Diplomacy
Sometimes you don’t have the stuff you want and you don’t want to have to conquer everyone. Diplomacy lets you do this. Diplomatic Capital is the resource here. The more of you get get, the more people love you. Trade others to get more of it and they’ll like you even more or trade it away to get other resources or get others to attack each other so that they’re too busy to get after you.
In my opinion, people should be concerned about diplomacy being too powerful, not too weak. Doesn't this also move hand-in-hand with espionage? Diplomacy has the potential to be every bit as gamebreaking and destructive as less subtle methods, but I think it's not being done in a way to correctly realise this.
For example, an appropriate "win-condition" for a diplomatic player would be a grand project using all their ties and connections across all the civilisations and populations across the world until finally, finally assassin dopplegangers were in place to assassinate every other ruler and leave me as the undisputed ruler of the land.
This makes a lot more sense than using the power of "heart" to win through friendship, or get "voted in" which has effectively zero sense behind it without sufficient military power to back it up anyway (I have memories of Master of Orion 2 where my grand star empire was in danger of "losing" to a ruler it itself had elected, when the total size of the newly combined enemy forces was approximately half that of my own - sensible?). Diplomacy is not "nice", and should never be assumed as such.
So, an assassination victory condition, and using diplomatic "currency" to insert spies, dopplegangers and assassins into enemy territories, or counteragents, friendly merchants (giving mutual gains for both sides) and the like into friendly ones.
This is the only way that diplomacy type abilities can be used outside of AI play (where they can give mystical abilities of "+10 likability" and the like). A diplomacy tech that involves other players "choosing" anything - "choosing" to trade with you, "choosing" to accept deals that are less beneficial and the like won't work. Players aren't dumb, they will never accept your offer of 5 Golds for their capitol city.
With the espionage/diplomat system however, this can give real, tangible effects to "notional" diplomatic actions.
Diplomats: Send in enough envoys, missionaries and traders to a neutral town to take it over. Insert a few merchants, embassies and other "booster" diplomats into a neighbour's territory, then every time you give them something, they will receive proportionally more, without you having to lift a finger (a well supported financial infrastructure is a wonderful thing to have). Result? An actually more favourable deal for the person you're dealing with, not just pretending to be one. This all happens on the diplomacy screen without the non-diplomat player seeing how much is "really" offered, just how much they get.
Send a trader to live in another person's city, accumulate more revenue, for both of you!
Helpful diplomat interactions are open, obvious, friendly and advantageous to everybody. People will want to be friends with you, because they get more bonuses with you alive than they do with you dead. The opposite - espionage, is concealed, aggressive and highly disadvantageous to the target and anyone who does business with them.
Espionage: Send in enough assassins, terror agents and criminals into a town to take out their defences, lower their morale and make conquering them easier - or sign over to you for protection. Insert a few saboteurs into a city to invisibly sap their resource production, or more insidiously - to make all deals make to the person involved by anyone except you give both players a reduced fraction of what the other player actually gave them - player 1 offers 100 gold for gems. Player 2 sees the offer of 80 gold, and offers 40 gems in exchange; Player 1 is annoyed by player 2 only giving them only 30 gems for their very generous 100 gold and makes a counteroffer of 60 gold for those gems - more than fair. Insulted by the offer of a mere 48 gold, player 2 cancels the deal. The offer has been made genuinely unattractive, and neither player knows why.
All this on top of making sure that their production teams aren't doing well, their heroes keep having to put down annoying peasant rebellions and bandit raiders (inspired by the diplomacy player), and their armies keep suffering from fatigue, sickness and other minor disadvantages....
Annoy a diplomatic nation, and everyone's going to be annoyed with you for no reason you can discover. Diplomats can remove as many resources from you as any warlord and you'll never know it unless you manage to catch one of their operatives.
Diplomacy rocks, but seriously, forget "everyone allying", nobody will intentionally ally with someone when doing so is the means of their own destruction. Instead, poison them and replace them with body doubles who'll ally with you instead, or slip them a mickey and marry them before they sober up. Either/or.
Imperium/Civilization
The world has resources. And your territory expands as your influence grows to make use of these resources. This tree allows you to increase your utilization of these resources. The most important resource here is Gildar (gold).
I think the problem with Imperium type abilities is that they don't really give the player anything to do with those resources as described here. Does it simply make your influence acquisition better? Give you more resources? I hope not, as those are some fairly tedious things. Imperium needs to be about building and upgrading grand cities, vast sprawling empires... And the ability to keep them to yourself, so you can be the only one benefitting from all those awesome city improvements you've made.
Part of this, I daresay, with Conquest covering the part of the conquering army, is fortifications. Buildings that serve a direct purpose in combat. City walls are obvious, but don't forget the lookout tower, the cannons that litter the battlements and the lethal pit traps that drop invaders into the boiling oil elementals.
And in the background, amidst all the wailing, screaming and boiling oil elementals hugging people, these fortified towns are plugging away researching with libraries, tithing in their temples, and generally plugging along providing a stable power base for whatever path you're going to use to actually win the game.
And there lies the biggest issue with Imperium. Magic is already the wildcard that lets you do all sorts of interesting things, but it's also a game-winning plan all by itself. Diplomacy is - at least theoretically - a game winning tech. Conquest and Adventuring are both game winners but.... Where's the victory condition? How does a pure imperium focus win me the game? Pure conquest can, pure adventure can, pure diplomacy might....
Imperium needs a goal, and ideally that goal should be to bring their empire up to the glory of the pre-cataclysm world, causing some form of ancient gods of old to collectively high-five their nation and crown their ruler to be the High King. Or something along those lines, essentially slow, steady build up until the total population of their empire exceeds X, they have Y advanced cities with appropriate improvements, allowing them to build Z - the Throne of the High King.
Adventure
There were a lot of resources before everything blew up. More than that, there was a lot of really powerful stuff out there that’s now gone. The purpose of adventure is to give players access to increasingly powerful items and resources that will aid them in their pursuit of one of the 4 objectives. Also leads to the Master Quest. What you are looking to do here is to build a band of powerful champions armed with magical items you have collected.
Warfare/Conquest
Imperium/Civilization
The world has resources. And your territory expands as your influence grows to make use of these resources. This tree allows you to increase your utilization of these resources. The most important resource here is Gildar (gold).
The primary question I have here is.... How big is the difference? If I focus on Adventure, I assume I'll pick up some parties of heroes that collectively could annihilate me and my entire empire (can my leader go adenturing? I'd need to bogart some of those magic items myself so as to protect me from the ultimate betrayal by my trusted lieutenants). These heroes can go adventuring, complete quests, and I assume, eventually take on dragons, entire armies and Mister Rogers all by themselves and stand a pretty good chance of coming out victorious.
And this is partly awesome, because adventuring is fun, but at the same time, boggles the mind as to how it might be balanced. A 100% specialised heroic ruler should be roughly equatable with a 100% specialised military leader. This means that either high-end units stand a fairly good chance of taking out heroes in numbers, or that the number of heroes (cohorts and rescued princesses/dragons in tow) are restricted in number enough that they would not be able to deal with a full scale invasion.
Both make me foresee problems.
1) If large numbers of high-end military units can reliably take down heroes, which are, by design, incredibly high investment units, then either heroes are too weak - weak dragonslayers is a confusing notion - or that this will not solve the problem this poses - a hero might not be able to take on large numbers of high-end military units, but would be able to paralyse the conqueror player who wouldn't be able to move units for fear of their valuable units being annihilated through attrition.
2) If the problem is sheer volume, this runs into several problems also - first that a player concentrating on pure adventure cannot adequately defend themselves with their reduced non-heroic forces, second that a heroic player might have heroic bands conquering cities of a conqueror left right and centre. They might not be able to hold them, but they would very possibly be able to ta, hem and disrupt the conqueror by doing so.
Possibly the biggest problem is that this isn't different enough, or indeed, heroic enough. I'd hope that there are key differences between a hero and an army.
Heroes:
- Cannot conquer towns.
Instead, they raid them and steal all the items that aren't nailed down, take a fortune in money from doing "subquests" and talking to the NPCs that walk back and forth repeating themselves. Conquering heroes are heroes with armies, no matter how powerful the hero, or how focussed a player is on the adventuring path, they will never gain the benefits of the conquering path without proceeding down the path of conquest.
- Are unusual.
Not every hero should be death-on-legs, able to kill huge armies without a hitch (though some should be of course). Each hero should ideally have a special activity they might engage in instead of plain old fighting:
A peasant-hero might be able to incite short-lived peasant uprisings, and provide them with a sizeable leadership bonus enough to make them dangerous whilst themself being not much better than their upgraded peasantry, and pretty vulnerable when their peasants inevitably go back to farming.
A bard-hero might persuade enemy armies to change sides.
A mage may summon some meatshields to keep enemy armies from beating the squishy, or they may call down devastating tile-based effects now and then (much like the hercules-style hero who drops rivers on people).
Trickster heroes may actually misdirect units to move in a certain direction for several turns.
Kingly heroes would provide the bridge between the two, best to serve in an army rather than take one out by their lonesomes.
Demagogue heroes might have a chance of causing a revolt in a city, freezing production for awhile and tying up troops.
- Adventure.
Reading a great deal of heroic literature, the heroes aren't killing armies - they're taking out small groups sure, but the heroes are busy doing some quest that will ultimately screw over those dread armies indirectly (heroes that create their own quests for particular goals? Hm.). Hundred thousand orcs charging for you? Your armies have no chance of holding them off for long? Better send your heroes off with the magic ring to some nearby mountain, causing all those orc units to disband, or fight through enemy lines to defeat the enemy general in single combat - freezing all the orcs without orders for several turns whilst mopping them up one-by-one. Each hero is interesting and unique. Tricksters, heroic knights, mages, fearless norse warriors, unstoppable martial artists, beautiful girls with seven dwarf cohorts...
- Possess advantages and disadvantages.
A hero slays bandits, rights wrongs, kills dragons and molests princesses they've rescued. Heroes should easily match a single squad alone (whether themselves, or by the effect their ability has on the battle), but if they are surrounded, or attacked by their weakpoint- slayers equipped with magic-eating swords for mages; A horde of ranged, poison using skirmishers for a warrior; incredibly armoured, net-throwing destroyers for a nimble archer...
Heroes have weaknesses, and an enemy player that has seen your hero in action can deduce what they are and design a suitable counter. The greatest heroes are the ones that aren't easily countered.
The ideal thing is giving them something that makes them a significant (and interesting) threat to an enemy army but doesn't necessarily make them all capable of destroying those armies alone, as happened in Master of Magic quite quickly.
- Are alone.
Possibly the biggest limitation, a hero who isn't supposed to be leading armies is a singular thing. A heroic band of them gets... what, five or six people? Part of a hero's remit should be limitted capacity to deal with large numbers. He only has one sword, six attacks a round (though they sure are powerful attacks), a few interesting skills, maybe one or two area effect spells he can use per encounter. On the other hand, what's he fighting?
A dragon has special abilities to make it great at dealing with large numbers of units - firebreath, multiple attack points (two claws, one tail and one mouth) and strikes that flatten swathes of creatures at a time. A gorgon? Sure, she'll be petrifying people left and right with those gazes. Some giant minotaur that tears people in half two at a time with his axe? A vampire that regains health and gains attack bonuses for every creature it kills?
Heroes are made for this sort of thing. There may be only one of them, but a single deadly combatant against a big creature that's hard to hurt, hits hard, and is at its most deadly when it's facing multiple foes is a great advantage. Heroes are resistant against magic, hard to hit, and hit hard. This is great for everything from wicked witches to demons crawling from the pit.
An army is a squad of twenty five people, fifteen of which can reach the hero at once, has another squad on the opposite side, some archers behind these annoying people shooting at you....
Heroes are not made for this. There's only one of them, and fifty arrows a turn, even with the hero's hard-to-hit nature and high defence, is probably going to have a few get through. Being flanked is going to let the soldiers have an easier time of hitting him.... And his overkill - and it's probably going to be overkill, killing the entire front row of soldiers every turn so hard they explode - isn't going to help here, since they're limitted in the number of people they can turn that damage against. 5 x 100 damage on five guys with 5 HP each isn't nearly so good as 5 x 100 damage on one guy with 500 HP. With probability and a minimum-damage received, if you assume a hero is 100 in all things (including health), taking one hit in twenty attacks from a small army of a hundred people for 1 HP a time whilst killing 5 a turn comes out at over 50 damage by the end of a battle, and that's only four squads of twenty-five.
- Are mobile.
An army marches at the speed of its comfort women, it's supply trains, its wait-for-new-orders time.... A hero walks alone, and as a result can travel across any terrain, and probably do it and more than twice the speed of the fastest army. Heroes have places to be. They have to ride across the land righting wrongs and perpetrating them.
- Are important.
Heroes are one of a kind, hard to replace, huge investments and should be treated accordingly. Heroes die hard, survive by the skin of their teeth, and generally defy mortality.
Armies
- Conquer towns.
Obviously.
- Are standardised.
Whilst my opinions on unit design (side-note: Hero design? Please?) are vocal and long-winded, ultimately, no matter how interesting the strategic decisions behind a unit's makeup are, an army should be made up out of specific, identifiable components. These units may enjoy certain squads with minor magical item bonuses, or interesting skill combinations, but the variation lies in combining these standardised units together, not in individualist groups being like mini-heroes in their own right.
- Are average.
Where a hero may have a glaring weakness, an army consists of multiple parts potentially able to handle every aspect of a combat. They will not by default exist in the same vacuum as a hero, as any weaknesses can easily be shored up by additional units, and quickly.
All the advantages of this unity are mentioned for heroes, as are the disadvantages. The same things that a hero excels against (including siege weaponry, attacking AOE using mage squads and monsters), an army both include, and suffer against. The army can contain its own cannons, mages and variety units, but will never function as well without other units in their squad, or as well without a hero leading the charge.
- Do not adventure.
Sending an army to clear out a bandit camp isn't adventuring, it's police action. Sending an army into a labyrinth isn't an adventure, it's a slaughter. Pure focus on conquering doesn't give you any of the advantages associated with heroic activity. If they were hero material, then they'd be heroing it up right now.
- Are fodder.
Even the most expensive unit with the best toys is ultimately reproduceable, spammable, and largely generic. Again, they should be treated accordingly, and turnover should be high, resupplying and replacement of dead troops a necessity (no revival of troops in the field either, full on returning to a city for recovery of every dead unit). Saving lives of fallen soldiers and getting them back when they do die should be the perks of heavy investment in the path of the conqueror.
Magic
Besides giving players access to the Spell of Making eventually, the spells you learn can help you achieve any of the 4 objectives when used right. The key resources here are Arcane Knowledge (how fast you learn new spells) and Essence (the maximum amount of mana your casters can hold).
The ultimate wildcard as I see it, magic involves spells to summon, produce attack effects in combats, bring forth heroes and manufacture goodwill, depending on the element involved and the particular spells available, with their maintenance springing from magical sources rather than mundane ones.
For it to be more than simple spells, I see four key components, all suitable wildcards in their nature.
1: Magi.
Magical research into tapping into the power of others rather than your own mastery opens the mage troop type - conqueror path. Mages should be inherently vulnerable, specialised or otherwise inferior to dedicated conqueror's path units, whilst at the same time providing their own unique advantages when carely nurtured, not to mention being able to provide magical items for their buddies. (Conquest)
2: Heroic tools and familiars.
Where an army might not follow, a hero's trusted falcon might, with its own peculiar bonuses for the investment. And his magical weapon certainly will... This one's fairly obvious, the summoning of companion creatures rather than direct units, equipment for a hero. (Adventure)
3: Magical populace.
Several different things here, from simple supernatural city improvements to actual supernatural citizens, each with their own peculiar advantages different and supplementary to those of a more natural origin. (Imperium)
4: Scrying.
Investment into scrying and other sorcerous means of detection and beguiling, hand-in-hand with investment into diplomatic activities makes for a great defence against, and boost for, diplomatic activities, however illicit. (Diplomacy)
The important thing I feel is that magic should make these better, not be able to replace them by itself. Magic should never allow you to get a hero better than investing in being heroic does, never get better troops than a dedicated conqueror.... Never win the game for you in any way but its own way. By treating it as the point of a pentagon, rather than the centre of a square, this approach might be difficult.
But I've rambled on again. That'll do I suppose. Ta ta.
