S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

I see what you mean about splitting focus. I agree. But I also don't think Manny is best designed as a civ that's *wholly* about culture.

but i'm guessing this is mostly moot, given our sets.

I totally agree about Manetheren not being wholly about Culture, and I wouldn't say any of the sets we've considered have really been wholly about culture either. Some of them are heavy on it, but it's only ever been Storied Legacy that's 100% on it - the other uniques are also useful elsewhere.

I think this is fine. I could also see us putting one of the more "normal" combat UUs as an alterate to either the UI or the UG.

Done!

I've listed an alternate next to both of them under the assumption that we wouldn't take both alternates, but would consider either.

up to you how you'd like to list them.

I'll leave them off, I think they're covered by the diversity in the sets.

right, so that lock list was:

The Aiel
Andor
The Atha'an Miere
Cairhien
Illian
Manetheren
Seanchan
Tear

I think there are probably more ivs on that list (wasn't Shienar or something?), though we've perhaps already done them (Shara and Shandalle). In any case, those would be fine. I suppose that makes Shienar next, if it's on the list, followed by Andor, yes?

Yeah, I seem to remember us discussing having at least one modern Borderlander civ is a good lock, and Shienar has risen to the top of that pile.

Funny about Cairhien being low ranking.

Yeah, given our other choices, I think modern civs might not be as common as we first feared. That's definitely good, but it means Cairhien's score has suffered for it.

Also, by "normal" civs, I don't think I agree. Also, and probably importantly, that's not what I meant. Cairhien is "normal," as is Andor, in that they're covered greatly in the books, and not terribly gimmicky - most especially, they're of the "Westlands" culture, in varying flavors. Pretty normal as far as WoT goes. We haven't done a single one of those civs, really (Malkier perhaps being an exception), since the A'aM aren't in the same cultural sphere.

Totally agree on this, I see what you meant here. In terms of "normal" as a modern Westlands civ, it will be great to use some of that flavor that we've been holding off until now!

Also, I don't agree that not being ****oo for Coca Puffs means boring. All civs can't be Venice. Korea isn't boring because it isn't introducing such a strange mechanic. Some of the stuff we're considering is really rather out there - building cities on coastal tiles! I would definitely not want that to be the case for all our civs - and the existence of that stuff doesn't make the civs with more traditional uniques (good-fighting UUs, yieldey UBs, etc.) boring, if the gameplay they lead to is fun gameplay.

I guess I want to know - which civs do you find boring in BNW? Why are they boring?

If it leads to fun gameplay, then totally, that's good. But I think that straight up "this unit, but better" and the general simple "upgrade" uniques don't lead to as fun gameplay. Obviously CiV itself is fun (at least to us!) so even a civ with no uniques would still be fun, in a general sense. Plain upgrades that encourage players to do weird and awesome things are in the same category of "out there" abilities to me, though I am a big fan of the very different mechanics. I'd say a lot of the variety we get with the out there mechanics adds a lot of replay value, where even games that are similar to each other in terms of map layout are drastically different if you're playing a different civ. Or even next to different civs, even if you're playing the same one.

I would ask, why can't every civ be Venice? What are the drawbacks of that kind of approach? It's not that every other civ will definitely be boring if they don't have Venice-level mechanical uniques, but there's an increased likelihood that some of them will be, and particularly by comparison.

In terms of BNW civs that I think are boring, America and Persia come to mind. Neither of their uniques particularly change how I play the game. It makes me better at some stuff, but my plan isn't significantly shifted by them. I've played many games of CiV, so I'd prefer if each civ felt quite different and had to plan and act differently from the others.

The opposite extreme is Venice. (Possible other candidates are Portugal - Feitoria seems quite out there, but I have yet to play as them - and the Mayans - tons of free GPs and a super bizarre way of producing them.) I have to play a totally different strategy with Venice, which makes it much more fun.

 

[S3rgeus]

well, obviously some of the words themselves (Matriarch, Lorekeeper, etc.) are nonsense I've made up. But it's more the "mechanical flavor" of things I'm referring to - them being all good at uniting folks, spreading Paths, affecting T'a'r, etc. Ways their civ interacts with it's world.

You say "obviously" but that wasn't obvious! I figured Matriarch was made up, but I assumed Lorekeeper was canon!

Are they good at uniting folks? They were divided and that's why Luthair was able to conquer everyone, weren't they?

Also, it's hilarious that we're two posts in and already talking about sets! A good sign!

Yeah, you had a ton of good options for this civ straight off the bat!

cool. Good thought making a UU with this ability. Glad you like this one. This is a good example of an ability that would be fun to use but isn't ****oo for cocoa puffs (btw, is that a meaningless reference to your hemisphere?)

I'd consider this on the border of ****oo for cocoa puffs, spawning Settlers is all kinds of crazy! It does make me think that we just have a different notion of "****oo" above though!

Yes, ****oo for Cocoa Puffs is meaningless over here, but I grew up on the west side of the Atlantic, so I know the reference! It was a great cereal!

Hmmm.... I can see why this would be a good addition, but I'm also worried about the mechanical implications of "auto majority" with an alliance. It means (by definition, I think) that it's knocking down others' influence. I guess I just worry that it could be an unbalancing way to "snipe" Path. Pay a lot of gold to a civ a continent away, who has no other Path contact with you. Next turn, the civ you usurped completes a quest and surpasses you in influence... but still has lost a ton of Path presence in that city. Seems a little cheap.

I've amended this to make it more predictable. If it's too weak this way, maybe it could be equivalent to 2 Herals, (probably not a Visionary, though).

Also, I decided it should be an *actual* expended Herald, since that might stack with other abilities in a fun way.

I think an auto-majority is probably still ok though. It would be a way to snipe one city (or several if you have all of the money), but it wouldn't be enough to be self-sustaining 95% of the time. And it's not something the player can abuse and do repeatedly, since it requires the other player to try to compete with them. (If they do, then fair game.) And it also costs a lot of money to keep that up, for limited gain if you're only interested in the religious majority. (A Visionary takes longer, since it has to get there, but is significantly more effective - it can grab that city and probably a few others as well.)

Also 2, it should be the majority path, or the path founded by P-C S (and what if they don't have one?)?

I'd say if P-C Seanchan has founded one, then go for that one. Otherwise go for the majority. If they don't have one, then it shouldn't do anything.

Also 3, does this work only when they *first* become an ally? What if the alliance switches back and forth, does it keep happening? (luckily, that's not something the player would be able to cause, I don't think)

I think it should keep happening, otherwise it gets squandered in the early game and then is never useful again, when some other civ can just spend some Faith for Heralds/Visionaries to get rid of it. And as you've said, that the player can't force the influence to jump back and forth. They could let it decay below 60, but leaving an important CS near 60 is dangerous for other reasons - other civs overtaking you more easily.

I think the addition makes them "good at t'a'r" in a way that's a little more flavor-presumptuous, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. You do think that extra vision's really useful?

I don't think it makes a big difference - it lets them keep better tabs on who's picking up their Glimmers and will give them a semi-unpredictable scattering of T'a'r vision. I don't think the UA is at much risk of being too powerful, and I figured this was a nice addition that made it a bit more competitive.

Any thoughts on whether it should be Faith or Culture?

Not particularly. Faith would combo well with some other kind of Path unique, but our primary consideration there seems to be another UA, and we can't pick both of those.

OK, I'm actually quite confused by your addition here. Does that mean the PS could yield a "Free" relic, or does it mean it'd destroy the PS? If the latter, than that's not that different from simply making a relic in the first place (not counting the "change your mind later" aspect, like I added to some of my abilities.

One issue with this one is that it's all mid and late game, which is weird with where this civ is supposed to occupy.

It would destroy the Portal Stone. It's very different from making the Relic in the first place - it makes the UA much more flexible. Without the ability to turn Portal Stones into an LW, giving bonuses to Portal Stones in their own territory specifically pushes them away from the Culture victory, since utilizing that ability reducing the number of LWs they can create (since LWs create Prestige and Portal Stones don't). But if they can make Portal Stones early and turn them into LWs later, then they can use this bonus in two ways: straight up Science bonus by just keeping the Portal Stones and pursuing the Science victory. Or they can slingshot their Science progress in the early game and convert that into LWs that produce Prestige in the late game, to pursue the Culture victory. That "change your mind" aspect you've got elsewhere makes it a much more useful UA, because it's not so much changing your mind, as using the same resources (conceptual resources - the things the player can use to win the game - rather than specifically CiV Resources) differently at different stages of the game.

I think the flavor of this happening later in the game is ok, because with early Portal Stones, the start of it (creating the Portal Stones) will still launch in the time period where they were around in the canon. The remaining sections (converting them into LWs) are exploring remnants of what was there from before, which also lines up with their flavor.

OK, the thing about the destructability is more supposed to enable the P-C S to be able to use a historian later to turn it into a Relic, or do whatever with it.

The limitation aspect is a part of balancing it, though... I guess, I'm trying to create a UI that isn't just a full replacement of the PS (because that could easily be a UB or a UA anyways), but offers an alternative approach that, when used properly, might be better. Ideas?

Thoughts on science v gold at this point?

I think Science is a good call on this one, because it fits well into an overall game plan to make these help you progress through the whole tree faster, regardless of what you're going for.

Right, the limitation is intended to make it so that it isn't always better than a Portal Stone. I think it does sort of achieve that, but I worry it goes too far the other way and feels quite punishing since it only matters in specific circumstances. (And if a Dragonsworn destroys it, that would be infuriating!)

How about if we make it something completely different from the Portal Stone? I've suggested an addition (new UI) below for something like this.

Personally I'd amend this a bit. I don't think we need to triple-dip on the Portal Stones thing. I would be perfectly fine (perhaps prefer) the PS's impacting two of the Uniques. *possibly* three, but I definitely don't see that as essential - perhaps it's even less desirable, as it's very "all in." (more on all-in below!) I guess with things like this - very specific small aspects of the game (like Portal Stones) - I'd prefer not to make that essentially the only plan that works for a civ. I'm all for differentiating civs, and we certainly don't want to spread the civ thin, but it's easy to go too far with that as well.

I like the idea of the UA combining well with other uniques (be they UU or otherwise), but I also think that's something we pretty much *always* are trying to do, and it does possibly lead us to perhaps unwarrantedly ignore certain more self-contained UAs. A good example is "Unite the Tribes," which I actually like pretty well, but doesn't *obviously* synergize with other Uniques. I don't want to prevent us from doing that kind of thing. We could do Portal Stone synergy with UUs and UBs, or UIs, instead, I think (we don't have to, I'm just trying to avoid us limiting ourselves).

To this specific set, I do think we've maybe gone a little toooo far on the Stones. Maybe it's fine, but it's very very focused.

I don't think we need to worry about going deep on Portal Stones though. What we'd want to ensure with a set like this is that the player could use Portal Stones to achieve a wide variety of strategies. The Portal Stones isn't something that limits them - it's something that lets them use a set of bonuses to use an existing mechanic in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise, to achieve a goal that's common to most civs.

This is quite different to our concerns about Manetheren being too Culture-y, for example. For them, a primary concern of making them too Culture-y is that they would always end up playing the same, since their uniques push them so hard toward Culture. But a Portal Stone focus like this on P-C Seanchan doesn't need to funnel them into one victory - it can be a common mechanic that their uniques can use to achieve any end. (Or that is the intention of what I'm suggesting.)

Of course, I like Unite the Tribes as well, and I don't think considering this kind of approach precludes that. All suggestions are considerations for the future at this stage, so the existence of a set like this doesn't affect Unite the Tribes's consideration, beyond giving it steeper competition if we do like this too. In the end, we should always go for the set that we think is best for each civ, with all of these things considered together.

OK, I have a few independent thoughts about this, both of which lead me towards Red.

First, it feels sort of like a lazy mechanic. It feels a little like "we couldn't think of a UA, so we added more UUs" or something! I suspect people will think this because we've kind of "invented" this civ in the first place... it's probably what I'd think if I saw this ability.

Secondly, as I've mentioned a few times above, I'm not sure we need to go all in on Exotics here. It also seems a little like the lazy way out. it's the "here's the only thing we know about this civ, and we couldn't fit these creatures into the Seanchan Regular (pronounce like it's Spanish, plz) civ, so here they are because it's cool flavor from the game" approach!

Now, granted, that's *precisely* what first attracted me to building this civ in the first place. But a few other things have emerged that seem compelling - Portal Stone stuff and maybe even T'a'r stuff. So, the way I look at it is we don't have to just slam super hard on all the Exotics to make this civ work. I could see us having one exotic only and that being fine. I could see us having two, potentially, but I don't think it's necessary.

Long story short, I think this UA goes a little too far in that direction.

All very good points. I agree! Removed.

That said, I do think some kind of Exotic is a "lock" for this civ. I'd go as far to say "an exotic not used by the other Seanchan civ" and "something about portal stones" are my two locks for this civ.

Agreed.

Got it, *but* it's abilities might carry over on upgrade, which could be cool

There's only one upgrade for the scout, which makes this a bit easier to keep track of, which is good. It will still become less relevant as the scout units lose relative power to the others, but it could definitely mitigate it.

yeah, I find the Morat thing to be way too evocative of the Seanchan Proper - the old tongue and all that. Did the ancient Seanchan use the old tongue? I don't suppose we have any idea (the linguistic history and lack of diversity of Randland is absolutely absurd, but that's another topic). That's why I went with the different kinds of names for these guys - I say let the morat be apart of the 'chan.

This ability is fine. Not sure which Grolm I like more.

Sounds good!



Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Unite the Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Federation of Tribes, City-State allies are considered a part of Pre-Consolidation Seanchan's territory for the purpose of other civilization's movement. Once you become Friends with a City-State, one bonus (random) City-State quest becomes active. When P-C Seanchan becomes a City-State's ally, it's Path becomes the majority in that City-State's capital (if it is not already), a Herald from P-C Seanchan's majority Path is expended in that City-State.
• Independent Tribes, penalties to Science and Culture through founding a city (note, not through conquest) are reduced by X% and Y%.
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith or Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics.

UUs:

• Kaensada Runner, replaces Recon 1, fights with a ranged attack with 1 range, 2 when on Hills. Can detect Ancient Ruins when they are within one hex of the unit's normal sight.
• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
• Ogier Berserker, replaces Siege 2, attacks as a melee unit. High combat strength and can take two attacks per turn. High cost.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophecy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces the Stable, each Horse and Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (portal stones), can be built on a Sites of Power. Constructs a temporary portal stone (destroyed if pillaged) that provides all the benefits of a Portal Stone, plus +X Science or +Y Gold
• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.
• Sacred Stones (LP), can be built on Sites of Power. +X (low) Gold/Science/Culture. Every Y turns, a Doomseer appears on this hex.

Sacred Stones (science)'s mounted production bonus works under the assumption that the exotic we choose will replace a mounted unit. The intention is to take in the exotic to nod to the flavor, but affect the whole upgrade path to make the Improvement useful all the time. If we choose an exotic that's a siege unit or something, then we should change the bonus here too.

Sacred Stones (LP) is a whole different thing. The yield should be low (if there at all) to compensate for the LP awesome. Y should be sufficiently high to balance the appearance of LPs. And Doomseer seems to make some kind of flavor sense, but some other LP types (notably Visionary) would also make some kind of sense.

 

[counterpoint]

Yeah, given our other choices, I think modern civs might not be as common as we first feared. That's definitely good, but it means Cairhien's score has suffered for it.

well, I think modern civs ARE as common as we feared. But our point ranking system rewarded *not* being modern, which has pushed the historical civs to the front of this conversation, which might be skewing our perspective a bit.

If it leads to fun gameplay, then totally, that's good. But I think that straight up "this unit, but better" and the general simple "upgrade" uniques don't lead to as fun gameplay. Obviously CiV itself is fun (at least to us!) so even a civ with no uniques would still be fun, in a general sense. Plain upgrades that encourage players to do weird and awesome things are in the same category of "out there" abilities to me, though I am a big fan of the very different mechanics. I'd say a lot of the variety we get with the out there mechanics adds a lot of replay value, where even games that are similar to each other in terms of map layout are drastically different if you're playing a different civ. Or even next to different civs, even if you're playing the same one.

I would ask, why can't every civ be Venice? What are the drawbacks of that kind of approach? It's not that every other civ will definitely be boring if they don't have Venice-level mechanical uniques, but there's an increased likelihood that some of them will be, and particularly by comparison.

As to why can't every civ be Venice... this is a tricky thing to answer, as this conversation is mostly theoretical or in principle, and I'd prefer not to make too many generalizations or grand statements that can't really be backed up. Still, here's a few reasons why that might be true:

Note first that most of the reasons below are not reasons for why it would be bad to play as a nutso civ, but to play against a game full of nutso civs.

1) BNW has only one Venice (extrapolated meaning being that BNW has few "weird civs" relative to the "normal ones"), and BNW is pretty darn fun. I'd say overall that it is pretty balanced, as well. While not scientific or any real "evidence," this item invokes the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of logic.

2) Weird mechanics do have a tendency to "take over," or at least make their presence felt. I was playing a diplo game as some civ and Austria was playing as well, marrying everybody and their mothers (and sons). I was like what-is-this-i-don't-even and adapted my strategy to accommodate the weirdness this created. This is a good thing, and a great end result of a weird civ ability like diplomatic marriage.

Now imagine that same game, but Venice is consuming CSs, and Austria is marrying them. OK, more stuff to deal with. Fine, I guess. But the game experience is also getting a little crowded, as I'm having to deal with other civs as much as I'm dealing with mine own. Fine, perhaps good.

But fill that out to its logical extreme, that every civ has something like this. Say there are 8 civs in the game, but the game is balanced in terms of VCs the civs are going with. But each one totally throws the way the game plays into a totally different perspective.

Civ 1 can build on the coast (SF)
Civ 2 can build on the desert in weird places (Aiel)
Civ 3 can build in the blight (Malkier)
Civ 4 has territory that can't be entered ( Shara)
Civ 5 can build on mountains (hypothetical)
Civ 6 can work a four-tile radius (hypothetical)
Civ 7 can build small cities super quickly, all over the map (hypothetical)
Civ 8 can build in other civs' territory (hypothetical)

Each of those abilities is intriguing (assuming for a moment that we've made the hypothetical ones workable), but taken as a whole, this is a truly bizarre game of civ. Imagine a domination victory in these situations. It *could* be good, but ensuring that is the case is much more difficult. It seems to me that a game situation like this would encourage, for instance, avoiding a domination route in favor of a VC that's less of a hassle in terms of movement and global position. Of course you need to adapt your game to the opponents, but if everybody is nutso this seems to me to be less fun and more annoying.

I also write this as somebody that's likes to get each civ's "experience" once, and then move on to the next civ, after one game (rarely, two). I feel like if I was playing a Dom civ, and got that group of civs, I'd consider restarting since I wouldn't get to really "feel" my civ.

3) Venice's weirdness is relatively tame, it seems to me, compared to some of the weirdness we've been proposing, including weirdness that I have stated that I approve of. The accumulation of such weirdness on the scale of numerous civs isn't the same as the accumulation of Venice's weirdness on the scale of multiple civs - it's a way bigger impact.

4) Because of this, balancing from our perspective becomes much, much more difficult. With tua'tha'an-like civs being the norm instead of the exception, the combinations would be very unpredictable. This is fun if we balance it properly, but that is very much easier said than done. I think of the "normal" civs as the "control group" from which we can appropriately balance the weird ones.

5) Similar to the "control group" notion above - the weird ones feel special and weird and impactful if they are rare. If everybody has a transcendent, game re-defining UA, the onus is on us to make each UA breathtaking and spectacular, or else it too will feel boring. What we should be focusing on is making a UA good, not spectacular.

6) We have a bunch of new mechanics that will change the way the game is played (channeling, the WT, the LB, Alignment, etc.). A strong argument could be made for keeping a good number of other game components relatively straightforward. An Alignment-centered UA, for instance, need not be in itself complex, and doesn't need to be a reinterpretation or re-definition of our Alignment mechanics since it's utilizing mechanics that are in and of themselves new.

In terms of BNW civs that I think are boring, America and Persia come to mind. Neither of their uniques particularly change how I play the game. It makes me better at some stuff, but my plan isn't significantly shifted by them. I've played many games of CiV, so I'd prefer if each civ felt quite different and had to plan and act differently from the others.

hmmm.. haven't played Persia yet. I actually found America to be surprisingly interesting. Their UA is quite dumb. But having one UU in the mid-game, and then one in the reeeeally-late game - where nobody else really has UUs - made it a pretty fun dom run.

The opposite extreme is Venice. (Possible other candidates are Portugal - Feitoria seems quite out there, but I have yet to play as them - and the Mayans - tons of free GPs and a super bizarre way of producing them.) I have to play a totally different strategy with Venice, which makes it much more fun.

I actually found the Mayans kind of lame. Their UA is rather unreliable, I found.

Venice is of course a quite different kind of game, which does make it quite fun. However, a big difference between the ****oo for cocoa puffs-ness of Venice and, say, the ****oo for cocoa puffs-ness of our cities-on-the-sea UA for The A'aM is that Venice's weirdness doesn't really extend that far into other players' game. True, some CSs might periodically disappear (which can happen with conquest anyways), but basically playing against/with Venice is basically like playing against a very Tall civ. Playing against a civ with cities you can't use (a la A'aM) is very different.

This relates to my point #3 above, and the "note" before all my points - Venice is weird, but doesn't "mess with" the game from the perspective of other civs. Some of the stuff we're suggesting probably would

 

[counterpoint]

You say "obviously" but that wasn't obvious! I figured Matriarch was made up, but I assumed Lorekeeper was canon!

Are they good at uniting folks? They were divided and that's why Luthair was able to conquer everyone, weren't they?

yeah, this is kind of like the "Manetheren is good as defense" thing. They sort of weren't since they were totally obliterated in defending... The P-CS were taken apart by Luthair exploiting their rivalries and such (likely a nod to Cortez vs the Aztecs), but I also thought that this suggested, at least, that they were a sort of confederacy of smaller states and such, not so much an "empire" or anything like that. If we're even going to presume to label them as one "civ," it seemed to make sense to flavor it that they were a disparate group - perhaps the word "unite" is problematic here.

I'd consider this on the border of ****oo for cocoa puffs, spawning Settlers is all kinds of crazy! It does make me think that we just have a different notion of "****oo" above though!

yeah, true. Thus the rant above

I mean that it isn't c-f-c-p mostly because it amps up a predictable mechanic. It amps it up in a possibly broken way, but it's not totally rewriting all the mechanics. A 3-4 free settlers in a game makes a civ uber wide uber fast (1-2 wouldn't be so nuts, while 8-9 would be ridic), but it's not c-f-c-p mechanically (i.e., regardless of scaling) like "can annex foreign cities when your Path becomes the majority there" would be.

Yes, ****oo for Cocoa Puffs is meaningless over here, but I grew up on the west side of the Atlantic, so I know the reference! It was a great cereal!

Nice to see high fructose corn syrup was just as prevalent in the 80s-90s in your homeland as it was in mine!

I think an auto-majority is probably still ok though. It would be a way to snipe one city (or several if you have all of the money), but it wouldn't be enough to be self-sustaining 95% of the time. And it's not something the player can abuse and do repeatedly, since it requires the other player to try to compete with them. (If they do, then fair game.) And it also costs a lot of money to keep that up, for limited gain if you're only interested in the religious majority. (A Visionary takes longer, since it has to get there, but is significantly more effective - it can grab that city and probably a few others as well.)

ok, we can leave this for now, then. I'm fine with whichever version you prefer.

I think it should keep happening, otherwise it gets squandered in the early game and then is never useful again, when some other civ can just spend some Faith for Heralds/Visionaries to get rid of it. And as you've said, that the player can't force the influence to jump back and forth. They could let it decay below 60, but leaving an important CS near 60 is dangerous for other reasons - other civs overtaking you more easily.

sounds good

Not particularly. Faith would combo well with some other kind of Path unique, but our primary consideration there seems to be another UA, and we can't pick both of those.

ok, we can leave it as ambiguous for now

It would destroy the Portal Stone. It's very different from making the Relic in the first place - it makes the UA much more flexible. Without the ability to turn Portal Stones into an LW, giving bonuses to Portal Stones in their own territory specifically pushes them away from the Culture victory, since utilizing that ability reducing the number of LWs they can create (since LWs create Prestige and Portal Stones don't). But if they can make Portal Stones early and turn them into LWs later, then they can use this bonus in two ways: straight up Science bonus by just keeping the Portal Stones and pursuing the Science victory. Or they can slingshot their Science progress in the early game and convert that into LWs that produce Prestige in the late game, to pursue the Culture victory. That "change your mind" aspect you've got elsewhere makes it a much more useful UA, because it's not so much changing your mind, as using the same resources (conceptual resources - the things the player can use to win the game - rather than specifically CiV Resources) differently at different stages of the game.

ok, I'm fine with this. Though, I'll note, that it's a little strange, the notion of PS first, LW later, as LWs are better for the Cul VC the longer you have them.

I think the flavor of this happening later in the game is ok, because with early Portal Stones, the start of it (creating the Portal Stones) will still launch in the time period where they were around in the canon. The remaining sections (converting them into LWs) are exploring remnants of what was there from before, which also lines up with their flavor.

sounds good

I think Science is a good call on this one, because it fits well into an overall game plan to make these help you progress through the whole tree faster, regardless of what you're going for.

Right, the limitation is intended to make it so that it isn't always better than a Portal Stone. I think it does sort of achieve that, but I worry it goes too far the other way and feels quite punishing since it only matters in specific circumstances. (And if a Dragonsworn destroys it, that would be infuriating!)

How about if we make it something completely different from the Portal Stone? I've suggested an addition (new UI) below for something like this.

address the new UI below.

Agreed on science for the PS version of this UI.

I'm wondering if we just eliminate the temporary nature, it's totally fine - after all, if you do want to convert it, just send a historian and dig up the SoP for real, right?

I don't think we need to worry about going deep on Portal Stones though. What we'd want to ensure with a set like this is that the player could use Portal Stones to achieve a wide variety of strategies. The Portal Stones isn't something that limits them - it's something that lets them use a set of bonuses to use an existing mechanic in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise, to achieve a goal that's common to most civs.

This is quite different to our concerns about Manetheren being too Culture-y, for example. For them, a primary concern of making them too Culture-y is that they would always end up playing the same, since their uniques push them so hard toward Culture. But a Portal Stone focus like this on P-C Seanchan doesn't need to funnel them into one victory - it can be a common mechanic that their uniques can use to achieve any end. (Or that is the intention of what I'm suggesting.)

Of course, I like Unite the Tribes as well, and I don't think considering this kind of approach precludes that. All suggestions are considerations for the future at this stage, so the existence of a set like this doesn't affect Unite the Tribes's consideration, beyond giving it steeper competition if we do like this too. In the end, we should always go for the set that we think is best for each civ, with all of these things considered together.

I'm mostly with you on this. I think part of what keeps this from being "too all in" on PSs is the specific bonuses we're providing - Culture (as in not Prestige) and Science and Faith are all veeery applicable to a number of VCs, especially rather early in the game.

Sacred Stones (science)'s mounted production bonus works under the assumption that the exotic we choose will replace a mounted unit. The intention is to take in the exotic to nod to the flavor, but affect the whole upgrade path to make the Improvement useful all the time. If we choose an exotic that's a siege unit or something, then we should change the bonus here too.

Hmmm... relatively interesting mechanically, but I feel like the connection to flavor is a little obscure, without a PS connection. It will seem like "made up" flavor - these "Sacred Stones of the P-C S," which isn't totally bad, but also it doesn't really "count" as "using" the PS flavor. Not a terrible thing, though

You do highlight here that I think if we do pull in the PS flavor somehow, it needs to be at least minorly connected to an Exotic - otherwise the flavor connections will make zero sense to the player, lore-wise.

Thus, your previous assertion that there should be a UU that is more powerful based on PSs...

Sacred Stones (LP) is a whole different thing. The yield should be low (if there at all) to compensate for the LP awesome. Y should be sufficiently high to balance the appearance of LPs. And Doomseer seems to make some kind of flavor sense, but some other LP types (notably Visionary) would also make some kind of sense.

hmmm.... not sure what to say about this one. It's kind of awesome, and kind of flavorful, but also kind of not awesome and not flavorful, lol!

This would only apply when worked, right?

No clear thoughts as to which yield is best, or which LP - I could see it being multiple options.

Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Diverse Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Federation of Tribes, City-State allies are considered a part of Pre-Consolidation Seanchan's territory for the purpose of other civilization's movement. Once you become Friends with a City-State, one bonus (random) City-State quest becomes active. When P-C Seanchan becomes a City-State's ally, it's Path becomes the majority in that City-State's capital (if it is not already), a Herald from P-C Seanchan's majority Path is expended in that City-State.
• Independent Tribes, penalties to Science and Culture through founding a city (note, not through conquest) are reduced by X% and Y%.
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith or Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics, removing the Portal Stone in the process.

UUs:

• Kaensada Runner, replaces Recon 1, fights with a ranged attack with 1 range, 2 when on Hills. Can detect Ancient Ruins when they are within one hex of the unit's normal sight.
• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
• Ogier Berserker, replaces Siege 2, attacks as a melee unit. High combat strength and can take two attacks per turn. High cost.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophecy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces the Stable, each Horse and Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (portal stones), can be built on a Sites of Power. Constructs a temporary portal stone (destroyed if pillaged) that pProvides all the benefits of a Portal Stone, plus +X Science or +Y Gold
• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.
• Sacred Stones (LP), can be built on Sites of Power. +X (low) Gold/Science/Culture. Every Y turns, a Doomseer appears on this hex.

 

[S3rgeus]

A little advance warning, I'm going to be out tomorrow evening, so my next post will be on Thursday evening!

I'm also going to be away this weekend. I'll try to get back in time to post on Sunday, but my next post after Thursday may be Monday.

well, I think modern civs ARE as common as we feared. But our point ranking system rewarded *not* being modern, which has pushed the historical civs to the front of this conversation, which might be skewing our perspective a bit.

Yeah, very possible! Our new plan to proceed with locked civs after this should hopefully counteract that! I'm thinking we have done a very good job overall though - compared to the original list which only had Manetheren as a non-modern civ, we've got a lot more variety.

As to why can't every civ be Venice... this is a tricky thing to answer, as this conversation is mostly theoretical or in principle, and I'd prefer not to make too many generalizations or grand statements that can't really be backed up. Still, here's a few reasons why that might be true:

Note first that most of the reasons below are not reasons for why it would be bad to play as a nutso civ, but to play against a game full of nutso civs.

1) BNW has only one Venice (extrapolated meaning being that BNW has few "weird civs" relative to the "normal ones"), and BNW is pretty darn fun. I'd say overall that it is pretty balanced, as well. While not scientific or any real "evidence," this item invokes the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of logic.

2) Weird mechanics do have a tendency to "take over," or at least make their presence felt. I was playing a diplo game as some civ and Austria was playing as well, marrying everybody and their mothers (and sons). I was like what-is-this-i-don't-even and adapted my strategy to accommodate the weirdness this created. This is a good thing, and a great end result of a weird civ ability like diplomatic marriage.

Now imagine that same game, but Venice is consuming CSs, and Austria is marrying them. OK, more stuff to deal with. Fine, I guess. But the game experience is also getting a little crowded, as I'm having to deal with other civs as much as I'm dealing with mine own. Fine, perhaps good.

But fill that out to its logical extreme, that every civ has something like this. Say there are 8 civs in the game, but the game is balanced in terms of VCs the civs are going with. But each one totally throws the way the game plays into a totally different perspective.

Civ 1 can build on the coast (SF)
Civ 2 can build on the desert in weird places (Aiel)
Civ 3 can build in the blight (Malkier)
Civ 4 has territory that can't be entered ( Shara)
Civ 5 can build on mountains (hypothetical)
Civ 6 can work a four-tile radius (hypothetical)
Civ 7 can build small cities super quickly, all over the map (hypothetical)
Civ 8 can build in other civs' territory (hypothetical)

Each of those abilities is intriguing (assuming for a moment that we've made the hypothetical ones workable), but taken as a whole, this is a truly bizarre game of civ. Imagine a domination victory in these situations. It *could* be good, but ensuring that is the case is much more difficult. It seems to me that a game situation like this would encourage, for instance, avoiding a domination route in favor of a VC that's less of a hassle in terms of movement and global position. Of course you need to adapt your game to the opponents, but if everybody is nutso this seems to me to be less fun and more annoying.

I also write this as somebody that's likes to get each civ's "experience" once, and then move on to the next civ, after one game (rarely, two). I feel like if I was playing a Dom civ, and got that group of civs, I'd consider restarting since I wouldn't get to really "feel" my civ.

3) Venice's weirdness is relatively tame, it seems to me, compared to some of the weirdness we've been proposing, including weirdness that I have stated that I approve of. The accumulation of such weirdness on the scale of numerous civs isn't the same as the accumulation of Venice's weirdness on the scale of multiple civs - it's a way bigger impact.

4) Because of this, balancing from our perspective becomes much, much more difficult. With tua'tha'an-like civs being the norm instead of the exception, the combinations would be very unpredictable. This is fun if we balance it properly, but that is very much easier said than done. I think of the "normal" civs as the "control group" from which we can appropriately balance the weird ones.

5) Similar to the "control group" notion above - the weird ones feel special and weird and impactful if they are rare. If everybody has a transcendent, game re-defining UA, the onus is on us to make each UA breathtaking and spectacular, or else it too will feel boring. What we should be focusing on is making a UA good, not spectacular.

6) We have a bunch of new mechanics that will change the way the game is played (channeling, the WT, the LB, Alignment, etc.). A strong argument could be made for keeping a good number of other game components relatively straightforward. An Alignment-centered UA, for instance, need not be in itself complex, and doesn't need to be a reinterpretation or re-definition of our Alignment mechanics since it's utilizing mechanics that are in and of themselves new.

All very good points and I find I agree with a lot of this, but it doesn't particularly discourage me from the mechanically out-there (henceforth CCFCP) civs. It speaks a lot to your first point about generalizations, that we don't want to get bogged down in the theory of it too much. I think a lot of these kinds of problems come from the actual effects in practice of certain combinations.

This leads into point #4, which I think is where I agree with you most. Having a lot of exotic mechanics makes balancing more difficult and we need to assess whether we can create a suitably balanced game. Games with asymmetric balance (think Starcraft - factions are very different, but even at the pro level all of them are played) are well known to be extremely fulfilling for players, but difficult to pull off. I think the only way we'll realistically achieve that is to be patching the mod - making balance adjustment as we see how players play. It's also worth noting though that our audience is much smaller than something like CiV itself, and a wholly single player market. Both of those factors significantly reduce the likelihood of a universal metagame forming. That means we need to avoid the obvious pitfalls - civs who are demonstrably superior in short periods of time - but the marginal balance issues that tilt metagames would affect games like CiV (and CiV certainly has balance issues anyway) don't affect us as much.

To the general assessment of the difficulty of playing against a set of civs with exotic mechanics, I'd say that comes down to the combinations. This is an important thing for us to keep in mind (and I think we've been doing a pretty good job - we've discarded several candidate uniques for this reason), that a civ's uniques shouldn't make them unfun to play against, even if they are fun to play as.

With the civs you called out, I'd think the Atha'an Miere and Shara particularly don't have their uniques tuned correctly if they discourage opposing Domination pushes. It should require the Domination player to play differently, but it shouldn't mean that the Domination player feels they're unfairly disadvantaged. (The rewards for capturing A'M cities should offset the fact that you don't get to keep them. The Sharan walls should be penetrable with sufficient preparation.)

Malkier and the Aiel is a very good point - the fact that their cities can be in places other civs wouldn't settle means those cities will be less useful to other civs when they are captured. I'd say that's something we should keep in mind as being a part of those civs' "bonus". In this case, Domination should often involve razing less useful cities, which would happen more often with these guys.

I like the idea of a civ that can build cities on mountains! Not too late to bring that back for consideration for Manetheren, right?

I don't think the remaining three (hypotheticals 5-8) would pose much of a problem for a Dom push. I can see how they might, but it would again just require a different strategy on the Dom player's part. Still, I appreciate that the specifics of this aren't really the crux of your point, and that we want to avoid situations where the civ the player is playing can't shine in their own way because the interaction of the specific other civs they've been matched against hard counters them. I think that's a balancing challenge that's worth us tackling.

I would say that I don't really agree with point #6. I think, from a uniques perspective, we should treat our own new systems in the same kind of way we would base game systems. When BNW released, I don't think that meant Firaxis went for less Culture-exotic uniques because the Culture victory was all new. The thing that uniques should bring about is that a civ has its own feel to it, so them all acting much the same on our new mechanics, when they do diverge on the old ones, will make our mechanics get stale over multiple playthroughs faster.

All of the above is prefaced with that I don't at all think we should feel compelled to make every civ a CCFCP civ. As you rightly say, we want our uniques to be good, first and foremost. And I think a unique that is good in a splashy way is falls under what I would call an "out-there" ability (like your suggestion below for P-C Seanchan with settlers), because it makes such a clear impact on the player's decisions.

hmmm.. haven't played Persia yet. I actually found America to be surprisingly interesting. Their UA is quite dumb. But having one UU in the mid-game, and then one in the reeeeally-late game - where nobody else really has UUs - made it a pretty fun dom run.

I actually found the Mayans kind of lame. Their UA is rather unreliable, I found.

That's sort of what I mean about America though. CiV is fun in itself and so it's fun to conquer everyone, but their uniques don't really make you conquer everyone any differently, just a bit better.

Venice is of course a quite different kind of game, which does make it quite fun. However, a big difference between the ****oo for cocoa puffs-ness of Venice and, say, the ****oo for cocoa puffs-ness of our cities-on-the-sea UA for The A'aM is that Venice's weirdness doesn't really extend that far into other players' game. True, some CSs might periodically disappear (which can happen with conquest anyways), but basically playing against/with Venice is basically like playing against a very Tall civ. Playing against a civ with cities you can't use (a la A'aM) is very different.

This relates to my point #3 above, and the "note" before all my points - Venice is weird, but doesn't "mess with" the game from the perspective of other civs. Some of the stuff we're suggesting probably would

This is a good point and one we should keep in mind. We need to weigh how much a change would affect the games of other players, and I think we have generally been doing this, as mentioned above. Some CCFCP civs don't change others' gameplans too much, even if they do change that of the player playing them, and that's another component for us to evaluate for new uniques.

 

[S3rgeus]

yeah, this is kind of like the "Manetheren is good as defense" thing. They sort of weren't since they were totally obliterated in defending... The P-CS were taken apart by Luthair exploiting their rivalries and such (likely a nod to Cortez vs the Aztecs), but I also thought that this suggested, at least, that they were a sort of confederacy of smaller states and such, not so much an "empire" or anything like that. If we're even going to presume to label them as one "civ," it seemed to make sense to flavor it that they were a disparate group - perhaps the word "unite" is problematic here.

Yeah, I can see this! Sounds good.

I mean that it isn't c-f-c-p mostly because it amps up a predictable mechanic. It amps it up in a possibly broken way, but it's not totally rewriting all the mechanics. A 3-4 free settlers in a game makes a civ uber wide uber fast (1-2 wouldn't be so nuts, while 8-9 would be ridic), but it's not c-f-c-p mechanically (i.e., regardless of scaling) like "can annex foreign cities when your Path becomes the majority there" would be.

Yeah, I think that's down to differing definitions of CCFCP. I was thinking of it more about "difference" rather than necessarily mechanically exotic. Anything that makes the player able to do very different things than what they could elsewhere. It being an extension of an existing system makes it easier for us to balance. That's a good thing and is generally a separate axis to CCFCP-ness in how I was evaluating new uniques.

ok, we can leave this for now, then. I'm fine with whichever version you prefer.

I think let's stick with majority for now.

ok, I'm fine with this. Though, I'll note, that it's a little strange, the notion of PS first, LW later, as LWs are better for the Cul VC the longer you have them.

Totally, it's only "flexibility" (rather than changing your mind) if P-C Seanchan can somehow create Portal Stones before they can dig up Sites of Power for LWs.

Agreed on science for the PS version of this UI.

I'm wondering if we just eliminate the temporary nature, it's totally fine - after all, if you do want to convert it, just send a historian and dig up the SoP for real, right?

Sounds good. Actually, what happens if another civ shows up and tries to dig up the Site of Power? Can they do that with this UI on it? Does it destroy the UI?

I'm mostly with you on this. I think part of what keeps this from being "too all in" on PSs is the specific bonuses we're providing - Culture (as in not Prestige) and Science and Faith are all veeery applicable to a number of VCs, especially rather early in the game.

Awesome, sounds good.

Hmmm... relatively interesting mechanically, but I feel like the connection to flavor is a little obscure, without a PS connection. It will seem like "made up" flavor - these "Sacred Stones of the P-C S," which isn't totally bad, but also it doesn't really "count" as "using" the PS flavor. Not a terrible thing, though

You do highlight here that I think if we do pull in the PS flavor somehow, it needs to be at least minorly connected to an Exotic - otherwise the flavor connections will make zero sense to the player, lore-wise.

Thus, your previous assertion that there should be a UU that is more powerful based on PSs...

Agreed, it's not a particularly obvious flavor connection. We should probably make some more explicit reference from the exotic UU to the Portal Stones in such a set. The Exotic Menagerie also does a good job with that one - should it provide something targeted to any exotic unit(s) in addition to what it does now?

hmmm.... not sure what to say about this one. It's kind of awesome, and kind of flavorful, but also kind of not awesome and not flavorful, lol!

This would only apply when worked, right?

No clear thoughts as to which yield is best, or which LP - I could see it being multiple options.

Hmmm, I'm not sure about worked or not. Obviously the yield is only when worked, since that's how tile yields function. The LP I'm not sure - the player has to put this on Sites of Power, so they can't choose where those will be. Having the LP only spawn after a certain number of turns of the tile being worked means we'd need to represent that progress to the player, but if it works all the time we can just let it happen. Not sure, it might be something to tweak for balance - only when worked is more difficult to track and all the time is more powerful.


Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Diverse Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Federation of Tribes, City-State allies are considered a part of Pre-Consolidation Seanchan's territory for the purpose of other civilization's movement. Once you become Friends with a City-State, one bonus (random) City-State quest becomes active. When P-C Seanchan becomes a City-State's ally, its Path becomes the majority in that City-State's capital (if it is not already).
• Independent Tribes, penalties to Science and Culture through founding a city (note, not through conquest) are reduced by X% and Y%.
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith or Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics, removing the Portal Stone in the process.

UUs:

• Kaensada Runner, replaces Recon 1, fights with a ranged attack with 1 range, 2 when on Hills. Can detect Ancient Ruins when they are within one hex of the unit's normal sight.
• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
• Ogier Berserker, replaces Siege 2, attacks as a melee unit. High combat strength and can take two attacks per turn. High cost.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophecy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces the Stable, each Horse and Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (portal stones), can be built on a Sites of Power. Provides all the benefits of a Portal Stone, plus +X Science
• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.
• Sacred Stones (LP), can be built on Sites of Power. +X (low) Gold/Science/Culture. Every Y turns, a Doomseer/Visionary/OtherLP appears on this hex.

In the polar opposite of Manetheren, I think we've arrived at a very good place very quickly! Do we want to cull the options a bit before we go into sets? I've suggested removing Independent Tribes since it doesn't seem like it competes with the other UA options, but I'm not sure where to cut elsewhere.

Or do we still need more options for exotics that connect to Portal Stones somehow?

 

[counterpoint]

A little advance warning, I'm going to be out tomorrow evening, so my next post will be on Thursday evening!

I'm also going to be away this weekend. I'll try to get back in time to post on Sunday, but my next post after Thursday may be Monday.

well, I guess I'll just have to post on the same day as my previous post to serve as a counterpoint to your absense!

All very good points and I find I agree with a lot of this, but it doesn't particularly discourage me from the mechanically out-there (henceforth CCFCP) civs. It speaks a lot to your first point about generalizations, that we don't want to get bogged down in the theory of it too much. I think a lot of these kinds of problems come from the actual effects in practice of certain combinations.

This leads into point #4, which I think is where I agree with you most. Having a lot of exotic mechanics makes balancing more difficult and we need to assess whether we can create a suitably balanced game. Games with asymmetric balance (think Starcraft - factions are very different, but even at the pro level all of them are played) are well known to be extremely fulfilling for players, but difficult to pull off. I think the only way we'll realistically achieve that is to be patching the mod - making balance adjustment as we see how players play. It's also worth noting though that our audience is much smaller than something like CiV itself, and a wholly single player market. Both of those factors significantly reduce the likelihood of a universal metagame forming. That means we need to avoid the obvious pitfalls - civs who are demonstrably superior in short periods of time - but the marginal balance issues that tilt metagames would affect games like CiV (and CiV certainly has balance issues anyway) don't affect us as much.

To the general assessment of the difficulty of playing against a set of civs with exotic mechanics, I'd say that comes down to the combinations. This is an important thing for us to keep in mind (and I think we've been doing a pretty good job - we've discarded several candidate uniques for this reason), that a civ's uniques shouldn't make them unfun to play against, even if they are fun to play as.

With the civs you called out, I'd think the Atha'an Miere and Shara particularly don't have their uniques tuned correctly if they discourage opposing Domination pushes. It should require the Domination player to play differently, but it shouldn't mean that the Domination player feels they're unfairly disadvantaged. (The rewards for capturing A'M cities should offset the fact that you don't get to keep them. The Sharan walls should be penetrable with sufficient preparation.)

Malkier and the Aiel is a very good point - the fact that their cities can be in places other civs wouldn't settle means those cities will be less useful to other civs when they are captured. I'd say that's something we should keep in mind as being a part of those civs' "bonus". In this case, Domination should often involve razing less useful cities, which would happen more often with these guys.

I like the idea of a civ that can build cities on mountains! Not too late to bring that back for consideration for Manetheren, right?

I don't think the remaining three (hypotheticals 5-8) would pose much of a problem for a Dom push. I can see how they might, but it would again just require a different strategy on the Dom player's part. Still, I appreciate that the specifics of this aren't really the crux of your point, and that we want to avoid situations where the civ the player is playing can't shine in their own way because the interaction of the specific other civs they've been matched against hard counters them. I think that's a balancing challenge that's worth us tackling.

I would say that I don't really agree with point #6. I think, from a uniques perspective, we should treat our own new systems in the same kind of way we would base game systems. When BNW released, I don't think that meant Firaxis went for less Culture-exotic uniques because the Culture victory was all new. The thing that uniques should bring about is that a civ has its own feel to it, so them all acting much the same on our new mechanics, when they do diverge on the old ones, will make our mechanics get stale over multiple playthroughs faster.

All of the above is prefaced with that I don't at all think we should feel compelled to make every civ a CCFCP civ. As you rightly say, we want our uniques to be good, first and foremost. And I think a unique that is good in a splashy way is falls under what I would call an "out-there" ability (like your suggestion below for P-C Seanchan with settlers), because it makes such a clear impact on the player's decisions.

trivializing in 3...2...1...

I'm fine with most of this. The truth is, we haven't actually *chosen* any of the CFCP civs (why the extra C in your acronym?), they're just options. The caution I advise just needs to be considered when we're doing actual Unique selection (or, to a much lesser extent, Civ selection).

If we're allowing for general mechanical weirdness, but not requiring it as a qualification for a civ to be interesting (i.e., not "if things are normal than the civ is boring," which started this side-conversation), and considering the possible annoyances of playing against that civ, then I'm fine with proceeding as we have been. I suppose, again, our perspective is likely warped by the fact that we've been working on a few CFCP civs at this stage in the process. If we're "forcing it" on Murandy and Arad Doman later, then it's a likely problem.

I see your points re: # 6. So far, I've been fine with any of the weirdness involved with our current new mechanics and uniques - including a "settle on the blight" Unique, even! Keeping up that way of doing things is fine with me.

That's sort of what I mean about America though. CiV is fun in itself and so it's fun to conquer everyone, but their uniques don't really make you conquer everyone any differently, just a bit better.

but isn't that true to the pure essence of 'Murica? Conquer everyone in the same manner as the rest of the world, but better?

I think let's stick with majority for now.

fine with me.

Sounds good. Actually, what happens if another civ shows up and tries to dig up the Site of Power? Can they do that with this UI on it? Does it destroy the UI?

hmmm... I think we have to let that civ dig up the SoP. Otherwise, I can see P-C S just dotting their territory with these, even if they're out of city radius, just to block other civs. Maybe that's not economical, but it seems like a cheap strategy.

That said, I'm not sure it necessarily destroys the UI! I think people should be able to dig these up and still get something from it. I propose below that it keeps the science yield, as well as a low faith yield. Should the science yield perhaps become lower? Should the faith yield be low culture instead? I want this to be more of either a consolation prize if someone digs it, or perhaps an interesting strategic decision regarding when you might dig it up yourself, but I don't want it to be "better" to just build the UI and then dig it up immediately.

Agreed, it's not a particularly obvious flavor connection. We should probably make some more explicit reference from the exotic UU to the Portal Stones in such a set. The Exotic Menagerie also does a good job with that one - should it provide something targeted to any exotic unit(s) in addition to what it does now?

I think the Exotic Menagerie is fine as it is now. I think once we actually create sets - or rather, once we pick uniques - we'd probably need to just account for this flavor linkage. It will exist already in some sets, but won't in others. If it doesn't, we should tweak one or more of the abilities to make it happen. Naming the abilities can also help solidify this. We might want to make a list of this priority in the master list

Hmmm, I'm not sure about worked or not. Obviously the yield is only when worked, since that's how tile yields function. The LP I'm not sure - the player has to put this on Sites of Power, so they can't choose where those will be. Having the LP only spawn after a certain number of turns of the tile being worked means we'd need to represent that progress to the player, but if it works all the time we can just let it happen. Not sure, it might be something to tweak for balance - only when worked is more difficult to track and all the time is more powerful.

yeah, this whole thing actually makes me feel like this ability is a bit more than we've bargained for. In the interest of culling, anyways, I've redded it below.

In the polar opposite of Manetheren, I think we've arrived at a very good place very quickly! Do we want to cull the options a bit before we go into sets? I've suggested removing Independent Tribes since it doesn't seem like it competes with the other UA options, but I'm not sure where to cut elsewhere.

Or do we still need more options for exotics that connect to Portal Stones somehow?

I've tried to do some cutting down below. Agreed on Ind. Tribes!

Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Diverse Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Federation of Tribes, City-State allies are considered a part of Pre-Consolidation Seanchan's territory for the purpose of other civilization's movement. Once you become Friends with a City-State, one bonus (random) City-State quest becomes active. When P-C Seanchan becomes a City-State's ally, its Path becomes the majority in that City-State's capital (if it is not already).
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith or Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics, removing the Portal Stone in the process.

UUs:

• Kaensada Runner, replaces Recon 1, fights with a ranged attack with 1 range, 2 when on Hills. Can detect Ancient Ruins when they are within one hex of the unit's normal sight.
• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
  [*]Ogier Berserker, replaces Siege 2, attacks as a melee unit. High combat strength and can take two attacks per turn. High cost.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophesy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces Culture 2, each Horse and Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (portal stones), can be built on a Sites of Power. Provides all the benefits of a Portal Stone, plus +X Science. If a Relic is removed from the Site of Power by a Historian (foreign or otherwise), the Sacred Stone remains, and continues to provide +X Science, in addition to +Y Faith.
• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science +X Culture (low) per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.
• Sacred Stones (LP), can be built on Sites of Power. +X (low) Gold/Science/Culture. Every Y turns, a Doomseer/Visionary/OtherLP appears on this hex.

Fed of Tribes - I like this ability, but I think I might like it better for another civ. I think Diverse Tribes handles the flavor better, and this one is very diplo-heavy in a way that doesn't feel as fitting for a pre-Compact civ. I dunno. I'm flexible here, I do like this ability.

I considered axing Sight Beyond Worlds, as it doesn't feel as strong as Enduring Legacy or Dreams of the Anc. Alternatively, we could axe End. Legacy... Part of me wonders if we should fuse some of these, actually. Add T'a'r site to PSs in Enduring Legacy, perhaps even with the Science Yield. Or, add something mild about PSs to Dreams of the Anc. Thoughts?

Axed the Kaensada Runner (though I like the flavor), because I think the Tribal Hunter might be more fun. Would you consider fusing them? Maybe remove the +X% against DS on the Hunter, and instead adding the range? Or, perhaps, add the Ruins detection to the hunter?

Should we add the An-Ruins detection ot the Trophy Hunter? (I'm thinking of synergy with possible UAs, obviously)

Ogier Berserker feels like people will think we've messed up the Gardener flavor.

Not really sure how to approach the culling of the Exotics! We certainly don't need most of them. The Grolm, and raken variants are the most flavorfully recognizable, but the Grolm at least is possibly going to pop up with the Seanchan. I do feel like we could axe a few of these, though it wouldn't be inconceivable to leave the majority of them, since they sort of are a reminder list on variants of one idea.

I've modified the Exotic Menagerie because i think it's too limited to be useful. You need to have horse or lopar AND get lucky by having a portal stone within range to get the main benefit. I'd prefer it not replace the stable at all, and merely get a benefit if close to lopar.

I think we should fuse the first two Sacred Stones abilities. I think the latter is better (the first is kind of loosey goosey), but I've modified it to adopt some of the spirit of the first. I really want to axe the mounted units bonus, and replace it with a "add +X% production to Y Exotic during era z", but I can't figure out how to do that considering such a unit would pre-date historians. Maybe we put it in provisionally in case we have an early-discovery unique? Can you think of a way to make it work?

axed Sacred Stones (LP)... just too "off" from the other things we're trying to do here

Thought I'd have time to propose a few sets, but alas I don't!

EDIT

Now I do! So here are some possible sets:

You Want Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones!
UA: Enduring Legacy
UU: some Exotic
UU: Trophy Hunter OR Tribal Hunter
UB: Exotic Menagerie OR UI: Sacred Stones (science) (amended so XP/production bonus applies only to the Exotic UU only, and is greater)

Still Want Portal Stones? Want to Try it with a little less Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones in a Different Way!"
UA: Diverse Tribes
UU: Matriarch
UU: some Exotic
UB: Lorekeeper's Domain OR Trophy Hunter OR another Exotic


Looking to Bring Some T'a'r into the Mix? Here, let's bring some T'a'r into the Mix!
UA: Dreams of the Ancestors
UU: some Exotic
UU: Matriarch or Tribal Hunter
UB: Exotic Menagerie OR UI: Sacred Stones (with previous modifications)

So next is Shienar, yes? I don't have anything for it now, but I can start thinking bout it and try to mock up something over the weekend while you're gone, assuming we can mostly finish this civwhen you post before then.

 

[S3rgeus]

trivializing in 3...2...1...

I'm fine with most of this. The truth is, we haven't actually *chosen* any of the CFCP civs (why the extra C in your acronym?), they're just options. The caution I advise just needs to be considered when we're doing actual Unique selection (or, to a much lesser extent, Civ selection).

If we're allowing for general mechanical weirdness, but not requiring it as a qualification for a civ to be interesting (i.e., not "if things are normal than the civ is boring," which started this side-conversation), and considering the possible annoyances of playing against that civ, then I'm fine with proceeding as we have been. I suppose, again, our perspective is likely warped by the fact that we've been working on a few CFCP civs at this stage in the process. If we're "forcing it" on Murandy and Arad Doman later, then it's a likely problem.

I see your points re: # 6. So far, I've been fine with any of the weirdness involved with our current new mechanics and uniques - including a "settle on the blight" Unique, even! Keeping up that way of doing things is fine with me.

Sounds like we agree! My original issue with normal being boring was that when I think of making civs more "normal" I was thinking we'd make them less splashy, not necessarily just less mechanically unique. As long as there's something that hits that gut "impressive" vibe, I'm all for it!

but isn't that true to the pure essence of 'Murica? Conquer everyone in the same manner as the rest of the world, but better?

Hopefully that's what Firaxis was thinking!

hmmm... I think we have to let that civ dig up the SoP. Otherwise, I can see P-C S just dotting their territory with these, even if they're out of city radius, just to block other civs. Maybe that's not economical, but it seems like a cheap strategy.

That said, I'm not sure it necessarily destroys the UI! I think people should be able to dig these up and still get something from it. I propose below that it keeps the science yield, as well as a low faith yield. Should the science yield perhaps become lower? Should the faith yield be low culture instead? I want this to be more of either a consolation prize if someone digs it, or perhaps an interesting strategic decision regarding when you might dig it up yourself, but I don't want it to be "better" to just build the UI and then dig it up immediately.

This is moot now, since we're removing this UA below. I'm fine with that, and will comment on the changes from this brought over to the other one below!

I think the Exotic Menagerie is fine as it is now. I think once we actually create sets - or rather, once we pick uniques - we'd probably need to just account for this flavor linkage. It will exist already in some sets, but won't in others. If it doesn't, we should tweak one or more of the abilities to make it happen. Naming the abilities can also help solidify this. We might want to make a list of this priority in the master list

Sounds good.

yeah, this whole thing actually makes me feel like this ability is a bit more than we've bargained for. In the interest of culling, anyways, I've redded it below.

I do really like this one, but we have too many options, so I'm ok with removing it.

Fed of Tribes - I like this ability, but I think I might like it better for another civ. I think Diverse Tribes handles the flavor better, and this one is very diplo-heavy in a way that doesn't feel as fitting for a pre-Compact civ. I dunno. I'm flexible here, I do like this ability.

Sounds fine to me.

I considered axing Sight Beyond Worlds, as it doesn't feel as strong as Enduring Legacy or Dreams of the Anc. Alternatively, we could axe End. Legacy... Part of me wonders if we should fuse some of these, actually. Add T'a'r site to PSs in Enduring Legacy, perhaps even with the Science Yield. Or, add something mild about PSs to Dreams of the Anc. Thoughts?

Funny, I think that this (Sight Beyond Worlds) and the Matriarch is a great combination - that would be my first suggested set because the two work together so well. I think porting all of the bonuses onto Enduring Legacy will make that too much of a do-everything ability. There are a lot of mechanics to a Portal Stone focus like this, and piling them all onto the UA doesn't seem like it's as good a solution as making the UA and UU work in tandem to create an effect that's greater than either could achieve alone.

Axed the Kaensada Runner (though I like the flavor), because I think the Tribal Hunter might be more fun. Would you consider fusing them? Maybe remove the +X% against DS on the Hunter, and instead adding the range? Or, perhaps, add the Ruins detection to the hunter?

We can put the flavor on one of the other units, possibly the Trophy Hunter? My favorite part about this unit was the range boost on hills, that felt really different to me. We'd have to go for replacing Ranged 2 for Trophy Hunter if we did that though? Unless the Kaensada Runner's speed is used to justify a range 2 melee unit? (In which cause it could also go on Tribal Hunter, but a melee attack on a scout unit isn't particularly good anyway, which diminishes the range boost.)

Should we add the An-Ruins detection ot the Trophy Hunter? (I'm thinking of synergy with possible UAs, obviously)

I'd be inclined to try to find a way to put the range boost on one of these guys first (somehow).

Ogier Berserker feels like people will think we've messed up the Gardener flavor.

Agreed.

Not really sure how to approach the culling of the Exotics! We certainly don't need most of them. The Grolm, and raken variants are the most flavorfully recognizable, but the Grolm at least is possibly going to pop up with the Seanchan. I do feel like we could axe a few of these, though it wouldn't be inconceivable to leave the majority of them, since they sort of are a reminder list on variants of one idea.

I really like the Raken Sourge, since it captures the "flying raken" flavor that we were never able to get working for Seanchan. I would be fine leaving all of the ones we have there as possibilities and think of them like "variants" on one UU, like we have multiple possible Wise Ones, we have multiple possible exotics (though definitely more).

I've modified the Exotic Menagerie because i think it's too limited to be useful. You need to have horse or lopar AND get lucky by having a portal stone within range to get the main benefit. I'd prefer it not replace the stable at all, and merely get a benefit if close to lopar.

I can get behind this change, but doesn't it make the UB more limited? Horse is a Strategic Resource, so civs should be fairly likely to have at least some. Lopar is a luxury and may not even exist on your home continent. The stable also only requires a nearby Pasture, which is on more resources than just Horses/Lopar. We could of course relax that restriction completely if we thought even that was too much?

I think we should fuse the first two Sacred Stones abilities. I think the latter is better (the first is kind of loosey goosey), but I've modified it to adopt some of the spirit of the first. I really want to axe the mounted units bonus, and replace it with a "add +X% production to Y Exotic during era z", but I can't figure out how to do that considering such a unit would pre-date historians. Maybe we put it in provisionally in case we have an early-discovery unique? Can you think of a way to make it work?

I don't think this one should produce Culture, because then it's competing directly with Portal Stones (which also produce Culture, presumably more of it). I think it adds a lot more variety for the civ to have those two different options available. It works well that either could be used to pursue different kinds of civ-wide objectives.

Now I do! So here are some possible sets:

You Want Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones!
UA: Enduring Legacy
UU: some Exotic
UU: Trophy Hunter OR Tribal Hunter
UB: Exotic Menagerie OR UI: Sacred Stones (science) (amended so XP/production bonus applies only to the Exotic UU only, and is greater)

Still Want Portal Stones? Want to Try it with a little less Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones in a Different Way!"
UA: Diverse Tribes
UU: Matriarch
UU: some Exotic
UB: Lorekeeper's Domain OR Trophy Hunter OR another Exotic


Looking to Bring Some T'a'r into the Mix? Here, let's bring some T'a'r into the Mix!
UA: Dreams of the Ancestors
UU: some Exotic
UU: Matriarch or Tribal Hunter
UB: Exotic Menagerie OR UI: Sacred Stones (with previous modifications)

In terms of a Portal stones set, I'd be inclined to go with something like this:

UA: Sight Beyond Worlds
UU: Matriarch
UB: Exotic Menagerie
UU: exotic

Sight Beyond Worlds + Matriarch achieves a lot for Portal Stones without overloading either of the uniques, and the two obviously complement each other a lot. It gets us both the slingshot science into culture or pure culture acceleration approaches as viable strategies.

I do see more about what you mentioned about merging Enduring Legacy and Sight Beyond Worlds here. I still think the resulting UA would be doing too much stuff:

• Historians can explore Portal Stones
• Science and T'a'r sight from Portal Stones
• Detect Sites of Power early
• Wilders can turn Sites of Power into Portal Stones

It has two UA-like pieces (in the middle) and modifies two separate, specific units to give them additional capabilities. I think the Sight Beyond Worlds + Matriarch splits that much better. The UA is all about Portal Stones being better. And the UU is all about finding and Portal-Stone-ifying the Sites earlier than usual.

This of course also touches on the T'a'r stuff a little as well. Exotic Menagerie + the Exotic (and a little bit of the Matriarch) offer some Domination motivation (it rhymes!). The Menagerie also connects to the Portal Stones bonuses from the first two.

I like the other two sets. Though I would say for the last one that we probably don't want to put the Matriarch and the Sacred Stones in the same final set (so we should probably pick other options on those lines if we go for one or the other), since the Matriarch for Portal Stones vs Sacred Stones on the same tiles means the two uniques compete with each other for usage space.

We've managed to get it down to 2 sets for all of the other civs, do we want to do the same here? I like the Sight Beyond Worlds set above as the Portal Stone candidate. Of your latter two, it's a bit of a close call. I think I lean toward the second one (Diverse Tribes UA) though I would replace the Matriarch with the Sacred Stones on this one:

Still Want Portal Stones? Want to Try it with a little less Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones in a Different Way!
UA: Diverse Tribes
UI: Sacred Stones (science) (amended so XP/production bonus applies only to the Exotic UU only, and is greater)
UU: some Exotic
UB: Lorekeeper's Domain OR Trophy Hunter OR another Exotic

I also like the idea of Sacred Stones on a set that could potentially have 2 exotics in it.


Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Diverse Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith/Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics, removing the Portal Stone in the process.

UUs:

• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophesy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces Culture 2, each Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science +X Culture (low) per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.

I've changed the "Faith or Culture" in Dreams of the Ancestors to "Faith/Culture" and un-magenta-ed it so that we can decide on the most appropriate yield later if necessary.

So next is Shienar, yes? I don't have anything for it now, but I can start thinking bout it and try to mock up something over the weekend while you're gone, assuming we can mostly finish this civwhen you post before then.

Yes, we seem to be mostly done with P-C Seanchan! Some cleaning up, but we can start Shienar. I have some notes for them, but I don't want to start it off alongside the discussion above, until you've had a chance to chime in on the final-ish round of tweaks. Feel free to start them over the weekend though, I'll add my stuff when I get back! I'm happy to start the next two civs in line after Shienar when we get to them, since you will have done two in a row then.

 

[counterpoint]

Funny, I think that this (Sight Beyond Worlds) and the Matriarch is a great combination - that would be my first suggested set because the two work together so well. I think porting all of the bonuses onto Enduring Legacy will make that too much of a do-everything ability. There are a lot of mechanics to a Portal Stone focus like this, and piling them all onto the UA doesn't seem like it's as good a solution as making the UA and UU work in tandem to create an effect that's greater than either could achieve alone.

Yeah, I've warmed up to this idea. I do see what you mean that Enduring Legacy feels a little bit like fifteen bandaids put on one wound.

The interesting thing here is that the Matriarch is sort of like a UA-UU, in that she's not really all that much better at combat (decent at covering friendly territory), but provides a pretty nifty civ-wide ability. So, in other words, it's sort of like a more elegant way to make a huge UA (by splitting it up).

Few questions about the Matriarch: she is made obsolete by the Kin, yes? We're ok with her functionality going obsolete, too, right? Obviously the mvoement and all that makes sense (units always go obsolete), and the the early PS-find is useless later in the game. But the convert-to-PS ability affixed to a channeling unit would also disappear, which somewhat changes the way this civ plays starting in mid and mid-late game. We're ok with that, right?

Also, can she detect SoP anywhere, or only in friendly territory? Basically, do we want PCS to be able to settle in lands knowing that they'll have access to Portal Stones? Also, once she detects them, do they stay detected for the civ, or does it disappear when she loses active vision?

We can put the flavor on one of the other units, possibly the Trophy Hunter? My favorite part about this unit was the range boost on hills, that felt really different to me. We'd have to go for replacing Ranged 2 for Trophy Hunter if we did that though? Unless the Kaensada Runner's speed is used to justify a range 2 melee unit? (In which cause it could also go on Tribal Hunter, but a melee attack on a scout unit isn't particularly good anyway, which diminishes the range boost.)

yeah, the idea of the ranged attack for the scout was to make the unit an actual viable unit and killing things in the early game - generally, attacking with a scout is not viable. I think adding in the range boost is cool. noted below.

I really like the Raken Sourge, since it captures the "flying raken" flavor that we were never able to get working for Seanchan. I would be fine leaving all of the ones we have there as possibilities and think of them like "variants" on one UU, like we have multiple possible Wise Ones, we have multiple possible exotics (though definitely more).

agreed

I can get behind this change, but doesn't it make the UB more limited? Horse is a Strategic Resource, so civs should be fairly likely to have at least some. Lopar is a luxury and may not even exist on your home continent. The stable also only requires a nearby Pasture, which is on more resources than just Horses/Lopar. We could of course relax that restriction completely if we thought even that was too much?

I was mistakenly thinking that the stable requires Horses specifically. Just pastures is certainly easier. Still, my change doesn't limit it, though, since it removes the requirement for any of these resources - it simply provides bonuses if you do have them.

I don't think this one should produce Culture, because then it's competing directly with Portal Stones (which also produce Culture, presumably more of it). I think it adds a lot more variety for the civ to have those two different options available. It works well that either could be used to pursue different kinds of civ-wide objectives.

fair enough. I've tweaked it so it produces faith, then. Kind of a weird companion to science, I know, but it seems to make flavorful sense given the weirdness of what we're talking about here.

In terms of a Portal stones set, I'd be inclined to go with something like this:

UA: Sight Beyond Worlds
UU: Matriarch
UB: Exotic Menagerie
UU: exotic

Sight Beyond Worlds + Matriarch achieves a lot for Portal Stones without overloading either of the uniques, and the two obviously complement each other a lot. It gets us both the slingshot science into culture or pure culture acceleration approaches as viable strategies.

I'm mostly fine with this. I don't love how UA and UB both stack to give a lot of +Science on a Portal Stone. I'm fine with them working towards the same goal, but that seems kind of uninspired to me. Any ideas?

I do see more about what you mentioned about merging Enduring Legacy and Sight Beyond Worlds here. I still think the resulting UA would be doing too much stuff:

• Historians can explore Portal Stones
• Science and T'a'r sight from Portal Stones
• Detect Sites of Power early
• Wilders can turn Sites of Power into Portal Stones

It has two UA-like pieces (in the middle) and modifies two separate, specific units to give them additional capabilities. I think the Sight Beyond Worlds + Matriarch splits that much better. The UA is all about Portal Stones being better. And the UU is all about finding and Portal-Stone-ifying the Sites earlier than usual.

touched on this above. Fine with this.

I like the other two sets. Though I would say for the last one that we probably don't want to put the Matriarch and the Sacred Stones in the same final set (so we should probably pick other options on those lines if we go for one or the other), since the Matriarch for Portal Stones vs Sacred Stones on the same tiles means the two uniques compete with each other for usage space.

good point.

We've managed to get it down to 2 sets for all of the other civs, do we want to do the same here? I like the Sight Beyond Worlds set above as the Portal Stone candidate. Of your latter two, it's a bit of a close call. I think I lean toward the second one (Diverse Tribes UA) though I would replace the Matriarch with the Sacred Stones on this one:

Still Want Portal Stones? Want to Try it with a little less Portal Stones? Here, Have Some Portal Stones in a Different Way!
UA: Diverse Tribes
UI: Sacred Stones (science) (amended so XP/production bonus applies only to the Exotic UU only, and is greater)
UU: some Exotic
UB: Lorekeeper's Domain OR Trophy Hunter OR another Exotic

I also like the idea of Sacred Stones on a set that could potentially have 2 exotics in it.

fine with only having two sets.

Fine with this set. Kind of wish there'd been a way to squeeze in the Glimmer stuff into one of the other abilities (besides the UA).

Recap!

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci/Dom)

UAs:

• Diverse Tribes, Ancient ruins have X% chance of spawning a settler when explored. Clearing Lawless and Dragonsworn encampments provides +1 population in the nearest city.
• Enduring Legacy, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Wilders can detect the presence of Sites of Power within home territory beginning in Era 3. These Sites can be made into Portal Stones by Wilders (but not harvested as Relics). Pre-Consolidation Historians can remove a Portal Stone, providing a Relic.
• Dreams of the Ancestors, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan Legendary People generate X% more Glimmers and P-C Seanchan Glimmers provide T'a'r sight for 1 hex around them.. If these Glimmers are harvested by a foreign civilization, Pre-Consolidation Seanchan gains Y Faith/Culture.
• Sight Beyond Worlds, Portal Stones provide sight into T'a'r. Each Portal Stone generates X Science and P-C Seanchan Historians can explore Portal Stones to generate Relics, removing the Portal Stone in the process.

UUs:

• Trophy Hunter, replaces Melee 2 or Ranged 2, +1 Range when on Hills. Every unit killed by the Trophy Hunter provides a unique yield: for Lawless and Dragonsworn, +X Faith, for major civilizations, +Y Culture, and for Shadowspawn, +Z Science.
• Matriarch, replaces the Wilder, can detect Sites of Power beginning in Era 3, and convert them into Portal Stones (consuming the unit). +X movement and ignores Zone of Control while in friendly territory.
• Feral Grolm, replaces Mounted 2, +X% combat strength when adjacent to a Feral Grolm. Does not suffer the loss of terrain bonuses of other Mounted units.
• Torm Tracker, replaces Recon 2, +X movement and +Y sight. Diminished combat strength, but does not suffer losses to combat strength when injured
• Corlm Hunter, replaces Mounted 2, as long as the Corlm Hunter has at least 1 movement remaining, it can "jump" to any unit within its sight line and perform an attack.
• Raken Scourge, replaces Mounted 2, does not need to Embark in Coast (not ocean), and can fight as normal on Coast and when crossing rivers. Fights as a melee unit, but has an operational range of 2 when attacking.
• To'raken Behemoth, replaces Melee 3, powerful combat unit that can cross rivers without penalty and receives a bonus +X% bonus to combat strength against Cities
• Lopar Goliath, replaces Mounted 2, requires the Lopar resource, powerful combat unit with diminished movement but greatly increased combat strength.
• Tribal Hunter, replaces Recon 1, has +X% combat strength against Dragonsworn. Exploring Ancient Ruins has a Y% chance of creating a settler. Clearing a Dragonsworn encampment provides +1 Population in the nearest P-C Seanchan city.
• Grolm Swarmer - replaces Polearm 3/4, additional movement, enemy mounted units consume their whole turn when attacking the morat'grolm.

UBs:

• Lorekeeper's Domain, replaces Science 1, can house any Legendary Works (not just Prophesy). Provides a different bonus yield for each Work type placed within it: for Prophesy, +X Science, for Epics, +Y Culture, for Crafts, +Z Production, and for Relics, +W Gold.
• Exotic Menagerie (portal stones), replaces Culture 2, each Lopar resource provides +X Science. Units trained in this city get +X EXP for each Portal Stone worked by this city.

UIs:

• Sacred Stones (science), can be built on Sites of Power. Produces +X (low) Science +Y Faith (low) per turn. Adjacent Improvements produce +1 Science per turn. A city that works this tile has +Y% Production towards mounted units.

Yes, we seem to be mostly done with P-C Seanchan! Some cleaning up, but we can start Shienar. I have some notes for them, but I don't want to start it off alongside the discussion above, until you've had a chance to chime in on the final-ish round of tweaks. Feel free to start them over the weekend though, I'll add my stuff when I get back! I'm happy to start the next two civs in line after Shienar when we get to them, since you will have done two in a row then.

yep, coming right up!

 

[counterpoint]

Noting first that this civ was just listed as "Dom/LB." I'm going to feel free to entertain some other possible VCs in my abilities below. I just think that Dom/LB might be a little too narrow - especially since LB sort of stacks on Dom in a lot of ways. I think the key here was that the flavor didn't clearly dictate any of the others - but I also don't really see them being a problem.

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, while in Shienaran territory, all Shienaran workers can perform a "Take Up Arms" custom mission that takes a full action. This mission transforms the worker into a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit of the current era or the previous (all randomly determined). Armed Workers cannot leave Shienaran territory. Any enemy unit killed by a Armed Worker generates +X Faith. This transformation lasts three turns, at which point the unit becomes a Worker once again.
• Peace Favor Your Sword, the local happiness cap in all cities is raised by X. Time of civil disorder is reduced by half.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion.
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Topknot Cavalry, replaces era 7-8 Mounted unit, +X% combat strength when within 3 hexes of the hornblower or any Heroes of the Horn (regardless of who controls them).
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and becomes available on any tile on which a unit has attacked or been attacked within the past Y turns. The completed action provides Y hexes of vision on all units that were involved in the detected battle.

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra or Plains, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. Friendly units on the Lamplight receive +X vision. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

Ingathering of the Lances was a term Agelmar used for the defense of the Shienaran Border. Meant to make invasions (from humans or shadowspawn) much easier to stomp out.

Every Man, Woman, and Child is meant to embody how even the civilians learn to fight. Supposed to greatly help with defense in the blight and in general - helps Shienar focus on infrastructure in the early game, instead of defense. Could be tweaked in various ways.

Peace Favor Your Sword is based on the notion that the Shienarans do not participate in the Game of Houses. This ability is likely not strong enough.

Nameday Sword refers to the Borderlander custom of the "Nameday," the day you are given your sword. Could be tweaked to provide a varying amount of free units.

The Black Hawk Soars is a sort generic take on a quasi-culture-related, "big picture" bonus for a tall civ.

Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, is based on the fact that Shienar apparently produces gems, gold, silver, etc. Meant to provide bonuses that compensate for your deficiencies in tundra - thus mines produce food, etc.

Lamplight Vigil is based on the notion that borderlanders keep their cities really well lit, in order to detect Fades and such among the populace. The Second ability is obviously pretty light-sided during the LB, which I don't love, but it's kind of cool.

Last Embrace of the Mother is based on the fact that Shienar has a very codified system of military rank. Everybody knows exactly where they are in the chain of command at all times. This could be adjusted so instead the surviving unit got a free promotion or something. This one is really strange, but could result in kind of nifty strategies

Heavy Lancer is a relatively standard shadowspawn-defense unit, though it comes in handy for the blight encroachment/LB era, not the TW.

Topknot Cavalry is supposed to reflect that it was chiefly the Shienarans that participated in the Great Hunt. This is possibly too minor of an ability, though, and probably needs to be added to something else.

The Borderlander is the UU equivalent of EM,W,C, and is different in that it doesn't require a transformation.

The Sniffer is weird because it may likely not fit at all as a Shienaran UU. I chose to include it because Hurin, the only Sniffer anybody knows, was from Shienar. I'm not sure what use this would really be - good for sniffing out shadowspawn, I suppose. It's the most literal manifestation of the ability that I can think of.


The Gaslamp borrows the flavor from the UA but uses it differently. Simply more alignment generation (I chose to make it agnostic)

Raised Gate (Based on the custom of Shienaran towns being on higher ground, and gates and such) is a UB version of the Lamplight Vigil UA.

Communal Baths are based on the fact that (despite the flavor of the next item) there are these big public baths in shienaran towns. a straightforward culture or faith dump (could also be other yields)

Separated Apartments (kind of lame I know) is based on the very strict rules in shienaran society, where men and women don't live together, and need permission to enter and such. (probably could switch which the bath flavor for same difference). These yields could be swapped, obviously.

Lamplight is another permutation of that flavor. Sort of serves a Fort purpose, but provides some yields (which are flexible).


So... that's what I have on this. Not particularly in love with many of these - definitely nothing cohesive springing to mind. Certainly more room for good UUs!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm back!

Yeah, I've warmed up to this idea. I do see what you mean that Enduring Legacy feels a little bit like fifteen bandaids put on one wound.

Do we want to remove Enduring Legacy, or does the necessity for two unique slots for the alternate approach mean we should keep it around for later, in case that becomes important?

The interesting thing here is that the Matriarch is sort of like a UA-UU, in that she's not really all that much better at combat (decent at covering friendly territory), but provides a pretty nifty civ-wide ability. So, in other words, it's sort of like a more elegant way to make a huge UA (by splitting it up).

Few questions about the Matriarch: she is made obsolete by the Kin, yes? We're ok with her functionality going obsolete, too, right? Obviously the mvoement and all that makes sense (units always go obsolete), and the the early PS-find is useless later in the game. But the convert-to-PS ability affixed to a channeling unit would also disappear, which somewhat changes the way this civ plays starting in mid and mid-late game. We're ok with that, right?

Yes, obsoleted by the Kin. I like the way that phases out the PS for Sites of Power. I think we're ok with them losing the channeler ability to do that and relying on Historians like other civs. Their uniqueness is in the earliness, so that should be fine.

Also, can she detect SoP anywhere, or only in friendly territory? Basically, do we want PCS to be able to settle in lands knowing that they'll have access to Portal Stones? Also, once she detects them, do they stay detected for the civ, or does it disappear when she loses active vision?

I think anywhere, for the settling reasons you mentioned. Players will want to plan their settling accordingly. I think they should probably stay around to start with, but if it turns out to be too strong, making it require active vision is something we could tweak for balance. (Same with working anywhere or just own territory.)

yeah, the idea of the ranged attack for the scout was to make the unit an actual viable unit and killing things in the early game - generally, attacking with a scout is not viable. I think adding in the range boost is cool. noted below.

I was mistakenly thinking that the stable requires Horses specifically. Just pastures is certainly easier. Still, my change doesn't limit it, though, since it removes the requirement for any of these resources - it simply provides bonuses if you do have them.

Sounds good!

fair enough. I've tweaked it so it produces faith, then. Kind of a weird companion to science, I know, but it seems to make flavorful sense given the weirdness of what we're talking about here.

Does it need to produce Faith as well? I think it's strong enough with just the Science. Or if it was producing just Faith, and making adjacent Improvements produce Science, that could also work.

I'm mostly fine with this. I don't love how UA and UB both stack to give a lot of +Science on a Portal Stone. I'm fine with them working towards the same goal, but that seems kind of uninspired to me. Any ideas?

I don't think it's uninspired - Portal Stones are still not easy to get into place around a city, so making that yield quite high can help them a lot.

Fine with this set. Kind of wish there'd been a way to squeeze in the Glimmer stuff into one of the other abilities (besides the UA).

We could put T'a'r vision on the Sacred Stones? It's not a particularly big thing in a balance sense, so shouldn't push the Improvement to be too strong. It doesn't capture the Glimmer ability directly though. We'd probably need a channeler UU that had projections that did something similar?



I've added P-C Seanchan to the design list! We may have a few tweaks left above, so I'll change it there if we do.

Also, I've given the set you named a shorter name. The names are mostly to refer to sets easily (and make a joke, where I see one) and the other one was very long. Feel free to suggest a name if you prefer another one.

 

[S3rgeus]

Noting first that this civ was just listed as "Dom/LB." I'm going to feel free to entertain some other possible VCs in my abilities below. I just think that Dom/LB might be a little too narrow - especially since LB sort of stacks on Dom in a lot of ways. I think the key here was that the flavor didn't clearly dictate any of the others - but I also don't really see them being a problem.

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

Overall I'm really liking the flavor here, there are clearly a lot of great sources for canonical names for stuff for Shienar!

Looking at some of our possible uniques, we've flagged them up as Tall. I think that makes sense from the canon, but does Domination work for a Tall civ? Seems like any civ that goes for Domination would become at least Wide-ish in the process? Do we want to consider sets that avoid pushing Shienar toward one way or the other, like we've done with some other civs, to avoid this conflict?

Ingathering of the Lances was a term Agelmar used for the defense of the Shienaran Border. Meant to make invasions (from humans or shadowspawn) much easier to stomp out.

Good flavor and I like the tactical layer created by the way this works.

Every Man, Woman, and Child is meant to embody how even the civilians learn to fight. Supposed to greatly help with defense in the blight and in general - helps Shienar focus on infrastructure in the early game, instead of defense. Could be tweaked in various ways.

I love this one. It does seem like it should be a UU worker replacement, rather than a UA though. This may have been to provide variety so we can choose to use it as a UA, but it is all new abilities added to the worker, nothing that has to be civ wide. The name does work very well though, and couldn't really fit a UU.

I'm proposing removing this and adding a UU with the same ability.

Peace Favor Your Sword is based on the notion that the Shienarans do not participate in the Game of Houses. This ability is likely not strong enough.

It doesn't quite jump out at you, but it might actually be amazingly powerful. It would make Domination much easier, since you can have more Happiness than otherwise.

Nameday Sword refers to the Borderlander custom of the "Nameday," the day you are given your sword. Could be tweaked to provide a varying amount of free units.

I like it, it's a nice, easily recognizable and very tweakable scaling bonus throughout the game. It should probably come with a discount on unit maintenance, since this will place additional burden on that.

The Black Hawk Soars is a sort generic take on a quasi-culture-related, "big picture" bonus for a tall civ.

Yeah, it's pretty general, but does some good stuff.

Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, is based on the fact that Shienar apparently produces gems, gold, silver, etc. Meant to provide bonuses that compensate for your deficiencies in tundra - thus mines produce food, etc.

I love the flavor of this one. I've proposed another one that hits the same flavor beats as this, but uses the resource quantities instead of yields. Increasing quantities has been quite strong in BNW.

Lamplight Vigil is based on the notion that borderlanders keep their cities really well lit, in order to detect Fades and such among the populace. The Second ability is obviously pretty light-sided during the LB, which I don't love, but it's kind of cool.

Awesome, love the flavor of this!

Last Embrace of the Mother is based on the fact that Shienar has a very codified system of military rank. Everybody knows exactly where they are in the chain of command at all times. This could be adjusted so instead the surviving unit got a free promotion or something. This one is really strange, but could result in kind of nifty strategies

Yeah, this one could be really cool.

Heavy Lancer is a relatively standard shadowspawn-defense unit, though it comes in handy for the blight encroachment/LB era, not the TW.

One of the features of the Horse line is usually that they don't get defensive terrain bonuses - is this intended to undo this as well?

Topknot Cavalry is supposed to reflect that it was chiefly the Shienarans that participated in the Great Hunt. This is possibly too minor of an ability, though, and probably needs to be added to something else.

Love the flavor, but agreed, it's too narrow. It could come up on another one, as you've said.

The Borderlander is the UU equivalent of EM,W,C, and is different in that it doesn't require a transformation.

I like this one as an alternative to EM,W,C's specific ability, but I think both are more UUs than UAs, unless we start including other civilians.

The Sniffer is weird because it may likely not fit at all as a Shienaran UU. I chose to include it because Hurin, the only Sniffer anybody knows, was from Shienar. I'm not sure what use this would really be - good for sniffing out shadowspawn, I suppose. It's the most literal manifestation of the ability that I can think of.

I like including this as a Shienaran UU, but I think this ability is a bit too direct. (Also means we need to track where all combat takes place for Y turns across all players.)

I think the Sniffer ability loosely translates to vision in CiV. I've suggested an alternative below.

The Gaslamp borrows the flavor from the UA but uses it differently. Simply more alignment generation (I chose to make it agnostic)

Sounds good.

Raised Gate (Based on the custom of Shienaran towns being on higher ground, and gates and such) is a UB version of the Lamplight Vigil UA.

I like this on a UB, I think it has a better chance here since it fits very well as a city-level mechanic.

Communal Baths are based on the fact that (despite the flavor of the next item) there are these big public baths in shienaran towns. a straightforward culture or faith dump (could also be other yields)

Shienarans and their weird lodging. Straightforward, but effective.

Separated Apartments (kind of lame I know) is based on the very strict rules in shienaran society, where men and women don't live together, and need permission to enter and such. (probably could switch which the bath flavor for same difference). These yields could be swapped, obviously.

Yep, easy to add most any relevant yield that we want to this one.

Lamplight is another permutation of that flavor. Sort of serves a Fort purpose, but provides some yields (which are flexible).

I really like this! I also like the idea of it just providing vision, rather than giving it to units. It means Shienar doesn't need to leave units stuck there to get the benefit (though maybe we want to encourage that kind of "stand by the border" approach, I think it will more often just be busywork for the player). That said, we could make the unit on it maintenance free? But then we risk Shienar carpeting their territory with it.





Recap!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, while in Shienaran territory, all Shienaran workers can perform a "Take Up Arms" custom mission that takes a full action. This mission transforms the worker into a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit of the current era or the previous (all randomly determined). Armed Workers cannot leave Shienaran territory. Any enemy unit killed by a Armed Worker generates +X Faith. This transformation lasts three turns, at which point the unit becomes a Worker once again.
• Peace Favor Your Sword, the local happiness cap in all cities is raised by X. Time of civil disorder is reduced by half.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y% discount on unit maintenance.
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Constant Vigil, Shienaran cities within X hexes of Blight have +Y combat strength, +Z range, and +W% production when training units.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Home for the Fallen, Shienar can produce unique units of any civilization that has been eliminated from the game.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Topknot Cavalry, replaces era 7-8 Mounted unit, +X% combat strength when within 3 hexes of the hornblower or any Heroes of the Horn (regardless of who controls them).
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and becomes available on any tile on which a unit has attacked or been attacked within the past Y turns. The completed action provides Y hexes of vision on all units that were involved in the detected battle. and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Warrior Mission, replaces the Settler, has combat strength equal to the strongest Melee unit Sheinar can build.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra or Plains, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. Friendly units on tThe Lamplight receive + provides X vision. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

New stuff!

My version of Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, as mentioned above, focuses on resources quantities.

An alternative version of Every Man, Woman, and Child applies to all civilian units and has a few other useful/flavorful effects.

Two variants of Honor Bound create the notion of collecting "honor" (kind of like a new yield, either at the unit level for (military) and civ-wide for (LP)) in order to trigger some kind of effect. I like the notion of building up something like this over the course of the game.

Constant Vigil is a fairly straightforward Borderlander bonus that makes Shienaran cities near the Blight really strong.

Immune to Strife plays on the Shienaran stability flavor. It's a fairly literal translation of that into CiV - even when people are unhappy, it doesn't upset Shienar as a society. This could be a bit of a double-edged sword, in that it's harder to get unhappiness under control if you're still producing new people quite often. Then again, it reduces the penalty of not getting it under control fairly significantly. And has a Philosophy-rebellion and High King components thrown in for good measure - narrow abilities, but very flavorfully appropriate and the other two effects provide the meat of the UA.

Home for the Fallen is a sideways nod at Lan always being welcome in Shienar after the fall of Malkier, and how Shienar could do that for any fallen civ. The flavor of it kind of encourages a restriction to civs eliminated by other players or Shadowspawn, but that's very dependent on other civs to do anything at all, which isn't good. It could be "any civilization that has a city captured by the Shadowspawn"? Which is much less dependent, since I imagine that will happen much more often than actual extinction.

Armed Folk is the UU version of your first version of Every Man, Woman, and Child.

Warrior Mission plays on similar flavor - making Shienaran Settlers combat-ready so that they can expand near the Blight (where Shadowspawn will always be running around) more easily and without getting so many Settlers captured.

Topknot Guardian comes back to the accumulation of honor like the two Honor Bound UAs, but takes the (military) one and puts it on a specific unit. There's some argument for making it a current unit during the LB when a lot of Shadowspawn killing will be going on, but I figured it would help more to give them more time to accumulate honor.

Unhooded Walls is a nod to the flavor where Shienar doesn't allow people to wear hoods inside their cities to keep away Myrddraal.

Civilian Training Barracks is another nod to the armed civilians flavor and creates a military bonus to ongoing population growth, which is actually a Tall-favoring military ability, which is quite cool.

And that's all I have time for this evening!

 

[counterpoint]

Do we want to remove Enduring Legacy, or does the necessity for two unique slots for the alternate approach mean we should keep it around for later, in case that becomes important?

I say keep it. I still fundamentally like it (in some form at least). I'd rather leave it, so we could choose to use/adapt it later.

I think anywhere, for the settling reasons you mentioned. Players will want to plan their settling accordingly. I think they should probably stay around to start with, but if it turns out to be too strong, making it require active vision is something we could tweak for balance. (Same with working anywhere or just own territory.)

agreed

Sounds good!

cool. There's also a block you quoted but didn't respond to (ranged attack and such). anything to add?

Does it need to produce Faith as well? I think it's strong enough with just the Science. Or if it was producing just Faith, and making adjacent Improvements produce Science, that could also work.

I don't have a strong opinion on this. Any of these three options could wokr (sci+faith, faith + adj sci, or Science alone)

We could put T'a'r vision on the Sacred Stones? It's not a particularly big thing in a balance sense, so shouldn't push the Improvement to be too strong. It doesn't capture the Glimmer ability directly though. We'd probably need a channeler UU that had projections that did something similar?

yeah, t'a'r vision could work. I don't like the idea of the UU, though - there doesn't seem to be any flavor justification for them *using* t'a'r well.

I've added P-C Seanchan to the design list! We may have a few tweaks left above, so I'll change it there if we do.

Also, I've given the set you named a shorter name. The names are mostly to refer to sets easily (and make a joke, where I see one) and the other one was very long. Feel free to suggest a name if you prefer another one.

care zero about the set naming! Though my monk in Reaper of Souls is very close to having a full set of Uliana's Strategem, so that's a name I stand behind!

 

[counterpoint]

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

Overall I'm really liking the flavor here, there are clearly a lot of great sources for canonical names for stuff for Shienar!

Looking at some of our possible uniques, we've flagged them up as Tall. I think that makes sense from the canon, but does Domination work for a Tall civ? Seems like any civ that goes for Domination would become at least Wide-ish in the process? Do we want to consider sets that avoid pushing Shienar toward one way or the other, like we've done with some other civs, to avoid this conflict?

I do think the fact that we listed Tall as well as ONLY LB/DOM is somewhat of a problem, as those things don't typically play nice.

That said, I think it would be cool to try to figure out a way for a civ to be tall-ish while pursuing Dom. I think a few of the things proposed here might help with that - providing units and population and stuff. I suppose one angle would be to have the civ be tall up until they make their dom pushes (back half of the game), at which point it might not matter as much for them to preserve the growth and specialists and culture and such.

So, I say let's make this civ tall-adjacent. Maybe Tall-unless-you-go-Dom. I suppose that means we need to provide options in our uniques.

I love this one. It does seem like it should be a UU worker replacement, rather than a UA though. This may have been to provide variety so we can choose to use it as a UA, but it is all new abilities added to the worker, nothing that has to be civ wide. The name does work very well though, and couldn't really fit a UU.

I'm proposing removing this and adding a UU with the same ability.

I see what you mean. Actually, *this* was the first ability I came up with, and then created the UU later.

I'm ok with this one going red, since you added a new one, though I think it would have been simplest enough to just green a few bits of this.

It doesn't quite jump out at you, but it might actually be amazingly powerful. It would make Domination much easier, since you can have more Happiness than otherwise.

yeah, this one's also not that fun. I foresee red in its future.

I like it, it's a nice, easily recognizable and very tweakable scaling bonus throughout the game. It should probably come with a discount on unit maintenance, since this will place additional burden on that.

fair enough. Should it be a % discount, or just X units maintenance free?

I love the flavor of this one. I've proposed another one that hits the same flavor beats as this, but uses the resource quantities instead of yields. Increasing quantities has been quite strong in BNW.

yeah, I could see either working. I do kind of like how the first one compensates for your weaknesses, though (sort of)

One of the features of the Horse line is usually that they don't get defensive terrain bonuses - is this intended to undo this as well?

the intention was that it would be in addition to providing normal terrain bonuses.

I like this one as an alternative to EM,W,C's specific ability, but I think both are more UUs than UAs, unless we start including other civilians.

I'm pretty confused by your comment here. This is a UU. You say a few times elsewhere that this makes a better UU than a UA... and here it is, as a UU.

I like including this as a Shienaran UU, but I think this ability is a bit too direct. (Also means we need to track where all combat takes place for Y turns across all players.)

I think the Sniffer ability loosely translates to vision in CiV. I've suggested an alternative below.

yeah, it's much less splashy in the new version, but I can see how the original is kind of overly specific.

Also, I'm not sold this needs to be a shienaran UU. Part of me just wants to name Recon 2 Sniffer and give it tremendous vision (thus embracing a better late-game point to scouts: spotting for siege weapons and such).

I really like this! I also like the idea of it just providing vision, rather than giving it to units. It means Shienar doesn't need to leave units stuck there to get the benefit (though maybe we want to encourage that kind of "stand by the border" approach, I think it will more often just be busywork for the player). That said, we could make the unit on it maintenance free? But then we risk Shienar carpeting their territory with it.

yeah, definitely get what you're saying, though now I'm wondering if these abilities work against each other. Yield suggests building it close to your cities, the other abilities suggest building it on your far border. Do we need to unify this?

New stuff!

My version of Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, as mentioned above, focuses on resources quantities.

yeah, nothing wrong with this. Feels a little Catherine in BNW, though. I like it though.

An alternative version of Every Man, Woman, and Child applies to all civilian units and has a few other useful/flavorful effects.

Yeah, so this takes the key change i'd have made to EMW+C (all civilians) and adds a bunch of other stuff. I'm not sure I see the need for the +X to be high, though. Also, the LP improvement thing is weird - what's this for? Are LP improvements ever far away from cities for this to be worthwhile?

I suppose the only other thing we need to worry about with "all civilians" is the possiibility of militarized Faith units and stuff - any balance issues with that?

Two variants of Honor Bound create the notion of collecting "honor" (kind of like a new yield, either at the unit level for (military) and civ-wide for (LP)) in order to trigger some kind of effect. I like the notion of building up something like this over the course of the game.

I think I like this in general, but I don't love the notion of it feeling like a UY (unique yield). I'd rather it bit something quite invisible, perhaps even framed in the concept of previously existing game mechanics. Not totally opposed, though. But I wonder if theres a different way to do it (EXP from Shadowspawn or something).

I like both of them, though.

Constant Vigil is a fairly straightforward Borderlander bonus that makes Shienaran cities near the Blight really strong.

probably not going to want more than one civ with a bonus like this, but if we don't do this for Malkier, Shienar's the next best option.

Immune to Strife plays on the Shienaran stability flavor. It's a fairly literal translation of that into CiV - even when people are unhappy, it doesn't upset Shienar as a society. This could be a bit of a double-edged sword, in that it's harder to get unhappiness under control if you're still producing new people quite often. Then again, it reduces the penalty of not getting it under control fairly significantly. And has a Philosophy-rebellion and High King components thrown in for good measure - narrow abilities, but very flavorfully appropriate and the other two effects provide the meat of the UA.

Hmmm, mostly like this one. Not worried about the double edged sword thing that much, though I do think we should probably lessen some of the bonuses this gets - unhappiness should still be a thing, I'd say. Removing the penalties too all those yields might be too much. Hard to say, though.

Part of me wants to suggest that we remove the food bonus, since that's what will cause the double edged sword... but that's what keeps this a tall happiness bonus, instead of a spread-wide-with-all-this-happiness thing, which is a good thing.

HK thing is good flavor!

Home for the Fallen is a sideways nod at Lan always being welcome in Shienar after the fall of Malkier, and how Shienar could do that for any fallen civ. The flavor of it kind of encourages a restriction to civs eliminated by other players or Shadowspawn, but that's very dependent on other civs to do anything at all, which isn't good. It could be "any civilization that has a city captured by the Shadowspawn"? Which is much less dependent, since I imagine that will happen much more often than actual extinction.

I like this as a mechanic, but I don't think this works for Shienar. Basically it urges you to eliminate civs via conquest in order to gain UUs. a cool mechanic, but very very un-Shienar.

Also, it's one that relies on others' badness to be good - especially if its tied to shadowspawn. That'd make Shienar have incentive to be a bad ally during the TW (and LB), which is a very bad flavor thing.

Armed Folk is the UU version of your first version of Every Man, Woman, and Child.

right. Addressed above. I don't see what makes this better than the borderlander.

Warrior Mission plays on similar flavor - making Shienaran Settlers combat-ready so that they can expand near the Blight (where Shadowspawn will always be running around) more easily and without getting so many Settlers captured.

I think this all depends on the cost of the unit. The conquistador is the closest BNW analogue, though that's obviously limited by era and by far-continent-colonization.

I could imagine situations where buying these is much, much cheaper than buying military units (eg late game), which is kind of silly. On the flipside, in the earlier game, producing these for military use primarily is sort of out of the question, because of the production halt.

So, I don't know, it depends on cost and balancing, but making it as strong as current units might be kind of weird. If we want it to be militarily-useful, then that's super odd, but if we don't want that (and want it to just be to defend itself when it ventures out), it's probably not useful enough.

Topknot Guardian comes back to the accumulation of honor like the two Honor Bound UAs, but takes the (military) one and puts it on a specific unit. There's some argument for making it a current unit during the LB when a lot of Shadowspawn killing will be going on, but I figured it would help more to give them more time to accumulate honor.

yeah, that's pretty cool. So it persists by being a flat bonus attached to a promotion or something? (because combat str obviously resets during upgrade). Creates a trippy blight-assault-fest during era 5-6 (when these are buildable) to upgrade them and such, which is sort of neat but also not grounded in flavor.

You have no comments on Heavy Cavalry. I'm fine with this, though re: the auto-retreat - isn't that kind of bad for the HCav? People always retreating makes it hard to kill them.

Unhooded Walls is a nod to the flavor where Shienar doesn't allow people to wear hoods inside their cities to keep away Myrddraal.

yeah, probably this one could/should take the lamp flavor too, since it's a building. Simple. Not super glamorous, but fine.

Civilian Training Barracks is another nod to the armed civilians flavor and creates a military bonus to ongoing population growth, which is actually a Tall-favoring military ability, which is quite cool.

And that's all I have time for this evening!

I like this one! Very cool. Interesting that it's EXP4 - a very high tier UB indeed!.

Recap!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Peace Favor Your Sword, the local happiness cap in all cities is raised by X. Time of civil disorder is reduced by half.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y% discount on unit maintenance.
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Constant Vigil, Shienaran cities within X hexes of Blight have +Y combat strength, +Z range, and +W% production when training units.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Home for the Fallen, Shienar can produce unique units of any civilization that has been eliminated from the game.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Warrior Mission, replaces the Settler, has combat strength equal to the strongest Melee unit Sheinar can build.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra or Plains, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. The Lamplight provides X vision. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

OK, tons of stuff here - anything left to add? I suppose now we can look as a whole and start thinking if we've covered our bases well enough.

What we don't really have are any options for Culture, Diplo, or Science, which I think we might be best off entertaining for a bit.... processing...processing, ok, I've added a few.

Network of Defense is meant to trigger when completing certain quests, providing gold for acting as a shield for CSs and Steddings (a few steddings near Shienar)

Added some +Gold functionality to the lamplight UI.

Added some culture functionality to Hard as Diamond. This could be added to your version as well. Rewards going rather all-in on Tundra stuff, also rewards growing such cities big.

Hmm... i'm actually pretty much out of ideas!

So, way too early for sets, but what we can discuss are Flavor Locks. I'd say Shienar has the following locks:

- something concerning its borderland status (geographically), including tundra, blight, guarding borders, or Shadowspawn (in some combination)
- a mounted UU

that's it, i'd say!

 

[S3rgeus]

Quick advance warning, I'm going to be out tomorrow evening so my next post will be on Thursday!

I say keep it. I still fundamentally like it (in some form at least). I'd rather leave it, so we could choose to use/adapt it later.

Sounds good.

cool. There's also a block you quoted but didn't respond to (ranged attack and such). anything to add?

Woops! Nope, nothing to add there, I like your change.

I don't have a strong opinion on this. Any of these three options could wokr (sci+faith, faith + adj sci, or Science alone)

Coolio, I've changed it to say "+X Science and/or +Y Faith", so we can decide later.

yeah, t'a'r vision could work. I don't like the idea of the UU, though - there doesn't seem to be any flavor justification for them *using* t'a'r well.

Ok, I'm fine leaving this off.

care zero about the set naming! Though my monk in Reaper of Souls is very close to having a full set of Uliana's Strategem, so that's a name I stand behind!

I haven't played Diablo 3 since before Reaper of Souls, I've heard it's improved a lot!

 

[S3rgeus]

I do think the fact that we listed Tall as well as ONLY LB/DOM is somewhat of a problem, as those things don't typically play nice.

That said, I think it would be cool to try to figure out a way for a civ to be tall-ish while pursuing Dom. I think a few of the things proposed here might help with that - providing units and population and stuff. I suppose one angle would be to have the civ be tall up until they make their dom pushes (back half of the game), at which point it might not matter as much for them to preserve the growth and specialists and culture and such.

So, I say let's make this civ tall-adjacent. Maybe Tall-unless-you-go-Dom. I suppose that means we need to provide options in our uniques.

Awesome, sounds good to me!

I see what you mean. Actually, *this* was the first ability I came up with, and then created the UU later.

I'm ok with this one going red, since you added a new one, though I think it would have been simplest enough to just green a few bits of this.

I see what you mean. I wrote the removal for this before I created another UA using the same flavor in my last post. Then I figured I'd just end up redding everything except the name, so it was easier to have a new line.

yeah, this one's also not that fun. I foresee red in its future.

How about red now?

fair enough. Should it be a % discount, or just X units maintenance free?

Good call, X units maintenance free is a military bonus that's much more Tall-favoring, which goes hand in hand with our tall-adjacent plan.

the intention was that it would be in addition to providing normal terrain bonuses.

Sounds good.

I'm pretty confused by your comment here. This is a UU. You say a few times elsewhere that this makes a better UU than a UA... and here it is, as a UU.

I'm saying that this achieves a similar goal to the mechanic that was originally on the EM,W,C UA, but it's different enough that I don't think it's a direct "EM,W,C UU". I like both of them (Borderlander and Armed Folk) as possible alternatives to each other as UUs. I mentioned "not as a UA" for this ability (Borderlander) because I'm considering this and the original EM,W,C UA mechanic (that I put on Armed Folk) as alternatives to each other (rather than UA and UU variants of each other).

Though the new EM,W,C that I proposed has ended up similar-ish to the Borderlander mechanic!

yeah, it's much less splashy in the new version, but I can see how the original is kind of overly specific.

Also, I'm not sold this needs to be a shienaran UU. Part of me just wants to name Recon 2 Sniffer and give it tremendous vision (thus embracing a better late-game point to scouts: spotting for siege weapons and such).

Yeah, we can certainly consider that in the non-uniques pass through the tree. As you mentioned before, I think Hurin will make most readers associate Sniffers with Shienar, even if they're not only used there.

yeah, definitely get what you're saying, though now I'm wondering if these abilities work against each other. Yield suggests building it close to your cities, the other abilities suggest building it on your far border. Do we need to unify this?

I think zone of control also sort of pushes towards putting it towards far borders, so we already have a bit of that. I think it's fine that it has different, but still useful components when built in different places. I think we might want to make it Tundra only though - then that limitation means that a lot of cities will have to make use of it only one of the two ways. (Plains is pretty much everywhere and we don't want carpets of UIs in all cities unless they've seriously worked to be Tundra only.)

The "other" abilities also aren't useless when placed against type (sight and zone of control can be useful near cities, yields can be useful farther away if you decide to found a city near there).

Yeah, so this takes the key change i'd have made to EMW+C (all civilians) and adds a bunch of other stuff. I'm not sure I see the need for the +X to be high, though. Also, the LP improvement thing is weird - what's this for? Are LP improvements ever far away from cities for this to be worthwhile?

I suppose the only other thing we need to worry about with "all civilians" is the possiibility of militarized Faith units and stuff - any balance issues with that?

Right, and it being similar to your original EM,W,C was the idea when I came back around to it - making it more about the whole civ than one unit. This connects to the red-then-blue stuff that I mentioned above, given the difference in mechanics between a "permanent military unit" and a custom mission over a limited time in own territory, I figured they were separate enough abilities that they're alternatives rather than just modifications. Looking back at the original EW,M,C, I would think to change it into this UA would basically red everything after the name, which is enough to make it a separate entry, right?

The reason I flagged X% as high is that these units have the power of obsolete units, so they're necessarily weaker than Shadowspawn (who keep up with the players) by a significant margin. I didn't want to make the civilian units a powerful military force, but did want them to be effective at fending off Shadowspawn.

The LP Improvement continues the essence of the LP being different due to the UA. LPs are combat units in this as well with this, so I figured their Improvements could help that way after they were created. In terms of sight being useful, it depends on the value of Y. If it's like 4, then putting an LP Improvement 3 hexes out (max working distance) from a city could provide significant sight (particularly since borders but up against Blight, so even Tall cities may have directions where their borders don't spread much/at all beyond 3). It means that the value of certain placements of LP Improvements is different for Shienar, which is cool.

Militarized faith units could possibly be a problem. There's already precedent for buying units with Faith and it isn't particularly strong, but this is an extra upgrade to a Faith unit that most Faith players buy already. I think we can stick with all civilians to start with, but if it proves to be too strong, we can pare it back to only specific unit types (Settlers, Workers, LPs, Historians, Heralds, etc, we can mix and match as appropriate.)

I think I like this in general, but I don't love the notion of it feeling like a UY (unique yield). I'd rather it bit something quite invisible, perhaps even framed in the concept of previously existing game mechanics. Not totally opposed, though. But I wonder if theres a different way to do it (EXP from Shadowspawn or something).

I like both of them, though.

I find I like the separate yield approach because it makes something very unique for the player to build up. Like the Mayan calendar pops up when the player researches Theology, this is something really visible for a Shienaran player to track for their progress on these UAs. It sort of creates the notion of a "quest" that the player is working on over time that's unique to them, rather than just being better at something.

probably not going to want more than one civ with a bonus like this, but if we don't do this for Malkier, Shienar's the next best option.

Even if Malkier does have a very Blight-y bonus, I don't think that means Shienar shouldn't. It can be fine for both of them to benefit from being near the Blight, as long as they're mechanically distinct, so it doesn't feel like playing the same civ when playing either of them.

Hmmm, mostly like this one. Not worried about the double edged sword thing that much, though I do think we should probably lessen some of the bonuses this gets - unhappiness should still be a thing, I'd say. Removing the penalties too all those yields might be too much. Hard to say, though.

Part of me wants to suggest that we remove the food bonus, since that's what will cause the double edged sword... but that's what keeps this a tall happiness bonus, instead of a spread-wide-with-all-this-happiness thing, which is a good thing.

HK thing is good flavor!

Pre-BNW the yield penalties weren't there, which was what made me think we could peel them back. They're not huge until the civ gets quite unhappy, it's 2% per 1 Unhappiness. We can of course tweak them back up if it's too strong (keep only the Food bonus even).

I like this as a mechanic, but I don't think this works for Shienar. Basically it urges you to eliminate civs via conquest in order to gain UUs. a cool mechanic, but very very un-Shienar.

Also, it's one that relies on others' badness to be good - especially if its tied to shadowspawn. That'd make Shienar have incentive to be a bad ally during the TW (and LB), which is a very bad flavor thing.

Totally agree.

right. Addressed above. I don't see what makes this better than the borderlander.

I'm not proposing it as a replacement for the Borderlander. The two do similar things that achieve a similar goal (make workers useful in combat), but they're achieve it differently. They obviously wouldn't go in the same set, but one may fit better than the other, depending on what the other uniques are.

I think this all depends on the cost of the unit. The conquistador is the closest BNW analogue, though that's obviously limited by era and by far-continent-colonization.

I could imagine situations where buying these is much, much cheaper than buying military units (eg late game), which is kind of silly. On the flipside, in the earlier game, producing these for military use primarily is sort of out of the question, because of the production halt.

So, I don't know, it depends on cost and balancing, but making it as strong as current units might be kind of weird. If we want it to be militarily-useful, then that's super odd, but if we don't want that (and want it to just be to defend itself when it ventures out), it's probably not useful enough.

This is a very good point, a settler is way too cheap to be this strong in the late game. We could simply make its purchase cost go up as the game goes on (as the player finishes techs). Or it could match the purchase cost of the unit that it matches strength with. Training them with hammers cuts off growth, so that's less of a problem, even if it is a bit cheaper to produce than lategame military units.

yeah, that's pretty cool. So it persists by being a flat bonus attached to a promotion or something? (because combat str obviously resets during upgrade). Creates a trippy blight-assault-fest during era 5-6 (when these are buildable) to upgrade them and such, which is sort of neat but also not grounded in flavor.

Yeah, the combat bonus would come from a promotion. While it's a Topknot Guardian that promotion gets stronger as they accumulate honor, otherwise it's just there. (In practice, this is how most unit abilities are done - by a promotion on an otherwise vanilla unit, it's the "not kept on upgrade" ones that need to be marked as not sticking around.)

You have no comments on Heavy Cavalry. I'm fine with this, though re: the auto-retreat - isn't that kind of bad for the HCav? People always retreating makes it hard to kill them.

Woops, I meant to describe this. Yes, the vs mounted units bit is intended to be bad for the Heavy Cavalry. For the combat bonus, by high, I was thinking crazy high (like 100% or more). Also notable that non-mounted units don't retreat, they get pushed back after normal damage is dealt (and the Heavy Cavalry takes the defending unit's old place). To offset that, other players need some kind of counterplay, which is their own mounted units. They can't straight up defeat the Heavy Cavalry (they have no particular advantage when attacking Heavy Cavalry), but also (usually) can't be killed as easily by them.

I think it will make fighting with/against Heavy Cavalry quite different tactically (and obviously strong for Shienar), and so interesting.

OK, tons of stuff here - anything left to add? I suppose now we can look as a whole and start thinking if we've covered our bases well enough.

I'd like to get a bit more UU variety to work with, but I'm unfortunately short on time for brainstorming tonight, so I won't be able to propose any new ones until next time.

What we don't really have are any options for Culture, Diplo, or Science, which I think we might be best off entertaining for a bit.... processing...processing, ok, I've added a few.

Network of Defense is meant to trigger when completing certain quests, providing gold for acting as a shield for CSs and Steddings (a few steddings near Shienar)

Does defending count both the "Barbarians in my lands" and "destroy that Barbarian encampment" equivalent quests, or just one of them?

I like the overall idea, it's a very Borderlander-y flavored ability.

Added some +Gold functionality to the lamplight UI.

In addition to what I said above about this potentially being useful both near and far from cities, another alternative could be to split this into two UIs. It seems like we've got two general themes - the military-esque "defend your borders" and the yield bonuses for Tundra. I think the reason we've converged on one UI rather than two is because players don't tend to build military-only Improvements, which pushes us back towards having just one.

Added some culture functionality to Hard as Diamond. This could be added to your version as well. Rewards going rather all-in on Tundra stuff, also rewards growing such cities big.

Sounds good!

So, way too early for sets, but what we can discuss are Flavor Locks. I'd say Shienar has the following locks:

- something concerning its borderland status (geographically), including tundra, blight, guarding borders, or Shadowspawn (in some combination)
- a mounted UU

that's it, i'd say!

Agreed on both, can't think of any others.


Recap!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Peace Favor Your Sword, the local happiness cap in all cities is raised by X. Time of civil disorder is reduced by half.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y units are maintenance free.
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Constant Vigil, Shienaran cities within X hexes of Blight have +Y combat strength, +Z range, and +W% production when training units.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Warrior Mission, replaces the Settler, has combat strength equal to the strongest Melee unit Sheinar can build.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra or Plains, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. The Lamplight provides X vision. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

 

[counterpoint]

I haven't played Diablo 3 since before Reaper of Souls, I've heard it's improved a lot!

I'd say it has, though I suppose that depends on what you value in your dungeon crawlers. Tons of loot dropping is th ename of the game now.

How about red now?

fair enough!

Good call, X units maintenance free is a military bonus that's much more Tall-favoring, which goes hand in hand with our tall-adjacent plan.

bien

I'm saying that this achieves a similar goal to the mechanic that was originally on the EM,W,C UA, but it's different enough that I don't think it's a direct "EM,W,C UU". I like both of them (Borderlander and Armed Folk) as possible alternatives to each other as UUs. I mentioned "not as a UA" for this ability (Borderlander) because I'm considering this and the original EM,W,C UA mechanic (that I put on Armed Folk) as alternatives to each other (rather than UA and UU variants of each other).

Though the new EM,W,C that I proposed has ended up similar-ish to the Borderlander mechanic!

Understand what you meant now. I'm fine with some of these coexisting as different applications of the same concept.

Yeah, we can certainly consider that in the non-uniques pass through the tree. As you mentioned before, I think Hurin will make most readers associate Sniffers with Shienar, even if they're not only used there.

right. We'll see when we get to that part. We can keep the flavor around for now.

I think zone of control also sort of pushes towards putting it towards far borders, so we already have a bit of that. I think it's fine that it has different, but still useful components when built in different places. I think we might want to make it Tundra only though - then that limitation means that a lot of cities will have to make use of it only one of the two ways. (Plains is pretty much everywhere and we don't want carpets of UIs in all cities unless they've seriously worked to be Tundra only.)

The "other" abilities also aren't useless when placed against type (sight and zone of control can be useful near cities, yields can be useful farther away if you decide to found a city near there).

fine with changing it to tundra only

Right, and it being similar to your original EM,W,C was the idea when I came back around to it - making it more about the whole civ than one unit. This connects to the red-then-blue stuff that I mentioned above, given the difference in mechanics between a "permanent military unit" and a custom mission over a limited time in own territory, I figured they were separate enough abilities that they're alternatives rather than just modifications. Looking back at the original EW,M,C, I would think to change it into this UA would basically red everything after the name, which is enough to make it a separate entry, right?

The reason I flagged X% as high is that these units have the power of obsolete units, so they're necessarily weaker than Shadowspawn (who keep up with the players) by a significant margin. I didn't want to make the civilian units a powerful military force, but did want them to be effective at fending off Shadowspawn.

OK, I think that's fine, then.

The LP Improvement continues the essence of the LP being different due to the UA. LPs are combat units in this as well with this, so I figured their Improvements could help that way after they were created. In terms of sight being useful, it depends on the value of Y. If it's like 4, then putting an LP Improvement 3 hexes out (max working distance) from a city could provide significant sight (particularly since borders but up against Blight, so even Tall cities may have directions where their borders don't spread much/at all beyond 3). It means that the value of certain placements of LP Improvements is different for Shienar, which is cool.

I see the angle here. I think we'd need to be careful though in making Y too high because of Citadels (our equivalent). It makes not sense to plop other LPIs on borders, but those are already destined for the borders.

Militarized faith units could possibly be a problem. There's already precedent for buying units with Faith and it isn't particularly strong, but this is an extra upgrade to a Faith unit that most Faith players buy already. I think we can stick with all civilians to start with, but if it proves to be too strong, we can pare it back to only specific unit types (Settlers, Workers, LPs, Historians, Heralds, etc, we can mix and match as appropriate.)

Fine with this approach!

I find I like the separate yield approach because it makes something very unique for the player to build up. Like the Mayan calendar pops up when the player researches Theology, this is something really visible for a Shienaran player to track for their progress on these UAs. It sort of creates the notion of a "quest" that the player is working on over time that's unique to them, rather than just being better at something.

Well, I'm not suggesting the unit be better at something. I'm suggesting we track something like "EXP gained from Shadowspawn Kills" and use that as the source of whatever bonus the player gets from "honor," without having to actually show or create Honor.

How would you suggest it be shown? The Mayan long count thing (which is, incidentally, not all that intuitive as i recall) is civ-wide, not unit tied.

Even if Malkier does have a very Blight-y bonus, I don't think that means Shienar shouldn't. It can be fine for both of them to benefit from being near the Blight, as long as they're mechanically distinct, so it doesn't feel like playing the same civ when playing either of them.

understood.

Pre-BNW the yield penalties weren't there, which was what made me think we could peel them back. They're not huge until the civ gets quite unhappy, it's 2% per 1 Unhappiness. We can of course tweak them back up if it's too strong (keep only the Food bonus even).

got it. Recall that I have zero pre-BNW experience with CiV.

This is a very good point, a settler is way too cheap to be this strong in the late game. We could simply make its purchase cost go up as the game goes on (as the player finishes techs). Or it could match the purchase cost of the unit that it matches strength with. Training them with hammers cuts off growth, so that's less of a problem, even if it is a bit cheaper to produce than lategame military units.

my suggestion is actually just to cut this one! Too much hoop-jumping to make it work.

Yeah, the combat bonus would come from a promotion. While it's a Topknot Guardian that promotion gets stronger as they accumulate honor, otherwise it's just there. (In practice, this is how most unit abilities are done - by a promotion on an otherwise vanilla unit, it's the "not kept on upgrade" ones that need to be marked as not sticking around.)

ok. sounds good!

Woops, I meant to describe this. Yes, the vs mounted units bit is intended to be bad for the Heavy Cavalry. For the combat bonus, by high, I was thinking crazy high (like 100% or more). Also notable that non-mounted units don't retreat, they get pushed back after normal damage is dealt (and the Heavy Cavalry takes the defending unit's old place). To offset that, other players need some kind of counterplay, which is their own mounted units. They can't straight up defeat the Heavy Cavalry (they have no particular advantage when attacking Heavy Cavalry), but also (usually) can't be killed as easily by them.

I think it will make fighting with/against Heavy Cavalry quite different tactically (and obviously strong for Shienar), and so interesting.

I think I get it now (though it's still a bit hard to visualize how it would all "feel") and I think this is fine.

Does defending count both the "Barbarians in my lands" and "destroy that Barbarian encampment" equivalent quests, or just one of them?

I like the overall idea, it's a very Borderlander-y flavored ability.

I... didn't really remember the "in my lands" quest. I feel like I only ever hear about the encampment one. I'm not sure which would trigger this - maybe differing amounts of different things?

In addition to what I said above about this potentially being useful both near and far from cities, another alternative could be to split this into two UIs. It seems like we've got two general themes - the military-esque "defend your borders" and the yield bonuses for Tundra. I think the reason we've converged on one UI rather than two is because players don't tend to build military-only Improvements, which pushes us back towards having just one.

Yeah, for me I think the military-only improvement sounds less fun to use. Also, Tundra is kind of lame, so it's not terrible if you get extra benefits from being there (and in our game, Tundra often equals near blight, which is extra lame).

Recap!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y units are maintenance free
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Constant Vigil, Shienaran cities within X hexes of Blight have +Y combat strength, +Z range, and +W% production when training units.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Warrior Mission, replaces the Settler, has combat strength equal to the strongest Melee unit Sheinar can build.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units ]and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.
• Guardian of the Pass, replaces era 7-8 Mounted, when killed, spawns the most recently obsolete melee unit

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra or Plains, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. The Lamplight provides X vision. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

re: Guardian of the Pass - isn't there some battle where shienar defended some pass against trollocs? Don't remember. Based on borderlander heartiness in general

shall we start redding stuff?

 

[S3rgeus]

I'd say it has, though I suppose that depends on what you value in your dungeon crawlers. Tons of loot dropping is th ename of the game now.

There was tons of loot before, so it must be a mountain of it now!

I see the angle here. I think we'd need to be careful though in making Y too high because of Citadels (our equivalent). It makes not sense to plop other LPIs on borders, but those are already destined for the borders.

Yep, that's a good thing to keep in mind.

Well, I'm not suggesting the unit be better at something. I'm suggesting we track something like "EXP gained from Shadowspawn Kills" and use that as the source of whatever bonus the player gets from "honor," without having to actually show or create Honor.

How would you suggest it be shown? The Mayan long count thing (which is, incidentally, not all that intuitive as i recall) is civ-wide, not unit tied.

I'm saying that using something like EXP feels much more like "a unit but better" than something that's tracked separately, from a player experience point of view. (It also requires us to use the numbers appropriate for EXP to represent this ability, but a separate honor tracker can take whatever values we want.) That said, even if we do use EXP from Shadowspawn, that would need to be represented to the player, which would lead to pretty much the same UI as having "honor" be its own thing.

For how it would be represented, that would depend on if it's a per unit thing (Honor Bound (military) or Topknot Guardian) or civ-wide (Honor Bound (LP)).

For per unit, I figure some kind of progress bar toward the next "upgrade point" (visible when the unit is selected). And some kind of visual at-a-glance representation of how many times a given unit has been upgraded by honor.

For civ-wide, a progress bar towards the next LP would be good.

my suggestion is actually just to cut this one! Too much hoop-jumping to make it work.

I don't think there are many hoops for this one. We just need to adjust the purchase cost. But separately I do think we have better alternatives, so I'm fine cutting it.

I... didn't really remember the "in my lands" quest. I feel like I only ever hear about the encampment one. I'm not sure which would trigger this - maybe differing amounts of different things?

Yeah, differing amounts for each seems good.

Yeah, for me I think the military-only improvement sounds less fun to use. Also, Tundra is kind of lame, so it's not terrible if you get extra benefits from being there (and in our game, Tundra often equals near blight, which is extra lame).

Agreed.

re: Guardian of the Pass - isn't there some battle where shienar defended some pass against trollocs? Don't remember. Based on borderlander heartiness in general

I'm not a big fan of giving players obsolete units, because that doesn't tend to be something CiV does. Once a unit is obsolete, there are no ways to make more and it's a process of turning the existing ones into the current ones.

That said, I think this could do fine, since it's a fixed Horse7/8 (whichever we choose) of always giving out Melee7/8. (I haven't checked if there are tech paths that still leads to that possibly giving the player an obsolete unit.)

shall we start redding stuff?

Yes!


Recap! And time for some removals!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y units are maintenance free
• The Black Hawk Soars, expending a Shienaran Legendary Person generates X Golden Age points. Golden Ages provide a bonus +Y% to the accumulation of Legendary Person points.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
• Lamplight Vigil, vision beyond Shienaran borders extends an extra X hexes. Shienaran cities receive an extra attack per turn, with +1 Range, that can only be used against Shadowspawn.
• Last Embrace of the Mother, when a Shienaran military unit is killed, one randomly-selected unit within 2 hexes that possesses X-Y less total Experience receives an amount of Experience equal to half the difference between the EXP amounts of each unit.
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Constant Vigil, Shienaran cities within X hexes of Blight have +Y combat strength, +Z range, and +W% production when training units.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units ]and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.
• Guardian of the Pass, replaces era 7-8 Mounted, when killed, spawns the most recently obsolete era 7-8 melee unit

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

I... tried? This has actually been super difficult. For the things I've proposed removing:

The Black Hawk Soars just didn't strike me as particularly engaging for the player. Nothing wrong with it, but there's steep competition!

With Lamplight Vigil and Constant Vigil, I figure we can capture this with one of the UB or UI options, and given the competition for UA, that seems more likely to be how we want to do it.

For Last Embrace of the Mother, I find I prefer the other military options for UAs.

Unhooded Walls I didn't think stands up to the other UBs - most of the time it's just a combat bonus to the city.

By my count, if we do all of the above removals, we have 7 separate "focuses" available from our remaining UAs. (So, the two variants of Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron both work toward the same focus.) Any more paring down and we'd need to drop certain approaches. Any we like less than others?

 

[counterpoint]

I'm saying that using something like EXP feels much more like "a unit but better" than something that's tracked separately, from a player experience point of view. (It also requires us to use the numbers appropriate for EXP to represent this ability, but a separate honor tracker can take whatever values we want.) That said, even if we do use EXP from Shadowspawn, that would need to be represented to the player, which would lead to pretty much the same UI as having "honor" be its own thing.

For how it would be represented, that would depend on if it's a per unit thing (Honor Bound (military) or Topknot Guardian) or civ-wide (Honor Bound (LP)).

For per unit, I figure some kind of progress bar toward the next "upgrade point" (visible when the unit is selected). And some kind of visual at-a-glance representation of how many times a given unit has been upgraded by honor.

For civ-wide, a progress bar towards the next LP would be good.

OK, ok, ok. I'm fine with using Honor, then

Yeah, differing amounts for each seems good.

ok, I'm looking at this ability once again (imagine that!) and it doesn't seem like we *could* vary it. I mean, it's a trade route. What would we vary?

I'm not a big fan of giving players obsolete units, because that doesn't tend to be something CiV does. Once a unit is obsolete, there are no ways to make more and it's a process of turning the existing ones into the current ones.

That said, I think this could do fine, since it's a fixed Horse7/8 (whichever we choose) of always giving out Melee7/8. (I haven't checked if there are tech paths that still leads to that possibly giving the player an obsolete unit.)

Right, this one isn't a sliding scale like a UA is, which makesit less wonky, perhaps. I guess the weird thing is that the unit could be upgraded to a modern unit.

We also could conceivably make it produce a contemporary unit - just one that is necessarily less expensive (not sure which that would be), or at the very least, with 0 EXP. We could then make the horse unit itself no better than its Generic contemporary, and the deal here is basically a kind of 2-for-1. Would inspire some interesting dynamics with strategy, perhaps - battles with tactical shifts mid-way due to changed unit composition.

I... tried? This has actually been super difficult. For the things I've proposed removing:

The Black Hawk Soars just didn't strike me as particularly engaging for the player. Nothing wrong with it, but there's steep competition!

With Lamplight Vigil and Constant Vigil, I figure we can capture this with one of the UB or UI options, and given the competition for UA, that seems more likely to be how we want to do it.

For Last Embrace of the Mother, I find I prefer the other military options for UAs.

Unhooded Walls I didn't think stands up to the other UBs - most of the time it's just a combat bonus to the city.

By my count, if we do all of the above removals, we have 7 separate "focuses" available from our remaining UAs. (So, the two variants of Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron both work toward the same focus.) Any more paring down and we'd need to drop certain approaches. Any we like less than others?

Yeah, I'm ok with your removals. I kind of liked the Black Hawk Soars, but only because it generated Golden Age points, which isn't something we've brought in much yet. That said, could easily do it with other civs. I also like Last Embrace, mechanically (the "sharing" of EXP is kind of cool), but I'm fine cutting it - we certainly need to.

OK, so let's line up those focii and see which ones are coolest, because yes, we need to cut more (still over 20 abilities remaining):

UA:
Ingathering of the Lances - tundra, defense
Nameday Sword - units
Hard as Diamond (yields) - tundra, culture, yields
Hard as Diamond (quantity) - tundra, strategic, luxury
Every Man, Woman, and Child - civilians, sight
Honor Bound (military) - Honor, shadowspawn, combat
Honor Bound (LP) - Honor, Shadowspawn, LP
Immune to Strife - stability
Network of Defense - trade, CS

UU:
Heavy Lancer - tundra, Shadowspawn, Faith
Borderlander - civilian, Faith
Sniffer - sight
Armed Folk - civilian
Topknot Guardian - Honor, Shadowspawn
Heavy Cavalry - movement/management
Guardian of the Pass - units

UB:
Gaslamp - Alignment
Raised Gate - Shadowspawn
Communal Baths - Culture, Faith
Separated Apartments - Golden Age, Culture
Civilian Training Barracks - units

UI:
Lamplight - tundra, defense, Shadowspawn, Yields

OK, I've bolded those above that seem to be the "major" features we're playing with here - tundra, defense, civilians, honor, and shadowspawn. Now, truthfully, those last three are really just variations on the same thing - different ways to defend your lands.

In any case, there are other foci, but I think the rest are sort of marginal and more incidentally a part of this mix - not necessarily something to build a set around.

With all this in mind, time to take a pass through these and eliminate some that serve the same purpose. This is tough! For pretty much any of these, I could probably be persuaded to red the one I chose and black the one i didn't!

Logic first:

UAs
Ingathering of the Lances - I'm unsure about this one. I think it fits what we're looking for here, but might not be as fun as the rest of these. red

Nameday Sword. I think I like thisone. Black.

Hard as Diamond (yields) vs (quantity) - I think (yields) is a little more interesting and less BNW-ish. I also like that it produces some culture. Redding quantity.

E M, W, + C deserves to stay around as an option. black

Honor Bount (military) vs (LP) are both quite cool, as is the UU counterpart. I could see either of these being useful to us. black for both.

Immune to Strife - I think this is an interesting ability, but I think this is also one of the most "off the beaten path" UAs, in that it doesn't seem to fit much with what we're trying to do here in general. Red.

Network of Defense- the same criticism could be put on this one, but I think this offers a trade/gold option, which might be helpful to leave around. black.

UUs:
Heavy Lancer - Somewhat like Ingathering, I'm tempted to red this one. However, I think it's a prett straightforwardly decent unit for anti-shadowspawn stuff, so I'm considering leaving it, especially since we don't have that many UUs. black, i guess. Possibly this unit could be tweaked to be made better

Borderlander vs Armed folk. These are two similar to both survive. I think I prefer the Borderlander, and it requires a little less micromanaging, and produces Faith (the latter could 100% be affixed to Armed Folk though) . redding AF

I think the Sniffer doesn't really deserve to be on the list. It's not as cool as most of the rest of these. I'm redding it, though if you think we need to keep it as an option for flavor reasons, I'm open to that.

Topknot Guardian - I like the honor thing and I think it should stick around.

Heavy Cavalry - I feel similarly here as I did for the Heavy Lancer - kind of a straightforward cool unit, but maybe not super exciting. Can keep around for now.

Guardian of the Pass - not sure about this one. I think it can survive because we don't have tons of UUs, and it's kind of a unique mechanic.

UBs:
Gaslamp, this one could be said to be off-the-beaten-path as well, but I think it's the kind of ability that might be fine on an island, and useful to Shienar. black for now.

Raised Gate - I like this ability as a mechanic. I'm concerned that it might not be broadly-useful enough, though. I'll red it, though with some sadness.

Communal Baths - I think this one is fine to keep around. encourages tall and rewards such with some culture

Separated apartments - same as above, though in a different way. I suppose these two could be similar enough such that we should remove them, but I'm keeping them both around.

Civilian Training Barracks - I think I'm fine with this one as well. I like that it rewards tallness (height?)

UIs:
Lamplight - looking at this ability, it does a heck of a lot. I'll keep it around.

OK, so if we do that kind of cruel genocide, we're left with 16 options:

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Ingathering of the Lances, Shienaran mounted units consume half movement in Tundra and Snow. Enemy units entering Shienaran territory have -X% combat strength for the first turn in which they enter.
• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y units are maintenance free
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (yields), strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
  [*]Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron (quantity), strategic resources on Tundra provide double quantites. Luxury resources on Tundra provide two copies instead of one.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Immune to Strife, Unhappiness only reduces Shienar's food output by 25% (instead of 75%) and does not decrease Production output, Gold output, or military unit strength. Shienaran cities cannot rebel due to Philosophical pressure. Shienaran rebels have -X% combat strength while in Shienaran territory. Shienar does not declare any wars and cannot be declared upon automatically at the end of the High King event.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route from the capital with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
  [*]Armed Folk, replaces the worker, can perform a custom "Take up Arms" mission to becomes a random current or previous era military unit for 3 turns.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units ]and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.
• Guardian of the Pass, replaces era 7-8 Mounted, when killed, spawns the most recent era 7-8 melee unit

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Raised Gate, replaces Defense 2, provides a free attack per turn, Ranged 4, that can be aimed at Shadowspawn.
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Unhooded Walls, replaces DefenseX, Myrddraal can't come within Y hexes of this city and provides an additional +Z combat strength to the city.
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

OK, as far as sets, given our "locks" are Cavalry and Tundra/Border stuff, I'll start with these sets (though there are many other possibilities):

Honor and Culture
UA: Honor Bound (military OR LP)
UU: Borderlander
UU: Heavy Lancer
UB: Communal Baths OR Separated Apartments.

Borderlander and Heavy Lancer reinforce the UA. Depending on which UA we go with, this could either be more Domey (but still sort of Tall) or more culturey.

Honor and War
UA: Nameday Sword
UU: Topknot Guardian
UU: Borderlander OR UI: Lamplight
UB: Separated Apartments or Gaslamp

Still has the Honor stuff, but more straightforwardly about sustaining and army and such for the LB, I'd say.

Lore of the Far North
UA: Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron
UU: Topknot Guardian OR Heavy Lancer OR Heavy Cavalry
UU: Borderlander OR UI: Lamplight
UB: Separated Apartments OR Civilian Training Barracks

I know that's a lot of options, but they are sort of dependent on one another. ?You wouldn't go with too many Culture Options, nor would you need to go with multiple "movement management" or "borders defense" options. I could see either the Culture of the UA or Sep. Apart. being changed to Faith or something.

OK, thoughts? I think getting solid on clear sets is really tough for this civ.

So I assume you're going to drop Andor's opening upon us in the next few posts. I just wanted to remind you that I'm pretty sure there are some suggestions by extinct participants in the early days of the thread that should probably be rendered here in orange, if only for the sake of honoring the fallen.

 

[S3rgeus]

ok, I'm looking at this ability once again (imagine that!) and it doesn't seem like we *could* vary it. I mean, it's a trade route. What would we vary?

The duration of the trade route would probably be the easiest. Or the yield rate from the trade route.

For the change to this UA, will a capital-bound trade route always work? What if the capital is too far away? In fact, even if we choose the closest city, that may still be too far away. (Distance affects the trade route duration, since it's actually decided by how long it takes the trade unit to get between the two ends of the trade route.)

Right, this one isn't a sliding scale like a UA is, which makesit less wonky, perhaps. I guess the weird thing is that the unit could be upgraded to a modern unit.

We also could conceivably make it produce a contemporary unit - just one that is necessarily less expensive (not sure which that would be), or at the very least, with 0 EXP. We could then make the horse unit itself no better than its Generic contemporary, and the deal here is basically a kind of 2-for-1. Would inspire some interesting dynamics with strategy, perhaps - battles with tactical shifts mid-way due to changed unit composition.

Yeah, the 2-for-1 makes this quite strong, on both offense and defense, which is good.

Yeah, I'm ok with your removals. I kind of liked the Black Hawk Soars, but only because it generated Golden Age points, which isn't something we've brought in much yet. That said, could easily do it with other civs. I also like Last Embrace, mechanically (the "sharing" of EXP is kind of cool), but I'm fine cutting it - we certainly need to.

Agreed, I think we've got a strong crop for Shienar - none of them are removed because they have particular problems, just that others are more engaging.

OK, so let's line up those focii and see which ones are coolest, because yes, we need to cut more (still over 20 abilities remaining):

UA:
Ingathering of the Lances - tundra, defense
Nameday Sword - units
Hard as Diamond (yields) - tundra, culture, yields
Hard as Diamond (quantity) - tundra, strategic, luxury
Every Man, Woman, and Child - civilians, sight
Honor Bound (military) - Honor, shadowspawn, combat
Honor Bound (LP) - Honor, Shadowspawn, LP
Immune to Strife - stability
Network of Defense - trade, CS

UU:
Heavy Lancer - tundra, Shadowspawn, Faith
Borderlander - civilian, Faith
Sniffer - sight
Armed Folk - civilian
Topknot Guardian - Honor, Shadowspawn
Heavy Cavalry - movement/management
Guardian of the Pass - units

UB:
Gaslamp - Alignment
Raised Gate - Shadowspawn
Communal Baths - Culture, Faith
Separated Apartments - Golden Age, Culture
Civilian Training Barracks - units

UI:
Lamplight - tundra, defense, Shadowspawn, Yields

OK, I've bolded those above that seem to be the "major" features we're playing with here - tundra, defense, civilians, honor, and shadowspawn. Now, truthfully, those last three are really just variations on the same thing - different ways to defend your lands.

In any case, there are other foci, but I think the rest are sort of marginal and more incidentally a part of this mix - not necessarily something to build a set around.

With all this in mind, time to take a pass through these and eliminate some that serve the same purpose. This is tough! For pretty much any of these, I could probably be persuaded to red the one I chose and black the one i didn't!

Awesome, good list of foci! I don't have much to add, I pretty much agree with all of this!

Logic first:

UAs
Ingathering of the Lances - I'm unsure about this one. I think it fits what we're looking for here, but might not be as fun as the rest of these. red

Nameday Sword. I think I like thisone. Black.

Hard as Diamond (yields) vs (quantity) - I think (yields) is a little more interesting and less BNW-ish. I also like that it produces some culture. Redding quantity.

E M, W, + C deserves to stay around as an option. black

Honor Bount (military) vs (LP) are both quite cool, as is the UU counterpart. I could see either of these being useful to us. black for both.

Immune to Strife - I think this is an interesting ability, but I think this is also one of the most "off the beaten path" UAs, in that it doesn't seem to fit much with what we're trying to do here in general. Red.

Network of Defense- the same criticism could be put on this one, but I think this offers a trade/gold option, which might be helpful to leave around. black.

UUs:
Heavy Lancer - Somewhat like Ingathering, I'm tempted to red this one. However, I think it's a prett straightforwardly decent unit for anti-shadowspawn stuff, so I'm considering leaving it, especially since we don't have that many UUs. black, i guess. Possibly this unit could be tweaked to be made better

Borderlander vs Armed folk. These are two similar to both survive. I think I prefer the Borderlander, and it requires a little less micromanaging, and produces Faith (the latter could 100% be affixed to Armed Folk though) . redding AF

I think the Sniffer doesn't really deserve to be on the list. It's not as cool as most of the rest of these. I'm redding it, though if you think we need to keep it as an option for flavor reasons, I'm open to that.

Topknot Guardian - I like the honor thing and I think it should stick around.

Heavy Cavalry - I feel similarly here as I did for the Heavy Lancer - kind of a straightforward cool unit, but maybe not super exciting. Can keep around for now.

Guardian of the Pass - not sure about this one. I think it can survive because we don't have tons of UUs, and it's kind of a unique mechanic.

UBs:
Gaslamp, this one could be said to be off-the-beaten-path as well, but I think it's the kind of ability that might be fine on an island, and useful to Shienar. black for now.

Raised Gate - I like this ability as a mechanic. I'm concerned that it might not be broadly-useful enough, though. I'll red it, though with some sadness.

Communal Baths - I think this one is fine to keep around. encourages tall and rewards such with some culture

Separated apartments - same as above, though in a different way. I suppose these two could be similar enough such that we should remove them, but I'm keeping them both around.

Civilian Training Barracks - I think I'm fine with this one as well. I like that it rewards tallness (height?)

UIs:
Lamplight - looking at this ability, it does a heck of a lot. I'll keep it around.

Looking through all of this I agree with all of these removals. Like above, nothing wrong with what we're taking out now, it's just by comparison to what else is left.

The only thing I'd like to find a way to keep is the Sniffer flavor somehow. What if he somehow worked with in conjunction with one of the three Honor abilities? Something like:

Sniffer, replaces Recon2, increased combat strength within X hexes of a city. Any combat with Shadowspawn within Y hexes of this unit generates +Z Honor.

So instead of kills, any combat (attacking or defending) would generate Honor. This would work best with the UA versions, since those apply to many units. It's too specific if we only have a single UU that uses Honor.

I would also be inclined to red Network of Defense. I see what you mean about it being a different option among the others, but I think it's quite similar to Immune to Strife in that it doesn't quite hit what we're generally going for with Shienar.

OK, as far as sets, given our "locks" are Cavalry and Tundra/Border stuff, I'll start with these sets (though there are many other possibilities):

Honor and Culture
UA: Honor Bound (military OR LP)
UU: Borderlander
UU: Heavy Lancer
UB: Communal Baths OR Separated Apartments.

Borderlander and Heavy Lancer reinforce the UA. Depending on which UA we go with, this could either be more Domey (but still sort of Tall) or more culturey.

Honor and War
UA: Nameday Sword
UU: Topknot Guardian
UU: Borderlander OR UI: Lamplight
UB: Separated Apartments or Gaslamp

Still has the Honor stuff, but more straightforwardly about sustaining and army and such for the LB, I'd say.

Lore of the Far North
UA: Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron
UU: Topknot Guardian OR Heavy Lancer OR Heavy Cavalry
UU: Borderlander OR UI: Lamplight
UB: Separated Apartments OR Civilian Training Barracks

I know that's a lot of options, but they are sort of dependent on one another. ?You wouldn't go with too many Culture Options, nor would you need to go with multiple "movement management" or "borders defense" options. I could see either the Culture of the UA or Sep. Apart. being changed to Faith or something.

OK, thoughts? I think getting solid on clear sets is really tough for this civ.

These are really good sets. Of the three, I think I'd go for #1 and #3.

My only addition to the first one would be adding OR Heavy Cavalry next to the Heavy Lancer, since I think they could both work well there. So, these:

Honor and Culture
UA: Honor Bound (military OR LP)
UU: Borderlander
UU: Heavy Lancer OR Heavy Cavalry
UB: Communal Baths OR Separated Apartments

Lore of the Far North
UA: Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron
UU: Topknot Guardian OR Heavy Lancer OR Heavy Cavalry
UU: Borderlander OR UI: Lamplight
UB: Separated Apartments OR Civilian Training Barracks


Recap!

Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB)

UAs:

• Nameday Sword, Shienar begins the game with two Warriors. At the start of every era, a Melee, Ranged, Polearm, or Mounted unit (randomly determined) of the current era spawns adjacent to every city of at least X population. These units are given one free first-tier promotion. Y units are maintenance free
• Hard as Diamond, Cold as Iron, strategic, luxury, and bonus resources on tundra produce extra yields depending on the improvement constructed. For mines, Food, for pastures, Gold, and for Camps, Production. Any city with at least X tundra, snow, or blight tiles within its radius generates +Y culture per turn.
• Every Man, Woman, and Child, Shienaran civilian units have combat strength equal to the most powerful obsolete Melee unit Shienar has been capable of training. They have +X% (high) combat strength against Shadowspawn. Shienaran Legendary Person Improvements provide Y sight.
• Honor Bound (military), military units accumulate honor for each Shadowspawn they kill. Every X honor, that unit's relevant combat strength permanently increases by 1.
• Honor Bound (LP), Shienar gains honor when any of its units or cities kill Shadowspawn, or Shadowspawn units die in Shienaran territory. At increasing intervals of total honor accumulated, starting at X, Shienar spawns a free Legendary Person of Shienar's choice.
• Network of Defense, Shienar gains a free, one-time (cap-ignoring) land trade route from the capital with any City-State or Stedding Shienar defends from Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn (via Quest completion). This trade route cannot be pillaged by Dragonsworn, Lawless, or Shadowspawn +X resting influence with any City-State bordering the Blight or Shadowspawn territory.

UUs:

• Heavy Lancer, replaces era 7-9 Mounted unit, terrain bonuses are doubled while on Tundra. Shadowspawn units ending their turns adjacent to the Heavy Lancer suffer X damage. When gaining a level, generates X Faith.
• Borderlander, replaces the Worker, while in Shienaran territory, the Borderlander can attack and defend with the strength of the previous era's Melee unit. Any enemy unit killed by the Borderlander generates +X Faith.
• Sniffer, replaces Recon 2, +X defensive combat strength. Gains the custom mission "Sniff Violence," which consumes 1 Movement and reveals all enemy units within Y hexes until Shienar's next turn.
• Topknot Guardian, replaces era 5/6 unit, gains honor when killing Shadowspawn and when being promoted. For each X honor gained, this unit's combat strength permanently increases by 1. (Persists when upgraded.)
• Heavy Cavalry, replaces Horse5/6, +X% (high) combat strength against non-mounted units and pushes them back into an adjacent unoccupied hex (if one exists) when attacking them. Enemy mounted units always retreat (if there is a valid retreat hex) when attacked by Heavy Cavalry.
• Guardian of the Pass, replaces era 7-8 Mounted, when killed, spawns the most recent era 7-8 melee unit

UBs:

• Gaslamp, replaces Alignment (Shadow or Light), any unit killed within this city's workable radius generates X alignment points (in the direction suggested by the building).
• Communal Baths, replaces Culture 2-3, adds one specialist slot. When filled, generates X Culture and Y Faith.
• Separated Apartments, replaces Food 2-3, when a new Citizen is born, provides X Golden Age points and Y Culture
• Civilian Training Barracks, replaces EXP4, whenever this city's population increases, a random non-obsolete military unit appears adjacent to the city.

UIs:

• Lamplight, built on Tundra, exerts zone of control on adjacent hexes. Any Shadowspawn, Dragonsworn, or Lawless unit killed on or adjacent to the Lamplight provides a yield of +X Gold. Produces +Y Faith (low) and +Z Culture (low) when worked.

So I assume you're going to drop Andor's opening upon us in the next few posts. I just wanted to remind you that I'm pretty sure there are some suggestions by extinct participants in the early days of the thread that should probably be rendered here in orange, if only for the sake of honoring the fallen.

Good call! Have you tracked down those suggestions already? I'm happy to do it for the Andor opener, but if you've already got them then that's gravy!