Considering how awful Koreans currently are, I’ll actually go 20%/30%/40% less wood in Feudal/Castle/Imperial age. Remove shipwright and adjust both of the UU cost.
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I dont know. Shipwright affects also the training speed, so Korean would heve to build extra docks in exchange. Sounds balanced in water.
However, outside ships and siege, wood units tend to cost low ammounts of wood, so an extra 20% discount wouldnt make a big difference on land.
For instance, a cav archer would cost 24w indtead of 30w…
Korean cav archers have free armor upgrades and even so they are barely used outside imperial wars.
A pikeman would cost 15w in imperial age. In castle age, it would cost 17.5w. Would that be enough against knights? I doubt it.
I would wait for the meta to set up a bit. The changes for nomad maps are good for koreans. So any change for arabia would push them in nomad more.
Since they are also meh in Arena, we can try to buff there with stuff like “free fortified walls”. Or just buff guard towers and keeps for eveyone.
Yeah. Because you’re saving shipwright resources and that’s quite a lot. Adding more docks won’t be a hard task. Also Vikings don’t get shipwright and that was never an issue.
All adds up. You will save 2 more wood per xbow. If you create 30 xbow in Castle Age, which is a reasonable number, you will get a farm for free. Also Koreans CA may have some use after this change.
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I wanna throw in to consider that you could give/Take away crop Rotation & 2man saw to finetune their Wood Eco in imp.
If you wanted to further improve the wood discount, I might suggest extending it to technologies: (“Non-Siege Units and Techs -25/30/35% Wood Cost in F/C/I”) - the beneficiaries of this are largely techs consistent with the Koreans’ ranged/defensive theme. It’s a small effect, but being able to get Thumb Ring, Ballistics and other Uni techs, as well as eco techs a bit earlier is at least mildly helpful on top of a unit discount.
Yeah, the nature of it is that it will be worse than a food or general discount even if you crank up the numbers or have it apply more broadly. But saved res are still saved res, and if it lets you move even 1-2 vills from wood to food, that’s something. This opens the door to discussion of how we might have a wood-themed bonus that saves food, but the ones that come to mind are very strong and might necessitate a replacement of the wood bonus, (which would then have to be compensated on water). Something like spear and/or skirm food cost being replaced with extra wood, or techs from certain buildings having food costs replaced with wood, I think would be very interesting and useful bonuses, but perhaps those are best saved for new civs.
And there’s always the Sicilian option of further incentivizing towers without directly increasing their combat stats. Korean towers could provide 5-10 pop headroom, train counter units, or double as eco dropsites.
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I definitely do. Koreans already have 5 civ bonuses, so improving one is probably preferable to adding more. Of the existing bonuses, the wood discount seems like the obvious/easiest one to improve. (This shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning I’m opposed to Koreans getting an extra bonus, though.)
Sounds good – I think Thumb Ring and Ballistics in particular have a high enough wood cost for a 30% discount to be meaningful.
You can replace “towers” by “towers and walls” so they get fortified walls for free without adding a bonus. But that wont help either.
maybe it isnt enough with tweaking their bonuses. There have been lots of major changes for them in the last years.
Towers were nerfed in AOE2DE snd koreans received the little wood discount. That was not enough, so they buffed the wood discount, move paknoseon (old UT) to the elite turtle ship and move their extra range to their new UT. Then, they received the free archer armor but that was too much for the war wagos that were nerfed.
They also received elitle cannon galeon.
Of those changes, the only one that pushed them up in the meta was the free archer bonus but now wat wagons arent meta anymore.
As they are right now, tweaking onde bonuss wont help much. They need lots of changes, or an unic big change
So lets buff theeir stone bonus a bit as well together free fortified walls. They can always send their stone to age up and retake it later. And buff the wood bonus by doing villagers use less wood for repairing. Both togethwr would make them much better at trushing, but also allow them to age up faster or reparing siege better.
Or make their siege deal bonus damage to cavalry (maybe after shinchikon?)
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Is it funny or sad that almost no-one reacted to the original conjecture that the exception for siege weapons is bad because it is inelegant?
I mean there are a few posts arguing about the combination of a wood discount with the minimum range reduction and the UT. I think it’d be fine because the UT minimum range thing isn’t worth that much (so you’re weaker than Slavs at that point) and when you’re talking about the point after the UT is researched you need to compare with Celts who get a double bonus and Monguls. And there is no hard rule against getting a discount and a UT effect, as demonstrated by Portuguese.
Add to all that that it’s not intrinsically a problem if a civ has a stacked unit, so long as the civ as a whole can be countered.
There could be an issue if a Korean archers+mangonel push would be too strong, or if the same would apply to a Korean mangonel+spears+monks push. I think we’re mostly safe on those fronts.
A lot of these proposals would make Koreans even more inelegant. If you’re gonna apply the wood discount to technologies, are you also going to exempt dock techs?
If you make the wood discount scale with the age so that Koreans can save more wood on their archers / spearmen, would it really have been unbearable to instead let them save some wood on their Onagers?
If you’re going to buff Korean siege, why not do it in a way that gets rid of an eye sore?
I do like the ideas of making defensive towers more worthy by making them drop-off points and increasing their anti-cav attack.
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Stats are out and as I predicted Koreans, Bengalis, Bohemians, Italians and Vietnamese are bottom 5. I totally missed elo range though. This is the stat of all elo range
My prediction was this would be 1200+ elo.
Looks like Koreans are doing way better than what I thought. They are almost there. I think just buffing the wood discount as @SirWiedreich suggested would be enough.
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Is this for a specific map? Right now on aoestats.io, it says Koreans have the lowest winrate of any civ in 1v1. They’re bottom for 1000-1200 and 1200+. Not bottom for 1900+, although their winrate it actually worse at that level. (Also, that’s top 1%, so should be ignored as outliers anyway.)
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Yes. I’m looking only at Arabia.
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It looks not that bad, but if you look at stats for all map 1200+ (and all elo range), Koreans, Vietnamese are bottom 2. Civ like Bohemians, Bengalis are top-tier (or close to top-tier) at Arena which is 2nd popular map. Italians are also decent at Arena. But the thing is, Koreans are also close to bottom tier at Arena. They also struggle at Arena with weak monks, bad eco and no good powerspike. (I think similar situation for Vietnamese, they also got very minor buff in this patch)
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Mayans get FU and discounted archers. Berbers get FU cav and discount, so that’s not entirely true
Imho koreans could get their discount for siege units and would be totally fine even if It would not help them all that much
Perhaps neither. I fully agree with the premise, but the idea of it being an odd and unnecessary exception is something that’s been called out in other threads on Koreans, so I’m less inclined to make that rehash a focal point here. I still agree that extending the bonus to siege is a decent and “elegant” idea, I just think that it’s extremely unlikely given the recent gift of that bonus to Dravidians. So it’s natural to look for other ways to improve the bonus rather than repeat an idea that’s been continually proposed (and continually ignored by the devs in favor of another civ). In any case, I find it more interesting to at least brainstorm other ways of to extending the bonus rather than just repeat something I’ve proposed in the past but that seems very unlikely (and frankly more boring) in view of recent changes.
I don’t think you’d need any exemptions. Affected dock techs are Gillnets, Galleon and Fast Fire. The savings come late (Imp for the last two) and are relatively small. It can provide a small timing advantage, but it’s nothing to write home about (and is partly counterbalanced by the proposed loss of Shipwright in more drawn-out lategame naval battles). Yeah, it’s a buff in an area that isn’t strictly needed (not unlike a siege discount, frankly), but where Koreans are a “naval civ” but don’t break into top 5 on any water/hybrid map AFAIK, I don’t think they need to be exempted from a small incidental buff of extending the wood bonus to techs.
Lost Incas team bonus can be added as civ bonus for Koreans.
Villagers +3 LOS → Villagers, spearmen and skirmishers +3 LOS.
Won’t help that much though.
+3 is one more point that the standsrd LOS bonus (except for ethiopean teambonus).
Vietnamese already have wood free gillnets amd itis not commonly used. Of course, a wood discoumt for techs sounds good, but that would make them similar to chinese. Besides, if all techs and units besides siege and eco units (and buildings) receive a wood discount, they would become at the end very similar to celts that have an wood gathering bonus, which is more elegant.
In theory, koreans have the wood discount because of their crafting skills with wood. So I could add a bonus showing this. For example, buildings or wood units could regenerate, or be repaired fasternor cheaper.
Another idea I am going to throw here is buffing base accuracy to range units like: all ranged units have 10% extra accuracy. They could lose thumbring in exchange if this is deemed too much powerful. The extra accuracy almost doesnt affect water units (fire galleys have 0% accuracy, cannon galleons 50%), or buildings (only bombard towers have 92% accuracy). War wago s are not affected either. Feudal archer with this would have 90% accuracy, and crossbow 95%. And hand cannoneers or cavalry archer would have an extra accuracy. Among siege, only trebuchets are affected
Although this buff fits italians more, in my opinion.
As @TommoChocolate asked in a different thread, I’d replace free archer armor upgrade with anything related to turtle strategy (Pun intended. Couldn’t hold back after seeing your profile picture). Some examples -
- Faster construction for walls and gates.
- Extra HP on stone walls.
- Extra HP on spear/skirm.
- Get extra stone on age up.
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The problem with this is that free archer armor made them playable before they nerfed the wat wagons, so they would need to rework twagons again.
Also, villagers walling faster combined with their LOS bonus could lead to laming, and developers dont want weird laming strategies.
However, I am on the mood for a turtle civ. More possible turtle bonuses are:
- Stone walls available in dark age
- Free fortified walls
Celts have a bonus that starts with “Can steal sheep”, are you sure about that?
Devs have nerfed dark ages bonuses when they went out of hand: berber villager drush, goths free loom, polish regenerating villagers. Devs dont want vill fights.
The only dark age bonus remaining that is actually uses is the bonis for persian TC drop
Celt bonus is more useful for the scout, like vietnamese one.
Korean villagers with extra LOS and faster quickwallimg could be exploited for vill fighting if you are good at micro