When I first heard about Dynasty systems for China I was very excited: the first thing I thought about was that they were taking the idea from AoE3 where you pick a leader and that leader gives you an small bonus… but instead, make it even bigger
AoE3 Politician|690x490
I really liked that concept in AoE3, because that enabled you to adapt to the map and the opponent you had… the problem on AoE3 was that you had to pick your deck at the beginning of the game, and you couldn’t undo that decision later. For some reason, I always felt that picking the cards BEFORE the game was a mistake and that they should enable the card selection on the age up, just not all the cards at once, but having a set of cards available.
On China there were different Dinasties, let’s say that you start with Qin Dinasty, and have the chinese as they are nowadays. Later, when you age up you have to choose one dinasty: HAN, NORTHEN or SOUTHERN
______________ Feudal Age ______________
HAN DINASTY ( Imperial Acadamy)
- Improved Inspectors (they collect more taxes)
- You can’t build stable, but your infantry and archers will have have +hp and defense
- Siege engineers is disabled.
- Stone walls are cheaper.
- Villagers are chaper
NORTHEN DINASTY ( Great Stable - Landmark that can create cheaper stable units)
- All cavalary gains +20hp
- Farm upgrades 25% cheaper
- Mining and lumbering upgrades 25% more expensive
SOUTHERN DINASTY ( Barbican of the Sun)
- Cheaper archery range and +1 range for archers
- Enables a weaker version of the crossbow in Feudal (auto upgrades in Castle)
- Access to all military buildings and Siege engineers.
- Eco upgrades take 50% more time.
______________ Castle Age ______________
TANG DINASTY ( Imperial Palace )
- Cheaper eco upgrades -50% cost
- Enables Villages construction and can create villagers in them
- Enables Granary
- Farms -25% cost
SONG DINASTY ( Astronomical Clocktower)
- Villagers are created 35% faster
- Enables Villages construction
- Unlocks Zhuge Nu unit
- Lowers archery range units cost -10%
YUAN DINASTY ( Spirit Way )
- Villagers, Officials, and Military units gain +15% speed.
- Unlocks the Fire Lancer
- Stables work 10% faster
- Unlocks stables (if they were not available)
______________ Imperial Age ______________
MING DINASTY ( Pagoda )
- Unlocks Grenadier
- Addional Hp for all military units +10%
- All military units are created 15% faster
QUING DINASTY ( Great Wall Gatehouse)
- Lower stone cost of all defensive structures (-20%)
- Infantry and archers can build defensive structures
- Additional Armor for Infantry and archers (+1/+2 )
Of course, the bonus will be accumulative, and you won’t lose them when upgrading. Yes, I know this is a pretty crazy concept, but I am actually borrowing the idea from Civilization games, were you had to take branches to “unlock” new technologies. Also, when you play any AoE you make this kind of decisions all the time: if you invest in your archers since feudal, but you have to switch to cavalary in imperial, you know you will have to spend a lot of resources, and in some scenarios that’s pretty much impossible
My idea is that you may go HAN > TANG > MING as a boomer, be a fat and happy pocket and go fast imperial, appearing with large army after playing SIMs for 25 mins in order to protect your team mates… or you can play agressive going NORTHEN > YUANG with heavy cavalary on Castle in order to crush your opponents.
Even this concept could be even better for european civilizations: The Holy Roman Empire can be split into different nationalities as you age up, focusing on different aspect of their army, economy and cuture: Since you have Germany, Italy, Swiss, Burgundy, Bohemia, Netherlands and a lot of countries, you don’t need to add one specific civilization for each of those, but use HRE as an umbrella and include each nationality as a branch with its own personality as you age up. The same could apply for Delhi Sultanate: by changing its name you can make it more broad, and then add Delhi Sultanate as one of the aspects you get to pick as you age up.
My point is: there were empires, there were great civilizations and there are nations and popolations that are only being included in the game just for the sake of it. In this way we could include many more nations addressing their uniqueness without altering the balance (think about the Aztecs on AoE2, who got powder units just because of balance)