IMO 2 Dark Age food bonuses is overkill, I’d go for one or the other. The hunt one is decent and will turn out saving wood for mills (or scouting time instead of pushing deer). On maps with lots of deer and shore fish, giving them both bonuses is potentially OP.
Regardless of cost, I think this is too strong, since not only is it a greater stone discount than the Slav tech, there’s no compensating wood cost, and this will make Castles cheaper than kreposts.
Damage reduction is fine, and already exists with reference to bonus damage. Extra Armor/HP is pretty played out at this point, I’d like to see a similar effect via a different mechanic.
-25% damage reduction and +20% extra HP are equivalent except for one situation: being healed in a castle or by a monk would be marginally faster in the damage reduction case
Sure, but +20% extra HP swordsmen and skirmishers already exist explicitly. Sure, it’s as civ bonuses rather than techs, but IMO just adding extra HP/Armor is kind of boring and overdone when you can achieve a similar result via a different mechanic.
Imo the big thing is their UU.
A melee charge attack plume with even higher attack…
Makes this civ really a ban-to.
The eco bonusses don’t seem so strong but can practically be eally neat as they allow different strats like sending your vills to the hunt or shore fish to boost your eco while already scouting your opponent.
Two things seem broken -Charge attack on ranged units is deadly. Especially with 6/8 base attack which by itself is quite solid for foot archers and +15 is just way too much. uu+onagers will be impossible to counter for the dps, range and speed they have. The hunt bonus is huge in nomad style maps and can lead to a lot of laming.
I think civ is quite weak till you get to uu and then becomes impossible to stop. So seems to be like a S tier WWC, top tier
on passive open map and bottom tier for closed.
But its great that you’ve balanced the tech tree well by removing many useful units and upgrades to support the OP uu.
Many bonuses seem redundant though - archer production, castle discount UT.
How about celts, Franks, goths, Saracens? How do you decide what offends you? Indians were split for game diversity reasons. In the same way we have millions of European civs.
If Devs really cared about pandering to your logic, a lot would have changed. It hasn’t. Because seemingly according to the bigger picture it doesn’t matter
This might be a bitter pill to swallow, but arguably it doesn’t make financial sense to waste civ slots(financing individual civ development) on splitting Bantu up when there are numerous other African cultures to accommodate as well. Especially when we still have the Americas and even more European civs(still the highest voted) to consider
I think if anything Devs would pick a name like Zimbabweans (or something else) just to simply avoid unnecessary vocal minority complaints, while essentially still creating an umbrella civ( like the Franks and so forth)
I like that you’ve come up with a design for a southern African civilization and how it would play, but I have to agree with other commentators that a Bantu umbrella civilization isn’t a good idea. Better to narrow it down to at least one of the various Bantu-speaking groups, or split up what you’ve got into more than one civilization.
BTW to contribute somewhat to this thread outside of telling you that Bantu is complete nonsense as faction name; Here’s some Zimbabwean architecture artwork I’ve seen on DeviantArt (Artwork by Kondrikthus):
The reason I went with an umbrella civ was twofold: 1. I didn’t feel that there were significant enough Bantu groups on their own to warrant their own civ, and 2. there simply isn’t enough information on the various Bantu kingdoms and empires online to make anything other than an umbrella.
