[SPOILERS] Lurkers Rooting for More Destruction

[Tarkeel]

I think the players expect a certain amount of fallout really.

[scooter]

I think the players expect a certain amount of fallout really.

Is fallout any worse than a flat desert or ice tile? I feel like it's okay to have some unusable tiles on the map just for the cool/story factor. (And you could put it on desert or I think Peaks anyway, couldn't you?) Unless fallout does something else I'm forgetting about ... or spreads?

Yeah I thought about placing them on Peaks specifically as the map has a fair amount of them. It does add -.5h per city nearby, but maybe if I just scatter them without clumping them, it wouldn't cause issues to have the unhealthy tile anymore than floodplains does the same.


Also, from looking into it, it does not appear that fallout affects global warming? I was a pretty concerned about that initially, but it doesn't seem like it's a real concern. So I think what I'll do is add it here and there but avoid situations where cities would deal with multiple tiles, and I'll try to make them functionally out of the way.

[civac2]

CTH disables Global Warming I believe.

[scooter]

CTH disables Global Warming I believe.

Ah, good catch. Yes this is right.

[scooter]

I didn't want to go into too much detail in the public thread, but on the Great Spy thing... The basic rationale here is that Spies, and especially the Great Spy, have two negative impacts on the setup here.


1) I would like players to have the option to hide their land if they deem that to be worth the tradeoffs. Maybe you find/acquire a monster city and you'd rather your neighbor not consider taking it, or any number of other reasons. Great Spy scouting/infiltration in particular totally wipes this out. In addition, it incentivizes you to scout your neighbors land before they settle it. I think scouting is a lost skill sometimes, and it's largely not punished by the style of games we play. I think players that invest in scouting will be rewarded here, and Spies/Great Spies put this on easy mode. There was a reason my comments in the OP referenced scouting and banning spies consecutively.


2) I want scouting efforts to be challenged by Barbarians. The Spies hard-counter this in a way that doesn't feel great to me.



Hopefully this doesn't feel too limiting to players, but I felt I needed to document my thinking somewhere, and I didn't think the players needed to see all of it.

[Qgqqqqq]

Do barbs pillage tiles outside player territory?

Edit: My bet on the easter egg, having seen exactly one start - tilted axis.

[scooter]

Do barbs pillage tiles outside player territory?

I've experimented with this a little bit, and in my very basic testing it appears that they do not. This is generally backed up by what I've read of how the barb AI is supposed to work. However, I am not 100% certain if this will always be the case.

[T-hawk]

2) I want scouting efforts to be challenged by Barbarians.

This sounds like a way for someone to get screwed by RNG. Is that the intent, or an acceptable downside, (or did CTH do something here like auto wins or deterministic barb combat?)

[scooter]

2) I want scouting efforts to be challenged by Barbarians.

This sounds like a way for someone to get screwed by RNG. Is that the intent, or an acceptable downside, (or did CTH do something here like auto wins or deterministic barb combat?)

It is an acceptable downside is more or less where I've landed. There's going to be some variance here, and whoever adapts best will likely have the most success.


One thing of note though which partly explains why I'm OK with this - if you have pre-placed barbarians and/or barbarian cities - which everyone seems to be expecting - actual barb spawn rates plummet dramatically, even on Raging. I wonder whether players will know this and adjust their plans if/when they see evidence of this, or if they'll play it safe regardless. For example, PB76 had barbarians enabled (but not raging), but in practice almost none spawned due in part to proximity to barbarian cities.

[Tarkeel]

One thing of note though which partly explains why I'm OK with this - if you have pre-placed barbarians and/or barbarian cities - which everyone seems to be expecting - actual barb spawn rates plummet dramatically, even on Raging. I wonder whether players will know this and adjust their plans if/when they see evidence of this, or if they'll play it safe regardless. For example, PB76 had barbarians enabled (but not raging), but in practice almost none spawned due in part to proximity to barbarian cities.

In particular, one little-known fact is that barbarians actually "fog-bust" themselves: No new units can spawn within two tiles of an existing unit, regardless of owner. This is also why barbarian animals get despawned at some point, to make way for bigger barbs.

With that being said, I wonder how Gav's great wall gambit will go; it's at the very least an interesting ploy.