Aoe4 Chinese Yuan dynasty suggested improvements

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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First off Song dynasty is the most impactful dynasty because it’s the cheapest, you can get it 5 to 6min into the game and it give you access to long term eco by way of faster villager production and granaries. Also being that you no longer LOSE access to unlocked dynasty units and buildings effectively after say 20 minutes of song dynasty double TC, you would have exhaust the full functionality of song dynasty (easily 100+ vils, granaries, zhuge nu unlocked).

Now let’s consider the current state of Yuan Dynasty? The 15% speed has virtually zero economic impact if you already have wheelbarrow, so the speed boost is strictly military, IO and villagers running away from danger. Next in a vacuum fire lancer are niche units with decent function, but they aren’t enough to merit going double castle the way CURRENT Grenadines are worth going double Imperial. Next are pagodas which are DECENT buildings IFFF you can secure 3 relics but again this building by itself nor along with the other perks justify double castle in a 1 v1 match.

I think the issue with yuan dynasty currently is NOT the cost but the IMPACT!! for 1 if you went for an optimal yuan dynasty timing you’d be cutting your song dynasty boom short of 100+ villagers. You could legit hit double castle by 15 to 18min into game. But 15-18min is where most other civs have established themsleves and are nearing some type of power spike and that’s NOT the ideal time for china to effectively be resetting their momentum. Yes some ppl have suggested reducing the cost of yuan dynasty but i rather it remain costly but have a higher impact and here is how:

  1. You can only make a single pagoda that auto generates 75 food, wood, stone every 30 seconds. However for each relic you put in it, up to 3 relics, you get an additional 50 gold per 30s and 25 food, wood, stone every 30s. The idea here is a castle upgraded villager is worth about 50 resources per minute and the pagoda is worth 150 wood, so essentially going yuan dynasty instantly gives you access to a 9 villager’s worth of production for the cost of 150 wood!! Then adding 3 relics gives the standard relic benefits but also 3 more effective villagers per relic for total effect of 18 villagers on food, wood and stone along with standard relic returns!!! This would displace the loss of song dynasty boom!

  2. Permanently unlock the ability to make 2 more Imperial officials. This would synergize well with superivising 2 large mining veins meanwhile supervising your other major income sources AND still be able to collect taxes. And it allow for an even stronger emergency surge of units with 6 production building supervised to effectively be 15 production buildings!!!

  3. Next the Imperial Offical get a wheelbarrow upgrade that takes 30 secs, can be researched from the TC or imperial academy or spirit way. Gives IOs 15% movement speed, 100 more carrying capacity and… 20% bonus on tax collected!! So you’d have an IO collect 80 gold from a mill for example and turn that into 96 gold!! And to address the issue of inefficient capping, the IO will always properly apply the 20% bonus even if it means it has to go over the displayed cap of 140 or 180.

  4. Fire lancers… now in the PUP notes they said they got something in store for them… so we’ll see, but meantime this is my suggestion for the unit as a raider. Bounty!!! Yes give the mongols bounty system to the fire lancer. I’m talking 50 food 50 gold. Make it so if the fire lancer tags the building at anytime and subsequently that building is destroyed, the fire lancer gets the bounty. So now you can make a small raid party of say 4 fire lancers that can rake threw congested woodline, killing easily 4 to 5 villagers then instead of chasing down that 6th villager can turn around and burn the lumber camp and get the bounty. Then run away to raid another exposed camp!!

I believe no one mentioned perk above would be worth double castle even though each are exceptionally improvements compared to current. But the sum total would maintain Chinese castle momentum and be worthy risking the exposure to not having equal army and losing song dynasty privileges. I dare say it might be worth to skip early song dynasty and go fast castle lancer harassment into yuan dynasty!!

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Honestly making the dynasties more impactful can only result in people complaining more and more and eventually getting it nerfed to the ground. The changes you propose are really good because in a normal 1v1 match you will never get to do Song, Yuan or Ming for free so then it makes sense, but then in team games or lower elo games the risk is nonexistent and the reward will be too high.

I’d rather have cheaper dynasties that are very situational so you get rewarded for using them correctly but you aren’t compelled to use everytime. This would also justify buffing the civ so not every match is an uphill battle until the dynasty bonus power spike.
Going a step further i would even suggest making Zhuge nu, Fire Lancer and Grenadier regular units (nerfed of course for balance) and making dynasty bonus specially synergistic with them.

At this point i am even questioning if Song dynasty is worth it because if you want to boom is actually better to go for the second TC, on the other hand if you want to go early aggresion zhuge nu are great but going Song means delaying your attack and your castle age so not really synergistic… Not saying Song is bad but it i just do it because i can instead of doing it to push my gameplan.

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I like it a lot when community comes up way better ways to buff / change china than the developers can and dev vision for the civ is just to trivializes every civs identity till we’re left with this universal civ system where each civ is same with very minor differences.

That being said there is still some things about these suggestions that are not really solving problems.

While this is interesting suggestion it still doesn’t solve the issue with tax system which is the fact that taxes cannot be collected from anything that its not near base. Any proxy production building,resource building, markets, docks etc cannot be collected and this suggestion doesn’t solve it at all.

Buffing IO mobility, carry capacity or cooldown will not solve this. Unless IO can carry all the gold from the building and is literally as fast as horsemen when leaving the base. And this is the issue of taxation system, also it doesn’t solve the fact that IO is more valuable target than villager for raiding and too squishy and needs religious unit to heal it back up. Its far more devastating to lose IO in game than couple of villagers.

Also there is the crucial fact that if building is destroyed all that gold is gone forever. Imagine delhi losing blacksmith and having start over with their research. Its exactly same thing. Just burn down first mill and china might lose 100-2k gold. Great…

We’ve seen what in store means. Last time they talked about dynasties and changing them and all they bothered doing was moving dynasty buildings one age earlier and that china can make dynasty buildings even if in different dynasty if the building was locked. Later is good change but they make it sound like they got great plans but they do absolutely nothing to save the civ. They’re dead set on making china to use universal units with no identity and sit top of walls without creating walls.

I can tell you right now what raiding unit needs to be:

Cheap to make
Easily accessible
Tanky enough to survive arrow fire from TC/towers
Fast
Decent dmg

Lets see what FL is

Expensive
Too hard to get
Squishy
Slow
low dmg

So essentially FL is everything that raiding unit shouldn’t be and it has no usage in any situation and this all comes down again lower elo sanctum of TG players complaining about them getting landmark sniped because scouting, walling etc was too hard for them. Its literally that anything that player doesn’t like to play against has to be nerffed. Relic is dead set on removing every strategy from strategy game as long as lower elo players whine especially if its TG players.

So even with your suggestion it would still impossible to justify making FL. If you’re ahead a lot then maybe but whats the point? Make army and go end game. Mongols don’t really have to do anything to get their raiding bonus. If mongols had to spent 1.8k resources to get the raiding bonus they wouldn’t get it. Its simple as that.

China is only civ that has to build 2 landmarks to get subpar bonuses, bad unique units and bad or subpar unique buildings. Top of that its not just 600, 1800 or 3600 resources thats being spent. Lot of downtime for villagers during the building time which results 2nd landmark being more expensive than the initial cost and in the end the landmarks hardly do anything compared to any other civ.

If give any of the landmarks to any other civ those civs would never make them, because they got far superior options to pick up. So yeah.

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I don’t know why ppl keep making up fake problems??? Did you know you can make an INIFINITE number of Town Centers?? Fun fact late game HRE is well known for making proxy TCs JUST to take advantage of emergency repairs! And given you’ll only have 1-3 drop-off WAAAAAY out from your main, I think you can afford make a proxy TC or two to collect, especially if they implement my idea of letting China have 6 Imperial Officials. So again far drops are not a real issue, PLUS the added speed and carrying capacity speed up all tax collection.

Next there NEEDS to be weak points in each civ, IO SHOULD be high value targets for enemies; and enemies SHOULD be attempting to burn down drop-offs points with lots of taxes?

The cost of Fire lancers is inbetween that of a horseman and a knight? at 160 resources? that’s expensive? It trains as fast as a horseman at 22s. It has the same speed as a knight in the PUP, so you’re saying knights are slow? it’s not tanky as that would make the unit busted; and for the purpose of raiding? how is 20 charge dmg with a 10 dmg splash for 150 degrees up to 1 tile away, followed by horseman melee attack of 11 with delay between standard attacks being 1.62 s, low dmg??

Normally woodline and gold/stone mines are the best scenarios to find villagers bunched up, so much so (esp on wood) that some villagers inhabit the same hitbox (practically). What that means is both units will take the 100% charge dmg from the Fire lancers, which clearly means the 160 resource unit, that moves as fast as a knight, can hit 2+ villagers with full 20 charge dmg causing 40+ dmg to the impact zone then 20+ dmg to nearby villagers? Imagine what 3 to 4 Fire lancers would do in that scenario? 3-4 Fire lancers would kill more bunched up villagers than 3-4 knights in that same scenario mainly b/c the knights would end up overkilling a target or two meanwhile the Fire lancers would splash the villagers to death.

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“fake problems” Are you kidding me? Its not fake problem. Its A FACT. If you don’t understand so basic thing about civ then its good idea not to really talk about changes for the civ. Here lets put you some numbers.

Small gold vein - 400g or 266g
Big gold vein - 800g or 533g
Big tree line - estimation 1035G or 690g
Small stone - 150 or 100g
Big stone - 300g or 200g

Emergency repair is completely different story from tax collection. Emergency repair does not require you to place vulnerable unit in the location and make sure its alive.

As you can see if you start dropping out TC’s everywhere chinese player gets negative value from the bonus. There is no reason to start dropping TC everywhere that costs 600 resources. Yes I can hear you saying now but make sure its in between multiple then its worth. Sure and yet once again it requires vulnerable IO and making sure it stays alive and micro managing over every raid that happens. Its something that no chinese player does because its NOT WORTH. Tell me one pro game where chinese went disgusting amount TC’s to get the taxation gold? There is none. Even with 6 IO’s no one would do it for very minimal gain.

Every game china losses anywhere few thousand to tens of thousands of gold from uncollected taxes and you call this fake problems?!?!?!?! Tell me how much does French save with keep when they build stables around it? I can tell you 20% which is INSANE and only requirement its to build stables and make ponies which they spam like crazy. Or how mongols get 50% more gold, or how delhi saves tens of thousands resources and not single cent given when they pick upgrade just get them instantly. We can continue this list and list goes on and China is basically only civilization that LOSSES their resources and cant utilize them

Yet the fact that IO is slow, vulnerable and has only 75 HP. Easy and best target for any form of raiding and hurts more than losing 3 villagers.

So yeah start dropping TC’s everywhere and see how well it goes for you.

Well do same to delhi then. If blacksmith is destroyed all tech is lost and they have to rebuild blacksmith and start research again. Do same to french if blacksmith is destroyed they lose access to free researchs, have mongols in such way that they have to deliver their raiding bounty back to their starting TC after burning building, Rus shoud lose ability to fish if docks are destroyed. Should I continue coming up more examples?

160 resources + 1800 resources to unlock. No one in right mind goes FL for raiding unit. Too expensive. With just unlock you can create 22.5 lancers which is far better option. Top of that firelancers requires 3 different resources which is worse than 2 resources which again horsemen need food and wood and lancers only gold and food.

On pup sure they’re as fast as lancers. They’re still slower than horsemen and horsemen are better.

Splash dmg is absolutely shit. Whats the point of making horsemen with firelancers when firelancers will drag horsemen to be slower units? There is no point. If FL was viable unit to make why don’t we see them ever made anymore? Because they’re not. They do nothing better than horsemen or lancers.

I can tell you rn if you play against opponent thats not blind you wont get any good splash hits. Its too situational. Might get value might not and most cases against good opponent useless. So no point. As someone that played shit loads of games with FL I can tell you even when they were better they still were bad against anyone with half of brain.

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The more you speak the more it appears you a fraud in the 1 v 1 realm?? a TC cost 700 res, 400w, 300s? maybe a typo?

Next on a map like Hill and Dale where majority of the resources are exposed in the center of map and along the edges, you NATURALLY? make several towers and a few keeps to give vision and a defensive position for your workers to retreat to. So you telling me… real china players would not make a 700 res TC somewhere mid resources in order to NOT idle their tax roaming IO?? A TC that gives vision and defense and tax drop off is a bad idea?? hmm, thx for your opinion, noted…

Don’t be dense… my comparison did not directly compare functionality of emergency repair to the functionality of collecting taxes… but instead?? I corelated how to ACCESS the function of “emergency repair” (build a TC), to how you could ACCESS far taxation via building a TC… So all that other shit you mention is moot.

Again it is of MY OPINION that each civ SHOULD have weakness and I personally WELCOME the idea that the Imperial Official be a high valued target for enemies to SNIPE! I consistently believe in such designs hence why I HATE safe uber resources concept that English and Mongols have, which are anti Risky Expansion RTS playstyle.

HERE you make PAINFULLY obvious, that you can’t even be consistent with your own position?? If the tax far away from the main is TOO LOW for an proxy TC… how is it now you have ten’s of thousands of gold uncollected?? You wouldn’t spend 2min and 700 res in order to collect some of this tens thousands tax?

right…

Next it’s of MY OPINION that other civ bonuses do NOT need to be exact copies of each other, so if French has some strong concept or Delhi or Mongols; they don’t NEED be copied straight across the board; maybe take a lil of this or that and share it between the civs or 2, but these direct comparisons you’re doing of how “this” civ has THAT so we should have…no? We shouldn’t necessarily IMO…

Are you sure you even understand what this thread is about??? Did you even read what I said in the original post??

Okay after revisited what my conclusion was?? AND the fact that this thread is predicated on the IDEA of making Yuan Dynasty worth it? You can’t mention… the 1800 second castle cost as part of the expenditure WITHOUT ALSO considering the OTHER perks I suggested??? Like WTF? bruhh, really?

Hmmm… so everyone else that maybe reading along, go try this FOR YOURSELF AND SEE!! The way this game works the impact zone for fire lancer can potentially hit 2+ villagers with the FULL charge damage. Now whether that is a bug or not IDK, but if you had 3 to 4 Fire lancers charge into a congested woodline or more realistically an exposed gold vein you could EASILY nuke 4 to 5 villagers on IMPACT zone alone, never mind the 50% splash damage that occurs up to 1 tile away from the impact zone within a 150 degree radius. So lets do the math, 4 Fire lancers charge at the same target and each hit that one villager for 21 dmg, then because the game associates the adjacent villagers as being inside the impact zone you also hit at least 1 if not more villagers with that full 21 by 4 dmg, so lets just say 1 other villager take full impact; then because along a gold vein you’ll at minimum have 4 villagers inside 1 tile gathering, the other 3+ villagers will take splash dmg; in this case in the order of 10.5 by 4 (42 dmg). @BdelloidBore5 is trying to convince me, and I suppose others, that horseman would accomplish that raid better? Or knights would do that raid better for the same cost??

Yea, I learn a lot today ty!

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relax, they always like this.
Fl in good old days could kill elite cavalary.
40 vs40 with a little micro, so they still sorry for good-old days, and want to return.

I’m surprised no one asked to return DEMOs

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Typo indeed thank you for correcting me.

Won’t be quoting much in this because you clearly dont understand how much tax is lost.

Play a game count resources you collected and simply use this formula amount of resources / 10 or 15.

From there you can get easily rough estimation how much taxes would’ve been made and now to put perspective. How much gold is actually collected? 10%?

I wonder are you really understanding how things work? Like really? You want to drop of TC at every location to collect the tax? Won’t work. Your resources are very split and optimally you want TC to be near enough so it wont take more than 15 seconds for tax collection to happen. Which is nearly impossible on any map.

I had my first mill contain 3-4k gold when collection time was 30seconds and only 20/40g could be carried. Now its much better, but every resource building will contain the amounts I said and if you think you can afford to start dropping TC everywhere to get 100g benefit then you’re dead wrong.

Then you talk about outposts / keeps. Keeps are getting massive nerf in next patch followed by outposts also gets nerffed. So yes keeps are not worth anymore especially not worth of repairing.

But you wanted riskier bonuses? How else are you going to have riskier bonuses if you cant lose them? Its not copying. ¨

Weren’t you just all about not copy things from other civs and you want to incorporate bounty system on china which suits a lot more mongols than china? “oh yeah but its alright if its the way i say and its only 2 civs” Dude either u copy or u dont simple as that.

50 food / gold. You need to burn down 18 buildings it to pay off the unlock investment and I wont bother even thinking amount of losses when you attempt this. So lets say it goes with par the dmg you guys to opponent but in reality it wont.

Other perks you mean raiding bonus? Yes I considered it and I said what I said with that in mind and its not worth the effort for a unit that is too expensive for the role it needs to fill. If they make it 120 resources like it Used to be and make them as fast as horsemen with bounty. Then yes we have a good suggestion.

1800 to unlock in castle age when ppl start to be aggressive is A LOT to be asked. So GL trying to squeeze that and at that time if opponent notices you go for Yuan they just go for imp themselves and your Yuan does nothing anymore and was wasted effort.

Then the fact that time opponent realizes you invested to FL and it has to deal enough dmg to justify 1800 resources or you threw that away and gave advantage your opponent and even seeing FL might instantly trigger attack knowing that you may not have enough army.

I have played with FL since they were nerffed and they do jackshit. They suck in every way even against villagers… Maybe when you play low elo sanctum where opponent isn’t reacting fast enough you might get good connections but when you play against higher level opponents it becomes harder and harder to get good connection. Which again is too huge of investment in hopes of getting just lucky. Lancers are way safer bet and they have much more value than FL with no additional cost attached to it.

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This is for everyone else to see. I’m playing a custom game just to prove a point of the possibilities of Fire lancers in the PUP right now.

Here is a picture of a game I REALLY WISH YOU ALL GO re-watch the video and analyze for YOURSELF and see! This picture was taken at 5min 47s at 1/4 speed freeze framed the moment that JUST the center 2 Fire Lancer hit their target. What you’ll see once you load in game is that JUST AFTER 2 fire lancers hit their front target that ALL 9 villagers took damage in the order of 21+ damage EACH?? But 2 Lancers heck 5 Lancers can’t hit 9 villagers for 21+ damage, nor can you micro 5 lancers to each hit a different villager unless you a living god??

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Please go into the game yourself ppl and CHECK THIS OUT YOURSELF… The impact zone of Fire lancers is HUGEEE.

Now ideally you won’t have 8+ villagers in a circle like so unless its out in the middle of the no-where gathering from hunt; so more realistically you’ll slap 4 to 5 in a straight line gold vein; or a more juicy bunch of villagers along a woodline inside the same hitbox space. That’s the next thing I’ll attempt to post of a woodline raid.

(again go look the game up yourselves; Mebak public replay, custom China vs Mongol Hill and Dale on the PUP).

EDIT.

This is the next second after all 4 Fire Lancers have hit their respective targets YET none have landed a standard melee attack. As you would see if you check the recording yourself is that each villager has lost at least 42 HP with the 2 indicated targets on my snippet having received 3 direct hits and 1 hit respectively (villager 1 took 3 direct hits and villager 2 took 1 direct hit). Villager 1 has 2 HP left (must be some rounding error? 21x3 + 10.5 dmg?? should be 1.5 HP remaining). Villager 2 has 22.5 HP ( 21 + 10.5x3). The remaining 7 villager have 42 less HP. Again the reality is most ppl don’t research textiles ESP at lower levels so realistically this repeated experiment would have resulted in 2 dead and 7 critically wounded that would be cleaned up in 3-4 seconds. A result of just FOUR Fire lancers?? But this is too weak? too expensive… and Horseman would have done this better…

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So how many villagers did you kill? Also. Good job picking basically the only civ thats gathering sheep under tc at +castle age.

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You’re gonna make a TC that costs 700 resources to collect like 400g, and repeat that for every proxy base? Srsly?

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Nono you got it all wrong. You have to place the tc between nodes so it at least is worth of few hundred gold after several minutes

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The TC doesn’t accumulate tax gold, so its made for the sole purpose of dropping off tax? Unless TC costs like 300 resources, I don’t see the point of dropping them just to collect taxes

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You missed the point bit XD Like Im completely agreeing with you here that only in very rare cases it could be profitable when placing TC close enough to multiple resources but it would take several minutes to pay it off.

But I was just copying responses how it would fix taxation. “just drop TC between multiple resources” which I dont agree at all

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Haha ok, maybe my view is even more extreme in a sense that I see absolutely no way dropping a proxy TC for tax collection is “profitable”, in other words, proxy tax gold is completely wasted atm

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I mean I don’t see it profitable at all either because its too easy to get rid off TC or even gathering building and lose the gold and it puts IO to vulnerable spot. Then the fact that the investment takes too long to pay off. Even if you get very good location with wood, food and gold. 80g per 15seconds 320g per minute so essentially it would take +2mins to pay off. Then the payoff is also a lot less than it would be without TC.

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  • Fire Lancers need to be turned into a viable unit
  • Pagodas need to grant bonus gold like their tooltip suggests (currently grants 0 bonus gold when it should grant 100)
  • Pagodas need to benefit from tithe barns
  • Yuan and Ming Dynasty cost should be reduced
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You and that Bdello guy… No where in the game does it state that relic would naturally generate gold in a pagoda? ITS ONLY on the pagoda itself that it states it generates gold and that is so it can match the effect of it otherwise being in a mosque/church. Why do you keep going around telling this lie over and over and over in each thread you open??? HOw can someone be so obtuse??

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NOTICE NO MENTION OF BONUS… Your mind sees the ‘+’ sign next to the 50 gold and you let your imagination go wild. BUT NOWHERE does it states that Pagoda are among the buildings you can place a relic inside and generate 100 gold/min?

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Again let us read the tooltip of the relic itself?? it states that it generates gold when placed in a mosque or a monastery? I don’t see Pagodas mentioned?

Please stop spreading those lies about gold generation in pagodas…

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A completely different direction in making China holistically better is to have dynasty units be unlock by age (zhuge nu in feudal, fire lancer in castle, and grenadiers in imperial) BUT make each dynasty unit cost more UNTIL, the repective age dynasty is achieved!

Example

  1. zhuge nu cost would be 30 food 30 wood 40 gold, until song dynasty is unlocked and the price returns to 20 food 30 wood 30 gold.
  2. Likewise Fire lancers will cost 130 food 20 wood and 40 gold, until Yuan dynasty is unlocked.
  3. Lastly Gren cost 120 food 60 wood 100 gold until ming dynasty is unlocked

This way instead of the old Spirit Way giving a 30% discount to Dynasty units; the Dynasty itself will grant a discount to respective unit. And if the cost increase isn’t enough of a debuff for NOT unlocking the age then also add time to the que; zhuge nu 20s, fire lancers 30s, grenadiers 35s

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I agree, it would make sense to go for a dynasty if you want to fully commit to a push (e.g. go mass zhuge nu in feudal) but also having the option to make some unique units anyways would make the civ more varied allowing for more interesting army compositions.

Other way to do it would be that the Dynasty upgrades the unit in a visually noticeable way like having the base zhuge nu fire 2 bolts and the dynasty one 3, fire lancers not having extra building damage until dynasty and grenadiers having smaller area of effect until dynasty.