I think it is time to give HRE a little bit more interesting units. As you’ve said in November, they really lack uniqueness in regards of their military choices. Landsknechte are a niche unit, which you cannot always go for and MAA fall down in relevance and power after early castle. I like the new Meinwerk additions, because it puts emphasis on that which historically made HRE strong (armor), but I think there should be more to it. Landsknechte are the only real unique military unit and they do not even have a single unique upgrade and have a lot of counters, while other civs have either several unique units and/or several unique upgrades to their unique units, which can somewhat be used in every state of the game. In this thread here there have been made a lot of suggestions, what kind of unique units the HRE could get. I’ve also created a new topic, which does not seem to find a lot of love or has been ignored up until now for whatever reason. But there I suggest the Archbishop as a new kind of (hero) unit to further define the HRE as what it was: An empire that was very adamant about religious warfare. I also suggested to ease the use of prelates, because the longer the game goes, the more tedious it becomes to actually make use of them within your economy. Especially when not going Aachen, which makes you lose out on an imperial tech now, hence I am not fond of using it anymore. Unless the map gen allows for an insane spot. We have had the suggestion here already that prelates can inspire from within a tower (in order to have Aachen continue to be a good choice, it should be a castle or an imperial tech) and I wanted to warm up that topic again. All other civs boni are much more reliant in their usage, but sprinkling prelates all over the place leads to a loss of intuitive gameplay. Double clicking prelates, because you have eco and military prelates, undeniably ruins your eco setup. This should be better. Without prelates, the HRE eco does not offer anything. So prelates are a must to make use of the civ’s strenghts. I also added another suggestion to Elzbach that goes somehwat in the same direction and would be kinda unique. It would also offer a better lategame scaleability, while also incentivising to have a longer castle age with multiple tcs. So there is actually a real alternative to one tc rushing into imperial. Even with the Meinwerk change the HRE continues to be rather one dimensional. Elzbach is weaker than any other age IV defensive landmark, which is okay, but in return it should offer something else instead of being a more hp keep that reduces dmg taken to all buildings in the area. It sounds better in theory than it actually is. There is just zero incentive to not go for Swabia.
I’d also be very happy to see new campaigns. Not only for HRE, but for all the civs that do not have one. At one point we’ll have a full on scenario editor and that is when new campaigns should be added as well. I just love the possibilities AoE 2 offers in this regard and the amount of campaign content they release. With further improvements to ai, AoE 4 could thus become a real interesting offline experience as well. The current offline experience is rather lackluster and I do not enjoy it very much.
And in order to promote my post that has been ignored for the most part, I’ll also link it here. I am not saying that my ideas need to be welcomed by everyone, but I’d like to have a discussion at the very least.
Last but not least: It’s nice to reinvigorate this thread here again. 