Herbal Medicine is one of the least useful techs in the game. Even with the buff from +300% to +500%, it’s still never really used in any serious game.
So here’s an idea; what if it also effected Monks?
Not in the exact same way. Buffing their healing by 500% would be insanely OP. But what if instead they gained a bonus to their healing radius?
So instead of healing a single unit, monks would heal everything withing about 1 tile of their target. This would make monks a much more practical option for healing in the later parts of the game, where you tend to have far more units.
To make this balanced and prevent overlap, you’d have to make it so the area effect healing could not stack multiple times(to avoid having like 8 monks and healing everything infinitely). Without stacking, at most everything would get healed 50% more than currently(since the first monk heals twice as much as the second).
You also might want to take it away from Aztecs, which wouldn’t really hurt them since they only use it for +5 monk health right now anyway.
Would this make the tech worth getting? Or be too powerful? Curious for opinions.
Well besides maybe making the tech slightly cheaper it’s actually quite usable now. Especially useful if you’ve got a forward castle and are massing a fast UU like mangudai, that can regularly come back to be quickly healed.
I think just reducing the tech cost further to 200 or 250 gold is better, it’s probably still used at low level games. 6x is no joke, monks take forever. Ofc you need a castle to garrison heal
I think the safe thing to so right would be just to cut the cost and see how it affects its usage. It’s too expensive right now and there is better alternative use of the gold.
I’d make it so that it doesn’t cost gold, but food instead (let’s say 550 food which is a fair ratio in the castle age and gets cheaper in the imperial age), then it’s not a huge deal to research it. It’s actually not bad for two reasons:
Withdrawing weak units into the castle (can be nice with certain unique units).
It gives an HP buff to Aztec monks so the tech can be had after the crucial castle age ones anyway (Redemption, Atonement, Fervor, Sanctity).
I don’t think the mechanics of it should change, though it would be interesting to see monks being used more often for healing - not necessarily through an upgrade.
The trouble with increasing their single-unit healing is it multiplies with armor, and even a 2x bonus could take a unit from easily killable to invulnerable.
An area effect by contrast just lets one monk be more useful with a larger army, but each individual unit would still be just as killable as before.
Healing inside the castle or TC is an area effect too.
So what you are asking for is a moveable effect. In MP this might be too much though, as the monks heal team mates too. That quickly can become too OP.
I mostly use the healing in the castle when a battle group needs healing. So retreat them, wait a few moments, resend them to join the battle somewhere again. Possibly that was the original intent of the skill anyway.