Using Hero Skill Tree System for Empire Skills

[keen ocean]

Since we already have a skill tree system for heroes from Ways of War, how about using it for empire skills ?
We can replace linear progression with branching policy trees that introduces real choices in empire building.
Please see the detailed post on the forum:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/using-the-hero-skill-tree-system-for-empire-skills.1737160/

[hidden plover]

I personally disagree. With hero skills, even before the revamp there were already a ton, so it was more of a rethink of how they are handled and replacing ones that were not well balanced. This would require adding a ton of new options or else make end up creating choice on individual skills but removing choice on affinity overall by making it too easy to run out of options from your primary affinity and just leading to you branching out.

If they were going to overhaul the affinity skill system, I think I would rather them add more along the existing lines. Make it so that there are some that you are only going to get if you really commit to that affinity, intentionally prioritizing only tomes that give at least one point for it, and mainly doing tomes that give two. I don't think just making another tree is actually as interesting as making it so that your choice is whether to prioritize getting the exact tomes that are optimal for your build, or prioritize getting access to the end game skills. I think with the right balancing that could give people reasons to both go single affinity builds and mixed affinity builds

[keen ocean]

Hey, I’m not quite following your point—this system actually increases variety, not removes it. Two Materium empires could pick completely different paths—even though they share the same Affinity, they’ll feel distinct.

Imagine the Materium tree gives you an “Arcane Artisans” policy that turns mines into mana-generators, or a “Quarry Coinage” policy that makes quarries spit out extra gold. Both require Materium points, but you can’t have both—so two Materium players might end up with wildly different economies and playstyles.

Every Affinity remains on-theme and unique: there simply aren’t equivalent of these options for, say, Nature or Order. You choose which branch of your Affinity to specialize in—so you still have that core strategic decision, plus the added depth of how you want to specialize within it.

That’s the whole point—more meaningful, thematic choices within each Affinity, rather than just more linear, generic bonuses.

[hidden plover]

My issue is that if it's already easy to get everything in a line, it's going to be even easier to get everything that you can if you only have half as many things that you can pick because the other half gets locked out by your choices. I think if they were going to do this, they would have to double or even triple the number of affinity skills for your empire since otherwise you would end up just getting way fewer, or having to spec into a ton of different affinities in order to actually be continuing to upgrade stuff as the game goes

And given that there's already overlap in skills (generic, order, and shadow all have things that give you an extra whispering sphere, and only shadow has more to the skill than just doing that for example), so I think increasing the number by that many would make it difficult not to have repeated skills

[keen ocean]

1. You still get roughly the same quantity of goodies
   Take the prototype Astral tree I posted:

Tier Pickable nodes How many you can actually end up with
T1 2 2
T2 4 (2 pair of mutually exclusive) 2
T3 2 (mutually exclusive) 1
T4 2 (mutually exclusive) 1
T5 1 1
T6 3 (non-exclusive) up to 3
**Total nodes attainable in one playthrough: 2+2+1+1+1+3 = 10.

Current live game? Astral has 10 empire-skills.
So, in practice, you’d still end the match with roughly ten Astral policies—just arranged in a more interesting shape.

2. Lockouts create divergence, not deprivation
   Yes, mutually exclusive pairs mean you skip some nodes—but that’s the point. They force you into A-or-B decisions that make two Astral players diverge. You’re trading one effect for another, not losing overall power.

Think of Civ’s Social Policies or Stellaris Traditions: you rarely unlock every single leaf, but your empire still feels complete.

3. No need to “spec into every Affinity”
   Because each tree contains plenty of nodes (9–12 attainable), you never have to dip into off-affinities just to stay busy. If you’re going mono-Materium, your Materium tree alone carries you through the entire game. Want hybrid playstyles? Cool—you can—but it’s a choice, not a necessity.

4. If the devs added even more nodes? Awesome
   Nothing prevents them (or modders) from inflating each tier if they want more variety. The framework scales—double the Tier-2 exclusives, add flavour-nodes for niche builds, etc. My example is deliberately one-for-one with the current count so folks can see it’s feasible without a content explosion.

TL;DR
You’ll still unlock about the same number of Affinity skills as now; you’ll just sweat a little more over which ones, and your neighbour’s Astral empire won’t look like a photocopy of yours.

[hidden plover]

I can see where you're coming from. I still think I would prefer, if they were adding more skills, them to be added to the existing lines with higher affinity requirements in order to give a reward for people sticking with one affinity, it's currently there's a lot of reason to branch out but not a ton of reason to stick to one. I guess I just feel like having another skill tree like this isn't actually that interesting to me. I feel like they should lean into the more unique part of the empire skill tree, that being that there are a bunch of different affinities, and make it so that the choice between affinities is a more meaningful choice on that screen, since right now it's pretty easy to fully fill out two affinity lines and still get a few scattered skills from early in another tree.

Like I agree with you that I think there should be more meaningful choice, I just would rather it come in a way that solidifies a cool unique part of the game, rather than doing a lockout skill tree which is already super common

I would definitely prefer your suggestion over not changing anything, now that you've explained it in a way that's making more sense to me, but I think that there are cooler ways to rework it and that it would be extremely hard to do both (adding a larger number of overall pickable skills on each affinity branch and having it so that some are mutually exclusive would probably mean content bloat that would be a pain in the ass for the devs to do well)

[keen ocean]

Totally get the worry about “content bloat,” but I think we might be under-estimating how comfortable Triumph + Paradox are with big, branching systems.

Stellaris launched with 7 tradition trees and now has 17—plus 5 separate Ascension trees—each with exclusivity, tiered unlocks, and unique capstones.

Hearts of Iron IV? Thirty-eight (!) national focus trees, many of them with dozens of mutually exclusive paths.

And that’s not counting CK III’s perk lines, EU IV’s idea groups, etc.

Branch-heavy design is practically Paradox’s native language at this point; they can probably spin up another Affinity tree while finishing a morning espresso. Triumph may not be Paradox proper, but they’re now in the same house and can borrow that playbook if needed.

So I’m betting the real hurdle isn’t “too hard for the devs,” it’s simply choosing which cool toys to put where. If they decide the game needs deeper Affinity identity, a lock-out tree is well within their wheelhouse—and, from a content cadence standpoint, totally doable.

In short: let’s give the devs some credit—they’ve shipped games with far meatier trees than this. If Triumph wants to lean in, they’ve got seasoned tree-smiths sitting one Slack ping away.

[vocal warren]

I'm not sold on it, but I think Triumph should at least investigate it.
Also helps with the difference between trees that are "locked into" a specific playstyle, vs universally good

Like Order being very weak if you're not going for vassals

[keen ocean]

Great point—this definitely warrants a closer look by Triumph!
One of the biggest pain points right now is that Order is basically a “vassal-only” affinity: if you don’t crown yourself king of the vassals, the whole tree goes dead in the water. (Likewise, Chaos feels pointless unless you’re pillaging every province you touch.)

With a branched policy tree you can split Order into two equally tempting specialties. For example:

Banner Oath (Left Path): All about forging unbreakable bonds with your vassals—boost their loyalty and raise feudal banners across the realm.
Divine Mandate (Right Path): Worship-powered reforms that slash unit upkeep and grant extra battle XP—perfect for the hands-on warlord who’d rather rally troops than broker fealty.

Each branch still needs Order points to unlock, but you’re free to ignore one entirely. Want a church-run standing army instead of a patchwork of petty kings? Roll Divine Mandate. Love your vassals more than your own spouse? Pledge the Banner Oath.
Result: Two wildly different “Order” playstyles—without ever forcing you into a single cookie-cutter build. Let me know what you think!

[bleak hill]

I'd be cool with expanding the tree. But I think the current theme works fine.

[hidden plover]

I definitely do agree that order and chaos are a bit too narrow in how they play. I'm doing a mixed order and materium build right now, but since it's a lava lakes campaign map (was doing a fire giant queen and wanted to have a thematic realm), there aren't a ton of city-states for me to vassalize, I'm on turn 40 and only have two, so I end up mostly missing out on significant benefits from the order branch. And since I like doing runs with alignment that is not obvious for the affinity (mainly good chaos or shadow runs and evil nature and order runs), it can be hard to get a lot of use out of the chaos line

So maybe the other chaos tree would focus on buffing tier 1 and 2 units and allowing you to swarm

[storm geyser]

i'm not sure i want too much crunch added to the affinity tree unless they find better way to present it. right now it feels very separated from the rest of the game being in its own window. making decisions about how to spend points in a tree isn't fun for me. what the skills/abilities allow me to do in the game is (or should be). Point is: I want to keep the decision making on which skill to choose lightweight so I can get back to the game to use it

[hidden plover]

I think you hit the nail on the head as to why I'm not so sure I'm in favor of this. I do agree that there are a few affinity skill lines that could use some help to make sure they work for bills outside of the playstyle they are currently centralized around, but I don't think op's method is what I would want. I'm not playing this game like a paradox developed game, I tend to struggle to get into those. Age of wonders 4 is published by paradox, but it's still a triumph game, and I like that the majority of the most influential decisions are made on the world map, battle map, and tome selection screen. I don't think adding meaningful decisions actually is always a good thing if it slows down the game more than it provides benefits. Reworking the hero trees The way they did didn't create new choices necessarily, it made the choices fit a better system that meant that allowed for heroes to have more individual identity, but strictly speaking you actually make fewer choices than you used to (before the rework, every time you leveled up your hero you had dozens of choices, even before unlocking Tome skills or later skills. Now you end up choosing between far fewer things, those choices just end up influencing each other more.

I could see an argument to divide each line into two with some overlapping skills, but even that feels like it's forcing the affinity skills to be something they aren't in a way that will just slow things down rather than actually make things more interesting.

I still think my idea of just extending the lines a bit, adding some new options for chaos and order, and making it so that the lines end at higher affinity requirements in order to Make the decision between single affinity and split affinity builds more meaningful is more interesting and I feel fits more into the spirit of the game

[keen ocean]

When you hit your very first Chaos-Affinity threshold, the game throws up a mini-event—think of it as your empire’s coming-of-age bonfire. A parchment scroll slides in with three big, shiny buttons (plus a tiny “Explain More” tooltip if you hover). Pick a empire template and you’re done — or hit the “I’ll craft my own destiny” option to keep everything manual. The event only fires once, can be re-opened from the Affinity panel, and never spends Imperium automatically unless you let it.*

Choose Your Chaos Creed

Creed
☠️ Blood-Fire Raiders Auto-queues the Pillage & Plunder path: bonus gold from razing, faster city burn-downs, premium loot after battles. You’re here to watch the world burn and bankroll it with other people’s stuff.
🐲 Broodspawn Horde Locks in the Flesh Is Cheap line: discount T1–T2 recruitment, militia upgrades, and food based unit production for endless red-shirt waves. Zerg-rush enjoyers, goblin spam fans, and anyone who thinks “quality” is a four-letter word.
🛠️ Clan Council Decrees Its Own Fate Manual mode. Browse every node, mix ’n’ match, min-max to your heart’s delight. Spreadsheet shamans, theorycrafters, or anyone with a healthy distrust of big red buttons.

Safety nets & QoL

Templates earmark Imperium instead of instantly spending it. Need that stash for a clutch ritual? Flick the Pause Auto-Spend toggle in the Affinity screen.
Result: casual warlords slam one button and dive back into conquest, while crunchy build-smiths still get their full buffet of knobs to tweak. Depth for the nerds, zero fuss for the barbarians. Thoughts? 🪓🔥