PS: Glad to hear/read, it went better than expecterd on your side

@avoraciopoctules @HSmasher you two did a nice job! trying my third approach to dig it deep ^^

Skaven, Warhammer/wesnoth sprite crossover, adventure guild were less intensive :)

Wow. Wow! This is an impressive mod. Very solid and one of the few not overpowered class mods.

Summary of the mod
Slow to start but gets traction. If playing without the specialists mod (which lets you construct vanilla sites), they will struggle in agriculture and ealier due to their dependence on ports and villages+. This class uses a big tech tree so to speak.
Not having regular recruitments (only very expensive mercenaries) and the complexity in general gives the AI a hard time playing this class.

I would like the Eunuchs and ceremonial masters to be easier to tell apart from each other.

Glacier here! Helping out with this project was a really delightful experience, glad folks dug the writing. If you want more stuff inspired by chinese literature, Ramc did a fantastic mod pack for Dominions here: https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3282531883

You may also be seeing some other fun CoE stuff in the nebulous future...

I'm glad you enjoyed it - the descriptions were written by Glacier and were indeed for the most part based on historical chinese literature; a few are actual edited quotes.

The unfinished descriptions will all be added in the next patch soon, I haven't quite had time to work on it and it will be a save-breaking update, but it should be done sometime this coming week.

Great mod! Loved the whole gameplay loop, but I didn’t get a chance to use great wall (didn’t need it cuz of map layout). Descriptions were cool too even tho some were unfinished. Did you draw inspiration from real Chinese literature?

Understandable, good luck w/ whatever you got going on.

Yeah I was thinking something along those lines; I'm too busy to do it now but I'll come up with something when I can.

@HSmasher
Perhaps you could make the lesser celestial summons available as soon as you uncover an ancient tomb or reach a certain tribute level? I don't think it'd be too against the lore since you get to start with a celestial unit if you pick the gardener starting option.

Playing Markus Wulfhart is partially what inspired this mod's design, so very on point.

I actually agree that there should be access to the weaker celestial units a bit earlier in the game - the celestial stuff in general is just there as bonus though, unless you're playing on extremely high difficulty or a particularly large map it's just bonus end game content, kind of like exploring planes in vanilla.

Love the concept and the aesthetics. Although I’d like to be able to use the celestial summons at a point when they’re still relevant. I usually end up winning the game by the time I get them, spending most of my time fighting with a lackluster human roster. Also, I don’t see much reason to upgrade the Terracotta Warrior to the Jade Warrior; you only get two slightly better unit for 25 emeralds and two turns of movement. I really enjoy the feeling of struggling as a colonial enterprise in a hostile world; it reminds me of a Markus Wulfhart campaign from Total War: Warhammer. In the end, I still had a lot of fun with the mod and would recommend it.

@Riceisnice Thank you, I appreciate that. It was very severe but it has gone almost miraculously well - its still difficult but significantly better than could realistically have been hoped for.

@Maybe JFK's - good catch, thanks. I'll have that fixed in the update which should be going up tomorrow.

The demon of heavenly fires attack may not be working as intended. I think it should have the line characteristic not the beam characteristic because as is it always hits the two spaces in front of the unit and doesn't actually do anything when it hits the target

"Muchas Glaciers" to get the informations on point (textwise help) and i hope your emergency is not too serve, and everyone will be better overtime – a heartfull wish of one who lost his byblood familiy in his early 20's.

Just the idea I was looking for when I came to the workshop! Thank you!

Apologies everyone, I had intended to have this mod updated a few days ago but a family emergency has prevented me, I will be trying to have it up later today or tomorrow.

Thank you!

Ancestral Tombs are 'smaller' more generic tombs that possess a limited number of terracotta warriors to awaken; the Imperial Tomb is the first emperor's tomb and the particular tomb you have to get to get the Terracotta Emperor - you find it by using the 'Divine Imperial Tomb' ritual which requires a number of Ancestral Tombs to be discovered first.

Unlike the Ancestral Tombs the Imperial Tomb never runs out of Terracotta units, which can to an extent also be recruited there.

Could you explain the difference between the ancient tomb and the imperial tomb and how you can go about finding the imperial tomb?

To put it another way:

There is a Tribute Counter, this counter is increased by 1 every time you send tribute.

What the counter is currently at determines the 'Tribute Level'.

Level 1 is 0
Level 2 is 1-5
Level 3 is 6-10
etc...

As you are increasing the tribute counter the counter is also degrading, so even though it only takes 5 to get from 2 to 3 it may actually require more than 5 in reality, depending on how much it is currently degrading [which can't really be calculated because it can vary so much circumstantially].

'Tribute Levels' are not equivalent to sending 1 tribute. Each 'Level' can require 5 to 10+ tributes to reach.

Thanks for the amazingly quick reply. And thanks for that information, although i don't think i understand some of it very well. To distill it down to one question, let ask how i did not achieve level 8 in one turn when, as i understand it, i got 9 levels in one turn. 3 from scion establishing silk road. 3 more from scion establishing port colonies, and 3 relic tributes from one of my eunuchs. That should be 9. And i had done some tributes the previous turns.

It decays at a slightly increasing 'fixed' rate, every few years that rate increases slightly.

Additionally every Imperial Port and Terracotta Emperor player on the map increases the amount it decays it each year.

The amount of tribute to reach each level increases significantly after around level 6 however, so it can sometimes feel like you should be getting a level when you're not.

It is not actually overly difficult to reach 8+ it can just sometimes take a little while, often people complain it is too easy to maintain 15 so just keep at it, you'll get there.

Are you ok with explaining how tribute level decays? I understand that sometimes these things need to be kept obscure or even secret. However i am trying to get to that 8th tribute level to open up the ancestral tomb thing and it just is not happening.

I tried one year doing constant resource tributes for about 6 turns until right before the first summer turn. With my two Eunuchs doing tributes at the fastest possible rate that should be 18 tribute levels, but i see it was 6 when i got the message that first turn of summer. And this is with a moderate amount of tributes before that too.

Next i tried to get to level 8 in one turn by having the scion do the two establish silk road and colonial port rituals in one turn while one of my eunuchs did three relic tributes. All in one turn. The last turn of spring. Next turn my tribute level is 7 in the messages and i still cant look for ancestral tombs.

So, if possible, let me know how that all works.

Just finished my first campaign with this mod. Even though I lost, it's extremely fun, and I love every aspect of it! It's probably the most complex class I've ever seen, yet it's not unbearably complex. Just complex enough to be fun. It's a thoroughly enjoyable mod, and the creator should be proud of themselves.

The only oddity to mention is having a starting settlement be inland, but having ships show up there each year. The idea of your citizens hauling a fleet of ships onto land and carrying them to your capital yearly is very funny to me.

Its your mod in the end, I like it quite a bit so thx

I can probably adjust it if its causing issues.

I don't know if this is possible but perhaps you can make it able to be adjacent by an oasis if in desert? Just a suggestion to lessen the restriction. The real silk road goes through a large desert so I thought it was a misstep at first

@hsmasher can you explain the reasoning briefly behind that?
I've had a couple spawns where eventually I couldn't reach the base 7 nodes required for tomb ritual because of desert and spawning in the south

@nicholas9822 You are likely experiencing a mod conflict of some kind. If you are using any large mods try disabling some of them and seeing if it works.

@whobe It is intentional that they can't be placed on deserts, you'll have to work around them.

hello can you make it so that you can place nodes in desert tiles?

Not sure why, since it seems to work for others, but I've tried several terracotta empire games and the Request Delegation ritual does not work at all - when cast, absolutely nothing happens. Am I missing something?

I'm getting a bit more into Dom modding and in my opinion, not much would translate well to it from these coe style classes. Dom modding, so far as I can tell, has a much larger number of things it can do as a base, but what you can actually do with those things is a lot more limited and a bit more clunky. CoE modding feels much more flexible - even just simple things like having ritual limiters such as hundreds of terrains to specify it to compared to the like 10 in dom or being able to have up to 3 different resource costs for a ritual allows for greater nuance in design; inversible event triggers is another big one - Dom is lacking in a lot of these kinds of ways. CoE classes also have a level of progression mechanics inherent to them that don't suit Dom quite as well.

But I am actively at work trying to make some interesting Dom6 nations so we'll see just how interesting I can manage to make them.

Your mods are top tier. This is really amazing stuff and I wonder how much of it would be possible in Dominions. I wish every nation was like this, jeez

Thought it would just be a simple port/sprite flip like so many others... man was I surprised

thank you for your response

It uses the 'villages & larger settlements' terrain group, which the ports are not a part of. Not much to be done about it since I don't want to use any more terrain groups than I already have in the mod.

Is it intended that you cannot use conscription officer in imperial ports?

Great mod that fills in the itch for a Chinese-inspired faction. Would be nice if there were more options to develop our holdings or a unique delegation that specializes in crafting siege engines to not depend too much on RNG.

The silk road nodes are Outpost>Baazar>Major Market>Trade Hub.

The spawn chance for the Celestial Dragons from Mandate of Heaven is 1 40% chance followed by 1 15% chance every turn. Statistically improbable but I suppose possible that you wouldn't get one for in 10 turns.

what are the levels of the silk road and how long does the Mandate of Heaven take to spawn higher tier units like dragons (for me ten turns pass and not seeing any dragons yet).

I didn't go too heavily into having it be like a proper Tien'Chi government because of the whole colonial theme, you're kind of just cobbling together what little administration you can, though there are magistrates who are stationed in the silk road nodes.

Your last suggestion is actually already kind of in the mod - the eunuchs can place a Conscription Officer in specific locations, which reduces the gold income of the settlement to 0 and begins spawning light infantry/archers.

Yeah I rather enjoy that this one isn't quite a straight 1:1 adaptation, the whole colonial/exploration setup was fun to come up with. The basic premise was essentially 'What if medieval china colonized the americas instead?' only its Elysium instead of the new world.

Tribute Level determines the amount of yearly reinforcements you receive - you get them every year in summer on the turn where it tells you the current Tribute Level. Random volunteers/explorers become somewhat more frequent the higher it is as well.

If you have no eunuch/scion alive you will eventually get a eunuch from a random event - the chance is fairly small though so you may wait a long while.

Could probably also make them a small limited gold/other bonus, so when you have excess of them, you can just lead them to income sources to boost their efficiency. So appointed scholars have full resource bonus, and this ones only limited as supporting clerks.
So only with time, good tribute and rich support from imperial court, you can actually build here effective administrative machine with Tien Chi characteristics.
Could probably also make possible to appoint captains as a military government in big settlements, so they will remove all income from there and become stationary, but will produce a bit of Tien Chi units. Not really effective and just as alternative, and temporary measure.
I know that this all is actually way more hard and time consuming to design and make, so I just speak what I would like to see in general details] Mod is already great and very enjoyable.

I did not seen yet how bureaucrats work in this mod, because I didn't had any, but I would like to add that it would be interesting to me, if that feature would have some kind of civil administrations and magistrates mechanics, to create positions for various bonuses on settlements/income sources.
Because I feel like this version of Tien Chi is based on late dynasties like Great Ming, which was very notorious for complex administrative system.
Could probably also make for example so governor can only be appointed on big distance from other ones, to create flavor of big chinese prefectures. And also to tie into existing mechanic, for all administrative positions would be needed a scholars, who is obviously should be brought from empire. As Elysium does not prepare confucian scholars]}]

After playing with it for some time, I love that it's not just cool Tien Chi faction, but actually kinda interesting and unique flavor as well.
The main things I feel lack so far, is that there is very much too little of instructions and descriptions, I mostly don't understand how many things work yet. And for example, that I can't keep track of tribute level. Maybe you could at least add some kind of divination ritual to see the tribute level, hah?
I also do not really understand what exactly they do, and how getting new expedition really work, but I did not been able to go into real middle-late game yet.
Also, I can't find how to replace the eunuch. Especially when scion is dead.

I'm glad you've enjoyed it, I was worried it might be too much for some people but its turned out there was no need to worry.

I've tested a couple of them just now and they worked for me. For Conquer & Claim to cast the ritual you have to have the scion standing in a square of the associated terrain (although honestly upon reflection I might want to remove that requirement); Establish can be cast anywhere. They're working for me but if its not for you I'll need to look into it, perhaps specific ones are broken.

Exceedingly cool mod - unique take on the game. I love the scope, the mechanical complexity (which is not too complex, but enough to be interesting and novel), and the creative prowess on display in the overall design and the unit descriptions.

A note:

Many of the Scion's "Objective" rituals do not seem to work. Even while fulfilling the requirements, personally, I have been unable to use them. I have observed this with the Ancient Forest, Desert Palace, and Silver Mine objectives. I have been able to successfully use the Trade Node and Imperial Port Objectives. (Now that I am writing this, it is clear to me that all the non-working objectives seem to be Claim and Conquer objectives, while the Establish objectives seem to be working properly).

No that's entirely understandable, not mean at all.

You can recruit ballistas from Great Wall Gates.

love the mod but three things I have problems are these. one no reliable siege (at lease give us a balista, two there is no really anything telling us how much Tribute you send actually does anything (e.i. the 1 to 15 amount), three the great wall is very finicky. (ps sorry if this sounds mean at all)

@NewMars Very strange. good to know it fixed itself somehow though.

@LawDog I haven't tried it on any custom maps so afraid I can't help there.