All the rest of units should be unique and different or at least have different buffs according to each civ.
Regarding siege: trebuchet mango and culverin (with super anti mango power but 5 to 6 pop each). The rest should be varied too.
This would be a good starting point in the asymmetry many players are asking for imo.
Thoughts??
I think the approach from the devs was really good and there should be a degree of symmetry between units, I dont really like the idea of too many different and unique units. Aoe3 is a big example of why this is the case where units were very well balanced at first until units like ashigaru started to come in and now with DE civs things went way too far with every new unit being far superior to their counter parts from other civs.
Also civs may have felt quite similar from each other at the start when the game was launched and the differences between civs started to show once the meta started to develop. Now the differences between civs are very obvious. Their prefered army compositions and strategies are far different from each other
Tbh having that variety would be great but there are a few downsides to it. Because while it makes sense for civs to have unique units, they’d have to not be so historically accurate in terms of their balance because they would push for a specific force for each civ, which implies there would be a certain number of similar units necessary for them to be flexible enough.
Like the camels would be the equivalent of French knights type of balance and everyone would need something to either counter or have the equivalent of the tank the Delhi elephant is. There has to be a complete rework I suppose for unique units to be viable. It’s a lot of thinking going into it.
Not saying no, it would be cool but it’s delicate.
If you played AOE3 you would know how painful it’s to play different civilizations, while some mechanics are shared, most civilizations are so different from each other that its hard to play and understand the game, not to mention that balance wise is game definitely not balanced and some matchups are much harder to win for one side.
Eventually AOE4 will gain another 4 - 12 civilization if it goes strong. Each civilization will have degree of uniqueness between most unique one Mongols/Chinese/Abbasids to least unique one English/HRE/French
AOE4 core civilization, that you can see, when you remove all unique bonuses provides good starting point for balancing team and players to be able to play each civilization and understand how to face them. Which is one of the largest advantages of the system, where each civilization has access to Spear, Archer, Horsemen, MAA, Knight, Crossbow, Springald, Mangonel, Trebuchet, Cannon, Priest, Scout allows any civilization current of future one to have unique units as long as it countered by something from core civilization.
If you would reduce this core units roster, then you are forced to introduce unique units for most of them that can fill their role, which would make balance worse for little to no benefit.
But I still agree that civilizations could use more unique units and upgrades to change core unit to unique one. Personally I think that everyone should have access to core roster. Unique upgrades should be straight up improvements for core roster and unique variants should be better than their core version, so they are always a bonus and not a hindrance in the long run. Then you can make each civilization more unique without sacrificing anything and any unique unit added to civilization is just a pure bonus. So they enable different army compositions, instead of forcing you to build same unit over and over again.