Dravidians had a pretty weak tech tree before this and now they only get the discount on siege, whereas you are proposing that Koreans should get the discount on all military units including siege ??
Yeah. If free armor was not a thing, WW would never get -1 archer armor.
Koreans have the highest amount of free techs in the game, 6 in total. And still ironically never feels like having a good powerspike.
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I mentioned mayans in that very post, did you read it fully? Berbers don’t get FU cav, they miss paladin. There is only one civ that gets better than FU at cheaper price. That’s portugese. But that civ is already weird with Feitoria.
This is a bad idea in general. It reduces focus and waters down the flavour of civ. 3 iconic bonuses are always better like 6 random, unfocused ones.
My guess is that most people in the thread care more about Koreans’ performance in game than how elegant the bonus is, and that’s why the discussion has gone that way. Personally, I don’t think the wood discount is any less elegant than the Britons’ archer bonus (“foot archers except Skirmishers”) or the Malians’ building bonus (“buildings except Farms and starting Town Center”). For my money, the least elegant bonus is the Celts’ sheep stealing bonus, since it can’t be explained clearly in a short sentence – closely followed by the Poles’ stone mining and Portuguese foraging bonus, since the extra resources trickle in rather than being dropped off.
Yes, all of their existing bonuses could be buffed in some way. The wood discount feels like a good candidate for a buff because there are clear ways to improve it, and currently it feels like a very weak bonus.
Hard to hit cavalry with mangonels/onagers. I think they’d need heavy scorpion for this to be useful.
In hindsight, this is so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t check that.
I feel like this is the general problem throughout the thread: it’s easy to come up with buffs that fit their theme – either by improving an existing bonus or introducing something new – but to me, none of the suggestions stand out as something that will definitely help in the right way.
Thanks. Of these, I think I like the extra HP on spears/skirms best, because it feels like it can be used a bit more actively to the others. Similar to what @SirWiedreich suggested (I think) with them taking reduced damage from cavalry, but more universal.
A minor overlap is not a big deal. Burgundians, Dravidians, and Italians also have some cheaper techs that emphasize the themes of those civs, whereas the universality of the Chinese discount is what makes them unique (and flexible).
The issue with most of these is that turtley-type bonuses are just really hard to design in a way that’s very useful. If you’re walling up heavily as Koreans, most other civs can just outboom you. Free stone is not bad, although I don’t think the devs would add anything that will directly incentivize trushing given how often that strat has been the reason for nerfs in the past. Extra HP on Spear/Skirm is good, but not so good as to make it a clear upgrade from free archer armor. As far as possibly viable turtling bonuses, I do think non-combat tower incentives are a good way to go, as suggested earlier.
Also this. OP’s critique is reasonable, although IMO that has become thoroughly eclipsed, not only by a stronger bonus for Dravidians, but also by a desire to create or extend a bonus that is more fine-tuned to address Koreans’ weaknesses. I’d rather have a bonus that appears slightly less “elegant” due to some exception or addition, but is highly effective, than something that looks nice on paper but changes very little. So in general, performance > aesthetics. If you can have both, all the better.
Yes, of the 4 listed, I like that the most, although I don’t think it’s strong enough to replace any existing bonus. The low base HP of spear/skirms means that a few extra HP in early game won’t alter that many interactions (e.g. where pikes take bonus damage from archers and skirms, and skirms are terrible when fighting anything but archers, and worse vs. infantry after Gambesons). In order to make it good enough to replace the archer armor, I’d suggest something like “Wood land units +4/8/12 HP in F/C/I,” or “Wood land units +5 HP, +10 in Imp.” You could maybe go up to 15, but in that case they’d have to lose Ring Armor. Not a perfectly “elegant” design, to be sure, but should be reasonably effective. And I have to say the options are kind of limited given how the devs seem to have painted themselves into a corner with the Koreans design, so whatever we end up with will probably not be mind-blowingly elegant. And I don’t have the heart for any kind of major rework since at that point you may as well just design a new civ.
But I do think extending the wood discount is the most promising start, on top of possibly adding new effects to the UTs. Apart from that, I think replacing the free archer armor with something more broadly useful (and reverting the WW nerf) would be the next best choice.
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You still have better chance at the late game than at early game with no walls.
I didn’t say this here. But this one I want replacing faster stone gathering bonus. The civ will still have the stone focus design but a lot faster as you don’t need to collect stone to start Trushing.
Maybe replace it with free Tower upgrades? Although both stone mining and free Tower upgrades bonuses are identity of Koreans.