When the best players in the world commonly share the opinion that Bulgarians are 100% unplayable on Arabia -> Bulgarians have a problem in this game!
While almost all Civs were seen in the drafts of the KotD3 Tournament, Bulgarians remain at 0% pick and 0% draft rate.
They only have 2 good bonuses going for them:
free MAA at the start of feudal
powerful Kreppost pushes
However, the early MAA became completely predictable and Kreppost rushes only work if you have a little bit of map control (and not completely lose the early game).
But right now Bulgarians have very bad cards at winning the early game / map control!
After the MAA:
you can go Scouts, which is very awkward as you just spend your food on MAA. Its not a great scout rush and delays your castle time even further -> not worth it
you can go for Archers -> horrible option as you don’t go to gold with the 20pop MAA build order. Also the archer become completely useless in castle age without Xbow upgrade…
you can play defensiv with Skirms -> and completly give up map control which you need in early castle for your Kreppost Rush…
All options you can choose will lead you to loseing the game IF you play against an equally skilled opponent that has a civ with actually decent bonuses!
-> therefore we see 0 Bulgarian picks at the high level.
We talked about buffing there Siege or wood income before but that won’t tackle their real issue of already losing when reaching castle age.
My suggestion:
Give them free Bloodlines!
(Or if that is too strong, make it only cost a small amount of food (50,75 or 100) and no gold. )
Yes, that is a powerful tech, but consider this:
going MAA into feudal and then going Scouts hurts you food eco a lot. The Scouts you produce need to be viable for this to make sense!
you still lag behind in Scout numbers compared to other scout civs like Mongols/Lithuanians!
-> when you go 21pop into Scouts while your Mongol/Lithuanian opponent goes 18pop into Scouts they can have the standard 6 Scouts on the field before you produced your first one!
What this bonus would means for your opponent: He/she actually need to use their scouting SKILLS to find out if you are going MAA or straight Scouts!
Also: going full scouts could become a viable strat again (with Bulgarians). Right now it’s dead…
What do you think?
(Update on the discussion -> see comment 96)
The current meta of KOTD3 is Knights and crossbow, add some Camels and monks or Mangonels behind. Or some Elite Skirms to counter many xbows.
Obviously Bulgarian missing xbow is a reason never pick them, same with Spanish civ.
Turks missing Elite skirms, Burmese and Malay missing armor upgrades and Byzantines missing Bloodlines is a reason not to play with if you have a lot of other option.
As you see Vikings losing a lot of games, the reason could be the missing Bloodlines for Knights.
I just want to say, Bulgarians are not the only civ, nothing against free Bloodlines but won’t change the fact they don’t have crossbow.
But it wouldn’t matter too much then, would it? You could just collect 10 gold and go maa into all-in scouts or straight scouts. Bloodlines is the feudal age upgrade with the strongest effect, it gives like +45% hp on scouts (that’s why it’s so expensive compared to other techs). Giving that for free to any civ could break the game. You had to either full wall your base or create tons of spears on the open arabia generations because even magyar and franks scouts would easily lose to that. So not a good idea imo.
Actually, civs with bad archers use to have a wood related bonus, but bulgarians dont.
I would give them a tiny wood bonus somehow, so the archer rush became an interesting option. This would also help to boom in castle with their TC bonus.
Again, if you try to do this you will get your first single scout out of your stable when the Scouts civs with a food bonus (like Mongols, Lithuanians and even Franks) already have ALL of their Scouts on the field.
Yes, you scouts will be much better once you reach the same number. But this requires you not getting raided by the enemy scouts early on and not getting into fights until you produced a decent amount of scouts.
Therefore I don’t think it would be broken. Strong, yes, but it comes with downsides.
But a better option might be to change the price. Maybe from 150food/50gold to 100food.
-> then you have to decide at what point you want to go for the upgrate
They won’t have all their scouts just a few. Why do you think people consider magyars the best scout rushing civ and having an edge in early feudal age over Franks? If you fear you’re getting steam rolled just adapt your build. You don’t even need to go pop21, pop 20 is easily doable when you push 1 or 2 dear. You can even go pop 19 but your eco will suffer too much if your a civ like Bulgarians which is why people rarely do stuff like that. If your opponent is 1 minute earlier to feudal just start off with 1 or 2 spears (these are usually out before your opponent builds stable, creates scouts and reaches your base) so it’s not that big of a deal.
Scouts can easily counted by speerman. Nothing to complain about. Franks are not only good because of their extra HP scout they are good because of their amazing economy and in addition “free” Bloodlines for their Knights. But still Franks are strong but not OP at all.
And Bulgarians have not good Archer, they will be in a bad spot as before. Maybe mid tier civ not more.
Why should I go for scouts with Bulgarians right now if they do not have a single bonus supporting them? (Only because they don’t have any other options…)
What “people” are you referring to?
I was talking about the results of KotD3, so the opinion of all the best players combined in a competitive environment:
Bulgarians have a problem on any map. On Arena they are bad as well so bad that they are sorted in C-Tier for Arena. They are one of those civs weaker players give the better player in MotC because they dont nothing on Arena even though they are an Infantry siege civ and should be as deadly as any other of those, but nope, no eco bonus that really matters (the cheaper tc doesnt matter when you dont towerrush) means mega dead.
Bulgarians are the opposite of Lithuanians for my taste, while the latter are very good on every map and considered top 10 on them Bulgarians are just boring and dont have any map where they might be top 10, ocassionally top 20 maybe.
There is already a civ with free bloodlines, they are called franks, there wont be another one. And free bloodlines for franks is nerfed by being worse than bloodlines for scouts. If you give them full free bloodlines bulgarians suddenly beat every scout civ easily but they are no scout civ but infantry and towers at that stage and later they have super heavy cavalry and infantry…
What about not free Bloodlines but cheaper somehow?
That will go with the civ description of infantry and cavalry civ with the current Militia line free upgrade
Or it could be a free upgrade for the Scout line (or Knight line -maybe to OP???-)
They don’t have palas so as soon as they hit Imp they would have Cavaliers but I guess the problem with the Bulgarians are late Feudal and early Castle and that doesn’t help them at all
Depends on the map layout. In kotd-like arabia gens they might just jump to the top because feudal age fights with scout are quite important, here. And obviously Franks are the better civ in the long run (even with free bloodlines for Bulgarians) but the point is early feudal age where this is super hard to stop.
You usually won’t unless it makes sense after maa. But if you gave them free bloodlines you’d probably see them going scouts in every game unless the maps are easily wallable.
Top players, casters, you name it. It is pretty common knowledge that magyars have one of the best scout rush but this doesn’t make them the best scout civ. If your initial rush doesn’t deal significant damage you’ll fall behind which is why magyars aren’t picked as often as Franks, Lithuanians or Khmer. But in the first few minutes of feudal they even have an edge over Franks so Franks contrary to their other matchups will more often than not play defensive after the magyar player has 3 or 4 scouts.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that Magyars don’t have a good scouts rush. I am arguing that having a good scout rush does not brake the game !
Magyars have a good mid to late feudal scout rush against other scout civs because Franks/ Mongols etc… can not keep up with the same number of scouts without delaying their castle time…
They have one with the worst Eco. So no one would pick Bulgarian!
The meso civs don’t even have scouts and eagles are not good in feudal age and still one of the most picked civ in the tournament.
Meso Civs are great in the feudal age. Mayan archers are cheaper and Aztec archers get produced faster…
The transition of archers into eagles ist super smooth as both units require mostly gold…
One option to make their pushes stronger after castle would be:
repairing cost X% resources
This would be useful for trushing, against trushing, for castle dropping, against douche, and for repairing siege and ships, of course.
Another possibility is villagers repair x% faster, useful for the same purposes, but should expend more resources (or not?).
Bulgarians can expend stone in a lot of kreposts during a match, and their siege is average, so either one option of the other would help them to maintain their status if they reach castle.
I posted this idea in the magyar thread, because I made it up for them, but after posting I thought it would fit bulgarians as well… And byzantines, or other defensive civs.