Dev Diary #162 - Steppe by Steppe

[hattusa]

4. We are in talks to add other Nomads in the world as a game rule, as so many people have been requested it. It's a bit more work than what we did for Admin, as we need to create a "Sahara Region" (and more) and set up Fertility there, but it seems likely that it will happen.

I will now commit the sin of quoting myself. This part of the post has received certain amount of attention and I want to clearly communicate what we are intending to do. This was in response to someone asking to add them as a Game Rule, same as we did with other Admin realms other than Byzantium. What this does not mean is exclusive or bespoke content, or new seasons available for the regions that would be getting Nomads.

As I mentioned before, this expansion is focused on the Eurasian Steppe, and expanding the scope of that is not possible more than in the form of a game rule and minor tweaks.

 

[JonZone]

Maybe "Fertility" could be renamed into "Pasturage"? As in "available Pasturage" to be grazed. And nomads on the plains eventually reduce the available pasturage as the animals eat all the grass. I feel that makes more sense as a name than "Fertility" which doesn't really make much sense here.

This you?

Jokes aside, I agree that the word "domain fertility" might not be as fitting as maybe pasturage in this case (I actually hadn't heard of it before)- but I would still say that fertility as in fertile lands - makes at least some sense. At a certain point in development - things are kind of set in stone - and everyone in the office talks about "fertility", the code says "fertility", the localization says "fertility" and so on.

Things can always be improved when it comes to development - but if you don't lock down concepts or features at a certain stage - you'll have a product development cycle without end. I will however steal away the word "Pasturage" and raise it to seem incredibly smart, next time I get a chance to.

 

[JonZone]

I get where you are coming from, and totally accept that if its too difficult to move on from you wouldn't want to do it. But for me at least, "Fertility" is inherently tied to agriculture. The Nile is fertile, the Lower Yangtze is fertile, Southern Italy is fertile etc. I would not describe the steppe as "fertile"(though there are actually spots that would be/are with modern tech good farmland with water access.). This is why I mainly disagree with the usage of the term, I think fertility is an inherently agricultural concept so for it to be used for a pastoralist lifestyle is odd, though yes of course "fertility" is still important for the recovery of grasses. But still it doesn't make sense to me that you "lower the fertility" when your animals graze it. But you CAN lower the amount of available pasturage making it need to recover, but generally speaking the fertility probably wont be changing that much.

That is fair and valid!

 

[JonZone]

but isn't the localisation just a single (or a few, depending on how many times you localise it) string?

Yes, you could change the english localization to say whatever you want. The issue then is that every designer or developer would be confused because it says one thing in the codebase and script and something completely else in the game. That's not the entire world - and could absolutely be warranted in some instances, but should be reserved to times when it's really needed.