played as Delhi, I had all the sacred sites controlled by minute 9, pomping units constantly from 4 production building with scholars inside + more incoming.
by minute 11 I started raming down manors with my 4 rams, managed to burn 3, killed 30 villagers were trying to torch my rams.
by the way, opponents didn’t touch his berries or deer pack, or any other food source in the map.
suddenly opponent age up & 9 demilancer spawn and destroy my rams, ghazi raiders & archers.
I retreat & age up thinking I did a lot of eco damage LOL.
after just 3 minutes, opponents now have double my unit count, with the insane yeomans and their speed and ability.
you now the rest, THE END.
I can’t believe that this civ actually passed testing, there is no way to punch their greed, how does it even make sense designing this civ to be able to get 9 manors in feudal.
malians for example can’t have more than two pit mines in feudal ( and pit mines btw are out in the map, not protected around ur TC, also they don’t shoot arrows LOL )
the recent nerfs made, are not enough devs, the amount of manors you can have need to be limited by age,
respectfully, this is not the game we like to play anymore, this civ completely broke the RTS counter system.
The fix is as simple as locking the tech behind age-ups. Many other civs (Malians and Ottoman) would be similarly imbalanced if they did not have age-up restrictions on their unique mechanics.
I’ve never had this poor of a winrate vs any other civ. I thought to myself I may not have been doing the right things, but in its current state the House of Lancaster player seems to have an unfair advantage.
I think i know the build your referencing and honestly i woulda thought that would be strong vs lancaster but now that i think of it you’d basically have to win or die becouse you’re relying entirely on the map food. What would happen if you didnt push and just dug in with map control?
It’s not as simple, they would still be super broken in imperial age with all the manors.
The problem isn’t how fast they get their manor, the problem is more in longer term because they don’t need to collect resources much and so it break all rts concept of resource depletion and map control, they don’t need to worry about any of that. The gold tech in imperial makes the manors give way too much resources. Before imperial the civ is actually not that good, they only become too good in imperial because they can have unlimited resources of ALL 3 types without leaving the base. While at that time other civs start to run out of wood and gold in their base (even malian).
Considering that imperial age is the problem, locking behind age isn’t going to change much their strength in imperial. I’d prefer another solution.
Some suggestions that would probably better:
-manor cost population
-manor dont gain arrowslit from the landmark and get less HP
-the tech that give gold income to manor should be nerfed
In my experience, the income they can generate from 6-9 manors being an extra 18-27 villagers by 8 minutes is combined with a castle ageup and levies. Like they said, 9-12 demilancers and 14-17 yeomen will suddenly materialize to push into you, and they’ll have plenty of income to spam trash units alongside that. When I play Lancaster Manor boom I struggle to spend my resources, I can manage 3tc abbasid without floating resources but HoL is a struggle because you get so much with 9 manors.
It can be very difficult to outboom them even with full map control. Even with raiding, like they said they killed 30 villagers, the tradeoff between spending resources for aggression or booming yourself doesn’t match their potential value. They can also spawn a large army quickly if they decide they don’t want to let you boom freely, so you can’t go pure greed.
Even going for a fast castle to use trebs from a distance is a difficult play, because they will have castle with similar timing and push through your forces to kill the siege quickly. It means you have to move much more carefully than them, their income isn’t nearly as exposed as yours is, so they start to raid you and push you back into your base. Unlike them you likely won’t have safe resources at that point, and they overwhelm you bit by bit.
What you’re saying is a valid approach, but it can take upwards of 25 minutes to finish games like that. I personally find it very punishing, it feels very familiar to the traditional English turtle strat where you can feel checkmate coming but they are relying on you making a mistake in the drawn out assault, or they can raid you while you lose anything you throw into their base.
Best way to balance this is taking Ottoman military schools and Malian pit mines as example.1 manor for each age thats it.If this is normal i want 9 military schools for Ottoman then.By the way forgotten empires might be sabotaging this game so aoe2 dont die and make more profit.
A).- Change the Age of certain Manors technologies
Condensed Land Practices (ii).- Change to Castle Age (II → III)
Open Field System (ii).- Change to Imperial Age (II → IV)
Actually, I didn’t know it was possible to activate them in the Feudal Age. No wonder they produced so many Demilancers.
B).- Change the income generation of manors to depend on the working villagers
Another idea is to limit the profit based on the current “feudalism,” instead of having resources come out of thin air:
The Rus limit the profit of their hunting lodges based on the time their villagers have been gathering animal meat, by level (Bounty Rewards).
The Lancasters could have something like this: Manors get a profit increase depending on the number of villagers working: 20 villagers (+10%), 50 villagers (+25%), 100 villagers (+50%).
To achieve this, the base profit of the manors themselves needs to be reduced, and only improved if you have working villagers.
I think it’s better this way, as it prevents those using the civ from obtaining infinite resources “without villagers,” which doesn’t make sense, since manors theoretically obtained their resources from the “overexploitation” of villagers. So “if the villagers are killed” or don’t work (the villagers rebel), the income should drop significantly.
Thinking better…
Either way, it will be a very strong NERF… since it will greatly delay the collection of resources and spawning of units by “Castle of Lancaster”.
We should think about finding a balance so that it is still viable.
I believe that if the division of +3 Palaces by Age is not adopted, then another solution is to FIX a number of units that can be summoned in the “Castle of Lancaster”. For example, the Demilancers would be fixed at a quantity of 5 units, and could no longer reach 9 units or make less, it would always be only 5 units.
Now,
if the developers choose to divide the Palaces by Age (+3 palaces per age), then we could still keep the “Condensed Territorial Practices” and “Open Field System” Upgrade research, but adding some extra novelty.
Since the construction of the Palaces was postponed, to be done only as the Ages passed, we could still allow improvements to be researched, so the bonuses could be like this:
Condesadas territorial practices: releases +3 Palaces and now the villagers can garrison the palaces and add +1 arrow to their defense. (here you will lose the original bonus of +200 health, but it would improve the defense with the use of the villagers) [note: you only get +1 additional arrow if you are garrisoned by villagers].
Open Field System: releases +3 Palaces and grants 1 Espringale to “Lancaster Castle” so that the Castle can help in the defense of your fiefs, in addition to now being able to use Lancaster Castle to garrison Villagers and Infantrys (here you will lose the original bonus of +300 health, but it would improve “Castle of Lancaster”).
Despite having improved Defense, the Palaces would be easier to Destroy because they have much less health than in the original version.
Perhaps the Health Bonus of the “Castle of Lancaster” for the Palaces should be increased, instead of +500 health, it will be increased to +600 health.