According to the devs this was the singular playstyle used by the vast majority of players. So what would stop them from doing the exact same thing? All you would do is prep the site with walls and towers and once you age send your s holar with pikes to guard them on their way. Being you can age by like 5mins not many civs will have a legit response at 5mins to deny your sites unless it their sole focus. And again that forces a singular play from both the delhi and the OPPO. They said they don’t want this.
Making it now a 4mins out AFTER hitting feudal means its still a viable strat to capture them just not as early and strong. 15 villagers worth on gold in the first 5mins is too strong…
And 15min villagers on gold is still strong 4 to 5 mins into feudal.
I suggest you rush to feudal to setup for a ram push meanwhile researching simultaneously sanctity. Once you push you also attempt to grab sites in order to have a backup plan onto castle. It will be minimal investment since all your focus and likely enemy’s focus will be addressing the ram push.
The saving in Imperial is as drastic as I mentioned if not more!! You’ll want all your keep upgrades and all your villagers gathering upgrades and all your blacksmith upgrades and all your current composition upgrades which will be cav upgrades archer upgrades and seige upgrades (which I forgot to add in the equation earlier). So while you won’t use all 20 something upgrades at once You’ll want and benefit immediately from more than half of them both in combat and defenses and eco.
Lastly the population displacement you suffer for making scholar doesn’t come at a villager discrepancy? It comes at a cost of making more army supply. At what point does the other player get villagers while you que scholars? What you spend in scholars he spends more in normal techs. If he gets a second tc, then you can eventually get a second tc too.
Lastly if you take that 18k res I mention save by teching them all and instead tech only 13 ( food wood mines all 4 blacksmith chemistry biology flaming arrows the infantry 20%buff then knights and one siege tech). That’s a regular civ cost of 13k res. Keep in mind you’re not making all 25 scholars at Imperial!! You likely already have at least 10? Maybe more already!! Also you probably already went the parallel research route by making several buildings so you really DONOT need all 25 scholars to get these 13 techs in a reasonable amount of time. So say you make 10 more scholars to have a total of 20. And we assuming 20 gets you the timings you desire. You would have spent IN IMPERIAL the 450 to make the university (same as the other guy) , then using the 4 mosques YOU ALREADY have up from castle plus your landmark you can que 2 batches of 5 scholars at 675g/batch in 90 seconds. Put all 10 in the university so no need to make additional mosques. That’s equates to a total savings of 11650 resources over the other guy trying to do the same thing as you just did for pretty essential upgrades.
At 60 resource gathered per min over a 10min window he would need have 20 villagers more than you to equal your savings. Or if you wanna look at it over the whole game so far (say 16min game so for?) still using the high Imperial gather rate of 60res/min he would have to have had the equivalent 13!!! Villagers more than you the whole 16mins of the game???
Now I understand all covs have some kind of economic bonus so it’s not as big as 13!!! Or 20!!! Villagers needed to compare but most civs don’t get for example 40% eco bonus over delhi eco (which even at 40% eco bonus over 16min they would need to have 9.3 villagers average MORE than delhi to get the above savings.)
The Imperial bonus is very very strong. The problem is getting there and they are heading in the right direction by lowering the early research times. And I agree elephants need a late castle Imperial love. I’ve suggest a permanent speed tech at the university giving them 0.4 additional tiles/s. War elephants would be 1.4 base (1.71 charging) and tower elephants would be 1.28 base.
Delhi was not OP before. The research system was incredibly powerful, but it was the only thing the civ had besides early sacred sites. Now those are gone, and Delhi has a huge nerf to its other core mechanic.
5x research in Imperial is balanced. Delhi do not get stupid powerful knights, they do not get stupid powerful bombards, they do not get 50% reduced vil costs, they do not get horse archers or streltsy… they get free research (after setting up infrastructure and sacrificing 10-15 popcap). It’s supposed to be stupidly good, because every civ has something stupidly good.
Are we gonna nerf French knights once they hit Imperial Age because, “hey, no other civ gets knights that good! It’s not fair!”…? No, of course not.
Sanctity in dark age was way stronger than all the early/perm bonuses other civs get. Nobody had 15 villagers worth on gold for a trivial amount of prep. Currently Sanctity is still in game and still viable tech but understandably better contested so won’t reward as much as it did pre-patch. Again if you can just consistently hold 1 site you’re talking the equivalent of 5 base villagers which at min count for queuing scholars plus helping you gain gold for aging.
I agree with you though that the upgrades can be more pronounced. Say make feudal tech only 3x times standard timing? Or reduce the scholars needed for standard feudal upgrades come down from 11 to 8?
How much res would a Mongol player gain from the bonus fishing boats they can make, since they don’t need to make houses?
How much do they gain from the double unit production?
How much do they make from raid bounties?
How much more resources do they gather because of Deer Stones?
In contrast:
How much resources is a Delhi player spending on mosques in the dark and feudal age?
How much resources is a Delhi player spending on additional military production buildings in the dark and feudal age?
How much later does a Delhi player get the benefit from the tech they are researching?
For the scholar system to be any kind of bonus, there has to be a point where the investment pays off and if you’re argument is that Delhi gets all of their tech at 25 minutes into the game, while their opponent gets extra units AND the tech they need, when they need it at 15 to 20 minutes into the game, then I’m going to have to disagree with you about it being OP.
I’ve already said I think you should have to get to Feudal to cap the sacred sites. Capping in dark age was only OP because it totally freed you from gathering gold and allowed 100% focus on military and map control. If you have to gather gold and build a landmark that takes at least a few vills (plus feudal resources) away from military production for several minutes (or several vills for a few minutes).
The bonus that Delhi gets in Imperial age is not spending a dime on incredibly expensive techs. Each eco upgrade and each University upgrade are 1000 resources a piece, the balance is the time offset, and that you have to produce scholars to offset that. Its hard to say how long research should be at the moment since scholars as a whole seem bugged, but assuming you’ve been working to build your scholar army up by imperial age, times shouldn’t be too crazy and you’re saving an absolute mountain of resources on research.
I made another topic earlier about this, because I’m not sure of the intended bonus mechanics of scholars when they’re not bugged, but assuming they cumulatively add research speed as I would expect with the 3x, 3.5x, 5x, 15x ramp up, you only need 20 scholars to match standard research times for Imperial techs. Again, I’m not sure if cumulative is how the mechanic is supposed to work, but thats what the balance changes hint at to me.
You don’t need all your houses at once but it’s a buff of 50 wood every so many minutes for a total 350 wood assuming single TC. Which is cute but not game breaking bonus. The ovoo auto generation is very very strong and is worth 6 villagers on stone that directly goes into traders and or units. The mobility tech is also OP the khan is OP… MONGOLS are the best civ…delhi can’t compare to them in total.
Getting techs early in Imperial can often be more important than getting them free.
Elephants suck, so fully upgraded normal units are Delhi’s only “unique” unit in Imperial. Meaning they get a strong advantage for their whole army relatively early, but the ultimate potential for those units will never be above their rivals, who get access to the same upgrades in addition to powerful unique units and buffs.
Finally, players will specialize into a particular unit comp by Imperial. They will only require a small subset of Imp techs to reach full power, so Delhi’s practical resource advantage is smaller than it seems. Yes, they have free transition into any alternate build they want, but such transitions are not seen in every game. The actual practical savings will be much closer to the cumulative eco bonuses that all other civs get.
Again, Delhi was balanced before. Perhaps an 8x modifier for Imp techs would be alright, to require a bit more focus on scholar infrastructure. But 15x just takes Delhi’s main advantage and turns it into a liability.
We agree 15x is too long but 9x for imp? Was broken while at the same time 5x for dark and feudal was underwhelming. I like the idea of faster free early techs then gradually require more scholars to speed techs up.
Again having 2 villagers on gold is sufficient to keep your landmark pumping out a scholar every 45s so ideally you can have 20 scholars generated in 20mins of game play which would cost you net 2.2k~ of gathered resources. Even in this 15x Imperial search times with 21 scholars you’re poking at 3min per tech but having multiple buildings pushes the overall time down compared to the foe.
Yes, I know. Delhi is balanced around having those techs for free, and earlier than the foe. Delhi was not overpowered in any way before, except perhaps if you let them claim and hold sacred sites.
Again, this is Delhi’s only gimmick, especially now that Sanctity has been nerfed. That early Imperial power spike was no more OP than any other civ’s special power, and the power trip you get from just clicking every tech without a care in the world was one of the better parts of playing the civ. It was how you do asymmetrical civs right. It was powerful and felt powerful, but felt stronger than it actually was, because of all the other things missing from the civ compared to the others. And it didn’t just make Delhi OP in one area. It affected every area of the game, but with only a moderate effect (you were just getting the same techs than other civs could get).
You can look at the total amount of resources saved and balk at the numbers, but it’s not as big of a deal as it seems at first. Other civs have eco advantages that make up a lot of the difference, and many of those techs would not typically be researched by a non-Delhi civ, i.e. Delhi does not actually save resources by researching them. Yes, it gets the tech anyway, but these techs are often non-decisive. Yes, Delhi can pull fully upgraded crossbows out of its ■■■ after specializing in MAA for the entire game, but France gets super-knights that heal themselves, and Delhi doesn’t. If old Delhi was so OP, why weren’t pro players calling for a nerf? It was usually only ranked B tier - not bad, not OP, just where it should be.
I think x15 is fine fi they didn’t secretly nerf scholars. If it was 15% 18 or 19 scholars would bring it to other civs speed, and that seems fine, but it actually takes way more than that
They just had a podcast on balance philosphy. Basically the want to bring the power level of the bottom to get up to the MONGOL level of power!
IMO
to bring Delhi to Mongol power level I suggest you make research times like so and keep scholar contributions AS IS
DARK AGE: 1.5x
FEUDAL AGE: 2.5X
CASTLE AGE: 4X
IMPERIAL AGE: 10X
that alone with tech fixes would make delhi scale up really really quickly and never really be behind in terms of eco or army mass.
To 1.: I agree mostly, 15x is too much and maybe 8x might be good.
To 2.: I kind of disagree: Because x-bow are their intended counter, war elephants should be weak against them. An elite upgrade sounds fun. A bit more HP against siege in Imp would be great.
To 3.: I don’t think horsemen need a special anti siege armor after the springalds are nerved, but I agree with the rest.
To 4.: I liked sanctity the way it was. It was a fun play style, but didn’t felt too strong.
To 5.: I disagree. You can just build a mosque near your docks. All mosques are connected, even if they don’t share the same influence area.
To the rest: You should be able to target with your TC already with this update.
I hope, that the springalds will be nerfed in the direction, that they stay good against siege, but are much worse against everything else. This might shift the meta in favor of elephants, because there will not be as many sprngals on the field any more an mangonels could kill massed x-bows.
Some of my additional thoughts:
I like elephants as pop efficient units for late game, but I kind of feel like Delhi struggles a lot against siege, wouldn’t it be good to give Delhi the culverine, too?
It’s a good start, but not enough. They still need to:
Fix all the bugs (Dehli have a lot, and they didn’t say one bit about that on the round table despite all the chat questions and posts lately). That would be a huge buff to Delhi by itself (Hisar useful, upgrades effecting tower elephants, etc.).
Buff elephant armor (particularly after spear and xbow buffs in winter update)
Make sanctity come in at beginning of feudal age. Getting to feudal then still having to research the tech is too long. It should not take longer than 5-6 minutes to get that tech in, though you should have to get to Feudal. Otherwise you’re not really even ahead of fast castle strats.
Fix water map balance (particularly Feudal age)
I also kind of think they need to do something else for Feudal age. I’m not entirely sure what at this point. On the one hand sanctity loses its charm (even though the double gold is still good) if it comes in later than 6 minutes. On the other hand, sanctity at 6 minutes plus another Feudal buff might be OP. So I want there to be a viable alternative to sanctity, but it needs to be something that doesn’t stack with Sanctity and create an OP situation. I’m kind of thinking sanctity should just give double gold, and the capping in Feudal age should be tied to one of the landmarks. If you tied double gold to the landmark it would force that landmark in almost every game. But if you make the Feudal cap a landmark option then you haven’t given up a major eco boost for later ages just because you wanted the other landmark. So I rather think the feudal cap should be tied to Dome of Faith, and Tower of Victory needs to provide some Feudal-specific buff in addition to faster attack speed for all foot units created within mosque influence (not just that walk close to the tower). You could even make the Tower of Victory attack speed bonus dependent on the number of garrisoned scholars if you wanted to. But I think it needs something else as well to help with Delhi’s feudal weakness (maybe +1 TC attack per arrow, instant research the mill and lumber camp Feudal age eco upgrades, +1 armor or damage to archers or spearmen in Feudal age, instantly research siege engineers, etc.).
I thought briefly about tying early sacred site cap to tower of victory, but I think that’s too strong because the extra gold income basically offsets the gold savings from Dome of Faith anyway and Dome of Faith is no longer attractive.
I like the idea of a landmark giving you sanctity without having to research it.
I agree that tower of victory feels bad, but it is bugged and doesn’t give close to the advertised benefit, so we can’t really judge before it gets fixed.
Even though I agree that landmarks should enable different strategies, I don’t think that they should do too much.
the game is still young to say that delhi was too strong or too weak pre-patch. People mostly played “meta” civ ergo french/rus/mongol and some english and abbasid here and there. Chinese and Delhi were rarely the first pick civ. But in a Dehli trend i’ll be proven wrong easly about that i’m sure. Any way the point is Delhi nerf is too strong too soon for an underused civ. They should have hit French Hulk stronger IMO and definitly exchange Sprigald damage with their bonus damage to force it to be an anti-seige specialist. The rest of the patch was ok Tier (expect for the rus early professional scout from what i understand 'bout it)