S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

aha! That last one did it (the Tools key). The first key you referenced was already correct, as I suspected. That second one was definitely not.

It all works! Should be able to play with it later. The BNW tree loads, as does your little one with 2 techs...

Awesome, glad those work!

The Old Prototype loads, but does give an error message as it does. It's the same "unhandled exception," but this time it says "The given key was not present in the dictionary."

Spoiler :

See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary.
at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key)
at IndieStoneTechEditor.TechEditorGlobals.LoadNewRow(Civ5XmlGameDataRow row)
at IndieStoneTechEditor.TechEditorGlobals.DB_LoadedDatabase(Civ5XmlDatabase db)
at IndieStoneCiv5XMLTools.Civ5XmlDatabase.OnLoadedDatabase()
at IndieStoneCiv5XMLTools.Civ5XmlDatabase.SetExternalLoad(Boolean bLoading)
at IndieStoneTechEditor.TechTree.DoLoad(String[] FileNames)
at IndieStoneTechEditor.TechTree.Load()
at IndieStoneTechEditor.Form1.loadAlteredTechTreeToolStripMenuItem_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.RaiseEvent(Object key, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEventInteractive(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.FireEvent(EventArgs e, ToolStripItemEventType met)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ScrollableControl.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripDropDown.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


************** Loaded Assemblies **************
mscorlib
Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 4.0.30319.34209 built by: FX452RTMGDR
CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v4.0.30319/mscorlib.dll

I don't know if this problem means much. What I can say is these techs aren't linked via "paths" (well, Fire and Stone Tools are). Not sure if that's corrector not.

Interesting, do you have all of the DLC for CiV? That tree is a bit more complicated and might have modified some DLC content that I have from the base game, and I'd imagine if your game didn't have it then it wouldn't be able to work out what to do. Otherwise I can take a closer look at that tree and see if there are any issues if I load it up from a different PC.

 

[S3rgeus]

This is about End of Illusion.

I'm not sure, does the mechanic "feel" like an Enhancer? I'm a bit unsure. I do feel like from a balance perspective it might work better that way - it is later in the game than a Founder, while at the same time doesn't feel as much like a "wasted custom" for the founder since Enhancers feel to me to be less splashy than Founders, at least in perception - but I do feel like the Enhancers all have some mechanical similarities that may not necessarily make this one a good fit. What do you think?

I've never really had a sense of a true guiding design for the mechanical similarities that holds up for all of the Enhancer Customs/Beliefs. I think we're best off using them as a way to either limit their use in the very early game or to make specific combinations impossible because we feel they wouldn't be fair. On the basis of the former, Enhancer sounds good to me for End of Illusion.

ok, lots to talk about here. First of all, mechanics.

I can't comment on the flight animations because... about halfway through my first game of CiV I turned off combat animations, as I found them (and movement!) far too slow for my liking. So I may not be a great authority on that. That said, I do find late game warfare in CiV (and previous versions of civ) a bit too time-consuming.

However, I do think that we should probably include some kind of version of this mechanic, if only for the reason that it does serve to build on the boosts to seige warfare in the industrial era - in fact, in many ways flight is the first great counter to artillery. That said, I think I'd be in favor of a simplified version.

Flight seems to be rather unit-intensive, in a way that feels somewhat incongruous to WoT. There's fighters and bombers, of various levels, who can attack, intercept, and do air sweeps and such. Then there are also carriers. Then there are AA guns. I can't really imagine us creating "anti-raken" units, and such. It feels a bit much. I feel like the late-game channeling mechanics give us enough cool stuff to work with. So I could imagine doing without the "anti" stuff, perhaps reduce the numbers of upgrades on these units (or else eliminate them completely) and theoretically even doing without the discrepancy between fighters and bombers, or at least do away with some of the complexity of it.

Interesting, I always find multiplayer games quite strange because of the lack of animations!

I'll address most of how we could deal with flight below, but I figured I'd call out here that I don't think we'd want to axe AA gun equivalents because otherwise whatever our aircraft solution is, it will be extremely powerful without some way to deliberately counteract it for a well matched opponent. (It's fine if aircraft stomp all over a civ that hasn't researched the counter yet, because that's a product of the attacker being ahead, but a civ that's in the tech lead should be able to produce something that mitigates against enemy aircraft.)

Regarding eras and such, I think we can keep the same rough unlock era of range-3 siege tech (though we may not call it dragons or make it gunpowder related). I do like the idea of splitting the range-3 and indirect fire components, in order to, at least somewhat, slow the massacre. Flight, in its somewhat reduced capacity, could potentially unlock at a similar point to when it does in CiV.

Despite the fact that I suggested it, I'm beginning to think that splitting range 3 and indirect fire might not be a good idea. It could go on to exacerbate our progression problem (the fact that we have to stretch to fill the Modern-Atomic mechanics) by making that jump to range 3 feel less useful to players. We'd be powering down the previous power bump and then moving part of it elsewhere, which would overall lead to a slowdown in player capabilities, which I don't think is quite what we want. We want the flavorful progression of technology to be slower, but not necessarily the mechanical capabilities of the players.

I think we'd be in a better place if we could keep the two together and have a novel way of addressing the mechanical progression we need for the Modern and Atomic eras. Which I'll go into below!

As far as flavor, as you've noted, there are some challenges. It looks to me like we have a few options:

1) use raken for only the Seanchan, and use some other kind of flying creature/device for everybody else
2) use raken for everybody. If we need them for the Seanchan, use a different version of raken
3) use some completely distinct, non-flight mechanic to create the same gameplay effect.

regarding 1), I'm not sure what else this could be. You mention Aviendha's visions showing some non-raken flying creature. Are you sure? I don't recall that. Looking through a brief description on the wotwiki, I see the mention of raken, but not anything else. Care to remind me?
Otherwise, we could theoretically justify some sort of advanced tech, though it would be a bit of a flavor stretch. Jo-wings are probably out of the question, as they're super advanced, but there may be a kind of rickety flying machine that was being developed in the Academies or something that we could appropriate for these purposes. That said, we've previously decided that those kinds of techs are going to be the last-age techs, associated with Innovations and such, which doesn't really fit their appearance earlier in the game (I think it'd be in the Era of Encroaching Blight).

I didn't remember any specific alternate flying flavor from Aviendha's visions, but I figured it would be a good place to look to see if such alternate flavor was available. Since the war between the Seanchan in the Aiel (and then everyone else) over some time would have allowed time for the other civs to gain expertise and resources to utilize and counter raken, it might give us our explanation.

I've read a bit more about the visions to refresh my memory and specifically looking out for these opportunities, but it doesn't look like there's anything there for us. Agreed, Jo-wings are too far into AoL level stuff.

The Academy-type stuff is something that could be made to work, but it does sort of overlap with our existing plans for the Science Victory. We might not need to use the flying stuff there, in which case it could be available here, but then we have the timing problem that you mention.

Overall, I don't think we're likely to go with this one.

Aside an aside, here's a super interesting blog post about Aviendha's visions.

Regarding 2), the flavor of raken most certainly is associated with the 'chan essentially exclusively, and that is kind of yucky. However, it's possible that that is acceptable.

First of all, it may be that we don't need the raken for the Seanchan. Between the sul'dam (which I imagine would include damane), deathwatch guards, and theoretically any of the other exotics, we have plenty of options for UUs for the Seanchan. Heck, a "bug helmeted warrior" would be more iconic and inspired seeming that most of the UU's we'll find for the other civs.

That said, it's possible we'll "need" a Seanchan flyer UU because, essentially, they're the only civ that could have one. If we're trying for an even spread of Uniques across various unit types, modeled somewhat off of BNW, then a UU aircraft could be a part of that (a la the USA in BNW). I can't think of another civ that would have one. This issue (generalized) is addressed as a part of my Civs/Uniques framing post, that is waiting in the wings for when we finish this topic.

We don't need to get into this too much right now, though, aside from leaving open the possibility of a Seanchan unique flyer, and not sticking us into a problematic corner at this stage in the design phase.

Essentially, I think we could be ok using raken as a generic unit, because there is a rather large amount of Seanchan flavor to go around. We've already decided to go with this with s'redit and lopars as luxuries, despite those being linked only the the Seanchan in the books. They are simply animals that could exist in anybody's land (so the logic goes).

In any case, I can see us going a few ways with using raken as a more generic unit:

A) raken for the generic unit and to'raken as the UU
B) raken and to'raken as the generic units (either fighter and bomber, respectively, or else as the latter being an upgrade of the former) with morat'raken and morat'to'raken being the UUs
C) raken and to'raken as the generic units, with der'morat'raken and der'morat'to'raken as the UUs.

'A' is the simplest, and perhaps cleanest, but prevents us from using to'raken as a generic unit. I suppose we could use morat or der'morat for generic upgrades - though we'd have no bomber option.

'B' is clean enough, but doesn't make much sense, really. All morat means is "one who handles" - so, then, the non-Seanchan exotics are working without handlers? Nonetheless, the vocab is there!

'C' may make the most flavorful sense, as the der suffix implies a "master handler/trainer", which understandably the Seanchan might have. That said, it is, by far, the clunkiest sounding and most inelegant.

I can see this working better than option 1, and of the three here, I think C is probably the most effective. Even if der'morat'raken is a mouthful, it's an in-universe term that makes sense in its role.

However, I do really feel like as a player I'd be disappointed by this approach. We've discussed the "WoT within CiV" vs "CiV within WoT" before - the latter tending much more towards mechanical overhauls to make everything fit the flavor, and we're generally going for the former. I feel it goes just that bit too far into the mechanics-favoring side though. We've got a set progression for a decent chunk of the tech tree from BNW that makes a lot of sense for the WoT-verse. But as we've discussed above, that progression relationship between WoT and BNW starts to break down around the Modern era, in terms of the expected implications of the mechanics involved.

I say the expected implications, rather than just simply "the mechanics involved" because the CiV aircraft system doesn't really mechanically require that flying be involved. All of the flavor in BNW is set up that way, but mechanically, aircraft are units that can only move between cities and have crazy long range. There are a variety of other subtleties to their combat, compared to other units, but none of which are inescapably flying-related.

And in this case I feel like we'd be making the raken available to all civs solely because it fills the same role as aircraft in BNW, even though the mechanical role of aircraft could be quite a bit more flexible. This is also something that only appears in the late-game, so changes to it are more measurable - there are fewer knock-ons since it doesn't have as long to spiral into so many combinations.

I'm going nuts with the italics here. I hope the people appreciate it.

I do! They should really invert back to normal when quoted, because they get lost currently, which is a shame!

Regarding option 3) above - the use of raken for the Seanchan only, and going in a totally different direction (non-flight-related) for everybody else, we have some options. Of course, it should be noted that we also have the option of doing any of these and excluding raken altogether (or else include them as minor flavor elsewhere) as a Seanchan UU (or unit at all).

A regular ol' channeler attack probably doesn't quite work, as we've previously decided that channelers cannot end their turns on cities (so as to prevent city defenses from getting too epic). And besides them, stacking them as planes are would be very, very bizarre. Other options?

Balefire: This could theoretically make some sense as a long-range missile. That said, I think we like it better as a kind of nuke, and I think it's best that way.

Flying: I don't think anybody really mastered that, did they? Certainly not by the eras we're imagining.

The Ways: not sure how exactly this would work, but theoretically you could assault another city via travel through its waygate

Traveling: this is perhaps the most flavorful and mechanically viable option, though it would, I think, require some changes to the air combat mechanics in CiV. We'ver previously imagined traveling as a map teleport - perhaps, combat wise, a kind of X-Com replacement is the most likely course. However, we could consider traveling as a kind of stand-in for air combat. If, say, a channeler is adjacent to a (friendly) city, they gain a "gateway assault" mission or something, and functions as a bombing run. These channelers also could theoretically work as AA in a similar manner.

This makes some decent flavor sense (in fact, having a Seanchan UU raken replace this functionality [which damane possibly wouldn't have] could be a decent flavor call-out to the assault on the Tower. Actually, raken could theoretically serve as well as "generic" fighters to the bomber functionality of the channelers).

That said, it does make things way, way more complex, in that it's yet another pile of abilities channelers get. Not to mention, it makes traveling a much more complex game concept.

I think you're very much onto something with Traveling here. As you've called out, we've previously discussed Traveling as something that would act like Paratrooper/XCOM Squad, where the unit (a channeler) could teleport across a visible section of the map. I really like this flavor and I think keeping that's a good idea.

However, like the Paratrooper is dropped out of a plane, we can use the Traveling flavor elsewhere simultaneously. As you've said, tacking another ability onto channeling units could be problematic, and I agree. And like I mentioned above, the mechanical role of aircraft is "units that can only move between cities and have crazy long range".

What if the actual unit doing the attacking wasn't a channeler? There could be a "Traveling squad" unit (name totally should not be that), which is actually flavorfully a set of "normal" military personnel - guys with swords or spears or whatever. But they're stationed specifically in cities with a channeler who can transport them into the area around the city for short periods of time for raiding attacks on enemies.

I'm thinking something along the lines of selecting them like aircraft above the city, selecting a target within range, and then Gateways pop up next to that target. A bunch of dudes with weapons run out of the Gateways and attack the targeted unit, and then run back through the Gateways (visually they disappear, flavorfully they're headed back to the city).

This lets us have this kind of Traveling for both pro- and anti-channeler civs. The pro-channeler civs' flavor explanation is that they have channelers as a part of their military. The anti-channeler civs' flavor explanation is that their channelers who create the Gateways are slaves. (Both of these flavor explanations are implied - the extreme Philosophies don't have different units.)

They're moved between cities by Traveling (explains why they're not moving across the map like other units), and the channeler sending them needs to know the destination (explains why rebase doesn't have infinite range). They are physical people who take up space, which explains why the city would have a maximum capacity, but would also let us do something with a building to increase that capacity (like Airports do for aircraft). The fact that the units fight face to face justifies why the "aircraft" takes return damage, even from melee units (which is a bit dubious in BNW actually), but their advantageous attacking arrangements explains why it's usually less damage than the attacker usually receives in normal face to face combat.

Mechanically, the actual usage of these units is identical to aircraft - we haven't needed to do any technical heavylifting to achieve a system that feels very different from BNW, but still achieves the same kinds of mechanical goals. (The only big addition is the coolest unit attack animation ever, involving Gateways and soldiers appearing through them and then retreating back through them.)

That's the crux of where I think would be a really good idea to go with this, but there are a few addendums of some additional stuff we could do if we adopt this:

You could station "Traveling Squads" (zomg, the name) on Traveling Grounds Improvements. There are loads of mods that let aircraft rebase onto Forts (which makes Forts useful!) and we'd be doing a very similar thing. Traveling Grounds would then also provide double-functionality (long distance targets for channeling units that have gained the Traveling ability, and stationing posts for "Traveling Squads" (lol, name!)), which would make their status as a gold-costing improvement more palatable.

Dreamspikes now have more strategic value, since they would be a counter to the lategame aircraft-like mechanic.

The potential Seanchan raken UU is now much splashier (very different from what it replaces, if it replaces the "Traveling Squad", or it may replace a different unit, or we may not make it a UU at all). Worth noting that a cool flavor line-up and mechanical ability synergy of such a raken unit would be an immunity to Dreamspikes.

Variants for other aircraft like fighter/bomber are easily done because you just Travel different "military personnel" in the variant unit. (One might be heavy shock troops, the other agile skirmishers, if we wanted to keep the light/heavy approach of fighter/bomber.)

Interceptions can be done by also Traveling out to the scene of a battle when an enemy "Traveling Squad" (blarg!) Travels into range. Then have the fight between the two Traveling units instead of the target unit and the attacker.

You've mentioned AA guns above, and I think that's definitely an important role to fill. That would likely be similar to the interception stuff above, but instead be a Traveling unit that's an actual CiV unit (moves across hexes and such), but uses Traveling defensively to intercept other Traveling units attacking friendlies nearby.

You've also mentioned some alternative flavor explanations, which I should comment on too!

Balefire, totally agree, this works better as a nuke stand-in.

The Ways are certainly closer. There's a flavor problem with needing a Waygate near the target, which shouldn't be something flexible enough to target any hex, which is what we need. But depending on how it was done, the damage taken by the attacking unit could be flavorsplained as being inflicted by Machin Shin instead of the defending unit, which works well with the Ways flavor.

It's also available a bit earlier in the tech tree, but it almost as the opposite problem from the other approaches, in that it flavorfully should be available basically right away, because the Waygates predate the Breaking. (Though if we make Waygates something players can build - like a building or National Wonder - we're breaking this flavor anyway. Though that building or National Wonder would conflict with this usage of the flavor.) The targeting difficulty makes me think that the Ways isn't quite the right fit for this.

Flying, agreed, I don't think any channelers got this working correctly during the Third Age. Certainly since it wasn't used prolifically in the books, it would feel very out of place as such a suddenly important mechanic.

And there are the knock-on effects of stacking of aircraft being non-existent (you'd be limited to how many can surround a city), which is both good and bad. It certainly makes flight more limited, especially considering the units themselves are vulnerable to attack in a much more direct way.

This isn't too much of a problem because aircraft stacking is limited in BNW as well. (Default 4, 8 after building an Airport.) We would either lose the ability to have a building increase the siege capacity of a city (which is part of what the Airport does) or could introduce a building that allowed our adjacent-units to stack in those hexes. That could be a bit confusing, and would definitely have new implications for defensive battles as well. Dropping the Airport-like ability to expand the siege capacity of the city is probably safest on this approach.

This is moot if we go with the Traveling stuff discussed above though.

Also, I think we weren't going to have traveling become available until pretty far into the game - would the modern era equivalent (encroaching blight?) be sufficiently late? Perhaps we could unlock certain aspects of traveling at different times.

This is a good point. Yes, I totally think we could unlock different aspects of Traveling at different times. So if we unlocked the "Traveling Squad" (there's a name here somewhere) earlier, we can give the channelers the Paratrooper-like Traveling ability on a later tech.

I'm not sure I can really think of other non-flight options, though. Maybe some sort of weird assault through T'a'r? Is there any way to make that work?

T'a'r could also be made to work. Attacking people through their dreams is something that a few characters achieve in the books and could be weaponized for something like this. Dreamspikes could also come into play here as well (since they block the shifting teleportation in T'a'r as well as Traveling in the physical world). I do like the way our existing T'a'r stuff works, but this could be a simultaneous use of that flavor, like I suggest for Traveling above.

 

[S3rgeus]

I simply meant that I was dumping a pile of concepts there to draw attention to them, but didn't need you to address them line-by-line or anything there.

Coolio, it looks like we're addressing Archaeology in your next post after the one I'm quoting here.

It seems like most of the rest will remain the same, except for Nuclear Weapons?

And it looks like we've stumbled on Nuclear Weapons briefly above, in the form of Balefire. Is there a lot of mechanical detail to how we could do that? I remember us discussing Fallout as the consequences of the Pattern unraveling after a Balefire strike, back at the beginnings of eternity.

great.

I say leave it, then!

Yeah, I say leave it as is then. The only reason I presented Bonus resources as somehow more viable an option for reconsideration is, simply, because they are less important to the game overall (being mere yield bonuses), and thus might not ruin things as bad if we changed em a bunch. By no means is that a reason to change things, though!

Ok, cool, Strategic, Luxury, and Bonus resources' unlock requirements all remain the same!

The larger point still stands, though - most Improvements are doled out early in the game.

Definitely.

Agreed. I could see it being downgraded in that way. That said, even the dirt paths are still perhaps referred to as "roads" in the books... Perhaps a better way to do it is just have it be Roads which upgrades to Cobbled Roads or something. A Path linking a vast empire seems perhaps a bit too silly.

Yep, that seems fine.

Yeah, I agree. We could consider renaming them for flavor reasons (e.g. irrigation like old civ), but an actual downgrade is somewhat silly.

Right. I'd say, though, that the ruins upgrade would probably *still* upgrade a scout to an appropriate ranged unit, though. We certainly don't want an Ancient Scout upgrading four eras ahead to a super scout, and besides, turning your scout into a very mobile archer is super useful.

Yeah, we can make it do that.

yeah. Doing all this will likely be a lot of fun mixed with a big pain in the rear. AKA I can't wait. That said, we will wait, as I think this is all "phase 3."

Yes, we don't need to go into any unit naming and such now!

right. I was just struck by how lame it's going to be when we're 80% done with the mod, and it's playable, but the graphics for the wonders will all be stand-ins from BNW, as in when you build the Toppless Towers, a Pyramids shows up next to your city...

And all the unit models. And their icons. And the building icons. And the tech icons. It's endless!

a great idea! Then again, there's nothing to say that Bridges shouldn't exist in this world...

Yeah, we could stick with bridges, the graphics involved in changing the roads stuff would be pretty crazy anyway. (Might be impossible, who knows how the visual road connections stuff works, none of that is in the code we have, that I know of.)

Yeah, especially if Flight (and nukes) aren't as a big a part of it. There can/will be a lot of cool things that can occur in the late eras with regards to the Power.

As far as deterioration of the power, I don't think I agree that that's a problem. It's true that the power of channelers deteriorates over the course of the Age, but that is most definitely *not* the case in the final years of the Age. Tons of new things are rediscovered, to say nothing of the super powerful channelers that are born (I suppose this all starts with Cadsuane, who, I suppose, was born in the Era of Encroaching Blight).

It only really seems to rebound in the Era of the Dragon, when a lot of stronger channelers start coming to the fore together. Still, I'm fine with ignoring that flavor problem because I don't see a way of making it co-operate with CiV's notion of progression throughout the game. Plus it's a relatively subtle point that I think most fans will be forgiving of.

I do remember reading that about Ea. I haven't played it yet, but this makes me feel like I should. I've just read a bit about it, and yes, it sounds like you're right.

I don't think we need to do that, though. Not that it wouldn't make flavorful sense - in truth, it'd make flavorful sense for even base civ - but it's just simply a bit more "different" than we need to be for that portion of the game. That is to say, I don't see it being required by our flavor. It's also sort of Ea's "thing," and would be a bit lame to steal it, I think, especially for another fantasy mod.

I don't think we'd be at risk of stealing Ea's main mechanics in this consideration. Ea's establishing of civs as tribes and such has a lot more to it than what I suggest we take. It's got options for abilities and quests that lead to being able to become certain civilizations. All sorts of unique stuff there. I'm more thinking that it provides a good example of how pre-Agriculture can be done within CiV and still be a fun experience (can't say about it being balanced from experience, but Pazyryk seems like the kind of person who would keep it reasonably well tuned).

This leads me to what will have to be my last points for the night (I'll take up the individual flavor comments next time):

First, on process: I think we don't want to dive too far into "random" flavor at this point. You ask later in your post if we should come up with flavor for the mid(and later)-game stuff at this point. I say no. I think the priority right now should be to stick the mechanics where they belong. Figure out where things unlock, and stick them there. Figure out the actual techs later. Of course, a big part of that, though, will involve detailed discussion on specific things (like flight, traveling, etc.) that may involve flavor. That's fine, but I think when I commended on your previous tech ideas (chain of command, etc.) I opened up a can of worms we probably should keep closed.

Agreed, this sounds like a good approach. And also agreed re the specific techs below - let's try to wrap up any non-early ones as quickly as possible, even if it's just "let's come back to this, then"!

Then, once the mechanics are in place (at least mostly), I think I'd prefer to start at the beginning. Perhaps this is simply a matter of preference - when I write a piece of music, I often map out the whole thing, roughly, but when I actually start churning out music, I typically go from "left to right," i.e. write minute one, then minute two, etc. To me, the beginning often informs the end. So in this case, knowing what we called "Optics" will very much inform what we call "Compass." I feel like I could come up with a guess as to what tech would unlock traveling, but honestly I won't really have a good sense until we've arrived at that particular era. Thoughts?

Yeah, working from start to finish sounds good. I think we want to have the big mechanical discussions like the flight one above first and define where we want the whole Tree to lean for each era, and then do this more comprehensive left to right for putting in flavor with the "melee unit 1" (and such) entries on them.

This lets us keep to a decided framework - it's flexible enough that we're not too limited, but it also makes sure our techs don't dead-end themselves.

Secondly, and lastly, I've been thinking about this whole "where do we start" thing (Agriculture vs. Fire) and I've begun to not like the idea of starting so stone-age. Simply, I don't think it really fits with our flavor.

Recall Rand's visions of the Aiel during the breaking. They're rolling around in wagons, trying not to die. People killing them presumably have "real" weapons. Presumably, these Aiel keep these wagons once the Breaking ends (and become the tinkers). My point is that these people didn't need to discover the Wheel. They didn't need to discover Fire. They didn't even really need to discover "Ironworking" in the same sense as Early Man did. They knew *about it*, they just didn't have the means to *do* it. I think, in general, mankind did not lose so much knowledge that they were essentially pre-historic. They just lost institutions and infrastructure.

So, I'm suggesting that instead of sending people back to the stone-age with our early techs, let's reframe the early techs as people rediscovering some lost aspects of their society. There's no flavor disconnect with Farms or "foraging" and such - they have already "discovered" farms, they just can't do them yet. So, techs more like:

Community
Working the Land
Division of Labor
Clanship
Bartering
Oral History

EDIT:
Another way to look at this that struck me, comes from character skills in role playing games, like D&D and such. I know those things are very individual-based, but still, they might work for this effect as "things your people are mastering," instead of truly things they are discovering for the first time. Things like:

Survival
Mountaineering
Tracking (perhaps a stand-in for Animal Husbandry... probably too close to trapping)
Orientation
Herbs (probably a bit better a little later)
History (a stand in for "writing" or something, if we assume that writing wasn't lost at all - though it could have been)
Appraisal (though that's perhaps better for Guilds or something a little later)
END EDIT

and so on. I could imagine some of those unlocking Farming, Mining, or trade routes. Of course, there's certainly room for some "technologies" as well - stoneworking, for instance - but these don't need to feel laughably primitive as Fire or Basketweaving might.

Then we can have the "real" CiV techs appear later and feel more natural. Mining (renamed?) could stand in for Bronze working or something, and Agriculture (which is, really, a pretty advanced concept) can appear later as well as a food upgrade.

What do you think?

A lot of good points here - a lot of the flavor dissonance with the improvements and the infrastructure of founding a civilization disappears if we move the technological flavor along a bit. I do think we could do some Ea-like foundational period stuff that wouldn't mean too much of a mechanical impact (much like my suggestion for Traveling as aircraft is a big flavor change, but a small mechanical one). The WoT flavor doesn't necessarily impose doing that on us, but I definitely think that it wouldn't be unreasonable to do so. The Breaking was long (239 to 344, according to the wiki, inaccuracy due to calendars not being kept correctly) and Rand's visions could have been from any time in there. A period of time with basically an absence of civilization for that long could destroy the majority of human progress. But you're right that it's unlikely to bring anyone as far back as needing to rediscover the usage of fire.

Starting off earlier also gives us more flavorful room for stretching - since we want the same number of eras but "slower" technological progression, adding more to the beginning helps toward that goal without us having to draw out the technologies of human history that are described in the BNW tech tree from Ancient to Industrial as much.

So I don't think the WoT flavor pushes us definitively one way or the other (starting later than Fire, but before Agriculture is definitely possible), so we should decide based on whether the added techs at the front will be useful to us in a general sense. Do you think the value of the added progression at the beginning will outweigh the difficulties with making things like Improvements available at that time?

I'd like to go into a bit more detail on this, but I've run out of time tonight, so I'll be back tomorrow!

EDIT:

Right! Continuing from the above. The suggestion to start later than Fire but before Agriculture seems to line up fairly well with what you're suggesting about new techs here (both the "rediscovery" ones and the "D&D" ones). (In fact, this is probably exactly what you're suggesting?

In which case, yeah, I think your approach is a good one! I can see us combining the two proposals you've got here, Survival, Mountaineering, and Herbs co-operate well with Community Clanship and Bartering, among other combinations.

 

[S3rgeus]

back for more! This time, lots of nitty-gritty! Again, a lot of this nitty-gritty flavor and nomenclature is probably best left for later. That said, we can wrap up these mini discussions below, and bring them back later. Of course, the super-early techs are quite relevant now!

Agreed, I think it's best if we leave the nitty-gritty flavor for later techs alone for now, since the ground is shifting under them with the earlier techs! I'll call that out on a few quote blocks and we can decide if we want to keep discussing.

re: fire.
see blurbs above. There is, after all, evidence that homo erectus weilded fire. Something tells me that the Breaking didn't knock civilization back *that* far.

I could see it doing it, but based on what we're discussing in the previous post, this is probably moot.

Hmmmm, I can't help but feel like the knowledge of the Pattern, and rebirth and stuff, is pretty advanced. I suppose it could work as an early tech if it's simply the notion that the knowledge has been passed down from the AoL. But it seems a bit more philosophical, to me. The kind of thing you start talking about only after you're not dying of starvation and such. I see a tech like "The One Power" or "The True Source" being a more fitting early tech - simply knowledge of its existence, and understanding that people can access it.

I wasn't thinking of knowledge quite that precise, none of the death/rebirth stuff. Just the notion that the world is a tapestry and everyone's lives are a part of it - a kind of founding sense that could lead to the deeper understanding you mention here later on.

I suppose I see the appeal of the dual meaning, though weaving (of baskets and such) is perhaps a bit too specific a "tech" for civ - it's not like we have "painting" and "glass work"... though there *is* pottery, so I suppose it's not that different!

Exactly, things like Pottery show us that the granularity for the techs is pretty malleable - BNW doesn't shy away from pulling very specific things (Pottery, Fertilizer, Dynamite) up alongside the very general (Physics, Education, Theology). So I think one of the important things for us with WoT is that we pick things that are very recognizable flavor.

I think this is probably one that I'm going to suggest we nix per my previous suggestion. Foraging has to be something well-known to civs during the breaking - otherwise they probably wouldn't have survived.

I can see an argument for a Foraging tech representing more than just the ability to go find food in a place, but this is mooted by the other tech discussion above anyway.

as stated above, I see "The One Power" or something like it making more sense very early in the tree. I think something that reflects the organization of channelers in spirit would be most appropriate for the WT-meet tech.

Yeah, that sounds like a good distinction. What would a first or second column Power tech do? What of our Power mechanics do we want to unlock almost straight away? I suppose this tech could give you some baseline Spark? But without unlocking Wilders, there's nothing to use that Spark on. (Unless we want to unlock Wilders this early?

Right, so I suppose the question is when this would occur - probably worth deciding now, since this may very well be one of our mechanically significant techs. So what would be the effect of this tech/the guild? I do recall us tossing around the idea that the guild allows you to build dragons. If so, then that's pretty late-game (especially if dragons aren't the industrial-age 3-range units, but the step beyond them). If not that, then what would it do, as (I presume) a national wonder? Is this something we need to decide now or is this simply a question of flavor?

I don't think this will necessary be a big deal tech from a mechanical point of view. I don't think we want to unlock Dragons with this - the Illuminators were around for a long time before anyone made Dragons. I was thinking that an Illuminators' Chapterhouse would be something of a GP building like the Writers' Guild, a National Wonder. That would place this tech somewhere in the era 3/4 area.

I'd say if we decide now that we don't want this to be the Dragons unlock point, then we can come back to this flavor later when we get to the part of the tech tree where we might otherwise insert it. I don't see it being something we'd want towards the beginning, which we're doing more detail on now.

I suppose it depends on what exactly it means to "research" these techs. Discovery *of* saidar/saidin? Or weaving of them? Might need to be clarified.

I suppose saidar could be an unlock point of wilders, which calls to mind - when should they become available? I assume not Turn 1, but are they an era 1 unlock? If so, are they tied to the first power-related tech, or is there some other power-related tech we'd have first (maybe the one that unlocks the Shrine equivalent or something?

As far as saidin, again, it somewhat depends on what it means to research saidin. Discovery of and understanding of saidin seems like it'd be much earlier than the things you've described - perhaps this is the unlock point for Gentling (which is probably pretty early on)? Does gentling have an unlock point? I'm guessingMC's themselves don't, as they're involuntary.

Regarding clarification, I actually think the techs are somewhere where we want to leave things much more open to interpretation of the player. While there are civilopedia entries, most players will only see a word/phrase and an icon that describes a tech, so we can afford to be very loose with the meanings and implications of "researching" these things. Saidar and Saidin are great examples - they're great flavor, things that need to be studied to be understood, and have a lot of connected flavor in our units and buildings. I don't think it needs to go much further than that - any deeper meaning is implied by the things that the tech unlocks.

Regarding Wilders, I'd forgotten you asked these questions here, and have re-asked them above! I'd say Wilders probably aren't something we want to be available immediately - they should be on a tech. And we want players to be able to accumulate some Spark before unlocking Wilders, otherwise it's just frustrating that they can't build these cool channeling units that they otherwise have access to.

I can definitely see the Power tech that unlocks Wilders giving civs some baseline Spark (maybe 1 or 2) to get them started, which makes me think it should be column 3 (first column in Classical) kind of area.

Saidin I think would come much later - the player voluntary Saidin mechanics aren't available in the early game. This could even go so far as being an unlock point for Asha'man and the Black Tower, toward the end of the Tree.

I've been thinking more about unlocking Gentling on a tech, and one difficulty of that is that the Red Ajah's ability doesn't do anything until the Sister has the Gentling ability. Might we be better leaving that as a default ability of Aes Sedai?

ok! I take your word for it. That said, it doesn't feel like a tech, so much as a thing that is the result of techs. This is flavor and can be decided later, but I'd prefer the tech to be more general somehow (something to do with working with rock or something).

This comes up a few times and I don't think we should try to go this way if we've got more recognizable WoT flavor in the "thing" rather than "making of the thing". Like I mentioned above, Pottery, Fertilizer, Dynamite, Radio, and many more BNW techs are "things" that have implications. I don't think we should try to shoehorn in WoT flavor that doesn't work with the things we need to mechanically unlock, but I think in general we have a lot more recognizable WoT flavor that are "things" rather than processes that make them. And BNW shows us that they can still make completely valid techs, so I figure leaning on that is a good plan in general.

I actually figured this Slate Roofs thing could be fairly early. It could unlock something like an Inn, which might be an early happiness building, or something to that effect. It could fill any mechanical role really - we'd just need to pick some everyday buildings that fulfill that role and have roofs.

My googling is simply because I couldn't remember it, regardless of Graendal's previous pleasures regarding it. I think streith, especially being something that isn't produced in the third age, probably makes sense as a material for Relics more than anything.

Yeah, good point, it doesn't ever get made during the Third Age, only some AoL remnants found, so it's not the best for a tech, even at the end of the tree.

I suppose fancloth is something that is created in the third age, not just a discovery? Sure, that sounds fine, though again, I'd prefer it be titled in a way that relates to that which enables its creation, not just the thing itself. Ex. the tech is "Imbuing" or something better, which unlocks some new ability for warders, for example.

I think this one is a prime example of the flavor stuff I mentioned above. While I understand wanting the tech to be a process that relates to its creation, I think we gain a lot more from the specifically WoT flavor. Imbuing doesn't particularly mean anything in WoT (I don't think?) but Fancloth is a known callout to the books.

Ah! I think they'd make good ancient ruins, and Angreal Cahces, as well. Probably best not to use it as a tech (it's never made in the Age, anyways).

Agreed!

looking at the misc summary, it appears we want the Horn project to become available in the Era of Enc. Blight, around when the Seals become visible. The Hunter unit becomes available in that same era, I'd assume. Should the Hunter unit be also a regularly viable combat unit? (perhaps too detailed for now)

We did place it there before, but given that it doesn't have any decided effects yet, I could definitely see us moving it to a different place as well. I could see the Hunt for the Horn project becoming available much earlier in the Tree than the actual discovery of the Horn, seeing as the Hunt happened many times before the Horn was actually found.

The absolute earliest I could see that happening would be the end of era 2 kind of time, but it would entirely depend on what the project did.

The Hunter could be a viable combat unit, but I think that will largely be determined by how close to the unlocking of visibility of the Horn the unlocking of the Hunter is.

OK, previously I'd been thinking that Wells were a strategic resource. Now I'm reminded that it's Angreal Cache instead. So, are Wells a thing in the game? Is this just a (late-game) Power upgrade?

It could be a late game channeler upgrade and an effect (much like bridges over rivers or revealing the map), something like "Your channelers can attack in Stedding and near the Guardian".

Yeah, I gotcha, I guess I just think the term "siege mechanics" is kind of advanced sounding. Its simply a matter of flavor-clash, somewhat. "Siegecraft," or something like that might feel more natural. Alternatively, something like "Carpentry" or "Woodworking could work, though probably catapults are too late in the tech tree for an advance like that.

Siegecraft sounds good to me for a tech that starts off the siege warfare line. Carpentry of Woodworking could work if we were including some other non-warfare effects on the same tech.

Yeah, I can see the value in keeping Gentling unavailable until some point in era 2 or so. What do you think?

I've ended up putting my thoughts on this above! Limiting it only until era 2 could work though - most civs won't receive their first Aes Sedai until that sort of time. It's early enough that if it really mattered to them, they could beeline that tech and unlock Gentling before/at the same time as getting their first Sister. (The tech that meets the Tower should probably be one of the upstream dependencies of the tech that unlocks Gentling.)

Yeah, this is all in the specific flavor. Exchange rate is a very modern term, to me. Maybe this is a good spot for the aforementioned "Appraisal"?

I could see both co-existing as techs, I was definitely short on economic-relevant stuff when I went through techs before. It doesn't seem very modern to me, it's obviously got a modern meaning, but it's something I see as recognized throughout history through the different ways that currency exchanges have worked. It would be a tech for near the end of the tree anyway, so something we can come back to.

I think I'm in favor of having specific power-related techs unlock the upgrades. It's more strategic and I think will be more satisfying to players.

With that in mind, we'd best get a little more detailed, at least so we can line up the right amount of upgrades. So, some linked questions:

1) How many upgrades do we want?
2) What exactly is being upgraded/unlocked

The specifics of 2) can be solved later, but we should probably at least figure out what each upgrade point does in general, so we can figure out the overall scope of channeler upgrades. As far as I can see, the following power-related things could be upgraded/unlocked via researched techs:

1) Combat stats of saidar users (perhaps increasing all stats in one go, or certain ones at certain points), perhaps separating Aes Sedai from more generic channelers
2) Combat stats of warders
3) combat stats of male channeling units (perhaps also including Asha'men)
4) specific abilities/missions of female channelers (healing, gentling, linking, traveling, healing of gentling)
5) specific abilities of warders (ignore terrain, shadow spawn detection, "bushido.")
6) upgrades to Spark
7) discovery of the White Tower
8) Projection into T'a'r
9) Sending of Novices to the WT
10) The Cleansing of Saidin

These things could be upgraded as a unit, or separately. I can imagine the channeler/warder/MC upgrades all happening as a part of one single unlock, and the other things (abilities, non-combat things) happening sometime alone, sometimes in conjunction with other upgrades, etc.

So, which ones should occur when? How many, overall, do we want? Are there certain parts of the game where the Power should get a big boost, and certain parts where it should fall somewhat behind regular tech (broadly speaking - the specifics can come later)?

Lots of stuff here! I think everything you've called out here make good unlockable things for techs, with a couple of exceptions on #4.

Healing, if referring to the targeted ability, should probably be always available since it's unique to the Yellows. The Healing aura each Sister has could be an unlocked thing though, if that's what you mean here.

I mentioned above that I think Gentling is probably best not tech gated because of the implications for the Red Ajah, but that isn't necessarily decided.

For the rest, all look good!

We're discussing projections, linking, discovery of the Tower, the Cleansing, and traveling unlocking elsewhere.

Sending Novices to the WT sounds like a good idea to gate on a tech. If meeting the Tower is a first column of era 2 tech, then I'd say this should be on the next column, dependent on the "meeting" tech. Another thing that Tower-focused civs can focus early, but this should have another dependency so that it forces them to diversify a bit more before going straight for it.

Making channelers fluctuate in relative power comapred to other units via the distribution of their upgrade points sounds like a very good idea. As you've said, something we can calibrate specifics of later.

I think we'll probably want 4 or 5 combat strength upgrade points for the two Saider user categories (Aes Sedai, non-Aes Sedai Saidar users). 2 or so combat strength upgrade points for Saidin users (including Asha'man units), since they skew more towards the end of the Tree. (Are there any other Saidin units aside from MCs and Asha'man?) And then maybe 2-4 combat strength upgrade points for Warders? Some of those combat strength techs would probably also have one of the Warder abilities on them as well.

Do we want the involuntary MC unit to follow this same upgrade path? I think it might actually be best if these scaled more like FDs, since they're partially adversarial for the player that controls them, due to the madness. (And they stop appearing once Saidin is Cleansed, right?) If they scale on specific techs, this could lead to players avoiding certain techs to underpower their MCs and make them easier to get rid of, which seems a bit bizarre and meta. (Not too likely though, because techs have big impacts in general, and the civ is likely to need the tech or one that depends on it.)

Upgrades to Spark is also a good one and I touched on this elsewhere. We probably don't want many of these though, since anti-channeling civs will also research these techs. Maybe three total, including one at the beginning-ish when we unlock the Wilder?

The other thing is "where" (not when) these Power-related things (or, truthfully, any of the stuff that concerns our new mechanics) should lie in the tree. In BNW, military techs tend to congregate towards the bottom, while exploration, religion, and science stuff tends to be on the upper paths. First off, are we preserving that dynamic? Secondly, where does the channeling stuff fit in with all of it?

This is definitely very important, because this structure is what causes civs with different focuses to actually act differently mechanically, because they traverse the tree differently. A key point is also that non-military civs can beeline non-military techs toward the end of the game, reaching the last column before Future Tech without researching Dynamite. And vice versa, military civs can beeline down their side, though that doesn't usually work as well - they need to dip the other way for Science techs to keep pace. It also allows non-Science civs to prioritize their own techs that favor their victory without having to get through too many irrelevant ones.

I think we'll want the Power-related stuff mostly in the "middle" of the tree, so the top edge of the military section. I think this is because we'll have some Power-y stuff that is military (channeling units that can attack people) and some stuff that's more Culture-y and Diplo-y (civ-wide bonuses and T'a'r; Tower relationship).

The truth is, the Mystic sites unlock is rather large - it will probably also unlock the Hunter unit, and of course, the search for the Horn. We can also unlock the authenticity thing, but I figure that's not going to be useful/appropriate until later in the game. If Mythic Sites unlock in the Era of Enc Bl, I'd guess the Seal Divination probably shouldn't be available untilt he Era of the Dragon, at the earliest, right? Or, do we want that Divination available, but the actual destruction not available yet? I'd figure the actual destruction and authentication make more sense on the same tech unlock - let the players search for them beforehand if they wish (before the've even chosen a side, theoretically).

This sounds like a good approach - unlocking the ability to find the Seals first and let players go and get them if they wish, even before they've chosen an side. Then unlock the Divination and Destruction abilities on the same tech in the Era of the Dragon.

sounds good. Do we want/need to figure those out now, or is it enough to just say there will be some of them and figure it out later?

I think it's enough to say we want them around there for now and will come to it when we get to that part of the tree.

Yeah, I think you budgeting ca. 500 alignment points from buildings on average per civ, which isn't very much. That either means these can't be massed produced (i.e. are a national wonder), or else occur late enough in the game that even if they are mass-produced , it won't matter. What do you think?

I think late enough in the game that even mass production still falls within the amount of Alignment we're aiming for. Alignment is more of a late game mechanic, like Tourism in BNW, so tilting it that way makes sense.

Yeah, I think I like early Era 2 or something, though this depends completely on when we want Aes Sedai unlocked, since that is what it would do for most civs.

Can civs who discover the WT before this tech use Aes Sedai, or are Aes Sedai at all unlocked with this? That would mean that civs that discover WT before can build influence and stuff, but can't really reap the rewards yet, which is probably fine.

First column of era 2 sounds good to me for this one. That way, civs can beeline it straight away if the Tower is a big part of their intended game plan and they can be a part of that process very early.

I think civs who meet the Tower the old fashioned way shouldn't be treated any different from usual. If the Tower chooses to give out Aes Sedai, it just looks at the civs it has met so far. The Sisters would be suitably weaker at this point, without most of the upgrading techs, and I imagine we'd have the Tower's decision system to assign them very small quotas (probably 1 at this stage), but there should be upside to being physically close to the Tower, much like there's upside to being physically close to other CSes and getting a head start on their quests (though obviously we don't want it as extreme with the Tower).

Yeah, maybe early in era 8? Though, we should keep in mind that the Black Tower has to actually be build, which means the actual production of the units would be a little after this.

This almost suggests era 7 since it can take 15-30 turns to build a Wonder, without a pre-cooked Great Engineer. I think we can decide on this when we get to that part of the tree though - unless this is our defining mechanic for one of these eras? In which case we should probably take it up above, maybe where the Balefire quote block is.

I suspect you are talking of Healing. I think that we could probably have Healing be always-available, though I could also imagine an early unlock.

However, I'm speaking here of Healing of Gentled Units, which is not the same (it turns a "Gentled Chaneller" back into a "Male Channeler". What do you think?

Oh, right! I missed this last time. Yes, I think this should definitely be gated on a tech and probably a very late game one, era 7/8.

Similarly, does the Healing of Gentling of MCs interact at all with our Philosophies stuff? Does Liberation do this better or something? Or is everybody equal? The only reason I think of it is because the existence of this ability is yet another incentive to gentle and not kill or donate to the tower - you can get the units back [way] later. Thoughts?

Blerg! Blerg is how it interacts with it!

More seriously, this is a very good point. We could give the Oppression bonus to killing Gentled MCs as well, though that would actually encourage civs who are planning to pick Oppression to be more Gentling-oriented for the first part of the game, which isn't quite intended.

We could disallow Oppression civs from using the ability, but that doesn't match up with the way Philosophies work.

We could introduce a chance of the channeler going rogue immediately upon being Healed, and increase that chance for Oppression, but then we're stacking another penalty onto them, which isn't great.

We could leave it be, since Oppression civs that are otherwise making use of their bonuses won't have many channelers or Gentled MCs?

Any other options?

Yeah, that's kind of tricky. I think 8 is fitting - the truth is, this may be happening on the eve of the LB (or during) anyways, right? I don't think that's necessarily bad.

I think the Last Battle is too busy for the Cleansing to be happening at the same time, unless the Cleansing was left alone/delayed at the project stage, and is happening unusually late. Some civs will have to send units all the way across the world for the Cleansing, which isn't something they can afford to do during the LB.

yeah, though I think maybe the tech could be called "Gateways."

Yep, that would be cool too!

yup. similar place in-game?

This is about Archaeology. Yes, I think so!

yeah this was indicated in the misc summary, I think.

I'd say relatively late. Probably era 7 or something (though I bet they existed in seanchan earlier than that). They should be splashy, I think. Though, we do probably want them to feel distinct from Grey Men, so they should probably come first.

I think the next era after the one that unlocks the first Eyes and Ears sounds like a good idea. That would be era 6. Given their maximum lifespan (45 turns) we want players to have time to go through a couple, if they choose to, by the end of the game. Most players' biggest restricting factor will probably be generating level 2+ Eyes and Ears.

right about the dream ones.

As far as the Amb, looking at the LP summary, it does look like they aren't produced by LP points, so we're off the hook!

Agreed, it doesn't look like any of the Ambassador point gains are things that could be scaled reasonably by buildings. I could see a Wonder modifying your Ambassador point rate - something like an additional +1 per CS ally or something, but we can address that later.

ok. So which era are you thinking? Is this going to be on a "power-related" tech, or something else?

I think we can put this on a Power related tech, probably somewhere in era 3/4. Probably on the Culture-y vertical placement of Power techs (so somewhere in the top of the middle).

I'm not sure what the benefit would be, really. Early-game LPs are pretty rare, after all. I suppose the question is whether we think the accumulation of a Gov bonus over time is somehow imbalanced versus the accumulation of, say, an LP improvement. I'm not sure it is.

Yeah, I think we're fine leaving this as an ability LPs always have and we can look at this again if it becomes a problem.

I meant the trigger techs. Now you've reminded me that those are world era based, so it doesn't apply. I don't think we'll be needing specific techs that provide advantages or anything. Though, of course, we could have certain military techs have shadowspawn relevency around the end of era 2, for example.

Cool, sounds good. Yeah, a Shadowspawn-fighting tech around the end of era 2 sounds good.

please do! I don't quite get the implications yet, as I haven't been able to use the editor, but I can see how seeing the abilities would be useful!

The difficulty is mainly the way Firaxis have done all of those abilities. None of them actually have anything to do with each other, they just share an icon. So I'd need to hook up all of the different effects individually, even though a lot of them only happen once (embassies, bridges, defensive pacts, etc).

Hooking them up generically with some simple strings as descriptions would mean that it would rely on a new DB table that I could provide in a mod, but then the Editor wouldn't work with the unmodded game! And that's how most modders use it.

I'll come up with something! It would be possible to store those non-base-game descriptions in something specific to the Editor so it could be used as a modders' reference even though it doesn't do anything, which would mean it doesn't need an actual DB backing.

It's like the good old days (thread pages 10-30, probably)!

I don't know how we kept that pace up for so long!



We're coming up with a lot more specifics for some of the early game stuff, so I'll take a stab at creating a provisional update to the DropBox tree in the next few days and see how sharing that info visually goes!

 

[counterpoint]

Interesting, do you have all of the DLC for CiV? That tree is a bit more complicated and might have modified some DLC content that I have from the base game, and I'd imagine if your game didn't have it then it wouldn't be able to work out what to do. Otherwise I can take a closer look at that tree and see if there are any issues if I load it up from a different PC.

Yup. Definitely have all the DLC. We'll see if it is a problem once we're really working on it.

I've never really had a sense of a true guiding design for the mechanical similarities that holds up for all of the Enhancer Customs/Beliefs. I think we're best off using them as a way to either limit their use in the very early game or to make specific combinations impossible because we feel they wouldn't be fair. On the basis of the former, Enhancer sounds good to me for End of Illusion.

alright. Enhancer it is.

And that's that with Paths! Though we'll need to rename some things once we've done the tech tree.

I'll address most of how we could deal with flight below, but I figured I'd call out here that I don't think we'd want to axe AA gun equivalents because otherwise whatever our aircraft solution is, it will be extremely powerful without some way to deliberately counteract it for a well matched opponent. (It's fine if aircraft stomp all over a civ that hasn't researched the counter yet, because that's a product of the attacker being ahead, but a civ that's in the tech lead should be able to produce something that mitigates against enemy aircraft.)

Yeah, I see what you mean. It does seem to add a few layers of complexity, though. I could also simply some units having extra defense against air units or something like that.

I'm not actively campaigning to remove AA or anything, though. Just thought we should consider a path that simplifies the whole system a bit (maybe also removing bomber/fighter differentiation, etc. I suppose from a flavor-perspective, I think of this: modern warfare is, in a sense at least, totally dominated by Air Combat. The dominant militaries at least. Even if we find good flavor in civ (e.g. the traveling squad, which is quite good), I still think the majority of battles in the last parts of the books were still made up of more conventional warfare. The idea of simplifying the air combat system in these potential ways (and theoretically limiting their ability) would have the effect of preventing air units from "dominating" the late game.

Despite the fact that I suggested it, I'm beginning to think that splitting range 3 and indirect fire might not be a good idea. It could go on to exacerbate our progression problem (the fact that we have to stretch to fill the Modern-Atomic mechanics) by making that jump to range 3 feel less useful to players. We'd be powering down the previous power bump and then moving part of it elsewhere, which would overall lead to a slowdown in player capabilities, which I don't think is quite what we want. We want the flavorful progression of technology to be slower, but not necessarily the mechanical capabilities of the players.

I think we'd be in a better place if we could keep the two together and have a novel way of addressing the mechanical progression we need for the Modern and Atomic eras. Which I'll go into below!

Yeah, I see the point. I don't think it's bad to keep it the same, really.

The Academy-type stuff is something that could be made to work, but it does sort of overlap with our existing plans for the Science Victory. We might not need to use the flying stuff there, in which case it could be available here, but then we have the timing problem that you mention.

Overall, I don't think we're likely to go with this one.

Aside an aside, here's a super interesting blog post about Aviendha's visions.

agreed on all points. Looking at that blog post (which is pretty cool), it does appear that some of the really fancy stuff (railroads, guns) may have appeared a few hundred years after the LB (in this timeline). It's possible we should think twice before adding them in as actual late-game techs (not counting the Innovations, which won't actually create a literal railroad or anything).

Also, it's amazing how much of this stuff I've forgotten since reading ToM!

I can see this working better than option 1, and of the three here, I think C is probably the most effective. Even if der'morat'raken is a mouthful, it's an in-universe term that makes sense in its role.

However, I do really feel like as a player I'd be disappointed by this approach. We've discussed the "WoT within CiV" vs "CiV within WoT" before - the latter tending much more towards mechanical overhauls to make everything fit the flavor, and we're generally going for the former. I feel it goes just that bit too far into the mechanics-favoring side though. We've got a set progression for a decent chunk of the tech tree from BNW that makes a lot of sense for the WoT-verse. But as we've discussed above, that progression relationship between WoT and BNW starts to break down around the Modern era, in terms of the expected implications of the mechanics involved.

I say the expected implications, rather than just simply "the mechanics involved" because the CiV aircraft system doesn't really mechanically require that flying be involved. All of the flavor in BNW is set up that way, but mechanically, aircraft are units that can only move between cities and have crazy long range. There are a variety of other subtleties to their combat, compared to other units, but none of which are inescapably flying-related.

And in this case I feel like we'd be making the raken available to all civs solely because it fills the same role as aircraft in BNW, even though the mechanical role of aircraft could be quite a bit more flexible. This is also something that only appears in the late-game, so changes to it are more measurable - there are fewer knock-ons since it doesn't have as long to spiral into so many combinations.

I definitely agree. I hope we can find a way for raken to make it in the game - even if it isn't as a unit - but doing it this way certainly does feel like we're "forcing it" in order to make late-game mechanics fit into the lore. We can do better.

I think you're very much onto something with Traveling here. As you've called out, we've previously discussed Traveling as something that would act like Paratrooper/XCOM Squad, where the unit (a channeler) could teleport across a visible section of the map. I really like this flavor and I think keeping that's a good idea.

Yeah, I do agree that we should keep the old traveling system intact (though we might theoretically simplify it a bit after putting in these additions).

However, like the Paratrooper is dropped out of a plane, we can use the Traveling flavor elsewhere simultaneously. As you've said, tacking another ability onto channeling units could be problematic, and I agree. And like I mentioned above, the mechanical role of aircraft is "units that can only move between cities and have crazy long range".

What if the actual unit doing the attacking wasn't a channeler? There could be a "Traveling squad" unit (name totally should not be that), which is actually flavorfully a set of "normal" military personnel - guys with swords or spears or whatever. But they're stationed specifically in cities with a channeler who can transport them into the area around the city for short periods of time for raiding attacks on enemies.

Yes. That's the answer, I think. Done. Next question.

Spoiler :

...

I like this idea. It's flavorful and only a little bit forced - but at least in this case, the forced-ness doesn't break flavor.

Obviously that name can't be the name, and I hate you for saying it so many times.

If we like that *kind* of name, though, I could see something like Gateway Skirmisher or something like that. Or, if we wanted something that's a little more specific, and allows for upgrades and various unit types, we could go with things like Gateway Footmen or Gateway Cavalry

I think there are other kinds of names that would work, but I don't love the Present-Participle-Verb Noun thing (e.g. Traveling something), seems kind of silly. Also, Traveler Footman or something feels weird. I suppose we could pull the Power out of it and say something generic like "Skirmisher" or "Ambush Infantry" or such. Thoughts?

The other aspect to this that might be handy is Skimming. Remember, the ride-a-platform-over-the-abyss that Rand rediscovered? It's sort of a lamer version of Traveling, and according to the wiki, is possible by any channeler (whereas Traveling is apparently a Talent than only some people can do - probably justification for making true channeling be a Promotion: is it?). Also, I think it was discovered earlier, which would allow it to come into the game earlier than real channeling, and keep flavor a bit.

Now, I'm not sure Skimming helps our name, really. I think Skimmer is problematic since it sounds stupid and implies the unit itself is a channeler. Skimming Cavalry or something could work, but it's not ideal. Of course, we could just have the tech that unlocks such things be called Skimming and have the units themselves be called something else.

I'm thinking something along the lines of selecting them like aircraft above the city, selecting a target within range, and then Gateways pop up next to that target. A bunch of dudes with weapons run out of the Gateways and attack the targeted unit, and then run back through the Gateways (visually they disappear, flavorfully they're headed back to the city).

That's awesome. Make it half as long as air combat animations and I might even consider turning combat animations back on (for a game or two...)

This lets us have this kind of Traveling for both pro- and anti-channeler civs. The pro-channeler civs' flavor explanation is that they have channelers as a part of their military. The anti-channeler civs' flavor explanation is that their channelers who create the Gateways are slaves. (Both of these flavor explanations are implied - the extreme Philosophies don't have different units.)

Yeah, it's also important to remember that there still ARE channelers in the oppression society, they just don't enjoy life very much.

On that note, though, do these units cost Spark? I'm torn.

They're moved between cities by Traveling (explains why they're not moving across the map like other units), and the channeler sending them needs to know the destination (explains why rebase doesn't have infinite range). They are physical people who take up space, which explains why the city would have a maximum capacity, but would also let us do something with a building to increase that capacity (like Airports do for aircraft). The fact that the units fight face to face justifies why the "aircraft" takes return damage, even from melee units (which is a bit dubious in BNW actually), but their advantageous attacking arrangements explains why it's usually less damage than the attacker usually receives in normal face to face combat.

All very justified, for sure. A Channeling Grounds could be retooled to be the building, if we wanted to, though that would involve scrapping the unit. Flavor of course can come later.

Mechanically, the actual usage of these units is identical to aircraft - we haven't needed to do any technical heavylifting to achieve a system that feels very different from BNW, but still achieves the same kinds of mechanical goals. (The only big addition is the coolest unit attack animation ever, involving Gateways and soldiers appearing through them and then retreating back through them.)

yup.

That's the crux of where I think would be a really good idea to go with this, but there are a few addendums of some additional stuff we could do if we adopt this:

You could station "Traveling Squads" (zomg, the name) on Traveling Grounds Improvements. There are loads of mods that let aircraft rebase onto Forts (which makes Forts useful!) and we'd be doing a very similar thing. Traveling Grounds would then also provide double-functionality (long distance targets for channeling units that have gained the Traveling ability, and stationing posts for "Traveling Squads" (lol, name!)), which would make their status as a gold-costing improvement more palatable.

We don't think that might make them too powerful? Also, what happens if you attack the Traveling Ground? Are you doing direct damage tot he aircraft, or is it auto-capture if they are undefended?

In any case, maybe their gold cost could be high enough to justify it. I'm not 100% sold on this, but I'm open to it.

Dreamspikes now have more strategic value, since they would be a counter to the lategame aircraft-like mechanic.

Yes, that is interesting. Hopefully we didn't just make Dreamspikes too good by making amazing anti-AA devices. Is there a way to counter it, or you just gotta destroy it in T'a'r like normal? It's possible we'll find that that's too epic (though, if we make "aircraft" a little less epic in general, that might help the situation).

The potential Seanchan raken UU is now much splashier (very different from what it replaces, if it replaces the "Traveling Squad", or it may replace a different unit, or we may not make it a UU at all). Worth noting that a cool flavor line-up and mechanical ability synergy of such a raken unit would be an immunity to Dreamspikes.

For sure. All good points. In any case, we have the option to use the raken, even if we choose not to.

Variants for other aircraft like fighter/bomber are easily done because you just Travel different "military personnel" in the variant unit. (One might be heavy shock troops, the other agile skirmishers, if we wanted to keep the light/heavy approach of fighter/bomber.)

Interceptions can be done by also Traveling out to the scene of a battle when an enemy "Traveling Squad" (blarg!) Travels into range. Then have the fight between the two Traveling units instead of the target unit and the attacker.

You've mentioned AA guns above, and I think that's definitely an important role to fill. That would likely be similar to the interception stuff above, but instead be a Traveling unit that's an actual CiV unit (moves across hexes and such), but uses Traveling defensively to intercept other Traveling units attacking friendlies nearby.

Yeah, I agree that all of these are easy to fit in with what you're proposing here. Good.

However, I want to bring up, one last time, the possibility of simplifying air combat a bit. There's a lot of new stuff going on the mod, especially in the late-game, and what with the dreamspikes, channeling in general, the LB, shadowspawn, the Dragon, etc... we might benefit from streamlining things a little bit here.

I'm not saying the *role* of AA doesn't need to be filled, but maybe there's a way to do such things without putting out so many units. Like, for instance, AA-ness could be a promotion for certain ranged units you could select, or perhaps just a feature of certain late-game units.

Also, is it worth considering the implications of merging the fighter and bomber into one unit? Truthfully, our flavor works much better as the Bomber unit. The fighter stuff is a little weird. I mean, interception makes sense as a traveling-related ability, but as far as the simple "anti-bomber-ness" of fighters, essentially, *any* military unit should be able to fill this role (i.e., fight the guys that take a gateway to you).

Could we then have a single unit that can bomb and do interception? Perhaps we need the unit to be more expensive, or weaker than its BNW counterpart at one or more aspects, in order to prevent them from becoming Uber units. Couple that with an "AA promotion" or something, and we've gone a long way towards preserving the mechanics of air combat without dumping a whole lot of stuff in the late game.

The other thing is we could just axe AA functionality completely, and expect Dreamspikes to fill that role.

Also, I think we could use this kind of thing to skew things such that air combat isn't the be-all-end-all in late-game that it seems to be in most of my games.

You've also mentioned some alternative flavor explanations, which I should comment on too!

Balefire, totally agree, this works better as a nuke stand-in.

Yeah, this is interesting. I do recall we'd decided that this was basically limited to Rand and the Forsaken. You mention this later, so I'll bring it up there.

The Ways are certainly closer. There's a flavor problem with needing a Waygate near the target, which shouldn't be something flexible enough to target any hex, which is what we need. But depending on how it was done, the damage taken by the attacking unit could be flavorsplained as being inflicted by Machin Shin instead of the defending unit, which works well with the Ways flavor.

It's also available a bit earlier in the tech tree, but it almost as the opposite problem from the other approaches, in that it flavorfully should be available basically right away, because the Waygates predate the Breaking. (Though if we make Waygates something players can build - like a building or National Wonder - we're breaking this flavor anyway. Though that building or National Wonder would conflict with this usage of the flavor.) The targeting difficulty makes me think that the Ways isn't quite the right fit for this.

yeah, this could work, but it's much much more of a stretch.

Also, pretty sure the ways don't predate the breaking. I think the male aes sedai made it to help the ogier not all die (i.e. it's during the breaking). Their taint let it corrupt.

Flying, agreed, I don't think any channelers got this working correctly during the Third Age. Certainly since it wasn't used prolifically in the books, it would feel very out of place as such a suddenly important mechanic.

agreed

This isn't too much of a problem because aircraft stacking is limited in BNW as well. (Default 4, 8 after building an Airport.) We would either lose the ability to have a building increase the siege capacity of a city (which is part of what the Airport does) or could introduce a building that allowed our adjacent-units to stack in those hexes. That could be a bit confusing, and would definitely have new implications for defensive battles as well. Dropping the Airport-like ability to expand the siege capacity of the city is probably safest on this approach.

This is moot if we go with the Traveling stuff discussed above though.

moot!

This is a good point. Yes, I totally think we could unlock different aspects of Traveling at different times. So if we unlocked the "Traveling Squad" (there's a name here somewhere) earlier, we can give the channelers the Paratrooper-like Traveling ability on a later tech.

for sure. If we flavor it as skimming, this also makes lore sense as well (i think).

T'a'r could also be made to work. Attacking people through their dreams is something that a few characters achieve in the books and could be weaponized for something like this. Dreamspikes could also come into play here as well (since they block the shifting teleportation in T'a'r as well as Traveling in the physical world). I do like the way our existing T'a'r stuff works, but this could be a simultaneous use of that flavor, like I suggest for Traveling above.

I say let's leave Ta'r alone if possible. That said, if it becomes an uber AA wall, we may very well have to dig back in and rebalance things (before, we were looking for ways to make them more useful. Well, this is a very big one.)

 

[counterpoint]

Coolio, it looks like we're addressing Archaeology in your next post after the one I'm quoting here.

It seems like most of the rest will remain the same, except for Nuclear Weapons?

And it looks like we've stumbled on Nuclear Weapons briefly above, in the form of Balefire. Is there a lot of mechanical detail to how we could do that? I remember us discussing Fallout as the consequences of the Pattern unraveling after a Balefire strike, back at the beginnings of eternity.

Right, so for nukes, according to the old summaries, it appears we had decided that balefire would, as you say, create Bubble of Evil (fallout). It would only be created by the Dragon (Randnuke) and the Forsaken.

So, should we be considering opening it up again as a game-wide ability that can be used by anybody? Honestly, I'm pretty much ok with it not existing beyond those limited forms, as it'll make it seem way more impactful when they are used by the Light and Shadow sides.

Yeah, we could stick with bridges, the graphics involved in changing the roads stuff would be pretty crazy anyway. (Might be impossible, who knows how the visual road connections stuff works, none of that is in the code we have, that I know of.)

yeah. let's stay bridges. A Ferry is a decent "building" option probably (Garden Replacement makes sense because of the river/lake thing, but not necessarily mechanically/flavorfully).

It only really seems to rebound in the Era of the Dragon, when a lot of stronger channelers start coming to the fore together. Still, I'm fine with ignoring that flavor problem because I don't see a way of making it co-operate with CiV's notion of progression throughout the game. Plus it's a relatively subtle point that I think most fans will be forgiving of.

yeah, within acceptable stretching.

I don't think we'd be at risk of stealing Ea's main mechanics in this consideration. Ea's establishing of civs as tribes and such has a lot more to it than what I suggest we take. It's got options for abilities and quests that lead to being able to become certain civilizations. All sorts of unique stuff there. I'm more thinking that it provides a good example of how pre-Agriculture can be done within CiV and still be a fun experience (can't say about it being balanced from experience, but Pazyryk seems like the kind of person who would keep it reasonably well tuned).

Understood, but to be clear: you aren't actually suggesting we *do* the Pazyryk thing, right? Just holding it up as an example, yes?

A lot of good points here - a lot of the flavor dissonance with the improvements and the infrastructure of founding a civilization disappears if we move the technological flavor along a bit. I do think we could do some Ea-like foundational period stuff that wouldn't mean too much of a mechanical impact (much like my suggestion for Traveling as aircraft is a big flavor change, but a small mechanical one). The WoT flavor doesn't necessarily impose doing that on us, but I definitely think that it wouldn't be unreasonable to do so. The Breaking was long (239 to 344, according to the wiki, inaccuracy due to calendars not being kept correctly) and Rand's visions could have been from any time in there. A period of time with basically an absence of civilization for that long could destroy the majority of human progress. But you're right that it's unlikely to bring anyone as far back as needing to rediscover the usage of fire.

Starting off earlier also gives us more flavorful room for stretching - since we want the same number of eras but "slower" technological progression, adding more to the beginning helps toward that goal without us having to draw out the technologies of human history that are described in the BNW tech tree from Ancient to Industrial as much.

So I don't think the WoT flavor pushes us definitively one way or the other (starting later than Fire, but before Agriculture is definitely possible), so we should decide based on whether the added techs at the front will be useful to us in a general sense. Do you think the value of the added progression at the beginning will outweigh the difficulties with making things like Improvements available at that time?

I'd like to go into a bit more detail on this, but I've run out of time tonight, so I'll be back tomorrow!

EDIT:

Right! Continuing from the above. The suggestion to start later than Fire but before Agriculture seems to line up fairly well with what you're suggesting about new techs here (both the "rediscovery" ones and the "D&D" ones). (In fact, this is probably exactly what you're suggesting?

In which case, yeah, I think your approach is a good one! I can see us combining the two proposals you've got here, Survival, Mountaineering, and Herbs co-operate well with Community Clanship and Bartering, among other combinations.

OK, lots here. You're right that the breaking was long, and we can't be sure how low things really got, but I am interested to see what your first draft of the beginning looks like. I still don't see much reason why it should be pushed back to pre-Sumerian technology, only reasons why it's theoretically possible. I suppose if you see value in starting pre-Agriculture, I'd just like the pre-Agriculture techs to be more "abstract" and not as literal as most other techs (thus my suggestions).

In terms of the stretch, I'm starting to feel like we actually will have plenty to work with in the early game. The challenges will happen mid- and late-game, I think. The problem is that there are certain functionalities that need to appear early-game (the Power, certain strategics, improvements) that are harder to flavorsplain, whereas the back half is going to be a bunch of "insert Horse Unit" and stuff that won't matter as much. As to your question of whether the added progression at the beginning outweighs the difficulties of improvements and such, I think there isn't a clear winner (though I'm inclined to say it doesn't necessarily). Essentially, I'm interested to see what you come up with and probably open to a range of solutions.

I could see it doing it, but based on what we're discussing in the previous post, this is probably moot.

yeah, I suppose this is where our opinions differ. We'll see if it matters soon, i'm sure.

[incidentally, i'm asking the WoT expert this question now]

I wasn't thinking of knowledge quite that precise, none of the death/rebirth stuff. Just the notion that the world is a tapestry and everyone's lives are a part of it - a kind of founding sense that could lead to the deeper understanding you mention here later on.

I see, so The Pattern as distinct from The Wheel of Time. I gotcha.

Exactly, things like Pottery show us that the granularity for the techs is pretty malleable - BNW doesn't shy away from pulling very specific things (Pottery, Fertilizer, Dynamite) up alongside the very general (Physics, Education, Theology). So I think one of the important things for us with WoT is that we pick things that are very recognizable flavor.

OK, I can buy that. I guess we'll see how it feels when framed against everything else.

I can see an argument for a Foraging tech representing more than just the ability to go find food in a place, but this is mooted by the other tech discussion above anyway.

right. may be!

Yeah, that sounds like a good distinction. What would a first or second column Power tech do? What of our Power mechanics do we want to unlock almost straight away? I suppose this tech could give you some baseline Spark? But without unlocking Wilders, there's nothing to use that Spark on. (Unless we want to unlock Wilders this early?

I'll comment on this specifically below, when you bring it up again.

I don't think this will necessary be a big deal tech from a mechanical point of view. I don't think we want to unlock Dragons with this - the Illuminators were around for a long time before anyone made Dragons. I was thinking that an Illuminators' Chapterhouse would be something of a GP building like the Writers' Guild, a National Wonder. That would place this tech somewhere in the era 3/4 area.

I'd say if we decide now that we don't want this to be the Dragons unlock point, then we can come back to this flavor later when we get to the part of the tech tree where we might otherwise insert it. I don't see it being something we'd want towards the beginning, which we're doing more detail on now.

Well it matters if we decide that it's a mechanic that needs to be stuck somewhere. If it's a LP building, which one is it? For the Gleeman? The Stonemason? The Artisan? Those aren't great, but they're certainly the only ones that make even a shred of sense.

I was figuring it'd be a National Wonder, but I'm not sure if it'd be one of our own invention, or a rebranding. If it's simply a rebranding (e.g., one of the science or happiness ones), then we're fine stopping it for now, but if it's somehow one that features some new or additional mechanic, we might want to roughly hash it out in case it affects its place in the time tree.

Of course, if we'd prefer to let it's place in the tree cause its mechanical effect (instead of the other way around), we can of course wait.

Agreed on your general placement. I'd guess era 4 or 5.

Regarding clarification, I actually think the techs are somewhere where we want to leave things much more open to interpretation of the player. While there are civilopedia entries, most players will only see a word/phrase and an icon that describes a tech, so we can afford to be very loose with the meanings and implications of "researching" these things. Saidar and Saidin are great examples - they're great flavor, things that need to be studied to be understood, and have a lot of connected flavor in our units and buildings. I don't think it needs to go much further than that - any deeper meaning is implied by the things that the tech unlocks.

Fair enough. Understood.

Regarding Wilders, I'd forgotten you asked these questions here, and have re-asked them above! I'd say Wilders probably aren't something we want to be available immediately - they should be on a tech. And we want players to be able to accumulate some Spark before unlocking Wilders, otherwise it's just frustrating that they can't build these cool channeling units that they otherwise have access to.

I can definitely see the Power tech that unlocks Wilders giving civs some baseline Spark (maybe 1 or 2) to get them started, which makes me think it should be column 3 (first column in Classical) kind of area.

Well, we don't *need* to provide spark before we provide Wilders. We could elect to do them at the same time. That said, keep in mind that Spark is based in part off of population and number of cities, so it's quite possible (and probably probable) that your civ has Spark automatically (if not literally on turn one).

If you did want to open the game (pre-wilder) with a tech that gave a small bonus to Spark (say it's "The Pattern" or something), I'd say we might want to simply affix that to an already preexisting tech. That, as you say, is useless at that moment, so it's probably better to just reflavor something else as relevant, and stick them together.

Column three sounds good though

Saidin I think would come much later - the player voluntary Saidin mechanics aren't available in the early game. This could even go so far as being an unlock point for Asha'man and the Black Tower, toward the end of the Tree.

The problem with this is of course that some civs will elect to use MCs voluntarily, and those units need to be kept at pace with other units. I understand and don't disagree if you want "Saidin" literally to be later in the game, but I think there should still be a few techs that upgrade the power of MC's along the way (perhaps simultaneous to the female upgrades). The whole rogue-MC thing I'll tackle below when you bring it up.

Considering gentling chance is based on strength and such, it might make sense for us to link the upgrades of MCs to the upgrades of saidar units. That way, in order to keep your MCs gentle-able, you have to avoid saidar techs... and keep your channelers all weak. Or, at least, we should put the saidin techs in places that make them harder to min-max around

I've been thinking more about unlocking Gentling on a tech, and one difficulty of that is that the Red Ajah's ability doesn't do anything until the Sister has the Gentling ability. Might we be better leaving that as a default ability of Aes Sedai?

I see your point, but I actually am not sure I agree. The truth is that several of the Sisters have abilities that are somewhat gated:

Blue: Governors produce +2 faith (and governors might not be immediately available if you find the tower early)
Red: Gentling
Yellow: Healing targeted units (you mention this one)
White: Governors produce science
Brown: Excavate antiquity sites (definitely the long game!)

The only ones that are totally not limited are Green and Gray. And this is only concerning the tier one abilities. The truth is, picking a sister is somewhat a long-term decision. I don't think this is terribly bad. I'm not suggesting we make Gentling be era 6 or anything. Maybe more like era 2 or something. If you get a sister before then, you might still consider red because you're not missing out on much in the meantime.

Brown is of course a trickier sell, but I think that might be acceptable. Do you remember how hard it was to come up with abilities for them?

That said, it doesn't matter that much if Gentling is auto-available, though!

This comes up a few times and I don't think we should try to go this way if we've got more recognizable WoT flavor in the "thing" rather than "making of the thing". Like I mentioned above, Pottery, Fertilizer, Dynamite, Radio, and many more BNW techs are "things" that have implications. I don't think we should try to shoehorn in WoT flavor that doesn't work with the things we need to mechanically unlock, but I think in general we have a lot more recognizable WoT flavor that are "things" rather than processes that make them. And BNW shows us that they can still make completely valid techs, so I figure leaning on that is a good plan in general.

I actually figured this Slate Roofs thing could be fairly early. It could unlock something like an Inn, which might be an early happiness building, or something to that effect. It could fill any mechanical role really - we'd just need to pick some everyday buildings that fulfill that role and have roofs.

OK, points taken. Meet me halfway, though - how about Slate Roofing or something (or some superior way of saying it)? I'm fine with it being early.

I think this one is a prime example of the flavor stuff I mentioned above. While I understand wanting the tech to be a process that relates to its creation, I think we gain a lot more from the specifically WoT flavor. Imbuing doesn't particularly mean anything in WoT (I don't think?) but Fancloth is a known callout to the books.

accepted.

We did place it there before, but given that it doesn't have any decided effects yet, I could definitely see us moving it to a different place as well. I could see the Hunt for the Horn project becoming available much earlier in the Tree than the actual discovery of the Horn, seeing as the Hunt happened many times before the Horn was actually found.

The absolute earliest I could see that happening would be the end of era 2 kind of time, but it would entirely depend on what the project did.

The Hunter could be a viable combat unit, but I think that will largely be determined by how close to the unlocking of visibility of the Horn the unlocking of the Hunter is.

Ah. I think what you're forgetting is that the Horn can be found in Mythic Sites (The horn and seals are found in mythic sites), and Mythic sites don't appear until Era 7. Even if we changed that so it was Antiquity sites, we're still looking at Era 5 (I think). I understand what you're saying, but I think mechanically it's kind of wonky for us to set the search for the horn up particularly early.

I don't know what the project does (and I don't think we need to know, really), but certainly it should tie into the actual literal hunt, right?

It could be a late game channeler upgrade and an effect (much like bridges over rivers or revealing the map), something like "Your channelers can attack in Stedding and near the Guardian".

Wells. Interesting. I think that could be a cool idea. Either/or.

Siegecraft sounds good to me for a tech that starts off the siege warfare line. Carpentry of Woodworking could work if we were including some other non-warfare effects on the same tech.

either or both is fine with me.

I've ended up putting my thoughts on this above! Limiting it only until era 2 could work though - most civs won't receive their first Aes Sedai until that sort of time. It's early enough that if it really mattered to them, they could beeline that tech and unlock Gentling before/at the same time as getting their first Sister. (The tech that meets the Tower should probably be one of the upstream dependencies of the tech that unlocks Gentling.)

yeah, this way of looking at its timing is probably fine.

I could see both co-existing as techs, I was definitely short on economic-relevant stuff when I went through techs before. It doesn't seem very modern to me, it's obviously got a modern meaning, but it's something I see as recognized throughout history through the different ways that currency exchanges have worked. It would be a tech for near the end of the tree anyway, so something we can come back to.

Right. I just have a feeling it wasn't *called that* throughout history.

Lots of stuff here! I think everything you've called out here make good unlockable things for techs, with a couple of exceptions on #4.

Healing, if referring to the targeted ability, should probably be always available since it's unique to the Yellows. The Healing aura each Sister has could be an unlocked thing though, if that's what you mean here.

Right, so this touches on what I was saying above. I don't see anything terrible with Yellow Healing being gated. I feel like aura healing and target healing should probably be unlocked at the same point. This could actually be one of the earlier techs, theoretically. I could be swayed on any of this, though.

We're discussing projections, linking, discovery of the Tower, the Cleansing, and traveling unlocking elsewhere.

right. I don't recall where we settled on for projections and linking, but I figure it was probably mid-game.

Sending Novices to the WT sounds like a good idea to gate on a tech. If meeting the Tower is a first column of era 2 tech, then I'd say this should be on the next column, dependent on the "meeting" tech. Another thing that Tower-focused civs can focus early, but this should have another dependency so that it forces them to diversify a bit more before going straight for it.

fine by me.

Making channelers fluctuate in relative power comapred to other units via the distribution of their upgrade points sounds like a very good idea. As you've said, something we can calibrate specifics of later.

righto!

I think we'll probably want 4 or 5 combat strength upgrade points for the two Saider user categories (Aes Sedai, non-Aes Sedai Saidar users). 2 or so combat strength upgrade points for Saidin users (including Asha'man units), since they skew more towards the end of the Tree. (Are there any other Saidin units aside from MCs and Asha'man?) And then maybe 2-4 combat strength upgrade points for Warders? Some of those combat strength techs would probably also have one of the Warder abilities on them as well.

Right, so you're saying treat Aes Sedai and other Saidar units as a whole? I agree, I think.

The only saidin units are MCs, asha'men, and whatever UU's we create.

I think I agree with your overall numbers (with the exception of the small number for saidin, as stated before). I think we could just have the MC's track along with the women, honestly. If we wanted to give the males some distinct changes in the late game, that could certainly be fine too.

So, numbers wise, we could do something like:

Channeler unlock in 2, strength in eras 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 or something, and then Warders in 4, 6, 7, or something? I dunno

Do we want the involuntary MC unit to follow this same upgrade path? I think it might actually be best if these scaled more like FDs, since they're partially adversarial for the player that controls them, due to the madness. (And they stop appearing once Saidin is Cleansed, right?) If they scale on specific techs, this could lead to players avoiding certain techs to underpower their MCs and make them easier to get rid of, which seems a bit bizarre and meta. (Not too likely though, because techs have big impacts in general, and the civ is likely to need the tech or one that depends on it.)

I can see why you'd want them to track with the FDs, but this seems a little off to me. Remember, when a MC goes rogue, we decided he's going to get a significant boost of power anyways, so that might take care of us needing to consider their "danger" when we're doling out upgrades.

I think, not counting late game Asha-people having the power-trajectory throughout the game of the MCs be distinct from that of the saidar units (i.e. in era 2 the saidar units are down and the MCs are powerful) is too complex and not really worth it, which takes away part of the point of separating these techs at all. I suspect the best thing is just to have them upgrade simultaneously, until such a time as we want some weird stuff to happen in the late game (if we choose to gate Gentling, we can call that tech "Saidin"). I think this would mostly prevent people from being meta about it. If they avoided all channeling, and eschewed all channeling upgrades just to keep their MCs weak... well, damn, that's some pretty good roleplaying, civ player! Have a cookie!

Upgrades to Spark is also a good one and I touched on this elsewhere. We probably don't want many of these though, since anti-channeling civs will also research these techs. Maybe three total, including one at the beginning-ish when we unlock the Wilder?

right, I think we put these in whenever we suspect players might need a surge of channelers, or when "expensive" channelers (e.g. Ashaman that cost multiple spark) come out. Keeping in mind that Spark increases with pop as well, we don't need this to do too much.

 

[counterpoint]

This is definitely very important, because this structure is what causes civs with different focuses to actually act differently mechanically, because they traverse the tree differently. A key point is also that non-military civs can beeline non-military techs toward the end of the game, reaching the last column before Future Tech without researching Dynamite. And vice versa, military civs can beeline down their side, though that doesn't usually work as well - they need to dip the other way for Science techs to keep pace. It also allows non-Science civs to prioritize their own techs that favor their victory without having to get through too many irrelevant ones.

I think we'll want the Power-related stuff mostly in the "middle" of the tree, so the top edge of the military section. I think this is because we'll have some Power-y stuff that is military (channeling units that can attack people) and some stuff that's more Culture-y and Diplo-y (civ-wide bonuses and T'a'r; Tower relationship).

I'm mostly right with you here. I think, the truth is that we can mostly keep to the middle, but also simply put techs at the top or the bottom as needed. Like, the Novices one, throw it up top. +Bushido for Warders? Put it near the bottom.

This sounds like a good approach - unlocking the ability to find the Seals first and let players go and get them if they wish, even before they've chosen an side. Then unlock the Divination and Destruction abilities on the same tech in the Era of the Dragon.

right. See above for more discussion on the seals and horn and such.

I think late enough in the game that even mass production still falls within the amount of Alignment we're aiming for. Alignment is more of a late game mechanic, like Tourism in BNW, so tilting it that way makes sense.

sure, so Alignment buildings should be mid-late game, then? What, era 6 or something? 5?

First column of era 2 sounds good to me for this one. That way, civs can beeline it straight away if the Tower is a big part of their intended game plan and they can be a part of that process very early.

great.

I think civs who meet the Tower the old fashioned way shouldn't be treated any different from usual. If the Tower chooses to give out Aes Sedai, it just looks at the civs it has met so far. The Sisters would be suitably weaker at this point, without most of the upgrading techs, and I imagine we'd have the Tower's decision system to assign them very small quotas (probably 1 at this stage), but there should be upside to being physically close to the Tower, much like there's upside to being physically close to other CSes and getting a head start on their quests (though obviously we don't want it as extreme with the Tower).

OK, so the WT starts handing out AS as soon as you meet them. Fine by me, I guess. We'll have to see how sucky it is for those who don't get those early sisters.

Keep in mind, though, that logically (and we talked about this forever ago), the AS of these early eras will be proportionally *more* powerful than those of later eras (except perhaps in the true late game). After all, stone axe < fireball (especially considering, as you said earlier, the Power was stronger back then). So, truthfully, the AS should be quite powerful relatively to everybody else. I do recall talking about the idea of having the AS wander around the map all bad-ass in the early game, though this isn't essential.

I don't know, it's kind of tough to decide.

This almost suggests era 7 since it can take 15-30 turns to build a Wonder, without a pre-cooked Great Engineer. I think we can decide on this when we get to that part of the tree though - unless this is our defining mechanic for one of these eras? In which case we should probably take it up above, maybe where the Balefire quote block is.

Yeah, late 7 is probably fine, though, of course, flavor wise it is quite literally something that should be taking place in the era of the dragon.

Oh, right! I missed this last time. Yes, I think this should definitely be gated on a tech and probably a very late game one, era 7/8.

yup. agreed.

Blerg! Blerg is how it interacts with it!

More seriously, this is a very good point. We could give the Oppression bonus to killing Gentled MCs as well, though that would actually encourage civs who are planning to pick Oppression to be more Gentling-oriented for the first part of the game, which isn't quite intended.

We could disallow Oppression civs from using the ability, but that doesn't match up with the way Philosophies work.

We could introduce a chance of the channeler going rogue immediately upon being Healed, and increase that chance for Oppression, but then we're stacking another penalty onto them, which isn't great.

We could leave it be, since Oppression civs that are otherwise making use of their bonuses won't have many channelers or Gentled MCs?

Any other options?

You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of the Oppression civs. I actually think the Opp civs are fine. Sure, they can gentle units to get this benefit, but then they miss out on their +1 happiness. Play to your strengths, oppression civ! Absolutely don't want to give the oppression bonus to killing gentled channelers.

I think the group we should be considering is Liberation civs. Is there some benefit they get to this, or some way that there is incentive for them to heal their gentled channelers? Probably not necessarily, really, but from a flavor perspective it makes sense (the White Tower being much more skeptical of such things, I'm sure).

I think the Last Battle is too busy for the Cleansing to be happening at the same time, unless the Cleansing was left alone/delayed at the project stage, and is happening unusually late. Some civs will have to send units all the way across the world for the Cleansing, which isn't something they can afford to do during the LB.

I think we kind of need it to have a good chance of happening during the LB, or at least on the eve of it. The truth is, the Cleansing pits civ against civ, and as we've designed it, it is more-or-less the case that Shadow civs don't want it, yes? With that in mind, putting this in era 7 seems like it forces people to play their hand too early, right? So I'm thinking more like EotD.

I think the next era after the one that unlocks the first Eyes and Ears sounds like a good idea. That would be era 6. Given their maximum lifespan (45 turns) we want players to have time to go through a couple, if they choose to, by the end of the game. Most players' biggest restricting factor will probably be generating level 2+ Eyes and Ears.

At first that felt too early, but given the lifespan thing, I think you're right.

Agreed, it doesn't look like any of the Ambassador point gains are things that could be scaled reasonably by buildings. I could see a Wonder modifying your Ambassador point rate - something like an additional +1 per CS ally or something, but we can address that later.

agreed!

I think we can put this on a Power related tech, probably somewhere in era 3/4. Probably on the Culture-y vertical placement of Power techs (so somewhere in the top of the middle).

Ah, *here* is where we're discussing projections! Yeah, 3 or 4 sounds good!

The difficulty is mainly the way Firaxis have done all of those abilities. None of them actually have anything to do with each other, they just share an icon. So I'd need to hook up all of the different effects individually, even though a lot of them only happen once (embassies, bridges, defensive pacts, etc).

Hooking them up generically with some simple strings as descriptions would mean that it would rely on a new DB table that I could provide in a mod, but then the Editor wouldn't work with the unmodded game! And that's how most modders use it.

I'll come up with something! It would be possible to store those non-base-game descriptions in something specific to the Editor so it could be used as a modders' reference even though it doesn't do anything, which would mean it doesn't need an actual DB backing.

OH, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that's annoying. I mean, should we/can we change the icons so that they're color-coded by the kind of thing it is? Like, Gold for trade-related, Blue for Science-related, or something? But yeah, that's a UI thing - for this phase, do what you gotta do, since it's obviously impossible to see what they mean without some text.

We're coming up with a lot more specifics for some of the early game stuff, so I'll take a stab at creating a provisional update to the DropBox tree in the next few days and see how sharing that info visually goes!

cool. look forward to it! It seems like we're pretty much ready for it now!

 

[S3rgeus]

I don't have a full response tonight - I've been working on the tech tree in the DropBox. I've placed in a bunch of techs (nothing attached to them) to get a general idea of placement for some of the techs we've discussed so far. I've also fixed a few bugs in the Editor that I ran into while making my changes.

There are definitely more techs that we've already discussed that could be placed on there, and we'll definitely want to move some (I've had to guess at a "best position" based on our text descriptions here, which demonstrates that having the visual helps because it wasn't always clear).

One of the things that I found was that for some of the early techs we have very clear goals (The Pattern, The One Power, History), others not as much (Clanship, Survival). That's not a problem, just something to keep in mind that the flavor of the techs should serve the things it's unlocking.

 

[S3rgeus]

Sorry for the delay again! I need to get back into that page 10 groove.

Yup. Definitely have all the DLC. We'll see if it is a problem once we're really working on it.

Coolio, can you open the one with the changes that I made on Thursday?

alright. Enhancer it is.

And that's that with Paths! Though we'll need to rename some things once we've done the tech tree.

Awesome, Paths finished!

Yeah, I see what you mean. It does seem to add a few layers of complexity, though. I could also simply some units having extra defense against air units or something like that.

I'm not actively campaigning to remove AA or anything, though. Just thought we should consider a path that simplifies the whole system a bit (maybe also removing bomber/fighter differentiation, etc. I suppose from a flavor-perspective, I think of this: modern warfare is, in a sense at least, totally dominated by Air Combat. The dominant militaries at least. Even if we find good flavor in civ (e.g. the traveling squad, which is quite good), I still think the majority of battles in the last parts of the books were still made up of more conventional warfare. The idea of simplifying the air combat system in these potential ways (and theoretically limiting their ability) would have the effect of preventing air units from "dominating" the late game.

I can see that working and the flavor distance we put with the Traveling Squad (lol) from aircraft means it won't be a big disappointment for players by comparison to BNW. It's a fine line to tread, we do still need to maintain the sense of progression throughout the game, that the player has unlocked something new and powerful that changes warfare. Otherwise the combat will become stale if it stays the same all the time.

Yeah, I see the point. I don't think it's bad to keep it the same, really.

Yeah, let's leave range 3 and indirect fire on the same unit then, whatever that unit turns out to be.

agreed on all points. Looking at that blog post (which is pretty cool), it does appear that some of the really fancy stuff (railroads, guns) may have appeared a few hundred years after the LB (in this timeline). It's possible we should think twice before adding them in as actual late-game techs (not counting the Innovations, which won't actually create a literal railroad or anything).

Definitely, we don't want to take the beginnings of techs that we saw there and make them widespread yet, we just want to extrapolate what would have been available elsewhere and make them more "discoveries" than usable things. (So a steam engine National Wonder or World Wonder, not a unit.)

Also, it's amazing how much of this stuff I've forgotten since reading ToM!

Same! And even reading the summaries of those visions is depressing! Everything that all of the characters worked for, unmade!

I definitely agree. I hope we can find a way for raken to make it in the game - even if it isn't as a unit - but doing it this way certainly does feel like we're "forcing it" in order to make late-game mechanics fit into the lore. We can do better.

Coolio, my thoughts exactly!

Yeah, I do agree that we should keep the old traveling system intact (though we might theoretically simplify it a bit after putting in these additions).

Cool, sounds good.

Yes. That's the answer, I think. Done. Next question.

Awesome!

I like this idea. It's flavorful and only a little bit forced - but at least in this case, the forced-ness doesn't break flavor.

Obviously that name can't be the name, and I hate you for saying it so many times.

Glad you like it! And it isn't as fun if I only say it once!

If we like that *kind* of name, though, I could see something like Gateway Skirmisher or something like that. Or, if we wanted something that's a little more specific, and allows for upgrades and various unit types, we could go with things like Gateway Footmen or Gateway Cavalry

I think there are other kinds of names that would work, but I don't love the Present-Participle-Verb Noun thing (e.g. Traveling something), seems kind of silly. Also, Traveler Footman or something feels weird. I suppose we could pull the Power out of it and say something generic like "Skirmisher" or "Ambush Infantry" or such. Thoughts?

I like the Gateway Skirmisher and that style of name overall. Does that still work if we go with Skimming as the flavor, as you mention below? Skimming is still done via Gateways to reach the platforms, right? Or are they called something else?

I also think that Skirmisher or Ambush Infantry could definitely fill the flavor!

The other aspect to this that might be handy is Skimming. Remember, the ride-a-platform-over-the-abyss that Rand rediscovered? It's sort of a lamer version of Traveling, and according to the wiki, is possible by any channeler (whereas Traveling is apparently a Talent than only some people can do - probably justification for making true channeling be a Promotion: is it?). Also, I think it was discovered earlier, which would allow it to come into the game earlier than real channeling, and keep flavor a bit.

Now, I'm not sure Skimming helps our name, really. I think Skimmer is problematic since it sounds stupid and implies the unit itself is a channeler. Skimming Cavalry or something could work, but it's not ideal. Of course, we could just have the tech that unlocks such things be called Skimming and have the units themselves be called something else.

Skimming sounds like a good one! It's a great way to explain why the two pieces of functionality are separated. I like the approach of calling the tech Skimming and then going with one of the two sets of names you suggested in the quote block above.

I figured "true Traveling" (the teleporting unit ability) would be unlocked on all of a certain class of unit by a tech. It feels like a few too many hoops to jump through to need a tech and then get to a certain promotion level with the affected unit type. Even if Traveling is an ability on talented individuals can learn, I'd say any channelers who are strong enough to become a unit in their own right should be strong enough for that. (Though we may limit it to certain unit types - so even if you've kept a Wilder around forever, they can't Travel, only Kin, Aes Sedai, and Asha'men or something like that.)

That's awesome. Make it half as long as air combat animations and I might even consider turning combat animations back on (for a game or two...)

Then we'll know we've succeeded when that happens!

More seriously, something like this would probably greatly improve the late game combat player experience. I think most people enjoy seeing visuals, but the grating of having to wait forever outweighs it most of the time. That's why there are mods like "turn off combat animations for AI turns"!

Yeah, it's also important to remember that there still ARE channelers in the oppression society, they just don't enjoy life very much.

Definitely, yep, and in auxiliary positions like this one it lets us be more flexible with what works flavorfully for the three Philosophies.

On that note, though, do these units cost Spark? I'm torn.

Hmmm, good point. The initial BNW aircraft do use strategic resources. I would say that, flavorfully, these units should probably cost a smaller amount of a Spark than "primary" channeling units, since it doesn't require a combat-competent channeler, just someone who can Skim people to an instructed location. 1 Spark is how much the Wilder costs, right?

I'm a bit torn on this one as well, but they should probably cost some kind of strategic resource, one way or another. Maybe they should consume Angreal Caches? That makes some kind of sense - even the weakest channelers can do the required skimming if given an angreal?

All very justified, for sure. A Channeling Grounds could be retooled to be the building, if we wanted to, though that would involve scrapping the unit. Flavor of course can come later.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean here. Traveling Grounds is the improvement, which I think is what you're referring to in the first part? Agreed, that could definitely be retooled to be the building if we wanted to. I think we might have more success coming up with something else for the building though, because Traveling Grounds fits very well as an improvement because it was built in military encampments during the books (meaning it's relatively movable, which fits well with improvements being out on the frontlines, relative to cities). Which unit would we need to scrap based on our choice here?

We don't think that might make them too powerful? Also, what happens if you attack the Traveling Ground? Are you doing direct damage tot he aircraft, or is it auto-capture if they are undefended?

In any case, maybe their gold cost could be high enough to justify it. I'm not 100% sold on this, but I'm open to it.

I don't think it'll be overpowered because it requires forward planning to have the Improvement placed strategically when you need it. I figured it would be consistent with the way aircraft work with carriers that if the Improvement was pillaged then it would destroy any "Traveling Squads" stationed there. (Pillaging being analogous to destroying the carrier.) I didn't think units would need to attack it since that feels like the realm of cities - a player who wants it to be defensible should have "normal" units to defend it. (Also could go a ways to addressing any power concerns, since pillaging the Improvement would be snipeable - if a player loads it up with Traveling Squads and doesn't defend it properly they can lose a lot of units really fast.)

Yes, that is interesting. Hopefully we didn't just make Dreamspikes too good by making amazing anti-AA devices. Is there a way to counter it, or you just gotta destroy it in T'a'r like normal? It's possible we'll find that that's too epic (though, if we make "aircraft" a little less epic in general, that might help the situation).

I think you just have to destroy it in T'a'r as usual. I don't think we'll have a problem with Dreamspikes being too powerful here since they come from LPs, which players won't have loads of. I think we did arrive at a good place for Dreamspikes before, but I was still a bit worried about their relative utility compared to other avenues of dominance - this makes them more relevant to the "main game".

For sure. All good points. In any case, we have the option to use the raken, even if we choose not to.

Yep, definitely an option! The Seanchan are positively oozing uniques!

Yeah, I agree that all of these are easy to fit in with what you're proposing here. Good.

However, I want to bring up, one last time, the possibility of simplifying air combat a bit. There's a lot of new stuff going on the mod, especially in the late-game, and what with the dreamspikes, channeling in general, the LB, shadowspawn, the Dragon, etc... we might benefit from streamlining things a little bit here.

I'm not saying the *role* of AA doesn't need to be filled, but maybe there's a way to do such things without putting out so many units. Like, for instance, AA-ness could be a promotion for certain ranged units you could select, or perhaps just a feature of certain late-game units.

Also, is it worth considering the implications of merging the fighter and bomber into one unit? Truthfully, our flavor works much better as the Bomber unit. The fighter stuff is a little weird. I mean, interception makes sense as a traveling-related ability, but as far as the simple "anti-bomber-ness" of fighters, essentially, *any* military unit should be able to fill this role (i.e., fight the guys that take a gateway to you).

Could we then have a single unit that can bomb and do interception? Perhaps we need the unit to be more expensive, or weaker than its BNW counterpart at one or more aspects, in order to prevent them from becoming Uber units. Couple that with an "AA promotion" or something, and we've gone a long way towards preserving the mechanics of air combat without dumping a whole lot of stuff in the late game.

The other thing is we could just axe AA functionality completely, and expect Dreamspikes to fill that role.

Also, I think we could use this kind of thing to skew things such that air combat isn't the be-all-end-all in late-game that it seems to be in most of my games.

Definitely good points here!

I think there are multiple benefits to having units that are dedicated to the AA role though. One is that it allows technologically advanced civs or ones with strong production capacity to compensate for enemy use of aircraft. This is something that they can do as a reaction to enemy army composition, whereas promotions would force players to speculatively make some of their units fill the AA role since they can't guarantee promotions at as short notice. (Unless this becomes a promotion available right away on some late game units, so EXP boosting buildings could be used to do that?)

The other is also for the attacker. If you have vision on the area around your bombing target, then you know to avoid bombing runs near where enemy AA units are stationed. But if it's just a promotion on existing units, then an attacking player has no real way of knowing whether there's a hard counter to their "air" attack in the area that they're planning to hit, even though with vision they arguably should have that information. This could be quite frustrating as some units unexpectedly hose "air" attacks. This would go some way to accomplishing the goal of weakening air combat though! And I imagine that some specific units in the late-game would emerge as commonly powerful units for the AA promotion, making it a bit more predictable for a human attacker. ("Oh, Blademasters usually take the anti-Traveler promotion, so I should probably not attack this guy next to a Blademaster." Then there's a meta in multiplayer of not picking that promotion since players will avoid it anyway. And double blinds and so on.)

One thing to keep in mind here is that if we're removing this role, then what are we replacing it with? It doesn't need to be the same thing, but I don't think we should straight up reduce the variety of unit roles that are there to be filled. AA is one of the few roles toward the endgame that remains consistently distinct - everything else can pretty much be covered by aircraft and tanks (ranged attacks, siege, killing enemy units, capturing civilians), whereas the roles are more distinct at the beginning of the game (cavalry, melee units, ranged units, siege units).

Combining the bomber and fighter roles is definitely something to consider. I've always found that fighters are usually quite defensive - you use them when fending off enemy air attacks more so than when laying siege to enemy cities (which is mostly about bombers on the air front, for attacking the city and the units defending it). Since fighters are limited to cities like bombers, this automatically makes defensive positions more powerful, which is good, because we don't want city control to suddenly be flip-flopping in all directions during the endgame. A unit that fulfills the fighter's role on the battlefield would be very similar to an AA unit, since it would be good for fending off enemy bombers when you're attacking. (Which connects to the AA role simplification you're suggesting.)

Overall I think we'd need to carefully consider why we want to reduce the number of unit roles available to players. Our objective here is to streamline the experience so that the guaranteed wars in WoTMod don't become a problem for the player experience. But at the same time, we don't want them all to play out the same way, and I think that availability of unit choice plays a lot into the strategics of that. If we're removing something like this, I think there should be something specific in mind that replaces it.

yeah, this could work, but it's much much more of a stretch.

Agreed.

Also, pretty sure the ways don't predate the breaking. I think the male aes sedai made it to help the ogier not all die (i.e. it's during the breaking). Their taint let it corrupt.

Good point, the Ways were made during the Breaking! Before our game starts, but not AoL.

for sure. If we flavor it as skimming, this also makes lore sense as well (i think).

Definitely, makes a lot of sense.

I say let's leave Ta'r alone if possible. That said, if it becomes an uber AA wall, we may very well have to dig back in and rebalance things (before, we were looking for ways to make them more useful. Well, this is a very big one.)

Yeah, I think this brings T'a'r into a much better place overall, which is good! Agreed, let's not use T'a'r specifically in the "aircraft" role.


I'm afraid it's gotten very late, but I will be back tomorrow evening!

 

[S3rgeus]

Right, so for nukes, according to the old summaries, it appears we had decided that balefire would, as you say, create Bubble of Evil (fallout). It would only be created by the Dragon (Randnuke) and the Forsaken.

So, should we be considering opening it up again as a game-wide ability that can be used by anybody? Honestly, I'm pretty much ok with it not existing beyond those limited forms, as it'll make it seem way more impactful when they are used by the Light and Shadow sides.

I could see us leaving it restricted to the Dragon and the Forsaken, but if we do that we should have some other kind of "ultimate military weapon" to fulfill that role in this era. Is there other flavor for us to draw from here - something that could be universally available and cause destruction like nukes? (Even eventually destroying cities, like Nuclear Missiles, though that specific mechanic could be left to Balefire.)

There's that roiling columns of fire weave that Rand used in the books, but again, that's a bit specific to Rand and he "learned it" from Lews Therin, which means it wouldn't be widely available.

Anything else that meshes well with our general lower tech armies toward the end of the game (compared to BNW)?

yeah. let's stay bridges. A Ferry is a decent "building" option probably (Garden Replacement makes sense because of the river/lake thing, but not necessarily mechanically/flavorfully).

Yep, sounds good. Ferry could also replace Water Mill, which also requires a river and is production/food, which meshes with the Ferry flavor.

Understood, but to be clear: you aren't actually suggesting we *do* the Pazyryk thing, right? Just holding it up as an example, yes?

Sort of. I'm not saying we do the full Ea thing because that's their thing and is way more complicated than we need for this, but the idea of civilizations that represent something before the Agriculture starting point of CiV is something Ea demonstrates can be done well.

OK, lots here. You're right that the breaking was long, and we can't be sure how low things really got, but I am interested to see what your first draft of the beginning looks like. I still don't see much reason why it should be pushed back to pre-Sumerian technology, only reasons why it's theoretically possible. I suppose if you see value in starting pre-Agriculture, I'd just like the pre-Agriculture techs to be more "abstract" and not as literal as most other techs (thus my suggestions).

In terms of the stretch, I'm starting to feel like we actually will have plenty to work with in the early game. The challenges will happen mid- and late-game, I think. The problem is that there are certain functionalities that need to appear early-game (the Power, certain strategics, improvements) that are harder to flavorsplain, whereas the back half is going to be a bunch of "insert Horse Unit" and stuff that won't matter as much. As to your question of whether the added progression at the beginning outweighs the difficulties of improvements and such, I think there isn't a clear winner (though I'm inclined to say it doesn't necessarily). Essentially, I'm interested to see what you come up with and probably open to a range of solutions.

I think those mid-game difficulties are what we can help with a pre-Agriculture start. By starting off the technology curve earlier on in human history, it gives us a wider range of flavor to pull from for the entire length of the tree. And reasons why such a progression is possible within the flavor are what allows us to do that.

Pre-agriculture techs being more abstract should be fine, I liked a lot of the techs you proposed a few posts back. I've put a few of them into the DropBox tree and plan to put in more, though I wanted to be sure that we had specific ideas for the role we wanted those techs to play before placing them. Most of the techs I've put in there I've put in after we've discussed one or more specific things that it could unlock (channeler upgrade point, meet the Tower, Siege Unit 1, etc).

It's probably worth us discussing which unit upgrade paths we're going to keep? That's something we're doing with the AA upgrade path specifically elsewhere, but not with the rest. I figure we probably want to keep most of the "foundational" upgrade paths: Melee, Ranged, Siege, Ranged Naval, Melee Naval, Horses, Anti-Horses. We also discussed adding our own Scouting upgrade path.

Just as a jumping off point, here are the BNW upgrade paths again:

• Warrior -> Swordsman -> Longswordsman -> Musketman -> Rifleman -> Great War Infantry -> Infantry -> Mechanized Infantry
• Scout *-> Archer -> Composite Bowman -> Crossbowman -> Gatling Gun -> Machine Gun -> Bazooka
• Spearman -> Pikeman -> Lancer -> Anti-Tank Gun -> Helicopter
• Horseman -> Knight -> Cavalry -> Landship -> Tank -> Modern Armor -> Giant Death Robot
• Trireme -> Caravel -> Ironclad -> Destroyer
• Galleass -> Frigate -> Battleship
• Chariot Archer -> (merges into Knight)
• Catapult -> Trebuchet -> Cannon -> Artillery -> Rocket Artillery
• Privateer -> (merges into Destroyer)
• Anti-Aircraft Gun -> Mobile SAM
• Great War Bomber -> Bomber -> Stealth Bomber
• Triplane -> Fighter -> Jet Fighter
• Aircraft Carrier
• Submarine -> Nuclear Submarine
• Paratrooper -> XCOM Squad
• Atomic Bomb -> Nuclear Missile
• Missile Cruiser
• Marine
• Guided Missile

Do we want to reduce or increase the number of units in any of these paths? Do we want to introduce more variety into the Naval units, which are much shorter in BNW than their land-based counterparts? Or do we want the decisions about the number of units in each path to be made mostly by the flavor as we go through the tree?

yeah, I suppose this is where our opinions differ. We'll see if it matters soon, i'm sure.

[incidentally, i'm asking the WoT expert this question now]

Any response from the WoT expert?

Well it matters if we decide that it's a mechanic that needs to be stuck somewhere. If it's a LP building, which one is it? For the Gleeman? The Stonemason? The Artisan? Those aren't great, but they're certainly the only ones that make even a shred of sense.

I was figuring it'd be a National Wonder, but I'm not sure if it'd be one of our own invention, or a rebranding. If it's simply a rebranding (e.g., one of the science or happiness ones), then we're fine stopping it for now, but if it's somehow one that features some new or additional mechanic, we might want to roughly hash it out in case it affects its place in the time tree.

Of course, if we'd prefer to let it's place in the tree cause its mechanical effect (instead of the other way around), we can of course wait.

Agreed on your general placement. I'd guess era 4 or 5.

I think its place in the tree will be a large part of deciding its mechanical effect. I can see it working for one of the LPs you mentioned or as a Science NW or as one for one of our mechanics. I think if we see which one we need the most, we'll have a better idea of what we want to do with the Illuminators flavor.

Well, we don't *need* to provide spark before we provide Wilders. We could elect to do them at the same time. That said, keep in mind that Spark is based in part off of population and number of cities, so it's quite possible (and probably probable) that your civ has Spark automatically (if not literally on turn one).

If you did want to open the game (pre-wilder) with a tech that gave a small bonus to Spark (say it's "The Pattern" or something), I'd say we might want to simply affix that to an already preexisting tech. That, as you say, is useless at that moment, so it's probably better to just reflavor something else as relevant, and stick them together.

Column three sounds good though

Sorry, rereading my last post, I was being very ambiguous! I totally agree that we don't want to give the player Spark before they have Wilders, since the Spark will be useless and confusing then, or give them Wilders before they accumulate any Spark, since they won't be able to build the unit. So, as you've said, unlocking both at the same time is a good plan - give the player an initial 1 or 2 Spark on the tech that unlocks the Wilder.

In the tech tree in the DropBox, I figured either we could unlock the Wilder on "The One Power" (column 4 but there's no tech in column 3). We could move The One Power back to column 3 if we like. Or we could unlock the Wilder on The Pattern and switch The Pattern and History around.

I'll see if I can get a list of units (and remove the BNW ones) into the Editor so we can at least hang those off techs as a starting point for fleshing them out. (I'll add placeholder stuff like Melee Unit 1, as well as ones we know we'll have like Wilder.)

The problem with this is of course that some civs will elect to use MCs voluntarily, and those units need to be kept at pace with other units. I understand and don't disagree if you want "Saidin" literally to be later in the game, but I think there should still be a few techs that upgrade the power of MC's along the way (perhaps simultaneous to the female upgrades). The whole rogue-MC thing I'll tackle below when you bring it up.

Considering gentling chance is based on strength and such, it might make sense for us to link the upgrades of MCs to the upgrades of saidar units. That way, in order to keep your MCs gentle-able, you have to avoid saidar techs... and keep your channelers all weak. Or, at least, we should put the saidin techs in places that make them harder to min-max around

All very good points, I agree! I'm on board with upgrading MCs at the same time as saidar users. (I'm writing this out of order and have definitely already written this agreement somewhere else in this post, but have lost track of where.)

I see your point, but I actually am not sure I agree. The truth is that several of the Sisters have abilities that are somewhat gated:

Blue: Governors produce +2 faith (and governors might not be immediately available if you find the tower early)
Red: Gentling
Yellow: Healing targeted units (you mention this one)
White: Governors produce science
Brown: Excavate antiquity sites (definitely the long game!)

The only ones that are totally not limited are Green and Gray. And this is only concerning the tier one abilities. The truth is, picking a sister is somewhat a long-term decision. I don't think this is terribly bad. I'm not suggesting we make Gentling be era 6 or anything. Maybe more like era 2 or something. If you get a sister before then, you might still consider red because you're not missing out on much in the meantime.

Brown is of course a trickier sell, but I think that might be acceptable. Do you remember how hard it was to come up with abilities for them?

True, but with all of the units except Yellow, the things that they affect are systems that exist in their own right. (Governors, Antiquity Sites) It's not a case of the unit "owning" an ability that they just can't have until you reach a certain tech, it's that your civ needs to reach the system that makes that bonus active. The Yellow restriction would just be arbitrary, since that mechanic isn't shared with anything else, it's just a Yellow Ajah ability.

I think there's a fair argument that Reds are more like Whites and Blues in this way though - that Gentling is its own "system" since it exists beyond just the Red Ajah. I'd agree on that, that we could lock out Gentling as a whole behind a tech and it would be similar to Blues, Whites, and Browns.

That said, it doesn't matter that much if Gentling is auto-available, though!

Agreed, do we think that restricting Gentling to later in the game serves a specific purpose? I think it might make the progression a bit complicated, since we're discussing Sisters becoming accessible around the same time as the Gentling tech, it just makes the order the ability unlocks an area of potential confusion for the player, when most of the time it may be available on their first Sisters since they'd already have the Gentling tech.

We also know that early game MCs will be more dangerous than late game, so we don't want to minimize ways of dealing with them.

OK, points taken. Meet me halfway, though - how about Slate Roofing or something (or some superior way of saying it)? I'm fine with it being early.

Totally, that's completely in line with what I'm talking about above since it still calls out the flavor that's recognizable from the books. (I've used "Slate Roofing" in the DropBox tree! )

Ah. I think what you're forgetting is that the Horn can be found in Mythic Sites (The horn and seals are found in mythic sites), and Mythic sites don't appear until Era 7. Even if we changed that so it was Antiquity sites, we're still looking at Era 5 (I think). I understand what you're saying, but I think mechanically it's kind of wonky for us to set the search for the horn up particularly early.

I don't know what the project does (and I don't think we need to know, really), but certainly it should tie into the actual literal hunt, right?

Actually, I figured (and realized I've never mentioned this before now) that the Hunt project might not necessarily interact directly with the Horn mechanics. So it could be available before the Mythic Sites. The Hunt for the Horn in the books has a big effect on a lot of characters throughout the WoT history and has a lot of relevant CiV-like effects on the civilizations involved in it. The Hunt itself is something that happens for quite a long time before ever finding the Horn, and moves around a lot of military force, affects cultural movements, and things like that.

The Horn also isn't actually found by a Hunter in the books. That could be an element of the "books timeline" or it could be a relative constant in the whole process. Either way, the Hunt predates the Horn by long enough that making its effects relevant to the rest of the game beyond the actual Horn itself sounds like it could be good.

All of this depends on what we want that project to do, and whether there's a role we want it to fulfill at a different part of the game.

Right. I just have a feeling it wasn't *called that* throughout history.

Possibly, it seems like the term originates from somewhere in the late 1800s, which would be the very end of our technological timeline.

Right, so this touches on what I was saying above. I don't see anything terrible with Yellow Healing being gated. I feel like aura healing and target healing should probably be unlocked at the same point. This could actually be one of the earlier techs, theoretically. I could be swayed on any of this, though.

I mentioned targeted Healing above and the passive one is something to consider as well. Like Gentling, an early tech may just make the progression of these channeler abilities confusing, because they're always available in most games, but some circumstances could lead to unexpected differences in that availability for the player. (Seems out of place to unlock an ability for a unit that the player wouldn't usually have yet.)

I'd be inclined to go with the Yellow ability, Gentling, and the passive Healing being default abilities of Aes Sedai, and see how it goes. Also, since Aes Sedai can't attack units that don't threaten them directly, their role as healers gives them something effective to do in the early game aside from be threatening to enemies who are trying to avoid hitting them.

Right, so you're saying treat Aes Sedai and other Saidar units as a whole? I agree, I think.

Coolio! Originally I was actually thinking they would be separate (I didn't make that clear last time) but from your specifics here and below, I think I agree that keeping them together is better! Just overall more understandable for the player.

The only saidin units are MCs, asha'men, and whatever UU's we create.

I think I agree with your overall numbers (with the exception of the small number for saidin, as stated before). I think we could just have the MC's track along with the women, honestly. If we wanted to give the males some distinct changes in the late game, that could certainly be fine too.

So, numbers wise, we could do something like:

Channeler unlock in 2, strength in eras 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 or something, and then Warders in 4, 6, 7, or something? I dunno

That sounds like a good schedule! I added Fancloth to era 4 in the DropBox tree as a tech that could be an upgrade point for Warders.

I can see why you'd want them to track with the FDs, but this seems a little off to me. Remember, when a MC goes rogue, we decided he's going to get a significant boost of power anyways, so that might take care of us needing to consider their "danger" when we're doling out upgrades.

I think, not counting late game Asha-people having the power-trajectory throughout the game of the MCs be distinct from that of the saidar units (i.e. in era 2 the saidar units are down and the MCs are powerful) is too complex and not really worth it, which takes away part of the point of separating these techs at all. I suspect the best thing is just to have them upgrade simultaneously, until such a time as we want some weird stuff to happen in the late game (if we choose to gate Gentling, we can call that tech "Saidin"). I think this would mostly prevent people from being meta about it. If they avoided all channeling, and eschewed all channeling upgrades just to keep their MCs weak... well, damn, that's some pretty good roleplaying, civ player! Have a cookie!

All very good points! Let's upgrade the MCs alongside the saidar units then!

right, I think we put these in whenever we suspect players might need a surge of channelers, or when "expensive" channelers (e.g. Ashaman that cost multiple spark) come out. Keeping in mind that Spark increases with pop as well, we don't need this to do too much.

Yeah, this is definitely just seeding numbers to give civs a baseline Spark, the majority of a given civ's total Spark should come from natural Spark generation for any civ that isn't specifically anti-channeling.

I'm mostly right with you here. I think, the truth is that we can mostly keep to the middle, but also simply put techs at the top or the bottom as needed. Like, the Novices one, throw it up top. +Bushido for Warders? Put it near the bottom.

Definitely, there's room for us to put them wherever we need them.

sure, so Alignment buildings should be mid-late game, then? What, era 6 or something? 5?

5 or 6 sounds like a good place!

OK, so the WT starts handing out AS as soon as you meet them. Fine by me, I guess. We'll have to see how sucky it is for those who don't get those early sisters.

Keep in mind, though, that logically (and we talked about this forever ago), the AS of these early eras will be proportionally *more* powerful than those of later eras (except perhaps in the true late game). After all, stone axe < fireball (especially considering, as you said earlier, the Power was stronger back then). So, truthfully, the AS should be quite powerful relatively to everybody else. I do recall talking about the idea of having the AS wander around the map all bad-ass in the early game, though this isn't essential.

I don't know, it's kind of tough to decide.

I don't think it will be a problem. Given how early the "meet" tech is, I don't think this will make much of a difference in most cases - most players who meet the Tower early won't get a headstart on Sisters because the Tower's rate of giving them out is relatively low (in terms of the whole cycle time).

Yeah, late 7 is probably fine, though, of course, flavor wise it is quite literally something that should be taking place in the era of the dragon.

Definitely, the flavor says EotD, but we might need to move it back so that it can be used properly for the CiV mechanics.

You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of the Oppression civs. I actually think the Opp civs are fine. Sure, they can gentle units to get this benefit, but then they miss out on their +1 happiness. Play to your strengths, oppression civ! Absolutely don't want to give the oppression bonus to killing gentled channelers.

I think the group we should be considering is Liberation civs. Is there some benefit they get to this, or some way that there is incentive for them to heal their gentled channelers? Probably not necessarily, really, but from a flavor perspective it makes sense (the White Tower being much more skeptical of such things, I'm sure).

I think Oppression civs still potentially present a problem. A powerful strategy for Oppression civs would be to Gentle all of their channelers throughout the game, then once they choose Oppression and get the Healing-of-Gentling tech, they Heal all of those channelers and then kill them for Happiness. (Which effectively creates the bonus for killing Gentled channelers that you call out.) This doesn't seem like something we want to encourage Oppression civs to be doing.

For the Liberation stuff you mention, can you Heal foreign Gentled channelers? This seems like something that Liberation civs would like to be able to do, flavor-wise. (Could even be a Tenet - is it strong enough for that? Maybe if it gives you the unit after it's been Healed, rather than the other civ?)

I think we kind of need it to have a good chance of happening during the LB, or at least on the eve of it. The truth is, the Cleansing pits civ against civ, and as we've designed it, it is more-or-less the case that Shadow civs don't want it, yes? With that in mind, putting this in era 7 seems like it forces people to play their hand too early, right? So I'm thinking more like EotD.

True, it does tip player's hands on their intended Alignment, which isn't good. It does sort of worry me about the whole structure of it all happening at once, but it's worth seeing if it becomes a problem before we try to design around it. EotD it is!

At first that felt too early, but given the lifespan thing, I think you're right.

Sounds good.

Ah, *here* is where we're discussing projections! Yeah, 3 or 4 sounds good!

Awesome, Dreaming's in the DropBox tree as a potential tech for this!

OH, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that's annoying. I mean, should we/can we change the icons so that they're color-coded by the kind of thing it is? Like, Gold for trade-related, Blue for Science-related, or something? But yeah, that's a UI thing - for this phase, do what you gotta do, since it's obviously impossible to see what they mean without some text.

cool. look forward to it! It seems like we're pretty much ready for it now!

Coolio, I've updated the DropBox tree a few times during this post. There are quite a few techs "hanging in space" without any dependencies where we've called out eras for some of the later stuff we want to do, I figured it best to get them on there while we still have what we wanted in mind.

I'll take a look into making it so we can hang some example units off these techs as well, rather than just the BNW ones. And what we can do about those generic string descriptions, like channeler upgrade points!

 

[counterpoint]

I don't have a full response tonight - I've been working on the tech tree in the DropBox. I've placed in a bunch of techs (nothing attached to them) to get a general idea of placement for some of the techs we've discussed so far. I've also fixed a few bugs in the Editor that I ran into while making my changes.

There are definitely more techs that we've already discussed that could be placed on there, and we'll definitely want to move some (I've had to guess at a "best position" based on our text descriptions here, which demonstrates that having the visual helps because it wasn't always clear).

One of the things that I found was that for some of the early techs we have very clear goals (The Pattern, The One Power, History), others not as much (Clanship, Survival). That's not a problem, just something to keep in mind that the flavor of the techs should serve the things it's unlocking.

OK, been taking a look as you've been updating it. Thanks and good work! I'll write on it here, though obviously some of the topics are relevant elsewhere.

I should say, first, that it's possible I'm not seeing this correctly. What I see is the names of the techs, and a tech icon. The tech icons are all the same, though. It's the dude with the hat reaching towards the ground. I'm not seeing "pottery" or any of those other icons. Also, none of these have units, buildings, or abilities attached. Just the name and the generic icon. Is that right? If not, what do I do?

OK, so, onto the content.

I suspect we can do better than "The Beginning." It doesn't seem in line with how the rest of this goes. We need something that could theoretically lead to farming and settling. Some thoughts:

Community (probably too close to Clanship).
Settlement
Shelter
Habitation
Hearth
Household
Territory
Work
Labor

Alternatively, a case could be made for either Clanship or Survival being this first tech.

Re: column 2. Part of me feels like Survival and Mountaineering, in this placement, feel too similar. If spread by a column or two, they could work, but here.... Mountaineering is more or less "survival in the mountains", so doesnt feel distinct enough. I figure we'll be likely to preserve the column 2 tech functionality, and I'm having trouble figuring out which one "lines up" to which BNW tech (not that it needs be exact), since all I see are th enames. In any case, I'd suggest we should probably swap out one of those for something else.

I'd say, flavor-wise, History makes more sense as a combination of The Pattern and Clanship. Certainly, Clanship should be involved.

Re: Pattern and History being flipped... (mentioned later) I could go either way. I suppose neither of them feels like it has to be a "first round" tech - perhaps neither is "primordial" enough. Certainly History shouldn't be pushed left, IMO. I could actually imagine them being in the same column, both feeding into the One Power.

Night's Shade? Like, the plant? Remind me how that comes up nad why it's after Skimming?

Rest looks good (though it's possible I'm not seeing all of it!)

lots of stuff below that I'm not quoting - there's lots of "sounds good" and such going on hereabouts. Not quoting = agreement was reached!

Same! And even reading the summaries of those visions is depressing! Everything that all of the characters worked for, unmade!

good thing none of it [I think] will come to pass!

I like the Gateway Skirmisher and that style of name overall. Does that still work if we go with Skimming as the flavor, as you mention below? Skimming is still done via Gateways to reach the platforms, right? Or are they called something else?

I also think that Skirmisher or Ambush Infantry could definitely fill the flavor!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Gateways are still used in Skimming.

I'm tempted to tentatively go with Gateway Skirmisher, then. It sounds more on point than "Skirmisher" and other less clear versions.

Skimming sounds like a good one! It's a great way to explain why the two pieces of functionality are separated. I like the approach of calling the tech Skimming and then going with one of the two sets of names you suggested in the quote block above.

I figured "true Traveling" (the teleporting unit ability) would be unlocked on all of a certain class of unit by a tech. It feels like a few too many hoops to jump through to need a tech and then get to a certain promotion level with the affected unit type. Even if Traveling is an ability on talented individuals can learn, I'd say any channelers who are strong enough to become a unit in their own right should be strong enough for that. (Though we may limit it to certain unit types - so even if you've kept a Wilder around forever, they can't Travel, only Kin, Aes Sedai, and Asha'men or something like that.)

Yeah, I'm fine with Traveling existing for all units of a certain type (we can determine exactly who is eligible later). Besides, these are military "units." Presumably, one Wilder is a group of a few of them... somebody's bound to be able to do it!

Hmmm, good point. The initial BNW aircraft do use strategic resources. I would say that, flavorfully, these units should probably cost a smaller amount of a Spark than "primary" channeling units, since it doesn't require a combat-competent channeler, just someone who can Skim people to an instructed location. 1 Spark is how much the Wilder costs, right?

I'm a bit torn on this one as well, but they should probably cost some kind of strategic resource, one way or another. Maybe they should consume Angreal Caches? That makes some kind of sense - even the weakest channelers can do the required skimming if given an angreal?

Right! I think, actually, we probably need only go with a strategic resource.

We *could* have it cost spark instead (or in addition), but I think we want to do that only if we want these units to be "opposed" to channelers, in the sense that having a bunch of them means you can't have as many channelers. If we want that for game balance reasons, we should do it. But if we don't, then we don't need to consume spark, since this unit itself is actually just a military group.

Considering the strategic, though, it does seem that it needs to be Peat. Does that make any sense at all? We have Peat as the technological equal to oil, while the Angreal Cache (which makes flavorful sense) is the technological equal to Uranium. Suggestions?

Related question - Oil can be found on Coastal Tiles. This is probably so that coastal civs have a chance to build up good navies. Are we going to have Peat be found in the water? That...really makes no sense, considering what Peat truly is. :What do we do about this aspect? Do we have some Social Policy or building or something that provides some peat for a coastal city?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean here. Traveling Grounds is the improvement, which I think is what you're referring to in the first part? Agreed, that could definitely be retooled to be the building if we wanted to. I think we might have more success coming up with something else for the building though, because Traveling Grounds fits very well as an improvement because it was built in military encampments during the books (meaning it's relatively movable, which fits well with improvements being out on the frontlines, relative to cities). Which unit would we need to scrap based on our choice here?

you got my meaning well enough, somehow. I was suggesting that the travground flavor could be applied to a building. I do agree that it makes more sense as an improvement, flavorwise.

I mistyped. I meant o say "would involve scrapping the improvement."

I don't think it'll be overpowered because it requires forward planning to have the Improvement placed strategically when you need it. I figured it would be consistent with the way aircraft work with carriers that if the Improvement was pillaged then it would destroy any "Traveling Squads" stationed there. (Pillaging being analogous to destroying the carrier.) I didn't think units would need to attack it since that feels like the realm of cities - a player who wants it to be defensible should have "normal" units to defend it. (Also could go a ways to addressing any power concerns, since pillaging the Improvement would be snipeable - if a player loads it up with Traveling Squads and doesn't defend it properly they can lose a lot of units really fast.)

I suppose, considering the Travground can be built only in your territory, this isn't such an awesome boon or anything.

The problem with having pillaging be the only way of dealing with it is that, unlike cities (and carriers), these units will be just sitting there in, essentially, open terrain. Like, there'll be a tile with a stack of "air" units on it. As mechanical equivalents to aircraft, these shouldn't really be able to defend themselves against a ground assault. Can they? If so, then that breaks the "no stacks of Doom" cornerstone of civ5. Essentially, air units in CiV are designed to be contained "within" something (a city or a carrier). Having them sit on a pillagable improvement doesn't quite fit that role. What happens if a melee unit attacks them?

I think you just have to destroy it in T'a'r as usual. I don't think we'll have a problem with Dreamspikes being too powerful here since they come from LPs, which players won't have loads of. I think we did arrive at a good place for Dreamspikes before, but I was still a bit worried about their relative utility compared to other avenues of dominance - this makes them more relevant to the "main game".

I'm willing to be in "try it and see" land here

Yep, definitely an option! The Seanchan are positively oozing uniques!

gross.

Definitely good points here!

I think there are multiple benefits to having units that are dedicated to the AA role though. One is that it allows technologically advanced civs or ones with strong production capacity to compensate for enemy use of aircraft. This is something that they can do as a reaction to enemy army composition, whereas promotions would force players to speculatively make some of their units fill the AA role since they can't guarantee promotions at as short notice. (Unless this becomes a promotion available right away on some late game units, so EXP boosting buildings could be used to do that?)

The other is also for the attacker. If you have vision on the area around your bombing target, then you know to avoid bombing runs near where enemy AA units are stationed. But if it's just a promotion on existing units, then an attacking player has no real way of knowing whether there's a hard counter to their "air" attack in the area that they're planning to hit, even though with vision they arguably should have that information. This could be quite frustrating as some units unexpectedly hose "air" attacks. This would go some way to accomplishing the goal of weakening air combat though! And I imagine that some specific units in the late-game would emerge as commonly powerful units for the AA promotion, making it a bit more predictable for a human attacker. ("Oh, Blademasters usually take the anti-Traveler promotion, so I should probably not attack this guy next to a Blademaster." Then there's a meta in multiplayer of not picking that promotion since players will avoid it anyway. And double blinds and so on.)

these are all very good points. I'm fine with keeping the AA role.

One thing to keep in mind here is that if we're removing this role, then what are we replacing it with? It doesn't need to be the same thing, but I don't think we should straight up reduce the variety of unit roles that are there to be filled. AA is one of the few roles toward the endgame that remains consistently distinct - everything else can pretty much be covered by aircraft and tanks (ranged attacks, siege, killing enemy units, capturing civilians), whereas the roles are more distinct at the beginning of the game (cavalry, melee units, ranged units, siege units).

I understand. I don't think there's any chance at all of us truly reducing unit roles, though. We have male channelers and female channelers. Neither of these exist in BNW, and they run throughout our entire game. To this specific point, though... what would I replace it with? I don't know. Probably another combat unit with some slightly distinct feature. You know, like how a Chariot archer or Marine or Privateer or sort of "off to the side."

Combining the bomber and fighter roles is definitely something to consider. I've always found that fighters are usually quite defensive - you use them when fending off enemy air attacks more so than when laying siege to enemy cities (which is mostly about bombers on the air front, for attacking the city and the units defending it). Since fighters are limited to cities like bombers, this automatically makes defensive positions more powerful, which is good, because we don't want city control to suddenly be flip-flopping in all directions during the endgame. A unit that fulfills the fighter's role on the battlefield would be very similar to an AA unit, since it would be good for fending off enemy bombers when you're attacking. (Which connects to the AA role simplification you're suggesting.)

Overall I think we'd need to carefully consider why we want to reduce the number of unit roles available to players. Our objective here is to streamline the experience so that the guaranteed wars in WoTMod don't become a problem for the player experience. But at the same time, we don't want them all to play out the same way, and I think that availability of unit choice plays a lot into the strategics of that. If we're removing something like this, I think there should be something specific in mind that replaces it.

I think your point about bombers being offensive and fighters defensive is a good rationale for merging them. They, together, fill one distinct role. However, I can also see the argument that this would then make them too good - if you take a city with your "bombers," you then automatically have it well-defended without having to bring in new units (that said, given the way rebasing works, this wouldn't be making a very big difference.

I do still have flavor-trouble with the idea of a distinct "gateway" unit that is "anti-gateway." I can imagine this more readily with an AA unit, somehow (e.g. some kind of archer or something), but a unit that skims to stop skimming is weird to me.

As to what I would replace fighters with.... I think this is a case where I would suggest we need not replace them with anything. I'd sleep pretty well after making such a suggestion!

I could see us leaving it restricted to the Dragon and the Forsaken, but if we do that we should have some other kind of "ultimate military weapon" to fulfill that role in this era. Is there other flavor for us to draw from here - something that could be universally available and cause destruction like nukes? (Even eventually destroying cities, like Nuclear Missiles, though that specific mechanic could be left to Balefire.)

There's that roiling columns of fire weave that Rand used in the books, but again, that's a bit specific to Rand and he "learned it" from Lews Therin, which means it wouldn't be widely available.

Anything else that meshes well with our general lower tech armies toward the end of the game (compared to BNW)?

hmmm.... very much not sure the books give us any ammo here. Surprising that there isn't some ultimate weapon the bad guys roll out at the nth hour, right?

What about the Flame of Tar Valon? I suppose that was an anti-balefire weave (pure creation and all), which may not totally work. If we do decide on nukes being balefire, the Flame could theoretically be used to flavor Bomb Shelters somehow... as weird as that would be.

As far as military tech, the Dragons appear to be the "uber weapon" of the books. I think they don't quite work here, though. And, as obvious canon, it makes too much sense to use them as siege weapons.

What if we tweaked the mechanics and used sa'angreal as our "nukes." The system wouldn't be the same, maybe. Basically, you'd "produce" (maybe flavored as "discover") a sa'angreal and then choose to use it at some point. Maybe it makes any one channeler attack (or action in general) some many times more powerful, like annihilate any unit and nearly waste most cities powerful. But, like a nuke, it consumes itself in that instant. That would make these much more flexible than nukes. I'm not sure we'd be able to simulate the "flying to your destination," thing. They could theoretically also create "Bubbles of Evil," though this doesn't make quite as much sense as Balefire doing so. It's kind of a neat idea, though.

the thing is, though, again, I'm not 100% sure we need this. The end game will be nuts. With shadowspawn going everywhere, and the dragon and forsaken and ashamen and stuff, I feel like we might have enough to make an "uber weapon" not as necessary.

 

[counterpoint]

Yep, sounds good. Ferry could also replace Water Mill, which also requires a river and is production/food, which meshes with the Ferry flavor.

that's it!

I think those mid-game difficulties are what we can help with a pre-Agriculture start. By starting off the technology curve earlier on in human history, it gives us a wider range of flavor to pull from for the entire length of the tree. And reasons why such a progression is possible within the flavor are what allows us to do that.

Pre-agriculture techs being more abstract should be fine, I liked a lot of the techs you proposed a few posts back. I've put a few of them into the DropBox tree and plan to put in more, though I wanted to be sure that we had specific ideas for the role we wanted those techs to play before placing them. Most of the techs I've put in there I've put in after we've discussed one or more specific things that it could unlock (channeler upgrade point, meet the Tower, Siege Unit 1, etc).

this was discussed a bit above. I'm happy with the path we're headed in for the time being.

It's probably worth us discussing which unit upgrade paths we're going to keep? That's something we're doing with the AA upgrade path specifically elsewhere, but not with the rest. I figure we probably want to keep most of the "foundational" upgrade paths: Melee, Ranged, Siege, Ranged Naval, Melee Naval, Horses, Anti-Horses. We also discussed adding our own Scouting upgrade path.

Just as a jumping off point, here are the BNW upgrade paths again:

• Warrior -> Swordsman -> Longswordsman -> Musketman -> Rifleman -> Great War Infantry -> Infantry -> Mechanized Infantry
• Scout *-> Archer -> Composite Bowman -> Crossbowman -> Gatling Gun -> Machine Gun -> Bazooka
• Spearman -> Pikeman -> Lancer -> Anti-Tank Gun -> Helicopter
• Horseman -> Knight -> Cavalry -> Landship -> Tank -> Modern Armor -> Giant Death Robot
• Trireme -> Caravel -> Ironclad -> Destroyer
• Galleass -> Frigate -> Battleship
• Chariot Archer -> (merges into Knight)
• Catapult -> Trebuchet -> Cannon -> Artillery -> Rocket Artillery
• Privateer -> (merges into Destroyer)
• Anti-Aircraft Gun -> Mobile SAM
• Great War Bomber -> Bomber -> Stealth Bomber
• Triplane -> Fighter -> Jet Fighter
• Aircraft Carrier
• Submarine -> Nuclear Submarine
• Paratrooper -> XCOM Squad
• Atomic Bomb -> Nuclear Missile
• Missile Cruiser
• Marine
• Guided Missile

Do we want to reduce or increase the number of units in any of these paths? Do we want to introduce more variety into the Naval units, which are much shorter in BNW than their land-based counterparts? Or do we want the decisions about the number of units in each path to be made mostly by the flavor as we go through the tree?

Right! Good idea. My thoughts are below:

Melee: fine as is
Ranged: fine as is, though we can officially pull the scout into its own category.
Scout -> Scout 2 (probably enough, I think)
Anti-hourse: probably fine. I've always hated the absurd leap from lancer to A-T G, especially how long lancers hang around. Could consider adding another unit here. I assume we're not going to reproduce the direct nature of the helicopter....
Horse: fine, I think.
Naval Melee: I think we could probably use another one here. The Trireme does seem to hang around a bit too long. Also, see below on Privateer (could be merged in here)
Naval Ranged: same as above. could probably use a better. Galleass to frigate is a pretty big leap. Could see bringing in the galleass equivalent earlier, but make it suckier, and put in an intermediate step. Also, could see another after the Fridate.
Chariot Archer: could see this one being eliminated. Don't feel strongly about it, though.
Siege: I think this is probably fine.
Privateer: part of me feels that this is kind of random in its loneliness. I could see us either merging it with the naval melee line, or else leaving it for a UU or something. On the other hand, it being on its own helps make it a somewhat rare unit, in comparison to the numerous caravels you see - which certainly makes it more dominant, since it's stronger than them and can thus often capture them. I suppose it would be lamer if there were tons of privateers of equal strength rolling around.
AA: Previously discussed. Don't need more. Could see only one generation if we did the same with our gateway units
"Bombers" and "Fighters": aforementioned notes on merging them still stand. Could also theoretically see us eliminating the upgrade path or something or making it only two units long.
Carrier: this is quite weird. Could definitely see eliminating this unit. I suppose it could survive as a "troop transport" in some way, but that is a little odd, especially seeing that it doesn't make sense why it couldn't transport other units as well. Of course, eliminating it means that you can't move your "air units"... which, maybe I'm ok with that?
Subs:: very odd. Can't justify this functionality at all. Theoretically as an "Innovation" or something, but not a real stand-alone unit type given our flavor.
Paratroopers:: I think we can axe these. Their purpose is being filled by travelling units.
Nukes: see above
Missile Cruiser: depends 100% on what we do with nukes.
Marine: highly likely this guy can just be merged into existing melee units or else ditched completely
Guided Missile: totally depends on nukes.

Also, we should add to this list some new-mechanics things:

The Hunter. Do they fit in with the melee units, or are they a stand-alone unit? If so, do they have an upgrade path? Is there a civilian version of them?

Wilder -> Kin (plus upgrades in stats/abilities)
Aes Sedai (upgrades)
Warder (upgrades)
Male Channeler (upgrades)
Asha'man (upgrades)

also, I remember you talking about a settler upgrade. Still thinking that's a good idea?

Do any of our civilians have upgrade paths?)

anything else?

Any response from the WoT expert?

not yet!

I think its place in the tree will be a large part of deciding its mechanical effect. I can see it working for one of the LPs you mentioned or as a Science NW or as one for one of our mechanics. I think if we see which one we need the most, we'll have a better idea of what we want to do with the Illuminators flavor.

ok. I think we can leave it alone for now, then.

Sorry, rereading my last post, I was being very ambiguous! I totally agree that we don't want to give the player Spark before they have Wilders, since the Spark will be useless and confusing then, or give them Wilders before they accumulate any Spark, since they won't be able to build the unit. So, as you've said, unlocking both at the same time is a good plan - give the player an initial 1 or 2 Spark on the tech that unlocks the Wilder.

In the tech tree in the DropBox, I figured either we could unlock the Wilder on "The One Power" (column 4 but there's no tech in column 3). We could move The One Power back to column 3 if we like. Or we could unlock the Wilder on The Pattern and switch The Pattern and History around.

I'll see if I can get a list of units (and remove the BNW ones) into the Editor so we can at least hang those off techs as a starting point for fleshing them out. (I'll add placeholder stuff like Melee Unit 1, as well as ones we know we'll have like Wilder.)

cool. this all sounds good. Addressed some of the Power stuff way above. Just to be clear, is "The Beginning" in Column 1, or 0?

All very good points, I agree! I'm on board with upgrading MCs at the same time as saidar users. (I'm writing this out of order and have definitely already written this agreement somewhere else in this post, but have lost track of where.)

great. looks like Aes Sedai, saidar, and saidin units all upgrade together.

True, but with all of the units except Yellow, the things that they affect are systems that exist in their own right. (Governors, Antiquity Sites) It's not a case of the unit "owning" an ability that they just can't have until you reach a certain tech, it's that your civ needs to reach the system that makes that bonus active. The Yellow restriction would just be arbitrary, since that mechanic isn't shared with anything else, it's just a Yellow Ajah ability.

I think there's a fair argument that Reds are more like Whites and Blues in this way though - that Gentling is its own "system" since it exists beyond just the Red Ajah. I'd agree on that, that we could lock out Gentling as a whole behind a tech and it would be similar to Blues, Whites, and Browns.

I could weasel around about how this isn't that big of a problem and such, but then I remember that I don't necessarily have any specific reason why healing (targetted or otherwise) *shouldn't* be there automatically. So, sure!

Agreed, do we think that restricting Gentling to later in the game serves a specific purpose? I think it might make the progression a bit complicated, since we're discussing Sisters becoming accessible around the same time as the Gentling tech, it just makes the order the ability unlocks an area of potential confusion for the player, when most of the time it may be available on their first Sisters since they'd already have the Gentling tech.

We also know that early game MCs will be more dangerous than late game, so we don't want to minimize ways of dealing with them.

again, don't have any real justification for why we should postpone this. Gentling available early!

Actually, I figured (and realized I've never mentioned this before now) that the Hunt project might not necessarily interact directly with the Horn mechanics. So it could be available before the Mythic Sites. The Hunt for the Horn in the books has a big effect on a lot of characters throughout the WoT history and has a lot of relevant CiV-like effects on the civilizations involved in it. The Hunt itself is something that happens for quite a long time before ever finding the Horn, and moves around a lot of military force, affects cultural movements, and things like that.

The Horn also isn't actually found by a Hunter in the books. That could be an element of the "books timeline" or it could be a relative constant in the whole process. Either way, the Hunt predates the Horn by long enough that making its effects relevant to the rest of the game beyond the actual Horn itself sounds like it could be good.

All of this depends on what we want that project to do, and whether there's a role we want it to fulfill at a different part of the game.

OK, radical idea: what's the point of the Hunt project? Like, maybe we don't need it. The hunt itself is ongoing (once unlocked). The Hunt seems to be something that would provide culture and stuff, so I could imagine it as a flavor-replacement for the Worlds Fair or something, but having such a project be *totally* divorced from the actual hunt seems flavor-dissonant, to me.

You're right that the hunt when on many times without being found, but they most certainly didn't know that. And in our game, everybody knows it isn't available until later. I'd say a meaningful "Great Hunt" project somewhat depends on an actual possibility of finding *something*, I think. But since even antiquity sites don't exist until rather late in the game, this feels somewhat immersion-breaking.

The Square of Tammaz (or whatever it is called) should still exist as a wonder, and probably gives some bonuses to Hunting (or bonuses *from* hunting), among other things, but I'm not sure this stand-alone project needs to exist. Of course, that might intrude on our ability to create a nice Illian UA, but inserting a whole mechanic just to justify a UA idea isn't a good idea anyways.

I mentioned targeted Healing above and the passive one is something to consider as well. Like Gentling, an early tech may just make the progression of these channeler abilities confusing, because they're always available in most games, but some circumstances could lead to unexpected differences in that availability for the player. (Seems out of place to unlock an ability for a unit that the player wouldn't usually have yet.)

I'd be inclined to go with the Yellow ability, Gentling, and the passive Healing being default abilities of Aes Sedai, and see how it goes. Also, since Aes Sedai can't attack units that don't threaten them directly, their role as healers gives them something effective to do in the early game aside from be threatening to enemies who are trying to avoid hitting them.

agreed on all this!

Coolio! Originally I was actually thinking they would be separate (I didn't make that clear last time) but from your specifics here and below, I think I agree that keeping them together is better! Just overall more understandable for the player.

agreed.

That sounds like a good schedule! I added Fancloth to era 4 in the DropBox tree as a tech that could be an upgrade point for Warders.

cool.

5 or 6 sounds like a good place!

roight.

I don't think it will be a problem. Given how early the "meet" tech is, I don't think this will make much of a difference in most cases - most players who meet the Tower early won't get a headstart on Sisters because the Tower's rate of giving them out is relatively low (in terms of the whole cycle time).

sounds good

I think Oppression civs still potentially present a problem. A powerful strategy for Oppression civs would be to Gentle all of their channelers throughout the game, then once they choose Oppression and get the Healing-of-Gentling tech, they Heal all of those channelers and then kill them for Happiness. (Which effectively creates the bonus for killing Gentled channelers that you call out.) This doesn't seem like something we want to encourage Oppression civs to be doing.

I say we just plain old eliminate any "killed gentler happiness bonus" for Oppression civs. Yes, they can do what you are saying, but they would get only the Gentling reward, not the Execution reward. This makes flavorful and mechanical sense to me.

For the Liberation stuff you mention, can you Heal foreign Gentled channelers? This seems like something that Liberation civs would like to be able to do, flavor-wise. (Could even be a Tenet - is it strong enough for that? Maybe if it gives you the unit after it's been Healed, rather than the other civ?)

that's kind of bizarre.... I mean, I suppose it could be an idea, but it seems like it might be mechanically problematic. You take a crappy unit of the enemies, and turn it into a much more powerful unit of your own? I suppose it's the "Take the Unit" part of this I find problematic, and doing it without getting the unit seems sort of pointless. I dunno... I guess I could be convinced. I do like the flavor of it.

True, it does tip player's hands on their intended Alignment, which isn't good. It does sort of worry me about the whole structure of it all happening at once, but it's worth seeing if it becomes a problem before we try to design around it. EotD it is!

it will be wonderful chaos.

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, been taking a look as you've been updating it. Thanks and good work! I'll write on it here, though obviously some of the topics are relevant elsewhere.

I should say, first, that it's possible I'm not seeing this correctly. What I see is the names of the techs, and a tech icon. The tech icons are all the same, though. It's the dude with the hat reaching towards the ground. I'm not seeing "pottery" or any of those other icons. Also, none of these have units, buildings, or abilities attached. Just the name and the generic icon. Is that right? If not, what do I do?

This is correct! I removed all of the base game techs and seeing as we'll need custom icons for our techs there's no need to go through and select other icons for them now.

I haven't assigned any units/buildings yet because I need to create the definitions for non-BNW content first. They will also all have placeholder icons!

I took a bit of a look into how difficult it would be to get the abilities stuff working and it will probably take a little while, but looks doable. I haven't looked at how to persist the information yet, but have been getting a better understanding of how it draws all of the things a tech unlocks and how I could add the BNW "generic functionality" thing with a tooltip onto certain techs.

OK, so, onto the content.

I suspect we can do better than "The Beginning." It doesn't seem in line with how the rest of this goes. We need something that could theoretically lead to farming and settling. Some thoughts:

Community (probably too close to Clanship).
Settlement
Shelter
Habitation
Hearth
Household
Territory
Work
Labor

Alternatively, a case could be made for either Clanship or Survival being this first tech.

Totally agreed, "The Beginning" was only a placeholder to show where the tree started. I can definitely see Survival being a good first tech - it makes sense from the Breaking point of view (learn to survive in the new world) and from a progression point of view (an essential skill for any organized society).

Before we can decide this though, I think we need to know what it does. Does the first tech unlock Farms like Agriculture does in BNW? I can see both Survival and Clanship working in that case - though I think Clanship has a certain proto-military suggestion to it, which could be good for an early military tech (more on this below). Some of the ones you suggested here also sound good for that role (specifically Settlement and Habitation).

And if we want to do something more than unlock Farms, what else do we want to unlock?

It's worth mentioning that in BNW Workers, Warriors, and Scouts don't require any technologies, which we will presumably leave the same?

Re: column 2. Part of me feels like Survival and Mountaineering, in this placement, feel too similar. If spread by a column or two, they could work, but here.... Mountaineering is more or less "survival in the mountains", so doesnt feel distinct enough. I figure we'll be likely to preserve the column 2 tech functionality, and I'm having trouble figuring out which one "lines up" to which BNW tech (not that it needs be exact), since all I see are th enames. In any case, I'd suggest we should probably swap out one of those for something else.

I'd say, flavor-wise, History makes more sense as a combination of The Pattern and Clanship. Certainly, Clanship should be involved.

As I mentioned above, I think Clanship can potentially be useful as an early military tech. I think with both Clanship and Mountaineering we've got techs on here before we know what we want them to unlock. In the case of the Pattern we're considering it as an early channeling tech (though I'm afraid I've lost track of which ability - I believe we were at "meet the Tower" and Wilders on The One Power, and "unlocking sending Novices" (at least) on Saidar, as well as that being an upgrade point for channelers?).

Anyway, we should sort that out, but in terms of Clanship and Survival, there are a few things we probably want to unlock in the first column of the After Breaking era, and what those things are should guide the flavor of what techs we want. What these things are will depend a bit on how directly we want to take the progression from BNW. I think in the early game, we might want to stick closer to BNW, since the foundational unlocks are difficult to operate without? This means column one should unlock: A Food Building, a Faith building, a trade route, reveal Horses, the land trade unit, the Pasture Improvement, Ranged Unit 1, the Mine Improvement, and the ability to cut down Forests.

Do we want to shift any of these later or pull anything from column two forward? (Handy full tree for reference.) Or could some of these become available from the get-go and not require a tech?

Related to us reproducing the unlock patterns from BNW, I don't think however that we want to recreate the exact tech dependency structure from BNW, because that will make the new tree very copy-and-paste of the old one.

Re: Pattern and History being flipped... (mentioned later) I could go either way. I suppose neither of them feels like it has to be a "first round" tech - perhaps neither is "primordial" enough. Certainly History shouldn't be pushed left, IMO. I could actually imagine them being in the same column, both feeding into the One Power.

Definitely, I could see either of these fitting in after column one. Both of them feeding into The One Power sounds like it would be a good idea.

Night's Shade? Like, the plant? Remind me how that comes up nad why it's after Skimming?

Night's Shade is also the name of the weave from the AoL that is used to create the Bloodknife rings. It probably would have been clearer if I'd just gone with "Bloodknife Ring" or something. I figure the exact flavor of that tech will depend on what else it unlocks and how that links to Bloodknives, if at all.

good thing none of it [I think] will come to pass!

Yeah, hopefully including the Aiel in the Dragon's Peace prevented that particular future!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Gateways are still used in Skimming.

I'm tempted to tentatively go with Gateway Skirmisher, then. It sounds more on point than "Skirmisher" and other less clear versions.

Yeah, I'm fine with Traveling existing for all units of a certain type (we can determine exactly who is eligible later). Besides, these are military "units." Presumably, one Wilder is a group of a few of them... somebody's bound to be able to do it!

Great, all sounds good!

Right! I think, actually, we probably need only go with a strategic resource.

We *could* have it cost spark instead (or in addition), but I think we want to do that only if we want these units to be "opposed" to channelers, in the sense that having a bunch of them means you can't have as many channelers. If we want that for game balance reasons, we should do it. But if we don't, then we don't need to consume spark, since this unit itself is actually just a military group.

Considering the strategic, though, it does seem that it needs to be Peat. Does that make any sense at all? We have Peat as the technological equal to oil, while the Angreal Cache (which makes flavorful sense) is the technological equal to Uranium. Suggestions?

I've been thinking of Spark sort of like a Strategic resource, so when I suggested that before I was considering Spark one of the options, rather than in addition. Totally agree, we don't want it to cost Spark + another Strategic resource. I think we're in agreement that we probably don't want to use Spark here (by itself) as the cost either. Particularly as you've said, because it limits channeler usage of the civ.

Peat... doesn't really make any sense here, as you've pointed out. For a few reasons. Given that the Strategics' role in the game is to restrict the unit counts of certain unit types though, shall we swap them around? Angreal Cache being the replacement for Oil and Peat as the replacement for Uranium? (Or possibly something else, at this rate, depending on what flavor we need to unlock our endgame military units?)

Related question - Oil can be found on Coastal Tiles. This is probably so that coastal civs have a chance to build up good navies. Are we going to have Peat be found in the water? That...really makes no sense, considering what Peat truly is. :What do we do about this aspect? Do we have some Social Policy or building or something that provides some peat for a coastal city?

This crosses over with the flavor from reality of military ships also using oil as fuel. Above, I've suggested swapping Peat and Angreal Caches, but I don't think Angreal Caches will match up to the flavor of our endgame naval units? Perhaps we should hold off on the Strategics until we know what the units are that they will be unlocking? Then we can look at that combination of units and see what common flavor we can use to link them up.

you got my meaning well enough, somehow. I was suggesting that the travground flavor could be applied to a building. I do agree that it makes more sense as an improvement, flavorwise.

I mistyped. I meant o say "would involve scrapping the improvement."

All sounds good then!

I suppose, considering the Travground can be built only in your territory, this isn't such an awesome boon or anything.

The problem with having pillaging be the only way of dealing with it is that, unlike cities (and carriers), these units will be just sitting there in, essentially, open terrain. Like, there'll be a tile with a stack of "air" units on it. As mechanical equivalents to aircraft, these shouldn't really be able to defend themselves against a ground assault. Can they? If so, then that breaks the "no stacks of Doom" cornerstone of civ5. Essentially, air units in CiV are designed to be contained "within" something (a city or a carrier). Having them sit on a pillagable improvement doesn't quite fit that role. What happens if a melee unit attacks them?

Definitely, we don't want them to be stackable defense. I'm saying that the "air" units and normal units don't interact at all in terms of movement of normal units. A normal unit can just walk onto the Traveling Ground and pillage it, if it's undefended by non-air units of the player who owns it. The Gateway Skirmisher unit would "stack" on Traveling Grounds in exactly the same way they do on cities - in a hovering menu above the tile, not "standing on it" like normal units do. The "within" in this case is the Improvement, which is vulnerable by itself, but a normal unit can be stationed on top of it to defend it.

gross.

They should really have someone take a look at that!

these are all very good points. I'm fine with keeping the AA role.

Sounds good!

I understand. I don't think there's any chance at all of us truly reducing unit roles, though. We have male channelers and female channelers. Neither of these exist in BNW, and they run throughout our entire game. To this specific point, though... what would I replace it with? I don't know. Probably another combat unit with some slightly distinct feature. You know, like how a Chariot archer or Marine or Privateer or sort of "off to the side."

This is a good point, though I think overall we should end up adding to the number of roles available to the player, since they will (mostly) come in with knowledge of the base game and taking away mechanical parts of that wouldn't be great for their experience if the roles those represented we're filled.

I think your point about bombers being offensive and fighters defensive is a good rationale for merging them. They, together, fill one distinct role. However, I can also see the argument that this would then make them too good - if you take a city with your "bombers," you then automatically have it well-defended without having to bring in new units (that said, given the way rebasing works, this wouldn't be making a very big difference.

I do still have flavor-trouble with the idea of a distinct "gateway" unit that is "anti-gateway." I can imagine this more readily with an AA unit, somehow (e.g. some kind of archer or something), but a unit that skims to stop skimming is weird to me.

As to what I would replace fighters with.... I think this is a case where I would suggest we need not replace them with anything. I'd sleep pretty well after making such a suggestion!

The combination offense/defense of the bomber/fighter setup does make merging them create a more "whole" unit, that's a good point. It may also go a ways to stopping air combat from dominating the late game. Players who are on the offensive tend to build a lot of bombers at the expense of fighters, and vice versa for defensive. If everyone always has effective air defense near their cities, then air attacks will be less effective overall.

Were we to keep the fighter role, they don't necessarily need to be Gateway units that are specifically anti-Gateway. I think it works pretty well (vision on an engagement starting from enemy units Traveling in, Travel out to combat them), but other flavor like some kind of "sniper-archer" unit, that can take super long shots from cover at such attackers could work. There are a number of ways of using some kind of channeling defending unit to try to cut off the Gateways somehow (rather than actually go out and attack, cause the gateways to collapse and kill the attackers), though this would be more of a "channeling unit" than the Gateway Skirmisher is.

hmmm.... very much not sure the books give us any ammo here. Surprising that there isn't some ultimate weapon the bad guys roll out at the nth hour, right?

What about the Flame of Tar Valon? I suppose that was an anti-balefire weave (pure creation and all), which may not totally work. If we do decide on nukes being balefire, the Flame could theoretically be used to flavor Bomb Shelters somehow... as weird as that would be.

As far as military tech, the Dragons appear to be the "uber weapon" of the books. I think they don't quite work here, though. And, as obvious canon, it makes too much sense to use them as siege weapons.

What if we tweaked the mechanics and used sa'angreal as our "nukes." The system wouldn't be the same, maybe. Basically, you'd "produce" (maybe flavored as "discover") a sa'angreal and then choose to use it at some point. Maybe it makes any one channeler attack (or action in general) some many times more powerful, like annihilate any unit and nearly waste most cities powerful. But, like a nuke, it consumes itself in that instant. That would make these much more flexible than nukes. I'm not sure we'd be able to simulate the "flying to your destination," thing. They could theoretically also create "Bubbles of Evil," though this doesn't make quite as much sense as Balefire doing so. It's kind of a neat idea, though.

the thing is, though, again, I'm not 100% sure we need this. The end game will be nuts. With shadowspawn going everywhere, and the dragon and forsaken and ashamen and stuff, I feel like we might have enough to make an "uber weapon" not as necessary.

The sa'angreal thing sounds like a great idea! Would we want to "launch" that from channeling units? (Specific unit types or otherwise?) As in, as long as you have a "discovered" sa'angreal, any of your qualifying channelers can launch the attack itself. (This would mean some of our channeling units would fulfill the roles of the Missile Cruiser, sort of - a lack of ocean launches makes that not quite the same.) Alternatively we could launch them from cities, the flavor being somewhat similar to Gateway Skirmishers in it being a channeler who wields it from within the city? (Or we could do both? The ability to "load up" the sa'angreal with a given unit and move it across the map that way.)

Agreed about Dragons, I think they work best as siege units. And also agreed about the Flame of Tar Valon, that could be used for bomb shelters, in a way!

With regards to the need for this, I think we still do. All of that craziness is at a different "layer" of the game to this one. It's all systematic stuff that affects the overall trajectory of all of the civs and their long term plans. This role affects the turn-to-turn action availability within the context of all of those wars. I think if there aren't a few civs that have "superweapons" then the LB stuff won't be as interesting, because there won't be as much tactical variety.


I'm afraid I'm out of time for tonight! And I'm going to be out tomorrow and Thursday evenings, and away over the weekend. But I'll try to get some more post done when I get home tomorrow and Thursday - hopefully be up to date before I go away on Friday!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm afraid I've failed to pull together the time for the rest of that reply before I leave tomorrow! I will reply to the rest as soon as I get back though! Sorry for the delay!

 

[counterpoint]

This is correct! I removed all of the base game techs and seeing as we'll need custom icons for our techs there's no need to go through and select other icons for them now.

I haven't assigned any units/buildings yet because I need to create the definitions for non-BNW content first. They will also all have placeholder icons!

I took a bit of a look into how difficult it would be to get the abilities stuff working and it will probably take a little while, but looks doable. I haven't looked at how to persist the information yet, but have been getting a better understanding of how it draws all of the things a tech unlocks and how I could add the BNW "generic functionality" thing with a tooltip onto certain techs.

In your absence, I took some time to work on the tech tree myself (see below) in the editor. I'm unfortunately here to report that I'm having some major issues with it. Most notably, I can't export - I get an error message (missing key, I think) anytime I try to export. This, combined with the not infrequent crashing, and the fact that (strangely) certain units and such are missing from the box on the right, I figured it's not worth it for me to be the one messing with the editor. It's helpful for me to mess around with, but I think if it works well for you, you may be the best person to actually do the editing.

That said, see below for my solution.

Totally agreed, "The Beginning" was only a placeholder to show where the tree started. I can definitely see Survival being a good first tech - it makes sense from the Breaking point of view (learn to survive in the new world) and from a progression point of view (an essential skill for any organized society).

Before we can decide this though, I think we need to know what it does. Does the first tech unlock Farms like Agriculture does in BNW? I can see both Survival and Clanship working in that case - though I think Clanship has a certain proto-military suggestion to it, which could be good for an early military tech (more on this below). Some of the ones you suggested here also sound good for that role (specifically Settlement and Habitation).

And if we want to do something more than unlock Farms, what else do we want to unlock?

It's worth mentioning that in BNW Workers, Warriors, and Scouts don't require any technologies, which we will presumably leave the same?

See below for my solutions to this kind of thing. Suffice it to say, I've been working with this initial tech unlocking all the same stuff as it does in BNW (the things you mentioned, in addition to the Monument). I experimented with pulling the farm and the settler out to a later tech, but I ultimately wimped out, opting, as you've mentioned, to keep things pretty similar to BNW in the beginning.

As I mentioned above, I think Clanship can potentially be useful as an early military tech. I think with both Clanship and Mountaineering we've got techs on here before we know what we want them to unlock. In the case of the Pattern we're considering it as an early channeling tech (though I'm afraid I've lost track of which ability - I believe we were at "meet the Tower" and Wilders on The One Power, and "unlocking sending Novices" (at least) on Saidar, as well as that being an upgrade point for channelers?).

I will say more below, but I do see how Clanship could be tech-related, though to me, it could also be related to something else. In my current iteration, I've gone away from using it, Mountaineering, or Survival.

Anyway, we should sort that out, but in terms of Clanship and Survival, there are a few things we probably want to unlock in the first column of the After Breaking era, and what those things are should guide the flavor of what techs we want. What these things are will depend a bit on how directly we want to take the progression from BNW. I think in the early game, we might want to stick closer to BNW, since the foundational unlocks are difficult to operate without? This means column one should unlock: A Food Building, a Faith building, a trade route, reveal Horses, the land trade unit, the Pasture Improvement, Ranged Unit 1, the Mine Improvement, and the ability to cut down Forests.

Do we want to shift any of these later or pull anything from column two forward? (Handy full tree for reference.) Or could some of these become available from the get-go and not require a tech?

Related to us reproducing the unlock patterns from BNW, I don't think however that we want to recreate the exact tech dependency structure from BNW, because that will make the new tree very copy-and-paste of the old one.

see below. I've decided to keep the beginning pretty much the same, but let the dependencies drift a bit.

Night's Shade is also the name of the weave from the AoL that is used to create the Bloodknife rings. It probably would have been clearer if I'd just gone with "Bloodknife Ring" or something. I figure the exact flavor of that tech will depend on what else it unlocks and how that links to Bloodknives, if at all.

got it. I think Night's Shade could be a cool tech name, but something more generic like "poisons" "apothecary" or "medicine" would be better.

I've been thinking of Spark sort of like a Strategic resource, so when I suggested that before I was considering Spark one of the options, rather than in addition. Totally agree, we don't want it to cost Spark + another Strategic resource. I think we're in agreement that we probably don't want to use Spark here (by itself) as the cost either. Particularly as you've said, because it limits channeler usage of the civ.

Peat... doesn't really make any sense here, as you've pointed out. For a few reasons. Given that the Strategics' role in the game is to restrict the unit counts of certain unit types though, shall we swap them around? Angreal Cache being the replacement for Oil and Peat as the replacement for Uranium? (Or possibly something else, at this rate, depending on what flavor we need to unlock our endgame military units?)

ok, no spark for gateways it is!

I do think we need to keep the Cache as our Uranium, if only because we've now stumbled upon sa'angreal as a likely nuke replacement - obviously they are quite linked.

I'm wondering if we simply need to change peat. As a resource, it's a little silly, especially for being late-game, as it's ultimately just rotting moss and such. I wonder if we'd be better off calling in tar (not to be confused with t'a'r or something, as it was used for ships and such. I'm not sure that helps us with the ocean platform thing though. Then again, i'm not sure *any* tech would help with that. (perhaps we need a building or something). I suppose we could even consider using oil itself.

This crosses over with the flavor from reality of military ships also using oil as fuel. Above, I've suggested swapping Peat and Angreal Caches, but I don't think Angreal Caches will match up to the flavor of our endgame naval units? Perhaps we should hold off on the Strategics until we know what the units are that they will be unlocking? Then we can look at that combination of units and see what common flavor we can use to link them up.

yeah, exactly. I suppose we could sort of hold off on such, but then again, I think we know what we know now and probably can decide

Definitely, we don't want them to be stackable defense. I'm saying that the "air" units and normal units don't interact at all in terms of movement of normal units. A normal unit can just walk onto the Traveling Ground and pillage it, if it's undefended by non-air units of the player who owns it. The Gateway Skirmisher unit would "stack" on Traveling Grounds in exactly the same way they do on cities - in a hovering menu above the tile, not "standing on it" like normal units do. The "within" in this case is the Improvement, which is vulnerable by itself, but a normal unit can be stationed on top of it to defend it.

got it. So they'd be stacking there, and if you DID pillage them with a unit, they'd go bye-bye. Would that destroy the units or capture them, or do something else? Either way, travgrounds are quite vulnerable!

The combination offense/defense of the bomber/fighter setup does make merging them create a more "whole" unit, that's a good point. It may also go a ways to stopping air combat from dominating the late game. Players who are on the offensive tend to build a lot of bombers at the expense of fighters, and vice versa for defensive. If everyone always has effective air defense near their cities, then air attacks will be less effective overall.

I like this. a good point.

Were we to keep the fighter role, they don't necessarily need to be Gateway units that are specifically anti-Gateway. I think it works pretty well (vision on an engagement starting from enemy units Traveling in, Travel out to combat them), but other flavor like some kind of "sniper-archer" unit, that can take super long shots from cover at such attackers could work. There are a number of ways of using some kind of channeling defending unit to try to cut off the Gateways somehow (rather than actually go out and attack, cause the gateways to collapse and kill the attackers), though this would be more of a "channeling unit" than the Gateway Skirmisher is.

I think this kind of thing could work, but it's a little immersion-breaking, to me. Like, for some reason these archers - and only these - can stack? A bit "off." The channeler is less bizarre, certainly, but then again then it feels like it should cost spark...

The sa'angreal thing sounds like a great idea! Would we want to "launch" that from channeling units? (Specific unit types or otherwise?) As in, as long as you have a "discovered" sa'angreal, any of your qualifying channelers can launch the attack itself. (This would mean some of our channeling units would fulfill the roles of the Missile Cruiser, sort of - a lack of ocean launches makes that not quite the same.) Alternatively we could launch them from cities, the flavor being somewhat similar to Gateway Skirmishers in it being a channeler who wields it from within the city? (Or we could do both? The ability to "load up" the sa'angreal with a given unit and move it across the map that way.)

Agreed about Dragons, I think they work best as siege units. And also agreed about the Flame of Tar Valon, that could be used for bomb shelters, in a way!

With regards to the need for this, I think we still do. All of that craziness is at a different "layer" of the game to this one. It's all systematic stuff that affects the overall trajectory of all of the civs and their long term plans. This role affects the turn-to-turn action availability within the context of all of those wars. I think if there aren't a few civs that have "superweapons" then the LB stuff won't be as interesting, because there won't be as much tactical variety.

Good! Gosh, I really don't know how this should work, mechanically. If we're ok differentiating things from the main game, I kind of like the idea of actual channelers picking up the sa'a in cities and carrying them. I'm not sure if the opponent would know the channeler has it or not. That makes it quite dangerous to carry them around. I feel like having it fired by cities is somewhat a missed opportunity with the flavor.


OK, so in lieu of the editor, I've decided to go down the rabbit hole of an excel sheet. It's attached to this post and in the DBox. It's not perfect, but it took forever so I'm at least sort of proud of it! What it does let us do is show the unlocks per tech in a much clearer way. Unfortunately, things need to be entered manually (much much more annoying when doing the pre-req lines!). I'm not saying we have to use it, but I found it useful since the Editor was trying to end me.

I took the tree up through era number three, which is what felt like a good stopping point of the "early" techs. I think for the most part it speaks for itself, but below I'm share some comments on some things. I went back and forth on this stuff a lot. Of course, all of this is negotiable. I did find that I veered away from some things that we'd previously decided we liked, both mechanically (e.g., T'a'r unlock point) and flavorfully (Clanship, etc.), because when putting it all together, there were quite a few domino moments that led me to such changes.

I should note that while I changed some (not all) of the pre-req linkages, I elected to keep the number of techs per column identical to BNW (as I believe the columns indicate tech cost).

I'll also note that things tended to move very much into the "general societal organization" category, rather than the "Technology" category. I took a look through carloscodex's Prehistoric Era Mod and got some ideas on such things there. I was reminded, also, of the fact that the flavor of WoT doesn't really seem to show a whole lot of technological progression over time - it seems like Manetheren isn't that far back from the New Era, for instance. This, and the fact that we have to stretch melee units over nine eras, made me emphasize this kind of stuff more. I suppose around where I stopped (era 4), more "real techs" might pop up.

A knock-on of this is that some of the uber-specifc stuff (weaving) didn't make the cut. I kept slate roofs there, since I know you have money on that horse, but it does somewhat stick out more than it would in a BNW-style tree.

Lastly, note that I put in "wonder" a whole lot on this tree. This is merely a marker that a BNW wonder is there. We could of course change them.

Cooperation - This was the best way I could figure out how to justify farming and such

I ended up pretty happy with the "main four" names from column 1. Survival could be subbed out. I do enjoy Leadership, though.

EDIT: Community of course could easily become Clanship, if you're ok with it referring not to military stuff. I think the "people coming together" flavor is kind of the only way to unify the faith and food things at this point in the tech tree. (also a lot of the subsequent techs are related to that).

You'll notice that The Pattern is available at the beginning, but is in column 2. I decided that this could, in fact, be our wilder unlock point. It seems to me that a civ could go "all in" on building a channeler force early-game, though they wouldn't be too strong until the era three upgrade. Basically, i struggled to find something else to do with "The Pattern" as a tech, but enjoyed the idea of it. Also, it made sense to me to put the happiness building from Trapping here (see below). Note that there is no Spark upgrade here. I figure all civs will start with 1 or 2 natively, and that that is enough for this stage.

Related to above, I felt like The Wheel and Trapping are both kind of lame. I fused their abilities and gave some of it to others.

Fishing - I don't like how I was never able to come up with a more "general" name here. Ideas? I originally chose "Territory" for this one, but decided that was better off below.

Speaking of which, I like Territory and Fealty and Warfare. These last two are quite similar to BNW's counterparts, with the rather dramatic elimination of the Chariot, replacing it with the Mounted 1 (horseman). This is because of the removal of Horseback Riding in the next era. This unit can be slighly weaker to accommodate this.

The next column involves some more repurposing, in order to make room for The One Power.. This is our White Tower meet point, and some spark, AND the circus maximus (because why not)?

Horseback Riding had been obliterated to make room for tOP. The rest of its goodies have gone to Measurement and Building. Measurement is thus a bit more robust than Math was before it.

Note that Building is a dumb name. Suggestions? I want something that grows from territory and fealty, but creates structures...

EDIT: I'm struck now that Building could be reframed as Smithing (which may need to be earlier in the tree since we have Smith specialists), and the later Smithing could become something else (Smelting, Bronze?)

Please note that Melee 2 (not ranged 2) is hanging out on "Building" (Construction), and that Ranged 2 is hanging out on Duty (which is where Swordsmen would be). This is because I have always found the closeness of swordsmen and longswordsmen (and muskets!) is such that they are somewhat useless. I do not yet know if Melee 2 should still require copper (former iron), or if Ranged 2 should require it instead.

I think The Wheel of Time is great flavor for cultural stuff, especially since the first culture LP building is for the Doomseer! This could also be "The Pattern" if we needed it, as that flavor is good too. Note that I decided to put the Projection unlock here. I know we'd decided era 3 and 4 were good, but then I remembered that the Myth tree (with it's Dreaming subpath), unlocks in era 2! We should definitely make it possible for people to be using T'a'r given there's a social policy tree about exactly that in that era!

Note that I got rid of Metal Casting in order to make room for Shipcraft. It seemed to me that we needed another Naval Ranged unit a little earlier in this era. I decided that it could take some of the trade-related stuff from Guilds (though not all of it).

Making room for Saidar was of course a concern, but luckily the flavor worked out that Civil Service could mostly translate right in! I think +Food and stuff is perfect for that. "Nov" is Novices-to-the-tower. Channelers get their first boost here. I should say that I kept Open Borders here in order to keep in mid-tree, but I really wanted to put it up on Shipcraft or something, but that felt rather out of the way for some civs.

Apprenticeship is sort of Metal-Casting meets Guilds.

Exploration is where I put in our second Naval Melee unit - earlier than in BNW. I think this is necessary. I think we could at least consider letting this melee unit cross oceans! (but *not* other units or embarking units). Alternatively (and probably better), we could let this unit *be able* to cross oceans once that next tech (in Era 4) is unlocked. Meaning, you won't have to buy a new upgrade for it, it'll just gain a promotion or something automatically. To this end, I was actually thinking that maybe we should unlock ship-based oceanic travel first (next column, i.e. one column "early"), but reserve embarking-ocean travel for the following column. Thoughts?

EDIT: I do recall now that you'd suggested Sextant as a tech. I was going to say one of these could be replaced by that, but now I see that it appears to be an 18th century invention, so perhaps not until far later. Anyways, noting it here.

Tutelage... better name? It and Hierarchy are currently identical to Education and Chivalry

The next three techs I always found kind of lame in BNW, especially the artist-formerly known-as Steel. I've kept Smithing (Machinery) the same. Same with Siegecraft (Physics), though this one I definitely would prefer some other boost to it. For Sword Forms, I decided to attach the Production building (Forge) from Metal Casting here to make this more useful. Theoretically, we could take something from Hierarchy and put it in either of these last two, or else merge them and do something else with the tech.

What do you think?

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm back! Finally at home for an evening, so I can catch up!

Right! Good idea. My thoughts are below:

Melee: fine as is
Ranged: fine as is, though we can officially pull the scout into its own category.

Both sounds good, and definitely agree on having Scout upgrade path be separate.

Just to be clear, we're still replacing the units listed here, right? We're just deciding if we should keep the number of units and relative strength of them for each path.

Scout -> Scout 2 (probably enough, I think)

Agreed. More detail on this below!

Anti-hourse: probably fine. I've always hated the absurd leap from lancer to A-T G, especially how long lancers hang around. Could consider adding another unit here. I assume we're not going to reproduce the direct nature of the helicopter....

Definitely, we won't have any direct equivalent for the helicopter, though our last unit in this path could be up for consideration for the ability to cross mountains.

Agreed, that jump from Lancer to Anti-Tank Gun is pretty bizarre. Another unit here could work.

Horse: fine, I think.

Agreed.

Naval Melee: I think we could probably use another one here. The Trireme does seem to hang around a bit too long. Also, see below on Privateer (could be merged in here)

Agreed, there's very little diversity in early game naval warfare. Part of me always feels like Caravels are some kind of "exploration" unit instead of a part of the Naval Melee upgrade path, but that's clearly not true. Would there be room for a more "exploration" focused naval unit where the Caravel is, and then we could have more actual military naval melee units? So, add an Exploration Ship that's the first one that can cross oceans, and have 5 Naval Melee units (adding one, as you suggest here), and only the last 2 can cross oceans?

Naval Ranged: same as above. could probably use a better. Galleass to frigate is a pretty big leap. Could see bringing in the galleass equivalent earlier, but make it suckier, and put in an intermediate step. Also, could see another after the Fridate.

Also agreed, more diversity here would be good, and one additional unit feels like it would do it.

Not sure what flavor we'll use for these new ships, but that's something for us to decide later!

Chariot Archer: could see this one being eliminated. Don't feel strongly about it, though.

I agree, I've never had any use for Chariot Archers. Some quick searching tells me that this is a relatively common opinion of them. And most people who want to favor Chariot Archers (at least from the thread I read) were also concerned that ranged cavalry's combination of mobility and range would be unbalancing.

I would be fine removing this, or else introducing a new upgrade path (maybe with two or three units) that was a "ranged cavalry" but with a range of 1 (like Gatling Guns).

Siege: I think this is probably fine.

Agreed.

Privateer: part of me feels that this is kind of random in its loneliness. I could see us either merging it with the naval melee line, or else leaving it for a UU or something. On the other hand, it being on its own helps make it a somewhat rare unit, in comparison to the numerous caravels you see - which certainly makes it more dominant, since it's stronger than them and can thus often capture them. I suppose it would be lamer if there were tons of privateers of equal strength rolling around.

I agree with what you've said here, and I think you've mentioned some good reasons that the Privateer is separate from the main Naval Melee upgrade path. I'd be fine keeping an equivalent unit separate like this?

AA: Previously discussed. Don't need more. Could see only one generation if we did the same with our gateway units

"Bombers" and "Fighters": aforementioned notes on merging them still stand. Could also theoretically see us eliminating the upgrade path or something or making it only two units long.

I think most players only really end up using two of the units in the fighter/bomber upgrade paths. The others unlock so close to the end of the tree that someone is usually winning at the time. Still, it's probably worth keeping that final slot in place so that Domination players can beeline to a super upgraded "aircraft" to give themselves an advantage.

Two units in the AA upgrade path still sounds good to me, since we'll want power counters to the endgame "aircraft".

Taking up the "merging" discussion here, I think your suggestion to merge the fighter and the bomber roles is a good one! Let's do that, into the Gateway Skirmisher to start with, and see what we come up with for the other upgrades (or maybe Gateway Skirmisher is the second one, who knows) when we get to them.

Carrier: this is quite weird. Could definitely see eliminating this unit. I suppose it could survive as a "troop transport" in some way, but that is a little odd, especially seeing that it doesn't make sense why it couldn't transport other units as well. Of course, eliminating it means that you can't move your "air units"... which, maybe I'm ok with that?

Agreed, the flavor is odd if a "troop transport" can't carry any arbitrary unit, only these Skirmisher guys. I think the carrier unit is relatively important though, otherwise you can end up in situations where it's impossible to move "aircraft" onto a certain continent because of the width of the ocean on certain maps.

It's possible to fulfill this role without a unit though. We could have a tech that boosts the rebase range of Gateway Skirmishers (and other appropriate units). Possibly even making it global? We could restrict it, like global rebase, after being unlocked by a tech, only works when moving to a Traveling Ground? This would make creating a landing zone on a continent when invading it quite important.

Subs:: very odd. Can't justify this functionality at all. Theoretically as an "Innovation" or something, but not a real stand-alone unit type given our flavor.

From a flavor point of view, completely agree, WoT doesn't have any equivalent of the submarine that we could use as a unit.

Mechanically, we have a stealthed anti-Naval Navel unit (which also doubles up as a deployment platform for the endgame weapon, Nuclear Missile). I think this is still a role we could still fulfill. Like the Gateway Skirmisher, is there any way that we could have some kind of quazi-channeling ship (as in, a ship with a normal crew but ostensibly one channeler that hides them from other ships somehow). This would intersect well with the flavor for sa'angreal being nukes, since we could launch sa'angreal from such ships.

My first thought is the Sea Folk Windfinders, but that presents a few problems. One is that it remove the potential for a UU from the Sea Folk, but that's not a big a deal. (They still have distinctly Sea Folk names for their ships, like raker, that could be used instead for "better" ships.) The other is that Windfinders don't have a flavor justification for stealthing their ships (beyond some explanation involving manipulation of fog). The other problem is that, like when we discussing raken as aircraft units for everyone, this is stealing distinctly Sea Folk flavor to use as a generic mechanic, which isn't great. Obviously we've done that in some places (like Oppression and the Seanchan), but this and raken feels, to me, like it's something distinct to their specific culture, rather than a "way of doing things" that's more easily generalized.

Paratroopers:: I think we can axe these. Their purpose is being filled by travelling units.

Agreed.

Missile Cruiser: depends 100% on what we do with nukes.

Agreed. Windfinders possibly fit a bit better here than they do for Submarines above, the same intersections with sa'angreal apply here.

Marine: highly likely this guy can just be merged into existing melee units or else ditched completely

Agreed.

Guided Missile: totally depends on nukes.

Also agreed, and this does potentially fit quite well with sa'angreal being nukes, since we could use angreal here.

Also, we should add to this list some new-mechanics things:

The Hunter. Do they fit in with the melee units, or are they a stand-alone unit? If so, do they have an upgrade path? Is there a civilian version of them?

The Hunter could be Scout 2? Seems like it would complement their Horn-related functionality quite well as well as giving us a very flavorful insert for our conspicuously new scout upgrade.

Wilder -> Kin (plus upgrades in stats/abilities)
Aes Sedai (upgrades)
Warder (upgrades)
Male Channeler (upgrades)
Asha'man (upgrades)

Yep, all looks good!

Do MCs upgrade into Asha'men at any point? We could gate that on a tech (possibly separate from the one that makes Asha'men trainable) or make it available only after Saidin is Cleansed?

also, I remember you talking about a settler upgrade. Still thinking that's a good idea?

I think so! In larger maps players are expanding throughout the game, but the later cities end up "building" all the way up until the game ends. I don't think we want to add more territory (a la Shoshone) because that would make expansion too easy, but starting at Population 4 or 5 with a couple of the very first buildings would be a nice kickstart to making them more useful.

Do any of our civilians have upgrade paths?)

The other (non-LP) civilians are the Worker, Sealbearer, Historian, "Work Boat", and the two trade units? The Worker already upgrades in BNW (work rate increase on certain techs, I think, or is it on eras?), which I think we should keep.

The Sealbearer and Historian don't need to upgrade.

Do we want to consider replacing the Work Boat "consumed to make an improvement" style with some kind of naval Worker unit? The lack of this in BNW is most likely due to the comparative lack of variety and quantity in ocean resources.

The trade units also sort of upgrades in BNW, with the extended trade route ranges on some techs. I think it's fine to keep this and the visual upgrades throughout the game. (Though we won't get as far as trucks, flavor wise!)

anything else?

Not that I can think of!

cool. this all sounds good. Addressed some of the Power stuff way above. Just to be clear, is "The Beginning" in Column 1, or 0?

I think you've worked this out already, but just in case, it's Column 0!

great. looks like Aes Sedai, saidar, and saidin units all upgrade together.

Yep, sounds good.

I could weasel around about how this isn't that big of a problem and such, but then I remember that I don't necessarily have any specific reason why healing (targetted or otherwise) *shouldn't* be there automatically. So, sure!

again, don't have any real justification for why we should postpone this. Gentling available early!

Sounds good on both counts - Gentling is available for all Sisters all the time, and targeted Healing is available for all Yellow Sisters all the time.

OK, radical idea: what's the point of the Hunt project? Like, maybe we don't need it. The hunt itself is ongoing (once unlocked). The Hunt seems to be something that would provide culture and stuff, so I could imagine it as a flavor-replacement for the Worlds Fair or something, but having such a project be *totally* divorced from the actual hunt seems flavor-dissonant, to me.

You're right that the hunt when on many times without being found, but they most certainly didn't know that. And in our game, everybody knows it isn't available until later. I'd say a meaningful "Great Hunt" project somewhat depends on an actual possibility of finding *something*, I think. But since even antiquity sites don't exist until rather late in the game, this feels somewhat immersion-breaking.

The Square of Tammaz (or whatever it is called) should still exist as a wonder, and probably gives some bonuses to Hunting (or bonuses *from* hunting), among other things, but I'm not sure this stand-alone project needs to exist. Of course, that might intrude on our ability to create a nice Illian UA, but inserting a whole mechanic just to justify a UA idea isn't a good idea anyways.

All very good points, and I totally agree. We're approaching this from the wrong side - we'll add a Hunt project if we find a need/niche for it, rather than trying too hard to shoehorn one in, when we're not yet sure if it will fit correctly. I'm fine with axing this for now.

Also, agreed re the Square of Tammaz being a wonder.

I say we just plain old eliminate any "killed gentler happiness bonus" for Oppression civs. Yes, they can do what you are saying, but they would get only the Gentling reward, not the Execution reward. This makes flavorful and mechanical sense to me.

I thought that once a Gentled unit was Healed, it would become a normal unit of the type it originally was? That seems strange to me then that killing those units doesn't produce Happiness for Oppression civs, because they're the same unit type as all of the ones that do. Which units can be killed for Happiness could become very confusing to keep track of if the civ does have a bunch of units that they Healed of Gentling, even if they weren't trying to abuse the system.

Still, I'm not sure what to suggest in place of this. Giving a Healed from Gentling unit a "Healed from Gentling" promotion (doesn't have to do anything) would make it possible at least, for Oppression players to know which units they can kill for Happiness, but that's still difficult to track and not very discoverable.

that's kind of bizarre.... I mean, I suppose it could be an idea, but it seems like it might be mechanically problematic. You take a crappy unit of the enemies, and turn it into a much more powerful unit of your own? I suppose it's the "Take the Unit" part of this I find problematic, and doing it without getting the unit seems sort of pointless. I dunno... I guess I could be convinced. I do like the flavor of it.

I think balance wise it should be fine. The Privateer is potentially a bigger power shift, since it takes an enemy combat unit and turns it into an equivalently powered (if damaged) combat unit of your own. (And if it fails to do that, then it has destroyed it.)

Here, we'd be capturing a unit from the enemy that isn't actually powerful/useful to them by itself. We'd potentially be creating a stronger unit than the Privateer would, but if our attempt fails, then presumably nothing happens. (As opposed to the Privateer, where this is a side effect of killing the unit, guaranteeing to deprive your enemy of it.) Newly Healed of Gentling channelers - do they come back at full health? If not, this lines up quite well. It's also semi-risky, since Gentled Channelers, as civilians (or at least most of them are?) could be killed instantly by any unit that could Heal them, by just "standing on them" (since all channelers that could perform the Healing are also combat units). We would presumably also have a success rate, based on the strength of the channeler that would be created (lower success rate for stronger channelers, I assume) and the health that the current Gentled unit has left (less health means higher success rate).

Giving Liberation a bonus to this ability would make them stand out here and capture the flavor you're referring to. So we could up their success rate and/or increase the health the newly Healed unit starts with (if it isn't full by default).

 

[S3rgeus]

In your absence, I took some time to work on the tech tree myself (see below) in the editor. I'm unfortunately here to report that I'm having some major issues with it. Most notably, I can't export - I get an error message (missing key, I think) anytime I try to export. This, combined with the not infrequent crashing, and the fact that (strangely) certain units and such are missing from the box on the right, I figured it's not worth it for me to be the one messing with the editor. It's helpful for me to mess around with, but I think if it works well for you, you may be the best person to actually do the editing.

That said, see below for my solution.

Argh, that's a shame! It might be best if we go through this in real time via IM (like on Steam or something) so I can find out what the specific triggers are for stuff going wrong and work to fix them.

The missing key error does sound like an error I've seen though. Does your export work for the first time for each session, but then not again until you restart the Editor? I fixed a bug like that locally, but haven't updated the CivFanatics download yet. The workaround for that is to restart between exports, but I can upload my fixed version now to eliminate the bug entirely.

If you have any more detail about what you're doing when it crashes in other cases, that could help me reproduce the issues on my PC and then I'll be able to fix them. (Step by step instructions that leads up to it crashing would be ideal!)

Some units are missing from the panel on the right because they still have PrereqTechs listed (from the original tree) but the original tree has been removed, so we can't see them. I may be able to fix that - it's an issue with the exported data rather than the Editor itself.

See below for my solutions to this kind of thing. Suffice it to say, I've been working with this initial tech unlocking all the same stuff as it does in BNW (the things you mentioned, in addition to the Monument). I experimented with pulling the farm and the settler out to a later tech, but I ultimately wimped out, opting, as you've mentioned, to keep things pretty similar to BNW in the beginning.

I will say more below, but I do see how Clanship could be tech-related, though to me, it could also be related to something else. In my current iteration, I've gone away from using it, Mountaineering, or Survival.

see below. I've decided to keep the beginning pretty much the same, but let the dependencies drift a bit.

All sounds good! We can always iterate on more "daring" changes later, and see how they turn out. As long as we get the big picture of progression at this stage and a structure that differentiates us a bit from BNW, then we are on the right track.

got it. I think Night's Shade could be a cool tech name, but something more generic like "poisons" "apothecary" or "medicine" would be better.

Yep, agreed!

ok, no spark for gateways it is!

I do think we need to keep the Cache as our Uranium, if only because we've now stumbled upon sa'angreal as a likely nuke replacement - obviously they are quite linked.

I'm wondering if we simply need to change peat. As a resource, it's a little silly, especially for being late-game, as it's ultimately just rotting moss and such. I wonder if we'd be better off calling in tar (not to be confused with t'a'r or something, as it was used for ships and such. I'm not sure that helps us with the ocean platform thing though. Then again, i'm not sure *any* tech would help with that. (perhaps we need a building or something). I suppose we could even consider using oil itself.

yeah, exactly. I suppose we could sort of hold off on such, but then again, I think we know what we know now and probably can decide

I agree that keeping Angreal Caches as the Uranium replacement sounds good with what we're discussing elsewhere. And also agreed that changing Peat is a good way to address this. I think we're still missing a few key pieces of information that would help us decide what to replace Peat with though. We've got our Gateway Skirmishers fairly well locked down (because they're a key mechanical lynchpin of the game's progression), but we don't know what the other units (both naval and land) that will want to consume this resource are. (And I don't think we should know yet, because we haven't gotten to that part of the tree.) It may be that when we decide those units, a resource we can use for all of them becomes clear, or what we decide now may no longer make sense. It may not take us too long to get to this point, but I definitely think it's worth us leaving this until we know the above.

got it. So they'd be stacking there, and if you DID pillage them with a unit, they'd go bye-bye. Would that destroy the units or capture them, or do something else? Either way, travgrounds are quite vulnerable!

Exactly! Destroy the units, I'd say.

I think this kind of thing could work, but it's a little immersion-breaking, to me. Like, for some reason these archers - and only these - can stack? A bit "off." The channeler is less bizarre, certainly, but then again then it feels like it should cost spark...

Seeing as Gateway Skirmishers are both offense/defense, it sounds like we'll use them to fulfill this role then? So they'll Skim out to intercept enemy Gateway Skirmishers that attack your units within range.

Good! Gosh, I really don't know how this should work, mechanically. If we're ok differentiating things from the main game, I kind of like the idea of actual channelers picking up the sa'a in cities and carrying them. I'm not sure if the opponent would know the channeler has it or not. That makes it quite dangerous to carry them around. I feel like having it fired by cities is somewhat a missed opportunity with the flavor.

It sounds like letting channelers carry these sa'angreal weapons as "one time fire" things would be good. It would let us have channelers fulfill the role of the Missile Cruiser, Nuclear Submarine (partially), and Carrier (partially, for Nuclear Bombs). Notably, all of those units are naval units, whereas our channelers are land units. That seems a bit suspect to me, but could possibly still work. Are there specific drawbacks to this difference that I'm not thinking of?

I think enemies should be able to see that the channeler is carrying a sa'angreal (same way they can see Nuclear Bombs on Carriers, etc), so that they know to prioritize attacking them, and the attacker knows to prioritize defending them. (Given the presumable range of these attacks, this isn't too difficult for the attacker unless they're trying to hit a target well within enemy territory.)

BNW has Nuclear Bomb -> Nuclear Missile. Do we want to have angreal -> sa'angreal? Can any channeler wield either of them? I think it would make sense to restrict each one to certain unit types (the sa'angreal being carryable by fewer).

Do we want to do anything with the flavor of some angreal and sa'angreal being male and female specific?

OK, so in lieu of the editor, I've decided to go down the rabbit hole of an excel sheet. It's attached to this post and in the DBox. It's not perfect, but it took forever so I'm at least sort of proud of it! What it does let us do is show the unlocks per tech in a much clearer way. Unfortunately, things need to be entered manually (much much more annoying when doing the pre-req lines!). I'm not saying we have to use it, but I found it useful since the Editor was trying to end me.

I'm super impressed, this is a very detailed Excel sheet! And no doubt took five eternities to put together! It also had 4 views before I downloaded it! Did you download it to check it was working a couple of times, or do we have a few lurkers still watching the topic? (*waves*)

It would be smoothest if we could get the Editor working for you, but that will take some time for me to make the required fixes! And unfortunately that time is the same time I would use to post here (which has been super diminished these past few weeks). For this stage of the project though, and for the wider CiV modding community (who benefit from the Editor being better), it's probably worth it.

I've updated the download with my most recent fixes, so you can try it again from here and see if it resolves the issue where you can't export, at least!

- Stuff! -

What do you think?

There is tons of great stuff here, thanks for putting all this effort into it! I want to go through a lot of this stuff individually, but right now I figured it would be helpful for me to convert it into the Editor - see if I can get the units and buildings on that tree properly and upload the version with some new fixes.

In terms of the stuff you've moved around, a lot of your reasoning sounds really good and a great balance between making things different but still keeping to the structure BNW provides. I'll have more detailed responses to a lot of this stuff tomorrow (even if converting the tree/making the units/buildings available takes longer than I want, I'll come back and respond here before I sink all of my time into that).


Unfortunately, after that I'm traveling again! I'm going to be busy on Thursday night and then I'm away for the weekend, but I should be back to posting the following Monday. Being busy on a Thursday has become a fixture for me at the moment (recurring D&D session), but that does mean I have more time on Sunday evenings (where that session moved from).

 

[counterpoint]

I'm back! Finally at home for an evening, so I can catch up!

welcome!

Both sounds good, and definitely agree on having Scout upgrade path be separate.

Just to be clear, we're still replacing the units listed here, right? We're just deciding if we should keep the number of units and relative strength of them for each path.

oh, yes, we definitely will replace the units. I just mean that the number and progression is good.Definitely must replace them, though!

Definitely, we won't have any direct equivalent for the helicopter, though our last unit in this path could be up for consideration for the ability to cross mountains.

Agreed, that jump from Lancer to Anti-Tank Gun is pretty bizarre. Another unit here could work.

interesting! I've never played dido, so i don't know how that all feels anyways. It's certainly an option - I doubt we'll do a UU like that, unless it's the raken. I guess, on that note, a raken UU would probably be our only possible helicopter-like unit (unless the raken was like a gateway unit in functionality). No matter, right now.

Agreed, there's very little diversity in early game naval warfare. Part of me always feels like Caravels are some kind of "exploration" unit instead of a part of the Naval Melee upgrade path, but that's clearly not true. Would there be room for a more "exploration" focused naval unit where the Caravel is, and then we could have more actual military naval melee units? So, add an Exploration Ship that's the first one that can cross oceans, and have 5 Naval Melee units (adding one, as you suggest here), and only the last 2 can cross oceans?

Interesting idea! This obviously intersects a bit with my tech tree stuff attempt, of course. I don't think the unit has to technically be "exploration" oriented in any literal way. But, we could simulate that with relative strength and such. Like, it may not be all that much *stronger* than the trireme-equivalent, but can cross ocean and move more swiftly. That way, you can't really use it to mount a naval invasion (well, you could, but you could be mowed down by galleas-equivalents, likely) but can still find the Seanchan continent.

Also agreed, more diversity here would be good, and one additional unit feels like it would do it.

Not sure what flavor we'll use for these new ships, but that's something for us to decide later!

Yeah, I have a feeling the ships are just going to be ships. We're probably goignt o have to steal from Earth flavor.

I agree, I've never had any use for Chariot Archers. Some quick searching tells me that this is a relatively common opinion of them. And most people who want to favor Chariot Archers (at least from the thread I read) were also concerned that ranged cavalry's combination of mobility and range would be unbalancing.

I would be fine removing this, or else introducing a new upgrade path (maybe with two or three units) that was a "ranged cavalry" but with a range of 1 (like Gatling Guns).

Eh. I say just cut it. No need to introduce a whole new path. I only build em in anti-barb emergencies. Horse units, or real archers, do just find for that. Normally I'd ask if we should replace it with anything or just be "short" one unit (probably just cut it), but that is already a consideration on my tech tree draft (because the horse unit appears earlier), so the question will be decided there.

I agree with what you've said here, and I think you've mentioned some good reasons that the Privateer is separate from the main Naval Melee upgrade path. I'd be fine keeping an equivalent unit separate like this?

I think what we do with the "exploration" melee unit might affect our decision here. The truth is, it might be appropriate to have the exploration-unit be like a wimpy caravel, and the "real naval melee unit" of that era be something like a Privateer - in the actual upgrade line. I could see either way. If inspiration doesn't hit us, we can probably keep it the same.

I think most players only really end up using two of the units in the fighter/bomber upgrade paths. The others unlock so close to the end of the tree that someone is usually winning at the time. Still, it's probably worth keeping that final slot in place so that Domination players can beeline to a super upgraded "aircraft" to give themselves an advantage.

Yeah, I think I've only ever used Great War F/B and and regular F/B. Honestly, I've mostly stopped at the GW ones (playing as USA excepted).

Two units in the AA upgrade path still sounds good to me, since we'll want power counters to the endgame "aircraft".

great.

Taking up the "merging" discussion here, I think your suggestion to merge the fighter and the bomber roles is a good one! Let's do that, into the Gateway Skirmisher to start with, and see what we come up with for the other upgrades (or maybe Gateway Skirmisher is the second one, who knows) when we get to them.

Yay! something good to try. I think it's probably safe to say we can have at least one upgrade for them. These guys will probably have a very extensive potential-promotion tree.

Agreed, the flavor is odd if a "troop transport" can't carry any arbitrary unit, only these Skirmisher guys. I think the carrier unit is relatively important though, otherwise you can end up in situations where it's impossible to move "aircraft" onto a certain continent because of the width of the ocean on certain maps.

It's possible to fulfill this role without a unit though. We could have a tech that boosts the rebase range of Gateway Skirmishers (and other appropriate units). Possibly even making it global? We could restrict it, like global rebase, after being unlocked by a tech, only works when moving to a Traveling Ground? This would make creating a landing zone on a continent when invading it quite important.

this is quite tough. The unit feels like flavor terribleness, but I think, if we require this functionality, it might be our only option - I'm not sure we do require it, though. You're correct about the width of ocean being a problem and such. It's possible that'll just need to be built into our game somehow.

Your other solutions are interesting, but I'm not sure they'll quite work. Absolutely-anywhere-global rebase just sound a little too insane to me, I think. Like, it would make traveling itself probably way too powerful. The other issue of it is that travgrounds are improvements, which can only be built in your territory. So, they wouldn't really help us with an "invasion," per se - you'd have to establish a city or take at least one to do so.

We could do a "mobile traveling grounds" or some nonsense, but... it really feels like we're stretching all this a bit too far.

From a flavor point of view, completely agree, WoT doesn't have any equivalent of the submarine that we could use as a unit.

Mechanically, we have a stealthed anti-Naval Navel unit (which also doubles up as a deployment platform for the endgame weapon, Nuclear Missile). I think this is still a role we could still fulfill. Like the Gateway Skirmisher, is there any way that we could have some kind of quazi-channeling ship (as in, a ship with a normal crew but ostensibly one channeler that hides them from other ships somehow). This would intersect well with the flavor for sa'angreal being nukes, since we could launch sa'angreal from such ships.

My first thought is the Sea Folk Windfinders, but that presents a few problems. One is that it remove the potential for a UU from the Sea Folk, but that's not a big a deal. (They still have distinctly Sea Folk names for their ships, like raker, that could be used instead for "better" ships.) The other is that Windfinders don't have a flavor justification for stealthing their ships (beyond some explanation involving manipulation of fog). The other problem is that, like when we discussing raken as aircraft units for everyone, this is stealing distinctly Sea Folk flavor to use as a generic mechanic, which isn't great. Obviously we've done that in some places (like Oppression and the Seanchan), but this and raken feels, to me, like it's something distinct to their specific culture, rather than a "way of doing things" that's more easily generalized.[/quoe]Ugh. This one is also kind of stupid tough.

Regarding the windfinder, for all the reasons you mention here, I say it's definitely not a good idea. I think it's flavor problematic much worse than the raken, because the raken are rather minor parts of a very immense "pantheon" of the Seanchan. The Windfinders, however (and their whole evolving dynamic with the Tower) is kind of the thing about the Sea Folk in the books. I don't think we can cannibalize that flavor!

I think cloaked anything is somewhat problematic from a flavor perspective for these books, actually.

I think maybe we should just make a ship that's really good at whacking naval units, but is very weak in defense. Perhaps the cloaking is unnecessary. And, what's the stop us from letting these units (or some other naval unit) "carry" our sa'angreal? Like, not launch them, but act as a sort of "rebase point" for moving them between chanellers?

Agreed. Windfinders possibly fit a bit better here than they do for Submarines above, the same intersections with sa'angreal apply here.

Right, I mean a windfinder unit, as a UU, could do such things, and be cool while doing it...

Agreed.

replace with nothing, or add another melee unit to the tree?

Also agreed, and this does potentially fit quite well with sa'angreal being nukes, since we could use angreal here.

right.

The Hunter could be Scout 2? Seems like it would complement their Horn-related functionality quite well as well as giving us a very flavorful insert for our conspicuously new scout upgrade.

Ooh! Interesting. That helps a lot, actually. It justifies the Hunter being a unit that sticks around throughout the rest of the game.

Yep, all looks good!

Do MCs upgrade into Asha'men at any point? We could gate that on a tech (possibly separate from the one that makes Asha'men trainable) or make it available only after Saidin is Cleansed?

I say no. The thing is that MCs spawn automatically, while Asha'man are produced with hammers. I wouldn't want somebody to be able to stock up on MCs and then flip them into these without having to deal with any production whatsoever. I could be convinced, though.

I think so! In larger maps players are expanding throughout the game, but the later cities end up "building" all the way up until the game ends. I don't think we want to add more territory (a la Shoshone) because that would make expansion too easy, but starting at Population 4 or 5 with a couple of the very first buildings would be a nice kickstart to making them more useful.

Cool. Sounds good. I'd imagine that extra pop would make the immediate happiness impact more.

I suppose once all this unit stuff is settled we should mock up a "final" list of the upgrade paths we have.

The other (non-LP) civilians are the Worker, Sealbearer, Historian, "Work Boat", and the two trade units? The Worker already upgrades in BNW (work rate increase on certain techs, I think, or is it on eras?), which I think we should keep.

The Sealbearer and Historian don't need to upgrade.

Do we want to consider replacing the Work Boat "consumed to make an improvement" style with some kind of naval Worker unit? The lack of this in BNW is most likely due to the comparative lack of variety and quantity in ocean resources.

The trade units also sort of upgrades in BNW, with the extended trade route ranges on some techs. I think it's fine to keep this and the visual upgrades throughout the game. (Though we won't get as far as trucks, flavor wise!)

Are you sure the worker upgrades (not counting the pyramids)? I think we can do whatever BNW does, but i'm not sure that actually happens.

Yeah, the whole workboat thing is a little annoying - especially when they'r pillaged. However, the worst thing ever would be having to defend your "water workers" all the time. So, maybe it's better just to leave it.

All very good points, and I totally agree. We're approaching this from the wrong side - we'll add a Hunt project if we find a need/niche for it, rather than trying too hard to shoehorn one in, when we're not yet sure if it will fit correctly. I'm fine with axing this for now.

Also, agreed re the Square of Tammaz being a wonder.

great.

I thought that once a Gentled unit was Healed, it would become a normal unit of the type it originally was? That seems strange to me then that killing those units doesn't produce Happiness for Oppression civs, because they're the same unit type as all of the ones that do. Which units can be killed for Happiness could become very confusing to keep track of if the civ does have a bunch of units that they Healed of Gentling, even if they weren't trying to abuse the system.

Still, I'm not sure what to suggest in place of this. Giving a Healed from Gentling unit a "Healed from Gentling" promotion (doesn't have to do anything) would make it possible at least, for Oppression players to know which units they can kill for Happiness, but that's still difficult to track and not very discoverable.

I'm pretty sure that the summaries claim that Gentled units are actually somewhat-weak combat units, not civilians (such as a worker), either way, I still see allowed them to be un-gentled for foreign civs causing problems. If they're combat units, it makes them very, very bad to use at all. Why would you? They're likely to die, or, worse, be turned against you into a much more powerful unit than you started with (unlike the Privateer mechanic, which starts out the same unit it turns in to). I feel like this way (also, if they're civilians), the recommended mechanic is simply the have these things hide in your borders, possibly in cities, and wait until the appropriate tech is reached. This makes sense to a certain extent but is, quite simply, not a very fun system. I think being able to use the unit, relatively freely, throughout the game, is more satisfying.

That said, if we do elect to turn them into civilians, I still say they can't be Healed by foreign forces. HOWEVER, if you capture the civilian, then it's *yours*, and you can un-gentle it as you see fit. That makes more sense to me. In this case, I like the idea of the units appearing as simple Workers to the outside world - surprise, surprise if you happen to capture one!

The other thing, regarding, Opression: I have zero problem with eliminating the bonus from a newly-Healed channeler. The thing is, we *have* to flag these guys this way, I think. If we don't, then you have a situation where a civ (especially Lib or Auth) could gentle a channeler, collect their reward, heal him up, then gentle him again, and collect the reward again. I say, once gentled, any future rewards that can be derived from that particular channeler really must be eliminated. I know it's somewhat immersion breaking to have to keep track of such a thing, but I think we are required to do so.

I think balance wise it should be fine. The Privateer is potentially a bigger power shift, since it takes an enemy combat unit and turns it into an equivalently powered (if damaged) combat unit of your own. (And if it fails to do that, then it has destroyed it.)

see above. I find civilian (or crappy combat unit) to uber powerful channeler definitely a much bigger power shift than privateer captures.

Here, we'd be capturing a unit from the enemy that isn't actually powerful/useful to them by itself. We'd potentially be creating a stronger unit than the Privateer would, but if our attempt fails, then presumably nothing happens. (As opposed to the Privateer, where this is a side effect of killing the unit, guaranteeing to deprive your enemy of it.)

right. That of course is a good point.

Newly Healed of Gentling channelers - do they come back at full health? If not, this lines up quite well.

I'm not sure. Either way.

It's also semi-risky, since Gentled Channelers, as civilians (or at least most of them are?) could be killed instantly by any unit that could Heal them, by just "standing on them" (since all channelers that could perform the Healing are also combat units). We would presumably also have a success rate, based on the strength of the channeler that would be created (lower success rate for stronger channelers, I assume) and the health that the current Gentled unit has left (less health means higher success rate).

Giving Liberation a bonus to this ability would make them stand out here and capture the flavor you're referring to. So we could up their success rate and/or increase the health the newly Healed unit starts with (if it isn't full by default).

Eh. I'm not really feeling it, to be completely honest. It seems needlessly complicated. And, regarding the flavor. It's not *really* flavor. It's flavor "in theory." No such things happen in the books, as far as I can tell. It feels a bit much to throw this on top of the mod without good reason.

 

[counterpoint]

Argh, that's a shame! It might be best if we go through this in real time via IM (like on Steam or something) so I can find out what the specific triggers are for stuff going wrong and work to fix them.

yeah, we can trouble shoot, if you'd like.

The missing key error does sound like an error I've seen though. Does your export work for the first time for each session, but then not again until you restart the Editor? I fixed a bug like that locally, but haven't updated the CivFanatics download yet. The workaround for that is to restart between exports, but I can upload my fixed version now to eliminate the bug entirely.

actually, the export never worked, though, to be clear, I only ever exported a copy I'd made into a different folder. I didn't try to export one that already existed, as I was afraid of overwriting it (truthfully, it's all very confusing... I couldn't figure out how to start a blank one, short of writing up xml...)

OK, I just tried to export the new tech tree you made, after making one change (sorry about that, but there's now a brute unlocked at Community, lol.... and... it worked! I think it must have been something I did wrong in my vain attempt to start a new one. It's also possible that the new version of the editor has fixed it

If you have any more detail about what you're doing when it crashes in other cases, that could help me reproduce the issues on my PC and then I'll be able to fix them. (Step by step instructions that leads up to it crashing would be ideal!)

I can't remember specifics right now, and have no time to retrace steps. I do seem to recall it happens during errant clicking and such. Like dragging something into nothing, etc. I can't recall.

Some units are missing from the panel on the right because they still have PrereqTechs listed (from the original tree) but the original tree has been removed, so we can't see them. I may be able to fix that - it's an issue with the exported data rather than the Editor itself.

Actually, I don't think that's it. There are plenty of epic units. Units like "Warrior" aren't present, though.

I agree that keeping Angreal Caches as the Uranium replacement sounds good with what we're discussing elsewhere. And also agreed that changing Peat is a good way to address this. I think we're still missing a few key pieces of information that would help us decide what to replace Peat with though. We've got our Gateway Skirmishers fairly well locked down (because they're a key mechanical lynchpin of the game's progression), but we don't know what the other units (both naval and land) that will want to consume this resource are. (And I don't think we should know yet, because we haven't gotten to that part of the tree.) It may be that when we decide those units, a resource we can use for all of them becomes clear, or what we decide now may no longer make sense. It may not take us too long to get to this point, but I definitely think it's worth us leaving this until we know the above.

Right. I think you are correct.

That said, I do feel reasonably sure that our end-game boats are going to be "really good boats," and that we probably *can* roughly predict what these units are, at least roughly. That said, things like Carriers and Subs are still question marks, so you are quite right - to be decided later.

Exactly! Destroy the units, I'd say.

OK, nice. Using a traveling grounds for these purposes is very much NOT safe!

Seeing as Gateway Skirmishers are both offense/defense, it sounds like we'll use them to fulfill this role then? So they'll Skim out to intercept enemy Gateway Skirmishers that attack your units within range.

for sure. As it wouldn't be a separate unit, I think the flavor thing wouldn't be questioned as much.

It sounds like letting channelers carry these sa'angreal weapons as "one time fire" things would be good. It would let us have channelers fulfill the role of the Missile Cruiser, Nuclear Submarine (partially), and Carrier (partially, for Nuclear Bombs). Notably, all of those units are naval units, whereas our channelers are land units. That seems a bit suspect to me, but could possibly still work. Are there specific drawbacks to this difference that I'm not thinking of?

full disclosure. I have very, very limited experience with nukes in this game. I've only really used them in "who cares" moments, e.g., my defeat is assured, or my victory is assured, or, the tantalizing "One More Turn" apocalypse after the game is over. In terms of how these units work, strategically, I know almost nothing from first-hand experience.

I think we're going to probably have to break form on this and not faithfully reproduce BNW here. It just feels a bit too weird, wehther we use angreal or balefire, to have it all be navy-centric. I think we work it into the limits of the unit. Possibly ours will be less powerful than BNW nukes, for example.

I think enemies should be able to see that the channeler is carrying a sa'angreal (same way they can see Nuclear Bombs on Carriers, etc), so that they know to prioritize attacking them, and the attacker knows to prioritize defending them. (Given the presumable range of these attacks, this isn't too difficult for the attacker unless they're trying to hit a target well within enemy territory.)

yes. This seems fair, though, I'm not sure the range will be that far. I was imagining this - understanding that this is mehanically different from CiV - as simply making some action/attack of the channeler be super awesome, on an apocalyptic level. That doesn't likely extend to range, though.

BNW has Nuclear Bomb -> Nuclear Missile. Do we want to have angreal -> sa'angreal? Can any channeler wield either of them? I think it would make sense to restrict each one to certain unit types (the sa'angreal being carryable by fewer).

Yes, that sounds sensible to have both! I assume the "carrying" differences would follow BNW precedent? I could go either way on this, but the truth is, we simply don't have a great many unit types - Aes Sedai are just Aes Sedai, for instance. Kin will be the Wilders of that era, so... the question is somewhat moot, I think.

Do we want to do anything with the flavor of some angreal and sa'angreal being male and female specific?

good question! I think we could get away with not, and that would certainly be simpler and a bit less tedious. However, it also means that we'd have to balance the effects of the sa'angreal such that what is worthy of using from an Aes Sedai doesn't become unfair when given splash damage from an Asha'man.

I'm super impressed, this is a very detailed Excel sheet! And no doubt took five eternities to put together! It also had 4 views before I downloaded it! Did you download it to check it was working a couple of times, or do we have a few lurkers still watching the topic? (*waves*)

Awesome. I definitely tested it, I think two times. That means that it's quite possible we have a few lurkers!

It would be smoothest if we could get the Editor working for you, but that will take some time for me to make the required fixes! And unfortunately that time is the same time I would use to post here (which has been super diminished these past few weeks). For this stage of the project though, and for the wider CiV modding community (who benefit from the Editor being better), it's probably worth it.

it's possible I'm good to go... That said, I do with it was easier to do things like "start a blank tech tree," or "save as" and such.

I've updated the download with my most recent fixes, so you can try it again from here and see if it resolves the issue where you can't export, at least!

perhaps, yes! I think I'm good.

There is tons of great stuff here, thanks for putting all this effort into it! I want to go through a lot of this stuff individually, but right now I figured it would be helpful for me to convert it into the Editor - see if I can get the units and buildings on that tree properly and upload the version with some new fixes.

cool. Looks great! I wonder what percentage of time it took to do that versus the excel sheet, lol.... I do kind of like the excel sheet, though!

In terms of the stuff you've moved around, a lot of your reasoning sounds really good and a great balance between making things different but still keeping to the structure BNW provides. I'll have more detailed responses to a lot of this stuff tomorrow (even if converting the tree/making the units/buildings available takes longer than I want, I'll come back and respond here before I sink all of my time into that).

Awesome. Look forward to that, then.
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Unfortunately, after that I'm traveling again! I'm going to be busy on Thursday night and then I'm away for the weekend, but I should be back to posting the following Monday. Being busy on a Thursday has become a fixture for me at the moment (recurring D&D session), but that does mean I have more time on Sunday evenings (where that session moved from).

You and your traveling... Or, should we say skimming? Dang, this talk of D&D (which version?) makes me sad. Haven't done any tabletop since I moved to the east coast. I was mid-way through writing the rulebook for my own game (the building and testing of is like 15 years in the making) and the.... WotMod came and took all that free time away!

 

[S3rgeus]

A quick Editor update - I've modified the exported tree in the DropBox so that it includes all of the BNW units again! They should all be assignable again. (We were also missing a bunch of Resources, I've added those back too.)

I've also made another change to the Editor (added a "Yes to all" to the "Are you sure you want to overwrite this file?" when exporting, because I'd chased that moving dialog box enough times!).

Just jumping to a few Editor things, since I don't think I'll get through everything tonight:

actually, the export never worked, though, to be clear, I only ever exported a copy I'd made into a different folder. I didn't try to export one that already existed, as I was afraid of overwriting it (truthfully, it's all very confusing... I couldn't figure out how to start a blank one, short of writing up xml...)

OK, I just tried to export the new tech tree you made, after making one change (sorry about that, but there's now a brute unlocked at Community, lol.... and... it worked! I think it must have been something I did wrong in my vain attempt to start a new one. It's also possible that the new version of the editor has fixed it

Awesome, glad that works now! I inadvertently removed the Brute from Community while making my changes this evening, but I've added Warrior to Cooperation as consolation.

When you say "start a blank one" do you mean a blank tree or create a new tech? To do the former, open the Editor (you should get the default CiV tree when it starts) and then go to File -> Clear All Techs. This will remove all techs.

When you go to export a tree that has deleted some techs you will get a box like this:

What that's saying is that there's a reference to one of the deleted techs from somewhere else. In the example above, there's a building that obsoletes with Replaceable Parts, but the Replaceable Parts tech no longer exists, so something else needs to be put in its place. Generally it's safest to go for "Type to Replace with: " and pick one of our techs. Then tick the box in the bottom that says "Do this for all conflicts with Technologies" so you don't have to walk through each of the conflicts individually (since we largely don't care what these kinds of things get reassigned to at this point).

If you want to create a new tech, just double click on an empty slot. It will create a new tech there. You can edit its name by clicking on the name (this can be a bit finicky and sometimes goes into edit mode then immediately back out - I will fix this as soon as I have time and can figure out why it's doing it, but until then it will work sometimes!). You add dependencies by clicking and dragging out of the small box on the right of the tech. Moving a tech is simple click and drag on the tech itself.

I can't remember specifics right now, and have no time to retrace steps. I do seem to recall it happens during errant clicking and such. Like dragging something into nothing, etc. I can't recall.

No worries - I tried a bit of rabid clicking myself but no crashes. If it happens again then let me know what was going on at the time and I'll try to fix it!

Actually, I don't think that's it. There are plenty of epic units. Units like "Warrior" aren't present, though.

Fixed! All of the BNW units should be there now.

More detailed reply to the tech tree changes coming later tonight!