Euros get 3 arenas of upgrades: Military train time and special units (Church), Economic production and heavy artillery (Factory), Military upgrades (Arsenal, Dock).
It's out of flavor for Natives to have these buildings. So the techs from each have been moved to the Firepit and to a lesser extent the Warchief.
The Firepit gives the natives access to enhanced unit train times and special units; enhanced economic production secondarily through faster villager training and/or travois dance; and military upgrades via Attack, Siege, Town, and Water dances. BB techs overlap a little with Arsenal (Sioux) but are otherwise not unique, and mimic ordinary unit and/or crate shipments. They pay heavily for this by having an effective 74-villager economy since they do not get factories, and up to 25% of their population needs to be engaged in non-economic activity to make the firepit maximally effective. (Ignoring Aztec for now)
So, the basic problem is finding a growth component of the prototypical Euro civ, and replacing it with something else: some other way to achieve the same general goal but leveraging a different resource. For Euros, they must use wood and villagers to build a Church and Arsenal, and send a Factory from their HC. They eventually must build a Capitol. For natives they can use BB or upgrades at TC but must dance for the rest, losing VS in the process. For a different model of civilization the cost may be different but must be roughly equal in absolute value to the civ, and must come from one of the following: Food, Wood, Coin, XP; shipment rate per XP; resource gather rate or VS; HC card space; HC level; Age-up politician choices in a single game; Time, Map space, and Population.
Building-based and VS-based civ bonuses have already been explored. Any of the other "currencies" or default rules of the game could be a new and exciting basis for a hypothetical civ's economic and administrative growth.
For instance, let's take a common theme, cavalry production. The sequence of steps to FU Imperial cavalry can be built many different ways:
Civ A researches Cavalry Cuirass at the Arsenal, RG upgrade at the Stable, Mass Cav at the Mosque. Cav improvement and production are building- and card-dependent.
Civ B gets big buttons to partially fill the Arsenal role, and a dance or two to fill the Church role, but also uses cards and Corral techs similar to the Euro model.
Civ C's cav (hypothetical) spawn automatically from a Corral so their numbers vary between 20 and 70, and can be switched between different types and rate modified by pop space or coin availability, and receive +5% atk/HP/ranged resist per 2 minutes game time as long as Civ B's player controls a Corral. Once the Corral is destroyed, the cav stop receiving additional atk/HP/ranged resist bonuses, instead remaining at their current levels until a new Corral is built. Sort of like a trickle calculated every 2 minutes rather than every second. (Think Fort Wars but with only one type of unit at a time.)
Civ D (hypothetical) uses stable and arsenal, but instead of Church upgrade they receive at the TC an option to buy Mass Cavalry IFF they control 20% of the map calculated by LOS of all units/buildings on the map. This option appears ONLY whenever that condition is met, but is retained if the condition is not met later. Civ C can research LOS at the Church and has automatic Extensive Fortifications without having to send a card. Additional upgrades become available once the first ones are researched, AND as more territory comes under LOS control. So this civ must keep pushing the frontier to grow, no holing up on an island or in a corner somewhere.
Civ E (hypothetical) loses Mass Cav at the church but gains a Tree Farm, a renewable infinite source of Wood. With this Wood he can make Uber-pikes that compensate for lack of mass cav. At higher HC levels he may also get some Cav mercs.
Civ F (hypothetical) has no Arsenal, Church, or HC cards. His entire army gets a small increment in atk, HP, speed, resistance vs. appropriate counters, and decrement in train time per 10 or 100 kills. The more he kills the better his units become, but the process takes time and is inversely proportional to his eco, so the more coin he has accumulated, the slower the rate of increment (so ultimately he has to have 1000 kills to get the next tiny increment). (Think AOM Norse + AOE3 Russian church cards Westernization and Petrine Reforms combined into one.)
So there are many ways to go about balancing and tampering with the various "rules" and currencies of the game. The natives are not meant to be identical carbon copies of European civs, so their problems were solved at the expense of VS.
DISCLAIMER: These are just hypothetical examples, and yes you must tinker with them and test them a lot to make sure they're not UTTERLY BROKEN.
Crunkatog on ESO
Bart331 balance suggestion: aztec: remove civ
Voltiguer: Ender, Sioux in 1.04 will be a top civ, no matter how many layers of Sioux goggles you put on
schildpad on Elephants: ...their mansabdar unit sucks so hard it looks like a black hole
Crunkatog on Steam.[This message has been edited by As_Saffah (edited 07-13-2007 @ 12:55 PM).]