Everything Wrong With The Chinese Civ From A China Main

General

  • Please move the dynasty button or let me minimize it somehow by default.

  • The song dynasty bonus reduces the time required to produce a villager by -35%, which actually means that it increases villager production by about +50%. That’s what the tooltip should say instead so that new players know what it does from the get go.

  • It’s kind of odd that the song dynasty bonus to villager production doesn’t affect imperial officer or scout production.

  • To generate the most tax gold and supervised food, its best to always drop food off at a mill, even food from your starting sheep. So I always do a mill 1st start. If my berries are too far away to drop my 1st mill there, I sometimes drop my mill directly below my TC and micro my sheep to the other side of the mill from the TC. If I do not micro this starting sheep, the villagers will prefer returning food to the TC instead of returning it to the mill, not generating tax gold or getting the supervision bonus as a result. Could you please have them prefer the mill or make returning resources to the TC give tax gold so I don’t lose 30 seconds if I forget to micro this sheep?

  • I think that the Great Wall is one of the 3 Landmarks that should have their aura radius buffed (the others are the Abbey of Kings for the English and the Tower of Victory for the Delhi).

  • Nest of Bees currently aren’t affected by the Chemistry upgrade +20% damage bonus that we get for free in the imperial age.

  • The construction speed bonus for defense structures is +33%, not +50% as advertised.

  • Spirit Way does not reduce Zhuge Nu’s wood cost.

Imperial Officer (IO)

  • If you have auto-tax on, as is the default, an IO will abandon the building it’s supervising if it is carrying 20 gold. Instead it will go return that gold to the TC and auto collect tax. This is why you sometimes have your IO sneak away from their post.

  • IOs with auto-tax enabled can be considered idle villagers, meaning that if I use my idle villager key bindings, it also selects IOs and whatever orders I give to those idle villagers will also be given to the IO, taking them away from the building their supervising.

  • If I give the command to collect tax from a building and then shift-right click a TC this makes the IO collect tax and then garrison in the TC. Meaning I cannot shift-click return the tax to the TC.

  • We need a hotkey to cycle through secondary economic units, like IO’s. I currently have to cycle through them by manually clicking on the left UI button.

  • IO’s collect tax using a 30s cooldown in the most inefficient manner. They will take 19 tax gold from one building, and then take 1 tax gold from another and put both buildings on cooldown, even if that building they took 1 tax gold from had hundreds of tax gold. Please make IO only auto-collect tax gold from buildings with enough tax gold to completely fill their capacity. For example, at the start of the game, they would only collect tax from buildings with 20 tax gold. I essentially have to turn auto-tax off and manually micro this unit every game. If I do not, an IO that has escaped their job of supervising a building will collect 19 tax from a building instead of waiting for the 20 tax gold I was waiting to build my landmark, thus putting me behind 30s.

  • I can micro IOs because I have experience playing RTS’s, and that’s essentially required to use IOs effectively. The current optimal way to open with china involves having an IO supervise a starting mill, and manually micro the IO to return 20 gold from the mill and woodcutting lodge whenever they have 20 tax gold. I have to do this tax collection micro manually 5+ times within the first 3:30 minutes of every game. This is makes my start quite micro intensive, and it should be no surprise that new players can’t do this. I don’t want carpal tunnel before I turn 30, so I think you should make the IO collect taxes from the building it’s supervising automatically, and return that tax gold to a nearby TC while still being considered supervising the building. Then they should return to that supervised building. This would make the civilization much more approachable.

  • The wheelbarrow upgrade reduces the amount of tax gold that resource drop offs generate by 33%, because they return to their resource drop offs less often. Internally, you should make the tax collected a float instead of an int, and just display an int. With the wheelbarrow upgrade, this would mean that villagers drop off 1.5 tax each time they return resources.

Granary

  • The building tooltip says it gives a 15% bonus per nearby granary, but the buff icon if you select the building says it gives a 10% bonus. I created a private sandbox and logged the resource collection of this building in multiple scenarios over 5 minute periods and have confirmed that each granary only gives a 10% bonus. But that’s not all, because it still could be a 15% bonus. You see the granary is a large 4x4 building, but has a 2x2 drop off point, meaning there is a longer walk time than a normal mill to return food. So either it is only a 10% bonus and the building tooltip is wrong, or it’s 15% bonus with a longer walk time mattering and the selected tooltip is wrong. Please clarify the tooltips and fix the longer walk times.

  • In most scenarios rather than going from zero farms to 30 farms all at once, I think it’s best to add farms and mills on gradually over time. This is a problem for the granary because the optimal way to place the granaries are in a triangle pattern completely surrounded by 20 farms so that they all get 3 stacking buffs, for a total of a +30% farming bonus to each farm. This makes adding one granary with farms at a time really awkward and suboptimal because you only get a 10% bonus for 250 wood. It’s best to spent 750 wood + 1500 wood on farms all at once to place this weird looking triangle structure, which is quite expensive to do considering I’ve spent 1800 resources on getting the dynasty to unlock it. Not to mention that generally by the time I have enough food to get the Yuan dynasty I already have farms so placing my previous mills and farms so that I can later create a triangle structure is impractical. I think we’d be better off having each granary give a +20-30% bonus and not having the auras stack.

Imperial Academy

  • In my games I seem to be generating more tax gold than my IO’s can ever collect, essentially meaning I’m not getting most of the tax gold bonus, and that the double tax gold bonus from the academy isn’t worth it. The upgrade to tax carrying capacity is worth more than the building. I’d like it if you considered having no tax collection cooldown, and that IO’s instead just only auto-collect taxes that would fill their carrying capacity like my suggestion above.

  • At the start of every game I build my buildings in a defensive pattern around my villagers and TC, but later if I want to get the most out of an academy I need to build it and all of my production buildings all near my TC somehow. This generally means I either don’t use most of the influence area, or I give the IO too long a walk time to collect all the extra tax gold. I’d like it if the academy was considered a drop off point for tax gold so I could use the entire influence area.

Thanks! Let me know what you all think.

16 Likes

Bro, I am main Chinese civ too and Im absolutely agree with your experience and explanation here, word by word.

Actually I am testing how to deffend in feudal age against Mongols, French or rus raids. By now it seems outpost in every gold-stone mine and Mills with a few spears is enough most of times until castle age, but don’t know if there is other strategy than that for the first 15 minutes of every single match.

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:+1::+1:

I agree with the granary issue- it might be advantageous to just give us the granary earlier?? What i was doing was overlapping the granary with the mill… cause i thought it said it stacks with the mill also? I never tested that…

As a drop off is great! I normally leave a estimated hole in my bld area for that structure

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I dont micro the io as much as u cause im old and cant keep up with my overall plans… so getting these io to do a better job on there own would put the whole rus micro intensive hunting to shame

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Maybe you should play an easier civ.

Chinese is supposed to be hard.

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Lol :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: thats why i play chinese… cause they are the easiest for the tactics i use…

The granary grants the bonus to farms in the radius, so yes you can drop them off near mills to give those farms the bonus. I’ve tested it. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

And you can delete mills and use granary exclusively for farms?

Cause i like chin civ the most- If i were to stay on topic…. :thinking: id have to say theres not much i dislike about Chinese, so im really kinda digging deep here, but the fire lancers are never talked about good or bad, they are completely forgotten about when people are complaining chin has nothing going for it.

And i been trying to find more info on the bonus units get on the walls, and the walls repairing themselves near towers or gate.

The tax system is designed in this way to prevent the game from losing balance. I guess the developers have a restriction to prevent players of Chinese civilization from receiving too much tax in a certain period of time through the tax system, causing Chinese civilization to become too dominant. As for the granary. , I don’t know if the 2x2 size drop-off point is a mistake, or the developer designed it like this? In any case, if the granary only increases the farmland yield by 10%, then the 250 wood is indeed a bit expensive, maybe it is reduced to 200 wood? It can accumulate. But it takes a little luck to find a suitable open space in the middle and late stages of the game.

Compared with these, I hope that developers will notice the errors of Nest of Bees.Some players on the forum found that these Nest of Bees used the slower launch time of the closed beta version of the game in the official version of the game, which caused their attack time interval to be too long. This phenomenon is seriously weakened to Chinese civilization. Not only are they one of the few advantages that a few Chinese civilizations can obtain in the castle age (other advantages have to wait until the emperor era), but also the main feature of this civilization. However, the current Nest of Bees is not much better than the original Mangonel. Even if the information on the data shows that Nest of Bees is better, it is not the case in actual use.

actually much worse except cost

are you able to play this civ to the levels that OP is able? the OP seems quite capable to me.

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Also Chinese farms harvest food 5% slower than other civs (thank you spirit of the law for your farming vid), and I think that Nest of Bees were over nerfed. I’d kind of like it they had the same attack range as Mangonels.

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I play only chineses.

I don´t know if i got you right, you´re saying if i can play Chinese and consider it OP (Overpowered?)

I think´s Chineses really do back agains´t French RAM + KNight + Archer Rush.
if they rush heavy at 12-14 minutes it´s really hard to hold your base. It´s the same with MAA´s.

And they do really back on water map´s, the attack ship is really weak. You need to castle age to be able to fight.

Basically i can booming more that my enemies while defending it´s a booming / tutling strategy.

But once you hold your ground and goes castle around 16-17 minutes and have huge economy you can press your enemy / raid and do all stuff that others do.

On Imperial, i focus on bombards and theyr fast firing tech, it´s really busted and can kill everything.
Clocktower bombard´s have huge HP.

Chinese need Buff.

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A friend and I found another bug, this time with the Nest of Bees.

The Nest of Beens does not do the damage advertised by it’s tooltips.

Please look at this video where a friend and I compared magonels to nest of bees against groups of archers. It’s quite clear which is better. Mangos vs Bees.mp4 - Google Drive

The result was thus.

  • Mangonels and Nest of Bees have 3 rings of AOE damage with their attacks.
  • The Mangonels has the intended damage and damage fall off you’d expect.
  • The nest of bees is supposed to deal 64 damage at it’s center, but it only deals 50. It also deals even less damage than the Mangonel in it’s 2nd and 3rd ring, meaning it has a much harsher damage falloff than the mangonel.
  • 3 Mangonel shots clearly kills more archers than 3 nest of bee shots.
  • If you add in that Nest of Bees has 1 fewer attack range, takes 5s longer to produce, it’s cost is more geared towards gold than wood, and it’s attack is over a longer period of time, giving the opponent more time to move their units away, the Mangonel is clearly better than the Chinese unique siege unit Nest of Bees.

Please fix this issue with the Nest of Bees.

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I am a Chinese secondary and I agree with all the OPs takes, emphasis on the inefficiency of Imperial Officials

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In this instance OP would mean Original Post, or Original Poster. It’s about the context.