Well folks, its been an interesting couple of hours exploring this civ. Here’s my first impressions:
Livestock maps are far too good for ethiopia. with a fast explorer and the amount of vill seconds they can rip out of livestock in just minutes is insane.
Fast Fortress builds seem very powerful here, lots of really good age 3 shipments. 9 shotel is huge, the stevastopol is a monster.
Javelin cav are a bit overtuned (but not by much). They’re a bit too cheap or need to be 2 pop with a small buff to something. Its so easy to skirm goon while hardly needing any population space.
A lot of techs, most of which feel very weak. 500 influence to add a vill to each shipment is pretty steep since it takes, what, 5 or 6 shipments to pay off? Stacks kinda well with jesuit influence.
Neftanya are monsters. Especially since ports gets you fairly accessible CIR.
Fantastic merc shipments. Cannoneers age 3 is solid. the sudanese knife throwers(?) are quite powerful- ranged melee lets them pick off artillery and this feels unintentional and probably a little broken. Need to check out more of the shipments.
Coin eco feels weird. Am I supposed to be training those healers to gather coin? currently I feel like buying a cow at the market for 100c and turning it into 300w in like a minute is huge returns.
No shadowtech (standard) units age 3 is a bit rough. despite not having access to the two fortress age units, they are still needing to be upgraded.
This civ will be a beast in treaty and ffa, probably big team games as well. 1 pop units that have very high stats and lots of economic potential. Lots of shipment points, defensive buildings. A little worried about countering massed artillery though, maybe I am missing something to deal with that?
Influence is exponsive.
This civ has such high apm requirements, lots of things to manage. market, granaries, age 2 goon raids, herding, more granaries, shipments, fast explorer rewards good kiting of guardians, upgrades, so many builder wagons, watching for my jesuit influence crates so they don’t stack up forgotten, purchasing cows at the market, getting eco techs from multiple buildings (india market, livestock market, granaries), possibly training economic units at the tc and the mountain monastary, utilizing levy units for defense, so good placement of houses is essential, macroing influence plus your food/wood/coin and management of livestock. Goodness gracious its a lot. I think with practice that high apm players will be able to squeeze out a ton of resources, units and map control.
And finally: love the appearance of the buildings and units. everything looks crisp and clean and the units are fairly easy to discern from one another.
What are your first impressions?