So currently Chineses’ way of gaining favor is very similar to Egyptians’.
The original civs where usually more different from each other, creating an asymmetry in how you play them, and how you play against them as well. That’s why imo this mechanism should be changed for Retold (just to clarify, i know many people love Chinese as they are, and that’s totally valid).
I have the following idea on how to improve this mechanic, addressing those issues and keeping the spirit of the original concept:
Gardens act as a bit more expensive (~60 wood, 20 gold) drop off site for all resources that also generate favor (replace storage pit)
When a villager drop resource at a garden, the garden generate ‘reserves’ equal to % of resources dropped.
Reserves trickle down to generate favor and an additional chosen resource-gold or wood or food, + favor.
A garden can only hold a limited maximum number of reserves and the trickle is fixed so a Chinese player should build more gardens than a usual drop off if they want to generate more favor.
If a garden is destroyed, all reserves are lost, so enemies should focus on taking them down in order to harm economy and both favor generation.
As a tradeoff, Chinese Villigers are not as effective as Greeks (similar to Egyptians or maybe something in between), so they should utilize gardens for their economy full potential.
Of course there is no longer a limit on number of gardens.
The original civs each generated favor using one core mechanic of RTS games.
Greeks generated it by gathering.
Egyptians generated it by constructing.
Norse generated it by fighting.
Atlanteans generated it by map control.
What if Chinese could generate Favor by “selling” other resources to the gods?
Giving offerings to the gods via a mechanic similar to selling and buying resources at a market, they could exchange X amount of Food, Wood, or Gold for Y amount of Favor.
It could be on a timer, so that they can only give an offering every minute or so, rather than just trade away all their resources.
Or perhaps each offering depreciates the exchange rate, and it slowly trickles back up to full value after a while. Similar to African civs trading livestock for Wood or Coin in AOE3.
On a side note, any unit (both allied and enemy) should definitely have the ability to walk over gardens just like they do with farms.
The fact that in the early game gardens are more useful to wall off your city rather than to generate favor is the ugliest thing about them.
Gardens are one of the very few chinese mechanics that could work in Retold with a proper redesign, they still are basically a copy from Aoe3 Japanese Shrines though, so they definitively need their own characterization.
Gardens are boring.
3/5 civilisations collect favour by building buildings, not very interesting.
I think some kind of trade or resource related system could definitely make sense.
Maybe a system like the Italian Lombards from AoE3 could work.
Those work in that way that you add one resource to them and they then trickle back the other two im a 1 to 1 ratio (so 1 to 0.5 + 0.5) making it a lot more efficient then market place trade.
With home city cards you can improve the efficiency to >1 effectively slowly generating resources.
Another home city cards gives a XP trickle to every conversation.
So something similar could work for AoM.
You can slowly trickle resources and favour by investing resources.
The more gardens you have the faster the trickle is.
Not sure how OP that would ne for gold but they can already trickle gold now anyway and you can also just trade with yourself.
Favour by trading is something a different civilisation should have though.
I will go for the latter, immidiatly gaining your full amount of favor should be hard to do, even in the lategame.
I really like that you are rewarded by saving extra resources which was needed in the highly populated china (this is kind of what i was trying to do with the reserve system).
And the deminishing returns make it scale great for late game.
The only problem i have is that it seems a bit too simple and tedious to do- click on a button at a certain building, and remember to do it every minute or so.
It is also not as trivial for the enemy to distrupt it for how simple it is.
Maybe make it so you can auto que which resource to offer every time it gets to 0, in addition to manualy, so it less tedious.
Yea, but for japanese they have to look for huntable animals to increase the trickle so you must have map control (at least on 1v1 when you dont have an ally that can give you herdibles). I guess we can make gardens work like aoe 3 sweeds Trops, generating favor according to resources arround.
Persians are a good candidate for that, I have an idea for them to be able to trade from age 1 with natural settelments as well so you dont have to wait to heroic age for favor.
I didnt mean the full 100, but rather some percentage of it. Maybe something like 6 favor per offering at a minimum (after spamming it enough) and 25 favor per offering at full value (if you wait for the exchnge rate to fully recover).
The exchange rate could be depreciated by losing buildings to the enemy, especially houses, gardens (if they’re kept), and temples. Giving enemy players a way to raid chinese favor production.
I don’t mean literal trading with caravans, but rather exchanging resources for favor, representing China’s extensive list of offering ceremonies, such as giving money to the dead.
The whole Lombard description was how I could imagine an “offering” system to work.
The way the Livestock Market works for the African civilisations in AoE3 could be a nice way of doing favour for a lot of civilisations because sacrifice way common amongst Indo European civilisations especially.
The way holy cows work in AoE3 would obviously work for a Hinduism inspired religion.
I think any kind of unit praying needs to come with additional mechanics to be differet than greeks.
An option (that doesn’t fit the chinese) would be to build shrines that buff nearby units and allow them to pray for favor, so instead of praying with vills in town you pray close to the battlefield. (Needs more tweaks)
All in all, I think I like the combination of resource offering with my suggestion- you can have a small trickle of favor from the reserves vills give you and boost it by manually turning resources to reserves at all your gardens.
There are several ideas- one you can try to imitate the chinese equivalent of High fantasy, Xianxia and have the chinese gather favor by having their units/perhaps only heroes enter a special stance where they “cultivate their qi” through meditation and martial arts exercises to gain favor.
Alternatively, the chinese were known to have invented a lot of things and were known for their reverence toward scholars as such their favor could be tied to research. When they are researching technology (excluding age ups), favor trickles in quickly, and when research is complete, they gain a small, permanent increase to favor trickle.
I like the idea of a „garden“ even tho I think it would fit Mesopotamian much better but still… i personally welcome every idea which doesn’t include buildings to gain favour I don’t think passive favour gaining is such a good idea (maybe also a reason I enjoyed Greeks and Norse more over the years than Egypt and Atlantean)
Getting favor and even other resources at Gardens are just plain copying of Aoe Online babylonian gardens (they decrease units train time and trickles food)
That’s actually not that stupid of an idea.
There should be a little more to it, like some units giving more favour compared to their value and maybe some units giving none despite being relatively strong to give you more strategical choice.