Military Tradition
Military Tradition is the system through which your troops develop a fighting identity over the lifetime of your empire — not through the technology tree, but through their own battlefield record. Fight enough wars with heavy cavalry, and your heavy cavalry will, in time, become something genuinely your own: statistically distinct from the same unit fielded by any other empire, shaped by exactly how you've chosen to use it.
The system has three layers, each one unlocking the next:
- Battle Honours — troop slots earn experience through actual combat use, climbing through tiers over the lifetime of the empire.
- Equipment Loadouts — once a slot reaches Tier 1, redistribute its stats within a fixed point budget, choosing what kind of fighter that troop type becomes.
- Troop Traits — at Tier 2 and Tier 3, choose special abilities that define a troop slot's strategic identity, each with a meaningful boost and an equally meaningful penalty.
Progress is tracked per troop slot, not per empire. A faction that wages decades of cavalry-led warfare will end up with deeply customised, battle-hardened cavalry — while their siege engines, never having fired a shot in anger, remain exactly as generic as the day the empire was founded. See Troop Types for the eight troop slots this system applies to.
Because the two-axis combat system splits a unit's fighting power across both physical stats (Melee, Ranged, Armour) and morale stats (Shock, Resolve), Military Tradition lets you design not just how tough a unit is, but what kind of fighter it becomes — a unit built to terrify versus one built to simply never break.
