Kailric
Jack of All Trades
Hey, he looks like a good choice to me too. I am going to read the full article on him but what would be the name of his Civ? Like the Franks proceeded the French, Anglo-Saxon the English. Also, I am looking for a German Civ and thinking maybe Otto the Great would be a good choice.I nominate Sviatoslav to lead the Rus.
I still think there needs to be some base (read: free) research. Civs that don't start with Monasticism can easily fall 30+ turns behind others. I usually try to get 2 monasteries up with libraries ASAP, and it still seems to take a long time to get to some of the more essential techs. Once I get everything going and have some inventors and monks, the rate seems pretty good (maybe a little too good, if I got a bunch of inventors and monks), but it's tough getting going, especially when you have to wait on monasticism.
Well, I have merged the JAnimals mod and I started a new game to test things and right off I realized what you are saying as I am playing as the Ostrogoth. Yeah, Monasticism is one of the more critical techs early on. It took forever for me to get a Seasoned Scout so I didn't do much exploring early on. I finally managed to make friends with Charlemagne and had enough gold to buy Monasticism from him. I started saving to buy that tech as soon as I realized It would take me 50 turns to get it
I had the tech rate low when I first released the mod so that it would be easier to test the techs for bugs and game balance. Now that a lot of things are worked out and fixed we can work on research rate.
Ok, here are some thoughts... If we give more free research then later on in the game the free research maybe to much as you say the rate as it is maybe still too good. I actually want the player to feel as if he really is living in the "Dark Ages" at the start of the game so adding "free research" would take away from this effect so I would like to find an alternate solution.
We could lower the cost of the first techs so it doesn't take nearly as long. However, Medieval unlike Civ4 doesn't rely so much on techs. There is plenty to do at the start without waiting on techs. I also wanted the first tier of techs to be very valuable thats why they have more benefits than other later techs. Sense these first techs give such good bonuses a Civ may get behind in Techs early on but they will be ahead in other areas. This also opens up the option of trading techs with other Civs and is a profitable strategy. But, what if no other Civs on the map starts with Monasticism? Well, in that case the Civs will all be even
Also, there is one feature that may go unnoticed and I will bring this to light more in the next update and that is a player gains a bonus to research when you Trade goods. It is historically accurate that Trade spurs on new ideas. Its been a while sense I looked over the mechanics of this but I bet it needs to be adjusted to match the research times.
I just tested things and you do gain a bonus when selling goods to Europe not with Natives though so I'll adjust that. I had 7 turns to go on my research then I sold about 180 units of wine at the Fair and gained enough research bonus to reduce the turns to 5. I will work on this feature in the next update and then we can test things out again.
Fixed for next update. I just can't seem to ever get this Units rightOn a related note: Islamic monks don't get a research bonus?
On settlements: While somewhat related to research, it just takes too dang long to get MaB up. What if, as I think you suggested, military units founded military settlements (Call them forts or outposts or whatever you like.) that could be improved to MaB and later Castles. Then you'd have 3 distinct settlements, each having unique buildings, each founded by different types of units. Monasteries for early research and agriculture, villages as economic manufacturing centers, and forts for military production.
I like this idea and will go with it. We'll call them outposts and will be founded instantly and have it set up so that only Castles can be built at an outpost. I plan also to expand Castle building. People didn't wake up one day and there was all of a sudden huge castles with all the bells and whistles, it was a gradual development with new features being added as new ideas and experience was gathered.
Also, I been thinking of adding special defense bonuses to Castles in the effect that Castles have a Defense radius and also have a Zone of Control. The Defense radius would add a defense bonus to your towns and monasteries that are within this radius. Also, they can detect Marauders like Towers do and I plan on adding new Military buildings like the Barracks and Archery range that will give benefits to soldiers.
What exactly is the deal with Marauders? They seem to always pop up in the same places, which is kind of boring. How is their spawning figured? Also, can they maybe not demolish settlements? Steal stuff, burn a building or two, and maybe murder an innocent citizen, but don't raze the city. That's a job for armies, not roaming marauders. Maybe when you capture them , they should be slaves, instead of outlaws, too
Well, the reason I haven't fixed cities being razed yet is that I will have to add in new code for such a feature. In the Vanilla game Indians would destroy a settlement if there was no defenders there with muskets. If there was defenders after the attack they would make off with goods. I am adding in Animals for the next update and this will add even more threat. It for sure would not be logical for Animals to raze a whole city so I will have to add a feature as you describe for them. The Vikings where Marauders so to speak and they for sure destroyed whole settlements, especially if the settlement put up a good resistance.
Now that would be a cool feature to add in that the player is presented with a choice to put up a resistance or let the Marauders take what they want. There could be certain buildings or a chance that helps to "hide" goods so they want be detected by the Marauders.
What exactly do you suggest here? You say they pop up in the same places, you mean like around the same settlements? Basically when a settlement starts to do well and word starts to get around of the wealth at the settlement Marauders will start to appear. This is random and it can happen to any settlement no matter who owns it. Much like Privateers will appear near any prosperous city.
And Marauders become outlaws because I had it in mind to allow them to be able to take on the Marauder profession. This would make Outlaws desirable by the player but it needs to be balanced.
Do workers "learn" professions they do long enough, like they did way back in the original Colonization? Like if you had a colonists working prime timber as a lumberjack, there was some chance every turn that he might become and expert lumberjack. I'd love to see this, especially with peddlers having the potential to become wily traders.
This is a feature that is on the to do list. You may of heard of my Professions mod which adds this very thing. I did however feel like it was over powered and a few people advised that it was. Its a balancing thing, if too many peasants become masters then the game becomes too easy if not enough then its a useless feature. You have to look at it this way. If we use the Vanilla game as the starting balance factor then by adding in auto learning professions then this will obviously through the game out of balance as more Masters/Experts will be in the game than intended.
Like I mentioned when I first posted this mod after we get the basic game balanced and bug free we can start adding new features. This was one feature I wanted to add however I want it to be balanced. I been thinking of maybe changing the way players can "Learn from Natives" in that the player can "wear out their welcome" and Natives will no longer allow you to learn from them, especially if they don't like you. This would in effect allow for new ways to acquire Masters/Experts.
On a similar note, do serf really need to be educated to free peasants? Can this just be bypassed so that serfs can go straight to learning a profession (just at the slower rate). It feels silly having to educate the lower classes first to peasants, when the natives can train them straight into some profession.
Again, game mechanics such as this are all in the testing phase. I would have to agree with you on this. To start with I had it set up so that serfs, outlaws, and slaves could not learn from natives but I changed that before I released the mod. So yeah, it is kinda pointless at the moment to even train up serfs and such this way. I will change this in the next update.
One Idea I have is to change the amount of food required for Serfs/Outlaws/Cottars to only one and make Slaves cost no food. This may actually make these units desirable to be used in your cities. Right now I purchase slaves and just send them on to learn for natives.
So, we can have them able to be educated but change it so they can't learn from natives as so..
Serfs are bound to the lords land and pretty much their labor force is needed in order for the empire to function correctly. Thus they can not become Peddlers and travel where they will or travel to barbarian villages to learn from them.
Outlaws would not be welcomed in other settlements long enough to live among them and learn, they can however become Peddlers.
Cottars are just basically poor peasants. They can and are best used for Peddlers or learning from natives. When we do the educate over time feature Cottars and Outlaws could get a bonus to becoming Wily Traders as it was their class that more than likely became the true historical Peddlers.
Slaves are still on the drawing board and we may do something special with them similar to what I did in my Privateers mod.
Finally, I've attached a save where I have been building a MaB for like 25 turns on the coast. It should complete the next turn, but all it does is remove the jungle. I tried removing the jungle first, but it still did nothing. (If you change the way castles are built it probably wont matter, but at the moment I would call it a bug.)
Yeah, this would be a bug and not sure why that would be but with your save I can figure this out. However, like you say, building castles this way may be done away with.
Wow, I just wrote a lot . Thanks for your input. Like I mentioned you guys are helping develop this mod into something quite entertaining