The mechanic of giving access to natives to certain civs without an nat embassies needs to change urgently as it unbalances the game and I will give some examples of this; (especially Hausa, Inca and USA, but mostly Mexican and Ethiopian).
Some civs have access to natives without the need for native embassies, for example; France, Germany, USA, Hausa, Inca, Mexico and Ethiopia.
Within this mechanic there are some differences, such as cards, or that give you access to natives and can also
give you access to their technologies (as in the case of inca, france and germany) or age ups that give access to technologies or federative cards that you give access to natives and possibly their upgrades (as in the case of
USA, Hausa, Mexico and Ethiopia ).
Example of cards and their respective civs
Germany:
In which the card does not give access to technologies only to units. (Natives count population)
Inca
which gives access to units and technologies. (Natives donât count population)
France:
which gives access to units and technologies. (Natives count population)
Federative cards
USA:
which gives access to units and technologies. (Natives donât count population)
Mexico:
granting access to units and some technologies. (Natives donât count population)
List item Age up upgrades
Hausa
which gives access to units and technologies. (Natives donât count population)
Ehiopia
which gives access to units and technologies. (Natives donât count population)
Given this long introduction, letâs address the real problem,that are two of themâŠ
Firstly all civs should have this resource of having access to one or more natives (in addition to the natives of the map) and their technologies to have a balance of power.
Secondly All civs with access to natives without an embassy should either count or not count population. And this decision to count or not to count MUST BE STANDARDIZED.
Either all natives outside the map count population or none of them count population, because otherwise there will be a very, very problematic situation (Mexico and Ethiopia) to deal with that I will address.
Mexico and Ethiopia are practically aberrations when it comes to civ power on behalf of the natives, you practically deal with 2 armies.
Game situations like this
With tons of natives are IMPOSSIBLE TO DEAL.
Treaty and FFA matches are most affected by this situation.
In 1v1 treaty matches you literally have 2 armies with the natives of the map, in team treaty matches you have 2 players with natives (practically 2 players with extra population in combat) or if not one player with 3 armies.
in FFA matches this problem is raised to maximum power, if a player manages to dominate the natives he has a ridiculously absurd amount of natives⊠if it is an unknown map, in addition to the number of units, you have the problem of the amounts of technologies that makes this players A GOD AT PLAY.
The treaty community has complained about mexico and ethiopia for years, and the only way to balance these 2 civs is tweaking and standardizing access to natives without an embassy for the other civs in the game.
germany doesnt get technologies
france gets half of the technologies
no. it doesnt make sense for every civ to get natives and not every native card should give technolgies:
some natives have waaay better techs than others (euro natives vs. most american natives) it would be the opposite of balance
some civs would profit more from having 0 pop units than others. Inca and france should have access, since âallying with nativesâ is one of their civ bonuses
why? its not standardized forbalance reasons (popspace for germany)
yes⊠but thats your fault then. dont let a player take full control of ~8 native posts. to some extend this is a good thing, since it rewards map control and punishes camping.
i know france can be somewhat OP on unknown, but the map is just for fun and is not for serious matches anyway.
Germany does have natives that do not cost population (2 cards). The problem is the âelector princesâ card, which does cost population space. I agree that the balance of the natives should not focus on the population, but on the creation limit.
The âCircle Armyâ card doesnât upgrade units as age, so this is another reoccurring issue with infinitely sendable natives. These units should improve with advancing age, otherwise they become obsolete very quickly and are not worth shipping. Even with the capitol buff for the natives they still lag behind as one or 2 previous buffs are often overlooked.
You know thereâs a very simple solution to this âproblem.â Itâs the same solution as with a lot of the âimbalancesâ we hear about. You raid the economy. In order to actually field those natives you have to pay for them. This means you need a similar number of total resources as any other unit. And a good part of the cost is in wood, which is non-renewable on the map. Raid the woodchoppers.
I suppose this complaint is primarily generated from a player who intentionally shuts off the counter by playing treaty. Treaty, of course, allows the enemy plenty of time to set up his economy without being raided and time to wall off his town without being challenged.
In practice, I donât think any of these native options are a problem. Either you spend the resources on your civâs baseline units or you spend them on the natives. They arenât free. Theyâre only really valuable if you can use them to overpopulate your military. And there are plenty of other ways to overpop for a little extra punch when you push in a maxed out game. If it were me, Iâd be much more concerned with Germany or Russia hitting 199/200 or 209/210 and sending the 2000g INF German merc army card for another 40ish pop of jaegers, landsknechts, and black riders. Thatâs one of my absolute favorites since those things hit like trucks. None of the non-Euro natives have that kind of impact.
Dont know if this is the right spot, but fun fact is usa and mexico get extra nats from their age2 card if they age up with tlaxcala and the tammany festival one. france, germany, incaâs dont count just usa/mexico because reasons. this is not explained anywhere and might be op but certainly deserves a tool tip at a minimum i watch new players get wrecked by this quite a bit. not every day, but enough that the card seems too sneaky for them
in the case of mexico and ethiopia it is very problematic, you have units similar to the common units that cost from 15% to 25% less not counting population, and you get to have 40 more units more without the natives of the map, that itâs ridiculous.
The natives, costing less due to the deck, are extremely cost-effective.
You always fight at a disadvantage against these civs and it drains you much faster than those who use this strategy, this is not a problem today, many treaty lobbies even ban Mexico and Ethiopia because of this.
For you to win against this type of build it is very difficult and demands more errors from those who use this build than from their skill itself
Iâve honestly never found any of these to be overpowered. You still have to pay for the units. There are caps on the benefit you can get from overpop. Cree CdB and Berber nomads are on the villager and population counters. The overwhelming majority of units you mention require wood to produce, which is a limited resource. Eventually, you will deforest the map which puts an soft cap on the future production of those units based on whatever renewable source your civ gets (ie factories, shrines, etc). They all still have their counters. They only really become a bonus when youâre over the pop cap. And to maintain that benefit, youâre spending 15-20% more resources to pay for that larger army. Treaty is a game of rates: your rate of unit production vs the enemies. This bonus bleeds you down and it can do it fast. If youâre below the pop cap, itâs just a unit choice like any other. You put your resources into this one rather than that one.
Yeah, you get some techs out of the shipment. The church cards also give tech upgrades. Theyâre not broken either. In treaty mode, you stack upgrades and civs are built with that in mind.
Every single one of these options comes with opportunity costs as well. The US and Mexican federal cards all require you to give up other bonuses you could otherwise take. The African ones are the same.
Perhaps the issue here is that people playing treaty arenât picking card decks optimized for treaty mode and trying to play against players with more experience who do have better decks? Do you have win-rate stats or something that shows these things are causing unfair advantage? Is this occurring at high rankings as well as low?
That is planned to improve the natives of the map and it is not very useful. Natives from the metropolis should upgrade automatically, or enable upgrade at the native embassy. Also blood brothers is not available for all civilizations.
These are fine. I refer to those of earlier ages in the game.
it affects all natives though, so anything you sent from shipments, on the map or not will be upgraded,
its basically required for german treaty for this reason
the current game design is such that most native shipment only provides provides upgrades in age 4, the only exception to this are the 2 special apache and comanche cards for US and mexico
In age 4 the non infinite card provide vet upgrade and the infinite one provide guard upgrades. You are not getting upgrades earlier then that.
and for civs without blood brothers (brits, Dutch, otto, swede, china, japan, india, malta, italy) are all civs that rely on their narrower infnite shipment so they have upgrades anyway , or they explicitly are bad at natives (italy and malta) or in the case of japan will probably never be allowed to send 29 guard soheis twice
I mean infinite native cards before the age of 4. These are not updated in any way. Like this card from the Ottomans.
I doubt itâs viable. If you use blood brothers in the treaty just to improve the circle card, you sacrifice other more necessary cards. also this card existed before and was never planned for the treaty game.
yeah thats not getting upgrades ever. Like think about this way, African civs get shadow tech natives for their shipments, they are balanced by the fact that they cant send any of them infinitely, devs arent going to allow that to get shadow tech.
its viable enough that it got a nerf specifically for circle army in treaty. yeah it was never used before in treaty but its specifically stronger now because of circle army
Now I see why it has spaces for these cards. He prefers war wagons instead of chevau legers. It also does not use mercenary camps and the mercenary upgrade.
I also used the grenade launcher card for the giant grenadiers, but now they are very unviable due to their population cost. I understand why it has so many free card slots to use with natives.
I really liked that strategy.
I donât think itâs broken, because it improves proportionally with age. But if it is considered unbalanced, it could be balanced by increasing the price of the card as it improves, just as they did with the circle army card if they consider it unfair. It costs 500 coins, it could end up costing 800 coins.
Can we focus tteaty balance on other maps that arent upper andes, please?? Its not the best to talk about natives, they are too much decisive on Andes.
Iâm not going to watch 4 hours worth of video to try and figure out your point. Respectfully, youâve got to do a little better. Tell me the short version here and cite the videos I can watch to see the supporting evidence of what youâre arguing. Ideally, give me timestamps so I donât have to waste my time watching things that donât matter.
You donât need to watch the entire video, so choose one of the videos, skip the bomming (which is the first 40 minutes) of the video and watch the fight and youâll see my point.
I would choose the 4° video, the problem that natives cause is very evident.
And you donât even need to watch the whole fight, just 10 minutes, youâll see the impact that the natives have.
