Essence and Longevity/Immortality of Heroes/Descendants

I dont think true immortality for anybody but the channelers would fit in lore-wise, but I DO encourage longer lifespans for those who are given essence by a channeler.  I think that this should be inherrant rather than an active spell (although active spells could increase a lifespan further). For instance, for upgrading your hero with the ability to cast magic, he would also have an increased (average) lifespan. Similarly, if all you did was make his sword arm stronger, he should still get a lifespan increase (although maybe not as high).

Unless the in-game calendar gets a major re-jiggering, it doesn't seem like even 'normal' lifespans are likely to matter for any but the most outrageously long games. Currently, a turn is a day, so a 3,650 turn game only spans a single decade.

Since the developers are speaking about family trees and diplomatic marriages and descendants of descendants of the channeler -tens if not hundreds of years- the life spans will matter (see journal "ugly children" for example). So a turn a day does not have a future.

Fluffwise - we have death magic, and vampires or liches do have rather excessive lifespans. Also high level live magic could increase the lifespan of someone quite significantly by constantly regenerating/rejuvenating the body.

I think Brad said in the last Dev Journal that channelers do age+die, but they live so long that it won't matter in terms of the game. I think he said ~800 years. That's 292000 turns. I doubt anyone will have a game go that long, but I would kind of like to find out what happens to your channeler after that.

I do not think a turn a day is a thing to stay, even if it is so at the moment and i doubt it. At least i was not able to see a confirmation of this. A turn is a turn. You need 20 turns to build a palace - i doubt it is possible in 20 days.

 Furthermore if one day would be one turn we could not have dynasties and descendants in any meaningful time - 20 years is 7300 days what would translate to 7300 turns till our first descendant turns 20. If he is to be born on turn one. So i think a turn is more like a month or more, not a day, or we would not be able to have a family tree and descendants and descendants of our descendants in any relevant time frame, and these features are confirmed by developers  https://forums.elementalgame.com/374237

With this it is confirmed that a game will go tens if not hundreds of years. In the light of this the question about lifespans is important.

Where is the confirmation of that?

[quote] Furthermore if one day would be one turn we could not have dynasties and descendants in any meaningful time - 20 years is 7300 days what would translate to 7300 turns till our first descendant turns 20. If he is to be born on turn one. So i think a turn is more like a month or more, not a day, or we would not be able to have a family tree and descendants and descendants of our descendants in any relevant time frame, and these features are confirmed by developers https://forums.elementalgame.com/374237[/quote]

There's nothing to rule out magic being involved. If they're related to a magical, almost immortal being, it's not inconveivable that they have special abilities. Like accelerated growth, longer than normal life, etc.

I can live with any abstraction.

Usually i never try to determine how long a "turn" is, unless it is specified by developers. Only if people are speaking of building up "dynasties" they are usually speaking about considerable time. If it is meant here that we will build Empires and get dynasties in 300 turns, how long it ever may be without anyone dying of old age - no problem from my position and the discussion is moot.

But if, as usual for dynasties, older members of them start to die at the time their grand grandchildren are around - well in that case i would like to have a possibility to prolong their lives. Can we agree on this and discuss this matter further?

I'm not sure that 1 day = 1 turn is a very good idea, if that is a fact.  It presents a lot of believability hurdles.  First, at the point at which you have children, are we to assume that we must hit the end turn button 5475 times before even one of our children reaches maturity? (15 years of age.)  Also, it presents a lot of problems for population growth too.  Assuming that most citizens won't be arriving from the wasteland at any point but the beginning (after all, the world was destroyed, wasn't it?) then at most you'll have maybe 4 generations of population growth throughout an astranomically long game, which is meagre and won't account for much by mideaval standards.  One turn equally one week might be more plausable, but even that is border line odd. 

As for sovereign immortality, I don't see why Froggy is so dedicated to the idea.  When we all heard about it at first, it made pretty good sense, but as development has proceeded, it doesn't seem to be adding any meaningful features to the game.  To the contrary, it seems to do the opposite.  A dynasty isn't really a dynasty unless there is certainty that the ruler will one day die of at least natural causes.  It seems that the game would be a lot more interesting if you were confronted with this fact, and were forced to groom a successor to take the sovereign's essence once the sovereign dies or actively pursue ways by which you could extend your sovereign's life span.  Making the sovereign immortal from the atrophe of age just seems to do less game feature wise than making him mortal.      

Even in Medieval Total War it took 15 turn for a noble to mature... that was a long time. Honestly in TBS games the whole time scaling thing is a huge issue if you want to make a realistic game... campaigns that would take a year if they had been done in real life take an entire decade... there's no easy solution to this. On the other hand, I feel like a turn length of a week for Galactic Civilizations is about as unbelievable as a day would be in Elemental, and eventually I just kinda stopped caring.

It wouldn't be a terrible thing if the game "accelerated" the gestation period by several orders of magnitude. I think if it took merely 30 days for a child to mature, I might notice the first time but then I'd just slowly learn not to care. I think the far better solution would be to make turn unit longer... I like the idea of weeks or months better than a day.

Back in December of '08, TexasTim65 started a thread that has a bunch of different takes on the turn=day thing. Given the recent talk here & the persistence of turn=day in the beta UI, I'm starting to lean to not having any in-game calendar and just calling a turn a turn. Elemental is plenty ambitious enough without trying to tackle a major problem like building a 'temporal transmission' that can shift gears between the pace of a hot war, the pace of a growing peacetime dynasty, and the length of a dragon's nap.

I tend to agree with both you and magic, except for one critical point: a game is less immersive every time you have to suspend your disbeliefs.  The dev's have continually boasted that Elemental will be a game that feels like an RPG but plays like a strategy game.  If a game is going to be immersive to this level, the player can't be jarred out of their experience or hung up on glaring peculiarities and irregularities. 

I know this, because whenever I DM in D&D and slip up on some element of setting or plot, the players go from being enveloped adventurers to critical skeptics.  "How did Lucan sail a fleet of ships across the Catalan Straights in 2 days?  It should take weeks with just one!" or "Montague Blight was a snot nosed child when we saw him last.  How did he become a 10th level fighter in 3 years??"

In Galactic Civs 2, for instance, I was removed from the narrative of "The Burgeoning Empire of N'orr" every time I noticed my population on a newly colonized planets shoot up from .05 million to 10 billion in a matter of 1-2 years.  I ran calculations in my head, and if we are to assume those swells of people migrated from my homeplanet of N'orr, there must have been at least 200 billion of them hiding somewhere beneath the surface at the start of the game. 

Now, I'm fine with just ignoring oddities and enjoying the strategic elements, but if this is the kind of thing we are confronted with Elemental, the boast of immersion just isn't honest.  

Granted, I think the abstraction itself helps keeps these inconsistancies from destroying the illusion. It's like the classic Dwarf Fortress problem: how big is a tile? If that question was ever answered, then the developer would have to build a huge set of complex rules how much of something can fit into a tile. So for now, a tile is whatever is convenient for the imagination.

On the other hand, it is nice to know the date.

Demiansky, you more or less caught me trying to, pardon the jargon, manage my own expectations. Civ-type games have never really done better than spackle over the player-POV/timescale problem, and Elemental has some unique possibilities because it includes magic and has the RPG 'fusion' thing going on.

The whole turn=week thing in GalCiv2 still drives me crazy even though we can now toggle the main map 'calendar' to display a turn number instead of an inscrutable Julian date from the 23rd century. The rest of the UI is still peppered with "week" and "weeks," e.g. the warning box that appears when an AI has built a base on an Ascension Crystal. That's probably why I'm open to such a drab compromise as just calling a turn a turn...

How fun would it be to be playing, your sovriegn dies of old age, and because your son/daughter married into some other kingdom, you no longer have any control over your kingdom, and effectively lose the game? I think that would just outright suck. Losing the game to the randomness of when your heart gives out would not be fun. Or it would basically force you to not marry outside of your kingdom, political marriges, etc.

I disagree about the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing. I think you can be immersed even if you don't believe something. Does not believeing in dragons or magic make Dragon Age: Orgins less fun or immersive? If you really want a game that doesn't require any suspension of disbelief, you should be playing The Sims or something, because pretty much every game requires it.

I agree with GW, that a turn should just be a turn. I think it would greatly simplify things.

I personally think this will be one of the most important factors of Elemental and its ability to immerse the player. If I have a son and he comes of age in 20 turns but it takes me 15 turns to train a group of 10 soldiers im gonna be really concerned. It doesn't matter if the turn is called a turn, a month, a year, or whatever because i'm still going to know that these don't add up realistically. It's gonna be one of those things we will probably be spending a ton of time balancing in the end betas. Sadly, I don't think it's possible to completely balance this sort of thing, there are always going to be things that don't add up in a game that tries to sum up hundreds of years in a matter of hours...

Well by the time your sovereign died you would have set up another successor, this is the point i think Demiansky is trying to make. For instance, let's say you never had a son who could take the throne, a powerful hero could take the throne instead. Or maybe you could take control of the nation in which your daughter was married into. Or maybe she runs away to come back and lead her kingdom. The possibilities are endless. But I don't think we'll see this done, Frogboy seems intent on making sovereigns immortal anyways. But I have to agree with Demiansky in that without a clear definition of how many generations are going to go by in game, sovereigns immortality doesn't really play that big of a role- or an important one for that matter- anymore imho.

It doesn't make sense that it can take more turns to train an elite paladin unit than to research some techs. Yet, that will happen from time to time depending on conditons. Even if we assume that people more or less kept their knowlledge base but was unable to use until the sovereigns started resurrecting the lands (bringing back the conditions for scientific research, turns being just the time to reimplement "lost" knowledge one step at a time), there is always be a problem between the correlation of turns/research/training/population growth/construction of buildings/Scions... Should I complain that a unitonce trained is inmortal? If it doesn't die in battle, it won't die of old age or anything. So why complain if the growing of the Scion can take some more turns than a normal unit? Unless turns represent literally days and everything works based on that (the most basic building will take a few days, others will take weeks, others months, totally basic units a day or two, elite units some months if not years,...), we are going to find problems correlating turns with actions in the game. We need abstraction and we don't need to like it.

We shouldn't take Sovereign = King/Emperor and the Dinasty system as the princes and princesses waiting for the lord to die and inherit. Because it's not like that and we shouldn't think about them in that way.

The Sovereign is the King. Scions are just nobles who rule a land given to them by the King. Conditions? Scions can rule that piece of land but they serve the King, pay him taxes and their manpower is available to him in times of war (just in case the "servethe King" part isn't clear enough). The noble can keep his lands as long as the King allows him, as the only real owner of those lands is the King.

If a Sovereign dies, nobles could claim lands as theirs but as it's in the game (Sovereigns being mumbo jumbo masters), they have to swear alliegance to another King. In this game Kings might not be considered chosen by God like in feudal times but they might still be considered chosen (because anyone can bring land to life, right?) and people might not like to defy that "fact" (irrational fears, religious beliefs... choose your poison).

It has been said about neutral Kingdoms or vassal estates, so nations without a Sovereign seem possible... as long as Sovereigns allow it (or they were formed before they met any Sovereign).

I totally agree here. In order to have your own dynasty you need to have an heir to your own kingdom. Otherwise it's not really a dynasty but just a family network where you try to push relatives into foreign kingdoms. I think the Sovereign should have a very long natural lifespan (but should be able to die in battle). In order to prolong his life you would need to invest in longevity/immortality spells (anti-aging only) during the game. Or you could choose to imbue a lot of essence into your heirs from the start, knowing that one day they will take over from the Founder Sovereign. When your Founder Sovereign dies, in battle or out of old age, his essence should be immediately inherited by his first heir. There could possibly be a prerequisite that you need to imbue your heir with at least 1 point of essence in order for him to inherit remaining essence when the Founder dies.

With such a system you need to plan in advance. You could choose between several strategies; putting all you got on your Founder Sovereign and hope he can achieve immortality before it's too late. Or build up a sustainable Dynasty, imbuing your future heirs with some essence and preparing them for the time one will need to take over the Kingdom.

More interesting and involving than just marrying off the girls me thinks.

Yes, very well spoken.

Some people seem to be suggesting that if you accept one thing that lacks believability, you should just open your mouth wide and swallow whatever garbage comes your way.  How disastrous would that be if movie makers had that kind of mentality?  "Well, it's all just pixels on a screen, so we might as well not worry about plot or setting consistencies and just do whatever we want to make the movie exciting!!"  Every movie would flow like a really bad Stephen King novel.

In actuality, there are two levels of "suspending your disbelief."  There is the first level, where you overcome the fact that a movie or book and it's setting are not actually real.  Then there is a second level, where you accept inconsistencies WITHIN that established plot and setting.  It's the second level that I'm gripping about.

As for Kyogre, I would give the devs just a little more credit.  If they went the way of a non-immortal sovereign, they would tweak the rules so that "randomness" didn't rule a game's outcome.  I think Rising Legend spoke well to explain this.

Wintersong, I don't doubt that a system by which the sovereign is immortal could work, but we have to compare the other option to it and what it brings to the table.  Very, very often, when you remove a variable from a complex system, it can actually improve your model.  I think this is the case with sovereign immortality, for reasons expressed in this thread.

Sovereigns should be immortal. Too much is tied up in them for there to be any kind of change over of leaders. It would also be nice to give bits of my imortality away. It might cost me some power right now, but giving a dozen knights some imortality will pay off down the road when they fought in every single war for the past century and are each experinced enough to slaughter a whole company of weaker units. Kind of a way to make sub-heroes. That and i don't want a hero i have invested a lot in breaking his hip after a few decades and becoming useless. Not everyone can be as spry as solid snake into thier old ages.

If you accept every bit of cannon in the current story, then yes.  But the devs should not be slaves to their own story if it means they could make a better game by changing it.  If there were no dynasty system, sovereign immortality would be fine by me.  Putting the two together is counter productive, though.

These are my thoughts as well on the subject

Ah, the perfect solution. Your soverign should be able to eat his children to maintain his immortality! You can either build up a big family and prepare for your eventual death, or you can suck the delicous youth right out of your kids and stay young and hip forever, but with no real family.

TaDa, both systems, at the same time.