@Calvente: It appears that the hammers provided by Citizens are also affected by buildings that do +% hammers, so nerfing their hammer yield somewhat does make sense in that regard.
The reasons for leaving them as hammers though is Wealth - or of course Research, Culture and Caste System. You can specialise a city with commerce buildings, add Art. III Citizens and have the city work on Wealth for a significant gain. the Artisan promotions remove the need for the Citizen to be paid for (They pay for themselves through their work in the city).
Since they may need a little nerf at the Art. III stage though, I'll definitely look at replacing any bonuses lost with Commerce or Gold.
@zoommooz11: OK, so I've looked through that list and extracted the details, which gives me this.
True Blood itself does nothing, it's just the entry Promo.
TB 1: +5% Str/Def
TB 2: +6% Str/Def
TB 3: +1 Move
TB 4: +7% Str/Def
TB 5: 75% Collateral Damage protection
TB 6: +10% Withdrawl Chance
TB 7: +2XP from combat
TB 8: 25% Resistance to Poison
TB 9: 25% Resistance to Cold
TB 10: 15% Resistance to Magic
TB 11: +8% Str/Def
TB 12: +12% Str/Def
TB 13: +15% chance to capture units after combat
TB 14: Can see invisible units
TB 15: Flying, Amphibious, +2 Moves
I think this can still be handled - albeit slightly altered - with stackable Promo's. As noted with the Giantkin, you can specify how many applications of a Promotion there must be, which is useful here.
The XML necessary is:
Code:
<PrereqPromotionANDs>
<PrereqPromotionAND>
<PromotionType>PROMOTION_GIANTKIN</PromotionType>
<iPrereqApplications>2</iPrereqApplications>
</PrereqPromotionAND>
</PrereqPromotionANDs>
Which will need changing, granted. But here's what I'm thinking.
As before, with the Vamp1, 2 and Improvement Promos. Handle the strength and defence boosts through the regular Improvement promotions. For balance, you may want to make this a 1% increase per application, or raise that depending on how often it gets applied.
Now lets take TB 3 as an example here. Third in the chain, adds 1 movement. So have the promotion check to see if there are three applications of VampImprove, which (using placeholder names, change them to whatever you choose to use) would be something like this:
Code:
<PrereqPromotionANDs>
<PrereqPromotionAND>
<PromotionType>PROMOTION_VAMP_IMPROVE</PromotionType>
<iPrereqApplications>3</iPrereqApplications>
</PrereqPromotionAND>
</PrereqPromotionANDs>
And that's it. Repeat for each of the following True Blood Promos that don't add strength or defence, as they're handled by VampImprove itself.
The up-side of doing it this way is that your vampires will continue to grow even after they surpass the fifteenth promotion, because they'll still get the stackable. Granted that can get a bit overpowered, but then you have to keep them alive long enough to do so.
You also don't have to apply the strength boosts by stackable either - that's just the way I'd do it. The stackable promotion can just act like a counter. It does nothing by itself, but the True Blood promotions check to see how many there are, and when there's the right number of them it applies the right True Blood promotions, including ones that handle strength mods.
If you want, I'll do up the XML for the promotions for either way, or both ways so you can see the differences in how they work.