Clearly the effect of taking favorable fights is more relevant in castle age, where you can add some extra reinforcements or a couple of monks to the fight and significantly change the battle.
In imp, especially when the numbers grow, the armor bonus is more important, I agree.
However I think that +2/2 Paladins with no husbandry makes teutons above average, but not top tier. So, if before we were used to compare teutons with Portuguese or Italians on land… well… now they may seem op. However they are still pretty far from top picks like Chinese. So, if you want to put teutons in they place where they were (just above Koreans/Italians/Portuguese) we need a nerf, maybe just +1/1 from castle age and no bonus improvements in imperial.
However Teutons can stay where they are, closer to, say, huns than what they were before.
I’m not sure they’re not a top pick atm; over a hundred games now, and they’re still reporting in as the highest winrate at 1650+ by a pretty good margin.
And that’s arguably drawn down by their lack of anything good on water maps. If anything, they’ll be better than that in their ideal scenario, which means they’re pretty dang nuts.
I think the teutons having highest win rate last month was because of the small sample size and the hype. If you look at this month it looks completely different. A few exceptional players like Viper or Hera doing more Teuton games than usual can have a high impact on win rate.
If you look at this month:
Saracens with 79% win rate (are they OP? I guess not), Khmer second with 67,3% then Malians with 63% followed by Byzantines with 60,9%. You see what I mean. Teutons are #12 this week with 52,4% in this elo range.
Small sample sizes are not reliable.
That is why I usually look at the 1250-1650 bracket for a larger sample size while still having decent elo players. 1250+ Elo players are around the top 15% as shown by https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/gwg7gm/aoe2_de_stats/ https://aoestats.io/stats/RM_1v1/1250-1650
There you can see that in the 1250-1650 elo range this month Teutons with 515 games played are at 47% win rate and #29 which is really bad. Do they still need more buffs according to that bad win rate? You see what I mean.
I would say we should wait for a while to see where the win rates will settle down. At the moment it doesn’t look like Teutons need a nerf considering these win rates and last month overall from what I remember the Teutons were around 50% win rate. They were only really above average in the 1650+ elo range with a small sample size.
To add an overall rating this month: Teutons are at 49,22% if you take all elo ranges. Thats below average with the accumulated games from this month.
Unfortunately, theorizing does little good in this game. I don’t see particularly high winrate for these civs neither in 1v1 nor in team games. So what’s the objective (i.e. independent on how You feel about the topic) basis for these nerfs? Do Teuton or Khmer outclass every other civ in tournaments?
Teutons are proved very strong by stats (top 5 1v1 win rate for elo >=1200)
the 40% cheaper farms are now likely better than 10% faster farms of Slavs
Teutonic paladins are better than Boyar and generic paladins in most situations (except chasing down fast units)
+1 armor for knight line should be enough IMO, +2 is huge