CHAOS Realm

[Littlenog]

How about just making it a global unrest lowering effect like -2 in all cities and give it a higher upkeep?

[Seravy]

I have a new idea to make Doomsday work better.
While keeping the current effects, it should also do "and population growth in all cities is reduced by X".

What this does is, it forces cities to shrink when maxed, and pretty much stay their max size-1. That wouldn't be a big deal normally, but corruptions reduce the max pop so this would make them relevant.

Alternately we could have "cities exceeding their maximum population have a growth rate of -200", or even make that a new game rule. Doing the latter is probably a bad idea though as it would make corruption and raise volcano a lot more powerful as well as Armageddon.

[Seravy]

Found something interesting while working on this.

"Max pop=0" is special-cased in population growth and yields a growth rate of -10 per existing population, while all other max pop results in basing the growth on food. I don't really see what's the purpose of this special case, especially as 0 max pop is almost impossible to reach (would require all corrupted/volcano/desert/tundra/mountain tiles and no Granary) and I find it funny that the shrinking is likely less than the food based one (which is -50 per missing food)

I'm going to remove this as it's meaningless and so elusive even the wiki doesn't mention it.

[Littlenog]

I like the idea of being able to attack a city without actually having to attack a city.

If you can force shrinkage vs minor inconvenience then it might be a way to help early races against late games races if they are not able to use their full capacity late.

[Nelphine]

I'm not sure about adding that effect. Problem is any opponent who is not life. They already had lots of problems from the unrest, and will now contend with this as well. Admittedly I like this concept a lot, but I think the unrest has to be reduced to compensate.

[Seravy]

Considering the population will now shrink even if there are no rebels, assuming enough Corrupted tiles, reducing the unrest is a possibility but I prefer to test it without reducing unrest first. The unrest is an immediate effect, while enough corruptions to shrink the population will happen only over a very long period of time. Time you might not have if there is no immediate benefit - it's a very rare spell so it will come late. Also the unrest makes it a good combo with other spells that raise unrest, Famine and Evil Presence (and also Armageddon but that is less important at this point because it has another combo with the new effect - volcanoes also contribute to loss of max population and thus shrinking.)

[Nelphine]

I don't think this will work actually. Again, I love the idea, and I think it's great to include. 

However, the problem you are trying to fix is that stream of life negates doomsday. I believe you must also make doomsday balanced against targets who do not have stream of life.

However, steam reamlife doubles city growth. It's easy to have a pop 24 city with 200+ growth with stream of life. If doomsday is going to be effective against that, x needs to be very high - so high that anyone without stream of life would negative potentially hundreds of growth, just from doomsday, not counting any food problems due to the massive unrest.

So, stream of life will either still counter x, or it will make doomsday far too powerful against anyone who doesn't have stream of life.

[Seravy]

That would be true if we did that version but I did the "cities with pop>max pop have a growth of -200" one instead. So cities will shrink as corrupted tiles reduce the max pop, and they can't grow back, as growth is at most +0 if pop>=max pop already.
This however is slow as it relies on corruption to spread, so it needs the unrest to have some immediate benefit as well.

[Nelphine]

Could we make chaos spawn under 300 cost? As per the strategic discussion, chaos spawn have a lot of weaknesses, and so making it so they don't trigger fairy ring would be a subtle way of buffing them and giving them more role, especially for the AI.

[Seravy]

It's 303 exactly because I wanted it to trigger that. It might be a somewhat situational unit but it is most definitely not weak - it can be far more effective than any other rare if you can properly take advantage of it.