I do think Halflings have a bit too many themes going on however, and I think it will be a good idea to split them into two races later :

Race 1 : keep food bonus, units, lucky, enable barracks, low interracial unrest modifiers, basically what we used to have in the original, a race meant for conquest mainly through buffed units or summoned creatures, and good lategame economy potential.
Race 2 : research bonus moved here, probably doesn't need lucky, units similar to halflings (as in, bad at melee, good at ranged), no food bonus, no barracks, average interracial modifiers, possibly better growth rates than halflings. This could be the "research while staying on defense" peaceful race.

However, this requires designing the new races and we'll need to actually create art for the new units for the non-halfling one. So it's not trivial.
We should properly discuss it.

We need to decide what the new race should be. (pixies?Fairies? Those could be power producing races though. Something you'd expect to be good at research, idk.)
Then decide what units they get. Then the stats of those units.
Building restrictions.
Finally we'll need to actually create all the necessary art for the citizens and units. I might not be able to to this part alone.

This is my spoiler thread.




Killed that temple dead, man

(July 7th, 2020, 11:12)Mjmd Wrote: Here you go. I got to play around with excel formula's I don't get to use often so I was happy.



For those curious:
Left out civs
Egyptian
French
Korean
Celtic

Left out leader
Genghis Khan

There are two reasons I love this picking method.

1. I don't have to learn the changes for every civ, just the 5 I pick and the 5 the others pick
   
2. When I inevitably lose, I can blame the leader/civ selection I was given.
   

Here's something that I've been working on for a little while now: a writeup of the recent PBEM17 Civ6 Multiplayer game: http://www.sullla.com/Civ6/PBEM17-1.html

Why this game exactly, considering that it's not one that I took part in? Well, The Black Sword kind of blew away the rest of the field in this game and I wanted to figure out how he pulled it off. That led to a lot of repeated reads through his spoiler thread for the game, and eventually I decided that it would be worthwhile to summarize things in more formal written form. This was also a good chance to discuss some of the changes to the Civ6 mechanics in Gathering Storm using the PBEM17 game as an case study. The report runs to five parts and it's focused on the economic side of the gameplay, hopefully providing a textbook example of how to snowball a game from a builder's standpoint.

I reserved some space on the last page in case anyone taking part in the PBEM17 game wants to add some additional thoughts now that it's been over for a few weeks. Let me know and I'll add whatever you want to say into the report.

Here we go again! Let’s see how we can exploit Charriu’s mod to squeeze out a victory

Great Person Log:
#1: Merchant T62 > Trade Mission for 1300 gold (-150g toll to scooter)
#2: Engineer T73 > Rush Mausoleum of Mausolus wonder
#3: Engineer T85 > Bulb Engineering for 1070 beakers (860 raw beakers)
Music Artist > T93 Golden Age #1
#4: Merchant T95 > Trade mission for 1300 gold
#5: Scientist T96 > Bulb Philosophy
#6: Merchant T100 > Trade Mission for 1500 gold
#7: Scientist T102 > bulb Education (1750 beakers)
#8: Scientist T104 > GA #2
#9: Artist T104 > GA #2

Wonder Log (end of turn dates):
T54: Colossus AND Great Lighthouse
T70: Pyramids
T73: Mausoleum of Mausolus
T92: Great Library
T101: National Epic

More thoughts here to come.

Start stuff:

TBS - Mao of Carthage
Cornfalkes - Nebuchadnezzar II of the Dutch
Mr. Cairo - Catherine of Khmer
Commodore - Washington of Ottomans
AutomatedTeller - Stalin of Japan
Scooter - Wang Kon of China

Password is:

If you are playing in this pitboss... kindly back out and never speak of this again 

This is a list of tasks for Milestone III which still require further discussion and a decision to be made before I can start working on them.
I'll cross out the ones that are already implemented into the alpha (feel free to tell if you disagree with the chosen solution of course)

1. Nonhero normal units gain extra MP from levels.
How much? Current plan is +2 at Veteran, +5 at Elite, possibly +10 at Champion. (no bonus for Regular and Ultra Elite).

2. Spell Blast will either be moved up to rare or its usage by the AI further restricted and Spell of Mastery during Time Stop disabled.
This depends mainly on what we'll see how large games with many opponents and huge landmasses plays out. Spell of Mastery might or might not be a necessity to finish those games in an acceptable amount of time. Either way making Spell Blast usage from the AI less frequent is important with more players around who might have access to it.

3. Outpost destruction by spell effects or conquest isn't currently implemented. It might be worth adding it, or might not.

4. Maybe the AI shouldn't break their treaties in the first 6 turns of making them for any reason (other than the player violating the treaty).
This could prevent the annoying case where the AI begs for a wizard's pact because you are too powerful, then breaks it a few turns later because you have Armageddon in play which eventually forces them to. There is abuse potential in this though as it's basically a "curse the AI's cities for 6 turns for free" card, if you did enough damage to not worry about the retaliation that's coming afterwards. (if it's even coming at all, as you didn't trigger a repeat warning war and your relation score might not be low enough for other kinds of wars.)

5. I'm planning to readd Halfling Bowmen. There is no limit to the number of unit types, and while Slingers are obviously better, sometimes you can't afford to wait for the expensive Fighter's Guild and need a unit immediately.

6. Maybe the starting casting skill and power income could be lowered by about 20-40% to account for the addition of Magic Market and, during this milestone, the new building that adds combat skill of which an early tier version that adds a small amount, and a better one that adds more but is expensive are planned.

7. We might or might not want to enable "Auto" to cast spells.
I think it's bad for the flavor of the game (if you're not leading your armies then who is casting spells?), and can be potentially harmful if the AI plays it too well so it definitely needs to be dumber down massively if allowed. It might be annoying to click through three dialog boxes as well (one for confirmation of enabling auto, one to confirm it's not for a single turn, and one to allow spells)

8. Might be nice to get a diplomacy bonus when dispelling from or spell blasting mutual enemies.

9. Currently Vertigo is rendered without transparency. I'm not sure if this looks better or worse than the original.

10. Surveyor only shows terrain bonus now. Any bonus from buildings while looking at a city tile is not included.
I do think this makes better sense (as the surveyor shows you terrain information) but the original game had it included.

11. Death Demons
These were a workaround for an unsolvable issue : summoning into certain unit slots made it impossible for the unit to be a Caster. I'm not sure if we want to keep them as a feature, or revert to the originally intended version of all Demons being a "caster 40" unit.

12. It's now possible to add more effects Mystic Surge can grant, including things that don't exist as a spell, such as "teleportation" or "Doom gaze" etc.

13. Charmed prevents failing resistance rolls. Disintegrate check resistance without making a roll. Following that logic it should ignore Charmed.

14. It might be interesting to give a diplomacy bonus for dispelling curses from cities of other wizards, as long as those curses weren't cast by you. Currently you can't target enemy cities with Disenchant Area to do so.

15. Pandora's Box rules have been changed slightly. Do you prefer the new rules or not?
(New rules give a 50% chance to activate the ability per turn per unit, and at most one unit can activate it each turn.)

16. Blazing March does not buff Fire Breath and or Lightning Breath, maybe it should.
I honestly don't remember if this was ever discussed or not, maybe we decided not to years ago.

17. Not sure where to put the "Info" button but definitely not where it is now. That place will have a "win/lose" button that allows you to end the game (either my retiring, of if you already triggered a surrender from other players then by winning the game instantly.)

18. Chaos Channels doesn't show a chaos enchantment aura, keep as is or change?

19. End of month report could show dispelled global enchantments. (possibly requiring Detect Magic to do so)

20. What if higher difficulty AI got more swordsmen spawned in new outposts? (or maybe even bowmen)
Might be unnecessary as the AI should summon units there to defend the city, assuming it knows Summoning Circle.

21. The original magic Vortex wasn't allowed to turn more than 90 degrees between each tile of movement. Do we want to reimplement this feature, or keep the movement random?

22. The original game has 3 different graphics for city walls in the LBX. Did anyone pay attention to which one is being show when, or do we want to define our own rule for this?

23. Would be nice to have an "ok" button to leave the Wizards and Cities screens but no idea where to put them. Esc on the keyboard works but pretty much everything is doable with a mouse in the game so there shouldn't be exceptions.

24. AI wizards are will be forbidden from warping nodes they haven't discovered yet by having a unit in scouting range during the course of the game (similarly to city curses) in tomorrow's uploaded alpha.
This restriction does not apply to sending spirits to those nodes, as the AI will only do so if the node is no further than 10 (12? Don't remember.) tiles from their nearest city as a separate feature already added earlier.
Should I restrict the AI from sending spirits to unguarded nodes near their territory anyway? I'm afraid it might encourage leaving the nodes undefended way too much, especially in the early game, when land troops are much less likely to have landed on the player's continent to occupy the node (and generally move too slow to actually do it.).
On the other hand, putting a single Spearmen on the node isn't much of a defense anyway and if people get used to not doing that, the AI might actually get the troops there after which you can't simply send your own spirits to toggle it back and send the spearmen that was forgotten earlier.
Please note that the AI does not scout intentionally. The only way they'll discover the node is if they accidentally move nearby or had a reason to go there - the node is unguarded and either land troops are available to occupy it or a spirit can be summoned and sent from the AI's nearby city. So denying the second option might make the AI not find the node at all.

Update : Renamed the thread to simple "bug reports" as alpha testing ended a long time ago.