Quest Victory

I would say knowing how far someone is along on their quest victory condition (or any other victory condition) should depend on how infiltrated into their government your spy network is. I do not think that you should automatically get a warning  that another player is about to win "just because". That would just encourage all the other players to dogpile on the player about to win, which personally I think is lame.

I tend to not be much of an infiltrator, because I would rather use the resources to win the game myself, but "keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer" is definitely a big part of TBS, and I am sure will continue to be in EWOM.

I agree with Denryu about needing a spy network if you want victory progress info (for whatever victory condition, not just the Master Quest).

But I think some quests that are discretely spawned by another civ's progress on the Master Quest is a neat idea that wouldn't necessarily need to warn a player directly (i.e. give 'free' info). If the Master Quest is really a collection of quests, which seems plausible to me, then wide variety in those components should be possible. That would mean that any given sub-quest, e.g. Slaying Geoff the Slug, would stand in its own right and could spawn a quest for the player to Defend Geoff the Slug from the nasty neighbors.

It might be nice to have an "Eye of Sauron" type spell so that you can see how far along those pesky little hobbitses are to quest victory, and even information about how they're going about it (where they're travelling to etc) so that you can set about sabotaging them (at the cost of maintaining the spell obviously).

Edit: Also SAVE GEOFF THE SLUG!!!

I agree with Denryu also. We shouldn't randomly receive information on other players' progress towards victory conditions; but it should be possible to gather information about it if you so choose. This could be done through spells, spies, or quests kind of like GW mentioned.

A good point has been raised though - all victory conditions need to be preventable by other players. If I discover that a player is approaching a Master Quest victory, I want to be able to do something about it other than attacking and destroying him. For the Master Quest, it would be appropriate to be able to go on quests to impede his progress; if someone is approaching a magic victory I should be able to use magic to impede his progress, etc. Maybe even I could embark on quests to impede someone's magic victory or magic to impede someone's quest victory. Oh the possibilities.

I'd be concerned with balance on it.    I really like the idea, however I see it being very important in feedback, since something like a quest victory can easily become too quick to achieve.   I mean a master quest would have to be VERY freakishly hard to complete.  

I'd also want there to be certain identifiable actions being required in the quest.   Like certain artifacts are needed, which are basically forced into several player's hands at the begining of the game, so said players would be forced to infiltrate each other in hopes to steal the artifacts.   At which point if one side was loosing the infiltration war, they'd just have to invade as a responce or something like that.

Oh yes, definattly.   But who would get the spell?   Would that just be one of those universal spells like "Awareness" in MoM?  If so, I'd want an upgraded form of the spell go to some element specifically. (Like nature's awareness was the nature only upgrade to awareness in MoM)  Perhaps the spell just shows the progress, but then there is "wispers of the wind" which lets you then also know where they are doing it.  I can't think of a better name, but the idea is that everything would be listening for what is happenning.   Murders of crows would fly over head and see the heroes, bugs would hear the questers talking about plans, and whatever you can imagine that would create a network of communication back to the wizard casting the spell to let them know of hero progress.

I'm personally a little opposed to a 'spy network' in particular, just because I'm a little burnt out on spys, but the concept of being able to somehow view enemy master quest progression does need to have a form.   Most games with spies that come to mind (HoMM, Civ 4 expansions) seem to have rather poor money to info ratios.  HoMM requires multiple taverns, but that requires having multiple towns which is pretty hard (sometimes impossible) on some maps.  And Civ 4 just makes it a little too subtle for all the money that can be put into it. 

I vote on using something like an overland spell that gained more information the longer that it is up.  That way you get pretty direct spell vs. info ratio to which we can give easy feedback to SD about.  The people doing the spying would be identifiable and countering would be through whatever disjunction means normally available.  (something we could probebly start a thread about >_>).    If a person started nuking the 'eye of sauron' spell (or whatever it is called) about 10 turns in, knowing that in 15 turns it will divulge the wearabouts of some particularly sneaky and important heroes who are all posed to finish the quest.  Then players might get tipped off to the fact that this person is doing the quest victory, even though they have not been able to get all the info needed, then alliances might start all throwing up the spell and pumping extra mana into it (something to make it harder to dispell) to try to gain the needed info to properly track the person racing for quest victory.

People going for quest victory as well would want that spell up of their own, just so they can see the progress of others.  I could even imagine there would be some trickery of "oh yeah, I don't want this person to get victory.  So I have this spell up, and a lot of extra mana on it, so its not gonig to be dispelled.    Just trust what I have to say and don't bother putting up spells of your own.  (because then you'll see my progress )  " 

That would be one way of making it interesting (having one school have a better version of a general spell that everyone gets) but on thinking about it I actually really like the idea, and this applies to I guess most spells that are needed by everybody, that every school could have it's own distinct spell that acts towrds the same result in a slightly different way. By this I mean that for the general "master quest tracking" spell you could have a different mechanism for each school. So for life you could have a spell telling you at what point some important enemy had been slain during a quest, or that one of the heroes embarking on the master quest has been badly wounded etc which would give you hints about which channelers were undertaking the master quest and how far along they are without being overly explicit. For earth you could have a marker showing you where heroes on the master quest arc currently located on the map, while air gives you a divination spell teling you where the next quest destination will be etc. I can't actually think up a decent variation for each school off the top of my head, but hopefully the devs could Anyway I hope the idea I'm trying to make is clear regardless. Admittedly this kind of general spell variation between schools increases the difficulty in balancing out the schools themselves, but if you had a similar variation for all generally needed spells then hopefully it would balance out across the game as a whole

A lot of good ideas.  I agree that the information shouldn't be free, but the random quests for other players spawned by quests that are part of the victory quest (ie to prevent the nation from succeeding in its sub-victory quests) was exactly where I was heading with that.  It would definately add another interesting layer to the game, and would prove most interesting.

I think it's important that the Master Quest vary significantly from game to game, or it will become boring and wrote. It needs to change, and change a lot, you can never know what to expect or you'll be able to prepare for it too well. it also means in order to be able to see someone's progress on the Master Quest, you will need more information than "Player A just slew Monster Y," because that won't be enough information.

Another thing to consider is, will the Master Quest be the same for all players, or will each player have their own? I'm not sure where I stand on that. On one hand, everyone having the same Master Quest would be strange, because if one player completes part of it, it wouldn't always make sense for other players to be able to do it again (for example, in quests that involve slaying a specific monster). But at the same, if everyone has different Master Quests then some might be easier than others.

True, which is why it might be best to afford more opportunities for opposing nations to interfere with quests of their own the closer that a nation's master quest gets to completion.  That would in large part mitigate the "your master quest was easier than mine" problem because it would give other nations the opportunity to attempt to retard the progress of a nation scalable to how far along in the quest that nation is.

Absolutely. And now that you make me think more, I think I'd strongly prefer no direct knowledge of any other channeler's progress on a Master Quest, unless perhaps we'll be able to have or become vassals and I decide to sign on to help an awesome AI beat everyone else to the finish. Master Quests should both vary, and be very personal to each channeler.

If the primary way to delay others' progress on their Master Quests is by completing regular quests of your own, that would simply mean that if you enable Master Quests, you'd better make going on quests a priority even if you're not going for the big one on your own. I imagine that item-related quests might get somewhat identifiable to experience players who don't use much custom content, but even there sufficient randomization in the quest generator should be a good balancing agent--is a Vial of Geoff's Slime an essential part of the Big Picture in this game, or is it just going to help one of your heroes slide quickly out of danger a few times during tactical combat?

Come to think of it, if you can design your own dungeons and fortresses, you could store items of great value (perhaps essential to another player completing their master quest) there when you aren't using it.

Option A ! All hail the mighty Geoff!

The solution that I like may be a little hard to explain, but here goes...

I think the Final Quest in the quest victory path should be the same for everyone in a given game (it could be, nay SHOULD BE different from one game to another). But the end goal should be the same for everyone.

However, the quest path to get to that final quest can be unique for each player. Let us imagine that there are ten quests from the beginning of the quest victory line to the ultimate final quest. The quest that starts the series could be something relatively simple, practically a random generated quest of someone that you need to talk to to begin the quest victory.

As you progress, there will be fewer and fewer sources of information to lead toward the final quest. Say by the time you did the 8th quest there were only two or three sources in the entire world with information to progress. So all players start to get funneled towards the same sources of information if you follow me. So maybe when you go see the Oracle of all knowing to find out the next step in the quest they might have another tidbit of information such as "You are the third person to ask me about that in the past month." etc. Maybe even some information (misinformation?) about WHO had come around asking. Maybe some of these higher level quest-givers are one use only - i.e. they will only tell you witht heir dying breath or after you ransack the recently demised's study. Of course at least one path must be unlimited use so  everyone could progress the quest.

I like that idea - mainly the whole part about funneling people doing the Master Quest into the same places. Another thing I've been thinking about is how to making the Master Quest scale with map size. The obvious ways would be to make the quest chain longer, or make the objectives bigger (instead of collecting 2 magic lumber from the Great Forest, collect 8, etc). The latter would be difficult to do for all types of quests, but with some creativity it could be done. Another way to do it, though, would be to use the map size to make quests intrinsically more involved. Quests can make you travel the world, basically, searching for items or places or people. In a larger map, those travels would then be longer.

Great post Denryu

I hope the quest elements lay somewhere along those lines.

If said oracle of all knowing was a bottle neck for everybody's quests, I can see some interesting dynamics based on "do I want to garrison some forces here in hopes to protect the knowledge from others, at the same time giving away its location.  Or do I want to take my forces elsewhere to bolster my forces to actually achieving the quest, but letting other players have access to the oracle"     Obviously if you're powerful enough though you can probebly stop other player progress if you can figure out the best bottle neck.

I'd want a super-quest mode that really takes the quest thing and runs with it.  Like has first to get 1000 points worth of quests or something like that (where small quests would only give 1 point, but larger quests give up to 8 or 9)

Regarding spies, perhaps there could be possible something like this.  If we had a very close match in game stats/characteristics with a particular npc hero, perhaps they would remain loyal to us to the extent that we could send them to pretend to be a hero for another player, yet provide information back to us on that player's activities.  IF they were stationed at the other wizard's home then we might have information about spells being cast, maps, quest progress and artifacts (which might be stolen, also).  If the npc had hawks, perhaps they could be used to communicate.  If not, other means (such as merchants and npcs) could be used.  Perhaps a 'spell of binding' could be cast to bring other npcs into our service that are nominally serving others, perhaps such spells could be broken by a counter spell as well.  If the hero was with an army, we would have information about that enemy army but not the capital.

In orther words, instead of spending resources on an abstracted spy newtork, you use the npc/hero system to build a real one.  This would not preclude some level of abstraction as well, perhaps through merchant networks giving us city information or some information becoming known after a battle with an enemy through the questioning of prisioners and by diplomatic missions (negotiations) with other wizards.