There is no need to “equalize” or make the Chinese more “generic”.
I think this dev change is a lackluster change and you guys are not focusing on actual quality upgrades. I’m not fan of the BETA change. I’m also not a big fan of Chinese civ themselves but I like knowing they have +1 extra villager on start.
This is the AoE1 forum not 2. 
Moved to the correct sub-forum
This was indeed a straight nerf.
-1 villager and +50 food = you lose some TC work time, as you now have to make the 6th villager as opposed to directly researching loom while you try to find your sheep and start gathering food.
It will lower the chinese winrate at high level but does nothing to facilitate the start at low level.
Hahaha, thanks.
Marvelous! Thank you very much.
You do the first vill, pick loom and the 6th vill builds a house; if you have sheep and force gather food you can have no idle TC and +1 vill ahead that your opponent, after him/her pick loom you will be +2 vills ahead
It is the same but it will be easer for new players and no idle TC time (still hard but could be)
IMO, Chinese pro-games will be as strong as it is right now
From the few videos I’ve seen on YouTube that talk about this change, it looks to target the really low ELO gameplay because apparently, the high ELO gameplay Chinese are kick-butt and top 8 and don’t appear to require much tweaking.
I heard that the goal was to make chinese more accessible to noob and less Op for pros but if that was the goal i feel like 75F would be needed
Indeed, 75 or 100, to be more than in the end just losing 25s of TC runtime.
As the current change is : statu quo if the player is slow, while it makes good/lucky play less efficient.
Spirit of the Law proved that the change infact didn’t change much if anything for chinese actually. the “nerf” is just a mere handful of second so just something like 10 res less
Altogether, it is a nerf at high Elo, and should not change anything at lower Elo. If this was done to balance it at high Elos as it is deemed too strong on open maps, then I understand. If it is to ‘equalise’ it, then I agree it should not be. Not all civs have to be easy to play, and training also involves training with civ-specific starts.
are you forgetting about loom?
Did you actually watched the video?
The video take also that into consideration iirc
If there was really no change, why do the change at all? Chinese have #1 global population in the world so it only makes sense they start with another villager.
It definitely changes gameplay.
Not a fan of just this one or all the changes in PUP?
I personally suspect that this change is for Xbox players, for whom early game micro would be much harder. However, I only play on a computer, so I wouldn’t really know. It also technically is a straight nerf, but from what I recall seeing in Youtube videos, it doesn’t really effect villager counts at a high level (you just lose a little gather time for one vil).
This change was made because the Chinese civilization is not commonly used in the game, but it’s not because it’s a bad civilization, but rather because its start is very complicated for players with an elo below 1400. With the new bonus of only 2 extra villagers and 50 additional food, the developers tried to make the civilization more accessible for less experienced players and bring it closer to the Mayan playstyle.
Personally, I preferred the previous bonus of three villagers, but I understand why they made this change.