Knights and Barbarians mod for Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

3 comments by AOE_Fan on Mar 16th, 2013

This week we are going through the third civset appearing in the Prologue, Muslims. It consist of three civs: Turks, Saracens and Moors, the latter not included in Prologue.

Race Track "dances" in no particular order.

There are five things to remember when playing as a Muslim civ:

1. Jihad, which is a set of techs located in Mosque. Jihad techs are five, relatively simple unit-sending techs, one for each age. Age I Jihad sends only two Imams but gets more powerful in later ages, all the way to sending lethal lategame units, provided you have the Black Powder tech researched. Jihad is useful to either repelling the enemy attacks or build an army yourself. Everything has a cost, though.
2. The Qal'aat, which is a unique defensive building similar to TAD's Castle. Qal'aat is considerably weaker than its European counterpart Castle (or Fort in Vanilla Aoe3) but you can build a lot more of them. Qal'aats are buildable only by Wagons gained either from HC or choosing the right politician (which are explained below), with buildlimit of two at Age III and increasing by one after each age-up. Also, a special HC card allows you to build one extra Qal'aat, bringing the toal to five. You'll probably wonder where's the catch... Well, Qal'aat is also upgradeable similar to Agra Fort. The Strengthened upgrade at Age III and Fortified upgrade at Age IV bring the Qal'aats up to par with European Castle. Qal'aats can train all infantry and cavalry units the same way as Castle does.
3. Race Track, which is replacement of Firepit in K&B. We naturally changed some dances and refined the idea by having half of dances shared between Muslim civs and half being unique for each civ, so each civ has 8 dances at Age V. More bigger change are the units who dance/race on the Race Track: instead of using Villagers, K&B uses Light Cavalry for the same purposes.
4. 5-politician age-up system, which is similar to TWC once again. You know the idea, there are five politicians with each of their own focus and you can pick the same politician only once. Again we played with the idea a bit and ended up with "politician pairs", which means that Age III politician has some effect as Age II equivalent but only in better version. In Age IV however, the bonus changes to something different, yet keeping that politician's specific focus.
5. Merchant, which uses the Aoe3's unused resource, Fame. Muslim civs start the game with Merchant and is used to gather Fame, or Trade as we call it in K&B, from Market, which is renamed as Bazaar for Muslims. Trade can be used in three different ways: training more Merchants from Town Center, researching Nationality techs for Merchants or buying Food, Wood or Gold crates. Each Muslim civs have their two unique choices for nationality, with each unlocking their own set of techs and granting a bonus for Merchant. These set of techs have always effects relating to trading and increase trading rates at Bazaar. Merchants naturally have a train limit and can be used for exploring and treasure gathering in early-game as well. The idea of Merchant and Bazaar hasn't ever really been finalized or use its full potential, so the idea might change a bit in versions after Prologue. Your ideas are of course welcome as well.

Qal'aat. The differences between upgrades are rather significant...

In general, the Muslim civset is the most versatile and unpredictable civset: Qal'aats help your map controlling and defense while Merchant boosts your economy and Race Track allows you to change your strategic focus in just a few seconds.

There has been some discussion in team-forum about whether to change the name "Slavs" to something else, or not.

K&B salutes... new Pope. Hopefully the Catholic Church finally comes to 21st century.
K&B refutes... North Korea. Even China doesn't seem to like them anymore...