"vision" specific buildings and effects

[davidlallen]

I am also thinking that keeping the vision mechanic, while renaming the visions, is the right approach. We can separately review the government civics column to see if things should be added or changed. If the visions had more generic names like "Brotherhood of Steel", etc, then people would stop attaching expectations of certain civic effects.

I think it's reasonable to limit the number of capitols to 7, which is the actual number of religions in the vanilla game. It happens that I made 6 sets of vision icons with advocates, but perhaps it is time to discard them. The question is what to replace them with.

What would be cool, is if the religion icon that showed up in the game was the actual flag of the founding civilization. That really matches the "state capitol" idea. That is where I got the idea of 18 religions, one per civ, but that is too hard to implement.

I could try seven generic group names with appropriate icons. Maybe some of the existing icons can stay, as long as the names are updated. Among the names suggested here, I like:

Enclave
Brotherhood of Steel
The League
Inheritors
Alpha Central
The Human Project
Children of the Fire (a civ name now, but may work better as a group name)

What do you think? What icons would work? (The icon needs to be legible at 16x16 pixels for the cities, so think small

Regarding inquisitor type units, I guess there are two approaches. In one case, I add a unit whose only function is removing opposing visions. This is easier to implement for the AI; I define the mission for such a unit and the existing AI doesn't worry about it. In another case, I add a new action button for the advocate unit. In this case I have to "fight" with the existing AI a little bit; the AI may generate an advocate for one reason and then I would hijack it to act as an inquisitor. Sadly, it makes more sense to a player, the second way.

Does anybody know if a building can effect the chance of religion spreading? I was also thinking that a "Bureau of Thought Control" or similar could be added, which would have a "religion defence" effect. It seems that in python, you can only get notified after a religion spread attempt has either succeeded or failed, with onReligionSpread.

 

[Jabie]

Don't the holy shrines and temples in the main game help spread religion? If you substitute "Regional Administration Office" for temple, you could have the same effect.

As for defence, how about this? A City can only recognise one Seat of Government. Whenever a City decides to recognise a Capital it automatically receives a free Administration Office. If this Administration Office is destroyed, the city no longer recognises that Seat of Government. (To encourage the AI to use Administration Offices, they ought to offer some kind of marginal benefit. A +1 Safety bonus ought to be enough)

A Diplomat (Inquisitor) Unit can supplant an Administration Office as a specific Espionage mission, thus, in order to start supplementing your own Capital as THE capital, you must divert some of your funding into Espionage, which ties in nicely with the statements about Bribery and Corruption in the Wild West.

Related source: See The Postman by David Brin in which, in an attempt to get into an enclave in a post-apocalytpic world, the protaganist pretends that he is a postman and that the US government is trying to re-establish control by sending out the post once more. Things kind of spiral out of control from there, but it's probably the kind of effect that you're looking for.

 

[Refar]

Shrines do help Spread Religion, Temples do not (They might be possible to mod to do so - i am not sure).

On the current mechanic making a city hold only one religion will make those "Blitz" vision victories even easier - a few big cities early i the game and you are done.

The administration office as "replacement" for temple (or courthose ) does not sound bad. There is a small issue however: How does a city "decide to recognize a Capital" (I.e. when we are talking about AI cities.)
also from what i seen the Victory condition does not check for "Administaration Offices" (Any buildings for that matter). It only counts pop in each religion.

 

[davidlallen]

There is already a city hall building. I can steal whatever tags the shrine uses to spread religion, and use that.

Many cities are controlled by a player with one state vision, but they also contain other state visions which have spread there. It seems like a player aiming for a vision victory would want to stamp those out.

I was thinking that other state visions in these cities should decay at some rate. Basically if you don't keep sending advocates to motivate the people, they forget about you. In game terms, each city which has a state vision and some other visions, has a percent chance to lose one of the non-state visions every turn. 1% normally, 5% if there is a city hall, 10% if there is a capitol. I can envision you might keep an advocate around in a foreign country waiting to see if your vision decays in a city, and then go burn the advocate to re-establish it.

Doing it automatically with a building avoids the problem of a special unit and action button to do it. It's possible, but building based decay is much easier.

 

[Refar]

Building based decay sounds fine to me.
The % chances might need testing/finetuning - 5% sounds high to me, but i cant really know without testing.

There are other issues to keep in mind: On the defualt game, no religion will spread "Spontaneously" in a city that already has one. So no matter if and how Buildings (Shrines/Temples) spread the religion - most of the spreading must go via Advocate.
This means that the Building Spread is i.e. Powerfull in the beginning, when maybe just one or two Visions are around.

A related issue is - in my game Capitols got built on very different points. Only 2 were built somewhat early. The last one around turn 220. So witout a counterweight by other visions those early ones got very powerfull (one of them was my, and i spread it targeted on fighting the other, otherwise it would have been another Fast Vision loss.)

Giving Capital the chance to spread, will obviously increase the power of those early Visions - similar it does with the early religions in the normal game. Add in, that at this point there are no other visions to counter it, and wat you might get is, that spreading via Building actually makes those "Blitz" victories easier.

One remedy for this would be making the Capitals more of a race - so a few of them are build early within a narrow timeframe - this will make those early vision rushes harder.

The AI might need more motivation to actually build a Capitol. The AI see it as a rather expensive building giving +1 and is not too compelled to build one. Additional boons on the Building should help that.

Giving it shrine propertie (+1 per city in Vision) would be really cool.

There might however be a problem (The same you would get making the building spread a vision) - at the time the Capitol is built, it is not clear yet, which vision it will hold.

 

[davidlallen]

Giving Capital the chance to spread, will obviously increase the power of those early Visions - similar it does with the early religions in the normal game. Add in, that at this point there are no other visions to counter it, and wat you might get is, that spreading via Building actually makes those "Blitz" victories easier.

Good point. I guess we don't need to make the "attack" portion of this mechanic any easier.

The AI might need more motivation to actually build a Capitol. The AI see it as a rather expensive building giving +1 and is not too compelled to build one. Additional boons on the Building should help that.

I cannot measure how much difference it makes, but the capitol has a ridiculously high iAIWeight of 10000. I borrowed this from Gods Of Old. I hope this makes the AI interested enough, even if it doesn't know why.

Giving it shrine propertie (+1 per city in Vision) would be really cool.

There might however be a problem (The same you would get making the building spread a vision) - at the time the Capitol is built, it is not clear yet, which vision it will hold.

Excellent idea. I will try it out. I suspect the income is based on state religion, so it may be OK.

 

[Refar]

Hmmm i am not sure how the weight factors in, but it is high... Perhaps the tech priority is the problem then - if the AI bypasses the Diplomacy tech for a long time, then it does not have a chance to check out the cool AIWeight of the building...

Ad now as we talking it i remembered something... There is another tiny - literally - issue with the capitol...

Look just below the Monument... I think you can safely double the scale of the building, maybe even more than that.

(And no, we do not have any health issues in the city. We are experimenting with... uh... oh... producing power from pig dung)

 

[davidlallen]

Huh. In the original it was huge, and I reduced it. I thought it was a normal size for me now. I will double-check.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

actually... i think most buildings can be reduced to match the size of the city set

 

[davidlallen]

I have put in "vision decay" as I have described it. In my test game (still underway, won't finish tonight) I built my capitol within a few turns of the other players. There are 3 capitols now, around turn 160. I will keep an eye on the vision levels and hopefully at least avoid the surprise vision loss. Refar's concern about his suggestion was right; there is no way to define a shrine when we set the religion afterwards. I could fake it with some python, but maybe it is not so important. Also I do not plan to add the advocate mission to remove visions, unless decay proves inadequate.

 

[Refar]

I think the shrine money is not that important.
If we really want it, we can still add another Vision-Specific building, buildable after the Vision was founded in the Holy City to give Shrine money / Additional Spread power. The delay (building the second building) might be good for gameplay anyway.

But i would say for now your changes sound good, so let see how they work out first.