Military Traditions 2.0

[IsaacCAT]

Preface: the mechanism to unblock military traditions is to gain military experience. You gain military experience by fighting wars or drilling cohorts.

Observation: with the new gated inventions coming in 2.0 I can see some overlap between military traditions and inventions.

Suggestion: transform military traditions to gated inventions and use the military experience to allow for the discrete use of these inventions events to unlock the implementation of these traditions.

Why:

We know that inventions are the product of brilliant minds but they are not easy to implement. They require time and overcome resistance to change. In modern organizations as in ancient times if you come with a new procedure, mechanism or technology, you will not have an immediate adoption. There will be early adopters and then use will spread. In game we can simulate this effect as follows:

How:

• The player unlocks an invention that allows for a new unit type, formation or bonus to their armies.
• The player spends military experience to implement this invention in some or all of their armies. Thus some of the armies will have the invention advantage while others not.

The military screen can show every military army and buttons to invest military experience to implement the available inventions. The player can choose to spread consistently all inventions to all armies or have elite armies with all possible inventions before all other.

NOTE: this will give more importance to the concept of army, as some armies will have special units,formations or bonus. I see some players wanting to rename their armies accordingly.

EDITED: found some problems on the implementation phase. See post below.

 

[IsaacCAT]

Problems: I can see the following issues:

• Splitting and army, who gets the inventions implemented to that army?
• If the army is killed or banished, what happens to the inventions implemented?
• The units are made of soldiers that retire, how the game simulates that? will the army loose the inventions implemented every generation?

After some thought, we cannot simulate implementation on armies as an attribute because it will not work. Thus a new mechanism for implementation:

Implementation shall be unlocked by battles or other events that fulfill the tradition conditions to apply the bonus nationwide. Examples:

• "Centuries of War" military tradition invention is discovered, the player decides to use military tradition points to implement this invention/tradition but only unlocked when an army with some heavy infantry wins a battle. Then a pop up window tells the player that the "Centuries of War" tradition has been adopted nationwide successfully for all armies. Because we will not wait 100 years to get this tradition, do we?
• Mastery of the mountains: the invention text will display the following: "unlocked after winning a battle in the Mountains with an army with archers, heavy infantry or light infantry after this tradition has been adopted."
• For army traditions like City State Fortifications (+15% Fort Defense), the game will unlock the bonus after some foreign siege cannot take one of the player fortified city. The pop up window would say something like: after glorious resistance in the siege of Rome, the Romans have learned the city state fortifications!

All these steps are not gratuitous, on the contrary, they help make every invention/tradition memorable and build up a nice story for the player.

EDITED: many times.

 

[Valentinius]

I always think of the "inventions" in Europa Barbarorum for Total War: Rome and Medieval 2, where the Seleucids could gain access to cataphracts by losing to the Phalavan (Parthian) faction in a few battles. The logic was that if you just win you dont have to innovate. Same for Hellenistic factions and Thureporoi/Thorakitai units, you had to face Galatians in battle to adopt their fighting style. It made a lot of sense.

Very good idea!