Its that time again… so my other thread was moved to the area where no one visits, so im approaching it from a completely different angle
so franks have 5 eco bonuses : berries, farms, free blood lines, castles, faster training cav = fewer stables = eco bonus
franks arent as 1 dimensional as others have pointed out before, their infantry is top notch, the throwing axe man is a fantastic UU and gives them a completely different play style. as opposed to (for example) the tarkan that doesnt help vs a civ like inca, the TA actually helps vs halb civs. or the goths being pure infantry. or other one dimensional civs with a lot less going for them.
now on top of a whopping 5 eco bonuses, they have arguably the best paladin in the game, along with a a number of other great military options (scout rush, castle drop, BBC etc) whereas many other civs will be lacking a lot more (more 1 dimensional) or have worse ecos but slightly better tech trees…
is this really balanced?
and if we refer to the win rate/pick rate/hera’s chart this just backs it up even more…
and finally because my thread was original post was moved to somewhere no one ever looks:
How are malians supposed to beat franks in the imperial age? (well teutons are probably even stronger her vs mali, halb + cavalier death ball is uncounterable except with extreme micro)
Franks have a vastly better eco. Cavalier + halb combo will eat anything mali can field.
Halbs absolutely decimate mali pikes just by themselves a whopping 133% more effective damage and 5 extra hp. (halb does 7,pikes does 3)
Halb doing about 33 dmg to camels
While pikes are doing a lame 23 to cavaliers, nevermind paladins
i honestly think franks are in a position where a nerf to berrys might help as they seem one dimensional with early scout rush into knights and then paladin spam
but can show more variety same as other civs like goths
probably had a reason
Farimba Imperial Camels
and yes i know their pikes wontcome close to the paladins of the frank the same applies for franks as malians got a good support from Archery Ranges
I recon Malians are supposed to beat Franks by forcing them into ‘weaker’ options (compared with knights) by using Camels, and then to do a lot of damage in early Imp with the Farimba power spike (The tech is cheaper than Cavalier + Blast furnace, and upgrades scouts, camels & kights). After that to finish it off with Farimba light cav raiding (which is superior to Frank light cav raiding).
I can see how it’s supposed to work, but I don’t think I have the skill to execute it. Whereas the Franks strats… are pretty easy. Franks vs Malians isn’t balanced for skill.
I know a lot of people have asked for the berry bonus to be nerfed, but I’d prefer a castle/imp nerf myself. I understand giving them a decent scout rush was good in many ways.
As for other ways to nerf franks:
general knighs/paladin nerf
remove Squires or other infantry techs
look at the UT costs and the UU
Bombard cannon and cheap castles combine to give franks a ‘defensive’ identity, and it’s kind-of neat to me.
I agree. The buffest civ since conquerors, by far. They are good at every age of the game. I don’t think they need a huge nerf though. I think that removing ‘squires’ from their tech-tree as in the original game is enough.
I think Franks are a pretty healthy s-tier civ. They are strong for sure, but there is also counterplay to them in most situations, so it rarely feels like you just have no chance.
So I think a (small) nerf might be okay, but it’s not desperately needed.
loool not a chance … i already said why… mix halbs with cavaliers, the camels W I L L attack the halbs and absolutely waste their time, while the halbs pop them like baloons…
in a pitched battle: if a cavalier attacks a camel or a pike, its not a huge waste, if a halb attacks a camel or a pike its not a huge waste. if a pike attacks a halb its a MASSIVE waste. if a camel attacks a halb its a MASSIVE waste.
heavy camel + farimba is cheaper than cavalier + BF? even if it is, franks mix in halbs. jobs a good’un you cant beat that ball. thats why i mentioned it
totally agree. they get the defensive identity as well as excellent infantry, on top of the best cav…
No it’ not. But farimba + heavy camel + cavalier is cheaper than BF + cavalier + paladin, and stronger than mere FU cavalier. It gives you time window in which you can do damage.
I think you really need the cavalier and light cav if the frank player is mixing in halbs, because they allow you to use mobility to damage the economy (and evade the halbs).
Take this with a grain of salt, because I don’t have the skill to do it consistently, so I might be missing something.
just flag krvemlik, he’s intentionally being argumentative…
a number of problems here, mainly
enemy is attacking you, eg with trebs, you have to fight him off, you have to engage the death ball. or you are trying to punch a hole in his wall with your siege, gives him more than enough time to bring the death ball over to eliminate the siege…
frank can easily out produce your cavaliers with his cavaliers, and eventually get paladins, which will obsolete your cavaliers instantly. so if your cavalier harassment fails, you’re dead.
franks have been consistently topping winrate statistics for years atleast since 2015, so a nerf has been long coming.
i would decrease the berry bonus to 15% similiar why indians fishing bonus was reduced so that they dont become too borken on heavy berry maps.
Then i would consider removing squirres and moving it to ports instead.
If necessary we can buff the elite trowing axemans movementspeed by 5% to partially offset the nerf on the UU.
Then i would reduce chilvary from 80% faster creation speed to 50%.
Yes this is a lot of nerfs, so i wouldnt mind if its carried out step by step over multiple patches to find the right balance, but keep in mind:
granted this is all elo 1v1 stats and for 1650 franks dont dominate so much. (frank is ultimate noob civ, just spawmn paladins with all your eco bonuses or drop a cheap castle, and that reflect in this statistics)
For 1250 to 1650 players which can not be called noobs anymore franks perform even better thought with a sample of more than 7000 franks games still:
Only at 1650 they fall of to around 50,5%, but here we also have a smaler sample of a few hundres
Lastly lets check out the teamgame 1650 statistics with over 21k franks games:
Consistently in the top 5. What more proof do we need to nerf this civ.
Tournament results? Franks are consistently picked/banned in 1v1 or teamgames for their paladins.
(also tournament civ winrates are meaningless, way too little samples)
RIght there are these people that claim pickrates only matter… (as a mathematician this is a bit apauling to me when we have winrates but nevermind)
Not really, no. Lets say you normally go for 14 stables (which is a very high number). Franks with chivalry would need 10 stables to match that production, saving a total of 170*4-800=**-**120 ressources. And thats very generous, as gold is easily 2-5times more valuable than wood.
Chivalry is good, but not as an eco bonus. It lets you get pala upgrade earlier, and it means that less population is in your queue and more is on the field.
“Arguably” is such a nice word, it lets you get away with very bold statments without any need to back them up. They are very good vs arbalest, but in pretty much any other situation lith, teuton or even cuman pala are better. And considering there are only a few pala civs at all (id say huns, franks, lith, cuman, teuton, magyar), thats not really “best in the game”.
While you really overstate their advantages, you dont even mention their trash. Because we all now its below terrible. One of the worst skirm/lcav in the entire game, only generic halbs.
So i DO agree that franks are a S-Tier civ and that they ARE really easy to play. But they also have their downsides and calling them inbalanced is an exageration.
Kind of Agree. many other good civs are nerfed in last few months but kind of surprise that Franks untouched.
True for skirms. but you mean their lcav is also worst? No. Full armor and attack (to kill villager 4 shot) is more important than little more HP for scout line and their Light Cav is neither top-tier nor worst.
We can easily find 10 civs that have worse lcav/Hussar than Franks. Celts/Koreans/Japanese for missing armor or both (Koreans) and Byzantines/Vietnamese for missing Blast Furnace. Don’t need to list more. Also, Chivalry help to spam lcav faster than other civs to compensate their weakness.
Stop blindly looking at winrates. What’s coming next ? Nerf Goth ? Then nerf Celts ? Then nerf everything that is above 50% ?
Franks are a very fair civ to play against, I’ve genuinely never seen anyone complain about them, and they don’t have a particularly high winrate at high Elo. Absolutely no need for a nerf.
The most important thing about the S-tier nature of Franks is that they have a very predictable playstyle. I could argue that the S-tier nature has more to do about the strength of that playstyle and how well they implement it, how poorly people address it, or how difficult it is to address it.
Honestly, the important thing to consider for me is just how expensive the army is for Franks. If your opponent goes for massed Halberdier to handle paladin, every reasonable counter available to the Franks requires gold. If they don’t go for paladin and decide to go for Axes, they’ll need anti-siege, which again, is expensive. It’s not infeasible to contain them until the gold runs out, at which point the Frank options are very lackluster.
but like india/khmer before, the problem is the position-picking lobby setting that they made “standard.” picking those civs and getting pocket position 100% of the time is OP
it’s sad how playing on settings for beginners has completely ruined the discourse around the game
people aren’t wrong to want nerfs because they don’t really have any control over what the lobby settings are. but the way they make civs, they have tons of bonuses for one map + position combination and few bonuses for other maps. so when you get to see what the map is and control what position you’ll spawn in before you pick your civ, the whole game is just about one-dimensional play.
it’s like they made a whole meta around forcing cheese strats. the game is balanced around maps like coastal, but everyone complains all the time because they’re forced to play arena, arabia, islands instead
…And the other side of statistics is that against their worse match up (Vikings) they still have like 48% of chances. That reflects they have decent options for everything. None other civ is like that. But I insist, taking away the squires from their tech-tree is enough since they are not an infantry civ. Perhaps compensate it increasing a bit the speed of the throwing axemen so they don’t get nerfed too much.
I’m sorry but this is a really bad reasoning. By this logic pretty much everything is an eco bonus. Look at Goths: cheaper infantry = eco bonus, effective free arson, anarchy = need less castles = eco bonus, perfusion = less barracks = eco bonus, more pop = more villies = eco bonus, the boar bonus= eco bonus Why were people asking for a Goth eco bonus then?
Of course, would anyone answer, it depends on how good the bonuses are. In the case of Franks the berry one is excellent, cheap castles are good, the “free bloodlines” is nice but actually worse than actual bl for anything that isn’t a knight, free farming bonus is really mostly good for horse collar but not much else (I mean who gets heavy plow before imp?), and when you reach the point you go for chivalry you shouldn’t have problems building stables anyway so it’s more of a pure military bonus. Overall pretty good stuff but not oppressive.
No, they are just better counter-infantry units than HC, they sure are great support units but they don’t offer a new playstyle, unless you’re facing goths you can’t focus on them and expect to win.
Franks lack the two key techs for arena monk play, have meh siege on top of horrendous archers and horrible trash, it’s not that hard to have a better tech tree than them.
Replace “Frank” with any other paladin civ. The answer is probs the same. It’s mainly because the Malian’s whole point as a civ is that they are made to be extremely versatile up to early imp and then fall of later with less options. If anything in a pure trash war they can defo beat Franks, while the trash of other pala civs is way better.
note: I don’t like using aoestats that much but just out of curiousity I looked at the Malian page and what do we get to see in the worst matchup category?
Yup, that’s 4 paladin civs.
AoC Franks were stuck with the second worst eco bonus after goth boar “bonus” while their most powerful military bonus was +4 HP on cavalier and +12 on palas compared to generic. Besides being pocket in TG and killing goths with axemen they couldn’t do anything. If anything Franks are a good example on how to bring F tier civs into relevance.
Do “heavy berry maps” even exist? The closest I can think off is Yucatan but even then it’s not a popular map and there are tons of hunts and turkeys as well so it’s not like only Franks are advantaged.
I can tell you why:
-genuinely good sure
-also good noob civ
-then Spirit of the law made a top 5 civs list and put Franks on top.
Long story short, it’s not because they are OP.
The very same ports that just got buffed?
Chivalry is only a 40% boost…
Aaaah pickrates. Remember when everyone believed that Persian were the best Arabia civ ever just because of that 5% boost and played them 24/24, and the second it went away they plummeted super hard? Of course the same likely won’t happen to Franks if a measured nerf happens, but I feel like people could be tempted to take stats to literally and decide to play Celts and Goths since they are next on the list.
Sounds like a good occasion to ask whether I’m the only one to think Celts totally didn’t deserve that nerf?
Only Celts have the same bad skirms tho, and they make up for it by being able to buy way better siege weapons. The other civs you listed have better skirms, and do you seriously think Byzantine having bad hussars will prevent them from destroying Franks in a trash war?
Well if this is enough to “compensate” for Frank weaknesses then Cuman must be god tier OP in trash wars mmhhh?
Well for beginners there are only pockets so does this matter?
Maybe it was like that in AoK but it’s clearly no longer the case today.
If I had to propose a nerf, bumping the cost of Chivalry sounds enough, and if it isn’t then maybe switching the UTs around so that you can’t get chivalry while aging up sounds like the next step (@TriRem’s idea not mine btw)
I don’t like the idea of nerfing the berry bonus because they are a slow source of food after all, so you kinda need a “big” number (still only the same than Brit shepherds) to make it noticeable.
