Neutral or just Faking It

from Elemental Forums

Coming out of the thread on cursed items, had some thoughts about neutral critters. Usual disclaimers, Sorry if already talked about or im tossing it too early/late, such and such.

First on Really neutral critters.

Being able to actually create neutral critters would be nice. Make a troll, then turn it loose in some other empires back yard. You don't pay upkeep on it, you don't control it, and its not flagged as being yours. All you did was make it and send it forth to wreck bloody chaos. This could let you mess with someone without actually having to declare war. If a zone is contested you could make some pretty mean critters and turn em loose in the area to keep others back. And since you are not paying upkeep on the critter you can afford to go all out and really make some vicious stuff.

This could let you get involved in a fight that you can't actually afford to commit yourself to. Obviously, if you release a neutral troll in the middle of a border between you and some other rival, he can figure out it was you. Unless that kind of critter appears in the area naturally, then it might be a bit harder. Or if you released a critter that hapenes somewhere naturally, and there are 3-4 borders right near there, no one will be able to point to you as the culprit. This could let you strike at someone without inviting retaliation.

Although when releasing these critters, you would have to be worried about them heading straight back in and attack your own troops too. And if the person who kills it has the body brought in for examination and has teched Troll Anatomy and Physiology or Magical Forensics, then he might be able to figure out who made it.

What these things had to do with cursed items is, if you could make a neutral critter and put it in its natural habitat, and put a cursed magic item on it, if a rival hero kills the critter, he is pretty likley to use the item since the critter looked like it was there naturally.

 

Second on Faking It neutral critters.

In civ4, i loved the privaters. They were gunpowder era ships, fairly weak, but with one important distinction. They were not flying a flag. They were always colored grey, not thier owner's color. You could use them to attack other nations without declaring war. They were weak enough that they could not pose a serious threat to anyone, but they could very annoying. Obviously, other players could see through it instantly since they moved on thier owner's turn, but with simultaneous turns, such things could be pretty useful.

Not just ships either, back in the middle ages, when a knight wanted to go out and commit dastardly deedsor other actions he did not want attributed to him would cover up or blaken thier coat of arms to prevent identifcation. Having a few units capable of such things would be very intresting. Want to weaken someone, but can't afford a war with them? Grab a unit of brigands and send them across to pillage and raze structures. Want to support another nation, but can't afford to antagonize thier attacker? Send in a team of loyal knights who are willing to strip any identification off themselves and send them in to fight. Or even better, make a secret deal with another channeler to send your blackened troops through his land to attack a mutual enemy. He can claim they just slipped through, you can claim nothing to do with it.

Of course, only a few units would actually be able to pull this off. Brigands and highwaymen would be naturals at it, plus they would be able to sneak around, but they are not exactly the finest fighters around and are likley to lose any serious confrontation. On the other end of the spectrum, you can have the elite knights, completly loyal to you, would die under torture before revealing who they serve. They would not be the sneakiest, but they could pack a punch and keep that agressive empire from the north from gobbling up your weaker neighbors.

Or the most sneaky case. Say you have a weak northern neighbor. Beyond him lies a large aggresive empire. You like having your weak neighbor as a buffer and don't want to spend your resources constantly fighting along that border. However, you can't just ally with the neighbor, that massive empire might come after you. If the empire sees a sudden influx of knights without flags in the weak neighbor, it dosen't take a lot of thought to figure out who is sending them. So you make a secret treaty with your neighbor. You send some of your loyal knights north to the border. But instead of usng blank shields, your neighbors lends them his colors! The border holds much better with your knights there, the empire is clueless as to your involvment, and you are only paying for a couple knights to keep it that way. Your weaker neighbor has his border secure, but now he has powerful knights loyal to you mixed in with his troops. A very dangerous situation for him.

Having some flexiblity in troops identifying themselves could be incredibly useful and create very intresting situations.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

10,873 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't know if I'd be too thrilled with this in Elemental, but that's just because I hated privateers for this reason:

They were weak enough that they could not pose a serious threat to anyone, but they could very annoying.

Barbarians are irritating enough, at least they don't have some alternate agenda. The only thing I don't like is that at that point where you can create units that cannot be identified, there really isn't any point in having regular units. Especially since we create units in Elemental, there wouldn't be anything stopping you (except gold i guess....) from adding the "black cloak" in order to maintain anonymity.

I wouldn't mind hiring those annoying barbarians to do that sort of thing I suppose. It's just the fact of being able to build an endless supply of unidentifiable units would get unbelievably irritating very quickly.. 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Mentioned a fix for that. Privaterrs were pretty weak in civ4. They lost to any of the warships you could have at that time. I figured the same thing would apply here. Most of your blacked out troops would be weak and expensive. Brigands and such. The only strong hidden troops would be those loyal knights, but they are expensive and rare.

Most units would not have this option. Peasent spearmen are all generic anyway, and are useless without someone giving them orders. Kinda hard to be sneaky with that sort of unit. If you send them in alone they desert, if you keep them in a big group, you need banners for commanding them anyway. Most units simply would not be capable of the kind of subterfuge nessecary to pull this off.

The idea is to limit it to at most 2-3 different units and for the units to be expensive and/or weak to keep people from simply building armys. They would specialists recruited for a specific purpose.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I suppose one mechanism for making wandering monsters would be if your normal summons could become neutral when their upkeep runs out. You could manipulate it, move it to a neutral location first, then cancel it's upkeep. But you can't gain any exp from killing them, or a reduced amount, to prevent spamming cheap ones for a mana->exp conversion.
It's interesting, but there would still be the odd problem of balance and costs... perhaps one option would be to flag them as 'confused' and have a spell can be cast in battle to capture them, perhaps with a scaling cost. That way it would seem like a bad idea to lose them, unless you knew the enemy had low mana reserves and couldn't banish/capture them.

 

Also, privateers and things. In Civ4 - fall further mod they have lots more units like that. They can work well... but sometimes they're very annoying and obviously from a certain race. - perhaps there should be a way of identifying them, so if there's a certain unit guarding an outpost your true intentions and colours will be revealed and you'd take a diplomacy hit/start a war. Because then you'd use them to attack in neutral territory, rather than having bandit armys sieging the castle... which doesn't really make any sense.

The most annoying thing I found was that allies with a open borders pact would destroy your troops... rush in with hunters and attack your army of baby spiders before they'd tasted their first human. Very sad... meant I had to refuse any pact when I had an army of spiders... which was very annoying. (unless I made them remove the hiddon nationality, but then they're not able to attack as well). So I'd suggest they'd be hidden while inside your castle... which would add a fun use to them. If your honor guard can disguise themselves as brigands, why not as farmers? It would make some attacks more risky and add an element of surprise. Especially if they're visible in any tile but your cities as "brigand" and then just add an extra digit to the population counter inside a city. Have a city with 5009 people in it? maybe you'd not rush in with your single scouting party and attempt to take it.

Also, I like them being strong, but definately not spammable. (one option is for them to have limits... some could be imposed simply by making them have exponentially increasing costs... first hidden troop costs 50, then 100, 200, 400, 800... (or 1x normal upkeep, then 2, 4, 8, 16 or 1x,2x,3x,4x...) etc. You may start off and have one or two pikemen for defence and to pick off scouts... eventually you'd replace them with death knights... but still you would find it harder to field more. (in this case I don't know what would work better... if it's a flat cost, you'd just churn them out, if it's based on unit cost and scales, you'd start making 1 deathknight then switch to militia (because 16x 10 is alot cheaper than 16 x 1000), if it is increased upkeep you'd make all deathknights... because the upkeep probably wouldn't scale with the training costs, or would probably be smaller either way.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

All good ideas, as usual. You picked it apart and found fixes for all the flaws. And for the knights with hidden coat-of-arms, i was thinking they would show up as knights, they would just have a single default color scheme for the models and would have the owner name on them replaced with "unknown". You know they are knights, you just don't know who they belong too.

Although being able to disguise as peasents would be pretty cool. You would really need to limit the number of units capable of that though or everyone would just do that and no one would be able to tell what was defending a city.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I think if you want to hurt another civilization it should all be done by way of espionage, that you don't see happening on the map. As Dr. Franknfurter said, the most annoying thing is when you know who it is but you can't stop them. It's ridiculous. Allies hurting you? why would they do that? they are indirectly hurting themselves.. But they do, because there isn't repercussions for them to do so ;P

I mean, most likely, there's going to be a unit like this in the game. And maybe, Stardock will get it right. But imo CivIV did not.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Sure there are repercussions. If you know who did it, then stop being thier ally and smack them around. That or players are likley to earn a rep as being trust worthy or not.