Eh not agreeing with just copying the Russian mechanic, I’m not even agreeing with removing or changing the banner army mechanic (I don’t play the Chinese often enough to have an opinion), but I don’t think any civ identity should be considered so good that it can never be changed, especially not the Asian civs.
I get that some people grew up with them and are nostalgic, but they’re convoluted and have a lot of the same problems that people complain about in newer civs. Like reusing assets.
It’s not like people are asking for changes just to be contrarians.
Honestly, the Chinese civilization needs a rework regarding its military units. Most are stuck in the 16th or 17th century; practically no unit adopts 19th-century attire upon reaching the Imperial Age—even though the Chinese civilization is based on the Qing Dynasty. This is yet another reason why a Chinese military overhaul wouldn’t be such a far-fetched idea. It might be possible to retain some original units by giving them a more modern look in the Imperial Age, while other units—such as arquebusiers, steppe horsemen, and meteor hammer troops—should likely be replaced entirely, all from a logical and historical standpoint. Additionally, incorporating the Self-Strengthening Movement would be a great addition, allowing for a more contemporary Chinese army that reflects the era of the Opium Wars and the Sino-Japanese War.
Yes but there are difference between core mechanics and features around them.
Villagers being trainable during ageing up is a core mechanic, the Wonders are features built on that. No matter how the Wonders are going to be changed or replaced, Villagers have to still be trainable during ageing up.
The banner army mechanic is core to the civ. As I said, the entire balance of the civ is based on it. If you remove it, the civ would need a complete rework on stats. If anything, a possible replacement for it should only be in the later game, exactly because the limitation from the mechanic is less significant to the civ’s late-game balance. On the other hand, replacing certain units, techs, or cards is fine as they’re leaves and branches instead of roots and stems to a civ.
Good morning man! Or good day wherever you live I guess. I really love discussing stuff with someone who is knowledgeable, but please just leave this personal stuff out, like “it’s a diffcult civ, civ design is not your style…”; “you don’t seem to care about core identities…”. This is kinda getting boring and repetitive - accusing me of personal attributes, that is.
Now back to the arguments.
Okay, you say Chinese need to be relatively weak early, sure fair enough. But your argument has a major flaw. You mention their strong economy, sure Chinese can have a good late game economy, but thats binded to them simply by using rice paddies with a lot of possible eco cards while also possible access to a factory and smaller trickle techs. That’s a lot of possible in my opinion, and not certain at all.
It’s like saying a civilization can’t be rebalanced for Supremacy because they get too many resources in a 40-minute Treaty match. No game ever should balance early-game production around late-game potential that hasn’t happened yet.
As for cheap units giving them a solid late game—no, cheap base stats don’t scale well into Age IV and V on their own. If by “solid late game” you’re referring to cards like Old Dynasty Reforms, then while that card is strong, relying on a single card to make a faction viable is poor design. It’s the exact definition of a balance crutch.
But how is forcing resource waste and idle training time mild in any pvp game?
Consider this standard early game scenario: My opponent plays a civ that drops a forward Barracks and queues up pure Musketeers or Crossbowmen (paying 375f/125c or 200f/200w), with the crucial advantage that they can queue more individual units as they get resources.
To counter that, I build my own xbow and queue a batch, but because I don’t have the full 255f/180w upfront, I have to idle my production building and wait. Once both buildings finish training, my opponent has 5 specialized units designed for his push, while I have 3 Crossbowmen and 3 Pikemen. I have effectively paid for 3 units I didn’t need in that specific engagement.
And this is not just a limitation on their early game, but mid game too, It’s not like you magically have unlimited ressources when you hit the 15 min mark.
Look, you’re acting as if batch production strictly belongs to Russia, and the Banner System to China, when in fact both empires during that time had a similar solution to the exact same problem.
They were both massive land empires in Eurasia that shared long borders and had to defend thousands of kilometers of wilderness against mobile steppe nomads. That all demanded huge, cheap standing garrisons produced en masse at regional outposts.
I.e. both the Qing Dynasty and Tsarist Russia created standing army systems to field huge forces, and batch production just kinda shows how both empires did that.
Why not let it be reflected in the way they play too? Just because one of them counts as a European civ and the other as Asian, they can’t share the way they build infantry?
Sure, fair enough, sounds cool.
While a heavy cavalry unit dies to light cav and heavy Inf, but I get your point.
Yeah, depending on the situation, you might not really need the units. But that’s what this civ is all about. You knew it before you play it. If you can make good use of the banner armies, you’ve mastered this civ. When I watch players who are good at this civ, I find that the resources and training time aren’t totally wasted at all.
The Germans force me to spend extra XP on population that I don’t even need. But players who know how to play the Germans well make good use of those Uhlans, even when they don’t actually need them.
You literally think making them trained individually in batches is balancing?
The units would have to be more expensive or weaker, since you can mass them without having to invest in other units. Otherwise, their early game could be broken. Once the stats of all the units are adjusted (assumed they can indeed be adjusted well), their Treaty game could also change quite a lot. On top of that, being able to mass-produce a single type of unit in team games makes their gameplay very different.
That would make the civ completely different in terms of gameplay. Put aside the balance issues, they wouldn’t play like the Chinese anymore. They’d lose their identity, no longer special and unique.
It’s about game design, not history. A civ needs to have its own unique identity.
If the Chinese or Russians were new civs that were still being designed, then yeah, they might be fine sharing the same training mechanics from the beginning. But they’ve been established civs for nearly two decades now, so doing that way would simply reduce their uniqueness and make them not that fun and interesting even if they might be stronger or balanced.
Personally i think the selfstrengthening movement should be an option for the chinese consulate. It would work a bit like the basilica does for the italians for modern units.
I get what you mean, but it’s like being proud of being able to navigate a faulty system, instead of fixing the underlying issue. I’m not spamming all these messages because im a change enthusiast, some posts earlier I even defended it. I still adore it, simply not in a rational way
And the German shipment design is sadly still a different mechanic. You get “free” extra uhlans with every shipment, essentially increasing the powerbudget each shipment brings, the disadvantage is that you start ahead of the XP curve. Swap it with the bannersystem and ask pros if they’d still think that Germany is a highly competitive civ with good mechanics
Yes, I believe it makes balancing much simpler. When two unit types are locked into a single batch price, you can’t tweak the cost of one unit without unintentionally buffing or nerfing the other. Unbundling them lets the devs balance each unit independently with less unintended side effects.
Again yes you’re right to point that out, I took the simple route and just adjusted the costs, so their cost to stat ratio fits their european counterparts.
Obviously China shouldn’t be able to produce them singularly but in batches of ~5 so you would need to add these numbers up. Also Ignore the Changdao for now, it would need to lie between more being a pike unit than halberdier. So it probably needs a modifier change besides cost/stat.
the Chu Ku Nu and Qiang Pikeman are very simple to adjust, the new Ying Marksman is obviously debatable if he should cost mainly food or coin, but something in that price range would fit his current stats.
Yes, with all the other changes that could compound, their treaty would perhaps need a tweak, but fixing the underlying issue would make it way simpler to handle that.
Now don’t hate me for saying that, but isn’t this literally how every other civ builds units?
Nah balance would be way easier as there are more levers to pull. Again, gameplay would simply be like every other civ. They’d lose their identity, hmm perhaps
Yeah obviously the easiest would have been releasing them in a better designed way from the start. That’s the bigger issue—people, me included, are so nostalgic about the things we have, that we simply ignore how bad these legacy mechanics actually are in practice.
But it isn’t a faulty system. In fact it is a very well designed system and one of the main things that makes China fun and unique while also being grounded in history. I actually think similar concepts would work well for other civs too. For example, the Aztec Nobles Hut could be interesting if it trained the “knight” units with a retinue of commoner units. There are some issues with China but you have not correctly identified them, and many could be solved by expanding the banner system, not by scrapping it.
You’re suggesting Russian style batch training which has the exact same issue. Russians actually have it worse because they don’t have cheap Villages that make it trivial to maintain population space.
You’re right 5 musks will kill an Old Han Army because they aren’t specialized enough so pure heavy infantry is a weakness of banner armies (though the trade is pretty close on a cost basis). But you’re forgetting that China doesn’t only have banner armies. One Flamethrower will clean up 5 musks with ease. 2 Steppe Riders will kill 5 xbows so if they’re coming at you with pure light infantry you only need half a banner army to fight that.
There are some unit compositions where the banner system doesn’t give enough flexibility to respond such as those with lancer type units. Since they hard counter infantry, half your anti-cav from your banner armies gets chewed up so you can’t trade effectively. But the solution to that would just be to add an additional banner army to close the gap there. Could do something like a Manchu Banner that consists of 2 Manchus and 2 Keshiks to give a pure light cav option.
There’s also serious benefits to the banner system you haven’t considered. In general it makes China more flexible because they can train both infantry and cavalry from a single building. So while in some cases your unit composition might not be completely optimal, you’re doing so from a starting point of saving 200 wood on a production building. In my opinion this is a big enough advantage to warrant War Academies being more expensive, and also the Blockhouse should be limited to only Castle units so China actually has to build a War Academy (though I would pair this nerf with a buff in other areas).
Buffing China can be done without completely gutting their core mechanics. My understanding is that at high levels, cards that one would think are integral to their play like Northern Refugees are just too low opportunity cost to be worth it, so those types of cards could be buffed slightly. Maybe it could be buffed so the TC spawns a Villager and a Goat, or even 2 Villagers to make the card more enticing. That would be a solid boost to China’s eco.
What he’s talking about is the Liaodong/Guanning Tieqi. They were armoured Ming cavalry equipped with a san yan chong. The guns were very difficult to reload on horseback so they’d just fire off a volley while charging in and then use the heavy metal barrels as a mace so they’d make sense as a heavy cavalry with a ranged charged attack. I’d say that’s reasonably close to the function of Meteor Hammers and a lot cooler looking than a guy with a lance. The charged attack would just need to deal siege damage or have a big multiplier vs artillery to fit the same role.
If forcing two distinct unit roles into a single batch cost were such superior design, why hasn’t any other civ adopted it? Suggesting we impose this system on Aztecs highlights why it fails—it strips away situational adaptation and prevents players from training the exact counter unit their game state requires.
Also, please specify which “issues of China” I failed to identify, because expanding the banner system will only bloat the UI of the military buildings, without actually fixing the fundamental issues I now mentioned multiple times.
Russia’s system is completely different. Russia trains single-role batches. When Russia needs anti-infantry, 100% of their investment goes into anti-infantry. China locks up 435 resources for a 50/50 Old Han split, forcing you to pay for melee anti-cav even if the opponent brought zero cavalry. Or do you perhaps mean something completely else?
Conveniently forgetting to mention that Russia gets +5 pop from their blockhouses, which also happens to function as an outpost on top of passive pop-scaling techs. You do realize that there already are mechanics in place to sustain their higher use of pop space.
So you recommend if my enemy happens to use Infantry that I simply build artillery instead of using my conventional infantry means
Again, there is already an Army called Mongolian Army. Basically instead of fixing the fundamental flaw of this training system you want to bloat the whole system even more by adding a double light cav comp. Not even talking about the fact that you consider fielding the Keshiks alongside the Manchu. Please bro, do you not realize the problem of your own arguments?
Okay, while the african civs do literally the same while not being forced into specific army compositions. Perhaps give them the bannersystem too?
The current African civs literally train infantry, and cavalry units from a single building without forcing players into locked, mixed army compositions. If single-building production is such a game-breaking advantage that it requires forced mixed batching as a drawback, should we make their War Camps more expensive too and with it also force the Banner system onto the African civs?
I could go on, but it’s clear your suggestions weren’t thought through from a competitive standpoint. Re-read the arguments already made in this thread. If there is an actual mechanical counterpoint I missed, feel free to bring it up. But keeping a fundamentally flawed batch system around simply because you think it’s fun, unique, and “grounded in history” isn’t a valid balance argument.
Also, do you honestly think a real historical army fielded literal unalterable “buy 3 Skirms + 3 Changdao” bundles?
They’re a little bit slow off the get go and they are vulnerable to some unit compositions like lancers. The banner system is a feature, not an issue to be fixed. Do you see anyone here agreeing with you?
No it isn’t. Both have a big upfront cost. You’re suggesting to use the Russian system of block training single units but that doesn’t help with the upfront cost at all.
China gets one too, big whoop. +5 doesn’t get you another Strelet batch, you effectively have to build a new house for each batch or wait until you take enough losses and forgo the numbers advantage.
Flamethrowers aren’t artillery, but yeah, that is an option.
I said Manchu, not Mongol. Who cares if there’s already a Mongol Army?
The fundamental flaw is a weakness to lancer type units because all anti-cavalry banners come with heavy infantry or Steppe Riders (which are anti-infantry focused and weak to other cav). Giving a 2 light cav banner fixes that issue.
Let’s use the same example you used with China. Imagine you’re Ethiopia and your opponent is rushing you with pure Musketeers. What unit are you making from your War Camp to hard counter that? You can’t, because the Africans have the drawback of lacking a full roster of units at the War Camp in age 2. You need to use natives and outlaws to supplement. Later on they have the drawback of bundled upgrades. If producing suboptimal units along with what you actually want gets you so riled up, then saving up for an expensive upgrade for units you never use should set you off too.
What is the flaw? If you’re able to counter what your opponent throws at you using it then it is balanced. The one case of lancers that it isn’t adequate is fixable with one new banner. This is just a you problem. Literally no one else agrees that this is an issue.
Please do yourself a favor and look that up: Argumentum ad populum.
You’re ignoring the actual problem. Nobody is complaining about upfront costs being the actual issue—we are talking about forced composition waste.
Yeah, but you get literally every other batch out of it, not to mention sending/building cavalry. And are you seriously arguing that this together with building two houses is worse than building a normal barracks and a village?
I’m aware it has a different name, but my point was that we already have a cheap light cav banner. Suggesting a new banner made out of two light cav units is just openly admitting the exact core issue I’ve been talking about this whole time—that forced mixed batches don’t work and you need single-type production to respond properly.
You’re moving the goalposts from production mechanics to specific unit matchups.
Whether Ethiopia fights Musks with Gascenya, Shotels, or Javelin Throwers in Age II is completely irrelevant to the actual point: when an Ethiopian player queues a unit, they get 100% of the unit they selected.
They aren’t forced to waste half their resources on unwanted, dead-weight units just to get the counter they need on the field. China’s Banner system forces that resource lockup on every single batch. You’re arguing about roster composition to dodge the fact that locked 50/50 production is a mechanically flawed way to queue troops.
I’ll spell it out for you: the flaw is forced resource waste. Paying for 3 useless units every time you need 3 counter units isn’t balance—it’s an arbitrary tax. And hiding behind “nobody agrees with you” is an appeal to popularity, not an argument.
It has always been about specific unit matchups. Why do you have such a hard on about making one specific unit type at a time? Because you need that specific unit type to counter what your opponent is making. But you can absolutely still do that with China.
If the units you produce are adequate for the matchups you face then there is no issue. If you face regular heavy cav, nothing produced from the Ming Army is a waste. If you face light cav, nothing in the Territorial Army is a waste. If you face light infantry, nothing in the Forbidden Army is a waste. If you face heavy infantry, you’ve got Flamethrowers.
Lancer comps are a gap that I think needs to be addressed. But most civs don’t have dedicated lancer units so an army that deals with that could be gated behind a card. Unless there are other unit compositions that banner armies (or Chinese artillery/siege) can’t deal with then the issue with banner armies is minimal.
The paired units are sometimes suboptimal, but never useless. Most of the time there is a banner where both units are a counter and even if not they still contribute to the fight or can be separated out to go raid or siege.
Games don’t happen in a vacuum. Opponents don’t politely fight in fixed 50/50 ratios, nor do armies die in perfect 50/50 sync. If the opponent goes 80% heavy cav and 20% skirmishers, or if your anti cav units get focused down first, you don’t need a forced 50/50 batch—you need to replenish specific front line counters. Forcing China to over-queue excess backline units just to get front-line mass isn’t “adequate,” it’s completely unadaptable micro-economics.
If you’re forced to send half your batch off to “go raid” because they’re useless in the main fight, you just lost half your army value in that engagement. That’s literally the definition of forced inefficiency.
Telling someone to “self-reflect” isn’t a mechanical argument. You’ve just completely run out of points to defend forced mixed batching.
Apparently we’re not on the same page, thanks for your time on this topic. However please stop responding to it if possible - if that’s all you gonna do. Have a good night
In AoE2, the Chinese civ starts the game with no food and reduced wood in exchange for extra villagers. Less experienced players can easily mess up their opening because of the lack of resources, and even with the extra villagers, they can end up falling behind economically. More experienced players, on the other hand, know how to manage their limited starting resources and make good use of the extra villagers, which can give them a very strong economy.
Basically, everyone recognizes this as a challenging design with a high learning curve that players have to overcome. But I don’t think anyone would call it a faulty system.
Throughout the entire franchise, the Chinese civs in AoE2 and AoE3 aren’t the only civs where requires players to learn and adapt more. Having a learning curve doesn’t mean the system has a underlying issue.
Looking at your math, I just feel like the civ would become boring.
Again, the Chinese are unique because of that mechanic, and their current balance is built around it. If you remove it and make them more like every other civ, you’re just making them more boring and potentially creating new balance issues.
Why hasn’t any other civ adopted it? Because it’s the core identity of the Chinese civ! Even if it’s an incredibly successful and brilliant design, they wouldn’t share it to other civs.
Exactly! That’s what I mean by Handcannon Cavalry.
Guanning was the garrison where these cavalry units were stationed, and Liaodong was the region where the garrison was, so having a unit with that name show up in Florida or the Gold Coast might be a little awkward. I think Handcannon Cavalry as a more generic name is good enough. And if we assume there would be an infantry in the future using a three-eyed gun (san yan chong), it’s fine for the cavalry to equip a larger-caliber, single-barrel hand cannon instead. Chinese hand cannons weren’t always three-barreled anyway.
That’s what I had surmised. But even the descriptions of them fighting in southern China and Burma that I read referred to them as the Liaodong or Guanning iron cavalry as that’s where they were originally recruited and trained. There are also a lot of other units named after places (Barbary Corsair, Vistula Legionary, Sennar Horseman, etc) so that wouldn’t be a huge deal. Simply calling them Tieqi or Iron Cavalry also works too. The only issue there is that name is pretty similar to Iron Flail.
The name hand cannon has very archaic connotations though. And the three eyed gun seems like it is kind of important to how they fought. The triple barrel looks like it would have more heft to it for use as a club and it would be way harder to reload than a single barrel, necessitating the melee switch.
Even if there were an infantry version with three eyed guns the use of the weapon is pretty different because the cavalry can’t really reload and mostly just uses it as a mace. It is also way less likely to get an infantry version as it would have to be a kind of musk and you couldn’t easily fit that into China without substantial reworks. But replacing a couple of the most fantastical Chinese units like Meteor Hammers and Flamethrowers with similar functioning units like Tieqi and Rocket Pods is more likely in my opinion.
