KUSHAN EMPIRE
Unique Ability: Silk Road
International Trade Routes provide +2 Gold and +1 Culture for every Luxury Resource and +1 Science for every Strategic Resource in the destination city. Traders are immune from being plundered on land tiles.
Unique Unit: Yuezhi Horse Archer
Classical era ranged unit unique to the Kushan. Ignores movement penalties on hills.
Unique Building: Bazaar
A building unique to the Kushan that replaces the Market. +3 Gold, +1 Great Merchant Point, and +1 Trade Route capacity. Grants a random Inspiration when built. +2 Tourism with Mercantilism, and +4 Tourism with Cultural Heritage.
Unique Building: Kanishka Stupa
A unique building the Kushan can build in one of their Holy Sites. +2 Culture, +2 Faith, and +2 Gold. Grants one free Relic when built, and increases Faith and Tourism from any Relic slotted there by 50%.
KANISHKA
Leader Ability: Temples of the Divine Family
All Holy Site buildings provide +2 Loyalty per turn, and can be purchased with Gold or Faith at a 50% discount. Temples trigger a culture bomb which claims surrounding tiles.
Leader Agenda: Middle Path
Prioritizes earning Faith and Gold. Likes civilizations that are high in Faith and Gold, and dislikes civilizations that are not.
LEADER STRATEGY
The Kushans profit immensely from international trade, and Kanishka can use these profits to help him with any victory condition. He can use the incredible speed of his Yuezhi Horse Archers to quickly eliminate barbarian threats early in the game. Kanishka can then use his excess Gold or Faith to fill out Holy Sites in his far-flung frontier cities, strengthening their loyalty to him and even stealing valuable territory and resources from his rivals. Building the Kanishka Stupa ensures Kanishka of having at least one Relic with increased yields, and choosing the Reliquaries Follower Belief will amplify this bonus even more and help Kanishka secure either a religious or cultural victory.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Kushans built an improbable empire at the crossroads of Asia in the First Century CE. They were unlikely imperialists, being the descendants of nomadic tribes from the steppes, but they managed to build an empire atop the fragmented kingdoms left behind by Alexander the Great. They created enough political stability over the several centuries of their rule to transmit a great world religion (Buddhism) across the Himalayas, and to help create a vast network of international trade that would roll on even after their empire had fallen.
This mod requires the Rise and Fall expansion.
NOTES
- The leader is not animated
- Some of the icons are custom, but most are repurposed from appropriate regular game content (such as the Kanishka Stupa, which uses the standard Stupa artwork)
- All buildings are visible
- The Yuezhi Horse Archer is a reconfigured Saka Horse Archer (with a red-tinted horse and slightly modified appearance), but otherwise there is no custom 3D art.
GALLERY
CLARIFICATIONS ON TRAITS
Bazaar: Trade Route Capacity
Like the Market, this adds +1 Trade Route capacity only if the city does not already have a Lighthouse, as well as providing one Citizen Slot.
Kanishka Stupa: Building Exclusivity
This is, in effect, a National Wonder that you can only build once, and occupied the Tier 3 spot in one of your Holy Sites (replacing the site of a Mosque, Cathedral, etc.). If you have more than one Holy Site, and are building a Kanishka Stupa in one, you often cannot build any other Tier 3 Holy Site building in another Holy Site until you've finished the Kanishka Stupa in the first one.
Kanishka Stupa: Relic Bonus
There is an inconsistency in how the Faith and Tourism bonus is handled when you apply the Reliquaries Follower Belief. Even though the theming bonus is set to 50% (meant to incentivize the player to actually place their new relic in the reliquary stupa), the Tourism bonus is smaller than it should be (+28 when you have Reliquaries instead of +36). Unfortunately I can't change this without messing with the bonus when you don't choose Reliquaries. This appears to be because the Faith yield is multiplied by a factor of three with Reliquaries, but the game simply adds +16 Tourism to the base Tourism (+8) to achieve the tripled yield bonus.
Temples of the Divine Family: Gold Purchasing
The Tier 3 Holy Site buildings (e.g., Mosque, Cathedral, etc.) can still only be purchased with Faith and not Gold, although the 50% discount still applies.
Temples of the Divine Family: Culture Bomb
The Temple culture bomb works just like the other culture bombs in the game. It claims tiles in a one-tile radius around the Holy Site, as long as the tiles are within the workable 3-tile radius of its city. Any tiles outside the city's radius are not claimed. Also, while you can steal resource tiles from an opponent, you cannot steal a completed district; that tile is left unclaimed. In testing, this has once resulted in an opponent's district being completely cut off and surrounded within Kushan territory.
COLORS
I just could not pick a color combination. I'd pick one, live with it for a week, then get dissatisfied and pick another. Call it my native indecision. I played around with green and tan, then yellow and blue, and even brown and cyan, but nothing felt quite right.
I eventually settled on a burgundy and gold theme. I like to think of this as representing pomegranates (native to the Kushan lands of Afghanistan and Pakistan) and gold (a homage to the Silk Road trade). These also seem to reflect familiar Buddhist colors to me, such as the color of monks robes I see in western media.
FINAL NOTES
This is my first mod attempt. Like, ever.
In the future, I would still love to include music, but haven't figured out how to do it yet. My attempts to simply copy the standard civilizations in Asset Editor have so far been unsuccessful regarding the music. I imagine this civilization as either using the Persian or Scythian themes.
If any artistic soul wants to help with custom 3D art, that'd be great, but I've at least included standard art and assets that are the most appropriate for the situation (e.g., I've re-used standard Historic Moment art and building assets for the Kushan uniques).
I also hope to update this with mod compatibility such as TSL as I learn how and have time.
My first inclination was to build the Kanishka Stupa as a true National Wonder that would require placement, but I couldn't figure out how to manipulate the art asset in the way I would need to fill the whole tile. I think placing it in the Tier 3 spot in the Holy Site was a decent alternative.
It's been an amazing journey. Learning how to use modifiers correctly took a lot of time, and the ideas for unique traits I started out with never came to fruition, either because they were impossible or ended up not fitting aesthetically. It's been a process of learning and adaption. It's also been a fun learning experience as I've gained more knowledge about the history of a civilization I had little familiarity with before.
Taking on the Kushan Empire appealed to me because it was obvious the two main traits would be something involving the Silk Road, and something involving the spread of Buddhism. The lack of information on the civilization has been a challenge, but has been rewarding.
I started out completely dreading the idea of having to do a custom leader animation, because I have no experience in computer graphic art and it seemed like a tall order. There weren't even any good 2D depictions of Kanishka I could use, which wouldn't have been a problem if I'd chosen a more modern civilization. The one image that is most commonly found on searches is the headless, armless statues of Kanishka found in Surkh Kotal, but for obvious reasons those were just not aesthetically acceptable. However, the coins of the Kushan Empire are one of their most interesting legacies, and so when I found really good images of coins with Kanishka on the obverse, I realized I could use it as my leader image and solve that problem altogether. (If you are wondering why the leader icon is a coin).
I've tested this game only a little, and not at all on higher difficulties. I had to cut it short because I wasn't spending as much time with the family as I'd like. Hopefully I can revisit this off and on as time permits, and adjust the balance as I get feedback.
THANKS
Many thanks to everyone on the CivFanatics Creation & Customization forum who have answered my questions, or answered other people's questions (and thus indirectly led me down the right path). This includes Deliverator, raen, and isau, as well as Leugi for the Unit Asset Tutorial, Nycholus V for the Using Modifiers Tutorial, and Josh Atkins for the modbuddy template.
Please enjoy.
