Idea regarding Flemish Revolution

Flemish Revolution being the equivalent of Ragnarok from Age of Mythology hasn’t been received all that well, but I think a different mechanic from AoM could be used instead. Namely, I’m thinking of Poseidon’s mechanic where every time one of his buildings is destroyed, it spawns two weak infantry units. These Poseidon Militia aren’t very strong and probably won’t cause a lot of damage, but they’re an annoyance for your enemies to clear out.

I think Flemish Revolution could be changed to enable this effect on the Burgundians’ buildings. All buildings except Houses, Farms, Walls, and Gates, would spawn 2 Flemish Militia upon being destroyed. This could be a useful defensive tech if you’re under pressure by enemy siege, slowing your enemy down while you try and mount a counteroffensive. At the very least, it could help punish some unescorted Rams.

Does this sound like it’d be more acceptable than the current Flemish Revolution?

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I use a similar mechanic in a Muisca civ design I made (as a civ bonus starting in Feudal).

That said, I think the effect is far too weak for an Imp tech. As a bonus it’s decent because it can help you stabilize when you’re on the back foot (i.e. getting buildings destroyed), but as an Imp tech it would be bad because it doesn’t actually give you any kind of powerspike or any kind of advantage you can use to push, (like just about every other Imp tech does.) It feels bad to invest resources into something that will only help you when you’re getting steamrolled (and probably won’t be nearly strong enough at that point to turn things around).

I like the Flemish Rev mechanic personally, but I think it needs to be tweaked, at minimum by having its cost vary with the number of villagers it will affect (like Spies). That alone would make it much easier to balance. Between that and some other alteration, perhaps only affecting 2/3rds of villagers or something, and I think it would be more than fine.

Having the effect as a civ bonus would be interesting, though if it were like that, I wouldn’t give it to the Burgundians. The Burgundians need to be punishable if they try to get greedy with their early eco techs.

To me the new effect sounds underwhelming but the idea sounds decent. I mean currently burgundians are too strong so I wouldn’t mind a UT nobody uses but generating 2 rather weak units from destroyed buildings? In the early game that might help but as it’s an UT it will be an imp thing.

Btw I don’t know about implementation. Although I think the effect is rather useless it could be abused if the game can’t differentiate between deleting your own buildings (or maybe even shooting it with onager) and destroyed buildings by opponent. Otherwise when a game goes long and you start flowing wood you just build 40 mills in the corner, delete them and get 80 military at once (similarly to current fr).

It can. Also if you go through the trouble to build and micro Onagers at high volume without killing the spawned units, maybe you’ve earned it. :joy:

Yeah, I’m not suggesting this for Burgundians at all. I think a Flemish Rework as outlined above would be fine, and this mechanic could be given as a bonus to a new civ (but I would make it 1 unit spawned).

Fair point 11 Anyways the concern was about deleting buildings but then maybe the idea could be a good alternative if the numbers are tweaked or something.

Also when you think about it: Why are villagers taking part in a revolution? Probably they don’t care about some stable of the regent being destroyed but they’d care a lot if their home is put to ashes so houses should definitely be included there imo.

But the whole idea is a peasant uprising, which FR does definitely capture the feel of. The problem is the lack of balance, and I think that the best solution might honestly be to just replace it entirely, rather than trying to fix it, because there’s no way to do that easily.

I think the biggest reason people don’t research the Flemish Revolution is the huge damage it did to economic growth.

To improve it, I would first try to make it increase the training speed of villagers by 100%, which allows players to recover their economy earlier after the Revolution.

Sure, just like most people I really dislike fr and my favorite option would be to replace it entirely. But as I’m skeptical this will happen, reworking the tech to something that somewhat preverse the idea but gets rid of the instant 150 army mechanic would be the next best option. Others have come up with ideas to make fr enable fm production from tcs which could also work. I personally don’t care too much how it’s done as long as the tech gets a rework.

Flemish militia should be available at TC upon imp regardless of the UT. Locking a unit behind an all-in UT is not good.

Is this true? Or is it a vocal demographic?

How do we know “most people” don’t like it?

This , along with many games ending before it can be effective, could be the reason we don’t see it. .not because “most people” don’t like it

I don’t disagree it could do with some tweaking at the very least.

But some people complained about FR before Burgundians even had a positive WR.

I maintain that my proposal of tying cost to the number of villagers and possibly affecting a percentage of villagers is a simple solution.
In general I think a lot of people are too quick to give up on things that could be fixed without so much difficulty.

This is a great point, and I strongly suspect the dislike is overstated.
Of that dislike, I also think the amount of it that is related to people not liking the mechanic is overstated (as opposed to it just not being well balanced in all contexts). But yeah, it’s definitely a vocal crowd, and you can hardly even suggest a similar mechanic for a hypothetical new civ without people “informing” you that “The community doesn’t like one-time gimmicks!”

Speak for yourselves. The tech plays out as a powerspike in a way that is similar to how many other things work in the game, and the fact that it’s a one-time thing isn’t even that relevant unless the game turns into a 4 hour slogfest.

Just my perception. You do see people being quite vocal about here, on reddit and aoezone but ofc it’s hard to get a complete picture of what the player base thinks about it. Iirc there were some polls (like about UTs) where Burgundians were frequently voted for (I might be wrong about it though).

What’s pretty clear at least is that every major caster and most pro players are heavily against it. And if you ask me that’s for good reason as fr is the single most broken thing in the game atm.

Nah that’s not true. The tech isn’t remotely similar to anything except maybe first crusade but the latter is capped at 35 units that also have more usable counters. Fr done at the right moment guarantees a win when your opponent otherwise would have had chances. When burgundians came out people sometimes lost with fr but nowadays everybody knows how to use it.

Also you do see it all the time. I experience it all the time vs arena civ pickers and if somebody streams a game featuring burgundians that goes to imp its like 50/50 if you see fr.

I’m not talking about it being similar to other techs, I’m talking about being comparable to other strategic aspects of the game (admittedly on a much greater scale, and currently overpowered). But it follows the general principle of being a (sort of) risky high investment strategy which becomes disadvantageous if you don’t do enough damage within a time window (like Turk fast Imp → Gunpowder).

Yeh, cause it’s overtuned right now and provides far too much utility for its cost. Fix that and its fine.

Well turks fast imp is exactly the opposite: it’s an auto loss (there is simply no way of winning with it if your equally skilled opponent knows what they’re doing) so that’s not the best example.

Ofc there are other high risk high reward strats but this category is so broad that imo you can’t argue this way. It’s really unlike everything else (only possibly similar case again first crusade) in that’s a strategy you do on top of other strategies. You don’t play pure fr but you get that 150 military units on top of your actual army.

Usually you get it after you get paladin, get popped and when your opponent makes counter units you push the button. If you do it right (having a lot of tcs and lots of food banked and having produced some siege) there isn’t any risk involved. The strategy is only risky if you don’t prepare well.

In the end if done correctly it’s a game move just by clicking it. And tuning it down doesn’t change it. It might change that in order to end the game your regular chances of winning must be 70/30 instead of 60/40. Anyways it still remains a badly designed tech. You nerf it it’s a badly designed tech with less
use cases than now. Ofc you could nerf it into the ground so that nobody is gonna use in multiplayer anymore (but that’s a far way to go).