Civilizations & Cultures: content and context
In BOC, progression system is based on civilization & cultures traits trees, you will progress from first prehistoric nomads tribes up to great ancient empires through civilizations and cultures time-line, but that progression is not linear, BOC takes to the table a non-linear progression system.
Unlike other strategy games where player chooses a particular faction, what we have is a sandbox-like combination of progression and cultures. At the beginning of the game, you will only have under your command a tiny nomadic tribe. This tribe are not Romans, nor Carthaginians, nor Persians nor Macedonians ... but depending on how you run them over the millennia, they may be one thing or another!
In BOC, as happened in the real world, it is the geography and the decisions that you make as a player what, with the passage of time, is shaping the culture and identity of your people.
Civilizations & cultures timeline
See timeline at full screen 2160p
Check civilizations list -work in progress-
We are working to offert more than 80 ancient Civilizations and cultures for the progression system at 1.0 release (including, planned oriental, and american cultures). At the first content for EA launch you can expect mesopotamian, early celtics and egypt cultures.
Gameplay mechanic: Full guide
Geographic weight as cultural factor
You can progress will freedom in the way that you choose through civilizations and culture traits, but there are some rules, each tree could have aclimatation requeriments or reestrictions, here you can see a conceptual distribution about that:
So, there are no reestriction about how direction that you can take, for example, you can take some traits nodes from Elamintes and after that maybe you will like to go to Egypt old-kingdom tree, as long as you accomplished the requirements of each tree -if exist-, in general terms always you can progress through trees that are reasonably closely, your faction can change passively his acclimatation based on where is placed over the world map, happens more faster at early game meanwhile you are nomad but still can change at midle or late game if you want to do.
Progression points
To unlock nodes from trait trees you need expend progression points, there are 3 different types of progression points: War, Growth and Myth points. -Originally was 9 types but along with the other mechanics of the game had thought that was an excess of design- are your decisions that you take, and at the end your way to play that give you progressions points, each node of each branch of each trait tree have is own progression points requeriments, is the branch specialization that defines how many and the combination of progression points that you will need.
To unlock new nodes from a particular tier requires have unlocked the same nodes than that tier row less one (simple formula: tier row -1) , that is like if you want to unlock nodes from tier 2 you need at least to have one node, or if you want to unlock any node from tier 5 you need to have at least 4 nodes of that branch.
Specialization branch agroup nodes with same background or purposes and are directly related with a famous definition of that historic civilization or culture.
Based on historic background each trait tree can allow one or more branchs, for example, above you are seeing Early indoeuropeans trait tree that is a single branch tree, now you can see Egypt pre-dynastic as a example of tree with multiple branchs:
Currently some civilization and cultures like Rome Republic have up to 5 branchs specializations, each branch can contain up to 5 tiers so that means up to 15 nodes per each branch, also each tree include tier bonuses if you unlock enough nodes like from picture of early indoeuropeans desing, that in this case unlocks an architectonic collection.
There are a limit about how many trait nodes player can unlock (arround 50), but still player can left previous trait nodes to allow new space for new ones, unlearn previous nodes also requires expend progression points multiply by 10.
In some special cases, (like egypt) you will require to complete some tier bonuses from previous egypts cultures, like it would be a tree chain, Rome and Babylons also have this requieriments.
Aside civilization and cultures timeline, there are knowledge system like as a tech tree that also requires the player to use progression points, and currently still is a open mechanic development and It will expain in next steam news!
-we are doing our best to reach as soon as posible the content quality to release EA-