Shoshone discussion

[pineappledan]

Great Expanse
Cities cannot grow beyond 4 Population.
When City borders expand naturally, claims all adjacent land tiles of the same terrain type.
Land units gain +20% combat strength in owned territory.

Taikwahni (unique civilian unit)
Unlocked at Trade
Costs same as a workboat
Pauses growth and costs 1 like a settler
Can build a Katayna (consumed on construction)

Katayna (unique improvement, uses Tipi model)
Can be built anywhere, but not next to another Katayna
1

+1 at Mathematics​

+1 at Machinery​

+1 at Metallurgy​

+1 at Industrialization​

+20% tile defense
Deals 5 damage to adjacent enemy units every turn
Has a free citizen permanently assigned to it

gives yields on the tile to the city that owns the tile​

ignores city working distance (ie. can be >3 tiles from the city as long as the tile is owned by that city)​

circumvents city population cap (contributes to population scaling abilities, but only the 4 from the cap can be freely assigned to specialists and tiles)​

 

[stii]

That would lead to effectively very big cities very quickly. But it would take up a lot of effort early on and it is almost their whole ability. I think it would be pretty powerful but it is hard to tell without playing it.

 

[Stalker0]

So this version of the Shoshone would be almost 100% divorced from food. Hammers = population, as growing from level 3 back to level 4 is pretty trivial, and so its all about how many Kataynas you can bust out, which is going to be a hammer constraint. One other weird thing thematically is yoru going to want to build Kataynas on hills over plains, again I don't care about food, its all about hammers. and so I want base hammers or gold for my tiles, not food grasslands and plains.

I think at base it would actually be pretty weak overall because of the lack of specialists. That's going to be a big factor, this civ would have almost non-existent GP production compared to most civs (and would never ever take Tradition). That's going to be a real hurdle to overcome. So while yes all of your cities will be "working" 20 tiles, that's not going to make up for a complete lack of Great Scientist and Writers in the later game.

I also think you either need to let the Katayna work adjacent to themselves, or you lower the settle distance between cities by 1 for the shoshone. Otherwise your just going to run out of land too quickly, you'll be pretty limited on how many Kataynas you can make, and that +4 is your max working tile limit, so your cities will cap out pretty fast.

 

[usadefcon1]

What happens on pillage? Lose access to the pop?

 

[Stalker0]

I will just drop this back in here. If tile gaining bonuses actually worked on Shoshone's initial land grab (aka from Authority's tribute or goddess of the expanse or even the lodge food bonus for pioneer cities), it would be a massive power boost, that alone would probably make shoshone a very competitive civ with a minimum of other tweaks.

 

[Stalker0]

if your wanting to make Shoshone not do a lot of specialists, its probably far easier to do somethign like this:

"You cannot use any abilities that ignore urbanization penalties".

That means specialists will always result in unhappiness for the shoshone. So yeah you can use them if you want (keep the flexibility don't create hard restrictions) but thematically your very much encouraged not to use a lot of them.

Or option 2: "Gain 1 additional urbanization for every specialist"

 

[ma_kuh]

I took "... (contributes to population scaling abilities, ...)" to mean that cost-for-next-pop was included. So you go down 1 pop, but the cost for next pop doesn't go down. I could be wrong about the intent though.

I don't know how to feel about "Great Expanse" rewarding you for packing in cities. Each one is effectively 4 more workers, and once you have half of your tiles converted into katayna, that's the only way you can grow. Maybe that won't prove the dominant strategy though.

 

[stii]

I read it as scaling for national wonders but it certainly could mean pop costs too.

 

[Markal]

Thanks to Hinin and Pinappledan for those propositions. Feels good to think outside of the box (even if it might not prove to be a good idea in the end) and for sure that's an ability I'd be curious to try.

On a side note, wouldn't that block the Shoshone out of most pantheons though? Any pantheon linked to a ressource or a number of citizen or a number of tiles worked would be a dead end for them no?

Hinin suggested a hard threshold on pop tied to era, maybe that would give some room for flexibility. Like cities are limited to 4pop (+1 per era). That would be 11 at the end if I'm counting correctly. Or maybe at least +1 per era in the capital or +1 per other city in the capital (so at least if you spam cities you could still kinda maybe go tradition with them à la Venice).

 

[azum4roll]

possible idea:
Great Expanse
- Claim adjacent unowned land tiles when Cities claim a tile of the same type. (current Huns ability)
- Cities gain +1Food and Tourism for every 2 Unworkable tiles they own
- Land Units receive a +20% Combat Strength bonus when fighting in friendly territory.

Unworkable tiles tiles are any tile a city owns but cannot assign to. This includes:
- Mountains
- Flat Desert with no resource or improvement
- Snow with no resource or improvement
- Any tile outside workable city radius. This is usually 4+ tiles away from the city, unless you have the tradition Finisher which adds +1 working radius

Spoiler Pros :

Spoiler map of traditional Shoshone Lands :

View attachment 669122

• The Shoshone traditional lands cover the Great Basin in present day Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. It's mostly desert, brushland, and highland forests bordered by the Rocky Mountains to the West. The rewards for marginal, unworkable land tie into the terrain from their homeland
• This also gives the Shoshone a new angle for settling priorities. We could change the Shoshone starting bias to Desert, and they would have a part of their kit that combines with that.
• Synergy with the large border blob abilities, which gives Shoshone something to do with their massive border growth
• Ties into the defensive bonuses. The large tile claims and yields incentivize settling further away and the defense bonuses mitigate the risks of doing that.
• Gives a source of , which gives a direction for Shoshone to go. Users have reported not knowing what to do with the Shoshone after the early game, because their early UI, on-settle tiles, and ruins bonus are all skewed towards early game, and don't give them a clear goal.

Spoiler Cons :

• Some unworkable tiles can be made workable. Great Person tiles can be placed on snow and desert tiles. Encampments can also be placed on flat Desert and Snow. Farms can also be put on flat desert next to a lake. The AI won't know not to do any of these things unless taught not to improve those kinds of tiles
• Tradition adds +1 working radius. Petra and universities add a yield to all desert and snow tiles, respectively, near a city. This weakens/counteracts the unworkable tiles UA ability. So some pretty weird countersynergies.
• The AI won't know to settle far apart so that their cities don't have overlapping work radiuses. The UA would reward spacing cities far apart, and the AI would have to be taught to do that, or to unlearn prioritizing settling closer together

I'll expand on this (pun not intended):

Great Expanse

• Claim adjacent unowned land tiles when Cities naturally gain a tile of the same (terrain) type. Tile picker always chooses the best tile to grow to.
• Land Units receive a +20% Combat Strength bonus when fighting in friendly territory.
• Cities gain +1 Food per 2, and +1 Tourism per 3 owned tiles that are 4 or 5 tiles from the City tile.
  • Up to 27 Food and 18 Tourism per city (54 tiles), but non-core cities are unlikely to reach it.
  • It doesn't matter which city owns the tile, as long as the player owns it.
  • The same tile can be repeatedly counted for different cities, as long as they're at the right distance.
  • Tile picker accounts for this.

Pros

• The UA makes you gain tiles faster, and benefit from it with per turn yields and combat bonus.
• No need to distinguish unworkable tiles. Every tile counts with the right distance from cities.
• Tradition doesn't make this worse.
• AI spams cities either way and having more cities (= more land) is always better for this ability. Settling closer makes it even better.

Cons

• How do you even word this?

 

[Solic]

So this version of the Shoshone would be almost 100% divorced from food. Hammers = population, as growing from level 3 back to level 4 is pretty trivial, and so its all about how many Kataynas you can bust out, which is going to be a hammer constraint. One other weird thing thematically is yoru going to want to build Kataynas on hills over plains, again I don't care about food, its all about hammers. and so I want base hammers or gold for my tiles, not food grasslands and plains.

I think at base it would actually be pretty weak overall because of the lack of specialists. That's going to be a big factor, this civ would have almost non-existent GP production compared to most civs (and would never ever take Tradition). That's going to be a real hurdle to overcome. So while yes all of your cities will be "working" 20 tiles, that's not going to make up for a complete lack of Great Scientist and Writers in the later game.

I also think you either need to let the Katayna work adjacent to themselves, or you lower the settle distance between cities by 1 for the shoshone. Otherwise your just going to run out of land too quickly, you'll be pretty limited on how many Kataynas you can make, and that +4 is your max working tile limit, so your cities will cap out pretty fast.

You could resolve no GP by putting GP points on the improvements. Potentially allow a different improvement for each GP.

The overall idea is too radical for me to not first try in a modmod to iron out any kinks. I'd also still regret just killing off any civs that do something with ancient ruins as a mechanic still.

 

[ma_kuh]

How would population cap work with Tradition's opener (+2)?
Ancient Ruins +1 pop?
Authority's 1 free unit/10 pop in city?

 

[CppMaster]

Great Expanse
Cities cannot grow beyond 4 Population.
When City borders expand naturally, claims all adjacent land tiles of the same terrain type.
Land units gain +20% combat strength in owned territory.

[/URL]
Taikwahni (unique civilian unit)
Unlocked at Trade
Costs same as a workboat
Pauses growth and costs 1 like a settler
Can build a Katayna (consumed on construction)

[/URL]
Katayna (unique improvement, uses Tipi model)
Can be built anywhere, but not next to another Katayna
1
+1 at Mathematics+1 at Machinery+1 at Metallurgy+1 at Industrialization+20% tile defense
Deals 5 damage to adjacent enemy units every turn
Has a free citizen permanently assigned to it
gives yields on the tile to the city that owns the tileignores city working distance (ie. can be >3 tiles from the city as long as the tile is owned by that city)circumvents city population cap (contributes to population scaling abilities, but only the 4 from the cap can be freely assigned to specialists and tiles)

This is cool and interesting idea! However, it completely overhauls the civ, so it may as well be a new civ. How about Powhatan? Their leader would be Princess Pocahontas. The most known NA Indian.

Great Expanse

• Claim adjacent unowned land tiles when Cities naturally gain a tile of the same (terrain) type. Tile picker always chooses the best tile to grow to.
• Land Units receive a +20% Combat Strength bonus when fighting in friendly territory.
• Cities gain +1 Food per 2, and +1 Tourism per 3 owned tiles that are 4 or 5 tiles from the City tile.
  • Up to 27 Food and 18 Tourism per city (54 tiles), but non-core cities are unlikely to reach it.
  • It doesn't matter which city owns the tile, as long as the player owns it.
  • The same tile can be repeatedly counted for different cities, as long as they're at the right distance.
  • Tile picker accounts for this.

Pros

Yeah, this may work for Shoshone.

Moderator Action: Removed reply to the argument earlier in the thread at the start of the post. Let's move on. - Recursive

 

[Dimmy]

What about a simpler approach: Cities have only a range of 1 or 2 radius (can depend of the tile on which it is built or if a river etc). And so Shoshones would be about spamming small cities?

 

[pineappledan]

I think a cap of 6 is more appropriate, now that I have slept on it.
That gives enough to fill the Tradition buildings or run all guilds in your capital (but not both), so it isn't quite as harsh for specialists

It's a very weird idea, and it would be a lot of work to implement. It's probably not worth it, but it could be a zany idea for a modmod. Might work well for an Aboriginal Australian civ, i dunno.
Probably too off the wall for VP anyways.

One other weird thing thematically is yoru going to want to build Kataynas on hills over plains

makes thematic sense, actually. The Shoshone traditional lands include the foothills and the valleys of the rocky and sawtooth mountains. The Eastern and Northern Shoshone are sometimes called the Sheepeaters because they hunted bighorn sheep. I will reiterate that the Shoshone are more of a mountain and desert people than a Plains people, though they did at times range out into the great plains.

Or option 2: "Gain 1 additional urbanization for every specialist"

Or option 3: Cities are blocked from generating Urbanization.
ie. You can only work specialists if they do not generate Urbanization, so your -1 urbanization abilities are also your specialist cap

On a side note, wouldn't that block the Shoshone out of most pantheons though? Any pantheon linked to a ressource or a number of citizen or a number of tiles worked would be a dead end for them no?

4-6 population in each city is enough to work the high value, pantheon boosted tiles in pretty much all cases. If you prioritize those tiles you would be fine. However, you will probably find something better to do with your assignable citizens after the founding phase, so you wont get as much benefit from a land-based pantheon

Hinin suggested a hard threshold on pop tied to era, maybe that would give some room for flexibility. Like cities are limited to 4pop (+1 per era).

That sounds like allowing Venice +1 city per era. A squishy moving cap by the end of the game won't feel like much of a cap at all. Barely an inconvenience.

How would population cap work with Tradition's opener (+2)?
Ancient Ruins +1 pop?
Authority's 1 free unit/10 pop in city?

This would break free pop abilities
I guess authority would scale like the yields etc, and count the Katayna pops

Great Expanse

• Claim adjacent unowned land tiles when Cities naturally gain a tile of the same (terrain) type. Tile picker always chooses the best tile to grow to.
• Land Units receive a +20% Combat Strength bonus when fighting in friendly territory.
• Cities gain +1 Food per 2, and +1 Tourism per 3 owned tiles that are 4 or 5 tiles from the City tile.
  • Up to 27 Food and 18 Tourism per city (54 tiles), but non-core cities are unlikely to reach it.
  • It doesn't matter which city owns the tile, as long as the player owns it.
  • The same tile can be repeatedly counted for different cities, as long as they're at the right distance.
  • Tile picker accounts for this.

I don't get it. So if you settle city A 4 tiles away from city B then city B's city tile counts towards City A's 4-5 tile umbrella?

The best tiles that will give you the most yields are the ones that are already owned when you settle the next city, so this doesn't reward new tile claim as much as it rewards packing cities close together so their city tiles can contribute to each other's 4-5 tile rings

 

[Anarcomu]

I love the katayana concept.
I would change, however, that the ability to get free on them be given to Shoshone's UA, to avoid them being better on other's hand (they are not limited to 4 pops).

 

[Stalker0]

It's a very weird idea, and it would be a lot of work to implement. It's probably not worth it, but it could be a zany idea for a modmod.

I agree, we are effectively disabling one of the core mechanics of the game. hehe remember how much you disliked my idea of giving a few yields for some unworked tiles because it "disincentivized growth". Well, here we are literally shutting off growth entirely for the civ, which would likely have all sorts of problems and side effects we would need to account for, and for what gain really?

I can see the idea of a civ disincentized from doing specialists and focused on the land, and we have already discussed a few simple ways that could work. If we did go that route we would likely need more buffs here, as that's a pretty big loss. Likely the UA would add in some extra bonuses to the land itself, or a bonus for working tiles or something, but I do think limiting specialists is a very very big nerf and would need corresponding buffs as appropriate.

 

[Stalker0]

Ok so one more idea of how we could frame the population cap as more of a "benefit" than a limit that would work more seemlessly with food, pop growth, etc.

UA: Upon reaching 6 pop, every additional pop gained in the city instead spawns a Taikwahni.

Taikwahni (unique civilian unit)
Can build a Katayna (consumed on construction)

Katayna (unique improvement, uses Tipi model)
Can be built anywhere, but not next to another Katayna
+1 to tile.
can be stacked on a tile up to 4 times.


This version still allows food to matter, as its no longer a hammer produced unit but a growth produced one. It also means things like the tradition pop bump aren't automatically wasted. This also would make the land tiles very attractive to work, so we don't have to limit specialists per say, the civ is naturally incentivized to work the "big strong land" rather than a specialist. This would also work better for shoshone that want to go tradition plays, though they can't utilzie the specialists as much they could concentrate their Taikwahnis to create the "super capital land" and magnify the capital bonuses that way. So its still "big capital" but in a less specialist focused way.

 

[pineappledan]

hehe remember how much you disliked my idea of giving a few yields for some unworked tiles because it "disincentivized growth".

Hehe, you wanted to give a unique improvement and a bonus for unimproved tiles on the same civ.

I can see the idea of a civ disincentized from doing specialists and focused on the land, and we have already discussed a few simple ways that could work.

The Inuit custom civ does this by lowering Consumption for non-specialists

the spot does require a pop to work, but up to 4 Taikwahnis could stack on the same spot. So we create a few "super tiles" that still require workers to work (so we don't have to add in that "free worker" mechanic).

The objective of this was to try to incorporate all that extra land they get from that UA for something other than just defense. Trying to create some economic benefit for tiles outside working distance so that Shoshone are incentivized to maximize their tile claims, settle wider and further apart.

 

[usadefcon1]

The Great Expanse:
When City borders expand naturally, claims all adjacent land tiles of the same terrain type.
Land units gain +20% combat strength in owned territory.
Unable to use specialists if they would cause Urbanization.

Katayna (unique improvement, uses Tipi model)
Cannot be build next to an improved tile, or next to another Katayna
1
+1 at Mathematics
+1 at Machinery
+1 at Metallurgy
+1 at Industrialization
To this tile and adjacent land tiles. Adjacent land tiles cannot be improved except for roads/railroads.