Hello and welcome to another development diary for the Pompey update! This time we’ll talk about new benefits to playing tall, and also discuss changes to barbarians, slaves and much more.
Trade Changes
We have done some changes to trade that may not seem that impactful to you at a glance, but gives us more tools in making the game deeper and more flavorful.
We removed the sources of easy extra trade routes in all provinces, as it was too powerful, and was a no-brainer to always go for those, and they also made for a huge snowball of trade.
We also made trade entirely handled as a province activity, and not a city activity. While each city provides some commerce from its citizens, the income from commerce is handled at a province level, so you can see the income from a trade-route at the one place it happens.
We removed the hardcoded benefits on a trade that were going to be exported, and instead we have 2 unique modifiers increases the value of your foreign imports and your foreign exports. The economic policy for commerce is now used for whether you want to strength your benefits from exports or your benefits from imports.
Improving your Provinces
One problem we identified was the lack of options at times when playing tall, and that you had too much resources that you had no use for when you were not busy conquering. Now he have added 4 new province level abilities, that each cost 400 power of its given type, and starts a process that 2 years later will give you a permanent bonus to that province. These can then be repeated as much as you like, but you can only have one process going on in a province at the time.
- Install Provincial Procurators - Military Power for 2% Population Output and 0.01 Monthly Province Loyalty
- Promote Infrastructure Spending - Civic Power for +1 Building Slot.
- Entice Business Investments - Oratory Power for +1 Import Routes
- Make Religious Endowments - Religious Power for +3% State Religion Happiness in Province
- There are also other ways to do these State Investments, other than spending lots of power. There are events and decisions, like country-forming, that will give you an amount of free state investments, which is then used instead of the power cost.
Also, there are three different abilities you can do in each city.
- Move Capital - First of all, you can move your capital to that city, for a large cost of civic power cost, where it becomes cheaper to move to a bigger city, and more expensive to move to a smaller city.
- Relocate Provincial Capital - You can change which city is the capital city of a province for 50 civic power . Province Capital will be set at start of the game, and only change otherwise if conquered by another nation.
- Coordinate Urban Development - Pay 100 Civic Power to start a process that at the end of 2 years time, you will get +1 local civilization in that city until the end of the game. This can be repeated as much as you want, but you can’t do it more than once in a city at the same time.
Buildings have changed with the population rework mentioned earlier, and by the trade rework mentioned today.
- Marketplaces : +10% Tax Income from City
- Training Camp: +10% Manpower
- Fortress: +1 Fort Level
- Granary: +5 Population Capacity
Now some of these may make you go “what the hell?”, I like to point out that granaries just don't give +5 pop capacity in most cases.. As there are modifiers like Grain giving +10%, Adjacent to Major River +50%, Warm Climate +90% etc...
Barbarian Rework
A lot of things regarding Barbarians work similar to have they did in the original EU: Rome, and that was just not good enough anymore. In Pompey you will now see the following changes to barbarians.
- Paid off barbarians will no longer loot your territory.
- Barbarians that have not fought in a battle will never accept to surrender.
- Barbarians will no longer care about “potential strength” when you negotiate with them, only about armies in the same general area.
- Barbarians are no longer clever enough to use zone of control propagation, even if they do take a fort.
- Barbarian have no longer any attrition in unknown provinces.
- Barbarians reinforce twice as quick when not siegeing.
- Barbarians will now grow in size as they take over provinces containing tribesmen.
Zone of Control Changes
There have also been two major advantages to friendly zone of control in Pompey. First of all, they now protect against all the nasty things barbarians do on your territory, but most importantly, friendly zone of control now protects against the attrition you get from bad climate. This makes is so that you don’t lose half your army because you live in a desert, nor will you take a huge hit every single winter as a German tribesman.
Slaves Distribution
We did some changes to slave distribution in Pompey, in that each time you take a city, the amount of possible cities getting slaves are far larger, and not weighted towards 50% reaching your capital. Now it will consider more provinces the bigger your nation is, and also add in ports, and not just provincial capitals, and cities where the commander has holdings etc, to get a better spread.
Heritages
One of the biggest complaints we had with the release was that nations felt the same. While we had a wide variety of countries, with different populations and governments, there needed to be a bit more of identity to them. Even if any city state on Crete would have a great number of similarities with other City states on the same island, there were also differences. This is why we are adding Heritages to the Pompey Update.
A Heritage has 2 benefits and 1 drawback, so give a sort of identity to your country. There is a dozen different generic heritages that depends on your geographical position, for instance you would get Seafaring Heritage if you start with a port, and Desert Heritage if your capital has desert terrain.
Over 20 countries will have unique Heritages in Pompey, and we will keep adding more in future patches. Some are for powers that have their glory days behind them while others are for countries that would rise to become influential in the future. As an example here are some that we have added for Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse and Athens:
