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Idea for DLC...


snakeboy

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It’s always nice to speculate about expansions when you love a game, so here’s my idea for a DLC.

Name: Empire

Main features:
- become an Emperor, gain additional powers
- Metropolis: create your Capital, awe of the world 
- Imperial Roads, Heraldry and Troops for extra advantages
- new goods, new buildings, new province features

This expansion aims to facilitate more engaging late-game play. As it stands now you will be swimming in gold with nothing left to build, while probably not being close to ruling as the Emperor of the World yet. 

This DLC aims to bridge that gap, by giving you ways to spend gold on more development, and while doing that address some issues that can feel slightly limiting when you are late game, like the lack of Knights, and the slow travel speed across the map. 

How it works:
There are already formable nations in-game, so with some small tweaks these can be upgraded to forming empires, triggering the ability to become Emperor. 

An Emperor will have added bonuses, similar but better than the King-level, but more importantly, you will now be able to recruit 2 more Knights. This will help you rule your empire more effectively, and will also facilitate more armies in the field. 

The second big feature is the Metropolis. You can designate one city of your realm your Capital, and it will gain 4 additional regular building slots.

On top of that you can now construct a CITADEL. 
This is the crown achievement of your Empire, and supposed to be a massive gold sink that will take a lot of building time to complete. 

I envision the Citadel feature as a separate, rather big UI screen, with a beautiful illustration of an imposing Citadel, with several rows of building slots.

Something like this (sketchy):

3rd Level: PALACE: throne room, chapel, courtyard, gardens, mausoleum
2nd Level: BASILICA: domed church, cloister, scriptorium
1st Level: CITY: aristocratic housing, specialized workshops, exotic market
Ground Level: WALLS: outer wall, inner wall, gate

(Of course for the Islamic world this can be styled like the splendid Alhambra.)

There will also be 2 more slots for Empire-wide bonuses:
- Imperial Roads: 3 tiers (gain incremental travel speed)
- Imperial Heraldry: 3 tiers (gain incremental culture + influence + fame, and some nice visual representation :)

And of course Imperial Elite troops.  

Many of the Citadel buildings, Walls and upgrades are meant to be very expensive, say between 50-100k each, and take a long time to build.  

They will also need more goods as requisites, so I have come up with 8 suggestions as a general idea: 

Silk (robes) 
Sea snails (purple dye) 
Granite (colored brick) 
Bronze (doors)
Perfume (accessory) 
Gems (crown) 

Also two new “profession goods” to construct the different stages of the Citadel: 

Mechanics
Architects

A few new province features will have to be made, and some of the new resources need some basic & intermediate buildings for the new good-chains as well. 

To accommodate this, as a final addition you will receive 5 extra building slots for the other Towns in your realm, to help out with resources and manpower.

+ 2 slots for 1 Large City 
+ 1 slot for 3 Minor Cities

The idea is that the endgame will now consist of you becoming an Empire and building your Metropolis, while you fight one or two other empires for the Crown of the World.

Edited by snakeboy
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Here’s some “flavor” text from the book Metropolis: A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson. 

This is about the great city of Baghdad: 

“The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur had traced out in cinders on bare earth the outline of what he ordained to be the intellectual, spiritual and commercial capital of the world. 

Purpose-built with the most sophisticated and dazzling urban design by an army of 100,000 architects, surveyors, engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths and labourers, the city was complete a mere four years after al-Mansur had founded it in 762. Within a few decades its population breached the million-person mark and at its zenith perhaps had as many as 2 million.

An admirer of Euclid, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur decreed that his city be perfectly round. The circumference of the massive wall was pierced by four equidistant gates. Four perfectly straight roads led from these gigantic gates to the centre, a circular city within the circular city. The people of Baghdad could see the enormous green dome of the imperial palace and the Great Mosque within this round precinct.”

The real city, the city where people lived and worked, sprawled outside the walls of the circular metropolis. Baghdad was a city of many cities. Al-Mansur’s master urban planners placed four large districts outside the Round City, densely populated quarters with avenues, streets, apartment blocks, shops, mosques, gardens, hippodromes, bathhouses and souks.

‘Everything produced from the earth is available there,’ wrote Du Huan, a Chinese prisoner. ‘Carts carrying countless goods to markets, where everything is available and cheap. Brocade, embroidered silks, pearls and other gems are displayed all over markets and street shops.’ A writer describing the city in its prime recorded that ‘Here every merchant, and each merchandise, had an appointed street: and there were rows of shops, and of booths, and of courts, in each of those streets.’ 

The markets contained the wealth of the world: earthenware and porcelain from China; silks, carpets and fabrics from central Asia; plums from Shiraz; quinces from Jerusalem; Syrian figs; Egyptian pastries; Indian pepper and cardamom; east Asian spices. There were streets and souks reserved for livestock, horses, slaves, precious metals and stones, jewellery, carpets, carpentry, hardware, fish, bread, puddings, cheeses, sweetmeats, soaps and detergents, herbs and spices, and just about everything, in its allotted space, that the heart could desire. Watermelons for instance, packed in snow to keep them fresh, were express-couriered from Bukhara.”
 

Edited by snakeboy
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