With the release of AoEIII Definitive Edition and the (small) possibility of a new expansion in the future, I have been thinking a lot lately about potential new content ideas. Today I would like to share one of these with you guys. This isn’t a demand for the devs, they clearly have much more urgent issues to address, I just want to discuss some fun possibilities for new content. Anyway, let’s get to it.
The addition of the Prospector Wagons(for South Africa and Finland), the Fur Trade for the Haudenosaunee and the Lakota and many other new economic units and buildings for major and revolutionary civs left me wondering what new economic units/buildings could be added to create new strategies and add more flavor to the game.
I also realized that the now renamed estate is a pretty generic building. Besides some flavor text in some of the home city cards and technologies, there is no mention of what exactly is being harvested there. This works perfectly fine for the game as it is, but I wondered how different specialized crops could open new economic strategies and how they would fit within the game’s setting. The following are some of the ideas I though that would make sense for the time period and context and how they could be implemented.
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Sugar Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The British, The Dutch, The Portuguese, Brazil, Haiti and Indonesia]
Builds a Sugar Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but generates +35% coin. -
Winery Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The French, The Spanish, The Portuguese, Chile and Argentina]
Builds a Winery Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but it generates both coin (at 90% the rate of a generic estate) and food (at 35% the rate of a generic farm). -
Tobacco Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Aztecs, The French, The Spanish and The Portuguese]
Builds a Tobacco Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but it generates both coin (at 110% the rate of a generic estate) and a small trickle of XP. -
Coffee Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Indians, The Ottomans, Gran Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil]
Builds a Coffee Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but generates +20% coin and each Coffee Estate built increases settlers movement speed and work rates by +5%(up to 25%) -
Cocoa Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Aztecs, The Dutch, The Spanish, The French, The British, The Swedes and Mexico]
Builds a Cocoa Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but it generates both coin (at 65% the rate of a generic estate) and food (at 50% the rate of a generic farm). -
Cotton Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Indians, The Ottomans, The Inca, The British, The USA and Egypt]
Builds a Cotton Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but generates +20% coin and each Cotton Estate built decreases civilian and infantry unit costs by -5%(up to 15%). -
Silk Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Chinese, The Indians, The Japanese and The Ottomans]
Builds a Silk Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but generates +40% coin and each Cotton Estate built decreases civilian unit costs by -2%(up to 10%). -
Oppium Estate Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The Chinese, The Indians, The Japanese, The Ottomans and The British] (This one is obviously controversial, I understand if the devs don’t want to include a hard drug in the game)
Builds a Oppium Estate. It functions similarly to a generic Estate, but generates +35% coin and and a small trickle of XP, however it slowly consumes your food supply. -
Oil Prospection Wagon: [Can Only be acquired via Home City shipment - Exclusive for: The British, The French, The Russians, The Ottomanns, The USA(obviously), Mexico, Gran Colombia and Romania] (Not a Estate, but a new coin source anyway)
The Wagon creates an Oil Well. The Oil Well is a building that functions similarly to a gold/silver mine. It has a massive total of 30,000 coin that can be harvested at a 3x faster rate than a regular mine, however only up to 5 settlers can work on an Oil Well at a time.
It’s obviously not well balanced, I’ll leave that discussion to the guys in the competitive community, and I’m probably forgetting some historically relevant civs for each of those crops, but I think you’ll get the general idea.
TL;DR: Here are some ideas for new Estate Crops to add new flavor and new bonuses to the game.