Healers at Co.munity Plaza (August PUP

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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My honest opinion on the Native civs about why they’re not that popular is because the Lakota and Hauds, specifically, are basically just Euro Lite reskins. When you play them, you don’t really feel like you’ve got anything to do with those cultures, you’re just playing unusually aggressive European civs that happen to have a Plaza.

The Aztes have a unique army and unique strengths/weaknesses they only really share with the Incans. The Hauds and Lakota, on the other hand, just play like really 1-dimensional Euro civs that have been reskinned to appear Native American.

woops, didn’t mean to finish there

The likeability of the Plaza, from the perspective of the player, likely has very little to do with why the Hauds and Lakota are so underplayed/unliked when the Aztecs and Incans are - the problem is an issue of diversity, and the Hauds and Lakota just aren’t.

From a gameplay design perspective, you can realistically make just about any mechanic fun to play - the fact that the Incans and Aztecs are played and liked decently should be proof enough that the Plaza likely has nothing to do with the issues behind the Hauds and Lakota.

Considering how different the Hauds and Lakota are from the two more southern civs, it seems like now would be a good time to remake them with a different core mechanic, make them unique civs, and this time around, make the effort to make them unique and diverse instead of just Euro Lite reskins.

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A new noun as the name of the unit to avoid from unable to understand whether it refers to a unit or a type of unit when seeing “healer”. I believe this is a problem that @M00Z1LLA and many people would like to improve.

No startup cost, but it can’t last forever without sacrificing villagers’ time to gather resources. This is another design for the presentation of technology, such like Church Cards offer free but side-effects technology, and Asian Wonders provides technology that requires cooling. Whether they’re interesting or practical is another matter, but in my opinion, these are simply designs for the various presentations of technology in games, not stereotypes. (I mean the techs themselves, not their platforms, so I am open to replacing the plaza itself just like replacing the wonders but their techs and abilities may basically remain.)

Your “passion” and reason for Lakota is already well known in the community. There is no one have objection to your feelings and suggestions here, at most, to tell you the possibility of your suggestions being realized and the reason. If there is same standard when looking at other civs, it’d be better. In particular, this game has a lot of Asian players, and most of them are not like you Lakotas who can use English properly to express their feelings about Asian civs.

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Both. It doesn’t feel fun. It’s a strange mechanic in both gameplay as well as how it feels to use it.

Imagine Europeans having a Plaza where they drink bier or wine together to revive their explorer, train militia or make their soldiers stronger.
That would feel like a strange mechanic that doesn’t belong into the game.

You don’t have to have knowledge of those cultures for that mechanic to feel wrong.

I think the Lakota are one of the least European feeling civilisations in the game. The Indians or Japanese are a lot closer to Europeans and so are the Africans.
Inca and Aztecs are the most unique and they are also not very similar. They barely share unit types. Even the Ethiopians have a Coyote Runner now.

I think the Haudenosaunee are supposed to be the Native civilisation that feels the most like Europeans on purpose.

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However, the villagers there are discussing issues, not eating, not drinking and even not dancing.

I wouldn’t find it particularly inappropriate if the capitol were designed to require settlers to go there to discuss policy.

Even if Asians have such a plaza, as an Asian, I will not resent it, at least it is more reasonable than wonders.

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How do you think Europeans (especially Germans) are discussing politics?
But anyway. Having Settlers stand around the Capitol to those things would be strange.
“Oh we are getting attacked, let’s go and discuss politics to spawn soldiers!”

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On a more humorous note, if these things aren’t happening at a Native gathering, something is very very wrong. I go to even a funeral and all the grammas are making so much food everyone has leftovers for days and then some to spare.

But I’m going to agree with Skadidesu here - the Plaza is a poor mechanic and very much needs replaced. The Lakota and Hauds could both use a major rehaul from the ground up.

Also, to answer your question on what to call the Healers, the Lakota word for doctor is “Waakisniya”. But honestly, I dunno what to tell you - Apiyha translates best to “Healer”. In this case, the simplest answer might be the best.

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Musketeer: “As soon as I got on the ship bound for the New World, I was suddenly teleported to the battlefield in the middle of the land. Then I’ve fired dozens of times. I’m lucky I’m not dead yet, and I’ve never run out of ammo.”

It’s a game.

The Chinese banner armies in history is by no means composed of two types of soldiers as in the game. In Chinese history, there were barracks and stables, but just no academies that were deliberately set up for military education. In the history of China’s defense, there were forts, frontier armed towns, and border garrisons, but there were few buildings that meet the definition of “castle” in English. Even so, when we talk about how Asian civs can remove stereotypes, we don’t ask for the real culture and appearance of Asians everywhere, especially the essence (the core I stated before. I finally found the correct word.) of these civs.

Then, why must the plaza and ceremonies in the game be the same as the gatherings of the native people in real?

The best answer must be easy to understand rather than confusing, at least in my opinion.

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Priestesses should not cost pop, inca have also been at a disadvantage from the lack of a good priestess shipment card, only having access to a team card for them in age 2 while aztec get 3 warrior priests.

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They also shouldn’t be able to convert units. It makes absolutely zero sense that they can do this. As far as I’m aware, the priestesses stayed within their temples and didn’t go out proselytizing. And it was the Inca that were converted to Catholicism, not Inca converting the Spanish.

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The Inca are designed as a civ for AoE2 players.
Having a defensive design and bringing back the feature to convert units.

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These things being shoehorned into a civ where they clearly don’t belong makes it considerably worse.

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I know it’s culturally unreasonable, but what new abilities or buffs should they get to make up for their lost old abilities?

I thought about it. If people don’t like it because it cannot work without villagers, why not use something similar to a consulate?

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Let’s first have a concept that the effect provided by each ceremony has its own standard maximum, which is called 100%.

Then, like a consulate, there are the options: A (default), B, C and D. Representing:

A → generates 0% of the effect of the selected ceremony, but villager gathering efficiency -0%.
B → generates 20%, but -5%.
C → generates 40%, but -10%.
D → generates 60%, but -15%.
(These percentages are tentative and can be adjusted based on balancing needs.)

Additionally, there can have up to 10 units working on it. Everyone tasked there can increase some percentage of the effect, which based on the population it uses.

0 pop: llamas → 2%.
1 pop: villagers, Haud/Lakota healers → 4%.
2 pop: Aztec/Inca healers → 6% or 8%.

when it’s full of people, you basically get a 100% effect or even a bit more.

In the early game, villagers must focus on gathering as much as possible, and this building can still provide the effect even if no one is there. In the late game, 99 villagers lost 15% of the efficiency, which is almost equivalent to letting 15 villagers work on the plaza without gathering resources, which is similar to the current situation.

The appearance and name of this building can remain as a plaza, but can also be changed to a religious building such as a temple or any other suitable building. I have no comment on what it should look like or what it should be called.

I’m not going to claim this is a perfect solution. Just sharing an idea.

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tbh i still think the xp generation is fine considering Xp is anything from fame to just experience so a ceremony that is generating xp is basically par for the course for all civs (churchs generate xp now)

then its most the other stuff (train speed, atk, minutemen (which tbh i hate as a mechanic for natives), respawn and so forth)

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Cultural problems aside, here’s a breakdown for specifically the Haudenosaunee and Lakota:

My personal problem with the Community Plaza is that it creates an on/off gameplay loop that forces the player to rotate their civ’s strengths by directly weakening their own economy - the problem with this is that the two civs in question already have the weakest economies in the game and some of the most brittle militaries available - the Lakota especially are extremely frigid with the options available to them, with their cavalry units out-classing their infantry in every way possible, but neither civ is particularly flexible in how they can respond to any given situation.

For both civs, this just leads to a gameplay pattern that is extremely unforgiving while simultaneously being dimensionless - they have no choice but to do this, and they have to do it well, or they’ll lose. The Devs, with the DE, have given both civs a bit of leeway to make mistakes by buffing them a bit overall, but ultimately (again, especially with the Lakota) both civs require overtuned military units in order to survive, which in turn just pushes them towards dimensionless gameplay to take advantage of their overtuned units, which is just a self-enforcing loop to be extremely aggressive in the early game because they have no late-game presence and a military they can’t usually afford to use.

The Plaza is at the root of the design problems for both the Hauds and the Lakota, and both civs need to be rebalanced and redesigned without it, with a new civ “gimmick” to utilize.

Personally, I’d rather it not be a religious aspect of the culture, but one more related to trade - the Lakota especially were a significant portion of the trading heart of North America. Oddly enough, I think the “Consulate” type option might be best with the ability to ally with other nations around them for unique units and techs, but done in a way that isn’t the same as the Asian Consulate or the New World Federal States or the African Alliances.

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yeah i think its a very much hated thing about the native civs, not to mention everytime you need to switch it takes like 5 seconds

So sharing a random idea

  • for a lot of the existing effect ones, maybe the ceremonies can be sort of turned into techs.
  • ie they are things you unlock for the civs by putting vils and healers on to work on it.

So the war ceremony for example can be a tech that is slowly increasing the stats of your unit over time until a capped is reached, say 20% atk - or kinda unlock tech levels for that tech - say 5% then 10% then 20%

The train speed one will also slowly increase train speed of all units to certain levels. so to put an extremely narrow example, 1 vil on the ceremony will generate 1 research point per second and after 100 research point you unlock the new level, increasing train speed by 10%

I do want to get rid of the minuteman training and the respawn ones, they make using a core unit very unpleseant and gimmicky though i dont know what could be done about that

I think a good model is the incan native american allies shipment, where you get a native embassy and select one native ally that will always be available + some of their techs.

I have said that this should be standard for all native civs, it gives access to potentially very important techs and units, it gives a guaranteed buff to lategame army numbers

To make it less of a card problem, it could be reworked to a big button instead where you unlock this - maybe reworking that new button at the native embassy to unlocking a native ally and make outlaws standard

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Honestly, a good new “gimmick” for the Hauds and Lakota would be an economic one, while still implementing the Incan variation of the Native ally thing.

For the Lakota, a building to infinitely spawn wild bison from. This would remove their dependence on their home city to sustain an economy and let them flex cards, as well as give them reason to use the hunting cards, as the farming cards would be irrelevant.
For the Haudenosaunee, a building to infinitely generate wood would be better - but either as a building that spawns trees or simply a unique variation of the Farm/Estate that allows for the gathering of wood. Either would work, but spawning trees would make natural resource spawning as the clear new “gimmick” of the two North American civs and would be fairly simple to balance around - it would also ensure the two civs would have a late-game economy, allowing them to be given more dimension and better balancing throughout the game’s stages that doesn’t pour 80% of their power budget into the Commerce Age.

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I think given the PUP they are somewhat moving in that direction, well the natural resources thing anyway.

The North American trade card makes their natural resource eco much more important and Haud now have basically infinite trees that is also their coin source. I do agree somewhat that Haud still kinda need an infinite wood source that in generatable , we do have the precedent of the indian mango grove that no one uses, that could be reworked as a haud thing (maybe trainable from travois)

I also think estate should just be removed for lakota & haud and the tribal market made into their lategame gold source. It can be a tech that unlock infinite gathering for the lategame but still counts as natural resource gathering, so cards will stack - it will allow them much easier eco transition in the late game when mines runs out.

edit: also with the healers now acting as essentially free xp in the late game, I think its ok if Lakota relies on hunt for the lategame ( especially with North American Trade) , the home city is effectively the training building

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Unless the blockade tech was removed, the Lakota player could get their entire economy choked out with a single tech. Once late-game hits, the Lakota military is generally too expensive for the player to spam out well. If their entire economy is technically capable of being choked out with a single tech on the side of the enemy, it isn’t a well-designed economy (regardless of how difficult that tech is to get - but let’s be real, if you’re fighting the Lakota that late, they’re gonna lose anyway.)

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then we can remove that, its baically never used anyway, I dont think anyone cares

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This all sounds more like the need to adjust the units’ stats rather than removes the plaza and ceremonies.

I’m not sure the changes you’re craving can make the game more fun, but I can imagine that my suggestion for the plaza could improve the player’s experience.

Let the Warriors be levied at TC just like the Militias, and change the effect of the related ceremony to strengthen the Warrior’s stats.

Agree this one.

If the Lakotas hadn’t domesticated bison as a cow-like livestock, I wouldn’t recommend it. It also goes against the cultural accuracy you always emphasize.

Bison may be able to become a unit in TC that can be transported from home city at the a little bit cost of resources like the Papal units. It doesn’t cost XP, so it’s better than the Bison Card.

Anyway, this thread is about the plaza. Let’s not digress further.