The tier based milestones for Rus and Abbasid Dynasty

Abbasid Dynasty and Rus have interesting macro mechanics, where reaching certain milestones (connecting a number of houses, and killing a number of animals on the map respectively), gives you a boost in economy. I love these macro mechanics with a caveat, that it’s a bit disappointing that they are descrete bonuses and not linear ones. As an example, reaching 499 killed animals gives you nothing compared to someone that has 250 killed animals, which doesn’t feel very good. Killing one more to get to 500 animals gives you a sudden +5% food harvesting rate and 6 seconds faster periodic gold from Hunting Cabins. Something about this feels a bit underwhelming.

I would personally enjoy much more a system akin to last hitting in MOBAs, where the bonuses get higher the more animals you kill, but in a continuous, linear manner, without those arbitrary milestones. For Abbasids, due to the Golden Age thematic, it would probably make sense to keep a fixed milestone element, but maybe having it split up to add a continuous one as well, that gets better with every building you connect to your House of Wisdom would make the mechanic more enjoyable and rewarding.

From a competitive perspective, a linear reward system feels much better than a tier based one, probably due to its positive reinforcement nature, being constantly rewarded for your actions. You can get into a game and strive to get that number as high as possible, knowing your results are paying off now, as opposed to just striving to get a faster Tier 2 timing this game.

1 Like

Last hitting in mobas, or at least league, works very similarly. You get gold and XP as you kill minions but neither have any effect until you level up or have enough gold to buy your next item.

Additionally I think tiers add interesting game play. If you know a champion wants to buy an expensive item first but force them back when they have 1300/1500 gold you put them in a very bad position. If the increase was linear this would have basically 0 impact.

Not that I don’t think incremental increases aren’t fun, both have their merits.

1 Like

Yeah that’s a fair point. The MOBA example wasn’t the best. Zerg’s Queen injects and creep spread in Starcraft 2 would have made a better one. I don’t know if it’s just me, but seeing only those 3 milestones feels underwhelming. I guess I like maximizing stuff and snow-balling, even though I could never get into MOBAs.

2 Likes

Yeah snowballing little wins is also an interesting game mechanic. This is kind-of like what dehli sultanate has with their research mechanic.

Start off with slow research and slowly build up scholars until your research is not only free but now faster as well

1 Like