New UU: DOCTORS
The doctors is an healer unit. It heal twice as fast than a monks, and they can be trained at both the TCs and monasteries since the second age. It’s affected by piety like a monk.
Cost: 200 gold
At the start, the doctor is a pure healing unit, but with upgrades (researched at TCs and monasteries) it can get other abilities. Those techs are available at both the TC and monastery.
Age 1:
UT: Lazzaretti
They can build an UB called lazzaretti. Those buildings heals more units at the same time in an area when doctors are garrisonsed inside. More doctors are garrisoned inside and bigger the healing area becomes (with zero doctors, the area is small circle of about 3 tiles radius). The healing speed is constant, and a eighth of the doctor standard speed (so a fourth of a monk). It’s affected by herbal medicine even if it doesn’t need to have units garrisoned.
Cost: 100 wood
Cost UT: 50 food and 50 wood
Age 2
UT: Poisons
After this UT, the doctors gain the ability to poison enemy buildings, it takes 10 seconds where the doctor has to stay put adjacent to the building and when it’s vulnerable (a bit like a aoe2 monk converting a building). A poisoned building train units with that already lost 15% of their heath, vills deposits 15% less resources to it and it deals 15% less damage.
When a building has been poisoned, it automatically starts a countdown of 100 seconds, at the end of it, the building is healed. This countdown though is sospended every time that a unit or a tech is queued, so basically the countdown proceed only when the building is idle, to simulate a quarantine (as it’ll be called from now on). Buildings that are poisoned can’t akso heal units inside.
Cost UT: 150 food and 200 gold
Age 3
UT: Plague
After this UT, the poison effect can be spread through nearby buildings if the building isn’t put into quarantine. Every 10 seconds that the building isn’t put on quarantine, the poison effect is spread to buildings near 1 tile, after 20 seconds, buildings through 2 tiles, and so on (max 10 tiles). We will call this area the contagion area. Then all other buildings have to be treated like a poisoned buildings, but they don’t spread the contagious further (like the original building).
Cost UT: 400 food and 400 gold
Requires poison UT
Now I know that all those effects seem to be OP, but keep in mind 2 things:
- Both the doctors and its poison UTs are expensive. The doctor also isn’t a strong unit (so it’s not impossible to snipe it), and it have a long reload time (5 minutes) for the poison ability.
- Almost all those negative effects can be avoided if the building is left idle for 100 seconds. This is the fastest way to have the building healed and ready again, so as soon as your building is poisoned you should clear the queue or at least avoid to add more units or techs. You can also delete the building and build a new one to be sure that the poison effect doesn’t spread.
The lazzaretto of Venice, one of the first methodic quarantine systems.
OP will be adjourned as soon as possible.
NOTE: all numbers and percentages are indicative in order to explain the concept of how it would work.
The units are the doctors with the tipical venetians masks that made them famous during the pestilence times through Europe. Despite the iconic looks isn’t clear when and where it started (so it might be a bit out of the aoe4 timeframe) but in general, Venice was always ahead of its time in dealing with plagues and illness. For example, they were fast to understand the importance of the quarantine, and it encouraged the medical practice. In every ships there must also always be a men trained in the basics medical practice.
That’s wasn’t the end though. Venice more than once resort to unconventional means to deal casualties to the enemy. Among these, there have been several attempts to poison the enemy troops. Poisoning the wells was of course a common defensive tactic, but there have been attempts of actually starting a plague epidemic among the enemy armies by doctors financed by the state. While we don’t have proves that this actually worked, I think that it might still be worth to include in the game.
Big thanks to @Siegelad4112 that with its profile picture has indirectly suggested the idea for this UU.