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Hiliadan

Major
Jun 17, 2018
614
6
This is a continuation of this thread on the old forum: https://aow.triumph.net/forums/topic/increasing-the-interest-of-multi-race-strategies/

Context
In most games I’ve seen (in PBEM), players stick with their starting race and most often than not, try to get Monoculture with 8 cities of the same race. Migrating cities is easy, and getting evil alignement is also a generally good strategy with no drawback: empire boost, Pure Evil Empire Quest (EQ), possibility to plunder, raze and migrate. Monoculture is very good as it gives three free T3. Multiculture on the other hand is pretty lacklustre with 5 support from 5 different races for a difficulty much higher than Monoculture (try to get 5 different races!! on a small map, that’s basically impossible and even in larger maps, it’s pretty complicated, except if you play 4vs4 and all allies have different races).

You gain a lot of advantages from playing only 1 race with racial governance (RG) and high race happiness providing morale bonus for your units. You gain no advantage from playing multiple races, except your increased production options and thus potential higher adaptability. But except if you want to get flyers and you play one race with no flyer (and thus you want Elf or Draconian or Halfling cities), there is no real need for such increased diversity of units.

I think it’s a shame game mechanics favour playing only 1 race like that. The game would be more diversified and fun if it was more viable to play more races in a given game.

How could the incentives to play multiple races be boosted?
1. Better rewards from Multiculture: each unit would be a support OR a T3
Or they could have abilities like Meditate, Volunteer, High Morale, stat boosts, etc.

2. Lower difficulty of Multiculture: needs 3 races or 4 races
Might seems like a bad idea because in team games, would be pretty easy, but in practice, that's still quite an investment to transfer a city to another player and have him absorb it. Also, team games are an edge case, relatively rare.


3. Increase the time needed to migrate by 1 turn for all migration
My favourite idea, pretty neat and make Mab’s Boon more useful. However, at first sight, we didn't find a way to implement it with Zaskow because there is no parameter setting the minimum time required for migration (currently 1 turn, and we want it to be 2 turns). I just thought about an alternative: doubling all migration time through an invisible Avatar skill which does the opposite of Swift Migration. To be tested.

4. Create a multiracial race governance
Unfortunately that does not seem moddable.
The idea would be that this RG would increase only if you have more than 1 race in your cities. E.g. X points every turn where X is the number of races in your cities. It would provide Empire-wide boost to economy or military as current RG (e.g. all Irregulars get +5 HP or all cities get +5% all income, etc.).

5. Create abilities based on multirace stacks or units
Not sure how to mod it.
E.g. +100 happiness for each unit of different race in the stack, +1 melee if a friendly unit of different race is adjacent in tactical map, etc.

Several people (gladis, Rodmar) were against as it seems more logical that units from different races do not like each other.

6. Make it more rewarding to get cities from new races
Give (temporary?) bonus to (the first?) cities outside your starting race that you get into your empire. That could be achieved with a new Empire Quest which is triggered when you get 2 races in your empire for instance.

7. Change totally the Migration mechanism
When Migrating a city, it razes it and gives you a Settler of that race for free. (see initial idea from Jolly Joker here: https://aow.triumph.net/forums/topic/increasing-the-interest-of-multi-race-strategies/#post-249098) which means that if you want to go for Monoculture, you need to produce the Settlers of your race yourself.

8. Make Migration much more costly
Migration costs gold and the racial happiness malus is 150 (as for Razing or Plundering). It could also possibly gives -400 city happiness for 10 turns to the newly migrated city.

9. Lower rewards for Monoculture
Monoculture could yield weaker units, or 2 instead of 3 T3, or just no units at all and instead an economic bonus.

10. Add morale malus for cities beyond 3 cities of the same race
All cities now start with a base modifier of “-100 vast empire”.
Add 3 unique buildings called “Source city #1-3” that gives cities +100 city happiness (or better would be if the “Source city” buildings could remove the “-100 vast empire” malus). Technically the buildings are like Beacons.

That way, you tackle two issues at once:
– beyond 3 cities, your extra cities have lower morale and it’s not as easy as before to just expand forever
– you are encouraged to play multiple races as you can build 3 “Source city” for EACH race

11. Lose race happiness when losing, disbanding or killing Builders and Settlers
I don't think it's moddable though.
 
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1. Each time I receive those recruit level support units (priests), I think like "meh, are those really are the embassy they sent me?" I would better have ambassadors from the different factions, and someone you can't dispatch easily:
elite rank, temporary faction penalty if killed, eventually volunteer.

4/5/6/10. Monoculture and Pluriculture could both have happiness/morale modifiers based on variety of factions:
Monoculture:
- small morale penalty for every dominant faction unit based on the number of non dominant faction units in the stack (e.g. -25/"stranger", capped at -100 (4-5 non dominant faction units, applied to 2-1 dominant faction units);
- small diplomatic faction malus;
- small happiness penalty and higher integration (etc) costs for non dominant faction cities;
Pluriculture:
- small morale bonus for every unit based on the number of factions represented in the stack (e.g. +25/faction, capped at +100 (4 factions));
- small diplomatic faction bonus;
- small happiness penalty for other factions if a single faction is over-represented in term of city number;

7/8. Yeah. A way to increase the cost in gold and time is to use settlers, but automated people transfer could work (like the necromantic spell). Moreover, the number of produced settlers could depend on the city's size:
Automated way:
- upon migrating a city, nearest elligible, owned city from the new faction is depleted by the amount of colonists;
- at the same time, nearest elligible city from the old faction (whatever the owner) gains new people (a fraction based on distance);
- this could occur immediatly afer a number of turns has ellapsed, as currently, or this could be progressive, with a sum of gold and a number of people being lost/transferred on each turn. If the process is cancelled, progressive cost is lost but migration is reset to nigh. (Currently, migration is also reset but cost is refund I believe, even if half the time has ellapsed)
Semi-automated way:
-upon migrating a city, nearest elligible, owned city from the new faction has a number of settlers queued in production, and they all have to be produced and moved to the migrated city in order to complete the migration process.
- each time the migrated city receives and uses a settler, nearest elligible city from the old faction (whatever the owner) gains new people...

Furthermore, should you migrate the last city of a faction, you could earn the diplomatic faction modifier "Genocidal" that would apply to any other faction (but yours), and to any other player (but pure evil aligned?)
 
Rodmar, please think about existing mechanisms, otherwise all the proposals are not do-able.

temporary faction penalty if killed
Not do-able, there is no way to add penalties if a unit is killed, except through victory conditions but I don't think we can add them in a RMG map, in the middle of the map.

based on the number of non dominant faction units in the stack
We can't count units from a race (please use the right words, it's race, not faction; it's absorption, not integration, multiculture not pluriculture).

capped at -100
We can't cap morale modifiers.

higher integration (etc) costs for non dominant faction cities
Might be do-able but would require a lot of work and I'm not even sure we can tie a migration modifier to a race. If we could, we could add 9 skills increasing absorption costs for each race, and then add 9 Monoculture racial EQ, each one giving the player who fulfils it the 8 skills related to the races he didn't reach.

if a single faction is over-represented in term of city number
We can't use the number of cities per race to give "real time" bonus/malus, only EQ when a threshold is reached.

Moreover, the number of produced settlers could depend on the city's size:
Unclear what that means. It's not possible to build multiple units per turn at a city, and not possible to require multiple units to interact.

nearest elligible, owned city from the new faction is depleted by the amount of colonists;
Not possible, except through a spell like the Necro spell but then it's unrelated to settling and migration.
(population, not colonists, stop playing PF maybe :p)

nearest elligible city from the old faction (whatever the owner) gains new people (a fraction based on distance);
Same as previous one.

city from the new faction has a number of settlers queued in production, and they all have to be produced and moved to the migrated city in order to complete the migration process
Impossible to have multiple units interact to unlock strategic effects.

should you migrate the last city of a faction
Impossible to track "the last city" of a race.
 
1. Better rewards from Multiculture: each unit would be a support OR a T3
- They are already supports?!, Maybe add something like the proposed abilities (ressurrect etc. also possible)

2. Lower difficulty of Multiculture: needs 3 races or 4 races
- yeah, also see the problem that players might exchange their cities in team games to achieve the quest. On the other hand, same could be done to achieve Monoculture.

3. Increase the time needed to migrate by 1 turn for all migration
- your idea is good.

4. Create a multiracial race governance
- yeah I think we could think easier ideas.

5. Create abilities based on multirace stacks or units
I am basically against it because it would buff MC-strategy. So it should work only on produced Units. But doesn´'t seem logical either.

6. Make it more rewarding to get cities from new races
Does only buff the 1st Player achieving this - so not a good solution I think.

7. Change totally the Migration mechanism
- interesting idea. So you would Need to send the settler of the 'foreign' race to another settle spot?

8. Make Migration much more costly
- good idea.

9. Lower rewards for Monoculture
- yeah, Maybe only 1 T3 + 1 Cav + 1 Pikeman + 1 Infantry etc.

10. Add morale malus for cities beyond 3 cities of the same race
- also good idea. would Need to think about it more.

11. Lose race happiness when losing, disbanding or killing Builders and Settlers
- don't understand, doesn't have something to do with migrating?!
 
Unclear what that means. It's not possible to build multiple units per turn at a city, and not possible to require multiple units to interact.

Not possible, except through a spell like the Necro spell but then it's unrelated to settling and migration.

7. Change totally the Migration mechanism
- interesting idea. So you would Need to send the settler of the 'foreign' race to another settle spot?

8. Make Migration much more costly
- good idea.

I'll elaborate.
  1. Settlers could be used to transfer population between two cities (same race) at a cost (usual gold and time to produce a settler) and eventually at an efficiency (you loose 2000 pop when producing a settler, but in the end, the destination city would only gain a limited number of pop, e.g. 1500). This would be useful if you want to move your capital into a more central or suitable location. The operation would take one turn once at the location (the same as building an outpost).
  2. Those new settlers could also be used in a new migration process: send a number of settlers from the elected race (whatever their production city) to another city that is populated by another race. There would be no further cost nor time needed to migrate the city, as they would be already important. When the last needed settler unloads its crew at the migrated city (after one turn), then the city has migrated for all purpose, and original game mechanics can "resume". These partial migrations wouldn't add population to the city under migration each time a new settler arrives. When the migration process is over, a number of settlers of the evicted race could spawn at the migrated city; they would be independent and "roaming", and could be bought by the migrating empire or any other one, to increase the population of a city of theirs or migrate another city, or build an outpost.
I recon that the process I depict at point 2 is perhaps not doable, but at least, you get the idea: add two new abilities to Settlers: Populate and Migrate, or only one ability those effect depends on wether the destination city is populated by same race or not.

Lesser impact implementation:
I all works as desired, I'd see the following process:
- city A produced a settler of its race;
- settler is moved to city B and ordered to "Populate" city B;
- on next turn: if city B is of same race as city A, then increases its population;
OR
- on next turn: if city B is of another race, then migrate instantly city B to settler's race (alternativelly, initiate the original migration process and add a few turns, so that current information windows can be used, or for balance reason);
- when migration is achieved (i.e. not cancelled) spawn one independent, wandering settler of race B.

As forme, migration couldn't be cancelled, but the one would have plenty of turns to change one's mind (all the travel time between both cities).
Note, that those settlers would be normal settler, not special ones. Hence, they could be used for another purpose before they actually initiate the populate/migrate action.

Greater impact implementation:
Same as above; only the number of needed settlers would change. For instance, this could be one settler per tier of city development. (1 for outpost, 2 for village, etc). Also, the number of spawned settlers would change the same way.


No, I don't play PF, and I haven't played for 1 month :(.
 
I am totally new to the modding (reading through the manual currently and trying things). What about adding a structure to cities, which adds to its functionality with each race in the nation. The final goal could be adding teleporters which would help immensely transporting units instead of providing new ones. Normally when you own 8 cities of 8 nations, your are not short of units but lack the time to get them in time, where would want to use them.

It could be some sort of market or exchance (mana to gold perhaps?) Or it could add to the viewable area around cities, or simply add resources at an increasing rate?