It applies to all Infantry, Huskarls included.
The issue is taht, with Platemail Armour, Goths discount would have to be brought back immensely, and then you would hear even more complaints about the lack of Supplies.
Goth Infantry is fine, they just need complementary troops for when Infantry is not enough.
But what if you put this last upgrade as a civ bonus (specifying the militia and pike lines gain) instead of allowing the tech in the blacksmith?..
+1/+1 (even not the final +2) for Champions and Halbs and with the discounts I propose, makes the compensation a bit fair for the lack of Supplies.
They need +2 Pierce Armour more than they need Melee Armour.
Problem with Goths is not that they are a One-Trick Pony, but that their One-Trick is not very good at all.
Portuguese and Mongol Champions are more cost-effective than Goth Champions.
Goth Infantry is also massively countered by Skirmishers alone, ecept for the Huskarl, which loses to most Melee units you can think of.
The argument could be made that Goths should use Hand Cannoners to counter Champions from other civs, but that still makes them especially vulnerable to Skirmishers.
Goths could really benefit from a rollback to most of the changes in this patch, and having FU Hussars, which would function as a viable counter to enemy Skirmishers.
Goths should not get FU Hussars, theyâre supposed to be an infantry civ. And their massive cost reduction makes their units far more cost effective than other civs, even lacking the armor upgrades.
Goths are perfectly fine in the lategame. Itâs the early game where they need help.
Give them +10 pop cap in all ages, so they save 2 houses to start, and give them +30% Boar Duration, and theyâll be good.
Franks are supposed to be a Cavalry civ, and a a full Barracks roster and upgrades.
Vikings are supposed to be an Infantry and Naval civ, and have great Arbalests.
One-Trick Ponies no longer work in this game.
Thatâs downright wrong. Look at what just happened last patch, for peteâs sake; the goths dominated the game.
And for ages everyone recognized that theyâre nigh-unstoppable if allowed to get to their post-imp spam. That hasnât changed.
They just need a little help to get there, definitely not making them a boring and bland average civ.
That is because they overdid it in the last patch, and Goths won in the Dark age, not the Imperial Age.
Goths won in both ages. Itâs not like they lost any of their power in imp, they just gained too much in dark.
There is literally nothing wrong with their playstyle, itâs very potent, they just need a little help getting to it. Small to medium eco bonuses would bridge that gap and make them a perfectly viable civ without breaking them and making them unbearably average.
They are the only civ that has NO fully upgraded Trash. It is a HUGE disavantage.
Because they donât need it? Theyâve got incredibly cheap pikes and champions, have a UU that is probably the best archer counter in the game, and can outnumber any other civ. Their champions cost 13 gold, thatâs practically trash champions.
Once they have their full-scale spam going theyâre very nearly uncounterable. All they need is help getting to that point; right now itâs slightly too easy to stop them.
I really like the idea of making their boar/hunt bonus better, because it would make them better on maps that are also good for the Mongols, and the Goths have really interesting counterplay against the mongols. It would give a more diverse choice of options on those maps and make the game more interesting.
Look, everyone that plays this game on a competitive level, has already said that Goths are by far the worst civ in the game.
From MBL, to Viper, HeraâŠ
Almost all of them agree that Goths need BIG buffs, or they will permanently be dead in the water.
Iâm not denying that theyâre currently in need of help, Iâm saying that the way to fix that is not to ruin the civâs central concept by making them boring and average.
If you want to make a civ stronger, buff them where they need help, and in ways that are in keeping with their civâs concept. Donât mute their weaknesses and end up with a civ thatâs incredibly dull.
In this case, expanding their population bonus and modernizing their boar bonus strengthens them where they need it, without diverging from their central theme.
They completely changed Persians into a viable civ (some say even OP) by just redoing one UT.
That is all it took, giving them more variety, and getting them out of their âPure Cavalryâ pigeonhole.
One-Trick Pony civs have no place in the modern competitive setting. The game has got much faster, and all newer civs have been made with speed and variety in mind.
Goths, as they are now, are a relic of a much older type of game. They just do not work the way they are supposed to, nowadays.
Statistically they still work just fine where they always have. In the post-imperial age theyâve maintained a 50%+ win rate until DEâs release, so this claim that âone trick poniesâ are outdated and useless is provably incorrect.
Relic my foot.
They are the worst civ in the game, at every stage of it, by far. Heraâs words, not mine.
If you think you know more about the game than people that make money out of itâŠ
Those are not by any means his words, even if we held the words of a single pro player to be as sacrosanct as you apparently do. In fact he said very little about them other than his ranking at the bottom. I watched that video too.
Conveniently, Iâve never said that the Goths are okay, only that theyâre not terrible at every stage of the game, and that they should be buffed in a specific manner to improve the civ while maintaining its theme.
Which giving them more trash options would not accomplish, but which giving them thematic bonuses such as better boar hunting and a wider population bonus would accomplish.
The fact of the matter is, theyâre just fine at the point where trash becomes most relevant. Where they need help is to smooth their curve in the earlier part of the game and make it more likely for them to get to their point of strength.
Just giving them + 10 pop in Dark Age will do nothing but save some 50 Wood, which is irrelevant because Goths never go for Archers, as they lack Thumb Ring.
They also never go for Cavalry, because they know they have no real Imp Age options.
Goths are like the Protoss of Starcraft 2, both have this really strong mechanic (large Infantry discount and Warp-In), but because everytime it is tampered with it absolutely destroys the balance, they are never allowed to actually use it to any actual benefit, and have waves of constant nerfs heap upon them.
Goths cannot even be played right now, unless you actually want to lose, just like Protoss has not won a tournament in several years.
All because the very priciple of their design is frankly silly, and fell into obsolecence due to continuous balancing and introduction of new gameplay elements.
It is time to stop being afraid.
Yeah, because Goths clearly have a zero percent win rate.
Oh wait, no they donât, theyâve got a 49.12% win rate. They donât need a polar shift, they need a slight change in elevation.
Literally every one of your assertions is wrong. You constantly spew âfactsâ that anyone can see are incorrect with a 15 second google search. You clearly have no grasp of the civilization. If for no other reason than that, any and all of your suggestions on the subject should be disregarded.
Shame most will disagree with you on this, and other matters.
Goths is dead, and unless the devs actually do something about it, it will just become a meme civ, like Teutons.
True, thereâs some exaggeration. Last I checked, generic FU champs donât beat Goth champs cost-effectively in Imp, but they hold up fairly well. Civs with FU+ champs (Japanese, Slavs, Vikings, Burmese, Aztecs - also Bulgarian 2H Swords, possibly Teutons now, possibly Malay) do beat Goth champs (and everything else in the Goth barracks) cost-effectively. As for the Goth creation speed, itâs a nice boost, but it can be compensated for easily enough by simply building a few more barracks for the non-Goth player. Itâs easy for most players to build enough production buildings that the bottleneck becomes their eco, not the number of buildings they have.
So while some may exaggerate, they have a point in that having faster produced infantry that is slightly more cost-effective that generic infantry, less cost effective than bonused infantry, and less pop efficient than both, is hardly enough to justify the massive deficits the civ has in every other area (awful defenses, no eco bonus, slow, no other strong unit lines). Even the Huskarl comes at a price, doing better against pierce at the expense of other Goth infantry doing worse.
You know that games can be decided in Feudal and Castle, right? For example, in the Japanese matchup, the Japanese player gets the full benefit of his infantry bonus as soon as Feudal, while the Goth doesnât until mid Imp. Aztecs get nearly the same initial production speed bonus as Goths for all military buildings, and Aztecs and Japs have better eco, better defenses, and more flexibility, plus UUs that wreck Goth infantry, so itâs no surprise that they could wreck a Goth in Feudal or Castle, or at least a decisive advantage that carries into Imp.
Donât be that guy. Uncalled for projection and âmind-readingâ doesnât further the conversation.
Bud, this is literally the case in the majority of âranged unit vs non-ranged unitâ matchups, i.e. if you donât take advantage of what makes a unit good (range in this case), that unitâŠisnât going to be good. Nobody makes ranged units without the intent of microing them or at least having a meat shield, so Iâm afraid tests of this nature canât really show us anything we didnât already know.
Ah, there it is.
Canât say I agree. I know that others, including Hera think this, but my rationale is that Goths were good as a âone-trick ponyâ civ back in AoC. The thing that makes them bad right now isnât that they only have one trick, itâs that itâs comparatively not very good. Thereâs no reason that Goths couldnât be balanced back to approximately the power level they had in AoC and still be an all-in infantry civ.
Well, from a certain point of view, so do Goths. Itâs called the Huskarl. I get that youâre referring to a non-infantry unit thatâs supposed to help them, but Huskarls were intended to break the standard infantry rules anyway, and the AoC Goths executed that ideal remarkably well - halbs for cav, huskies for archers, and champs for other infantry and trash. Itâs just all broken down thanks to Supplies since every other civ has the option to comparatively nullify a majority of the Gothsâ bonus. Where Iâm going with this is that I donât think even FU hussars solve the Gothsâ problem at all (theyâre still bad against good infantry and siege civs), and for the same reason that you pointed out regarding gold, spending large amounts of food on hussars will interfere with the Gothsâ infantry spam. Having hand cannons and bombards is good enough IMO, but the reason Goths are bad is their trick (infantry) is bad, so why beat around the bush by giving them âother options?â Gotta buff their infantry directly.
Youâve shown that itâs something that you disagree with, but I donât find any compelling argument youâve made that shows that itâs actually bad. If anything, stats show that the Gothâs winrate goes from awful in early game to breaking even in lategame (50+% ish), which is hardly the âunstoppableâ lategame that people sometimes talk about.
I agree. In order to become good again in late game, much less great, Goths need either Plate Mail or a staggered discount something like 25/30/35/40.
Uh, this wouldâve been true back in AoC, but the whole reason this and other threads exist is due to the obvious nerf that Supplies has on the cost-effectiveness of Goth infantry. Another way of looking at is is that with Supplies, you already did ânerf their discountâ compared to other civs, only you never gave them a bonus to compensate. Hence, either plate mail or a 40-45% discount is needed to give them comparable cost effectiveness to AoC. Unless you think that Goths were broken and unstoppable in AoC/HD (which the data doesnât bear out at all), this should be an obvious and logical step.
Definitely not quite true for Mongols or other FU generics, and Iâd have to test with Portuguese. But Supplies definitely closed most of that gap in cost effectiveness, giving every other civ a large chunk of the âperks of being Gothsâ but without any of the drawbacks.
Absolutely agree.
âFarâ is a strong word, but yes, their champs are somewhat more cost-effective in melee than generic FU champs. Not so against the 7-ish bonused 2H/champ civs mentioned previously.
Interesting ideas, but I donât think they go far enough. They definitely provide a strong Dark, saving 50 wood and giving some extra food, but theyâd still be fairly weak late Feudal through Castle. But I do think they should get some kind of actually decent boar/hunting bonus.
That has changed with HD and the expansions, even pre-Supplies. Lots of infantry civs can go toe-to-toe with Goth infantry in Imp, especially Aztecs, Slavs, Japs, Burmese, Vikings, Malay, not to mention the civs that can counter them with Siege (Celts, Khmer, Portuguese, sometimes Koreans) or UUs (Teutonic Knights, Cataphracts, Chu Ko Nu). There are some civs you donât want to be against Goths in post Imp (mainly Mayans), but by and large, the âunstoppable Goth spamâ has a very heavy component of myth to it.
Iâm not really worried about the state of the Gothsâ trash, as about their infantry. Having cheap champs should help a lot in a trash war, but lacking the final armor takes a lot of wind out of their sails. Hence, give them the final armor upgrade.
Absolutely. You know, Iâve noticed I tend to broadly agree with much of your analysis and design philosophy, but often not so much with specific aspects of implementation.
The thing to understand about Persians is that pre-buff, they didnât have bad cavalry; they had an FU stable and could go toe-to-toe with any cavalry civ (nor were they âpure cavalryâ - they had a solid eco/naval bonus). Their deficiency was largely their weakness against cavalry counters, which Kamandaran provided a solution for.
The problem with Goths is that they canât necessarily go toe-to-toe with top tier infantry civs, so if you try to fix anything but what Supplies broke (their infantry), that will still remain the case.
IMNSHO