My group of friends came up with some ideas to buff Byzantine to make them fit more with the theme “defensive civilization” and tested it online. You can download here to test the changes out too:
The mod is called: Windy_Byzantine_patch_test
Link:
At the moment, the language file doesn’t work for unknown reason, so the descriptions will remain the same but the new effects will still apply.
New Civ bonus:
-Counter units upgrade (skirm line, spearmen line, camel line) are 50% cheaper
-Outpost cost no stone
New tech
-Greek Fire is replace by Auxiliary
-Auxiliary: Skirm line, spearmen line and camel line can be trained 50% faster. (cost 400 food, 400gold)
New Team Bonus:
-Trade Units move 20% faster.
Reasoning:
Having herbal medicine to compensate for the new team bonus
-Their knight line is weak and undesirable, with logistica applying trample damage only, it will help them be on par at least with generic fully upgraded paladins. Me and my friends only find this viable in team game. In 1 v 1, it’s not a good idea to go for this because it take too much time and resources.
-Cheaper upgrade cost for counter Units make it more accessible for byzantine to have better preparation to defend against FC rush. Also, help them save some resources as eco bonus .
-Outposts cost no stone, it’s not much but it psychologically encourages Byzantine players to build more outposts, gaining more vision to better prepare for defending.
-New Tech: Auxiliary. Romans were well known for Auxiliary recruitment. This allows them to train counter units faster to better defend in late castle and early imperial age. Pretty useful in super late game as well.
-Trade units move 20% faster. Romans were well known for trading as well, This will help them better in team game.
Further adjustment:
I’m thinking about removing these bonus to compensate for the new changes: Fast fire rate for fire ship, , Siege ram. Some numbers above may need to change as well. Any feedback is appreciated.
How do these changes affect their early game?
It just encourages boom, that’s the easy part, making Knights viable, just like developers did with Sicilians, booming into Unique Techs is not how to increase diversity in this game.
Their Castle Age is still the same, their Imperial was always strong, so where’re you heading?
With that being said, the Outpost bonus is awesome!, however considering they have free Town Watch, it’ll be too strong, I’d give this bonus to Portuguese. (Which are known to discover and travel) and remove Town Patrol tech from Portuguese.
I tried to give them “gold miner give stones” to help them early game but it didn’t work. So, if I could do that, I would have added it in already
Their castle age is not the same. They have no eco bonus to speak of, with cheaper upgrade for counter units line, they basically save resources for something else, for exmaple: black smith upgrades or fast imperial.
Their imperial age, imo, isn’t strong at all. Weak paladins, cataphracts are vulnerable to ranged attacks, no siege engineers, terrible hussar, no heavy scopion, below average champion. The only thing they have are cheaper counter units and generic arbalest, which is average at best.
what am I heading is making them focus on more defensive gameplay more bonus for counter units, because their aggressive option is bare bone at best, if not down right terrible, while cheaper counter units alone isn’t gonna help much. Cataphract is a good units but only work against infantries.
I’m not trying to make byzantine more diversity, I’m trying to make them better at what they do.
I totally agree with you about this, I will give it to the Portuguese instead.
Thanks for the feedback
I think stone-free outpost may be too strong for Portuguese now. Perhaps change it to ‘return stone cost upon the destruction of outpost’. But no need to remove town patrol.
I have to agree. Portuguese need a buff on land maps, but not outposts. They’re also the only civ with a source of unlimited stone, so spending a little on outposts isn’t a big issue.
Stone-free outposts fits Byzantines much better. They are defensive, with LOS bonuses, and they value stone for building walls and castles with high HP.
I really like this change, it gives you a reason to use the Knight-line in the mid-game as Byzantines and grants you a genuinely strong Team Game option. As Catas even though they have decent damage output against paladins have too little pierce armour and health to effectively fight against Arbs and Cav Archers. This leaves Byz in a horrible Catch 22 situation in which their Bonuses are horrible for Flank but their Tech Tree heavily leans towards it, and vice versa for Pocket leaving them as mediocre in both positions. giving Logistica to their Paladins fixes this issue in a wonderfully concise manner.
I understand the reasons behind this change, but Byz would already be quite powerful in Team games Late game with just the Logistica Change combined with their Cheaper Imp, Tech Tree and Higher HP% buildings also giving their team drastically boosted gold income ontop of that makes their lategame power a bit excessive. What I feel they should get instead is a greatly buffed Monk Heal Rate like 3-4x as opposed to 1.5x right now,
I definitely understand why you would want to remove Greek Fire, it being a tech more or less exclusively useful on pure Water Maps that also conditionally nerfs Byz Fire Ships is silly, but I don’t think the right way to change it is to double down on the already very strong trash play as Byz. I feel a better idea would be to buff a military thing Byz go for in the midgame on land or maybe something economic I’m not sure.
What potentially could be done if you want to stick to the theme of Greek Fire is to keep the bonus to Fire Ships, but also increase their accuracy (to compensate for the lost of accuracy through the increased range), or boost the damage of an Archer Range or Siege unit (with the exception of Rams, Bombard and maybe Hand Cannoneers) against buildings or siege units. (Since Greek Fire was historically used as a grenade-esq weapon by Foot soldiers, sometimes from Horseback or flung from Siege Devices like Mangonels ,Ballistas or Springalds (The latter two are more or less variations on the Scorpion seen ingame.), this is also the reasoning behind the Saracen Team bonus)
I absolutely love the idea of this bonus, , but as others already expressed it should be given to a Civ like Portuguese or Ethiopians instead rather than Byzantines. The reasons for this is that the free Town Watch + Patrol bonus already gives you plenty of building LOS with just houses (which cost the same amount of wood as Outposts) and granting Byz this bonus would just double down on something they’re already very good at.
Overall it’s cool that you and your buddies doing this actually creating a mod to test the proposed changes out in, most people just list off balance changes and don’t do anything with them, I would like to see more stuff like this in the future
Thanks for the feedbacks , I think what you said about the faster trade cart and the cheaper upgrade for counter units are correct, they are too much in one package. I’ll remove the cheaper upgrade
I’m still not so sure about removing faster trade units because no matter how much monk’s healing gets buffed, it’s still not as good as just having herbal medicine. Maybe I will dump it down to 10%?
As for Fire Greek,yeah maybe I will revert it back but give it something to do with bombard cannon or their weak Ornager line since they have no siege engineer. Greek fire can be an alternative for siege engineers with different effect
I’m also thinking about farm upgrades increase 5%work rate for farmers to help them in early game and long term game, but remove 33% cheaper imp upgrade
Having herbal meds would be nice for byzantines, but the current team bonus must stay as it is or at least be buffed past 1.5× / faster trade carts isn’t good, imagine chasing them.
I like greek fire as it is, tho it would be nice for it to unlock fire towers and have bonus dmg vs rams and ships.
I feel that logistica effecting the knight line places too many focuses for byzantines to follow. The cataphract is already still too expensive on a per unit basis, but it is also their most useful unit; it’d draw them even further away from the cataphract which just won’t do if we buff their paladin and it places much too high of overall costs burden on the civ. Beyond that the only reason byzantines would want to make paladins would be to soak up arrow fire, but can’t really do that due to the lack of hp and defense upgrades. In the case of byzantines countering other paladins, just use pikes, cataphracts and a few decently placed defensive bombard towers.
Logistica affecting the knight-line could be neat Unfortunately It won’t see much play outside of Deathmatch since they are missing bloodlines and investing into the knight line before Logistica isn’t viable. Maybe it could affected their scout-line. But the last thing they need is a buff to their trash.
Auxiliary is a good tech but It shouldn’t affect camels and their trash doesn’t need a buff.
20% percent faster trade is ridiculous not only does can it stack with Spanish to give your team 50% more trade income, but their trade carts can now outrun Cuman hussars and tradecogs have a speed of 2.476
thanks for the feedback, yes the main reason for logistica on knight line is to help them in death match and team game as pocket to diverse their role. I also think 20% speed on trade units is a bit too much after further testing I plan to turn it down to 10%, (trade cart move As fast as hussar) and yes I already removed Auxiliary.
The plan is to bring back Greek fire but with additional effect of enabling byzantine to build fire tower to help them deal with siege ram push. They are very bad at this as far as I can tell which is kinda ironic for a defensive civ . Fire towers in the base game file are not affected by upgrades from blacksmith (except extra range granted from pierce attack upgrade, but no extra attack) and murder hole + ballistic, they are only affected by masonry and architect which byzantine has neither so I guess it’s balanced.
dev already grants your wish with monk healing
And yes, I already worked on the fire tower for byzantine, they are not affected by murder hole and ballistic tho
Ffs pls don’t make fire towers buildable in multiplayer. They are already enough of a pain in campaigns, so in the hand of a player rather than an AI and with +40% HP on top of it they are just going to be unbearable.
i remember that mission in the berbers campaign were you are restricted to castle age and have two take out a castle fortified by Firetowers. hopefully trebuchets should be a good enough counter
Rams don’t work vs fire towers because receiving a constant stream of damage from the fire make them go hayware and mess with their pathing even more, and rams being able to counter defensive buildings is important. That’s why in AoC they nerfed bombard towers so that they could no longer beat rams.
All that being said I suppose if multiplayer fire towers were different from the campaign version it could be OK, even thought Byzantine already have the most resilient castles and bombard towers so there would be less incentive to build pushable fire towers.
they cost the same as a bombard tower (100 stone, 125 gold), so they are not something you can just keep spamming and get a way with, especially in castle age when you need gold for knights or Xbow. Not to mention pvp maps are mostly open so they are not as good as you think.
They do not out right delete ram on the spot like halb vs hussar, the can still go underneath with 2/3 of its health most of the time. Since fire towers are not affected by anything (including murder hole and ballistic) except + range from archery upgrade, once the ram is underneath, the tower are dead.
Also, in multiplayer, you can get into imp to counter those tower easily with treb and bombard cannon…or you can just send in any melee units to destroy the tower because they dps is really low to kill melee units in range. A few Champion with arson can easily wipe out the fire tower really fast (byzantine’s buildings have no armor upgrade so they go down faster than that extra 40% hp suggests otherwise) .
I will do more testing, to see how strong they are when they are tightly packed
