Civilization Ideas

[frodare]

-- DRAFT IN PROGRESS --

Milestone 1 (Lorebooks)

Lorebooks

• each civilization will have a set of lore books
• obtaining a lore book for a civ will give rep to the player
• lorebooks can be obtained by treasure chests (in toro structures and vanilla), random reward from lord quest, and sold by librarian.
• allow other mods to register books
  ? reasons to collect the sets: achievement, rep bonus, xp drops out
  ? bookshelves for the lorebooks (craftable or built into a structure in the village? One book per shelf?)

Lorebook Types

• civilization lore (collectable sets of 12) (explanations of the civs and negative effects they can cause)
• location hints (location to lost artifact or possibly even structure or nearby resources)
• game hints (includes books from other mods)
• general fiction (random poems / lore / etc)

Milestone 2 (Curses/Blessings)

Negative Reputation Effects

• Gustaberg: player is lifted into the air and dropped (similar to phantom attack from BoP)
• Aquarius: player is damaged by water
• Solaris: player catches fire in direct sunlight
• Lumens: blindness
• Terra: slowness?, or take damage when on a dirt block?
• Wolf: turn into a wolf?, or take damage in moonlight?

Curses

• build using the potion system
• will only be applied for a limited time, however will be reapplied when in the civ's boundaries
• effect duration and possibly strength are affected by how negative the player's rep is

Positive Reputation Effects

• Gustaberg: speed? strength?
• Aquarius: grants water breathing
• Solaris: instant health
• Lumens: fire resistance
• Terra: speed (mining speed?)
• Wolf: night vision

Milestone 3 (Assassins)

Assassin Entities

• start with a generic assassin with some sort of identifiable item, like the capes on the guards
• Gustaberg: Flying Assassin (winged guy who swoops down to attack)
• Aquarius: Merman Assassin (will attack if you're in the water)? Pirate Assassin?
• Solaris: Paladin Assassin
• Lumens: Primitive Assassin (fire always makes me think of club-wielding, fur-clad brutes)
• Terra: Witch Assassin
• Wolf: Night Assassin

Assassin Impact

• the lower your rep, the more frequent the assassin attacks
• when killed by an assassin, your rep goes less negative so that eventually the assassinations will end
• killing an assassin will have a chance to drop his weapon or a potion
• killing an assassin will not affect rep

Milestone 4 (Deities)

Deities

? maybe one of the win conditions is defeat all of the deities and bring peace to all of the civs
? fightable only when a villain
? spawn in a large structure / castle

• having a complete set of lore books (12) for a civ will open portal to deity

Reasons to have Negative Reputation

• quests from another civ asking the player to spy, steal, or attack that civ
• only way to fight some future mini-bosses
  ? civs are at war with another civ

---

Ah, ok. I also have a suggestion about what happens when you become enemies to a civilisation: Curses and Assassins

Gustaberg, Aquarius, and Solaris would put a curse on you, while the others send an assassin. Assassins might spawn in villages of all civs, not just the one you enfuriated.

Terra: Sends a´ Witch Assassin, invisible and attacking you with potion arrows

Gustaberg: Air Curse: When you reach a heigth of 180, there is a 10% chance you get an levitation effect. The same for 190, 200, ... , 260

Lumens: Paladin Assassin, visible, attacking with a fire sword and clad in armor

Aquarius: Water Curse: You take damage when touching water

Solaris: Sun Curse: At noon, there is a 30% chan´ce to get hit by a fireball out of nowhere

Wolf: Night Assassin, Invisible, very fast, attacks using an Obsidian sword (might drop heavily damaged), blinds you on a full or new moon

I also have a pantheon prepared (from a while ago for a similar project that didn´t get past the planning stage), which might be useful to flesh this out. All civs use this pantheon, but think of different ones as the most important ones, reflecting their values. So here would be my idea of the main god of each civ:

Terra: Rovwelord, Genus Locii of the Earth and God of Stability, Strength and Perceverance

Gustaberg: The Cloud Chicken, Trickster God of Joy, Luck, and Prosperity

Lumens: Pyrron, the Destroyer-Creator, God of Change, Ambition, and Cooking

Aquarius: The Ancient Guardian, God of the Sea and the Rain, Wave-That-Sinks-The-Ship-Yet-Saves-The-Crew, Saviour-Traitor, The Salty One

Solaris: Sol Amans, The Loving Sun, God of Generosity, Love, and Wrathful Revenge

Wolf: Gray-Night, The Protecting Wolf, Silver Light in the Dark, God of Hospitality, and Protection from Danger. Also Blood-Night, God of the Vengeful Hunt

What do you think? Does that fit to what little you have already?

~CawCawDrakon

https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/toroquest?comment=20

[zeriley]

There are some great ideas in this. I love the idea of assassins or even a bounty being placed on your head if you're enemies with a civilization. We would have to change it so that once you were killed by the assassin or someone claimed your bounty, you would have to go back to neutral rep, so that it's not just an endless cycle of having assassins after you. We could start with a simple assassin that wears armor in the color of the civilization they represent, and then evolve them into more diverse assassins later.

I'm not a big fan of the curses, unless they were very temporary like the elder guardian's mining fatigue.

The idea of deities for each civilization is intriguing, but most of the gameplay mechanics I can think of for them would be redundant to the village lord. For instance, donating stuff to the god of Gustaberg would give you Fortune-like effects where no matter what pickaxe you use, you have a chance of getting double or triple drops. Which we could either fold that idea into positive reputation for each civilization (positive rep with Gustaberg grants luck) or have two systems of reputation. Reputation with Gustaberg allows you to buy weapons at a discount from the shopkeeper, reputation with The Cloud Chicken (love that name, by the way) would grant you more luck, but no reputation with the civilization.

That would give you a choice to make when donating any goods you may have. Do you want reputation with the village or the deity?

Certainly some interesting ideas. Most of them seem feasible, as well. What do the rest of you think?

[frodare]

I like the idea of the curses, but yeah, they should be temporary. I was thinking of maybe just hacking into the potion effect system. Love the idea of a curse that would not let you touch water. Maybe you get the curse when crossing into a province like a beacon, but the effects would last for a minute or so after leaving.

[frodare]

@zeriley you lost me on the reputation stuff, are you thinking of expanding the rep system beyond the 6 civs?

[zeriley]

Yeah, that's exactly what I had in mind. Go through a village in a province and it'd be just like passing within so many blocks of an ocean temple. How long does mining fatigue last? Five minutes? I guess it could be an effect that lasts proportional to the amount of negative rep. Between -10 and -100, it would last for a minute; between -100 and -500, it would last for three minutes; under -500, it would last for five minutes.

[frodare]

I think we need a reason to have negative rep. In all of our play testing, no one has ever wanted to go negative. I think we need to figure that out first since there is not reason to all this cool stuff if no one would get it.

[zeriley]

I'm not thinking of doing anything with reputation at the moment. Was just thinking through what gameplay mechanics could be added by having deities. Most of the stuff I could think of could be accomplished by folding them into the village lord.

However, if we wanted to do deities, we could do rep for the civ and rep for the deity of that civ, separately. So that it gives you a choice of how you want to be rewarded: cheaper and more access to goods or gameplay benefits like an ever-present fortune effect.

[zeriley]

Or we could just have deities just to give the village some more structures and more depth. Could be purely cosmetic, but I'd rather it have some gameplay effect.

[frodare]

They could take the place of the village trophies. The would take quite a bit of work though.

[zeriley]

Yeah, there's a lot of work in adding deities with gameplay mechanics.

• the structure itself, which it sounds like CawCaw has already made
• a new priest villager type
• implementing the positive and negative rep (oooh, idea, you have negative rep with Cloud Chicken and sometimes diamonds turn into coal when mined)
• quests the priest can give you (province quests are exclusive; if you have a quest from the village lord, you can't have a quest with the priest, and vice versa)
• ways to lose rep with that deity

[CawCawDrakon]

Is there a way to add lorebooks for each civ? That was how I thought to implement stuff like religion, politics, history and so on. Maybe each civ gets their own bookseller who can sell these books?
I would write them, finish the structures (I only have them as schematics though, heard they might be incompatible?) but sadly my programming experience is only in R, so I can´t really help with the other stuff.

[zeriley]

That's why I think some enemy structures should be tied to civilizations. When you clear out a Mage Tower, you would lose reputation with one of the civilizations. So then you have to weigh the consequences of getting the loot from the mage tower or keeping your rep.

Making that obvious that you are going to lose rep for that, though, will be difficult.

[frodare]

Certainly. I am not sure how difficult it would be but I will look into to. I was going to look into how vanilla books anyway for the quest system. Would the lorebooks add to the game play?

[CawCawDrakon]

Maybe reading them for the first time gives a small rep bonus? Or they contain stuff that might be usefull - like pieces of an in-game wiki, to keep stuff immersive.
Personally, I mainly play creative and turn survival for some artifact hunting & collecting, and since lorebooks count as artifacts, for me they would definitely add to the gameplay.
One mod that might be useful to look into for lorebook implementation: Father Toast´s Lost Books
That one gave me the idea actually

[zeriley]

Oooh, I like that. One of the books could mention something about a nearby Bastion's Lair or a fabled deposit of diamonds. If we can crack the nut for maps to mansions and monuments, a map could "fall out" of one of the lorebooks.

[CawCawDrakon]

About negative rep needing some reason: The assassins, if strong enough, count as minibosses. Some people would definitely invoke a civs wrath just to fight a new boss

[frodare]

We could have the rep boost, have them lead players to hidden artifacts in the map, have sets of books that give achievements when fully collected ... and much more :)

[zeriley]

Maybe if you die with or destroy one of the tools given to you by the lord or one of the lorebooks in your inventory, you'll lose rep for losing the civilization's stuff. Maybe there are other ways of accidentally losing rep.

[CawCawDrakon]

I think it might be useful to have multiple lists of lorebooks, depending on where you can get them, like this:

1. Common Books
   These you can get anywhere, general books, general game hints, lore that all civs share, etc.

2.-7. Civ Books
Books that are unique to a civ. A book might be in multiple civ book lists. Show the views of each civ

8. Heretic Books
   Rare and only found in dungeons. Quests from Booksellers to obtain them?

[zeriley]

@CawCawDrakon I think that's basically the idea we came up with above, with having different types of lorebooks.

Also, @frodare I've come back to the idea of turning the books into the village lord, because if you read the book outside of a province, what civ do you get rep for? If it's a civilization's book, it would make sense to give that rep to the appropriate civilization, but for generic ones, where would it go? If we have to turn them in to the village lord, then the rep would be given at that point, and that donation system is already built.

From there, maybe the village lord can have a bibliography tab in his GUI where you can re-read any books you have donated to that civilization (not province).

Sidenote: if you donate one civ's book to another civ, maybe you can lose rep with the intended civ and gain boosted rep from the civ donated to.

[CawCawDrakon]

Wouldn´t it make more sense to have another npc for these book donations? An archivist or something, with the same donation system as the village lord, just with books. Or you donate the books to the village lord and the archivist has the bibliography tab

[zeriley]

It may make more sense, but we can't get too ambitious. We all have full-time jobs as programmers and it's important to start small or else features will never be finished. Creating another entity with another GUI with more AI and a building for him to live in, potentially, creates a lot more work for us. Start small and enhance down the road is the path to success for us.

[CawCawDrakon]

Ah, that makes sense.

[zeriley]

In light of that, please don't get discouraged if our first versions of the features you have asked for don't live up to your expectations. This is an iterative process and we will slowly enhance each feature of the mod over time.

[CawCawDrakon]

Of course! But looking at the what you have done so far, I doubt it will dissapoint. Take your time and keep up the great work, etc, etc

[frodare]

My vote is to make the lorebooks craftable into into a complete set (so maybe 9 instead of 12) which could be placed as a block. At first, all this would do is give you rep, xp and a collector's item (like the ender dragon egg). Maybe we could add something if place all the book sets together. Zane beat me to it, this might be mostly due to me being lazy ;)

[zeriley]

But what about the non-civilization lore books?

[frodare]

They would just be there for interest and hits / in game wiki replacement. Maybe in the future they could even have quests unrelated to a civ.

[CawCawDrakon]

Apropo "Unrelated to a civ": Is there an easy way to implement nomads or neutral trading caravans, moving through the world, from village to village? Alternatively, those could spawn around some kind of way-stone structure in the wilderness as well as in villages, just implying travel? What do you think?

[frodare]

@CawCawDrakon that is getting back to some of our original ideas! I think it is possible so some degree. An easier place to start might be giving a village a one in six chance to spawn neutral with no added structures. We could then add a chance of spawning caravan mobs (with lamas of course:) on lines between known provinces and neutral villages. For that matter, we could spawn them between provinces.

[zeriley]

Oooooh, and some of those nomads won't trade with you if you have positive rep with certain civilizations, and they'll have really good items or good deals or something. That gives us a reason to go negative.

[CawCawDrakon]

@zeriley This would also fit the lore I have written so far about Aquarius and Lumens engaging in slave-trading (unless you don´t want that)! So Aquarius and Lumens (and maybe one or two of the others) are enemies to the nomads, while Wolf is an ally to the nomads (because of their hospitality - in the lore, Wolf actually would be the only civ to let the nomads set up camp within their village walls. Impossible to implement (or at the very least not worth the effort), just a tidbit of lore)

[zeriley]

Ah, that's cool. I have no problem with slave trading. I mean, in the game... obviously, personally, I have many problems with slave trading.

Hahaha, would be funny if as the nomads passed by one of the non-friendly villages, the villagers would throw snowballs or eggs at the passing caravan.

[CawCawDrakon]

Another thing about the non-civ lorebooks: these gods are not the only ones in that Pantheon. So, if the civ-books open a portal to their main deities, the others might send you to other gods.

Also, I don't think bookshelves are worth the trouble: Bibliocraft will upgrade eventually, and anyone interested in collecting books will have that

[Hypsandar]

Frodare, you post really great suggestions! I'd love to see the in the mod.