What? The UT doesn’t even affect paladins. Only hussars, SL and CA. And it’s super strong for spamming hussars in the late game and raid your enemy eco.
Even just a sneaky stable can cause so much damage with the UT.
And yet hussar is the perfect spam unit, since it cost only food. And at the same time it’s the perfect raiding unit.
It seems that those player don’t know how to play cumans then. Or they think that they still have the post release SL, when you could just patrol them a steamroll everything.
I actually made a approximate calculation “how fast” all civs can end their boom.
The Time given is determined by a certain “threshold” of economic power to reach. It’s chose in a way that you have placed the last Tcs about 3 minutes before and only add new vills while you mainly already transitted to military production. Because military needs vary, I chose this kind of calculation, because I think it is the most representative.
All calcs a done with a assumption of a fc into 4 tc boom start (yes 4 tc, not 3) because I evalueated that this boom should be slightly superior to the 3 tc boom. For all civs except the cumans I calculated the booming potential and the ressource (also more vills counting as further advantage included) advantage each civ gets until they can start booming with the same build. Since I used the same “build” for every civ, I made an assumption how much the build could possibly improved by adjusting the build to the civs strengths. This possible improvement is marked orange in the graph. Note, that some civs like malay would certainly be stronger with a 3 tc boom start, but I didn’t had the time to look for the optimal strat, so I decided to let it be 4 tc when reaching castle for all.
As Berbers and Mayans have very specific eco bonusses and I had to collect all efective gathering rates myself to fit in my calculation, I didn’t calculate these 2 civs. I also don’t think they are good booming civs, so I’m fine with just ignoring them for the moment.
For cumans I chose to take my safegame were I abused the market to get a 18:20 uptime into a 4 tc boom. I can use any safegame around that 18:00 minute mark to calculate the booming potential of the build behind that (except berbers/mayans of course). So if anyone thinks I underestimate a civ with a certain build here, just give me the safegame and I can calculate how “fast” that civ is with this safegame.
As you can see, there are different long orange bulks which represent the possible improvement potential by build adjustments. Especially the Chinese look like they can come very close to the cuman boom. But it shows, that the Cuman boom is indeed the best in the game, what makes it very tricky to buff them in a way they don’t become OP again, especially in Team games.
I’m convinced the only way to make them balanced is to adjust that booming potential.
Honestly I would like if Cumans had the faster castle age cav since that may give them an alternative to Kipchaks. Other than that, would rather make Cuman Mercenaries slightly cheaper (costing slightly less than 10 Kipchaks) and reduce the research time and creation time of the free Kipchaks until its better to research than to create Kipchaks normally. Maybe a feudal age ram buff would be nice as well
Like Tatars? Isn’t it a bit too much?
I think Magyars could use a small incentive Bonus instead, as their scout discount is usefull the whole game (they are one of the best lategame civs). But having no eco bonus is actually a big downside.
They have basically free husbandry. They have a quite strong mid game.
I actually calculated the effect of a 50 % decrease of TC working rate (after the first one). It would drastically reduce the worth of the feudal TC. I calculated that it then would actually be better to make a common fc boom strat.
So I added spawning vills once you build a TC with them. If the cumans secondary TCs spawn 3 vills when built, work with 50 % rate and are build in 220 secs (in castle age/ feudal can stay at 270), the cumans had about the same booming potential as Indians. (Note that this is guilt also after aging up, not only for feudal age).
With this change a cuman player could sometimes get away with a greedy second tc in the feudal age also in open maps, but since the booming would be nerfed, it wouldn’t make them OP in more closed maps.
It also fills the lack of defences of the cumans, as they have to build more TCs for their boom which leads to a better protected eco and allows the cuman player also to be more aggressive himself as the eco is better protected.
I think after that change Cumans could also use some bonus to their Siege, as they don’t get siege engineers besides being known for their siege capabilities. To improve their sieging potential (also in feudal), there could be a 50 % discount to Siege Workshops and 10-15 % to Siege units, to compensate the lack of Siege engineers.
This would allow them to convert their early eco also in more closed maps than hideout, besides still being on a timer because of their bad lategame capabilities.
An interesting change to cuman mercenaries would be that the cuman player also gets 1 free kipchak every minute after researching it. This would make the tech also viable in 1v1 and improve the bad cuman lategame a bit.
This would be my three ideas to rebalance the cumans and finally make the mercenaries a useful tech.
Actually they have the fastest Knights. The bonus is multiplicative not additive. In Castle Age, their cavalry moves 10.25% faster than Teutons, or 0.22% faster than cavalry with Husbandry.
That makes sense but honestly I think that giving them the 15% faster speed on castle age would be better for catching cav archers, running away better from enemy units or just running away better. Particulary if you mix in some camels, it would just help you do everything better
Cumans are completely fine in the midgame, they don’t need a castle age buff. They can make basically everything and they have several lines to play around.
They lack key techs for the lategame and their extra tc ist basically suicide in open maps, at least against experienced players. And in closed maps their lategame is so bad, they often can’t convert their advantage to a victory.
Only as a pocket in team games they can sometimes shine. And the mid game cav spam is actually really strong. And therefore I see a speed increase critical, because it would actually make them even better at what they excel, especially as mobility is king in team games. Their weaknesses should be adressed.
By that way of thinking Berbers can also do everything, but they cant because just like Cumans their economy isnt very good (no, the extra town center isnt good on open maps). I know it will be very hard to balance Cumans between 1v1s and TGs, but we should at least attemp to do so and they are just bad on open maps (and thats why I think they should get the speed increase). Yes, the late game could be buffed, but the only thing you can do rn in arabia 1v1 is Kipchaks.
Nerf expected in the upcoming patch. So they are becoming worse. I agree the bonus was too strong, but what about a buff?
A simple buff can be:
Civ bonus: Light Cavalry units and Cavalry Archer line train 100% faster (basically Steppe Husbandry)
Castle Age UT: TCs have +4 attack.
Reasons:
a. Cumans are supposed to be Cavalry rushing civ, but they reach the Feudal Age at the same time as a generic civ, just like Magyars. Unlike Magyars, the Cuman bonus doesn’t help much (Magyars have 2 bonuses for their scouts). With this bonus, even if you perform a 21 pop Feudal (20 villagers), and do a 4 scouts rush (3 scouts created), you save 45 seconds of stable time. This means that you arrive at the enemy’s base at the same time as a Frank player’s 19 pop Feudal (18 viilagers).
b. In Castle Age, unlike crossbowmen, you create Cavalry Archers from scratch and they are pretty much bad in Imperial Age (lack Bracer), so there isn’t much incentive to go Cav Archers, but even if you go, you need only 50% of the production buildings, saving 175 wood per Archery Range. This is a great economy - military bonus for a civ which lacks pure economy bonus on open land maps.
c. This also makes a compelling case for Steppe Lancers in Castle Age. Usually a 2 stable Lancer production is good but with Cumans, you need only 1 stable - saving 175 wood. A 2 stable Lancer production in this case would be impossible because of the demanding food costs.
d. This is a slight buff to late game Hussar raiding which is the present use of this technology, because now you won’t need a technology to do this.
e. To make it clear, this does not apply to Archer-Crossbowmen production, Knight production or research of upgrades, which makes it different from Chivalry. Compared to Perfusion, Huskarls are a heavy infantry unit forming a core of the army, whereas these 3 units are mostly raiding units, so I don’t think this will be OP. Cumans also do not have any discounts unlike Goths.
The reason is quite simple. Cuman defence is the worst in the late game due to lacking Architecture and Bracer. Cuman Towers are aweful, even worse than Aztec towers (they have Guard Tower, but miss Masonry). Cumans lack Bracer which makes Cuman Watch Towers worse than Goth Watch Towers (Goths have Architecture too), slightly bad castles, and aweful TCs. So this one boost is for late game defense when they have the worst defence in the game.
I think this civ just needs a redesign, while I generally really dislike redesigning civs, this civ just didn’t have any good concept to begin with.
The UU needs to be fixed so that it’s not going to be broken in Castle Age, but stay viable in Imperial, the castle age UT needs to be probably replaced with a UT that’s related to the UU to facilitate this, the civ’s bonuses need an overhaul, so that it turns into something that can form a gameplan, rather than an assortment of random, unrelated bonuses. (Some of them are just so useless, like the siege workshop bonus, or just could be replaced with something better, like the free husbandry bonus)
Creating light cav and cav archers 100% faster could become extremelly unfair situationally.
I would just give them “Cavalry moves 5% faster, husbandry free”, reduce the speed of non-elite Kipchaks by 0.05, giving elite +1 attack and making Cuman Mercenaries slightly cheaper and making it create those 10 Kipchaks really fast
It is more of an economy bonus till Imperial Age, saving 50% wood and building time on stables and archery ranges when going for full Cavalry Archers or Steppe Lancers. It is an economy bonus similar to Malay age up letting you scrush faster.
You cannot really maintain the regular 3 ranges CA production because of the fragile economy in the early castle age.
I’m no expert by any means but wouldn’t it be the best to balance the Cumans around their civ designing traits, the Feudal TC and Siege Workshop?
Either make those very slightly cheaper or built faster in the case of the TC as an example. They really struggle in the early game, so that might help them a bit. Or give them something more to support their rush potential, at least for the 1vs1 situation. In Team games, they seem actually pretty good
The problem seems to be that its hard to keep the second TC balanced in both 1v1 and team game. Its possible to make it balanced but it probably needs you to work around their military units mostly
Wasn’t this we tried here to discuss? Or was it in another thread?
The Idea was to half the second TC work speed, so the cuman player doesn’t has to invest as much into the the boom, reducing the peak of investment.
As halving the extra tcs workrate would make them bad in general (not even worth getting it), there should be something initial coming with the extra tcs like instantly spawned vills (or maybe free farms or whatever) to compensate for the initial investment partially.
This would allow cumans to actually play the second tc and get away with it, but the booming potential could be held in an area comparable with indians.
I also would like to see the cuan siege buffed a bit, it’s unique. But right now, nobody uses it.
