Do Civs need a clear weakness?

I hardly believe that trash monks or burgundian vineyards are that broken in post imperial age.
Burgundians fall off pretty quickly in imperial age imho, as their tech tree is severely lacking.
Champions without supplies, mediocre archery range without thumb ring, arbalester and ring archer armor, mediocre siege lacking SO, heavy scorpions and siege ram.
Basically they have to rush to Paladins and hope to close the game quickly. Flemish revolution is something that can really backfire hard, it is also very expensive now, not really affordable as soon as you hit imp if you are planning to do Paladins.

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Tbf I’ve seen it happens but mostly in RM and in specific match ups

Camels trade really badly against serjeants, but I literally do not see any reason to play camels against Sicilians

Sadly, certain civs just die to hauberk cavs

The biggest problem with the pala tech is not the cost (although it’s pretty costly and difficult to tech palas kn arabia if you are not already ahead). The problem is how long it takes to complete the pala tech since you need to wait 100 seconds for cavalier and 170 seconds for pala. If the tech was faster it wouldn’t be such a problem, but you are paying a lot of res agasint someone who could be pushing you with a much faster powerspike (let’s halbs + arbs). Now you have to fight and lose numbers of the units you are trying to upgrade for such a big cost or lose production/eco/map control. Here lies the big problem.

11 what? Arena is the most second played map in the game and closed map are a common feature in every tournament. Furthermore Sicilians are at least B tier on arabia while having amazing match ups against top tier civs (meso are pretty shit against them)

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Generally arbalesters are frown upon; khmer skrims and cavs are much better to do their job (thumb ring is around 20% dps increase in late game)

Camels are faster than Serjeant and Serjeant are too expensive to amass, thats why Serjeant cannot counter camels (not pure camels, think of a camel+archer/scrop combo)

Is there any civ that dies to +8 cav? I cannot think of a lot of civ, not one come to my mind that is worse than Teutons vs Mangundai.

(In fair situation in imp - I think that Sicilians are strong at castle age)

Mesos, Viet, Brit and so on

HC4 had a game with Khmer on bypass I think and they were mainly making arbs. Thumb ring is very good to have but arbs witjout it are still pretty good

They are good on arena but wouldn’t really say they excel there. Eco bonus is nice for booming but only kicks in later compared to other civs and units are good but somewhat one sided as you rely mainly on melee. Also no bbc. Wouldn’t put them in top 10. Imo they are strongest on semi open maps where knight line has more usage than on arena.

I probably need to check the game out - but I guess at least it is not mainstream to play arbalester

The 2nd most popular map of the community, one of the 2 fixed map in the map pool and one of the 2 map that has its own pro tournaments every year is irrelevant. Okay. Good to know that.

Fair enough. Let’s just wait for DOTD win rate, another Arena tier list by some of the big influencers.

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As long as Arabia has more than 2/3rd of the overall play rate it’s the sad, but hard truth.
I like Arena way more than Arabia, but 13% play rate is nothing compared to 60%, on higher ELO is 9% vs 75%, even worse.
In team games is a different story but team games are not the primary target of this game, as they’re quite hard to balance.
Of course we can pretend the play rate is meaningless, in that case all is good then. Franks are not OP, they suck on water, and Spanish are not weak, as they have good cannon galleons.

Yeah let’s buff Italians age up discount, Koreans wood discount and Portuguese gold discount further. All of them are bottom 5 in Arabia and pretty close to Sicilians in Arena and all the 0.5%-1% water maps are more irrelevant than Arena.

I don’t think that would help them on Arabia. And yes, water maps are even more irrelevant. Or, like I said, they aren’t and everything is already balanced as it is. Franks are not op, then. So stop pretending (not you specifically) they are.
After all Franks weakness is water play, missing bracer is huge there, they also lack elite cannon galleon and shipwright.
7
Balance achieved.

I think you also should stop pretending (specifically you) that non-Arabia maps are not worthy to consider for balance change.

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I’m not pretending. I’m clearly stating it. If all maps had the same “weight” we wouldn’t see all those nerf Franks, nerf Chinese, nerf Mayans/Britons threads. The reality is sadly different. And I hate Arabia, just to be clear.

No one is saying that all maps have same “weight”. But “stating” anything other than Arabia is “irrelevant” is completely a wrong statement.

This started with Sicilians being a good civ in Arena or not, right? Why not we go back to Sicilians change log? The 1st TC in nomadic maps are not built any faster from the very first balance change of Sicilians? Why? How’s that supposed to happen? It never changed anything in Arabia? And who cares about those 5% nomadic maps, they are “irrelevant”, even more “irrelevant” than Arena in terms of play rate as well as tournaments play. Cannon Galleon tech is removed to unlock the unit and Italians dock discount is reduced where there is not a single drop of water in Arabia.

You know for a fact that just because other maps and settings don’t have equal “weight” as RM Arabia doesn’t mean they are “irrelevant”. Which is why I also used the word “pretending”.

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Let’s go straight to the main point: complete and total balance of every civ for every map and every game mode is impossible, unless some sort of balance change tied to each map is implemented. And this balancing difficulty is well documented by the constant balance change updates and nerf/buff requests.
So, would you like to spend time to balance civs for Islands or Nomad, or for the random map of the day, or for the most played map ever?
Otherwise I’m calling for Franks, Aztecs and Cumans buffs because on water maps they’re not good, and I don’t play Arabia so I don’t care if they’re good there.
And I’m done with this for good.

I think civs shouldn’t designed around weaknesses. Strenghts, yes. But weaknesses?

Look at Teutons, their weakness to cav archers makes them having very weird matchups, often having civ wins or losses depending on the opponents which can or cannot exploit their weakness.

So having clear weaknesses makes civs weird and feel unrevarding to play, depending on the matchups. I think all civs should have possible gameplans against everything. They can be limited cause of restrictions, missing techs etc, but it’s bad to design a civ around a weakness to eg cav, archers, cav archers or whatever. That’s a poor design imo, even worse than one-trick pony civs.

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I dont think Teutons arent as weak to cav arhcers tbh, unlike Franks they actually have an answer to Mangudai and also have better siege

Well said. Ideally every civ would be able to have a viable response to any unit combination the enemy can throw at them. Civ losses are not a good thing. Losing should be caused by mistakes, whether that’s poor scouting and getting caught off guard, being slow to transition, or simply making the wrong units. I also don’t like when the only play is “beat them in Feudal”, which is often the advice for matchups like Mayans vs Goths. Late game options need to exist, and for the most part they do.

Agreed. Yeah, let’s just poke at and attack the weakness every match. No fun

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