18-08-2002 21:09									#1
	Comments / questions on larger game mechanics Tired of ads?

I just read through all the threads on this forum, which took me 3 days, but was quite fun . I think I'm finally getting a better picture of what CB will be, even if the combat is not very intuitive without actually having something to play with. However, it could be that there has been a lot of private discussion in chats / e-mails, but it seems some of larger game mechanics are not documented here. So some questions on them:

1. Winning?
So far, I encountered 2 possible ways of winning the game, a) controlling two thirds of the provinces, or b) having 200 honor points. Are these still accurate, and if so, are other ways of winning under consideration?

For instance, you're not supposed to research all techs, so could a academic victory type be if you manage to reach the end of all tech trees? Or, could a great wonder(Great Library) be triggered by reaching the end of the trees, which takes considerable resources (e.g. all your mages/generals(minimum 20), lots of gold, lots of workers) and a lot of time (e.g. 15 turns) to complete, and the first one to finish wins? This still leaves some kind of race, and the tension associated with it, while being very focussed on one aspect of the game leads to one way of winning.

Another possibility is to have a general or mage with extraordinary experience, thus gaining so much adoration that everybody will fear/love him. Say for instance a XP of 100 for a general (20 was the start, no?), wich should be minimum double the nearest experience in the game

And as influence seems to be a very important concept for some ways of playing, and is in that respect somewhat alike culture in CivIII, is it possible to have some kind of 'influencial' victory?

2. balance between combat / magic
I strongly feel that the best games are those that let you choose between several styles, all of which as equally as possible to win. That's why Civ has always been great, one day you feel like warring, the other building, and with the focus on one of those you can always win. Of course, the particulars of the current game might lead to shifts in your initial plan.

In CB, it will be hard to strike a balance between traditional combat, and the use of magic. But, it would be very cool if it would get balanced so that it is possible to focus almost exclusively on magic and win, while others who focus on combat have the same chance of winning. I fear that some types of magic as they are proposed now will get too unbalancing, so my question is whether it would be possible to get inherent balancing in most of the spells: if you cast a highly offensive spell on an enemy army, get some defensive punishment for it (e.g. moral drop of your own traditional troops) too.

But also the other way around: players who spend everything they have on traditional troops, generals, and research to further the use of these, should also gain some punishment for it. E.g. a general in a province also increases the cost to cast a spell there (or from there) by 10%.

I've seen quite a bit of these balancing issues (e.g. temples negate research buildings in a province) here already, but maybe some additional thought should go out to what different focusses a player can have, and how these will be baked into the game even more so that from one hand pure focus in one aspect is negated (some balance is needed), from the other hand blend play (no focus at all) will make it more difficult to win. One idea: a province with barracks can't build new sigils or any other magical stuff, and the other way around, a newly created sigil will mean that no military buildings are possible.

3. Peaceful conquest
So far, it was mentioned that peaceful conquest should be possible, but I can't find anything on the specifics here. Peaceful acquisition of neighbouring, neutral provinces because your influence reaches a certain point? Or your honor / infamy reaches a certain point? Will it be possible to peacefully gain another player's provinces?

4. Honor / Infamy
While we're at it, this balance is nice, but could also, IMHO, use some fleshing out. Anyone played Black & White? In that game, most actions had a Good or Evil effect, and the whole game responded to that. There was no clear advantage of playing the good guy, or the bad guy, both options were as equal, but had their own specifics (for instance casting a food spell while you were already Good could mean that more people joined your empire).

I see a lot of this shining through in CB, and I like it. But, it seems the game is biased towards the Honor side of things. For instance, only being very Honorous(sp?) is considered a victory condition, where being very Infamous could mean a victory as well. Further, it is a lot harder to keep your honor, than it is to gain infamy. Certain wonders have requirements of having a certain number of honor or infamy points: these will be easier to reach on the infamy side of things.

So my suggestions: make both sides as rewarding to pursue, and have level depending punishments. E.g. each thieving guild will cost you 1% of your honor points saved up (total rounded down, and never negative), while each beneficial spell you cast has a percentage of your infamy points destroyed (% depending on level, perhaps). Further, infamy could lead to your people running away at the slighest of malcontentness, while honor makes them lazy (as there is no fear of punishment).

Last suggestion: make more buildings / units / spells honor depending, it will only add to the variance in gameplay. By that I don't mean you have to include more stuff, only change what is already in to be split towards honor/infamy/neutral (neutral making up the bulk of it, of course). And what balancing is concerned: it could be a little counterintuive, but an idea could be to have e.g. infamy reguired spells, who increase your honor rating, thus immediately countering their use.

5. Faction specific stuff
Another of those points that gets touched upon, but the differences aren't very clear, or fleshed out yet. I can see different factions having certain advantages, but maybe it would be good to add some other things to that. Do I understand correctly that each faction will normally gain a certain region of provinces at the start of the game? Because that could be another way of specialising it.

Already it is mentioned in the resource stuff that moon lillies only grow in one province, and this of course is great. Further ideas: Each faction can choose one area of spells to develop, while one other is given by the terrain they control (certain landmarks for instance). As Fury (military) always starts near the landmark of the fire school (an everburning flame or so), they automatically can develop that. Further they can choose one, e.g. artifice.

This would also make conquest for magic more doable: each school is represented by one landmark, so conquering the province that landmark is in gains you another school. Losing that landmark makes those spells unavailable to you. Certain factions can start out with one landmark in their territory, while others have none, and thus have only the one school of choice initially.

On top of that, I would limit the available schools per faction even more. Castillar can't develop any of the elemental magics, so gaining an elemental landmark is only useful because they deny it for others. Wizzards can have all (so don't need two free choices), while e.g. Fury can only have the more military ones.

6. Magic classifications
Related to the above, it might be a good idea to include extra classifications, and limit / favor factions / buildings to certain classifications. One of these classifications was made in the earlier magic thread, but not repeated in the last one, being a military or a worldy spell. Classifying a spell like that could mean that you can prevent e.g. Fury to develop a worldly spell (but it could be given by for instance a special building / fate card), plus it could be useful to have the AI making adequate use of it.

Other classifications:
- unit/area/global (target an army, province, or your territory).
- Honor / Infamy
- defensive / offensive
- churchlike / witchcraft (but that's already in, as Castillar can't use the elemental schools)
- ...

7. Fate cards
I haven't found anything on fate cards yet, apart from the core rules. I'm wondering how these will be used...

8. Random events and random 'discoveries'
I haven't seen many random events yet, but think that these could make the game more interesting to play. For instance one of the fate cards could call for a quest on one of your academics/mages, which then can start excavating your land, and, by a certain chance each turn, possibly finds some burried ruin with some benefit for it (e.g. generating gpt, generating manna, making a certain wonder available).

Other randomness could be a general epidemic (Plague), (increased) Nillrog attacks, etc. I'm not sure if this will be convered by the fate cards, but maybe there should also be some kind of randomness inherent to the game, even without specific fate cards drawing.
---

I hope this was not too much to post in one thread, and am sorry if many of these things are decided already, but simply not known to me. Any comments more then welcome!

DeepO

	19-08-2002 18:47									#2
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LOTS of reading to catch up on, and a slew of fantastic ideas in your post, master DeepO!

Dang! I scoot away for the weekend, and just look at all the creativity I missed out on! That's okay, it has made for some terriffic reading this morning! Several things we should be able to implement would be:

* Peaceful conversion of Neutral lands via Influence
* Honor/Infamy differentiation
* More tweaks to the magic schools (currently working on that now, actually!)
* More restrictions on types of buildings that can be put together (Barracks = No sigils, etc).
* Acadamean Victory type (research all techs, build X wampum

And probably some more besides that! You've got my brain churning on CB stuffages already this morning! Outstanding!

-=Vel=-

	19-08-2002 20:36									#3
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Glad you like it, Vel.

While you're at it, I've had some more ideas on the magic stuff, but I'm not sure about them. And I didn't include them here, because I tried to limit myself to larger things, balance issues, etc.

The main thing I was thiking of was to make certain schools God-specific (e.g. the elementals), which could be included with the idea of having some kind of landmark that gives you right to develop one school. There are a whole load of ideas that are implied by this, main ones IMHO are that magic becomes very intertwined with religion, and thus influence and manna become exchangeable. Sigils should produce influence for one God, deminishing it for another, spells the same, etc. The ability to cast a spell would not be limited to once per turn, but would be in function of the influence a certain god has...

I was also playing with the idea to make separate mages for separate schools, but decided that I wouldn't find it fun if one mage could only cast part of the spells. But maybe there is something to be done with that idea, in that he needs to be trained to access other schools, or something like that. It would add another RPG element (if wanted, of course)

One final thing: as a relatively young CB follower, I haven't seen much on the different aspects of the Gods yet, some story / deisgn specs would be nice..

DeepO

	19-08-2002 21:09									#4
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We experimented initially with basing the magic system on the gods, but for a couple of reasons, backed away from that. There's a huge opportunity there, and I'd very much like to save that idea for the next game (I made a board game a few years ago called "Holy War" which might serve as the genesis of yet another game title.... ). For now then, the gods and goddess of Candle'Bre are a bit more abstracted. J'honsa is the small pantheon's head god, and his influence is by far the most pervasive. The other gods hold much less influence, but will make their presence known via miracles (I'm working on the final list now, based on the comments on the free version magic thread!)

The elemental sigil idea will eventually be implemented, but prolly not till the commercial release, but when we get to that point, I can totally see a faction acquiring a sigil and being able to make use of its magics at least in some fashion...that's good stuff!

-=Vel=-

	19-08-2002 22:09									#5
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But, I thought you were supposed to have multiple sigils, sometimes even several in one province? This is not really what I had in mind, I was more thinking on having one landmark, artifact, whatever (I'm not good in coming up with English names) which enables you to both see the sigils from that type, and use spells from that school. This would add a strategic level to the game, as the uniqueness of those landmarks would make them heavily disputed. Sigils are of course also nice, but don't have the same attraction, as there are more of them around.

And, choosing one school at the start with a faction would partially negate the need for combat to get near a landmark...

About the Gods: if they are more abstracted, and don't have a role in fate cards, I hope they won't be some arbitrary thing... probably not, seeing what you cooked up until now

I'll wait until the list of miracles becomes available, and debate it then some more. I think that's better to try to convince you now for something I know nothing about. I don't see any problems with losely basing (some) magic on Gods, as long as you don't tie it too strongly together, but those problems might come if I know more
DeepO

	19-08-2002 22:19									#6
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Ahhh, I get you...yep, that was my bad...unclear wording on my part. Sigils are, for CB purposes, of two different flavors. In the release we're working on now (we'll call it CB1), we're taking steps toward the magic system that will be in CB2. Sigils in CB1 are more basic versions now than what they'll eventually grow into in CB2. In version one, all they do is enhance mana collection abilities, making it possible to cast more spells, more quickly. Eventually though (CB2), they will tie in with Elemental Sigils, creating ley lines of magic between the focusing sigils, and enabeling different spells based on the different magical energies that are tapped into.

Your note here though, *do* have me kinna contemplating the notion of making some primitive version of that available now....will finish fleshing out the spells and such, and see how it looks!

-=Vel=-

	19-08-2002 22:30									#7
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I'll be curiously waiting...

And I understand why I was confused: if things change, and you read only part of the history of ideas backwards (like here on this forum), it can be pretty daunting to understand things. My bad

DeepO

	25-08-2002 18:25									#8
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I thought the "ley lines" of magic were already there, and the sigils were supposed to tap them.

	26-08-2002 20:21									#9
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Hey man! The way the system will eventually work is that the sigils are there "first." That is, they each represent an elementally driven/derived magical nexus. A magical nexus can be tapped into by players creating mana focusers which direct and channel the power coming from the sigil itself. The act of doing so creates a line of magic between the two....ley lines.

Things get really interesting when you begin intersecting various ley lines by tapping into the ley lines created by yourself and/or others. What starts happening at that point is that the energy feeds back into the sigil which powers the whole thing, and changes its elemental nature.

Change the elemental nature of the sigil under your control, and you change the spells and abilities you can gain from it.

The tough part....the challenging part has been to keep all that balanced. It represents a "slippery eel" as far as design goes, but it's really, really cool....

-=Vel=-

	27-08-2002 00:21									#10
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Could the ley lines be created between two nexi of the same magic type? For example, Player A has built an air sigil in Province X, and Player B has built an air sigil in Province Y. There is now a ley line that goes across the board through provinces X and Y. Player C, D, or E can now tap this line by building a "tapping" improvement on any of the provinces the ley line happens to go through.