Poly Sneak Peek image - Age of Empires III: Wars of Liberty mod for Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

🌴Welcome to Polynesia!🌞

Hey everyone! Today we will talk about our brand new culture, what they do, how they do it and what's fun about it. Let’s get right into it.

Actually it’s kind of hard to decide where to start from, because they have a lot going on and everything is so important. So let’s start with the basics: The Town Center.
They don’t have one.

Well, actually they do, but they also don’t, since it’s only half a Town Center: you can only train villagers from it, and it’s called camp instead of Town Center. Plus you can only build one. But what they DO have is a juicy replacement, one per civilization, that allows you to either get population, train villagers, and/or host different technologies and bonuses. Maybe you get a super huge palace and houses. Maybe you have to build small fortresses, maybe your explorer gives you the population you need? All of that depends on the civilization you play! What does this mean for gameplay purposes? Well, first of all, you’ll get easier access to juicy buildings that can act as nice defenses and eventually you’ll be able to get quite an engine going on. All of that at the cost of getting housed if you don’t manage your resources wisely. This culture will certainly require long term thinking.
Talking about long term thinking, there’s also their shipments. Being a seafaring culture, they get access to a feature that I wonder why it hasn’t been added to the mod yet: double cost shipments! Some cards, let’s say villager shipments, have a double cost version that will give you more than double the benefits. You will also have this for resources, military units and even some upgrades. But you might be probably wondering: where are we getting the shipments from? From aging-up.

The polynesians age-up in quite a charming way. Just like in Moana, you have to decide how far you’ll go before aging-up. To age-up, you just click on your explorer and choose a destination: will you sail to a close island? or maybe you want to sail to lands so far no one has ever seen? Well, to do both things you’ll need resources and time, but the rewards of your voyage will probably be worth it. Each voyage will bring you the usual benefit plus shipments. The amount of each will depend on how far the destination is: the closer to your HC, the cheaper and faster. The further away, the more expensive and slower it will be. The benefits, though, will both grow, with the cheapest voyage giving you a small reward but no shipments, the second cheapest a bigger reward and a shipment, and so on, until you get a HUGE reward and 3 shipments from one age-up alone.

And now we are getting to the heart of the polynesian culture. They have no cavalry units, they have a nice combination of old and new buildings, but where they shine in battle is on their military and their upgrade tree. I’ll say it like this: They literally only have three basic units, the Marksman, the Spearman and the Fighter.
Then how do they do things? What about their Unique units? They use their upgrade tree.

Instead of upgrading units normally, each age from Capital age and onwards, you get to choose between two units to turn your basic unit into. Do you want your Fighter to be a faster version of that unit with a bonus against artillery? Or maybe you want it to be tanky and deal area damage. The choice is yours, and it is really hard to make, but the benefits are also huge, for the units are quite good at what they do. Think of it like the Habsburg age up bonus, but with units only.. After that choice, you get to upgrade that unit ‘normally’ in Industrial age, except that this time you have to choose between two upgrades as well, choosing to improve further one aspect of the unit: do you want to upgrade it plus give it more speed? or you want to upgrade it plus give it more armor? The choices never end! And, to be honest, there’s a whole lot more to say about this culture, but I’ll leave you guys with that for now and a few questions for you guys to start discussing:

How would you make your deck to take advantage of these features?
How would you deal with this culture to bypass their ability to adapt and send powerful units?

See you next time!

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