After almost a week, I am so far not impressed by the new civs.
Ofc it’s clear that we haven’t figured out the optimal opening strats with them yet. But there are already good tight BO for them which I doubt could be improved a lot. Especially for the standard openers.
And it doesn’t look to me they would perform well. Imo Georgians actually fare a bit better with the passive healing for the scouts which can be quite nice in careful hands.
Armenians on the other hand I struggle to see a decent gameplan for them. In theory you can imagine how strong their lategame comp with champs + composite bows can be. Practically it’s hard to find a way to build up towards this. You feel you need to open trash + towers - but there are just a lot of other civs that do that better. And it’s a tactical build where the slight mass differences count the most.
Also cause of their bad Siege even when you manage to get to that comp you usually can’t make it work.
It feels like Armenians can theoretically do a lot of things, but then there are just crucial aspects for these strats that they miss in comparison to other civs.
Georgians also have a big initial burden with the uncommon start, missing 50 F. Which leaves even the best players with the struggle to decide wether they take a risk for a more optimized BO or play safer but less optimized. There are some Scout BO which seem to get a good timing without risking much (those where you chop stragglers). But that’s really only for Scouts which makes the civ very predictable. The fast drush BOs usually at least for now end in terrible eco setups for the Georgians - so if they don’t kill vills with that they are usually so far behind that they just die from there.
At Aoestats.io we also have a sneak peek showing that the civs so far struggle to perform also from the objective perspective, not only my own subjective one. Though ofc this could indeed just come from people getting them by chance struggling with the uncommon start.
I just want to statem that imo it’s crucial for the perception of the new civs that they perform from the beginning. And as they seem to struggle so far I would like to see a hotbuff for them.
Which ofc can be reversed if retrospectively they only didn’t perform cause of the incommodities at the start.
My buff idea:
A) Make Mule Carts just 100 W like camps
B) Remove the -50 F for Georgians
C) Increase the Armenian Mule Cart Bonus to 40 %
This should result in Georgains having + 70 F in the early game and Armenians having +30 F and +30 W and after DBA about 10 % faster wood income. But most importantly you can just basically play all standard BOs with these civs, you don’t need to learn specialised ones.