The 5 longbows plus multiple horsemen (with triumph), followed by horsemen/lb/limitanei is pretty insane…
I feel you need to outclass your oponent in skill by a whole league in order to have a chance to hold against that.
Let’s see how it works out in the coming days/weeks in terms of statistics.
I have a strong feeling though, the mercenary change has to be (partially) reverted.
Vortix said on his patch review video that Byzantines have had an insane buff, let’s see the following weeks.
I like the byz style, but I haven’t played them much since they were in a pretty bad state, now I’ll probably give them a try,
Indeed they did.
The mercenary contract is being researched instant and free of cost (saving 100 oil).
So you can get 5 longbows and some horsemen VERY early and push/pressure.
Forcing an enemy’s response, you add a barracks and make Limitanei.
The enemy is slowed down by the initial pressure and can’t handle the following waves.
Or you just semi fast castle after this and finish the enemy in age3…
Seems pretty sick.
Just played a match vs someone who was almost 2 leagues below me and it gave me trouble.
He barely microed and wasn’t attentive to counter-raids, still tough match.
He could easily push me into my eco.
Indeed it is very strong and SHOULD HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THIS.
By going berries first instead if sheep you were always forging the optimal FOOD resources. This means your age up is later than it would otheriwse be. Secondly when you made the merc house, having to wait 20s?? Just to START queueing a batch of units? Was insanely slow and counterproductive to asserting what SHOULD HAVE BEEN an advantage?
So basically you use to gather food slower age later build a production facility that delays queuing units by 20s, then the units take a reasonable amount of time to train, and finally the build went idle, bc we use to have to get on to the 2nd set of berries bushes to get a 2nd que from th merc house???
Meanwhile above plat byz sat at a 44% win rate.
Besides you can scout the aggression or FC BY just checking what food source byz starts off gathering. Sheep? Nominal winery play or hippo minor cav harassment. Berries?! They are gonna hit you immediately or gonna sell the oil for a fast castle.
Today I played vs Byzantines and this guy was Plat1 the last day of season6.
I was Dia3 with 1380 points (1 match before conq) the last day of season6.
That’s a difference of 5, almost 6 divisions, almost 2 leagues.
And I had to sweat my t**s off to win that match.
It was honestly super close and I could barely hold the push.
Well, my 2nd pitmine being faaaar forward didn’t help lol.
The only chance for the lower player to win such a match should be hoping for the higher player’s internet crash, very honestly.
How high is the chance, a legit plat1 player wins against a dia3/conq1 or at least makes him sweat to the absolute limit until the end?
TL;DR
Byzantines are one of the civs, which isn’t exactly intuitive.
At super-high elo, where the actual pros play (top conq3 and tournament players), Byzantines can be a strong situational pick and have always been in the right hands.
It is just that the majority of players doesn’t understand how to utilize the tools of that civ but still plays them, hence drags down the winrates.
In the right hands, this civ is lethal AF now.
Sheep gathering is only 13.6% faster than berries, and berries give 50% in value to olive oil. Also consider cistern bonus rates, this will equalize any gathering loss. Using longbow as an example, you can get normal timing on feudal, have a stable with landmark (+triumph as a bonus) and push 5 longbow out within 60~ seconds of aging up. It has a very early power spike and tapers off quickly, but tempo is everything in 1v1 and this is a clear advantage. They accomplish what no other civ can that early, other than tower rush in DA.
We’ll have to see if it’s over tuned, assuming flawless play this kind of strategy has no real counter and forces the person facing it to take a defensive stance, which the byz player should be able to exploit. Each berry patch they harvest is just shy of 2 batches of longbow, they are more vulnerable, but this is slightly in favor of byz because of their house vision + fast response times from their own horsemen… who will win equal engagements with triumph.
By no means is the berry gather rate reduction as significant as what they gain with mercenaries. Ideally you would use the map control for more berries and focus on archers, potentially seeding early farms for passive olive oil. God help you if there is shore fish.
Only 13%?? Lol. Having a 13% deficiencies in gather rate at the very start of the game is the opposite of tempo setting. Also 10% gathering rate of cistern doesnt bridge the gathering rate of food between berries and unbuffed sheep gathering; and this is a fact before you factor in idle time with all that walking thats involved with berry forging.
You absolutely cannot get the same age up timings starting on berries as oppose to staying on sheep. Next before the patch, you drop 150w on a production building, waiting 20ish sec, then que longbows that take 53s? That in itself is longer than 60s. More like 30s build+ 20s contract + 53s training…Then you would get no further use of said production building until you completed in your in base berries AND moved on to the next set of berry bushes?
Say you aged at 4min30. You’d have a set of lb ready at 6min something? That’s fast to you? Again, its not like you’re delhi where youd have a respectful army at 6min that keeps growing nonstop, or Ottomans. But instead you peak at 6min and now your merc houses goes idle and you should have made additional production to sustain your massing.
Yeah, it’s not head and shoulders above other civ bonuses… but every mercenary unit is made with resources that are essentially a bonus. I know the verbage of the thread is “insane”, but what I am pointing out is that they may have over corrected. Not to a great margin, but enough that it may dominate this season.
I think its too early to tell how it will plan out once people got to practice against it for a bit, but yes it does look like they perhaps have over tuned the mercenary contract a bit too much.
I guess we’ll see, but I think people are over-stating the strength.
I mean Byz could do essentially the same but with the LB coming out a little later. I’m not sure how much later - and 20-30 seconds is not a negligible amount of time when you are 6 minutes into a match - but I don’t know if its the sort of thing to take a 45% win rate civ to mad OP nerf ASAP. There are admittedly questions of whether Byz was a bad faction in the hands of the pro’s (all 10 of them?) but still.
As an edit - it might be quite a bit slower. The main issue being gathering up that extra oil. Although how this works out is debatable. You are probably down a horseman or something - which is impactful, but is it that much?
Admittedly the play at higher end is probably harass, force your opponent into making military units to counter and use that time to go Castle or grab a second TC. Or because its Byz, grab early Cisterns or something. But this was already an option so…
I was initially suspect because English could chuck out 5 LB and a couple of Horsemen with a not entirely dissimilar timing - and to my knowledge, this has never been an English opener. But Byz get Cisterns, the Triumph ability and by going on Berries, you should keep a stockpile of sheep. By comparison English will burn through 12~ sheep very quickly if they make horsemen without some early farms (and if they run out of sheep it just feels awful). Byz get Lims, which are clearly better than regular spears, but then the English can pump out more LB (and as LB get better the more you have, this is hardly a bad thing).
“20-30 seconds is not a negligible amount of time when you are 6 minutes into a match”
Yeah, in silver it’s not.
In higher elo it does make a significant difference…
Archers and pikes take 15 seconds to train.
That’s litterally 2 units out of ONE building.
4:20 first horseman out
5:15 5 longbows and 3 horsemen with triumph (!) out.
I think there is nothing to discuss about that.
No other civ can do this crazy stuff, afaik…
have u seen Vortix Tier list lmao?
check on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/1birfmg/vortix_tier_list_for_the_new_patch/
reason why u dont ever balance games around pros only. its a joke
More of a reason not to talk down to people if they are below your rank…
As said, to within a few seconds of 5.13, I’m pretty sure English can get out 5 LB and 3 Horsemen. (I was struggling to juggle the 3rd horseman, and suspect you might better off with say 2 horsemen, 6 LB - or, indeed, spears).
In any case - as outlined there are some negatives on doing this with English when compared with Byzantines - but I feel if this was especially good, it would have been a feature of the game in the past 2.5 years.
From Drongo’s video, you aren’t getting your 5 LB to their base until 6 minutes. That’s quite a long time. From the perspective of English LB harass, having an LB or two show up at 5 minutes is considerably more annoying than 5 showing up at 6. Byzantines can get that horseman out early, but I feel a single horseman does almost nothing unless they’ve jumped on forward deer/boar etc (or you are unlucky and your gold is out of TC range etc).
As many comments on the reddit thread, they don’t show all their hand in the weeks previous a tournament.
By the way, will they play with the new patch?
I still think it’s too early to tell if they are now broken or not. For sure people will learn more ways to play them but also people will learn how to deal with these new build orders.
Let time pass.