tleilaxu mechanics

[Ahriman]

Invisibility is *very* dangerous, particularly when we don't have any units that can spot invisible, and given that the AI is very incompetent at spotting invisible units.
I suggest that Marksmen and invisible together is way too much.
If you have Marksmen, then that is how their blending/tactical invisibility is represented; they can change forces to slip past guards. And Marksmen is already an incredibly powerful ability.

They don't really have strategic invisibility; you can still see that there are people there.
If you did give them invisibility, then you'd need to have some unit types (thopters for eg) able to spot invisible.

 

[Slvynn]

Invisibility is *very* dangerous, particularly when we don't have any units that can spot invisible, and given that the AI is very incompetent at spotting invisible units.
.

agree completely here

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

good point on invis. though is till think they should be able to enter rival borders.

also, why cant espionage units see invisible?

 

[Slvynn]

good point on invis. though is till think they should be able to enter rival borders.

also, why cant espionage units see invisible?

because it ruins bts spy mechanics.
IMO noone should be able to see invisile units and no unit may be invisible except spies.

May be also Ixian spying eyes - there were mention about them. (just scout with no combat or transport ability, flying)

 

[Ahriman]

The point is well made.
To clarify: if there are units that can spot invisible units, then spies during wartime can be spotted and killed.
If there are NOT units that can spot invisible units, then invisible combat units become far too strong.

IIRC, the Ordos Infiltrator UU at least used to be an invisible combat unit, which really needs to go; make it just an espionage unit (with more abilities and greater movement?) or a non-invisible combat unit. I had one of these in my borders running around destroying all my workers. Incredibly frustrating.

 

[davidlallen]

IIRC, the Ordos Infiltrator UU at least used to be an invisible combat unit, which really needs to go

Fortunately this unit was deleted along with all the other UU back in 1.4.

 

[Ahriman]

Yes, thats what I thought (hence "used to be"), but when we add UUs back in they should keep this issue in mind.

An Ordos Saboteur could be a non-invisible moderate strength combat unit who can enter without open borders and can use espionage missions and has 2 movement points.

Or it could be just a spy that rapidly accumulates XP by itself, and maybe has access to some superior sabotage missions, of improvements or buildings.

 

[davidlallen]

Or it could be just a spy that rapidly accumulates XP by itself, and maybe has access to some superior sabotage missions, of improvements or buildings.

This is the way the ordos spy has worked since 1.3. I have not tried to add civ-specific missions to the espionage list yet, but the ordos spy accumulates 1 xp per turn.

 

[Ahriman]

Ideas from late-game resdesign thread:

[Keep in mind reading this thread that we settled on Facedancers as spy UUs.]

Also, I had another idea for Tleilaxu ghola implementation.

Is it possible to adapt Great General mechanics for Tleilaxu?

I would implement it as follows:
1) Replace Great Generals with Gholas for Tleilaxu civ.
2) A Ghola has two abilities; add to city (same as for a regular GG, permanent XP bonus for units) or add to unit. The add to unit function adds the "Ghola commander" promotion to the unit (instead of giving XP). "Ghola commander" functions the same as the FFH Immortality promotion; when the unit is killed, it reappears in the capital city (damaged) instead of dying.
3) The Axolotl tank building increases the faction-wide great general production (is this possible?) by 10% per Tank (so, 10 cities means 100% increase), and gives +25% GPP in the city.
4) The Nullentropy Sphere building (which could have a cap of 5) gives a further +15% great general production, and creates (by Event) a free Ghola unit in your capital when created.

Buildings do have an iGreatGeneralRateModifier and also an iDomesticGreatGeneralRateModifier (for only increasing the number of points earned within your own borders).

It is also possible to assign a building to give GPP towards great generals (in fact it is possible to give "great people" points towards any unit, not just great people).

Option A: Ghola unit represents the "military" side of ghola technology, civilian side is left with normal great people
1) Replace Great Generals with Gholas for Tleilaxu civ.
2) A Ghola has two abilities; add to city (same as for a regular GG, permanent XP bonus for units) or add to unit. The add to unit function adds the "Ghola commander" promotion to the unit (instead of giving XP). "Ghola commander" functions the same as the FFH Immortality promotion; when the unit is killed, it reappears in the capital city (damaged) instead of dying.
3) The Axolotl tank building increases the faction-wide great general production (using iGreatGeneralRateModifier) by 10% per Tank (so, 10 cities means 100% increase), and gives +20% GPP in the city.
4) The Nullentropy Sphere building (which could have a cap of 5) gives a further +10% great general production, +30% GPPs, and creates (by Event) a free Ghola unit in your capital when created.

Option B: Ghola unit represents both military and civilian side of ghola technology.
1) Replace Great Generals with Gholas for Tleilaxu civ.
2) Ghola has 5 abilities: Attach to unit, Settle as Trader, Settle as Techman, Settle as Scientist, Settle as Priest.
The first adds the Ghola Commander promotion as above.
The others create regular permanent great people, like a Sidar shade.
3) The Axolotl Tank building gives +3 Ghola great people points.
4) The Nullentropy Sphere building gives a further +3 ghola great people points, and creates a Ghola by Event when constructed.


The disadvantage of A) is that it could arguably feel weird to have a Ghola unit that was *only* a military commander.
The disadvantages of B) is that it could feel weird to have successes on the battlefield leading to civilian specialists [I'd make the argument that they're collecting genetic samples from defeated enemies], and that the AI would likely always choose to settle their gholas as specialists rather than make immortal units (since it wouldn't understand the benfits from immortality).

Basically, the design intention was to capture that gholas are in a sense a way of making a particular historic figure "immortal". This means that some great military tactician or leader, or a great thinker or mentat or whatever can be perpetually recreated from their stored DNA. Tleilaxu Masters also use this technique to make *themselves* immortal. The Master's are those who run society, and it is really the Masters we are trying to represent with the Tleilaxu "priest"/"great priest" economy.

It seems logical then that ghola technology should be able to increase the access to great people, both on the military side and the civilian side.

Axolotl tanks are used to grow gholas in, and Nullentropy spheres are used to preserve the DNA of large numbers of people; basically like a tiny data storage facility for DNA code.

Immortality is a very powerful mechanic however, so it has to be very limited for balance purposes,

We could also tweak the mechanics somewhat, so for example each time the unit died and resurrected, its level increased, which weakens the unit by requiring ever greater amounts of XP needed to gain another level. (Eg a level 3 Immortal unit with 8 XP dies. It used to need 2 more XP (total 10XP) to gain level 4 and get a new promotion, but now it comes back as a level 4 unit already, and so needs 8 more XP (total 16XP) in order to gain level 5 and get a new promotion.

 

[Pickly]

Might Gholas just be done as a separate unit than great generals? I could imagine Ghola production being similar to Grigori adventurers, where they are another type of great person. when generated, they could have any of the mechanics listed above, or some others that you may think of. Ghola great points would than come from Axlotl tanks and possibly nullentropy spheres.

(Admittedly, this might not produce many Gholas thanks to the limited great people points, and I might have remembered the grigori mechanics wrong.)

 

[Ahriman]

Admittedly, this might not produce many Gholas thanks to the limited great people points

You're right about how Grigori worked, they came from a separate GPP type.
All Adventurers were produced in the early game and carefully shepherded, because eventually the Adventurer GP points were crowded out by those from Wonders or specialists, and so it became too difficult to get any further Adventurers.

I don't think that's ideal for our purposes; I think we want gholas to mostly be a mid-game/late-game thing, and for there not to be a random tradeoff between getting priests (or other specialists) vs getting gholas.

 

[Deon]

I didn't read 2 & 3 pages (sorry) but the idea about GP increasing building (axlotl tanks) can be done this way: it should grant no GP ponts and gain GP boni based on already born great persons.

I.e., someone creates a Great Engineer. Axlotl tanks gain +0.5 GE bonus. So with 2 GE you get +1 GE point. And more nations exist (and more GP are born), more bonus you have.

Probably you have to cap this bonus at some point though, and further just shift the ratio of GP types based on the whole born GP. Also it probably should be unaffected by YOUR gp.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm not quite sure I understand. You're suggesting that the GPP yields of the Axoltl tank building is dependent on the number of GPs produced by other factions?

These feels problematic to me.
a) The income from buildings and the like should depend on actions by the player, which they can control, not on the actions of other players (which the player cannot control).
Also, the mechanic is non-transparent, you it depends on actions that you don't easily observe.
b) Scaling issues; mapsize, number of AIs, etc., would lead to this having very different yields
c) Timing issue. Most GPPs are produced in the early-midgame, because of the increasing cost in GPPs for each extra GP, so not that many GPs are produced after Axolotl tanks start getting built.

 

[Deon]

It was along the line of cloning existing GP, and there can be a counter instead of adding after axlotl tanks are built. And they were used to clone other important people, so I think that they SHOULD depend on other nation's great persons. Map size/speed scaling can be done via python.

 

[Ahriman]

Its an interesting idea, but I personally think basic tenets of gameplay (the player can control their own fate) are more important than realism. Atanks as GPP boosters make sense, but I think its more fun if the player can still control what kinds of great people they get through specialist selection.

We can see what other people think.

 

[Deon]

Sure, I was just thinking about already existing code for a wonder which "inspired different people" and had its GP type switching via event. It's somewhere in the database (maybe it was made by Gyr or another famous modder) so it would be easy to adopt the code. I don't mean that this is the only mechanic I want, I just propose one idea of many . I honestly liked Davidlallen's idea about "building" famous units' clones, but I would rather see heroes and national characters (when they appear... I saw Deliverator's post with various possible "nation heroes") rather than great people.

 

[Pickly]

Another possible idea: the planetfall mod has a technology that combines all the great person points into a single counter. Depending on the coding difficulties, I could see something similar to this for Axlotl tanks, where the great person points for axlotl tanks (or possibly nullentropy spheres) are combined into a faction wide pool. For balance reasons, this might remove all individual city points (Planetfall doesn't do this, but its balance will likely be different than this mod's.) I am not sure of how easy this would actually be to code, though. (this of course could be combined with other mechanics as desired)


Out of the two ideas suggested by Ahriman in his earlier big post, I prefer option A, as it seems to make more gameplay sense, and somewhat gets the flavor across of what these things are supposed to be.

(It will be good to get a different mechanic then the current axlotl mechanic, which was a neat idea, bit in practice often becomes somewhat of a mess.)

 

[Deon]

Its an interesting idea, but I personally think basic tenets of gameplay (the player can control their own fate) are more important than realism. Atanks as GPP boosters make sense, but I think its more fun if the player can still control what kinds of great people they get through specialist selection.

We can see what other people think.

The simpliest idea is a "free specialist" . Then you can assign him to anything. But it may be TOO simple hehe.