Haven’t seen the match so just blindly speculating here; could you also not make the argument that it’s because it’s a bad decision that it worked because it caught the opponent off guard because no one would predict such a sub optimal play?
I’m not defending or even arguing for the OPs suggestion, but I struggle a bit with some of your reasoning / arguements. (Apologies I am going on an extreme high level tangent here) We will never know the ideal state of usage/gameplay nor we will have the time to evaluate all casual pathways. To me it seems more practical to react to the meta and observed behaviours and reactively correct them. If in turn this opens up unforseen balance problems these again can be reactively corrected. I feel that such a purist philosophy to design (needing to understand all theoretical interactions / complications) leads to analysis paralysis where we spend too long with an observed problem in fear of unknown hypothetical problems.
I appreciate I am off topic here so will happily read any replies but won’t respond any further to avoid derailing the thread.
Sure you can definitely balance in a dynamic sense. I’ve mentioned this before. That’s totally a viable method of balance. It’s more noisy and a little harder to isolate things if you have dependencies in the causal graph but it works.
I mean you could buff all sorts of stuff and not break the game and so it would stay within some tolerance of balance. You’d never have an unbalanced game in an absolute sense, but the relative balance would change quite often.
But the point is that you can’t claim the change is justified for reason XYZ when in reality those reasons aren’t actually valid.
Most changes people suggest are minor and therefore not going to break the game. But at the same time a lot of times the justification is totally wrong.
But we don’t know completely what’s rational and what not. For all we know, everyone is irrational.
Even you, you see the problem only from a mathematical point of view, but you don’t consider other aspects.
The discussion isn’t anymore about the +1 range, but basically has evolved into a “why don’t we see/use the GC more?”. This in my opinion isn’t something that we can answer with just a mathematic answer, that’s why I talked about the meta, and tried to find a reason why the GC isn’t often included.
The decision of not using GC must be something more beyond an irrational behavior. I mean, people sometimes try them, and even if they use them successfully, they don’t keep using them. It might be a strong consolidate bias, and probably it’s that.
Some small buff, changes, might incourage people on using trying them again, and maybe discover that they aren’t a bad unit. Then again, the main reason why people don’t use them, is the range, so you either buff that, or you buff more consistently something else.
Or you leave them as they are, the GC, like the Italians, are underrated as most people says. That doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from small changes, but it also means that they don’t need radical changes.
Some people just want a buff, in general, to give another chance to the unit, or at least that is my feeling.
In my opinion, their major problem was the training time, and that was fixed (although it could have been lowered a little bit more) then they even lower a bit the gold cost (that I never understood…).
The other major thing that people complain about, is their elite upgrade, which is a bit expensive for a civ without a consistent eco bonus. The elite upgrade too doesn’t give much to the unit, although that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind that the elite upgrade would give them +1 range, or +1 attack, just to incourage people to use the unit more, but I don’t see it as necessary either.
I would instead apply some small changes to the civ itself.
Basically, most unique units are situational and we dont use them often. Generic counterpart are often more all-rounded and do the job better for most of the time.
Arbalest are way easier to mass and more all-rounded. Other unique units has the same fate. But the role of GC is kinda weird. It is fine not to replace arbalest at all. However, tech tree misses halbs for the sake of GC. GC is hard to mass up to defend cavalry and often fail to replace halbs, esp in 1v1.
Trying to disguise preferences as “objective” is pointless because it’s so easy to see that many times the “objective” argument isn’t actually good.
In this case of the EGC I’m well aware that 1 range will feel better and make the unit perform slightly better in certain contexts. That is a perfectly valid preference to desire that slight extra flexibility. It’s also a valid preference to desire the EGC have a noticeable tradeoff with the arbalest and thus not want the +1 range.
But from all measurable and theoretical indications +1 range doesn’t make the unit much stronger offensively and mostly serves to make the unit harder to counter. Others have pointed this out on other threads.
I also didn’t realize this before but +1 range has significant balance issues with civs that lack bracer. Almost universally these are good cavalry civs (celts excepted). But an EGC that outranges them while being supported with cheaper bombard cannons? That’s a pretty serious issue.
I realize people have preferences for changes. And a lot of the time those preferences won’t break anything. But there’s no need to dress things up in some kind of objective analysis. A preference for something else which is balanced is totally valid. But you gotta put in the work to check if it’s actually balanced.
I would say that if several people do no use the unit, the unit has some problem. It is difficult to me that almost everyone is wrong.
There are several problems with the unit in general:
the elite upgrade is too expensive
the civ is very bad on land
the anti-cavalry is a role that does not match properly with an archer unit, just think of a raiding defense
I have always thought that the best way to fix the anti-cavalry problem of Italians (that is not the main problem of the civ) is just giving them halbs, making GCs a TG-specific unit.
Perhaps. Maybe you need to see it as an attacking unit, not a defending unit, and rely on walls as a method of raid prevention? This unit is extremely good in a push because it’s a more effective defender of siege than Halbs are since they aren’t as positionally dependent as Halbs and provide more consistent damage.
We know walls are criminally underused at all levels of play in the midgame/lategame. Multiple top players who have opinions you should consider have said as much. One would likely argue that failing to wall your base against raids, knowing your civ lacks Halb, is a contributing factor.
That sounds pretty reasonable… but the Italians already have perfect Champions. If you consider it for the point that the meso civs don’t get Cavalry and get Eagles instead, and the Genoese is the main anti-cav unit for the Italians, it makes sense that way, but on the other hand, I don’t really think it needs it.
I think we’d be better off giving that bonus against Eagles to the Condottiero instead, since it fills an emergency production role for the Italians, and it’s an affordable unit in terms of upgrades.
Going to be honest here, giving it to Condottiero would be way stronger and way more interesting than the Genoese, since Condos are only available in Imperial age. It’d make the Italian - Meso matchup extremely compelling. Italians would suffer until Imperial age, and then in Imperial age the Condo turns things around. If the Italians go into main infantry upgrades to defend in castle age, those upgrade costs can’t be recouped.
I look forward to it. But condo is a shared unit and hence easily abused by infantry civ ally. This makes condo difficult to balance, limiting potential buff.
I think its better to replace the team bonus with silk road and introduce a new UT boosting GC accessibility(preferably GC produced in TC). Condo will be no longer a shared unit. It is not seen often in land Team games after nerf of patch 5.7
Its funny how much people are against end game compositions…which are slow and expensive to tech into, on top of relying on a slow to mass UU and non SE BBC…
Yet you’re fine with Vikings getting a 1000+ Res boost by early castle age…
Do you only play closed maps maybe?
Just because you think something doesn’t make it true. Extra range definitely improves offensive capabilities. It doesn’t need explaining
Italians have FU cheap HC for eagles, which are way better than GC with some bonus damage. If that it’s not necessary, they have FU militia line, and condos, even if the latter aren’t that great against eagles, but they can act as a panic button.
Which is mainly due to their weak early game, not because they lack a counter for eagles.
I think that if the condo would get a +2 vs eagles it would hardly make it OP, even for allies.
No. I just know that the return on investment for stone walls in late castle age is more or less very similar to the return on investment to palisades in early feudal when weighted by the size of your eco. So I don’t handicap myself by blindly avoiding stone walls when the civ forces me to use a slow composition.
I’ve seen and experienced enough hussar raids end games to have learned from my and others mistakes. I’m not going to try avoiding stone walls over and over only to lose to hussar raids over and over on slow civs on open maps.
I’ve found people who say something doesn’t need explaining rely mostly on pattern matching and lack a comprehensive analytical framework which can put together coherent explanations.
I cannot find any coherent explanation for why 1 range would significantly affect the fights you want to actually take. However I can see how it significantly affects the fights you don’t want to take, i.e. fights where you want to go on the offensive are relatively unaffected compared to fights you’re trying to avoid/defend against.
Everyone agrees that the elite upgrade is too expensive for what it does. Either it should more (the +1 range) or it should be much cheaper.
Said that, I do not think that this would
Britons are my main civ, the extra range is really useful for both attack and defense. But still I do not think that +1 range would fix the unit.
First Italians are too bad to get to a UU without a considerable disadvantage.
Second, having halbs is almost always better than having GCs. There are conditions where GCs are better, but halbs are spammable from barracks, cost no gold and much more effective in low numbers.
It would have been better if the original desig of the unit had been thought as a trash UU (then weaker but much more spammable, even in archery ranges with a UT).
Fixing GC as it is, requires to fix Italians first