MAJOR RELEASE (2): CRAFTING
Today, the Crafting component of the new release goes live. The new resources have been live on the map for a couple of days. Now, this chunk of the release lets you put them to good use, making equipment for your armies - or indeed, to sell to others for their armies.
Come you masters of war....
In order to make troop equipment, you will need specific special resources. But you will also need to build a specialist crafting building.
There are seven new crafting buildings. Each corresponds to an existing production building. In order to make specialist equipment, you will need both buildings. As before, the production takes place in the production building, but the speed of production is based on the number of specialist crafting buildings that you have.
The pairings are:
Bowyer – Fletcher
Chain Armourer – Blacksmith
Horse Trainer – Paddock
Leather Armourer – Tanner
Plate Armourer – Forge
Spearsmith – Spearmaker
Swordsmith – Blacksmith
As a note, if you have more than one crafting building of the same time, their bonuses to production speed are cumulative, but each is only half as effective as the one before. So, for example, your second Swordsmith has only half the effect of the first Swordsmith when figuring production speed, and a third would have only one quarter the effect of the first.
Fools die for want of wisdom
Once you have built one or more crafting buildings, this will unlock the initial Researches in the Crafting tab of the Research tree. You cannot create a new piece of equipment without having first unlocked the appropriate Research.
Each new Research under Crafting (except for
Workshop Specialisation) is a weapon, piece of armour, or horse that can be produced in the relevant buildings.
The Research descriptions include the stats that the weapon will have. These are percentage modifiers to the stats of any units who you later give these to. Several of these stats might come into play at any time. (Example: if there were a weapon giving +10% defending against swordsmen and +5% when used in the Jungle and +2% when used by Orcs, then in the hands of an Orc defending against attack by swordsmen on a Jungle square, the weapon would give +17%%, whereas the same weapon used by an Elf to defend against swordsmen in the Desert would give only +10%.)
The Research descriptions also show you what resources are required to produce each weapon.
Players who have previously noticed screenshots showing War Wolves in the horses category, will notice that there are no War Wolves in the Research tree. From that, you may conclude if you wish that we hate Orc players, and have taken away their War Wolves. Or, you may conclude that there are Discoveries that are not in the Research Tree. We leave that up to you.
Wish I was special....
You will notice that production times are quite long from your new crafting buildings. But there is a solution. Specialisation.
At the foot of the Crafting research page, is
Workshop Specialisation. This allows you to lock any one of your crafting buildings to enable only a single type of equipment. (For example, you could lock your Horse Trainer to train only Nimble Warhorses, or your Plate Armourer to make only Obsidian Platemail.) This will make your production go three time faster.
So, without
Workshop Specialisation you can tinker around and make all sorts of different weapons, but slowly. But if you want to equip a big army you will probably need to specialise in specific equipment for those troops.
You can brush my hair, dress me everywhere
Once you have some equipment, you will need to give it to your troops. You can equip and unequip soldiers, per Division, in the Armies screen – the same place that you currently set up your Divisions and Armies.
In order to be able to equip any equipment, however, you will require the
Military Outfitter research. This is at the foot of the Military tab on the Research Tree.
Once you have completed Military Outfitter, you will find that:
- Spears can be given to any unit that required a spear to be produced, or which required no weapon to be produced
- Swords can be given to any unit that required a sword to be produced (i.e., sword units)
- Bows can be given to any unit that required a bow to be produced
- Leather can be given to any unit that required leather armour to be produced, or which required no armour at all when produced
- Chain can be given to any unit that required chain to be produced
- Plate can be given to any unit that required a plate to be produced
- Draught horses can only be given to siege units
- Riding Horses can only be given to foot units
- All other horses are cavalry horses, and so can be given to cavalry units
So, the key is to look in the production screen of your Barracks, and see what a unit needs to be recruited: they can use the same armaments, defaulting to leather and spears; horses depend on unit type, as above.
Most units can therefore be given a weapon, armour and a horse.
Siege units are different – they can only have the Draught Horse.
They were few in number, but the look in their eyes told all
There are also four other new skills amongst the Military Researches. These are the Elite units Researches. These work as follows:
- There is one Research for each unit type – spearmen, swordsmen, archers, cavalry.
- Each Research doubles the stats of all equipment given to a Division of soldiers, so long as that Division is under a certain size, and does not contain soldiers of another type.
- The size of the Division varies depending on the individual Research. A Cavalry Division gains this bonus if up to 60 troops. A Spears division gains the bonus up to 200 troops.
- Division sizes are counted excluding the Division Commander. The Commander is also not affected by this Research.
- All equipment stats are doubled. That includes unit speed as well as combat stats.
- Minuses are doubled as well as pluses – so be very careful.
- Any Division with only troops of that type, under the size threshold, originating from a town which has the Elite Research completed, are considered Elite and so gain these bonuses (and penalties). You do not have to mark the Division as Elite in any way. The bonus is applied automatically.
- You can have Elite Divisions as part of a larger army. So, for example, if you had 4,000 spearmen in one Division and 200 in another in the same army, then the second Division would be considered Elite, and the larger Division would not.
So, that's crafting, and equipping crafted equipment.
Still to come, in the next release the magical resources will find their way into your spell casting.
But just one last thing....
We haven't had that spirit here since 1969
This isn't related to Crafting, but we wanted to point it out anyway.
The cost of recruiting traders is in Wine and Gold. The cost in Wine rises as you have more Traders. This is worked out per player, not per city. So, although in each settlement you are limited by your Merchant's Guild as to how many Traders you can have in that town, over all you may find that a much bigger constraint is your supply of Wine.
So, to avoid you having lots of under-utilised Merchant's Guilds, we would strongly suggest that you do not seriously build up your Merchant's Guilds until you have secured a good supply of Wine.
And with this, a new facet of Illyriad opens up for you to tinker with!
Edited by GM ThunderCat - 31 Jul 2012 at 16:42
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31JUL12 - MAJOR RELEASE (Crafting)
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GM ThunderCat wrote:
