Is it just me or Roman is actually pretty terrible

I am just not convinced in battle - I hoped that the bonus are great enough, but I need actual gameplays to prove that.

I’ve just played as Romans on the ladder and honestly I agree they are underwhelming. I feel like they need a discount on the infantry armour and blacksmith. Something like 50% cheaper blacksmith + 50% cheaper infantry armour. So 75 wood + 75 food, I think that would encourage Feudal MAA play a bit more.

They both have better MAAs.

The timing of MAAs are the most important - so MAA bonuses that does not require a blacksmith is much better >than Romans.

You can do e.g. 18P MAA with archer followup with Japan, but for Roman you just have to wait for a blacksmith and 100F for it to work, which is so terrible.

How would a good MAA or Infantry overall bonus for the Romans look like in your opinion?

Malay one: free upgrade is miles better than the Roman one

Oh I misread, sorry
Idk how a better one for Roman would look like, but maybe consider the Burgundian treatment: upgrades are cheaper and can research one age earlier

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I think romans are ok ,but it’s an all in full agresión civ

Your first feudal building should be always the blacksmith and if You lure 2 deers You have the food for both mĂĄa and armor.
Your máa would recieve 1 dmg when the first archer is trained
 Even scouts would only make 3 dmg to Spears and militia

It is not a civ to play META,

Nah, they miss any specific military instant bonus for that.

Romans are just solid all around. There is no real “weak” phase.

But they also miss something to be excited for. They seem to be geared towards infantry + siege play in the midgame. But this still doesn’t work even with the Roman bonusses as to have them you need to invest in the necessary techs. Which means you can’t have the numbers at the same time.

Maybe it’s an Idea to give them a free tech somewhere, to have an axciting incentive.
But maybe Romans are already fine without it, it’s a bit early to call it.

I personally would be for Ballistics free, this would reappy spice up things.

There are multiple problems with this approach -

  • No you dont have enough food for MAA + upgrade without losing either archer timing or villager production
  • MAA without archer will just be quick walled forever. If you add archer and blacksmith and armkr, chances are your opponent likely has range upgrade ready with more archer than you.
  • MAA with armor causes 100F per average if you only produce 3MAA, and I never see feudal mass MAA (without supplies!!!) works in serious typical games.

You can do the math pretty easily.

How many farmers do you usually have? Is it 30% of your villagers? 40%? 50%?

According to Spirit of the Law’s Wheelbarrow video, he found that high-level players averaged 41% farmers and 53% lumberjacks+miners. So you get 5% more on all of that. As an easy mark, if you have 100 villagers, that’s getting the value of 105 villagers.

A Slav player, by contrast, gets 10% bonus on the 41%; that’s an extra 4.1 villagers, or the equivalent of 104.1 villagers.

So slavs get 4.1 extra vills, compared to romans getting 5.

That right there shows that it’s about 20% stronger than the Slav bonus on a purely resource collection basis. But it’s worth more than that, because you also get the enhanced build and repair speeds, AND you get the bonus in the Dark Age.

Yea but I am not really interested on anything on paper for this bonus.

Would be great if there are some games that shows how strong this bonus are - it has been lackluster per my 6+ games unfortunately.

I don’t think any particular game is going to be very useful for determining the value of this bonus. We’re talking about a relatively small bonus either way, so random chance is going to throw things wildly until you have a very large sample size.

This is a situation where mathematical analysis is probably the best approach. It should definitely be revisited in a few months, once things have settled down a bit, though for now, I wouldn’t hesitate to call the Roman bonus substantially stronger.

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To show why the math analysis can be wrong, I will try to challenge your analysis with the two premise:

  1. average 41% farmers. Does that include archer civs? Since we are talking about knight plays only, I expect the number to be higher

  2. You assumed that one farmer villager equals one miner villager. Which may not be true.

Sounds like you expect it to be in the same ballpark as Chinese, Aztecs or Vikings.
It isn’t.
It’s a solid eco bonus all around, nothing more. Prob a bit above average, but definitely also not S-Tier.

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That is true, consider that I think it is their only bonus before imperial age.

It is not a bad bonus, but with this and only this bonus? I think it is more like B or C tier, like Malay before buff.

(It plays so blank that it feels like a generic civ with a 5% speed bonus - too generic, that it is actually terrible since most civs are not generic)

  1. As I said, you don’t play META, don’t prioritize archers with romans, enemy archers can’t stop romans maa with +2 so easily (you need 3x the normal hits), so you focus on disrupting their eco instead

  2. Quickwalling is a valid defense, but pros still uses maa rushes because they work
 a continuos flow of maa can either breach the quickwalls or force the defender to dedicade a lot more of their limited vills to repair task insteaed of doing eco

But it’s still an all-in strategy, if the pressure works LS and +4PA = gg, if it fails you won’t have enough to defend against archers snowball. You can try to mix skirms when you see a enemy BS (archers with +1 still do less dmg, but are a decent counter), but if you didn’t do enough damage you will fall behind anyways.

At very high level I only saw DauT use this strategy vs Tatoh when the civ was just release, but I expect at least some of them will try it now that romans are in ranked


I mean they work, not as you described tho. The strongest timing MAA has is always the first wave, then it falls off, because MAA in general are so damn expensive.

It does not help to have 1.5X more attack required (3 dmg vs 2 dmg - archer attack upgrade usually is a given) - MAA just gets kited forever.

Pros use MAA - but do you really see 4+ MAA works at pro level?

The main reason 2 militra rush become more popular than maa is that you dont invest as much and get similar result.

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Do you have archers + blacksmith + (+1) by the time MAA gets on your base? most likely not, it’s a lot more of resources


Archers will start with just 1dmg, if they defend well they will get the +1 and probably win, but they will have to get it under pressure

It is actually less resource consider that the MAA player also have to build a blacksmith and armor.

Usually it is +0 vs +0 or +1 vs +2. Malay ones are much stronger, because they dont need blacksmith (resource+time) for armor.

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Yeah, I don’t have RoR, so feel free to disregard my opinion on that basis. But from the civ design and having played against them a few times, they really just seem like an average-ish cav/knight civ. The infantry/scorp side is strong, but not super relevant on open maps outside of M@A, and lack of gunpowder puts a ceiling on their arena performance, although they may otherwise be decent there. In some ways they kind of remind me of Dravidians - a good water civ that can flounder on land, and especially open maps, because its strengths are off-meta units.

I think we all know what 5% means. The bigger question is what kind of practical advantage that nets you long before you have 100 villagers - the extent to which it enables smoother builds, earlier uptimes/aggression, etc.

Don’t think that’s necessarily the case in anything other than the most bland and generic sense, or is otherwise what OP is looking for. Getting a massive sample size of games can give you a clue as to the overall strength of one civ relative to others (WR), but it usually won’t tell you much about any one of the individual bonuses. A single game showing how the Roman eco bonus (hypothetically) enables a highly effective build order for a given strat is a lot more actionable than some mathematical analysis of a ton of games.

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That wasn’t the question. The question was whether or not it was superior to the Slavs farming bonus.

The Slavs bonus doesn’t particularly do any of the things you mention, either; it doesn’t allow some high-performance build order, for instance. It’s just a general bonus that broadly enhances their gameplay. If you look at the statistics, most players just use the extra power to allow themselves to get by with less farmers as needed, distributing them elsewhere.

That’s exactly what the Romans bonus does, as well; it just does it better, on pretty much every single level. It’s available sooner, it’s statistically superior, and it’s functionally broader.