S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

I've seen your response to the Epic Framing Post. Awesome! I'm definitely not going to respond to any of it until you're done (barring some specific or need for or requested clarification or something)

Aren't fortune tellers "mediums"? I don't think people will get that confused.

oy! Of course they are. That's embarrassing...

I don't think the unlocks really work if we swap that flavor around. Traveler2 on Power-Wrought Weapons could work if we made sure to align the flavor of the unit with it, but the other three upgrades work better on Inverted Weaves. The innovation and non-channeler units (particularly an anti-channeler unit) work better on Power-Wrought Weapons than Inverted Weaves - the former provides an avenue for making non-channelers stronger, but the latter doesn't really. I see what you mean about them being out of order, but I think given the mechanical considerations and how close together the tree is (time wise) by this point, I think it's ok.

OK, I think I'm with you on this.

So, I'm not responding to the rest of this because I agree with your assessments. Just to be clear, though: on several of these, where I pointed out problems, you indicated that you "agreed" with my assessment (that there were some problems). Am I correct in assuming that, in your opinion, all of the "problems" are minor enough to be left as such?

...

OK, so I've begun to proof our three versions of the tree: the editor, the excel, and the summary. I will do this over the course of a few "sessions." In any case:

Era 1
no edits! looks great!

Era 2
Smithing - I'm pretty sure this one is supposed to require Territory as a prereq, in addition to Fealty. This is required in order to make a direct line from Rng 1 to Rng 2. I have that prereq in the excel version, but it isn't in the editor. How bad is this for overall prereq counts to add this back in?

also on Smithing (though not proof-related): that tech has a *lot* of unlocks. Uber-techey? Possibly move the Wonder to The One Power? Possibly move the Trade unit elsewhere (Measurement, maybe)? The Bridge element to Measurement?

Summary was missing one of the prereqs on Ritual. fixed

My versions have a Wonder on Appraisal. The Editor doesn't. Is there something I'm missing, or is this an error? There doesn't appear to be a Wonder the other techs have that my versions are missing, so I don't think I missed a switch or anything.

My versions referred to the "granary" as Food 1, and the Aqueduct as 2, etc. Yours have them as Food (Wheat) and Food 1, respectively. Yours are correct, as the granary isn't required for the aqueduct. Fixed (throughout).

Era 3
Summary was missing a prereq on Weaves

similar to with food above, I counted the Lighthouse as "Coastal 1," when it should be Food (Coastal). Fixed (as well as numbering of subsequent coastals...

Produce Science renamed to Produce Research on my versions

the rest of the eras will have to wait til next time!

EDIT

PAGE 50!
I feel like we have to celebrate!

EDIT 2

Era 4
summary had extra ability on The New Tongue

Mine erroneously labeled the "windmill" as "Production (Hill)", which the opposite of the truth.

Era 5
At Channeling Circles in the Editor, the linking upgrade should probably specify saidar units only (seeing that a later one unlocks saidin

visually, this era looks wonky in the Editor. Especially, I find the top to be somewhat confusing. Bkbnding should probably be on top, and Trts should probably be in line with Cnctions

The summary indicated that Letters of Rights fed into High Chant. which I'm pretty sure it doesn't

Era 6
The summary and excel have a Trade Route on Exchange Rates. The editor does not. Which is incorrect?

summary incorrectly labeled "Culture 5" as "Culture 4" on High Chant

The summary and excel have a Trade Route on Infrastructure. The editor does not. Which is correct? The fact that this is happening twice in the same column, is fishy, and makes me suspect that there may have been some kind of copying error. Seeing that I have 9 "Additional trade route" items listed at the end of the summary, and I think there are supposed to be ten, one of these is clearly weird.

Rule of Medians in the summary was missing a prereq (High Chant)

Summary had Lenses as a prereq into Keeping, which it doesn't seem to be.

Summary had Advanced Maneuvers as a prereq for Keeping, which it doesn't appear to be.

that's all for that era, and for now!

 

[S3rgeus]

I've seen your response to the Epic Framing Post. Awesome! I'm definitely not going to respond to any of it until you're done (barring some specific or need for or requested clarification or something)

Sounds good - I'll jump in with this post just to make my responses to the framing post even more difficult to track down so that this topic can continue while I work on that!

OK, I think I'm with you on this.

So, I'm not responding to the rest of this because I agree with your assessments. Just to be clear, though: on several of these, where I pointed out problems, you indicated that you "agreed" with my assessment (that there were some problems). Am I correct in assuming that, in your opinion, all of the "problems" are minor enough to be left as such?

Yeah, exactly, where I've agreed I see what you mean, but I don't think we need to change things based on them.

OK, so I've begun to proof our three versions of the tree: the editor, the excel, and the summary. I will do this over the course of a few "sessions." In any case:

Era 1
no edits! looks great!

Awesome!

Era 2
Smithing - I'm pretty sure this one is supposed to require Territory as a prereq, in addition to Fealty. This is required in order to make a direct line from Rng 1 to Rng 2. I have that prereq in the excel version, but it isn't in the editor. How bad is this for overall prereq counts to add this back in?

It doesn't affect the end of the tree, all of their prereq counts remain the same, so I'm fine with it.

also on Smithing (though not proof-related): that tech has a *lot* of unlocks. Uber-techey? Possibly move the Wonder to The One Power? Possibly move the Trade unit elsewhere (Measurement, maybe)? The Bridge element to Measurement?

Wonder onto The One Power sounds like a good plan. And Bridges onto Measurement? Then it seems a bit more fair.

My versions have a Wonder on Appraisal. The Editor doesn't. Is there something I'm missing, or is this an error? There doesn't appear to be a Wonder the other techs have that my versions are missing, so I don't think I missed a switch or anything.

Your version is probably right, since you authored this part of the tree! Added to the Editor tree.

EDIT

PAGE 50!
I feel like we have to celebrate!

Man, remember your first post all the way back on page 3!? We've been at this a long time! July 2014!

Era 5
At Channeling Circles in the Editor, the linking upgrade should probably specify saidar units only (seeing that a later one unlocks saidin

Good point, fixed!

visually, this era looks wonky in the Editor. Especially, I find the top to be somewhat confusing. Bkbnding should probably be on top, and Trts should probably be in line with Cnctions

Done!

The summary indicated that Letters of Rights fed into High Chant. which I'm pretty sure it doesn't

It used to, but we changed it to fix some prereqs later on.

Era 6
The summary and excel have a Trade Route on Exchange Rates. The editor does not. Which is incorrect?

The summary and excel have a Trade Route on Infrastructure. The editor does not. Which is correct? The fact that this is happening twice in the same column, is fishy, and makes me suspect that there may have been some kind of copying error. Seeing that I have 9 "Additional trade route" items listed at the end of the summary, and I think there are supposed to be ten, one of these is clearly weird.

Yours is probably correct on both counts - there was a bug in the Editor which I have now fixed (in the version released last Sunday) that caused renaming techs to remove BNW abilities that are based on tech table fields (like trade routes). We renamed these techs a few times and I probably forgot to add the trade routes back!

Does this mean we have too many now if we add both? Exchange Rates and its immediate prereq Letters of Rights now both add trade routes.

Summary had Lenses as a prereq into Keeping, which it doesn't seem to be.

I think it was originally this way, but I changed it to work with the prereq counts in Era 9.

Summary had Advanced Maneuvers as a prereq for Keeping, which it doesn't appear to be.

That's quite a vertical jump!

 

[counterpoint]

It doesn't affect the end of the tree, all of their prereq counts remain the same, so I'm fine with it.

Cool.

Wonder onto The One Power sounds like a good plan. And Bridges onto Measurement? Then it seems a bit more fair.

cool. Both added! surprised we let that one get so bloated.

Your version is probably right, since you authored this part of the tree! Added to the Editor tree.

nice.

Man, remember your first post all the way back on page 3!? We've been at this a long time! July 2014!

dang. that's *nuts*. Funny how I'm blabbing there about UAs and such.... and 50 pages later, almost two years later, we finally start talking about them...

Done!

this was the visual moving of stuff. Looks better! We'll probably have to reevaluate for solely aesthetic purposes in like three years....

Yours is probably correct on both counts - there was a bug in the Editor which I have now fixed (in the version released last Sunday) that caused renaming techs to remove BNW abilities that are based on tech table fields (like trade routes). We renamed these techs a few times and I probably forgot to add the trade routes back!

Does this mean we have too many now if we add both? Exchange Rates and its immediate prereq Letters of Rights now both add trade routes.

Right. So, I'm under the understanding that BNW has 8 "gain an additional trade route" moments. By my summary, we have 9.

Also, it looks to be the case that in BNW, you only gain one per era, with the exception of the ancient era. So I have a feeling the double-duty of Exchange Rates and Infrastructure is a mistake. I think I know what happened - we probably thought Exchange Rates made thematic sense, so put it there, but then Infrastructure is the very bottom of Column 1, which is where Railroads is in BNW - which has a trade route. Probably we never got around to deleting it. So, by that logic, we should simply delete the one on Infrastructure...

...But, it's really quite lame to have one on LoRghts and one immediately after it on ExRts. In BNW, they're on opposite sides of the tree, which seems more appropriate. Unfortunately, if we go with Infrastructure, then Exchange Rates seems a much worse tech - also, it makes good sense, flavor-wise (though, so does infrastructure). Can you think of anything we could put on ExR to compensate?

How do you want to solve the issue?

That's quite a vertical jump!

yeah, that's because it's a mistake. What I meant to say is that Adv Maneuvers is a prereq for Traveling (not Keeping) in the summary. Still a mistake, right?

Era 7
My versions have a Trade Route on Keeping. The Editor doesn't. I think this one is supposed to be there.

Traveling is a pretty bombastic tech. I know it should be good, but it's a bit over the top relative to some other. We should probably pull something off of it, right? Mechanisms below it is very light. the "logical" answer is to pull Pole, since it doesn't fit the flavor anyways, but part of me wants to keep that there because of its placement vertically. There is a lot of "gateway" stuff there - Gate 2, Trav 1, Airport, and Trav Grounds. Any chance of us pulling one of those and putting it on Mechanisms? (maybe even something else?) I think the Airport could actually make some sense, especially seeing as we have no real idea what the flavor will be anyways. The Traveler, Gateway, and Grounds seem somewhat "locked" to that tech. What do you want to do?

"Production (Angreal)" renamed to "Production 3 (Angreal)" in my versions. Same with "Production [3] (Desert")

Wells was missing the prereq of Traveling in the summary. Both other versions have it - fixed.

Era 8
Sextants made plural in excel sheet

In summary, added Greater Consensus as prereq to Power-Wrought Weapons (on both "ends" of it). Removed Telescopes as prereq to Power-Wrought Weapons ( I suspect his never got fixed when we flipped these techs.

Polearm 6 didn't exist in either of my versions! (P-W Weapons). I suppose I never altered that, once we made that decision. oops...

Era 9
Melee 9 added to Lightning Jars in summary

That's it!

Also, my "A Beginning" says " Increases Score." Editor doesn't - nor does civ. I suppose we'll keep it like civ. Also, my "Cooperation" has *everything* on it (including Settlers and stuff) - the editor doesn't. You wnat to keep it like CiV?

So, all trees appear to be synced (though there's a couple things above that need to be decided). At first I wondered whether we'd catch many mistakes doing this - we most certainly did, so it was worth it. Also, let us catch some techs that stood out as too big.

I'll try to find time soon to also proof the "summary summary" (the stuff at the bottom of the summary) as well - I suspect most of it should be good, though.

 

[S3rgeus]

dang. that's *nuts*. Funny how I'm blabbing there about UAs and such.... and 50 pages later, almost two years later, we finally start talking about them...

Yeah, it's amazing how much detail we've gotten into in the two years since! The mod definitely has a much clearer specification now and I think it will be much better for it.

this was the visual moving of stuff. Looks better! We'll probably have to reevaluate for solely aesthetic purposes in like three years....

And then again four years after that!

Right. So, I'm under the understanding that BNW has 8 "gain an additional trade route" moments. By my summary, we have 9.

Also, it looks to be the case that in BNW, you only gain one per era, with the exception of the ancient era. So I have a feeling the double-duty of Exchange Rates and Infrastructure is a mistake. I think I know what happened - we probably thought Exchange Rates made thematic sense, so put it there, but then Infrastructure is the very bottom of Column 1, which is where Railroads is in BNW - which has a trade route. Probably we never got around to deleting it. So, by that logic, we should simply delete the one on Infrastructure...

...But, it's really quite lame to have one on LoRghts and one immediately after it on ExRts. In BNW, they're on opposite sides of the tree, which seems more appropriate. Unfortunately, if we go with Infrastructure, then Exchange Rates seems a much worse tech - also, it makes good sense, flavor-wise (though, so does infrastructure). Can you think of anything we could put on ExR to compensate?

How do you want to solve the issue?

Hmmm, we could delete the trade route on Infrastructure, then swap the Wonder from Infrastructure with the trade route on Exchange Rates? Exchange Rates is really good flavor for a trade route, but Infrastructure works too, and it eliminates the trade routes being right next to each other.

yeah, that's because it's a mistake. What I meant to say is that Adv Maneuvers is a prereq for Traveling (not Keeping) in the summary. Still a mistake, right?

Ah, ok, right! Yes, and a much more expected mistake, since there was a prereq from Advanced Maneuvers to Traveling previously!

Era 7
My versions have a Trade Route on Keeping. The Editor doesn't. I think this one is supposed to be there.

Bah, I thought I'd fixed all of the omissions caused by this yesterday, but it seems I missed Keeping! Added!

Traveling is a pretty bombastic tech. I know it should be good, but it's a bit over the top relative to some other. We should probably pull something off of it, right? Mechanisms below it is very light. the "logical" answer is to pull Pole, since it doesn't fit the flavor anyways, but part of me wants to keep that there because of its placement vertically. There is a lot of "gateway" stuff there - Gate 2, Trav 1, Airport, and Trav Grounds. Any chance of us pulling one of those and putting it on Mechanisms? (maybe even something else?) I think the Airport could actually make some sense, especially seeing as we have no real idea what the flavor will be anyways. The Traveler, Gateway, and Grounds seem somewhat "locked" to that tech. What do you want to do?

I'm actually a little worried that in our general attempt to make the techs more balanced that we risk making them too uniform. We have a couple of columns that have exactly the same unlock count on all of the techs, so I'd be fine with leaving Traveling as a bit strong here.

Also, my "A Beginning" says " Increases Score." Editor doesn't - nor does civ. I suppose we'll keep it like civ. Also, my "Cooperation" has *everything* on it (including Settlers and stuff) - the editor doesn't. You wnat to keep it like CiV?

Yeah, I'd say let's keep it like CiV.

The Cooperation one is actually a difference, but in practice doesn't affect anyone. Unlocks that have no prereqs are always available to all civs (barring unique replacements and things with negative production costs, like GPs). Things on Agriculture are unlocked by that tech, it's just that all of the major civs in BNW get Agriculture for free. (Not sure if the Barbarians and City States do - I'd need to check!) I figure we might as well stick with CiV's format for this.

So, all trees appear to be synced (though there's a couple things above that need to be decided). At first I wondered whether we'd catch many mistakes doing this - we most certainly did, so it was worth it. Also, let us catch some techs that stood out as too big.

I'll try to find time soon to also proof the "summary summary" (the stuff at the bottom of the summary) as well - I suspect most of it should be good, though.

Awesome, sounds good! Definitely well worth doing! And thanks re proofing the summary summary! Now I'm back to replying to the framing post!

 

[S3rgeus]

C - CATEGORY 1: CIVS WE KNOW WE WANT
These are ones that were mentioned by S3rgeus in his introductory posts a long time ago (before counterpoint was involved, i.e.“B.C.&#8221, as being a part of the first-launch. There are others that have been introduced at later dates, and essentially added as FLC (e.g. Shara and Hawkwingville), but since proper discussion may have never occurred, I'll not presume that to be the case. Regardless, this category is not technically meaningful, in that it won't have any bearing on the end result of this exercise, if we delve into Category 2 in equal detail.

In the subsequent sections of this series of posts, there are additional flavor details about each of these civs. That information may be useful to help decide which civs should be selected.

The following 12 civs are highly likely to be in the mod:

The Aiel
Altara
Amadicia
Andor
The Atha'an Miere
Cairhien
Illian
Manetheren (HISTORICAL – Ten Nations [Era of Nations/Classical])
Seanchan
Shienar
Tarabon
Tear

Looks like a good list! Definitely a good starting point.

All of these are “modern” civs, in that they exist in the book, with the exception of Manetheren, which is marked as such.

Very goodpoint, so we'll definitely need some added variety to that - Manetheren alone can't represent the past!

Tarabon is deserving of inclusion mostly because of the prominent events that take place in Tanchico in the middle-late books. However, other than that, it occupies a relatively small space in the “zeitgeist” of the books, which makes its position as FLC somewhat arguable.

I could see us dropping Tarabon to a post-launch civ if we have a replacement that fulfills some of the other needs I replied to in my last framing-post-reply-post. You're very right that a lot of prominent things happen in Tanchico, but we don't know too much about Tarabon as a country.

The same could be said, to a certain extent, of Shienar, which is most prominent within the early books and not as much later (though it is perhaps the most noteworthy borderland nation, which makes it quite significant in the overall lore of the books).

I would be less inclined to drop Shienar than Tarabon, mostly because I feel we should have at least one Borderlander civ. And it feels like of the four, Shienar is the best fleshed out in the books, mostly because, as you mentioned, a lot of stuff happens there in the first few books.

There is Malkier, which is a Borderlander civ not from the exact same era as the current civs, but I feel like omitting all of the current Borderlander civs would be an oversight on our part. (This doesn't affect our consideration of Malkier though, I'd say.)

For me, Amadicia's status as a first-launch civ is dependent on whether their uniques are tied to the Whitecloaks. Obviously in the context of the books, the Children make their home in Amador, but they are not technically the ruling party (though they are the defacto authority). Additionally, in this mod, the “Way of the Light” is a Path that can be chosen by any civ, and, some of the Children units can additionally be built by anybody with the proper Path Custom. In any case, a strong case could be made for tying Amadicia to the Whitecloaks, but on the other hand, a case could also be made that the whitecloaks should be treated as a separate entity entirely. This issue doesn't technically have to be solved until we make this civ's uniques.

However, if Amadicia isn't given a Children-related ability, there doesn't really seem to be enough in-book content to use to come up with their uniques and justify their inclusion as a FLC. In short, if they aren't tied to the Whitecloaks, they probably shouldn't be a FLC. Currently, I'm tempted to split the difference here – make some aspects of the Whitecloaks generic and available to anybody (such as our Customs), but also give Amadicia some (or perhaps only) whitecloak-related uniques.

This is very interesting, and I would be interested in trying out the flavor for both approaches to this - non-Children and Children related.

I think the Children one will win out, but I wouldn't want to leave the other one unconsidered. There's a certain logic to saying that the Children's de facto rule of Amadicia was a relic of the books timeline, rather than a property of the world itself, but the Children will be a big part of Amadicia's recognizable flavor.

If it's anything to go by, back at the beginning of time when I was making civs for this mod, I assigned Pedron Niall as the leader of Amadicia. He won the popularity contest in my head against King Ailron. But again, wouldn't want to go ahead with the Children one without considering the alternative first!

I would definitely be in favor of the splitting the difference approach if Amadicia does have Children-related uniques - so give them some stuff that mechanically synergizes well with the Children Customs, but also their own unique stuff that uses the Children flavor in a different, useful way.

This strikes me as the first part of these replies where we'll want to dive into the flavor of a specific civ? I know Amadicia's relationship to the Children is mentioned later, but it feels like this is the deepest section of it. Do we want to dive on the flavor from this quote block, or are we still too early in defining the process and should hold off for a few posts?

It should also be mentioned that we could theoretically consider having The Two Rivers as its own civ. Obviously, it is not its own country, but in the books it is somewhat treated as if it is – and in fact, it's separateness from Andor is one of its defining characteristics. The flavor components of the Two Rivers are discussed below within the context of either Andor or Manetheren – if a Two Rivers civ were to be desired, that flavor could be removed and reassigned as we saw fit.

Interesting. I wouldn't be against trying out the flavor, as we're doing above for Amadicia, but my gut reaction isn't particularly favorable for them being their own civ. They don't strike me as a civilization. They sort of self-govern, but they don't really have that kind of holistic flavor link through or an organized government that creates an obvious distinction.

Worth trying though!

Which of the civs above should be included? (see below for more detail)

I think it would be relatively safe to call the following civs very likely at this point, and worth "provisionally listing" as our known FLCs. The only reason I could see us removing one of these is if we really wanted to bring in a lot more variety to the time periods the civs are from at launch.

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

Which should be considered for post-launch release?

The more I think about it, the more I think Tarabon is likely to be pushed back to post-launch to make way for more variety in time periods, which, as you mention later, is going to cause us a bunch of problems if we don't actively address it.

I would also lean towards Altara going that way as well, but I'll comment more on that when Altara comes up again.

D - CATEGORY 2: CIVS THAT ARE CONSIDERED FOR EITHER LAUNCH OR EXPANSION
These are civs that have been mentioned variously as candidates for first run, or as later additions. Some of these were on S3rgeus' original list, but have been mentioned as possibly less essential than some others on this second list.

Arad Doman
Arafel
Aridhol (HISTORICAL – Ten Nations [Era of Nations/Classical])
Far Madding
Ghealdan
Hawkwing's Empire/Shandalle (HISTORICAL – Free Years [Era of Consolidation/Renaissance])
Kandor
Malkier (HISTORICAL – New Era [Era of Encroaching Blight/Atomic or Era of Stability/Modern])
Mayene
Murandy
Saldaea
Shaido Aiel
Shara
Tuatha'an

Also seems like generally a good list!

Hawkwing's empire is very prominent in the Lore and thus deserves inclusion, IMO. The same is true for Shara – which also gives us a civ that isn't from the Westlands. Malkier gives us relatively little to go off of, but is highly memorable due to its connection to certain characters. The same is true for Mayene, though as a City-State, Mayene might not be considered a valid “civilization” (as is the case with Far Madding, which is much less prominent in the lore).

Thinking more on this, I'm now leaning more towards Hawkwing and Shara being included as FLCs than I was before. Generally because it addresses the cultural diversity problem (Shara) and the time period problem (Hawkwing).

I think Mayene, despite actually being a city-state in the books, is definitely worthy of consideration as a civ. Like Venice in BNW, what was technically a city-state in real life can be a full civ if adapted appropriately. And Mayene is certainly very visible in the lore, has some known unique characteristics, and their leader is one of my favorite characters. (Though it does exacerbate the books-era-only-civs problem.)

Arad Doman is relatively high-profile in the books, from a referential perspective, though it is not visited (to my recollection). The same is true with Saldaea.

I think Arad Doman is more worthy of consideration here. We do visit it a few times. Rodel Ituralde's first few PoV chapters are set there (after he escapes from Almoth Plain, I think). Rand has a PoV chapter that goes to Bandar Eban (capital of Arad Doman) to provide aid. Natrin's Barrow was also in Arad Doman.

A bit less so with Saldaea, but we do go there in the books. There's a trolloc invasion of Maradon (capital of Saldaea) around the beginning of the LB that Rodel Ituralde and Rand fight off. There are a few chapters of street-and-alley fighting against the trollocs there. The city is technically saved, but supposedly massively damaged and most of the people dead. I'm not particularly pushing for Saldaea to be included as an FLC, as long as we have at least one modern Borderlander civ and Shienar seems like it fits the bill better for that.

Arafel, Kandor, and Murandy occupy only small parts of the overall flavor of the lore.

Agreed, I wouldn't be inclined to include any of these as FLCs because we have enough modern day civs already, so we can include some more civs from the past instead of these. Definitely good candidates for post-launch civs though.

The Shaido Aiel are an interesting choice in that it is not necessarily clear if they should be given their separate status (from the Aiel in general) as a civ. Still, they occupy a very primary role in the sequence of events in the books, and this could serve as justification.

They do, but I feel like The Aiel vs the Shaido is more like a scenario distinction than something in the main game. The Shaido as a distinct entity only really exist for a year or so of time in the whole history of the WoT world, which, despite their prominent flavor, strikes me as an odd inclusion for a civ. And we also have a lot of modern day ones, so I would be inclined to push these guys to post-launch, possibly introduced first/as well as a scenario civ in some kind of Aiel civil war scenario.

Aridhol is probably the only other Ten Nations's country familiar to readers, as it becomes Shadar Logoth.. Unfortunately, that's most all we know about it, and since Shadar Logoth has been divorced of any specific City-State allegiance (any CS can become it), it leaves us with precious little flavor to go on. Still, it is an “ancient” era civ in a mod that might have very few of them. Theoretically, some reflection of it's Logoth-ness could be provided in its Uniques (much how the same might be done for the Children in Amadicia, despite the Way of the Light standing alone as an independent Path).

I could see us doing something similar to Amadicia here with Aridhol, and touching on the Logothness, even if it's not the actual transformation into Shadar Logoth since that's a separate mechanic. I could also see us dredging up flavor for this civ, since it's definitely recognizable and from an underrepresented period in WoT history. (Trait name: "Where the Shadow Waits"? )

For me, whether Ghealdan is relevant enough to be a civ depends on how we choose to deal with the Prophet. In some ways, this situation is similar to Amadicia's – we know very little about Ghealdan that doesn't involve it getting turned to chaos by the Prophet. So it seems to me that if Ghealdan does make the cut, it's going to be in some way connected to the Prophet's control of the region. That said, this is a bit odd for a few reasons. First, the Dragonsworn are our barbarians. Second, Masema was never a “real” ruler – more like a raider/conqueror (see: barbarians).

But again, if we don't go with Masema, then I have zero idea what to do with Ghealdan (it fades into the obscurity of places like Murandy). And, it should be mentioned that the uniques associated with the Prophet's dragonsworn would probably be unique at the very least (pun semi-intentional) – it might be a chance to do some cool things with DS/lawless, Paths, and even Alignment, that would be a much less natural fit with other civs.

It seems a shame not to use Alliandre as a leader, but I think in general Ghealdan could probably be a post-launch civ as well. Again, we have lots of present-day civs and while there are cool ways to go with Ghealdan, I don't think fans will be champing at the bit for them either, so something good and recognizable to keep in reserve since we can fill its FLC slot with civs that fulfill more of our other objectives.

The decision to go with the Tuatha'an or not is both flavor-related and gameplay-related. On the one hand, they are relatively memorable within the WoT universe. But on the other hand, they are not a nation – they don't even have settlements. Furthermore, the whole pacifism thing would make them very difficult to balance (see: any suggestions made earlier in this thread...). Still, they are intriguing.

Definitely very intriguing - enough that we've already done like 3 or 4 iterations of their trait! I think this could make a good post-launch civ as well, partially because I think players will accept them as a civ, but not necessarily expect them.

Big Questions:

• Which of the civs above should be included? (see below for more detail)
  
• Which should be considered for post-launch release?

I think I've answered these questions inline, but I haven't consolidated them yet, until we discuss and agree on some!

E – CATEGORY 3: CIVS THAT WE MIGHT CONSIDER
These civs are ones that I think might be worth considering, if only to spread out the history/game Eras a bit more (i.e., including more AB civs and FY civs) as well as Philosophies, Victory-tendencies, start biases, etc.. None of these are well-known to readers, so we should probably only include them to fill a specific need – if we do put them in, it's probably chiefly for mechanical/balancing reasons.

These are not ones I will be diving further into in my dive for flavor and balance generalizations. Do not take that to mean that these are not still to be considered – call one out by name and we can did in more specifically. Additionally, note that this list is not exhaustive. These are simply those civs that seemed to stand out in the lore. There are many others we could consider (especially from the Free Years).

Those of these that aren't selected are likely to be prime sources of CS names.

Awesome, sounds like a good category, though I would like to cherry pick one or two as FLC considerations!

Under these quote blocks, I note whether or not I think they're worth us considering as FLCs. Most are a no, as is the point of this section, but I figured it worth writing out just to be clear about where I stand, when I often describe them as interesting and cool (which might imply FLC consideration where I had not intended!).

Aldeshar (HISTORICAL – Free Years [Era of Freedom/Medieval or Era of Consolidation/Renaissance]) – apparently a powerful nation, and one that stood against Hawkwing pretty significantly. Andoran nobility claim descent from their queen, Ishara.

It's a shame that Ishara was never actually Queen of Aldeshar, only the last King's granddaughter, otherwise we could have stuck a recognizable figurehead on a relatively unknown civilization to give some immediate flavor context to the reader. I don't think it fills a specific niche for us to promote it to FLC consideration.

Almoth (HISTORICAL – New Era [Era of New Beginnings/Industrial]) – This one occupied the space that is in between Tarabon and Arad Doman. Apparently they had a piece of Avendesora. This is also the name of the Whitecloak Nation Pedron Niall hoped to create.

Also interesting and recognizable via Almoth Plain and Pedron Niall. Not quite FLC-able, but a good post-release candidate.

Aramaella (HISTORICAL – Ten Nations [Era of Nations/Classical]) – this was supposedly a powerful one, and has a leader whose name we know (in the Lore), and authored the Compact of the Ten Nations

As the author of the Compact of Ten Nations, this strikes me as a civ that's possibly FLC-able. I'll comment more on this later when there's a lot more about it, but this strikes me as one of the few WoT flavor civs that cries out to be diplo focused. Given that and it represents a non-modern civ, it feels like this fills a lot of niches for us.

Darmovan (HISTORICAL – Free Years [Era of Freedom/Medieval or Era of Consolidation/Renaissance]) – One of the larger FY nations. The first nation that the “Second Dragon” Guaire Amalasan took control of, starting the War of the Second Dragon (eventually leading to Hawkwing's empire).

Interesting stuff, but nothing that pushes me to suggest FLC. Certainly a good post-release consideration.

The Isle of Madmen Era Unknown) – We know essentially nothing of this third continental mass... and that's part of what makes me super interested in it. It's all mysterious and dangerous. Putting a civ in would be adventurous on our part, and would provide us with a lot of flexibility in what the Uniques would be... but it would also be 100% speculative.

I so unbelievably want to do this. But I don't think it would be a good idea to omit civs that have well defined flavor in favor of one that we have to define more ourselves in the FLCs, just from a fans' completeness point of view. I would definitely like to find a way to rope these guys in later on though.

Katar – This is a city-state in the northwest of the continent during the “modern” era. It is claimed by Arad Doman, but doesn't appear to really be under that nation's control, and thus may be considered as at least semi-autonomous.. There isn't much about it in the books.

A possible post-release candidate, but being modern and not very prominent, I wouldn't be inclined toward FLC consideration. I would be all up for including it at a CS at launch though, and if we decide to make the civ later, just remove the CS.

Moreina (HISTORICAL – Free Years [Era of Freedom/Medieval or Era of Consolidation/Renaissance]) – This was a strong trade nation, occupying the lands currently a part of Tear. This includes the Stone of Tear, which led to false dragons trying to take the city (which was actually still called Tear).

Interesting, but not FLC-candidate, I'd say. Post-launch possibility.

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (HISTORICAL – After the Breaking through Free Years [Era After the Breaking/Ancient through Era of Freedom/Medieval]) – This is whatever culture/society existed in Seanchan before Luthair Consolidated it. Presumably it was a pretty developed civilization (or several) because so many odd things appear to have been inherited by the modern empire. There are a few characters we meet (e.g. Ajimbura), that appear to be of “outsider” peoples from Seanchan, and these might be a good place to start looking. It would provide us with something else from the earlier eras – but much of their flavor would be speculative on our part.

This one is awesome and something I hadn't even considered before. I feel like it sort of falls into the same category as the Isle of Madmen, though not as completely. It's something we'd have to come up with a lot of our own flavor for, and as an FLC we'd need to omit other civs that have much more clearly defined flavor from the books. This makes me think it's not a good candidate for FLC consideration, but would certainly make a great post-launch civ.

Which of the civs above should be included?
Which should be considered for post-launch release?

Answered inline again!

I would say that at this stage, we most definitely do not need to (or particularly want to, really) decide which civs, which won't be FLCs, will or won't be post-launch civs (vs CSes or just straight up left out). I figure we just want to pare it down to an FLC list, and then consider all of the other civs on their own merits later on, based on the experience we've gained from what we've made so far, at that time.



And that's all I have time for tonight! I shall return tomorrow!

 

[counterpoint]

Hmmm, we could delete the trade route on Infrastructure, then swap the Wonder from Infrastructure with the trade route on Exchange Rates? Exchange Rates is really good flavor for a trade route, but Infrastructure works too, and it eliminates the trade routes being right next to each other.

done, now two wonders on Exchange Rates and none on Infrastructure. Trade route on Infra only.

Note that on the Editor, you still have a trade route on Exchange Rates!

Also note that Exchange is now rather wonder-ful... probably fine, but we can feel free to move either of them if we need to.

I'm actually a little worried that in our general attempt to make the techs more balanced that we risk making them too uniform. We have a couple of columns that have exactly the same unlock count on all of the techs, so I'd be fine with leaving Traveling as a bit strong here.

I see what you're saying in general, but I don't quite see that applying in this particular case.

In this specific case, we have one centrally-located tech with 5 unlocks, three of them being units, and the other two being strategically significant to at least two victory paths. Right below it, we have a tech with only two unlocks, one of them being a wonder, and the other being a unit that is likely less strategically significant than at least one of the units on the other tech (Gate 2, I'd say).

To me, that's a huge difference. While I agree with what you're saying in principle, note that the one's I've been suggesting "realignment" on are those that seem particularly egregious.

I definitely recommend that something move to Mechanisms - is that ok? What would you move?

Yeah, I'd say let's keep it like CiV.

The Cooperation one is actually a difference, but in practice doesn't affect anyone. Unlocks that have no prereqs are always available to all civs (barring unique replacements and things with negative production costs, like GPs). Things on Agriculture are unlocked by that tech, it's just that all of the major civs in BNW get Agriculture for free. (Not sure if the Barbarians and City States do - I'd need to check!) I figure we might as well stick with CiV's format for this.

fine with me.

Also, proofread the summary-summary through the units. so far so good!

 

[S3rgeus]

done, now two wonders on Exchange Rates and none on Infrastructure. Trade route on Infra only.

Note that on the Editor, you still have a trade route on Exchange Rates!

Also note that Exchange is now rather wonder-ful... probably fine, but we can feel free to move either of them if we need to.

There doesn't seem to be a trade route on Exchange Rates when I open it up in the Editor. I forgot to export the tree again immediately when I posted last time though - I think I only updated DropBox an hour or so later, so maybe you saw it in between!

Agreed on all points.

I see what you're saying in general, but I don't quite see that applying in this particular case.

In this specific case, we have one centrally-located tech with 5 unlocks, three of them being units, and the other two being strategically significant to at least two victory paths. Right below it, we have a tech with only two unlocks, one of them being a wonder, and the other being a unit that is likely less strategically significant than at least one of the units on the other tech (Gate 2, I'd say).

To me, that's a huge difference. While I agree with what you're saying in principle, note that the one's I've been suggesting "realignment" on are those that seem particularly egregious.

I definitely recommend that something move to Mechanisms - is that ok? What would you move?

Yeah, that does make sense. Polearm5 onto Mechanisms?

fine with me.

Also, proofread the summary-summary through the units. so far so good!

Sounds good! More framing responses from me incoming in a bit!

 

[S3rgeus]

2 – CIVILIZATION OPTIONS – GAMEPLAY AND FLAVOR

A – INTRODUCTION
Before we jump in and actually try to settle UU's, UA's, and UB's, I think it best to have a general idea of the various design goals for each potential civ. In CiV, most civ's unique aspects tend to suggest one or more victory types. Often, there is a “primary” and a “secondary.” For example. Assyria is obviously very capable in a Domination victory because of its powerful UU and UA, but its UB and UA also lend themselves to a Scientific victory, though perhaps less simply than for Domination.

Along these lines, here I provide a conception of each civ's victory types based solely on the lore. “Settling” these can then make the design of unique characteristics much more deliberate (a Domination-oriented Tear would likely have a very different UA than a Diplomatic-oriented Tear, for example). Lastly, this will also help us keep track of the overall balance between various victory types. There's a lot of war in this series, so we might have to go out of our way to make it so every civ wasn't Domination-aimed – seeing these all laid out will help that cause.

All sounds like a good plan. I'll go into more detail on balancing victory conditions when you discuss it with numbers a bit later on!

[I should state that I have elected not to include the Last Battle victory as a type that a civ could specialize in. I think we could conceivably make that the case (there are some civs, like the Aiel, the borderlanders, etc. for which this could make sense), but to me it seems peculiar from a design perspective. I'd rather not telegraph a civ's allegiance in the LB – or even that the civ “wants” the LB to happen – any more than possible. While we could make an alignment-agnostic LB-related Uniques, still the idea of “oh, X civ is in the game... looks like we're in for an LB” seems problematic to me. It seems better that a civ be good at the LB simply because they are good at one of the other four VCs. We have elected to include Tier Three Philosophical tenets that are LB-related, but these are selected late in the game – having this kind of “selection” happen before turn one is very different.

I could see us not wanting to telegraph preferred Alignment based on civ choice, and therefore steering away from "Shadow bonuses" on civ abilities, though I do think there could be merit in those as well. But I think there should be LB-oriented civs.

This doesn't seem like it should be different from the other victory conditions. If you've got Shaka or Attila in your game, you know they're most likely going to be vying for Domination and need to plan accordingly. If you've got Gandhi or Kamehameha in your game, then you know you'll probably need to invest in some Culture production to stall their victory late game. The presence of a civ that is LB-oriented at the start of the game doesn't guarantee the presence of an LB more so than otherwise. It does mean that if they become a dominant force in the world, then that's the victory condition you expect to have to deal with them going for. Which seems entirely sensible to me, and very much the same as how all of the other victory conditions and civ biases affect the player's decisions.

It also gives us a very good outlet for quite a few civs from the lore than are militaristic in nature, but mainly in the context of the Blight and Shadowspawn. These civs (particularly modern Borderlander civs) don't fit well with the objective of trying to conquer everyone else, but do want to have powerful militaries, which is all that's good for in BNW. By making them LB-focused, we can direct that power toward something that isn't necessarily the other players.

Unfortunately this skews a lot of the content below, because we'd need to consider the LB as a victory type available for specialization, which you've not done in this pass, but I do think that it's a good idea to do so.

Related to telegraphing Alignment, I'm less sure about. I could see us wanting to avoid it because we've avoided it elsewhere. But bonuses for choosing a specific side doesn't tell the other players what that civ is actually doing in this game, it only makes it a sensible choice. And there are good flavor opportunities for civs that are known for their stance on good and evil, as well as interesting Alignment-exclusive-mechanics that we can interface their uniques with that would otherwise be the same for all players. It also lets players create obviously inverted situations of playing against type for their own amusement, which CiV tends to embrace.




Unfortunately I didn't get to write as much as I'd planned today! But I'll be back tomorrow!

 

[S3rgeus]

I'm doing these based on the lists I described above, though of course when evaluating the overall balance between victory types we'll need to consider which civs will actually make the cut.

...

Obviously, there are some components that this simply doesn't “Catch.” The Tua'tha'an, for example, might score quite high on most of these categories, but there's also a phantom “pain in the ass” category that isn't listed, that might be prohibitive. In any case, I hope something like this proves helpful.

This seems like a good ranking system to me. I've sort of short circuited this process a little with my suggestion above to start a shortlist for some civs already, mostly based on prominence and non-numerical assessment of how valuable they are. We'll see if my rankings below line up with those suggestions!

I'll also include a short bit about why I gave out a particular ranking to a civ.

Also, as I mentioned a while ago (after the framing post, but I seem to have posted a lot since then!), civs don't have explicit Ideological tendencies in BNW, but their victory condition tendencies usually pushes them towards the same Ideology in most cases.

You've mentioned here that the intent with this section was to find a mechanical balance for the civs rather than going straight with the flavor (though you've noted flavor influence in a few individual civs' descriptions). I think that given we've got more numbers in the latter parts of your posts, we may be able to make the most informed mechanical decisions about distribution of victory biases and starting biases there, so here I'll try to cover fit between the flavor and the mechanical objectives we're wanting to give the civs. As you note (somewhere) there are a lot of the civs that could be quite flexible if we really need to fill a mechanical niche later, so I think starting with where the flavor takes us and seeing what distribution we end up with is a good way to go.


I'm returning to this section after writing a lot of the below, and I'm thinking now that starting bias probably isn't as important in itself as we're considering here. What we generally want to avoid is all of the civs stacking up on the same ones, but my impression of the Firaxis ones is that they're generally aligned with the flavor of the civ in question. We are of course able to create whole new start biases, if there are new geographical features available to us. River-specific-ness isn't something BNW does (though some biases end up favoring rivers, more on that later), but we could. And you mention a Blight start bias below, which totally makes sense, particularly if a civ's uniques relate to Shadowspawn.

I'm also ending up marking quite a few modern civs low on the Placement category, because of the glut of modern civs. But obviously if we take that too far, it ceases to be the case. Probably not likely to happen, but worth keeping in mind!

The Aiel
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Cultural (perhaps Diplomatic)
Notes: Domination should certainly be the primary, for obvious reasons. Of the others, the only one that doesn't make much sense is Scientific. Cultural could make sense, especially if their UA tied to captured Great Works or something (“the Fifth&#8221. The Aiel seem particularly “inward” facing, so Diplo doesn't make much sense... but something like the “Fifth” could also provide a lot of gold, theoretically, which could lead to diplo victories.

Size: Wide – lots of settlements, with very few being large.
Starting Bias – Desert
Philosophy Tendency – Liberation

This seems like a good assessment of the Aiel - Domination then Culture is a good, flavorful combo for them. I could see them being an LB civ, but it doesn't cry out for it, possibly as a secondary. And a primary as Domination has some useful mechanical overlap.

The Aiel
Prominence: 5 - the Aiel are all over the books, very well culturally defined and with tons of important characters
Flavor: 5 - They've got a lot of unique stuff to them which should make pulling out uniques very easy.
Mechanics: 2 - I don't see the Aiel particularly exposing new mechanics for us or interfacing with ones that will be particularly underserved, unless we do something super cool with Wise Ones and T'a'r.
Placement: 4 - Modern day, which lets them down a bit, but still one of the only known-for-deserts civs we have.

Altara
Primary: Cultural
Secondary: Scientific (perhaps Diplomatic, not Domination)
Notes: Cultural is chosen as the primary, mostly because of the emphasis placed in the books on this civ's society (as opposed to its military or its economy). While the dueling thing is neat, I don't think Domination makes sense – these guys didn't last long against the Seanchan and don't usually have a standing army. I mention Scientific as a secondary because it appears to be a “free society”, which might foster such things – similar arguments could be used for Diplomatic, though.

Size: Tall (the royal family rarely controlled much solidly outside of the capital), although we do have a rather long list of village and town names for Altara)
Starting Bias – None or Coastal
Philosophy Tendency – Authority (possibly Liberation)

I may have been giving Altara a bad rap up above, though I'd still put them on the chopping block as potentially-not-FLC. I think the fact that it doesn't particularly call out for any of the victory conditions also makes it less useful. Culture seems the most likely, but I don't feel like the flavor drives us to definitely do that.

If we aren't uber short on Science civs, I'd be inclined to go for Diplo second.

Altara
Prominence: 4 - Probably Altara's biggest positive, readers will be familiar with it and many characters from it.
Flavor: 3 - There's a lot about them culturally as a people, but not so much about them structurally as a nation, or stuff that maps well into CiV concepts.
Mechanics: 1 - They don't seem to offer us anything we don't have elsewhere.
Placement: 1 - Modern, Authority, normal-ish Westlands folk. There could be a niche for coastal which might make this a 2, but a lot of the Westlands civs were on the coast.

Amadicia
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Cultural
Notes: The above assumes this is Whitecloak-associated Amadicia. If not... we have much less to go on. Domination is obvious, due to their military presence. Cultural seems somewhat like the only remaining option – Science and Diplomacy both seem somewhat antithetical to the Children. The “Secondary” one is likely a distant second to the primary. Also note that a Whitecloak-themed Amadicia also lends itself well to Path or Alignment-related Uniques.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – None or Hills
Philosophy Tendency – Oppression (possibly Authority)

Like I mentioned above, I would like to try the flavor approach for both a Children and non-Children Amadicia. Domination seems like a good one, as does Culture.

Children Amadicia
Prominence: 3 - Despite being modern, Amadicia itself is often outshone by the Children.
Flavor: 3 - The Children also appear prominently in the books and adapting their known structure to the civ helps here.
Mechanics: 4 - A good civ for interfacing with Paths to the Light. In fact, the perfect one.
Placement: 2 - Modern, generic terrain, only Oppression really helps them out.

Non-Children Amadicia
Prominence: 3 - Same country as above
Flavor: 2 - Not nearly as much to go on, saved from being a 1 only by existing during the books, so we have more ancillary interactions with it.
Mechanics: 1 - Nothing really stands out.
Placement: 2 - Same as above.

So Children Amadicia clearly provides more in this ranking.

Andor
Primary: Any (perhaps best as Diplomatic or Domination)
Secondary: Any
Notes: Since Andor is essentially the central nation in the books, I can imagine a UA/UB setup that justifies essentially any configuration. I'm not suggesting all be actually equally viable for the player – I'm just suggesting that we could choose any of them and they'd work fine with the lore. Domination is easy since Andor is a large and powerful country, but we may be saddled with too many Dom-centered civs as is. Diplomatic makes a lot of sense due to the wealth of the nation and the political prowess of Elayne (for example). Scientific makes sense for similar reasons. Cultural could work, though this one is perhaps the least viable.

Size: probably Wide due to territory – or at least wide borders (some of the cities themselves are quite large)
Starting Bias – none or Plains (country in general) or Hills (Caemlyn)
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

I feel like Diplo should be Andor's focus after Elayne took the Sun Throne in Cairhien through diplomacy. But there are certainly other considerations. Andor as a country is known to be one of the stronger ones. LB as one of Andor's victory conditions could also be worth considering, since its forces played an important part in the books' LB, and the characters who spearheaded the LB were primarily from there. Though all of that could be seen as more books-timeline than properties of Andor as a civ.

Andor
Prominence: 5 - It doesn't get much more prominent than this!
Flavor: 3 - We have a lot of very specific Andor flavor, but a lot also falls into the generic modern Westlands category.
Mechanics: 2 - I don't see much in new mechanics here, beyond some specific callouts to things that we saw in the books, like Alum, Dragons, etc.
Placement: 1 - Modern, generic terrain, Authority.

The Atha'an Miere
Primary: Diplomatic
Secondary: Domination (perhaps Cultural)
Notes: Essentially, I see the Sea Folk as trade-centered. Consequently, this suggests a Diplomatic victory. That said, as the Sea Folk keep the Tower at arms length (in the books), so that would seem to make their diplo victory have more to do with gold, and less to do with the tower. The lore certainly supports Diplomacy, however (Aes Sedai aside), because of their negotiation prowess. With vast wealth, coupled with probably the best UU ships in the game, Domination is an intuitive choice mechanically, though one that doesn't perhaps jive 100% with the lore. Cultural can certainly make sense as well. Scientific is the only one that doesn't make much sense to me.

Size: wide
Starting Bias – Coast
Philosophy Tendency – Liberation

I think Diplo and Culture are the way to go here (in that order) - I never saw the Sea Folk navy as something that other civs were scared of militarily in the books.

Sea Folk
Prominence: 4 - Very prominent, but not quite the setting of the books.
Flavor: 4 - A lot of unique stuff, but we know unfortunately little about their actual settlements.
Mechanics: 4 - As a navy-focused civ, they can have uniques where few other WoT civs can.
Placement: 4 - One of our very few actually naval-focused civilizations, and they're not Authority or generic terrain. They are modern though.

The Sea Folk have done pretty well!

Cairhien
Primary: Scientific (perhaps Diplomatic)
Secondary: Diplomatic (perhaps Scientific)
Notes: The Scientific victory seems reasonable in part because of the Academy set up there. Additionally, it seems to be quite “developed” among the nations (incomplete Topless Towers notwithstanding). Diplomatic certainly makes sense, both because of The Game of Houses, and the country's trade focus. I choose Scientific here as primary in part because I feel there will be few opportunities to do so with other civs (understanding that I've contradicted my assertion that I'm doing this based on flavor, not balance).

Size: Tall, though this could be simply due to a lack of representation of their other cities in the books.
Starting Bias – Hills
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Science is a good call on this one, because we're otherwise relatively short on Science civs, it seems. Probably due to the slow technological progress in WoT. Diplo as second sounds good.

Cairhien
Prominence: 4 - Very major in the books, possibly a 5.
Flavor: 3 - Despite being quite central, there isn't tons of unique stuff, but I doubt we'd have trouble finding some.
Mechanics: 1 - They don't seem to offer much other Westlands civs don't have.
Placement: 1 - Modern, generic terrain, etc. Could be improved if we took their proximity to the Wastes to affect their starting bias, though we probably wouldn't want to go full desert.

Surprisingly low scores, really, for such a central civ.

Illian
Primary: Cultural (perhaps Domination)
Secondary: Domination (perhaps Cultural)
Notes: I choose cultural as the primary because we'd discussed that Illian's ties to the Hunt for the Horn could provide it with big culture/prestige boosts (though again I know that I claimed above that I was doing this solely based on flavor...). Domination makes a good deal of sense here because Illian is somewhat the “800 pound gorilla” in the south. Either could be primary, but once again I'm concerned there are too many Domination-centered civs.
Of note is that Illian apparently doesn't have a standing navy – despite its major-port status, a military naval-related unique is somewhat against-lore.

Size: unspecified, but potentially Tall due to the large size of the city itself.
Starting Bias – Coast or Hills or Marsh
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

I'm finding that in our quest to have less Domination focus, Domination hasn't actually come up that much so far. I'd be inclined to go for a Domination Illian, since they're known to be militarily aggressive (along with Tear) in the books, as you mention. And Culture as a second because of the Horn is a good call.

Illian
Prominence: 4 - Also very central to the books.
Flavor: 3 - Like Cairhien, not tons of stuff that's unique to them.
Mechanics: 1 - They don't seem to offer much other Westlands civs don't as well. Nothing underserved anyway.
Placement: 2 - Improved a bit by being coastal, but otherwise modern and Authority.

Manetheren
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Any
Notes: Manetheren is difficult because we don't know all that much about it. Domination makes sense as either the primary or the secondary, due to the emphasis in the books on its great generals and valiant battles. Of the others, I could imagine any of them working, and Domination could easily be the secondary option.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – River (is this possible?) or Hills
Philosophy Tendency – Liberation or Authority (The Queen was an Aes Sedai – the implications of this should be explored)

Domination seems like a good call. LB seems like it would make a good second, or possibly even first, given Manetheren's specific demise and known opposition to the Shadow. (Not suggesting their uniques would necessarily be Light-focused, the bonus could apply to both sides and playing Shadow would just be playing against flavor intentionally, but as I mention above, I think a Light-specific bonus isn't something we should rule out completely.) Particularly something that affects the TW would make a lot of sense. (Which I generally factor in as "part of the LB victory" - the same way gold/CSes into Diplo or Great Works into Culture.) Or possibly Culture as a second, given how strongly their cultural influence has stood the test of time into the era of the books.

I'd also go for Liberation for the Philosophy, since we defined Authority before as deference to the Tower, which having an Aes Sedai as Queen wouldn't be. Scratch that, an Aes Sedai Queen could still respect the authority of the Tower. Still, I feel like Authority is more about the modern Westlands doctrine of non-direct diplomacy from Aes Sedai and the opinion of channeling that they foster. An Aes Sedai Queen doesn't quite line up with that.

Manetheren
Prominence: 4 - I'd say the main characters refer to it often enough that readers will recognize it quickly.
Flavor: 3 - Not too much, but not a complete absence either.
Mechanics: 3 - A good opportunity for interfacing with Alignment mechanics.
Placement: 4 - An underserved time period and still recognizable as a civ.

Seanchan
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Scientific
Notes: Domination is the easy answer – they will probably be among the best military civs in the game. Scientific makes a lot of sense as a secondary, since they are relatively advanced. Additionally, both Diplo and Cultural seem to make little sense given the country's insular nature. One could make a case for culture, though, since they are quite unique and far-reaching.

Size: Wide
Starting Bias – None/Any
Philosophy Tendency – Oppression

I would be tempted to go for Culture second actually, because their Culture seems to be fairly aggressive when they return to the Westlands. They're isolated by geography before that, but their ways and customs start to affect the peoples of the lands they claim very quickly. It also lines up well with Culture being more aggressive in BNW than it was before that expansion - where spreading your influence isn't necessarily peaceful.

Domination first totally makes sense.

Also they are very much not an LB civ, given they didn't even believe in Shadowspawn when they first arrived in the Westlands and had to be coerced into helping at all. They're the definition of Neutral there.

Seanchan
Prominence: 5 - The bad guys - everybody loves to hate them.
Flavor: 5 - They've got all of the unique things. All of them.
Mechanics: 5 - They can potentially twist around the channeling system and make a very unique playstyle out of it.
Placement: 4 - Modern, which cost them a point, though they have been around for a while compared to some other Westlands civs. They've got their own continent, which lets us be flexible with start biases (might want to just go with avoid tundra).

The Seanchan, the well fleshed out civ with all of the flavor!

Shienar
Primary: Domination or Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: Shienar is tricky because, like other Borderlanders, they have a very militarized society, which would obviously suggest Domination. However, their military appears to be mostly defensive in nature, and Shadowspawn-focused. Shienarans appear willing to sacrifice their own lives in the defense of the Westlands, which doesn't fit well with the take-over-the-world goal. Thus, we could make their militancy be in support of some other victory type, though none are obviously prescribed by the lore.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – Hills or Tundra or Blight (?)
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

This is the one I'd say LB as primary makes a lot of sense. Shienaran society is generally centered around dealing with Shadowspawn, and we get to see a lot of that in the early books. Domination could be second, or possibly even Diplo, given that the Borderlander nations had that whole pact to fight the Shadow thing going.

Shienar
Prominence: 4 - Very prominent in the early books, less so later on.
Flavor: 3 - Shadow-dealing-with stuff gives them some uniqueness.
Mechanics: 3 - Related to the flavor score, this is one of our main candidates for interacting with the Alignment system (Shadowspawn, Alignment, TW, LB).
Placement: 3 - Modern and Authority, but one of the few places actually up towards the "edge of the map". A tundra start bias would be cool, or it would totally work for us to make a new "Blight" start bias.

Tarabon
Primary: Diplomatic
Secondary: Cultural/Scientific
Notes: Tarabon's trade wealth and interesting political structures suggest to me a Diplomatic victory, though I think Culture and Science can also be in contention. I don't see anything to suggest Domination.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – Coast or Plains
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

I could see Science as a second off the back of the Illuminators having their "main home" there, and the Illuminators being one of the largest organization in WoT that's more real world invention-y than channeling related. Diplo first seems like it could be a good one. We could even stretch to Science first if we're short on Science civs.

Tarabon
Prominence: 4 - Fairly prominent
Flavor: 3 - Not a lot to go on here, surprisingly
Mechanics: 1 - I don't see them giving us much.
Placement: 2 - Tanchico is on the coast, which is a little useful. Otherwise not much.

Tear
Primary: Diplomatic
Secondary: Domination
Notes: Tear is frequently described as a wealthy nation in the Westlands. This, coupled with the fact that their society seems to slide along the borders of various philosophies (they cooperate somewhat with Aes Sedai, but distrust channelers, for instance), suggests to me a Diplomatic victory. They are also described as aggressive and somewhat entitled, which suggests to me Domination.

Size: unspecified or Tall
Starting Bias – Coast
Philosophy Tendency – Authority (conceivably Oppression)

I feel like we have a relatively high percentage of Diplo civs, but that's just an impression, not an actual count, so we'll see later. With that in mind I could see us going with Domination first, Diplo second, given their ongoing war/skirmishes with Illian. Or maybe Culture in the running given their unique stance on channelers in the Westlands that has persevered despite the Tower's intentions.

Tear
Prominence: 4 - Good and prominent.
Flavor: 3 - Not a lot, structurally, that makes them stand out.
Mechanics: 2 - Also not really much here, beyond the specific callouts we gain from them being around during the books.
Placement: 3 - Better than other Westlands civs, as they're on the coast and have a unique-ish channeler outlook.


More coming now, I'm just gonna keep writing for the next post!

 

[counterpoint]

There doesn't seem to be a trade route on Exchange Rates when I open it up in the Editor. I forgot to export the tree again immediately when I posted last time though - I think I only updated DropBox an hour or so later, so maybe you saw it in between!

that's probably what happened!

Yeah, that does make sense. Polearm5 onto Mechanisms?

That one certainly seems logical, as far as the flavor. But is this a situation where we want to keep Pol off the bottom, and more accessable? If so, maybe we could put the "Airport" there or something? Or, perhaps Gate 2. I know both of those fit well with the "Traveling" flavor, but they can also probably be stretched to be fine on Mechanisms.

Also, incidentally, in both cases, Pol 5 (and Pol 6) break the no-direct-ancestry-of-Polearm-units streak. I suppose that isn't a problem?

This appears to be the last "issue" with the tech tree. I'll upload new versions of things once this is settled.

EDIT

this is actually in response to your Civ/Uniques Framing responses:

You called out a few of the "unlikely" civs as actually being of interest to you. Should you "score" them now, as you've been doing with the other civs? Or should we do that later? Or, do you need me to do a "flavor dive" of them to get more info (don't think there'll be much)?

 

[S3rgeus]

C – CIVS FROM CATEGORY 2

Leaving this quote block here to clearly delineate categories 1 and 2!

Arad Doman
Primary: Scientific/Diplomatic
Secondary: Scientific/Diplomatic/Cultural
Notes: Due to their merchant prowess and the presence of the Terhana Library, these two options both seem fitting for this civ. I am not sure which is more appropriate. The festivals may suggest a Cultural path as well.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – Coast or Plains
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Good call on Science here. I could also see Domination here, given their ongoing fight with Tarabon over Almoth Plain. Diplo off of the mercantilism is a good one too though.

Arad Doman
Prominence: 3 - Not as much as some other modern, civs, but still very recognizable.
Flavor: 3 - Not too much unique about them, but as a modern civ we have more from the books' events.
Mechanics: 1 - I don't really see any unique mechanical things here.
Placement: 2 - Coast and plains (rather than the more generic grassland stuff everyone else in the Westlands is on) both help it a little.

Arafel
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: We know relatively little about Arafel. Since they are Borderlanders, they feature the same possibilities (and problems) with them being tooled towards Domination as Shienar.

Size: unspecified
Starting Bias – Hills or Tundra or Blight (?)
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Like Shienar, Arafel could be an LB focused civ. The main risk here would be that, if we introduce more Borderlander civs over time then we don't want them all to be LB focused. Then again, they make very good LB-victory-focusing candidates, because it lines up really well with their flavor.

Arafel
Prominence: 2 - Very sparsely mentioned, despite being modern day.
Flavor: 2 - Not much to go on, but we do know a few characters from there.
Mechanics: 2 - Not much new, though lines up well with an LB focus.
Placement: 1 - There are other, better modern Borderlander civs.

Aridhol
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: We don't have much to go on for Aridhol. Most of what we do know is concerned with its transformation into Shadar Logoth. What we do know doesn't suggest much regarding Victory Conditions.

Size: unspecified – probably Tall
Starting Bias – None or Forest
Philosophy Tendency – Unknown

I could see us having LB as one of Aridhol's focuses, but making it more about their generation of Alignment, and particularly during the TW. (Unlike modern Borderlander civs who have LB focuses that would probably be more centered around advantages in the LB itself.) This way we can wink and nod at the Shadar Logoth transformation in this civ's structure. It also provides us a unique civ in that it has a specific flavor connection to the Cleansing of Saidin, which none of the others do.

Aridhol
Prominence: 2 - Recognizable, but overshadowed by Shadar Logoth.
Flavor: 2 - Not much about them before the Logoth-ness, as you mention.
Mechanics: 4 - Potentially a lot if we take in some unique Alignment interactions and Cleansing interactions.
Placement: 4 - Like Manetheren, they're from long ago but still have a name fans will know.

Far Madding
Primary: Diplomatic or any (not Domination)
Secondary: any (not Domination)
Notes: Most of what we know of Far Madding concerns the Guardian. Since it is a trade hub and is relatively wealthy, it could make sense for Diplomatic victories.

Size: Tall – Far Madding is a city-state, with a few satellite towns.
Starting Bias – Plains
Philosophy Tendency – Authority (possibly Oppression)

Interesting that I wouldn't have considered Far Madding for FLC-ness. Not that I don't like the idea, it just never really occurred to me. Probably partially because I think they were, like Mayene, technically a CS in the books, and if elevating a CS to a civ, I would go for Mayene first. Diplo seems like a good primary, but like some others, the flavor doesn't really force us towards and one condition. I could see us putting Science in as a secondary, given they exist without channeling, which probably affects non-magical progress.

Far Madding
Prominence: 3 - Known but not too much.
Flavor: 2 - With The Guardian's flavor tied up elsewhere (presumably), they don't have a lot left.
Mechanics: 2 - Not much, unless they have some kind of channeling connection.
Placement: 2 - Modern and generic terrain, but a different channeler outlook.

Ghealdan
Primary: Domination (Prophet-centric) or not Domination (non-Prophet-centric)
Secondary: Any
Notes: Ghealdan is tricky because of the aforementioned decision to feature a Prophet-controlled Ghealdan, or a peaceful (and mostly insignificant) Ghealdan that existed for most of its history. A Prophet-centric Ghealdan suggests a Domination- (and Path-) oriented “Barbarian civ.” If we go with “normal” Ghealdan, we have relatively little to go off of – not likely to be Domination, though, as their armies are traditionally small.

Size: possibly Tall (described as relatively small)
Starting Bias – Hills or Forest
Philosophy Tendency – Oppression (possibly Liberation!)

Interesting, definitely! I would like to, like Amadicia, try both a Prophet and non-Prophet approach. I mentioned this already, but it does seem quite a shame not to have Alliandre as a leader some day, given how much we see her in the books and she is a queen.

Prophet Ghealdan
Prominence: 4 - A part of several character arcs in the books.
Flavor: 3 - We can make the Prophet uniqueness go a ways.
Mechanics: 4 - Like Amadicia, one of the only civs that the flavor tells us should focus on Paths. Also could uniquely interact with the "Barbarians" since they're Dragonsworn.
Placement: 1 - Nothing unusual here.

Non-Prophet Ghealdan
Prominence: 4 - Same as above, possibly even boosted by how much we know Alliandre.
Flavor: 2 - Not as much.
Mechanics: 2 - Not much new here, though we could nod to the Prophet-ness without it necessarily being led by Masema.
Placement: 1 - Same as above.

There's also something of an argument to eventually having both.

Hawkwing's Empire/Shandalle
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Diplomatic
Notes: Domination and Diplomacy both feel fitting for Hawkwing's empire. I suppose any of the others could work, as well, but these two stand out as the best options (though I can see Diplomatic being primary as well).
Obviously the name of this era is worth discussing. It doesn't appear to ever be named. However, Shandalle is the nation in which Hawkwing was born, and where he rose to power, so it could be said that it was that nation's empire that he founded.

Size: Wide (Shandalle is relatively small, but the empire is quite large)
Starting Bias – None
Philosophy Tendency – Authority (possibly Oppression – Hawkwing's relationship with the Tower was strained)

Originally I didn't think this would work, but I've certainly come around since then. Hawkwing fills a lot of niches for us, so I like him as an FLC. I'd also go for Shandalle as the civ name, just to avoid naming it after the leader, which we don't seem to do anywhere else.

Shandalle
Prominence: 4 - Not modern, but very prominent for an older civ.
Flavor: 3 - A bit difficult to dig up structural flavor that's unique to them.
Mechanics: 5 - Very clear victory intentions, and as you mention elsewhere, uniquely placed to interact with the Governor system. And potentially the Tower too, given Hawkwing's siege of it.
Placement: 5 - A recognizable and effective civ in that massive hole in the middle of our timeline, where nothing seems to come from!

Kandor
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: Quite little is established about Kandor that sets it apart from the other Borderlander nations, so it has the same problematic relationship with Domination aims. The nation does seem to have a significant trade network, which could suggest a gold-funded Diplomatic victory.

Size: Tall (Chachin is described as large, and the country isn't particularly big)
Starting Bias – Plains or Tundra or Blight (?)
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Basically everything I said for Arafel applies to Kandor, they're very much alike. In fact, I'll just give them the same scores for the same reasons.

Kandor
Prominence: 2
Flavor: 2
Mechanics: 2
Placement: 1

Malkier
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: Malkier has the same challenges as any Borderlander nation. Domination could be a good choice because of the legendary prowess of its warriors... but it was completely destroyed. Other than that, culture seems like it could be a possibility.

Size: unknown (possibly Tall)
Starting Bias – Tundra or Blight (?)
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

If we were to add a second Borderlander civ as an FLC, I'd say Malkier would be the way to go. They're very recognizable through Lan and are positioned very well to focus on the LB victory. They could also potentially do Culture as a second, given how many of their people persisted with its customs elsewhere beyond the death of the kingdom itself.

Prominence: 4 - Very recognizable.
Flavor: 3 - Not too much unique to them, but still some flavor.
Mechanics: 3 - Their death at the hands of the Shadow could make some great LB interactions.
Placement: 4 - Given that they're not a modern civ since they die before the books start, even if shortly, this gives a feel of filling the past in a bit more. Also great candidates for a Blight/Tundra start.

Mayene
Primary: Diplomacy
Secondary: Any (not Domination)
Notes: The Diplomatic victory path is an obvious one because of both the City-State's wealth, as well as the legendary diplomatic prowess of its Firsts (Berelain and those before her). Either Culture or Science seem like viable second options, though there isn't clear flavor preference for one over the other.

Size: Tall (maybe one city or Venice-like)
Starting Bias – Coast or Marsh or Jungle
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Another I wouldn't have considered as FLC, but totally a good one to consider. If we're going to elevate any CS, I'd say this is the one to do. (And Berelain is awesome. I've mentioned she's my favorite character, right?)

Prominence: 4 - Very prominent.
Flavor: 3 - A lot of good diplo flavor, but it kind of ends there?
Mechanics: 3 - Could definitely have some CS-relevant abilities, which I don't see us having elsewhere.
Placement: 2 - I don't think jungle start is as important for them, because Illian, Tear, and Altara are all on about the same latitude (Illian is actually further South on the map) and could have some jungle. Otherwise they're modern, etc.

Murandy
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: Murandy is difficult because we know very little of it, and most of the characterization we do see does not paint it in a good light – what exactly is it good at? Wealth may inspire Diplomacy, but the ruler is frequently described as nearly powerless. Domination suffers for the same issue. Perhaps Culture and Science are the only options, due to process of elimination.

Size: unknown, perhaps Tall
Starting Bias – Hills
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Probably not a good FLC candidates for reasons we've both covered before. They've got some flavor, but not much.

Prominence: 2 - Surprisingly low for a modern civ.
Flavor: 2 - Not much beyond some passing references.
Mechanics: 1 - I don't see any specific mechanics they offer.
Placement: 1 - Modern, generic terrain, blah.

Saldaea
Primary: Any
Secondary: Any
Notes: Saldaea prompts the same questions as all the Borderlander civs. Most of the attention paid the nation in the books is in characterization of its people (e.g. Faile), not its lands or institutions. Also mentioned are some luxuries they export. Neither of these suggest specific Victory paths particularly strongly.

Size: Any
Starting Bias – Coast, Hills or Plains or Forest or Tundra or Blight (?) … avoid Desert/Jungle?
Philosophy Tendency – Authority

Like Arafel and Kandor before it, Saldaea is a bit general-Borderlander-y. It gains a bit of prominence from Faile and Davram Bashere, and Queen Tenobia, but otherwise has all the same issues. I'd go for Sheinar and Malkier first.

Prominence: 3 - Faile and Davram Bashere, and Queen Tenobia boost it a little over Kandor and Arafel.
Flavor: 2
Mechanics: 2
Placement: 1

Same reasons for the last 3.

Shaido Aiel
Primary: Domination
Secondary: Culture (perhaps Science)
Notes: Most of the characteristics of the Aiel in general can apply to the Shaido. If we decide to include the Shaido as a specific civ, though, we are doing so in obvious representation of the Shaido of the very late Third Age. So the sneakiness and warmongering nature make something like Diplomacy a non-option. Culture seems like the likely secondary aim, if only due to process of elimination.

Size: Wide
Starting Bias – Desert
Philosophy Tendency – Liberation

This is one of the civs that falls into one of the phantom categories for me, in that I don't feel like the Shaido are a discrete civilization for long enough in WoT history to warrant omitting another major civ from launch. Not to say we wouldn't include the Shaido later, but it seems like an oversight to do so off the bat.

Anywho, holding that aside for a moment, their rankings:

Shaido Aiel
Prominence: 3 - Very prominent for a short time, but I'd say less so than other visible modern civs because of how short a time that is, by comparison.
Flavor: 2 - They overlap quite a bit with the general Aiel in this department.
Mechanics: 3 - This could be a uniquely Shadow-y civ, which could be interesting. Or possibly Dragon-related, nodding to Couladin.
Placement: 3 - Modern, but desert, like the Aiel. But they're only really separate from the rest of the Aiel when they're outside the Waste in the books.

Shara
Primary: Any (not Diplomatic)
Secondary: Any (not Diplomatic)
Notes: Shara is interesting because everything we know about it comes from interactions very late in the third age – either in aMoL or in “River of Souls.” Domination could be a possible path, due to the presumed power of the country, but they are typically isolationists by design, which is somewhat contradictory to that aim. Culture and Science could be fine options. Diplomatic seems unlikely due to their lack of interaction with any other civilizations (I suppose the same could be true about Culture).

Size: Any (likely Wide)
Starting Bias – None
Philosophy Tendency – Liberation (possibly Oppression!)

Like Hawkwing, I originally wasn't considering these guys, but they do fill a lot of niches for us! They could also have a cool, non-Borderlander relationship with the LB. And also potentially quite a Shadow-y one.

Shara
Prominence: 3 - Like the Shaido, we only really see them for a short time.
Flavor: 5 - They're very different from most other civs.
Mechanics: 4 - Like the Seanchan, a lot of opportunity to interact with the channeling system.
Placement: 3 - They've been around a long time (right?) so could be considered non-modern. We also don't really know much about their geography?

Tuatha'an
Primary: Cultural/Diplomatic
Secondary: Diplomatic/Cultural
Notes: The most important consideration is that the Tuatha'an should absolutely not be steered towards a Domination Victory. Science could be possible, but their nomadic nature makes that seem unlikely. Cultural Victories seem the most in-tune with their flavor, but I can imagine an economically-driven Diplomatic Victory as well.

Size: Wide
Starting Bias: None
Philosophy Tendency – Authority (possibly Liberation)

For reasons I've mentioned already, I wouldn't be inclined to use the Tuatha'an as an FLC, but I do love the idea of having them as a civ eventually.

In terms of their victories, Culture definitely seems like a good primary. I would also sort of be inclined to go for Science as a secondary. Our innovations could be framed by them as "look at this cool stuff we brought from elsewhere" which would make a lot of sense.

Tuatha'an
Prominence: 4 - Very prominent
Flavor: 4 - Quite a bit of uniqueness to them.
Mechanics: 5 - The Tuatha'an could see us potentially invent a new way to actually play the game. That sounds a bit melodramatic, but a completely non-war civ would be a totally new experience in CiV, and if we did it right, a really, really freakin' cool one.
Placement: 2 - Modern and nothing particular about their location that makes them stand out, beyond the nomadic nature.

(note, again, that civs from category 3 are not covered in detail here. They can be, if it is desired, on a case-by-case basis)

I think of all of the category 3 civs, the only one I'd like to promote into this discussion of possible FLC candidacy is Aramaelle (note, it seems to end with an 'e' in the Companion:

Aramaelle
Primary: Diplomatic
Secondary: Any (Possibly LB)
Notes: As the creator of the Compact of Ten Nations, and given that flavor's importance in WoTMod, Aramaella can interface uniquely with that diplomacy process. They're also another Ten Nations Era civ, which gives us some more content toward the front of the tree. We also know that its capital is where Fal Dara is in the modern day Westlands, so it's close to the Blight, and could therefore be LB-ish.

Size: Probably Tall
Starting Bias: Tundra or Blight (possibly leaning Tundra, since the Blight wouldn't have been as big back then)

Flavor bits:
Some city names - Mafal Dadaranell, Rhahime Naille, Anolle'sanna, Cuebiyarsande
Creator of the Compact
Leader - Queen Mabriam en Shereed - was an Aes Sedai and a Queen, possibly ta'veren
Mabriam's Day - feast possibly named after the above Queen that is observed in modern Westlands

I would avoid giving a ranking and explaining the civ in the same post, but I think the time we'd lose on this civ needing to go back and forth one more time (and taking it out of sync with the others) is more of an issue, so here are my rankings!

Aramaelle
Prominence: 1 - Who's this now?
Flavor: 2 - An Aes Sedai Queen and the Compact author gives us some flavor for this, but not as much for UB/UU/UI
Mechanics: 4 - My main reason for elevating for consideration - well positioned for unique interactions with the Compact itself. (A UA that changes votes or something.)
Placement: 5 - Possibly the only "northern" civ we could place in non-Blight Tundra specifically. Also from an underserved time period.

3 – CIV CHARACTERISTICS: GENERAL

A – INTRODUCTION

...

We can choose to follow or abandon the model set by BNW, but if we do so, we should do so knowingly.

I think one of the core roles of the start biases is to capture the flavorful feel of the civilization in question, which I mentioned above. It's also something we can use to ensure that civs who are dependent on certain geographical features as a part of their uniques (buildings that can only be built near rivers or mountains, units that are good against Shadowspawn, which are found near the Blight, unique naval units which they need coastal cities to build, etc.) don't get stuck with part of their uniques unavailable due to randomness at the beginning of the game.

It's also worth calling out that if the game is unable to find a suitable start location (one with a few resources and favorable terrain yields) for a civ in its given start bias, then it will totally drop them elsewhere, and where that is will be random. This obviously happens 100% of the time if the selected map type doesn't provide for a given bias. (Coastal on Great Plains, for example.)

Victory conditions are totally on point. As I mentioned above, Ideology biases in BNW aren't really a separate thing, they're generally derived from victory biases and assessments of the world at the time.

B - VICTORY CONDITIONS

The following is totally subjective. Not being an expert on CiV strategy (and having not played all the civs yet), I have stolen these assessments from Zigzagzigal's excellent guides on the Steam Community forums (for example: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=326390646 ).

...

Final Counts:
Domination – 26
Diplomatic – 8
Scientific – 7
Scientific – 8

The abundance of Domination, when counted out, is staggering. This is interesting because of the aforementioned “bias” in the books towards showing us a lot of military might that had left me inclined towards putting forth a large number of Domination-oriented civ designs above.

I'll start with that Zigzagzigal's guide is super impressive, that's a ton of content! And also that the skew towards Domination is definitely very significant. I think there may be good reason for that though! More below!

It's also interesting to note that the other three VCs are very close to balanced in terms of their spread throughout the civs.

...

Do we want Domination to be the most common “primary” VC, or should we design our civs with “true” balance in mind, and be ok with some “overflow” that may occur into Domination?

I think your first point definitely plays a lot into it. I think another big reason for this is that Zigzagzigal's guide is a strategy guide, rather than a design guide. So he's going through all of the best ways for a human to utilize the civilizations. And, as we've mentioned before, the CiV tactical AI is terrible at actual turn-by-turn tactics, which means combat heavily favors the human player. I'd say this skews the results in favor of Domination, because even a single UU or relevant ability gives an already advantaged human player even more to tip them toward Domination. I'd say if the AI was better, or were this a multiplayer guide, then we'd see a better distribution as some of those Domination civs became relatively more effective at what is currently their secondary victory types.

Firaxis may have intended some of the civs that were selected as Domination to head towards other victory types (notably IMO, Arabia, Assyria, China, Germany, Persia, and Poland). Still, that does leave it Domination-heavy. And I think part of that is that the remaining civs flavorfully do lean towards Domination. so I'd say allowing ourselves to be led appropriately by the flavor to a greater extent than we might have otherwise could be a good call here.

In any case, balance between the other three conditions does seem to be a stable part of BNW. Should we preserve that?

This seems like a good idea in general, we don't want a lack of any certain victory type among the civs we have available.

Ultimately, how many of each victory specialization should exist in the mod?

This is very interesting to consider in an abstract way, and compare to the flavor and specific choices that we have above.

With 14 civs divided among 5 victory conditions, it would make some sense to have 3 of each for 4 VCs, and 2 for the last one. But I think there will be some civs that don't necessarily focus directly on one of the victory conditions, and their focus is more on specific mechanics of the game.

Civs in BNW I'd say are like this are: America, Austria, Byzantium, Celts, Inca, Mayans, Shoshone, Spain, and Sweden. While these civs have bonuses that do help them towards certain victory conditions, the main purpose of at least some portion of their uniques is to change the way the player interacts with a certain subsystem of the game, providing them with new opportunities to pursue a variety of strategies with them.

So that makes me think a simple 4 groups of 3 and 1 group of 2 for the victory conditions is not quite what we want. Something more like 5 groups of 2 and 4 mechanic-specific civs might be more appropriate? But again, I feel that as long as we avoid obvious imbalances, our civ selection can be driven quite significantly by flavor and "feel", because that's a big part of what players want and get out of a civilization's uniques.

C - START BIASES

As I mention above, I don't think start biases are necessarily as important as we're considering them here. I think their primary purpose is to make sure the player has an experience that "feels" like an individual civ. The main mechanical justification is probably, which I mention above, trying to make civs' uniques that are geographically sensitive useless less often.

As long as all of the civs don't have the same one (they're not all trying to be in the desert or tundra, when there will only be a few starting locations of that type on any given map), then we won't have many problems. And of course a start bias of none just means the civ will be placed wherever the game assesses is a good starting location after all of the "picky civs" with biases have been placed.

I should state that I don't necessarily grasp the mechanical implications of Starting Biases, beyond the obvious sense. Also, I don't quite understand the significance of the “avoid” biases – e.g., what makes “avoid” tundra worth choosing over “near X” instead (and why that would be more suitable for babylon, for instance, than a “near desert” or “rivers” or “plains” start bias). I also have no idea what happens to Starting Biases in weird map types (e.g. no coast, no desert, etc.)

I think the "avoid" ones are there for civs that are notably flavorfully dissonant with such a start position, but don't have any other particular requirements. This lets them be placed in appropriate locations but makes it easier to use them to fill in the map after "pickier civs" have been placed already.

And of course, if no starting locations are available for a civ's bias on the generated map, that bias will be ignored. It just "tries the bias first."

Can we combine/stack them (e.g., start near coast and plains)? Is this a bad idea? This would obviously affect the ratios above.

I think stacking them in a logical "and" fashion would make them too restrictive and unlikely to be filled correctly in a lot of the randomly generated maps.

I believe there are fallback biases for some of the civs, when their primary starting bias is unavailable. I do seem to remember something about a bug making those not be considered, but it's certainly possible in the general case.

 

[S3rgeus]

Also, can we/should we be adding our own (e.g. “near blight,” “rivers,” and “marsh”)? Again, would affect the ratios above.

Adding "Blight" as a start bias seems like a good call, particularly if we have LB-specialized civs, since their uniques will presumably interact with Shadowspawn in some way.

Rivers is an interesting one. There isn't a river start bias in BNW, but several of the other start biases often result in civs being placed near rivers (particularly the desert one). When the game considers how to place a civ, it looks for locations that have several resources nearby (strategic, luxury, and bonus) as well as tile yields in the area around it. Because rivers have a positive effect on the food yield of unimproved tiles, the selection process often gravitates towards rivers when choosing or creating starting locations. I mention the desert bias above because it's almost impossible for the game to choose a desert start location that isn't near/on a river, because the yields are too low on non-flood-plains desert tiles. The same also affects the Tundra bias, though to a lesser extent because tundra hills + forest gives a decent production output and can be considered viable that way.

However, if we had a civ whose uniques or flavor made being near a river a key part of how they worked, then we could totally add an explicit river bias, to prioritize getting that civ near a river where we could. In the end, the primary role of starting biases is to provide the map generator with a selection method that is sensible for arranging the civs on a randomly generated map.

I should mention that I don't think it's a good idea to solidly decide on Starting Biases until we've at least partial determined Uniques (a “coastal” bias would likely depend on a ship UU or a coastal-UA). However, in the first stage of this process, this data will be helpful if we want to use starting biases to help us balance/determine which civs make the cut.

Agreed, though as I mention above, I think flavor could play a significant role in this as well. We wouldn't want to make that choice isolated from the uniques' mechanics though, so not something to decide now, as you've said.

So, in general, how many of each starting bias should we have?

I think unlike victory conditions, we're best off "seeing where we end up" with starting biases, and then correcting for problems, rather than setting up a quota up front.


I have typed many words today! And still not to the end, there's so much left! But I'll continue tomorrow.

However, I have family coming to visit from tomorrow evening until Thursday, so I'll only get half an evening tomorrow. I'll see how far I can get with your final post in that time!

 

[S3rgeus]

Quick ninja reply post!

That one certainly seems logical, as far as the flavor. But is this a situation where we want to keep Pol off the bottom, and more accessable? If so, maybe we could put the "Airport" there or something? Or, perhaps Gate 2. I know both of those fit well with the "Traveling" flavor, but they can also probably be stretched to be fine on Mechanisms.

Hmmm, I see what you mean here, but I think I'd prefer to keep Pol6 down there. The other unlocks could be made to work with Mechanisms, but I feel like that's too big a flavor sacrifice compared to how they connect to Traveling. The Traveling tech is fairly major from the books and has a lot of mechanical implications, like Flight in BNW, so I think it's best to keep those together. Especially since we've done so well with Skimming leading into it.

Also, incidentally, in both cases, Pol 5 (and Pol 6) break the no-direct-ancestry-of-Polearm-units streak. I suppose that isn't a problem?

This appears to be the last "issue" with the tech tree. I'll upload new versions of things once this is settled.

I think that's fine.

EDIT

this is actually in response to your Civ/Uniques Framing responses:

You called out a few of the "unlikely" civs as actually being of interest to you. Should you "score" them now, as you've been doing with the other civs? Or should we do that later? Or, do you need me to do a "flavor dive" of them to get more info (don't think there'll be much)?

Already done! Just Aramaelle, I think! I did a quick flavor dive into the Companion, but if you can find more on them, that would be awesome.

 

[counterpoint]

Hmmm, I see what you mean here, but I think I'd prefer to keep Pol6 down there. The other unlocks could be made to work with Mechanisms, but I feel like that's too big a flavor sacrifice compared to how they connect to Traveling. The Traveling tech is fairly major from the books and has a lot of mechanical implications, like Flight in BNW, so I think it's best to keep those together. Especially since we've done so well with Skimming leading into it.

cool. Done, then!

latest summary updated and various trees attached to it!

Gone through more of the summary summary. Spy National Wonder was accidentally omitted. Has been fixed.

Prestige is listed as "Prestige 1". It appears to be the only one. Were we supposed to add a Prestige 2? It doesn't need to have an analogue in BNW.

sum-sum had the hummingbird project on the wrong tech. fixed. there was also weird redundancy here. all fixed.

XP 2 had wrong tech. XP (Nat.) had been omitted. Fixed.

ok, that's the Buildings. I'll get to the Abilities soon! That section's the one that I have the most likely chance of still missing a mistake, since there's a bit more "random" stuff. I'll do it as well as I can!

EDIT
Just went through the Abilities section of the sum-sum.

Linking (either) was absent from it. added)

"Faster Embarkation" (in 5.2) didn't have a tech associated with it.

There were a few inaccuracies in the yield bonus section.

And that's that! Proofread done! Tech summary should be current.

 

[S3rgeus]

I have returned! And to finish the response to the civs and uniques framing post! However, I'm going away this weekend, so I won't be able to post again until Monday at absolute earliest.

Also, I just sent you a quick PM, in case you didn't see the notification (which is super easy to miss!).

4 – CIV CHARACTERISTICS: UNIQUES

Once we've decided the civs that we would like to use, we need to consider their Uniques. It seems to me that a rough outline of all the civs we plan to include (at launch or short-term expansion) is prudent before we dive into the specifics of each civ. At the very least, a cursory exploration of potential uniques could inform which civs “make the cut.”

I think it could definitely help us to explore specific uniques as a way of narrowing down which civs are FLCs, if we're otherwise undecided. Those that don't make the cut at this point are likely to be ones we want to work on for post-release, as you mention here. I don't think we really need to set out to design the uniques for the civs we plan to have as an expansion yet, until we get a better idea of how the systems play together.

A – UNIQUE ABILITIES

What Unique Abilities should be associated with each civ?

This is not really a question that can be discussed briefly. The best bet is probably to outline a few possible UA's that fit the Victory Conditions described above at the same time that we outline some potential UU's, UB's, and/or UI's. From there, a UA can be selected, when weighed with all the other Uniques of a civ. As some UA's are quite powerful, and others are secondary to a civ's other Uniques, a UA must be selected in relation to the other civ's Uniques. This is not necessarily the case with UU's, UB's, and UI's, which, being typically linked to “numbers,” can be tweaked (unlike, say, the Byzantine UA which is not easily tweakable).

A related topic is how well a civ's uniques should synergize. Some are very clearly designed with the civ's other uniques in mind (siege towers [UU] fuel your theft of technologies [UA] as Assyria, etc.), while some seem to be very separate in their conception (e.g. the Byzantine uniques). Should we be case-by-case about this, as Firaxis apparently was, or be consistent?

I think we should go case by case, like Firaxis did, since that seems like it will give us the most variety of civs to choose from. I think in some cases, we'll have strong flavor that guides us a certain direction, and that may determine which part of the uniques we design first (UA vs UU/UB/UI). I also figure that once we've got an overall plan for where we want the civs to go from the sections above, then we'll want to approach each civ holistically. So, rather than make all of the non-UA uniques and then do a UA pass, I'd say dive in on The Aiel, Andor, etc. individually (in parallel), seeing which part of the uniques achieves the overall design goals for that civ best.

I have a gut feeling that tending towards well synergized uniques will be appreciated, since it makes the civ more cohesive to play. It has more of a known game plan. It could be said that that means most games with a specific civ will feel very similar, but the general impression I've gotten from BNW is that fans quite like the exotic civs with specific playstyles, like Venice.

I ask about UA's first, but it's quite possible that this is the last thing we should settle. For reference purposes, a very rough (and subjective) abstraction of the goals of the UA's from BNW are below:

...

counts:
culture – 6 (14%)
defense – 2 (5%)
gold – 8 (19%)
espionage – 1 (2%)
expansion – 4 (9%)
exploration – 5 (12%)
faith – 2 (5%)
golden ages – 1 (2%)
great people – 1 (2%)
growth – 2 (5%)
happiness – 2 (5%)
influence – 2 (5%)
national wonder yields – 1 (2%)
production – 3 (7%)
religion – 2 (5%)
science – 3 (7%)
social policies – 1 (2%)
strategic – 2 (5%)
tourism – 2 (5%)
trade – 3 (7%)
war – 11 (26%)
wonders – 1 (2%)

The above catalog of data may not be particularly useful – certainly, it is very rough and highly subjective (the distinction between “defense” and “war” is subject to much debate, for example). Additionally, the percentages described above add up to much more than 100%, as many UA's included more than one feature. Thus, numerically this data is highly suspect, since not all UA components are created equal.

That said, it is worth noting the rather large amount of UA components (if not entire UA's) are dedicated to combat. Gold came in second, with most others being far more rare.

Interesting that war has come up as the highest proportion again. As you've said, I don't think we want to reproduce this distribution, but it's certainly something to consider. It seems like the main victory conditions are fairly good at supporting many competing civs. War becomes interesting with more powerful players, and many players focusing on war tend to eliminate each other early. Diplo players can compete on CSes, even ending up capturing and liberating them to skew votes. Culture players are in direct competition with each other - both in their Tourism vs Culture and trying to find all of the GWs.

I feel like it's the mechanics-specific civs that we don't want to end up doubling up on. In all of the above cases, the civ doing overall the best will tend to prevail. But in the mechanics-specific cases, there can be difficulties like the max religion count preventing a late-entry from making a difference.

It certainly doesn't seem to me that we should seek to reproduce this kind of distribution in the mod, however, it might be worth keeping such in mind, as significant deviation from this could have some unusual (potentially negative) consequences – a single game with 6 civs all with CS-influence-related UA's would likely be pretty lame (more so than a game with several battle-ready civs). Or worse, yet – a game full of religion-UA'd civs (not faith, actual religion), more than the max number of religions per game!

Agreed, for things like Paths, we want to avoid the likelihood of oversaturating a mechanic that has hard limits (max Paths per game). Thankfully in this case, I don't think we'll have very many Path-focusing civs. And given the distributions I mentioned in my last post, if we have a fairly even representation of mechanics across 14 civs, then we'll have very few that share focuses with one another.

B – UNIQUES: OVERALL NUMBER

How many Uniques of each type should we select?

Many cycles of the moon ago, S3rgeus stated that he was planning on using two UU's and one UB for each civ. I don't have a problem with that, but it's worth discussing here, as are all of our early-development-cycle decisions.

Would having two UU's (i.e., one more than in CiV) cause there to be more of a focus on combat and/or domination than in the game? The civs with two UU's in BNW are relatively rare, and typically combat-oriented civs.

Is there flexibility in this? Will some combat-heavy civs have 3 UU's? Will some have 2 UB's and 1 UU?

I remember this! Indeed, it's worth reconsidering now. Mostly, do we think that having three uniques will serve us well?

Some advantages are:

• More variety
• More room for civs to specialize effectively
• More flavor captured from the books

Some disadvantages are:

• More difficult to balance
• Risks diluting flavor by stretching some civs to have more uniques than we have good sources for

There would definitely be flexibility in a three unique system to allow for civs with 3 UBs; 2 UBs, 1 UU; 1 UU, 1 UB, and 1 UI. Any combination that was appropriate for the civ.

C – UNIQUE IMPROVEMENTS

What about Unique Improvements?

S3rgeus's early suggestions don't (as far as I recall) include Unique Improvements? While they are relatively rare in CiV, it is worth considering including them in the mod.

If we do include them, how many should there be? Should it mirror the ratio of their inclusion in BNW?

If we do include them, what Unique should they replace? Replacing one of the UU's would give a civ one of each Unique type. Replacing the UB (which appears to be what occurs in CiV) would give a civ two UU's and no UB.

What flavor exists in the books to suggest UI's? It seems like a few civs (Ghealdan, Aiel, etc.) might have flavor that would suggest such. In some cases, a UB concept can be tweaked to become a UI (the Kasbah is a good example of this in BNW). But the opposite is also true – if we find flavor that suggests a UI, it could probably be adapted into a UB.

As you mention later, it seems that UIs are all "sourced" from the UB pool. However, I don't think that we necessarily need to follow that exact guideline. UIs were not present in vanilla and were only introduced in DLC. They're also functionally quite different from other uniques (they don't replace an existing Improvement, they just add a new one for that civ, unlike UUs and UBs).

I would definitely go for including some UIs, since they're quite interesting for the player and have the potential (like the Feitoria) to do quite interesting and unusual things that can capture civ flavor quite well.

D – NEW MECHANICS

Should the Uniques all be “normal” uniques, or should some of theme embody new or unusual mechanics in the game? For example, we've discussed the possibility of the Freed (UU Male Channeler for Shara), the Daughters of Silence (UU Wilder for Altara, possibly), the Wise Ones (UU Wilder for the Aiel), the Damane (UU... something of Seanchan) and the Windfinder (UU... something of Sea Folk), so clearly we will have UU channeling units. Also, the Khan (Mongolia) and the Merchant of Venice (Venice) are precedent for UU GP's. To what extent should we employ these? Some possibilities:

UU Aes Sedai units (i.e., not regular channelers)
UU governors (bizarre, I know)
UU Heralds, Truthspeakers, or Questioners (conceivably linked to Amadicia, Ghealdan, Seanchan, etc.)
UU Workers, Historians or other civilians
UU Eyes and Ears (e.g. Seanchan “Listeners”) or Bloodknives
UU GP's (especially new ones like Wolfbrothers)
UU trade units
UU shadowspawn
UB Faith buildings (i.e. buildings bought with faith via Customs)

UGs (Unique Governors) sound awesome, and the suggestion to try it on Hawkwing sounds like a really good one that lines up with that flavor well.

Overall, I think we should try to include these where we can and they're appropriate. I'm not sure if we want to establish a "baseline" by not using these kinds of strange uniques everywhere? Part of me thinks that will make the ones we do have feel more special to the player, but I also wonder if players would like it more if the uniques were all splashy/showy. Not necessarily more powerful, but just unusual and interesting, like these.

It certainly seems like there are elements of flavor that tilt us in this direction. And this also plays quite well into the 3 uniques set up, since we could have more "normal" uniques without sacrificing these ones. We would likely wanr exotic mechanical uniques to be quite synergized with the rest of the civ's uniques (playing into what we're discussing above).

UU Shadowspawn could be very interesting, but would necessarily be for a Shadow-intended LB civ, right? Only Shadow players ever control Shadowspawn units, so we wouldn't be able to supply this unique as a replacement otherwise. I would be fine with doing that, but you seemed to suggest that we would want to avoid it in your earlier posts.

E – ERA DISTRIBUTIONS

Given the “modern-heavy” leaning of most of the civs of the books (i.e., late-third age), how should we distribute the UU's of the game? How much “fudging” of flavor should we do to accomplish a relatively even distribution?

Or, alternately, should we embrace the late-game-ness of this and have most of the UU's occur during the late game (I'm guessing “no”)?

This is definitely something we'll need to be aware of. Like you mention, we can "backport" some uniques like Firaxis did with the Native American civilizations, making them available in earlier eras than the one they're present in the books, presumably due to a flavorful lack of requirement for technological advancement in that particular unique. (The Aiel Maidens of the Spear are the result of a cultural process at the time of the books, rather than emerging because the equipment they use has recently been invented, and so could exist in earlier timeframes.)

I think part of our civ selection process should make this a bit easier, since we're actively selecting civs in order to have a more diverse era layout. However, we'll still probably end up modern-heavy, since that's the era of the books.

I think there are a few ways to deal with this. As you mention later, UBs in BNW don't appear toward the end of the tree, presumably because having them earlier in the tree allows them to accrue advantage over the course of the game. I think I've mentioned elsewhere that if we design our UBs to have immediate impactful effects, then we can afford to have them present later in the game. (So their value isn't dependent on a boosted yield or some turn-by-turn equivalent.) This gives us more flexibility for late-game civs that aren't UU-heavy.

I think that we'll want to see where we end up with civ distribution as well, before we can accurately address this.

On a related note, for those civs with multiple Uniques (which may be all of them), should those UU's occupy close or the same era? There doesn't appear to be a consistency in this in BNW (e.g., the American UU's are Renaissance and Atomic), and appear to be based primarily on flavor (in this case, those two eras are eras that were home to important phases of US history). However, basing it more-or-less on flavor (as seems to be mostly the case in BNW, though the mesoamerican UU's like the Incan Slinger are an exception) would lead to us having the aforementioned “modern” bias in our mod. Should we let mechanical balance trump flavor, unlike in CiV?

(this question is valid for any civs we create that have more than one UB)

I think we shouldn't feel like we need to make the uniques of a single civ close to one another on the tree, unless the mechanics of those uniques rely on each other. (Two units that give each other bonuses should obviously be placed so they are fielded at the same time.) This gives us more room to tweak the placement of each unique to avoid the modern-heavy bias.

I'd say the overall process should still be flavor led, but with mechanical considerations for distribution, since that will be a bigger problem for us than it was in BNW.

It's worth mentioning that BNW's mechanics nicely slot in with the fact that Firaxis usually don't want to include civs with modern leaders (presumably to avoid being political about it).

F – UNIQUES IN BNW

Below is a compilation of the UU's in BNW for reference purposes. These have been abstracted so as to give us a more useful spread of what exactly each unit is. This way we can see not only how many of each unit type exist, but in what eras they all appear.

...

Lastly, note that pre-BNW uniques (e.g. French foreign legion) are not considered here)

Awesome, this is good reference info! It's affected a lot of what I've said elsewhere, but not much for me to say to it directly.

Eras are abstracted into numbers –
Ancient (1), Classical (2), Medieval (3), Renaissance (4), Industrial (5), Modern (6), Atomic (7), Information (8)

...

count of spans between eras for uniques:
0 eras: 8 – 18%
1 era: 19 – 44%
2 eras: 5 (7 including the N/A GP ones) – 12% or 16%
3 eras: 5 – 12%
4 eras: 4 – 9%

Looking at a lot of these, I definitely get the impression that Firaxis' civ design process is flavor led, which is what I'm thinking would be a good call for ours as well. Not abandoning mechanical considerations obviously, but the "feel" of the civs is one of the most important parts of someone wanting to invest many hours in playing through the game with them.

The fact that many of the civs only existed for part of the tech tree likely also contributes to the clustering of uniques. Above, I mentioned I don't think we should feel we have to try to keep uniques close together (within 3 eras or any such limit), and it looks like we'll end up with a clustering due to the flavor anyway. Most civs will tend to unlock uniques around the time of the tech tree in which they existed in the books timeline.

BREAKDOWN BY ERA

...

BREAKDOWN BY TYPE

Total Uniques[/B] – 23, 13, 23, 17, 7, 1, 3, 0 (plus 2 all era) = 89

This is super interesting, and I'd never noticed how quickly the UBs fall off at the end of the game. I feel like we're covering the detail of the general picture here above!

Things to Note:

This is obviously not an even distribution of Uniques, whether considered by type or by era. The degree to which we will preserve that is something we have to consider, but in any case it seems worthy of note. The mean era (and median era) of the UU's is 3 (Medieval), with the mode being 1 (Ancient).

Of the UU's, melee and mounted units are the most common, but appear in very different ways throughout the game, with the melee units clustering towards the beginning, and the mounted units clustering in the middle. This is true even if we group like-unit types (melee with gun, mounted with armor), though less so. This clustering, with these types and with others, likely is at least in part due to idiosyncrasies of the tech tree – the arrival of the caravel in the Renaissance, an important and era-defining unit, is likely responsible for the clustering of naval melee UU's in that era.
On the other hand, there are important, era-defining units that are mostly ignored as UU's, which I found surprising. Ranged units are particularly rare, as are siege – there is no UU artillery, despite that unit's significance (a UU of that unit would potentially be far too powerful). Whether we preserve this or not is certainly open for debate, but it appears to be consciously done that way by Firaxis.

This is very interesting. I'd be inclined to say we should try this and have uniques for some era-defining units. I'd say Firaxis has done it a little, like with the Korean Turtle Ship replacing the Caravel, and actually changing how Korea interacts with the sea, compared to other civs, that way.

I think the lack of a well defined distribution is a byproduct of the process for Firaxis being flavor led. They've had some overall mechanical considerations, which has resulted in the uniques being brought more towards the start of the tree. I think this seems like a good process for us too.

Concerning UU's in general across eras, it is worthy of note that the late game is essentially completely devoid of UU's (or uniques in general). Things slow down in the Industrial era, and then completely drop off in the Modern. This is particularly significant in our mod because those eras correspond to the New Era in the lore. Strictly speaking, all the events of the book are within era 8 (Era of the Dragon), which has zero uniques in BNW. Viewed liberally, many of the potential UU's shown in the books were likely first created in the preceding few eras, but there is a limit to how far back we can push such things – many of the nations of the books did not exist in the equivalent to the Renaissance or even Industrial eras. This is something we'll have to consider very carefully. While we should feel free to stretch the flavor within limits, we probably should strive not to break it. It should be noted that this kind of “pushing back” does occur in BNW – for instance, the mesoamerican civs tend to have early-game Uniques, even though those civs didn't exist that early in Earth's history. Still, they are the exception, rather than the rule.

This point has come up a few times elsewhere, and it's definitely an important one. I think we'll want to see what we end up with in terms of civ distribution and backportable uniques, and whether an overall tendency towards the end of the tree is something we then need to adjust for explicitly, or if our previous selection processes had already compensated for it.

The point about modern units existing before the events of the books is also a key one that will help with backporting. There are obviously limits, but depending on how specific we get in terms of books-characters-callouts in the uniques, then many of them seem like they should be shiftable in this way.

On the other hand, if we chiefly follow the flavor, we will end up with a game with a bunch of mid-late and late-game UU's, which will likely drastically alter the way a game of CiV works (especially domination runs) – a problem amplified if we decide to go with 2 UU's per civ.

Most civs have a relatively small span between their uniques, with a significant plurality being separated by one era. A few civs are as separate as four eras.

Of course, the existence of both fighter and bomber UU's should be considered within the context of our comination of those units into one unit type.

As I mention above, I'd say the small span is likely flavor driven by the presence of specific civs during certain parts of the tree.

And throwing more UUs towards the end of the tree and tilting Domination that direction may not be a bad thing. Domination sticks out as one of the victory types that can be achieved the fastest in BNW, whereas others require significantly more tech tree investment. It seems like the main difference there for any given game is a player's propensity to try to win via Domination, rather than their ability to do so. So slowing Domination down seems like it will bring it more in line with the other victories. Even after doing that, given how the Domination victory interacts with player count, I'd say it will still often be one of the most achievable quickly on smaller map sizes.

So what should our “spread” of UU's be, across eras? Across unit types?

As I mentioned above, I'd be inclined to make this process flavor led, so I don't think a desired spread for UUs is something we want to set out with at the beginning. I think we'll want to address obvious imbalances in where the flavor takes us, after we've assessed where that is.

I would like to see more diversity in the UU spread - not leaning so much on Melee or Mounted units, but again, it will depend on where the flavor takes us.

Regarding the UB's, the most significant thing of note is that there are zero UB's originating after the Renaissance (clustering mostly in the Medieval). Mean/Median = 2 (Classical), mode = 1 and 3. This makes sense, as it gives the UB's plenty of time to pay off – and also, the UB's tend to be based on simple versions of a building (e.g. the barracks, not the military academy), which all occur early in the game. In BNW, the late-game civs (e.g. America) simply don't have UB's.

This is, of course, highly problematic for our flavor, when you consider that most of our civs are late game – again, in multiple cases not even existing during era 4. How should we handle this?

I've sort of covered this above, but I think we can make mechanical tweaks to how some UBs work in order to make them still relevant when they unlock in the final few eras. By giving them more immediate effects, rather than yield-bonus payoffs, they can remain relevant in the late game.

As far as the UB's themselves, they are mostly an even distribution, though faith-, gold-, and production-related UB's are the most common. Interestingly, the science- and experience-related UB's only exist in the Ancient era. Both of these aspects are worthy of consideration.

So, should our spread of UB's by type and era be similar to BNW? If not, what should it look like?

The same sort of thing with deciding general spread here. I think leaning warlike in general might serve us well, since quite a few of our new mechanics require some military presence, particularly the systems involved with and leading up to the LB victory condition. This seems to be the spread that BNW has already.

The UI's are mostly unsurprising, in that they, like the UB's, only exist in the early-mid parts of the game, likely to allow their benefits to pay off over time (mean = late era 2, median = 2, mode = 3). The implications of this are the same as those described above. Worthy of note is that there is no duplication of terrain type for the UI's (though there is some duplication of the yields they produce), which probably contributes to their overall small number. This is a feature that can most likely be preserved in the mod. Should we do things this way in the mod (assuming we have UI's at all)?

When considering the Uniques as a whole, they are obviously clustered in the early game: mean = late era 2, median = 2, mode = 1 and 3. As far as the ratio between UU's, UB's, and UI's in BNW, it is actually surprisingly similar to what we'd be creating with a 2 UU-1 UB-0 UI distribution for every civ: 64% are UU's, 26% are UB's, and 8% are UI's. The 2-2-0 method of course creates 66%/33%/0%, which is quite similar – the UI's could be thus said to be “stolen” from the UB pool. Of course, my thoughts above that 2 UU's per civ would create a more combat-heavy game isn't quite true – there's be many more UU's (and UB's) than in BNW, but the overall ratio would remain unchanged, excluding UI's.

Uniques being generally early game probably leads on from most of them being yields-driven, where earlier availability makes them more useful. I'd say, like I've said with UBs, more instantaneous effects can make any type of unique more relevant in the late game. I'm generally in agreement that having fewer UIs than UUs or UBs overall sounds like a good plan. Mostly because it makes them stand out more, and given that they don't replace anything from the base game, they're inherently quite powerful.



And there we go! I feel like in this last section, I've been giving a lot more general vague answers, because the decisions here will be very much driven by the decisions from earlier on in the process. Hopefully you think that's an acceptable way to approach this part of it! Quite a bit of the info here has also affected my suggestions earlier on, which has left me with less specific to say in this part!

I'm particularly interested to hear your opinions on LB focused civs and flavor led uniques, since those two things seem to be the biggest things that I'm saying in my responses that are different from the content of the framing post.

And again, thank you for going through and putting all of this together! We've got a great start on this part of the mod now, and it's one of the parts that's most visible to players!

 

[S3rgeus]

latest summary updated and various trees attached to it!

Awesome, thanks!

Prestige is listed as "Prestige 1". It appears to be the only one. Were we supposed to add a Prestige 2? It doesn't need to have an analogue in BNW.

Good point, I don't think we ever specifically discussed a Prestige 2 building. Do we think we'll want to have one? I don't see anything that specifically pushes us towards it.

And that's that! Proofread done! Tech summary should be current.

Awesome, thank you for going through them all to make sure they lined up! There were a bunch of great fixes there that otherwise would've been thoroughly confusing when we came back to them later!

 

[counterpoint]

Reply time! Of course, this'll take me a few days to get through, I'm sure.

There'll be a fair number of quote blocks I'll likely pass over, when no further discussion is necessary.

starting waaay back on page 49...

Man, BNW has tons of civs. In fact, I think I remember someone from Firaxis being quoted for an article a few years ago expressing surprise (even as one of the devs) at how many civs they had gotten into the game. He was commenting on how they could possibly do something "better" for Civ6.

heck, I'm 600-something hours into BNW, and still haven't tried several of the civs.

That's a much more manageable number. I don't think we should feel like we need to meet that though. As you say below, we've got other mechanics, and I think given our relative size difference from Firaxis players wouldn't expect as many civs. (I already think 14 is quite high!)

Mechnically, we want to cover our bases, which you go into in more detail later, and is probably what you're referring to here. I think we can cover all of the mechanical needs at 14 (or even fewer, if we wanted to).

I think you are probably right that we could be ok with 14 or even lower (as you propose later). However, I'm not 100% sold that we wouldn't be better off shooting for 14-18 nonetheless (even if every one doesn't quite make the FLC cut. Simply, when looking through the ones we both seem to like, it seems like we're ending up with more than ten! more on this later (and later [and later])!

For a direct comparison, vanilla civ did include the actual game of CiV though - which we're getting for free. I figure most of this difference is a size thing - Firaxis can invest more in variety because they have more developers.

my point was that Vanilla civ didn't have to "cover" as many different kinds of mechanics. They didn't need to have a Religion civ, or a Theming-Bonus civ, and stuff like that. We, arguably, should have such things, in addition to ones that make use of our mechanics, and things might "fill up" sooner than they did for Vanilla civ.

In terms of authoring time, compared to the major systems like T'a'r/LB and such, an individual civ is a much smaller amount of work (even ones with exotic, weird playstyles like Venice), though we obviously have lots of civs, where there's only one LB that works for everyone. Balancing will likely take an interestingly long time. I can't see it being a quick process, because it will involve playing whole games with the civs we're evaluating (possibly multiple games).

Yes, I agree. Design isn't that crazy, balancing might be crazy. I suppose this might be why I'm leaning somewhat towards erring on the side of "creating" more civs, and hoping we can get them all balanced, but possibly demoting some to "expansion" if we can't, or if it seems unreasonable to really try. In other words, possibly "waste" some more time fleshing out civs that may or may not be true FLCs at this time (or soon, at least), up to and including designing "specifics", because, as you say, it's not actually that much time, relatively to all the other stuff.

Hopefully we'd get them all in, but if balancing turns into a clusterf&*$, we can demote the ones that deserve it. After all, it does feel, at this juncture, somewhat arbitrary, us deciding on some of the "borderline" civs (the Arad Domans and Tarabons of the world). We could spend some time on one of those civs and find that we come up with really fun-seeming uniques and such, and later decide it should be an FLC (at the expense of someone else, or perhaps in addition).

So, in short, while you might be accurate in figuring ten civs or so is the "real" FLC number, a solid argument could be made that we should design 18 of them, and "see what happens."

Based on the content of the subsequent sections, I assume we don't want to approach answering these questions yet?

As a ballpark, I'm still quite happy with 14 FLCs. My general assessment is it might be a bit on the high side, in terms of amount of work, but it feels like it will create a well varied world for the game.

In terms of post-launch, I wouldn't be inclined to even guess. We can shift specific flavor to "post-launch" based on the discussions below, but I don't think that stuff will need a plan until much later.

agreed that the final number of Post-launch doesn't need to be guessed at this point.

Agreed, this definitely guides a lot of our decisions and frames our early choices. We want the mod to feel like the books and immerse the player in the lore, and a part of that is fans recognizing the flavor involved. We can certainly have more obtuse flavor and I think it will be great for fans to discover new elements of WoT flavor through the mod that they hadn't seen before, but we need to hit the "big ticket" stuff before we can do that.

Priority: 1 - This seems like it captures the whole point of the mod, to immerse players in the fiction, so I think extreme prominence in the books (Andor, Seanchan) basically guarantees a civ a place. (Though a lack of prominence wouldn't discount it!)

Prominence

Yeah, I agree, this is priority 1. As you say, it's the "point" of the mod in the first place.

I'd say the history of the whole world is relevant, but you're right that Randland is our primary concern, mainly for the reasons above.

Priority: 7 - I think a lot of this will be covered in the prominence stuff above, but it is still something separate for us to keep an eye on.

historical importance
I see your point, but in my head this might be more like a 5 (that's somewhat splitting hairs, of course). The reason I see this as more important is that historicity is part of what civ feel like civ. The anachronisms, and such. the feeling like your in your civ's "home time" (e.g. playing as Manetheren during the Era of Nations, etc.).

Agreed, though I'm not sure if Murandy lacks lots of flavor? Isn't there a fair bit of merchant in-squabbling and petty lords stuff we know that we could use here? That's a Murandy-specific thing that we could go into later though. As a general guideline, I totally agree that we want to make sure we have enough flavor to actually build a civ players will recognize.

Priority: 2 - Unlike prominence, which I've given a 1 and is most useful for deciding to include civs, I think this one is more powerful in discounting civs. There are civs that have been named in the books that we won't be able to make CiV civs for because there isn't enough information, and they'll feel weak and forced by comparison to the others. I think we want to avoid that if at all possible.

flavor availability
I think you found out for yourself in visiting Murandy later in your posts that yes, it's pretty darn low on flavor.

I think I'd actually be inclined to rate this one as slightly lower in priority as you have here. Truthfully, I see it as a kind of boolean thing: is there a bare minimum of flavor to create the civ (enough for a few uniques, a leader, some cities [though the latter will be a problem for virtually all civs])? No? Then this is priority 1, and that civ gets axed outright. Yes? OK, then this actually isn't all that important (like a 5 or something). Civs like the Seanchan have way too much flavor. I'm guessing we'll find, in general, most civs - even the obscure ones - will have juuust enough flavor to make feel like a real civ. Of course, it's easier if we have a bunch of it, easier for us, I mean, but that's not a reason to include or disqualify a civ.

Also a good point! There's a lot more detail on this in later sections, but in general it looks like we'll have our work cut out for us when it comes to distributing uniques' placement throughout the tree. And totally agree on the Aridhol point, that we may want more older civs that are any way recognizable, because we'll otherwise be mostly civs from the times of the books.

Priority: 3 - Given the imbalance toward the latter eras, I think we'll have to give this a bit more importance than we would have otherwise in order to achieve a reasonable mechanical balance.

eras
lots more said on this later, but i agree with your assessment here.

I'll say now, though it'll come up again: the major "hole" does seem to be the Free Years (eras 3-4). There are a few 10 Nations civs that'll give us some ammo, I think. The Hawkwing era civs are much harder. (actually, come to think of it, era ONE is probably the biggest hole, though we'll probably be able to stretch the Nations civs to that era).

Yeah, this is a good consideration. You go into more numbers for this later, so I'll cover it in more depth then.

Priority: 5 - We want the victories to be covered so that in big games there is almost always someone competing directly with the human player.

Victory conditions
I think this is actually a really big, high priority, from a design perspective... but I don't think it's a huge priority in civ-selection, since most of these are flexible, in VCs.

Good point! I'm liking Hawkwing for Governors actually, sounds like a good flavor and mechanical combination!

Priority: 4 - We don't want there to be mechanics that are left out/orphaned on release, so making sure we cover all bases with this one is probably a good thing. We also want to make sure we have at least one civ that calls out each of the WoTMod mechanics as well, to draw players into exploring how they work more.

agreed.

I agree to an extent. I think that we want to tend more towards the BNW side of the spectrum. I don't think the civs from vanilla are more "baseline" than the BNW civs in order to create a balance/lack of chaos, I think that's more about Firaxis' designers getting more comfortable with bolder choices after they'd worked with the game for some time. We're obviously only "starting" making civs now ourselves, but we do have hands on experience with the known quantity of BNW and what works well there. So I'd say we want our civs to stand out as interesting and distinctive to play wherever possible, and we shouldn't necessarily shy away from "crazier" FLCs if we can make them work. (The risk is of course that we can't make a crazy Tuatha'an civ without it disrupting the game for all of the other players - that would make us step back and not include them!)

Priority: 9 - I'd say this is more case by case, we'll know the civs that have problematic abilities when we work on them, and for civs that don't this won't be a factor.

craziness
I see your points. You're very correct that this is simply a case-by-case thing. Truly, it's a Priority 9 in most cases... except for in problem cases, where it's a Priority 1!

I think this is a good theoretical consideration, but I don't think we have any way to apply that now. As you've said, we're not aware of any additional mechanical systems we plan to add post-release, so we can't say which civs will intersect with them. And like Firaxis did, we are of course free to modify existing civs when we create a new expansion/new mechanics. (England gained the bonus Spy, France's whole UA changed, Germany gained a UB and lost a UU, etc.)

Priority: 11/not - I don't think we have the information to use this consideration effectively yet. If we do add these kinds of systems and have put in a Far Madding CS, and want to promote it to a civ, I'd say we're on a timeframe for those kinds of changes that it would be fine to remove the CS and add the civ, and generally approach the allocation of flavor that way, rather than reserve anything for mechanics we don't know yet.

post-release mechanics
I agree. I have no idea what post-release mechanics we'd add, so it is somewhat moot at this point!

I had not even considered this! This is a good point, we want random maps to feel authentic but still be playable, which this plays into. There's a lot more detail on the specifics of starting biases below, so I'll cover that then.

Priority: 6 - I feel I should almost bump this up a bit, because I'm not really familiar enough with the map scripts and how starting points are allocated to make definitive assessments of how robust they are to an imbalanced civ pool, so this has the potential to break the major map types. Definitely something we'll want to shuffle to optimize for.

starting biases
I agree with your assessment, mostly. I do think, as you noted later, that it's not realistic for us to worry about it too much at this stage. It seems better to pick our general group of FLCs and then see, once we have, what the start-bias "spread" looks like (and then, presumably, either "force" some different biases, axe a civ, or else shrug and move on). It seems absurd to use the biases in our choices much earlier than that.

I think for any true start locations stuff we'd want to be fairly beholden to the flavor, since that's the objective behind that game mode. I don't think this needs much consideration from us for now - it would be difficult to create a situation where it's impossible for us to do a true start map. For example, if Seanchan being sparse in the flavor creates mechanical implications, I think we'd mostly want to just go with them, mitigating where we can (resource distribution, etc).

Priority: 10/not - I think this is a secondary concern that we will want to address as a part of that scenario/map, rather than make it important in how we choose civs for the main game.

true start locations
I actually don't quite get all of your points here. Nonetheless, I agree that this isn't so important.

Yeah we probably don't want to be completely lacking in terms of a militant civ that always tries to kill everyone and passive civs that rarely go to war - a balance would be good!

Priority: 8 - I think we mainly want to do a general purpose sanity pass on this consideration, to make sure we haven't completely missed any major archetypes.

leader personalities
I agree. The other thing is that we can't possibly "use" this information now, since we won't decide on leaders until we're much more knee-deep in the design phase anyways. I can see us, theoretically, choosing a leader because of this ("we need another pacifist!"), but I sure as heck can't see us choosing a civ because of this.

I'll go into this in more detail when you ask about it again later, but civs don't actually have direct Ideology tendencies in BNW (hence the difficulty finding them!). The AI picks its Ideology based on the victory it's going for and the state of the world. Since the leaders do have victory tendencies, this usually amounts to the same civ picking the same Ideology in isolation, which creates the appearance of Ideological tendencies. (Or it creates the Ideological tendencies indirectly, however we wish to think about it.) A nice side effect of this is if we balance the victory tendencies for the leaders (which doesn't necessarily map one to one with victory effectiveness), we effectively balance Philosophy selection as well.

Priority: free! - Probably not actually free, but we'll see.

Ideology
Interesting. Are you sure? If you look at specific civ's write-ups on the wiki, it lists a "Preferred Ideology." Is that kind of mumbo-jumbo, then, and not actually a "thing"?

In any case, I'm fine doing whatever bnw does.

that'll do it for me tonight! more soon!

 

[counterpoint]

I could see us dropping Tarabon to a post-launch civ if we have a replacement that fulfills some of the other needs I replied to in my last framing-post-reply-post. You're very right that a lot of prominent things happen in Tanchico, but we don't know too much about Tarabon as a country.

yeah,more on this later, but Tarabon is likely to be one of the "swing" civs, that may or may not make the FLC cut. I'm not willing to dismiss them outright - we need to line things up properly first - but they're likely to be in the "bubble." Of course, this depends on how many civs we design (whether its a conservative number, eg 10, or a more liberal one, eg 18, as discussed above).

I would be less inclined to drop Shienar than Tarabon, mostly because I feel we should have at least one Borderlander civ. And it feels like of the four, Shienar is the best fleshed out in the books, mostly because, as you mentioned, a lot of stuff happens there in the first few books.

There is Malkier, which is a Borderlander civ not from the exact same era as the current civs, but I feel like omitting all of the current Borderlander civs would be an oversight on our part. (This doesn't affect our consideration of Malkier though, I'd say.)

Shienar will be addressed again later, but in general, I'm in agreement.

This is very interesting, and I would be interested in trying out the flavor for both approaches to this - non-Children and Children related.

I think the Children one will win out, but I wouldn't want to leave the other one unconsidered. There's a certain logic to saying that the Children's de facto rule of Amadicia was a relic of the books timeline, rather than a property of the world itself, but the Children will be a big part of Amadicia's recognizable flavor.

If it's anything to go by, back at the beginning of time when I was making civs for this mod, I assigned Pedron Niall as the leader of Amadicia. He won the popularity contest in my head against King Ailron. But again, wouldn't want to go ahead with the Children one without considering the alternative first!

I would definitely be in favor of the splitting the difference approach if Amadicia does have Children-related uniques - so give them some stuff that mechanically synergizes well with the Children Customs, but also their own unique stuff that uses the Children flavor in a different, useful way.

This strikes me as the first part of these replies where we'll want to dive into the flavor of a specific civ? I know Amadicia's relationship to the Children is mentioned later, but it feels like this is the deepest section of it. Do we want to dive on the flavor from this quote block, or are we still too early in defining the process and should hold off for a few posts?

To address your final question first: I'd say no, we shouldn't treat Amadicia separately and dive into it in more detail now. We should dive in to the proper amount of detail given where we finally decide it "stands" in terms of FLC consideration. It's looking (from your later posts) like it's way more likely that we will include it as a Children-linked civ (if we include it at all), but I'm happy juggling both options for the time being until we rule one out. I'm not totally sold that we should totally flesh out both options - make uniques and whatnot - for both options before we decide, but I'm willing to if you want.

I think you're right that there's also a way to split the difference here - have uniques that nod to the children without necessarily being "Whitecloak" units.

Regarding Pedron Niall and the popularity contests, I'll merely forewarn you that I'm going to be pushing for us to be broad and outside-of-the-box in our Leaders consideration. I think part of making it feel like civ may be us embracing the many eras of these civs, and not merely focusing on the ones we meet in the books. It's true that those are more well-known to the player, and thus feel more familiar to people - and thus are a part of the "point" of this mod - but at the same time, a good number of them aren't very "good" rulers, or have very important other rulers in their prior history (also, leaders further back might help us "justify" uniques that aren't in the late-game, which we may have to do for mechanical reasons anyways). This is something to bring back up way later, but I'm probably going to suggest that we at least consider, and discuss, 2-3 leaders for each civ, hopefully spanning many eras.

Interesting. I wouldn't be against trying out the flavor, as we're doing above for Amadicia, but my gut reaction isn't particularly favorable for them being their own civ. They don't strike me as a civilization. They sort of self-govern, but they don't really have that kind of holistic flavor link through or an organized government that creates an obvious distinction.

Worth trying though!

The TR never really came up again, so I'm not sure if your opinion of this changes at all.

I definitely see your point here, though I suspect there is absolutely a subset of fans that would prefer we do have the TR as their own civ. I think I'm inclined to agree with you, though truthfully, I'm not sure whether Andor or Maneth is the better place for their flavor to end up (e.g., Longbowman, etc.). Probably Manny, since we have a lot, lot for Andor. Should we continue to investigate and consider them in the specific way?...

I suppose I should, here, just in case, since, as you note, bouncing it back to you, and then back to me, takes forever. And, it's better to be thorough and at least consider all our options. So....

The Two Rivers
Primary: Cultural or Diplomatic
Secondary: Cultural or Diplomatic
Notes: I can see Domination, in theory, because of Perrin Goldeneyes, etc, but I see this as a much more "Defensive" civ, moreso than even the Borderlanders, perhaps. So, I imagine them as more of an economic or cultural institution (not sure which). Science feels a little "eh" for them, flavor-wise.

Size: Probably Tall, though this is tricky, as they have only small settlements... but there aren't many of them
Starting Bias: Rivers! If not... near mountains? or nothing at all

Flavor Bits:
[see flavor bits for Andor and Manetheren]
Some City Names: Emonds Field, Taren Ferrey. Deven Rode. Watch Hill
Leader: Probably Perrin Goldeneyes - if we aren't pulling from that era, we're probably not including them at all!

The Two Rivers
Prominence: Probably a 4 - Knocked down a bit because it's not a *real* civ. But obviously one of the most prominent regions in the book. In fact, truly, there could be two scores for this one - a 5, or a 1 - depending on your perspective
Flavor: 4 - A fair bit of flavor to draw on, including distinct stuff from Andor. However, using said flavor may also somewhat gimp our flavor for Manetheren.
Mechanics: 2 - Dodges a 1 simply because of the potential interest of "defensive" Uniques and such. Nothing much here.
Placement: 2 - dodges a 1 simply because of the physical thing: a "river civ," if such is possible. Otherwise, modern and landlocked - not very useful.

I think it would be relatively safe to call the following civs very likely at this point, and worth "provisionally listing" as our known FLCs. The only reason I could see us removing one of these is if we really wanted to bring in a lot more variety to the time periods the civs are from at launch.

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

I agree. I'd be very, very surprised if we cut any of those. I think there may, in fact, actually be a few more "locked" ones, but it's not important to tackle any of that here. We can compile the big picture further below.

The more I think about it, the more I think Tarabon is likely to be pushed back to post-launch to make way for more variety in time periods, which, as you mention later, is going to cause us a bunch of problems if we don't actively address it.

I would also lean towards Altara going that way as well, but I'll comment more on that when Altara comes up again.

very possible in both cases, though, again, this'll depend on a bit on how we handle the whole "how many are we designing" thing.

Thinking more on this, I'm now leaning more towards Hawkwing and Shara being included as FLCs than I was before. Generally because it addresses the cultural diversity problem (Shara) and the time period problem (Hawkwing).

for me, these two pretty much go into the "locked in" category.

I think Mayene, despite actually being a city-state in the books, is definitely worthy of consideration as a civ. Like Venice in BNW, what was technically a city-state in real life can be a full civ if adapted appropriately. And Mayene is certainly very visible in the lore, has some known unique characteristics, and their leader is one of my favorite characters. (Though it does exacerbate the books-era-only-civs problem.)

very much agreed. If we do do this, though, I'd want to make sure it's mechanically distinct from Venice - no-settlers-but-buying--CSs-with-a-GP isn't a good idea.

I think Arad Doman is more worthy of consideration here. We do visit it a few times. Rodel Ituralde's first few PoV chapters are set there (after he escapes from Almoth Plain, I think). Rand has a PoV chapter that goes to Bandar Eban (capital of Arad Doman) to provide aid. Natrin's Barrow was also in Arad Doman.

A bit less so with Saldaea, but we do go there in the books. There's a trolloc invasion of Maradon (capital of Saldaea) around the beginning of the LB that Rodel Ituralde and Rand fight off. There are a few chapters of street-and-alley fighting against the trollocs there. The city is technically saved, but supposedly massively damaged and most of the people dead. I'm not particularly pushing for Saldaea to be included as an FLC, as long as we have at least one modern Borderlander civ and Shienar seems like it fits the bill better for that.

Hmmm... I actually think differently, though only slightly. Neither are a "lock" for FLC, and both are "fringe" at best. However, the thing about Arad Doman is, even though it does come up a few times, it feels somewhat flavorless. True, Ituralde is from there, and does stuff there, but there's nothing distinctly "domani" about him, and isn't a real Domani "feel" to the stuff that's set there. I'd say the only Domani flavor that really permeates the books as a whole is the whole "tight dresses" and "seduction" thing.

For Saldaea, I find this slightly different. True, we never see Saldaea, but everything we see about Saldaea - namely Faile and Davram and Tenobia (and Faile's mom) are sort of "dripping" with Saldaea-ness, such that the land feels more like a "character" in the world, moreso than A.D. and Tarabon even, I'd say. You know, "and Faile did such and such, which was a thing that Saldaean women did, and then Perrin did so and so, which was shocking to her, because Saldaean men don't do that, and them Davram Bashere, as was the custom for Saldaeans rallied his soldiers with this and that." You know, it's almost kind of uncomfortable... like when one's grandpa needlessly points out somebody's race in a conversation during which it matters not at all....

Anyways, a subtle, but noteworthy distinction.

They do, but I feel like The Aiel vs the Shaido is more like a scenario distinction than something in the main game. The Shaido as a distinct entity only really exist for a year or so of time in the whole history of the WoT world, which, despite their prominent flavor, strikes me as an odd inclusion for a civ. And we also have a lot of modern day ones, so I would be inclined to push these guys to post-launch, possibly introduced first/as well as a scenario civ in some kind of Aiel civil war scenario.

In agreement. This comes up later, but I do think that it would feel a bit "off" to include them as an FLC. Whether they're post-launch, or simply only in scenarios, is a different matter that can be settled elsewhere.

I could see us doing something similar to Amadicia here with Aridhol, and touching on the Logothness, even if it's not the actual transformation into Shadar Logoth since that's a separate mechanic. I could also see us dredging up flavor for this civ, since it's definitely recognizable and from an underrepresented period in WoT history. (Trait name: "Where the Shadow Waits"? )

hmm... for me Aridhol using its Logothiessence isn't quite as easy to pull of as the Children-Amadician or Dragonsworn-Ghealdianin thing. Part of that is the shadow-lean of it all, which I find problematic - which I'll bring up later in much detail. But the other part of it is that there's nothing Logothistic about Aridhol that would be *good* for Aridhol. Like, have their UA be "gets consumed by corruption and the player loses" or something....

I don't know, this one will be discussed later, but if we include Aridhol, I'd think its abilities would have to be only barely tangentially related to SL.

"Where the Shadow Waits" is certainly flavorful, but I don't think is likely to work. First of all, Shadar Logoth literally means "Where the Shadow waits," which makes the whole connection really, really too close for me. Maybe we can come up with a way to make that work, but it could be problematic.

Essentially, if we want Aridhol to be that civ, I think we shouldn't have SL as a CS. If we wanted a reality where mashadar and all that craziness was attached to a civ in actually, I could see Aridhol being the logical extension. But I don't think we do want that.

It seems a shame not to use Alliandre as a leader, but I think in general Ghealdan could probably be a post-launch civ as well. Again, we have lots of present-day civs and while there are cool ways to go with Ghealdan, I don't think fans will be champing at the bit for them either, so something good and recognizable to keep in reserve since we can fill its FLC slot with civs that fulfill more of our other objectives.

I don't see it as a shame not to use Alliandre as a leader. True, she's a memorable character, but... as a sworn lady to Perrin and Faile, which isn't exactly ruler-worthy. That's like having the Vichy government of France be the leader of France in BNW (though not quite as bad). Also, by all accounts she must have been a pretty lousy leader to have let things get so bad in her country. In any case, to be decided later!

In any case, I'd say that a prophet-related Ghealdan doesn't *have* to actually mean the Leader is The Prophet himself. We could have abilities that are related to the fact that Ghealdan's people are, for some reason, fanatical about stuff, and have a cooperative relationship with the dragonworn (who are, technically, "bad guys" in our game). We could probably make it work, regardless of who the leader is.

I'm not so sure that Ghealdan should be post launch - for me it's still very much in contention for the top list. The reason for this is that we may find it an excellent opportunity to use some special mechanics (especially Paths or Alignment), which won't always be easy to do.

I know that may seem somewhat in contradiction to what I said above on Aridhol. To me there's a big difference between Ghealdan's fate (or Amadicia's) and Aridhols - especially considering the fact that the CS->ShLogoth thing is already happening elsewhere in the game.

Definitely very intriguing - enough that we've already done like 3 or 4 iterations of their trait! I think this could make a good post-launch civ as well, partially because I think players will accept them as a civ, but not necessarily expect them.

The tinkers,,, ah... craziness. Gonna have to just see what happens! I think your last point is very sound.

It's a shame that Ishara was never actually Queen of Aldeshar, only the last King's granddaughter, otherwise we could have stuck a recognizable figurehead on a relatively unknown civilization to give some immediate flavor context to the reader. I don't think it fills a specific niche for us to promote it to FLC consideration.

Yeah, a shame. I suppose we *could* put Ishara as its leader... it's a stretch, and not a great one, but also not a terrible one.... I think the thing about this civ is that it does feel a pretty needed niche for us - FY civs. I think we could consider booting it back into the discussion. I'm not saying it's a "yes," but it's definitely worth further consideration, IMO, for this reason alone.

Aldeshar
Primary: Domination or Diplomacy or any
Secondary: any
Notes: Unclear which is best. They apparently were rather powerful militarily... though they did ultimately fall to Hawkwing. We have relatively little to go on, so any of them could probably work. Their alliance with the tower could suggest diplomacy.

Size: Probably Tall
Starting Bias: any or avoid coast

Flavor Bits:
cities: unknown, possibly Lugard. Also Whitebridge
Leader: King Joal Ramedar, stretch-consideration: Ishara Casalain
Black Fever
War of the Second Gragon - Guaire Amalasan
Alliance with Aes Sedai against Hawkwing
retaliatory treatment by Hawkwing - mercy from His wife, Tamika

Aldeshar
Prominence: 2 - noteworthy through its connection to Hawkwing and Ishara, but otherwise, probably a 1
Flavor: 1, possibly 2 - we have some historical bits, but very little in the way of things that might inspire uniques.
Mechanics: 2, possibly 1 - nothing really to go on here, despite perhaps some Tower-relations, or stand-against-a-might-empire stuff
Placement: 4 - this is where this one "wins" - FY civ ftw! Loses a point for boring geography.

Also interesting and recognizable via Almoth Plain and Pedron Niall. Not quite FLC-able, but a good post-release candidate.

Almoth
I agree. I'm going to do the flavor dump below because I think this one has potential and should be considered, but I think it's very, very unlikely it'll make first cut, and actually rather far down the list for second cut also.

[note that for these dumps, I'm using the wikis, and not delving into the companion like I did before. this is out of convenience - I don't think these will get very far, but if they do, we can go back in]

Almoth (FY version, not hypothetical whitecloak nation)
Primary: any
Secondary: any
Notes: we know very little about it - not much in the way of VC's to suggest.

Size: unknown
Starting Bias: plains

Flavor Bits:
cities: unknown
leader: unknown
blue (sky) and black (earth) banner, with Tree of Life
had a branch of Avendesora
rose after Hawkwing's empire collapsed
desired-revival by Pedron Niall
Almoth plain

Almoth
Prominence 2 - a familiar name, but not a whole lot else
Flavor 1 - we know almost nothing!
Mechanics 2 - giving it a 2, generously... we know so little about it that we could kind of get away with doing anything we wanted with it, so... 2!
Placement 3 - not a 5, since it's still a NE civ. That said, it's a very early NE civ, one whose uniques could theoretically start in Era 2. So this is actually placed as a 3, maybe even a 3.5

As the author of the Compact of Ten Nations, this strikes me as a civ that's possibly FLC-able. I'll comment more on this later when there's a lot more about it, but this strikes me as one of the few WoT flavor civs that cries out to be diplo focused. Given that and it represents a non-modern civ, it feels like this fills a lot of niches for us.

agreed. More comments later, when you bring it back up.

Interesting stuff, but nothing that pushes me to suggest FLC. Certainly a good post-release consideration.

Darmovan. Agreed. A lot like Aldeshar, but without the Andor-connection and standing-against-Hawkwing thing. Useful as it is from the FY, but that's it.

I so unbelievably want to do this. But I don't think it would be a good idea to omit civs that have well defined flavor in favor of one that we have to define more ourselves in the FLCs, just from a fans' completeness point of view. I would definitely like to find a way to rope these guys in later on though.

Isle of Madmen
Yeah, I think this is mostly a bad idea from a design perspective - probably shouldn't be totally bullsh^tting stuff right off the bat, eh? Still, I'm with you that it's quite awesome. It's funny, it's way low on my list as an FLC, but actually rather high on the list for a second or third round (higher than some civs that are higher on the FLC consideration scheme, even.) I'm going to tackle it in a little detail here, though, just because I think it'll be interesting to see how its "numbers" wind up.

The Isle of Madmen/Land of the Madmen[/]
Primary: any (not diplomacy)
Secondary: any (not diplo)
Notes: Totally unknown what they would be good at. That said, they are clearly hostile to outsiders, so diplo is probably out.

Size: unknown
Start Bias: coastal (there's no "island" bias or "volcano", though theoretically we could have them start near a natural wonder)

Flavor bits:
smallest continent
lots of volcanoes and icebergs
never recovered from Breaking - male channelers are usually insane

The Isle of Madmen/Land of the Madmen
Prominence - 2, I'd say. Really, functionally a 1, except I think any reader who looked at a world map or read the BWBoBA was probably really really hoping to hear more about these guys.
Flavor - 1. nothing. really
Mechanics - 4, though this is hard to rate. Sort of nothing there, but the flexibility to do weird stuff with madness (of both genders!) and natural wonders gives it some promise, for sure
Placement - 5, as far as I can tell, it's a chameleon - fits into any era, and can kind of do whatever we want in terms of game-role.

A possible post-release candidate, but being modern and not very prominent, I wouldn't be inclined toward FLC consideration. I would be all up for including it at a CS at launch though, and if we decide to make the civ later, just remove the CS.

Yeah, I agree. A good CS for now, and probably forever.

Interesting, but not FLC-candidate, I'd say. Post-launch possibility.

Moreina
Yeah, agreed. It's connection and direct-line into Tear gives it some prominence... but also makes it somewhat redundant. If we can find another way to "fill out" the FY, this one isn't necessary at all.

This one is awesome and something I hadn't even considered before. I feel like it sort of falls into the same category as the Isle of Madmen, though not as completely. It's something we'd have to come up with a lot of our own flavor for, and as an FLC we'd need to omit other civs that have much more clearly defined flavor from the books. This makes me think it's not a good candidate for FLC consideration, but would certainly make a great post-launch civ.

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan

Hmmm...., I'm thinking about this more now, and honestly, I'm starting to think it *could* be an FLC! I mean, it's kind of crazy, just like the Madmen, but unlike the Don Draper folks, we wouldn't be making up everything. We would be inventing the civ name (can't call it "Pre-Consolidation Seanchan, can we), cities, and leaders, likely, but the truth is, we have a lot of flavor to draw from, namely: Seanchan exotics. Given Sul'dam/damane and deathwatch guards (or even the bug-helmet soldiers), we could very easily do the whole Seanchan civ and not even use any of their crazy animals. These animals were, however, the forces of the "armies of the night" Luthair fought when they arrived. So we could totally use Grolm and such here, and not be stretching anything at all. Other than this, we could draw on what we know of the "hill tribes" and stuff (from Karede's so'jihn) - also, it's likely that these lands weren't unified at all before Luthair, so we could also just choose one little subregion (and maybe take it's name) and pretend we're talking just of that.

Plus, this gives us another FY civ - or even earlier, if we wished. And we could probably come up with a more unusual terrain start bias, here.

in short, I think we should continue to consider this one. It involves some squishiness, certainly, but it is also pretty cool. More viable than the Drapers.

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan (needs a better name!)
Primary: any
Secondary: any
Notes: I feel like a reasonable justification could be made for any of these, though perhaps diplo isn't a good fit.

Size: any (though if we zero-in on a small region, Tall is better)
Star Bias: any (could be arbitrarily decided by us)

Flavor Bits:
Armies of the Night - mistaken for shadowspawn
Exotics (lopar, torm, grolm, to'raken, raken)
exotics found somehow through portal stones
Kaensada hill tribes - Ajimbura's tribe. long braids
two landmasses of Seanchan - smaller is to the north
freedom (apparently) of channelers

Pre-Consolidation Seanchan
Prominence - 2, sort of prominent, in that its a part of the whole Seanchan backstory, but seeing that it doesn't have a freakin' name, and isn't discussed directly, it's pretty obscure. Could actually be a 1 if you consider the fact that we have to somewhat invent a bunch of this.
Flavor - 3, simultaneously have a bunch and have none. If we port the seanchan exotics into this, we have some good stuff to work with. If we don't.... this civ is probably a non-starter.
Mechanics - 3. It offers us the potential to use the uniques, which *might* be mechanically distinct (a UU "flier" or something), but might just be other units. Offers us the theoretical possibility of using portal stones as a part of the UU (free unit when building one, etc.), which is kind of interesting
Placement - 5, though I would accept 4, as well. Similar to The Mad Men above - flexibility with era, start bias, and overall "feel."

I would say that at this stage, we most definitely do not need to (or particularly want to, really) decide which civs, which won't be FLCs, will or won't be post-launch civs (vs CSes or just straight up left out). I figure we just want to pare it down to an FLC list, and then consider all of the other civs on their own merits later on, based on the experience we've gained from what we've made so far, at that time.

Yeah, agreed in theory, though, as I've made the case above, I think that list of FLCs - the groups we continue to at least consider for first-inclusion - should be bigger than I think you want it to be.

 

[counterpoint]

Oh shoot, should probably address this stuff now.

Good point, I don't think we ever specifically discussed a Prestige 2 building. Do we think we'll want to have one? I don't see anything that specifically pushes us towards it.

Eh, I don't think we need it, and consequently, I'm not sure we want it, either. Prestige seems to work much like Tourism, which works fine in the late game, by my estimation. We can leave it as one, at least for now.

I'll leave them all as "Prestige 1," instead of going in and removing the "1," partially because I don't want to deal with the hassle, and partially because... no, that's the only reason.

 

[counterpoint]

ok, this'll be a rather small quote-block that will warrant a pretty huge response... apologies.

I could see us not wanting to telegraph preferred Alignment based on civ choice, and therefore steering away from "Shadow bonuses" on civ abilities, though I do think there could be merit in those as well. But I think there should be LB-oriented civs.

This doesn't seem like it should be different from the other victory conditions. If you've got Shaka or Attila in your game, you know they're most likely going to be vying for Domination and need to plan accordingly. If you've got Gandhi or Kamehameha in your game, then you know you'll probably need to invest in some Culture production to stall their victory late game. The presence of a civ that is LB-oriented at the start of the game doesn't guarantee the presence of an LB more so than otherwise. It does mean that if they become a dominant force in the world, then that's the victory condition you expect to have to deal with them going for. Which seems entirely sensible to me, and very much the same as how all of the other victory conditions and civ biases affect the player's decisions.

It also gives us a very good outlet for quite a few civs from the lore than are militaristic in nature, but mainly in the context of the Blight and Shadowspawn. These civs (particularly modern Borderlander civs) don't fit well with the objective of trying to conquer everyone else, but do want to have powerful militaries, which is all that's good for in BNW. By making them LB-focused, we can direct that power toward something that isn't necessarily the other players.

Unfortunately this skews a lot of the content below, because we'd need to consider the LB as a victory type available for specialization, which you've not done in this pass, but I do think that it's a good idea to do so.

Related to telegraphing Alignment, I'm less sure about. I could see us wanting to avoid it because we've avoided it elsewhere. But bonuses for choosing a specific side doesn't tell the other players what that civ is actually doing in this game, it only makes it a sensible choice. And there are good flavor opportunities for civs that are known for their stance on good and evil, as well as interesting Alignment-exclusive-mechanics that we can interface their uniques with that would otherwise be the same for all players. It also lets players create obviously inverted situations of playing against type for their own amusement, which CiV tends to embrace.

Ok, OK, in general, I tend to disagree. I definitely wish that I was smart enough to have though to examine this in much more detail in the framing post, as it's obviously a very big topic. Truly, I simply wrote this bit of the post many, many months ago, before things had quite coalesced on other fronts, and sadly never updated it or fleshed it out more.

Some "options" first.

The way I see it, there are five ways our civs can interact with the LB on a design perspective. Obviously not all civs need be alike in these regards, but we do essentially need to decide on one of these as the "max involvement" of a civ (the most tied-to-the-LB we're willing to include). I'll list them, and then assess them below, and offer my more general thoughts on this issue.

Civ designs can relate to the LB in the following ways, in order of least to greatest connection (though 2 is somewhat off in its own category):

1 - Not at all
2 - Uniques appear during the LB's era
3 - Uniques relate to systems related to the LB
4 - Uniques relate to the LB itself, though in a side-impartial manner
5 - Uniques relate to the LB itself or its side-systems, and relate to specific "sides" in the conflict (Light, Shadow, or Neutrality)

If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, I think my position would have been for "1 - Not at all," but upon thinking much more of this, for this post, I've realized that my actual position is actually closer to 3, and I could actually probably go as far as 4. I remain pretty much staunchly opposed to 5 (latching on to a specific side), as I'll describe more below.

Some more exploration of each option:

1 - Not at all
With this choice, we would avoid creating uniques that tie into the LB. Taken to the extreme, or at least literally, this also means eliminating uniques that relate to alignment, or that occur in the eras close to the LB itself. Taken more liberally, it means keeping the civs' design elements like BNW, in terms of what they cover, and trying to avoid direct connection with the LB.

A literal interpretation of this is likely a bad idea, as we'd be missing out on fully flexing many of the new features of our mod. A more liberal interpretation of this is... well, it's actually pretty much #3 below.

2 - Uniques appear during the LB's era
With this choice, our uniques would technically have little or nothing to do with the LB, or its key mechanics. However, some civs would have some or all of their uniques pop up during the LB's era. Since success in the LB relies on myriad game mechanics - warfare, economy, science, etc. - having a unique during said era would constitute being "good at the LB." A powerful unit during the LB will help steer you to whatever your military goal is.

This possibility touches (more than touches, actually) on something that comes up later - whether we should have uniques in the very late parts of the game. Certainly, the lore suggests we should, since several of the books happen during the time we'd consider the LB to be taking place within. However, as said elsewhere, this is very, very different from BNW, which essentially "equalizes" civs (in most cases) in the end game by having no new uniques pop up in the later eras. Thus, an argument could be made for outright *avoiding* something like this, despite the flavor.

In any case, this seems to me to be something that can be treated somewhat separately from the rest of these - we could conceivably go any of the other options (well, maybe not any), and then decide, independently, whether we want uniques of any sort to be around during the LB.

3 - Uniques relate to systems related to the LB
This is the logical extension of a liberal view of #1 above. The LB itself isn't directly referenced by civs' uniques, but systems related to the LB (not counting those generically related, like "combat" or "paths" or "economics") would be fair game. The most prominent examples of these (what else is there) is the Alignment system, the Trolloc Wars (because it connects to the alignment system), possibly Shadar Logoth (though that doesn't necessarily have to count), shadowspawn, and, conceivably, T'a'r (because one of the T'a'r GPs can produce Threads, thus, alignment).

EDIT
Also, The Hunt for the Horn could be a part of this!
/EDIT

While these systems do certainly tie into the LB, broadly, and one could imagine uniques that very specifically provide results during the LB (a UA that provides an increase of your alignment "bonus" during the LB, for instance, which I think is actually a tier 3 tenant we created), it's also quite possible to create uniques that don't connect with the LB directly (or do so just barely). Some examples of this might be:

a UA that provides some sort of yield or something whenever your Alignment increases or reaches some kind of threshold - or anything that rewards your accumulation of Alignment
a UA that provides sort of bonus for spreading your alignment
a UA that provides an extra something when you select a Thread choice
a TW-era UU that provides some reward for killing shadowspawn (noting that all players will be fighting the shadowspawn here)

These examples don't directly tie into the LB itself, though they would of course be useful in the LB (but then again, so would any improvement to your civ), but also they are importantly agnostic with respect to "side" in the LB.

4 - Uniques relate to the LB itself, though in a side-impartial manner
This choice takes the principles behind #3 above, and then extends them into the LB-specific mechanics as well, though doing so without tying itself to any of the three "sides" (counting neutral) of the LB. Some examples:

a UA that helps you discover Seals faster (useful for all sides)
a UU that allows you to accumulate Alignment more easily (thus providing you more bonuses during the LB, though this one may not be particularly good for neutral players)
a UB that prevents other civs from influencing your alignment
a UU that helps you kill Shadowspawn during the LB (this might sound like a Light-side thing, and it somewhat is, but do remember that at a certain point, shadow players must fight one another, so it certainly could be used to fuel a Shadow-victory)
a Unique that rewards choosing the "proper" side for your alignment (e.g., you get bonuses if you choose neutral when your alignment suggests that you "should," in fact, choose neutral)
a Unique that rewards chooseing the "improper" side for your alignment

The above vary from absolutely playing into the LB itself to passively boosting a civ during it, but in all cases, there isn't a specific bias towards any one side.

Uniques relate to the LB itself or its side-systems, and relate to specific "sides" in the conflict (Light, Shadow, or Neutrality)
This choice allows for actual "side-related" uniques, that effect the LB or other eras of the game in a way to either help civs win as a certain side, or incentivize them choosing that side. Some examples:

a UA that provides bonuses when controlling the Dragon
a UU that fights well against the Dragon, or against the Forsaken
a UU shadowspawn or a UA that helps when fighting as shadowspawn
a Unique that provides bonus to either Light or Shadow (specifically) in any circumstance
a Unique that rewards having a certain threshold of Light points, Shadow points, or rewards having below certain thresholds (staying neutral)
a UB that helps in destroying seals (which could be very much taken to be immediately better for the Shadow, though this is perhaps arguable)
a UU that gets bonuses against Thakan'dar

In the cases above (with the possibly exception being the pentultimate entry), the Unique specifies a "side" in the LB, which isn't happening very much at all in the previous categories (I hope!)

**********

Now, my thoughts.

I feel pretty strongly that #5 is a bad idea. I'll explain why below. To what degree the others are a good or bad idea will emerge below as well, though I'll say that I think any of them can work.

Right off the bat, I should say that I'm not 100% sure on what we should do about #2 (Uniques during the LB's era). My instinct tells me that we should keep things like BNW, in general, and not have much going on int he way of civ uniques specific to the late-game (though, naturally, some earlier uniques will still be functioning at that point), as that seems to work pretty well in BNW. That said, if we decided we wanted to go with #4 (agnostic LB-related uniques), we would obviously be making exceptions to this. In BNW, there seems to have been an effort to "equalize" the civs in the late-game, which might be a way of making the earlier eras "count more" (a civ with dominant era 8 or 9 uniques would likely be very frustrating to players, who might view it as a "blue shell" of sorts. I think we should probably view all this LB-stuff with that in mind. What do you think?

anyways, back to the general sense of all of this. I should say that i think I disagree with your statement that we should treat the LB victory as "not different" from the other VCs. To me, it is very much different, in many ways. Notably, the LB utilizes all of the various mechanics (science, combat, etc.), and that was very purposeful in our design. So, uniques that aid any one aspect of the game should, presumably, aid the LB as well - distinguishing things from this further may not be necessary. Also, the LB just *feels* different from the other victory types. It's a team-related victory for one (by definition if you choose Light). that makes things way, way more complex than any one normal VC stream. The notion that we can paint it with the same brush as the others feels, to me, problematic.

Yes, if Shaka is in your game, you know to defend against aggression. Same with Kamehameha for culture. But that seems somewhat like a truism to me. Naturally, whatever a civ's unique does is something you need to watch out for. England? Watch out for era 4 (or 5?) naval units! Of course. The VC is just an extension of that ("watch out for a domination-push from England during Era 4 or 5"), almost intrinsic in the very presence of Uniques at all. The LB to me is so much more complex, and long-term to be somewhat like apples to Shaka's oranges. This is especially true if a civ is linked to a particular *side* in the LB.

Of course, none of the above means we can't have LB-related uniques, and that it shouldn't be treated as a Victory condition. However, I think it really warrants being treated differently, and more carefully, than the others. It's special.

Regarding the borderlanders and such, I think their fate is likely fine as long as we go with at least option #3 above. If the systems related to the LB are fair game, we shouldn't have aproblem working things in as you describe here. If we go with hands-off (#1), we might have a tricky situation, though.

OK, regarding "telegraphing" either the LB at all, or, especially, a civ's side in the LB, I do think we want to try to prevent it as much as possible. Currently, most of our mechanics support the "surprise" element of the LB - alignment units are invisible, Threads and such aren't visible to others, etc.). The flavor from the books also supports the surprise element - the last-minute decision of the Seanchan, the surprise evil-ness of Shara. Tying mechanics and flavor together, the flexibility of any civ going to any side is compelling to me, as a kind of fusion of the historical mixups of the civ series, and the infinite "restarts" of the Wheel of Time cosmology.

Telegraphing that a civ "wants" an LB (though not its specific alignment) is certainly less problematic, but I still don't love it, as it still seems not to mesh well with the "surprise" elements above. To me, the game feels like it should proceed as if everybody's trying, if possible, to win before the LB starts (which is usually not possible). Barring that, you plan for the possibility of the LB, and if it happens, you choose a side and make the best of it. Civs beginning with the LB in mind doesn't feel quite right to me.

I don't think the "players are free to play 'against type'" thing isn't the right way to look at this. Of course they can, but we probably shouldn't be designing with that in mind. You say later in your posts (way later, I think), that people tend to like the most "directed" civs, despite the lack of "flexibility" that is present in earlier versions of the game that don't have VC-related uniques. We should be building a game that works well when people play along with type, primarily, and then worry about against-type players later. If by playing the civ as it is designed causes problems (too much telegraphing, etc.),t hen its a problem, even though human players might not ultimately even play that way.

In sum, on telegraphing etc., I'd like to keep it to a minimum, etc. But, I'm not trying to be absurd here. Obviously, if a civ has an LB-related ability, that is somewhat a telegraph, by design. But "ooh, Shienar's in the game, I'll have to deal with them in the LB!" is a lot like "ooh, France is in this game, I'll have to deal with their culture!", and isn't a problem at all. "Ooh, Shienar's in the game, better brace for an LB" is much worse, and "ooh, Shienar's in the game, he's choosing light", is much, much worse.

So what do I think?

I think I'm feeling like #3, maybe #4, is probably the way to go here. I think we need to include our LB-related systems to maximize our cool new mechanics. I'm thinking most especially about Alignment here, and T'a'r (though that only tangentially relates to the LB). Other things, like the TW and Shadar Logoth, I am open to (though the latter much less so), but more on a case-by-case basis - I don't think we should strive for their inclusion, necessarily).

I'm less sure that we should engage with the LB itself, though (#4). I'm open to it, but I think it presents some problems. One key issue is that it goes against the rough "equalization" that BNW sets up in the late-game. I'd worry that boosting somebody during the LB too much could cause problems for *any* VC. I'd also worry that we'd potentially be making that civ lame for the entire earlier part of the game.

That said, I think there are ways to make this mostly innocuous, if done properly. I'm open to it.

I am pretty much a "no" on #5 (side-related abilities), and I think the reasons for that should be clear by now, and need not be reiterated.

As a caveat, I should also add that, regardless of which option we choose, I'd like to see any LB-related unique be useful outside of an LB-game. So, ideally, it isn't a UA that helps you with Seals, it's a unique that helps you with something that helps you with seals. That way, if the end-game comes before the LB starts, or if you do play "against type", you still get something for the Unique. I could be convinced to let this go for one unique or something, but it absolutely needs to be true for a civ as a whole.

To this end, I think I'd also like to propose that we aim to have "LB Victory" only ever be the secondary victory preference of a civ (after Domination, Culture, Diplomacy, or Science, understanding that "primary" and "secondary" are vague distinctions). I think given the complexity we've been looking at here, that is probably the safest path.

<gasp>. OK, that was way, way too long. I'm bummed because I've been thinking about this for a few days now, and this has come out way less articulate than I hoped it would!

Thoughts?



I'll be back soon to keep moving!