Nosferatiel wrote:
Why would they? Their natural victory should be the wonder victory, not necessarily supremacy. Their goal is and was to leave the planet. Everything and everyone else is either a tool or a removable distraction/obstruction.

SO they could go and kill everyone in the galaxy?

Nasarog wrote:
SO they could go and kill everyone in the galaxy?

Nah. It never is or was about everyone. It is just about the Endless and any of their remains, remembrances and legacies. All that has to be removed.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Nah. It never is or was about everyone. It is just about the Endless and any of their remains, remembrances and legacies. All that has to be removed.

Um, the dust affects everything it touches, including the Cultists... soooooo.. yeaaaaa....

Nasarog wrote:
Um, the dust affects everything it touches, including the Cultists... soooooo.. yeaaaaa....

The cultists use dust as a tool. Dust is malleable. Removing all dust is the harmony's agenda, not the cultists. They see it as a taint, but not as an Endless being. Unlike ruins, temples, statues or alive Endless. And in ES, there ARE alive Endless. They'd go to war to get them. Wanted dead, not alive.

Nosferatiel wrote:
The cultists use dust as a tool. Dust is malleable. Removing all dust is the harmony's agenda, not the cultists. They see it as a taint, but not as an Endless being. Unlike ruins, temples, statues or alive Endless. And in ES, there ARE alive Endless. They'd go to war to get them. Wanted dead, not alive.

OOOOOOHHHHHH, so the Cultists survived the Auriga Wars, and are now invading Endless Space as the new faction to be added to ES. Brilliant!

Nasarog wrote:
OOOOOOHHHHHH, so the Cultists survived the Auriga Wars, and are now invading Endless Space as the new faction to be added to ES. Brilliant!

Nah, not yet. Let's hope they do, one day. Or in an alternate timeline.



If you pose ES as a sacrosankt truth, then only the vaulters would be allowed to win, ever.

I've discovered that many of the mechanics used by converted villages (for Cultist faction) are less favorable for the owner than I would have expected.





- Vision is a major problem: converted villages only have a sight radius of 1, and garrisoned units do not provide vision. This makes it hard to see enemy armies or settlers approaching.



- If you keep 1 unit outside the village to act as a sentry and provide vision, that unit can be killed easily, because units garrisoning a village cannot join a battle as reinforcements.



- That might incline you to keep most of your units outside of the villages rather than inside them, but that leaves your villages vulnerable, because a village is destroyed if its garrison is killed, even if the attacker did not win the battle because you had reinforcements still fighting.



- And your villages will be attacked a lot, because AI players aggressively attack converted villages in NEUTRAL territory (attacking converted villages in their own territory makes sense, but in neutral territory they don't get any benefits for it, they're merely going out of their way to hurt you). This doesn't require a declaration of war, and if you counter-attack the army that just destroyed your village the AI will become upset due to your "aggression in cold war".



- Since armies can't stand directly on a village, clicking "new army" will automatically move garrisoned units to an adjacent tile (and charge them movement points). But you can't issue orders directly to units in a village like you can in a city, so "new army" is the only way to get them out, meaning you can't choose what direction they exit in. If you happen to want to move in the opposite direction from where the game chooses to pop them out, this can cost you almost an entire turn's worth of movement (because villages cost more than cities to move through, and cannot build road networks).



- Converted villages exploit the 6 adjacent tiles for your capital city...but only if those tiles are within the same region. Since villages seem to like to spawn in the corners of regions, this frequently means you get more like 2-4 adjacent tiles. (Cities have to stop at region boundaries because otherwise they could overlap, and this isn't much of a disadvantage because you can choose where to place the city; there's no obvious reason that villages have to stop at region boundaries, and you can't avoid the downside because you don't choose their placement.)



- Units in a converted village do not regenerate



- Units in a converted village sometimes mysteriously disappear





Some of those are clearly bugs. Others...I honestly can't tell.

All very good points. I would also like to point out that the tiles around a village give bonuses from city buildings (eg extra dust on a river), but only in the capital region. I think this should also be standardized, or at least made more clear. In general, I feel this assimilation should either require playing only with 1 city, or be reworked to fit better with having multiple cities.

Speaking of working with multiple cities...how does it work with multiple cities? I'm playing a custom Cultist faction that didn't take the razing bonus, so I actually have a second city right now. I haven't check who's getting the bonus resources, but the capital is paying the full -10 dust per turn income (which is ridiculously expensive for what you get out of it, can you imagine if a district costed 10 dust per turn?) while the new city is not paying in full, but does still have a -6 tax. I'm not sure if that's -2 from each of my villages, or -6 from the one it's in, or what.

So having looked into it a bit more, non-capitol cities do not get the tile bonuses from converted cities, and they also don't get the population bonuses, those go to the capitol, and neither the capitol nor any other cities benefit from Cull the Heard, because converted cities don't count as pacified. Conversion kinda sucks a lot.

Sounds like you're trying to get the best of both worlds, which is not a bad thing. If converted cities counted as pacified, playing a Cultist affinity faction would be extremely desirable. Likewise, their intended playstyle is centered around the one capital city.



I would like to see some changes made to converted cities, notably additional defenses and better vision. It can be really difficult, especially when you have converted villages far from your capital in the middle of enemy territory. I'd like to have the option of building up defenses to at least have a chance of stopping an attack. Maybe stopping minor unit production for a time in favor of a defense bonus for the village? I don't know, but I just know I'd like it.



On a sidenote, I also think it would be neat if the Cultists had the options of creating spies that could enter pacified villages of other factions and "sow dissent", to borrow the phrase from the game Seven Kingdoms, where I got the idea from. There would have be some mechanic for defense from that, of course, but it would fit with a Cultist desire to sway everyone to their cause and create minor to major disruptions in the opposing faction's territory (depending on success).

daveyg2611 wrote:
If converted cities counted as pacified, playing a Cultist affinity faction would be extremely desirable.

Conversion is not part of the affinity, it's a separate trait. The affinity is "+1 max district level, no settlers" (and also gives you about 20 more points to spend on other traits than most affinities give you).



If you're playing with multiple cities, Conversion probably compares very poorly to Cellulose Mutation (they both let you exploit more tiles, but Cellulose Mutation costs less and scales up based on the number of cities you control).



I'm not holding my breath for balanced custom factions, though.

When I was playing custom factions with Convert, I noticed the following issues: (I might start another thread about these in particular)



1- FIDSI Income from converted villages is NOT affected by traits that increase FIDSI from terrain such as "Knack for Knowledge" or "Dust Efficient". For example, if you see 3 Dust from a desert tile on Minor Village (and you have "Dust Efficient"), the village will only give you 2 Dust for that tile instead of 3! This happens for all regions.



2- Building improvements and Pillars that increase terrain FIDSI such as Geomics Lab and Pillar of Influence do NOT affect Minor Villages. The villages will not gain extra FIDSI from these.



3- Converted Villages are considered "inside the region" of your capital ONLY. It means that if you convert villages from other regions inside your empire, those regions will be deprived of ALL Minor Village bonuses, including the "Cull The Herd" trait.



4- So if you choose Cull The Herd and Conversion together, you are handicapping yourself cuz Cull the Herd is nullified by Conversion. Not sure if this is a bug or intentional, not sure if it was fixed later in a patch. Also I notice that converted villages do NOT count as extra villages for Cull the Herd bonus in your capital city.



NOTE: If these issues were fixed later, please tell me! Last time I played was 1 week ago, and these issues still existed at that time.

I would like to see a mechanic introduced so that even though the Cultist do not have a city in the zone, that they hold the territory so no other empires can build a city in it. It gets very hard to deal with the fact that every time you clear a zone out with an enemy, that a new potential enemy fills the vacuum with their own cities, so you end up having to deal with it again. An ideal solution would be allow the Cultist to build a temple which does not have any structures that can be built there, but has a defensive value, so they can move their converted troops into it to defend the zone. Priest could be modified so they can build the temple much like a settler does. Right now the Cultist are pretty much non viable for winning the game built as is and using the computer AI. A player has to run them in order for them to have a chance. This is in part because they cannot claim territories and the void just gets filled over and over again, which is a total pain to deal with. I have a game with the Cultist in the 500 turn range and I have had to clear every zone on my home continent 3 times now, from 3 different enemies. It gets old.

Playing and cultist game right now and I have to say the vision range on the villages obviously needs to be increased. That at least seems like a completely open and shut case.

I haven't played with them yet or a custom faction. I'll report my findings here when I do.

Other than vision increase and garrisoned units being able to regen in their villages- and be used for reinforcements- I'd like to be able to retrofit assimilated factions spawned in their villages. Having them spawn equiped would be too broken I think, but having the option to pay x to retrofit a full garrison, and have a new army, would be pretty nice. As opposed to naked armies costing me dust.

Think_Blindly wrote:
Other than vision increase and garrisoned units being able to regen in their villages- and be used for reinforcements- I'd like to be able to retrofit assimilated factions spawned in their villages. Having them spawn equiped would be too broken I think, but having the option to pay x to retrofit a full garrison, and have a new army, would be pretty nice. As opposed to naked armies costing me dust.

Only if they are in the territory of your one and only city, or if it's a custom faction, your capitol city.

Think_Blindly wrote:
As opposed to naked armies costing me dust.

They don't appear to cost you any dust as long as they're garrisoned in a converted village.

@OP: I fully agree.

The cultists are a mess. The most egregious thing is their diplomacy mess.

Where AI aggressively slaughter your villages without declaring war, while you can't retaliate. And the AI colonizing your territories. Also, your ability to convert villages in someone else's territories without that being an act of war.

I have argued before that the cultists should claim as their territory any territory in which they have a village that does NOT contain a city of someone else.

This neatly solves most of the issues without any need for coding specific exceptions for the AI.



It would be nice if it went a step further and included a symbiosis treaty (you may build cities in my territory, I may convert your villages).