“Exploring the Strengths of Archer and Cavalry Archer Civilizations in Part Four”
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Hi everyone!
For the fourth and fifth days of discussion, I have separated the remaining civilizations into two groups.
Today we’ll be looking at the ones that are more focused on Archer/Cavalry Archer units (but don’t take this as me saying that Bulgarians are not an Infantry or a Cav Archer civ!).
As a reminder, everything I write is meant to spark discussion, and is not a formal proposal.
I will emphasize any particularly strong feelings I have by writing it in **bold**.
**Bohemians:** I have always thought that four free mining technologies is a bit too much of an economic bonus.
But the developers don’t appear to think it’s overpowered.
I still think they are a very strong option on Arena and a civilization that leaves very little room for other civilizations to win in certain matchups.
I haven’t seen many complaints about Bohemians lately, so has the bug with Hussite Wagons been fixed (apparently, if you task a HW to move before it has fired all its projectiles, when tasked to fire again, it would begin firing the secondary, low damage projectiles)?
**Britons:** A while ago, I wrote a thread proposing a balance change for them that got more than 100 upvotes.
I’m sure there are not many balance threads with that level of support.
You can find the link to it here:
[Is there a friendly way to enhance Longbowmen usage over Briton Arbalester usage? : aoe2 (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/ulr33w/is_there_a_friendly_way_to_enhance_longbowmen/).Even with the approval of many players, I’m not sure if nerfing Yeomen so that it doesn’t affect the Archer-line and leaving Arbalesters at 10 range is the best idea.
However, Britons are still a very popular pick in Team Games, so perhaps we can tweak that feature.
What if we change the Team Bonus to “Archery Ranges work 10% or 15% faster” instead of the current 20%?
**Huns: Beautifully designed.** The change to Atheism was fine, but its cost is too high. **Make Atheism less powerful and/or lower its cost**.
**Italians:** They are top on Water, very good on Nomad, competitive on Arena, and formidable for civilizations that rely heavily on mounted units if they cannot prevent Italians from massing their UU. **I cannot think of any changes**.
**Koreans:** When you look at their tree, it looks pretty good on paper: Wood discount, free Archer armors and Tower upgrades, extra range Onagers on top of a full Siege Tech tree.
A Cavalry Archer UU that defeats the rest of Cavalry Archers and Foot Archers, faster Stone miners to reach the Castle building point, FU Arbalester, Halberdiers, Hussars and a Ship UU.
But, paraphrasing OrnLu, “Something seems to be Off”.
On Monday, I proposed an increase in Ratha’s hidden armor for Bengalis.
Could this also work for War Wagons?
Would Shinkichon giving Onagers +2 range instead of +1 make them too oppressive in Black Forest?
Do Turtle Ships need a small buff?
Why is their win rate currently so low (assuming that, when counting 42 civs, one of them will inevitably be the 42nd)?
**Magyars: Don’t touch them.** How can a civilization that lacks gunpowder and an economic bonus still be balanced?
Good job developers!
**Portuguese:** **Was it necessary to give them an early economic bonus?** I thought their Castle drop into Organ guns to buy time for Feitorias for unlimited Gold and Stone was enough.
But their lack of success on Arabia seems to be the reason for the buff.
Now they are good on Arabia (arguably the best civilization on double gold compositions), can Castle drop you much more easily (both on Arena and Nomad) and make Wood from nowhere on Water maps.
At first, I thought it was a good addition.
But I have changed my mind.
I am interested to hear what you think.
Tomorrow will be the last day!
Have a nice day!
The behavior of secondary projectiles on Hussite Wagons is a feature, not a bug (or at least it’s a necessary balance thing)
Edit: fixed a wrong word order and a bad choice of words
* Bohemians are rough to play as when they’re outranged or if they struggle to produce pressure.
Feels a lot like Burmese, but with a cheesy imp.
tech and bad cav.
Almost feels too slow to play reasonably, but that could just be my own foolishness.
* Britons are cheap.Their xbows shouldn’t be affected by their unique range upgrades (with another bonus being used and longbows having their stats adjusted), and I do not respect Britons mains.
* Huns, I have no opinion on.
* Italians are a nuisance.I encounter them way too often when a bad map (islands) comes up, and the idea is always the same.
Boom into Gen Xbows, then add cav and something to win against your main composition.
It’s disgusting.
* I can’t remember the last time I encountered a Koreans player on Arabia.Last time I played them, it felt like they had poor options for actually pushing “out” or taking the map back from an enemy.
* Mags are fine.Annoying, but fine.
I’d appreciate it if they missed heresy, but that’s just me.
* Portuguese should not have received an early eco bonus.Wrong solution to the problem.
Britons: Don’t let the winrate fool you.
Consider a civ that has a 100% winrate vs half the civs, and 0% winrate against the other half.
This civ is “balanced”, it is not OP (assuming that the two sets of civs are partitioned not based on strength, but on something uncorrelated to strength).
Nevertheless this civ is cancer, the game is won or lost at the civ select screen.
Britons are not quite as egregious as this, but some matchups are free wins and some are free losses.
What do Teutons do vs Britons?
What do Britons do vs Mayans?
Both feel super stupid, Teutons have no answer to the one trick of Britons, Britons have no good answer to eagles (they add their own xbow to counter longswords if they ever want to force a fight).
Britons should not autowin against siege and enemy xbows in castle age, but should get something to deal with high pierce armor units.
I’d give them free bodkin and bracer, remove the +1/+2 range for free (although buff longbows so they remain unchanged in this regard) and if that’s too big of a nerf then give them thumbring.
Also yeah stagger the archery range speed if that matters for team games.
Koreans have too many answers to archers and not enough answers to non-archers.
Similar a bit to Burmese in that they have too many answers to cav (buffed halbs, monks with cheap techs, elephants AND arambai, but the first 3 are situational so just spam arambai to deal with cav).
Koreans theoretically could do something like war wagons + monks rather than arambai + siege, i.e.
main gold unit counters one type of unit, support unit counters what they are weak against.
The problem is that there isn’t a single support unit that deals with cav, because light cav will snipe the monks easily due to the crappy dps of the war wagon (you are really paying for tankiness with this UU, not dps) and similarly eagles will wreck you.
Generally units that counter what they counter by being tanky get rekt by their own counters as they are unable to protect their support unit that counters their counter.
The second problem is that the opponent can go full monks to counter war wagon + monks, but I guess super long range towers in key areas can mitigate that.
If you take war wagons out of the frame then what does this civ have?
It’s only eco bonus is mining stone to help make this UU, other than that they have generic everything (slightly cheaper, big whoop).
The SO UT is kinda useless in most matchups due to BBC and monks as well.
>Magyars: Don’t touch them.
How can a civ that lacks gunpowder and an eco bonus still be balanced?
It’s not, the civ is arse.
The only map where maybe, MAYBE it’s in the top 5 civs is land madness (although Mongols, Chinese, Franks, Huns arguably stronger, not to mention obviously Hindustanis and Gurjaras but those civs are just busted, and maybe Mayans/Aztecs are better than Magyars here potentially too?), because of its feudal scouts bonus.
It hasn’t been used in KotD in a long time, it isn’t used on arena ever, and it is crap on hybrid maps too (where even otherwise crap civs like Persians can have their moment in the sun potentially).
The civ absolutely needs something.
Portugese are a funny civ.
On the one hand I don’t get how Turks aren’t the outright best arena civ.
So I dislike arena purely due to Turk dittos, if you let me play Turks vs a non-Turk civ then I enjoy that map.
This Portugese change meant that basically whenever I get taken to arena these days it is vs Portugese.
On the one hand it is less variety.
On the other hand hey, at least it isn’t a Turk ditto!
Bohemians are absolutely busted on arena – once they get to houfnice + support unit they win by default against all but 3 civs:Turks, Bengalis and than maybe Portuguese.
That’s how their design works however and I believe it would be extremely difficult to nerf them on arena with one simple balance change without making them even worse on more open maps at the same time
About Britons I agree with the part that longbows don’t feel all that special compared to regular Briton arbs.
At the same time castle age xbow powerspike needs to stay, so I propose removing extra +1 range in imp and increasing longbows’ base range to compensate.
Now going arbelest would mean you really need to prioritise yeomen and they would only max out on 10, making the difference with 12-range longbowmen much more noticable.
I won’t speak about their TB as this bonus is fine in 1v1’s and I don’t play teamgames
And now Portuguese rant incoming 11 Why are we fixing the problem that doesn’t exist???
Sure, before the patch Portuguese weren’t the greatest arabia civ, but not every civ needs to be one, that would be boring!
In fact I’d argue they were fine on every other map type: nomad, hybrid and water maps are self-explanatory, but surely you wouldn’t complain about getting Porto on closed maps either.
And now after this ‘fix’ Portuguese are good everywhere, turns out removing civ’s only weakness might be a bad idea, who would have known?!
And to make things worse, feitoria problem returns, bringing more ridiculous games and this time not only on islands!
Those games with full feitoria clown eco are fun to watch every once in a while ngl, but it looks stupid and doesn’t match the game design
For longbowmen, maybe if they received some weird bonus like +1 attack against non-stone buildings, might that be overpowered?
So bohemians in my opinion doesnt need any nerfs.
Its only really on arena they are S tier.
I portuguese unique unit spam on arena is good in tgs but has some counters like turks, britons, probably aztecs. (arena team game is quite civ dependent and hard to balance the game around)
I totally agree with you that briton team bonus needs a nerf for 4v4 and 3v3s where it makes britons into a given pick.
I would like either the team bonus to be a civ bonus instead and give a different team bonus to britons or nerf it to maybe 10 percent although I am not sure that would change up civ pick rates for britons.
Id like if britons had 10 percent faster archer ranges as civ bonus and team bonus could be 15 percent cheaper crossbow and arb upgrade.
>But still then, Britons are a very popular pick on Team Games, and perhaps we can somehow tweak that feature.
What if we change the Team Bonus to “Archery Ranges work 10% or 15% faster” instead of the current 20%?
Are you trying to imply that Britons are picked in team games primarily because of their team bonus?
I’ve been having an idea for Britons.
I’m not sure how to make it happen, but at the end I think arbalest should lose one range, longbow should keep it’s castle age range, and Ellie longbow should get one more range.
Then instead of deciding between 11 and 12 range you look at 10 vs 13, making longbows silly good fun and arbs still really good at +2 range on everyone else.
The Britons haters really came out of the woodwork for this one.
They’ve been fine for years and years.
You gotta be constantly microing in the midgame to take advantage of the range bonus, it’s never a free win
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