We are a new leader over a city-state in Ancient Greece (with magic). There will be numbers, and they will go up. Unless you mismanage things, then they will go down. Try not to let that happen.
You must first define our city-state by distributing 10 points into areas of magical or technical skills. You must spend at least 5 points in mundane skills, and no one magic skill can be over 5.
For comparison, Athens has 4 in naval and Sparta has 4 in military. 5 is considered mundane excellency, while anything in the 6-10 range is basically a permanent divine blessing, and a nearly magical level of expertise.
Mundane skills can be brought up past 0 after the game starts, but our lands won't be as good for supporting them. With no skills related to forging or smithing, we're still assumed to have a few smiths, and will be importing bronze into our ore-poor lands.
You should spend at least 2 points in something that can directly or indirectly bring food. Level 2 rug making lets us trade for the food we need, or level 2 in military strength would start us with a tributary for food.
For the most part, you're assumed to have support for your choices, especially higher level ones. Military 3 gets you the smiths and mines to arm your soldiers competently. Note that taking Weapon Smithing 1 alongside that will still be helpful.
Magic has to be at least 1 to be used, and this is your only time to create custom magical disciplines.
Do define your magic, and if it needs weaknesses, you may offer suggestions.
Distribute 10 points between Authority, Population, and Resources. You may instead trade 2 points here for 1 more skill point, above.
3 is considered average.
Authority is a measure of loyalty, morale, and centralization. It affects tax rate, unrest, and how well troops fight. A low level might be from a kid as king, newly conquered lands, or colonies with sticky-fingered governors.
Population gets more people, and lands to support them.
Resources is affected by our skills. If we're heavy on smithing, we'll have some rich tin and copper mines, easily accessible, while a naval focus would give us high quality lumber. It'll also slightly raise unfocused skills' resources.
A has level 1 pyromancy. They have a handful of people who accidentally start fires when they get angry, but can't consciously control their magic. They have no interest in pursuing magic, as they have mundane jobs already, and it would take significant effort to learn even a simple firestarter spell. They will need significant support to become useful.
B has level 2 pyromancy. They have more potential mages than A, and a few of the more ambitious ones meet during leisure hours to practice magic and teach each other. Most of these can safely start a fire at will, and they are starting on projecting a weak flame.
C has level 2 pyromancy. They have more potential mages than A. They have a prodigy who can cast a small but combat-effective fireball. He will likely have a slow time of teaching others, but is very effective at showing the potential to nay-sayers.
D has level 3 pyromancy. They have a small yet organized mage's guild, which can independently support a few full-time magical practitioners. It will slowly grow in usefulness even if ignored by the state, but financial support would still be quite useful.
E has level 3 pyromancy. They have an entire village with potential pyromancers, and several outside of that, but no real organization.
F has level 4 pyromancy. They have a small independent mage's guild, but most of their pyromancers are in the military.
G has level 5 pyromancy. They have a few small mage's guilds, and a huge one with branches in every major population center. It's headed by a powerful wizard able to incinerate an entire formation of hoplites in seconds.
H has level 5 pyromancy. They aren't particularly organized, but every citizen has some potential, and most can at least light a fire. Their hoplites are all trained well enough to keep their spears on fire during combat.
I has level 1 pyromancy and level 5 of another magic. The equivalent to a grad student found a few of the potential pyromancers, and they are his personal project. The existing power structure is somewhat disdainful of them, and little progress will be made without state support. (They are still better off than those under A.)
A mage can learn more than one discipline. For difficulty, think of it as someone who isn't a math-person learning math. (In this example, a muggle would have dyscalculia. You can even train those to cast basic spells if you're particularly dedicated.)
By default, you'll have specialist mages, with an assumed 3%-5% lightly cross-training. (A generic group of mages will occasionally use other spells, but I'm not tracking who has what and you shouldn't plan on it or order it). If you want a new type of mage cross-trained (Say, FireHealer Acolyte, with L2 pyromancy and L2 healing) you'll have to order the training programs modified. Of course, increasing the training time from 5 years to 8 (for example) will reduce how many mages you can train. It is easier to pick up a second discipline than it is to learn magic from nothing.
Mages are pretty bad at researching outside of their main discipline, and need the basics down before they can even start trying (so no creating new disciplines). You may want to try off-research anyway, if you capture and interrogate enemy mages well enough to have a mage learn the basics, or if you peacefully get a few dabblers and want an archmage to jump-start that. Be warned: Off-researching is more dangerous, think carefully before doing so with a branch that's normally dangerous enough, like demonology.
Feel free to start with something powerful, like time magic. I'll be balancing disciplines against pyromancy as the baseline. Pyromancers can replace archers at fairly low levels, with fire arrows and flamethrowers for up close. Mid-levels can replace artillery (I'm going with multiple mages casting rituals together behind the lines, then throwing giant fireballs or firestorms at the enemy lines), which you don't really have a proper mundane equivalent in this time period. Non-combat wise, they have a chance of getting started on iron-smelting, which will be pretty inefficient, but you might get mundane iron smelting off it. I don't think there's too much higher level stuff other than MOAR BOOM, unless you start getting creative and, say, seek out immortality by bonding with phoenixes.
So time magic getting balanced around that. At high levels, you could wind back to an old turn, while keeping archmages and key innovations (or get warnings from time travelers). You could make time chambers to speed training along, or to freeze something in stasis. Low levels will be pretty limited, let's say the main spell is a haste spell, which is pretty tiring for the target, and eats away at their lifespan inordinately, due to the stresses involved. Add in an easier slow spell that's single-target. Interesting, but a little weak. Good. For other negatives, it's pretty slow to learn and to research, somewhat dangerous, and you might have problems with [REDACTED].
For a simpler discipline, Elementalism vs Pyromancy. With 4 different subtypes, institutional knowledge will build slower. The teacher pyromancer, who's great at keeping fire compressed from thirty feet away, becomes a regular fire-focused combat magic instructor. Depending on start-of-game choice, mages will randomly only be talented at one subtype, or everything but learn slower from the split focus. Institutional increases in skill will be slower.
City-state name:
Ruler name and details:
Ruling style: (Republic? Despotism?)
Magical/technical skills:
Authority/population/resource points:
This is a suggestion game, with only one city-state. Voting will be by plan, with approval voting (you can vote on all plans you like).
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Topic: Fantasy Greek Hegemony (SG) (Read 2645 times)