The last three years of patches are full of horrible balance decisions.
- Siege engineer benefiting all siege ships:
Teuton Castles, Korean Towers, and Turk bombard towers aren’t designed to be outranged and quickly destroyed by unupgraded cannon galleons with siege engineer. This isn’t a balance change; it’s the dilution of these civilizations’ bonuses unfairly and handicapping civilizations that lack siege engineer.
And Artillery used to provide a +2 range advantage over other cannon galleons, but now it provides only a 6% range advantage over other elite cannon galleons minus siege engineer’s bonuses.
Also, why increase Artillery’s cost when also downgrading its benefit at the same time?
- Shatagni providing +2 range to hand cannoneers:
This is a ridiculously overpowered tech considering their hand cannoneers already have an armor bonus and are backed by a very strong Hindustani economy. On top of that, this tech is so cheap and doesn’t even reduce the accuracy of their hand cannoneers. Their hand cannoneers should never indefinitely outrange their supposed counters with 75% accuracy.
- Giving Treadmill Crane to Byzantines and Britons and removing it from Teutons:
Giving or taking away techs from old civilizations isn’t a good thing, even for balance purposes, which could have been achieved differently.
- First Crusade and Flemish Revolution:
These techs are just out of place and do not fit well.
- Missionaries:
This unit is overbuffed. First, the range and then the armor buff are way too much. They even tank arrows better than Aztec Monks, which should have never been the case.
- Turtle Ships:
Another overbuffed unit. Why does siege engineer benefit turtle ships? They aren’t even a siege ship, and now they are almost unbeatable, especially if your civilization lacks fast fire ships. Turtle ships are supposed to have short range!
- Pirotechnia:
Giving a three-strong stacked bonus on top of a fully upgraded unit is a recipe for breaking balance.
- Janissaries:
They were expecting compensation after the hand cannoneer buff, but instead, they received a range nerf, and the elite version wasn’t even buffed! Janissaries are supposed to carry their +9 HP and +1 range advantage over Hand Cannoneers, or at least the range advantage. Otherwise, they are nothing but a weaker and overpriced version of the hand cannoneer.
It’s like reducing Mangudai’s range, increasing heavy cavalry archer’s HP by 14%, and expecting people to train Mangudai.
- Food Inflating:
Increasing the initial food cost from 130 gold to 150 gold is unacceptable. It’s just arbitrarily removing one of the player’s choices.