They probs tested the bonus with a flat 50% discount (like what they get for their stables techs) and they settled for a food discount only bonus.
Burgundian still have it better late game than civs like Aztecs or Vikings. They are also the only civ that can go for paladins all the time, even in a 1v1 where you’re streched for ressources.
Yeah but onward, on fudal age agression having 3 vills is better, and if your opponent can do some feudal age damage basically it already nullify your advantage.
In 1v1, Burgundians are the civs that most likely will be able to research paladins in 1v1 because of the early cavalier and cheaper upgrades, and now cheaper eco tecs. So for that great powerspike I think that it’s balanced that they lack 20HP.
In the end, their paladins still beat most of the other civs cavaliers and some other paladins too, and most likely even beat civs like franks, because they can research paladins when the other civ have cavalier at best.
Wheelbarrow takes exactly as long to research as the time it takes to make three villagers. With this bonus, it will cost a little more than one and a half villagers worth of food, meaning that, while researching wheelbarrow as Burgundians, you bank more food than you would making villagers. So, what I’m wondering is, can you exploit that bump in food collection to click up to castle faster, i.e., research wheelbarrow to get the last bit of food you need while avoiding TC idle time? Maybe going up to feudal sooner, knowing that you intend to grab wheelbarrow before clicking castle?
In theory, yes. In practical game not really. It’s also only 60 food you can safe, so… If you it fails it’s even more punishing as the food income will be delayed by the extra carry capacity.
The main “cost” of wheelbarrow is still the research time, so just dumping the food cost doesn’t make it miraculously overpowered. It’s still something you should just get if you have a lot of farms already - or if you are badly housed.
The bonus from researching the techs earlier hasn’t changed. They’re still the same technologies and for hand-cart/wheelbarrow face almost the exact same opportunity cost (villagers).
Effectively what is happening is the Burgundians have the option of paying to get Celt lumberjack bonus and/or Sicilian farm bonus. It’s not likely that they will be able to justify getting anything else earlier. Since neither of these is really OP the only consideration is: do they gain too much of a food eco advantage by mid castle age thanks to the savings?
Luckily this is easy to fix, just reduce the discount. Devs can use binary search or player input to find the ‘balanced’ position. Binary search would be each month doing this change: 50 → 25 → +/-12.5 → +/-6.25.
Their current win rate is biased by people doing dumb stuff like trying to get the techs earlier without doing the math to realize it’s crazy risky because you’ve got less villagers (i.e. max payback is not that high and takes a while to obtain). So I’d be wary of weighting current win rates all that heavily. You’ll notice their sub 20-min win rate is atrocious, 10-15 percentage points below the next lowest depending on Elo. I mean it doesn’t seem possible for their tech tree to generate that much lower of a win rate without players being conned into a bad strategy over and over.
yeah that’s totally what i see the pros doing. no. when i talked about their winrates i was talking at the highest level. not what joe nobody is doing.
But we should definetely talk about this.
It’s not good for a game to have such misleading bonusses which are punished so hard.
And it’s also not helpful to talk about more casual player in such a toxic way. The game is designed for the majority of players and not for pure pro play. And if you see also 1800 players trying to use the “bonus” to their advantage, it’s definetely justified to do something to actually make it a bonus and not a misleading… whatever.
When the civ first came out, yeah they did do that lol. I remember a few games where they did exactly that. Obviously the pros have learned, but has everyone else? That’s a problem for balancing the civ and for inferring what their win rate is going to look like at different stages of the game. Even the 1650+ players are doing it according to aoestats
I don’t think the Burgundians’ poor win rate is entirely due to the misuse of their economic upgrades, though. No thumb ring, arbalest, or last archer armor, plus no real bonus for going archers makes that strategy feel like a bad decision in feudal, especially when you know you’ll want to make cavalry in castle. At the same time, lacking bloodlines means their scouts aren’t amazing, and their early castle knights are worse than those of any civilization that could pick up bloodlines on their way up. If you try to get cavalier, the upgrade time sets you back more than five knights compared to an opponent that is continuously producing, which is enough of a numbers disadvantage that it probably doesn’t make a difference. Even if the only economic upgrade you get early is double bit axe, they just feel below average in every strategy you could try until late castle age, which is often too late to change the outcome of a 1v1 game. That’s just my opinion, but I did spend quite a bit of time trying to make the civilization work in ranked. I used different builds, and everything just felt bad.
Obviously their aggregated win rates aren’t due entirely to the misuse of the bonuses, but their pre-20m win rate is 25% at 1650+ elo. If they live long enough their win rates turn into run of the mill ‘below average’ (40-45%).
I mean think of a civ bonus structure that would generate a similar win-rate for short games. Even civs with really poor dark/feudal bonuses only bottom out around 40%. Now you’ve still got to figure out how to drop another 15 points lol.
The civ is a huge noob troll. Because lower elo players will be like ooh early economy upgrades, cool, lets take those! and then get shrekt by early aggression from the opponent.
As for 1650+, I imagine that a lot of people try and tried to just pick the civ and experiment with it. I have done the same, and had a few very early defeats while doing so.
Yeah, the map was Hideout vs Liereyy as Burgundians. He did very early double bit axe, horse collar as he aged up, very early feudal bow saw, didn’t get heavy plow, wheelbarrow, or hand cart early. So basically only took advantage of the wood upgrades.
Unsurprisingly he got M@A trushed, though his stone and gold were pretty defensible so it wasn’t a great trush. You could tell Viper was worried about defending his stone though so he saw it coming. After Liereyy gave up the trush Viper tried to apply pressure with seige+monk+cavalier with mixed success. Unfortunately Liereyy was able to amplify his feudal age map control into setting up forwards on both sides of viper’s base and in the end viper had to resign because he couldn’t get enough villagers out of his base safely to mine gold. He acknowledged he made a lot of mistakes though (his cavalier never got much done e.g.).
Overall by getting the wood upgrades early and horse collar just before feudal finished he captured like 80% of the benefit of earlier techs. So the only thing that would change if he had the 50% discount would be around 500-600 more food through castle age.
I agree the biggest advantage is to get the wood upgrades earlier. Considering this case I would assume that the changes in the beta would lead to just also getting heavy plow in feudal. This would almost exactly fit the saved ressources.
So the change would be that vipers farms would have heavy plow also, giving them just a little bit more food income (like 3-4 %) and allowing him to place more farms in mid castle age.
No, I just looked up the match on twitch and jotted down the tech times lol. I was curious as well to see what techs he chose to research.
I agree with it probably not being OP, after all the raw resources until early castle age are pretty well capped at like 300wood from lumberjacks, maybe another 150 wood from farm reseeds and maybe another 600-700 from the tech discounts + heavy plow bonus. But even if it is, its a well designed bonus in that it’s way easier to balance than things like “Eco upgrades available 1 age earlier”
1000 wood/food in early castle age is an eco bonus about as strong as the chinese two extra villagers at that point in the game (two villagers working for 20 minutes give about 20602*0.4=960 resources). Chinese start with 200 resources less to balance the bonus but they still have one of the strongest economies in the game.
In my opinion, they should get Ring Archer Armor in exchange for Bracer. Their Skirmishers become worse, but earlier Paladin can be used to deal with Archers. Better Hand Cannoneers can be a decent change.
Missing out on bracer really sucks for maps with water. Not that you would ever want to pick this civ specifically for water, but it’s still something to consider. (Some people like to play random civs, and also, some people like to play megarandom, which might include significant amounts of water from time to time)