S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

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!

Awesome, thanks for posting all that! (And for reading through the Companion!) I see what you mean about wanting to go for uniques first and then seeing what flavor is left over to be used as "main" units/buildings. I think we might need to skip back and forth a bit on that, but that's something for us to do then!

I think that's a good place for it, even better now that it's called "Advanced Maneuvres"

Agreed, sounds good.

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.

Awesome, thanks! Agreed, I think Firaxis struck a good balance here.

I don't think we need to go to the actual top. the middle or top-middle should suffice.

Sounds like a plan (for placing melee7).

shadow points for randnuke! Will put that in the LB summary.Also, have updated Chan summary! check em out!

Awesome, looks good!

In the LB summary, it would probably help to compare the Dragon's balefire to nuclear weapons from BNW, since it's more similar to those than our angreal stuff.

I don't think we want to attach the angreal/sa'angreal automatically to a unit within range. There are tons of circumstances there where we'd need to make a decision that the player would want to. (Which one do we pick? What if there aren't any? What if the obvious choice has been killed on the AI's turn?) I think angreal and sa'angreal can be stationed in cities, they just can't be fired from them, only rebased to and from them.

"Whether a channeler is holding an angreal or sa'angreal is detectable for other civs."

It's worth adding here that it's detectable when the other player has active vision on the unit holding it, rather than all the time. (That is the case?)

"Sa'angreal attacks that strike empty hexes will pillage any improvements on that hex."

I'd say sa'angreal attacks should just always pillage.

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 think making the combat strength of the unit wielding it a modifier to the damage sounds like a good idea. It adds a layer of coolness to the whole thing ("Oh no, he's given the sa'angreal to that almost-mad Asha'man, he's going to destroy us!").

oh. well do you want to do that, then? That's fine with me.

Awesome sauce, done!

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?

Done!

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.

Yes, there's the equivalent to the Modern Armor still remaining on the mount upgrade path! So let's make sure he doesn't end up on the bottom row!

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.

Indeed, seems like either could work.

FYI, it's Era of Prophesy

That's the one! (I still like the Fourth Age >.> )

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.

Ok, I think we'll have more concrete decisions to make when we finish Era 8.

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?

No, Era 9 wouldn't be only Innovation-techs. As you point out here, we totally want to do what BNW does and make some Innovations available earlier than others. We only need two in Era 9 (as you've picked) to comfortably ensure Science players need the most techs and need to get close to the end of the tree.

They wouldn't only be Science techs in Era 9 though - we probably want out equivalents to The Internet and Globalization (Culture and Diplo endgame techs) there as well. This is for the whole LB triggering thing - we don't want one civ pulling ahead meaning the LB doesn't happen unless they want it to.

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?

This is a good point, I think I forgot to move this guy. Originally you were suggesting moving Range 5 down to Infrastructure and moving Def4 up to Skimming. The flavor works for that, but we could keep this unit slightly above the bottom of the tree, if we want to, by swapping it with AG1?

Not sure which I prefer. Having some units on the bottom of the tree isn't in itself a problem as long as there's a good distribution otherwise from here on. And AG1 being on the tech after Skimming seems good. Any strong feeling either way?

I'm leaning towards swapping it with Def4.

don't feel strongly. you make the call.

Let's leave Kin on High Chant for now then.

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.

Hmmm, Exchange Rates vs Manifests. I feel like the Tar Valon Mark is really close to a very good flavor match up. I can't seem to compress it down more succinctly though. Exchange Rates for now then!

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....

Bingo, Shared Bloodlines!

yeah, we've already fixed the flavor weirdness of lancer->ATG (by not having tanks!), but the distance is also way too long.

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.

Now that we've moved the trade route from Concoctions up to Letters of Rights they seem a bit more comparable. Fireworks is closer (vertically) to Formations, so let's go with that. I've moved Pol 4, which means Looking Glass, like its BNW counterpart, is two naval units (though not the same two).

I like this tech. i like the name, too.

Awesome, this one was the very first one I came up with! It's nice when the flavor co-operates so well!

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?

A search for angreal sounds like good flavor to me. Is there an angreal cache from the books or a specific search for some angreal that we can take the name of, like Firaxis did with the Manhattan Project?

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?

Woops, this is an error, the Bazooka is Range 6. I incorrectly labelled Rocket Artillery as Range 6 when renaming all the units. I corrected that to Siege 5 when doing Era 7, but forgot to also change the Bazooka!

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?

Hrm yes, the Advanced Maneuvers prereq is quite important. Removing it brings Traveling's prereq count down from 49 to 37, which is a big drop. We also don't really have a chance to re-introduce the dependency from Advanced Maneuvers (and everything it pulls in back to Alloys) to the middle of the tree until Era 8, column 1, which would make the middle of Era 7 much cheaper than the top or bottom of the tree.

However, this has drawn my attention to the fact that Rediscovery only has 36 prereqs. Making me think it should require Rule of Medians (which brings it up to 46). That means Wells needs 61, which is a lot, but perhaps still a better arrangement overall. (Unless we want crazy people to be able to start searching for Seals way early.)

Related to the line from Skimming again, very good point. Perhaps we're better off removing that one, even though it does look nice? Or we could just leave there, even if it is a bit redundant?

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.

Awesome, we can come up with flavor for it later then.

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 could see us unlocking the Black Tower before the Asha'man unit, but I think the Asha'man unit should come before the Cleansing tech. Mostly because even though we've shifted the timeline back, I think we're still keeping to its general chronology, and the events of the books put significant reader time between the creation of the Asha'man and the Cleansing.

I could probably be convinced to put these together though, since the books cover a short period of time in the general history sense.

Would it be weird if the Asha'man units couldn't be built until someone built the Black Tower?

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.

Flame and the Void is awesome if we're keeping the Asha'man. It's even tempting to leave them back here just to keep that flavor!

Or there's less saidin-linked - Inverted Weaves or something.

Also a possibility if we move the Asha'man.

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.

I think it's a good thing to keep around. It's a good flavor call out and also works towards the general mechanical goals of giving players game-ending tools at this part of the game. This tech breaks down one of the major barriers for Domination-leaning channeling civs, and will probably help most warmongers in some way.

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.

This is a very good point. There's no particular flavor to the Production (Desert) and Production (Angreal Cache) buildings at this point. (They could even be different - making production from Plains, or Hills, or Mountains, or whatever.) One of them could be the Bellfoundry and moved down onto Bellfounding. Leave the other on Flame and Void and move the Apollo Program up onto Wells. I didn't like the Apollo Program being on the bottom of the tree anyway - and based on our changes elsewhere, this actually puts the Apollo Program (or whatever Innovation we replace it with) on the tech that has the most prereqs in this era.

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?

We definitely want to notify other players when an Exhibition takes place, much like everyone gets notified by each spaceship part in BNW. I don't know if the Apollo Program is specifically meant to slow Science players down, it's just the first step toward that victory, so completing it tells everyone else you're aiming for that. We could equally just have another Innovation?

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?

Keeping lives! Treesong is good, but since it doesn't connect with Stedding or Sung Wood, it doesn't feel like the right place.

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...

I agree, I think we're a little early for Power-Wrought Weapons.

Law of War sounds like a good one - I've put that in. Machine Tools could work as well. There's that crossbow formation stuff that Mat re-introduced for the Band of the Red Hand, right?

*goes to look up*

Apparently it's a cranking mechanism for the crossbows, instead of the archer needing to set the drawstring themselves. Bow Cranks? Just Cranks too generic? Alternating Fire?

Also, do we want to move Pol 5 back, seeing as Pol 4 is back on Fireworks? We could swap it with Range6 on Traveling and then use the crossbow flavor (the name for which I will need to find) for "Unnamed Tech 8"?

Actually, Horse 4 and Horse 5 are right next to each other (Fancloth and "Unnamed Tech 3"). How about: Pol 5 on Skimming, Range 6 on "Unnamed Tech 3" (now named after that crossbow flavor, candidates above), and Horse 5 on "Unnamed Tech 8" (now called Law of War)?

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).

Exactly, you've got that all right.

Indeed, we should make sure we've synced up all of the decisions so we didn't make any by accident!

cool. I've attached a new version of the Excel sheet as well!

Brandon and Harriet have viewed this one too!

 

[counterpoint]

Awesome, looks good!

In the LB summary, it would probably help to compare the Dragon's balefire to nuclear weapons from BNW, since it's more similar to those than our angreal stuff.

I don't think we want to attach the angreal/sa'angreal automatically to a unit within range. There are tons of circumstances there where we'd need to make a decision that the player would want to. (Which one do we pick? What if there aren't any? What if the obvious choice has been killed on the AI's turn?) I think angreal and sa'angreal can be stationed in cities, they just can't be fired from them, only rebased to and from them.

"Whether a channeler is holding an angreal or sa'angreal is detectable for other civs."

It's worth adding here that it's detectable when the other player has active vision on the unit holding it, rather than all the time. (That is the case?)

"Sa'angreal attacks that strike empty hexes will pillage any improvements on that hex."

I'd say sa'angreal attacks should just always pillage.

agreed, and fixed.

Clarification, though: can you freely rebase the angreals/sa'angreal between cities? Don't they have to follow channelers around (and rebase within a range of 3? Or can they move freely? I understand the need for that mechanically, but since the airport equivalent - which is the extension of that mechanic - is about traveling/skimming, it seems hard to connect it.

also, what layer does the unit occupy? What other units can it share the tile with?

I think making the combat strength of the unit wielding it a modifier to the damage sounds like a good idea. It adds a layer of coolness to the whole thing ("Oh no, he's given the sa'angreal to that almost-mad Asha'man, he's going to destroy us!").

agreed.

also, does it *always* create Unravelled pattern, or just sometimes, or through over-use?

That's the one! (I still like the Fourth Age >.> )

we can re-discuss that again some time, if you want. EoP certainly fits the "Era of..." pattern better

Could we change the calendar, instead? So after NE 1000, it starts 4A 0 instead of continuing past 1000?

No, Era 9 wouldn't be only Innovation-techs. As you point out here, we totally want to do what BNW does and make some Innovations available earlier than others. We only need two in Era 9 (as you've picked) to comfortably ensure Science players need the most techs and need to get close to the end of the tree.

They wouldn't only be Science techs in Era 9 though - we probably want out equivalents to The Internet and Globalization (Culture and Diplo endgame techs) there as well. This is for the whole LB triggering thing - we don't want one civ pulling ahead meaning the LB doesn't happen unless they want it to.

ok! sounds good!

This is a good point, I think I forgot to move this guy. Originally you were suggesting moving Range 5 down to Infrastructure and moving Def4 up to Skimming. The flavor works for that, but we could keep this unit slightly above the bottom of the tree, if we want to, by swapping it with AG1?

Not sure which I prefer. Having some units on the bottom of the tree isn't in itself a problem as long as there's a good distribution otherwise from here on. And AG1 being on the tech after Skimming seems good. Any strong feeling either way?

I'm leaning towards swapping it with Def4.

OK, let's swap him with Def4. I like the idea of moving him back to Adv. Man., and dont love him on the bottom row... but I don't like the idea of moving AG1 to Skimming. So let's swap him with Def4.

The other thing is that by moving him to Adv. Man, we'd make him only one tech away from Rng 6. As it is, they're already pretty close. Too close, or ok?

Let's leave Kin on High Chant for now then.

good.

Hmmm, Exchange Rates vs Manifests. I feel like the Tar Valon Mark is really close to a very good flavor match up. I can't seem to compress it down more succinctly though. Exchange Rates for now then!

Exchange Rates could be ok, but I actually do kind of like Tar Valon Mark just as is...

Bingo, Shared Bloodlines!

noice.

Now that we've moved the trade route from Concoctions up to Letters of Rights they seem a bit more comparable. Fireworks is closer (vertically) to Formations, so let's go with that. I've moved Pol 4, which means Looking Glass, like its BNW counterpart, is two naval units (though not the same two).

agreed.

A search for angreal sounds like good flavor to me. Is there an angreal cache from the books or a specific search for some angreal that we can take the name of, like Firaxis did with the Manhattan Project?

I don't think so, I mean, they search for ter'angreals (bowl of winds, and stuff), but I don't think angreals or sa's. We could do a "search for the bowl" or something, but then we'd also have to have there be some weather-based effect. Also, this is an era too early for that. Not sure what to do, flavor-wise.

Oh, forgot to mention this. Another idea we could theoretically do is lock sa'angreal by project, but not angreal.

Woops, this is an error, the Bazooka is Range 6. I incorrectly labelled Rocket Artillery as Range 6 when renaming all the units. I corrected that to Siege 5 when doing Era 7, but forgot to also change the Bazooka!

got it. one thing, again - do we like how close this is to the new Rng 5?

Hrm yes, the Advanced Maneuvers prereq is quite important. Removing it brings Traveling's prereq count down from 49 to 37, which is a big drop. We also don't really have a chance to re-introduce the dependency from Advanced Maneuvers (and everything it pulls in back to Alloys) to the middle of the tree until Era 8, column 1, which would make the middle of Era 7 much cheaper than the top or bottom of the tree.

However, this has drawn my attention to the fact that Rediscovery only has 36 prereqs. Making me think it should require Rule of Medians (which brings it up to 46). That means Wells needs 61, which is a lot, but perhaps still a better arrangement overall. (Unless we want crazy people to be able to start searching for Seals way early.)

Related to the line from Skimming again, very good point. Perhaps we're better off removing that one, even though it does look nice? Or we could just leave there, even if it is a bit redundant?

I say remove skimming from traveling. Redundancy doesn't seem optimal.

Yes, adding RoM to Rediscovery is a good choice. As far as Wells having a lot, hmmm... If we remove Traveling as a prereq, then it'd be 47 - that's too low for the center, right? It would be higher if we made it have Keeping as a prereq, though, though then we'd have a weird double-requirement thing where "saidin" and it have the same prereqs. Wht do you want to do?

I could see us unlocking the Black Tower before the Asha'man unit, but I think the Asha'man unit should come before the Cleansing tech. Mostly because even though we've shifted the timeline back, I think we're still keeping to its general chronology, and the events of the books put significant reader time between the creation of the Asha'man and the Cleansing.

I could probably be convinced to put these together though, since the books cover a short period of time in the general history sense.

I think it's probably fine to leave it where it is, and the Asha'man there as well.

I'm still open to pushing the A'M back one tech, and pushing Cleansing back one tech.

Would it be weird if the Asha'man units couldn't be built until someone built the Black Tower?

wait, isn't that kind of the point of the Black Tower? I thought that was a "if one person builds this then anybody can build Asha'man" Wonder?

Flame and the Void is awesome if we're keeping the Asha'man. It's even tempting to leave them back here just to keep that flavor!

it's kind of problematic, chronology-wise, since I'm sure people have been using the Void for centuries, but the flavor is worth it, I'd say.

also, shouldn't it be "THE flame and the void," like "the" wheel of time, the pattern, etc.?

Also a possibility if we move the Asha'man.

Inverted Weaves can work for any channeling tech we need in these last eras, probably.

I think it's a good thing to keep around. It's a good flavor call out and also works towards the general mechanical goals of giving players game-ending tools at this part of the game. This tech breaks down one of the major barriers for Domination-leaning channeling civs, and will probably help most warmongers in some way.

ok, good. this is a per-civ, thing, right? Like, if one person researches Wells, but you haven't, you still can't channel there, right?

This is a very good point. There's no particular flavor to the Production (Desert) and Production (Angreal Cache) buildings at this point. (They could even be different - making production from Plains, or Hills, or Mountains, or whatever.) One of them could be the Bellfoundry and moved down onto Bellfounding. Leave the other on Flame and Void and move the Apollo Program up onto Wells. I didn't like the Apollo Program being on the bottom of the tree anyway - and based on our changes elsewhere, this actually puts the Apollo Program (or whatever Innovation we replace it with) on the tech that has the most prereqs in this era.

OK, so I'm fine with moving "Apollo Program" up to Wells and moving one of the others here... however, I think you partially are mistaking what I'm suggesting. I think Bellfoundry, makes a good building, and a good tech, but not both. If we create a bellfoundry building, it's quite lazy to have the tech too, especially since it's really kind of a random tech anyways. Don't want to double-dip on such random flavor.

So, maybe we don't need to move much, really, as the bellfoundry building could live on F&V or Wells decently (though you can ov course move Apollo up and do a swap either way).

Which of the buildings should it be?

...but then we lose the flavor synergy of bellfounding and the dragons, which isn't awesome. I dunno, this one's kind of tough.

We definitely want to notify other players when an Exhibition takes place, much like everyone gets notified by each spaceship part in BNW. I don't know if the Apollo Program is specifically meant to slow Science players down, it's just the first step toward that victory, so completing it tells everyone else you're aiming for that. We could equally just have another Innovation?

yeah, I could see it being the first, rather early innovation, if you want such things to start this early. Or, we could just nuke this particular thing and have the innovations start later. Either way. Not sure we need a generic project that serves no purpose but unlocking innovations, though.

Keeping lives! Treesong is good, but since it doesn't connect with Stedding or Sung Wood, it doesn't feel like the right place.

keeping!

I agree, I think we're a little early for Power-Wrought Weapons.

later, then!

Law of War sounds like a good one - I've put that in. Machine Tools could work as well. There's that crossbow formation stuff that Mat re-introduced for the Band of the Red Hand, right?

*goes to look up*

Apparently it's a cranking mechanism for the crossbows, instead of the archer needing to set the drawstring themselves. Bow Cranks? Just Cranks too generic? Alternating Fire?

Law of War is good, though it sounds like it's BS and not real flavor, oh well.

Cranks is not a lovely tech name. I'd say, if you're looking for that, we should go with Machine Tools instead, or Mechanical Tools or Mechanical Weaponry or something. Best bet?

Also, do we want to move Pol 5 back, seeing as Pol 4 is back on Fireworks? We could swap it with Range6 on Traveling and then use the crossbow flavor (the name for which I will need to find) for "Unnamed Tech 8"?

yes! Let's do that. Move Pol 5 back to Traveling, put Range 6 on this tech, call that one <machine stuff>, and then call the bottom one, with Mnt 5, "Law of War."? Does that work? confirm each of these pieces so I know what to update in the excel

Actually, Horse 4 and Horse 5 are right next to each other (Fancloth and "Unnamed Tech 3"). How about: Pol 5 on Skimming, Range 6 on "Unnamed Tech 3" (now named after that crossbow flavor, candidates above), and Horse 5 on "Unnamed Tech 8" (now called Law of War)?

wait, Pol 5 on *skimming*? Isn't Pol 4 on fireworks?

Mnt 5 on "Law of War" is good, though. Still very confused about the Pols, though.

 

[S3rgeus]

Clarification, though: can you freely rebase the angreals/sa'angreal between cities? Don't they have to follow channelers around (and rebase within a range of 3? Or can they move freely? I understand the need for that mechanically, but since the airport equivalent - which is the extension of that mechanic - is about traveling/skimming, it seems hard to connect it.

To be clear, the angreal and sa'angreal wouldn't be units that walk around the map, they would be "attached" to the channelers or cities they're in (like aircraft). I don't think cities need to be a special case for any of the rebase mechanics, just allow them as a rebase point. Keeping the same rebase range of 3 for consistency sounds good - though it would mean you could never rebase from one city to another. (I would say an individual angreal or sa'angreal can never be rebased more than once in a turn anyway, regardless of whether or not a city was involved.)

The "flavor mechanism" for an angreal or sa'angreal being rebased (from or to anywhere valid) can be that a Gateway is opened from the source to the target and the item is "handed through". (May be a while before we have an animation for that!) Then it lines up fine with the airport stuff too.

also, what layer does the unit occupy? What other units can it share the tile with?

Same layer as the Gateway Skirmisher, I'd say? Or maybe its own layer. "Normal" military and civilian units' movement shouldn't be affected by their placement.

also, does it *always* create Unravelled pattern, or just sometimes, or through over-use?

I think having a probability of doing so for each strike sounds good.

we can re-discuss that again some time, if you want. EoP certainly fits the "Era of..." pattern better

Yeah, let's discuss this again later.

Could we change the calendar, instead? So after NE 1000, it starts 4A 0 instead of continuing past 1000?

Doing that definitely sounds like a good idea either way, but I wouldn't say it replaces the era's name.

OK, let's swap him with Def4. I like the idea of moving him back to Adv. Man., and dont love him on the bottom row... but I don't like the idea of moving AG1 to Skimming. So let's swap him with Def4.

The other thing is that by moving him to Adv. Man, we'd make him only one tech away from Rng 6. As it is, they're already pretty close. Too close, or ok?

Sounds good, done!

We're moving Range 5 onto Infrastructure here, not Advanced Maneuvers, right? I think the distance between Range 5 and Range 6 now is fine (from Infrastructure to Cranks, or whatever we call that), because Advanced Maneuvers (in between them) pulls in Skimming as well, so it isn't a straight through for this whole era.

Exchange Rates could be ok, but I actually do kind of like Tar Valon Mark just as is...

Mmm, it's close, but I feel like it's not a flexible enough flavor.

I don't think so, I mean, they search for ter'angreals (bowl of winds, and stuff), but I don't think angreals or sa's. We could do a "search for the bowl" or something, but then we'd also have to have there be some weather-based effect. Also, this is an era too early for that. Not sure what to do, flavor-wise.

Oh, forgot to mention this. Another idea we could theoretically do is lock sa'angreal by project, but not angreal.

True, if we limit sa'angreal only we could make it some kind of channeling project, rather than about the actual items themselves? Something to do with pulling together a large number of channelers?

Also, this has reminded me: Linking. This is a mechanic, and I believe we've forgotten to assign it because it should have been available by now, right? I really like the Linking mechanics we discussed before, they quite simply but effectively capture the flavor. Or is Linking just always available? It seems like something that should be tech gated? Like Era 4/5?


Also, rereading the channeling summary, allowing players who sign Defensive Pacts to use each others Traveling Grounds makes a lot of sense, both flavor wise and mechanics wise for making Defensive Pacts more attractive.

got it. one thing, again - do we like how close this is to the new Rng 5?

Address above.

I say remove skimming from traveling. Redundancy doesn't seem optimal.

Done!

Yes, adding RoM to Rediscovery is a good choice. As far as Wells having a lot, hmmm... If we remove Traveling as a prereq, then it'd be 47 - that's too low for the center, right? It would be higher if we made it have Keeping as a prereq, though, though then we'd have a weird double-requirement thing where "saidin" and it have the same prereqs. Wht do you want to do?

I think leaving Wells with a high prereq count for this era is ok - particularly if we move whatever we replace the Apollo Program onto it. (More detail on that below.) We'll need a tech above Cleansing that leads through to the Culture and Diplo final techs for the beeline which avoids this chain of prereqs, much as Telecommunications does in BNW.

I think it's probably fine to leave it where it is, and the Asha'man there as well.

I'm still open to pushing the A'M back one tech, and pushing Cleansing back one tech.

I'm already concerned that the Cleansing will happen too late, so I'd prefer not to push it back. I'm totally up for leaving them where they are now though - sounds like a plan!

wait, isn't that kind of the point of the Black Tower? I thought that was a "if one person builds this then anybody can build Asha'man" Wonder?

Totally, I'd forgotten if we'd discussed this! Yes, I like this idea.

it's kind of problematic, chronology-wise, since I'm sure people have been using the Void for centuries, but the flavor is worth it, I'd say.

also, shouldn't it be "THE flame and the void," like "the" wheel of time, the pattern, etc.?

Yeah, it seems like a good compromise. I think the use of the Flame and the Void for channeling was only sort of formalized (again) during the time of the books, right? That sort of ties in.

Also, yes, "the"!

Inverted Weaves can work for any channeling tech we need in these last eras, probably.

Yep, there should be a slot for that flavor!

ok, good. this is a per-civ, thing, right? Like, if one person researches Wells, but you haven't, you still can't channel there, right?

Yep, exactly, the change unlocks for each civ (well, team) individually when they finish the tech.

OK, so I'm fine with moving "Apollo Program" up to Wells and moving one of the others here... however, I think you partially are mistaking what I'm suggesting. I think Bellfoundry, makes a good building, and a good tech, but not both. If we create a bellfoundry building, it's quite lazy to have the tech too, especially since it's really kind of a random tech anyways. Don't want to double-dip on such random flavor.

So, maybe we don't need to move much, really, as the bellfoundry building could live on F&V or Wells decently (though you can ov course move Apollo up and do a swap either way).

Which of the buildings should it be?

...but then we lose the flavor synergy of bellfounding and the dragons, which isn't awesome. I dunno, this one's kind of tough.

Why not both? I don't see why it's lazy - we've got good flavor and it makes sense that the tech and building are connected, like the best techs unlock things that make immediate sense about why they work. (Rocketry unlocks stuff that fires rockets, Nuclear Fission makes the Nuclear Bomb, Satellites makes the Hubble Telescope, etc. etc.). I agree that the Bellfounding flavor is a slam dunk for Dragons and it seems like a similar slam dunk for the building to me, given that it's a building from the books that's generic and exists all across the world, has clear yield implications, and is called out as important in the books.

As for which of them it should be, it'll probably make more sense to go for the Production (Desert), because I'm not sure how we'd connect up the flavor for the Angreal Cache resource.

yeah, I could see it being the first, rather early innovation, if you want such things to start this early. Or, we could just nuke this particular thing and have the innovations start later. Either way. Not sure we need a generic project that serves no purpose but unlocking innovations, though.

I think this being the first Innovation sounds like a good idea. I agree we don't need a generic project that unlocks them, there isn't really good flavor for that. Mechanically, the Apollo Program is one of the stages of the Science Victory. Even including the Apollo Program, BNW only has 7 things that need to be built (Apollo Program, SS Booster, SS Booster, SS Booster, SS Cockpit, SS Stasis Chamber, SS Engine), so we probably want to start at this time.

Law of War is good, though it sounds like it's BS and not real flavor, oh well.

Cranks is not a lovely tech name. I'd say, if you're looking for that, we should go with Machine Tools instead, or Mechanical Tools or Mechanical Weaponry or something. Best bet?

I think it would be good if we could call out the flavor from the books more directly, since it's a technology that's invented (or at least rediscovered) by the Band. Cranked Crossbows or something? The flavor for the wonder could be something to do with a known character who used one (like a statue of them or something).

yes! Let's do that. Move Pol 5 back to Traveling, put Range 6 on this tech, call that one <machine stuff>, and then call the bottom one, with Mnt 5, "Law of War."? Does that work? confirm each of these pieces so I know what to update in the excel

wait, Pol 5 on *skimming*? Isn't Pol 4 on fireworks?

Mnt 5 on "Law of War" is good, though. Still very confused about the Pols, though.

Woops, error on my part, meant to say Pol 5 is on Traveling.

Agreed to the rest: Pol 5 on Traveling. Law of War is the one with Horse 5 and a Wonder (above Bellfounding). Range 6 is on <machine stuff> (which is below Traveling), which we're naming above.


I've got some ideas for Era 8, but I'm going away this weekend! I'll try to be back with an updated tree and a post on Sunday, but if not, I'll definitely have it on Monday.

 

[counterpoint]

To be clear, the angreal and sa'angreal wouldn't be units that walk around the map, they would be "attached" to the channelers or cities they're in (like aircraft).

yes.

I don't think cities need to be a special case for any of the rebase mechanics, just allow them as a rebase point. Keeping the same rebase range of 3 for consistency sounds good - though it would mean you could never rebase from one city to another. (I would say an individual angreal or sa'angreal can never be rebased more than once in a turn anyway, regardless of whether or not a city was involved.)

ok. sounds good.

The "flavor mechanism" for an angreal or sa'angreal being rebased (from or to anywhere valid) can be that a Gateway is opened from the source to the target and the item is "handed through". (May be a while before we have an animation for that!) Then it lines up fine with the airport stuff too.

my issue isn't with the flavor mechanism for rebasing. The question is of what is the flavor mechanism for an "airport" improvement. Oh well, tbd later!

Same layer as the Gateway Skirmisher, I'd say? Or maybe its own layer. "Normal" military and civilian units' movement shouldn't be affected by their placement.

if it's the Gateway layer, does that mean there'd be a little "1" above a channelers head that's holding one?

I think it might need to be a different layer - it shouldn't count for the max-occupancy of a city's "fliers"

Sounds good, done!

We're moving Range 5 onto Infrastructure here, not Advanced Maneuvers, right? I think the distance between Range 5 and Range 6 now is fine (from Infrastructure to Cranks, or whatever we call that), because Advanced Maneuvers (in between them) pulls in Skimming as well, so it isn't a straight through for this whole era.

yep. that's all correct.

Mmm, it's close, but I feel like it's not a flexible enough flavor.

ok, exchange rates wins for now.

True, if we limit sa'angreal only we could make it some kind of channeling project, rather than about the actual items themselves? Something to do with pulling together a large number of channelers?

yeah... I think we have enough stuff like that that we don't need another "special event." Or, you're talking just flavor, right? Hmmmm.... not sure.

Also, this has reminded me: Linking. This is a mechanic, and I believe we've forgotten to assign it because it should have been available by now, right? I really like the Linking mechanics we discussed before, they quite simply but effectively capture the flavor. Or is Linking just always available? It seems like something that should be tech gated? Like Era 4/5?

yeah, Linking should probably be tech gated, if only because then it makes the progression of channelers more fun.

Let's say era 5, as that's the era when things seem to beef up in power (artillery, philosophies, etc.) What tech should it be attached to? Or, should it just be a part of the Earth Singing "Channeler Upgrade" that already exists? There aren't a whole lot of obvious flavor places thereabouts.

I do think that it is possible that Linking won't actually survive into the final game, though... We'll see.

Also, rereading the channeling summary, allowing players who sign Defensive Pacts to use each others Traveling Grounds makes a lot of sense, both flavor wise and mechanics wise for making Defensive Pacts more attractive.

sure. that sounds good! I've updatd the channeler summary - don't you have stuff about defPacts somewhere in another summary?

I think leaving Wells with a high prereq count for this era is ok - particularly if we move whatever we replace the Apollo Program onto it. (More detail on that below.) We'll need a tech above Cleansing that leads through to the Culture and Diplo final techs for the beeline which avoids this chain of prereqs, much as Telecommunications does in BNW.

sure, then!

I'm already concerned that the Cleansing will happen too late, so I'd prefer not to push it back. I'm totally up for leaving them where they are now though - sounds like a plan!

it's a plan.

Yeah, it seems like a good compromise. I think the use of the Flame and the Void for channeling was only sort of formalized (again) during the time of the books, right? That sort of ties in.

Also, yes, "the"!

The!

Why not both? I don't see why it's lazy - we've got good flavor and it makes sense that the tech and building are connected, like the best techs unlock things that make immediate sense about why they work. (Rocketry unlocks stuff that fires rockets, Nuclear Fission makes the Nuclear Bomb, Satellites makes the Hubble Telescope, etc. etc.). I agree that the Bellfounding flavor is a slam dunk for Dragons and it seems like a similar slam dunk for the building to me, given that it's a building from the books that's generic and exists all across the world, has clear yield implications, and is called out as important in the books.

As for which of them it should be, it'll probably make more sense to go for the Production (Desert), because I'm not sure how we'd connect up the flavor for the Angreal Cache resource.

OK, I'll change your mind on this one.

Bellfoundry is not flavor from the books. It's not even a word, as far as I can tell. Googling it, you find a few companies referred to as that, with a space between the words. But it's not a literal things. Bells are made by casting various metal in foundries. There's no place called a bellfroundry.

EDIT: ok, looking in the companion, I do see this in the entry on Andor: "Andor was considered to have the best bellfoundries, second possibly only to Arafel, and certainly the most numerous except for Arafel." So it is something in the books. Doesn't change the larger point, but obvously makes the paragraph above moot.

Now, Bellfounders are things, at least in WoT. Bellfounding is certainly a thing, in real life. And the connection is there, in WoT, but that doesn't mean the building is a thing or should be a thing.

but honestly it's not so much a "tech" as it is a clever use of another tech - somebody decides, "hey, let's combine a bell shape with boom!" The tech itself in the real world is really really old - fifteen hundred years or something. So, it's somewhat suspect as a tech, anyways.... But, that's a compromise that is probably fine to make.

However, the building itself - on top of the tech name - is a little bit of a stretch. I don't see it as the same thing as the examples you cited, actually. Rocketry unlocks "rocket artillery," not "rockets." Just like "Horseback riding" unlocks "horseman," not "horseback rider." One is fine, the other is tragically inelegant. Sattelites unlocks "hubble space telescope," not "Sattelite." "Nuclear Fission" unlocks "Nuclear Bomb," not..... I don't think there is a 1:1 parallel, there.

So, fine with Bellfounding unlocking units and things, but unlocking a unit called a "Bell" or "Bellfoundry" is truly rather lazy, IMO. In addition to the lack of true flavor justification... and the fact that there isn't really "supposed" to be a building on this tech anyways. We're stretching the flavor *and* moving mechanics for what is sketchy, at best.

However, I can see us, if we really wanted a building here, having a building called a Foundry instead. That would be better. That would make Bellfounding a sort of stand-in for "Metal Casting" as a tech.

Again, though, I'm not sure we need to be moving the building here, though, without good reason. There's also not a whole lot of good reason for making a Foundry desert-linked anyways (and yes we could take away or change the desert requirement, but that comes with balance implications - it seems likely it was put there as a "reward" for having a city near desert, which is overall pretty bad).

Also, on an unrelated note, regarding Angreal Cache... I think we may be up against a similar flavor-redundancy when we have a resource you collect called "Angreal," and in order to build Angreal you have to consume 1 Angreal.... And a sa'angreal consumes 2 Angreal. Pretty weird....

I think this being the first Innovation sounds like a good idea. I agree we don't need a generic project that unlocks them, there isn't really good flavor for that. Mechanically, the Apollo Program is one of the stages of the Science Victory. Even including the Apollo Program, BNW only has 7 things that need to be built (Apollo Program, SS Booster, SS Booster, SS Booster, SS Cockpit, SS Stasis Chamber, SS Engine), so we probably want to start at this time.

OK, Innovation 1!

I think it would be good if we could call out the flavor from the books more directly, since it's a technology that's invented (or at least rediscovered) by the Band. Cranked Crossbows or something? The flavor for the wonder could be something to do with a known character who used one (like a statue of them or something).

Eh... another case of double-dipping, IMO. Yes, call out the flavor. We do that by naming the unit "Cranked Crossbowman" or whatever. (having the latter-day ranged units be crossbows is decent flavor anyways, as it can serve as a justification of their reduced range), but calling the unit and the tech that is less than ideal, especially considering this is really rather obscure flavor.

Also, our tech tree hasn't more the most part called upon specific weapons or items in naming its techs. It's sticks out to me here to do it now.

I'd much rather see something more general. If not one of the ones I suggested before, something more "tech-y".

Woops, error on my part, meant to say Pol 5 is on Traveling.

Agreed to the rest: Pol 5 on Traveling. Law of War is the one with Horse 5 and a Wonder (above Bellfounding). Range 6 is on <machine stuff> (which is below Traveling), which we're naming above.

ok, all sounds good!

I've got some ideas for Era 8, but I'm going away this weekend! I'll try to be back with an updated tree and a post on Sunday, but if not, I'll definitely have it on Monday.

ok, look forward to it then!

EDIT 2:

really quick. I was working on the in-progress Tech Tree Summary, and I noticed that some buildings don't have direct lines to their decendents. The two I noticed that were "broken" were Culture 4 and Culture, and then Food 1 to Food 2.

Is this a problem? Obviously, you must have the earlier building to build the later one in a city, so I suspect it isn't a problem (unlike with units)

EDIT 3:
flavor drop, here: "balescream" is "another effect of the use of balefire on the PAttern. It was a warping, ripplig of the air as if the Pattern itself was howling in pain." Don't have to change the name of "Unravelled Pattern," but if we were to, that's some flavor to look to.

 

[S3rgeus]

I said I would be back on Monday! Unfortunately creating Era 8 has taken a bit longer (and I've had less time than I wanted this evening). I've ended up folding Era 9 into this phase as well because the whole "endgame" stuff all runs together and are relatively interdependent. I've completed most of the tree locally and have written a big chunk of post describing it, but don't have time to finish up the why of placing everything. So I shall return tomorrow with a newly uploaded tree and explanations for all of it!

 

[S3rgeus]

my issue isn't with the flavor mechanism for rebasing. The question is of what is the flavor mechanism for an "airport" improvement. Oh well, tbd later!

Yeah, I think the specific flavor of that can be decided later. The general relationship to Traveling for the actual "rebase" mechanic should give us a basis to work from.

if it's the Gateway layer, does that mean there'd be a little "1" above a channelers head that's holding one?

Maybe not exactly a "1", but definitely some visual UI indicator that the unit is carrying an angreal/sa'angreal.

I think it might need to be a different layer - it shouldn't count for the max-occupancy of a city's "fliers"

Yeah, it seems sensible to keep those separate.

yeah... I think we have enough stuff like that that we don't need another "special event." Or, you're talking just flavor, right? Hmmmm.... not sure.

Yeah, I'm talking flavor for the project. I think that mechanically, gating the "ultimate weapon" units on some civ-wide project that notifies other civs makes a lot of sense.

yeah, Linking should probably be tech gated, if only because then it makes the progression of channelers more fun.

Let's say era 5, as that's the era when things seem to beef up in power (artillery, philosophies, etc.) What tech should it be attached to? Or, should it just be a part of the Earth Singing "Channeler Upgrade" that already exists? There aren't a whole lot of obvious flavor places thereabouts.

I do think that it is possible that Linking won't actually survive into the final game, though... We'll see.

Should Earth Singing be straight up changed to Linking, as much more recognizable flavor? Then we can put that unlock on there as well.

I'd be fairly confident in the staying power of Linking, it seems like a big flavor element for us to skip over when we've got a fun new mechanic for it as well. (If it isn't fun, then that's the main thing that could sway it.)

sure. that sounds good! I've updatd the channeler summary - don't you have stuff about defPacts somewhere in another summary?

Yes, in the Diplo summary! Added to there as well!

OK, I'll change your mind on this one.

Bellfoundry is not flavor from the books. It's not even a word, as far as I can tell. Googling it, you find a few companies referred to as that, with a space between the words. But it's not a literal things. Bells are made by casting various metal in foundries. There's no place called a bellfroundry.

EDIT: ok, looking in the companion, I do see this in the entry on Andor: "Andor was considered to have the best bellfoundries, second possibly only to Arafel, and certainly the most numerous except for Arafel." So it is something in the books. Doesn't change the larger point, but obvously makes the paragraph above moot.

Now, Bellfounders are things, at least in WoT. Bellfounding is certainly a thing, in real life. And the connection is there, in WoT, but that doesn't mean the building is a thing or should be a thing.

but honestly it's not so much a "tech" as it is a clever use of another tech - somebody decides, "hey, let's combine a bell shape with boom!" The tech itself in the real world is really really old - fifteen hundred years or something. So, it's somewhat suspect as a tech, anyways.... But, that's a compromise that is probably fine to make.

However, the building itself - on top of the tech name - is a little bit of a stretch. I don't see it as the same thing as the examples you cited, actually. Rocketry unlocks "rocket artillery," not "rockets." Just like "Horseback riding" unlocks "horseman," not "horseback rider." One is fine, the other is tragically inelegant. Sattelites unlocks "hubble space telescope," not "Sattelite." "Nuclear Fission" unlocks "Nuclear Bomb," not..... I don't think there is a 1:1 parallel, there.

So, fine with Bellfounding unlocking units and things, but unlocking a unit called a "Bell" or "Bellfoundry" is truly rather lazy, IMO. In addition to the lack of true flavor justification... and the fact that there isn't really "supposed" to be a building on this tech anyways. We're stretching the flavor *and* moving mechanics for what is sketchy, at best.

However, I can see us, if we really wanted a building here, having a building called a Foundry instead. That would be better. That would make Bellfounding a sort of stand-in for "Metal Casting" as a tech.

Again, though, I'm not sure we need to be moving the building here, though, without good reason. There's also not a whole lot of good reason for making a Foundry desert-linked anyways (and yes we could take away or change the desert requirement, but that comes with balance implications - it seems likely it was put there as a "reward" for having a city near desert, which is overall pretty bad).

I'd be willing to go with this, mostly because I don't have a particularly strong opinion about using the bellfoundry as the flavor for this building, only that not using it seems like it's creating unnecessary work for us when the building doesn't strike me as a bad idea.

As you point out in your edit, there's definitely flavor foundation for bellfoundry being a building. It's even something that Elayne discusses directly after Aludra demonstrates how a dragon can work, about getting all of Caemlyn's bellfounders to work on making them.

I don't really find the specifics of the Rocketry etc stuff as convincing that our usage here would be lazy. None of those "direct" things are unlocked by those techs not because it would be lazy to do so, but because the Earth flavor doesn't line up for those things doing what the mechanics need. Particularly Horseman vs Horseback Rider, I would say those are totally the same thing from a flavor perspective (not in the obvious way, in that they describe the same thing, but that they are the immediate thing that the tech is about, just like Bellfounding and Bellfoundry), "Horseman" is just a convenient word. If we commonly used "horseback rider" to describe people who fought in such ways, then it would be fine. Same re Hubble, that's a wonder, so it should be a specific satellite.

Regarding moving the mechanics, we want to move the building off of Wells anyway because that's a good place for Innovation 1. This gives us a reasonable thing to do with one of these buildings that otherwise remains undefined flavor (which could also be fine at this point, I just figure this seems an easy association).

The desert link holds the most sway of these with me, but I'd still be suspect of the balance implications of using something aside from deserts. Most of the yield deficit created from being a desert city will have affected the player by this stage of the game.

As I said above, I'm not particularly attached to using this flavor here, but none of these seem like compelling reasons not to, and we'll otherwise have to come up with new flavor for it (alongside many other things!).

Also, on an unrelated note, regarding Angreal Cache... I think we may be up against a similar flavor-redundancy when we have a resource you collect called "Angreal," and in order to build Angreal you have to consume 1 Angreal.... And a sa'angreal consumes 2 Angreal. Pretty weird....

I don't think this sounds weird either. It seems quite logical that a player would discover a cache of angreal and only by "using" that can they gain access to one that can be used in the field (particularly since the making of angreal isn't rediscovered in the books).

Eh... another case of double-dipping, IMO. Yes, call out the flavor. We do that by naming the unit "Cranked Crossbowman" or whatever. (having the latter-day ranged units be crossbows is decent flavor anyways, as it can serve as a justification of their reduced range), but calling the unit and the tech that is less than ideal, especially considering this is really rather obscure flavor.

Also, our tech tree hasn't more the most part called upon specific weapons or items in naming its techs. It's sticks out to me here to do it now.

I'd much rather see something more general. If not one of the ones I suggested before, something more "tech-y".

Cool, I can see that working here. What about something like Mechanisms for the tech? I would almost suggest something like Mechanization, but that's a lot more modern, despite having similar etymology.

ok, look forward to it then!

One epic about eras, coming up!

EDIT 2:

really quick. I was working on the in-progress Tech Tree Summary, and I noticed that some buildings don't have direct lines to their decendents. The two I noticed that were "broken" were Culture 4 and Culture, and then Food 1 to Food 2.

Is this a problem? Obviously, you must have the earlier building to build the later one in a city, so I suspect it isn't a problem (unlike with units)

I agree, I don't think this is a big issue, for exactly the same reason you've called out, that building the newer building requires the older one to be in the city.

EDIT 3:
flavor drop, here: "balescream" is "another effect of the use of balefire on the PAttern. It was a warping, ripplig of the air as if the Pattern itself was howling in pain." Don't have to change the name of "Unravelled Pattern," but if we were to, that's some flavor to look to.

Interesting! That seems like better flavor than the Unravelled Pattern flavor, then? I'd be up for changing that.

 

[S3rgeus]

I have returned (at last)!

Era 8! And bonus era: Era 9! The updated tree is attached to this post, for any curious lurkers.

As I mentioned in my post from yesterday, when I went to create Era 8, I found a lot of the decisions in Era 8 were driven by the intended structure of Era 9. And it seemed like the two discussions would end up crossing back and forth quite often.

First things first, re the Editor and what this looks like, "Era 9" starts at Era 8 column 3 in the Editor tree. There are some bugs with adding eras that I need to sort out, but I wanted to finish this off before doing those, so for now there is no Era 9 on the Editor tree.

So, with that in mind, I actually started with Era 9. We have a bunch of things we want to be in Era 9. Because of the way the Last Battle works, we want the "endgame" techs for each victory condition to be in Era 9, so that pursuing those triggers the Last Battle (meaning it will be triggered in all games that get to this stage, and actually start in most of them - games where a player wins a very early Domination or Culture Victory not included).

We also want to ensure that Science Victory players need to complete the majority of the tree, whereas those other mechanics are able to beeline toward the end. Since the Innovations are our gateway to the Science Victory, we use the unlocking of the Innovations to force the Science players to reach certain techs.

This and other discussions we've had previously mean the following mechanics live in Era 9:

• Double Prestige
• Additional delegates for <something>
• Global rebase for Skimming units
• Melee 9
• Two Innovations
• A channeler upgrade
• Reveal the location of the remaining Seals

This is actually quite a lot of stuff! I ended up breaking this up into 5 techs, which can be seen at the end of the tree.

Names and unlocks aside for a moment, there is some prereq magic going on here that I think ended up working really well. Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace at the top (direct equivalents to The Internet and Globalization, and the respective endgame techs for Culture and Diplo civs) both have 57 total prereqs, which is exactly the same number that the BNW equivalents have.

Further, something that happened almost by accident, Portal Stones at the bottom of the tree is effectively the Last Battle victory's endgame tech. And it also has 57 prereqs!

All of these were achieved by two prereq changes much farther back in the tree, which I think you'll quite like. One was restoring the prereq from Profession to Crop Rotation. This meant that whole bottom section of the tree became a part of the middle much sooner and didn't all come in a chunk with the dependency on Alloys later on. That made Traveling's prereq count shoot up, but compensating for that by removing the prereq from Advanced Maneuvers to Traveling, and re-adding the double-length prereq from Skimming to Traveling brought all of their numbers back into line.

So, given the general "roles" of those three techs as endgames for the Culture, Diplo, and LB victories, I think the prereq structure serves them very well.

Another structural change is that with the presence of Era 9, I removed a tech from Era 8 column 2, when compared to BNW (we have 5 to their 6). I could see us removing another one, possibly, and possibly also/instead removing one from Era 8 column 1 (we match BNW at 6 techs there right now). This means that in terms of total tech count, we've added 4 techs.

We have also ended up with the same number of techs (5) as BNW that "do one thing only", which I think is very good, considering we've added 4 techs. The easiest way to deal with that would be to dilute the unlocks, but it seems like we've added enough new unlocks at this stage to fill them in.

Another prevalent feature of Eras 8 and 9 is the Innovations. I've used the Apollo Program's icon to represent them, and labeled them Innovation 1 through 8. Like Particle Physics in BNW, Steam Engines (almost named Steam Power, when I realized there was a BNW tech by the same name) contains just a single innovation and serves to pull in the majority of the top and middle of the tree as prereqs for the Science players. Below is True Power which has the other Era 9 innovation and serves to pull in most of the bottom of the tree.

Both of these techs serve as our gathering techs that force Science players to research more stuff in order to win the game. They have prereq counts of 72 and 73 respectively. This is higher than BNW's count for Particle Physics (the most expensive non-Future-Tech tech) of 68. However, it is very similar comparatively to our Future Tech equivalent. BNW's Future Tech has 80 prereqs, ours has 84, so the differences between the final science tech and the final tech in each tree (WoTMod and BNW) are 11 and 12, quite similar to each other. (If the middle of our tree is more clumped together, that could also explain why True Power has more prereqs than the BNW tech that fulfills the same role, Nanotechnology.)

This suggests to me that we might actually want to bump up the prereqs required for Untempered Glory, The Dragon's Peace, and Portal Stones by 3 or 4, so that there's a more even playing field. I can't say for certain which approach will be more effective, and if the Science techs' differing prereq count will have a significant impact on the viability of the Science victory. If we choose to remove any more techs from Era 8, we could do it in such a way that addresses part of this.

So, with Era 9 in place, I looked back at what we wanted to do in Era 8 to facilitate the structure that could lead to this set up, as prompted by the LB victory's requirements for the other victories' endgame abilities. (Obviously I didn't have those prereq numbers until after I did Era 8 and tweaked many things, but it's still a sensible order to go through the creation.)

Like before, I filled in all of the unlocks from Era 8 in BNW.

I axed the Guided Missile, which I believe we decided to drop?

I realized that we probably want to have another naval ranged ship upgrade somewhere, and that in fact Naval Range 3 was quite far back, on Exchange Rates. I added Naval Range 4 to Keeping, which seemed like a good mechanical place for this to go, but possibly less so in terms of flavor. I could see it living on Rediscovery, but the flavor of the unit would probably have to be quite specific to make sense with the flavor of that tech as well.

So this led to the creation of Naval Range 5, which I dropped onto Era 8 column 2.

I also distributed the Innovations throughout the era in such a way that they were relatively spread out and gave the Science players something to be working on every few techs.

I added the channeling content that we had earmarked for this era:

• Unlocking the Cleansing of Saidin
• Another channeler strength upgrade
• A Spark increase

So, next up was flavor! I've been using the names from the tree above to identify techs, but most of them were unnamed until this part of the process. (Unnamed Tech 1 through 14, I believe, and Cleansing.)

Cleansing I left there since it had been a placeholder for holding the sa'angreal and was an obvious place to put the actual Cleansing project. I would be quite happy to change this if there's evocative flavor for the actual process that Rand and Nynaeve used to discover/manipulate/create the weaves that they used to Cleanse Saidin in the books.

The next techs I named were the Era 9 techs. Searching for the name for an endgame Diplo tech, The Dragon's Peace seemed like a very large flavor nod that would make a lot of sense.

Untempered Glory is generic flavor that I thought sounded pretty cool - reflecting the Prestige of a civ spreading to the world. I tried out Victor's History on this as well - evoking the idea of a winner writing their own history to embellish their own role in it and tying into Historians etc as our sources of Prestige, but this sounded too much like a military tech for my liking. There might be a melding of these flavors that works better.

Steam Engines, as mentioned above, was almost called Steam Power until I realized that was a BNW tech. This seems like a great flavor callout for an innovation that captures the flavor from the steamcarts stuff that started emerging from Rand's academies in the books (even used in the latter parts of the books' LB). Seeing as the tech hosts only an innovation, the two being directly connected seems like a good call.

True Power, I'm unsure about. It's a very Shadow-ish flavor to put on a tech that will be researched by any Science player. I could see it being pitched as an understanding of the True Power, rather than necessarily a using of it. This would also let us make Melee 9 some kind of Shadow-like True Power unit, if we wished to. We might choose to make it a standalone unit, rather than a part of the melee upgrade path, if we do that.

Portal Stones I'm also unsure about. There were a lot of Traveling-related techs in Eras 8 and 9 (which will be touched upon some more in a moment). Portal Stones is well known flavor and the understanding of them is something that's beyond the knowledge of the books. But that doesn't line up with the other techs in this column (more on the role of the Fourth Age/Era of Prophesy below) which are more current to the time of the books themselves. The creation of or reliable use of Portal Stones also doesn't seem like it would be something likely to happen shortly after the books took place. So I'd be all up for changing this one's name to something that fits its unlocks and makes more flavor sense.

Now we're back to Era 8. I knew that we needed a beeline across the top row to Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace, for all the reasons mentioned before. Originally I had a prereq going from Cleansing to Scholarship, but after the prereq changes back earlier in the tree, that ended up increasing Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace prereq counts to 61. (If we want to increase those prereq counts as I mentioned when discussing overall tech counts and the last 2 innovations, then restoring that prereq would be an ideal way to do so.)

Our Gateway2 unit takes the place of both the Jet Fighter and the Stealth Bomber. I elected to put it on Era 8 column 2 (where the Stealth Bomber was) because we seemed to want for units there a bit more.

And now for some flavor! Bowl of Winds I do not particularly like. It's not really a tech and doesn't lead well into the next tech along (Scholarship). The Bowl flavor could work well with a naval unlock and a wonder, but I feel like there is probably a better way to do this.

Scholarship I'm a bit happier with. It's generic flavor, but kind of hints at the general move toward scientific progression that Rand started in the books. It hosts the Prestige National Wonder (which works much better with Science-ish flavor than Tourism did) and an Innovation.

Next is Cleansing, which I discussed above.

Sextant is something we discussed a while ago as a tech that could theoretically go at the end of the tree. With the strongest naval unit in the game on it, I figured this could be a good place for it to live, and some kind of navigation-themed Innovation would go well wtih that flavor too. It can also be seen as vaguely leading into steam engines, through their applications for ships.

Next up is A'dam. This might be controversial as a tech, but I think it potentially fits very, very well here. Wells and Law of War combine flavorfully to lead to it, and it would be very doable to have an innovation on it. Our melee unit here could also, possibly, not be Melee 8, but rather let Melee 8 be the one in Era 9. (Related to making Melee 9 a non-Melee-upgrade-path Shadow-ish unit, we'd probably want to either not do both of these, or have Melee 8 be a third unit on a different tech in this era, if we do adopt both.) Here, we could have some kind of anti-channeling unit, which I don't believe we've discussed before, but seems like it could be a mechanical hole in our new systems - a way to deliberately counteract channeler-heavy enemies without using channelers yourself. This obviously combines well with the flavor of the a'dam and its easy use as an anti-channeler weapon.

Greater Consensus we had previously earmarked as useful flavor for this era, which it works for here. We've got the Flame of Tar Valon flavor on the nuke defense building, and the Healing of Gentling as something the Aes Sedai would need to "agree to do", hence the association with the tech. And we've also got a wonder, for which I'm sure there's some related flavor.

Across from Greater Consensus, we have Ter'angreal, which is also flavor we've discussed before as being ideally placed to appear at this part of the tree. (This flavor captures the rediscovery of how to make ter'angreal, as we saw in the books.) Hooking an innovation onto that should be eminently doable and it's a good home for the two more general channeler upgrades we wanted to put here. (Did we want a final T'a'r upgrade? If so, this is also a good place for it. There's also room to move one of the channeling unlocks down onto Gateways if such a T'a'r upgrade would make Ter'angreal too busy.)

Gateways I don't like at all as a name. It suffers from the same problem as Portal Stones, in that its desired flavor is "Traveling, but better". Given its unlocks, that intended flavor fits (revealing the map and a new Skimming unit point to it, the innovation is more flexible), but there are undoubtedly better names.

And then there are three unnamed techs, two of which just unlock a new military unit. I'd say the flavor for these techs are probably more dependent on the specific flavor we choose for the units they'll unlock.

"Unnamed Tech 3" has a bit more focus, unlocking the final Naval Melee 6 unit (which does have a through line to Naval Melee 5!) and the Spaceship Factory equivalent. Our Spaceship Factory equivalent is presumably something that allows players to build Envoys more quickly, or something to that effect? Do we have a rough idea of what flavor we want for that?

So, something I touched on above was the role of "Era of Prophesy/Fourth Age" and how that fits in with the techs in Era 9. To me, it feels like a lot of these techs are actually more callouts to techs and events from the later part of the timeline of the books. I wonder if we shouldn't let the time compression go even further than we did previously and have the final era be something along the lines of an LB era. "Era of Turmoil" or even "Era of Tarmon Gai'don" (I can't remember if we discussed this when originally naming the era? I get the vague impression I may have suggested we not do this at the time?).

And I think that brings me to the end of what's there for now for Eras 8 and 9!

 

[counterpoint]

Should Earth Singing be straight up changed to Linking, as much more recognizable flavor? Then we can put that unlock on there as well.

Interesting! a few things:

1) Much better flavor
2) is this ok given the rest of the unlocks on that tech (production boosts)?
3) as you could predict, I don't love the "Linking unlocks Linking" terminology if we did this. Is there a way around it? Like, naming the tech Circles (a synonym for it) or Channeling Circles or calling it Linking but letting it unlock "create a channeling circle" or something like that?

I'd be willing to go with this, mostly because I don't have a particularly strong opinion about using the bellfoundry as the flavor for this building, only that not using it seems like it's creating unnecessary work for us when the building doesn't strike me as a bad idea.

ok, so I propose a solution (or path to a solution) below. But first, I'll pick through each point...

As you point out in your edit, there's definitely flavor foundation for bellfoundry being a building. It's even something that Elayne discusses directly after Aludra demonstrates how a dragon can work, about getting all of Caemlyn's bellfounders to work on making them.

but that's not the same thing. Yes, "Bellfounders" come up rather prominently. "BellfoundRIES", as a place, not so much (I don't recall it ever, but it's mentioned incidentally in the Companion). the fact that there's a dedicated place where they make bells is a bit less coherent than the fact that there's a dedicated person that makes bells.

I don't really find the specifics of the Rocketry etc stuff as convincing that our usage here would be lazy. None of those "direct" things are unlocked by those techs not because it would be lazy to do so, but because the Earth flavor doesn't line up for those things doing what the mechanics need. Particularly Horseman vs Horseback Rider, I would say those are totally the same thing from a flavor perspective (not in the obvious way, in that they describe the same thing, but that they are the immediate thing that the tech is about, just like Bellfounding and Bellfoundry), "Horseman" is just a convenient word. If we commonly used "horseback rider" to describe people who fought in such ways, then it would be fine. Same re Hubble, that's a wonder, so it should be a specific satellite.

I think you're presuming a lot here. The Hubble example is valid, of course. But I can't say I agree that they'd call it a Horse Rider if that's what we called it on earth. In fact, I posit that it appears to be the case that, in general, Firaxis tried to avoid this kind of "redundancy" as well - in fact, the apparent fact of their avoidance of it is why I'm trying to avoid it.

If we called it a "horseback rider" in real life, I posit that there's a good chance they would indeed call the unit that, but that additionally they would find another name for the tech (as in, not "horseback riding.") You presume that it is a coincidence of sorts that they don't have the direct redundancy - it's just because of earth flavor. I can't see any evidence for that, and the opposite (that they tried to avoid redundancy in naming) seems just as reasonable or likely.

Also, keep in mind that this is essentially the only tech we're considering doing this for (as of now) - that makes it "stick out."

Regarding moving the mechanics, we want to move the building off of Wells anyway because that's a good place for Innovation 1. This gives us a reasonable thing to do with one of these buildings that otherwise remains undefined flavor (which could also be fine at this point, I just figure this seems an easy association).

ok, moving it off of wells is certainly an option (see flow chart below, and also see general discussion on innovations below).

The desert link holds the most sway of these with me, but I'd still be suspect of the balance implications of using something aside from deserts. Most of the yield deficit created from being a desert city will have affected the player by this stage of the game.

I agree, let's keep it as desert. However, that's pretty darn weird, when given the bellfoundry flavor. There doesn't appear to be any reason whatsoever why a bellfoundry would occur in the desert, or only in desert cities. The civs in the companion described as having good bellfounders (Andor and Arafel, if I recall correctly), are most definitely not desert civs.

The bellfoundry (or foundry in general) flavor makes the most sense, IMO, as a factory-replacement - a powerful production building that requires Iron. To me, the desert thing just doesn't make any sense.

As I said above, I'm not particularly attached to using this flavor here, but none of these seem like compelling reasons not to, and we'll otherwise have to come up with new flavor for it (alongside many other things!).

Obviously I don't agree that we have no compelling reasons against doing this - is the desert flavor-break not a pretty darn good one? - but more to the point, we haven't flavored *any* of this stuff yet (buildings, etc.). Why start with somewhat suspect flavor with our first building? If we have to settle later, we can settle later, but why settle now?

That said, it's not the *end of the world* to do something like this. I could live with it as a tentative solution if it can survive the following logical gauntlet:

1) Do we definitely want a production (desert) building living on Bellfounding (as opposed to one of the other techs)?
if NO - put on another tech and flavor accordingly
if YES - proceed

2) Are we definitely ok with the flavor of Bellfoundries being linked to deserts, and thus only available in desert cities?
if NO - put on Bellfounding and leave generic ("Production (Desert") until later phase of tech tree development
if YES - proceed

3) Are we definitely ok with the flavor obscurity of a Bellfoundry?
if NO - put on Bellfounding and leave generic until next phase
if YES - proceed

4) Are we definitely ok with the direct redundancy of Bellfoundry with Bellfounding?
if NO - proceed to 5
if YES - proceed to 6

5) Should we rename Bellfounding to accommodate this?
if NO - proceed to 6
if YES - rename Bellfounding to eliminate redundancy

6) name building Bellfoundry and place in Red, considering alternate flavor in the future.

I don't think this sounds weird either. It seems quite logical that a player would discover a cache of angreal and only by "using" that can they gain access to one that can be used in the field (particularly since the making of angreal isn't rediscovered in the books).

I think the issue I have with it is these two aspects:
1) having to "build" an angreal after the fact, when you clearly already have them
2) using them to create sa'angreal

It's not terrible, but I feel like we could/should do better. What if they were called "Items of Power" instead or something (have we used that elsewhere? Otherwise, is there a way to reframe the production of the ang/sa'ang "units" to fix this?

Cool, I can see that working here. What about something like Mechanisms for the tech? I would almost suggest something like Mechanization, but that's a lot more modern, despite having similar etymology.

I think Mechanisms is fine. Not perfect, but definitely fine.

Interesting! That seems like better flavor than the Unravelled Pattern flavor, then? I'd be up for changing that.

I could go either way. Balescream is certainly cooler flavor, it just... doesn't quite "fit" as well, in that it's supposedly to be the sound you hear, not necessarily the "thing" that has happened. What's your vote?

 

[counterpoint]

This is epic! Thanks so much for doing this. I feel very glad that I jumped in and did the first half of the eras, because this craziness with prereq counts would have made my head hurt. I feel like the kid in class who raises his hand to answer the easy question, knowing that then he won't get called on for the hard one (incidentally, why haven't more of my students caught on to that trick?).

As I mentioned in my post from yesterday, when I went to create Era 8, I found...
<STUFF>
...which can be seen at the end of the tree.

ok, all sounding good in general. I do think there's a related discussion that needs to happen though, regarding the innovations and such (see below). I also am not 100% positive that all of this stuff does need to live in era nine. Mostly, I'm concerned about the extra techs - more on this below.

Names and unlocks aside for a moment, there is some prereq magic going on here that I <STUFF> And it also has 57 prereqs!

ok, so at first consideration I raised my eyebrow to these being in Era 9 - shouldn't they be in Era 8, like in BNW? But if you're saying they have the same amount of prereqs, then that's totally fine!

Of course, the other element is that by entering a new era, other things happen, including triggering world era. If putting them in era nine helps ensure that the LB begins at the right point, then that is also fine. If that's not the effect, or if that causes some unintended negative affects, then we should reconsider. I suspect you have considered this all and that I have the right of it.

All of these were achieved by two prereq changes much farther back in the tree,... <STUFF>...and re-adding the double-length prereq from Skimming to Traveling brought all of their numbers back into line.

yes, I do very much like these changes!

So, given the general "roles" of those three techs as endgames for the Culture, Diplo, and LB victories, I think the prereq structure serves them very well.
<STUFF>
The easiest way to deal with that would be to dilute the unlocks, but it seems like we've added enough new unlocks at this stage to fill them in.

OK, so this is the first thing to really give me pause. 6 extra techs seems like quite alot. I understand that the beeline points for a few of the victories are the same, but still, having that many extra does certainly have some consequences. For one, it could make the science victory too long (but see below for that). Secondly, it rewards good science output more than BNW. Namely, when you're done in BNW, all you get to do is unlock future tech for score. Now, there's more and more stuff to unlock, essentially further rewarding your science. Not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's most certainly a *thing*.

I think what you've proposed could work, but I do think I'll like it more if it wasn't so far above BNW. If that means cutting some of era 8, fine, if it means removing some of era 9, also fine (and probably better). I don't really see the problem with having fewer "one unlock" techs, and doubling up on some things - especially since some of our unlocks are "new" and don't have BNW analogues.

Another prevalent feature of Eras 8 and 9 is the Innovations....
<STUFF>
... we could do it in such a way that addresses part of this.

ok, lots here, though I actually have little to directly say about it. I want to talk at some length below about innovations, though.

Regarding "evening the playing field," I do think that's apt, though I might suggest that it would be better to lower the science tech count instead of raising the others. I don't think we necessarily should be aiming to make the tech tree longer - it seems like it'd just make it harder to pull off a "normal" culture or diplo victory... unless you think we should actively be designing in such a way that we need the extra techs so as to provide stuff to research doing an extended LB.... I was under the impression that the total game length was still going to be relatively similar, epic LB notwithstanding. I rarely, if ever, reach the end of the tree.

I axed the Guided Missile, which I believe we decided to drop?

Yeah I think the guided missile is gone.

I realized that we probably want to have another naval ranged ship upgrade somewhere, ...<STUFF>..., but the flavor of the unit would probably have to be quite specific to make sense with the flavor of that tech as well.

If you like the mechanical placement of NvR 4 on Keeping, then I say do it. The flavor is fine. Preserving food and stuff certainly would help naval vessels have larger crews, go on longer trips, etc.

So this led to the creation of Naval Range 5, which I dropped onto Era 8 column 2.

fine with this.

I also distributed the Innovations throughout the era in such a way that they were relatively spread out and gave the Science players something to be working on every few techs.

fine with this.

I added the channeling content that we had earmarked for this era:

• Unlocking the Cleansing of Saidin
• Another channeler strength upgrade
• A Spark increase

yeah, that plus the T'a'r stuff, potentially.

Also, where's the sa'angreal unlock? There could be a tech called Balefire that unlocks the use of sa'angreal.... am I crazy, or did you forget to unlock these?

OK, before we talk flavor, I think we need to talk innovations.

According to our previous discussion and our Science V summary, we did want 8 innovations (not 9), and, most importantly, wanted them attached to 5 technologies, not 9 separate techs. I can definitely see the flavor value of having 9 separate techs, but i certainly see the mechanical value in having some coexist on the same tech. Alternatively, I could see another way of doing this be to simply bring them in earlier (early era 8, or even era 7). In any case, the 9 separate technologies thing is part of what accounts for/causes the "Extra" techs we have, vs BNW, and the difficulties that may cause.

So, in short, need we have them on so many "extra" technologies? It's true, they're never totally alone, which is definitely a good thing, but still, things are still spread pretty thin at the end, there, moreso than BNW. I'm not convinced that's the best thing.

The other question is whether 9 is too many. You need to build Apollo plus 6 parts in BNW, so 7 total things you're producing. The thing is, this is likely going to be much more difficult to pull off, in that you have to actually send an envoy with the innovation - and that envoy provides benefits to your opponent! So I question whether having those extra 2 innovations (in comparison to the 7 things in BNW) is ideal. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just calling it into question.

Lastly - but probably the biggest piece - is the flavor. This has me thinking that we probably should have done a quick "reframing" before you did the innovations, so as not to waste time - I think there might be a few things we need to reevaluate. I was under the understanding that the innovations were going to be uber-late story techs (possibly some very near future techs) from the lore? I thought we were going to use the experimental stuff developed in the Cairhien academy as flavor for these - we have plenty of ideas from that. Your Steam Engines one is a great example. But... where are the others?

In any case, it makes sense that instead of just searching for flavor in the same manner we've been doing when naming techs, we should look to the flavor of the innovations we will unlock in order to provide inspiration for the tech itself. Now, I've made it clear that I don't love redundancy in names of techs and unlocks, but 1)I think we can avoid too much direct redundancy, and 2) the innovations may be the precise kind of thing where that redundancy isn't a problem - "I've learned the secrets of "electricty," I'm going to show "Electricity" to the people.

In short, I think we should break protocol here, and come up with the unlock's flavor first, and then the tech's flavor. Yes, that may call into question a lot of your tech names. I think it's worth it.

Also, we need to decide up-front: are the innovations simply called after the tech they unlock, or do they have distinct flavor/naming (if only slightly)? Like, would the Steam Engine tech unlock a Steam Engine innovation, or a Steam Wagon innovation?

In any case, from our previous posts, a long time ago, the Academy at Cairhien folks had recently invented the following stuff (my words, not specific flavor) (also see this):

Giant Crossbow/Ballista
Lightning Jar/early electricity/lights
Glider
Paddlewheel Riverboat
Steam Engine
Telescope (astronomical)
Better Paper/printing press
Six furrow plough
Horse-drawn hay harvester
better loom
aqueducts
better drainage and sewers
paved roads
gas fuel (bio waste)
Crossbow Crank (not in the Academy)
Understanding of the need to destroy the dark One's seals
Aludra's roarstick (not academy)

[SIDE NOTE - We have "looking glasses" as a naval tech, thinking that that's a telescope. A Looking Glass, as far as I can tell, is a Magnifying Glass, not a telescope. So this flavor is lousy for that tech, I think. I'd say we probably need to rename that one - we could do "Lenses" or something, but that may be someone redundant with this presumed late-game tech. Though, it does appear that this wasn't a new invention - it's the building a bit one and putting it on a tower that's the new thing (i.e., an observatory). Thoughts?]

OK, so that's a rather high amount of options! And I think many, if not all of those, have conceivable ways to link up with late-game mechanics we need. Also, many, if not all, could have more generalizable tech names associated with them. So, looking at them each briefly through these "filters":

Giant Crossbow/Ballista - this thing throws spears, it seems. The name of the tech would need to be generalized a bit, I think, though I'm not sure how. This one would make the most sense also attached to a very late game siege unit (making the Dragons the previous unit), or else framed (with only moderate "stretching") as a late-game Range unit (that likely doesn't yet exist). I could see it linked to some other military stuff, of course, but the absent of the actual usable unit would be conspicuous. This one is a decent candidate, I think.

Lightning Jar/early electricity/lights - any number of directions we could go with in naming the tech itself and the innovation itself. could tie into revealing map, revealing seal locations, helping with innovation production, etc. This one's a good candidate, I think.

Glider - this one would probably need a more generalized tech name (something about the science of making such things). Could theoretically be linked to a late-game unit, though that'd break the traveling-link these units all have. Not much else seems to fit. Not a great candidate

Paddlewheel Riverboat - Could probably find a general tech to encompass this specific creation. this one would be great with a production or trade related thing, but there aren't really those at this stage. However, I could see this connecting to the Tourism boost , or revealing the whole map. A decent candidate.

Steam Engine -They call the things steamwagons in the books. I think the steam engines tech name and steamwagon innovation may work fine. This one is like the paddleboat above, in that it's not really unit-tied (though there are weaponized ones in Aviendha's visions, though that's not really what we're going for here, I think) - more like helping with trade, science, tourism, revelation, etc. Any of those would work. Only a decent candidate, but one that's flavorfully present event that it essentially demands inclusion.

Telescope (astronomical) - depending on what we do with "Looking Glass" earlier, this could be adapted into something general concerning lenses. This one could tie into map revelation, innovation production, or even naval units. A decent candidate.

Better Paper/printing press I think finding the right tech to flavor this might be tricky, especially since the printing press itself appears to have existed for the whole age (according to the link above). This one could connect to any of the things listed above for paddlewheel, especially the tourism thing, in addition to the Diplomat boost thing (that last might be the best bet). Not the best candidate for inclusion, but the synergy with diplomacy may make it useful to us.

Six furrow plough and Horse-drawn hay harvester - these ones will be hard to create a neat sounding late-game tech... much like the trouble we had earlier with agricultural techs. Also, there aren't a lot of late-game unlocks that make sense in connection to this, IMO. Neither are good candidates, I think.

better loom - exactly the same as the agri stuff above - tech generalizability and mechanical link is tricky. Not a good candidate.

aqueducts - Finding a good tech name might be tricky. Also, what this would do mechanically is problematic. Not sure what exactly it would be, as there's no food stuff around here. Also, it feels like something that should already exist, so that creates some weirdness. Not a good candidate.

better drainage and sewers I suppose we'd spin it into some kind of "Sanitation" tech. Not sure what it would do, mechanically - might be somewhat forced. Not a terrible candidate, but not great either.

paved roads - this might be tricky to name, tech-wise. Mechanically, it's probably best linked with all the same stuff as the steamwagon above. The problem here is that this flavor cries out to unlock actual paved roads, which we won't have at this stage, so the flavor is thus problematic. Mediocre as a candidate, but possible.

gas fuel (bio waste) - this one's a trip. Could probably come up with something to do with the tech, though it might be tricky. Not sure what it would unlock - conceivably some of the military techs, and/or the stuff I linked to steam above. Mediocre candidate.

Crossbow Crank (not in the Academy) - we already have this one, and I think it's fine as it is and where it is. It's conceivable, however, that we could put an innovation there as well - that may be too early, though. Mediocre candidate.

Understanding of the need to destroy the dark One's seals - not sure at all what this tech would be called, but it's referring to the Fel guy's ideas, possibly partially contained in his book "Reason and Unreason." In any case, it'd link to the "reveal seals" mechanic. A decent candidate if we can make it make sense.

Aludra's roarstick (not academy) - this one could be flavored as a tech with explosives or something like this. This one would certainly connect to one of the late game melee units, or even one of the other kinds of units (traveler, gateway, etc.), and may not need to be an innovation. Basically, whichever unit we want to use this flavor on, we should just name the tech in a way such that it makes that viable. A decent option.

What do you think? We could probably find the right number of innovations there - the question is how many techs do they occupy?

Cleansing I left there since it had been a placeholder for holding the sa'angreal and was an obvious place to put the actual Cleansing project. <STUFF>.

hmmm... I suppose I'd prefer not to call the tech "Cleansing," if possible. "The Cleansing" is the flavor name of the event itself..

apparently, "Rand used repulsion and attraction of opposites," saidin and shadar logoth. "Opposites cancel, but opposites far enough apart become alike, and like attracts like." That was the process. Any way to work that in somehow?

The next techs I named were the Era 9 techs. Searching for the name for an endgame Diplo tech, The Dragon's Peace seemed like a very large flavor nod that would make a lot of sense.

This is good flavor, but I don't think it's right for here. The reason is because the Dragon Peace is the name of the establishment of the Light Alliance if you join it in the LB. It seems weird to use that name there, and then call a tech that too - one that shadow players could research. I guess as a tech at all its somewhat weird.

Maybe something about gathering leaders together? Perhaps one of the innovation-linked ones above provides the answer.

Untempered Glory is generic flavor...<STUFF>...There might be a melding of these flavors that works better.

Hmmm... Untempered Glory is a little pretentious, but it isn't terrible. Also, this could get some ideas from the innovation stuff above. Not sure what else to suggest right now.

Steam Engines, as mentioned above,...<STUFF>...the two being directly connected seems like a good call.

Yeah, they're steamwagons. I think this tech name is fine, though. This innovation-only tech is one example of something that could be fused with another tech, though.

True Power, I'm unsure about....<STUFF>...rather than a part of the melee upgrade path, if we do that.

I'm not sure I like this idea, for the reasons you mention. Not actually anything anybody understands, and those that use it are either forsaken or Rand. I'm also unsure if I like the idea of throwing in such a drastically weird unit at the end. If we want the roarstick to be the final melee unit, perhaps this flavor should be based on that instead? Any illuminator-related ideas?

Portal Stones I'm also unsure about. ...<STUFF>...So I'd be all up for changing this one's name to something that fits its unlocks and makes more flavor sense.

Yeah, this one we shouldn't do. I feel pretty solid on this opinion. We've (stretched the flavor) included Portal Stones as our Landmarks, which isn't awesome, but at least fits the bill as "something you found that gives you culture because it's trippy." Having it as a tech presumes you're using them to some advantage. The only thing I can think that that would do is produce seanchan exotics (since they came from beyond the portal stones),which we aren't doing here.

Portal stones appear to be things that were made *before* the AoL, anyways.

Maybe this tech is based on an innovation above? Maybe it's simply channeling related? Inverted Weave or some such thing? Cuendillar? What else is rediscovered late in the series?

Now we're back to Era 8. I knew that we needed a beeline across the top row to Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace,...<STUFF>...then restoring that prereq would be an ideal way to do so.)

ok, this all makes sense to me.

Our Gateway2 unit takes the place of both the Jet Fighter and the Stealth Bomber. I elected to put it on Era 8 column 2 (where the Stealth Bomber was) because we seemed to want for units there a bit more.

sounds good.

And now for some flavor! Bowl of Winds I do not particularly like. It's not really a tech and doesn't lead well into the next tech along (Scholarship). The Bowl flavor could work well with a naval unlock and a wonder, but I feel like there is probably a better way to do this.

Yeah, we can do better. Either some generic navally stuff, an innovation above, or something else entirely. The BoW isn't terrible, but it doesn't really fit "as a tech", IMO. Still thinking on this one...

Scholarship I'm a bit happier with. It's generic flavor, but kind of hints at the general move toward scientific progression that Rand started in the books. It hosts the Prestige National Wonder (which works much better with Science-ish flavor than Tourism did) and an Innovation.

Eh, can't do it. Scholarship is the name of our Social Policy tree. Need a different name. Luckily, I think we have plenty of options in innovations above

Sextant is something we discussed a while ago as a tech that could theoretically go at the end of the tree. With the strongest naval unit in the game on it, I figured this could be a good place for it to live, and some kind of navigation-themed Innovation would go well wtih that flavor too. It can also be seen as vaguely leading into steam engines, through their applications for ships.

this one could be fine. I could also see this flavor being used earlier, though (like where Bowl of Winds is, or Unnamed tech 3). It does seem a little bit epic for this late. Since there's an innovation here, we should probably use an innovation-related flavor here instead.

Next up is A'dam. This might be controversial as a tech, but I think it potentially fits very, very well here. Wells and Law of War combine flavorfully to lead to it, and it would be very doable to have an innovation on it. Our melee unit here could also, possibly, not be Melee 8, but rather let Melee 8 be the one in Era 9. (Related to making Melee 9 a non-Melee-upgrade-path Shadow-ish unit, we'd probably want to either not do both of these, or have Melee 8 be a third unit on a different tech in this era, if we do adopt both.) Here, we could have some kind of anti-channeling unit, which I don't believe we've discussed before, but seems like it could be a mechanical hole in our new systems - a way to deliberately counteract channeler-heavy enemies without using channelers yourself. This obviously combines well with the flavor of the a'dam and its easy use as an anti-channeler weapon.

Sorry, definitely don't like this one being a tech. First of all, it's super seanchan specific. Second of all, the a'dam was invented by one of Luthair's Aes Sedai during Era 4, so that really doesn't work.

I am open to the idea of doing an anti-chan unit, but I'm not sure of such. It definitely opens up a rather large balancing/game design can of worms that I'm not sure is appropriate to open right this moment. It would serve a cool function, but also might cause some problems. We should probably table this for now. The other idea is that we could simply add that functionality to melee units of this era, without making a new unit path.

This is an innovation tech - I suggest we look to the final innovation to flavor it (and pick one that could yield a melee unit).

Greater Consensus we had previously earmarked as useful flavor for this era, which it works for here. We've got the Flame of Tar Valon flavor on the nuke defense building, and the Healing of Gentling as something the Aes Sedai would need to "agree to do", hence the association with the tech. And we've also got a wonder, for which I'm sure there's some related flavor.

like this one.

Across from Greater Consensus, we have Ter'angreal, which is also flavor we've discussed before as being ideally placed to appear at this part of the tree. (This flavor captures the rediscovery of how to make ter'angreal, as we saw in the books.) Hooking an innovation onto that should be eminently doable and it's a good home for the two more general channeler upgrades we wanted to put here. (Did we want a final T'a'r upgrade? If so, this is also a good place for it. There's also room to move one of the channeling unlocks down onto Gateways if such a T'a'r upgrade would make Ter'angreal too busy.)

I like this flavor. And yes, this is the place for the last T'a'r upgrade - this one should be like an "end game tech" in terms of glimmers. Drastically increase the amount of points you get for a glimmer harvested. However, I think that functionality should probably be unlocked earlier, as in in the previous column. Could we put Ter'angreal back one column and move one of the other flavors here instead?

I'm not sure how an innovation here jives with the whole list of innovations above. If we're trying to unify techs to innovations (which I'm proposing), having this one be ter'angreal might be problematic. MAybe it shouldn't be an innovation tech. Unless the innovation is "making ter'angreal" or something.

Gateways I don't like at all as a name. It suffers from the same problem as Portal Stones, in that its desired flavor is "Traveling, but better". Given its unlocks, that intended flavor fits (revealing the map and a new Skimming unit point to it, the innovation is more flexible), but there are undoubtedly better names.

Yeah, this one doesn't work. Also, Gateways aren't better than traveling. Gateways *are* traveling.

No idea what to call it - look to the innovation.

And then there are three unnamed techs, two of which just unlock a new military unit. I'd say the flavor for these techs are probably more dependent on the specific flavor we choose for the units they'll unlock.

"Unnamed Tech 3" has a bit more focus, unlocking the final Naval Melee 6 unit (which does have a through line to Naval Melee 5!) and the Spaceship Factory equivalent. Our Spaceship Factory equivalent is presumably something that allows players to build Envoys more quickly, or something to that effect? Do we have a rough idea of what flavor we want for that?

Yeah, these military techs are getting hard. I think it might be prudent (I don't have time right now) to look through a summary of the Last Battle and steal some flavor from that. Use some of the tactical things Mat was doing, or something, maybe. Otherwise... some of these techs could be axed, and their units put elsewhere...

Re: Spaceship factory, yes, that sounds right to me. The flavor would be anything that helps with science, IMO - several of the innovations above could work, I think.

So, something I touched on above was the role of "Era of Prophesy/Fourth Age" and how that fits in with the techs in Era 9. To me, it feels like a lot of these techs are actually more callouts to techs and events from the later part of the timeline of the books. I wonder if we shouldn't let the time compression go even further than we did previously and have the final era be something along the lines of an LB era. "Era of Turmoil" or even "Era of Tarmon Gai'don" (I can't remember if we discussed this when originally naming the era? I get the vague impression I may have suggested we not do this at the time?).

And I think that brings me to the end of what's there for now for Eras 8 and 9!

You're correct, these techs are callouts to the late-book stage, not the fourth age. That's not a contradiction though. We named the last Era the "Era of Prophesy" to capture that exact thing. We considered the "Era of War" or "era of tarmon gaidon" Conflict or stuff like that, but settled on Prophesy because it sounded flavorful while being ambiguous enough to support any possible ending a given game might have. Essentially, this is the era in which all the prophesies come to pass. So yeah, I agree, but we've already had this conversation, and settled on EoP!

I was thinking, though, that the "A Beginning" could be changed to incorporate the 4th age. "A Beginning" is kind of a cool call out to the way the books open. But we could also do with "Knowledge of the Fourth Age" or something as our repeatable Future Tech equivalent. It definitely makes sense that way.

I've attached an updated excel sheet. Basically it's an excel version of your tech tree as is.

oy! and on a work night!

 

[S3rgeus]

Interesting! a few things:

1) Much better flavor
2) is this ok given the rest of the unlocks on that tech (production boosts)?
3) as you could predict, I don't love the "Linking unlocks Linking" terminology if we did this. Is there a way around it? Like, naming the tech Circles (a synonym for it) or Channeling Circles or calling it Linking but letting it unlock "create a channeling circle" or something like that?

I think the production boosts can sort of work. It's not as connected as Earth Singing was, but the recognizability of this flavor swings it for me.

Calling the tech Channeling Circles and the ability Linking seems like a good plan!

ok, so I propose a solution (or path to a solution) below. But first, I'll pick through each point...

but that's not the same thing. Yes, "Bellfounders" come up rather prominently. "BellfoundRIES", as a place, not so much (I don't recall it ever, but it's mentioned incidentally in the Companion). the fact that there's a dedicated place where they make bells is a bit less coherent than the fact that there's a dedicated person that makes bells.

I think you're presuming a lot here. The Hubble example is valid, of course. But I can't say I agree that they'd call it a Horse Rider if that's what we called it on earth. In fact, I posit that it appears to be the case that, in general, Firaxis tried to avoid this kind of "redundancy" as well - in fact, the apparent fact of their avoidance of it is why I'm trying to avoid it.

If we called it a "horseback rider" in real life, I posit that there's a good chance they would indeed call the unit that, but that additionally they would find another name for the tech (as in, not "horseback riding.") You presume that it is a coincidence of sorts that they don't have the direct redundancy - it's just because of earth flavor. I can't see any evidence for that, and the opposite (that they tried to avoid redundancy in naming) seems just as reasonable or likely.

Also, keep in mind that this is essentially the only tech we're considering doing this for (as of now) - that makes it "stick out."

ok, moving it off of wells is certainly an option (see flow chart below, and also see general discussion on innovations below).

I agree, let's keep it as desert. However, that's pretty darn weird, when given the bellfoundry flavor. There doesn't appear to be any reason whatsoever why a bellfoundry would occur in the desert, or only in desert cities. The civs in the companion described as having good bellfounders (Andor and Arafel, if I recall correctly), are most definitely not desert civs.

The bellfoundry (or foundry in general) flavor makes the most sense, IMO, as a factory-replacement - a powerful production building that requires Iron. To me, the desert thing just doesn't make any sense.

Obviously I don't agree that we have no compelling reasons against doing this - is the desert flavor-break not a pretty darn good one? - but more to the point, we haven't flavored *any* of this stuff yet (buildings, etc.). Why start with somewhat suspect flavor with our first building? If we have to settle later, we can settle later, but why settle now?

That said, it's not the *end of the world* to do something like this. I could live with it as a tentative solution if it can survive the following logical gauntlet:

1) Do we definitely want a production (desert) building living on Bellfounding (as opposed to one of the other techs)?
if NO - put on another tech and flavor accordingly
if YES - proceed

2) Are we definitely ok with the flavor of Bellfoundries being linked to deserts, and thus only available in desert cities?
if NO - put on Bellfounding and leave generic ("Production (Desert") until later phase of tech tree development
if YES - proceed

3) Are we definitely ok with the flavor obscurity of a Bellfoundry?
if NO - put on Bellfounding and leave generic until next phase
if YES - proceed

4) Are we definitely ok with the direct redundancy of Bellfoundry with Bellfounding?
if NO - proceed to 5
if YES - proceed to 6

5) Should we rename Bellfounding to accommodate this?
if NO - proceed to 6
if YES - rename Bellfounding to eliminate redundancy

6) name building Bellfoundry and place in Red, considering alternate flavor in the future.

So many things! I see your points here. Also, my previous post about the desert stuff was super ambiguous. I was actually saying that I don't think switching it to something aside from desert would have a significant balance impact, because of the stage of the game the building becomes available. Sorry about the confusion!

I'm fine with leaving this as "Production (Desert)" on Bellfounding for now. But I do think when we go to do a units/building pass over the tree, we'll run into this contention very often. I really don't think the double-dip here is a big deal at all, and avoiding it in all circumstances will create a lot of work for us in finding the right flavor for this kind of stuff, when we'll often only have very peripheral flavor to work with. I'm not saying we should go for these if we have more diverse alternatives, but I don't think trying to avoid this at all costs is something worth doing either.

I think the issue I have with it is these two aspects:
1) having to "build" an angreal after the fact, when you clearly already have them
2) using them to create sa'angreal

It's not terrible, but I feel like we could/should do better. What if they were called "Items of Power" instead or something (have we used that elsewhere? Otherwise, is there a way to reframe the production of the ang/sa'ang "units" to fix this?

I think we should wait on working this one out until we run through the resources again, based on what we've mentioned so far about how they'll fit into the units/buildings that they're needed for (and the techs that unlock them). I'd say the general flavor of angreal cache is one of the less likely to change completely (which will bring us to the flavor tweaking you're suggesting here), but it's worth making sure we don't decide to upend the underlying flavor first.

I wouldn't be too keen on "Items of Power", because I feel like we're leaning on "___ of Power" already elsewhere.

I think Mechanisms is fine. Not perfect, but definitely fine.

Done!

I could go either way. Balescream is certainly cooler flavor, it just... doesn't quite "fit" as well, in that it's supposedly to be the sound you hear, not necessarily the "thing" that has happened. What's your vote?

From what I'm reading in the Companion and the wiki, it doesn't look like balescream necessarily describes the sound itself. It describes the physical manifestation of the Pattern being torn apart by the balefire, and those distortions are described "as if the Pattern was screaming", which sounds like a turn of phrase to give the visuals to the reader, rather than directly meaning audio. I'd go for balescream!


I've completed a fair chunk of my next post, but it's gotten too late for me to finish it! I shall return tomorrow!

 

[S3rgeus]

This is epic! Thanks so much for doing this. I feel very glad that I jumped in and did the first half of the eras, because this craziness with prereq counts would have made my head hurt. I feel like the kid in class who raises his hand to answer the easy question, knowing that then he won't get called on for the hard one (incidentally, why haven't more of my students caught on to that trick?).

No problem, I'm glad to be pitching in! I felt like I was leaving all of the work to you when we were at the start of the tree!

Surely your students know you'd reverse that trick since you're aware of it?

ok, all sounding good in general. I do think there's a related discussion that needs to happen though, regarding the innovations and such (see below). I also am not 100% positive that all of this stuff does need to live in era nine. Mostly, I'm concerned about the extra techs - more on this below.

ok, so at first consideration I raised my eyebrow to these being in Era 9 - shouldn't they be in Era 8, like in BNW? But if you're saying they have the same amount of prereqs, then that's totally fine!

Of course, the other element is that by entering a new era, other things happen, including triggering world era. If putting them in era nine helps ensure that the LB begins at the right point, then that is also fine. If that's not the effect, or if that causes some unintended negative affects, then we should reconsider. I suspect you have considered this all and that I have the right of it.

Putting our equivalents of The Internet and Globalization in Era 9 is definitely key to making sure that the Last Battle triggers in the right place, as you mentioned here. That placement means that when one civ runs away with the game and gets far ahead, they don't have as strong a control over the triggering of the Last Battle. (They will often need those final techs to secure their win.) Otherwise this situation would mean that the Last Battle would basically only happen if they chose to let it, which defeats the way we want that victory to work.

yes, I do very much like these changes!

Awesome sauce!

OK, so this is the first thing to really give me pause. 6 extra techs seems like quite alot. I understand that the beeline points for a few of the victories are the same, but still, having that many extra does certainly have some consequences. For one, it could make the science victory too long (but see below for that). Secondly, it rewards good science output more than BNW. Namely, when you're done in BNW, all you get to do is unlock future tech for score. Now, there's more and more stuff to unlock, essentially further rewarding your science. Not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's most certainly a *thing*.

I think what you've proposed could work, but I do think I'll like it more if it wasn't so far above BNW. If that means cutting some of era 8, fine, if it means removing some of era 9, also fine (and probably better). I don't really see the problem with having fewer "one unlock" techs, and doubling up on some things - especially since some of our unlocks are "new" and don't have BNW analogues.

To be clear, we're not adding 6 extra techs, we're adding 4 extra techs. We've added a new column of 5 (Era 9 column 1) and removed one tech from Era 8 column 2.

I'm actually more concerned that the arrangement we have right now punishes Science players, rather than rewards them. They need to get more techs more than other players in our tree than non-Science players, compared to the amounts in BNW. Science players in BNW need to research a total of 74 techs in order to unlock all of the spaceship parts. Non-Science players in BNW need 57 techs to reach their "endgame" tech. (Total difference of 17.)

Whereas in our tree, Science players need to get 81 techs to unlock all of the innovations, and non-Science players still need only 57 (difference of 24). This is where my suggestion to add the prereq from Cleansing to Scholarship comes in. That would increase the number of techs the non-Science players need to research to 61, which brings the difference back down to 20 (still higher than BNW). As you've said, needing more Science in general favors Science players, which would suggest a longer tree with more techs should have a greater difference in requirements for Science and non-Science players. That means 20 might be the right difference for us, even if it is higher than BNW.

The main thing that leaves is Portal Stones still only has 57 prereqs after that, and there isn't really room to add a prereq from Gateways to Portal Stones. We're discussing some other restructuring below which may make this bit easier. Or, since the LB is a relatively long and involved victory condition, it may be best that LB players can beeline the most aggressively of all.

ok, lots here, though I actually have little to directly say about it. I want to talk at some length below about innovations, though.

Regarding "evening the playing field," I do think that's apt, though I might suggest that it would be better to lower the science tech count instead of raising the others. I don't think we necessarily should be aiming to make the tech tree longer - it seems like it'd just make it harder to pull off a "normal" culture or diplo victory... unless you think we should actively be designing in such a way that we need the extra techs so as to provide stuff to research doing an extended LB.... I was under the impression that the total game length was still going to be relatively similar, epic LB notwithstanding. I rarely, if ever, reach the end of the tree.

I think that generally, making the tree longer from this point on isn't a bad thing, and we'd need to raise the tech count required for the endgame techs when we do that. Doing so won't make normal culture or diplo victories harder as long as we tweak the balance of how quickly those are attainable to be in line with the tech progression. And given the content we've added so far that affects yields and such, we're going to have to do this tweaking even if the tech tree stays exactly the same, because BNW's requirements will be too easy for us now. So I don't think it will create work for us by making the tree longer (beyond generating the techs to be added), just move the balance goalpost we're aiming for when we tweak the victory conditions. (E.g. how much Prestige is required for each stage of influence over other players, how many delegates are needed to win the diplo victory, etc.)

I would expect that non-Domination victories would usually take place once you've researched at least one of the techs in the last column before Future Tech? (The relevant Internet or Globalization) Domination's speed is much more affected by player count and map size, though Culture can also fall into this category sometimes. Certainly Science players are unable to win until they have 2 of the Era 8 column 2 techs, at which point they've almost finished the tree.

I do think that we might have a problem with the LB trigger here. I worry it will come too late, even with the work we've done to shift the endgame techs along. However, I don't want to unseat all of the work we've done on the LB victory based on that suspicion alone, and the CiV endgame continually surprises me by how many turns it actually occupies. There are some changes that we could make later that would allow us to compensate for the LB being too late, if we play it and find out it is. The easiest would be to trigger it one world era earlier. Another would be to add more techs to the end of the tree and shift the endgame stuff further.

Anyway, I think we might be best off evaluating those possibilities when we know this is a problem, rather than trying to speculatively address it.

Yeah I think the guided missile is gone.

Axed!

If you like the mechanical placement of NvR 4 on Keeping, then I say do it. The flavor is fine. Preserving food and stuff certainly would help naval vessels have larger crews, go on longer trips, etc.

Sounds good to me then!

Also, where's the sa'angreal unlock? There could be a tech called Balefire that unlocks the use of sa'angreal.... am I crazy, or did you forget to unlock these?

Sa'angreal unlock is back on Cleansing, with the Nuclear Missile icon.

OK, before we talk flavor, I think we need to talk innovations.

...

So I question whether having those extra 2 innovations (in comparison to the 7 things in BNW) is ideal. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just calling it into question.

I'm not sure why you've mentioned 9 Innovations here a few times - I've only put 8 on the tree, as discussed when we did the Science victory stuff. (Or at least I've only intended to put 8, and there are 8 there from what I can see now! If more are showing for you, then that's a mistake or bug!)

I did forget that we'd decided on having them on 5 techs though! The ones on Steam Engines and True Power are essential to the balance requirements of the Science victory, but all of the others can definitely be moved. When moving those, the main considerations would be if we're leaving any techs with too few unlocks and if we can make the flavor work with the innovation and whatever other unlocks it shares the tech with. We'd also want to make sure that the Science players have a "progression" - so they don't chunk unlock 7 of the 8 all at once in a three tech rush up to True Power and then have to sit around while they complete the remaining X techs they've left out before Steam Engines.

Going from 7 to 8 things does raise similar concerns to going to 9 though, for the very reasons you've mentioned here. The Innovations are more difficult to complete than BNW's spaceship parts, so adding more of them likely makes our Science victory harder than BNW's.

It's worth calling out that our techs aren't thinner than BNW, in terms of unlocks, which you mention here. I miscounted before, and we've actually got fewer "single unlock" techs than BNW (we have 5, BNW has 6), and only one of those has an innovation on it, so I don't think unlock sparsity is a problem for the innovations, distributed as they are across 8 techs, rather than 5. Steam Engines was the only tech created with the express purpose of hosting an innovation (and that because having that endgame science victory requirement only tech is a mechanical consideration), the other 4 in era 9 were because of mechanics we want to have in Era 9 due to how they interact with the LB. In eras 8 and 9 we've added a total of 4 techs, and in that space we've also added 10 unlocks that don't have equivalents in BNW (11 with the T'a'r upgrade), while only removing 2 (Guided Missile and Jet Fighter), and none of that includes innovations vs spaceship parts (where because none of our innovations are duplicates, we effectively gain another 3). So, if anything, our unlocks are denser than BNW's.

In terms of getting the innovations onto just 5 techs, I think that will be easier if we reduce the innovation count to 7, based on the difficulty stuff above. The reason for that is that the two innovations on Steam Engines and True Power are fairly fixed - their positioning balances the Science victory. The one on Wells, as the first one, also seems like a good one to fix in place to me. Having a definite "first innovation" is good for introducing players to how this mechanic works and Wells is a good place for that to live.

That means we've got 2 more techs somewhere in Era 8 to assign the remaining innovations to. (In order to keep a total of 5.) If we drop one innovation to a total of 7, then we'll have 2 techs with two innovations each, which seems pretty good.

Alternatively, we could be ok just letting them be on separate techs. As we're discussing above, our Science victory requires the player to invest more in moving stuff around the map than BNW's, so making some of the innovations available earlier helps and allowing them to be split up makes it easier to put them onto earlier techs. And because of 3 of BNW's spaceship requirements being duplicates of the same unlock, players will already be familiar with only unlocking one science victory "progress type" at a time.

Lastly - but probably the biggest piece - is the flavor. This has me thinking that we probably should have done a quick "reframing" before you did the innovations, so as not to waste time

...

Understanding of the need to destroy the dark One's seals
Aludra's roarstick (not academy)

This all sounds like a good plan to me. I'd say whether we want the innovation/tech relationship to be "the thing that was found" (Steam Engines tech unlocks a Steam Engines innovation) or a "product made from it" (Steam Engines tech unlocks a steamwagons innovation) will depend on the innovation flavor we choose each time, and doesn't need to be only one or the other for all of them. For Steam Engines, I would say go with steamwagons as the innovation, since we have a recognizable product from the books that it makes sense to "show off" to other civs.

All of these specific flavor ideas from before sound like good ones to consider, I'll comment on them in more detail below as they connect to some tree changes. I'm also totally ok with changing a lot of the tech names from here - most of the work was the general structure of the prereq count and how that affected the victory conditions, so there are a lot of the names that I wasn't really happy with.

[SIDE NOTE - We have "looking glasses" as a naval tech, thinking that that's a telescope. ... that's the new thing (i.e., an observatory). Thoughts?]

How about Lenses to replace Looking Glass, and Telescopes on this tech?

OK, so that's a rather high amount of options! And I think many, if not all of those, have conceivable ways to link up with late-game mechanics we need. Also, many, if not all, could have more generalizable tech names associated with them. So, looking at them each briefly through these "filters":

...

What do you think? We could probably find the right number of innovations there - the question is how many techs do they occupy?

Related to the flavor you mention here and a lot of the other discussions we're having in this post, I've made some more changes to the general structure of Eras 8 and 9. I'm struggling to find a good way to mention all of those changes in a sensible order as a quote block below, so here's a general overview of things that I changed. Some specific points may come up in more detail below near the blocks that inspired them.

I removed "Unnamed Tech 4" and "Unnamed Tech 11". This means that we're only adding 2 techs compared to BNW. That difference has meant that Science players now only need 78 techs to have all of the innovations available, so I've not added the prereq from Cleansing to Scholarship.

I renamed True Power to Roarsticks and Portal Stones to Inverted Weaves. Ter'angreal has been renamed to Cuendillar and Gateways renamed to Ter'Angreal. "Unnamed Tech 3" has been named as Aerodynamics and swapped position with Greater Consensus.

I removed an innovation, so that we have the same number of Science-things-to-unlock as BNW. I've moved a bunch of them around, trying to make them available earlier where possible so that civs have more chance to do the whole exhibition thing. I've gone with the "separate techs" approach (rather than keeping it to 5).

Horse4, which was on "Unnamed Tech 4", has been moved up to A'dam (rename pending). Horse7, which was on "Unnamed Tech 11", has been moved to Steam Engines.

Naval Ranged 5 has been moved up to Scholarship (rename pending). The main reason for this is I figured the innovation could stand alone better than the National Wonder (Prestige), though I could see us moving Naval Ranged 5 back down and leaving that NW alone there. Sextant has been renamed to Lightning Jars and Bowl of Winds has been renamed to Sextant. If we want to keep 8 innovations rather than 7, I could see us putting a second one on Lightning Jars. (Or if we move Naval Ranged 5 back down onto Lightning Jars, then the 8th innovation could go on Scholarship.)

The general structure here means that we now only have 3 techs that unlock just a single thing (versus BNW's 6). I do worry that the bottom of the tree is now very busy, but a lot of the channeling flavor has landed there (rightly so, since it leads into the LB endgame tech). I could see us moving Cuendillar up a space and adding another military tech below it that leads into Roarsticks and depends on Aerodynamics. I don't know which units it could grab though, because neither Horse6 nor Melee8 could move to it (Horse6 would no longer have a through line to Horse7, Melee8 would be too close to Melee9).

hmmm... I suppose I'd prefer not to call the tech "Cleansing," if possible. "The Cleansing" is the flavor name of the event itself..

apparently, "Rand used repulsion and attraction of opposites," saidin and shadar logoth. "Opposites cancel, but opposites far enough apart become alike, and like attracts like." That was the process. Any way to work that in somehow?

Dichotomy?

Alternatively we could go with something that connects to the discovery of the knowledge that sa'angreal need to be used in proximity to Shadar Logoth in order to perform the Cleansing. We've mentioned before that we used the Snakes and Foxes flavor earlier on in the tree, even though it had the potential to fit in later as well. Could we use more direct Aelfinn flavor for this tech? Something like Three Questions or Three Truths?

This is good flavor, but I don't think it's right for here. The reason is because the Dragon Peace is the name of the establishment of the Light Alliance if you join it in the LB. It seems weird to use that name there, and then call a tech that too - one that shadow players could research. I guess as a tech at all its somewhat weird.

Maybe something about gathering leaders together? Perhaps one of the innovation-linked ones above provides the answer.

Good point about Shadow players researching this, that doesn't really seem to work. It's a shame, because it makes a lot of sense given the bonus it gives out. I would consider using something else for the Light Alliance during the LB and using the Dragon's Peace here, if it wasn't for that Shadow problem!

Looking through the innovations flavor, the only contender here seems to be the printing press-ish stuff. I'm struggling to find the right way to use that flavor though.

Going for generic flavor, we could have stuff like Worldwide Summit or International Negotiation.

We could tie it more to the Tower, for things like Amyrlin's Approval (though that may not jive with the state of the game, the flavorsplanation could be that the Amyrlin likes you, even if the Tower diplomatically doesn't).

Hmmm... Untempered Glory is a little pretentious, but it isn't terrible. Also, this could get some ideas from the innovation stuff above. Not sure what else to suggest right now.

I'm fine with leaving it Untempered Glory at least for now, I think having it as something that isn't necessarily inspired directly by a physical object is quite good.

Yeah, they're steamwagons. I think this tech name is fine, though. This innovation-only tech is one example of something that could be fused with another tech, though.

It's worth mentioning that BNW has a spaceship-part-only tech here as well, which makes me think that that isn't something we need to avoid in general. I've actually ended up moving Horse7 onto this tech, to keep it farther from Horse6, which has been moved up.

I'm not sure I like this idea, for the reasons you mention. Not actually anything anybody understands, and those that use it are either forsaken or Rand. I'm also unsure if I like the idea of throwing in such a drastically weird unit at the end. If we want the roarstick to be the final melee unit, perhaps this flavor should be based on that instead? Any illuminator-related ideas?

This sounds like a very good place for the Roarsticks flavor. It fits with all of the unlocks quite well.

I'm not sure if I mentioned last time, but I added the wonder that's currently on this tech. Hubble and the CN Tower are the last wonders in BNW, in Era 8 column 1. Given the added techs on our tree, I figured adding another wonder here made sense. Given it's on the last column, it should probably do something crazy good, but we can come back to what that might be some other time.

Yeah, this one we shouldn't do. I feel pretty solid on this opinion. We've (stretched the flavor) included Portal Stones as our Landmarks, which isn't awesome, but at least fits the bill as "something you found that gives you culture because it's trippy." Having it as a tech presumes you're using them to some advantage. The only thing I can think that that would do is produce seanchan exotics (since they came from beyond the portal stones),which we aren't doing here.

Portal stones appear to be things that were made *before* the AoL, anyways.

Maybe this tech is based on an innovation above? Maybe it's simply channeling related? Inverted Weave or some such thing? Cuendillar? What else is rediscovered late in the series?

Totally agreed, Portal Stones isn't something that makes sense here.

Inverted Weaves seems like a good way to go - it connects well with the channeling flavor of all of the unlocks on this tech. I could see us using the "know to break the Seals" one very effectively here as well though, if there's a succinct way of describing it!

Yeah, we can do better. Either some generic navally stuff, an innovation above, or something else entirely. The BoW isn't terrible, but it doesn't really fit "as a tech", IMO. Still thinking on this one...

As you suggest below, I've ended up renaming this one to Sextant and the tech that used to be sextant to use one of the innovation flavors.

Eh, can't do it. Scholarship is the name of our Social Policy tree. Need a different name. Luckily, I think we have plenty of options in innovations above

Blarg! I had forgotten this. So the innovation has actually moved off this tech, and now it hosts Naval Ranged 5 and National Wonder (Prestige).

Sorry, definitely don't like this one being a tech. First of all, it's super seanchan specific. Second of all, the a'dam was invented by one of Luthair's Aes Sedai during Era 4, so that really doesn't work.

...

This is an innovation tech - I suggest we look to the final innovation to flavor it (and pick one that could yield a melee unit).

This tech now has Horse6 as well.

I see what you mean about the a'dam being invented much earlier than this. It's a shame really, I think it otherwise would have worked great. Elayne did make a new modified one in the books' timeframe to restrain Moghedian (which can pull it apart from Era 4 and the Seanchan), but still, I'm not sure what the innovation could be with such flavor.

I do want to use the Giant Crossbow/Ballista flavor here, but that doesn't really work with the units we have. We have neither a siege nor ranged unit, and creating one here wouldn't really work because we'd have to move one of the others (which is difficult, as I mentioned elsewhere). This section of the tree is busy as is, so if we create either of those, I would suggest making a new tech for it, and potentially other units we're considering. (Side note, a ballista being a ranged unit could fall foul of the "unit structure change on a single upgrade path" which we wanted to avoid - where promotions were lost when moving to mechanized and such in BNW.)

The paddlewheel riverboat also feels close, but it would be better for a naval-ish unit or something trade-y. I'm also a bit underwhelmed with this one flavrofully, compared to the others. I can see why it would be a big deal economically, but it feels much less WoT-special than some of the others.

Could the horse unit have some kind of carriage involved and work with the paved roads flavor? What would we do with Melee8's flavor in that case?

I am open to the idea of doing an anti-chan unit, but I'm not sure of such. It definitely opens up a rather large balancing/game design can of worms that I'm not sure is appropriate to open right this moment. It would serve a cool function, but also might cause some problems. We should probably table this for now. The other idea is that we could simply add that functionality to melee units of this era, without making a new unit path.

Given that we've removed several standalone unit upgrade paths from the latter half of the tree, I think there's room for us to have a new one. It is something we can come back to, though can potentially affect what we do with the techs in Era 8 column 2, as I mention above.

 

[S3rgeus]

I like this flavor. And yes, this is the place for the last T'a'r upgrade - this one should be like an "end game tech" in terms of glimmers. Drastically increase the amount of points you get for a glimmer harvested. However, I think that functionality should probably be unlocked earlier, as in in the previous column. Could we put Ter'angreal back one column and move one of the other flavors here instead?

I'm not sure how an innovation here jives with the whole list of innovations above. If we're trying to unify techs to innovations (which I'm proposing), having this one be ter'angreal might be problematic. MAybe it shouldn't be an innovation tech. Unless the innovation is "making ter'angreal" or something.

So this tech has sort of moved around a bit with my recent shuffling of stuff. The Ter'angreal tech now lives on the bottom row and no longer has an innovation, as you suggest here. I wasn't really able to find a way to move this flavor backwards into Era 8 column 1, none of the other sets of unlocks there really worked with it.

I did add the new T'a'r upgrade here. In the spirit of being endgame splashy-madness, I put "Gathering a Glimmer immediately spawns a new Wolfbrother or Dreamwalker". Mainly because the game is rushing towards an end by this stage, so things that make the progressive accumulation of T'a'r points over time go faster will only have a chance to make a difference once or twice, if at all.

Yeah, this one doesn't work. Also, Gateways aren't better than traveling. Gateways *are* traveling.

No idea what to call it - look to the innovation.

That was exactly what I meant - I used Gateways just because it was a different word, but we actually wanted "Traveling, but better", which that isn't. It looks like we've found a way around that flavor though, and I think the layout of these techs is more flavorfully in line now.

Yeah, these military techs are getting hard. I think it might be prudent (I don't have time right now) to look through a summary of the Last Battle and steal some flavor from that. Use some of the tactical things Mat was doing, or something, maybe. Otherwise... some of these techs could be axed, and their units put elsewhere...

Axed and moved elsewhere! Though I do worry that getting rid of both has made the bottom of the tree quite busy, it might be worth having one military-specific tech in here somewhere. Certainly if any of the new unit types we're considering (anti-channeler unit, True Power unit) are added, I would suggest putting them on a new tech somewhere in this area.

Re: Spaceship factory, yes, that sounds right to me. The flavor would be anything that helps with science, IMO - several of the innovations above could work, I think.

Cool, so this is where the Aerodynamics flavor came from! I figured that the Glider could be the innovation on this tech. The spaceship factory equivalent could then have some kind of general learnings/innovations/science-ish flavor to it. (Plus if our naval units are still wood-and-sails, this even makes sense for them!) This also let me move "reveal the map" back into Era 8 column 1, which is where it was in BNW. I moved it into Era 8 column 2 because there was no flavor that worked for it here, but I didn't like delaying that reveal, since it was already fairly late.

My only worry is that the word Aerodynamics is quite modern, but still.

You're correct, these techs are callouts to the late-book stage, not the fourth age. That's not a contradiction though. We named the last Era the "Era of Prophesy" to capture that exact thing. We considered the "Era of War" or "era of tarmon gaidon" Conflict or stuff like that, but settled on Prophesy because it sounded flavorful while being ambiguous enough to support any possible ending a given game might have. Essentially, this is the era in which all the prophesies come to pass. So yeah, I agree, but we've already had this conversation, and settled on EoP!

My impression of our previous discussion of this topic was that we decided on Era of Prophesy as the time during and after the Last Battle, where we would extrapolate the flavor of the time period of the books into the next 15 or so years of time, which you touch on briefly way above. However, I'm now thinking that that might not be the best course of action - that we have more recognizable and useful flavor in the immediate times of the books. I'm saying we could make the time compression of Era 9 even greater than we discussed before, pulling it down to only a couple of years in duration. (Which would mean it would span books 7 through 14.)

This makes me think that Prophesy doesn't fit nearly as well as it used to, and something much more direct like Era of Turmoil or Era of Tarmon Gai'don now works better. Given the way the LB triggers, it's going to happen in almost every game (the situations where it doesn't start at all are supposed to be few and far between, and the result of player mechanical actions overtaking the timeline, not something I think we want to hinge our choice of era flavor on). Regardless of how someone wins the game, the Last Battle is going to be the main spectacle of this era and occupy a lot of the civilizations' actions in pursuing their own plans while it takes place.

I was thinking, though, that the "A Beginning" could be changed to incorporate the 4th age. "A Beginning" is kind of a cool call out to the way the books open. But we could also do with "Knowledge of the Fourth Age" or something as our repeatable Future Tech equivalent. It definitely makes sense that way.

I can see "Knowledge of the Fourth Age" working, but it feels like that's a much more exactly what players who know the flavor will expect. I think "A Beginning" is a nice little nugget for fans that they won't necessarily expect, but when they see it it will make a lot of sense and be quite cool. It also makes a lot of sense as something that repeats, which plays into the WoT flavor of it. I just reread the epilogue of A Memory of Light, and the last line of that book is "It was an ending." "An Ending" could work as well, but I still like the idea of it being something that starts anew, since it's repeatable.



As an unrelated side note, I've been reading the WoT wiki so much while we've been doing all this that I've taken to editing it. Nothing big, but I've been correcting obvious typos and easily fixable grammar errors where they cropped up.

EDIT:

Attached the updated tree!

 

[counterpoint]

I think the production boosts can sort of work. It's not as connected as Earth Singing was, but the recognizability of this flavor swings it for me.

Calling the tech Channeling Circles and the ability Linking seems like a good plan!

agreed! It no longer works as well in the actual tree - profession > ch. circles > alloys, but that part of the tree is somewhat impossible in that regard anyways.

Also, it remains to be seen if Ch. Circles needs both "Linking" AND a chan upgrade. I was under the understanding that linking *was* that upgrade. It's a pretty epic tech otherwise. If we do want those both to occur, I could see us later deciding to move the chan upgrade elsewhere.

So many things! I see your points here. Also, my previous post about the desert stuff was super ambiguous. I was actually saying that I don't think switching it to something aside from desert would have a significant balance impact, because of the stage of the game the building becomes available. Sorry about the confusion!

I'm fine with leaving this as "Production (Desert)" on Bellfounding for now. But I do think when we go to do a units/building pass over the tree, we'll run into this contention very often. I really don't think the double-dip here is a big deal at all, and avoiding it in all circumstances will create a lot of work for us in finding the right flavor for this kind of stuff, when we'll often only have very peripheral flavor to work with. I'm not saying we should go for these if we have more diverse alternatives, but I don't think trying to avoid this at all costs is something worth doing either.

ok, end of epic side conversation, then!

Production (Desert) now lives on Bellfounding, with the understanding that Bellfoundry is current front-runner for the building name.

I think we should wait on working this one out until we run through the resources again, based on what we've mentioned so far about how they'll fit into the units/buildings that they're needed for (and the techs that unlock them). I'd say the general flavor of angreal cache is one of the less likely to change completely (which will bring us to the flavor tweaking you're suggesting here), but it's worth making sure we don't decide to upend the underlying flavor first.

I wouldn't be too keen on "Items of Power", because I feel like we're leaning on "___ of Power" already elsewhere.

yeah, we also have Sites of Power. Agreed, leave it as is for now.

From what I'm reading in the Companion and the wiki, it doesn't look like balescream necessarily describes the sound itself. It describes the physical manifestation of the Pattern being torn apart by the balefire, and those distortions are described "as if the Pattern was screaming", which sounds like a turn of phrase to give the visuals to the reader, rather than directly meaning audio. I'd go for balescream!

balescream it is!

 

[counterpoint]

To be clear, we're not adding 6 extra techs, we're adding 4 extra techs. We've added a new column of 5 (Era 9 column 1) and removed one tech from Era 8 column 2

ok, got it. Not sure where my confusion came from.

I'm actually more concerned that the arrangement we have right now punishes Science players, rather than rewards them. They need to get more techs more than other players in our tree than non-Science players, compared to the amounts in BNW. Science players in BNW need to research a total of 74 techs in order to unlock all of the spaceship parts. Non-Science players in BNW need 57 techs to reach their "endgame" tech. (Total difference of 17.)

Whereas in our tree, Science players need to get 81 techs to unlock all of the innovations, and non-Science players still need only 57 (difference of 24). This is where my suggestion to add the prereq from Cleansing to Scholarship comes in. That would increase the number of techs the non-Science players need to research to 61, which brings the difference back down to 20 (still higher than BNW). As you've said, needing more Science in general favors Science players, which would suggest a longer tree with more techs should have a greater difference in requirements for Science and non-Science players. That means 20 might be the right difference for us, even if it is higher than BNW.

The main thing that leaves is Portal Stones still only has 57 prereqs after that, and there isn't really room to add a prereq from Gateways to Portal Stones. We're discussing some other restructuring below which may make this bit easier. Or, since the LB is a relatively long and involved victory condition, it may be best that LB players can beeline the most aggressively of all.

I can see how I was being unclear before. I agree with you that the "extended tree" punishes science players, inasmuch as it punishes science *victory* players. I was trying to point out that it "rewards" players with good science *output* who aren't trying for the SC, in that it gives them "more to research" and thus exploit their advantage more. However, this is a very minor point that may in fact not even be correct.

Question, regarding our "LB Victory Tech" (now called Inverted Weaves) - is there a way that could be abused? Consider a group of Light civs. If only one of them gets that tech, they can then tell their allies which cities have the seals. Of course, civs would still have to send spies and actually "discover" them properly themselves, but it certainly helps speed things along, potentially quite a bit.

This is part of "teamwork," but on the other hand, does it then make that tech weird in that it's the "LB Victory tech.... for one player"?

I think that generally, making the tree longer from this point on isn't a bad thing, and we'd need to raise the tech count required for the endgame techs when we do that. Doing so won't make normal culture or diplo victories harder as long as we tweak the balance of how quickly those are attainable to be in line with the tech progression. And given the content we've added so far that affects yields and such, we're going to have to do this tweaking even if the tech tree stays exactly the same, because BNW's requirements will be too easy for us now. So I don't think it will create work for us by making the tree longer (beyond generating the techs to be added), just move the balance goalpost we're aiming for when we tweak the victory conditions. (E.g. how much Prestige is required for each stage of influence over other players, how many delegates are needed to win the diplo victory, etc.)

agreed. The fact of governors and all our other stuff really does throw it all out of whack already. No problems, then.

I would expect that non-Domination victories would usually take place once you've researched at least one of the techs in the last column before Future Tech? (The relevant Internet or Globalization) Domination's speed is much more affected by player count and map size, though Culture can also fall into this category sometimes. Certainly Science players are unable to win until they have 2 of the Era 8 column 2 techs, at which point they've almost finished the tree.

Culture's weird in that there are times when it takes forever, but also times when you can win it somewhat early. These are almost always "exception" strategies, and not normal. But yeah, Diplo seems almost impossible to get before that last column.

I do think that we might have a problem with the LB trigger here. I worry it will come too late, even with the work we've done to shift the endgame techs along. However, I don't want to unseat all of the work we've done on the LB victory based on that suspicion alone, and the CiV endgame continually surprises me by how many turns it actually occupies. There are some changes that we could make later that would allow us to compensate for the LB being too late, if we play it and find out it is. The easiest would be to trigger it one world era earlier. Another would be to add more techs to the end of the tree and shift the endgame stuff further.

Anyway, I think we might be best off evaluating those possibilities when we know this is a problem, rather than trying to speculatively address it.

You definitely have a point here, and it's quite possible you're right. We don't want the objective of the game to be "do X and Y so you can win before the LB starts". I suppose waiting to see what happens may be the best thing. Tweaking it's trigger later shouldn't be *too* impossible.

Sa'angreal unlock is back on Cleansing, with the Nuclear Missile icon.

uh....... was that there before? (lol). Yeah, I guess I was scanning around looking for another mushroom cloud. It was late at night!

I'm not sure why you've mentioned 9 Innovations here a few times - I've only put 8 on the tree, as discussed when we did the Science victory stuff. (Or at least I've only intended to put 8, and there are 8 there from what I can see now! If more are showing for you, then that's a mistake or bug!)

same as above. I have zero idea why I thought that.

I did forget that we'd decided on having them on 5 techs though! The ones on Steam Engines and True Power are essential to the balance requirements of the Science victory, but all of the others can definitely be moved. When moving those, the main considerations would be if we're leaving any techs with too few unlocks and if we can make the flavor work with the innovation and whatever other unlocks it shares the tech with. We'd also want to make sure that the Science players have a "progression" - so they don't chunk unlock 7 of the 8 all at once in a three tech rush up to True Power and then have to sit around while they complete the remaining X techs they've left out before Steam Engines.

Going from 7 to 8 things does raise similar concerns to going to 9 though, for the very reasons you've mentioned here. The Innovations are more difficult to complete than BNW's spaceship parts, so adding more of them likely makes our Science victory harder than BNW's.

It's worth calling out that our techs aren't thinner than BNW, in terms of unlocks, which you mention here. I miscounted before, and we've actually got fewer "single unlock" techs than BNW (we have 5, BNW has 6), and only one of those has an innovation on it, so I don't think unlock sparsity is a problem for the innovations, distributed as they are across 8 techs, rather than 5. Steam Engines was the only tech created with the express purpose of hosting an innovation (and that because having that endgame science victory requirement only tech is a mechanical consideration), the other 4 in era 9 were because of mechanics we want to have in Era 9 due to how they interact with the LB. In eras 8 and 9 we've added a total of 4 techs, and in that space we've also added 10 unlocks that don't have equivalents in BNW (11 with the T'a'r upgrade), while only removing 2 (Guided Missile and Jet Fighter), and none of that includes innovations vs spaceship parts (where because none of our innovations are duplicates, we effectively gain another 3). So, if anything, our unlocks are denser than BNW's.

yeah, your new version is looking pretty dense!

In terms of getting the innovations onto just 5 techs, I think that will be easier if we reduce the innovation count to 7, based on the difficulty stuff above. The reason for that is that the two innovations on Steam Engines and True Power are fairly fixed - their positioning balances the Science victory. The one on Wells, as the first one, also seems like a good one to fix in place to me. Having a definite "first innovation" is good for introducing players to how this mechanic works and Wells is a good place for that to live.

That means we've got 2 more techs somewhere in Era 8 to assign the remaining innovations to. (In order to keep a total of 5.) If we drop one innovation to a total of 7, then we'll have 2 techs with two innovations each, which seems pretty good.

Alternatively, we could be ok just letting them be on separate techs. As we're discussing above, our Science victory requires the player to invest more in moving stuff around the map than BNW's, so making some of the innovations available earlier helps and allowing them to be split up makes it easier to put them onto earlier techs. And because of 3 of BNW's spaceship requirements being duplicates of the same unlock, players will already be familiar with only unlocking one science victory "progress type" at a time.

Yeah, I think moving to 7 is probably the best choice. But I'll say hereas far as fitting them on five techs, I suppose that in and of itself isn't a requirement, and may in fact clutter things too much, or mess with the flavor.

I'd say, by moving them up (earlier) a little bit, and making sure the "Extra ones" (i.e., the two or three beyond the five) are prereqs to other innovations. In other words, they should be on techs yo have to get anyways. As long as they're still early enough, the player should have enough time to build them.

In summary, I'm fine with whichever path we take!

This all sounds like a good plan to me. I'd say whether we want the innovation/tech relationship to be "the thing that was found" (Steam Engines tech unlocks a Steam Engines innovation) or a "product made from it" (Steam Engines tech unlocks a steamwagons innovation) will depend on the innovation flavor we choose each time, and doesn't need to be only one or the other for all of them. For Steam Engines, I would say go with steamwagons as the innovation, since we have a recognizable product from the books that it makes sense to "show off" to other civs.

All of these specific flavor ideas from before sound like good ones to consider, I'll comment on them in more detail below as they connect to some tree changes. I'm also totally ok with changing a lot of the tech names from here - most of the work was the general structure of the prereq count and how that affected the victory conditions, so there are a lot of the names that I wasn't really happy with.

ok, great! once we have the basic map of it all, we can see about naming the specific innovations.

How about Lenses to replace Looking Glass, and Telescopes on this tech?

I don't love this, but it's ok. Well, I like "Lenses" in place of Looking Glass fine (do you think the flavor is clear enough to people, given the unlocks there?). But Telescopes.... eh, feels a little "simple." I wonder if there's a way to "spice it up" a little bit so it feels more flavorful. Although, the truth is, without an innovation attached to that tech, there isn't really a point to calling this "Telescopes" at all. The flavor is OK, but somehow still a little off, especially considering we've already established that oceanic ones sort of already exist - thus "Lenses" earlier - so why is this one (supposed to be more like Observatory Telescopes) unlocking a naval unit and a prestige building? I think the flavor doesn't quite work here.

Related to the flavor you mention here and a lot of the other discussions we're having in this post, I've made some more changes to the general structure of Eras 8 and 9. I'm struggling to find a good way to mention all of those changes in a sensible order as a quote block below, so here's a general overview of things that I changed. Some specific points may come up in more detail below near the blocks that inspired them.

I removed "Unnamed Tech 4" and "Unnamed Tech 11". This means that we're only adding 2 techs compared to BNW. That difference has meant that Science players now only need 78 techs to have all of the innovations available, so I've not added the prereq from Cleansing to Scholarship.

ok, definitely fine with this. 2 extra techs is hardly anything!

I renamed True Power to Roarsticks and Portal Stones to Inverted Weaves.

both of these are good, I think! The only questions are whether or not we'll need to tweak the roarstick name once we create the innovation and units - we may want something slightly different to allow for less redundancy (e.g. don't want "Roarsticks", which unlocks the "Roarstick" unit and allows you to send a "Roarstick" envoy... well, I don't want it, at least).

Inverted weaves is good, though it's possible we could call it Inverting instead, which is what the wikis call it. Thoughts?

Ter'angreal has been renamed to Cuendillar and Gateways renamed to Ter'Angreal. "Unnamed Tech 3" has been named as Aerodynamics and swapped position with Greater Consensus.

the connection between Cuendillar and its unlocks is somewhat a stretch, but I think it's fine overall.
Ter'angreal is a much better name than Gateways. Don't love Aerodynamics, more on that below.

I removed an innovation, so that we have the same number of Science-things-to-unlock as BNW. I've moved a bunch of them around, trying to make them available earlier where possible so that civs have more chance to do the whole exhibition thing. I've gone with the "separate techs" approach (rather than keeping it to 5).

I think what you've done is good. they all feed into each other, so it looks like a science player could unlock them at a realistic pace, allowing them to build them when they need to build them.

Horse4, which was on "Unnamed Tech 4", has been moved up to A'dam (rename pending). Horse7, which was on "Unnamed Tech 11", has been moved to Steam Engines.

both good.

Naval Ranged 5 has been moved up to Scholarship (rename pending). The main reason for this is I figured the innovation could stand alone better than the National Wonder (Prestige), though I could see us moving Naval Ranged 5 back down and leaving that NW alone there. Sextant has been renamed to Lightning Jars and Bowl of Winds has been renamed to Sextant. If we want to keep 8 innovations rather than 7, I could see us putting a second one on Lightning Jars. (Or if we move Naval Ranged 5 back down onto Lightning Jars, then the 8th innovation could go on Scholarship.)

hmmm....I'm fine with most of this. I have flavor reservations with Telescopes, as described above. Sextant is fine where it is. Lightning Jars is fine as it is, if you do feel like having an Innovation-only tech is worth having at this stage. Not sure what I think about that NW standing alone.... The NvR unit certainly makes no sense on Lightning Jars, flavor-wise, so that's probably noteworthy. What do you think about the "top-of-the-tree-ness" of the naval units, here?

The general structure here means that we now only have 3 techs that unlock just a single thing (versus BNW's 6). I do worry that the bottom of the tree is now very busy, but a lot of the channeling flavor has landed there (rightly so, since it leads into the LB endgame tech). I could see us moving Cuendillar up a space and adding another military tech below it that leads into Roarsticks and depends on Aerodynamics. I don't know which units it could grab though, because neither Horse6 nor Melee8 could move to it (Horse6 would no longer have a through line to Horse7, Melee8 would be too close to Melee9).

hmmm, as far as the busy-ness... I'm not sure we need to add an additional tech to make it work.

Actually, if you want to salvage the flavor of Telescopes, you could either rename Aerodynamics as telescopes, and maybe move that naval unit elsewhere (possibly up on the top with the NW, but the problem there is that then we're super duper top-heavy in navy), or you could simply pull the Innovation off of Aerodynamics (reducing clutter) and put it up with Telescopes (on the top), thus justifying that tech's flavor a bit more.

World map revelation could also go on either "Lightning Jars" or "Telescopes."

You could also pull the science (production) thing up to one of the higher techs as well.

Other ideas: Maybe we could rip one or two of the abilities from inverted weaves and put them elsewhere. I'm thinking of either the channeler upgrade or the global rebase (the former being the most likely)

the Wonder on Greater Consensus could be moved up.

any of those you like?

Dichotomy?

Alternatively we could go with something that connects to the discovery of the knowledge that sa'angreal need to be used in proximity to Shadar Logoth in order to perform the Cleansing. We've mentioned before that we used the Snakes and Foxes flavor earlier on in the tree, even though it had the potential to fit in later as well. Could we use more direct Aelfinn flavor for this tech? Something like Three Questions or Three Truths?

hmmm... this one feels a little too sideways of the actual flavor. Also, dichotomy is a highly abstract notion (and sounds somewhat modern) that I'm not sure truly connects well enough.

The S&F side of the flavor may also be too specific as well, actually. Direct "this is how they learned how to cleanse saidin" is maybe too specific..... Like, Rand happened to ask them something, but what does that have to do with other civs (especially those that don't want to cleanse saidin)

One thing is that an epic Circle with uber-powerful channelers - between genders - is part of what enabled this. We *could* elect to name *this one* Channeling Circles, and revert the previous one back to Earth Singing. Then, we'd need to also move the "Linking" mechanic here, which isn't what we wanted to do... but on the other hand, we could do it that way, and make this the "sh*t gets real!" channeling tech towards the end of the game - sa'angreal and linking together! (and we'd probably make Linking more powerful, by extension).

Also, Rand pushes saidin through a funnel of saidar that he calls a Conduit. That's kind of obscure flavor, but I suppose Conduits could be a name here, though perhaps it suffers from the same problems as the S&F stuff in that it's rather specific. However, if we did this, we could then enable linking between genders at this tech (keeping "linking" earlier), and use that as a kind of "sh$t gets real!" channeling moment.

The other idea, which I mentioned before but you didn't comment on, is simply calling this tech Balefire. Sure, it unlocks the saidin project, but perhaps much more importantly is its unlocking of sa'angreal, which allow Balefire (angreal don't enable Balefire, as we decided, just really powerful attacks). This might be the simplest solution, and is obviously not a flavor stretch at all.

I'm fine with leaving it Untempered Glory at least for now, I think having it as something that isn't necessarily inspired directly by a physical object is quite good.

doing these slightly out of order.

I don't love the untempered glory thing... ok, but not great. Feels kind of forced... BUT, I have an idea.

Was scanning through the Companion entry on The Old Tongue, which is awesome, with a partial dictionary and some phrases.

Why don't we turn this into essentially an Old-tongue translation of what you have, or something like it. There's a lot of Carai an Caldazar (for the honor of the red eagle) and that kind of stuff that pops up, often either in reference to Lan, Manetheren, or Mat's memories - and thus epic LB-era stuff.

So why don't we do something like "Blah blah blah Glory" and simply write it in the old tongue?

I'm not going to dig through all the words until we decide we like this, but we could do something like "For the Glory of the King" or some such. A good place to start might be to simply adapt a preexisting phrase, which will help it feel appropriately flavorful. So, I turn to p. 572...

Al Caldazar! - for the red eagle. We would change it in "For the king" or something.
Al dival, al kiserai, al mashi!" - for light, glory, and love
Carai an Caldazar! - For the honor of the Red Eagle. Again, switch out Red Eagle for something else.
Ghior feal da'vin lormae; ghiro o'vin gemarisae - thus is our treaty written, thus is agreement made. Obviously refers to the S&F, but interesting here.
Kiserai ti Wansho!" - glory to the builders (change last word)
Mordero daghain pas duente cuehiyar! - my heart fears no death
sind vyen loviyagae - memories never fade (interesting!)
Suravye ninto manshima taishite - peace favor your sword
Tsingu ma choha - you honor this unworthy one

Anything working there? We could also just build one using the dictionary and basic grammar rules. I think the "Carai" and "Kisera" ones are very flavorful.

Good point about Shadow players researching this, that doesn't really seem to work. It's a shame, because it makes a lot of sense given the bonus it gives out. I would consider using something else for the Light Alliance during the LB and using the Dragon's Peace here, if it wasn't for that Shadow problem!

Looking through the innovations flavor, the only contender here seems to be the printing press-ish stuff. I'm struggling to find the right way to use that flavor though.

Going for generic flavor, we could have stuff like Worldwide Summit or International Negotiation.

We could tie it more to the Tower, for things like Amyrlin's Approval (though that may not jive with the state of the game, the flavorsplanation could be that the Amyrlin likes you, even if the Tower diplomatically doesn't).

I'm wondering if we can do something like above for this as well. Something in the old tongue that might fit the theme. Thoughts?

Otherwise, maybe we should look to the specifics of what this one does. It provides you with votes because of Diplomats. So yeah, the global connectiveness is the angle.... Your two suggestions hit that well, but are really very modern. I'd prefer not to have to frame it that way.

It's worth mentioning that BNW has a spaceship-part-only tech here as well, which makes me think that that isn't something we need to avoid in general. I've actually ended up moving Horse7 onto this tech, to keep it farther from Horse6, which has been moved up.

right, but that's left Lightning Jars alone. So we still have one that's just a "science v" tech. It's interesting in that that'll probably make Horse 7 not worth it for many players - you need an extra tech you don't need to attain it. Ok with that?

This sounds like a very good place for the Roarsticks flavor. It fits with all of the unlocks quite well.

I'm not sure if I mentioned last time, but I added the wonder that's currently on this tech. Hubble and the CN Tower are the last wonders in BNW, in Era 8 column 1. Given the added techs on our tree, I figured adding another wonder here made sense. Given it's on the last column, it should probably do something crazy good, but we can come back to what that might be some other time.

yeah. No problem whatsoever with adding a wonder. Honestly, there are not enough late-game wonders! Maybe we can add one or two elsewhere in this era, to fix some of the crappiness of a few of these techs?

Totally agreed, Portal Stones isn't something that makes sense here.

Inverted Weaves seems like a good way to go - it connects well with the channeling flavor of all of the unlocks on this tech. I could see us using the "know to break the Seals" one very effectively here as well though, if there's a succinct way of describing it!

thoughts on this are above.

This tech now has Horse6 as well.

I see what you mean about the a'dam being invented much earlier than this. It's a shame really, I think it otherwise would have worked great. Elayne did make a new modified one in the books' timeframe to restrain Moghedian (which can pull it apart from Era 4 and the Seanchan), but still, I'm not sure what the innovation could be with such flavor.

I do want to use the Giant Crossbow/Ballista flavor here, but that doesn't really work with the units we have. We have neither a siege nor ranged unit, and creating one here wouldn't really work because we'd have to move one of the others (which is difficult, as I mentioned elsewhere). This section of the tree is busy as is, so if we create either of those, I would suggest making a new tech for it, and potentially other units we're considering. (Side note, a ballista being a ranged unit could fall foul of the "unit structure change on a single upgrade path" which we wanted to avoid - where promotions were lost when moving to mechanized and such in BNW.)

The paddlewheel riverboat also feels close, but it would be better for a naval-ish unit or something trade-y. I'm also a bit underwhelmed with this one flavrofully, compared to the others. I can see why it would be a big deal economically, but it feels much less WoT-special than some of the others.

Could the horse unit have some kind of carriage involved and work with the paved roads flavor? What would we do with Melee8's flavor in that case?

Yeah, this one's tough. Really, the late-game combat stuff is all though.

However, I have the answer, I think: Power-Wrought Weapons! We wanted to put them, right? I mean, Aes Sedai wouldn't do it, because it's in violation of the oaths, but everybody else could and would. It fits the horse and melee units easily. The innovation could be Perrin's hammer (or a reference to that) or something else entirely. Or, of course, we could move it elsewhere.

The only conceivable problem I have with this is that it's a little early. I know that's weird to say, given this is era 8, but having this before Ter'angreal, Cuendillar, and Inverted weaves is a little weird - those were all things Asmodean/Moghedian taught the protagonists in the middle of the books (maybe cuendillar was just a discover of egwenes), whereas power wrought weapons were more at the nth hour. Similarly, power-wrought horse and melee units should be epic - here'd they'd be replaced by something better later on. Can you see a situation where we would/should rebrand one of the later techs into "power wrought weapons" and pull the other flavor back here?

Given that we've removed several standalone unit upgrade paths from the latter half of the tree, I think there's room for us to have a new one. It is something we can come back to, though can potentially affect what we do with the techs in Era 8 column 2, as I mention above.

yeah, it definitely would effect our tech tree... Hmm...

Well, here's another idea: why don't we add anti-channeling functionality to the Anti-Gateway unit? Considering the "AG" is already somewhat disadvantaged by the fact that we've combined fighters and bombers into one - thus given "attacking" skimmers much more flexibility - maybe these guys could use the boost. Plus, that feels very flavorfully synergized. Maybe it starts out as just a minor bonus against channeling units, that then upgrades quite a bit either upon AG unit 2, or through a promotion at high XP. Plus that makes those units feel less overly specific. Maybe we could in exchange gimp their strength versus non-channeling (or gateway) units.
yeah?

alternatively, I could see giving that functionality to the "traveler" or something - make him have a cooler niche.

 

[counterpoint]

So this tech has sort of moved around a bit with my recent shuffling of stuff. The Ter'angreal tech now lives on the bottom row and no longer has an innovation, as you suggest here. I wasn't really able to find a way to move this flavor backwards into Era 8 column 1, none of the other sets of unlocks there really worked with it.

I did add the new T'a'r upgrade here. In the spirit of being endgame splashy-madness, I put "Gathering a Glimmer immediately spawns a new Wolfbrother or Dreamwalker". Mainly because the game is rushing towards an end by this stage, so things that make the progressive accumulation of T'a'r points over time go faster will only have a chance to make a difference once or twice, if at all.

t'a'r upgrade here is good. I wonder if your splashy-madness isn't quite right, though. I'm all for splashy madness, but i'd rather have it be such that it rewards people that have already been awesome at T'a'r. Since presumably there will be other ways to make your glimmer-harvesting better - social policies, tenets, promotions, wonders - I'd rather see this as an epic multiplier of the civ's current harvesting rate. And it could be epic, if you wanted (x5? x10? more?). If it's as you've suggested, then it doesn't build on the player's investment at all. Capiche?

Axed and moved elsewhere! Though I do worry that getting rid of both has made the bottom of the tree quite busy, it might be worth having one military-specific tech in here somewhere. Certainly if any of the new unit types we're considering (anti-channeler unit, True Power unit) are added, I would suggest putting them on a new tech somewhere in this area.

Yeah, I'm amenable to it, though I'm not sure we need it. Let's see how things shape up above.

Cool, so this is where the Aerodynamics flavor came from! I figured that the Glider could be the innovation on this tech. The spaceship factory equivalent could then have some kind of general learnings/innovations/science-ish flavor to it. (Plus if our naval units are still wood-and-sails, this even makes sense for them!) This also let me move "reveal the map" back into Era 8 column 1, which is where it was in BNW. I moved it into Era 8 column 2 because there was no flavor that worked for it here, but I didn't like delaying that reveal, since it was already fairly late.

My only worry is that the word Aerodynamics is quite modern, but still.

yeah, way too modern, sadly...

Words like Lift, Drag, Wings and such come to mind. But those aren't satisfying. The truth is that Physics would work well here, but synonyms that aren't super advanced are hard to come by (and we don't want to steal the tech from BNW. Laws of Motion? Theory of Flight?

My impression of our previous discussion of this topic was that we decided on Era of Prophesy as the time during and after the Last Battle, where we would extrapolate the flavor of the time period of the books into the next 15 or so years of time, which you touch on briefly way above. However, I'm now thinking that that might not be the best course of action - that we have more recognizable and useful flavor in the immediate times of the books. I'm saying we could make the time compression of Era 9 even greater than we discussed before, pulling it down to only a couple of years in duration. (Which would mean it would span books 7 through 14.)

This makes me think that Prophesy doesn't fit nearly as well as it used to, and something much more direct like Era of Turmoil or Era of Tarmon Gai'don now works better. Given the way the LB triggers, it's going to happen in almost every game (the situations where it doesn't start at all are supposed to be few and far between, and the result of player mechanical actions overtaking the timeline, not something I think we want to hinge our choice of era flavor on). Regardless of how someone wins the game, the Last Battle is going to be the main spectacle of this era and occupy a lot of the civilizations' actions in pursuing their own plans while it takes place.

I'm sold, regarding the time compression. Yeah, let this be the last few books. A few months.

I still think Prophesy could work. But Era of Turmoil or Era of Conflict could work too. Era of Destiny? Era of Fate?

I like the idea that EoProphesy still fit with people who win Diplo Victories and such (sans LB). Some of these unfortunately are super war-heavy. But I could be fine with many of them. Era of Destiny might be cool.

I can see "Knowledge of the Fourth Age" working, but it feels like that's a much more exactly what players who know the flavor will expect. I think "A Beginning" is a nice little nugget for fans that they won't necessarily expect, but when they see it it will make a lot of sense and be quite cool. It also makes a lot of sense as something that repeats, which plays into the WoT flavor of it. I just reread the epilogue of A Memory of Light, and the last line of that book is "It was an ending." "An Ending" could work as well, but I still like the idea of it being something that starts anew, since it's repeatable.

Interesting, I somewhat feel like "A Beginning" doesn't sound like a tech that would be repeatable, though I know you're proposing the opposite as true.... I'm fine with it, if you like it. I don't think "An Ending" works so well.

What if it alternated beginning/ending as you got additional techs? That's stupid, right?

The 4Age one is certainly the simplest, but if you like the more abstract thing, I'm fine with it. When you get the tech, the quote will need to be something like a quote from the first paragraph of the first (or any) book.

As an unrelated side note, I've been reading the WoT wiki so much while we've been doing all this that I've taken to editing it. Nothing big, but I've been correcting obvious typos and easily fixable grammar errors where they cropped up.

NERD!

Awesome, though. This is getting circular. We use the wiki for reference. What happens when we ARE the wiki?

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've found a few typos in the companion as well... Can't edit that one, though.

Attached the updated tree!

I'll update the excel sheet too, though I may wait til you're done with your next pass.

 

[S3rgeus]

agreed! It no longer works as well in the actual tree - profession > ch. circles > alloys, but that part of the tree is somewhat impossible in that regard anyways.

Also, it remains to be seen if Ch. Circles needs both "Linking" AND a chan upgrade. I was under the understanding that linking *was* that upgrade. It's a pretty epic tech otherwise. If we do want those both to occur, I could see us later deciding to move the chan upgrade elsewhere.

I can definitely see us splitting those up onto different techs. I don't think we'd want to drop either of them though. Without the strength upgrade, even with the Linking ability, channeling units would struggle to stay relevant in military conflicts as the normal units upgraded.

ok, end of epic side conversation, then!

Production (Desert) now lives on Bellfounding, with the understanding that Bellfoundry is current front-runner for the building name.

Coolio, sounds good.

yeah, we also have Sites of Power. Agreed, leave it as is for now.

Coolio.

balescream it is!

Awesome!

 

[S3rgeus]

I can see how I was being unclear before. I agree with you that the "extended tree" punishes science players, inasmuch as it punishes science *victory* players. I was trying to point out that it "rewards" players with good science *output* who aren't trying for the SC, in that it gives them "more to research" and thus exploit their advantage more. However, this is a very minor point that may in fact not even be correct.

A longer tree should mean that Science players will get farther ahead, since they accrue more beakers faster than other players, the longer than goes on, the more techs they pull ahead. That's what I was referring to about allowing for the difference between the science victory and non-science victory endgame techs to be higher in WoTMod with a longer tree, which I think is related to what you're saying here.

I'm not so sure about non-Science victory players who have good Science output gaining an advantage from a longer tree, they're just inherently playing well. I wouldn't expect any non-Science players to finish the tree before they win the game, which means having more additional tree doesn't really help, it's more about what's on the techs that are accessible as "leftovers".

All fairly moot at this point though, if we're only 2 techs higher than BNW, there isn't much in it.

Question, regarding our "LB Victory Tech" (now called Inverted Weaves) - is there a way that could be abused? Consider a group of Light civs. If only one of them gets that tech, they can then tell their allies which cities have the seals. Of course, civs would still have to send spies and actually "discover" them properly themselves, but it certainly helps speed things along, potentially quite a bit.

This is part of "teamwork," but on the other hand, does it then make that tech weird in that it's the "LB Victory tech.... for one player"?

I think this is ok. There won't be any way to share this information with the AI (nor for the AI to tell the player, beyond the player tracking the AI's units moving to Sites of Power, which makes total sense if they do it that way). For multiplayer, all hidden information in CiV has this disconnect. Players can tell each other how the map is laid out before others see it, where Natural Wonders are, who enemy civs are before other human players have met them, share things like wonder construction progress uncovered by spies, etc. The location of the remaining Seals seems like the same kind of information. It's all about whether it's in their interest to share at that point, where humans would keep it to themselves if revealing that information was actually likely to give another human an advantage in winning the game.

agreed. The fact of governors and all our other stuff really does throw it all out of whack already. No problems, then.

Culture's weird in that there are times when it takes forever, but also times when you can win it somewhat early. These are almost always "exception" strategies, and not normal. But yeah, Diplo seems almost impossible to get before that last column.

You definitely have a point here, and it's quite possible you're right. We don't want the objective of the game to be "do X and Y so you can win before the LB starts". I suppose waiting to see what happens may be the best thing. Tweaking it's trigger later shouldn't be *too* impossible.

Cool, it sounds like we're ok leaving the general structural consideration of this until we have a better picture of how easy or difficult it is to win the varying victory types given all of our other changes. I would suspect, if anything, we might want to add a bunch of techs here to give the players more to do, since we've given them more yields overall on the way, so they'll be stronger and able to effectively use more unlocks and progress through the tree faster.

Yeah, I think moving to 7 is probably the best choice. But I'll say hereas far as fitting them on five techs, I suppose that in and of itself isn't a requirement, and may in fact clutter things too much, or mess with the flavor.

I'd say, by moving them up (earlier) a little bit, and making sure the "Extra ones" (i.e., the two or three beyond the five) are prereqs to other innovations. In other words, they should be on techs yo have to get anyways. As long as they're still early enough, the player should have enough time to build them.

In summary, I'm fine with whichever path we take!

Cool, sounds good. I'm correct in thinking that your second paragraph here is referring to "all techs should be downstream of Steam Engines and Roarsticks", so science players never need to shoot off and grab an extra tech on the way to those two, they should hit all of the other innovations on the way? If that's what you mean, I totally agree and that should be how it's set up now!

ok, great! once we have the basic map of it all, we can see about naming the specific innovations.

Cool, sounds good.

I don't love this, but it's ok. Well, I like "Lenses" in place of Looking Glass fine (do you think the flavor is clear enough to people, given the unlocks there?). But Telescopes.... eh, feels a little "simple." I wonder if there's a way to "spice it up" a little bit so it feels more flavorful. Although, the truth is, without an innovation attached to that tech, there isn't really a point to calling this "Telescopes" at all. The flavor is OK, but somehow still a little off, especially considering we've already established that oceanic ones sort of already exist - thus "Lenses" earlier - so why is this one (supposed to be more like Observatory Telescopes) unlocking a naval unit and a prestige building? I think the flavor doesn't quite work here.

I think Lenses is clear enough for unlocking the two ships, players will assume they're used in telescopes or some such. It is a bit of a science-y thing, but I think it will work.

I figured Telescopes was making use of the flavor of something that was invented as a part of the books, rather than that everything from the academies necessarily needs to be linked to innovations. We've created that link for our benefit, but I don't think it's exhaustive in that everything from there should be an innovation. In terms of the unlocks, better telescopes will usually help naval units, and even stargazing ones can be useful for mapping the skies if ships still rely on stars to navigate. The flavor of the national wonder is totally up to us, so it could easily be something like an observatory, flavor wise.

ok, definitely fine with this. 2 extra techs is hardly anything!

both of these are good, I think! The only questions are whether or not we'll need to tweak the roarstick name once we create the innovation and units - we may want something slightly different to allow for less redundancy (e.g. don't want "Roarsticks", which unlocks the "Roarstick" unit and allows you to send a "Roarstick" envoy... well, I don't want it, at least).

Presumably the unit will be some flavor variant on "guys with roarsticks", rather than the unit actually being named that, which seems to be the main problem there? Some kind of formation name or something and let the unit's 3D model/animations/effects demonstrate that they're using proto-guns.

Roarstick envoy seems fine to me, it plays into the potential duplication you mentioned before with the techs being something a player discovers and then they literally go and show that thing to others.

Inverted weaves is good, though it's possible we could call it Inverting instead, which is what the wikis call it. Thoughts?

Hmm, I don't think Inverting has a clear enough association with channeling, just as a word standing alone on the tech. Players will work it out from the unlocks, but I think a lot of first reactions would be puzzlement.

the connection between Cuendillar and its unlocks is somewhat a stretch, but I think it's fine overall.
Ter'angreal is a much better name than Gateways. Don't love Aerodynamics, more on that below.

Sounds good!

I think what you've done is good. they all feed into each other, so it looks like a science player could unlock them at a realistic pace, allowing them to build them when they need to build them.

Coolio, seems like a good progression. It is possible to get to the one on Aerodynamics before the one on Wells because there's no direct prereq, (and Aerodynamics requires two fewer techs than Wells).

hmmm....I'm fine with most of this. I have flavor reservations with Telescopes, as described above. Sextant is fine where it is. Lightning Jars is fine as it is, if you do feel like having an Innovation-only tech is worth having at this stage. Not sure what I think about that NW standing alone.... The NvR unit certainly makes no sense on Lightning Jars, flavor-wise, so that's probably noteworthy. What do you think about the "top-of-the-tree-ness" of the naval units, here?

The NvR unit could make sense on lightning jars - you can light a ship more effectively if your method of lighting is less likely to set it on fire (vs oil lamps or some such), which could afford new ship layouts/types. The top-of-tree-ness is something that gives me a bit of pause on this, especially with another naval unit on Sextant. Still, there's a naval melee unit way down lower. I'm unsure if we need to find a way to move it down.

As you mention later, we could also add a new wonder on Lightning Jars, I'm sure there could be flavor for that.

hmmm, as far as the busy-ness... I'm not sure we need to add an additional tech to make it work.

Actually, if you want to salvage the flavor of Telescopes, you could either rename Aerodynamics as telescopes, and maybe move that naval unit elsewhere (possibly up on the top with the NW, but the problem there is that then we're super duper top-heavy in navy), or you could simply pull the Innovation off of Aerodynamics (reducing clutter) and put it up with Telescopes (on the top), thus justifying that tech's flavor a bit more.

Related to the above, I don't think we want to move the naval melee unit up there, just because then we're super top-heavy on naval, as you say.

I do sort of like the idea of moving the innovation up onto Telescopes. I think the flavor works anyway, but as mentioned above, this innovation is odd in that it can be reached before the one on Wells, which we earmarked as the "first". Although you can get to Telescopes without Wells as well (by design).

If we increase the tech count again and need to bump up the prereq count for Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace, then the added prereq from Dichotomy to Telescopes would solve that problem.

World map revelation could also go on either "Lightning Jars" or "Telescopes."

I'd say both of those are a bit late for the world map reveal, I'd like to keep that back in Era 8 column 1, if at all possible.

You could also pull the science (production) thing up to one of the higher techs as well.

I like the mechanical placement of the spaceship factory here on Aerodynamics, because a Science player could choose to go for this tech first and build the building while researching the innovations, letting them get the production boost for all of them.

Other ideas: Maybe we could rip one or two of the abilities from inverted weaves and put them elsewhere. I'm thinking of either the channeler upgrade or the global rebase (the former being the most likely)

I'd be more inclined to move the global rebase back, but I don't see the flavor of either of these working with the techs at the middle/top of the tree, where we're trying to shift stuff to. Most of the channeling tech has sensibly arranged itself near the bottom, where it leads into Inverted Weaves. I could see the global rebase moving back to Ter'angreal maybe, but that would be more to allow that to happen early, rather than to address unlock crowding.

the Wonder on Greater Consensus could be moved up.

any of those you like?

It could be moved, but then I feel like we'd be lacking wonders at the bottom of the tree here and it would make Greater Consensus relatively weak compared to the techs around it.

It does feel like if we want to address the crowdedness here that a new tech is the way to go, because otherwise we fight a lot of the flavor or general victory structure of this part of the tree. Adding a new tech in the bottom/middle would let us move some of these unlocks around a bit more.

hmmm... this one feels a little too sideways of the actual flavor. Also, dichotomy is a highly abstract notion (and sounds somewhat modern) that I'm not sure truly connects well enough.

The S&F side of the flavor may also be too specific as well, actually. Direct "this is how they learned how to cleanse saidin" is maybe too specific..... Like, Rand happened to ask them something, but what does that have to do with other civs (especially those that don't want to cleanse saidin)

One thing is that an epic Circle with uber-powerful channelers - between genders - is part of what enabled this. We *could* elect to name *this one* Channeling Circles, and revert the previous one back to Earth Singing. Then, we'd need to also move the "Linking" mechanic here, which isn't what we wanted to do... but on the other hand, we could do it that way, and make this the "sh*t gets real!" channeling tech towards the end of the game - sa'angreal and linking together! (and we'd probably make Linking more powerful, by extension).

Also, Rand pushes saidin through a funnel of saidar that he calls a Conduit. That's kind of obscure flavor, but I suppose Conduits could be a name here, though perhaps it suffers from the same problems as the S&F stuff in that it's rather specific. However, if we did this, we could then enable linking between genders at this tech (keeping "linking" earlier), and use that as a kind of "sh$t gets real!" channeling moment.

The other idea, which I mentioned before but you didn't comment on, is simply calling this tech Balefire. Sure, it unlocks the saidin project, but perhaps much more importantly is its unlocking of sa'angreal, which allow Balefire (angreal don't enable Balefire, as we decided, just really powerful attacks). This might be the simplest solution, and is obviously not a flavor stretch at all.

I like the idea of calling this tech Conduits and unlocking Linking between male and female channelers at this point. I don't think we'd want to restrict all Linking until now, because it's very late in the game to be adding that kind of mechanic. I like the idea of it getting stronger now though, and it particularly makes sense because how to form male-female circles was rediscovered during the books.

I can see what you mean about the balefire flavor, but I think Conduits covers the unlocks better and we won't be missing out on the balefire flavor if we don't use it here, since it's the ability.

Did we agree that angreal didn't use balefire flavor-wise? I remember us discussing the mechanical differences.

I don't love the untempered glory thing... ok, but not great. Feels kind of forced... BUT, I have an idea.

Was scanning through the Companion entry on The Old Tongue, which is awesome, with a partial dictionary and some phrases.

Why don't we turn this into essentially an Old-tongue translation of what you have, or something like it. There's a lot of Carai an Caldazar (for the honor of the red eagle) and that kind of stuff that pops up, often either in reference to Lan, Manetheren, or Mat's memories - and thus epic LB-era stuff.

So why don't we do something like "Blah blah blah Glory" and simply write it in the old tongue?

I'm not going to dig through all the words until we decide we like this, but we could do something like "For the Glory of the King" or some such. A good place to start might be to simply adapt a preexisting phrase, which will help it feel appropriately flavorful. So, I turn to p. 572...

Al Caldazar! - for the red eagle. We would change it in "For the king" or something.
Al dival, al kiserai, al mashi!" - for light, glory, and love
Carai an Caldazar! - For the honor of the Red Eagle. Again, switch out Red Eagle for something else.
Ghior feal da'vin lormae; ghiro o'vin gemarisae - thus is our treaty written, thus is agreement made. Obviously refers to the S&F, but interesting here.
Kiserai ti Wansho!" - glory to the builders (change last word)
Mordero daghain pas duente cuehiyar! - my heart fears no death
sind vyen loviyagae - memories never fade (interesting!)
Suravye ninto manshima taishite - peace favor your sword
Tsingu ma choha - you honor this unworthy one

Anything working there? We could also just build one using the dictionary and basic grammar rules. I think the "Carai" and "Kisera" ones are very flavorful.

I'm wondering if we can do something like above for this as well. Something in the old tongue that might fit the theme. Thoughts?

So totally yes, let's definitely do this. "Carai al Caldazar" is super awesome flavor, I even knew what that phrase meant without a translation!

"For Honor and Glory" - if we can translate that?

Otherwise, maybe we should look to the specifics of what this one does. It provides you with votes because of Diplomats. So yeah, the global connectiveness is the angle.... Your two suggestions hit that well, but are really very modern. I'd prefer not to have to frame it that way.

Agreed, let's see if we can get the Old Tongue stuff working, and if not come back to this avenue for the diplo tech!

right, but that's left Lightning Jars alone. So we still have one that's just a "science v" tech. It's interesting in that that'll probably make Horse 7 not worth it for many players - you need an extra tech you don't need to attain it. Ok with that?

As I mention above and you said directly below this block, we could add a wonder to this tech. That would make it more attractive for non-Science players and lead them more easily to Horse7. Otherwise, I think it could still be fine for Horse7 to be a unit most often used by Science victory civs.

yeah. No problem whatsoever with adding a wonder. Honestly, there are not enough late-game wonders! Maybe we can add one or two elsewhere in this era, to fix some of the crappiness of a few of these techs?

Agreed, above!

Yeah, this one's tough. Really, the late-game combat stuff is all though.

However, I have the answer, I think: Power-Wrought Weapons! We wanted to put them, right? I mean, Aes Sedai wouldn't do it, because it's in violation of the oaths, but everybody else could and would. It fits the horse and melee units easily. The innovation could be Perrin's hammer (or a reference to that) or something else entirely. Or, of course, we could move it elsewhere.

The only conceivable problem I have with this is that it's a little early. I know that's weird to say, given this is era 8, but having this before Ter'angreal, Cuendillar, and Inverted weaves is a little weird - those were all things Asmodean/Moghedian taught the protagonists in the middle of the books (maybe cuendillar was just a discover of egwenes), whereas power wrought weapons were more at the nth hour. Similarly, power-wrought horse and melee units should be epic - here'd they'd be replaced by something better later on. Can you see a situation where we would/should rebrand one of the later techs into "power wrought weapons" and pull the other flavor back here?

Power-Wrought Weapons is awesome! Yes, let's use it. I'm not sure if there's a good way to move it along to the next column though, unless we were to add it as a new tech. It's also difficult to move Horse6 and Melee8, as I mentioned in my last post, and particularly into Era 8 column 2, since they have their next unit upgrade in Era 9 column 1.

Ter'angreal is in the next column, but does have 9 fewer prereqs than this tech? Not sure what to say about Cuendillar, but were they discovered at a similar time in the books?

yeah, it definitely would effect our tech tree... Hmm...

Well, here's another idea: why don't we add anti-channeling functionality to the Anti-Gateway unit? Considering the "AG" is already somewhat disadvantaged by the fact that we've combined fighters and bombers into one - thus given "attacking" skimmers much more flexibility - maybe these guys could use the boost. Plus, that feels very flavorfully synergized. Maybe it starts out as just a minor bonus against channeling units, that then upgrades quite a bit either upon AG unit 2, or through a promotion at high XP. Plus that makes those units feel less overly specific. Maybe we could in exchange gimp their strength versus non-channeling (or gateway) units.
yeah?

alternatively, I could see giving that functionality to the "traveler" or something - make him have a cooler niche.

Mm, I don't think we'd want to hook this onto one of the existing unit types. They all already have niches that they fulfill tactically. Rather than bringing this up as a new mechanical suggestion, I'm mostly thinking that I never noticed we're missing an anti-channeler tactical choice before. And it does fit in well with some of the wants of this part of the tree. It would make sense to put an anti-channeling unit on a tech called Power-Wrought Weapons, which could live where Cuendillar currently is (shift Cuendillar up one and leave all of its prereqs the same. We could also move the innovation on Aerodynamics onto it, which would enforce the through-line back to the first innovation on Wells.

t'a'r upgrade here is good. I wonder if your splashy-madness isn't quite right, though. I'm all for splashy madness, but i'd rather have it be such that it rewards people that have already been awesome at T'a'r. Since presumably there will be other ways to make your glimmer-harvesting better - social policies, tenets, promotions, wonders - I'd rather see this as an epic multiplier of the civ's current harvesting rate. And it could be epic, if you wanted (x5? x10? more?). If it's as you've suggested, then it doesn't build on the player's investment at all. Capiche?

Awesome, I totally see what you mean - we want to power up players that are good at T'a'r rather than create a potential swing mechanic. Players might take a similar tactic to "bulbing" Great Scientists in BNW, which wouldn't be cool. So yeah, x10 multiplier!

yeah, way too modern, sadly...

Words like Lift, Drag, Wings and such come to mind. But those aren't satisfying. The truth is that Physics would work well here, but synonyms that aren't super advanced are hard to come by (and we don't want to steal the tech from BNW. Laws of Motion? Theory of Flight?

I quite like Laws of Motion! Even if we move the innovation on this tech elsewhere, it can be a good flavor connection for the unit and the Envoy building.

I'm sold, regarding the time compression. Yeah, let this be the last few books. A few months.

I still think Prophesy could work. But Era of Turmoil or Era of Conflict could work too. Era of Destiny? Era of Fate?

I like the idea that EoProphesy still fit with people who win Diplo Victories and such (sans LB). Some of these unfortunately are super war-heavy. But I could be fine with many of them. Era of Destiny might be cool.

I think even if a player wins in a way that isn't the LB, the LB will still be a defining part of that era. A player who wins the diplo victory will need to hang onto all of his votes while fighting Shadowspawn (possibly protecting CSes that are needed to win!). If they win fast enough that the LB doesn't even start, then I don't think that needs consideration for this era's flavor, because "time" never really got into that era in that game.

With added time compression, this is arguably the Era of Sanderson, though we obviously shouldn't use that!

I'm still liking Era of Turmoil overall - there will be upheaval and death and stuff before the world can move on.

Interesting, I somewhat feel like "A Beginning" doesn't sound like a tech that would be repeatable, though I know you're proposing the opposite as true.... I'm fine with it, if you like it. I don't think "An Ending" works so well.

What if it alternated beginning/ending as you got additional techs? That's stupid, right?

The 4Age one is certainly the simplest, but if you like the more abstract thing, I'm fine with it. When you get the tech, the quote will need to be something like a quote from the first paragraph of the first (or any) book.

Agreed re "An Ending", it's there in AMoL, but doesn't really work here.

Alternating could be quite weird. Potentially cool, but I worry it will make it look like it does more than it actually mechanically does.

I'm liking A Beginning! And totally agreed re the quote!

NERD!

Awesome, though. This is getting circular. We use the wiki for reference. What happens when we ARE the wiki?

Who watches the Watchmen?

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've found a few typos in the companion as well... Can't edit that one, though.

:O! Where?

I'll update the excel sheet too, though I may wait til you're done with your next pass.

Mostly small changes this time, but there may be a few more after the above. Attached the newest version!

 

[counterpoint]

There is a fair amount of stuff I'm not quoting - all stuff that my response was simply "sure!" or "awesome!" Normally I include such things for accountability's sake. This time, I'm too entranced by the notion of paring down these quote blocks!

I can definitely see us splitting those up onto different techs. I don't think we'd want to drop either of them though. Without the strength upgrade, even with the Linking ability, channeling units would struggle to stay relevant in military conflicts as the normal units upgraded.

ok, sure enough. I'm guessing you prefer to keep them both there for now?

Cool, it sounds like we're ok leaving the general structural consideration of this until we have a better picture of how easy or difficult it is to win the varying victory types given all of our other changes. I would suspect, if anything, we might want to add a bunch of techs here to give the players more to do, since we've given them more yields overall on the way, so they'll be stronger and able to effectively use more unlocks and progress through the tree faster.

Wait, just to be clear, are you suggesting we "add a bunch of techs"? It seems kind of casually tossed in, so I'm not sure if you mean what I think you mean... If you want to add a bunch of techs, isn't now the time to do that?

Cool, sounds good. I'm correct in thinking that your second paragraph here is referring to "all techs should be downstream of Steam Engines and Roarsticks", so science players never need to shoot off and grab an extra tech on the way to those two, they should hit all of the other innovations on the way? If that's what you mean, I totally agree and that should be how it's set up now!

yep, that's what I meant. We're good, here.

I think Lenses is clear enough for unlocking the two ships, players will assume they're used in telescopes or some such. It is a bit of a science-y thing, but I think it will work.

I figured Telescopes was making use of the flavor of something that was invented as a part of the books, rather than that everything from the academies necessarily needs to be linked to innovations. We've created that link for our benefit, but I don't think it's exhaustive in that everything from there should be an innovation. In terms of the unlocks, better telescopes will usually help naval units, and even stargazing ones can be useful for mapping the skies if ships still rely on stars to navigate. The flavor of the national wonder is totally up to us, so it could easily be something like an observatory, flavor wise.

I can live with this, especially if we end up putting an Innovation on it, which is proposed below. Is there not an adjective or something that makes it feel more distinct from the implied flavor of "lenses" (which are already telescopes)? You know, "Telescope Towers" or "Stargazing Telescopes" (or, there's always just "Stargazing") or "Grand Telescopes" or some such? Or does that feel like inventing flavor too much?

Presumably the unit will be some flavor variant on "guys with roarsticks", rather than the unit actually being named that, which seems to be the main problem there? Some kind of formation name or something and let the unit's 3D model/animations/effects demonstrate that they're using proto-guns.

Roarstick envoy seems fine to me, it plays into the potential duplication you mentioned before with the techs being something a player discovers and then they literally go and show that thing to others.

right. I'm fine with this.

Hmm, I don't think Inverting has a clear enough association with channeling, just as a word standing alone on the tech. Players will work it out from the unlocks, but I think a lot of first reactions would be puzzlement.

OK, inverted weaves it is. I kind of wish there wasn't a tech called Weaves and also one called Inverted Weaves, but oh well.... Last chance to rename Weaves The Five Powers...?

Coolio, seems like a good progression. It is possible to get to the one on Aerodynamics before the one on Wells because there's no direct prereq, (and Aerodynamics requires two fewer techs than Wells).

you mention elsewhere a few other Innovations that can be unlocked earlier than the one on Wells, this, especially considering the Laws of Motion one actually require *fewer* techs, definitely compromises the whole Wells-as-the-first-one thing? Are you ok with that, or should we "fix" it?

The NvR unit could make sense on lightning jars - you can light a ship more effectively if your method of lighting is less likely to set it on fire (vs oil lamps or some such), which could afford new ship layouts/types. The top-of-tree-ness is something that gives me a bit of pause on this, especially with another naval unit on Sextant. Still, there's a naval melee unit way down lower. I'm unsure if we need to find a way to move it down.

As you mention later, we could also add a new wonder on Lightning Jars, I'm sure there could be flavor for that.

eh, flavor-wise, NvR is better on Telescopes.

Re: top of the tree - are you ultimately suggesting we leave it, then?

I say "yes" to adding a Wonder to Lightning Jars. Very much.

Related to the above, I don't think we want to move the naval melee unit up there, just because then we're super top-heavy on naval, as you say.

I do sort of like the idea of moving the innovation up onto Telescopes. I think the flavor works anyway, but as mentioned above, this innovation is odd in that it can be reached before the one on Wells, which we earmarked as the "first". Although you can get to Telescopes without Wells as well (by design).

If we increase the tech count again and need to bump up the prereq count for Untempered Glory and The Dragon's Peace, then the added prereq from Dichotomy to Telescopes would solve that problem.

Yes, I like the idea of Telescopes having an Innovation. However, one also makes a lot of sense on Laws of Motionn, since that one could then be the Glider.... Hmmm.. any other one you could see us moving there instead?

As far as the Wells-as-first thing, I'll follow your lead on this, re: prereqs. I do feel ultimately like we should add one more tech, though, so that might help.

I like the mechanical placement of the spaceship factory here on Aerodynamics, because a Science player could choose to go for this tech first and build the building while researching the innovations, letting them get the production boost for all of them.

hmmm... yes. To me, though, that then somewhat suggests that this tech shouldn't also have an actual Innovation. Especially considering it requires fewer techs than any of the innovations (though that it and of itself might be a problem). But then, we lose the Glider, which was the whole point of this flavor. Any chance of moving the Science Production functionality *somewhere* that still fits that general placement, while note messing with other things?

I'd be more inclined to move the global rebase back, but I don't see the flavor of either of these working with the techs at the middle/top of the tree, where we're trying to shift stuff to. Most of the channeling tech has sensibly arranged itself near the bottom, where it leads into Inverted Weaves. I could see the global rebase moving back to Ter'angreal maybe, but that would be more to allow that to happen early, rather than to address unlock crowding.

Yeah, you're right. I could see a few of the techs on column 1, era 8, working, but that's way far back...

It could be moved, but then I feel like we'd be lacking wonders at the bottom of the tree here and it would make Greater Consensus relatively weak compared to the techs around it.

ok. leave it.

It does feel like if we want to address the crowdedness here that a new tech is the way to go, because otherwise we fight a lot of the flavor or general victory structure of this part of the tree. Adding a new tech in the bottom/middle would let us move some of these unlocks around a bit more.

yeah, I ultimately agree with this, especially given a few of the further points below. However, I'd suggest this tech not really be too wrapped up in prereqs and stuff. Probably just a side-path or something.

I like the idea of calling this tech Conduits and unlocking Linking between male and female channelers at this point. I don't think we'd want to restrict all Linking until now, because it's very late in the game to be adding that kind of mechanic. I like the idea of it getting stronger now though, and it particularly makes sense because how to form male-female circles was rediscovered during the books.

I can see what you mean about the balefire flavor, but I think Conduits covers the unlocks better and we won't be missing out on the balefire flavor if we don't use it here, since it's the ability.

Did we agree that angreal didn't use balefire flavor-wise? I remember us discussing the mechanical differences.

Eh. To me Balefire covers the sa'angreal super well, so is my preferred choice. Conduits is more random as far as flavor call-outs (and it's not really flavor so much as a description of something). Admittedly, Conduits captures the new Linking thing better, though, as well as the cleansing. It's a preference, but not a strong one.

But yeah, I thought angreal weren't Balefire, which is why it didn't cause Balescreams, lower population, or pillage tiles. Right?

So totally yes, let's definitely do this. "Carai al Caldazar" is super awesome flavor, I even knew what that phrase meant without a translation!

"For Honor and Glory" - if we can translate that?

ok. here goes....

Carai e daishar - For Honor and Glory
Carai an daishar - For Honor of Glory
Carai e kiserai - For Honor and Glory (kiserai appears to be glory/honor, whereas daishar is more like battlefield glory, I think. It's unclear)
Daishar an carai - For the glory of honor
Carai an shan - For the honor of the Lord
Daishar an shan - For the glory of the Lord
Carai an car - For the honor of the chief

any of those work? All probably require an exclamation after them as well...

Agreed, let's see if we can get the Old Tongue stuff working, and if not come back to this avenue for the diplo tech!

ok, some ideas:

calichniye ti amelae - Welcome to friends
shain tom amelae - Peace among friends
inemelara ain amelara - My enemy is my friend ( I think, might be messing up the possessive here.
shain der veren - peace from those who bring change
o gurupat an shain - an oath of peace

Anything working?

also, did a little digging, leaving a few things here to help us make adjustments if we want (so we don't have to dig again)

amela - friend
calichniye - welcome
shain - peace
vid - with
veren - those who cause change
gurupat - oath
inemela - enemy
ti - to
tom - among
ara - suffix - "my"
ain - is
o - a
der - from

As I mention above and you said directly below this block, we could add a wonder to this tech. That would make it more attractive for non-Science players and lead them more easily to Horse7. Otherwise, I think it could still be fine for Horse7 to be a unit most often used by Science victory civs.

yeah, wonder!

Power-Wrought Weapons is awesome! Yes, let's use it. I'm not sure if there's a good way to move it along to the next column though, unless we were to add it as a new tech. It's also difficult to move Horse6 and Melee8, as I mentioned in my last post, and particularly into Era 8 column 2, since they have their next unit upgrade in Era 9 column 1.

Ter'angreal is in the next column, but does have 9 fewer prereqs than this tech? Not sure what to say about Cuendillar, but were they discovered at a similar time in the books?

interesting about the prereq count of ter'angreal. Is that kind of disjointedness of the columns "normal" in BNW? It seems kind of bizarre to me. 9 is a lot!

Cuendillar is rediscovered by egwene in one of the midd-late books (like 9 or 10 or something). Doesn't she make a huge chain of it when trying to sneak into the tower or something? I think the power-wrought thing is much later (book 13 or something)?

Mm, I don't think we'd want to hook this onto one of the existing unit types. They all already have niches that they fulfill tactically. Rather than bringing this up as a new mechanical suggestion, I'm mostly thinking that I never noticed we're missing an anti-channeler tactical choice before. And it does fit in well with some of the wants of this part of the tree. It would make sense to put an anti-channeling unit on a tech called Power-Wrought Weapons, which could live where Cuendillar currently is (shift Cuendillar up one and leave all of its prereqs the same. We could also move the innovation on Aerodynamics onto it, which would enforce the through-line back to the first innovation on Wells.

In general, I'm fine with adding another unit type, and fine with it living around here. Also fine with adding one tech to help it along.

That specific solution could work, but it isn't perfect. The flavor isn't great - why would power-users make weapons that hurt channelers? But it's ok. I do like that it moves that flavor later. I don't love that aerodynamics loses the glider, though that's actually otherwise a good move for the reasons you state.

[also, one weird idea is swapping the names of laws of motion and telescopes, possibly dragging hte innovation with it. neither here nor there]

Awesome, I totally see what you mean - we want to power up players that are good at T'a'r rather than create a potential swing mechanic. Players might take a similar tactic to "bulbing" Great Scientists in BNW, which wouldn't be cool. So yeah, x10 multiplier!

good

I quite like Laws of Motion! Even if we move the innovation on this tech elsewhere, it can be a good flavor connection for the unit and the Envoy building.

yeah, I like this, though it does strike me as slightly weird that here laws is plural, but with Law of war, it isn't.

I think even if a player wins in a way that isn't the LB, the LB will still be a defining part of that era. A player who wins the diplo victory will need to hang onto all of his votes while fighting Shadowspawn (possibly protecting CSes that are needed to win!). If they win fast enough that the LB doesn't even start, then I don't think that needs consideration for this era's flavor, because "time" never really got into that era in that game.

With added time compression, this is arguably the Era of Sanderson, though we obviously shouldn't use that!

I'm still liking Era of Turmoil overall - there will be upheaval and death and stuff before the world can move on.

Era of Turmoil is fine with me! So, specially, what should the time span be?

Agreed re "An Ending", it's there in AMoL, but doesn't really work here.

Alternating could be quite weird. Potentially cool, but I worry it will make it look like it does more than it actually mechanically does.

I'm liking A Beginning! And totally agreed re the quote!

a beginning fine with me!

 

[S3rgeus]

There is a fair amount of stuff I'm not quoting - all stuff that my response was simply "sure!" or "awesome!" Normally I include such things for accountability's sake. This time, I'm too entranced by the notion of paring down these quote blocks!

Sounds good!

ok, sure enough. I'm guessing you prefer to keep them both there for now?

Yeah, let's leave them both on Channeling Circles for now.

Wait, just to be clear, are you suggesting we "add a bunch of techs"? It seems kind of casually tossed in, so I'm not sure if you mean what I think you mean... If you want to add a bunch of techs, isn't now the time to do that?

I'm not saying we should add a bunch of techs now, but that that's one of our options later. When we find that the balance of the game is way out because we've given the players more sources of yields, we'll be tweaking things to address that, and one way to do so is add more techs, as long as we have content for them.

I can live with this, especially if we end up putting an Innovation on it, which is proposed below. Is there not an adjective or something that makes it feel more distinct from the implied flavor of "lenses" (which are already telescopes)? You know, "Telescope Towers" or "Stargazing Telescopes" (or, there's always just "Stargazing") or "Grand Telescopes" or some such? Or does that feel like inventing flavor too much?

I like the idea of Stargazing as the tech name, but I don't think we'll be able to get the innovation onto this tech, which makes that much more of a flavor stretch, I think.

OK, inverted weaves it is. I kind of wish there wasn't a tech called Weaves and also one called Inverted Weaves, but oh well.... Last chance to rename Weaves The Five Powers...?

Naaah, that combination seems fine to me, since one is definitely a refinement/enhancement of the other. I still don't really like The Five Powers as a tech name.

you mention elsewhere a few other Innovations that can be unlocked earlier than the one on Wells, this, especially considering the Laws of Motion one actually require *fewer* techs, definitely compromises the whole Wells-as-the-first-one thing? Are you ok with that, or should we "fix" it?

I'll address this below, but currently (as of my last post) the only tech where this happens is Laws of Motion. The other one was Telescopes, which was a suggested new location for this innovation.

eh, flavor-wise, NvR is better on Telescopes.

Re: top of the tree - are you ultimately suggesting we leave it, then?

Yeah, I think we can leave it up there.

I say "yes" to adding a Wonder to Lightning Jars. Very much.

Done!

Yes, I like the idea of Telescopes having an Innovation. However, one also makes a lot of sense on Laws of Motionn, since that one could then be the Glider.... Hmmm.. any other one you could see us moving there instead?

As far as the Wells-as-first thing, I'll follow your lead on this, re: prereqs. I do feel ultimately like we should add one more tech, though, so that might help.

If we don't tip our tech count back up a bit more, I wouldn't be inclined to add the prereq from Conduits to Telescopes, because of how it will affect diplo and culture wins. That would mean this tech would break the "Wells first" innovation set up we want (Telescopes requires just one more tech than Wells), and I think we have a place for that innovation below.

hmmm... yes. To me, though, that then somewhat suggests that this tech shouldn't also have an actual Innovation. Especially considering it requires fewer techs than any of the innovations (though that it and of itself might be a problem). But then, we lose the Glider, which was the whole point of this flavor. Any chance of moving the Science Production functionality *somewhere* that still fits that general placement, while note messing with other things?

I don't think the glider has to be the focal point of the flavor, it still works with the other unlocks. Is there better flavor that we can connect with the naval unit, envoy production boost, and revealing the map?

Yeah, you're right. I could see a few of the techs on column 1, era 8, working, but that's way far back...

Yeah, let's leave it on Inverted Weaves for now.

ok. leave it.

Left!

yeah, I ultimately agree with this, especially given a few of the further points below. However, I'd suggest this tech not really be too wrapped up in prereqs and stuff. Probably just a side-path or something.

Cool re the new tech. If we want it to host an innovation though (which seems like a good choice given what we're dealing with when finding techs downstream from Wells) then it seems like it will have to be in the middle-ish, rather than off to the side. I've put this new tech, named Power-Wrought Weapons (more on name moving below) onto the tree with the innovation and the anti-channeler unit on it.

I also removed the prereq from Laws of Motion to Cuendillar to allow for the new prereqs here. This has only decreased Cuendillar's prereq count by 1, so I think that's fine.

Eh. To me Balefire covers the sa'angreal super well, so is my preferred choice. Conduits is more random as far as flavor call-outs (and it's not really flavor so much as a description of something). Admittedly, Conduits captures the new Linking thing better, though, as well as the cleansing. It's a preference, but not a strong one.

I think I like Conduits since it feeds into two of the three really well, and also based on balefire stuff below.

But yeah, I thought angreal weren't Balefire, which is why it didn't cause Balescreams, lower population, or pillage tiles. Right?

I figured they were still using balefire, just not enough to cause widespread disruption in the Pattern. The balescreams that take up a tile would span a large area, whereas most balefire strikes we saw in the books just unwound 30 or so seconds of one person's actions.

ok. here goes....

Carai e daishar - For Honor and Glory
Carai an daishar - For Honor of Glory
Carai e kiserai - For Honor and Glory (kiserai appears to be glory/honor, whereas daishar is more like battlefield glory, I think. It's unclear)
Daishar an carai - For the glory of honor
Carai an shan - For the honor of the Lord
Daishar an shan - For the glory of the Lord
Carai an car - For the honor of the chief

any of those work? All probably require an exclamation after them as well...

Carai an daishar!

I'll have to see if it's possible to make the tech names italicized on the tree in-game.

ok, some ideas:

calichniye ti amelae - Welcome to friends
shain tom amelae - Peace among friends
inemelara ain amelara - My enemy is my friend ( I think, might be messing up the possessive here.
shain der veren - peace from those who bring change
o gurupat an shain - an oath of peace

Anything working?

also, did a little digging, leaving a few things here to help us make adjustments if we want (so we don't have to dig again)

amela - friend
calichniye - welcome
shain - peace
vid - with
veren - those who cause change
gurupat - oath
inemela - enemy
ti - to
tom - among
ara - suffix - "my"
ain - is
o - a
der - from

shain tom amelae stands out to me, it has a great translated meaning and also has a nice ring to it.

Looking at both of these on the tree, I kind of worry that the Old Tongue doesn't stand up as well as I would've liked on the relatively clinical CiV UI. What do you think?

interesting about the prereq count of ter'angreal. Is that kind of disjointedness of the columns "normal" in BNW? It seems kind of bizarre to me. 9 is a lot!

Yeah, this is normal at this stage. Mobile Tactics has 9 more prereqs than Advanced Ballistics, and that's in Era 8 Column 1 in BNW, which is the column before this one.

Cuendillar is rediscovered by egwene in one of the midd-late books (like 9 or 10 or something). Doesn't she make a huge chain of it when trying to sneak into the tower or something? I think the power-wrought thing is much later (book 13 or something)?

Yeah, Mah'alleinir seems to become a Power-Wrought Weapon in Towers of Midnight (Book 13) Chapter 40, whereas Cuendillar is rediscovered in Crossroads of Twilight (Book 10) Chapter 17. It's not a huge difference, but is certainly out of order.

In general, I'm fine with adding another unit type, and fine with it living around here. Also fine with adding one tech to help it along.

That specific solution could work, but it isn't perfect. The flavor isn't great - why would power-users make weapons that hurt channelers? But it's ok. I do like that it moves that flavor later. I don't love that aerodynamics loses the glider, though that's actually otherwise a good move for the reasons you state.

Power users would be most effective at making weapons to use against other channelers. I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but it makes sense that they would have a better understanding of how other power users would fight, and generally making stronger weapons would put the users in better stead.

This also brings us back to needing a name for the tech-formerly-known-as-A'dam. It's got Horse6, Melee8, and an innovation.

Could Laws of Motion go on this one and something else on the spaceship factory thing? (Would also give us the Glider back.) Revealing the map could move up with it if that makes naming the spaceship factory + Naval Melee 6 easier?

[also, one weird idea is swapping the names of laws of motion and telescopes, possibly dragging hte innovation with it. neither here nor there]

The flavor of these could work, but I don't think we want to put the innovation up where Telescopes is because it wouldn't depend on Wells.

yeah, I like this, though it does strike me as slightly weird that here laws is plural, but with Law of war, it isn't.

A little inconsistent, but I think they have separate inspirations that push them towards different plurality. (Moral law as a single concept vs Newton's laws.)

Era of Turmoil is fine with me! So, specially, what should the time span be?

Awesome! Based on the techs in it, it could be just books 11 to 14?

a beginning fine with me!

Done!

 

[counterpoint]

I'm not saying we should add a bunch of techs now, but that that's one of our options later. When we find that the balance of the game is way out because we've given the players more sources of yields, we'll be tweaking things to address that, and one way to do so is add more techs, as long as we have content for them.

gotcha. agreed.

I like the idea of Stargazing as the tech name, but I don't think we'll be able to get the innovation onto this tech, which makes that much more of a flavor stretch, I think.

OK, I guess we're leaving it as telescopes for now. We may consider alternatives in the future, I'd guess.

Naaah, that combination seems fine to me, since one is definitely a refinement/enhancement of the other. I still don't really like The Five Powers as a tech name.

weaves it stays

If we don't tip our tech count back up a bit more, I wouldn't be inclined to add the prereq from Conduits to Telescopes, because of how it will affect diplo and culture wins. That would mean this tech would break the "Wells first" innovation set up we want (Telescopes requires just one more tech than Wells), and I think we have a place for that innovation below.

ok. however you wwant to handle this, then.

I don't think the glider has to be the focal point of the flavor, it still works with the other unlocks. Is there better flavor that we can connect with the naval unit, envoy production boost, and revealing the map?

it's fine not using the glider, truly. It was just cool flavor that seemed to fit this tech well.

Though, honestly, Laws of Motion doesn't fit these unlocks terribly well, without the glider anymore. I'm sorry to say it, but Telescopes does seem to fit these unlocks quite well (with or without an innovation). Naval unit is fine enough. Envoy production boost, sure. Reveal map? very much so.

So, I suggest this tech be called Telescopes. It seemed you were considering moving Law of War elsewhere, anyways....

Yeah, let's leave it on Inverted Weaves for now.

sure.

Cool re the new tech. If we want it to host an innovation though (which seems like a good choice given what we're dealing with when finding techs downstream from Wells) then it seems like it will have to be in the middle-ish, rather than off to the side. I've put this new tech, named Power-Wrought Weapons (more on name moving below) onto the tree with the innovation and the anti-channeler unit on it.

sounds good.

unrelated: can we maybe consider moving the Wonder off of Channeling Circles onto something else, like, perhaps Crop Rotation (which essentially doesn't impact the tree at all). Chan Circ is now very, very full of unlocks, and seems to kind of be an uber-tech. Agreement?

I also removed the prereq from Laws of Motion to Cuendillar to allow for the new prereqs here. This has only decreased Cuendillar's prereq count by 1, so I think that's fine.

all seem fine to me.

I think I like Conduits since it feeds into two of the three really well, and also based on balefire stuff below.

sure.

I figured they were still using balefire, just not enough to cause widespread disruption in the Pattern. The balescreams that take up a tile would span a large area, whereas most balefire strikes we saw in the books just unwound 30 or so seconds of one person's actions.

eh, moot, anyways...

Carai an daishar!

ok, cool. I like that one too.

I'll have to see if it's possible to make the tech names italicized on the tree in-game.

yeah, and don't forget, stuff like sa'angreal (not a tech name) and ter'angreal (a tech name) would be too!

shain tom amelae stands out to me, it has a great translated meaning and also has a nice ring to it.

Yeah, I wish "amelae" was a word that came up more in the books. This is the best of the current options, I think. Not amazing, but decent.

Looking at both of these on the tree, I kind of worry that the Old Tongue doesn't stand up as well as I would've liked on the relatively clinical CiV UI. What do you think?

I can see what you mean. Italics might help that, but even then, it is sort of a bunch of gibberish.... It "Feels" like the Old Tongue, which is good, but ultimately nobody will know what the reference is....

I don't know, I could go either way on this. It would be easier if the whole column were somehow all O.T. or something, as it'd be cohesive. As is, they do stand out a bit. They also aren't really "techs" so much as just random concepts. We haven't had any suggestions, O.T. or otherwise, that really feel like "techs" for these two....

I'm not sure what else to name them, though. Not sure we'd have anything that would truly be flavorful. I wonder if the answer is simply to get really "clinical" or technical, and dive back into a brainstorm of what might actually yield better Prestige and better Diplomatic relations.

Yeah, this is normal at this stage. Mobile Tactics has 9 more prereqs than Advanced Ballistics, and that's in Era 8 Column 1 in BNW, which is the column before this one.

got it

Power users would be most effective at making weapons to use against other channelers. I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but it makes sense that they would have a better understanding of how other power users would fight, and generally making stronger weapons would put the users in better stead.

right. fine with it.

This also brings us back to needing a name for the tech-formerly-known-as-A'dam. It's got Horse6, Melee8, and an innovation.

Could Laws of Motion go on this one and something else on the spaceship factory thing? (Would also give us the Glider back.) Revealing the map could move up with it if that makes naming the spaceship factory + Naval Melee 6 easier?

I think this synergizes well with my suggestion about Telescopes above. Name "Unnamed" Laws of Motion because reasons. Name "Laws of Motion" Telescopes and enjoy the decent flavor. Then as far as Telescopes on top... come up with something else... Here we are again with a Prestige thing being hard to "name" with a technological advance. Any other ideas on what to do with this kind of thing?

Unfortunately, Laws of Motion and Telescopes are very much not a flavorful way to arrive at Power-Wrought Weapons, which is their child... I wonder if we should strive for something a little more channeling-related (or something) for one of those techs? Is Foretelling too weird for former-Laws of Motion? Nobody really "rediscovers" it late in the series.

Ach! This is really tough. I feel like as it is it doesn't quite work, though, so needs a little something extra.

Awesome! Based on the techs in it, it could be just books 11 to 14?

right, so what stretch of time, then? That's got to be a year or less. I imagine we'd be counting turns with months, like in the uber-end of BNW. Hey, we can use the in-universe month names!

We're super close! Hopefully we can get some of this flavor solid soon, and then we can do a "big picture pass" of the whole thing and check for mistakes, etc. Oh, and we can name the innovations, I suppose.