As I understand it, the crossbow and arbalest costs are globally getting nerfed. The reasoning is probably because of the subpar melee pathing and the cost of the upgrades being cheap relative to their counterparts. After the nerfs, the civs which are primarily using those units will get a hit, specifically Britons,Mayans,Chinese and some others. These civs are very dominant in the pro scene both in pick and ban phases. However, a big thing to mention is that the archer civs we see on the pro scene have extremely good eco bonuses which help them get to their intended army comps. When the unit upgrades costs get a global nerf, the civs that can/may use the same units but don’t have the same powerful eco bonuses will be hit even more compared to the ones I mentioned before, because it increases the value of eco bonuses even more for the civs. If there are no further balance follow-ups in realtion to the archer nerfs, two things might happen in result of this:
1- Civs with no eco bonus or minor eco bonus will be hit even harder because the of the cost increase(if they want to utilise the archer line)
2- Same civs will be forced to utilise other types of units due to the nerfs, which will significantly hurt their versatility.
Just to give some examples, Byzantines and Magyars both have the full archer line techs available for them, but the nerfs are going to hurt their options even more because they don’t have a strong eco bonus to carry them to an even more costly upgrade.If the melee pathing gets a proper fix, there will be even more incentive to use the cavalary line for them(both civs are already using the stable units heavily, but now the archer options will be less optimal). These civs might get a bigger drop on their winrate then intended, or the versitility on their tech tree might shrink a bit due to the changes.
Even with economy bonuses in mind it will allow you to mass skirmishes to counter archers a bit easier. The power spike of the crossbow man in Castle Age was frankly insane. This will delay even the Mayans archer rush a little. Archer vs Archer matches become strange, but civilisation such as the Burmese now might have a fighting chance.
Edit: Unlike like cavalry units and infantry, archers tend to not cost food. Which make civilisations that rely on food significantly weaker vs archer civs.
This forum is now getting on tears of archer players XD.
Archers were wayyy too good to upgrade and keep alive without touching your boom, and made britons/mayans too strong overall, stop complaining, is fine.
Time to see the rise of Knights- cav UUs and infantry UUs.
And yeah, Burmese will see more action with archer play harder to execute.
Yeah, food is ridiculously hard to earn in the early game. Massing farms is very difficult to do. You are trying to mass farms to pump out your awesome cavalry units, meanwhile the archer player just spams archers that do not cost food… allowing him to age up faster due to their farms not wasting food, and even make more villagers.
In regard of this, I wonder why aging up doesn’t cost any wood nor stone…
Because buildingsand othwr things you need after ageing up do
Also time to bury Japanese, Goths, Malay, Koreans, Italians, Portuguese, Dravidians, Vietnamese, Bohemians, Saracens, Malians, Byzantines, Sicilians and Incas.
Dravidians were dead on arrival, so it’s never not been time to bury them on land maps. The weird thing is, I’m not sure all the changes add up to a much of an improvement of Dravidians on open maps. I don’t think the EA changes will make it viable for open maps. And having BBC is great, but it doesn’t solve their awkward cav/eagle free midgame where there archer play is now worse.
Even so, I think the changes are good overall, but I suspect they will need to be followed up with specific buffs for most of these civs, or a global infantry buff, like spearline moving slightly faster or taking less bonus damage from ranged units.
Well you’re right. And that makes things even worse.
No it’s because the unit itself is way too valuable for it’s cost? Jesus, “pathing” and “upgrade costs”.
Real.
First of all the upgrade itself is way too valuable for 125f, 75g. Secondly, the mid-tier civs not being able to compete with top-tier civs is the problem of imbalance in the magnitude of certain eco bonuses, and while the crossbow upgrade might hurt a little against cavalry civs, its not the primary reason why those civs struggle. The right way to address that is nerf the overpowered OG bonuses like those of Franks.
You guys are overacting. It is just +50g/+50f, is this a big deal?!
That is why it would have been a better way to adress those op civs first instead of globally nerfing the xbows and arbs. Then you can nerf the archers again if it still needs it, but maybe to a lesser degree
The unit itself might be too cost effective for what it does and it might indeed need a nerf, but that doesn’t explain what I was talking about anyway. I was mentioning that it needs follow-up balance changes on certain civs because when you globally buff/nerf something, it doesn’t affect everybody the same
Personally I’m not an “xxxx type of player” and I don’t have a problem with certain type of units being stronger in different patch cycles. But if the problem is specifically Britons and Mayans being too strong, they should be adjusted instead of nerfing a unit for everybody
Britons are not even that OP in 1v1, it’s mostly TGs really. In 1v1 Britons are fine and fun to play as and against. The main thing Britons have going for them in 1v1 is the faster production, but with appropriate scouting you can generally always counter it, just be careful of the random Scouts opening now and again.
As for Mayans, main issue is that their eco early game is hard to harass, because of the extra resources they get from herdables and hunt. They also get a small resource gathering boost with the extra villager and, unlike Franks (whose economy is similarly smooth), they get a discount on their natural unit AND they can start msssing it in Feudal. I have claimed for a long time that Mayans eco is mostly fine and any nerfs to them (they are OP 1v1 unlike Britons) should address their production discount. At the same time, their tech tree is fairly inflexible, they can basically make 4 units, Eagles, Archers, Trebs and Siege Rams (with no Siege Engineers) so I would be careful with nerfs, too, they have a very small tech tree overall.
Yes most of the complain from above are the TG archer civ player
Definitely agree on that. But I guess these are the same devs who built FE and HD and gave the bonuses like Chivalry, faster berries, Obsidian arrows and Warwolf to their favorite civs. So don’t think they’ll nerf them by a considerable amount anytime.
Well Sicilians got hit the hardest from this, combined to the other targeted nerf.
Archer line, despite missing thumb ring and last armor was a viable option for them, if anyone wanted to play something else than a pure and dumb hauberk cavalier spam.
Well, I bet we’ll see only that dumb spam now. I get one nerf is minor, but combine the two, and I think they were hit harder than most other civs. Quite odd for a civ with such an average win rate.
I guess some nice rework of Serjeant/Donjon mechanic to make it a viable alternative instead was out of the question 
No.
You need to look at everything together.
Sicilians were hurt less by the archer nerf than actual archer civs or other hybrids. Sicilians being a very strong cav civ if anything come out ahead compared to “lesser” civs.
For example civs like viet, Koreans, even Portuguese etc, the bottom tier archer civs are hurt the most by the archer nerf
Even then it’s a small nerf to archers. The bottom civs need buffing outside of this anyway. It doesn’t mean xbow wasn’t an overly cheap tech.
Like there was no choice in taking the upgrade regardless of the civ you played because it made such a small impact on your eco, While giving such a big reward. Compare that to almost any other unit line, for example do we auto auto upgrade scouts left over from feudal? Not a chance. It’s still a decision because the returns aren’t that great
Compared to xbow. It was almost always viable to pay the low cost to get the xbow buff on remaining feudal archers, even as Teutons making xbows (recent example)