S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

I understand, but I'm not sure I agree. Borderlanders are somewhat more "hardened" about such things, and might not actually be as scared of them as southerners. But that might be moot anyways. The thing is, the nightmares aren't necessarily shadowspawn. they can be anything. So I don't see the blightborder being an important component. If we felt weird about it, we could make these nightmares include human (barbarian (lawless? I don't remember what we settled on) or dragonsworn) units as well. Or, we could invent a new unit that's just a vaguely shaped "monster." Thoughts?

Cool, using more than just Shadowspawn units gets around the whole issue. I don't think we need to invent any new units for it, Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, and Lawless is a good mix.

i'm not suggesting that we draw different names from different chapters to "name" trinkets. I'm just saying that chapter names can inspire us to name ALL of them. There is, for example, a chapter called Glimmers in the Pattern, i think, and that inspired me to suggest Glimmers.

"Wrinkle" still feels a little silly to me. I could be ok with it, though. you don't like glimmer?

I see what you mean about wrinkle sounding silly. I've just looked it up and "Glimmers of the Pattern" is the name of two chapters! I think that sways me, then. Glimmers of the Pattern it is!

ok. let's go with "move the trinket". You're right, I don't think it'll be meta'd too bad.

Cool, sounds good.

Knowing that i'm the guy who originally suggested this, I'm also not loving the idea of making things complicated.

So, I like the "no immediate repetition" in principle, because it seems simpler and easier to understand, but I think we'll need to set up a few things to make sure it isn't abused (using two units, you grab Andor, then immediately Shienar, and then back to Andor, in two turns, for example).

Maybe when you grab a civ's Trinket, it "dims" into an inaccessible or low-value one for a bit and stays that way for the next X turns (5? 10?). In the interim, all other civs' Trinket's would presumably be "bright" (high value) - unless you'd grabbed one of them within the past X turns as well.

This prevents people from doing the double-switch I wrote about above, but also doesn't totally screw a civ who only has one neighbor by locking them out of that civ's goodies until they find another civ 50 turns later.

I wonder, though, should they "dim" to be worth less, or be worthLESS or inaccessible at all? The less-value option seems cool, but I feel like making them inaccessible might be better for gameplay - it allows other civs to come in and compete for the goods while you're waiting to be allowed to get them again. Might encourage bringing along some wolves or something to keep them away, eh? Or drop a dreamspike, etc.

what say you, atreyu?

I think involving timed cooldowns and such makes the system too complicated for the player.

I think your suggestion from the previous post had a good balance between complexity and fairness, with some tiny tweaks it becomes easy to understand and quite balanced. So, basing it off nationality, allowing just "alternating" seems fine to me. The situation you've described doesn't seem like abuse - that's good tactical preparation, rewarding the player for synchronizing their units over a wide area within a very strict timescale (for optimality). There are also plenty of opportunities for other players to interrupt such a setup. (Consuming a trinket takes time, and each trinket presents its own independent chance of being disrupted.)

If we make it so that we go for lower-value for consecutively-the-same-nationality being consumed, then that gives us the balance with player diversity you mentioned before. Someone with just one neighbor will have no competition grabbing the trinkets, but each of them is likely to be worth less than those grabbed less frequently by players in more populated areas. Something like 50%, maybe? But that's obviously very customizable if we like this systematic approach.

Players who are aware of multiple trinkets from different civs at once are likely to try to coordinate capturing them in the optimal order, as quickly as they can, which should involve a need for wolves and Dreamspikes to drive off enemies. Though Dreamspikes, as a one-use GP ability, are likely to play a relatively minor role in turn-by-turn motions of T'a'r gameplay, since there will just always be too few GPs for that to be very common. Dreamspikes are likely to come in at the pivotal moments, when the players know they will particularly gain from the bonuses Dreamspikes provide.

Right, that all makes sense. I'm not sold we need variability. If we do, we maybe just have two or three levels, that are standardized. I don't think we need it though. The players aren't going to see the source-GP, so this isn't really something you can "play" for much, so it sort of just seems like a random benefit/punishment based on decisions your neighbors have made.

I like random.Let's do that!

for me, the reasonto stay away from meta has to do with me not wanting t'a'r to encroach too much on the rest of the game. I share your desire to integrate it into gameplay, but I don't think I want it to have too many weird knock-on effects - determining WHERE you use a GP ability, for instance, doesn't seem like a fun or flavorful strategy, despite it being potentially incentivized by our T'a'r mechanics.

Cool, randomness for determining when multi-use abilities drop their T'a'r trinkets. I think this means we don't need any form of variability beyond the nationality stuff above, which avoids the downsides you've mentioned here.

Right. Nobody's going to Shara. That's a good point. Or 'chan either. I think the reason for this may not be that there's a limit to your travel, necessarily, but you are stil bound by human movement, for the most part (Perrin and Slayer are apparently awesome enough to violate this, of coruse). sure, you can teleport around, but it's by Thinking Really Hard about a place you've been to, and appearing there. Once you're there, though, you've gotta walk (or teleport again to a place you Know). the issue is that in civ, a unit can "walk" five hundred miles in a turn. T'a'r-users only have as long as they can sleep. I run all the time, and don't think I could do more than, say, three hundred miles, in one nine hour sleep cycle.

In short, I think the option 2 ban on undiscovered movement is fine flavorfully.

Cool, sounds good!

Are you suggesting that maybe having T'a'r units in a location won't give you real-world sight on that location? i could see the flavor go either way. Basically, we're creating invisible scouts here (like an Observer from Starcraft or something).

No, I think that will make them much less useful and will devalue usage of T'a'r in general. I think them not being able to discover new tiles is a sufficient nod to the lack of "temporary" objects in T'a'r flavor. They're invisible-ish scouts, like the Observer, but they can't loiter like the Observer since they only last for X turns. And they have quite a few abilities that distinguish them from scouts, while main layer scouts are definitely combat units (if weak ones), most T'a'r units behave more civilian-ish.

I do think we could have an improvement, maybe one of the T'a'r ones, or a building or something, or a real-world unit, that either exposes T'a'r units, or else at least tells you that one is nearby.

Possibly, is there any precedent in flavor for being able to track entities in T'a'r from reality?

I think we're not stepping on any toes!

Cool, sounds good!

I think I agree with you and your approach, here.

the one thing I'll say, though, is that I wish there was a "middle way" here. Like, front-line channelers doing t'a'r stuff is sort of silly, but a bunch of ladies sitting next to your capital just seems so *boring*, and the HP loss typically only serves the purpose of Cooldown, and doesn't really make things risky - even if your projection gets killed, you're safe at home to heal up.

nothing we can really do about that, huh?

I think the "middle way" will be the most effective, which it looks like is what you want. It would be safest for civs to leave their T'a'r units at home, but their T'a'r units are also (largely) good at fighting. I'd say they'd want them within accessible-but-safe-as-possible range to be able to change strategy and have them fight if things began to turn against them in certain ways. So, if you were fighting on another continent, I'd say you'd still want to bring your Aes Sedai for it, even if you're primarily using them to T'a'r-project in the area around the fighting, because they could step in if needed.

I like the spike idea, i think. If you escape death, that's good.

Part of me feels like 50 might not be high enough. I feel like there should be a risk of getting killed in t'a'r, even if it's really rare. Like, if you're at 60% health when you enter, you'd best make darn sure your projection doesn't get killed. You might die if it does.

I did think that 50% with randomness could be compelling though - it means that after you die the first time, you might survive a second one, but you can never be sure. Will you wait to heal? Can you afford to? 60% with randomness (unless there's a lot of variance) is a guaranteed kill if you die twice. This is obviously easily tweakable either way though, so using the spike approach overall is the main decision here, which we agree on!

Also, it goes without saying that a Sleeping unit doesn't heal/cannot be healed while sleeping, yes?

Totally, yeah, sleeping units don't heal.

Well, unfortunately I don't htink the Ogier go into T'a'r much, so we can't have a "treat with the Ogier" ability or anything that necessarily links up with T'a'r.

This seems difficult for us to connect, we might be better off pursuing a diplo-usefulness for T'a'r via the Dreamwarding stuff below! When we go to put the GP abilities onto actual GP types, maybe something will become more clear along this avenue.

no, I don't think we want a third field. Two is enough, especially since only one of them is truly justified by the flavor.

But I do think using a dream ward offensively is, in theory at least, possible (more below).

well, if we wanted something offensive, couldn't we make something that LOWERS a city's happiness cap? Or raises its unhappiness? I know this is flavorfully weird, as this ismore like the Inception we spoke of above, but "Dream Ward" could be generalized (and renamed) to be "messing with people's dreams". that could be interesting domination-wise.

Maybe a better thing woudl be to slow a city's production using dreamwards, or their gold generation, or something?

yeah, i don't love this one.

so, as far as other things that annoy me in domination victories....

- well, not having a spotter is one. But that's already covered here.
- getting really far behind in science is another. But that's not really gonna fit with t'a'r.
- getting reinforcements in place fast enough can be trouble. Again, not sure we want to fix that with this, though.
- would it be too weird to have "fake units" or something ? Like illusions (from nightmares or something) that take up a tile and/or draw fire?

Not sure what else to suggest. you've hit at the major stumbling blocks to domination victories.

...

Well, if something changes the happiness cap wouldn't people keep it up all the time? That's not super fun, though.

...

I'm not so sold on Dreamwards as a Projection ability, if it gives always-useful effects like happiness-cap adjustments. then we've got a situation where you're sitting by your capital, sleeping, and projecting, for the whole game. That's not very fun, and very needy, to me. I'd rather the abilities be Splashier (and GPs), OR make them only situationally useful (so, like you say, they're only in contested areas). That last is fine, but as we're talking about it, it doesn't seem like things are lining up that way with some of these effects.

Looking at all of this Domination stuff, you've got a lot of good points. I'll start with agreeing that we don't want a third field type in T'a'r. We've got two major usages that we want to find for Dreamwarding: Domination internal usefulness, and Diplo aggressive usefulness.

I think for the Domination internal usefulness, the lowered-occupied-unhappiness bonus solves a lot of our problems. It's not a persistent thing (only useful over annexed cities, until you build a courthouse), so players won't just be leaving these fields up all over the place (which we want to avoid). However, it is constantly useful to a civ that's going for the Domination victory in a very real way. It's repeatable for them, but not too easy (must be actively placed, can be destroyed by the enemy, damages some of their (the attackers') best units), and doesn't lead to them snowballing out of control (no situation where the bonuses start to multiply or anything like that, each one is an isolated interim bonus that mitigates mounting unhappiness from capturing cities, but doesn't approach eliminating it). Its primary usefulness is also in a location that is guaranteed to be actively contested by an enemy, making it something that will lead to player interaction (struggling over keeping a Dreamward up on a city you've just captured, if you haven't cleared the area properly yet and your enemy is still resisting).

All of those factors make it fit very well with spawned-by-projections as a way of generating Dreamwards.

Lowering enemy happiness caps would suffer from a similar problem to raising happiness caps in your own city, in that players would end up trying to carpet the map with them, since it's a persistent bonus for them. (It's a bonus for the player dropping the Dreamwards, since other people doing worse means they're better in comparison.) It's also not as fun for other players to be suddenly-worse at happiness. And it unfairly targets the human player, since we have much less happiness on most difficulties than the AI.

Illusions and such could be useful, but they'd be quite complex. And one of a Domination player's problems is usually wrangling with 1UPT when moving through rough terrain, terrain choke points, or enemy cities, so illusions would occupy tiles they'd want to have a real unit standing in quite often.

I think between us we've called out the difficulties domination players need to deal with. What do you think of the lower-occupied-unhappiness approach?

In terms of an offensive Diplo use for Dreamwards, let's take a similar approach: what makes Diplo players' lives hard?

1. Other people invading their CS allies
2. Not having enough money to buy CS allies
3. The Tower or Stedding voting against them
4. Other players staging coups in their city-states
5. Other players having votes in the Compact
6. CS allies keep wanting them to refresh their influence (to offset the decay)

What about #4? Dreamwards prevent CS election shenanigans and coups, when placed over allied CSes? This nicely overlaps with the espionage system as well, which we've been looking for ways to do.

Or, tangentially related, #6 could be addressed by decreasing/stopping the influence decay with CSes that have a dreamward-controlled-by-you over them. (Since Dreamwards presumably can't overlap, much like Dreamspikes, this can create competition, which is good here.)

I also still think the "steal a vote" by having a Dreamward over an enemy capital could work. A maximum of one vote per player isn't going to instantly destroy anyone, but it will tip a leading player over to win if they time it properly.

As you've mentioned, Dreamwarding can be reflavored if we find the usage of warded dreams as a descriptor no longer suits the role it's fulfilling. Both of the CS-focused abilities play well with the existing Dreamwarding flavor.

I gotcha, but I don't think we have to be so worried about using "components" from BNW UAs. I mean, I wouldn't feel terrible if we stole the iriquois forest-speed and gave it to Aiel as desert-speed, for instance. Adaptation of an ability i think could be fine.

Yeah, that kind of change would be fine.

ooh. that's an interesting idea! Oh, also, that's an awesome name.

Thank you!

interesting! gives you military units, though. cheating! could work, though. VERy different from the settler-fest you suggested last time.

how about a variation on a theme....

The Tuatha'an (take 3)
You cannot produce military units. Civilizations with three or more trade routes with you get +2 gold per turn per trade route. Civilizations with three or more trade routes with you (and their CS allies) automatically declare war on any civ that declares war on you.

Yeah, military units was cheating! I wanted to make an Aram-like unit but couldn't seem to find the name for Tinkers who'd abandoned the Way of the Leaf (there is an in-universe name for that, right?). Then we'd end up in a situation where it needs to be an Aes-Sedai-like-upgradeable unit, otherwise it's only relevant at certain points in the game.

Complicated, it's hard to have a civ that can't fight people! I think my favorite part of my take was the doubling-up-trade-routes by war count, so declaring war on them made them richer and made it even harder for anyone else to declare war on them. I wanted that to be the crux of the ability, but it doesn't actually defend them from the guys who are already at war, which is a problem!

 

[counterpoint]

Cool, using more than just Shadowspawn units gets around the whole issue. I don't think we need to invent any new units for it, Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, and Lawless is a good mix.

Cool[io]

I see what you mean about wrinkle sounding silly. I've just looked it up and "Glimmers of the Pattern" is the name of two chapters! I think that sways me, then. Glimmers of the Pattern it is!

two chapters?! BAH! aSoIaF has like fifty chapters called Jon!

Agreed. So do you Gather a Glimmer? Absorb it? Harvest it? Or are we not going to be Doing stuff to it?

I think involving timed cooldowns and such makes the system too complicated for the player.

I think your suggestion from the previous post had a good balance between complexity and fairness, with some tiny tweaks it becomes easy to understand and quite balanced. So, basing it off nationality, allowing just "alternating" seems fine to me. The situation you've described doesn't seem like abuse - that's good tactical preparation, rewarding the player for synchronizing their units over a wide area within a very strict timescale (for optimality). There are also plenty of opportunities for other players to interrupt such a setup. (Consuming a trinket takes time, and each trinket presents its own independent chance of being disrupted.)

OK, so I'm fine going in this direction, I think. But I'd say that, say you grab an Andoran Glimmer, the rest of Andor's glimmers won't be Full Value again until you *finish* harvesting another civ's glimmer. So, if you andor-aiel-andor, you can't do that in three consecutive turns if you want full value - you'd have to wait for the aiel to finish. I find this better, yes?

If we make it so that we go for lower-value for consecutively-the-same-nationality being consumed, then that gives us the balance with player diversity you mentioned before. Someone with just one neighbor will have no competition grabbing the trinkets, but each of them is likely to be worth less than those grabbed less frequently by players in more populated areas. Something like 50%, maybe? But that's obviously very customizable if we like this systematic approach.

50% sounds good.

Players who are aware of multiple trinkets from different civs at once are likely to try to coordinate capturing them in the optimal order, as quickly as they can, which should involve a need for wolves and Dreamspikes to drive off enemies. Though Dreamspikes, as a one-use GP ability, are likely to play a relatively minor role in turn-by-turn motions of T'a'r gameplay, since there will just always be too few GPs for that to be very common. Dreamspikes are likely to come in at the pivotal moments, when the players know they will particularly gain from the bonuses Dreamspikes provide.

right, agreed.

Cool, randomness for determining when multi-use abilities drop their T'a'r trinkets. I think this means we don't need any form of variability beyond the nationality stuff above, which avoids the downsides you've mentioned here.

correct!

No, I think that will make them much less useful and will devalue usage of T'a'r in general. I think them not being able to discover new tiles is a sufficient nod to the lack of "temporary" objects in T'a'r flavor. They're invisible-ish scouts, like the Observer, but they can't loiter like the Observer since they only last for X turns. And they have quite a few abilities that distinguish them from scouts, while main layer scouts are definitely combat units (if weak ones), most T'a'r units behave more civilian-ish.

ok! movement settled then.

Possibly, is there any precedent in flavor for being able to track entities in T'a'r from reality?

eh... I think actually there is absolutely none.

I think the "middle way" will be the most effective, which it looks like is what you want. It would be safest for civs to leave their T'a'r units at home, but their T'a'r units are also (largely) good at fighting. I'd say they'd want them within accessible-but-safe-as-possible range to be able to change strategy and have them fight if things began to turn against them in certain ways. So, if you were fighting on another continent, I'd say you'd still want to bring your Aes Sedai for it, even if you're primarily using them to T'a'r-project in the area around the fighting, because they could step in if needed.

Yeah. I'm not totally sure we *have* achieved the middle way. I hope so, though.

This belongs elsewhere but I don't want to forget: I think your channelers should be totally useless when they're sleeping. We already spoke about healing, but if your channeler gives off a healing aura, that should stop. If your channeler confers a bonus to a governor, that stops as well. I don't mind people cowering in their capitals while asleep, providing they're sacrificing something for it, which would be A) an Aes Sedai unit, or B) a unit that is otherwise consuming their Spark.

I did think that 50% with randomness could be compelling though - it means that after you die the first time, you might survive a second one, but you can never be sure. Will you wait to heal? Can you afford to? 60% with randomness (unless there's a lot of variance) is a guaranteed kill if you die twice. This is obviously easily tweakable either way though, so using the spike approach overall is the main decision here, which we agree on!

ok. Let's try this, then!

Totally, yeah, sleeping units don't heal.

the slackers!

This seems difficult for us to connect, we might be better off pursuing a diplo-usefulness for T'a'r via the Dreamwarding stuff below! When we go to put the GP abilities onto actual GP types, maybe something will become more clear along this avenue.

I'm with you, here.

Looking at all of this Domination stuff, you've got a lot of good points. I'll start with agreeing that we don't want a third field type in T'a'r. We've got two major usages that we want to find for Dreamwarding: Domination internal usefulness, and Diplo aggressive usefulness.

right. agreed.

I think for the Domination internal usefulness, the lowered-occupied-unhappiness bonus solves a lot of our problems. It's not a persistent thing (only useful over annexed cities, until you build a courthouse), so players won't just be leaving these fields up all over the place (which we want to avoid). However, it is constantly useful to a civ that's going for the Domination victory in a very real way. It's repeatable for them, but not too easy (must be actively placed, can be destroyed by the enemy, damages some of their (the attackers') best units), and doesn't lead to them snowballing out of control (no situation where the bonuses start to multiply or anything like that, each one is an isolated interim bonus that mitigates mounting unhappiness from capturing cities, but doesn't approach eliminating it). Its primary usefulness is also in a location that is guaranteed to be actively contested by an enemy, making it something that will lead to player interaction (struggling over keeping a Dreamward up on a city you've just captured, if you haven't cleared the area properly yet and your enemy is still resisting).

as you say, there are a lot of reasons why this makes sense. I'm all for this being the primary defensive benefit of Dreamwards. that said, it is a LITTLE flavor-weird, in that you're only shielding your newly captured citizens, instead of all of your citizens.

All of those factors make it fit very well with spawned-by-projections as a way of generating Dreamwards.

Right. I don't think it's a problem for them to be spawned by projections.

Lowering enemy happiness caps would suffer from a similar problem to raising happiness caps in your own city, in that players would end up trying to carpet the map with them, since it's a persistent bonus for them. (It's a bonus for the player dropping the Dreamwards, since other people doing worse means they're better in comparison.) It's also not as fun for other players to be suddenly-worse at happiness. And it unfairly targets the human player, since we have much less happiness on most difficulties than the AI.

agreed. let's scrap this.

Illusions and such could be useful, but they'd be quite complex. And one of a Domination player's problems is usually wrangling with 1UPT when moving through rough terrain, terrain choke points, or enemy cities, so illusions would occupy tiles they'd want to have a real unit standing in quite often.

i say scrap this too.

I think between us we've called out the difficulties domination players need to deal with. What do you think of the lower-occupied-unhappiness approach?

I think it's the best option!

In terms of an offensive Diplo use for Dreamwards, let's take a similar approach: what makes Diplo players' lives hard?

First of all, I wasn't necessarily thinking they needed to be offensive DIPLO useful - I was thinking they'd be offensive Dom useful. But this is a cooler line of thought as it gives them a more clear role.

1. Other people invading their CS allies
2. Not having enough money to buy CS allies
3. The Tower or Stedding voting against them
4. Other players staging coups in their city-states
5. Other players having votes in the Compact
6. CS allies keep wanting them to refresh their influence (to offset the decay)

What about #4? Dreamwards prevent CS election shenanigans and coups, when placed over allied CSes? This nicely overlaps with the espionage system as well, which we've been looking for ways to do.

I think I like this. It's a weird thing, though, as on the one hand, it's the kind of thing that *could* encourage people to just carpet all the CSs with these, but on the other hand, the ability is not THAT good, so it's unlikely to be used that way so often.

does it only do something with an ALLIED CS? What about a Friend? More defense, or offense?

Or, tangentially related, #6 could be addressed by decreasing/stopping the influence decay with CSes that have a dreamward-controlled-by-you over them. (Since Dreamwards presumably can't overlap, much like Dreamspikes, this can create competition, which is good here.)

yeah, i like this too, but this one does suffer a bit more from the carpet-fest. But then again, that'd be a lot of work to pull off, and if you did that, you probably deserve the benefit.

I do like how it doesn't GIVE you anything, it just helps prevent your influence decay. Maybe we make it a similar amount to that social policy, or something, and then not have that social policy.

Brainstorming on other frustrating diplo moments...

- Diplomatic Marriage taking away your possible CS allies!
- being pulled into war.
- Embargo City States and other such things.

I don't think any of those yield great ideas..

The last think I'll mention is to remind us that we did create a new mechanic - refusability of Edicts. Is there some weird way that T'a'r intersects with that?

I also still think the "steal a vote" by having a Dreamward over an enemy capital could work. A maximum of one vote per player isn't going to instantly destroy anyone, but it will tip a leading player over to win if they time it properly.

I just think that's too powerful for a random projection. A dreamspike (i.e. GP), sure, but some Kinswoman being able to steal a game-winning vote? No thanks.

As you've mentioned, Dreamwarding can be reflavored if we find the usage of warded dreams as a descriptor no longer suits the role it's fulfilling. Both of the CS-focused abilities play well with the existing Dreamwarding flavor.

right. Again, the only flavor that's weird is the fact that you ARENT doing it to your own people.

Yeah, military units was cheating! I wanted to make an Aram-like unit but couldn't seem to find the name for Tinkers who'd abandoned the Way of the Leaf (there is an in-universe name for that, right?).

Yeah, they're called the

Spoiler :

Aiel!

Then we'd end up in a situation where it needs to be an Aes-Sedai-like-upgradeable unit, otherwise it's only relevant at certain points in the game.

Complicated, it's hard to have a civ that can't fight people! I think my favorite part of my take was the doubling-up-trade-routes by war count, so declaring war on them made them richer and made it even harder for anyone else to declare war on them. I wanted that to be the crux of the ability, but it doesn't actually defend them from the guys who are already at war, which is a problem!

yeah, all of this would be very insane.

the main problem I have with ANY of these Tinker UA's we've dreamed up is not that they wouldn't be fun to play as, or even theoretically be winnable with (not counting Dom, of course). The problem is that they'd potentially be rather annoying when playing *against*. I feel a bit like these UAs have a huge effect on your neighbors, and it would kind of take over the whole game to have a Tuatha'an civ nearby.

 

[S3rgeus]

two chapters?! BAH! aSoIaF has like fifty chapters called Jon!

Agreed. So do you Gather a Glimmer? Absorb it? Harvest it? Or are we not going to be Doing stuff to it?

There should be more chapters called Eddard.

Gather is nicely alliterative and sort of makes sense, so let's go with that.

OK, so I'm fine going in this direction, I think. But I'd say that, say you grab an Andoran Glimmer, the rest of Andor's glimmers won't be Full Value again until you *finish* harvesting another civ's glimmer. So, if you andor-aiel-andor, you can't do that in three consecutive turns if you want full value - you'd have to wait for the aiel to finish. I find this better, yes?

Yes, definitely, this is how it should work. Given the way "harvesting" things works in CiV you could still complete three all in one turn if you started them off at the right times.

50% sounds good.

Good!

eh... I think actually there is absolutely none.

Ok, let's leave this for now.

Yeah. I'm not totally sure we *have* achieved the middle way. I hope so, though.

Yeah, we'll have to see how players adapt to it. I think we've got a good system from what we know at the moment!

This belongs elsewhere but I don't want to forget: I think your channelers should be totally useless when they're sleeping. We already spoke about healing, but if your channeler gives off a healing aura, that should stop. If your channeler confers a bonus to a governor, that stops as well. I don't mind people cowering in their capitals while asleep, providing they're sacrificing something for it, which would be A) an Aes Sedai unit, or B) a unit that is otherwise consuming their Spark.

Yes, passive abilities should stop functioning as well while they're asleep!

as you say, there are a lot of reasons why this makes sense. I'm all for this being the primary defensive benefit of Dreamwards. that said, it is a LITTLE flavor-weird, in that you're only shielding your newly captured citizens, instead of all of your citizens.

A little weird but workable - maybe it's warding the dreams of folks who would otherwise be affected by dissident meddling. (Though it takes on a much more sinister light with that flavor.) I think most players will see it as a mechanical tool - it uses some flavor they're aware of from the books, but isn't nearly as direct as Aes Sedai and such.

I think it's the best option!

Awesome sauce, reduced-occupied-unhappiness it is!

First of all, I wasn't necessarily thinking they needed to be offensive DIPLO useful - I was thinking they'd be offensive Dom useful. But this is a cooler line of thought as it gives them a more clear role.

Coolio, sounds good then!

I think I like this. It's a weird thing, though, as on the one hand, it's the kind of thing that *could* encourage people to just carpet all the CSs with these, but on the other hand, the ability is not THAT good, so it's unlikely to be used that way so often.

does it only do something with an ALLIED CS? What about a Friend? More defense, or offense?

Trying to carpet all CSes (for this and the one below) will also create competition (much like the CS influence itself does) - since only one field can be active over a given hex at a time.

Do you mean espionage defense or offense? I was thinking this would make enemy coups less likely/impossible and prevent your influence from decaying if an enemy spy "rigs an election" (however we reflavor that). This would work universally on any CS for any player, but the coup thing would only really affect the ally (/highest influence ally for a Stedding).

yeah, i like this too, but this one does suffer a bit more from the carpet-fest. But then again, that'd be a lot of work to pull off, and if you did that, you probably deserve the benefit.

I do like how it doesn't GIVE you anything, it just helps prevent your influence decay. Maybe we make it a similar amount to that social policy, or something, and then not have that social policy.

Related to above, by making it more directly useful, players will be more actively competing for it, so a single civ carpet of most CSes becomes even less likely. And at that point, as you've said, if someone achieves it then they worked hard for it.

Totally, I could see this coexisting with or replacing the CS-influence policy. We could go for a % decrease in decay or stopping altogether, whichever we prefer.

So which of the two above do we prefer? Preventing coups/election shenanigans, or slowing/stopping influence decay?

Brainstorming on other frustrating diplo moments...

- Diplomatic Marriage taking away your possible CS allies!
- being pulled into war.
- Embargo City States and other such things.

I don't think any of those yield great ideas..

Yeah, I don't see much for us to do here either. Diplomatic Marriage will presumably not be a problem without Austria!

The last think I'll mention is to remind us that we did create a new mechanic - refusability of Edicts. Is there some weird way that T'a'r intersects with that?

One way would be to somehow reduce the cost of refusing Edicts based on Dreamwarding - though I don't think we want to do that, it ends up being quite complicated due to the structure of the refusal costs.

We could bar civs from being able to refuse Edicts somehow, via a certain coverage of Dreamwarding, but that seems a bit harsh. (Same problem here with scaling up the cost of refusal for enemies, the refusal costs are difficult to scale simply.)

Do Edicts have a manifestation in T'a'r somehow?

I'm not sure if we need to have a crossover, but it's good to be sure.

I just think that's too powerful for a random projection. A dreamspike (i.e. GP), sure, but some Kinswoman being able to steal a game-winning vote? No thanks.

It's only game-winning if the player was already very close to winning anyway, but I do see what you mean. Looks like the two above are our frontrunners.

right. Again, the only flavor that's weird is the fact that you ARENT doing it to your own people.

I don't think it's necessarily a flavor problem that you're not doing it at home - it's a targeted use of the Power (sort of) where it gives you visible political rewards. For most folks, having their dreams warded wouldn't really affect them.

Yeah, they're called the

Spoiler :

Aiel!

Yeah, but I thought there was a word that the Tinkers called Aram when he killed someone? I can't remember or find it anyway!

yeah, all of this would be very insane.

the main problem I have with ANY of these Tinker UA's we've dreamed up is not that they wouldn't be fun to play as, or even theoretically be winnable with (not counting Dom, of course). The problem is that they'd potentially be rather annoying when playing *against*. I feel a bit like these UAs have a huge effect on your neighbors, and it would kind of take over the whole game to have a Tuatha'an civ nearby.

True, both your suggestion and my original one would almost necessitate leaving attacking the Tuatha'an to last due to incidental wars you'd end up in by attacking them. That's sort of what we were trying to achieve, I suppose - make it unattractive to attack them even though they can't defend themselves on the battlefield. We also do sort of have a precedent in BNW with Korea - their UA means attacking and conquering them early game is a constant drain on your resources, so it's often best to leave them until last - changing the strategies of all players that interact with them in a similar way to the Tuatha'an ones.


This was a nice and short post! So I've spent the remaining time editing all of our T'a'r stuff into the Misc summary. It all fit in quite nicely, but I think the misc summary is fairly full now. (I could see us breaking this out into its own summary if we wanted to include other small misc stuff in the Misc summary later.) I've highlighted some stuff in red that we haven't addressed yet - mostly small things that require clarification because we didn't explicitly discuss them when deciding how the related feature worked.

Please ensure I haven't missed anything! Combat units such as wolves and Slayer didn't really come up very explicitly on there, and I'm not sure if they should. I figure they'll be described in more detail in the GP summary once we decide on the GPs that generate them? That said, it might be worth having a combat section to explain how combat-ish units like Wolves, Slayer, Forsaken, Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, and Lawless interact with the more civilian-ish projections that make up most of the population of the T'a'r map layer? Have we discussed that?

I also wasn't sure if we needed the "Great People" section at the end of the T'a'r section? I could see it being expanded to include their roles, or removed entirely and that topic covered in the GP summary? (The role of collecting T'a'r GP points and which GP types you can spawn, and how, with them.)

Also, editing the Misc summary reminded me that we haven't discussed Shadar Logoth, which is on there as a placeholder. Is that in our agenda? I imagine we'll at least go back and finish off GPs before that.

 

[counterpoint]

Gather is nicely alliterative and sort of makes sense, so let's go with that.

We have gone with it, then.

Yes, definitely, this is how it should work. Given the way "harvesting" things works in CiV you could still complete three all in one turn if you started them off at the right times.

OK, so it's only the completion of the Gathering that matters, not the time at which it is started? I don't feel like that really lines up with what I perceive to be the purpose of the 50%-from-same-civ-thing. The purpose as I see it is:

A) incentivize exploration and finding other civs to Gather from.
B) provide for competition by not encouraging one civ to "hog" all the Glimmers up immediately.

I feel like the way you're suggesting it, at best we're encouraging a three turn spread between two civs. It would be better if the ideal pace required a bunch of civs to work efficiently. I think i'd prefer that a "full points" Gathering is only "unlocked" when a new Gathering is initiated after a different civ 's Glimmer is successfully Gathered (as opposed to beginning th eGathering while it's still only one turn in and still getting the full benefit). The flavor is intended to be that you learned something new from a different civ, now you can learn something again from this first civ with fresh eyes.

The Spirit of the rule is clearly that you're supposed to spread out and diversify if you want max efficiency. True, you can hog them all, but you'll lose T'a'rGP points. It should be a balance between wanting to miss out on potential GP points by hogging them all..... and being worried that other civs will steal them while you're waiting.

A little weird but workable - maybe it's warding the dreams of folks who would otherwise be affected by dissident meddling. (Though it takes on a much more sinister light with that flavor.) I think most players will see it as a mechanical tool - it uses some flavor they're aware of from the books, but isn't nearly as direct as Aes Sedai and such.

Yeah, I think it is good enough.

Trying to carpet all CSes (for this and the one below) will also create competition (much like the CS influence itself does) - since only one field can be active over a given hex at a time.

Do you mean espionage defense or offense? I was thinking this would make enemy coups less likely/impossible and prevent your influence from decaying if an enemy spy "rigs an election" (however we reflavor that). This would work universally on any CS for any player, but the coup thing would only really affect the ally (/highest influence ally for a Stedding).

what I mean by offense is that you'd use it on a CS that wasn't your ally, as a means to gain an edge against the current ally. Defense is of course just preserving your lead.

Related to above, by making it more directly useful, players will be more actively competing for it, so a single civ carpet of most CSes becomes even less likely. And at that point, as you've said, if someone achieves it then they worked hard for it.

Totally, I could see this coexisting with or replacing the CS-influence policy. We could go for a % decrease in decay or stopping altogether, whichever we prefer.

So which of the two above do we prefer? Preventing coups/election shenanigans, or slowing/stopping influence decay?

Right. As far as which I prefer..... I tend to like the influence-decay one more. I feel like it is useful to more players. I find myself doing lots of spy-in-cs-stuff in some games, and not at all in others.

But then agian, this ability is also found in a social policy, as aI recall. Should this stack with that, or replace it?

Yeah, I don't see much for us to do here either. Diplomatic Marriage will presumably not be a problem without Austria!

Go away, Hapsburgs. Nobody wants to play with you.

One way would be to somehow reduce the cost of refusing Edicts based on Dreamwarding - though I don't think we want to do that, it ends up being quite complicated due to the structure of the refusal costs.

We could bar civs from being able to refuse Edicts somehow, via a certain coverage of Dreamwarding, but that seems a bit harsh. (Same problem here with scaling up the cost of refusal for enemies, the refusal costs are difficult to scale simply.)

ugh... Just seems way to complex. Nevemind!

Do Edicts have a manifestation in T'a'r somehow?

I'm not sure if we need to have a crossover, but it's good to be sure.

Well, I'd say that T'a'r-related edicts make a lot of sense. "All T'a'r units gain +1 movement for 30 turns" or "cannot project T'a'r units for 20 turns" or whatever. Do we still have room for more?

But, beyond that, I don't think we need anything special.

It's only game-winning if the player was already very close to winning anyway, but I do see what you mean. Looks like the two above are our frontrunners.

Not very close, IMO. What if you send four projections to steal 4 votes from 4 civs? That's pretty darn good. If done in the last turn before a vote... yeah, kind of cheap.

I don't think it's necessarily a flavor problem that you're not doing it at home - it's a targeted use of the Power (sort of) where it gives you visible political rewards. For most folks, having their dreams warded wouldn't really affect them.

Yeah, Rand protecting his dreams from spying seems to have been a major thing he did-

OH CRAP.

1) we forgot to talk about T'a'r Eyes and Ears. Did we cut those?
2) Dreamwards should block T'a'r Eyes and Ears, or at least lessen their affect, right?

But then I start thinking that Dreamwards are becoming too awesome, especially as compared to Dreamspikes.

Should T'a'r EaE be related to any of these other things? They need to somehow interact with the T'a'r systems to justify their existence, right? Or... did we scrap them for that exact reason?

They could be the thing that provides vision in T'a'r around a given area (city)? (including your own).

Yeah, but I thought there was a word that the Tinkers called Aram when he killed someone? I can't remember or find it anyway!

No idea. Maybe "character that seemed like he'd have an interesting arc but then ultimately was unfulfilling"?

True, both your suggestion and my original one would almost necessitate leaving attacking the Tuatha'an to last due to incidental wars you'd end up in by attacking them. That's sort of what we were trying to achieve, I suppose - make it unattractive to attack them even though they can't defend themselves on the battlefield. We also do sort of have a precedent in BNW with Korea - their UA means attacking and conquering them early game is a constant drain on your resources, so it's often best to leave them until last - changing the strategies of all players that interact with them in a similar way to the Tuatha'an ones.

Wow... I've never thought about that aspect of Korea. I am embarrassed to say I don't quite understand why that would be the case. I've always just thought it gave you extra science from specialists and periodic science windfalls.

This was a nice and short post! So I've spent the remaining time editing all of our T'a'r stuff into the Misc summary. It all fit in quite nicely, but I think the misc summary is fairly full now. (I could see us breaking this out into its own summary if we wanted to include other small misc stuff in the Misc summary later.) I've highlighted some stuff in red that we haven't addressed yet - mostly small things that require clarification because we didn't explicitly discuss them when deciding how the related feature worked.

Cool. My comments on the red stuff is below. We can, of course, break this into its own summary later if need be.

Please ensure I haven't missed anything! Combat units such as wolves and Slayer didn't really come up very explicitly on there, and I'm not sure if they should. I figure they'll be described in more detail in the GP summary once we decide on the GPs that generate them? That said, it might be worth having a combat section to explain how combat-ish units like Wolves, Slayer, Forsaken, Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, and Lawless interact with the more civilian-ish projections that make up most of the population of the T'a'r map layer? Have we discussed that?

I think we probably need to address wolves and such in the summary. The truth is, I think we've created a mechanism (GPs) that will make them pretty uncommon, but have created a game role (harassing T'a'r units and improvements) that is quite important, and "feels" like it would be quite common through our conversation. We seem to be relying on them to balance some things (projection death and competitiveness of glimmers and such)

In any case, we need to flesh it out a bit more. Some solutions we could pursue:

1) They are not very numerous or frequent, but have a really splashy effect when used. (such as?)
2) They are rare, but NPC T'a'r enemies are numerous enough that this doesn't really matter
3) They are rare, but persist for a long time (or forever?) that this isn't a problem.
4) They are produced additionally by some non-GP means (GP ones are perhaps better or different)

thoughts?

I'd say forsaken probably only need to be addressed if their behavior is unique to T'a'r. If they're just attacking in the same manner they do in the waking world, we don't need to say much. But.... they're probably behaving somewhat differently, right?

What about Slayer? I imagine that he and the 'saken are definitely the most significant threat to player-controlled combat units. (Nightmares are probably mostly Projection-killers)

I also wasn't sure if we needed the "Great People" section at the end of the T'a'r section? I could see it being expanded to include their roles, or removed entirely and that topic covered in the GP summary? (The role of collecting T'a'r GP points and which GP types you can spawn, and how, with them.)

eh. Don't think it's hurting anybody by being there. Hard to say how needed it is until we see what the GPs are and how complex they will be. Perhaps what would need to be specified is any special rules that apply to GP projections/physical entrance into T'a'r. (not yet known of course).

Also, editing the Misc summary reminded me that we haven't discussed Shadar Logoth, which is on there as a placeholder. Is that in our agenda? I imagine we'll at least go back and finish off GPs before that.

Yeah, we do need to discuss SL. We should probably finish what we're doing (this is, after all, just a huge parenthetical to GPs!), but yeah, on the agenda!

OK, my comments on your summary below.

As I see the misc summary, though, I'm struck by:

Threads of the Pattern are Alignment-driven decisions presented to each civilization at intervals.

Didn't we specify those intervals? Or what that just FQuests and FDragon spawning and stuff?

This promotion has prerequisite promotions, <promotions>, as well as a prerequisite technology, <technology>.

these are both TBD.

A custom mission that puts the channeler herself to sleep (henceforth the "host" unit) and places a new unit in the T'a'r map layer (henceforth the "projection" unit) on any hex the player has active vision (as opposed to ever explored?).

I'm thinking active vision. I could be persuaded otherwise, though. I know the flavor suggests otherwise, but this does help make embassies and EaE more useful.

A projection unit has a lifetime of X turns.

What are we thinking for this? 10?

A projection can be expended (does this deal 50% damage to the host?) to create a Dreamward centering on its current hex.

I think it has to deal the damage. Otherwise, you'd drop the ward just to stave off death. Essentially a disband that gives you a cool ward as well.

A projection can attack and destroy Dreamwards and Dreamspikes (instantly? do the Dreamwards/spikes have health? how much damage does one projection do?)

Are you sure about the projections having the ability to do this? I wonder if this seriously steps on the usefulness of the GP-units/wolves. I know it certainly steps on the usefulness of Dreamspikes - boom, destroyed in one turn by enemy projection.

Maybe Wards can be destroyed by projections, but not spikes?

As far as your specific questions, I think my above question might help determine our answers. I'm thinking, though, that in the interest of simplicity, the spikes and wards don't really have health. Maybe they're destroyed similarly to a pillage action? (but can't be repaired, I'd guess). Then again, maybe wards work one way and spikes another.

Not sure if it should be instantaneous. Probably yes. But does it expect the projection?

Projections can be expended to gather a Glimmer of the Pattern from the hex they are currently standing on over the course of X turns.

X=5?

• Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are represented by improvement-like entities that exist on plots and are only visible from the T'a'r map layer. (They coexist with all existing plot modifiers such as Type, Terrain, Resource, Improvement, and Feature.)
• Dreamwards and Dreamspikes create an area of effect around them, 3 hexes in radius.
• Dreamwards are created by expending projections.
• Dreamspikes are created by expending a <GP type>.
• Only one T'a'r-related field can affect a given hex at a time. If placing a Dreamward or Dreamspike would cause two fields to be overlapped, the ability to place the Dreamward or Dreamspike is disabled.
• Dreamwards have the following effects on entities that exist on the hexes they cover:
  • Occupied cities controlled by the same player as the Dreamward produce 50% less occupied unhappiness.
  • CS diplo bonus under discussion
• Dreamspikes have the following effects on entities that exist on the hexes they cover:
  • Units cannot Travel within, into, or out of the range of a Dreamspike.
  • Envoys (see the Science Summary) controlled by the same player as the Dreamspike can Exhibit to cities from a range of 3.

OK, figured I had to tackle these en masse.

I'm wondering, as mentioned before, if Dreamspikes are way , way less cool than they need to be to justify a GP expenditure. As is, they seem less useful than wards, even. So I want to look at a few things here.

- Why do they both need to be an AoE? It seems to be that Dreamwards should effect Cities, and Dreamspikes should affect an area of effect. I don't know that there's any majorly compelling mechanical reason (or use, even) to having an AoE on a Ward - its bonuses are only felt on a nearby city. If the only reason we need them off of the city tile is to enable its destruction via Projection or other unit, then I suppose we could simply have the improvement exist on one Tile with a "Beam" connecting to the city. Still, no real need for an AoE.
If the reason it needs an AoE is to block Dreamspikes by "claiming" that AoE already, then I think, once again, that Wards are too powerful.

- On a related point, I'm not sure the two kinds of "fields" need to or should be mutually exclusive. Of course, one tile/city should only be able to be affected by one instance of each field type.

- Weren't we talking about Dreamspikes preventing T'a'r units to enter that area? I know that slightly breaks flavor, of course, but mechanically it seems like it might be necessary. Perhaps only GPs and Wolves can enter the zone - thus, it's protection against projections, and projections alone. And perhaps they CAN enter, but they move slowly or take damage while there in it. In general, I think the Dreamspikes need at least one more primary, useful ability. As is now, they're only useful for defense against a channeler-heavy army and useful for science users. That's not enough, IMO.

- On that note, the extra exhibit range does seem so very random. Part of me wants to unify it with the idea above and slow them down. I know you wanted it to be more "positive," but this just really feels quite odd to me, as a mechanic - especially as associated with a Dreamspike. Gah. Do you like it this way?

If a player gathers a Glimmer of the same nationality as the previous Glimmers they gathered, then it will only increase their T'a'r Great Person points per turn by 50% of its normal value.

my issues with this are above in the previous section of the post.

The WoTMod analogue for Hidden Antiquity Sites exists in T'a'r and can be discovered/explored/something by projections after being unlocked by a policy.

OK, so I'm not sure where to go with this. I can see either them being harvested by the Projections themselves, or just detected. The latter is a little uninspiring, though.

What if Gathering a glimmer has a chance to discover one or something? (post social policy unlock)? Maybe just a full-point glimmer?

Or maybe they're created when T'a'r GPs are expended (do those leave glimmers?)?

Maybe simply after enough Gathering, one is located?

The simplest is of course to simply make it identical to the social policy, but make them be harvested via Projections.

ok! That post got longer!

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, so it's only the completion of the Gathering that matters, not the time at which it is started? I don't feel like that really lines up with what I perceive to be the purpose of the 50%-from-same-civ-thing. The purpose as I see it is:

A) incentivize exploration and finding other civs to Gather from.
B) provide for competition by not encouraging one civ to "hog" all the Glimmers up immediately.

I feel like the way you're suggesting it, at best we're encouraging a three turn spread between two civs. It would be better if the ideal pace required a bunch of civs to work efficiently. I think i'd prefer that a "full points" Gathering is only "unlocked" when a new Gathering is initiated after a different civ 's Glimmer is successfully Gathered (as opposed to beginning th eGathering while it's still only one turn in and still getting the full benefit). The flavor is intended to be that you learned something new from a different civ, now you can learn something again from this first civ with fresh eyes.

The Spirit of the rule is clearly that you're supposed to spread out and diversify if you want max efficiency. True, you can hog them all, but you'll lose T'a'rGP points. It should be a balance between wanting to miss out on potential GP points by hogging them all..... and being worried that other civs will steal them while you're waiting.

I don't think this will be nearly this big a problem - I see the primary limiting factor in trying to gather multiple glimmers being their placement on the map and actually reaching those hexes, not the player's choice of which one to go for first. Given the number of T'a'r units a player will have at a given time (not many) and the number of glimmers on the map, and the general distribution of those glimmers (focused around capitals, and spread for various other GP abilities), it won't be practical to be gathering so many of them simultaneously.

Modifying the value of other glimmers on completion of gathering is also more consistent with the way CiV handles systems like this, where a partial gather is effectively worthless (its only value is progress toward a completed gather, Improvements and Antiquity Sites being good examples of thing) - it would be a very subtle difference for the player. A structure where another gather has to finish before you can reset the state back to full value by starting a second one is also relatively difficult to keep track of - what happens if the second one is interrupted?

I see the primary value of the 50%-discount being to encourage players not to just target their nearest neighbor. It also balances the pathological case where two players are isolated from all others by geography. They have no competition for glimmers, but other players elsewhere don't suffer in comparison because the variety the others experience offsets the consistent glimmer-gathering done by the isolated players. (And encouraging players to search farther afield means more competition - which means it's more difficult to construct optimal scenarios where players gather multiple different nationalities within a single turn for maximum benefit.)

Flavor wise, I don't think it's a problem - most of the "gathering" process that takes time could be classification or searching work in the area the glimmer is hidden in, it's only in the final moment of "discovery" that it matters if your civ has fresh eyes for the gathering in question.

A completely theoretically optimal gathering schedule (which is impossible to achieve in normal play), would be to finish gathering a number of glimmers every turn equal to the number of other civilizations, in an order that meant no two consecutive gatherings were from the same player. I think the force of competition and map layout will achieve the spirit of the rule that you've outlined - where players are encouraged to diversify and gather glimmers from different civs, but be aware of some glimmers that they could harvest for less points from their nearest neighbors.

On that last point though, I'm not sure that will happen very often, and even then it should only be with very nearby players. Glimmers can only be seen from T'a'r, so only T'a'r units can reveal them, which means most players will likely want to grab most glimmers they see, regardless of nationality, because it's more efficient to have that guaranteed output than to work towards a theoretical optimal that might produce 0, depending on the state of the game. And even saying that, I don't think they'll be doubling up on a single civ all that often either - just because T'a'r units won't usually be used as sentries, as we discussed earlier, because of the way they interact with each other and their limited lifespans. So the units will be trying to be moving, which will often lead to finding more glimmers from different civs in the process.

And keeping all of that in mind, it isn't a huge upheaval to switch between these two alternatives later if we find it doesn't work out. I'd be keen to see us stick to the CiV design paradigms of how missions and consuming/constructing things on tiles work and only deviate if it actually creates a problem.

what I mean by offense is that you'd use it on a CS that wasn't your ally, as a means to gain an edge against the current ally. Defense is of course just preserving your lead.

Right, I see what you mean. I think this is more defense on an individual CS level, though it is "offense" on a diplo victory level, in that it helps a player win (rather than prevents an opponent from winning).

Right. As far as which I prefer..... I tend to like the influence-decay one more. I feel like it is useful to more players. I find myself doing lots of spy-in-cs-stuff in some games, and not at all in others.

But then agian, this ability is also found in a social policy, as aI recall. Should this stack with that, or replace it?

I like the influence decay one as well. I think we'll need to decide on the policy usage when we're doing policies and see what kinds of roles we need to fulfill and how we can do that. I'd say replacing or stacking with the policy would be fine from the T'a'r side, but the we won't know if it's fine from the policy side until then.

Well, I'd say that T'a'r-related edicts make a lot of sense. "All T'a'r units gain +1 movement for 30 turns" or "cannot project T'a'r units for 20 turns" or whatever. Do we still have room for more?

But, beyond that, I don't think we need anything special.

Yeah, a few more Edicts (Generic Edicts, unless we wanted to bump up the count for each Ajah, or replace an existing one) could definitely work.

Reflections in Tel'aran'rhiod
Glimmers are created at double their normal rate for the next 30 turns.

Sisters and Dreamers
Projections of Aes Sedai deal double "passive damage" to other projections in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.

Not very close, IMO. What if you send four projections to steal 4 votes from 4 civs? That's pretty darn good. If done in the last turn before a vote... yeah, kind of cheap.

4 votes is pretty close. I can definitely see the sniping potential, but it's also a lot of synchronization to drop so many Dreamwards in the right place at exactly the right time (when people would presumably be watching for them). It's definitely strong, but this goes back to splashy conditions in the end-game that should make players win. If you're within 4 votes of winning, then you're definitely in the lead and will have at most one competitor for the vote count.

Yeah, Rand protecting his dreams from spying seems to have been a major thing he did-

OH CRAP.

1) we forgot to talk about T'a'r Eyes and Ears. Did we cut those?
2) Dreamwards should block T'a'r Eyes and Ears, or at least lessen their affect, right?

But then I start thinking that Dreamwards are becoming too awesome, especially as compared to Dreamspikes.

Should T'a'r EaE be related to any of these other things? They need to somehow interact with the T'a'r systems to justify their existence, right? Or... did we scrap them for that exact reason?

They could be the thing that provides vision in T'a'r around a given area (city)? (including your own).

I believe we cut T'a'r EaE? We discussed them, but I didn't think we ever came up with enough unique functionality to make them distinct from normal EaE.

Wow... I've never thought about that aspect of Korea. I am embarrassed to say I don't quite understand why that would be the case. I've always just thought it gave you extra science from specialists and periodic science windfalls.

Huh, you know, I've been thinking Korea's UA from the Samurai Invasion scenario was a part of their real one. (The whole "they never die, and continue to spawn units near their original capital after they are completely conquered"). I guess a scenario is not as good a main-game precedent then!

I think we probably need to address wolves and such in the summary. The truth is, I think we've created a mechanism (GPs) that will make them pretty uncommon, but have created a game role (harassing T'a'r units and improvements) that is quite important, and "feels" like it would be quite common through our conversation. We seem to be relying on them to balance some things (projection death and competitiveness of glimmers and such)

In any case, we need to flesh it out a bit more. Some solutions we could pursue:

1) They are not very numerous or frequent, but have a really splashy effect when used. (such as?)
2) They are rare, but NPC T'a'r enemies are numerous enough that this doesn't really matter
3) They are rare, but persist for a long time (or forever?) that this isn't a problem.
4) They are produced additionally by some non-GP means (GP ones are perhaps better or different)

thoughts?

I'm actually liking #3 - powerful combat units that persist forever in T'a'r. Depending on the prevalence of nightmares, this could allow T'a'r-leading players to use these units to make their expeditions into T'a'r markedly safer by clearing nightmares away from the lands around them.

This does kind of conflict with the notion of Dreamspikes vs Dreamwards making Dreamspikes too weak though - if the permanent units are the ones that can destroy Dreamspikes, even if there are much fewer of them, it's moving in the same direction as projections being able to destroy Dreamspikes. (Not quite as bad, but still makes Dreamspikes easier to get rid of.)

#1 would be a nice approach, but I'm at a loss as to what that splashy effect could be.

I'd say forsaken probably only need to be addressed if their behavior is unique to T'a'r. If they're just attacking in the same manner they do in the waking world, we don't need to say much. But.... they're probably behaving somewhat differently, right?

Are they behaving differently? They're basically just hunting for things owned by Light players and destroying them.

What about Slayer? I imagine that he and the 'saken are definitely the most significant threat to player-controlled combat units. (Nightmares are probably mostly Projection-killers)

Do we want to have Slayer as a one-time-only entity in T'a'r towards the start of the LB time? We've generally avoided one-time-only folks where they weren't the central pillar of the story. (The Dragon being the example of how important we want one-time-only characters to be, for them to be included as once-offs mechanically.) It seems like Slayer's origins are rooted in growing up in the Town (according to his wiki page) - would we want to make Slayer a more general Shadow-related GP type that has particular relevance to T'a'r? Maybe he's generated by T'a'r GP points but only usable by Shadow players? We could make wolfbrothers the counterpart of that - available only to Light? (Though didn't Elyas say something about the wolf gift not being related to a person's goodness?)

eh. Don't think it's hurting anybody by being there. Hard to say how needed it is until we see what the GPs are and how complex they will be. Perhaps what would need to be specified is any special rules that apply to GP projections/physical entrance into T'a'r. (not yet known of course).

Cool, we'll see if it expands as we go.

Yeah, we do need to discuss SL. We should probably finish what we're doing (this is, after all, just a huge parenthetical to GPs!), but yeah, on the agenda!

Cool, the rest of GPs then Shadar Logoth after this!

Didn't we specify those intervals? Or what that just FQuests and FDragon spawning and stuff?

We did specify those intervals. I don't have time to go through and find our finalized plan for that tonight, so keep this quote block alive and I'll do it tomorrow!

I'm thinking active vision. I could be persuaded otherwise, though. I know the flavor suggests otherwise, but this does help make embassies and EaE more useful.

I'm thinking active vision as well. Though that only makes EaE more useful (embassies don't provide active vision, just "explored hexes"). Active vision seems like a more reasonable range in a game of CiV. Removed the red.

What are we thinking for this? 10?

Sounds reasonable, though maybe a bit higher. Depends on how long it takes to gather a glimmer - we don't want the difference between the two to be so small that you almost need active vision on the hex where the glimmer is (necessitating a double T'a'r scout to gather most glimmers). I can see that idea being somewhat useful to us mechanically, but I think players would find it frustrating.

15?

I think it has to deal the damage. Otherwise, you'd drop the ward just to stave off death. Essentially a disband that gives you a cool ward as well.

Unless it takes multiple turns to "create" a Dreamward? (Much like building an improvement.) That way it would never be effective as an escape tactic, but also doesn't cost you a whole bunch of health.

Are you sure about the projections having the ability to do this? I wonder if this seriously steps on the usefulness of the GP-units/wolves. I know it certainly steps on the usefulness of Dreamspikes - boom, destroyed in one turn by enemy projection.

Maybe Wards can be destroyed by projections, but not spikes?

Dreamwards being destructible by projections and not Dreamspikes sounds good to me. Based on stuff below, I agree that this interferes with the usefulness of GP/combat-ish units in T'a'r, if projections can destroy Dreamspikes. I've removed this from the summary.

As far as your specific questions, I think my above question might help determine our answers. I'm thinking, though, that in the interest of simplicity, the spikes and wards don't really have health. Maybe they're destroyed similarly to a pillage action? (but can't be repaired, I'd guess). Then again, maybe wards work one way and spikes another.

Not sure if it should be instantaneous. Probably yes. But does it expect the projection?

I think we'd only want to go with a pillage-like system if we have a way to repair them - otherwise destroying them is just simpler for everyone to keep track of (us and the player). Because then pillaging effectively is destroying, except we need to represent the pillaged thing left behind, despite it not doing anything.

I agree on instantaneous destruction for the Dreamwards - sounds like it should expend the projection then? It takes more investment to turn over someone else's Dreamward into your own (covering a CS for example) that way.

X=5?

Sounds like a good baseline - there are presumably policies/techs/something that make this faster. We can address those in their relevant summaries.

OK, figured I had to tackle these en masse.

I'm wondering, as mentioned before, if Dreamspikes are way , way less cool than they need to be to justify a GP expenditure. As is, they seem less useful than wards, even. So I want to look at a few things here.

- Why do they both need to be an AoE? It seems to be that Dreamwards should effect Cities, and Dreamspikes should affect an area of effect. I don't know that there's any majorly compelling mechanical reason (or use, even) to having an AoE on a Ward - its bonuses are only felt on a nearby city. If the only reason we need them off of the city tile is to enable its destruction via Projection or other unit, then I suppose we could simply have the improvement exist on one Tile with a "Beam" connecting to the city. Still, no real need for an AoE.
If the reason it needs an AoE is to block Dreamspikes by "claiming" that AoE already, then I think, once again, that Wards are too powerful.

I agree that Dreamwards are turning out to be more useful than Dreamspikes, because Dreamwards provide generally useful bonuses to captured cities and any old CS alliance, whereas Dreamspikes are useful in a narrower set of situations.

AoE Dreamwards could potentially take effect on two cities at once. (Useful for the enterprising warmonger that has taken two cities close together in quick succession.) This isn't particularly abusable since they're useful on cities that you've conquered, so you didn't choose where to found those cities - only possibly worked out that you could encompass both at once.

- On a related point, I'm not sure the two kinds of "fields" need to or should be mutually exclusive. Of course, one tile/city should only be able to be affected by one instance of each field type.

Making them non-mutually-exclusive is definitely possible and would even up the power levels a bit. I'm happy to do that - shall I change it over now then?

- Weren't we talking about Dreamspikes preventing T'a'r units to enter that area? I know that slightly breaks flavor, of course, but mechanically it seems like it might be necessary. Perhaps only GPs and Wolves can enter the zone - thus, it's protection against projections, and projections alone. And perhaps they CAN enter, but they move slowly or take damage while there in it. In general, I think the Dreamspikes need at least one more primary, useful ability. As is now, they're only useful for defense against a channeler-heavy army and useful for science users. That's not enough, IMO.

- On that note, the extra exhibit range does seem so very random. Part of me wants to unify it with the idea above and slow them down. I know you wanted it to be more "positive," but this just really feels quite odd to me, as a mechanic - especially as associated with a Dreamspike. Gah. Do you like it this way?

I strongly prefer the exhibit range to slowing the Envoys down, because I think the positive bonus thing is instrumental to this working as a part of the player experience. I wouldn't mind using a different, more flavorfully aligned bonus though.

Earlier on in the Dreamspikes' lifetime we discussed yield enhancements on Dreamspikes but worried that they would be too powerful. Do we think we've gone too far the other way and could benefit from re-introducing that? do they provide some kind of Science bonus? The drawback to that approach is that a Science bonus is more useful for Domination players than a Traveling block in most circumstances (certainly more reliable, and a safer location for the Dreamspikes itself) and we want to encourage the more flavorfully-aligned usage if we can.

A reference to the WoT wiki shows me the following about Dreamspikes though: "Touching the barrier in Tel'aran'rhiod drains the energy from a person and can likely kill them." This seems like a good flavor justification from stopping T'a'r units from entering Dreamspikes' AoE - reserving destroying them for GP-spawned T'a'r entities such as wolves/Slayer. I'd say we can just straight up add that ability on top of what we have, regardless of how/if we change the Science component of it.

OK, so I'm not sure where to go with this. I can see either them being harvested by the Projections themselves, or just detected. The latter is a little uninspiring, though.

What if Gathering a glimmer has a chance to discover one or something? (post social policy unlock)? Maybe just a full-point glimmer?

Or maybe they're created when T'a'r GPs are expended (do those leave glimmers?)?

Maybe simply after enough Gathering, one is located?

The simplest is of course to simply make it identical to the social policy, but make them be harvested via Projections.

ok! That post got longer!

At first, I was thinking that we wouldn't want to connect the availability of these Sites to players' proficiency with T'a'r (via gathering glimmer rates, for example), but rather to give Culture players to have an in-road to make T'a'r useful to them.

But thinking more on it, the whole T'a'r system is an available investment for the Culture players. They will know that Hidden Antiquity Sites are gated by T'a'r and they should plan accordingly to have a reasonable T'a'r positioning in order to capitalize on that.

Also, the Hidden Antiquity Sites are a great example of a positive bonus that's relevant to a victory, because you can certainly win the Culture victory without them. (The primary advantage is that their discovery is culture-dependent and therefore there's less competition for them.) I've won Culture games before without following the Exploration policy tree that unlocks the Hidden Sites.

I think we'll still want to gate the Hidden Sites on something Culture related, because that's core to what makes them useful (you're only competing with other Culture players). In BNW that's the Exploration finisher. I like the one you suggested where every X glimmers you gather, you have a chance of "revealing" a Site in T'a'r for you to gain a GW from (flavor pending). So if we add that as an additional gate on finding individual Sites, we'll probably want to shift the "able to discovery Hidden Antiquity Sites" thing down from a policy finisher into a policy on a Culture-focused policy tree.

We'll also need a spawning mechanism. Like BNW, these Sites should "exist" on the map but players only gain the ability to see them after they do certain things. (In BNW finish the Exploration policy tree, for us, pending above, adopt some relevant policy and gather some glimmers, which will reveal one Site.) Spawning these Sites on the expenditure of T'a'r GPs sounds quite sensible. Do we want to spawn glimmers as well for those GPs? (Since you can't harvest your own glimmers, this doesn't create any dangerous positive feedback loops.)

Also, what's the flavor of these Sites? As you've mentioned, do we want them to be Sites in T'a'r gathered by projections or Sites revealed from T'a'r to be dealt with in the main layers? I can see either approach work - possibly leaning towards the former to give projections more things to be doing.

 

[counterpoint]

I don't think this will be nearly this big a problem - I see the primary limiting factor in trying to gather multiple glimmers being their placement on the map and actually reaching those hexes, not the player's choice of which one to go for first. Given the number of T'a'r units a player will have at a given time (not many) and the number of glimmers on the map, and the general distribution of those glimmers (focused around capitals, and spread for various other GP abilities), it won't be practical to be gathering so many of them simultaneously.

Modifying the value of other glimmers on completion of gathering is also more consistent with the way CiV handles systems like this, where a partial gather is effectively worthless (its only value is progress toward a completed gather, Improvements and Antiquity Sites being good examples of thing) - it would be a very subtle difference for the player. A structure where another gather has to finish before you can reset the state back to full value by starting a second one is also relatively difficult to keep track of - what happens if the second one is interrupted?

I see the primary value of the 50%-discount being to encourage players not to just target their nearest neighbor. It also balances the pathological case where two players are isolated from all others by geography. They have no competition for glimmers, but other players elsewhere don't suffer in comparison because the variety the others experience offsets the consistent glimmer-gathering done by the isolated players. (And encouraging players to search farther afield means more competition - which means it's more difficult to construct optimal scenarios where players gather multiple different nationalities within a single turn for maximum benefit.)

Flavor wise, I don't think it's a problem - most of the "gathering" process that takes time could be classification or searching work in the area the glimmer is hidden in, it's only in the final moment of "discovery" that it matters if your civ has fresh eyes for the gathering in question.

A completely theoretically optimal gathering schedule (which is impossible to achieve in normal play), would be to finish gathering a number of glimmers every turn equal to the number of other civilizations, in an order that meant no two consecutive gatherings were from the same player. I think the force of competition and map layout will achieve the spirit of the rule that you've outlined - where players are encouraged to diversify and gather glimmers from different civs, but be aware of some glimmers that they could harvest for less points from their nearest neighbors.

On that last point though, I'm not sure that will happen very often, and even then it should only be with very nearby players. Glimmers can only be seen from T'a'r, so only T'a'r units can reveal them, which means most players will likely want to grab most glimmers they see, regardless of nationality, because it's more efficient to have that guaranteed output than to work towards a theoretical optimal that might produce 0, depending on the state of the game. And even saying that, I don't think they'll be doubling up on a single civ all that often either - just because T'a'r units won't usually be used as sentries, as we discussed earlier, because of the way they interact with each other and their limited lifespans. So the units will be trying to be moving, which will often lead to finding more glimmers from different civs in the process.

And keeping all of that in mind, it isn't a huge upheaval to switch between these two alternatives later if we find it doesn't work out. I'd be keen to see us stick to the CiV design paradigms of how missions and consuming/constructing things on tiles work and only deviate if it actually creates a problem.

I think it's probably fine doing it the way you're suggesting, for consistency with the rest of civ. That said, I'm not convinced that it is the best way. I'm not thinking of this primarily as a means to "spread" people's T'a'r activity out all around the world - the main point is to "slow down" the consumption of a close neighbor's Glimmers in order to allow for proper competition. It seems to me that at the point T'a'r becomes unlocked, there may very well be a handful of them sitting in easy reach of your capital, via a close neighbor. A civ with, say, a 20 turn lead in T'a'r access (due to tech tree or other prioritization) would snatch those up quite easily, making the competition for said Glimmers (which we view as a design priority) non-existent. I don't think "well, they focused on it, they deserve it" is a viable way to look at it, etiher - I kind of hate the way Faith/Religion in CiV is somewhat "get it strong early, or don't even bother," and don't want that to occur here as well.

The hope would be to tempt a civ to spread out the consuming of that first set of glimmers over the course of more turns, for the increased rewards. I don't think that is trivial

So the specific mechanism I proposed (must wait til the other glimmer finishes) has been shown, rightfully, to be out of sync with the way civ operates. What else could we consider, instead? A simply X turn delay in which Glimmers go dim?

I like the influence decay one as well. I think we'll need to decide on the policy usage when we're doing policies and see what kinds of roles we need to fulfill and how we can do that. I'd say replacing or stacking with the policy would be fine from the T'a'r side, but the we won't know if it's fine from the policy side until then.

ok. agreed, then.

Yeah, a few more Edicts (Generic Edicts, unless we wanted to bump up the count for each Ajah, or replace an existing one) could definitely work.

Cool. So these are just General edicts, then? Makes sense. It's not that there's any one Ajah that uses them more.

Reflections in Tel'aran'rhiod
Glimmers are created at double their normal rate for the next 30 turns.

What do you mean by Created? Aren't glimmers created when a GP is expended? Do you mean they pay out double their GP points, or that they are Gathered at double their rate?

Sisters and Dreamers
Projections of Aes Sedai deal double "passive damage" to other projections in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.

This one's a little wimpy. Probably fine, though, just not very splashy.

Possible additions/alternatives as a nod to the flavor of the Tower Schism:
Root out Traitors
Projections of Aes Sedai have +2 Sight in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.
OR
Projections of Aes Sedai last 5 extra turns in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.

Ward the Amyrlin's Study
Any Projection in Tel'aran'rhiod suffers 30 points of damage per turn ended within City-State or Tar Valon borders for the next 20 turns.

I gather that none of those are refusable, of course.

4 votes is pretty close. I can definitely see the sniping potential, but it's also a lot of synchronization to drop so many Dreamwards in the right place at exactly the right time (when people would presumably be watching for them). It's definitely strong, but this goes back to splashy conditions in the end-game that should make players win. If you're within 4 votes of winning, then you're definitely in the lead and will have at most one competitor for the vote count.

Yes, four votes is close, but remember that this could theoretically be 15 votes. Yes, that would be hard to do, nigh impossible, but still possible, and as I've said in previous conversations, I don't view a task being really difficult as necessarily indicating that it deserves a tremendous reward.

The main thing here is that this seems very swingy when compared to the benefits we've afforded the other victory conditions through T'a'r. Unlocking hidden antiquity sites is a drop in the bucket in many games, compared to this. Yes, four votes isn't a huge amount, but it is double what you get for Wold Religion and stuff, which is certainly significant right?

Also, do keep in mind that stealing one vote is in effect stealing 2, if against a direct competitor - you gain a vote, and they LOSE a vote.

I think the fact that this seems super Snipe-able - whereas the other T'a'r things do not - is the source of my major projem with this. You could be totally dominating in T'a'r the whole game, but one guy has one good turn in T'a'r, and he wins. I don't like that this doesn't really allow a player a chance to respond.

So, with that in mind, I'm fine with this, providing we do one of the following:

1) Wards take more than one turn to construct, as you suggested. This way, a player has a chance to intervene to stop the theft of the vote.
2) You "copy" the vote, without the stealing it - the original owner still has it (thus it's basically just +1 vote for you).

I believe we cut T'a'r EaE? We discussed them, but I didn't think we ever came up with enough unique functionality to make them distinct from normal EaE.

ok! That explains that then!

Huh, you know, I've been thinking Korea's UA from the Samurai Invasion scenario was a part of their real one. (The whole "they never die, and continue to spawn units near their original capital after they are completely conquered"). I guess a scenario is not as good a main-game precedent then!

ok. I feel better now. Need to try that one, though.

I'm actually liking #3 - powerful combat units that persist forever in T'a'r. Depending on the prevalence of nightmares, this could allow T'a'r-leading players to use these units to make their expeditions into T'a'r markedly safer by clearing nightmares away from the lands around them.

This does kind of conflict with the notion of Dreamspikes vs Dreamwards making Dreamspikes too weak though - if the permanent units are the ones that can destroy Dreamspikes, even if there are much fewer of them, it's moving in the same direction as projections being able to destroy Dreamspikes. (Not quite as bad, but still makes Dreamspikes easier to get rid of.)

#1 would be a nice approach, but I'm at a loss as to what that splashy effect could be.

Alright. You make a good point, for sure, regarding this making DS's easier to destroy...

I wonder if, perhaps, DSs "fight back" or something. That the wolf has to enter into combat with it or something. Or that it can shoot at the wolf like a city. But then, if that's the case, such battles would seem to be pre-ordained based on which thing has the most stats.

Maybe instead, a wolf that destroys a DS is consumed in the process? So, they're permanent units.... until they do that. So it's GP-for-GP, a trade. Perhaps each wolf can do this action 2 or 3 times, like a Spread Religion, or something.

But are they also consumed when destroying Wards?

Oh, the other thing I just thought of, and I feel kind of dumb for not thinking of it before - Maybe DSs are destroyed by the Wolfbrother GP (or any T'a'r GP) itself, not necessarily the wolves. If that consumes the GP (even if in a Spread Religion fashion that would then lock them out of spawning a Wolf) that would prevent the ability to build up an army of Wolves that make you immune to DSs - you'd need to choose between Unit defense or DS defense.

Are we ok with this, considering we weren't previously considering the GPs themselves actually being in the T'a'r layer (instead sending a projection) - though this is definitely a flavorful nod when using the Wolfbrother).

If we do that, are the GPs themselves needed to destroy Wards, or can wolves do that?

Are they behaving differently? They're basically just hunting for things owned by Light players and destroying them.

Yeah, but are they doing their typical attacks and stuff? It seems to me that wolves and such likely stand zero chance against them.... which, I suppose makes sense. The thing is, we can basically make wolves - and projections and Nightmares - stay the same strength throughout the game, right? The forsaken being unaltered messes with that, which is kind of annoying.

Do we want to have Slayer as a one-time-only entity in T'a'r towards the start of the LB time? We've generally avoided one-time-only folks where they weren't the central pillar of the story. (The Dragon being the example of how important we want one-time-only characters to be, for them to be included as once-offs mechanically.) It seems like Slayer's origins are rooted in growing up in the Town (according to his wiki page) - would we want to make Slayer a more general Shadow-related GP type that has particular relevance to T'a'r? Maybe he's generated by T'a'r GP points but only usable by Shadow players? We could make wolfbrothers the counterpart of that - available only to Light? (Though didn't Elyas say something about the wolf gift not being related to a person's goodness?)

Eh, I don't want to overdesign the Slayer thing. Probably he should probably just be a Forsaken stand-in (perhaps a unique unit skin/icon) that only exists in T'a'r. He *could* be a rogue wolfbrother unit or something, but that seems a bit much.

Cool, we'll see if it expands as we go.

Phrasing!

Cool, the rest of GPs then Shadar Logoth after this!

nice.

We did specify those intervals. I don't have time to go through and find our finalized plan for that tonight, so keep this quote block alive and I'll do it tomorrow!

Yeah, I just looked through the alignment summary, and it isn't there..... do we have to dig through the meat of the thread?

Sounds reasonable, though maybe a bit higher. Depends on how long it takes to gather a glimmer - we don't want the difference between the two to be so small that you almost need active vision on the hex where the glimmer is (necessitating a double T'a'r scout to gather most glimmers). I can see that idea being somewhat useful to us mechanically, but I think players would find it frustrating.

15?

Assuming a Gathering takes 5 turns, I think 15 is probably fine.

Unless it takes multiple turns to "create" a Dreamward? (Much like building an improvement.) That way it would never be effective as an escape tactic, but also doesn't cost you a whole bunch of health.

Yeah, I think these feels a *little* weird, but is probably mechanically necessary, both for this issue here, and also, potentially, to prevent abuse/imbalance in Wards (see Diplo rant above).

so, how long? 2? 3 turns? 5? eleventy?

Dreamwards being destructible by projections and not Dreamspikes sounds good to me. Based on stuff below, I agree that this interferes with the usefulness of GP/combat-ish units in T'a'r, if projections can destroy Dreamspikes. I've removed this from the summary.

ok. good. more comments on this below.

I think we'd only want to go with a pillage-like system if we have a way to repair them - otherwise destroying them is just simpler for everyone to keep track of (us and the player). Because then pillaging effectively is destroying, except we need to represent the pillaged thing left behind, despite it not doing anything.

I agree on instantaneous destruction for the Dreamwards - sounds like it should expend the projection then? It takes more investment to turn over someone else's Dreamward into your own (covering a CS for example) that way.

Definitely. That's a good idea. Tit for tat. Consumes the projection, but happens instantaneously.

Sounds like a good baseline - there are presumably policies/techs/something that make this faster. We can address those in their relevant summaries.

right.

I agree that Dreamwards are turning out to be more useful than Dreamspikes, because Dreamwards provide generally useful bonuses to captured cities and any old CS alliance, whereas Dreamspikes are useful in a narrower set of situations.

AoE Dreamwards could potentially take effect on two cities at once. (Useful for the enterprising warmonger that has taken two cities close together in quick succession.) This isn't particularly abusable since they're useful on cities that you've conquered, so you didn't choose where to found those cities - only possibly worked out that you could encompass both at once.

Yeha, I'm not so much worried about abuse so much as Clutter and confusion from a user-experience. We don't want huge translucent auras covering the map. And we also can't have them only visible when in the T'a'r layer, sinc ethat will make it confusing when it comes time to Travel or figure out your unhappiness issues... right?

Can you think of an elegant way to represent this all visually? Something like that City Limits mod?

Making them non-mutually-exclusive is definitely possible and would even up the power levels a bit. I'm happy to do that - shall I change it over now then?

ok, now I'm having second thoughts.

I'm wondering if, in fact, Dreamspikes should always Trump. The main reason for this is that, if a DS prevents passage in T'a'r (for projections), that means any Ward contained within the DS radius would be essentially invulnerable and permanent. Seems like an unintended, really powerful side effect.

I'm tempted to say that any Wards actually within a DS's radius are automatically destroyed upon its creation. As far as whether their radii can overlap (assuming the Ward is actually placed outside of the DS's radius itself), I suppose I don't really care either way. Logically (according to above), the DS should trump and the Ward should be left with less territory than it'd normally have. But on the other hand, the "no T'a'r units within DS" thing is already somewhat flavor-sketchy, so i'd be happy with ignoring this rigorous enforcement of that logic. What do you think?

That reminds me, are Wards permanent if not destroyed?

I strongly prefer the exhibit range to slowing the Envoys down, because I think the positive bonus thing is instrumental to this working as a part of the player experience. I wouldn't mind using a different, more flavorfully aligned bonus though.

Earlier on in the Dreamspikes' lifetime we discussed yield enhancements on Dreamspikes but worried that they would be too powerful. Do we think we've gone too far the other way and could benefit from re-introducing that? do they provide some kind of Science bonus? The drawback to that approach is that a Science bonus is more useful for Domination players than a Traveling block in most circumstances (certainly more reliable, and a safer location for the Dreamspikes itself) and we want to encourage the more flavorfully-aligned usage if we can.

A reference to the WoT wiki shows me the following about Dreamspikes though: "Touching the barrier in Tel'aran'rhiod drains the energy from a person and can likely kill them." This seems like a good flavor justification from stopping T'a'r units from entering Dreamspikes' AoE - reserving destroying them for GP-spawned T'a'r entities such as wolves/Slayer. I'd say we can just straight up add that ability on top of what we have, regardless of how/if we change the Science component of it.

Yeah, I figured you'd say that regarding the Bonus-aspect to Envoys. That said, I still really am not "feelin it" on this. Feels flavorfully bad and also somewhat mechanically clunky - this is something I much more prefer as a Philosophical Tenet at Tier 3.

I don't like the idea of yields, either, basically because it seems like then DSs just become mainly used for their yields.... which, as you allude to, has huge effects on the rest of the victory types as well.

So, while on hold with the gas company, I came up with some alternate ideas, revolving around Envoys and such. Some of these are still somewhat weak flavorfully, but I think they're all better than the Envoy distance thing. They are also of varying degrees of "bonus-ness".

1a) When Exhibiting in a city, the receiving civ normally gets a bonus (quoted from the summary: "in the region of 500 Gold, specific bonuses pending the decision on which Innovations are unlocked by which Technology. If a DS is erected on that city, This bonus could be instead given to the Exhibiting player. The DS prevents the receiving player from learning all they can from blah blah blah. This doesn't so much help the science victory, as much as help a civ generally who is pursuing a science victory.
1b) The receiving player and exhibiting player share the bonus in some ratio.
1c) the receiving player may or may not receive the bonus. The exhibiting player receives a dump of science at the time. Perhaps the most flavorfully justified (you spy on them as they use your technology blah blah blah) and certainly the most directly contributing to a science victory.
1d) the receiving player may or may not receive the bonus. The exhibiting player receives a production discount/hammers towards the construction of the next envoy (in which city?)

Question, though: does it matter who build the dreamspike? Does it have to be a "friendly" Dreamspike, or can you take advantage of a players "defensive" DS to fuel your science victory?

2) If a Dreamspike is constructed in one of your cities, that city can produce envoys faster/receives a production discount. Mechanically clean, but... not really flavorful. In isolation from your enemies, you can prepare an exhibition with blah blah blah.

what do you think? All of these are superior, IMO.

At first, I was thinking that we wouldn't want to connect the availability of these Sites to players' proficiency with T'a'r (via gathering glimmer rates, for example), but rather to give Culture players to have an in-road to make T'a'r useful to them.

But thinking more on it, the whole T'a'r system is an available investment for the Culture players. They will know that Hidden Antiquity Sites are gated by T'a'r and they should plan accordingly to have a reasonable T'a'r positioning in order to capitalize on that.

Also, the Hidden Antiquity Sites are a great example of a positive bonus that's relevant to a victory, because you can certainly win the Culture victory without them. (The primary advantage is that their discovery is culture-dependent and therefore there's less competition for them.) I've won Culture games before without following the Exploration policy tree that unlocks the Hidden Sites.

I should say now that I just won a culture game on Emporer as Austria without even touching Hidden Sites. In fact, I almost NEVER go for the Exploration tree. I'm sure I'm missing out, but I think I've only really ever gotten to them in one or two culture games.

I think we'll still want to gate the Hidden Sites on something Culture related, because that's core to what makes them useful (you're only competing with other Culture players). In BNW that's the Exploration finisher. I like the one you suggested where every X glimmers you gather, you have a chance of "revealing" a Site in T'a'r for you to gain a GW from (flavor pending). So if we add that as an additional gate on finding individual Sites, we'll probably want to shift the "able to discovery Hidden Antiquity Sites" thing down from a policy finisher into a policy on a Culture-focused policy tree.

I think this is a good idea. For sure, it does need to be culture-related, but also being T'a'r related is a good thing, though I don't think it should require absolutely T'a'r domination to get a lot out of it. Should probably line-up somewhat similar to the HSites in BNW, if perhaps a little trickier.

Making it a lower-level policy is probably a good idea. If they're being revealed by consumption of Glimmers (or by accumulation of GP points, or by use of T'a'r GP abilities), I do think they should be revealed retroactively. So, if you've harvested 50 glimmers in the first half of the game, and then unlock this policy, you should get Glimmers appropriate for 50 glimmers, I think.

We'll also need a spawning mechanism. Like BNW, these Sites should "exist" on the map but players only gain the ability to see them after they do certain things. (In BNW finish the Exploration policy tree, for us, pending above, adopt some relevant policy and gather some glimmers, which will reveal one Site.) Spawning these Sites on the expenditure of T'a'r GPs sounds quite sensible. Do we want to spawn glimmers as well for those GPs? (Since you can't harvest your own glimmers, this doesn't create any dangerous positive feedback loops.)

I do agree that revealing them on a single-instance basis is the way to go, though - if these are retrievable via teleporting units (projections), they'd all otherwise be snatched up immediately.

I'm unsure whether T'a'r GPs should create Glimmers. It's hard for me to conceive of how many of these we'll likely be seeing in a game. It's probably fine, though.

I think spawning them on T'a'r GP expenditures is probably fine as well, but will that yield enough of them? Should other events in T'a'r or the real world do so as well? Maybe a consumed glimmer creates one? Or ANY GP expenditure (or has a chance to)?

Also, what's the flavor of these Sites? As you've mentioned, do we want them to be Sites in T'a'r gathered by projections or Sites revealed from T'a'r to be dealt with in the main layers? I can see either approach work - possibly leaning towards the former to give projections more things to be doing.

I think making them gathered by projections is probably the way to go. I guess we'll find out...

To me the flavor is pretty solid. More solid then in BNW, IMO. These are simply objects that are hidden from view in the real world, but are still so powerful/significant/permanent that they have a strong presence in T'a'r, and you're awesome T'a'rness (and.... culture?) lead you to them.

OK, feels like we're getting close to some solidity here!

 

[S3rgeus]

I think it's probably fine doing it the way you're suggesting, for consistency with the rest of civ. That said, I'm not convinced that it is the best way. I'm not thinking of this primarily as a means to "spread" people's T'a'r activity out all around the world - the main point is to "slow down" the consumption of a close neighbor's Glimmers in order to allow for proper competition. It seems to me that at the point T'a'r becomes unlocked, there may very well be a handful of them sitting in easy reach of your capital, via a close neighbor. A civ with, say, a 20 turn lead in T'a'r access (due to tech tree or other prioritization) would snatch those up quite easily, making the competition for said Glimmers (which we view as a design priority) non-existent. I don't think "well, they focused on it, they deserve it" is a viable way to look at it, etiher - I kind of hate the way Faith/Religion in CiV is somewhat "get it strong early, or don't even bother," and don't want that to occur here as well.

The hope would be to tempt a civ to spread out the consuming of that first set of glimmers over the course of more turns, for the increased rewards. I don't think that is trivial

So the specific mechanism I proposed (must wait til the other glimmer finishes) has been shown, rightfully, to be out of sync with the way civ operates. What else could we consider, instead? A simply X turn delay in which Glimmers go dim?

If focusing on a single civ for glimmers is too effective for civs that pull ahead, then we should probably lower the proportion of T'a'r GP points that repeat consumption from the same nationality pays out to compensate. It should achieve what you're saying - that the player will want to find others in order to make the ones they can already see more valuable, while also worrying that other players will grab those nearby while they search.

I think that just having "last glimmer gathered" will be fine without a cooldown - glimmers are full value if the last one you gathered is from a different civilization.

ok. agreed, then.

Summary-ized (better than summarized).

Cool. So these are just General edicts, then? Makes sense. It's not that there's any one Ajah that uses them more.

Yep, generic Edicts!

What do you mean by Created? Aren't glimmers created when a GP is expended? Do you mean they pay out double their GP points, or that they are Gathered at double their rate?

I mean GPs produce two each when expended in that time!

This one's a little wimpy. Probably fine, though, just not very splashy.

It should make Sisters' projections quite competitive for grabbing any T'a'r objectives. It's a wash when fighting other Sisters' projections, so mainly hits civs that use Wilders and Kinswomen as their hosts. I'd be fine dropping it if you don't think it would work?

Possible additions/alternatives as a nod to the flavor of the Tower Schism:
Root out Traitors
Projections of Aes Sedai have +2 Sight in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.
OR
Projections of Aes Sedai last 5 extra turns in Tel'aran'rhiod for the next 30 turns.

Oo, I like the second one! Does it mean that any spawned projections during that time have an additional 5 turns of life, or the lifetime of Aes Sedai projections is increased by 5 only while the Edict is active? (The former: projections that already exist when the Edicts is issued are unaffected, the latter: projections that have lived normal +2 turns when the Edict ends will disappear.) I think the former is better, so we'll be able to reliably know how long the projection's lifespan will be for enabling/disabling abilities that take time.

Ward the Amyrlin's Study
Any Projection in Tel'aran'rhiod suffers 30 points of damage per turn ended within City-State or Tar Valon borders for the next 20 turns.

I like the flavor. I assume affecting all CSes is to prevent it from only punishing players close to the Tower? It does seem a bit strange that it doesn't just affect Tar Valon.

I gather that none of those are refusable, of course.

Yeah, none that we've said now are refusable.

Yes, four votes is close, but remember that this could theoretically be 15 votes. Yes, that would be hard to do, nigh impossible, but still possible, and as I've said in previous conversations, I don't view a task being really difficult as necessarily indicating that it deserves a tremendous reward.

The main thing here is that this seems very swingy when compared to the benefits we've afforded the other victory conditions through T'a'r. Unlocking hidden antiquity sites is a drop in the bucket in many games, compared to this. Yes, four votes isn't a huge amount, but it is double what you get for Wold Religion and stuff, which is certainly significant right?

Also, do keep in mind that stealing one vote is in effect stealing 2, if against a direct competitor - you gain a vote, and they LOSE a vote.

I think the fact that this seems super Snipe-able - whereas the other T'a'r things do not - is the source of my major projem with this. You could be totally dominating in T'a'r the whole game, but one guy has one good turn in T'a'r, and he wins. I don't like that this doesn't really allow a player a chance to respond.

So, with that in mind, I'm fine with this, providing we do one of the following:

1) Wards take more than one turn to construct, as you suggested. This way, a player has a chance to intervene to stop the theft of the vote.
2) You "copy" the vote, without the stealing it - the original owner still has it (thus it's basically just +1 vote for you).

It occurs to me that I didn't mention I kept this quote block alive to discuss the potential merit of the stealing votes mechanic because I thought it could be made to work in and of itself, but it was still a competitor of the "decay rate slowdown" mechanic - which I think is the better of the two as the diplo arm of the Dreamwards' abilities.

All very good points about the swingy nature of stealing votes and the comparative value of the World Religion Resolution. I'm happy to drop the stealing/copying votes!

Alright. You make a good point, for sure, regarding this making DS's easier to destroy...

I wonder if, perhaps, DSs "fight back" or something. That the wolf has to enter into combat with it or something. Or that it can shoot at the wolf like a city. But then, if that's the case, such battles would seem to be pre-ordained based on which thing has the most stats.

Maybe instead, a wolf that destroys a DS is consumed in the process? So, they're permanent units.... until they do that. So it's GP-for-GP, a trade. Perhaps each wolf can do this action 2 or 3 times, like a Spread Religion, or something.

But are they also consumed when destroying Wards?

I think fighting back also has a complexity problem - we'd need to balance and give adequate control to the players involved, which I think we want to avoid doing.

Consuming the unit in the process of destroying a Dreamspike sounds like a good idea. Being multi-use is also good (answers should be cheaper than the things they defeat). 2 uses sounds fine.

I don't think they should be consumed when destroying Dreamwards, seeing as projections can be used for that and projections have much shorter enforced lifetimes, it would just mean that wolves would never be used on Dreamwards, which would strangely make the more powerful unit less useful in some scenarios.

Oh, the other thing I just thought of, and I feel kind of dumb for not thinking of it before - Maybe DSs are destroyed by the Wolfbrother GP (or any T'a'r GP) itself, not necessarily the wolves. If that consumes the GP (even if in a Spread Religion fashion that would then lock them out of spawning a Wolf) that would prevent the ability to build up an army of Wolves that make you immune to DSs - you'd need to choose between Unit defense or DS defense.

Are we ok with this, considering we weren't previously considering the GPs themselves actually being in the T'a'r layer (instead sending a projection) - though this is definitely a flavorful nod when using the Wolfbrother).

If we do that, are the GPs themselves needed to destroy Wards, or can wolves do that?

I would also be fine with this approach, it's definitely a good flavor nod to Perrin - entering T'a'r in the flesh. If we go ahead with this, then yeah, we can disallow wolves entering Dreamspikes' AoE (as well as projections) - meaning only the Wolfbrother GP himself can destroy a Dreamspike. (Which makes the Dreamspikes stronger, since the ways to destroy them are much more difficult to come by than the Dreamwards one.)

It seems like a good ability pairing! Have we just created our first GP type?

Wolfbrother

Call the Wolves
Expend this unit to spawn two wolf units under your control in Tel'aran'rhiod adjacent to this unit's location.

Enter the Wolf Dream
This unit moves into Tel'aran'rhiod in the flesh.

(The T'a'r-layer-Wolfbrother-unit would have the ability to destroy Dreamspikes via custom mission. This would be a 2-use mission, much like Spread Religion as discussed above.)

The second ability actually makes me think we could have the GP able to return to reality, just if he'd used his destroy Dreamspike ability, then his Call the Wolves ability is disabled. Alternatively the transport into T'a'r could be permanent? Is the T'a'r wolfbrother a powerful combat unit there?

Yeah, but are they doing their typical attacks and stuff? It seems to me that wolves and such likely stand zero chance against them.... which, I suppose makes sense. The thing is, we can basically make wolves - and projections and Nightmares - stay the same strength throughout the game, right? The forsaken being unaltered messes with that, which is kind of annoying.

Since we can make wolves, projections, nightmares, and various T'a'r things be at whatever power level we like and keep them static for the entire game (since they don't interact directly with the main layers) we can just put them at a power level that means the Forsaken will be appropriately powerful. Strong, but not completely invincible. I think doing their normal attacks makes sense - they can essentially treat the T'a'r units like any other combat unit.

Eh, I don't want to overdesign the Slayer thing. Probably he should probably just be a Forsaken stand-in (perhaps a unique unit skin/icon) that only exists in T'a'r. He *could* be a rogue wolfbrother unit or something, but that seems a bit much.

If we go with the wolfbrother stuff above, having a Shadowspawn unit type or another GP type or something that could do the same kind of thing (enter T'a'r in the flesh) would be very easy to reuse as well as capturing some good flavor.

Yeah, I just looked through the alignment summary, and it isn't there..... do we have to dig through the meat of the thread?

Same, that was the first place I checked too. Yep, digging through the meat of the thread it is! I think I remember loosely what we decided, I just need to find our formal final description so I can copy it as a clear ruling into the summary.

*insert loading icon*

So back on page 28 we decided on a rate of one Thread every 14-16 turns for each player. I had expected this to end up being a lot of text, but it is literally a fixed interval. I've edited this into the misc summary.

Assuming a Gathering takes 5 turns, I think 15 is probably fine.

Both sound good.

Yeah, I think these feels a *little* weird, but is probably mechanically necessary, both for this issue here, and also, potentially, to prevent abuse/imbalance in Wards (see Diplo rant above).

so, how long? 2? 3 turns? 5? eleventy?

Eleventy!

3 seems fine - a unit will never be able to stop for that long when running from someone, but it's not prohibitively long in the normal run of things either. Summary-ized.

Definitely. That's a good idea. Tit for tat. Consumes the projection, but happens instantaneously.

Follow on question: does this work only on the same hex as the Dreamward or on an adjacent one? (We have BNW precedents for either approach via Pillaging and Spreading Religion, respectively.) Same hex makes it more defensible, but I don't think we want T'a'r to be a particular defensive place?

Does the projection take "death" damage when expended to destroy a Dreamward? I'm thinking no?

Yeha, I'm not so much worried about abuse so much as Clutter and confusion from a user-experience. We don't want huge translucent auras covering the map. And we also can't have them only visible when in the T'a'r layer, sinc ethat will make it confusing when it comes time to Travel or figure out your unhappiness issues... right?

Can you think of an elegant way to represent this all visually? Something like that City Limits mod?

Well, T'a'r-only entities like Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are still visible to their controllers (the team of the player who spawned/built them) at all times. (The same way your own territory is visible to you.) For that player, we can show them the field range, but I think we can make it more like culture borders than the city limits thing is. The city limits mod highlights each hex that's affected - I'd say we can highlight the "edge" of the effect - provided I can coerce the UI into doing that.

For other players, they'll only need to be able to see the actual "structure" in the center when they have T'a'r vision on that hex. Though I could also see the "border" highlight becoming visible to other players when they have active T'a'r vision on those hexes. (This is consistent with the flavor of being able to see a Dreamspike in T'a'r. We could even make Dreamspikes' borders visible and not Dreamwards, but I have no strong preference on that.)

For showing folks who are Traveling, I figure it would show up when you actually try to select a hex to move a unit who is trying to Travel there. In the same way that the drag preview turns red and the path disappears when you right click and drag over a mountain tile (unless you've got a helicopter selected or are playing as Carthage).

For figuring out happiness, the breakdown in the happiness tooltip will just have "X Unhappiness from occupied cities" - which will be a lower number if the player has Dreamwards covering those cities.

ok, now I'm having second thoughts.

I'm wondering if, in fact, Dreamspikes should always Trump. The main reason for this is that, if a DS prevents passage in T'a'r (for projections), that means any Ward contained within the DS radius would be essentially invulnerable and permanent. Seems like an unintended, really powerful side effect.

I'm tempted to say that any Wards actually within a DS's radius are automatically destroyed upon its creation. As far as whether their radii can overlap (assuming the Ward is actually placed outside of the DS's radius itself), I suppose I don't really care either way. Logically (according to above), the DS should trump and the Ward should be left with less territory than it'd normally have. But on the other hand, the "no T'a'r units within DS" thing is already somewhat flavor-sketchy, so i'd be happy with ignoring this rigorous enforcement of that logic. What do you think?

I'd be fine with that too. "No T'a'r units within a Dreamspike" has good foundation in flavor really - I mentioned it in my last post. I agree about that making Dreamwards within their bounds surprisingly powerful, so destroying Dreamwards would also be an alternative usage of Dreamspikes, which is quite nice.

If their fields overlap, I think it's fine to allow both effects on the overlapped tiles, because neither the Dreamspike nor the Dreamward themselves are any less accessible in that case - there's no reason for the player to need to reach the overlapped tile in T'a'r, beyond to do things which they should need to destroy the Dreamspike first anyway.

Shall I summary-ize this then?

That reminds me, are Wards permanent if not destroyed?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, I figured you'd say that regarding the Bonus-aspect to Envoys. That said, I still really am not "feelin it" on this. Feels flavorfully bad and also somewhat mechanically clunky - this is something I much more prefer as a Philosophical Tenet at Tier 3.

I don't like the idea of yields, either, basically because it seems like then DSs just become mainly used for their yields.... which, as you allude to, has huge effects on the rest of the victory types as well.

So, while on hold with the gas company, I came up with some alternate ideas, revolving around Envoys and such. Some of these are still somewhat weak flavorfully, but I think they're all better than the Envoy distance thing. They are also of varying degrees of "bonus-ness".

1a) When Exhibiting in a city, the receiving civ normally gets a bonus (quoted from the summary: "in the region of 500 Gold, specific bonuses pending the decision on which Innovations are unlocked by which Technology. If a DS is erected on that city, This bonus could be instead given to the Exhibiting player. The DS prevents the receiving player from learning all they can from blah blah blah. This doesn't so much help the science victory, as much as help a civ generally who is pursuing a science victory.
1b) The receiving player and exhibiting player share the bonus in some ratio.
1c) the receiving player may or may not receive the bonus. The exhibiting player receives a dump of science at the time. Perhaps the most flavorfully justified (you spy on them as they use your technology blah blah blah) and certainly the most directly contributing to a science victory.
1d) the receiving player may or may not receive the bonus. The exhibiting player receives a production discount/hammers towards the construction of the next envoy (in which city?)
2) If a Dreamspike is constructed in one of your cities, that city can produce envoys faster/receives a production discount. Mechanically clean, but... not really flavorful. In isolation from your enemies, you can prepare an exhibition with blah blah blah.

what do you think? All of these are superior, IMO.

I like 1c - the exhibiting player receives a science dump, something like 50% of a great scientist? That encourages T'a'r usage for Science players but doesn't punish them for ignoring it, and the flavor you've discussed makes more sense than the exhibition distance one.

Should the defending player still receive the bonus? I think it would be fine either way, what's your preference? I'm leaning toward still giving them the bonus, but it's not a strong feeling.

Question, though: does it matter who build the dreamspike? Does it have to be a "friendly" Dreamspike, or can you take advantage of a players "defensive" DS to fuel your science victory?

I think Dreamspikes only confer bonuses onto the player that built them - we don't want to make expending GPs have potential direct negative blowback on the player who used them. And the flavor of Dreamspikes even included some caveats that allowed people to be "permitted" to enter its field by the wielder, so it makes sense in universe too that it could benefit your other units and not foreign ones.

I should say now that I just won a culture game on Emporer as Austria without even touching Hidden Sites. In fact, I almost NEVER go for the Exploration tree. I'm sure I'm missing out, but I think I've only really ever gotten to them in one or two culture games.

I've been meaning to try Exploration again, but I keep getting dragged into other victory types by achievements.

I think this is a good idea. For sure, it does need to be culture-related, but also being T'a'r related is a good thing, though I don't think it should require absolutely T'a'r domination to get a lot out of it. Should probably line-up somewhat similar to the HSites in BNW, if perhaps a little trickier.

Making it a lower-level policy is probably a good idea. If they're being revealed by consumption of Glimmers (or by accumulation of GP points, or by use of T'a'r GP abilities), I do think they should be revealed retroactively. So, if you've harvested 50 glimmers in the first half of the game, and then unlock this policy, you should get Glimmers appropriate for 50 glimmers, I think.

I do agree that revealing them on a single-instance basis is the way to go, though - if these are retrievable via teleporting units (projections), they'd all otherwise be snatched up immediately.

Single-instance and retro-active, if I'm reading this correctly? So, civs get credit for all of the glimmers they've gathered up until now, revealing individual sites as would be appropriate, once they've unlocked the policy that allows them to see the Hidden Sites? And then continue to reveal more as they gather more glimmers? (Provided there are more to reveal.)

What kind of gathering rate per site do we think it should be? 10 glimmers reveals one?

I'm unsure whether T'a'r GPs should create Glimmers. It's hard for me to conceive of how many of these we'll likely be seeing in a game. It's probably fine, though.

I think spawning them on T'a'r GP expenditures is probably fine as well, but will that yield enough of them? Should other events in T'a'r or the real world do so as well? Maybe a consumed glimmer creates one? Or ANY GP expenditure (or has a chance to)?

I can't seem to find any numbers online about how many Hidden Antiquity Sites usually pop up in a given game of BNW, or if it's even consistent. There shouldn't need to be very many. I think we could start with spawning just on T'a'r GP expenditures and see what kinds of numbers we get. Adding other spawning mechanism if necessary will be the same amount of work then as it would be up front.

I think making them gathered by projections is probably the way to go. I guess we'll find out...

To me the flavor is pretty solid. More solid then in BNW, IMO. These are simply objects that are hidden from view in the real world, but are still so powerful/significant/permanent that they have a strong presence in T'a'r, and you're awesome T'a'rness (and.... culture?) lead you to them.

OK, feels like we're getting close to some solidity here!

Cool, so are they all objects infused with the One Power? Or more mysterious things like Portal Stones and the like?

 

[counterpoint]

If focusing on a single civ for glimmers is too effective for civs that pull ahead, then we should probably lower the proportion of T'a'r GP points that repeat consumption from the same nationality pays out to compensate. It should achieve what you're saying - that the player will want to find others in order to make the ones they can already see more valuable, while also worrying that other players will grab those nearby while they search.

I think that just having "last glimmer gathered" will be fine without a cooldown - glimmers are full value if the last one you gathered is from a different civilization.

If you want to go with the "last glimmer gathered" as described, OK. What you mention about lowering points over time for repeats on the same civ, that also sounds good, and might accomplish this better, if it's not too complex. Do you have any suggestions for that, or do you just want to go with the other, flawed, but workable, option?

I mean GPs produce two each when expended in that time!

gotcha.

It should make Sisters' projections quite competitive for grabbing any T'a'r objectives. It's a wash when fighting other Sisters' projections, so mainly hits civs that use Wilders and Kinswomen as their hosts. I'd be fine dropping it if you don't think it would work?

I think it "works," it's just not particularly powerful. Nothing wrong with that, though.

Oo, I like the second one! Does it mean that any spawned projections during that time have an additional 5 turns of life, or the lifetime of Aes Sedai projections is increased by 5 only while the Edict is active? (The former: projections that already exist when the Edicts is issued are unaffected, the latter: projections that have lived normal +2 turns when the Edict ends will disappear.) I think the former is better, so we'll be able to reliably know how long the projection's lifespan will be for enabling/disabling abilities that take time.

Yeah, former seems fine to me. not a strong opinion, though.

I like the flavor. I assume affecting all CSes is to prevent it from only punishing players close to the Tower? It does seem a bit strange that it doesn't just affect Tar Valon.

exactly, the flavor is a bit weird with the CSs, but it's to make the edict more broadly applicable. Maybe the title shouldn't be so specific? Ward the General's/Leader's Study? too stupid?

It occurs to me that I didn't mention I kept this quote block alive to discuss the potential merit of the stealing votes mechanic because I thought it could be made to work in and of itself, but it was still a competitor of the "decay rate slowdown" mechanic - which I think is the better of the two as the diplo arm of the Dreamwards' abilities.

All very good points about the swingy nature of stealing votes and the comparative value of the World Religion Resolution. I'm happy to drop the stealing/copying votes!

oh, wow. Yeah, I had forgotten that this point was mostly moot. Way to flog a dead horse, counterpoint...

I think fighting back also has a complexity problem - we'd need to balance and give adequate control to the players involved, which I think we want to avoid doing.

Consuming the unit in the process of destroying a Dreamspike sounds like a good idea. Being multi-use is also good (answers should be cheaper than the things they defeat). 2 uses sounds fine.

I don't think they should be consumed when destroying Dreamwards, seeing as projections can be used for that and projections have much shorter enforced lifetimes, it would just mean that wolves would never be used on Dreamwards, which would strangely make the more powerful unit less useful in some scenarios.

OK, let's go with
Yes. Wolves can destroy wards for free, and can destroy two DSs. (this assumes we don't just go with perrin)

I would also be fine with this approach, it's definitely a good flavor nod to Perrin - entering T'a'r in the flesh. If we go ahead with this, then yeah, we can disallow wolves entering Dreamspikes' AoE (as well as projections) - meaning only the Wolfbrother GP himself can destroy a Dreamspike. (Which makes the Dreamspikes stronger, since the ways to destroy them are much more difficult to come by than the Dreamwards one.)

It seems like a good ability pairing! Have we just created our first GP type?

Wolfbrother

Call the Wolves
Expend this unit to spawn two wolf units under your control in Tel'aran'rhiod adjacent to this unit's location.

Enter the Wolf Dream
This unit moves into Tel'aran'rhiod in the flesh.

(The T'a'r-layer-Wolfbrother-unit would have the ability to destroy Dreamspikes via custom mission. This would be a 2-use mission, much like Spread Religion as discussed above.)

The second ability actually makes me think we could have the GP able to return to reality, just if he'd used his destroy Dreamspike ability, then his Call the Wolves ability is disabled. Alternatively the transport into T'a'r could be permanent? Is the T'a'r wolfbrother a powerful combat unit there?

Hmmm... I'm *almost* sold on this.

I guess the main issue I see here is it feels like entering the Wolf Dream is a little limited, and makes me wonder why it needs to exist distinctly from Wolves. Compare:

Wolves - combat units. Permanent. Can't enter DS. Can consume Wards
Brudda - combat unit. Permanent? Limited time? Can enter DS. Can consume Wards and DSs

To me, their functionality is just too darn close, much closer than anything we see in any other GPs. So, you choose between two wolves (maybe better at fighting and chasing down projections since there are two) or stay Perrin... and be slightly less good at combat, but able to grab DSs. Seems sort of like a subtle, not-too-compelling choice.

I wonder if we're looking at this wrong. Like, in fact, there isn't really a dichotomy between these two things. That they are really just part of the same ability. Maybe that's how you're already viewing it.

Wolfbrothers have two abilities:

1) Some ability unrelated to T'a'r (or at least not *directly* related.
2) Enter the Wolf Dream.

Upon entering the Wolf Dream (teleporting in like a projection?, you are in Man form. You move quickly and can destroy DSs and DWs. You are *not* a very good fighter, though [this is for balance reasons]. You can surely kill projections, and perhaps survive against a nightmare, but not all that well. I'd also consider him staying a civilian like all the other GPs.
You either stay as Perrin, catching DSs and such, or Call Wolves. Wolves are much better fighters, but cannot destroy DSs (or enter the field). I'm considering that, perhaps its best if they can't destroy WARDS either, just to differentiate between Man form and the Wolves appropriately.
Presumably, once you've destroyed one DS, you are locked out of Calling Wolves. OR, perhaps you have two "actions" in T'a'r. You can summon ONE Wolf and then kill a DS (and be expended). Or you could summon two wolves in back to back turns. Or you could destroy two DSs.
Again, the point here is that Wolf Dream mode is not an ability per-se. It's just a "mode" you go into in order to access your other abilities.

As far as leaving the Wolf Dream... I could imagine you doing so in order to then teleport to a different location. Otherwise, you could get wierd situations like where you teleport to where a spy is, but can't go anywhere because you haven't uncovered any of the surrounding land.
But the weird thing about going back and forth from the WD is the presence of the "Other" ability, which I do think we may need in order to make this GP still of interest to a wide variety of civs. Does going into T'a'r lock that ability outright, or only if you Call a Wolf or destroy a DS? I'm tempted to say it should lock, because otherwise people would go run around, killing wards before using their ability, which is a little weird. Do you find it weird?

At least, that's how I'm visualizing it for the time being.

Of course, I'd also be fine without this complexity, and just make either the wolfbrother do all this (without wolves), or (probably cooler) have it all be wolves, sans wolfbrother (except for the GP that spawns them). If we *do* have both, they have to be distinct enough in roles to justify it.

Since we can make wolves, projections, nightmares, and various T'a'r things be at whatever power level we like and keep them static for the entire game (since they don't interact directly with the main layers) we can just put them at a power level that means the Forsaken will be appropriately powerful. Strong, but not completely invincible. I think doing their normal attacks makes sense - they can essentially treat the T'a'r units like any other combat unit.

sounds good.

If we go with the wolfbrother stuff above, having a Shadowspawn unit type or another GP type or something that could do the same kind of thing (enter T'a'r in the flesh) would be very easy to reuse as well as capturing some good flavor.

Yeah... hmmm. I'll hold off on judgement on this idea until we finalize the WB mechanics. I think it might be a bit too much detail for little payoff.

3 seems fine - a unit will never be able to stop for that long when running from someone, but it's not prohibitively long in the normal run of things either. Summary-ized.

Well, they can run from another PROJECTION for that long, providing they have the Health for it.

Follow on question: does this work only on the same hex as the Dreamward or on an adjacent one? (We have BNW precedents for either approach via Pillaging and Spreading Religion, respectively.) Same hex makes it more defensible, but I don't think we want T'a'r to be a particular defensive place?

I'm tempted to go with same-hex. It just "feels" better. I know it's more defensible, but we're talking insta-destroy, so I don't think that's a bad thing. If you literally have a wolf sitting on your Ward... You probably deserve to keep it if nobody's willing to fight you for it, right?

Does the projection take "death" damage when expended to destroy a Dreamward? I'm thinking no?

You mean, does the *host* take damage as if the projection died? Nah, I say.

Well, T'a'r-only entities like Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are still visible to their controllers (the team of the player who spawned/built them) at all times. (The same way your own territory is visible to you.) For that player, we can show them the field range, but I think we can make it more like culture borders than the city limits thing is. The city limits mod highlights each hex that's affected - I'd say we can highlight the "edge" of the effect - provided I can coerce the UI into doing that.

For other players, they'll only need to be able to see the actual "structure" in the center when they have T'a'r vision on that hex. Though I could also see the "border" highlight becoming visible to other players when they have active T'a'r vision on those hexes. (This is consistent with the flavor of being able to see a Dreamspike in T'a'r. We could even make Dreamspikes' borders visible and not Dreamwards, but I have no strong preference on that.)

For showing folks who are Traveling, I figure it would show up when you actually try to select a hex to move a unit who is trying to Travel there. In the same way that the drag preview turns red and the path disappears when you right click and drag over a mountain tile (unless you've got a helicopter selected or are playing as Carthage).

For figuring out happiness, the breakdown in the happiness tooltip will just have "X Unhappiness from occupied cities" - which will be a lower number if the player has Dreamwards covering those cities.

Ugh. I'll follow your lead on this. I'm imagining it as quite a mess, visually. The thing is, I do think you need to be able to see when your stuff is being affected by a DW or a DS, whether you have T'a'r vision on it or not. In ciV, you can see EVERYTHING about your cities, right? Maybe a notification, or a trippy icon hovering by the city name on the map?

I'd be fine with that too. "No T'a'r units within a Dreamspike" has good foundation in flavor really - I mentioned it in my last post. I agree about that making Dreamwards within their bounds surprisingly powerful, so destroying Dreamwards would also be an alternative usage of Dreamspikes, which is quite nice.

great.

If their fields overlap, I think it's fine to allow both effects on the overlapped tiles, because neither the Dreamspike nor the Dreamward themselves are any less accessible in that case - there's no reason for the player to need to reach the overlapped tile in T'a'r, beyond to do things which they should need to destroy the Dreamspike first anyway.

Shall I summary-ize this then?

mechanically, it's fine. But flavorfully, I could see the Wards not overlapping with DSs. You know, your T'a'r reach can't extend that far to protect them blah blah blah. Either way.

I like 1c - the exhibiting player receives a science dump, something like 50% of a great scientist? That encourages T'a'r usage for Science players but doesn't punish them for ignoring it, and the flavor you've discussed makes more sense than the exhibition distance one.

Yeah, I like that one the most, too.

I think 50% of a GS is maybe too much. I know it requires a DS (and thus a GP expenditure), but wouldn't that add up a bit fast?

Then again, I don't know the balancing of late-game science well. Just seems like a few free GSs being potentially available might be a bit much.

Should the defending player still receive the bonus? I think it would be fine either way, what's your preference? I'm leaning toward still giving them the bonus, but it's not a strong feeling.

yeah, let em have it.

I think Dreamspikes only confer bonuses onto the player that built them - we don't want to make expending GPs have potential direct negative blowback on the player who used them. And the flavor of Dreamspikes even included some caveats that allowed people to be "permitted" to enter its field by the wielder, so it makes sense in universe too that it could benefit your other units and not foreign ones.

OK, hopefully this won't get confusing. It's a little weird, I think, but it'd definitely be weird for this one GP type to work differently.

What if you capture a city that has a DS active? Do you gain control of that DS? Kinda weird. Same with Wards. What happens if somebody has warded a city of theirs, and you take it - does it stay warded? What if they ward a CS to boost influence, and you capture the CS?

Single-instance and retro-active, if I'm reading this correctly? So, civs get credit for all of the glimmers they've gathered up until now, revealing individual sites as would be appropriate, once they've unlocked the policy that allows them to see the Hidden Sites? And then continue to reveal more as they gather more glimmers? (Provided there are more to reveal.)

Yep. You're reading it right.

What kind of gathering rate per site do we think it should be? 10 glimmers reveals one?

Sounds probably a little high. Some civs only drop around 10 GP in a game, right? So harvesting that many for ONE site... Then again, I have almost no idea.

I can't seem to find any numbers online about how many Hidden Antiquity Sites usually pop up in a given game of BNW, or if it's even consistent. There shouldn't need to be very many. I think we could start with spawning just on T'a'r GP expenditures and see what kinds of numbers we get. Adding other spawning mechanism if necessary will be the same amount of work then as it would be up front.

Yeah, I think we have to just test and see... I have no idea what is normal.

Cool, so are they all objects infused with the One Power? Or more mysterious things like Portal Stones and the like?

Well, did we decide the relics were all Relics of Power? If so, then these should be the same.

So, I know we aren't done, but we're BASICALLY done - really the Wolfbrother thing is all that's left. So I am going to go ahead and respond to a very old post of yours next!

 

[counterpoint]

OK, super duper late post! We decided to table this until T'a'r was workable. And I think it is! Barring some updates to the summary and decisions on wolfbrothers, I think we're ready to start thinking about GP again.

I don't think any of us thought T'a'r would get that deep!

Suggestion, though - keep these sub-threads separate, for clarity of quoting. Like, let the T'a'r Quotes stay in a separate post so we can watch it dwindle.

So, way back on page 33.....

Various things!

I respond to these matters below, as responses to S3rgeus's responses to your responses.

Responses:

No worries, it gave me time to build some spaceships in Space Engineers! Highly recommended if you like any of the build/explore games like Minecraft or Terraria.

I have played no such things! I try to avoid games that go on forever...

So the thing is, CiV wasn't supposed to be that way, but it is, and it's too late. Every other experience I've had with the Civ series hasn't been that way. I'd play, binge until three in the morning for a couple nights, and then burn out and stop playing. Then, pick it up again in a year... rinse repeat.

CiV didn't work that way. I started playing, and now it's hundreds of hours in and I'm designing a mod. I blame UA's, I think.

I had actually forgotten that the TW was a Trolloc killing contest. Forest for the trees and all that. Giving them uber units to kill the Trollocs with is a big problem unto itself, and then there are also the flavor issues we've all been trying to address.

So I'm going to do a 180 and say I think we should go with Ogier units spawning near the Blight, controlled by the Stedding. However, we'll need at least one Stedding to still be alive in the game, because someone needs to be given control of the units. (If there are none, though a rare occurrence, then we'll just have to not have Ogier fighting during the TW. Which makes sense.) Otherwise we can distribute "ownership" of the units between all living Stedding (which will cause some players to meet them from far away) when there are multiple, preferring Stedding that are nearer to the spawn points.

There will be some specific AI for this, but the TW is quite a different context for the AI, so I suppose that makes sense.

A lot of this brings me back to consider though: do we want to do this? Is it still solving the Borderlanders-overrun-problem that we wanted to address originally?

Zalminen makes a good point about the balance of giving the units to all players. And I suppose only being able to attack Shadowspawn is very similar to the restrictions we're putting on the Aes Sedai units.

I think I'm in favor of just going with generically-owned, teleporting Stedding-controlled units (providing a stedding still exists). My second place choice is with Zalminen's suggestion to give it to everyone, but this seems a bit clunky for civs that are super far from the Blight (although on the other hand, that serves as a perfect incentive to go kill things in the blight, as there's no other purpose to your ogier). I could be convinced either way.

As far as the “why,” I don't think it had much to do with making B-landers lives easier. I think Zalminen said something about the coolness of fighting-Ogier in the TW for flavor reasons, and I think we went from there. To me, that's all this needs to be – flavor. It's cool to have this epic war, and “hey, there's an ogier fighting a trolloc!” and “hey, that Tar Valon-controlled Sister is fighting a Fade!” It doesn't need to be more far-reaching than that, IMO.

What about the inverse - do Stedding give units to players they dislike/are at war with?

I'd say if we go with Ogier-gifts for “all” civs (instead of Stedding-controlled Ogier), we could exclude civs at war with steddings. Dislike shouldn't get in the way, though.

Yeah, there's some component of Tall/Wide in everything!

Phrasing!

I was going to break this up into 3 sections and respond in line, but I find I'm repeating myself in each section. I think you've made some great points here about the roles of Heralds and what kind of effect a GP that is a "Super Herald" would have - so I'm happy to drop this ability if you are now!

Sniff out Dfs
nuked!

Treat with the Forsaken
Related to the above, and based on the problems both of us have flagged up here, let's drop the Forsaken Quests GP ability then.

agreed.

Pull of the Pattern
Your points above have largely turned me away from using a GP to spread DFC ratio, mostly for the reasons you state above. It seems like players would only ever find that tangentially useful, and I think we need something a bit more concrete to firm up the value of this ability.

So, on top of creating a Thread, it could create some kind of Improvement? A simple addition of a yield-over-time (non-Alignment yield) that way enhances the value of the ability.
...
You've touched on this elsewhere, but you can expend Heralds as much as you want on foreign cities, since you can't see the exact results it's never restricted. Actually, then, the players who will have problems are those that are isolated from other civs - across an ocean on their own or something.
...
For this and the section above, both sound like viable tactics. I think these are things for us to keep in mind in the next stage of the process, when we're trying to decide on the GP types and therefore which GP types are spawned by which things.

Hmmm.... Creating an improvement seems a little weird to me, because I have trouble figuring out what that could be.

But I do agree that it might be better served for next phase. I say this one passes for now.

Plant a Dreamspike
I figured this would be in addition to Traveling Grounds. Traveling Grounds as an improvement are basically more flexible airports, mechanically. So short-distance Traveling (which may unlock before or after Traveling Grounds, on different techs, be available to different units, whatever, those are mostly details for later) could add onto that well. (Since paradrops don't make airports useless and vice versa.)

Paradrops can be super helpful, I've found. It lets you get some great tactical positions that would otherwise take too long/be too dangerous to grab. It also lets you deploy units to cities near your borders really quickly.

Soooo already discussed that (see last two weeks of thread).

Explore T'a'r quote block preservatives added

already discussed....

Treesing
I'm leaning towards all Stedding (or at least all you've met when you expend it), but we can come back to this within the context of the GP type. We'll keep this one around to the next round then?

Yeah, agreed. I think this is enough detail on this one for now.

It's mostly a conceptual thing that hexes don't produce happiness in BNW, that Happiness is a kind of "derived" yield - one that doesn't come directly from the nature of things, but what we (humans) do with them. Hexes that players might think produce happiness don't actually - luxuries are just "connected to your trade network" by their improvements. You then get happiness according to the variety of luxuries you have, independent of any tiles those luxuries come from. Same with natural wonders, *working* the tile doesn't give you happiness, there's a player level "happiness from natural wonders" on each player, and it's just equal to the number of natural wonders in their territory.

There is also the element of working tiles making happiness defeating the feedback loop of happiness vs population. Increasing population is intended to cause unhappiness, and as you've mentioned, allowing a citizen to work a tile that generates happiness effectively makes them "happiness free."

Yeah, that definitely makes sense to me.

Groves are also the centers of Stedding, not just in human cities, so it's not too far to have them in their territory.

Right, my mistake then. That said, from a reader perspective, we always see them in cities, so that's the more iconic flavor, IMO.

It could come with an immediate influence boost (a la GMe) as well as set up the influence floor. It could possibly give you access to a resource from the Stedding instead, but then we're copying the Feitoria.

Treesing Groves
Well, the issue I have with this is based on the weirdness of having all the civs doing this to the stedding. Imagine Feitoria on every tile around a CS, each from a different CS? This problem is greatest if we copy the Feitoria functionality, but still there if it's simply diplo.

Unless... unless that's the only improvements steddings have. Kind of odd, but also kind of flavorful. What if steddings didn't have workers, and relied on civs to provide them with Groves, which thus created influence and provided yield bonuses. So, if you had an Ogier GP, you have a choice even within one ability: plant it near you for yield benefits, or give it to the stedding for influence.

Form a Compact
We could have them accumulate based on "successful" use of your votes. So voting for something that passes and against things that fail generate points for this GP? Said points could also be generated by successfully swinging Stedding votes for Stumps (available for the whole game). Not sure if there's a way to make the Tower politics factor into it too (also whole game available, if we can make it work).

I actually do think I like this idea. It makes even votes you don't care about matter somewhat. Also, it creates this weird metagame wherein you're trying to side with who you think will be the winner, which makes diplomats all the more valuable (for the record, I've barely ever used those), but in the end may actually function as a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy....

As far as the tower, that's tough.... If an Amyrlin is elected from an Ajah you're BFFs with?

Discover a Weave
I don't think players can see their quota - it's just something the Tower uses internally when giving out Sisters to ensure that it doesn't give out too many to people who are good at keeping them alive, not a resource or anything like that. Aes Sedai that are spawned from other means (we've had a few, I don't remember exactly what they are) that are non-Quota-ed are just given to the player like any other unit, which doesn't interact with quota. (Quota goes up when the Tower's normal rotation gives you an Aes Sedai, rather than your consumption of quota being equal to the number of Sisters you have.)

So the simplest and most understandable approach for the player would be just make it a non-Quota-ed Sister.

OK. In general I think I agree with you.

That said, the issue with this is that we have also established, I think, that the Tower will “recall” Sisters if you're influence drops. So if you have 5 of them, and your influence drops such that your quoto drops to 4, they will take back a sister (of your choice, as I recall). This is triggered when you have more Sisters than your Quota.

According to that, this would technically be happening in that case, and the Tower would request a sister back. Flagging that specific Sister as “quota free” feels a little weird, though, since we've treated them otherwise as interchangeable from a Tower politics perspective.

So I'm not quite sure how successful it will be for us to allow this (and other situations) to go beyond your quota – anything we can add to address it?

Advise a Governor
I don't think it does - the White/Brown/Blue abilities just straight up add a yield bonus to a Governor within X hexes of the Sister, the same way that policies would (external factor causes the Governor to produce extra stuff). This ability is progressing through the Governor's upgrade system, making that Governor permanently better in and of itself, which exists beyond the GP that created the "bonus" from then on. The other bonuses (policy/Sister ability) disappear if the factor providing the bonus is removed.

OK. Gotcha. It survives.

Dice in my Head
It's not a single percentage though. There's an amount of possible "extra damage" a unit can do due to randomness, modified by their current hitpoints. I figure this ability means they always roll maximum "extra damage" instead of having any randomness (so their combat is also accurately predictable, as well as stronger on average). And that's just combat - anything that involves randomness (Gentling a male channeler, stealing a Seal) can be weighted in the favor of the player with the bonus. (Most likely just weighted, not 100% for things like Gentling.)

I see. I think I've always assumed that the game was always using randomness in battle. But if combat strength isn't really random – it's this vs. this equals this, then of course this would be very different, mechanically,because it wouldn't affect regular battle at all.... but shouldn't it (flavor-wise)?

Exactly, we'd want a spawning mechanism that favors Tall civs. However, it seems like the sister ability of this one has been axed above, do we want to keep this around?

Legendary Monument
Sure. Though I should note the Alignment aspect was never an essential part of this.

It's already possible to get other civs' UUs via relationships with CSes (though I'm not sure if the UUs are always from civs that aren't in the current game). I don't think that's too big a problem though - civs who see this unit coming should move their most valuable units accordingly. (Which I'm sure the AI will be categorically terrible at doing, but we'll try!)

Recruit
Clarification: I'm not saying this could be problematic because it allows you to steal UU units. I'm saying it could be problematic if this ability is better used as, or similar to, the ability of[/b] a UU.

Yes, I like that! Expend the GP to promote all nearby units with a promotion that grants extra EXP sounds like a lot more fun.

Ancient Memories
I like it... though it's less flavorful that way.

I can't quite articulate why I don't like unit generation from GPs, which probably means it's not a good reason to not like it. I get the impression it's an unusual divergence from the way BNW works, but I can't quite place why.

Right. I can't say I disagree, though.

Changing the nature of a GW is a very unique and cool idea. It's quite a niche use of a GP though - possibly giving it multiple uses would make it more comparable to other GP abilities?

Discover Relic
Multiple-uses is interesting. Then you can turn it into something that can change themake-up of your theming bonuses (which could be TOO good if we give too many uses) without actually giving any GW. Kind of cool.

That said, it's also pretty culture-victory focused, which is ok, but should be noted. This is definitely an ability that some civs would never use. Would need a secondary effect, or to be coupled with another ability choice that's more generally useful.

"expend to stage a coup in this CS" kind of thing? A bit risky - I think to make it a valuable GP ability we'd need to make it a guaranteed coup, but guaranteed coups undermine a lot of the way the CS relationship system works.

Ta'veren Influence
Yeah, there may not be a satisfactory middle ground.

Reducing all other civs' influence (election shenanigans, as you've mentioned) is possible, but won't be very visible - only rare cases where that causes a player to eclipse another as an ally would cause visible effects, and in that case they could have bought past them/used a GMe (or whatever has the GMe ability).

b Ta'veren Infl
Yeah, that is just a less fun version of other abilities.

Interacting with an Eyes and Ears in that city is an interesting one, though I'm not sure what useful effect the GP could have on the way the Eyes and Ears work.

Ta'veren I
Rushing the task at hand? Making it have a higher % success rate? Kind of weird, though, sending a GP to an opponent's city.... “Hello, I have an EaE stationed here. Don't mind me...”

I'm afraid I can't really think of one! He could be a unit. Like, normal unit that unlocks on a tech. We could give him some flavorfully useful ability then, which has a whole different parameter set/design space from GP abilities.

Right, I am thinking now that Sniffers will probably be best used as a normal unit, maybe a mid-game melee unit or even Scout upgrade (along with Thief-taker)?. After all, we have to stretch the medieval/rennaissance tech over almost an entire game. Probably some kind of movement or detection promotion.

By the way: The list looks good!


AAAANNNND.... I'm all caught up!

are you?

 

[S3rgeus]

If you want to go with the "last glimmer gathered" as described, OK. What you mention about lowering points over time for repeats on the same civ, that also sounds good, and might accomplish this better, if it's not too complex. Do you have any suggestions for that, or do you just want to go with the other, flawed, but workable, option?

I hadn't actually meant to suggest that (decreasing with each time you consume the same nationality), but it does sound like a good idea. You really don't like the "last glimmer gathered" approach, do you? I really think that when we play it it won't be as hoard-ish as you think.

gotcha.

Added to the master list.

I think it "works," it's just not particularly powerful. Nothing wrong with that, though.

Cool, added to the list.

Yeah, former seems fine to me. not a strong opinion, though.

Coolio, added to the list. Do we still want to call it Root Out Traitors? Is it more like Gifted Dreamers or something?

exactly, the flavor is a bit weird with the CSs, but it's to make the edict more broadly applicable. Maybe the title shouldn't be so specific? Ward the General's/Leader's Study? too stupid?

I think it could be ok for it to only affect Tar Valon. The flavor of warding the Amyrlin's study is really good and it should be ok for some Edicts to make a difference to only a small number of players.

OK, let's go with
Yes. Wolves can destroy wards for free, and can destroy two DSs. (this assumes we don't just go with perrin)

Cool, let's preserve this quote block until we finish the Wolfbrother stuff below, so we have the two alternatives side by side.

Hmmm... I'm *almost* sold on this.

I guess the main issue I see here is it feels like entering the Wolf Dream is a little limited, and makes me wonder why it needs to exist distinctly from Wolves. Compare:

Wolves - combat units. Permanent. Can't enter DS. Can consume Wards
Brudda - combat unit. Permanent? Limited time? Can enter DS. Can consume Wards and DSs

To me, their functionality is just too darn close, much closer than anything we see in any other GPs. So, you choose between two wolves (maybe better at fighting and chasing down projections since there are two) or stay Perrin... and be slightly less good at combat, but able to grab DSs. Seems sort of like a subtle, not-too-compelling choice.

I wonder if we're looking at this wrong. Like, in fact, there isn't really a dichotomy between these two things. That they are really just part of the same ability. Maybe that's how you're already viewing it.

Wolfbrothers have two abilities:

1) Some ability unrelated to T'a'r (or at least not *directly* related.
2) Enter the Wolf Dream.

Upon entering the Wolf Dream (teleporting in like a projection?, you are in Man form. You move quickly and can destroy DSs and DWs. You are *not* a very good fighter, though [this is for balance reasons]. You can surely kill projections, and perhaps survive against a nightmare, but not all that well. I'd also consider him staying a civilian like all the other GPs.
You either stay as Perrin, catching DSs and such, or Call Wolves. Wolves are much better fighters, but cannot destroy DSs (or enter the field). I'm considering that, perhaps its best if they can't destroy WARDS either, just to differentiate between Man form and the Wolves appropriately.
Presumably, once you've destroyed one DS, you are locked out of Calling Wolves. OR, perhaps you have two "actions" in T'a'r. You can summon ONE Wolf and then kill a DS (and be expended). Or you could summon two wolves in back to back turns. Or you could destroy two DSs.
Again, the point here is that Wolf Dream mode is not an ability per-se. It's just a "mode" you go into in order to access your other abilities.

As far as leaving the Wolf Dream... I could imagine you doing so in order to then teleport to a different location. Otherwise, you could get wierd situations like where you teleport to where a spy is, but can't go anywhere because you haven't uncovered any of the surrounding land.
But the weird thing about going back and forth from the WD is the presence of the "Other" ability, which I do think we may need in order to make this GP still of interest to a wide variety of civs. Does going into T'a'r lock that ability outright, or only if you Call a Wolf or destroy a DS? I'm tempted to say it should lock, because otherwise people would go run around, killing wards before using their ability, which is a little weird. Do you find it weird?

At least, that's how I'm visualizing it for the time being.

Of course, I'd also be fine without this complexity, and just make either the wolfbrother do all this (without wolves), or (probably cooler) have it all be wolves, sans wolfbrother (except for the GP that spawns them). If we *do* have both, they have to be distinct enough in roles to justify it.

I think the Wolfbrother entering the wolf dream in the flesh wouldn't have the same initial teleport that projecting does, because he's actually creating a gateway between the worlds at his current location, rather than pushing his consciousness into it alone. (I don't remember if Perrin and Slayer had to at least start where they were in reality and then will themselves over distance? If they did, that would be a good flavor foundation for that difference.)

The approach of having a single "Enter the Wolf Dream" ability also sounds like it could work to me. I think making entering the Wolf Dream permanent is almost all-positive from a mechanical perspective (and would be my preference), but it unfortunately directly conflicts with the flavor from the books, in such a way that I don't think we can do it. As you've suggested, locking out the Wolfbrother's other ability once they enter T'a'r once makes sense - being able to roam and destroy Dreamwards in the interim and then subsequently use the GPs' full alternate ability defeats part of the way GPs work.

All that said, I can totally see the appeal of the less complex approach - no GPs entering T'a'r, just expending him to spawn wolves. We've got a flavor-mechanical conflict here, because making Wolfbrothers (Perrin) the primary way of combating Dreamspikes is a flavor slam dunk.

Honestly I'm not sure if we can know which will be better without playing it. Given that we will need Wolfbrothers and wolves for either approach, shall we go with the simpler one to start with? If we decide we want to do full T'a'r interaction for the Wolfbrother, the only "extra" work we did was create the mission which created the wolves and expended the Wolfbrother, which is relatively trivial next to actually making the Wolfbrother and wolves units (icons, models, balance), which we'll have to do either way.

Yeah... hmmm. I'll hold off on judgement on this idea until we finalize the WB mechanics. I think it might be a bit too much detail for little payoff.

Preserving this quote block (about Slayer) until then, then.

Well, they can run from another PROJECTION for that long, providing they have the Health for it.

True, unless damage interrupts them?

I'm tempted to go with same-hex. It just "feels" better. I know it's more defensible, but we're talking insta-destroy, so I don't think that's a bad thing. If you literally have a wolf sitting on your Ward... You probably deserve to keep it if nobody's willing to fight you for it, right?

Sounds good to me. Summary-ized.

You mean, does the *host* take damage as if the projection died? Nah, I say.

Woops, yes, the host! Sounds good.

Ugh. I'll follow your lead on this. I'm imagining it as quite a mess, visually. The thing is, I do think you need to be able to see when your stuff is being affected by a DW or a DS, whether you have T'a'r vision on it or not. In ciV, you can see EVERYTHING about your cities, right? Maybe a notification, or a trippy icon hovering by the city name on the map?

I'm not so sure, I think without T'a'r vision, a player being affected by a foreign Dreamspike should only see the consequences (not being able to Travel there). The other effects of Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are actually irrelevant to foreign players. None of the other effects cause negatives for that player, only positive for the Dreamspike/ward owner, which should be circumvented by an active effort by the foreign player, rather than have them notified about it for free.

Players who own the Dreamwards/spikes in question obviously don't need T'a'r vision on them to see them, they are the owners so they have vision on their own structures. (Do Dreamwards provide vision or can you just see them in the fog? Providing vision at least on the warded hex itself would be more consistent with CiV.) I could see an icon for your own cities, but I don't think it's necessary, and we should only introduce it if we find that its absence is a problem, to avoid the city UI becoming even busier than it already is.

Overall, I don't think we'll have a problem with presentation of the effects' range to relevant players.

great.

Summary-ized

mechanically, it's fine. But flavorfully, I could see the Wards not overlapping with DSs. You know, your T'a'r reach can't extend that far to protect them blah blah blah. Either way.

I'd be fine either way, and allowing overlapping is simpler.

Yeah, I like that one the most, too.

I think 50% of a GS is maybe too much. I know it requires a DS (and thus a GP expenditure), but wouldn't that add up a bit fast?

Then again, I don't know the balancing of late-game science well. Just seems like a few free GSs being potentially available might be a bit much.

yeah, let em have it.

We'll have to calibrate from playtesting, but I think 50% should be a good ballpark. It requires a GP expenditure in the right place, a subsequent Envoy to the same civ (Envoys can't exhibit at any random civ, needs to be planned) and the defending player has opportunity to destroy either the Envoy or the Dreamspike independently.

OK, hopefully this won't get confusing. It's a little weird, I think, but it'd definitely be weird for this one GP type to work differently.

What if you capture a city that has a DS active? Do you gain control of that DS? Kinda weird. Same with Wards. What happens if somebody has warded a city of theirs, and you take it - does it stay warded? What if they ward a CS to boost influence, and you capture the CS?

I think Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are completely disconnected from city control - they never change ownership. Because the player doesn't really "ward a city," they place a ward that has an effect on that city (and possibly more). Related to what I mentioned above, foreign Dreamwards affecting your cities doesn't really impact your capabilities, and Dreamspikes only for Traveling. If the player wants to get rid of pre-existing ones after conquering a region, then they should destroy them (and build their own if they wish).

Yep. You're reading it right.

Summary-ized

Sounds probably a little high. Some civs only drop around 10 GP in a game, right? So harvesting that many for ONE site... Then again, I have almost no idea.

Yeah, maybe 5? It's a decent starting point and easy for us to tweak.

Well, did we decide the relics were all Relics of Power? If so, then these should be the same.

Yes! Summary-ized.

 

[S3rgeus]

I have played no such things! I try to avoid games that go on forever...

So the thing is, CiV wasn't supposed to be that way, but it is, and it's too late. Every other experience I've had with the Civ series hasn't been that way. I'd play, binge until three in the morning for a couple nights, and then burn out and stop playing. Then, pick it up again in a year... rinse repeat.

CiV didn't work that way. I started playing, and now it's hundreds of hours in and I'm designing a mod. I blame UA's, I think.

I always blame achievements, that's what ends up making me spend endless hours on a game. Though it has to already be fun! I wish there were more achievements in Batman: Arkham City, I would've kept playing that forever.

I find Space Engineers usually works as you describe. Keen update the game every Thursday, which is very impressive, so the game has been much better each time I've come back to it, which is really cool. There's tons more to do now than there ever was when I first played it.

I think I'm in favor of just going with generically-owned, teleporting Stedding-controlled units (providing a stedding still exists). My second place choice is with Zalminen's suggestion to give it to everyone, but this seems a bit clunky for civs that are super far from the Blight (although on the other hand, that serves as a perfect incentive to go kill things in the blight, as there's no other purpose to your ogier). I could be convinced either way.

As far as the “why,” I don't think it had much to do with making B-landers lives easier. I think Zalminen said something about the coolness of fighting-Ogier in the TW for flavor reasons, and I think we went from there. To me, that's all this needs to be – flavor. It's cool to have this epic war, and “hey, there's an ogier fighting a trolloc!” and “hey, that Tar Valon-controlled Sister is fighting a Fade!” It doesn't need to be more far-reaching than that, IMO.

I remember this conversation. Seems like eons ago.

I agree that this is the approach I like most - generically owned Stedding units that are teleported to the Blightborder to fight.

I think the "should we do this at all" is worth discussing though - the major reason that I latched onto this when we first discussed it was that it could be used to address the potential issue of Borderlanders always being overwhelmed by the TW, so human players would always restart if they found themselves near the Blight. This is still only a theoretical problem, we're not sure it will happen, but do we think this will help with that?

It also adds complexity, while definitely being a "non-essential" feature. I agree seeing Ogier fighting the Trollocs would be quite cool, but do we think it's something we should develop as a part of launch? Does it cause more problems than that coolness might be worth?

I'd say if we go with Ogier-gifts for “all” civs (instead of Stedding-controlled Ogier), we could exclude civs at war with steddings. Dislike shouldn't get in the way, though.

Sounds sensible, if we do it this way, though that looks unlikely.

Phrasing!

I think I understood the last one of these, but this seems like a serious stretch for an innuendo.

Hmmm.... Creating an improvement seems a little weird to me, because I have trouble figuring out what that could be.

But I do agree that it might be better served for next phase. I say this one passes for now.

Coolio, I've left the "encounter a Thread" as the text for now.

Yeah, agreed. I think this is enough detail on this one for now.

Cool

Right, my mistake then. That said, from a reader perspective, we always see them in cities, so that's the more iconic flavor, IMO.

Funny, I've always thought of the Ogier forests that we see inside Stedding when various characters enter them as having Groves at the center (the Great Stump is hosted in a Grove, right?).

Treesing Groves
Well, the issue I have with this is based on the weirdness of having all the civs doing this to the stedding. Imagine Feitoria on every tile around a CS, each from a different CS? This problem is greatest if we copy the Feitoria functionality, but still there if it's simply diplo.

Unless... unless that's the only improvements steddings have. Kind of odd, but also kind of flavorful. What if steddings didn't have workers, and relied on civs to provide them with Groves, which thus created influence and provided yield bonuses. So, if you had an Ogier GP, you have a choice even within one ability: plant it near you for yield benefits, or give it to the stedding for influence.

This is certainly very interesting and would make Stedding very unique. I don't think we'd want to put it as a GP ability though, with this approach. Mainly because there won't be enough GPs of a single type across all of the civs to populate all of the Stedding's tiles this way.

We do still have the opposite problem, as you've mentioned, of having Groves dotted all over certain Stedding, if it's a "non-universal" improvement. And there definitely should be some distinction for it, so that it isn't just a "Great Merchant that only works on Stedding."

Still drawing a bit of a blank on this one.

I actually do think I like this idea. It makes even votes you don't care about matter somewhat. Also, it creates this weird metagame wherein you're trying to side with who you think will be the winner, which makes diplomats all the more valuable (for the record, I've barely ever used those), but in the end may actually function as a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy....

Interesting, I've found I always use Diplomats by the endgame (as long as I'm not way behind in tech, in which case I need the stealing), particularly when playing Culture or Diplo. It's useful to know how the AI will vote so you can bribe them to vote differently strategically. I suppose with humans you can always ask, but the catch is humans might lie.

Sounds like a fun idea then, though! Something for us to keep in mind when creating GP types and deciding what generates their points.

As far as the tower, that's tough.... If an Amyrlin is elected from an Ajah you're BFFs with?

Definitely a possible source, and it makes sense in a flavorful sense. The only way to guarantee you'll get this bonus is to be top-influencer with the top 3 Ajahs, which is quite hard, so no one should be able to monopolize it as a source, unless they should clearly be getting all of the points because of how far ahead they are.

OK. In general I think I agree with you.

That said, the issue with this is that we have also established, I think, that the Tower will “recall” Sisters if you're influence drops. So if you have 5 of them, and your influence drops such that your quoto drops to 4, they will take back a sister (of your choice, as I recall). This is triggered when you have more Sisters than your Quota.

According to that, this would technically be happening in that case, and the Tower would request a sister back. Flagging that specific Sister as “quota free” feels a little weird, though, since we've treated them otherwise as interchangeable from a Tower politics perspective.

So I'm not quite sure how successful it will be for us to allow this (and other situations) to go beyond your quota – anything we can add to address it?

Discover a Weave
This depends on how transparent we want to be. The player doesn't need to be able to distinguish between quota-ed and un-quota-ed Sisters. If the Tower's quota for a player falls and the player was at their quota of quota-ed Sisters, then the Tower will request a Sister back. The player then chooses any of their Sisters to send back. It doesn't matter if that Sisters was actually originally a quota-ed one or not, because we don't need to connect that. Only the Tower knows how many quota each player has remaining and what those quotas are, because it's not really a resource that players should manage, it's a system for the Tower to distribute Sister units in a meaningful way.

My only concern here is to do with the whole "taking back a Sister" concept that we decided on before. Might it look too arbitrary and unpredictable from the player's perspective, that the Tower suddenly pulls back its Sisters? Would the connection between them doing "worse" at the game and that recall be clear enough?

I see. I think I've always assumed that the game was always using randomness in battle. But if combat strength isn't really random – it's this vs. this equals this, then of course this would be very different, mechanically,because it wouldn't affect regular battle at all.... but shouldn't it (flavor-wise)?

Dice in my Head
I'm not sure what you mean here. Randomness is a part of all combat in CiV. I'm proposing that this aura/effect make that randomness non-random when one of these units is involved, and instead roll maximally in the favor of the player with the aura/effect. This would have the side effect of meaning you could work out the result of combat involving one of these "non-random" units with certainty, before it had happened. (Unlike normal combat, which is only estimated beforehand.) So this ability will affect all combat involving that unit. Combat strength, on the other hand, is never random (combat strength is the number that your unit has written in the UI). Effective combat strength can be deduced from terrain and various modifiers. The randomness is normally in addition to all of that.

Legendary Monument
Sure. Though I should note the Alignment aspect was never an essential part of this.

Right, following this back to its original post, the Alignment approach was one of two proposed abilities. Do we like the general yield enhancement? I have no particularly strong feelings either way, it kind of avoids the cost of an Improvement (using a tile) so would necessarily have to be weaker.

Recruit
Clarification: I'm not saying this could be problematic because it allows you to steal UU units. I'm saying it could be problematic if this ability is better used as, or similar to, the ability of[/b] a UU.

Oh, right! Are there any WoT flavor elements that lend themselves particularly to this ability?

Ancient Memories
I like it... though it's less flavorful that way.

I don't think it's less flavorful - the Band of the Red Hand carried on being awesome in Mat's absence, in part due to his influence, which lines up with the flavor of this ability. Mechanically I agree, sounds good!

Discover Relic
Multiple-uses is interesting. Then you can turn it into something that can change themake-up of your theming bonuses (which could be TOO good if we give too many uses) without actually giving any GW. Kind of cool.

That said, it's also pretty culture-victory focused, which is ok, but should be noted. This is definitely an ability that some civs would never use. Would need a secondary effect, or to be coupled with another ability choice that's more generally useful.

Yeah, all sounds sensible.

Ta'veren I
Rushing the task at hand? Making it have a higher % success rate? Kind of weird, though, sending a GP to an opponent's city.... “Hello, I have an EaE stationed here. Don't mind me...”

Seems like this is the only variant of Ta'veren Influence we want to pursue?

Rushing ongoing tasks like stealing techs or stealing Seals (!) could be quite cool. Having to send it to an enemy city would definitely suck though, exactly as you've said. Perhaps the GP can be expended in your territory and then you pick an EaE to rush?

Right, I am thinking now that Sniffers will probably be best used as a normal unit, maybe a mid-game melee unit or even Scout upgrade (along with Thief-taker)?. After all, we have to stretch the medieval/rennaissance tech over almost an entire game. Probably some kind of movement or detection promotion.

Cool, sounds good!

By the way: The list looks good!

Awesome, I've made a few more edits while replying to the above.

AAAANNNND.... I'm all caught up!

are you?

Yes! But not for long, I imagine.

 

[counterpoint]

I hadn't actually meant to suggest that (decreasing with each time you consume the same nationality), but it does sound like a good idea. You really don't like the "last glimmer gathered" approach, do you? I really think that when we play it it won't be as hoard-ish as you think.

Eh, I don't hate it. If you're fine with it, I can be fine with i.

Honestly, at this point, simplest is better, I guess.

Coolio, added to the list. Do we still want to call it Root Out Traitors? Is it more like Gifted Dreamers or something?

Yeah, that's a better name, though let's go Gifted Dreamwalkers or something, since they aren't necessarily Dreamers.

Or Dreamwalker Training or something.

I think it could be ok for it to only affect Tar Valon. The flavor of warding the Amyrlin's study is really good and it should be ok for some Edicts to make a difference to only a small number of players.

Well, I think the flavor problems associated with CSs make up for the mechanical benefits.

I mean, who is going to be dreamwalking into Tar Valon, anyways? They don't drop GP, so there won't really be any glimmers there, unless there's a GMe type GP that would periodically go there.

Do Wards even work in Tar Valon? Do they prevent influence decay just the same?

So, occasional, rare glimmers, and somebody dropping a Dreamward or spike there (which would probably already be there by the time this edict is dropped in many games) - those are the only reasons somebody would ever go there. In other words, people will basically never go there. I'd guess that were this edict to come up, there's only a 50/50 chance a single civ would even have bothered to go there in T'a'r.

So, in other words, this is really, REALLY limited in its scope. I'd rather it apply to all CS-like entities. If it needs new flavor, fine. Otherwise, I say drop it.

Cool, let's preserve this quote block until we finish the Wolfbrother stuff below, so we have the two alternatives side by side.

preserved.

I think the Wolfbrother entering the wolf dream in the flesh wouldn't have the same initial teleport that projecting does, because he's actually creating a gateway between the worlds at his current location, rather than pushing his consciousness into it alone. (I don't remember if Perrin and Slayer had to at least start where they were in reality and then will themselves over distance? If they did, that would be a good flavor foundation for that difference.)

I don't think in the books that this is the case. I think they could still teleport around and appear where they want to. Not 100% sure, though. Wouldn't a gateway (somewhat by definition) be able to go anywhere?

In any case, I think mechanically we shoudl probably allow the teleport. If the main purpose (or sole purpose) is to clean up DreamSpikes and such, I think he needs that functionality.

The approach of having a single "Enter the Wolf Dream" ability also sounds like it could work to me. I think making entering the Wolf Dream permanent is almost all-positive from a mechanical perspective (and would be my preference), but it unfortunately directly conflicts with the flavor from the books, in such a way that I don't think we can do it. As you've suggested, locking out the Wolfbrother's other ability once they enter T'a'r once makes sense - being able to roam and destroy Dreamwards in the interim and then subsequently use the GPs' full alternate ability defeats part of the way GPs work.

I don't think trapping the GP in the wolf dream breaks flavor THAT much. If you like it much more, mechanically, we should do it. It definitely feels more GP-like, that way. I mean, it's not like scientists actually only invent one thing and then die - the gp is an abstraction of their work. So it could work like that here, too, I think.

On the other hand, if we're allowing two Dreamspike-destructions per Wolfbrother, by not letting him re-enter the real world and re-teleport around, it becomes difficult, presumably, for that WB to use his second DS-destroy - what if he teleported to a small island and was stuck there, uselessly?

I do think that the WB needs to NOT have a sleeping unit, though (*that* destroys the flavor). So, assuming he CAN return to the real world - does he come back to where he started, or where he last was in T'a'r (in the real world?)?

Basically, I think I could go either way with this, but if we do the one-way-trip thing, are we ok with him floating around the world to find his next DS to destroy? Probably.

All that said, I can totally see the appeal of the less complex approach - no GPs entering T'a'r, just expending him to spawn wolves. We've got a flavor-mechanical conflict here, because making Wolfbrothers (Perrin) the primary way of combating Dreamspikes is a flavor slam dunk.

Yeah, I think it's hard to argue with the power of the flavor slam dunk.

The other thing we could do is, instead of having "Call Wolves," the WB could just *become* a wolf in the Wolf Dream - which is what he did for 90% of the series, anyways, thus the name "Wolf Dream." Then we could combine the functionality and the flavor. Though, of course, that's not how perrin found the Dreamspikes.

Honestly I'm not sure if we can know which will be better without playing it. Given that we will need Wolfbrothers and wolves for either approach, shall we go with the simpler one to start with? If we decide we want to do full T'a'r interaction for the Wolfbrother, the only "extra" work we did was create the mission which created the wolves and expended the Wolfbrother, which is relatively trivial next to actually making the Wolfbrother and wolves units (icons, models, balance), which we'll have to do either way.

Eh, I say we go with whichever one *feels* better. I don't think, mechanically, it makes that much of a difference. So, while I understand the idea of just starting simpler, I'd counter by simply saying "start with better." So, if you like the two-sides-to-the-WB approach a bit more, let's go with that.

So what do you think? And, for whichever you prefer, does it involve the WBr having another, T'a'r-unrelated ability as well?

OK, I'm also struck now by what is a good question, but should be a DUMB quesiton:

Who the heck makes the Dreamspikes? That's not the WB too, right? Is that a Great Dreamer or something like that?

We can discuss that when we do all the GPs, but just checking to make sure it isn't also the WBr. In any case, do we need to consider that unit at all before we move on from T'a'r? Whatever it is, it seems like it's second ability would be unrelated to T'a'r, yes?

Preserving this quote block (about Slayer) until then, then.

Eh. I've heard enough. Make him a random powerful Nightmare, or a Forsaken stand-in, or not at all.

True, unless damage interrupts them?

I'd say getting ATTACKED disrupts it. I don't think the projection aura damage should count, though.

I'm not so sure, I think without T'a'r vision, a player being affected by a foreign Dreamspike should only see the consequences (not being able to Travel there). The other effects of Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are actually irrelevant to foreign players. None of the other effects cause negatives for that player, only positive for the Dreamspike/ward owner, which should be circumvented by an active effort by the foreign player, rather than have them notified about it for free.

Players who own the Dreamwards/spikes in question obviously don't need T'a'r vision on them to see them, they are the owners so they have vision on their own structures. (Do Dreamwards provide vision or can you just see them in the fog? Providing vision at least on the warded hex itself would be more consistent with CiV.) I could see an icon for your own cities, but I don't think it's necessary, and we should only introduce it if we find that its absence is a problem, to avoid the city UI becoming even busier than it already is.

Overall, I don't think we'll have a problem with presentation of the effects' range to relevant players.

OK. Sounds good, then. If you're happy, I'm happy.

I don't know if wards and spikes provide vision. I suppose they provide T'a'R vision within their radius, but only that.

I'd be fine either way, and allowing overlapping is simpler.

fair enough.

We'll have to calibrate from playtesting, but I think 50% should be a good ballpark. It requires a GP expenditure in the right place, a subsequent Envoy to the same civ (Envoys can't exhibit at any random civ, needs to be planned) and the defending player has opportunity to destroy either the Envoy or the Dreamspike independently.

That sounds good.

I think Dreamwards and Dreamspikes are completely disconnected from city control - they never change ownership. Because the player doesn't really "ward a city," they place a ward that has an effect on that city (and possibly more). Related to what I mentioned above, foreign Dreamwards affecting your cities doesn't really impact your capabilities, and Dreamspikes only for Traveling. If the player wants to get rid of pre-existing ones after conquering a region, then they should destroy them (and build their own if they wish).

Also sounds good.

Yeah, maybe 5? It's a decent starting point and easy for us to tweak.

Yeah, why not? (this is about glimmers-to-hidden-sites).

Oh, what should we call them? Are they simply Hidden Sites of Power? Or should they be something like Reflections of Power or something?

 

[counterpoint]

I remember this conversation. Seems like eons ago.

I agree that this is the approach I like most - generically owned Stedding units that are teleported to the Blightborder to fight.

I think the "should we do this at all" is worth discussing though - the major reason that I latched onto this when we first discussed it was that it could be used to address the potential issue of Borderlanders always being overwhelmed by the TW, so human players would always restart if they found themselves near the Blight. This is still only a theoretical problem, we're not sure it will happen, but do we think this will help with that?

It also adds complexity, while definitely being a "non-essential" feature. I agree seeing Ogier fighting the Trollocs would be quite cool, but do we think it's something we should develop as a part of launch? Does it cause more problems than that coolness might be worth?

Eh. I could go either way. I think I like it more than I dislike it, but that doesn't mean we need it. If we keep it simple - some ogier units pop in to fight - than it's not a big problem either way. But if it's more complex than that, then I say no.

If I had to vote, though, I'd say put in the simple version.

I think if the borderlanders are reset-worthy, this isn't going to fix that problem anyways!

And besides, while Borderlandrr in the books does not mean Borderlander in a given game, civs DO have start biases, so Shienar and the rest ARE more likely to appear on the border (assuming we give them that bias), and will probably have UAs that synergize with that aspect.

Sounds sensible, if we do it this way, though that looks unlikely.

we wont!

I think I understood the last one of these, but this seems like a serious stretch for an innuendo.

That's what she s-
nevermind.

Funny, I've always thought of the Ogier forests that we see inside Stedding when various characters enter them as having Groves at the center (the Great Stump is hosted in a Grove, right?).

They may very well! But... how many times in the books does somebody enter a stedding?

This is certainly very interesting and would make Stedding very unique. I don't think we'd want to put it as a GP ability though, with this approach. Mainly because there won't be enough GPs of a single type across all of the civs to populate all of the Stedding's tiles this way.

Right, but there's nothing to say that a stedding needs to have every tile improved, right? Couldn't they work with slightly different mechanics? Also, that one grove could be worth a billion food or something.

I say this one should pass to the second round of the audition, where it can get laughed off stage in front of a live studio audience.

We do still have the opposite problem, as you've mentioned, of having Groves dotted all over certain Stedding, if it's a "non-universal" improvement. And there definitely should be some distinction for it, so that it isn't just a "Great Merchant that only works on Stedding."

Still drawing a bit of a blank on this one.

Treesing
Well, planting groves could also yield the... planter GP points of that type? Or some other yield?

Interesting, I've found I always use Diplomats by the endgame (as long as I'm not way behind in tech, in which case I need the stealing), particularly when playing Culture or Diplo. It's useful to know how the AI will vote so you can bribe them to vote differently strategically. I suppose with humans you can always ask, but the catch is humans might lie.

Sounds like a fun idea then, though! Something for us to keep in mind when creating GP types and deciding what generates their points.

Yeah, I say pass the one along too.

I think my lack of diplomat-usage has a lot more to do with me not loving the spy system so much, and getting lazy with it. I'm rarely in a close race for diplo.

Definitely a possible source, and it makes sense in a flavorful sense. The only way to guarantee you'll get this bonus is to be top-influencer with the top 3 Ajahs, which is quite hard, so no one should be able to monopolize it as a source, unless they should clearly be getting all of the points because of how far ahead they are.

Well, I can't think of anything better for the tower, sadly. Not now, at least (since this GP stuff is only now really sinking back into my brain.

Discover a Weave
This depends on how transparent we want to be. The player doesn't need to be able to distinguish between quota-ed and un-quota-ed Sisters. If the Tower's quota for a player falls and the player was at their quota of quota-ed Sisters, then the Tower will request a Sister back. The player then chooses any of their Sisters to send back. It doesn't matter if that Sisters was actually originally a quota-ed one or not, because we don't need to connect that. Only the Tower knows how many quota each player has remaining and what those quotas are, because it's not really a resource that players should manage, it's a system for the Tower to distribute Sister units in a meaningful way.

My only concern here is to do with the whole "taking back a Sister" concept that we decided on before. Might it look too arbitrary and unpredictable from the player's perspective, that the Tower suddenly pulls back its Sisters? Would the connection between them doing "worse" at the game and that recall be clear enough?

Had to jump back two posts to remember which ability this even was...

OK, first of all, your explanation makes sense, but I think you may be missing the point, really. Transparent or not, if this ability gives a civ who is at "full quota" a sister, and then the Tower immediately takes it back, the ability at that point is pointless...

So, I am unsure on the merits of that ability.

Now, as far as the Tower taking back sisters. I think it's a necessary mechanic, if sister quota is based on parameters that evolve over the course of the game (population, Philosophy, etc. - not diplo, as I recall). If you abandon Authority and jump to Oppression, you most definitely need to lose sisters. If you lose half your cities and become a puny nation, you'd probably lose sisters.

I think we need finesse with this, though. We can't have it be that you hit 1 million population, and gain one, and then if you drop back to 990 thousand, you lose it again. You have to "fall behind" quite a bit below the initial threshold, I'd say. Changing your philosophy is probably the only way to instantly lose several sisters. In general, we can have them leave one at a time, also, as opposed to in one instant.

Dice in my Head
I'm not sure what you mean here. Randomness is a part of all combat in CiV. I'm proposing that this aura/effect make that randomness non-random when one of these units is involved, and instead roll maximally in the favor of the player with the aura/effect. This would have the side effect of meaning you could work out the result of combat involving one of these "non-random" units with certainty, before it had happened. (Unlike normal combat, which is only estimated beforehand.) So this ability will affect all combat involving that unit. Combat strength, on the other hand, is never random (combat strength is the number that your unit has written in the UI). Effective combat strength can be deduced from terrain and various modifiers. The randomness is normally in addition to all of that.

Yeah, I got you now. I thought you were saying that combat wasn't randomized. You were saying that Combat Strength isn't, of course.

I still do say that it feels the same, though - a 10% boost to Combat strength and a 10% "advantage to odds," for instance. I mean, you aren't really suggesting that all the randomness be *maximally* in the advantage of the civ with the power, are you (unless that amount is rather small)? (e.g. rolling 20s every time).

Right, following this back to its original post, the Alignment approach was one of two proposed abilities. Do we like the general yield enhancement? I have no particularly strong feelings either way, it kind of avoids the cost of an Improvement (using a tile) so would necessarily have to be weaker.

Legendary Monument
What are we talking about.....?

oh, right. I too have no strong opinion. Yields?

Oh, right! Are there any WoT flavor elements that lend themselves particularly to this ability?

Recruit
Hmmm... any possible UUs or UAs that would enable unit-stealing...?

Well, there's compulsion from black sisters.

And seanchan with channelers.

not sure what else. Then again, CiV has a regular unit that does this (privateer).

I don't think it's less flavorful - the Band of the Red Hand carried on being awesome in Mat's absence, in part due to his influence, which lines up with the flavor of this ability. Mechanically I agree, sounds good!

Ancient Memories
ok then!

Seems like this is the only variant of Ta'veren Influence we want to pursue?

Rushing ongoing tasks like stealing techs or stealing Seals (!) could be quite cool. Having to send it to an enemy city would definitely suck though, exactly as you've said. Perhaps the GP can be expended in your territory and then you pick an EaE to rush?

Hmmm.... not sure. Maybe the influence-related one is the safest?

As far as rushing the EaE... I think it's worth throwing into the pot to vote on later, though. Yeah, I think from your territory could be fine, I guess.

Programming note: I'm in town for a couple days, but leaving town from Tuesday-Wed. So if we want me to get another post in before I leave, I'll need to do so either tomorrow evening or Monday evening.

 

[S3rgeus]

Eh, I don't hate it. If you're fine with it, I can be fine with i.

Honestly, at this point, simplest is better, I guess.

Cool, we can change it later if we find it's a problem.

Yeah, that's a better name, though let's go Gifted Dreamwalkers or something, since they aren't necessarily Dreamers.

Or Dreamwalker Training or something.

I like Gifted Dreamwalkers. Summary-ized.

Well, I think the flavor problems associated with CSs make up for the mechanical benefits.

I mean, who is going to be dreamwalking into Tar Valon, anyways? They don't drop GP, so there won't really be any glimmers there, unless there's a GMe type GP that would periodically go there.

Do Wards even work in Tar Valon? Do they prevent influence decay just the same?

So, occasional, rare glimmers, and somebody dropping a Dreamward or spike there (which would probably already be there by the time this edict is dropped in many games) - those are the only reasons somebody would ever go there. In other words, people will basically never go there. I'd guess that were this edict to come up, there's only a 50/50 chance a single civ would even have bothered to go there in T'a'r.

So, in other words, this is really, REALLY limited in its scope. I'd rather it apply to all CS-like entities. If it needs new flavor, fine. Otherwise, I say drop it.

I'm leaning towards dropping it. There are a few ways to make the flavor CS-wide, but then they end up feeling like they're beyond the scope of the Tower's abilities, since it wasn't particularly known for its T'a'r expertise.

As for do Dreamwards work in Tar Valon. I could see them working for overall Tower influence, or not at all. Leaning towards not at all.

preserved.

still preserved (wolves)

I don't think in the books that this is the case. I think they could still teleport around and appear where they want to. Not 100% sure, though. Wouldn't a gateway (somewhat by definition) be able to go anywhere?

In any case, I think mechanically we shoudl probably allow the teleport. If the main purpose (or sole purpose) is to clean up DreamSpikes and such, I think he needs that functionality.

Only if it's a gateway in the Traveling sense - I'm not sure if it is. (The WoT wiki article isn't specific about it.)

Mechanically, I don't think he needs the teleport. If his objective is clearing up Dreamspikes, that's something that should require some main layer presence in the area - clearing the way for a channeling force to Travel into the area for example. He's also a strong combat unit in T'a'r, so he shouldn't much trouble moving through T'a'r unless severely outnumbered, or he encounters a Forsaken.

Disallowing the teleport also solves our problems with making moving into T'a'r permanent - if he transported directly into the T'a'r layer from the main layer in the same location, then we know the player has consistent vision around the area (because they must've moved him to that location in the main layers).

I don't think trapping the GP in the wolf dream breaks flavor THAT much. If you like it much more, mechanically, we should do it. It definitely feels more GP-like, that way. I mean, it's not like scientists actually only invent one thing and then die - the gp is an abstraction of their work. So it could work like that here, too, I think.

On the other hand, if we're allowing two Dreamspike-destructions per Wolfbrother, by not letting him re-enter the real world and re-teleport around, it becomes difficult, presumably, for that WB to use his second DS-destroy - what if he teleported to a small island and was stuck there, uselessly?

I do think that the WB needs to NOT have a sleeping unit, though (*that* destroys the flavor). So, assuming he CAN return to the real world - does he come back to where he started, or where he last was in T'a'r (in the real world?)?

Basically, I think I could go either way with this, but if we do the one-way-trip thing, are we ok with him floating around the world to find his next DS to destroy? Probably.

Totally agree, the Wolfbrother doesn't have a "sleeping unit" host back in the main layer, he just appears as a "different unit" (in the CiV sense) in the T'a'r layer.

Being stuck, I've mentioned above and I think we can avoid it.

If we don't think that being stuck permanently in T'a'r after activating the "enter the wolf dream" ability is a big flavor problem, then I think we should do that. It creates fewer avenues for exploits and presents a simpler ability set to the player. Explaining it as an abstraction is a good call.

With the one-way-trip approach, I think we could say that the wolfbrother can use two of his "big" abilities in T'a'r before being expended. So he can summon wolves twice (giving you two wolves), or destroy two Dreamspikes, or destroy one Dreamspike and summon one wolf.

A consequence of summoning wolves from the wolfbrother GP in T'a'r is that the wolves should fight better against most T'a'r units - otherwise why would you give up your superior wolfbrother unit to create a wolf?

Yeah, I think it's hard to argue with the power of the flavor slam dunk.

The other thing we could do is, instead of having "Call Wolves," the WB could just *become* a wolf in the Wolf Dream - which is what he did for 90% of the series, anyways, thus the name "Wolf Dream." Then we could combine the functionality and the flavor. Though, of course, that's not how perrin found the Dreamspikes.

Eh, I say we go with whichever one *feels* better. I don't think, mechanically, it makes that much of a difference. So, while I understand the idea of just starting simpler, I'd counter by simply saying "start with better." So, if you like the two-sides-to-the-WB approach a bit more, let's go with that.

So what do you think? And, for whichever you prefer, does it involve the WBr having another, T'a'r-unrelated ability as well?

I think I'm convinced on going for the better feel approach. The way I think works:

Wolfbrother GPs have an "enter the wolf dream" ability and another, unrelated to T'a'r ability.

Entering the wolf dream permanently moves the wolfbrother into the T'a'r layer, on its current hex.

In the T'a'r layer, the wolfbrother is a strong combat unit, with two other abilities: summon wolves, and destroy Dreamspike.

Summon wolves create a wolf adjacent to the wolfbrother in the T'a'r layer, controlled by the same player.

Destroy Dreamspike destroys a Dreamspike. (tautology club)

When the wolfbrother uses his special abilities twice in total, he is expended.

OK, I'm also struck now by what is a good question, but should be a DUMB quesiton:

Who the heck makes the Dreamspikes? That's not the WB too, right? Is that a Great Dreamer or something like that?

We can discuss that when we do all the GPs, but just checking to make sure it isn't also the WBr. In any case, do we need to consider that unit at all before we move on from T'a'r? Whatever it is, it seems like it's second ability would be unrelated to T'a'r, yes?

Yes, Dreamspikes are sourced from a different GP type. (This might be a good base ability for a Slayer-like GP type, despite below.) But it's something we can discuss when making the GP types!

Eh. I've heard enough. Make him a random powerful Nightmare, or a Forsaken stand-in, or not at all.

Oh noes, mentioned above! Let's leave this and see what we come up with when making GP types.

I'd say getting ATTACKED disrupts it. I don't think the projection aura damage should count, though.

I realize I should've mentioned this before: I figured projections couldn't attack. That's why they had that passive damage field. They're "only defensive combat" units, so they can't initiate combat, but do defend themselves from nightmares and the like (it's not an auto-kill against them).

OK. Sounds good, then. If you're happy, I'm happy.

I don't know if wards and spikes provide vision. I suppose they provide T'a'R vision within their radius, but only that.

Well, we discussed Dreamspikes providing main layer vision before and decided we liked the idea. As a tactical tool, I think that makes sense.

Dreamwards I'm less sure about, being able to carpet the map with active vision is dangerous, since Dreamwards could be made in much greater numbers than Dreamspikes. It is super weird to own a structure and it not be within your active sight though, which is what makes me think providing vision on its own hex might be the best compromise.

fair enough.

Summary-ized

That sounds good.

Summary-ized

Yeah, why not? (this is about glimmers-to-hidden-sites).

Oh, what should we call them? Are they simply Hidden Sites of Power? Or should they be something like Reflections of Power or something?

Reflections of Power sounds pretty cool.

I realized when writing this into the summary: Hidden Antiquity Sites have two functions that are different from normal Antiquity Sites. One is that you can discover GW of Writing in them sometimes. And the other is sometimes they can be consumed for a culture dump (equal value to the Great Writer's culture dump ability). Do we want to keep that possibility as well?

 

[S3rgeus]

Eh. I could go either way. I think I like it more than I dislike it, but that doesn't mean we need it. If we keep it simple - some ogier units pop in to fight - than it's not a big problem either way. But if it's more complex than that, then I say no.

If I had to vote, though, I'd say put in the simple version.

I think if the borderlanders are reset-worthy, this isn't going to fix that problem anyways!

Even the simple version presents complexities for us, if not for the user. Having some Ogier units pop in to fight means that one of the Stedding needs to be given control of them (all units must belong to a player). But we don't want to give them all to the same Stedding, in case a large number survive and that Stedding ends up with tons of units. So now we need to distribute their ownership evenly across all the Stedding on the map. But a CS AI that suddenly gains a unit far from home may just try to pull it back to their own lands, which isn't really the idea. Avoiding that involves new AI code.

All of these things are possible - probably a few days' work, but I wonder if it's something we should prioritize here. If it sounds like this functionality is worth that work, I'm all for it, but I figured I should mention that having some units pop up to fight will have more complex implications than it looks.

And besides, while Borderlandrr in the books does not mean Borderlander in a given game, civs DO have start biases, so Shienar and the rest ARE more likely to appear on the border (assuming we give them that bias), and will probably have UAs that synergize with that aspect.

Yes, totally.

we wont!

Axed!

They may very well! But... how many times in the books does somebody enter a stedding?

Enough times that it was the first thing I thought of for Groves.

Right, but there's nothing to say that a stedding needs to have every tile improved, right? Couldn't they work with slightly different mechanics? Also, that one grove could be worth a billion food or something.

I say this one should pass to the second round of the audition, where it can get laughed off stage in front of a live studio audience.

Cool, this one lives on then! In which form? Shall I leave it as a question mark for now, and let us choose whichever Grove interpretation works best for the GPs we have available?

Treesing
Well, planting groves could also yield the... planter GP points of that type? Or some other yield?

I think it would be cool if we could have something mechanically distinct for this, since it would make Stedding stand out a lot more. It would be good to have a mechanical distinction like this between Stedding and normal CSes, which would end up making them visually quite different.

Yeah, I say pass the one along too.

I think my lack of diplomat-usage has a lot more to do with me not loving the spy system so much, and getting lazy with it. I'm rarely in a close race for diplo.

Cool, like below (writing out of order), this is a possible source of GP points for an as-yes-undecided GP type, so we'll need to keep it in mind when deciding on spawning mechanisms.

Well, I can't think of anything better for the tower, sadly. Not now, at least (since this GP stuff is only now really sinking back into my brain.

Cool, this quote block is about a source of GP points for a diplo-driven GP, so we'll need to keep it in mind when we're making the GP types and deciding how to generate them!

Had to jump back two posts to remember which ability this even was...

OK, first of all, your explanation makes sense, but I think you may be missing the point, really. Transparent or not, if this ability gives a civ who is at "full quota" a sister, and then the Tower immediately takes it back, the ability at that point is pointless...

So, I am unsure on the merits of that ability.

That's not what would happen. It would be like this:

Player A has quota 5. The Tower has given them 5 Sisters, so they have 5 "quota-ed" Sisters. (The player does not see the number 5 anywhere, they just have 5 Aes Sedai.)

Player A uses this ability and gains a 6th "un-quota-ed" Sister. She's no different from the ones they have already, from their point of view.

Player A loses a war and bunch of cities, and the Tower "demotes" them in their eyes, lowering their quota. Internally, the Tower lowers his quota to 4. Player A must now send 1 of his 6 Sisters back to the Tower.

This means quota is only ever internal to the Tower. Quota-ed or un-quota-ed Sisters are indistinguishable to everyone else. Sometimes the Tower just asks for a Sister back, if a player becomes worse.

Now, as far as the Tower taking back sisters. I think it's a necessary mechanic, if sister quota is based on parameters that evolve over the course of the game (population, Philosophy, etc. - not diplo, as I recall). If you abandon Authority and jump to Oppression, you most definitely need to lose sisters. If you lose half your cities and become a puny nation, you'd probably lose sisters.

I think we need finesse with this, though. We can't have it be that you hit 1 million population, and gain one, and then if you drop back to 990 thousand, you lose it again. You have to "fall behind" quite a bit below the initial threshold, I'd say. Changing your philosophy is probably the only way to instantly lose several sisters. In general, we can have them leave one at a time, also, as opposed to in one instant.

Cool, this all sounds sensible and a good reason to keep "recalling Sisters" around as a mechanic.

Yeah, I got you now. I thought you were saying that combat wasn't randomized. You were saying that Combat Strength isn't, of course.

I still do say that it feels the same, though - a 10% boost to Combat strength and a 10% "advantage to odds," for instance. I mean, you aren't really suggesting that all the randomness be *maximally* in the advantage of the civ with the power, are you (unless that amount is rather small)? (e.g. rolling 20s every time).

Dice in my Head
The randomness is rather small (doing 30-ish average damage, the randomness is usually 25-35 range), so yes, for combat we could give maximal advantage to the units that are affected by this aura. They would still lose to superior units, but they'd win more even match-ups most of the time, which is cool. Other effects that are altered by this (say, Gentling, Stealing Seals, anything else probability based that we want to include) wouldn't be maximally in the player's favor, just weighted a bit. It depends on the value of the randomness.

Legendary Monument
What are we talking about.....?

oh, right. I too have no strong opinion. Yields?

Should we drop it if neither of us feel strongly about it? It circumvents the costs presented by other GPs and Governors, and doesn't make any big splashy coolness for the player.

Recruit
Hmmm... any possible UUs or UAs that would enable unit-stealing...?

Well, there's compulsion from black sisters.

And seanchan with channelers.

not sure what else. Then again, CiV has a regular unit that does this (privateer).

Right, but we have Compulsion elsewhere, and it's a more targeted ability. Same with sul'dam. This is a "splash" of conversions. I'd be fine leaving this in because it seems cool, and we'll see if we have a GP for it.

Hmmm.... not sure. Maybe the influence-related one is the safest?

As far as rushing the EaE... I think it's worth throwing into the pot to vote on later, though. Yeah, I think from your territory could be fine, I guess.

I've added the "rush a spy" to the candidate list.

Which influence-related version do you want to add to the list? Stopping other players from couping/shenanigansing?

Programming note: I'm in town for a couple days, but leaving town from Tuesday-Wed. So if we want me to get another post in before I leave, I'll need to do so either tomorrow evening or Monday evening.

This was minorly confusing, I was all "but I do the programming" Enjoy the trip!

 

[counterpoint]

Fastest turnaround ever! Won't be able to finish all my posts now, though.

I'm leaning towards dropping it. There are a few ways to make the flavor CS-wide, but then they end up feeling like they're beyond the scope of the Tower's abilities, since it wasn't particularly known for its T'a'r expertise.

drop it, I think.

As for do Dreamwards work in Tar Valon. I could see them working for overall Tower influence, or not at all. Leaning towards not at all.

Eh, I do think that all-tower-influence might feel kind of powerful, but then again, it will encourage competition.

I guess I'm leaning towards overall tower influence, because otherwise it will seem unintuitive to the players to have wards do nothing in TV.

still preserved (wolves)

Yeah, I think we can terminate this quote block. If we go with your WBr suggestion, this all still applies (they can eat Wards but not spikes, if I recall this quote block correctly).

Only if it's a gateway in the Traveling sense - I'm not sure if it is. (The WoT wiki article isn't specific about it.)

I think it is a gateway. See here at the bottom.

Mechanically, I don't think he needs the teleport. If his objective is clearing up Dreamspikes, that's something that should require some main layer presence in the area - clearing the way for a channeling force to Travel into the area for example. He's also a strong combat unit in T'a'r, so he shouldn't much trouble moving through T'a'r unless severely outnumbered, or he encounters a Forsaken.

Disallowing the teleport also solves our problems with making moving into T'a'r permanent - if he transported directly into the T'a'r layer from the main layer in the same location, then we know the player has consistent vision around the area (because they must've moved him to that location in the main layers).

if you greatly prefer no-teleport, I can accept that.

I think the one issue is that it does become quite difficult to get wolves into the proper defensive positions. A whole Glimmer or DS/DW battle could be happening on the other side of the world, with WBr or Wolves not getting there until things are already done. I'm not concerned with him having trouble moving around in the sense that he'll get killed, but in the sense that it'll just take too long.

Also, there's the opposite of the "trapped" issue we spoke of before. If he has to move normally through T'a'r, those distant pockets of vision (from an EaE) would be technically inaccessible to the wolves and the WBr both.

I'd vote for keeping the teleport ability intact. The "trapped" thing is just a bummer byproduct, but one that stems from a player-decision, at least (they decided to put him in a trap-place).

The other thing is that "Call Wolves" could create wolves in any location (e.g. a teleport), but that feels less good, and is less flavorful, then appearing near/next to him.

But, yeah, that's my vote. I think it feels more in-line with the rest of T'a'r, and preserves balance, if he can teleport.

Totally agree, the Wolfbrother doesn't have a "sleeping unit" host back in the main layer, he just appears as a "different unit" (in the CiV sense) in the T'a'r layer.

would be cool if his unit looks more "real," e.g. not ghostly or fuzzy or w/e.

If we don't think that being stuck permanently in T'a'r after activating the "enter the wolf dream" ability is a big flavor problem, then I think we should do that. It creates fewer avenues for exploits and presents a simpler ability set to the player. Explaining it as an abstraction is a good call.

I'm fine with T'a'r being a one-way ticket.

With the one-way-trip approach, I think we could say that the wolfbrother can use two of his "big" abilities in T'a'r before being expended. So he can summon wolves twice (giving you two wolves), or destroy two Dreamspikes, or destroy one Dreamspike and summon one wolf.

A consequence of summoning wolves from the wolfbrother GP in T'a'r is that the wolves should fight better against most T'a'r units - otherwise why would you give up your superior wolfbrother unit to create a wolf?

Yes, agree on all of this.

I'd actually venture to say the WBr is not a "powerful unit," really. He doesn't even need to attack, IMO, but his combat str should be far greater than the projections. Maybe he can attack, but this is not necessary. In any case, I don't feel he should be powerful, really - let the wolves justify their existence. Perrin is "powerful" because of his manipulation of T'a'r, which I think we're expressing here properly in other ways.

I think I'm convinced on going for the better feel approach. The way I think works:

Wolfbrother GPs have an "enter the wolf dream" ability and another, unrelated to T'a'r ability.

Entering the wolf dream permanently moves the wolfbrother into the T'a'r layer, on its current hex.

In the T'a'r layer, the wolfbrother is a strong combat unit, with two other abilities: summon wolves, and destroy Dreamspike.

Summon wolves create a wolf adjacent to the wolfbrother in the T'a'r layer, controlled by the same player.

Destroy Dreamspike destroys a Dreamspike. (tautology club)

When the wolfbrother uses his special abilities twice in total, he is expended.

Yeah, this all looks good, which the aforementioned changes:
- WBr can teleport in
- WBr isn't particularly powerful. He probably has good movement and good "Defensive" abilities though.

Yes, Dreamspikes are sourced from a different GP type. (This might be a good base ability for a Slayer-like GP type, despite below.) But it's something we can discuss when making the GP types!

Oh noes, mentioned above! Let's leave this and see what we come up with when making GP types.

Eh... we can consider this later. Slayer is so specifically and obviously evil it's hard to think of things like him as an alignment-neutral GP (which he'd need to be, lest we only allow DSs for shadow civs). The "feel" of the books seems to be that his neutral counterpart is a wolfbrother (though of course that isn't technically correct).

So be sure to add "Make Dreamspike" or w/e we call it into the GP ability list for later consideration.

I realize I should've mentioned this before: I figured projections couldn't attack. That's why they had that passive damage field. They're "only defensive combat" units, so they can't initiate combat, but do defend themselves from nightmares and the like (it's not an auto-kill against them).

Right, certainly. But we were talking about whether damage interrupts their planting of wards. I'm saying that attack damage would (from wolves, nightmares, 'saken), but damage from other projection's AoE wouldn't.

EDIT: actually, I'm kind of thinking now that attacks shouldn't disrupt anything anyways. It feels cheap if you're two turns into creating the Ward, for a nightmare or civ-Wolf to whack you once and that's it. If the projection survives the attack, shouldn't it be able to still perform the action (like a suicidal Worker)?

Well, we discussed Dreamspikes providing main layer vision before and decided we liked the idea. As a tactical tool, I think that makes sense.

Dreamwards I'm less sure about, being able to carpet the map with active vision is dangerous, since Dreamwards could be made in much greater numbers than Dreamspikes. It is super weird to own a structure and it not be within your active sight though, which is what makes me think providing vision on its own hex might be the best compromise.

Yeah, I agree. That's a good perk of DSs. As far as the DWs, I think maybe one hex is fine? It does still feel odd, but I think it's necessary not to allow more than that one hex.

Reflections of Power sounds pretty cool.

I realized when writing this into the summary: Hidden Antiquity Sites have two functions that are different from normal Antiquity Sites. One is that you can discover GW of Writing in them sometimes. And the other is sometimes they can be consumed for a culture dump (equal value to the Great Writer's culture dump ability). Do we want to keep that possibility as well?

Oh, wow. Right. You know, I use hidden ant sites so rarely I've only really had these come up in one game....

I think we should keep them, right? Prevent unintended balancing problems and such?

I think the flavor is good, too, the GWoW is likely to be a Prophesy they find.

OK, gonna try to finish the last one, but it's unlikely that I'll be able to now.

EDIT: yeah, I'll get to the second post later today/tonight.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

I apologize for not reading the thread before posting. Is this playable yet? I'm a huge fan of both the WoT and Civ V so this is an amazing idea. If it's a reality I want to play

 

[counterpoint]

I apologize for not reading the thread before posting. Is this playable yet? I'm a huge fan of both the WoT and Civ V so this is an amazing idea. If it's a reality I want to play

Oh, man, I wish we had something playable!

Glad you like the idea! Always great to find another fan of both of these franchises.

S3rgeus can probably be more specific, but recently I do remember us saying we were hoping to be in Alpha somewhere "within a year". We'll see.... As you can probably see, there's a lot of design going into this thing - we want to get it right!

Keep checking back. And, of course, if you want to offer some suggestions or contribute, you are more than welcome!

Even the simple version presents complexities for us, if not for the user. Having some Ogier units pop in to fight means that one of the Stedding needs to be given control of them (all units must belong to a player). But we don't want to give them all to the same Stedding, in case a large number survive and that Stedding ends up with tons of units. So now we need to distribute their ownership evenly across all the Stedding on the map. But a CS AI that suddenly gains a unit far from home may just try to pull it back to their own lands, which isn't really the idea. Avoiding that involves new AI code.

All of these things are possible - probably a few days' work, but I wonder if it's something we should prioritize here. If it sounds like this functionality is worth that work, I'm all for it, but I figured I should mention that having some units pop up to fight will have more complex implications than it looks.

WELL, first of all, I should say I'm totally fine dropping this if you want. Just making that clear first, since I feel like every time you point out a difficulty with this particular mechanic, I'm like "but, but..."

But, but.... we could just have the Ogier disappear at the end of the TW, right? I mean, any newly-created/teleported-to-blight ones. It'd be like the Trollocs themselves wandering off and disappearing.

But, again, fine to axe it. You know much butter how much of a burden this'd be.

Enough times that it was the first thing I thought of for Groves.

Phrasi--

i'll stop now

Cool, this one lives on then! In which form? Shall I leave it as a question mark for now, and let us choose whichever Grove interpretation works best for the GPs we have available?

Yeah. I think we should probably leave it ambiguous, and/or mention all of the ideas in the list. I think it'll depend on which role needs to be filled, and such.

I think it would be cool if we could have something mechanically distinct for this, since it would make Stedding stand out a lot more. It would be good to have a mechanical distinction like this between Stedding and normal CSes, which would end up making them visually quite different.

agreed

Cool, this quote block is about a source of GP points for a diplo-driven GP, so we'll need to keep it in mind when we're making the GP types and deciding how to generate them!

Yeah. It's probably A-OK to have the diplo-GPs not necessarily affect Tower politics, at all. In fact, Tower politics are a small part of the diplo victory - they are a very large part of Channeling and Aes Sedai usage, so it's possible that such things would be a Great , not a diplo focused GP

That's not what would happen. It would be like this:

Player A has quota 5. The Tower has given them 5 Sisters, so they have 5 "quota-ed" Sisters. (The player does not see the number 5 anywhere, they just have 5 Aes Sedai.)

Player A uses this ability and gains a 6th "un-quota-ed" Sister. She's no different from the ones they have already, from their point of view.

Player A loses a war and bunch of cities, and the Tower "demotes" them in their eyes, lowering their quota. Internally, the Tower lowers his quota to 4. Player A must now send 1 of his 6 Sisters back to the Tower.

This means quota is only ever internal to the Tower. Quota-ed or un-quota-ed Sisters are indistinguishable to everyone else. Sometimes the Tower just asks for a Sister back, if a player becomes worse.

OH.

Yeah, ok. So what you're suggesting is that that GP ability simply Raise your quota by 1? It has to, right? Otherwise, it would be super lame to be under-quota and just get a free one, but if you're at quota, then you get pushed above quota.

That's a pretty good GP ability, then...

Dice in my Head
The randomness is rather small (doing 30-ish average damage, the randomness is usually 25-35 range), so yes, for combat we could give maximal advantage to the units that are affected by this aura. They would still lose to superior units, but they'd win more even match-ups most of the time, which is cool. Other effects that are altered by this (say, Gentling, Stealing Seals, anything else probability based that we want to include) wouldn't be maximally in the player's favor, just weighted a bit. It depends on the value of the randomness.

totally getcha now.

Should we drop it if neither of us feel strongly about it? It circumvents the costs presented by other GPs and Governors, and doesn't make any big splashy coolness for the player.

Yeah. I think it's clear that this one won't survive the Lightning Round anyways.

Right, but we have Compulsion elsewhere, and it's a more targeted ability. Same with sul'dam. This is a "splash" of conversions. I'd be fine leaving this in because it seems cool, and we'll see if we have a GP for it.

Fair enough. Keep it around.

I've added the "rush a spy" to the candidate list.

Which influence-related version do you want to add to the list? Stopping other players from couping/shenanigansing?

Well, no, I was just insinuating that the abilities that straight-up just add influence with a CS should stay on the list (and they are, I think). I don't think we need to worry about any more spy abilities.

OK. Dang. So I think we're pretty much ready to jump into the list and go nuts, right?

What's our process here? Are we discussing things? Voting? Combining them into various potential GPs?

 

[Mr. Shadows]

I just took some time to look at what you're attempting here and I'm blown away. It's an incredibly ambitious project. I've always thought the WoT would make a spectacular strategy game, but the rights are languishing due to crappy business. You're trying to make my day-dream a reality and I wish you all the luck in the world. I've read every book in the series at least twice, and some more then that. It will take me a while to give this thread the attention it deserves but when I do I'm sure I'll have something constructive to say. I don't know a thing about modding or programming but I spent more then 20 years reading (and waiting for) the WoT. If nothing else I'll cheer enthusiastically in the hopes that this turns out even half as cool as you're trying to make it.

 

[S3rgeus]

drop it, I think.

Dropped

Eh, I do think that all-tower-influence might feel kind of powerful, but then again, it will encourage competition.

I guess I'm leaning towards overall tower influence, because otherwise it will seem unintuitive to the players to have wards do nothing in TV.

It will definitely encourage competition - I imagine trying to keep this Dreamward up would require quite a solidly dominant T'a'r civ. I don't think it would be too big a problem for player understand if we made Dreamwards not work on Tar Valon though, it already has a lot of distinct behavior from other CSes.

Yeah, I think we can terminate this quote block. If we go with your WBr suggestion, this all still applies (they can eat Wards but not spikes, if I recall this quote block correctly).

I think this quote block was originally the alternative where we discussed the non-Wolfbrother-in-T'a'r scenario, using wolves in their mechanical place (so wolves could destroy Dreamspikes, but were consumed in the process). But, as we'll see in a moment, I agree, let's terminate this quote block and use the Wolfbrother approach.

I think it is a gateway. See here at the bottom.

Awesome, that looks pretty clear cut.

if you greatly prefer no-teleport, I can accept that.

I think the one issue is that it does become quite difficult to get wolves into the proper defensive positions. A whole Glimmer or DS/DW battle could be happening on the other side of the world, with WBr or Wolves not getting there until things are already done. I'm not concerned with him having trouble moving around in the sense that he'll get killed, but in the sense that it'll just take too long.

Also, there's the opposite of the "trapped" issue we spoke of before. If he has to move normally through T'a'r, those distant pockets of vision (from an EaE) would be technically inaccessible to the wolves and the WBr both.

I'd vote for keeping the teleport ability intact. The "trapped" thing is just a bummer byproduct, but one that stems from a player-decision, at least (they decided to put him in a trap-place).

The other thing is that "Call Wolves" could create wolves in any location (e.g. a teleport), but that feels less good, and is less flavorful, then appearing near/next to him.

But, yeah, that's my vote. I think it feels more in-line with the rest of T'a'r, and preserves balance, if he can teleport.

Coolio, I'm convinced, let's allow the Wolfbrother to teleport into T'a'r in the same manner as projections (except he doesn't leave a host behind).

would be cool if his unit looks more "real," e.g. not ghostly or fuzzy or w/e.

Yes, totally! Which means we make him as a normal unit, in terms of the model, and need to make the projections ethereal looking. I'm sure we'll have fun with partial transparency and particle effects for "ghostly wisps" - lots of Blender trial and error unless Deliverator, Ekmek, or NomadOrWhat have already figured that out!

I'm fine with T'a'r being a one-way ticket.

Decided

Yes, agree on all of this.

I'd actually venture to say the WBr is not a "powerful unit," really. He doesn't even need to attack, IMO, but his combat str should be far greater than the projections. Maybe he can attack, but this is not necessary. In any case, I don't feel he should be powerful, really - let the wolves justify their existence. Perrin is "powerful" because of his manipulation of T'a'r, which I think we're expressing here properly in other ways.

Cool, noticeably stronger than the projections, but noticeably weaker than the wolves. I think having him attack with a hammer would be pretty cool.

Yeah, this all looks good, which the aforementioned changes:
- WBr can teleport in
- WBr isn't particularly powerful. He probably has good movement and good "Defensive" abilities though.

Awesome sauce'em, summary-ized all of this.

Eh... we can consider this later. Slayer is so specifically and obviously evil it's hard to think of things like him as an alignment-neutral GP (which he'd need to be, lest we only allow DSs for shadow civs). The "feel" of the books seems to be that his neutral counterpart is a wolfbrother (though of course that isn't technically correct).

Cool, stuff for us to consider later!

So be sure to add "Make Dreamspike" or w/e we call it into the GP ability list for later consideration.

Already there!

Right, certainly. But we were talking about whether damage interrupts their planting of wards. I'm saying that attack damage would (from wolves, nightmares, 'saken), but damage from other projection's AoE wouldn't.

EDIT: actually, I'm kind of thinking now that attacks shouldn't disrupt anything anyways. It feels cheap if you're two turns into creating the Ward, for a nightmare or civ-Wolf to whack you once and that's it. If the projection survives the attack, shouldn't it be able to still perform the action (like a suicidal Worker)?

Right, but this quote block originates from us wanting creating Dreamwards to not be a "get out of T'a'r free card" when a projection is under attack (preventing the "spike" damage from death from taking effect, since creating a Dreamward ideally wouldn't do the "spike" damage when used normally). We then noted that it was still effective to use Dreamwards as an escape mechanism when running from other projections - hence the suggestion that damage interrupt the process of creating a Dreamward.

I think having the construction of a Dreamward be interrupted by either could work when compared to the way that workers work. Ranged damage doesn't stop a worker from continuing next turn, but a melee attack captures the worker immediately "interrupting" him. But it does leave a partially finished improvement that the player can build with a different worker. Do we want "partially constructed" Dreamwards to exist?

Yeah, I agree. That's a good perk of DSs. As far as the DWs, I think maybe one hex is fine? It does still feel odd, but I think it's necessary not to allow more than that one hex.

Cool, one hex. Summary-ized.

Oh, wow. Right. You know, I use hidden ant sites so rarely I've only really had these come up in one game....

I think we should keep them, right? Prevent unintended balancing problems and such?

I think the flavor is good, too, the GWoW is likely to be a Prophesy they find.

Ok, sounds good.