Welcome Godir one and all. I am Thomas Schuiten, Senior Designer at Triumph (I’ve gotten older) and on this day, as was foreseen by the Archons, we are going to be speaking of the newest culture emerging in the Realms: the Architects!
Prepared to shape the realm to their designs.
Architect who?
The Archons were behind many of the great wonders you find around the Realms, they did not build these alone, there were those who toiled in their name, and as the Archons moved on they, the Architects, remained. Building and forging in accordance to plans and designs passed down through the ages. These incredible creations are now a matter of tradition and discipline.
Architects are a culture that create great Monuments to the Affinities, granting their people powerful boons and strengthening their ties to that Affinity.
The city of Akatemar is a proud marvel of architecture in its own right.
What do they do?
The Architect culture is adaptable, requiring planning for the long-term construction of Monuments, but granting a flexibility in their Affinities and damage channels.
The Architect chooses their culture’s starting affinity.
Notably the Architect do not have an inherent Affinity from their culture, instead when creating your Architect faction you can choose their initial Affinity points from among the 6 Affinities.
Their units are likewise adaptable, each having a partially hybridized unit role and matching their (non-physical) damage type to their Dominant Affinity, letting you lean in to builds that make extended use of specific damage types (such as going full Astral lightning and inflicting lots of lightning weakness!)
Most notably, the Architect build Monuments, but before we can lay down the first bricks we must acquire a powerful building material: Wonderstone.
Wonderstone
The Surveyor is a useful scout, quick on their feet, with a keen eye for extracting Wonderstone.
A unique material created from the residue of Magic Materials via secretive methods, Wonderstone is used to lay the foundations of Monuments and to build each Tier upon them.
Wonderstone can be obtained from Magic Materials in 2 ways:
Surveying provinces with magic materials is the quickest way to gain Wonderstone, but can only be done by your Surveyors and only once per province. So while it is an excellent early source of the resource, it cannot support your projects indefinitely.
Magic Materials your empire owns grant some Wonderstone each turn, a slower source than surveying, but much more consistent.
As this income is global, the source of the Material is irrelevant, be they in annexed territory, provided through Vassals, trade agreements or even synthesized using Transmutation, each grants that much needed income of Wonderstone.
While obtaining Magic Materials is vital to Architect cultures’ Monuments, how you get them is up to you. So how about those Monuments then?
Monuments
Each Architect city may build a Monument, this is done in a similar manner to other Special Province Improvements. The first step is laying down the foundations.
When laying down the foundation, you must choose which Affinity this Monument will be dedicated to, this dedication has a low minimum Affinity requirement. Your people must at least understand what they are building towards after all.
Tier 1: the Foundation
The foundation grants your units one stack of Affinity Incarnate, the type is dependent on the Affinity the Monument was dedicated to. Each stack gives +1 damage to the appropriate channel. So if we dedicated this Monument to Chaos, we would gain a stack of Chaos Incarnate, granting +1 Fire Damage to all attacks (+2 for single shot attacks).
More interestingly perhaps the Foundation grants +1 of the Monument’s Affinity to the owner. Thus if this is our aforementioned Chaos dedicated Monument, our empire now gains +1 Chaos affinity, accelerating our Empire Development unlocks and potentially letting us access higher tier Chaos tomes without needing to invest in earlier Tomes of that Affinity!
The Monument also counts as a Conduit for the purposes of Adjacency bonuses and boosts.
Tier 2: the Sanctum
The sanctum grants an additional stack of Affinity Incarnate of the Affinity that the Monument was dedicated to. In addition it grants +20 City Stability, letting the city grow more rapidly. The affinity gained increases, further increasing your empire's development.
Tier 3: the Zenith
The sanctum grants an additional stack of Affinity Incarnate of the Affinity that the Monument was dedicated to. (bringing us up to 3!)
In addition at Tier 3 your units gain bonus resistance based on the Monument’s affinity (Thus our Chaos Monument would grant +2 Fire Resistance)
The affinity gained increases again, further increasing your empire's development. The city that owns this monument now gains +10% more Food, Production and Draft. Accelerating its growth and development.
Tier 4: the Apex
The apex represents the final step of the Monument’s construction, as with the previous Tiers it grants another Affinity Incarnate for a total of 4.
The resistance bonus likewise increases at this tier, thus our Chaos Monument would be providing a solid +4 Fire Resistance to our units.
The affinity gained increases further still. That +10% bonus income that the previous tier gave now extends to all resources, turning the city that this Monument belongs to into a true economic powerhouse!
Additionally at Tier 4, the Monument counts as a Gold Wonder, letting you use these impressive structures as a way to attain Magic Victory by binding them as you would any other Gold Wonder!
Affinity Effigies
Becoming available to build in Architect cities that possess a Tier 4 Monument, this is a structure project that can be repeated, increasing in cost each time it is completed.
Each completion however grants the city a hefty income bonus of +20 Food, +10 Gold and +10 mana! Enough to turn the heads of any magistrate, but even more impressive as it combines with the multiplier given by the Monument itself!
The Cost
Monuments however are only impressive if they outdo the last, thus each time a Monument Tier is built, the cost of constructing another of that same tier increases significantly as they seek to outdo their “competition” with grander and grander projects.
This practically means that as an Architect empire you may choose between building multiple lower tier Monuments to varied Affinities, or dedicating to completing fewer Monuments for the increased economic effects.
Each Monument requires a significant investment of structure production as well, thus prioritizing effective structure production is often a priority for Architect cultures.
Development
A whiteboard full of chaos, many more deleted takes and rewritten documents later…
Getting this mechanic right has proven to be quite a challenge, no culture concept that I’ve worked on has gone through as many varied iterations as the Architect. We wanted to have a Culture that could represent the Archon indirectly, and avoid adding another Order focused culture. Thus we focused instead on what the Archons created, and made a Culture themed around those creations.
The architect city went through some iteration after its original concept turned out too “floaty” for a culture about construction and architecture.
Then in order to represent more than just that, we decided they should lean into the Affinities, playing with them in interesting ways. There were many iterations, each more mind-boggling than the last (well maybe not each, I did scale down the mind boggling sometimes) but eventually we settled on a relatively restrained take that keeps the overall balance intact, letting the player interact with Affinities in new ways and gain power over time. Eventually outscaling the opposition.
Monuments came together decently quickly, we wanted to represent the Affinity in each stage visually. I am particularly fond of the affinity icon being visible in the foundation.
The units in particular have some fun twists on them that I'm proud of, but those will be seen in the next Dev diary!
Conclusion
There is more to talk about still, but the powers that be decreed that it shall have to be spoken of in the next week. We will go into detail on the units and spells available to the culture then. Thank you for reading and hope this provides an interesting introduction to the newest Culture of Age of Wonders 4!
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