Native Americans concepts

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Refer to the opinions expressed by many people, but add principles that I think are indispensable for gameplay and balance. For example,

  • The Plaza must be remained as the symbol of the AoE3 natives (although the function can be adjusted)
  • Avoid significantly changing the resource gathering efficiency.
  • In any case the mine must be utilized to provide an economical use.

Farm:

Basically the same but:

  • To avoid blocking Villagers from moving, remove the fence or change the position and the size fence.
  • Reduce the area for livestock and increase the area for crops to allocate to corn, squash, and beans.
  • Change livestock to sheep (Haud), domestic turkey (Aztec) and llama (Inca) respectively.
  • Not accessible to Lakota.

Garden:

The coin farming building replaceing the Estate.

  • Give each civ an unique suitable skin fot the structure of the building.
  • The crops become tobaccos (Haud), chili peppers (Aztec) and coca (Inca).
  • Not accessible to Lakota.

Marketplace:

Replacing the Market of the all 4 civs.

  • Still use the skin of the current Market.
  • Basically same as the current Market, but it uses food as a medium of exchange rather than coins.
  • Remove the Tribal Marketplace. Haud can mine now.

Tradehouse:

Replacing the Native Embassy of the all 4 civs.

  • Maybe reuse the skin of current Tribal Marketplace.
  • Up to 3, can slightly trickle coins and train native units, outlaws and 3 ramdom of mercenaries.
  • The Arsonel techs will be moved from Longhouses and Teepees to here.

Buffalo Pound:

Unique building to replace Farm and Estate for Lakota from Age I.
Cost 400 wood, can be built at anywhere and with a size equal to a Mill or a Plaza.

  • There are up to 5 Trapped Bisons in the building when built, and up to 10 Villagers can go into the building to hunt and gather resources from them.
  • The Trapped Bison looks just like a common Bison and carries as same as 500 resource, but it won’t run even while getting shot, and won’t get rotten after killed.
  • On the UI of the building, you can choose the type of the resource the bison carried in the building to food or coin, while only those Villagers tasked on the building can hunt and gather them.
  • The rate of gathering Trapped Bisons is different from hunting other animals. It’ll be as slow as farming on the current Farms and Estates, and be improved in the name of “working on Buffalo Pound (food/coin)” rather than of hunting.
  • You don’t need to micro the Villagers to hunt. Just task them on the building, and they will go into it and hunt automatically. A new Trapped Bison will be spawned inside the building in 1 minute when a Trapped Bison is gathered and disappears, so the animal won’t never run out.

Overall, it’s somehow like using a Rice Paddy, but with the visual feedback of Villagers hunting Bisons. If the enemy destroys the building, the Trapped Bisons will just die and disappear, like the horses in the Corrals.

Buffalo Jump:

Unique building for Lakota from Age I.
Variant of the Buffalo Pound. Cost free, and can only be built next to a mine.

  • The mine itself will become just a common hill when the building is built, so any players cannot mine the hill and check the number of coin carried on the mine by click the hill.
  • There are up to 5 Trapped Bisons too when built. Different from the Pound, the Buffalo Jump can only be chosen the coin, and the number of Trapped Bisons there and later the Buffalo Jump spawns is not infinite, depending on the number of coin of the mine. If it is a tin mine (1500), only 3 Bisons and no more will be spawned there. If silver (2000), only 4 and no more. If gold (5000), 5 and another 5 later, 10 in total. If diamond, 5 and another 195 later, 200 in total.
  • Up to 10 Villagers can be tasked on the Buffalo Jump, and they gather coin from those Bisons as fast as mining. It’ll be improved as “working on Buffalo Jump” rather than as hunting and “working on Buffalo Pound”.
  • Clicking on the building, players can check how many coin still carried on the all the Bisons on the UI. When the enemy destroys the building, the hill will turn back to the mine with the remaining coins.
  • If all the Bisons are run out, no more coin, the hill and the building will remain there. You can pay 400 wood to turn it into a Buffalo Pound, and then the hill will collapse and disappear, or can just leave it there for the light of sight, and still the mine won’t appear when the enemy destroys it.

Overall, they are still hunting bisons but the mechanic can use the mine, so the game can be fair and balance.

Teepee

Now has an aura to improve the units’ and buildings’ HP, faster thefatten rate of livestock, and increase the resources gathering by 5%. Can stack, up to 15%. That’s it.
Lakota cannot train livestock, but if converting others’ livestock, they can stay here.

Longhouse

Now trickles wood. Maybe cost a bit higher for this.
I wish the civ could gather wood quickly and have a sustainable means of getting wood instead of simply making trees last longer.

War Hut:

For the Haud and Lakota, it could shoot firearms after upgrades.

  • Haud units:
    Tomahawk (II)
    Bare Bowman (II): Archaic light infantry with a bow. Costs food only.
    Bare Spearman (II): Archaic heavy infantry with a spear.
    Bare Rifleman (III): Light infantry with a rifle.
  • Lakota units:
    Bare Bowman (II)
    Bare Spearman (II)
    Bare Rifleman (III)
  • Aztec and Inca units:
    Same as the current.

Corral:

Still training cavalry.

  • Not accessable to Aztec and Inca still.
  • Haud units:
    Kanya Horseman (II)
    Musket Rider (III)
  • Lakota units:
    Warpath Badger (II): Heavy cavalry with a war club.
    Kitfox Soldier (III): Lancer, good against infantry.
    Pale Horse Archer (II): Bow rider, cheap and weak.
    Crow Owner (III): Rifle rider, good against siege units.
    Blotahunka (IV): Siege cavalry throwing torches, locked by the Big Button.

Plaza:

Reserve some of the concepts but try to adjust and improve.

  • Adjust the growth curve. When there are fewer people, adding members will provide more boosts. When there are more people, adding members will provide less boost.
  • Every ceremony has a base rate, so even no one there, the civ can still get a slight benefit.
  • Now there are 6 Ceremonies at most.
    • Gift Ceremony: Generating XP. People feasting on the Plaza.
    • Healer Ceremony: Spawning healers. People worshipping spirits on the Plaza.
    • Call the People Ceremony: Calling 3 Warriors at a time. People preparing weapons on the Plaza.
    • War Ceremony: Spawning unique units. People blessing those warriors on the Plaza.
    • Wisdom Ceremony: Speeding up tech (except age advance) researching in the Plaza and nearby buildings. People giving speach and discussing on the Plaza.
    • Unique Ceremony: The name will be diffirent for each civ. People working on the Plaza.
  • Now there are 4 technoledge lines.
    The effect of the techs are permanent, but they take long to research. Remember you can use the Wisdom Ceremony to speed up.
    • Harvest Knowledge: Speeding up training. Lv.1 (Age I, 30 secs) → Lv.2 (Age II, 60 secs) → Lv.3 (Age III, 2 mins) → Lv.4 (Age IV, 5 mins).
    • Combat Knowledge: Improving all units’ and buildings’ attack. Lv.1 (II, 60 secs) → Lv.2 (III, 2 mins) → Lv.3 (IV, 5 mins).
    • Defense Knowledge: Improving all buildings’ HP. Lv.1 (II, 60 secs) → Lv.2 (III, 2 mins) → Lv.3 (IV, 5 mins).
    • Ceremony Knowledge: Improving ceremonies’ rate. Lv.1 (III, 2 mins) → Lv.2 (IV, 5 mins).
  • The Unique units of the War Ceremony
    These units can also be trained by their Warchief in the regular way, maybe by default or unlocked by a card or a tech.
    • Forest Prowler (Haud): Powerful sharpshooter units, fast and able to stealth, very good against infantry, especially light infantry.
    • Owns Alone (Lakota): Powerful cavalry archer.
    • Skull Knights (Aztec)
    • And a skirmisher or heavy cavalry unit, not Maceman for Inca.
  • The Unique ceremony
    • Spawning Travois (Haud)
    • Generating coin (Lakota)
    • Reducing age advance cost (Aztec)
    • Improving the trickles of nearby Kancha Houses (Inca)
  • Add more decorations, like teepees, symbles, or temple structures, if possible.
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How to lose an audience in 20 seconds.

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No plaza.

“Farm”
“Garden”

Just replace with a singular building that does all three. Three Sister’s Garden simplifies the production down to the level that the Natives knew it. A separate livestock pen can be created.

I actually really like this. Food is probably the one medium that the Natives used in this manner far more than coin.

It would need a new skin. The purpose of it is to appear as the home of a significant trader in your town, so it would need to look like a house, but a lot bigger.

No. This isn’t creating something new, this is just reskinning the Farm/Estate, which is an incredibly lazy way to approach something that was done in such a significantly different manner.

Again, no. This is just a lazy reskin that isn’t any better than the current Tribal Marketplace. If “build structure to mine without mining” was the goal, we’d just turn the Tribal Marketplace into an Estate.

“Too’te Lodge”. It doesn’t make sense for the Hauds to have this many longhouses in their town this size. The Town Center itself needs to be a unique variant called the Longhouse if the Hauds get any reference to it at all.
ADD: The Too’te Lodge should generate trees over time, in the same manner that the Buffalo Pound would. The two civs would avoid helping allies by having naturally low resources in them, which would make sense considering how quickly they’re produced. In return, the Lakota + Hauds natural resource upgrades would focus more heavily on Yield over Speed, although the Hauds would also just get more wood upgrades available than they have now.
You don’t build a city and then give it 14 Capitol buildings and then make them all small and insignificant. The Longhouse needs to be the focal point of the Hauds.

If you use the title “Bare” for the Hauds, the culture will associate it with
 “ladies of the night,” not soldiers. The Bare title is specifically something associated with Lakota culture, and it comes from the youngest and most numerous Akicita - the Bare Lances, who were often called Bare X as well, depending on what weapon they were using.
(Note that they were also regarded as walking, uh, “wood” jokes as well.)

Again, this doesn’t make sense. “Pale Horse” comes from the White Lances, who were among the only Akicita to wear full warbonnets. Why would the most experienced and veteran soldiers be considered cheap and weak?

I know a lot of your ideas come from my writings, and thank you for paying attention
 but you can’t pull a lot of this out of context without it falling apart.

And while I think the Plaza as a whole needs to be removed, I will say that your concept behind the “super long Ceremony that trains for free but requires villagers to research faster” is actually quite novel and I like it.

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In a previous thread you mentioned that Lakota training meant that a lot of lakotans were profecient at shooting arrows from horseback. If you have a unit that reflects that Lakotans have relatively easy access to trained cavalry archers, how would you call such a unit?

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Or just rename Lakota to some other agricultural resident if their people really feel offended by the game basiclly proceeding in the non-nomadic way.

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I think I need to explain.
The purpose of my topic is to explore a way of change that is easy for more people to adapt.

Whenever there’s a thread in the forums asking for a civilized rework for accuracy, people there tend to be chasing a lot of variation, sometimes even aggressive. People out there who don’t support/pursue change are always a minority and always unwelcome.

But I think they are actually another important part of the community that supports the game, and finding ways to help them accept and adapt should also be important. If there is a compromise, it should be tried.

What’s more, the plaza itself has no cultural problems at all. Just modify its mechanics to make it better.

I tried to make it visually closer to the actual agricultural culture of the natives as a compromise to reserve the two buildings. Even without using a single building, it should still be possible to respect the farming culture of the Three Sisters and traditional cash crops with art closer to them.

Thank you. It has the advantage of reducing losses when you want to turn excess food into wood.

Not bad. Though I don’t want to waste the existing asset as possible.

If just spawning bisons, not only will there be trouble in controlling villagers, but there may also be difficult balance problems to solve. Anyway, the way I’m proposing is still to have the villagers go into the pound and hunt the bison, not harvest the crops.

No matter how high your standards for what design fits your culture, making mines an exclusive source of resources for other civilizations is unfair and troublesome for balance from a game design perspective.

This is to improve the design of the tribal marketplace from “I don’t know why it must be next to the hill and it will collapse automatically after a while” to the buffalo jump that is reasonably built next to the hill and won’t disappear after a while.

Two civs sharing War Hut units refer to other people’s ideas.
If there’re appropriate names, that’s great.

Maybe because I misunderstood your article. You can give a new name.

Maybe Pale Horse Archer could replace Owns Alone as the unit’s name. The latter could have some trouble localizing since it’s even a verb rather than a noun.

This is my attempt to improve the Plaza problem you have pointed out. Important effects such as attack power and training speed can be obtained without using ceremonies, but still respect the original design. Changing them from ceremonies to (probably free) techs that take a long time to research, but can be shortened with a new ceremony.

This is absolutely a good way. But at this time you will be asked to remove all elements related to Lakota.

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I think you can go pretty far by making the Plaza the logistical backbone of the lakota, just like the Church is the administrative backbone of many an european nation (which is in no small part why you can research improvements there for the European civs).
It’s in part why I have some difficulty with accepting religious ceremonies for the native american factions. The church building for the european civs has research in there that has
 well, nothing at all to do with faith. It kinda sucks that native americans basically get religion instead of technology, as if religion was somehow more important to them then it was to the Europeans. The entire reason why the Dutch became independent from the Spanish is due to a religious revolt! Being able to worship god the way we wanted to is literally our nation’s origin story! Instead, the principal dutch mechanic is about investment banking. Which isn’t bad: I prefer an atheistic approach to the church in a videogame that isn’t about mythology. But it’s weird that you’d then have a plaza where healers are created by “worshipping spirits”. Rather then extensive training and knowledge of the local flora.

I’d ditch any ‘ceremony’ from the plaza that actively creates healers. Instead, those healers should just be recruited through the default resource cost like any other unit. Mostly becuase it’s just very annoying to find out that you’ve reached the unit cap on healers minutes ago and the Plaza just span its wheels for a bunch instead (hate that with the factory too, but there at least it’s just becuase you hit the regular unit cap). If you want to retain the Plaza mechanic itself, I’d take an atheistic approach to it as well. So here’s my idea for it:

Instead of the Community Plaza being a religious centre, it should be a diplomacy and trade centre. I’m sorta okay with switching buffs, but I’d focus the mechanic a bit more on being an alternative to the factory. Specifically: The North Americans could not have the sheer economy of scale, but they managed to acquire a lot of the fruits of industry (like repeater rifles) via trade. They have to be nimble in approach to problems that the United States could force through brute force (why equip your men with expensive repeater rifles when you can just drill up entire formations with standard issue single shot rifles?).

So I wouldn’t have an “acquire and spend influence” mechanic as has been proposed elsewhere. The principal resource that’s spend here, as before, is the time of your villagers that they’d otherwise spend on gathering resources or building things.

So instead of the ceromonies I’d call it “Acquiring stuff”. Yes it’s not very fancy.

Here’s my alternative idea: Have the plaza have “focuses” that grants a permanent buff over time. So instead of having a temporary weapons boost, you’d slowly increase a damage multiplier. Then if you decide to switch to a research time boost, the weapons multiplier would stay the same whilst the research multiplier slowly increases.
I’d keep the XP bonus as is, so that the plaza can always fall back to just giving you more XP when you reach the ‘cap’ of whatever your plaza occupants are improving.

This would remove a significant chunk of the issues I currently have with the plaza, which mostly revolve around:

  • The thing just spinning its wheels in some situations, like when you forgot to switch off your weapon buff when the fighting is over.
  • The fact that you sometimes have to switch the ‘ceremony’ around in very short order.
  • The fact that you instantly lose your valuable buffs if you accidentally order your villagers off the plaza by accident.
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Good point of view.
I don’t mind having the Plaza reduce the focus on religion.

If it is an opinion for visual feedback, maybe it is not people worshiping spirits but people healing the wounded and sick. After a time, there will be enough experience and wisdom to make the tribe have people with professional medical knowledge.

I have a question. If villagers pay time on there just to trickle resource, what is the difference from the Farm and the Garden? Any else special there?

Maybe, if I go the farthest in my way, maybe there will only be 2 kinds of Ceremonies: Feast Ceremony (drip XP), and Wisdom Ceremony (speed up technology research); then, there will be 8 kinds of tech in the square, that is, the effects of spawning healers, spawning unique units, calling Warriors, and unique Ceremonies also become techs.

Very interesting and fresh point! And could be implemented together with my ideas directly.

Nice feedback. These should indeed be improved.

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Yeah I messed that one up. Ignore that xD

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I think this is a poor basis for any adjustments to the Natives. Their current gameplay is not working, their current designs are completely made up. They need a rehaul, not an adaption.

Their play levels are among the lowest in the game. The Plaza is a well-known feature - that does not make it a well-liked feature.

If keeping the Plaza is a must, adjust it to look at the Aztecs and Inca primarily, not the Lakota and Hauds. The Lakota and Hauds need a new foundation entirely, not more bandaids on top of an already-broken mechanic.

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But if the plaza is based on racist stereotypes and considered “magic”, why should the aztecs and incas keep it but not the hauds and lakotas?

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Frankly, because I’m not going to make an argument for or against it with the Aztecs and Inca. Someone else can make design suggestions for them.

Only thing I’ve got is that the Aztecs should focus on farms like their lives depend on it because Chinampa are cool.

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I’d fully argue that the aztecs and incas should not keep it at all. The incas and aztecs should get buildings that reflect the fact that they had unmatched civil engineering capabilities in their time.

Like, say, temples. They should absolutely get temples in place of churches, rather then the former fire pit.

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Oooh the other thing I wanted to see was banner armies for the Aztecs. Not as their sole way of training units, but as their sole way to gain Nobles. So while you could individually train puma or coyote, you’d need to train a banner of, say, three coyote to gain access to the Eagle Knight, or two puma and two otontin to gain one skull knight.

(Names need changing too)

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Related idea - the long form ceremonies could be turned into the core basis of the Aztec, with their Priests being used to shorten the train time of these ceremonies.

Just steal from AoE4 and have most, or all, of the Aztec’s upgrades available this way, and increase the XP needed per shipment to give them more impactful shipments that they could expedite with this same method.

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Controlling aztec army is hard enough to become them harder and less efective with banner armies. Chinese suffer a lot from having to train units they dont need already

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The military power of the Aztecs were very similar. Overwhelming by numbers with a few quality troops leading various spots.

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I remember from my old days at Wars of Liberty our plan to rework the Native Americans included giving a Tanning Rack building to replace Plantations as their coin source.

It’d be worked by a single villager, they were planned to have a food equivalent, called homestead or something silly like that.

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I’d argue that “Vast conscripted armies with a core of highly trained units” is basically any regular army ever.

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You’re not wrong, but I bring it up here specifically because this specific pattern of training is more interesting and, more importantly, it frees up room for the Nobles to be quite super powerful and may help balance the civ a bit better.
It’s a method of artificially increasing the cost of the Nobles without directly making them obscenely expensive.

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