Friday Update: Week 39/2015, Duality!

"Life is an exercise in duality", the great Ben Croshaw once said. Replace "Life" with "The Slavs" and capitalise the D in "duality" and this also applies to K&B. In our last Friday Update we talked about the economy and basic military bonuses of the Slavs, but this week we'll delve into what makes the Slavs truly unique; the Duality feature.

Duality is a way for the Slavs to change their entire military strategy. It can make them a storming cavalry-focused civ, but equally it can benefit their infantry to a great extent. What all European civilisations have, among other things, are a set of two units for which they have unique Royal Guard upgrades that offer more of a benefit than regular unit upgrade techs. The Slavs do not have this. Another thing that all other civs (not just Europeans) share is a set of Blacksmith techs that benefit the cost, movement speed, line-of-sight and a variety of other parameters of their units. The Slavs do no thave this either. What the Slavs have instead is a choice between Poland and Lithuania, with each side offering a different set of Royal Guard upgrades and Blacksmith techs. As such, when we say the Slavs don't have Royal Guard and Blacksmith techs like other civs, what we're actually saying is that they have twice as many, but they have to choose. Choose, that is, between Poland and Lithuania.

Choosing a side is done upon building a military building, with all the units and techs blanked out until a choice is made in the Duality. Choosing a side is free and is done instantaneously so as not to obstruct quick unit training. Choosing Poland will give Royal Guard upgrades for cavalry units and give Blacksmith techs that benefit cavalry, while choosing Lithuania does the same for infantry.

Planning the Slavs was completed quite a long time ago, so here's something that was done a bit more recently, the redone Observatory:



This week we don't have a quote from the team forum, but instead we've got something else that's been "leaked" from the team forum:



K&B salutes... Wars of Liberty. It's not every day that we can congratulate a fellow modding team on releasing a new version of their mod, after all.
K&B refutes... right-wing politicians in Europe, who like to pretend that our own petty first-world problems are so big that we couldn't possibly take up Syrian refugees who have actual problems...