Agree with everything. But this comment about Abbasid doesn’t make much sense. Abbasid get some extremely powerful tech from their Landmark. Villagers at half price? Thats great! +1 Armor on all your infantry simply by building 1 Camel unit? Thanks to the Military win you should always win Archer fights. And Age 2 is usually mass Archers vs mass Archers, unless one civ has access to Knights in Age 2. Because Horsemen were nerfed so much that they are not worth building anymore.
The Golden Age bonuses for additional gather rate are also very powerful - and can be unlocked early on. Just 10 buildings to get 10% gather rate? You can do that easily by just building a few houses in advance. Now compare this vs Delhi for example. Delhi is going to get the economy techs for free at a point when no one would be researching them anyway. So its a 15% bonus to every ressources for Delhi. But it doesn’t come into play until 6 or 7 minutes (correct me if I’m wrong) while Abbasid can get this much quicker.
Also talking about Abbasid, the Trade Wing is extremely underrated and I feel like people are sleeping on this. Abbasid has some of the best trade in the game, comparable to Mongols. And you can increase it by 30% in Age 2 already. I’m sure once pro players invest time into this and use it on certain maps, Abbasid will rise up in everybody’s tierlist.
I completely disagree with nerfing the units, castle rush or pro-scouts instead of making Kremlin stronger. It has the attack power of a TC but needs garrisoned units. It’s just a pathetic landmark, in a macro game adds no value whatsoever. You are referring to people going Kremlin against something as OP as Mongols as a desperation play, that’s not good enough reason to defend against power creep when Rus IS NOT on the same tier as French and Mongols
Chinese have powerful units that are cheap, and great upgrades. You mentioned literally all of their downsides. The lategame bomabards are the best in the game, with 50% extra HP, 2 extra range and 33% faster reload speed
So far as I can tell, Chinese landmarks are deliberately less powerful because they’re expected to build… all of them, sometimes. If that assumption is true, it is further evidence of my complaints about kremlins…
On the topic of Chinese, it’s worth remembering that they get unique dynasty buildings as well. Villages and granaries are both extremely useful and powerful buildings in the right situation. I think a lot of people look at how the dynasty mechanic is set up and assume that it’s supposed to be optional, in a sense. That is, if you want to ignore the dynasty mechanic and just play the Chinese in the Tang dynasty the whole time, you can… but the more I look at how the civ is designed, the more I think that probably isn’t the case. I think the designers imagined players being more concerned with which dynasty they were in than which age they were in.
Technically, I started this thread to discuss balancing landmarks with their counterparts, e.g. nobody ever builds kremlins, nobody ever builds the Abbey of Kings, nobody ever builds the Meinwerk Palace or Burgrave Palace. This doesn’t just railroad the meta for each civ, it’s boring and uninteresting.
I focused on the Feudal age-up landmarks for Rus because I really enjoy playing Rus, and I feel like I don’t get to make a meaningful tactical decision until I’m aging up to Castle. Because I play them more than the other civs I also know what I’m talking about when I make suggestions for how to fix the issue.
Just as the real Kremlin “leveled up” over time (as it mentions in the campaign) maybe you could be able to spend additional resources in subsequent ages to increase it’s abilities.
Haven’t thought through what that would look like, but it could be interesting.
Rus is indeed not on the same tier as French, currently they are a much stronger civ, French is very middling tier right now while FC horse archers is making Rus easily a top 2 civ. Not to mention horse archers are bugged right now to be much stronger than their tooltip indicates (and benefits way more than it should from incendiary arrows.)
Rus is a civ that needs nerfs right now and currently civ viability is heavily impacted by how well they do professional scouts since that tech is really OP right now. What I was referring to was for the first month of the game, Rus went Kremlin every single game at a high level unless they were trying a 2 TC golden gate strat on a closed map. The golden gate might need some nerfs, but the Kremlin is a very average powerlevel landmark and likely doesn’t need its own buffs.
When I made this topic, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would be so many people willing to say that a kremlin was on the same level of utility as a Red Castle, or Deer Stones, or Compound of the Defender. I would geniunely love to know what thought process is taking place in your mind that says that an outpost with all the emplacements in it has the same impact on the game as almost any other landmark a person could name. I am seriously baffled, this is not a joke.
I’m sure that back when nobody knew how to play the game, they kremlin was used about as often as the Golden Gate. I did the same thing when I first got it. But now that we all know how the game works, we’re not making rookie mistakes. I don’t think it’s fair to judge landmark balance by the decisions made by people who don’t know the game yet. The game balance was also different back then.
Whether not any given civ is unbalanced has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I tried to explain this to Adribird90, too. This isn’t about civ-vs-civ balance, this is about tactical decision making for oneself. This is about the health of the game when you’re playing Rus, or you’re playing against Rus. There is no reason to choose the kremlin unless you’re aging up in the middle of an attack (which is, of course, unwise). The Rus player knows this, and their opponent knows this, and it’s not fun for either.
I never said it was a deer stones level landmark or S tier, I said it was fine. It’s a pretty average like C-tier landmark and is good when heavy feudal play is popular. Maybe the landmark could use buffs, but there are a lot more landmarks that are worse than it and/or landmarks that deserve nerfs before this should be changed. It’s still better than all but 1 of Chinese landmarks (which maybe should be, idk about that philosophy), but it’s nowhere near the level of stuff like abbey of kings, tower of victory, burgrave palace or Hisar academy, and is probably a good level compared to most landmark forts (except red castle, approaching that thing is like medieval D-Day).
Kremlin is arguably a good option if you are going to be doing significant fighting in the feudal age before golden gate gets tons of value (granted IMO golden gate is too good and deserves nerfs).
The issue is more golden gate is one of the best landmarks in the game, not that Kremlin is trash.
I could have said Regnitz Cathredal, School of Cavalry, or Astronomical Clocktower, but I know those are overpowered landmarks. I’m just pointing out that I was measured in my response, sir.
Like I’ve said before, we mostly agree. Especially about China, I think all their all their landmarks are garbage, but maybe that’s on purpose…
I have no qualms with doing something about the Abbey of Kings or any of the other landmarks that either of us have named in terms of buffs. I’m not trying to say the kremlin is the only landmark that’s lackluster at all: in fact I named the Barbican in my topic for exactly that reason. Moreover, those landmarks exacerbate the exact issue I’m complaining about with a focus on the Rus; it hardly seems like a choice at all between the two landmarks which leads to predicatability and stagnation not only within the meta, but within any given player’s personal experience.
The only thing we disagree on from your last statement is that I very much believe that the kremlin is trash. Because I’ve built many outposts with all the emplacements and I’ve usually paid for it with my Golden Gate.