" units also raise the complexity problematically. Namely: 1) a really, really high level promotion, 2) some sort of thing you build in a city that then unlocks the ability in a sister or Asha'man 3) It can be freely-used past a certain tech (or after constructing a wonder or something), but every time you use it, you lose something - Faith, hammers, gold, prestige, Alignment - I dunno. But something.

I don't love any of those options. We could do an outrageous cooldown, but that just makes things hard to balance - then we'll have to deal with the possbility of barrages of 10 balefire shots at once and such.

With the precedent of GPs having named units and a pool of Forsaken names to draw from (whereas the Dragon only canonically has one, Rand - two at a stretch if you made Lews Therin a possibility, but that doesn't make much sense) having the Forsaken just be male female variants but with the names seems like a good compromise between flavor and complexity. Simply having "Female Forsaken" as the unit type seems like it's taking it a bit far.

no disagreement here!

Possibly related to the stuff about Compacts above, I think it makes more sense for the endgame Alignment Decisions to also be pushing players directly towards winning one way or another. I think if we avoid everything that makes certain Decisions a non-choice for some players, they will feel quite bland.

OK. I can see that logic, for sure. I not sure having the Threads effect the rest of the civs in real ways such as this is the best idea - especially since they're likely to be randomly given.

I'm not sure if this is too specific to include in general. There are X Heroes and spinning them out not via a mechanic, but a Decision/Forsaken Quest would involve a lot less complexity. In either case, the result is simply a bonus for the Shadow if the Hero is betrayed in some way, or a unit for the controller if the Hero is somehow saved. All of that is flavor dressing, the choices are effectively:

Artur Hawkwing has been ripped from the World of Dreams and now exists in the Pattern, isolated in Shadowspawn territory.

Option A: Send soldiers to help him
Cost: -100 Gold, select X combined military strength of units to be destroyed
Result: Receive a melee Hero unit named Artur Hawkwing
(You could swap for Gaidal Cain or any other melee Hero via pure text. Other hero types (like Birgitte ranged) would only involve a unit type change for the reward.)

Option B: Abandon him to the Shadow
Cost: Nothing
Result: 400 Shadow points, (do we want any Decisions to have different results for differently aligned players? This result calls out for: Shadow players receive 2 Trolloc units, Light players have X fewer Shadowspawn spawn in their territory for 5 turns (they are busy killing Hawkwing instead of you).)

Option C: Rescue and Elevate Hawkwing in your Government
Cost: -400 Gold, select X combined military strength of units to be destroyed
Result: +100 Light, +5 Prestige per turn (culture players like this)

Something like that?

Let me be clear that when I say it's "too specific," I mean that the plot point of Brigitte being ripped from the Pattern is really very specific, in a way that doesn't make me feel like we must include it in the mod - perhaps just having her as a Hero is enough. See, also: Slayer; the cool double-bond telepathy from aMoL, etc.

Now, tackling this issue and your proposals specifically, don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like here. But there's also a few issues with it, mostly concerning the fact that these Threads/Quests apply to only one player. So only one player gets a chance to rescue Hawkwing? So, it's luck-based then? (if it's a forsaken quest [how could it be?] it would also be based on how Shadowey you are) So, what if the randomness makes it so like 5 civs get this Thread, but not the others? Are there fewer Horn Heroes, or they've all been subbed out? It just seems like we're really expanding the reach of what Threads can be (i.e. not just yields) with something like this.

That said, I *do* like what you have here. It is flavorful and seems fun. For sure. I think maybe part of the issue here is that we 1) haven't done other threads, so we're still a bit unclear on the scope of them, and 2) I don't view this flavor as worthy of "creating an exception".

I can understand the reluctance to have False Dragons be tracked over the course of the whole game, from both of you. It seems to make that this is kind of how CiV works though. Units persist over period of time that are humanly impossible, just because it doesn't make any gameplay sense to have to keep rebuilding them all of the time. I think it would be similar to this to track False Dragons the same way.

I'm not hugely attached to the idea, but I can see value in being able to recreate channelers in the endgame (regardless of whether the LB is active) from previously Gentled male channelers (provided the player has the Spark to spare), either via some tech or mission or something. Attaching an alternate method via a Tower Edict that becomes available after a certain point also seems like it could work well in tandem. Something like:

Cure for Gentling
One Gentled male channeler worker unit owned by each civilization becomes a male channeler again. (Civs with none receive nothing, civs who don't have enough Spark still get him, but go into "negative strategic resources mode" as with traded supplies.)

I understand if you guys don't think we should do that, but figured I'd bring it up again since it seems flavorful in the bigger picture, and quite CiV-y.

OK, also a lot to like here, for sure. I do wonder if there's a simpler way to do this, that doesn't involve the player having to keep track of formerly-gentled civilians (and all that goes along with that, like the weird meta element of people attacking each others' workers when they suspect they are former channelers, which is about the most anti-in-universe thing I can think of). Like:

1) abstracting the process, and a "Cure for Gentling" simply providing a bonus to Spark
2) abstracting the process, having a "cure for gentling" simply provide a free saidin unit or two
3) abstracting the process, granting the ability to turn *any* workers into saidin units (given X and Y parameters).

Exactly what I was thinking too. I can't think of a way to have "defensive" objectives without revealing too much about other players' Alignment, or even making those objectives impossible. (Some are only really workable when players don't know what exactly they should be defending against, like the Ajah influence thresholds.) Then again, maybe that is just part of making it really hard to Turn the Tower. It still leaves us with the outing-Alignment issue though.

currently i'm in the "no defense" camp.

Woops, totally true, I've gone and done things backwards again. That wasn't the intended effect at all. Gaining culture from expending Heralds does make more sense.

good!

No worries, you've started off a lot of very valuable discussions!

I noted that lordoflinks mentioned that he hadn't really known much about the LB mechanics. Might we update the 1st page of the thread to have a Disclaimer to New Posters or something directing them to the Summaries? That might save people some headaches.

Also, this is a lot of work for you, but you could also periodically update that first page (every few weeks, probably) indicating Under Discussion topics. At least hte broad ones (like now it would be Darkfriends and Alignment, and that's maybe all that'd be worth mentioning).

This is possible, though difficult. We'd need to store information about every combat death on every unit for a turn (enough data to reconstruct the unit that died). We'd likely need to do that for the whole game, since the units don't know when the Dragon is active. I really like where you're going here though - balefire having some demonstrable "Pattern-unwinding" effect is very in-universe. And the data we need to hang onto is relatively short-lived (single turn).

this is regarding balefire. I'd say if we did do this, the way it should probably work is just to "undo" the units previous action, and only that action. If they dealt damage, that damage is restored, if they upgraded, they go back down, if they healed, they unheal (asssuming they survived the blast, which I suppose is impossible). Right?

Right, ok, this is less swing-y than him going over to the Shadow. I like the flavor of the Dragon flipping to lead the Dragonsworn, but I think the complexity of tracking a metric like Dedication on the Dragon that leads to that makes it a less attractive.

This all (turning to the Shadow, Forsaken Teachers) all feels like great fodder for a "Path of the Dragon" Scenario, where Rand comes to his own, takes the Stone, goes to Rhuidean, and goes good or bad. Most of it seems too micro-level for a full game of civ.

This sounds very possible. What should the effects of this promotion be? I'm thinking this only happens if the Dragon is in unit mode, rather than spy mode. I can see it providing a bonus when attacking Thakan'dar and possibly other Forsaken instead/as well.

i'm definitely in favor of a Rand-kill of one of the Forsaken being rewarded by some cool promotion or yield or something.

Another thing I've been thinking about for a little while, which I just remembered when distinguishing between unit and spy mode above. Is the Dragon's spy mode really a spy mode? It seems to me that our intended behavior is actually much more like an aircraft than a spy. There are a lot of similarities:

You've got to pretty significant lengths to make the point here, and I think you probably could have convinced me with "Hey, isn't Rand more like a Plane than a spy?"

I agree. But, it doesn't actually matter, right? Like, him as a plane or a spy is only something that'll float around in this thread, right - not actually how he'll be described in the game, right?

Balefire:
I was thinking a "barrage" ability on Sisters, either unlocked by a tech, edict or Social Policy or a alternative Sister unit

Just to clarify, if you didn't know, that Saidin units do AoE damage - not sure if that's what you meant by barrage (or are you referring to the Promotion that deals extra damage on rough terrain?)

HotH:
I side with S3rgeus here, a alternative way to get GP

I may be misunderstanding, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't suggesting the HotH would end up GP. It sounds like he was talking about them being flavorful manifestations of yield bonuses, or else providing a powerful military unit.

But, since you mention it here, GP (Great Leader, I'd guess) would be another option. Though, again, I'm concerned with it being too much of an "exception" - only something we should do if the Threads system in general is capable of spitting these kinds of things out.

False Dragons:
Perhaps a compromise could be that they can stick around but every turn they remain gentled their chances of carking it increases, so they can last but often will not

That makes intuitive sense, but that's again to me somewhat a complex mechanic to be keeping track of.

Forsaken:
I think thirteen total in a game is a bit harsh, perhaps have the wonder be national and the potential Forsaken cap is dependent on the number of Shadow Civs, as for alternative names the Encyclopedia should give us a lot of old tongue words to use

13 is harsh in what sense? Do you mean it's too few? But that's all just based on how we balance them, right? Like, we could have only 5 forsaken, and if they were balanced to be really powerful, they'd be comparable to having 25 weak ones.

Really don't know where S3rg is in terms of doing Forsaken numbers based on how many shadow civs. Should the strength of the AI Shadowspawn civ vary based on this factor? If anything, I could see it varying in the opposite direction - the fewer Shadow civs there are, the stronger it is (to make the LB still challenging). But that feels like rubberbanding

I do share your optimism that we shouldn't have trouble finding more names, should we need them

EDIT:
A odd time to bring this up but we could rename the Angreal Cache to a Stasis Box and use the model of a box, that is red with a blue glowing orb set in the lid, buried in the ground

Why stasis box, though? From a flavor perspective, I mean - how does that translate to being able to use more Channelers (+1 Spark)?

As far as the model, I think the goal was to have to create as few unique new ones as possible. I say this though as the guy who knows essentially nothing of this aspect of modding.

All right! All caught up!

 

[Lordoflinks]

Why stasis box, though? From a flavor perspective, I mean - how does that translate to being able to use more Channelers (+1 Spark)?

As far as the model, I think the goal was to have to create as few unique new ones as possible. I say this though as the guy who knows essentially nothing of this aspect of modding.

All right! All caught up!

Mainly because in-universe stais boxes had the possibility of holding Angreal and I feels it is more logical to come across one than a random Cache.
The tech that reveals them could be something like "Remains of the Age of Legend"

By barrage I meant just the notion of a archer having two attacks, normal and barrage and re skinning barrage to be Balefire and editing it as necessary.

Regarding HotH perhaps I misunderstood it?

 

[ldragogode297]

I'd like to interject once again and suggest the last era be named Era of Finality.

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm going to forward-quote some sections that have had further discussion since I posted last. I'll only actually quote the leading message and note that I'm responding to later stuff too.

Balefire:
I was thinking a "barrage" ability on Sisters, either unlocked by a tech, edict or Social Policy or a alternative Sister unit

Based on your later response, this means that units which can use balefire would just have a second attack (custom mission) available to them which was a "balefire attack" mission.

I'd be inclined to say there should be some other differentiating factor - balefire should fulfill a gameplay niche rather than just exist for flavor. Once a unit has balefire, there's no reason to use the normal attack anymore, which isn't great. (Balefire presumably does more damage - though the flavor would tell us any damage is lethal damage, we could ignore that if we like, or flavor-explain it away by partial damage representing incidental damage the unit incurred avoiding the balefire.)

Counterpoint suggested a negative feedback to the player here, which is kind of what I mean above - losing Faith or some other yield. It means normal ranged attacks become more viable again, even with balefire available. Still, some of those yields will inevitably be unimportant to certain players, so we'll have a stream of balefire coming from them. Same with using a cooldown and multiple units - sudden bursts of it en masse aren't really achieving what we want with gameplay or flavor.

So, it's worth stepping back and asking what we want to achieve with balefire. This ties into some stuff that comes up later - reviving Forsaken and undoing unit's actions. I'll come to more detail later, but it wouldn't be feasible to undo any given unit action when that unit is killed, we'd need a much more focused undo-able set of actions, ideally just combat kills, or maybe including damage too.

The flavor of what we want to achieve is that balefire is taboo. Channelers who know how to use it don't do so unless in the most dire of circumstances (the Shadow even stopped using it during the War of Power). A lot of channelers don't even know how to make the weave, IIRC.

We've got balefire as one of the abilities of the Dragon while he's in plane mode. Due to the way control of the Dragon is structured, this necessarily makes the ability relatively rare, even if every player chooses to use it at every opportunity they have.

Can we achieve a similar thing if we make that ability more widely available in some way? CiV doesn't seem to lend itself to abilities that are available but not often used (they're either always used or just not good, so never used). Though I may be forgetting some examples. It feels like we should have a wider use case for the balefire ability's secondary effects before introducing it to units that exist outside the Last Battle, where it has relevant effects with the Forsaken.

Promotion:
I think a strength promotion would do for the main game

I can see a strength bonus working. I could also see a bonus against Shadowspawn-civ-controlled units being effective. With this is our abstraction for a Forsaken's insider information, then a bonus against the civ the Forsaken was controlled by (the Shadowspawn civ) makes mechanical and flavorful sense. I'm fine with either approach.

HotH:
I side with S3rgeus here, a alternative way to get GP

As counterpoint has said, I was intending this to be a military unit, rather than a GP. I don't think we'd want to try to divide the Heroes up into the GP types that we otherwise have.

This plays into what we think the roles of Threads are, which I'll come to in more detail later. I'm thinking they can be more diverse than yield bonuses, so we'll see where that discussion goes!

False Dragons:
Perhaps a compromise could be that they can stick around but every turn they remain gentled their chances of carking it increases, so they can last but often will not

This definitely makes flavorful sense from what we know about Gentled False Dragons historically. I do think it could be difficult for the player to keep track of and potentially annoying. Many players would prefer a consistent worker, since the former False Dragon dying while building something could set them back - building key improvements for resources and such and needing to move a worker from elsewhere. They could shift the unit onto less important tasks in general, but then it's not really pulling its weight given the maintenance they pay for it.

Forsaken:
I think thirteen total in a game is a bit harsh, perhaps have the wonder be national and the potential Forsaken cap is dependent on the number of Shadow Civs, as for alternative names the Encyclopedia should give us a lot of old tongue words to use

I don't think thirteen is too few - it's just a matter of ensuring they're powerful enough. A relevant example is the Volunteer Army tenet in base CiV, which is a level 2 Freedom tenet. That gives a single player 6 (maintenance free) units, which is quite powerful. The Shadowspawn civ is getting 13 (Shadowspawn civ doesn't really pay maintenance on anything) and they're some of the strongest in the game - discussion thus far has placed them below only the Dragon and comparable (stronger) to Asha'men, which are looking to be the strongest unit a civ can normally build.

I've also considered the point counterpoint brought up later about making the Shadowspawn civ inversely powerful related to the Shadow civs, so that the Last Battle remains challenging regardless of who chooses which side. It's certainly tempting, but we have to be careful about it feeling like a cheat, from the player's perspective. It seems like the alternative is a potentially unbalanced Last Battle though.

EDIT:
A odd time to bring this up but we could rename the Angreal Cache to a Stasis Box and use the model of a box, that is red with a blue glowing orb set in the lid, buried in the ground

After seeing your later explanation for this, I understand what you mean here. I'll say that my initial reaction was much the same as counterpoint's - I wondered why a Stasis Box would boost a civilization's channeling capacity. Several angreal are found in stasis boxes, but a lot of other things are as well, which are unrelated to channeling prowess or prevalence.

That's not to say I don't like it though - stasis boxes are very in-universe items. And we could use the stasis boxes as the model and still call the resource Angreal Cache - fans of the series should recognize stasis boxes when they see them, and the name will tell them what has been found in them, which explains the effect of the resource.

This would mean leaving out the other parts of stasis boxes - the un-channeling-related items, but I actually think stasis boxes could play a cool flavor role in Threads too.

OK. I am very much fine with leaving it production based.

I definitely do kind of hate building archaeologists though. Not being able to rush build them, or faith build them, hurts every time. Maybe that's fine!

Production based it is! Archaeologists are a pain in the face to build every time, but I think that's the idea - it forces you to commit to the strategy.

OK, please take a look at the LB summary Alignment section. I added a lot of this in. Check my work!

Awesome, thanks! Addressing red stuff:

+5 sounds good for the amount of Light generated by killing a Shadowspawn unit. (This is the in-universe "Shadowspawn" - so any Trolloc, regardless of who controls it, though that will be the Shadowspawn civ in almost every case that matters.)

3 Shadow points per DFC also sounds good.

Alignment spreading unit strength addressed below.

We'll come back to buildings and wonders when we have a better idea of the structure of the tech tree and where they could go, what roles they could otherwise fulfill.

City defection will be addressed in my next post!

Alignment Stable is a good term for us to use in the thread, but I think we could use something more flavorful in game. We could even name Instability in either direction as something to do with Light or Shadow. (Hey, that would be labeling the cities Light or Shadow, which we didn't want to do earlier?) Stable could have a different name depending on which side of the scale the civ is net leaning towards. Shadow civs could have "At Peace with the Great Lord" and Light civs could have "At Peace with the Creator" - or some similar descriptions?

Cycle stuff addressed also addressed below, we've subtly diverged on this.

How many DFCs are added or removed by Heralds is discussed below.

Using Faith as a reward yield when expending a Herald also discussed below.

Correction-over-time of Instability addressed below too, in terms of total accumulation of points for each side changing the civs' existing Unstable cities.

Hopefully that's all of the red addressed - I think it is!

wait, really? But I thought change-of-Alignment automatically switched the Alignment of your cities (didn't we establish that above, a few posts back)? So, if the city is stable, it will stay stable, but adjust it's DF composition immediately. Similarly, if you have a city that is unstable (+2 DFCs), that should stay equally unstable (+2 DFCs) regardless of how your alignment changes.

I think we need to do it this way. Otherwise it seems like it won't be possible to change Tiers except through huge lump sums of Alignment points. If I'm at Neutral, if I advance to 1 Tier Shadow in a turn, but my cities remain Neutral, it seems those cities might pull be back up to Neutral due to them remaining neutral in composition.

Bargh! I think I see where we got our wires crossed here, but I thought we had actually explicitly avoided this approach. When I was talking about progressing through the tiers and only the current tier of the player being considered, I was referring to what we do with growth, nothing to do with citizens that were already there. So when a new citizen shows up, it follows the progression of the current tier as though the city had always been of that tier. No existing citizens change. The progression was only intended to cover how new citizens are created - all future changes are due to Heralds from somewhere (foreign or domestic).

The progression could be used (and I think we intend to do this, based on our discussion in the last few posts, although I think now we were talking slightly across each other) to say how many DFs and nonDFs should be in a city, had it been founded and grown to its current size all while the civ was in its current Alignment tier. (This is what allows civs to use Heralds to normalize a city, because the progression can be used to infer what the baseline should be, but the progression doesn't itself represent the baseline.) This is what I was referring to when I said we couldn't make an assertions about which citizens should be Darkfriends or not, because that will vary depending on what tiers the civ was at when the population of the city grew - which is information we no longer have. (At the time when the civ is in a different tier and we're assessing whether the city is Stable or not.)

I don't think we need to change the cities over automatically with tier, mainly because the citizens are primarily a symptom and only an incidental cause. Threads are our major source of Alignment, which is in the form of lump sums. If a civ goes to tier 1 Shadow, as their cities grow they will be generating more Shadow points than they would have been, but the pull back towards Neutral will only be very incidental unless they're already massive. (In which case, they've been Neutral for a long time, so it makes sense that they're a bit set that way. But it's by no means difficult to escape if you're trying to.)

It would be more difficult to go from extreme Lightness or Shadowness back to Neutral or the opposing side, because then your cities would really be working against you. (If your cities are Neutral, then they're mostly just treading water, Alignment wise.) This also makes sense, since it should be more difficult to corrupt a very Light civ or purify a very Shadow civ - the people are already a certain way and there's inertia to changing that.

Not swapping the cities over automatically on tier change also means players have a good use for Heralds in their own cities aside from pure defensive against cities that have been affected by a foreign civ. This should be good for the player experience because it means Heralds aren't always being used in an environment where their results can't be quantified by the Herald's controller. It will let the player see what kind of effect they are presumably having abroad.

OK, I've been struggling with this, and I think maybe we just need to subtly adjust our base-line, here. I think by focusing not on flat numbers of DFs, but on the number of DFs for a city of a particular size, we'll find an answer.
Proposal:
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is close to the middle (Neutral and Tiers 1-2 on either side) can cause the city to gain or lose up to 3 Darkfriend citizens, being pulled closer to the number of DFCs that would be present in the Herald's civ for a city of that size.
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is further from the middle (Tiers 3-5 on either side) can cause the city to gain or lose up to 2 Darkfriend citizens, again based on the Herald's home civ.
- A Herald used on a city who's civ is far from the middle (Tiers 6-8 on either side) can only cause the city to gain or lose 1 Darkfriend citizen, based on the Herald's home civ.

At first read, that might seem crazy, but consider that the Herald Civ has to be very substantially different from the City Civ in terms of Alignment for it to ever be 3 DFCs moving. If we take a size 10 city, and the maximum disparity - a Herald from a Tier 8 Shadow civ being used in a Tier 2 Light civ (which would have 2 DFCs at size 10) - we do see that this city would in fact gain the full 3 Darkfriends, because a size 10 city at Shadow Tier 8 would have exactly 5 Darkfriend citizens. But that's a very extreme case. If we do something more common, like a Shadow Tier 5 civ (4 DFCs at size 10 trying to infect a Neutral civ (2 DFCs at size 10), we see that only 2 DFCs would be created, since that's the difference between the two stable alignments.

The nice thing about this is that, in that case where a Light civ's city has been knocked way, way out of Stability, they could easily rectify it with a single Herald.

Also, unintentionally or not, this does reinforce the notion of spreading to multiple cities and not one city. If your herald was effective enough to move a whole 3 DFCs up or down, a second herald would only have an effect at all if it were a large city (size 20, etc.). Of course, if the civ you're "attacking" is Shadow Tier 7, or something (and can only be moved 1 DFC at a time), then of course multiple uses would be fruitful. But the civ doesn't know this, so the multi-city strategy - or one that only assaults very large cities - is the most viable.

Also, note that if your civ has the same Stable configuration as the other civ, your Herald would do nothing (unless that city is out of Stability).

Lastly, note that a very small city (say population 4) would only really ever change one DFC, maybe two in extreme cases. Since we aren't just "dumping" DFCs - we're pulling it closer to the "Stable" configuration for the Herald civ's cities of that size, not just a flat 3 DFCs or anything.

This of course is rather complicated, but I don't think it's important that the Player really understand any of it, beyond that it's easier to sway civs that are in the middle, and easiest if you are yourself in one of the extremes. Remember, they won't see any of this happen.

I wonder as to how we represent this. Take that Light Tier 2 city of size 10 (L/L/D/L/L/L/L/D/L/L) that was gaining a whole 3 DFCs. Would they just be dumped at the end? (L/L/D/L/L/L/D/D/D/D)? To me this is somewhat clunky, especially considering what happens if the city gains or loses population. On the other hand, it's intuitive in that it looks very "off" to the player. I wrote a whole long paragraph about the coolness of switching the Tier of the city (into one that would "naturally" have 5 DFCs), but then I realized that that would mean a single Herald would have a huge effect on a city with a very large population.

Thoughts? Propose something else, if you think this is wonky.

Even though we were thinking about the progression subtly differently above, I think this is all happily quite separate from that. Feels weird responding to so much with so little, but yeah, this all sounds good! The Herald brings the city closer to what stable would be if that city were controlled by the Herald's controller. (Which is true even in the case where the city is controlled by the Herald's controller.) Thresholds based on which tier the player is in, 3 DFCs for "-2 < tier < 2" and so on all look good.

As you've said, this is quite complex, but the player doesn't need to understand the specifics of it, only that Heralds make cities "more like me overall."

In terms of which citizens we choose to convert, I think it could be purely random. The only case where it matters which citizen we choose is when some disappear to starvation, in which case the controlling civ has more pressing problems than their Alignment shifting slightly further one direction than might be expected, given all other preconditions that they've been exposed to. (And since those preconditions will vary wildly from city to city, even within a single player in a single game, the effect of that starvation shift will be basically unnoticeable.)

Why not go with Faith? It seems to me that going alignment would be problematic. Perhaps Faith is a nice alternative. Not a huge amount or anything, but something that rewards the intention, at least. That seems appropriate, maybe. I think it should be an amount of faith that is not, in and of itself, "worth" the hammers, though - if you're blasting Heralds left and right, just for faith, you're being very inefficient.

This would only work on opposing civs, right? No yield for your own cities?

I can see the logic in not getting a yield bonus for your own cities, but I think there's some value in consistency for the player - that the Herald is a unit that "does a thing" which either includes a yield bonus or not, rather than varying depending on which city it's used on. If the yield is small and an inefficient cost of hammers for it as you've suggested, I don't think we need to exclude cities controlled by the same player.

This has made me think about something only really tangentially related. Teams. Choosing your Alignment for the Last Battle has to be a team level decision, right? Otherwise we have situations where intra-team wars can happen, which isn't how teams work in CiV. That means if one team member goes heavy Light and the other heavy Shadow, someone's in for a nasty surprise.

If we *were* to try to figure out a way to make it be Alignment points, it is certainly a bit weird... I think the best option, though it isn't great, would simply be to reward people based in part on their own Tier. Like, if you're Tier 3 Light, you get some small amount of Light points. If you're Tier 8 Light, you get more light points. What about Neutral, though? Also, what happens in your own cities - again, no yield? I can imagine getting some yield in your own cities, and it could actually be direction-based in this case - if you pull your city dark, you get some Shadow (regardless of your actual Alignment) and the opposite if you pull it light. I don't love it, but it could work. Thoughts?

I see what you mean about how we scale the awards being weird for Alignment points. I'm happy to go with Faith instead.

I agree with you in theory, though it looks like if we choose something like the mechanics I outlined above, the spread-out will be strategically the best option, especially since you *can't* usually just blast one city over an over again (well, not with any effect) - according to my model above, a Size 4 City *can't* have 4 DFs, since the max is D/L/D/L (Tier 8 Shadow). If that doesn't work for you, please go to the drawing board and help us find something that does.

Sure, in the context of what you've proposed above, I'm fine with spreading out across multiple cities being a more effective use of Heralds. I was mainly saying we didn't need to aim for that as an objective, but as a byproduct of an approach that otherwise makes sense it's no problem. Players will need to "just know this" though and keep track of it themselves? Where they've spread to and such. But then they don't know what other changes may have taken place since they were there last. It's largely fire-and-forget, I don't think it's a problem. The crazy optimizers may be unhappy though.

This seems maybe too complex. I think the yield-based "pressure" we're talking about here should probably be *corrective*. To be riding neutral the whole game (with Stable cities) and then, when you hit 1000 shadow, to have *every city* gain 1 entire DF (regardless of Size) is a HUGE effect, especially considering gaining an entire *Tier* towards shadow would have a much, much smaller effect.

I'd say the better way would be whenever you hit a thousand points in either yield, your cities that are *Unstable* in the opposite direction gain or lose the appropriate darkfriend. Does that work for you?

Very good points! Complexity and how drastic of an effect it is. I think there's value in having this affect existing citizens because Heralds are currently the only way to do that and having some natural drift makes sense. Cities that are Unstable in the opposite direction makes good sense.

So once you accumulate 1000 Shadow, all of your Unstable-because-too-Light cities gain a DF. And the inverse for 1000 Light, Unstable-because-too-Shadow lose a DF. Stable cities are unaffected, and cities that are already Unstable in the direction you've accumulated are also unaffected. Both of those should account for a majority of cities for most players, most of the time, so it won't be too swingy.

Just to be sure, this is the "underlying" accumulation right, not the net leaning? So if a civ has 1200 Shadow and 400 Light, they've had one Shadow "step" where their Unstable-because-too-Light cities moved more Shadow-y, even though they're currently at net 800 Shadow total?


I'm afraid I had a late start writing this tonight, so I've run out of time! I will be back tomorrow!

 

[counterpoint]

Balefire stuff..

I'm honestly not sure how to proceed here, because I feel like your inviting some pretty in-depth discussion on how we might adapt BF into our system better and... well, I'm finding myself coming back to the "don't include it" side of things. Well, let the Dragon and the forsaken use (forsaken can probably be on a cooldown.

I feel like I've expressed opinions why in the past, but essentially I've always been concerned with layering too many abilities on our units, action-rpg style. This one just seems like a balancing nightmare. Also, to me if we do use it, we need to appropriately deal with the "universe unraveling" aspect and... I just don't think we should really go there. Pollution caused by Rand's use of it and such, that's enough, I think.

If somebody else wants to really dig in there and come up with the way to make it work, I'll hear it, but right now I remain skeptical.

I can see a strength bonus working. I could also see a bonus against Shadowspawn-civ-controlled units being effective. With this is our abstraction for a Forsaken's insider information, then a bonus against the civ the Forsaken was controlled by (the Shadowspawn civ) makes mechanical and flavorful sense. I'm fine with either approach.

we're talking about the Rand-just-killed-a-forsaken bonus, right? This could work. Nothing wrong with it. I think we might stumble upon something more exciting, but this is probably fine.

This definitely makes flavorful sense from what we know about Gentled False Dragons historically. I do think it could be difficult for the player to keep track of and potentially annoying. Many players would prefer a consistent worker, since the former False Dragon dying while building something could set them back - building key improvements for resources and such and needing to move a worker from elsewhere. They could shift the unit onto less important tasks in general, but then it's not really pulling its weight given the maintenance they pay for it.

Your point is well taken, but I'm having trouble discerning what you actually want to *do* as far as the False Dragons, though.

I've also considered the point counterpoint brought up later about making the Shadowspawn civ inversely powerful related to the Shadow civs, so that the Last Battle remains challenging regardless of who chooses which side. It's certainly tempting, but we have to be careful about it feeling like a cheat, from the player's perspective. It seems like the alternative is a potentially unbalanced Last Battle though.

yeah, really don't know where to go with this one! Obviously rubber-band AI is annoying, and not very civ-like.

I guess what I'm worried about is that "the books" will be impossible. In the books, all but ONE civ (Shara) fought for light (arguably a few remained somewhat neutral). Still, the battle was very, very close. It seems that in our version, that would be a pathetically easy light victory. If we balance the LB assuming 50/50 split, or something, I'm worried people will just all jump on light (unless they're way ahead)because it's essentially a guaranteed victory, right? Seems kind of weird.

After seeing your later explanation for this, I understand what you mean here. I'll say that my initial reaction was much the same as counterpoint's - I wondered why a Stasis Box would boost a civilization's channeling capacity. Several angreal are found in stasis boxes, but a lot of other things are as well, which are unrelated to channeling prowess or prevalence.

That's not to say I don't like it though - stasis boxes are very in-universe items. And we could use the stasis boxes as the model and still call the resource Angreal Cache - fans of the series should recognize stasis boxes when they see them, and the name will tell them what has been found in them, which explains the effect of the resource.

This would mean leaving out the other parts of stasis boxes - the un-channeling-related items, but I actually think stasis boxes could play a cool flavor role in Threads too.

I agree with everything said here! Stasis Boxes could also end up one of the Relic types as well.

Awesome, thanks! Addressing red stuff:

+5 sounds good for the amount of Light generated by killing a Shadowspawn unit. (This is the in-universe "Shadowspawn" - so any Trolloc, regardless of who controls it, though that will be the Shadowspawn civ in almost every case that matters.)

3 Shadow points per DFC also sounds good.

both updated!

Alignment Stable is a good term for us to use in the thread, but I think we could use something more flavorful in game. We could even name Instability in either direction as something to do with Light or Shadow. (Hey, that would be labeling the cities Light or Shadow, which we didn't want to do earlier?) Stable could have a different name depending on which side of the scale the civ is net leaning towards. Shadow civs could have "At Peace with the Great Lord" and Light civs could have "At Peace with the Creator" - or some similar descriptions?

hmmm... very much not sure. I'd say though that what you're talking about isn't the same as labelling a city as "shadow" or "light" - at least it doesn't have to me. I don't think we need to say "at peace with the GL/creator," or any sort of signifier - we merely need to indicate that it is at peace at all. The key piece of info is whether your city is "off" in the direction of shadow or of light - and even then, that's only secondarily important next to the notion that it is off at all.

I'd say we could go with some signifer that says it's "Stable" but that is more flavorful, as you suggest. But it doesn't have to be as loaded as the ones you've suggest (though I'm fine with them if you really like them). What about something like "At Peace with the Pattern" or something like that. "As the Wheel Wills."

Then, if your city is "off," we can say "Touched By the Dark One" or "Touched by the Creator."

Bargh! I think I see where we got our wires crossed here, but I thought we had actually explicitly avoided this approach. When I was talking about progressing through the tiers and only the current tier of the player being considered, I was referring to what we do with growth, nothing to do with citizens that were already there. So when a new citizen shows up, it follows the progression of the current tier as though the city had always been of that tier. No existing citizens change. The progression was only intended to cover how new citizens are created - all future changes are due to Heralds from somewhere (foreign or domestic).

Ah. I suspected that's what you were talking about. So I tried to clarify and... apparently that didn't work.

The progression could be used (and I think we intend to do this, based on our discussion in the last few posts, although I think now we were talking slightly across each other) to say how many DFs and nonDFs should be in a city, had it been founded and grown to its current size all while the civ was in its current Alignment tier. (This is what allows civs to use Heralds to normalize a city, because the progression can be used to infer what the baseline should be, but the progression doesn't itself represent the baseline.) This is what I was referring to when I said we couldn't make an assertions about which citizens should be Darkfriends or not, because that will vary depending on what tiers the civ was at when the population of the city grew - which is information we no longer have. (At the time when the civ is in a different tier and we're assessing whether the city is Stable or not.)

ok, my initial thoughts on this were that it seems kind of nuts. Like, not bad nuts, but confusing, in that each city will be essentially wholly unique. This is not a bad thing, I just think it'll make it a little less intuitive for players. They're light, but they're staring at a city with tons of darkfriends in it.

I don't think we need to change the cities over automatically with tier, mainly because the citizens are primarily a symptom and only an incidental cause.

I'm not sure I agree completely with this statement. While I can understand what you're saying, I feel like I could argue the opposite as well. Certainly if we change the alignment of each city along with global shifts in Tier, that would cause you to automatically generate more of each alignment yield in a more impactful way.

But viewed from another angle, the opposite is true. If DFCs are primarily a *reflection* of your Alignment, shoudln't your cities reflect that, then? In the system you're proposing, the cities stand out as somewhat independent of your global alignment.

That said, clearly the way I proposed has a rabbit hole of other issues (how heralds work, for instance). But from a strictly flavor standpoint, I'm not sure I'm 100% with you on this point (though it's not a sticking point).

Threads are our major source of Alignment, which is in the form of lump sums. If a civ goes to tier 1 Shadow, as their cities grow they will be generating more Shadow points than they would have been, but the pull back towards Neutral will only be very incidental unless they're already massive. (In which case, they've been Neutral for a long time, so it makes sense that they're a bit set that way. But it's by no means difficult to escape if you're trying to.)

right. i'm with you here.

It would be more difficult to go from extreme Lightness or Shadowness back to Neutral or the opposing side, because then your cities would really be working against you. (If your cities are Neutral, then they're mostly just treading water, Alignment wise.) This also makes sense, since it should be more difficult to corrupt a very Light civ or purify a very Shadow civ - the people are already a certain way and there's inertia to changing that.

ok, yeah

Not swapping the cities over automatically on tier change also means players have a good use for Heralds in their own cities aside from pure defensive against cities that have been affected by a foreign civ. This should be good for the player experience because it means Heralds aren't always being used in an environment where their results can't be quantified by the Herald's controller. It will let the player see what kind of effect they are presumably having abroad.

ok. I can see this. But here's what I don't like: Every time you change alignment Tier, having to pump out a bunch of Heralds to "fix" your cities for only minor benefit. Now, obviously, the benefit is minor, which suggests that it might not be worth it, but still, if you *did* want to, it doesn't seem all that fun to me.

We'd definitely absolutely need a clear indicator when a city is "off" versus stable.

Even though we were thinking about the progression subtly differently above, I think this is all happily quite separate from that. Feels weird responding to so much with so little, but yeah, this all sounds good! The Herald brings the city closer to what stable would be if that city were controlled by the Herald's controller. (Which is true even in the case where the city is controlled by the Herald's controller.) Thresholds based on which tier the player is in, 3 DFCs for "-2 < tier < 2" and so on all look good.

As you've said, this is quite complex, but the player doesn't need to understand the specifics of it, only that Heralds make cities "more like me overall." I'd think we should set it up so when a player uses a Herald in their own territory, they can see exactly what it'll do (e.g. -2 Darkfriends, +2 Light Points/turn)

In terms of which citizens we choose to convert, I think it could be purely random. The only case where it matters which citizen we choose is when some disappear to starvation, in which case the controlling civ has more pressing problems than their Alignment shifting slightly further one direction than might be expected, given all other preconditions that they've been exposed to. (And since those preconditions will vary wildly from city to city, even within a single player in a single game, the effect of that starvation shift will be basically unnoticeable.)

whatever we do, it needs to be consistent. Population loss can also happen due to city capture, so we definitely should have it ironed out exactly which citizens "flip" (either from Heralds or the Alignment Point accumulation).

I say we either go with the newest citizens or the oldest. Or totally random, I dunno....

I can see the logic in not getting a yield bonus for your own cities, but I think there's some value in consistency for the player - that the Herald is a unit that "does a thing" which either includes a yield bonus or not, rather than varying depending on which city it's used on. If the yield is small and an inefficient cost of hammers for it as you've suggested, I don't think we need to exclude cities controlled by the same player.

OK. Yeah, I think I agree with you here.

This has made me think about something only really tangentially related. Teams. Choosing your Alignment for the Last Battle has to be a team level decision, right? Otherwise we have situations where intra-team wars can happen, which isn't how teams work in CiV. That means if one team member goes heavy Light and the other heavy Shadow, someone's in for a nasty surprise.

hmmm... yeah. I don't know what else we could do here? Could it be that we have to pool alignment between the two civs? That seems sucky. But yeah, if we keep it separate than somebody would certainly have a chance to get kind of screwed.

I see what you mean about how we scale the awards being weird for Alignment points. I'm happy to go with Faith instead.

OK. any suggestions as to specific values?

Sure, in the context of what you've proposed above, I'm fine with spreading out across multiple cities being a more effective use of Heralds. I was mainly saying we didn't need to aim for that as an objective, but as a byproduct of an approach that otherwise makes sense it's no problem. Players will need to "just know this" though and keep track of it themselves? Where they've spread to and such. But then they don't know what other changes may have taken place since they were there last. It's largely fire-and-forget, I don't think it's a problem. The crazy optimizers may be unhappy though.

at this point all of this is obviously thrown into chaos, as we still haven't settled on exactly how this will work.

Very good points! Complexity and how drastic of an effect it is. I think there's value in having this affect existing citizens because Heralds are currently the only way to do that and having some natural drift makes sense. Cities that are Unstable in the opposite direction makes good sense.

ok. good.

So once you accumulate 1000 Shadow, all of your Unstable-because-too-Light cities gain a DF. And the inverse for 1000 Light, Unstable-because-too-Shadow lose a DF. Stable cities are unaffected, and cities that are already Unstable in the direction you've accumulated are also unaffected. Both of those should account for a majority of cities for most players, most of the time, so it won't be too swingy.

ok, the fact that stable cities are unaffected is huge, and the fact that it does it for all the cities is also huge, in that ithelps mitigate the slog of producing 8 Heralds every time you "advance" a tier. Of course, it would suck to advance a Tier the turn after your crossed the 1000 threshold.

Just to be sure, this is the "underlying" accumulation right, not the net leaning? So if a civ has 1200 Shadow and 400 Light, they've had one Shadow "step" where their Unstable-because-too-Light cities moved more Shadow-y, even though they're currently at net 800 Shadow total?

yeah, I was thinking of the "raw" scores. This of course might make it a little less predictable to players, since they'll more likely be looking at the net score.

OK, so I think I've come around to being ok with what you're proposing. At first I mostly didn't like it. But thinking about it a bit more, I do think it'll make things easier, at least in terms of how Heralds work - can be simply +/- DFCs. I'm still not in love with how it "feels," but I think the cost is less than the benefit.

OK, so how exactly are you proposing the heralds work, in terms of how many citizens they convert? Should it be based on the Heralding civ, or the receiving civ?

And, also, just to clarify, it "caps" when it reaches "stability," right? And if you're Heralding in another civ, it caps when it reaches *your* stability, right?

In any case, I'll "sign off" on this once I see specifically what you're suggesting!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm gonna respond to counterpoint's latest first,s ince it continues the discussion from my last one! Then I'll jump back to other stuff.

I'm honestly not sure how to proceed here, because I feel like your inviting some pretty in-depth discussion on how we might adapt BF into our system better and... well, I'm finding myself coming back to the "don't include it" side of things. Well, let the Dragon and the forsaken use (forsaken can probably be on a cooldown.

I feel like I've expressed opinions why in the past, but essentially I've always been concerned with layering too many abilities on our units, action-rpg style. This one just seems like a balancing nightmare. Also, to me if we do use it, we need to appropriately deal with the "universe unraveling" aspect and... I just don't think we should really go there. Pollution caused by Rand's use of it and such, that's enough, I think.

If somebody else wants to really dig in there and come up with the way to make it work, I'll hear it, but right now I remain skeptical.

I'm in a similar position, I don't see a compelling gameplay reason/strategy to make balefire widely available yet, and making it more complex for "undoing actions" stuff isn't worth it while balefire is only available to the Dragon.

I'm open to being convinced about a wider usefulness for balefire, because it's quite flavorful and would be nice to have a more WoT-ish use for it. I'm drawing a blank on what we could do for that though.

we're talking about the Rand-just-killed-a-forsaken bonus, right? This could work. Nothing wrong with it. I think we might stumble upon something more exciting, but this is probably fine.

Yeah, a bonus for the Dragon when/if he kills a Forsaken.

Your point is well taken, but I'm having trouble discerning what you actually want to *do* as far as the False Dragons, though.

Very true, my last post didn't suggest much of a way to move forward. I think we should either do CiV-style persistence (so the Gentled channelers are Gentled channelers as long as the unit exists) and have those channelers able to be Healed through some later mechanism (like an Edict or technology), or drop the notion of Healing Gentled channeler units.

Given the role Logain played in the books, I'd tend towards the former. The "strangeness" from this approach comes up a lot in CiV, with the way it handles time and things lasting longer than they should. Some players will choose to be more careful with these workers for the time they have them, and I think that's ok.

yeah, really don't know where to go with this one! Obviously rubber-band AI is annoying, and not very civ-like.

I guess what I'm worried about is that "the books" will be impossible. In the books, all but ONE civ (Shara) fought for light (arguably a few remained somewhat neutral). Still, the battle was very, very close. It seems that in our version, that would be a pathetically easy light victory. If we balance the LB assuming 50/50 split, or something, I'm worried people will just all jump on light (unless they're way ahead)because it's essentially a guaranteed victory, right? Seems kind of weird.

The Seanchan were arguably Neutral up until the end, right? That aside, yes, it should be possible for almost all civs to choose Light and them still be challenged by the Shadowspawn.

While rubberbanding is annoying, the mechanics it describes are only really referred to as rubberbanding if it's not done well - if it feels like the AI is getting an unfair advantage just because you're doing better. I think as long as the whole Shadow side of the LB presents a similar challenge regardless of the number of Light players, players will be fine with it. They would be more upset if the Shadowspawn got stronger as Shadow civs die, which would be much more direct rubberbanding.

This makes me think that yes, the Shadowspawn's overall strength should be inversely related to the number of Shadow civs. But it shouldn't be characterized as them getting weaker when there are more civs - that's clearly not the idea. They have a "baseline strength" that makes it difficult to capture Thakan'dar or effectively patrol any significant portions of the Blight. The Shadowspawn's role is mostly defensive if 7/8 players chose Shadow.

But if 7/8 players chose Light, it's now the Shadowspawn's job to spawn units all over the world, to push out in every direction and threaten all 7 of those players at once.

I agree with everything said here! Stasis Boxes could also end up one of the Relic types as well.

Cool, I've saved this into the misc summary!

hmmm... very much not sure. I'd say though that what you're talking about isn't the same as labelling a city as "shadow" or "light" - at least it doesn't have to me. I don't think we need to say "at peace with the GL/creator," or any sort of signifier - we merely need to indicate that it is at peace at all. The key piece of info is whether your city is "off" in the direction of shadow or of light - and even then, that's only secondarily important next to the notion that it is off at all.

I'd say we could go with some signifer that says it's "Stable" but that is more flavorful, as you suggest. But it doesn't have to be as loaded as the ones you've suggest (though I'm fine with them if you really like them). What about something like "At Peace with the Pattern" or something like that. "As the Wheel Wills."

Then, if your city is "off," we can say "Touched By the Dark One" or "Touched by the Creator."

Hmm, but we will also have situations where a tier 4 Shadow civ has a tier 3 city - it seems strange to describe that with a Light-related caption.

I don't particularly like most of the ones I proposed originally, but they were all I could think of at the time. I think it would be good if we could reduce it down to one word, rather than a whole phrase. Possibly two words, but one would be better. CiV tends to use single, evocative words to represent concepts like this, which I really like and think we should stick to.

I'm liking the reference to the Pattern in your suggestion. Though obviously we can't use just the word "Pattern," which is what the stuff I've said above would suggest, because it doesn't tell the player what it means.

I've been mulling this over (came back to this section at the end of this post) but I'm yet to come up with a good alternative that abides by the single-word preference.

Ah. I suspected that's what you were talking about. So I tried to clarify and... apparently that didn't work.

Sorry, I must've missed the distinction between these two first time through!

ok, my initial thoughts on this were that it seems kind of nuts. Like, not bad nuts, but confusing, in that each city will be essentially wholly unique. This is not a bad thing, I just think it'll make it a little less intuitive for players. They're light, but they're staring at a city with tons of darkfriends in it.

I'm not sure I agree completely with this statement. While I can understand what you're saying, I feel like I could argue the opposite as well. Certainly if we change the alignment of each city along with global shifts in Tier, that would cause you to automatically generate more of each alignment yield in a more impactful way.

But viewed from another angle, the opposite is true. If DFCs are primarily a *reflection* of your Alignment, shoudln't your cities reflect that, then? In the system you're proposing, the cities stand out as somewhat independent of your global alignment.

That said, clearly the way I proposed has a rabbit hole of other issues (how heralds work, for instance). But from a strictly flavor standpoint, I'm not sure I'm 100% with you on this point (though it's not a sticking point).

...

OK, so I think I've come around to being ok with what you're proposing. At first I mostly didn't like it. But thinking about it a bit more, I do think it'll make things easier, at least in terms of how Heralds work - can be simply +/- DFCs. I'm still not in love with how it "feels," but I think the cost is less than the benefit.

OK, so how exactly are you proposing the heralds work, in terms of how many citizens they convert? Should it be based on the Heralding civ, or the receiving civ?

And, also, just to clarify, it "caps" when it reaches "stability," right? And if you're Heralding in another civ, it caps when it reaches *your* stability, right?

In any case, I'll "sign off" on this once I see specifically what you're suggesting!

Cool, sounds like I'm making sense! I definitely think this will make things easier, in terms of how Heralds work and how we track DFCs. (The upshot of all of this is that we basically never need to track them, we can do simple calculations when a Herald is expended and follow a known progression when a new citizen is created.)

I also think the feel of this makes a lot of sense though, rather than us making a trade-off to make things simpler. An Alignment Decision has provided a lump sum of Alignment yield due to some choice made by your civilization's leader. This doesn't immediately affect his people, it's only people who develop and learn over time in the kind of environment those decisions have fostered that are truly affected by them.

It also gives some inertia to the Alignment leaning, so civs will tend to move more slowly toward the ends of the spectrum, but it's harder to switch back and go the other way, which makes sense in terms of changing the course of a civilization.

So specific questions:

Heralds' effectiveness is based on the tier of the "defending" civ (as you suggested a little while ago, up to 3 citizens in +/- 2 tiers, up to 2 in tiers 3-6, etc.), but the tier of the civ that controls the Herald is used to determine what "Stable" they're moving towards.

Yes, each city "caps" at "Stable," where Stable is defined by the player that controls the Herald.

Concrete examples:

Tier 4 Shadow civ uses a Herald on a city with 6 population and 2 Darkfriends. Nothing happens. (This city would be Stable if it was controlled by a tier 4 or 5 Shadow player.)

Tier 8 Shadow civ uses a Herald on a city with 10 population and 2 Darkfriends, owned by a tier 1 Light civ. 3 new Darkfriends are created.

Tier 1 Light civ uses a Herald on a city with 6 population and 2 Darkfriends, owned by a tier 1 Shadow civ. 1 Darkfriend disappears. (This is because having 1 DFC is Stable for a tier 1 Light civ.)

I think this part is all the same as what you suggested in this post.

ok. I can see this. But here's what I don't like: Every time you change alignment Tier, having to pump out a bunch of Heralds to "fix" your cities for only minor benefit. Now, obviously, the benefit is minor, which suggests that it might not be worth it, but still, if you *did* want to, it doesn't seem all that fun to me.

We'd definitely absolutely need a clear indicator when a city is "off" versus stable.

Agreed we need to have a clear indicator. I don't think civs will need to pump out a bunch of Heralds for their own cities, mostly because it's not worth it. The gain towards their desired Alignment will be relatively minimal and I think those hammers would be better spent elsewhere. The cities will also tend towards their "side" because they will continue to grow.

whatever we do, it needs to be consistent. Population loss can also happen due to city capture, so we definitely should have it ironed out exactly which citizens "flip" (either from Heralds or the Alignment Point accumulation).

I say we either go with the newest citizens or the oldest. Or totally random, I dunno....

City capture! That's a good one, forgot about that. Ok, that makes this significantly more important.

My gut reaction was to put the Darkfriends at the front (so they die last), because flavor wise they would be sneaky and more difficult to kill than normal citizens. But the problem with that is that captured cities will necessarily lean Shadow, and I don't think we want to characterize warmongering in general as a Shadow activity?

Putting the DFCs at the end (they die first) does the opposite - making warmongering a Light activity. Weird.

This makes me think random is a good idea. A uniform random distribution will mean some cities tend more Light or Shadow when captured, but there's no particular rhyme or reason to it (as with any real city siege) - whoever happens to survive are the people that shape the city going forward. And in the big picture, randomness should mean it comes out as a wash, keeping warmongering as a general strategy unrelated to Light or Shadow, which is good!

hmmm... yeah. I don't know what else we could do here? Could it be that we have to pool alignment between the two civs? That seems sucky. But yeah, if we keep it separate than somebody would certainly have a chance to get kind of screwed.

I was thinking pooled Alignment too, but as you've said, it's quite sucky. The two players could end up fighting over it and either one would be dragged the other way, or they'd end up Neutral.

For humans, this could be fine. If two players diverge on a team, it's their own fault - they can talk about their plans and see each others' cities, they should decide on a united strategy. It is significantly more difficult for a human player to communicate their intentions to an AI teammate. A very simple voting mechanic for any part of this falls apart for teams of two, which I believe would be the most common team size aside from one.

Should the Decisions be team-wide, then? And players cast votes according to the amount of population/number of cities they have? That seems a bit bleh.

OK. any suggestions as to specific values?

Scaling by era sounds like a plan. Eras in ascending order from After Breaking:

1: 10
2: 20
3: 30
4: 40
5: 50
6: 60
7: 75
8: 90
9: 100

10 is a decent amount of faith at the beginning of the game, but building a Herald has a big opportunity cost when you don't have many cities.

100 per unit could add up by the end of the game, but by then you have much better stuff you could build much faster, which is worth more than 100 faith.

Sound like the right kind of ballpark?

ok, the fact that stable cities are unaffected is huge, and the fact that it does it for all the cities is also huge, in that ithelps mitigate the slog of producing 8 Heralds every time you "advance" a tier. Of course, it would suck to advance a Tier the turn after your crossed the 1000 threshold.

Coolio, this sounds good. Yes, there are definitely times when this is less effective such as advancing a tier right after you cross 1000. Such is CiV!

yeah, I was thinking of the "raw" scores. This of course might make it a little less predictable to players, since they'll more likely be looking at the net score.

Cool, this sounds fine. Like you mentioned a while ago, we can do a Happiness-style breakdown on the Alignment tooltip, so the player will be able to see how far they've gone in each direction, in addition to their net leaning. This is all for the crazy optimizers to understand thoroughly (and us, since we need to make it!), most players will only need to understand that getting more Alignment will tend to make their citizens more like that Alignment. (Even if it is a combination of factors that cause that overall shift to happen!)


Right, dinner time! I'm going to come back after dinner to jump back into the older posts.

 

[counterpoint]

I'm gonna try to respond to this before you finish dinner!

Yeah, a bonus for the Dragon when/if he kills a Forsaken.

OK, I'm adding this to the LB summary. Please check how I'm explaining it. Are we calling it "Student of the Forsaken"? Also, does it stack/improve if he kills many of them? Is there a cap?

Also, how large is the bonus? 15%, then 5% more for every Chosen killed? Does this gel with how promotions work in Civ?

Very true, my last post didn't suggest much of a way to move forward. I think we should either do CiV-style persistence (so the Gentled channelers are Gentled channelers as long as the unit exists) and have those channelers able to be Healed through some later mechanism (like an Edict or technology), or drop the notion of Healing Gentled channeler units.

Given the role Logain played in the books, I'd tend towards the former. The "strangeness" from this approach comes up a lot in CiV, with the way it handles time and things lasting longer than they should. Some players will choose to be more careful with these workers for the time they have them, and I think that's ok.

OK, idea here (though it's quite possible this is what you're suggesting). Let's just make it a distinct unit, NOT a worker. Call it "Gentled" or "Gentled Channeler" or something. Make it *not* a civilian, but make it a very bad combat unit. Maybe it can't even attack, but dies in a couple hits. But, it has the moves (most of them?) of a worker. Sort of like a crappy Legion. The purpose of this is to make it A) stand out the player, and B) not capturable by opposing civs.

thoughts? which summary should all this go under, anyways?

The Seanchan were arguably Neutral up until the end, right? That aside, yes, it should be possible for almost all civs to choose Light and them still be challenged by the Shadowspawn.

the 'chan were neutral, but then they did ultimately side Light. Case in point, though - if they hadn't, prolly wouldn't have ended the way it did.

While rubberbanding is annoying, the mechanics it describes are only really referred to as rubberbanding if it's not done well - if it feels like the AI is getting an unfair advantage just because you're doing better. I think as long as the whole Shadow side of the LB presents a similar challenge regardless of the number of Light players, players will be fine with it. They would be more upset if the Shadowspawn got stronger as Shadow civs die, which would be much more direct rubberbanding.

This makes me think that yes, the Shadowspawn's overall strength should be inversely related to the number of Shadow civs. But it shouldn't be characterized as them getting weaker when there are more civs - that's clearly not the idea. They have a "baseline strength" that makes it difficult to capture Thakan'dar or effectively patrol any significant portions of the Blight. The Shadowspawn's role is mostly defensive if 7/8 players chose Shadow.

But if 7/8 players chose Light, it's now the Shadowspawn's job to spawn units all over the world, to push out in every direction and threaten all 7 of those players at once.

OK, I think I agree. I think an important thing to decide is what exactly scales. Probably not everything.

I'd say the strength of Thakan'dar, strength of any of the units (spawn and forsaken), and speed of Blight spreading will remain unchanged.

However, I'd say shadowspawn spawning rates and forsaken spawning rates (though probably not the cap) should scale. Is there a specific formula we should adopt? Perhaps it can be interwoven ergonomically into the "Touch of the Dark One" level, or something.

The other thing to consider are the Seals. How does the Shadow win if there are *no* Shadow civs? I guess just by capturing the light cities, right? But don't they have to break seals still to complete the victory?

Also, I think the rate of Forsaken Quests should tie into this. Forsaken quests are a way of helping the Shadow side in general - at no cost to the shadowspawn civ. More shadow civs = more benefits all around. Should there be fewer Forsaken Quests per civ, the more shadow civs there are? Probably shouldn't be a linear relationship, but some sort of curve seems to make sense to me.

Hmm, but we will also have situations where a tier 4 Shadow civ has a tier 3 city - it seems strange to describe that with a Light-related caption.

I don't particularly like most of the ones I proposed originally, but they were all I could think of at the time. I think it would be good if we could reduce it down to one word, rather than a whole phrase. Possibly two words, but one would be better. CiV tends to use single, evocative words to represent concepts like this, which I really like and think we should stick to.

I'm liking the reference to the Pattern in your suggestion. Though obviously we can't use just the word "Pattern," which is what the stuff I've said above would suggest, because it doesn't tell the player what it means.

I've been mulling this over (came back to this section at the end of this post) but I'm yet to come up with a good alternative that abides by the single-word preference.

Putting the one-word goal aside, it still sounds a little bit like you're hoping for an impossible linguistic feat. You want something that coveys that a civ is "too light" without presuming that its Dark (e.g. your previous issues with my suggestions [though i don't like them either]). I'm not sure how to get around it.

So you wouldn't like using a word like "Corrupted." If your city is "Corrupted (+2)" it tells the player that it's too "dark", regardless of whether the civ "is" dark or light (this is just TOO dark).

- Corrupted or "Corrupt" or "Touched" could work for being too dark. "Twisted," Deviant"
- Light is more difficult, as I'm looking for words that convey goodness in a bad way.... "Puritanical," "Prudish," "Self-Righteous," "Holier-than=though", "Priggish"
- for stability, well, there's "Stable," "Serene," "peaceful," "Comfortable," "Stoic," "Balanced"

thoughts?

Cool, sounds like I'm making sense! I definitely think this will make things easier, in terms of how Heralds work and how we track DFCs. (The upshot of all of this is that we basically never need to track them, we can do simple calculations when a Herald is expended and follow a known progression when a new citizen is created.)

I also think the feel of this makes a lot of sense though, rather than us making a trade-off to make things simpler. An Alignment Decision has provided a lump sum of Alignment yield due to some choice made by your civilization's leader. This doesn't immediately affect his people, it's only people who develop and learn over time in the kind of environment those decisions have fostered that are truly affected by them.

I can get behind this.

It also gives some inertia to the Alignment leaning, so civs will tend to move more slowly toward the ends of the spectrum, but it's harder to switch back and go the other way, which makes sense in terms of changing the course of a civilization.

We'll just have to play through it and see how it works out!

So specific questions:

Heralds' effectiveness is based on the tier of the "defending" civ (as you suggested a little while ago, up to 3 citizens in +/- 2 tiers, up to 2 in tiers 3-6, etc.), but the tier of the civ that controls the Herald is used to determine what "Stable" they're moving towards.

ok, so do you like this setup, then? In terms of how many change for each tier.

Yes, each city "caps" at "Stable," where Stable is defined by the player that controls the Herald.

Concrete examples:

Tier 4 Shadow civ uses a Herald on a city with 6 population and 2 Darkfriends. Nothing happens. (This city would be Stable if it was controlled by a tier 4 or 5 Shadow player.)

Tier 8 Shadow civ uses a Herald on a city with 10 population and 2 Darkfriends, owned by a tier 1 Light civ. 3 new Darkfriends are created.

Tier 1 Light civ uses a Herald on a city with 6 population and 2 Darkfriends, owned by a tier 1 Shadow civ. 1 Darkfriend disappears. (This is because having 1 DFC is Stable for a tier 1 Light civ.)

I think this part is all the same as what you suggested in this post.

yeah, the conversion is the same, but I was approaching it from a very, very different place!

City capture! That's a good one, forgot about that. Ok, that makes this significantly more important.

My gut reaction was to put the Darkfriends at the front (so they die last), because flavor wise they would be sneaky and more difficult to kill than normal citizens. But the problem with that is that captured cities will necessarily lean Shadow, and I don't think we want to characterize warmongering in general as a Shadow activity?

Putting the DFCs at the end (they die first) does the opposite - making warmongering a Light activity. Weird.

This makes me think random is a good idea. A uniform random distribution will mean some cities tend more Light or Shadow when captured, but there's no particular rhyme or reason to it (as with any real city siege) - whoever happens to survive are the people that shape the city going forward. And in the big picture, randomness should mean it comes out as a wash, keeping warmongering as a general strategy unrelated to Light or Shadow, which is good!

totally! Let's do random!

I was thinking pooled Alignment too, but as you've said, it's quite sucky. The two players could end up fighting over it and either one would be dragged the other way, or they'd end up Neutral.

For humans, this could be fine. If two players diverge on a team, it's their own fault - they can talk about their plans and see each others' cities, they should decide on a united strategy. It is significantly more difficult for a human player to communicate their intentions to an AI teammate. A very simple voting mechanic for any part of this falls apart for teams of two, which I believe would be the most common team size aside from one.

Should the Decisions be team-wide, then? And players cast votes according to the amount of population/number of cities they have? That seems a bit bleh.

ok, so there's really two separate (but related) issues here:

A) doing Alignment Decisions
B) Choosing which side to fight on in the LB.

For A), I'm tempted to just say "touch luck." Each civ can make their own decisions, and if one chooses totally Shadow and the other Light... tough. Don't play on a team with an AI! You might need to program an AI tendency towards agreeing on one path, though, even if its a two-AI team.

For B), obviously we can't just say "tough." An actually decision must be made. You're gonna hate this, but maybe whoever has the highest score gets to choose? Voting could work, but if it's based on numbers of cities/population, I also wonder if Alignment strength should factor in as well. Like, if their leaning shadow and you're hardcore Tier 8 light, you should maybe win, assuming your populations aren't *that* different.

But we could sort of split the difference here. Like, make every Thread totally distinct between the player, but ultimately pool the actual Alignment itself. I dunno, it does suck though. And that certainly doesn't save us from the Big Decision at the start of the LB.

Scaling by era sounds like a plan. Eras in ascending order from After Breaking:

1: 10
2: 20
3: 30
4: 40
5: 50
6: 60
7: 75
8: 90
9: 100

10 is a decent amount of faith at the beginning of the game, but building a Herald has a big opportunity cost when you don't have many cities.

100 per unit could add up by the end of the game, but by then you have much better stuff you could build much faster, which is worth more than 100 faith.

Sound like the right kind of ballpark?

in this vacuum of game design, those numbers look good to me!

OK, so I've gone through and done a very big update to the LB summary incorporating our current thoughts on darkfriends. check it out when you can.

 

[S3rgeus]

Oh yeah, Windows Update took out my post again, but this time Lazarus was there to revive everything! No lost work! *commence boogie*

OK. Gotcha. I could go either way. I wonder, though - does it matter? If I'm recalling correctly, we're not *really* gating anything, right? It's just that we want some super-late-game techs, right?
In BNW, some of the last techs are essentially techs from the future - Death Robot, etc. - that stuff would be the equivalent of our steam power or guns and such, right? So I don't think we *need* to put them in a new era, right?

We need there to be an era beyond the Era of the Dragon in order to trigger the Last Battle when the World Era enters the Era of the Dragon. If EotD is the last one, the only trigger is when half of the civs reach it, which would allow a runaway to easily finish any other victory long before they got there. (The other way of looking at that is a civ who pulls way ahead is unable to win via the Last Battle, even if they want to, because they can't trigger it.)

So I think we definitely need an era at the end of the tree. Given that our existing divisions up into 9 seems to work quite well with our alternate form of time compression and WoT events, I'd be inclined to keep it this way.

That said, I also don't really see the harm in it... aside from the somewhat questionable flavor of the 4th age beginning in the middle of the last battle (which it would, necessarily).

It wouldn't necessarily begin then. If half of the civs reach EotD then the Last Battle will trigger before anyone reaches the Fourth Age. In a game that was timed the same as the events of the books, none of those civs would reach the Fourth Age before the LB ended.

As far as the number of technologies, I don't recall if we ever really decided on anything. If we did, though, it doesn't matter, because it was so long ago that I'm highly suspect of our opinions from so long ago .

Yep, good point, no reason to stick to 4. We may not even have decided that, I might just be remembering something different and getting them mixed up!

We should also keep in mind the Innovations of the Science Victory - some of those are supposed to be cutting edge (e.g. Steam Power, I think) such that I'm not sure the Fourth-Age era distinction is really necessary - unless we're talking about reeeally far in the future stuff.

Something I do remember us discussing last time that I think is still valuable is that the Fourth Age stuff be a projection of the tech the Westlands were headed towards going into the Last Battle. So things like more widespread uses for steampower and stuff. Having some of the Innovations be Fourth Age techs makes sense - they're at the end of the tree and will presumably converge into some Future Tech equivalent. The Science victory should require the most techs of all victory types - as base CiV does for the spaceship parts, there are very few techs you can leave out and complete all of those, and they're almost exclusively in the last row before Future Tech.

Also because of time compression, we're not projecting really far ahead. If EotD represents 30 years, then Fourth Age is only the first 15-20 after the LB. Technology itself will be mostly developments of nascent ideas we saw in the books in that timeframe.

I would be happy with Era of Tarmon Gai'don, Prophesy, or Destiny. I'm not sure which I like the best. Probably agree that Destiny is less in universe but sounds really cool. Your call, I think.

And

I'd like to interject once again and suggest the last era be named Era of Finality.

I'd say let's go with Prophesy and see how it goes. If players are wondering why it isn't the Era of the Last Battle or some equivalently referential name (because everyone is playing with the LB on) then we can change this name easily.

I've noted this in the misc summary.

Definitely, that's how it should go down. Simply disable them if the Shadow has the WT

Cool, I'll note that in the Edict list above these Edicts.

This one's good. But if it's supposed to be analogous to Nuclear Non-proliferation, shouldn't it be a full-on ban? Or is that more in the realm of a Compact Resolution, instead of an Edict.

Exactly, I think a full on ban is more of a Compact Resolution. I'll add this to the Edict list if you're happy with it then?

great

Added

right! I could also see this one being that that civ gets a couple extra Aes Sedai for the next thirty turns (a la the extra attention paid the Two Rivers)

Yeah, this sounds cool too. Do we want to do both? I think they can function as separate bonuses. These Aes Sedai don't consume any of that civ's quota, right?

I think so. Not necessarily Shadow ones, more like *Red* ones. On that note, are these tied to a given Ajah, or are these Generic ones.

OK, some attempts:

Dragonsworn Panic
For the next 30 turns, civilizations suffer a -10 penalty to Happiness when they control the Dragon.

Awesome! Should we call this Dragonsworn Denunciation, or something similar? A panic would be an effect of the Tower's decree, rather than what the decree itself is.

Protest the Dragon (Pre-LB only)
For the next 30 turns, when a civilization controls the Dragon, all that civilization's Aes Sedai will be unable to perform combat-related or Ajah-specific missions.

Nobody controls the Dragon before the LB starts, right? Or is the intention that this would start pre-LB and the 30 turns would include some Dragon-controlling time once the LB started? Seems a bit strange that the ability wouldn't be active once it was announced.

sure. fine with me to go with that kind of thing!

This is about the Edict that reduces madness tier by one on all saidin units. Would this Edict still be available to a Shadow Tower? It would certainly mechanically help Shadow players, but I'm not sure if it makes sense for the Shadow to fight against the Taint.

Alright. I see that I'm thinking of these slightly differently than you. You are right that the end-game ones are kind of crazy powerful. So, I'll follow your lead here.

Interesting, I always associated World Ideology and Religion as mostly Diplo-victory aiding (what with the +2 delegates). I see now that the Religion sets up a tourism bonus for the holy city, but what about Ideology?

You're right that Ideology is actually the other way around for the Culture victory. It makes public opinion favor that Ideology, which is more likely to cause foreign cities to convert to players that are very culturally influential. (Because that's caused by an unhappiness threshold combined with a want for a foreign Ideology.) So it's good for culture players that are already good, but doesn't help them Culture better.

Ah, so... are we gonna leave them the same here, then?

Yes, I think we can leave normal denunciations as haivng primarily diplo-only consequences.

I think Bystanders could work. Or even something like Spectators.

Or maybe we go with the Selfish angle instead.

I've added this resolution to the list with Bystanders as the name for Neutral, but left it red so we reconsider later and make sure we still like it.

Lol, took me three click-throughs of old threads to remember what the heck you're asking here. OK, Red items in Misc summary (that seem answerable now)...

I really don't know what other modifiers to the BK/GM detection. I'd imagine they might be the same as those for assassinations (which you should add, since I can't remember them). But they should probably be less, I think.

I've noted the BK/GM detection stuff in the misc summary.

re: the model for the Angreal Cache.... I have no idea. Any way to retool the aluminum model or something so it looks like a bunch of pieces instead of of one big blob?

LordofLinks has given us the answer to this one, so I've put it in the misc summary.

I think False Dragon spawning rate will be rather complicated. It will probably vary by era. Everything we've said up through this point suggests that it's also going to depend on the specific actions of the civs themselves, or at least the choices they make.

Considering we will probably hide this all from the player, I'm figuring we can afford it to be a bit complex. I'm thinking there might be a few ways to do this:
1) The process is essentially random
2) civs accumulate False Dragon "points" in an invisible manner, not unlike GPs, and after a certain amount (perhaps with some randomness applied), one is born somewhere near their civ's borders. The things that contribute to a civ's False Dragon points could be the amount of saidin units they use, their social policies and tenets (e.g. Fear verses Tolerance), their ideology (with Liberation creating the most), as well as wonders and such.
3) civs accumulate False Dragon points as above, but these go into a global "pot", and when a certain threshold is crossed, a false dragon is born *somewhere* in the world. Perhaps the location of its birth is random, but greatly influenced by who contributed the most points.

As far as how often in general, I'm expecting that it would vary quite widely. A Fear+Oppression civ who never uses Saidin units would seem to me to almost never get them, but the opposite type of civ would get them quite frequently.... I suppose *how* frequently depends on how awesome the FDs are. If they're essentially just beefy barbs, then it could be pretty frequent.

I'm liking option 2, it gives us more room to have civs' decisions influence how often they see the False Dragons.

I think that given how annoying a single barbarian unit can be (because they always show up where your army is not currently stationed!!! How do they know?), even if the False Dragon isn't that strong, the fact that it's him and a few other units acting as an "army" can make him very disruptive.

So I'd say we should have False Dragons scale, like Aes Sedai and Warders, so that they remain relevant throughout the game (though obviously stop appearing once the LB starts and the Dragon becomes controllable). The False Dragon himself can be relatively powerful - stronger than the current best unit the civ who spawned him has, but not significantly so. The other guys can be standard Dragonsworn units of the time, just organized to fight in a unit. (How well those units can be made to fight as a group is anyone's guess at this point - I've heard the martialling AI for forming armies is actually relatively good, it's the toe-to-toe fighting bit where they stand on each others' faces.)

Regarding the Gentling rewards.... I honestly can't assess those values at this point. The whole Gentling bonus thing has already spun my head in knots in prior phases of this conversation. I'd say at this point I'd need to see how it lines up with other elements before I could really assess 50-75% as the bonus.

Cool, let's leave 50-75% in for now - tweaking what the percentages are will be quite easy later.