Japan gameplay is highly highly main base defensive; cheap and high gathering food in base; cheap 2nd TC, bugged 2tc range…, HRE-isk melee infantry with high mobility and DPS and tankiness ALL IN FEUDAL.
WHILE everyone can produce the proper counter composition to Japanese in Castle and beyond there are a few civs that are dead in the water and others that do have a soft/direct counter but struggle to contend with said economy.
I would nerf japan with cost increases. Sam prices needs to go up to 40 gold. Bugatti needs to go up to 30 gold.
Upgrade TC needs to adjust base dps down to 40 dmg and put the rest into bonus vs bio units. Bc 90 dmg is killing siege ; french needs an imp upgrade to do this meanwhile Japan can technically do it in dark age???
So all in al you have English safe and highly defensive base with free/cheap farms and the mobility of Hre infantry. And with the right up you have china1 song dynasty villager production???
I don’t think Japan is really comparable to English (other than farms and defensiveness). Japan is a weak feudal strong castle, solid imperial civ while English is basically the opposite in strong feudal weak castle age civ.
Samurai are basically just MAA clones that do slightly better against high damage units like handcannons/knights/xbows, while being worse cost-effectively against everything else.
Lack of spearman make horsemen + archers very solid against them (and like only Delhi has to resort to that) and they don’t have a great answer to feudal knights/keshiks.
Samurai plus Bugatti are all players doing even at the top ranks and it works more times than not and is HRE A move EZZZ.
Also UNLIKE English Japanese infantry have HIGH mobility. So they don’t have to necessarily move from tower tower in groups. Nor suffer to counter raids th way English does.
The thing is it does not work more times than not. Japanese currently are performing terribly in feudal age games, only really having an advantage if the game is lasting at least 25 minutes. The only level that feudal rushes is performing somewhat well in are in silver or below games.
Not saying that full fuedal army play never works, but it is inconsistent and fails more often than it suceeds (at least on average, there may be certain matchups that it does well in).
It is possibly that the strategy is good and the majority of people are doing other things and losing in feudal, time will show on that but it isn’t out here rolling over games like Ayyubids and Jeanne are doing atm.
I don’t understand why you want increase japan MAA cost when the HRE ones are better and cost less.
Japan winrate isn’t that high. It’s quite balanced at the moment and japan has many other disadvantages. Like slow gathering on sheep and no keep in castle. Their farm tech are expensive also and need more investment in feudal.
Bugeisha die soo easily to ranged units. Their archer are bad and crossbow are expensive. So they really rely on samourai being slightly stronger and bugeisha, because the rest of their units isn’t good.
The only thing that could potentially need a nerf is the ozutsu (not sure if i remember the name correctly, but the unit with a gun and splash damage). I would also nerf the shinto landmark so that you generate less gold maybe from forge. Would be much better nerf this way. By making samourai and bugeisha more expensive you just removing everything fun about the civ.
Im fine with making rocket less good against ram and fixing the tc range bug.
nerfing the 2 units by increasing the gold cost will not eradicate the sam/bugatti spam? Just like when they nerfed China 1 PG didnt change PG spam raids and late game PG play? The idea is to take a lil off the top;
Win rates never tell the whole story.
also all the units you mentioned get significantly buffed by bannerman to include Yumi Archers!
Yes but you need investment for bannerman.
I don’t think the units are underpriced, I don’t see them being spam that much. Maybe just against specific civs. I think knights are better to have in feudal than the japanese units.
Japans have other issues to address first such as ozutsu and the shinto landmark… Fix that first and see how the civ does in the stats. Then MAYBE the bugeisha would need nerf, but definitely not the samourai as they aren’t that good if you compare to other MAA other civs have such as hre or abbasid. Balance civ in a way that doesn’t make all their unique stuff bad.
Ex: Longbow are super strong and hard to deal with, and so are royal knights, but im not asking for nerf for them because that’s the core identity of those civs. You’ll figure out how to deal with japan units im sure. And nerfing other things in their eco will definitely help with that.
Just mass archers, your archers can beat their archers, their samurai, and their onnas, and if they do horseman just make a few spears…
Japan can only be a problem in feudal if you have villagers outside your base exposed to bugeisha. Despite that, it’s like any other civ who has MAA in feudal.
Also think that onna bugeisha are really only worth in feudal, so nerfing them would leave the unit out of the game.