I don’t necessarily have a very clear historical background to the designs, but want to emphasize their civilizational identity and possible strategies. It might be a little unbalanced, but hopefully it will inspire community creativity.
I remember a rumor that there was a big DLC with Armenians, Georgians, Vlachs, and Russ renamed from Slavs. If the dev want to finish Europe with a big DLC like the last one, it will be fine.
Edited: Some modifications were made as suggested.
Vlachs
Balkan cavalry civilization
Long before the well-known Battle of Dracula, Wallachia of the Vlachs had been fighting Hungary and Ottoman to maintain their independence. In this plain full of fertile black soil, immigrants from the Roman Empire who pursued gold mines in the past established a tenacious force in the Middle Ages and became the predecessor of Romania.
They should take advantage of black soil and age advancing to use a variety of strategies.
Civ bonuses:
Can build Black Soil Farm.
Advancing Castle age and Imperial age cost -200 gold.
Free Heresy but units resist convert -25%.
Can garrison Villagers in Mining Camps (10 Villagers per buildings).
Team Bonus: Mills and Folwarks provide +5 population.
Wonders: Bran Castle, or Sucevița Monastery, or Cozia Monastery, or Curtea de Argeș Cathedral.
Unique Building: Black Soil Farm
Replaces the common Farm. Provides 75 food with the size of 2x2.
Costs 25 wood originally, and Wheelbarrow and Hand Cart could make Black Soil Farm’s cost -10 and -5 wood respectively.
UU: Țintaşi or Vlach Marksman (40W 50G)
A bowman who can charge the attack. A full charge may take about 90 seconds.
In the history of Romania and Wallachia, the foot archers were the important part. Their Țintaşi (Vlach Marksmen) played a big role in their battles. Wallachian archers ambushed and resisted the enemy in many battles like Posada and Rovine, while Moldovan archers were hired as mercenaries.
HP: 30 → 35
Attack: 5 → 6, +10 → +14 when fully charged
Range: 5
Rate of Fire: 2.03
Frame delay: 15
Attack delay: 0.35
Accuracy: 100%
Projectile speed: 7
Armor: 0/0
Speed: 0.85
LoS: 8 → 10
Upgrade cost: 600F 500G, 50 seconds
Castle UT: “Scorched Earth Tactic” (400F 400W)
Cavalry +3 Attack vs Buildings; Receive or return 50% of the non-stone cost of the building when destroying an enemy’s or losing your own.
Imperial UT: ''Ambush Tactic" (600F 400G)
Țintaşi have their recharge time reduced by 20%. The Vlach archers successfully repelled intruders with ambush in many battles.
Tech Tree:
Economy: no Farm and Horse Collar, Heavy Plow, Crop Rotation.
Blacksmith: full.
Castle: full.
Barrack: no Supplies.
Stable: no Camel line and Lancer line.
Archery Range: no Arbalester and Parthian Tactics.
Siege workshop: no Onager and Heavy Scorpion.
Monastery: no Atonement, Redemption and Block Printing.
University: no Architecture, Heated Shot, Treadmill Crane and Siege Engineers.
Dock: no Galleon, Elite Cannon Galleon and Shipwright.
For real? Just having 2x2 size probably is enough of an bonus. Having a farm for 10 wood is one of the most broken eco bonus I’ve ever heard. It has almost half of the food so it should cost accordingly.
Make it 5 and not all of of them just minig camps or lumber camps. Otherwise too good early game.
I don’t think such things should be in the game. There’s a reason the tech costs 1k gold. If you do something like the civ should be build around that bonus meaning it can’t have an eco bonus and in practice every would go yolo knights siege because the best castle age counter to wouldn’t work.
And they have even no horse collar.
Low wood cost is aimed to give them a low start-up threshold.
I wouldn’t mind raising the cost a little or reducing the food content, but I don’t think it should go below 6.5 food per wood.
I just want to encourage players to take advantage of this bonus to use knights.
Their strengths are almost all focused on the early game to the mid game, so they have to be tough at that point.
The biggest benefit I want to stress is its low cost. Imagine if there is a lack of natural food sources in the early game, or if you want Fast Castle or Fast Imperial and have to farm early, this would be a huge help. The smaller size also helps save space.
Of course, I don’t mind balance adjustments like making its build time longer or villagers gather food a bit slower on it.
Apart from atheism, there are currently no other techs that are burdening the enemy, so I think this aspect can be tried. Vlachs seems a good fit.
It’s not really about the food per wood ratio but about the (basically non existent) initial investment. You need less than the equivalent of one farm to get 5 vils on food. That’s insane because you can have 10 farmers in no time. You can just spam them on your way to feudal age and you’ll be miles ahead to castle age. Imo that’s bad because it removes the basic game mechanic of how to get food past dark age.
Also you make their farms have 2 strong bonuses at once. I think a 2x2 farm is a pretty good farming bonuses in itself (not sure if it’s technically feasible though).
Fair enough but that’s just too much imo. If you give them an insane bonus like that they need some devastating drawbacks (e.g. no access to mangonels).
Well you are always protected from raids without any further investment. Khmer at least need to build houses that won’t be uses as part of a wall, cost wood and might takes space up in your base.
Slower gather rate on farms would probably suck tbh. Not sure how to balance this tbh, but this isnt the way
Way too big of a help I believe
Atheism is boring, and as it is, the only thing that diferenciates Vlachs from any generic civ are the negative efffects on enemies and their eco and neither of them are interesting. Maybe one UT or bonus that affects the enemy is fine (although I still find it lame) but they need to haveore unique bonuses
Khmer have a better eco than Vlachs so they can afford the houses. I stilldont see how it is that OP tbh
Technically it works since it is a new building.
Just relying on the smaller size doesn’t make it unique enough as an unique building in my opinion, so I tried to feature low cost. It still requires a mill to build, and even the lower cost is not enough to compete against natural source in my opinion.
It runs out of food very quickly, so a slightly longer build time I think is an effective balance.
Any civilization needs Onagers, otherwise the forest cannot be destroyed.
So do you mean they can’t use Mangonel line until the Imperial age?
They can get to the Castle age without mining gold.
With the Black Soil Farm, I think this is unique enough.
So which one is better? Influence the enemy’s military or economics?
Do you have any ideas on how you want the new UT to look like?
But there isn’t any natural resources past dark age. So after your boars sheep and whatnot run out this civ can have 10 vils on food with 100 food while a regular civ can’t even make two farms. Again it’s not about when they run out its about the number of vils collecting food that early.
Honestly who cares about cutting forest? That’s super niche and only a thing on one single (and not the most competitive) map. Btw turks don’t have onager.
No what I’d propose here is to remove the mangonel line entirely for this civ. But even then I’m skeptical about free heresy.
The whole new farm thing is a massive problem. Not only is it really good as even just a 2x2, it’s super cheap. So basically, your farm eco is set up light years ahead of everyone else, and then their castle age doesn’t cost gold? This is going to give them the best eco and the fastest castle time in the game probably. It won’t matter if the power falls off later, because there won’t be a later in most cases.
What I want is easier access to artificial food and space saving advantages. I welcome any suggestions, but I hope it would be better if it followed this principle as much as possible.
Btw, I originally designed their farms to have normal cost and food amount, but allow 2 villagers to gather. I didn’t think it was easy to manage so I scrapped the idea.
At the moment, the way for balance I assume:
Make the farmer’s efficiency -30%/-20%/-10%/0% in each age. They don’t need more lumberjacks to afford the farms, but more farmers to maintain food income. But as @TungstenBoar said, reducing the farmer’s work efficiency may not be a good solution.
Or, make the Black Soil Farm costs 25 wood originally, and Wheelbarrow and Hand Cart could make Black Soil Farm’s cost -10 and -5 wood respectively. I believe this could help to solve what you worry about.
Which one you like? Or better suggestion?
Monks can still kill their knights if you need to rely on monks for defense.
It’s an indeed big bonus, but I don’t really think it’s going to be completely broken.
I dont think it is nearly as unique as China who are mostly generic outaide of their defenses and scorpions.
I think I prefer the eco tech
Tbh their tech tree is very open (prob too open with FU siege rams, gunpowder, paladins and arbs) but a cav, gunpodwer or siege bonus would make sense I imagine
I hate to sound nitpick but I despise techs that punish enemies as it doesn’t reward you the player for getting the tech it just hurts them instead.
If I can offer a replacement bonus: I read that Wallachian Castles utilized some interesting features such as tunnel systems and actually having ballista/scorpions in their defensive turrets. So while the idea of being able to garrison in one castle and pop out your army at another sounds a little bonkers, I feel like the ability to grant castles the ability to garrison scorpions and give their arrows a strike through effect fits better here than any other civ I can think of as Google searches don’t show much about ballistae castles for any other civ.
The tech tree doesn’t really encourage or discourage any specific military. Balkan civ is not a description you can put into the tech tree.
They don’t have Siege Engineers, so they don’t have FU Siege Rams actually
My current thinking is to remove Arbalesters, make Țintaşi’s elite upgrade no longer affect the recharge time, and then change “Impaler” to “Ambush Tactics” to drastically reduce Țintaşi’s recharge time. I hope to give this UU more opportunities to perform. How is this idea?
I think it’s ok if just a civilization is made particularly famous for this. This will not be the norm.
As a UT, its effect still needs to train scorpions first and put them into the castle to take effect. I think it is too niche.
And I’ve already given the Georgians the idea of making the castle fire scorpion bolts with scorpion’s effect.
It still is what some might call anti-fun. If you want to try something with scorching? How about units steal food from farms when attacking them and destroying a farm makes that spot unable to be farmed again for a short time. It rewards your action instead of inaction.
It’s why games like League of Legends has moved away from global debuff auras. I’m not the best at explaining my point and I should probably commit Heresy researched wololo effect for bringing up an inferior game but I felt compelled.
TLDR the bonus might be fun to use but incredibly unfun to go against as it would feel almost unfair to just be punished so hard for this. You can also consider the horrors of having multiple Wallachians on maps where that player starts in Imp age and suddenly the game is really not fun.
Well, at least I know that I don’t belong to those people for now.
I also don’t like to punish my opponent too much, so I set the number at -5% instead of -10% or higher. -5% takes long enough to manifest its effect, and is even considered too insignificant by the first person to reply.
Destroying farms for gaining the food is fun, but maybe a bit too niche.
This basically only brings benefits in the Castle Age, as there is no shortage of food in the late game.
If you can get 100% of the food in the farm, it’s probably too strong. Once the crossbowmen or UU successfully break into the opponent’s base, you can easily destroy 3 or 4 farms to get enough resources to advance to the Imperial age.
If you can only get part of the food, say 50%, it may not be very attractive. And the premise of all this is to have the opportunity to destroy the opponent’s farms and the opponent has no power to fight back.
I also don’t like the idea of techs that punish your opponent - aside from being “anti-fun”, one problem with them is balancing them for different numbers of players. If the effect is strong enough to matter in a 1v1 it will be overpowered in a team game.
Atheism gets around this mostly by nobody using it anyway, although my guess is it’s underpowered and useless at least in 1v1s.