S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

I grew up over here, so I use both. You didn't notice I always use color, humor, etc. instead of colour, humour?

Ah! Yo're right. We certainly don't like "U" mch here. Yo know, I think I may have noticed that about yo at some point, but never let it trn into a flly fnctional thoght.

I think for now, just having two will be fine. The recon unit's utility isn't really based on its combat strength, just its mobility, which should be relatively portable from a unit from this part of the tree.

Yeah, agreed.

I think they should regain their full strength. In the books, they only get their full strength back if Healed by a channeler of the opposite gender. I think we can let that detail be abstracted away. We could use a "promotion" to weaken them if they were Healed by the same gender, but that will just end up creating busywork for the player to ensure they get full powered channelers back.

I'd say Madness should be come back at the same level. I don't recall the Healing of Gentling affecting how mad the subject was (flavor wise)?

I'd say if they were Rogue then that doesn't matter yet, the player just gets the unit back. However, a Rogue channeler was probably quite mad, so keeping the Madness level will ensure that they're still at risk of being dangerous.

EDIT: As you mentioned on Steam - Madness level 3 is going Rogue! So I'd say if they were on madness level 3 before, let's pull them back down to 2. The unit is still clearly a threat of going Rogue (unless Saidin has been Cleansed), but the player at least uses it, so it's still a mechanic that makes sense.

Right! I am in agreement here. If it turns out that there's some weird loophole where somebody can "get out of jail free" on their madness through gentling, we'll find out the hard way later.

This is not saying much?

this is hilarious. I obviously said this well before I actually wrote the epic novel that ended up my answer. I guess I kind of rile myself up sometimes...

I don't think we should circumvent the Oaths here, I'd say this ability should fall under the same restrictions as the Aes Sedai's normal attack, which are all of the restrictions you outlined here. Totally agree, that we can't avoid that flavor because it would fly in the face of what we know Aes Sedai to do from the books.

agreed. Keep the oaths intact!

Making sure that Aes Sedai are useful in comparison to non-Oaths channelers with angreal is a very good point then. I think we can deal with that, possibly by range. Give Aes Sedai a longer range with angreal and sa'angreal than saidin users (possibly by just overall giving Saidar users longer range than Saidin users - the restriction of sa'angreal to Aes Sedai makes them the priority for usage there). So say Saidin users have a range of 6, Saidar users could have a range of 10 (same as Nuclear Bombs)?

There are a few problems with this. One is that saidar units include Kin and UU's and such, as well as Aes Sedai. Thus, those units would benefit from the enhanced range without suffering the consequence. Secondly, that doesn't solve the issue with Black Sisters being able to go all out against Light and Neutral players, while Light and Neutrals are still "gimped," at least with regards to each other. This latter issue may not be terrible, though.

I'm fine in general with the saidar units having different range than the saidin units - differentiation like this is neat - but I don't think it actually addresses this problem itself.

The truth is, the whole oaths-vs-angreal thing could create a kind of neat meta-game (pre-LB), actually. You see a channeler with a sa'angreal approaching. Crap, better kill it! But if you do.... then she can attack you with the nuke... Maybe that's a kind of stalemate that's not fun, but it also might very much be fun. Part of me feels like we should make that the metagame, and restrict the nukes to AS units only (not counting saidin ones, which could exist otherwise). That eliminates a lot of this weirdness

I could see us still allowing regular angreal for other units, but in that case, they'd need to be much, much weaker than the sa', enough to make this problem go away - I'm not sure we like that idea.

ACHKASDFKLJ!

For splash damage, I could either see us having splash damage only on Saidin users (like normal attacks), because there aren't any Saidin users affected by the Oaths. Or I could see us eliminating splash damage from the individual strikes of the angreal/sa'angreal weapons. The flavor of it is fairly simple, that the channelers are using the same kind of powered up weaves to strike at a distance via the angreal, whereas the properties of their normal attack weaves differ in such a way that the Saidin users cause collateral damage. I don't think we'd be able to make splash damage co-operate with the Oaths.

I am fine with either of these. Splash for saidin, or splash for noone. Not sure how to decide which.

Also, I'd say you can use angreal/sa'angreal to attack hexes as well. So even if there's no unit/city on it, the hex can be targeted to pillage it (maybe this creates our Fallout equivalent, though it should be something different from Bubbles of Evil, hitting an unoccupied tile?) This gives Aes Sedai a lot more potential targets when they're still under the effects of the Oath. (They can destroy structures and such under the Third Oath, right? As long as they don't directly hurt anyone?)

Yeah, I can see this being used on hexes, though it's certainly less epic a usage as on units or cities. I'm not sure what to say about the Fallout thing... I feel like if we have the Bubbles of Evil, we should either use those, or else use nothing. Don't see the need to create a new thing for it. If we really want it, we should scrap Bubbs.

Again, though, why aren't we using Balefire? BF *would* probably create Bubbles of evil. I know we decided to limit it to the dragon before, but...why again? I know we wanted the 'saken and the "Rand Nuke" to be special, but they probably still can be. I can see us still using angreal as the actual product you create, but balefire be the attack. Or maybe only the sa'angreal is balefire. it does let us use "The Flame of Tar Valon" as a bomb-shelter mechanic, also. And the lore really supports the whole "you should feel really bad about using Balefire" thing, just like nukes.

Also... can we really ever justify AS using any of these attacks on cities? The cities lose population, by golly! How does that fit in with the oaths!?

For Oppression civs not having many of these, despite Domination being one of their designated victory types, I think we'll need to have some mechanic related to their Tenets that specifically tips anti-channeler war in their favor. And they will still have the capacity to produce some channelers, they may do so just for this.

great idea.

Range could also be a differentiator, like it is for Nuclear Bombs and Nuclear Missiles. That's a range of 10 and 12 respectively in BNW.

Power and who can fire them are also good ones. Each strike will do more damage from a sa'angreal, and restrictions based on unit type which we discussed before.

ok, let's see what we settle on, then.

I don't think buildings get destroyed by nukes in BNW. Nuclear Missiles can destroy whole cities if their pop is less than 6 (less than 5 with a Bomb Shelter), but I think all of the original buildings survive if the city does. Buildings get destroyed when a city is captured, but the wiki doesn't provide us with any information on how that's done beyond it being "random". (Though all defensive buildings are definitely destroyed, apparently.)

I think we'd want to do something a bit different to the city capture set up. Each strike could destroy a maximum of 1 building, I'd say. And it would target "cheaper" buildings first. Or do we want to allow the attacker to choose which building to target? (We could merge the two approaches by letting the attacker choose from a subset.)

Ah... so, if buildings aren't destroyed by nukes (weren't they in previous games), I say let's not do this. Losing buildings doesn't seem like a fun mechanic, realistic as it may be. I don't feel a need to add it.

The Channeling Summary sounds like a good place for it.

yeah, sure. Gonna need some serious recap before I can post anything though (once it's settled)

Maybe it can start back up again! Roll20 is a great resource for playing D&D online, that's what my group are using.

Nah, sadly, I think this one has fizzled... Do you play live, or by post? Roleplaying by post seems like it would take *forever*....

As fun as I'm having with WotMod, though, I do miss working on the rulebook to our game, though (the roleplaying game I co-designed, after around a decade of tweaks and playtesting). This has replaced that for me, for better or for worse (hopefully better).

I think I like option A. The distance between the NvM 2 and 3 seems pretty significant to me - Shipcraft (which houses NvM 2) only has prereqs along the naval line, whereas Mapmaking (which houses NvM 3) requires a significant chunk of the rest of the tree. There's a tech in between NvM 1 and NvM 2, so there seems to be enough distance there. Civs taking a non-beelined approach to the tree will certainly have NvM 1 for a while before NvM 2. Civs who go straight for naval expansion will get NvM 2 fairly quickly, but that means they'll be better than most other civs for a while, which is nice for them, since they prioritized it.

I don't think the ranged naval units at the same time as the embarked units is too much of a problem in general. Ranged naval units can't capture barb camps, so they're not good for that. And usually a land unit siege is more effective than a naval siege anyway, though naval ranged units make good siege weapons. But whether this is a problem is moot if we take option A, where it doesn't occur anyway.

Related to the distance between NvR 1 and NvR 2, this is a very good point. I could see us moving NvR 2 onto Mapmaking with this approach. If we're adding more naval units, it makes sense to shift the "existing" units forward a bit, so we'd effectively be moving the two units that were on Navigation back to Astronomy. (They will be weaker to compensate.)

Shipcraft requiring Ritual could make some sense. Then Shipcraft will require the whole block of three techs after our Pottery equivalent, which is similar-ish to what Compass requires in BNW (though less, which is good, because our tech is "earlier"). It does make our structure quite similar to BNW here. I think it might work without this prereq, so shall we go without it to start with?

OK, OK, I think we mostly have something now. I've updated the latest version of the tree with this progression:

Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1, NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

The only iffy thing seems to be the distance between NvR 1 and 2. I'm tempted to think it might be fine, though. I'm not sure "Next Tech" would be good enough if it is forced to stand alone without at least one unit there. I'm also open to the idea of switching NvM 3 and NvR 2's tech placement, but I'd suggest we probably need to gimp the NvR unit slightly (relative to the Frigate, which is quite good) to compensate. Which do you prefer, overall? I don't love the "ranged simultaneous to embarkation" thing, but I can live with it. I'm hoping the way it's plotted out above will work, though.

Just to clarify, the ExpShip and NvM 3 coexist, right? They both upgrade to NvM 4 (e.g. the Ironclad), yes? Question, then: is there something good about the ExpShip that makes it worth using while NvM 3 exists? It's weaker, and slower in ocean... Or, can we make it so its movement limitation on ocean is released upon Mapmaking? Maybe it upgrades on "Next Tech" instead? That feels somewhat arbitrary, though. In short, what's the point of the unit in era 4?

Let's leave the prereqs for shipcraft alone for now, then.

 

[counterpoint]

I won my first Emperor game just the other day! I was playing as Askia on Small Continents. I played on a random map size and got Small (4 players) so I won Domination on turn 173 off quite a good starting position.

that's fast! Still don't think I've played as Askia yet!

True, but they can finally start training modern military units if they don't have any Iron. Or if they only have one or two, they can upgrade through the interim ones from their awesome warriors by getting to Musketman in sequence.

Related to some stuff with moving Sword Forms that will come up later on, I think removing the prereq on Design could work here. (Since if we move Sword Forms, then Melee 3 and Melee 4 won't be right next to each other.)

Yeah, let's get rid of the Design prereq!

Confusingly "unit type" is used to refer to "Warrior" and "Mechanized Infantry" - so, like, you unlock a "unit type" on a tech.

Terminology aside, I think because we're compressing the real world timeframe of the technology our tree reflects and the progression from one end to the other tends towards having units that are similar, we should be able to avoid this problem. We don't have a "mechanized" layer at the end of the tree, for example. I think most of our units will end up being some permutation of humans in armor, and so that loss of promotions stuff shouldn't be necessary.

OK, hopefully we don't need to. But, the Pike->Lancer moment is still a culprit - are we going to avoid mounted Pol units as well?

Yeah, I think it fits in well with the flavor of naval + Heritage, we just need to find the right word! Some candidates:

Find the Wind (a bit wordy)
Weaves of Wind (also wordy, crosses over with Weaves too much)
Windseeing (too Sea Folk-y)

Related to Heritage, is there something we can do about the whole "nautical lifestyle" flavor? It's not specifically WoT, but often sailors stick together and have their own shared mythologies. Something like Voyagers (or Voyaging) or some such?

Hmm... the problem with the things you're proposing is that they *sound* like Flavor, when in fact they're made up flavor that is trying to specifically evoke "Listening to the Wind," which is *actual* flavor (and rather prominent, I'd say). So, I dont' see how those are better. Maybe Listening to the Wind is, after all, the best idea. Even we simply equate it to "predicting the weather," which is is, then the things that tech unlocks - trade, a unit that's ok with ocean, a coastal building, and Fishing boats upgrade - seem wholly logical. So it doesn't need to be "Wind" as related to "Windfinding," but Wind in the sense that "your boats do better if you know when storms are coming. Not concerning your navy so much (thus the Expship, not a NvM), but your *port*. Yeah?

I'm open to the "Sailing culture" thing as well. Don't love "Voyaging," though, as it's essentially the same as Seafaring.

Packed Earth is what a lot of roads are made from before they're ever cobbled/paved. It comes up in the books as well, I think, but only ever in passing.

Ah. That seems like the kind of thing that was invented and perfection way way long ago, though. Not so sexy as a tech here. I move to keep it as Design... unless you have other suggestions!

Agreed, that sounds like a good thing to move. We might make the building weaker, I think that's something we can decide when we're going through and deciding what all of the units/buildings do exactly.

nice. Prod 1 moved to Slate Roofing. Pol 2 moved to Apprenticeship!

Agreed, I'd also like to avoid scrapping Heroism. I could see us moving the Defensive Pact there. Honestly I've never seen a Defensive Pact being used in a game with the AI - either between the human and an AI partner or between multiple AI players, so I'm not sure which part of the tree it should really live on.

Did we discuss the utility of the Defensive Pact before? I think we did - did we come to some decision that makes it more useful?

If we move the wonder back from Talents, then definitely, it would be a different kind of wonder. I think we'll end up doing a "wonder pass" at some point to work out what roles we want all of the wonders to fulfill, where they should live, which techs need wonders to fill them out, and what flavor could fill that slot, and so on. So that makes the wonders relatively mobile at this point, since they're undefined flavor and function.

Regarding Def Pacts.... hmmm.... I honestly don't know what more we could/should add to them. It does seem like they need something more, but I have no idea what that should be. If we do move it to the bottom of the tech tree, is there something we should add that makes it more valuable to "military civs," instead of just defensive civs?

I'm open to either or both of stealing a Wonder from Talents and moving the DefPact to Heroism, but I do neither of those things in this latest pass of the tree. Which, if either (or both) would you like to do?

Also agreed, moving Recon 2 all the way back to Heroism doesn't seem like a good one. I think the reshuffling of New Tongue and Talents could mean that Recon 2 on one of them could let us move one of the other things on that tech back onto Heroism. (Like the wonder discussed above.)

The other possibility is, if we decided to take the NvR unit off of "Not Navigation" and move it earlier (Mapmaking), we could elect to put Recon 2 on *that* tech, which makes some degree of sense, and would make that tech more worthwhile.

Going for the flavor of trading/ships sounds like a good plan! What about Trade Agreements? Or Shipping Agreements? Are there any known constellations in the WoT sky that we can use? (Like if there's one that's good for navigation, that would be perfect.) Or is that too close to Astronomy? The WoT verse is supposedly Earth in a different part of the turning of the Wheel, right? So our constellations would actually work, it would be about finding the WoT names for them (if they exist). I don't have the Companion with me to check on those.

We could also go with Circumnavigation, though that might be a bit close to Navigation, and also intersects with the whole "proving the world is round" thing. (Do we still do that? Is the WoT world round? (I suppose it is if it's Earth.) I feel the generated maps probably still should be.)

Yeah, I'd looked around before for constellation stuff, and couldn't find anything. That led me to consider "Astrology" or something like it, but then that just felt like we were naming it "Not Astronomy" or something.

As far as Randland being Earth, I think it's left completely unclear. I don't think it's *supposed* to be Earth, necessarily. The Legends of the Age Before the Age of Legends (presumably, the First Age, though they probably thought of themselves as the "Third Age" in the infinite loop or something) do seem to be parallel to some things in our world. But I'm not sure if that's Jordan trying to be particularly meaningful, or if it's more of an Easter Egg kind of thing that's not to be taken to be particularly meaningful (like House "Jordayne" of "Tor" from A Song of Ice and Fire, or Sanderson naming some characters in the final books after WoT fans)

As far as Circumnavigation, I think we definitely don't want to go there. The world may be round, but it seems pretty clear that nobody has proven that through circumnavigation. I don't think anybody has sailed from Shara to Seanchan or vise-versa. Certainly not anybody we've heard of. There could theoretically be another continent or something.

I like the idea of Shipping Agreements, but it feels a little... off to me. I think Shipping could theoretically work. What about Freight? Is that too economic? We *do* have Coastal 3 on that tech. Could also see something like Manifest.

Also, this could flat out be where we introduce the Sail. We can't call it Sailing, because of BNW, but we could go with Rigging or Sailing Vessels or something. Also, Sailcloth is the name for the stuff itself, which could work. Or could go really literal and specific and have it be Canvas or something.

I could be fine with many of the names above. I've left it empty for now.

I would also be totally fine with it being in Era 5, I'm sure there will be a tech it fits with there too. We've definitely got one in Era 4.

I don't think we need/want them in both eras.

I'm a little confused by your "definitely" here. I was under the understanding that we originally selected Era 5. I'm fine with 4 too, but I don't think 4 is some preordained fact of the universe or anything.

Just to clarify a channeling tech doesn't necessarily need to unlock only channeling-related things - some could be those "next step along" buildings/units that are implied by the technique the channeling flavor implies.

Of course. I also don't think, though, that we want too many of the techs to be flavored with channeling, really.

Funny about Weaves feeling less advanced, if anything I felt that opposite, that "surely they've worked out the basics of Weaves by now" would be something the players might think. The combination of both our impressions means this might be the right place for it! It would make a good unlock point for the Spark boost mentioned above.

pretty sure we're saying the same thing here. I'm saying that weaves, as a tech, is too primitive ("less advanced") than what would be required for Era 4. Weaving seems like the first or second thing you'd learn how to do when channeling, as it's essentially just "channel something specific."

I'm getting off topic here, though. We need flavor for this tech! If possible, I'd like it to be somewhat "real world," allowing for the Cultural nat wonder. Considering what culture is in our game - crafts, prophesy, and Epics - any ideas that might inspire us here? I got nothing!

I did add Spark here, though (so I am open to this being channeling related).

Definitely awesome flavor, but should it have become available earlier in the tree? Perhaps before or around where we are now?

Totally agree on Delving.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm wondering if we should rename the tech Saidar. I know it's justified in its existence, but it's not a particularly economical use of flavor. We don't need to put saidar in the tech tree. It'll be everywhere in this game.

What would you think of calling Saidar something like Weaves (is this still too advanced a place for that?) or The Five Powers (is that weird to have "The One Power" and a tech of this name?)?

Was this T'a'r upgrade where Projections went from being spawnable on top of the host unit to spawnable anywhere the civ has active vision? Did we decide to separate those two things?

I'm not sure. I could see that as an option, but we'd have to determine that this point in the game is the right place to make that kind of trade. Essentially, we'd be deciding that we want civs to be able to reach further with their Gathering. Probably suitable given this is the "Age of Exploration" in CiV.

Also, we could theoretically boost the lifespan, number of harvests, etc. of the projections. I figure we might be best leaving that stuff for later in the game though. A late-game upgrade that helps people clean up the remaining glimmers quickly would probably be nice.

So, I think my specific suggestion here is to swap these two around into the following configuration:

Where New Tongue is now (directly below High Chant) put Dreaming with: Happ 2, Wonder, Wonder, T'a'r

Where Talent is now (prereq on Design and Hierarchy) put New Tongue with: Recon 2, Court, Gold 2, Trade, Compact (what is "Court" here?).

Then move the wonder that we've lost from New Tongue onto Heroism, and all seems well.

In Talents vs Dreaming, I could see either working here. I don't think we want Delving yet here. I could see Dreaming being used later in the tree, as you mention. (Do we have another T'a'r upgrade after this one?) I think we should definitely use Dreaming somewhere, because it's a very recognizable and tech-ish thing.

First off, the Court.... Yeah, that's a mistake. I mean the Constabulary-equivalent. I'd forgotten the difference when doing this originally. I've added the "Spy" category of buildings to make up for it.

In terms of the name, I think Dreaming here is fine unless we decide we need it later. I do think we could justify another T'a'r upgrade in era 7 or 8 or something. I think we could come up with alternate flavor for that, though - I think if the later one speeds up gathering or something (or makes you have more gathers, or last longer, or something), then that might be a good tech to call ter'angreal, wince the creation of ter'angreals increases the number of folks that can enter t'a'r by like a billionfold. As far as Dreaming being too advanced for this point in the tree.. is this one of those Talents that was actually more common in earlier eras? Also, Dreamwalking would work here, but we have an LP called "Dreamwalker," so that's out. Could we use Foretelling?

I mostly like your changes, for sure. The one thing I don't quite agree with is Happ 2 living on the upper of those techs. I think the Zoo is on Printing Press in order to make it rather accessible to the military civs, and I think this is probably a worthy goal. So I would swap that for Spy 1, which certainly could make sense on either of these techs.

So I've put this for now:

Dreaming (on top)
(none)
Spy 1 Wonder Wonder
T'a'r

The New Tongue (on bottom)
Rcn 2
Gold 2 Happ 2
Compact Trade

I could absolutely see us moving Rcn 2 up to Dreaming, if the NT is too good. It probably doesn't matter. Also, it could move up to "Not Navigation" or something.

I do find myself less inclined to steal one of Dreaming's wonders and stick it on Heroism now, though.

Keeping sounds like a very good call! Like I mention above (or is that below?) a tech inspired by channeling flavor doesn't necessarily have to unlock part of our channeling mechanics. (Though do we have any we need to put around here somewhere?) Keeping could affect these yield bonuses and make whatever the building is become "viable" (from a flavor perspective), and therefore buildable.

The issue I have with Keeping is simply that it's somewhat arcane flavor. Like, I know it's flavor because I looked up a list of Weaves. It could work, but might be too obscure. Also, Keeping might be actually more useful to us later, with Refrigeration or something

This could be another good spot for "The Five Powers," as I could imagine mastery of them would yield to a bunch of disparate bonuses, if we can get past the fact that that should be more of a "basic" tech.

I could also see us going with something like Wards, as this is more recognizable and general. It's not the *best* flavor-mechanics alignment, but I think it's pretty good. I can imagine any number of wards being used to protect things, make yields more productive, etc.

I go into why I think we should keep the diversity for Melee 3 below. And as you've said here, I think if we keep Melee 3, then all of these techs slot together quite well.

So, where we currently have Sword Forms, we instead have Formations (good name!), which has Pol 3 and a wonder. Then where we have the "Mine Quarry Brickyard" tech at the moment (these are yield bonuses, right?), we have Sword Forms with Melee 4 and the Warder upgrade.

Do we want the Mine, Quarry, and Brickyard yield bonuses to stay where they are on Sword Forms? Might we split them up or put some/all back on Formations?

OK, I'm in agreement with this!

Mine, Quarry Brickyard all seem to me to be essentially part of one big bonus, as they're all production boosts from similar things. I wouldn't want to break them up. I honestly could go either way with these - I could also imagine them attaching to that lonely Melee 4 or Artillery, though that'd be pushing the bonus quite far back. Will leave for now - though the flavor on Sword Forms is quite awful, and needs to change, IMO.

Two main reasons: one is that I've always felt like the melee units upgrade path, while it has difficulties with shortness from Longswordsman -> Musketman, is the most interesting and useful unit upgrade path. It captures a lot of great real world flavor and I always feel like upgrading my melee units is worthwhile. The other is that there are a lot of wars around this part of the tech tree. By this point, players have had a decent amount of time to establish stable power bases to produce units and are starting to run up against the borders of other civs with their expansion. More unit diversity here means that tech differences are more noticeable during these wars, but not completely the deciding factor. The guy with Musketman will be beaten by a sea of Longswordsman units if the guy making the Longswordsman can make a lot more of them, because they're not too different in combat strength. So overall it adds a lot of nice variety to what is quite a frequently war-based part of the progression.

ok, I'm sold, sure.

So it's looking like New Tongue and Formations are the prereqs for this one now. Looking at what this tech unlocks, it's going to be a military tech. So something like Martial Command, or simply Command. Maybe Logistics, since siege weapons are often logistical challenges. Tactics could also work here. Any of those standing out or inspiring anything?

I think Martial Command and Command essentially duplicate some earlier tech's we've established (Leadership, etc.). I think Tactics is probably my choice here, though it is rather close to Siegecraft. That's probably ok, though.

Awesome, Fireworks as Electricity sounds good.

None of our mechanics have National Wonders, but the Illuminator's stuff doesn't strike me as a match for those. Alignment, Channeling (via Spark), anything else National Wonder-able of ours?

agreed. not a good fit.

I'd say it would be good to stick with the pattern of National Wonders requiring some kind of building in all cities first - that's what makes them something that helps Tall civs, since Wide civs take much longer to build any building in all of their cities. There are two Gold National Wonders in BNW (East India Company and National Treasury) - we could have it be one of these?

Science also has two National Wonders (National College and Oxford University... which seems more like a World Wonder, because it is a specific thing that exists in one place, but anyway). We could use that either.

I was confused for a bit, and then looked it up, and I think you're actually mixing things up. The Nat. Treasure was axed in favor of the East India in BNW. I do think that gold might be the way to go here, though I don't know what buildings we'd require.

What if we made a point of flavoring the "Bank" to be something that could theoretically be required to build this *second* Gold Nat Wonder (added by us)? Could we come up with a building that would make flavorful sense? If we could, then we could make it "Gold related," or trade related, and not necessarily simply a strict +X Gold thing. Maybe Gold production also results in culture production, or vise-versa? Something "special" like that? Leaving this ambiguous for now.

So good! But by itself on a tech good?

probably yes, but I don't feel strongly.

OK, so coming up on the next era, it sounds like we already have a decent sense for what kinds of things should happen here. Some questions:

Should Archaeo unlock at the same point?

Should Range 4 be tied to "Industrialization" still?

Are we ok with Rifling being alone? (to me, this is a bigger point of weirdness than Artillery) Also, I'm assuming Rifling should be moved further to right as we only just unlocked the last Melee unit, so maybe this will be resolved another way.

Should the Channeler upgrades be hanging out in the top/middle, or should they possibly be closer to the bottom of the tree?

Do we like the next melee ship being lower in the tree?

There's a 2.5 version in the Dbox (sorry lurkers and/or newbies, not uploading it yet). Not enough changes to warrant a whole new version, but certainly some worthy things!

 

[S3rgeus]

Ah! Yo're right. We certainly don't like "U" mch here. Yo know, I think I may have noticed that about yo at some point, but never let it trn into a flly fnctional thoght.

And here I am trying to be consistent and you don't notice!

Right! I am in agreement here. If it turns out that there's some weird loophole where somebody can "get out of jail free" on their madness through gentling, we'll find out the hard way later.

Sounds good! This is summary-able for the Channeling Summary now, right?

There are a few problems with this. One is that saidar units include Kin and UU's and such, as well as Aes Sedai. Thus, those units would benefit from the enhanced range without suffering the consequence. Secondly, that doesn't solve the issue with Black Sisters being able to go all out against Light and Neutral players, while Light and Neutrals are still "gimped," at least with regards to each other. This latter issue may not be terrible, though.

I'm fine in general with the saidar units having different range than the saidin units - differentiation like this is neat - but I don't think it actually addresses this problem itself.

The truth is, the whole oaths-vs-angreal thing could create a kind of neat meta-game (pre-LB), actually. You see a channeler with a sa'angreal approaching. Crap, better kill it! But if you do.... then she can attack you with the nuke... Maybe that's a kind of stalemate that's not fun, but it also might very much be fun. Part of me feels like we should make that the metagame, and restrict the nukes to AS units only (not counting saidin ones, which could exist otherwise). That eliminates a lot of this weirdness

I could see us still allowing regular angreal for other units, but in that case, they'd need to be much, much weaker than the sa', enough to make this problem go away - I'm not sure we like that idea.

ACHKASDFKLJ!

Ok, it sounds like we're going back to using the flavor of there being male-only and female-only angreal and sa'angreal. I'm totally up for us including this if it serves a mechanical purpose, which it looks like we can make it do here. (It would also mean that they could unlock at different techs?)

I don't think the issue with Black Sisters is a problem - part of the allure of the Black Ajah is avoidance of the Oaths, and if the Oaths weren't a restriction, then that wouldn't really be much of a change.

Boosted range for all Saidar units definitely has problems though, as you've mentioned. I think we'll end up deciding any UU channelers' capacities here on a case by case basis. For example (not a suggestion), we may elect to allow damane to use sa'angreal, or something like that. So we've got Kin (and their predecessors, Wilders), who aren't restricted by the Oaths and need to be included in some way.

Some options:

Don't let Kin or Wilders use either angreal or sa'angreal. While this does solve some of our mechanical problems, it does seem fairly arbitrary and unjustified. Players will expect these units to be able to use at least angreal, since those are established as workable for anyone. (Whereas sa'angreal were called out as being dangerous to untrained users.)

Alternatively, make a significant range and power difference between the two. Have angreal have a range of 3/4 and sa'angreal have a range of 8/10. This makes angreal less useful, and given the Kin units' lack of Oaths restriction, a Kin with an angreal could still potentially compete with an Aes Sedai with a sa'angreal in a lot of practical situations, which isn't what we want.

Alternatively, make the two functionally different. Angreal can just strike units and cities, don't pillage Improvements, don't create Fallout (or whatever we call it). Sa'angreal can hit units, cities, hexes, pillage any Improvement on a targeted hex, and reduce city population instead of just damaging the city. That added to a more comparable range difference (6 vs 8 maybe) and a power difference, could create the effect we want. This does make angreal significantly less about infrastructure damage than the Nuclear Bombs that they replace, but they can still be impactful for military stand-offs. And then Aes Sedai wielding sa'angreal would still have a mechanical niche.

Any of these options preserve the metagame of players being "unsure if they should attack" the Aes Sedai holding the weapon. There are potential others as well, but what do you think of these?

I am fine with either of these. Splash for saidin, or splash for noone. Not sure how to decide which.

If we're separating male and female sa'angreal as mentioned above, then keeping splash damage for saidin users seems fine, since it will just be consistent with their normal attacks and they already have a clear mechanical division from the saidar users within this mechanic.

Yeah, I can see this being used on hexes, though it's certainly less epic a usage as on units or cities. I'm not sure what to say about the Fallout thing... I feel like if we have the Bubbles of Evil, we should either use those, or else use nothing. Don't see the need to create a new thing for it. If we really want it, we should scrap Bubbs.

Again, though, why aren't we using Balefire? BF *would* probably create Bubbles of evil. I know we decided to limit it to the dragon before, but...why again? I know we wanted the 'saken and the "Rand Nuke" to be special, but they probably still can be. I can see us still using angreal as the actual product you create, but balefire be the attack. Or maybe only the sa'angreal is balefire. it does let us use "The Flame of Tar Valon" as a bomb-shelter mechanic, also. And the lore really supports the whole "you should feel really bad about using Balefire" thing, just like nukes.

The only reasons I can find for us not using balefire here, after looking back through the backup, is to make that usage by the Dragon and the Forsaken more impactful. However, like we've done with Traveling, we can use the same flavor in two places without that being a problem. (Traveling for the paradrop and aircraft mechanics.) As you've said, balefire fits in well with the mechanical role of these weapons in the game, and we can moderate the usage of balefire this way by requiring the angreal and sa'angreal.

So, it seems like if we switch to balefire, nothing really mechanically changes about what we've been discussing. I agree that the balefire flavor fits well here and we can differentiate the Dragon and Forsaken's usages through their effects. (Make those ones much more explosion-like, rather than the targeted damage that we're discussing here.)

Related to Bubbles of Evil, does balefire create them? I thought Bubbles of Evil were consequences of the Dark One's influence, whereas balefire causes threads of the pattern to unravel and events to "unhappen" (over relatively short periods of time). These unhappenings can be destructive and could be used as some kind of Fallout equivalent.

Also... can we really ever justify AS using any of these attacks on cities? The cities lose population, by golly! How does that fit in with the oaths!?

If the city is controlled by Shadowspawn (only example of that in the books would be the Town?) then that seems readily justified. And for Shadow-declared players during the LB, that also seems reasonable enough. Those would be the only times an Aes Sedai could use this on a city unprovoked, right? If an individual city attacks a Sister, then striking back at that city's defenses (which would kill some of the people wielding them) could also fall within the Oaths.

Ah... so, if buildings aren't destroyed by nukes (weren't they in previous games), I say let's not do this. Losing buildings doesn't seem like a fun mechanic, realistic as it may be. I don't feel a need to add it.

Sure, let's leave that out.

Nah, sadly, I think this one has fizzled... Do you play live, or by post? Roleplaying by post seems like it would take *forever*....

We play live on roll20.net. It gives you a shared virtual tabletop that everyone can see and the DM can manage hidden information and all that kind of stuff you need. Definitely, playing by post would take actual eternities!

As fun as I'm having with WotMod, though, I do miss working on the rulebook to our game, though (the roleplaying game I co-designed, after around a decade of tweaks and playtesting). This has replaced that for me, for better or for worse (hopefully better).

Hopefully for the better! The experience you got doing all that design work has definitely carried over very effectively for WoTMod!

All of this design work has replaced the time I usually spend coding my own projects, so I'm quite looking forward to when we move on to implementation!

OK, OK, I think we mostly have something now. I've updated the latest version of the tree with this progression:

Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1, NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

The only iffy thing seems to be the distance between NvR 1 and 2. I'm tempted to think it might be fine, though. I'm not sure "Next Tech" would be good enough if it is forced to stand alone without at least one unit there. I'm also open to the idea of switching NvM 3 and NvR 2's tech placement, but I'd suggest we probably need to gimp the NvR unit slightly (relative to the Frigate, which is quite good) to compensate. Which do you prefer, overall? I don't love the "ranged simultaneous to embarkation" thing, but I can live with it. I'm hoping the way it's plotted out above will work, though.

Just to clarify, the ExpShip and NvM 3 coexist, right? They both upgrade to NvM 4 (e.g. the Ironclad), yes? Question, then: is there something good about the ExpShip that makes it worth using while NvM 3 exists? It's weaker, and slower in ocean... Or, can we make it so its movement limitation on ocean is released upon Mapmaking? Maybe it upgrades on "Next Tech" instead? That feels somewhat arbitrary, though. In short, what's the point of the unit in era 4?

Let's leave the prereqs for shipcraft alone for now, then.

I think the ExpShip and NvM 2 coexist. Both upgrade into NvM 3. The role of the ExpShip here is that it's beeline-able for an early ocean travel exploration, because Mapmaking's prereqs pull in a lot more of the middle of the tree. From this point of view, I could sort of see value in removing the prereq from Exploration on Heritage, so that someone could go straight for the ExpShip. The unlocking of the ExpShip doesn't really threaten the utility of NvM 2 because NvM 2 is more useful in combat, and both will upgrade to the same unit later, so it isn't wasted production in the long term either. If anything players will want some of both, which creates the diversity we want here.

Swapping NvR 2 and NvM 3 sounds like a good plan (NvR 2 on Mapmaking, NvM 3 on "next tech"). That prevents the ExpShip from being replaced (in terms of what to produce) by the next tech after it unlocks, and also means that our melee and ranged upgrade paths will be upgrading at a similar rate to one another, which seems like a good idea. Totally, NvR 2 would be weaker than the Frigate then.

 

[S3rgeus]

that's fast! Still don't think I've played as Askia yet!

Thanks! His UA didn't end up mattering much that early in the game, none of the AI really attacked my units on the sea. His bonus gold from sacking cities was pretty cool though.

I won another game as Arabia, on King again this time though. (Only 3 leaders away from beating the game with all of the vanilla leaders! Siam, Persia, and the Ottomans remain!) The Arabian UA is awesome, and the Bazaar is the greatest thing ever.

I've also been playing some of the scenarios and they've been a lot of fun. (And quite surreal - some of them are based on vanilla instead of G&K or BNW, so it's back to the old 10 HP instead of 100, and weird garrisoning UI, stuff like that!) It will be actual eons before we get to it, but I look forward to our WoT scenarios!

Yeah, let's get rid of the Design prereq!

Cool, looks good! We've got a big beeline potential here, straight all the way up to Sword Forms from Slate Roofing. I think that's good though! I think Era 5 seems like a good time to pull in a bit more of the middle of the tree, so whatever has a prereq on Sword Forms (the tech that has Mnt 3 probably), if it also depends on Tactics that will pull in some of the middle again.

OK, hopefully we don't need to. But, the Pike->Lancer moment is still a culprit - are we going to avoid mounted Pol units as well?

Yeah, I think so, if we can! We'll have to see what flavor is available, but the non-portability of promotions is definitely a problem.

Hmm... the problem with the things you're proposing is that they *sound* like Flavor, when in fact they're made up flavor that is trying to specifically evoke "Listening to the Wind," which is *actual* flavor (and rather prominent, I'd say). So, I dont' see how those are better. Maybe Listening to the Wind is, after all, the best idea. Even we simply equate it to "predicting the weather," which is is, then the things that tech unlocks - trade, a unit that's ok with ocean, a coastal building, and Fishing boats upgrade - seem wholly logical. So it doesn't need to be "Wind" as related to "Windfinding," but Wind in the sense that "your boats do better if you know when storms are coming. Not concerning your navy so much (thus the Expship, not a NvM), but your *port*. Yeah?

I'm open to the "Sailing culture" thing as well. Don't love "Voyaging," though, as it's essentially the same as Seafaring.

I'm not a big fan of "Listening to the Wind" as the name of the tech though. I know it's canonical flavor, but it stands out from the other techs in being not the same type of phrase/thing. I would prefer Exploration as the name if we can't find a more succinct way of capturing the Listening to the Wind flavor.

Ah. That seems like the kind of thing that was invented and perfection way way long ago, though. Not so sexy as a tech here. I move to keep it as Design... unless you have other suggestions!

Agreed, Packed Earth would be something from much before this. My only worry with Design is that it's very generic flavor. It can take the meaning that we want here, but standing alone on the tech there's a lot of room for it to mean different things. I do think it could work though - we have the icon and the unlocks to provide context.

Some other suggestions: Logistics (matches up with the roads flavor and is useful across the board in a civilization context), Workmanship (follows on from Apprenticeship).

nice. Prod 1 moved to Slate Roofing. Pol 2 moved to Apprenticeship!

Awesome!

Regarding Def Pacts.... hmmm.... I honestly don't know what more we could/should add to them. It does seem like they need something more, but I have no idea what that should be. If we do move it to the bottom of the tech tree, is there something we should add that makes it more valuable to "military civs," instead of just defensive civs?

I'm open to either or both of stealing a Wonder from Talents and moving the DefPact to Heroism, but I do neither of those things in this latest pass of the tree. Which, if either (or both) would you like to do?

Thinking about it now, I think we've got Heroism covered well and probably don't need to move Defensive Pact off of Hierarchy, unless we had another reason for wanting to move that?

In terms of making it more valuable in general, it could boost trade between the two civs? Or maybe increase the defensive strength of cities (or give them more HP)? Possibly only a subset of cities (defined somehow? by proximity to the other civ who's a part of the pact?).

The other possibility is, if we decided to take the NvR unit off of "Not Navigation" and move it earlier (Mapmaking), we could elect to put Recon 2 on *that* tech, which makes some degree of sense, and would make that tech more worthwhile.

I could see that working. Even if we leave NvR 3 on "next tech" (or NvM 3, based on our discussion in my last post to swap them), neither Dreaming nor New Tongue seem to particularly need Recon 2 in order to make themselves worthwhile. Moving Recon 2 over to "not Navigation" sounds good. I think we can leave NvR 3 where it is for the moment, to avoid more crowding of the ExpShip when the player reaches Mapmaking.

Yeah, I'd looked around before for constellation stuff, and couldn't find anything. That led me to consider "Astrology" or something like it, but then that just felt like we were naming it "Not Astronomy" or something.

As far as Randland being Earth, I think it's left completely unclear. I don't think it's *supposed* to be Earth, necessarily. The Legends of the Age Before the Age of Legends (presumably, the First Age, though they probably thought of themselves as the "Third Age" in the infinite loop or something) do seem to be parallel to some things in our world. But I'm not sure if that's Jordan trying to be particularly meaningful, or if it's more of an Easter Egg kind of thing that's not to be taken to be particularly meaningful (like House "Jordayne" of "Tor" from A Song of Ice and Fire, or Sanderson naming some characters in the final books after WoT fans)

Yeah, the books themselves never come out and confirm that the First Age is present day Earth. It seems like that's hinted at purposefully, but it's not really enough of a part of the flavor for us to use it for anything more than also hinting at it, as you've said.

As far as Circumnavigation, I think we definitely don't want to go there. The world may be round, but it seems pretty clear that nobody has proven that through circumnavigation. I don't think anybody has sailed from Shara to Seanchan or vise-versa. Certainly not anybody we've heard of. There could theoretically be another continent or something.

Cool, that never really does anything mechanical in the game, so us removing it shouldn't really have any consequences. It's definitely an Earth flavor thing.

I like the idea of Shipping Agreements, but it feels a little... off to me. I think Shipping could theoretically work. What about Freight? Is that too economic? We *do* have Coastal 3 on that tech. Could also see something like Manifest.

Also, this could flat out be where we introduce the Sail. We can't call it Sailing, because of BNW, but we could go with Rigging or Sailing Vessels or something. Also, Sailcloth is the name for the stuff itself, which could work. Or could go really literal and specific and have it be Canvas or something.

I could be fine with many of the names above. I've left it empty for now.

I think my favorite of those would be Canvas.

I don't think we need/want them in both eras.

I'm a little confused by your "definitely" here. I was under the understanding that we originally selected Era 5. I'm fine with 4 too, but I don't think 4 is some preordained fact of the universe or anything.

The definitely follows on from the previous sentence, we definitely don't want it in both eras! I was saying that there may be a tech with fitting flavor for Era 5, and we know that we already have one that fits in Era 4.

Of course. I also don't think, though, that we want too many of the techs to be flavored with channeling, really.

I don't think it's something we need to aim for or avoid, just something that's useful. It seems like a great way to get a lot of the WoT flavor into the game when it fits the unlocks we're going for.

pretty sure we're saying the same thing here. I'm saying that weaves, as a tech, is too primitive ("less advanced") than what would be required for Era 4. Weaving seems like the first or second thing you'd learn how to do when channeling, as it's essentially just "channel something specific."

I'm getting off topic here, though. We need flavor for this tech! If possible, I'd like it to be somewhat "real world," allowing for the Cultural nat wonder. Considering what culture is in our game - crafts, prophesy, and Epics - any ideas that might inspire us here? I got nothing!

I did add Spark here, though (so I am open to this being channeling related).

Ah, I see what you mean!

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm wondering if we should rename the tech Saidar. I know it's justified in its existence, but it's not a particularly economical use of flavor. We don't need to put saidar in the tech tree. It'll be everywhere in this game.

What would you think of calling Saidar something like Weaves (is this still too advanced a place for that?) or The Five Powers (is that weird to have "The One Power" and a tech of this name?)?

I think The Five Powers as a tech conflicts with The One Power. I know they're distinct in the WoT canon, but the names standing alone strike me as something that's quite confusing and looking contradictory.

Will the Saidar flavor itself actually be everywhere in the game, though? There aren't that many non-Civilopedia locations that the word Saidar would come up - only through channeling enhancements that are specific to Saidar users.

Based on the progression of "channeling tech" that we're got on the tree, Weaves would be well placed where Saidar is or where Hierarchy/Tutelage are. Arguably Saidar leads to Weaves, because it's knowledge of how the female side of the True Source works that leads to being able to weave it to do stuff. We don't really have mechanical space for both given the stuff we're trying to unlock in the second column of Era 3 though. Weaves also doesn't flavorfully link up to the unlocks on that tech as well as Saidar does. I think between the two I'd keep Saidar, but would like to find space for a Weaves tech on the tree, if there's somewhere appropriate.

I'm not sure. I could see that as an option, but we'd have to determine that this point in the game is the right place to make that kind of trade. Essentially, we'd be deciding that we want civs to be able to reach further with their Gathering. Probably suitable given this is the "Age of Exploration" in CiV.

Also, we could theoretically boost the lifespan, number of harvests, etc. of the projections. I figure we might be best leaving that stuff for later in the game though. A late-game upgrade that helps people clean up the remaining glimmers quickly would probably be nice.

Those are both good points. So shall we make this point unlock the ability to spawn Projections anywhere within active sight? And as you mention here (and elsewhere, I think) we can save the lifespan, harvest yield, harvest rate, and such for later in the game.

First off, the Court.... Yeah, that's a mistake. I mean the Constabulary-equivalent. I'd forgotten the difference when doing this originally. I've added the "Spy" category of buildings to make up for it.

Ah, of course! Sounds good.

In terms of the name, I think Dreaming here is fine unless we decide we need it later. I do think we could justify another T'a'r upgrade in era 7 or 8 or something. I think we could come up with alternate flavor for that, though - I think if the later one speeds up gathering or something (or makes you have more gathers, or last longer, or something), then that might be a good tech to call ter'angreal, wince the creation of ter'angreals increases the number of folks that can enter t'a'r by like a billionfold. As far as Dreaming being too advanced for this point in the tree.. is this one of those Talents that was actually more common in earlier eras? Also, Dreamwalking would work here, but we have an LP called "Dreamwalker," so that's out. Could we use Foretelling?

Yeah, Dreaming was more common earlier on in the Third Age (that comes up as a part of Egwene's induction storyline), so it sounds like it fits well here. Foretelling could be made to work, but I don't think it fits the flavor of the T'a'r unlock as well, and Spy 1 and the Wonders can work with either.

Foretelling does seem like something we could do in the endgame though? Some of the final channeling upgrades or maybe the next Spy building?

Also good call on Ter'angreal, that's got some great flavor for other unlocks as well, so we'll see what else we're trying to place when we get to that part of the tree!

I mostly like your changes, for sure. The one thing I don't quite agree with is Happ 2 living on the upper of those techs. I think the Zoo is on Printing Press in order to make it rather accessible to the military civs, and I think this is probably a worthy goal. So I would swap that for Spy 1, which certainly could make sense on either of these techs.

So I've put this for now:

Dreaming (on top)
(none)
Spy 1 Wonder Wonder
T'a'r

The New Tongue (on bottom)
Rcn 2
Gold 2 Happ 2
Compact Trade

I could absolutely see us moving Rcn 2 up to Dreaming, if the NT is too good. It probably doesn't matter. Also, it could move up to "Not Navigation" or something.

I do find myself less inclined to steal one of Dreaming's wonders and stick it on Heroism now, though.

We don't need to steal one of Dreaming's wonders, because New Tongue used to have a wonder on it, which I removed in my proposal in order to move that wonder back to Heroism. (There were 3 wonders between Dreaming and New Tongue, now we have it with just 2 on Dreaming.)

Moving Happ 2 onto New Tongue sounds good, as you've said, accessibility for military civs is good.

The issue I have with Keeping is simply that it's somewhat arcane flavor. Like, I know it's flavor because I looked up a list of Weaves. It could work, but might be too obscure. Also, Keeping might be actually more useful to us later, with Refrigeration or something

This could be another good spot for "The Five Powers," as I could imagine mastery of them would yield to a bunch of disparate bonuses, if we can get past the fact that that should be more of a "basic" tech.

I could also see us going with something like Wards, as this is more recognizable and general. It's not the *best* flavor-mechanics alignment, but I think it's pretty good. I can imagine any number of wards being used to protect things, make yields more productive, etc.

I'd prefer Wards of these, mostly because of the Five Powers conflict I mentioned above. And keeping Keeping around (eh?) for later in the tree, if we need it, sounds fine!

OK, I'm in agreement with this!

Mine, Quarry Brickyard all seem to me to be essentially part of one big bonus, as they're all production boosts from similar things. I wouldn't want to break them up. I honestly could go either way with these - I could also imagine them attaching to that lonely Melee 4 or Artillery, though that'd be pushing the bonus quite far back. Will leave for now - though the flavor on Sword Forms is quite awful, and needs to change, IMO.

Yeah, this could possibly all move onto the next tech after this? That tech could be more about the infrastructure of military training, rather than Sword Forms' specificity to the training of an individual with a single weapon.

I think Martial Command and Command essentially duplicate some earlier tech's we've established (Leadership, etc.). I think Tactics is probably my choice here, though it is rather close to Siegecraft. That's probably ok, though.

Tactics sounds good.

I was confused for a bit, and then looked it up, and I think you're actually mixing things up. The Nat. Treasure was axed in favor of the East India in BNW. I do think that gold might be the way to go here, though I don't know what buildings we'd require.

What if we made a point of flavoring the "Bank" to be something that could theoretically be required to build this *second* Gold Nat Wonder (added by us)? Could we come up with a building that would make flavorful sense? If we could, then we could make it "Gold related," or trade related, and not necessarily simply a strict +X Gold thing. Maybe Gold production also results in culture production, or vise-versa? Something "special" like that? Leaving this ambiguous for now.

probably yes, but I don't feel strongly.

Ah, right! Good point, I haven't built a National Treasury in a long time, now that you mention it.

The East India Company is already a trade related National Wonder, rather than straight up gold, which the National Treasury used to be, so it seems like we could combine that with this flavor. The risk with crossing over the Gold/Culture on the National Wonder level is that the interests of players focused on one or the other don't intersect all that often (Diplo vs Culture victories). Obviously each player needs some of both, but the National Wonders are only really pursue-able when they're on-task for your intended victory (or if your civ has very few cities, in which case it's relatively doable to just build them all).

I'm fine with leaving this ambiguous until we flesh out what the required buildings do (though keeping this in mind when we do decide those!).

OK, so coming up on the next era, it sounds like we already have a decent sense for what kinds of things should happen here. Some questions:

Should Archaeo unlock at the same point?

It seems sensible to leave this in the same column as BNW at least. We might even want to check out how many prereqs Archaeology has in BNW and take that into consideration too. Given the way the artifacts stuff works, it is probably quite sensitive to the placement of its unlock point. Moving it earlier allows the map to be exhausted of Sites more often, moving it later could mean nobody gets enough Prestige.

Should Range 4 be tied to "Industrialization" still?

I think that column is a good place for Range 4 - it's a fair distance from Range 3. Where it's earmarked at the moment (right of Tactics) sounds like a good place to at least start with.

Are we ok with Rifling being alone? (to me, this is a bigger point of weirdness than Artillery) Also, I'm assuming Rifling should be moved further to right as we only just unlocked the last Melee unit, so maybe this will be resolved another way.

Yeah, this one does stand out more than Artillery. I have always wondered why Rifleman is such a special unit. Agreed, we want to move Melee 5 farther along so that it's well spaced from Melee 4.

Should the Channeler upgrades be hanging out in the top/middle, or should they possibly be closer to the bottom of the tree?

The top of the bottom, maybe. It's more military than the previous channeling stuff, but the channeling things have been middle-ish thus far. So maybe where Industrialization is.

Do we like the next melee ship being lower in the tree?

In BNW, the whole "top of the tree is for navy" seems to disappear once you hit Archaeology. I'd be interested to know if there's a specific reason Firaxis decided to do that. I don't see any particular reason for it, beyond that there's content that fills the whole of the tree vertically with non-naval stuff in several columns from then on. I would think we shouldn't let NvM 4 go to the bottom of the tree, but I'd be fine with it either in the middle or top, unless there's a specific reason to keep it in the middle.

There's a 2.5 version in the Dbox (sorry lurkers and/or newbies, not uploading it yet). Not enough changes to warrant a whole new version, but certainly some worthy things!

I'll try to get on to some tech tree stuff soon now that we're most of the way sorted on Era 4!

 

[counterpoint]

Sounds good! This is summary-able for the Channeling Summary now, right?

yup. already in it!

Ok, it sounds like we're going back to using the flavor of there being male-only and female-only angreal and sa'angreal. I'm totally up for us including this if it serves a mechanical purpose, which it looks like we can make it do here. (It would also mean that they could unlock at different techs?)

I actually don't think we need to have there be actual separate "units" for men and women. It doesn't seem to be exactly necessary given the parameters we've been discussing.

I don't think the issue with Black Sisters is a problem - part of the allure of the Black Ajah is avoidance of the Oaths, and if the Oaths weren't a restriction, then that wouldn't really be much of a change.

yeah, that makes sense.

Boosted range for all Saidar units definitely has problems though, as you've mentioned. I think we'll end up deciding any UU channelers' capacities here on a case by case basis. For example (not a suggestion), we may elect to allow damane to use sa'angreal, or something like that. So we've got Kin (and their predecessors, Wilders), who aren't restricted by the Oaths and need to be included in some way.

agreed. UUs to be determined case-by case. We just need to decide "in principle" between AS only or AS-and-others

Some options:

Don't let Kin or Wilders use either angreal or sa'angreal. While this does solve some of our mechanical problems, it does seem fairly arbitrary and unjustified. Players will expect these units to be able to use at least angreal, since those are established as workable for anyone. (Whereas sa'angreal were called out as being dangerous to untrained users.)

I'm pretty ok with *Wilders* being excluded. Since Kin are the upgrade to Wilders, I'd be totally fine with this being one of the differences between the different units.

Yeah, I think the thing with sa' is that you could kill yourself by allowing too much of the Power to move through you. I'm not sure if the control of that is through training or actually power of the individual though.

In any case, I think we both feel like, ideally, angreal should be universal, and sa' don't need to be.

Alternatively, make a significant range and power difference between the two. Have angreal have a range of 3/4 and sa'angreal have a range of 8/10. This makes angreal less useful, and given the Kin units' lack of Oaths restriction, a Kin with an angreal could still potentially compete with an Aes Sedai with a sa'angreal in a lot of practical situations, which isn't what we want.

I could go along with something like this. You've successfully proved the need for the "nuke," but given the other crazy stuff going on (channlers, shadowspawn, the Dragon, etc.), I'd be fine with the true "total annihilation" weapon coming in a little later game, and the earlier unit being less destructive (though more flexible, It'd seem).

Alternatively, make the two functionally different. Angreal can just strike units and cities, don't pillage Improvements, don't create Fallout (or whatever we call it). Sa'angreal can hit units, cities, hexes, pillage any Improvement on a targeted hex, and reduce city population instead of just damaging the city. That added to a more comparable range difference (6 vs 8 maybe) and a power difference, could create the effect we want. This does make angreal significantly less about infrastructure damage than the Nuclear Bombs that they replace, but they can still be impactful for military stand-offs. And then Aes Sedai wielding sa'angreal would still have a mechanical niche.

Yeah, I'd also be ok with this. This is more splashy, and perhaps "cooler." However, it's also a little less intuitive and a little more complicated.

Any of these options preserve the metagame of players being "unsure if they should attack" the Aes Sedai holding the weapon. There are potential others as well, but what do you think of these?

I don't know, which do you prefer? I'm down with either of the two, I think. For now, we should probably just agree in general on one, notate it, and formulate specifics later. They both seem to impact the tech tree in the same way. (since I don't think we need to differentiate Male from Female, I don't think we need to worry about that tech-wise either).

If we're separating male and female sa'angreal as mentioned above, then keeping splash damage for saidin users seems fine, since it will just be consistent with their normal attacks and they already have a clear mechanical division from the saidar users within this mechanic.

Yeah, I'm fine differentiating the *effects*, but I also feel like for simplicity's sake, I could imagine just creating one angreal unit and "loading" it on a unit and, voila, it's the right kind of angreal (probably can't be moved to another unit, though). As long as the two kinds are balanced, I don't think there's the potential for abuse. Or am I forgetting something?

The only reasons I can find for us not using balefire here, after looking back through the backup, is to make that usage by the Dragon and the Forsaken more impactful. However, like we've done with Traveling, we can use the same flavor in two places without that being a problem. (Traveling for the paradrop and aircraft mechanics.) As you've said, balefire fits in well with the mechanical role of these weapons in the game, and we can moderate the usage of balefire this way by requiring the angreal and sa'angreal.

So, it seems like if we switch to balefire, nothing really mechanically changes about what we've been discussing. I agree that the balefire flavor fits well here and we can differentiate the Dragon and Forsaken's usages through their effects. (Make those ones much more explosion-like, rather than the targeted damage that we're discussing here.)

great! Balefire is back!

Related to Bubbles of Evil, does balefire create them? I thought Bubbles of Evil were consequences of the Dark One's influence, whereas balefire causes threads of the pattern to unravel and events to "unhappen" (over relatively short periods of time). These unhappenings can be destructive and could be used as some kind of Fallout equivalent.

Hmmm.... I don't think it does, technically. However, it pulls the pattern apart, which seems to be similar to what the DO was doing. Is this acceptable stretching?

How else would we create the "unraveling" of the pattern effect?

If the city is controlled by Shadowspawn (only example of that in the books would be the Town?) then that seems readily justified. And for Shadow-declared players during the LB, that also seems reasonable enough. Those would be the only times an Aes Sedai could use this on a city unprovoked, right? If an individual city attacks a Sister, then striking back at that city's defenses (which would kill some of the people wielding them) could also fall within the Oaths.

Well, except for the fact that in firing on a city, and lowering that city's population, you are destroying civilians. AS can't capture cities (and thus can't lower civilian pop in that way) - if they attack a provoking city, they simply lower its HP. Killing 10% of its population is an entirely different matter.... This is especially grievous, when it's just a normal civ they're at war with.

I think the ExpShip and NvM 2 coexist. Both upgrade into NvM 3. The role of the ExpShip here is that it's beeline-able for an early ocean travel exploration, because Mapmaking's prereqs pull in a lot more of the middle of the tree. From this point of view, I could sort of see value in removing the prereq from Exploration on Heritage, so that someone could go straight for the ExpShip. The unlocking of the ExpShip doesn't really threaten the utility of NvM 2 because NvM 2 is more useful in combat, and both will upgrade to the same unit later, so it isn't wasted production in the long term either. If anything players will want some of both, which creates the diversity we want here.

OK, I had found old quotes that said it upgraded to NvM 4, but it's possible that was because we had a different placement of the ExpShip.

I don't doubt the benefit of having it coexist with NvM 2... the issue is having it go obsolete so soon....

see below.

Swapping NvR 2 and NvM 3 sounds like a good plan (NvR 2 on Mapmaking, NvM 3 on "next tech"). That prevents the ExpShip from being replaced (in terms of what to produce) by the next tech after it unlocks, and also means that our melee and ranged upgrade paths will be upgrading at a similar rate to one another, which seems like a good idea. Totally, NvR 2 would be weaker than the Frigate then.

I think, as much as I do'nt like unlocking NvR along with an embark upgrade, I think this is the answer. NvR 2 on Mapmaking!

I've updated the spreadsheet with this!

I think the other interesting thing is which of these will require strategics. That'll definitely play into when things are upgraded (for some civs)

Cool, looks good! We've got a big beeline potential here, straight all the way up to Sword Forms from Slate Roofing. I think that's good though! I think Era 5 seems like a good time to pull in a bit more of the middle of the tree, so whatever has a prereq on Sword Forms (the tech that has Mnt 3 probably), if it also depends on Tactics that will pull in some of the middle again.

oh, yeah, that is a pretty epic beeline... line.

Do you think it's problematic?

I'm not a big fan of "Listening to the Wind" as the name of the tech though. I know it's canonical flavor, but it stands out from the other techs in being not the same type of phrase/thing. I would prefer Exploration as the name if we can't find a more succinct way of capturing the Listening to the Wind flavor.

Eh... don't love exploration!

What if we went with something like Weather Sense? Or is that a cop-out version of LttW? You did already mention Forecasting, which *is* feeling a little more appealing now...

The other thing is we could use Cloud Dancing, which is the Weave that lets you change the weather (Sea Folk call it Weaving the Winds). Some other AS, such as Moiraine and Verin, can also do this. Of course, if we do this, than we pretty much *have* to unlock some sort of Sea Folk Unique on this tech!

Agreed, Packed Earth would be something from much before this. My only worry with Design is that it's very generic flavor. It can take the meaning that we want here, but standing alone on the tech there's a lot of room for it to mean different things. I do think it could work though - we have the icon and the unlocks to provide context.

Some other suggestions: Logistics (matches up with the roads flavor and is useful across the board in a civilization context), Workmanship (follows on from Apprenticeship).

I understand your hesitation about Design.

Logistics feels too BNW (promotion) and sort of too technical for this era. Worksmanship is fine, but sounds way too much like it's brother, Apprenticeship. Artistry, Expertise, Invention, Innovation... any of these give you any ideas?

Thinking about it now, I think we've got Heroism covered well and probably don't need to move Defensive Pact off of Hierarchy, unless we had another reason for wanting to move that?

ok. leave it on hierarchy

In terms of making it more valuable in general, it could boost trade between the two civs? Or maybe increase the defensive strength of cities (or give them more HP)? Possibly only a subset of cities (defined somehow? by proximity to the other civ who's a part of the pact?).

I think the problem with boosting trade is that it changes the purpose *behind* the DP. You shouldn't be signing them to boost your trade. You should be signing them to protect each other. The bonus strength thing captures that spirit, but somehow feels somewhat unlike the kinds of bonuses you normally see in CiV.

I think we could probably leave it alone. Other ideas.... Maybe we could have units of each civ get combat bonuses when adjacent to each other (when at war with same civ)... Or you get one when adjacent (i.e. defending) your partner's city?

I could see that working. Even if we leave NvR 3 on "next tech" (or NvM 3, based on our discussion in my last post to swap them), neither Dreaming nor New Tongue seem to particularly need Recon 2 in order to make themselves worthwhile. Moving Recon 2 over to "not Navigation" sounds good. I think we can leave NvR 3 where it is for the moment, to avoid more crowding of the ExpShip when the player reaches Mapmaking.

OK! I say we put the Rcn 2 on "Next Tech"!

Cool, that never really does anything mechanical in the game, so us removing it shouldn't really have any consequences. It's definitely an Earth flavor thing.

I'm not suggesting we not allow people to travel around the world as if it's round. I'm also not saying we can't have the little "Elayne has proven the world is round" blurb. I'm saying we shouldn't have a tech called circumnavigation, because nobody does that in the WoT books, as far as we know, so we shouldn't have that be an advance that is a part of its history.

I think my favorite of those would be Canvas.

I could be ok with this. It does feel kind of wimpy here, though. I'm not sure how long ago Canvas was invented. Sailcloth is better in that one regard, at least. If we do do this, I do think it needs to be the first true "Sailing" Ship (so the expo ship would need to be something else, which is somewhat problematic).

If we want to make one of the earlier ships sailing (probably the expship...) we can always swap names! They are kind of arbitrary.

I think The Five Powers as a tech conflicts with The One Power. I know they're distinct in the WoT canon, but the names standing alone strike me as something that's quite confusing and looking contradictory.

Will the Saidar flavor itself actually be everywhere in the game, though? There aren't that many non-Civilopedia locations that the word Saidar would come up - only through channeling enhancements that are specific to Saidar users.

Based on the progression of "channeling tech" that we're got on the tree, Weaves would be well placed where Saidar is or where Hierarchy/Tutelage are. Arguably Saidar leads to Weaves, because it's knowledge of how the female side of the True Source works that leads to being able to weave it to do stuff. We don't really have mechanical space for both given the stuff we're trying to unlock in the second column of Era 3 though. Weaves also doesn't flavorfully link up to the unlocks on that tech as well as Saidar does. I think between the two I'd keep Saidar, but would like to find space for a Weaves tech on the tree, if there's somewhere appropriate.

You don't think we'd be referring to saidar in our descriptions of mechanics and such, like in policies, tech-based bonuses, etc? As in "+10% combat strength against saidar units" or something?

I'm fine leaving it as saidar, or changing it to weaves. Since the "Chan" upgrade on Saidar effects MCs as well as saidar units, the "Weaves" flavor does seem somewhat better, as its broader.

I have no idea where else we'd be able to put Weaves. It does seem very "basic." We could replace "The One Power" with it, I suppose.

Those are both good points. So shall we make this point unlock the ability to spawn Projections anywhere within active sight? And as you mention here (and elsewhere, I think) we can save the lifespan, harvest yield, harvest rate, and such for later in the game.

Yeah, sure. Sounds good! Could you maybe stick that wherever the summary that contains t'a'r is, so we remember?

Yeah, Dreaming was more common earlier on in the Third Age (that comes up as a part of Egwene's induction storyline), so it sounds like it fits well here. Foretelling could be made to work, but I don't think it fits the flavor of the T'a'r unlock as well, and Spy 1 and the Wonders can work with either.

Foretelling does seem like something we could do in the endgame though? Some of the final channeling upgrades or maybe the next Spy building?

Also good call on Ter'angreal, that's got some great flavor for other unlocks as well, so we'll see what else we're trying to place when we get to that part of the tree!

great! Dreaming it is! Ter'angreal later. (and maybe foretelling, which might line up with some espionage tech or something).

Also, I was recently struck by the fact that Greater Consensus could be a cool Globalization-ish tech.

We don't need to steal one of Dreaming's wonders, because New Tongue used to have a wonder on it, which I removed in my proposal in order to move that wonder back to Heroism. (There were 3 wonders between Dreaming and New Tongue, now we have it with just 2 on Dreaming.)

Moving Happ 2 onto New Tongue sounds good, as you've said, accessibility for military civs is good.

agreed

I'd prefer Wards of these, mostly because of the Five Powers conflict I mentioned above. And keeping Keeping around (eh?) for later in the tree, if we need it, sounds fine!

done!

Yeah, this could possibly all move onto the next tech after this? That tech could be more about the infrastructure of military training, rather than Sword Forms' specificity to the training of an individual with a single weapon.

yeah, I think we might be better off doing that. But are we ok with making these production bonuses unavailable until the following era?

Tactics sounds good.

done.

Ah, right! Good point, I haven't built a National Treasury in a long time, now that you mention it.

The East India Company is already a trade related National Wonder, rather than straight up gold, which the National Treasury used to be, so it seems like we could combine that with this flavor. The risk with crossing over the Gold/Culture on the National Wonder level is that the interests of players focused on one or the other don't intersect all that often (Diplo vs Culture victories). Obviously each player needs some of both, but the National Wonders are only really pursue-able when they're on-task for your intended victory (or if your civ has very few cities, in which case it's relatively doable to just build them all).

I'm fine with leaving this ambiguous until we flesh out what the required buildings do (though keeping this in mind when we do decide those!).

Cool! Let's say it's Gold Nat 2 and decide specifics later!

It seems sensible to leave this in the same column as BNW at least. We might even want to check out how many prereqs Archaeology has in BNW and take that into consideration too. Given the way the artifacts stuff works, it is probably quite sensitive to the placement of its unlock point. Moving it earlier allows the map to be exhausted of Sites more often, moving it later could mean nobody gets enough Prestige.

agreed.

I think that column is a good place for Range 4 - it's a fair distance from Range 3. Where it's earmarked at the moment (right of Tactics) sounds like a good place to at least start with.

good.

Yeah, this one does stand out more than Artillery. I have always wondered why Rifleman is such a special unit. Agreed, we want to move Melee 5 farther along so that it's well spaced from Melee 4.

ok, hopefully we can give Mel 5 some more stuff on its tech.

The top of the bottom, maybe. It's more military than the previous channeling stuff, but the channeling things have been middle-ish thus far. So maybe where Industrialization is.

ok, good. will play with it.

In BNW, the whole "top of the tree is for navy" seems to disappear once you hit Archaeology. I'd be interested to know if there's a specific reason Firaxis decided to do that. I don't see any particular reason for it, beyond that there's content that fills the whole of the tree vertically with non-naval stuff in several columns from then on. I would think we shouldn't let NvM 4 go to the bottom of the tree, but I'd be fine with it either in the middle or top, unless there's a specific reason to keep it in the middle.

good point. Hadn't really noticed it. I wonder why. It seems to work ok, though.

Also, you never responded to my requesting advice on the naming of the 2nd column era 2 culture tech (architecture). What should we do that captures both Spark and Culture?

EDIT:

OK, so I've been working on Era Five. Some notes.

- I've renamed Tactics, tentatively as Profession. The reason for this is that I needed something more "technical" in order to pollenate the next column. Tactics was too limited to military. Professionalism (which is actually another option if you don't like Profession) seems like it could logically stem from easier communication and heightened organization (New Tongue and Formations). This thus leads to the next set of techs more easily (one of which takes the name Tactics).

Similarly, I renamed Wards, as I decided that was more necessary for the tech in the next column. Also, I noticed that the tech we'd called Wards was giving Gold bonuses to terrain (not production). This made no flavorful sense . Unfortunatel, can't think of anything to go in its place... Any ideas?

So I've attached a "Version 3" which attempts at the next era. It's definitely not perfect. Some notes:

1) Obviously, please evaluate names and give me your thoughts. Some of these I have been unable to come up with!

Removed a Wonder from "Invention" (Industrialization) and moved it to (the new version of "Wards," which is in Era 5, but otherwise simply inherits the leftover production upgrades from "metallurgy" (and adds a channeling upgrade)

"Unnamed" is the same as Fertilizer - thoughts?

The new Tactics is the same as its BNW equivalent.

I learned that part of the weird "down jump" of the Ironclad is that it *does not require the caravel as a prereq!" I didn't want to do that, so I moved Exchange up a bit. I also gave it the Gold building ("stock exchange") stolen from "Fireworks". Fireworks is as previously discussed, with the new nat wonder, but minus Gold 3.

Should we move Spy 2 to another tech?

Combined "Dynamite" and "Rifling"! too good?

definitely some changes were made to prereqs here. The collumn structure is odd in this era - 6 techs collapsing to 4 was kind of tricky.

Advise!

EDIT 2:

So, yeah, not a lot of success with names and flavor in this batch. As it happens, though, I've been perusing the WoT Companion, scanning for flavor. It's quite a pain, unfortunately, since there are so, so many names (I wish it was organized by category or something). Still, I've browsed through C (which is already 150 pages or so) and have stumbled upon some flavor that we might find useful. Some pertains to above, some not directly:

The Age Lace ties into the pattern. Not sure what to do with it, but there it is.

a Binder is an AoL object that can control channelers. Probably not sueful to us.

In the two rivers, they use Birdcall Signals to communicate. Sort of like Maiden Handtalk, in its theoretical usefulness. Not sure if this is broad enough to be a tech, but it's certainly that *kind* of thing.

There are also any number of herbs

In illian, there is a guild of Bookers who do insurance and stuff. Probably not a tech, but could make a building or something.

There is some mention of Lensmakers and looking glasses. This is probably an excellent naval or science tech. Are we "there" yet, or should that be later in the game?

There are a few things that tie into culture that might be helpful. The Bittern is a musical instrument, for instance. Apparently like a dulcimer, or maybe a zither, I think. I could see this helping us out with cultural stuff. I could actually see something like this replacing High Chant, and then High Chant taking the place of "Shared Belief." We could then use Shared Belief elsewhere, or not at all.

Bellfounders helped make the Dragons, so a Bellfoundry or something could be a late- prod building, or else an actual tech.

Snakes and Foxes, the game, could also be a tech. Maybe one that is culture related or something - but also unlocks a wonder (the Tower of Genji wonder). Similarly, there's a rather detailed description of the decks of cards in WoT, though I don't know if these would help us with technologies.

People are described as being ironmongers. Not sure we could use that for a tech itself, but a building perhaps.

Cold storms off the Sea of Storms are referred to as Cemaros (unless I'm misreading my note. Not sure that can help us, though.

Thatching is another thing that comes up sometimes. Analogous to Slate Roofs, I'm guessing. And yes, there's plenty of packed dirt roads.

The Chair of Remorse is this weird ter'angreal used in the tower for punishment. There's a lot about it in there. Not sure what we'd do with it, but it theoretically could be anti-espionage or something.

The Circuit of Heaven is a apparently a big racetrack in one of the nations. Maybe a circus maximus type of thing.

There is, in fact, a list of the various constellations in their world. Useful to us?

There's something called Covanen's First Rule of Medians, which is a sort of logical paradigm used by some white sisters. Could theoretically be a late-game science tech, or something (it would make sense, also, as a good GWoWr, but we don't have those!)

There's a long blurb on currency, but the interesting thing is the reminder of Letters of Rights. This would be a very good economic tech. Could sub in for some of the ones we're having trouble with (e.g. the one in the last column of era 4, or else "Exchange," or something later.

And that's all I got. But some ideas, right?

 

[S3rgeus]

I have returned! As I'm sure you've seen, I've been working on the Tech Tree Editor for the last week and it's improved a lot over that time. It's in a much better place for what we're doing here and I've got the tree on there pretty much up to date. (I'll update it some more as I reply to the below and attach the files when I'm done, for any curious lurkers who don't have access to the DropBox!) So it should be much more usable now for us to share changes that way!

I think the only thing that's missing at this point is the "bonus yield from X improvement" (under varying situations) starbursts.

I've used the Pyramids as the icon for all of the wonders, seeing as the plan for a "wonder pass" will lead to us flavoring these appropriately later.

I've also published a new version while writing this post, to fix one specific bug I ran into while making the changes below.

I actually don't think we need to have there be actual separate "units" for men and women. It doesn't seem to be exactly necessary given the parameters we've been discussing.

True, it's not completely necessary, but the ability to switch the sa'angreal between two units and have them have significantly different effects could create confusion. Suddenly moving your sa'angreal onto an Asha'man close to the enemy from an Aes Sedai changes the defender's ability to prioritize who to attack. If we have two separate unit we force the attacker to make the decision earlier which kind of assault they want to have available (and think will be most useful to them).

agreed. UUs to be determined case-by case. We just need to decide "in principle" between AS only or AS-and-others

Totally.

I'm pretty ok with *Wilders* being excluded. Since Kin are the upgrade to Wilders, I'd be totally fine with this being one of the differences between the different units.

Yeah, I think the thing with sa' is that you could kill yourself by allowing too much of the Power to move through you. I'm not sure if the control of that is through training or actually power of the individual though.

In any case, I think we both feel like, ideally, angreal should be universal, and sa' don't need to be.

Yep, sounds like we're in agreement here!

I could go along with something like this. You've successfully proved the need for the "nuke," but given the other crazy stuff going on (channlers, shadowspawn, the Dragon, etc.), I'd be fine with the true "total annihilation" weapon coming in a little later game, and the earlier unit being less destructive (though more flexible, It'd seem).

I think the main issue with this approach (significant power and range difference) is that angreal on Kin will be more useful than sa'angreal on Aes Sedai in a lot of practical situations. I think that reversal of the progression will be very confusing for players, and also put them off when they realize it, because the later "units" should be an improvement.

Yeah, I'd also be ok with this. This is more splashy, and perhaps "cooler." However, it's also a little less intuitive and a little more complicated.

I don't know, which do you prefer? I'm down with either of the two, I think. For now, we should probably just agree in general on one, notate it, and formulate specifics later. They both seem to impact the tech tree in the same way. (since I don't think we need to differentiate Male from Female, I don't think we need to worry about that tech-wise either).

I think I prefer the latter one. It may be a bit more complex, but it doesn't have the systematic problems I mentioned above with the comparative power between angreal and sa'angreal. The sa'angreal are definitely an upgrade because they offer distinct functionality and are markedly more destructive.

Re male and female, I think it could help to separate them. Rather than have the same unit have different mechanics depending on which unit is holding it, I think if the two do different things, then making the player who's producing them decide which one they need/want most can be good.

Yeah, I'm fine differentiating the *effects*, but I also feel like for simplicity's sake, I could imagine just creating one angreal unit and "loading" it on a unit and, voila, it's the right kind of angreal (probably can't be moved to another unit, though). As long as the two kinds are balanced, I don't think there's the potential for abuse. Or am I forgetting something?

I think I've covered this above, but just in case! A big distinction is for the defender as well, knowing what type of attack they need to deal with. Even if the two are equally powerful but different, you would want to respond to each of them differently, and the attacker being able to switch between them takes away that ability.

You've mentioned not being able to move the angreal after attaching it to a unit here, which would solve this problem, but I don't think we can do that. We don't want to force the player to pick a specific unit that must do the attacking, that's way too narrow a restriction. If they're sitting around in peace time, we don't want rebasing the angreal, which looks like a normal operation, to commit them to a unit then. We could make it so that you can only rebase from one unit to another if they're the same saidin/saidar, but then we've effectively created the separate units anyway and it's just more confusing for the player than the separate unit type approach.

great! Balefire is back!

Awesome!

Hmmm.... I don't think it does, technically. However, it pulls the pattern apart, which seems to be similar to what the DO was doing. Is this acceptable stretching?

How else would we create the "unraveling" of the pattern effect?

I think that Fallout will make a good mechanical addition to Balefire, the Pattern unraveling that I described here could be seen as a "Fallout-like" something. It just means that we won't be using the same flavor for "this Fallout" and the Bubble of Evil "Fallout". That's not a problem, we can name them different things, just being clear that they're separate flavor!

Well, except for the fact that in firing on a city, and lowering that city's population, you are destroying civilians. AS can't capture cities (and thus can't lower civilian pop in that way) - if they attack a provoking city, they simply lower its HP. Killing 10% of its population is an entirely different matter.... This is especially grievous, when it's just a normal civ they're at war with.

Killing a city's defenders (who have attacked them) would lower the city's population though. I've always thought that the "city attack" is the city's population being pressed into service manning the city defenses to strike at something, so it would be those people, flavor wise, that the Aes Sedai would be killing.

OK, I had found old quotes that said it upgraded to NvM 4, but it's possible that was because we had a different placement of the ExpShip.

I don't doubt the benefit of having it coexist with NvM 2... the issue is having it go obsolete so soon....

see below.

I don't see where you've picked this up below, with any issues of it going obsolete too quickly? Looking at the tree now and based on other discussions I think we had last post, the next tech after the ExpShip (Mapmaking) now unlocks NvR 2, and NvR 3 isn't until Canvas, which puts a decent distance between them. Or do you mean that the ExpShip is mechanically obsolete once the player has NvR 2?

I think, as much as I do'nt like unlocking NvR along with an embark upgrade, I think this is the answer. NvR 2 on Mapmaking!

I've updated the spreadsheet with this!

I think the other interesting thing is which of these will require strategics. That'll definitely play into when things are upgraded (for some civs)

Definitely, if one starts requiring a strategic, that will make it harder to produce at first.

oh, yeah, that is a pretty epic beeline... line.

Do you think it's problematic?

No, I think that's good!

Eh... don't love exploration!

What if we went with something like Weather Sense? Or is that a cop-out version of LttW? You did already mention Forecasting, which *is* feeling a little more appealing now...

The other thing is we could use Cloud Dancing, which is the Weave that lets you change the weather (Sea Folk call it Weaving the Winds). Some other AS, such as Moiraine and Verin, can also do this. Of course, if we do this, than we pretty much *have* to unlock some sort of Sea Folk Unique on this tech!

Weather Sense seems like a good one for now!

I understand your hesitation about Design.

Logistics feels too BNW (promotion) and sort of too technical for this era. Worksmanship is fine, but sounds way too much like it's brother, Apprenticeship. Artistry, Expertise, Invention, Innovation... any of these give you any ideas?

The similarity between Workmanship and Apprenticeship was intentional, since one leads to the other, but it may still be too close for separate techs.

Innovation is unfortunately taken for our science victory stuff.

Expertise seems good - I feel like that leads on more from Apprenticeship as well, right? What do you think?

I think the problem with boosting trade is that it changes the purpose *behind* the DP. You shouldn't be signing them to boost your trade. You should be signing them to protect each other. The bonus strength thing captures that spirit, but somehow feels somewhat unlike the kinds of bonuses you normally see in CiV.

I think we could probably leave it alone. Other ideas.... Maybe we could have units of each civ get combat bonuses when adjacent to each other (when at war with same civ)... Or you get one when adjacent (i.e. defending) your partner's city?

A combat bonus when in the other player's territory would make a lot of sense. It would mean you're defending them in some capacity, since your unit is fighting on their land. I'm still not sure it makes Defensive Pacts worthwhile, but it's a step in the right direction.

I'd be happy to take another look at it later though.

OK! I say we put the Rcn 2 on "Next Tech"!

Coolio.

I'm not suggesting we not allow people to travel around the world as if it's round. I'm also not saying we can't have the little "Elayne has proven the world is round" blurb. I'm saying we shouldn't have a tech called circumnavigation, because nobody does that in the WoT books, as far as we know, so we shouldn't have that be an advance that is a part of its history.

Ah, ok, I was thinking about removing the "Elayne has proven the world is round" blurb, because it's not really a thing that exists in the WoT world. Totally fine not having any techs named after it.

I could be ok with this. It does feel kind of wimpy here, though. I'm not sure how long ago Canvas was invented. Sailcloth is better in that one regard, at least. If we do do this, I do think it needs to be the first true "Sailing" Ship (so the expo ship would need to be something else, which is somewhat problematic).

If we want to make one of the earlier ships sailing (probably the expship...) we can always swap names! They are kind of arbitrary.

Seems like we're have the same problem with Sailcloth as we do with Canvas, but I think it will work either way. I like Canvas for this one though.

You don't think we'd be referring to saidar in our descriptions of mechanics and such, like in policies, tech-based bonuses, etc? As in "+10% combat strength against saidar units" or something?

I'm fine leaving it as saidar, or changing it to weaves. Since the "Chan" upgrade on Saidar effects MCs as well as saidar units, the "Weaves" flavor does seem somewhat better, as its broader.

I have no idea where else we'd be able to put Weaves. It does seem very "basic." We could replace "The One Power" with it, I suppose.

Hmmm, very good point re MC power. Fine! Let's go with Weaves.

I think Saidar will come up in places, just not nearly as much as it does in the books, because of the perspective difference we have in CiV as a leader managing an empire, rather than dealing with individual characters. Still, it should work!

Yeah, sure. Sounds good! Could you maybe stick that wherever the summary that contains t'a'r is, so we remember?

Done!

great! Dreaming it is! Ter'angreal later. (and maybe foretelling, which might line up with some espionage tech or something).

Also, I was recently struck by the fact that Greater Consensus could be a cool Globalization-ish tech.

Awesome, all sounds good!

yeah, I think we might be better off doing that. But are we ok with making these production bonuses unavailable until the following era?

We'll have to see, I think! For now, let's move them over, but if players are finding it difficult to produce stuff in the time leading up to it, we may need to move them.

Cool! Let's say it's Gold Nat 2 and decide specifics later!

Sounds good!

good point. Hadn't really noticed it. I wonder why. It seems to work ok, though.

Agreed, I don't think we need to worry about trying to make it more naval-y across the top of the tree.

Also, you never responded to my requesting advice on the naming of the 2nd column era 2 culture tech (architecture). What should we do that captures both Spark and Culture?

Good point! (All part of my elaborate plan, this remaining unnamed helped me find and fix a bug in the tech tree Editor! )

It seems like you've added Shared Belief as the name of this tech while doing the Era 5 stuff below though, and that seems like a fine name. Is that specifically WoT flavor?

OK, so I've been working on Era Five. Some notes.

Already at work here! A quick note, we'd originally flagged up Skimming for appearance in the second column of this era. However, given that it's effectively a flight equivalent, it would probably do well at the beginning of era 6, right?

- I've renamed Tactics, tentatively as Profession. The reason for this is that I needed something more "technical" in order to pollenate the next column. Tactics was too limited to military. Professionalism (which is actually another option if you don't like Profession) seems like it could logically stem from easier communication and heightened organization (New Tongue and Formations). This thus leads to the next set of techs more easily (one of which takes the name Tactics).

Profession sounds good to me - I prefer that over Professionalism. (The latter seems more civilian than the former.)

Similarly, I renamed Wards, as I decided that was more necessary for the tech in the next column. Also, I noticed that the tech we'd called Wards was giving Gold bonuses to terrain (not production). This made no flavorful sense . Unfortunatel, can't think of anything to go in its place... Any ideas?

Wards as the flavor for Gold makes sense, I thought that was what we discussed before. If Wards can be used to keep food/perishable goods usable for longer (for which we were discussing the Keeping flavor, but decided it was too specific), then that benefits trade. (Hence, Gold.)

I'd be open to moving Wards if it's more useful elsewhere, but it seems like on the Economics equivalent it makes the most sense. The ability to preserve materials could sensibly lead to the two techs that are named to the right (Sophistication and Invention), and it's a good follow up from Dreaming and The New Tongue. (I also suggest removing the prereq from Sophistication onto this tech elsewhere, in which case they would still all make sense.)

This would mean we'd need to rename the tech that has the wonder and the production bonuses at the beginning of Era 5. This tech, combined with Invention, leads to Fireworks. It provides a lot of production bonuses, and makes me think something along the lines of a new mining/production method would fit in well. I would think we would move the channeler upgrade, either back to Wards or up onto Sophistication. Or possibly right onto the unnamed tech between Exchange and Fireworks (more work on that name below).

Prospecting could be a good one. Earth Singing is also a channeling flavor (Talent) that matches up with the ability to manipulate the ground, but Fireworks are called out as being non-channeling.

Also, would it make sense to swap this tech and our Fertilizer equivalent around? Given what this does, it feels like it should lead into Alloys. And if we keep a fertilizer-ish flavor for the other tech, it's fairly slam dunk for leading into Fireworks.

So I've attached a "Version 3" which attempts at the next era. It's definitely not perfect. Some notes:

1) Obviously, please evaluate names and give me your thoughts. Some of these I have been unable to come up with!

Aside from the Economics equivalent discussed above, I think the completely unnamed ones are the Fertilizer equivalent and the tech that unlocks Peat. Fertilizer is discussed below!

For the Peat tech, what is the Well entry on that tech? Is it actually Wells, which we discussed a long time ago, allowing channelers to attack in Stedding and the Guardian?

I think the difficulty with this tech is we've got a lot of undefined flavor on it. Food2, which can be anything, Peat, which may be being changed depending on our resource discussions once we've decided the units, and a trade route.

Related to what I discussed above, if we move the channeler upgrade to this tech, and if Wells is the Wells I think it is, then a channeling flavor tech makes sense here. (And channeling playing into keeping food fresh also makes sense.)

This could be the usage of Keeping we discussed before, unless the Keeping weave is actually a type of Ward? Maybe this is where we could have some kind of Herbalist flavor? But it seems odd that that and Wisdoms would be so far apart.

Removed a Wonder from "Invention" (Industrialization) and moved it to (the new version of "Wards," which is in Era 5, but otherwise simply inherits the leftover production upgrades from "metallurgy" (and adds a channeling upgrade)

Moving that wonder sounds good - Invention is still a strong tech.

"Unnamed" is the same as Fertilizer - thoughts?

Related to what I mentioned above, swapping this with Prospecting could make sense. I'd like to find a way to break these up a bit and make them less like BNW, but separating the yields for each improvement doesn't seem like a good idea, and then it's difficult to add other things onto them.

Still regarding the flavor here, something close to Fertilizer does lead well into Fireworks. We've thus far avoided not-quite-BNW flavor, which would be things like Compost here. Like I mentioned above, a channeling flavor tech here doesn't fit too well because Fireworks are so specifically not channeling. (Even though there is literally a weave used for farming in the books, though it doesn't have a great name to be used as a tech "Leveling the Ground".)

Is Irrigation too close to BNW's flavor? This is the "without fresh water" tech, where more advanced water delivery mechanisms make sense as an explanation of the bonus.

The new Tactics is the same as its BNW equivalent.

That seems good.

I learned that part of the weird "down jump" of the Ironclad is that it *does not require the caravel as a prereq!" I didn't want to do that, so I moved Exchange up a bit. I also gave it the Gold building ("stock exchange") stolen from "Fireworks". Fireworks is as previously discussed, with the new nat wonder, but minus Gold 3.

Weird, I'd never noticed that about the Ironclad and the Caravel. I suppose, given the way the BNW units work, unlocking either first could make some kind of sense. But we're making the unit upgrade path for naval melee a bit more linear, so this seems like a good change.

Should we move Spy 2 to another tech?

There's definitely room for us to, Fireworks still seems like a fine tech without it. I feel like there should be another channeling flavor for the tech named Keeping to allow it to live on there.

Alternatively, none of the other techs in this column seem to be particularly short on unlocks. Might we move Spy 2 into column 1 of Era 6?

Combined "Dynamite" and "Rifling"! too good?

No, I think it looks pretty good! We'll have to see if it becomes the ultimate military tech. I'm surprised Firaxis got two techs in here with only one thing on them.

definitely some changes were made to prereqs here. The collumn structure is odd in this era - 6 techs collapsing to 4 was kind of tricky.

Advise!

I think we're being a lot more restrictive than BNW was in this same era, particularly going into column 1. There are a few distinct "lanes" in BNW (the top through to Biology and Electricity, the middle through to Steam Power, and the bottom through to Dynamite). Each one pulls in one of two other techs, but we seem to have a lattice from (vertically) Sophistication to Tactics.

What about removing the prereq from Wards onto Profession? And also remove the one from Sophistication onto our Economics equivalent? Does that introduce significant problems I haven't seen? It does make our science tech a bit easier to reach than BNW's.

I had never really noticed how close together Coal, Aluminum, and Oil were in BNW, but they really are all pretty much next to each other! Removing the prereq from Sophistication onto the Economics equivalent puts a little more distance between them and makes Peat more beeline-able, while still keeping them as close neighbors. (This is similar to what BNW does with Oil, since that depends on the naval part of the tree behind Archaeology, but our moving both resources down meant that was no longer the case.)

The tech that unlocks Iron now leads directly into Sulfur. Does that make those resources too close? We can't really move either down into the lower, military part of the tree at this stage to compensate though.

EDIT 2:

So, yeah, not a lot of success with names and flavor in this batch. As it happens, though, I've been perusing the WoT Companion, scanning for flavor. It's quite a pain, unfortunately, since there are so, so many names (I wish it was organized by category or something). Still, I've browsed through C (which is already 150 pages or so) and have stumbled upon some flavor that we might find useful. Some pertains to above, some not directly:

That's a lot of reading! Thanks for going through it so thoroughly! It sounds like a lot of this stuff will be very useful when we're doing buildings, as you call out a bit below!

The Age Lace ties into the pattern. Not sure what to do with it, but there it is.

Interesting. I think we've got enough Pattern flavor early in the tree, but this might be useful for some of the Faith buildings?

a Binder is an AoL object that can control channelers. Probably not sueful to us.

Agreed, I think the a'dam give us what we need here.

In the two rivers, they use Birdcall Signals to communicate. Sort of like Maiden Handtalk, in its theoretical usefulness. Not sure if this is broad enough to be a tech, but it's certainly that *kind* of thing.

Sounds like it might come up!

There are also any number of herbs

Potentially useful with the Wisdom stuff, then? Not sure if we'll need any herbs flavor though.

In illian, there is a guild of Bookers who do insurance and stuff. Probably not a tech, but could make a building or something.

Awesome, yeah, that would do well as one of the Gold buildings.

There is some mention of Lensmakers and looking glasses. This is probably an excellent naval or science tech. Are we "there" yet, or should that be later in the game?

I think we're going to get there in Era 6, so we'll keep this in mind!

There are a few things that tie into culture that might be helpful. The Bittern is a musical instrument, for instance. Apparently like a dulcimer, or maybe a zither, I think. I could see this helping us out with cultural stuff. I could actually see something like this replacing High Chant, and then High Chant taking the place of "Shared Belief." We could then use Shared Belief elsewhere, or not at all.

I ask above if Shared Belief is WoT specific flavor, I think this decision depends on that. (Internet searches aren't turning up anything for me.) This flavor feels like it's more on the level of a building (some kind of instrument crafter as a culture building) rather than a tech though?

Bellfounders helped make the Dragons, so a Bellfoundry or something could be a late- prod building, or else an actual tech.

Yep, sounds good!

Snakes and Foxes, the game, could also be a tech. Maybe one that is culture related or something - but also unlocks a wonder (the Tower of Genji wonder). Similarly, there's a rather detailed description of the decks of cards in WoT, though I don't know if these would help us with technologies.

It could also unlock the anti-channeling medallion, if that's a thing that exists mechanically for us. (Not sure what it would do?) Sounds like an endgame thing.

People are described as being ironmongers. Not sure we could use that for a tech itself, but a building perhaps.

What are ironmongers? Is it distinct from a smith? I see mention of the word in several WoTWikia articles, but no page about the word itself. (And I also get many search results about the villain from Iron Man.)

Cold storms off the Sea of Storms are referred to as Cemaros (unless I'm misreading my note. Not sure that can help us, though.

Cemaro Season could potentially be a tech? Not sure what the bonuses would be though. We're looking for stuff for Food bonuses, but that doesn't really fit here.

 

[S3rgeus]

Thatching is another thing that comes up sometimes. Analogous to Slate Roofs, I'm guessing. And yes, there's plenty of packed dirt roads.

Yeah, Thatching was used a lot more in places that were more rural (like Two Rivers). Yay, packed dirt roads!

The Chair of Remorse is this weird ter'angreal used in the tower for punishment. There's a lot about it in there. Not sure what we'd do with it, but it theoretically could be anti-espionage or something.

Could be, or could be a wonder. Maybe our Great Firewall equivalent?

The Circuit of Heaven is a apparently a big racetrack in one of the nations. Maybe a circus maximus type of thing.

This sounds a bit more like a world wonder, since it's one specific place in the WoT world. (Not that BNW doesn't use a similar structure with Oxford University, I've always thought that more generic stuff like National College was better for the National Wonders.)

There is, in fact, a list of the various constellations in their world. Useful to us?

Awesome, if there is a particularly well known one, we could use that name for the Weather Sense tech? It wouldn't tie the Sea Folk flavor to it as tightly.

There's something called Covanen's First Rule of Medians, which is a sort of logical paradigm used by some white sisters. Could theoretically be a late-game science tech, or something (it would make sense, also, as a good GWoWr, but we don't have those!)

Awesome, sounds good! "Rule of Medians" could fit well.

There's a long blurb on currency, but the interesting thing is the reminder of Letters of Rights. This would be a very good economic tech. Could sub in for some of the ones we're having trouble with (e.g. the one in the last column of era 4, or else "Exchange," or something later.

Agreed, this sounds good.

And that's all I got. But some ideas, right?

Definitely, it's good stuff!



Hopefully we'll be finalizing the Era 5 stuff above soon! I'm traveling back home tomorrow, so I won't be back until Sunday/Monday because my flight is overnight. I'd like to work on Era 6 when I get back then (as long as nothing above is holding us back) since I haven't done the initial pass for an era yet!

 

[counterpoint]

I have returned! As I'm sure you've seen, I've been working on the Tech Tree Editor for the last week and it's improved a lot over that time. It's in a much better place for what we're doing here and I've got the tree on there pretty much up to date. (I'll update it some more as I reply to the below and attach the files when I'm done, for any curious lurkers who don't have access to the DropBox!) So it should be much more usable now for us to share changes that way!

I think the only thing that's missing at this point is the "bonus yield from X improvement" (under varying situations) starbursts.

I've used the Pyramids as the icon for all of the wonders, seeing as the plan for a "wonder pass" will lead to us flavoring these appropriately later.

I've also published a new version while writing this post, to fix one specific bug I ran into while making the changes below.

looks great. Very much better now. Thanks!

True, it's not completely necessary, but the ability to switch the sa'angreal between two units and have them have significantly different effects could create confusion. Suddenly moving your sa'angreal onto an Asha'man close to the enemy from an Aes Sedai changes the defender's ability to prioritize who to attack. If we have two separate unit we force the attacker to make the decision earlier which kind of assault they want to have available (and think will be most useful to them).

and

I think the main issue with this approach (significant power and range difference) is that angreal on Kin will be more useful than sa'angreal on Aes Sedai in a lot of practical situations. I think that reversal of the progression will be very confusing for players, and also put them off when they realize it, because the later "units" should be an improvement.

and

I think I prefer the latter one. It may be a bit more complex, but it doesn't have the systematic problems I mentioned above with the comparative power between angreal and sa'angreal. The sa'angreal are definitely an upgrade because they offer distinct functionality and are markedly more destructive.

Re male and female, I think it could help to separate them. Rather than have the same unit have different mechanics depending on which unit is holding it, I think if the two do different things, then making the player who's producing them decide which one they need/want most can be good.

and

I think I've covered this above, but just in case! A big distinction is for the defender as well, knowing what type of attack they need to deal with. Even if the two are equally powerful but different, you would want to respond to each of them differently, and the attacker being able to switch between them takes away that ability.

You've mentioned not being able to move the angreal after attaching it to a unit here, which would solve this problem, but I don't think we can do that. We don't want to force the player to pick a specific unit that must do the attacking, that's way too narrow a restriction. If they're sitting around in peace time, we don't want rebasing the angreal, which looks like a normal operation, to commit them to a unit then. We could make it so that you can only rebase from one unit to another if they're the same saidin/saidar, but then we've effectively created the separate units anyway and it's just more confusing for the player than the separate unit type approach.

combined because they're all connected.

I should clarify what I was imagining, regarding the way units are loaded and unloaded. I was not suggesting you should be able to pass an angreal from a saidar unit to a saidin unit. I'm merely suggesting that you could create an angreal generically, and decide which kind of unit it would go to on production. After that point, it would be a "male" or "female angreal." But from a production perspective, it would be much simpler. That way we wouldn't have to have 2 (or technically four) different "units" available. Also, you then only have to make a tactical decision once it's produced.

Above you also mention that Angreal on kin is more useful in certain situations than a sa'angreal on an AS, due to the Three oaths. I'm not sure if you're expressing that that is a problem. To me, it's not. That's what the flavor dictates.

as far as the actual difference between the units, I'm fine with the one you preferred:
Angreal only damage units and cities, range of 6
Sa'angreal damage units, hexes (pillage), (population), have greater range (8), and create "fallout."

See below for consideration of population). Ranges are tentative. Do they have the same number of strikes?

Also fine with men doing splash damage but less damage overall, or fewer strikes. Don't think the "unit" itself needs to be different, though.... (see below).

You say that differentiating the "units" by gender is useful to the defender. I don't see how that would matter. If a man holds the angreal, they would see that, or if a woman hold it, they would see that. Thus, they'd deal with each appropriately. How does it matter how the unit was produced?

OK, in terms of mechanics of what I'd actually propose.... Truthfully, I was originally figuring that an angreal would be "attached" to a specific unit forever. I still don't see that as that bad - it's not that different from the way nukes are currently.

But, if we want what you've described, but don't feel like we *need* gender differentiation, why not just allow the "change of hands" of an angreal only in special situations. Perhaps when adjacent to a friendly city, you can pass the angreal to an adjacent unit (of the same gender). That way you can't "dance around" while on the offensive, while your opponent is trying to kill the AngrealBearer. But it's also not limiting.

What would you think of that? If not, what's the mechanism?

I think that Fallout will make a good mechanical addition to Balefire, the Pattern unraveling that I described here could be seen as a "Fallout-like" something. It just means that we won't be using the same flavor for "this Fallout" and the Bubble of Evil "Fallout". That's not a problem, we can name them different things, just being clear that they're separate flavor!

so are you proposing this "Fallout" is mechanically the same as bubbles of evil, just different flavor? (so, like Lawless vs Dragonsworn, False Dragons notwithstanding) So, can this be "cleaned up"? Also, what would you call it?

Killing a city's defenders (who have attacked them) would lower the city's population though. I've always thought that the "city attack" is the city's population being pressed into service manning the city defenses to strike at something, so it would be those people, flavor wise, that the Aes Sedai would be killing.

I'm willing to go with you on this, but I still don't quite buy it. This isn't "manning the defenses." This is *balefire raining down on the city*. There's only one realistic explanation of this. See: natrin's barrow. Given that that's a pretty important moment of character development in the books that I'd prefer to not ignore.

I don't see where you've picked this up below, with any issues of it going obsolete too quickly? Looking at the tree now and based on other discussions I think we had last post, the next tech after the ExpShip (Mapmaking) now unlocks NvR 2, and NvR 3 isn't until Canvas, which puts a decent distance between them. Or do you mean that the ExpShip is mechanically obsolete once the player has NvR 2?

Yeah I'm not sure where I specifically picked it up before, or what I meant here (a consequence of these posts getting so far apart...) I think whatever this was was fixed by flipping NvR with NvM in era 4.

Weather Sense seems like a good one for now!

ok, we can go with that for now. I don't like that it's a "personality trait," though, and not really a tech or a development in society...

The similarity between Workmanship and Apprenticeship was intentional, since one leads to the other, but it may still be too close for separate techs.

Innovation is unfortunately taken for our science victory stuff.

Expertise seems good - I feel like that leads on more from Apprenticeship as well, right? What do you think?

eh... I feel like Expertise then blurs too much with Profession! Sorry, still rooting for design.... The truth is, I like it because of its synonymity with "Engineering." Still open to change, though...

A combat bonus when in the other player's territory would make a lot of sense. It would mean you're defending them in some capacity, since your unit is fighting on their land. I'm still not sure it makes Defensive Pacts worthwhile, but it's a step in the right direction.

I'd be happy to take another look at it later though.

OK, I think let's tentatively decide a small combat bonus in other player's territory, then. Should that be added to the misc summary or something? or diplomacy, or what?

Seems like we're have the same problem with Sailcloth as we do with Canvas, but I think it will work either way. I like Canvas for this one though.

hmmm... I think I prefer sailcloth, if only because it sounds more mysterious and is less mundane seeming. Like, it conjures to mind something actually special, and doesn't conjure to mine ,"really, *that?*"

Hmmm, very good point re MC power. Fine! Let's go with Weaves.

done.

Good point! (All part of my elaborate plan, this remaining unnamed helped me find and fix a bug in the tech tree Editor! )

It seems like you've added Shared Belief as the name of this tech while doing the Era 5 stuff below though, and that seems like a fine name. Is that specifically WoT flavor?

It is most definitely not from flavor. I't s ok, I think, but some flavor would be preferred!

Already at work here! A quick note, we'd originally flagged up Skimming for appearance in the second column of this era. However, given that it's effectively a flight equivalent, it would probably do well at the beginning of era 6, right?

yes, era 6. I wonder if that was a mistake, calling for era 5 "flight."...

Profession sounds good to me - I prefer that over Professionalism. (The latter seems more civilian than the former.)

done.

Wards as the flavor for Gold makes sense, I thought that was what we discussed before. If Wards can be used to keep food/perishable goods usable for longer (for which we were discussing the Keeping flavor, but decided it was too specific), then that benefits trade. (Hence, Gold.)

I'd be open to moving Wards if it's more useful elsewhere, but it seems like on the Economics equivalent it makes the most sense. The ability to preserve materials could sensibly lead to the two techs that are named to the right (Sophistication and Invention), and it's a good follow up from Dreaming and The New Tongue. (I also suggest removing the prereq from Sophistication onto this tech elsewhere, in which case they would still all make sense.)

I think the most common application of wards is actually more traditionally "protective." As in barriers against shadowspawn and such. Keeping, though, is a kind of Ward, so I see what you're saying. Still, if we're considering Keeping as the main impetus for that flavor... why wouldn't it just be a food bonus? I don't really see gold as the primary aim, here. But to me the "defensive" application seems the most consistent usage in the books - thus the channeler upgrade being there.

That said, it's not terrible. I could be fine with Wards sitting on all that economic stuff...though it doesn't make tons of sense of the production building. Are we ok with Wards being the sole prereq into a tech called Invention? Is there no better solution?

This would mean we'd need to rename the tech that has the wonder and the production bonuses at the beginning of Era 5. This tech, combined with Invention, leads to Fireworks. It provides a lot of production bonuses, and makes me think something along the lines of a new mining/production method would fit in well. I would think we would move the channeler upgrade, either back to Wards or up onto Sophistication. Or possibly right onto the unnamed tech between Exchange and Fireworks (more work on that name below).

Prospecting could be a good one. Earth Singing is also a channeling flavor (Talent) that matches up with the ability to manipulate the ground, but Fireworks are called out as being non-channeling.

Also, would it make sense to swap this tech and our Fertilizer equivalent around? Given what this does, it feels like it should lead into Alloys. And if we keep a fertilizer-ish flavor for the other tech, it's fairly slam dunk for leading into Fireworks.

First off, I think we wanted the Chan upgrade to skip an era here, thus early 6 and not late 5. I'm fine with that. Also, we wanted it to be lower on the tree, because it's military, so I like the pre-req of Profession. That said, if we *do* swap the place of the production one and the Fertilizer one, that most certainly achieves this - but is the Chan upgrade too low on the tech tree? Do we care? It does seem to simplify things a bit. I do agree with swapping their places here, though.

Secondly, I don't think we need to worry too much about the whole "channeling leading into Fireworks" thing. That happens all the time in this tech tree, so we shouldn't panic here. Also, it's quite possible that Illuminators at least got the idea for fireworks from channelers. So this isn't problematic, IMO.

I previously considered Prospecting. It's just so very associated with the Gold Rush in these parts that it feels a little weird, flavorfully...

Earth Singing is kind of random and obscure, but it is flavor, certainly (hopefully people don't think it refers to the Ogier or anything). I could be fine with this - however, are we ok with the fact that it basically has no power-based prereqs? Maybe that's fine.

The Chan upgrade would still make sense here, which is nice.

The other thing, while we're on it, is that we could consider swapping the names Profession and Tactics. They're close, but perhaps Profession+Earth Singing makes more sense as a prereq for Alloys. And There doesn't seem to be much lost in the swap. Thoughts?

Aside from the Economics equivalent discussed above, I think the completely unnamed ones are the Fertilizer equivalent and the tech that unlocks Peat. Fertilizer is discussed below!

For the Peat tech, what is the Well entry on that tech? Is it actually Wells, which we discussed a long time ago, allowing channelers to attack in Stedding and the Guardian?

I think the difficulty with this tech is we've got a lot of undefined flavor on it. Food2, which can be anything, Peat, which may be being changed depending on our resource discussions once we've decided the units, and a trade route.

Related to what I discussed above, if we move the channeler upgrade to this tech, and if Wells is the Wells I think it is, then a channeling flavor tech makes sense here. (And channeling playing into keeping food fresh also makes sense.)

This could be the usage of Keeping we discussed before, unless the Keeping weave is actually a type of Ward? Maybe this is where we could have some kind of Herbalist flavor? But it seems odd that that and Wisdoms would be so far apart.

Well is Oil Well. Darn it, it seems you spun a lot of ideas off of that, so I regret that not being more clear.

Definitely too early in the game to use Wells, IMO. That's a late game mechanic, if at all. We *could* use it here, but it seems quite random, considering what it unlocks. If anything, it should be the tech that gives you the ter'angreal cache. (or is it angreal cache?)

I definitely think this one doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a channeling tech. True, the flavor is rather undefined, but each component (if we don't add Chan here... and I don't see a reason to do so) is quite "worldly."

I do like the Herbal thing in some ways, though it is problematically late in the tree. I originally figured this would come really early in the tree, but we ended up going for broad things like Community and Cultivation (those were two candidate techs for "Herbs" or something). Wisdoms as specialists pop up with Wheel of Time. That one could theoretically be replaced by Herb stuff, but the WoT flavor seemed pretty good for the Doomseer.

I've tentatively called this "Herbal Concoctions," though I mostly hate the name. The word "potions" doesn't pop up in WoT, but searching for "Concoction" on the wiki brings up a whole lot of stuff. Does this make any sense so late in the tree? It's true that wisdoms are much earlier, but might there be a way to tweak this to justify it? I want to say something about Apothecaries or Pharmacology or chemistry, but don't know how to fit the flavor. just "Concoctions"?

Related to what I mentioned above, swapping this with Prospecting could make sense. I'd like to find a way to break these up a bit and make them less like BNW, but separating the yields for each improvement doesn't seem like a good idea, and then it's difficult to add other things onto them.

yeah, not sure what else to do

Still regarding the flavor here, something close to Fertilizer does lead well into Fireworks. We've thus far avoided not-quite-BNW flavor, which would be things like Compost here. Like I mentioned above, a channeling flavor tech here doesn't fit too well because Fireworks are so specifically not channeling. (Even though there is literally a weave used for farming in the books, though it doesn't have a great name to be used as a tech "Leveling the Ground".)

Is Irrigation too close to BNW's flavor? This is the "without fresh water" tech, where more advanced water delivery mechanisms make sense as an explanation of the bonus.

I think Compost is somewhat ridiculous - and much too close to BNW. I think Irrigation is actually much further from BNW. The problem with this one is the tech itself is super ancient. These people were probably irrigating a long time ago. like, early in the tree. Something like "Crop Rotation" is similar, in that it was invented forever ago but was perfected along the way.

What about something more technical? Right now I have Heavy Plow in version 3.5. There might be a better way to call it, but something like that. Just straight-up better farming. Doesn't lead into Fireworks so sexily, though (and actually leads into Alloys a little better!)... Something closer to that, though. Thoughts?

There's definitely room for us to, Fireworks still seems like a fine tech without it. I feel like there should be another channeling flavor for the tech named Keeping to allow it to live on there.

Alternatively, none of the other techs in this column seem to be particularly short on unlocks. Might we move Spy 2 into column 1 of Era 6?

yeah, I say we move it into era 6. It's not like I build spy 2 all the time anyways. Certainly not instantly.

I'm ambivalent about keeping. Since it's a kind of Warding, it feels like we're already covered it.

I think we're being a lot more restrictive than BNW was in this same era, particularly going into column 1. There are a few distinct "lanes" in BNW (the top through to Biology and Electricity, the middle through to Steam Power, and the bottom through to Dynamite). Each one pulls in one of two other techs, but we seem to have a lattice from (vertically) Sophistication to Tactics.

What about removing the prereq from Wards onto Profession? And also remove the one from Sophistication onto our Economics equivalent? Does that introduce significant problems I haven't seen? It does make our science tech a bit easier to reach than BNW's.

I had never really noticed how close together Coal, Aluminum, and Oil were in BNW, but they really are all pretty much next to each other! Removing the prereq from Sophistication onto the Economics equivalent puts a little more distance between them and makes Peat more beeline-able, while still keeping them as close neighbors. (This is similar to what BNW does with Oil, since that depends on the naval part of the tree behind Archaeology, but our moving both resources down meant that was no longer the case.)

The tech that unlocks Iron now leads directly into Sulfur. Does that make those resources too close? We can't really move either down into the lower, military part of the tree at this stage to compensate though.

Ugh... I don't know. I just don't know. I have changed nothing, as of now.

I can see what you're saying about the Lattice, but I wonder if the top of it becomes far too belinable if we remove both the prereqs on Sophistication and on Exchange (which is Steam power, I think, not economics, in terms of what it does. Economics is the gold one from era 5). This is made more extreme since these techs follow one another. If you want to remove some prereqs, I'd rather see us remove them from different paths, and not one path. So, I could imagine removing the one on sophistication but keeping the on on exchange. I don't know, I really don't. But is this actually very different from BNW, at the start of the era? It seems similar to me.

As far as Iron and Sulfer... are you sure we can't move one down? The "Best" option would be, for instance, to put Iron on Earth Singing (heavy plow makes sense, but that doesn't really help). But that's too far down, right? Also, we probably will Require Iron for Prod 2, so it should sit on that tech. Dang... is there any solution?

That's a lot of reading! Thanks for going through it so thoroughly! It sounds like a lot of this stuff will be very useful when we're doing buildings, as you call out a bit below!

NOTE: Not "reading." NOTE: not "thoroughly." Scanning for things that look like not-character-names.

Interesting. I think we've got enough Pattern flavor early in the tree, but this might be useful for some of the Faith buildings?

it could be, I suppose. Not sure how, though.

Agreed, I think the a'dam give us what we need here.

but that's not likely to actually be a tech either...

I ask above if Shared Belief is WoT specific flavor, I think this decision depends on that. (Internet searches aren't turning up anything for me.) This flavor feels like it's more on the level of a building (some kind of instrument crafter as a culture building) rather than a tech though?

ShBe is not WoT flavor. The Bittern is. I see what you mean about a building... but "bittern crafter" is a pretty lame building.

The truth is, this is exactly like Slate Roofing, IMO. Well, in fact, its more flavorful in that it's a made-up work.

So is "Bitterns" as a tech too weird? Weird proposals:

1) rename High Chant "Bitterns" (or something like it) and Shared Belief as "High Chant." Consider renaming Sophistication
or
2) rename "Shared Belief" "Bitterns" or something, and do something cool with Sophistication.

(googling tells me that this is also a kind of bird, which is weird...) Definitely not essential that we use this flavor, certainly.

It could also unlock the anti-channeling medallion, if that's a thing that exists mechanically for us. (Not sure what it would do?) Sounds like an endgame thing.

Yeah, I doubt it'd be a mechanic.

But Snakes and Foxes existed far before the current era, I think. Actually, I'm starting to think of this one as a good Culture tech, for one that gives you Wonders. Could we call "Shared Belief" "Snakes and Foxes"?

What are ironmongers? Is it distinct from a smith? I see mention of the word in several WoTWikia articles, but no page about the word itself. (And I also get many search results about the villain from Iron Man.)

ironmongers I think sell metal, perhaps also make it. It's a real thing, though. Probably a production or gold building or something. (mahbe the factory)

Cemaro Season could potentially be a tech? Not sure what the bonuses would be though. We're looking for stuff for Food bonuses, but that doesn't really fit here.

eh... that seems kind of random as a tech.

Could be, or could be a wonder. Maybe our Great Firewall equivalent?

not a bad idea!

This sounds a bit more like a world wonder, since it's one specific place in the WoT world. (Not that BNW doesn't use a similar structure with Oxford University, I've always thought that more generic stuff like National College was better for the National Wonders.)

I see what you mean, but on the other hand, Circus maximus is exactly this, a single famous racetrack, and it's a national wonder.

Awesome, if there is a particularly well known one, we could use that name for the Weather Sense tech? It wouldn't tie the Sea Folk flavor to it as tightly.

I don't quite recognize any...

I mena, we could just rename Weather Sense "Constellations," but that's sort of like Astronomy..... well, more like astrology....

Constellations or Weather Sense?

Awesome, sounds good! "Rule of Medians" could fit well.

cool. The last science building is in era 6.. is that where this should go, or should we use this for something else (our versions of one of the uber-late techs)?

Agreed, this sounds good.

I've tentatively renamed "Exchange" "Letters of Rights". OK with this, or would you rather use this elsewhere?

Hopefully we'll be finalizing the Era 5 stuff above soon! I'm traveling back home tomorrow, so I won't be back until Sunday/Monday because my flight is overnight. I'd like to work on Era 6 when I get back then (as long as nothing above is holding us back) since I haven't done the initial pass for an era yet!

please, please do! I found fatigue hitting me big time in era 5. Kind of running out of ideas, here...

I know you probably won't do it on the excel sheet, but please do consult it for info on era 6-7. I've put in things that we've said we were going to put in those eras, for reference. (don't necessarily follow the vertical or horizontal placement, though)

 

[S3rgeus]

I've updated the tree in the Dropbox with Era 6, but unfortunately it's too late for me to write a post as well! I shall return tomorrow with details on what I moved around/added and where various flavor comes from.

 

[S3rgeus]

I should clarify what I was imagining, regarding the way units are loaded and unloaded. I was not suggesting you should be able to pass an angreal from a saidar unit to a saidin unit. I'm merely suggesting that you could create an angreal generically, and decide which kind of unit it would go to on production. After that point, it would be a "male" or "female angreal." But from a production perspective, it would be much simpler. That way we wouldn't have to have 2 (or technically four) different "units" available. Also, you then only have to make a tactical decision once it's produced.

...

Also fine with men doing splash damage but less damage overall, or fewer strikes. Don't think the "unit" itself needs to be different, though.... (see below).

You say that differentiating the "units" by gender is useful to the defender. I don't see how that would matter. If a man holds the angreal, they would see that, or if a woman hold it, they would see that. Thus, they'd deal with each appropriately. How does it matter how the unit was produced?

OK, in terms of mechanics of what I'd actually propose.... Truthfully, I was originally figuring that an angreal would be "attached" to a specific unit forever. I still don't see that as that bad - it's not that different from the way nukes are currently.

But, if we want what you've described, but don't feel like we *need* gender differentiation, why not just allow the "change of hands" of an angreal only in special situations. Perhaps when adjacent to a friendly city, you can pass the angreal to an adjacent unit (of the same gender). That way you can't "dance around" while on the offensive, while your opponent is trying to kill the AngrealBearer. But it's also not limiting.

What would you think of that? If not, what's the mechanism?

Having to hand off the angreal near cities or only to directly adjacent channelers seems like a lot of complexity. Not from an understanding point of view, but from a mechanical capabilities point of view, it makes the angreal much less flexible than nukes (which can rebase at will to any valid rebase point in range each turn). It weakens them a lot because it forces the attacking player to keep them on just one unit, when being able to get that specific unit into range depends on a significant amount of luck in terms of how your and your enemy's unit placements end up intersecting.

My point about differentiating the units helping the defender was predicated on the system allowing the rebases related to what I mentioned above. Restricting the rebase to only units of the same gender solves the same part of the problem, but I don't think it's consistent with how CiV handles this kind of mechanic. Creating that restriction when the unit is first rebased effectively means we do have male and female angreal units, they're just not produced as such. I think that difference from other CiV units is unnecessary.

My overall proposal:

We have four total units: female angreal, male angreal, female sa'angreal, and male sa'angreal.

Each one can be rebased to a valid channeler (obvious restrictions based on male/female of the target unit, as well as the unit type restrictions we discussed before) within range of its current position once per turn. (Or possibly at the cost of some movement of the unit holding it.)

Above you also mention that Angreal on kin is more useful in certain situations than a sa'angreal on an AS, due to the Three oaths. I'm not sure if you're expressing that that is a problem. To me, it's not. That's what the flavor dictates.

That definitely lines up with the flavor here, but I do think it can present a mechanical problem. The sa'angreal, as a technological upgrade of the angreal that is more expensive to produce and consumes more resources (presumably? like the Bomb vs Missile is 1 vs 2 Uranium) should offer the player a more effective weapon. I'm hoping the changes below (next quote block) will make those situations much less common!

as far as the actual difference between the units, I'm fine with the one you preferred:
Angreal only damage units and cities, range of 6
Sa'angreal damage units, hexes (pillage), (population), have greater range (8), and create "fallout."

Cool, as mentioned above, I'm hoping this will make sa'angreal the more powerful choice in most cases, since we're framing them that way mechanically.

See below for consideration of population). Ranges are tentative. Do they have the same number of strikes?

Good point, number of strikes is a good differentiating factor. Just picking some numbers, 4 and 6?

so are you proposing this "Fallout" is mechanically the same as bubbles of evil, just different flavor? (so, like Lawless vs Dragonsworn, False Dragons notwithstanding) So, can this be "cleaned up"? Also, what would you call it?

Exactly! Yeah, I'd say it can be cleaned up as well. Something like "Pattern Disruption" or "Unwound Threads" or something like that? I can't recall if a specific phrase was ever used to describe the unhappenings that occurred around balefire.

I'm willing to go with you on this, but I still don't quite buy it. This isn't "manning the defenses." This is *balefire raining down on the city*. There's only one realistic explanation of this. See: natrin's barrow. Given that that's a pretty important moment of character development in the books that I'd prefer to not ignore.

I think this is quite different from Natrin's Barrow. I'd say Natrin's Barrow actually (quite nicely!) lines up better with the flavor/mechanics of our Dragon nuke balefire. That was Rand using an epic wall of balefire to destroy the entire city itself. I'd say the Aes Sedai's usage for our units is much more human-sized lances of balefire to destroy people who are attacking them from the city, along with its fortifications.

I don't think the mechanic gets used very often in BNW, but this could make us consider moving the "destroy city" functionality off the sa'angreal (we haven't discussed it in the context of the new mechanics, but just based on the general assumption that the sa'angreal replaces the Nuclear Missile) and make that solely the province of the Dragon nuke.

Also lines up a great achievement for destroying the city of Natrin's Barrow with the Dragon nuke!

Yeah I'm not sure where I specifically picked it up before, or what I meant here (a consequence of these posts getting so far apart...) I think whatever this was was fixed by flipping NvR with NvM in era 4.

I try to post faster, there's just so much other stuff!

Agreed, it looks like we fixed this as a part of the other naval reshuffle.

ok, we can go with that for now. I don't like that it's a "personality trait," though, and not really a tech or a development in society...

It's sort of an ability, right? Like Foretelling and such, which we figured would make good techs.

eh... I feel like Expertise then blurs too much with Profession! Sorry, still rooting for design.... The truth is, I like it because of its synonymity with "Engineering." Still open to change, though...

Hmmmm, I will find one! My main issue with Design is that while it can have that synonymity with Engineering, it's a very broad word that I think a lot of players won't interpret that way straight away. And given its unlocks, it doesn't need to evoke an engineering-like flavor. What about Tradesmen or Discipline?

OK, I think let's tentatively decide a small combat bonus in other player's territory, then. Should that be added to the misc summary or something? or diplomacy, or what?

Sounds good. I've added it to the Diplo summary.

hmmm... I think I prefer sailcloth, if only because it sounds more mysterious and is less mundane seeming. Like, it conjures to mind something actually special, and doesn't conjure to mine ,"really, *that?*"

I see what you mean, yeah. Changed!

I think the most common application of wards is actually more traditionally "protective." As in barriers against shadowspawn and such. Keeping, though, is a kind of Ward, so I see what you're saying. Still, if we're considering Keeping as the main impetus for that flavor... why wouldn't it just be a food bonus? I don't really see gold as the primary aim, here. But to me the "defensive" application seems the most consistent usage in the books - thus the channeler upgrade being there.

That said, it's not terrible. I could be fine with Wards sitting on all that economic stuff...though it doesn't make tons of sense of the production building. Are we ok with Wards being the sole prereq into a tech called Invention? Is there no better solution?

I see what you mean here, when I think of Wards from the books, the protective stuff is the first thing that comes to mind for me as well. I wonder if we should go with the Keeping flavor then - it seems like we keep (heh) coming back around to it.

Alternatively, playing into something you mention elsewhere, what if we move the channeler upgrade up to Shared Belief? That's already a channeling-ish tech with its Spark upgrade and the wonders + Culture National Wonder could follow that flavor too.

That would mean that Wards doesn't serve quite the flavor purpose here any more and we could go with a more everyday thing. Given what we're doing with the techs that were Wards briefly, perhaps we should drop this flavor until it becomes more directly relevant? So, for this tech, something like: Ferries, Milling, Grindstones?

First off, I think we wanted the Chan upgrade to skip an era here, thus early 6 and not late 5. I'm fine with that.

Agreed, I've moved that! More detail on where it ended up in the Era 6 stuff below.

Also, we wanted it to be lower on the tree, because it's military, so I like the pre-req of Profession. That said, if we *do* swap the place of the production one and the Fertilizer one, that most certainly achieves this - but is the Chan upgrade too low on the tech tree? Do we care? It does seem to simplify things a bit. I do agree with swapping their places here, though.

I don't think we need to worry about the channeler stuff being too high in this case. I've noticed that in general we've been hitting the "bottom of the tree is military" a lot harder than BNW does, so it would help for us to ease off a little on that.

Secondly, I don't think we need to worry too much about the whole "channeling leading into Fireworks" thing. That happens all the time in this tech tree, so we shouldn't panic here. Also, it's quite possible that Illuminators at least got the idea for fireworks from channelers. So this isn't problematic, IMO.

Cool, that seems good if we end up back with that kind of flavor intersection for the prereqs again then!

I previously considered Prospecting. It's just so very associated with the Gold Rush in these parts that it feels a little weird, flavorfully...

Earth Singing is kind of random and obscure, but it is flavor, certainly (hopefully people don't think it refers to the Ogier or anything). I could be fine with this - however, are we ok with the fact that it basically has no power-based prereqs? Maybe that's fine.

The Chan upgrade would still make sense here, which is nice.

I see what you mean about the Prospecting flavor, but I don't think that will be a big issue. It has a recognizable other meaning as well, and is suitably old-world-y while also helpfully working well with a production bonus.

Earth Singing is actual flavor, but I worry it's too obscure and that it looks like different flavor from what it is. (As you've noted, seems to be associated with the Ogier at first glance, or at worst like we made it up but made it try to sound WoT-y.) It makes me think Prospecting would work better here and we should put the channeler upgrade on something else (like Sophistication, or possibly way up on Bookbinding, alongside Sites of Power, which does make some flavor sense).

Reconsidered the above while writing this post, this being Earth Singing solves a lot of problems with the techs around it, so let's stick with that!

The other thing, while we're on it, is that we could consider swapping the names Profession and Tactics. They're close, but perhaps Profession+Earth Singing makes more sense as a prereq for Alloys. And There doesn't seem to be much lost in the swap. Thoughts?

I think either arrangement could work. Profession + Sword Forms also leads very well into Tactics, and I think Prospecting + Tactics leads well into Alloys. New Tongue + Formations seems to fit Profession a bit better than Tactics (Profession captures some of the less directly military flavor of New Tongue).

Well is Oil Well. Darn it, it seems you spun a lot of ideas off of that, so I regret that not being more clear.

Blarg! Woops, I'd forgotten that was around this part of the tree!

Definitely too early in the game to use Wells, IMO. That's a late game mechanic, if at all. We *could* use it here, but it seems quite random, considering what it unlocks. If anything, it should be the tech that gives you the ter'angreal cache. (or is it angreal cache?)

Agreed, Wells (as in WoT Wells) fit better later in the game.

The resource is angreal cache. So far, anyway!

I definitely think this one doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a channeling tech. True, the flavor is rather undefined, but each component (if we don't add Chan here... and I don't see a reason to do so) is quite "worldly."

...

I've tentatively called this "Herbal Concoctions," though I mostly hate the name. The word "potions" doesn't pop up in WoT, but searching for "Concoction" on the wiki brings up a whole lot of stuff. Does this make any sense so late in the tree? It's true that wisdoms are much earlier, but might there be a way to tweak this to justify it? I want to say something about Apothecaries or Pharmacology or chemistry, but don't know how to fit the flavor. just "Concoctions"?

I think Concoctions is better, but it's still a bit iffy. If we stick with this flavor, would we be better moving the trade route off this tech and onto Letter of Rights, above it? That fits the flavor better and both techs are still useful afterwards.

We could go for Herbalism, or is that too old for this part of the tree?

I think Compost is somewhat ridiculous - and much too close to BNW. I think Irrigation is actually much further from BNW. The problem with this one is the tech itself is super ancient. These people were probably irrigating a long time ago. like, early in the tree. Something like "Crop Rotation" is similar, in that it was invented forever ago but was perfected along the way.

What about something more technical? Right now I have Heavy Plow in version 3.5. There might be a better way to call it, but something like that. Just straight-up better farming. Doesn't lead into Fireworks so sexily, though (and actually leads into Alloys a little better!)... Something closer to that, though. Thoughts?

This sounds like a good direction to go in, though I'd like to get it a little closer to the Fireworks flavor. I think the swap of Prospecting and Fertilizer sounds like a good idea overall, so it'd be good to make it fit here.

Your suggestion about Crop Rotation works well here. I've definitely seen that as a tech in some other games, but I can't remember which. It leads into Fireworks a bit better than Heavy Plow.

yeah, I say we move it into era 6. It's not like I build spy 2 all the time anyways. Certainly not instantly.

Moved! More detail below.

I'm ambivalent about keeping. Since it's a kind of Warding, it feels like we're already covered it.

Unless we axe Wards, as discussed above, in which case this could still fit here. I feel like we've come back around to Keeping several times because it has uniquely useful flavor for us.

Ugh... I don't know. I just don't know. I have changed nothing, as of now.

I can see what you're saying about the Lattice, but I wonder if the top of it becomes far too belinable if we remove both the prereqs on Sophistication and on Exchange (which is Steam power, I think, not economics, in terms of what it does. Economics is the gold one from era 5). This is made more extreme since these techs follow one another. If you want to remove some prereqs, I'd rather see us remove them from different paths, and not one path. So, I could imagine removing the one on sophistication but keeping the on on exchange. I don't know, I really don't. But is this actually very different from BNW, at the start of the era? It seems similar to me.

Good points, there are actually the same number of prereqs crossing the era boundary here as in BNW. Maybe the lattice appearance is just because of the vertical placement of the techs, with the 5 stacked directly together? I think it might be good to remove the prereq from Profession onto the Fertilizer equivalent (assuming we've swapped them, as discussed elsewhere, I've left this prereq removed in the Editor tree, so it's more clear which one I mean). This creates more clearly defined paths, while still pulling the techs back together going into the next era.

As far as Iron and Sulfer... are you sure we can't move one down? The "Best" option would be, for instance, to put Iron on Earth Singing (heavy plow makes sense, but that doesn't really help). But that's too far down, right? Also, we probably will Require Iron for Prod 2, so it should sit on that tech. Dang... is there any solution?

It may not be a problem, the two will have different appearance rates. It stood out to me, but given the problems moving them can create, I'd say we can leave it until we find it's causing a problem.

NOTE: Not "reading." NOTE: not "thoroughly." Scanning for things that look like not-character-names.

It's still been very useful!

ShBe is not WoT flavor. The Bittern is. I see what you mean about a building... but "bittern crafter" is a pretty lame building.

The truth is, this is exactly like Slate Roofing, IMO. Well, in fact, its more flavorful in that it's a made-up work.

So is "Bitterns" as a tech too weird? Weird proposals:

1) rename High Chant "Bitterns" (or something like it) and Shared Belief as "High Chant." Consider renaming Sophistication
or
2) rename "Shared Belief" "Bitterns" or something, and do something cool with Sophistication.

(googling tells me that this is also a kind of bird, which is weird...) Definitely not essential that we use this flavor, certainly.

I like option 1! And I think Sophistication can stay the same, at least for now.

But Snakes and Foxes existed far before the current era, I think. Actually, I'm starting to think of this one as a good Culture tech, for one that gives you Wonders. Could we call "Shared Belief" "Snakes and Foxes"?

This does present us with another alternative/complement to the previous quote block, "Snakes and Foxes" would play well with the tech-formerly-known-as-Shared-Belief taking a channeling upgrade, to go with its Spark upgrade. And then Sophistication could become High Chant?

ironmongers I think sell metal, perhaps also make it. It's a real thing, though. Probably a production or gold building or something. (mahbe the factory)

Sounds good.

eh... that seems kind of random as a tech.

It's more about using Cemaros as a source of rain, much like the whole Monsoon Season thing, but that's monsoons rather than hurricanes, which aren't the same thing.

I see what you mean, but on the other hand, Circus maximus is exactly this, a single famous racetrack, and it's a national wonder.

Exactly, that and Oxford University stand out as poorly flavored National Wonders to me. It doesn't make sense to have many of those in the world. I'd prefer to avoid doing the same thing if we can.

I don't quite recognize any...

I mena, we could just rename Weather Sense "Constellations," but that's sort of like Astronomy..... well, more like astrology....

Constellations or Weather Sense?

I think we should stick with Weather Sense then. Constellations feels very "not Astronomy, but Astronomy".

cool. The last science building is in era 6.. is that where this should go, or should we use this for something else (our versions of one of the uber-late techs)?

Good call!

I've tentatively renamed "Exchange" "Letters of Rights". OK with this, or would you rather use this elsewhere?

Sounds good to me.

please, please do! I found fatigue hitting me big time in era 5. Kind of running out of ideas, here...

I know you probably won't do it on the excel sheet, but please do consult it for info on era 6-7. I've put in things that we've said we were going to put in those eras, for reference. (don't necessarily follow the vertical or horizontal placement, though)

Phew, so I've created a first pass at era 6! And of course used the excel sheet as reference! I wouldn't want to leave out any flavor that we've discussed already.

It seems like we added a lot of stuff for our mechanics in this era, more so than previous ones. I'm not sure if that's actually the case numerically (didn't bother counting things in all eras), but if it is, I would say it's likely because we're getting closer to the times of the books, where the flavor is more well defined.

So, stuff!

First, I picked out some obvious flavor that we knew we wanted to include: Skimming and Cobbles were pretty quick - as our replacements for Flight and Railroads flavor wise, they fit right in as techs. I knew we wanted something Bloodknife-y, which I've put in as Night's Shade right now, which was the name of the weave for creating Bloodknives in the Age of Legends.

Next up was Rule of Medians, which we'd discussed directly above and fit quite well onto the tech that unlocked the next science building (equivalent to Plastics).

Then there wasn't any obvious tech flavor outstanding, so I filled in all of the BNW unlocks for this era. And then our new unlocks for this era, which include: a Warder upgrade, an Alignment building, the Kin unit, Bloodknives, and the Settler upgrade. (Plus we moved Spy 2 into this era.) I also found that Naval Melee 4 was unlocked in this era in BNW, but we've already unlocked that way back, so I ended up adding a Naval Melee 5.

With the addition of Naval Melee 5 and the presence of Naval Ranged 3 in this era (on Electronics) and the Carrier, I figured there was room for a naval tech, which used the Looking Glass flavor that we discussed above quite well. This does beg the question of whether or not we have a unit that will act like the Carrier does, though? Even if we don't, it still fits well and can stand up as a tech. I have noticed here that Naval Ranged 3 is much farther from Naval Ranged 2 than its corresponding Naval Melee counterparts. Do we want to address that back in era 4/5 and make this Naval Ranged 4?

So, between a Settler upgrade, the Happiness3 building, and an Alignment building, I saw the makings of a good expansion-centered WoT flavored tech. I grouped those together around where Replaceable Parts used to be.

Replaceable Parts used to have Melee 6 on it, but with our shuffling of Melee 5 up to Alloys, it needed to move. I moved it down to Night's Shade, which was then feeling like a good candidate to be a spying/military tech.

This is where I noticed that we're generally much more focused on "military at the bottom of the tree" than BNW is. From this era onwards, BNW's military unit unlocks seem to happen at all levels of the tree (Infantry and Marines are on the highest vertical techs in their columns). So in general I think we can also afford to allow units to float a bit higher than we have in eras before this. Despite that sentiment, Melee 6 on Night's Shade does fulfill our other objective of making the unit upgrade paths require one another as they progress.

Also due to our earlier moving of units, and because our single Traveling Squad (teh name! (I know we have a name, but this is fun )) made Skimming much less unlock-ful than Flight was, I moved Range5 back onto Skimming. (Bizarrely, the two "generics" visible on Flight in BNW are both enhancements to unique improvements of civs, which I have decided to leave out of consideration completely, since it doesn't really affect the balance of the tree and should be decided as a part of that civ's uniques.)

Wanting to make the tech-that-was-once-Replaceable-Parts into an expansionist WoT tech, I needed to find a new home for Defense 4, which seems like it can fit quite well with the flavor of Cobbles, and also means that it now ensures it requires the tech that lets the player construct Defense 3. (Whether or not this is actually different depends on what we decide for the prereqs onto Profession.) With this becoming military-ish, as techs go, it seemed like a good place to put Spy 2, which also led well into Night's Shade having the Spy National Wonder.

With all this shuffling, some techs were now much more unlock heavy than others, mostly due to wonder distribution. I redistributed a lot of the wonders in the first column here to rebalance the techs. It's worth noting that there are three wonders in column 1 of Era 6 that are the "Ideology Wonders" in BNW (Prora, Statue of Liberty, and the Kremlin), and should probably unlock on different techs. I've kept them on different techs here.

Looking at the Radio equivalent, I saw that it was still a good Culture tech, but could also be a home for the Kin unit, which helped a bit with our making military stuff a bit more available to higher parts of the tree from this era onward. I pulled Prestige1 down off of Refrigeration and onto this Culture tech, since Culture and Prestige complement each other well. That led to another wonder moving up in exchange, since Refrigation had lost Happiness3 and Prestige1.

So now came some naming! Some of the tweaking changes above were interspersed with choosing names, and I also kept in mind what we've been discussing about making techs lead into each other well. I'm pretty happy with Treatises and Manifests. Both lead on well from Letters of Rights but still connote relevant flavor for their unlocks. Manifests we discussed before as a possible naval-like tech, and as the Refrigation equivalent that unlocks the anti-naval naval unit it has a chance to do that here.

Both of those lead quite well into Rule of Medians, the flavor of which is discussed above.

Then there's the one that I've currently labeled Festivals. My main concern with this name is that it seems like something that would have become available earlier in history than this part of the tree. But New Era-specific festivals would have been cropping up at about this time. And a Herbalist-ish flavor + Fireworks is a pretty awesome lead in for Festivals, flavor wise. It also fits well with the WoT flavored, expansionist nature of the unlocks on that tech.

Looking Glass's prereqs aren't as much of a direct flavor win though. Treatises makes some sense, but Festivals only vaguely so.

Going from Cobbles to Night's Shade also isn't very direct. Given that Night's Shade, the weave, was never actually rediscovered in the books, it might be good to rename Night's Shade, somehow keeping the link to the Bloodknives. It's otherwise a spy-ish/military tech, which is why I ended up moving the Warder upgrade onto here.

And finally, we have Unnamed Tech 6, which has AA1 and Horse 4 (stolen from Night's Shade, which now has plenty of unlocks, but replaces Combustion, where the Landship used to live). I couldn't really come up with a name for this one. AA1 being unlocked by the next tech along from Skimming makes a lot of sense, but otherwise I wasn't sure what to call it.

Unnamed Tech 4 is off at the start of Era 7, just to show where I figured a good double-length prereq could go from the first column of this era.

 

[counterpoint]

Going to start this post here, but will have to finish later.

Having to hand off the angreal near cities or only to directly adjacent channelers seems like a lot of complexity. Not from an understanding point of view, but from a mechanical capabilities point of view, it makes the angreal much less flexible than nukes (which can rebase at will to any valid rebase point in range each turn). It weakens them a lot because it forces the attacking player to keep them on just one unit, when being able to get that specific unit into range depends on a significant amount of luck in terms of how your and your enemy's unit placements end up intersecting.

My point about differentiating the units helping the defender was predicated on the system allowing the rebases related to what I mentioned above. Restricting the rebase to only units of the same gender solves the same part of the problem, but I don't think it's consistent with how CiV handles this kind of mechanic. Creating that restriction when the unit is first rebased effectively means we do have male and female angreal units, they're just not produced as such. I think that difference from other CiV units is unnecessary.

My overall proposal:

We have four total units: female angreal, male angreal, female sa'angreal, and male sa'angreal.

Each one can be rebased to a valid channeler (obvious restrictions based on male/female of the target unit, as well as the unit type restrictions we discussed before) within range of its current position once per turn. (Or possibly at the cost of some movement of the unit holding it.)

OK, OK. I'm with you now. I don't love having 4 separate units, but I do think that clunkiness might be the least clunky option.

I'd say that it's "rebase" range can't be too big, though. Certainly not as big as it's attack range. I know that will limit its usefulness. Great. Logically, you should be able to kill a unit if you suspect it has one of these on it. I don't want it to be impossible to do so.

I do think we need to clarify exactly how much of an action this consumes. It seems logical that it would consume both the passing unit and receiving unit's action. I can understand it only consuming of the units' actions, though. It does certainly seem that from balancing perspectives, you shouldn't be able to "rebase" and fire on the same turn (such as is the case with nukes). What do you propose?

Good point, number of strikes is a good differentiating factor. Just picking some numbers, 4 and 6?

I think that sounds fine. Definitely going to have to balance it, though. Guaranteed to be way off when we arbitrarily choose values of damage that first time...

Exactly! Yeah, I'd say it can be cleaned up as well. Something like "Pattern Disruption" or "Unwound Threads" or something like that? I can't recall if a specific phrase was ever used to describe the unhappenings that occurred around balefire.

I think the term most used is that it "unravels the pattern." So we could go with Unravelled Thread or Unravelled Pattern

I think this is quite different from Natrin's Barrow. I'd say Natrin's Barrow actually (quite nicely!) lines up better with the flavor/mechanics of our Dragon nuke balefire. That was Rand using an epic wall of balefire to destroy the entire city itself. I'd say the Aes Sedai's usage for our units is much more human-sized lances of balefire to destroy people who are attacking them from the city, along with its fortifications.

I don't think the mechanic gets used very often in BNW, but this could make us consider moving the "destroy city" functionality off the sa'angreal (we haven't discussed it in the context of the new mechanics, but just based on the general assumption that the sa'angreal replaces the Nuclear Missile) and make that solely the province of the Dragon nuke.

Also lines up a great achievement for destroying the city of Natrin's Barrow with the Dragon nuke!

I think we're getting far afield here, but I'm not sure that all follows logically.

First of all, Natrin's barrow is a fort, not a city. Just one large building, with some towers. Yes, he did an epic ball of balefire, but a city-sized version of that doesn't appear to be possible. That said, I don't disagree with your suggestions re: Rand Nuke (or Forsaken-nuke!)

So, imagine a city of reasonable size, which, in this world, probably has a few hundred thousand people? So, each population point is, say, 5-10 thousand people? So, an Aes Sedai is launching 5-10 thousand "individual lances" at individual troops? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Either they're simply blasting soldiers and battlements, (hurting the city's defenses), or they're doing the "ball of bale" like Rand, and killing innocents.

Again, though, we're pretty far afield, here. I can't tell if you actually feel strongly that sa'angreal *should* lower population - that it really helps us that much. We obviously disagree on the flavor of it, but I haven't heard a mechanical argument that says this is necessary, anyways (beyond that it exists in BNW).

So, what I propose follows. Accept or reject this proposal, and I will accept that decision:

neither angreal nor sa'angreal lower population or can destroy cities. The Randnuke and comparable attacks from Forsaken do. These could theoretically be flavored as drawing from the True Power

In any case, this is some epic stuff, which I need to put in the channeling summary. Let me make sure I understand it all well. We have:

- male and female variants of both angreal and sa'angreal
- angreal are available to channelers of all types, sa'angreal are only available to Aes Sedai and Asha'man
- both angreal and sa'angreal can switch between units, which <CONSUMES ACTION IN DISCUSSION ABOVE>
- angreal enable a channeler to strike 4 times within a range of 6. These strikes deal damage to units and cities.
- sa'angreal enable a channeler to strike 6 times within a range of 6. These strikes do additional damage, can be fired at units (and pillage tiles), and create Unravelled Threads <POPULATION HIT PENDING ABOVE>
- male varieties of angreal and sa'angreal do reduced damage, but deal splash damage <DO THEY ALSO HAVE FEWER STRIKES?>
- The "RankNuke" and comparable attacks from the Forsaken act similarly to sa'angreal (though likely without the multiple shots, but with increased power), but do deal population damage, and can destroy cities.

It's sort of an ability, right? Like Foretelling and such, which we figured would make good techs.

yeah, but weather sense doesn't really seem like a learned behavior. Oh well.

Hmmmm, I will find one! My main issue with Design is that while it can have that synonymity with Engineering, it's a very broad word that I think a lot of players won't interpret that way straight away. And given its unlocks, it doesn't need to evoke an engineering-like flavor. What about Tradesmen or Discipline?

Discipline feels too close to Profession and a bunch of the other Military techs we have. Tradesmen doesn't sound like a tech....

Something like Simple Machines seems like a cool idea, though obviously simple machines are too ancient for us to use here. What if we did some reshuffling? Like maybe Measurement became Simple Machines, and then we shifted all of those others to the right (with "Design" being Apprenticeship)?

Or is there something related to that we can put instead of design that isn't just a synonym for it's BNW namesake (machinery, right?)? Like Gears or Gearworks or something.


I am out of time for the moment! Hopefully back tonight to finish!

 

[counterpoint]

I see what you mean here, when I think of Wards from the books, the protective stuff is the first thing that comes to mind for me as well. I wonder if we should go with the Keeping flavor then - it seems like we keep (heh) coming back around to it.

Alternatively, playing into something you mention elsewhere, what if we move the channeler upgrade up to Shared Belief? That's already a channeling-ish tech with its Spark upgrade and the wonders + Culture National Wonder could follow that flavor too.

That would mean that Wards doesn't serve quite the flavor purpose here any more and we could go with a more everyday thing. Given what we're doing with the techs that were Wards briefly, perhaps we should drop this flavor until it becomes more directly relevant? So, for this tech, something like: Ferries, Milling, Grindstones?

I think those last three suggestions are simply too weird when considering they're coming off of New Tongue and Dreaming. I think this one needs to be a little more "in the head," at the very least. If not channeling-related, at least philosophical or something. That is of course problematic, considering the unlocks, which are production-based.

Also, it looks like your "Milling" on the editor is missing a whole lot of techs.

double-Also, I don't think that tech has a channeler upgrade anymore, as that has already been moved to Earth Singing? (see the next quote in your post). So, should move that from your "High Chant" into Earth Singing

In any case, I think Wards may ultimately remain the best result, regardless. I like Milling, quite a bit, actually, but I'm having trouble justifying it coming from those prereqs...

Also, in related news, according to the companion, Keeping was only recently rediscovered in this Age - Moghedian taught it to Egwene during their "sessions." Thus, I think if we use that as a tech at all, it needs to be much, much later in the tree.

I see what you mean about the Prospecting flavor, but I don't think that will be a big issue. It has a recognizable other meaning as well, and is suitably old-world-y while also helpfully working well with a production bonus.

Earth Singing is actual flavor, but I worry it's too obscure and that it looks like different flavor from what it is. (As you've noted, seems to be associated with the Ogier at first glance, or at worst like we made it up but made it try to sound WoT-y.) It makes me think Prospecting would work better here and we should put the channeler upgrade on something else (like Sophistication, or possibly way up on Bookbinding, alongside Sites of Power, which does make some flavor sense).

Reconsidered the above while writing this post, this being Earth Singing solves a lot of problems with the techs around it, so let's stick with that!

Yeah, again, Prospecting doesn't feel suitably Old World to me... more like 19th century.

But yeah, moot - we're sticking with Earth Singing, it seems.

I think either arrangement could work. Profession + Sword Forms also leads very well into Tactics, and I think Prospecting + Tactics leads well into Alloys. New Tongue + Formations seems to fit Profession a bit better than Tactics (Profession captures some of the less directly military flavor of New Tongue).

It's a bit odd that you're talking about Prospecting here. But in any case, I think we're fine keeping this as is.

I think Concoctions is better, but it's still a bit iffy. If we stick with this flavor, would we be better moving the trade route off this tech and onto Letter of Rights, above it? That fits the flavor better and both techs are still useful afterwards.

We could go for Herbalism, or is that too old for this part of the tree?

first off, check the unlocks on Concoctions. there are two trade routes.

I'm fine with Concoctions, but I also think Herbalism could work. It is definitely too old, so I was hoping for something better.

What about Medicine or something like that?

I can go either way on the trade route. Yes, it makes more sense on LoR, but that tech is also fine as it is. It's not great flavor on Conc, but it's not the worst thing, either.

This sounds like a good direction to go in, though I'd like to get it a little closer to the Fireworks flavor. I think the swap of Prospecting and Fertilizer sounds like a good idea overall, so it'd be good to make it fit here.

Your suggestion about Crop Rotation works well here. I've definitely seen that as a tech in some other games, but I can't remember which. It leads into Fireworks a bit better than Heavy Plow.

I don't love how Crop Rotation is thousands of years old. But I'm also willing to think of it as "[Advances in] Crop Rotation" and let it stand.

Unless we axe Wards, as discussed above, in which case this could still fit here. I feel like we've come back around to Keeping several times because it has uniquely useful flavor for us.

keeping discussed above.

Good points, there are actually the same number of prereqs crossing the era boundary here as in BNW. Maybe the lattice appearance is just because of the vertical placement of the techs, with the 5 stacked directly together? I think it might be good to remove the prereq from Profession onto the Fertilizer equivalent (assuming we've swapped them, as discussed elsewhere, I've left this prereq removed in the Editor tree, so it's more clear which one I mean). This creates more clearly defined paths, while still pulling the techs back together going into the next era.

yeah, it's a little wonky with milling and profession splitting into so many techs without so much interconnectivity between them, and then collapsing immediately afterwards. But BNW does that too there so I'm ok with it.

It may not be a problem, the two will have different appearance rates. It stood out to me, but given the problems moving them can create, I'd say we can leave it until we find it's causing a problem.

agreed.

It's still been very useful!

I'm through "L" now, so I'll have some more.

I like option 1! And I think Sophistication can stay the same, at least for now.

agreed. In retrospect, I prefer Bittern over Bitterns, though.

This does present us with another alternative/complement to the previous quote block, "Snakes and Foxes" would play well with the tech-formerly-known-as-Shared-Belief taking a channeling upgrade, to go with its Spark upgrade. And then Sophistication could become High Chant?

I like this idea. The problem with it is that High Chant feels like it really needs to be at least partially cultural. Sophistication is all science (plus some yield stuff that's missing). I find that hard to justify as High Chant.

Below I take issue with Treatises. Perhaps that tech can be a good home for either High Chant? It could also be Snakes & Foxes, but there's no normal wonder there wiating to become the Tower of G. What do you think?

Phew, so I've created a first pass at era 6! And of course used the excel sheet as reference! I wouldn't want to leave out any flavor that we've discussed already.

cool! Thanks.

It's definitely neat to see it in the editor, though I'm finding it's still pretty useful to have the excel sheet. The reason is because there's apparently still some stuff missing in the editor (yield stuff, it seems), and, most importantly, I find it kind of crazy seeing all the different units and buildings there. The sword guy being Kinswoman is kind of hard on the brain, especially now that I'm used to some of the colors of the excel. In any case, I'll maintain the excel sheet alongside the editor, for the time being (attached).

It seems like we added a lot of stuff for our mechanics in this era, more so than previous ones. I'm not sure if that's actually the case numerically (didn't bother counting things in all eras), but if it is, I would say it's likely because we're getting closer to the times of the books, where the flavor is more well defined.

I think that might just be an illusion. Seems pretty typical to me.

So, stuff!

First, I picked out some obvious flavor that we knew we wanted to include: Skimming and Cobbles were pretty quick - as our replacements for Flight and Railroads flavor wise, they fit right in as techs. I knew we wanted something Bloodknife-y, which I've put in as Night's Shade right now, which was the name of the weave for creating Bloodknives in the Age of Legends.

regarding Cobbles, I think we can a should do better. It's true that we plan to go with Cobbled Roads as a thing, but Cobbles themselves are not compelling flavor, nor are they really a compelling "invention."

I wonder if something about Communication or something is the way to go here? Spy defense. Better roads, etc. SEems like it could make sense. I can't figure what precisely to do though.

Skimming is good.

Bloodknives is tricky. The companion doesn't mention that the weave is forgotten, but the wiki does. Is this perhaps a good spot for Fancloth, since there's a Warder upgrade here, and a melee unit? The Bloodknives are not addressed, but that's fine. And there's no big flavor problem. Also, waiting too long for Fancloth is unrealistic, as I'm pretty sure that tech wasn't new to the late-third age.

Next up was Rule of Medians, which we'd discussed directly above and fit quite well onto the tech that unlocked the next science building (equivalent to Plastics).

sounds good

With the addition of Naval Melee 5 and the presence of Naval Ranged 3 in this era (on Electronics) and the Carrier, I figured there was room for a naval tech, which used the Looking Glass flavor that we discussed above quite well. This does beg the question of whether or not we have a unit that will act like the Carrier does, though? Even if we don't, it still fits well and can stand up as a tech. I have noticed here that Naval Ranged 3 is much farther from Naval Ranged 2 than its corresponding Naval Melee counterparts. Do we want to address that back in era 4/5 and make this Naval Ranged 4?

OK, regarding all this naval stuff.. Looking Glass is good and is justified. I'm not sure there's a need for a Carrier replacement. It's true we're lacking functionality by eliminating it, but I don't think there's a way to justify it (or the missile cruiser, etc.). Is there a reason to keep it? What should it be?

I think it is rather wide between the two NvR units. I think one thing to keep in mind is that the Submarine takes some of the functionality/role from the NvR units (minus the land-unit striking). Are we confident that we need the "Anti Naval" unit to be a separate line? Is it not perhaps simpler just to have that be NvR 3 and have it be a unit particularly good again ships (or not)? We're not going to cloak it, so the difference is so subtle as to be sort of pointless, I think.

Also, I could instead imagine somewhere in the late-era 5 having an NvR 3, and then bringing in NvR 4 in early era 7, probably.

Definitely don't think we want Looking Glass to have three units like that, though!

So, between a Settler upgrade, the Happiness3 building, and an Alignment building, I saw the makings of a good expansion-centered WoT flavored tech. I grouped those together around where Replaceable Parts used to be.

A good idea!

Replaceable Parts used to have Melee 6 on it, but with our shuffling of Melee 5 up to Alloys, it needed to move. I moved it down to Night's Shade, which was then feeling like a good candidate to be a spying/military tech.

this could work, though I could also see the mounted and melee units switching places, if only to get the Mel units out of the bottom-row.

This is where I noticed that we're generally much more focused on "military at the bottom of the tree" than BNW is. From this era onwards, BNW's military unit unlocks seem to happen at all levels of the tree (Infantry and Marines are on the highest vertical techs in their columns). So in general I think we can also afford to allow units to float a bit higher than we have in eras before this. Despite that sentiment, Melee 6 on Night's Shade does fulfill our other objective of making the unit upgrade paths require one another as they progress.

right. The difference between Plastics and the bottom there is huge. I do like that Mel 5 leads to 6, though. Is there any way to push it higher? If we push it where Mnt is, as mentioned above, that might help a little - but then we'd be stuck with Mnt being on the very bottom, two units in a row.

The other thing to consider is that there isn't supposed to be Mel 7 for quite some time right? (since we're eliminating Marine) So, maybe, instead, we could simply push Mel 6 into early Era 7, higher up on the tech tree (requiring a through-line from Mel 5).

Also due to our earlier moving of units, and because our single Traveling Squad (teh name! (I know we have a name, but this is fun )) made Skimming much less unlock-ful than Flight was, I moved Range5 back onto Skimming. (Bizarrely, the two "generics" visible on Flight in BNW are both enhancements to unique improvements of civs, which I have decided to leave out of consideration completely, since it doesn't really affect the balance of the tree and should be decided as a part of that civ's uniques.)

I get this in theory, but mechanically I find it somewhat problematic that there's so little space between Range 4 and 5. You could beline in one tech. Might it make more sense to somehow move Rng 5 up or down one slot (assuming you want them in this column)? That way the life of Rng 4 can be similar to what it is in BNW.

Wanting to make the tech-that-was-once-Replaceable-Parts into an expansionist WoT tech, I needed to find a new home for Defense 4, which seems like it can fit quite well with the flavor of Cobbles, and also means that it now ensures it requires the tech that lets the player construct Defense 3. (Whether or not this is actually different depends on what we decide for the prereqs onto Profession.) With this becoming military-ish, as techs go, it seemed like a good place to put Spy 2, which also led well into Night's Shade having the Spy National Wonder.

still not totally solt on the Profession prereqs, but for now they are as you state.

Also not sold on Cobbles (Cobbling would be better, by the way, though probably still not the right choice). But all of that considered, I agree with all that you're proposing here.

With all this shuffling, some techs were now much more unlock heavy than others, mostly due to wonder distribution. I redistributed a lot of the wonders in the first column here to rebalance the techs. It's worth noting that there are three wonders in column 1 of Era 6 that are the "Ideology Wonders" in BNW (Prora, Statue of Liberty, and the Kremlin), and should probably unlock on different techs. I've kept them on different techs here.

all looks good. Good catch with the Philosophy wonders!

Looking at the Radio equivalent, I saw that it was still a good Culture tech, but could also be a home for the Kin unit, which helped a bit with our making military stuff a bit more available to higher parts of the tree from this era onward. I pulled Prestige1 down off of Refrigeration and onto this Culture tech, since Culture and Prestige complement each other well. That led to another wonder moving up in exchange, since Refrigation had lost Happiness3 and Prestige1.

I think the flavor rationale for the Kin here is a little iffy, but I also don't think it matters all that much. I do think that this tech (Treatises) may be a little too epic, now, though. Not sure I have a good suggestion, though. In general, the reshuffling looks good.

The other thing is that if we go Herbal on the Concoctions tech, we could move the Kin to *that* tech and enjoy the better flavor synergy.

So now came some naming! Some of the tweaking changes above were interspersed with choosing names, and I also kept in mind what we've been discussing about making techs lead into each other well. I'm pretty happy with Treatises and Manifests. Both lead on well from Letters of Rights but still connote relevant flavor for their unlocks. Manifests we discussed before as a possible naval-like tech, and as the Refrigation equivalent that unlocks the anti-naval naval unit it has a chance to do that here.

Manifests is OK, but just OK, IMO. A manifest is, after all, just a ledger. Something a bit more extensive than that would be better, I think. The whole "Triangular Trade" thing from Earth's history is a good example of this, but of course that's very earth specific, and I'm not sure what a good WoT-ization would look like. In short, I don't have a particularly swell suggestion for a better tech than Manifests at this point.

I'm less happy, actually, with Treatises. It doesn't seem to fit, for a few reasons. Mostly, it seems like something that likely had already been developed - it seems reasonable that all of these techs (post era 3 at least) were first discovered by some scholar who told everybody about them through a treatise they wrote. So it seems like a weird tech this late in the game. Also, it feels somewhat more scientific/philosophical than Prestige/channeling/Authority related.

I could actually imagine a scenario, though, where we called this tech Sophistication, or something, and moved Treatises back to where Sophistication was. That's a little easier to swallow, maybe. Alternatively, a similar thing could happen with Bookbinding. In any case, it kind of sticks out here.

Both of those lead quite well into Rule of Medians, the flavor of which is discussed above.

agreed.

Then there's the one that I've currently labeled Festivals. My main concern with this name is that it seems like something that would have become available earlier in history than this part of the tree. But New Era-specific festivals would have been cropping up at about this time. And a Herbalist-ish flavor + Fireworks is a pretty awesome lead in for Festivals, flavor wise. It also fits well with the WoT flavored, expansionist nature of the unlocks on that tech.

I share your concern. Also, Festivals are available as Customs unlocks for the Paths, so Festivals will more than likely already exist by this point, anyways.

Maybe this is where Shared Belief goes? Other than that, maybe there are similar concepts like Identity or Nationhood or something like that that could work (note that the last thing didn't *really* exist on Earth until the 19th century, though of course versions of it did long before)

Looking Glass's prereqs aren't as much of a direct flavor win though. Treatises makes some sense, but Festivals only vaguely so.

Yes. It's possible, actually, that if we come up with something more interesting for Manifests, that *that* tech name could go here, and you could give Looking Glass to the tech currently called "Manifests," if that helps.

Going from Cobbles to Night's Shade also isn't very direct. Given that Night's Shade, the weave, was never actually rediscovered in the books, it might be good to rename Night's Shade, somehow keeping the link to the Bloodknives. It's otherwise a spy-ish/military tech, which is why I ended up moving the Warder upgrade onto here.

yes. Discussed somewhat above. Fancloth is my suggestion, as of now.

And finally, we have Unnamed Tech 6, which has AA1 and Horse 4 (stolen from Night's Shade, which now has plenty of unlocks, but replaces Combustion, where the Landship used to live). I couldn't really come up with a name for this one. AA1 being unlocked by the next tech along from Skimming makes a lot of sense, but otherwise I wasn't sure what to call it.

yeah, this one's hard.

The other weird idea is to reshuffle some things in order to fit the following techs: Ter'angreal and Fancloth. Imagine, for instance:

Skimming and "Cobbles" leads to Ter'angreal, which has, at minimum, Anti-Gate 1, Bloodknives, and a T'a'r upgrade (I think we wanted one somehwere, not sure if it was here or next era). The ter'angreal flavor justifies all of these very very well.

Cobbles leads to Fancloth (somehow.... again, need a better name!) which has, at minimum, the Warder upgrade.

The other abilities (Mnt 4, Mel 6, and Spy (Nat.) can be distributed as seems fitting for balance and through-line. The key thing, is of course, that the ter'angreal flavor justifies the first set of items above. A possible configuration:

Ter'angreal - Anti-Gate 1, Mnt 4, Bloodknives, T'a'r
Fancloth - Mel 6, Spy (Nat.), Warder

thoughts?

Otherwise, I suppose some other generic military tech name will do...

Unnamed Tech 4 is off at the start of Era 7, just to show where I figured a good double-length prereq could go from the first column of this era.

yeah could be good!

Cool, so I'll still be digging through the companion. I'm not doing another flavor-dump until I finish - unless I find something that sounds like a Tech. But what should I do with this information? I'm finding things that might make good Unit names, etc. - where to house all of that?

I've attached excel sheet v4.

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, OK. I'm with you now. I don't love having 4 separate units, but I do think that clunkiness might be the least clunky option.

Coolio, sounds good.

I'd say that it's "rebase" range can't be too big, though. Certainly not as big as it's attack range. I know that will limit its usefulness. Great. Logically, you should be able to kill a unit if you suspect it has one of these on it. I don't want it to be impossible to do so.

Yeah, 2 or 3 seems like it could work?

I do think we need to clarify exactly how much of an action this consumes. It seems logical that it would consume both the passing unit and receiving unit's action. I can understand it only consuming of the units' actions, though. It does certainly seem that from balancing perspectives, you shouldn't be able to "rebase" and fire on the same turn (such as is the case with nukes). What do you propose?

Mechanically, I think we want to consume all remaining movement on the unit being passed to. I'm struggling to come up for a flavor justification about why that would happen though - it seems like consuming all of the passer's movement makes more logical sense. By consuming all of the target's movement, we ensure that it can't be used to attack on the same turn. We make moving and passing kind of awkward, but still doable. It might be confusing that having one unit take an action causes a different unit to consume all of its movement though.

The other way around, (consume all of the passer's remaining movement), makes sense from a "units taking actions" point of view. We'd probably need to just disallow the angreal attack on the turn it was passed. This would make pass-and-move flow a bit easier.

I'm not sure which I prefer. I wouldn't want to go with consuming both of their movement, because that's a serious action deficit for that turn and would make rebasing angreal while moving an army (even one that wasn't fighting anything, just getting somewhere) really annoying.

In both cases, I'd say we should consume remaining movement, rather than require all of the unit's movement. Otherwise it's really frustrating to move them. It's also consistent with how CiV deals with movement-consuming stuff like attacking (consumes all, but can be done with only 1, units with special move-after abilities not included) and moving into forests/jungle/hill (they consume 2 movement to move over, but you can move onto them with 1, so if that's the edge of your movement it's more efficient to go that way).

I think that sounds fine. Definitely going to have to balance it, though. Guaranteed to be way off when we arbitrarily choose values of damage that first time...

Yep, one of the many thousands of tweaks we'll make later!

I think the term most used is that it "unravels the pattern." So we could go with Unravelled Thread or Unravelled Pattern

Unravelled Pattern sounds like a plan!

I think we're getting far afield here, but I'm not sure that all follows logically.

First of all, Natrin's barrow is a fort, not a city. Just one large building, with some towers. Yes, he did an epic ball of balefire, but a city-sized version of that doesn't appear to be possible. That said, I don't disagree with your suggestions re: Rand Nuke (or Forsaken-nuke!)

So, imagine a city of reasonable size, which, in this world, probably has a few hundred thousand people? So, each population point is, say, 5-10 thousand people? So, an Aes Sedai is launching 5-10 thousand "individual lances" at individual troops? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Either they're simply blasting soldiers and battlements, (hurting the city's defenses), or they're doing the "ball of bale" like Rand, and killing innocents.

Again, though, we're pretty far afield, here. I can't tell if you actually feel strongly that sa'angreal *should* lower population - that it really helps us that much. We obviously disagree on the flavor of it, but I haven't heard a mechanical argument that says this is necessary, anyways (beyond that it exists in BNW).

So, what I propose follows. Accept or reject this proposal, and I will accept that decision:

neither angreal nor sa'angreal lower population or can destroy cities. The Randnuke and comparable attacks from Forsaken do. These could theoretically be flavored as drawing from the True Power

I see it more as them killing a whole bunch of militia people that are otherwise just citizens. But anyway, flavor aside, because the mechanics make it moot, as you've said!

Side note, I think there is a formula for going from population number to actual population (where the Population statistic comes from on the Demographics screen). I don't think the scale is linear, so one point difference at higher numbers counts as more people. (So 1 to 2 might only be 500 different, but 19-20 might be 50,000 different.)

I'm totally cool with making population-decrease a feature of only the Randnuke and Forsaken balefires. So let's do that!

In any case, this is some epic stuff, which I need to put in the channeling summary. Let me make sure I understand it all well. We have:

- male and female variants of both angreal and sa'angreal
- angreal are available to channelers of all types, sa'angreal are only available to Aes Sedai and Asha'man
- both angreal and sa'angreal can switch between units, which <CONSUMES ACTION IN DISCUSSION ABOVE>
- angreal enable a channeler to strike 4 times within a range of 6. These strikes deal damage to units and cities.

All sounds good!

- sa'angreal enable a channeler to strike 6 times within a range of 6. These strikes do additional damage, can be fired at units (and pillage tiles), and create Unravelled Threads <POPULATION HIT PENDING ABOVE>

Did we decide to give sa'angreal boosted range as well? Should this be a range of 8?

- male varieties of angreal and sa'angreal do reduced damage, but deal splash damage <DO THEY ALSO HAVE FEWER STRIKES?>

I think trading off targeted damage for splash damage should make them fair enough without reducing their strikes as well. It's certainly a good option for us if they do prove too strong though.

- The "RankNuke" and comparable attacks from the Forsaken act similarly to sa'angreal (though likely without the multiple shots, but with increased power), but do deal population damage, and can destroy cities.

Agreed. Single-shot, explosion like the BNW Nuke style, population damage, and destroys cities under a certain population. (Might as well stick with BNW's value of 6?)

yeah, but weather sense doesn't really seem like a learned behavior. Oh well.

Ah well, we might change it later!

Discipline feels too close to Profession and a bunch of the other Military techs we have. Tradesmen doesn't sound like a tech....

Something like Simple Machines seems like a cool idea, though obviously simple machines are too ancient for us to use here. What if we did some reshuffling? Like maybe Measurement became Simple Machines, and then we shifted all of those others to the right (with "Design" being Apprenticeship)?

Or is there something related to that we can put instead of design that isn't just a synonym for it's BNW namesake (machinery, right?)? Like Gears or Gearworks or something.

Huh, I figured Gears were invented later in history than where we're talking about here, but according to Wikipedia they've been around a surprisingly long time. I like Gearworks. Here you're suggesting it replace Design? Or go where Measurement is and still do the shift right? I'm fine with either choice.

 

[S3rgeus]

Also, it looks like your "Milling" on the editor is missing a whole lot of techs.

Yep, improvement yields aren't supported yet. (They're their own tables that related the improvement to the yield and value, whereas all the ones I've added so far are just flags on the tech, like AllowsOpenBorders.) I'll be making a start on getting that working though!

double-Also, I don't think that tech has a channeler upgrade anymore, as that has already been moved to Earth Singing? (see the next quote in your post). So, should move that from your "High Chant" into Earth Singing

Moved!

I think those last three suggestions are simply too weird when considering they're coming off of New Tongue and Dreaming. I think this one needs to be a little more "in the head," at the very least. If not channeling-related, at least philosophical or something. That is of course problematic, considering the unlocks, which are production-based.

...

In any case, I think Wards may ultimately remain the best result, regardless. I like Milling, quite a bit, actually, but I'm having trouble justifying it coming from those prereqs...

I see what you mean about that prereq flavor. All good points! Wards it is then!

Also, in related news, according to the companion, Keeping was only recently rediscovered in this Age - Moghedian taught it to Egwene during their "sessions." Thus, I think if we use that as a tech at all, it needs to be much, much later in the tree.

Good points!

It's a bit odd that you're talking about Prospecting here. But in any case, I think we're fine keeping this as is.

Woops, I forgot to change this to Earth Singing after I reconsidered that flavor! Sounds good then.

first off, check the unlocks on Concoctions. there are two trade routes.

Good point! This was a manifestation of a bug where renaming a tech that had a generic unlock from BNW (like trade routes) created a duplicate when reloaded! Weaves had a duplicate Open Borders unlock for the same reason. I've fixed that locally and will publish a new version probably tomorrow with some other fixes. (Until then, I've deleted the duplicates created this time!)

I'm fine with Concoctions, but I also think Herbalism could work. It is definitely too old, so I was hoping for something better.

What about Medicine or something like that?

Medicine does feel a bit modern though, like it would come up after the events of the books. I feel like the WoT tech didn't quite get to the stage of separating medicine from "this should help". I do agree Herbalism is too old though. Concoctions should work for now!

I can go either way on the trade route. Yes, it makes more sense on LoR, but that tech is also fine as it is. It's not great flavor on Conc, but it's not the worst thing, either.

I'd look at it the other way around, is Concoctions short on unlocks without it? It seems like either tech could stand without the trade route, so we might as well put it where the flavor works best? I don't think the position of the trade route on the tree (vertically) makes much difference here either.

I don't love how Crop Rotation is thousands of years old. But I'm also willing to think of it as "[Advances in] Crop Rotation" and let it stand.

Agreed, sounds good.

yeah, it's a little wonky with milling and profession splitting into so many techs without so much interconnectivity between them, and then collapsing immediately afterwards. But BNW does that too there so I'm ok with it.

Sounds good.

I'm through "L" now, so I'll have some more.

Awesome!

agreed. In retrospect, I prefer Bittern over Bitterns, though.

I prefer Bitterns of the two. Mostly because "Bitterns" gets invented as a thing that can be made, whereas Bittern is more like one of them.

I like this idea. The problem with it is that High Chant feels like it really needs to be at least partially cultural. Sophistication is all science (plus some yield stuff that's missing). I find that hard to justify as High Chant.

Below I take issue with Treatises. Perhaps that tech can be a good home for either High Chant? It could also be Snakes & Foxes, but there's no normal wonder there wiating to become the Tower of G. What do you think?

I think I've got my head around what we're changing here. How about an epic switcheroo based on what you're saying here and below. Going from the state of the Editor tech tree:

High Chant becomes Snakes & Foxes
Bookbinding becomes Sophistication
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes High Chant

This means we'd lose Bookbinding. I could see us keeping Bookbinding and losing Sophistication instead?

cool! Thanks.

It's definitely neat to see it in the editor, though I'm finding it's still pretty useful to have the excel sheet. The reason is because there's apparently still some stuff missing in the editor (yield stuff, it seems), and, most importantly, I find it kind of crazy seeing all the different units and buildings there. The sword guy being Kinswoman is kind of hard on the brain, especially now that I'm used to some of the colors of the excel. In any case, I'll maintain the excel sheet alongside the editor, for the time being (attached).

The excel sheet had two views when I got here! Hello, lurkers!

Cool, I'll try to get the yields stuff going soon. That's my project for tomorrow, once I've fixed another bug I introduced while putting in a visualization of the prereq count for the currently selected tech! Or more, fix a bug that the prereq count thing revealed, which was already there, but benign until I tried to count a tech's prereqs!

Yeah, the Swordsman as the Kinswoman is super weird. We can use any icon if we want, I just went for Swordsman since I used Warrior for Wilder, but there's no particular reason for it.

regarding Cobbles, I think we can a should do better. It's true that we plan to go with Cobbled Roads as a thing, but Cobbles themselves are not compelling flavor, nor are they really a compelling "invention."

I wonder if something about Communication or something is the way to go here? Spy defense. Better roads, etc. SEems like it could make sense. I can't figure what precisely to do though.

I figured Cobbles was pretty good flavor - what don't you like about it? The invention here is that they're used to make transport better, which ties into the flavor of our totally-not-Railroads upgrade for the Road.

On the flavor of better communication, I can see things like Messengers, Ciphers (plays well into the spy-ishness, there might be a WoT word for this? Doesn't connect to Cobbled Roads the Route though), or Transportation.

EDIT: Filled in my suggestions here!

Bloodknives is tricky. The companion doesn't mention that the weave is forgotten, but the wiki does. Is this perhaps a good spot for Fancloth, since there's a Warder upgrade here, and a melee unit? The Bloodknives are not addressed, but that's fine. And there's no big flavor problem. Also, waiting too long for Fancloth is unrealistic, as I'm pretty sure that tech wasn't new to the late-third age.

Yeah, Fancloth sounds like a good one for here!

OK, regarding all this naval stuff.. Looking Glass is good and is justified. I'm not sure there's a need for a Carrier replacement. It's true we're lacking functionality by eliminating it, but I don't think there's a way to justify it (or the missile cruiser, etc.). Is there a reason to keep it? What should it be?

I'm not really sure what role it could fulfill, aside from transporting-but-not-firing (sa')angreal, which seems super niche for a whole unit, and we've solved the transporting across the continents thing elsewhere. We could let players base Gateway units on them, but given we've solved the continents thing, I think we can avoid the direct-from-BNW mechanic here to make the mod stand out more.

So no Carriers, it looks like?

I think it is rather wide between the two NvR units. I think one thing to keep in mind is that the Submarine takes some of the functionality/role from the NvR units (minus the land-unit striking). Are we confident that we need the "Anti Naval" unit to be a separate line? Is it not perhaps simpler just to have that be NvR 3 and have it be a unit particularly good again ships (or not)? We're not going to cloak it, so the difference is so subtle as to be sort of pointless, I think.

I think having the anti-naval unit as a separate line is still useful. It provides variety during a naval war. If we were to make NvR 3 an anti-naval unit, then that affects all of the NvR units from 4 onwards. Either we remove the bonus when upgrading, which is annoying for players (our whole changing from horse to helicopter stuff meaning promotion resets) or keep it around and all we've really done is made navies into more glass cannons toward the end of the game, rather than make NvR 3 stand out.

Agreed, I don't think we'll cloak it, I think it will just be another (shorter) ship upgrade path.

Also, I could instead imagine somewhere in the late-era 5 having an NvR 3, and then bringing in NvR 4 in early era 7, probably.

That works for me in the context of NvR 3, but if we don't have a Carrier replacement, we'll also need to move something else onto Looking Glass. (Could that be the anti-naval ship?)

Definitely don't think we want Looking Glass to have three units like that, though!

Looks like we'll get rid of at least one off there, possibly two!

this could work, though I could also see the mounted and melee units switching places, if only to get the Mel units out of the bottom-row.

Sounds good to me. Done. We can make the Fancloth flavor work with Horse 4, right?

right. The difference between Plastics and the bottom there is huge. I do like that Mel 5 leads to 6, though. Is there any way to push it higher? If we push it where Mnt is, as mentioned above, that might help a little - but then we'd be stuck with Mnt being on the very bottom, two units in a row.

I think switching them around will be ok and we can address this more aggressively in the next era. There aren't many techs to move the Melee unit to in this column.

The other thing to consider is that there isn't supposed to be Mel 7 for quite some time right? (since we're eliminating Marine) So, maybe, instead, we could simply push Mel 6 into early Era 7, higher up on the tech tree (requiring a through-line from Mel 5).

The Marine isn't part of the normal Melee upgrade path, so I don't think he plays directly into where we unlock this unit. Like we've done with the naval units, we could move Melee 7 earlier (he's column 1 Era 8 in BNW), to like column 2 Era 7? Or we could even leave him there, allowing more distance between the units toward the end of the tree. We do have an Era 9 to play with where BNW doesn't, even if it's shorter than the other eras (has one column instead of two, not including "Future Tech"). If we move Melee 7 back to column 2 Era 7, we could have some kind of very-endgame Melee 8 unit in Era 9.

I get this in theory, but mechanically I find it somewhat problematic that there's so little space between Range 4 and 5. You could beline in one tech. Might it make more sense to somehow move Rng 5 up or down one slot (assuming you want them in this column)? That way the life of Rng 4 can be similar to what it is in BNW.

Good point. It could potentially switch places with Defense4 or the Wonder on Cobbles? I don't think it lines up well with the general theme of the tech above (currently Festivals) for us to move it there.

still not totally solt on the Profession prereqs, but for now they are as you state.

Cool, sounds good.

Also not sold on Cobbles (Cobbling would be better, by the way, though probably still not the right choice). But all of that considered, I agree with all that you're proposing here.

I think Cobbles works well in the plural, like Alloys, Wards, Letters of Rights, etc.

I think the flavor rationale for the Kin here is a little iffy, but I also don't think it matters all that much. I do think that this tech (Treatises) may be a little too epic, now, though. Not sure I have a good suggestion, though. In general, the reshuffling looks good.

The other thing is that if we go Herbal on the Concoctions tech, we could move the Kin to *that* tech and enjoy the better flavor synergy.

If we go for the switcheroo mentioned above, then the Kin would be on High Chant, which seems like a better flavor line up? The Herbal stuff would be a good flavor match, but I', not sure if we want the Kin to be moved back into Era 5. Seems like we're going for Concoctions though, which makes that moot.

Manifests is OK, but just OK, IMO. A manifest is, after all, just a ledger. Something a bit more extensive than that would be better, I think. The whole "Triangular Trade" thing from Earth's history is a good example of this, but of course that's very earth specific, and I'm not sure what a good WoT-ization would look like. In short, I don't have a particularly swell suggestion for a better tech than Manifests at this point.

I think Manifests is more about it being Shipping Manifests (though we shouldn't use that name), which ties in well with the naval unit, trade route, and can for the wonder. The Oil Platform will totally depend on what we do with that resource.

Otherwise, if we move the anti-naval unit off it as discussed elsewhere, there's some WoT lore about being able to trade with Shara (Cairhien and the Aiel). I'm not sure what we should call that though, given that we can't use the specific nations' flavor since they're civs. Something about a Blood Bond or the like? Or maybe a reference to Avendesora somehow?

I'm less happy, actually, with Treatises. It doesn't seem to fit, for a few reasons. Mostly, it seems like something that likely had already been developed - it seems reasonable that all of these techs (post era 3 at least) were first discovered by some scholar who told everybody about them through a treatise they wrote. So it seems like a weird tech this late in the game. Also, it feels somewhat more scientific/philosophical than Prestige/channeling/Authority related.

I could actually imagine a scenario, though, where we called this tech Sophistication, or something, and moved Treatises back to where Sophistication was. That's a little easier to swallow, maybe. Alternatively, a similar thing could happen with Bookbinding. In any case, it kind of sticks out here.

This is a lot of the source for my switcheroo suggestion above, so covered up there, for many of the reasons you state here!

I share your concern. Also, Festivals are available as Customs unlocks for the Paths, so Festivals will more than likely already exist by this point, anyways.

Maybe this is where Shared Belief goes? Other than that, maybe there are similar concepts like Identity or Nationhood or something like that that could work (note that the last thing didn't *really* exist on Earth until the 19th century, though of course versions of it did long before)

What about Bloodlines or something like that? It calls out the flavor for both the Two Rivers and Seanchan, which is an odd pairing, about how much of the WoT world's expansion is affected by the people who came before. It doesn't tie into Fireworks as well as Festivals, but it does also make sense with Concoctions.

Yes. It's possible, actually, that if we come up with something more interesting for Manifests, that *that* tech name could go here, and you could give Looking Glass to the tech currently called "Manifests," if that helps.

Possibly, let's see what we work out with those other names!

yeah, this one's hard.

The other weird idea is to reshuffle some things in order to fit the following techs: Ter'angreal and Fancloth. Imagine, for instance:

Skimming and "Cobbles" leads to Ter'angreal, which has, at minimum, Anti-Gate 1, Bloodknives, and a T'a'r upgrade (I think we wanted one somehwere, not sure if it was here or next era). The ter'angreal flavor justifies all of these very very well.

Cobbles leads to Fancloth (somehow.... again, need a better name!) which has, at minimum, the Warder upgrade.

The other abilities (Mnt 4, Mel 6, and Spy (Nat.) can be distributed as seems fitting for balance and through-line. The key thing, is of course, that the ter'angreal flavor justifies the first set of items above. A possible configuration:

Ter'angreal - Anti-Gate 1, Mnt 4, Bloodknives, T'a'r
Fancloth - Mel 6, Spy (Nat.), Warder

thoughts?

Otherwise, I suppose some other generic military tech name will do...

I don't think I like the Ter'angreal flavor at this stage of the tree. The making of new ter'angreal is something that is a big deal story point in the books, so I think it would be an ideal thing for us to call out in the endgame, like in Era 8. At this stage it would be more about discovering ter'angreal, like the Seanchan did to create Bloodknives, as you've noted, but in Era 8 it could be the "making ter'angreal tech from the books.

Is there flavor that we can do related to the anti-Gate unit? Some kind of tactic that's particularly effective against enemy channelers using Traveling to position military forces? Or maybe a T'a'r scouting flavor (particularly if we're having a T'a'r upgrade here)? Dreamspying isn't real flavor, but its meaning is fairly obvious. (I don't see a word in the wiki or companions that means "spying from t'a'r", but if there is one, that would be awesome!)

Cool, so I'll still be digging through the companion. I'm not doing another flavor-dump until I finish - unless I find something that sounds like a Tech. But what should I do with this information? I'm finding things that might make good Unit names, etc. - where to house all of that?

Awesome, thanks! It could be good to drop that on here, just in note form in one post, rather than something we break down with quote blocks? That way we can refer back to it when we're doing units and stuff.

I've attached excel sheet v4.

For the lurkers!

 

[counterpoint]

No time for full post right now, but wanted to mention a few things:

1) We forgot about Polearms! BNW doesn't have any in Era 6, I don't think. The issue is, we also moved our last Pol unit (lancer equiv) up a column. Considering the epic length that is already between lancer and anti-tank gun, combined with us moving Pol 3 up, it does seem like we need to put a Pol unit somewhere in era 6. Going from 4 (column 1) to 7 (column 1) seems crazy. Where do you think it should go, mechanically? 6 column 1 or 2?

2) Also, I've actually been starting a "Tech Tree" summary - basically, compiling the techs we already have settled into text form. I've noticed that we've kept "direct line" between all units except polearm. Fine. we've noted that. The nuttything is that Pol is *completely* indirect, as far as I can tell - no line from Pol 1 to 2, and no line from 2 to 3. This is rather striking. Are we ok with this, or is that too far.

and yes, we are very "bottom of tree" heavy on the melee units. ?I'd really like to switch that up, maybe even finding a way to force the issue in 6. Naval units are similar, but there's at least some relief in sight there.

3) looks like you didn't finish something above. You say

I figured Cobbles was pretty good flavor - what don't you like about it? The invention here is that they're used to make transport better, which ties into the flavor of our totally-not-Railroads upgrade for the Road.

On the flavor of better communication, I can see things like

pretty sure you meant to finish that. curious what you were going to suggest!

 

[counterpoint]

Yeah, 2 or 3 seems like it could work?

If we go with 3, then it's a whole city radius. does that sound good?

Mechanically, I think we want to consume all remaining movement on the unit being passed to. I'm struggling to come up for a flavor justification about why that would happen though - it seems like consuming all of the passer's movement makes more logical sense. By consuming all of the target's movement, we ensure that it can't be used to attack on the same turn. We make moving and passing kind of awkward, but still doable. It might be confusing that having one unit take an action causes a different unit to consume all of its movement though.

The other way around, (consume all of the passer's remaining movement), makes sense from a "units taking actions" point of view. We'd probably need to just disallow the angreal attack on the turn it was passed. This would make pass-and-move flow a bit easier.

I'm not sure which I prefer. I wouldn't want to go with consuming both of their movement, because that's a serious action deficit for that turn and would make rebasing angreal while moving an army (even one that wasn't fighting anything, just getting somewhere) really annoying.

In both cases, I'd say we should consume remaining movement, rather than require all of the unit's movement. Otherwise it's really frustrating to move them. It's also consistent with how CiV deals with movement-consuming stuff like attacking (consumes all, but can be done with only 1, units with special move-after abilities not included) and moving into forests/jungle/hill (they consume 2 movement to move over, but you can move onto them with 1, so if that's the edge of your movement it's more efficient to go that way).

this is tough. I'd say, though, that it is probably simplest to consume the receiving units remaining movement. Would be awesome if we could set it up as an action for the "receiving" unit - "Get sa'angreal". But that's lame, since it'd just be sitting there greyed out for the whole game...

If you think the "disallow its use on turn it's moved" thing won't be too clunky, then let's go with it consuming the passERS movement. If you think it'll be clunky, then let's do the Receiver.

Unravelled Pattern sounds like a plan!

agreed.

Did we decide to give sa'angreal boosted range as well? Should this be a range of 8?

a mistake!

I think trading off targeted damage for splash damage should make them fair enough without reducing their strikes as well. It's certainly a good option for us if they do prove too strong though.

sure.

Agreed. Single-shot, explosion like the BNW Nuke style, population damage, and destroys cities under a certain population. (Might as well stick with BNW's value of 6?)

sounds good. Also... this should give you Shadow points, right? That's what happened to Rand when he did it, I'd say. So overusing the Rand nuke will lower the bonuses you get from your Brightness in the LB.

OK! Pending the decision on pass-off mechanic, I will update the summary. This is what we have:

- male and female variants of both angreal and sa'angreal
- angreal are available to channelers of all types, sa'angreal are only available to Aes Sedai and Asha'man
- both angreal and sa'angreal can switch between units within 3 hexes away, which <CONSUMES ACTION IN DISCUSSION ABOVE>
- angreal enable a channeler to strike 4 times within a range of 6. These strikes deal damage to units and cities.
- sa'angreal enable a channeler to strike 6 times within a range of 8. These strikes do additional damage, can be fired at units (and pillage tiles), and create Unravelled Pattern
- male varieties of angreal and sa'angreal do reduced damage, but deal splash damage
- The "RankNuke" and comparable attacks from the Forsaken deal significant damage in a single shot. These attacks have all the properties of a sa'angreal strike, but also deal 6 population damage, and can destroy cities of population below 6.

Huh, I figured Gears were invented later in history than where we're talking about here, but according to Wikipedia they've been around a surprisingly long time. I like Gearworks. Here you're suggesting it replace Design? Or go where Measurement is and still do the shift right? I'm fine with either choice.

let's do it! Gearworks! Yeah, I'm talking about replacing Design. Not sure if it's a word, but it's close enough!

Medicine does feel a bit modern though, like it would come up after the events of the books. I feel like the WoT tech didn't quite get to the stage of separating medicine from "this should help". I do agree Herbalism is too old though. Concoctions should work for now!

ok. agreed.

I'd look at it the other way around, is Concoctions short on unlocks without it? It seems like either tech could stand without the trade route, so we might as well put it where the flavor works best? I don't think the position of the trade route on the tree (vertically) makes much difference here either.

ok. let's leave it on Conc, then.

Also, gross. The notion that learning mix concoctions leads to the discovery of peat... makes me not want to drink those concoctions.

I prefer Bitterns of the two. Mostly because "Bitterns" gets invented as a thing that can be made, whereas Bittern is more like one of them.

ok, that's fine, but I'll then draw your attention to "Looking Glass," "The Wheel," Compass, "... BNW doesn't appear to be wholly consistent. It's fine, though.

I think I've got my head around what we're changing here. How about an epic switcheroo based on what you're saying here and below. Going from the state of the Editor tech tree:

High Chant becomes Snakes & Foxes
Bookbinding becomes Sophistication
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes High Chant

This means we'd lose Bookbinding. I could see us keeping Bookbinding and losing Sophistication instead?

yes! That's the spirit.

I think let's leave Bookbinding. Thats more WoT-y feeling to me than "sophistication.

The only thing I don't love about this is that High Chant is now particularly late in the tree. So this presumes that the bardic High Chant was only invented a few hundred years before the books. I think that could be OK, but it's also probably the case that it's much older than that. I wish S&F worked well on that later tech (it's missing the Tower of Genji replacement...)....

The other theoretically possibility is that we put Bitterns late (theoretically understandable to have an instrument invented late) and have High Chant be that early tech, which makes sense given the Gleeman unlock. The problem is that the later tech's unlocks doesn't fit the flavor of Bitterns well, while Hich Chant seems to fit it quite well.

So, it looks like we're going with:

High Chant becomes Snakes & Foxes
Bookbinding doesn't change
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes High Chant

unless.... unless we just decide right now that the Tower of G is an Authority-only Wonder. That's a little weird, right? We'd probably want something tower related. But maybe we could make it work, somehow. If we did that, then we'd have this:

High Chant stays
Bookbinding stays
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes S&F

what do you think? Are we crazy to commit to that right now? Or, of course we could move it around and have that be the Liberation or Oppression Wonder, instead. What say you? I won't change anything on the excel until we decide this.

The excel sheet had two views when I got here! Hello, lurkers!

nice, and that's not me. I never tested it.

I'm just going to assume its Brandon Sanderson and Harriet McDougal checking us out

I figured Cobbles was pretty good flavor - what don't you like about it? The invention here is that they're used to make transport better, which ties into the flavor of our totally-not-Railroads upgrade for the Road.

the problem I have with cobbles is just what they literally are. Just. Rocks.

All cobblestone roads are are just rocks with some cement in the middle. To me, that's not a tech that's any more advanced than the masonry equivalents we've already done. So, to me it's not suitable.

Of cousre, that could bring to question whether "cobbled roads" is a sufficient upgrade. But, the thing is, even today, whether a road is paved isn't really a question of whether the maintainer of that road knows how to do it, it's a quesiton of resources and actually literally doing the work. So, I think we could be ok with cobbled roads - but that makes me think that this tech should be an "Infrastructure" tech - not the literal technology itself, but the procedure behind setting up an operation like a transcontinental paved road.

On the flavor of better communication, I can see things like Messengers, Ciphers (plays well into the spy-ishness, there might be a WoT word for this? Doesn't connect to Cobbled Roads the Route though), or Transportation.

EDIT: Filled in my suggestions here!

there's those thoughts!

"Messengers" is perhaps too generic and "primitive." "Transportation" is kind of the same, I think.If we did "Messenger Pigeons" or something - which are used in WoT, it's mentioned a few times, I think - that could work, but that doesn't support us having roads and all this other stuff.

"Ciphers" or something spy-ish could be ok, but it also doesn't fit roads well. What we could do, intead, is go with a "spy" name here, and move Cobbled Roads up to "Festival" (or whatever it becomes), since Festival is likely to be "expansion" oriented regardless. Then, we could move Happ 3 or something down to Cobbles, or something like that.

I really feel like we need a tech name for this that means "communication network" or "oversight". That kind of thing fits well with roads, anti-spy, defense, everything. darn, this one's hard! Administration or Management are so soulless and modern. Down below, I throw out Supply Chains. Something like that, or perhaps phrased better?

Yeah, Fancloth sounds like a good one for here!

agreed!

I'm not really sure what role it could fulfill, aside from transporting-but-not-firing (sa')angreal, which seems super niche for a whole unit, and we've solved the transporting across the continents thing elsewhere. We could let players base Gateway units on them, but given we've solved the continents thing, I think we can avoid the direct-from-BNW mechanic here to make the mod stand out more.

So no Carriers, it looks like?

no carrier!

also, remind me - how did we solve the continents thing? global rebase?

I think having the anti-naval unit as a separate line is still useful. It provides variety during a naval war. If we were to make NvR 3 an anti-naval unit, then that affects all of the NvR units from 4 onwards. Either we remove the bonus when upgrading, which is annoying for players (our whole changing from horse to helicopter stuff meaning promotion resets) or keep it around and all we've really done is made navies into more glass cannons toward the end of the game, rather than make NvR 3 stand out.

Agreed, I don't think we'll cloak it, I think it will just be another (shorter) ship upgrade path.

ok. Since we won't have cloaking, though, let's try to come up with some other way that these are special, then. Like a really long range, or really short range, or fast movement, or something (and no land attacks)

That works for me in the context of NvR 3, but if we don't have a Carrier replacement, we'll also need to move something else onto Looking Glass. (Could that be the anti-naval ship?)

Yes, that's it. Let's put the Anti-Naval Ship on Looking Class, and put the true NvR 3 on Manifests.

Looks like we'll get rid of at least one off there, possibly two!

got rid of one!

Sounds good to me. Done. We can make the Fancloth flavor work with Horse 4, right?

yay! It makes just as much sense as a melee unit there...

The Marine isn't part of the normal Melee upgrade path, so I don't think he plays directly into where we unlock this unit. Like we've done with the naval units, we could move Melee 7 earlier (he's column 1 Era 8 in BNW), to like column 2 Era 7? Or we could even leave him there, allowing more distance between the units toward the end of the tree. We do have an Era 9 to play with where BNW doesn't, even if it's shorter than the other eras (has one column instead of two, not including "Future Tech"). If we move Melee 7 back to column 2 Era 7, we could have some kind of very-endgame Melee 8 unit in Era 9.

I'm fine with either of these paths. I think moving the melee 7 to 7/2 is a decent idea, but then again, we've been doing X column 2 for a LONG time here. We could change things up, surely. But, also, cramming in an era 9 one could be cool, too - our first gun unit, perhaps (flavor only)?

Also, please clarify about era 9. So we're adding total number of techs here? BNW is, of course, just "future tech" - we're having a whole row there? Why do I not remember this...? How does this affect our whole "keep the number of techs the same" thing?

Good point. It could potentially switch places with Defense4 or the Wonder on Cobbles? I don't think it lines up well with the general theme of the tech above (currently Festivals) for us to move it there.

I say move Rng 5 to Cobbles (which will be renamed, I predict!) and move Def 4 up to Skimming. This last bit isn't very flavorful, but it's not any less so than Rng 4 was in the first place.

The other thing is we could move Rng 5 to "Unnamed Tech" and move Anti Gate 1 *back* to Skimming. Is there a key reason we want AG1 to be born *after* gate 1?

I'll do nothing on the excel sheet until we decide this.

If we go for the switcheroo mentioned above, then the Kin would be on High Chant, which seems like a better flavor line up? The Herbal stuff would be a good flavor match, but I', not sure if we want the Kin to be moved back into Era 5. Seems like we're going for Concoctions though, which makes that moot.

Kin on High Chant is still random, but not as bad. Kin could also go down on "Festivals" (which will be renamed) and something else could be sent up there. Align 1 or Happ, maybe.

I think Manifests is more about it being Shipping Manifests (though we shouldn't use that name), which ties in well with the naval unit, trade route, and can for the wonder. The Oil Platform will totally depend on what we do with that resource.

Otherwise, if we move the anti-naval unit off it as discussed elsewhere, there's some WoT lore about being able to trade with Shara (Cairhien and the Aiel). I'm not sure what we should call that though, given that we can't use the specific nations' flavor since they're civs. Something about a Blood Bond or the like? Or maybe a reference to Avendesora somehow?

I know Manifests is shipping manifests. I'm saying that shipping manifests have probably existed for three or four columns at this point....

Regarding the trade..... What about Shipping Rights or something like that? I know it's not something you discover, so much as "negotiate," but that kind of an agreement-focused tech could do the trick. Something like Safe Passage reflects what you're saying, though again, that isn't really a tech... Is this firing any neurons in the right direction, though?

What about Bloodlines or something like that? It calls out the flavor for both the Two Rivers and Seanchan, which is an odd pairing, about how much of the WoT world's expansion is affected by the people who came before. It doesn't tie into Fireworks as well as Festivals, but it does also make sense with Concoctions.

Bloodlines is ok, but a little odd in that it feels like a Path or a Lineage-related thing, in this game.

We haven't had a history tech yet, because we don't want to abuse that flavor, which pops up elsewehre (e.g. Historian).

I am thinking that "Shared Belief" is pointing towards the right thing, in that it fits all the unlocks here. I want to say Shared History, but for the History thing. Is there a more WoT-friendly version of "Manifest Destiny"? That's the flavor we're going for. The problem is that these things fit the unlocks well, but send us far afield of the prereqs.

What about Civil Pride or something along those lines?

The prereqs really do support "Festivals" - is there a way we can spin that into a synonym that doesn't tread on the Customs that are literal festivals? National Feast Day or something?

I don't think I like the Ter'angreal flavor at this stage of the tree. The making of new ter'angreal is something that is a big deal story point in the books, so I think it would be an ideal thing for us to call out in the endgame, like in Era 8. At this stage it would be more about discovering ter'angreal, like the Seanchan did to create Bloodknives, as you've noted, but in Era 8 it could be the "making ter'angreal tech from the books.

I know. You're right. This would need to be "finding" them, which isn't so awesome.

Is there flavor that we can do related to the anti-Gate unit? Some kind of tactic that's particularly effective against enemy channelers using Traveling to position military forces? Or maybe a T'a'r scouting flavor (particularly if we're having a T'a'r upgrade here)? Dreamspying isn't real flavor, but its meaning is fairly obvious. (I don't see a word in the wiki or companions that means "spying from t'a'r", but if there is one, that would be awesome!)

don't want to go with the made-up-flavor-that-sounds-like-flavor here if we can get away with it.

Don't think there's really a name for the Dream Spying. And keep in mind that there isn't *really* a T'a'r upgrade here - that was just to make ter'angreal make sense! So no need to force that - and also, T'a'r doesn't fit the rest of the stuff so well, anyways.

I think for this tech we probably need to go straight-up military and/or weapons-technology. It's just too easy to justify, what with the Melee unit here and the "hard to wrap your brain around" Anti-Gate unit here.

So.... going with a defensive focus (anti-gate), we could use Troop Movements, Advanced Maneuvers, Battlefield Surveyance, Battlefield Scouting, Supply Chains (this kind of thing could actually be used for Cobbles, above), or Battlefield Intelligence. Anything good?

Awesome, thanks! It could be good to drop that on here, just in note form in one post, rather than something we break down with quote blocks? That way we can refer back to it when we're doing units and stuff.

yeah, I'll figure something out. Don't want it to be totally lost in the shuffle, though.

So, don't forget to think about Pol 4! I do think we should probably have one here somewhere. If we continue to not care about direct line for Pol units, I could imagine it going on Fireworks or Festivals, or something. Otherwise, Cobbles or "UNNAMED", depending on where you want it.

It looks like the structure of everything is mostly set, and we're just working on the specific unlocks and names. - do feel free to get started on Era 7 when you have a chance!

 

[counterpoint]

MISCELLANEOUS FLAVOR FROM COMPANION

This post is a temporary holding place for some flavor I found while taking a very cursory pass through the Wheel of Time Companion. Note that this pass through the companion was looking for:

Tech-related flavor
potential military units or uniques

and was definitely not looking for:
Wonders
People
potential legendary works

we will definitely have to make another pass or two when the time comes to fill out our list of Wonders, or when looking for names of Legendary People or Legendary Works.

Also, I recently realized that I probably should have dug out wonders more carefully this time around, not because we need Wonders any time soon, but because potential Wonders (or unique locations) specific to certain civs might be most valuable reappropriated as UBs (something like a "Burial Tomb" for BNW might be an example of this).

Also note that this list does not include flavor that is particularly specific to civs. That seems hilariously stupid, doesn't it? The reason is because I have a [mostly done] "Civs and Uniques" framing post that will be dropped once we finish the techs. The civ-specific flavor (e.g., the "White Lions," a band of Queen's Guard in Caemlyn) will be put in that post, where it will be more useful. If we need that flavor for generic units instead, that's fine, since we'll be looking at the UU's before we do generics anyways. We'll know at this point, which things are "leftovers"

anyways

Objects and things in the world
Herbs - a great many of them. I started our writing them out, and then gave up once I realized it was pointless. some were acem, andilay, blisterweed, bluewort, boneknit, chainleaf, corenroot, crimson thorn (also poison), dogword, dogweed, feverbane, flatweed, goatstongue, greenwort, goosemint, healall, heartleaf, lionheart
Aspin rot - poisonous plant (stopped looking for these eventually)
Avendesora
catfern - used for those who lie (a plant)
forkroot - anti channeling herb
Anchorage (port/harbor)
Razorlace
Running Sheepsfoot (knot)
Shama - AoL musical instrument

the natural world
bellfruit
biteme
capar - aiel boar
cemaros (tempests)
Coin pepper
t'mat - edible fruit in waste

Cosmology
Age Lace
Colors - weird colors the three superboys felt/saw when thinking of each other in later books
Dreamshard - mini world, closed off from rest of dreamworld
Number of Chaos/Worlds that Might be (related to Portal Stones)
Web of Destiny
Time of Change (end of an age)

People and Jobs
shatayan - house keeper
Younglings
Captain-General of Green Ajah
Coalition - allies during Aiel War
Knitting Circle - ruling elders of Kin (in Ebou Dar, so possibly a Unique of theirs), aka Elders
First Clerk - in Caemlyn (Halwin Norry)
Dockmaster
Cobbler, Cooper
Lamplighter - patrol borderlander cities and keep things lit.

Possible Techs or related concepts
Algode - plant fiber
bellfounding
Thatching
constellations, especially The Three Geese, which point to North.
Lighttowers (there are a few of these, such as Eastpoint Lighttower - could be Wonders but also could just be our name for lighthouse)
Essays on Reason
Brickmason - the term they use in the books, apparently
Firesticks - invented by Aludra (illuminator). appears to be matches. also called strikers
Lightmakers - in Aviendha's vision - Seanchan in future using these. Illuminated Ones
Lightstick - from AoL, glowstick. starts fire
glowbulb - from AoL, lightbulb
Jo-car, jumper - AoL transportation
Law of War - from W.T.
Law of Unintended Consequences
Lofting Tubes - used to launch fireworks
Power-wrought weapons
Pumpwagon - in fire fighting
Radun's Standard of Deviation (logical principle)
riverboats - riverships
steamwagon
Wash-Leather - used to make coin purses

Units or combat
Ashandarei - Mat's spear thing
Banner-General - in Band of Red Hand and Seanchan
Redarm - in band
Captain-General of Caemlyn Queen's Guard, or of Seanchan, or of Band of RH
Dragon's Eggs - cannonballs fired from dragons - exploding, it seems - may have been special and not the typical rounds used in Dragons
Dreadbane - title in Borderlands given to one who has slain a Myrddraal (could be used as Unique)
Longboats
Hundredman (whitecloaks)
Thief-catcher/thief-taker
sniffer
Greatship
Sword-Bard
Heron-Marked Blade
Reimon's Eagles - unit in Band of RH
Roarstick - gun-like weapon created by Aludra
sword moves - there's a list of the forms
Talmanes' Thunderbolts (in band of RH)
White Ribbon (symbol of Truce in Arad Doman)
Wolf Guard - perrin's guard

Channeling
Aligning the Matrix - metal-related Talent
Arrows of Fire - battle weave
Artham - ter'angreal that lets you hide form the dark one
Binder - controls channelers (from AoL)
flame and the void/ oneness
folded light - invisibility
Grand Emergence - very mysterious Red Ajah thing (would need to looki it up again!)
Inverted Weave - undetectable
Mindtrap
Need - leads you to things in T'a'r
Nym (constructs)
Talisman of Growing (ogier)
Penance (and mortification of the flesh)
Ring of Tamyrlin - famous ter'angreal (name Amyrilyn may be corruption of this word)
saa - flecks in the eye - from using True power
Sealed to the flame (secret in W.T.)
Shadow-Forgers - creatures in Thakandar
sleepweavers - sleep ter'angreal
Vacuole - "bubble" in pattern ( Mogh got trapped in one once)
View-Well - AoL illusion
Vileness - black ajah something-or-other
Wayline - locate somebody channeling (a forsaken uses it)
Zomara - aginor's constructs. black-eyed androgynous servants.

Culture
Aptarigine Cycles - set of epics (stopped looking for these early in the process
Aleth-Loriel - a song (stopped looking for these early)
Meane sol Ahelle - a composer (stopped looking for these early)
Arrays - card game
Bird Calls
Bounce (game)
coronation festival
Creed (of the Asha'men)
Fire Wands - used by gleemen in fire eating
Guestright - specifically in Malkier, but might be more general
Katar - a CS in modern times that we have forgotten about, as it doesn't really pop up in the books much
Long Exile - for Ogier, or Long Wandering
Longing (ogier)
N'Shar - a blood oath sworn on the Shadow Coast
Nameday Sword (in borderlands, given to you)
Oaths
Book of Translation (ogier)
Treesong
Queen's Writ (laws in Andor)
Sealbreaker - an AS dubbed Logain this
Seed Singing (ogier)
Silk Path
Tai'shar - "true blood" ala taishar manetheren
Tairen maze - embroidery pattern
The Tenets - whitecloaks
Troubles - Whitecloak War
Wild Hunt
wolfkin - wolfbrothers

Wonders (stopped looking for these very early on)
Amahn'rukane - statue
Chair of Remorse
Circuit of Heaven
Gold Road
Causeway of the Northern Star
Silver Circuit race track)

 

[S3rgeus]

Tech Tree Editor changes! As noted in the Tech Tree Editor topic, I made several changes yesterday, including support for all of the improvement yields and other generics that we were missing before! (And Processes, like Production into Gold.) I've gone through and added all of the improvement yields and such from the Excel sheet to the Editor tree. (I even renamed the LP improvements! ) I think I got all of them, but please check I haven't missed any!

1) We forgot about Polearms! BNW doesn't have any in Era 6, I don't think. The issue is, we also moved our last Pol unit (lancer equiv) up a column. Considering the epic length that is already between lancer and anti-tank gun, combined with us moving Pol 3 up, it does seem like we need to put a Pol unit somewhere in era 6. Going from 4 (column 1) to 7 (column 1) seems crazy. Where do you think it should go, mechanically? 6 column 1 or 2?

Woah, totally true! Agreed, Polearm 4 should be in Era 6. As I think you mention elsewhere, we can use the polearm here to counteract some of our "bottom of the tree is military" stuff by placing it higher.

More detail on this below.


Also, speaking of forgotten things, BNW's Combustion (which is in Era 6) has a land trade route range boost. I've added that to "Unnamed Tech 6" at the moment - does that sound like a good home? An alternative could be to move it forward to Skimming, since we're moving Range 5 off there?

2) Also, I've actually been starting a "Tech Tree" summary - basically, compiling the techs we already have settled into text form. I've noticed that we've kept "direct line" between all units except polearm. Fine. we've noted that. The nuttything is that Pol is *completely* indirect, as far as I can tell - no line from Pol 1 to 2, and no line from 2 to 3. This is rather striking. Are we ok with this, or is that too far.

I think that's ok for now. I imagine most players are probably unaffected by this, because they don't usually beeline too aggressively.

Speaking of the general balance of the tree though, we've crossed our Dynamite point (official name). I'd say we should make a conscious to decision to make it possible to get to the top (vertical) tech in Era 9 column 1 without having researched Alloys.

Also, the new "total prereqs" feature in the Editor has taught me some very interesting things about the structure of the BNW tree. Firaxis have achieved some nice balance here, the science techs definitely stand out and it seems to be very deliberate. The number of prereqs for techs in the last column before Future Tech in BNW:

• The Internet - 57
• Globalization - 57
• Particle Physics - 68
• Nuclear Fusion - 61
• Nanotechnology - 55
• Stealth - 56

Particle Physics has a 7 more prereqs than any other tech in the same column and at least 11 more than most of them (4/5). And since Particle Physics is toward the top and Nanotechnology toward the bottom, there's even a decent chunk of non-shared prereqs between them. Pretty sweet and something for us to take note of and see what we end up with in our last column!

and yes, we are very "bottom of tree" heavy on the melee units. ?I'd really like to switch that up, maybe even finding a way to force the issue in 6. Naval units are similar, but there's at least some relief in sight there.

Yeah, it looks like we're doing ok with distributing naval units now, they're not 100% top-of-tree. I think going into Era 7, with Melee 6 on "Unnamed Tech 6", there's room for us to get the next Melee unit up more towards the middle of the tree. If we want to go for the top we will need to break the chain though (unless we shuffle some past stuff around first), because we have a melee unit on Alloys, which we don't want the top of the tree to take in.

If we go with 3, then it's a whole city radius. does that sound good?

3 sounds good!

this is tough. I'd say, though, that it is probably simplest to consume the receiving units remaining movement. Would be awesome if we could set it up as an action for the "receiving" unit - "Get sa'angreal". But that's lame, since it'd just be sitting there greyed out for the whole game...

If you think the "disallow its use on turn it's moved" thing won't be too clunky, then let's go with it consuming the passERS movement. If you think it'll be clunky, then let's do the Receiver.

Hmmmm, I don't think the "disallow its use on turn it's moved" will be too bad - the action will be greyed out and we can present the reason in the tooltip, which is a format players are familiar with. ("An angreal cannot be used on the same turn it is passed to another unit" or something quite similar and simply direct.)

So, let's go with consuming all remaining movement on the unit that is doing the passing. The receiving unit acts as normal that turn, but can't use the newly acquired angreal.

sounds good. Also... this should give you Shadow points, right? That's what happened to Rand when he did it, I'd say. So overusing the Rand nuke will lower the bonuses you get from your Brightness in the LB.

Yes, totally, that makes a lot of sense!

OK! Pending the decision on pass-off mechanic, I will update the summary. This is what we have:

- male and female variants of both angreal and sa'angreal
- angreal are available to channelers of all types, sa'angreal are only available to Aes Sedai and Asha'man
- both angreal and sa'angreal can switch between units within 3 hexes away, which <CONSUMES ACTION IN DISCUSSION ABOVE>
- angreal enable a channeler to strike 4 times within a range of 6. These strikes deal damage to units and cities.
- sa'angreal enable a channeler to strike 6 times within a range of 8. These strikes do additional damage, can be fired at units (and pillage tiles), and create Unravelled Pattern
- male varieties of angreal and sa'angreal do reduced damage, but deal splash damage
- The "RankNuke" and comparable attacks from the Forsaken deal significant damage in a single shot. These attacks have all the properties of a sa'angreal strike, but also deal 6 population damage, and can destroy cities of population below 6.

All sounds good!

let's do it! Gearworks! Yeah, I'm talking about replacing Design. Not sure if it's a word, but it's close enough!

Awesome sauce, done!

ok. agreed.

ok. let's leave it on Conc, then.

Also, gross. The notion that learning mix concoctions leads to the discovery of peat... makes me not want to drink those concoctions.

I was suggesting moving the trade route from Concoctions to Letters of Rights.

Indeed, quite gross!

ok, that's fine, but I'll then draw your attention to "Looking Glass," "The Wheel," Compass, "... BNW doesn't appear to be wholly consistent. It's fine, though.

True, there are some of both!

yes! That's the spirit.

I think let's leave Bookbinding. Thats more WoT-y feeling to me than "sophistication.

The only thing I don't love about this is that High Chant is now particularly late in the tree. So this presumes that the bardic High Chant was only invented a few hundred years before the books. I think that could be OK, but it's also probably the case that it's much older than that. I wish S&F worked well on that later tech (it's missing the Tower of Genji replacement...)....

The other theoretically possibility is that we put Bitterns late (theoretically understandable to have an instrument invented late) and have High Chant be that early tech, which makes sense given the Gleeman unlock. The problem is that the later tech's unlocks doesn't fit the flavor of Bitterns well, while Hich Chant seems to fit it quite well.

So, it looks like we're going with:

High Chant becomes Snakes & Foxes
Bookbinding doesn't change
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes High Chant

unless.... unless we just decide right now that the Tower of G is an Authority-only Wonder. That's a little weird, right? We'd probably want something tower related. But maybe we could make it work, somehow. If we did that, then we'd have this:

High Chant stays
Bookbinding stays
Sophistication becomes Treatises
Treatises becomes S&F

what do you think? Are we crazy to commit to that right now? Or, of course we could move it around and have that be the Liberation or Oppression Wonder, instead. What say you? I won't change anything on the excel until we decide this.

Hmmm, I'm reluctant to decide on the Tower of Ghenjei as this wonder now. I share your concerns that it's not likely to be the right flavor for even any of the Philosophy-specific wonders. I'd say let's stick with the first of the two switcheroos you've described here. Also, Dreaming leading into Snakes and Foxes is a pretty epic flavor win, which I quite like about that arrangement.

nice, and that's not me. I never tested it.

I'm just going to assume its Brandon Sanderson and Harriet McDougal checking us out

I'm sure they'd love to play it when it's done!

the problem I have with cobbles is just what they literally are. Just. Rocks.

All cobblestone roads are are just rocks with some cement in the middle. To me, that's not a tech that's any more advanced than the masonry equivalents we've already done. So, to me it's not suitable.

Of cousre, that could bring to question whether "cobbled roads" is a sufficient upgrade. But, the thing is, even today, whether a road is paved isn't really a question of whether the maintainer of that road knows how to do it, it's a quesiton of resources and actually literally doing the work. So, I think we could be ok with cobbled roads - but that makes me think that this tech should be an "Infrastructure" tech - not the literal technology itself, but the procedure behind setting up an operation like a transcontinental paved road.

Infrastructure is also a possible name for the tech! I see what you mean - I think Cobbled Roads instead of Railroads the route makes a lot of sense, but if we have better flavor for the tech then let's use it!

there's those thoughts!

"Messengers" is perhaps too generic and "primitive." "Transportation" is kind of the same, I think.If we did "Messenger Pigeons" or something - which are used in WoT, it's mentioned a few times, I think - that could work, but that doesn't support us having roads and all this other stuff.

"Ciphers" or something spy-ish could be ok, but it also doesn't fit roads well. What we could do, intead, is go with a "spy" name here, and move Cobbled Roads up to "Festival" (or whatever it becomes), since Festival is likely to be "expansion" oriented regardless. Then, we could move Happ 3 or something down to Cobbles, or something like that.

I really feel like we need a tech name for this that means "communication network" or "oversight". That kind of thing fits well with roads, anti-spy, defense, everything. darn, this one's hard! Administration or Management are so soulless and modern. Down below, I throw out Supply Chains. Something like that, or perhaps phrased better?

I think Happ3 on Festivals (or whatever) is a key part of that being a good expansion tech - Happiness is usually the factor holding a civ back from expanding more.

I like the idea of the flavor for a communication network. Supply Chains feels like it's almost there. Is Intelligence Network too modern or too deep on the spy flavor? What about National Infrastructure - too modern as well? Civilized Defenses? Blerg, so close but not quite there!

no carrier!

Carrier axed!

also, remind me - how did we solve the continents thing? global rebase?

Yes, though we did flag that as uber endgame. Might want to move it earlier, but we'll see. Probably a play test thing!

ok. Since we won't have cloaking, though, let's try to come up with some other way that these are special, then. Like a really long range, or really short range, or fast movement, or something (and no land attacks)

Agreed on all points.

Yes, that's it. Let's put the Anti-Naval Ship on Looking Class, and put the true NvR 3 on Manifests.

Awesome sauce, done!

yay! It makes just as much sense as a melee unit there...

I'm fine with the flavor of all this. The only thing here is that pulling a Mount unit up into the middle of the tree will be quite difficult at this point without breaking the direct through-line on that upgrade path. (Such will be the case for any unit we put on Fancloth.) Are we ok with that or shall we deal with as we find it? (Which may be later in this post when I do Era 7.)

I'm fine with either of these paths. I think moving the melee 7 to 7/2 is a decent idea, but then again, we've been doing X column 2 for a LONG time here. We could change things up, surely. But, also, cramming in an era 9 one could be cool, too - our first gun unit, perhaps (flavor only)?

The flavor of a gun unit works really well - plays into Aviendha's visions of the future. I think we've mostly been sticking with X/2 so that there's enough distance from the previous unit. We could pull it back and make it quite close? Vertical prereq pull-ins are a bit more challenging now, but still possible to compensate for the adjacency.

Also, please clarify about era 9. So we're adding total number of techs here? BNW is, of course, just "future tech" - we're having a whole row there? Why do I not remember this...? How does this affect our whole "keep the number of techs the same" thing?

This is from back when we first laid out what the eras were. IIRC, we planned to have four techs along the end, and have them host at least some of our Innovations.

This does mean we'd be changing the number of techs in the game, but not across the board, which would be much more difficult to define, only at the end, where the game is more bounded (not much stuff left to happen).

Interestingly this could also offer us an alternative way to deal with beelining toward the end of the tree. I've mentioned above a want to make the top of the tree not require Alloys, because that means our beelines for our different victory types work correctly. (Science victory needs to require more techs, otherwise everyone always hits it first.)

If the Science Victory requires Fourth Age techs (it's not called the Fourth Age anymore, but anyway) and the other victories don't (to get their best techs) then even if the tree doesn't permit beelining as much, the Science victory will require the additional techs needed to make it more fair.

Some disadvantages to using the Fourth Age this way: games will be more similar to one another. With less opportunity for beelining, players will tend to unlock techs in a more similar order in subsequent games, which isn't great for replayability. Strategically, it also takes options away from the human player, who can intelligently beeline techs to defeat the AI which relies on static bonuses.

There's obviously room to reconsider components of this, but a significant amount of our Alignment stuff (and other things, I'm sure) hinges on there being 9 Eras. A smaller Era 9 makes the LB victory more difficult, because we would necessarily have more "victory" mechanics in Era 8, making it more likely that a player in the lead would win the game before the LB starts.

We also previously discussed putting the "endgame" techs for each victory in the Fourth Age, so that the LB at least triggers in most games, since even a player who isn't trying to do the LB victory will advance the world era by grabbing their "endgame" tech. (So in BNW, that's the Internet for Culture, Globalization for Diplo, sort of Nuclear Fusion for Domination, and Science needs to grab both Particle Physics and Nanotechnology, in keeping with the prereq stuff.)

There are more specifics, but we might be better placed to comment on them after we finish Era 8?

I say move Rng 5 to Cobbles (which will be renamed, I predict!) and move Def 4 up to Skimming. This last bit isn't very flavorful, but it's not any less so than Rng 4 was in the first place.

The other thing is we could move Rng 5 to "Unnamed Tech" and move Anti Gate 1 *back* to Skimming. Is there a key reason we want AG1 to be born *after* gate 1?

We could use this as an opportunity to move a unit up the tree though! Range 4 is on Invention, which actually has a through line to Looking Glass. A ranged unit on there would mean 3 units, but one would be land and two naval.

Related to AG1, I don't think there's a huge need for it to be unlocked after Gate1. Having the anti-unit come later does make getting to Gate units first a bit sweeter, which is nice.

Kin on High Chant is still random, but not as bad. Kin could also go down on "Festivals" (which will be renamed) and something else could be sent up there. Align 1 or Happ, maybe.

I could see trading Alignment 1 up if the Festivals replacement flavor works better for the Kin. (Though they are a top-of-tree military unit!) I like Happ3 there on Festivals because of the expansion mechanics on it.

I know Manifests is shipping manifests. I'm saying that shipping manifests have probably existed for three or four columns at this point....

Regarding the trade..... What about Shipping Rights or something like that? I know it's not something you discover, so much as "negotiate," but that kind of an agreement-focused tech could do the trick. Something like Safe Passage reflects what you're saying, though again, that isn't really a tech... Is this firing any neurons in the right direction, though?

I see a lot of these as very malleable, there's room to say a lot of the techs we've already decided on should have existed earlier, depending on which meaning you use (Looking Glass, Crop Rotation, Tactics, Sailcloth - I like all of these techs, but they could feasibly be available much earlier). I would definitely see Manifests as a kind of formalism flavor, that now everyone is using some kind of standardized manifest that can be interpreted by sailors/quartermasters from other ships. It's also the kind of educated skill that ties in well to Letters of Rights and Rule of Medians.

On the encouraging trade flavor, this could be a home for Exchange Rates, which plays very well with Letters of Rights and Rule of Medians. It doesn't connect as well to Naval Range3. (Other unlocks are good though.) Possibly Seaport Levies or Import Agreements (sounds a bit modern though).

Bloodlines is ok, but a little odd in that it feels like a Path or a Lineage-related thing, in this game.

We haven't had a history tech yet, because we don't want to abuse that flavor, which pops up elsewehre (e.g. Historian).

I am thinking that "Shared Belief" is pointing towards the right thing, in that it fits all the unlocks here. I want to say Shared History, but for the History thing. Is there a more WoT-friendly version of "Manifest Destiny"? That's the flavor we're going for. The problem is that these things fit the unlocks well, but send us far afield of the prereqs.

What about Civil Pride or something along those lines?

The prereqs really do support "Festivals" - is there a way we can spin that into a synonym that doesn't tread on the Customs that are literal festivals? National Feast Day or something?

I like the idea of using some kind of Festivals stand-in, but I'm having trouble coming up with any good flavor for it. (Unless we want to use something really obvious like Carnivals, but that feels a bit Earth-y.) National Feast Day doesn't really sound like a tech. Civil Pride feels just a bit too modern of a phrase.

Shared History could work though. I don't think it really think it crosses over badly with the Historian, because that history being "shared" makes it about the people that are sharing it, rather than about the more general concept of history.

I know. You're right. This would need to be "finding" them, which isn't so awesome.

don't want to go with the made-up-flavor-that-sounds-like-flavor here if we can get away with it.

Don't think there's really a name for the Dream Spying. And keep in mind that there isn't *really* a T'a'r upgrade here - that was just to make ter'angreal make sense! So no need to force that - and also, T'a'r doesn't fit the rest of the stuff so well, anyways.

I think for this tech we probably need to go straight-up military and/or weapons-technology. It's just too easy to justify, what with the Melee unit here and the "hard to wrap your brain around" Anti-Gate unit here.

So.... going with a defensive focus (anti-gate), we could use Troop Movements, Advanced Maneuvers, Battlefield Surveyance, Battlefield Scouting, Supply Chains (this kind of thing could actually be used for Cobbles, above), or Battlefield Intelligence. Anything good?

A lot of options for this one. I'm thinking Advanced Maneuvers sounds pretty good to me.

yeah, I'll figure something out. Don't want it to be totally lost in the shuffle, though.

It shouldn't be - we did refer back to flavor dumps like this before on Paths and... something else. I am making a very good case for myself here. You could drop it in DropBox too.

So, don't forget to think about Pol 4! I do think we should probably have one here somewhere. If we continue to not care about direct line for Pol units, I could imagine it going on Fireworks or Festivals, or something. Otherwise, Cobbles or "UNNAMED", depending on where you want it.

Pol 4! So Pol3 is allllll the way back on Formations in Era 4 column 1. Did we say we wanted to address there being too big of a gap between these two, as well as the weirdness of Lancer -> Anti-Tank Gun?

If so, we might want to put it in Era 5 column 2? Fireworks (as you suggest) or Concoctions could host a unit like this? (Particularly if we move the trade route from Concoctions onto Letters of Rights, as discussed above!)

If we're ok making the distance between them farther, and want to address our "units higher up" stuff - we could put it on Rule of Medians? It might be too far then, though.

We could move the trade route off Cobbles and onto Skimming (which also makes sense) and then there'd be a bit more room on Cobbles for Pol 4? But that's a bottom-row unit again.

It looks like the structure of everything is mostly set, and we're just working on the specific unlocks and names. - do feel free to get started on Era 7 when you have a chance!

Era 7 you say?

*dramatic pause*

 

[S3rgeus]

Welcome to the era of channeling, apparently! Era 7 presented a lot of channeling tech flavor, mostly because a decent chunk of the unlocks in this era are channeling-related.

So, like last time, I built up the techs that were present in BNW. Further to our discussions about angreal and such, I figured Atomic Theory and its role in the nuke line was a key part of this era's structure. It's also worth noting that Atomic Theory is required for the Internet, but Nuclear Fission is not.

So, we had a decent amount of flavor that was about rediscovering lost channeling arts and such. Finding angreals and Mythic Sites and leading up to Cleansing Saidin at the beginning of Era 8.

Hence, Rediscovery takes the place of Atomic Theory. It gains Mythic Sites in addition to its existing unlocks.

This brings up a question: Do we have an equivalent to the Manhattan Project? Something civ-wide the player must do to be able to build our angreal and sa'angreal units? (And also notifies other players of the presumed intent to use them.)

I noticed that sa'angreal was marked for Era 7 in the Excel sheet, but I think that might have been a mistake. Sa'angreal replaces the Nuclear Missile, which doesn't pop up until Era 8, right? We need to unlock the angreal first and I've always thought that CiV's dynamic of revealing Uranium before unlocking Atomic Bombs worked very well, so that would make angreal a column 2 unlock in Era 7.

We also have an upgraded "flying" tech in column 1 of Era 7. Cue Traveling, which builds on that flavor very well. It unlocks the Gateway2 unit and the Traveler1 unit (Paratrooper). I also added the Traveling Grounds improvement onto this tech (impersonating the Chateau), and the Range7 unit. Range7 is certainly moveable at this point, but I wanted to try getting him a bit higher up the tree than our other units, while still keeping the through-line. (It may look like this makes Range6 and Range7 quite close together, but Traveling needs a full 20 techs more than Skimming, at 49 vs 29.)

Another question that came up here is: we do have an equivalent to the Airport, right? We talked about a building before that permitted transfers from cities, in addition to possibly allowing transports from Traveling Grounds?

I also added the Asha'man into this era, but I'm not sure if we want them this early? We had the Black Tower earmarked for here, so I've put the two on the same tech. Asha'men are some of our endgame units, but as channelers they will be upgraded by some later techs. It also seems strange that we would hit the Cleansing before we would unlock Asha'men, and the Cleansing is earmarked for column 1 Era 8.

I called this tech Saidin, but I doubt we'll keep that name given that we didn't keep Saidar. I've struggled to find alternative flavor for this.

Related to angreal again, we have the Wells tech, which has the angreal unit on it, as well as the desert production building and the "allow channelers to attack into and from Stedding and the Guardian" functionality.

We also have Bellfounding, which was earmarked in the excel sheet. It obviously contains the final siege unit, which is presumably the Dragon (cannon). It also has anti-gate2, which keeps its through-line.

And a question asked by this tech: do we have an equivalent to the Apollo Program? Something civ-wide the player needs to do before they can start working on the Exhibitions? (Also notifies other players of their intention.)

Finally, the last named tech is called Herbalism and totally should not be called Herbalism. I wanted to go for that flavor - with a food building, the Peat producing building, and a trade route, that seemed like the right kind of flavor, but Herbalism is much too old a word for this part of the tree. We can't use Wisdoms or any variants thereof because that flavor is used by the Specialist, which has existed since way back in era 1/2.

And then we have two more unnamed techs that are basically military + wonder. They're pretty much straight ports of Combined Arms (since Pol4 is now back in the previous era) and Computers (though it's been effectively vertically swapped with Rocketry). There's a decent amount of leeway to move any of the units on these, Range7 on Traveling, and Anti-Gate2 on Bellfounding around to other techs in order to make consistent flavor here, but I've had difficulty coming up with a good way to do that.

Also, prereqs in this era were a nightmare. Looking at the prereq count of our techs, everything started going awry in column 2 whenever I connected up anything around Wells and "Unnamed Tech 8". Suddenly one of those techs would have 60 prereqs (more than some of the techs in column 2 Era 8 in BNW. I needed to dive back into previous eras' prereqs to see if I could find out where these two big mutually exclusive sets were coming from.

In the end, I modified the prereqs of Concoctions and Letters of Rights, which balanced out the top and bottom of the tree a bit. It fixed Era 7 - the techs there now have approximately the right amount of total prereqs compared to BNW (all fairly even-ish, all around 50). There's still a big chunk getting pulled in for Era 8 on the Cleansing stand-in that I created there (it has 64 prereqs), but apparently that happens in BNW too on Mobile Tactics (also has 64 prereqs).

Current version attached for any curious lurkers!

 

[counterpoint]

I'll start by pointing out that I actually did a flavor dump post right above your posts. I only mention this because I think we were typing in these posts simultaneously, and you may be unaware of it, as it was buried by your next post. Take a look!

Also, speaking of forgotten things, BNW's Combustion (which is in Era 6) has a land trade route range boost. I've added that to "Unnamed Tech 6" at the moment - does that sound like a good home? An alternative could be to move it forward to Skimming, since we're moving Range 5 off there?

I think that's a good place for it, even better now that it's called "Advanced Maneuvres"

I think that's ok for now. I imagine most players are probably unaffected by this, because they don't usually beeline too aggressively.

Speaking of the general balance of the tree though, we've crossed our Dynamite point (official name). I'd say we should make a conscious to decision to make it possible to get to the top (vertical) tech in Era 9 column 1 without having researched Alloys.

Also, the new "total prereqs" feature in the Editor has taught me some very interesting things about the structure of the BNW tree. Firaxis have achieved some nice balance here, the science techs definitely stand out and it seems to be very deliberate. The number of prereqs for techs in the last column before Future Tech in BNW:

• The Internet - 57
• Globalization - 57
• Particle Physics - 68
• Nuclear Fusion - 61
• Nanotechnology - 55
• Stealth - 56

Particle Physics has a 7 more prereqs than any other tech in the same column and at least 11 more than most of them (4/5). And since Particle Physics is toward the top and Nanotechnology toward the bottom, there's even a decent chunk of non-shared prereqs between them. Pretty sweet and something for us to take note of and see what we end up with in our last column!

this is really interesting, and i think that added functionality on the editor is super useful in our balancing. good work! I do think we should probably try to mirror this as much as we can.

I'm fine with keeping the belinability of BNW as well.

Yeah, it looks like we're doing ok with distributing naval units now, they're not 100% top-of-tree. I think going into Era 7, with Melee 6 on "Unnamed Tech 6", there's room for us to get the next Melee unit up more towards the middle of the tree. If we want to go for the top we will need to break the chain though (unless we shuffle some past stuff around first), because we have a melee unit on Alloys, which we don't want the top of the tree to take in.

I don't think we need to go to the actual top. the middle or top-middle should suffice.

3 sounds good!

done.

Hmmmm, I don't think the "disallow its use on turn it's moved" will be too bad - the action will be greyed out and we can present the reason in the tooltip, which is a format players are familiar with. ("An angreal cannot be used on the same turn it is passed to another unit" or something quite similar and simply direct.)

So, let's go with consuming all remaining movement on the unit that is doing the passing. The receiving unit acts as normal that turn, but can't use the newly acquired angreal.

great. done.

All sounds good!

shadow points for randnuke! Will put that in the LB summary.Also, have updated Chan summary! check em out!

Also, check what I say about damage - does the strength of the source unit effect the overall damage output, or is it flat based on the item? In other words, is an angreal more powerful on a high-XP Asha'man than a brand new MC?

I was suggesting moving the trade route from Concoctions to Letters of Rights.

oh. well do you want to do that, then? That's fine with me.

Hmmm, I'm reluctant to decide on the Tower of Ghenjei as this wonder now. I share your concerns that it's not likely to be the right flavor for even any of the Philosophy-specific wonders. I'd say let's stick with the first of the two switcheroos you've described here. Also, Dreaming leading into Snakes and Foxes is a pretty epic flavor win, which I quite like about that arrangement.

ok! done and agreed!

Infrastructure is also a possible name for the tech! I see what you mean - I think Cobbled Roads instead of Railroads the route makes a lot of sense, but if we have better flavor for the tech then let's use it!

I think Happ3 on Festivals (or whatever) is a key part of that being a good expansion tech - Happiness is usually the factor holding a civ back from expanding more.

I like the idea of the flavor for a communication network. Supply Chains feels like it's almost there. Is Intelligence Network too modern or too deep on the spy flavor? What about National Infrastructure - too modern as well? Civilized Defenses? Blerg, so close but not quite there!

Fine with Happ3 staying where it is.

I... think we should go with Infrastructure! It's kind of the only one that fits perfectly with what we're talking about here. Fits all the unlocks, IMO. It's kind of modern, but not too bad. I think the other ones are all very "close," and when they get closer, they become infrastructure. K?

Yes, though we did flag that as uber endgame. Might want to move it earlier, but we'll see. Probably a play test thing!

yes. Maybe era 8 could work.

I'm fine with the flavor of all this. The only thing here is that pulling a Mount unit up into the middle of the tree will be quite difficult at this point without breaking the direct through-line on that upgrade path. (Such will be the case for any unit we put on Fancloth.) Are we ok with that or shall we deal with as we find it? (Which may be later in this post when I do Era 7.)

there's one more Mounted unit, right? If so, no problem - let's just make sure that one is at least one slot higher in the tree. If there isn't, then yes this might be a problem.

The flavor of a gun unit works really well - plays into Aviendha's visions of the future. I think we've mostly been sticking with X/2 so that there's enough distance from the previous unit. We could pull it back and make it quite close? Vertical prereq pull-ins are a bit more challenging now, but still possible to compensate for the adjacency.

I think with the flavor dump above (roarsticks or whatever they are) we may not even need to go with Aviendha's visions. or, we could use the vision for the final unit and Aludra's one for the penultimate.

This is from back when we first laid out what the eras were. IIRC, we planned to have four techs along the end, and have them host at least some of our Innovations.

This does mean we'd be changing the number of techs in the game, but not across the board, which would be much more difficult to define, only at the end, where the game is more bounded (not much stuff left to happen).

Interestingly this could also offer us an alternative way to deal with beelining toward the end of the tree. I've mentioned above a want to make the top of the tree not require Alloys, because that means our beelines for our different victory types work correctly. (Science victory needs to require more techs, otherwise everyone always hits it first.)

If the Science Victory requires Fourth Age techs (it's not called the Fourth Age anymore, but anyway) and the other victories don't (to get their best techs) then even if the tree doesn't permit beelining as much, the Science victory will require the additional techs needed to make it more fair.

Some disadvantages to using the Fourth Age this way: games will be more similar to one another. With less opportunity for beelining, players will tend to unlock techs in a more similar order in subsequent games, which isn't great for replayability. Strategically, it also takes options away from the human player, who can intelligently beeline techs to defeat the AI which relies on static bonuses.

There's obviously room to reconsider components of this, but a significant amount of our Alignment stuff (and other things, I'm sure) hinges on there being 9 Eras. A smaller Era 9 makes the LB victory more difficult, because we would necessarily have more "victory" mechanics in Era 8, making it more likely that a player in the lead would win the game before the LB starts.

We also previously discussed putting the "endgame" techs for each victory in the Fourth Age, so that the LB at least triggers in most games, since even a player who isn't trying to do the LB victory will advance the world era by grabbing their "endgame" tech. (So in BNW, that's the Internet for Culture, Globalization for Diplo, sort of Nuclear Fusion for Domination, and Science needs to grab both Particle Physics and Nanotechnology, in keeping with the prereq stuff.)

There are more specifics, but we might be better placed to comment on them after we finish Era 8?

FYI, it's Era of Prophesy

I'm fine with this. Well, truly, I'm fine with whatever you're fine with, as it seems you "get" this bit more than I do.This conceptualization of this stuff is new to me - I'm not sure I grasped the implications of it back then.

It's effect on beelinability and such... I defer to you.

Question, though, for clarity's sake - are these era 9 techs *only* Innovations, or is there other stuff there (units, etc.)?

EDIT: another thing is that by having the innovations be in era 9, we aren't letting science-victory players "pace themselves" In BNW, you can produce certain spaceship parts before others. Shouldn't we be staggering the different items they can produce? Maybe we could/should have Era 9 be only 2 (maybe 3) techs, with the other 2 or 3 (the summary says we are supposed to have 5 innovations) be in Era 8. Thoughts?

We could use this as an opportunity to move a unit up the tree though! Range 4 is on Invention, which actually has a through line to Looking Glass. A ranged unit on there would mean 3 units, but one would be land and two naval.

Related to AG1, I don't think there's a huge need for it to be unlocked after Gate1. Having the anti-unit come later does make getting to Gate units first a bit sweeter, which is nice.

so where did you land with this? Are we moving Rng 5 off of Skimming? I see on the editor tree that looking class has a Pol unit. What did you wnat to do with Rng to make it less belinable?

I could see trading Alignment 1 up if the Festivals replacement flavor works better for the Kin. (Though they are a top-of-tree military unit!) I like Happ3 there on Festivals because of the expansion mechanics on it.

don't feel strongly. you make the call.

I see a lot of these as very malleable, there's room to say a lot of the techs we've already decided on should have existed earlier, depending on which meaning you use (Looking Glass, Crop Rotation, Tactics, Sailcloth - I like all of these techs, but they could feasibly be available much earlier). I would definitely see Manifests as a kind of formalism flavor, that now everyone is using some kind of standardized manifest that can be interpreted by sailors/quartermasters from other ships. It's also the kind of educated skill that ties in well to Letters of Rights and Rule of Medians.

On the encouraging trade flavor, this could be a home for Exchange Rates, which plays very well with Letters of Rights and Rule of Medians. It doesn't connect as well to Naval Range3. (Other unlocks are good though.) Possibly Seaport Levies or Import Agreements (sounds a bit modern though).

I think we should go with Exchange Rates. Personally, I like the sound of Exchange better, but that does leave some clarity to be desired.... Exchange rates is just kind of tedious. There's also Currency Exchange. There's also a weird way of doing it like Tar Valon Standard Mark or something. You choose.

I like the idea of using some kind of Festivals stand-in, but I'm having trouble coming up with any good flavor for it. (Unless we want to use something really obvious like Carnivals, but that feels a bit Earth-y.) National Feast Day doesn't really sound like a tech. Civil Pride feels just a bit too modern of a phrase.

Shared History could work though. I don't think it really think it crosses over badly with the Historian, because that history being "shared" makes it about the people that are sharing it, rather than about the more general concept of history.

What if we do something like Shared Bloodlines? What do you think of that? Kind of mixes all of it together.

Otherwise, National Pride or something....

A lot of options for this one. I'm thinking Advanced Maneuvers sounds pretty good to me.

agreed! Some of these others could be useful later.

It shouldn't be - we did refer back to flavor dumps like this before on Paths and... something else. I am making a very good case for myself here. You could drop it in DropBox too.

see above!

Pol 4! So Pol3 is allllll the way back on Formations in Era 4 column 1. Did we say we wanted to address there being too big of a gap between these two, as well as the weirdness of Lancer -> Anti-Tank Gun?

yeah, we've already fixed the flavor weirdness of lancer->ATG (by not having tanks!), but the distance is also way too long.

If so, we might want to put it in Era 5 column 2? Fireworks (as you suggest) or Concoctions could host a unit like this? (Particularly if we move the trade route from Concoctions onto Letters of Rights, as discussed above!)

If we're ok making the distance between them farther, and want to address our "units higher up" stuff - we could put it on Rule of Medians? It might be too far then, though.

We could move the trade route off Cobbles and onto Skimming (which also makes sense) and then there'd be a bit more room on Cobbles for Pol 4? But that's a bottom-row unit again.

I'm flexible. I'd say let's not put it as far as Rule of Medians, and also not put it as low as Cobbles. I think Fireworks or Concoctions is probably far enough. What do you think? FW is a little "lighter" of a tech at this point.

Welcome to the era of channeling, apparently! Era 7 presented a lot of channeling tech flavor, mostly because a decent chunk of the unlocks in this era are channeling-related.

So, like last time, I built up the techs that were present in BNW. Further to our discussions about angreal and such, I figured Atomic Theory and its role in the nuke line was a key part of this era's structure. It's also worth noting that Atomic Theory is required for the Internet, but Nuclear Fission is not.

So, we had a decent amount of flavor that was about rediscovering lost channeling arts and such. Finding angreals and Mythic Sites and leading up to Cleansing Saidin at the beginning of Era 8.

Hence, Rediscovery takes the place of Atomic Theory. It gains Mythic Sites in addition to its existing unlocks.

I like this tech. i like the name, too.

This brings up a question: Do we have an equivalent to the Manhattan Project? Something civ-wide the player must do to be able to build our angreal and sa'angreal units? (And also notifies other players of the presumed intent to use them.)

I think "yes," we probably want the Man Pr equivalent. Mostly because of the last parenthetical you wrote.

As far as the flavor, I'd say the project is "Research Angreal" or "Search for Angreal". "Learn to build" doesn't work unless it was ter'angreal. Which do you prefer?

I noticed that sa'angreal was marked for Era 7 in the Excel sheet, but I think that might have been a mistake. Sa'angreal replaces the Nuclear Missile, which doesn't pop up until Era 8, right? We need to unlock the angreal first and I've always thought that CiV's dynamic of revealing Uranium before unlocking Atomic Bombs worked very well, so that would make angreal a column 2 unlock in Era 7.

I think we should keep it the same as BNW. So yes, a mistake.

We also have an upgraded "flying" tech in column 1 of Era 7. Cue Traveling, which builds on that flavor very well. It unlocks the Gateway2 unit and the Traveler1 unit (Paratrooper). I also added the Traveling Grounds improvement onto this tech (impersonating the Chateau), and the Range7 unit. Range7 is certainly moveable at this point, but I wanted to try getting him a bit higher up the tree than our other units, while still keeping the through-line. (It may look like this makes Range6 and Range7 quite close together, but Traveling needs a full 20 techs more than Skimming, at 49 vs 29.)

I like this tech and what it unlocks. However, there are some problems here.

1) Range 7? Where's Rng 6? Isn't the one back on Skimming (which we may move) actually range 5?

2) The prereqs here are weird. I like the super long line from skimming to traveling. However, it also requires advanced maneuvres. Since A.M. requires Skimming in the first place, that makes the prereq on Skimming completely redundant. In any case, it should have Looking glass and either A.M. or skimming, not both. I like the skimming prereq, it feels unique - is there a reason we definitely want the "line" from AM though?

Another question that came up here is: we do have an equivalent to the Airport, right? We talked about a building before that permitted transfers from cities, in addition to possibly allowing transports from Traveling Grounds?

I'd say yes. Even if it doesn't permit easy rebase (in fact, maybe it shouldn't!), we want it for the prestige bonus, and for the extra-units stacking thing.

I also added the Asha'man into this era, but I'm not sure if we want them this early? We had the Black Tower earmarked for here, so I've put the two on the same tech. Asha'men are some of our endgame units, but as channelers they will be upgraded by some later techs. It also seems strange that we would hit the Cleansing before we would unlock Asha'men, and the Cleansing is earmarked for column 1 Era 8.

I think the logic here was that it takes some time for somebody to actually build the B.T. wonder, so if it was 8.1 then it'd take until 8.2 or even 9 in some games for Ashas to be available. So, yeah, that does make sense to me, as long as we're ok witht he possibility of some people belining this with a Ogier Mason and getting Asha'man early.

actually, though... the B.T. could unlock here and we could have the actual unit unlock later (perhaps even on Cleansing. The B.T. presumably does other things besides unlock A'M.

Also, I don't think we need to be married to Cleansing unlocking in 8.1. Could do 8.2 if it helped.

I called this tech Saidin, but I doubt we'll keep that name given that we didn't keep Saidar. I've struggled to find alternative flavor for this.

looking at my flavor dump above, I think we could use Flame and the Void or Oneness here. Those seem to be the most fitting I can think of.

Or there's less saidin-linked - Inverted Weaves or something.

Related to angreal again, we have the Wells tech, which has the angreal unit on it, as well as the desert production building and the "allow channelers to attack into and from Stedding and the Guardian" functionality.

yeah, thiis is good. So, the attack-into-steddings functionality, that's stil a thing? I'd prefer it not to be complicated. So, does this just allow that privilege for anyone, then? I don't want a situation where it's another "flag" to keep track of on units. i guess the big question we should ask is whether we want the mechanical reality of steddings (and Far Madding, or, if the Guardian is a Wonder civs build, then all civs) to be suddenly fair game for channelers in the late game. Probably fine, but it's certainly a significant decision.

when we decide, I'll add into channeling summary.

We also have Bellfounding, which was earmarked in the excel sheet. It obviously contains the final siege unit, which is presumably the Dragon (cannon). It also has anti-gate2, which keeps its through-line.

great. I think I'm find with this. I could also have imagined this not as the name of a tech, but us having a Bellfoundry building. No such building is here, so this is fine.

And a question asked by this tech: do we have an equivalent to the Apollo Program? Something civ-wide the player needs to do before they can start working on the Exhibitions? (Also notifies other players of their intention.)

well, I think that depends. Apollo is meant to slow down science people, right? We've already done that by requiring all these innovations be produced, AND brought to other civs, AND potentially some "extra" techs be researched anyways. I'm fine with this, in theory, but it's likely overkill. Thoughts?

EDIT: of course, there is the whole "notify other players" bit - is there a way to do this without such a project? Would we want to be notifying players every time a civ builds an Innovation, instead?

Finally, the last named tech is called Herbalism and totally should not be called Herbalism. I wanted to go for that flavor - with a food building, the Peat producing building, and a trade route, that seemed like the right kind of flavor, but Herbalism is much too old a word for this part of the tree. We can't use Wisdoms or any variants thereof because that flavor is used by the Specialist, which has existed since way back in era 1/2.

yeah, can't do herbalism. Maybe this is where we stick Keeping? I know that's supposed to be much later, but... we did unlock Traveling and skimming a few hundred years earlier than in the books.

Treesong or Seed Singing?

And then we have two more unnamed techs that are basically military + wonder. They're pretty much straight ports of Combined Arms (since Pol4 is now back in the previous era) and Computers (though it's been effectively vertically swapped with Rocketry). There's a decent amount of leeway to move any of the units on these, Range7 on Traveling, and Anti-Gate2 on Bellfounding around to other techs in order to make consistent flavor here, but I've had difficulty coming up with a good way to do that.

I think Traveling has enough unit unlocks. we should leave it alone, I think. I could see us moving one of the units from Unnamed 3, 8, or Bellfounding up to Wells, and pulling the Production building down as compensation. Up to you, I think.

As far as names.... Maybe we're stuck with gneeric military stuff here? The flavor is rather general because of the unit+ambiguous wonder thing.

Are we too early for Power-Wrought Weapons? That should be really late game, right? Do we have enough subsequent military techs? That might be our Fusion tech or something.

In the flavor dig, we can see Law of War there, though that's a little weird.

Otherwise, Counter-offensive, Attrition, Shock and Awe, that kind of thing.

As far as real "technology," it's hard without having actual units here. Metals and industry stuff could work. Machine Tools, Plated Mail, Horse Armor, those kinds of things...

Also, prereqs in this era were a nightmare. Looking at the prereq count of our techs, everything started going awry in column 2 whenever I connected up anything around Wells and "Unnamed Tech 8". Suddenly one of those techs would have 60 prereqs (more than some of the techs in column 2 Era 8 in BNW. I needed to dive back into previous eras' prereqs to see if I could find out where these two big mutually exclusive sets were coming from.

In the end, I modified the prereqs of Concoctions and Letters of Rights, which balanced out the top and bottom of the tree a bit. It fixed Era 7 - the techs there now have approximately the right amount of total prereqs compared to BNW (all fairly even-ish, all around 50). There's still a big chunk getting pulled in for Era 8 on the Cleansing stand-in that I created there (it has 64 prereqs), but apparently that happens in BNW too on Mobile Tactics (also has 64 prereqs).

Just to be clear, what you changed were the techs leading from LoR and Conc, not *to* them, right? LoR used to split into Exchange Rates and High Chant (former Manifests and Treatises), with nothing else going into it. Conc used to lead directly to only festivals, which also required Fireworks. Nothing else.

Now, LoR leads only to Manifests/Exchange Rates, which also requires Concoctions. High Chant (former Treatises) now requires Concoctions instead of LoR. Festivals still requires Concoctions and Fireworks. Is this correct?

I think that is probably a fine solution. I'll have to check the excel sheet's prereqs against yours at the end of all of this (before the Summary goes up).

Current version attached for any curious lurkers!

cool. I've attached a new version of the Excel sheet as well!