I feel like camel archers will once again leave game in broken state for a long time in next update. Devs are always behind when it comes to balance changes. We have already seen Abbasids are strong (above average) civ. With Berry and On field siege they need some buff which they did by giving **** imperial techs early on. Imagine french getting Royal Blood Line on Feudal Age. On top of that they re-worked the options to age up. Buffing trade further. But these changes are not broken.
Lets get to actual problem. The camel archers. The effective counter for mangadi and horse archers are Archers and Horsemen. Using Knights against them is waste of resource. Archers are good at defending but wont help in mobility and horsemen have been the best counter to this spam. That also means it counters camel archers as well. Cancel out resource-wise as food is disposable resource. But camels counter cav wtf? Every archer unit in game gets effectively countered by horsemen. Currently camel archers are not issue. They will be after update. As they buffed speed and damage which makes no sense (making it new horse archer). How can a camel run faster than a knight. But thats not the main issue. Now horsemen will not be an effective counter. On top of that it has armour upgrades late-game making it even more tankier against archers. So what are you supposed to counter its spam?
Lets talk about french as it is abbasids are direct counter to french. I feel like french has been a very well balanced civ in previous updates even after multiple nerfs but still finds a way to say average or above. Except for single bug fix, french has gotten nothing since game release. French doesn’t need buff but if you keep buffing every other civilization you are indirectly nerfing other civs.
French has really good bonuses but not many. If you compare to any other civ french isn’t that unique. It got eco bonuses which lets it gain momentum early game but most civs can take back map control slowly. Lets just talk about Royal Knights. Same stats as early knight but gets 1 tech each age. Not a unique unit. Doesn’t have to be! But compared to other civs I think its lacking a lot. Royal blood-line is post imperial tech which you need university. And it comes so late that its very hard to take advantage of it. Also just having to make an entire landmark to get this single tech in castle is absurd.
Lets get to crossbows, again nothing special. Just a few more techs. +5 meele armour is good on paper but if you are trying to counter knights. It barely makes a different. Crossbows get trashed by mangonel. Maybe siege armour would have helped. Also Q ability is not really helpful. You want your crossbows to be retreating against most armies. Unless you are fighting under keep there are very limited use cases of Q.
Finally, french is supposed to be good at trading but it only gets bonuses on trade ships not on traders. Most of hybrid maps are already banned and on top of that knowing location of trade posts is useless in 1v1, 2v2s as they are not randomized.
Also will they rework on french landmarks like they did for chinese and abbasids. They get stuck on buffing or nerfing single civ for months. In my personal opinion devs should not make major balance changes. They should push minor updates after 2 weeks (1 week for bug or broken mechs) to balance one thing at a time instead of reworking the entire civ.
Thanks for listening to rant. I hope devs should remain up-to-date about current meta and not make breaking changes. Or if they are going buff one civ to hell they should consider re-working on other civs.
Camel Archers do NOT get camel barding tech anymore. Also horsemen are still faster than camel archers plus, unlike mongol HA’s, camel archers caNNOT shoot while running. Lastly they nerf the camel archer vs spearman from 30 dmg down to 24 dmg which means they are less effective in mass vs mass infantry (with spears).
Abbasid is strong but they got buffs along with nerfs; field siege takes 40s longer to build; berries lost 150 food per bush. The 15% infantry HP isn’t new just get it sooner than imp, but you’re not gonna forgo fresh foods in feudal age are you?? So its optimally a Castle tech; unless you are going all in and aging with the 15% infantry HP will telegraph your strat?
Need to see thousands and thousands of games to see where the civs shake out.
I think you are right about the trade issue needing to be fixed ASAP rather than whenever we finally get the spring update.
In regards to knights / arbalatrier:
Royal knights are definitely unique. They are strong in almost every situation because they are offered better stats by default than regular knights in addition to their charge bonus and feudal deployment.
It sounds like you may misunderstand the use case for arbalatrier. No crossbow unit should ever be the sole counter to knights. They will always need a screen to protect them (spears or knights). Deploying the pavis with the arbalatrier makes them a threat for enemy archers in addition to shredding knights and MAA. Especially once the armor bug gets fixed I think they will fair even better against units that push past your frontline.
As far as the french economy, once commerce gets fixed they should be able to flourish late game. The 5% discount from castles isn’t much and I could see an argument to make that more impactful. French also have decreased villager production time which gets them off to a strong start.
All in all, I think there is a reason french is 50+% winrate. With the upcoming bug fixes I think they will be fine.
Also, I wouldn’t build horsemen to beat camel archers. I think archers of your own is the correct counter because they are cheaper and don’t need to contend with mounted speed and risk getting kited.
I am not saying knights and arbalatrier are not good. But they dont look special compared to what other civs get. A late-game knight mass is indeed a death ball and hard to counter due to mobility but game will end much earlier before you can get royal blood line. The second issue with french is its early defense is very weak. You don’t have access to MAA in Feudal and knights are useless at defending and get pushed back by spear + archer comp. You need to get good archer numbers to push back the enemies. And rams make it worse as you can’t siege with archers or knights. You lose expensive knights if you try and archers dont work.
This feel more of a bait. Your archer composition isn’t gonna age well. Abbasids and Mongols on-field siege despite being nerfed is also a huge threat. So on top of make good army you have to build siege workshop and get siege advantage to keep your archers useful. Knights being very gold consuming its very hard to get siege advantage as french. Or just give up on knights now you lose civ advantage.
Even if abbasids dont go for siege, they can train knights/horsemen and don’t get any penalty on their own units. Camel archers can easily shred your spears and knights will shred archers. You can’t go horsemen/knights as camels heavily nerf them. You can’t go MAA as they will keep retreating. Also with damage buff MAA/Knights armor will be less relevant. I don’t there is any good composition against Camel Archers + Knights. Crossbows themselves get countered by Camel archers. So you are getting locked into a composition that will ultimately lead you to defeat in castle age. On top of that Camel Archers + Knights have extremely good mobility and they restrict mobility and kill so many villagers and retreat in open maps.
I know they wont be able to mass in castle but will keep building the army. I am talking about how to counter this composition. Aoe4 is supposed to be a countering game. Knight, Spears and Archers are classic triangle. Then Mangonel against Archer + Spears, Cav against Mangonel and then Archers + Spears against Cav. So there is a counter to most unit compositions that trade effectively.
I am talking about what should be done against a Camel Archer + Knight composition. Unfortunely the buff will make it much harder to deal with any composition with camel archers.
Camel archers are already getting nerfed pretty hard. Just because they’re giving them 1 single damage bonus in feudal, doesn’t erase the fact they’re reducing the dmg multiplier and armor, and put their infantry armor aura in imperial age when no one uses infantry. Cavalry counter aura is pretty much the only reason to play Abbasid. The nerf to berry bonus is gonna hurt a lot too.
Part of the reason I like Abbasid is because they have some synergy in team games with their auras and berry farms. I agree other civs should have some sort of team feature too. Like England’s town bell and Mongol’s yam aura.