I wouldn’t mind seeing 30% faster techs get bumped up to 40 or 50%.
No civ can even tickle their late-game navy and if you ask the AI to make a lot of ships in treaty you can actually have a lot of fun. I always make 30 Galleons, 30 Caravels and 20 Cannon Galleons from 8 docks as Portuguese.
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I’m a fan of giving skirmishers +2 bonus damage vs cavalry, it’s rather historically accurate given it’s what happened at Aljubarrota when Portuguese skirmishers decimated a larger Castilian cavalry army by entrenching themselves in the mud, and it buffs feudal age archery range play. The gold bonus pushes portuguese players to focus on archers rather than skirmishers, and I think this could offset that and push them towards a better army comp. That way skirms still don’t counter cavalry, but it means that they force a cavalry player to think twice before engaging skirms. It would also buff portuguese against the Berbers and Huns and mean they would have a very good answer to cav archers.
Perhaps the bonus could be +1 in Feudal/ +2 in Castle to make it more balanced, but from a historical and gameplay point of view I would love this change.
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squires are nice, i like infantry.
maybe lose final archer armor? they cant be king everywhere!
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That’s the point of Portuguese though. Not as good at archers as Mayans. Not as good at cavalry as Berbers. Not as good at infantry as Teutons.
But still, pretty good at both cavalry and archers. You can make whatever your opponent is worst against. And if you can survive long enough (eg by counting whatever your opponent is doing) you win via Feitoria. Portuguese is one of only 2 civs I’d pay as a “flexible” civ.
Except you can’t really go infantry. Which means there are some strategies which you can’t answer to with the appropriate counter unit.
It somewhat spoils the concept for me.
Looking at the stats, it’s really not like Portuguese are in danger of being too strong after the mere addition of squires.
Archers? Yes. Cavalry? No.
No Hussar or Paladin and no bonus to Cavalry whatsoever.
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not a lot of ways to buff them without making them overpowered in teamgames
would have to do something like “lumberjacks don’t require buildings to drop off wood. lumberjacks work 5% slower for each ally you have”
FU light cav and discounted FU cavalier isn’t bad. For 1v1s lacking hussars isn’t ideal but not having access to paladins isn’t a huge deal
Neither of those are FU, as FU stands for Fully Upgraded, which means they would have ALL standard upgrades, including Hussar and Paladin.
A Gold discount on Cavalier is not that great, a Food discount would have been much better. Gold discounts help Archers and Ships more than anything else.
Portuguese are completely fine now, no more buffs please
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It’s clear that I meant that their light cav and cavaliers have all stable and blacksmith upgrades, you can question about the definition but it’s not a bad stable.
Maybe from a strictly eco perspective a food discount might be better, but having gold discount has nice advantages… You need to put less villagers on gold to sustain production, you can make gold units for longer time, you have less urgency to expand eco to new gold mines potentially hard to secure… And this bonus is really flexible because it applies to a variety of unit (archers, cavs, siege, monks), which all transition well in imp due to portuguese flexible tech tree.
It is not a good Stables either.
He also implied that it is better than their Barracks, which it is just not. Halb + BBC is way better than Cavalier or Light Cavalry, even without Squires.
Portuguese are one of those civs where you only Stables for Knights, because it all ages pretty badly later on.
I understand most AoE II lingo but what does BBC mean?
It means Bombard Cannon.
Why are there two B’s then?
Because “Bombard” is a composite word, so it is technically 2 words.
-Bombus- Latin for Bomb
-Barde- Old French for to throw, to carry
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Portuguese definitely still need something. Chinese and Huns are the gold standards for solid flexible civs. The Portuguese are flexible but are still not very solid as they fall behind too much. The stats are pretty telling. They average 45-46% win rate across all elos. I think the 30% tech speed bonus should be 50%. Then can reassess.
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This is balanced, believe it or not. It means they have close to 1 in 2 chances of winning a match.
I think depends how you set the threshold to define “good”
45% win rate civ going up against a 52% win rate civ is a pretty massive difference in win percentage. I wouldn’t call 7% difference balanced especially when it comes to big money tournaments. Ideally the devs shouldn’t stop balancing civs until they can get to as close to 50% overall win rate as possible. Now the individual civ match up rates will vary which makes the game interesting but overall it should be 50% and the devs shouldn’t be satisfied until they can reach that.