S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

Paths to the Light Framing Post

This post serves as an introduction to the discussion on Paths to the Light.

Terminology

Are we still choosing to call Religions Paths to the Light? The only argument I could see being raised would be due to the use of the word "Light," and the alignment that would seem to imply.

I think Paths to the Light is still a good name. It does imply a Light alignment, but I think that can be explained by saying that all of these belief systems are arranged in such a way that they were intended to be used to make their people more moral and just. But they may not actually end up doing that on an individual level (e.g. Children of the Light).

We previously decided to rename Pantheon as Lineage, choosing to characterize it as the cultural history of your people - is this still correct?

Still sounds good to me!

We previously discussed renaming Beliefs into Customs. Are we still in favor of this?

Yes, I think so. This came up during the Culture stuff and you noted at the time that Customs was in use in Paths, where it fit better, and I agree with that.

Will we still refer to Founder and Follower customs by the same names? What about Enhancer customs (it's surprising that they never gave this a more flavorful name)?

Enhancement customs don't really need a name because they aren't really a class of customs. All of the beliefs you get from enhancing a religion are additional founder and follower beliefs, you're just selecting from a different pool. So I don't think we'd need a name for those.

We could change Founder and Follower. They still work and would be fine to use, but possibly we could have something that references the flavor difference in our system? Something that calls out that the "founder" is the group of people that a particular lineage began with.

Founder
Sire
Ancestor

Follower
Descendant
Disciple

What will we call Reformation customs in the mod (which is a flavorful name for Earth history)? Note that this will connect to what we choose to call the [final?] policy in the Myth/Folklore tree.

Is there an event from the WoT canon that mirrors the Reformation beliefs' role in making Paths more relevant as we head into the late game? I think we might end up using a more generic word for this.

Mechanics

Are the general mechanics about Paths, the methods of Faith acquisition, and how Paths spread going to be preserved in the mod?

I think so, the way these belief systems exist in the WoT universe doesn't really suggest a specific alternative mechanic to me about how they would become stronger or spread. The BNW system seems pretty good!

Is the faith buy cost of units, LPs and buildings going to progress in the same manner as in BNW?

We might have to scale it down a tiny bit, since we're adding other things that you can spend Faith on. (Right? I'm thinking Shadowspawn, is there anything else?)

Although, having written more of this post, we've also added a few more sources of Faith, so the existing costs may be fine.

Will the possible number of Paths per game be the same as in BNW?

Yeah, those amounts seem quite appropriate. They allow players who focus on it to usually have a Path, but there are still enough non-Path-founding players that at least a couple Paths will get to spread abroad.

Is the way pressure works, and how city conversion occurs, the same as in BNW?

Also seems fine with me to keep, though we may have additional customs that interact with it, as opposed to just 2 beliefs in BNW. I've always felt those two (Itinerant Preachers and Religious Texts) were quite powerful, compared to a lot of others.


Another topic worth discussing is if we want to keep the mutual exclusivity of Customs for Paths? (So if one Path adopts a Custom, then other Paths can't adopt the same one.) I think we should keep it since it enforces variety and rewards players for getting their Path going faster.

Paths
The Paths previously adopted were:


Descendants of the Blood
Ji'e'Toh
Stewards of the Dragon
Vanguard of the Wyld
Watchers Over the Waves
Water Way
Way of the Leaf
Way of the Light
Westlands Lore

Are these still what we'd like?
The only one of these that may pose some issues is "Westlands Lore," which might present some confusing overlap with a "lore-related" name of the Path-focused Policy tree (still under discussion)

I think using Folklore as the Tree name for the Policy gives us enough distance from Westlands Lore that it will be ok. All of these look good to me!

Units

The Great Prophet has previously been renamed the Visionary

Sounds good!

Will the Missionary and Inquisitor still exist in the same capacity as in BNW?

Hmm, I do wonder about the Inquisitor. I've always found them very underwhelming (and poorly explained, on the game's part). We probably do want the variety of having two Path-focused units though, just Missionaries would be a bit bland.

Will the Missionary's role still be the same - spreading Path 2x?

I think it's fine to keep this behavior.

Will the Inquisitor's role still be the same - eliminating foreign Paths and instilling the player's Path, as well as "blocking" foreign unit-based conversion attempts?

I would like it if we could give the Inquisitor something more active to do. His role right now is primarily a defensive one, where you need to remove a foreign Path from your own cities. If he was useful elsewhere, not necessarily in offense, but at least in interacting with other civs/Paths, then that would be cool. I'm not sure what to suggest as an additional ability/purpose though.

Will Faith units still suffer attrition in the same manner?

Yes, this seems like a good way of balancing their avoidance of Open Borders necessity.

What will the mod's version of Missionaries be called? The text suggests some options (there are probably more):

Peddler (obviously not quite related)
Truthspeakers (from the Seanchan)

Out of these two, I definitely prefer Truthspeakers. I'd side against Peddlers for two reasons: the one you've mentioned about it being a bit unrelated, and also that we previously discussed using Peddlers as our Caravan replacement. (Where I think it fits better.)

Not sure about Truthspeakers though - it's a bit of a different thing in Seanchan from what Missionaries are doing, even after the flavorful conversion from religion to Paths. I don't think the Truthspeaker flavor is something that we're likely to use anywhere else though, which does make this a good use of it, if we can get it to work.

Is there a good flavorsplanation for Truthspeakers as spreaders of Paths?

What will the mod's version of Inquisitors be called? The text suggests some options (there are probably more):

Inquisitor (from the Children)
Child of the Light (from the Children)
Whitecloak (from the Children)
Hand of the Light (from the Children, synonymous with Inquisitor)
Questioner (from the Children, synonymous with Inquisitor)
Seeker for Truth (from Seanchan)
Listener (from Seanchan)

Certainly, terms could be selected from outside of the universe (e.g. regular English) as well.

Of course, the issue with many of the above is that they are tied to specific civs in the universe. Will some of these be best reserved as possible units (even UU faith units, a weird concept, of course) for some certain civs (Seanchan, Amadicia, etc.)? Perhaps synonyms are useful to us here (e.g. Questioner and Hand of the Light, Child and Whitecloak).

This might depend on if we change the role of the Inquisitor significantly based on the discussion about that above. Out of these choices, one of the Children-related names is certainly flavorfully the closest to the BNW Inquisitor, though as you mention, we would be removing flavor availability for Amadicia. Removing flavor from the Seanchan probably isn't as much of a problem, because they have so much more flavor that can be turned into uniques than a lot of the other Westlands nations, which have a lot of cultural similarities.

Similarly, should any of the above be made available, not as Faith units, but as Faith-buy Military units available to all civs (or available to civs that select a particular custom)?

Faith buy military units is definitely a possible mechanic. Would this be driven by any specific flavor? (So are there existing WoT units that fit will into this mold?) There's also the BNW belief that lets the player buy military units with Faith, which this would be similar to/replace.

Lineage

The following list was created as a means of adapting the Pantheons from BNW into Lineage, without changing the mechanics:

Artisans – +2 Faith for each Gems or Pearls resource
Border Settlers – 15% faster border growth
Children of Dragonmount – +4 Faith from Natural Wonders
Craftsmen – +1 Faith for each Copper, Iron, and Salt resource
Devoted to Prophecy – +1 Culture from Shrines
Festive Society – Culture and +1 Faith for each Wine and Incense
Fishermen – +1 Production from Fishing Boats
Friends of the Ogier – +15% Production of Wonders from the Era After Breaking and Era of Nations
Hardy Folk – +1 Faith from Tundra tiles without Forest
Herbal Healers – +30 HP healed per turn if adjacent to a friendly city
Honored Smiths – +1 Production in cities with Population of 3+
Hunter Society – +1 Food from Camps
Keepers of History – Happiness from cities with Population of 6+
Loyal Bannermen – Palace provides +1 Culture, Faith, Gold, Production, and Science
Masters of Harvest – +1 Food for each Bananas, Apples, and Wheat resource
Merchant Elite – +1 Culture and +1 Faith for each Gold and Silver
Mountain Folk – +2 Faith from Quarries
River Traders – +1 Happiness from cities on rivers
Shepherds – +1 Culture from Pastures
Soldier Community – Gain Faith if you win a battle within 4 tiles of your city
Stalwart Defenders – +30% increase in city Ranged Combat Strength
Thriving Populace – 10% faster Growth rates
Traveling Scholars – +2 Science in cities with a City Connection
Water Seekers – +1 Faith from Desert tiles
Woodland Folk – +1 Culture from Jungle tiles

should any of the above be removed? Should any be renamed?

I don't think any need to remove any. I'll comment on the names in orange below, where you've called them out individually.

Would we like to add any more, including any that might tie into the new systems of the mod (Alignment, channeling, etc.)

Interesting, yes! I think so. A few possible candidates:

Adherents of Saidin
Gain +30 Faith when a Male Channeler is born within 4 hexes of your city.

Dreamers
+2 Faith per turn from Dreamwards (working the tile the Dreamward is on)

Fertile Channelers
+1 Spark for every 4 cities

Devoted Leaders
Governors produce +2 Faith per turn

Unyielding Defenders
+2 Faith, +2 Production from Blight

There could probably be more, but we might start to tread on some ideas for Customs.

Items above marked with Orange are done so to indicate that the name should be reaffirmed, as it may (or does) present a current conflict. These should be either fixed, or else affirmed.

Coolio, I've noticed that Children of Dragonmount is orange (or at least the word "Children" is) but isn't in this list. Is it orange because of similarity to Children of the Light? I don't think we'd need to worry about those being conflicting.

Artisans - name currently taken by the Master Artisan LP

Some possible alternatives:

Jewelers
Appraisers

Neither is particularly Faith-y, but are relevant to Gems and Pearls.

Craftsmen - name currently taken by Specialist tied to Master Artisan

Could be very simple with this one and go with Miners?

Honored Smiths - very similar to the Smith Governor Type

I think this similarity is good - they both give bonuses to the same kind of thematic approach to the game (they help production) - so names that have similarities make sense.

Keepers of History - might be too similar to Historians (our Archaeologists)

It's a bit similar, but they do have significant distance within the game. Lineages are only selected in the first hundred or so turns, and most players in the earlier part of that. Historians won't become available until later, on a timeline with Archaeologists from BNW.

Unlike Honored Smiths though, this one doesn't feed into the same mechanics as the thing that its name resembles. Some potential alternatives:

Festival Founders
Good Samaritans (probably not, because of the phrase's biblical origins on Earth)
Thoughtful Neighbors

Loyal Bannermen - no current conflict, but it is possible that Bannermen may develop as a UU (I'm thinking Cairhien, for the flag-and-colors wearing officers... but these could be called something else)

I think we can rename this if we run into the conflict later, but until then it's fine.

Merchant Elite - potentially too close to Merchant Lord

I don't think these are too close, the Lineage's phrasing describes a class of person, whereas a Merchant Lord is an individual. Like Honored Smiths, the crossover between their names makes sense since they're applicable to the same facet of the game.

Thriving Populace - Might fit with tone/tense of other Lineages if it was called "Thriving Peoples" or something like that

Thriving Peoples sounds good to me!

Entries in Red may need to be changed for other reasons.

Copper, Iron, and Salt - Copper in BNW is a lux (hills), as is Salt (desert), while Iron is a strategic. In the mod, Copper's lux role was taken by Alum, and Copper became a Strategic (in the place of Iron). Iron has then replaced Coal. Salt remains the same. Should this Lineage refer to Alum, Copper, and Salt, or Copper, Iron, and Salt?

Alum, Copper, and Salt, I'd say. The timing of Iron being aligned to Coal from BNW means that civs will have already chosen their Lineages when they reveal Iron, which isn't conducive with the player assessing whether this Lineage is useful to them.

Camps - Bison (a camp-bonus resource) is being replaced by Zemai, which would eliminate one camp-elligible resource. Is there anything that should be done to compensate?

I wouldn't have thought of that. It's probably ok though, because Bison was only very recently patched into the main game, whereas this belief has been around since G&K.

Bananas, Apples, and Wheat - Should Zemai be added to this? Oranges (which Apples have replaced), are a jungle resource, while Apples (if we're being accurate), should be a cold-or-temperate (forest?) resource - should the Lineage be adjusted? What about Ice Peppers? (presumably a cold-terrain resource)

Hmm, depending on how we deal with Zemai, I could see us replacing Apples in this belief with Zemai. If it's a plains resource, then definitely yes, because Bananas, Zemai, and Wheat would spawn relatively near to each other. But if we make it a Desert resource, then it has the same problem as Apples. (Seeing as Zemai is corn, plains makes the most sense, right?)

Relationship to New Systems
As hinted at above, should our Paths system tie into other new mechanics? Such as:

Channeling
Male Channelers
the LB
Alignment
The Tower
The Ogier
Governors
The Horn
Shadowspawn
Dragonsworn
The TW
The High King

If so, how? Via Customs?

Yes, I think some of these should come up in the new Customs we create. I'm not sure if the Horn, TW, and High King are things that occur widely enough to have a Custom for them. Likely we'd be best off having Customs that are especially useful in those situations, but aren't geared only towards them. (I have a feeling I may be contradicting something I said about TW Customs a few posts ago?)

The rest all look like good targets.

The Paths summary has (in red), some ideas for how Paths might connect to some systems (some of these may be not obsolete from later decisions):

Founder Belief ideas
- Friendly Heralds are twice as effective
- Foreign Heralds are half as effective.

Follower Belief ideas
- Governors produce double alignment
- + X alignment points for every city following this path (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- X building produces +Y Alignment (in the direction of your overall alignment)
- allows construction of <Alignment Building> based on direction of your overall alignment, that produces more alignment, plus other things (e.g., Evil Pagoda).

These seem like possible abilities for Alignment-related Customs. I'm a bit wary of things that snowball your Alignment that a player is unable to configure to swap directions when they adopt it, in the event that they've decided to change sides. (A 100 Shadow points player has decided to go for Light instead, but if he chooses the +X Alignment for every city, he needs to fight that "bonus" until he gets to Light points, at which point it swaps over. A bit weird.)

Customs/Beliefs

Will any beliefs from BNW be removed? Will any be added? Will any be rebalanced?

I think quite a few of the beliefs from BNW are underpowered. Ones like Tithe stand out as great because they have a measurable impact on the player's success elsewhere in the game, whereas most of the beliefs don't. I think we'll want to make it so that a few more of them scale like that to being more useful!

Obviously, most/all will be renamed - what shall we name them?

As in a general system for naming them, right? Since we like Customs as our name replacement for Beliefs, I'd say they should generally be things that people in the WoT-verse tend to do that are noticeable societal trends. Things like the Cairhienin colored slashes in their attire to indicate rank/status.

The beliefs from BNW are copied here, with flavor included, for our reference:

Founder Beliefs
Ceremonial Burial +1 Happiness for every 2 Cities following this religion
Church Property +2 Gold for each City following this religion
Initiation Rites +100 Gold when each City first converts to this religion
Interfaith Dialogue Gain Science when a Missionary spreads this religion to cities of other religions
Papal Primacy +15 to Influence resting point with City-States following this religion
Peace Loving +1 Happiness for every 8 followers of this religion in non-enemy foreign cities
Pilgrimage +2 Faith for each foreign City following this religion
Tithe +1 Gold for every 4 followers of this religion
World Church +1 Culture for every 5 followers of this religion in other civilizations

Follower Beliefs
Asceticism Shrines provide +1 Happiness in cities with 3 followers
Cathedrals Use Faith to purchase Cathedrals
Choral Music Temples provide +2 Culture in cities with 5 followers
Divine Inspiration Each World Wonder provides +2 Faith in city
Feed the World Shrines and Temples provide +1 Food each in city
Guruship +2 Production if city has a Specialist
Holy Warriors Use Faith to purchase pre-Industrial land units
Liturgical Drama Amphitheaters provide +1 Faith in cities with 3 followers
Monasteries Use Faith to purchase Monasteries
Mosques Use Faith to purchase Mosques
Pagodas Use Faith to purchase Pagodas
Peace Gardens Gardens provide +2 Happiness in city
Religious Art Hermitage provides +8 Culture in city
BNW-only Hermitage provides +5 Culture and +5 Tourism
Religious Center Temples provide +2 Happiness in cities with 5 followers
Religious Community +1% Production for each follower (Max +15%)
Swords into Plowshares 15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war

Enhancer Beliefs
Defender of the Faith +20% Combat Strength near friendly cities that follow this religion
Holy Order Missionaries and Inquisitors cost 30% less Faith
Itinerant Preachers Religion spreads to cities 30% further away
Just War +20% Combat Strength near enemy cities that follow this religion
Messiah Prophets 25% stronger and earned with 25% less Faith
Missionary Zeal Missionary conversion strength +25%
Religious Texts Religion spreads 25% faster (50% with Printing Press)
Religious Unity Religion spreads to friendly City-States at double rate
Reliquary Gain 50 Faith each time a Great Person is expended

Reformation Beliefs
Charitable Missions Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%
Evangelism Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions
Heathen Conversion Missionaries convert adjacent Barbarian units to this civilization
Jesuit Education May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith
Religious Fervor Use Faith to purchase Industrial (and later) land units
Sacred Sites All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each
To the Glory of God Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era
Underground Sect Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy
Unity of the Prophets Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it)

Awesome, thanks for pulling these together! Shall we run through and propose some changes to these? I'm a bit short on time tonight, but will try to get back to suggesting some tomorrow!

Note: I'll be leaving town for the weekend starting Wed. night. As before, I have no idea my internet availability - might be able to post, might not.

No worries, I've barely been able to post due to NaNoWriMo! Have a good trip!

 

[counterpoint]

Dramatic delays and all, but I'm at 16,037 words, so NanoWriMo is going well! Apologies that I haven't been on during the week, it's difficult to do both in an evening!

wow, one week in and 32% done!

I feel like Oppression should be leaning towards killing their MCs rather than Gentling them, which should avoid the general flavor problem you call out in #2. That does mean that an overall combat bonus against MCs would make mechanical sense, in that it would encourage players to play like Oppression civs. I see what you mean about a Fear Policy or Oppression Tenet, but we could even have it in both places? If it stacks then that could make some civs quite good at this, but I don't think it would give them an unfair advantage, since even the most MC-loving civ won't be able to field an army that's mostly MCs, since MC spawn rates and timings are relatively out of their control.

OK, I think I agree with you in theory, but in practice, I'm not sure it's quite so simple. Certainly gentling MCs is a flavor conflict that's not ideal though.

The issue with what you're suggesting is revealed by your first sentence "killing their MCs." The thing is, there is currently no mechanism for killing their MCs. A combat bonus versus MCs in general provides a similar thing, to some extent, but unfortunately not in a way that is as likely to influence behavior so they're all that much like an "Oppression Civ." Consider the results of the bonuses for the three choices:

Liberation: use channelers freely and widely
Authority: snuggle up to the tower or ignore the tower, while still having decent relations with them
Oppression: get FDs less, and deal with them better, and... pick fights with opponents that use lots of Male Channelers...?

That last bit *should*, ideally, be, "treat your MCs harshly, and kill them", but as it is that's not what it accomplishes, as you would still be dealing with your MCs in exactly the same way - unless, of course, you fail to gentle one, and he goes rogue, at which point you will more effectively be able to kill him. Additionally, the oppression situation is also the only one that relies on other civs to make your bonus worthwhile - if nobody is generating MCs or triggering FD spawns (e..g your neighbors are also oppression!) you'll not receive much benefit from this.

We previously decided that MCs cannot be disbanded, and obviously cannot be killed. When one spawns, you can:

1) gentle him yourself (requires an Aes Sedai)
2) Gift him to the tower from your own territory.
3) use him.

Should we reintroduce the idea of disbanding, and frame it as *killing*? If we do, it needs to probably be riskier than the other methods - more likely to result in a rogue unit. Gentling him yourself is currently slated as the easiest, %wise (as it requires an Aes Sedai). Killing him could be the lowest % chance, and also doesn't provide any sort of bonus (but doesn't require relations with the tower), right? Presumably, an Oppression civ would get a bonus to this chance. But, that doesn't really make the mechanic worth including - you'd still be best off sending him to the tower, as, oppression or no, +Tower influence is still helpful. Is there some other benefit to killing him? Is there a way to have killing them be integrated into the game as a whole (meaning that there would be reasons for even a non-oppression civ (or pre-oppression) to want to do it?)

Any suggestions on this? MC-combat bonus is close, but it certainly isn't the perfect flavor.

Also, just to clarify: are we talking about MCs only, or all saidin units?

 

[counterpoint]

I think Paths to the Light is still a good name. It does imply a Light alignment, but I think that can be explained by saying that all of these belief systems are arranged in such a way that they were intended to be used to make their people more moral and just. But they may not actually end up doing that on an individual level (e.g. Children of the Light).

ok. cool with this.

Still sounds good to me!

good! (lineage)

Yes, I think so. This came up during the Culture stuff and you noted at the time that Customs was in use in Paths, where it fit better, and I agree with that.

yeah, I like customs, I think.

Enhancement customs don't really need a name because they aren't really a class of customs. All of the beliefs you get from enhancing a religion are additional founder and follower beliefs, you're just selecting from a different pool. So I don't think we'd need a name for those.

Right. You'd just be "Enhancing a Path." That's fine, probably. There could theoretically be a more fun term, though, although we might be better off using any fun terms we find elsewhere....

We could change Founder and Follower. They still work and would be fine to use, but possibly we could have something that references the flavor difference in our system? Something that calls out that the "founder" is the group of people that a particular lineage began with.

Founder
Sire
Ancestor

Follower
Descendant
Disciple

Well, I'm not sure we need to connect the lineage-ness diretly to the path or the customs. Clearly the connection between pantheon and religion is much clearer than our connection between lineage and Path. That said, a better connection between lineage and "having customs" might make some sense.

Of the ones you wrote, none of them quite do it for me. Focusing on the "founder" as the person who invents a custom (which we don't usually refer to as an "ancestor"), or else the person who literally dreamed up/wrote the path (e.g. an "author") makes more sense to me. The follower would then be somebody who adopts somebody's customs, etc.

I don't like these below, but potentially we could use:

Founder
Author
Inventor
Visionary
Advocate

Follower
Enthusiast
zealot
devotee
supporter
adherent

eh, also could just go with Founder/Follower, which still very much apply.

Is there an event from the WoT canon that mirrors the Reformation beliefs' role in making Paths more relevant as we head into the late game? I think we might end up using a more generic word for this.

Hmm.... I don't think there's anything WoT specific. And it's not that the Reformation necessarily made religions "relevant," it's more just that that's a really iconic historical event/era that affected some major religions. Not sure there's really anything like that in WoT with customs.

But some not-loaded-with-earth-history options could be:

Renewal
Transformation
Reform
Complement
Strengthen
Upgrade
Update
Elevation
Exaltation
Restoration
Revision
Renovation

I think so, the way these belief systems exist in the WoT universe doesn't really suggest a specific alternative mechanic to me about how they would become stronger or spread. The BNW system seems pretty good!

right. agreed!

We might have to scale it down a tiny bit, since we're adding other things that you can spend Faith on. (Right? I'm thinking Shadowspawn, is there anything else?)

Although, having written more of this post, we've also added a few more sources of Faith, so the existing costs may be fine.

right. For now, maybe leave them the same.

Yeah, those amounts seem quite appropriate. They allow players who focus on it to usually have a Path, but there are still enough non-Path-founding players that at least a couple Paths will get to spread abroad.

agreed.

Also seems fine with me to keep, though we may have additional customs that interact with it, as opposed to just 2 beliefs in BNW. I've always felt those two (Itinerant Preachers and Religious Texts) were quite powerful, compared to a lot of others.

yeah, the other ones feel way more special-case. Maybe a good idea to come up with some adjacent mechanics - without making it so everybody's religion spreads really easily, thus taking away the oomph of these beliefs.

Another topic worth discussing is if we want to keep the mutual exclusivity of Customs for Paths? (So if one Path adopts a Custom, then other Paths can't adopt the same one.) I think we should keep it since it enforces variety and rewards players for getting their Path going faster.

good question. I definitely agree we should keep it.

I think using Folklore as the Tree name for the Policy gives us enough distance from Westlands Lore that it will be ok. All of these look good to me!

ok great.

Hmm, I do wonder about the Inquisitor. I've always found them very underwhelming (and poorly explained, on the game's part). We probably do want the variety of having two Path-focused units though, just Missionaries would be a bit bland.

and

I think it's fine to keep this behavior.

and

I would like it if we could give the Inquisitor something more active to do. His role right now is primarily a defensive one, where you need to remove a foreign Path from your own cities. If he was useful elsewhere, not necessarily in offense, but at least in interacting with other civs/Paths, then that would be cool. I'm not sure what to suggest as an additional ability/purpose though.

I agree that the inquisitor is kind of lame. That said, I'm not sure what the right idea would be on fixing it. I think he's quite deliberately defense-only, and I'm not 100% sure whether that needs to be preserved or not. Things I can think of:

1) merge him with the Missionary
2) merge him with the Herald
3) add some additional functionality
4) leave him alone

I think of the new options, #1 might be the best. I'm trying to figure out what the drawbacks would be. It would work such that the unit could *either* Spread 2x, or "remove heresy" (which we'd have to rename) once. Presumably, using Spread 1x would lock "remove heresy." I suppose the only real mechanical implication of them coexisting is that Spread would no longer be a very efficient way of spreading to your own cities - using Remove Heresy would be far more efficient, as it neutralizes opponents and maxes out yours. Thus, getting a foothold on your own territory would work slightly differently. That said, Spread does have the option of getting the Path in multiple places. Aside from that, is there any drawback to combining them into one unit?

#2 feels cool, but opens up a rather large can of worms by which we link alignment and faith. Not ideal. Also, we'd determined that the herald was made by production, which isn't really compatible here.

#3 is what I think you're suggesting. Honestly, though, I don't have any suggestions on that, though. I feel like the missionary abilities would be the logical choice.

4 is of course the safest path...

Yes, this seems like a good way of balancing their avoidance of Open Borders necessity.

attrition stays!

Out of these two, I definitely prefer Truthspeakers. I'd side against Peddlers for two reasons: the one you've mentioned about it being a bit unrelated, and also that we previously discussed using Peddlers as our Caravan replacement. (Where I think it fits better.)

Not sure about Truthspeakers though - it's a bit of a different thing in Seanchan from what Missionaries are doing, even after the flavorful conversion from religion to Paths. I don't think the Truthspeaker flavor is something that we're likely to use anywhere else though, which does make this a good use of it, if we can get it to work.

Is there a good flavorsplanation for Truthspeakers as spreaders of Paths?

right, peddlers is trash.

Do you have any other suggestions for these guys, beyond Truthspeakers? There's non-canonic, but maybe fitting words, such as Messenger or Evangelist or some such.

If we do want to use truthspeakers, eh... not really much to flavorsplain it. They honestly could theoretically make more sense with the role of the Herald... and then we use the word Herald for Paths instead (which actually somewhat makes sense). The same is true for the inquisitor things below - they could be used for the alignment functionality if we needed them.

Other thoughts? There has to be a set of other options, as well - remember, we're kind of talking about transmitting culture and societal practices - not really religions, so much. That's why I threw out the peddler. Gleemen could work... but that's obviously taken. Traveller? Storyteller?

This might depend on if we change the role of the Inquisitor significantly based on the discussion about that above. Out of these choices, one of the Children-related names is certainly flavorfully the closest to the BNW Inquisitor, though as you mention, we would be removing flavor availability for Amadicia. Removing flavor from the Seanchan probably isn't as much of a problem, because they have so much more flavor that can be turned into uniques than a lot of the other Westlands nations, which have a lot of cultural similarities.

I should say that we can of course keep the name Inquisitor, since it's flavorful - but only if we keep the functionality identical. If we improve the Inquisitor, or else mix him with the missionary, we'll need a new name to avoid confusion.

For inquisition-functionality (assuming we don't use Inquisitor as the name), I think Questioner could work for the universal unit, with Hand of the Light being a potential UU name. Seeker for Truth could also work. Child/Whitecloak could work, but they smack of combat to me.

For combined functionality - or else simply as additional missionary options, Seeker for Truth is probably the best option of these. IThe Quesitoner/Inq ones are too "aggressive" seeming, considering these aren't even religions. Seeker is like that too, but it's less obvious about it, I think. Children and Whitecloak don't fit all that well, for me.

There's a good chance that we'd be better off with a non-universe-based word here. Thoughts?

Faith buy military units is definitely a possible mechanic. Would this be driven by any specific flavor? (So are there existing WoT units that fit will into this mold?) There's also the BNW belief that lets the player buy military units with Faith, which this would be similar to/replace.

I see this as going one of two ways:

1) the landsnekt of faith. a relatively inexpensive unit bought with Faith. Not sure how they'd interact with the BNW belief you'd mention - perhaps these are more inexpensive, but then again I really don't know the faith costs of the BNW ones, since I don't think I've chosen that belief before...
2) a combat unit that also has some religious functionality, like can spread 1X, or can "defend" like an inquisitor (when it garissons), or gets faith on kills. Something like that. So not directly replacing the BNW belief.

In both cases, I'd think Whitecloak could be a cool name (reserving Child of Light for Amadicia, or else doing the exact opposite). The existence of such soldiers is a tenet of the Way of the Light, so should consequently be a Custom you could select.

Interesting, yes! I think so. A few possible candidates:

Adherents of Saidin
Gain +30 Faith when a Male Channeler is born within 4 hexes of your city.

Interesting. "Adherents" is an interesting word, as it seems to imply that they use/follow saidin.

I like this in theory, but it's hard for me to judge whether thats a too-high or too-low amount of saidin. I've always avoided the 'gain X when a GP is expended" powers in BNW because they feel like they'd be bad. But I suppose this all depends on how often an MC is born.

I should say, though, that this may somewhat tread on a potential Social Policy option - though not necessarily.

Dreamers
+2 Faith per turn from Dreamwards (working the tile the Dreamward is on)

hmmm.. this seems like it might be quite easy to exploit, actually. There's nothing to stop you from just dropping dreamward after dreamward all throughout your territory. Since such practices aren't supposed to help you at all in the main game - one ward is enough to ward a city, and subsequent ones do nothing - I wouldn't want to encourage such practices just because of this mechanic.

The other issue is that Dreamwards probably aren't available super early in the game, which makes this somewhat odd as a Lineage.

A dreamspike, on the other hand, is more special and wouldn't be possible to abuse. But on the other hand, they'd happen way later int he game, and also isn't a good Lineage.

Can you think of a way to twist it so it can't be abused? I definitely think it would be the case the case that it would be worth spending a few dozen turns early-game getting epic faith production set up, at the expense of using your projections for more traditional scouting, I think. That's no fun.

Fertile Channelers
+1 Spark for every 4 cities

You mean for every 4 cities that follow the lineage? That... seems like a Founder belief to me. Doesn't "feel" like a Lineage belief, in terms of how it's framed. I suppose its somewhat similar to the "happiness from cities with population of 6+" one, but virtually all of the others are city-yield based.

Also, I'm not sure we want to allow wide empires to scale their spark so epicly, right? The AI would have a LOT of spark when they do their "24 city challenge" nonsense.

Devoted Leaders
Governors produce +2 Faith per turn

Yeah, this could be cool, though, again, it might be helpful too late, such that it isn't really inthe spirit of Lineages, which ideally help you get a religion or else help in the early game. This one might be better as a Follower Custom. Also, does this kind of intrude on the Faithey governor?

Unyielding Defenders
+2 Faith, +2 Production from Blight

cool. Not sure if the numbers are exactly right yet, but this could be cool if you're nuts.

There could probably be more, but we might start to tread on some ideas for Customs.

Yeah, do I have any to add? Not really. These are hard.

Coolio, I've noticed that Children of Dragonmount is orange (or at least the word "Children" is) but isn't in this list. Is it orange because of similarity to Children of the Light? I don't think we'd need to worry about those being conflicting.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. But yeah, I agree.

Some possible alternatives:

Jewelers
Appraisers

Neither is particularly Faith-y, but are relevant to Gems and Pearls.

What about some things that are less merchanty, like:

Curators
Collectors
Custodians

Could be very simple with this one and go with Miners?

eh... it's just soooo boring. could work though. What about

Prospectors?
Speculators?

Maybe miners is the best option...

I think this similarity is good - they both give bonuses to the same kind of thematic approach to the game (they help production) - so names that have similarities make sense.

ok. honored smiths it is.

It's a bit similar, but they do have significant distance within the game. Lineages are only selected in the first hundred or so turns, and most players in the earlier part of that. Historians won't become available until later, on a timeline with Archaeologists from BNW.

Unlike Honored Smiths though, this one doesn't feed into the same mechanics as the thing that its name resembles. Some potential alternatives:

Festival Founders
Good Samaritans (probably not, because of the phrase's biblical origins on Earth)
Thoughtful Neighbors

Why not something like City Folk? Simple, but in keeping with Woodland folk and mountain folk, yes?

I think we can rename this if we run into the conflict later, but until then it's fine.

loyal bannermen stays.

I don't think these are too close, the Lineage's phrasing describes a class of person, whereas a Merchant Lord is an individual. Like Honored Smiths, the crossover between their names makes sense since they're applicable to the same facet of the game.

ok. this stays.

Thriving Peoples sounds good to me!

great.

Alum, Copper, and Salt, I'd say. The timing of Iron being aligned to Coal from BNW means that civs will have already chosen their Lineages when they reveal Iron, which isn't conducive with the player assessing whether this Lineage is useful to them.

ok, alum, copper, and salt.

I wouldn't have thought of that. It's probably ok though, because Bison was only very recently patched into the main game, whereas this belief has been around since G&K.

probably alright to just not worry about it, then. I could go either way, though. This is most certainly more often selected by civs that are near forest or tundra, and not plains civs, anyways.

Hmm, depending on how we deal with Zemai, I could see us replacing Apples in this belief with Zemai. If it's a plains resource, then definitely yes, because Bananas, Zemai, and Wheat would spawn relatively near to each other. But if we make it a Desert resource, then it has the same problem as Apples. (Seeing as Zemai is corn, plains makes the most sense, right?)

Intuitively, I thought it must be desert, because of the Aiel, but then again, if its fertile ground, it's not really desert, is it? So, plains might make more sense. But I could see desert as well - if we want the existence of a +1food resource in desert, that is.

So if it's plains, that means this belief would end up Bananas, Wheat, and Zemai - no apples, yes?

ok, so once these are settled, you should probably update the misc summary resources with any weird changes that might pop up, but also, I can update the Lineage list in that summary to reflect the new names and any resource tweaks.

Yes, I think some of these should come up in the new Customs we create. I'm not sure if the Horn, TW, and High King are things that occur widely enough to have a Custom for them. Likely we'd be best off having Customs that are especially useful in those situations, but aren't geared only towards them. (I have a feeling I may be contradicting something I said about TW Customs a few posts ago?)

The rest all look like good targets.

I'm in agreement.

These seem like possible abilities for Alignment-related Customs. I'm a bit wary of things that snowball your Alignment that a player is unable to configure to swap directions when they adopt it, in the event that they've decided to change sides. (A 100 Shadow points player has decided to go for Light instead, but if he chooses the +X Alignment for every city, he needs to fight that "bonus" until he gets to Light points, at which point it swaps over. A bit weird.)

ok, I think worth checking out in detail when we tackle Customs earnestly (which is very soon, I think).

I think quite a few of the beliefs from BNW are underpowered. Ones like Tithe stand out as great because they have a measurable impact on the player's success elsewhere in the game, whereas most of the beliefs don't. I think we'll want to make it so that a few more of them scale like that to being more useful!

totally agree. Probably need to do a little rebalancing.

As in a general system for naming them, right? Since we like Customs as our name replacement for Beliefs, I'd say they should generally be things that people in the WoT-verse tend to do that are noticeable societal trends. Things like the Cairhienin colored slashes in their attire to indicate rank/status.

. Yeah, I think some things from a looong time ago might be worthwhile. See this post from forever ago. In it I list some customs we could use (Feast of Lights, Matriarchy, etc.) as well as fashion stuff (Veils, Marriage Knives). Either could be viable paths here (or perhaps both). Certainly some of the former category could also appear as social policy/tenet names. The fashion stuff would be kind of cool, but is obviously rather suspect in terms of the link between the fashion and the mechanical effect.

Awesome, thanks for pulling these together! Shall we run through and propose some changes to these? I'm a bit short on time tonight, but will try to get back to suggesting some tomorrow!

cool. yes, if you have thoughts, suggest away! Then maybe we can go in and look for new ones.

 

[S3rgeus]

wow, one week in and 32% done!

Apologies for the catastrophic delay on my part. NanoWriMo has completely consumed all of my usual posting time and I had guests last weekend so couldn't even manage a Saturday post! I wouldn't be surprised if we've fallen off the second page by now, I ended up finding the topic via Google.

On the good news side, I'm just over 40,000 words, so well on track to reaching 50,000 a few days early! Then when the book is done, normal posting patterns shall resume at last.

OK, I think I agree with you in theory, but in practice, I'm not sure it's quite so simple. Certainly gentling MCs is a flavor conflict that's not ideal though.

The issue with what you're suggesting is revealed by your first sentence "killing their MCs." The thing is, there is currently no mechanism for killing their MCs. A combat bonus versus MCs in general provides a similar thing, to some extent, but unfortunately not in a way that is as likely to influence behavior so they're all that much like an "Oppression Civ." Consider the results of the bonuses for the three choices:

Liberation: use channelers freely and widely
Authority: snuggle up to the tower or ignore the tower, while still having decent relations with them
Oppression: get FDs less, and deal with them better, and... pick fights with opponents that use lots of Male Channelers...?

That last bit *should*, ideally, be, "treat your MCs harshly, and kill them", but as it is that's not what it accomplishes, as you would still be dealing with your MCs in exactly the same way - unless, of course, you fail to gentle one, and he goes rogue, at which point you will more effectively be able to kill him. Additionally, the oppression situation is also the only one that relies on other civs to make your bonus worthwhile - if nobody is generating MCs or triggering FD spawns (e..g your neighbors are also oppression!) you'll not receive much benefit from this.

We previously decided that MCs cannot be disbanded, and obviously cannot be killed. When one spawns, you can:

1) gentle him yourself (requires an Aes Sedai)
2) Gift him to the tower from your own territory.
3) use him.

Should we reintroduce the idea of disbanding, and frame it as *killing*? If we do, it needs to probably be riskier than the other methods - more likely to result in a rogue unit. Gentling him yourself is currently slated as the easiest, %wise (as it requires an Aes Sedai). Killing him could be the lowest % chance, and also doesn't provide any sort of bonus (but doesn't require relations with the tower), right? Presumably, an Oppression civ would get a bonus to this chance. But, that doesn't really make the mechanic worth including - you'd still be best off sending him to the tower, as, oppression or no, +Tower influence is still helpful. Is there some other benefit to killing him? Is there a way to have killing them be integrated into the game as a whole (meaning that there would be reasons for even a non-oppression civ (or pre-oppression) to want to do it?)

Any suggestions on this? MC-combat bonus is close, but it certainly isn't the perfect flavor.

A lot of good points here and I'm generally on board with the idea of re-introducing disbanding for MCs but having it potentially have a drawback if done in an attempt to avoid the other Gentling methods. Disbanding should definitely only be possible while the MC is in your own territory, otherwise it could be used to spawn FDs on/near civs you don't like.

I can't remember the exact % success rates that we discussed before for Gentling with Aes Sedai vs sending to the Tower, but I think disbanding would need to have a fairly dramatic chance of failure if done with no external bonuses. (Like 75%? 90%?) It's extremely easy to try to do, so civs should be actively discouraged from doing so if they don't have any of the bonuses that make it more viable. Getting it up to something like 75% success rate for a full Oppression civ would mean they could deal with most MCs very quickly and easily.

Your point about disbanding MCs vs sending them to the Tower is a very good one - Tower Influence is always useful. I can see a few ways that we could balance that out:

• Make sending MCs to the Tower require a certain amount of Tower influence. Once under a certain threshold (which Oppression civs are likely to be) the Tower won't even accept your MCs. They have no presence in your territory and are unwilling to let you send potentially dangerous channelers into their midst. This also means that it's an option (likely one of last resort) for other civs that aren't getting along with the Tower.
• A False Dragon might actually be useful. This one is a bit weird, but if Oppression-like civs get bonuses from killing False Dragons, then being able to create them gives them more opportunity to use that bonus. I don't think a civ should be able to surround an MC with units, turn him into an FD by failing to disband him, and then burst him down to no health all in the same turn, with no negatives for themselves, that's obviously super weird and anti-flavor. (The FD should spawn with an army of sorts, making this difficult to contain, or just spawn as a normal FD when the disbanding fails, so the previous location of the disbanded MC is irrelevant, meaning the player can't have all their units in place ahead of time.)

The dependency on other civs to make the Oppression bonuses worthwhile is, as you've pointed out, a definite problem. The second of these points does go a ways to making that not the case.

Also, just to clarify: are we talking about MCs only, or all saidin units?

At first I was going to say just MCs, but given what we're discussing above with disbanding and how that could interact with Asha'men that are still affected by madness, I'd say this disbanding logic could affect all saidin users pre-Cleansing. (One of the effects of the Cleansing can be "Saidin units can be disbanded like normal units")

 

[S3rgeus]

ok. cool with this.

Awesome, Paths to the Light it is!

yeah, I like customs, I think.

Coolio, done.

Right. You'd just be "Enhancing a Path." That's fine, probably. There could theoretically be a more fun term, though, although we might be better off using any fun terms we find elsewhere....

Yeah, I think Enhancing a Path is fine - if we find extra flavor to use here later than we can swap it in.

Well, I'm not sure we need to connect the lineage-ness diretly to the path or the customs. Clearly the connection between pantheon and religion is much clearer than our connection between lineage and Path. That said, a better connection between lineage and "having customs" might make some sense.

Of the ones you wrote, none of them quite do it for me. Focusing on the "founder" as the person who invents a custom (which we don't usually refer to as an "ancestor"), or else the person who literally dreamed up/wrote the path (e.g. an "author") makes more sense to me. The follower would then be somebody who adopts somebody's customs, etc.

I don't like these below, but potentially we could use:

Founder
Author
Inventor
Visionary
Advocate

Follower
Enthusiast
zealot
devotee
supporter
adherent

eh, also could just go with Founder/Follower, which still very much apply.

I think Founder/Follower looks like it's still our best choice, because it's applicable to pretty much all of our distinct flavor pieces here. There's the lineage stuff and ancestry, the people who wrote out texts that form the bases of beliefs like the Way of the Light, and the people who originate a custom like the Cairhienin sashed clothes. Any of those can be Founded/Followed, whereas all of our suggestions here have tended to fit only into one or two of the distinct flavor categories.

I do quite like Adherent for Follower, but I can't see us renaming Follower and not Founder.

Hmm.... I don't think there's anything WoT specific. And it's not that the Reformation necessarily made religions "relevant," it's more just that that's a really iconic historical event/era that affected some major religions. Not sure there's really anything like that in WoT with customs.

But some not-loaded-with-earth-history options could be:

Renewal
Transformation
Reform
Complement
Strengthen
Upgrade
Update
Elevation
Exaltation
Restoration
Revision
Renovation

I meant the relevancy as mechanical - most G&K religion mechanics are more effective in the early game and so their usefulness declines later on. Reformation beliefs are mostly beliefs that add some late game bonuses to the religion.

Renewal or Restoration seem like good choices to me here. A few of the others feel more mechanical (as in, they describe mechanical processes, like Update/Upgrade), which isn't quite what we want.

yeah, the other ones feel way more special-case. Maybe a good idea to come up with some adjacent mechanics - without making it so everybody's religion spreads really easily, thus taking away the oomph of these beliefs.

Definitely, sounds good.

good question. I definitely agree we should keep it.

Cool, keeping the exclusivity of beliefs/customs!

I agree that the inquisitor is kind of lame. That said, I'm not sure what the right idea would be on fixing it. I think he's quite deliberately defense-only, and I'm not 100% sure whether that needs to be preserved or not. Things I can think of:

1) merge him with the Missionary
2) merge him with the Herald
3) add some additional functionality
4) leave him alone

I think of the new options, #1 might be the best. I'm trying to figure out what the drawbacks would be. It would work such that the unit could *either* Spread 2x, or "remove heresy" (which we'd have to rename) once. Presumably, using Spread 1x would lock "remove heresy." I suppose the only real mechanical implication of them coexisting is that Spread would no longer be a very efficient way of spreading to your own cities - using Remove Heresy would be far more efficient, as it neutralizes opponents and maxes out yours. Thus, getting a foothold on your own territory would work slightly differently. That said, Spread does have the option of getting the Path in multiple places. Aside from that, is there any drawback to combining them into one unit?

#2 feels cool, but opens up a rather large can of worms by which we link alignment and faith. Not ideal. Also, we'd determined that the herald was made by production, which isn't really compatible here.

#3 is what I think you're suggesting. Honestly, though, I don't have any suggestions on that, though. I feel like the missionary abilities would be the logical choice.

4 is of course the safest path...

After some consideration of this, I'm thinking #4 is the best option. While we're not entirely happy with where the Inquisitor is now, I don't think we hagve any runaway alternatives. I can definitely see how combining him with the Missionary could be useful, but I think we lose a lot of variety from Paths vs Religions by having only one unit that interacts with their spread.

This, of course, means that we can keep the name as well, which we're discussing below.

Until we can come up with a useful additional way to contribute mechanically to a defensive Paths unit, he is probably best where he is now. As you've mentioned, combining Missionaries and Inquisitors means that Remove Heresy-ing your own territory is more effective and will make spreading a Path abroad more difficult, which I think is the major implication of that. It also removes a lot of player choice from the process, since it's now just one option.

right, peddlers is trash.

Do you have any other suggestions for these guys, beyond Truthspeakers? There's non-canonic, but maybe fitting words, such as Messenger or Evangelist or some such.

If we do want to use truthspeakers, eh... not really much to flavorsplain it. They honestly could theoretically make more sense with the role of the Herald... and then we use the word Herald for Paths instead (which actually somewhat makes sense). The same is true for the inquisitor things below - they could be used for the alignment functionality if we needed them.

Other thoughts? There has to be a set of other options, as well - remember, we're kind of talking about transmitting culture and societal practices - not really religions, so much. That's why I threw out the peddler. Gleemen could work... but that's obviously taken. Traveller? Storyteller?

The point about this being general culture and societal practices is a very good one. Settlers is arguably quite appropriate, but obviously already taken (even if we rename the Settler unit, reusing the name would be confusing). Are there any specific terms we could take from the "globalization" of Two Rivers over the course of the books? It went from being a backwater village with very set customs to a more international place, with people from all over the Westlands, which is the kind of effect that we want this unit to have on its target city. (So in mechanical terms, Two Rivers is an Andoran city that has had several different foreign Paths spread to it.) It's also similar to what the Seanchan do in Tarabon, they bring farmers and merchants as well as their armies to help assimilate the general population into their way of life.

I'm still not able to come up with a single word that describes the people who lead these kinds of changes, aside from something simple like "Migrants" which is a bit of a loaded term anyway. Maybe "Nomads" but that's not the same kind of thing.

Storytellers is close, but it feels like it should be almost broader than that. Storytellers would be effective for certain kinds of societal spreading (shared mythos) but not as much for the more physical (fashions, physical actions).

If we can't decide on any of the above, then I think Truthspeakers is a fine provisional choice because we're very unlikely to want to use that flavor elsewhere and it is definitely recognizable.

I should say that we can of course keep the name Inquisitor, since it's flavorful - but only if we keep the functionality identical. If we improve the Inquisitor, or else mix him with the missionary, we'll need a new name to avoid confusion.

For inquisition-functionality (assuming we don't use Inquisitor as the name), I think Questioner could work for the universal unit, with Hand of the Light being a potential UU name. Seeker for Truth could also work. Child/Whitecloak could work, but they smack of combat to me.

For combined functionality - or else simply as additional missionary options, Seeker for Truth is probably the best option of these. IThe Quesitoner/Inq ones are too "aggressive" seeming, considering these aren't even religions. Seeker is like that too, but it's less obvious about it, I think. Children and Whitecloak don't fit all that well, for me.

There's a good chance that we'd be better off with a non-universe-based word here. Thoughts?

I think leaving the functionality of the Inquisitor the same is actually my preferred approach, which means that keeping the name the same would be the most effective of these options. As you've called out, Hand of the Light is a good UU substitute if we go down that avenue for someone like Amadicia. Totally agree that Child of the Light/Whitecloak imply combat units.

I see this as going one of two ways:

1) the landsnekt of faith. a relatively inexpensive unit bought with Faith. Not sure how they'd interact with the BNW belief you'd mention - perhaps these are more inexpensive, but then again I really don't know the faith costs of the BNW ones, since I don't think I've chosen that belief before...
2) a combat unit that also has some religious functionality, like can spread 1X, or can "defend" like an inquisitor (when it garissons), or gets faith on kills. Something like that. So not directly replacing the BNW belief.

In both cases, I'd think Whitecloak could be a cool name (reserving Child of Light for Amadicia, or else doing the exact opposite). The existence of such soldiers is a tenet of the Way of the Light, so should consequently be a Custom you could select.

A Follower Custom that allows players to purchase a Whitecloak unit sounds like a good plan, especially if the Way of Light flavor encourages this. I generally prefer that to making it available to everyone because it means that it will generally be available to an appropriately flavored player in each game who is more likely to make use of it.

Interesting. "Adherents" is an interesting word, as it seems to imply that they use/follow saidin.

I like this in theory, but it's hard for me to judge whether thats a too-high or too-low amount of saidin. I've always avoided the 'gain X when a GP is expended" powers in BNW because they feel like they'd be bad. But I suppose this all depends on how often an MC is born.

I should say, though, that this may somewhat tread on a potential Social Policy option - though not necessarily.

Agreed, this is the kind of Lineage I would avoid as well, for exactly the same reason, so I'm unsure about it. Firaxis clearly think they work though, they use it a decent amount, and it may just be mostly about calibrating the payout of Faith.

hmmm.. this seems like it might be quite easy to exploit, actually. There's nothing to stop you from just dropping dreamward after dreamward all throughout your territory. Since such practices aren't supposed to help you at all in the main game - one ward is enough to ward a city, and subsequent ones do nothing - I wouldn't want to encourage such practices just because of this mechanic.

The other issue is that Dreamwards probably aren't available super early in the game, which makes this somewhat odd as a Lineage.

A dreamspike, on the other hand, is more special and wouldn't be possible to abuse. But on the other hand, they'd happen way later int he game, and also isn't a good Lineage.

Can you think of a way to twist it so it can't be abused? I definitely think it would be the case the case that it would be worth spending a few dozen turns early-game getting epic faith production set up, at the expense of using your projections for more traditional scouting, I think. That's no fun.

I may be misremembering, but I didn't think Dreamwards could overlap with each other? That would mean you couldn't stack them up for Faith rewards. You could create a carpet, but given you need to put the Dreamward on your own territory to be able to work it and if they can't overlap there's a minimum distance of 6 hexes between them, it wouldn't be very effective. It would just be a nice little Faith bonus for civs that are using dreamwards, which is largely the function of Lineages.

You mean for every 4 cities that follow the lineage? That... seems like a Founder belief to me. Doesn't "feel" like a Lineage belief, in terms of how it's framed. I suppose its somewhat similar to the "happiness from cities with population of 6+" one, but virtually all of the others are city-yield based.

Also, I'm not sure we want to allow wide empires to scale their spark so epicly, right? The AI would have a LOT of spark when they do their "24 city challenge" nonsense.

Agreed, this one would be better as a Founder Custom. I did use the Happiness from cities with pop 6+ as a template for this, but +1 Spark seemed stronger than +1 Happiness, so I wanted to scale it back. (Hence every 4 cities.)

Yeah, this could be cool, though, again, it might be helpful too late, such that it isn't really inthe spirit of Lineages, which ideally help you get a religion or else help in the early game. This one might be better as a Follower Custom. Also, does this kind of intrude on the Faithey governor?

I figured this would be useful for players that are intending to use Governors very early - turning their first few GP into them. It could be a Follower Custom, but a lot of the Lineages could potentially do that and it's largely a matter of magnitude (+2 instead of +4 Faith or whatever) and scaleable usefulness (+2 Science is much more universally useful than +2 Faith).

I don't think it intrudes on the Faith Governor since it will stack with his normal output, so very Faith focused civs are still more effective, but it also allows other players to gain from more diverse strategies.

cool. Not sure if the numbers are exactly right yet, but this could be cool if you're nuts.

Yeah, all numbers are provisionary and likely to be changed!

Yeah, do I have any to add? Not really. These are hard.

They are! Given what we've discussed above with Founder + Follower comparisons for these Lineages, we might be better off coming back to them and seeing if anything pops out once we've done the Founder and Follower Customs. That will make sure we don't cannibalize ideas we want to use for Follower and Founder Customs.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. But yeah, I agree.

Awesome, Children of Dragonmount lives!

What about some things that are less merchanty, like:

Curators
Collectors
Custodians

Curators!

eh... it's just soooo boring. could work though. What about

Prospectors?
Speculators?

Maybe miners is the best option...

Prospectors and Speculators sound like more modern mining terms to me. I think Miners might be where it's at!

Why not something like City Folk? Simple, but in keeping with Woodland folk and mountain folk, yes?

City Folk sounds good!

probably alright to just not worry about it, then. I could go either way, though. This is most certainly more often selected by civs that are near forest or tundra, and not plains civs, anyways.

Cool, sounds good.

Intuitively, I thought it must be desert, because of the Aiel, but then again, if its fertile ground, it's not really desert, is it? So, plains might make more sense. But I could see desert as well - if we want the existence of a +1food resource in desert, that is.

So if it's plains, that means this belief would end up Bananas, Wheat, and Zemai - no apples, yes?

Zemai on Plains sounds good. I don't thinkw ewant to introduce something that works against the whole Desert == lack of food set up. (Though Desert cities without Petra are basically always terrible.)

Yes, this Lineage should now be Bananas, Wheat, and Zemai.

ok, so once these are settled, you should probably update the misc summary resources with any weird changes that might pop up, but also, I can update the Lineage list in that summary to reflect the new names and any resource tweaks.

Cool, I've updated it. Is there anything else to add aside from Zemai being on Plains?

. Yeah, I think some things from a looong time ago might be worthwhile. See this post from forever ago. In it I list some customs we could use (Feast of Lights, Matriarchy, etc.) as well as fashion stuff (Veils, Marriage Knives). Either could be viable paths here (or perhaps both). Certainly some of the former category could also appear as social policy/tenet names. The fashion stuff would be kind of cool, but is obviously rather suspect in terms of the link between the fashion and the mechanical effect.

Awesome, that looks like a great list to pull from. Some of the fashion stuff should make flavorful sense with certain bonuses, particularly where they have certain societal trends implicated by them (like Veils and Marriage Knives, which you mention here).

cool. yes, if you have thoughts, suggest away! Then maybe we can go in and look for new ones.

I think this is my greatest abuse of the word "tomorrow" yet.

I think it's probably best not to delve into this quite yet until I finish NaNoWriMo, with shorter posts I'll have some chance of cobbling together a post on a weekday!

 

[counterpoint]

Apologies for the catastrophic delay on my part. NanoWriMo has completely consumed all of my usual posting time and I had guests last weekend so couldn't even manage a Saturday post! I wouldn't be surprised if we've fallen off the second page by now, I ended up finding the topic via Google.

On the good news side, I'm just over 40,000 words, so well on track to reaching 50,000 a few days early! Then when the book is done, normal posting patterns shall resume at last.

I'm not sure if catastrophic is the right word, but that probably is the longest ... absitence we've had in this thread since page four or so.

I've been working on, of all things, the Uniques framing post! I know it's a while off, but after our previous conversation, I decided it needed to be updated. Basically, its original form was more of a long rant (like "Counterpoint's Thoughts on Channeling" was). I've adapted it into the form that the Frame posts have more recently taken.

Incidentally, "Counterpoint's Thoughts on Channeling" would probably qualify for NaNoWriMo...

A lot of good points here and I'm generally on board with the idea of re-introducing disbanding for MCs but having it potentially have a drawback if done in an attempt to avoid the other Gentling methods. Disbanding should definitely only be possible while the MC is in your own territory, otherwise it could be used to spawn FDs on/near civs you don't like.

I understand and agree with most of what you're saying here, but I wanted to chime in and say that MCs going rogue does not spawn FDs. If you fail any gentling attempt, the MC turns into a dragonsworn unit, in terms of which civ owns him (though I suppose he could turn into a Lawless), but he is still just a "Male Channeler" unit. It's the same thing as when one goes Mad naturally, I think.

I think having a Dope MC turn into an FD would cause some problems. Namely, it provides rewards upon defeating them. We don't want to create a situation where people are mining their MCs for FD-reward payout.

Though talking about this now, I think in order to make the madness of MCs scary, as it's intended to be, we probably need to give the rogue/fully mad MCs some sort of bonus via that promotion. You're probably imagining an "oh crap he went rogue!" moment in your head, which led to you imagining an actual false dragon. If MCs occupy a place in many armies, the units themselves will obviously not be really powerful (though as channelers, they'll be decent). Perhaps they get a free promotion (or it's included in the Madness promotion) that boosts their combat strength or something. Probably shouldn't be quite as powerful as an FD, though.

I can't remember the exact % success rates that we discussed before for Gentling with Aes Sedai vs sending to the Tower, but I think disbanding would need to have a fairly dramatic chance of failure if done with no external bonuses. (Like 75%? 90%?) It's extremely easy to try to do, so civs should be actively discouraged from doing so if they don't have any of the bonuses that make it more viable. Getting it up to something like 75% success rate for a full Oppression civ would mean they could deal with most MCs very quickly and easily.

Looking at the Diplo summary, it appears that we gave gentling your own channelers a 30% success rate and red sisters a 60%. Those numbers feel a little low to me, though if we raise the 60% too high, we don't leave much room for bonuses and such. 25% success rate seems like a pretty decent number for "disbanding," though.

Intuitively, a 75% success rate for an Oppression civ feels a bit high, but honestly, it's hard to say without knowing the rates for WT and AS gentling (since I don't know that the ones in the summary are ones we totally stand behind). I think what we should figure out now is whether it should be higher or lower than those values. If it's comparable, but yields no direct bonuses, then that might be good. I imagine a Red Sister fully decked out is probably going to be better, though.

Your point about disbanding MCs vs sending them to the Tower is a very good one - Tower Influence is always useful. I can see a few ways that we could balance that out:

• Make sending MCs to the Tower require a certain amount of Tower influence. Once under a certain threshold (which Oppression civs are likely to be) the Tower won't even accept your MCs. They have no presence in your territory and are unwilling to let you send potentially dangerous channelers into their midst. This also means that it's an option (likely one of last resort) for other civs that aren't getting along with the Tower.
• A False Dragon might actually be useful. This one is a bit weird, but if Oppression-like civs get bonuses from killing False Dragons, then being able to create them gives them more opportunity to use that bonus. I don't think a civ should be able to surround an MC with units, turn him into an FD by failing to disband him, and then burst him down to no health all in the same turn, with no negatives for themselves, that's obviously super weird and anti-flavor. (The FD should spawn with an army of sorts, making this difficult to contain, or just spawn as a normal FD when the disbanding fails, so the previous location of the disbanded MC is irrelevant, meaning the player can't have all their units in place ahead of time.)

The dependency on other civs to make the Oppression bonuses worthwhile is, as you've pointed out, a definite problem. The second of these points does go a ways to making that not the case.

I don't love the idea of making a civ be friendly with the Tower to send their MCs to them. It feels like it could kind of screw you, especially early-game when you have very limited ways to get influence. It's not terrible, though it's perhaps a bit weird on the flavor-front.

I think I would be ok with locking tower gentling for people "in the red" with the Tower (- influence). That makes sense to me.

The other thing is that I think the Tower gentling is best if intended to be the "default" one. It's the one that most often happens in the books, even with unsympathetic civs like Tear. Mechanically, it seems appropriate, especially because of the early game. Basically, you have to have one of your aes sedai hang around every 20 turns or so to gentle somebody. It seems unlikely early in the game. It seems to me that "eh, send him to the tower" feels like the natural response for most leaders. Those that choose to do it themselves are rewarded for it, and have a better success rate, but it's more of a hassle.

That said, if we unlock gifting to the tower once you've met the Tower, that does make the early-game kind of nuts for some civs. You basically need to use them or kill them. I suppose that makes sense. Note that we do have slated the creation of an early-game tech that introduces everybody to the Tower. This means that most civs will probably "use them" at first, and likely the madness wouldn't be so bad by the time they go rogue.

I should state here that the summaries don't directly state that gifting a MC to the tower generates Tower influence. I think we both assumed it did, intuitively, but I'm not sure if we decided that it actually did. I'm not positive we need it, though (discussion below).

Regarding the FD point... you can imagine that we can't really use this now, since FDs aren't generated by rogue MCs.

At first I was going to say just MCs, but given what we're discussing above with disbanding and how that could interact with Asha'men that are still affected by madness, I'd say this disbanding logic could affect all saidin users pre-Cleansing. (One of the effects of the Cleansing can be "Saidin units can be disbanded like normal units")

I think this would depend on what we finally work out for all of this. Asha'man are purposefully made (i.e. don't spawn naturally), and do cost maintenance, so I'm not 100% sure all we decide here is necessary to apply. That said, I do think the rest of the gentling stuff does apply, so it's quite possibly what we settle on here will to.

So... what to do? I think, actually, we kind of need to revisit these Gentling options quickly and confirm the benefits/positives of each approach. From there, we can look to see how a Disband/Kill option (we should probably just call it Kill to make it clearer, right?) might actually fit in. THEN we can see about having Philosophy bonuses that would affect it. If we fail, then I think we're stuff with lower FD rate and bonuses against saidin units in general being the perks for Oppression.

So, what we know (all can be changed):
Gentling with Aes Sedai
Success Rate: 30% (60% with Red)
Rewards: some, undetermined
Factors that affect success: Fear policies? Tenets?
Note: must be done in friendly territory (your territory, or an ally's?)

Gentling through the Tower
Success Rate: unspecified - lower than 30%
Rewards: unspecified (perhaps Tower influence)
Factors that affect success: Policies? Tenets?
Note: must be done in friendly territory

So, looking at this, I'm kind of questioning our previous logic. It appears we wanted a situation where it was essentially always better to do it yourself. You get a reward, and it's easier. The only thing that is negative about it is that it requires you to have a sister on hand. This is fine, but seems kind of un-fun - in fact, it seems to make having a Red sister (especially ear-game) kind of a default choice for numbers reasons (unless the gentling reward is inconsequential).

I'm wondering if we need to tweak something here, and make the Tower gentling actually be higher success rate than doing it yourself. It makes perfect sense: it's a whole institution, not just one sister. I also suggest you *not* receive Tower influence for doing so. The reason to gentle them yourself, however, needs to be somewhat decent, though (though not too good!)

I think we could go ahead and say you have to have 0+ influence with the Tower to use them, though - if you have less than that, you're on your own.

This is tricky. I'm not sure, but that's what I'm starting to think. So that would leave us with:

Gentling through AS
Success: lower than tower (but better with Red Sister... higher or lower than tower?)
Rewards: decent
Factors: same as above
Note: must be done in friendly territory

Gentling through Tower
Success: higher than Aes Sedai
Rewards: none
Factors: same as above:
Note: must be done in friendly territory. Must have 0+ influence with Tower.

Now where does that leave killing/disbanding? That's tough, especially if we calibrate the Tower option to be the "base" option. Certainly it has a place for the people with less than 0 influence, and who lack AS to do it themselves. If we force Opp civs to have negative influence, that would make this relevant, but I'm not sure that'll always be the case - an Opp civ who's following Edicts and such might still be hovering around 0, right?

So what to do? Obviously the success rate needs to be lower. The sticking point for me is the "reward." If feels like there should be one, though of course that's very very weird. Your reward is not having a society "corrupted" by MCs. Should there be something else? Is there some reason to kill otherwise? Can it be done outside of your territory maybe? Would that make everybody else start doing it?

Maybe it simply exists only as a worst-case option for most civs, but we make Opp civs have a rather significant bonus to its success rate? I can imagine, after all this, actually giving them a very high success rate, maybe higher than the tower, etc.

Ugh! thoughts?

Or we scrap this entirely and choose something else for Opp!

 

[counterpoint]

I think Founder/Follower looks like it's still our best choice, because it's applicable to pretty much all of our distinct flavor pieces here. There's the lineage stuff and ancestry, the people who wrote out texts that form the bases of beliefs like the Way of the Light, and the people who originate a custom like the Cairhienin sashed clothes. Any of those can be Founded/Followed, whereas all of our suggestions here have tended to fit only into one or two of the distinct flavor categories.

I do quite like Adherent for Follower, but I can't see us renaming Follower and not Founder.

Yeah, totally with you. Adherent is cool. But let's stick with Follower/Founder.

I meant the relevancy as mechanical - most G&K religion mechanics are more effective in the early game and so their usefulness declines later on. Reformation beliefs are mostly beliefs that add some late game bonuses to the religion.

Renewal or Restoration seem like good choices to me here. A few of the others feel more mechanical (as in, they describe mechanical processes, like Update/Upgrade), which isn't quite what we want.

Alright. I like Renewal. Fine with you?

After some consideration of this, I'm thinking #4 is the best option. While we're not entirely happy with where the Inquisitor is now, I don't think we hagve any runaway alternatives. I can definitely see how combining him with the Missionary could be useful, but I think we lose a lot of variety from Paths vs Religions by having only one unit that interacts with their spread.

This, of course, means that we can keep the name as well, which we're discussing below.

Until we can come up with a useful additional way to contribute mechanically to a defensive Paths unit, he is probably best where he is now. As you've mentioned, combining Missionaries and Inquisitors means that Remove Heresy-ing your own territory is more effective and will make spreading a Path abroad more difficult, which I think is the major implication of that. It also removes a lot of player choice from the process, since it's now just one option.

While I kind of liked the idea of combining them into one unit (and calling it the Herald!), I do see that this does open up a bunch of weirdness and it's probably not worth it.

Of course naming the Inquisitor the same works fine, but I should mention that the flavor isn't great. I mean, Inquisitor comes fromt he books of course, but the Inquisitor feels more like a unit that would deal with Alignment, not Paths. Certainly, eradicating Customs feels like a weird thing to send these guys to do.

That said, it is the simplest solution.

But if we want un-simple, but perhaps better, we could:

1) Call the Missionary the Herald
2) Call the Inquisitor the Truthspeaker (which feels more like a defensive unit anyways, as they are advisors in the books)
3) Call the Alignment Unit (former Herald) the Questioner (could theoretically call them Inquisitors, but that would cause massive confusion.

I kind of like that, actually. Heralds are good for Alignment, certainly, but they are (for me) certainly the best choice for spreading Paths, and I think the Questioner (or inquisitor, theoretically) makes great sense for dealing with Alignment.

The Questioners are of course somewhat negative in the books, but in some ways this works to our advantage, flavor-wise - they could go for Light or for Shadow, depending on who's in charge

The point about this being general culture and societal practices is a very good one. Settlers is arguably quite appropriate, but obviously already taken (even if we rename the Settler unit, reusing the name would be confusing). Are there any specific terms we could take from the "globalization" of Two Rivers over the course of the books? It went from being a backwater village with very set customs to a more international place, with people from all over the Westlands, which is the kind of effect that we want this unit to have on its target city. (So in mechanical terms, Two Rivers is an Andoran city that has had several different foreign Paths spread to it.) It's also similar to what the Seanchan do in Tarabon, they bring farmers and merchants as well as their armies to help assimilate the general population into their way of life.

I'm still not able to come up with a single word that describes the people who lead these kinds of changes, aside from something simple like "Migrants" which is a bit of a loaded term anyway. Maybe "Nomads" but that's not the same kind of thing.

Storytellers is close, but it feels like it should be almost broader than that. Storytellers would be effective for certain kinds of societal spreading (shared mythos) but not as much for the more physical (fashions, physical actions).

If we can't decide on any of the above, then I think Truthspeakers is a fine provisional choice because we're very unlikely to want to use that flavor elsewhere and it is definitely recognizable.

Yeah, Truthspeakers is definitely ok, though I think the flavor of that works better for the defensive unit, actually.

I wouldn't have a problem with Storytellers, actually, though I can see that it's a little limiting. If you are definitely not in favor of the Herald, and like the feel of Migrants and such, I think Traveler is probably the best bet, then, though it might not strike people as a good fit upon first sight.

I think leaving the functionality of the Inquisitor the same is actually my preferred approach, which means that keeping the name the same would be the most effective of these options. As you've called out, Hand of the Light is a good UU substitute if we go down that avenue for someone like Amadicia. Totally agree that Child of the Light/Whitecloak imply combat units.

Agreed on these points, but see above.

A Follower Custom that allows players to purchase a Whitecloak unit sounds like a good plan, especially if the Way of Light flavor encourages this. I generally prefer that to making it available to everyone because it means that it will generally be available to an appropriately flavored player in each game who is more likely to make use of it.

OK, but what kind of unit is it? Is it the first example above (simply a combat unit) or the second (one with some faith-related functionality)?

In agreement that it should be based on Follower belief selection. My question was on the nature of the unit itself.

Agreed, this is the kind of Lineage I would avoid as well, for exactly the same reason, so I'm unsure about it. Firaxis clearly think they work though, they use it a decent amount, and it may just be mostly about calibrating the payout of Faith.

ok. I'm totally unsure whether to include it, then. What do you think?

I may be misremembering, but I didn't think Dreamwards could overlap with each other? That would mean you couldn't stack them up for Faith rewards. You could create a carpet, but given you need to put the Dreamward on your own territory to be able to work it and if they can't overlap there's a minimum distance of 6 hexes between them, it wouldn't be very effective. It would just be a nice little Faith bonus for civs that are using dreamwards, which is largely the function of Lineages.

You're right - they can't overlap.

That makes this one fine, I think! Added to the summary. I'm fine with the name, since it's flavorful, but also imagine that we might need to snap up that flavor for something more important later!

Agreed, this one would be better as a Founder Custom. I did use the Happiness from cities with pop 6+ as a template for this, but +1 Spark seemed stronger than +1 Happiness, so I wanted to scale it back. (Hence every 4 cities.)

I think maybe let's leave this one out of lineages, then. Yeah?

I figured this would be useful for players that are intending to use Governors very early - turning their first few GP into them. It could be a Follower Custom, but a lot of the Lineages could potentially do that and it's largely a matter of magnitude (+2 instead of +4 Faith or whatever) and scaleable usefulness (+2 Science is much more universally useful than +2 Faith).

I don't think it intrudes on the Faith Governor since it will stack with his normal output, so very Faith focused civs are still more effective, but it also allows other players to gain from more diverse strategies.

ok. I'm convinced! In the summary. Name is fine.

Yeah, all numbers are provisionary and likely to be changed!

ok, Unyielding Defenders added to summary, but...

I don't love the name. We already have Stalwart Defenders. Can we have this be Unyielding Warriors or "Sentinels" or "Protectors" or something?

Also, is +2 production too good? Is this pantheon like a Petra for Blight. Is that maybe OK if it is?

They are! Given what we've discussed above with Founder + Follower comparisons for these Lineages, we might be better off coming back to them and seeing if anything pops out once we've done the Founder and Follower Customs. That will make sure we don't cannibalize ideas we want to use for Follower and Founder Customs.

good, those I've put in are in, but maybe that's where we should stop for now.

Awesome, Children of Dragonmount lives!

Curators!

Prospectors and Speculators sound like more modern mining terms to me. I think Miners might be where it's at!

City Folk sounds good!

all added.

oh, the santa hats are back! Before thanksgiving, really?

Zemai on Plains sounds good. I don't thinkw ewant to introduce something that works against the whole Desert == lack of food set up. (Though Desert cities without Petra are basically always terrible.)

Yes, this Lineage should now be Bananas, Wheat, and Zemai.

ok. good.

Should the Misc summary list what terrain these resources happen on?

Cool, I've updated it. Is there anything else to add aside from Zemai being on Plains?

I don't think so, though the Zemai-on-plains thing might suggest we should do the same on the rest of them.

Awesome, that looks like a great list to pull from. Some of the fashion stuff should make flavorful sense with certain bonuses, particularly where they have certain societal trends implicated by them (like Veils and Marriage Knives, which you mention here).

cool. To dig into soon!

I think this is my greatest abuse of the word "tomorrow" yet.

I think it's probably best not to delve into this quite yet until I finish NaNoWriMo, with shorter posts I'll have some chance of cobbling together a post on a weekday!

ok, well let's hash through these issues for now, and by then the novel should be done!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm not sure if catastrophic is the right word, but that probably is the longest ... absitence we've had in this thread since page four or so.

I've been working on, of all things, the Uniques framing post! I know it's a while off, but after our previous conversation, I decided it needed to be updated. Basically, its original form was more of a long rant (like "Counterpoint's Thoughts on Channeling" was). I've adapted it into the form that the Frame posts have more recently taken.

Incidentally, "Counterpoint's Thoughts on Channeling" would probably qualify for NaNoWriMo...

I'm finished! Finally reached the 50,000 words, so normal programming may now resume. The book turned out really well, I think, so I'll be returning to it for an editing pass in January (which shouldn't completely derail my ability to post on here, because it's much more flexible time-wise).

Thanks for looking into future sections like the Uniques stuff while I've been off, it'll be great to have a good foundation for those and for us to still have momentum even after a very slow November!

I understand and agree with most of what you're saying here, but I wanted to chime in and say that MCs going rogue does not spawn FDs. If you fail any gentling attempt, the MC turns into a dragonsworn unit, in terms of which civ owns him (though I suppose he could turn into a Lawless), but he is still just a "Male Channeler" unit. It's the same thing as when one goes Mad naturally, I think.

I think having a Dope MC turn into an FD would cause some problems. Namely, it provides rewards upon defeating them. We don't want to create a situation where people are mining their MCs for FD-reward payout.

Though talking about this now, I think in order to make the madness of MCs scary, as it's intended to be, we probably need to give the rogue/fully mad MCs some sort of bonus via that promotion. You're probably imagining an "oh crap he went rogue!" moment in your head, which led to you imagining an actual false dragon. If MCs occupy a place in many armies, the units themselves will obviously not be really powerful (though as channelers, they'll be decent). Perhaps they get a free promotion (or it's included in the Madness promotion) that boosts their combat strength or something. Probably shouldn't be quite as powerful as an FD, though.

Blarg! I had forgotten that it was a "become a Dragonsworn unit" thing, rather than becoming a False Dragon.

I agree, an individual MC unit won't be super powerful by default, because it will need to be a balanced part of an otherwise normal army composition. We also want them to be quite impactful if they do turn against you, so giving them a promotion that makes them more powerful in that case sounds like a good idea. Also, since the existing levels of madness are "promotions", it should even make sense to the player (rather than us arbitrarily making them stronger) that they obtain a final madness promotion when going rogue that makes them stronger.

Looking at the Diplo summary, it appears that we gave gentling your own channelers a 30% success rate and red sisters a 60%. Those numbers feel a little low to me, though if we raise the 60% too high, we don't leave much room for bonuses and such. 25% success rate seems like a pretty decent number for "disbanding," though.

Intuitively, a 75% success rate for an Oppression civ feels a bit high, but honestly, it's hard to say without knowing the rates for WT and AS gentling (since I don't know that the ones in the summary are ones we totally stand behind). I think what we should figure out now is whether it should be higher or lower than those values. If it's comparable, but yields no direct bonuses, then that might be good. I imagine a Red Sister fully decked out is probably going to be better, though.

Yes, I'm thinking that an Oppression civ would have a better chance of killing an MC by disbanding him than they would with a non-upgraded Red Sister (or possibly the same), but the most effective method of getting rid of an MC in the whole game should be an upgraded Red Sister.

Following on from my confusion in the previous post regarding False Dragons, what if we make that a feature of the disbanding process? An additional chance that he may become a False Dragon and spawn an army, rather than just become a single unit? That would ensure that even with a success rate approaching that of sending the MC to the Tower, it would be quite risky. However, given the bonuses you get from killing False Dragons, this may lead other players to use the disbanding more as well, which isn't quite what we want. We could create an exception for False Dragons spawned this way, but that seems weird and wouldn't be how players would expect it to work.

I don't love the idea of making a civ be friendly with the Tower to send their MCs to them. It feels like it could kind of screw you, especially early-game when you have very limited ways to get influence. It's not terrible, though it's perhaps a bit weird on the flavor-front.

I think I would be ok with locking tower gentling for people "in the red" with the Tower (- influence). That makes sense to me.

Yeah, this is what I meant in that we could set the threshold at 0, then civs who have negative relationships with the Tower could be locked out. That means that civs have that action available to them by default when they are early in the game and haven't become more Oppression-y, but they can take actions which would cause that to become unavailable by annoying the Tower.

The other thing is that I think the Tower gentling is best if intended to be the "default" one. It's the one that most often happens in the books, even with unsympathetic civs like Tear. Mechanically, it seems appropriate, especially because of the early game. Basically, you have to have one of your aes sedai hang around every 20 turns or so to gentle somebody. It seems unlikely early in the game. It seems to me that "eh, send him to the tower" feels like the natural response for most leaders. Those that choose to do it themselves are rewarded for it, and have a better success rate, but it's more of a hassle.

That said, if we unlock gifting to the tower once you've met the Tower, that does make the early-game kind of nuts for some civs. You basically need to use them or kill them. I suppose that makes sense. Note that we do have slated the creation of an early-game tech that introduces everybody to the Tower. This means that most civs will probably "use them" at first, and likely the madness wouldn't be so bad by the time they go rogue.

Yep, having "send to the Tower" being the first way that most civs deal with MCs sounds like a good idea, for a lot of the reasons you state here. I think given the way the Tower is central to quite a few mechanics that would be strange to apply to only specific civs that are nearby, the "meet the Tower" tech should be relatively early in the tree. That would mean that most civs would only have one or two MCs by the time they research that tech, and neither would be likely to be completely mad yet.

I should state here that the summaries don't directly state that gifting a MC to the tower generates Tower influence. I think we both assumed it did, intuitively, but I'm not sure if we decided that it actually did. I'm not positive we need it, though (discussion below).

Yeah, actually, starting with no Influence bonus for getting rid of MCs sounds like a good idea actually. I'll respond more to this below.

Regarding the FD point... you can imagine that we can't really use this now, since FDs aren't generated by rogue MCs.

Definitely, this doesn't work with our current systems. Possibly useful if we go for the FD chance mentioned above, but we'll see!

I think this would depend on what we finally work out for all of this. Asha'man are purposefully made (i.e. don't spawn naturally), and do cost maintenance, so I'm not 100% sure all we decide here is necessary to apply. That said, I do think the rest of the gentling stuff does apply, so it's quite possibly what we settle on here will to.

I think if we're going to go with disbanding for MCs, then we should do the same for Asha'men. Mostly because our other two options are "Asha'men can't be disbanded" and "Asha'men disband like normal units". The former is super weird - Asha'men are then the only unit in the game that can't be disbanded and have this ticking timebomb of madness feedback. The latter completely defeats the madness, since the player can just disband the unit in their later stages of madness. The main difference is that the player has opted into having the Asha'man, as you've said, but since they still use the madness mechanics, I think that's the primary driver for the different disbanding behavior.

So... what to do? I think, actually, we kind of need to revisit these Gentling options quickly and confirm the benefits/positives of each approach. From there, we can look to see how a Disband/Kill option (we should probably just call it Kill to make it clearer, right?) might actually fit in. THEN we can see about having Philosophy bonuses that would affect it. If we fail, then I think we're stuff with lower FD rate and bonuses against saidin units in general being the perks for Oppression.

Sounds good! I think we can make this work, so let's go!

So, what we know (all can be changed):
Gentling with Aes Sedai
Success Rate: 30% (60% with Red)
Rewards: some, undetermined
Factors that affect success: Fear policies? Tenets?
Note: must be done in friendly territory (your territory, or an ally's?)

Gentling through the Tower
Success Rate: unspecified - lower than 30%
Rewards: unspecified (perhaps Tower influence)
Factors that affect success: Policies? Tenets?
Note: must be done in friendly territory

So, looking at this, I'm kind of questioning our previous logic. It appears we wanted a situation where it was essentially always better to do it yourself. You get a reward, and it's easier. The only thing that is negative about it is that it requires you to have a sister on hand. This is fine, but seems kind of un-fun - in fact, it seems to make having a Red sister (especially ear-game) kind of a default choice for numbers reasons (unless the gentling reward is inconsequential).

I'm wondering if we need to tweak something here, and make the Tower gentling actually be higher success rate than doing it yourself. It makes perfect sense: it's a whole institution, not just one sister. I also suggest you *not* receive Tower influence for doing so. The reason to gentle them yourself, however, needs to be somewhat decent, though (though not too good!)

I think we could go ahead and say you have to have 0+ influence with the Tower to use them, though - if you have less than that, you're on your own.

This is tricky. I'm not sure, but that's what I'm starting to think. So that would leave us with:

Gentling through AS
Success: lower than tower (but better with Red Sister... higher or lower than tower?)
Rewards: decent
Factors: same as above
Note: must be done in friendly territory

Gentling through Tower
Success: higher than Aes Sedai
Rewards: none
Factors: same as above:
Note: must be done in friendly territory. Must have 0+ influence with Tower.

Now where does that leave killing/disbanding? That's tough, especially if we calibrate the Tower option to be the "base" option. Certainly it has a place for the people with less than 0 influence, and who lack AS to do it themselves. If we force Opp civs to have negative influence, that would make this relevant, but I'm not sure that'll always be the case - an Opp civ who's following Edicts and such might still be hovering around 0, right?

So what to do? Obviously the success rate needs to be lower. The sticking point for me is the "reward." If feels like there should be one, though of course that's very very weird. Your reward is not having a society "corrupted" by MCs. Should there be something else? Is there some reason to kill otherwise? Can it be done outside of your territory maybe? Would that make everybody else start doing it?

Maybe it simply exists only as a worst-case option for most civs, but we make Opp civs have a rather significant bonus to its success rate? I can imagine, after all this, actually giving them a very high success rate, maybe higher than the tower, etc.

Ugh! thoughts?

Or we scrap this entirely and choose something else for Opp!

Lots of things here, and I haven't been able to pull out any individual quote blocks, but I'll respond in semi-order!

I think your assessment of the un-fun nature of AS being the most effective way of Gentling MCs is a very good one - it essentially turns Aes Sedai Gentling into busywork that the player needs to keep doing throughout the game. And, as you've said, forces the choice of Red relatively early on.

So, following on from what I said above, I think having the "send to Tower" option not provide any bonuses is good. The bonus is "not having to deal with the MC", pretty much.

Also following on from what I mentioned above, I think having an upgraded Red Sister be better than the Tower is good. There's still an element of difficulty to the process of Gentling an MC with a Sister, since that requires all the moving of the units and all that kind of stuff, whereas send to Tower is mostly just select the MC and press a button (though there may be some military build up to prepare in case it goes wrong). So I think the Ajah dedicated to Gentling should be able to eventually get the best of both worlds for those players who fully invest in that process. I'd say it would only be a marginal difference (maybe 75% vs 60% or something of that magnitude), but still there.

I think having the kill/disband option (which you're right, we should flavor as killing) can definitely still fit in. We can make it available to everybody, work only in your own territory, and have a very low success rate by default. (Like, 10% to compare to the numbers we have already.) Then, as you suggest, a significant bonus to that success rate for Oppression civs. (Up to 60-70%) Normally, disbanding units gives you Gold, but I think we would avoid that here (for all civs). So for non-Oppression civs, killing MCs is only available as a last-ditch attempt to get rid of them if they've pissed off the Tower and can't get an Aes Sedai in range in time. (More likely that, if the player is that close to the line, they'll be saved or struck by the random variance of the time it takes an individual unit to go mad.)

However, just a bonus to MC kill rate doesn't seem like a great Oppression bonus, when compared to Tower influence bonus and Spark bonus for the other two. At risk of making Oppression's bonus quite powerful (which could be a nice change from our problems thus far!), what if successfully killing MCs generated Happiness for Oppression civs? This makes flavorful sense in that the population of civs that oppress their channelers are much more likely to view them as monsters/dangerous (like the Seanchan). From a mechanical perspective, Philosophies are chosen toward the end of the game, where Happiness and Unhappiness come in much greater quantities. MC spawn rate is also not directly under the player's control, so it's not something that's abusable to manufacture Happiness to offset all other Unhappiness. That seems like it would be a good, comparable bonus to the other two?

I shall return to follow up on the other post a bit later!

 

[S3rgeus]

For once, a fast *later* from me!

Alright. I like Renewal. Fine with you?

Yep!

While I kind of liked the idea of combining them into one unit (and calling it the Herald!), I do see that this does open up a bunch of weirdness and it's probably not worth it.

Of course naming the Inquisitor the same works fine, but I should mention that the flavor isn't great. I mean, Inquisitor comes fromt he books of course, but the Inquisitor feels more like a unit that would deal with Alignment, not Paths. Certainly, eradicating Customs feels like a weird thing to send these guys to do.

That said, it is the simplest solution.

But if we want un-simple, but perhaps better, we could:

1) Call the Missionary the Herald
2) Call the Inquisitor the Truthspeaker (which feels more like a defensive unit anyways, as they are advisors in the books)
3) Call the Alignment Unit (former Herald) the Questioner (could theoretically call them Inquisitors, but that would cause massive confusion.

I kind of like that, actually. Heralds are good for Alignment, certainly, but they are (for me) certainly the best choice for spreading Paths, and I think the Questioner (or inquisitor, theoretically) makes great sense for dealing with Alignment.

The Questioners are of course somewhat negative in the books, but in some ways this works to our advantage, flavor-wise - they could go for Light or for Shadow, depending on who's in charge

This all makes a lot of sense! Yes, I'm good with swapping these around this way, the new names work quite well. Even before I'd read your explanation, I was struck by exactly the same notion for the Questioner as the Alignment-spreader, since they ostensibly work for the Light (good, spread Light!) but do evil things quite often (good, spread Shadow!). Perfectly aligned (ha) with our goals!

Is it just the Alignment and Path summaries that need to change for this? I don't see the word Herald in the LB summary, which was the only other place I might expect to.

Yeah, Truthspeakers is definitely ok, though I think the flavor of that works better for the defensive unit, actually.

I wouldn't have a problem with Storytellers, actually, though I can see that it's a little limiting. If you are definitely not in favor of the Herald, and like the feel of Migrants and such, I think Traveler is probably the best bet, then, though it might not strike people as a good fit upon first sight.

Agreed, Storyteller could work, but most players wouldn't see why it fit into the grand scheme on first sight, since they wouldn't have any experience of the new system yet. I'm good with your proposed changes above!

OK, but what kind of unit is it? Is it the first example above (simply a combat unit) or the second (one with some faith-related functionality)?

In agreement that it should be based on Follower belief selection. My question was on the nature of the unit itself.

Ah, I see! I think a combat unit sounds like a good idea, one that's slightly stronger than the units on the tree around the time most civs adopt their first sets of Path Customs.

ok. I'm totally unsure whether to include it, then. What do you think?

I'd say let's include it for now.

You're right - they can't overlap.

That makes this one fine, I think! Added to the summary. I'm fine with the name, since it's flavorful, but also imagine that we might need to snap up that flavor for something more important later!

Awesome!

I think maybe let's leave this one out of lineages, then. Yeah?

Yep, let's leave it out.

ok, Unyielding Defenders added to summary, but...

I don't love the name. We already have Stalwart Defenders. Can we have this be Unyielding Warriors or "Sentinels" or "Protectors" or something?

Sentinels sounds good!

Also, is +2 production too good? Is this pantheon like a Petra for Blight. Is that maybe OK if it is?

I think it being powerful is fine. There are a ton of disadvantages to bordering the Blight, so this might go a ways to preventing players from instantly restarting (and instead playing a different strategy that works well by the Blight). We might need some other similar bonuses in other systems to make that playstyle viable - this one looks like a good foundation!

good, those I've put in are in, but maybe that's where we should stop for now.

Yep, we can come back to Lineages after we've done Customs to ensure we don't use any flavor on Lineages that we want in Customs.

oh, the santa hats are back! Before thanksgiving, really?

Yeah, they're back! It's even snowed and there are Christmas trees up all over the place here.

Should the Misc summary list what terrain these resources happen on?

I don't think so, though the Zemai-on-plains thing might suggest we should do the same on the rest of them.

I think it's fine for us to just highlight that for Zemai since there is a certain expectation that Zemai might be desert because of the Aiel, but we've discussed otherwise. Though we could just leave it out and say that all of the Resources go on the same terrain type as the resource they replace? I think that's true for all of them, though Lopar may be different from Truffles, is the only exception I can see?

ok, well let's hash through these issues for now, and by then the novel should be done!

Novel done and hopefully most hashing completed above!

 

[counterpoint]

I'm finished! Finally reached the 50,000 words, so normal programming may now resume. The book turned out really well, I think, so I'll be returning to it for an editing pass in January (which shouldn't completely derail my ability to post on here, because it's much more flexible time-wise).

Thanks for looking into future sections like the Uniques stuff while I've been off, it'll be great to have a good foundation for those and for us to still have momentum even after a very slow November!

Congrats! Did the story have a natural ending around 50k words, or did you have to stretch/compress it to hit that mark?

care to say what the book is "about," or it's theme/setting, etc?

Blarg! I had forgotten that it was a "become a Dragonsworn unit" thing, rather than becoming a False Dragon.

I agree, an individual MC unit won't be super powerful by default, because it will need to be a balanced part of an otherwise normal army composition. We also want them to be quite impactful if they do turn against you, so giving them a promotion that makes them more powerful in that case sounds like a good idea. Also, since the existing levels of madness are "promotions", it should even make sense to the player (rather than us arbitrarily making them stronger) that they obtain a final madness promotion when going rogue that makes them stronger.

Right, so the final Madness promotion also has combat bonus aspects. Should we decide what they are now? I figure we can probably wait for such things.

Just to be clear, this bonus would also be applied if a unit went totally mad (e.g. Lawless/Dragonsworn mode) even my normal (i.e. turn-clock) means, right?

And these should be Dragonsworn, right? Not Lawless?

Lastly, we *could* consider having each stage of Madness carry with it some sort of bonus, such that the units become progressively more powerful as they become more mad. This would make the meta-game of madness somewhat more complex. However, I don't think we should do it, since it's not particularly flavorful, and, after all, we don't really want to encourage players to tempt the madness thing very much (being afraid of saidin is sort of a central conceit of the books). Either way, I thought I'd mention it nonetheless as a possibility.

I've updated the Channeling summary with some of this - some things here and below likely will require an update of the Misc Summary's FD section, I'm guessing.

Yes, I'm thinking that an Oppression civ would have a better chance of killing an MC by disbanding him than they would with a non-upgraded Red Sister (or possibly the same), but the most effective method of getting rid of an MC in the whole game should be an upgraded Red Sister.

Makes sense.

Following on from my confusion in the previous post regarding False Dragons, what if we make that a feature of the disbanding process? An additional chance that he may become a False Dragon and spawn an army, rather than just become a single unit? That would ensure that even with a success rate approaching that of sending the MC to the Tower, it would be quite risky. However, given the bonuses you get from killing False Dragons, this may lead other players to use the disbanding more as well, which isn't quite what we want. We could create an exception for False Dragons spawned this way, but that seems weird and wouldn't be how players would expect it to work.

This is interesting, but in actuality i'm not sure it's a great idea, most especially do to flavor. Killing them seems to have, historically, resulted in *less* FD generation. Thus, this increased incidence of FDs seems to kind of go against the "point" of playing a civ that is ruthless against MCs. We could elect to have the Oppression Kill-MC bonus also drastically reduce this bonus (or, rather, the FD rate "bonus" would also be applied to Kill-failure FDs).
For me the prospect of doing this FOR the bonus/reward of killing the FD is highly problematic, and I don't like the idea of making an exception for such FDs - it doesn't feel intuitive.

If you like this idea, I think I'd like to hear a bit more about how I'm thinking about it in the wrong way and/or missing something. I will concede that mechanically, it does seem to be a fun idea - if there's a way to make it fit nicely, it could be neat.

Yeah, this is what I meant in that we could set the threshold at 0, then civs who have negative relationships with the Tower could be locked out. That means that civs have that action available to them by default when they are early in the game and haven't become more Oppression-y, but they can take actions which would cause that to become unavailable by annoying the Tower.

great.

Yep, having "send to the Tower" being the first way that most civs deal with MCs sounds like a good idea, for a lot of the reasons you state here. I think given the way the Tower is central to quite a few mechanics that would be strange to apply to only specific civs that are nearby, the "meet the Tower" tech should be relatively early in the tree. That would mean that most civs would only have one or two MCs by the time they research that tech, and neither would be likely to be completely mad yet.

right. Makes sense.

I think if we're going to go with disbanding for MCs, then we should do the same for Asha'men. Mostly because our other two options are "Asha'men can't be disbanded" and "Asha'men disband like normal units". The former is super weird - Asha'men are then the only unit in the game that can't be disbanded and have this ticking timebomb of madness feedback. The latter completely defeats the madness, since the player can just disband the unit in their later stages of madness. The main difference is that the player has opted into having the Asha'man, as you've said, but since they still use the madness mechanics, I think that's the primary driver for the different disbanding behavior.

OK, understood. All of this stuff applies to all Saidin units.

Lots of things here, and I haven't been able to pull out any individual quote blocks, but I'll respond in semi-order!

I think your assessment of the un-fun nature of AS being the most effective way of Gentling MCs is a very good one - it essentially turns Aes Sedai Gentling into busywork that the player needs to keep doing throughout the game. And, as you've said, forces the choice of Red relatively early on.

So, following on from what I said above, I think having the "send to Tower" option not provide any bonuses is good. The bonus is "not having to deal with the MC", pretty much.

Agreed, and well said on that last line.

Also following on from what I mentioned above, I think having an upgraded Red Sister be better than the Tower is good. There's still an element of difficulty to the process of Gentling an MC with a Sister, since that requires all the moving of the units and all that kind of stuff, whereas send to Tower is mostly just select the MC and press a button (though there may be some military build up to prepare in case it goes wrong). So I think the Ajah dedicated to Gentling should be able to eventually get the best of both worlds for those players who fully invest in that process. I'd say it would only be a marginal difference (maybe 75% vs 60% or something of that magnitude), but still there.

That last bit - you're suggesting that bringing a normal Red to a fully-upgraded Red would make their rate go from 60 to 75? That seems somewhat to small a difference, to me. Did you mean that the Tower is 75? If so, then what's the upgraded Red? 90?

I think having the kill/disband option (which you're right, we should flavor as killing) can definitely still fit in. We can make it available to everybody, work only in your own territory, and have a very low success rate by default. (Like, 10% to compare to the numbers we have already.) Then, as you suggest, a significant bonus to that success rate for Oppression civs. (Up to 60-70%) Normally, disbanding units gives you Gold, but I think we would avoid that here (for all civs). So for non-Oppression civs, killing MCs is only available as a last-ditch attempt to get rid of them if they've pissed off the Tower and can't get an Aes Sedai in range in time. (More likely that, if the player is that close to the line, they'll be saved or struck by the random variance of the time it takes an individual unit to go mad.)

right. Very much agree. No gold for the Kill. Thi sisn't Disbanding, so I think that difference will be easy to swallow.

OK, so I've put this is a re-vamped Channeling summary, mostly in red. Here's what appears to be the case:

Killing (non-Oppression) - ca. 10%, no reward
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 30%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - ca. 60%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - ca. 60-70%, no reward
Tower - ca. 75%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - ca. 75%? Or ca. 90%?, reward
All must be done in Friendly Territory

We should probably clarify some of those numbers. It all feels very congested in the 60-75% range. Should it look more like this?:

Killing (non-Oppression) - 10%, no reward
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 30%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - 60%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - 60% (to be specifically analogous to the Red Sister approach), no reward
Tower - 75%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - 90%, reward
All must be done in Friendly Territory

I could also see pulling the last few of these down by 10 or 15%, or also closing the gap between AS and Red success rate. The success rate of the AS gentling should probably be related to the reward you get.

Also, is the 10% chance almost pointlessly small?

Also II, are we sure you can do this in Allied territory? I'm fine with it being a Team Member's territory, but I don't want this to end up a crazy "MC nuke" of somebody you have a DoF with... (or, if so, it should be an act of war)

Care to clarify some numbers?

Also, the following entry exists in the Channeling summary:

Gentling foreign saidin units has a highly variable success rate, ranging from low to moderate. This rate is negatively modified the enemy unit's combat strength and HP, and positively modified by the Aes Sedai's combat strength.

Should it be this complex? How should it work? This obviously most especially applied to the Gentling of FDs, but also applies to dealing with enemy Asha'man. Of course, those units wouldn't go Rogue upon failed Gentle.

Also, it states elsewhere that a unit's Madness Level contributes to the success-rate of any of these processes. How much should it reduce their success rates? Should this Madness-penalty occur when trying to gentle foreign units as well?

However, just a bonus to MC kill rate doesn't seem like a great Oppression bonus, when compared to Tower influence bonus and Spark bonus for the other two. At risk of making Oppression's bonus quite powerful (which could be a nice change from our problems thus far!), what if successfully killing MCs generated Happiness for Oppression civs? This makes flavorful sense in that the population of civs that oppress their channelers are much more likely to view them as monsters/dangerous (like the Seanchan). From a mechanical perspective, Philosophies are chosen toward the end of the game, where Happiness and Unhappiness come in much greater quantities. MC spawn rate is also not directly under the player's control, so it's not something that's abusable to manufacture Happiness to offset all other Unhappiness. That seems like it would be a good, comparable bonus to the other two?

I shall return to follow up on the other post a bit later!

Well, Happiness isn't really a "yield," that can be consumed, right? Do you mean a temporary happiness bonus? We'd be giving Liberation a static +X to spark. You're obviously not suggesting a +Y statically to Happiness for Oppression, so how would this be triggered? *every time* you kill an MC? That seems perhaps too powerful. So how would ths work?

Maybe there's a better way to do this, mechanically: Oppression civs receive +Y happiness for every turn in which the civ controls no Saidin units.

That accomplishes the same thing, right? We could of course make it more specific and complex, requiring them to be Killed or something, but that might not be worth it. Besides, if an Oppression civ wants to deal with them with the few Red AS they have, that should be acceptable.

 

[counterpoint]

For once, a fast *later* from me!
This all makes a lot of sense! Yes, I'm good with swapping these around this way, the new names work quite well. Even before I'd read your explanation, I was struck by exactly the same notion for the Questioner as the Alignment-spreader, since they ostensibly work for the Light (good, spread Light!) but do evil things quite often (good, spread Shadow!). Perfectly aligned (ha) with our goals!

Is it just the Alignment and Path summaries that need to change for this? I don't see the word Herald in the LB summary, which was the only other place I might expect to.

Wow! OK, that was in some ways kind of a big deal change in a few small moments.

So Missionary = Herald, Inquisitor = Truthspeaker, and Alignment = Questioner.

So, faith-buy or UU units such as "Hand of the Light," would likely be Alignment-based units, not Faith ones. A Seeker of Truth could of course be any of the above.

Yeah, I've changed the Alignment and Path summaries.

Agreed, Storyteller could work, but most players wouldn't see why it fit into the grand scheme on first sight, since they wouldn't have any experience of the new system yet. I'm good with your proposed changes above!

great.

Ah, I see! I think a combat unit sounds like a good idea, one that's slightly stronger than the units on the tree around the time most civs adopt their first sets of Path Customs.

ok. great.

I'd say let's include it for now.

ok, Adherents of Saidin is ok.

Do we still like the word Adherents here, though? It does seem to suggest they USE saidin.

Yep, let's leave it out.

axed

Sentinels sounds good!

done.

I think it being powerful is fine. There are a ton of disadvantages to bordering the Blight, so this might go a ways to preventing players from instantly restarting (and instead playing a different strategy that works well by the Blight). We might need some other similar bonuses in other systems to make that playstyle viable - this one looks like a good foundation!

ok. will have to check to make sure Blight doesn't suddenly become the best tile, though.

I think it's fine for us to just highlight that for Zemai since there is a certain expectation that Zemai might be desert because of the Aiel, but we've discussed otherwise. Though we could just leave it out and say that all of the Resources go on the same terrain type as the resource they replace? I think that's true for all of them, though Lopar may be different from Truffles, is the only exception I can see?

Well, I think the clarification of Lopar is probably worth it. So, it's Forest, then?

Beyond that, I can see several that are unclear.

Tabac should be clarified. Where does this grow?
Ice Peppers should be clarified. Bananas come from Jungle, but Ice Peppers don't. They are up in the borderlands. So, are they Tundra? Hills? Plains?
Beyond that, what did we decide for Apples? They're no longer jungle, right?
What about Olives?

Do we have enough Jungle ones?

 

[S3rgeus]

Congrats! Did the story have a natural ending around 50k words, or did you have to stretch/compress it to hit that mark?

care to say what the book is "about," or it's theme/setting, etc?

Thanks! It's a mystery novel about a group of people who keep getting reborn throughout history. They have memories of all of their past lives and each time they come back, one of them gets killed and the rest need to find out who the killer was. The current cycle (set in the present day) is strange because the same person died as the previous cycle, and that's not supposed to happen!

I feel like I stretched it a bit to reach 50k, but overall I've got a lot of stuff that I need to add to make the ending make more sense. And to set up most of the final quarter of the book, really. So while a decent chunk of stuff can be removed, I'll probably add back in a similar amount.

Right, so the final Madness promotion also has combat bonus aspects. Should we decide what they are now? I figure we can probably wait for such things.

Yeah, we can wait on that one.

Just to be clear, this bonus would also be applied if a unit went totally mad (e.g. Lawless/Dragonsworn mode) even my normal (i.e. turn-clock) means, right?

Yes.

And these should be Dragonsworn, right? Not Lawless?

Dragonsworn seems good to me, unless you think otherwise?

Lastly, we *could* consider having each stage of Madness carry with it some sort of bonus, such that the units become progressively more powerful as they become more mad. This would make the meta-game of madness somewhat more complex. However, I don't think we should do it, since it's not particularly flavorful, and, after all, we don't really want to encourage players to tempt the madness thing very much (being afraid of saidin is sort of a central conceit of the books). Either way, I thought I'd mention it nonetheless as a possibility.

It could be quite fun. As you've said, let's not aim for tempting players into using more mad units. If we find that it would address some gameplay concern that crops up when we play the mod, then it's certainly something to consider.

I've updated the Channeling summary with some of this - some things here and below likely will require an update of the Misc Summary's FD section, I'm guessing.

Cool, thanks!

This is interesting, but in actuality i'm not sure it's a great idea, most especially do to flavor. Killing them seems to have, historically, resulted in *less* FD generation. Thus, this increased incidence of FDs seems to kind of go against the "point" of playing a civ that is ruthless against MCs. We could elect to have the Oppression Kill-MC bonus also drastically reduce this bonus (or, rather, the FD rate "bonus" would also be applied to Kill-failure FDs).
For me the prospect of doing this FOR the bonus/reward of killing the FD is highly problematic, and I don't like the idea of making an exception for such FDs - it doesn't feel intuitive.

If you like this idea, I think I'd like to hear a bit more about how I'm thinking about it in the wrong way and/or missing something. I will concede that mechanically, it does seem to be a fun idea - if there's a way to make it fit nicely, it could be neat.

That last bit - you're suggesting that bringing a normal Red to a fully-upgraded Red would make their rate go from 60 to 75? That seems somewhat to small a difference, to me. Did you mean that the Tower is 75? If so, then what's the upgraded Red? 90?

I think you got this right in your section below. My intention here was to call out the difference between an upgraded Red and send-to-the-Tower as about 15%!

right. Very much agree. No gold for the Kill. Thi sisn't Disbanding, so I think that difference will be easy to swallow.

Sounds good.

OK, so I've put this is a re-vamped Channeling summary, mostly in red. Here's what appears to be the case:

Killing (non-Oppression) - ca. 10%, no reward
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 30%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - ca. 60%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - ca. 60-70%, no reward
Tower - ca. 75%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - ca. 75%? Or ca. 90%?, reward
All must be done in Friendly Territory

We should probably clarify some of those numbers. It all feels very congested in the 60-75% range. Should it look more like this?:

Killing (non-Oppression) - 10%, no reward
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 30%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - 60%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - 60% (to be specifically analogous to the Red Sister approach), no reward
Tower - 75%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - 90%, reward
All must be done in Friendly Territory

I could also see pulling the last few of these down by 10 or 15%, or also closing the gap between AS and Red success rate. The success rate of the AS gentling should probably be related to the reward you get.

I think your second section looks pretty good.

I do agree that we could probably close the gap between the general AS success rate and the un-upgraded Red Sister. However, we may not need to do that. If the attempt to kill/Gentle the saidin user fails, do they always go rogue? Is there room for a "fail" that leaves the unit alone (or damages it) and possibly consumes all of its movement (when killing) or the Gentler's movement for that turn? The chance would probably be different between Gentling and killing (killing would have a much higher rogue rate), but it would allow us to have a more differentiated Red Sister Gentling rate without making the default Sisters supremely risky in creating rogue MCs.

Also, is the 10% chance almost pointlessly small?

I think this is fine because it's a last ditch effort thing. Killing MCs shouldn't be viable as even a partial strategy for anyone but Oppression.

Also II, are we sure you can do this in Allied territory? I'm fine with it being a Team Member's territory, but I don't want this to end up a crazy "MC nuke" of somebody you have a DoF with... (or, if so, it should be an act of war)

Sorry, I totally forgot to respond to this on your last post! I think that killing MCs should be own-team-territory only (not any ally) for exactly the reason you've stated: using the MCs as a way of hampering your allies. (On the same team is fine, since hampering your team-mate is never a good idea, you share science and win as a team, etc.)

If we make killing an act of war if done in foreign territory, then players will just kill the MCs one tile away from the target civ.

Also, the following entry exists in the Channeling summary:

Gentling foreign saidin units has a highly variable success rate, ranging from low to moderate. This rate is negatively modified the enemy unit's combat strength and HP, and positively modified by the Aes Sedai's combat strength.

Should it be this complex? How should it work? This obviously most especially applied to the Gentling of FDs, but also applies to dealing with enemy Asha'man. Of course, those units wouldn't go Rogue upon failed Gentle.

I think this all sounds reasonable and just needs to be given numbers at some point. Gentling a foreign unit should function similarly to combat with a foreign unit, having positives and negatives that can affect it, and being based on the relative strength of the units involved. (Otherwise heavily injured Sisters could still Gentle full strength enemies just as effectively, and vice versa.) This would apply to enemy MCs as well, since those can be used in combat too. Generally, the structural similarity to combat is because Gentling of this type will tend to be attempted on a battlefield where the alternative was to attack that unit, and so it should be fair and useful in the context of that system.

Do we want to decide on % numbers now? I don't think we need to at the moment.

Also, it states elsewhere that a unit's Madness Level contributes to the success-rate of any of these processes. How much should it reduce their success rates? Should this Madness-penalty occur when trying to gentle foreign units as well?

By a total of about 20-30%? And yes, I'd say let's apply that to your own and foreign units.

Well, Happiness isn't really a "yield," that can be consumed, right? Do you mean a temporary happiness bonus? We'd be giving Liberation a static +X to spark. You're obviously not suggesting a +Y statically to Happiness for Oppression, so how would this be triggered? *every time* you kill an MC? That seems perhaps too powerful. So how would ths work?

Maybe there's a better way to do this, mechanically: Oppression civs receive +Y happiness for every turn in which the civ controls no Saidin units.

That accomplishes the same thing, right? We could of course make it more specific and complex, requiring them to be Killed or something, but that might not be worth it. Besides, if an Oppression civ wants to deal with them with the few Red AS they have, that should be acceptable.

I mean that every time an Oppression civ kills an MC, they get a permanent +1 Happiness. There are a ton of massive Happiness bonuses toward the end of the game in BNW (and a ton of big penalties too), which is the part of the game where the Philosophy stuff becomes relevant. Seeing as players can't willingly spawn MCs, that spawn rate is outside their direct control, it's not something they can abuse for huge ongoing Happiness bonuses. But it is powerful and useful, like the other two Philosophy bonuses.

Giving Oppression civs +Y Happiness while they have 0 saidin users is definitely possible. It is a bit all-or-nothing though, it might be better to have something like (Y - [number of saidin users]) Happiness (minimum 0). That way an MC spawning or being gifted a saidin unit or anything like that that causes a saidin unit to appear unexpectedly won't destroy the bonus completely for that turn.

Either could work. The latter would allow the Oppression civs to use non-killing methods of dealing with saidin users and still get the most out of their bonus. The former makes their two bonuses (added MC kill chance and MC kill Happiness) more directly complementary. I lean toward the former, because I think players will feel that that's more powerful even if it ends up being about the same, and it also specifically encourages the use of the killing mechanics for MCs, which is part of the intended flavor of being an Oppression civ.

 

[S3rgeus]

Wow! OK, that was in some ways kind of a big deal change in a few small moments.

So Missionary = Herald, Inquisitor = Truthspeaker, and Alignment = Questioner.

So, faith-buy or UU units such as "Hand of the Light," would likely be Alignment-based units, not Faith ones. A Seeker of Truth could of course be any of the above.

Yeah, I've changed the Alignment and Path summaries.

Awesome, sounds good!

ok, Adherents of Saidin is ok.

Do we still like the word Adherents here, though? It does seem to suggest they USE saidin.

Do you mean Adherents suggests that they use saidin where it shouldn't, or the Lineage suggests that and the word doesn't? Adherents mean worshippers/followers, so I understand in the latter case, though I think it could still be fine. (Gaining Faith toward a Path due to nearby MCs because your people think they're important.)

ok. will have to check to make sure Blight doesn't suddenly become the best tile, though.

I think even if it does become one of the better/best tiles, it has enough drawbacks to balance that out. I doubt we'll see Blight-centered civs unless we go waaaay too far with Blight bonuses. Until then we're just trying to make living near/on the Blight more bearable for a human.

Well, I think the clarification of Lopar is probably worth it. So, it's Forest, then?

Beyond that, I can see several that are unclear.

Tabac should be clarified. Where does this grow?
Ice Peppers should be clarified. Bananas come from Jungle, but Ice Peppers don't. They are up in the borderlands. So, are they Tundra? Hills? Plains?
Beyond that, what did we decide for Apples? They're no longer jungle, right?
What about Olives?

Do we have enough Jungle ones?

Tabac should be Plains or Grassland?
Ice peppers should probably be Tundra.
Apples could probably be on Forest.
Olives grow (on Earth) in relatively hot places, so, as you've mentioned, since we're short on Jungle resources, shall we put them in Jungle?

 

[counterpoint]

Thanks! It's a mystery novel about a group of people who keep getting reborn throughout history. They have memories of all of their past lives and each time they come back, one of them gets killed and the rest need to find out who the killer was. The current cycle (set in the present day) is strange because the same person died as the previous cycle, and that's not supposed to happen!

cool! It's like Planscape:Torment, in a group... though probably with fewer flying skulls.

I feel like I stretched it a bit to reach 50k, but overall I've got a lot of stuff that I need to add to make the ending make more sense. And to set up most of the final quarter of the book, really. So while a decent chunk of stuff can be removed, I'll probably add back in a similar amount.

are you going to try to get it published, then?

Yeah, we can wait on that one.

madness-related combat bonus tabled!

Dragonsworn seems good to me, unless you think otherwise?

nah. that's good![/quote]

It could be quite fun. As you've said, let's not aim for tempting players into using more mad units. If we find that it would address some gameplay concern that crops up when we play the mod, then it's certainly something to consider.

ok, left off the table. Could be a cool Unique or something or scenario.

I think you got this right in your section below. My intention here was to call out the difference between an upgraded Red and send-to-the-Tower as about 15%!

First off, there's a blob of quoted text I think you forgot to respond to. It's the stuff about disbanding-units-can-become-FDs. I think this may have been dropped, but I'm not 100% sure.

in any case, re: the reds: gotcha.

I think your second section looks pretty good.

I do agree that we could probably close the gap between the general AS success rate and the un-upgraded Red Sister. However, we may not need to do that. If the attempt to kill/Gentle the saidin user fails, do they always go rogue? Is there room for a "fail" that leaves the unit alone (or damages it) and possibly consumes all of its movement (when killing) or the Gentler's movement for that turn? The chance would probably be different between Gentling and killing (killing would have a much higher rogue rate), but it would allow us to have a more differentiated Red Sister Gentling rate without making the default Sisters supremely risky in creating rogue MCs.

K, so leaving those values alone as we clarify this stuff about failure.

So, I'm thinking we need to make failure=rogueness. It makes flavorful sense - the point of going rogue is that the man realizes he's screwed and tries to get away and/or fight back. There's no reality in which that unit would just sit around and wait to be gentled, I think.

That said, there isn't Rogueness for foreign Saidin users, since they're already your enemy. Failure there just equals a wasted turn.

But, what I think that leads us to is the feeling that 30% is too low a success rate for an AS, right? Or maybe the reward is such that this becomes worth it. I'm thinking the key thing is in the balancing of the penalty-due-to-foreignness. Gentling your own channelers should be, percentage-wise, easier, because it is balanced against the fact that you only have one attempt to do so. What if we did something like:

Killing (non-Oppression) - 10%, no reward (could this be 20% without ruining too much, maybe)
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 50%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - 70%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - 60% (no longer specifically analogous to the Red Sister approach, though it could be), no reward
Tower - 80%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - 90%, reward
All must be done in Team Territory

This closes the gap between Reds and Non-reds, which makes gentling somewhat worth trying... but is that gap then not enough to make a Red worth it? Is there something else about a Red that would be useful (non-upgraded)?

These chances will be negatively affected by Madness level, though I think your chance should probably bottom out at 10%.

I would think though that we woulddn't modify these chances by unit strength and health and such. Seems like the domestic ones should be kept simpler. Right?

I think this is fine because it's a last ditch effort thing. Killing MCs shouldn't be viable as even a partial strategy for anyone but Oppression.

right.

Sorry, I totally forgot to respond to this on your last post! I think that killing MCs should be own-team-territory only (not any ally) for exactly the reason you've stated: using the MCs as a way of hampering your allies. (On the same team is fine, since hampering your team-mate is never a good idea, you share science and win as a team, etc.)

If we make killing an act of war if done in foreign territory, then players will just kill the MCs one tile away from the target civ.

Right, so the option is just greyed out when you aren't in Team territory.

I think this all sounds reasonable and just needs to be given numbers at some point. Gentling a foreign unit should function similarly to combat with a foreign unit, having positives and negatives that can affect it, and being based on the relative strength of the units involved. (Otherwise heavily injured Sisters could still Gentle full strength enemies just as effectively, and vice versa.) This would apply to enemy MCs as well, since those can be used in combat too. Generally, the structural similarity to combat is because Gentling of this type will tend to be attempted on a battlefield where the alternative was to attack that unit, and so it should be fair and useful in the context of that system.

Do we want to decide on % numbers now? I don't think we need to at the moment.

OK, I agree. We can flesh out the numbers later. But yeah, make it highly variable.

By a total of about 20-30%? And yes, I'd say let's apply that to your own and foreign units.

Sure. Sounds good.

I mean that every time an Oppression civ kills an MC, they get a permanent +1 Happiness. There are a ton of massive Happiness bonuses toward the end of the game in BNW (and a ton of big penalties too), which is the part of the game where the Philosophy stuff becomes relevant. Seeing as players can't willingly spawn MCs, that spawn rate is outside their direct control, it's not something they can abuse for huge ongoing Happiness bonuses. But it is powerful and useful, like the other two Philosophy bonuses.

Giving Oppression civs +Y Happiness while they have 0 saidin users is definitely possible. It is a bit all-or-nothing though, it might be better to have something like (Y - [number of saidin users]) Happiness (minimum 0). That way an MC spawning or being gifted a saidin unit or anything like that that causes a saidin unit to appear unexpectedly won't destroy the bonus completely for that turn.

Either could work. The latter would allow the Oppression civs to use non-killing methods of dealing with saidin users and still get the most out of their bonus. The former makes their two bonuses (added MC kill chance and MC kill Happiness) more directly complementary. I lean toward the former, because I think players will feel that that's more powerful even if it ends up being about the same, and it also specifically encourages the use of the killing mechanics for MCs, which is part of the intended flavor of being an Oppression civ.

Hmm.... I see what you're saying, and I can see how that could work.

That said, it also feels a little weird to me in that it isn't a static bonus. Liberation appears to be a static +X Spark, and I'd imagine Authority was going to be a static +Z to resting influence with the tower, right? So having this be something that can be cultivated like a yield feels weird. It also makes it hard to balance and plan around - players could devise strategies built around exploiting this. Whether its powerful or not, it's unpredictable and somewhat inconsistent, which is unlike the other two Philosophies, and makes this somewhat less desirable to me. The happiness=Y-saidin units thing seems ok to me. In any way to figure this out?

 

[counterpoint]

Do you mean Adherents suggests that they use saidin where it shouldn't, or the Lineage suggests that and the word doesn't? Adherents mean worshippers/followers, so I understand in the latter case, though I think it could still be fine. (Gaining Faith toward a Path due to nearby MCs because your people think they're important.)

eh. Adherents is fine.

I think even if it does become one of the better/best tiles, it has enough drawbacks to balance that out. I doubt we'll see Blight-centered civs unless we go waaaay too far with Blight bonuses. Until then we're just trying to make living near/on the Blight more bearable for a human.

righto!

Tabac should be Plains or Grassland?
Ice peppers should probably be Tundra.
Apples could probably be on Forest.
Olives grow (on Earth) in relatively hot places, so, as you've mentioned, since we're short on Jungle resources, shall we put them in Jungle?

Not sure about Tabac. Whichver fits the mechanical needs, I guess.
Yeah, IPs in Tundra.
Apples in Forest.
Yeah, let's do Olives in Jungle. Why not?

OK, so ready for some actual Customs, then? Uh... you go first?

EDIT: Well, I suppose I should re-frame, based on what we've decided, eh?

1) How should we modify the existing Customs to make them more balanced and valuable? Refer to this post for the current list of BNW Customs.

2) What should the existing Customs be named? Some can be "translations" in a general sense into Wot-speak from their BNW versions, but some should probably be related to specific paths, at least from a flavor perspective. (see below for some thoughts on that). Again, this old post may have some useful flavor.

3) From a mechanical perspective, what additional Customsshould be added to fill a need? What should these be named?

4) From a flavor perspective, what additional Customs should be added? We should probably only do this if the flavor is particularly worthy of inclusion (e.g. a Children of the Light unit or something)

5) Ideally, at least one or two Customs should be named "in honor" of each of the Paths. (e.g. Monastery is obviously Christian while Mosque is clearly Islamic). Hopefully this doesn't require two much "stretching". A very cursory flavor dive is below:

Descendants of the Blood
Omens
Seekers of Truth
Shaved Heads
Da'covale
So'jhin
exotic creatures
caste system

Ji'e'Toh
gai'shain
having toh and fixing it
touching an enemy - getting lots of ji
polygamy
water oath
cadin'sor

Stewards of the Dragon
Legion of the Dragon
Algai'd'siswai
reading signs for prophesy

Vanguard of the Wyld
River of Souls
Freeing of the Slaves
tattoos

Watchers Over the Waves
waiting for a Return
watchtowers
First Watcher

Water Way
acceptance of what is, not what one wishes for
semi-pacifism
End Of Illusion - mass suicide (of Amayar after the choedan kal)
Time of Illusion
Porcelain

Way of the Leaf
pacifism
The Song
Da'shain Aiel/Jenn Aiel
Traveling wagons
colorful cloaks

Way of the Light
Abstinence from the Power
temptation of power can corrupt
Children of the Light
Inquisition/Hand of the Light
Council of the Annointed
Spymasters

Westlands Lore
Festivals (Bel Tine, Winternight, Sunday, Spring Pole etc.)
various fashions
fear of Saidin and the Dragon
Deference to Aes Sedai

obviously there are a whole lot of other more generic customs (dueling, peace-bonding, matriarchy) that are available, but of course don't specifically tie into any of the above categories.

 

[S3rgeus]

cool! It's like Planscape:Torment, in a group... though probably with fewer flying skulls.

I haven't played Planescape, but being compared to Black Isle is definitely good, they know their stuff!

are you going to try to get it published, then?

Yeah, hopefully!

First off, there's a blob of quoted text I think you forgot to respond to. It's the stuff about disbanding-units-can-become-FDs. I think this may have been dropped, but I'm not 100% sure.

Woops very true! Yes, I think we can drop that FD bonus/generation thing. I wasn't a big fan of the idea, but figured it was worth bringing up.

K, so leaving those values alone as we clarify this stuff about failure.

So, I'm thinking we need to make failure=rogueness. It makes flavorful sense - the point of going rogue is that the man realizes he's screwed and tries to get away and/or fight back. There's no reality in which that unit would just sit around and wait to be gentled, I think.

Just to jump in quickly on the flavor of this. I figured the three classifications of result from attempting to Kill/Gentle an MC would be:

Success: MC is killed/Gentled
Rogue: Attempt visibly fails and the MC turns against you
Failure: The killer/Gentler doesn't have the right opportunity to strike or attempts to kill them in some way that fails, but doesn't tip off the victim (poison his wine but someone else drinks it).

So I think the flavor can work out fine for attempts that result in nothing happening.

That said, there isn't Rogueness for foreign Saidin users, since they're already your enemy. Failure there just equals a wasted turn.

But, what I think that leads us to is the feeling that 30% is too low a success rate for an AS, right? Or maybe the reward is such that this becomes worth it. I'm thinking the key thing is in the balancing of the penalty-due-to-foreignness. Gentling your own channelers should be, percentage-wise, easier, because it is balanced against the fact that you only have one attempt to do so. What if we did something like:

Killing (non-Oppression) - 10%, no reward (could this be 20% without ruining too much, maybe)
Gentling (regular Aes Sedai) - 50%, reward
Red Sister (normal) - 70%, reward
Killing (Oppression) - 60% (no longer specifically analogous to the Red Sister approach, though it could be), no reward
Tower - 80%, no reward
Red Sister (upgraded) - 90%, reward
All must be done in Team Territory

This closes the gap between Reds and Non-reds, which makes gentling somewhat worth trying... but is that gap then not enough to make a Red worth it? Is there something else about a Red that would be useful (non-upgraded)?

These chances will be negatively affected by Madness level, though I think your chance should probably bottom out at 10%.

I'm happy with these changes. Just to be clear, this would be across the board, foreign and domestic channelers? And then we can use the health/strength modifiers discussed below to generally make foreign channelers more difficult (along with the penalty-due-to-foreignness). Yes, 30% seems too long for an Aes Sedai, given that it's the more involved of the ways of getting rid of MCs. We'll need to calibrate the reward that the Aes Sedai pays out to make it still fair.

In terms of making the Reds more useful now that we've closed the gap between other Aes Sedai and them now, Red Sisters could provide a better reward for Gentling MCs?

I would think though that we woulddn't modify these chances by unit strength and health and such. Seems like the domestic ones should be kept simpler. Right?

Yes, domestic ones aren't in an open military contest, so discounting strength and health sounds fine from a flavor point of view. It also makes sense from a mechanical point of view that it would be easier to kill/Gentle your own channelers, as you've said. (Not all cases of health/strength comparisons will make it easier, but in general they don't interact too much with this kind of attempt.)

Right, so the option is just greyed out when you aren't in Team territory.

Yes

OK, I agree. We can flesh out the numbers later. But yeah, make it highly variable.

Sounds good!

Hmm.... I see what you're saying, and I can see how that could work.

That said, it also feels a little weird to me in that it isn't a static bonus. Liberation appears to be a static +X Spark, and I'd imagine Authority was going to be a static +Z to resting influence with the tower, right? So having this be something that can be cultivated like a yield feels weird. It also makes it hard to balance and plan around - players could devise strategies built around exploiting this. Whether its powerful or not, it's unpredictable and somewhat inconsistent, which is unlike the other two Philosophies, and makes this somewhat less desirable to me. The happiness=Y-saidin units thing seems ok to me. In any way to figure this out?

I wonder if the Authority bonus should be a static bonus. It could be a modifier like some of the other bonuses/penalties to Tower influence. It would also mean players could choose to have an Authority civ that doesn't get along with the Tower, if they want to do that.

I think the static bonus of +X Spark on Liberation still sounds good - it's immediately powerful, useful, and flavorful.

I think the viability of the +1 Happiness per killed MC is mainly determined by how much the MC rate can be purposefully manipulated by the player. I really like that the player investing in making the Oppression bonus good literally causes them to do things that an Oppression civ should be doing, which is a great intersection of flavor and mechanics.

That said, Y - saidin numbers combined with the kill-chance-boost does encourage a similar kind of thing. It's not as direct, since players can use other ways to get rid of MCs. But that is giving the player more choices, and CiV doesn't shy away from weird combinations.

It depends on how much we want to encourage Oppression civs to use the killing MCs mechanic. Both encourage it: Happiness per kill makes it very specific - you must be killing MCs - and Y - saidin users allows them to use Gentling and the Tower (if still available to them). We don't want the optimal mechanical Oppression play to be a marginally positive Tower rating just so they can send MCs to the Tower though.

On the other hand, Y - saidin users also includes Asha'men, which Happiness per kills doesn't (can't, it would be crazy).

 

[S3rgeus]

Not sure about Tabac. Whichver fits the mechanical needs, I guess.
Yeah, IPs in Tundra.
Apples in Forest.
Yeah, let's do Olives in Jungle. Why not?

Re Tabac, woops! I was ambiguous, I meant to say that we could have Tabac appear on both Plains and Grasslands.

I've added the others to the Misc summary.

OK, so ready for some actual Customs, then? Uh... you go first?

EDIT: Well, I suppose I should re-frame, based on what we've decided, eh?

1) How should we modify the existing Customs to make them more balanced and valuable? Refer to this post for the current list of BNW Customs.

On this one, I'm not sure if all of the existing Beliefs from BNW need to come across. Generally, we'll want to avoid finding new ways to do the same thing as an existing BNW Belief just for the sake of it, but if some of them just don't fit for some reason, then I think we can leave them out.

I'd almost be tempted to start from "scratch," using the BNW beliefs only as a reference for the kind of distribution of bonuses we should have. If a bunch of our Customs end up being similar to/the same as those Beliefs, then fine, but there's no problem if we come up with alternates that serve a similar mechanical purpose but fulfill it in a different way.

Also, several of the existing BNW Beliefs refer to or are centered around buildings that presumably don't exist in their BNW form in WoTMod. I think we can leave these Beliefs/Customs out until we've gone through and done the buildings later? (Not only the ones like Cathedrals that allows the player to purchase Cathedrals, but things like Peace Gardens which affect "existing" buildings.)

2) What should the existing Customs be named? Some can be "translations" in a general sense into Wot-speak from their BNW versions, but some should probably be related to specific paths, at least from a flavor perspective. (see below for some thoughts on that). Again, this old post may have some useful flavor.

Renaming the existing Beliefs ties into what I mentioned above. I think starting from "scratch" would end up with some of our Customs effectively being renames, but we wouldn't have quite as many mechanical copies as if we rename all of the existing Beliefs into Customs and then add to that list.

More detail on the Path-specific Customs below.

3) From a mechanical perspective, what additional Customsshould be added to fill a need? What should these be named?

From the post you linked to with all of the existing BNW Beliefs in it, you also made a list of all of the new mechanics that Customs could tie into:

Channeling
Male Channelers
the LB
Alignment
The Tower
The Ogier
Governors
The Horn
Shadowspawn
Dragonsworn
The TW
The High King

I don't think there are any more mechanics that have been added since then? (Except Shadar Logoth? Which probably isn't big enough to warrant a Custom.)

When we discussed this briefly before, I think we said that the TW, High King, and Horn were all a bit niche to have Customs specifically for them, but that some of the other Customs may be useful for those situations. (Shadowspawn bonus is good for the TW, for instance.)

The other ones all seem like good mechanical topics for us to add new Customs for.

4) From a flavor perspective, what additional Customs should be added? We should probably only do this if the flavor is particularly worthy of inclusion (e.g. a Children of the Light unit or something)

Yes, the Whitecloak unit one that we discussed before is definitely something that we should include because the flavor is right there. I'm thinking that most of these will be covered by the Path-specific ones below!

5) Ideally, at least one or two Customs should be named "in honor" of each of the Paths. (e.g. Monastery is obviously Christian while Mosque is clearly Islamic). Hopefully this doesn't require two much "stretching". A very cursory flavor dive is below:

Definitely, this sounds like a great idea and a very good starting point! I'll go through your flavor dive and try to make some appropriate Customs/Belief renames.

The general format of a new Custom is:

Name (Follower/Founder/Reformation)
Effect

I've left out Enhancer because they all seem to be either Founder or Follower Beliefs in BNW, the main difference is when they're available, which we can choose based on the mechanics involved in what the Custom affects.

Descendants of the Blood
Omens
Seekers of Truth
Shaved Heads
Da'covale
So'jhin
exotic creatures
caste system

Omens (Founder)
+X Faith per turn per city following this Path. (Upgraded Pilgrimage)

Da'covale (Follower)
+1 Production per turn per Specialist. (Upgraded Guruship)

Ji'e'Toh
gai'shain
having toh and fixing it
touching an enemy - getting lots of ji
polygamy
water oath
cadin'sor

Gai'shain (Founder)
+X Production in your nearest city when you kill an enemy unit.

Matters of Toh (Follower)
+X Culture per turn per citizen.

Cadin'sor
+X% combat strength near friendly cities that follow this Path. (renamed Defender of the Faith, if we remove the friendly requirement, it can be a combination of Defender of the Faith and Just War)

Stewards of the Dragon
Legion of the Dragon
Algai'd'siswai
reading signs for prophesy

Lews Therin's Legacy (Reformation)
May purchase channeling units with Faith. (Not including Aes Sedai or Male Channelers)

Karaethon Cycle (Reformation)
The Dragon is X% more effective in cities that follow this Path. (Applies to Randspy mode, would benefit each ability in a specific way.) Seals can be researched X% faster in cities following this Path. (Just the researching part, not breaking)

Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to convert Dragonsworn units you defeat to your control.

Alternative:
Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to spawn a Herald when you defeat a Dragonsworn unit.

Vanguard of the Wyld
River of Souls
Freeing of the Slaves
tattoos

I haven't read the excerpt from AMoL about the Wyld yet, so I'm not as familiar with this flavor, but it's worth a shot!

Angarai'la (Follower)
+X Faith per turn from cities on rivers.

Keepers of Sakarnen (Founder)
Shadowspawn move more slowly through your territory.

Watchers Over the Waves
waiting for a Return
watchtowers
First Watcher

Await the Corenne (Follower)
+X Culture for cities on the coast.

Water Way
acceptance of what is, not what one wishes for
semi-pacifism
End Of Illusion - mass suicide (of Amayar after the choedan kal)
Time of Illusion
Porcelain

Time of Illusion (Follower)
+X Production in cities with population less than 5. (Amayar's island is a low pop city that make tons of porcelain.)

End of Illusion (Founder)
-X Population in foreign cities when this Path first spreads there. (An offense-based Custom?)

Fragile Artificing (Founder)
+X Happiness from each source of Porcelain your civilization has access to. (Creates a stacking bonus for multiple copies)

Way of the Leaf
pacifism
The Song
Da'shain Aiel/Jenn Aiel
Traveling wagons
colorful cloaks

Pacifism (Follower)
15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war (renamed Swords into Plowshares)

The Song (Founder)
+1 Happiness for every 4 followers of this Path in non-enemy foreign cities. (upgraded Peace Loving)

Colorful Motley (Follower)
<Early faith building> provides +2 Culture. (Upgraded Choral Music)

Nomadic Wagons (Follower)
+X Culture from land trade routes.

Way of the Light
Abstinence from the Power
temptation of power can corrupt
Children of the Light
Inquisition/Hand of the Light
Council of the Annointed
Spymasters

Righteous Inquisition (Follower)
Questioners are doubly effective.

Alternative:
Righteous Inquisition (Follower)
Foreign Questioners are half as effective.

Devoted Children (Follower)
Can purchase Whitecloaks with Faith (can this be seen to replace Holy Warriors?)

Council of the Anointed (Founder)
+X Faith when a Questioner is used on a city following this Path.

Westlands Lore
Festivals (Bel Tine, Winternight, Sunday, Spring Pole etc.)
various fashions
fear of Saidin and the Dragon
Deference to Aes Sedai

Festivals (Founder)
+1 Happiness for every city following this Path (upgraded Ceremonial Burial)

Or, super weird alternative/addition (if renamed to be separate from Festivals, or the above is renamed):
Festivals (Follower)
+5 Food and +2 Local Happiness on every turn divisible by X (bonuses manifest on festival days - we can't quite do actual dates because of the date scaling throughout the game, though there might be a way to use the scaling to create a Custom that scales in power throughout the game)

Respect for The Tower (Founder)
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance X% more quickly.

Respect for Sisters (Follower)
Aes Sedai have +X% combat strength near cities following this Path.

obviously there are a whole lot of other more generic customs (dueling, peace-bonding, matriarchy) that are available, but of course don't specifically tie into any of the above categories.

Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of these. I think the main place we risk stealing flavor from with these is probably uniques. Putting off these Customs until then doesn't seem like a great idea though. Given the importance of uniques, I'd say we can afford to just develop the Customs as we see fit and then if there are specific Customs that overlap too much with a unique we come up with later, we can swap out the Custom for something else.

I won't go into a full list for things like that today, since all of the above stuff already took me so long - I'd have to spend another day at it!

 

[counterpoint]

Woops very true! Yes, I think we can drop that FD bonus/generation thing. I wasn't a big fan of the idea, but figured it was worth bringing up.

always worth bringing it up.

Just to jump in quickly on the flavor of this. I figured the three classifications of result from attempting to Kill/Gentle an MC would be:

Success: MC is killed/Gentled
Rogue: Attempt visibly fails and the MC turns against you
Failure: The killer/Gentler doesn't have the right opportunity to strike or attempts to kill them in some way that fails, but doesn't tip off the victim (poison his wine but someone else drinks it).

So I think the flavor can work out fine for attempts that result in nothing happening.

alright. From a flavor perspective, I can definitely see what you mean!

I'm happy with these changes. Just to be clear, this would be across the board, foreign and domestic channelers? And then we can use the health/strength modifiers discussed below to generally make foreign channelers more difficult (along with the penalty-due-to-foreignness). Yes, 30% seems too long for an Aes Sedai, given that it's the more involved of the ways of getting rid of MCs. We'll need to calibrate the reward that the Aes Sedai pays out to make it still fair.

In terms of making the Reds more useful now that we've closed the gap between other Aes Sedai and them now, Red Sisters could provide a better reward for Gentling MCs?

Yes, these values would theoretically be across the board, though the actual operating % would be quite a bit less in most all cases.

But, yeah, 50% for AS should help things along.

I think, as far as the reds, I could see the reward being slightly better, but I'd want it to be quite small. I think I'd prefer not doing that, though. The other thing is we could give them is a slight bonus to combat with saidin units (maybe to defense against them or something).

In any case, you'll need to update the Diplo Summary where it talks about the Red's powers.

NOTE: the final ability of the Reds is no longer going to work. A half-MC-spawn rate is no longer really a "bonus" due to how Fear/Acc and such has worked out. Is there something similar we could do? Maybe that one raises the reward for Gentling?

Yes, domestic ones aren't in an open military contest, so discounting strength and health sounds fine from a flavor point of view. It also makes sense from a mechanical point of view that it would be easier to kill/Gentle your own channelers, as you've said. (Not all cases of health/strength comparisons will make it easier, but in general they don't interact too much with this kind of attempt.)

agreed

I wonder if the Authority bonus should be a static bonus. It could be a modifier like some of the other bonuses/penalties to Tower influence. It would also mean players could choose to have an Authority civ that doesn't get along with the Tower, if they want to do that.

Hmm... you're suggesting it could be like a "+X% to any tower influence gains" or something? Something like that could work. Honestly, I think we can decide this later, when we have the Tenets and Policies worked out - likely some version of each of these things will show up in a few of these different places.

I think the static bonus of +X Spark on Liberation still sounds good - it's immediately powerful, useful, and flavorful.

good.

I think the viability of the +1 Happiness per killed MC is mainly determined by how much the MC rate can be purposefully manipulated by the player. I really like that the player investing in making the Oppression bonus good literally causes them to do things that an Oppression civ should be doing, which is a great intersection of flavor and mechanics.

That said, Y - saidin numbers combined with the kill-chance-boost does encourage a similar kind of thing. It's not as direct, since players can use other ways to get rid of MCs. But that is giving the player more choices, and CiV doesn't shy away from weird combinations.

It depends on how much we want to encourage Oppression civs to use the killing MCs mechanic. Both encourage it: Happiness per kill makes it very specific - you must be killing MCs - and Y - saidin users allows them to use Gentling and the Tower (if still available to them). We don't want the optimal mechanical Oppression play to be a marginally positive Tower rating just so they can send MCs to the Tower though.

On the other hand, Y - saidin users also includes Asha'men, which Happiness per kills doesn't (can't, it would be crazy).

you almost had be sold on the +1 Happiness thing, and then you mentioned the Asha'man...

I do totally see how the Tower would still be a viable place to send your channelers if you had a half-way decent rep with the Tower. I do feel like playing that way - oppression but not totally anti-tower - should definitely be possible. It's just somewhat inefficient. But a positive rep with the Tower would also come with benefits - more sisters - that would definitely "offset" the inefficiency of you not using the primary bonus (the oppression chance increase).

The other thing is we could raise the oppression kill chance to 70%, which makes it in-line with a Red sister, and thus a go-to for most oppression civs.

We could also just say "Oppression cannot send to the Tower," but I don't think I like that.

But as far as the bonus, I think I'm inclined to do the Y-Saidin Units thing, if only because of the Asha'man thing. If you have an idea as to how to make the Asha'man thing fit in, then I'd be happy to do the +1 Happiness per kill (as it does encourage the kill, which is nice)

 

[counterpoint]

Re Tabac, woops! I was ambiguous, I meant to say that we could have Tabac appear on both Plains and Grasslands.

Gotcha. Yeah, that's fine.

On this one, I'm not sure if all of the existing Beliefs from BNW need to come across. Generally, we'll want to avoid finding new ways to do the same thing as an existing BNW Belief just for the sake of it, but if some of them just don't fit for some reason, then I think we can leave them out.

I'd almost be tempted to start from "scratch," using the BNW beliefs only as a reference for the kind of distribution of bonuses we should have. If a bunch of our Customs end up being similar to/the same as those Beliefs, then fine, but there's no problem if we come up with alternates that serve a similar mechanical purpose but fulfill it in a different way.

I'd just as soon walk through the existing Beliefs and just decide if we want them or not. I see what you're suggesting, and think what you've done so far works fine, but on the other hand, it's a little harder to keep track of which ones have been used (and renamed), and which ones are still waiting to be used or scrapped. To me, it seems simpler just to deal with the pre-exising ones now, keep or abandon, and not have to worry about weird similar-but-not-quite-the-same functionality. I'm flexible, though. You clearly have more ideas for these than I, though I will say that it's possible the "scratch" approach is causing a few issues with how these Paths work and are framed (see below).

Also, several of the existing BNW Beliefs refer to or are centered around buildings that presumably don't exist in their BNW form in WoTMod. I think we can leave these Beliefs/Customs out until we've gone through and done the buildings later? (Not only the ones like Cathedrals that allows the player to purchase Cathedrals, but things like Peace Gardens which affect "existing" buildings.)

Huh. I actually don't agree here. I'd say right here, if we have an idea for one of these buildings, from a flavor-perspective, now is the time to decide it. Like, if you get the idea for "Seeker's Tower" that happens to have the same functionality as a Mosque, let's just call it that and be done with it. If we have to come back and change things because of the tech tree or uniques later, we can do that. The faith-buy buildings don't really interact with actual buildings and the tech tree in a meaningful way, but are quite important to how the religion thing works in BNW, so I think we should make decisions as to the actual functionality of the buildings now, if not the flavor. And as far as Peace Gardens or things like that, I think we should just decide if we want the functionality. If so, then we just say "<Garden Replacement> produces 2 Happiness in the city" and decide the actual flavor later. But, if we think we'll want that functionality, we should add it in now to be flavored later.

Renaming the existing Beliefs ties into what I mentioned above. I think starting from "scratch" would end up with some of our Customs effectively being renames, but we wouldn't have quite as many mechanical copies as if we rename all of the existing Beliefs into Customs and then add to that list.

I can see your point here. It's a matter of perspective. I'd be happy to do it this way now and then go through and consider the leftovers in a more deliberate manner.

From the post you linked to with all of the existing BNW Beliefs in it, you also made a list of all of the new mechanics that Customs could tie into:

Channeling
Male Channelers
the LB
Alignment
The Tower
The Ogier
Governors
The Horn
Shadowspawn
Dragonsworn
The TW
The High King

Of the ones here, I'm not totally sold on the LB as a stand-alone Custom being the right design decision. I see the one below about Seals and such, and to me it sticks out a little from the others as a bit strange. I'm still mostly in the camp that things that help you do well in the game will also help you in the LB, and for Paths I think that might be the best way to handle it.

I don't think there are any more mechanics that have been added since then? (Except Shadar Logoth? Which probably isn't big enough to warrant a Custom.)

I think this list looks good.

When we discussed this briefly before, I think we said that the TW, High King, and Horn were all a bit niche to have Customs specifically for them, but that some of the other Customs may be useful for those situations. (Shadowspawn bonus is good for the TW, for instance.)

makes sense. I sort of feel the same about the LB.

OK, gonna have to finish this up later (hopefully tonight). Let me say generally that your Customs proposals are mostly great, but that some of them have one specific issue: they aren't tied to a city in a way that lets us connect it to a Path in a specific manner. I'll be specific later, but for example:

"Respect for The Tower (Founder)
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance X% more quickly"

This is a "global" thing, that doesn't directly have anything to do with a Path. Founder Beliefs, as I understand them, are supposed to benefit you when your religion becomes more powerful and widespread (e.g. Tithe). This is just a bonus to your whole civ, which would be there even if your religion was essentially exterminated. There are a few of these that suffer from this issue. I'll tackle them specifically below, but in general I think we need to make sure these can be tied to specific cities having a given Path, when they confer bonuses (or else connect to Faith in general). A better version of this could be something like:

Respect for The Tower (Founder)
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance more quickly by +X% per city following this Path.

Don't know if that's a good Custom, but it's certainly works "like a Custom,"

 

[counterpoint]

OK, back for more!

Definitely, this sounds like a great idea and a very good starting point! I'll go through your flavor dive and try to make some appropriate Customs/Belief renames.

The general format of a new Custom is:

Name (Follower/Founder/Reformation)
Effect

I've left out Enhancer because they all seem to be either Founder or Follower Beliefs in BNW, the main difference is when they're available, which we can choose based on the mechanics involved in what the Custom affects.

righto! I'm going to suggest, in order to make it easier to populate a list of final Customs, let's do a few things:

1) if you propose a change to a custom (e.g. I'm changing a +2 you proposed to a +3), rewrite the whole Custom.
2) when a custom reaches its "final form", post the full name and its final description, and some signifier that this one is ready to be summarized (the ol @settled could work)

I know this will involve a lot of rewriting of them, but in the event that some of these go through a few revisions and such, it'll make it easier, I think.

Omens (Founder)
+X Faith per turn per city following this Path. (Upgraded Pilgrimage)

interesting. So no longer foreign requirement. Were you thinking that X would be higher than 2 (pilgrimage), or what?

Now, I never choose this one, but I can see that the intent behind it in BNW is to reward people for spreading their religion globally. These changes somewhat by removing the foreign requirement. What if we simply kept it foreign, but raised the amount of faith (e.g. +3)? Would that accomplish something similar to what you're going for, while still rewarding the specific behavior BNW is trying to?

So, something like:

Omens (Founder)
+3 Faith for each foreign City following this religion

In terms of the flavor, I think it's fine. This one is relatively abstract, so could be flavored in many different ways, and nothing else jumps out as clearly omen-based anyways.

Da'covale (Follower)
+1 Production per turn per Specialist. (Upgraded Guruship)

hmmm... I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, I never use this one, ever. On the other hand, in BNW it's +2 total, and with this, it could be +10 or +20 or whatever. Will this not get way to high eventually? I wonder, again, if this one would be better fixed by simply increasing the number from BNW. Something like:

Da'covale (Follower)
+4 Production if a city has a specialist

Now, yours feels different, which is better. But I worry if it's too scalable.

Love the flavor, for sure. A good fit. I do wonder if the name needs a modifying word, though. I think many will know what Da'covale are, but I wonder if another word would maybe make it clearer what this is referring to. Loyal Da'covale or something. I dunno.

Gai'shain (Founder)
+X Production in your nearest city when you kill an enemy unit.

I like the flavor of this one, for sure, but I think it doesn't work as a Custom. This is more of a global bonus, and here's nothing I can see that connects it to a Path, and that Path spreading.

I'm not sure this is a great custom, but one alternative could be:

Gai'shain (Founder)
When you kill an enemy unit in your territory, gain +X Production in the nearest city for every foreign city following this Path.

This way, at least, it is tied to the spreading and maintenance of the path. It's also flavorful, I think - the more people who follow Ji'e'toh, the more Gai'shain you get.

Matters of Toh (Follower)
+X Culture per turn per citizen.

This one seems a little too straight-forward in a way that isn't quite fitting. Maybe something like:

Matters of Toh (Follower)
+X Culture per turn for every follower of this Path

I'm not sure if that's phrased correctly, but here it's dependent on how popular the Path is in that city.

Still, not totally sure this one isn't too obviously just a culture-factory that isn't all that compelling.

Cadin'sor
+X% combat strength near friendly cities that follow this Path. (renamed Defender of the Faith, if we remove the friendly requirement, it can be a combination of Defender of the Faith and Just War)

hmm.... again, one I never use, but I wonder if combining them is too good. Maybe lower the percentage from what it is for the separate ones, but combine them? So:

Cadin'sor (Enhancer)
+15% Combat Strength near cities that follow this Path

10%?

Flavor is mostly ok. I'd perhaps prefer a qualifying word, though(<Something> Cadin'sor).

Lews Therin's Legacy (Reformation)
May purchase channeling units with Faith. (Not including Aes Sedai or Male Channelers)

Think this one's totally fine, if you do. So:

Lews Therin's Legacy (Reformation)
May purchase channeling units with Faith. (Not including Aes Sedai or Male Channelers) @settled

So you can buy Asha'man?

Karaethon Cycle (Reformation)
The Dragon is X% more effective in cities that follow this Path. (Applies to Randspy mode, would benefit each ability in a specific way.) Seals can be researched X% faster in cities following this Path. (Just the researching part, not breaking)

I see the logic here. However, I'm slightly unconvinced that we need this one. It's oddly specific to the LB. I know that is the point, but the other beliefs don't seem to be so specific in what they do. If the LB doesn't happen, this has literally zero benefit for the chooser. It makes it a highly risky choice.

Also, I think we might need the name Karaethon Cycle for our Prophesies later, so we might consider altering it slightly. Custodians of Karaethon?

Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to convert Dragonsworn units you defeat to your control.

OK, back to the problem with this having nothing to do with a Path or that path spreading. Maybe it needs to be something more like:

Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to convert Dragonsworn units you defeat to your control for every city following this Path

or nothing at all, maybe.

Alternative:
Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to spawn a Herald when you defeat a Dragonsworn unit.

same exact problem as above. Maybe:

Legion of the Dragon (Founder)
X% chance to spawn a Herald when you defeat a Dragonsworn unit for every city following this Path

I'm not sure which I prefer. Maybe the first.

I haven't read the excerpt from AMoL about the Wyld yet, so I'm not as familiar with this flavor, but it's worth a shot!

Angarai'la (Follower)
+X Faith per turn from cities on rivers.

You mean the short story River of Souls? I haven't read it either.

I think this one could work, but should it be tied more to path-ness:

Angarai'la (Follower)
+X Faith per turn from cities on rivers with 3 or more followers.

I think this flavor is quite obscure, so this probably needs more words to make a stronger impression to the player of what this represents. Walkers of the Angarai'la? Devotion of the Angarai'la? Something?

Keepers of Sakarnen (Founder)
Shadowspawn move more slowly through your territory.

Again, this one is too loosey-goosey in relation to a path. Should it be clarified as such:

Keepers of Sakamen (Founder)
Shadowspawn move more slowly when within 4 tiles of a city following this Path

Await the Corenne (Follower)
+X Culture for cities on the coast.

I think this one could work. It's not super fun or anything, but workable.

Await the Corenne (Follower)
+X Culture for cities on the coast.

Time of Illusion (Follower)
+X Production in cities with population less than 5. (Amayar's island is a low pop city that make tons of porcelain.)

ok, the implication of this is that the city must folllow the Path, right?

also, is Tremalking necessarily low pop?

End of Illusion (Founder)
-X Population in foreign cities when this Path first spreads there. (An offense-based Custom?)

Ooh.... I don't know. Kind of interesting, but I think this might be opening up a can of worms we don't want. The back-and-forth that can happen between Paths would be devastating. I say let's resist this one.

Fragile Artificing (Founder)
+X Happiness from each source of Porcelain your civilization has access to. (Creates a stacking bonus for multiple copies)

I'm also not quite sure on this one. Isn't porcelain a CS resource? That's not going to be something that's going to pay off very often.

Pacifism (Follower)
15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war (renamed Swords into Plowshares)

perfect. so

Pacifism (Follower)
15% faster Growth rate for city if not at war (renamed Swords into Plowshares) @settled

The Song (Founder)
+1 Happiness for every 4 followers of this Path in non-enemy foreign cities. (upgraded Peace Loving)

I think this could work. I wonder, though, how easy is it to get 4 followers through normal pressure? 8 clearly seems like it would require missionaries and stuff. Is four too low?

Also, the Song is never found, so the custom itself being the song feels weird. I wonder if it'd be better as "Search for the Song" or something.

Colorful Motley (Follower)
<Early faith building> provides +2 Culture. (Upgraded Choral Music)

Interesting. I wonder what the benefit of this change really is, though. By making it easier to get the equivalent bonus, it seems like we're simply making it easier for others to piggy-back on the benefits of the Path, right? Like, how does eliminating the 4 follower requirement help the founder of the religion at all (since the founder is likely to have at least 4 followers in all of their cities quite easily)?

Or by "early faith building" are you meaning Shrines instead of Temples?

Nomadic Wagons (Follower)
+X Culture from land trade routes.

I think this needs to be clarified. Do you mean:

Nomadic Wagons (Follower)
+X Culture from international land trade routes with a city following this Path

?

Righteous Inquisition (Follower)
Questioners are doubly effective.

Interesting that this is alignment-based. I can see it, from a flavor perspective.

However, it's a little unclear. Do you mean that Questioners are doubly effective when working in cities that follow this Path? They couldn't be doubly effecting in general.

Alternative:
Righteous Inquisition (Follower)
Foreign Questioners are half as effective.

Same question of clarification as above.

As to which I prefer... perhaps the 1/2 as effective version, though I'm not sure why. Righteous Inquisition, when phrased like that, suggests the double one, though.

Devoted Children (Follower)
Can purchase Whitecloaks with Faith (can this be seen to replace Holy Warriors?)

Interesting. I'm not sure. I never use Holy Warriors. What kinds of units do people usually get with them? I think we could justify removing it and replacing it with this one. Certainly having them both doesn't make sense, really. I'm not sure....

Council of the Anointed (Founder)
+X Faith when a Questioner is used on a city following this Path.

I think I like this one, though I also feel like this mechanic is something we'd likely find useful in one of the Myth Policy sub-trees... What do you think? Worth using here?

Festivals (Founder)
+1 Happiness for every city following this Path (upgraded Ceremonial Burial)

hmmm... this is literally twice as good. Maybe that's ok? I mean, cities are still draining on happiness, and this wouldn't cancel that.

Or, super weird alternative/addition (if renamed to be separate from Festivals, or the above is renamed):
Festivals (Follower)
+5 Food and +2 Local Happiness on every turn divisible by X (bonuses manifest on festival days - we can't quite do actual dates because of the date scaling throughout the game, though there might be a way to use the scaling to create a Custom that scales in power throughout the game)

Very interesting. I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. Hard to say how something like that would work. I like the idea, though. Don't know how to explore it further.

As far as names, why not split these two into two distinct Festivals? Like, this second one could be the Festival of Lights or something, while the other one could be something else. I dunno

Respect for The Tower (Founder)
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance X% more quickly.

This was the example I used above. Somewhat problematic when connected to a Path. I might suggest:

Respect for the Tower (Founder)
Novices and Accepted from your civilization advance X% more quickly for each of your cities following this Path

Also, props to you for reminding us of this mechanic!

Respect for Sisters (Follower)
Aes Sedai have +X% combat strength near cities following this Path.

I think this is probably fine. The name's a little bland, though. Not sure what else to suggest, though.

Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of these. I think the main place we risk stealing flavor from with these is probably uniques. Putting off these Customs until then doesn't seem like a great idea though. Given the importance of uniques, I'd say we can afford to just develop the Customs as we see fit and then if there are specific Customs that overlap too much with a unique we come up with later, we can swap out the Custom for something else.

I won't go into a full list for things like that today, since all of the above stuff already took me so long - I'd have to spend another day at it!

definitely with you. Let's try not to steal obvious uniques, but I think we can mostly do what we want now and worry about those if they become a problem.

OK, adding a few of mine own, keeping to the "new" ones for now (e.g. not digging into the BNW ones yet):

Deference to the Blood (Founder)
+X Faith for every in a city following this Path that has a Governor.

Admiration of the Ogier (Founder)
+X Science for every Stedding with 5 Followers of this Path

Emblematic Tatoos (Follower)
+X% Production when building melee units if the city has a Governor

Watchtower Vigil (Follower)
<Lighthouse equivalent> produces X faith

End of Illusion (Reformation)
+X Pressure for each World Wonder residing in a city of this Path

Dueling Tradition (Follower)
+X Culture whenever a unit dies within 3 tiles of this city. [any unit]

some things I really want to try to fit in:

Sister Wives
Peace Bonding
Marriage Knives
Village Council

anyways, that's all i got for now!