Topic: Ideas for new tribes

WorldSavior wrote:

.

Strategical:

a tribe which is strongest in the midgame in comparison to early game and late game where it is weaker - whatever midgame is precisely.

You could argue empire is that. in the early game they are relatively weak because all their infrastructure is very expensive to set up, requires tons of marble column. when they have their infrastructure set up, they are however very strong: they can operate mines cheaply with fish and train soldiers at reasonable price. when fish runs out, or when they have to make deep mines, they become much weaker. in the very late game, all the need of large space for farms and piggeries is crippling.

workers which fulfill different purposes

Cheap tools, like 1iron+3logs=2tools, or any other wares could be used for tools.

or no big need for tools at all

Transport animals:

cheap transport animals

transport animals which can be transformed into meat

you don't spend much resources on tools and pack animals, so all those changes would be virtually invisible. most players would't even notice them.

tribe where soldiers do also something else than fighting, for example building or other work Hammers not only as tools, but also as standard weapons

could be interesting, but it would be very hard to make it work without complaints. I can see especially the AI or weaker players to get stuck because all their soldiers are busy making buildings, or being unable to build because all their builders are manning military sites.

Tribe without iron and gold: smithies are smelting works at the same time / consume the ores

that would just mean skipping the smelting works. not a big change.

Soldiers:

Many shields for defense. Maybe a tribe which is even more defensive-powerful than atlanteans?

well, there is a suggestion for amazons who would be very defence-powerful, but lacking attack.

Top

Quote

Ok, I'm having several ideas for amazons, so I'll post them here.

Amazons

++ General outline ++

bronze age tribe, doesn't use iron. soldiers very strong in defence, weaker in offence. require lots of wood. requires little stone. it is strong when there is little metal to be had (of course) and when the terrain is fertile. has troubles when it cannot grow many trees.

++ ideas for buildings and resources ++

soldiers have two relatively cheap weapon promotions (stone-tipped spears, hardened stone-tipped spears) which serve the same role of evade promotions for other tribes (i.e. cheap, more cost-effective than others, can be made without fullly developed economy) and should bring their soldiers on roughly equal footing with a fully evaded soldier of another tribe. After that they need all kinds of rare and expensive furs and woods to get evade, defence and healt.

they have the best wood economy of the game. their foresters (could be called junglemasters) plant trees already at the second stage of growth. This is offset by their huge need for wood.

they have a building called gardening center that can terraform terrain into more fertile terrain. the inspiration is the "terra preta" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta), a mixture of charcoal, bone and manure that native amazonians made to fertilize the ground. while ideas that they created the rainforest are very exaggerated, they certainly had good knowledge of soil management. So this gardening center could turn mountain into forested mountains, barren steppe into steppe, steppe into meadow. it should not work on desert or other unbuildable terrain, because that would be too much. it would also be very slow and expensive to operate - I'm thinking one coal and one fish to terraform one triangle, so its early game cost would be prohibitive. Make it two fish and two coal if it is not hard enough.

resources: wood, ironwood (armors and weapons and tools, some buildings), rubber (armor and defence and evade, some buildiings), balsa (ships and some buildings, possibly armor), fish, meat, papaya (cultivated in farms, equivalent of grain-wheat-corn. it si original of central america, not the amazon basin, so feel free to suggest a more fitting plant). stone is used for weapons and some tools. gold is used for advanced armors. of course that is not a complete list.

they don't have a pack animal, because there are no pack animals in the amazons. but they can get "strong carriers" instead of normal carriers: those are big-muscled carriers that move at twice the speed of ordinary carriers. they cost food to produce.

balancing of their economy should be such that most of their terrain should be devoted to forest to grow all the wood they need. ideally, their tribe should look like a few buildings and roads in the middle of a jungle. therefore they should not need that many buildings, since wood growing fills up lots of space.

strenghts/weaknesses: its fast foresters give them a lot of early growth. they have however weaker soldiers overall, so they are at a disadvantage through all the mid and late game. however, continuous terraoforming would eventually give them a very good land, so they should be strong later, when they get more terrain than everyone else. Also, never running out of metals is an advantage. their stone mines should have a reasonably high chance of making stones even when granite is exhausted, say 10% to 20%, to compensate for the fact that in most maps there is more iron than granite.

Top

Quote

einstein13 wrote:

I agree for most about Amazons, but I disagree with:

Spear

Amazons were fighting with bows. I think that we can make "bolts" as an upgrade of attack (wood bolts, stone bolts).

yeah, but we don't have ranged attacks, and they would completely upset the balance. that, or we'll have to justify why they use bows but only attack in melee.

Pack animal

I think better is to stay with 2 carriers: normal and strong one. No real code changing. Easier to implement & learn.

then the two carriers should be equal. a strong carrier and a carrier would be a real boost in trasnport capacity over the other tribes.

Changing terrain

Is a great idea, but really complex one. Triangle change is easy to code, but which terrain should be picked - it is hard to say. Should we stay with the same type of terrain (winter/desert/green/waste?) or can we mix them and target green one? Also: should we change the terrain in a specific order? Or rather changing it with randomness (but with the target of better soil)?

Imagine that we stick to the same type of terrain (wastelands stays wastelands, ...) and we will stick to specific order of soils (barren steppe is always changed to the steppe). Then there is a possibility to make terrain mixed with different soils that will never be fertile. Mixture of fertile terrains can be not fertile at all (because of strange temperatures & humidities).

I've been thinking about this issue. It should have a list of unfertile terrains to change, and it should change them at random within its working area. if we only change the infertile soils, and only swap between the same type of terrain (wasteland stays wasteland) then the combination will always be more fertile. the main case of fertile terrains mixed becoming infertile is wasteland ash with desert terrains, creating a terrain that is too fertile for desert trees but too hot for other trees, and that should not happen. the trees that grow on steppe grow well on a steppe/meadow combination, and the same applies to most trees growing on barren soils. generally trees that grow well on barren terrains still like more "normal" conditions of humidity and fertility, they simply are more adaptable.

I wonder if all the different kinds of wood would be harvested from regular trees at intervals, like the roman stonecutter harvests one marble every two stones, or if there should be a special forester planting a special kind of tree (which would not follow the fertility rules to grow) or if there should be farm-like buildings planting and harvesting those trees. I think farm-like buildings would be the simplest thing.

as for soldier stats, let's start with basic values of 12-16 attack, 5 defence, 130 healt and 30% evade. The 2 attack promotions should bring them on equal footing with an enemy soldier with evade 2, so +8 for every promotion totaling 28-32 attack should be fine. at this point they deal some 60% of the damage of a fully promoted atlantean or imperial soldier, and they need 8 hits to kill a fully promoted enemy. So let's eyeball some defensive values to make things even: I was thinking of 3 level of evade, for +15% each, bringing maximum evade to 75%. Now they should be hit three times for every 4 hits they deliver, so if they can survive 5 blows from a fully promoted enemy but not a 6th it should bring parity. I'd say 3 healt and 2 defence promotions tobring the total number of promotions to 10, and final stats of 25% defence (so +10 per level) and 205 defence (so +35 per level).

Einstein, can you check if those values work? basic soldiers are equal to imperial ones, so we can trust them without trials; you'd need to check if an amazon soldier with attack 2 is equal to an atlantean or imperial with evade 2, and if a fully promoted amazonian is equal to a fully promoted from another tribe. thanks.

Top

Quote

I'm making the thread as I post this minor nitpick: i said 3 healtpoints levels, so it would be +23 per level

Top

Quote

king_of_nowhere wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

.

Strategical:

a tribe which is strongest in the midgame in comparison to early game and late game where it is weaker - whatever midgame is precisely.

You could argue empire is that. in the early game they are relatively weak because all their infrastructure is very expensive to set up, requires tons of marble column. when they have their infrastructure set up, they are however very strong: they can operate mines cheaply with fish and train soldiers at reasonable price. when fish runs out, or when they have to make deep mines, they become much weaker. in the very late game, all the need of large space for farms and piggeries is crippling.

Yes, that is true. But I don't know if the empire is stronger in the midgame than atlanteans (autocrat mode)

workers which fulfill different purposes

Cheap tools, like 1iron+3logs=2tools, or any other wares could be used for tools.

or no big need for tools at all

Transport animals:

cheap transport animals

transport animals which can be transformed into meat

you don't spend much resources on tools and pack animals, so all those changes would be virtually invisible. most players would't even notice them.

This is true for long autocrat matches. But on small maps this is questionable.

tribe where soldiers do also something else than fighting, for example building or other work Hammers not only as tools, but also as standard weapons

could be interesting, but it would be very hard to make it work without complaints. I can see especially the AI or weaker players to get stuck because all their soldiers are busy making buildings, or being unable to build because all their builders are manning military sites.

Yes, maybe it's not the best idea

Tribe without iron and gold: smithies are smelting works at the same time / consume the ores

that would just mean skipping the smelting works. not a big change.

Well, it is a little bit boring that every tribe has got a smelting work

Soldiers:

Many shields for defense. Maybe a tribe which is even more defensive-powerful than atlanteans?

well, there is a suggestion for amazons who would be very defence-powerful, but lacking attack.

Yes, and this suggestion has been made after my post.

PkK wrote:

A few years ago I was thinking about some "Eastern Empire" tribe.

The motivations were: 1) The current Empire tribe is clearly inspired by the Roman empire, which was historically in contact with at least with the Chinese empire, with the latter not having a counterpart in-game. 2) The idea of having a somewhat different economy with wood being rather rare ware (it seems in the east, temples and palaces were built with plenty of wood, while poorer people lived in houses of stone and brick).

So I thought about an economy were foresters come quite late and are relatively inefficient,

Sounds interesting, but how could they win a match in the mode "wood gnome", which is probably one of the best balanced modes?

there are fish farms and clay pits (large buildings that might require to be placed near water resources like wells), rice and tea farms, where food is based on noodles or rice instead of bread, etc. While Ihad ideas for the economy, I didn't want to get into creating artwork, so I never bothered to continue with it.

I was quite surprised when I saw the northmen thread, and that tribe turning out suprisingly similar to the Eastern Empire in some aspects.

Philipp

Nice ideas. Yes, that's really surprising

Tinker wrote:

It was suggested earlier this week about Elves as a tribe which I think would bring a lot of variety.

I have not thought much about details yet but pehaps as they are long living beings they would have health 4, evade 3, attack 2 defence 1. Weapons short bow and long bow for first or second attack then long sword.

Interesting ideas, but ranged attacks could really break the balance, right?

As they abhore cutting down living trees buildings are stone or living trees.

Every tribe should be able to break forester-defenses in my opinion. (Building lots of foresters at the border, especially combined with castles)

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

Top

Quote