On Finding Shards

I have to say, my biggest question by far is how someone who is as familiar with the english language as you clearly are could misspell "shard" as "shrad" every single time?  

More on topic, I'm not sure I like the idea because of mainly one problem: the better a player is doing, the better chance they have of finding more shards (and thus becoming even more powerful) than players who got off to a slower start. It could turn into one real big snowball effect.

I also think that once you find/capture a shard, it should be yours - at least until someone else wrests it from your control. It would be really frustrating to lose whole armies or, after devoting resources to taking a shard, have it turned over to another channeler. To me it would be a case of an interesting game mechanic causing more frustration than fun. And, I get the impression that shards are going to be map objects - you won't be taking them home to your channeler. Could be explained as shards being too big to carry easily, but it's also necessary for gameplay: If you can hoard all your shards with your channeler, enemies can only take control of your shards by destroying you (and vice versa).

I do like the idea of hidden shards though. I'm not sure how it would work, though. I mean judging from screenshots shards seem big and shiny, hard to miss. It would be awkward if I need to send a scout to comb through some grassland in order to find a large, glowing object right where my army had just passed through... Any ideas how this could be implemented if shards are map objects?

Thanks for the reply.  In answer to your first question- its not really a mystery.  I am a horrible speller.

I share your concern about a snowball effect (stronger players finding more shards and becomming even stronger) but this will tend to happen with just about any system.  If anything, making them harder to find will slow this process down -not speed it up.  Also encourages world exploration early in the game.

-I also understand your concern about introducing frustrating elements.  I personally like games with some randomness where I am not fully in charge of everything and, knowing this, making plans accordingly.  Mine might be a minority oppinion.  That's fine.

-I am sad to hear that the shards may be big unmovable objects on the map.  I imagined that the channeler would need direct contact with the crystals. I think it would be neat to move them into big, highly defended wizard towers, or maybe just hide them in an odd corner of the world and use them when the time is right.

-ideas on how to hide them on the map?  I was thinking of just making them not visible until (whatever the mechanism) they are discovered.  At that point they could be visable to anyone who could see that portion of the map.

Cheers

Ok then! Although I disagree, based on your posts you seem to be a better speller than the average american. Anyways - is it possible for you to change the title of the thread, though? People will probably take this thread more seriously if Shards is spelled correctly in the title.    

Point taken. I guess either way it would depend on the details of how its implemented. I think that the two things that should determine a unit's chance of finding a shard should be scouting skill and magic affinity.

I agree, actually. I like a degree of randomness, but where randomness is involved needs to be carefully considered. Good randomness doesn't frustrate me - it excites me. Poor randomness makes me load to a previous save. If I discovered a shard with my giant army of doom, and it all of a sudden deserts - I would load. If I discover a shard and for some reason my troops hand it over to my sworn enemy, I would load. On the other hand if one of my troops discovers a shard, accidentally triggering an appropriate random spell of moderate power (beneficial or detrimental), I'd take the effects into account and keep playing.

I'm glad they're unmovable. If you can hoard them wherever you please, nobody could ever wrest control of a shard away from you. Conquering enemies' shards should be a viable way to weaken them, while strengthening yourself. Another problem with being able to hoard them is that whoever deals the killing stroke will almost invariable gain possession of ALL that channeler's shards. Personally, I'd rather that every invader have the opportunity to take control over said players shards as they take territory.

Yeah. I realized that I was thinking too much about how the shards look in the screenshots in the media section (big and glowy, in large structures) - as in very hard to miss. But then I realized that they're symbolic representations, not to scale, and the structures can be passed off as being built once you find the shard.

Also, I think that some shards should be visible, requiring no exploration - but should be heavily defended, probably by beasts. 

I think obtain control of a shard should be possible through a variety of measures, which you have listed above.  Some examples could be:

• Casting a spell that "finds" one.  This would likely be useful on very large maps where easy exploration is not possible.  Whether you could actually "get" the shard versus just know the location is up for debate, but given good play balacing I could see either option possible (obviously casting a spell to get a shar would not be a trivial task at all!).
  
• Defeating the shard's guardian(s).  This could be something amazingly tough (think dragon) or a huge group of tough fighters.
• Diplomacy could land you a shard, assuming you didn't have the military might but did have the diplomatic saavy/resources to get this done and some sentient being had access to one.
  
• You could perform a quest that allows you access to one.
• You defeat another player that has control over one.
• You could simply find one through exploring early on or start with one at the beginning of the game (unless you always start a game with a shard normally).

I don't think all shards should be easy to obtain, but neither should they *only* be obtained through warfare.  This is a strategy game, and if you can only do military conquest to get shards it would seem to defeat the multiple ways of winning a game, much like how GalCiv2 allows you to win through multiple paths.

It would be interesting to know if it's required that your channeler be physically present in order to harness the power of the shard.  It would be a cool game mechanic, forcing you to shift the channeler's influence away from other areas to improve things in the long run.  Or maybe you could control a shard, but can't take full advantage of its abilities until your channeler goes out there.  Fun stuff to ponder.

I figured it would be similar to the nodes of MoM.  You would find them, but their magic power draws the strongest of beasts to guard it.  So you have the first trouble of just capturing it.  I liked in MoM how you had to bind your wizard to them with a magic spirit, unlike AoW which you just kinda claimed. 

I think that having them visable from the begining vs. having to explore to find them should be an easy option to have for the game.   I mean it could be a check box in "map settings" pretty easily I imagine. 

I think they should be hard to take from other players.  Like you should be able to fortify them or something to make it harder to steal.  If nothing else, stealing shards requires a certain amount of culture or channeling to occur to "change the flow of magic" and allow the new channeler to assume control.

Maybe stealing a shard that's outside of the owner's territory should just be a matter of defeating whatever garrison is there? The defender should get some sort of boost while defending a shard. Maybe a magic boost, or a passive bonus to combat abilities or something. This way you can get by with a relatively small garrison, and still effectively protect your more distant shards. 

It should be harder to take control of a channeler's shard inside his own domain. Either the bonuses provided the defender could be much bigger (making it easier for the defender to keep shards), or it could just be much harder for another channeler to take control over a node once it's militarily claimed.

I've never played MoM, so I don't know how binding your wizard to shards worked there, so sorry if this is how it worked in MoM. Finding and defeating the garrison of a shard shouldn't automatically give you control over it. You should have to cast a spell with your channeler, which you should be able to do from a distance. Once the spell is successfully cast, the channeler should slowly gain access to the shard; and the farther the shard is from the channeler, the longer that should take. It could also be possible to put more mana into the spell, or to continue casting it past its normal duration, to reduce the time it takes to gain full control. It should only be possible to cast the binding spell on an unoccupied, unclaimed shard (or one occupied by your troops).

it wasn't the garrison in MoM, it was just binding a new spirit to it.  The only defenses was setting up a garrison (so they couldn't weasle their own spirit through your army) or by using a special guardian spirit that was only available to the life wizards.   It was actually a pretty weak part of the system, so I agree with you.

I mentioned it briefly elsewhere, but, I really liked MoM's system. It gives you a goal to work towards early on: defeat those Gorgons / Phantom Beast / whatever. I always thought it should be added to by having the node generate an unkeep free magical garrison for you once you've captured it. Or maybe you have to spend mana to get this protection.

Pigeonpigeon-Thanks for saying I spell better than most but I have deceived you-I just try to avoid the words the give me trouble.  Good idea about changing the mispelled title of the post -but since this is my first thead/post not sure how to do it.  Will have come up with another solution.

Interesting discussion- I agree there should be a boost to find shards by scouting skills or magic and that they should be found in various states -unguarded, part of monster hoard, held by independants... And it would be fun to have spells specially to find them. 

I still think it would be fun to have them movable and hoardable.  Folks have given some very good reasons why this might not be a good idea but here is a few last thoughts from me about it.  I do not think it would be a game breaker since it has been stated that acquiring all of the shards is only one way to win- I read this as meaning that while owning one or more shards gives a significant advantage, there are ways that other players can overcome it.  Since there are only 5, and a typical civ-like game can have 10 or so opponents-even early on it will be clear that not everyone is going to have a shard- in that case the advantage to having one cannot be so great that other cannot often take them away fairly often (otherwise game outcome is decided very early on).  So, if it is not that big of a deal to hold one, it would not be that big of a deal (just one of many strategies) to hoard or hide them (if moveable-see my first post).

Another thing to consider: game size.  With the new really-immense maps being proposed for this game- old game paradimes (that can't be spelled right) may not hold.  A really gigantic map holding only 5 shards means that they are really spread out -finding and holding them could be a real problem and frustration for many players.  I would hope that there are viable alternatives.  Those luckly enough to find and hold a shard should gain some unique powers but it should not hand them the game.

I really like some of the game mechanisms proposed for finding the shards.  But it may not be worth developing them since there are only 5 -so in many games a player may not ever find one on his own.  I also hate to give up on the idea of finding movable bits of power.  So if the 5 main shards are indeed immovable. maybe there can be smaller bits of the crystal also hidden accross the landscape?  We could call them...oh, i don't know....shrads! (problem with post title solved!).  Sure they have less power (maybe just boost spell casters up a lever?) but are worth finding and hoarding.  It would make searching for the crystals (or as I now call it -the shard-shrad complex) more interesting since in any one game you are unlikely to find a shard.

Edit:Oops-I have just reread the lore section and now realize that there will likely be many more that 5 shards. That sounds much better. Still dont know how to edit the title.

Edit your first post...you should be able to edit the title from there.

Well nonetheless, your vocabulary of words that you know how to spell ain't too shabby!

paradigms

Ahaha, good one! 

Yeah. If there were only five shards on a map then I would agree with making them moveable. But seeing as that isn't so, I think they're better off being stationary. The idea of being able to find some more minor sources of power that you can hoard is good, though. But I think that should be taken care of through the item system. You should be able to find some ancient/magic items that can grant abilities/bonuses to your channeler/hero/nation. It would be cool if items could include much smaller crystal fragments, too.

I think part of the thing with having the shards immovable is as an anti-turtling measure. You force players to come out of their shell and compete for limited resources.

I hope it will be possible to turtle. I hate it when games try to force you to go out and be aggressive. Sometimes I want to play aggressive, sometimes I want to be isolationist and defensive, let me play the way I want to play! The devs have also said they're planning for the game to be winnable in many significantly different ways, so hopefully the game will even be winnable if you decide to play a completely defensive game!

QFT

I also like to turtle and do not like playing aggressively, I want to do things on MY time table, not some devlopers. Which is my biggest complaint with EA latest C&C series, they encourage fast play and punish turtlers.(Barring RA3 since I refuse to buy it but thats another topic)

Also I think the shards should be able to be carried back to your channeler. In exchange for being able to move one everyone else should be able to know about it. Like in EA's BFME II where once you find the ring everyone knows that you have it until it gets to your fortress, unlike EA BFME II once you get it to a city/castle it no longer broadcasts its position, since it is enclosed somewhere and thus not moving. However should you chose to relocate it again, it once again lets everyone know where it is and whats carrying it until back inside another fortress/city.

Maybe add a speed penalty to whats carrying the shard so you can't just whisk it away in less than one turn.

While I'm also a turtler, I would prefer by a lot having shards immovable, as it would increase the number of ways to attack one player. How fun would it be to fight against one player with only a single, extremely powerful, city with all shards moved there? The only thing you could do against him would be to assemble a stack of doom and attack his fortress, nothing else. With immovable shards, he would have to send some of his army to defend them or take them back from you, making for a more dynamical game.

One example of a game were turtling wasn't discouraged is AoW2. There the multiple points of attack are the cities, since while city defenders have great bonii, it is impossible to put enough troops in all of your cities due to upkeep. So you have to engage incoming armies or you'll have to take back your cities.

some valid points for and against. Personally, I'm a turtler and always have been. However,i think i like the idea of having immovable shards. Would definitely increase the dynamism of play. Not saying all of them should be immovable, but maybe the stronger ones should be attached with weaker shards possible to transport. you could make it a specific spell or tech that enables transportation of the weaker shards, i.e. as a player, you'd have to invest a not inconsiderable amount of resources into developing the ability to transport weaker shards (and possibly cloak larger ones) thus making turtling a viable strategic choice but at the same time one that requires investment of time and resources. I would place the ability to transport shards somewhere towards the end of a shallow branch on a tech/spell tree. That way we have yet another strategic choice to make; do i invest in turtling or spend those precious resources somewhere else? Would this keep everybody happy?

I prefer to turtle more often than not, but I do enjoy shaking things up and playing aggressive sometimes, too. But nonetheless I'd also prefer immovable shards. Like multiple people have already said, being able to hoard shards wherever you want would cause some pretty big problems.

Honestly I don't like the idea of a very small nation gathering up a disproportionate number of shards and bringing them back to their stronghold. If you want to control a whole lot of shards, you should be forced to use diplomacy (make peace with anyone who could threaten your precious shards) or to expand and really split up your forces/essence. Turtling can still be an effective strategy, because you have much less area to protect, and you don't have to invest very much of your channeler's essence into anything. Likewise, if you're constantly shoring up your defenses, even very large would-be attackers would have a tough time breaking through - for one, all your military would be in one small area, and your channeler probably wouldn't be much worse off than the attacker's.

What I would like to see is really small, pocket-sized fragments of shards that can be found as items. They would be significantly less powerful than the shards themselves, but would have the advantage that you can hoard them deep inside your territory. 

I'll tell you a story about turtling. I understand the attaction of it, sort of a perfectionist thing I think. You tech all the way to the top and then get to build the most exciting weapons. In the meantime you're probably very effective against most AIs, since it's quite difficult for them to understand how best to vary their strategy to crack your shell. Plus there's also the attaction of designing your base.

So one time I was playing a team game Supreme Commander multiplayer at a LAN. And I was teching up to build artillery or an experimental or something, and in the mean time my allies (who were good at the game) were getting hammered. And one of them said to me "build some ****ing units". And in the next game, I did, and I went and contested the middle resources and supported my allies' forces and, in short, had a lot of fun. Fun because pretty much the whole time I was actually playing the game, rather than just going through the upgrades in order and hoping my defences held out in the meantime. And I've played that way since.

Which is not to say that a game tower defence stylee isn't fun. Rather, it's that going out of your comfort zone and moving to put pressure on your opponent can be a really enjoyable part of the game. Give it a try.

The result was a gang-up on me, followed by his subsequent rape by their combined forces. Over and over again. Once he started to move out, and we learned to work together, we truly turned the tables. That being said, I'm easily a bit of a turtler myself, under the right circumstances. With the same friends (-1), we ran a number of free-for-all skirmishes, where I continously tried to keep out of the warzones, letting them beat eachother senseless over scraps, while I suddently swoop down in a moment of weakness and steamroll them both, one after the other.

In 4x games, I'm a huge turtler, because I throughly enjoy just building my safe, secure and strong Empire. I will never forget the game of Civ3 I played with 2 friends over LAN, though. One of my friends, Rome at the time, was being steamrolled by Germany. It just took me so long to get everything underway, and then my ships kept getting sunk, that by the time I got a single ship over to him, it was pretty much too late. Great baaawing ensued.

In short, I hope that under certain conditions and with certain nations, being "the great bulwark" of stability and turtling will be truly viable. At the same time, it shouldn't be an end-all solution. As a turtler, you -should- be susceptible to a variety of attacks, like continous harrassment, great magic, or long-range artillery of various sorts. Even if turtling should be viable, turtling should -never- equal stagnancy of any sort. A turtler needs to be on his toes, because suddently, some bastard have gone through Holland and Belgium, and you're standing there with your pants down, baguette in hand.

Ninja Turtles FTW!!!

<-- Turtler here. Not a very good one but turtler anyways.

Crystal Shards should be like mana nodes in MoM. Easier to manage, more interesting to play with,... And i suppose you could always build cities just aside the shards if the terrain allows it, and then sorround it as the city grows.

And of course, confer some minor special attribute(s), just like any other part of a city does.

me too, but i'd like the opportunity to move minor shards. Not many and it should cost me to do so.

I think there isn't anything wrong with turtling.  And making the shards/nodes stationary won't prevent turtling.  It might encourage compition over resources encouraging conflict, but turtles can deal with that just as they can in every other game where there are stationary resources on the map.  It doesn't matter if it is gold, minerals, crystal, or magic... turtles find a few good sources of the stuff and then setup camp.  Turtles won't come out of their shells to compete, they will build bigger shells so that more resources are included inside the shell!  Thats how a good turtle plays the game. 

I agree with you. And like I said, I do occasionally enjoy to play aggressively. But I quickly get tired of games that force me to play in any given way. If I'm forced to turtle it's not so bad because that's usually what I do anyways, but nonetheless I get bored faster with it because I can't play each game completely differently. If I'm forced to be aggressive and expansionist, I get tired of games really fast. Just because playing outside my comfort zone is also fun doesn't mean I should be forced to not be able to play within it. And yes, when playing on teams turtling is a bad idea unless terrain allows you to share defenses.

QFT.

I'm all for shards being fortifiable positions. Seems almost like a necessity to me. Even if you can't build walls or towers or anything, the shard itself should confer defending troops with enough bonuses to make them as defensible as any fortress.

On the other hand I'm not sure I like the idea of being able to incorporate shards into cities, especially if they confer a bonus to said city. I'm just afraid that would lead to every shard ending up part of a city. I think that maybe shards should make it very difficult to settle nearby terrain. It could take a lot more essence to make nearby land fertile due to ambient interference of the shard, for example. This way if you want to protect your shard within a city and/or incur a bonus for your city by including a shard, you have to pay for it with an increased expenditure of essence.

I like to imagine the idea that the shard could be set in a very difficult terrain location.  Like the center of a crater or on the top of a mountain.  Someplace a bit more exotic then in the center of all the cities.  AT the same time, a shard with a castle built around it sounds really cool too, so I guess it just comes down to what kind of feeling SD wants to make shards give.

In MoM, the nodes of magic were so full of magic that other spells had a VERY high chance not to work.  I imagine the reason they were stocked full of things like earth elementals and phantam beasts is because the terrain and everything living there was warped and changed due to the extreme amounts of magic.  That being said, I cannot imagine many normal people living in such a magic rich environment for long (especially on Myrrer where the magic seemed to turn everything dark and scary).  So if shards are like a non-IP infringement version of old MoM nodes with the same core-idea, then I don't think that cities should be able to build around them (though I DO think cities nearby should be effected by them.  Like a nature shard causing the nearby cities to be covered in a forest of plants, or the walls near a fire/chaos shard to be burnt, black, and warped.)

The garrisoned troops would be help in things like watch towers and are not normal everyday people anyway.  Heroes can verture to the hearts of very strange lands and back with no problem.  Its raising families in such places that cause problems.  (OMG, a city next to a chaos shard randomly having the equivilent of 'chaos channels' cast on it at random from time to time)