A pretty wild suggestion for Slavs

So Kremlin and Strelet seems to weak according to the feedback, I will change some stats

Kremlins
Why I love this idea:

  1. It’s an indirect eco bonus, much more inspiring than another “50% wood reduction cost to all eco techs” kind of what our beloved develoeprs like to do.
  2. Slavs are indeed very boring to play, especially in this post-AOE era of gimmicks and clownery designs.
  3. This change actually encourages a non-meta play, perhaps a heavy Boyar strategy.
  4. No civ has an upgrade to their Castles that is beyond just some tweaks to their stats.
  5. It’s great for civs who lack Bracer / Ranged Unique Unit, since it won’t be abusable on closed map like Arena, where a Castle drop is a real threat there.

Why this change is impossible to implement:

  1. Slavs already have arguably one of the strongest eco bonuses in the game, encouraging heavy stone play will just lead to a mass TC’s into a defensive Castle, an awfully boring game. This concept of an economical Castle Defence approach would fit civs who lack any eco bonus to begin with.
  2. There is no practical meaning to this tech but boom if it doesnt affect the offensive usage of Castles, it needs to have a hidden bonus damage vs. Buildings and Castles in order to have some sort of versatility offensively. In a Castle vs Castle situation you’d rather go Imp, this tech offers no alternative, Castles are quite indifferent towards one another, this tech can change it.
  3. You better be more minimalistic and therefore accurate with the purposefulness of your ideas, having +15 armor, +400HP and +2 range is too little to change anything, feels more like a late-Imp university tech that you’d go for only if you have inflation of resources. You rather want the Castle to proffesionalize in one aspect of it (again, if you dont want it to end up as just another bulky TC that costs tons, boom-fest gimmick), a good example will be Crenellations, since all Castle bonuses were already taken you chose to just give them a little in each and some Boiling Oil feature to sum it up. I think you can do better.
  4. It’s going to be quite disguisting to deal with the training point of this new building, will it be able to select a resource of our choice? Vills would be able to drop res there?
  5. Castles that are busy pumping Vills out of it, won’t be able to actually deliver Unique Units into the game, it would be more worthy to go for the generic Knight play, which is the opposite we want in this game.

*Upgraded HC would just make Slavs another copy-paste generic Knight civ just like Franks, Burgundians, Teutons, Persians, Spanish etc… That just have HC to cover their Knights as their go to composition, and overall the idea of filling gaps in tech tree always leads to a complete havoc of diversity.

*Monks having 1/2 or 2/3 armor looks good, but practically the melee armor makes no relevancy, Scout will needs 5 hits to take down a Monk with or without the armor, same goes for the 3 hits Light Cav needs and the 5 hits that Knight needs. So why would you bother?
Again the principle of identity relies on proffesionalizing of a feature, how about 0/3 and 0/4 armor (pierce only), or rather a whole unique feature that makes ranged units 40% chance to miss their attacks while being converted. This would actually impact the playability drastically.

If the Kremlin is going to be a combination of Castle and TC, it should instead have shorter range, cheaper cost and lower HP than Castle. Maybe 9 or 10 range, 300 wood 300 stone, 3500 HP, 4×4 tiles.

Moreover, it should be more appropriate as a new unique building to replace the common castle, just like the Donjon replaces the common tower for the Sicilians. The castle is tough enough and there are not many, it doesn’t need an “upgrade”.

Tbh Slavs suffer agaisnt CA and sometimes archer balls if they don’t get the SO out, not against infantry.

Also Strelets are a thing of the 16th century which isn’t quite what AoE2 encompasses.

If they were a not upgraded version, just a regular gunpowder skirmisher, I think they would make more sense. Also because Slavs get full archer armor and no Thumb Ring.

A gunpowder skirm that was either super strong, or costed no gold.

16th century is also covered in AOE 2 tho (Conquistador, Winged Hussar)…

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I want to like this, but Slavs really do not need any buffs.

Honestly Slavs are along with Magyars in the category of “below average and boring but not bad enough to be offensive”. Honestly I dont like either of them unlike other cooler low B-tier arabia civs like Bohemians

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Tbh I think people are often unfair to Slavs. Sure their bonuses aren’t screaming “innovation” but sometimes it’s good to have simple, reliable stuff. Also their siege bonus is criminally underrated, don’t you hate it when you need a mangonel but you have to spend 10 seconds spamming the button while waiting for the missing res to come in? I sure do, and Slavs help with that.

I guess people find Slavs boring cuz they remember it as that one civ that got its main bonus nerfed and whose UU is just a paladin from castle. Surely they must have been more popular before DE.

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Definitely agree here. Slavs have a lot of food intensive they can use. In fact they do have a decent tech tree only really lacking ranged units and gunpowder. Even going skirms in castle age or super late game can make sense as you can really spam these with your farming bonus. And while khmer farmers might be somewhat faster early on, at the point where players researched wheel or handcard slavs farmers are way better as their bonus isn’t diminished by these techs. Cheaper siege is really strong for all in castle age pushes with knights siege. Late game you have hussar and halbs. Also their champs are great for different reasons (eco bonus, free supplies, druzinha). So while they might not excel in any unit type apart from champs I guess they don’t have obviou weaknesses. That makes them way more interesting than a lot of these one trick cav or archer civs imo.

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