S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

WELL, first of all, I should say I'm totally fine dropping this if you want. Just making that clear first, since I feel like every time you point out a difficulty with this particular mechanic, I'm like "but, but..."

But, but.... we could just have the Ogier disappear at the end of the TW, right? I mean, any newly-created/teleported-to-blight ones. It'd be like the Trollocs themselves wandering off and disappearing.

But, again, fine to axe it. You know much butter how much of a burden this'd be.

You and your solutions. Choosing where to put them is still relatively complicated, but if we just make them disappear like the Trollocs do, then it has less complex implications going forward. Let's do it! Has this been added to a summary somewhere? Alignment or Last Battle? (wherever the TW stuff is)

Yeah. I think we should probably leave it ambiguous, and/or mention all of the ideas in the list. I think it'll depend on which role needs to be filled, and such.

Coolio, left ambiguous!

Yeah. It's probably A-OK to have the diplo-GPs not necessarily affect Tower politics, at all. In fact, Tower politics are a small part of the diplo victory - they are a very large part of Channeling and Aes Sedai usage, so it's possible that such things would be a Great , not a diplo focused GP

I think it'd be good to have at least one GP relevant to the diplo aspect of the Tower, since it still votes in the Compact in a significant-ish way (even if diminished by the end of the game).

OH.

Yeah, ok. So what you're suggesting is that that GP ability simply Raise your quota by 1? It has to, right? Otherwise, it would be super lame to be under-quota and just get a free one, but if you're at quota, then you get pushed above quota.

That's a pretty good GP ability, then...

Not quite! It isn't really a quota increase. I've realized there was a minor flaw with the way I was thinking about it last time, the Tower's logic should basically work like this:

I need to reduce player A's quota by 1, from 5 to 4. Does player A have greater than 4 Sisters? If yes, give me 1 Sister back.

So they ask for a number of Sisters back equal to the amount they have lowered the player's quota, if that player has more Sisters than their new quota. (The amount more than their quota doesn't particularly matter.)

This allows us to have mechanisms that give the player extra Sisters without permanently affecting their quota, while still making all Sisters equal to the player. (They don't have to babysit any specific Sisters because those Sisters don't count towards their quota, which would be bad - too micro-managey for no particular reason.)

So, if a player has 6 Sisters, but a quota of 5 (so they had a full quota, and then used some ability that gave them an extra Sister). If they lose one in combat and the Tower comes around to its usual "giving out Sisters" phase, it doesn't give them a new one, because they have the "full" 5. Hence it not being a permanent quota increase - if their quota gets bumped up to 6 and none of their Sisters die, they gain nothing from it. They only have a "bonus" Sister until any of them dies.

totally getcha now.

Awesome!

Yeah. I think it's clear that this one won't survive the Lightning Round anyways.

Axed!

Fair enough. Keep it around.

Kept!

Well, no, I was just insinuating that the abilities that straight-up just add influence with a CS should stay on the list (and they are, I think). I don't think we need to worry about any more spy abilities.

I'm not sure if there's a straight up influence boost ability (beyond the Ogier one) for CSes on the list? Is this distinct from the Great Merchant ability? (All BNW abilities are implicitly included.)

OK. Dang. So I think we're pretty much ready to jump into the list and go nuts, right?

What's our process here? Are we discussing things? Voting? Combining them into various potential GPs?

But the posts are so enjoyably short.

As mentioned above, all BNW abilities are also in the running, and we're probably unlikely to eliminate any of those completely without very good reason (like some component of their functionality no longer makes sense in the context of our changes). But we'll want to mix and match them a bit.

I feel like there should be some structure to how we approach this, but I don't want to bias us towards making very BNW-like GPs. I think a structure like "GPs relevant to each victory" will end up like that - but that might not in itself be a problem? GPs do serve that mechanical purpose.

How about we come at it from both sides, like we've done for previous topics?

For mechanical-first, we need GPs that help the player pursue the different victory conditions - particularly to balance Tall vs Wide where the interaction with those victories is dependent upon capabilities that are themselves Tall/Wide dependent (e.g. production capacity).

For flavor-first, what characters from WoT lend themselves to being turned into GPs? We've turned Perrin (and Elyas) into the Wolfbrother GP. Rand is the Dragon, who exists outside the GP system. Some of the abilities lend themselves to Mat - who may or may not fit as some variant on a Great General. (I'm leaning towards not, I think he has enough distinct flavor to make a GP, even without his general-ing.)

Slayer has come up before, as has Min. (And Hurin, though that's been axed.) Are there more? The common thread with these characters is that they have some form of supernatural power that doesn't fit neatly into the hierarchy of channelers we've already got. What GP abilities that we've discussed thus far fit with them? do they suggest new ones? How do they fit into mechanical roles?

I apologize for not reading the thread before posting. Is this playable yet? I'm a huge fan of both the WoT and Civ V so this is an amazing idea. If it's a reality I want to play

And

I just took some time to look at what you're attempting here and I'm blown away. It's an incredibly ambitious project. I've always thought the WoT would make a spectacular strategy game, but the rights are languishing due to crappy business. You're trying to make my day-dream a reality and I wish you all the luck in the world. I've read every book in the series at least twice, and some more then that. It will take me a while to give this thread the attention it deserves but when I do I'm sure I'll have something constructive to say. I don't know a thing about modding or programming but I spent more then 20 years reading (and waiting for) the WoT. If nothing else I'll cheer enthusiastically in the hopes that this turns out even half as cool as you're trying to make it.

As counterpoint has said, welcome! Always glad to see another fan on here and thank you so much for all the praise!

Sorry for not quoting you in order, I figured it might be easier to find this response at the end of the page!

As counterpoint said, nothing's playable at this point. I have a mod locally (backed up across a few machines and hosted on the web, on Github, which I've just realized I should link to from the first post) that I've added a tiny fraction of the designed features to, but it's not really playable, it's all just isolated pieces of functionality, rather than an actual game at this point! Alpha within a year would be awesome, and that's what we hope to do.

The summaries linked from the first post describe all of the decided features that we've gone through so far, so that's a great place to get caught up on what we're doing. The rest of the thread is discussion on the ideas that eventually end up in there.

Again, thanks for your enthusiasm! I feel much the same way, that I would love to play a WoT game, but it doesn't look like there's one out there. So make one was the next option, and CiV presented a great basis for it! We've definitely got a lot of very ambitious goals (the summaries are already a daunting feature list, and there are likely to be several more before we're done!) so we're hopeful to deliver a fun experience!

Looking forward to what you've got to say about everything we've designed so far, and any input on what we're discussing at the moment!

 

[counterpoint]

I just took some time to look at what you're attempting here and I'm blown away. It's an incredibly ambitious project. I've always thought the WoT would make a spectacular strategy game, but the rights are languishing due to crappy business. You're trying to make my day-dream a reality and I wish you all the luck in the world. I've read every book in the series at least twice, and some more then that. It will take me a while to give this thread the attention it deserves but when I do I'm sure I'll have something constructive to say. I don't know a thing about modding or programming but I spent more then 20 years reading (and waiting for) the WoT. If nothing else I'll cheer enthusiastically in the hopes that this turns out even half as cool as you're trying to make it.

All the books twice, eh? You have me beat. I've only hit books 11-14 once... (though EotW currently sits at 3.333 times, or something).

It will definitely encourage competition - I imagine trying to keep this Dreamward up would require quite a solidly dominant T'a'r civ. I don't think it would be too big a problem for player understand if we made Dreamwards not work on Tar Valon though, it already has a lot of distinct behavior from other CSes.

ok. up to you if we do this, then

Coolio, I'm convinced, let's allow the Wolfbrother to teleport into T'a'r in the same manner as projections (except he doesn't leave a host behind).

suweet.

Yes, totally! Which means we make him as a normal unit, in terms of the model, and need to make the projections ethereal looking. I'm sure we'll have fun with partial transparency and particle effects for "ghostly wisps" - lots of Blender trial and error unless Deliverator, Ekmek, or NomadOrWhat have already figured that out!

cool! We can dream for the day where we have actual art assets....

Cool, noticeably stronger than the projections, but noticeably weaker than the wolves. I think having him attack with a hammer would be pretty cool.

not just a hammer: Mah'alleinir!

speaking of his hammer, that was a really cool scene (when it was made), but... do you remember if it really mattered in the end? Was there anything awesome accomplished by it?

Right, but this quote block originates from us wanting creating Dreamwards to not be a "get out of T'a'r free card" when a projection is under attack (preventing the "spike" damage from death from taking effect, since creating a Dreamward ideally wouldn't do the "spike" damage when used normally). We then noted that it was still effective to use Dreamwards as an escape mechanism when running from other projections - hence the suggestion that damage interrupt the process of creating a Dreamward.

I think having the construction of a Dreamward be interrupted by either could work when compared to the way that workers work. Ranged damage doesn't stop a worker from continuing next turn, but a melee attack captures the worker immediately "interrupting" him. But it does leave a partially finished improvement that the player can build with a different worker. Do we want "partially constructed" Dreamwards to exist?

hmmm... yeah. I'm not sure other projections need to be able to interrupt their construction, though. I mean, if you really, really care, you can always destroy the ward with the projection (once it's built). And of course, if you do enough damage due to your aura to kill the projection, then of course it wouldn't be built. I think the ambient-damage-interrupting stuff will just make fewer dreamwards built, and also devaules wolves somewhat.

I'd say no to partially constructed dreamwards.

On that note, if you are nearby 3 projections, do you (a projection) suffer 10 damage, or 30?

 

[counterpoint]

You and your solutions. Choosing where to put them is still relatively complicated, but if we just make them disappear like the Trollocs do, then it has less complex implications going forward. Let's do it! Has this been added to a summary somewhere? Alignment or Last Battle? (wherever the TW stuff is)

cool. The Trolloc Wars summary lives in the Last Battle summary. I've added the following text:

As long as there is at least one stedding remaining, Ogier units will appear near the Blight to help fight the Trollocs. They are not bound to any one Stedding. At the termination of the Wars, these extra units disappear.

I think it'd be good to have at least one GP relevant to the diplo aspect of the Tower, since it still votes in the Compact in a significant-ish way (even if diminished by the end of the game).

Alright, let's see if one makes the cut!

Not quite! It isn't really a quota increase. I've realized there was a minor flaw with the way I was thinking about it last time, the Tower's logic should basically work like this:

I need to reduce player A's quota by 1, from 5 to 4. Does player A have greater than 4 Sisters? If yes, give me 1 Sister back.

So they ask for a number of Sisters back equal to the amount they have lowered the player's quota, if that player has more Sisters than their new quota. (The amount more than their quota doesn't particularly matter.)

This allows us to have mechanisms that give the player extra Sisters without permanently affecting their quota, while still making all Sisters equal to the player. (They don't have to babysit any specific Sisters because those Sisters don't count towards their quota, which would be bad - too micro-managey for no particular reason.)

So, if a player has 6 Sisters, but a quota of 5 (so they had a full quota, and then used some ability that gave them an extra Sister). If they lose one in combat and the Tower comes around to its usual "giving out Sisters" phase, it doesn't give them a new one, because they have the "full" 5. Hence it not being a permanent quota increase - if their quota gets bumped up to 6 and none of their Sisters die, they gain nothing from it. They only have a "bonus" Sister until any of them dies.

This finally makes sense. Yes, that's the missing piece.
That way, you could have zero sisters, and when granted this free one, you could build up, theoretically, to 6/5, assuming you never lost one.

I'm not sure if there's a straight up influence boost ability (beyond the Ogier one) for CSes on the list? Is this distinct from the Great Merchant ability? (All BNW abilities are implicitly included.)

Right. Good point. It's half of the GMe ability (which theoretically could be stripped and re-paired with something else.

But the posts are so enjoyably short.

As mentioned above, all BNW abilities are also in the running, and we're probably unlikely to eliminate any of those completely without very good reason (like some component of their functionality no longer makes sense in the context of our changes). But we'll want to mix and match them a bit.

I feel like there should be some structure to how we approach this, but I don't want to bias us towards making very BNW-like GPs. I think a structure like "GPs relevant to each victory" will end up like that - but that might not in itself be a problem? GPs do serve that mechanical purpose.

How about we come at it from both sides, like we've done for previous topics?

For mechanical-first, we need GPs that help the player pursue the different victory conditions - particularly to balance Tall vs Wide where the interaction with those victories is dependent upon capabilities that are themselves Tall/Wide dependent (e.g. production capacity).

For flavor-first, what characters from WoT lend themselves to being turned into GPs? We've turned Perrin (and Elyas) into the Wolfbrother GP. Rand is the Dragon, who exists outside the GP system. Some of the abilities lend themselves to Mat - who may or may not fit as some variant on a Great General. (I'm leaning towards not, I think he has enough distinct flavor to make a GP, even without his general-ing.)

Slayer has come up before, as has Min. (And Hurin, though that's been axed.) Are there more? The common thread with these characters is that they have some form of supernatural power that doesn't fit neatly into the hierarchy of channelers we've already got. What GP abilities that we've discussed thus far fit with them? do they suggest new ones? How do they fit into mechanical roles?

OK, I will do my best to take first crack at this below. Of course, this process is going to be quite odd... I'm not really going to be able to make any final recommendation or anything, at this stage.

 

[counterpoint]

The BNW GP abilities can be found at the bottom of this post.
The new GP candidates can be found in this post.
Mechanics 1 - Abilities
I keep going back and forth about the best way to organize this. I think what I'm going to do is group them into the two "system" categories (Tall/Wide and System-specific), and then within that, group them by victory-relation. This last bit is of course quite subjective, as Gold helps all victories, for instance.

I'm putting mechanical names here, not flavorful names (so Pull of the Pattern = Encounter Thread Now)

Within that, I'm going to comment on each of them, and color code them based on whether my instincts tell us we should include them.

Definitely Want
Mostly Want
Unsure
Don't Really Want
Definitely Don't Want

Note that the Orange and Red options don't really mean I don't like the item, simply that I don't feel like there's room for it.

Also note that I don't have any ones marked red on this list (to me, these all passed that initial red-screening). I make the schema above before I actually rated them. Just because none of these are red doesn't mean you won't choose to mark them read, or that I won't later decide to change them.

After that, I will attempt to make logical pairings.

Tall/Wide Balance

Miscellaneous Benefit

Start Golden Age
I like this one, and serves a role in-game, but it is not an *essential* role, it seems.

Hurry Production
This is essential, IMO. Though, I should note that I am theoretically open to tweaking some of these "dump" ones and combining them with other things (like the Gold Dump Trade Mission also has a CS-influence aspect).

Create Production Improvement
Essential, though could be weaker with some added effect.

Advise a Governor
This is sort of neat, but by no means essential - and perhaps unnecessarily cluttering

Move Governor Location (Counsel a Migration
This is rather wimpy, and has the same cluttering effect, potentially. Governors are new enough.

GP-Point Creation Building (Interpret a Viewing)
I really like the idea of this one. However, I worry that it will be difficult to balance - it essentially by definition needs to be Tall/Wide balancing, but is likely to live on a GP that is one of the "weird" types, not necessarily analogous to the Tall/Wide balancing mechanics.
Also, I love the flavor of the GP point creation, but don't like the flavor of it being a building that does this.

Science Victory

Hurry Science
Necessary. Could be combined.

Create Science Improvement
Necessary

Diplomatic Victory

Gold from CS (Trade Mission A)
I think *some* kind of gold dump is probably necessary - it doesn't have to come from a CS, though. This one notably also assists in all other victory conditions (Gold is like that, y'all).

CS Influence (Trade Mission B)
Necessary. Can be generalized to include Steddings and Tar Valon, if we wish. Doesn't need to be linked to Gold.

Create Gold Improvement
necessary.

Plant Grove (Treesing)
I like the idea of this, but complicated in that we don't know how it could work. I suspect that it needs to be a CS-influence related thing. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't coexist with CS Influence (Trade Mission B) above.
Perhaps you plant groves in CS's territory (not just steddings) and get an influence boost with that CS... and perhaps a small boost with all steddings? Very similar to Trade Missions, but a slightly more flavorful mechanic (and without the gold), or maybe it combines with Stedding Vote.

Stedding Vote (Stedding Influence)
This one seems cool enough, but might not have a chance to be squeezed in. Maybe combines with above in some way?

Extra Compact Vote
If we are doing Dreamwards-give-you-a-diplo vote, I now find this one largely unnecessary.

Increase Trade Route Cap (Many Roads)
I think this one is just not splashy enough for a GP ability. Also, kind of confusing to keep track of.

Cultural Victory

Create Craft (Art)
Needed

Create Legend (Music)
Needed

Create Prophecy (Writing)
Needed

Prestige Dump (Concert Tour)
Probably needed, because we have nothing to replace it with, but I'd also be happy to mix this with something else.

Write History (Political Treatise)
Probably needed.

GW-Type Transform (Transmogrify)
Like the idea of this one as an unusual effect for a culture player... not sure if we'll find room for it, though.

System Specific
Paths to the Light (Religion)

Create Holy Site
Probably needed. Could be combined.

Found Path to the Light
Needed. A one-off.

Enhance Path to the Light
Needed. Also a one-off.

Spread Path to the Light/Eliminate Path to the Light
Most likely needed, but we could potentially get rid of this and rely on Missionaries to do this work. Unlikely, though.

Military

Land Unit Combat Bonus
Probably fine as it is, but may be replaceable if we want to be cooler.

Naval Combat Bonus
Would probably be cool to merge this with above into one single ability. Of course, doing away with the GAd means Naval Dominance won't be as boolean - in CiV, if you're better at navy, you get more GAds, which makes you better at navy.... If we merge these, then a land conquerer (who has a bunch of GGens) would also be immediately much better at Navy because those Generals are useful on the water. Something to consider from a balance perspective.

Land Steal (Create Citadel A)
Not sure it's needed. Probably Nice though

Damaging Fort (Create Citadel B)
Not bad, but IMO the lesser of the two citadel abilities.

Repair Ships
Nice if in sea, but not sure it has to be there.

Weigh Randomness (Dice in My Head)
I like this. It's very similar to Land Unit Combat Bonus above, but flavorfully nice. Might be a cool replacement. Not really worth having both, IMO.

Steal Units (Ta'veren Pull)
Don't hate this one, but don't think we need it.

EXP Growth Promotion (Ancient Memories)
Like this in theory. Not sure we need it though.

Alignment

Encounter Thread Now (Pull of the Pattern)
I like this one and would like to include it... not sure how, though.

Tel'aran'rhiod

Plant Dreamspike
Already decided we like it.

Create Wolves (Run with Wolves)
Already decided we like it.

Destroy a Dreamspike
Already Like it

Enter the Wolf Dream
just an axillary ability to those above.

Miscellaneous

Gain Aes Sedai (Discover a Weave)
Unsure here. Not bad, but definitely not necessary.

Gentle a Foe
Not splashy enough IMO. Undermines the Red Ajah's usefulness. (ironically, this one was very close to being marked red by me).

Create Dragonsworn (Anger Dragonsworn)
Fine, but not sure how it would fit in with all of this.

Hurry Eyes and Ears
Cool, in theory. Not sure how it could fit in, though.

 

[counterpoint]

Mechanics 2/Flavor 1 - The GPs

OK, so below I go through the abilities in the post above and see which ones can be combined in interesting ways. This may be successful, or may be a failure. You decide.

I'm trying to keep new GPs to a minimum, though there will certainly be some. I'm trying to make the new GPs be almost exclusively connected to our new systems - trying in most cases to avoid, say, creating a new Culture GP, or Science GP.

I've divided things into Tall/Wide balance and System-specific balance, once again, and am trying to make this delineation quite strict. This is tricky with a few abilities (those concerning Alignment, for instance) that have some key element of Tall/Wide, while also being System Specific in a large way.

Whenever possible, I'm trying not to mix obvious Science/Gold/Production GP abilities with Culture abilities, as I imagine we'll be using similar GP-Point generation division as in BNW. We could decide against this, but for now I'm preserving the BNW way.

I'm keeping one eye on not simply duplicating the BNW GPs... but I'm also not working very hard to prevent it.

Lastly, I'm attempting to name these flavorfully, and name the abilities to fit that flavor.

Tall/Wide Balance - Grouped GP Generation

These first four are by far the most tenuous. I tried working in the stedding stuff and it.. just messed everything up. Definitely could consider just duplicated BNW here (and going Scholar/Builder/Peddler or something).

Scholar
Hurry Science
Create Academy
Not much change here....
I think this name works fine... but are we using it elsewhere?
I know that Academy is also the BNW name, but... it fits perfectly. Though, we could decide to name universities Academies and come up with something else here.

Ogier Builder or Treesinger
Treesing/Plant a Grove (Increase CS/Stedding Influence, Grab Stedding Vote OR Manufactory
This one's weird. So, you plant a Grove. Where it is planted determines its effect. In a CS or Stedding you get a dump of Influence with that entity and +1 Stedding vote. If in your own territory, it's a manufactory (sung wood blah blah blah). I know, a bit of a stretch.

Peddler or Merchant
Create Caravan (Customs House)
Sell Wares (Gold Dump to CS, stedding, or Tar Valon - no influence boost)
The name of this one would depend on what we call our normal caravans (we could choose to call them Peddlers, after all)
Since Sell Wares doesn't include an influence boost, perhaps it could be more gold?

Steward
Hurry Production
Advise a Governor
Naming this one is tricky.
Do you think Advising the Gov balances properly against Hurry production? Would anybody ever choose it?

Tall/Wide Balance - Separate GP Generation
Master Artisan
Create Craft
Start Golden Age
This one seems rather unglamorous, but also seems necessary.

Gleeman
Create Legend
Perform (Prestige Dump)
This one is pretty straightforwardly analogous to BNW.

Viewer or Doomseer
Create Prophesy
Interpret a Viewing (GP-point creation building)
This one is obviously different from what we have in BNW. (no culture dump)
I know the Viewing thing is supposed to be a Building in order to makeit one-per city (I think), but I have trouble with it being a building. How the heck does this flavor work? What would this building be called? I think we could consider instead that this just be a GP point dump. Or, else we could consider making it a GP improvement or something (and what would we call that)?
As far as name, Viewer is not a word that appears in-books. Doomseer is what the Seanchan call Min and people like min. I think that's the most flavorful name, but it is a little odd sounding.

Ogier Historian
Write History (Culture Dump)
Reclassify Relic (Change GW type 2x)
I'm unsure if the Reclassify ability is strong enough to not simply be ignored by most players. Then again, Concert Tour is probably ignored by many players.

System Specific

Visionary or Philosopher
Found Path to the Light
Enhance Path to the Light
Create Holy Site
I couldn't think of any edits worth making here. The name "Prophet" is obviously problematic, as that's Masema. Not a whole lot of flavor to draw from for the name.
Holy Site needs a better name.

Great Captain
Dice in My Head (Weigh Randomness)
Create Citadel (Land Steal and Damaging Fort)
Repair Ships
I toyed with splitting this guy into two units, which I think you prefer. I, for now, decided that that was too cluttered, that the Dice ability was functionally (if not mechanically) redundant to the GGe ability, and that the second ("Mat") unit would be a bit odd-seeming.
I gave this unit the Repair Ships ability as well, which only functions at sea.
Citadel probably needs a new name - and only functions on land.

Wolfbrother
Enter the Wolf Dream
Run with Wolves
Destroy Dreamspike
Pull of the Pattern (Immediate Thread)
The second and third abilities are obviously included within the first.
I am unsure of the decision to use PotP as his second ability. Not very WBr-specific, however, it does make sense for Perrin, as a Ta'veren. Also, since it's sort of isolated system-wise, I couldn't think of a better way to make it happen.

Dreamer
Enter Tel'aran'rhiod
Plant Dreamspike
Discover a Weave (Gain Aes Sedai)
This GP is serving the role of the Great Channeler.
The first ability simply creates the Dreamer's projection, and thus the Dreamspike Ability. The projection itself is still a projection - no attack abilities - but probably with better movement and perhaps a longer turn limit. Any other changes?
I didn't love choosing Discover a Weave, but couldn't stray too far in terms of balancing aspects of these abilities.
One interesting collision of flavor is that it would of course make sense for Dreamers to be delivering prophesies - but it also makes sense for Mins, and for Foretellers. Had to choose something.

Unaccounted-For Abilities
Ones I didn't use, that I sort of feel bad about:

EXP Growth Promotion
Hurry Eyes and Ears

couldn't really figure out a great way to work them in. Don't know that a GP-type simply including the two of them is worth having, really. This one could be a "Ta'veren" GP, but... didn't we decide to call them all Ta'veren, or did we decide that that name should be applied more narrowly?

Other Flavor
I can't think of a whole lot that I wish we were using that we aren't using.

Sniffer - better off as unit.
Probability Man - think he's simplest as a GGe replacement. Also, no elegant name...
Slayer - think he's too specific to include.

Not sure what else is out there.

Whew, that took almost 4 hours. Good luck!

 

[S3rgeus]

ok. up to you if we do this, then

Let's say the Tower isn't affected for now.

cool! We can dream for the day where we have actual art assets....

So far away, in that distant future where we can actually play this!

not just a hammer: Mah'alleinir!

speaking of his hammer, that was a really cool scene (when it was made), but... do you remember if it really mattered in the end? Was there anything awesome accomplished by it?

Mah'alleinir was Perrin's hammer, so I'd imagine other wolfbrothers would have different hammers. It was a pretty cool scene, but I think if we did include it, we would do so by including the forging of Power-Wrought weapons (somehow).

hmmm... yeah. I'm not sure other projections need to be able to interrupt their construction, though. I mean, if you really, really care, you can always destroy the ward with the projection (once it's built). And of course, if you do enough damage due to your aura to kill the projection, then of course it wouldn't be built. I think the ambient-damage-interrupting stuff will just make fewer dreamwards built, and also devaules wolves somewhat.

I'd say no to partially constructed dreamwards.

Ok, if we're fine with projections not being able to interrupt Dreamward-making (unless their passive damage kills the projection that's making the Dreamward before he finishes) then we seem to be done!

On that note, if you are nearby 3 projections, do you (a projection) suffer 10 damage, or 30?

30


One last thing on T'a'r then: Reflections of Power. When a Site of Power is consumed, you can either get a Relic GW or create a Landmark (we're still doing that, right?). Landmarks don't make as much sense in T'a'r, what do we do instead? (Hidden Antiquity Sites have a 70% chance of acting like normal sites, and 30% of being GWoW or Culture dump, which we discussed earlier.)

 

[S3rgeus]

cool. The Trolloc Wars summary lives in the Last Battle summary. I've added the following text:

Looks good!

This finally makes sense. Yes, that's the missing piece.
That way, you could have zero sisters, and when granted this free one, you could build up, theoretically, to 6/5, assuming you never lost one.

W00t, yep! You've only got an extra Sister as long as none of them dies.

Whew, that took almost 4 hours. Good luck!

I've been thinking about how to work through this for the last two days (knowing today you'd be back and I'd need to post tonight!). I don't know if our process has just worked really well - the categorizing of abilities and classification of GPs and such - because I think you've pretty much got most of it where we want it. I'll go through and pick up some things I think we can discuss, but I'm a big fan of the general direction.

Mechanics 1 - Abilities

I don't want it to seem like I'm skipping over this section, because it was a very good framing mechanism for the discussion in your second post. But there are few things that I would comment on here that wouldn't then need to be duplicated when commenting on specific suggested GP types.

By and large, I agree with your classifications of which abilities we want and how much we want them. I'll call out a few below that I want to comment on directly, but everything I skip, I agree with, and some of these comments aren't that important in the context of the specific GP arrangements from the next post.

Start Golden Age
I like this one, and serves a role in-game, but it is not an *essential* role, it seems.

I'd put more value on this one due to its role in the Culture victory - Golden Ages cause you to produce a lot of extra Culture, and so can be useful in grabbing policies for Culture players, or for defending against Tourism for other players. It's included on a GP below though, so this distinction is pretty much moot.

Gold from CS (Trade Mission A)
I think *some* kind of gold dump is probably necessary - it doesn't have to come from a CS, though. This one notably also assists in all other victory conditions (Gold is like that, y'all).

Are there other good sources for us to use? I'd be all for changing this up from being sourced on CSes if we have a good alternative. We could let the GP be expended by cities you currently have an international trade route with? (Or at least X international trade routes with?)

CS Influence (Trade Mission B)
Necessary. Can be generalized to include Steddings and Tar Valon, if we wish. Doesn't need to be linked to Gold.

The separation from Gold makes this one quite interesting - is it still Tall/Wide balancing? Gold is already Tall/Wide balanced, which is the main way of accruing CS influence. CS quest complete-ability is somewhat affected by Tall/Wide (Wide players are more likely to control land near the CS, and therefore be able to complete quests more easily) but it's not that significant.

Regarding the Ogier and Tar Valon, this is very interesting, and I'll come back to it more in the next post about specific GP types. I wonder if it doesn't create room for a "Diplo GP" using the point generation methods we discussed higher up on this page (assuming this post is still on page 34). Related to that, below:

Plant Grove (Treesing)
I like the idea of this, but complicated in that we don't know how it could work. I suspect that it needs to be a CS-influence related thing. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't coexist with CS Influence (Trade Mission B) above.
Perhaps you plant groves in CS's territory (not just steddings) and get an influence boost with that CS... and perhaps a small boost with all steddings? Very similar to Trade Missions, but a slightly more flavorful mechanic (and without the gold), or maybe it combines with Stedding Vote.

I quite like your idea for this one in the next post - more detail on it then. I don't think this ability is necessarily mutually exclusive with Trade Mission B, if Trade Mission B doesn't work on Stedding and we have well targeted Stedding stuff, that might be helpful.

Stedding Vote (Stedding Influence)
This one seems cool enough, but might not have a chance to be squeezed in. Maybe combines with above in some way?

Or possibly on an Ogier GP. More on this later.

Extra Compact Vote
If we are doing Dreamwards-give-you-a-diplo vote, I now find this one largely unnecessary.

We're not doing Dreamwards-give-you-a-diplo-vote, so I think this one is more valuable. (Dreamwards stop CS influence decay.) It would also work well on a diplo GP, mentioned above, and will be covered in more detail later!

Increase Trade Route Cap (Many Roads)
I think this one is just not splashy enough for a GP ability. Also, kind of confusing to keep track of.

I'm fine leaving this off, but I don't think it would be confusing. We just change the maximum trade route count for the player and the number in the top left of the screen increases - showing them they have a spare trade route.

Spread Path to the Light/Eliminate Path to the Light
Most likely needed, but we could potentially get rid of this and rely on Missionaries to do this work. Unlikely, though.

I agree, I think we'll need to keep this one.

Naval Combat Bonus
Would probably be cool to merge this with above into one single ability. Of course, doing away with the GAd means Naval Dominance won't be as boolean - in CiV, if you're better at navy, you get more GAds, which makes you better at navy.... If we merge these, then a land conquerer (who has a bunch of GGens) would also be immediately much better at Navy because those Generals are useful on the water. Something to consider from a balance perspective.

This was probably Firaxis's intention, but I don't know if I've ever felt better at naval warfare due to Great Admirals. I think combining them (as you've done) is a good call, because it makes their strengths accessible through means most players are actually going to interact with, while also making the GP type itself useful in much more situations. (Both GG and GAd are, in my mind, the lesser GPs, particularly before GG got land steal, because they never had as much visible impact as any of the others.)

Land Steal (Create Citadel A)
Not sure it's needed. Probably Nice though

Damaging Fort (Create Citadel B)
Not bad, but IMO the lesser of the two citadel abilities.

These abilities are definitely separatable, and in fact they were previous separate in CiV. Pre-BNW (or possibly pre-G&K), land steal was "Culture Bomb" (like in Civ4) and was attached to the Great Artist. Adding it to the Citadel did dramatically increase the value of the Great General though.

Weigh Randomness (Dice in My Head)
I like this. It's very similar to Land Unit Combat Bonus above, but flavorfully nice. Might be a cool replacement. Not really worth having both, IMO.

I think we could have both this and the combat bonus. We talked at length about the combat bonus because it was the most confusing part of this ability, but this ability is much more broadly applicable than the combat bonus. We can apply it to any element of the game which contains an element of randomness, which makes it quite mechanically distinct.

Scholar
Hurry Science
Create Academy
Not much change here....
I think this name works fine... but are we using it elsewhere?
I know that Academy is also the BNW name, but... it fits perfectly. Though, we could decide to name universities Academies and come up with something else here.

I'm totally fine with having a Great Scientist equivalent - this seems good. The only thing here is the name Academy - I think we should change it from BNW. I know Academy is a WoT thing, but I don't think GS Academies are quite the same - they're available for most of history. I think we'll want to replace the role of the Research Lab building with the Academy.

As for what we could call this - we could go with library? Loial makes quite a few references to libraries being great sources of knowledge, as do Aes Sedai. Several noble characters talk about their families/relatives having libraries of their own, so it would make sense that they're available throughout history, and also that they might be decentralized outside cities on nobles' estates. The distance this provides us from BNW also helps - this is our clearest direct translation from BNW, so I think even these cosmetic changes make a big difference here.

Ogier Builder or Treesinger
Treesing/Plant a Grove (Increase CS/Stedding Influence, Grab Stedding Vote OR Manufactory
This one's weird. So, you plant a Grove. Where it is planted determines its effect. In a CS or Stedding you get a dump of Influence with that entity and +1 Stedding vote. If in your own territory, it's a manufactory (sung wood blah blah blah). I know, a bit of a stretch.

Related to the Diplo GP I'm going to suggest later, I really like this, but I think we can drop the CS influence part (non-Stedding CS). It's a bit weird though - Grab Stedding Vote + Stedding Influence doesn't seem like a Tall/Wide balancing ability? Manufactory is definitely Tall/Wide balancing. That makes generating this GP a bit of a problem.

Flavor wise, I could see Groves in your own territory generating Culture or Prestige, more than Production, but it could be made to work at a stretch, as you've said. Using either of those yields instead doesn't solve our Tall/Wide dilemma though.

Peddler or Merchant
Create Caravan (Customs House)
Sell Wares (Gold Dump to CS, stedding, or Tar Valon - no influence boost)
The name of this one would depend on what we call our normal caravans (we could choose to call them Peddlers, after all)
Since Sell Wares doesn't include an influence boost, perhaps it could be more gold?

I like this one. Peddler is probably more appropriate for the Caravan unit, because Peddlers are generally relatively run-of-the-mill folks. It is a very in universe term though. Are there any other famous markets/merchants' guilds or anything we could steal a name from?

Steward
Hurry Production
Advise a Governor
Naming this one is tricky.
Do you think Advising the Gov balances properly against Hurry production? Would anybody ever choose it?

This seems more like Steward in the Lord of the Rings sense than the Wheel of Time sense, on the name.

I don't think Advise a Governor balances well against Hurry Production. But I think we've basically run up against one of the GP balance aspects that Firaxis never really solved either: I don't think anything measures up to Hurry Science or Hurry Production. Those two abilities are most definitely the most powerful GP abilities in the game - and whatever we group them with is largely doomed to obscurity, useful only in the narrow edge cases where it's actually comparable.

Hurry Science is effectively a free tech (and in fact used to be exactly that, until they nerfed it and it's still awesome), which is crazy good - sudden bursts that let you pull ahead faster than expected, or grab key abilities an opponent wasn't expecting. Or even just boost ahead incrementally, even if you don't have a key tech in researchable range right now.

Hurry Production is basically "free Wonder" which is super duper amazing. Not only does it give you the Wonder ability, which is usually pretty awesome (and can also give you more GPs... to do it again), it also denies your opponents that ability. If you look up GP preferences online for which GP types players pick when prompted for a free GP, Great Engineer is the top choice, followed closely by Great Scientist, who both lead the pack by a million miles. (Dedicated Culture players sometimes pick Culture GPs, but even they pick GEs often because they snag Wonders, which are essential to the Culture victory.)

Do we think we can address that without unhinging the game? Is the solution to pump up all of the other GP abilities?

As for how this applies to the Steward GP, I'm not sure if we need him, but we'll see below, depending on what you think of my suggestions.

Tall/Wide Balance - Separate GP Generation
Master Artisan
Create Craft
Start Golden Age
This one seems rather unglamorous, but also seems necessary.

Gleeman
Create Legend
Perform (Prestige Dump)
This one is pretty straightforwardly analogous to BNW.

Totally fine with these.

Viewer or Doomseer
Create Prophesy
Interpret a Viewing (GP-point creation building)
This one is obviously different from what we have in BNW. (no culture dump)
I know the Viewing thing is supposed to be a Building in order to makeit one-per city (I think), but I have trouble with it being a building. How the heck does this flavor work? What would this building be called? I think we could consider instead that this just be a GP point dump. Or, else we could consider making it a GP improvement or something (and what would we call that)?
As far as name, Viewer is not a word that appears in-books. Doomseer is what the Seanchan call Min and people like min. I think that's the most flavorful name, but it is a little odd sounding.

Doomseer seems like the preferable name, given what you've outlined here.

I also completely agree that the building doesn't work. I was about to ask what you think we can do, but how about this:

Interpret Viewings
Expend this GP to create a Doomseer Specialist slot, in any other building that has a specialist slot (or a specific building?) in an adjacent city, who produces <GP type> GP points.

That works with the flavor, right? It's a person now, who's interpretting Viewings and therefore generating GP points.

Which GP type do they generate GP points for? The WoT GP types? (All of the GP types that don't have direct BNW analogues) Or does this specialist create GP points for the GP type that this city already creates the most GP points for? (If you produce +6 Artist and +2 Engineer, it generates Artist points, if +10 Scientist and +9 Merchant, it creates Scientist points.) This would also be Tall/Wide balancing, which is what we want.

Ogier Historian
Write History (Culture Dump)
Reclassify Relic (Change GW type 2x)
I'm unsure if the Reclassify ability is strong enough to not simply be ignored by most players. Then again, Concert Tour is probably ignored by many players.

I think Concert Tour is ignored by everyone except Culture-Victory-resisting players that are dealing with particularly Cultureful enemies. Which means most players ignore it for most of the game.

Related to Ogier and Diplo stuff I'll suggest below though, I'm not sure we need this GP type.

Visionary or Philosopher
Found Path to the Light
Enhance Path to the Light
Create Holy Site
I couldn't think of any edits worth making here. The name "Prophet" is obviously problematic, as that's Masema. Not a whole lot of flavor to draw from for the name.
Holy Site needs a better name.

Visionary sounds fine if we can't come up with an in-universe alternative. Totally agree we can't use Prophet.

Great Captain
Dice in My Head (Weigh Randomness)
Create Citadel (Land Steal and Damaging Fort)
Repair Ships
I toyed with splitting this guy into two units, which I think you prefer. I, for now, decided that that was too cluttered, that the Dice ability was functionally (if not mechanically) redundant to the GGe ability, and that the second ("Mat") unit would be a bit odd-seeming.
I gave this unit the Repair Ships ability as well, which only functions at sea.
Citadel probably needs a new name - and only functions on land.

Given the distinction I outlined above between the GG ability and the Dice ability, I think splitting this into two units makes more sense. I think having a more direct GG analogue, who is the Great Captain + Great Admiral, would be good, so like:

Great Captain
GG Aura
Create Citadel
Repair Ships

As for what we could call the Citadel, I was hoping that the Borderlanders would have some unifying name for the forts and fort-like cities constructed by the Blight, but I can't find anything on it online.

Wolfbrother
Enter the Wolf Dream
Run with Wolves
Destroy Dreamspike
Pull of the Pattern (Immediate Thread)
The second and third abilities are obviously included within the first.
I am unsure of the decision to use PotP as his second ability. Not very WBr-specific, however, it does make sense for Perrin, as a Ta'veren. Also, since it's sort of isolated system-wise, I couldn't think of a better way to make it happen.

I'm totally fine with this - Pull of the Pattern seems like a good fit, given Perrin's Ta'veren-ness and his position as primary inspiration for this GP.

Dreamer
Enter Tel'aran'rhiod
Plant Dreamspike
Discover a Weave (Gain Aes Sedai)
This GP is serving the role of the Great Channeler.
The first ability simply creates the Dreamer's projection, and thus the Dreamspike Ability. The projection itself is still a projection - no attack abilities - but probably with better movement and perhaps a longer turn limit. Any other changes?
I didn't love choosing Discover a Weave, but couldn't stray too far in terms of balancing aspects of these abilities.
One interesting collision of flavor is that it would of course make sense for Dreamers to be delivering prophesies - but it also makes sense for Mins, and for Foretellers. Had to choose something.

Interesting one. From the flavor, Dreamspikes are actually planted in reality, and then transport themselves into T'a'r, so they don't necessarily need to be planted by a T'a'r layer GP.

Unaccounted-For Abilities
Ones I didn't use, that I sort of feel bad about:

EXP Growth Promotion
Hurry Eyes and Ears

couldn't really figure out a great way to work them in. Don't know that a GP-type simply including the two of them is worth having, really. This one could be a "Ta'veren" GP, but... didn't we decide to call them all Ta'veren, or did we decide that that name should be applied more narrowly?

Following on from my suggestion to make a more GG-like Great Captain, I think we can include the EXP bonus ability if we have a Mat-like GP type.

Related to Ta'veren, I think we decided Ta'veren would be applied more narrowly. Are we sticking with Great People then, though?

I'd be fine dropping the Rush EaE ability.

So, I've been discussing GP proposals in several places above. I think there's room for a Diplo GP in such a way that it could shift around some of our Ogier/production/Tall/Wide dilemma.

Ambassador

Gain a Compact Vote
Gain a Sister
CS Influence Boost

Previously, Gain a Sister has been flavored as Discover a Weave - but there's a great flavor argument for making this ability non-Power related. The Aes Sedai would certainly favor someone who showed them a new weave (after some consternation that the woman in question wasn't already an Aes Sedai). But equally, Aes Sedai were often dispatched to nations specifically to serve diplomatic purposes (Andoran Queen's advisor, for example), which would have been brokered by some political presence at the Tower. We could call the ability Treat with Tar Valon or Meet with the Amyrlin - when performed on Tar Valon lands (or on your lands?) gives you a Sister, via the mechanics we discussed before.

This also grabs the CS influence boost I talked about before - separating it from the Stedding influence boost.

Whether or not we include "Gain a Compact Vote" is certainly up for debate - I think it fits well and the fact that these abilities are less powerful than ones like Hurry Production, the flexibility of 3 abilities could help to offset that.

Alternatively - do we think the gain a Sister and gain a Compact Vote abilities are too weak by themselves? What if we combine the essence of both?

Meet with the Amyrlin
Gain a Sister and Tar Valon puts one of its votes in the next Compact in concert with your selection. (If you split your delegates, the Tower chooses which of the two you've voted on it will use that vote for. Or we could let the player pick? Seems less diplo-y that way though.)

This diplo GP could be generated via the Diplo-y methods we discussed previously, which we'd want to go into more detail on if we decide we like this. Neither of these abilities is Tall/Wide balancing, so it's a diplo system-specific GP type.


I also mentioned a Mat-like GP type. What if this were the Ta'veren GP type?

Ta'veren
Dice in my Head
EXP Promotion burst

Should he have a second "active" ability, since Dice in my Head is passive? There's some argument for the Encounter a Thread ability to be on this GP type, but it works equally well on Wolfbrother, and I'm not sure what we'd swap it out for there. (Unfortunately can't really steal Perrin's blacksmithing stuff for Wolfbrother, freeing up the Thread ability for this GP type, because production-y stuff is mostly Tall/Wide balancing, whereas Wolfbrother is System-specific.)

He could grab the Rush EaE ability, if we wanted.

Could he have the Create Dragonsworn ability somehow?

What generates a Ta'veren GP though? It seems system-specific in nature, so where should the points come from? We discussed Alignment-generated GPs before, which this makes some sense for - generated when you reach specific tiers?

EDIT: As you rightfully pointed out via Steam I've orphaned the Plant Dreamspike ability on the Dreamer GP. The Ta'veren GP type is one possible host for that ability, given the flavor I described above.

Another alternative would be to have a more Channeler-focused GP type, something along the lines of:

Great Channeler
Plant Dreamspike
Gentle a Foe (2x multi-use)

This could probably be a T'a'r GP type (generated by Glimmer-points, since neither of these abilities is Tall/Wide balancing). Otherwise I think Wolfbrother is the only T'a'r GP type (if we drop Dreamer), which is a bit weird.

Alternatively, we might be able to use Slayer after all!

Slayer (might need a different name)
Plant Dreamspike
Create Dragonsworn

Could also be a T'a'r GP type. Plant Dreamspike is obviously a flavor bullseye for Slayer. And the Create Dragonsworn ability actually does sort of line up with his role of interfering with the armies of the Light leading up to the LB. Mechanically we liked the ability, but it didn't fit into the other GP types - this would let us include it.

END EDIT

Finally, production stuff and Ogier. I like the idea of Groves doing different things in different places, but I think one desired effect of that (stedding influence + vote) is system-specific, and any yield bonus in your own territory is Tall/Wide balancing. Which is a bit of a problem. And continues to be a problem, now that I try to write this out. I'm looking at this pool of abilities:

Create Manufactory
Culture Dump
Hurry Production
Advise a Governor
Stedding Influence boost + vote

I think they can all be Ogier-ified, but only the last one is system-specific. Would we be fine having a system-specific ability on a Tall/Wide-driven GP? (That would give Tall players an advantage in the system the GP type enhances.) Are the Ogier somehow already favoring Wide players, which would make this a fair trade?


Another thing worth mentioning here is Governors. We decided on the GP -> Governor method of Governor generation, do we want to go through and decide what Governor types correspond to which GP types? (And what the Governor types are.) I'm assuming all GP types have a "Govern City" ability as well?


Also, aside to this whole discussion, Firaxis are releasing a new expansion for Civ:BE. That article mentions some features from there that could be very cool. Cities at sea. Cities that can move. Worth us keeping in mind when it comes to looking at UAs!

 

[counterpoint]

Had a few minutes. the big GP stuff will have to come later.

Let's say the Tower isn't affected for now.

It is said!

Mah'alleinir was Perrin's hammer, so I'd imagine other wolfbrothers would have different hammers. It was a pretty cool scene, but I think if we did include it, we would do so by including the forging of Power-Wrought weapons (somehow).

I don't think this is an important enough thing to jump through hoops to include - certainly not adding extra mechanics just to include it. If we want the WBr to have hammers, that's cool. But they also could not have hammers, and I think that would be cool, as well.

Ok, if we're fine with projections not being able to interrupt Dreamward-making (unless their passive damage kills the projection that's making the Dreamward before he finishes) then we seem to be done!

Then we are done!

30

30!

One last thing on T'a'r then: Reflections of Power. When a Site of Power is consumed, you can either get a Relic GW or create a Landmark (we're still doing that, right?). Landmarks don't make as much sense in T'a'r, what do we do instead? (Hidden Antiquity Sites have a 70% chance of acting like normal sites, and 30% of being GWoW or Culture dump, which we discussed earlier.)

Well, as I recall, Build Landmark has been replaced by "Uncover Portal Stone." If that's the case, I actually think it makes jolly good sense. Well, it makes no less sense than normal sites doing the same would.

The other thing I'm wondering, though ,is if it's too weird having the projections be the ones to actually dig out the sites. I'm thinking it might be better if we rely on our Historians (I think we may have chosen to call Arch's that, which would conflict with Ogier Historian a bit) to actually dig up the site.

Like, you need to do T'a'r stuff to uncover the site (glimmers and such), but the projections don't have to actually dig them up. Would you still need to "find them" in T'a'r with your projections.

I guess I'm just wondering if it's weird having the projections do the uncovering - they can then be killed without a DoW (ambient Damage), they would potentially disappear before they finish the digging, and they don't require any production sacrifice like Archs do... just a few things that make them feel weird when stacked against Archaeos.

What do you think?

 

[counterpoint]

The site's back! I was going to respond to this three days ago, but the server migration happened. Here we are, all intact and everything.

I've been thinking about how to work through this for the last two days (knowing today you'd be back and I'd need to post tonight!). I don't know if our process has just worked really well - the categorizing of abilities and classification of GPs and such - because I think you've pretty much got most of it where we want it. I'll go through and pick up some things I think we can discuss, but I'm a big fan of the general direction.

Yeah, the epic explosion I did wasn't really intended, at first. You left your previous post pretty open ("let's get started" essentially), and I tried to that... but found it kind of impossible to do in small steps. Glad it's in the right direction.

I don't want it to seem like I'm skipping over this section, because it was a very good framing mechanism for the discussion in your second post. But there are few things that I would comment on here that wouldn't then need to be duplicated when commenting on specific suggested GP types.

By and large, I agree with your classifications of which abilities we want and how much we want them. I'll call out a few below that I want to comment on directly, but everything I skip, I agree with, and some of these comments aren't that important in the context of the specific GP arrangements from the next post.

gotcha.

I'd put more value on this one due to its role in the Culture victory - Golden Ages cause you to produce a lot of extra Culture, and so can be useful in grabbing policies for Culture players, or for defending against Tourism for other players. It's included on a GP below though, so this distinction is pretty much moot.

Golden Age
Yeah, moot, I think. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't have GAs - for some reason they just seem to do similar things to other GPs. keep it.

Are there other good sources for us to use? I'd be all for changing this up from being sourced on CSes if we have a good alternative. We could let the GP be expended by cities you currently have an international trade route with? (Or at least X international trade routes with?)

Gold from CS
Yeah, I think a different Gold-Dump source would be welcome. Not sure what it could be, though. The International trade route idea is cool, in that it could work for CSs as well. I think X trade routes would be too restrictive, perhaps.

The separation from Gold makes this one quite interesting - is it still Tall/Wide balancing? Gold is already Tall/Wide balanced, which is the main way of accruing CS influence. CS quest complete-ability is somewhat affected by Tall/Wide (Wide players are more likely to control land near the CS, and therefore be able to complete quests more easily) but it's not that significant.

Regarding the Ogier and Tar Valon, this is very interesting, and I'll come back to it more in the next post about specific GP types. I wonder if it doesn't create room for a "Diplo GP" using the point generation methods we discussed higher up on this page (assuming this post is still on page 34). Related to that, below:

CS Influence
Right. Discussed more below.

As far as the Tall/Wide balance of this one, I'd say it's narrowly T/W B at best, BUT it's built up as such in BNW, seeing that it's attached to the GMe.

I quite like your idea for this one in the next post - more detail on it then. I don't think this ability is necessarily mutually exclusive with Trade Mission B, if Trade Mission B doesn't work on Stedding and we have well targeted Stedding stuff, that might be helpful.

it's not mutually exclusive, but I don't love the idea of having GP abilities that are very similar in functionality. It dilutes the splashiness, IMO.

We're not doing Dreamwards-give-you-a-diplo-vote, so I think this one is more valuable. (Dreamwards stop CS influence decay.) It would also work well on a diplo GP, mentioned above, and will be covered in more detail later!

Extra Compact Vote
Oh shoot. My bad! You're right that we didn't do that. OK.

I'm fine leaving this off, but I don't think it would be confusing. We just change the maximum trade route count for the player and the number in the top left of the screen increases - showing them they have a spare trade route.

Many Roads
appears to no longer be in contention, so m00t.

This was probably Firaxis's intention, but I don't know if I've ever felt better at naval warfare due to Great Admirals. I think combining them (as you've done) is a good call, because it makes their strengths accessible through means most players are actually going to interact with, while also making the GP type itself useful in much more situations. (Both GG and GAd are, in my mind, the lesser GPs, particularly before GG got land steal, because they never had as much visible impact as any of the others.)

Naval Combat Bonus
Would we trigger their creation through naval combat and land combat, now?

We can always try and see if the unit now becomes too good due to this functionality. If so, we can find a way to gimp it somehow.

I think we could have both this and the combat bonus. We talked at length about the combat bonus because it was the most confusing part of this ability, but this ability is much more broadly applicable than the combat bonus. We can apply it to any element of the game which contains an element of randomness, which makes it quite mechanically distinct.

Weigh Randomness
OK, the one issue I have here is that, while they are mechanically distinct, they are *functionally* quite similar - a dude hanging around your units that makes them fight better. I think, when considering End-User-Experience, they will be very close to the same.

I imagine myself as a player, and having essentially zero idea or preference as to which of these I would want to have hanging out with my units (not counting their other abilities), making them somewhat non-strategic, which I think it pretty much a major No-No when considering this kind of GP. I think I'd probably just treat them identically, in my head. I'd know they aren't the same, but they both "make units fight well", which is broadly true. Maybe I'd bring one to help with Gentling, but beyond that, they'd be the same unit.

Also, question: would these abilities stack with one another? If so, that seems like it might be powerful kind of fast.

I think the way to make these abilities both worth having is to significantly differentiate their functionality. Like, apply the GGe combat bonus more narrowly, and make this randomness ability also apply more narrowly (e.g., make it NOT apply to normal combat, and only apply to the other randomness stuff..... of which there isn't this much).

As it is, I'm not in favor of simply having one ability that boosts your units combat strength, and another that makes randomness favor you in combat. Too similar, experientially and strategically.

I'm totally fine with having a Great Scientist equivalent - this seems good. The only thing here is the name Academy - I think we should change it from BNW. I know Academy is a WoT thing, but I don't think GS Academies are quite the same - they're available for most of history. I think we'll want to replace the role of the Research Lab building with the Academy.

As for what we could call this - we could go with library? Loial makes quite a few references to libraries being great sources of knowledge, as do Aes Sedai. Several noble characters talk about their families/relatives having libraries of their own, so it would make sense that they're available throughout history, and also that they might be decentralized outside cities on nobles' estates. The distance this provides us from BNW also helps - this is our clearest direct translation from BNW, so I think even these cosmetic changes make a big difference here.

Scholar
Yeah, you're right that the Academy should be something more significant and not available all game. While the research lab is a good option, I could also picture it as a national wonder (e.g. Oxford) or theoretically a University. More on that later.

I don't think Library is necessarily the best answer, because I do feel like we'll need that one more likely as a low-level science building.

Maybe, if we desire to stay in-universe, we could go with something like "Depository" and flavor it as an archival place. Also, "Archives" or something could work. Or Chronicles, though that's kind of weird.

I was wondering if we should generalize our scope of "Science", in general. I've been thinking recently that perhaps we shouldn't even call it Science, since Science doesn't really exist in WoT as a concept. What if we simply rebranded it as "Learning" or "Knowledge" or something like that? Seems more in-universe, and also allows us to be more general with our Science Buildings, while still being in-universe - as none of them, strictly speaking, are Science.

Related to the Diplo GP I'm going to suggest later, I really like this, but I think we can drop the CS influence part (non-Stedding CS). It's a bit weird though - Grab Stedding Vote + Stedding Influence doesn't seem like a Tall/Wide balancing ability? Manufactory is definitely Tall/Wide balancing. That makes generating this GP a bit of a problem.

Flavor wise, I could see Groves in your own territory generating Culture or Prestige, more than Production, but it could be made to work at a stretch, as you've said. Using either of those yields instead doesn't solve our Tall/Wide dilemma though.

Ogier Builder
OK, will talk more on this one below, re: diplo.

Yeah, I see the Grove-as-production being a bit of a stretch (sung wood, but it's hard to imagine ogier wanting humans to mass-produce that), but I think adding yet another cultuer GP ability may be a mistake.

I like this one. Peddler is probably more appropriate for the Caravan unit, because Peddlers are generally relatively run-of-the-mill folks. It is a very in universe term though. Are there any other famous markets/merchants' guilds or anything we could steal a name from?

Peddler
Merchant is the term they use throughout the books, as far as I can tell. Might be what we should do. Not so glamorous, though. 'Trader"?

This seems more like Steward in the Lord of the Rings sense than the Wheel of Time sense, on the name.

I don't think Advise a Governor balances well against Hurry Production. But I think we've basically run up against one of the GP balance aspects that Firaxis never really solved either: I don't think anything measures up to Hurry Science or Hurry Production. Those two abilities are most definitely the most powerful GP abilities in the game - and whatever we group them with is largely doomed to obscurity, useful only in the narrow edge cases where it's actually comparable.

Hurry Science is effectively a free tech (and in fact used to be exactly that, until they nerfed it and it's still awesome), which is crazy good - sudden bursts that let you pull ahead faster than expected, or grab key abilities an opponent wasn't expecting. Or even just boost ahead incrementally, even if you don't have a key tech in researchable range right now.

Hurry Production is basically "free Wonder" which is super duper amazing. Not only does it give you the Wonder ability, which is usually pretty awesome (and can also give you more GPs... to do it again), it also denies your opponents that ability. If you look up GP preferences online for which GP types players pick when prompted for a free GP, Great Engineer is the top choice, followed closely by Great Scientist, who both lead the pack by a million miles. (Dedicated Culture players sometimes pick Culture GPs, but even they pick GEs often because they snag Wonders, which are essential to the Culture victory.)

Do we think we can address that without unhinging the game? Is the solution to pump up all of the other GP abilities?

Steward
Yeah, this guy was certainly one of the ones I was least comfortable with, in terms of name and ability both.

Totally right that Advise a Gov fails in balancing against Hurry production. I think BNW may have the only viable solution to that - pairing it with Manufactory. That way, you either get a production dump, or, if its early enough in the game, you go for the long-haul production yield. I think anything else we do will fail to match that. I suppose advise a gov COULD be that, if you choose a production bonus.

We could of course pump up other GPs, or perhaps we should simply slightly nerf Hurry Production and Hurry science? I think people wouldn't kill us for that - after all, it won't "feel" as weird, since you'll be hurrying wonders and techs that aren't familiar.

Or we just leave it and let it be.

As far as the name, I won't worry about it now, as it seems like we might not need him after all.

Totally fine with these.

Master Artisan
Gleeman
Awesome.

Doomseer seems like the preferable name, given what you've outlined here.

I also completely agree that the building doesn't work. I was about to ask what you think we can do, but how about this:

Interpret Viewings
Expend this GP to create a Doomseer Specialist slot, in any other building that has a specialist slot (or a specific building?) in an adjacent city, who produces <GP type> GP points.

That works with the flavor, right? It's a person now, who's interpretting Viewings and therefore generating GP points.

Which GP type do they generate GP points for? The WoT GP types? (All of the GP types that don't have direct BNW analogues) Or does this specialist create GP points for the GP type that this city already creates the most GP points for? (If you produce +6 Artist and +2 Engineer, it generates Artist points, if +10 Scientist and +9 Merchant, it creates Scientist points.) This would also be Tall/Wide balancing, which is what we want.

Doomseer
OK, so I was actually thinking this ability worked differently, at least in its end-result. I was thinking it would boost ALL GP point production in the city - at least those GP points that are happening in the city in the first place. Rather than simply one significant type. Wasn't sure the math, but figured it would be a % increase or a +1 or something. Whatever seems balanced.

That being said, it should also be mentioned that this GP is a "culture GP", at least as it would relate to BNW and its GP point accumulation (because it has the Prophesy ability). We should bear that in mind when allowing it to produce Scholar Points.

I think the Specialist slot could work, mechanically, but it does seem a bit more complicated than any other current GP ability. We'd need to make sure the AI citizen management uses it well. This is especially confusing if it's not obviously apparent what it would do (e.g. if it only boosts one GP type). It's obviously VERY tall/wide balancing, which is good, but we'd just need to make sure it plays nice with other abilities that interact with specialists (policies, UAs).

By far the simpler solution is simply a GP point dump - sacrifice THIS GP in order to get a bit for all the others.

I think Concert Tour is ignored by everyone except Culture-Victory-resisting players that are dealing with particularly Cultureful enemies. Which means most players ignore it for most of the game.

Related to Ogier and Diplo stuff I'll suggest below though, I'm not sure we need this GP type.

Ogier Historian
ok. Below, then.

Visionary sounds fine if we can't come up with an in-universe alternative. Totally agree we can't use Prophet.

Visionary it is, then!

Given the distinction I outlined above between the GG ability and the Dice ability, I think splitting this into two units makes more sense. I think having a more direct GG analogue, who is the Great Captain + Great Admiral, would be good, so like

Great Captain
GG Aura
Create Citadel
Repair Ships

As for what we could call the Citadel, I was hoping that the Borderlanders would have some unifying name for the forts and fort-like cities constructed by the Blight, but I can't find anything on it online.

Great Captain
My comments on this are above. I am not in favor of splitting these units unless we can sufficiently differentiate the *experience* of using the GG Aura vs the Dice Aura.

The citadel is hard. The word citadel is a bit out-of-character, but you're right that there may not be a great analog. Simply Fortress?

What if, instead, we go with the land-steal aspect? Does that help find a name? It's not a military base, so much as.... something that claims territory. I don't have any ideas.

Wolfbrother
I'm totally fine with this - Pull of the Pattern seems like a good fit, given Perrin's Ta'veren-ness and his position as primary inspiration for this GP.

alright. good.

Interesting one. From the flavor, Dreamspikes are actually planted in reality, and then transport themselves into T'a'r, so they don't necessarily need to be planted by a T'a'r layer GP.

Dreamer
Quite right. I do think you comment more on this later, so I'll comment below.

Following on from my suggestion to make a more GG-like Great Captain, I think we can include the EXP bonus ability if we have a Mat-like GP type.

Related to Ta'veren, I think we decided Ta'veren would be applied more narrowly. Are we sticking with Great People then, though?

I'd be fine dropping the Rush EaE ability.

As far as the name, I don't love Great Person, but it might have to do. Maybe we could find a more generic word for it, since ours aren't all "Great X".

"Leader". "Innovator." "Luminary." "Paragon."?

 

[counterpoint]

So, I've been discussing GP proposals in several places above. I think there's room for a Diplo GP in such a way that it could shift around some of our Ogier/production/Tall/Wide dilemma.

Ambassador

Gain a Compact Vote
Gain a Sister
CS Influence Boost

Previously, Gain a Sister has been flavored as Discover a Weave - but there's a great flavor argument for making this ability non-Power related. The Aes Sedai would certainly favor someone who showed them a new weave (after some consternation that the woman in question wasn't already an Aes Sedai). But equally, Aes Sedai were often dispatched to nations specifically to serve diplomatic purposes (Andoran Queen's advisor, for example), which would have been brokered by some political presence at the Tower. We could call the ability Treat with Tar Valon or Meet with the Amyrlin - when performed on Tar Valon lands (or on your lands?) gives you a Sister, via the mechanics we discussed before.

This also grabs the CS influence boost I talked about before - separating it from the Stedding influence boost.

Whether or not we include "Gain a Compact Vote" is certainly up for debate - I think it fits well and the fact that these abilities are less powerful than ones like Hurry Production, the flexibility of 3 abilities could help to offset that.

Alternatively - do we think the gain a Sister and gain a Compact Vote abilities are too weak by themselves? What if we combine the essence of both?

Meet with the Amyrlin
Gain a Sister and Tar Valon puts one of its votes in the next Compact in concert with your selection. (If you split your delegates, the Tower chooses which of the two you've voted on it will use that vote for. Or we could let the player pick? Seems less diplo-y that way though.)

This diplo GP could be generated via the Diplo-y methods we discussed previously, which we'd want to go into more detail on if we decide we like this. Neither of these abilities is Tall/Wide balancing, so it's a diplo system-specific GP type.

Ambassdor
OK, so in general I'm fine with this unit's existence. I think The Ambassador as a word is a *little* modern, but I think it could work. Is Emmisary better (wasn't that one we were previously considering for an evil herald or something)? Not a big problem, though.

I was a little iffy about having the Sister thing be, mainly because I figured we'd need an ability like that to go with a GChanneler/Dreamer of some kind. But, I can see how it makes sense here when flavored appropriately.

As far as having it have three abilities, It does sort of feel weird, even though, as you state, it might make this GP be more able to "compete" with the likes of the production and science GPs.

Combining the Compact vote and Sister ones does seem like it's a good idea. I like it. I was wondering before how Compact-stealing could every really be balanced - on the one hand, it had the power to be crazy good, but as it only affects one Vote, it's more likely it'd be useless. By combining it with this other ability, and restricting it to Tar Valon alone - with a limited number of votes to steal - I think this works much better.

Just to be clear, if TV has like 6 votes, what happens if a 7th civ uses this ability? Also, can a civ use this ability more than once on the same compact? You know, election "bulbing." AKA American Electoral Politics.

Also, what happens once the LB is going and some civs are at war with TV? Does it not matter? Or, at war with TV ever, for that matter.

On the CS influence ability... I'm not sure it needs to be separated from the Stedding one. It depends. If the stedding one ends up awesome enough to justify its existence, then fine. Otherwise, it's very much ok for steddings to be include here, IMO.

In general, I'm down with this one, I think. As far as how it's created, I do see what you're saying that none of these abilities are T/W balancing, by necessity, but we should keep in mind that BNW treated the CS influence one as if they *were* (by attaching it to the GMe). Are we concerned with that at all? At the very least, we would probably need to make sure the GP generation isn't biased slightly *towards* Wide - as several of the "neutral" ones appear to be.

I also mentioned a Mat-like GP type. What if this were the Ta'veren GP type?

Ta'veren
Dice in my Head
EXP Promotion burst

Should he have a second "active" ability, since Dice in my Head is passive? There's some argument for the Encounter a Thread ability to be on this GP type, but it works equally well on Wolfbrother, and I'm not sure what we'd swap it out for there. (Unfortunately can't really steal Perrin's blacksmithing stuff for Wolfbrother, freeing up the Thread ability for this GP type, because production-y stuff is mostly Tall/Wide balancing, whereas Wolfbrother is System-specific.)

He could grab the Rush EaE ability, if we wanted.

Could he have the Create Dragonsworn ability somehow?

What generates a Ta'veren GP though? It seems system-specific in nature, so where should the points come from? We discussed Alignment-generated GPs before, which this makes some sense for - generated when you reach specific tiers?

EDIT: As you rightfully pointed out via Steam I've orphaned the Plant Dreamspike ability on the Dreamer GP. The Ta'veren GP type is one possible host for that ability, given the flavor I described above.

Another alternative would be to have a more Channeler-focused GP type, something along the lines of:

Great Channeler
Plant Dreamspike
Gentle a Foe (2x multi-use)

This could probably be a T'a'r GP type (generated by Glimmer-points, since neither of these abilities is Tall/Wide balancing). Otherwise I think Wolfbrother is the only T'a'r GP type (if we drop Dreamer), which is a bit weird.

Alternatively, we might be able to use Slayer after all!

Slayer (might need a different name)
Plant Dreamspike
Create Dragonsworn

Could also be a T'a'r GP type. Plant Dreamspike is obviously a flavor bullseye for Slayer. And the Create Dragonsworn ability actually does sort of line up with his role of interfering with the armies of the Light leading up to the LB. Mechanically we liked the ability, but it didn't fit into the other GP types - this would let us include it.

END EDIT

This is a huge quote block, I know. But you've included a whole lot here that needs to be considered simultaneously.

I've made my thoughts on Dice in my Head as it relates to the simultaneous existence of the GGe Aura very clear, so need not repeat them here. Though, I will say that when paired with an EXP boost ability, I can say I'd most likely always just go ahead and use the exp bonus ability right before a battle. The GGe aura isn't very splashy, as we've noted - and neither is the Dice ability - so considering the existence of the Captain, I'd probably just rely on them to boost my combat (since Citadels are only situationally useful) and use these guys for the EXP boost - far splashier (but also not essential to include). That makes Dice seem even more problematic, IMO.

I don't think he needs a second active ability as he's designed here - that would make him just "better" than the Great Captain. If we differentiate him further from the GCap (which I advocate), then perhaps another ability could work.

I think I enjoy the Encounter a Thread ability as attached to the WBr (I too lament not being able to use Smithing for him, though).

I feel like, the way this guy is currently designed, he has to be generated through combat, just like the GGe. I know that's problematic, but otherwise it feels wrong - he's basically a GGe, but he's generated by doing something totally unrelated? That feels against the spirit of how GP creation works in CiV. That said, I think he needs to change so I'm not sure this will continue to be true.

More specifically, though:

Create Dragonsworn - that could work, I suppose.

Plant a Dreamspike COULD go for him. Not a terrible idea. Doesn't *quite* feel right, but it's also not terrible. All in all, considering the problems below, this might be the best option, actually....

The Great Channeler - eh, I really don't think Gentle a Foe deserves to exist. I don't think it holds a candle to other GP abilities. And considering that Plant a DS is already very small in its scope, a second (even more limited) ability would be problematic.

Also, I should note that I find GChanneler way less flavorful than Dreamer.

In short, I'm unsure what to do with Plant a DS. I do feel like it should be placed on a T'a'r-related unit - that way you have to be good at T'a'r to get them. Right? I don't feel super strongly on this, though. This doesn't work well with the Ta'veren, though.

Lastly, on Slayer.... I just don't think he deserves to be a GP. I'm sorry, as I know you don't seem to agree. He is essentially treated as the anti-perrin. Even though he isn't a wolfbrother, he's kind of the evil double of the wolfbrother. To me, this makes his existence as a separate GP types weird. After all, all he is is a very T'a'r adept human, a Dreamwalker. I'd rather see that just in there as a Dreamer or something, or not in there at all.

Also, the problems with this pairing of abilities is that they are both very, very specific in their use. By no means will everybody have a need of DSs through most of the game. Similarly, you won't always have a need of dumping Dragonsworn on your enemies. That makes this GP of marginal use throughout the game.

Finally, production stuff and Ogier. I like the idea of Groves doing different things in different places, but I think one desired effect of that (stedding influence + vote) is system-specific, and any yield bonus in your own territory is Tall/Wide balancing. Which is a bit of a problem. And continues to be a problem, now that I try to write this out. I'm looking at this pool of abilities:

Create Manufactory
Culture Dump
Hurry Production
Advise a Governor
Stedding Influence boost + vote

I think they can all be Ogier-ified, but only the last one is system-specific. Would we be fine having a system-specific ability on a Tall/Wide-driven GP? (That would give Tall players an advantage in the system the GP type enhances.) Are the Ogier somehow already favoring Wide players, which would make this a fair trade?

Yeah, the combination of a Production ability with *anything else* has proven to be quite tricky!

The safe solution is, of course, create a GEn and simply rebrand it as an Ogier Mason and just leave it at that. Then we can dig through the other ablities and see if we want something else as well. Probably should have the manufactory stay something with that kind of flavor - the Grove is, perhaps, too weird for +production.

But, getting more complicated, I do think, as things stand, we can't make any ability with Production bonuses be system-specific. It'd have to be tall/wide balanced. That is certainly a problem for any diplo-related abilities that live on the GP. That said, we could create some specific feature of Stedding that amkes them inherently Wide-favoring. It could be simply due to proximity - just as it is with CSs in CiV - but that is somewhat underwhelming.

Another option could be that Steddings produce benefits for the player on a per city basis. Instead of simply + happiness or whatever, they provide a yield bonus to the nearest city or something (or all cities). This would theoretically make friendships with Steddings be more useful to Wide players (perhaps hugely so), giving us incentive to create a GP to compensate.

You didn't include Reclassify Relic in this list. There's a problem with connecting a Culture Dump to a Production yield. Yes, they are both Tall/Wide Balanced, but this doesn't play nice with BNWs split of GE/GM/GS and then the culture ones all standing alone. That's why I gave the Historian abilities that were culture-specific. It doesn't have to have the Reclassify ability, but I wouldn't want to see the culture dump sharing space with a production yield or something.

Perhaps a grove built in your territory creates Culture per turn? But then that's treading on the Landmark/Portal stone territory majorly.

So, I'm pretty darn unsure what to do here. Definitely tempted to just make a GE-analog and build one or two additional GPs to house the other abilities we want here. Of those remaining abilities, Culture Dump is the only essential one, IMO. Groves are nice flavor, but groves can also absolutely be national wonders or something instead.

What do you suggest?

Another thing worth mentioning here is Governors. We decided on the GP -> Governor method of Governor generation, do we want to go through and decide what Governor types correspond to which GP types? (And what the Governor types are.) I'm assuming all GP types have a "Govern City" ability as well?

We can wait til we have the final list, I think. But I do think all of these can be possible govs. The Ogier ones are odd flavor, though.

Also, aside to this whole discussion, Firaxis are releasing a new expansion for Civ:BE. That article mentions some features from there that could be very cool. Cities at sea. Cities that can move. Worth us keeping in mind when it comes to looking at UAs!

Wow, that city stuff is nuts. Not so useful to us, thank goodness.

But, that said, apparently there's some major Diplo overhauls as well - Fear vs Respect. If this turns out to be the Holy Grail that finally fixes CiV's diplo system (unlikely as that may be), we'll need to take a look at it.

 

[counterpoint]

the forum double posted my previous message ( i must have clicked twice... the forum is VERY slow right now).

This is junk. please ignore.

 

[S3rgeus]

I don't think this is an important enough thing to jump through hoops to include - certainly not adding extra mechanics just to include it. If we want the WBr to have hammers, that's cool. But they also could not have hammers, and I think that would be cool, as well.

That's fine with me.

Well, as I recall, Build Landmark has been replaced by "Uncover Portal Stone." If that's the case, I actually think it makes jolly good sense. Well, it makes no less sense than normal sites doing the same would.

Awesome, that's good.

The other thing I'm wondering, though ,is if it's too weird having the projections be the ones to actually dig out the sites. I'm thinking it might be better if we rely on our Historians (I think we may have chosen to call Arch's that, which would conflict with Ogier Historian a bit) to actually dig up the site.

Like, you need to do T'a'r stuff to uncover the site (glimmers and such), but the projections don't have to actually dig them up. Would you still need to "find them" in T'a'r with your projections.

I guess I'm just wondering if it's weird having the projections do the uncovering - they can then be killed without a DoW (ambient Damage), they would potentially disappear before they finish the digging, and they don't require any production sacrifice like Archs do... just a few things that make them feel weird when stacked against Archaeos.

What do you think?

The lack of a production cost is a very good point. Have we mitigated that with the Glimmer-gathering being much more intensive than just adopting a series of policies?

If we were to change to Historians being able to dig up the Sites in the main layers, we'd need to reflavor the Sites themselves to be more like the normal Sites of Power. My main worry here is that Hidden Antiquity Sites were seen as a missed opportunity by a lot of players to do something more interesting - which I think we have with the Reflections of Power.

What if the Policy that starts the reveals of Reflections also lets Historians project into T'a'r? (Aiel Wise Ones demonstrated that one needn't be a channeler to be a T'a'r expert.) And only Historian projections can gather the Reflections - also consuming their host in the process? Keeps the production cost as a part of the equation, but also gives us the flavor wins. I'm not too concerned with players being able to kill projections without a DoW. Taking time can be handled in the same way as creating Dreamwards (disable the ability when they don't have enough time left). Alternatively Historian projections could be permanent, though that might be a bit can-of-worms.

 

[S3rgeus]

Yeah, the epic explosion I did wasn't really intended, at first. You left your previous post pretty open ("let's get started" essentially), and I tried to that... but found it kind of impossible to do in small steps. Glad it's in the right direction.

I think a lot of it has collapsed down into fewer quote blocks with this post now, which is good.

Gold from CS
Yeah, I think a different Gold-Dump source would be welcome. Not sure what it could be, though. The International trade route idea is cool, in that it could work for CSs as well. I think X trade routes would be too restrictive, perhaps.

Do we want to try out that change then? A boosted gold GP ability that you can use at any city you have established an international trade route with? Does the receiving civ get anything? (I think not.) Are there any other effects of this that might upset the balance of everything?

Naval Combat Bonus
Would we trigger their creation through naval combat and land combat, now?

We can always try and see if the unit now becomes too good due to this functionality. If so, we can find a way to gimp it somehow.

Yeah, let's do both. GGs and GAds are created based on EXP earned by units of their respective type, so we're basically going to combine those counters.

Weigh Randomness
OK, the one issue I have here is that, while they are mechanically distinct, they are *functionally* quite similar - a dude hanging around your units that makes them fight better. I think, when considering End-User-Experience, they will be very close to the same.

I imagine myself as a player, and having essentially zero idea or preference as to which of these I would want to have hanging out with my units (not counting their other abilities), making them somewhat non-strategic, which I think it pretty much a major No-No when considering this kind of GP. I think I'd probably just treat them identically, in my head. I'd know they aren't the same, but they both "make units fight well", which is broadly true. Maybe I'd bring one to help with Gentling, but beyond that, they'd be the same unit.

Also, question: would these abilities stack with one another? If so, that seems like it might be powerful kind of fast.

I think the way to make these abilities both worth having is to significantly differentiate their functionality. Like, apply the GGe combat bonus more narrowly, and make this randomness ability also apply more narrowly (e.g., make it NOT apply to normal combat, and only apply to the other randomness stuff..... of which there isn't this much).

As it is, I'm not in favor of simply having one ability that boosts your units combat strength, and another that makes randomness favor you in combat. Too similar, experientially and strategically.

You know, you make a lot of good points here. This topic comes up again later, and I don't think I'll need to address it much there, because basically I'm convinced. The probability man GP type was the weakest I proposed (IMO), and I guess that tells us pretty much that we don't need him! I'd be cool with expanding the Great Captain's aura ability to include the probability stuff instead of a simple combat bonus then?

Scholar
Yeah, you're right that the Academy should be something more significant and not available all game. While the research lab is a good option, I could also picture it as a national wonder (e.g. Oxford) or theoretically a University. More on that later.

I don't think Library is necessarily the best answer, because I do feel like we'll need that one more likely as a low-level science building.

Maybe, if we desire to stay in-universe, we could go with something like "Depository" and flavor it as an archival place. Also, "Archives" or something could work. Or Chronicles, though that's kind of weird.

Archives definitely works and sounds quite dramatic. I think that we might want Library as a low-level science building is actually a very good reason to use it here though - because the building is already called a Library in BNW, and this would give us more distance from that, for little effort. We could equally use Archives as a Science building.

I was wondering if we should generalize our scope of "Science", in general. I've been thinking recently that perhaps we shouldn't even call it Science, since Science doesn't really exist in WoT as a concept. What if we simply rebranded it as "Learning" or "Knowledge" or something like that? Seems more in-universe, and also allows us to be more general with our Science Buildings, while still being in-universe - as none of them, strictly speaking, are Science.

This is a good point and yeah, sounds like a good plan. Knowledge seems like good flavor for it - research is "expanding your knowledge" or something?

Ogier Builder
OK, will talk more on this one below, re: diplo.

Yeah, I see the Grove-as-production being a bit of a stretch (sung wood, but it's hard to imagine ogier wanting humans to mass-produce that), but I think adding yet another cultuer GP ability may be a mistake.

Definitely, we can't have the Grove make Culture because it would tread on Culture GPs and have crossover problems with the other abilities here, as discussed elsewhere. I was saying that, as a player, Culture is what I would expect a Grove to do. More detail on this later though.

Peddler
Merchant is the term they use throughout the books, as far as I can tell. Might be what we should do. Not so glamorous, though. 'Trader"?

Both Merchant and Trader kind of need the "Great" before their name to make them GP-worthy, which I think we're avoiding on the other GP types? (Except Great Captain?) Maybe Great Trader could work? I don't really have any alternatives.

Steward
Yeah, this guy was certainly one of the ones I was least comfortable with, in terms of name and ability both.

Totally right that Advise a Gov fails in balancing against Hurry production. I think BNW may have the only viable solution to that - pairing it with Manufactory. That way, you either get a production dump, or, if its early enough in the game, you go for the long-haul production yield. I think anything else we do will fail to match that. I suppose advise a gov COULD be that, if you choose a production bonus.

We could of course pump up other GPs, or perhaps we should simply slightly nerf Hurry Production and Hurry science? I think people wouldn't kill us for that - after all, it won't "feel" as weird, since you'll be hurrying wonders and techs that aren't familiar.

Or we just leave it and let it be.

As far as the name, I won't worry about it now, as it seems like we might not need him after all.

Agreed, I don't think we'll need this guy. I think we're better off leaving it be for now, there are still some fundamentals of BNW that we don't want to unseat!

Master Artisan
Gleeman
Awesome.

Normally I would check this myself in the topic, but the forum takes like 3 minutes to load a page - are these guys in the GP summary now?

Doomseer
OK, so I was actually thinking this ability worked differently, at least in its end-result. I was thinking it would boost ALL GP point production in the city - at least those GP points that are happening in the city in the first place. Rather than simply one significant type. Wasn't sure the math, but figured it would be a % increase or a +1 or something. Whatever seems balanced.

That being said, it should also be mentioned that this GP is a "culture GP", at least as it would relate to BNW and its GP point accumulation (because it has the Prophesy ability). We should bear that in mind when allowing it to produce Scholar Points.

I think the Specialist slot could work, mechanically, but it does seem a bit more complicated than any other current GP ability. We'd need to make sure the AI citizen management uses it well. This is especially confusing if it's not obviously apparent what it would do (e.g. if it only boosts one GP type). It's obviously VERY tall/wide balancing, which is good, but we'd just need to make sure it plays nice with other abilities that interact with specialists (policies, UAs).

By far the simpler solution is simply a GP point dump - sacrifice THIS GP in order to get a bit for all the others.

At first, I thought you meant it was a risk to allow Culture player to generate Scholar points, which I don't think would happen very easily with the "highest GP type point output" selection method, but I now see that you probably mean the opposite: Science players using this GP to create Science, even though it's a Culture GP.

I'm a big fan of the Specialist idea, when put against the GP point dump approach. I think the Specialist will be more useful for players, particularly Culture players who end up with so many Specialists.

The easiest solution for the Culture crossover would be to make the Specialist much simpler: it produces 1 GP point for each Culture GP type (which would include itself). I feel like that doesn't correctly capture the flavor of Min's more general role though - she finds all kinds of Greatness, not just Cultural. I'm wondering if it's possible to use the city's/civ's culture output to determine the Specialist's yield? The Specialist produces GP points for the GP type your city produces the most of, but it produces an amount of those points proportional to the city's culture output. Normal Specialists produce +3 GP points per turn - so if the bottom level Culture started at +1 GP points, it would be less efficient than the normal Scientist Specialists for Science players - though still an incremental boost.

Visionary it is, then!

Summary-izable as well!

Great Captain
My comments on this are above. I am not in favor of splitting these units unless we can sufficiently differentiate the *experience* of using the GG Aura vs the Dice Aura.

The citadel is hard. The word citadel is a bit out-of-character, but you're right that there may not be a great analog. Simply Fortress?

What if, instead, we go with the land-steal aspect? Does that help find a name? It's not a military base, so much as.... something that claims territory. I don't have any ideas.

Fortress could work.

It was called Culture Bomb, back when it was just the land steal on the Great Artist, which doesn't really help us. Could we use any of the flavor from trying to push back the Blight to characterize the capturing of land? (Without making it only make sense if used on the Blightborder.)

As far as the name, I don't love Great Person, but it might have to do. Maybe we could find a more generic word for it, since ours aren't all "Great X".

"Leader". "Innovator." "Luminary." "Paragon."?

Would these still be prefixed by Great? I think Luminary is my favorite of these, but we'd probably need to see if it sinks in well. We've become very accustomed to the term GP (or at least I think I have) so it's difficult to weigh up another term against it, because GP seems to mean "more" than just the actual words.

Ambassdor
OK, so in general I'm fine with this unit's existence. I think The Ambassador as a word is a *little* modern, but I think it could work. Is Emmisary better (wasn't that one we were previously considering for an evil herald or something)? Not a big problem, though.

I think the word ambassador is used by Rand and the Tower a few times in the books, so it should be fine. I think it sounds more GP-ish than Emissary.

I was a little iffy about having the Sister thing be, mainly because I figured we'd need an ability like that to go with a GChanneler/Dreamer of some kind. But, I can see how it makes sense here when flavored appropriately.

As far as having it have three abilities, It does sort of feel weird, even though, as you state, it might make this GP be more able to "compete" with the likes of the production and science GPs.

Combining the Compact vote and Sister ones does seem like it's a good idea. I like it. I was wondering before how Compact-stealing could every really be balanced - on the one hand, it had the power to be crazy good, but as it only affects one Vote, it's more likely it'd be useless. By combining it with this other ability, and restricting it to Tar Valon alone - with a limited number of votes to steal - I think this works much better.

Awesome sauce, sounds like combining the abilities is the way to go.

Just to be clear, if TV has like 6 votes, what happens if a 7th civ uses this ability? Also, can a civ use this ability more than once on the same compact? You know, election "bulbing." AKA American Electoral Politics.

We have a couple of options for the first one: 1. we could allow them to "steal the vote back" from another player who's already grabbed a vote. But this will encourage players all using this GP on the last turn before a Compact vote, which basically means it just turns into a turn-order-determined effect, which is terrible.

2. Another thing we could do is disable the ability if there are no votes left. This is simple and very visible for the player.

3. The next possibility would be to have that vote carry over to the next Compact - so the Tower wouldn't vote with that player this time, but would next time. This removes some of the strategic planning of when the 7th player used their GP, but then again, they were beaten to the punch by 6 other players, so having them lose out does make sense. (And it isn't a huge loss.)

4. Another possibility is to make the voting part not happen, only give them a Sister. We would probably want to tell them this is the state of the Tower before they expend the GP though, in case they want to keep the GP back until the next Compact vote is over.

I think I like #3 most, followed by #2.

As for more than once on the same Compact, we have options for that too.

1. No restrictions. This seems like the most CiV-like approach.
2. One per Compact - players can only ever steal one vote at once.

Related to this is the spawn rate for this GP - I don't think very many would be generated over the course of a game, even for a diplo player, compared to, say, Scholars for Science players, or the 3 Culture types for Culture.

I think we should go with option #1 to start with and introduce restrictions if bulbing becomes a problem, rather than try to fix it before we're sure how it will come together. (Since the restriction layers completely on top of the "no restriction approach" with no wasted work.)

Also, what happens once the LB is going and some civs are at war with TV? Does it not matter? Or, at war with TV ever, for that matter.

I'd say the ability is disabled when you're at war with the Tower - you just have to use the CS influence boost ability, which is still a pretty good ability.

On the CS influence ability... I'm not sure it needs to be separated from the Stedding one. It depends. If the stedding one ends up awesome enough to justify its existence, then fine. Otherwise, it's very much ok for steddings to be include here, IMO.

In general, I'm down with this one, I think. As far as how it's created, I do see what you're saying that none of these abilities are T/W balancing, by necessity, but we should keep in mind that BNW treated the CS influence one as if they *were* (by attaching it to the GMe). Are we concerned with that at all? At the very least, we would probably need to make sure the GP generation isn't biased slightly *towards* Wide - as several of the "neutral" ones appear to be.

I think the Great Merchant was Tall/Wide balancing mostly because of the Gold (since that leads to more CS relationships, and Gold production is a Tall/Wide thing). The same ability could have been a pure Gold dump, but Firaxis' flavor effectively meant you were forced to spend a portion of it on the CS you did the Trade Mission with.

Do we want to go through the Diplo GP spawning mechanisms for this GP now, or wait until these posts have shortened a bit?

More on the Ogier below.

This is a huge quote block, I know. But you've included a whole lot here that needs to be considered simultaneously.

And I'm going to break it up into sections again.

I've made my thoughts on Dice in my Head as it relates to the simultaneous existence of the GGe Aura very clear, so need not repeat them here. Though, I will say that when paired with an EXP boost ability, I can say I'd most likely always just go ahead and use the exp bonus ability right before a battle. The GGe aura isn't very splashy, as we've noted - and neither is the Dice ability - so considering the existence of the Captain, I'd probably just rely on them to boost my combat (since Citadels are only situationally useful) and use these guys for the EXP boost - far splashier (but also not essential to include). That makes Dice seem even more problematic, IMO.

I don't think he needs a second active ability as he's designed here - that would make him just "better" than the Great Captain. If we differentiate him further from the GCap (which I advocate), then perhaps another ability could work.

I think I enjoy the Encounter a Thread ability as attached to the WBr (I too lament not being able to use Smithing for him, though).

I feel like, the way this guy is currently designed, he has to be generated through combat, just like the GGe. I know that's problematic, but otherwise it feels wrong - he's basically a GGe, but he's generated by doing something totally unrelated? That feels against the spirit of how GP creation works in CiV. That said, I think he needs to change so I'm not sure this will continue to be true.

More specifically, though:

Create Dragonsworn - that could work, I suppose.

Plant a Dreamspike COULD go for him. Not a terrible idea. Doesn't *quite* feel right, but it's also not terrible. All in all, considering the problems below, this might be the best option, actually....

Happily, I think we can stop here, since I'm fine dropping the probability man GP type and using Dice in my Head on the Great Captain. (A note on generation: I figured it would be generated on the same EXP counter as Great Captains and the player chooses which they want when they get to the threshold to generate a new GP.)

The Great Channeler - eh, I really don't think Gentle a Foe deserves to exist. I don't think it holds a candle to other GP abilities. And considering that Plant a DS is already very small in its scope, a second (even more limited) ability would be problematic.

Also, I should note that I find GChanneler way less flavorful than Dreamer.

In short, I'm unsure what to do with Plant a DS. I do feel like it should be placed on a T'a'r-related unit - that way you have to be good at T'a'r to get them. Right? I don't feel super strongly on this, though. This doesn't work well with the Ta'veren, though.

All good points and good reasons to drop the Great Channeler. I'm fine with that.

Lastly, on Slayer.... I just don't think he deserves to be a GP. I'm sorry, as I know you don't seem to agree. He is essentially treated as the anti-perrin. Even though he isn't a wolfbrother, he's kind of the evil double of the wolfbrother. To me, this makes his existence as a separate GP types weird. After all, all he is is a very T'a'r adept human, a Dreamwalker. I'd rather see that just in there as a Dreamer or something, or not in there at all.

Also, the problems with this pairing of abilities is that they are both very, very specific in their use. By no means will everybody have a need of DSs through most of the game. Similarly, you won't always have a need of dumping Dragonsworn on your enemies. That makes this GP of marginal use throughout the game.

Mm, I don't agree here. I think he's actually the strongest proposal for this GP role. I don't think he was really presented as the anti-Perrin, he was just the antagonist in Perrin's story arc, and crossed over with some of the other storylines as well.

Dreamwalker seems like a great name for this GP type - since we don't want to use the name of a character from the books as a type.

This GP type is a T'a'r GP type, the same as the Wolfbrother, so would be generated by points from Glimmer-gathering. That expands his usefulness because if you generated him, then you definitely have more use for him than most players, because the mechanism used to do so is only triggered by players that are T'a'r invested.

It also creates a nice, subtle Light/Shadow dichotomy in in the T'a'r GP race - nothing mechanical about their role is exclusive to either side, but players will see that flavor influence.

I figure once the player reaches the threshold to generate a T'a'r GP from Glimmer-points, then they choose which one of the two they want.

Yeah, the combination of a Production ability with *anything else* has proven to be quite tricky!

The safe solution is, of course, create a GEn and simply rebrand it as an Ogier Mason and just leave it at that. Then we can dig through the other ablities and see if we want something else as well. Probably should have the manufactory stay something with that kind of flavor - the Grove is, perhaps, too weird for +production.

But, getting more complicated, I do think, as things stand, we can't make any ability with Production bonuses be system-specific. It'd have to be tall/wide balanced. That is certainly a problem for any diplo-related abilities that live on the GP. That said, we could create some specific feature of Stedding that amkes them inherently Wide-favoring. It could be simply due to proximity - just as it is with CSs in CiV - but that is somewhat underwhelming.

Another option could be that Steddings produce benefits for the player on a per city basis. Instead of simply + happiness or whatever, they provide a yield bonus to the nearest city or something (or all cities). This would theoretically make friendships with Steddings be more useful to Wide players (perhaps hugely so), giving us incentive to create a GP to compensate.

You didn't include Reclassify Relic in this list. There's a problem with connecting a Culture Dump to a Production yield. Yes, they are both Tall/Wide Balanced, but this doesn't play nice with BNWs split of GE/GM/GS and then the culture ones all standing alone. That's why I gave the Historian abilities that were culture-specific. It doesn't have to have the Reclassify ability, but I wouldn't want to see the culture dump sharing space with a production yield or something.

Perhaps a grove built in your territory creates Culture per turn? But then that's treading on the Landmark/Portal stone territory majorly.

So, I'm pretty darn unsure what to do here. Definitely tempted to just make a GE-analog and build one or two additional GPs to house the other abilities we want here. Of those remaining abilities, Culture Dump is the only essential one, IMO. Groves are nice flavor, but groves can also absolutely be national wonders or something instead.

What do you suggest?

I think recombining the Engineer (Hurry Production and Manufactory) and reflavoring them as Ogier Stonemasons makes sense.

I think giving Stedding a per-city bonus is coming at the problem from the other side - rather than making the bonuses from Stedding more accessible to Wide civs, it actually makes them better for Wide civs. This means that Tall players in isolation are more likely to ignore them in favor of more lucrative bonuses, though they may want to grab some to stop runaway Wide civs, which I think is an inherent imbalance.

Do we think that a GP type with Culture Dump and Reclassify Relic would be one players want to get? (And is it just another Culture GP type - how does it get generated?) I usually ignore the Culture dump ability in favor of the GW in the BNW GPs, but that's not necessarily the best idea. I could see us being able to create a flavorful GP combination for these abilities.

That would let us put Stedding Influence + Vote and Advise a Governor on some kind of Ogier GP type that's system-specific, and then we'll have used all of the abilities that we wanted (I think).

Super alternatively, we could axe both GP types - dropping all 4 abilities completely (probably adding the Stedding influence + vote to the Ambassador's Influence ability)? I'm not sure if I like this idea, but it's a possibility, so I figured it's worth discussing. We could choose to drop one and not the other, or neither, we'll see.

I'd be fine with the Grove flavor popping up elsewhere, since we're having such trouble fitting it into any of the GP roles correctly.

We can wait til we have the final list, I think. But I do think all of these can be possible govs. The Ogier ones are odd flavor, though.

True, maybe the mission isn't "Govern City" but "Appoint Governor" or something along those lines, so we avoid the flavor weirdness of Ogier Governors.

Wow, that city stuff is nuts. Not so useful to us, thank goodness.

The Tuatha'an UA could involve moving cities!

But, that said, apparently there's some major Diplo overhauls as well - Fear vs Respect. If this turns out to be the Holy Grail that finally fixes CiV's diplo system (unlikely as that may be), we'll need to take a look at it.

We'll see! Backporting those kinds of changes to BNW would be... complicated.

 

[counterpoint]

We're back! Second server migration successful, apparently!

And... what are we talking about?

The lack of a production cost is a very good point. Have we mitigated that with the Glimmer-gathering being much more intensive than just adopting a series of policies?

If we were to change to Historians being able to dig up the Sites in the main layers, we'd need to reflavor the Sites themselves to be more like the normal Sites of Power. My main worry here is that Hidden Antiquity Sites were seen as a missed opportunity by a lot of players to do something more interesting - which I think we have with the Reflections of Power.

What if the Policy that starts the reveals of Reflections also lets Historians project into T'a'r? (Aiel Wise Ones demonstrated that one needn't be a channeler to be a T'a'r expert.) And only Historian projections can gather the Reflections - also consuming their host in the process? Keeps the production cost as a part of the equation, but also gives us the flavor wins. I'm not too concerned with players being able to kill projections without a DoW. Taking time can be handled in the same way as creating Dreamwards (disable the ability when they don't have enough time left). Alternatively Historian projections could be permanent, though that might be a bit can-of-worms.

OK, lots to consider here.

First off, just to be clear - does attacking a T'a'r unit with your wolves/wolfbrother constitute a DoW? Intuitively, it should, right? But at the same time, I think that kind of ruins what we have here. The primary purpose of the wolves and such are "T'a'r" management, in addition to to killing the Nightmares. It seems like the scramble for glimmers and such will be more fun if people are able to freely fight, without a DoW - it's like your Effing with people in T'a'r, not necessarily *killing* them or anything.

Plus, if DoW is required to attack in T'a'r, it makes the passive hp drain of projections more powerful, relatively speaking - realistically, a few projections huddled together would be the smartest way to take out another civ's unit, with no DoW required. Also, if destroying DWs and DSs requires a DoW, it makes managing Dreamwards and Dreamspikes way harder.

obviously, this has huge implications for below, as well - if we go with no-DoW required for wolves and such (which I think we should), that means picking off archaeos and such would be way too easy, especially when compared to dealing with their real-world counterparts.

I'll speak on the specifics of Archaeo-projections below, but I should say that my overall gut tells me that we shouldn't go down that path, at least as described here. Creating a whole bit pile of unit functionality - and really, a new unit - for this kind of thing seems a bit over-the-top. Too high on the complexity chart for something like that, IMO. As far as the flavor of it, yes, of course non-channelers can dreamwalk, but.... all historians feels a little weird to me.

Also, I'm not sure the policy gating and glimmer-gathering necessarily substitutes in well for the production cost. True, it sets up a limitation that, for many, may even be *more* limiting and "out of the way," but it doesn't regulate the "pacing" of your sites-consumption very well. A player with a healthy amount of channelers/t'a'r units would be able to consume a decent number of the Reflections essentially as soon as they appear. This isn't the case with archaeologists, typically. It's not necessarily a "stronger" limit, but it is one that works very differently

I will now address the specifics of what you're proposing, and then I'll see about an alternate solution.

If we did the Historian Projections, yes, they would need to consume the unit in the process. I'm undecided on how much of a problem the projection HP-drain thing taking out an archaeological expedition.... I feel like we could easily just make projection-auras not hurt the archaeo units.
Historian units is definitely a no-no, I think, because it gives somebody essentially a perma-scout in T'a'r, which really doesn't seem like what we're intending.

So, I'm wondering if there's a way to simplify things a little bit, to make this all feel a little bit more elegant. Specifically, I think adding a Historian-projection that actually hangs out on the map and such is problematic for the few reasons mentioned above.

Essentially, if we're looking for parity with regular hidden antiquity sites, we have to simulate/replace these aspects:

1) They are unlocked by policy and tech
2) they take time to harvest
3) They require production
4) they can only be defeated with a DoW
5) you have to physically move them to a point on the map.
6) they require an open-borders agreement to be harvested

We are good to go on 1-2. 3 is still somewhat TBA, but I think should be preserved if at all possible. The others... not so much. We of course have these to counterbalance this aspects:

7) You must harvest a number of glimmers in order to reveal them.

Does that sufficiently make up for #3, #5 and #7? I think, perhaps not. Probably makes up for *one* of those things, maybe two. I'd say, if we eliminate another of those differences - (e.g., make it cost production), the other will be balanced with #6.

So, a few options:

A) Just make them Historian only, the only difference being you must have physically detected them in T'a'r, and or have *active vision* on them in T'a'r. This is the simplest, but this also makes getting them "harder" because there's nothing to counterbalance #7.
I should note here that I don't see a problem with flavor - they'd just be Sites of Power, discovered from T'a'r (not necessarily Reflections anymore)

B) This is my preferred solution, I think
You must produce a Historian, like normal, but this Historian has a new mission that is "Dig in T'a'r". This unit then essentially "teleports" to a Reflection that you have previously uncovered (potentially one you have active vision on, not sure), and immediately commences a Dig on that spot.
The difference here is that there is no "projection" unit wandering around, making things complicated. Essentially, here's what we've got:

1) They are unlocked by policy and tech - yes
2) they take time to harvest - yes, equal
3) They require production - yes
4) they can only be defeated with a DoW - potentially, see below
5) you have to physically move them to a point on the map - NO, this is balanced by "7) You must harvest a number of glimmers in order to reveal them."
6) they require an open-borders agreement to be harvested - yes.

I should note that there's an additional balancing factor here - you can't see them coming. This makes them harder to "defend" by dropping a unit on the tile to block the archaeo. This is probably fine, since these are Hidden and thus likely less competitive.

As far as DoW, I think it is necessary that they be included. So, I think the Historian unit appears in the real world, or at least has some sort of manifestation in the real world? What do you think? If we do make them only in the t'a'r layer, I'd think there should be some easier way to get rid of them then "just happen to have a unit catch them with vision AND bring a wolf over" - but I do think that method does need to have a DoW attached

thoughts?

 

[counterpoint]

ok, let's see how far I get!

Do we want to try out that change then? A boosted gold GP ability that you can use at any city you have established an international trade route with? Does the receiving civ get anything? (I think not.) Are there any other effects of this that might upset the balance of everything?

Gold from BS
Well, I think if we're removing the Diplo component, we can afford to make this one a little cooler, right? Maybe make it slightly more gold, available to international trade partners (whether CS, civ, TV, or stedding)?

Also, A0 we could keep the amount of gold the same as in BNW, but have there be a gold bonus based on the number of routes you have with that civ? Or, if that then encourages people not to spread out their routes (which is a viable strategy at times) in a boring way, maybe we just offer a significant Gold boost if you have a trade route at all, but allow the mission to ALL other entities, even if you don't have a route set up.
I'd say the other civ gets nothing

Or, crazy B), it provides normal gold, but provides you with, essentially, a one-term trade route with that civ, and all that would entail. Too much? Obviously that then brings up the whole what-do-they-get thing....

A is safer. Thoughts?

Yeah, let's do both. GGs and GAds are created based on EXP earned by units of their respective type, so we're basically going to combine those counters.

Naval Combat Boners
Yeah, we'll just have to monitor the EXP levels and such and see if they need to be tweaked. Some situations will end up with much, much faster production of this particular GP types.

You know, you make a lot of good points here. This topic comes up again later, and I don't think I'll need to address it much there, because basically I'm convinced. The probability man GP type was the weakest I proposed (IMO), and I guess that tells us pretty much that we don't need him! I'd be cool with expanding the Great Captain's aura ability to include the probability stuff instead of a simple combat bonus then?

Weight Rand-dumbness
OK, I'm glad we've arrived at the same point on this particular topic.

But yeah, I think replacing the GG Aura with "Dice in my Head" is cool, both for flavor and such - makes it way more clearly Mat-aligned - but also because then it can encompass channeling and gentling and compulsion and... resistance against those things.

Archives definitely works and sounds quite dramatic. I think that we might want Library as a low-level science building is actually a very good reason to use it here though - because the building is already called a Library in BNW, and this would give us more distance from that, for little effort. We could equally use Archives as a Science building.

Scholar (moronic pun impossible)
Yeah, definitely see what you mean here. That said, I think just "Library" feels underwhelming. Can we put a descriptive word with it, or something, so it feels more special and in-universe? Brainstorm, go:

Great Library
Library Compound
Library Cluster
Official Library
Estate Library
Lord's Library
Library Manor
Library Hold
Library Collection
Collections
Library Annex

Of course, I'm also ok with just Library, though.... Just not so exciting. oh well.

This is a good point and yeah, sounds like a good plan. Knowledge seems like good flavor for it - research is "expanding your knowledge" or something?

Dang, that was fast. So, Science = knowledge now.

Yeah, expanding knowledge could work. What about "Uncovering it"? "Resdiscovering"? It's like you're tapping into things that were lost from the AoL and stuff. I like that vibe.

Sorry, gonna have to update the science summary, yeah? Well, is it still called the "Science Victory"?

Definitely, we can't have the Grove make Culture because it would tread on Culture GPs and have crossover problems with the other abilities here, as discussed elsewhere. I was saying that, as a player, Culture is what I would expect a Grove to do. More detail on this later though.

Got it. That makes sense. Yeah, it'd be culture, or happiness, intuitively. Probably the latter, mechanics be damned.

Both Merchant and Trader kind of need the "Great" before their name to make them GP-worthy, which I think we're avoiding on the other GP types? (Except Great Captain?) Maybe Great Trader could work? I don't really have any alternatives.

Eh... I only like the the Great in front of Captiain, because that is actually an in-universe term and such.

I'd say we do whatever we need to do to avoid using Great in front of Trader or Merchant. Even using a different, similar word, "Legendary" or "Grand" something.

Could Also do Merchant Chief, but that's kind of lame and out of universe. Merchant Lord? Merchant Baron? Merchant Commander? Caravan Liege? Merchant Overlord?

We could also make the term more epic than trader/merchant... but such things sound sort of modern:
Mogul
Tycoon

OK, got to go for now - finish rest later today!

 

[counterpoint]

ok. have a few more minutes. Probably won't be able to finish...

Agreed, I don't think we'll need this guy. I think we're better off leaving it be for now, there are still some fundamentals of BNW that we don't want to unseat!

Yeah, no steward.

BAD steward!

Normally I would check this myself in the topic, but the forum takes like 3 minutes to load a page - are these guys in the GP summary now?

Pretty sure the summary is totally empty!

At first, I thought you meant it was a risk to allow Culture player to generate Scholar points, which I don't think would happen very easily with the "highest GP type point output" selection method, but I now see that you probably mean the opposite: Science players using this GP to create Science, even though it's a Culture GP.

Doomseer
I think I mean both of those things. It's being balanced (for spawning) as if it is a Culture GP, I imagine. That Culture GP would then have the option, however, to produce ANY kind of GP point - Scholar, Producer, Merchant, etc.

I think this is potentially a balance problem - however, as we've both noted, the Min flavor feels like it should absolutely do exactly that.

I'm a big fan of the Specialist idea, when put against the GP point dump approach. I think the Specialist will be more useful for players, particularly Culture players who end up with so many Specialists.

Right. If you think it wouldn't be to micro-managey, then I'm fine going for it. I'd be willing to bet that some majority of BNW players don't really "get into" the specialists so much (me included) - I wouldn't want the GP to be less useful or too freaky for such players.

The easiest solution for the Culture crossover would be to make the Specialist much simpler: it produces 1 GP point for each Culture GP type (which would include itself). I feel like that doesn't correctly capture the flavor of Min's more general role though - she finds all kinds of Greatness, not just Cultural. I'm wondering if it's possible to use the city's/civ's culture output to determine the Specialist's yield? The Specialist produces GP points for the GP type your city produces the most of, but it produces an amount of those points proportional to the city's culture output. Normal Specialists produce +3 GP points per turn - so if the bottom level Culture started at +1 GP points, it would be less efficient than the normal Scientist Specialists for Science players - though still an incremental boost.

Hmmm....

I think the "easiest" solution you mention is probably also the "best". I think the flavor sucks a bit, but it might be worth it in the end for simplicity's sake. A bit nuts having a "generalist" for culture like that, but hey....

As far as the culture-output-determining the yield... That's what I'm talking about as being a bit too complicated. I think it might be too hard to use strategically for some players, and probably even weirder for the AI. I wouldn't think that's the right direction to go in.

Is there a way to make it be a +1 to all the GP point types in the city, or, perhaps, just the top 3 types (unless we're ok with this specialist producing more than an average citizen, which might be ok, considering it is a GP expenditure)?

I mean, we're talking about things that are all Tall/Wide balancing, at least, so I think it could be doable. What if Doomseers are generated through acclimation of *any* of the Tall/Wide balanced GP points? Obviously, the targets you need to reach would be much higher - maybe they could even scale proportionally as your GS/GM/GE counter also scales (but maybe don't raise the cost of that counter)

That way, while Min is mostly culture, she can certainly boost your Science through her viewing ability - and could also be Spawned through science, but it'd be a significantly more inefficient way of doing it than using culture gp points would be.

Also, this would prevent us from having to deal with a new GP-point producing specialist and building, which a 4th culture GP type would likely do.

EDIT: I'm being dumb again. Obviously, Min is the GWr analogue here, so I think we'd probably be keeping her spawning mechanic and specialist-configuration similar. Right?

so?

Fortress could work.

ok. let's.

It was called Culture Bomb, back when it was just the land steal on the Great Artist, which doesn't really help us. Could we use any of the flavor from trying to push back the Blight to characterize the capturing of land? (Without making it only make sense if used on the Blightborder.)

I'm not sure there's any structure or thing like that that really pushes back the blight....

I think our only other hope for flavor lies with the idea of Ta'veren, and the Mat vibe. You know, Ta'veren persuasion and such. Taken land through sheer awesome recruitment power. Is there a way to somehow visualize that on the map? Also, this thing has to deal damage to enemies...

I mean, a "Recruitment Fortress" is stupid. Should it be something supernatural, and not really a building at all? Like "Web of Ta'veren," representing just an area where he exerts tons of influence? "Pull of the Pattern" and whatnot... visualized somehow. I wish there was something like a "bubble of good."

Would these still be prefixed by Great? I think Luminary is my favorite of these, but we'd probably need to see if it sinks in well. We've become very accustomed to the term GP (or at least I think I have) so it's difficult to weigh up another term against it, because GP seems to mean "more" than just the actual words.

I think if we're still using the prefix "Great," we might as well call them GP ...

I see what you mean about GP feeling like it means something, especially mechanically.

I'd say we could make it an obvious flavor swap and call them Legendary People, but then that sort of butts up against the "legend" GW type.

On that note, we'd have to rename GWs...

I dunno.

I think the word ambassador is used by Rand and the Tower a few times in the books, so it should be fine. I think it sounds more GP-ish than Emissary.

fine with me.

We have a couple of options for the first one: 1. we could allow them to "steal the vote back" from another player who's already grabbed a vote. But this will encourage players all using this GP on the last turn before a Compact vote, which basically means it just turns into a turn-order-determined effect, which is terrible.

2. Another thing we could do is disable the ability if there are no votes left. This is simple and very visible for the player.

3. The next possibility would be to have that vote carry over to the next Compact - so the Tower wouldn't vote with that player this time, but would next time. This removes some of the strategic planning of when the 7th player used their GP, but then again, they were beaten to the punch by 6 other players, so having them lose out does make sense. (And it isn't a huge loss.)

4. Another possibility is to make the voting part not happen, only give them a Sister. We would probably want to tell them this is the state of the Tower before they expend the GP though, in case they want to keep the GP back until the next Compact vote is over.

I think I like #3 most, followed by #2.

I agree. I'd say if we did three, we could consider notifying the player that this is happening... though does that give away too much information about your enemies?

As for more than once on the same Compact, we have options for that too.

1. No restrictions. This seems like the most CiV-like approach.
2. One per Compact - players can only ever steal one vote at once.

Related to this is the spawn rate for this GP - I don't think very many would be generated over the course of a game, even for a diplo player, compared to, say, Scholars for Science players, or the 3 Culture types for Culture.

I think we should go with option #1 to start with and introduce restrictions if bulbing becomes a problem, rather than try to fix it before we're sure how it will come together. (Since the restriction layers completely on top of the "no restriction approach" with no wasted work.)

I agree. We just need to make sure this GP has a second ability that's helpful throughout the game. Middle-of-the-game compact votes aren't always super important, so it is theoretically that somebody might just hoard the units for the whole game until a bulb. But, in most cases, bulbing with GSs isn't smart, since you can really use science throughout the game. If the second ability here is useful enough, keeping these guys around for long would pose a similarly problematic opportunity cost.

But yeah, don't anticipate tons of them popping up either (the GPs, I mean).

OK, lame I know, but I'm out of time again. Be back later.

 

[counterpoint]

I return once again, bearing gifts. Gifts of WOTMOD

Sorry for all the little posts... it's been hard finding long streams of time to do this.

I'd say the ability is disabled when you're at war with the Tower - you just have to use the CS influence boost ability, which is still a pretty good ability.

ok. this seems fine.

I think the Great Merchant was Tall/Wide balancing mostly because of the Gold (since that leads to more CS relationships, and Gold production is a Tall/Wide thing). The same ability could have been a pure Gold dump, but Firaxis' flavor effectively meant you were forced to spend a portion of it on the CS you did the Trade Mission with.

Do we want to go through the Diplo GP spawning mechanisms for this GP now, or wait until these posts have shortened a bit?

More on the Ogier below.

ok, regarding the Diplo GP spawning. I think since we have to do at least some of that for all the GPs, since there are some new ones, it's probably best to tackle them all at the end. I'd hate to waste time on a GP spawn and then scrap that GP.

And I'm going to break it up into sections again.

Well, I got you beat... 4 posts in one day, instead of one.

Happily, I think we can stop here, since I'm fine dropping the probability man GP type and using Dice in my Head on the Great Captain. (A note on generation: I figured it would be generated on the same EXP counter as Great Captains and the player chooses which they want when they get to the threshold to generate a new GP.)

ah, interesting. Moot, but interesting!

Mm, I don't agree here. I think he's actually the strongest proposal for this GP role. I don't think he was really presented as the anti-Perrin, he was just the antagonist in Perrin's story arc, and crossed over with some of the other storylines as well.

Dreamwalker seems like a great name for this GP type - since we don't want to use the name of a character from the books as a type.

Dreamwalker, huh?

Well why didn't you say so?

It's crazy, but this is the first time I've considered that word as the name of a GP type. That makes no sense, I know, since I said the word in my previous post. I sort of compartmentalized it, though. I guess I always figured that we were going to have a dreamwalker unit or something, and obviously we don't.

So, I don't really see this as a "slayer gp." For me, the prototypical DW is the Wise One, but that's obviously a different sort of thing. In any case, I think this flavor distinction doesn't matter, in the end. But for what it's worth... I don't think Slayer was ever really referred to as a dreamwalker in the books. I doubt most players will hear dreamwalker and assume we're talking about or even referencing Slayer. And nor should we be using him as that model, IMO. I mean, he's two souls mixed together, for chrissakes. He's described as a "dark creature" in the wiki.... I don't see this at all as appropriate flavor for a GP in a game of civ.

Dreamwalker is a good name for the GP, though! Slayer or no.

This GP type is a T'a'r GP type, the same as the Wolfbrother, so would be generated by points from Glimmer-gathering. That expands his usefulness because if you generated him, then you definitely have more use for him than most players, because the mechanism used to do so is only triggered by players that are T'a'r invested.

It also creates a nice, subtle Light/Shadow dichotomy in in the T'a'r GP race - nothing mechanical about their role is exclusive to either side, but players will see that flavor influence.

I figure once the player reaches the threshold to generate a T'a'r GP from Glimmer-points, then they choose which one of the two they want.

OK. I think the choice thing couldn work, though it's not the way it works in BNW. I think that's probably by design - the GPs are balanced against each other, it seems, with the knowledge that you have to actually make use of a particular GP you're given - you don't get to sidestep a GP type to find one you like more. A little weird to have the choice, when it isn't a one-shot policy kind of thing. I'm not quite sold, but I'm not wholly opposed to it either. I think I'd prefer to figure out a different way to do it, though. In any case, I think we can figure it out definitively after we settle on the GPs.

See above rant on slayer (and previous rants) for my take on the light/shadow dichotomy.

I'm also not sold on create dragonsworn ability. As I mentioned previously, both of these abilities are alittle arcane, and solving that problem by grouping this GP spawning with another GP spawning type doesn't seem to address the issue, IMO. Also, flavoring the GP as a Dreamwalker (which we should)... then suddenly the Anger Dragonsworn ability makes zero sense.

Anyother abilities you can think that might make sense? Is the Rush Eyes and Ears one too stupid? Can it be boosted? What fits with the flavor?

Also, how will the DW unit compare while in T'a'r to the WB, or the projections? Are there abilities/features that are unique to it?

I think recombining the Engineer (Hurry Production and Manufactory) and reflavoring them as Ogier Stonemasons makes sense.

ok. do we like that name?

I think giving Stedding a per-city bonus is coming at the problem from the other side - rather than making the bonuses from Stedding more accessible to Wide civs, it actually makes them better for Wide civs. This means that Tall players in isolation are more likely to ignore them in favor of more lucrative bonuses, though they may want to grab some to stop runaway Wide civs, which I think is an inherent imbalance.

This is valid logic and I see how that would cause some problems.

Do we think that a GP type with Culture Dump and Reclassify Relic would be one players want to get? (And is it just another Culture GP type - how does it get generated?) I usually ignore the Culture dump ability in favor of the GW in the BNW GPs, but that's not necessarily the best idea. I could see us being able to create a flavorful GP combination for these abilities.

That would let us put Stedding Influence + Vote and Advise a Governor on some kind of Ogier GP type that's system-specific, and then we'll have used all of the abilities that we wanted (I think).

Super alternatively, we could axe both GP types - dropping all 4 abilities completely (probably adding the Stedding influence + vote to the Ambassador's Influence ability)? I'm not sure if I like this idea, but it's a possibility, so I figured it's worth discussing. We could choose to drop one and not the other, or neither, we'll see.

I'd be fine with the Grove flavor popping up elsewhere, since we're having such trouble fitting it into any of the GP roles correctly.

Bah, this is such a challenge.

OK, first off, I'm not super comfortable totally axing the Culture Dump ability. It seems to me to be pretty necessary. I find myself doing it plenty when I'm relatively late in the game and not going for a culture victory. In any case, we've somewhat established the keeping of the BNW abilities, and at this point - with only one left - I feel we might as well keep that going.

Putting Ogier aside for a moment, we should recall that this floating ability exists because of the Interpret Viewing power. That is one that's causing us some design trouble, but it's also one that we really like the flavor for.... So, ideally we keep it.

But, we could theoretically combine the culture dump with that ability, right? Make it dump less culture, but provide the specialist? Probably too weird.

Alternately, we could combine the Culture Dump power with the Relic power, if you thought neither of them was strong enough or cool enough to stand alone. But then there's the question of what to do with the other ability. Ugh. Also, I'm growing a bit wary of having this 4th culture GP, partially because of the GP-spawning aspect as distinct from the other 4.

OK, reset. can you think of another Tall/Wide ability that might work well paired with Culture Dump, or perhaps mixed with reclassify relic? If we can't think of something, then I feel like maybe we need to do something drastic.

I'm not sure we really need the stedding diplo GP type. I'm struck by the fact that the Stedding Vote ability is kind of backwards. The Stump votes based on how much influence you have, right...? So, mechanics that affect that vote should probably do so by simply improving your influence - and we already have that ability, in the ambassador. Don't need it, right?

Advise a Gov is ok, but just ok.

please have some good suggestions, because this is getting hard.

True, maybe the mission isn't "Govern City" but "Appoint Governor" or something along those lines, so we avoid the flavor weirdness of Ogier Governors.

We could do that. But it's not *that* weird...

The Tuatha'an UA could involve moving cities!

Tuatha'an, destroying game balance one wagon at a time.

We'll see! Backporting those kinds of changes to BNW would be... complicated.

Well, good thing our entire coding team acts as if they are of one brain!

 

[S3rgeus]

We're back! Second server migration successful, apparently!

And now with regular backups!

OK, lots to consider here.

We were so close to being finished with T'a'r. What have you done?

First off, just to be clear - does attacking a T'a'r unit with your wolves/wolfbrother constitute a DoW? Intuitively, it should, right? But at the same time, I think that kind of ruins what we have here. The primary purpose of the wolves and such are "T'a'r" management, in addition to to killing the Nightmares. It seems like the scramble for glimmers and such will be more fun if people are able to freely fight, without a DoW - it's like your Effing with people in T'a'r, not necessarily *killing* them or anything.

...

thoughts?

Many things! Responding to things in a relatively random order:

Yes, I agree that destroying a Historian that is trying to excavate a Hidden Antiquity Site (replace with all WoTMod nouns and verbs as appropriate) should require a DoW, whichever mechanism we decide to use to drive the system.

I also agree that creating a projection with the Historian has a side effect of creating a persistent scout in T'a'r, which is not good. I think this is enough of a reason alone to drop the idea of Historians having a similar projection-interaction with T'a'r as other units we've discussed before.

I think that we've already accounted for the additional difficulty of #7 (have to gather glimmers) by shifting the policy requirement from a finisher to a normal policy, so I think we only need to balance up against the BNW requirements if we remove from or add to those requirements.

This means that teleporting to the site of the Reflection upon usage of a Historian ability is a net easing of difficulty for Culture players. I'm not too keen on such a teleport system - the Reflection you revealed may not be anywhere you could normally spawn a T'a'r projection (which is what this would look like to the player) or possibly not even somewhere you've revealed the fog.

We could very simply make the Reflection vs Site pure flavor dressing - have the Historian become "ghostly" while excavating the Reflection to represent that they've delved into T'a'r in the process. Killing them in the main map layer then isn't a flavor problem, because it's an easy characterization that they're moving back and forth between T'a'r and reality during the excavation, or that their bodies are left in reality while they explore in the Dream.

Mechanically, the actual consumption of the Reflections is then identical to the Hidden Antiquity Sites in BNW. Is that a problem? We've created some differentiation via the method the Reflections are revealed, which, combined with the flavor dressing on the mission, may be enough of a change for the players? Unless we come at it in a more fundamentally different way.

 

[S3rgeus]

Gold from BS
Well, I think if we're removing the Diplo component, we can afford to make this one a little cooler, right? Maybe make it slightly more gold, available to international trade partners (whether CS, civ, TV, or stedding)?

Also, A0 we could keep the amount of gold the same as in BNW, but have there be a gold bonus based on the number of routes you have with that civ? Or, if that then encourages people not to spread out their routes (which is a viable strategy at times) in a boring way, maybe we just offer a significant Gold boost if you have a trade route at all, but allow the mission to ALL other entities, even if you don't have a route set up.
I'd say the other civ gets nothing

Or, crazy B), it provides normal gold, but provides you with, essentially, a one-term trade route with that civ, and all that would entail. Too much? Obviously that then brings up the whole what-do-they-get thing....

A is safer. Thoughts?

A one-term trade route is a trade route that lasts for a normal time and then doesn't turn back into a trade unit? That's a very interesting ability. Would the player choose the city on their own side that the trade route links to? (The mission would then only be available if you have a city within range of the target city that doesn't already have a trade route with the target city.) I think the other player (the one who doesn't have the Merchant) would then get the normal bonus for being the recipient of a trade route.

I'd actually be quite ok with this approach - the same Gold bonus as BNW, but with a new trade route at the target.

Naval Combat Boners
Yeah, we'll just have to monitor the EXP levels and such and see if they need to be tweaked. Some situations will end up with much, much faster production of this particular GP types.

Cool, this sounds good then.

Weight Rand-dumbness
OK, I'm glad we've arrived at the same point on this particular topic.

But yeah, I think replacing the GG Aura with "Dice in my Head" is cool, both for flavor and such - makes it way more clearly Mat-aligned - but also because then it can encompass channeling and gentling and compulsion and... resistance against those things.

Coolio, sounds good!

Scholar (moronic pun impossible)
Yeah, definitely see what you mean here. That said, I think just "Library" feels underwhelming. Can we put a descriptive word with it, or something, so it feels more special and in-universe? Brainstorm, go:

Great Library
Library Compound
Library Cluster
Official Library
Estate Library
Lord's Library
Library Manor
Library Hold
Library Collection
Collections
Library Annex

Of course, I'm also ok with just Library, though.... Just not so exciting. oh well.

I quite like Estate Library from that list!

Dang, that was fast. So, Science = knowledge now.

Yeah, expanding knowledge could work. What about "Uncovering it"? "Resdiscovering"? It's like you're tapping into things that were lost from the AoL and stuff. I like that vibe.

Sorry, gonna have to update the science summary, yeah? Well, is it still called the "Science Victory"?

Urk, this has a lot of etymological knock-ons. I think we're basically axing the word "Science" from the mod, since that's a more modern/Earth-like word than what we want for the mod.

I like the notion of rediscovering knowledge, also plays well into time being a wheel. It might be a bit narrow though - it prescribes a certain kind of thing to contribute toward "rediscovery" of knowledge (feels like it should be sourced from the AoL directly, rather than just being rediscovered (eh?) separately).

Eh... I only like the the Great in front of Captiain, because that is actually an in-universe term and such.

I'd say we do whatever we need to do to avoid using Great in front of Trader or Merchant. Even using a different, similar word, "Legendary" or "Grand" something.

Could Also do Merchant Chief, but that's kind of lame and out of universe. Merchant Lord? Merchant Baron? Merchant Commander? Caravan Liege? Merchant Overlord?

We could also make the term more epic than trader/merchant... but such things sound sort of modern:
Mogul
Tycoon

Merchant Baron sounds good - was Baron ever used as a title in WoT? If not (I'm not seeing anything after some cursory searching) then Merchant Lord might be better.

Pretty sure the summary is totally empty!

Blargh, I don't know why I thought you were doing this summary! I should start editing things into it.

Doomseer
I think I mean both of those things. It's being balanced (for spawning) as if it is a Culture GP, I imagine. That Culture GP would then have the option, however, to produce ANY kind of GP point - Scholar, Producer, Merchant, etc.

I think this is potentially a balance problem - however, as we've both noted, the Min flavor feels like it should absolutely do exactly that.

Right. If you think it wouldn't be to micro-managey, then I'm fine going for it. I'd be willing to bet that some majority of BNW players don't really "get into" the specialists so much (me included) - I wouldn't want the GP to be less useful or too freaky for such players.

Hmmm....

I think the "easiest" solution you mention is probably also the "best". I think the flavor sucks a bit, but it might be worth it in the end for simplicity's sake. A bit nuts having a "generalist" for culture like that, but hey....

As far as the culture-output-determining the yield... That's what I'm talking about as being a bit too complicated. I think it might be too hard to use strategically for some players, and probably even weirder for the AI. I wouldn't think that's the right direction to go in.

Is there a way to make it be a +1 to all the GP point types in the city, or, perhaps, just the top 3 types (unless we're ok with this specialist producing more than an average citizen, which might be ok, considering it is a GP expenditure)?

I mean, we're talking about things that are all Tall/Wide balancing, at least, so I think it could be doable. What if Doomseers are generated through acclimation of *any* of the Tall/Wide balanced GP points? Obviously, the targets you need to reach would be much higher - maybe they could even scale proportionally as your GS/GM/GE counter also scales (but maybe don't raise the cost of that counter)

That way, while Min is mostly culture, she can certainly boost your Science through her viewing ability - and could also be Spawned through science, but it'd be a significantly more inefficient way of doing it than using culture gp points would be.

Also, this would prevent us from having to deal with a new GP-point producing specialist and building, which a 4th culture GP type would likely do.

EDIT: I'm being dumb again. Obviously, Min is the GWr analogue here, so I think we'd probably be keeping her spawning mechanic and specialist-configuration similar. Right?

so?

As you've noted in your edit, Doomseer is the Writer stand-in, so we can't disconnect her from the Culture-driven spawning mechanism.

I do wonder whether or not being able to produce small amounts of off-focus GP points would actually be a problem. (Science vs Culture vs Production are all still Tall/Wide balancers.) I also don't think a culture-based output would be too complicated for players. It's another one of those mechanics that when we write out all of the edge specifications and justifications, it sounds complicated, but for players it's basically:

• If I produce more Culture, this Specialist gets better.
• She produces Scientist points in Science-y cities, Gleeman points in Culture-y cities, and so on for other yields

Also, your suggestion later on of combining this ability with the Culture dump one is very good - I think, regardless of what we decide about which GP points the Specialist produces and how, having a Culture dump at the same time would be totally fine. That brings us back to having 3 Culture GP types.

I'm reluctant to go straight in on making the Specialist just produce Culture GP points, because I feel like that misses the key part of the flavor that makes Min the source for this GP type. We risk falling too close to effectively reskinning BNW (though we do still inherit a need to rebalance in this case, since we've changed the delivery mechanism for those additional points), and I think we could be better off creating something quite different.

+1 to all GP types or +1 to the top 3 has the same crossover potential as the "top GP type" method above, which I think will stand out more for players, so out of the 3 we should go for that one.

I'm not sure there's any structure or thing like that that really pushes back the blight....

I think our only other hope for flavor lies with the idea of Ta'veren, and the Mat vibe. You know, Ta'veren persuasion and such. Taken land through sheer awesome recruitment power. Is there a way to somehow visualize that on the map? Also, this thing has to deal damage to enemies...

I mean, a "Recruitment Fortress" is stupid. Should it be something supernatural, and not really a building at all? Like "Web of Ta'veren," representing just an area where he exerts tons of influence? "Pull of the Pattern" and whatnot... visualized somehow. I wish there was something like a "bubble of good."

What if the structure were called a "Fortress" but the ability was simply called "Claim Land"? The player is staking their claim over a certain territory and planting their armies there, disregarding other civs' claims.

I keep thinking there is some in-universe name for sudden upheavals in the Pattern, but I'm failing to find one online.

I think if we're still using the prefix "Great," we might as well call them GP ...

I see what you mean about GP feeling like it means something, especially mechanically.

I'd say we could make it an obvious flavor swap and call them Legendary People, but then that sort of butts up against the "legend" GW type.

On that note, we'd have to rename GWs...

I dunno.

Don't we have to rename Great Works anyway - or were we thinking we could leave that the same?

I think I agree about dropping the Great prefix from all of them bar the Great Captain, and not use Great People as the name of the system. Luminaries it is then?

I agree. I'd say if we did three, we could consider notifying the player that this is happening... though does that give away too much information about your enemies?

Yeah, it should be very rare that this actually occurs, given the number of votes the Tower will probably have. I don't think it gives away much about your enemies, since you only really know that a large number of Ambassadors have been used, rather than anything about who used them. (The biggest piece of info it gives you is probably that the current vote is very important to many players - which you probably already knew if that was the case.)

I agree. We just need to make sure this GP has a second ability that's helpful throughout the game. Middle-of-the-game compact votes aren't always super important, so it is theoretically that somebody might just hoard the units for the whole game until a bulb. But, in most cases, bulbing with GSs isn't smart, since you can really use science throughout the game. If the second ability here is useful enough, keeping these guys around for long would pose a similarly problematic opportunity cost.

But yeah, don't anticipate tons of them popping up either (the GPs, I mean).

The CS influence boost ability is the proposed second ability for this GP, which should be relevant throughout the game.

Sorry for all the little posts... it's been hard finding long streams of time to do this.

No worries. I'm always happy to have time to build more elaborate spaceships!

ok, regarding the Diplo GP spawning. I think since we have to do at least some of that for all the GPs, since there are some new ones, it's probably best to tackle them all at the end. I'd hate to waste time on a GP spawn and then scrap that GP.

Cool, we'll go through the spawning mechanics for the Ambassador once we're done with the rest of this!

Well, I got you beat... 4 posts in one day, instead of one.

You can always edit your old posts.

Dreamwalker, huh?

Well why didn't you say so?

It's crazy, but this is the first time I've considered that word as the name of a GP type. That makes no sense, I know, since I said the word in my previous post. I sort of compartmentalized it, though. I guess I always figured that we were going to have a dreamwalker unit or something, and obviously we don't.

So, I don't really see this as a "slayer gp." For me, the prototypical DW is the Wise One, but that's obviously a different sort of thing. In any case, I think this flavor distinction doesn't matter, in the end. But for what it's worth... I don't think Slayer was ever really referred to as a dreamwalker in the books. I doubt most players will hear dreamwalker and assume we're talking about or even referencing Slayer. And nor should we be using him as that model, IMO. I mean, he's two souls mixed together, for chrissakes. He's described as a "dark creature" in the wiki.... I don't see this at all as appropriate flavor for a GP in a game of civ.

Dreamwalker is a good name for the GP, though! Slayer or no.

OK. I think the choice thing couldn work, though it's not the way it works in BNW. I think that's probably by design - the GPs are balanced against each other, it seems, with the knowledge that you have to actually make use of a particular GP you're given - you don't get to sidestep a GP type to find one you like more. A little weird to have the choice, when it isn't a one-shot policy kind of thing. I'm not quite sold, but I'm not wholly opposed to it either. I think I'd prefer to figure out a different way to do it, though. In any case, I think we can figure it out definitively after we settle on the GPs.

See above rant on slayer (and previous rants) for my take on the light/shadow dichotomy.

I'm also not sold on create dragonsworn ability. As I mentioned previously, both of these abilities are alittle arcane, and solving that problem by grouping this GP spawning with another GP spawning type doesn't seem to address the issue, IMO. Also, flavoring the GP as a Dreamwalker (which we should)... then suddenly the Anger Dragonsworn ability makes zero sense.

Anyother abilities you can think that might make sense? Is the Rush Eyes and Ears one too stupid? Can it be boosted? What fits with the flavor?

While I agree that Dreamwalker does seem like great flavor for a GP type (I suggested it after all, based on your use of the word!), I worry here that we're trying to fit an extra GP ability in in order to allow us to use that flavor, which I think will end up creating a less mechanically useful GP type. (Unless we come up with a whole new GP ability?) I think that Plant a Dreamspike and Create Dragonsworn stack up well against Wolfbrother in terms of utility, and Slayer is a good example of being able to put those two abilities together flavorfully.

Is there more we can do to generalize Slayer into a GP type? Can he be a Two-Souled Warrior or something to that effect? I think we can evoke the Slayer flavor without creating something inherently "evil" (like you've said, we don't want a GP that's a "dark creature").

Also, just considering here, should Plant a Dreamspike be a multi-use ability? Twice?

Also, how will the DW unit compare while in T'a'r to the WB, or the projections? Are there abilities/features that are unique to it?

Flavor tells us that Slayer would be stronger than Wolfbrothers or wolves individually, but could be weaker than a couple of them acting in concert. (This makes sense mechanically as well, since a single Wolfbrother can create multiple wolves.) He would have the ability to attack, like Wolfbrothers and Wolves (which is different from projections).

The flavor for Wise-One-style Dreamwalkers would be a bit different - they're arguably less powerful than wolves/Wolfbrothers (Egwene noted how powerful Perrin was despite being self-taught in T'a'r usage).

I think the results here depend on the decision above.

ok. do we like that name?

Ogier Stonemason sounds good to me! It's in-universe and fits with the flavor of what the GP does.

Bah, this is such a challenge.

OK, first off, I'm not super comfortable totally axing the Culture Dump ability. It seems to me to be pretty necessary. I find myself doing it plenty when I'm relatively late in the game and not going for a culture victory. In any case, we've somewhat established the keeping of the BNW abilities, and at this point - with only one left - I feel we might as well keep that going.

Putting Ogier aside for a moment, we should recall that this floating ability exists because of the Interpret Viewing power. That is one that's causing us some design trouble, but it's also one that we really like the flavor for.... So, ideally we keep it.

But, we could theoretically combine the culture dump with that ability, right? Make it dump less culture, but provide the specialist? Probably too weird.

Alternately, we could combine the Culture Dump power with the Relic power, if you thought neither of them was strong enough or cool enough to stand alone. But then there's the question of what to do with the other ability. Ugh. Also, I'm growing a bit wary of having this 4th culture GP, partially because of the GP-spawning aspect as distinct from the other 4.

OK, reset. can you think of another Tall/Wide ability that might work well paired with Culture Dump, or perhaps mixed with reclassify relic? If we can't think of something, then I feel like maybe we need to do something drastic.

I'm not sure we really need the stedding diplo GP type. I'm struck by the fact that the Stedding Vote ability is kind of backwards. The Stump votes based on how much influence you have, right...? So, mechanics that affect that vote should probably do so by simply improving your influence - and we already have that ability, in the ambassador. Don't need it, right?

Advise a Gov is ok, but just ok.

please have some good suggestions, because this is getting hard.

Right, further to what I mentioned with the Doomseer above, I think we may be looking at dropping the fourth Culture GP type here? So we wouldn't use the Reclassify Relic ability (unless it's used below, we may drop Advise a Governor in such a case). What do you think?

I don't think the Stedding Vote ability is redundant with the Ambassador's influence ability (were it to work on Stedding) because of the way the Stedding votes work. Even being the Stedding's ally, you only have 2 votes to pit against the Stedding's own 2. A bonus of 1 vote would allow a single ally to override the Stedding for a single Stump (only thwarted by another player voting in tandem with the Stedding, or several in concert, etc.). On the other hand, an influence boost when you're already the Stedding's ally doesn't actually help you, which makes this ability even more useful when it exists separately from a generic CS influence boost ability. (It's always useful for any Stedding, whereas an Influence boost ability is only useful for Stedding that it would take you from Neutral -> Friend or Friend -> Ally.)

I would be happy to use Reclassify Relic in the place of Advise a Governor on this Ogier GP type, if we prefer that ability.

Well, good thing our entire coding team acts as if they are of one brain!

Uncanny how they do that!

 

[counterpoint]

And now with regular backups!

great!

Many things! Responding to things in a relatively random order:

Yes, I agree that destroying a Historian that is trying to excavate a Hidden Antiquity Site (replace with all WoTMod nouns and verbs as appropriate) should require a DoW, whichever mechanism we decide to use to drive the system.

ok. good!

I also agree that creating a projection with the Historian has a side effect of creating a persistent scout in T'a'r, which is not good. I think this is enough of a reason alone to drop the idea of Historians having a similar projection-interaction with T'a'r as other units we've discussed before.

no historoprojections!

I think that we've already accounted for the additional difficulty of #7 (have to gather glimmers) by shifting the policy requirement from a finisher to a normal policy, so I think we only need to balance up against the BNW requirements if we remove from or add to those requirements.

This means that teleporting to the site of the Reflection upon usage of a Historian ability is a net easing of difficulty for Culture players. I'm not too keen on such a teleport system - the Reflection you revealed may not be anywhere you could normally spawn a T'a'r projection (which is what this would look like to the player) or possibly not even somewhere you've revealed the fog.

oh, wow. Totally forgot we'd made it earlier in the policy chain! As long as T'a'r isn't tech-locked so early that that proves an additional impedence, you're very right.

We could very simply make the Reflection vs Site pure flavor dressing - have the Historian become "ghostly" while excavating the Reflection to represent that they've delved into T'a'r in the process. Killing them in the main map layer then isn't a flavor problem, because it's an easy characterization that they're moving back and forth between T'a'r and reality during the excavation, or that their bodies are left in reality while they explore in the Dream.

Mechanically, the actual consumption of the Reflections is then identical to the Hidden Antiquity Sites in BNW. Is that a problem? We've created some differentiation via the method the Reflections are revealed, which, combined with the flavor dressing on the mission, may be enough of a change for the players? Unless we come at it in a more fundamentally different way.

Yeah, I think the visual flavor (and different spawning mechanic) may be enough. It still seems more unique than it was in BNW, though, which is good. Also, the fact that more will become available as you uncover glimmers will make it feel more fun, i think.

Quick clarification, though: are these guys revealed immediately once the civ has the requisite glimmers, or do you need to see them on the t'a'r layer via scouting as well? I'm assuming they just "pop in" once you grab enough glimmers.

Also, do Reflections get revealed in the same order for all civs, or is it random? Like, if Andor and the Aiel have each revealed 5, is it possible that those are not the same glimmers? I suppose the larger question is whether these Reflections are "created" by gathering glimmers, or simply revealed.

I've updated the Culture Summary.