Agreed. Town Patrol is not a “must” but it can help out in spotting enemy forces and allowing you to react quicker to incoming enemy attacks.
The BIGGEST reason Town Patrol (and even Town Watch) are completely ignored by most players in due to creating idle time in TCs producing Vills. Though Town Watch is only a mere 75 food, players will almost always prefer using that food to produce another Vill.
Still…the fact that Byzantines get Town Watch free the moment they reach Feudal Age, is not bad, since it means that a Byzantine player can spot enemies lurking near their base a bit easier, without having to compromise on TC villager-creation time.
Town Patrol perhaps ought to be reducing in resource cost, so that it is researched more often.
And you are seeing just half of the bonus, it’s not just a defensive bonus, but it also improves any foward buildings to see more. Especially with TP and foward buildings in castle age.
First of all, it helps with Trushes too. Then it’s more than simply see more of your base, you can have outposts that are more efficient, or you can more likely be able to sneak a range/stable on a flank, and it more likely that you can see more of the enemy action with it.
Giving them free TP for example is a buff for a monk+siege rush. Your monastery and workshop will be able to spot more of the enemy base even before you pop up your monks and manganels, or when those are away. Also, since it’s common to also build foward houses to keep your foward vills busy, if you spread them out a bit, you can have more map awareness.
It’s not useless, it’s just less immediate than for example cheaper blacksmit techs, you need to be a bit more ingenious on how to use it.
Then again, it woun’t give them a crazy powerspike of course, but it would polish everything that they are able to do.
I just remembered also, that there was a T90 1v1 game that he published a long time ago (back in HD days) where there was an experienced AoE2 player (I forget who) who was **Blue player ** who did an amazing quick-wall reaction to the opponent Red player–who was another experienced AoE2 player–who was Drushing. Blue player barely saw the Red player’s 3-4 Militia by the bare minimum LOS that one of his Houses had when the Militia marched past it, and he literally had only a split second to react to the incoming Drush attack.
The point to take away from this, was that the Blue player reacted so quickly, and so precisely, to the incoming threat, despite having Town Watch upgraded. And it goes without saying that any less-experienced player would probably would have not have noticed the Drush until it was too late, or would have reacted a lot slower, due to the lack of Town Watch.
For me, I think one of the reasons why the first age in AoE2 is “Dark Age” is due to the fact that you civilization is so primitive and underdeveloped, that it cannot properly secure its borders with respectable LOS. Even Outposts in Dark Age have terrible LOS, until you research Town Watch.
I just checked those stats again and their win rate dropped down even further.
Team Random Map across all Elo: 46,55% → 46,02%
Team Random Map across 1650+ Elo: 45,79% → 45,59%
What I find even more worrisome is that across all Elo the gap between the 1st and 35th civ is 4,18% and then there is a 1,75% gap to the last civ - the Byzantines. (I didn’t take the 36th place into consideration - the Burgundians, since they won’t stay down there after the upcoming patch.)
No matter what Elo range we’re looking at, the Byzantines always have the worst win rate either in <20 min games or in 20-30 minute games. So they need something to help them get going early. Also they do particularly bad in team games compared to 1v1s, so maybe a boost of the team bonus could help them out to make them more team game friendly.
For the early game:
Cheaper houses could be fine
or
Starting with +25 of each resource could be fine
For the team bonus:
Monks heal 100% faster
or
The first garissoned relic gives +100 gold (added to the existing bonus)
Making Houses cheaper I think would make Byzantines too broken (despite how much of love the civ and enjoy reading/studying their history). Bloodlines I can get on board with, but I do think that Byzantines are were deliberately deprived that tech back in Age of Conquerors specifically so that they would NOT have so much beefy-Cataphracts. And don’t forget that Byzantines get cheaper Heavy Camels. If Bloodlines WERE to be added, then maybe to balance it out would be to make Byzantines lose access to Paladin upgrade (but keep Cavalier).
Even with Bloodlines they would be worse than all other Paladin civs except for the Celts. But either way I don’t think adding Bloodlines their tech tree is the correct move.
It’s the same gold cost as a Knight… I mean yes, it’s more than most other cavalry unique units but I don’t think it’s too much of a problem since you have cheaper trash and don’t have to rely too heavily on gold units. Sure, 5 or 10 gold less might be nice but this will also not help their early struggles.
Honestly Bloodlines is not a small buff. It is a huge buff despite you reduce Cata’s HP. Also giving them BL must have to come with 2 major changes -
First of course Cata’s HP. You need to reduce their HP by 20. This will indirectly increase their upgrade cost which is already high enough. Cata without BL will be absolute garbage.
Camel discount. Berber’s discount was reduced from 20% to 15% mostly because of camels. And as Byzantines you can’t have 25% discount with BL.
15wood discount per house is not small either. You’ll save 60 wood in the Dark Age, enough to make a farm. And you’ll constantly save wood through out the game. For Byzantines with cheaper Trash and cheaper Imp, I don’t think it will be small.
The biggest problem I see, is that catas die vs both the meta units. Knights and xbows counter catas.
Yeah, you can make slightly act on the cost of the other upgrades for catas. Also in castle age, where catas are extremely underused, I do not think a 20hp nerf is needed. Maybe just 10…
It may be enough to make the counter bonus to act only on food and wood. Trash wouldn’t be affected.
Is this really a lot with respect to other eco bonuses? Consider the civ misses one…
its almost like the cataphract performs other roles.
by this logic we could buff every melee and cavalry unique unit in castle age.
the fact that you have to change bonuses because you add something like bloodlines should tell you just how big a buff it is, and not small like you said earlier. it makes their knights on par with other civs, it makes their camels great, it gives them almost fully upgraded cavalry archers, and the mere fact that you have to change the HP on the cataphract is telling of again, just how big a change adding bloodlines to the civ is. so how you can sit there and say something like
this little gem is beyond me.
considering that the civ has two other bonuses that effect the economy, they can’t really get a big economy bonus.
I still smaller than most bonuses like Malian, Japs, Teutons, Burmese, Celts, Huns, Vietnamese, Incas…This can go on and on.
This not have to be 10 wood, can be 12 or even 15 if 10 is too much.
Considering how weak Byzantine early game is on open maps, I don’t see an issue with the concept itself. 10 is probably too cheap for Houses though, because at that rate they might even be better to build than pallisade walls
(yes, I know that you can counter most attacks with cheap byz trash, but the problem with doing that, is that you can not make an effective counter attack. Trash units are simply not a threat in feudal age)
Well yeah, this is very true if you take Arabia and Arabia clones into consideration. On closed maps it matters much less.
