You want motivations? Ok let’s give you motivations:
Archers move 10% faster: they can easily dictate fight against other ranged unit and micro better against basically everything. It’s way too much considered how strong ranged unit already are.
Archers have 0 frame delay: well, let’s give them a machine gun then 11. If you don’t see why this is op…
Archers negates skirmisher weakness: a unit should never negates the bonus a counter has against it, it would be game breaking
Archers gain +1 against archers every age: you are giving way too much edge in archers fight this way. The other player has to mix in skirm, that will do 0 damage to an eventual cavarly meatshield, while you xbow will still do something to them
Swapping between armor when depending on the target armor: again, you are destroying the counter system this way
Giving bonus damage to cavarly to arbs: no. They are easly massed and it would make them impossibile to engage in castle age, while also destroying the uniqueness of their UU
Archers do trample damage: this is op by definition. Give them this in the current drush fc meta and watch a batch of xbow destroy everything thanks to it
Archers get huge antisiege bonus: you really don’t like counters. Once again, way too strong to be on a archery range unit who can be easily massed and it’s already solid in castle and imp. At least the mangudai are locked behind a castle and they reach their full potential after a lot of techs.
This might be brainstorming, but so many of these bonuses cannot even be closed to be considered a minor buff and you should know it
ranged balance is much more delicate though, there’s ultimately a limit to how many melee units can target attack a single unit. Ranged attacks are completely different
Frame delay is limited for archers, so not sure how big is this. If zero is too much, maybe a 50% reduction may be better
+1 per age is a lot actually, but maybe just a flat +1 can work. It would be still worse than Ethiopians, or at least more situational. For instance it is usles vs cavalry.
Not sure on this. Italians seem to be designed in that way. Archers good vs cavalry, infantry resistant to gunpowder. I have not written a number about of hidden armor, but I think that a right balanced bonus this way fits very good the idea of the civ.
I am sorry, I was meaning anti siege armor bonus. Like you survive one more onager shot. I wrote the bonus in the wrong way, my bad!
I also think that extra attack on archers may become too strong, since they are easy to mass. Maybe it could work if it was just GC, but then GC becomes a do-it-all unit.
For archers and GCs only. It is similar to cumans, where the training time buff affects only one unit per building (which is not the case for instance of hun/briton team bonus).
+1 attack would be a huge boost, though frankly, given the nature of Pavise, i think if Italians do get a bonus, it should be more Armor, seeing as they tend to lean towards defense. if anyone should get extra attack, i’d lean towards Tatars or Cumans if they needed it.
While personally I would like such a powerful bonus on a weak civ like the Italians, I also think that there is the risk of abuse it, since xbows can be easily massed, so even just a +1 attack can be stack it up pretty quickly and it could potentially snowball out of control.
Though, we also have to consider that all other archers civs (and some non-archers civs too) have better eco bonus and so they can field more units, so +1 attack could potentially compensate that, but also +1PA could do that as well.
Yes, I disagree with most of those too, but there are more polite ways of expressing personal opinions.
However, among those there were some that were good ideas, like free armor or +1PA, and some that risks to be borderline OP, but still deserve and analysis since they aren’t that crazy, like faster speed or more attack.
Xbows already have a low frame delay, so there isn’t a lot of margin, it would be either meaningless or OP.
Italians already negate cavalry and siege weaknesses with GC and cheaper BBC, and they still have their FU skirms for skirms wars, giving them more resistant to archer counters would be too much.
Not sure that italians have the eco to sustain a faster xbows production from ranges.
Pf so they become op again on all maps + unbeatable on hybrid… Persians are more or less fine now and with the pathing improved I predict they will be a very decent pocket civ
I think next year NAC and HC should ban being able to pick the same civs that they did this year.
I’d also like to see a tournament where the most common races were banned outright.