This is highly map dependent. On Arabia games don’t often last to the point of gold-exhaustion. On Arena, or Black Forest, it very well might. So this would work better if the distribution of maps being played wasn’t so heavily dominated by one specific map. Even if you know that you can spend more gold than other civs, you might not get to that stage of the game where this matters.
Stone is the most scarce resource on most maps. So players are naturally averse to spending it. Only way this would really change is if megarandom was the standard map (and I don’t think many players would like this )
Tbf I am glad they got rid of it. I know AoE isn’t about realism, but Cavalry Archers demolishing buildings does not feel right. (And CA are one of the best, most cost effective units in the game still)
This is a good point and I agree. Some things that were nerfed were defniitely feeling based and not based on any kind of (meaningful) data.
They have good, but inconsistent bonuses. I think their stats will go up in the current patch.
What I mean is that, the hill bonus is a hit-and-miss, on some maps it’s completely useless because all land is flat (e.g. Arena), while on Arabia it used to depend on map gen whether you had a useful hill to camp or not. Now with the new Hoang eat TC mapgen, there are always hills to camp, so I expect that to help a lot.
The free sheep in castle thing is probably one of the points @Dagorad62 raised about suboptimal play, not everyone really makes use of this bonus, sometimes I just see sheep still hanging out well into late game.
The Free Thumb Ring is a nice bonus, but you might not even want to go archers in certain matchups, so again, it’s strong, but usefulness is inconsistent.
That’s true. But I don’t think that alone can explain their extremely bad performance. Especially in the early game, they should be able to make all rushes with great power because of their insane amount of free food. They are a good early agression civ actually. Why don’t the stats show this?
Is it a bad transition to the mid game? Are too many people going directly for cav archers with them, not knowing that full cav archer play in castle age is in most cases very bad?
The problem is, they have like 2 % playrate, so most of us haven’t faced them more often than like 5-10 times. So we don’t even know if the way they were played against us is the current “tatar meta”.
I faced several cav-archer all-ins. And they were usually very bad for the tatars player. What is your experience?
That a lot of the time they get basically played as a generic civ with no bonuses after the dark age food eco. And the bonus in dark age itself doesn’t do anything to win games if there isn’t something solid the civ can use to rely on during later stages of the game. So if there’s no nice hill to camp, you’re kinda, sorta, playing generic.
It’s also why the Incas aren’t doing so well in early game anymore, despite having a good early eco. You’ve got no civ bonuses after dark age, other than cheaper watch towers 11
As an Example where it all works: Franks.
You have dark age boost with the berries. Sweet. In Feudal, you get free and instant Horse Collar, so that saves you a bit of res (~1 scout worth), as well as giving you a very smooth eco, since you can instantly place farms in feudal, and that’ll already start giving you the wood saving by having to refresh your farms later. Oh, and if you want to Scout Rush, your scouts have extra HP, so the enemy has to invest into BL if they don’t want to get out-right rekt. Then, if you need to transition to Castle Age, the earlier bonuses still continue to help. You don’t have the wood “crunch” from reseeding farms as early, and your knights already have BL thanks to civ bonus. You also get castles for only ~490 stone, which means you can secure a position very early.
Or is it just that players who play tatars by chance don’t know how to use their bonusses to success because to use them you maybe would need to know special “tatars buildorders” if you aren’t able to adjust your eco to your income, you can’t really make use of the sheep bonus. So they perform bad in the rankings because their eco bonus is “too special” like the saracen market?
This are all possible things to consider. And I must say if I play tatars I don’t have bad experience with them. But I also play them as an archer or scout into lategame cav archer civ generally. Usually archers. I don’t go straight for cav archers in castle, cause I know it’s bad.
I mean, if a map literally doesn’t have a useful, strategically positioned hill, you won’t be able to use the civ bonus, no matter how much you’re aware that it’s a strong bonus. But that is why I expect Tatar win rate to go up, because with the new Hoang Arabia, you always get good hills.
I think this bonus isn’t that strong. It is neat, but only in certain maps IF you already have the control of the important hills. Opponent shouldn’'t fight you uphill anyways, so a bonus to a bad decision of the opponent is… weird.
Against Tatars? What about placing your own castle there… Against an (cav) archer civ usually one of the most common moves I do atm. It solves so many things.
Now that I think about predictability and Arabia, that’s also why the Hoang Rush is so good. He makes full use of the Celt civ bonuses. He often adds infantry (drush, but also a couple of spears here and there), so that’s passively making use of the speed buff. He often goes for forward Siege Workshop and Monastery, plus makes plenty of Siege, so that’s the lumberjack bonus covered. He makes Siege (point reiterated i know), so he makes use of the faster firing siege weapons bonus. Oh, making siege also makes use of the Team Bonus. Sometimes he goes for laming, so even on occasions, you can see him benefiting from the sheep convert bonus (admittedly, this one is the most rarely used bonus). All in all, he’s got something going for him in all stages of the game. Love or hate the playstyle, but it is well thought out.
In context of Tatars, I’d find it difficult to think up a strategy with Tatars where you can use all their bonuses to such awesome harmony so consistently.
That’s also a thing. Some civs just have clear gameplans and easy execution. And even if you know how you want to play Tatars and use all their bonusses they aren’t easy to execute to all their strengths. YOu need to adjust your eco to their unique bonusses, you want to get map control to make use of their hill bonus. But then you can’t make use of their booming bonus initially.
They are a civ that’s complicated to master and yet we haven’t found our “tatars hoang” who shows how to combine all their bonusses to great success,
Looks like tatars “bad overall” winrate comes mainly because they suck in arena, hideout and so on. Seems they are quite balanced in the other maps. So the bad overall winrate is maybe deceptive as many of the losses come from these flat closed maps where they suck.
The stats say they are at 47%, and that’s an extremely low sample size of games (under 800) and well within an appreciable range of "this could definitely be noise in the data.
The timeline also shows that they spike to 56% winrate in late castle / early imperial, which is where we expect their powerspikes to pay off. They are far from hurting. “Extremely bad performance” is pushing it.
But if I had to guess: There are no hills on Arena. I was thinking their siege is questionable (it’s actually well above average on reassessment) but really, I’m going to put my expectations for why they aren’t great on Arena firmly on a relatively smooth, relatively slow start compared to the best arena civs, an expensive military to field comparable to other archer civs, a comparably population-inefficient military to field compared to other Cav civs, and their Silk Armor doesn’t help with Hussar raids when the walls are closed.
Well in the overall rankings their best “rank” was 28 and this was the one they got the massive buff they were immediately hotnerfed after, cause they were OP with that buff.
Even there, they didn’t performed in the overall rankings as everybody expected.
So the question remains, why are tatars, a commonly as “a-tier” interpreted civ perform in the stats as a d-tier civ?
You are asking why the general populace doesn’t capitalize on a temporary advantage as well as the best players in the world. The reason they were nerfed as a result was that the players most invested in the success of the game and efficient builds took the time to experiment and immediately make an advantage of the slight edge they were given.
The Tatars, until the very late stages of the game, are all about getting temporary advantages and pushing them. The stats show exactly what I’d expect. They do okay early, they thrive mid, they taper off very late. I don’t see the problem.
Doesn’t explains why they were even 28th in the winrates when they needed to be nerfed.
Also Tatars early game is quite strong. They can make all openers with great success as they don’t need to add as many farms behind. A huge advantage over all the other civs.
Probably Tatars are more equally played across all maps compared to Franks, which are overplayed on maps in which they excel, and underplayed on maps in which they suck.
Example.
A civ is played only on two maps (impossible, but just to keep it simple), one of which accounts for 90% of its total games.
In the first map said civ has 60% win rate, on the second map it has only 30%.
Let’s say # of games disputed is 1000.
First map, 90% (900 games) => 540 wins, 360 losses
Second map, 10% (100 games) => 30 wins, 70 losses
Total wins 570, total losses 430 => overall win rate 57%.
But if we averaged the win rate based on the # of maps it would be only 45%.
See, a massive difference in numbers. Imho win rate should be averaged through the various maps, not just reported as hard total, because some civs are never picked outside random in certain maps, and others are way, way more preferred where they excel, skewing everything.
Once the win rate has been averaged, devs can intervene with balances if some maps present clear disproportions in win rates, in other words if a civ is too much predominant or weak in some map.
Trying to make winrate better as a data point like this has glaring issues. Remember what I said earlier about the scarcity of actual civ matchups. Outside of a select few maps, most maps do not have a statistically relevant amount of games played on them to eliminate noise in the data. Especially given this game is built to create noise in the data. Civ matchups make a huge difference, map spawns make a huge difference, skill of players makes a huge difference, random vs selected civ makes a huge difference.
Stop trying to make Winrate a good metric. It’s not going to be a good metric. The whole point of this thread is to explain all the reasons why, in a way that’s complete enough that whenever another person posts another one of those winrate balance threads I can just paste this instead of having to try to explain why a civ that has 46% winrate is fine.
It’s already happening in this thread with Tatars. Why is Tatar winrate below 50%? Because winrate is a terrible metric for establishing good and bad civilizations generally, and your argument based off it is invalid. posts link. That’s what I want. Call me selfish.
So we need to refer to them anyways. But ofc they can’t be an excuse for random “balance” changes.
I think everybody proposing balance changes needs to bring personal explanation why he thinks these changes would improve the gameplay with and against these civs.
