Talking about the winrate doesn’t make much sense, as they were already fine in many cases where changes were made. Just a typical case of QQ that got way out of hand. Even if the civ was to be changed, there’s a difference between adding a slight nerf and throwing a wrench into the gears. The point that you will not be able to weasel your way through is that the community agrees that many civs are simply trash, simply by not playing them. It’s worth more than any kind of gymanstics we do here in the forums.
you mean like franks, who had something like a 9% playrate? yeah. i wonder why they got nerfed.
there is more then one reason to play a civ - the fun factor is what holds some of them back. the devs need to find a way to fix those. but to pretend that incas were balanced is a fallacy.
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At least that was a case of a nerf (if you mean the berry bonus), not a complete removal of a civ’s feature. Which is exactly the point, people would be less bothered by adjustments like that.
if trushes were completely removed, why can incas still do them? just because you say something doesn’t make it true.
here you go buddy - post nerf - hera still able to trush.
facts. just because its HARDER doesn’t mean it was removed. it was FAR EASIER to execute a trush then it was to defend.
Incas strength was a very strong feudal. And your video features a Castle Age play. Do I even need to continue?
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and the “strong feudal” was too strong, to the point that they had over a 55% winrate in the early game.
which isn’t balanced. they were designed as a strong defensive civ with lots of counter options.
and guess what? that still applies.
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It’s not like the Inca bonus (since let’s be real it’s the strat you’re talking about rn) has had 9 years of official existence. Not much of a new strat at this point.
On the contrary some people believe there are now X-1 cancer civs. Others believe there are X-1 badly designed civs. Things aren’t this easy.
Incas were literally just a villager + tower civ at this point, the nerf was like operating a tumour, now people who do play this civ use it for more than just feudal age biased in their favour. Aztecs are still good at what they are supposed to be (agressive plays on Arabia, monk stuff on Arena) and Indian are legit situationally better (more pierce armour on light cav in castle age allows for different strats, and instant +2 pierce armour in imp can be more useful than plate barding).
Ever since Viper suggested to nerf the Tatars by removing their hill bonus rather than nerfing the second sheep bonus or that Hera said kamayuks and slingers are in the same tier as elephant archers I struggle to blindly trust the pros lol.
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and was literally so strong that it was the default strategy for them, even at the pro level.
despite literally everyone knowing incas were going to be trushing. and gasp, what happened? still highly positive winrates. so the strategy was so strong that despite knowing what they were going to do people still couldn’t hold it at the pro level the majority of the time.
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You two need my interjection. You two are welcome.
I don’t think we should be making too many changes, and as such I agree with the OP. If something strong surfaces, we should have a really serious span of time where we actively and intentionally ignore it with the plan of letting the players further adapt to it.
The incan blacksmith bonus has existed in it’s pre-nerf form for practically its entire existence and just appeared in the meta relatively recently. So, think of how long it really takes to figure out optimal (or even specific) competitive strategies for civilizations.
The adaptation of players becomes less and less a prominent feature of the game’s balance the more and more the developers change the strongest strategies. This leads to the “devs please nerf” mentality as opposed to working at solving the problems in the meta with adaptation and I think those pushing for changes continually are missing that.
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Incas were nerfed because DE is flooded with new players who are annoyed by trushing and cry out in the forums until daddy dev does something about it. The inca bonus was irrelevant and more of a pseudo bonus. Who trushed, gets a BS down and researches the first infantry bonus? seems like a waste of early resources on top of whatever you lose sending 5+ vills forward.
Trushing is so easy to counter, who loses vs a stationary building?
“I can’t win with britians anymore I cant do my archer rush build I learned waaaah”
Fact is Towers were never OP and didn’t deserve a nerf and now they are gutted to the point where Trush civs had to be given completely new civ bonuses or were indirectly nerfed into irrelevance (Spanish, Byzatines)
And if you can’t accept this truth then I will just assume that you are one of the build order civ picker tryhards who collaps under the APM requirement a messy trush game leads into
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You mean that one time, when it went above it by like 0.2%? lol okay, at the same time, no one is bothered by Lithuanians sitting at a comfy 56%… which leads me to be more sure that a lot of these change requests are coming from people who QQ about specific strategies they can’t be bothered to deal with
Tatars is a hard one to balance, because hill bonus can be completely useless (e.g. Arena, is completely flat) or borderline OP if you have a hill right in front of enemy resources in Arabia. I can see the reasoning why he’d not like the bonus that much.
As for Hera’s comments, I do not disagree with them at all. Both very situational units that you will rarely actually need to make.
doesn’t matter - the fact is 55% was the cutoff. not 55.2%.
actually i recommended nerfing their food bonus down to 100 from 150, that would lower that wouldn’t it?
and yet most people seemed to be having a hard time dealing with it - when a particular build is winning the majority of the games its used in, despite everyone knowing they are going for it, that indicates a problem.
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11 11 11, hey man I was literally like you, I hate to make all the games stupid m@a into stupid archers or stupid scouts into stupid knights, the game really need some variety. Spice the food. The devs not even nerfed the Incas, they reomved Celts fast militia drush and nerfed the Persian dark work rate TC and the Arambai, but still for Incas and Arambai were really reasonable somehow.
This was just one example mate. Check out Ethiopians (59% at 1650+ lol), Burgundians etc. (and even in the case of Burgundians, the most people complain about is FR, which isn’t even whats winning people games)
Agree, TG defintely need the balance change, not the civs.
put more effort on it rather than just keep making players adapating the civs.
while TG right now is full of unfairness over there.
Aztecs should have received compensatory changes to make them interesting, similar to Turks. Aztecs are an extremely boring civ by design. They just have amazing eco which pros can capitalize on but that make them uninteresting for most of the ladder. By just nerfing the eco bonus, only 2 things can happen, either:
- The nerf is not big enough, the eco is still too strong, the civ keeps being picked 100% at pro level.
- The nerf is too big, now the eco is outshined by other civs, so they are no longer played by pros (because other civs are better) nor on the ladder (because they are not fun).
So 1) is what happened for the first 2-3 nerfs, then 2) happened after the last one it seems.
Incas were not busted.
showed 55% winrate at most with average pickrate. And now, I have a plot twist for you: winrate is probably the most misleading and irrelevant stat you could use for ever justifying a nerf. I’ve looked at aoe2stats for months and every single patch, I’ve found statistical aberrations, like Britons were at <45% winrate for a while after the pathing buff, Goth and Celts were at >55% for a very long time despite being considered sub-average civs, Lithuanian varying from 48%to 54% and right now Saracens at 45%. I can quote you a topic where at the time one guy argued that SPANISH needed a nerf (because they had 54% winrate during a few weeks after the pathing buff).
If anything that this website shows is how people will blindly change opinion just after reading it. I bet you that if this website didn’t exist nobody would have asked for a Franks nerf.
Having a high/low winrate does not mean the civ is performing statistically good. It can mean that, but it can also mean something entirely else: for example, that many of this civ’s players are statistically better than average (eg. Hoang), or that the civ is easier to play / that the civ’s players are terrible to adapt to any other civ (Incas/Goths), etc.
Let’s take the example of Incas, you read it as “Players who pick Incas get artficially better results because the civ is too good” when in reality it is most of the time “Players who pick Incas know what they are doing, and so they get good results with it compared to other civs”.
Not to mention, the winrates are also very inflated by maps / civ matchups. For example, Franks have TAs which is a very unusual unit to deal with and many civs struggle to counter.
How is that a problem? Just like 90% of times cavalry civs will go scouts/knights and archer civs will go archers.
Pros have literally asked to nerf everything in this game that is not archers / knights. The UUs in particular: Conquistadors, Leitis, Arambai, now Mangudai. Pros do not care at all about having unique / fun civs they care 100% about BALANCE, because they earn money depending on it, but BALANCE (espeically in a few % winrate difference) does not matter for most people. Nobody would have played the game in the first place if it was 1v1 Aztecs-only yet I bet you pros would be totally fine with that.
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As long as the game development is active, we’ll see new balance changes. It’s actually a good sign to see such commitment from Microsoft in general.
Sure, I didn’t like all the changes either (Korean redesign e.g. and trushing nerfs), but if it’s the prize to pay to get active development, especially in forms of new civs, I’m fine with that.
HD didn’t change often enough in my opinion.
incredibly small sample size - and outside the norm for them. whereas Incas were consistently an early game power house with a strategy even the best struggled to handle.
yeah that’s why they were sporting over a 55% winrate in the early game, with a strategy that the best answer to is go to castle age and get siege.
agreed, but when even in tournaments we see incas doing one thing and only one thing? and winning while doing it? that shows a problem.
and that’s why you don’t just look at 1 period. but incas were consistently strong in the early game, to an overbearing degree.
because it was winning them over 55% of all games during the early game?
except incas weren’t "within a few %. their early game was sitting at over 55%. for literally MONTHS ON END.
I thought like that before, which led me to take not so smart takes in favour of stuff like 35% cheaper militia for Goths in the dark age. Yikes.
“I can’t win with Incas anymore I cant do my tower rush build I learned waaaah”
This is quite false, as not only many people QQ against +4 paladins, but others criticize the Lithuanian for their design, in a not so different fashion of what happened with Incas.
It’s just make your hill-advantaged units 25% more effective, because half of the advantage of being uphill comes from the damage reduction you take from downhill units, so the Tatar bonus only affects half the equation so to say, so it ended being quite a mediocre bonus. Meanwhile Inca villagers could always force fights against enemy villagers while being literally three times as strong.
Yup, an infantry unit that kills cav and infantry alike without being really countered by archers, and an easy to get anti-infantry unit that comboes perfectly with eagles are just as situational as an overpriced, slow cavalry archer that is countered by most units in the game. Sure.
Yup, 95 HP monks offer no variability whatsoever, they play out exactly like a generic monk. A military bonus that boosts the production of all military isn’t flexible at all, it’s well known Aztecs have only one strat Kappa.
Well, the pros were the only ones that could handle the aforementioned Goth drush, and they were the best one at handling the Inca trush or really any strat you can think of. So if anything they could have cared less lol.
Also everyone is busy crying over nerfed stuff but what about buffs? After all they are changes too.
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Regarding the 55% winrate, can you please address this point:
Incas did not have 55% winrate because they were too good. They had 55% because winrates do not mean what you think. If the civ was too good as you think then people would realize it and play the civ more. Yet even when it was at 55% winrate it had 2.5% pickrate.