Burgundians is widely considered the best Arena civ and a “must ban” next to Poles & similar. Really, when you see Bohemians vs Turks on Arena, make no mistake, it’s because Burgundians was either banned or sniped (= ban post-draft). Burgundians beats both Turks and Bohemians very hard on Arena. On Arabia they are above average too, Hera rates them top 7-10 for example in his most recent tier list. They have good eco bonuses, a good tech tree and power spikes in the form of UU, Cavalier in Castle age, a good Monastery etc. Also, a cavalry civ can never be bottom 50% on Arabia tbh (maybe except Persians).
No, Poles will kill Berbers with Cavalier + Hussar spam with support of Castles and Bombard Cannons and Berbers, having no eco bonus, won’t be fast enough to respond to the Poles aggression mid Castle age to mid Imperial Age?
See what I did there? You can make any text and make it sound believable. But it turns out, Poles Cavalier is too cheap and basically beats everything in the game cost-efficiently, maybe units like Leitis can trade well vs it or Japanese/Teutons halbs, but I’m fairly sure Camels are actually countered by Polish Knights, while Pikes still narrowly win vs Polish Knights resource-wise but the problem is that the Poles player will take only engagements that look like, 20 Poles Knights vs 13 Pikes, and avoid those that are like, 20 Poles Knights vs 28 Pikes. Not to mention Knight play always has an overrun factor, once the Knights defeat the counter unit, you can’t remass it and stop the flood again because pikes coming out of the Barracks are very weak individually and not a threat anymore.
In reality, Poles Cavalier beats most cavalry civs if you assume equal resources. You can test this in mass battles. Some Paladin civs like Lithuanians with 4 Relics or Teutons might come out ahead assuming you can find breathing room for the 2000+ res required for Paladin upgrade during a game vs Poles.
No, Poles will beat Cumans with a FC driven by Folwarks into few Knights!
Byzantines is a counter pick for any civ only if you play perfectly with monks, camels and crossbows. In reality, Franks have 55% winrate at 1700+ over the past 1.5 yrs.
Again an exaggeration. Ranked ladder stats since Hindustanis lost halberdiers shows that Franks have 55% winrate against Hindustanis. It was 46% before that. Camels used to be better before with extra p.armor preventing Knight-crossbow play from being effective. With the extra p.armor gone, that’s no longer the case.
Its nearly impossible to fail to get a lead against at least 30 civs. Even if you don’t do any damage with your scouts, you get faster berries, free mill upgrades, free extra hp on your knights avoiding the need to do bloodlines. The castle age timing is of enormous value. The meta civs for each map are the ones that give a nice lead in castle age timing or some lead in castle age timing along with a lot of extra/saved resources in early castle age. If you’re up sooner by a min, you get 2 knights with some upgrades that can clear out most of the existing feudal army, force a lot of defense from the opponent.
All the situations you speak of is the hypothetical 50+ min game time until which the game position stayed completely even. 95% of the open map games end before that and even in the few ones that last beyond that mark, Franks hold majority of the map because of their cheaper castles, mobility and faster respawning of light cav with Chivalry. For Dravidians and Goths its quite the opposite and they can’t stay even against most other civs until 40 or 50 mins. And those civs don’t get great siege either.
Because Khmer got vast impactful nerfs after their buff was found to be too much -8% farm rate reduction, lost bombard canons, and Ballistas while fun for TG, are still nearly impossible to get to in an even matchup. These two along with Chinese never got any impactful nerf, continue to have their double eco bonus, military bonuses.
Mongols are a niche on maps with a lot of hunt but I would be totally onboard for a nerf on their hunting bonus rate or stagger they’re steppe lancer hp bonus across castle and imperial ages. An increase in training time or cost of Mangudais are also good changes.
Yet another exaggeration. Non-elite keshiks have 110 base hp, 2 p.armor, 1 melee armor and 9 base attack. That’s not even a cavalier. Its just a knight that trades off dps and melee armor for cost and speed. And you need CASTLES for production.
ZERO eco bonus. But changes to their monk-line or removing gunpowder or champion upgrade or even reducing base attack of non-elite Camel archer is perfectly fine.
Incas also have the same 3P armor on castle age eagles but they’re almost never picked in tournaments nor have much success in the ladder. The reason is THE ECONOMY. Its not just +1 vill like Goths. Its also the extra food from gaia - 15% longer lasting resources, cheaper archers and cheaper walls all combined. In a standard RM game you need about 3500-4000 food depending on the number of feudal military you produce, to go upto castle age. For normal civs, 2200-2300 of this comes from animals and berries and the remaining from farms. When you get an additional 15% thats like about 350 extra food and a majority of this food is much faster compared to farms.
Civs that don’t have an economy-military tradeoff are the ones that are too strong. Poles, Hindustanis, Gurjaras from a few months ago, OG Cumans, OG Huns, OG Indians, Khmer from Feb 2020, Aztecs with +5 carry capacity and 18% faster military. All these got nerfed but Chinese, Mayans, Franks and Mongols on the hunt rich maps are still roaming freely.
Totally onboard for a staggered discount on their units as well. Either 15%, 20%, 25% cheaper in feudal, castle, imperial or just 20% and 25% in castle age and imperial age. Imp discount down from 33% to 25% while some other benefit for fire ships related UT. One or more of these could be nice.
Its not a power spike. Bonuses last across all ages. Berries in dark age, scout hp and mill upgrades in feudal, knight hp, los, heavy plow in early castle age, castle discount in late castle age and early imp, 12 extra hp on Paladin and a lot of complementing unit options like halbs, hand canoneers, uu, onager, bombard canons. Likewise for Mayans, extra vill and extra resources from gaia, 14 resources saved on every xbow in castle age, longer lasting farms and mines, +67% hp on eagles.
Power spike bonuses are ones that have a very small time window like free thumb ring, free archer armor, free forging/iron casting, 200 extra resources upon hitting next age. These aren’t power spike.
It already got a considerable nerf, twice. And I’d still be ok if the monk hp bonus got a nerf. Like +3 hp per tech or decaying bonus +5 for first tech then +4, +3 and stops at 60 hp.
You’re missing the point again - the castle age timing. -100 food from the 20 horse collar farms means castle age would get delayed further, more investment into defending against early caslte age aggression would be needed. -8 food per farm will significantly delay the knight spam timing. Once the timing window is missed, your opponent will have heavy camels or halberdiers and bracer+chemistry. And then the knights will be of considerably lower value. Just the stone mining nerf alone delayed this quite a bit and their winrates dropped by 3% to 50.5%. This nerf would push them even further down on open maps. And I guess that’s ok because they’ll still be an excellent closed and semi-closed maps.
And Halberdier. I think Hindustanis will eventually get back halberdier in the future or some other buff like a direct discount on villagers without staggering.
Idk how stats are that way, but really most pros rate Hindustanis S-tier, while Franks make only A-tier. My experience is similar, while Franks Castle age can be indeed scary, a good map generation where you can get down walls early and defending early Castle age leaves you nearly always ahead. I am more scared of Hindustanis than I am of Franks on ladder for sure.
As for Castle age, in terms of pure Knight vs Camel fight, new Camels are better. If your argument is “Franks go 2x gold comp into CD”, sure Knight + Xbow is probably stronger than Camel + Xbow/Camel + Skirm but you also need to afford ALL upgrades (hard even for Franks eco). And really you need to get an overwhelming lead (i.e. CD that damages 15+ farms and kills 1 TC) in Castle age because in Imp, cheap Castles or no, things aren’t looking in your favor.
In my experience, Knight + Xbow vs Camel + 2nd unit often comes down to who had the slightly better macro (i.e. has 1-2 extra Monks for example) more than the units themselves.
I can probably name more than 12 civs that can challenge Franks in Feudal. Mongols, Khmer, Bulgarians seem solid. Hell even civs with strong spears like Bohemians or Byzantines probably are good enough vs Franks. On Arabia if I wanna gain a big lead in Feudal I would MUCH rather be Khmer or Mongols than Franks.
sure but also an earlier uptime generally comes at the expense of eco, if you are up early, sure you make Knights early, but you are also 3-4 vills behind. Saying that Knights beat Feudal army is fair only if you assume the opponent plays open, if he is fully walled (which is a fair assumption), the timing only gives you a positional advantage (read: forward siege + monastery). Defending isn’t a bad act per se or always means you are behind, it just means… you are the defender. If you are 2nd to Castle age, assuming you wall well, you should nearly always have a slight eco lead.
sure this is the argument I can support. I am not a big user of Castles myself, I do use them but it’s not something I spam, sending 25+ to stone in mid-castle age like some players. This might be part of the reason I undervalue Franks, I tend to look at their trash units and they have 1 of the worst trash comps in the game. Sure you might do Light Cav faster (can’t you just drop more Stables then though?), but it’s also 72 HP Light Cav…
Khmer even after the nerfs are extremely solid, able to hit crazy timings both in Feudal and in Castle and in Imp they are 1 of the best Hussar civs.
Mongols can do crazy uptimes, they can reach Castle age fast and do Lancers and their Imp looks solid. On Arabia the main good thing of Mongols is that you are nearly always the aggressor which generally means you can have a nicer macro at home than the defender.
I don’t think Mongols are broken though. If you get past Feudal vs Mongols you are generally fine.
Ok but have you looked at the total cost? It’s 100 total resources vs 135 of Knight-line. Also 110 base HP is before Bloodlines, so in Castle Age it’s better than a Knight. The Imp version, the stats you should be looking at are 3P armor (which is the main reason Paladin is a good unit aka it kills anything archer) and 160 total HP. Sure it needs Castles but it’s basically a unit that in mass battles behaves like Paladin while being largely a food dump (60% of cost is food vs 44% of Paladin). I would hope it needs a Castle because if you could make them from Stables, yikes. No reason to ever bother with Paladin again
This without even mentioning its passive ability. In an average fight, the unit probably gets off 5-10 attacks so in reality it costs you something like 38-37 gold.
Like you say later on, it’s the combination of good tech tree and eco bonus that makes a good civ. Berbers have strong enough army that they are good without eco bonus in practice. I personally would nerf them by maybe taking away Hussar. Would leave them still nice to play in Imp with BBC, good UU and cheap Cavalier while leaving them also a bit awkward to play in Imp.
eh sure. I agree. The point I’m trying to make is that Mayans can play basically 4 units: Archers (with discount), Monks, Halbs, and Eagles. The rest of their units are either hard to get to (Siege #### ### or trash (Militia-line, other Siege units). I don’t disagree Mayans are top tier but it’s funny that time ago they were S-tier when Archers were meta, now suddenly Berbers made it to top 10 when they were middle-of-the-pack before. All it takes is a meta unit change funnily and Berbers and Mayans have the same military bonus (cheaper main unit).
The main reason that prevents me from agreeing with a Mayans nerf is their narrow tech tree.
Yes this sounds reasonable. Tbh Byzantines is a hard sleeper pick right now imo, even on Arabia most people rate them middle of the pack while I put them at top 10. If you fail to beat them in Feudal, it can be a nightmare to deal with them.
I meant Franks faster Castle timing, and Mayans faster Castle into (slightly) more Xbow. Obviously free Heavy Plow isn’t a power spike.
their Knights cost nearly like a Champion without supplies. They have really comparable stats, if anything the Knights win the comparison. I don’t think with a 60f 30g Cavalier you can “miss the timing”, to me it looks more like an infinite zombie horde, and vs Poles you are playing a survival game in late Castle and in Imp.
Really even with regular farms, Poles Knights would still probably be OP, give that UT to someone like Japanese, BAM Japanese is now one of the best Knight civs in the game.
A Halberdier needs 12s to kill a Elite keshik in that time it generates 4.4 gold (22gold/min)
A Paladin needs 20.9s to kill it in that time 7.66 gold are generated
Since you usually dont fight halbs with keshiks i think its more than fair to say that in pure melee battles (which of course is not always the case) they generate 5gold atleast.
Stats from AoE 2 Database
Edit: in Castle age its even better with 5.5 /9.24 gold being generated vs pikeman/ knights
Personally I would do 8/12/16/20 but I think they still playable they have the best camels, Ghulams, 9 range hc with +1/1 FU Hussar and Skirms. Also the elephant nerf isn’t as bad as you make it out to be they have 2 more cav and elephants armor.
Pros rate them that way on Arabia because Franks don’t do well against some of the other S-Tier civs like Chinese, Mayans and a few less common but counter pick like Berbers, Teutons at their level. Not the case for Hindustanis before the nerf. In the event that Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs also get nerfed apart from Poles, Hindustanis, Franks will become crazy good even at their level on several maps.
That was the case because of the former eco bonus. In a passive map situation if opponent is walled, Hindustanis can just stay at base and get much far ahead with -10f per villager compared to what Franks can get. You don’t need to be as scared as before with -7 food and probably 1 min later castle age.
I don’t mean straight fast-castle. The standard meta build of fast feudal, walls, defensive feudal army and then going upto castle age. In that scenario, if your opponent invested more into feudal and is trying to break-in which happens fairly often, a 1 or 2 min faster castle age timing is of huge value. The slower civs fail and take damage more often while the faster ones defend successfully more often than not. And in case opponent stays safe inside their base you can still force more defensive units, walls behind walls while they’re on the way to castle age while you add tcs and get eco lead.
If you are slower by 2 mins, you have the eco lead only before clicking up. In castle age eco grows faster with extra tcs.
But its kind of necessary in mid game. You’d need it for trebs and conscription and defending more gold sites even if you don’t want to go forward. The trash unit strength is weak when you compare it with Chinese or Burgundians otherwise game simply doesn’t go past 50th min or doesn’t stay even. The paladin would have just done too much damage for the other player with a civ that has superior trash units to be able to keep up production.
They are but they got their nerfs for a lot of situations and in most tournaments they have a pick priority somewhere between 10-20 depending on the number of maps like Atacama, Land Madness or Haboob. Still good and definitely don’t need any buffs, but no need of any nerfs either. Stats wise all their stats are positive but just above average. And another important thing is they have been a strong civ for about 3 yrs. Before that they were pretty much never picked except by Viper.
Yes indeed, so you do see the value of faster castle age timings right. You can’t sit with 6 or 7 extra vills and click up 3 mins later assuming that will give you good eco. The faster civs have potential to do a lot of damage. And this all comes down to the relative strength of castle age - extra tcs, multiple strong unit lines unlocked, siege, monks etc.
I was just saying that its totally ok to nerf some aspects if it could reduce their power on certain hunt friendly maps. Not that they need nerfs imo. They’re useless on Empire wars, not the best on Arabia and a few more castle age based maps.
But that’s how unique units are supposed to be. More powerful than generic unit lines so that there’s some incentive after investing into the stone collections. And its true for most of the cavalry unique units like Leitis, Konniks, Keshiks, Coustillier all of these add more value in different situations compared to knights either by being cheaper or having more dps or double life. You said how you’re not a big fan of putting down several villagers to do castles, and that’s because it slows down your eco but that’s exactly what needs to be done by the player who wants to play Keshiks from castle age. You can’t lose a bunch of them fighting against opponent knights or camels or eagle-pikes and then replenish fast enough until like 35 or 40 mins into the game. So its not a broken unit. Hypothetically if Tatars got extra sheep in feudal age like Nov 2020, then probably yes but now that’s not the case.
They still are S-tier and that’s the thing I’m trying to imply. They were broken af when they had Obsidian arrows and the game had melee pathing issues. Now they’re still S-tier. Highest win rates in the past 5 months ,top-5 most preferred in S-tier tournaments that happened since then. Their castle unit is much easier to get to compared to most of the other unique units and adds a lot of value. The reason its not seen often is because Mayans don’t need to go for them and can end the game with arbs-halbs-eagles.
Like I said before, the tech tree-eco bonus balance is heavily tilted in favor of winning for mayans in most situations. You have 2 strong bonuses for a faster castle age, heavy discount on mainstream aggressive units in castle age and imp and very cost efficient units and longer lasting resources for mid imp.
Lack of monk techs puts them behind on maps like Arena or Fortified clearing which have stone walls but on open maps they have everything that’s needed. Extremely difficult to push them past 1+ hr where the lack of light cavalry line starts troubling the Mayan player.
Again the wall meta and castle age timings. In open and aggressive maps or hybrid maps you can make better use of stronger towers, fire ships and cheaper spear-skirm and close the lead over many other eco civs. But with the wall meta, they’re almost always slower to castle age and that evens out the game. If heavy feudal age play becomes more common, then yes Byzantines are definitely a top-10.
I mean, they’re sure going to be more useful than champions in many situations yes but the amount of damage you can do with the mass of knights would drop significantly if opponent reaches imp and gets upgraded army. Upto 5 mins of delay, potentially what would now be the case moving forward, is still ok for doing damage with those knights. But if its further nerfed, Szlacha Privileges will become very situational and Poles would have to be played in a different way.
Franks have 60% winrate against Khmer 53% against Bulgarians 55% against Byzantines, 51% against Bohemians and 49% only against Mongols. As you go up in the elo, the positive differences grow stronger. 77% winrate against Khmer and 58% against Bulgarians at 2k+ elos.
Poles are weak in feudal because they have no dark age bonus, and the civ starts taking the lead after around 15 mins. Hindustanis, Mayans are NOT weak in feudal age. They get very strong dark age and they just get even better in castle age, so you don’t see them as a feudal civ.
They were definitely top tier on open as well, no doubt. But now they might struggle quite a bit more after the nerfs.
Its because Poles beating Berbers that way has literally happened in many games.
It all comes to the timing window. The mass grows very strong during a time window which is still too early to handle for most of the civs except maybe Hindustanis, Chinese and maybe the old Gurjaras. But post nerf, more civs are going to be able to handle it imo.
