What universal techs would you like to see? Techs that no set civ has, with either many, if not all civs have. Go crazy, even if unbalanced. Here’s some examples.
Taxation. Villagers produce 1 gold every 5 minutes. Costs 500 gold. Cost debatable.
Fortified palisade walls. Changes the appearance of palisade walls and gates and makes them significantly stronger. 100 food, and 100 wood.
Town Militia. Villagers do 5 bonus damage against eagle warriors, scouts, and militia line. Plus 20 HP. Villagers can now hold their own against early units.
Forestry. Farms return 10% of their wood cost upon depletion. Lumberjack produce a slow trickle of food from gathering wood.
This isn’t possible without coding changes. You can have a main projectile, and a secondary projectile, both of which have to be arrows for the castle.
This might be good. I’ve also suggested making this editor building accessible in normal game before. Perhaps the next stage of technology for Loom.
Firstly, it greatly encourages tower rush and villager combat. Secondly, it makes raiding units lose their important value. Thirdly, if it is costly or late to access for balance, it fails to live up to the original intention of introducing it.
If this is not an UT, this is awful. If this is an UT, this is too close to Spanish UT.
Both of these are more suitable as civilization bonuses. In fact, I have suggested the latter in the other thread and named it Slash-and-burn.
Mahout is good and should be practical.
Sharpened Javelin is pointless. You can just increase the attack bonus of Elite Skirmisher.
The others might break the balance. Do not like them.
The Petard one is nice but more suitable as civilization bonuses I think.
The Castle one feel suitable to be a part of effect of an UT, maybe for the UT of a new civ or an existing UT like Stronghold.
The others seem to overlap with existing UTs or civ bonuses. If they become common techs, they will kill the advantages of the UTs or civ bonuses, or just break the balance. Not recommended.
Every type of collecting/working speed of a villager can be improved except for Repairing.
I think a few techs could be added regarding repairing.
In Blacksmith:
Repairing Buildings and siege becomes 30% faster
Repairing Buildings and siege gets 30% cheaper.
In Docks: (Added bonus to existing upgrades)
Careening - Ships get repaired 20% faster.
Dry Docks - Repairing ships is 20% cheaper.
We could just make Treadmill Crane also benefit repair. On the other hand, siege and ship repair are niche that I do not think people would be willing to pay for them.
We all know what happened to Battle Elephants when they had Khmer speed. Imperial Camels were uncounterable in TG-s with +1P and Indian free TG-s didn’t exist because everyone had to abuse the civ. Bombard Arbalest is imbalanced, it was removed from Mayans and nerfed with Saracens. It has no place in the game. Skirmishers are already a perfect, balanced counter to Archers.
What if I want to touch 5 civs without touching 36 rest?
Militia line +1PA and +10% speed. Can’t name anything.
Or,
Military drill - Militia line +10% speed.
Don’t give it to Hindustanis, Gurjaras, Saracens, Malians and everything is fine.
Just don’t give it to Khmer, Bengalis and Burmese. Rest 3 will be totally okay.
In that case Saracens is also imbalanced as they get it for free from Feudal age.
Edit: I’m not fan of archer units dealing huge damage to building either. But dealing 2 damage instead of 1 will be okay imo.
If that was true, arbalester upgrade cost shouldn’t be touched.
i believe that was hit more because fast imp builds. fast imp arb is of course going to have an advantage against castle age elite skirms with only castle age upgrades
Which could be prevented by an expensive castle age tech for skirmishers. Either way, all of these are hypothetical and none of them will ever happen. Maybe only “Mahout” is a probability.
But Skirmishers originally have attack bonus and are good at fighting archers.
I don’t think we need to make that trivial differentiation.
As you can imagine this gives Camels and Heavy Camels the qualities of the former Indian Camels.
It is not fine. Camels should not reduce their fear of archers.
So some people including me support changing this bonus. No more siege archer.
Most of my new techs ideas are coming from having very small and specific civs in mind. When I see Koreans, Portuguese and Malay are the bottom 3 all the time, I just badly want a new archer techs for them.
Similarly this is coming from Teutons, Celts and Slavs perspective. All of them have good siege to compensate. But what if I want to design more than one cavalry civs without bracer (and last armor), and without good siege? I have to repeat a skirmisher bonus which is way worse than adding a new generic tech.
Same with Camels. Turks, Tatars, and Mongols have bad spearman line. They don’t need to have good camel either because all of them are top CA civ which does very well against Cavalry. Since not having knight is a trend for new civs, what if some African civs don’t get knight or CA? If this is just a civ bonus, we will be limited to only one new civ with this design.
Instead of adding some global changes and then making most of civs irrelevant to the new stuff, you should directly make balance suggestions for those specific civilizations.
So I’ve given some thought to these suggestions and I’d like to provide my opinion on them.
first things first
this ones a bit of a gimmick, and is a long term investment for very little return. think about it. at most every 5 minutes you’re getting about 120-140 gold. now this means that not only does it take 25 minutes to pay off at the current price, but how much impact is 120-140 gold (MAX) every 5 minutes really going to provide?
this - well beyond the fact that you would need to add a new armor class to these units for the bonus damage to work, if this is an early game tech it’s really busted. and if it’s a late game tech, for most civs it’s still kind of worthless.
This - as was pointed out would make some civs camels problematic. the answer to this was "well just make sure those civs don’t get it. the civs in question were Hindustani, Gurjaras, Saracens, and Malians. but Frankly, i think given the Strength of Chinese and also the cheapness of Berber Camels they would need to be excluded from the list as well, which means you’re left with 7 civs that could potentially get it. not really universal anymore is it? which leads into the next one
this was suggested - well frankly the reason given was to buff “5 or so civs” 5 or so civs doesn’t seem very universal to me. If those civs skirms need love, find another way to buff those. or just buff skirms in general. onto the next one.
This one - we already had this. I think we all know how this went. Can we just say no and move on?
this one here. and other various ones directed at buffing the militia line.
we already have plenty of techs for buffing the Militia line. adding another would just make them even more expensive and longer to tech into. not really a fan.
same thing with
towers are already niche and we see a lot of upgrades for them not even taken. if towers really need more range just bake it in.
Having some exclusive techs don’t make a global change imo.
That’s why it feels like we’re running out of bonuses and adding mechanics from other games. I’m not saying mechanics from other games are bad by default. But so far, they didn’t do good. Adding some exclusive generic techs will be an alternative option to prevent repetition and new gimmicks.
