Research
All research will be conducted by dedicated researchers (pulling in a huge amount of RP - up to 180). There will be no need to spam mages just to keep competitive, instead it will be most effective to only recruit mages when needed (and you can use the free commander slots for thematic national commanders!).
There's several options to go from here, but I first want to discuss other changes that follow from that.
Random paths
Since you are not going to have enough mages to ensure lucking on the paths you need, many mages will be given different forms with predefined path picks.
So for example you will see 4 fortune tellers on your recruitment screen:
s2, sd, sn, sb
I thought that this should apply to all non-cap and weak cap-only mages.
So fortune teller and mage engineer, yes, archtheurg and oreiad no.
Money
Without having to buy castles/labs/researchers upfront, I'll have to reduce the money income somehow. However I think of doing this via the researchers upkeep and leaving more breathing room early on, while increasing the upkeep as the game progresses.
What interests me how will this effect the balance of the game, any ideas?
Research Boosters
Won't work as items, as I intended the mod. Summons? Full prize or dwarven hammer price?
Research Options
I thought about giving a nation exactly two researchers, but with dynamic output.
There are other options but this will change the dynamics of researcher spamming, has probably the least problems with exploits, and gives access to many other options.
Goal (d) -> research bonus early on
Goal (a) -> limit it later
Base research output on game progress, nation, number of labs, etc
I wanted to base it purely on game progress and nation. I dislike how powerful expanders will ultimately win the research race, thanks to higher income. Fixing output will allow comebacks, etc. and hopefully keep the game more interesting, especially for struggling players.
I also think it's thematically justified to balance nations into research and combat nations. Mictlan will not be better at research than Arco, even with much higher income, as Arco has a rich tradition of philosophers and enigneers to build on, while Mictlan is "a backward nation".
I'm not entirely decided on this, though.
Dynamic research upkeep. Size of nation?
Drawbacks: This will require different mods on server (dynamic) and client (static, for keeping annoyance low).
This means research output and maybe upkeep wont show correctly, it will be most likely a percentual value.
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