S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[S3rgeus]

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.

Sounds good - era 3 seems like a good place to stop for this first stage!

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).

The columns do mostly indicate tech cost, but techs that have prereqs in the column immediately preceding them cost more than ones that don't. (So Drama and Poetry costs less than Currency, for example.)

Keeping techs per column the same sounds like a good rule of thumb for now.

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.

Looks like a good source of inspiration. I'd say these things all feel technology-ish enough to me that they're not too different from BNW, they're just for a very early society.

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.

Slate Roofing, yeah! Given the way the Power techs have progressed in what we have so far, I could see Weaving cropping up later if we wanted it to. Like I mentioned above, I don't think that Slate Roofing stands out here - the new techs seem very reasonably technology-ish.

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.

Sounds good.

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

Seems like a good starting place to me!

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

I think Survival is fine for now. Leadership is pretty cool!

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).

I wouldn't mind Clanship not being military, but I feel like Community better captures the peaceful nature of that side of the tree.

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.

This is really cool - I particularly liked this because it differentiates our tree rom the BNW one quite readily when the player starts (they'll have 5 choices instead of 4 initially). Sounds good on the rest of it, Wilders, Happiness, Spark upgrade being later.

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.

Funny I've always thought The Wheel was a pretty good tech - mainly because I always run up against a lack of Roads. Trapping I totally agree on. Redistributing these does seem fine though.

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.

Fishing seems like a very good name for this tech - is there something specific we want to capture that it doesn't? All of the unlocks look plausibly related to fishing.

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.

Moving the first mounted unit closer to the start of the tree can work, we're only moving it back one tech which shouldn't be too far. It might make defending against Barbarians a bit easier, but we've also introduced several new "rogue" factions that can attack the player quite aggressively.

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)?

All sounds good!

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.

Like The Wheel, this is interesting, because Mathematics is usually one of the techs I find specifically useful. Siege units and Courthouses are usually important to me when I unlock them. Though its wonder is Policy-gated.

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

Archways? Structures? Brickwork(ing)?

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?)

This could also work - Smelting is probably the better of these two as a replacement for the later Smithing tech, because Bronze sounds like a Resource.

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've always found that Longswordsman -> Musketman was a much smaller gap. Because of the way the dependencies and other techs work out, it usually takes me a while to get from Swordsman -> Longswordsman. Though pulling it back gives us more room to have Melee 3 (Longswordsman) farther back, creating room before Melee 4 (Musketman).

I think early Ranged units don't require Strategics due to their defensive usefulness. Otherwise players who lack the right Strategics will have difficulty keeping themselves alive at this part of the game.

I'm good with Ranged 2 being later, because Composite Bowman always hits me before I expect it.

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!

Totally cool, that makes a lot of sense.

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).

That may have interesting knock-ons for early game military civs - it's harder for them to get to Shipcraft than it was Guilds, so it may be difficult for them to finance their armies. Still, not something we should compensate for until we know it's a problem.

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.

We could put Open Borders on Apprenticeship if we wanted to move it elsewhere? That's still quite central and still requires the civ to go through Appraisal. They would be able to get to it without doing any of the Power techs then, but that seems ok.

Apprenticeship is sort of Metal-Casting meets Guilds.

Looks good.

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?

I think letting this unit cross oceans but at a reduced speed (like the Ironclad) could be a great start to exploration, particularly if it fulfilled the Exploration Ship role that we're discussing elsewhere (underpowered melee ship that makes up for it by being able to cross oceans). Totally agree that we could keep back Embarked ocean crossing.

I'd be inclined to keep ocean crossing as a restriction on unit types rather than letting some unit types do it sometimes and not others, mostly so it's easier to assess the capabilities of a foreign navy from a distance.

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.

Agreed, that can come up later!

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

Education is the tech of techs, so I'd be fine leaving that one the same.

In terms of changing Hierarchy, we could swap Range 2 (from Smithing) and Defense 2 around? Hierarchy is on the same row as Civil Service, so military units (Pikeman) do sometimes crop up at that height.

Tutelage seems like a pretty good name.

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.

Yeah, Steel can be underwhelming. I've always found Physics all right though (particularly if Notre Dame hasn't been built) because cities are usually becoming difficult to kill with Catapults by the time I get there. Still, it is a one-unit tech for most civs. Could this be a Warder upgrade point? Or does that make infinitely more sense on Sword Forms? (Or is it straight up too early?) If we add Warder Upgrade to Sword Forms, then we could move XP 2 onto Siegecraft?

What do you think?

So awesome! Thank you again for going through all of this with such a fine-toothed comb! A lot of what I've said above has been straight up agreement, because it's difficult to know with such a complex system what kinds of issues players might face with certain arrangements. Certainly it feels like your decisions have been building on BNW very well.

Hopefully you'll be able to use the Editor from here, since that offers a lot of flexibility for trying new arrangements. (Click and drag stuff around instead of needing to recreate all those lines in Excel!)

I probably won't have time for a full post tomorrow, but I'll try to add in placeholder units and buildings to the DropBox Tree so that we don't have to constantly translate from Swordsman to Melee 2 and so on. The Editor does let you duplicate units/buildings, which may be useful for this. (Or just rename the existing ones.)

I'll also see what I can do about generic abilities. I started working on that last week and made some headway in understanding how the system works. Unfortunately lemmy and CaptainBinky's approach isn't very amenable to unlocks that aren't themselves database entries (there's no "Trade route" entry anywhere - it's just a number attached to the tech). But it should be possible!

 

[counterpoint]

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!).

Cool. Downloading and playing with it now.

Looks like the units are all there now!

Just jumping to a few Editor things, since I don't think I'll get through everything tonight:

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.

Yeah, I'd already tried that. Before, all it was doing was clearing the unlocks. Like, if you had a few units unlock on a tech, they would disappear. But it was keeping the techs themselves. However, this new version is working fine.

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).

OK, that... mostly makes sense. I had zero idea what it all was about before.

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.

Yeah, this I'd figured out, for sure.

The columns do mostly indicate tech cost, but techs that have prereqs in the column immediately preceding them cost more than ones that don't. (So Drama and Poetry costs less than Currency, for example.)

Oh, I didn't know that. So, how should we make that work? We obviously want to feel free moving around the prereqs, but we could end up, over the course of the game, significantly changing the amount of science required for certain branches. What can we work in to compensate for that?

This is really cool - I particularly liked this because it differentiates our tree rom the BNW one quite readily when the player starts (they'll have 5 choices instead of 4 initially). Sounds good on the rest of it, Wilders, Happiness, Spark upgrade being later.

noice! I agree.

Funny I've always thought The Wheel was a pretty good tech - mainly because I always run up against a lack of Roads. Trapping I totally agree on. Redistributing these does seem fine though.

Yeah, I guess I maybe get out my first settler a little later than I should, so the roads don't need to happen as early. I'm often belining to something, and it feels to me like the Wheel isn't usually a part of that, strangely.

Fishing seems like a very good name for this tech - is there something specific we want to capture that it doesn't? All of the unlocks look plausibly related to fishing.

The issue I have with "Fishing" is not that it doesn't make sense given the unlocks, it's that it doesn't make sense given the prereqs. Part of what made this take so long - and what makes it pretty good - is that I tried hard to make prereq techs feel like they actually would lead into the next tech (moreso than BNW, in many cases, I think). For me Cultivation and Legend feel like they could crow out of "Community" easier than Fishing. It's not terrible, but I don't love it. Anything else I tried was less fitting to the unlocks themselves... so they ultimately weren't any better.

Moving the first mounted unit closer to the start of the tree can work, we're only moving it back one tech which shouldn't be too far. It might make defending against Barbarians a bit easier, but we've also introduced several new "rogue" factions that can attack the player quite aggressively.

Yeah, we can also always beef up the early barbs if we have to. Also, I'd figured we could make that Horsey slightly weaker or something as compensation.

Like The Wheel, this is interesting, because Mathematics is usually one of the techs I find specifically useful. Siege units and Courthouses are usually important to me when I unlock them. Though its wonder is Policy-gated.

Yeah, I guess truth be told, I'm only rarely in an offensive war (that is, one that would need siege and courthouses) this early in the game. Only when I'm playing a civ whose uniques would make that logical. I find the opportunity cost on infrastructure to be pretty painful. So maybe I don't have an accurate read for this teach. Are you suggesting we change this one back then?

Archways? Structures? Brickwork(ing)?

hmmmm, none of those speak to me. Archways are actually probably too advanced - they're certainly more advanced than roofs, I think. Structures is essentially identical to Building in my brain. Brickwork feels a bit like a cop out, but that one could work. What do you think?

This could also work - Smelting is probably the better of these two as a replacement for the later Smithing tech, because Bronze sounds like a Resource.

Yeah, given the issue with the Smiths being unlocked way earlier in the game, I was all set to go with then. But I think its somewhat nonsensical, actually - don't you have to smelt metals before they can be smithed, anyways? Like, I think these techs must always coexist.... Bah...

There's always "Bronzeworking". That's not so terrible. I dunno. I do like Smithing better at Building... I just wish there was a good replacement for the old Smithing. Thoughts?

I've always found that Longswordsman -> Musketman was a much smaller gap. Because of the way the dependencies and other techs work out, it usually takes me a while to get from Swordsman -> Longswordsman. Though pulling it back gives us more room to have Melee 3 (Longswordsman) farther back, creating room before Melee 4 (Musketman).

I think early Ranged units don't require Strategics due to their defensive usefulness. Otherwise players who lack the right Strategics will have difficulty keeping themselves alive at this part of the game.

I'm good with Ranged 2 being later, because Composite Bowman always hits me before I expect it.

Sorry, I'm a little lost in the point. You're suggesting we put things back, or we keep it the way I proposed here?

That may have interesting knock-ons for early game military civs - it's harder for them to get to Shipcraft than it was Guilds, so it may be difficult for them to finance their armies. Still, not something we should compensate for until we know it's a problem.

Interesting. A good point. I'm happy to re-conceive these techs if you want, or just try it and see. Either way.

We could put Open Borders on Apprenticeship if we wanted to move it elsewhere? That's still quite central and still requires the civ to go through Appraisal. They would be able to get to it without doing any of the Power techs then, but that seems ok.

Looking at it now, that does seem pretty logical. I suppose the reason I didn't do it is that it made Apprenticeship a pretty epic tech. Is there something we'd want to move to Saidar as compensation? Or, we could just leave it alone. Preference?

I think letting this unit cross oceans but at a reduced speed (like the Ironclad) could be a great start to exploration, particularly if it fulfilled the Exploration Ship role that we're discussing elsewhere (underpowered melee ship that makes up for it by being able to cross oceans). Totally agree that we could keep back Embarked ocean crossing.

I'd be inclined to keep ocean crossing as a restriction on unit types rather than letting some unit types do it sometimes and not others, mostly so it's easier to assess the capabilities of a foreign navy from a distance.

totally didn't know that was a characteristic of the ironclad! I suppose that's another era where I'm unlikely to be involved in naval warfare, or maybe based on my research progression, I'm usually still rocking the frigates and/or belining to something better.These all sound like good suggestions, though.

So, just to be clear, you're suggesting That Naval Melee 2 have this reduced oceanic capability, should that be later? If we do it this way, that means ocean travel will actually be unlocked earlier than in BNW. You're also saying that that unit will remain with that slowness, correct?Beyond that one element, when specifically do you see things unlocking otherwise? Sorry for some reason I'm again somewhat lost in the proposal at hand. (4-5 hours a sleep a night for a week will do that!)

In terms of changing Hierarchy, we could swap Range 2 (from Smithing) and Defense 2 around? Hierarchy is on the same row as Civil Service, so military units (Pikeman) do sometimes crop up at that height.

Tutelage seems like a pretty good name.

Why make that switch though? If we did that, Hierarchy would unlock *two* military units (the "Knight" also). It seems better to split these up, IMO.

Yeah, Steel can be underwhelming. I've always found Physics all right though (particularly if Notre Dame hasn't been built) because cities are usually becoming difficult to kill with Catapults by the time I get there. Still, it is a one-unit tech for most civs. Could this be a Warder upgrade point? Or does that make infinitely more sense on Sword Forms? (Or is it straight up too early?) If we add Warder Upgrade to Sword Forms, then we could move XP 2 onto Siegecraft?

yeah, on emperor I so rarely have a real shot at Notre Dame, so...

We'd penciled in Warder Upgrade in era 4, but that was pretty arbitrary. We could definitely put it around here if you wanted - though it would definitely have to be on Sword Forms - flavor dictation! Moving the XP building to Siegecraft could work, though it was a good flavor fit on SF.... but it's a fine flavor fit on Siege as well.

What do you think, ultimately?

So awesome! Thank you again for going through all of this with such a fine-toothed comb! A lot of what I've said above has been straight up agreement, because it's difficult to know with such a complex system what kinds of issues players might face with certain arrangements. Certainly it feels like your decisions have been building on BNW very well.

Hopefully you'll be able to use the Editor from here, since that offers a lot of flexibility for trying new arrangements. (Click and drag stuff around instead of needing to recreate all those lines in Excel!)

for sure. Though I'll say being able to see the unlocks with words (in excel) is handy. If we can't get "labeling" like that in the Editor, it'll always stay a bit inconvenient.

I probably won't have time for a full post tomorrow, but I'll try to add in placeholder units and buildings to the DropBox Tree so that we don't have to constantly translate from Swordsman to Melee 2 and so on. The Editor does let you duplicate units/buildings, which may be useful for this. (Or just rename the existing ones.)

I'll also see what I can do about generic abilities. I started working on that last week and made some headway in understanding how the system works. Unfortunately lemmy and CaptainBinky's approach isn't very amenable to unlocks that aren't themselves database entries (there's no "Trade route" entry anywhere - it's just a number attached to the tech). But it should be possible!

Cool. We'll see where this goes. I'm also fine continuing with the Excel sheet. Now that it's there, it's mostly easy to mess with it.

 

[S3rgeus]

I wrote a decent chunk of this reply on Thursday, but wasn't able to finish it then! Here we are, at last!

Also, I did get to publish another version of the Tech Tree Editor on Thursday with some fixes for issues I ran into when trying to create new units in it. (One of them, about the wrong context menu coming up on right click sometimes, I'm very surprised lemmy101 and CaptainBinky never fixed!)

Jumping slightly ahead, I'll be looking at adding an option for showing "name labels" for unlocks when I can work on the Editor again. Fingers crossed it's not too complicated, since all of that information is already in there, it should just be a matter of changing the draw behavior of the unlock icons to add some text at the bottom. Undoubtedly there will be some weirdness that makes it a bit more complicated than that!

With the above fixes, duplicating the CiV units to create our new ones should be much easier. But I think there is still a bug related to dragging around duplicated units and them still being "connected" to the unit they were duplicated from, I haven't had a chance to work out if it was distinct from the bug I fixed where they were invisible.

oh, yes, we definitely will replace the units. I just mean that the number and progression is good.Definitely must replace them, though!

Awesome, sounds good!

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.

Helicopters can cross mountains for any player though, not just Dido. (Though they also take 50 damage, which I don't think Firaxis intended.) Also agreed, no need to decide this now.

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.

Yeah, this seems like a good approach. I ended up discussing this in my previous post, but overall I like the idea. A ship that isn't much stronger than the previous military ship (so weaker than you might expect given where it is on the tree), but can cross oceans.

Yeah, I have a feeling the ships are just going to be ships. We're probably goignt o have to steal from Earth flavor.

Yeah, this seems very likely.

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.

Fine with me - Chariot Archer is cut!

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.

From the quote blocks above, I think having the Exploration Ship be a separate unit makes some sense and then have the "normal" military ship (normal strength that is) be a part of the main upgrade line.

What do we want to do with the "steal your opponent's ship" ability from the Privateer? Keep it? (Does it disappear on upgrade?) Move it to the Exploration Ship? (That would be a bit weird.)

Or would we leave both in the upgrade path and just make our Privateer equivalent the separate one. So we would have the Exploration Ship as Melee Naval 2 and some other ship as Melee Naval 3. Both Melee Naval 2 and Privateer Equivalent upgrade into Melee Naval 3.

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).

Interesting, I do usually get to the second set if I'm doing endgame wars! The final ones are usually reserved for opposing civs that are actually doing comparably well.

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.

Three units in the upgrade path still sounds like a good place to me.

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.

Global rebase only to Traveling Grounds wouldn't be as much of a power issue, exactly for the reasons you've mentioned. Needing to build it on your own territory necessitates establishing a foothold on a continent you're invading before you can bring in the Gateway folks. And then it takes time to actually make the Improvement (assuming you didn't capture an enemy one, but hopefully they were smart enough to pillage it). The strength of being able to rebase to it from anywhere trades off against those challenges. I think that we can't end up in a situation where some continents will be inescapable for Gateway units, because that will just be super annoying and feel very out of place. Plus I'd say we should gate it on a late game tech as well. Carriers show up in BNW at the end of the Modern Era, so we could push it up into the next era after that.

Agreed that mobile traveling grounds are too much of a stretch.

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, let's not use Windfinders here.

And yes, cloaking doesn't really seem to fit into any of the WoT flavor here. A pure anti-naval naval unit does sound like a good approach to it. And we could totally use them as rebase points for sa'angreal, if we wanted to and made the flavor fit.

replace with nothing, or add another melee unit to the tree?

I'd say we could just axe the Marine.

Ooh! Interesting. That helps a lot, actually. It justifies the Hunter being a unit that sticks around throughout the rest of the game.

Sounds like a plan then!

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 I agree, keeping MCs separate makes sense because of how different they are produced from other units.

Cool. Sounds good. I'd imagine that extra pop would make the immediate happiness impact more.

Yeah, it definitely would.

I suppose once all this unit stuff is settled we should mock up a "final" list of the upgrade paths we have.

Yeah, it looks like we're most of the way to that now.

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.

I've always thought that at least routes were built faster toward the end of the game, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It looks like techs can increase work rate, but none of the BNW techs are set up to do so. Aside from that, buildings, policies, and traits can.

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.

Heh, water workers sounds quite strange! Yeah, I'm fine leaving this the same.

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 lack of incentive to actually use Gentled channelers in such a system is a very good point and that's swayed me on this. Also agreed, we'd marked them as worker-like units before. I like your suggestion here, of them being civilians and indistinguishable from Workers for foreign players. (I'm not sure if we can do that - make them look different for the player who owns them - but we can try!) The mechanics play out really well with that. It seems like a good call to remove the "defensive only combat strength" from them too, because that's not something that really exists in CiV and it feels a bit too subtly out of place to me.

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.

Ah, of course. And with Gentling success rates maxing out at 90% that cycle would be a fast and very reliable source of Tower Influence, which isn't good. (We did agree that Gentling via Aes Sedai would generate Tower Influence, right? It's still marked as undecided in the Channeling summary.)

This seems fine then, if we're already doing it for a larger system, it's less out of place for Oppression here. And I can't think of any other ways to deal with it without throwing the Gentling chances and MC stuff we've already decided out of whack!

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.

I don't think it's really at all complicated. I went through a lot of implications before, but the actual mechanic is just "Healing of Gentling also works on foreign Gentled Channelers". Totally agreed, it's not flavor that exists in the books, I mainly only proposed it as a way for Liberation to have something that relates to this aspect of the game, since we wanted them to. Is there another avenue to fill that gap or shall we leave it out?

OK, nice. Using a traveling grounds for these purposes is very much NOT safe!

Yes, definitely! Needs to be very well defended!

for sure. As it wouldn't be a separate unit, I think the flavor thing wouldn't be questioned as much.

Sounds good.

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.

Strategically in game, they're useful for striking at players who are otherwise very well defended. If you can win with "old fashioned" units then you'd probably prefer to do that, since you don't have to clean up nearly as much afterwards. But if you're trying to hamstring another civ that presents a significant threat but you can't push out of a tactical stalemate, then they're instrumental. They're also useful for fighting powerful opponents and striking at their "good cities" behind their front line to weaken them enough for you to successfully capture the border cities.

I've seen them used more often in multiplayer games since there are more likely to be evenly matched opponents there.

Deployed against a player who can't fire them back is also pretty devastating. Even if their army survives, it cripples the cities it hits and prevents them from training more units, breaking a traditional army stalemate that way.

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.

Yeah, I think this should be ok. I think the main thing you get from BNW's use of naval units to hold the nukes is that you need to "stage" an assault on a foreign continent. I think we'll still get that since our angreal and sa'angreal need to be carried by channeling units.

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.

I think we can diverge from BNW's specific mechanics, but the underlying usefulness and distinct behavior of nukes is that they strike at a large number of units and damage enemy infrastructure. Range is an essential part of being able to strike at key infrastructure in an enemy civ. I don't think we'd end up with a superweapon if we just soup up the holding channeler's attacks for one or more attacks. I think using them as a "staging" unit for a unique attacking ability, much like Carriers can be used for Nuclear Bombs, will make this fulfill the role we want it to better.

As for differences, instead of using Fallout (whose role is sort of covered by Bubbles of Evil), we could make this attack pillage tiles around the target much more aggressively than nukes do. Though the loss of a Fallout equivalent will make getting rid of the result of such an attack easier - reducing infrastructure damage. (That does weaken them overall though, in line with what you are suggesting.)

Alternatively, we could make it quite different from nukes by instead of creating a "splash damage center point", we let the channeler pick and choose multiple hexes in a single turn to strike at, damaging all of the units in those hexes and possibly pillaging the tiles at the same time.

Also, we're presumably not allowing angreal and sa'angreal to be fired from cities, only from the channelers? That alone weakens them a lot compared to nukes, since they require more preparation to use.

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.

I was thinking all channelers could carry angreal and only Aes Sedai and Asha'men can carry sa'angreal? They seem like they're the strongest Saidar and Saidin channelers that the player gets, respectively.

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.

This ties into the discussion above a bit about the function of the angreal and sa'angreal. If they have distinct effects that are "deployed" by the channelers that are holding them, then we don't need to balance Aes Sedai against Asha'men, since both could do the same thing.

I do agree though that having some sa'angreal be male or female specific would be tedious for the player, I think it'll be fine if we just let them be deployed by either unit type.

Awesome. I definitely tested it, I think two times. That means that it's quite possible we have a few lurkers!

Awesome, hello, lurkers! We hope you like the look of what you see!

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!

We play 5e, which has been really fun. Thankfully I'm not the DM, otherwise I'd never be able to juggle WoTMod and D&D (and all this other Skimming stuff!). I tried DMing and really enjoyed it, but just don't have time to run the setup between sessions.

 

[S3rgeus]

Yeah, I'd already tried that. Before, all it was doing was clearing the unlocks. Like, if you had a few units unlock on a tech, they would disappear. But it was keeping the techs themselves. However, this new version is working fine.

That's very strange, I don't think I changed anything related to how it clears the techs! Glad it's working now though.

Oh, I didn't know that. So, how should we make that work? We obviously want to feel free moving around the prereqs, but we could end up, over the course of the game, significantly changing the amount of science required for certain branches. What can we work in to compensate for that?

I don't think we'll be able to reason about this sensibly for a long while. Given our shuffling around of various unlocks from one tech to another, we'll be changing the number of techs required to reach all sorts of things. I think this will have to be a part of a later balance pass.

I think we want to be sure that it's still possible to be very aggressive in beelining for certain techs, but create cross-tree dependencies at key points. I think I brought up before that you can get to The Internet and Globalization without ever researching Dynamite, which is the kind of thing we want to preserve so that non-Science-Victory players are still able to get their endgame techs.

The issue I have with "Fishing" is not that it doesn't make sense given the unlocks, it's that it doesn't make sense given the prereqs. Part of what made this take so long - and what makes it pretty good - is that I tried hard to make prereq techs feel like they actually would lead into the next tech (moreso than BNW, in many cases, I think). For me Cultivation and Legend feel like they could crow out of "Community" easier than Fishing. It's not terrible, but I don't love it. Anything else I tried was less fitting to the unlocks themselves... so they ultimately weren't any better.

I think Fishing and Community can be seen as quite related though, but then I've always found the BNW tree's dependencies mostly reasonable. they made enough overall chronological sense that in practice I differentiated between them purely by what they unlocked.

In the case of the Fishing flavor, communities are often built around a lifestyle that's dependent on fishing. (Small fishing villages and such.) And Fishing can be more than the knowledge of mechanics of how to set nets and such, it's a way of life for the people who do it all the time, which only develops after they've come together as a community.

So it does really seem fine to me.

Yeah, we can also always beef up the early barbs if we have to. Also, I'd figured we could make that Horsey slightly weaker or something as compensation.

Yep, slightly weaker would be good.

Yeah, I guess truth be told, I'm only rarely in an offensive war (that is, one that would need siege and courthouses) this early in the game. Only when I'm playing a civ whose uniques would make that logical. I find the opportunity cost on infrastructure to be pretty painful. So maybe I don't have an accurate read for this teach. Are you suggesting we change this one back then?

No, I don't think it feels like any of the resulting techs are out of whack. As I mentioned above, I'm mostly in try it and see mode for this, because reasoning about the balance of these changes is pretty difficult.

hmmmm, none of those speak to me. Archways are actually probably too advanced - they're certainly more advanced than roofs, I think. Structures is essentially identical to Building in my brain. Brickwork feels a bit like a cop out, but that one could work. What do you think?

Slate Roofing isn't just roofs though - it's a specific usage of materials, so rudimentary archways could come before that. I'm not sure why Brickwork is a cop out - what does it avoid? I'd be fine with either of these.

Yeah, given the issue with the Smiths being unlocked way earlier in the game, I was all set to go with then. But I think its somewhat nonsensical, actually - don't you have to smelt metals before they can be smithed, anyways? Like, I think these techs must always coexist.... Bah...

There's always "Bronzeworking". That's not so terrible. I dunno. I do like Smithing better at Building... I just wish there was a good replacement for the old Smithing. Thoughts?

I don't think we can use Bronze Working because that's a BNW tech, and we haven't completely reused any others elsewhere.

Smelting could come first, Smithing could be the organization of such expertise and its codification into principles and "recipes" that can be handed down to new smiths. A way of training people and a shared way of working, all that kind of stuff.

However, if we use Archways or Brickwork here, then we don't need to move Smithing back from where it currently is, and then this isn't a problem.

Sorry, I'm a little lost in the point. You're suggesting we put things back, or we keep it the way I proposed here?

No, not suggesting changing it back, just running through some reasoning out loud. I've found that the annoyingly short part of the melee tree is usually Longswordsman -> Musketman, which isn't what we're actually changing here. But by changing these two units, we're able to move our Longswordsman equivalent to earlier, creating more space between it and the Musketman equivalent.

Interesting. A good point. I'm happy to re-conceive these techs if you want, or just try it and see. Either way.

I think try it and see. I think a lot of this process is going to have to be like that, because the tech tree is such a complex web of dependencies that it's very difficult to say with any certainty what the knock-ons of a given set of changes are, let alone such a big overhaul as we're looking at here.

Looking at it now, that does seem pretty logical. I suppose the reason I didn't do it is that it made Apprenticeship a pretty epic tech. Is there something we'd want to move to Saidar as compensation? Or, we could just leave it alone. Preference?

We could move the wonder over, since that's still completely undefined flavor. And what's the "Craft" on Apprenticeship? Is that moveable to Saidar?

totally didn't know that was a characteristic of the ironclad! I suppose that's another era where I'm unlikely to be involved in naval warfare, or maybe based on my research progression, I'm usually still rocking the frigates and/or belining to something better.These all sound like good suggestions, though.

So, just to be clear, you're suggesting That Naval Melee 2 have this reduced oceanic capability, should that be later? If we do it this way, that means ocean travel will actually be unlocked earlier than in BNW. You're also saying that that unit will remain with that slowness, correct?Beyond that one element, when specifically do you see things unlocking otherwise? Sorry for some reason I'm again somewhat lost in the proposal at hand. (4-5 hours a sleep a night for a week will do that!)

Hmm, unlocking ocean travel earlier sounds like it might not be a good idea. What about if we made the Exploration ship the equivalent of the Privateer, in terms of upgrade path. So have it upgrade into Naval Melee 4. Unlock the Exploration Ship on the tech immediately to the right of Exploration (so, our Astronomy equivalent), and unlock Naval Melee 3 on the tech after it (or maybe later?). Then we set up the dependencies so that the tech for Naval Melee 3 requires some more techs from the middle (making the Exploration ship more beeline-able).

In this set up, the upgrade paths look like this:

NM1 -> NM2 -> NM3 -> NM4 -> NM5
ExpShip -> NM4 -> NM5

This lets us move Naval Melee 2 closer to the front of the tree, which we wanted to do. In this set up, Naval Melee 2 and Exploration Ship are designed to co-exist, with Naval Melee 2 lacking the ability to cross oceans, but requiring fewer techs.

Why make that switch though? If we did that, Hierarchy would unlock *two* military units (the "Knight" also). It seems better to split these up, IMO.

I'm fine with that too, your original post presented Tutelage and Hierarchy being the same as Education and Chivalry, so this was just a suggestion that could make them different. Unlocking two military units is something that happens in BNW, so we don't need to avoid it necessarily. (AA Guns and Machine Guns on Ballistics, Tanks and Anti-Tank Guns on Combined Arms, Carrier and Battleship on Electronics)

yeah, on emperor I so rarely have a real shot at Notre Dame, so...

Mr. Fancy Emperor Man

We'd penciled in Warder Upgrade in era 4, but that was pretty arbitrary. We could definitely put it around here if you wanted - though it would definitely have to be on Sword Forms - flavor dictation! Moving the XP building to Siegecraft could work, though it was a good flavor fit on SF.... but it's a fine flavor fit on Siege as well.

What do you think, ultimately?

Sword Forms is a good flavor fit, but I think it might be a bit early for this upgrade. I'd imagine most players would get their first Sister somewhere in era 2? They won't have their Warders immediately, so I think we want time for a bit of tension to build with other units catching up before we drop the first Warder upgrade. Era 4 still seems like the right place.

Might we want to move Sword Forms into era 4 and put something else in its place in era 3?

for sure. Though I'll say being able to see the unlocks with words (in excel) is handy. If we can't get "labeling" like that in the Editor, it'll always stay a bit inconvenient.

I didn't expect to get this far tonight, but here I am! I'll try to add an option to show the names of unlocks beneath them. As I mentioned above, it shouldn't be complicated.

Cool. We'll see where this goes. I'm also fine continuing with the Excel sheet. Now that it's there, it's mostly easy to mess with it.

Sure, if that works with your process then go for it.

I think the upgrades to the Editor that we get as a side effect of this work have already been really cool, so I'll keep trucking on that. It should end up being much easier to work with in the end. The features are there, but I need to get it to that place of stable user experience for that to be the case!


Right, I am actually caught up! So, tomorrow evening I'm going to try to make some more fixes and improvements to the Editor, move towards a full replica of our current era 1-3 plan, so hopefully I'll be in a place to contribute some techs on there for era 4 onwards!

Time related though, I'm going to be super busy this week. I won't be free on Wednesday or Thursday evenings and then I'm traveling again this weekend!

 

[counterpoint]

Looks like this'll be a quick post!

I don't think we'll be able to reason about this sensibly for a long while. Given our shuffling around of various unlocks from one tech to another, we'll be changing the number of techs required to reach all sorts of things. I think this will have to be a part of a later balance pass.

I think we want to be sure that it's still possible to be very aggressive in beelining for certain techs, but create cross-tree dependencies at key points. I think I brought up before that you can get to The Internet and Globalization without ever researching Dynamite, which is the kind of thing we want to preserve so that non-Science-Victory players are still able to get their endgame techs.

yeah, I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

I haven't don the Internet/Globalization-before-dynamite, but I've come close in a Cultural game I was playing. Then I got invaded.... That game ended in a restart...

I think Fishing and Community can be seen as quite related though, but then I've always found the BNW tree's dependencies mostly reasonable. they made enough overall chronological sense that in practice I differentiated between them purely by what they unlocked.

In the case of the Fishing flavor, communities are often built around a lifestyle that's dependent on fishing. (Small fishing villages and such.) And Fishing can be more than the knowledge of mechanics of how to set nets and such, it's a way of life for the people who do it all the time, which only develops after they've come together as a community.

So it does really seem fine to me.

ok, leaving it!

Slate Roofing isn't just roofs though - it's a specific usage of materials, so rudimentary archways could come before that. I'm not sure why Brickwork is a cop out - what does it avoid? I'd be fine with either of these.

I'll be clearer, Brickwork is sort of a cop-out because it's synonymous with Masonry, is all.

The other tricky thing here is coming up with a flavor that fits with the various stuff it'll unlock - the melee unit, lumber mill, and trade route are a tricky bunch. The ones on the table now don't help with that.

What if we approached it from another direction. It's coming from Fealty and Territory. What about something like Design, as a sort of proto-Engineering? There's also Assembly, which might fit the bill. Or does that sound too advanced? There's also some things as simple as Planning or Coordination. Any of this working for you? (To me most of these seem better than the alternative)

I don't think we can use Bronze Working because that's a BNW tech, and we haven't completely reused any others elsewhere.

duh! of course...

Smelting could come first, Smithing could be the organization of such expertise and its codification into principles and "recipes" that can be handed down to new smiths. A way of training people and a shared way of working, all that kind of stuff.

However, if we use Archways or Brickwork here, then we don't need to move Smithing back from where it currently is, and then this isn't a problem.

Well, some of the suggestions above could work here. If we went with Design or Assembly or something, we could put that one here, and then move Smithing back to Building like I previously suggested.

No, not suggesting changing it back, just running through some reasoning out loud. I've found that the annoyingly short part of the melee tree is usually Longswordsman -> Musketman, which isn't what we're actually changing here. But by changing these two units, we're able to move our Longswordsman equivalent to earlier, creating more space between it and the Musketman equivalent.

Yeah I also don't like the LS-Musket transition either.

We could move the wonder over, since that's still completely undefined flavor. And what's the "Craft" on Apprenticeship? Is that moveable to Saidar?

That shade of purple is for LP buildings. So "Craft" is the Legendary Craft building, (e.g. the Artist's guild). I think it needs to stay on Apprenticeship.

Looking at it again, though, I don't see much of a problem with Saidar housing the Open Borders. It's not a great fit, but honestly, neither is apprenticeship. Transcendence of Aes Sedai and all, I guess. So I'm thinking maybe now leave it.

Hmm, unlocking ocean travel earlier sounds like it might not be a good idea. What about if we made the Exploration ship the equivalent of the Privateer, in terms of upgrade path. So have it upgrade into Naval Melee 4. Unlock the Exploration Ship on the tech immediately to the right of Exploration (so, our Astronomy equivalent), and unlock Naval Melee 3 on the tech after it (or maybe later?). Then we set up the dependencies so that the tech for Naval Melee 3 requires some more techs from the middle (making the Exploration ship more beeline-able).

In this set up, the upgrade paths look like this:

NM1 -> NM2 -> NM3 -> NM4 -> NM5
ExpShip -> NM4 -> NM5

This lets us move Naval Melee 2 closer to the front of the tree, which we wanted to do. In this set up, Naval Melee 2 and Exploration Ship are designed to co-exist, with Naval Melee 2 lacking the ability to cross oceans, but requiring fewer techs.

Hmmm... that seems like a solution that could work. I wonder, though, if then it ends up a bit too cluttered with units in that area, especially considering we're actually adding a naval unit in the spread. Like, unlocking NvM 2, then ExpShip, then NvM 3 on back to back techs feels a little over the top, to me. What do you think? We could theoretically move NvM 2 to Shipcraft, switching it with NvR 1, but then NvM 2 might come too early.

Then again, if the ExpShip is *really* different - like as weak as a Trireme or something, then it might have very distinct functionality and might not feel so weird. Then, of course, it's really nothing like a Privateer at all (which isn't the point, I know). I wonder, though, if this will make the ExpShip just feel like we seriously gimped the Caravel, since they both pop up on "Astronomy."

Also, I know I may very well have suggested it, but perhaps we should second-guess the implications of unlocking normal travel across oceans later. Are we creating problems by allowing the exploration of distant lands far earlier than the colonization and/or invasion of such lands? Maybe that's a cool change, but it's a significant one, probably, and we should consider it carefully.

Bah! I don't feel like I have an answer here!

I'm fine with that too, your original post presented Tutelage and Hierarchy being the same as Education and Chivalry, so this was just a suggestion that could make them different. Unlocking two military units is something that happens in BNW, so we don't need to avoid it necessarily. (AA Guns and Machine Guns on Ballistics, Tanks and Anti-Tank Guns on Combined Arms, Carrier and Battleship on Electronics)

ok, let's leave them for now.

Mr. Fancy Emperor Man

Yeah, I'd like to think I'm really awesome, but I'm here to report that me winning on emperor unfortunately seems to require me playing like a wimp. Namely, I restart after around Era 2 if I can tell I'm not doing super well. I'm been "pretty good" enough times on that difficulty only to find that in the late-game I either lose or (most commonly) end up in stalemates and such.

Recently it took me three or four tries to finally win a single game as Isabella. I only won when I ended up getting super lucky, early game, and getting my 2nd city right on a nice wonder.

Sword Forms is a good flavor fit, but I think it might be a bit early for this upgrade. I'd imagine most players would get their first Sister somewhere in era 2? They won't have their Warders immediately, so I think we want time for a bit of tension to build with other units catching up before we drop the first Warder upgrade. Era 4 still seems like the right place.

Might we want to move Sword Forms into era 4 and put something else in its place in era 3?

Agreed that Warders shouldn't be upgraded here. But definitely, Sword Forms is great flavor for the Warders. I could totally imagine us pushing it to era four, and finding something else here. If we did that, though, would you be ok moving Fancloth to a later era? Era six is the next option

If you do want to replace SF... hmmm..

Discipline could work, though it's kind of like Duty.
We could also go with Heroism
Training and Regimen are somewhat analogous to Tutelage...
Rank could be interesting, though that's probably too related to Hierarchy
There's also stuff like Combat Arts or something
And of course things like Bladed Weapons or something
I think something like Strategy or something could work, but is weird alongside Siegecraft, as they're very related.
(In fact, we could actually rename Siegecraft to something like that...)

Bah! Or, we just leave it as SF! Thoughts?

Right, I am actually caught up! So, tomorrow evening I'm going to try to make some more fixes and improvements to the Editor, move towards a full replica of our current era 1-3 plan, so hopefully I'll be in a place to contribute some techs on there for era 4 onwards!

Time related though, I'm going to be super busy this week. I won't be free on Wednesday or Thursday evenings and then I'm traveling again this weekend!

cool! Hopefully this is short enough that you can comment on these few things tomorrow and we'll be good to go once you have your changes to the editor.

It sounds like you won't be back til next week - hopefully I'll have some time to throw together some ideas for eras 4 and possibly 5, providing we settle some of the things here with significant implications (mostly the ocean stuff, I think)

 

[S3rgeus]

Looks like this'll be a quick post!

Just a quick post here - you've missed a post! you skipped straight to my second, shorter post.



I'll try to respond to the ocean stuff a bit later.

 

[counterpoint]

Just a quick post here - you've missed a post! you skipped straight to my second, shorter post.



I'll try to respond to the ocean stuff a bit later.

d'oh!

I'll respond in full later, but I'll quickly respond to the only bit that seemed directly relevant to the tech tree discussion at this stage: Privateers. (this obviously ties in to what I was previously saying).

Tying the Steal functionality to the exploration ship is problematic, I think, for reasons already considered. I do like the Steal functionality, however.

I wonder if our problem is in the adding of the extra NvM unit, which makes things feel cluttered an undifferentiated. We've moved NvR earlier, and will probably add an extra NvR, and I agree with that, but perhaps, given the existence of the Privateer-like unit, we don't need an *extra* NvM. What we *do* need, I think, is to shift NVM 2 a bit earlier, as we've done. Then we can also shift the Privateer-like unit earlier as well? Or does that essentially gain us nothing?

Ugh...

I suppose the truth is that if we want this exploration unit that can travel through oceans terribly before everybody else, AND we want to make the NvM class feel more robust, we're going to certainly have things be a little "cluttered" in the unit department. On the flipside, if we want that unit but don't want to actually add a unit, we'd need to make the exploration unit change over time, at tech unlocks - not something you've indicated is desirable, understandably.

I suppose I simply don't know how this should all work out. I'm curious to hear your next batch of thoughts.

 

[S3rgeus]

Editor changes! I've uploaded a new version that has a new view option that you can toggle on to get names underneath the unlocks on techs on the tree - helping out modders like us who don't have artwork to differentiate their unlocks yet!

Like so:

Some very busy techs become difficult to read, but it should be serviceable for now, rather than me getting into all of the logic for positioning larger labels in different places for adjacent unlocks so that their text doesn't overlap. If any individual item is hard to read, it will draw "full size" if you click and drag it (you can drop it back where it was before once you've read it), as a quick way to be able to do that.

Hmmm... that seems like a solution that could work. I wonder, though, if then it ends up a bit too cluttered with units in that area, especially considering we're actually adding a naval unit in the spread. Like, unlocking NvM 2, then ExpShip, then NvM 3 on back to back techs feels a little over the top, to me. What do you think? We could theoretically move NvM 2 to Shipcraft, switching it with NvR 1, but then NvM 2 might come too early.

Then again, if the ExpShip is *really* different - like as weak as a Trireme or something, then it might have very distinct functionality and might not feel so weird. Then, of course, it's really nothing like a Privateer at all (which isn't the point, I know). I wonder, though, if this will make the ExpShip just feel like we seriously gimped the Caravel, since they both pop up on "Astronomy."

Also, I know I may very well have suggested it, but perhaps we should second-guess the implications of unlocking normal travel across oceans later. Are we creating problems by allowing the exploration of distant lands far earlier than the colonization and/or invasion of such lands? Maybe that's a cool change, but it's a significant one, probably, and we should consider it carefully.

Bah! I don't feel like I have an answer here!

I've reconsidered a bit from my last post, but it's not a big shift! Looking at the three techs in BNW, there are actually four ships on the three techs that are equivalent to what we're discussing now. Galleass on Compass, Caravel on Astronomy, and Frigate and Privateer on Navigation. So I don't think the techs being busy will be too much of a problem.

Navigation is a straight line from Astronomy, so three of those ships (two of whom are competitors) are unlockable almost immediately after each other.

A key thing is that getting from Compass to Astronomy requires going through the whole Education, Civil Service, Horseback Riding, Currency etc. You can beeline for Compass, but then need to spread out much wider.

I think we're best off keeping that kind of divide, but moving our ExpShip to the Compass equivalent, and our Privateer equivalent (NvM3) to our Astronomy equivalent.

This way, we're unlocking ocean travel early for just this one unit.

Also agreed about moving ocean crossing in general to later being quite significant - I'd be inclined to keep ocean crossing for embarked units on our Astronomy equivalent now.

So, we end up with this upgrade path:

NvM2 -> NvM3 -> NvM4
ExpShip -> NvM4

NvM3 can cross oceans, since it unlocks alongside the rest of the ocean crossing stuff. ExpShip unlocks earlier, is weaker, and can cross oceans, but only slowly. And given that we're moving NvM3 closer to the front of the tree than its BNW equivalent, it makes sense that NvM2 is available earlier as well (which was one of our other goals).

Does this sound sensible?

 

[counterpoint]

OK. Redeeming previous mistakes and answering this post!

Helicopters can cross mountains for any player though, not just Dido. (Though they also take 50 damage, which I don't think Firaxis intended.) Also agreed, no need to decide this now.

Right. I know helis can fly/hover. But having land units do that will feel very Dido-ish, to the player, I think. That's fine, but I mention it here only to state that if we decide we want a civ to have that as a UA or a UU, we might not want a generic unit to have it.

Totally bizarre that helis take 50 dmg.... I've never used them, of course...

Decide later!

Global rebase only to Traveling Grounds wouldn't be as much of a power issue, exactly for the reasons you've mentioned. Needing to build it on your own territory necessitates establishing a foothold on a continent you're invading before you can bring in the Gateway folks. And then it takes time to actually make the Improvement (assuming you didn't capture an enemy one, but hopefully they were smart enough to pillage it). The strength of being able to rebase to it from anywhere trades off against those challenges. I think that we can't end up in a situation where some continents will be inescapable for Gateway units, because that will just be super annoying and feel very out of place. Plus I'd say we should gate it on a late game tech as well. Carriers show up in BNW at the end of the Modern Era, so we could push it up into the next era after that.

Agreed that mobile traveling grounds are too much of a stretch.

ok, I think i'm fine with this. So, if travelling is currently slated to unlock in era 7, Global rebase should be when? 9? That's when X-coms pop up, right?

Sounds like a plan then!

This was about the Hunter as a Scout upgrade.

Quick question, though: we have Mystic Sites slotted to uncover in Era 7. It seems a bit weird for the scout upgrade to unlock that late. I think we'd penciled in the scout upgrade for era 4, though I could imagine era 5. Should the unit unlock first and then get the mystic-dig functionality later (well, technically, it could already have the functionality, but there'd be nothing to dig), or should we have it upgrade yet again at era 4?

The lack of incentive to actually use Gentled channelers in such a system is a very good point and that's swayed me on this. Also agreed, we'd marked them as worker-like units before. I like your suggestion here, of them being civilians and indistinguishable from Workers for foreign players. (I'm not sure if we can do that - make them look different for the player who owns them - but we can try!) The mechanics play out really well with that. It seems like a good call to remove the "defensive only combat strength" from them too, because that's not something that really exists in CiV and it feels a bit too subtly out of place to me.

just to be clear, the summaries have them as combat units, not worker units.

I'm fine changing that so that they are apparently-identical worker units that can be Healed later in the game. I'm leaving this part of the summary alone for now, in case you want to look at it - once we agree on this, I'll fix/update it.

Ah, of course. And with Gentling success rates maxing out at 90% that cycle would be a fast and very reliable source of Tower Influence, which isn't good. (We did agree that Gentling via Aes Sedai would generate Tower Influence, right? It's still marked as undecided in the Channeling summary.)

This seems fine then, if we're already doing it for a larger system, it's less out of place for Oppression here. And I can't think of any other ways to deal with it without throwing the Gentling chances and MC stuff we've already decided out of whack!

Yeah, AS gentling = tower influence. Fixed

ok, can't get the execution bonus for a newly-healed channeler, nor can you get a reward for gentling him again. Will be put into the summary once confirmed! I tend to not always reread my post when you quote me, so please say UPDATE SUMMARY in your post or something in case I miss it

I don't think it's really at all complicated. I went through a lot of implications before, but the actual mechanic is just "Healing of Gentling also works on foreign Gentled Channelers". Totally agreed, it's not flavor that exists in the books, I mainly only proposed it as a way for Liberation to have something that relates to this aspect of the game, since we wanted them to. Is there another avenue to fill that gap or shall we leave it out?

I'm pretty fine leaving it out. The only other thing I can think of could be that newly-healed saidin units have half-maintenance for Liberation or something...

Yeah, I think this should be ok. I think the main thing you get from BNW's use of naval units to hold the nukes is that you need to "stage" an assault on a foreign continent. I think we'll still get that since our angreal and sa'angreal need to be carried by channeling units.

Right, I think that accomplishes the same thing, really.

I think we can diverge from BNW's specific mechanics, but the underlying usefulness and distinct behavior of nukes is that they strike at a large number of units and damage enemy infrastructure. Range is an essential part of being able to strike at key infrastructure in an enemy civ. I don't think we'd end up with a superweapon if we just soup up the holding channeler's attacks for one or more attacks. I think using them as a "staging" unit for a unique attacking ability, much like Carriers can be used for Nuclear Bombs, will make this fulfill the role we want it to better.

As far as splash damage and such, we could make that a function of saidin. As in, Saidar units are epic against single units (and cities), while saidin ones have splash damage, of course. That's already a distinction somewhat in our game.

alternatively, it could simply add splash damage to whatever the channeler would normally be doing. As far as infrastructure, I'm not sure what to suggest that isn't obvious - couldn't it destroy buildings and such, still? In any case, the point is that it would still "feel" like a regular old attack - it would just be tremendous

As for differences, instead of using Fallout (whose role is sort of covered by Bubbles of Evil), we could make this attack pillage tiles around the target much more aggressively than nukes do. Though the loss of a Fallout equivalent will make getting rid of the result of such an attack easier - reducing infrastructure damage. (That does weaken them overall though, in line with what you are suggesting.)

Hmmm... honestly not totally sure how to handle this, actually.

The thing is, I feel like the flavor of the thing loses a little when a "special attack" - as opposed to simply making the channeler's regular attacks super powerful. If it's a "special" move, it feels like it kind of *has* to be balefire. It feels somewhat conspicuous if it isn't bale fire. If it just makes the channeler epic, this wouldn't feel "off."

Alternatively, we could make it quite different from nukes by instead of creating a "splash damage center point", we let the channeler pick and choose multiple hexes in a single turn to strike at, damaging all of the units in those hexes and possibly pillaging the tiles at the same time.

hmmm... that feels a little odd to me, but what if it were expressed slightly differently? Like, it just gives you X attacks per turn (maybe they're more powerful, maybe they aren't, though they probably have a chance to destroy buildings)?

Also, we're presumably not allowing angreal and sa'angreal to be fired from cities, only from the channelers? That alone weakens them a lot compared to nukes, since they require more preparation to use.

yeah, I think we need to disallow this, right?

I was thinking all channelers could carry angreal and only Aes Sedai and Asha'men can carry sa'angreal? They seem like they're the strongest Saidar and Saidin channelers that the player gets, respectively.

Oh, that's interesting. So the nuke bomb and nuke missile thing includes a "pyramid" of which units can use it. I could get behind that, though I could also see all of them being limited to AS and A'M.

We play 5e, which has been really fun. Thankfully I'm not the DM, otherwise I'd never be able to juggle WoTMod and D&D (and all this other Skimming stuff!). I tried DMing and really enjoyed it, but just don't have time to run the setup between sessions.

only played 5E once. Had fun with it. I miss being the DM, but, like you, me not being the DM means I can do this. My previous campaign stalled around when I started on this mod.

But *man* was our campaign epic. It was a near-future space opera thing. I had a whole wiki for it and everything. Had spelled out what was happening on most of the moons in the solar system. Took way too much work...

Editor changes! I've uploaded a new version that has a new view option that you can toggle on to get names underneath the unlocks on techs on the tree - helping out modders like us who don't have artwork to differentiate their unlocks yet!

Like so:

Some very busy techs become difficult to read, but it should be serviceable for now, rather than me getting into all of the logic for positioning larger labels in different places for adjacent unlocks so that their text doesn't overlap. If any individual item is hard to read, it will draw "full size" if you click and drag it (you can drop it back where it was before once you've read it), as a quick way to be able to do that.

cool! Nice functionality! Now hopefully it'll let the renaming go smoothly!

I should say though that it isn't resizing if I drag, at least not when I tried it (maybe the tech wasn't cluttered enough).

I've reconsidered a bit from my last post, but it's not a big shift! Looking at the three techs in BNW, there are actually four ships on the three techs that are equivalent to what we're discussing now. Galleass on Compass, Caravel on Astronomy, and Frigate and Privateer on Navigation. So I don't think the techs being busy will be too much of a problem.

Navigation is a straight line from Astronomy, so three of those ships (two of whom are competitors) are unlockable almost immediately after each other.

A key thing is that getting from Compass to Astronomy requires going through the whole Education, Civil Service, Horseback Riding, Currency etc. You can beeline for Compass, but then need to spread out much wider.

I think we're best off keeping that kind of divide, but moving our ExpShip to the Compass equivalent, and our Privateer equivalent (NvM3) to our Astronomy equivalent.

This way, we're unlocking ocean travel early for just this one unit.

Also agreed about moving ocean crossing in general to later being quite significant - I'd be inclined to keep ocean crossing for embarked units on our Astronomy equivalent now.

So, we end up with this upgrade path:

NvM2 -> NvM3 -> NvM4
ExpShip -> NvM4

NvM3 can cross oceans, since it unlocks alongside the rest of the ocean crossing stuff. ExpShip unlocks earlier, is weaker, and can cross oceans, but only slowly. And given that we're moving NvM3 closer to the front of the tree than its BNW equivalent, it makes sense that NvM2 is available earlier as well (which was one of our other goals).

Does this sound sensible?

Yeah, I think that all sounds sensible to me - though we'll have to see if there are weird effects to the early unlock of the expship's ocean travel.

NvM 2 is better in combat but can never travel in ocean, correct? (unless it upgrades) Also, I should state that I'm assuming NvM3 doesn't *have* to have the privateer functionality. We could put that functionality in the "main line," like this, but it doesn't seem essential. The Expship, while totally different, obviously fills its "progressive" role, as the "black sheep," even if it's combat role is very different.

Does the expo ship move normally in ocean after (Astronomy)? Or still slow?

One other thing that's still unclear to me - Are we unlocking NvM2 and ExpShip on the same tech (Compass/Exploration)? If so, are you envisioning something like this:

Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - NvM 2, ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvM 3
(Navigation) - NvR 2

If so, that feels like a *lot* of melee unlocks very close together. I know Nav is the unlock point for Privateer and NvR 2 in BNW, but this feels somehow more chaotic. Having two melee units (one being the expo-ship) unlock on "Compass," and then immediately after getting another one makes me feel like the life-span of NvM 2 is somewhat pathetic and somewhat pointless. The ExpShip is more justified, perhaps, in that it still wil lhave good movement and vision and such - unless it forever moves slow in ocean.

Possible Alternatives:

Do not add a melee unit
Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvM 2
(Navigation) - NvR 2

If we do this, we basically have replaced the progression-role of the privateer with the ExpShip. Of course, with this way, there's a long way between NvM 2 and 3, which would be (Ironclad) (though it could theoretically be moved earlier)

Flip NvR and NvM
Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - NvM 2, ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvR 2
(Navigation) - NvM 3

Still perhaps a bit odd, but a little more spaced out. Kind of weird having the first full "ocean vessel" be a Ranged one, though.

I think in general I prefer to hold off NvR 2 til (Navigation). The distance from Shipcraft to (Navigation) feels right. Definitely don't know where that leaves us with these melees, though!

Definitely the do not add suggestion above may be the simplest!

EDIT:
(an unrelated edit)

Just realized that I totally accidentally left our second Polearm unit (Pol 2, the Pikeman) off of this tech tree! It's supposed to sit on Civil Service, which is, of course, Saidar.

What do you suggest we do? We could move it to Apprenticeship, which might better justify such a unit, but then i'd definitely suggest we do something to make up for it. What do you think?

Alternatively, we could unlock it early on Appraisal, which is notable in that it removes all the "top of the tree" prereqs for that unit. Solution?

EDIT 2
The other thing we could consider is moving that unit later. We could put it on Gunpowder equivalent, which would allow us not to put Melee 4 there, thus spreading out those units a bit, which might be nice. Then we could push the lancer back, which would let it not hang around way too long before the anti-tank gun equivalent. Of course, the problem that thus arises is that there's a rather long stretch between Spearman and "Pikeman" (Pol 1 and 2) - eras 1 to 4!

We previously spoke of also adding another Pole unit. This could help this. If we stuck the second one in there at Appraisal or apprenticeship, and then put the next one at "Gunpowder," and then pushed the lancer-equivalent back into the beginning or even end of era 5 (instead of end of era 4), this might make something like this work. We'd then be free to do whatever we want with melee 4. The challenge then becomes working out the transition between Pol 1 and 2. If it's on appraisal, then there would be actually no prereqs linking the two - you could theoretically unlock Pol 2 first! Not good.

The other possibility is to not add an extra unit, but stick Pol 2 on Siegecraft - technically *later* than Civil Service, but doesn't have nearly as complex a prereq setup. Then, we'd probably best be served by also pushing the LAncer later, and/or requiring some more complex prereqs.

Thoughts?

EDIT 3!
Also, I've found that I have Rng 2 and Sge 1 popping up twice in this tree (they're just typos, though). We also have an issue where Rng 2 (in its first location) can be unlocked without doing Rng 1, and Melee 3 without Mel 2! I do see now though that in BNW, you can unlock Pol 2 (at Civ Service) without ever having grabbed Pol 1 (at Bronze). Wow. Well, ok, then. I'll try to prevent such, but I suppose if it happens it isn't the worst thing.
... By the time you're back, I'll hopefully have a proposed solution to all this unit mumbo jumbo!

 

[counterpoint]

Alright,

So here's a new version of the excel tech tree. I'm keeping it in excel for now, as the lack of ability to specify bonuses and stuff in the Editor makes the Editor hard to "work" in (brainstorm, try different things, etc.).

This was a huge, massive pain in the butt, and I only got through a partial Era 4 (Renn/Consolidation)! This is because there was a lot, lot, lot of problematic stuff living in the bottom of the late era 3 and early era 4, mostly centering around unit unlocks. While the top of the tree was nice and clean, the bottom was getting crazy. Suffice it to say, this version attempts to address these issues and begin Era 4 - I really really shouldn't keep going until I get thoughts from you. Also, I've been at this way, way too long, and I'm out of flavor ideas...

A few big priorities for me with these edits were 1) better space out unit upgrades, and 2) maintain upgrade integrity (by that I mean, Pol 2 is required before you can get Pol 3). Despite my best efforts, the previous version of the medieval era didn't succeed with these both of these aspects. This version might, but I'm also convinced that there truly is no great, perfect solution. I hope I'm wrong and you can propose one!

A consequence of these is that Belining is likely more difficult in this tech tree - I've set up a bunch of dependencies that provide, I think, a few more tech bottlenecks than there are in BNW.

A note on process: I've been knee deep in this and have tried many, many permutations. You may very well have some suggestions that save the day (I hope you do!)! So, I suggest that when it comes to previously-proposed techs (as opposed to stuff in the future), make suggestions completely specific. E.g. (just an e.g., not a suggestion!), at this point, "Could we put Mel 4 higher in the tree?" is much less useful than "Put Mle 4 on Talent, and make Siegecraft a Prereq for Talent to keep the upgrade line valid." Some of the previous discussion has involved some spinning around concepts, and I think we won't get much done very quickly if we continue in this way on the actual techs.

Lastly, note that this doesn't really address the ocean units. I'm still waiting on what you want to do with those.

So, new things are outlined below. These changes are also highlighted in the spreadsheet, and can be un-highlighted when confirmed.

Building became Smithing for aforementioned reasons.

Also, Smithing and Duty have swapped units, with Rng 2 going back to Smithing and Mel 2 going back to Duty, as they are in the equivalent techs in BNW. I was trying to be different and break up the later melee-line craziness, but unfortunately in doing so I created a situation where it was rather easy to get Rng 2 without ever having to tap Rng 1. Yuck. Fixed, I think (though now it's the same as BNW!)

Apprenticeship now has Slate Roofing as a prereq, in addition to simply Appraisal. This tech is the bastard offspring of both Guilds and Metal Casting. Most importantly, though, I did this to preserve the tech upgrade line from Range 2 to the later Range 3.

Exploration: I think I'd like to rename this. Feels sort of ambiguous. I considered Mapmaking, but mapmaking felt like a good name for a tech that would spawn from Tutelage. If you want to call this one Mapmaking, what should we call the next one?

Smithing (the second one) is now called Design. The tech itself is largely unchanged. I tried about fifty different things, but left it pretty much the same as Machinery.

Siegecraft now requires Slate Roofing in addition to Duty. Additionally, it provides the Mel 3 unit in addiiton to the Sge 2 unit. The reason for this is I really, really wanted to break up Duty and Heroism, and try not to have an upgrade only one tech apart. This now means in order to go from Mel 2 to 3, you have to explore the level directly above it. It's possible this tech is too awesome now - we can pull the wonder or something if need be.

Sword Forms was renamed Heroism. Also, the Mel 3 unit became the Pol 2 unit. This one drove me, and drives me, crazy. The issues here are thus:
A) Civil Service is where Pol 2 is housed in BNW. This tech doesn't really have an analogue here. It would be Saidar, which makes no flavorful sense.
B) Civil Service is completely out of the upgrade path of Pol 1. You could get Pikemen before Spearmen, though they're separated by a lot of bulbs.
C) Civil Service is, nicely, accessible to those that aren't going combat-focused. That way, a counter to knights can be grabbed by defensive civs who are ignoring the bottom half of the tech. Interestingly, knights themselves also share this quality.

Ultimately, the current decision was to put it here on Heroism. The main reasons I did this are:
A) To uphold the upgrade line of Polearms
B) to put something on Heroism. I really really didn't want to put Mel 3 there, as that would be really rather too easy and quick to get too from Mel 2 (the Longswordsman problem, identically). This unit then provides something nice for this tech that isn't Melee 3. I wanted it to be Rng 3, initially, but I couldn't get a direct upgrade line from Rng 2 to Heroism, without putting extra prereqs on duty, thus gimping Mel 2. Also, Rng units are perhaps best higher in the tree where they can be accessible to non-warmongers.

What do you think? The other place I had Pol 2 live - for really quite along time - was on Apprenticeship. This is not as flavorfully yucky as Saidar, and is quite accessible to everybody. The problem with this, of course, is the lack of upgrade line from Pol 1. If we don't care about this, then fine.

However, the other problem with doing that is then *what the heck do we do with Heroism*? Is there no unit there? Can we cut the tech? I found myself wishing I could cut it, and use Siegecraft (maybe renaming it Heroism) and Design for these units. Unfortunately, then we're losing one tech in the column, which we are trying to avoid - and there doesn't appear to be mechanical room for another tech in the upper parts of this column.

I'm certainly open to putting Pol 2 in Apprenticeship if we can figure out a solution - in fact, it'd probably be better that way...

Mapmaking and its unnamed subsequent tech (suggestions?) will depend wholly on what we decide to do with ships.

High Chant is our acoustics, and is pretty much the same as that tech. High Chant, you recall, refers to the way bards/gleemen perform the big Epics. I like this flavor.

It's followed by a tech that is unnamed (suggestions?) that as of now is identical to Architecture, but need not be.

The New Tongue steps in for Banking. I mean this as the main language they all speak. I thought it was called the Common Tongue, but apparently it's the New Tongue. Also, when looking it up, apparently it was adopted roughly around this time in the third age, which is nifty. So I like the flavor, though I don't love how it looks next too High Chant - they're 100% different, but on the page they look similar topically.

The New Tongue itself similar to Banking, but also adds our Recon Upgrade (pending the discussion above).

Talent stands in for Printing Press. I like the flavor here, but don't love the wording. By Talent here I mean channeling Talents (Healing, Traveling, Dreaming, etc.). I considered naming it Dreaming or something like that, but the more general thing feels better. Supposedly we were supposed to have a T'a'r thing here (perhaps it was the initial unlock?), so I have a T'a'r upgrade here - no idea what it will be, though.

I'm open to reconfiguring the elements of The New Tongue and Talent, even swapping their positions entirely. The items under these techs somewhat work in either tech. Thoughts?

These two feed into a currently unnamed tech (suggestions?) that takes the place of Economics. Not 100% sure what to do here at this point.

Sword Forms stands in for Gunpowder. This gives us Mel 4, but, given the three-tech prereqs leading into here, it's not going to be so simple to just ignore Mel 3... I hope. Ideally, I would have preferred to put off Mel 4 until the next column, and put something else here. Perhaps a Pol 3 (an *added Pol unit*) would work here if we figured out a way to move Pol 2 back to Apprenticeship. Thoughts?

EDIT: I did also consider axing one of the Melee units, and removing the clutter from this era. This version avoids doing that, as we'd previously decided to keep them the same. What do you think? This is perhaps a less drastic workaround than the remove-one-tech-from-this-column solution (which solves our issues here, but creates some new issues).

Otherwise, note that Sword Forms houses a Warder upgrade. If we move SF to the next column over (putting a Pol 3 here instead or something), I'd say Warder upgrade should follow the tech itself and move over one column.

An unnamed tech (suggestions) is the spawn of Talent and Swordforms. It stands in for Metallurgy, but provides the Sge 3 unit instead of Pol 3. This is to make the spread between Sge 2 and 3 a little larger (it's rather small in BNW).

Sword Forms leads to an unnamed tech (suggestions?), and I'm not sure what to put here. Right now it holds the upgrades that were based on Chemistry, but without the Sge unit (which is above). I've considered putting Rng 4 here, instead of in the next column where it is in BNW. Thoughts?

For the industrial era, we're supposed to have a channeler upgrade, a spark boost, and illumination. Personally, I could see the Spark Boost going in the previous era somewhere.

I think Fireworks could theoretically be a good rename of Industrialization, though it unlocking Iron (instead of Coal) is a little weird. The Factory could be an Illuminator's chapterhouse (though, again, iron...)

Another option could be where Electricity is in BNW. I can see a stock exchange or something being replaced with an illumininator chapterhouse (produces gold), though this is weird since then there'd be tons of them (EDIT: nothing of course stops us from creating a new national wonder here). The awesome thing here is that this tech reveals Sulfur, which makes perfect sense for fireworks!

Additionally, I was thinking of having Pol 3 (the much maligned Lancer) appear in column 1 here, growing out of the former Economics and Metallurgy techs. I'm trying to get it higher in the tech tree...

Also, was thinking of getting the mounted units lower on the tree, so having Mnt 3 be in this column, growing out of the former Metallurgy and Chemistry techs.

Lastly, I figured we could have Sge 4 (artillery!) on the *next* column over, prereqs TBD.

Thoughts? Or, to put it more elegantly, HELP!

 

[S3rgeus]

Epic delays! Apologies, I'd intended to post on Monday and let you know I'd be traveling on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, good news! I am now on vacation for a couple of weeks, which should mean I have more time than usual!

OK. Redeeming previous mistakes and answering this post!

And I'll start with this post, so that we keep chronological order!

Right. I know helis can fly/hover. But having land units do that will feel very Dido-ish, to the player, I think. That's fine, but I mention it here only to state that if we decide we want a civ to have that as a UA or a UU, we might not want a generic unit to have it.

Totally bizarre that helis take 50 dmg.... I've never used them, of course...

Decide later!

Totally agree!

ok, I think i'm fine with this. So, if travelling is currently slated to unlock in era 7, Global rebase should be when? 9? That's when X-coms pop up, right?

Yeah, that seems like a good place for that!

This was about the Hunter as a Scout upgrade.

Quick question, though: we have Mystic Sites slotted to uncover in Era 7. It seems a bit weird for the scout upgrade to unlock that late. I think we'd penciled in the scout upgrade for era 4, though I could imagine era 5. Should the unit unlock first and then get the mystic-dig functionality later (well, technically, it could already have the functionality, but there'd be nothing to dig), or should we have it upgrade yet again at era 4?

I think it's fine for it to be unlocked and then have the ability to dig the Sites unlocked for the unit later in the game.

just to be clear, the summaries have them as combat units, not worker units.

I'm fine changing that so that they are apparently-identical worker units that can be Healed later in the game. I'm leaving this part of the summary alone for now, in case you want to look at it - once we agree on this, I'll fix/update it.

This sounds like a good plan to me! Agreed on civilian Gentled Channelers! [Update Summary]

Yeah, AS gentling = tower influence. Fixed

Awesome, thanks!

ok, can't get the execution bonus for a newly-healed channeler, nor can you get a reward for gentling him again. Will be put into the summary once confirmed! I tend to not always reread my post when you quote me, so please say UPDATE SUMMARY in your post or something in case I miss it

I'm pretty fine leaving it out. The only other thing I can think of could be that newly-healed saidin units have half-maintenance for Liberation or something...

Awesome, agreed! Also, [Update Summary] sounds like a good system! It's kind of like @settled, I suppose! We'll decide on a standard one day, and then we'll be done!

Right, I think that accomplishes the same thing, really.

Sounds good! (This is about staging angreal and sa'angreal through channelers, instead of naval units.)

As far as splash damage and such, we could make that a function of saidin. As in, Saidar units are epic against single units (and cities), while saidin ones have splash damage, of course. That's already a distinction somewhat in our game.

alternatively, it could simply add splash damage to whatever the channeler would normally be doing. As far as infrastructure, I'm not sure what to suggest that isn't obvious - couldn't it destroy buildings and such, still? In any case, the point is that it would still "feel" like a regular old attack - it would just be tremendous

Hmmm... honestly not totally sure how to handle this, actually.

The thing is, I feel like the flavor of the thing loses a little when a "special attack" - as opposed to simply making the channeler's regular attacks super powerful. If it's a "special" move, it feels like it kind of *has* to be balefire. It feels somewhat conspicuous if it isn't bale fire. If it just makes the channeler epic, this wouldn't feel "off."

Funny, I have quite the opposite feeling on this. I feel like players will find that building what is basically a whole new unit and transporting it via channeler across the map to where it's most useful will never feel worthwhile if it only enhances that channeler's existing abilities in some way. If it doesn't do something big and flashy and different, why not just build more channelers/other units? They would be both more flexible and easier to do, which strikes me as a problem, because these angreal and sa'angreal should stand out as powerful.

I also think that the flavor of angreal and sa'angreal certainly permits us to have a big, "special attack" that isn't necessarily balefire. Any weave would be made massive and destructive with their amplification, (which is part of why, I think, you're suggesting boosting their existing attacks) so we can be destructive without balefire.

Thinking back to before, I think for making this distinct from nukes but still powerful and damaging to infrastructure, the multi-special-attack set up could be very effective. The channeler "uses" (and consumes) the angreal/sa'angreal and then immediately attacks 4-6 times within a boosted ranged. Each tile they hit does tons of damage to any unit/city on that tile, and if there is an Improvement, pillages it (unlike nukes, this would be a guaranteed pillage on specific tiles, which can make it a bit more targeted).

I'd say either all of them get splash damage from these hits or just saidin users, I could be convinced either way.

I think the key component of this is that it's something splashy and recognizable that happens all at once and does a lot of damage to the defender, which makes it a distinct behavior that's worth managing the transporting of these angreal/sa'angreal "units" for.

hmmm... that feels a little odd to me, but what if it were expressed slightly differently? Like, it just gives you X attacks per turn (maybe they're more powerful, maybe they aren't, though they probably have a chance to destroy buildings)?

I think the mechanics of this make a lot of sense, because it's pretty much what I discuss above. The only real difference is whether we attach it to the default attack action or create a new one.

Destroying buildings in cities is definitely an interesting idea and would be really cool. How would we decide which buildings would be affected and what kind of damage would destroy which ones? We'd want to start with the cheaper buildings, right?

yeah, I think we need to disallow this, right?

Yep, that's fine with me! No using angreal or sa'angreal directly from cities, only via channeling units!

Oh, that's interesting. So the nuke bomb and nuke missile thing includes a "pyramid" of which units can use it. I could get behind that, though I could also see all of them being limited to AS and A'M.

Yeah, I think it could work either way. It probably won't make too much difference - as the strongest units of their time, Aes Sedai and Asha'man will probably be most of what most players will be using at this point of the game, if they have channelers. This would be a nice nod to that power though, and to the flavor of sa'angreal being difficult to control. I seem to remember the flavor of angreal was that any channeler could use it and be very powerful, but a lot of channelers would be destroyed by using sa'angreal.

only played 5E once. Had fun with it. I miss being the DM, but, like you, me not being the DM means I can do this. My previous campaign stalled around when I started on this mod.

But *man* was our campaign epic. It was a near-future space opera thing. I had a whole wiki for it and everything. Had spelled out what was happening on most of the moons in the solar system. Took way too much work...

That sounds awesome! That's a lot of contextual preparation around the campaigns. Did it play into your sessions very often or was it all mostly a "layer back" providing motivation for characters/NPCs?

cool! Nice functionality! Now hopefully it'll let the renaming go smoothly!

I should say though that it isn't resizing if I drag, at least not when I tried it (maybe the tech wasn't cluttered enough).

The resizing only occurs if there are enough unlocks on the tech that it needs to shrink the icons. (Like Bronze Working in BNW.) The size from the screenshot is "full size", because there are only 3 unlocks on Pottery.

Yeah, I think that all sounds sensible to me - though we'll have to see if there are weird effects to the early unlock of the expship's ocean travel.

NvM 2 is better in combat but can never travel in ocean, correct? (unless it upgrades) Also, I should state that I'm assuming NvM3 doesn't *have* to have the privateer functionality. We could put that functionality in the "main line," like this, but it doesn't seem essential. The Expship, while totally different, obviously fills its "progressive" role, as the "black sheep," even if it's combat role is very different.

Does the expo ship move normally in ocean after (Astronomy)? Or still slow?

One other thing that's still unclear to me - Are we unlocking NvM2 and ExpShip on the same tech (Compass/Exploration)? If so, are you envisioning something like this:

Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - NvM 2, ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvM 3
(Navigation) - NvR 2

If so, that feels like a *lot* of melee unlocks very close together. I know Nav is the unlock point for Privateer and NvR 2 in BNW, but this feels somehow more chaotic. Having two melee units (one being the expo-ship) unlock on "Compass," and then immediately after getting another one makes me feel like the life-span of NvM 2 is somewhat pathetic and somewhat pointless. The ExpShip is more justified, perhaps, in that it still wil lhave good movement and vision and such - unless it forever moves slow in ocean.

Possible Alternatives:

Do not add a melee unit
Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvM 2
(Navigation) - NvR 2

If we do this, we basically have replaced the progression-role of the privateer with the ExpShip. Of course, with this way, there's a long way between NvM 2 and 3, which would be (Ironclad) (though it could theoretically be moved earlier)

Flip NvR and NvM
Era 3
Shipcraft (New) - NvR 1
Exploration (Compass) - NvM 2, ExpShip
Era 4:
(Astronomy) - NvR 2
(Navigation) - NvM 3

Still perhaps a bit odd, but a little more spaced out. Kind of weird having the first full "ocean vessel" be a Ranged one, though.

I think in general I prefer to hold off NvR 2 til (Navigation). The distance from Shipcraft to (Navigation) feels right. Definitely don't know where that leaves us with these melees, though!

Definitely the do not add suggestion above may be the simplest!

I think one of the things to consider is how this looks in BNW. So quickly, this is BNW's set up in this part:

Era 1:
Sailing NvM 1
Era 2:
Optics - None
Era 3:
Compass - NvR 1
Era 4:
Astronomy - NvM 2
Navigation - NvR 2, Priv

So, if we consider our ExpShip to be a "replacement" for the Privateer (even if it mechanically isn't, it's taking up the "Privateer slot" in the upgrade path) we're effectively unlocking that earlier. So the whole above chain from BNW makes me think something like this will work:

Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - NvR 1
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2, NvM 3

Like BNW, we'd have two ships on one tech, but the time when that happened would be one earlier. In this set up, NvM 2 would not be able to cross oceans, and the ExpShip would, but at a lower speed. Then NvR 2 and NvM 3 would have full ocean travel. (And both NvM 2 and ExpShip would upgrade to NvM 3.)

It does also mean that each tech in the "naval" series would have at least one ship on it, but alternating the Melee and Ranged (and throwing in Exp) means that no single unit is immediately invalidated too quickly.

The proximity between ExpShip and NvM 3 should be offset by, in a similar way to Astronomy in BNW, Mapmaking having prereqs that requires the player to do more of the center of the tree. Alternatively, we could put NvM 3 on the tech after Mapmaking.

EDIT:
(an unrelated edit)

Just realized that I totally accidentally left our second Polearm unit (Pol 2, the Pikeman) off of this tech tree! It's supposed to sit on Civil Service, which is, of course, Saidar.

What do you suggest we do? We could move it to Apprenticeship, which might better justify such a unit, but then i'd definitely suggest we do something to make up for it. What do you think?

Alternatively, we could unlock it early on Appraisal, which is notable in that it removes all the "top of the tree" prereqs for that unit. Solution?

EDIT 2
The other thing we could consider is moving that unit later. We could put it on Gunpowder equivalent, which would allow us not to put Melee 4 there, thus spreading out those units a bit, which might be nice. Then we could push the lancer back, which would let it not hang around way too long before the anti-tank gun equivalent. Of course, the problem that thus arises is that there's a rather long stretch between Spearman and "Pikeman" (Pol 1 and 2) - eras 1 to 4!

We previously spoke of also adding another Pole unit. This could help this. If we stuck the second one in there at Appraisal or apprenticeship, and then put the next one at "Gunpowder," and then pushed the lancer-equivalent back into the beginning or even end of era 5 (instead of end of era 4), this might make something like this work. We'd then be free to do whatever we want with melee 4. The challenge then becomes working out the transition between Pol 1 and 2. If it's on appraisal, then there would be actually no prereqs linking the two - you could theoretically unlock Pol 2 first! Not good.

The other possibility is to not add an extra unit, but stick Pol 2 on Siegecraft - technically *later* than Civil Service, but doesn't have nearly as complex a prereq setup. Then, we'd probably best be served by also pushing the LAncer later, and/or requiring some more complex prereqs.

Thoughts?

Unlike the Naval units, I've never really felt that additional polearm unit was required - I never felt like upgrading from Spearman to Pikeman left much in between. (In terms of actual power they're not too far apart, right? 11 power on the Spearman, 16 power on the Pikeman.)

Sticking Pol2 on Siegecraft sounds like a good way of resolving this. Would we move Mel3 then? Mel3, Sge2, and Pol2 would all be on the same tech if we make this move. Which could be ok?

We do potentially reduce the availability of modern-ish units to civs that aren't military focused at this part of the tree, but that's another one of those things I'm not sure we can really assess accurately yet.

However, looking at the current iteration of the tree and your post a bit later on, it seems that Pol 2 currently lives on Heroism, so I'll cut this bit short for now and pick it up later!

EDIT 3!
Also, I've found that I have Rng 2 and Sge 1 popping up twice in this tree (they're just typos, though). We also have an issue where Rng 2 (in its first location) can be unlocked without doing Rng 1, and Melee 3 without Mel 2! I do see now though that in BNW, you can unlock Pol 2 (at Civ Service) without ever having grabbed Pol 1 (at Bronze). Wow. Well, ok, then. I'll try to prevent such, but I suppose if it happens it isn't the worst thing.
... By the time you're back, I'll hopefully have a proposed solution to all this unit mumbo jumbo!

Woah, that's weird! I'd never noticed that you could get to Pikeman without getting to Spearman. I guess it's offset by the distance between the two - Bronze Working is so early and unlocks such key stuff, they figure players wouldn't leave it unresearched for so long.

So it looks like in the current set up of the tree I've got, you've fixed the issue with Rng2 and Rng1. And the prereq from Siegecraft to Duty means that Mel3 now does require Mel2. I've taken so long to reply that you've fixed both!


More to come later!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'll be clearer, Brickwork is sort of a cop-out because it's synonymous with Masonry, is all.

The other tricky thing here is coming up with a flavor that fits with the various stuff it'll unlock - the melee unit, lumber mill, and trade route are a tricky bunch. The ones on the table now don't help with that.

What if we approached it from another direction. It's coming from Fealty and Territory. What about something like Design, as a sort of proto-Engineering? There's also Assembly, which might fit the bill. Or does that sound too advanced? There's also some things as simple as Planning or Coordination. Any of this working for you? (To me most of these seem better than the alternative)

Ah, I see! (Re Brickwork and Masonry being the same.)

It seems like you've solved this in the most recent iteration of the tree by moving Smithing back over this tech, as we were discussing below? Looks good to me, then!

That shade of purple is for LP buildings. So "Craft" is the Legendary Craft building, (e.g. the Artist's guild). I think it needs to stay on Apprenticeship.

Looking at it again, though, I don't see much of a problem with Saidar housing the Open Borders. It's not a great fit, but honestly, neither is apprenticeship. Transcendence of Aes Sedai and all, I guess. So I'm thinking maybe now leave it.

Moving Open Borders onto Saidar seems fine to me, as you mention, Aes Sedai are known for their ability to cross borders at a whim, and they often mediate such diplomatic discussions between nations. I could see the Craft building being moved onto Saidar either, seeing as the Power can be used to make fine works of art, or at least culturally inspire it.

Hmmm... that seems like a solution that could work. I wonder, though, if then it ends up a bit too cluttered with units in that area, especially considering we're actually adding a naval unit in the spread. Like, unlocking NvM 2, then ExpShip, then NvM 3 on back to back techs feels a little over the top, to me. What do you think? We could theoretically move NvM 2 to Shipcraft, switching it with NvR 1, but then NvM 2 might come too early.

Then again, if the ExpShip is *really* different - like as weak as a Trireme or something, then it might have very distinct functionality and might not feel so weird. Then, of course, it's really nothing like a Privateer at all (which isn't the point, I know). I wonder, though, if this will make the ExpShip just feel like we seriously gimped the Caravel, since they both pop up on "Astronomy."

Also, I know I may very well have suggested it, but perhaps we should second-guess the implications of unlocking normal travel across oceans later. Are we creating problems by allowing the exploration of distant lands far earlier than the colonization and/or invasion of such lands? Maybe that's a cool change, but it's a significant one, probably, and we should consider it carefully.

Bah! I don't feel like I have an answer here!

Ship stuff all handled elsewhere!

Yeah, I'd like to think I'm really awesome, but I'm here to report that me winning on emperor unfortunately seems to require me playing like a wimp. Namely, I restart after around Era 2 if I can tell I'm not doing super well. I'm been "pretty good" enough times on that difficulty only to find that in the late-game I either lose or (most commonly) end up in stalemates and such.

Recently it took me three or four tries to finally win a single game as Isabella. I only won when I ended up getting super lucky, early game, and getting my 2nd city right on a nice wonder.

From what I've read from players who play on Deity, I think a lot of players do a similar thing - restart if they find they don't have the Iron needed to stay alive early game and such. Neither of my two attempted Emperor games ever ended up with me catching up with the civs who were ahead. I had a lot of interesting conflicts in my local area, but there was usually a civ somewhere else who'd already run away with the game!

Agreed that Warders shouldn't be upgraded here. But definitely, Sword Forms is great flavor for the Warders. I could totally imagine us pushing it to era four, and finding something else here. If we did that, though, would you be ok moving Fancloth to a later era? Era six is the next option

If you do want to replace SF... hmmm..

Discipline could work, though it's kind of like Duty.
We could also go with Heroism
Training and Regimen are somewhat analogous to Tutelage...
Rank could be interesting, though that's probably too related to Hierarchy
There's also stuff like Combat Arts or something
And of course things like Bladed Weapons or something
I think something like Strategy or something could work, but is weird alongside Siegecraft, as they're very related.
(In fact, we could actually rename Siegecraft to something like that...)

Bah! Or, we just leave it as SF! Thoughts?

I think you've called out this specific set of techs a bit later on below as well. And it looks like you've solved this specific problem by moving Sword Forms into the start of Era 4! I would be fine with moving Fancloth to later on. That sounds like a good strategy to me, and I'll comment more on the specific techs when I get to that part of your post below!


Still more to come later!

 

[S3rgeus]

I claim I'll have more time, and then unstructured days completely run away with me. Still, I'm here!

Alright,

So here's a new version of the excel tech tree. I'm keeping it in excel for now, as the lack of ability to specify bonuses and stuff in the Editor makes the Editor hard to "work" in (brainstorm, try different things, etc.).

You've probably seen me making changes to the DropBox tree from the Editor in the last day or so. I don't have access to the Editor code right now, and there's some stuff that I want to fix now that I tried to bring up all of the "Melee 1" and such as units on there. I'll also be able to take a look at the generic abilities then.

This was a huge, massive pain in the butt, and I only got through a partial Era 4 (Renn/Consolidation)! This is because there was a lot, lot, lot of problematic stuff living in the bottom of the late era 3 and early era 4, mostly centering around unit unlocks. While the top of the tree was nice and clean, the bottom was getting crazy. Suffice it to say, this version attempts to address these issues and begin Era 4 - I really really shouldn't keep going until I get thoughts from you. Also, I've been at this way, way too long, and I'm out of flavor ideas...

No worries about progress, I can tell you've sunk a lot of time into getting this to where it is now! I haven't been able to get as into this as I'd like for creating new techs and stuff because I never seem to pull together enough time! but now that I'm on holiday I hope to be able to do more once I've got the Editor code back next week.

A few big priorities for me with these edits were 1) better space out unit upgrades, and 2) maintain upgrade integrity (by that I mean, Pol 2 is required before you can get Pol 3). Despite my best efforts, the previous version of the medieval era didn't succeed with these both of these aspects. This version might, but I'm also convinced that there truly is no great, perfect solution. I hope I'm wrong and you can propose one!

These sound like good objectives! I probably don't have a perfect solution now, but I imagine we will eventually reach one through playtesting!

A consequence of these is that Belining is likely more difficult in this tech tree - I've set up a bunch of dependencies that provide, I think, a few more tech bottlenecks than there are in BNW.

Interesting! I think it's important we're quite careful with this, because a lack of beelining handicaps non-Science-Victory players. I think possible-but-unlikely beelines that result in out-of-order unit upgrades (like Spearman and Pikeman in the BNW tree) are preferable to severe restrictions on beelining.

I think it's usually the case on the BNW tree that techs which bring in more prereqs (depend on some part of the tree that the player might be missing if they've beelined up to the tech before it) are important. Things like Astronomy that unlock ocean travel pull in a lot of new techs that weren't required to get to the previous column.

But as you mention below, none of the above are specific recommendations! So are there specific prereqs that you've added that you felt inhibited beelining specifically? We can look at the unlocks and why those prereqs were necessary and see if we can shuffle stuff around. And that's of course only if we find that beelining is particularly difficult at that part of the tree!

A note on process: I've been knee deep in this and have tried many, many permutations. You may very well have some suggestions that save the day (I hope you do!)! So, I suggest that when it comes to previously-proposed techs (as opposed to stuff in the future), make suggestions completely specific. E.g. (just an e.g., not a suggestion!), at this point, "Could we put Mel 4 higher in the tree?" is much less useful than "Put Mle 4 on Talent, and make Siegecraft a Prereq for Talent to keep the upgrade line valid." Some of the previous discussion has involved some spinning around concepts, and I think we won't get much done very quickly if we continue in this way on the actual techs.

Totally cool, that definitely sounds like a good way to approach this. Specific recommendations are much easier to implement and make sure that I consider all of the knock-ons of a given change!

Lastly, note that this doesn't really address the ocean units. I'm still waiting on what you want to do with those.

Awesome, I've covered them above! And with specific recommendations and everything!

So, new things are outlined below. These changes are also highlighted in the spreadsheet, and can be un-highlighted when confirmed.

Building became Smithing for aforementioned reasons.

Awesome, sounds good.

Also, Smithing and Duty have swapped units, with Rng 2 going back to Smithing and Mel 2 going back to Duty, as they are in the equivalent techs in BNW. I was trying to be different and break up the later melee-line craziness, but unfortunately in doing so I created a situation where it was rather easy to get Rng 2 without ever having to tap Rng 1. Yuck. Fixed, I think (though now it's the same as BNW!)

It looks like avoiding BNW's layout here would just make things more complicated, so sticking with it sounds like a good plan.

Sort of related to this change, I'm struck by the fact that Melee 3 is the next tech along from Melee 2. There are definitely mitigating factors, it's a double-column jump, so there's a bigger increase in tech cost than usual, and Siegecraft requires Slate Roofing, which has a ton more prereqs than Duty (which unlocks Melee 2). So military-focused players will have a while of using Melee 2 since they'll usually prioritize it early. But non-military players will usually go quite quickly from Melee 2 to Melee 3. Then again, maybe this is fine. It means that most non-military players will be fighting military players' Melee 2 units with their own Melee 1s, which is an appropriate power gap for those different strategies.

Not suggesting any changes here, just noting things.

Apprenticeship now has Slate Roofing as a prereq, in addition to simply Appraisal. This tech is the bastard offspring of both Guilds and Metal Casting. Most importantly, though, I did this to preserve the tech upgrade line from Range 2 to the later Range 3.

After combining Guilds and Metal Casting, this seems like a good prereq to add. In BNW, Machinery (which hosts Range 3) has prereqs on Guilds (this tech we're working on, effectively) and Engineering (which is itself a prereq of Metal Casting).

This is potentially one of our beelining-restriction points, right? In BNW you can beeline Gunpowder for Melee 4. This seems like we've made an improvement here though. This is where Longswordsman -> Musketman crops up, and Gunpowder has 2 prereqs, both of which have only one prereq and it's Metal Casting for both. This means the time between Longswordsman and Musketman is always really short. In our set up, Melee 4 is gated by the majority of the middle of the tree, which makes it more of a step up.

The power difference between the Longswordsman (21) and Musketman (24) is relatively small (though Musketman doesn't need Iron), so we might want to push up Melee 4's power a little to compensate.

Many words above, but I'm pretty happy with where this is.

Exploration: I think I'd like to rename this. Feels sort of ambiguous. I considered Mapmaking, but mapmaking felt like a good name for a tech that would spawn from Tutelage. If you want to call this one Mapmaking, what should we call the next one?

Exploration is also the name of a Policy tree in BNW, so we should probably avoid it. Based on my naval units stuff above, Exploration fit quite nicely with the Exploration Ship going on this tech, but that's only because we're calling it "the Exploration Ship" - which won't be its final name.

We could go with something like Buoyancy, though that's a bit modern (origins in the 1500s). There may be something we can do with the concept of weather prediction and storms here. I want to say something like Forecasting, but that's obviously much too modern.

Smithing (the second one) is now called Design. The tech itself is largely unchanged. I tried about fifty different things, but left it pretty much the same as Machinery.

Design can certainly work, just figured I'd throw a few other candidates for names out there as well: Infrastructure, Excavation, Packed Earth, Cobbles (only if we're not using Cobbled Roads as a Railroad replacement, which would come later).

Siegecraft now requires Slate Roofing in addition to Duty. Additionally, it provides the Mel 3 unit in addiiton to the Sge 2 unit. The reason for this is I really, really wanted to break up Duty and Heroism, and try not to have an upgrade only one tech apart. This now means in order to go from Mel 2 to 3, you have to explore the level directly above it. It's possible this tech is too awesome now - we can pull the wonder or something if need be.

I kind of touched on this above, and it seems like this should be good to go. Yeah, the wonder can certainly be movable if we want to.

Sword Forms was renamed Heroism. Also, the Mel 3 unit became the Pol 2 unit. This one drove me, and drives me, crazy. The issues here are thus:
A) Civil Service is where Pol 2 is housed in BNW. This tech doesn't really have an analogue here. It would be Saidar, which makes no flavorful sense.
B) Civil Service is completely out of the upgrade path of Pol 1. You could get Pikemen before Spearmen, though they're separated by a lot of bulbs.
C) Civil Service is, nicely, accessible to those that aren't going combat-focused. That way, a counter to knights can be grabbed by defensive civs who are ignoring the bottom half of the tech. Interestingly, knights themselves also share this quality.

Ultimately, the current decision was to put it here on Heroism. The main reasons I did this are:
A) To uphold the upgrade line of Polearms
B) to put something on Heroism. I really really didn't want to put Mel 3 there, as that would be really rather too easy and quick to get too from Mel 2 (the Longswordsman problem, identically). This unit then provides something nice for this tech that isn't Melee 3. I wanted it to be Rng 3, initially, but I couldn't get a direct upgrade line from Rng 2 to Heroism, without putting extra prereqs on duty, thus gimping Mel 2. Also, Rng units are perhaps best higher in the tree where they can be accessible to non-warmongers.

What do you think? The other place I had Pol 2 live - for really quite along time - was on Apprenticeship. This is not as flavorfully yucky as Saidar, and is quite accessible to everybody. The problem with this, of course, is the lack of upgrade line from Pol 1. If we don't care about this, then fine.

However, the other problem with doing that is then *what the heck do we do with Heroism*? Is there no unit there? Can we cut the tech? I found myself wishing I could cut it, and use Siegecraft (maybe renaming it Heroism) and Design for these units. Unfortunately, then we're losing one tech in the column, which we are trying to avoid - and there doesn't appear to be mechanical room for another tech in the upper parts of this column.

I'm certainly open to putting Pol 2 in Apprenticeship if we can figure out a solution - in fact, it'd probably be better that way...

Ok, I've taken a pretty good look at this part of the tree and I can definitely see why this is driving you crazy! There are a whole bunch of requirements pulling us in a bunch of different directions and I've gone back and forth on a bunch of different ways in which we might address them. (Probably fewer than you have, but I have a potential plan!)

As you touch on at the end of this quote block, I think Pol 2 on Apprenticeship makes a lot of sense. The availability to non-military players, the general balance of the tree, and makes more flavor sense than Saidar. It strikes me that Apprenticeship would be super duper awesome then - perhaps we should move the Prod 1 building onto Slate Roofing? That also makes flavorful sense, which is good.

Then that leaves us with Heroism, as you've noted, not actually having much to do. Scrapping the tech is certainly an option. Alternatively, we could move the wonder from Siegecraft onto Heroism, which makes Heroism more worthwhile, and Siegecraft is still valuable with both units. Totally agree that we can't put Melee 3 on Heroism.

I see Recon 2 is on New Tongue, but could it be used here? Could we use that on Heroism? (I think we ballparked Recon 2 as being in Era 4 - this would be the end of Era 3 instead.)

Or does putting Recon 2 on Talent let us move something back? Then moved one of those wonders from Talent onto Heroism? (Possibly in addition to moving the wonder from Siegecraft - making Heroism quite a "wonderful" tech?)

Mapmaking and its unnamed subsequent tech (suggestions?) will depend wholly on what we decide to do with ships.

I'm a big fan of Mapmaking as the name for that tech, which played into my naval suggestions way above.

Would Sextant be something that we could use for the unnamed tech? It's a bit modern, as we noted before, but it's definitely an "old world navigation" technology. This is also in the Era of Consolidation, when Luthair crossed the ocean to Seanchan, so it would make sense to have such a tech at this time.

High Chant is our acoustics, and is pretty much the same as that tech. High Chant, you recall, refers to the way bards/gleemen perform the big Epics. I like this flavor.

Nice flavor! Sounds good to me.

It's followed by a tech that is unnamed (suggestions?) that as of now is identical to Architecture, but need not be.

Based on some suggestions below, we'd have High Chant and Talent/Dreaming feeding into this. You also mention putting the Spark boost somewhere into this era much later on. I think we can grab at all of this flavor quite well with a channeling-related tech here. Keep the wonders and the Cultural National Wonder, like Architecture, but also have the Spark boost so that everyone does actually get something out of this tech, rather than it being dead for some Wide players.

We could go with Weaving here? Or some variant on that word like Weaves?

The New Tongue steps in for Banking. I mean this as the main language they all speak. I thought it was called the Common Tongue, but apparently it's the New Tongue. Also, when looking it up, apparently it was adopted roughly around this time in the third age, which is nifty. So I like the flavor, though I don't love how it looks next too High Chant - they're 100% different, but on the page they look similar topically.

The New Tongue itself similar to Banking, but also adds our Recon Upgrade (pending the discussion above).

I do agree about their appearance on the page. I didn't remember the flavor for either New Tongue or High Chant, but that's not a be all and end all for fans. Especially since these two actually are grounded in such specific flavor, it seems fine to keep them.

I've mentioned Recon 2 above, with respect to using it on Talent. Or if we swap them, as you're mentioning below, then the places that we'd potentially move Recon 2 from are even closer to their target. (Grab the wonder from New Tongue, instead of Talent, to place on Heroism.)

Talent stands in for Printing Press. I like the flavor here, but don't love the wording. By Talent here I mean channeling Talents (Healing, Traveling, Dreaming, etc.). I considered naming it Dreaming or something like that, but the more general thing feels better. Supposedly we were supposed to have a T'a'r thing here (perhaps it was the initial unlock?), so I have a T'a'r upgrade here - no idea what it will be, though.

I'm open to reconfiguring the elements of The New Tongue and Talent, even swapping their positions entirely. The items under these techs somewhat work in either tech. Thoughts?

Ah, I see. I think Talents might make that more clear than Talent. However, overall I think something like Dreaming might work better. It calls out clearer flavor for the player and if the Happiness 2 building ties into the flavor of Dreaming, then it can make a lot of sense.

From a flavor point of view, I feel like New Tongue should be the thing that unlocks the Compact. (Everyone speaks the same language, so now we can all have this big diplomatic summit thing.) And if we're looking at swapping around Talent and New Tongue, that makes even more sense. This also means we wouldn't have Compact unlock on Dreaming, which wouldn't make too much sense.

I see that you probably meant just swapping the names of Talent and New Tongue (not all of the things they unlock) but I feel like the things they unlock could also be swappable? I don't see any unlock issues that that creates.

These two feed into a currently unnamed tech (suggestions?) that takes the place of Economics. Not 100% sure what to do here at this point.

So even if we swap Talent/Dreaming and New Tongue around, this still has the same prereqs, so this quote block remains unaffected! The fact that Economics unlocks Windmills in BNW doesn't seem particularly obvious. I can see ways to connect them, but only because Economics can be said to affect so many things.

Overall we're boosting the Gold yield from a lot of tile Improvements, which seems to be what the flavor lines up with.

Something like Levies could be used for a double-meaning - taxation to explain the gold you're getting and dams to explain the production building.

It has also always annoyed me that the tech tree has "Polder gold yield increase" on it, even for all of the other players who don't have Polders. (Though I suppose they could capture them. Equally, the Dutch might not be in the game.)

We could go with something similar to Economics, but not quite the same, like Mercantilism.

Sword Forms stands in for Gunpowder. This gives us Mel 4, but, given the three-tech prereqs leading into here, it's not going to be so simple to just ignore Mel 3... I hope. Ideally, I would have preferred to put off Mel 4 until the next column, and put something else here. Perhaps a Pol 3 (an *added Pol unit*) would work here if we figured out a way to move Pol 2 back to Apprenticeship. Thoughts?

Seeing as I talked through a way to move Pol 2 back onto Apprenticeship above, it seems like we have a way to do this! Does that mean that the unnamed tech two columns directly right of Talent would become Pol 4 (instead of Pol 3, which it is now)? I assume that means there is a prereq from the tech that contains Siege 3 onto it? (Otherwise you can reach Pol 4 without doing Pol 3.)

As you note in your edit below, Sword Forms could move over a column and take Melee 4 and the Warder upgrade with it.

Does that mean that the tech formerly known as Sword Forms just has Pol 3 and a wonder?

And then what should we call that tech? If it's Pol 3 and a wonder, is something like Wedge Formation too specific or too wordy? I also feel like the flavor of this tech will depend on the flavor of the wonder and the Pol 3 unit. (As an anti-cavalry unit, will it definitely be using lances or will it use some other kind of anti-horse weapon?)

EDIT: I did also consider axing one of the Melee units, and removing the clutter from this era. This version avoids doing that, as we'd previously decided to keep them the same. What do you think? This is perhaps a less drastic workaround than the remove-one-tech-from-this-column solution (which solves our issues here, but creates some new issues).

I think the diversity in the progression of the melee units is something we want to keep. And based on the stuff I've mentioned above, I think it should be balance-able to have the same number of melee units!

Otherwise, note that Sword Forms houses a Warder upgrade. If we move SF to the next column over (putting a Pol 3 here instead or something), I'd say Warder upgrade should follow the tech itself and move over one column.

I think I've addressed this above.

An unnamed tech (suggestions) is the spawn of Talent and Swordforms. It stands in for Metallurgy, but provides the Sge 3 unit instead of Pol 3. This is to make the spread between Sge 2 and 3 a little larger (it's rather small in BNW).

Based on what's discussed above, this is ending up being the spawn of Wedge Formation (or whatever we call that) and New Tongue. Like the above, I feel like this should be informed by the flavor of the wonder and the Siege 3 unit.

Sword Forms leads to an unnamed tech (suggestions?), and I'm not sure what to put here. Right now it holds the upgrades that were based on Chemistry, but without the Sge unit (which is above). I've considered putting Rng 4 here, instead of in the next column where it is in BNW. Thoughts?

If we swap Sword Forms over, then this will be Sword Forms, so no new name needed. We'd also have Melee 4 here, so I don't think we'd need to move Range 4 onto it. (Plus Range 4 being on Sword Forms wouldn't make too much flavor sense, unless we have an unusually sword-based ranged unit.) Seems like moving Sword Forms here addresses these concerns!

For the industrial era, we're supposed to have a channeler upgrade, a spark boost, and illumination. Personally, I could see the Spark Boost going in the previous era somewhere.

Moving the Spark boost back into Era 4 is something I mentioned above, and looks quite possible! The others being in Era 5 still sounds good.

I think Fireworks could theoretically be a good rename of Industrialization, though it unlocking Iron (instead of Coal) is a little weird. The Factory could be an Illuminator's chapterhouse (though, again, iron...)

I'm not sure about the Illuminator's Chapterhouse being a replacement for the Factory. Difficulties with Iron/Coal aside, while the Chapterhouse is very visible flavor, there were only actually 2 in the Westlands, so I feel like a National Wonder would be a better fit for this, rather than the Factory, which ends up being built everywhere.

That would probably put it way back on where Design is now though - making the Chapterhouse the production National Wonder, which is too early (right?).

Another approach would be to go for this and have the Illuminator's Chapterhouse replace the Factory. I think we might end up doing a similar thing to what we're waiting on Angreal Cache and Peat, and possibly rename/move Iron and Coal as resources once we have an idea of all of the things they're going to unlock.

Fireworks in the first column of Era 5 certainly would work, and it feels like a good replacement for Industrialization.

Another option could be where Electricity is in BNW. I can see a stock exchange or something being replaced with an illumininator chapterhouse (produces gold), though this is weird since then there'd be tons of them (EDIT: nothing of course stops us from creating a new national wonder here). The awesome thing here is that this tech reveals Sulfur, which makes perfect sense for fireworks!

Now that sounds like a flavor jackpot if we can make it work. When you say a new national wonder, are you thinking a new Gold or new Culture National Wonder, that requires the next building on after the National Treasury and Hermitage (equivalents)? I strongly prefer this to the above.

Additionally, I was thinking of having Pol 3 (the much maligned Lancer) appear in column 1 here, growing out of the former Economics and Metallurgy techs. I'm trying to get it higher in the tech tree...

Cool, I touched on this above. So this unit would now be Pol 4 if we take the suggestions from the quote blocks above? It seems like it could work!

Also, was thinking of getting the mounted units lower on the tree, so having Mnt 3 be in this column, growing out of the former Metallurgy and Chemistry techs.

This sounds reasonable overall. Mounted units are good defenders but also good harrying units for attacking a well defended foe. Looking at the arrangement of this part of the tree (starting at column 2 of Era 3, and up to column 1 of Era 5) I do worry a little that we're creating a series of two-by-two connections that ends up making beelining through any side of this section of the tree very difficult. Still, that's only an impression and I don't have any specific changes in mind to address it.

Lastly, I figured we could have Sge 4 (artillery!) on the *next* column over, prereqs TBD.

Wow, we're already to Artillery! We're doing very well. (Or really, I should say you're doing very well! This is the equivalent location to Dynamite in BNW, which makes sense. We'll be able to discuss it in more detail once we've got the couple of techs before it up there. I have always wondered if Artillery really is strong enough to warrant its own tech.

Another thing to keep in mind here is we're just about reaching the point where the endgame beelines begin in BNW! Nothing to do about this yet, but it's probably a good structure to be mindful of as we move past our Dynamite equivalent.

Thoughts? Or, to put it more elegantly, HELP!

So much good stuff here! A lot of this post supersedes some of the stuff we were talking about earlier (I think most things except the naval structure discussion?). And again, thanks for all the work on this! It's definitely tough going to get this all making sense.

I seem to have caught up, but I won't be just resting on my laurels until you reply! I'm hoping to fill in all of the content we want to place into the Editor in the next couple of days, and then to make some fixes related to that once I get the code back (hopefully Monday). Then 'd like to try my hand at filling in some more of the tree. I'd imagine we'll shore up the end of Era 4 in that kind of time frame, so it will probably be the stuff going into Era 5 and beyond.

 

[counterpoint]

Epic delays! Apologies, I'd intended to post on Monday and let you know I'd be traveling on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, good news! I am now on vacation for a couple of weeks, which should mean I have more time than usual!

Traveling, and *then* vacation, eh? Quite a life you lead!

Also, you are saying the word "vacation" - been talking to too many USians lately?

I think it's fine for it to be unlocked and then have the ability to dig the Sites unlocked for the unit later in the game.

Well, the other possibility is that we have three generations of Recon units. One in era 4, and again one in era 7. Do we think there's enough of a point to justify this?

This sounds like a good plan to me! Agreed on civilian Gentled Channelers! [Update Summary]

updated! There's some new bits in red though:

Does a Healed channeler regain his full strength? In the books, they come back weaker, right? What should we do? Similarly, what about Madness level - does it go back to whatever it was before? Is it downgraded by one level or something? If not, what happens if you Heal a Channeler that was previously Rogue? It can't possibly wash it all away.

Awesome, agreed! Also, [Update Summary] sounds like a good system! It's kind of like @settled, I suppose! We'll decide on a standard one day, and then we'll be done!

I think both are useful. @settled has become useful only in local use. The summaries have negated its big-picture use. My god, the original proposition was to not have summaries, but search the thread for @settled.... ugh.

Funny, I have quite the opposite feeling on this. I feel like players will find that building what is basically a whole new unit and transporting it via channeler across the map to where it's most useful will never feel worthwhile if it only enhances that channeler's existing abilities in some way. If it doesn't do something big and flashy and different, why not just build more channelers/other units? They would be both more flexible and easier to do, which strikes me as a problem, because these angreal and sa'angreal should stand out as powerful.

I also think that the flavor of angreal and sa'angreal certainly permits us to have a big, "special attack" that isn't necessarily balefire. Any weave would be made massive and destructive with their amplification, (which is part of why, I think, you're suggesting boosting their existing attacks) so we can be destructive without balefire.

Thinking back to before, I think for making this distinct from nukes but still powerful and damaging to infrastructure, the multi-special-attack set up could be very effective. The channeler "uses" (and consumes) the angreal/sa'angreal and then immediately attacks 4-6 times within a boosted ranged. Each tile they hit does tons of damage to any unit/city on that tile, and if there is an Improvement, pillages it (unlike nukes, this would be a guaranteed pillage on specific tiles, which can make it a bit more targeted).

I'd say either all of them get splash damage from these hits or just saidin users, I could be convinced either way.

I think the key component of this is that it's something splashy and recognizable that happens all at once and does a lot of damage to the defender, which makes it a distinct behavior that's worth managing the transporting of these angreal/sa'angreal "units" for.

and

I think the mechanics of this make a lot of sense, because it's pretty much what I discuss above. The only real difference is whether we attach it to the default attack action or create a new one.

Destroying buildings in cities is definitely an interesting idea and would be really cool. How would we decide which buildings would be affected and what kind of damage would destroy which ones? We'd want to start with the cheaper buildings, right?

and

Yep, that's fine with me! No using angreal or sa'angreal directly from cities, only via channeling units!

and!

Yeah, I think it could work either way. It probably won't make too much difference - as the strongest units of their time, Aes Sedai and Asha'man will probably be most of what most players will be using at this point of the game, if they have channelers. This would be a nice nod to that power though, and to the flavor of sa'angreal being difficult to control. I seem to remember the flavor of angreal was that any channeler could use it and be very powerful, but a lot of channelers would be destroyed by using sa'angreal.

OK, lots to talk about here, though I won't be saying much, as I am mostly fine with what you're proposing.

So, I'm fine with the multiple-attack thing, though I think we're going to have to carefully balance it. As proposed, with tons of damage 4-6 times, AND splash damage, it seems to me that this will be much, much more powerful than nuclear weapons, most especially because of the flexibility of being able to target it so many times. As such, I suggest we tone it down a bit. Ideas are below, but first, some complications:

The Three Oaths. We have them, and we need to keep them. They actually set us up for a nice balance against the extreme power of these things. However, it creates situations where nukes are wildly powerful in some situations, and gimped in others. Namely:

You can fire an angreal freely if you are:
1) An Asha'man (including sa'), an MC, or any non-Aes Sedai channeler (presumably, not sa'
2) A Black Sister (sa'
3) An Aes Sedai fighting Shadowspawn or any unit belonging to a civ that has declared for the Shadow in the LB [presumably, this applies to both Aes Sedai owned by Light civ and those owned by neutral civs, though this is unclear in the summaries. Thoughts? (sa')
4) (the biggie) An Aes Sedai that has been attacked directly (or another sister or warder within vision) by a unit or city, though that Aes Sedai is only permitted to attack targets within three tiles of the offending unit, for 10 turns (assuming they aren't attacked again) (sa')

You cannot fire an angreal if you are:
1) An Aes Sedai fighting any non-Shadow civ or NPC group (Dragonsworn or Lawless) that hasn't directly attacked that sister, or another sister or warder within her vision.

So, this presents a huge problem for us, I think. Namely, "nukes" outside of the last battle become much more difficult for Aes Sedai to use. This is fine, except for the fact that other units can use them with no such limitation. So, balancing them with the Third Oath in mind - allowing them to be sufficiently powerful, since it's rare to find an opportunity to use them - means the saidin units (and/or other channelers who can use them) will be able to go nuts with such power.

Luckily, these problems do seem to mostly go away once the LB starts (assuming we open the restrictions for neutral civs as well as light civs), though Light civs and Neutral civs still won't be able to freely nuke each other.

I should note, though, that I think we need to preserve this flavor. It is hugely flavor-breaking to have Aes Sedai, supposedly bound by the oaths, blasting cities into oblivion. So the question is how we can make it work while keeping it the way it is.

One possibility is to limit it to Aes Sedai only. This could work, though the lack of Asha'man use is somewhat problematic flavor-wise. we could enable them for Asha'men too, but make those have less power or something. The other thing is that the later books do very much make it clear that there are plenty of super powerful channelers that are not AS - Alivia or whatever her name is, Aviendha, etc. So the "AS and A'M are the most powerful" argument isn't rock solid.

The other problem with this approach is that it makes Authority Civs the Nuke Civs, since they have more AS. This is weird, especially since, as I recall, that is not a domination-linked Philosophy (in terms of VCs). In any case, certainly Oppression civs are more screwed, nuke wise...

In fact, linking "nukes" at all to channeling units may be somewhat problematic for Oppression civs. Are we ok with this, considering they're likely to be good with domination?

As far as what else to suggest.... gosh, I don't know!

Oh, another tricky bit is if we did do splash damage - how does that interact with the Oaths? Can you damage somebody collaterally even if you aren't allowed to hit them directly?

Ugh!

So, as far as what you're proposing in general, putting aside the Oaths... I think we should not include Splash Damage if we also allow multiple attacks per round. To me, that seems like 4-6 nukes instantaneously. I think something like four powerful attacks, within a range, sounds pretty good to me. If we wanted, we could have saidin units hit splash instead, and only get a couple attacks, or something. Of course, it's all about how damaging these attacks are - 4 powerful attacks is better than 6 wimpy ones. But since you're imagining these as quite big, at least roughly like nukes, I'm thinking we can't have too many.

So, what difference do you anticipate between angreal and sa'angreal? Just power (and who can fire them), or something else?

As far as building destruction, I suppose we can model it after whatever happens in CiV... So, what happens in CiV?

Of course, it should be noted that we don't technically have to solve all this now, as the task at hand was really just to figure out what era they unlock in and what units depend on them (though, of course, it's possible that the three oaths thing could change some of this, if we find they can no longer fit on channelers! ugh)

This is all going to need to be summarized very clearly once it's settled, though we aren't quite there yet. Where, the Channeling Summary?

That sounds awesome! That's a lot of contextual preparation around the campaigns. Did it play into your sessions very often or was it all mostly a "layer back" providing motivation for characters/NPCs?

more the background. Also, it made improvisation way easier for me, in that I could deal with things as they popped up without having to totally BS. Of course, there were lots of things that I was hoping to do with all of it before long, but alas the campaign halted...

I think one of the things to consider is how this looks in BNW. So quickly, this is BNW's set up in this part:

Era 1:
Sailing NvM 1
Era 2:
Optics - None
Era 3:
Compass - NvR 1
Era 4:
Astronomy - NvM 2
Navigation - NvR 2, Priv

So, if we consider our ExpShip to be a "replacement" for the Privateer (even if it mechanically isn't, it's taking up the "Privateer slot" in the upgrade path) we're effectively unlocking that earlier. So the whole above chain from BNW makes me think something like this will work:

Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - NvR 1
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2, NvM 3

Like BNW, we'd have two ships on one tech, but the time when that happened would be one earlier. In this set up, NvM 2 would not be able to cross oceans, and the ExpShip would, but at a lower speed. Then NvR 2 and NvM 3 would have full ocean travel. (And both NvM 2 and ExpShip would upgrade to NvM 3.)

It does also mean that each tech in the "naval" series would have at least one ship on it, but alternating the Melee and Ranged (and throwing in Exp) means that no single unit is immediately invalidated too quickly.

The proximity between ExpShip and NvM 3 should be offset by, in a similar way to Astronomy in BNW, Mapmaking having prereqs that requires the player to do more of the center of the tree. Alternatively, we could put NvM 3 on the tech after Mapmaking.

I really want this to work simply, but I fear it's still a little complicated.

I think having the NvR 1 unlock at Seafaring (Optics) instead of Shipcraft (which doesn't have a BNW analogue, and was created newly here) is problematic for two reasons. It's an entire two columns earlier than BNW, for one, instead of one column. But more importantly, I suspect that they very deliberately avoiding unlocking Ranged naval units simultaneous to embarkation. It seems they want civs to have to get actual units on the ground before they can go to war with land forces (especially, probably, barbarian camp camping). Thus, embarkation before Galleas. Similarly, I think the caravel unlocking before the Frigate is deliberate for similar reasons - you can explore and mount a land invasion (which is a long process) at Astronomy, but you can't just start pot-shotting their cities and units until Navigation.

In short, I think this sounds like wisdom to me, and I'd like to preserve it. Thus, I suggest we keep NvR 1 at Shipcraft. Embarkation is a big enough deal to justify Seafaring, IMO.

The other thing is that you're map appears to leave off "Navigation" (tech after Mapmaking), unit-wise. Considering it once had two units, I suspect we'd be best served by keeping at least one unit there. Which to keep, though? Well, here are some paths, though all have problems! (assuming we change NvR 1 above):

A)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1, NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

This one has two somewhat lame aspects: 1) there's not that much time between the various NvMs, though that isn't the worst thing. Shipcraft is pretty epic, so maybe we make it need Ritual as a prereq (and maybe remove the prereq from Exploration... or not). The second potential problem is that the gap between NvR 1 and 2 is relatively great. Technically, it's longer than it was in BNW, because we've moved NvR 1 earlier (in terms of column, not necessarily in terms of number of techs). May not be a big deal.

Still, this one does preserve the embarkation thing (above), and lets the ExpShip shine, which is nice.

B)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1
Exploration - ExpShip, NvM 2
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

This one is the same as above, but NvM 2 is a bit later - somewhat sucky because then NvM 2 and 3 are very close together. This is somewhat lame.

C)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1
Exploration - ExpShip, NvM 2
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2
Next Tech - NvM 3

This one could also be combined with any of the other two above, the key difference here being that the R-M alternation is preserved. The problem with this, of course, is that we unlock ocean naviagtion for embarked units at the same time as we unlock an ocean-navigable Ranged unit. This is somewhat lame given the discussion above.

Then there's:
D)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - NvR 1
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2
Next Tech - NvM 3

This is your exact suggestion, though taking your sub-suggestion and moving NvM 3 to the next tech. Focusing only on units, this one is nice, though NvR 1 unlocks awful early. The problem is that both key embarkation points are shared with Ranged units, which seems to be to be somewhat problematic.

I think of these I may prefer A) the most, but I don't love it 100%. I suppose we could maybe change the prereq structure a bit to make things balance, though we do need to keep in mind that we're actually adding one more tech to the line, here.

Ack. Thoughts? I'm not changing anything yet....

Unlike the Naval units, I've never really felt that additional polearm unit was required - I never felt like upgrading from Spearman to Pikeman left much in between. (In terms of actual power they're not too far apart, right? 11 power on the Spearman, 16 power on the Pikeman.)

Yeah, I don't think the extra Pol thing was really needed at this point in the tree. It's more later, with Lancer-Anti Tank that we could conceivably add one.

Sticking Pol2 on Siegecraft sounds like a good way of resolving this. Would we move Mel3 then? Mel3, Sge2, and Pol2 would all be on the same tech if we make this move. Which could be ok?

I think this might be moot from later posts of yours. But actually I think having all three of those on one tech is problematic.

 

[counterpoint]

Moving Open Borders onto Saidar seems fine to me, as you mention, Aes Sedai are known for their ability to cross borders at a whim, and they often mediate such diplomatic discussions between nations. I could see the Craft building being moved onto Saidar either, seeing as the Power can be used to make fine works of art, or at least culturally inspire it.

OK, I think let's keep OpBor on Saidar. I think the flavor is such that the Artisan Building should really live on Apprenticeship!

Ship stuff all handled elsewhere!

ugh!

From what I've read from players who play on Deity, I think a lot of players do a similar thing - restart if they find they don't have the Iron needed to stay alive early game and such. Neither of my two attempted Emperor games ever ended up with me catching up with the civs who were ahead. I had a lot of interesting conflicts in my local area, but there was usually a civ somewhere else who'd already run away with the game!

I'm guessing you could win on Emperor after a few attempts with a relatively predictable civ. AFter a few wins, you can probably win with anybody. Somebody like England with a really obvious era of dominance, could be a good chance to go for dom - wipe out a continent by then and you should be fine. Some of the more unpredictable ones have been really hard, though, e.g. ,shudder> Spain and <shudder> Byzantium.

Interesting! I think it's important we're quite careful with this, because a lack of beelining handicaps non-Science-Victory players. I think possible-but-unlikely beelines that result in out-of-order unit upgrades (like Spearman and Pikeman in the BNW tree) are preferable to severe restrictions on beelining.

I think it's usually the case on the BNW tree that techs which bring in more prereqs (depend on some part of the tree that the player might be missing if they've beelined up to the tech before it) are important. Things like Astronomy that unlock ocean travel pull in a lot of new techs that weren't required to get to the previous column.

But as you mention below, none of the above are specific recommendations! So are there specific prereqs that you've added that you felt inhibited beelining specifically? We can look at the unlocks and why those prereqs were necessary and see if we can shuffle stuff around. And that's of course only if we find that beelining is particularly difficult at that part of the tree!

OK, I suppose the point that could be potentially problematic for a beliner are is the mumbo jumbo in the bottom of era 3, theoretically. In order to "slow down" some of the obsoletion of the melee units, we may have quite a few prereqs (e.g., going into Sword Forms). This could be OK, but is theoretically more of a bottle neck than would exist in BNW.

Awesome, I've covered them above! And with specific recommendations and everything!

ack!

It looks like avoiding BNW's layout here would just make things more complicated, so sticking with it sounds like a good plan.

Sort of related to this change, I'm struck by the fact that Melee 3 is the next tech along from Melee 2. There are definitely mitigating factors, it's a double-column jump, so there's a bigger increase in tech cost than usual, and Siegecraft requires Slate Roofing, which has a ton more prereqs than Duty (which unlocks Melee 2). So military-focused players will have a while of using Melee 2 since they'll usually prioritize it early. But non-military players will usually go quite quickly from Melee 2 to Melee 3. Then again, maybe this is fine. It means that most non-military players will be fighting military players' Melee 2 units with their own Melee 1s, which is an appropriate power gap for those different strategies.

Not suggesting any changes here, just noting things.

Right, Melee 3 being right after Melee 2 is one of the consequences of having to flip Mel 2 and Rng 2 back to how it was in BNW. Ideally, Mel 2 could have come earlier to make more space here.

What I did, though, is add Slate Roofing as a prereq for Siegecraft (which carries Mel 2). This means, while Mel 2 is only one column over, it requires several additional techs. Thus, while it means a well-rounded-teching player will unlock Mel 3 shortly after Mel 2, Mel 3 can't really be belined too - you'd be stuck on Mel 2 for awhile while you catch up to Slate Roofing.

Is that a good enough solution, you think?

The other solution - and this might be worthy, in any case - is to simply axe Melee 3 completely, and keep Duty with Melee 2, and keep Sword Forms where it is, with Mel 3 (formerly Mel 4). Yes, I know that this is less diversity in units and whatnot, but I am not convinced that extra unit diversity at this specific point in the game - a point when tons of units are unlocking around the same time - is all that important.

What say you?

After combining Guilds and Metal Casting, this seems like a good prereq to add. In BNW, Machinery (which hosts Range 3) has prereqs on Guilds (this tech we're working on, effectively) and Engineering (which is itself a prereq of Metal Casting).

ok, good.

This is potentially one of our beelining-restriction points, right? In BNW you can beeline Gunpowder for Melee 4. This seems like we've made an improvement here though. This is where Longswordsman -> Musketman crops up, and Gunpowder has 2 prereqs, both of which have only one prereq and it's Metal Casting for both. This means the time between Longswordsman and Musketman is always really short. In our set up, Melee 4 is gated by the majority of the middle of the tree, which makes it more of a step up.

The power difference between the Longswordsman (21) and Musketman (24) is relatively small (though Musketman doesn't need Iron), so we might want to push up Melee 4's power a little to compensate.

Many words above, but I'm pretty happy with where this is.

Yeah, this is one of the bottlenecks for belining, as discussed above. However, since Siegecraft is already requiring Slate Roofing, the choke point is actually potentially more around there than at Sword Forms. Of course, requiring Design as well is a pretty significant chunk - I could be amenable to removing that requirement, but keeping the Siegecraft bottleneck. What do you think?

Again, this is all mostly here to enforce a sense of progression between the Melee units - removal of one unit would somewhat take care of that.

Also, re: Musketman, yeah, they don't need iron, but woe is the civ with no iron who wants to upgrade a l33t Warrior up to a Musketman.... not possible.

Oh, that reminds me, in my pain going through this last week I was looking on various boards to see what people thought of the various unit progressions, and it brought a few issues up. The main one:

Should we have units change type upon upgrade? The Anti-Horse unit line seems to be pretty hated for doing this. Going from melee to horse to armor to helicopter means, as far as people claim, your promotions are often tossed. Can we make this better, somehow? Like, either not have any unit-type changes (though Pol's will forever be slow...), or somehow "convert" the promotions, or let the player choose new promotions, or, at the very least, reset the unit to level zero (so getting all the promotions back isn't impossible due to high XP cost)?

Exploration is also the name of a Policy tree in BNW, so we should probably avoid it. Based on my naval units stuff above, Exploration fit quite nicely with the Exploration Ship going on this tech, but that's only because we're calling it "the Exploration Ship" - which won't be its final name.

We could go with something like Buoyancy, though that's a bit modern (origins in the 1500s). There may be something we can do with the concept of weather prediction and storms here. I want to say something like Forecasting, but that's obviously much too modern.

Both of those feel a little wonky to me...

It's flavorful...almost... to use Listen to the Wind here. It certainly ties in with Forecasting. Of course, Wisdoms don't use it for naval travel.. it's sort of like in our dreams it's what the windfinders use... Is there one of these Naval techs that could use this flavor, and then we can reshuffle them a bit? Though at exploration is kind of cool because it is based on Heritage.

It's almost awesome! We could flavor the Coastal building to somehow justify the flavor.

Design can certainly work, just figured I'd throw a few other candidates for names out there as well: Infrastructure, Excavation, Packed Earth, Cobbles (only if we're not using Cobbled Roads as a Railroad replacement, which would come later).

hmmm... I think I prefer design. Excavation is way too archaeology for me. Packed Earth... what are you going for there? Cobbles is ok, but I think that's better for later as the Railroad replacement, maybe.

Ok, I've taken a pretty good look at this part of the tree and I can definitely see why this is driving you crazy! There are a whole bunch of requirements pulling us in a bunch of different directions and I've gone back and forth on a bunch of different ways in which we might address them. (Probably fewer than you have, but I have a potential plan!)

As you touch on at the end of this quote block, I think Pol 2 on Apprenticeship makes a lot of sense. The availability to non-military players, the general balance of the tree, and makes more flavor sense than Saidar. It strikes me that Apprenticeship would be super duper awesome then - perhaps we should move the Prod 1 building onto Slate Roofing? That also makes flavorful sense, which is good.

Then that leaves us with Heroism, as you've noted, not actually having much to do. Scrapping the tech is certainly an option. Alternatively, we could move the wonder from Siegecraft onto Heroism, which makes Heroism more worthwhile, and Siegecraft is still valuable with both units. Totally agree that we can't put Melee 3 on Heroism.

I see Recon 2 is on New Tongue, but could it be used here? Could we use that on Heroism? (I think we ballparked Recon 2 as being in Era 4 - this would be the end of Era 3 instead.)

Or does putting Recon 2 on Talent let us move something back? Then moved one of those wonders from Talent onto Heroism? (Possibly in addition to moving the wonder from Siegecraft - making Heroism quite a "wonderful" tech?)

OK, lots to chew on here!

I think I can get on board with moving Pol 2 to Apprenticeship. It breaks the through-line of upgrades, but honestly I think that might be lesser of all the evils.

I think that the consequence of that should also be that we do in fact move the production building to Slate Roofing. Yes, it's flavorful on Apprenticeship, but it's also relatively flavorful on Slate Roofing (and honestly, that one might give us a nice flavor to name the building or something). Are we ok with the production building being moved up earlier in the tech tree as a result? Should we compensate by making the building lamer or something?

I think I'd like to avoid scrapping Heroism if possible, as it'll create a bit of a chain reaction. Making it have one (or two?) extra wonders - certainly taking one from Siegecraft - is probably the best way to go. And, of course, it'll have the XP building. Also, I could totally see it having Defensive Pact as well. Makes sense. However, that's mechanically problematic right - I'd guess it's non-militant, defensive civs that most want a DefPact, right? And they're probably not that low on the tech tree. So probably not viable. As far as moving a Wonder from Talent, I suppose I could go either way - it would most likely be a very different kind of wonder.

I don't love it having the Recon guy, though. Moving the Recon guy even earlier seems problematic. Honestly, I was torn about whether we should consider moving him to Era 5, considering he's supposed to be viable through the rest of the game. Era 4 might be too soon. Then again, Era 4 is the era when the big exploration things happen, so it's probably fine. But era three... eh. Also, I don't like the recon guy being way into the Military side of the tech tree. Seems to me not to quite fit with the mechanical needs/purpose of the unit.

I'm a big fan of Mapmaking as the name for that tech, which played into my naval suggestions way above.

Would Sextant be something that we could use for the unnamed tech? It's a bit modern, as we noted before, but it's definitely an "old world navigation" technology. This is also in the Era of Consolidation, when Luthair crossed the ocean to Seanchan, so it would make sense to have such a tech at this time.

Yeah, it seems like the Sextant was invented around 1600, so to me this is way too early for such things.

We could go with something like Lodestone, as a sort of clunky parallel to Compass, though of course that term doesn't come up in the books.

The other thing is that this tech could have to do with whatever it unlocks. It could be informed by the unit... some kind of ship, undoubtedly. Perhaps the Seaport is the better place to look. We could call it Trade Lines or Currents or something (don't quite like either of those). In any case, something that has to do more with the connections between cities, or inter-continental travel in general, rather than specifically boats and such.

Based on some suggestions below, we'd have High Chant and Talent/Dreaming feeding into this. You also mention putting the Spark boost somewhere into this era much later on. I think we can grab at all of this flavor quite well with a channeling-related tech here. Keep the wonders and the Cultural National Wonder, like Architecture, but also have the Spark boost so that everyone does actually get something out of this tech, rather than it being dead for some Wide players.

We could go with Weaving here? Or some variant on that word like Weaves?

I think I had suggested that the Spark boost would be early in Era 5, though I could be convinced to put it here.

I'm not sure this one needs to be/should b echanneling related, given that it's fundamentally more about culture, considering the previous tech (Talent) will be Channeling-related. It could be, but doesn't need to be. But if you want the Spark boost here, then OK, that might clear it up a bit.

Weaves could work (better than Weaving), though it feels a little less advanced than I'd expect for this place. Is there a term for the thing they do when determining if somebody has the ability to channel? That test?

Also, throwing out "The Five Powers" as a possible combat-upgrade tech for channelers for another point! Also "Delving" could be used for one that related to Healing somehow.

I do agree about their appearance on the page. I didn't remember the flavor for either New Tongue or High Chant, but that's not a be all and end all for fans. Especially since these two actually are grounded in such specific flavor, it seems fine to keep them.

I've mentioned Recon 2 above, with respect to using it on Talent. Or if we swap them, as you're mentioning below, then the places that we'd potentially move Recon 2 from are even closer to their target. (Grab the wonder from New Tongue, instead of Talent, to place on Heroism.)

and

Ah, I see. I think Talents might make that more clear than Talent. However, overall I think something like Dreaming might work better. It calls out clearer flavor for the player and if the Happiness 2 building ties into the flavor of Dreaming, then it can make a lot of sense.

From a flavor point of view, I feel like New Tongue should be the thing that unlocks the Compact. (Everyone speaks the same language, so now we can all have this big diplomatic summit thing.) And if we're looking at swapping around Talent and New Tongue, that makes even more sense. This also means we wouldn't have Compact unlock on Dreaming, which wouldn't make too much sense.

I see that you probably meant just swapping the names of Talent and New Tongue (not all of the things they unlock) but I feel like the things they unlock could also be swappable? I don't see any unlock issues that that creates.

OK, we'll keep both the New Tongue and High Chant flavor around.

I think Talents is probably superior to Talent. I'm a little iffy on Dreaming, though... without this having anything *necessarily* to do with dreams (we have a T'a'r upgrade here, but I'm sitll not sure that that was actually intentional. What would it do?). Certainly, a tech with that name should do so, and we could probably more easily justify that as a latter-half-of-the-game tech. What about using Delving here? Could that justify a Happ building? I do like the generic-nature of Talents, though.

Re: the rest... Hmmm... I agree that New Tongue feels like something that should enable the Compact (though, truly, it shouldn't matter. It's not that everybody came together on one tongue and could suddenly communicate... they all previously apparently spoke the Old tongue, and could presumably all communicate). I'd be fine moving Compact to The New Tongue - what should we take in exchange? A Trade route? Recon 2? Gold 2? Not another wonder!

So even if we swap Talent/Dreaming and New Tongue around, this still has the same prereqs, so this quote block remains unaffected! The fact that Economics unlocks Windmills in BNW doesn't seem particularly obvious. I can see ways to connect them, but only because Economics can be said to affect so many things.

Overall we're boosting the Gold yield from a lot of tile Improvements, which seems to be what the flavor lines up with.

Something like Levies could be used for a double-meaning - taxation to explain the gold you're getting and dams to explain the production building.

It has also always annoyed me that the tech tree has "Polder gold yield increase" on it, even for all of the other players who don't have Polders. (Though I suppose they could capture them. Equally, the Dutch might not be in the game.)

We could go with something similar to Economics, but not quite the same, like Mercantilism.

Eh... levies is so.... eh. And Mercantilism is a 16th century thing, sort of proto-capitalism in some way... Not really an appropriate flavor fit, IMO.

If it's yield bonuses we have here (and not actual gold), is this the good place for the channeling-related tech? Keeping is a weave that keeps food from spoiling. That kind of thing. Maybe this is a place for Weaves in general?

Seeing as I talked through a way to move Pol 2 back onto Apprenticeship above, it seems like we have a way to do this! Does that mean that the unnamed tech two columns directly right of Talent would become Pol 4 (instead of Pol 3, which it is now)? I assume that means there is a prereq from the tech that contains Siege 3 onto it? (Otherwise you can reach Pol 4 without doing Pol 3.)

Yeah, so if we decided to add an extra Pol 3, at Sword Forms, then the Pol 4 in the next era would need this as a prereq - in fact, we could probably move it back on column, if we wanted. I could go either way on this: add this extra unit, or else go the long stretch from Apprenticeship to the start of era 5. Which do you prefer?

As you note in your edit below, Sword Forms could move over a column and take Melee 4 and the Warder upgrade with it.

Does that mean that the tech formerly known as Sword Forms just has Pol 3 and a wonder?

And then what should we call that tech? If it's Pol 3 and a wonder, is something like Wedge Formation too specific or too wordy? I also feel like the flavor of this tech will depend on the flavor of the wonder and the Pol 3 unit. (As an anti-cavalry unit, will it definitely be using lances or will it use some other kind of anti-horse weapon?)

This all completely depends on what we decide we want to do with Mel 4. If we axe the Mel 3, like I suggest above, then Mel 4 should stay where it is (as should SF), and we should put Pol 3/4 somewhere else. If we keep Mel 3 where it is, then I do suggest we move SF to the right one column. The Pol situation falls into place after that, I think (and yes, I think it'd maybe just be a wonder and the Pol unit). I think something like Formations or something is a better name, though it's perhaps too generic and primitive tech-wise. Could go with Tactics or something.

I think the diversity in the progression of the melee units is something we want to keep. And based on the stuff I've mentioned above, I think it should be balance-able to have the same number of melee units!

much has been said on this above. Why would you like to preserve the diversity *at this point in the tree*?

Based on what's discussed above, this is ending up being the spawn of Wedge Formation (or whatever we call that) and New Tongue. Like the above, I feel like this should be informed by the flavor of the wonder and the Siege 3 unit.

Yeah, I think we can come up with a name for this one, but I feel like we have to figure out it's prereqs first.

If we swap Sword Forms over, then this will be Sword Forms, so no new name needed. We'd also have Melee 4 here, so I don't think we'd need to move Range 4 onto it. (Plus Range 4 being on Sword Forms wouldn't make too much flavor sense, unless we have an unusually sword-based ranged unit.) Seems like moving Sword Forms here addresses these concerns!

Right, So Rng 4 would then go first column next era, or what?

Moving the Spark boost back into Era 4 is something I mentioned above, and looks quite possible! The others being in Era 5 still sounds good.

ok. good!

I'm not sure about the Illuminator's Chapterhouse being a replacement for the Factory. Difficulties with Iron/Coal aside, while the Chapterhouse is very visible flavor, there were only actually 2 in the Westlands, so I feel like a National Wonder would be a better fit for this, rather than the Factory, which ends up being built everywhere.

That would probably put it way back on where Design is now though - making the Chapterhouse the production National Wonder, which is too early (right?).

Another approach would be to go for this and have the Illuminator's Chapterhouse replace the Factory. I think we might end up doing a similar thing to what we're waiting on Angreal Cache and Peat, and possibly rename/move Iron and Coal as resources once we have an idea of all of the things they're going to unlock.

Fireworks in the first column of Era 5 certainly would work, and it feels like a good replacement for Industrialization.

and

Now that sounds like a flavor jackpot if we can make it work. When you say a new national wonder, are you thinking a new Gold or new Culture National Wonder, that requires the next building on after the National Treasury and Hermitage (equivalents)? I strongly prefer this to the above.

Yeah, I think putting Fireworks on Electricity is totally the answer. I can probably see it being predominately a Gold Natl Wonder, though I could see culture as well. Sci and Prod are theoretically justifiable too. Though, I could honestly see it do something totally different. It could be a National wonder that isn't necessarily predicated on building normal buildings, also. Just a only-build-one kind of thing. Though, that does break the pattern, which is unfortunate. Are there any other kinds of building types that don't have Nat-Wonders already attached to them?

This sounds reasonable overall. Mounted units are good defenders but also good harrying units for attacking a well defended foe. Looking at the arrangement of this part of the tree (starting at column 2 of Era 3, and up to column 1 of Era 5) I do worry a little that we're creating a series of two-by-two connections that ends up making beelining through any side of this section of the tree very difficult. Still, that's only an impression and I don't have any specific changes in mind to address it.

Yeah, I definitely see what you mean. Let's create the basic "answer" and then reexamine it. I am guessing that we can probably tear out a prereq or two - some of these may have been put in to overcompensate for problems that were then remedied in other ways.

Wow, we're already to Artillery! We're doing very well. (Or really, I should say you're doing very well! This is the equivalent location to Dynamite in BNW, which makes sense. We'll be able to discuss it in more detail once we've got the couple of techs before it up there. I have always wondered if Artillery really is strong enough to warrant its own tech.

oh, man, Artillery is the BEST.

Another thing to keep in mind here is we're just about reaching the point where the endgame beelines begin in BNW! Nothing to do about this yet, but it's probably a good structure to be mindful of as we move past our Dynamite equivalent.

ok, so key design point, then: don't add too many prereqs. Yes?

So much good stuff here! A lot of this post supersedes some of the stuff we were talking about earlier (I think most things except the naval structure discussion?). And again, thanks for all the work on this! It's definitely tough going to get this all making sense.

I seem to have caught up, but I won't be just resting on my laurels until you reply! I'm hoping to fill in all of the content we want to place into the Editor in the next couple of days, and then to make some fixes related to that once I get the code back (hopefully Monday). Then 'd like to try my hand at filling in some more of the tree. I'd imagine we'll shore up the end of Era 4 in that kind of time frame, so it will probably be the stuff going into Era 5 and beyond.

Cool, so maybe it might be smart for you to help shore up Era 4 before you dive back into the Editor? That way, we can think on the next era and not have a big pause while you code. Does that work?

 

[S3rgeus]

Traveling, and *then* vacation, eh? Quite a life you lead!

It's good fun!

Also, you are saying the word "vacation" - been talking to too many USians lately?

I grew up over here, so I use both. You didn't notice I always use color, humor, etc. instead of colour, humour?

Well, the other possibility is that we have three generations of Recon units. One in era 4, and again one in era 7. Do we think there's enough of a point to justify this?

I think for now, just having two will be fine. The recon unit's utility isn't really based on its combat strength, just its mobility, which should be relatively portable from a unit from this part of the tree.

updated! There's some new bits in red though:

Does a Healed channeler regain his full strength? In the books, they come back weaker, right? What should we do? Similarly, what about Madness level - does it go back to whatever it was before? Is it downgraded by one level or something? If not, what happens if you Heal a Channeler that was previously Rogue? It can't possibly wash it all away.

I think they should regain their full strength. In the books, they only get their full strength back if Healed by a channeler of the opposite gender. I think we can let that detail be abstracted away. We could use a "promotion" to weaken them if they were Healed by the same gender, but that will just end up creating busywork for the player to ensure they get full powered channelers back.

I'd say Madness should be come back at the same level. I don't recall the Healing of Gentling affecting how mad the subject was (flavor wise)?

I'd say if they were Rogue then that doesn't matter yet, the player just gets the unit back. However, a Rogue channeler was probably quite mad, so keeping the Madness level will ensure that they're still at risk of being dangerous.

EDIT: As you mentioned on Steam - Madness level 3 is going Rogue! So I'd say if they were on madness level 3 before, let's pull them back down to 2. The unit is still clearly a threat of going Rogue (unless Saidin has been Cleansed), but the player at least uses it, so it's still a mechanic that makes sense.

I think both are useful. @settled has become useful only in local use. The summaries have negated its big-picture use. My god, the original proposition was to not have summaries, but search the thread for @settled.... ugh.

We would be here for all of eternity looking for those @settleds.

OK, lots to talk about here, though I won't be saying much, as I am mostly fine with what you're proposing.

This is not saying much?

So, I'm fine with the multiple-attack thing, though I think we're going to have to carefully balance it. As proposed, with tons of damage 4-6 times, AND splash damage, it seems to me that this will be much, much more powerful than nuclear weapons, most especially because of the flexibility of being able to target it so many times. As such, I suggest we tone it down a bit. Ideas are below, but first, some complications:

The Three Oaths. We have them, and we need to keep them. They actually set us up for a nice balance against the extreme power of these things. However, it creates situations where nukes are wildly powerful in some situations, and gimped in others. Namely:

You can fire an angreal freely if you are:
1) An Asha'man (including sa'), an MC, or any non-Aes Sedai channeler (presumably, not sa'
2) A Black Sister (sa'
3) An Aes Sedai fighting Shadowspawn or any unit belonging to a civ that has declared for the Shadow in the LB [presumably, this applies to both Aes Sedai owned by Light civ and those owned by neutral civs, though this is unclear in the summaries. Thoughts? (sa')
4) (the biggie) An Aes Sedai that has been attacked directly (or another sister or warder within vision) by a unit or city, though that Aes Sedai is only permitted to attack targets within three tiles of the offending unit, for 10 turns (assuming they aren't attacked again) (sa')

You cannot fire an angreal if you are:
1) An Aes Sedai fighting any non-Shadow civ or NPC group (Dragonsworn or Lawless) that hasn't directly attacked that sister, or another sister or warder within her vision.

So, this presents a huge problem for us, I think. Namely, "nukes" outside of the last battle become much more difficult for Aes Sedai to use. This is fine, except for the fact that other units can use them with no such limitation. So, balancing them with the Third Oath in mind - allowing them to be sufficiently powerful, since it's rare to find an opportunity to use them - means the saidin units (and/or other channelers who can use them) will be able to go nuts with such power.

Luckily, these problems do seem to mostly go away once the LB starts (assuming we open the restrictions for neutral civs as well as light civs), though Light civs and Neutral civs still won't be able to freely nuke each other.

I should note, though, that I think we need to preserve this flavor. It is hugely flavor-breaking to have Aes Sedai, supposedly bound by the oaths, blasting cities into oblivion. So the question is how we can make it work while keeping it the way it is.

One possibility is to limit it to Aes Sedai only. This could work, though the lack of Asha'man use is somewhat problematic flavor-wise. we could enable them for Asha'men too, but make those have less power or something. The other thing is that the later books do very much make it clear that there are plenty of super powerful channelers that are not AS - Alivia or whatever her name is, Aviendha, etc. So the "AS and A'M are the most powerful" argument isn't rock solid.

The other problem with this approach is that it makes Authority Civs the Nuke Civs, since they have more AS. This is weird, especially since, as I recall, that is not a domination-linked Philosophy (in terms of VCs). In any case, certainly Oppression civs are more screwed, nuke wise...

In fact, linking "nukes" at all to channeling units may be somewhat problematic for Oppression civs. Are we ok with this, considering they're likely to be good with domination?

As far as what else to suggest.... gosh, I don't know!

Oh, another tricky bit is if we did do splash damage - how does that interact with the Oaths? Can you damage somebody collaterally even if you aren't allowed to hit them directly?

Ugh!

So, as far as what you're proposing in general, putting aside the Oaths... I think we should not include Splash Damage if we also allow multiple attacks per round. To me, that seems like 4-6 nukes instantaneously. I think something like four powerful attacks, within a range, sounds pretty good to me. If we wanted, we could have saidin units hit splash instead, and only get a couple attacks, or something. Of course, it's all about how damaging these attacks are - 4 powerful attacks is better than 6 wimpy ones. But since you're imagining these as quite big, at least roughly like nukes, I'm thinking we can't have too many.

Phew! Lots of stuff!

I don't think we should circumvent the Oaths here, I'd say this ability should fall under the same restrictions as the Aes Sedai's normal attack, which are all of the restrictions you outlined here. Totally agree, that we can't avoid that flavor because it would fly in the face of what we know Aes Sedai to do from the books.

Making sure that Aes Sedai are useful in comparison to non-Oaths channelers with angreal is a very good point then. I think we can deal with that, possibly by range. Give Aes Sedai a longer range with angreal and sa'angreal than saidin users (possibly by just overall giving Saidar users longer range than Saidin users - the restriction of sa'angreal to Aes Sedai makes them the priority for usage there). So say Saidin users have a range of 6, Saidar users could have a range of 10 (same as Nuclear Bombs)?

For splash damage, I could either see us having splash damage only on Saidin users (like normal attacks), because there aren't any Saidin users affected by the Oaths. Or I could see us eliminating splash damage from the individual strikes of the angreal/sa'angreal weapons. The flavor of it is fairly simple, that the channelers are using the same kind of powered up weaves to strike at a distance via the angreal, whereas the properties of their normal attack weaves differ in such a way that the Saidin users cause collateral damage. I don't think we'd be able to make splash damage co-operate with the Oaths.

Also, I'd say you can use angreal/sa'angreal to attack hexes as well. So even if there's no unit/city on it, the hex can be targeted to pillage it (maybe this creates our Fallout equivalent, though it should be something different from Bubbles of Evil, hitting an unoccupied tile?) This gives Aes Sedai a lot more potential targets when they're still under the effects of the Oath. (They can destroy structures and such under the Third Oath, right? As long as they don't directly hurt anyone?)

For Oppression civs not having many of these, despite Domination being one of their designated victory types, I think we'll need to have some mechanic related to their Tenets that specifically tips anti-channeler war in their favor. And they will still have the capacity to produce some channelers, they may do so just for this.

So, what difference do you anticipate between angreal and sa'angreal? Just power (and who can fire them), or something else?

Range could also be a differentiator, like it is for Nuclear Bombs and Nuclear Missiles. That's a range of 10 and 12 respectively in BNW.

Power and who can fire them are also good ones. Each strike will do more damage from a sa'angreal, and restrictions based on unit type which we discussed before.

As far as building destruction, I suppose we can model it after whatever happens in CiV... So, what happens in CiV?

I don't think buildings get destroyed by nukes in BNW. Nuclear Missiles can destroy whole cities if their pop is less than 6 (less than 5 with a Bomb Shelter), but I think all of the original buildings survive if the city does. Buildings get destroyed when a city is captured, but the wiki doesn't provide us with any information on how that's done beyond it being "random". (Though all defensive buildings are definitely destroyed, apparently.)

I think we'd want to do something a bit different to the city capture set up. Each strike could destroy a maximum of 1 building, I'd say. And it would target "cheaper" buildings first. Or do we want to allow the attacker to choose which building to target? (We could merge the two approaches by letting the attacker choose from a subset.)

Of course, it should be noted that we don't technically have to solve all this now, as the task at hand was really just to figure out what era they unlock in and what units depend on them (though, of course, it's possible that the three oaths thing could change some of this, if we find they can no longer fit on channelers! ugh)

Very true, we don't need to decide this now. I think we're close enough to a resolution that we can finish it up though. And I don't think we're going to decide on anything later that will specifically affect our decisions here.

This is all going to need to be summarized very clearly once it's settled, though we aren't quite there yet. Where, the Channeling Summary?

The Channeling Summary sounds like a good place for it.

more the background. Also, it made improvisation way easier for me, in that I could deal with things as they popped up without having to totally BS. Of course, there were lots of things that I was hoping to do with all of it before long, but alas the campaign halted...

Maybe it can start back up again! Roll20 is a great resource for playing D&D online, that's what my group are using.

I really want this to work simply, but I fear it's still a little complicated.

I think having the NvR 1 unlock at Seafaring (Optics) instead of Shipcraft (which doesn't have a BNW analogue, and was created newly here) is problematic for two reasons. It's an entire two columns earlier than BNW, for one, instead of one column. But more importantly, I suspect that they very deliberately avoiding unlocking Ranged naval units simultaneous to embarkation. It seems they want civs to have to get actual units on the ground before they can go to war with land forces (especially, probably, barbarian camp camping). Thus, embarkation before Galleas. Similarly, I think the caravel unlocking before the Frigate is deliberate for similar reasons - you can explore and mount a land invasion (which is a long process) at Astronomy, but you can't just start pot-shotting their cities and units until Navigation.

In short, I think this sounds like wisdom to me, and I'd like to preserve it. Thus, I suggest we keep NvR 1 at Shipcraft. Embarkation is a big enough deal to justify Seafaring, IMO.

The other thing is that you're map appears to leave off "Navigation" (tech after Mapmaking), unit-wise. Considering it once had two units, I suspect we'd be best served by keeping at least one unit there. Which to keep, though? Well, here are some paths, though all have problems! (assuming we change NvR 1 above):

A)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1, NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

This one has two somewhat lame aspects: 1) there's not that much time between the various NvMs, though that isn't the worst thing. Shipcraft is pretty epic, so maybe we make it need Ritual as a prereq (and maybe remove the prereq from Exploration... or not). The second potential problem is that the gap between NvR 1 and 2 is relatively great. Technically, it's longer than it was in BNW, because we've moved NvR 1 earlier (in terms of column, not necessarily in terms of number of techs). May not be a big deal.

Still, this one does preserve the embarkation thing (above), and lets the ExpShip shine, which is nice.

B)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1
Exploration - ExpShip, NvM 2
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvM 3
Next Tech - NvR 2

This one is the same as above, but NvM 2 is a bit later - somewhat sucky because then NvM 2 and 3 are very close together. This is somewhat lame.

C)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - none (embarkation)
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvR 1
Exploration - ExpShip, NvM 2
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2
Next Tech - NvM 3

This one could also be combined with any of the other two above, the key difference here being that the R-M alternation is preserved. The problem with this, of course, is that we unlock ocean naviagtion for embarked units at the same time as we unlock an ocean-navigable Ranged unit. This is somewhat lame given the discussion above.

Then there's:
D)
Era 1:
Fishing - NvM 1
Era 2:
Seafaring - NvR 1
Era 3:
Shipcraft - NvM 2
Exploration - ExpShip
Era 4:
Mapmaking - NvR 2
Next Tech - NvM 3

This is your exact suggestion, though taking your sub-suggestion and moving NvM 3 to the next tech. Focusing only on units, this one is nice, though NvR 1 unlocks awful early. The problem is that both key embarkation points are shared with Ranged units, which seems to be to be somewhat problematic.

I think of these I may prefer A) the most, but I don't love it 100%. I suppose we could maybe change the prereq structure a bit to make things balance, though we do need to keep in mind that we're actually adding one more tech to the line, here.

Ack. Thoughts? I'm not changing anything yet....

I think I like option A. The distance between the NvM 2 and 3 seems pretty significant to me - Shipcraft (which houses NvM 2) only has prereqs along the naval line, whereas Mapmaking (which houses NvM 3) requires a significant chunk of the rest of the tree. There's a tech in between NvM 1 and NvM 2, so there seems to be enough distance there. Civs taking a non-beelined approach to the tree will certainly have NvM 1 for a while before NvM 2. Civs who go straight for naval expansion will get NvM 2 fairly quickly, but that means they'll be better than most other civs for a while, which is nice for them, since they prioritized it.

I don't think the ranged naval units at the same time as the embarked units is too much of a problem in general. Ranged naval units can't capture barb camps, so they're not good for that. And usually a land unit siege is more effective than a naval siege anyway, though naval ranged units make good siege weapons. But whether this is a problem is moot if we take option A, where it doesn't occur anyway.

Related to the distance between NvR 1 and NvR 2, this is a very good point. I could see us moving NvR 2 onto Mapmaking with this approach. If we're adding more naval units, it makes sense to shift the "existing" units forward a bit, so we'd effectively be moving the two units that were on Navigation back to Astronomy. (They will be weaker to compensate.)

Shipcraft requiring Ritual could make some sense. Then Shipcraft will require the whole block of three techs after our Pottery equivalent, which is similar-ish to what Compass requires in BNW (though less, which is good, because our tech is "earlier"). It does make our structure quite similar to BNW here. I think it might work without this prereq, so shall we go without it to start with?

 

[art336]

Long story short:

I'm a huge WoT fan. I started playing Civ5 about a year ago and just ran up on this mod. I know absolutely nothing about modding Civ5, and a great deal about the lore, though nothing you likely don't already know. I'm willing to help in any way possible, though I don't Foretell myself being useful at all, but I really just came with a question....
Is there any type of estimation of when this mod will go live? I see that it's ran since 2013 already, and has kept going, so it looks like something that will be completed, but is there any hopeful estimate?

 

[S3rgeus]

OK, I think let's keep OpBor on Saidar. I think the flavor is such that the Artisan Building should really live on Apprenticeship!

Sounds good!

I'm guessing you could win on Emperor after a few attempts with a relatively predictable civ. AFter a few wins, you can probably win with anybody. Somebody like England with a really obvious era of dominance, could be a good chance to go for dom - wipe out a continent by then and you should be fine. Some of the more unpredictable ones have been really hard, though, e.g. ,shudder> Spain and <shudder> Byzantium.

I won my first Emperor game just the other day! I was playing as Askia on Small Continents. I played on a random map size and got Small (4 players) so I won Domination on turn 173 off quite a good starting position.

OK, I suppose the point that could be potentially problematic for a beliner are is the mumbo jumbo in the bottom of era 3, theoretically. In order to "slow down" some of the obsoletion of the melee units, we may have quite a few prereqs (e.g., going into Sword Forms). This could be OK, but is theoretically more of a bottle neck than would exist in BNW.

Yeah, we'll see if it becomes an issue!

Right, Melee 3 being right after Melee 2 is one of the consequences of having to flip Mel 2 and Rng 2 back to how it was in BNW. Ideally, Mel 2 could have come earlier to make more space here.

What I did, though, is add Slate Roofing as a prereq for Siegecraft (which carries Mel 2). This means, while Mel 2 is only one column over, it requires several additional techs. Thus, while it means a well-rounded-teching player will unlock Mel 3 shortly after Mel 2, Mel 3 can't really be belined too - you'd be stuck on Mel 2 for awhile while you catch up to Slate Roofing.

Is that a good enough solution, you think?

The other solution - and this might be worthy, in any case - is to simply axe Melee 3 completely, and keep Duty with Melee 2, and keep Sword Forms where it is, with Mel 3 (formerly Mel 4). Yes, I know that this is less diversity in units and whatnot, but I am not convinced that extra unit diversity at this specific point in the game - a point when tons of units are unlocking around the same time - is all that important.

What say you?

I think the solution in place for the tree as it is now is a good one. I'll touch on the existence of Melee 3 a bit later.

Yeah, this is one of the bottlenecks for belining, as discussed above. However, since Siegecraft is already requiring Slate Roofing, the choke point is actually potentially more around there than at Sword Forms. Of course, requiring Design as well is a pretty significant chunk - I could be amenable to removing that requirement, but keeping the Siegecraft bottleneck. What do you think?

Again, this is all mostly here to enforce a sense of progression between the Melee units - removal of one unit would somewhat take care of that.

Also, re: Musketman, yeah, they don't need iron, but woe is the civ with no iron who wants to upgrade a l33t Warrior up to a Musketman.... not possible.

True, but they can finally start training modern military units if they don't have any Iron. Or if they only have one or two, they can upgrade through the interim ones from their awesome warriors by getting to Musketman in sequence.

Related to some stuff with moving Sword Forms that will come up later on, I think removing the prereq on Design could work here. (Since if we move Sword Forms, then Melee 3 and Melee 4 won't be right next to each other.)

Oh, that reminds me, in my pain going through this last week I was looking on various boards to see what people thought of the various unit progressions, and it brought a few issues up. The main one:

Should we have units change type upon upgrade? The Anti-Horse unit line seems to be pretty hated for doing this. Going from melee to horse to armor to helicopter means, as far as people claim, your promotions are often tossed. Can we make this better, somehow? Like, either not have any unit-type changes (though Pol's will forever be slow...), or somehow "convert" the promotions, or let the player choose new promotions, or, at the very least, reset the unit to level zero (so getting all the promotions back isn't impossible due to high XP cost)?

Confusingly "unit type" is used to refer to "Warrior" and "Mechanized Infantry" - so, like, you unlock a "unit type" on a tech.

Terminology aside, I think because we're compressing the real world timeframe of the technology our tree reflects and the progression from one end to the other tends towards having units that are similar, we should be able to avoid this problem. We don't have a "mechanized" layer at the end of the tree, for example. I think most of our units will end up being some permutation of humans in armor, and so that loss of promotions stuff shouldn't be necessary.

Both of those feel a little wonky to me...

It's flavorful...almost... to use Listen to the Wind here. It certainly ties in with Forecasting. Of course, Wisdoms don't use it for naval travel.. it's sort of like in our dreams it's what the windfinders use... Is there one of these Naval techs that could use this flavor, and then we can reshuffle them a bit? Though at exploration is kind of cool because it is based on Heritage.

It's almost awesome! We could flavor the Coastal building to somehow justify the flavor.

Yeah, I think it fits in well with the flavor of naval + Heritage, we just need to find the right word! Some candidates:

Find the Wind (a bit wordy)
Weaves of Wind (also wordy, crosses over with Weaves too much)
Windseeing (too Sea Folk-y)

Related to Heritage, is there something we can do about the whole "nautical lifestyle" flavor? It's not specifically WoT, but often sailors stick together and have their own shared mythologies. Something like Voyagers (or Voyaging) or some such?

hmmm... I think I prefer design. Excavation is way too archaeology for me. Packed Earth... what are you going for there? Cobbles is ok, but I think that's better for later as the Railroad replacement, maybe.

Packed Earth is what a lot of roads are made from before they're ever cobbled/paved. It comes up in the books as well, I think, but only ever in passing.

OK, lots to chew on here!

I think I can get on board with moving Pol 2 to Apprenticeship. It breaks the through-line of upgrades, but honestly I think that might be lesser of all the evils.

Agreed, I think BNW demonstrates that there's enough distance there that the lack of a direct prereq is fine, because players will need to grab the tech for Pol 1 because it's so foundational in the early game.

I think that the consequence of that should also be that we do in fact move the production building to Slate Roofing. Yes, it's flavorful on Apprenticeship, but it's also relatively flavorful on Slate Roofing (and honestly, that one might give us a nice flavor to name the building or something). Are we ok with the production building being moved up earlier in the tech tree as a result? Should we compensate by making the building lamer or something?

Agreed, that sounds like a good thing to move. We might make the building weaker, I think that's something we can decide when we're going through and deciding what all of the units/buildings do exactly.

I think I'd like to avoid scrapping Heroism if possible, as it'll create a bit of a chain reaction. Making it have one (or two?) extra wonders - certainly taking one from Siegecraft - is probably the best way to go. And, of course, it'll have the XP building. Also, I could totally see it having Defensive Pact as well. Makes sense. However, that's mechanically problematic right - I'd guess it's non-militant, defensive civs that most want a DefPact, right? And they're probably not that low on the tech tree. So probably not viable. As far as moving a Wonder from Talent, I suppose I could go either way - it would most likely be a very different kind of wonder.

Agreed, I'd also like to avoid scrapping Heroism. I could see us moving the Defensive Pact there. Honestly I've never seen a Defensive Pact being used in a game with the AI - either between the human and an AI partner or between multiple AI players, so I'm not sure which part of the tree it should really live on.

Did we discuss the utility of the Defensive Pact before? I think we did - did we come to some decision that makes it more useful?

If we move the wonder back from Talents, then definitely, it would be a different kind of wonder. I think we'll end up doing a "wonder pass" at some point to work out what roles we want all of the wonders to fulfill, where they should live, which techs need wonders to fill them out, and what flavor could fill that slot, and so on. So that makes the wonders relatively mobile at this point, since they're undefined flavor and function.

I don't love it having the Recon guy, though. Moving the Recon guy even earlier seems problematic. Honestly, I was torn about whether we should consider moving him to Era 5, considering he's supposed to be viable through the rest of the game. Era 4 might be too soon. Then again, Era 4 is the era when the big exploration things happen, so it's probably fine. But era three... eh. Also, I don't like the recon guy being way into the Military side of the tech tree. Seems to me not to quite fit with the mechanical needs/purpose of the unit.

Also agreed, moving Recon 2 all the way back to Heroism doesn't seem like a good one. I think the reshuffling of New Tongue and Talents could mean that Recon 2 on one of them could let us move one of the other things on that tech back onto Heroism. (Like the wonder discussed above.)

Yeah, it seems like the Sextant was invented around 1600, so to me this is way too early for such things.

We could go with something like Lodestone, as a sort of clunky parallel to Compass, though of course that term doesn't come up in the books.

The other thing is that this tech could have to do with whatever it unlocks. It could be informed by the unit... some kind of ship, undoubtedly. Perhaps the Seaport is the better place to look. We could call it Trade Lines or Currents or something (don't quite like either of those). In any case, something that has to do more with the connections between cities, or inter-continental travel in general, rather than specifically boats and such.

Going for the flavor of trading/ships sounds like a good plan! What about Trade Agreements? Or Shipping Agreements? Are there any known constellations in the WoT sky that we can use? (Like if there's one that's good for navigation, that would be perfect.) Or is that too close to Astronomy? The WoT verse is supposedly Earth in a different part of the turning of the Wheel, right? So our constellations would actually work, it would be about finding the WoT names for them (if they exist). I don't have the Companion with me to check on those.

We could also go with Circumnavigation, though that might be a bit close to Navigation, and also intersects with the whole "proving the world is round" thing. (Do we still do that? Is the WoT world round? (I suppose it is if it's Earth.) I feel the generated maps probably still should be.)

I think I had suggested that the Spark boost would be early in Era 5, though I could be convinced to put it here.

I would also be totally fine with it being in Era 5, I'm sure there will be a tech it fits with there too. We've definitely got one in Era 4.

I'm not sure this one needs to be/should b echanneling related, given that it's fundamentally more about culture, considering the previous tech (Talent) will be Channeling-related. It could be, but doesn't need to be. But if you want the Spark boost here, then OK, that might clear it up a bit.

Weaves could work (better than Weaving), though it feels a little less advanced than I'd expect for this place. Is there a term for the thing they do when determining if somebody has the ability to channel? That test?

Just to clarify a channeling tech doesn't necessarily need to unlock only channeling-related things - some could be those "next step along" buildings/units that are implied by the technique the channeling flavor implies.

Funny about Weaves feeling less advanced, if anything I felt that opposite, that "surely they've worked out the basics of Weaves by now" would be something the players might think. The combination of both our impressions means this might be the right place for it! It would make a good unlock point for the Spark boost mentioned above.

Also, throwing out "The Five Powers" as a possible combat-upgrade tech for channelers for another point! Also "Delving" could be used for one that related to Healing somehow.

Definitely awesome flavor, but should it have become available earlier in the tree? Perhaps before or around where we are now?

Totally agree on Delving.

OK, we'll keep both the New Tongue and High Chant flavor around.

I think Talents is probably superior to Talent. I'm a little iffy on Dreaming, though... without this having anything *necessarily* to do with dreams (we have a T'a'r upgrade here, but I'm sitll not sure that that was actually intentional. What would it do?). Certainly, a tech with that name should do so, and we could probably more easily justify that as a latter-half-of-the-game tech. What about using Delving here? Could that justify a Happ building? I do like the generic-nature of Talents, though.

Re: the rest... Hmmm... I agree that New Tongue feels like something that should enable the Compact (though, truly, it shouldn't matter. It's not that everybody came together on one tongue and could suddenly communicate... they all previously apparently spoke the Old tongue, and could presumably all communicate). I'd be fine moving Compact to The New Tongue - what should we take in exchange? A Trade route? Recon 2? Gold 2? Not another wonder!

Was this T'a'r upgrade where Projections went from being spawnable on top of the host unit to spawnable anywhere the civ has active vision? Did we decide to separate those two things?

So, I think my specific suggestion here is to swap these two around into the following configuration:

Where New Tongue is now (directly below High Chant) put Dreaming with: Happ 2, Wonder, Wonder, T'a'r

Where Talent is now (prereq on Design and Hierarchy) put New Tongue with: Recon 2, Court, Gold 2, Trade, Compact (what is "Court" here?).

Then move the wonder that we've lost from New Tongue onto Heroism, and all seems well.

In Talents vs Dreaming, I could see either working here. I don't think we want Delving yet here. I could see Dreaming being used later in the tree, as you mention. (Do we have another T'a'r upgrade after this one?) I think we should definitely use Dreaming somewhere, because it's a very recognizable and tech-ish thing.

Eh... levies is so.... eh. And Mercantilism is a 16th century thing, sort of proto-capitalism in some way... Not really an appropriate flavor fit, IMO.

If it's yield bonuses we have here (and not actual gold), is this the good place for the channeling-related tech? Keeping is a weave that keeps food from spoiling. That kind of thing. Maybe this is a place for Weaves in general?

Keeping sounds like a very good call! Like I mention above (or is that below?) a tech inspired by channeling flavor doesn't necessarily have to unlock part of our channeling mechanics. (Though do we have any we need to put around here somewhere?) Keeping could affect these yield bonuses and make whatever the building is become "viable" (from a flavor perspective), and therefore buildable.

Yeah, so if we decided to add an extra Pol 3, at Sword Forms, then the Pol 4 in the next era would need this as a prereq - in fact, we could probably move it back on column, if we wanted. I could go either way on this: add this extra unit, or else go the long stretch from Apprenticeship to the start of era 5. Which do you prefer?

I think adding Pol 3 onto a new tech here and moving Sword Forms right one column is my preference. More detail below.

This all completely depends on what we decide we want to do with Mel 4. If we axe the Mel 3, like I suggest above, then Mel 4 should stay where it is (as should SF), and we should put Pol 3/4 somewhere else. If we keep Mel 3 where it is, then I do suggest we move SF to the right one column. The Pol situation falls into place after that, I think (and yes, I think it'd maybe just be a wonder and the Pol unit). I think something like Formations or something is a better name, though it's perhaps too generic and primitive tech-wise. Could go with Tactics or something.

I go into why I think we should keep the diversity for Melee 3 below. And as you've said here, I think if we keep Melee 3, then all of these techs slot together quite well.

So, where we currently have Sword Forms, we instead have Formations (good name!), which has Pol 3 and a wonder. Then where we have the "Mine Quarry Brickyard" tech at the moment (these are yield bonuses, right?), we have Sword Forms with Melee 4 and the Warder upgrade.

Do we want the Mine, Quarry, and Brickyard yield bonuses to stay where they are on Sword Forms? Might we split them up or put some/all back on Formations?

much has been said on this above. Why would you like to preserve the diversity *at this point in the tree*?

Two main reasons: one is that I've always felt like the melee units upgrade path, while it has difficulties with shortness from Longswordsman -> Musketman, is the most interesting and useful unit upgrade path. It captures a lot of great real world flavor and I always feel like upgrading my melee units is worthwhile. The other is that there are a lot of wars around this part of the tech tree. By this point, players have had a decent amount of time to establish stable power bases to produce units and are starting to run up against the borders of other civs with their expansion. More unit diversity here means that tech differences are more noticeable during these wars, but not completely the deciding factor. The guy with Musketman will be beaten by a sea of Longswordsman units if the guy making the Longswordsman can make a lot more of them, because they're not too different in combat strength. So overall it adds a lot of nice variety to what is quite a frequently war-based part of the progression.

Yeah, I think we can come up with a name for this one, but I feel like we have to figure out it's prereqs first.

So it's looking like New Tongue and Formations are the prereqs for this one now. Looking at what this tech unlocks, it's going to be a military tech. So something like Martial Command, or simply Command. Maybe Logistics, since siege weapons are often logistical challenges. Tactics could also work here. Any of those standing out or inspiring anything?

Right, So Rng 4 would then go first column next era, or what?

Yes, Range 4 would be in the first column of Era 5.

Yeah, I think putting Fireworks on Electricity is totally the answer. I can probably see it being predominately a Gold Natl Wonder, though I could see culture as well. Sci and Prod are theoretically justifiable too. Though, I could honestly see it do something totally different. It could be a National wonder that isn't necessarily predicated on building normal buildings, also. Just a only-build-one kind of thing. Though, that does break the pattern, which is unfortunate. Are there any other kinds of building types that don't have Nat-Wonders already attached to them?

Awesome, Fireworks as Electricity sounds good.

None of our mechanics have National Wonders, but the Illuminator's stuff doesn't strike me as a match for those. Alignment, Channeling (via Spark), anything else National Wonder-able of ours?

I'd say it would be good to stick with the pattern of National Wonders requiring some kind of building in all cities first - that's what makes them something that helps Tall civs, since Wide civs take much longer to build any building in all of their cities. There are two Gold National Wonders in BNW (East India Company and National Treasury) - we could have it be one of these?

Science also has two National Wonders (National College and Oxford University... which seems more like a World Wonder, because it is a specific thing that exists in one place, but anyway). We could use that either.

Yeah, I definitely see what you mean. Let's create the basic "answer" and then reexamine it. I am guessing that we can probably tear out a prereq or two - some of these may have been put in to overcompensate for problems that were then remedied in other ways.

Sounds good.

oh, man, Artillery is the BEST.

So good! But by itself on a tech good?

ok, so key design point, then: don't add too many prereqs. Yes?

Yep, definitely! Just not prereqs that end up pulling in most of the tree from beyond this point.

Cool, so maybe it might be smart for you to help shore up Era 4 before you dive back into the Editor? That way, we can think on the next era and not have a big pause while you code. Does that work?

Sounds like we're on our way with Era 4 above! I should get the code back for the Editor later today and will tinker when the time presents itself.

 

[S3rgeus]

Long story short:

I'm a huge WoT fan. I started playing Civ5 about a year ago and just ran up on this mod. I know absolutely nothing about modding Civ5, and a great deal about the lore, though nothing you likely don't already know. I'm willing to help in any way possible, though I don't Foretell myself being useful at all, but I really just came with a question....
Is there any type of estimation of when this mod will go live? I see that it's ran since 2013 already, and has kept going, so it looks like something that will be completed, but is there any hopeful estimate?

Hello and welcome to the thread! Always glad to hear from another fan!

We don't have any hard and fast estimates of when we'll have a playable build. I keep feeling like, as of late, we're within sight of the end of the primary design phase of the project. (We can at least describe the sections that are left!) There are still months of work for us to do on that, and given our feature set, a very long time getting everything actually into the game! I would give a very optimistic estimate of having something playable-ish in a year, but that's really a total guess on my part.

We'll certainly be looking for people to play the mod as it develops, once we're working on bringing actual features into CiV. Both to get feedback on how it's going and also to find problems to fix. If you've got any background in computing/IT, then you would certainly have time to train up in CiV modding to help out with WoTMod once we get going on implementing features. (Even if you don't, you could still get into it enough to help out on some parts of the mod eventually!)

Counterpoint and I are here for the long haul on this one, and this topic will always be updated with our progress! If you see anything specific that concerns you, feel free to let us know and we'll try to address it in a reasonable order. If you haven't read them already, the summary posts linked to from the first post in this topic provide overviews of what the mod is going to do. From the most recent posts you've probably seen, we're working on fleshing out the tech tree at the moment!

 

[counterpoint]

Long story short:

I'm a huge WoT fan. I started playing Civ5 about a year ago and just ran up on this mod. I know absolutely nothing about modding Civ5, and a great deal about the lore, though nothing you likely don't already know. I'm willing to help in any way possible, though I don't Foretell myself being useful at all, but I really just came with a question....
Is there any type of estimation of when this mod will go live? I see that it's ran since 2013 already, and has kept going, so it looks like something that will be completed, but is there any hopeful estimate?

Welcome!

I echo everything S3rgeus has already written.

Do you, by any chance, have any artistic skills? We are most certainly lacking in that department! I'm a musician by trade, but useless in the visual arts, and S3rgeus has some artistic ability, but we are most definitely in need of this kind of thing!

In general, though, if you'd like to be involved, feel free to share your input on the topics at hand. Even if you don't want to get nitty-gritty into game mechanics and such, there are often "flavor"/lore-related things we get stumped on. True, we know a lot about the lore, but there's only so much that we can keep fresh in our heads. The "what to name each tech" issue we've been discussing above is an excellent example.

Oh, and for the record, I have no modding experience. I have some game design experience, but not videogame design experience! I figure I'll likely learn a little scripting to help out when the time comes, but otherwise, not a coder at all.