New civilization brainstorming: Brasil

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
1

Since I, like a lot of people in this forum, seem to think that Brasilians will become a new civ sooner or later, I thought aout making a thread where we brainstorm ideas for the civ. I’ll start:
Starts with only with 50 max Settlers and 50 Fishing Boats, but can improve through the building of Captancies (see below);
Instead of aging-up with Federal States, ages-up with Imperial Provinces (ships a Captaincy as well as 3 new cards instead of only two);
Receives Paulistas (a weaker explorer), through Cards.

Barracks:

  • Praça (replaces Musketeer, slower moving but with high attack and hp, Royal Guard: Guarda Nacional);
  • Voluntário da Pátria (Skirmisher-like unit with low stats that costs food and wood, spaws a batch of five every time a Barracks is built);
  • Halberdier.

Stables:

  • Voluntário Académico (replaces the Hussar, horseman with weak stats and 1 pop cost, gains bonus Hp and Attack each time there’s a tech researched at the Colégio (see below));
  • Guarda de Honra (replaces the Dragoon, has very high stats (especially melee attack), but has 3 pop cost and can only be recruited from the IV age).

Unique Outlaws:

  • Jagunço (Comanchero);
  • Cangaceiro (Renegado);
  • Pampeiro (Pistolero).

Other Unique Units:

  • Jesuit (unique priest recruited at the Colégio that has an aura that buffs Native/Royal Units)

Royal Guards:

  • Guarda Nacional (Praça);
  • Matadeira (Falconet).

Unique Buildings:

  • Engenho (replaces the Market, buffs the gather rate of Mills, Estates or Livestock Pens, can build Homestead Wagons (can also buil Brazilwood Camps));
  • Colégio (replaces the Church and the Native Embassy, has some unique upgrades);
  • Captaincies (functions as a different building depending of the nationality of the Colonists (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, German, Japanese, Ukraynian, Lebanese, etc.) can recruit Workers (just Settlers with another name) and different Unique Units).
  • Brazilwood Camps (functions like a Mill/Estate (Plantation) but produces Wood instead)

Imperial provinces:

  • Age II: Maranhão, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe, Alagoas
  • Age III: Pernambuco, Espírito Santo, Bahia, Pará, Piauí
  • Age IV: Mato Grosso, Paraná, Paraíba, Santa Catarina, Goiás
  • Age V: Amazonas, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo

Anybody who wishes to add or make a modification, is welcome.

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Eu faria os Engenhos substituírem os moinhos ou as propriedades (ou os dois, que nem a Hacienda dos Mexicanos), não os mercados

O conceito das colônias parece o tipo de coisa que o Definitive Edition tá tentando evitar

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Eu escolhi pôr os Engenhos como substituto do Mercado para que fossem diferentes o suficiente das Haciendas Mexicanas sem que perdessem o seu significado original.
Quanto às colónias, foi mesmo por não ter pensado num nome melhor (se alguém pensar num, que faça um post aqui), mas sabia que, se quisesse implementar a história da imigração para o Brasil, tinha de o fazer de modo a que fosse radicalmente diferente do método que aplicaram para os Americanos. De qualquer modo, os “game designers” do FE foram bizarramente selectivos na escolha da remoção da palavra “colonial”, uma vez que uma das cartas dos Espanhóis (e agora partilhada pelos Mexicanos) chama-se “Colonial Estancias”, sem que tenha sofrido qualquer alteração.

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Personally, I’d prefer if they just made Brazil into a revolution you’d want to actually choose. Right now, the revolutions just don’t really fill the role of giving a good strategic alternative to Age 5 Imperial, and I’d like to see them revamped.

However, if you want to do a civ, think about what’s going to define that civ and make it feel unique and interesting to play. For example, if I’m picking a civ to play, what makes me pick Brazil over Britain or Japan? What’s unique and interesting about it? That’s a key question that goes beyond just filling in the various slots for units, buildings, and cards.

This seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of just giving a simple economics buff. As a rule, I prefer to keep things simple. It makes new content easier to learn. If you want to do an economic card called Engenho and have it buff production to mills and estates, that’d be fine. The Aztecs do it with their Chinampa and Great Chinampa cards. And this way you never have to worry that you placed a mill outside the radius of effect (we have this issue with the Indian Karni Mata wonder).

Is there something particularly unique and interesting about Brazilian markets that make them different from other markets?

I don’t think you necessary have to do it differently. If you want to highlight immigration as a part of Brazil’s story, having some immigrant cards makes perfect sense. Yes, America was defined by immigration, but frankly, so were most countries in Latin America. Only a small handful ended up having their populations be mostly indigenous or mixed with the original settlers. Chile and Bolivia are like that, for example, but it’s not terribly common. I couldn’t think of doing Argentina, for example, without talking about Italian and German immigrants.

What I might suggest is picking different countries of origin than the USA civ uses. The USA has no Italian, Portuguese, or Japanese immigrant cards for example. The other thing they do not have is African immigrants. I know this is a delicate subject to touch upon in a game, but Brazil’s history of importing people from Africa is a huge part of the national identity. Having cards that evoke some of the African tribes already in the game with the two African civs (ie Yoruba, Hausa, etc) could be a way of telling that story without the negative baggage that comes with talking about the slave trade.

I guess if you really didn’t want cards, you could use the age-up mechanic to do it, but I think the pattern of having the New World nations (US, Mexico, any future ones) use a federal system for aging up is better. Showing immigration with cards is a good way to do it.

5

En chile al menos el 58% de la población es blanca y desciende en su mayoría de españoles, alemanes, franceses, suizos y bastante de Europa del este es solo un pequeño dato xd

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I was referring to people of mixed heritage. I read somewhere where the majority of Chilean people at the time of the revolution were mixed European and Native. Chile was a smaller colony and not particularly wealthy, so it didn’t bring as many Spaniards as other parts of New Spain did. I just looked and the modern breakdown is very different from what I remember reading. And I can’t find the source I was thinking about. Since I can’t find it, I’ll take your word for it =)

7

One thing I suggested here on the forum already is making the Brazilian civ be based on the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves along with independent Brazil

It was a period where the Portuguese royal family relocated to Brazil to run away from Napoleon’s army.

I mean, I don’t like the Portuguese royal family, but at least it would extend the timeline for the civ.

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poderia ser idade 1 a 4 brasil império e idade 5 republica e ter o mesmo sistema do México e estados unidos e de revolução Pernambuco e minas gerais

9

seria interessante o brasil ter suas plantações próprias por exemplo : plantação de açúcar gera comida e de café gera ouro, aldeão ser treinado 2 por vez e ser po 180 de comida e treinado em 33 segundos ou mais um pouco mais, ter um consulado com estados unidos , Portugal , Inglaterra e Japão.

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No pasa nada colega y si al inicio de la revuelta éramos eso y debido a la constante guerra con los indígenas se creo el tercio de Arauco y junto con Perú, chile era una de las colonias más fieles de España ya que el ultimo reducto quedo en Chiloé que aguanto hasta 1826, y con respecto a la inmigración alemana y suiza esta ocurriría en la década de 1840 en las zonas del sur del pais como lo es la zona de Valparaíso y Llanquihue

11

Huh, I like this design, certainly takes the civ in a new direction rather than being a clone of WoL’s Brazil which seems to be what people tend to make when designing these civ ideas, (although it definitely seems inspired by it.)

Engenhos buffing nearby mills and plantations looks cute, although dunno how much it’d unbalance the game if they are too cheap or expensive. But I like it as it creates a simple and subtle way of encouraging that type of economy.

Immigration is definitely a very good way to define Brazil while avoiding unsavory topics about slavery, imo.

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12

Great idea on the Engenhos. Love it.
Capitania could replace colony maybe? Just to make it different.

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13

One idea I could pitch to make Brazil more " unique" would be to add a sawmill building that can do three things:

a) passively gather wood in a radius very slowly on its own.

b) boost the gather rate of villagers chopping wood within that radius.

c) generate a tiny trickle of coin based on the amount of wood collected within the radius by the sawmill directly and by any villager gatherers as well.

d) it can garrison villager units and attack when garrisoned just as an hacienda.

The sawmill could contain upgrades to gather rate from a 15% initial to 25% in Age 2, to 35% in Age 3, to 50% in Age 4. The option to increase the effect radius could also be considered as part of these improvement techs.

I would also add a home city card called “tropical fruits” in age 4 that would enable the gathering of a trickle of food as well from the sawmill camp.

I also think that an Indian immigrants card or age up should allow the shipping of mango groves with all subsequent home city shipments so they can be placed near the sawmills in the late game when they will have exhausted the nearby natural wood supplies.

In general I think Brazil should be a civ strongly geared to exploit wood better than any other civ so probably they might have a few other cards related to wood gathering. On the off side, they should be limited on the amount of crates of gold they can ship from the home city. One extra civ feature could be that all tech costs have 50% of their coin cost shifted to wood.

There should probably be a limit of two or three sawmills, but as a catch, they only get one factory card in Age 4.

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14

I think Engenhos could also be a completely separate building. No need to make them a market replacement, I assume most people only create one market anyway (except Hausa and Ethiopians, since only 10 cattle can be assigned to each tribal marketplace).

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I don’t see how Sawmills are thematic to Brazil. Brazilwood Camps could be interesting, maybe Brazil in general could have some sort of subtheme of buildings that buff gather rate of resources.

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Yeah, I played a bit of WoL and didn’t like Brazil. The way they were so upfront about slavery that they made physical punishments a gameplay purpose straight up made me uncomfortable.

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They have the third largest forest reserves in the world (after Russia and Canada) and exploiting the Amazon has been a defining trait of the nation since its colonial days (the other one being its overuse of slave labor, but that would not fly with Microsoft, and to be honest, I wouldn’t feel too comfortable centering their economy around that either).

One last factor is that no civ is really outstanding in exploiting wood, so there is a niche opportunity there in my opinion.

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…that’s… that’s why I suggested Brazilwood Camps.

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I thank you all for the several replies to this post. I’ll attempt to give everyone an answer about why I made these choices.

While I definitely agree with you, I think that can of worms has been already thoroughly open. So I think it’s time to embrace it and see what can we do with new ideas.

Originally, my idea for the Engenhos felt way too similar to the Mexican Hacienda, which I wanted to avoid in order to keep each post-colonial American civ’s uniqueness intact. Turning it into a card, I think, would minimise the importance of agriculture in post-colonial Brasil , which was what I wanted to highlight through that building and would make the civ way too boring, which I obviously wanted to avoid. I made it a Market as well, so that players would be encouraged to build it during most games. I still think it’s a bit clunky, which is why I welcomed some discussion about it, but turning it into a card doesn’t feel like the right choice, at least to me.

Again, since the Immigrant Cards feel like such an important element for the United States, I wanted to include Brasil’s history of immigration without reusing an element that belonged to other civs. This felt like the best compromise, but if other people have a more practical idea to include them, I’m all ears.

I don’t know how you could represent this though and I don’t think there’s really a point.

Sinceramente, acho que isso não contribuiria muito positivamente para a facção. Algumas cartas para referenciar essas revoluções e interações diplomáticas seria melhor, na minha opinião. No entanto, isso das plantações deu-me uma ideia.

Hmm, maybe I could find a way of putting them in their design.

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I only made it replace the Market in order to “force” players to build Engenhos most games, since I don’t believe they would build Engenhos on most games if it was just a building that buffs production.