I understand your point. But I was talking about people just reducing everything to a unit being too weak or OP, without putting things into context.
And on your argument about the general nerfs that hit Chinese the hardest, it seems to me that what Chinese are good at is diversity. They can get a little bit of everything, and the mixing and matching of that, paired with game knowledge and economy and macro skills allow the player to put out mostly optimal army comps, eco booms and timing attacks than other civs can. I understand that the landmarks have to be weak, otherwise the civ would just have a lot of everything, instead of a little of it. You see, as they had one strong landmark, the mentioned Clocktower, it was enough of a balance issue in the Chinese civ context.
Back to the general nerfs, considering the civ is good in diversity, we have now, in this patch, two problems: the main one is the meta transition, and the second, derived from the first, is what players try to invent in order to get a game advantage. The meta is trying to pull away from siege 100% of the time, and although we still see a lot of mass siege around, we are going in the right direction. This complicated things for Chinese, again and also, due to their only “good” landmark becoming a standart Chinese level landmark. The meta is changing, and in this context, the main civ strength has fallen apart. And, as the meta shifts, players are trying to build new strategies, not only military ones. Economy strategies are intrinsically tied to military, specially on transitions. If you want to go from mass archers into mass knights as you move into age 3, you have to adjust half of your economy, which might include building farms, production buildings, putting vills into gold, more into wood, and in the case of Chinese it includes retasking the Officials, too. Skilled players have a hard time putting everything in the right place, specially because there’s a lot happening in high level games, and low skill players… well… probably don’t know about these stuff. Anyway, my point is that we have “old patch” eco-military strategies, like the number of villagers into each resource for a said army composition and unit output, and as the new compositions are just coming out of the oven, people have to measure the economy and other efforts all over again. For Chinese, it’s even worse due to the civ’s complexity and diversity. Just remembering the cost of each UU can be a headache for most players.
In summary, one could say the civ were just exploiting the OP stuff in the game (siege) with it’s only imbalanced landmark (for the civs landmark phylosophy), and people learned to play the civ in that way because it was effective. I honestly believe we have some really hard lessons to learn before truly learning to exploit China’s potential. Due to that, balancing the civ, amidst this “colective learning process” will be, at the very least, a challenge.