I think it’s more the straightforward and easy to manage game plan.
Like yeah in theory lithuanians are stronger but they don’t have two eco bonuses working in conjunction to boost you strongly into castle age.
They then have to invest heavily into a monastery and a monk to snag relics to truly take advantage of there strengths. It slows them down.
French cav in aoe 3 has sevrly be nerfed in imperial age last month thought.
It took 15 years. But potentially broken op unit stats are not fine. It all about the theoretical max. How hard it is to achieve doesn’t matter, because when it’s reached its unfair, unfun to play against. Lithuanian FU paladin with 4 relics are the original stats French imperial cuirassier fully carded of aoe 2
Aoe 2 needs to Man up and ner teuton and Lithuanian paladins back in place too
Finally someone gets it. If every civ is OP, there are only a few strats per civ left. Thats not my aoe…
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I don’t agree that mostly nerfing stuff is better than buffing.
First I think it’s quite ineffective if the purpose is to make more room for weaker civs. For instance let’s say instead of buffing Burgundian like they are planning to do, they nerf Franks by removing their cav HP boost in feudal age, or their berry bonus, to hopefully make Burgundian look more attractive in comparison. But what about literally every other cav civ, that would also look more attractive in comparison? Even if you go further and nerf say, Lithuanian and Teutons too, there are still other contenders waiting on the line that would still be better than Burgundian. So in the end it would feel like it helps mid-tier/underrated civs more than weak ones.
I disagree with this too. Either you buff a specific strat for a civ, and unless this buff allows it to counter its counters (which would ofc be excessive and shouldn’t happen) the other strats of this civ would still be used in the same . Example: even if they gave the Teutons +10 melee armour on cav, their halb+siege strat wouldn’t disappear because it would still be a better counter to say, cav archer plays. The civ would just be OP but not less diverse.
What would reduce the number of strats for each civ is if you would tried to “min-max” weaker civs by removing “useless” bonuses and replace them by bonuses who boost the “useful” bonuses like some people propose sometimes.
I don’t know for you but in my AoE there is plenty of room for good bonuses and good units.
To make it clearer I will take the example of the Britons. It’s a classic AoE2 civ and , we can agree on that, each and every one of its bonuses and unique tech is very good. What if we nerfed most of them? Let’s say TC discount would be 30%, they no longer get +1 range for free in imp and the TB is only +10% training speed. They would probs still be a viable civ. Would they still be viable? Surely. Be just as fun while making weaker archer civs more fun? I don’t think so.
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Its funny how both of your examples actually prove MY point 11
First, lets look at my statment again which you completly strawman:
I am not saying that civs in general need to be nerfed or that most civs are OP. I am saying that i fear powercreep because IF we get to the level that a civ can’t do stuff it has no bonuses for the game gets boring. I have never claimed we are at that point already.
This already adresses your point about britons: They are currently not OP, so…yeah i really dont have to say anything more. They dont need nerfs right now, i never proposedd any.
Still, the example is actually interesting: In AOK, britons had by far the best archers. With AoC, Thumbring was introduced, making archers a bit stronger overall. The devs had 3 options to handle this: Buff other civs, nerf britons eco bonus or nerf briton archers. They chose the last one and did decide to not give the new archer upgrade to the civ known for archers. This was a great decision: Briton archers were now a bit less above the curve, making them stand out a bit less and making the briton gameplan overall more diverse.
Your other example talks about a hypothetical change, so at least you got what i was saying there.
However, you just straight up claim stuff that is insane. If we give teuton Kts 14 melee armor, they are nearly immune to anything but archers. Hell, even just their scs would WRECK most melee units. Lets think about the implications: There is no reason to ever build any melee unit vs teuton as even simple scouts can kill your kts/longswords/hussar/whatever. So not only does it nudge teutons to at least use the stable to some degree, it also completly locks out the enemy of any melee option. Nudging one civ into using stable and forcing the opponent into ranges is ofc eliminating options.
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I’m sorry if it sounded like strawman. I interpreted it as: " if we keep buffing all civs, then everything will end OP".
I thought you thought there was power creep in AoE2 already because you did reply and (partially ig) agree to a post that mentioned Lith and Teutons as examples of power creep.
I took the Briton example because while they aren’t OP and you didn’t say so, I did get to read complaints about each one of their bonuses over time, and it’s an easy example of a civ that has strong bonuses that stand out, and that could be toned down without making the civ useless.
Regarding thumb ring, wouldn’t it count as “power creep” since they buffed literally all the archer civs rather than nerf Britons, which received Yeomen on top of their natural range bonus, which ended up in pretty much every archer civ getting stronger.
I only thought about it from the point of view of the overbuff civ ooops.
Interesting question.
In isolation, you are correct. However, remember that the same patch also brought bloodlines and hussar to the game. And to keep the cav in check, halbs were introduced. Now this sound a lot like powercreep, but i would argue its statcreep at most (if we double every units HP and attack, the game does not change). The archer civs didn’t become more specialized in archers, the cav civs didnt get more spezialed in cav (note that franks did not get BL, just like britons didn’t get TR). The game imho got more options but those were mostly used to widen the options of civs instead of buffing what they were already good at.
Again, the stuff that worries me is creeping up a civs bonuses/UUs to the point where they are the only usable option or at least a solid default option which you wont often shy away from. An example from DE would be the mongols: There is really no reason not to go mangudai. Even vs skirms mangudai will be the core of your army! Thats just boring.
Overall, i would say AoC did maybe powercreep the game a bit (both meso civs and spanish were really dominant for like 20y; also, UTs…) but mostly, the changes were used to buff the weak options of the civs. Overall, AoE2 is in a great spot and my comment was aimed at people in the forum more than the devs - because the latter seem to know that making civ bonuses stronger and stronger will force you to use them (as your opponent certainly will) and therefor eliminate options.
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I agree with you that burgundian can’t be helped by nerfing better civs.
Also agree that it helps and works onyl for average civs.
That’s actually the key point.
Teutons were low average , they get buffed and Rose to top average.
They didn’t need this buff. They were fine for a decade.
The unbalanced stronger civs were the problem.
That’s powercreeped for me.
Generally favoring nerfs instead of buffs prevents this. Buffs are sure still needed.
Many of the aoc civs strong bonus got offset somehow. Mongols and huns lacking last armor, goth lacking armor, byz lacking blast furnace, Britons lacking thumb ring. Viking and aztec lacking halbs.
It doesn’t apply always but there was a clear design philosophy.
Most newer civs and balance trends are FU units and a bonus on top.
This balance approach makes even FU units feel weak, something that wasn’t the case in aoc. And if you don’t get FU units it feels sometimes quite unfair, like when you are forced to use light cav while opponents run around with op bonus hussars.
FU Hussars are a very solid asset for any civ. There were no bonuses on top of that in aoc.
Now we got many. And not just minor ones.
Somiliar story with paladins to a lesser extect.
The point is, generally FU unit should be the more or less peak of a unit line, and civ bonuses should offset missing techs by strengthening something else, as with the above mentioned classic civs.
Instead we introduce ever stronger bonuses and ridiculous strong unit lines emerge that topple the decade long balance slowly.
If this continues on, at some point civs are forced to only use their FU bonuses op unit they got and if that doesn’t work and have to use something god forbid not even FU it’s insta gg. And if you don’t even have a op unit line you are doomed to fail (see all bottom winrste civs, ports, Italians)
People are calling for Spanish buffs now.
And the cycle continues…
FE did tons of civs that have a bonus for some units but lack some upgrades to compensate. Think of Malian or Malay. Or more recently, Burgundian (none of their bonused units are FU) and Sicilian (only their infantry is FU).
On the other hand, AoC had stacked af units too. Generic onager feels weak when you have Mongol, Celt and Korean SO rampaging around. Who cares about generic champion when Japanese infantry has machine gun attack rate.
Even the fact that Port and Italians are “weak” on Arabia (because even without water maps, they are still good on Arena and hybrid maps) doesn’t show a civ needs a killer unit, because not so long ago the clear bottom 2 were Khmer (eles+scorp is definitely a killer combo) and Vietnamese (archer UU that spanks other archer UUs hard). Both had obvious gameplans and strong units but they just didn’t work out.
Now your point about people being obsessed about bonuses is true, but it’s not really the civs’ fault. First they sometimes don’t even see the downsides. As an example, you see Ornlu’s threads about civ matchups? Under the Spanish vs Aztec one people would keep repeating that “Aztec pikemen beat paladins” (no they don’t) or that “Aztec trash is better than the Spanish one” (that’s literally mistaking one of the worst for the best and vice versa)
On the contrary they can perfectly see the point of generic FU stuff when it suits them. Take Franks, it’s trendy to hate them, so you can see people throwing tantrums about how they dare have generic champions, halbs, heavy scorpions and BBC … like tons of other civs actually. Heck I’ve seen people being salty about Britons getting fortified walls lmao.
You might think at this point I’m disgressing and I probably am so let’s go to the most important part: since there is already so much to think about in this game, people will flock to civs that “tell them what to do” so to speak. Helps Frank playrate at low elo, probs does the opposite to Port/Italian sure, but to civs like Chinese too.
Regarding winrates and buff demands for otherwise fine civs, it’s just that people have their eyes glued to AoEstats and assume that bottom of the list = bad civ. It mostly worked when you had Khmer and Vietnamese sitting at like 30% winrate or something garbage like that. But now it leads to people to think that 44-46% winrate = bad since it’s what’s at the bottom. Funnily enough it also means the Spanish buff demands are buried under nonsense about Malay or Portuguese. Lastly, even if I think Spanish can be fine as they are rn, they are among the rare civs that are a straight downgrade from their HD/WK counterpart (I realized that just now lol), since both their trush and UU rush strats are nerfed, which of course looks uglier than if they were left unchanged, and make people worry.