Introduction and Game Manual

[Pazyryk]

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—Image by Ruan Jia ​

You begin knowing only that you are a small tribe, belonging to one of three races, without name, leader or history. Your tribe will gain a name soon enough. Its character will develop over time based on local geography and the choices you make. Heroes and other great people will arise from the ranks of armies tested in battle, from places of arcane or divine study, or from the alleyways of your most corrupt cities. Some of these individuals will lead your civilization. All will pass in time (except perhaps for the ageless). Your small tribe has no lore, no epic tales of heroes or gods from times past. There is no past. The story of Éa is yours to make…

Éa III Sword & Sorcery Game Manual

Major Differences from Civ5:

• You begin the game simply as a "Tribe of ______" (one of three races) without a civilization name or leader. You will take a specific civ name with an associated “civ trait” early in the game based on an achievement, discovery or some other specific condition.
• Leaders are derived from great people, exist as units on the map, and may be replaced.
• The Great People system is very different, both in derivation and function. GPs build all wonders, craft epics, establish trade routes, cast spells, lead armies, and do other things—and they don't "disappear" after performing these actions. Instead, they are limited by the fact that great accomplishments take time. Any GP can become a leader.
• Tech advancement is no longer the overarching "measure of progress" that it is in base Civ5. You can achieve most victory conditions while illiterate. Higher-tier techs are just one of the tools to victory.
• Policy advancement is based on Cultural Level, which is a function of culture generated per population point over your civilization's entire history.
• The land is alive. Depending on your approach to the world, forest, jungle and marsh may be your friend or your worst enemy.
• There are no "punishments" for building cities. No policy advancement slowdown. No extra tech costs. No extra unhappiness. You are encouraged to evaluate potential city sites without worrying about these indirect effects. Even a city that can't grow beyond size 2 might be useful, perhaps to hold a strategic point or claim a single valuable resource. If it is worth defending and the cost of a settler, then go for it. Civilizations are therefore not either Tall or Wide; a civilization focused on growing a few large cities might still have small outposts. (ICS is defeated in other ways.)
• Resources and improvements are more valuable, and non-resource, non-improved land much less so. In fact, the latter provide zero yield. City placement is not driven by minimum spacing requirement (there is none except that cities can't be adjacent), but rather by local geography, resources or the civilization's policy and tech development. Taken together, these factors might encourage tightly clustered or widely spaced city placement. These changes also result in the maintenance of large "wildlands" regions even late into the game. It is a fantasy setting after all, and I dislike the "suburban sprawl" that inevitably occurs from the base game rules.
• Extensive AI modding. The mod AI controls all tech and policy choices and all great person movement and actions for AI civs. Eventually, it will also influence build queues, war/peace choices, and other things. These are driven by actual strategies and value calculations (not just a random number generator with some biasing).

Éa is a fantasy mod project for Civ5 that I have been developing for some time now, with the initial idea going back to this post in the Fall From Heaven forum. I announced the mod with a teaser thread in January 2012 and released Éa I Dawn of the Mortal Races (which was really just an early prototype build) in April of that year. Éa II The Ageless & The Divine was initially released on December 21, 2012 (to coincide with the end of the world). The mod developed quite a bit with the help of testers through the first half of that year. But it was never a "complete" game because I hadn't added the mod's victory conditions yet. Even worse, we had no fantasy units! Well, there were other problems too (like slow pacing) but I think that we always needed units for real immersion.

Perhaps I should have tackled the unit problem sooner, but I really had my hands full with coding. I started working on Éa III Sword & Sorcery by diving into the dll. The most important changes were freeing up the Great People in combat, stacking and entering foreign cities. This was really needed for my vision of Great People going around and doing all kinds of different things. I got some help when ls612 (C++ coder extraordinaire) joined the effort in early 2014. There were some signs that unit creation would pick up in 2013, especially when Deliverator started making tools to make it happen. But the Golden Age for Civ5 fantasy modding is just starting now (May 2014) with a whole load of fantasy units coming out by ispanets, Civtar and Nomad or What.

So there is a ton of new stuff with Éa III release and that means plenty of bugs and balance issues to work through. We now have five victory conditions, but it isn't clear that they all "work" yet. And there are still things I want to add during this phase, most importantly the Heldeofol as a playable race but also lycanthropy, vampirism and other stuff. So I'm still calling it an alpha for now. With your help we can get this mod to "beta" stage soon enough. After that we will stay in a sort of eternal beta stage as new stuff gets added and new phases are released.