I read this post (IDEA: alternative to Tribal Market for Lakota/Haudenosaunee) and agreed with the points given there. Basically, I am on board with giving them a new way to gather coin, as I enjoy diverse mechanics, but I think the way it’s implemented now is not the way to go: it doesn’t have anything to do with fur trading (although it is mentioned in the history tab) and you end up depleting the mine anyway, which is the whole point of changing things.
So I propose the tribal market gets split in two buildings, each focusing on one of it’s abilities; generating coin and generating xp.
The first building would be the same tribal market we know but it wouldn’t be placed in mines. Instead, it would act like a shrine, atracting a max of 10 animals each (can be fewer). But the animals wouldn’t generate coin by themselves, you’d have to put villagers working in the building so it can start producing coin (only coin). It can be infinite or it can change each food point for 2 gold and dissapear when all animals are consumed. You could only build 3 at a time at can only be worked by 10 villagers at a time. The cost would be the same.
The second “building” would effectively be a sacred site you build on top of mines and generates xp by itself, like indian cows in their special building (don’t remember the name right now but it relates because religion). Another effect of this sacred site placed on top of the mines would be that they become unminable: no one can exploit the mine until the site is destroyed (or the player can destroy it to allow and ally to mine it). It relates to reality and it could make a good mechanic.
This would shift the meta of both civs to include or focus on negating resources to the enemy (hunt with the tribal market and coin with sacred sites) and map control, and you could add cards to make tribal markets trickle food or buffing sacred sites in some way.
Would you like to see the mechanic changed to something like this?
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No I think this is a bad idea, because it upsets the map balance and how civs consume res:
- The fur trading mechanic would result in these two civs consuming far more animals which causes them to be far more aggressive and have even worse eco than now (they already have bad eco).
- Meanwhile the xp generation mechanic would give the civs a balance upsetting buff giving them a completely new avenue of generating xp and increasing momentum (these two civs are already the fastest civs in the game). In addition the occupation of a mine is still upsetting for teamgames and map control purposes.
Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are cool, it’s just that it would upset balance far more than what we currently have.
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I would make the tribal marketplace their coing gathering building after the mine runs out.
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Thanks for replying. I agree it changes things, that was part of the design, as I wanted to give them somethin more unique.
About your first point, yes, it would make them rely more on hunt, and of course it should be balanced, but it wouod neef testing.
About xp, I was thinking about removing the xp ceremony in the community plaza to compensate the xp gathered on mines. And it is also true that occupation of mines its upseting but only for enemies, as you could destroy the building and let them mine it (or allow allied players to gather from the mine bellow but I prefer that wasn’t the case.
In any case, nothing is set on stone and this are just ideas. I’d like other players to give their ideas and maybe we could all propose an interesting and hopefully unique mechanic.
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Honestly when I first heard they were going to introduce fur trading into the game I automatically assumed it would have something to do with killing animals and thought that would be interesting because I am all for accuracy. When I saw the way it was implemented I was just utterly confused. Like who would have green lighted this stupid design idea?
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As implemented in this idea or like it is in the game?
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Me too. I really was hyped to see a new mechanic, but we were presented with mining with extra steps. I mean, they knew there was going to be a push back, why no go all the way if there were going to be complaints anyway? At least we’d have a new mechanic to work with.
So I really hope they take a good look to ir in the near future.
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Just had an idea. Make the fur trading building independent from mines. And also add a fortress or industrial age card that enables normal mining, could be called “metallurgy”, it would make sense and be more realistic. As natives didn’t mine because they didn’t know how to nor what to do with it, until europeans introduced it to them.
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Not true. Mining wasn’t a foreign concept - there was trade all up and down the Americas, and the Mesoamericans were big into metallurgy. It was just part of a religious nature to the specific nations in question that they didn’t mine because of how it disrupts the earth.
As for everything else, I am not really a fan. The tribal marketplace as a building is a good idea, I just think it’s a poor design - My opinion is still to take a leaf from the book of Age of Mythology - have villagers tasked to the marketplace walk back and forth between the marketplace in question and back to an allied structure, with the type of structure and distance both increasing the amount of coin generated. This would allow for the removal of the Estate from both cultures, especially considering neither really used “plantations.”
(The Haudenosaunee did farm, but the Lakota did not - I’m still weirded out that the Lakota in-game can farm or use an estate at all. It’s not historically accurate in the least. I personally think that the Lakota should have a building that passively generates bison and these bison would be attracted to the Lakota’s community plaza like a Japanese shrine in lieu of villagers, up to a limit.)
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I was referring to north American natives, i know that mesoamericans did work with metal. With trade do you meant about Mesoamerica or all Northamerica? I’m not convinced with NA natives not mining because of “respect to the earth”, unless they actually knew they could do that. I believe that any tribe would work with metal as long they could use it against their enemies, they could just see it as a gift from mother earth
I’m no expert, maybe it’s true that they didn’t mine knowing about it, that would impress me
Bruh. I am Lakota. We knew how it worked, and there were trade routes up and down the entirety of the Americas. Metallurgy wasn’t an alien thing to us, we knew how it worked even way back then. We didn’t do it as a religious practice. Preserving Unci Makha was far more important than some pointless leg-up over an enemy that would eventually die and return to the earth, same as we would.
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I like the AOM coin creation idea!
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Interesting. I am curious as a Lakota person, do you feel that the game is genuinely trying to be respectful in its representation or basically just trying to get cred without actually caring about the actual representation accuracy? I honestly can’t see how this whole mess with the fur trading and the mines would impress someone from that culture.
It’s not really trying, but to make a game that had any traces of respect towards us would require a Native dev team.
I could probably write a few pages of grievances about the Lakota, at least, with how they’re poorly representing us.
The biggest ones, to me, have always been the Dog Soldier (which was partially fixed by renaming it the Tokala Soldier, but now it has the issue of wearing a Dog Soldier’s warbonnet and not a Tokala Soldier’s warbonnet), the weird fixation the game has on promoting guns > bows, which just wasn’t true to Lakota culture (there’s accounts of Lakota riding up to a buffalo on a horse and shooting an arrow through the buffalo - Lakota bows were short-range and powerful, and they were largely going to favour the bow over the gun), the coin (which is being addressed - I think the AoM coin mechanic is a good fix), and the usage of the farm and estate. The Lakota didn’t use farms or estates. The coin mechanic I introduced would supply a coin income throughout the game, and would allow the removal of the estate, and granting the Lakota free bison generation at their town centers (wild bison, not tamed) would be the easiest way to fix the farming thing. To balance them out, let their Community Plaza attract a static number of bison in place of villagers.
I have many grievances about the Lakota representation in this game. The more I learn about my own culture through my elders and whatnot, the more I come to dislike the representation.
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Thanks for sharing that. Its good to actually hear from someone who has a better understanding of those things than the corporation pretending to speak on behalf of those people. I have always had issue with non-European representations in AOE games even though its still my favourite RTS game.
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They’ve at least tried. One thing that amused me was that the Lakota in the base Age of Empires III game (when the Lakota were a minor native civ) they seem to be speaking Dakota, not Lakota. Made me laugh.
My other gripe is with the Cheyenne minor civ - replacing the Cheyenne Rider with the Dog Soldier would be a good move. The Dog Soldiers were a proud warrior society of the Cheyenne, and not using one of the Cheyenne warrior societies for their unit is a bit odd.
(And weird as it would seem, Dog Soldiers were almost never mounted soldiers - their thing was using an arrow to pin themselves to a spot on the battlefield and staying there until the battle was over or they died. They were essentially berserkers, not cavalrymen. The only way they could leave was if another Dog Soldier removed the arrow.)
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They did essentially no research when they made the Dog Soldier unit, or most of the Lakota civ. I wish I could remake it from the ground up, I have a complete idea I would implement.
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They could add an alternate resource to the coins, or have their coin named differently. The fur market seemed to me to be an unoriginal and poorly implemented idea. This requires a rework.
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