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WalrusJones

A more complex iron age.

11 posts in this topic

Have you read, understood, and followed all of the rules listed in large text at the top of the suggestions forum?(Yes/No): Yes.

On rule number #2, I will do my absolute best to only use language that is more generic, only using terms that would feel familiar to TF1 if they help me shape my ideas in a way that I feel they would be more easily understood.

Now, to start off, I wish to bring up that the bloomery age in TFC 1 opened up in a clever way, by having the bloomery gate be a material that would actually *melt* before you could ever melt iron, or one of irons ores, you pointed out that the goal of the bloomery was never to melt the iron. As you know, the bloomery was a chemical process that created a slag-filled sponge of barely workable iron. However, the work that it requires to get into the bloomery, and the flawless products it made felt very disengenious to the actual struggles of the iron age.

 

Subsaharan societies without casting ages were able to learn to make bloomeries, and work iron. However, it took all ironworking societies centuries to learn to make good iron. I would love to see this represented in TFC 2, that iron processing isn't exceptionally hard to get into as a society, but that finishing an iron tool so that it that would end up equal, or better then a bronze tool would take more work after the innitial forging was completed.

 

Iron was a common metal, but it was fickle, and it took a centuries for bronzeworking societies to make it so iron tools could even compare in quality to the ones they already had. Annealing Bronze to relieve an ingot of work hardening was much easier then doing the same with iron, and in the cases of iron which had accidentally been converted into a mild steel, annealing would actually worsen any brittleness which work hardening had caused. As you can imagine, this was a huge problem in the early iron age. Fortunately, iron could be annealed, it just took hours of leaving an iron tool exposed to dry air to do so.

 

One way to represent this would be to give iron tools a very serious durability problem if they hadn't been properly annealed.

 

Even after the discovery of the annealing methods of iron, along with other methods of fixing the inherent brittleness problems that early iron had to overcome, iron couldn't be hammered into being sharp like bronze could, you needed to grind it. Prior to this discovery, cutting iron tools weren't really plausable.

 

The same should be true of a TFC 2 society as well, there would be no iron knives, axes, or swords until they learn that iron cannot be forged sharp, as it needed to be ground to gain an edge, where a casting age society could make the same tools the moment they cast they fired their first moulds.

 

Forging should be less stressful with iron then with bronze, there is less risk fo melting a tool you spent a long time working on, and more importantly, ironworking gives you so many excuses to take breaks and catch up on other things. Postprocessing would add time and energy to the process of making most iron tools, but I feel the struggle of learning to make good tools would be infinitely more enaging then the unrealistic grind that was making a complicated bronze bloomery door.

Another benefit of such a design would be that fewer start locations would reach a complete "Dead end" due various factors, be it, lack of clay for hundreds of miles around, or simple bad luck with ore generation.

 

Of course, the extra time it takes to complete each tool in an early ironworking society could also serve as a balancing factor, when compared to another society which is going through a casting era.

Edited by WalrusJones
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Very cool thoughts. I was entirely ingorant of these and I'm building a forge in my back garden. I like the beenfit of balance it would add to the game without simply amking all starting locations identical, that's a great benefit IMHO.

 

Couple of queries.

 

Do you see a place for iron tools prior to th grinding technology, and if so what's that. Or instead do you suppose we'll skip straight to forging tools and then immediately going to the grinding stone we've readied.d

 

Also do you think this would require an increase in the effectiveness of the resultant iron tool to warrant the extra effort or do you see this as a 'fix' for current progression. I'm aware of the fact that TFC is new I'm just curious as to the origin of your thoughts and their effective implementation.

Edited by Thorah
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Wow, didn't know you could forge a sharp edge on a bronze tool.

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I guess my main question is, if iron tools are made harder to make well, what will be done to discourage people from just skipping them entirely and moving on to steel?  Will the iron plates for the Blast Furnace require the same degree of care in making?  Creating a separate class of sheets that have some sort of NBT data?   I feel like the current game already has something of a tendency to encourage skipping over iron tools entirely, in the push for steel.  The lack of graphite being the only true roadblock to that.  Or is it just considered that hey, if the player has graphite, good for them?

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In regards to players skipping iron on their way to steel, I'd like to point out that the current island hopping progression that is planned will specifically require the player to acquire a specific tier of tools/weaponry in order to move on to the next island. I'm perfectly fine with exploring ideas for making the mechanics involved more interesting, but skipping tiers likely won't be an option.

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In regards to players skipping iron on their way to steel, I'd like to point out that the current island hopping progression that is planned will specifically require the player to acquire a specific tier of tools/weaponry in order to move on to the next island. I'm perfectly fine with exploring ideas for making the mechanics involved more interesting, but skipping tiers likely won't be an option.

From a realistic standpoint, Iron should only be a tier above bronze from the perspective of the urgency of action and commonality of materials. You don't need to worry about melting it on the forge, don't need to alloy anything, and don't need to have access to copper and other stuff. That's really the only reason adoption of iron happened at first in bronze using societies, because it allowed independance from the copper-tin trade routes, and allowed them to use metal reliably instead of most of their tools still being stone or copper.. The stats would, realistically, even favor bronze slightly in usage, and the iron would have the additional problem (which would just be a pain to represent) of destructive rather than preservative corrosion, as iron oxides are oxygen permeable unlike copper oxides, which after forming prevent any deeper corrosion of the metal.

Edited by PlotVitalNPC
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IRL, tin was rather hard to find - that's why the British Isles were important to the Romans (they called them the Tin Islands)...

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That and COAL what was the base for the industrial age Empire in the British Isles.

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I like the idea. I don't think there would be a problem of people skipping iron for steel, as it sounds like it would just have the effect the progression from copper to bronze has, where most players would be focused on moving quickly through that portion of the tier where the iron forged is no better than the bronze they already have. If I understand this correctly, there's not really an effective way to just skip iron as a whole and go to steel to avoid initial problems with iron. I'm sure someone will point out if there is a way, as I'm far from the best player when it comes to TFC.

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         in realistic,both bloomery and blast furnace made from fire clay but if you do that it will skip bronze age.So i want you to tell dovolper to add realistic recipe with

configration(like i need to use at least 5 kind of bronce tool to craft bloomery)

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