As one of the original civilizations from the Age of Conquerors era, Britons were once a premier pick. However, in the Definitive Edition era, they have been sidelined. Despite a sub-50% win rate on Arabia, their only recent balance change was a nerf to Archery Range work rates—a change that stripped them of their role as a 4v4 team game flank.
The Current Situation: A Statistical Exile
The decline of the Britons is evident in the facts of the current competitive landscape:
• S-Tier Tournaments: In recent premier competitions (such as KOTD 6), Britons are almost never chosen or drafted.
• Arabia: They are currently ranked among the worst civilizations on this map, with no presence in the high-level meta.
• Closed Maps: On Arena-style maps, Britons are virtually never picked. On Black Forest, they have fallen to a situational 5th-tier pick.
• Nomad & Hybrid Maps: Britons are completely absent from the competitive pool.
• Team Games: They are no longer a priority pick for the flank position in 4v4 Arabia games.
The Root Problems
Eco Obsolescence: The faster shepherd rate has lost its significance in the modern “deer pushing” meta. The Town Center discount provides negligible momentum compared to modern DLC eco bonuses, since more and more player tend to play all-in, or at most one extra TC.
The “Range Trap”: Currently, the extra range is not useful as people may think. Because projectiles travel at a fixed speed of 7, arrows fired at max range take much longer to arrive, giving opponents a massive window to dodge.
No “Plan B”: Unlike the Hindustanis (who received the Ghulam to let them counter eagle or archer), Britons have no answer to high-pierce armor units. Against massed Skirmishers, Elite Eagles, or Huskarls, the result is a one-sided slaughter.
The Proposed Fixes
Double the Blacksmith Range
a. Double the range effect of Fletching and Bodkin Arrow, remove Bracer.
b. Double the range effect of Fletching,Bodkin Arrow and Bracer. Replace current silver unique tech with another one.
This gives them an immediate, terrifying power spike in Feudal and early Castle Age, allowing them to dictate the pace of the game rather than just reacting to it.
Synchronized Projectile Velocity To fix the “Range Trap,” projectile speed must be synchronized with range so that the “time-to-target” remains consistent with a standard archer. Using the base velocity of 7 as a benchmark, we propose:
• Castle Age (Range 8 vs 7): Increase speed to 8.0 (+14.3% increase).
• Imperial Age (Range 10 vs 8): Increase speed to 8.75 (+25% increase).
• Post-Imp (Range 11 vs 8): Increase speed to 9.625 (+37.5% increase).
• Result: A Briton arrow at 11 range will land at the exact same time as a standard Arbalester’s arrow at 8 range.
The Armor-Piercing Volley (The “Plan B”) Introduce a Charge Attack for foot archers (replacing the expensive/niche Yeomen tech).
• The Effect: The first volley deals +5 True Damage (ignoring armor). This allows a skilled player to “snipedown” high-armor threats through micro, finally giving the Britons a viable answer to their hardest counters.
TL;DR: Saving the Britons
• The Issue: 0% pick rate in S-Tier tournaments. Extra range is currently a nerf because it makes arrows easier to dodge.
• The Fix: Synchronize arrow velocity to range (8.0 / 8.75 / 9.625 speed) so “travel time” is the same as other civs. Add a “True Damage” charge shot to handle Eagles and Huskarls.
It’s actually still one of the best bonusses for pure booming. Unfortunately, the playstyle has changed and we bascially neve have the scenarios of “booming behind walls with a slow military buildup”.
This also happened quite some time ago. If we have stats I can tell you you will very much see britons drop off once we started with adding forward siege when we had the military advantage. This strat just broke the traditional playstyle of britons with “booming behind walls whilst slowly building up the archer mass”.
The fundamental question we have to ask ourselves for changes to britons is if we want the traditional briton playstyle back or adjust them to the new metaplay.
I wouldn’t do too much to their Archers, maybe the Longbowmen could receive a minimal buff. But their military options in the ranged segment are actually top tier already. Always were. I would prefer if the changes would affect other parts of their gameplay.
Persians might be better, sicilians almost on par, but they don’t have a really good power unit to get for then.
But something else.
Britons having really bad heavy cav is odd. All I heard is that they actually had top tier heavy cav in the middle ages. Later they dropped it, but they actually should have a bonus to Knights.
If this is done well this could help them bridge the gap the meta change has left in their middle age buildup. And bring them closer to the historic Britons aswell.
I could imagine just a flat Attack boost to their Knights would make them an interesting option to go for in the midgame in low numbers. And later on their cav would fall off anyways.
I agree that Britons aren’t as popular as they used to be but disagree that the range bonus or shepherd bonus are irrelevant. Main reason for Britons not being picked in tournaments is skirms. As you might have seen in KOTD 70% of the games involved had skirms. Skirms being broken and bad cavalry pathing makes it difficult to use xbows. Second problem - Towers usage. except with Koreans and maybe Japanese, players never used Guard towers with any other civ and Britons have a very powerful bonus they can’t use. Fixing towers without making Japanese and Koreans OP will address the problem to some extent. Finally, its the lack of scalable powerful unit in imp. Imo Elite longbows should have higher projectile speed and higher rof. Towers, broken skirms and this longbow change should be sufficient to fix Britons.
In open TGs, they used to be so broken before and had like 4x the pickrate compared to most of the other archer civs. Even now they’re easily a top-10 flank civ and that’s fine.
I think you refer to TGs. That was the briton nerf, they were considered too strong there.
Though idk if this was really accurate.
Even now the stats over all elos actually are fine for britons. I though they were lower but I guess that this was just me remembering when they were really weak in a melee dominated meta we had like 1-2 years ago (?).
Britons seem to be still very dependent on elo, bad at lower elos but high elos can utilize them way more effective it seems. So it might also be necessary to look into this and give them more of an easy bonus. They are kinda a noob trap, seem so easy and straight forward but in reality they are way harder to master than other archer civs.
Britons have way less issues with Skirms than a lot of other archer civs because of their range. Also they can use their own Skirms, Cav, Infantry and in the lategame even Warwolf trebs. If you look at the stats from the ranged (“skirm”) dominated meta, britons actaully performed very well there.
Arabia isn’t necessarily the best map for Britons, though admittedly in the past britons were generally consideredn so strong that they were even competitive in tournaments there. But there are a lot of other Maps that suit Britons way better. So I’m not surprised they weren’t picked in this tournament when civs like shu exist that are just way smoother to play, optimal to play into the timing meta we currently have.
However it’s clear for me that Britons somehow lost their iconic identity and I would like to see some changes to them so they can see plays in tournaments with varied map pools.
Exactly. what happened was archer attack move bug got fixed, xbow and Arbalester upgrade cost increased, the super easy walling generations of Arabia were removed. So drush fc xbow and xbow play in general got indirectly nerfed as well apart from the skirm buff which affected Britons.
Isn’t having longbows kinda pointless when you have arbalesters? What about making longbows an upgrade to archers from castle age and give them a new UU, maybe an infantry unit with bonus against other infantry or some melee advantage? Maybe paladin too?
yeah, multiple archer line nerfs, powercreep, archery speed nerf and skirm are the reason why briton is now completely irrelevant in the game. Power creep is definitely the biggest reason here.
As the other guy said, Just make longbowmen a generic upgrade from archers and give briton a new “halberdier” UU infantry similar to fire lancer or Flemish militia.
Take the range bonus away and jack up the longbow range to like 7 [9] so they still hit far away and actually look unique since before any bonuses a longbows base range is FIVE
Thank you but to be fair it’s an idea people were discussing here since a while. There’s a campaign by basedteuton where you play as “English" and they have Obuch instead of longbows, I don’t remember the name of the unit but it’s quite popular and historically grounded and would fix the Britons a bit.
That’s the issue, longbows are not unique because the range is given to generic archers too so it’s basically like Britons do not have a UU currently. Even without the +1 bonus I’m not sure if 7 + potentially another 2 range would still be too strong in early castle for a unit to spam out of archery ranges but I guess you’d still need to pay for fletching and bodkin and of course the longbow upgrade would cost more than the crossbow one. You’d reach 9 range without having to build a castle and research yeomen basically. If both yeomen and the bonus go away elite longbows should have 9 range by default to reach 12 which is fine since it’s in late imp.