I don’t have early access, but have been watching some videos of content creators who do, and overall the Chinese civ looks really fun, you can see that care was put in to it! Quite a few mechanics and god powers do seem obviously OP to be fair, but that can always be adjusted further down the line.
The one thing that I am sceptical about however is the favour generation mechanic. At the moment, from what I’ve seen I don’t really like it. It has the same problem as OG Atlantean, you get favour just by existing, by doing what you’d just be doing anyways, at no cost to you. Favoured land spreads from buildings, which you would build anyway, and the in practice removal of AQ encourages building spamming even more, which wasn’t the case for OG. You get a lot of favour, especially early game whereas other civs have to make compromises, I don’t see any compromises that the Chinese have to make…
Greeks: gather resources or gather favour, a serious decision for early game and throughout
Norse: fight, which means that early game you might be struggling for favour and you might not have it when you want/need it
Egyptian: spend resources to build monuments which have a capped generation rate
Atlantean: tied to line of sight of oracles, which cost population, resources and have to be positioned optimally
I find the Atlantean rework from OG to be ingenious, it turned Atlantean favour from something passive and boring into a dynamic mechanic, but now it seems to me that this befalls the Chinese… I don’t really know how this could be improved at this point, maybe make it so that the favoured land spreads only from certain buildings, or have some building positioning requirements. But as is it now, my first impression is that it seems both too strong and lacklustre.
This also means that all the major god bonuses that work on favoured land you just get for free so to speak as favoured land is easy to have. Like the 300% research speed for example, it’s so powerful and it’s pretty much guaranteed.
If you pay attention you can see that building that stand alone have a gray aura- they dont provide favored land. It’s perfect IMO.
Only TC provide favored land on their own, other buildings have to be connected to create a continuous area.
So you have to carefully choose to place your buildings not necessarily in an ideal place to generate favor.
It is really similar to OG Atlantians, as it depends on TC as well. But in a much better way.
Makes me wonder if they thought about this as a rework for atlantians first and then had the oracle idea which could fit only Atlantians and not Chinese as they don’t have oracles.
It’s better to release things in op state, which draws players and creates a nice set of data for nerfs.
Otherwise it’s up, no data, then buffed to op which is basically square 1 of the previous method.
I don’t understand why they didn’t make it like new Gaia lush which spreads only with certain buildings. But instead of houses and markets etc make if spread via forts and towers or certain military buildings or just temples (TC included ofc)
Yeah, from what I’ve seen is that you would need to go out of your way NOT to increase your favoured land spread. With the exception of distant resource drop off sites and maybe side-builds you don’t really need to put any thought into it, the fact that the radii are big and it counts for all buildings you’ll just end up growing your favoured land easily.
Some potential balance ideas I had:
inflate the favour, so Chinese get a lot of it, but favour costs are more expensive balancing it out. Not a fan of this tbh.
have a similar mechanic to oracles, where you get penalised for overlapping buildings too closely. This would balance it out quite nicely as then to maximise favour you’re potentially making your base/buildings less secure and more prone to attack.
I assume the made it like this cause unlike Norse with their dwarves Kuafu cost favour to built and since peasants are worse in everything than other villagers Chinese economy needs Kuafu but since they cost favour you need a quite stable favour income unlike Norse. Maybe that’s the reason.
It seems planned that after 2 min mark you gain 17 favor which is the cost of kuafu.
They still generate less favor than atlantians starting favor generation of 3 oracles which is 21-22 for 2 min (though with less risk). And I’m not sure whether or not they have deminishing returns mechanics so that the larger the area the less efficient it is, which can keep them in line for the rest of the game.
While greeks and Egyptians have a 5, 6 per min for the starting favor generation (1st monument, 1 praying villiger), so I can see it beeing nerfed by up to ~30% so that the starting base is more in line with them, and adjust kuafu accordingly.
It kinda works like that already. The more the new area overlaps with the old, the less it will grow and the less additional favor you will gain.
