Forge

[HoneyBadger]

You make some good points, Levolun.

The reason I made that statement is because at the time of the Roman Empire, Greece was already a very technologically-advanced empire, so were Egypt and Carthage, for that matter, so Rome didn't happen in a test-tube. It had a lot of role-models and a broad base of military and technical know-how to draw from. England at the time was still barbarian backwoods, with only the remnants of the fringes of the Celts to look to for any real "civilization" in the, ironically, Roman/Western sense, and it took the advent of a conquering Rome to help the situation.

Forest regions do get better resources, because they have all that readily available wood. Wood's good by itself, but it's also good for smelting and forging metals because it can be made into charcoal. Owning a forest province doesn't make you Greece though, it just means you have a nice stand of timber you can lumber off. It shouldn't affect your gold-cost though.

Now we're getting into the heart of the matter. Ok, you compare humans to trolls. Your Celtic humans are a great example because some are equipped with chainmail while others are bare-chested. That's fine as per the purposes of the game, without Forging, but suppose you wanted to arm your Celts with some of the advanced weapons the Celts and Saxons and Gauls and Scottish and Irish and etc. actually invented? You could equip them with the Seax or the Falcata or the Irish longspear or the Scottish claymore or the dirk (perhaps a little anachronistically, but still...) or even a harpoon (to represent the Gae Bolga). The possibilities go on and on, but still you're talking one human with one weapon. You shouldn't have to invent a whole new nation just because you want the Irish to represent. But, advances like the Falcata SHOULD cost more to equip your units, and that cost is technology and resources. That's what the Forge represents, a determined effort to improve your nation via the application of technology and infrastructure. Now you might say "well one broadsword is as good as any other, why do we need seven different colors of the same thing when we already have a few types of generic sword in the game?" Well, because we already have the Falchion. And the falchion is a different breed of sword from a broadsword, so why limit ourselves and the game to one curious type of specialization?

Now, consider the Trolls. Trolls get a bad rep: they're stupid, ugly, and they eat gold like you and I would split a pizza. But they are crafty, and sneaky, and mercenary, and mean, and some of them more than others. Smart trolls (who grow up to be Troll Kings) are out there, and maybe some of them decide that they want to use technology too. Well, clever or not, they're lazier than humans, that's why they live under bridges instead of staying at the Ritz.
So when they invent, they think bigger, and spikier, and smashier versions of what us humans have already invented. Troll smiths come up with something like the Troll-sized 3 headed flanged iron mace. Great for smashing, carbon-graphite shaft, has a nice sweet spot. And because Troll-sized is Jotun-sized, they turn around and sell it to the Jotuns, and then the Jotuns start inventing, or more probably, they've been inventing all along, coming up with things like "axe" and "boot" and "war" while us humans were still dangling from the trees eating lice off of each other (until God told us not to, for those Christian creationists out there). Now Troll arms are far more expensive than human arms, because they're 5 sizes larger and because they can sell new designs to the Jotuns for a fortune (and Jotuns always want exclusive rights). They're also cruder, because as stated before, Trolls are lazy, and they're mostly just in it to make a buck. If you got a human or a jotun master smith to make you a triple-headed, flanged, iron mace, it's going to be a work of deadly loving beauty, and it's going to work great. If you get a troll to do it, it's going to be a hulking rusty monstrosity, and it just won't work as well. Att and Def will be reduced. Damage might even be a little tiny bit lower because all the flanges aren't individually aligned to maximal aerodynamic brains-on-the-slaughterhouse-floor angle. It'll still smash 'em up good though.

The Forge, however, doesn't take on balancing issues by itself. It's up to whoever uses the Forge application to resolve that, and hopefully that person will have some sense. Some nations just get more out of the Forge than others, and that's a good indicator of a population's overall intelligence, creativity, determination, and-most importantly of all-ability to steal ideas from their neighbors.

[Endoperez]

I'm not quite sure if Marverni -> Marignon works, but Marignon (a nation of MA) has halberds, pikes and greatswords - those would be the Irish Longspears and Scottish Claymore.

Rome was in Italy precisely because the technology already existed.

Also, "a determined effort to improve a nation via the application of technology and infrastructure" doesn't mean magic. If Romans decided to invest on technology (as they did), they might have gotten swords of sligthly different design better suited for formations, or better armors, or better helmets, or perhaps may have come up with a more effective way of making armor. This took more than few years, though. Even a decade would really push it, and your Forge would produce wonders in very, very short time. Claymores weren't invented in 6 months, and a Forge shouldn't take longer to build than a castle...

[HoneyBadger]

Yeah, I wish (and hope for the future) that there was a way, based on the time/aging system for new units to appear for nations at certain years. This would really help make the Forge useful, because you'd have to protect your Forge for say a year or 10 years or whatever until it started paying off in larger amounts. It still would be useful in the beginning of the game for added resources and a few different kinds of units, but it would grow better as time went by, providing the Forge had an "age".

[HoneyBadger]

For that matter, the "aging" system could be applied to temples and labs. Older temples might spread Dominion faster and themselves produce the occasional advanced troop, while Labs might allow you to perform rituals for less over time, because you're assumed to have collected magical apparatus which can be reused or recycled. Better, older labs might also let you make or summon new types of undead, demons, etc. while at the same time increasing the chance for a magical catastrophy as the "land itself over time became warped by the vast concentration of magical power pouring out, until the very waters and forests and ground itself spewed forth abomination".

[HoneyBadger]

Endoperez, magic is present and we have access to it. The Romans attempted quite extensively and earnestly to use magic, but it wasn't working for them nearly as well as, say, concrete. Dom3 however postulates a world in which the forces of the elements, the moon, nature, death, faith, and blood sacrifice are resources as easy to tap as, for instance, pulleys. They are in and of themselves a "sort" of technology that improves with research and application. I'm certain that if you dropped the Greko-Roman empire into a Dominions world, within 50 years they'd be coming up with all manner of new uses for magic, even if they had no power of magic within themselves to begin with. So there's no reason that technology and magic can't be interwoven, and no reason they can't develope along separate lines-magical "scientists" developing spells, performing rituals, coming up with new ideas, and magical "engineers" forging magic items, creating machines and technology, and utilizing ALL the forces and resources around them-not just the so called "magic" ones, but also the ones we use. They'd even be able to tap into things we can't, that you wouldn't necessarily call magic, like the Void. There's room for both, and there's room for faith, as well.

[Endoperez]

Magic can be researched, and it does change the world. However, even if a mage can enchance the walls of a city, the masons of the city can't build a new castle whose walls are as good as the magically enchanced ones.

A historical empire dropped into Dominions world would come up with uses for magic, of course. All the nations in Dominions already have come up with all kinds of uses for magic. Many have uses for Faith too, for that matter (Arcos scrying dominion, MA C'tis Miasma dominion, etc, and then all the spells that work better in your own dominion). However, this has taken much longer than 50 years. Why do you think technology would be any easier to develop?

Magic and technology can and have been interwoven in Dominions. Ulm uses Black Steel armors! EA Arcoscephale has build flying contraptions! LA Man mages have siege bonus and can spy, doubtless with the help of simple Earth and Air magic! EA Vanheim and Helheim commanders use magical armors! EA Atlantis has Basalt Spears and Armors! And then there's Caelum who uses magical weapons and armor throughout all ages... But all of these combinations are heavily guarded secrets. The ways of mass-forging Black Steel were forgotten between middle and late ages. After Early age, the only flying armor is the super-heavy Stymphalian suit of bronze wings. LA Atlantis had to steal the secret of ice equipment from Caelum. The changes you suggest are too drastic for anything but time to solve.

[HoneyBadger]

Technology is already there, it doesn't need to develope up from nothing. If the Romans landed in Dom3 World, they wouldn't find themselves surrounded by primitive cavemen unless they happened to have Cave Men neighbors but that's not what we're talking about. I'm not saying that because a nation has a Forge they'll suddenly leap ahead in the technological arms-race, I'm saying the Forge will give them more avenues and more choices. They can devote more resources towards specialization, not technological wonder-making, just specialization, something most if not all successful nations have done, usually within single generations, and often within just a few years. Something that also often enough LEADS to innovation, but, it's much more matters of fashion, hunch, elitism, taste, community, family and fad, than it is a matter of genius.
Look at the American Revolutionary War for example (hint-there are better examples): Everyone more or less had access to pretty much the same technology, there weren't the huge innovations brought on by the conditions of the Civil War, but basically it was English against English, with some addition of mercenaries and foreign soldiers of fortune etc, but basically everybody spoke the same language and prayed to the same god. Yet you'll find there was an ENORMOUS variety to the troops both sides deployed. You had everything from Indian skirmishers to White Indian-fighters to German Hessian knights to Kentucky longriflemen, and plenty of variety within the rank-and-file of the English and American infantries/calvalries. It's logical and it happens that nations develope different units for different purposes, and it seems to be the nature of war that fighters come in endless variety. Look at modern weapons-at it's most basic, a gunpowder weapon is a bullet, a barrel, a trigger, and the internal and external mechanisms which work together to propel that bullet to, into, and possibly through a target. A gun is superior to any weapon which has come before it to the point where an army armed with pretty much any kind of decent modern gun will defeat any army armed with more primitive weapons, providing the more primitively armed army doesn't have huge advantages over the one with the guns, and yet look at the incredible variety of guns. Yes, we modern folk can produce our ideas more quickly than people could in the past, but the answer isn't technology by itself, it's the reality of war and the reality of human response to warfare and strategy. The Forge represents a nation's ability to put the kinds of strategy that we call "mixed arms" "diversity of arms" and "arms-logistics" into effect in the game. It also represents a nation's internal diversity and a truer model of what the "unit" and the "fighter" really were.