S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

[counterpoint]

The speed is picking up already, given that you've replied to the whole thing in an evening! (Even if you did write some posts earlier, as you mention below).

Also, what did you write this post with? Some super weird formatting seems to have taken over and everything in your post has newlines mid-sentence (it seems to be constrained to staying within a certain line length).

noice. Trying very much to continue this rapidity! Couldn't get a post in last night, but I'm trying to knock all these out today. This time I'll do them as they come, though, instead of lumping them all at once.

I wrote these all in the reply window on the board, but pasted them to a txt file when I was between posts. Obviously that created some weird issues. When I was posting it, I could tell that *something* was iffy, but couldn't put my finger on what it was...

Woah, 2021!? Let's not get ahead of ourselves!

Yeah, we should probably follow the Blizzard model, and just never specify a release date. That way nobody can complain when it's 2023. Or, follow the Valve model (as in HL 3), and just hide the existence of the mod for a decade...

Is MCMaMC some kind of autocorrected Masema? Anywho, we'll be coming back to this later!

Nope, not autocorrect (also, doing this on a phone... ugh...). I defined my terms earlier in the post. MCMaMC - Minor Character Masquerading as Major Character, which is the pseudonym Alliandre writes under (and her stage name when she performs), because it's hard for a defamed queen to get published in the tough literary world of Randland.

It looks like we've come down on the side of DQing the Isle of Madmen in the rankings stuff later.

yeah. would be fun to do later though.

Also doing a lot of trivializing above and below, btw!

Yeah, these were deliberately omitted since their relationships to being side-specific were less clear cut. They're all definitely things to consider when making this decision though. I would say that finding Seals isn't side-specific, since both sides need to do that.

Agreed.

I've combined these two separate quote blocks because it feels to me like they conflict with each other. I don't think we can offset the decision to the stage of designing specific civs if we want to have these ground rules established before we get to that stage.

OK, point noted.

I understand what you mean about having both of us to pass the "smell test" for any unique later on, but I worry that if we don't decide now, up front, that we want to allow side-specific uniques or not in the general case (as in, we'll consider them on equal footing with other proposed uniques) then no one individual unique will, by itself, be enough motivation for us to swing that decision towards side-specific. (We risk always refusing the first side-specific unique because at that point it would be the only one, and the same would continue to be true, even if we'd actually proposed 5 separate ones by that stage.) And then across all of the civs, we risk eroding some options from several of them, which may have ended up being some of our most engaging ones.

I think you may have picked up on this a bit later in the post, but it seems I may have not been totally clear before, or else you misinterpreted the extent of my suggestion. Let me clarify

Yes, in general, I'm not much of a fan of side-specific LB uniques. I'd venture to guess that even you, who very much want to keep our options open for their inclusion, get why that is and don't dispute my logic. That said, I'm not willing to rule out the possibility that in some cases a side-specific unique might be cool, and might be worth seriously considering (in previous posts, I've outlined some examples, like the TW).

So, what I was suggesting was not "let's go with #4 and maybe you'll come up with a side-specific unique that'll make me change my mind," but instead, "come up with #5's as you see fit, but I think we should tend towards #4's, and be very, very picky with our #5's."

Put simply, "passing" a #5 ability past the Counterpoint Audit is going to be rather challenging, but that's something to tackle on a case-by-case basis. I'm not suggesting that you have to come up with enough #5 abilities such that we can then flip some switch and "enable" side-specific LB uniques. What I'm saying is, propose them as you see fit, but I (and I'd suggest, both of us) am going to have a stronger gravitational pull towards #4-ness. But that doesn't create any prohibitive policy as you seem to have been assuming - if at the end of the day, there are no civs that end up with a #5 ability, that's simply because, on a case-by-case basis, the side-specific uniques proposed didn't win out against the non-side-specific uniques. Similarly, if, say, one civ ends up with side-specific uniques, that's likely fine - it won't feel super inconsistent (though it would probably best to at least have one Light one and one Shadow one), I think, because, as you've stated, we're only likely to have a few LB civs anyways, and, of course, an "LB civ" isn't an actual thing that the end user will perceive and understand, since most (all, hopefully) civs will have viable VCs associated with them.

Make sense? I'm still very much leaning towards #4, and I suspect I will continue to - and I suspect in many cases, perhaps most cases, you'll agree - but I'm not trying to create some structure or process that inherently biases us against creating #5s. I'm fine with proposing anything as an option, at least at this stage.

I should clarify, though, that I don't feel comfortably committing to include #5s in the final result, though. A specific unique needs to prove its worth. (conversely, I am willing to commit to, say, a Path-related unique, or an Alignment-related [i.e., LB side-neutral] unique. I hope you view this as acceptable.

As we mentioned before, the more "directed" civs we see in BNW are often player favorites, even though their specialization effectively reduces player choice during a given game. I feel like side-specific uniques can capture that feeling very well.

I understand this logic. I'm still not convinced that this doesn't go a little too far though - we've created the side-surprise element, which is a new part of the game. We couldn't say convincingly that being directed about *that* would go over well with players. We can't know, of course - which is why I'm suggesting we conservatively evaluate any such uniques.

I see your point about having enough flavor that we don't need to consider controversial uniques, and my main point here is that if we're going to consider them going forward, then side-specific uniques shouldn't be controversial.

Controversial aside, I think it cannot be denied that side-specific uniques are somewhat "heavier" and kind of a "bigger deal" than other uniques. It's perhaps on a similar level to some of the kinds of things we might do with the Tinkers (though not as extreme), in the sense that it is more unpredictable and messes with some established norms. So, while they may not be controversial, I think we do need to smell such abilities extra deeply, and be somewhat cautious. There are legitimate arguments against their inclusion at all - disagree, though you may - but the fact is that those arguments exist, where they typically don't with other "genres" of uniques. This needs to be respected, and I think that's very, very reasonable to expect. Just make sure you're not losing sight of the fact that side-specific uniques are... just kinda weird.

And reiterating from last time, even if we do decide now that we will allow side-specific uniques in general, that doesn't guarantee that we'll come up with ones we want to use for any of our specific civs.

yes.

And even though making this decision now is potentially complicated, yet may yield no actual change in the resulting civs, we have no way of knowing whether it will or not until we've already made it, because not making that decision will bias the design process in favor of non-side-specific. Not that I think we will intentionally bias the design process, but that uncertainty will create an inherent bias from both of us - it will be easier to not address it.

I've tried to address this above. It's truly a difference of minute details, so I understand its touchy. I would like to fully embrace #5s in the brainstorming process, but it does seem fair to admit that those abilities are, in many cases, at least, going to be looked at with greater suspicion than others. That seems highly logical, given the complexity and "what's at stake." Please don't take that to mean other abilities won't be scrutinized to a great degree, but in many cases, other proposed abilities will deal with mechanics that are more familiar to us. You know what I mean, I think.

Also, you mention above that there will be side-specific and non-side-specific variants on interactions between uniques and quite a few mechanics. I completely agree on that and I think making this decision now will let us consider those options in the space of which is the most fun, flavorful, and balanced, rather than needing to also consider whether side-specific is something we want to do. I think a lot of concerns about side-specific uniques may fall under the umbrella of balance - since the utility of some variants would be significantly reduced by them only being applicable/usable in very narrow circumstances (like a combat bonus to a unit when controlling the Dragon, this is only active a very small portion of the game, would be my main issue with such a unique), we would need to consider how that makes a given unique too weak. That feels to me like a separate issue to the general case we're discussing here.

I am very much in favor of making any side-specific unique - indeed, many LB uniques - have some other functionality, or at least affect some other facet of the game. This is both because of the possible challenges they present (that we've been discussing), as well as the very small portion of the game they occupy, as you mention. Not a blanket requirement, of course, but a statement of preference - such abilities are likely to be better, as they might lessen some of the potential "damage" caused by a side-specific-ness (telegraphing, etc.).

Similarly, I'm also much, much more interested in seeing some "side specific" abilities that have "opposite side" affects as well (which comes up later), so while a civ might have a pro-Dragon ability, it also has an anti-Dragon ability (perhaps the same ability), such that the civ is sort of side-specific towards *both* sides.

Again, not a requirement, but an honest statement on what I think is more likely to survive.

You mention above that there are points you still stand by from your first post that would discourage us from using side-specific uniques. Would we be able to go through those specifically? Is there more detail from my last post that you feel doesn't address some of those points adequately?

Gosh, no. No more elaboration or digging back into it, lol.

It's not that you haven't addressed all of my points. It's that your addressing of those points doesn't completely negate those points, and there are still a healthy amount of reasons why its reasonable to be suspicious of side-specificness. If you find that hard to swallow, I honestly suggest rereading some of the passages from last month's posts, and ask yourself "is that truly such an invalid viewpoint?" I think between then, and now, I've stated all the "reasons" why we should be cautious.

There are pros and cons to both sides, but I feel that overall deciding to allow side-specific uniques is a good call. (You picked up that this was my opinion, but I've realized here that I never actually stated it clearly!)

I completely agree with this. And I agreed with this last time, as well - apparently I didn't articulate it very clearly, though.

I can see this being a good approach.

I was also thinking that we could make it so that there isn't a hard limit on how long the game is, but that the LB continues to ramp up to such an extent that it becomes impossible for any civs to hang on. (This would require the Shadowspawn civ to somehow end up killing Shadow players though.) So that may be too complicated.

interesting, so a more organic end to it all. Impossible waves of shadowspawn, etc.... But, as you say, the shadow players.... I don't know. What if the Shadow players were one-by-one "fired" from the shadow, and forced into neutrality or something? tough question.

I think we'll want to keep score anyway, since it lets players estimate their relative placement in the world. Though it might have interesting effects on the game if it's removed - causing human players to fall back on much more in-universe opinions of other players (and make them much more focused on reconnaissance).

Hmmm... that last idea would be interesting. Probably safest to leave it alone, though.

As I've touched on above, I feel like this is a subtly different issue to the general case that we want to decide here. The issue with such uniques is that they need to be appropriately powerful even though they're available for only a short time, and the player can't be left feeling like they're playing a generics-only-civ until they reach a certain late game target - their other uniques should help them along the way to making the most specific one (if they have one unique that is useful only in quite specific circumstances, like when fighting/controlling the Dragon, or finding a Seal) useful as often as possible.

I think I hit this above. For sure - I think this is a compelling reason for us to give many LB-oriented abilities (not just side-specific ones) other aspects as well (i.e., they don't JUST generate alignment points).

My comparison to an era and the LB being a game phase doesn't really capture what I'd intended. I didn't mean to compare an era as a portion of the game to the LB as a portion of the game. It's more about a specific civ reaching a certain era is a certain amount of progression within the game that that civ must achieve in order to leverage its uniques. For LB-specific uniques, it's the same kind of thing: the player must progress to a certain extent in order to be able to leverage them, and can be denied the opportunity to apply that leverage by another player progressing significantly faster than them (in the era analogy, that's another civ teching up faster and being able to kill them first; in the LB analogy that's someone else winning the game before the LB-specific civ is able to trigger the LB, meaning the other player was way ahead of them).

The considerations to keep in mind with that, is that if a civ has LB-specific uniques and its other uniques don't help it in getting to a position where those specific uniques are useful, then we've created another Byzantium. A mechanic-specific unique that the actions of other players can deprive the civ from leveraging, even though that civ has no given advantage in being able to reach the leverage-able situation. This is a problem with that civ, rather than LB-specific uniques in general.

I think actually I was understanding your era/game phase comparison, and I think my comments still make sense within that context. Your point on Byzantium is valid, though - synergy is desired, and all that. But, I'm figuring that any "LB civ" is *also* a "Culture" civ or a "Science" civ or something like that - or more organic piece that can fit into a larger game.

In terms of LB specific uniques not being useful in pursuing other VCs, that can be true. However, I don't think that's a problem. Of course, it's more flexible for a civ to have uniques that can apply to multiple VCs, but that seems like something we should design intentionally as a part of that civ. We can make some civs be much more directed than others. BNW establishes that some unique components can contribute directly to only one VC, like Brazil's UA, which is almost useless if you're not going for the Culture victory (particularly the Tourism part, otherwise the extra GPs help with some CS quests and a couple of Golden Ages). (And then they go and put an achievement in for winning a Diplo victory with them!)

The Brazillian UA is an exception that proves the rule, though - so this should be possible, but it'll only be on a specific case-by-case that it'll pop up, I'd say. I'd rather not go out of our way to create it. If good uniques that are LB-only are created and appear to be the most compelling options, we should choose them, of course!

I definitely see what you mean about the TW, and given how early it is, players aren't particularly invested in one Alignment or the other at that point. Most bonuses that are TW-related are likely to be much more broad than ones that come later in the tree, just because of the foundational stage of the game that we're at.

I've pulled this particular block about Aridhol down in my post so that it's after the bigger LB stuff above, because I think it's a good example of how not deciding on whether we allow side-specific uniques will affect our thinking when we try to design individual civs. We know that avoiding the side-specific options means it will be less complex to design, which inherently pushes us in this direction. I think we should be considering, in this case, potential Aridhol uniques against each other in terms of fun, flavor, and balance rather than whether or not they're side-specific. (Not suggesting we do Aridhol now, that would throw the process out of whack, just using them as an example.)

Sure. I don't think this conflicts with anything I've said above.

I think I've covered the multiple VC applicability above.

"locking out other victories" for Light players is a very good point. But it seems to me like that's complexity at a different level of the game from the structural placement of the LB as something a given player tries to achieve as "their intended victory", rather than something that happens along the way of their attempting to win one of the BNW VCs.

Potential can of worms suggestion. I will make this brief, so we should feel it is distinctly appropriate, if we don't want to pursue it further, to just decide "no, let's not go into this" now.

What if the Light side of the LB wasn't a team victory, and didn't lock out the other VCs? The Light players compete in some non-military way to be the person who controls the Dragon unit, and the player who captures Thakan'dar with the Dragon is the Light winner.

There are difficulties with "why would they work together to take Thakan'dar", but that's something we could work out, if we go any further with this. It would also mean players could pivot back to other victories if things went sour, not being able to do so could potentially be very frustrating. It may also lead to modifying the Shadow victory as well (potentially no longer requiring another "normal" victory, and having some other requirement instead), which I do sort of worry is almost always more difficult than the Neutral path of "just win that victory".

Anyway, can of worms tipped just to the edge of being open, but still very closeable. If you don't think we should go through this all again, then please do say so and we can hold off. This has been sitting in the back of my mind for the last back and forths, so I figured it best to say!

Ah! Interesting. This is very tough...

I'm tempted to not change the big picture of how the Light victory works. I think you'd never really work together, because why would you (see previous discussions). Also it makes the choice of Light-versus-Shadow much different. Currently, the Light victory is cool because numbers can win - a bunch of small civs could beat a dominant shadow civ. It's a kind of chess game, choosing which side to join. I feel like this is lost if we do what you're hinting at.

That said, what if there was a way to dissolve the light alliance? Like, a majority vote that breaks it up and makes everybody neutral? Or, potentially, a vote that enables other VCs (while still providing the alliance)? Maybe both only are available after X turns of LB. Of course, the tricky thing here is that gives a lot of power into the hands of a diplo-oriented civ (is there another way), and, obviously, what would this mean when there was, say, only one Light civ? Can they fight for good until its convenient, and then snap off the "alliance" and win an immediate diplo victory or something?

Sounds good. In relation to "secondary functionality", this refers to LB-related uniques' applicability to other VCs? In the context of what I've said above about a lack of cross-applicability to other VCs not being a problem, I'm referring to the "possibility of such uniques" not being a problem. It becomes a problem if all of our civs can only effectively do one VC (regardless of what those VCs are). But having one or two civs that are much more focused than the rest is fine.

yeah, that makes sense. See above for more details!

OK, back in a few hours for more!

 

[counterpoint]

Last comment about my LB stuff above, this is also another good example of how not deciding affects our designs. We don't need to make them LB focused, which is totally true. And I think it will always be true, but not necessarily best. I think we should decide on whether or not we do make a civ LB-focused based on how much we like the uniques that each approach offers (as well as general mechanical/VC spread considerations), rather than to avoid the general case. (I'm repeating myself a bit, sorry! I do feel quite strongly on this!)

I understand. That said, I'm not necessarily sold that the LB should be one of their two primary VCs. I'm open to it though, I just don't think it's in my top two (just off the top of my head). I'd say this may be one of the civs that, when we do our next step (big list), may have three VCs listed.

s).
I reread this section here and realize that enormous proportions of my previous post may have been unnecessary. (But I have written them, so they are getting posted.) "if a proposed unique works, it works" is the a very succinct abstraction of what I'm going for with side-specific LB uniques. And that may totally have been what you were intending to say with your posts above.

If so, I must apologize for wasting both of our time.

you're concerned about wasting time in a dev thread that's on page 52?

I'm happy to go over 20 if there are some we're still not happy to drop. I would be happy to drop Saldaea and Aldeshar at this point. Saldaea for redundancy - Shienar and Malkier fulfill its FLC roles better, IMO. Aldeshar for obscurity. But if you would prefer we go further with them then I'm up for that.

I'm fine with dropping Far Madding, so that brings us down to 22 at most.

Eh, let's just keep em in. Why not? (all but Far Madding)

The truth is, at this early stage, an extra two won't make a difference. Also, if we do them in score order, as you suggest below, it's totally possible that we'll get like 18 in, and get tired of it and "delay" the rest. So, we could always *not* do those last two.

(honestly, though, that logic is making me feel nervous, and want to put the TR back into the pot... lol...)

Yeah, that seems like an appropriate level of detail for the next stage - so we're really just aggregating what we've gone through before. It lets us make sure it all still lines up like we expect, because all of these details were decided in parallel in separate quote blocks last time, so it will be good to look at the big picture.

Let's let the LB stuff collapse down a bit more before we do this, which may be quite shortly, depending on how much is left to discuss.

agreed. I'm guessing we'll be done with the LB stuff in one post, two max.

But what if that's what Firaxis wanted us to do?

re: turtle ship. Yeah... but it wasn't all that fun, since I think I never fought a single non-barb with one.

They were in the house the whole time!

That reference was a bit forced. >.>[/quote]

Related to designing fewer civs at once, I very much support this idea! When I'm able to get other things done on top of the post on a weeknight it means I'm much more able to do an every-day response.

We could do them in batches of 4, as you suggest, and simply use the order from the leaderboards above? (Probably the unweighted one.)

totally fine with this!

This seems like a good level of detail for step 4! 3 or 4 options for each category sounds good, though some civs we may end up leaving with less than that if they're thin on flavor.

What does the Era range mean when next to the name of the civ? The eras where their tech-unlocked uniques unlock? Or a general statement of where they are dominant in the tree? (These two might be the same.) Or where in the tree their flavor-defined existence took place?

What about alternate interpretations of the same flavor? We can just put them in side by side as alternatives? Like:

House Stark

UB
Weirwood Grove (bonus vision during winter)
Weirwood Grove (culture from units killed)

Also bravo on using an ASoIaF civ as an example, that was a very cool idea. It explained the level of detail super clearly but also didn't affect any of our actual designs.

The era range was, i guess, *both* of those things (the era of their flavor, and the era of their uniques), though I suppose it's mostly the former. In this case, it was totally arbitrary, since I have no idea the era scope of our hypothetical aSoIaF mod. Also, for the record, we would make an incredible ASoIaF mod...

Yeah, alternate interpretations, for sure, are fine.

I'll nitpick and suggest that in this mod we're not developing, the civ should probably be called "The North," right?

 

[S3rgeus]

noice. Trying very much to continue this rapidity! Couldn't get a post in last night, but I'm trying to knock all these out today. This time I'll do them as they come, though, instead of lumping them all at once.

Same here - within hours!

I wrote these all in the reply window on the board, but pasted them to a txt file when I was between posts. Obviously that created some weird issues. When I was posting it, I could tell that *something* was iffy, but couldn't put my finger on what it was...

Notepad is evil! (Notepad++ is much better.)

Yeah, we should probably follow the Blizzard model, and just never specify a release date. That way nobody can complain when it's 2023. Or, follow the Valve model (as in HL 3), and just hide the existence of the mod for a decade...

This topic is public, so the HL3 approach will be difficult. The Blizzard model seems appropriate!

Nope, not autocorrect (also, doing this on a phone... ugh...). I defined my terms earlier in the post. MCMaMC - Minor Character Masquerading as Major Character, which is the pseudonym Alliandre writes under (and her stage name when she performs), because it's hard for a defamed queen to get published in the tough literary world of Randland.

Ah, I see! The publishing industry is cutthroat even in fantasy!

OK, point noted.

I think you may have picked up on this a bit later in the post, but it seems I may have not been totally clear before, or else you misinterpreted the extent of my suggestion. Let me clarify

Yes, in general, I'm not much of a fan of side-specific LB uniques. I'd venture to guess that even you, who very much want to keep our options open for their inclusion, get why that is and don't dispute my logic. That said, I'm not willing to rule out the possibility that in some cases a side-specific unique might be cool, and might be worth seriously considering (in previous posts, I've outlined some examples, like the TW).

So, what I was suggesting was not "let's go with #4 and maybe you'll come up with a side-specific unique that'll make me change my mind," but instead, "come up with #5's as you see fit, but I think we should tend towards #4's, and be very, very picky with our #5's."

Put simply, "passing" a #5 ability past the Counterpoint Audit is going to be rather challenging, but that's something to tackle on a case-by-case basis. I'm not suggesting that you have to come up with enough #5 abilities such that we can then flip some switch and "enable" side-specific LB uniques. What I'm saying is, propose them as you see fit, but I (and I'd suggest, both of us) am going to have a stronger gravitational pull towards #4-ness. But that doesn't create any prohibitive policy as you seem to have been assuming - if at the end of the day, there are no civs that end up with a #5 ability, that's simply because, on a case-by-case basis, the side-specific uniques proposed didn't win out against the non-side-specific uniques. Similarly, if, say, one civ ends up with side-specific uniques, that's likely fine - it won't feel super inconsistent (though it would probably best to at least have one Light one and one Shadow one), I think, because, as you've stated, we're only likely to have a few LB civs anyways, and, of course, an "LB civ" isn't an actual thing that the end user will perceive and understand, since most (all, hopefully) civs will have viable VCs associated with them.

Make sense? I'm still very much leaning towards #4, and I suspect I will continue to - and I suspect in many cases, perhaps most cases, you'll agree - but I'm not trying to create some structure or process that inherently biases us against creating #5s. I'm fine with proposing anything as an option, at least at this stage.

Awesome sauce, I think we're in the same place!

Not sure what else to say here really, but it does feel like there should be more to say. Anyway, it looks like this is fairly settled - #5s are an option and we just need to consider which uniques we like for each civ as we would normally, when we get to that stage.

I should clarify, though, that I don't feel comfortably committing to include #5s in the final result, though. A specific unique needs to prove its worth. (conversely, I am willing to commit to, say, a Path-related unique, or an Alignment-related [i.e., LB side-neutral] unique. I hope you view this as acceptable.

Totally agreed, I wouldn't want to commit to including #5 uniques now, the same way I wouldn't want to commit to including uniques that affect votes in the Compact. As you've said, we don't know yet if there will be a unique in that category that we like most for a civ.

I understand this logic. I'm still not convinced that this doesn't go a little too far though - we've created the side-surprise element, which is a new part of the game. We couldn't say convincingly that being directed about *that* would go over well with players. We can't know, of course - which is why I'm suggesting we conservatively evaluate any such uniques.

Agreed, I definitely think that there are a lot of these side-specific uniques that would go too far - the main thing here is keeping the options open to find the ones that don't.

Controversial aside, I think it cannot be denied that side-specific uniques are somewhat "heavier" and kind of a "bigger deal" than other uniques. It's perhaps on a similar level to some of the kinds of things we might do with the Tinkers (though not as extreme), in the sense that it is more unpredictable and messes with some established norms. So, while they may not be controversial, I think we do need to smell such abilities extra deeply, and be somewhat cautious. There are legitimate arguments against their inclusion at all - disagree, though you may - but the fact is that those arguments exist, where they typically don't with other "genres" of uniques. This needs to be respected, and I think that's very, very reasonable to expect. Just make sure you're not losing sight of the fact that side-specific uniques are... just kinda weird.

Agreed, and this is why my main point above was all about ensuring we keep the possibility open, not about suggesting we do make such uniques. They are much more in the flavor of BNW's more exotic directed civs.

I am very much in favor of making any side-specific unique - indeed, many LB uniques - have some other functionality, or at least affect some other facet of the game. This is both because of the possible challenges they present (that we've been discussing), as well as the very small portion of the game they occupy, as you mention. Not a blanket requirement, of course, but a statement of preference - such abilities are likely to be better, as they might lessen some of the potential "damage" caused by a side-specific-ness (telegraphing, etc.).

Similarly, I'm also much, much more interested in seeing some "side specific" abilities that have "opposite side" affects as well (which comes up later), so while a civ might have a pro-Dragon ability, it also has an anti-Dragon ability (perhaps the same ability), such that the civ is sort of side-specific towards *both* sides.

Again, not a requirement, but an honest statement on what I think is more likely to survive.

Gosh, no. No more elaboration or digging back into it, lol.

It's not that you haven't addressed all of my points. It's that your addressing of those points doesn't completely negate those points, and there are still a healthy amount of reasons why its reasonable to be suspicious of side-specificness. If you find that hard to swallow, I honestly suggest rereading some of the passages from last month's posts, and ask yourself "is that truly such an invalid viewpoint?" I think between then, and now, I've stated all the "reasons" why we should be cautious.

I definitely understand a lot of those points and agree that they can be problems, I was mainly thinking that all of them can be overcome with the right uniques, so we don't want to discount those uniques yet.

interesting, so a more organic end to it all. Impossible waves of shadowspawn, etc.... But, as you say, the shadow players.... I don't know. What if the Shadow players were one-by-one "fired" from the shadow, and forced into neutrality or something? tough question.

It seems like something we can decide later though?

Hmmm... that last idea would be interesting. Probably safest to leave it alone, though.

Agreed, it's safest to leave this alone for now. And without the Time victory, Score is relatively meaningless by itself (nothing else depends on it), so we're free to assess whether we'd like to remove it later.

I think actually I was understanding your era/game phase comparison, and I think my comments still make sense within that context. Your point on Byzantium is valid, though - synergy is desired, and all that. But, I'm figuring that any "LB civ" is *also* a "Culture" civ or a "Science" civ or something like that - or more organic piece that can fit into a larger game.

The Brazillian UA is an exception that proves the rule, though - so this should be possible, but it'll only be on a specific case-by-case that it'll pop up, I'd say. I'd rather not go out of our way to create it. If good uniques that are LB-only are created and appear to be the most compelling options, we should choose them, of course!

Agreed, and the existence of any exception means that option remains open (which is what you've said here, and what was my point before... and your point before that!).

Ah! Interesting. This is very tough...

I'm tempted to not change the big picture of how the Light victory works. I think you'd never really work together, because why would you (see previous discussions). Also it makes the choice of Light-versus-Shadow much different. Currently, the Light victory is cool because numbers can win - a bunch of small civs could beat a dominant shadow civ. It's a kind of chess game, choosing which side to join. I feel like this is lost if we do what you're hinting at.

Potentially, but I think there are ways we could address that. We'd only want to go into them if we want to dive deeper on considering this change now though! I'm a bit reluctant to put everything on hold for this kind of upheaval. At the same time, we don't want to end up invalidating our civs by changing the victory mechanics out from underneath them later. What do you think?

That said, what if there was a way to dissolve the light alliance? Like, a majority vote that breaks it up and makes everybody neutral? Or, potentially, a vote that enables other VCs (while still providing the alliance)? Maybe both only are available after X turns of LB. Of course, the tricky thing here is that gives a lot of power into the hands of a diplo-oriented civ (is there another way), and, obviously, what would this mean when there was, say, only one Light civ? Can they fight for good until its convenient, and then snap off the "alliance" and win an immediate diplo victory or something?

Making everybody Neutral would necessitate changes to the Shadow victory as well, since that's dependent on capturing Light capitals. Still doable.

I do like the general idea of having some mechanism for re-enabling other victory conditions, because I worry that the Light Alliance might unknowingly lock a player into an avoidable loss, which would be endlessly frustrating for a human player. We did discuss dissolving the Alliance before, but decided not to go into detail at the time, right? That it was a potential post-launch feature? (Hey, we do have at least one of those!)

Like the stuff above, I'm not sure if we want to go into this now though. It will probably take a while, because it's a whole new design process/set of changes that we'll discuss at length around the structure of this VC.

 

[S3rgeus]

you're concerned about wasting time in a dev thread that's on page 52?

Page number is only related to post count, not the length of the discussion. That means our page 52 involves a lot more time than most topic's page 52, which is completely contrary to the concern about wasting time, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

Heck, our topic has an automated backup system! You're right, we're all the way off the deep end of time commitment.

Eh, let's just keep em in. Why not? (all but Far Madding)

Done! Civ list for stage 3:

Seanchan
The Aiel
Shandalle
Sea Folk
Shara
Malkier
Manetheren
P-C Seanchan (they're actually ranked quite highly when not DQed!)
Shienar
Ghealdan
Mayene
Amadicia
Andor
Tarabon
Tear
Aridhol
Aramaelle
Illian
Altara
Cairhien
Arad Doman
Saldaea
Aldeshar

Which is actually coming in at a total count of 23. Have I included someone we've DQed or did we just miscount last time?

The truth is, at this early stage, an extra two won't make a difference. Also, if we do them in score order, as you suggest below, it's totally possible that we'll get like 18 in, and get tired of it and "delay" the rest. So, we could always *not* do those last two.

Sounds good - though I'd say we probably want to press through to the end there, I doubt we'll be in a position where we can say we like all of the current proposed uniques so much we don't even need to consider the other civs, if we can't eliminate them at this stage now!

(honestly, though, that logic is making me feel nervous, and want to put the TR back into the pot... lol...)

I think our previous decision to DQ it still makes sense!

agreed. I'm guessing we'll be done with the LB stuff in one post, two max.

It seems to be sorted! (Barring redesigning the whole Light victory, which I don't think we're doing now?)


With that in mind, and since stage 3 is mostly recollecting things we've decided already and ensuring we still like the pieces and consider the big picture, here's a list!

The only thing here that I've really need to make any decisions on is the era range, for which I've used the "flavor of when they existed" we discuss above. Seeing as we're making sure we have each part of the tech tree covered at this stage, I figure we want to go for this flavor range first, before making any decisions on where to narrow the more chronologically flexible civs down to.

Also, a note on VCs listed here, I figure that rather than a primary and secondary (and tertiary) here, we're listing the more favored VCs that we'll be trialling "specializing" that civ into in the later steps. Some civs (probably most) will have uniques that are useful for multiple VCs, and our intention here would be to have all of those VCs in the list at this stage.

It's also worth mentioning that while we're classifying each civ with Wide or Tall, their uniques may not end up pushing them one way or the other, in which case such a classification would no longer hold.

Stuff I'm knowingly unsure about is marked in red, but of course any of it is changeable if we want to. When referring back to our discussions of individual civs earlier on, I find we didn't go back and forth much, so I'm including all of both of our suggestions to start with (some options subsume one another, "any" contains all others, obviously, but I've listed all discrete suggestions for clarity).

We've also got starting biases on here, which I think we might end up tweaking based on the uniques we pick, since the starting bias's objective is often to facilitate a civ's uniques being useful.

Seanchan (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Not Diplo/LB, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, Any/LB/Cul, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Unknown (suggest Tall), Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Tall/Wide, Any/not LB, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9 (or 7-8?), Tall, Dom/Any, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Not Dom, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Any, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cil/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Any/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo/Any, no bias/Avoid Coast)

It's interesting that going into this, I figured we'd have a lack of Wide civs because the Westlands civs seem to be Tall to me, for the most part (several of them are effectively just one city and some villages). Our diversification seems to have given us some more Wide civs though!

Also, the FY is still most definitely a hole. Aldeshar and Shandalle are the only civs that cover era 4 specifically (not counting the ones who cover the whole tree).

The era range was, i guess, *both* of those things (the era of their flavor, and the era of their uniques), though I suppose it's mostly the former.

Era range for their flavor sounds like a good definition for that heading.

Also, for the record, we would make an incredible ASoIaF mod...

It would be so awesome. There are some other ASoIaF mods for CiV already, but I don't know if any are still being actively maintained/developed/finished.

Yeah, alternate interpretations, for sure, are fine.

Sounds good!

I'll nitpick and suggest that in this mod we're not developing, the civ should probably be called "The North," right?

I dunno, that would seem to me to miss out on the conflicts between the Starks and the Boltons, and if we went far enough to include civs from the extended universe (like the Forresters from the Telltale game), The North would encompass a whole bunch of distinct potential civs. I'd think an ASoIaF mod would want to have a very different diplomacy system, particularly allowing for some form of vassalage-like system where one could piece together a "the North" force from several civs of Houses. (It would probably want a very different combat system as well, to discourage the kinds of global wars we see in civ and pull things down to more regional conflicts.)

This mod we're not developing could get pretty detailed.

 

[counterpoint]

Same here - within hours!

onward we go! nuking even more quote blocks!

Awesome sauce, I think we're in the same place!

Not sure what else to say here really, but it does feel like there should be more to say. Anyway, it looks like this is fairly settled - #5s are an option and we just need to consider which uniques we like for each civ as we would normally, when we get to that stage.

yes. fairly settled, indeed!

Totally agreed, I wouldn't want to commit to including #5 uniques now, the same way I wouldn't want to commit to including uniques that affect votes in the Compact. As you've said, we don't know yet if there will be a unique in that category that we like most for a civ.

ooh, the Compact is a great similar example. Possibly a good idea, but also possibly a terrible one

Agreed, it's safest to leave this alone for now. And without the Time victory, Score is relatively meaningless by itself (nothing else depends on it), so we're free to assess whether we'd like to remove it later.

I think actually I was understanding your era/game phase comparison, and I think my comments still make sense within that context. Your point on Byzantium is valid, though - synergy is desired, and all that. But, I'm figuring that any "LB civ" is *also* a "Culture" civ or a "Science" civ or something like that - or more organic piece that can fit into a larger game.

yes, on that last bit, for sure.

Potentially, but I think there are ways we could address that. We'd only want to go into them if we want to dive deeper on considering this change now though! I'm a bit reluctant to put everything on hold for this kind of upheaval. At the same time, we don't want to end up invalidating our civs by changing the victory mechanics out from underneath them later. What do you think?

hmmm... I say design with the current rules in place. I really doubt we're going to make Uniques that will be rendered invalid by a change like this - in fact, I'd be pretty against creating any uniques that played off of this kind of mechanic (e.g., a civ that gets bonuses for betraying their allies and breaking the Light alliance, or something). So, we can consider doing this later, but it should be pretty independent from all these uniques, I think.

Making everybody Neutral would necessitate changes to the Shadow victory as well, since that's dependent on capturing Light capitals. Still doable.

right. also tabled.

I do like the general idea of having some mechanism for re-enabling other victory conditions, because I worry that the Light Alliance might unknowingly lock a player into an avoidable loss, which would be endlessly frustrating for a human player. We did discuss dissolving the Alliance before, but decided not to go into detail at the time, right? That it was a potential post-launch feature? (Hey, we do have at least one of those!)

Like the stuff above, I'm not sure if we want to go into this now though. It will probably take a while, because it's a whole new design process/set of changes that we'll discuss at length around the structure of this VC.

I don't think we decided to table the dissolving of the Light Alliance. I think we decided *not* to do it at all, because of the aforementioned (and relatively plain) problems it causes. I agree that we shouldn't dig into this now, as it will derail this topic. I think this is something we could reexamine pretty late in the process.

Page number is only related to post count, not the length of the discussion. That means our page 52 involves a lot more time than most topic's page 52, which is completely contrary to the concern about wasting time, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

oh, that bums me out. Nobody knows how gigantic this thread really is, then...

Done! Civ list for stage 3:

Seanchan
The Aiel
Shandalle
Sea Folk
Shara
Malkier
Manetheren
P-C Seanchan (they're actually ranked quite highly when not DQed!)
Shienar
Ghealdan
Mayene
Amadicia
Andor
Tarabon
Tear
Aridhol
Aramaelle
Illian
Altara
Cairhien
Arad Doman
Saldaea
Aldeshar

Which is actually coming in at a total count of 23. Have I included someone we've DQed or did we just miscount last time?

great. Amazing how low Andor is on this list!

I think the count of 22 may have been you adding Aldeshar and A.D., but not Saldaea.

Sounds good - though I'd say we probably want to press through to the end there, I doubt we'll be in a position where we can say we like all of the current proposed uniques so much we don't even need to consider the other civs, if we can't eliminate them at this stage now!

ok!

I think our previous decision to DQ it still makes sense!

OK, bring on the angry Perrin-fanboys, then!

It seems to be sorted! (Barring redesigning the whole Light victory, which I don't think we're doing now?)

sorted!

With that in mind, and since stage 3 is mostly recollecting things we've decided already and ensuring we still like the pieces and consider the big picture, here's a list!

The only thing here that I've really need to make any decisions on is the era range, for which I've used the "flavor of when they existed" we discuss above. Seeing as we're making sure we have each part of the tech tree covered at this stage, I figure we want to go for this flavor range first, before making any decisions on where to narrow the more chronologically flexible civs down to.

Absolutely, flavor range is the better option for now. We'll shift things "mechanically" as need be, once we get further into the process.

Also, a note on VCs listed here, I figure that rather than a primary and secondary (and tertiary) here, we're listing the more favored VCs that we'll be trialling "specializing" that civ into in the later steps. Some civs (probably most) will have uniques that are useful for multiple VCs, and our intention here would be to have all of those VCs in the list at this stage.

agreed.

It's also worth mentioning that while we're classifying each civ with Wide or Tall, their uniques may not end up pushing them one way or the other, in which case such a classification would no longer hold.

agreed. I think it's only going to be something we specifically target in a few cases. Otherwise, the Tall/Wide thing is likely going to be decided as it seems to often/usually be in BNW - the VC you're pursuing (culture as generally tall, etc.)

Stuff I'm knowingly unsure about is marked in red, but of course any of it is changeable if we want to. When referring back to our discussions of individual civs earlier on, I find we didn't go back and forth much, so I'm including all of both of our suggestions to start with (some options subsume one another, "any" contains all others, obviously, but I've listed all discrete suggestions for clarity).

We've also got starting biases on here, which I think we might end up tweaking based on the uniques we pick, since the starting bias's objective is often to facilitate a civ's uniques being useful.

ok, all that sounds good to me. I'll quote your list, and then comment on the red ones I have specific comments on - all other red entries can be turned into normal text (i.e. I don't dispute them). I considered actually just removing the colors myself, but then I realized that you haven't yourself commented on them (I'm pretty sure you've just copied this from our previous convo).Also, I've indicated other changes that aren't currently in red.

Seanchan (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Not Diplo/LB, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, Any/LB/Cul, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Unknown (suggest Tall), Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Tall/Wide, Any/not LB, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9 (or 7-8?), Tall, Dom/Any, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Not Dom, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Any, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cil/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Any/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo/Any, no bias/Avoid Coast)

• The Seanchan could likely start in era 4, which is when they're consolidated.
• Era 1 might be a little early for the Aiel - at that point, they're probably still basically Tinkers, right? I think we could do it, tech-wise (i.e., mechanical usefulness of having spears early in the game), but flavor-wise, it probably doesn't quite work.
• Sea Folk look good. Era 1 works.
• I think Shara could probably be either Tall or Wide. Yes, it's a big empire (we think), but it's also described as having high walls and being impenetrable and such - I imagine a huge tall empire with epic cultural borders could also work. Wide is probably preferred, though. Era 1 works.
• Malkier looks good
• Tall is fine for Manetheren. I'd be tempted to simply put "any" for their VCs (or Any/LB, if you like that better)
• P-C Seanchan looks good
• Sheinar I'd say is better as Tall.
• I think Prophet Ghealdan, if taken literally, should be 7-8. But if we're going to open it up to ghealdan in general, then leave it as 5-9.
• Amadicia should probably be "unknown" for size
• Andor should be "any" for size (or unknown, however you want to state it)
• No opinion on size of Tarabon - unknown works for me.
• Tear feels more like a Tall civ, but a Tall civ that churns out Gold and trade, which is kind of interesting. I'm fine with both those potential biases. I think, since Tear as a city is older than Tear as a country, we could probably justify putting it in era 4, or even 3.
• what's the rationale behind Aramaelle as LB? Also, why Wide? I guess I'm not as familiar with that civ, so maybe I should just take previous us's word for it!
• Altar feels like it'd make a better "cul" civ than "Cil" civ, but that's just me
• No opinions on Arad Doman's size
• No opinions on Saldaea's size
• all others not mentioned look good

It's interesting that going into this, I figured we'd have a lack of Wide civs because the Westlands civs seem to be Tall to me, for the most part (several of them are effectively just one city and some villages). Our diversification seems to have given us some more Wide civs though!

Also, the FY is still most definitely a hole. Aldeshar and Shandalle are the only civs that cover era 4 specifically (not counting the ones who cover the whole tree).

re: the FY, I think at this point there's essentially nothing to be done with that. I'd say we basically need to be considering the P-C Seanchan of the FY as well, and probably bring at least some aspect of the uniques of the "whole tree" civs into that era. Also, we should probably consider some of the "old school" NE civs as beginning in that era (Malkier, Tear, Andor, etc.)

The size does seem reasonably balanced.

As far as the VC's, a count of those that are *specifically* mentioned (i.e, not "any" and ignoring the "not diplo" and related ones):

Dom: 12
Sci: 5
Cul: 10
Diplo: 12
LB: 7

Obviously this is rather unscientific (since some civs have 3, and they likely won't have three, and many have "any"), but clearly Sci is in need of some love. What to do? Should we force some of these to be Sci's right now, or just make a point of making several of the "any's" be Sci (and all of the ones who currently have Sci as a potential choice actually end up as Sci)?

Also, we should keep in mind that this list is *not* the list of FLCs, so the relative balance may not matter - we just might be in a position where, if we only end up with 4 Sci civs, all of those would automatically "Get in" as FLCs. Looking at the civs listed as "Sci" right now, that's a mixed band - some are locks and some are borderline.

The LB victory is is a somewhat similar position, but that's so loosey-goosey at this point, it's not a problem (more will become clear in time)

No overall comments on the biases. It seems that we have some flexibility there.

It would be so awesome. There are some other ASoIaF mods for CiV already, but I don't know if any are still being actively maintained/developed/finished.

yeah, as far as I know, none are. I only played a Mod of IaF, and that was quite broken. It probably should have stayed as a simple civ pack, but they went with a sort of half-finished total conversion, which didn't quite work. That said, I retract all criticism, as they actually had something they were able to release!

I dunno, that would seem to me to miss out on the conflicts between the Starks and the Boltons, and if we went far enough to include civs from the extended universe (like the Forresters from the Telltale game), The North would encompass a whole bunch of distinct potential civs. I'd think an ASoIaF mod would want to have a very different diplomacy system, particularly allowing for some form of vassalage-like system where one could piece together a "the North" force from several civs of Houses. (It would probably want a very different combat system as well, to discourage the kinds of global wars we see in civ and pull things down to more regional conflicts.)

This mod we're not developing could get pretty detailed.

Ah, so I think the discrepancies here are pretty big picture. I think what you're talking about is a Scenario for this mod we're not making. The scenario would be called the "War of the Five Kings," or "A Game of Thrones" or something. And there, yes, it would be a game of houses pitted against each other.

The mod I think we'd actually make would be more based off of "The World of Ice and Fire," rather than the series of books itself - a game of civ played in their world, much as we've done with WoT. You know, the Rhoynar, Valyrians, Qaathi, Asshai, First Men, etc., would all be civs. You know, actual civs. The Boltons are by no means a civ. They are, either, a part of the civ called the "North," or the civ called the "Seven Kingdoms", right? I don't know how old House Bolton is, but they're either old bannermen of the Stark kings, or bannermen of the Starks under the Targaryens, thus a member of *that* civ. So, what you're talking about is really just a discussion of who the *leader* of said civ would be. It *could* be Ned, or even a Bolton (depending on how the story ends), but it's also likely Brandon the Builder or some super old Stark, who's far more mighty and such.

Same with House Forrester - theoretically a possible civ in a scenario, but when taken with the epic, era-spanning scope that a full fledged game of civ is supposed to have, it'd seem preposterous to have them as a civ. Is Manchester a civ in BNW? Cologne? Shanghai? Or, even closer to what you're talking about here, the "Torreys" or the "Labour party" or the "Kennedy family"?

On topic, though. I'm thinking of the process we should follow when bouncing our civ brainstorms back and forth. I'd prefer not to have to dig around to find what the "final civ" looks like, so should we do a thing where we're constantly repasting/reposting a given civ, and then using color coding and brief explanations to keep things up to date. So, for example, an exchange might look like (red is suggesting a cut, green suggesting a modification, blue an addition):

COUNTERPOINT:
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (food, production, happiness?)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at peace?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)

<insert explanation>

S3RGEUS
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (food, production, happiness?)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (shorter occupation time)

<insert explanation>

COUNTERPOINT
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)

<insert explanation. first one cut was rejected - proposed alternate. New one was accepted and modified. Other one modified>

S3RGEUS
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural/Domination, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)
Dany's not in this episode (every 3rd turn, this civ may make no actions)

<explanation. changes accepted. new one added, VCs changed>

COUNTERPOINT
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Cultural/Domination, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)
Dany's not in this episode (every 3rd turn, this civ may make no actions)

<explanation. all accepted>

Mereen is now "final," which only means that this is the final set we'll be considering in the future. This can be added to a "master list" (perhaps a summary, but perhaps not a true summary, since itll eventually be transformed into something else.)

How's that process look? I imagine this would be done outside of quote blocks, but should we do it within quote blocks? Perhaps we should keep the quote blocks AND add the new repeat.

 

[S3rgeus]

yes, on that last bit, for sure.

Woops, some of your post slipped through unquoted!

hmmm... I say design with the current rules in place. I really doubt we're going to make Uniques that will be rendered invalid by a change like this - in fact, I'd be pretty against creating any uniques that played off of this kind of mechanic (e.g., a civ that gets bonuses for betraying their allies and breaking the Light alliance, or something). So, we can consider doing this later, but it should be pretty independent from all these uniques, I think.

Agreed, I think it's unlikely any of the uniques will interact with this mechanic directly. My main worry would be if we made some more structural changes to how players win the LB, then which mechanics help them out may change. But still, it's something we can address later.

I don't think we decided to table the dissolving of the Light Alliance. I think we decided *not* to do it at all, because of the aforementioned (and relatively plain) problems it causes. I agree that we shouldn't dig into this now, as it will derail this topic. I think this is something we could reexamine pretty late in the process.

I thought we'd realized that that was going to be a big issue and tabled the discussion of how we would resolve in until we had played the LB and knew more about it. Doesn't matter though, the result is the same for right now.

oh, that bums me out. Nobody knows how gigantic this thread really is, then...

Yeah, there are even some other threads that are much shorter but have more pages!

great. Amazing how low Andor is on this list!

Yeah, they got hit pretty hard on mechanics and placement!

OK, bring on the angry Perrin-fanboys, then!

I imagine we'll have many other variants of fanboys, given all the interpreting we've done of the lore!

agreed. I think it's only going to be something we specifically target in a few cases. Otherwise, the Tall/Wide thing is likely going to be decided as it seems to often/usually be in BNW - the VC you're pursuing (culture as generally tall, etc.)

Agreed, but do we want to leave any of them as any/unknown at this stage?

I think, generally, if we come up with a specific unique in the later stages that falls outside the ranges of something we've put down here, then as we've said above, if it works then it works! So choosing Tall/Wide at this stage isn't so much a commitment for that civ as a suggestion of what we're aiming for.

The Seanchan could likely start in era 4, which is when they're consolidated.

Done!

Era 1 might be a little early for the Aiel - at that point, they're probably still basically Tinkers, right? I think we could do it, tech-wise (i.e., mechanical usefulness of having spears early in the game), but flavor-wise, it probably doesn't quite work.

True, I figured we'd want Era 1 civs where we could, but you're right! Era 2, then?

Sea Folk look good. Era 1 works.

I put Domination in red on this one because I'm still quite unsure about a Sea Folk Domination focus. It doesn't seem like it really lines up with what we see of them in the books. As we've said before, if we come up with Dom uniques that work later then we'll use them, but I'm not sure about pushing for it specifically at this stage.

I think Shara could probably be either Tall or Wide. Yes, it's a big empire (we think), but it's also described as having high walls and being impenetrable and such - I imagine a huge tall empire with epic cultural borders could also work. Wide is probably preferred, though. Era 1 works.

I think Shara would probably be classed as wide. (I put this in red because we didn't discuss this last time.) They're very defensive, but Tall vs Wide seems to be more about land area and population to me. We don't know much about population, but we do know that Shara's huge. It's bigger than all of the Westlands according to the maps. Smaller than Seanchan, but that's about it.

Malkier looks good

With the civs that have Any/VC/VC (or any combination of any, with anything else), do we want to narrow it down a bit now? (Seeing as we can consider other uniques if they come up us, but intended VCs gives us a bit of focus for them.) I would say LB/Cul and maybe Dom could work for Malkier?

Tall is fine for Manetheren. I'd be tempted to simply put "any" for their VCs (or Any/LB, if you like that better)

I figured we'd want to try to eliminate the "Any"s at this point, to give us some direction for the next stage.

P-C Seanchan looks good

Related to eliminating "Any"s, I would suggest Wide for P-C Seanchan, since we're capturing the flavor of that continent before it was Consolidated. Even if we use the name of a single nation from that continent, I don't think we'll be restricting the flavor in any way that wouldn't capture everyone who'd been living there before Luthair showed up.

Sheinar I'd say is better as Tall.

Agreed.

I think Prophet Ghealdan, if taken literally, should be 7-8. But if we're going to open it up to ghealdan in general, then leave it as 5-9.

I think even with Prophet Ghealdan, we could use the country of Ghealdan's whole timeline. (Particularly since Paths are more relevant early game, and Prophet Ghealdan is presumably Path-y.) It could be a books timeline thing that the Prophet came about in Era 7/8.

Amadicia should probably be "unknown" for size

Related to removing "Any"s, I would be inclined to pick one to give us direction. Based on its size on the map (and the same for most Westlands civs), I would be inclined to go for Tall, since it's quite small.

Andor should be "any" for size (or unknown, however you want to state it)

Same again as Amadicia, regarding choosing. Andor's bigger than Amadicia though, so they're one of the few Westlands civs I could see as Wide.

No opinion on size of Tarabon - unknown works for me.

I'd be inclined to go for Tall, just based on their size on the map.

Tear feels more like a Tall civ, but a Tall civ that churns out Gold and trade, which is kind of interesting. I'm fine with both those potential biases. I think, since Tear as a city is older than Tear as a country, we could probably justify putting it in era 4, or even 3.

Yeah, Tear definitely feels Tall to me - it all orbits around the capital city and has very little of note elsewhere. Interesting about the era thing. Was the city of Tear part of a different country at those earlier times, though?

what's the rationale behind Aramaelle as LB? Also, why Wide? I guess I'm not as familiar with that civ, so maybe I should just take previous us's word for it!

They're a Borderlander civ, hence the LB suggestion, and they occupy what becomes Arafel, Shienar, Malkier, and some of Kandor, so they're quite big for a Westlands civ, hence Wide.

Altar feels like it'd make a better "cul" civ than "Cil" civ, but that's just me

I knew they were Path-y, but naming themselves after part of a church? Sheesh! (Fixed! )

No opinions on Arad Doman's size

Like elsewhere, I think a choice here as guidance may help. Arad Doman isn't very big, so we could go with Tall. It's a Plains-y civ though, most of which usually scatter smaller settlements across such an area, which could mean Wide.

Tall?

No opinions on Saldaea's size

Saldaea seems quite small on the map, so I'd go with Tall?


And with all of the above edited in, here's the current list (anything still under discussion left red):

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Not Diplo/LB, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, Any/LB/Cul, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Tall/Wide, Any/not LB, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9 (or 7-8?), Tall, Dom/Any, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Not Dom, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Any, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Any/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo/Any, no bias/Avoid Coast)


There are a few more "Any"s I'd like to try to remove, but I'll wait for you to chime in on what you think of keeping any "Any"s before I do that!

re: the FY, I think at this point there's essentially nothing to be done with that. I'd say we basically need to be considering the P-C Seanchan of the FY as well, and probably bring at least some aspect of the uniques of the "whole tree" civs into that era. Also, we should probably consider some of the "old school" NE civs as beginning in that era (Malkier, Tear, Andor, etc.)

Yeah, it will likely be fine given that we have lots of content on the two eras around era 4, so some will probably end up bleeding into era 4 out of mechanical necessity (which units/buildings they replace, etc.).

The size does seem reasonably balanced.

As far as the VC's, a count of those that are *specifically* mentioned (i.e, not "any" and ignoring the "not diplo" and related ones):

Dom: 12
Sci: 5
Cul: 10
Diplo: 12
LB: 7

Obviously this is rather unscientific (since some civs have 3, and they likely won't have three, and many have "any"), but clearly Sci is in need of some love. What to do? Should we force some of these to be Sci's right now, or just make a point of making several of the "any's" be Sci (and all of the ones who currently have Sci as a potential choice actually end up as Sci)?

Also, we should keep in mind that this list is *not* the list of FLCs, so the relative balance may not matter - we just might be in a position where, if we only end up with 4 Sci civs, all of those would automatically "Get in" as FLCs. Looking at the civs listed as "Sci" right now, that's a mixed band - some are locks and some are borderline.

The LB victory is is a somewhat similar position, but that's so loosey-goosey at this point, it's not a problem (more will become clear in time)

I agree that we're a bit light on Science civs, but I think we'll only really need to try to address balancing these numbers out later on. If we follow the general distribution that I suggested a while back, then we'd only need 2 true Science civs as FLCs (2 for each victory, 4 mechanic-specific). I'm not saying we should be beholden to that distribution, but just that even 5 potential Science civs is likely to be more than enough.

yeah, as far as I know, none are. I only played a Mod of IaF, and that was quite broken. It probably should have stayed as a simple civ pack, but they went with a sort of half-finished total conversion, which didn't quite work. That said, I retract all criticism, as they actually had something they were able to release!

I think that one came out before BNW, so it's understandable it doesn't work now!

Ah, so I think the discrepancies here are pretty big picture. I think what you're talking about is a Scenario for this mod we're not making. The scenario would be called the "War of the Five Kings," or "A Game of Thrones" or something. And there, yes, it would be a game of houses pitted against each other.

The mod I think we'd actually make would be more based off of "The World of Ice and Fire," rather than the series of books itself - a game of civ played in their world, much as we've done with WoT. You know, the Rhoynar, Valyrians, Qaathi, Asshai, First Men, etc., would all be civs. You know, actual civs. The Boltons are by no means a civ. They are, either, a part of the civ called the "North," or the civ called the "Seven Kingdoms", right? I don't know how old House Bolton is, but they're either old bannermen of the Stark kings, or bannermen of the Starks under the Targaryens, thus a member of *that* civ. So, what you're talking about is really just a discussion of who the *leader* of said civ would be. It *could* be Ned, or even a Bolton (depending on how the story ends), but it's also likely Brandon the Builder or some super old Stark, who's far more mighty and such.

Same with House Forrester - theoretically a possible civ in a scenario, but when taken with the epic, era-spanning scope that a full fledged game of civ is supposed to have, it'd seem preposterous to have them as a civ. Is Manchester a civ in BNW? Cologne? Shanghai? Or, even closer to what you're talking about here, the "Torreys" or the "Labour party" or the "Kennedy family"?

That big picture difference is definitely intentional. ASoIaF's flavor would push me to making time quite different from what we've done for WoT. It's a lot more about the relationships between the houses and their individual peoples rather than the movement of civilizations. Civs do happen, as you've outlined, but I feel like ASoIaF's strengths lend themselves to a greatly compressed timeline and "civs" that represent the factional houses. Given the way the houses change (Brandon vs Eddard, Daenerys vs Aegon), as you've said, I could even see the same house being multiple civs with different leaders. (As in, include multiple civs of the same house.)

I definitely think one could make a more CiV-like experience like you're discussing, but I think we'd end up missing out on a lot of ASoIaF's strengths that way. It would be about mechanically inciting betrayal and ensuring that open combat was very costly. Espionage would need to be ramped way up from BNW and actual inter-civ diplomacy (trades/wars/agreements/plots) would need a lot more layers to it.

On topic, though. I'm thinking of the process we should follow when bouncing our civ brainstorms back and forth. I'd prefer not to have to dig around to find what the "final civ" looks like, so should we do a thing where we're constantly repasting/reposting a given civ, and then using color coding and brief explanations to keep things up to date. So, for example, an exchange might look like (red is suggesting a cut, green suggesting a modification, blue an addition):

COUNTERPOINT:
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (food, production, happiness?)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at peace?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)

<insert explanation>

S3RGEUS
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (food, production, happiness?)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (shorter occupation time)

<insert explanation>

COUNTERPOINT
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (culture or happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)

<insert explanation. first one cut was rejected - proposed alternate. New one was accepted and modified. Other one modified>

S3RGEUS
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Diplomatic/Cultural/Domination, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)
Dany's not in this episode (every 3rd turn, this civ may make no actions)

<explanation. changes accepted. new one added, VCs changed>

COUNTERPOINT
Mereen (Era 5-7, Tall, Cultural/Domination, plains)

UAs:
something based on slavery or freedom from it (alignment)
Way of the Harpy (cultural bonuses when at war?)
For the Mhysa (happiness when spreading a Path)
Political Marriage (half occupation time)
Dany's not in this episode (every 3rd turn, this civ may make no actions)

<explanation. all accepted>

Mereen is now "final," which only means that this is the final set we'll be considering in the future. This can be added to a "master list" (perhaps a summary, but perhaps not a true summary, since itll eventually be transformed into something else.)

How's that process look? I imagine this would be done outside of quote blocks, but should we do it within quote blocks? Perhaps we should keep the quote blocks AND add the new repeat.

Sounds like a good system! It will let us pick up the final candidates much more easily and, as you've said, keeps us from having to do loads of backtracking to find them.

I think quoting the previous suggestion makes sense because it keeps each one with the context of the discussion around it. (We'll probably have some paragraphs before and after each actual suggestion formatted entry to discuss reasons about why we suggest what we do.)

 

[counterpoint]

Agreed, I think it's unlikely any of the uniques will interact with this mechanic directly. My main worry would be if we made some more structural changes to how players win the LB, then which mechanics help them out may change. But still, it's something we can address later.

yep. we'll see.

I thought we'd realized that that was going to be a big issue and tabled the discussion of how we would resolve in until we had played the LB and knew more about it. Doesn't matter though, the result is the same for right now.

huh, I thought we sort of settled it. I may be misremembering. ?I don't think the summary indicates that it's unsettled.

Agreed, but do we want to leave any of them as any/unknown at this stage?

I think, generally, if we come up with a specific unique in the later stages that falls outside the ranges of something we've put down here, then as we've said above, if it works then it works! So choosing Tall/Wide at this stage isn't so much a commitment for that civ as a suggestion of what we're aiming for.

yeah, sure, we can settle the other "anys" and unclear bits right now. I think some of these are "any" because we simply don't know, though.

True, I figured we'd want Era 1 civs where we could, but you're right! Era 2, then?

you're correct, but this range (on this list) is supposed to be flavor based - we can "break" it and mechanically use era 1 later, if need be.

I put Domination in red on this one because I'm still quite unsure about a Sea Folk Domination focus. It doesn't seem like it really lines up with what we see of them in the books. As we've said before, if we come up with Dom uniques that work later then we'll use them, but I'm not sure about pushing for it specifically at this stage.

Sea Folk: I think they were presented as a possible Dom simply because they're likely to have awesome naval units (true, some may be awesome in non-combat ways, but they also might be very much awesome at combat). That said, I agree that we shouldn't be aiming for it, specifically - but it's likely to be something people can achieve due to their naval dominance, regardless of what we aim for.

I think Shara would probably be classed as wide. (I put this in red because we didn't discuss this last time.) They're very defensive, but Tall vs Wide seems to be more about land area and population to me. We don't know much about population, but we do know that Shara's huge. It's bigger than all of the Westlands according to the maps. Smaller than Seanchan, but that's about it.

no problems. wide.

With the civs that have Any/VC/VC (or any combination of any, with anything else), do we want to narrow it down a bit now? (Seeing as we can consider other uniques if they come up us, but intended VCs gives us a bit of focus for them.) I would say LB/Cul and maybe Dom could work for Malkier?

I suppose LB and culture works, though I think, by extension of LB, they'll probably be ok at dom as well.

I figured we'd want to try to eliminate the "Any"s at this point, to give us some direction for the next stage.

yeah, Dom/LB/Cul is fine for Manetheren.

Related to eliminating "Any"s, I would suggest Wide for P-C Seanchan, since we're capturing the flavor of that continent before it was Consolidated. Even if we use the name of a single nation from that continent, I don't think we'll be restricting the flavor in any way that wouldn't capture everyone who'd been living there before Luthair showed up.

wide is fine. As far as their VCs, I'm tempted to look to make them distinct from regular Seanchan. I think Cul is still logical, though. I'd like to avoid outright dom, if possible. Cul/Diplo or Cul/Sci? Maybe the former. I dunno, this one is tough.

I think even with Prophet Ghealdan, we could use the country of Ghealdan's whole timeline. (Particularly since Paths are more relevant early game, and Prophet Ghealdan is presumably Path-y.) It could be a books timeline thing that the Prophet came about in Era 7/8.

right, especially since its prophet-related uniques will likely represent Ghealdan's tendency towards such zealotry and such, and not literallly the prophet's control of the country, this is fine.

Related to removing "Any"s, I would be inclined to pick one to give us direction. Based on its size on the map (and the same for most Westlands civs), I would be inclined to go for Tall, since it's quite small.

i don't know, I could see Amadicia as being wide. It's not *that* small (also we have way way more tall civs) - and their expansionist by temperament. I think this country is likely to be a Dom civ, so Wide would make that a little easier.

Same again as Amadicia, regarding choosing. Andor's bigger than Amadicia though, so they're one of the few Westlands civs I could see as Wide.

Yeah, wide makes sense. I think the rationale for the Tall option is because Caemlyn is huge - isn't it like the largest city in the westlands or something? Hmmm, maybe they're a wide civ that also has a huge capitol (UA possibility?)?

I'd be inclined to go for Tall, just based on their size on the map.

Tarabon - yeah, that's fair.

Yeah, Tear definitely feels Tall to me - it all orbits around the capital city and has very little of note elsewhere. Interesting about the era thing. Was the city of Tear part of a different country at those earlier times, though?

I think Tear was a part of several countries throughout history. The Stone of Tear, as I recall, comes from the AoL or perhaps the breaking, so there was pretty much always a city there (and often under the same name), so I think there's a bit more continuity than in some other places. But the same could be said about some other "old cities" (e.g. Caemlyn)

They're a Borderlander civ, hence the LB suggestion, and they occupy what becomes Arafel, Shienar, Malkier, and some of Kandor, so they're quite big for a Westlands civ, hence Wide.

This is Aramaelle. Agreed.

I knew they were Path-y, but naming themselves after part of a church? Sheesh! (Fixed! )

sorry, totally don't get the reference - and I even googled it!

Like elsewhere, I think a choice here as guidance may help. Arad Doman isn't very big, so we could go with Tall. It's a Plains-y civ though, most of which usually scatter smaller settlements across such an area, which could mean Wide.

Tall?

you say tall, I say wide, since we have so many tall ones. pretty arbitrary though.

Saldaea seems quite small on the map, so I'd go with Tall?

yeah, I think.

And with all of the above edited in, here's the current list (anything still under discussion left red):

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Not Diplo/LB, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, Any/LB/Cul, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Tall/Wide, Any/not LB, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9 (or 7-8?), Tall, Dom/Any, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Not Dom, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide/Tall, Diplo/Dom/Any, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Any/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo/Any, no bias/Avoid Coast)

There are a few more "Any"s I'd like to try to remove, but I'll wait for you to chime in on what you think of keeping any "Any"s before I do that!

ok, regarding the other Anys:

Shara's "not Diplo" should probably be Dom/LB/Cul, or something
Ghealdan is hard - I hate to throw in another Dom/Cul, but I can't figure out rationalizing Diplo or Sci - maybe Dom/LB, since their UA could theoretically be Alignment-related?
Mayene - I'd go Diplo/Sci?
Andor is fine as plain ol Diplo/Dom
Airdhol - hmmm... maybe something like Sci/LB? I'm thinking Diplo could work, but it's a little weird that they were consumed by their own hatred...
Saldaea - unsure here. Maybe Cul/Diplo or something? Cul/Dom? Cul/Sci? Very much not sure.
Aldeshar - probably fine as Dom/Diplo

I agree that we're a bit light on Science civs, but I think we'll only really need to try to address balancing these numbers out later on. If we follow the general distribution that I suggested a while back, then we'd only need 2 true Science civs as FLCs (2 for each victory, 4 mechanic-specific). I'm not saying we should be beholden to that distribution, but just that even 5 potential Science civs is likely to be more than enough.

this is the same as with Wide vs Tall - i see the point, we do only need a few, but we're somewhat "stacking the deck" against ourselves coming up with a truly awesome science unique if we only have four chances to come up with them.

I think that one came out before BNW, so it's understandable it doesn't work now!

that's not why it's bad. It's broken because the tech tree just literally stops at the renaissance (not stretched, the same pace, and then a stop, and then, as I recall, is "future tech" forever), but the rest of the game is still "full." so science as a game mechanic is totally off.

That big picture difference is definitely intentional. ASoIaF's flavor would push me to making time quite different from what we've done for WoT. It's a lot more about the relationships between the houses and their individual peoples rather than the movement of civilizations. Civs do happen, as you've outlined, but I feel like ASoIaF's strengths lend themselves to a greatly compressed timeline and "civs" that represent the factional houses. Given the way the houses change (Brandon vs Eddard, Daenerys vs Aegon), as you've said, I could even see the same house being multiple civs with different leaders. (As in, include multiple civs of the same house.)

I definitely think one could make a more CiV-like experience like you're discussing, but I think we'd end up missing out on a lot of ASoIaF's strengths that way. It would be about mechanically inciting betrayal and ensuring that open combat was very costly. Espionage would need to be ramped way up from BNW and actual inter-civ diplomacy (trades/wars/agreements/plots) would need a lot more layers to it.

so, the thing is, the "rest" of the stuff in that universe is very, very interesting, though. The ancient history, the lands beyond westeros, and such. It's all far better developed than any of the non-westlands are in WoT. Ignoring all that content, while understandable given the focus of the books, is a big missed opportunity - similar to if we only did "modern civs" in our game, but worse, IMO. Dang, I think this mod we're not developing isn't working out - I think I'm going to quit not developing it.

Sounds like a good system! It will let us pick up the final candidates much more easily and, as you've said, keeps us from having to do loads of backtracking to find them.

I think quoting the previous suggestion makes sense because it keeps each one with the context of the discussion around it. (We'll probably have some paragraphs before and after each actual suggestion formatted entry to discuss reasons about why we suggest what we do.)

Cool, good! It looks like our list is just about done, too - once its settled we can do a final look to make sure it feels "balanced" enough, and move on!

 

[S3rgeus]

huh, I thought we sort of settled it. I may be misremembering. ?I don't think the summary indicates that it's unsettled.

I think we purposefully didn't mark it in the summary since it wasn't a feature we were considering for launch at the time. I've tried to find the conversation about this from before, but haven't been able to. (Any good keywords to look for? I'm searching the thread backup and have tried "Light Alliance", "dissolv", "Light victory", and "Dragon's Peace". None turned up the discussion about dissolving the alliance, only our more initial discussions about how it would work.)

you're correct, but this range (on this list) is supposed to be flavor based - we can "break" it and mechanically use era 1 later, if need be.

Sounds good!

Sea Folk: I think they were presented as a possible Dom simply because they're likely to have awesome naval units (true, some may be awesome in non-combat ways, but they also might be very much awesome at combat). That said, I agree that we shouldn't be aiming for it, specifically - but it's likely to be something people can achieve due to their naval dominance, regardless of what we aim for.

I think that may be more strategy than design, like when we were discussing Zigzagzigal's guide being about playing well as a human. I think if we give them good ships then it will make them better at Domination, but given how the Sea Folk work, it seems appropriate for that to be incidental in those ships having some other functionality that interacts with a non-military mechanic. (Like, I wouldn't be inclined to give them a unique that is explicitly an awesome combat ship and nothing else.)

no problems. wide.

Done

I suppose LB and culture works, though I think, by extension of LB, they'll probably be ok at dom as well.

Agreed. Whether LB uniques help Dom will depend on what those uniques are - a lot of them would help, but some kinds wouldn't really interact directly with a Dom victory. I'm wondering here if we should target Dom at all for Malkier (intentionally making Dom-focused uniques) rather than only doing so by allowing any LB ones to be Dom-useful as well.

yeah, Dom/LB/Cul is fine for Manetheren.

Done

wide is fine. As far as their VCs, I'm tempted to look to make them distinct from regular Seanchan. I think Cul is still logical, though. I'd like to avoid outright dom, if possible. Cul/Diplo or Cul/Sci? Maybe the former. I dunno, this one is tough.

They did also use channelers differently from the Westlands, which would lead to a Dom focus, presumably. Is there flavor behind a Science focus? It would be nice to have another potential Science civ, as you say below.

right, especially since its prophet-related uniques will likely represent Ghealdan's tendency towards such zealotry and such, and not literallly the prophet's control of the country, this is fine.

Done

i don't know, I could see Amadicia as being wide. It's not *that* small (also we have way way more tall civs) - and their expansionist by temperament. I think this country is likely to be a Dom civ, so Wide would make that a little easier.

But if we're saying Andor is just about big enough for Wide, Andor is much bigger than Amadicia. Compared to places like the Waste, Shara, and Seanchan, they're both tiny.

I think for these more debatable civs, we'd be unlikely to focus directly on Tallness/Wideness in their uniques, so this may end up not contributing to the final civ design.

In terms of numbers, with Amadicia and Arad Doman undecided (and all others assigned as discussed elsewhere in this post), it's 8 Wide vs 13 Tall at the moment.

Yeah, wide makes sense. I think the rationale for the Tall option is because Caemlyn is huge - isn't it like the largest city in the westlands or something? Hmmm, maybe they're a wide civ that also has a huge capitol (UA possibility?)?

Done! And possibly!

Tarabon - yeah, that's fair.

Done

I think Tear was a part of several countries throughout history. The Stone of Tear, as I recall, comes from the AoL or perhaps the breaking, so there was pretty much always a city there (and often under the same name), so I think there's a bit more continuity than in some other places. But the same could be said about some other "old cities" (e.g. Caemlyn)

What do you think about the era, then? Stretch it back, or go with the start of the modern nation? I'd be inclined to go with the latter, since we'll probably take the flavor that we've got from the books, which will mostly be from their modern nationhood.

This is Aramaelle. Agreed.

Done

sorry, totally don't get the reference - and I even googled it!

Your correction of my typo had a typo in it too - you said "Altar" instead of "Altara".

you say tall, I say wide, since we have so many tall ones. pretty arbitrary though.

It's the same kind of size thing as Amadicia really. Though Arad Doman is much more plains-y, which could make me consider Wide here more.

yeah, I think.

Done (Saldaea is Tall)

Shara's "not Diplo" should probably be Dom/LB/Cul, or something

Sounds good. No Science? I don't have any particular flavor to justify Science, but it was implicitly included in "Not Diplo".

Ghealdan is hard - I hate to throw in another Dom/Cul, but I can't figure out rationalizing Diplo or Sci - maybe Dom/LB, since their UA could theoretically be Alignment-related?

Dom/Cul/LB seems fine to me. If they have a Dragonsworn related ability that could be made into something LB-ish.

Mayene - I'd go Diplo/Sci?

Done

Andor is fine as plain ol Diplo/Dom

Done

Airdhol - hmmm... maybe something like Sci/LB? I'm thinking Diplo could work, but it's a little weird that they were consumed by their own hatred...

Is there flavor behind the Sci? I'd say Aridhol is likely to be a mechanic-focused civ rather than a victory-focused civ, so not having much here is probably not a problem.

Saldaea - unsure here. Maybe Cul/Diplo or something? Cul/Dom? Cul/Sci? Very much not sure.

Cul and Diplo sound good.

Aldeshar - probably fine as Dom/Diplo

Done


I think the only thing we've missed is Shienar has a red /Any - shall we just remove that?


With all that covered, here's the current status of the list!

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/LB/Cul, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Sci, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide, Diplo/Dom, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Diplo/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo, no bias/Avoid Coast)

this is the same as with Wide vs Tall - i see the point, we do only need a few, but we're somewhat "stacking the deck" against ourselves coming up with a truly awesome science unique if we only have four chances to come up with them.

I think this is mostly because there isn't great flavor available for a science-focused civ. I think it'll be better to see what we come up with by way of science uniques before we try to push one of the other civs into it. If we do end up short, then we can branch out into science-y alternatives for civs we've discussed already.

that's not why it's bad. It's broken because the tech tree just literally stops at the renaissance (not stretched, the same pace, and then a stop, and then, as I recall, is "future tech" forever), but the rest of the game is still "full." so science as a game mechanic is totally off.

Aw, that's a shame!

so, the thing is, the "rest" of the stuff in that universe is very, very interesting, though. The ancient history, the lands beyond westeros, and such. It's all far better developed than any of the non-westlands are in WoT. Ignoring all that content, while understandable given the focus of the books, is a big missed opportunity - similar to if we only did "modern civs" in our game, but worse, IMO. Dang, I think this mod we're not developing isn't working out - I think I'm going to quit not developing it.

Man, we couldn't even keep the team together for 5 posts! We're doomed! Doomed!

Overall I'd think that both approaches could make good mods, it's a shame we don't have time to make them! (WoT will be better anyway. )

 

[counterpoint]

I think we purposefully didn't mark it in the summary since it wasn't a feature we were considering for launch at the time. I've tried to find the conversation about this from before, but haven't been able to. (Any good keywords to look for? I'm searching the thread backup and have tried "Light Alliance", "dissolv", "Light victory", and "Dragon's Peace". None turned up the discussion about dissolving the alliance, only our more initial discussions about how it would work.)

hmmm... well, it doesn't matter what we decided *then* does it? we'll just re-decide when the time comes!

I think that may be more strategy than design, like when we were discussing Zigzagzigal's guide being about playing well as a human. I think if we give them good ships then it will make them better at Domination, but given how the Sea Folk work, it seems appropriate for that to be incidental in those ships having some other functionality that interacts with a non-military mechanic. (Like, I wouldn't be inclined to give them a unique that is explicitly an awesome combat ship and nothing else.)

agreed

Agreed. Whether LB uniques help Dom will depend on what those uniques are - a lot of them would help, but some kinds wouldn't really interact directly with a Dom victory. I'm wondering here if we should target Dom at all for Malkier (intentionally making Dom-focused uniques) rather than only doing so by allowing any LB ones to be Dom-useful as well.

sounds good

They did also use channelers differently from the Westlands, which would lead to a Dom focus, presumably. Is there flavor behind a Science focus? It would be nice to have another potential Science civ, as you say below.

not necessarily flavor behind a sci focus. I mean, there could be, but we dont know it. Also, to me the regular Seanchan seem like a good science choice, and I wouldn't want them to both be identical in that regard. Dom is fine. Either Cul or Sci could work - I say, whichever isn't used by the Seanchan? so at this point, let's put both...[/quote]

But if we're saying Andor is just about big enough for Wide, Andor is much bigger than Amadicia. Compared to places like the Waste, Shara, and Seanchan, they're both tiny.

I think for these more debatable civs, we'd be unlikely to focus directly on Tallness/Wideness in their uniques, so this may end up not contributing to the final civ design.

In terms of numbers, with Amadicia and Arad Doman undecided (and all others assigned as discussed elsewhere in this post), it's 8 Wide vs 13 Tall at the moment.

But I'm *not* saying that Andor is "just about big enough for wide." It's very, very big, far bigger than I'd say the minimum for wide should be. The only reason it's in consideration for tallness is because it is ALSO tall - Caemlyn being huge and all. Andor is a lot like, say, China, wide AND tall in real life. I don't mean to suggest that andor's "width" is somehow borderline between tall and wide. It's true that the Seanchan empire is way bigger, but we shouldn't use that as the standard for width - just like we wouldn't want to use the size of the British empire at its height as the definition of "wide." there are most certainly some wide civs in BNW that aren't so huge on the map, in actuality.

So, with that in mind, I'd go with wide for Ama. Not sure about Arad Doman

But you're right that these aren't likely to be mechanically relevant in these borderline civs.

What do you think about the era, then? Stretch it back, or go with the start of the modern nation? I'd be inclined to go with the latter, since we'll probably take the flavor that we've got from the books, which will mostly be from their modern nationhood.

eh, let's do modern nationhood. Again, this is based only on flavor, and strictly, that's the correct era.

Your correction of my typo had a typo in it too - you said "Altar" instead of "Altara".

It's the same kind of size thing as Amadicia really. Though Arad Doman is much more plains-y, which could make me consider Wide here more.

yeah, lets say wide, then?

Sounds good. No Science? I don't have any particular flavor to justify Science, but it was implicitly included in "Not Diplo".

ok, add Sci to Shara then!

Dom/Cul/LB seems fine to me. If they have a Dragonsworn related ability that could be made into something LB-ish.

fine with this for Ghealdan.

Is there flavor behind the Sci? I'd say Aridhol is likely to be a mechanic-focused civ rather than a victory-focused civ, so not having much here is probably not a problem.

the sci is there to simply add another sci, mechanically. Doesn't mean we have to actually choose any of those abilities. If we find something flavorful that works, it would be a good idea, though - putting this civ as Sci is just a reminder to try to find something like that.

Cul and Diplo sound good.

fine for Saldaea

I think the only thing we've missed is Shienar has a red /Any - shall we just remove that?

yeah, though I could also see Dom/LB/Cul

With all that covered, here's the current status of the list!

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/LB/Cul, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB/Any, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Sci, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide, Diplo/Dom, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, Any/LB, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, unknown/Tall, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Diplo/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo, no bias/Avoid Coast)

Nice. Once we settle those last couple (which I think are settled, once you approve the last few changes), we can do a count and just double check the scope/balance of it all.

I think this is mostly because there isn't great flavor available for a science-focused civ. I think it'll be better to see what we come up with by way of science uniques before we try to push one of the other civs into it. If we do end up short, then we can branch out into science-y alternatives for civs we've discussed already.

I disagree. Much like it's "safe" to propose side-specific LBs, even though we may not want them, it's also safe to try to dream up some Sci options, if we think it will help us mechanically. In all cases, these stray "Sci's" are put onto civs that have very little, or no, real flavor-justification for VCs. Putting Sci is a harmless way to possibly give us some guidance while also making us more likely to meet our goals on Sci spread.

Cool, so let's clean up these last things, and also do the count for balancing purposes, but otherwise, we're at the next phase, right? Seems crazy to actually be dreaming up uniques - two years after I joined the mod, hoping to come up with uniques. The hilarious thing is that I've not been thinking about them much over those two years, so it's not like I have a huge backlog of ideas. That said, I've been thinking about them this week!

So what's first? Seanchan, The Aiel, The Seafolk, and Shandalle, right? Should we wait til we have "full" ideas, or just dump stuff as we get them, slowly building up each civ? Similarly, should we wait til we have ideas for all 4 civs, or just drop a single civ once we have enough ideas?

 

[S3rgeus]

hmmm... well, it doesn't matter what we decided *then* does it? we'll just re-decide when the time comes!

Indeed!

agreed

Done (Sea folk)

sounds good

Done (Malkier)

not necessarily flavor behind a sci focus. I mean, there could be, but we dont know it. Also, to me the regular Seanchan seem like a good science choice, and I wouldn't want them to both be identical in that regard. Dom is fine. Either Cul or Sci could work - I say, whichever isn't used by the Seanchan? so at this point, let's put both...

Sounds good, added both.

But I'm *not* saying that Andor is "just about big enough for wide." It's very, very big, far bigger than I'd say the minimum for wide should be. The only reason it's in consideration for tallness is because it is ALSO tall - Caemlyn being huge and all. Andor is a lot like, say, China, wide AND tall in real life. I don't mean to suggest that andor's "width" is somehow borderline between tall and wide. It's true that the Seanchan empire is way bigger, but we shouldn't use that as the standard for width - just like we wouldn't want to use the size of the British empire at its height as the definition of "wide." there are most certainly some wide civs in BNW that aren't so huge on the map, in actuality.

So, with that in mind, I'd go with wide for Ama. Not sure about Arad Doman

But you're right that these aren't likely to be mechanically relevant in these borderline civs.

I'm thinking that Andor is only just about big enough to be Wide though. While I still don't really agree on Amadicia being labeled Wide, we do agree that this probably won't have much affect on what Amadicia's uniques end up doing anyway, so I'm happy to just go with it. (And otherwise this would be the only red bit left!)

eh, let's do modern nationhood. Again, this is based only on flavor, and strictly, that's the correct era.

Done

yeah, lets say wide, then?

Sure, we're shorter on them.

ok, add Sci to Shara then!

Sci does seem weird on Shara, but I figured I'd bring it up since it was implicitly there before. I suppose they must be relatively advanced to be able to keep everyone out, otherwise Hawkwing would've been able to successfully invade and such.

fine with this for Ghealdan.

done

the sci is there to simply add another sci, mechanically. Doesn't mean we have to actually choose any of those abilities. If we find something flavorful that works, it would be a good idea, though - putting this civ as Sci is just a reminder to try to find something like that.

Sure, I'm fine filling in Sci where we otherwise lack flavor, since that makes sense to rebalance. (Aridhol)

yeah, though I could also see Dom/LB/Cul

Done



Unredded list!

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/LB/Cul/Sci, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Sci, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide, Diplo/Dom, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, LB/Sci, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, Wide, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Diplo/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo, no bias/Avoid Coast)

I've updated the Excel sheet in DropBox (and attached) with a visualization of the era layout (still skews late, as expected) and the victory counts. As you mentioned before, the counts here aren't particularly representative of much, since they only represent the "potential" of that civ to be focused on that VC. The counts are:

Dom 13, Sci 9, LB 9, Cul 15, and Diplo 13.

Interesting that Culture is now our most prevalent option. I think the balance there is pretty good, for potential numbers, and it will be more up to what uniques we come up with.

There's not much to do about the era diversity now, but I think we've done an admirable job of not making them all modern, given how the WoT canon is laid out!

I didn't generate any stats on start biases, since I imagine those will be quite changeable.

I disagree. Much like it's "safe" to propose side-specific LBs, even though we may not want them, it's also safe to try to dream up some Sci options, if we think it will help us mechanically. In all cases, these stray "Sci's" are put onto civs that have very little, or no, real flavor-justification for VCs. Putting Sci is a harmless way to possibly give us some guidance while also making us more likely to meet our goals on Sci spread.

Oh, I agree we want to try out Sci options if we come up with good ones, and given the lack of them, filling them into civs that lack VC-favoring flavor makes sense. But I wouldn't be inclined to try to force a Science focus onto a civ that does have other well defined VC flavor until we know we're short on Science focus elsewhere. We don't want to force ourselves into Science uniques on those civs to the detriment of other more flavorful possibilities when we don't know we need to take that hit.

Cool, so let's clean up these last things, and also do the count for balancing purposes, but otherwise, we're at the next phase, right? Seems crazy to actually be dreaming up uniques - two years after I joined the mod, hoping to come up with uniques. The hilarious thing is that I've not been thinking about them much over those two years, so it's not like I have a huge backlog of ideas. That said, I've been thinking about them this week!

So what's first? Seanchan, The Aiel, The Seafolk, and Shandalle, right? Should we wait til we have "full" ideas, or just dump stuff as we get them, slowly building up each civ? Similarly, should we wait til we have ideas for all 4 civs, or just drop a single civ once we have enough ideas?

Yeah, we seem to be there! It's definitely been a very long ride, but we're finally here! There's light at the end of the design phase tunnel! (That light is an equally long, if not longer, implementation phase!)

Seanchan, The Aiel, the Sea Folk, and Shandalle are where we start.

I think we should start with the skeleton of what you mentioned before, make a list of possible UAs, UUs, UBs, and UIs for each civ, at an abstracted level. I'll start coming up with a few now and keep them locally and you can start us off in your next post and I'll have some "independent" ideas to fill in on my next post then.

 

[counterpoint]

This is a super quick reply just to finish off this part of the thread. No Uniques proposed here, not today.

I'm thinking that Andor is only just about big enough to be Wide though. While I still don't really agree on Amadicia being labeled Wide, we do agree that this probably won't have much affect on what Amadicia's uniques end up doing anyway, so I'm happy to just go with it. (And otherwise this would be the only red bit left!)

to be clear, I don't feel uber strongly about this. I think you're right, though, that it's not likely to matter.

Sci does seem weird on Shara, but I figured I'd bring it up since it was implicitly there before. I suppose they must be relatively advanced to be able to keep everyone out, otherwise Hawkwing would've been able to successfully invade and such.

not a big deal, either way. I doubt we'd select some super-specific science unique for them (e.g. Korea) anyway

Unredded list!

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)
The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB, desert)
Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)
Sea Folk (Era 1-9, Diplo/Cul, Coast)
Shara (Era 1-9, Wide, Dom/LB/Cul/Sci, no bias)
Malkier (Era 5-7, Tall, LB/Cul/Dom, Blight)
Manetheren (Era 2-3, Tall, Dom/LB/Cul, River/Hills)
P-C Seanchan (Era 1-4, Wide, Cul/Diplo/Sci, any/no bias)
Shienar (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Prophet Ghealdan (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul/LB, Hills/Forest)
Mayene (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Sci, Coast/Marsh/Jungle)
Amadicia (Era 5-9, Wide, Dom/Cul, no bias/Hills)
Andor (Era 5-9, Wide, Diplo/Dom, no bias/Plains/Hills)
Tarabon (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Cul/Sci, Coast/Plains)
Tear (Era 5-9, Tall, Diplo/Dom/Cul, Coast/Marsh)
Aridhol (Era 2-3, Tall, LB/Sci, no bias/Forest)
Aramaelle (Era 2-3, Wide, Diplo/LB, Tundra/Blight)
Illian (Era 5-9, Tall, Dom/Cul, Coast/Hills/Marsh)
Altara (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Sci/Diplo, no bias/Coast)
Cairhien (Era 5-9, Tall, Sci/Diplo, no bias/Hills)
Arad Doman (Era 5-9, Wide, Sci/Diplo/Cul, Coast/Plains)
Saldaea (Era 5-9, Tall, Cul/Diplo/LB, Coast/Hills/Plains/Forest/Tundra/Blight (avoid Desert + Jungle))
Aldeshar (Era 3-4, Tall, Dom/Diplo, no bias/Avoid Coast)

I've updated the Excel sheet in DropBox (and attached) with a visualization of the era layout (still skews late, as expected) and the victory counts. As you mentioned before, the counts here aren't particularly representative of much, since they only represent the "potential" of that civ to be focused on that VC.

love the color coding on the spreadsheet. There's a lot of blue on those early eras!

I've "updated" the one in the DBox (it's the xls one, since I am not using excel on this computer and thus can't do xlsx) with an alternate way of looking at the VCs (it's to the right). To me, that's easier, visually. thoughts? It's somewhat cool in that it lets you see which permutations are common and which aren't.

The counts are:

Dom 13, Sci 9, LB 9, Cul 15, and Diplo 13.

Interesting that Culture is now our most prevalent option. I think the balance there is pretty good, for potential numbers, and it will be more up to what uniques we come up with.

yeah, other than Cul dominance, it looks fine. I think the Cul dominance is simply due to Jordan's writing style - we have a lot of cultural info, so can imagine the various civs much more easily in terms of their culture than in terms of, say, science.

There's not much to do about the era diversity now, but I think we've done an admirable job of not making them all modern, given how the WoT canon is laid out!

yep

I didn't generate any stats on start biases, since I imagine those will be quite changeable.

yeah, they are what they are.

Oh, I agree we want to try out Sci options if we come up with good ones, and given the lack of them, filling them into civs that lack VC-favoring flavor makes sense. But I wouldn't be inclined to try to force a Science focus onto a civ that does have other well defined VC flavor until we know we're short on Science focus elsewhere. We don't want to force ourselves into Science uniques on those civs to the detriment of other more flavorful possibilities when we don't know we need to take that hit.

ok. definitely agree.

Yeah, we seem to be there! It's definitely been a very long ride, but we're finally here! There's light at the end of the design phase tunnel! (That light is an equally long, if not longer, implementation phase!)

Seanchan, The Aiel, the Sea Folk, and Shandalle are where we start.

I think we should start with the skeleton of what you mentioned before, make a list of possible UAs, UUs, UBs, and UIs for each civ, at an abstracted level. I'll start coming up with a few now and keep them locally and you can start us off in your next post and I'll have some "independent" ideas to fill in on my next post then.

I'm scared of that implementation phase, since I'll be largely useless, at least relatively speaking. I imagine I'll be doing a fair bit of tedious digging-up-quotes-and-civilopedia-entries and stuff while you, you know, make the mod...

As far as the next step... it definitelydoesn't have to be me. I have some ideas, as I've been thinking a bit about Shandalle and the Seanchan. Not sure when I'll have enough to be worth posting... if they come quickly, I'll wait till I get a "set," if it looks like it'll be slow going, I'll post the stuff I have - we don't want a situation where we're both "sitting" on our ideas too long, and then coming up with the same stuff, etc.. In other words, feel free to jump in if you have something.

Also, it seems like it might be worth digging back into pages 1-4 again. Some folks had ideas on uniques for some of these civs. Obviously the game has changed a lot since them, and they aren't around, but it might be worth doing them the honor of throwing their ideas into the mix, at least at the first phase. Obviously they weren't ideas necessarily about these four civs, but some of the important ones were covered, obviously. Looking back, it looks like we have ideas for:

Page 2 -
kidshowbusiness - Illian, Andor, Cairhien, Tear
Calavente - Cairhien

I think that's it, but I was very, very rapidly looking through, so I may have missed some.

Thoughts?

Also, I recall kidshowbusiness proposing a lot of the same mechanics for various civs (I think he had like a flanking bonus for many UUs), and this brings to mind - should we keep every set of proposals completely unique, or should we build some redundancy into it? For example:

Tarabon
UA - something that boosts food, etc.
UU - Master of Horse, etc.

Arad Doman
UA - something that boosts food, etc.
UU - Master of Horse, etc.

In other words, propose similar mechanics (e.g. Path-spreading uniques) - or even the same flavor (multiple borderlander civs each having the same unit as an option, or, say, the Raken as an option for both PC-Seanchan and Seanchan regular). Obviously we would totally not *choose* these options for both civs, but we could do a thing where we say "if we don't choose this here, let's put it here?" I think we did something similar back with Social Policy stuff, or Paths, or something (or Threads?). Should we do that, or should we go for purity and tightness for each civ?

 

[S3rgeus]

A thing has occurred. A brief sojourn out of our current system of proceeding with uniques to call out that Civ VI is coming out this year. We previously discussed that Civ:BE didn't particularly change our plans for WoTMod because of its functional similarity to CiV and sci-fi leaning meant that it didn't offer us much, but did present challenges if we wanted to move to it. So CiV was a clear choice there.

CiVI (official shortening now), we said, was something to consider separately and may have a better chance of us upheaving everything to move to. I figured that Firaxis might actually do another BE expansion before going for CiVI.

I think there are a few components to this. CiVI isn't coming out until October, so there are literally 0 things we can do about it until then, in terms of making an informed decision of the technical challenges that would be involved in repurposing WoTMod for it. We'll get a bit more of an inkling about the design considerations as they announce more info about how the game plays, but even that will be quite superficial until we are actually able to play and experience it first hand.

From what they've announced so far, the changes to cities and combat have potentially far-reaching implications for foundational systems such as the new ones we've proposed.

We do have historical precedent to work with though. And that historical precedent tells me that WoTMod will not be possible in CiVI immediately after it's released. (It wasn't possible in CiV until approximately 3 years after its release in 2010.) There was a similar story for large total conversions like FFH in CIV (Civ4).

And even if Firaxis release all of their source code when they release the game (within the realm of possibility, but unlikely), there's a significant spin-up time to being able to work effectively with the new tools and new (even if related) code. The community will also take some time to transition over. (Modding in CiV was declared "dead" several times in its first few years.) That would mean fewer potential artists. Though a new title does usually mean we'd get an influx of newcomers, some of whom will become the prolific modder artists for CiVI.

CiVI would also be a moving target, in terms of developing the mod, since Firaxis would still be releasing new DLC and expansions that can potentially (read: definitely will) break our mod. BNW, on the other hand, is fixed in place since Firaxis aren't working on it.

That's not to say that CiVI may not have advantages as well. The new cities look interesting, but we don't have enough information to say how that will affect us. (It looks like they've taken some cues from Endless Legend.) The new art style could be seen to be a bit more WoT friendly than the CiV one. Firaxis may give modding access to some parts of the game that are currently inaccessible. Particularly terraforming/hex type changes, all Features (Atolls, Natural Wonders, modded Features, etc.) being moveable like Forests would be awesome. Still, these are relatively small feature limitations, in the big picture of WoTMod. I feel that we rarely run up against technical limitations in our design for CiV.

Overall, there's not much for us to do now about it now, but it's something to think about. History tells me that we're unlikely to want to move WoTMod onto CiVI, and given that even CIV's modding community is still churning out content now, CiV's modding activity probably has a significant lifetime beyond CiVI's release.

Now, that was all a very reasoned technical assessment of the impact of CiVI on WoTMod. Did I also mention that CiVI IS COMING OUT THIS YEAR!?!!? Super excited and I can't wait to play it!

love the color coding on the spreadsheet. There's a lot of blue on those early eras!

Thanks! I figured it would a good thing to get a quick visual on. There is definitely a lack of green in the early eras, though there's some diversity towards the top of the rankings!

I've "updated" the one in the DBox (it's the xls one, since I am not using excel on this computer and thus can't do xlsx) with an alternate way of looking at the VCs (it's to the right). To me, that's easier, visually. thoughts? It's somewhat cool in that it lets you see which permutations are common and which aren't.

Yeah, that looks cool!

yeah, other than Cul dominance, it looks fine. I think the Cul dominance is simply due to Jordan's writing style - we have a lot of cultural info, so can imagine the various civs much more easily in terms of their culture than in terms of, say, science.

Agreed, that's a sensible reason for the Culture favoring.

I'm scared of that implementation phase, since I'll be largely useless, at least relatively speaking. I imagine I'll be doing a fair bit of tedious digging-up-quotes-and-civilopedia-entries and stuff while you, you know, make the mod...

We all need our areas of specialization! I'm looking forward to turning all of these ideas we've had into something that can be played. Plus, there will inevitably be additional design discussions as well. Like when we "re-did" the LB summary because I went to implement some stuff and realized we needed more detail. Part of that was because the LB was a very early summary and we've gotten a better handle on it since then, but there will be a lot of additional edge cases to account for when I try to put things into the game.

You can do some recruitment during that time too. More programmers would be helpful, but we're also in dire need of artist(s).

As far as the next step... it definitelydoesn't have to be me. I have some ideas, as I've been thinking a bit about Shandalle and the Seanchan. Not sure when I'll have enough to be worth posting... if they come quickly, I'll wait till I get a "set," if it looks like it'll be slow going, I'll post the stuff I have - we don't want a situation where we're both "sitting" on our ideas too long, and then coming up with the same stuff, etc.. In other words, feel free to jump in if you have something.

Awesome sauce, more on this below!

Also, it seems like it might be worth digging back into pages 1-4 again. Some folks had ideas on uniques for some of these civs. Obviously the game has changed a lot since them, and they aren't around, but it might be worth doing them the honor of throwing their ideas into the mix, at least at the first phase. Obviously they weren't ideas necessarily about these four civs, but some of the important ones were covered, obviously. Looking back, it looks like we have ideas for:

Page 2 -
kidshowbusiness - Illian, Andor, Cairhien, Tear
Calavente - Cairhien

I think that's it, but I was very, very rapidly looking through, so I may have missed some.

Thoughts?

Very good call, let's definitely revive the ideas that others contributed earlier on in the topic. I think it will help to stick to our order overall and insert the ideas from the other folks as we reach the civs they suggested. I've found one from kidsshowbusiness for the Seanchan as well, and I think Calavente had some Seanchan ideas (I certainly remember another Seanchan idea that isn't mine - I need to find out whose it its!). More searching on that imminently!

Also, I recall kidshowbusiness proposing a lot of the same mechanics for various civs (I think he had like a flanking bonus for many UUs), and this brings to mind - should we keep every set of proposals completely unique, or should we build some redundancy into it? For example:

Tarabon
UA - something that boosts food, etc.
UU - Master of Horse, etc.

Arad Doman
UA - something that boosts food, etc.
UU - Master of Horse, etc.

In other words, propose similar mechanics (e.g. Path-spreading uniques) - or even the same flavor (multiple borderlander civs each having the same unit as an option, or, say, the Raken as an option for both PC-Seanchan and Seanchan regular). Obviously we would totally not *choose* these options for both civs, but we could do a thing where we say "if we don't choose this here, let's put it here?" I think we did something similar back with Social Policy stuff, or Paths, or something (or Threads?). Should we do that, or should we go for purity and tightness for each civ?

I think if we've got mechanics that really fit into two civs, then by all means let's include it in both. When I say really fit, I would want it to be more like "Man, this unique fits in really well with both X and Y, I'm not sure which one will use it better." Rather than "This unique is really cool, I'll add it to Y as well as X because it's related to what they do."




So! Uniques! After my post last night, I did some brainstorming about possible uniques for our top 4 civs. (And some others occurred to me for later civs, but I'll hold onto them for now.)

Firstly, I'm a big fan of the exotic uniques ideas. That sounds like a scary statement in itself. I was going to assure you it isn't actually scary, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, there are some uniques here that could make the game play very differently for that civ (a la Venice) and I find I'm liking those kinds most of all. I'm finding I don't want our mod's only representation of certain cultures from the canon to be one that's quite bland, while other cultures get all the awesomeness/splashiness.

I also find I possibly get marginally more specific with my suggestions that we may have indicated above. No hard numbers, but I find a certain amount of specificity helps get to the right mechanical place for capturing certain flavor.

Also, it occurs to me that several UAs in BNW are effectively multiple unrelated bonuses. They may complement one another, but aren't linked. Take England: boosted naval movement and an additional spy. Several of the UAs I list below for the four civs are definitely underpowered by themselves, but could be combined well with some of the other less powerful ones to make a more diverse civ that has some interesting abilities.

I'm also realizing that UAs were the only thing discussed in our prototype back-and-forth for these civs. I've ended up including some other unique types as well, because I've found that some UAs really function with the other uniques in mind.

All names are totally provisional and mostly to give us unique monikers for referencing each proposed unique option.

Also, any unique that has a username in brackets after it was suggested by someone else earlier in the topic. And we also have some uniques from you when we discussing channeling uniques a bazillion years ago! There's some Sea Folk and Aiel stuff that we can use immediately below. (I haven't included those because I'm not sure which parts of those you feel are still most applicable, and there are several different avenues discussed.)

Mid way through writing this post, I'm realizing that it's quite long. I've cut back to 2 civs instead of 4 to make it a bit shorter (I did this a bit backwards, so I've left the Seanchan and Shandalle out, which has temporarily chopped out the suggestions from other posters earlier in the topic). Let me know if you think we should drop down to just 1 at a time to keep these posts punchy. I imagine our discussion of each civ is going to get wider before it narrows again. I've already got a bunch of stuff for Shandalle that I've not put on here.

And another final point. This brainstorming has been a ton of fun. I don't often find myself obsessed with my posts on here in between putting them up, but that has been happening this time!

Anyway, that's enough preamble.

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Gai'shain, hurry production at a nearby city when capturing a foreign city
• Gai'shain, fewer buildings destroyed when capturing a foreign city
• Desert Lifetime, +Food from Desert tiles
• Warrior People, all units get +X combat strength
• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow, can only found cities on Desert
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that can stick around in T'a'r
• Samma N'sei, can be controlled when fighting for the Shadow during the LB

UBs:

• Water Hole, replaces Food1 or Food (Wheat), +Food from Desert tiles

UIs:

• Temporary Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, provides a fortification bonus and inflicts 5 damage per turn to adjacent enemies, spawns a Maiden of the Spear on an adjacent hex when pillaged
• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (melee) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

One thing that comes up a couple of times here is somehow increasing the Food yield of Desert for the Aiel. I think if we want to have a desert civ that plays truly in the Desert (BNW's "Desert civs", Egypt and Arabia, usually play around Deserts and along rivers) then some way to enhance the Desert's lacking Food yield could allow the Aiel to expand in very unique and unexpected ways. I think I prefer the UB approach to the UA approach, since there are loads of other uses for their UA.

So, what's up with Clanship, eh? I'm not really sure. It has the potential to make the Aiel play very differently and work in their nature as a collection of clans, rather than a single unified people (which only really happens in the final 5 years of our 3000 year timeline). A straight up restriction to Desert would make them unplayable on some maps. I do not know exactly what a separate "diplomatic entity" could mean. I don't quite see how the CiV diplo functions could be made per-city for one civ. Or unit production, but it feels like there's a really cool mechanic in here somewhere that's a good use for that flavor. Some combination with a Warriors' Hold-like UI could be used to make cities a bit more independent without sacrificing all of the benefits of civ-wide parallelism.

I think the Maidens of the Spear is obviously great flavor, but it might be desirable to make them an evergreen unit somehow (doesn't obsolete, stays useful), given their relative technological simplicity combined with their modern effectiveness (and presence) in the books. Not sure how often we would want to consider such a thing.

The Wise Ones we've discussed before and how they're one of the only uniques that can connect to T'a'r, which makes them quite valuable. They're also very central to the Aiel flavor in the books. How would we want the Wise Ones to differ from other T'a'r entities, given what we know about how the other parts of T'a'r work now?

I think the other uniques are relatively self explanatory applications of Aiel flavor for some more straightforward bonuses.

The Atha'an Miere (Era 1-9, Wide, Diplo/Cul)
UAs:

• Fierce Negotiators, receive double gold from foreign trade routes established with your cities (just by sea?)
• Sea Folk, embarked movement is doubled
• Land Legs, all land units become naval units when embarked (Melee1 is NavalMelee1, Siege1 is NavalRanged1, Ranged1 is NavalRanged1, etc), and naval units can disembark as corresponding land units

UUs:

• Raker, replaces the trade ship, gives boosted range to trade routes
• Windfinder, replaces Wilder, embarks into a combat ship? a ship that boosts other ships?
• Windfinder, replaces NavalMelee6, can move farther and enemy ships have -X combat strength within 5 hexes of it

UBs:

• Porcelain "forge", replaces Gold2, produces "Porcelain" luxury resource and Gold yield, only buildable in Coastal cities

UIs:

I think it's worth mentioning what we call this civ. I would be inclined to call them the Atha'an Miere, rather than the Sea Folk.

There would be a lot more detail to the Land Legs mechanic and how which units map to one another (and how we disembark newly created naval units that have multiple possible land counterparts), but this demonstrates the basic mechanics of it. This could combine quite effectively with some kind of Windfinder UU, since the Windfinder is known from the flavor to be a person, but this allows us to still use them on a ship, while visibly acknowledging and using that person flavor as well.

User the Raker as a replacement for the Cargo Ship goes back to what I mentioned before about the Sea Folk's naval uniques not always helping Domination. It also maps quite well to what Rakers did in the books.

Having their own unique Luxury Resource (vaguely related to Indonesia in BNW, I suppose) in the form of Porcelain via a UB, fits their flavor very well in terms of trading dominance. I feel we've used the Porcelain flavor somewhere else as well (which doesn't necessarily preclude it from use here), but I don't remember where/how we used it. Making this a UB that can be built on the coast will give the Sea Folk a dominant trading position in many games where they can get a few coastal cities and be able to trade this resource that no other civs can have. Restricting it to coastal cities rewards the player for playing "like the Sea Folk".



Also, when generating ideas for Shandalle, I realized that we never selected a tech to be the trigger tech for the High King. (Three guesses what some of my potential Shandalle UAs are.)

As a quick recap, the tech for the High King is one of the possible ways for a civ to become the High King. The placement of the chosen tech is intended to encourage the High King event to occur at a time that is reasonably historically accurate and places it approximately in the middle of the game.

I think the Treatises tech is a well placed tech for this, for a few reasons. Mechnically, it's in the first column of Era 5, so anyone unlocking it means the world era will progress immediately to Era 4 (Era of Consolidation) which is the right time period for the High King. Someone unlocking High King by tech also means that they've been pulling ahead in the early game (none of the other High King conditions have been fulfilled yet), so catching them just as they advance past Era 4 makes a lot of sense.

In terms of prereq count, Treatises has 28, which is middle of the road in this column (which varies from 23 to 32). Given that the High King is ostensibly a Diplo event, we don't want the tech requirement to be the most taxing aspect of it. (Also nicely, the lower prereq count techs are at the bottom of the tree, so beelining that way is likely to the exclusion of pursuing the High King tech unlock.) It also fits the Treatises flavor well.

 

[counterpoint]

A thing has occurred. A brief sojourn out of our current system of proceeding with uniques to call out that Civ VI is coming out this year. We previously discussed that Civ:BE didn't particularly change our plans for WoTMod because of its functional similarity to CiV and sci-fi leaning meant that it didn't offer us much, but did present challenges if we wanted to move to it. So CiV was a clear choice there.

CiVI (official shortening now), we said, was something to consider separately and may have a better chance of us upheaving everything to move to. I figured that Firaxis might actually do another BE expansion before going for CiVI.

I think there are a few components to this. CiVI isn't coming out until October, so there are literally 0 things we can do about it until then, in terms of making an informed decision of the technical challenges that would be involved in repurposing WoTMod for it. We'll get a bit more of an inkling about the design considerations as they announce more info about how the game plays, but even that will be quite superficial until we are actually able to play and experience it first hand.

From what they've announced so far, the changes to cities and combat have potentially far-reaching implications for foundational systems such as the new ones we've proposed.

We do have historical precedent to work with though. And that historical precedent tells me that WoTMod will not be possible in CiVI immediately after it's released. (It wasn't possible in CiV until approximately 3 years after its release in 2010.) There was a similar story for large total conversions like FFH in CIV (Civ4).

And even if Firaxis release all of their source code when they release the game (within the realm of possibility, but unlikely), there's a significant spin-up time to being able to work effectively with the new tools and new (even if related) code. The community will also take some time to transition over. (Modding in CiV was declared "dead" several times in its first few years.) That would mean fewer potential artists. Though a new title does usually mean we'd get an influx of newcomers, some of whom will become the prolific modder artists for CiVI.

CiVI would also be a moving target, in terms of developing the mod, since Firaxis would still be releasing new DLC and expansions that can potentially (read: definitely will) break our mod. BNW, on the other hand, is fixed in place since Firaxis aren't working on it.

That's not to say that CiVI may not have advantages as well. The new cities look interesting, but we don't have enough information to say how that will affect us. (It looks like they've taken some cues from Endless Legend.) The new art style could be seen to be a bit more WoT friendly than the CiV one. Firaxis may give modding access to some parts of the game that are currently inaccessible. Particularly terraforming/hex type changes, all Features (Atolls, Natural Wonders, modded Features, etc.) being moveable like Forests would be awesome. Still, these are relatively small feature limitations, in the big picture of WoTMod. I feel that we rarely run up against technical limitations in our design for CiV.

Overall, there's not much for us to do now about it now, but it's something to think about. History tells me that we're unlikely to want to move WoTMod onto CiVI, and given that even CIV's modding community is still churning out content now, CiV's modding activity probably has a significant lifetime beyond CiVI's release.

Now, that was all a very reasoned technical assessment of the impact of CiVI on WoTMod. Did I also mention that CiVI IS COMING OUT THIS YEAR!?!!? Super excited and I can't wait to play it!

holy moley... So, yeah, that's a thing that has occurred...

I don't really have much to say. It kind of bums me out, of course, that we're going to be so obsolete. But, I do think you're correct that we couldn't really plan to move to CiVI for quite some time - several years. If CiVI is anything like CiV, the vanilla version is going to be sort of like a commercially-released Beta, and the "final" game is really going to only exist once the expansions come out. Specifically, it's likely that some key mechanics that our mod relies on (religion, espionage, etc.) will be simply absent in vanilla. So, yeah, we have to pretty much wait.

That being said, some of this new stuff does look interesting! Maybe WodMod 2.0 would be better off on CiVI, but for now, V it is.

I'm a notoriously late adopter for games. Might have to make an exception this time.

We all need our areas of specialization! I'm looking forward to turning all of these ideas we've had into something that can be played. Plus, there will inevitably be additional design discussions as well. Like when we "re-did" the LB summary because I went to implement some stuff and realized we needed more detail. Part of that was because the LB was a very early summary and we've gotten a better handle on it since then, but there will be a lot of additional edge cases to account for when I try to put things into the game.

You can do some recruitment during that time too. More programmers would be helpful, but we're also in dire need of artist(s).

yeah, recruitment indeed. I'll reach out to the larger WoT community - hopefully we'll get some people!

Very good call, let's definitely revive the ideas that others contributed earlier on in the topic. I think it will help to stick to our order overall and insert the ideas from the other folks as we reach the civs they suggested. I've found one from kidsshowbusiness for the Seanchan as well, and I think Calavente had some Seanchan ideas (I certainly remember another Seanchan idea that isn't mine - I need to find out whose it its!). More searching on that imminently!

ah... looks like I'd missed a few!

I think if we've got mechanics that really fit into two civs, then by all means let's include it in both. When I say really fit, I would want it to be more like "Man, this unique fits in really well with both X and Y, I'm not sure which one will use it better." Rather than "This unique is really cool, I'll add it to Y as well as X because it's related to what they do."

got it. agreed.

So! Uniques! After my post last night, I did some brainstorming about possible uniques for our top 4 civs. (And some others occurred to me for later civs, but I'll hold onto them for now.)

Firstly, I'm a big fan of the exotic uniques ideas. That sounds like a scary statement in itself. I was going to assure you it isn't actually scary, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, there are some uniques here that could make the game play very differently for that civ (a la Venice) and I find I'm liking those kinds most of all. I'm finding I don't want our mod's only representation of certain cultures from the canon to be one that's quite bland, while other cultures get all the awesomeness/splashiness.

I don't have a problem with crazy uniques. I'm not going to want everybody to feel gimicky, but splashy stuff can be cool. Case by case, blah blah blah. It also depends on how extreme the craziness goes...

I also find I possibly get marginally more specific with my suggestions that we may have indicated above. No hard numbers, but I find a certain amount of specificity helps get to the right mechanical place for capturing certain flavor.

yeah, the guideline to be general is mostly about making this process take less long - if the ideas that come to you are specific, go ahead!

Also, it occurs to me that several UAs in BNW are effectively multiple unrelated bonuses. They may complement one another, but aren't linked. Take England: boosted naval movement and an additional spy. Several of the UAs I list below for the four civs are definitely underpowered by themselves, but could be combined well with some of the other less powerful ones to make a more diverse civ that has some interesting abilities.

for sure. There's no reason we should have only one big UA aspect.

I'm also realizing that UAs were the only thing discussed in our prototype back-and-forth for these civs. I've ended up including some other unique types as well, because I've found that some UAs really function with the other uniques in mind.

I had only put UAs before because I only felt like coming up with example UAs for that example. We should absolutely be looking at all the Uniques at this point.

All names are totally provisional and mostly to give us unique monikers for referencing each proposed unique option.

for sure. just capture the flavor, and go from there.

Also, any unique that has a username in brackets after it was suggested by someone else earlier in the topic. And we also have some uniques from you when we discussing channeling uniques a bazillion years ago! There's some Sea Folk and Aiel stuff that we can use immediately below. (I haven't included those because I'm not sure which parts of those you feel are still most applicable, and there are several different avenues discussed.)

Mid way through writing this post, I'm realizing that it's quite long. I've cut back to 2 civs instead of 4 to make it a bit shorter (I did this a bit backwards, so I've left the Seanchan and Shandalle out, which has temporarily chopped out the suggestions from other posters earlier in the topic). Let me know if you think we should drop down to just 1 at a time to keep these posts punchy. I imagine our discussion of each civ is going to get wider before it narrows again. I've already got a bunch of stuff for Shandalle that I've not put on here.

Looking at this, I'm quite liking the 2-civs at a time thing, actually. I think, moving forward, that might be the best thing....

..

...

...that said, I think at this time, let's go with all four. The reason is because we've both been thinking of all four. I kind of want some of these things to be "out of my head and onto the page," if that makes sense. I've been thinking of these civs over the past few days, such that it's kind of hard to focus down on just two at this point. I'll be starting the other two civs below, but they'll be relatively bare bones - of course, add away!

But after this, let's go two at a time, I think!

EDIT
Just finished my post below. OK, that took forever. Definitely down with doing them one at a time after we finish these ones! One or two - your call./EDIT

And another final point. This brainstorming has been a ton of fun. I don't often find myself obsessed with my posts on here in between putting them up, but that has been happening this time!

great!

I should say, though, it's fun, but it's also time consuming. So don't expect me (speaking only for myself) to have all the fully formed ideas at once. This'll be a few tosses back and forth, I think. Also, I'll say that on this first pass, I'll probably be commenting, but am not likely to propose cuts or huge changes. I feel like I need to sleep on some of these, think about them some more, etc. Cuts will come, eventually. We'll have to decide how many options we want to have for each civ.

Also, please note that the flavor bits on page 49 will be useful for us here! (and later, for Aldeshar, etc.)

I'm actually going to end this post here, so as to let the Uniques stuff stand alone.

 

[counterpoint]

ok, so here's the color scheme I'm suggesting (most of this is review):

red - proposed cut
green - proposed change
blue - proposed new
magenta - called into question
orange - old ideas, from the beginning of the thread

obviously, the magenta one could be way overused - at this point in the discussion, *everything* is called into question. I think this should mean something very specific that needs to be dug into and re-examines (a conflict, etc.). I'm also ok with axing this color.

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Gai'shain, hurry production at a nearby city when capturing a foreign city
• Gai'shain, fewer buildings destroyed when capturing a foreign city
• Desert Lifetime, +Food from Desert tiles
• Warrior People, all units get +X combat strength
• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow, can only found cities on Desert
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that can stick around in T'a'r
• Samma N'sei, can be controlled when fighting for the Shadow during the LB

UBs:

• Water Hole, replaces Food1 or Food (Wheat), +Food from Desert tiles

UIs:

• Temporary Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, provides a fortification bonus and inflicts 5 damage per turn to adjacent enemies, spawns a Maiden of the Spear on an adjacent hex when pillaged
• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (melee) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

One thing that comes up a couple of times here is somehow increasing the Food yield of Desert for the Aiel. I think if we want to have a desert civ that plays truly in the Desert (BNW's "Desert civs", Egypt and Arabia, usually play around Deserts and along rivers) then some way to enhance the Desert's lacking Food yield could allow the Aiel to expand in very unique and unexpected ways. I think I prefer the UB approach to the UA approach, since there are loads of other uses for their UA.

I understand, and agree that the UA would be better spent elsewhere. However, I'm not totally sold that we need the Aiel to be desert-bound. They are, traditionally - and they uniquely seem to thrive there - but on the other hand, they *do* come over the dragon wall and such. More importantly, I don't see why we wouldn't want them still near rivers and such. I don't know.... Also, I don't know if +food is the best option - I know it's essential for success in the desert, but we probably want them to keep their cities small, right?

So, what's up with Clanship, eh? I'm not really sure. It has the potential to make the Aiel play very differently and work in their nature as a collection of clans, rather than a single unified people (which only really happens in the final 5 years of our 3000 year timeline). A straight up restriction to Desert would make them unplayable on some maps. I do not know exactly what a separate "diplomatic entity" could mean. I don't quite see how the CiV diplo functions could be made per-city for one civ. Or unit production, but it feels like there's a really cool mechanic in here somewhere that's a good use for that flavor. Some combination with a Warriors' Hold-like UI could be used to make cities a bit more independent without sacrificing all of the benefits of civ-wide parallelism.

This is quite interesting. I think a straight-up desert restriction might not be necessary. Better to give them bonuses in desert, I think. Right? I can see the appeal of the desert-only thing, but do recall that the start bias is just a *bias* (right?). You could get majorly screwed.

The diplo thing is very interesting. Don't know how it'd work, though. You'd have to have each city's health and size and happiness have it somehow decide on things - like the Stump. It seems a little complex...

I think the Maidens of the Spear is obviously great flavor, but it might be desirable to make them an evergreen unit somehow (doesn't obsolete, stays useful), given their relative technological simplicity combined with their modern effectiveness (and presence) in the books. Not sure how often we would want to consider such a thing.

the Maidens could very much be either early game or late game. I don't htink making them actually evergreen is necessary. Kind of weird exceptionalism.

The Wise Ones we've discussed before and how they're one of the only uniques that can connect to T'a'r, which makes them quite valuable. They're also very central to the Aiel flavor in the books. How would we want the Wise Ones to differ from other T'a'r entities, given what we know about how the other parts of T'a'r work now?

this is the kind of thing I don't think we really need to get into now. But yes, T'a'r functionality. MAybe they can go there themselves (instead of projecting), and do crazy stuff. Hmmm... Otherwise, longer projections, different actions there, multiple projections at once, increased movement, etc.

I think the other uniques are relatively self explanatory applications of Aiel flavor for some more straightforward bonuses.

Right. The additional thoughts I have on this stuff:

The Gai'shain stuff - do note that we have a Founder Custom called Gai'shain, that does very much something similar (thematically) to what you have here (the first one) - when you kill an enemy unit, gain +2 Production in your nearest city for every foreign city following this path.

We could of course remove that custom, but I actually think, given that Ji'eh'toh is a Path, it may serve us best by leaving it where it is. If you like this functionality, perhaps it'd need a name that's either totally different, or obliquely connected to Ji'e'toh.

The second Gai'shain one - similar to the Fifth one - is quite different, and pretty cool. Giving the issues with the Gai'shain name, I'm going to suggest we delete it and merge it with the Fifth.

The +combat str one feels too bland.

The Samma N'sei... that one doesn't really work for me, and not just because it's side-specific. That just doesn't really fit with what the SN's are, to me. True, they're Aiel, but they've gone so far off the reservation that I can't see the Aiel being able to specifically use them any better than anybody else. Now, a pro-light alternative... that's a little more believable.

Water Hole is bland but functional. It'd need a fun name.

The last UI is nuts. So, it'd literally produce units, automatically? What's to stop this from being a RTS-style unit factory? Seems a little toooo nuts.

so, to recap, plus some new stuff:

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Gai'shain, hurry production at a nearby city when capturing a foreign city
• Gai'shain, fewer buildings destroyed when capturing a foreign city
• Desert Lifetime, +Food from Desert tiles
• Warrior People, all units get +X combat strength
• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow, can only found cities on Desert
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%
• The Fifth, +X% gold, production, or units taken when caputring a city for the first time.
• Water Oath, Production or Happiness bonuses when multiple cities work flood plains on the same river (includes international and CSs)
• For the Car'acarn, +50% combat strength for all units on turns you control the Dragon (is there a Shadow version of this?)
• Spit in Sightblinder's Eye, +X% combat bonus against Samma N'sei, +X% combat bonus when fighting adjacent to a friendly Samma N'sei
• Water and Shade, treat desert as Roads.
• Algai'd'siswai - cannot build any sword units. Each is replaced by a leveled Alai'd'siswai spear unit..

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that can stick around in T'a'r
• Samma N'sei, can be controlled when fighting for the Shadow during the LB
• Stone Dogs, Red Shields, etc.... any number of other societies for various benefits.
• Brotherless, replaces an era 8 spear unit, significant combat bonuses when only adjacent to X or fewer friendly units
• Algai'd'siswai, see above

UBs:

• Water Hole, replaces Food1 or Food (Wheat), +Food from Desert tiles
• Hold, replaces XP 1 or XP 2 - +X XP to every melee unit produced in this city for every desert tile with no resources worked by this city.
• Roof (or something about Roofs) - unsure on functionality
• Sweat tent - unsure on functionality (and would need to eliminate the Path Building we've already created)

UIs:

• Temporary Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, provides a fortification bonus and inflicts 5 damage per turn to adjacent enemies, spawns a Maiden of the Spear on an adjacent hex when pillaged
• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (melee) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

I actually think, for the most part, my items speak for themselves. Not much more to say. Water Oath and Algai' are the nuttiest UAs, obviously.

The Atha'an Miere (Era 1-9, Wide, Diplo/Cul)
UAs:

• Fierce Negotiators, receive double gold from foreign trade routes established with your cities (just by sea?)
• Sea Folk, embarked movement is doubled
• Land Legs, all land units become naval units when embarked (Melee1 is NavalMelee1, Siege1 is NavalRanged1, Ranged1 is NavalRanged1, etc), and naval units can disembark as corresponding land units

UUs:

• Raker, replaces the trade ship, gives boosted range to trade routes
• Windfinder, replaces Wilder, embarks into a combat ship? a ship that boosts other ships?
• Windfinder, replaces NavalMelee6, can move farther and enemy ships have -X combat strength within 5 hexes of it

UBs:

• Porcelain "forge", replaces Gold2, produces "Porcelain" luxury resource and Gold yield, only buildable in Coastal cities

UIs:

I think it's worth mentioning what we call this civ. I would be inclined to call them the Atha'an Miere, rather than the Sea Folk.

I agree.

There would be a lot more detail to the Land Legs mechanic and how which units map to one another (and how we disembark newly created naval units that have multiple possible land counterparts), but this demonstrates the basic mechanics of it. This could combine quite effectively with some kind of Windfinder UU, since the Windfinder is known from the flavor to be a person, but this allows us to still use them on a ship, while visibly acknowledging and using that person flavor as well.

this is very interesting. Also potentially very powerful. Need to think on this a bit more. I will say, though, one thing I don't like about this is that it turns the A'M into an "amphibious" civ, that can swarm from sea and go nuts on lank (like Denmark in BNW). That doesn't seem to fit, IMO.

User the Raker as a replacement for the Cargo Ship goes back to what I mentioned before about the Sea Folk's naval uniques not always helping Domination. It also maps quite well to what Rakers did in the books.

Yeah, I thought of this as well (a UU cargo ship). I don't know that it needs to be the Raker, but it could be. Also, we can maybe do something more interesting than boosted range, right?

Having their own unique Luxury Resource (vaguely related to Indonesia in BNW, I suppose) in the form of Porcelain via a UB, fits their flavor very well in terms of trading dominance. I feel we've used the Porcelain flavor somewhere else as well (which doesn't necessarily preclude it from use here), but I don't remember where/how we used it. Making this a UB that can be built on the coast will give the Sea Folk a dominant trading position in many games where they can get a few coastal cities and be able to trade this resource that no other civs can have. Restricting it to coastal cities rewards the player for playing "like the Sea Folk".

Yeah, so I actually don't like Porcelain as a unique resource. It feels very, very ripped off from CiV. It's bad luck that the trakemark A'M resource is also one of just a few like that in CiV. We'd decided previously that Porcelain would just be a "craft" material for legendary works. We can totally have the Porc. flavor show up for this civ, but I don't think we want it to literally be as a resource.

Other thoughts:

"Sea Folk" - too generic, IMO

Regardless of what we do for Land Legs, I do think that sea+land functionality switch could be pretty cool on a Windfinder UU. Interesting how the Windfinder would also make a good UU Great Admiral... too bad we don't have those!

I think the Porc Forge building is a fine ID - I just don't think it should literally create a resource.

I should also say that, if we don't go with an actual UU ship (that can fight), we definitely should have some aspect of their UA that at least lets them potentially have naval dominance.

So:

The Atha'an Miere (Era 1-9, Wide, Diplo/Cul)

UAs:

• Fierce Negotiators, receive double gold from foreign sea trade routes established with your cities (just by sea?)
• Sea Folk, embarked movement is doubled
• Land Legs, all land units become naval units when embarked (Melee1 is NavalMelee1, Siege1 is NavalRanged1, Ranged1 is NavalRanged1, etc), and naval units can disembark as corresponding land units
• Home at Sea, big bonuses (food? gold? happ?) when building on the coast, significant penalties when not on the coast
• Calming Waters, +X% combat bonus for land units when within 2 tiles of the coast

UUs:

• Raker, replaces the trade ship, gives boosted range to trade routes
• Windfinder, replaces Wilder, embarks into a combat ship? a ship that boosts other ships?
• Windfinder, replaces NavalMelee6, can move farther and enemy ships have -X combat strength within 5 hexes of it
• Swordmaster or Master of Blades - replaces some sword unit for some nice effect (better when embarked?)
• Darter, Soarer, Skimmer, Raker - any number of combat ships or trade ships (more detail when necessary, which is probably very soon)

UBs:

• Porcelain "forge", replaces Gold2, produces "Porcelain" luxury resource and Gold yield, only buildable in Coastal cities
• Porcelain shop, replaces Gold2, and has some additional effect (not sure! happiness?)
• Cargomaster's Hold, replaces coastal 1, +Production for every international sea trade route, more if they trade with you too.
• Shipyard, replaces Coastal 2, -X% gold cost for purchasing naval units in this city.

UIs:

• (unknown flavor), UI fishing boats for some better yield (though this is probably better for one of the civs that is known for fishing, e.g. Tear or Mayene)

Not much to say on these ideas, actually!

Also, when generating ideas for Shandalle, I realized that we never selected a tech to be the trigger tech for the High King. (Three guesses what some of my potential Shandalle UAs are.)

As a quick recap, the tech for the High King is one of the possible ways for a civ to become the High King. The placement of the chosen tech is intended to encourage the High King event to occur at a time that is reasonably historically accurate and places it approximately in the middle of the game.

I think the Treatises tech is a well placed tech for this, for a few reasons. Mechnically, it's in the first column of Era 5, so anyone unlocking it means the world era will progress immediately to Era 4 (Era of Consolidation) which is the right time period for the High King. Someone unlocking High King by tech also means that they've been pulling ahead in the early game (none of the other High King conditions have been fulfilled yet), so catching them just as they advance past Era 4 makes a lot of sense.

In terms of prereq count, Treatises has 28, which is middle of the road in this column (which varies from 23 to 32). Given that the High King is ostensibly a Diplo event, we don't want the tech requirement to be the most taxing aspect of it. (Also nicely, the lower prereq count techs are at the bottom of the tree, so beelining that way is likely to the exclusion of pursuing the High King tech unlock.) It also fits the Treatises flavor well.

I'm definitely fine with this. I think Treatises is fine! And, on average, it'll happen when most people are in era 4, correct?

OK, I'll try! Sorry if I'm stepping on any of your ideas here - don't worry, mine aren't that awesome!

Shandalle (Era 3-4, Wide, Dom/Diplo, no bias)

UAs:

• Trusted Advisors, all Governors spawn at second level
• Trusted Advisors, governors advance level X turns faster
• Provincial Dominance, double rewards from being the High King, double rewards gifted to you when you are a province, bonuses given to you cannot be "Meager" and "Nothing"
• Insightful Rule, if you are the High King, select a Provincial bonus for yourself, if you are a Province, select which bonus you receive.
• Sight of the Golden Hawk, gain vision on the capitol cities of the High King and any civs that received "Powerful" or "Significant" Provincial bonuses
• Years of Silent Rage, if your city is captured, gain +X% production and +X% combat strength against the capturing civilization for X turns

UUs:

• Breaching Tower (era 4 Siege) - the bonuses of defensive structures and garrisoned units is halved
• Breaching Tower (era 4 Siege) - can pillage a tile that has already been pillaged (endless siege or Tar Valon)
• Civil Guard (era 3-4 melee or polearm) - triple garrison bonus
• Circuit Rover (era 3-4 ranged) - weaker than comparable unit, but X% change of spawning in any city that is under direct attack.
• Golden Hawk Foot (era 3-4 melee) - something something

UBs:

• Civil Guard House (replaces Era 3-4 XP building), lowers local unhappiness
• Hall of the Magistrate (replaces Courthouse), something something...

UIs:

• Siege Camp, built in opposing territory (?), provides bonuses to any unit that is "set up" on the tile.

Not much to say about all of this, actually. I think the UBs need some working out. I don't have much yet, though.

Seanchan (Era 4-9, Wide, Dom/Sci/Cul, no bias)

UAs:

• The Seanchan may not raze cities and receive diplomatic and cultural (tourism) penalties in their dealings with all other civs. In addition they cannot influence Ajahs in the Hall of the Tower. However, as long as they control the capitol of a rival civ, they gain that civ's UA and can build their UU's and UB's. (kidshowbusiness)
• Ever Victorious Army, puppeted cities will periodically produce units, including Unique Units
• At the Eve of Battle - choose your side in the Last Battle after all other civs have publicly declared their allegiance
• The Conquest - +X production when building military units in the capitol for every city you have puppetted
• Voice of the Blood - each city with a governor will get a +X% bonus towards the creation of some unit or military-related building, this unit/building will change after a certain number of turns

UUs:

• Deathwatch Guards: Receives Elite Formation promotion for free. Gets a 10% combat bonus against other units with the Elite Formation promotion. (kidshowbusiness)
• Exotics: Since you seemed okay with Andor having more than two uniques, I can only assume that there's room for all of these for the Seanchan. There's grolm and lopar. Torm and Crolm. Plus the two flying types. You could probably get away with cutting the Torm and Crolm since they mostly seem to be used for scouting and the fliers kind of make that redundant. The ground types at least, should be pretty powerful, with bonuses against cavalry and perhaps that Terror promotion some elephant units have. But they should be limited somehow, only allowed to construct X number at once? (kidshowbusiness)
• Sul'dam: And how could we forget the foundation of the Empire's power? A special kind of channeling unit. Takes longer to construct/train and is more limited (ex. Sul'dam don't seem able to heal, or else no Seanchan will accept healing, which amounts to the same thing), but are somewhat more powerful in battle. Can't be more specific as I'm not sure how you're handling the whole channeling thing yet. (kidshowbusiness)
• Insectoid soldier (name?) (replaces era 5-9 melee or spear), unknown ability
• Deathwatch Guard, late game melee, when killed, is brought back instantly with 20% health
• Gardener, late game melee, very powerful
• Exotics - kidshow mentioned them above - should we delve into specifics? such as...
• Fists of Heaven - UU Skimmer (a raken flier)
• Suldam/Damane - replace all female channelers. Suldam converts enemy channelers into Damane.
• Banner-General, Captain-General, Marshall-General, etc. - fancy warrior units, or even UU Great Captain

UBs:

• Seanchan Patrol Station: Replaces Courthouse. Eliminates extra unhappiness from occupied cities. +1 happiness if city has a connection to the capitol. Cost 75 (3/4 of Courthouse). Maintenance 2 Gold per turn (1/2 of Courthouse). (kidshowbusiness)
• Seeker's tower (replaced courthouse), constructed instantly
• Seeker's tower (replaces Alignment building), defense against Spies (I know, mixing things a bit here)

UIs:

ok, obviously kidshowbusiness's stuff is in there. Some of it has inspired, over the two years, some other ideas we've had for this civ. I've left them here unaltered, and also included some spin-off ideas.

There could be way more here, but I've quit for now before it gets too bloated.

 

[S3rgeus]

holy moley... So, yeah, that's a thing that has occurred...

I don't really have much to say. It kind of bums me out, of course, that we're going to be so obsolete. But, I do think you're correct that we couldn't really plan to move to CiVI for quite some time - several years. If CiVI is anything like CiV, the vanilla version is going to be sort of like a commercially-released Beta, and the "final" game is really going to only exist once the expansions come out. Specifically, it's likely that some key mechanics that our mod relies on (religion, espionage, etc.) will be simply absent in vanilla. So, yeah, we have to pretty much wait.

That being said, some of this new stuff does look interesting! Maybe WodMod 2.0 would be better off on CiVI, but for now, V it is.

I'm a notoriously late adopter for games. Might have to make an exception this time.

CiV it is!

One other thing that did occur to me that Firaxis might do, is they might adopt an open format like FBX for their 3D models in CiVI. That would drastically change the unit creation landscape for the game, since the majority of the difficulty in CiV's process comes from GR2 being a pain in the face, since it's proprietary and difficult to export to from standard modeling programs. Deliverator has done some amazing work making it possible to do so, but it's taken him a long time. If FBX could simply be loaded up by the game, then every 3D modelling program and their uncles would be able to instantly export models for use really easily.

Oh, also, they did announce that Espionage, International Trade, and Religion would all be in the base game. It seems like they're aiming to be feature-comparable with BNW to start with, though we don't have all of those details yet.

Still, all speculative and not a reason to change strategy now!

yeah, recruitment indeed. I'll reach out to the larger WoT community - hopefully we'll get some people!

Seamas Gallagher would be the greatest recruitment ever!

I had only put UAs before because I only felt like coming up with example UAs for that example. We should absolutely be looking at all the Uniques at this point.

Phew! I'm glad I didn't jump way ahead with that!

...that said, I think at this time, let's go with all four. The reason is because we've both been thinking of all four. I kind of want some of these things to be "out of my head and onto the page," if that makes sense. I've been thinking of these civs over the past few days, such that it's kind of hard to focus down on just two at this point. I'll be starting the other two civs below, but they'll be relatively bare bones - of course, add away!

Barg, I'm not sure. I'm not going to finish responding to all 4 tonight because I don't have time to go through all of it, and that's without me spending any time brainstorming as well (which, as you;ve rightly said, also takes a while!). I would be inclined to pull it back to 2 and continue on with the next two from your post (Seanchan and Shandalle) when we finish those. It seems like we'll get better content out of them all that way, and we don't want to squander our most flavor rich civs!

But after this, let's go two at a time, I think!

EDIT
Just finished my post below. OK, that took forever. Definitely down with doing them one at a time after we finish these ones! One or two - your call./EDIT

Looking at what we're discussing now, one at a time sounds like the way to go! Two at a time for the first four possibly, but I would even be ok dropping back down to one at a time and picking up the others after we're finished the first one.

I should say, though, it's fun, but it's also time consuming. So don't expect me (speaking only for myself) to have all the fully formed ideas at once. This'll be a few tosses back and forth, I think. Also, I'll say that on this first pass, I'll probably be commenting, but am not likely to propose cuts or huge changes. I feel like I need to sleep on some of these, think about them some more, etc. Cuts will come, eventually. We'll have to decide how many options we want to have for each civ.

I feel like 2, maybe 3, UA options and 3-9 other uniques options would be a good place to get to at this stage. It lets us keep UAs that represent different approaches to the civ in the running until we make a big picture pass and know more about how the VC balance is going and the like.

3-9 other uniques means we may pare all the way down to a final 3 (though that seems unlikely, given we have multiple UA options and specific uniques will often be built off one of those UA options) if have some that emerge as particular favorites. 9 would be for when we have 3 sets of 3 uniques that are geared around the 3 different UAs we're considering.

Also, please note that the flavor bits on page 49 will be useful for us here! (and later, for Aldeshar, etc.)

Definitely, I used that for my previous post!

 

[S3rgeus]

ok, so here's the color scheme I'm suggesting (most of this is review):

red - proposed cut
green - proposed change
blue - proposed new
magenta - called into question
orange - old ideas, from the beginning of the thread

obviously, the magenta one could be way overused - at this point in the discussion, *everything* is called into question. I think this should mean something very specific that needs to be dug into and re-examines (a conflict, etc.). I'm also ok with axing this color.

After going through some of the below, I think magenta can help us out where one of us has proposed a change and the other person wants to discuss an alternative. For example, if one of us proposes a delete and the other person wants to keep that unique in discussion, then magenta disambiguates that discussion about deletion from new deletes proposed in the next post.

I understand, and agree that the UA would be better spent elsewhere. However, I'm not totally sold that we need the Aiel to be desert-bound. They are, traditionally - and they uniquely seem to thrive there - but on the other hand, they *do* come over the dragon wall and such. More importantly, I don't see why we wouldn't want them still near rivers and such. I don't know.... Also, I don't know if +food is the best option - I know it's essential for success in the desert, but we probably want them to keep their cities small, right?

This is very true, the Aiel cities shouldn't grow massive (by default), which is what a food bonus would do. In terms of keeping them near rivers, it's not that we wouldn't want them near rivers, but that striking out into bare desert is not something most civs can do. (And civs who do it will often do so for pure strategic reasons and the cities founded in desert will be largely yield black holes.) I think it's interesting to make the Aiel different from other civs in that way, actively encouraging them to strike out into desert where other civs wouldn't be able to profitably venture. Of course they can stick by rivers and do as well as anyone else, since rivers improve desert yields for anyone. But a pure desert bonus makes them stand out.

About coming over the wall and such, the Aiel do venture into the Wetlands a few times, but they never remain as a civilization there. It's always coming across for some major event and then going back. They don't occupy Cairhien after the Aiel War or anything like that, which would tilt me more towards a non-desert-y approach to their civ.

This is quite interesting. I think a straight-up desert restriction might not be necessary. Better to give them bonuses in desert, I think. Right? I can see the appeal of the desert-only thing, but do recall that the start bias is just a *bias* (right?). You could get majorly screwed.

Agreed, a straight up desert restriction could majorly destroy a player's chance of being able to play this civ at all on some map types. We're probably best off going with some kind of approach that makes it beneficial for them to use deserts, but not be bound to them.

At the same time, some BNW civs plainly don't work properly on certain map types. You can't build Polynesia's UI on maps that don't have ocean. England's naval component of their UA is useless in the same circumstances. Carthage's mountain movement doesn't help on Archipelago, where there are hardly ever mountains, let alone reason to need to cross them.

I don't mention those to endorse restricting the Aiel to just the desert, because that's a much more prevalent restriction. But I think it's all right if they don't play their best on maps that don't have deserts (or for any of our civs to play less well on certain map types), because it's inherently putting them out of where they should flavorfully be at their most advantaged.

The diplo thing is very interesting. Don't know how it'd work, though. You'd have to have each city's health and size and happiness have it somehow decide on things - like the Stump. It seems a little complex...

Yeah, I feel like I need to ruminate a bit more on this one and work out what this could mean.

the Maidens could very much be either early game or late game. I don't htink making them actually evergreen is necessary. Kind of weird exceptionalism.

Yeah, it's probably fine for them to be a normal unit, I just wanted to float the evergreen idea.

this is the kind of thing I don't think we really need to get into now. But yes, T'a'r functionality. MAybe they can go there themselves (instead of projecting), and do crazy stuff. Hmmm... Otherwise, longer projections, different actions there, multiple projections at once, increased movement, etc.

Is it something we don't need to get into now? I think it only feels like we don't need to get into it because we've discussed the Wise Ones specifically before (and maybe that's your reasoning here). I figure we'd want to do the same level of exploration we would to the "diplo entities" entry above, in that we know what "T'a'r functionality" means and how it would interact/synergize with other uniques.

A T'a'r ability that allows Wise Ones to quickly kill other T'a'r entities could lead us to consider other uniques that exploit that T'a'r dominance. One that allows them to generate yields through T'a'r from Glimmers would send us a different direction.

Multiple projections could be mechanically really cool. It could be explained by a single "Wise One" unit being multiple actual Wise One people (since one person being at multiple places at once in T'a'r is a bit non-canonical). It would allow the Aiel player to have a much broader presence in T'a'r - keep vision over much larger areas and more easily gang up on enemies. It would also be interestingly risky, since both projections would presumably carry the same host-damage-penalty if caught out and could quickly deplete a Wise Ones health if all of them were caught unawares in quick succession.

Right. The additional thoughts I have on this stuff:

The Gai'shain stuff - do note that we have a Founder Custom called Gai'shain, that does very much something similar (thematically) to what you have here (the first one) - when you kill an enemy unit, gain +2 Production in your nearest city for every foreign city following this path.

We could of course remove that custom, but I actually think, given that Ji'eh'toh is a Path, it may serve us best by leaving it where it is. If you like this functionality, perhaps it'd need a name that's either totally different, or obliquely connected to Ji'e'toh.

Agreed, I thought we were using this kind of mechanic in the Paths system, but figured it was worth proposing. I agree and think that with Ji'e'toh as a Path, we don't really want to remove that Custom. This doesn't feel like a frontrunner ability for the Aiel to me either, so let's axe it.

The second Gai'shain one - similar to the Fifth one - is quite different, and pretty cool. Giving the issues with the Gai'shain name, I'm going to suggest we delete it and merge it with the Fifth.

Quick point here on the name, which comes up again below with some other uniques and on some of the Sea Folk uniques. I don't think we want to do a naming pass on any of these while we're working through this part of the process. Deciding on the names will potentially take us a few backs and forths and given that we're not going to take most of these ideas forward to the final mod, I'd say that's wasted time on most of them. I figure the names are just a way to uniquely identify them for now.

That said, in this case you're totally right that the second Gai'shain UA has a huge overlap with the first The Fifth UA, so I'd say we can just axe it.

The +combat str one feels too bland.

Agreed.

The Samma N'sei... that one doesn't really work for me, and not just because it's side-specific. That just doesn't really fit with what the SN's are, to me. True, they're Aiel, but they've gone so far off the reservation that I can't see the Aiel being able to specifically use them any better than anybody else. Now, a pro-light alternative... that's a little more believable.

I agree, I wasn't the biggest fan of the way this worked either. I'm happy to axe it.

Water Hole is bland but functional. It'd need a fun name.

You mentioned the Aiel city size above and I didn't really comment there, because I figured I'd put it here!

I agree with your assessment above that a significant Food bonus in desert would lead to the Aiel having large cities in the desert, which isn't really what we want.

One of the core things to consider here is what makes deserts hard to expand into in general. Deserts lack in Food and Production. The majority of the scalability in late game Production for Desert cities is because they don't have a high enough Food yield to make themselves big enough to get scaling bonuses from their citizen count and reach all of the highest yield hexes.

However, we want an Aiel city that can be effective while not ballooning in population size on bare desert. (Or at least that's a way I think we could make them a very interesting to play civ while also playing to their flavor strengths.)

That makes me think that a UB with two components could be really useful: a static food bonus to offset the desert's total lack of Food (think +3 Food per turn or something). This is useful in setting up the cities, but doesn't scale as Food requirements for higher populations increase; cities need to be able to take advantage of multiple high food yield tiles to actually grow large. So the cities will stay relatively small. But a second component of a production bonus for Desert tiles could make the cities instantly productive. Even the smallest bonus of +1 Production from Desert tiles makes smaller cities much more able to actually produce things in the desert (and I wouldn't suggest going much above that).

To that end, I'll add a new UB below!

The last UI is nuts. So, it'd literally produce units, automatically? What's to stop this from being a RTS-style unit factory? Seems a little toooo nuts.

It is nuts, and that's the glorious part! We could make it automatic, but I'd be inclined to give the player control of what it's producing.

I totally understand your concerns about this one. I do think that are some nuanced ways of making this kind of UI balanced though, and by doing so we get a big boost to player experience because it feels nuts when you first see it.

One important component is that it only makes any progress toward the unit it's training while a city is working it. This is a UI with no yield bonuses, so the city is paying an opportunity cost by working it, to enable it to produce units. In fact, I could even see the UI forcing the yield of the tile down to 0.

The other thing to avoid is allowing players to carpet them across their land (yields allowing) and produce masses and masses of units, which isn't what we want. I see two ways of avoiding that: a maintenance cost or a per-city production rate, rather than per-improvement.

The maintenance cost is fairly straightforward mechanically - set up a cost that makes it inefficient to put loads of these improvements everywhere.

However, the second option feels to me like it can work really well. I'd say rather than each UI progressing X% of the city's production per turn toward its unit training, all instances of the UI worked by the same city have a total progress of X% of that city's production output.

That means that the most efficient use of them is to have one per city. And at that point, statistically, it's a production bonus when training units in the city. It has a similar effect on actual throughput to completing that unit in less time than the city otherwise would have been able to do, in between the stuff it "does in parallel" while the UI trains the unit. But it feels hugely different for the player and will make them (I think) consider unit training strategies quite differently.

Quick example, say the UI had a training rate of 20% of the city.

With no UI, the city takes 5 turns to build Food1, then 6 turns to build Happiness1, then 6 turns to build Melee2, then 7 turns to build Culture1, and finally 6 turns to build Production1. For a total of 30 turns.

With the UI, it still takes the city 5 turns to build Food1, then 6 turns to build Happiness1. (Though it may be slower if there's Production left on the table by working the UI instead of some other tile with Hammers.) Then 7 turns for Culture1 and then 6 turns for Production1. Now the city has 6 more turns to attribute to whatever it wants before the UI finishes Melee2 after 30 turns.


Now I'll actually get to commenting on some of yours!

The Fifth (your one) and my The Fifth both feel like they're a bit underwhelming for the Aiel UA. It fits with the flavor to relate this to capturing cities, but given that Assyria gets a whole tech from doing that (until they're ahead anyway), I feel like these abilities will fall short.

Water Oath is super interesting. That's a flavorful mechanic that players will be totally unfamiliar with, which is good. It should probably be combined with another ability, since it's relatively niche mechanically.

For the Car'a'carn is very interesting too. It could potentially be combined with Water Oath, since both are quite niche mechanically? In terms of a Shadow version, it could be proximity to the Forsaken? There are more Forsaken, so you'd be more likely to hit this with any individual unit during the LB, but the Dragon one is guaranteed and lets you push all units at once.

Spit in Sightblinder's Eye is good flavor, but I don't think the Samma N'sei will be prevalent enough in the LB for it to be useful as the Aiel UA.

Water and Shade could be cool. It's much more straightforward than a lot of our other options. Possibly a bit close to Hiawatha's UA though?

Stone Dogs etc. are good flavor. Do we want to leave that up as its own option when we don't have a more specific consideration for them?

Brotherless could be cool, it's a solid option with an interesting ability.

Algai'd'siswai is great flavor and could make Aiel combat quite different from the others. How would it interact with the advantages vs mounted and such usually given to pole units? Also, in the event that we have a UA that produces some kind of unit, or even a different unique that produces some kind of unit, would the "free bonus unit" also count as one of the civ's 3 uniques? (This may be relevant to Sul'dam/damane for the Seanchan later.) It would also mean that other civs can't assess the strength of algai'd'siswai without actually looking at their combat strength, since ones spawned at different times will be of different strengths. (Sort of like what we have with channelers, but at least all channeler units of a given type will be the same strength for a single civ at any given time.)

Hold is cool and would mean the Aiel produce very well upgraded units quickly, which is in line with their flavor.

Not sure what the Roofs flavor is particularly. It seems you don't have a specific in mind. Do we want to have entries like this one, before we have an initial idea of how we want to use the flavor?

I wouldn't be inclined to remove the Sweat Tents as the Path building unless we have a very compelling UB/UI for the Aiel that only works with that flavor. The Path buildings were difficult (and I believe on is relatively flavor stretched already?), and the Sweat Tents were one of the ones that fit best.



Recapping the Aiel (anywhere that you've proposed a delete and I've agreed, I've taken the entry out, anything still red is somewhere I'm proposing a delete):

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Gai'shain, hurry production at a nearby city when capturing a foreign city
• Desert Lifetime, +Food from Desert tiles
• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow, can only found cities on Desert
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%
• The Fifth, +X% gold, production, or units taken when capturing a city for the first time.
• Water Oath, Production or Happiness bonuses when multiple cities work flood plains on the same river (includes international and CSs)
• For the Car'a'carn, +50% combat strength for all units on turns you control the Dragon (is there a Shadow version of this?)
• Spit in Sightblinder's Eye, +X% combat bonus against Samma N'sei, +X% combat bonus when fighting adjacent to a friendly Samma N'sei
• Water and Shade, treat desert as Roads.
• Algai'd'siswai - cannot build any sword units. Each is replaced by a leveled Algai'd'siswai spear unit.

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that can stick around in T'a'r
• Stone Dogs, Red Shields, etc.... any number of other societies for various benefits.
• Brotherless, replaces an era 8 spear unit, significant combat bonuses when only adjacent to X or fewer friendly units
• Algai'd'siswai, see above

UBs:

• Water Hole, replaces Food1 or Food (Wheat), +Food from Desert tiles
• Hold, replaces XP 1 or XP 2 - +X XP to every melee unit produced in this city for every desert tile with no resources worked by this city.
• Roof (or something about Roofs) - unsure on functionality
• Sweat tent - unsure on functionality (and would need to eliminate the Path Building we've already created)
• Desert Sept, replaces Food1, Food (Wheat), or Food (Production), +Food in city and +X (very low number) Production from Desert tiles worked by this city

UIs:

• Temporary Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, provides a fortification bonus and inflicts 5 damage per turn to adjacent enemies, spawns a Maiden of the Spear on an adjacent hex when pillaged
• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (melee) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

Ok, after all of that, I think designing one at a time is the order of the day. 4 at once will be enormous given the conversations we'll want to have about even the most abstract of uniques. This is the longest post I've written in about a week (of posting every day!) and it's just one civ! And I've only really proposed one new thing! (And I can definitely come up with more for just the Aiel!) If you agree, feel free to pick up from this post and we can grab the other civs in their current state after. And if not, please make a quick post so I know to proceed on to the other civs (and simultaneously make another attempt to suggest we stick with one at a time ).

 

[counterpoint]

one civ at a time is fine (or two, your call). I've dumped all my ideas on the page from the other civs, so now I have a clean slate to think about the Aiel!

I should be able to get to this tomorrow

 

[S3rgeus]

one civ at a time is fine (or two, your call). I've dumped all my ideas on the page from the other civs, so now I have a clean slate to think about the Aiel!

I should be able to get to this tomorrow

Awesome, I'm happy to go with one at a time!

 

[counterpoint]

After going through some of the below, I think magenta can help us out where one of us has proposed a change and the other person wants to discuss an alternative. For example, if one of us proposes a delete and the other person wants to keep that unique in discussion, then magenta disambiguates that discussion about deletion from new deletes proposed in the next post.

ok. So that's something that is somewhat in contention, or at least hanging somewhat.

This is very true, the Aiel cities shouldn't grow massive (by default), which is what a food bonus would do. In terms of keeping them near rivers, it's not that we wouldn't want them near rivers, but that striking out into bare desert is not something most civs can do. (And civs who do it will often do so for pure strategic reasons and the cities founded in desert will be largely yield black holes.) I think it's interesting to make the Aiel different from other civs in that way, actively encouraging them to strike out into desert where other civs wouldn't be able to profitably venture. Of course they can stick by rivers and do as well as anyone else, since rivers improve desert yields for anyone. But a pure desert bonus makes them stand out.

About coming over the wall and such, the Aiel do venture into the Wetlands a few times, but they never remain as a civilization there. It's always coming across for some major event and then going back. They don't occupy Cairhien after the Aiel War or anything like that, which would tilt me more towards a non-desert-y approach to their civ.

I agree with these sentiments! I'm not sure we need to have the Aiel be in river-free desert, but it's certainly an interesting and unique choice. It's also flavorful - like they are in the books, the players would be able to colonize the lands that nobody else wants.

Agreed, a straight up desert restriction could majorly destroy a player's chance of being able to play this civ at all on some map types. We're probably best off going with some kind of approach that makes it beneficial for them to use deserts, but not be bound to them.

At the same time, some BNW civs plainly don't work properly on certain map types. You can't build Polynesia's UI on maps that don't have ocean. England's naval component of their UA is useless in the same circumstances. Carthage's mountain movement doesn't help on Archipelago, where there are hardly ever mountains, let alone reason to need to cross them.

I don't mention those to endorse restricting the Aiel to just the desert, because that's a much more prevalent restriction. But I think it's all right if they don't play their best on maps that don't have deserts (or for any of our civs to play less well on certain map types), because it's inherently putting them out of where they should flavorfully be at their most advantaged.[/quote]yeah, I think as long as we keep it as *encouraging* desert, and not punishing non-desert, we should be fine.

Is it something we don't need to get into now? I think it only feels like we don't need to get into it because we've discussed the Wise Ones specifically before (and maybe that's your reasoning here). I figure we'd want to do the same level of exploration we would to the "diplo entities" entry above, in that we know what "T'a'r functionality" means and how it would interact/synergize with other uniques.

A T'a'r ability that allows Wise Ones to quickly kill other T'a'r entities could lead us to consider other uniques that exploit that T'a'r dominance. One that allows them to generate yields through T'a'r from Glimmers would send us a different direction.

Multiple projections could be mechanically really cool. It could be explained by a single "Wise One" unit being multiple actual Wise One people (since one person being at multiple places at once in T'a'r is a bit non-canonical). It would allow the Aiel player to have a much broader presence in T'a'r - keep vision over much larger areas and more easily gang up on enemies. It would also be interestingly risky, since both projections would presumably carry the same host-damage-penalty if caught out and could quickly deplete a Wise Ones health if all of them were caught unawares in quick succession.

Right, I gotcha. What I mean by we don't need to settle this now is simply that we should keep things relatively generic. You're right that we need this to synergize with the other Uniques, but until we know what those other uniques are, we can't truly do that. the best we can expect is to create a set of options that we think might synergize well with the kinds of things we're proposing for this civ.

I think the thing we need to figure out with these T'a'r uniques is how they might be helpful to our victory condition in general. Start there, in the general sense, and that'll inform how it connects with uniques. We don't talk about T'a'r much, and its not something we've played before, so its direct "feel" and impact in game is still not at the forefront in our minds. To that end, here are the things that T'a'r does, and the things that happen in T'a'r.

- allows for the harvesting of glimmers, which leads to wolfbrothers and dreamwalkers
- wolfbrothers can lead to threads (alignment and assorted yields) [LB, assorted other victories] and to T'a'r superiority (killing projections through wolves) and destroying dreamspikes [LB and domination?] and dreamwards
- dreamwalkers can rush eyes and ears [LB for seals, various others], plant dreamspikes (domination and anything that benefits from blocking of traveling), and corrupt dreams (any VC that benefits from spawning lawless at your enemies)
- T'a'r units can be used to keep active vision with projections [domination, etc]
- projections can plant dreamwards, which lower occupied unhappiness [domination] and slow influence decay [diplo]

am I forgetting anything? It seems to me that these aspects of T'a'r seem to pretty easily synergize with domination (controlling travelling and such, lowering occupied unhappiness) and the LB (dealing with alignment, spies, and, again, traveling). It seems to me that the best path of the Wise One would be to interface with these things directly. I don't think they'd need to tie into the Aiel's other *uniques*, specifically, as long as those uniques synergized well with the VCs we want them to pursue. So, to that end, creating Wise Ones that spit out the T'a'r LP more easily, or can otherwise interface with Dreamspikes, Dreamwards, and threads in some way, is probably where we want to go. Just making them have a bunch of projections, or having automatic T'a'r vision or something, doesn't seem to really engage with the essense of what T'a'r "offers" as a VC, right?

Hilariously, I'm out of time. I'm hoping I'll be back in an hour or so, or later tonight, to finish (I'll just edit this post and add the rest).

OK, so with that in mind, I'd say these kinds of Wise One abilities would serve the purposes listed above:

- faster glimmer gathering (more t'a'r LP = more alignment and t'a'r dominance)
- greater LP points from glimmer gathering or mellower "diminishing returns" (probably better off as a social policy or something)
- can still act normally while projecting (leads to more glimmer gathering, since you can essentially project whenever you want and still have a viable channeler army
- can project 2x at once (similar to above)
- less/no life lost when projection dies (can enter tar in more often)
- shorter t'a'r cooldown (same as above)
- projections can fight in t'a'r (like wolves or LPs) (leads to greater overall dominance)
- projections can destroy dreamspikes (see above, also might make WBs a useless LB, which is a problem)
- active, short T'a'r vision even when not in t'a'r (very much helps in finding glimmers)
- some other means of finding glimmers more easily

that's what I got for now on those. I'm actually *not* going to propose any specific abilities below - I'll let you bounce back with your general response and, if you'd like, you can propose which combo of abilities you like the most.

Quick point here on the name, which comes up again below with some other uniques and on some of the Sea Folk uniques. I don't think we want to do a naming pass on any of these while we're working through this part of the process. Deciding on the names will potentially take us a few backs and forths and given that we're not going to take most of these ideas forward to the final mod, I'd say that's wasted time on most of them. I figure the names are just a way to uniquely identify them for now.

That said, in this case you're totally right that the second Gai'shain UA has a huge overlap with the first The Fifth UA, so I'd say we can just axe it.

I agree in general that we shouldn't be critiquing names at this point. That said, critiquing the *flavor* of a name is appropriate, as this is. Here, the flavor is occupied elsewhere, so its worth noting. Specific verbiage and such is not worth mentioning at this time.

You mentioned the Aiel city size above and I didn't really comment there, because I figured I'd put it here!

I agree with your assessment above that a significant Food bonus in desert would lead to the Aiel having large cities in the desert, which isn't really what we want.

One of the core things to consider here is what makes deserts hard to expand into in general. Deserts lack in Food and Production. The majority of the scalability in late game Production for Desert cities is because they don't have a high enough Food yield to make themselves big enough to get scaling bonuses from their citizen count and reach all of the highest yield hexes.

However, we want an Aiel city that can be effective while not ballooning in population size on bare desert. (Or at least that's a way I think we could make them a very interesting to play civ while also playing to their flavor strengths.)

That makes me think that a UB with two components could be really useful: a static food bonus to offset the desert's total lack of Food (think +3 Food per turn or something). This is useful in setting up the cities, but doesn't scale as Food requirements for higher populations increase; cities need to be able to take advantage of multiple high food yield tiles to actually grow large. So the cities will stay relatively small. But a second component of a production bonus for Desert tiles could make the cities instantly productive. Even the smallest bonus of +1 Production from Desert tiles makes smaller cities much more able to actually produce things in the desert (and I wouldn't suggest going much above that).

To that end, I'll add a new UB below!

I think this is a pretty interesting idea. In fact, I really like the idea of the UB - not the UA - being the desert-encouraging factor. That leaves us able to let the UA be (at least somewhat) combat-related. I'd been thinking about how lame some people might think it is for us to have the Maidens be early game, because then the Aiel are normal late game (when they could still be bad@sses). If we have a combat-related UA (or other unique), though, then we can have our UUs go earlier in the game, but the Aiel are still "aiel-ey" in the late game as well.

Anyways, on point: I think this is a a pretty cool idea. If this let's us keep their cities small, but viable in lame ol' desert, I think that's cool. I suppose we could do it this way (which feels sorta like Petra) or do it as a UI (which feels sort of like the Casbah, though obviously it's different). I think I might like this way better.

It is nuts, and that's the glorious part! We could make it automatic, but I'd be inclined to give the player control of what it's producing.

I totally understand your concerns about this one. I do think that are some nuanced ways of making this kind of UI balanced though, and by doing so we get a big boost to player experience because it feels nuts when you first see it.

a worthy goal!

One important component is that it only makes any progress toward the unit it's training while a city is working it. This is a UI with no yield bonuses, so the city is paying an opportunity cost by working it, to enable it to produce units. In fact, I could even see the UI forcing the yield of the tile down to 0.

ok, so, would that stack with a UB or UA that gives bonuses to desert, though? Or would this be a truly "dead tile"?

The other thing to avoid is allowing players to carpet them across their land (yields allowing) and produce masses and masses of units, which isn't what we want. I see two ways of avoiding that: a maintenance cost or a per-city production rate, rather than per-improvement.

The maintenance cost is fairly straightforward mechanically - set up a cost that makes it inefficient to put loads of these improvements everywhere.

However, the second option feels to me like it can work really well. I'd say rather than each UI progressing X% of the city's production per turn toward its unit training, all instances of the UI worked by the same city have a total progress of X% of that city's production output.

That means that the most efficient use of them is to have one per city. And at that point, statistically, it's a production bonus when training units in the city. It has a similar effect on actual throughput to completing that unit in less time than the city otherwise would have been able to do, in between the stuff it "does in parallel" while the UI trains the unit. But it feels hugely different for the player and will make them (I think) consider unit training strategies quite differently.

given those two choices, I agree that the second seems more interesting

Quick example, say the UI had a training rate of 20% of the city.

With no UI, the city takes 5 turns to build Food1, then 6 turns to build Happiness1, then 6 turns to build Melee2, then 7 turns to build Culture1, and finally 6 turns to build Production1. For a total of 30 turns.

With the UI, it still takes the city 5 turns to build Food1, then 6 turns to build Happiness1. (Though it may be slower if there's Production left on the table by working the UI instead of some other tile with Hammers.) Then 7 turns for Culture1 and then 6 turns for Production1. Now the city has 6 more turns to attribute to whatever it wants before the UI finishes Melee2 after 30 turns.

Interesting. So, if I'm getting this right, it's like a second production queue (though only one item in it) How would that work, UI-wise (user-interface, not UI)? Would it be on the city screen?

In any case, it's super interesting and definitely worth keeping around.
Very promising, and quite nutty. If we did this and the desert one above, these guys would be military-production powerhouses.

I should mention, though, that this is a very weird UI to fall into enemy hands (if the city is captured).

Also, what would happen if the tile gets pillaged? Does it start the cycle over again? (obviously, that's way too much detail to discuss right now...)

Now I'll actually get to commenting on some of yours!

The Fifth (your one) and my The Fifth both feel like they're a bit underwhelming for the Aiel UA. It fits with the flavor to relate this to capturing cities, but given that Assyria gets a whole tech from doing that (until they're ahead anyway), I feel like these abilities will fall short.

I can't disagree. It'd be nice to inject that flavor into the game somewhere, though.

Water Oath is super interesting. That's a flavorful mechanic that players will be totally unfamiliar with, which is good. It should probably be combined with another ability, since it's relatively niche mechanically.

Yeah, very niche...

For the Car'a'carn is very interesting too. It could potentially be combined with Water Oath, since both are quite niche mechanically? In terms of a Shadow version, it could be proximity to the Forsaken? There are more Forsaken, so you'd be more likely to hit this with any individual unit during the LB, but the Dragon one is guaranteed and lets you push all units at once.

I don't think proximity to the 'saken would balance. Controlling the Dragon is something you'd get every X turns. You could probably just follow around the 'saken and get this massive bonus *every turn*. So, while that makes sense in theory, it's not going to translate evenly.

Though on that note, this is a super problematic ability -what if you're the only Light civ, and control him every turn. *broken*!

Spit in Sightblinder's Eye is good flavor, but I don't think the Samma N'sei will be prevalent enough in the LB for it to be useful as the Aiel UA.

agreed.

Water and Shade could be cool. It's much more straightforward than a lot of our other options. Possibly a bit close to Hiawatha's UA though?

yeah, underwhelming. Not a bad aspect of a UU, though.

Stone Dogs etc. are good flavor. Do we want to leave that up as its own option when we don't have a more specific consideration for them?

well, it's more like we ask ourselves "do we want a combat UU that isn't the Maidens?" (likely in addition to the maidens). If the answer is yes, then this is probably a good one to go with. Then build appropriate mechanics around it. It's more like a flavor starting point.

Brotherless could be cool, it's a solid option with an interesting ability.

Yeah. I think with this one, we'd have to think carefully about what kind of gameplay that would lead to. It obviously changes things - a bunch of non-clustered battles. A UA that supports that could make that very interesting. But the ability itself on an "island" - probably sort of pointless.

Algai'd'siswai is great flavor and could make Aiel combat quite different from the others. How would it interact with the advantages vs mounted and such usually given to pole units? Also, in the event that we have a UA that produces some kind of unit, or even a different unique that produces some kind of unit, would the "free bonus unit" also count as one of the civ's 3 uniques? (This may be relevant to Sul'dam/damane for the Seanchan later.) It would also mean that other civs can't assess the strength of algai'd'siswai without actually looking at their combat strength, since ones spawned at different times will be of different strengths. (Sort of like what we have with channelers, but at least all channeler units of a given type will be the same strength for a single civ at any given time.)

I think there's certainly justification to blocking sword units regardless of what else we do here. It's absolutely flavorful to do so. Of course, in this mod, that probably means a huge number of Melee units (as opposed to CiV, which would only be a few units, I think).

I'm not sure if the "Free" unit would necessarily "count" as a UU. Not necessarily, since, as you imply when bringing up the sul'dam, it'd have to scale through the eras, and that'd quickly consume all the uniques "slots." But not being able to assess their power is sort of a problem, because it is, as you say, different from channelers, who will all advance as a block, so to speak.

Hmm... I don't know about this one. The "no sword" thing is something that feels like it might be justified, though. What do you think?

It could also be a mechanic that captures that flavor from the "back door." Something like "all Aiel units (or a particular UU) receive X combat bonus against sword units" or even something as nutty as "all Aiel units receive a penalty when fighting alongside sword units" or a production penalty when building them... Not sur ehow that's helpful, though...

Hold is cool and would mean the Aiel produce very well upgraded units quickly, which is in line with their flavor.

right.

Not sure what the Roofs flavor is particularly. It seems you don't have a specific in mind. Do we want to have entries like this one, before we have an initial idea of how we want to use the flavor?

The Roof thing was just to capture the flavor of the "Roofmistress." Maybe the better way to do it would be to call a building the "Roofmistress's Hold" or something.

I wouldn't be inclined to remove the Sweat Tents as the Path building unless we have a very compelling UB/UI for the Aiel that only works with that flavor. The Path buildings were difficult (and I believe on is relatively flavor stretched already?), and the Sweat Tents were one of the ones that fit best.

agreed.

Recapping the Aiel (anywhere that you've proposed a delete and I've agreed, I've taken the entry out, anything still red is somewhere I'm proposing a delete):

OK, recap on the Aiel. I agree with all of your reds. Some new reds

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%
  [*]The Fifth, +X% gold, production, or units taken when capturing a city for the first time.
• Water Oath, Production or Happiness bonuses when multiple cities work flood plains on the same river (includes international and CSs)
• For the Car'a'carn, +50% combat strength for all units on turns you control the Dragon (is there a Shadow version of this?)
• Water and Shade, treat desert as Roads.
• Algai'd'siswai - cannot build any sword units. Each is replaced by a leveled Algai'd'siswai spear unit.

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that can stick around in T'a'r
• Stone Dogs, Red Shields, etc.... any number of other societies for various benefits.
• Brotherless, replaces an era 8 spear unit, significant combat bonuses when only adjacent to X or fewer friendly units
• Algai'd'siswai, see above

UBs:

• Water Hole, replaces Food1 or Food (Wheat), +Food from Desert tiles
• Hold, replaces XP 1 or XP 2 - +X XP to every melee unit produced in this city for every desert tile with no resources worked by this city.
• Roof (or something about Roofs) - unsure on functionality
• Desert Sept, replaces Food1, Food (Wheat), or Food (Production), +Food in city and +X (very low number) Production from Desert tiles worked by this city

UIs:

• Temporary Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, provides a fortification bonus and inflicts 5 damage per turn to adjacent enemies, spawns a Maiden of the Spear on an adjacent hex when pillaged
• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (melee) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

I think most of the suggested changes are detailed above. I think Temporary Hold is kind of too close to a Citadel. I think "Food (Wheat)" on the Desert Sept (which I think maybe could be flavored as a "Hold" btw, not a sept, which isn't a building) defeats some of the purpose of this building, as it means you can't build it (thus, can't build a city) on truly barren desert (since there'd be wheat/zemai there!) Maybe that's fine, but maybe that isn't fine.

Ok, after all of that, I think designing one at a time is the order of the day. 4 at once will be enormous given the conversations we'll want to have about even the most abstract of uniques. This is the longest post I've written in about a week (of posting every day!) and it's just one civ! And I've only really proposed one new thing! (And I can definitely come up with more for just the Aiel!) If you agree, feel free to pick up from this post and we can grab the other civs in their current state after. And if not, please make a quick post so I know to proceed on to the other civs (and simultaneously make another attempt to suggest we stick with one at a time ).

Yeah, I totally agree.

I don't have any specific things to suggest we add at this point. That said, I want to make sure we aren't missing something by having more "cobat-related" UA options on the table. The way the chips are falling, it's looking to me like we're going in the direction of having something like:

some UA
Wise Ones, with T'a'r functionality (I think this is mandatory)
Maidens of the spear (to me, this seems mandatory)
a UB or a UI

So, a few issues, here: it looks like that may very well mean we couldn't do both the food/production UB and the produce-units UI, right? Is there any way to transform one of those into the UA? The UB's power as a blanket bonus to all desert tiles, automatically, could work, but is that perhaps too powerful? Similarly, could we justify having the "auto-production" thing automatically on in all cities? Maybe it'd be only for cities on desert, or something like that? In any case, if we want both of these functionalities, one will have to be in the UA, I think. (I know we aren't deciding on the final set right now, but we have to set things up so that the frontrunners we like are actually *possible* together.

Related to that, if we do one or both of those things, have the Wise Ones tearing upthe place, and an early Maiden unit, are the Aiel "good" enough in combat? The UI functionality certainly helps with military might, in terms of quality, but not quantity. I guess we have to ask ourselves if we think it's important that there be something extra in the UA that also makes the Aiel into good warriors (as units) or warmongers (capturing and holding cities, etc.). This could be a relatively minor thing (I wonder if there's a way to work it in with no-swords)

Also, it should be noted that we don't have anything super awesome yet for the Maiden's actual functionality. But actually, I'm pretty fine with that at this point - we know we want them, and not *everything* has to be super kooky with this civ.

Although, now that I think of it, although I mentioned the WOs and MotS were "mandatory," I suppose we could change that, such that their functionality and flavor was a part of a UA or other ability. For example, there could be no wise one unit, but we could have a UA that says "all Kin units receive X ability" or whatever. And we could not have a Maiden unit, but call a UB a "Maiden's Hold" or whatever, or have the Algai'd'siswai unit be a maiden or something (if we did that). Both of those seem like cheating though.

tricky! I know I'm mostly getting ahead of myself, but things were lining up such that it was seeming sort of likely that we'd end up with 4 Uniques (not counting UA) that we'd want, which is a problem....

 

[S3rgeus]

Sorry I didn't get to post yesterday, I had a bunch of people over so didn't get time to sit down at my computer!

I agree with these sentiments! I'm not sure we need to have the Aiel be in river-free desert, but it's certainly an interesting and unique choice. It's also flavorful - like they are in the books, the players would be able to colonize the lands that nobody else wants.

Agreed, this makes them stand out and fits the canon.

yeah, I think as long as we keep it as *encouraging* desert, and not punishing non-desert, we should be fine.

Agreed.

Right, I gotcha. What I mean by we don't need to settle this now is simply that we should keep things relatively generic. You're right that we need this to synergize with the other Uniques, but until we know what those other uniques are, we can't truly do that. the best we can expect is to create a set of options that we think might synergize well with the kinds of things we're proposing for this civ.

I think the thing we need to figure out with these T'a'r uniques is how they might be helpful to our victory condition in general. Start there, in the general sense, and that'll inform how it connects with uniques. We don't talk about T'a'r much, and its not something we've played before, so its direct "feel" and impact in game is still not at the forefront in our minds. To that end, here are the things that T'a'r does, and the things that happen in T'a'r.

- allows for the harvesting of glimmers, which leads to wolfbrothers and dreamwalkers
- wolfbrothers can lead to threads (alignment and assorted yields) [LB, assorted other victories] and to T'a'r superiority (killing projections through wolves) and destroying dreamspikes [LB and domination?] and dreamwards
- dreamwalkers can rush eyes and ears [LB for seals, various others], plant dreamspikes (domination and anything that benefits from blocking of traveling), and corrupt dreams (any VC that benefits from spawning lawless at your enemies)
- T'a'r units can be used to keep active vision with projections [domination, etc]
- projections can plant dreamwards, which lower occupied unhappiness [domination] and slow influence decay [diplo]

am I forgetting anything? It seems to me that these aspects of T'a'r seem to pretty easily synergize with domination (controlling travelling and such, lowering occupied unhappiness) and the LB (dealing with alignment, spies, and, again, traveling). It seems to me that the best path of the Wise One would be to interface with these things directly. I don't think they'd need to tie into the Aiel's other *uniques*, specifically, as long as those uniques synergized well with the VCs we want them to pursue. So, to that end, creating Wise Ones that spit out the T'a'r LP more easily, or can otherwise interface with Dreamspikes, Dreamwards, and threads in some way, is probably where we want to go. Just making them have a bunch of projections, or having automatic T'a'r vision or something, doesn't seem to really engage with the essense of what T'a'r "offers" as a VC, right?

Hilariously, I'm out of time. I'm hoping I'll be back in an hour or so, or later tonight, to finish (I'll just edit this post and add the rest).

It hadn't really occurred to me quite how Domination focused T'a'r is! This is a very good call and has made me consider the Wise Ones quite differently below!

OK, so with that in mind, I'd say these kinds of Wise One abilities would serve the purposes listed above:

- faster glimmer gathering (more t'a'r LP = more alignment and t'a'r dominance)
- greater LP points from glimmer gathering or mellower "diminishing returns" (probably better off as a social policy or something)
- can still act normally while projecting (leads to more glimmer gathering, since you can essentially project whenever you want and still have a viable channeler army
- can project 2x at once (similar to above)
- less/no life lost when projection dies (can enter tar in more often)
- shorter t'a'r cooldown (same as above)
- projections can fight in t'a'r (like wolves or LPs) (leads to greater overall dominance)
- projections can destroy dreamspikes (see above, also might make WBs a useless LB, which is a problem)
- active, short T'a'r vision even when not in t'a'r (very much helps in finding glimmers)
- some other means of finding glimmers more easily

that's what I got for now on those. I'm actually *not* going to propose any specific abilities below - I'll let you bounce back with your general response and, if you'd like, you can propose which combo of abilities you like the most.

All good suggestions! I like the idea of double projections because it stands out to the player immediately as something that's quite powerful.

Also, down below we're looking for some way to ensure that the Aiel have a purposefully enhanced military presence. T'a'r's connection with the Domination victory could be a good way to do that. What if the Dreamwards made by Wise Ones were more difficult to destroy/affected a wider area? (Wider area is particularly powerful since I believe we chose the Dreamwards' size so you couldn't cover multiple cities with a single ward?) This would help them shore up Happiness while pushing for Domination, which is usually one of the limiting factors on an invasion. Combine that with their other uniques allowing them to make more units, and it seems like they'd be a military powerhouse.

I agree in general that we shouldn't be critiquing names at this point. That said, critiquing the *flavor* of a name is appropriate, as this is. Here, the flavor is occupied elsewhere, so its worth noting. Specific verbiage and such is not worth mentioning at this time.

I agree to an extent. If a suggestion's flavor doesn't make sense, then I would be inclined to discuss that now. But given how we've reused flavor in multiple mechanics elsewhere, I wouldn't say that crossover with another system we've done would be something we'd want to consider renaming now, because it's assumed we're going to rename it later if it gets through. In this case, we wouldn't keep the plain name "Gai'shain" in the end, so the fact that that name is also a Custom doesn't seem like something we want to care about yet. (The fact that it's redundant, as you pointed out before, due to another suggestion that is basically the same, is totally what we want to discuss now, as we've done here.)

I think this is a pretty interesting idea. In fact, I really like the idea of the UB - not the UA - being the desert-encouraging factor. That leaves us able to let the UA be (at least somewhat) combat-related. I'd been thinking about how lame some people might think it is for us to have the Maidens be early game, because then the Aiel are normal late game (when they could still be bad@sses). If we have a combat-related UA (or other unique), though, then we can have our UUs go earlier in the game, but the Aiel are still "aiel-ey" in the late game as well.

Anyways, on point: I think this is a a pretty cool idea. If this let's us keep their cities small, but viable in lame ol' desert, I think that's cool. I suppose we could do it this way (which feels sorta like Petra) or do it as a UI (which feels sort of like the Casbah, though obviously it's different). I think I might like this way better.

I agree, I do very much like the idea of the UB being the desert-encouraging factor, because it makes the civ about the desert, but doesn't plaster it all over the place with what the player sees of that civ. However, we're running into difficulty fitting everything into 3 uniques, so more on this below!

ok, so, would that stack with a UB or UA that gives bonuses to desert, though? Or would this be a truly "dead tile"?

Up to us, that seems like a balancing decision we'd make based on how powerful this proves to be in game. (There might not be any yield penalties necessary, just the lack of any bonuses may be enough.)

Interesting. So, if I'm getting this right, it's like a second production queue (though only one item in it) How would that work, UI-wise (user-interface, not UI)? Would it be on the city screen?

User interface-wise we could either add it to the city screen somehow or make it a separate "queue" screen that is its own entity you get sent to by the "choose production" notification. (The production queue on the left hand side of the city screen should be extractable and presentable by itself.)

I should mention, though, that this is a very weird UI to fall into enemy hands (if the city is captured).

True, I could either see it not working for other civs (sort of like the Feitoria if you capture a CS) or just letting other players have it.

Also, what would happen if the tile gets pillaged? Does it start the cycle over again? (obviously, that's way too much detail to discuss right now...)

I would say we keep it simple and just reset the improvement if it gets pillaged - start again as if it were a new one when it gets repaired.

I can't disagree. It'd be nice to inject that flavor into the game somewhere, though.

We do have The Fifth as a Custom (Double yield from international trade routes with civilizations that you have annexed a city from.), so the flavor isn't missed completely.

I don't think proximity to the 'saken would balance. Controlling the Dragon is something you'd get every X turns. You could probably just follow around the 'saken and get this massive bonus *every turn*. So, while that makes sense in theory, it's not going to translate evenly.

Though on that note, this is a super problematic ability -what if you're the only Light civ, and control him every turn. *broken*!

Blarg, these are good points on both counts. The Dragon's availability will vary hugely between separate games, so it's difficult to create a sensible ability that depends on "when you control him" unless it actually changes something about the Dragon himself, rather than your civ.

yeah, underwhelming. Not a bad aspect of a UU, though.

Agreed, that would be a good thing on a UU!

well, it's more like we ask ourselves "do we want a combat UU that isn't the Maidens?" (likely in addition to the maidens). If the answer is yes, then this is probably a good one to go with. Then build appropriate mechanics around it. It's more like a flavor starting point.

I see what you mean, more on this below!

Yeah. I think with this one, we'd have to think carefully about what kind of gameplay that would lead to. It obviously changes things - a bunch of non-clustered battles. A UA that supports that could make that very interesting. But the ability itself on an "island" - probably sort of pointless.

Agreed, more on this way below!

I think there's certainly justification to blocking sword units regardless of what else we do here. It's absolutely flavorful to do so. Of course, in this mod, that probably means a huge number of Melee units (as opposed to CiV, which would only be a few units, I think).

I'm not sure if the "Free" unit would necessarily "count" as a UU. Not necessarily, since, as you imply when bringing up the sul'dam, it'd have to scale through the eras, and that'd quickly consume all the uniques "slots." But not being able to assess their power is sort of a problem, because it is, as you say, different from channelers, who will all advance as a block, so to speak.

Hmm... I don't know about this one. The "no sword" thing is something that feels like it might be justified, though. What do you think?

It could also be a mechanic that captures that flavor from the "back door." Something like "all Aiel units (or a particular UU) receive X combat bonus against sword units" or even something as nutty as "all Aiel units receive a penalty when fighting alongside sword units" or a production penalty when building them... Not sur ehow that's helpful, though...

Agreed, it makes a lot of sense with the flavor to do this. I think the main difficulty will be replacing so many units in a way that makes sense in CiV. And there's a suggestion for how we could do that below!

The Roof thing was just to capture the flavor of the "Roofmistress." Maybe the better way to do it would be to call a building the "Roofmistress's Hold" or something.

Sound sgood - that's something we can use when naming the uniques then, right?

I think most of the suggested changes are detailed above. I think Temporary Hold is kind of too close to a Citadel. I think "Food (Wheat)" on the Desert Sept (which I think maybe could be flavored as a "Hold" btw, not a sept, which isn't a building) defeats some of the purpose of this building, as it means you can't build it (thus, can't build a city) on truly barren desert (since there'd be wheat/zemai there!) Maybe that's fine, but maybe that isn't fine.

Woops, I should've specified that replacing Food (Wheat) wouldn't necessarily keep the requirement for Wheat. (Like our Sea Folk bank suggestion that requires the coast, we can also do the opposite and remove requirements from buildings we replace.) Totally agreed that if it still needed Wheat it wouldn't make sense.

And agreed on the Temporary Hold.

Desert Sept vs Desert Hold is sort of what I mean above about names. I totally agree with your reasoning here and that Hold is better, and this is a flavor mistake since Septs aren't buildings (dang ASoIaF and their Sept buildings!). But we'll end up with two things called Hold here that we're trying to work together, so we could end up renaming one regardless. I would be fine with this one being called "Deserty building" at this point, and we can name it properly later, because it's more focused on using the mechanics of a building to capture the Aiel's more general city structure and placement flavor.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I don't have any specific things to suggest we add at this point. That said, I want to make sure we aren't missing something by having more "cobat-related" UA options on the table. The way the chips are falling, it's looking to me like we're going in the direction of having something like:

some UA
Wise Ones, with T'a'r functionality (I think this is mandatory)
Maidens of the spear (to me, this seems mandatory)
a UB or a UI

So, a few issues, here: it looks like that may very well mean we couldn't do both the food/production UB and the produce-units UI, right? Is there any way to transform one of those into the UA? The UB's power as a blanket bonus to all desert tiles, automatically, could work, but is that perhaps too powerful? Similarly, could we justify having the "auto-production" thing automatically on in all cities? Maybe it'd be only for cities on desert, or something like that? In any case, if we want both of these functionalities, one will have to be in the UA, I think. (I know we aren't deciding on the final set right now, but we have to set things up so that the frontrunners we like are actually *possible* together.

Related to that, if we do one or both of those things, have the Wise Ones tearing upthe place, and an early Maiden unit, are the Aiel "good" enough in combat? The UI functionality certainly helps with military might, in terms of quality, but not quantity. I guess we have to ask ourselves if we think it's important that there be something extra in the UA that also makes the Aiel into good warriors (as units) or warmongers (capturing and holding cities, etc.). This could be a relatively minor thing (I wonder if there's a way to work it in with no-swords)

Also, it should be noted that we don't have anything super awesome yet for the Maiden's actual functionality. But actually, I'm pretty fine with that at this point - we know we want them, and not *everything* has to be super kooky with this civ.

Although, now that I think of it, although I mentioned the WOs and MotS were "mandatory," I suppose we could change that, such that their functionality and flavor was a part of a UA or other ability. For example, there could be no wise one unit, but we could have a UA that says "all Kin units receive X ability" or whatever. And we could not have a Maiden unit, but call a UB a "Maiden's Hold" or whatever, or have the Algai'd'siswai unit be a maiden or something (if we did that). Both of those seem like cheating though.

tricky! I know I'm mostly getting ahead of myself, but things were lining up such that it was seeming sort of likely that we'd end up with 4 Uniques (not counting UA) that we'd want, which is a problem....

Totally agree, we're running into some difficulty here! It seems strange that the UA is the part that's ended up not being overcontended, but that's where we're at!

I agree that the Maidens and Wise Ones are largely mandatory. Your suggested workarounds could work, but I agree that they feel like cheating and wouldn't capture the flavor as players (and we!) want it to.

So, the UB and the UI, converted into UAs, and the difficulties with that:

Desert Sept as a UA could be something like "Cities with population X or less founded on a Desert (not Flood Plains) tile have +Y Food and +Z Production from desert tiles". I feel like the population restriction is a way of compensating for the fact that it's no longer replacing a building, so it isn't a static bonus to Food/Production all the time. (Could possibly restrict just the Food bonus to lower pop cities, letting the Production bonus stand everywhere that has desert.)

Warriors' Hold as a UA could be something like "Cities founded on desert tiles can produce units at X% normal production rate at the same time as working on something else". This feels like it loses a lot of the oomph of the UI approach, but achieves a similar mechanical goal.

However! I have an alternative plan. I totally agree that the Maidens are an essential unique, so what if we use the Algai'd'siswai UA and tweak it a little? One of the issues we're discussing with that one is that it would be difficult for another player (or even the Aiel player) to know how strong a given Algai'd'siswai unit is at a glance. We also think that the Aiel UU's lack of a presence in the endgame would be somewhat annoying, flavorfully.

So how about we grab the flavor of all the different warriors clans you mentioned (Stone Dogs, Red Shields, etc.) including the Maidens and replace the Aiel's sword units with them as their UA? Most could be straight up replacements with no inherent combat implications, beyond them being pole units rather than sword units, and then the Maidens could replace the last sword unit (or wherever we end up wanting to put them), and be marginally stronger. That way, each unit type has a known strength. Stone Dogs are always Swordsman equivalents, Red Shields always Sword Dancer (made up name) equivalents, Maidens always Blademaster equivalents, etc.

So the UA would be something like "Aversion to Swords, All sword units are replaced with Aiel warrior clan units using spears". This would also play into the flavor of the UI really well, allowing us to make the Warriors' Hold only able to produce warrior clan unit types. (Which solves our "conquered by other players" quandary, since they can't build those unit types, so the UI doesn't work for them.)

Then the whole line up could be:

UA - Aversion to Swords
UU - Wise One
UB - Desert Sept
UI - Warriors' Hold


With all that in mind, recapping the Aiel!

The Aiel (Era 2-9, Wide, Dom/Cul/LB)
UAs:

• Clanship, each city acts as its own diplomatic entity somehow
• The Fifth, only 20% of buildings destroyed when taking a city instead of 50%
• Water Oath, Production or Happiness bonuses when multiple cities work flood plains on the same river (includes international and CSs)
• For the Car'a'carn, +50% combat strength for all units on turns you control the Dragon (is there a Shadow version of this?)
• Algai'd'siswai - cannot build any sword units. Each is replaced by a leveled Algai'd'siswai spear unit.
• Aversion to Swords, replace all sword units with an equivalent Aiel warrior clan spear unit.

UUs:

• Maidens of the Spear, replaces an era 2/3 spear unit, is stronger and has a movement bonus on Desert
• Wise Ones, replaces the Kin, Dreaming unit that create stronger Dreamwards/can project into T'a'r twice (is both too strong?)
• Stone Dogs, Red Shields, etc.... any number of other societies for various benefits.
• Brotherless, replaces an era 8 spear unit, significant combat bonuses when only adjacent to X or fewer friendly units
• Algai'd'siswai, see above

UBs:

• Hold, replaces XP 1 or XP 2 - +X XP to every melee unit produced in this city for every unimproved desert tile near this city.
• Desert Sept, replaces Food1, Food (Wheat), or Food (Production), +Food in city and +X (very low number) Production from Desert tiles worked by this city

UIs:

• Warriors' Hold, buildable on Desert tiles, can produce (warrior clan) units at a rate equal to X% (low, like 20-ish) of the production rate of the city working this tile.

I still haven't come up with any way for Clanship to actually work, so I figure we can axe it. If I do come up with something for it, I'll suggest it again.

I've suggested culling a lot of options here. Partially because several of them combine into the Aversion to Swords UA (Algai'd'siswai, warrior clans, and Maidens).

Also it looks like neither of us are big fans of the Car'a'carn ability? I would be happy to keep developing that if we think there's more though!

I figure The Fifth UA is quite underwhelming.

The Brotherless, Water Oath, and Hold I've left standing separate. I like the overall synergy of the four uniques I outlined before the recap, but there's room for us to keep a parallel proposal for the civ alive as well, right?

One thing I notice about Hold is that it encourages a lot of player micromanaging. It gives a bonus based on which tiles are worked when a unit is completed. So the optimal way to do that would be to get as close as possible to finishing the unit on one turn, then reassign all citizens to have as many worked improvement-less desert tiles as possible on the turn that the unit completes. We could go straight for "each unimproved desert tile near this city" (where "near" is technically defined by tiles that are owned due to this city's culture) to avoid that.

You mentioned that the Brotherless UU probably wants a supporting UA. Water Oath also needs a bit more due to its niche-ness. It'll have to be quite a punchy effect though, to keep the UA succinct and understandable. It could be very straightforward (and very powerful) by giving all units the March promotion (while they're on desert tiles)? Healing every turn would allow a unit to stand alone against several enemies for much longer, when they otherwise would've been worn down by attrition.