I had another Idea regarding sicilians.
There were 2 things bothering me:
A) Why they are classified as infantry civ? Their only infantry bonus is the serjeant which is countered by champs (Which is completely fine).
B) Defensive application of first crusade. As you only get the full value of first crusade you want to place 5 tcs. So you try to outboom your opponent. He will try to punish that with agression. Now you need anything in defence. You click first crusade. But the serjeants don’t perform well, because you don’t have the upgrades yet as you preferred to boom. By the time you got the upgrades your serjeants are basically gone and you get raided.
This means that first crusade has only offensive applications which is bad for a tech you need to place booming buildings for.
So what could be the solution? It’s pretty obvious and I don’t understand why we haven’t found it yet:
Free infantry armor.
It would help the sicilians also in their whacky early game. It would help in the donjon rush, it would make first crusade an interesting defensive tech.
Then I have also something to say about the first crusade in general. At first, I think it is still a bit too much in potential, second I would like to have some tradeoff, as it is the more powerful the earlier you get it. Third it may be a misleading bonus as it may trick players into placing too many town centers too early. 5 TCs are a lot. It would be completely fine to give the full effect to 4 TCs to make it less punishing to go for it.
My best Idea so far is to increase the cost by 50%, researched instantly, but let it pay back half investment over 5 minutes and after these 5 minutes the serjeants will spawn. If you click it a second time, the instant serjeants will spawn, but the repay trickle will stop.
This would also be a solution for the analysis done in this thread:
So you would get the secondary effect of the UT immediately. If you go for the knight rush you get your conversion resistance, which can be heplful. If you go for the boomy attempt, you can research the tech and wait until you “need” it because of the enemy agression. The longer you wait the more you get paid back your investment.
So, first crusade:
Enables: Call to Weapons: Each Town Center (max 4) spawns 7 Serjeants.
Units are more resistant to conversion.
Pays Back half of it’s investment over 5 minutes if Call to Weapons isn’t researched yet.
Cost:
600 F
600 G
Research Time: Instantly
So the tradeoff is either to get call to weapons for the offensive usage, which is slightly nerfed and more costly. Or to research first crusade for defensive purposes, waiting for the right moment to use. As the then spawned serjeants would already have the armor upgrades they could perform much better to fight off the enemy.
Also if you make an 1 TC all-in it can be useful to get first crusade just for the conversion resistance because you would get paid back 50 % of your investment.
All in all, this would make the tech less abnoxious but give it more utility in the exchange, fitting almost every playstile you want to go for with sicilians.
Another Idea could be to give Sicilians an infinite gold trickle once they researched first crusade (from the crusade raids) and a tech to call back the crusaders from the promised land. Stopping the Gold trickle but spawning the serjeants in the tradeoff. So instead of paying back half the investment, Sicilians would get 1 Gold / Second once researched first crusade, stopping when the recall is made.