I was keeping an eye on Koreans win rate in Arabia since their nerf. And they are really bad, the lowest Arabia civ from 1200 elo+.
As you can see, other than Saracens, Sicilians, and Cumans they have very bad w/r against all civ with camel, eagle and good knight. They don’t even have 40% w/r against them, it is around only 35%. Meaning you will lose 2 out 3 times if you face an eagle or camel or knight civ. Strangely enough it is totally the opposite against Saracens.
They are not really good against other civs either. Other than 2-3 civs, they are always at 40%-45%.
I think nerfing their WW along with increasing cost of xbow and Arbalester upgrade without any compensation hurt them really hard.
After crossbowmen became more expensive, I guess they became more dependent on WW than before. But experienced players can easily defeat WW with skirmishers and monks, which makes them no real advantage strategy.
Cavalry are designed to be disproportionately bad, as if they don’t exist.
Siege Onager is not considered, because often do not live to that time.
I find that civilizations like them that were originally designed to rely too much on towers are (or were once) unpopular. The Teutons were saved by the armor bonus. After changing the team bonus, the Incas are still considered mediocre to this day. And the Koreans, I even think a greater degree of rework may be needed.
Yeah I always said that that WW nerf was actually totally unnecessary.
If anything about that WW play was a bit “problematiC” it was the anti-building bonus damage that was probably a bit too high for castle age.
But it’s not a problem of “only” Koreans. Most archer civs currently have really bad winrates.
And this isn’t surpriseing cause archer civs already had worse winrates on average than Knight civs even before the xbow nerf.,
xbow price increase definitely nerfed archer based civs without eco bonus disproportionally. I can see some arguments for war wagon nerf though.
What if we specifically give the Koreans xbow upgrade for free? Civs without good eco should be able to play with the power spikes (see Magyars which is far more competitive).
Enough xbow can even deal with knights, which is part of the complain that the upgrade was too cheap? That would address their weakness though.
Too much maybe. Free unit upgrade is powerful than free Blacksmith techs.
And they still have the free armor bonus, making them with a super high power peak upon hitting a new Age.
For some optional ideas…
Military units cost –20% less wood (except siege weapons).
→ All units cost fixed -10 less wood.
Allow the archers, skirmishers and pikes get a better price, while UUs, sieges, CAs, ships and trades could still be balanced.
Gain 2 in Bloodlines, Plate Barding Armor, and Blast Furnace, then loss the Hussar upgrade.
More choices always better, but the more items on the menu does not mean they can order more at a time. Trying to use the Stable Unit could be useful to deal with their weakness, but also means that they don’t benefit from any bonuses. WW and elite WW can be nerfed by 10 HP to 20 HP in exchange, but this change will not make WW unusable. On the other hand, they don’t need a good raiding ability in the late game with good skirmishers, halberdiers and siege.
More if possible: Change the armor class of War Wagon from cavalry archer unit to cavalry + siege, and change its projectiles from a bolt to a volley of 4 arrows.
After gaining a more cavalry-friendly tech tree, this could be bring some interesting differences and allow it to work like its historical reference more closely. The 4 arrows could cause as same as 9 damage of the current bolt, by the main arrow with 3 attack and the additional arrows with 2.
Makes its +5 attack bonus against buildings reasonable.
No longer free armor for it so it’s not going to be such a super tank unit as soon as it’s available. But it can benefit from Bloodlines and PBA if the techs are available.
Even though no longer afraid of skirmishers, it’s still countered by Monks and Mangonels.
Perhaps giving it a slight attack bonus against siege weapons could assist it in facing Mangonels and killing converted Wagons.
Without benefiting from the Fletching line, the range is too short. Maybe make it 6 and benefit from SE and Shinkichon in the Imperial Age.
The ideas have been shared before, but some people seems feel unacceptable that the Koreans have better cavalry than they have now, even though they are so weak and there is not much room for buffs for archers.
Civilizations like the Koreans were designed to use the tower as another military unit. Not sure how to implement this in the actual meta without turning into another tower rush civ
Also, I would like to see the Turtle ship more often
If it replaces with free archer armor, I don’t see any problem with that.
I’ll pick PBA and BF. Not having BF makes their halb weaker than generic against Paladin. Not too big of a deal as Koreans usually dies before that. But having some decent infantry and cavalry in late game will help.
I understand the armor class change. But why projectile?
Add a new Unique building like Donjon?
I think I’ll change my data sheet and add a new “Jack of all tread” civs with Chinese, Malians, Byzantines, Portuguese and Saracens. Considering Chinese only archer, Malians and Saracens as only Camel don’t really make sense to me anymore. Maybe even move Dravidians from “Archer civ” to “Other civ” as well.
I still think it may be a no.
If we check the stats, we can notice that the crossbow upgrade provide +5 HP, +1 range and +1 attack, which is much stronger than free armor in the practice.
If the free bodkin arrow is unacceptable, so is this.
The bolt speed is only 6. Scorpions can damage multiple units in 0.2 tiles width, and the hitboxes of the ships that War Galleys mainly fight against are large enough. In contrast, the current WW cannot damage multiple units, and most of the targets they fight against do not have such large hitboxes, so its fault tolerance rate actually not high.
A volley of arrows is helpful. The arrow speed is 7. Even if only 1 or 2 arrows hit the target, some slight damage can still be done. It lowers the accuracy and micro requirements, especially before researching Ballistics (if they become cavalry + siege, they even cannot benefit from Ballistics). Although I believe many people will think that WWs don’t need micro because they’re tank enough to just let them fire. But always being slower to deal damage makes them vulnerable to defeat against monks, skirmishers and camels before accumulating enough volume.
After through calculation, the total amount of damage will still be 9, so it’s not an overly powerful buff. Also, it can make this UU more close to its reference, the Korean fire arrow launcher wagon “Huacha”.
To use the tower as a means of attack, you must let more than 3 villagers give up gathering the main resources to gather stones, and at the same time let more than 4 villagers go to the front to build towers and give up gathering resources. Compared with the opponent, you give up more than 7 villagers’ resources, so you not only have to defeat the opponent’s army, but also must cause enough damage to the opponent’s economy, otherwise the opponent will definitely gain better combat effectiveness and economy.
Additionally, the tower is not mobile and is passive in combat. Once you find something is wrong, you can let the army turn back quickly to avoid losses, or you can quickly send them to other places to fight against the enemy. But the tower cannot move, which makes it unsuitable to be thought of as a military unit.
A good practice is to allow players to give up less economy when going tower rush. The Pole bonus is just that, making them actually the best civ for towers. You can also see strategies like this in Arena.
I agree that Koreans are a clumsy civ. They are a tower & archers civ, but towers are not supposed to be strong, to avoid “lame gameplay”. So we are left with an “FU arbalests” civ with subpaar infantry and bad stables.
They got a nice buff in DE with the free archer armor, but in the end it is not enough to compete.
I feel that Koreans are relatable to Celts who have some kind of late game Siege Onager based deathball with very few alternative late game options (Koreans only got FU skirms Arbs and bbc, Celts only got Champions Halberdiers and scorpions). The difference is though:
Korean have a bad early game bonus, making them bad in 1v1 open maps
Celts have both bad options as flank and pocket (Korean are pretty decent as flank)
I like the idea of free crossbows. So a balance idea would be:
remove free archer armor upgrades
give free xbow upgrade
give +1 PA to foot archer units starting feudal age
Alternatively, there is still the timeless proposal of extending the 20% wood discount to siege units, to provide a nice 32w discount per mangonel. Along with the free archer armors, this may make up for enough bonus for Koreans to hold their own (they dont need to become decent/above average on 1v1 arabia, just “not horrible” is enough)
Extend them the 20% wood discount to siege is a good starting point
If you ask for an eco bonus the Koreans can turn in another eco bonus-Portuguese and that can be too much
The fine line between meticulously tweak a civ or abruptly break the ladder
Yeah that’s a heck of an expensive military unit that can be knocked down by villagers.
At this point Koreans has been steered towards archer civ, considering the changes they experienced. Removal of faster defensive building construction was unnecessary imo. They would have at least been a defensive civ.
Maybe I’m going off topic here but I would suggest a Tower rework idea in order to give Koreans an opportunity to actually build them and get some use out of its bonuses.
I would start by giving every civ free tower upgrade. Let’s be honest, no one goes to the trouble of building an university in Castle age so you can that mind-blowing guard tower upgrade. I’ve also never seen a keep in multiplayer.
Koreans would exchange this bonus for something else. I’m not so sure on what exactly but it shouldn’t be another archer related bonus. Maybe something defensive like faster/cheaper repair starting from castle age.
For the rest of the tower changes, I would suggest a mix of increase attack and attack speed or the ability to target multiple units at the same time (increased according to their tier, starting from 1 arrow in feudal). I think this last chance would at least differentiate them a bit instead of being just a weak castle.
To balance it out, villagers would take reduced damage from towers, so they would stop being used as a rush strategy and to harass exposed resources.
Woot? That just kills all aggression that isn’t towerrushes. Its basicially giving 550 res to the defender and i hope i dont have to explain why thats a bad thing.
You dont see them doing what, exactly? Defending with guard tower?
Maybe, just maybe, because players dont even attempt to push koreans in castle age with stuff that can be killed with guard towers? (mostly mangos, but also several UU pushes)
No need to get emotional, this is a discussion after all
. I’m just pushing for strat diversity so we don’t have just archer-cavalry meta. And yes, I’ve never seen someone defending with towers outside of feudal age. If we don’t actually use them than why having them at all? Just so you can say that you saw them working 1 time 5 years ago in some random game?
We see towers all the time. Not sure why you claim we would not; its simply not true. Guard tower defense was pretty much standard play vs mangos/monks/some uus like organ. It has fallen a bit out of favour, but is still absolutly viable. Thats with 550 res investment; imagine how much more we see them once the change you propose would go throug…
Nope, you’re not. Just look at the list above. What do you notice? oh…guard tower defense is particularly effective vs pretty much everything that isn’t kts/xbow (because those are mobile enough to do damage despite the towers).