Upgrading to Elite Chu Ko Nu costs 950 food and 950 gold, and in return, you get 5hp, with no increase in attack or range. I know many think Chinese are borderline OP already–and that point is well taken. However, the upgrades in the game still need to make some kind of sense. If you are paying 950 food and 950 gold, you should at least get either a +1 attack or +1 range. If we do not want to give attack or range, then the costs of upgrading should be reduced, to perhaps 600 food and 600 gold, IMO. Thoughts?
The upgrade also makes your chu ko nu fire 2 more arrows, and is actually cheaper than what you wrote since it’s affected by the Chinese discount on all techs.
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That’s the cost of the upgrade before the Chinese technology discount. The real cost is 760/760.
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Aside from what is already mentioned by the 2 posts above, Elite Chu Ko Nu trains in 13 seconds vs 16 before upgrade. And as for the power of two extra arrows, check this wiki:
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ROFL chook chooks are one of the best UU in the game… you wanna see a bad UU upgrade… here you go. it is MORE EXPENSIVE and does less…
or another one which is never teched just because the unit is worthless AND the tech is almost the same price
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Fair enough. The tech tree definitely does not say all of that. It just shows +5hp. It makes more sense now the cost.
It gives 2 extra minor arrows, meaning 2 extra damage, more against rams.
Just increase the elite upgrade by 50 food and 100 gold.
But anything the Chu Ko Nu needs a nerf, they are too good and very abusable in large groups, they melt everything in their way by the mere 40 wood, 35 gold, while the Rattan Archer, Genoese Crossbow, Plumed Archer and even Longbowman can’t, and those, whith the exception of Plumes, which are balanced by having much less attack, are considerably more expensive and takes more to train and upgrade, great insanity.
And then Chinese have much better eco than those civs.
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Always less? Even the unit? It seems so
A FU ckn has 8+6 attack + 5 arrow.
A GC has 6+4+7(bonus damage) vs cavalry.
For a cavalry unit with 2+4 armor:
- ckn does 8+6-6=8 damage plus one more per arrow, so up to 13 (quite probable in large battles)
- a gc does 6+4-6+7=11 damage.
The two units have the same range, ckn has a much better TT and it is much cheaper. So, vs cavalry I would pick a ckn.
Vs everything else… guess what 
Ckn seems superior in everything, even where the GC is supposed to shine.
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against ram is 6 extra damage, because rams have -3 melee armor and that arrows does 0 melee damage.
thats why chukonus destroy rams
Just wrong. Not even going to get into the numbers because it’s a complete waste of time. Chu Ko Nu fire 50% slower than a GC. GC massively outperform chu ko nu against cavalry, which should emphasize just how crazy GC are against Cavalry given how good Chu Ko Nu tend to be.
Lightly touching on the numbers, they fire five arrows (four additional) so it’d be 8+4 (or 12), not 8+5 (13) but it’s irrelevant given how that makes the DPS 4.0 compared to the Genoese 5.5 per unit.
So, what is the total DPS normalize to the cost of the unit? I am actually asking.
The computation ofc is non-trivial but my feeling is that ckn does not perform too bad compare to gc vs cavalry.
Normalized for cost, the Genoese does 14% more damage to Cavalry per resource spent than a FU Chu Ko Nu. That doesn’t account for the fact that the Chu Ko Nu costs significantly more to upgrade once counting Rocketry, even if you count Pavise for Italians given how dirt cheap Pavise is. This is assuming we’re talking about basic Cavalry, if it’s camels or elephants that number looks a lot more like 40 or 45% more damage per resource because each class that matches adds it’s bonus damage.
The more informative number to consider: 4.5 is the effective DPS against 2+4 Cavalry of the non-elite Genoese Crossbow. The only bonus given to the Unique upgrade for it’s over 1600 resource cost is +2 bonus damage against cavalry and 5 hp. That’s genuinely it. Imagine if the unit was actually improved by it’s elite tech. Reminder, the Elite chu-ko-nu’s effective dps against cav was 4.0
To put that number in perspective further, the non-elite chu ko nu has an effective dps of 3.3 against 2+4 cavalry, and that’s with rocketry, with full imperial upgrades minus the elite upgrade, the works. Suffice to say, the Elite Genoese Crossbowman is a sad upgrade, but as sad as it is, it’s got one specific use.
First thank you for the explanation.
Another very difficult thing to add is that GC takes forever to train…
How do you weight the gold vs wood?
I think they need an HP nerf. Or perhaps even just a nerf in training time would do the trick.
Poorly. If I gave the gold a higher weighing (2 to 1), I’d find the chu ko nu still do worse than the Genoese, but not by a lot, ~11% per resource spent. That doesn’t at all account for the approximately 500 more gold spent to upgrade the Cho Ko Nu to begin with, which is why I don’t skew the estimated cost of each unit to account for the difference in resource scarcity.
The real takeaway over all this is that the Genoese Elite upgrade is depressing.
Yeah definitely…