As Franks are most picked TG pocket civ. Maybe a little balancing would be nice for TG, while trying to keep them top tier in 1v1.
Suggestion:
Not a fan of removing blast furnace
They already spam castles like crazy, you want to make them even cheaper? 
Removing blast furnace is a huge nerf to the only thing they got going for them.
Yea no one likes things to be removed so i feel ya.
Other options would be removing Plate Barding Armor or Husbandry, those would make things a lot worse and ruin the civ.
Also there is a simple and bland route to just remove 20% hp buff and give Franks free Bloodlines… but thats kinda boring fix.
You say they already spam castles and then say Blast Furnace is the only thing going for them, those 2 are not related. Also castle discount could be made by split - Castle age -20% and Imperial age -30% discount.
No it is just weird for franks. Franks are “the” paladin civ. And you want to remove one of the important upgrades, making frank paladins worse than teutons, lith, persians, spanish…
It just doesn’t makes sense.
Also the other changes you propose are weird and you didn’t brought up any explanation why you want these weird changes. I don’t get what you want to achieve with these changes.
Just changes to keep Franks viable in 1v1 games, could also be something else.
To keep Franks as “the” paladin civ in TGs but balanced, you’d have to start removing their other buffs:
Franks have way too many non Cavalry bonuses for one-dimensional pure Paladin civ. To keep Franks one-dimensional or not is the dilemma.
Just removing the farming upgrades and buffing their berriees should be enough
Now gonna ask you what kind of games are you playing lol
I’m vocal about nerfing Franks but you suggest ridiculous and arbitrary ways to do it, remove castle discount? Franks already lack bracer. Farm Upgrades? this one dates from AOK, Buffing Foragers? That bonus was nerfed and you want it reverted or even better wtf? Reverting Chivalry and Bearded Axe? LMAO Chivalry is nothing but a broken tech which effect has to go lol.
Buffing foragers to compensate removing free farm upgrades, not having both…
Just removing foragers bonus is a joke and wont change anything.
Am I even saying removing forager bonus??
No, keep the eco advantages but nerf the stupid Imperial Age UT, change the effect (Fallen Knights return 33% of the gold, nerfs them by a lot in TGs but at the same time helps them in 1v1 when the gold starts to run out). Also if you want, the cavalry HP bonus applies in the castle age (Franks will still keep the eco advanatges in feudal, but they won’t have supremacy at scout rushing anymore, and they will have to use such eco advantages to reach castle age sooner as their scouts will fall hard in late feudal).
This would be totally OP on TGs actually.
IMO the best approach is indeed to adjust their eco bonusses - I personally would remove the forager bonus to make it free for other civs and in the exchange give a minimal buff to their lategame cav like cav having 25 % HP in imp. Maybe this could also instead be an adjustment to chivalry - instead of making stables faster Chivalry could give extra HP to their cav.
And TGs: They need an overhaul in general. It isn’t franks or britons fault that there is this stale knight/arche rmeta.
24G per fallen Knight, not even close to what was going to be the Burgundian bonus (50% gold back, and that was a civ bonus so in castle age it started), you need to lose like 3 paladins to get the price of 1 back, also btw in team games there’s trade anyway.
As for 1v1 it will be in Imperial Age anyway, where Franks have poor military units when gold is out. Also, still respects the Chivalry theme of French cavalry if you want to know.
Your wording was like you though i suggested buffing foragers speed back to 25% while not removing free farm upgrades. Maybe i misunderstood.
I do like the Fallen Knight UT, but it should be 20% maybe max 25% not 33%. But as a pure one-dimensional Paladin civ, 1 of the 3 non cav bonuses needs to go. The main Paladin civ having so many non cav bonuses is wierd…
Another thing.
Is it even reasonable to keep a so one-dimensional civ in current well established TG meta - Archers + Paladins in almost every game. To change the TG meta seems a lot harder to do than make one-dimensional civs a bit more flexible but weaker on their main aspect.
Like Briton archers and Frank Paladins.
Well you have to look at the Franks tech tree, outside of paladins, their other military options are very limited, the Infantry is ok but other civs have better barrack units and infantry UUs, their archery range is really poor, siege not spectacular, etc.
Yes i agree with you. That was actually the premise of my topic. How to bring down Frank Paladin spam to level of other top tier pocket civs, so we wont have a clear dominating Paladin civ.
Doing that while compensating them somewhere else to not make them garbage in 1v1. In TG you just spam Paladins as Frank. Nerfing Knight-line spam to match the rest top pocket civs would cripple them in 1v1 as at the moment knight-line spam is their only viable option in 1v1
Spamming knight-line is not nearly as effective in 1v1 as it is in TG.
I totally agree with the Blast Furnace thing, though it won’t work, most people are single dimensional in their approach to the game, they wont accept this change, think that Franks are a Knight civ, which is pretty much dumb-down to this whole strategy game, but okay.
Ig that ES wanted to dumb down the game before it was even released Kappa
Franks are a knight civ though. They are the knight civ. The game doesn’t need to be overcomplicated to be fun.
That’s kind of just a worse thing then Szlachta Privileges. It’s Imp instead of Castle, has a weaker effect, and only applies if the knight dies first. People are typically encouraged to try and keep their units alive, so it seems kind of pointless as a whole. I agree current Chivalry needs a nerf though.
How would one balance TG’s then when there is the archer civ and the knight civ?
By changing the whole TG Archer+Paladin meta would take a lot more time and broken changes before getting it right.