After seeing the previews in last few days, I think the devs has done a great job at creating new variant civ that seem very fun to play, but it’s also quite obvious that fixes will be needed.
The Problem
In the case of House Lancaster, it seems like they just looked at income per minute, and cost to get there and said “well that’s on par with other civ so it’s good”, but have forgotten so many important core mechanics that make a good RTS game like:
-Needing to go out on the map to gain resources
-Resource depletion after a time.
-Balancing your population (between army and resources)
-The ability to raid your opponent’s base.
Manors literally break all those rules. They are not interactive, hard to destroy, give infinite of ALL 3 resources, without any pop cost… So yeah, they may be on par with other things in the game if you just look at it from a math perspective, but that’s why math isn’t everything when designing and balancing a civ. People like to compare to Malian, but cow ranch just replace farms (minus the pop) so they still need to go out on the map for gold and wood (pit mine are spread out on the map so easy to destroy). Food is the easiest resource to gain late game so having passive food isn’t as big of an issue.
The other major problem is: Yeoman, their ability is basically as strong as a mangonel, but on the one of the fastest archer unit in the game, and without any warning for your opponent. Mangonel are super strong yes, but they have a major weakness: they are slow, so if taken out of position, they will get destroyed, also they have that very unique sound that everyone recognize by now warning you of a shot and letting you avoid it. A very frequent reflex when encountering a mangonel is to just run away from it, giving you the time to adjust.
Now, why did the yeoman archer needed to be the ranged unit with the fastest move speed in the game? How do you run away from them? They literally run faster than your own archer, so if you see them, it’s already too late? You can’t run back and must lose your whole army. Because they will run after you and catch up and use the ability. It’s crazy broken. Also they don’t cost gold.
Suggestions for HoL
-Manor design should be short term passive income but they should not translate into the best economy in late game (because they don’t deplete resources) and they shouldn’t give HoL so much population space for their army (because you can make 30-40 less villagers).
-For this reason I think manors should cost population (2 or 3 pop each), and they should also remove the tech that allow manor to produce gold (let HoL have at least 1 resource they need to find on the map)
-This would make manor the same strength when just built, but would make them much weaker in late imperial. Which is the goal IMO. I they don’t want to remove the gold tech, they will need to reduce the amount of manor you can build, or just remove wood income totally, or reduce all resources they produce but that would affect early game which is a bad idea i think.
-Manors should have way less HP as well, they shouldn’t go over 1000 hp with the landmark boost).
-Yeoman movement speed need to be put back to normal archer speed or even longbow move speed. You cannot have BOTH a AoE ability and the best move speed, otherwise you can’t avoid it.
-There needs to be a bit of delay between the shoot and the hit (maybe visually the arrow just go higher above ground), and the other player needs to see a circle or other visual cue of where the arrows will land. Game needs to be interactive.
Those fixes should improve the game by a lot. Especially the move speed reduction and removing either gold or wood from manor (they need a resources that they must find on map). Those two are so important to fix.
Suggestions for Templars
The Templars seems to be a lot lot better. But they seem to be a bit broken on water maps. I’m really hoping they are going to put back the lumbercamp for templars. I just don’t like that mechanic thematically it’s weird (teleportation in middles ages?) and that would just solve their strength on water. I think they could keep the food from tree bonus and the free lumber camp tech, but without resources teleportation. That’s the only big fix I’m asking, for now.
Curious to know what people think of those suggestions.
