Haudenosaunee: Looking Forward

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Overview

Most of my posts focus on the Lakota, but - Shocked Pikachu Face - here’s one focusing on the other half of Tortuamerica, the Haudenosaunee!

I’m just going to outline the basics of how I think the civ should move forward.

Economy

The Longhouse

The Haudenosaunee focused their lives on their Longhouses. While the game does note this and replaces houses with them, I’d like to propose taking this one step further - Enable the Haudenosaunee Town Center to act as a unique Town Center called the Longhouse. Alongside making it stronger and more expensive, and able to fire without garrison, the Longhouse would have two main aspects to it that would shape the entirety of the Hauds in-game:

  1. Villagers within X units of the Longhouse gather faster from Three Sisters Gardens.
  2. Longhouses support 50 population on their own, and the Haudenosaunee do not have houses.
    • This would enable the Haudenosaunee to build a new TC from the start, rather than needing to wait until Age 3. Notably, the lack of single-resource shipments for the Hauds would help balance this out, so they can’t age up and immediately build a new TC.

Longhouses would cost 1000 Wood, be 25% stronger, deal 25% more damage, and would potentially have a new model. Wouldn’t need one, though, tbh. The regular Town Center model is fine, though I’d imagine that the Devs would want to create a new TC model for them, and the current Hauds model would be the normal TC model for other woodlands nations, like the Five Civilized Tribes or the Anishinaabe.

Three Sisters Garden

While I’ve touched lightly on these for the Lakota, they aren’t that important over there and would likely be used for nothing more than an infinite wood source in the super late game, which would be about the only time they’d get built, aside from for the BBT.

On the other hand, the Haudenosaunee would revolve around the Three Sisters Garden, with many upgrades for the gather rates. Mirroring their resource shipments, I think it’d be cool if the Hauds had 2-3 cards like Economic Theory, but aimed directly for the Garden. Alongside just having a high rate of gather from those cards, they would also have cards to specifically increase the gather rate of coin, wood, and food separate from that.

With these clustering around Longhouses, the Hauds would make for a very defensive civ.

Too'te Lodge

The Too’te Lodge is the last notable thing for the Hauds’ economy. These are little huts that, over time, generate trees. Villagers can be tasked to these to improve the rate at which they produce trees, swapping back and forth between planting and gathering trees.
While planting, the villagers produce XP at an increased rate, but do not collect wood. While collecting, the gatherers… well, gather wood.
The base spawn rate for the Too’te Lodge for trees is only changeable by 2 things - Home city shipments and building the lodge nearby other trees. The more trees near the Lodge, the faster it produces trees.

Military

I’m gonna be honest here, the only thing I’ve really got is that the unique and strongest unit of the Hauds should be the Forest Prowler, renamed to Bone Carrier. Or just call them the Rotisken’rakéhte, though I’ve genuinely no idea how to say that. It translates (super roughly) to “Bone Carrier”. And “Earth Carrier”. And “Those who carry the [bones/earth] of our ancestors”.

Concerning the bulk of the military, it could be approached in a very European style - Generic age 2 archer + spearman combo, with weak scaling, with the Tomahawk and Bone Carrier becoming available in Age 3 to effectively replace the prior two units wholesale.
I’m still of the opinion that the Tomahawk should deal melee damage at a range. There’s no way a hatchet to the face is going to feel the same as a bullet.

As for the artillery, I think the Hauds could use more. When civs only have a single artillery unit, it often ends up trying to be a mortar, a culverin, and a field gun all at once, and then ultimately fails at all three (See: Light Cannon, Siege Elephant.) The Hauds are the one Native civ that can boast a focus on artillery, and that’s a direction they should go. I’d suggest three artillery pieces:

  1. Heavy Hollow
    • The Hollow Gun is the most generic artillery, available in age 3, and borders the horse gun in terms of effectiveness after its Guard upgrade.
  2. Light Hollow
    • Using the current Light Cannon model, the Light Hollow is purely a culverin, plain and simple. There is no particular reason for it to do anything else, and it may as well have identical stats.
  3. Howitzer Hollow
    • A howitzer. That’s it. That’s the whole suggestion.

For context, Mohawk uses the word ga’hQgnreg to name cannons; It, effectively, conveys the meaning of “big hollow [tube of metal]”. (No, I don’t know how to say the word.) Hence, Haudenosaunee artillery units would use “Hollow” where we would otherwise use “Gun” or “Cannon” *(“Heavy Cannon,” “Light Cannon,” “Howitzer Cannon.”)

As for their cavalry, they should be fairly limited and weak, with few available upgrades. It might actually be interesting to flat-out give them Hussars and Dragoons, but with a Haudenosaunee outfit and weapons.
Frankly, I can’t find any information about cavalry-mounted Haudenosaunee warriors, and they don’t seem to have valued the horse as heavily as prairie nations, and nor were their societies as well-organized.

One last random note, but I’d also argue that the Haudenosaunee and Lakota both gain a different type of explorer, rather than a warchief - the Lakota, a Heyoka, and the Haudenosaunee, a Clan Mother.

For the Lakota, not much would change. The explorer position the warchief holds is already, quite literally, the job of a Heyoka, down to being inspiring to nearby allies to being the only Heyoka in a tribe and being an informal leader figure. Like, the only thing missing is him riding his horse backwards and throwing his lance at enemies.

For the Hauds, the Clan Mother would stand out as a uniquely economic/defensive-focused explorer. Give her the ability to heal from the start and have her carded upgrades give her the ability to take damage for units around her and construct Medicine Camps, the same as the Haudenosaunee healers.
Plus, this way, Town Destroyer will just look all that much funnier.
(ADD: I think it’d also be cooler if the Lakota and Haud explorers were both women. Heyoka could be and were women just as often as men, and it’d give some much-needed diversity to the baseline explorers across the civs in the game. Currently, a whole zero civs have female explorers as their default.)

ADD: Ahh, I hit post too soon. Expect changes.

ADD2: Alright, I think that’s mostly it.

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I dont think we can have a stronger TC right out of the gate, that would be way too hard to push in the early game, not to mention firing without garrison, would kinda make them unrushable combined with like a war hut.

I do like the idea of them focusing on one building without the houses though I think we can take inspiration from china and how villages gain more pop space with a tech (or even just from age up). It can even gain more stats with each age.

edit: almost like how port gain more tcs with age up, haud tcs can gain more benefits with age up

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They also need to spend 1000 wood to build another and are stuck at a 50 pop cap until they do so. They are hard to rush, but that’s the point - their civ bonuses make defense easier, but it does nothing for their early economy.

The direction is absolutely that of a turtling civ, but booming isn’t something they do from the start. They need to survive age 2 to get to that point.

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I dont think booming is the primary concern, FF would be in this case unless we cut down their access to things like crates and xp.

Haud currently can and do have a very good FF and skirm goon comp and allowing them to just not care about early defenses is a risk for that more than booming, they already dont boom much in their current state.

A super fast FF into 1k wood would essentially solve all their pop and defense problems in this config

edit: like haud eco right now doesnt have that much early upgrades either, so this change is kinda just a boost to their FF

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I feel like you’re not quite getting that this is a full rework, not a small update. What they can do now is irrelevant - you raise a good point that an FF with this civ would be strong, but I think it would be hard to pull off well, which justifies the strength of it.

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I’d like them to have

Ondaqua (meaning Watch Towers or Galleries by their pallisades)
Basically give them proper defensive towers in-lieu or to complement War Huts.
They could have less HP than the standard one however cheaper than the norm.
Standard attack would be arrows however the Industrial Age upgrade could add Cannon to it.

‘In 1685 the French Iroquois at the Sault protected their village with a pentagonal palisade with five bastions, one armed with an eight-pounder cannon.’

Their ‘gimmick’ could be at much closer range (typical infantry siege range), the towers could also throw stones down.
Historically Haud defensive walls, pallisades, galleries, etc had piles of rocks and stones very close by (as well as water - to extinguish fires) to throw as attackers got near.
:The ethnohistorical passages indicate that defending warriors stood on platforms built into the double palisade walls for firing arrows and hurling stones onto attackers.’

Source: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Iroquois Assault Tactics Used against Fortified Settlements of the Northeast in the Seventeenth Century - Craig S. Keener

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I’d rather just replace the warhut with the Ondaqua, personally. “Warhut” is such a bizarre word that has no real relation to the Natives.

There’s not really a good alternative for the Lakota, but the Ondaqua could be a nice alternative for the Hauds.

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Oh absolutely. Warhut is one of those odd ‘broad stroke’ approaches again for the Native civs (heck, for the Aztecs they’d really have Commoner and Noble schools for the warriors - a war hut would seem a little basic for them!)

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Ondaqua would be a decent place for your general units. The four warhut units could show up there, and the Siege Workshop could remain the place for the Mantlet and three cannons.

But I’d rather remove the ram altogether. It’s an interesting curiosity, but just… not worth it.

Maybe Town Destroyer can enable the training of rams from the Clan Mother lol

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My wish for Hauds is for them Woodworking age3 card to make each Longhouse spawn 1 tree every 4 or 5 minutes. Main reason is to make Environmentalism card viable to play in large game

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I… I feel like you just commented on this without actually reading any of it.

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I don’t really see the issue with current Longhouses that would inspire the need for a change like this. Iroquois towns didn’t just consist of one or two giant houses, there were still quite a few of them.

You also have to keep in mind that the Haudenosaunee do not have a monopoly on longhouses. The current house version would work really well with Haida or other civs that used them, but the TC version you propose would not.

I don’t really see how this is conceptually all that different from the current Farm. Three sisters should certainly feature more heavily in the current Farm both visually and as the name of the upgrades, but they were grown in fields (farms) not just gardens. Why it would be a different building, and why that building would produce wood or coin isn’t apparent to me. They’re all food crops not cash crops, and none are bushes/trees that would produce wood.

Is that name just based on this Rotisken’rakéhte? If so, they are a modern group of violent separatists. Probably something to steer clear of.

I’d be down for that, it makes sense and would be interesting.

Light Cannons are shared by Inca and Maya so they should be kept generic so that continues to make sense.

How about no? A shared hero unit is generally the best way to go and there’s nothing wrong with Warchief.
A Heyoka could be a good skin for a Lakota Warchief, but clan mother doesn’t fit the role at all and would be absurd.

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This seems to be a common theme with the faction formerly known as the Iroquois.

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Pretty sure this is what is growing in ingame farms

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Always they were there.

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Haudenosaunee means “Dwellers of the Longhouse”. Their symbols are attached to the Longhouse in the same manner that the Lakota attach symbolism to the tipi.
The main reason is flavor. There are no unique TCs in the game, and making a unique one isn’t exactly hard (I did it with about 4 lines of code for my mod and one extra line in the TC tactics file). The Haudenosaunee present an excellent opportunity to introduce something new like this, where their societies rested on and were shaped by the Longhouse. Not only that, but it makes for an easy foundation to set up an interesting turtle/boom civ with a lot of scout-type units in age 2.
While I understand that the Haida also used Longhouses, they did not value them to the same level of the Haudenosaunee… and they wouldn’t even be using the same architectural set, so I’m not sure how they’re relevant in the first place. The Haida would most likely have their own longhouse model more akin to how the Haudenosaunee one works now.

It really isn’t, and that’s kind of the point. Rice Paddies aren’t that different from Mills or Fields, but I don’t see you remarking on that.

My original idea was to have the Gardens each produce a different set of two resources for each of the three main regions (woodlands, prairies, PNW) but I realized that would get weirdly complicated for no good reason. Originally, it was Prairie made wood/coin, PNW made wood/food, and Woodland made coin/food - if you notice, each of the regions can’t configure their Garden to produce the natural resource they have a different mechanic for to produce indefinitely, with the Prairie having the Buffalo Pound, the Woodlands having the Too’te Lodge, and the PNW having… Salish wool dogs? Unsure yet, that’s a later discussion.

The point being… the Natives lack late-game wood sources and often have a much higher need for wood than other civs, due to their units largely consisting of wood/food costs more predominately than other civs. This is good, since it’s more reflective on the values of the cultures, but it can screw them over in the late-game much harder than other civs since they inherently lack any late-game wood sources.

As for whether or not it makes sense… the Japanese can produce all three by building a weird little home for wild animals and whales produce coin indefinitely while schools of fish dry out relatively fast and the Dutch produce coin from banks without any input to said banks and the Italians can turn 100 into 200, I’m not really sure if this is any worse than any of those other weird abstractions. It’s meant to be a simplification to avoid making the civs’ economies too difficult.

Those are the modern day Rotisken’rakéhte. They themselves come from a longer line of warriors who shared the same name.
And violent separatists is a harsh thing to call them. AIM does the same thing, and my own tribe has had altercations with the US gov’t over it.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize two cultures 2.8k miles apart needed to share units.

Two religious leaders as heroes.
I am strongly opposed to the Lakota hero being a warchief. Historically, their sole duty was to sit ## ##### #### and get fat and do nothing until an actual fight came up. They were not honored, they were not leaders, they had nothing to do with anything the Lakota hero does with the sole exception of fighting. Warchiefs like Crazy Horse and Gall rose to prominence by being the Naca of their Akicita, a title that doesn’t really have a clear translation into English, not by being a warchief.
A Heyoka, on the other hand, absolutely did all of that and then some.

As for the Haudenosaunee, I do believe the Clan Mother should be a hero available to them. I also think they should have a more war-like hero available as well - A unique economic hero is something the game doesn’t have, and the Clan Mother would be an excellent place to include one.
For a more war-like hero, being able to gain one through a BBT or a HC card would be fine.
But, frankly, warchiefs weren’t really a thing with the Haudenosaunee. The Clan Mothers declared war, and they would send their Chiefs out as the war leaders. There was no sub-set warchief, so giving the Hauds one is basically like giving the Chinese a Lt. Colonel as their hero.
Ideally, I’d go with this direction → Give the Haudenosaunee a Clan Mother from the start, with normal explorer stuff going on (crackshot/regeneration/outlaw friendship), along with the general shadowtechs that improve Explorers with each age
But rather than giving her any aggressive upgrades, like the Lakota siege/damage aura, give her an ability that allows her to quickly create units on the spot and the ability to function as a Villager specifically on the Garden, but nowhere else.
Then, somewhere along the line, the Haudenosaunee would have the ability to ship in (or enable through a BBT) an actual Chief, who is more powerful than a regular explorer but can die, and when he dies, a new one can be retrained by the Clan Mother.

ADD: I want to note that changing the Lakota warchief to a Heyoka would literally just be changing the general name and giving him some funny animations. That’s it. Nothing else would change.
I also realized my above explanation was a bit much, so here’s a TLDR: Hauds get a Clan Mother at start, have a BBT to enable her to recruit Chiefs, which are stronger than the typical warchief, but can die and need to be retrained by the Clan Mother when they do.

My experience with the Haudenosaunee language is that they are very much like the French with their spelling choices - there’s way more letters than there need to be, and half the time, they don’t make the sound you think they do.

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I’m aware of that, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are far from unique to them. Above all, they are a Longhouse, so making them anything other than a house is kind of silly. Ultimately you’re suggesting massive gameplay changes to an existing civ for something that isn’t historically or conceptually better.

If you really want a unique Town Center equivalent, giving the Portuguese a Feitoria would be the most obvious way to do that.

That’s my point. Longhouses are a fairly generic kind of house. Forcing them into the role of a weird Iroquois TC just muddles everything for civs that would just need them for a house.

Yep, never once remarked on that.

Buildings that generate coin should be growing cash crops, not food crops.

The PNW natives shouldn’t have Farms or Three Sisters Gardens, instead they should have Clam Gardens.

I’d argue Japanese Shrines and infinite whales are also stupid and could be done better. Finite whales and replaceable Fish Traps would make way more sense for the water. Maybe also more sources of offshore coin like pearls.

That’s more or less how real banks do it.

Got any sources on the historical warriors? Searching it only comes up with the modern insurrection.

There is only the vaguest of detail of these various groups using cannons, so splitting them into half a dozen different units is pretty contrived. In all these cases it is natives using captured or purchased European cannons, so there isn’t much to set them apart.

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How about something more interesting? The Iroquois had a history of armoured archers that could make for a cool unit.

Aquientor Archer

A heavily armoured archer with very high ranged resistance like an Iron Troop. On a side note, Iron Troops could be a bit more interesting with a function more like Azaps.

Similar armour was used by both the peoples of the great lakes and the PNW so this unit could be shared with a civ like Haida. The current Aenna could maybe be moved to Lakota as a Bare Archer, since a cheap unit that costs only food would fit well with that role.

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The Feitoria is, more or less, exactly what the Longhouse is to the Haudenosaunee people. A place of trade, a place of market, but for internal affairs rather than external.
Call the TC the Ganoñhsésgeh, if you want the Onondaga word for it. Point is, the Hauds are a great place to introduce a unique aspect like this.

Imma be honest, but I’ve leaned primarily on Haudenosaunee interviews on that, mostly regarding the game Humankind, who also use the name.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EddjqdkXgAACI1I?format=png&name=large
Ngl, Humankind is great for this.

Half the game is made of vague references and extremely niche aspects made bigger. That’s what makes the game fun.

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yeee i also believe it shouldnt be design over balance and competitiveness, it should be balance and competitiveness> Design.

also we playing a video game and not a history simulator. I aprreciate to make civilisations as accurazy as possible but changing multiple civs so fundamentally, i dont know. Doesnt seems usefull to me in terms of the game.

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I don’t know if you’ve seen the other posts, but the general consensus about the Lakota + Hauds justifying a rework is their extremely low playrate (about half of what should be expected) and the fact that they’re both played for specific strategies because the civs are 1-trick ponies. They’re failures in terms of both cultural representation and interest of the players, which is pretty good grounds to look at significant reworks for both civs.