S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

Back on a computer! I couldn't convince myself that doing this post on an iPad was realistic. Between the switching between pages, looking up Shara, etc., it would have been a huge pain. The good thing about the wait is that it's giving me time to make some ideas!

Sounds good! Since I wasn't posting here yesterday, I did some coding for some of the stuff that's already been decided. Continuing on from the work I did (whenever that was!), I added support for a couple more things to Threads:

• Yield changes in capital cities
• Yield dumps of Culture
• Yield dumps of Prestige

As seen here:

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

There are 4 Threads that I've made work so far. (I didn't screenshot them all because they're functional variants of each other, just different yields.) The next "major" Thread feature is for Threads that target variable cities, rather than the whole player or a fixed city like the capital.

But now that you're back, I'll leave that until another design hiatus!

yeah, 4 at a time seems insane. In truth, though, we've gone into much more detail than I originally was picturing (for the better)!

Yeah, I'm quite happy with where we are with the civs we've finished now!

I think that "wrinkle" in Prestige is appropriate, as would be a tech gate. This one is tough because I think the limitation is appropriate, but the benefit itself I'm not quite sold on. I guess the whole culture-spread-through-trading thing just doesn't seem particularly fitting for Shara. I'm magenta'ing this, because I'm not sure I know what to do with it yet.

This ability doesn't have a limitation, exactly. Trade routes established by Shara would give Shara the bonus. The restriction (must have adjacent borders) is for other civs establishing trade routes with Shara. So Shara can trade with whoever they like, but only neighboring civs can trade with them. I think the Culture stuff fits, as well as any offense-based civilization mechanic can with Shara's isolationist flavor. People in the Westlands know Shara to be mysterious and valuable trading partners, and they know only the Aiel and the Tuatha'an (and formerly Cairhien) can trade with them, which are all precedents for this kind of influence.

yeah, this is an interesting example of a civ being an "LB" civ simply due to temporal circumstance. I'm not sure this is interesting enough to survive, but it's not a bad one.

Yeah, it's not particularly exciting.

I will take issue with the name, though, due to clash elsewhere. We have the Wyld stuff as a Path, and probably sort of need it to stay one (though it's not essential). We also might need aspects of the prophesy itself for our LWs.... I think there's a better way to frame this.

Do you have any other part of the Sharan flavor in mind as an alternative? Like we've done with the Gai'shain on the Aiel, I'd be inclined to leave this as it is until we know we're taking it forward and need to resolve the conflict. If we want to keep it, then we can always use different words to nod at the same flavor to avoid the conflict with Paths.

Hmm... not sure on this. I think this is fine to keep around for now, but I think this Spark-related mechanic will transform by the end of our discussion and this one will disappear, as is. It is somewhat too liberation-ey. Some kind of limitation or specificity to this is needed to keep it from just being a Wilder-fest. It's related to the breeding flavor your specified, but it's also sort of an oversimplification of that breeding. One of my suggestions below (a nutty one, partially inspired by perpetual government) may address this)

I've marked this as red because we just have way too many options and as this one isn't particularly exciting, it seems unlikely we'll go with it. The Spark boost will resurface if we like it elsewhere.

nutty! This one is interesting. I like keeping it around for now, though I think it could do with some tweaking.

What if it didn't literally eliminate happiness? What if you could still become unhappy, but that unhappiness was offset by some ratio by the Gold loss? For example, if, say, -10 Happiness translated into -60 gold and -2 happiness (using some complex calculation)? Or, perhaps, we capped unhappiness at -9 so you could never have rebellion...

As is, it might be too powerful, since happiness is one of the main limiters in civ - but that doesn't mean we can't adapt this into something more workable.

I can see these changes making it easier to balance, but I think it makes the UA dramatically less useful. The main benefit to an at-least-0 Happiness level is that you don't suffer from the Food/Growth penalties associated with being Unhappy. (And therefore have all the assorted benefits of cities that grow more aggressively, though it would quickly exacerbate any Happiness deficit since cities would continue to grow at the normal rate, which is something of a balancing mechanism.) Avoiding rebellions at -10 and below are cool, but that's not nearly as useful in most cases. If the player has gotten down to -10 or below Unhappiness, then they were already doing pretty badly.

The main gain from this UA would be if we could find a way to keep Happiness positive even when Shara would normally be unhappy, that's really powerful and will change how players can play. We just don't want it to go too far, obviously, so that Unhappiness should be offset by some kind of shift somewhere else in the civ, but one that's less punishing than the Unhappiness itself (or can be intentionally compensated to be so), so that it's still a bonus.

Direct yields we can feed convert Unhappiness into:

• Gold - was my first choice and still seems pretty good. It's not immediately damaging to get a lot of negative Gold for a time, but it is damaging to keep it going permanently, since it will start to affect everything else.
• Science - possible, but would need a more forgiving conversion rate than Gold. Choosing Science could make this more "burst"-like, where Shara would accept Happiness deficits for a short time in order to win a war or something, but need to recoup it quickly. The risk here is that it will never be useful because the penalty would mean they always fall behind.
• Culture - Possible, but a bit risky. This just means they won't get many Policies/Tenets. While those are powerful, Shara could win most games before this deficit becomes a gamechanger.
• Prestige - Way too Culture-victory-specific, Shara would just ignore this.
• Food - A bit weird because this is a local yield. There isn't really much point in doing this one, since a Food reduction is one of the primary effects of Unhappiness that we're trying to avoid.
• Production - Local yield again. Possible, but probably not punishing enough.
• Faith - Like Prestige, Shara would just dump it in exchange for infinite Happiness.
• Alignment - Could be quite unusual, dampen or remove their Alignment somehow (tend it towards Neutral). Like Prestige and Faith though, it is liable to be dumped for Happiness.

Of those, Gold and Science seem to be the most appropriate. There are also more complex feedback mechanisms. Disbanding units every X turns (where X is determined by the Unhappiness they would have). Spawning more False Dragons near them (potentially a double dip though, since Shara can kill those FDs for yields).

Other mechanisms? I do think Gold could be made to work.

Yeah, something with madness might be appropriate. I won't make an amendment now, since I'm proposing a few alternate Freed's - we can tweak whichever ones survive the next round.

Sounds good.

First off, I definitely wouldn't want to do this AND the Freed proposed above - two UUs that are mechanically the same (in combat) in the same civ would likely feel quite boring, unless they interfaced with the other Uniques in a very special way.

Hmm... I think the idea of this is cool, but on the other hand, does it feel that impactful to have a UU that simply exists to surrender itself to make something you can otherwise do? It's a bit like the Conquistador in BNW, but in the Conq, having a combat unit be able to found acity is pretty awesome. Having a combat unit replace the functionality of an LP is sort of neat in that you'll be able to have many more of them, but it's not very splashy.

Also, why the Ta'veren? T'a'r vision and hampering dragonsworn doesn't seem super related. Not bad, but also not obviously related. I suppose the question we should ask is - which VC is this meant to aid?

No particular reason for the Ta'veren, more that I was trying to go for the most "leader-y" Governor type. As I mentioned in the block above this, the Dignitary may fit that flavor role better, but speaking of victory conditions, that targets Diplo, which isn't really on point for Shara. Domination is probably the best thing to target here.

I do agree that having the unit not really be much different than the Wilder/Kin could be underwhelming though. You don't actually have the UU itself for very long if you use its primary ability, at which point it becomes a generic thing again.

Lastly, on that note - and back to Shandalle for a minute - is it worth considering altering our UGov such that it's actually some kind of UU (GC or actual combat unit) that can then become the UGov?

I don't think we need to go back. There's a Great Captain replacement in our candidates for Shandalle, so the potential connection to the UG is covered there, I'd say.

Bao is nuts. Shame on you!

This is interesting. It's certainly "all in" on the LB, and I'm not sure about that, though I don't hate it (it's not side-biased!) I definitely like the notion of the Wyld (Bao is a name, the Wyld apparently is the role, so that should probably change...)

I don't have many thoughts on the mechanics itself. I think increased range is a nice touch (I do recall the Ayyad artillery and such). Not sure what I think of the overall balance and feel of it, yet. More thought needed.

It's an "all in" unique in that it's only useful for the LB, but it doesn't commit all of Shara's uniques to being like that, which is quite good. It's also a good way to drop in quite an unexpected but still flavorful very late game UU.

Agreed on the title.

re: UBs for shara - well, we never go there in the books, or even hear stories (like Seanchan), so that isn't surprising...

Yeah, that does make sense!

I don't love this one. I'm redding it, but you could perhaps convince me. I guess the Palace replacements just don't feel like a UB. I mean, you don't really *build* it, it's automatic. Feels more like a UA. Unless I'm somehow now understanding the palace...

No, I agree, palace replacements aren't very exciting unless they give the civ very visible abilities. (Acting like a mini UA.) Then it's that ability that's the exciting part, not the building.

I think this is a pretty cool idea. It's serious business, that's for sure, but it's also pretty compelling. I like how it is a flavorful combination of both culture and isolation-related quasi-domination (building them fast mid-war would be a really cool way of securing a new city).

However, there are also some issues with it. The main one has to do with worked tiles. Presumably, these tiles need to be worked to generate culture- that's pretty much what everything we know about BNW points to. It seems likely to me that these tiles will very often be outside of the radius of a sharan city, especially if we position Shara as a "culture civ," whose borders will expand well past the three hexes of normal city work-range. What do we do about this? I don't think I love the idea of the tiles producing culture even when *not* being worked - imagine the Polynesian UI with that element!

Also what happens if the enemy borders or your borders *do* change? For instance, their city is razed, your city is razed, or one of you captures the others' city? Would the wall fall, or stand? In those cases, the wall would either be in the middle of no-man's-land, your territory, or theirs. This isn't a problem so much as something we need to clarify.

For the borders changing, I think we would demolish the improvement if the hex it was on was no longer the outer edge of Sharan territory. (We'd make that clear on our unit that has the culture bomb ability, when the Sharan player goes to it as well.) If an enemy city is razed and Sharan territory is left standing alone, I'd say the wall can remain as long as it borders no-man's-land. This would suggest allowing Shara to build it bordering no-man's-land in the first place, but it would be difficult to communicate to players not to do that early, otherwise it will disappear as the borders expand.

The worked tile is a good call. Perhaps it shouldn't have a Culture yield on a per-tile basis, but instead "work together" to create Culture. The idea is for the Sharan players to string them along their borders. So something like "Cities that work or own the tiles where X Immense Walls are built produce +Y Culture". That way we can make it a lower per-Improvement yield so it won't get out of control when it benefits the city from outside its work radius.

Alternatively, we could make a feature of the Improvement be that the tile can be worked regardless of how far it is from the city. It will still be bounded by population then.

I think I see what you're saying with the last point. You mean it serves the same purpose as whichever improvement normal civs will use to capture angreals. It's probably likely, though, that that improvement is one of the "regular" ones (camp, plantation, whatever), following in how BNW works - we wouldn't want to replace *all* mines into these, right?

I'm so-so on this improvement. OK, but not that exciting. Sort of straightforward, and not super strategically interesting.

Right, if the Angreal Cache is improved by an Improvement that is used elsewhere, then this one wouldn't replace that. It's a bit weird that we present the player with two options, one of which is strictly worse than the other, but still. This one's more of an enabling unique, that would make the channeling uniques that use Spark much more numerous.

Should this still be magenta?

Cycle of the Sh'boan is meant to represent the fact that the Ayyad assassinate (apparently) the monarch every 7 years. Sort of like the Mayan Long Calendar, but much more common. The yields presented could be anything, and could be made to cover whatever strategy we wanted (I'm not married to these specifics). Also considered making it so the turn before that 7th, you get some kind of *penalty*.

I really like this one, it feels very much like a UA, which I think some of our other Shara options don't as much. I don't think we need the penalty on the preceding turn just yet. What kinds of actions are we thinking? Making an LW, capturing a city, stuff like that? Would they all be empire-wide stuff (Happiness, Culture, Prestige, etc) or sometimes dig down to specific cities? (Create a building sometimes, provide Food somewhere, stuff like that?)

Beyond the Shroud is meant to represent the "hi, we're here too!" of Shara in the LB. It's a recycling of the failed Seanchan UA (the flavor was actually better for the seanchan!) I expect it to die here as well, though the competition might not be as steep with this civ.

I agree that this fit better on the Seanchan. I think rather than put it onto Shara, our previous idea of putting it on a wonder will work better. So I'll mark this as red.

The Freed (half mad) has the post-cleansing element. I'm not so sure of this, as it makes Shara seek the Cleansing - we could eliminate that if need be.

The Freed (less mad) is probably more splashy than its cousin. Of course, its worth noting that these UAs are flawed in that they encourage MC use of all kinds, which is unflavorful... Thought the mechanic was interesting, though....

I think encouraging them to chase the Cleansing is too much of a flavor break on the first one. It's also only applicable for a very short time for a UA.

The second one could be quite strong. It does turn the way our MC system works on its head because it doesn't end in going rogue. Would such a channeler still eventually disappear? It's a bit unflavorful that they're able to stave off the madness completely somehow. And there's the MC usage thing you mentioned.

I've marked this as red, but I could be convinced otherwise.

Insights of the Ayyad is based on the same advisor-ruler flavor you've highlighted. The yield could also be specific - X culture or something - instead of varying per Gov. Could also be "for every Ayyad used" or something more specific. The idea is that by *using* the Spark, you get a bonus. However, this promotes liberation, because it rewards high spark. It's possible that a better (but complex) system would be to give a bonus for the *ratio* of your unused spark (so if you had less spark, you could still get the bonus. However, then that rewards *avoiding* spark gains... oy. Promising, though.

I don't think rewarding high Spark is necessarily a problem. (Were we thinking that Shara wouldn't be Liberation normally?) I don't think it's something we should avoid in general, just because one way or the other favors a Philosophy, since it's one of our major new systems.

With that in mind, I'd be inclined to go for the simpler approach, of relating the bonus to each Spark being used. That will also be easier for the player to keep track of.

River of Souls is based on that same Angarai'la flavor - this one would probably need a second aspect, likely a combat one. Also, has kind of weird strategy implications - hunting river cities, etc.

You've got an interesting theme on this a few of the uniques of using LWs to generate Faith, which I think is pretty cool. It lets Shara pursue a Culture victory and excel at Paths through that process, which is quite different.

Breeding Power is meant to call to mind that same concentrated channeler you mentioned. Here it has a different mechanic, though . Instead of providing unlimited happiness, it provides "unlimited" Spark - breed away, but pay the price. I could see this tweaked variously, though.

This is an interesting one. One difficulty is that this means that Spark acts differently from other strategic resources for Shara in a somewhat confusing manner. Normally, if you end up with a negative strategic resource (you trade for it and the trade ends or you have some yourself and it gets pillaged) then everything that consumes that resource gets "worse". Units get lowered combat strength, buildings don't produce as much yield. Would this UA eliminate that penalty and replace it with the Unhappiness one only for Spark?

Also, side note, can Spark be traded? The flavor of trading "spark from angreal" makes some kind of sense, but not so much the natural Spark. The existence of a natural baseline also means disallowing trade doesn't lead to situations where some players are completely left without.

Freed (madness) is left ambiguous in that it could use either of the madness components described by my UAs above, so would need to be clarified. Could also incorporate some other factor (combat bonus, etc.). Not sure if it would be Asha'man only or could be MCs as well.

I've ended up marking both of those as Red. I do think some kind of madness connected UU could work though. Maybe the (less mad) variant should still allow roguing, but benefit the unit in some other way?

Freed (distance) is weird and is based on the notion that these guys are hated within Shara, but epic warriors. I could actually see some kind of reality where it was the opposite, though. I could also see this being adapted with the reverse mechanic (stronger when closer) and applied to the Ayyad instead.

My main worry with this one is that it would be quite hard for other players to know how strong a given Freed would be when they're fighting against it. Things like the map seam can make those distances quite hard to judge.

Ayyad (advisor) is nuts. Unfortunately duplicates some of our Ajah abilities, but I figured this one captures it in a different way. They can advise you if you're close, but it causes some problems because they are untrusted (this yield could also be science). If you're there, separate from society, you can still influence politics, but it makes the sharans happy. Weird?

Interesting, this one is pretty cool. I think that your suggestion below for an Ayyad Enclave UI would actually fit this mechanic much better though. Something that the player decides to build and its existence affects peoples' opinion. I've suggested that UI below.

I've also suggested that each bonus only be able to effect each city once, to avoid carpets of them at a certain distance out (which would apply for the unit as well). It does mean they can be combined at different distances to get both bonuses if they're fine with the Happiness penalty though!

Having a Happiness penalty on this UU/UI would also combo quite well with the Perpetual Government UA.

I've been thinking of weird stuff with the Freed and the Ayyad - we can also come back and consider simply combat-related bonuses if we prefer that.

Yeah, we should probably consider some "normal" uniques as well. Though I'm quite liking the weirdness overall. It should make all of the civs play quite differently.

Tattoo warrior is meant to call to mind the notion that the tattoos show the rank of the given warrior in Sharan society (are these guys slaves)? This notion is obviously highly abstracted here. I'm not sure if these are sword, spear, or other weaponed guys - later in the process, I'll probably dig out the specific Shara chapters in aMoL and see if that gives us a better idea. I could also see a Tattoo mechanic simply being a "better" unit, and not having a weird gimmick like this.

Yeah, this one would presumably replace a quite late game unit, so that Shara would have time to build up Prestige influence over other civs and activate its combat bonus.

Hearttomb (Nat) could get ridiculously powerful if it allows theming bonuses to apply to that total as well. It should probably be capped. Also, these yields are somewhat arbitrary - I went with Faith and culture, here. Note that the Hearttomb could also be a World Wonder. Could be called "River Tomb" or something.

The other Hearttombs are permutations of this same idea. Note that they provide the bonuses listed, but also promote culture in general by adding relic slots at all (these buildings don't normally have them)

Hearttomb (nat) looks like it could be quite powerful, but it's also the kind of yield dump stuff that players tend to avoid. I've marked it red, but I could be convinced otherwise.

I like Hearttomb (relics), though I think combining it with Hearttomb (river) would make a lot of sense. Production (river) becomes available quite early, and this as a way to generate Faith at that part of the game could be pretty cool. Will Shara have any Relics to put in these slots though? Do the corresponding LPs become available early enough? I've also suggested limiting the EXP bonus to channeling units, because it seems quite strong (presumably still has Production (river)'s normal yields?), since it will stack with the other EXP buildings.

Ayyad's enclave is pretty straightforward. As is the Freed's Enclave. could be made more interesting.

How would the Enclave of the Freed work? EXP is local to a unit being trained in a city, but the male channeler tracking is civ-wide. Would the amount of EXP given to the units trained in that city just keep building over time or does it expire somehow?

Ayyad's Enclave is straightforward, as you say. It's also worth mentioning that yield dumps when a unit is trained tend to encourage players to suicide those units (or even just disband them to keep a yield factory going).

Also, should note that that I also considering working in silk somehow, since that's where it comes from. Not sure how to do it, though - there aren't any buildings that use that resource in BNW.

I've suggested a use for the Silk flavor below!

 

[S3rgeus]

Recap in a separate post due to character limit!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Exotic Treasures, trade routes established by Shara produce Culture and Prestige (specifically against the civilization the trade route is with) in addition to Gold. Other players can only establish trade routes with Shara if they have adjoining borders (any two hexes where their borders meet).
• Prophecies of the Wyld, all cities produce +X% (high number) more Production once the Dragon is born.
• Ayyad Harem, Shara's population produces X% more Spark
• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• Beyond the Shroud of the Great Rift, choose you alignment in the LB after all other civs have chosen (and been made public)
• The Freed (half mad), saidin units accumulate at half rate. If saidin has been cleansed, all madness is removed from saidin users.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier, though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness. Saidin units cannot go fully "rogue".
• Insights of the Ayyad, +X yield for all governors for every Y Spark used (by active units)
• River of Souls, every Relic housed within a city on a River produces +X Culture and +Y Faith
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has run out of Spark. Every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative spark exceeds Z.
• Isolationism (defensive), civilizations that Shara does not provide Open Borders to cannot accumulate Prestige against Shara
• Isolated Kingdom, Shara generates +50% Prestige against civilizations that it does not have Open Borders with.
• Isolationism (yields), Shara generates +X Culture per turn and +Y Prestige per turn (Prestige after <tech>) for each civilization it does not provide open borders to and each city state Shara has met and is not friends nor allies with.

UUs:

• Freed (early), replaces the Asha'man, unlocks on an earlier tech and does not require the Black Tower (same combat strength)
• Freed (madness), replaces the Male Channeler or the Asha'man, uses one of the madness bonuses described above under the UAs.
• Freed (distance), replaces the Asha'man, gains +X combat strength for every Y tiles away the closest Sharan city is (max Z)
• Ayyad (Ta'veren), replaces the Wilder and Kin, same strength (upgrades at the same time/amounts as them), can become Ta'veren Governors
• Ayyad (Gov Advisor), replaces the Kin, cities with governors within 3 hexes of the Ayyad produce +X Culture but -Y happiness, cities with governors with an Ayyad between 4 and 6 hexes away produce +Z happiness and +W Prestige (after a certain tech)
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Silk Depot, replaces Gold (Trade), trade routes established by Shara in this city with civilizations who do not receive Open Borders from Shara produce +X Culture per turn. And +Y Prestige per turn after <tech>.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (nat), replaces Culture National Wonder, +X Faith and +Y Culture for all channelers produced in this city for every +1 culture produced from Legendary Relics housed within the city
• Hearttomb (relics), replaces XP 2, adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building who produce Culture and Faith (instead of Culture and Prestige)
• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Ayyad's Enclave, replaces XP 1, each channeler produced in this city produces an instant yield of X culture.
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP for every Male Channeler born in this civilization

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Shrine in Angarai'la, can be built on top of Angreal Caches and provides double Spark
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

New stuff!

Isolationism (defensive) rewards players for playing like Shara. Unlike most defensive abilities, this one will be relevant to the player more often (though still not every game), since it will affect the Happiness output to the influence of other Philosophies.

Isolated Kingdom is along a similar vein. I picked 50% to intentionally beat the 25% bonus that you normally get for open borders.

And similarly for Isolationism (yields). I quite like this one because it brings in CS relationships as well.

Silk Depot is the silk flavor that I mentioned above, and continues the "not having open borders with people is good for you" theme.

The Ayyad's Enclave is your proposed UU moved onto a UI, as mentioned above.

 

[counterpoint]

Thread stuff!

Awesome! thanks for moving forward on this. Seems like forever ago that we did all those Threads...

This ability doesn't have a limitation, exactly. Trade routes established by Shara would give Shara the bonus. The restriction (must have adjacent borders) is for other civs establishing trade routes with Shara. So Shara can trade with whoever they like, but only neighboring civs can trade with them. I think the Culture stuff fits, as well as any offense-based civilization mechanic can with Shara's isolationist flavor. People in the Westlands know Shara to be mysterious and valuable trading partners, and they know only the Aiel and the Tuatha'an (and formerly Cairhien) can trade with them, which are all precedents for this kind of influence.

regarding the limitation, understood.

My issue isn't with the tradeitself, it's with the fact that *culture* spreads because of that trade. In fact, it seems like things were set up specifically so that didn't happen. It seems that "trade depots" were set up on the edge of their territory, and may not have even really shown any "Sharan-ness," as they were quite cut off from the country in general.

In fact, I'm actually starting to have significant trouble with "Cul" being one of the VCs for Shara. It's true, they should produce a healthy amount of Culture, but Prestige, and winning the Culture VC? I don't think it makes much sense. They are isolationist to the extreme, much more so than Seanchan or any of the other civ. I think, given the nature of the Culture VC in the game, this civ doesn't fit it very well. They aren't really spreading their ways and style anywhere - in fact, they want to *hide* it from everyone else.

I think I could see us creating abilities that produce lots of culture (for Policies and for culture defense) and/or other forms of defense against prestige, but the specific assault of other civs culturally doesn't seem to fit. Below I try out a few weird ideas where Prestige is converted into other things, etc.

What would I replace it with, VC wise? Science, I suppose, though LB is also in there.

Do you have any other part of the Sharan flavor in mind as an alternative? Like we've done with the Gai'shain on the Aiel, I'd be inclined to leave this as it is until we know we're taking it forward and need to resolve the conflict. If we want to keep it, then we can always use different words to nod at the same flavor to avoid the conflict with Paths.

nothing specific, beyond just "Great War" stuff or w/e. I'm not going down this road again, so let's just leave it for now, since this may not survive anyways. If it does, we can discuss further.

I've marked this as red because we just have way too many options and as this one isn't particularly exciting, it seems unlikely we'll go with it. The Spark boost will resurface if we like it elsewhere.

I can see these changes making it easier to balance, but I think it makes the UA dramatically less useful..... STUFF.....

This is about Perpetual Government.

I agree that Gold, possibly science, is the best choice here. I think this one is neat, but I still that the impossibility of Unhappiness might be too powerful, as getting knocked into unhappiness is one of the biggest "checks" against your awesomeness in BNW. That said, if we calibrated the Gold penalty so it felt fair, it could work OK - it should probably scale, like -X gold per happiness if it's removing 1-9 unhappiness, and -2X gold per happiness if it's removing 10-20, etc., that kind of thing.

Also, what are the implications on this for the AI on higher difficulties? I can see AI behavior that would alternately make this totally useless for them (because of the epic happ bonuses), or totally unfairly strong (50 cities, etc.). Thoughts?

No particular reason for the Ta'veren, more that I was trying to go for the most "leader-y" Governor type. As I mentioned in the block above this, the Dignitary may fit that flavor role better, but speaking of victory conditions, that targets Diplo, which isn't really on point for Shara. Domination is probably the best thing to target here.

I do agree that having the unit not really be much different than the Wilder/Kin could be underwhelming though. You don't actually have the UU itself for very long if you use its primary ability, at which point it becomes a generic thing again.

yeah, I think I wanna red this one.

I don't think we need to go back. There's a Great Captain replacement in our candidates for Shandalle, so the potential connection to the UG is covered there, I'd say.

fair enough

It's an "all in" unique in that it's only useful for the LB, but it doesn't commit all of Shara's uniques to being like that, which is quite good. It's also a good way to drop in quite an unexpected but still flavorful very late game UU.

Agreed on the title.

yeah, can leave it one for now

For the borders changing, I think we would demolish the improvement if the hex it was on was no longer the outer edge of Sharan territory. (We'd make that clear on our unit that has the culture bomb ability, when the Sharan player goes to it as well.) If an enemy city is razed and Sharan territory is left standing alone, I'd say the wall can remain as long as it borders no-man's-land. This would suggest allowing Shara to build it bordering no-man's-land in the first place, but it would be difficult to communicate to players not to do that early, otherwise it will disappear as the borders expand.

The worked tile is a good call. Perhaps it shouldn't have a Culture yield on a per-tile basis, but instead "work together" to create Culture. The idea is for the Sharan players to string them along their borders. So something like "Cities that work or own the tiles where X Immense Walls are built produce +Y Culture". That way we can make it a lower per-Improvement yield so it won't get out of control when it benefits the city from outside its work radius.

Alternatively, we could make a feature of the Improvement be that the tile can be worked regardless of how far it is from the city. It will still be bounded by population then.

Interesting. Agreed about the razed/standing situation. Definitely don't want to allow it normally bordering no-man's land, for the reason you've described.

The working situation is tricky. To clarify, what does it mean when a city 'owns" a tile? Does that mean that a civ's total perimeter is actually made up of the owned tiles of various cities? How is this determined? (culture from the city, I'd guess)? If that's what it means, then I'm fine with this. It should be noted that this would make it objectively better to make sure these are beyond the 3 tiles (if possible), so you could put regular improvements on the workable tiles.

You like the X culture for Y minimum tiles thing better than it being per tile?

I'm not in favor of letting the cities work far away tiles just for this purpose.

Right, if the Angreal Cache is improved by an Improvement that is used elsewhere, then this one wouldn't replace that. It's a bit weird that we present the player with two options, one of which is strictly worse than the other, but still. This one's more of an enabling unique, that would make the channeling uniques that use Spark much more numerous.

Should this still be magenta?

I'm redding this one, now. It's too niche - totally useless if you never get an angreal cache. since it's a late-game resource, it's also somewhat hard to plan around to compensate (and unlike the s'redit resource for the seanchan unit, you can't trade for a tile

I really like this one, it feels very much like a UA, which I think some of our other Shara options don't as much. I don't think we need the penalty on the preceding turn just yet. What kinds of actions are we thinking? Making an LW, capturing a city, stuff like that? Would they all be empire-wide stuff (Happiness, Culture, Prestige, etc) or sometimes dig down to specific cities? (Create a building sometimes, provide Food somewhere, stuff like that?)

Not sure. It could be big things like those, or it could be small things (x number of units killed, yields generated). We'd need some kind of hierarchy to determine which is given when multiple conditions are met.

I agree that this fit better on the Seanchan. I think rather than put it onto Shara, our previous idea of putting it on a wonder will work better. So I'll mark this as red.

axed

I think encouraging them to chase the Cleansing is too much of a flavor break on the first one. It's also only applicable for a very short time for a UA.

The second one could be quite strong. It does turn the way our MC system works on its head because it doesn't end in going rogue. Would such a channeler still eventually disappear? It's a bit unflavorful that they're able to stave off the madness completely somehow. And there's the MC usage thing you mentioned.

I've marked this as red, but I could be convinced otherwise.

axe the first one. I should clarify, as I was being very confusing - I didn't mean they cannot be "scared rogue" (a failed gentling, etc.). I was thinking of the "natural" accumulation of madness, i.e. they'd never go rogue through turns passing. Not nearly as imbalanced. Still, I'd say let's modify the second one to allow them to go rogue - they're just much more sentient beforehand - though I'd be fine tweaking it so that the "natural" roguesness happens later.

I don't think rewarding high Spark is necessarily a problem. (Were we thinking that Shara wouldn't be Liberation normally?) I don't think it's something we should avoid in general, just because one way or the other favors a Philosophy, since it's one of our major new systems.

With that in mind, I'd be inclined to go for the simpler approach, of relating the bonus to each Spark being used. That will also be easier for the player to keep track of.

hmmm... shara is always a tough call between lib and opp, for me. We can leave this one for now

This is an interesting one. One difficulty is that this means that Spark acts differently from other strategic resources for Shara in a somewhat confusing manner. Normally, if you end up with a negative strategic resource (you trade for it and the trade ends or you have some yourself and it gets pillaged) then everything that consumes that resource gets "worse". Units get lowered combat strength, buildings don't produce as much yield. Would this UA eliminate that penalty and replace it with the Unhappiness one only for Spark?

Also, side note, can Spark be traded? The flavor of trading "spark from angreal" makes some kind of sense, but not so much the natural Spark. The existence of a natural baseline also means disallowing trade doesn't lead to situations where some players are completely left without.

ooh, I've honestly felt like Spark *needs* to be treated separately from other SR's. It shouldn't be able to be traded, I'd say. It's true that the Angreal Cache would suggest otherwise, but that resource isn't tied to specific units (e.g. "Asha'man requires 2 Angreal Caches), it just boosts spark, so I'm fine with ignoring that. Consequently, I definitely think 0 should be the minimum Spark for civs (special abilities notwithstanding). I think this is logical and appropriate mechanically.

I'm going to unmagenta this one.

I've ended up marking both of those as Red. I do think some kind of madness connected UU could work though. Maybe the (less mad) variant should still allow roguing, but benefit the unit in some other way?

Yeah, I'm going to magenta the less mad one and tweak it.

My main worry with this one is that it would be quite hard for other players to know how strong a given Freed would be when they're fighting against it. Things like the map seam can make those distances quite hard to judge.

agreed and axed

Interesting, this one is pretty cool. I think that your suggestion below for an Ayyad Enclave UI would actually fit this mechanic much better though. Something that the player decides to build and its existence affects peoples' opinion. I've suggested that UI below.

I've also suggested that each bonus only be able to effect each city once, to avoid carpets of them at a certain distance out (which would apply for the unit as well). It does mean they can be combined at different distances to get both bonuses if they're fine with the Happiness penalty though!

Having a Happiness penalty on this UU/UI would also combo quite well with the Perpetual Government UA.

interesting UI. Agreed that it should apply to a city once. Because of that, I've actually suggested a UB below that seems to fit better with that aspect.

Hearttomb (nat) looks like it could be quite powerful, but it's also the kind of yield dump stuff that players tend to avoid. I've marked it red, but I could be convinced otherwise.

"avoid" in what sense? Like people won't build it?

looking at this again, I think this is a mistake, and doesn't quite make sense... trying to figure out what I really meant... fine with its reddness.

I like Hearttomb (relics), though I think combining it with Hearttomb (river) would make a lot of sense. Production (river) becomes available quite early, and this as a way to generate Faith at that part of the game could be pretty cool. Will Shara have any Relics to put in these slots though? Do the corresponding LPs become available early enough? I've also suggested limiting the EXP bonus to channeling units, because it seems quite strong (presumably still has Production (river)'s normal yields?), since it will stack with the other EXP buildings.

i'm fine with merging these. Relics are certainly not available early enough to make this work with (river) though (is that era 3?). What should we do? This feature of the UB would be useless until era 5. I don't have a problem with not making shara particularly "good" at getting the relics - this just gives them a place to convert them. Do we need to provide a relic with this building though? That seems too good.

How would the Enclave of the Freed work? EXP is local to a unit being trained in a city, but the male channeler tracking is civ-wide. Would the amount of EXP given to the units trained in that city just keep building over time or does it expire somehow?

this was unclear. I mean +X EXP *to* every MC born in the civ. as in they are each born with +25 XP or something.

Ayyad's Enclave is straightforward, as you say. It's also worth mentioning that yield dumps when a unit is trained tend to encourage players to suicide those units (or even just disband them to keep a yield factory going).

yeah, should we nuke it?

I've suggested a use for the Silk flavor below!

yeah, you had this one under UUs, btw... the thing about this one is that it has nothing to do with the actual silk resource. I suppose "porcelain shop" in the A'M is the same, but that does feel a little strange.

This one feels very pro-spreading Prestige and stuff. According to my culture rant above, that's a problem. I'm redding it.

New stuff!

Isolationism (defensive) rewards players for playing like Shara. Unlike most defensive abilities, this one will be relevant to the player more often (though still not every game), since it will affect the Happiness output to the influence of other Philosophies.

interesting. This one is way way too extreme, though. It means you cannot win a CV against Shara, practically speaking - why would any (especially human) player EVER grant an OB to a pro-culture player?

Isolated Kingdom is along a similar vein. I picked 50% to intentionally beat the 25% bonus that you normally get for open borders.

this one is quite interesting, mechanically! I still have issue with this being aprestige-generation machine, since I question Shara-as-Culture, but I think this shell could be used to generate perhaps another yield (one of the new ones provided below is inspired by this). I'm not categorically opposed to prestige, but I think this one is too all-in on culture as is. Also, if it were prestige, I'm not sure 50% is the best number - double that of OB might be too much, eh?

And similarly for Isolationism (yields). I quite like this one because it brings in CS relationships as well.

same as above, though this one is a bit more nuanced which is nice. I question whether it should provide prestige - providing the culture would sort of accomplish the same thing (unless we said it couldn't be converted to prestige), and isn't as on the nose. Prestige could be replaced with something else.

Silk Depot is the silk flavor that I mentioned above, and continues the "not having open borders with people is good for you" theme.

discussed above

The Ayyad's Enclave is your proposed UU moved onto a UI, as mentioned above.

discussed above. a little clunky, but ok.

RECAP!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Exotic Treasures, trade routes established by Shara produce Culture and Prestige (specifically against the civilization the trade route is with) in addition to Gold. Other players can only establish trade routes with Shara if they have adjoining borders (any two hexes where their borders meet).
• Prophecies of the Wyld, all cities produce +X% (high number) more Production once the Dragon is born.
• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier, though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness. Saidin units cannot go fully "rogue".
• Insights of the Ayyad, +X yield for all governors for every Y Spark used (by active units)
• River of Souls, every Relic housed within a city on a River produces +X Culture and +Y Faith
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has run out of Spark. Every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative spark exceeds Z.[/COLOR]
• Isolationism (defensive), civilizations that Shara does not provide Open Borders to cannot accumulate Prestige against Shara
• Isolated Kingdom, Shara generates +50% Prestige against civilizations that it does not have Open Borders with.
• Isolationism (yields), Shara generates +X Culture per turn and +Y Prestige per turn (Prestige after <tech>) for each civilization it does not provide open borders to and each city state Shara has met and is not friends nor allies with.
• Isolationism (conversion), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to is converted into X Gold.

UUs:

• Freed (early), replaces the Asha'man, unlocks on an earlier tech and does not require the Black Tower (same combat strength)
• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Ayyad (Ta'veren), replaces the Wilder and Kin, same strength (upgrades at the same time/amounts as them), can become Ta'veren Governors
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
  [*]Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Ayyad's Enclave, replaces XP 1, each channeler produced in this city produces an instant yield of X culture.
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Silk Depot, replaces Gold (Trade), trade routes established by Shara in this city with civilizations who do not receive Open Borders from Shara produce +X Culture per turn. And +Y Prestige per turn after <tech>.
• Hearttomb (museum), replaces the Museum, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture (cannot be converted to Prestige) and Y Science
• Ayyad Enclave, replaces Culture 2, when a friendly female channeler is within 3 hexes of this city, produces +X Culture and -Y happiness per turn. If a friendly female channeler is within 4-6 hexes fo the city, produces +Z happiness and +W prestige (after <tech>). these bonuses cannot be stacked

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Shrine in Angarai'la, can be built on top of Angreal Caches and provides double Spark
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

ayyad (warrior) is a straightforward channeler killer. Could also be the freed instead. could *also* be a UU 'anti-channeler" unit, though that's probably a bit too late-game to make sense (and those don't use spark!)

Isolationism (conversion) is confusingly worded. The idea is that it has a bonus regardless of your open borders status. The most desirable state is no-OB - the civ's prestige against shara is converted into gold. This yield could be something else as well (Science?). If Shara chooses to grant OB for various other reasons (winning CV itself, movement, etc.), the bonus goes away, but the civ doesn't get any prestige boost vs Shara.

Hearttomb (museum) is a weird way of converting culture into something else. Note that this UU would make the Culture Victory actually more difficult to achieve, but would actually reward a certain amount of "culture playing," - gathering works, etc. I think this might not be an entirely bad thing. the yields could be changed to be something else, such as XP or something, but the Culture is meant to provide defense against the CV (the "conversion" referred to is from Airports or Hotels or whatever the improvement is that converts it to Prestige, that is negotiable).

ayyad enclave (UB) seems to feel a little less clunky than the improvement, since the city limit-one thing is weird on the UI. The last bit (stacking) is open to discussion.

 

[S3rgeus]

Awesome! thanks for moving forward on this. Seems like forever ago that we did all those Threads...

It has been! The Thread summaries are over a year old!

regarding the limitation, understood.

My issue isn't with the tradeitself, it's with the fact that *culture* spreads because of that trade. In fact, it seems like things were set up specifically so that didn't happen. It seems that "trade depots" were set up on the edge of their territory, and may not have even really shown any "Sharan-ness," as they were quite cut off from the country in general.

In fact, I'm actually starting to have significant trouble with "Cul" being one of the VCs for Shara. It's true, they should produce a healthy amount of Culture, but Prestige, and winning the Culture VC? I don't think it makes much sense. They are isolationist to the extreme, much more so than Seanchan or any of the other civ. I think, given the nature of the Culture VC in the game, this civ doesn't fit it very well. They aren't really spreading their ways and style anywhere - in fact, they want to *hide* it from everyone else.

I think I could see us creating abilities that produce lots of culture (for Policies and for culture defense) and/or other forms of defense against prestige, but the specific assault of other civs culturally doesn't seem to fit. Below I try out a few weird ideas where Prestige is converted into other things, etc.

What would I replace it with, VC wise? Science, I suppose, though LB is also in there.

This makes a lot of sense and I was having a lot of the same flavor difficulties myself while trying to come up with new uniques. It doesn't seem like Culture is a good fit for Shara after all, or at least, not winning through the Culture victory condition.

I almost suggested switching over to the Science victory for Shara in my last post, but edited it out before I finished the post. The BNW Science victory would mechanically be quite fitting for Shara, but our changes to the Science victory condition actually make it a lot more flavorfully about spreading to other civs as well. "Displaying" inventions to other civs at their capital and such, that seems to suffer from the same kind of difficulty as the Culture victory with Shara's flavor.

Since Diplo is obviously not in line with Shara's flavor, that only leaves Domination and the LB. Those two do at least fit, which is good.

Do you think there's a way to make Science work?

Actually, I do have a possible variant that could make Science work. UA incoming below.

nothing specific, beyond just "Great War" stuff or w/e. I'm not going down this road again, so let's just leave it for now, since this may not survive anyways. If it does, we can discuss further.

Sounds good.

This is about Perpetual Government.

I agree that Gold, possibly science, is the best choice here. I think this one is neat, but I still that the impossibility of Unhappiness might be too powerful, as getting knocked into unhappiness is one of the biggest "checks" against your awesomeness in BNW. That said, if we calibrated the Gold penalty so it felt fair, it could work OK - it should probably scale, like -X gold per happiness if it's removing 1-9 unhappiness, and -2X gold per happiness if it's removing 10-20, etc., that kind of thing.

Also, what are the implications on this for the AI on higher difficulties? I can see AI behavior that would alternately make this totally useless for them (because of the epic happ bonuses), or totally unfairly strong (50 cities, etc.). Thoughts?

Scaling for higher Unhappiness values is a good call - Unhappiness should still be bad for them, just not as much as it is for other civs, and in a definitely different want that they have to deal with it.

The AI on higher difficulties wouldn't have a use for this UA, since they have crazy Happiness bonuses already. That doesn't strike me as a problem though - the problem is that the AI need crazy Happiness to be competitive. (And that even with crazy Happiness they don't run completely out of control.) This doesn't really affect the player experience, since the AI is effectively already leveraging this bonus all the time on those difficulties, but without the negative Gold part.

Interesting. Agreed about the razed/standing situation. Definitely don't want to allow it normally bordering no-man's land, for the reason you've described.

The working situation is tricky. To clarify, what does it mean when a city 'owns" a tile? Does that mean that a civ's total perimeter is actually made up of the owned tiles of various cities? How is this determined? (culture from the city, I'd guess)? If that's what it means, then I'm fine with this. It should be noted that this would make it objectively better to make sure these are beyond the 3 tiles (if possible), so you could put regular improvements on the workable tiles.

You like the X culture for Y minimum tiles thing better than it being per tile?

I'm not in favor of letting the cities work far away tiles just for this purpose.

Owning a tile is, as you've guessed, when the culture from a city is the source of that player's ownership of that tile. The easiest way to see city tile ownership is when you capture a city from someone else. All of the tiles you receive from capturing that city are the tiles that are "owned" by that city. (So you'll often see this interleaved with other tiles when cities are close together and have expanded "around" each other.)

I think X culture for every Y tiles owned by this city is more flexible than per tile, since it lets us set X to be less than Y. If it's per tile, 1 is the minimum, but if it doesn't require working the tile, I might be inclined to suggest values like 2 Culture for every 3 tiles or something like that.

However, allowing working the tile does have some advantages. I know you've said you're not in favor, but it does specifically address some of the non-working drawbacks you've mentioned. If it requires working the tile, it's no longer objectively better to put the Wall outside workable range, because in order to work that farther tile, you have to assign a citizen that would otherwise have been working a closer tile. It also means we can be more liberal with the Culture bonus, since the amount of Culture that can be generated by this Improvement is restricted by the Population of the city and how many tiles it can work, rather than the size of its borders. (Border size increases faster than linearly as the city's border radius increases.) So while that's actually got a lower ceiling for total Culture yield than the non-working approach, each Improvement looks more attractive to players since each Improvement can produce more yield by itself.

The only drawback I'm seeing to allowing working farther away tiles is it can allow a city to work tiles that are "too powerful" - grabbing all of the high yield tiles in too large an area. I think there are a few balances to that though, which don't make it so much of an issue as it first seems. One is the time it takes to expand a city's borders far enough that it can cover so much land - other players have time to settle in that space, and even Shara's own other cities will compete for those tiles. The other is that this Improvement would preclude other Improvements being built on that tile. So you can't use it to work resources that are way out there, unless you want to forgo Improving that resource. And the Immense Wall would presumably get rid of Forest/Jungle, so it can't combine with the yield bonus from those.

I'm redding this one, now. It's too niche - totally useless if you never get an angreal cache. since it's a late-game resource, it's also somewhat hard to plan around to compensate (and unlike the s'redit resource for the seanchan unit, you can't trade for a tile

I agree to removing this one, but for a different reason. Mainly I think it's much less exciting than a lot of the other options we're considering. I don't think it's too niche, exactly because of the scarcity. Angreal Caches (presumably like Uranium) are few and far between, so being able to enhance their output is much more valuable. And while you can't trade for a tile (well, you can trade for cities, but that wouldn't be practical), you can conquer it, which happens for Uranium in BNW.

Not sure. It could be big things like those, or it could be small things (x number of units killed, yields generated). We'd need some kind of hierarchy to determine which is given when multiple conditions are met.

Right, a table of suitable bonuses could be shown to the player and how they're prioritized. We can sort out what the bonuses are later, if we go with this one.

axe the first one. I should clarify, as I was being very confusing - I didn't mean they cannot be "scared rogue" (a failed gentling, etc.). I was thinking of the "natural" accumulation of madness, i.e. they'd never go rogue through turns passing. Not nearly as imbalanced. Still, I'd say let's modify the second one to allow them to go rogue - they're just much more sentient beforehand - though I'd be fine tweaking it so that the "natural" roguesness happens later.

I like the idea of them being less affected by the lower madness levels, but I think having the rogueness progress normally would still make sense. There isn't really any flavorful mechanism for a society as a whole to stave off the Taint on Saidin, which makes slowing down the rogueness on units by other ways aside from Cleansing Saidin always seem strange to me.

ooh, I've honestly felt like Spark *needs* to be treated separately from other SR's. It shouldn't be able to be traded, I'd say. It's true that the Angreal Cache would suggest otherwise, but that resource isn't tied to specific units (e.g. "Asha'man requires 2 Angreal Caches), it just boosts spark, so I'm fine with ignoring that. Consequently, I definitely think 0 should be the minimum Spark for civs (special abilities notwithstanding). I think this is logical and appropriate mechanically.

I'm going to unmagenta this one.

I would be very reluctant to make Spark so different from other Strategic resources in general. I can see not allowing it to be traded to be sensible, because of what I mentioned before about the availability of a Population-based baseline (no one is ever left completely without). Those two differences are interrelated.

But a hard 0 limit doesn't seem practical to how resources work in CiV to me. The relationship between all of the strategic resources and their units is the same as what you describe with Spark, Asha'man, and Angreal Caches. Swordsmen don't need 1 Iron Mine, they need 1 Iron (whether you get that from a mine, trading with another civ, or given by a CS alliance). Spark is much the same, channeler units need X of it, no matter where you got it from.

And Spark can fluctuate up and, particularly, down. It's based on Population, which can be starved lower or captured with a city (or lost by Balefire). Or Angreal Caches, which can be captured (with their city) or pillaged, instantly reducing the civ's available Spark. If there are any Philosophical Tenets that boost Spark (presumably there are) then being forced to switch Philosophy would cause a Spark decrease. Same with Compact resolutions that can be repealed. I think it would be uber-confusing to make this different from how all other strategic resources work. We would end up having to disband some of the player's units, or at least prompt them to do so. That would be very punishing by comparison and very unexpected.

I'm going to mark this one as magenta again, though I'd be inclined to go for red, since it doesn't really co-operate with strategics in general.

Yeah, I'm going to magenta the less mad one and tweak it.

I like the changes to the unit

"avoid" in what sense? Like people won't build it?

looking at this again, I think this is a mistake, and doesn't quite make sense... trying to figure out what I really meant... fine with its reddness.

Yeah, avoid as in people won't build it because yield dumps on a trigger tend to be difficult to predict the payout for and people worry about missing out.

i'm fine with merging these. Relics are certainly not available early enough to make this work with (river) though (is that era 3?). What should we do? This feature of the UB would be useless until era 5. I don't have a problem with not making shara particularly "good" at getting the relics - this just gives them a place to convert them. Do we need to provide a relic with this building though? That seems too good.

Providing it with the building might be a bit strong. That only happens once in BNW, that I'm aware, and it's on the Parthenon (a wonder).

I think I might've been confused about the eras last time - I was thinking of Food (River) (the water mill), which is in era 1, but this is Production (river) (the Hydro Plant), which is in era 5. By that time, they will be able to get their hands on a few Relics, so this should be fine.

Are we worried about how close this is to Assyria's Royal Library? Replaces the Library, has a GWoW slot, provides +EXP to units trained in the city if the slot is filled?

this was unclear. I mean +X EXP *to* every MC born in the civ. as in they are each born with +25 XP or something.

Oh, I see! Of course, because MCs spawn in a civilization-wide manner. Yeah. that makes a lot of sense. +EXP is also quite strong on MCs, since their lifetimes are shortened by the madness, so this lets them be strong faster.

yeah, should we nuke it?

Yeah, let's do that. Marked red.

yeah, you had this one under UUs, btw... the thing about this one is that it has nothing to do with the actual silk resource. I suppose "porcelain shop" in the A'M is the same, but that does feel a little strange.

This one feels very pro-spreading Prestige and stuff. According to my culture rant above, that's a problem. I'm redding it.

Agreed, I'm also in favor of dropping the Culture victory as one of Shara's VCs, so let's axe this.

interesting. This one is way way too extreme, though. It means you cannot win a CV against Shara, practically speaking - why would any (especially human) player EVER grant an OB to a pro-culture player?

Yeah, this would be one that forces a Culture player to attack Shara, which, depending on geography, may be too difficult.

this one is quite interesting, mechanically! I still have issue with this being aprestige-generation machine, since I question Shara-as-Culture, but I think this shell could be used to generate perhaps another yield (one of the new ones provided below is inspired by this). I'm not categorically opposed to prestige, but I think this one is too all-in on culture as is. Also, if it were prestige, I'm not sure 50% is the best number - double that of OB might be too much, eh?

50% can be calibrated later, but I'd be inclined to think of that as a sort of lower bound, rather than an upper one. It should be a bonus, and OB is only one of 4 factors that can end up providing a +100% total against another player (this would only bring it up to +125% total). There's even a BNW Policy that brings the maximum modifier up to +160% already.

I'm quite liking the general flavor of lack-of-open-borders-is-good, but as you've said, going for the Culture VC isn't very well aligned with Shara's flavor.

same as above, though this one is a bit more nuanced which is nice. I question whether it should provide prestige - providing the culture would sort of accomplish the same thing (unless we said it couldn't be converted to prestige), and isn't as on the nose. Prestige could be replaced with something else.

You've mentioned converting Culture to Prestige a few times now. Is this connected to the conversion stuff you're suggesting for Shara above? It doesn't seem to be, but Culture can't normally be converted into Prestige systematically (or at least, Culture doesn't turn into Tourism in BNW). The Hotel adds a bonus to Tourism based on the city's Culture output, but that's because the two are often interrelated, rather than establishing a system for converting from one to the other.

ayyad (warrior) is a straightforward channeler killer. Could also be the freed instead. could *also* be a UU 'anti-channeler" unit, though that's probably a bit too late-game to make sense (and those don't use spark!)

A UU anti-channeler could be pretty cool! Very late game isn't a problem as long as Shara doesn't feel bland elsewhere. And we could make the replacement require Spark, even if the original unit didn't!

Isolationism (conversion) is confusingly worded. The idea is that it has a bonus regardless of your open borders status. The most desirable state is no-OB - the civ's prestige against shara is converted into gold. This yield could be something else as well (Science?). If Shara chooses to grant OB for various other reasons (winning CV itself, movement, etc.), the bonus goes away, but the civ doesn't get any prestige boost vs Shara.

Does the civ still get influence over Shara as it normally would, when there are no open borders? If so, cool, I like the symmetry of both no-OB and OB having bonuses and they sound good! If that's the case, I would also say we shouldn't call it "convert", because that says to me that it's transforming one yield into the other, whereas this is a bonus based on the value of that yield. (This distinction may be the source of other confusion in this post.)

Hearttomb (museum) is a weird way of converting culture into something else. Note that this UU would make the Culture Victory actually more difficult to achieve, but would actually reward a certain amount of "culture playing," - gathering works, etc. I think this might not be an entirely bad thing. the yields could be changed to be something else, such as XP or something, but the Culture is meant to provide defense against the CV (the "conversion" referred to is from Airports or Hotels or whatever the improvement is that converts it to Prestige, that is negotiable).

Presumably this is Hearttomb (Culture3), rather than museum?

I think I see where you're getting at with the conversion stuff a bit more here, but I don't think that's something we should be targeting on this UB. Our Prestige buildings may not use the same mechanism as the BNW buildings to generate Prestige, and the BNW buildings don't "convert" Culture to Tourism, they provide a bonus to Tourism which has its value based on the city's Culture output. (Convert would be like the Processes, which you can dump hammers into to get Gold/Science.)

That aside, restricting certain forms of Culture to not contribute toward such a bonus, if we have one, would be really confusing. Because then if the player is trying to do a Culture victory, then they need to work out what parts of their Culture are coming from this and won't count, which won't be obvious. (Or even easy to work out if you know what to look for. Let alone keep track of as the yields change over time.)

I think if we want to add Culture onto Shara in some of its uniques without encouraging the Culture VC and we do keep one of our Prestige buildings like BNW as using cities' Culture output to determine the value of its Prestige bonus, then the best way to address that would be to replace such a Prestige building with a Sharan UB that doesn't have that same kind of effect. (That sentence was a mouthful.)

The upside for this UB is I don't think it needs the conversion restriction.

ayyad enclave (UB) seems to feel a little less clunky than the improvement, since the city limit-one thing is weird on the UI. The last bit (stacking) is open to discussion.

I'm not sure, I think the UI actually fits this effect better. Both this and the UU have the issue that they need to use the location of a unit for the bonus, which leads to the player having to shuffle one or more units around quite often, creating a lot of unnecessary busywork for them. The UI means they commit to one bonus more often because it's not movable every turn, but can still be moved in general if their longer term circumstances change. I see what you mean about the one-per-city being a bit unusual for the UI, but I don't think that's an issue because it's exuding an "aura" rather than (like other improvements) producing a yield that requires the tile to be worked. I do also think the flavor fits quite well about people being upset about the Ayyad being living too close permanent location near an area/city, but that having that permanent location farther away is preferable, which an Improvement represents better.


Recap!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Prophecies of the Wyld, all cities produce +X% (high number) more Production once the Dragon is born.
• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier, though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• Insights of the Ayyad, +X yield for all governors for every Y Spark used (by active units)
• River of Souls, every Relic housed within a city on a River produces +X Culture and +Y Faith
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has run out of Spark. Every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative spark exceeds Z.
• Isolated Kingdom, Shara generates +50% Prestige against civilizations that it does not have Open Borders with.
• Isolationism (yields), Shara generates +X Culture per turn and +Y Prestige per turn (Prestige after <tech>) for each civilization it does not provide open borders to and each city state Shara has met and is not friends nor allies with.
• Isolationism (conversion), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to is converted into X Gold.
• Introspection, Shara generates +X Science for each civilization it has met and not traded open borders to. +Y Science for each City-State it has met and is not friends nor allies with. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Z population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (early), replaces the Asha'man, unlocks on an earlier tech and does not require the Black Tower (same combat strength)
• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Ayyad's Enclave, replaces XP 1, each channeler produced in this city produces an instant yield of X culture.
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces the Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture (cannot be converted to Prestige) and Y Science
• Ayyad Enclave, replaces Culture 2, when a friendly female channeler is within 3 hexes of this city, produces +X Culture and -Y happiness per turn. If a friendly female channeler is within 4-6 hexes fo the city, produces +Z happiness and +W prestige (after <tech>). these bonuses cannot be stacked

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

I've suggested removing Prophecies of the Wyld because I don't think it's as strong as some of the other UA candidates.

Introspection is a new one that tries to turn our modified Science victory around to work with Shara's isolationist flavor. It provides some Science bonuses and also allows them to forgo some foreign Exhibitions. Saying "as though they were foreign capitals" means that they would also be restricted to how many times you can Exhibit at each one, in the same manner as foreign capitals. So Shara could only avoid all international Exhibitions if it had a number of cities with population greater than X equal to the number of foreign capitals it needs to Exhibit to on this map size. We can calibrate X to make that more or less likely, for balance vs flavor.

 

[counterpoint]

This makes a lot of sense and I was having a lot of the same flavor difficulties myself while trying to come up with new uniques. It doesn't seem like Culture is a good fit for Shara after all, or at least, not winning through the Culture victory condition.

I almost suggested switching over to the Science victory for Shara in my last post, but edited it out before I finished the post. The BNW Science victory would mechanically be quite fitting for Shara, but our changes to the Science victory condition actually make it a lot more flavorfully about spreading to other civs as well. "Displaying" inventions to other civs at their capital and such, that seems to suffer from the same kind of difficulty as the Culture victory with Shara's flavor.

Since Diplo is obviously not in line with Shara's flavor, that only leaves Domination and the LB. Those two do at least fit, which is good.

Do you think there's a way to make Science work?

Actually, I do have a possible variant that could make Science work. UA incoming below.

I think Science can work. I know that the final mechanism of the science victory is somewhat anathema to Shara, but 95% of the rest of the process - researching and such - isn't. I think the innovation stuff could theoretically be interpreted as an abstraction, not a literal action their taking. The
"point" of the Science VC is to be good at science. This isn't the case with culture, though - because of the prestige element (which appears for almost half the game), it seems pretty much that the point of hte cultural victory is having a culture that influences others.

I think your suggestion could work, but in general I think we'd be fine with science-oriented abilities, as long as they don't specifically target the spreading of innovations (in the traditional way). Keeping it generic and not super powerful will also help, since science helps everyone, much like a + culture ability doesn't totally marry you to the culture victory itself.

Scaling for higher Unhappiness values is a good call - Unhappiness should still be bad for them, just not as much as it is for other civs, and in a definitely different want that they have to deal with it.

The AI on higher difficulties wouldn't have a use for this UA, since they have crazy Happiness bonuses already. That doesn't strike me as a problem though - the problem is that the AI need crazy Happiness to be competitive. (And that even with crazy Happiness they don't run completely out of control.) This doesn't really affect the player experience, since the AI is effectively already leveraging this bonus all the time on those difficulties, but without the negative Gold part.

ok. right. sounds good.

Owning a tile is, as you've guessed, when the culture from a city is the source of that player's ownership of that tile. The easiest way to see city tile ownership is when you capture a city from someone else. All of the tiles you receive from capturing that city are the tiles that are "owned" by that city. (So you'll often see this interleaved with other tiles when cities are close together and have expanded "around" each other.)

I think X culture for every Y tiles owned by this city is more flexible than per tile, since it lets us set X to be less than Y. If it's per tile, 1 is the minimum, but if it doesn't require working the tile, I might be inclined to suggest values like 2 Culture for every 3 tiles or something like that.

However, allowing working the tile does have some advantages. I know you've said you're not in favor, but it does specifically address some of the non-working drawbacks you've mentioned. If it requires working the tile, it's no longer objectively better to put the Wall outside workable range, because in order to work that farther tile, you have to assign a citizen that would otherwise have been working a closer tile. It also means we can be more liberal with the Culture bonus, since the amount of Culture that can be generated by this Improvement is restricted by the Population of the city and how many tiles it can work, rather than the size of its borders. (Border size increases faster than linearly as the city's border radius increases.) So while that's actually got a lower ceiling for total Culture yield than the non-working approach, each Improvement looks more attractive to players since each Improvement can produce more yield by itself.

The only drawback I'm seeing to allowing working farther away tiles is it can allow a city to work tiles that are "too powerful" - grabbing all of the high yield tiles in too large an area. I think there are a few balances to that though, which don't make it so much of an issue as it first seems. One is the time it takes to expand a city's borders far enough that it can cover so much land - other players have time to settle in that space, and even Shara's own other cities will compete for those tiles. The other is that this Improvement would preclude other Improvements being built on that tile. So you can't use it to work resources that are way out there, unless you want to forgo Improving that resource. And the Immense Wall would presumably get rid of Forest/Jungle, so it can't combine with the yield bonus from those.

regarding tile ownership - gotcha. That makes sense. Is there any easy way to see which tiles are owned by a city?

I'm fine with X culture for every Y tiles. Something like 2 for 3 tiles could work well, though I don't really know at this point.

The problem I have with allowing the working of far-away tiles is simply that it's not a mechanic we have, and it's kind of a strange one (that isn't in BNW) that we'd be inventing, implementing, and explaining just for Shara. True, we could institute it game-wide, but I don't feel compelled to do so at this point, especially this far in the process, just for the heck of it (I actually like the limitation, I think). (the lack of clarity about which city owns which tile is another thing that's unintuitive) To have it exist solely for Shara seems like it would be intuitive, and a bit complex for just a UI. If you were playing against Shara, it would also be pretty confusing (if you'd never played as them before) to play against.

Since you're quite limited in where exactly you are able to put these anyways, it seems we don't need to be terribly flexible in how this works - a simple "count" like your main proposed method seems to work fine. I don't have a problem allowing these to provide a yield if worked as well, though (if it does happen to fall within the city's radius).

I agree to removing this one, but for a different reason. Mainly I think it's much less exciting than a lot of the other options we're considering. I don't think it's too niche, exactly because of the scarcity. Angreal Caches (presumably like Uranium) are few and far between, so being able to enhance their output is much more valuable. And while you can't trade for a tile (well, you can trade for cities, but that wouldn't be practical), you can conquer it, which happens for Uranium in BNW.

ok, well in any case, axed!

Right, a table of suitable bonuses could be shown to the player and how they're prioritized. We can sort out what the bonuses are later, if we go with this one.

i'm not sure it all would even need to really be shown... as long as we had it. Certainly dtails wouldn't be necessary in the main visuals of the game.

I like the idea of them being less affected by the lower madness levels, but I think having the rogueness progress normally would still make sense. There isn't really any flavorful mechanism for a society as a whole to stave off the Taint on Saidin, which makes slowing down the rogueness on units by other ways aside from Cleansing Saidin always seem strange to me.

agreed. Amended.

I would be very reluctant to make Spark so different from other Strategic resources in general. I can see not allowing it to be traded to be sensible, because of what I mentioned before about the availability of a Population-based baseline (no one is ever left completely without). Those two differences are interrelated.

But a hard 0 limit doesn't seem practical to how resources work in CiV to me. The relationship between all of the strategic resources and their units is the same as what you describe with Spark, Asha'man, and Angreal Caches. Swordsmen don't need 1 Iron Mine, they need 1 Iron (whether you get that from a mine, trading with another civ, or given by a CS alliance). Spark is much the same, channeler units need X of it, no matter where you got it from.

And Spark can fluctuate up and, particularly, down. It's based on Population, which can be starved lower or captured with a city (or lost by Balefire). Or Angreal Caches, which can be captured (with their city) or pillaged, instantly reducing the civ's available Spark. If there are any Philosophical Tenets that boost Spark (presumably there are) then being forced to switch Philosophy would cause a Spark decrease. Same with Compact resolutions that can be repealed. I think it would be uber-confusing to make this different from how all other strategic resources work. We would end up having to disband some of the player's units, or at least prompt them to do so. That would be very punishing by comparison and very unexpected.

I'm going to mark this one as magenta again, though I'd be inclined to go for red, since it doesn't really co-operate with strategics in general.

we both agree that Spark shouldn't be tradable - I feel confident in this decision. Though it does open to door that it is different from other Strategics already.

I can see how sudden flips in how many channelers you have could cause a hard limit to be weird. I suppose as long as we disallow the *building* of a channeler when you're already at 0 or below (like is the case with Iron units), it accomplishes a similar effect.

With that in mind, though, I think this one can be amended to work ok with the system of typical strategics - simply *permit* the Sharan's to build when in negative, mitigate the penalty, and give a different penalty. Thoughts? Perhaps the happines should be changed to gold?

Providing it with the building might be a bit strong. That only happens once in BNW, that I'm aware, and it's on the Parthenon (a wonder).

I think I might've been confused about the eras last time - I was thinking of Food (River) (the water mill), which is in era 1, but this is Production (river) (the Hydro Plant), which is in era 5. By that time, they will be able to get their hands on a few Relics, so this should be fine.

Are we worried about how close this is to Assyria's Royal Library? Replaces the Library, has a GWoW slot, provides +EXP to units trained in the city if the slot is filled?

dang, i was, in my head, thinking it was the water mill too... Era 5 is more fitting, though, obviously.

Oh, I forgot about the Royal Library (Assyria was like the 3rd civ I played as). Eh, I think this is different enough. It's true that it has the EXP, but this also adds a slot, which is quite different. If you think the +XP is too similar, maybe we could change it such that the XP bonus comes from a successful Theming Bonus instead?

Oh, I see! Of course, because MCs spawn in a civilization-wide manner. Yeah. that makes a lot of sense. +EXP is also quite strong on MCs, since their lifetimes are shortened by the madness, so this lets them be strong faster.

Yeah. This is also quite good post-cleanse, though of course so is anything MC related.

50% can be calibrated later, but I'd be inclined to think of that as a sort of lower bound, rather than an upper one. It should be a bonus, and OB is only one of 4 factors that can end up providing a +100% total against another player (this would only bring it up to +125% total). There's even a BNW Policy that brings the maximum modifier up to +160% already.

I'm quite liking the general flavor of lack-of-open-borders-is-good, but as you've said, going for the Culture VC isn't very well aligned with Shara's flavor.

yeah, I've been thinking of it as a 2X bonus, but as you say, that doesn't amount to an imbalancing amount in and of itself.

Re: culture, I think we could afford to have some that are culture related, if not specifically VC-obsessed.

You've mentioned converting Culture to Prestige a few times now. Is this connected to the conversion stuff you're suggesting for Shara above? It doesn't seem to be, but Culture can't normally be converted into Prestige systematically (or at least, Culture doesn't turn into Tourism in BNW). The Hotel adds a bonus to Tourism based on the city's Culture output, but that's because the two are often interrelated, rather than establishing a system for converting from one to the other.

Yeah, I'm talking about the Tourism-based-on-Culture-output. You're quite right that that is not conversion at all.

I do seem to recall some things in BNW that involve culture that isn't used in the calculation for Hotel tourism... some UB or UI or something. I could be totally misremembering, though. In any case, that statement was founded upon that notion. You make a good argument against this later, so yeah, that aspect of these uniques should be removed.

A UU anti-channeler could be pretty cool! Very late game isn't a problem as long as Shara doesn't feel bland elsewhere. And we could make the replacement require Spark, even if the original unit didn't!

cool! We'll check it out then.

Does the civ still get influence over Shara as it normally would, when there are no open borders? If so, cool, I like the symmetry of both no-OB and OB having bonuses and they sound good! If that's the case, I would also say we shouldn't call it "convert", because that says to me that it's transforming one yield into the other, whereas this is a bonus based on the value of that yield. (This distinction may be the source of other confusion in this post.)

Hmm... I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here (in your first sentence). I'd say everything that isn't mentioned explicitly is left unchanged. But yeah about the conversion. clarified above.

Presumably this is Hearttomb (Culture3), rather than museum?

yeah,

I think I see where you're getting at with the conversion stuff a bit more here, but I don't think that's something we should be targeting on this UB. Our Prestige buildings may not use the same mechanism as the BNW buildings to generate Prestige, and the BNW buildings don't "convert" Culture to Tourism, they provide a bonus to Tourism which has its value based on the city's Culture output. (Convert would be like the Processes, which you can dump hammers into to get Gold/Science.)

That aside, restricting certain forms of Culture to not contribute toward such a bonus, if we have one, would be really confusing. Because then if the player is trying to do a Culture victory, then they need to work out what parts of their Culture are coming from this and won't count, which won't be obvious. (Or even easy to work out if you know what to look for. Let alone keep track of as the yields change over time.)

all good points. Again, this was founded upon my apparent misremembering of something that I thought occurred in BNW.

I think if we want to add Culture onto Shara in some of its uniques without encouraging the Culture VC and we do keep one of our Prestige buildings like BNW as using cities' Culture output to determine the value of its Prestige bonus, then the best way to address that would be to replace such a Prestige building with a Sharan UB that doesn't have that same kind of effect. (That sentence was a mouthful.)

The upside for this UB is I don't think it needs the conversion restriction.

sure. let's remove that aspect. This is a good example of an ability that produces cul and sci without feeling unflavorful - it could help them win those VCs, but it's not as direct.

I'm not sure, I think the UI actually fits this effect better. Both this and the UU have the issue that they need to use the location of a unit for the bonus, which leads to the player having to shuffle one or more units around quite often, creating a lot of unnecessary busywork for them. The UI means they commit to one bonus more often because it's not movable every turn, but can still be moved in general if their longer term circumstances change. I see what you mean about the one-per-city being a bit unusual for the UI, but I don't think that's an issue because it's exuding an "aura" rather than (like other improvements) producing a yield that requires the tile to be worked. I do also think the flavor fits quite well about people being upset about the Ayyad being living too close permanent location near an area/city, but that having that permanent location farther away is preferable, which an Improvement represents better.

hmm... I think if we go with one of these, it's going to be decided based chiefly on how it fits in with the other uniques. the UI is certainly ok. I';m not sure I love any of them - they're fine, though.

I've suggested removing Prophecies of the Wyld because I don't think it's as strong as some of the other UA candidates.

yeah, good idea.

Introspection is a new one that tries to turn our modified Science victory around to work with Shara's isolationist flavor. It provides some Science bonuses and also allows them to forgo some foreign Exhibitions. Saying "as though they were foreign capitals" means that they would also be restricted to how many times you can Exhibit at each one, in the same manner as foreign capitals. So Shara could only avoid all international Exhibitions if it had a number of cities with population greater than X equal to the number of foreign capitals it needs to Exhibit to on this map size. We can calibrate X to make that more or less likely, for balance vs flavor.

At first consideration, this seemed too powerful, but I do think it could be made to work if the pop requirement were high enough. Le last aspect is not the most fun ability, though, since it just helps you int he end game. The rest is cool - probably X and (especially) Y will need to be relatively small values. Do you think this should only apply after a certain tech is researched? Like, the one that offers OB?

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Dom/Sci)

UAs:

• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier (though "going rogue" still occurs at the standard times), though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• Insights of the Ayyad, +X yield for all governors for every Y Spark used (by active units)
• River of Souls, every Relic housed within a city on a River produces +X Culture and +Y Faith
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has 0 or less Spark. When below 0 total Spark, Shara does not suffer the typical combat penalties. However, for every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative spark exceeds Z.
• Isolated Kingdom, Shara generates +50% Prestige against civilizations that it does not have Open Borders with.
• Isolationism (yields), Shara generates +X Culture per turn and +Y Prestige per turn (Prestige after <tech>) for each civilization it does not provide open borders to and each city state Shara has met and is not friends nor allies with.
• Isolationism (symmetry), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to generates X Gold for Shara.
• Introspection, Shara generates +X Science for each civilization it has met and not traded open borders to. +Y Science for each City-State it has met and is not friends nor allies with. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Z population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (early), replaces the Asha'man, unlocks on an earlier tech and does not require the Black Tower (same combat strength)
• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces the Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture and Y Science

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

I'm actually out of fresh ideas for now, and I think we're about wrapping up here. So I've red'd a few things that I offer up for red consideration. I wanted to cull the UAs a bit, though I'm finding it tricky since most of those that remain are pretty unique. Insights and Isolated Kingdom get cut, IMO.

Also suggesting we cut Freed (early) because it isn't that fun. I suppose we could add in another Freed, though - as is, we only have one Freed and one Ayyad. Maybe that's fine. The UBs and UIs look fine as is.

So, locks? Shara's sort of simple here, because their flavor only occurs briefly. I'd say the only real lock is that the Ayyad flavor needs to be in there somewhere - perhaps as a unit, but also perhaps as a UA, UB, UI, etc. I'd say the Freed and isolationism (as a concept) are *near*-locks, but perhaps not going that far. I think our "mechanical lock" is that we need something related to the Dom victory.

Agreed? Can we put together some sets at this point or is there more culling that should be done (or more abilities to propose)? This brings it down to 16 abilities, which is still quite a lot (though half of those are UAs)

 

[S3rgeus]

I think Science can work. I know that the final mechanism of the science victory is somewhat anathema to Shara, but 95% of the rest of the process - researching and such - isn't. I think the innovation stuff could theoretically be interpreted as an abstraction, not a literal action their taking. The
"point" of the Science VC is to be good at science. This isn't the case with culture, though - because of the prestige element (which appears for almost half the game), it seems pretty much that the point of hte cultural victory is having a culture that influences others.

I think your suggestion could work, but in general I think we'd be fine with science-oriented abilities, as long as they don't specifically target the spreading of innovations (in the traditional way). Keeping it generic and not super powerful will also help, since science helps everyone, much like a + culture ability doesn't totally marry you to the culture victory itself.

Very true, I definitely agree that Science fits better. As you've said, avoiding tying the uniques directly into the more send-stuff-abroad victory condition makes it work better with Shara's flavor.

regarding tile ownership - gotcha. That makes sense. Is there any easy way to see which tiles are owned by a city?

Not that I'm aware of (beyond the city being captured), though we could change it so that it is visible.

I'm fine with X culture for every Y tiles. Something like 2 for 3 tiles could work well, though I don't really know at this point.

The problem I have with allowing the working of far-away tiles is simply that it's not a mechanic we have, and it's kind of a strange one (that isn't in BNW) that we'd be inventing, implementing, and explaining just for Shara. True, we could institute it game-wide, but I don't feel compelled to do so at this point, especially this far in the process, just for the heck of it (I actually like the limitation, I think). (the lack of clarity about which city owns which tile is another thing that's unintuitive) To have it exist solely for Shara seems like it would be intuitive, and a bit complex for just a UI. If you were playing against Shara, it would also be pretty confusing (if you'd never played as them before) to play against.

Since you're quite limited in where exactly you are able to put these anyways, it seems we don't need to be terribly flexible in how this works - a simple "count" like your main proposed method seems to work fine. I don't have a problem allowing these to provide a yield if worked as well, though (if it does happen to fall within the city's radius).

Allowing them to work the tiles at any range doesn't seem like a particularly new thing that we're adding just for Shara's sake. Working tiles with a citizen is already a very well established concept, and we're just tweaking the parameters by allowing it a differing range. It would be a perfectly acceptable UA (on a different civ) to have something like "cities can work tiles one hex farther away". Even having this on a wonder would seem quite reasonable. Allowing this for Shara is a much smaller mechanical invention than the Sul'dam/Damane are for the Seanchan, or many of the other uniques that we've considered for the other civs so far.

I also think it will probably be easier to understand. The notion of "ownership" of tiles for cities is never explicitly exposed in BNW, as we're discussing above. While we can expose it to make it work, it's also something the player can't interact with. (Again, that is changeable, but it's an unnecessarily new complexity players need to understand.) Our alternative of workable tiles is already well understood and represented in the game, and is very quickly recognizable from the city overview. And it also achieves the same mechanical goal of making the improvement useful beyond its military applications.

i'm not sure it all would even need to really be shown... as long as we had it. Certainly dtails wouldn't be necessary in the main visuals of the game.

We can iron out details of that later, but I wouldn't be inclined to hide much from the player about how it works. It should be easily understandable from a general "gist" approach (much like GP generation is usually loosely understood by players in BNW, but not in exact detail), but the precise detail should be available for players who want to drill down to specifics. We don't want to require players to look at the code to be able to know what strategies are best.

we both agree that Spark shouldn't be tradable - I feel confident in this decision. Though it does open to door that it is different from other Strategics already.

I can see how sudden flips in how many channelers you have could cause a hard limit to be weird. I suppose as long as we disallow the *building* of a channeler when you're already at 0 or below (like is the case with Iron units), it accomplishes a similar effect.

With that in mind, though, I think this one can be amended to work ok with the system of typical strategics - simply *permit* the Sharan's to build when in negative, mitigate the penalty, and give a different penalty. Thoughts? Perhaps the happines should be changed to gold?

Spark's different in some ways certainly. But I would still approach it in the way of it being a strategic resource that has variances from the others, rather than that it is its own unique thing that happens to be similar.

Totally agreed on the building of new units when a player is at 0 or less Spark, they shouldn't be able to build more channelers (by default), in the same way as for other units that need resources.

Hmm, I think maybe Happiness should change to Gold, yeah. From the point of view of Shara intentionally building more channelers than it has Spark, I would be fine with the Happiness penalty. But if other things happen that cuase Shara to have negative Spark, I wouldn't want the UA to become a liability to them, which wouldn't be fun. Happiness would often be a bigger impact in that circumstance than the usual combat penalty. Arguably Gold might be a bigger problem than the usual combat penalty relatively often as well though.

dang, i was, in my head, thinking it was the water mill too... Era 5 is more fitting, though, obviously.

Oh, I forgot about the Royal Library (Assyria was like the 3rd civ I played as). Eh, I think this is different enough. It's true that it has the EXP, but this also adds a slot, which is quite different. If you think the +XP is too similar, maybe we could change it such that the XP bonus comes from a successful Theming Bonus instead?

Part of the Royal Library's effect is that it adds a Writing slot though. The two are very similar: UB that adds an LW slot to a building that doesn't already have one and grants EXP to units in the city when that slot is filled.

I think we should probably steer clear of EXP as the bonus if the effect is adding an LW slot. What if we granted some kind of unique promotion instead? (Could have quite a simple effect, like a ranged combat strength increase.) Or one of the existing "normal" promotions early? (Not one of the ones they would get immediately from an EXP bonus.)

Yeah, I'm talking about the Tourism-based-on-Culture-output. You're quite right that that is not conversion at all.

I do seem to recall some things in BNW that involve culture that isn't used in the calculation for Hotel tourism... some UB or UI or something. I could be totally misremembering, though. In any case, that statement was founded upon that notion. You make a good argument against this later, so yeah, that aspect of these uniques should be removed.

Sounds good.

Hmm... I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here (in your first sentence). I'd say everything that isn't mentioned explicitly is left unchanged. But yeah about the conversion. clarified above.

The first sentence was another confusion about conversion, when I read that the civ's Prestige was "converted" into Gold, that implied to me that it wasn't being accumulated against Shara anymore. Totally agreed that stuff we don't specify is otherwise left the same as how it normally works.

Also, in your previous post you mentioned possibly using a different yield than Gold for being generated by this UA. You mentioned Science as another possibility, but I didn't respond to that while we were sorting out the conversion stuff. I think that's a good call, because tons of Gold will tend to make Shara better at the diplo victory, which I don't think we want to do. Science sounds like a good alternative.

hmm... I think if we go with one of these, it's going to be decided based chiefly on how it fits in with the other uniques. the UI is certainly ok. I';m not sure I love any of them - they're fine, though.

Yeah, one may slot in where the other doesn't.

At first consideration, this seemed too powerful, but I do think it could be made to work if the pop requirement were high enough. Le last aspect is not the most fun ability, though, since it just helps you int he end game. The rest is cool - probably X and (especially) Y will need to be relatively small values. Do you think this should only apply after a certain tech is researched? Like, the one that offers OB?

The last part is the "wrap up" that works with the first two parts. Standing alone it wouldn't be very fun since it isn't useful for most of the game, but working with the Science bonus from the first part it changes how Shara approaches the endgame, which is pretty cool. Yeah, X and Y would probably need to be quite small. Science does scale the most aggressively of the yields and this is a direct bonus (rather than a proportional one) so that will diminish its relative power as the game goes on. Its probably the strongest right after the Compact is founded, the earliest time the civs have met each other and Shara can purposefully ignore everybody at once.

I'm actually out of fresh ideas for now, and I think we're about wrapping up here. So I've red'd a few things that I offer up for red consideration. I wanted to cull the UAs a bit, though I'm finding it tricky since most of those that remain are pretty unique. Insights and Isolated Kingdom get cut, IMO.

Agreed on the cuts.

Also suggesting we cut Freed (early) because it isn't that fun. I suppose we could add in another Freed, though - as is, we only have one Freed and one Ayyad. Maybe that's fine. The UBs and UIs look fine as is.

Also agreed.

So, locks? Shara's sort of simple here, because their flavor only occurs briefly. I'd say the only real lock is that the Ayyad flavor needs to be in there somewhere - perhaps as a unit, but also perhaps as a UA, UB, UI, etc. I'd say the Freed and isolationism (as a concept) are *near*-locks, but perhaps not going that far. I think our "mechanical lock" is that we need something related to the Dom victory.

Agreed? Can we put together some sets at this point or is there more culling that should be done (or more abilities to propose)? This brings it down to 16 abilities, which is still quite a lot (though half of those are UAs)

I think having at least one of the two Ayyad/Freed flavor is a good lock. If we can get both in, then that would be good too, but not essential. I would very much like to get the isolationism mechanics in there, to reward the player for forcing everyone else out of their lands like Shara did, but it's also a bit short of a lock.

I'm also finding that there don't seem to be very evident "sets" in the uniques we've got here. Particularly with Shandalle and the Sea Folk, we had a couple of uniques that complemented each other significantly (while also functioning alone). Shara's uniques are all flavorful, but I don't see big mechanical complements. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the notion of sets at this stage a bit more fluid. I could see many combinations of the uniques we have here being viable.

The other thing I'm finding is that we've only really got the isolationist stuff in the UAs, which severely limits our options there. I want to include the isolationist mechanics, but that precludes the other UAs which I like more by comparison.

If I were to pick a set:

UA: Isolationism (Symmetry)
UU: Wyld
UU: Ayyad (battle)/UB: Hearttomb (river)
UI: Immense Wall

This was tough - I put the Hearttomb as a possible alternative for Ayyad (battle) if we thought that the three non-UA-uniques were going a bit too far into combat otherwise. I almost put Hearttomb (culture3) rather than (river), but I think combined with Isolationism (symmetry) it would make Shara too much of a science-focused civ. While I like them having some kind of science benefit, I don't feel like their flavor pushes them to be something like Korea or Babylon.

The UA was super difficult to choose. I would say that the "Exhibitions at home" aspect of Introspection could also work quite well with Isolationism (symmetry). I went for Isolationism (symmetry) because I like the elegance of how the two OB states both benefit Shara in different, complementary ways.

However, I'm also a big fan of Perpetual Government and Cycle of the Sh'boan. I mainly didn't pick them as a primary here for the reason I mentioned above of wanting to include the isolationist mechanics, but our only candidates for that are UAs.

I've proposed removing a few more UAs below, following on from my thoughts while trying to come up with this set. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of the UAs I'm suggesting to cut, but they were ones that I wasn't really feeling pushed to choose when the others mentioned above were competing options.

I've also suggested a new UB to try and give us an isolationist mechanic that isn't a UA, opening up options for Perpetual Government and Cycle of the Sh'boan.

I've also un-magenta-ed Science as one of their listed VCs, since we seem to be in agreement that should be included.


Recap!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Dom/Sci)

UAs:

• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier (though "going rogue" still occurs at the standard times), though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• River of Souls, every Relic housed within a city on a River produces +X Culture and +Y Faith
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has 0 or less Spark. When below 0 total Spark, Shara does not suffer the typical combat penalties. However, for every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative Spark exceeds Z.
• Isolationism (yields), Shara generates +X Culture per turn and +Y Prestige per turn (Prestige after <tech>) for each civilization it does not provide open borders to and each city state Shara has met and is not friends nor allies with.
• Isolationism (symmetry), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to generates X Science for Shara.
• Introspection, Shara generates +X Science for each civilization it has met and not traded open borders to. +Y Science for each City-State it has met and is not friends nor allies with. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Z population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture and Y Science
• Isolated Trade Plaza, replaces Gold (trade), Shara receives double the usual Science from international trade routes to and from this city with civilizations it does not permit open borders to, and those civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes with this city.

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

 

[counterpoint]

Not that I'm aware of (beyond the city being captured), though we could change it so that it is visible.

it's only important if we make it mechanically important

Allowing them to work the tiles at any range doesn't seem like a particularly new thing that we're adding just for Shara's sake. Working tiles with a citizen is already a very well established concept, and we're just tweaking the parameters by allowing it a differing range. It would be a perfectly acceptable UA (on a different civ) to have something like "cities can work tiles one hex farther away". Even having this on a wonder would seem quite reasonable. Allowing this for Shara is a much smaller mechanical invention than the Sul'dam/Damane are for the Seanchan, or many of the other uniques that we've considered for the other civs so far.

I also think it will probably be easier to understand. The notion of "ownership" of tiles for cities is never explicitly exposed in BNW, as we're discussing above. While we can expose it to make it work, it's also something the player can't interact with. (Again, that is changeable, but it's an unnecessarily new complexity players need to understand.) Our alternative of workable tiles is already well understood and represented in the game, and is very quickly recognizable from the city overview. And it also achieves the same mechanical goal of making the improvement useful beyond its military applications.

OK, I think I have a grasp of the key issue here, and it's one of specificity, not generality.

I would totally be ok with a UA that was "cities can work tiles one hex farther away," provided that that wasn't too unfairly good. I also agree that that is simpler to explain and understand in some sense - certainly the ownership thing is unintuitive, perhaps prohibitively so.

The issue for me stems from the following angles:

- the possibility that these tiles could be really rather quite far away. 5 or even more hexes from the city, potentially out of the easily-visible range of the city management window
- the lack of ability to work other tiles within this range
- the possibility of awesome resources on those tiles that have walls

The first is self-explanatory. I have issues with this from a User Interface perspective. It feels rather clunky for me to imagine what happens when your cultural borders get rather large, beyond four, really.

The second is a minor point. Presumably we won't allow them to work *anything* within this range. That might be fine, but also might feel a bit odd from within the city management window, especially coupled with the first item above.

The last is more of a question of balance, not really a true problem (in that it would be easily solved). What happens if there's a resource on the wall tile? Do you get it? Do you get the hex yields from whatever tile the wall is on, resource or not.

I can see how this is more intuitive than the "ownership" method, but I also feel like it is sort of clunky from a player experience perspective.

Also, do we still want it to generate culture?

We can iron out details of that later, but I wouldn't be inclined to hide much from the player about how it works. It should be easily understandable from a general "gist" approach (much like GP generation is usually loosely understood by players in BNW, but not in exact detail), but the precise detail should be available for players who want to drill down to specifics. We don't want to require players to look at the code to be able to know what strategies are best.

I agree, I just feel like there are some conditions that could end up rather complex, and I wouldn't want those to be readily available in, say, the UA description on the civ-selection screen.

Spark's different in some ways certainly. But I would still approach it in the way of it being a strategic resource that has variances from the others, rather than that it is its own unique thing that happens to be similar.

Totally agreed on the building of new units when a player is at 0 or less Spark, they shouldn't be able to build more channelers (by default), in the same way as for other units that need resources.

Hmm, I think maybe Happiness should change to Gold, yeah. From the point of view of Shara intentionally building more channelers than it has Spark, I would be fine with the Happiness penalty. But if other things happen that cuase Shara to have negative Spark, I wouldn't want the UA to become a liability to them, which wouldn't be fun. Happiness would often be a bigger impact in that circumstance than the usual combat penalty. Arguably Gold might be a bigger problem than the usual combat penalty relatively often as well though.

Hmmm... this one is interesting. It *feels* like it should work, but at the end of the day, I'm starting to wonder if it's just a more punitive equivalent to "+X spark." Of course, this is theoretically limitless, but presumably the happiness or gold penalty would get unmanageable. It feels more fun than +X Spark, but in terms of actual player benefit, I'm not sure it's actually better.

What do you think of this? Should we cut this one? Darn, I thought I was being so clever with this one!

Part of the Royal Library's effect is that it adds a Writing slot though. The two are very similar: UB that adds an LW slot to a building that doesn't already have one and grants EXP to units in the city when that slot is filled.

I think we should probably steer clear of EXP as the bonus if the effect is adding an LW slot. What if we granted some kind of unique promotion instead? (Could have quite a simple effect, like a ranged combat strength increase.) Or one of the existing "normal" promotions early? (Not one of the ones they would get immediately from an EXP bonus.)

You know, I thought the library already had a slot for writing, and the royal library was merely replacing that slot's bonus...

I'm wondering if this needs the "for every Relic" bonus at all. I mean I bet we could simply make it have the added slots, and then add some other minor benefit, without having to fill the slots. Since there are two slots, having a promotion stem from them seems sort of weird- would it happen when they were both filled? One per Relic? When there's a theming bonus?

I'm not sure where to land with this one.

The first sentence was another confusion about conversion, when I read that the civ's Prestige was "converted" into Gold, that implied to me that it wasn't being accumulated against Shara anymore. Totally agreed that stuff we don't specify is otherwise left the same as how it normally works.

Also, in your previous post you mentioned possibly using a different yield than Gold for being generated by this UA. You mentioned Science as another possibility, but I didn't respond to that while we were sorting out the conversion stuff. I think that's a good call, because tons of Gold will tend to make Shara better at the diplo victory, which I don't think we want to do. Science sounds like a good alternative.

agreed on science.

The last part is the "wrap up" that works with the first two parts. Standing alone it wouldn't be very fun since it isn't useful for most of the game, but working with the Science bonus from the first part it changes how Shara approaches the endgame, which is pretty cool. Yeah, X and Y would probably need to be quite small. Science does scale the most aggressively of the yields and this is a direct bonus (rather than a proportional one) so that will diminish its relative power as the game goes on. Its probably the strongest right after the Compact is founded, the earliest time the civs have met each other and Shara can purposefully ignore everybody at once.

right, so, again, do you think it should be tech gated? It seems a little weird to be rewarded for no OB before OBs are possible.

I think having at least one of the two Ayyad/Freed flavor is a good lock. If we can get both in, then that would be good too, but not essential. I would very much like to get the isolationism mechanics in there, to reward the player for forcing everyone else out of their lands like Shara did, but it's also a bit short of a lock.

agreed on all of that. The other thing to mention about the Freed is that they are a UU male channeler, and I think this might be the only place in the whole mod we're able to do that.

I'm also finding that there don't seem to be very evident "sets" in the uniques we've got here. Particularly with Shandalle and the Sea Folk, we had a couple of uniques that complemented each other significantly (while also functioning alone). Shara's uniques are all flavorful, but I don't see big mechanical complements. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the notion of sets at this stage a bit more fluid. I could see many combinations of the uniques we have here being viable.

Yeah, as long as they work towards similar goals, I think this is fine sometimes.

The other thing I'm finding is that we've only really got the isolationist stuff in the UAs, which severely limits our options there. I want to include the isolationist mechanics, but that precludes the other UAs which I like more by comparison.

yeah, good point.

If I were to pick a set:

UA: Isolationism (Symmetry)
UU: Wyld
UU: Ayyad (battle)/UB: Hearttomb (river)
UI: Immense Wall

This was tough - I put the Hearttomb as a possible alternative for Ayyad (battle) if we thought that the three non-UA-uniques were going a bit too far into combat otherwise. I almost put Hearttomb (culture3) rather than (river), but I think combined with Isolationism (symmetry) it would make Shara too much of a science-focused civ. While I like them having some kind of science benefit, I don't feel like their flavor pushes them to be something like Korea or Babylon.

The UA was super difficult to choose. I would say that the "Exhibitions at home" aspect of Introspection could also work quite well with Isolationism (symmetry). I went for Isolationism (symmetry) because I like the elegance of how the two OB states both benefit Shara in different, complementary ways.

However, I'm also a big fan of Perpetual Government and Cycle of the Sh'boan. I mainly didn't pick them as a primary here for the reason I mentioned above of wanting to include the isolationist mechanics, but our only candidates for that are UAs.

Yeah, I think this is a viable set, actually. I'm not sure it's the best, but it would definitely be viable. I think the presence of the Wyld is probably the biggest question - I could easily see replacing it with whichever one we didn't choose under your third row, or perhaps even the Freed UU.

I also feel like Immense Wall and Isolationism, while they can work together (though random small science and culture bonuses are perhaps a little odd), might be kind of double dipping. I think they sort of achieve the same thing, not in a mechanical sense, but in the overall "gesture", if that makes sense. You know, "hey kids, Shara doesn't play nice with other people!"

So, with that in mind, I might propose something like this:

UA: Isolationism (Symmetry)
UU: Wyld/The Freed (less mad)
UU: Ayyad (battle)
UB: Hearttomb (river)/Hearttomb (Culture 3)

Again, as you say, hard choices.

The truth is, these abilities fall into a few general categories:

Isolationism related
Male Channeler Related
Ayyad Related
Misc.

I'd say we ideally want to hit at least one of each of the first three, and perhaps even the fourth. With that in mind, sets emerge like:

UA: Perpetual Government/Cycle of the Sh'boan (both misc)
UU: The Freed (less mad) (MC)
UU: Ayyad (battle) (ayyad)
UI: Immense Wall (isolation)

or even something like:

UA: The Freed (less mad - saved from extinction) (MC) + Cycle of the Sh'boan (misc)
UU: Ayyad (battle) (ayyad)
UB: Tattoo Warrior (misc)
UB: Isolated Trade Plaza (isolation)

(note that the UA above includes both effects, with the second being a pared down version of it. The Freed feels like it might not be strong enough to stand as a UA)

or

UA: Introspection (isolation)
UU: The Freed (MC)
UB: Hearttomb (Culture3)
UI: Ayyad's Enclave (ayyad)

I think an argument could be made for any of these above. I do find myself wanting to try to get in 1) the Ayyad as a true, playable unit, 2) either the Freed or some MC related bonus, and 3) some kind of isolation-related mechanic. I think all should be possible.

I should note, out of order, that HT(river)'s bonus about channelers EXP could be taken as a substitute for ayyad stuff - it buffs your female channelers - so we might need to consider that if we axe it.

I've proposed removing a few more UAs below, following on from my thoughts while trying to come up with this set. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of the UAs I'm suggesting to cut, but they were ones that I wasn't really feeling pushed to choose when the others mentioned above were competing options.

Yeah, I agree, though I'm saving The Freed (less mad) as a UA, because it gives us an option to include MCs in our UA. I do think that it might be better used in conjunction with another UA, though.

I've also suggested a new UB to try and give us an isolationist mechanic that isn't a UA, opening up options for Perpetual Government and Cycle of the Sh'boan.

yeah, this isn't as splashy as the UA versions, but it fits the bill!

I've also un-magenta-ed Science as one of their listed VCs, since we seem to be in agreement that should be included.

definitely.

Recap!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Dom/Sci)

UAs:

• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier (though "going rogue" still occurs at the standard times), though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has 0 or less Spark. When below 0 total Spark, Shara does not suffer the typical combat penalties. However, for every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative Spark exceeds Z.
• Isolationism (symmetry), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to generates X Science for Shara.
• Introspection, Shara generates +X Science for each civilization it has met and not traded open borders to. +Y Science for each City-State it has met and is not friends nor allies with. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Z population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture and Y Science
• Isolated Trade Plaza, replaces Gold (trade), Shara receives double the usual Science from international trade routes to and from this city with civilizations it does not permit open borders to, and those civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes with this city.

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization. Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

OK! Where we at now? Almost done, I think...

Then is Malkier, next, right?... trying to come up with ideas, though this is the first I've really ever thought of Malkier. It's my turn to do the first post, is it? (I don't have ideas, but I figured i've made that your burden too long - of course, if you already have a bunch of Malkier ideas, say so)

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, I think I have a grasp of the key issue here, and it's one of specificity, not generality.

I would totally be ok with a UA that was "cities can work tiles one hex farther away," provided that that wasn't too unfairly good. I also agree that that is simpler to explain and understand in some sense - certainly the ownership thing is unintuitive, perhaps prohibitively so.

The issue for me stems from the following angles:

- the possibility that these tiles could be really rather quite far away. 5 or even more hexes from the city, potentially out of the easily-visible range of the city management window
- the lack of ability to work other tiles within this range
- the possibility of awesome resources on those tiles that have walls

The first is self-explanatory. I have issues with this from a User Interface perspective. It feels rather clunky for me to imagine what happens when your cultural borders get rather large, beyond four, really.

The second is a minor point. Presumably we won't allow them to work *anything* within this range. That might be fine, but also might feel a bit odd from within the city management window, especially coupled with the first item above.

The last is more of a question of balance, not really a true problem (in that it would be easily solved). What happens if there's a resource on the wall tile? Do you get it? Do you get the hex yields from whatever tile the wall is on, resource or not.

I can see how this is more intuitive than the "ownership" method, but I also feel like it is sort of clunky from a player experience perspective.

Also, do we still want it to generate culture?

Point 1 is a fair one, but I don't think it will be much of a problem. At first I thought this would be a bigger issue, but you can actually see quite far on the city view screen:

Spoiler :

That's from my current game as Persia and you can see about 8 tiles away in the most visible direction and 5 in the shortest. I can see it getting beyond 5 in some configurations, but we should still be able to make it work. (Zoom out the camera, or even show the Immense Wall citizen slots in their own panel above the Specialist panel, if we absolutely couldn't get them onto the main screen somehow.)

I don't really think it's an issue that should hold us back at this stage, because we will be able to present it to the user somehow that will make sense. And it isn't a new concept for them, it's just "you can work tiles that have this Improvement on them". A lot of players at the lower difficulties (myself included!) don't often manually configure their citizen assignments.

The second one, I agree that we don't want to allow the player to work all of the tiles out at that distance - only the ones with Immense Walls. I think that will be easily representable the same way that workable tiles are represented already by showing the citizen slot over it on the city view screen. (Darkened when no citizen assigned, green when assigned.)

The third one about resources, I figure we don't want to give the civ the resource as if they had built the "intended" Improvement on it, otherwise the Immense Wall could be used to grab distant resources, which I don't think should be its purpose. It should be a trade off for the player if they think it's worth leaving that resource unconnected to their trade network. Though this is tweakable for balance.

Overall I think working the tiles will be much easier for players to get to grips with. The majority of players will probably ignore which system we choose anyway and just go with "the more of these I build, the more Culture I get". For those who want to know, "the Improvement allows me to work these tiles that are normally out of range" is much simpler than needing to understand the notion of city ownership of tiles.

I think Culture is still a good yield for this one, it's an appropriate "defensive" yield that also has other applications.

I agree, I just feel like there are some conditions that could end up rather complex, and I wouldn't want those to be readily available in, say, the UA description on the civ-selection screen.

Oh, definitely, it would be way too much detail for the civ selection screen. It would need to be detailed in some kind of popup off a notification when the effect happened or something like that. Available for the player to look into, but not always displayed.

Hmmm... this one is interesting. It *feels* like it should work, but at the end of the day, I'm starting to wonder if it's just a more punitive equivalent to "+X spark." Of course, this is theoretically limitless, but presumably the happiness or gold penalty would get unmanageable. It feels more fun than +X Spark, but in terms of actual player benefit, I'm not sure it's actually better.

What do you think of this? Should we cut this one? Darn, I thought I was being so clever with this one!

Yeah, I would be inclined to cut this one. I think we can make it work in the general case, but it doesn't feel like it's working well with the Spark mechanics and Shara seems to have pretty steep UA competition.

You know, I thought the library already had a slot for writing, and the royal library was merely replacing that slot's bonus...

I'm wondering if this needs the "for every Relic" bonus at all. I mean I bet we could simply make it have the added slots, and then add some other minor benefit, without having to fill the slots. Since there are two slots, having a promotion stem from them seems sort of weird- would it happen when they were both filled? One per Relic? When there's a theming bonus?

I'm not sure where to land with this one.

When there's a theming bonus could be good. (That could be the theming bonus, rather than a yield, it enhances units trained in that city.) That would make it quite unique.

What do you think about the promotion idea?

right, so, again, do you think it should be tech gated? It seems a little weird to be rewarded for no OB before OBs are possible.

I don't know. It only counts for civs that Shara has met, which won't be most others before OBs are allowed. I'd say we can tweak it one way or the other for balance.

Yeah, I think this is a viable set, actually. I'm not sure it's the best, but it would definitely be viable. I think the presence of the Wyld is probably the biggest question - I could easily see replacing it with whichever one we didn't choose under your third row, or perhaps even the Freed UU.

I also feel like Immense Wall and Isolationism, while they can work together (though random small science and culture bonuses are perhaps a little odd), might be kind of double dipping. I think they sort of achieve the same thing, not in a mechanical sense, but in the overall "gesture", if that makes sense. You know, "hey kids, Shara doesn't play nice with other people!"

I wouldn't be worried about Isolationism (symmetry) and Immense Wall being an overlap, mostly because Immense Wall encourages military defensiveness and Isolationism (symmetry) encourages diplomatic isolation. The two have related flavor, but they don't intersect mechanically, and the combination of the two creates that two-fold isolation creates an attitude quite like the Shara from the books.

I'm a big fan of the Wyld UU. Like you mentioned for MCs, I don't see any of the other civs' flavor giving us a symmetrical LB replacement like this unit either. Particularly anything that could replace Forsaken or the Dragon.

So, with that in mind, I might propose something like this:

UA: Isolationism (Symmetry)
UU: Wyld/The Freed (less mad)
UU: Ayyad (battle)
UB: Hearttomb (river)/Hearttomb (Culture 3)

Again, as you say, hard choices.

The truth is, these abilities fall into a few general categories:

Isolationism related
Male Channeler Related
Ayyad Related
Misc.

I'd say we ideally want to hit at least one of each of the first three, and perhaps even the fourth. With that in mind, sets emerge like:

UA: Perpetual Government/Cycle of the Sh'boan (both misc)
UU: The Freed (less mad) (MC)
UU: Ayyad (battle) (ayyad)
UI: Immense Wall (isolation)

or even something like:

UA: The Freed (less mad - saved from extinction) (MC) + Cycle of the Sh'boan (misc)
UU: Ayyad (battle) (ayyad)
UB: Tattoo Warrior (misc)
UB: Isolated Trade Plaza (isolation)

(note that the UA above includes both effects, with the second being a pared down version of it. The Freed feels like it might not be strong enough to stand as a UA)

or

UA: Introspection (isolation)
UU: The Freed (MC)
UB: Hearttomb (Culture3)
UI: Ayyad's Enclave (ayyad)

I think an argument could be made for any of these above. I do find myself wanting to try to get in 1) the Ayyad as a true, playable unit, 2) either the Freed or some MC related bonus, and 3) some kind of isolation-related mechanic. I think all should be possible.

I should note, out of order, that HT(river)'s bonus about channelers EXP could be taken as a substitute for ayyad stuff - it buffs your female channelers - so we might need to consider that if we axe it.

Those are good topics. I don't feel as compelled to definitely include both the Ayyad and the Freed though. We wouldn't want to miss out on both, but if we hit one, I'd be more ok with missing the other if we have more preferred candidates.

I find with a few of these alternate sets that while they hit the overall notes for the flavor beats for Shara, I prefer quite a few of our individual alternatives to specific uniques of the same type.

Do we want to record any sets for Shara? It seems like we could have so many combinations that putting sets on this one might narrow our focus too much when we return here.

Also, I'm going to do one more pass at proposing some removals to make the list a bit shorter.

Tattoo Warrior seems to be from when we were still considering Culture as one of Shara's victories (relies on exerting Prestige on other players) - do we still want to keep this one?

I think Introspection is inferior to Isolationism (just realized it doesn't need the symmetry qualifier anymore because the other Isolationisms have been removed!) if we move the Exhibition-at-home aspect over. They achieve very similar goals overall.

I'm still not a big fan of the Freed (less mad) UA. I like the UU, but given how few Saidin channeler units we have, applying the ability as a UA feels like it isn't as impactful as a UA should be, whereas the UU being isolated to that unit gives it more relative impact. You've got a good point about it being the final MC-related UA though. Would we consider making another one? Or would we be better off with our MC representation being a unit?



Recap!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Dom/Sci)

UAs:

• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier (though "going rogue" still occurs at the standard times), though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• Breeding Power, units that consume Spark can be built even if Shara has 0 or less Spark. When below 0 total Spark, Shara does not suffer the typical combat penalties. However, for every point of negative Spark produces X unhappiness. This value increases to Y when negative Spark exceeds Z.
• Isolationism (symmetry), Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to generates X Science for Shara. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Y population as though they were foreign capitals.
• Introspection, Shara generates +X Science for each civilization it has met and not traded open borders to. +Y Science for each City-State it has met and is not friends nor allies with. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Z population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ for each Y Prestige you have against that civ.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, +X XP for all channeling units produced in the city for each Relic filling these slots with a theming bonus that provides <promotion> to channeling units trained in the city.
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture and Y Science
• Isolated Trade Plaza, replaces Gold (trade), Shara receives double the usual Science from international trade routes to and from this city with civilizations it does not permit open borders to, and those civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes with this city.

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization and the tile it is on can be worked by the closest Sharan city (even if normally out of range). Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

OK! Where we at now? Almost done, I think...

Then is Malkier, next, right?... trying to come up with ideas, though this is the first I've really ever thought of Malkier. It's my turn to do the first post, is it? (I don't have ideas, but I figured i've made that your burden too long - of course, if you already have a bunch of Malkier ideas, say so)

Almost done! Yes, Malkier's up next. I think it's worth finishing up some of the above (probably will be very shortly) before starting that off. I've got a couple of ideas written down for Malkier. I don't mind going first, you did the original first pass for the first four civs, so it's no problem! Do feel free to start if you collapse down most of the Shara stuff though.

 

[counterpoint]

Point 1 is a fair one, but I don't think it will be much of a problem. At first I thought this would be a bigger issue, but you can actually see quite far on the city view screen:

Spoiler :

That's from my current game as Persia and you can see about 8 tiles away in the most visible direction and 5 in the shortest. I can see it getting beyond 5 in some configurations, but we should still be able to make it work. (Zoom out the camera, or even show the Immense Wall citizen slots in their own panel above the Specialist panel, if we absolutely couldn't get them onto the main screen somehow.)

I don't really think it's an issue that should hold us back at this stage, because we will be able to present it to the user somehow that will make sense. And it isn't a new concept for them, it's just "you can work tiles that have this Improvement on them". A lot of players at the lower difficulties (myself included!) don't often manually configure their citizen assignments.

The second one, I agree that we don't want to allow the player to work all of the tiles out at that distance - only the ones with Immense Walls. I think that will be easily representable the same way that workable tiles are represented already by showing the citizen slot over it on the city view screen. (Darkened when no citizen assigned, green when assigned.)

The third one about resources, I figure we don't want to give the civ the resource as if they had built the "intended" Improvement on it, otherwise the Immense Wall could be used to grab distant resources, which I don't think should be its purpose. It should be a trade off for the player if they think it's worth leaving that resource unconnected to their trade network. Though this is tweakable for balance.

Overall I think working the tiles will be much easier for players to get to grips with. The majority of players will probably ignore which system we choose anyway and just go with "the more of these I build, the more Culture I get". For those who want to know, "the Improvement allows me to work these tiles that are normally out of range" is much simpler than needing to understand the notion of city ownership of tiles.

I think Culture is still a good yield for this one, it's an appropriate "defensive" yield that also has other applications.

OK, I'm happy to defer to your intuition on this one. As you can see, the issues I had with this were less about content and real mechanics, more about the "how." If that stuff can be easily resolved, then I say do it.

Oh, definitely, it would be way too much detail for the civ selection screen. It would need to be detailed in some kind of popup off a notification when the effect happened or something like that. Available for the player to look into, but not always displayed.

same exact comment as above!

Yeah, I would be inclined to cut this one. I think we can make it work in the general case, but it doesn't feel like it's working well with the Spark mechanics and Shara seems to have pretty steep UA competition.

agreed

When there's a theming bonus could be good. (That could be the theming bonus, rather than a yield, it enhances units trained in that city.) That would make it quite unique.

What do you think about the promotion idea?

I think a promotion could be fine. I'm not sure which, but I don't think we need to know that right now. Yeah, the "whenenver you've achieved a theming bonus" is kind of neat.

I don't know. It only counts for civs that Shara has met, which won't be most others before OBs are allowed. I'd say we can tweak it one way or the other for balance.

sure

I wouldn't be worried about Isolationism (symmetry) and Immense Wall being an overlap, mostly because Immense Wall encourages military defensiveness and Isolationism (symmetry) encourages diplomatic isolation. The two have related flavor, but they don't intersect mechanically, and the combination of the two creates that two-fold isolation creates an attitude quite like the Shara from the books.

I'm a big fan of the Wyld UU. Like you mentioned for MCs, I don't see any of the other civs' flavor giving us a symmetrical LB replacement like this unit either. Particularly anything that could replace Forsaken or the Dragon.

no further comment on isolation vs walls.

re: the Wyld, very good point. I do think the MCs is sort of a "bigger mechanic" for the game though, so it's possible that it's a more impactful use of a UU. In any case, both are viable unique-ness points.

Those are good topics. I don't feel as compelled to definitely include both the Ayyad and the Freed though. We wouldn't want to miss out on both, but if we hit one, I'd be more ok with missing the other if we have more preferred candidates.

Agreed, in general, chiefly from a flavor perspective - from a mechanical perspective, it tilts a little differently (as described above)

I find with a few of these alternate sets that while they hit the overall notes for the flavor beats for Shara, I prefer quite a few of our individual alternatives to specific uniques of the same type.

Do we want to record any sets for Shara? It seems like we could have so many combinations that putting sets on this one might narrow our focus too much when we return here.

I'm thinking that you might be right in that we shouldn't propose any sets, exactly for the reason you stated. It might be useful to note a "set" that includes one isolation, one MC, or ayyad, and then a fourth something else, or something, since that's (for me) the preferred end result, but other than that, I don't think so.

Also, I'm going to do one more pass at proposing some removals to make the list a bit shorter.

Tattoo Warrior seems to be from when we were still considering Culture as one of Shara's victories (relies on exerting Prestige on other players) - do we still want to keep this one?

Hmmm... I'm knocking him magenta. I think he's on here not because of the culture thing, but because he's a "regular UU," in that he's a soldier, which I think is a useful thing to have around in case we need it. The specific ability he has was wholly arbitrary anyways, and could easily be trained. Do we need to change the ability, or should we leave it as a placeholder? Or nuke it, as you say? I've proposed a sort of alternative below that embraces the isolation flavor. I considered adding a symmetrical bonus (if you have an OB or an alliance), but couldn't think of something that made sense.

I think Introspection is inferior to Isolationism (just realized it doesn't need the symmetry qualifier anymore because the other Isolationisms have been removed!) if we move the Exhibition-at-home aspect over. They achieve very similar goals overall.

yeah, I agree, though I think the new composite UA is at risk of being too strong - we'll have to watch it accordingly.

I'm still not a big fan of the Freed (less mad) UA. I like the UU, but given how few Saidin channeler units we have, applying the ability as a UA feels like it isn't as impactful as a UA should be, whereas the UU being isolated to that unit gives it more relative impact. You've got a good point about it being the final MC-related UA though. Would we consider making another one? Or would we be better off with our MC representation being a unit?

I think you may have missed the bit where I suggested that this one made more sense as attached to another UA, not alone (since it's too niche). I could see this one stacking with the Cylcle of the Sh'boan or something, which isn't by definition "powerful" (since we can tweak the 7-yearly bonuses accordingly). Because of that, I think it's worth keeping magenta. If you want, we could create another UA, but I'm not sure we need it.

Recap!

Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, LB/Dom/Sci)

UAs:

• Perpetual Government, instead of becoming unhappy, each net total unhappiness causes Shara to lose X Gold (scaling) per turn. (Happiness remains at 0.)
• Cycle of the Sh'boan, receive X Faith, Culture, Science, or Gold every 7 turns. Which yield is received depends on the actions of the previous 7 turns.
• The Freed (less mad), saidin units behave as if they operate at one lower madness tier (though "going rogue" still occurs at the standard times), though they still receive the strength bonuses of the greater madness.
• Isolationism, Civilizations that Shara provides Open Borders to generate no bonus Prestige. Every point of Prestige generated by a civilization that Shara does not provide Open Borders to generates X Science for Shara. Shara can Exhibit Innovations in its own cities that have more than Y population as though they were foreign capitals.

UUs:

• Freed (less mad), replaces the Asha'man, behaves as if it operates at one lower madness tier, though still receives the bonuses of the greater madness (and can still go rogue). +X% combat strength against channeling units.
• Wyld, replaces either the Forsaken or the Dragon (in unit form), determined by which side Shara picks during the LB, is a ranged male channeling unit, has an X% ranged combat boost against units fighting for the opposing Alignment. Channelers within Y hexes that share an Alignment with the Wyld (including himself) have their ranged attack range increased by Z.
• Tattoo Warrior, replaces some Melee, Polearm, or Ranged Unit, receives +X combat strength against a civ you do not have an Open Borders agreement with or a CS you are not friends or allies with.
• Ayyad (battle), replaces the Wilder or Kin or anti-channeler, +X% combat strength against channelers and warders, Ignore Zone of Control from channelers and warders.

UBs:

• Hearttomb (river), replaces Production (river), adds 2 slots for Legendary Relics to the building that produce Culture and Faith instead of Culture and Prestige, with a theming bonus that provides <promotion> to channeling units trained in the city.
• Enclave of the Freed, replaces XP National Wonder, +X (large) XP to every Male Channeler born in this civilization
• Hearttomb (Culture3), replaces Culture3, Prestige generation from Legendary Works is halved. Each Legendary Work produces X culture and Y Science
• Isolated Trade Plaza, replaces Gold (trade), Shara receives double the usual Science from international trade routes to and from this city with civilizations it does not permit open borders to, and those civilizations do not receive Science from trade routes with this city.

UIs:

• Immense Wall, generates +X Culture per turn, can only be built where Shara's borders meet another civilization and the tile it is on can be worked by the closest Sharan city (even if normally out of range). Enemy units cannot cross into hexes that have an Immense Wall from outside Sharan territory.
• Ayyad's Enclave, Sharan cities within 3 hexes of this improvement produce +X Culture and -Y Happiness per turn. Sharan cities 4 to 6 hexes away produce +Z Happiness and +W Prestige (after <tech>). Each city can only be affected by each of these bonuses once.

Almost done! Yes, Malkier's up next. I think it's worth finishing up some of the above (probably will be very shortly) before starting that off. I've got a couple of ideas written down for Malkier. I don't mind going first, you did the original first pass for the first four civs, so it's no problem! Do feel free to start if you collapse down most of the Shara stuff though.

hmmm, didn't *you* do the initial posts for the first four civs? I feel likeyou did. I did do the framing post, though. I'm happy to let you take the lead on this, but since it seems like you have done all of them at this point, I feel like you'd probably need a break. In any case, I have a little time, so I can start it here. I don't have much, but I'm not sure it's worth "holding out." With that in mind, I won't "force it," in that I won't hunt for additional flavor and ideas I don't already have. That'll leave plenty of room for your ideas (but also likely means I have some ideas that'll come out later)

Again, no blue

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:
Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles
Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
Guestright, all units of civilizations you grant Open Borders to receive full healing, you receive +X global culture per turn for every non-enemy military unit passing through your territory, as well as +Y prestige against that civilization (after <tech>).
Living in Legend, you receive +X culture and +Y prestige (after <tech>) per turn for every city you founded that has been razed.

UUs:
Hadori Cavalry, replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, can attack shadowspawn (and only shadowspawn) unlimited times per turn.
Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent units have half of their health restored
True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The owner of the territory receives +W Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time

UBs:
Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.

UIs:
Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn of the Blight. Remains in effect even if the Blight expands into this tile, though it becomes usable by all civs.

Edge of the World is more of a large gesture than a specific recommendation - not sure if the second half is possible or even a good idea. Point being, it allows some basic survival along the blight. Note that the blight could be improved, but that doesn't mean they have the base yields of Plains. The opposite could be possible - provide the base yields of Plains but still prevent improvement (this might be the only way to do it, depending on how the Blight works [i.e. if it's an improvement, feature, etc.])

Rally to the Crane Banner is meant to reflect Lan's recruitment in the later books. Not sure how to balance this so it's not too bad and not too good. Designed to be good against regular wars and the LB.

The Guestright is more of a borderlander thing than just Malkier, but I think it's said that it was strongest with them (and perhaps Sheinar). I like this idea, though I'm not sure if the healing is enough to convince people to actually move through your territory.

Living in Legend is the seed of an idea, but I'm not sure how to make it really work. It's rather straightforward (though quite weird)

The Hadori is the braided cord they wear. Presumably, blight will have some movement penalty, so they'll move faster in blight than everybody else, but still slower than in tundra. The second thing is confusing, I know - not sure how to state it. The idea is that they can have as many attacks per turn as the want against shadowspawn, but not against anybody else. They can thus swarm in the blight.

The Diademed Battle Lord is yet another GC replacement. Meant to make your forces really hard to kill, but not necessarily provide specific "offensive" abilities.

True Blade is Lan. The idea is to create a unit that helps people along with his Aes Sedai. Can kill enemy civs, shadowspawn, and dragonsworn/lawless. Obviously quite nice in the TW and the LB. The +W faith is meant to inspire civs to grant you OB.

The Tower of the Crane is meant as a flavor stand-in for th e Seven Towers, which will probably be a Wonder. Probably stacks well with a UA that makes the Blight workable (it would probably require it for the prestige bonus to work). Not sure about the specific bonus, though - doesn't need to be culture related

Border Tower is also meant to evoke the 7 towers. This ones another weird case of a improvement-replacement. That could be changed. Not sure about this one, especially the last part. Note that normal forts slow the advance of Blight already.

ok, that's all I have now!

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, I'm happy to defer to your intuition on this one. As you can see, the issues I had with this were less about content and real mechanics, more about the "how." If that stuff can be easily resolved, then I say do it.

Sounds good.

I think a promotion could be fine. I'm not sure which, but I don't think we need to know that right now. Yeah, the "whenenver you've achieved a theming bonus" is kind of neat.

Also sounds good!

Agreed, in general, chiefly from a flavor perspective - from a mechanical perspective, it tilts a little differently (as described above)

I'm thinking that you might be right in that we shouldn't propose any sets, exactly for the reason you stated. It might be useful to note a "set" that includes one isolation, one MC, or ayyad, and then a fourth something else, or something, since that's (for me) the preferred end result, but other than that, I don't think so.

Sounds like a good plan. I've

Hmmm... I'm knocking him magenta. I think he's on here not because of the culture thing, but because he's a "regular UU," in that he's a soldier, which I think is a useful thing to have around in case we need it. The specific ability he has was wholly arbitrary anyways, and could easily be trained. Do we need to change the ability, or should we leave it as a placeholder? Or nuke it, as you say? I've proposed a sort of alternative below that embraces the isolation flavor. I considered adding a symmetrical bonus (if you have an OB or an alliance), but couldn't think of something that made sense.

Will we need a "regular UU" though? It seems like we have a lot of contenders for these slots, so I doubt we would fall back on a more "normal" unit.

The OB-related bonus is good though - a non-UA source of diplomatic isolationism encouragement.

yeah, I agree, though I think the new composite UA is at risk of being too strong - we'll have to watch it accordingly.

I'd say this might be marginally weaker than Introspection was, because it relies on other people going for the Culture victory. I wouldn't be concerned about it being too strong yet.

I think you may have missed the bit where I suggested that this one made more sense as attached to another UA, not alone (since it's too niche). I could see this one stacking with the Cylcle of the Sh'boan or something, which isn't by definition "powerful" (since we can tweak the 7-yearly bonuses accordingly). Because of that, I think it's worth keeping magenta. If you want, we could create another UA, but I'm not sure we need it.

Possibly, though overall I think I like the Cycle of Sh'boan standing separately where it can have a bigger impact. Sounds like something we'll consider when we come back again, then? I'll note that next to the entry, since I think we want to remove all of the colors when we get them into the list!

I've added Shara to the list!

hmmm, didn't *you* do the initial posts for the first four civs? I feel likeyou did. I did do the framing post, though. I'm happy to let you take the lead on this, but since it seems like you have done all of them at this point, I feel like you'd probably need a break. In any case, I have a little time, so I can start it here. I don't have much, but I'm not sure it's worth "holding out." With that in mind, I won't "force it," in that I won't hunt for additional flavor and ideas I don't already have. That'll leave plenty of room for your ideas (but also likely means I have some ideas that'll come out later)

Good point, it wasn't all you! Looking back, I did the first pass for The Aiel and the Atha'an Miere and you did the first pass for Seanchan and Shandalle. Seeing as I went first for Shara, you going first for Malkier means we're on even counts so far! Sounds good!

And also, lists!

Edge of the World is more of a large gesture than a specific recommendation - not sure if the second half is possible or even a good idea. Point being, it allows some basic survival along the blight. Note that the blight could be improved, but that doesn't mean they have the base yields of Plains. The opposite could be possible - provide the base yields of Plains but still prevent improvement (this might be the only way to do it, depending on how the Blight works [i.e. if it's an improvement, feature, etc.])

I had one that was almost exactly the same as this one (I like yours better, so I won't put it up), so it seems like Malkier's flavor definitely pushes us this way! I think finding a way to make Malkier thrive while near the Blight will be an interesting challenge, and one we should go for. The Blight provides a lot of disadvantages, so the uniques would need to be very targeted, but would also need to avoid pushing them too far the other way. This seems like a good way to contribute to that.

Rally to the Crane Banner is meant to reflect Lan's recruitment in the later books. Not sure how to balance this so it's not too bad and not too good. Designed to be good against regular wars and the LB.

This one is really interesting, particularly in the context of the LB. And it's great that that ties into the flavor so well.

The Guestright is more of a borderlander thing than just Malkier, but I think it's said that it was strongest with them (and perhaps Sheinar). I like this idea, though I'm not sure if the healing is enough to convince people to actually move through your territory.

I think other civs will probably do it, players are usually discouraged by penalties to themselves more so than bonuses to other players. However, it is a UA that has its utility based directly on the actions of your opponents, which can end up being quite frustrating.

Living in Legend is the seed of an idea, but I'm not sure how to make it really work. It's rather straightforward (though quite weird)

I see what you mean. I love the flavor of it, but it encourages a rather destructive playstyle (intentionally getting your cities razed to capitalize on the bonus). Then if we design against that, it becomes useless unless Malkier is majorly losing.

The Hadori is the braided cord they wear. Presumably, blight will have some movement penalty, so they'll move faster in blight than everybody else, but still slower than in tundra. The second thing is confusing, I know - not sure how to state it. The idea is that they can have as many attacks per turn as the want against shadowspawn, but not against anybody else. They can thus swarm in the blight.

I love it. This is kooky and awesome and fits them really well. I think "attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of this unit's movement or attacks for the turn" is the best way to describe it? I also really like that the way combat works in CiV means they can't just steamroll a ton of Shadowspawn in a single turn, but the possibility of doing that is there, for players to work towards. (Give them a Yellow Ajah Sister that can heal them up and they can wreak havoc. Ah, the flavor crossovers are awesome.) Presumably they will eventually stop when they run low on/out of health (likely to happen first) or there are no more Shadowspawn within their movement range.

The Diademed Battle Lord is yet another GC replacement. Meant to make your forces really hard to kill, but not necessarily provide specific "offensive" abilities.

I like it, it's a very strong defensive ability that will make Malkier really strong in wars of attrition, which a lot of dealing with Shadowspawn will be. It would certainly make policing their section of the Blight throughout the game much more manageable, which is good.

To clarify, this would only activate when one of Malkier's units dies, right? Not when they kill an enemy or an unrelated unit dies? Also doesn't heal enemies/other civs' units?

Should this ability work against Shadow-declared civs as well?

True Blade is Lan. The idea is to create a unit that helps people along with his Aes Sedai. Can kill enemy civs, shadowspawn, and dragonsworn/lawless. Obviously quite nice in the TW and the LB. The +W faith is meant to inspire civs to grant you OB.

When Malkier can only have one True Blade, this doesn't really replace the Warder, right? They can still have other, normal Warder units on their other Aes Sedai?

That's kind of strange, but I could get behind it. I would worry a bit that we'd be creating a kind of "hero unit" for one civ where one doesn't otherwise exist. (The obvious comparison here is to the Wyld, but he replaces a unit that's already an only-one.)

I feel like if there's only one of him, he should be a bit stronger. I've added another ability below, making the Sister he is bonded to stronger as well. (I figure V could be a relatively low number.)

The Tower of the Crane is meant as a flavor stand-in for th e Seven Towers, which will probably be a Wonder. Probably stacks well with a UA that makes the Blight workable (it would probably require it for the prestige bonus to work). Not sure about the specific bonus, though - doesn't need to be culture related

This is a good call, the Seven Towers being a wonder does kind of cut off their use as a UB or UI here! Still, we can nod to it, as you've done!

Is there a reason for the Culture being "within workable radius" and the Prestige being "tiles worked by"?

Border Tower is also meant to evoke the 7 towers. This ones another weird case of a improvement-replacement. That could be changed. Not sure about this one, especially the last part. Note that normal forts slow the advance of Blight already.

This one is pretty cool. I don't think it needs to start working for all civs when Blight moves into the tile, since Malkier will still own that tile. I like the idea of it continuing to work when the Blight comes in anyway, because that's quite a unique thing and also plays really well into Malkier's near-Blight strategy.


Overall I'm liking the idea of achieving all of our different objectives (LB, Culture, or Dom victories) via mechanics that help Malkier deal with a nearby Blight.


Recap, with some new stuff!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Guestright, all units of civilizations you grant Open Borders to receive full healing, you receive +X global culture per turn for every non-enemy military unit passing through your territory, as well as +Y prestige against that civilization (after <tech>).
• Living in Legend, you receive +X culture and +Y prestige (after <tech>) per turn for every city you founded that has been razed.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry, replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, can attack shadowspawn (and only shadowspawn) unlimited times per turn. attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +W Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the Shadow

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Seven Towers, replaces CultureX (one of the later ones), only 7 can be built in your civilization, Blight provides +X Culture and +Y Prestige (after <tech>). When all 7 are constructed, the Prestige output of those cities is multiplied by Y.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.

UIs:

• Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn of the Blight. Remains in effect even if the Blight expands into this tile, though it becomes usable by all civs.

Stand Against the Shadow is another that depends on an enemy's actions, but it depends on the Shadowspawn, who are much more predictable in this way. Being near the Blight, getting pillaged by them will be fairly common. Having a unit be the reward (which consumes Gold) discourages players from intentionally allowing this to happen too often, since they're sacrificing yields and will probably have units to defend themselves from said Shadowspawn. Still, that could be a concern, like it is for some of the others.

Surviving King is a Warder replacement, like your suggestion (Great minds!), nodding to Lan. I was actually thinking of allowing multiples and just leaving the flavor weirdness alone, but that's not that great.

Seven Towers has a flavor conflict if we use that as a wonder, but we can rename it to something more like one of your suggestions if we do that. I quite like the idea of a building that can be built in a fixed number of places and then "all do something" when they've all been built. It's something we don't see elsewhere but fits very easily into CiV's mechanics.

Blightborder Outpost would work very well with one of the Blights-give-some-yields uniques. The name sounds a bit more like an Improvement than a building, but it gets into the right ballpark. I figured X could be quite a low cost (toward the low end of what tiles cost toward the beginning of the game) since there's a maximum range on purchasing anyway, so they can't completely run away with it. This would always encourage Malkier to expand into the Blight, regardless of what its natural growth is doing. (Natural growth through Culture never goes into Blight, right? I think we decided that a long time ago.)

 

[counterpoint]

Sounds like a good plan. I've

ooh! ooh! I want to know the end of this sentence!

Will we need a "regular UU" though? It seems like we have a lot of contenders for these slots, so I doubt we would fall back on a more "normal" unit.

The OB-related bonus is good though - a non-UA source of diplomatic isolationism encouragement.

yeah, I also doubt it, but I don't feel a need to cut it, either.

also, under tattoo warrior, there's still a stray "COLOR" flag hanging out on the list.

I'd say this might be marginally weaker than Introspection was, because it relies on other people going for the Culture victory. I wouldn't be concerned about it being too strong yet.

fair enough.

Possibly, though overall I think I like the Cycle of Sh'boan standing separately where it can have a bigger impact. Sounds like something we'll consider when we come back again, then? I'll note that next to the entry, since I think we want to remove all of the colors when we get them into the list!

yeah, sounds like a plan.

I've added Shara to the list!

thanks!

Good point, it wasn't all you! Looking back, I did the first pass for The Aiel and the Atha'an Miere and you did the first pass for Seanchan and Shandalle. Seeing as I went first for Shara, you going first for Malkier means we're on even counts so far! Sounds good!

And also, lists!

oh, I'd forgotten that I did the first 'chan and 'dalle posts.

I had one that was almost exactly the same as this one (I like yours better, so I won't put it up), so it seems like Malkier's flavor definitely pushes us this way! I think finding a way to make Malkier thrive while near the Blight will be an interesting challenge, and one we should go for. The Blight provides a lot of disadvantages, so the uniques would need to be very targeted, but would also need to avoid pushing them too far the other way. This seems like a good way to contribute to that.

yeah, I agree. I think this civ is a good opportunity to do something blight related, even if it's just one of the abilities. We could justify it somewhat with other borderlander civs as well, but Malkier certainly seems like the most likely candidate.

This one is really interesting, particularly in the context of the LB. And it's great that that ties into the flavor so well.

rally to the crane banner. Cool. agreed.

I think other civs will probably do it, players are usually discouraged by penalties to themselves more so than bonuses to other players. However, it is a UA that has its utility based directly on the actions of your opponents, which can end up being quite frustrating.

guestright. That's certainly a problematic aspect. I'm not sure if you're suggesting we axe it, or if it still might be ok - I'll put it as magenta now.

part of me thinks a minor version of this ability would make a good Policy or Tenet.

I see what you mean. I love the flavor of it, but it encourages a rather destructive playstyle (intentionally getting your cities razed to capitalize on the bonus). Then if we design against that, it becomes useless unless Malkier is majorly losing.

yeah, this one's tough. I'm kind of thinking that this one should be redded. Any adjustments you could propose that might save it?

I love it. This is kooky and awesome and fits them really well. I think "attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of this unit's movement or attacks for the turn" is the best way to describe it? I also really like that the way combat works in CiV means they can't just steamroll a ton of Shadowspawn in a single turn, but the possibility of doing that is there, for players to work towards. (Give them a Yellow Ajah Sister that can heal them up and they can wreak havoc. Ah, the flavor crossovers are awesome.) Presumably they will eventually stop when they run low on/out of health (likely to happen first) or there are no more Shadowspawn within their movement range.

ok, a couple of things here:

If we like the mechanics of this, this could be easily pasted onto a Warder UU as well. Truly, any of these UU abilities are interchangeable with the various flavors.

The Yellow sister thing really should be an achievement.

regarding the shadowspawn.... hmmm... Actually, the way I'd intended it, if you took three attacks on a spawn, you then wouldn't be able to take an attack on a regular unit, nor could you take an attack on a normal unit, and then attack forever on shadowspawn afterwards. I thought of it similarly to when you spend on Spread Religion with a GPr - it locks out the other GPr abilities. If that's the mechanic we desire, I think the phrasing you suggested doesn't quite work.

I am open to allowing what I described, though. I was worried it'd be too powerful, but the HP damage you suffer and stuff might be its own mitigating factor.

This reminds me of Great Cleave or Supreme Cleave, for all you nerds in the audience...

I like it, it's a very strong defensive ability that will make Malkier really strong in wars of attrition, which a lot of dealing with Shadowspawn will be. It would certainly make policing their section of the Blight throughout the game much more manageable, which is good.

To clarify, this would only activate when one of Malkier's units dies, right? Not when they kill an enemy or an unrelated unit dies? Also doesn't heal enemies/other civs' units?

Should this ability work against Shadow-declared civs as well?

To your first question - yeah, this is only for Malkieri units getting killed. Your changes are correct.

To the second question... I'm quite confused. This ability is supposed to work against all enemies (it triggers when your guys are killed), regardless of alignment.

When Malkier can only have one True Blade, this doesn't really replace the Warder, right? They can still have other, normal Warder units on their other Aes Sedai?

That's kind of strange, but I could get behind it. I would worry a bit that we'd be creating a kind of "hero unit" for one civ where one doesn't otherwise exist. (The obvious comparison here is to the Wyld, but he replaces a unit that's already an only-one.)

I feel like if there's only one of him, he should be a bit stronger. I've added another ability below, making the Sister he is bonded to stronger as well. (I figure V could be a relatively low number.)

Right... this wouldn't really be a replacement unit. That's sort of funky, but not terrible in this case, because the warder works differently from other units. You don't "produce" them, as I recall - you choose an existing unit with your sister, and bond that unit, turning it into a warder unit. I'd imagine either all Malkieri warders (within the right eras) would have this custom mission to become the True Blade, or else sisters would have a custom mission to create a true blade - either would be greyed out if a TB already existed. So I don't think there's really disconnect between the fact that the Warder and the UU exist simultaneously.

The Hero Unit thing is of course a separate, yet related issue. I can see how it might be problematic. It's not terrible for me, though with your added boosts, it does start to feel like we're playing Warcraft III or something...

As far as your specific proposal... I may be ok with boosting the sister, but there's certainly a part of me that doesn't want to do that. I don't want a UU Aes Sedai for Malkier, I want a UU warder. I'd rather make the Warder more awesomer than the Aes Sedai. So I'd rather rethink he's bonuses than spread them, though I would be ok with her having bonuses that are warder-related, whatever that might be (heal him more, less negative effects if he dies or for him if she dies, etc.)

If the Hero Unit thing is problematic, we could also simply not boost this UUs strength, and make this replace ALL Warders. It's sort of a flavor issue, but it's not so awful, maybe...

This is a good call, the Seven Towers being a wonder does kind of cut off their use as a UB or UI here! Still, we can nod to it, as you've done!

Is there a reason for the Culture being "within workable radius" and the Prestige being "tiles worked by"?

yeah, that distinction was deliberate, though of course I'm not married to it. The Culture was a "congrats, you are brave and have lots of blight nearby." The Prestige is "congrats, you're hardcore and are trying to actually farm this hell."

This one is pretty cool. I don't think it needs to start working for all civs when Blight moves into the tile, since Malkier will still own that tile. I like the idea of it continuing to work when the Blight comes in anyway, because that's quite a unique thing and also plays really well into Malkier's near-Blight strategy.

ok, there was a momentary brain fart here, when I made this. I imagined that when the blight spreads, you lose your territory. That's not the case, so it makes your deletion certainly apt.

The "Remains in effect even if the Blight expands..." line is redundant with the fact that it can be constructed on Blight...

That said, what happens if you lose the territory through a razed city or something - is the Fort still usable by anybody? What happens to Citadels?

Overall I'm liking the idea of achieving all of our different objectives (LB, Culture, or Dom victories) via mechanics that help Malkier deal with a nearby Blight.

cool. Agreed, though we probably shouldn't leave those as the *only* options.

On that note, a start bias is just that, a bias - not a guarantee. I think we need to be careful to not go all-in on the blight (or even shadowspawn) stuff here. I think Blight can be a portion of the Uniques, of course, but I'd feel better if they weren't totally useless if you were placed on the equator. That would be far worse than, say, England getting landlocked on a normal map - city number two is still reasonably easy to make coastal.

How does that effect Tower of the Crane, in your opinion? Right now, that building has zero benefit outside of blight-adjacent cities (which even if you spawn next to the Blight, Malkier is likely to have a few of). Should we add an additional bonus as well?

Stand Against the Shadow is another that depends on an enemy's actions, but it depends on the Shadowspawn, who are much more predictable in this way. Being near the Blight, getting pillaged by them will be fairly common. Having a unit be the reward (which consumes Gold) discourages players from intentionally allowing this to happen too often, since they're sacrificing yields and will probably have units to defend themselves from said Shadowspawn. Still, that could be a concern, like it is for some of the others.

hmm... Interesting. I think this might be a little too powerful. I'm not sure though. The barbs pillage my sh*t all the time... that'd be a lot of units. I'm not sure it'd be abused, but as you say, it definitely could be. Also, it does depend on the enemy, which is a little lamer... Considering the worry of us disadvantaging non-blight players above, I'm tempted to red or magenta this one. I won't yet.

Surviving King is a Warder replacement, like your suggestion (Great minds!), nodding to Lan. I was actually thinking of allowing multiples and just leaving the flavor weirdness alone, but that's not that great.

My thoughts on this one's hero-ness (and multipless) are identical to above.

I suggest a change below. I understand why you made it light-leaning, but it just as soon couldn't be. I should say, in general, that I've enjoyed how several of these (all?) abilities have been LB related, while remaining quite indirectly related, and certainly they've all remained side agnostic. This one throws that out in general, with its more literal final bonus, but the side-specific nature is a step further.

I'm not demanding it, but I do think it might be better to adjust this so it's side-agnostic. I can imagine a parallel world where New Spring happens, but then Moaraine ends up a Black sister and... there goes Lan. I'd say if you're shadow, this should work against the light (and shadowspawn). I'd venture to say that if you're neutral, it still works against shadow, but only shadow (though I could maybe be persuaded that it'd work for nobody).

Seven Towers has a flavor conflict if we use that as a wonder, but we can rename it to something more like one of your suggestions if we do that. I quite like the idea of a building that can be built in a fixed number of places and then "all do something" when they've all been built. It's something we don't see elsewhere but fits very easily into CiV's mechanics.

I've been playing a fair bit of Reaper of Souls lately, and this feels a lot like the item sets in Diablo...

This one certainly amps up the "replacement weirdness" discussed above, and its less avoidable - if you replace Culture 4, you'd actually only be replacing Culture 4 for seven of your cities, the others would have regular culture 4...

Also, we'd described Malkier as being Tall before. We're not stuck to that, but I don't think the other Uniques are disharmonious with that. This one kind of is - in fact, more than most UBs, it really pushes you to have 7 cities, which is certainly rather wide.

I like the "set" bonus idea, and think there is a way to make it work elsewhere, but I'm not sure this is the place for it. Maganeta'ing, though I considered redding.

Blightborder Outpost would work very well with one of the Blights-give-some-yields uniques. The name sounds a bit more like an Improvement than a building, but it gets into the right ballpark. I figured X could be quite a low cost (toward the low end of what tiles cost toward the beginning of the game) since there's a maximum range on purchasing anyway, so they can't completely run away with it. This would always encourage Malkier to expand into the Blight, regardless of what its natural growth is doing. (Natural growth through Culture never goes into Blight, right? I think we decided that a long time ago.)

Hmm.... I'm not 100% sure on the slowed-natural growth. How does growth normally work? Does it go for good tiles first? If so, then in most cases Blight would be pretty low priority in all cases, so we might not need to do much more than that.

If that is the case, then I'm not sure I'm much a fan of this UB. It seems rather niche. I see what you're saying about it combo-ing well with other abilities but Wonders and Uniques in BNW related to buying tiles always seem so underwhelming. Is that the American UA? Yeah, america is great because of their UUs, not the UA...

Recap

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Guestright, all units of civilizations you grant Open Borders to receive full healing, you receive +X global culture per turn for every non-enemy military unit passing through your territory, as well as +Y prestige against that civilization (after <tech>).
• Living in Legend, you receive +X culture and +Y prestige (after <tech>) per turn for every city you founded that has been razed.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Hadori Cavalry (Blight), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and tundra, does not lose HP while in the Blight.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +W Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Seven Towers, replaces CultureX (one of the later ones), only 7 can be built in your civilization, Blight provides +X Culture and +Y Prestige (after <tech>). When all 7 are constructed, the Prestige output of those cities is multiplied by Y.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast, replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged.

UIs:

• Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn of the Blight. Remains in effect even if the Blight expands into this tile.

I did a few new ones that were just relocated versions of other Uniques. Namely...

The new Hadori unit is a UU version of Edge of the World. Kind of underwhelming.

The Holdfast is a UB version of Stand Against the shadow. Somewhat straitforward, though it isn't shadowspawn linked.

hmm... that's actually I got for now! Honestly, though, I feel like we have some pretty good stuff to work with on Malkier. It's probably a good idea to sit on it for another few, but I'm feeling pretty good about this selection, and not sure how many more ideas I'll have..

 

[S3rgeus]

ooh! ooh! I want to know the end of this sentence!

Aha! I was wondering where this sentence went! I knew I'd started the "I've added Shara to the master list" sentence elsewhere when I went back to write it in. I think I might have also been about to say "I've listed these elements as something we'd want to hit with a final set below Shara's uniques", but then forgot to finish it after I actually went and made that edit.

also, under tattoo warrior, there's still a stray "COLOR" flag hanging out on the list.

Fixed!

yeah, I agree. I think this civ is a good opportunity to do something blight related, even if it's just one of the abilities. We could justify it somewhat with other borderlander civs as well, but Malkier certainly seems like the most likely candidate.

Agreed.

guestright. That's certainly a problematic aspect. I'm not sure if you're suggesting we axe it, or if it still might be ok - I'll put it as magenta now.

I'd probably go with axe. It's dependent on behavior of other players that's not particularly reliable and is easily avoidable on their part in most cases.

part of me thinks a minor version of this ability would make a good Policy or Tenet.

Yeah, some variant on this would make a good Policy or Tenet!

yeah, this one's tough. I'm kind of thinking that this one should be redded. Any adjustments you could propose that might save it?

Not without turning it into a whole different thing. I'm ok with removing this one.

ok, a couple of things here:

If we like the mechanics of this, this could be easily pasted onto a Warder UU as well. Truly, any of these UU abilities are interchangeable with the various flavors.

Very good call, that would be good since it's much more recognizable Malkieri flavor. We'd need to work out the flavor dissonance with multiple Lans somehow though. More on that below!

regarding the shadowspawn.... hmmm... Actually, the way I'd intended it, if you took three attacks on a spawn, you then wouldn't be able to take an attack on a regular unit, nor could you take an attack on a normal unit, and then attack forever on shadowspawn afterwards. I thought of it similarly to when you spend on Spread Religion with a GPr - it locks out the other GPr abilities. If that's the mechanic we desire, I think the phrasing you suggested doesn't quite work.

I am open to allowing what I described, though. I was worried it'd be too powerful, but the HP damage you suffer and stuff might be its own mitigating factor.

I think the damage will be its own mitigating factor, most units can only survive 5 or 6 rounds of combat before they die, even in favorable circumstances (unfavorable would only be 2 or 3 before they die), and it will otherwise be easier to understand. But if we find it's too powerful, then we can switch it over to disallowing other attacks once the Shadowspawn attacks have "started" for the turn. I think the two will be the same in most practical circumstances - there won't often be multiple Shadowspawn and non-Shadowspawn enemy units all within movement range of this unit within a single turn.

This reminds me of Great Cleave or Supreme Cleave, for all you nerds in the audience...

Ooh, I know what Cleave is! A friend of mine played a Barbarian (Fighter?) that used it. It was seriously good at level 1. Shame we didn't keep that group together!

The Yellow sister thing really should be an achievement.

Awesome thought! Noted in the Misc summary (in red, in case we don't go with a Warder unique for Malkier).

To your first question - yeah, this is only for Malkieri units getting killed. Your changes are correct.

Awesome sauce.

To the second question... I'm quite confused. This ability is supposed to work against all enemies (it triggers when your guys are killed), regardless of alignment.

Woops! This was supposed to go in the quote block above! Luckily my suggestion of Surviving King is similar to my question here, so I'll respond to that. Though after you read what I say about Surviving King, I'd still be interested in what you think about this question ("Should this apply to Shadow-declared civs too?") to Hadori Cavalry (swarm).

Right... this wouldn't really be a replacement unit. That's sort of funky, but not terrible in this case, because the warder works differently from other units. You don't "produce" them, as I recall - you choose an existing unit with your sister, and bond that unit, turning it into a warder unit. I'd imagine either all Malkieri warders (within the right eras) would have this custom mission to become the True Blade, or else sisters would have a custom mission to create a true blade - either would be greyed out if a TB already existed. So I don't think there's really disconnect between the fact that the Warder and the UU exist simultaneously.

You're right on the Warder production thing - they're "made" by a custom mission on the Aes Sedai unit that converts one of the civ's normal units into a Warder unit.

I agree, I don't think there's a big disconnect between replacing one, since their spawning mechanism is different.

The Hero Unit thing is of course a separate, yet related issue. I can see how it might be problematic. It's not terrible for me, though with your added boosts, it does start to feel like we're playing Warcraft III or something...

As far as your specific proposal... I may be ok with boosting the sister, but there's certainly a part of me that doesn't want to do that. I don't want a UU Aes Sedai for Malkier, I want a UU warder. I'd rather make the Warder more awesomer than the Aes Sedai. So I'd rather rethink he's bonuses than spread them, though I would be ok with her having bonuses that are warder-related, whatever that might be (heal him more, less negative effects if he dies or for him if she dies, etc.)

If the Hero Unit thing is problematic, we could also simply not boost this UUs strength, and make this replace ALL Warders. It's sort of a flavor issue, but it's not so awful, maybe...

However, I think the hero unit thing is more challenging. Mainly because I think our two goals are in conflict: not having "hero units" and making a single unit good enough to take up a whole UU slot for a civ.

While I did suggest it below with Surviving King, I'm thinking now that replacing all of the Warders is probably not a great idea. CiV embraces absurdity, but only through "combination" - creating situations that that are paradoxical based on our knowledge of history. (The Aztec Great General Hernan Cortez, for example.) But we'd be creating a nonsensical situation (multiple instances of the same character) in every game with Malkier, which doesn't strike me as the same kind of thing.

The other alternative, of course, is to be fine with the notion of hero units. The Dragon and the Forsaken do already stand apart as "hero units", even if they are more generally available than a UU. The Aes Sedai and Warders are hero-esque, in that they stay perpetually up to date with other units without needing to be upgraded and have a bunch of special powers. (Though, again, more generally available.)

However, I could see this mechanic of hero-like units being something we "allow" as a unique. We might not have it in any other civs' uniques (though we would consider it, as appropriate), but it is something that the player can interact with sensibly and we can explain as a part of the mod's mechanics. So it can be a concept that we're ok with.


I don't think the unique boosting the Sister pushes Malkier toward having a UU Aes Sedai. It still feels very much a part of the Warder's awesomeness, because that Sister only becomes better when they gain the True Blade as their Warder. It also goes a ways to making a single unit UU more worthwhile in that he can have more presence in a single turn by affecting the Sister who bonded him. Generally I'd want to try to give him some kind of "aura" that affects nearby units, but the Warder presents a unique way to affect another unit in a powerful and unusual way that matches up with the mechanics and flavor.


Also would we want to be even more direct and only allow Blue and Yellow Sisters to create True Blades? (Or even really direct, only allow Blues to create them and Yellows to rebond them if the Blue Sister dies. That should probably be an achievement, not a mechanic.)

yeah, that distinction was deliberate, though of course I'm not married to it. The Culture was a "congrats, you are brave and have lots of blight nearby." The Prestige is "congrats, you're hardcore and are trying to actually farm this hell."

Cool, that's fine. Making Prestige more limited is probably a good call as well. Just wanted to make sure it was intentional!

ok, there was a momentary brain fart here, when I made this. I imagined that when the blight spreads, you lose your territory. That's not the case, so it makes your deletion certainly apt.

The "Remains in effect even if the Blight expands..." line is redundant with the fact that it can be constructed on Blight...

That said, what happens if you lose the territory through a razed city or something - is the Fort still usable by anybody? What happens to Citadels?

I'm reconsidering this now - should this just apply to all non-Shadowspawn civs all the time? It seems like that will make this a lot easier for players to reason about. We should probably restrict it so it doesn't help civs that are at war with Malkier (don't want their Improvements to help their enemies).

It probably also doesn't need to replace the Fort. I can see why we might want to, but replacing Improvements isn't something that's done elsewhere and this doesn't have to supersede the Fort in all situations.

cool. Agreed, though we probably shouldn't leave those as the *only* options.

On that note, a start bias is just that, a bias - not a guarantee. I think we need to be careful to not go all-in on the blight (or even shadowspawn) stuff here. I think Blight can be a portion of the Uniques, of course, but I'd feel better if they weren't totally useless if you were placed on the equator. That would be far worse than, say, England getting landlocked on a normal map - city number two is still reasonably easy to make coastal.

True, but Malkier is also free to settle their additional cities near the Blight. If there's no Blight available to settle near, then that's rather like England on the Great Plains map. They aren't penalized (like the restrictions we briefly considered for the Aiel of stuff that only worked on desert) they're just lacking their bonuses, which is more manageable.

I do agree that Blight shouldn't be our only options though. I just think it would be fine if we ended up with a set that was quite dependent on Blight.

How does that effect Tower of the Crane, in your opinion? Right now, that building has zero benefit outside of blight-adjacent cities (which even if you spawn next to the Blight, Malkier is likely to have a few of). Should we add an additional bonus as well?

I figure it still has the default EXP1 EXP bonus, so it will still have that utility in non-Blight cities. Like the Seanchan courthouse replacement, I think it's fine if it's only better than the default in its intended circumstances.

hmm... Interesting. I think this might be a little too powerful. I'm not sure though. The barbs pillage my sh*t all the time... that'd be a lot of units. I'm not sure it'd be abused, but as you say, it definitely could be. Also, it does depend on the enemy, which is a little lamer... Considering the worry of us disadvantaging non-blight players above, I'm tempted to red or magenta this one. I won't yet.

I think the dependency on another player in Stand Against the Shadow is much less of a problem than ones that depend on other actual civilizations. Those civs might have strategies that lead them away from whatever the action is that a given unique requires (or they may purposefully adopt such strategies due to the presence of the unique). However, the Shadowspawn civ won't do that. It will always try to kill all of the players it can get its units in range of, which will invariably involve pillaging some of their tiles.

And like above, we wouldn't be disadvantaging non-Blight players, we would be not-advantaging them, which I think is a key difference.

I do agree that power is a concern on this one though. It will generate a lot of units. And that may actually become a burden - lots of units cost lots of Gold. Which will lead to Malkier using its military more aggressively - either against other players (pushing Domination, one of our intended VCs) or against the Blight (ties in with the flavor). It will lead to them fighting more with waves of newly-spawned units than highly trained (lots of EXP, many promotions) units, which I think is what Malkier's flavor promotes? EXP bonuses are handed out so often in CiV though, that I'm reluctant to make that Malkier's bonus.

My thoughts on this one's hero-ness (and multipless) are identical to above.

I suggest a change below. I understand why you made it light-leaning, but it just as soon couldn't be. I should say, in general, that I've enjoyed how several of these (all?) abilities have been LB related, while remaining quite indirectly related, and certainly they've all remained side agnostic. This one throws that out in general, with its more literal final bonus, but the side-specific nature is a step further.

I'm not demanding it, but I do think it might be better to adjust this so it's side-agnostic. I can imagine a parallel world where New Spring happens, but then Moaraine ends up a Black sister and... there goes Lan. I'd say if you're shadow, this should work against the light (and shadowspawn). I'd venture to say that if you're neutral, it still works against shadow, but only shadow (though I could maybe be persuaded that it'd work for nobody).

Originally, I was going to say that the bonus against Shadow civs doesn't really tilt very far Light - the bonus that matters for 90% of the game is the Shadowspawn bonus - and that it makes a lot of flavor sense. And that arguably the Shadowspawn bonus already tilts Light in the same way that an against-Shadow bonus does, in that because Shadow players make peace with the Shadowspawn player, it becomes useless if you pick the Shadow side of the LB. And I think those are still good points.

However, I'm realizing now that a Shadow bonus is actually useful to Shadow players too. It actually makes this ability more symmetrical, because Shadow players are at war with each other as well as the Light during the LB. The Shadowspawn bonus is guaranteed to be useless for Shadow players during the LB, but a bonus-against-Shadow-declared actually can be useful for them.

The issue with that is the flavor of it. A bonus against Shadow players is clearly driven by "Light flavor" but is still effective when fighting for the Shadow, which doesn't seem to make too much sense. Though I could see us inverting it for Shadow players, like you suggest, and making the ability a bonus against Light players if you declare for the Shadow.

It's also worth noting that Sisters and their Warders get juggled if the player declares for the Shadow and the Tower isn't Turned. We can make it a part of this unit's mechanics (and any single-unit Warder replacement) that said juggling doesn't affect this specific unit, but it's something we should decide to do intentionally.

I've been playing a fair bit of Reaper of Souls lately, and this feels a lot like the item sets in Diablo...

This one certainly amps up the "replacement weirdness" discussed above, and its less avoidable - if you replace Culture 4, you'd actually only be replacing Culture 4 for seven of your cities, the others would have regular culture 4...

Also, we'd described Malkier as being Tall before. We're not stuck to that, but I don't think the other Uniques are disharmonious with that. This one kind of is - in fact, more than most UBs, it really pushes you to have 7 cities, which is certainly rather wide.

I like the "set" bonus idea, and think there is a way to make it work elsewhere, but I'm not sure this is the place for it. Maganeta'ing, though I considered redding.

I actually figured that they would be unable to build any more Culture4 once they'd reached the 7 (so they could build the national wonder then, regardless of how many cities they had left, which is a kind of ancillary bonus of such a set system), to avoid the non-replacement-buildings-still-used quandary. I think we can afford to allow the replacement and the normal unit to co-exist for Warders because of Warders' own inherent uniqueness, but on a normal building like this I wouldn't be inclined to allow them to be owned by the same civ side by side.

However, what you're saying about Wideness makes a lot of sense, and this would push Malkier too Wide. I'm going to mark it red because of that.

I do agree about the "set" of buildings though, I like the idea! I'll keep it in mind if it fits better elsewhere.

Hmm.... I'm not 100% sure on the slowed-natural growth. How does growth normally work? Does it go for good tiles first? If so, then in most cases Blight would be pretty low priority in all cases, so we might not need to do much more than that.

Yes, it goes for good tiles first. I think we decided to straight up disallow Culture spreading (and possibly also purchasing) of Blight tiles though. Not that that's not changeable, but I think it's still a good idea - the Shadowspawn "owns" that territory.

If that is the case, then I'm not sure I'm much a fan of this UB. It seems rather niche. I see what you're saying about it combo-ing well with other abilities but Wonders and Uniques in BNW related to buying tiles always seem so underwhelming. Is that the American UA? Yeah, america is great because of their UUs, not the UA...

I think the difficulty with the American UA is that it doesn't go far enough. It also isn't granting access to a tile type that's not normally available and provides the civ a unique benefit that others don't receive. America's discount is only 25%, but I'm thinking that these tiles would cost like 25 Gold (all the way out, any distance) for the whole game. Later on, Malkier should be able to purchase tons of these. (I even considered suggesting they cost just 1 Gold, but that seems a bit far.) And America's discount is "taking up" a part of their UA bonus, but this is a building that you can choose to build only where it's needed, rather than squandering a civ-wide bonus where it doesn't matter. (Plus it's also a defensive building, which will likely be needed in cities near the Blight for its city-strength bonus anyway, and otherwise has equivalent utility.)

The new Hadori unit is a UU version of Edge of the World. Kind of underwhelming.

Agreed, on a single unit this is a lot less powerful. I don't think it competes with our other options.

The Holdfast is a UB version of Stand Against the shadow. Somewhat straitforward, though it isn't shadowspawn linked.

A Shadowspawn link is probably a good idea, because this is significantly stronger than Stand Against the Shadow as it is, which we already have concerns about. It does need to be constructed, but going straight for (or purchasing) EXP2 would be a call with this ability.

I like how the ability has translated well into a UB though! Gives us a good alternative option for fitting the mechanic into any given set.

hmm... that's actually I got for now! Honestly, though, I feel like we have some pretty good stuff to work with on Malkier. It's probably a good idea to sit on it for another few, but I'm feeling pretty good about this selection, and not sure how many more ideas I'll have..

I don't have anything new this evening either, but unfortunately I didn't get any time to brainstorm today! I should have more tomorrow!



Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Guestright, all units of civilizations you grant Open Borders to receive full healing, you receive +X global culture per turn for every non-enemy military unit passing through your territory, as well as +Y prestige against that civilization (after <tech>).
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Hadori Cavalry (Blight), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and tundra, does not lose HP while in the Blight.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +W Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Seven Towers, replaces CultureX (one of the later ones), only 7 can be built in your civilization, Blight provides +X Culture and +Y Prestige (after <tech>). When all 7 are constructed, the Prestige output of those cities is multiplied by Y.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast, replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged.

UIs:

• Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn of the Blight.

Also, total aside from Malkier, with all this talk of Warders and Bonding and such, I've had an idea for another achievement:

As Andor, use a Green Ajah Sister to bond one of the Heroes of Horn as a Warder.

Sound good?

 

[counterpoint]

I'd probably go with axe. It's dependent on behavior of other players that's not particularly reliable and is easily avoidable on their part in most cases.

fine with me.

Very good call, that would be good since it's much more recognizable Malkieri flavor. We'd need to work out the flavor dissonance with multiple Lans somehow though. More on that below!

right, though I do think this might be kind of a thing with several points in our game. see: Min, Hurin, Perrin, Mat. These things are either wholly unique or so rare as to be functionally so, yet we're putting them into the game (sniffers only possibly). I know Lan-Moaraine is another level, since it's a relationship, not a power, but still, we're setting up flavor-breaking multiplicity as is, so...

I think the damage will be its own mitigating factor, most units can only survive 5 or 6 rounds of combat before they die, even in favorable circumstances (unfavorable would only be 2 or 3 before they die), and it will otherwise be easier to understand. But if we find it's too powerful, then we can switch it over to disallowing other attacks once the Shadowspawn attacks have "started" for the turn. I think the two will be the same in most practical circumstances - there won't often be multiple Shadowspawn and non-Shadowspawn enemy units all within movement range of this unit within a single turn.

I'm fine with this.

Ooh, I know what Cleave is! A friend of mine played a Barbarian (Fighter?) that used it. It was seriously good at level 1. Shame we didn't keep that group together!

as I recall, Supreme cleave (which is not available at level 1) is ridiculous - something like if you make a kill, you can immediately make another attack, and if you make a kill, another attack... etc., indefinitely, *and* you can move a yard in between attacks or something. i think, theoretically, you could traverse the world in one combat round using that ability.

Woops! This was supposed to go in the quote block above! Luckily my suggestion of Surviving King is similar to my question here, so I'll respond to that. Though after you read what I say about Surviving King, I'd still be interested in what you think about this question ("Should this apply to Shadow-declared civs too?") to Hadori Cavalry (swarm).

good question, but a moot question, I think - Hadori cavalry will be obsolete by the time the LB starts. The blight is encroaching during that era, so shadowspawn-dominance is useful. If we made the ability a keep-on-upgrade promotion, then it'd last the LB, but still that wouldn't likely suggest it should apply for Shadow players.

However, I think the hero unit thing is more challenging. Mainly because I think our two goals are in conflict: not having "hero units" and making a single unit good enough to take up a whole UU slot for a civ.

While I did suggest it below with Surviving King, I'm thinking now that replacing all of the Warders is probably not a great idea. CiV embraces absurdity, but only through "combination" - creating situations that that are paradoxical based on our knowledge of history. (The Aztec Great General Hernan Cortez, for example.) But we'd be creating a nonsensical situation (multiple instances of the same character) in every game with Malkier, which doesn't strike me as the same kind of thing.

The other alternative, of course, is to be fine with the notion of hero units. The Dragon and the Forsaken do already stand apart as "hero units", even if they are more generally available than a UU. The Aes Sedai and Warders are hero-esque, in that they stay perpetually up to date with other units without needing to be upgraded and have a bunch of special powers. (Though, again, more generally available.)

However, I could see this mechanic of hero-like units being something we "allow" as a unique. We might not have it in any other civs' uniques (though we would consider it, as appropriate), but it is something that the player can interact with sensibly and we can explain as a part of the mod's mechanics. So it can be a concept that we're ok with.

I'm not clear from this which of these alternatives you prefer. You make good points... on both sides!

I share you hesitation about hero units, for sure - I don't think rationale needs to be stated, as I think we feel similarly. However, you do make a good point about other civs potentially giving us another reason to add this as an overarching mechanic. To that end, I feel like we should keep these units in the running for the time being (if they pass the same tests as any unit, that is), and not commit either way adopting or disallowing the mechanic. I don't imagine that many civs will pop up that suggest hero-ish units, so I'm guessing we won't go with that here, but if I'm wrong, and enough do pop up, that concept could be established as a feature of the mod in general.

I don't think the unique boosting the Sister pushes Malkier toward having a UU Aes Sedai. It still feels very much a part of the Warder's awesomeness, because that Sister only becomes better when they gain the True Blade as their Warder. It also goes a ways to making a single unit UU more worthwhile in that he can have more presence in a single turn by affecting the Sister who bonded him. Generally I'd want to try to give him some kind of "aura" that affects nearby units, but the Warder presents a unique way to affect another unit in a powerful and unusual way that matches up with the mechanics and flavor.

yeah, that's fine. I don't the +1 range ability - that's what feels like a UU Aes Sedai, to me, because in some ways, that makes the Sister the more exciting unique of the pair. I want to propose a more moaraine-aligned alternate below, but i can't think of one!

Also would we want to be even more direct and only allow Blue and Yellow Sisters to create True Blades? (Or even really direct, only allow Blues to create them and Yellows to rebond them if the Blue Sister dies. That should probably be an achievement, not a mechanic.)

I would say no to the first two... waaaay too specific and nichey. Achievement fine, though! Achievement for having his bond passed from a blue to a green, and then to a yellow (and then killing the sharan shadow-aligned wyld?)!

I'm reconsidering this now - should this just apply to all non-Shadowspawn civs all the time? It seems like that will make this a lot easier for players to reason about. We should probably restrict it so it doesn't help civs that are at war with Malkier (don't want their Improvements to help their enemies).

It probably also doesn't need to replace the Fort. I can see why we might want to, but replacing Improvements isn't something that's done elsewhere and this doesn't have to supersede the Fort in all situations.

I guess Im' fine with what you suggest above, though I'm not completely clear on what you mean. Ar eyou saying that, for instance, four different civs (non-enemies) could all surround the Tower and gain this bonus, or that it would have to be "controlled" by any given non-shadowspawn civ?

As far as the Fort - what specific use would the fort still have?

True, but Malkier is also free to settle their additional cities near the Blight. If there's no Blight available to settle near, then that's rather like England on the Great Plains map. They aren't penalized (like the restrictions we briefly considered for the Aiel of stuff that only worked on desert) they're just lacking their bonuses, which is more manageable.

I do agree that Blight shouldn't be our only options though. I just think it would be fine if we ended up with a set that was quite dependent on Blight.

Eh... I do think this isn't the same as the GP map. On a normal map, its pretty easy to get to water. On a normal map, it's pretty reasonable to either end up on the equator, or else end up on an island that has no blight at all. That seems more limiting. I think where we end up is similar, but I'm inclined to be a little more conservative about this, I think.

I think the dependency on another player in Stand Against the Shadow is much less of a problem than ones that depend on other actual civilizations. Those civs might have strategies that lead them away from whatever the action is that a given unique requires (or they may purposefully adopt such strategies due to the presence of the unique). However, the Shadowspawn civ won't do that. It will always try to kill all of the players it can get its units in range of, which will invariably involve pillaging some of their tiles.

ok. I see the point.

And like above, we wouldn't be disadvantaging non-Blight players, we would be not-advantaging them, which I think is a key difference.

I do agree that power is a concern on this one though. It will generate a lot of units. And that may actually become a burden - lots of units cost lots of Gold. Which will lead to Malkier using its military more aggressively - either against other players (pushing Domination, one of our intended VCs) or against the Blight (ties in with the flavor). It will lead to them fighting more with waves of newly-spawned units than highly trained (lots of EXP, many promotions) units, which I think is what Malkier's flavor promotes? EXP bonuses are handed out so often in CiV though, that I'm reluctant to make that Malkier's bonus.

the big-untrained-military aspect of this is very anti-flavorful, IMO. I'm making an adjustment.

Originally, I was going to say that the bonus against Shadow civs doesn't really tilt very far Light - the bonus that matters for 90% of the game is the Shadowspawn bonus - and that it makes a lot of flavor sense. And that arguably the Shadowspawn bonus already tilts Light in the same way that an against-Shadow bonus does, in that because Shadow players make peace with the Shadowspawn player, it becomes useless if you pick the Shadow side of the LB. And I think those are still good points.

They are good points, but not flawless points.

It's true that the shadow civ aspect of this is only applicable to the late game, but since this is an "LB civ," that is *the* part of the game.

More importantly, shadowspawn stuff isn't useless if you pick the Shadow. You are at war with shadow players, and shadow players can build shadowspawn (some powerful ones if you're shadowy enough), and presumably might go to war with you. This doesn't go against your larger point, though.

However, I'm realizing now that a Shadow bonus is actually useful to Shadow players too. It actually makes this ability more symmetrical, because Shadow players are at war with each other as well as the Light during the LB. The Shadowspawn bonus is guaranteed to be useless for Shadow players during the LB, but a bonus-against-Shadow-declared actually can be useful for them.

again, by no means is the shadowspawn guaranteed to be useless for shadowplayers during the LB.

To your larger point, though, I don't at all think everybody getting the against-shadow bonus is *more* symmetrical than if the bonus flipped. Getting a light bonus as a shadow player - against civs you are guaranteed to be fighting with - is far more directly comparable to a shadow bonus as a light player, than a shadow bonus as a shadow player, which you might find useful, depending only civ behaviors. I'm not saying a shadow bonus isn't somewhat useful to shadow players, but there's no way we can realistically consider it as symmetrical - or more, as you state - than a light bonus would be.

The issue with that is the flavor of it. A bonus against Shadow players is clearly driven by "Light flavor" but is still effective when fighting for the Shadow, which doesn't seem to make too much sense. Though I could see us inverting it for Shadow players, like you suggest, and making the ability a bonus against Light players if you declare for the Shadow.

It's also worth noting that Sisters and their Warders get juggled if the player declares for the Shadow and the Tower isn't Turned. We can make it a part of this unit's mechanics (and any single-unit Warder replacement) that said juggling doesn't affect this specific unit, but it's something we should decide to do intentionally.

I agree with both of these points - especially the first. It certainly doesn't feel right. If we want to make a civ have a bonus against ohter shadow players, when they are shadow, I think it should be flavored as such, which wouldn't make much sense with Malkier (recall that Malkier doesn't even exist in the LB...)

the Aes Sedai thing is simply kind of a weird exception... nothing specific to say about it. It just is.

I'm having trouble determining where you've landed with this one.

I actually figured that they would be unable to build any more Culture4 once they'd reached the 7 (so they could build the national wonder then, regardless of how many cities they had left, which is a kind of ancillary bonus of such a set system), to avoid the non-replacement-buildings-still-used quandary. I think we can afford to allow the replacement and the normal unit to co-exist for Warders because of Warders' own inherent uniqueness, but on a normal building like this I wouldn't be inclined to allow them to be owned by the same civ side by side.

However, what you're saying about Wideness makes a lot of sense, and this would push Malkier too Wide. I'm going to mark it red because of that.

I do agree about the "set" of buildings though, I like the idea! I'll keep it in mind if it fits better elsewhere.

Agreed.

I think the set bonuses could be useful as a sort of national-wonder variant for wide players. Reward a player for building a certain number of a building, and all that. Make it have a bonus that somehow is fitting for wide players

Yes, it goes for good tiles first. I think we decided to straight up disallow Culture spreading (and possibly also purchasing) of Blight tiles though. Not that that's not changeable, but I think it's still a good idea - the Shadowspawn "owns" that territory.

are you sure of that? I don't disagree with the notion, necessarily, though I don't see it anywhere int he summary.

It does seem that unless we force ourselves to use the Blightborder Output, we kind of need to change this, though. Otherwise Malkier's abilities would be hard to put into use.

I think the difficulty with the American UA is that it doesn't go far enough. It also isn't granting access to a tile type that's not normally available and provides the civ a unique benefit that others don't receive. America's discount is only 25%, but I'm thinking that these tiles would cost like 25 Gold (all the way out, any distance) for the whole game. Later on, Malkier should be able to purchase tons of these. (I even considered suggesting they cost just 1 Gold, but that seems a bit far.) And America's discount is "taking up" a part of their UA bonus, but this is a building that you can choose to build only where it's needed, rather than squandering a civ-wide bonus where it doesn't matter. (Plus it's also a defensive building, which will likely be needed in cities near the Blight for its city-strength bonus anyway, and otherwise has equivalent utility.)

ok. I can leave this one alone for now. It's not particularly fun seeming, though.

Agreed, on a single unit this is a lot less powerful. I don't think it competes with our other options.

axed.

A Shadowspawn link is probably a good idea, because this is significantly stronger than Stand Against the Shadow as it is, which we already have concerns about. It does need to be constructed, but going straight for (or purchasing) EXP2 would be a call with this ability.

I like how the ability has translated well into a UB though! Gives us a good alternative option for fitting the mechanic into any given set.

I added in the better pillage conditions because I made it an X% chance to spawn instead of a guarantee. Since I proposed the X% on the other ability, that difference becomes negligible, so I'll put the shadowspawn back in.

Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, there is a X% chance that a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital
• Memories of the Golden Crane, Malkieri Legendary Epics and Relics provide an additional +1 Culture. Epics and Relics of Malkieri origin kept by foreign civilizations preserve this bonus, but also provide +1 Prestige for Malkier towards the keeping civilization.

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +V Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast, replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged.

UIs:

• Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn of the Blight.

I feel pretty good about this set, though I do feel like we should have another UA just to give us an additional option.... though I suspect that's because I'm being influenced by our previous civs. Three UA options, all rather different, is pretty good, actually.

I'm noticing now though that we did lose our Culture UA. A weird one added in...

Memories of the Golden Crane. The idea here is that people remember the tales of Malkier. Other people want to harvest your relics and such... but you benefit from them doing so. Not sure if the numbers line up well here, it's the big idea more than the specifics.

As far as locks, I do think something Blight-related should be a lock. Additionally, some kind of UU, though that's probably obvious given the number of options. I suspect Hadori Cavalry are a frontrunner for survival, though I can't call them a lock. I could definitely see us going 2 UUs and a UB/UI.

Also, total aside from Malkier, with all this talk of Warders and Bonding and such, I've had an idea for another achievement:

As Andor, use a Green Ajah Sister to bond one of the Heroes of Horn as a Warder.

Sound good?

hmm.... I think that probably won't work. Don't the Heroes disappear after X turns? I know there's a Thread that rips Hawkwing from the pattern (and other heroes), if that one survives (it may not), but otherwise bonding one and getting a free permanent warder out of it seems cheap. If you mean bonding a ripped-from-the-pattern-one, fine, I guess... Though, honestly that would be awful, since you'd be taking a really powerful unit (uh, a literal hero unit... that may be problematic) and turning it into a presumably less powerful warder. I guess by that notion, you could do the same even if they are short term, but that seems an unfair way to get a free warder (unless he disappears after a few turns, and which point there... is no point)

 

[S3rgeus]

right, though I do think this might be kind of a thing with several points in our game. see: Min, Hurin, Perrin, Mat. These things are either wholly unique or so rare as to be functionally so, yet we're putting them into the game (sniffers only possibly). I know Lan-Moaraine is another level, since it's a relationship, not a power, but still, we're setting up flavor-breaking multiplicity as is, so...

I don't think it's as much of a flavor problem in those cases though. For all of them, we're generalizing accessibility to a power of some kind, whereas Lan doesn't really have any special powers. His strengths come from who he is as a person, and having multiples of that is much more flavorfully difficult, I'd say.

For those examples, Min's abilities are particularly of interest to the Seanchan, implying they may have seen something of it before or have some lore based on the generality of that ability. Hurin, as you've noted, is a Sniffer which is already a more general concept. We know Perrin's abilities aren't specific to him (because of Elyas), so it makes sense that there could be others/more in other timelines. Mat's tactical abilities are given by the Finn, which they could presumably give to anyone. The probability stuff less so, but it's still an "ability" rather than the status of Mat as a person.

as I recall, Supreme cleave (which is not available at level 1) is ridiculous - something like if you make a kill, you can immediately make another attack, and if you make a kill, another attack... etc., indefinitely, *and* you can move a yard in between attacks or something. i think, theoretically, you could traverse the world in one combat round using that ability.

Yeah, Cleave in 5e is a bit different (actually it might have been unlocked at level 2 or 3), but it's the same gist: you can attack again if you kill an enemy with the attack. I think it has limited uses per round though (possibly only 1). There might be better Cleaves in 5e, but I've never played with a warrior class to high enough level to see.

good question, but a moot question, I think - Hadori cavalry will be obsolete by the time the LB starts. The blight is encroaching during that era, so shadowspawn-dominance is useful. If we made the ability a keep-on-upgrade promotion, then it'd last the LB, but still that wouldn't likely suggest it should apply for Shadow players.

The Hadori Cavalry will only be obsolete if Malkier is the one racing ahead and triggering the LB. If the LB is triggered by half or more players reaching Era 8 then it's quite possible that it would still be Malkier's most up to date unit, and is even more likely if the LB is triggered by another player pulling far ahead and reaching Era 9.

And if we end up pulling the LB back to be triggered earlier, then it will definitely not be obsolete. In either case, it would act like a "recovery" mechanic for Malkier, which I think is quite good and it fits their target victory condition. It's also not nearly strong enough to be blue shelling another player who wins.

Whether it should benefit Shadow or opposing-Alignment is the discussion below, but I think an effective LB bonus would make sense on this guy.

I'm not clear from this which of these alternatives you prefer. You make good points... on both sides!

I share you hesitation about hero units, for sure - I don't think rationale needs to be stated, as I think we feel similarly. However, you do make a good point about other civs potentially giving us another reason to add this as an overarching mechanic. To that end, I feel like we should keep these units in the running for the time being (if they pass the same tests as any unit, that is), and not commit either way adopting or disallowing the mechanic. I don't imagine that many civs will pop up that suggest hero-ish units, so I'm guessing we won't go with that here, but if I'm wrong, and enough do pop up, that concept could be established as a feature of the mod in general.

There's some more detail on hero units below, but I think between the two choices, the hero unit is the better approach here.

yeah, that's fine. I don't the +1 range ability - that's what feels like a UU Aes Sedai, to me, because in some ways, that makes the Sister the more exciting unique of the pair. I want to propose a more moaraine-aligned alternate below, but i can't think of one!

I can sort of see that, but it still feels like a property of the Warder unit to me, because he confers that bonus on the Sister.

I would say no to the first two... waaaay too specific and nichey. Achievement fine, though! Achievement for having his bond passed from a blue to a green, and then to a yellow (and then killing the sharan shadow-aligned wyld?)!

Oo, the Wyld bit is a good achievement as well! Dependent on two UUs we haven't finalized yet, but I'll record it in red.

Achievement for bond passing sounds good too!

I guess Im' fine with what you suggest above, though I'm not completely clear on what you mean. Ar eyou saying that, for instance, four different civs (non-enemies) could all surround the Tower and gain this bonus, or that it would have to be "controlled" by any given non-shadowspawn civ?

I'm saying that wherever it is built, if that tile is owned by any player, then the healing + not damaged by Blight aura works for all units that are owned by players not at war with the Improvement's owner. If it's on unclaimed land, then anyone who isn't a Shadowspawn, I'd say.

As far as the Fort - what specific use would the fort still have?

You may not want to confer the healing bonus to other civs for some reason. Even if the uses are very tangential, it doesn't seem like this needs to replace the Fort, so I'd avoid replacing Improvements since that's not a mechanic that exists elsewhere. If we have another unique Improvement that we definitely want to replace a baseline Improvement, I'd revisit this at that point.

Eh... I do think this isn't the same as the GP map. On a normal map, its pretty easy to get to water. On a normal map, it's pretty reasonable to either end up on the equator, or else end up on an island that has no blight at all. That seems more limiting. I think where we end up is similar, but I'm inclined to be a little more conservative about this, I think.

I'm not so sure, I believe the plan was to make all of the mapscripts have Blight on them (seems quite necessary for the TW and LB to work). Unless the player explicitly disables Blight (at which point, Malkier, a civ based around Blight, being worse off seems totally fine), Blight will be available on a lot more map types than oceans are. Oceans may be easier to stumble onto on some map types, but Blight is also at predictable locations (poles).

ok. I see the point.

the big-untrained-military aspect of this is very anti-flavorful, IMO. I'm making an adjustment.

I agree on this being unflavorful. Your change makes this more balanceable, which is good, but doesn't seem to address the big-untrained-military aspect.

I'm not sure how to modify an ability that spawns units that doesn't encourage large quantities of untrained units though.

They are good points, but not flawless points.

It's true that the shadow civ aspect of this is only applicable to the late game, but since this is an "LB civ," that is *the* part of the game.

More importantly, shadowspawn stuff isn't useless if you pick the Shadow. You are at war with shadow players, and shadow players can build shadowspawn (some powerful ones if you're shadowy enough), and presumably might go to war with you. This doesn't go against your larger point, though.

again, by no means is the shadowspawn guaranteed to be useless for shadowplayers during the LB.

Right, this is a good point about Shadowspawn. It's not totally useless to Shadow civs, but it is dramatically less useful than it is to Light civs. Shadow-declared civs will only have time to intersperse some Shadowspawn units into their armies - they need have a standing army when the LB starts and can't start building Shadowspawn until they actually declare (and less Shadow-y players are locked out of the more powerful Shadowspawn unit types). Light civs are literally fending off waves of Shadowspawn units from the Shadowspawn civ. Bonuses against Shadowspawn seem to me to be clearly Light-leaning during the LB, both in flavor and mechanics. And I'm totally fine with that, and such a bonus is clearly equally useful to everyone (influenced by geography, not Alignment) in the whole game leading up the LB. But the fact that Shadowspawn bonuses lean so clearly Light and we're fine with those means we shouldn't discount against-Shadow abilities, because it's actually a less severe mechanical preference for Light.

To your larger point, though, I don't at all think everybody getting the against-shadow bonus is *more* symmetrical than if the bonus flipped. Getting a light bonus as a shadow player - against civs you are guaranteed to be fighting with - is far more directly comparable to a shadow bonus as a light player, than a shadow bonus as a shadow player, which you might find useful, depending only civ behaviors. I'm not saying a shadow bonus isn't somewhat useful to shadow players, but there's no way we can realistically consider it as symmetrical - or more, as you state - than a light bonus would be.

I'm not saying that a Shadow-bonus is more symmetrical than flipping the bonus, my comparison is between the against-Shadowspawn bonus and the against-Shadow-declared bonus. I agree that the flipped bonus is more symmetrical than either, but we're accepting the Shadowspawn bonus as fine even though it's mechanically less symmetrical than an against-Shadow-declared bonus.

I agree with both of these points - especially the first. It certainly doesn't feel right. If we want to make a civ have a bonus against ohter shadow players, when they are shadow, I think it should be flavored as such, which wouldn't make much sense with Malkier (recall that Malkier doesn't even exist in the LB...)

I do agree that the flavor is a major problem on this one. Being good against Shadow on a unit that evokes Lan is clearly inspired by his Light-driven flavor from the books. There's some mileage in a Shadow civ manipulating him to fight other Shadow civs in a kind of double-agent approach, but it's a bit weak. Related to what I mentioned above, the flipped bonus resolves this flavor conflict, so I'd be inclined to go with that.

the Aes Sedai thing is simply kind of a weird exception... nothing specific to say about it. It just is.

I can see two sides to this. Mechanically, we don't want to punish Malkier for having a Warder UU just because some other mechanic removes some of your Sisters/Warders based on randomness. That's not cool. But also, the flavor of why some of a civ's Sisters and Warders leave when they declare for the Shadow is that those Sisters and Warders, while controlled by that player in CiV mechanics, are truly agents of the Tower and have their own independent positions on the Light and Shadow of everything. A given Sister-Warder pair that happens to be a UU Warder should be able to equally make that flavorful decision, manifested in the chance of them leaving. This guarantee that such a unit would remain with the host civ's choice flies in the face of why that system works.

Not sure which way to go. Arguably, I think our hands are a bit tied by the mechanics - it's too punishing to let the UU disappear. In practice, most players will just think they got lucky since they won't play tons of games as Malkier to realize it never happens. (Unless we actually point out that it won't happen in the unit's description. Which is... probably a thing we should do, if that's the case.)

I'm having trouble determining where you've landed with this one.

I agree with your flavor assessment that the flipped bonus is the best fit on this UU. Most of the stuff about Shadow-declared things above is the more general case - if we have a flavorful way to have an always anti-Shadow bonus (characters like Padan Fain come to mind, there are probably others) that isn't embedded in Light flavor providing that bonus, then an against-Shadow-declared bonus makes a lot of sense.

are you sure of that? I don't disagree with the notion, necessarily, though I don't see it anywhere int he summary.

You're right, this should be in a summary. I did some digging, and if we take a quick sojourn back to October of 2014, we discussed this there. (Search for the word "gamesmanship" to find the relevant section.) My next response to the relevant part was basically, "yeah, cool!" (We have been doing this for such a long time!)

It's worth noting that I don't think we went into any detail on it being actual enemy territory. I don't think the intent was it to be an actual major civ border, but instead that for the purpose of Culture expansion, it be treated like a border. We also discussed the potential for a late game building/tech/wonder that could allow civs to expand into the Blight.

It does seem that unless we force ourselves to use the Blightborder Output, we kind of need to change this, though. Otherwise Malkier's abilities would be hard to put into use.

Any of the UAs could also allow Malkier's Culture to spread into Blight as normal (if we use that, we probably wouldn't use Blightborder Outpost as well). So we don't have to use Blightborder Outpost if we leave this the same, it's just one way of addressing it.

Related to how this connects to the above discussion of Malkier having bonuses from Blight tiles - do we still like the general treatment of Blight disallowing civs from expanding into it? I think it still sounds like a good idea and will make Malkier's Blight bonuses even more unique. It just means some aspect of Malkier's uniques will need to allow them to circumvent that usual expansion restriction.

ok. I can leave this one alone for now. It's not particularly fun seeming, though.

I actually disagree about the fun aspect. A big aspect of the fun element of a lot of uniques is realizing where the situations are that make them impactful and powerful for your civ. If Malkier can work Blight tiles for lots of Prestige (or any other bonus), then there's an "oh, wow!" moment when the player realizes they can combine this UB with that Prestige to win the game. I wouldn't be inclined to let America's disappointing UA affect our impressions of the utility of tile-purchasing in general, because this one, for example, could let the player suddenly buy like 10 tiles all at once.

I added in the better pillage conditions because I made it an X% chance to spawn instead of a guarantee. Since I proposed the X% on the other ability, that difference becomes negligible, so I'll put the shadowspawn back in.

Sounds good! I've proposed a similar change to the UB. (I think you may have intended to add it to the UB here?)

I feel pretty good about this set, though I do feel like we should have another UA just to give us an additional option.... though I suspect that's because I'm being influenced by our previous civs. Three UA options, all rather different, is pretty good, actually.

Yeah, I feel like we've gotten to a good place quite quickly with Malkier.

I'm noticing now though that we did lose our Culture UA. A weird one added in...

Memories of the Golden Crane. The idea here is that people remember the tales of Malkier. Other people want to harvest your relics and such... but you benefit from them doing so. Not sure if the numbers line up well here, it's the big idea more than the specifics.

Ooh, I like it! Caring about the nationality of the LW even when it's abroad is something we haven't seen before but works really well with the mechanics. I think it would be fine for this to provide Malkier with just +1 Prestige (possibly more than 1, I'll change it to X), rather than only against that civ specifically. (Otherwise the +1 Culture cancels out the Prestige, but even if it didn't I think it's still not too strong even if it applies to everyone.)

It is something that the human player can abuse though. The way the AI trades LWs (badly, it trades them badly) doesn't give the AI a chance to refuse any trades, so a human Malkier player could load up all of the other civs with LWs for big time bonuses. This would be fine if we change the way that LW trading works (because it's ridiculous anyway), but that's a significant body of work.

As far as locks, I do think something Blight-related should be a lock. Additionally, some kind of UU, though that's probably obvious given the number of options. I suspect Hadori Cavalry are a frontrunner for survival, though I can't call them a lock. I could definitely see us going 2 UUs and a UB/UI.

Agreed, Blight-related is a good lock. And agreed, there should be at least one UU, and I also see 2 as likely.


Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles. Malkier's borders can expand into Blight as if it were normal terrain.
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, there is a X% chance that a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital
• Memories of the Golden Crane, Malkieri Legendary Epics and Relics provide an additional +1 Culture. Epics and Relics of Malkieri origin kept by foreign civilizations preserve this bonus, but also provide +X Prestige for Malkier towards the keeping civilization.

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +V Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast, replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged by a Shadowspawn unit.

UIs:

• Border Tower, replaces the Fort, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn from the Blight.

If I were to pick a set at this stage, I'd probably go with:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: True Blade
UB: Tower of the Crane

All of those are complementary bonuses that I feel work together well. The UA I feel most compelled to try to include in a second set is actually Memories of the Golden Crane (if we can sort out the human player exploit problem), because it's a really interesting avenue to the Culture victory, but it doesn't work together well with the uniques in the set above.

Something like:

UA: Memories of the Golden Crane
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Diademed Battle Lord
UI: Border Tower

Still, I feel like the latter set is less cohesive than the former. I'd be inclined to try out some new ideas for UUs and UBs if we wanted to go with Memories of the Golden Crane.

hmm.... I think that probably won't work. Don't the Heroes disappear after X turns? I know there's a Thread that rips Hawkwing from the pattern (and other heroes), if that one survives (it may not), but otherwise bonding one and getting a free permanent warder out of it seems cheap. If you mean bonding a ripped-from-the-pattern-one, fine, I guess... Though, honestly that would be awful, since you'd be taking a really powerful unit (uh, a literal hero unit... that may be problematic) and turning it into a presumably less powerful warder. I guess by that notion, you could do the same even if they are short term, but that seems an unfair way to get a free warder (unless he disappears after a few turns, and which point there... is no point)

I thought this would be so simple.

I could see us restricting it to only the ripped-from-the-Pattern Warders, but I don't think we need to, in terms of balance. True, it would create a "free" Warder from the Hero, but it's not something that anyone can really abuse. It's a marginal bonus at best. Each Sister can only have so many Warders (just one for everyone but Green) and players won't have that many Sisters. By the time the player has actually managed to get their hands on the Horn of Valere and find a place to use it that doesn't squander all of the other Heroes if they're using one for a Warder, it would have been so much simpler to just train any old unit in any city and use that one.

But still, using one of the Ripped-from-the-Pattern heroes makes more flavorful sense for the achievement, so I'd be inclined to put the achievement on that even if we do allow players to bond the Heroes from the Horn.

As far as the hero unit being better before they became a Warder, I think that's totally fine. An achievement doesn't need to always concern itself with rewarding the player for doing well, it should reward them for doing something notable, which playing close to the flavor should qualify for.

So, two things here:

How does this achievement sound? "As Andor, use a Green Ajah Sister to bond a Hero of Horn, who has been ripped from the Pattern by a Thread, as a Warder."

And more generally, should players be able to bond the non-ripped-Hero units? (You'd think that those heroes would take the time to work out. *finger guns*)


About the Heroes of the Horn units being hero units, which we were concerned about for True Blade and Surviving King. This is a very good point. Maybe the Heroes of the Horn are already our precedent for hero units? (Hero units the concept, rather than the fact that they are Heroes in the flavor.)

 

[counterpoint]

I don't think it's as much of a flavor problem in those cases though. For all of them, we're generalizing accessibility to a power of some kind, whereas Lan doesn't really have any special powers. His strengths come from who he is as a person, and having multiples of that is much more flavorfully difficult, I'd say.

For those examples, Min's abilities are particularly of interest to the Seanchan, implying they may have seen something of it before or have some lore based on the generality of that ability. Hurin, as you've noted, is a Sniffer which is already a more general concept. We know Perrin's abilities aren't specific to him (because of Elyas), so it makes sense that there could be others/more in other timelines. Mat's tactical abilities are given by the Finn, which they could presumably give to anyone. The probability stuff less so, but it's still an "ability" rather than the status of Mat as a person.

good points. I think it's arguable, but clearly the feel of "infinite lans" is problematic.

The Hadori Cavalry will only be obsolete if Malkier is the one racing ahead and triggering the LB. If the LB is triggered by half or more players reaching Era 8 then it's quite possible that it would still be Malkier's most up to date unit, and is even more likely if the LB is triggered by another player pulling far ahead and reaching Era 9.

And if we end up pulling the LB back to be triggered earlier, then it will definitely not be obsolete. In either case, it would act like a "recovery" mechanic for Malkier, which I think is quite good and it fits their target victory condition. It's also not nearly strong enough to be blue shelling another player who wins.

Whether it should benefit Shadow or opposing-Alignment is the discussion below, but I think an effective LB bonus would make sense on this guy.

It's true that an era 7 unit could certain be in play during the LB, but it's also quite possible that it wouldn't be. those differences are largely incidental. Clearly the unit is an era 7 unit, and flavor dictates it as such - designing around it being present for the LB (era 9 in book canon) feels weird to me. That makes me not want to design it specifically around the LB.

I would argue that it does have LB use already, and that's beside the shadowspawn killing. The half movement in the Blight, makes clean up around Thakan'dar (in its defense or in assaulting it) quite good - again, especially if that is a keep-on-upgrade ability, which I'd be fine with.

There's some more detail on hero units below, but I think between the two choices, the hero unit is the better approach here.

I'm not 100% solid on this, but that also means I can't argue against it. Their both somewhat flawed IMO. You're probably right that this is the less lame approach.

I can sort of see that, but it still feels like a property of the Warder unit to me, because he confers that bonus on the Sister.

my problem is more to do with +1 Range specifically - I don't like that bonus. I'd prefer we go with something else that isn't just "turns your AS into awesomer artillery." Something related to defense or scouting or something.

I'm saying that wherever it is built, if that tile is owned by any player, then the healing + not damaged by Blight aura works for all units that are owned by players not at war with the Improvement's owner. If it's on unclaimed land, then anyone who isn't a Shadowspawn, I'd say.

hmmm, I feel like it makes it a little annoying if it's anybody you aren't fighting (when owned by malkier). Seems like it'd promote cheese strategies like having units just hanging out around the fort (you aren't Malkier) holding off choke points and being a pain in Malkier's rear. I think Malkieri units or units "Friendly" in some other ways would be better. I'm fine with it being any regular civ if it is in non-Malkieri territory.

You may not want to confer the healing bonus to other civs for some reason. Even if the uses are very tangential, it doesn't seem like this needs to replace the Fort, so I'd avoid replacing Improvements since that's not a mechanic that exists elsewhere. If we have another unique Improvement that we definitely want to replace a baseline Improvement, I'd revisit this at that point.

a minor distinction, but I don't have a problem with this, though if we tweak the who-it-heals stuff, it matters less (you'd rarely if ever do a fort)

Would it still do all the same things as a fort (defense and slowing the blight)?

I'm not so sure, I believe the plan was to make all of the mapscripts have Blight on them (seems quite necessary for the TW and LB to work). Unless the player explicitly disables Blight (at which point, Malkier, a civ based around Blight, being worse off seems totally fine), Blight will be available on a lot more map types than oceans are. Oceans may be easier to stumble onto on some map types, but Blight is also at predictable locations (poles).

again, a minor distinction, but there is a difference between civs getting unlucky on unusual maps (e.g. Polynesia on GP) and civs getting unlucky on *normal* maps. True, there will always be blight, but will there be blight on every continent?

I agree on this being unflavorful. Your change makes this more balanceable, which is good, but doesn't seem to address the big-untrained-military aspect.

I'm not sure how to modify an ability that spawns units that doesn't encourage large quantities of untrained units though.

I've proposed an alternate version of this below, which replaces the free unit with... XP!

Right, this is a good point about Shadowspawn. It's not totally useless to Shadow civs, but it is dramatically less useful than it is to Light civs. Shadow-declared civs will only have time to intersperse some Shadowspawn units into their armies - they need have a standing army when the LB starts and can't start building Shadowspawn until they actually declare (and less Shadow-y players are locked out of the more powerful Shadowspawn unit types). Light civs are literally fending off waves of Shadowspawn units from the Shadowspawn civ. Bonuses against Shadowspawn seem to me to be clearly Light-leaning during the LB, both in flavor and mechanics. And I'm totally fine with that, and such a bonus is clearly equally useful to everyone (influenced by geography, not Alignment) in the whole game leading up the LB. But the fact that Shadowspawn bonuses lean so clearly Light and we're fine with those means we shouldn't discount against-Shadow abilities, because it's actually a less severe mechanical preference for Light.

and

I'm not saying that a Shadow-bonus is more symmetrical than flipping the bonus, my comparison is between the against-Shadowspawn bonus and the against-Shadow-declared bonus. I agree that the flipped bonus is more symmetrical than either, but we're accepting the Shadowspawn bonus as fine even though it's mechanically less symmetrical than an against-Shadow-declared bonus.

AND....

I do agree that the flavor is a major problem on this one. Being good against Shadow on a unit that evokes Lan is clearly inspired by his Light-driven flavor from the books. There's some mileage in a Shadow civ manipulating him to fight other Shadow civs in a kind of double-agent approach, but it's a bit weak. Related to what I mentioned above, the flipped bonus resolves this flavor conflict, so I'd be inclined to go with that.

Whew... that's been a lot of back and forth on this topic and... I think we're in the same place. Opposite-of-Malkier is probably the best bet.

I can see two sides to this. Mechanically, we don't want to punish Malkier for having a Warder UU just because some other mechanic removes some of your Sisters/Warders based on randomness. That's not cool. But also, the flavor of why some of a civ's Sisters and Warders leave when they declare for the Shadow is that those Sisters and Warders, while controlled by that player in CiV mechanics, are truly agents of the Tower and have their own independent positions on the Light and Shadow of everything. A given Sister-Warder pair that happens to be a UU Warder should be able to equally make that flavorful decision, manifested in the chance of them leaving. This guarantee that such a unit would remain with the host civ's choice flies in the face of why that system works.

Not sure which way to go. Arguably, I think our hands are a bit tied by the mechanics - it's too punishing to let the UU disappear. In practice, most players will just think they got lucky since they won't play tons of games as Malkier to realize it never happens. (Unless we actually point out that it won't happen in the unit's description. Which is... probably a thing we should do, if that's the case.)

I think the truth is, it isn't as big a deal as we're making it out to be, since the UU can be recreated instantly. There's always the risk of losing a warder with your AS when the LB starts - so you have to make another. If you happen to lose your UU Warder... you still just make another. It seems no different to me, though it hurts more if the guy has a lot of EXP...

Did we decide that when sisters leave you, it was totally random? Should we favor the less-powerful sisters leaving you in order to compensate for this?

You're right, this should be in a summary. I did some digging, and if we take a quick sojourn back to October of 2014, we discussed this there. (Search for the word "gamesmanship" to find the relevant section.) My next response to the relevant part was basically, "yeah, cool!" (We have been doing this for such a long time!)

It's worth noting that I don't think we went into any detail on it being actual enemy territory. I don't think the intent was it to be an actual major civ border, but instead that for the purpose of Culture expansion, it be treated like a border. We also discussed the potential for a late game building/tech/wonder that could allow civs to expand into the Blight.

added to summary. Fine with it not being actual enemy territory.

Any of the UAs could also allow Malkier's Culture to spread into Blight as normal (if we use that, we probably wouldn't use Blightborder Outpost as well). So we don't have to use Blightborder Outpost if we leave this the same, it's just one way of addressing it.

Related to how this connects to the above discussion of Malkier having bonuses from Blight tiles - do we still like the general treatment of Blight disallowing civs from expanding into it? I think it still sounds like a good idea and will make Malkier's Blight bonuses even more unique. It just means some aspect of Malkier's uniques will need to allow them to circumvent that usual expansion restriction.

yeah, fine with this. Like the change you made to the first UA.

I actually disagree about the fun aspect. A big aspect of the fun element of a lot of uniques is realizing where the situations are that make them impactful and powerful for your civ. If Malkier can work Blight tiles for lots of Prestige (or any other bonus), then there's an "oh, wow!" moment when the player realizes they can combine this UB with that Prestige to win the game. I wouldn't be inclined to let America's disappointing UA affect our impressions of the utility of tile-purchasing in general, because this one, for example, could let the player suddenly buy like 10 tiles all at once.

fine with this ability surviving.

Sounds good! I've proposed a similar change to the UB. (I think you may have intended to add it to the UB here?)

yep, thanks (though I'm reconsidering the whole thing now!)

Ooh, I like it! Caring about the nationality of the LW even when it's abroad is something we haven't seen before but works really well with the mechanics. I think it would be fine for this to provide Malkier with just +1 Prestige (possibly more than 1, I'll change it to X), rather than only against that civ specifically. (Otherwise the +1 Culture cancels out the Prestige, but even if it didn't I think it's still not too strong even if it applies to everyone.)

It is something that the human player can abuse though. The way the AI trades LWs (badly, it trades them badly) doesn't give the AI a chance to refuse any trades, so a human Malkier player could load up all of the other civs with LWs for big time bonuses. This would be fine if we change the way that LW trading works (because it's ridiculous anyway), but that's a significant body of work.

your change is fine. good point.

About the AI... hmmmm... does this kill the ability (by making it too useless to the AI or too good for the humans) or can we work around it?

Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles.Malkier's borders can expand into Blight as if it were normal terrain.
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, there is a X% chance that a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital
• Memories of the Golden Crane, Malkieri Legendary Epics and Relics provide an additional +1 Culture. Epics and Relics of Malkieri origin kept by foreign civilizations preserve this bonus, but also provide +X Prestige for Malkier.

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +V Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.
• Crane Scion (culture), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, heal +X HP and gain +Y Prestige the latter bonus increasing by Z for every subsequent ally slain.
• Crane Scion (XP), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, gain +X EXP.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast (unit), replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged by a Shadowspawn unit.
• Cranes Holdfast (XP), replaces XP2, When a Shadowspawn unit pillages a tile within this city's radius, the next unit to be trained in this city receives +X EXP (cannot be stacked).

UIs:

• Border Tower, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn from the Blight. This bonus applies to any non-Shadowspawn units if the Tower is left standing outside of Malkieri territory.

In addition to the new UB described above, I also added two new UUs, which is a "normal unit" meant to represent the followers of Lan during the LB, which is why it is latter-era. This is handy for us if we want two UUs but decide against the Hero thing, so the functionality is similar to some of the heroes and UAs.

I figured we should have a culture-ready unique unit that isn't a hero. The compounding Prestige is meant to make it pack a punch, given that it exists so late in the game.

The second is much more straightforward, a UU version of my new Holdfast

If I were to pick a set at this stage, I'd probably go with:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: True Blade
UB: Tower of the Crane

All of those are complementary bonuses that I feel work together well.

Yeah, this is a pretty good set. I also like this variant of it:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Crane Scion (culture)
UB: Crane's Holdfast (XP)

I like this set because it 1) helps with Blight very much through the UA and first UU, but isn't "all in," 2) helps with the LB through the first three, but isn't side-specific, 3) doesn't rely on Hero-unit weirdness, 4) Provides for a cultural victory through the second UU, and 5) provides for a domination victory through, particularly, the last UB.

The UA I feel most compelled to try to include in a second set is actually Memories of the Golden Crane (if we can sort out the human player exploit problem), because it's a really interesting avenue to the Culture victory, but it doesn't work together well with the uniques in the set above.

Something like:

UA: Memories of the Golden Crane
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Diademed Battle Lord
UI: Border Tower

Still, I feel like the latter set is less cohesive than the former. I'd be inclined to try out some new ideas for UUs and UBs if we wanted to go with Memories of the Golden Crane.

Yeah, this one isn't quite as solid, though it still could work. I might swap in something else for either of the last two abilities, though I don't have a clear preference now.

I thought this would be so simple.

I could see us restricting it to only the ripped-from-the-Pattern Warders, but I don't think we need to, in terms of balance. True, it would create a "free" Warder from the Hero, but it's not something that anyone can really abuse. It's a marginal bonus at best. Each Sister can only have so many Warders (just one for everyone but Green) and players won't have that many Sisters. By the time the player has actually managed to get their hands on the Horn of Valere and find a place to use it that doesn't squander all of the other Heroes if they're using one for a Warder, it would have been so much simpler to just train any old unit in any city and use that one.

But still, using one of the Ripped-from-the-Pattern heroes makes more flavorful sense for the achievement, so I'd be inclined to put the achievement on that even if we do allow players to bond the Heroes from the Horn.

As far as the hero unit being better before they became a Warder, I think that's totally fine. An achievement doesn't need to always concern itself with rewarding the player for doing well, it should reward them for doing something notable, which playing close to the flavor should qualify for.

So, two things here:

How does this achievement sound? "As Andor, use a Green Ajah Sister to bond a Hero of Horn, who has been ripped from the Pattern by a Thread, as a Warder."

And more generally, should players be able to bond the non-ripped-Hero units? (You'd think that those heroes would take the time to work out. *finger guns*)

About the Heroes of the Horn units being hero units, which we were concerned about for True Blade and Surviving King. This is a very good point. Maybe the Heroes of the Horn are already our precedent for hero units? (Hero units the concept, rather than the fact that they are Heroes in the flavor.)

ok, ok, a lot here for such a minor thing! Your logic above is all very sound.

Yeah, that achievement is fine. I'd say in the interest of simplicity, "no" to bonding non-working-out hero units. I could be convinced otherwise - I'm choosing this because it seems cleanest, not because I think it'd be abused (you don't gain much by doing it). If you disagree, I'm fine with it going the different way.

So, basically done with Malkier, then? Or do you have some more?

 

[S3rgeus]

What's that!? Two posts in a day!?

It's true that an era 7 unit could certain be in play during the LB, but it's also quite possible that it wouldn't be. those differences are largely incidental. Clearly the unit is an era 7 unit, and flavor dictates it as such - designing around it being present for the LB (era 9 in book canon) feels weird to me. That makes me not want to design it specifically around the LB.

I would argue that it does have LB use already, and that's beside the shadowspawn killing. The half movement in the Blight, makes clean up around Thakan'dar (in its defense or in assaulting it) quite good - again, especially if that is a keep-on-upgrade ability, which I'd be fine with.

I don't really see this as designing it specifically around the LB, more about ensuring that the unit's bonus remains relevant for the whole time when it's likely to be relevant in the game. It is possible that it will be obsolete by then, but I'd estimate that it wouldn't be obsolete at the start of the LB more often than not.

Still, this runs up against the same flavor issue as the True Blade in having an against-Shadow-declared bonus, and this one doesn't seem to have an appropriate driver for an Alignment-flippable bonus.

my problem is more to do with +1 Range specifically - I don't like that bonus. I'd prefer we go with something else that isn't just "turns your AS into awesomer artillery." Something related to defense or scouting or something.

I feel like +1 range does have quite an impact though. What about +X sight range instead?

hmmm, I feel like it makes it a little annoying if it's anybody you aren't fighting (when owned by malkier). Seems like it'd promote cheese strategies like having units just hanging out around the fort (you aren't Malkier) holding off choke points and being a pain in Malkier's rear. I think Malkieri units or units "Friendly" in some other ways would be better. I'm fine with it being any regular civ if it is in non-Malkieri territory.

But the player doing that would be the one fighting Shadowspawn all the time then (since it's presumably been built near/adjacent to the Blight), and is effectively defending Malkier's land for them. That seems fine to me. True, the player could cheese chokepoints to confuse the AI, but they can do that anyway, anywhere on the map where there are chokepoints. Mostly it's not worth the player's time because they end up needing to move the unit(s) around all the time to keep the AI stuck. And most AI troops movements are just random "I feel I must move all my units every turn", so it would be very difficult to know when to do this to give yourself any kind of advantage.

a minor distinction, but I don't have a problem with this, though if we tweak the who-it-heals stuff, it matters less (you'd rarely if ever do a fort)

Would it still do all the same things as a fort (defense and slowing the blight)?

Yes, I think it would still do the defense and Blight-stalling stuff. Even if building a Fort is rarely a good idea against this Improvement, unless we introduce the idea of replacing Improvements for something that really needs to replace the existing Improvement, I'd be inclined to let them both exist.

again, a minor distinction, but there is a difference between civs getting unlucky on unusual maps (e.g. Polynesia on GP) and civs getting unlucky on *normal* maps. True, there will always be blight, but will there be blight on every continent?

That's up to us, we could make sure that there's Blight on every continent, if we wanted that to be the case. It would make the TW less likely to leave some civs completely unscathed.

I've proposed an alternate version of this below, which replaces the free unit with... XP!

I'm not too sure about this one. X would need to be pretty big to make this worthwhile, because it replaces a building that provides guaranteed EXP to every unit trained in this city, and the necessity for units often comes in bursts rather than stretched out. And if X is big enough to offset that limitation, I would it be a concern that Malkieri units would jump straight to the much later promotions?

Whew... that's been a lot of back and forth on this topic and... I think we're in the same place. Opposite-of-Malkier is probably the best bet.

Agreed. The discussion of against-Shadow-declared bonuses is delayed to another day!

I think the truth is, it isn't as big a deal as we're making it out to be, since the UU can be recreated instantly. There's always the risk of losing a warder with your AS when the LB starts - so you have to make another. If you happen to lose your UU Warder... you still just make another. It seems no different to me, though it hurts more if the guy has a lot of EXP...

Did we decide that when sisters leave you, it was totally random? Should we favor the less-powerful sisters leaving you in order to compensate for this?

Yeah, it was the EXP bit I worry about. If the Malkieri player has had that unit as the first Warder they made since very early in the game then he may have a lot of EXP and good promotions, so taking that away would be quite annoying.

Yeah, we decided on random (as to which Sisters were chosen - the overall proportion of Sisters lost is based on how close to being Turned the Tower got). I think it makes sense for it to be random since it's about who the Sisters are as people, rather than anything to do with their strength. The only measure of relative power we have is total EXP earned, which, while accurate in theory, isn't necessarily how players compare the utility of their own units (particularly Sisters who have varying abilities per Ajah).

Still not sure which way I prefer on this. I'm thinking I lean the same way as you, that if it does happen to hit a very high EXP True Blade, then that's too bad. The True Blade has a lot of abilities even without any EXP, so creating a new one will still regain most of that utility.

However, can they make a new one? Shadow civs don't get new Sisters unless the Tower has been Turned. Their existing Sisters will presumably already have Warders. Hmmmm...

yep, thanks (though I'm reconsidering the whole thing now!)

No changes for that reconsidering though? Seems like Crane's Holdfast (unit) is now magenta?

your change is fine. good point.

About the AI... hmmmm... does this kill the ability (by making it too useless to the AI or too good for the humans) or can we work around it?

It will still be useful for the AI because other players will naturally pick up some Malkieri LWs, even without trading. But it is very abusable by the human player unless we change the LW trading system into something completely different to what it is now. I think if we changed it we would make it better (because it is currently quite bad), but it's significant work to change it.

My gut reaction for how to change it would be to make it a part of the existing trade/diplomacy system. (So where we all trade gold and resources and votes and such.) Though the AI's valuation of LWs may have been why Firaxis decided not to do that - it's very difficult to get the AI to treat such trades reasonably. (Not giving them away for too little, not giving them to civs who can reap a lot more utility out of them, not being willing to give up too much in exchange for one the player doesn't care about, there are tons of edge cases there.)

We might be fine with it being abusable for the human, but in general we've steered clear of that. It would be a shame to miss though, because it's a really cool ability and makes a lot of sense with the concepts of how LWs should work. It's just the implementation of how LWs get traded that are working against us.

In addition to the new UB described above, I also added two new UUs, which is a "normal unit" meant to represent the followers of Lan during the LB, which is why it is latter-era. This is handy for us if we want two UUs but decide against the Hero thing, so the functionality is similar to some of the heroes and UAs.

I figured we should have a culture-ready unique unit that isn't a hero. The compounding Prestige is meant to make it pack a punch, given that it exists so late in the game.

I like it, this is a good alternative unit. In theory I really like the mechanic of triggering the ability off an adjacent unit dying. However, I think it does encourage a playstyle that's a bit problematic. The best way to play that would probably be to have a core set of units that utilize the bonus and a bunch of low-EXP fodder to die and trigger that ability. That seems like it works against the Malkieri flavor similar to how the unit spawning uniques do.

How exactly would the value of Z work? As in it just keeps getting larger over the lifetime of each unit?

The second is much more straightforward, a UU version of my new Holdfast

I like this on the UU more so than the UB because it doesn't compete directly with a guaranteed EXP boosting building and is an EXP boost that generates more EXP from a situation that would normally grant EXP anyway (war/combat with someone), so it feeds into that system quite well.

I'm finding that EXP bonuses seem like a very easy bonus to give units, so not hugely enthused about that, but not a problem I'd remove it over.


Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles.Malkier's borders can expand into Blight as if it were normal terrain.
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, there is a X% chance that a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital
• Memories of the Golden Crane, Malkieri Legendary Epics and Relics provide an additional +1 Culture. Epics and Relics of Malkieri origin kept by foreign civilizations preserve this bonus, but also provide +X Prestige for Malkier.

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +1 range and +W% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +V Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.
• Crane Scion (culture), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, heal +X HP and gain +Y Prestige, the latter bonus increasing by Z for every subsequent ally slain.
• Crane Scion (XP), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, gain +X EXP.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast (unit), replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged by a Shadowspawn unit.
• Cranes Holdfast (XP), replaces XP2, When a Shadowspawn unit pillages a tile within this city's radius, the next unit to be trained in this city receives +X EXP (cannot be stacked).

UIs:

• Border Tower, can be constructed on Blight. Friendly units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn from the Blight. This bonus applies to any non-Shadowspawn units if the Tower is left standing outside of Malkieri territory.

Yeah, this is a pretty good set. I also like this variant of it:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Crane Scion (culture)
UB: Crane's Holdfast (XP)

I like this set because it 1) helps with Blight very much through the UA and first UU, but isn't "all in," 2) helps with the LB through the first three, but isn't side-specific, 3) doesn't rely on Hero-unit weirdness, 4) Provides for a cultural victory through the second UU, and 5) provides for a domination victory through, particularly, the last UB.

I've proposed removing Crane's Holdfast (XP) above, so I'd be inclined to swap that out here, possibly for Border Tower or maybe even Crane Scion (XP) for a triple-UU approach. Though maybe a Culture UB would be good in that slot either, to complement the UU, which wouldn't push Malkier too far towards Culture overall, since a unit's utility is such a smaller area than a building.

I'm also finding I've warmed some to the hero unit approach. That's something we can make a final decision on later though.

ok, ok, a lot here for such a minor thing! Your logic above is all very sound.

Yeah, that achievement is fine. I'd say in the interest of simplicity, "no" to bonding non-working-out hero units. I could be convinced otherwise - I'm choosing this because it seems cleanest, not because I think it'd be abused (you don't gain much by doing it). If you disagree, I'm fine with it going the different way.

Awesome, all sounds good. Achievement and scrawny Heroes not being Warders noted in the misc summary.

So, basically done with Malkier, then? Or do you have some more?

Nothing more to add for Malkier, they seem to be in a good place. If you're happy with the above then I'll add them to the list.

Looks like Manetheren is up next! I'll be brainstorming for them this evening and can start us off tomorrow. (Feel free to start if you've already got ideas!)

 

[counterpoint]

What's that!? Two posts in a day!?

don't mind if I do!

I don't really see this as designing it specifically around the LB, more about ensuring that the unit's bonus remains relevant for the whole time when it's likely to be relevant in the game. It is possible that it will be obsolete by then, but I'd estimate that it wouldn't be obsolete at the start of the LB more often than not.

Still, this runs up against the same flavor issue as the True Blade in having an against-Shadow-declared bonus, and this one doesn't seem to have an appropriate driver for an Alignment-flippable bonus.

to the first point, understood. To the second, I think it's fine. The unit will begin its existence pre-LB anyways (most likely) so it should be useful at least for a bit.

I feel like +1 range does have quite an impact though. What about +X sight range instead?

my problem with +1 range is that its *too* good. That's a boon I think we want to reserve for other situations (that's why I think it distracts from the Warder's awesomeness somewhat, since it's so awesome. I think +X sight is better (though perhaps not exciting enough!) Sight is flavorful, though, in that a greater awareness of surroundings is tied to a warder's awesomeness, specifically

But the player doing that would be the one fighting Shadowspawn all the time then (since it's presumably been built near/adjacent to the Blight), and is effectively defending Malkier's land for them. That seems fine to me. True, the player could cheese chokepoints to confuse the AI, but they can do that anyway, anywhere on the map where there are chokepoints. Mostly it's not worth the player's time because they end up needing to move the unit(s) around all the time to keep the AI stuck. And most AI troops movements are just random "I feel I must move all my units every turn", so it would be very difficult to know when to do this to give yourself any kind of advantage.

yeah, I think it might be OK. It's not only available near the blight, though, so this kind of thing could happen elsewhere.

Yes, I think it would still do the defense and Blight-stalling stuff. Even if building a Fort is rarely a good idea against this Improvement, unless we introduce the idea of replacing Improvements for something that really needs to replace the existing Improvement, I'd be inclined to let them both exist.

sure.

That's up to us, we could make sure that there's Blight on every continent, if we wanted that to be the case. It would make the TW less likely to leave some civs completely unscathed.[/quote]fair enough. In any case, it doesn't look like any of our sets are Blight-overloaded, so this discussion has been sort of a waste of bandwidth, or a kind of synthetic frippery, to quote an unrelated song.

I'm not too sure about this one. X would need to be pretty big to make this worthwhile, because it replaces a building that provides guaranteed EXP to every unit trained in this city, and the necessity for units often comes in bursts rather than stretched out. And if X is big enough to offset that limitation, I would it be a concern that Malkieri units would jump straight to the much later promotions?

I think you'll reconsider once you realize how terribly confusing I wrote this the first time around. My bad. The "stacking" didn't mean that it didn't stack with the normal EXP bonus, it meant that killing multiple units wouldn't make the bonus get higher and higher. You still get the normal +10 or whatever from the armory, but if somebody pillages you get an additional +5 or 10 or whatever (but not a +50 if 5 tiles get pillaged). Once that unit is trained, the bonus reverts to zero.

That's better, right? Please reconsider - I mostly like this one, though it does rely on the actions' of others. Should it apply only the Shadowspawn?

Yeah, it was the EXP bit I worry about. If the Malkieri player has had that unit as the first Warder they made since very early in the game then he may have a lot of EXP and good promotions, so taking that away would be quite annoying.

that's true, but relatively speaking, that's true with any Warder in any civ. The Malkieri could lose a level 10 True Blade, but so could Andor (a Warder). Obviously the TB is the superior unit, but in both cases its a lot of waste.

Yeah, we decided on random (as to which Sisters were chosen - the overall proportion of Sisters lost is based on how close to being Turned the Tower got). I think it makes sense for it to be random since it's about who the Sisters are as people, rather than anything to do with their strength. The only measure of relative power we have is total EXP earned, which, while accurate in theory, isn't necessarily how players compare the utility of their own units (particularly Sisters who have varying abilities per Ajah).

Still not sure which way I prefer on this. I'm thinking I lean the same way as you, that if it does happen to hit a very high EXP True Blade, then that's too bad. The True Blade has a lot of abilities even without any EXP, so creating a new one will still regain most of that utility.

However, can they make a new one? Shadow civs don't get new Sisters unless the Tower has been Turned. Their existing Sisters will presumably already have Warders. Hmmmm...

ok, it sounds like it's tentatively settled, then

As far as making a new one, isn't it as simple as running the custom mission again? I imagine a Sister could disband her Warder, which might incur negative penalties which is a bummer - so I was figuring that maybe the "make into a True Blade or Diademed BL" mission could still be used on a preexisting Warder. Why not?

No changes for that reconsidering though? Seems like Crane's Holdfast (unit) is now magenta?

reconsidering the whole thing in the sense that I decided to target XP instead of bonus units.

It will still be useful for the AI because other players will naturally pick up some Malkieri LWs, even without trading. But it is very abusable by the human player unless we change the LW trading system into something completely different to what it is now. I think if we changed it we would make it better (because it is currently quite bad), but it's significant work to change it.

My gut reaction for how to change it would be to make it a part of the existing trade/diplomacy system. (So where we all trade gold and resources and votes and such.) Though the AI's valuation of LWs may have been why Firaxis decided not to do that - it's very difficult to get the AI to treat such trades reasonably. (Not giving them away for too little, not giving them to civs who can reap a lot more utility out of them, not being willing to give up too much in exchange for one the player doesn't care about, there are tons of edge cases there.)

We might be fine with it being abusable for the human, but in general we've steered clear of that. It would be a shame to miss though, because it's a really cool ability and makes a lot of sense with the concepts of how LWs should work. It's just the implementation of how LWs get traded that are working against us.

hmmm....

I think for now, we keep this ability on the list, as it is nice in a few ways. If it turns out that this ability is actually selected (or similar ones for other civs'), then we have a big discussion to do. Whether we "fix" the trading system or not is a big conversation, and one that would ideally be handled alone, and later (post-release?). If it turns out we hav eUniques that interact with it, we'll obviously have to dive in earlier - but without that, let's not.

I wonder if other modders have tackled this...

I like it, this is a good alternative unit. In theory I really like the mechanic of triggering the ability off an adjacent unit dying. However, I think it does encourage a playstyle that's a bit problematic. The best way to play that would probably be to have a core set of units that utilize the bonus and a bunch of low-EXP fodder to die and trigger that ability. That seems like it works against the Malkieri flavor similar to how the unit spawning uniques do.

How exactly would the value of Z work? As in it just keeps getting larger over the lifetime of each unit?

Not sure about Z. I assumed that yes, it would increase throughout the lifetime of the unit.

The other possibility is that the death of this unit could boost those around it, but that seems similarly problematic.

Is there another trigger condition to pick that makes more mechanical sense? I chose this one because it referred to the failed status of Malkier, which was kind of nice, but maybe there's a better way.

I like this on the UU more so than the UB because it doesn't compete directly with a guaranteed EXP boosting building and is an EXP boost that generates more EXP from a situation that would normally grant EXP anyway (war/combat with someone), so it feeds into that system quite well.

I'm finding that EXP bonuses seem like a very easy bonus to give units, so not hugely enthused about that, but not a problem I'd remove it over.

of course, the UB *doesn't* compete with guaranteed EXP - it's in addition!

I know EXP is kind of lame, but we were talking about making the unit "Better." This wouldn't work on the UU version (too cheap), but for the UB version, we could decide to make it grant, instead of +X XP, one free random level 1 promotion. That would be kind of neat, and likely less easy to abuse (but super awesome if you get lucky and get the one you would have chosen anyways). What do you think of that?


Recap!

Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom)

UAs:

• Edge of the World, all units receive the <no HP loss on the Blight> promotion, Blight tiles can be improved as if they are plains tiles.Malkier's borders can expand into Blight as if it were normal terrain.
• Rally to the Crane Banner, there is an X% chance per turn for a random contemporary military unit to spawn outside the borders of any known civ you are not at war with, when you are at war with a common foe.
• Stand Against the Shadow, whenever a Shadowspawn unit pillages a hex owned by Malkier, there is a X% chance that a melee unit spawns in Malkier's capital
• Memories of the Golden Crane, Malkieri Legendary Epics and Relics provide an additional +1 Culture. Epics and Relics of Malkieri origin kept by foreign civilizations preserve this bonus, but also provide +X Prestige for Malkier.

UUs:

• Hadori Cavalry (swarm), replaces era 7 mounted unit, half movement cost in Blight and Tundra, attacking Shadowspawn doesn't consume any of their movement or attacks for the turn.
• Diademed Battle Lord, replaces the Great Captain, can fight as a melee unit, when Malkieri units within two hexes of the Diademed Battle Lord are killed, +X culture is gained and all adjacent Malkieri units have half of their health restored
• True Blade, replaces the Warder, +X% (significant) combat strength in non-enemy foreign territory (including CSs). +Y Culture and +Z Faith when killing an enemy unit in non-enemy foreign territory. The Aes Sedai he is bonded to has +W Sight and +V% combat strength against Shadowspawn. Malkier receives +V influence per turn with that Sister's Ajah. The owner of the territory receives +U Faith (small) as well. Malkier may only have one True Blade at any given time
• Surviving King, replaces the Warder, has an X% (massive) combat bonus against Shadowspawn and units controlled by civilizations declared for the side opposite of Malkier in the Last Battle.
• Crane Scion (culture), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, heal +X HP and gain +Y Prestige, the latter bonus increasing by Z for every subsequent ally slain.
• Crane Scion (XP), replaces era 8-9 melee, ranged, or polearm unit, whenever a Malkieri unit adjacent to the Scion is killed, gain +X EXP.

UBs:

• Tower of the Crane, replaces Defense 1, +X culture per turn for every Blight tile within this city's workable radius, +Y prestige (after <tech>) for every Blight tile worked by this city.
• Blightborder Outpost, replaces Defense2, tiles with Blight on them can be purchased at a fixed rate of X Gold per tile.
• Crane's Holdfast (unit), replaces XP2, X% chance to spawn a melee unit in this city when a tile within this city's radius is pillaged by a Shadowspawn unit.
• Cranes Holdfast (XP), replaces XP2, In addition to providing the standard EXP bonuses to trained units, when a Shadowspawn unit pillages a tile within this city's radius, the next unit to be trained in this city receives +X EXP (additional pillaging does not add to this bonus).

UIs:

• Border Tower, can be constructed on Blight. In addition to the normal effects of a Fort, non-enemy units on Blight tiles adjacent to or in the tower do not suffer HP loss per turn from the Blight. This bonus applies to any non-Shadowspawn units if the Tower is left standing outside of Malkieri territory.

Suggesting we remove the first Crane's Holdfast for oft-discussed reasons.

I've proposed removing Crane's Holdfast (XP) above, so I'd be inclined to swap that out here, possibly for Border Tower or maybe even Crane Scion (XP) for a triple-UU approach. Though maybe a Culture UB would be good in that slot either, to complement the UU, which wouldn't push Malkier too far towards Culture overall, since a unit's utility is such a smaller area than a building.

I'm also finding I've warmed some to the hero unit approach. That's something we can make a final decision on later though.

I'm suggesting once again that we consider the original set i proposed, now that I redefined (clarified) Crane's Holdfast (XP). So:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Crane Scion (culture)
UB: Crane's Holdfast (XP)

Nothing more to add for Malkier, they seem to be in a good place. If you're happy with the above then I'll add them to the list.

Looks like Manetheren is up next! I'll be brainstorming for them this evening and can start us off tomorrow. (Feel free to start if you've already got ideas!)

Cool! Not quite done with Mal, it seems - your next response will finish it up, I think.

I don't have much on Manny - some ideas, but nothing concrete. Feel free to start.

 

[S3rgeus]

to the first point, understood. To the second, I think it's fine. The unit will begin its existence pre-LB anyways (most likely) so it should be useful at least for a bit.

Sounds good then!

my problem with +1 range is that its *too* good. That's a boon I think we want to reserve for other situations (that's why I think it distracts from the Warder's awesomeness somewhat, since it's so awesome. I think +X sight is better (though perhaps not exciting enough!) Sight is flavorful, though, in that a greater awareness of surroundings is tied to a warder's awesomeness, specifically

Let's go with sight for now then, we can upgrade it later if we want to make it better.

yeah, I think it might be OK. It's not only available near the blight, though, so this kind of thing could happen elsewhere.

It can happen elsewhere, but that's not really related to the Improvement, right? That's just the presence of choke points on the map.

fair enough. In any case, it doesn't look like any of our sets are Blight-overloaded, so this discussion has been sort of a waste of bandwidth, or a kind of synthetic frippery, to quote an unrelated song.

We firmed up some of the design for Blight in general on this quote block, so it wasn't a total waste!

I think you'll reconsider once you realize how terribly confusing I wrote this the first time around. My bad. The "stacking" didn't mean that it didn't stack with the normal EXP bonus, it meant that killing multiple units wouldn't make the bonus get higher and higher. You still get the normal +10 or whatever from the armory, but if somebody pillages you get an additional +5 or 10 or whatever (but not a +50 if 5 tiles get pillaged). Once that unit is trained, the bonus reverts to zero.

That's better, right? Please reconsider - I mostly like this one, though it does rely on the actions' of others. Should it apply only the Shadowspawn?

Aha, that makes more sense! I see that your original was correctly abiding by our "existing mechanics remain unchanged, unless specified otherwise" system, I just jumped to the conclusion that the similar EXP-bonus was replacing the existing one.

I'd say let's let it apply to all pillaging to start with and we can restrict it to Shadowspawn if it's too strong. We're probably more likely to tweak the value of X for balance, but it's good to have multiple avenues.

that's true, but relatively speaking, that's true with any Warder in any civ. The Malkieri could lose a level 10 True Blade, but so could Andor (a Warder). Obviously the TB is the superior unit, but in both cases its a lot of waste.

Yeah, this is a good point. Let's let it remain truly random.

ok, it sounds like it's tentatively settled, then

As far as making a new one, isn't it as simple as running the custom mission again? I imagine a Sister could disband her Warder, which might incur negative penalties which is a bummer - so I was figuring that maybe the "make into a True Blade or Diademed BL" mission could still be used on a preexisting Warder. Why not?

Allowing Sisters to disband their Warders is one way to solve it, but I think we should definitely make that general decision quite purposefully, if we do. Is there any basis in the flavor for Warders being released from their bond?

Making an existing Warder into a True Blade or Surviving King (Diademed Battle Lord is a GC replacement) also seems flavorfully weird to me. It's "turning the unit into another person", rather than giving them an ability.

However, maybe the simplest way to work around this is change the original spawning method for them. Allow a single Warder to become a True Blade or Surviving King while they are stationed in the Malkieri capital. (They're being "crowned".) This is basically the same as what we were planning with the custom mission, but it makes the flavor make more sense if a new True Blade or Surviving King needs to be made from a unit that isn't being newly bonded as a Warder.

hmmm....

I think for now, we keep this ability on the list, as it is nice in a few ways. If it turns out that this ability is actually selected (or similar ones for other civs'), then we have a big discussion to do. Whether we "fix" the trading system or not is a big conversation, and one that would ideally be handled alone, and later (post-release?). If it turns out we hav eUniques that interact with it, we'll obviously have to dive in earlier - but without that, let's not.

I wonder if other modders have tackled this...

Agreed, let's approach this later if we need to. And yes, this does seem like a good post-release feature, whether or not we pick this unique.

Not sure about Z. I assumed that yes, it would increase throughout the lifetime of the unit.

Ah, and this is a fairly late UU, so it doesn't have time to get out of hand. That sounds good.

The other possibility is that the death of this unit could boost those around it, but that seems similarly problematic.

Is there another trigger condition to pick that makes more mechanical sense? I chose this one because it referred to the failed status of Malkier, which was kind of nice, but maybe there's a better way.

We could trigger it off any unit dying, even if it isn't a Malkieri unit? It's similar, but since you can get it from killing your enemies, it's more advantageous to keep your own units alive again.

This would make Crane Scion (culture) + Hadori Cavalry super powerful against Shadowspawn, since the healing would let the Hadori Cavalry machine gun through all the enemy units they could keep near each other with. We might need to see if that needs to be tweaked down for balance, but I'd say we can let it stand for now - both might not end up in the final set anyway.

of course, the UB *doesn't* compete with guaranteed EXP - it's in addition!

I know EXP is kind of lame, but we were talking about making the unit "Better." This wouldn't work on the UU version (too cheap), but for the UB version, we could decide to make it grant, instead of +X XP, one free random level 1 promotion. That would be kind of neat, and likely less easy to abuse (but super awesome if you get lucky and get the one you would have chosen anyways). What do you think of that?

Agreed, it doesn't make sense to take issue with EXP as a bonus if our main objective with the flavor is to have Malkier field an experienced military. Let's stick with the EXP for now on the UU as well.

Suggesting we remove the first Crane's Holdfast for oft-discussed reasons.

Sounds good.

I'm suggesting once again that we consider the original set i proposed, now that I redefined (clarified) Crane's Holdfast (XP). So:

UA: Edge of the World
UU: Hadori Cavalry
UU: Crane Scion (culture)
UB: Crane's Holdfast (XP)

Coolio, this sounds like a good set then.

Cool! Not quite done with Mal, it seems - your next response will finish it up, I think.

Yep, possible tweaks left on the Crane Scion (Culture) and True Blade, but I've added them to the master list anyway. I'll edit it if we make those changes.

I don't have much on Manny - some ideas, but nothing concrete. Feel free to start.

Tada! Apparently I had a lot of ideas for Manetheren. Much more so than Malkier!

Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul)

UAs:

• Band Together, all combat units (within a certain era? of a certain upgrade path?) are replaced with Band of the Red Hand equivalents that have +5 relevant combat strength, +X% combat strength against Shadowspawn, and +Y% combat bonus for each Band of the Red Hand unit within Z (like 3) hexes.
• Far Reaching Influence, Manetheren receives double bonuses from Tower Edicts and can refuse Edicts without penalty during the Trolloc Wars and Last Battle.
• Close to the Tower, Manetheren receives double Ajah Influence bonuses from completing Tower Quests and can have twice as many Tower Quests active as other civilizations.
• Powerful Relationship, Manetheren operates as if it has one tier of influence higher with each Ajah in the Tower
• Old Blood, Manetheren may create a Lineage upon researching The Pattern.
• Storied Legacy, Manetheren nationality Legendary Works count toward any Theming bonus, regardless of era or nationality required by the building. (Works for all players.)
• Jealous Amyrlin, The Ajah Manetheren has the most influence with has the bonuses and behavior of the Ajah that raised the Amyrlin, regardless of where the current Amyrlin was actually raised from.
• Carai an Caldazar, Manetheren units that die before any civilization researches Bookbinding always leave Relics where they die (unless there is already a Relic in that hex).

UUs:

• Sister Queen, the first Aes Sedai Manetheren receives, when it does not control a Sister Queen, becomes a Sister Queen unit instead and has the abilities of the Ajah the player selected and her (first, if Green Ajah) Warder becomes a Warder King unit instead of a Warder. Manetheren cities within X hexes of a Sister Queen unit produce double Alignment and +Y% Culture.
  Manetheren units within Z hexes of a Warder King unit can only be killed by Shadowspawn or Mashadar if they are at 1 HP (attacks that otherwise would normally kill them reduce them to 1).
• Band of the Red Hand (Culture), replaces some era 2 unit, generates +X Culture when they attack a Shadowspawn unit in Manetheren territory. +Y Faith in unclaimed territory. And +X Culture and +Y Faith in another civilization's territory.
• Band of the Red Hand (Horn), replaces some era 2/3 unit, has an extra ability that sounds a warhorn. Moves a chosen friendly unit from within 5 hexes to a chosen adjacent hex.
• Valiant Defenders, replaces Melee 2/3, has higher combat strength and, when fortified in a city, this unit fights instead of the city when it is attacked by a melee unit.

UBs:

• Sisters' Embassy, replaces Culture2, produces +X Tower Influence per turn in addition to its normal effects.

UIs:

• Staging Grounds, tiles within X hexes of this Improvement cannot be pillaged by Shadowspawn. Whenever a Shadowspawn tries to pillage such a tile, the host civilization receives +Y Faith.

UGs:

• Channeler, created from an Aes Sedai instead of an LP, yield is Tower Influence, unique upgrade 2 ability is "Novices sent to the Tower from this city cannot fail to become Sisters and Manetheren may choose which Ajah they join", relevant LP for upgrade 3 ability is the Ambassador. (Though could be Aes Sedai.) Produces double Alignment (if chosen) from upgrades 1 and 3.

I'll try to be brief with each one since there are quite a few.

Band Together makes Manetheren a permanent military power, though the different avenues to restrict where this applies (within an era, for a certain upgrade path), could be used to tone it down.

Far Reaching Influence is a nod to Manetheren's apparent closeness and influence over the Tower. It gives them a strong bonus with the Edicts and a unique capability to refuse them during certain parts of the game.

Close to the Tower is something that uses similar flavor to the above, but interacts with the Tower Quests system, which I don't think we've considered any uniques for yet.

Powerful Relationship is also similar flavor and would make all of Manetheren's Aes Sedai stronger.

Old Blood lets Manetheren found a Lineage really early (basically guaranteed to get there as one of the first if they try for it), but I'm not sure it's strong enough to stand alone.

Storied Legacy is a cool Culture-based bonus that nods to Manetheren's persistent culture flavor from the books. It makes theming bonuses a piece of cake for them (and anyone who grabs their Relics).

Jealous Amyrlin is a reference to the flavor that brought about Manetheren's downfall, where the current Amyrlin delayed reinforcements to them during the TW because she was jealous of Manetheren's Queen's influence and power. Not sure if this one is strong enough to stand alone though - it's hard to tell how globally impactful this kind of internal Tower state will be.

Carai an Caldazar will mean Manetheren would have a ton of Relics near them, which helps them out a lot in Culture victories. (Another nod to the persistence of their culture in the flavor.)

Sister Queen and Warder King are actually rather hero-ish units. This references Manetheren's flavor of having an Aes Sedai Queen. The Sister Queen unit provides bonuses to cities near her to make them more Culture-y and Alignment-y. The Warder King provides military bonuses that help fighting Shadowspawn (with a little Mashadar reference thrown in there for good measure). Both mechanical bonuses feed well into the Manetheren flavor. (It's worth noting that the spawn mechanic for the Sister Queen is intended to be set up so that if one dies, the next Aes Sedai Manetheren receives will become the new Sister Queen.)

Band of the Red Hand (Culture) can generate a lot of Culture and Faith. It's even more beneficial for Manetheren to fight Shadowspawn in other people's territory (so they defend others), which feeds well into their flavor.

Band of the Red Hand (Horn) is an interesting twist on a new unit ability. It would let you choose one of your own other units and move them adjacent to this unit. Could make the Manetheren armies very mobile (particularly if this were a mounted unit) and difficult for an enemy to divide them up. I think the ability proposed on this unit would be balanced (not too strong, not too weak, or at least tweakable to be so) as a UU as it is, but I did also consider adding "This unit has an X% reduced cooldown if it possesses the Horn of Valere." as an additional thing to them (flavor intersection with warhorns and such). Given how niche the Horn of Valere is, it doesn't really contribute much to them either way from a general balance perspective, but it would be a cool thing to have for the player if it did happen.

Valiant Defenders are a straight up combat improved UU, with the added bonus of being very good at holding cities. Because a melee unit needs to finish the city off, if a Valiant Defender is garrisoned inside, they can hold the attacker off for longer. (This would be particularly relevant during the TW, when everyone is trying to hold off waves of Shadowspawn from capturing their cities.)

Sisters' Embassy is another nod to Manetheren's closeness to the Tower. It simply adds a Tower Influence yield to the building, which would make it easier for Manetheren to mechanically have an overall more positive relationship with the Tower.

Like Shara, since we never actually go to Manetheren, buildings were a bit difficult.

Staging Grounds is an intentionally anti-Shadowspawn-invasion UI that would make Manetheren significantly more effective for the duration of the TW. (I know they died in the TW in the books, but again with books timeline and betrayals and such, their valiant defense on their own when so many others fell apart tells me they should be good at it via their uniques.)

Channeler is another unique governor type, like Shandalle's unique governor! It also nods to Manetheren's closeness to the Tower and their penchant for Aes Sedai rulers. It has a unique yield that makes it a distinct governor type (rather than eclipsed by one of the existing ones) and will generally keep Manetheren closer to the Tower.

It's worth noting that the Novices and Accepted system referenced in the Diplo Summary isn't particularly firmed up. (It references a mid-conversation post.) The upgrade 2 ability of this UG assumes that Novices are sent from specific cities to the Tower (presumably at the cost of a Population), but we should probably work out how that system works anyway and if necessary, modify this proposal accordingly.

 

[counterpoint]

I feel like I've killed the momentum by getting a night's sleep before posting again...

Let's go with sight for now then, we can upgrade it later if we want to make it better.

fine with this.

It can happen elsewhere, but that's not really related to the Improvement, right? That's just the presence of choke points on the map.

I was just responding to how you said that it's fine if you are healing other people's units, since they're helping fight off the blight. My point was that this was only true for Towers on the blight. If you put them elsewhere, those units aren't doing you a "service" by hanging around.

Aha, that makes more sense! I see that your original was correctly abiding by our "existing mechanics remain unchanged, unless specified otherwise" system, I just jumped to the conclusion that the similar EXP-bonus was replacing the existing one.

I'd say let's let it apply to all pillaging to start with and we can restrict it to Shadowspawn if it's too strong. We're probably more likely to tweak the value of X for balance, but it's good to have multiple avenues.

sounds like a good plan, then!

Allowing Sisters to disband their Warders is one way to solve it, but I think we should definitely make that general decision quite purposefully, if we do. Is there any basis in the flavor for Warders being released from their bond?

hmmm... I think it's not common, though it does happen. Wasn't everybody trying to get whatsername to release Rand from his Bond? That means it's possible.

I think Warder's should be disbandable, like all units, but I don't think that should exempt the Aes Sedai from suffering the negative effects of Warder Death. Otherwise, you'd have situations where AS disband their warders before they are killed.

So in short, I don't think disbanding is a workable solution to the current challenge.

Making an existing Warder into a True Blade or Surviving King (Diademed Battle Lord is a GC replacement) also seems flavorfully weird to me. It's "turning the unit into another person", rather than giving them an ability.

eh, I don't know that its that much of a problem.. Remember that these are all abstractions (though these particular units are less so). We gladly upgrade from a dude on a horse to a helicopter, so this shouldn't be a problem. This is either a different person, or else the guy finds his heritage as a the TB/SK or whatever it is.

However, maybe the simplest way to work around this is change the original spawning method for them. Allow a single Warder to become a True Blade or Surviving King while they are stationed in the Malkieri capital. (They're being "crowned".) This is basically the same as what we were planning with the custom mission, but it makes the flavor make more sense if a new True Blade or Surviving King needs to be made from a unit that isn't being newly bonded as a Warder.

that strikes me as a little odd, seeing that the Warder bond is something done by the Sister as an action. This seems like it'd be the same. I suppose that could still happen in the capital, but it seems a little overly complicated. I don't see this as that much flavorfully distinct from the situation above (that you weren't a fan of).

Actually, this is all making me think we may be jumping through a whole lot of hoops for not a lot of payoff. The truth is, the creation of a new TB/SK is only going to happen when:

1) You have no UU Warder but have Aes Sedai without a Warder or empty Aes Sedai "slots"
2) You have no UU Warder and no free "slots"
3) An Aes Sedai and her UU Warder are killed
4) An Aes Sedai's UU Warder is killed
5) An Aes Sedai and her UU Warder leave when the Tower Turns
6) An Aes Sedai leaves due to bad Tower relations

- For 1, you simply bond a unit and proceed, or wait to be granted an additional Aes Sedai and then do the same. No fancy mechanics required.
- For 2, why haven't you created a UU Warder by this point? I assume around era 6 or 7 will provide at least one opportunity for a new AS slot, and Warder, so you should be able to plan accordingly, if these units are era locked. If not, shame on you - wait till one dies and make a new one. I'm fine with this.
- For 3, wait for a new AS to spawn and create a new Warder. If you must, kill an existing warder.
- For 4, pick a new unit and make the UU
- For 5, this is somewhat chaotic - kill an existing warder or (if possible) improve tower relations to get another AS
- For 6, improve your tower relations. Also, as far as I recall, you select which one you lose when this happens, so shame on you if you choose the UU.

This is all simply making me think that in most cases, things seem to be pretty simple and not very punitive. I don't love the idea of making the system more complex and/or weird just because of the unlikely case of the Turning of the tower.

So, I guess I think we should keep it as simple as possible - either do nothing or allow existing warders to become new UU Warders.

One interesting situation is if the AS is killed but the UU Warder survives. Then we have an interesting case where you have a gimped UU warder hanging around, either waiting for a new AS to spawn, or else by disbanding a contemporary warder and rebonding this one, accepting whatever consequences (but still probably being worth it in the long haul)

This does of course suggest another path - we could have, if a sister leaves, the UU Warder stay behind (perhaps with the death penalties).

We could trigger it off any unit dying, even if it isn't a Malkieri unit? It's similar, but since you can get it from killing your enemies, it's more advantageous to keep your own units alive again.

This would make Crane Scion (culture) + Hadori Cavalry super powerful against Shadowspawn, since the healing would let the Hadori Cavalry machine gun through all the enemy units they could keep near each other with. We might need to see if that needs to be tweaked down for balance, but I'd say we can let it stand for now - both might not end up in the final set anyway.

yes, I think I'd perhaps be fine with doing it this way (getting it for kills as well), though I'd be tempted to only include non-shadowspawn units - that'd prevent the epic double punch you're describing. Again, doesn't need to be decided now. I'm fine with either version.

Agreed, it doesn't make sense to take issue with EXP as a bonus if our main objective with the flavor is to have Malkier field an experienced military. Let's stick with the EXP for now on the UU as well.

ok, fair enough.

Yep, possible tweaks left on the Crane Scion (Culture) and True Blade, but I've added them to the master list anyway. I'll edit it if we make those changes.

cool, thanks! I think things are clarified at this point.

Tada! Apparently I had a lot of ideas for Manetheren. Much more so than Malkier!

you sure do! More than I had, for sure.

I'll try to be brief with each one since there are quite a few.

Band Together makes Manetheren a permanent military power, though the different avenues to restrict where this applies (within an era, for a certain upgrade path), could be used to tone it down.

it's interesting doing Many right off of doing Malky. I find myself wondering if some of these abilities are rather similar to Malkier abilities... This is one of them

Its also kind of similar mechanically to one of our frontrunner (*the* frontrunner?) Aiel UAs.

I'm not sure whether this one is a bit over-designed, actually. Replacing all units with BotRH units that have the same flat bonus seems like a lot of work for a more colorful version of simply "all Manetheren units receive +X% against shadowspawn," which actually isn't all that special. I know that's the Aiel thing as well, but with the Aiel, it fills a very special flavor need - the lack of swords - and also only happens for a few units. Replacing *all the units* (or even just a few eras) is a lot of work that feels somewhat like a waste.

I'm magenta'ing this ability. I like the idea of it, but I'm not sure it works, practically.

As far as the bonus, itself, I'm again wondering if there's something else to consider doing instead of a simple shadowspawn bonus (not counting the second bonus), but that migh just be because we just did Malkier. I'm not digging further because I'm not sure this will survive long enough.

Far Reaching Influence is a nod to Manetheren's apparent closeness and influence over the Tower. It gives them a strong bonus with the Edicts and a unique capability to refuse them during certain parts of the game.

interesting. I think this one makes most sense if tied to the Sister Queen flavor. I'm not sure this kind of manifestation of their relationship is exactly "right," but I do like this ability in general.

Close to the Tower is something that uses similar flavor to the above, but interacts with the Tower Quests system, which I don't think we've considered any uniques for yet.

same thoughts as above. Fine for now.

Powerful Relationship is also similar flavor and would make all of Manetheren's Aes Sedai stronger.

Interesting. Same as above.

Old Blood lets Manetheren found a Lineage really early (basically guaranteed to get there as one of the first if they try for it), but I'm not sure it's strong enough to stand alone.

Yeah, I think this one is too weak. It doesn't provide a constant bonus throughout the game, which is a bummer.

Storied Legacy is a cool Culture-based bonus that nods to Manetheren's persistent culture flavor from the books. It makes theming bonuses a piece of cake for them (and anyone who grabs their Relics).

I like this one! I do feel like it helps everybody else out in a way that doesn't help out Manetheren at all... I wonder if there's some way to offset that (like Manetheren gains 1 prestige whenever that happens, or something). Otherwise people will just make a mad dash for Manetheren's Relics in a way that might be quite annoying for the person actually playing Manetheren. Thoughts?

Jealous Amyrlin is a reference to the flavor that brought about Manetheren's downfall, where the current Amyrlin delayed reinforcements to them during the TW because she was jealous of Manetheren's Queen's influence and power. Not sure if this one is strong enough to stand alone though - it's hard to tell how globally impactful this kind of internal Tower state will be.

hmmm... as far as I recall, I don't think the Amyrlin bonus is so profound as to actually be UA worthy. Also, kind of a weird flavor to base this off of. Like making a roman UA be "barbarians invading and mismanagement".

Carai an Caldazar will mean Manetheren would have a ton of Relics near them, which helps them out a lot in Culture victories. (Another nod to the persistence of their culture in the flavor.)

I also think this is pretty cool, though, again, I worry that this sort of helps others out in a way that might be pretty annoying for the Many player. Consider if you were playing Manetheren as Dom-focused, and not making a big deal bout Relics - you've just given whoever's trying to win via Culture a heck of a lot of ammo. Any way to offset this? If not, I'd suggest we can't use it.

Sister Queen and Warder King are actually rather hero-ish units. This references Manetheren's flavor of having an Aes Sedai Queen. The Sister Queen unit provides bonuses to cities near her to make them more Culture-y and Alignment-y. The Warder King provides military bonuses that help fighting Shadowspawn (with a little Mashadar reference thrown in there for good measure). Both mechanical bonuses feed well into the Manetheren flavor. (It's worth noting that the spawn mechanic for the Sister Queen is intended to be set up so that if one dies, the next Aes Sedai Manetheren receives will become the new Sister Queen.)

OK, interesting! Quite hero-ey, indeed. I think it's interesting how the SQ isn't in and of herself any better at combat.

Can you please clarify the mechanics of the WK a little better - I think I get it, but it's a little confusing to me, still. Maybe an example. How does it relate to non-shadow units?

Band of the Red Hand (Culture) can generate a lot of Culture and Faith. It's even more beneficial for Manetheren to fight Shadowspawn in other people's territory (so they defend others), which feeds well into their flavor.

I like this one very much from a flavor perspective, especially the other-territory thing. I like how it doesn't specifically require certain playstyles - you'll get some bonus no matter where you are. Is there a bonus if you are in *enemy* territory?

Band of the Red Hand (Horn) is an interesting twist on a new unit ability. It would let you choose one of your own other units and move them adjacent to this unit. Could make the Manetheren armies very mobile (particularly if this were a mounted unit) and difficult for an enemy to divide them up. I think the ability proposed on this unit would be balanced (not too strong, not too weak, or at least tweakable to be so) as a UU as it is, but I did also consider adding "This unit has an X% reduced cooldown if it possesses the Horn of Valere." as an additional thing to them (flavor intersection with warhorns and such). Given how niche the Horn of Valere is, it doesn't really contribute much to them either way from a general balance perspective, but it would be a cool thing to have for the player if it did happen.

Interesting, definitely. It feels a little "special move-ey" to me, which isn't how UU's normally work (though there are exceptions, the Nau, etc.), but it could be acceptable. Neat combat implications. Not sure how the flavor really ties in, though.

I don't think it can be tied to the Horn of Valere, since I'm pretty sure you can't yet have received it by this point in the game.

I'm not sure the warhorn flavor is the best choice, actually. Given that it isn't tied to *the* Horn, I feel like it might be a little confusing having there be a horn at all

Valiant Defenders are a straight up combat improved UU, with the added bonus of being very good at holding cities. Because a melee unit needs to finish the city off, if a Valiant Defender is garrisoned inside, they can hold the attacker off for longer. (This would be particularly relevant during the TW, when everyone is trying to hold off waves of Shadowspawn from capturing their cities.)

Interesting. Help me out, though - how is the unit defending better than normal? Units garrisoned have their combat strength applied to the city already, right? Would the unit itself be weaker?

Assuming I'm wrong, this could work, though it is of course mildly unflavorful, since... they didn't defend their city. Not a problem, I don't think.

also, you're flavoring this one like it's a UA. Wouldn't this probably just be another BotRH unit (BotRH (garrison)) or something?

Sisters' Embassy is another nod to Manetheren's closeness to the Tower. It simply adds a Tower Influence yield to the building, which would make it easier for Manetheren to mechanically have an overall more positive relationship with the Tower.

unoffensively useful. Not particularly interesting, but not bad.

Like Shara, since we never actually go to Manetheren, buildings were a bit difficult.

yeah, understood and agreed.

Staging Grounds is an intentionally anti-Shadowspawn-invasion UI that would make Manetheren significantly more effective for the duration of the TW. (I know they died in the TW in the books, but again with books timeline and betrayals and such, their valiant defense on their own when so many others fell apart tells me they should be good at it via their uniques.)

Yeah understood and agreed re: the flavor weirdness.

I'm interested to know why this is a UI, and not, say, a building? Does it provide a yield?

I actually don't really like this one because it seems like it takes advantage of stupid AI in a way that's really odd, even "lampshading" to a certain degree. If they can't be pillaged, why would the shadowspawn be trying to pillage it anyways? Trollocs are stupid, but they aren't that stupid - certainly not with Myrrdraal around. I'd be fine with disallowing pillaging, or with rewarding pillaging with faith, but not with both. I suppose it could be amended to work - maybe if the SS *could* pillage, but it took an entire round of movement/actions to do it, and rewarded Many, it would be more effective. Maybe not worth a Unique slot, though.

Channeler is another unique governor type, like Shandalle's unique governor! It also nods to Manetheren's closeness to the Tower and their penchant for Aes Sedai rulers. It has a unique yield that makes it a distinct governor type (rather than eclipsed by one of the existing ones) and will generally keep Manetheren closer to the Tower.

I think this is a pretty good use for the AS-Queen flavor! I also think the level 2 ability could tie into the Old Blood flavor quite well. I thin kit's cool, in theory, to spawn govs with AS instead of LP - we'll have to make sure it is balanced in the end, though. Question - does having this gov consume your aes sedai quota, or will you get another to replace her? The latter seems nicer to the player, but it is also flavorfully quite weird, as well as more likely to be abused. I wonder if you could fire the governor and get the sister back if you needed her.

I should say that I'm not sure it should be guaranteed novice success. That takes something away from all of this, I think, considering this is a slow process that happens over the whole game.. I think huge bonuses are probably a better idea.

It's worth noting that the Novices and Accepted system referenced in the Diplo Summary isn't particularly firmed up. (It references a mid-conversation post.) The upgrade 2 ability of this UG assumes that Novices are sent from specific cities to the Tower (presumably at the cost of a Population), but we should probably work out how that system works anyway and if necessary, modify this proposal accordingly.

hmm.... I thought it was that you sent channeling *units* to the tower who became novices (i.e. wilders), with the max you can have being your Spark. Is this not it? If not, I wonder why they aren't just sent automatically, based on Spark - if you don't have strategic decisions over which to send, etc., what's the point in having the choices at all? the unit thing requires a clear "sacrifice" from the player. Population does too, but that presents some problems (see below)

On that note, no I don't think they were supposed to be tied to each city. I suppose it could be, but I don't think it's that helpful, mechanically. This whole system is sort of a back-room kind of thing that I'd prefer not to become too tedious. I'd rather it be pretty simple and user friendly.

Population could be a way to make it work, but I think in conjunction with this UG, that's problematic. It seems like this would suggest you constantly sending all your novices from a few key cities, which actually sort of hurts those cities... Maybe that's ok, but maybe it's not. Just something to think about.

If we do it based on pop, then the gov bonus could be made to work. If it's by units, then I think it might need to be slightly different - +X% success rate per gov, or something weird (doesn't help with the ajah choice thing at all). Hmm...

Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul)

UAs:

• Band Together, all combat units (within a certain era? of a certain upgrade path?) are replaced with Band of the Red Hand equivalents that have +5 relevant combat strength, +X% combat strength against Shadowspawn, and +Y% combat bonus for each Band of the Red Hand unit within Z (like 3) hexes.
• Far Reaching Influence, Manetheren receives double bonuses from Tower Edicts and can refuse Edicts without penalty during the Trolloc Wars and Last Battle.
• Close to the Tower, Manetheren receives double Ajah Influence bonuses from completing Tower Quests and can have twice as many Tower Quests active as other civilizations.
• Powerful Relationship, Manetheren operates as if it has one tier of influence higher with each Ajah in the Tower
• Old Blood, Manetheren may create a Lineage upon researching The Pattern.
• Storied Legacy, Manetheren nationality Legendary Works count toward any Theming bonus, regardless of era or nationality required by the building. (Works for all players.)
• Jealous Amyrlin, The Ajah Manetheren has the most influence with has the bonuses and behavior of the Ajah that raised the Amyrlin, regardless of where the current Amyrlin was actually raised from.
• Carai an Caldazar (relics), Manetheren units that die before any civilization researches Bookbinding always leave Relics where they die (unless there is already a Relic in that hex).
• Mountain Home, mountain tiles can be worked, and provide X production and Y culture. Any unit adjacent to a mountain has +Z sight.
• Legacy of the Red Eagle, Manetheren receives rewards for the Trolloc Wars one tier higher than actually earned (does not affect rewards other civs receive), and the bonus of the level they actually earned is doubled. In addition to the double bonus, if Manetheren earns the top tier reward naturally, they additionally receive X Golden Age points.
• Carai an Caldazar (golden age), the beginning and end of every "global event" (Trolloc Wars, High King, and Last Battle) triggers a Golden Age that lasts X turns, in addition to providing Y Faith.
• Staunch Allies, when a civilization declares war on Manetheren, that civilization instantly loses X Influence with all City-States who are at least Friendly towards Manetheren, while Manetheren gains Y influence and Z Faith with those same City-States.
• Glory from Betrayal, If a civilization declares war on Manetheren, pillages a (friendly) trade route with Manetheren, or votes against Manetheren's cause in a losing (for Manetheren) Compact Vote, Manetheren receives X Faith and Y Golden Age Points (scales based on the occurrence)

UUs:

• Sister Queen, the first Aes Sedai Manetheren receives, when it does not control a Sister Queen, becomes a Sister Queen unit instead and has the abilities of the Ajah the player selected and her (first, if Green Ajah) Warder becomes a Warder King unit instead of a Warder. Manetheren cities within X hexes of a Sister Queen unit produce double Alignment and +Y% Culture.
  Manetheren units within Z hexes of a Warder King unit can only be killed by Shadowspawn or Mashadar if they are at 1 HP (attacks that otherwise would normally kill them reduce them to 1).
• Band of the Red Hand (Culture), replaces some era 2 unit, generates +X Culture when they attack a Shadowspawn unit in Manetheren territory. +Y Faith in unclaimed territory. And +X Culture and +Y Faith in another civilization's territory.
• Band of the Red Hand (Horn), replaces some era 2/3 unit, has an extra ability that sounds a warhorn. Moves a chosen friendly unit from within 5 hexes to a chosen adjacent hex.
• Band of the Red Hand (garrison), replaces Melee 2/3, has higher combat strength and, when fortified in a city, this unit fights instead of the city when it is attacked by a melee unit.
• Red Eagle Bowman, replaces era 2/3 ranged unit, gains +1 Range when on hills

UBs:

• Sisters' Embassy, replaces Culture2, produces +X Tower Influence per turn in addition to its normal effects.
• Mountain Fortress, replaces Defense 1, the defensive bonus of the building is increased by X for every hill or mountain tile within the city's workable radius.

UIs:

• Staging Grounds, tiles within X hexes of this Improvement cannot be pillaged by Shadowspawn. Whenever a Shadowspawn tries to pillage such a tile, the host civilization receives +Y Faith.
• Mountain Waystation, built on Hills, base X (low) gold, and +Y culture for every adjacent Hill or Mountain Tile, as well as Z Faith (low) for five turns after an enemy unit is killed in an adjacent tile.

UGs:

• Channeler, created from an Aes Sedai instead of an LP, yield is Tower Influence, unique upgrade 2 ability is "Novices sent to the Tower from this city cannot fail to become Sisters and Manetheren may choose which Ajah they join", relevant LP for upgrade 3 ability is the Ambassador. (Though could be Aes Sedai.) Produces double Alignment (if chosen) from upgrades 1 and 3.

OK, so new ones!

Mountain Home (which is what Manetheren means) is a nod to exactly that. Provides some culture and also really really good scouting from mountains.

The Legacy of the RE is a pretty literal TW-bonus UA. Not sure its strong enough. Could obviously be tweaked quite a bit.

My Carai an Caldazar uses GA's to provide a way to make Many "significant" even when losing battles and stuff, during impactful eras. Obviously there's no bonus at the end of the LB. Could conceivably add other things as well (birth of the Dragon, for instance)

Staunch allies is meant to capture both the tight alliances they had, as well as the betrayal that was their downfall. It's diplo-related, which might not be quite right, but I thought I'd throw it in anyways. I have it triggered by a DoW from the other civ, but it of course could be *any* war, even if it's Many's fault (nuts in the mandatory wars of the HK and LB!) The idea is that, in theory at least, alliances could flip because of this.

Glory from Betrayal is nutty. I'm not sure what all the conditions would be. Obviously depends on the actions of others, but presumably this would be stuff that would happen no matter what, and provides a general deterrent for messing with Manetheren.

Red Eagle bowman is a flavor nod to both the mountain thing as well as the Two Rivers Longbow. It's obviously way too early in the game for a longbow, both in technology and in game balance (if we consider the English unit as a good representation), so perhaps a mini-longbow with increased range in only certain places would be good. Great for defense, obviously.

Mountain Fortress is a typically great defensive building, somewhat unflavorful given their demise, of course.

Mountain Waystation is perhaps too complex - basically a mountain culture yield, plus faith when defending.

 

[S3rgeus]

I was just responding to how you said that it's fine if you are healing other people's units, since they're helping fight off the blight. My point was that this was only true for Towers on the blight. If you put them elsewhere, those units aren't doing you a "service" by hanging around.

Right, but the Improvement's ability that affects other players is also connected to the Blight. So other civs can hang around Malkier on top of these Improvements elsewhere, but the Improvement being there doesn't actually affect that in any way. The capability for cheesing is the same as it always is against the AI.

hmmm... I think it's not common, though it does happen. Wasn't everybody trying to get whatsername to release Rand from his Bond? That means it's possible.

I think Warder's should be disbandable, like all units, but I don't think that should exempt the Aes Sedai from suffering the negative effects of Warder Death. Otherwise, you'd have situations where AS disband their warders before they are killed.

So in short, I don't think disbanding is a workable solution to the current challenge.

Agreed, Warders should be disband-able, and from a Sister-Warder Bond perspective, that should be the same as the Warder dying. And it's not a good mechanism to get around this problem with True Blades and not being able to gain new Sisters.

eh, I don't know that its that much of a problem.. Remember that these are all abstractions (though these particular units are less so). We gladly upgrade from a dude on a horse to a helicopter, so this shouldn't be a problem. This is either a different person, or else the guy finds his heritage as a the TB/SK or whatever it is.

We're purposefully avoiding the horse to helicopter stuff though. And even that makes more sense - it's swapping out all of the tech that the unit is using because better stuff is available. I agree that these are abstractions, but it feels very much like the wrong level of abstraction to transform the existing Warder anywhere.

that strikes me as a little odd, seeing that the Warder bond is something done by the Sister as an action.

...

This does of course suggest another path - we could have, if a sister leaves, the UU Warder stay behind (perhaps with the death penalties).

I'm not suggesting that the UU Warder be created by the Sister in the capital when gaining a new Warder. I'm saying that if Malkier doesn't have a True Blade already, then they can move one of their Warders to their capital and create one that way. I don't see why we wouldn't do it this way, because mechanically they're almost identical, it's a better flavor hit, and it solves the problem where the Malkier player can't get any new Warders without losing one they already have. In all of those circumstances that you've outlined, it's either the same or better than the "True Blade when Bonded" approach.

The only potential drawback I see, and this is very marginal, is needing to get the Warder you want to become the UU back to the capital city. And if we find that becomes a problem (somehow), then we can make it work in any city, though that's less flavorful.

Particularly to scenarios 2 and 6, having a "full set" of Warders for your Aes Sedai and not being able to create the UU will just lead to undesirable human player behavior (deliberate suicide or disbanding of a Warder) or sub-optimal AI behavior (not doing that, because we don't think it's how the system should be approached, even though it might be logically best at a given time).

And most especially 5. I agree this is a specific case, but it's one that leads to attempts to disband or suicide Warders being the guaranteed best course of action for Malkier, which isn't something we should encourage.

I agree that in those 3 cases there's room to say that the player has put themselves into that situation, but why would we let them screw themselves over when the alternative is equally simple ("Bring Warder to capital and press a button on the Sister/Warder" (whichever we prefer)) and makes it impossible for them to do so.

yes, I think I'd perhaps be fine with doing it this way (getting it for kills as well), though I'd be tempted to only include non-shadowspawn units - that'd prevent the epic double punch you're describing. Again, doesn't need to be decided now. I'm fine with either version.

Agreed, that will depend on if we end up proceeding with both uniques. I've edited the master list to match this.

it's interesting doing Many right off of doing Malky. I find myself wondering if some of these abilities are rather similar to Malkier abilities... This is one of them

Its also kind of similar mechanically to one of our frontrunner (*the* frontrunner?) Aiel UAs.

I'm not sure whether this one is a bit over-designed, actually. Replacing all units with BotRH units that have the same flat bonus seems like a lot of work for a more colorful version of simply "all Manetheren units receive +X% against shadowspawn," which actually isn't all that special. I know that's the Aiel thing as well, but with the Aiel, it fills a very special flavor need - the lack of swords - and also only happens for a few units. Replacing *all the units* (or even just a few eras) is a lot of work that feels somewhat like a waste.

I'm magenta'ing this ability. I like the idea of it, but I'm not sure it works, practically.

As far as the bonus, itself, I'm again wondering if there's something else to consider doing instead of a simple shadowspawn bonus (not counting the second bonus), but that migh just be because we just did Malkier. I'm not digging further because I'm not sure this will survive long enough.

Yes, it is relatively mechanically similar to the Aiel frontrunner. I think they will achieve different goals though - the Aiel one works well with their UI and allows them to be produced in greater numbers. The idea with this Manetheren unique is that it makes Manetheren's military noticeably different over a certain time period.

I wouldn't be worried about the crossover between Malkier and Manetheren on Shadowspawn. I think the abilities we're looking at here are much more about being able to fight individual Shadowspawn, rather than the more systematic stuff that Malkier had for surviving near the Blight. I think with these kinds of bonuses, Manetheren should make a serviceable near-Blight civ, in that they can fend off Shadowspawn better than some other civs, but they shouldn't be particularly advantaged by the actual Blight part of it. That plays well with their flavor, from what I see of it. The perception of overlap is fine, because we only have a few specifically anti-Shadowspawn civs (Malkier, Manetheren, Shienar, Aramaelle, and Saldaea), and we're doing them fairly back to back.

In terms of work load, I agree that replacing a large number of units is a decent chunk of work (mostly art-related work), but if we only replace 1 or 2 eras (like the ones where Manetheren actually existed, which should overlap with the TW, so that plays well) then I would imagine replacing all sword units would involve more unit changes.

Mechanically I see what you mean about the bonus being equivalent to "+X% combat strength, +Y% strength against Shadowspawn, and +Z% with adjacent allies". I agree that that direct variant isn't engaging, but it's the difference that makes it engaging, right? Manetheren has all these different units and they're all stronger. They stick close to each other because it makes them fight better and are great at holding off waves of Trollocs during the Trolloc Wars. It's the effects of such mechanical changes that make the mechanics of it engaging, and it's the flavor wrapping that makes it immediately engaging for the player experience.

Yeah, I think this one is too weak. It doesn't provide a constant bonus throughout the game, which is a bummer.

Agreed.

I like this one! I do feel like it helps everybody else out in a way that doesn't help out Manetheren at all... I wonder if there's some way to offset that (like Manetheren gains 1 prestige whenever that happens, or something). Otherwise people will just make a mad dash for Manetheren's Relics in a way that might be quite annoying for the person actually playing Manetheren. Thoughts?

Yes, good call. It does open us up to the human abuse we discussed with Malkier, but this is looking like it will be a recurring theme with any unique that cares about other players' LWs.

I also wouldn't be inclined to use the same balancing mechanic for foreign possession of LWs for both Malkier and Manetheren (Malkier's Memories of the Golden Crane), but otherwise these uniques would be able to co-exist. It might be simple enough to change the yield, but Prestige does seem quite apt.

Alternatively, we could make this bonus only apply to Manetheren and not other players - only Manetheren get the bonus for their own LW nationality. Manetheren LWs would then be the same as any other for non-Manetheren players. (Though there's still some benefit to other players in denying them that bonus by digging up Manetheren's Relics first.)

hmmm... as far as I recall, I don't think the Amyrlin bonus is so profound as to actually be UA worthy. Also, kind of a weird flavor to base this off of. Like making a roman UA be "barbarians invading and mismanagement".

Re barbarians, it's not based off of the betrayal flavor, it's based off of the flavor that caused the betrayal (Manetheren Queen was too powerful within and without the Tower). Agreed that the Amyrlin bonus is too narrow for a UA though.

I also think this is pretty cool, though, again, I worry that this sort of helps others out in a way that might be pretty annoying for the Many player. Consider if you were playing Manetheren as Dom-focused, and not making a big deal bout Relics - you've just given whoever's trying to win via Culture a heck of a lot of ammo. Any way to offset this? If not, I'd suggest we can't use it.

Ah, very good point, you don't want to provide your enemies with tons of Relics if you're not going for the Culture victory.

It could also disallow foreign Historians from digging up Manetheren's territory? We could choose to allow or disallow Brown Ajah Sisters to do so based on balance (probably leaning disallow to start with). That way, Manetheren's borders would be their way of keeping those safe. However, that does require them to fight more at home or be expansionist, and we have them marked as Tall.

OK, interesting! Quite hero-ey, indeed. I think it's interesting how the SQ isn't in and of herself any better at combat.

Can you please clarify the mechanics of the WK a little better - I think I get it, but it's a little confusing to me, still. Maybe an example. How does it relate to non-shadow units?

Sure, the Warder King makes it so that Manetheren's units (within range), if they have more than 1 HP and would be killed by a Shadowspawn unit (or Mashadar) then instead they go to 1 HP. I considered making them unkillable by Shadowspawn or Mashadar in range, but that lets players create walls of units during Shadowspawn invasions that would shepherd the AI way too easily and couldn't be broken through. So, instead, the unit can die if it's at 1HP already when it gets attacked.

If it's a non-Shadowspawn unit (that isn't Mashadar) doing the attacking, then the Warder King's ability doesn't affect that combat. Non-Manetheren units are also unaffected.

I like this one very much from a flavor perspective, especially the other-territory thing. I like how it doesn't specifically require certain playstyles - you'll get some bonus no matter where you are. Is there a bonus if you are in *enemy* territory?

Hmm, distinguishing enemy territory could be very interesting. It's worth noting that both the foreign and enemy territory interactions will behave slightly differently during the LB, when an enemy of Manetheren may themselves control some Shadowspawn units. (Depends on if we classify Shadowspawn units as a set of specific unit types: Trollocs, Myrddraal, Draghkar etc. or as units controlled by the Shadowspawn civilization.)

Enemy territory could yield double?

Interesting, definitely. It feels a little "special move-ey" to me, which isn't how UU's normally work (though there are exceptions, the Nau, etc.), but it could be acceptable. Neat combat implications. Not sure how the flavor really ties in, though.

I don't think it can be tied to the Horn of Valere, since I'm pretty sure you can't yet have received it by this point in the game.

I'm not sure the warhorn flavor is the best choice, actually. Given that it isn't tied to *the* Horn, I feel like it might be a little confusing having there be a horn at all

The flavor is mainly related to Manetheren's renowned strength and their calling for aid from others as a part of the Compact.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be a warhorn flavor on the mission.

Agreed about the Horn of Valere. We could get to it by allowing the ability to stick around through upgrades, but that's a bizarre thing for the player to keep track of.

Interesting. Help me out, though - how is the unit defending better than normal? Units garrisoned have their combat strength applied to the city already, right? Would the unit itself be weaker?

Assuming I'm wrong, this could work, though it is of course mildly unflavorful, since... they didn't defend their city. Not a problem, I don't think.

Units garrisoned in a city increase the defense of the city in a way that's related to their combat strength, but this ability means that the unit needs to be killed before the city can be captured. Normally, if a city is down at 0 health and you attack it with a melee unit, you capture if and destroy any units that were inside it (or capture them, as appropriate). That's usually a good way of destroying powerful, full health units without having to fight them: burst down the city's health and capture it, destroying the unit as collateral. This ability requires the attacking player to kill the Defender unit inside the city (with melee attacks) before they can attack the city itself, no matter how much health the city has.

The unit shouldn't be weaker than the unit it replaces - I've marked them as having higher combat strength because otherwise it's only useful on the defensive, which isn't good.

On the flavor, does that double negative mean you do see it as a problem? I'm not sure, the way you've written it makes it seem like you're fine with it. Just in case, I can still see it working with their flavor. True, they died defending, but they fought to the end against an enemy no one could have defeated alone, and were only beaten because they were denied their allies. They're much more capable at defending, which is evidenced by how long they lasted, where other civs would have been bowled over immediately. The fact that such an army was needed shows they're good at it.

also, you're flavoring this one like it's a UA. Wouldn't this probably just be another BotRH unit (BotRH (garrison)) or something?

Yeah, it could be another Band of the Red Hand variant. I was flavoring it more about "Defenders" being people who are valiant, rather than describing them as a civ as being known for valiantly defending stuff.

Yeah understood and agreed re: the flavor weirdness.

I'm interested to know why this is a UI, and not, say, a building? Does it provide a yield?

I actually don't really like this one because it seems like it takes advantage of stupid AI in a way that's really odd, even "lampshading" to a certain degree. If they can't be pillaged, why would the shadowspawn be trying to pillage it anyways? Trollocs are stupid, but they aren't that stupid - certainly not with Myrrdraal around. I'd be fine with disallowing pillaging, or with rewarding pillaging with faith, but not with both. I suppose it could be amended to work - maybe if the SS *could* pillage, but it took an entire round of movement/actions to do it, and rewarded Many, it would be more effective. Maybe not worth a Unique slot, though.

Foiled by my own brevity! I think this one needs something like what you're suggesting here to make it so that it's not abusing the AI, but I'm not sure which one to go for. I was thinking along the lines of allowing the Shadowspawn unit to be healed, but not damaging the Improvement on the tile. Your suggestion of it consuming all of their movement could work too. So could preventing the healing and only damaging the Improvement.

Do you have any preferences among those kinds of choices?

It's an Improvement because it cares about location. A building would always create the aura around the city (and would need to replace another building), but I like the idea of placing these tactically to make some parts of your civ easier to defend against Shadowspawn than others. It could be used to defend places they expect TW and LB battles to be significant due to geography. We could put a yield on it - possibly Alignment? It pushes you in the direction of your overall leaning? Or if worked by a Darkfriend citizen it produces Shadow, if worked by a non-Darkfriend it produces Light?

I think this is a pretty good use for the AS-Queen flavor! I also think the level 2 ability could tie into the Old Blood flavor quite well. I thin kit's cool, in theory, to spawn govs with AS instead of LP - we'll have to make sure it is balanced in the end, though. Question - does having this gov consume your aes sedai quota, or will you get another to replace her? The latter seems nicer to the player, but it is also flavorfully quite weird, as well as more likely to be abused. I wonder if you could fire the governor and get the sister back if you needed her.

I should say that I'm not sure it should be guaranteed novice success. That takes something away from all of this, I think, considering this is a slow process that happens over the whole game.. I think huge bonuses are probably a better idea.

I would lean towards the Governor not counting toward your Aes Sedai quota to start with. (Flavor justification for that can be that she now actually works for your civ, instead of being an agent of the Tower that you just have temporary sway over.) It would also remove the impetus for us to allow the Governor to turn back into a Sister, which, like we decided for Governors, I think would open up too many combinations that could be abused. And as you've said, it's nicer to the player this way. How would the player abuse the Governor not taking up quota? I suppose they would get more value than other civs by ensuring they always had spare quota, but that seems like part of the bonus to me.

I think the Novice thing will need to be evaluated once we've finished the discussion in the block below this. There are a lot of unknowns in how that system actually works that I think we need to work out before we can know what makes a good bonus to it.

hmm.... I thought it was that you sent channeling *units* to the tower who became novices (i.e. wilders), with the max you can have being your Spark. Is this not it? If not, I wonder why they aren't just sent automatically, based on Spark - if you don't have strategic decisions over which to send, etc., what's the point in having the choices at all? the unit thing requires a clear "sacrifice" from the player. Population does too, but that presents some problems (see below)

On that note, no I don't think they were supposed to be tied to each city. I suppose it could be, but I don't think it's that helpful, mechanically. This whole system is sort of a back-room kind of thing that I'd prefer not to become too tedious. I'd rather it be pretty simple and user friendly.

Population could be a way to make it work, but I think in conjunction with this UG, that's problematic. It seems like this would suggest you constantly sending all your novices from a few key cities, which actually sort of hurts those cities... Maybe that's ok, but maybe it's not. Just something to think about.

If we do it based on pop, then the gov bonus could be made to work. If it's by units, then I think it might need to be slightly different - +X% success rate per gov, or something weird (doesn't help with the ajah choice thing at all). Hmm...

I think it might be worth doing a few sidebar posts on this topic, because there's a decent amount for us to cover here and it will sidetrack Manetheren. I agree that it should be simple and user friendly to interact with, so I think we'll need to go through a bit of detail to be able to achieve that.

I think a lot of this is still undefined from when we discussed it first, because there are no solid details that I can find about how this works in either the Channeling or Diplo summary. My understanding is:

Sending units to the Tower and sending Novices are separate ways of interacting with the Tower. Conceptually, one is sending channelers that have already ignited their Spark (that might be an MtG-ism, not a WoT-ism) to be taken in (sending units), the other is deliberately sending young women to be trained (Novices).

You can gift channeling units to the Tower for overall Tower Influence by moving them into Tower territory and doing a "Gift unit" as you usually would.

Novices are sent to the Tower by <undefined mechanic>. They progress through to Accepted and then Aes Sedai. At each stage, there is a chance they will fail to progress to the next one and the civ will need to send a new Novice (if they wish to). A Novice starting at the Tower or a Novice being elevated to Accepted results in a nominal amount of overall Tower Influence to the civ that sent them. An Accepted joining an Ajah grants Ajah Influence to the civ that sent them. (The civ doesn't choose which Ajah they join, that's based on the dominance of Ajahs and some randomness.)

It's the <undefined mechanic> that I don't think we ever actually nailed down. I see a few paths into this:

1. Use the unit as the vehicle to deliver Novices to the Tower
2. Send 1 population to the Tower to act as a Novice
3. Automatically based on Spark
4. Another mechanism

Each one has significant differences in how the system will play out and the kinds of strategies it will lead to. Assuming that Novices, once in the Tower, do work roughly how we outlined originally, then whichever way we choose, the payout is some Tower Influence and a chunk of Ajah Influence (referred to collectively as "TV Influence below").

Approaches 1 and 2's first significant difference to me is that #1 converts Production into TV Influence and #2 converts Food into TV Influence.

In terms of #3, I would be inclined to make this a system that the player is involved in, where they have to make tactical decisions about how and how many Novices they want to send to the Tower. #3 will lead to a constant influx of TV Influence from all players, varied only by their Spark, not necessarily their relationship with the Tower. That doesn't seem to me like the way we want it to work.

Option #4 is of course the wild card - if we think of another way to do this that we also like, then we should consider that as well!

I tried to do a pros and cons comparison of #1 and #2, but I find that I've got a stack of cons for each one that are arguably strategic challenges, rather than design flaws. This makes me think that either could work, but will affect how players interact with the system, so we should decide how we want that to look.

Things that stand out to me is that #1 favors civs that are geographically close to the Tower. While that could be something we'd want, I don't think it is, because the Tower plays a significant role in the Diplo victory, and having that bias deciding by how the Tower is placed doesn't seem very fun.

#2 favors Tall civs, since they produce more Food per city and so can lose 1 Population in a given city more easily.

#1 favors Wide civs since they're able to produce more units (and are more likely to have land close to the Tower).

#1 makes interaction with Novices a unit-level and civ-level concept, so UUs and UAs will be the ones most easily able to interact with that.

#2 makes interaction with Novices a city-level and civ-level concept, so UBs and UAs the same as above.

Are there other foundations that I'm missing? Advantages or disadvantages or strategies I haven't considered?

How would we like Novices to play? I think either system will put most of the emphasis on player action at the start, before the Novice actually appears in the Tower. This makes sense flavorfully and means that the process is relatively hands-off for the player from that point onwards. They can just track progress, if they wish, and can be notified of events like ascending to Accepted/Sister or failing out.