Laborer and Gatherer both have lower resource collection rates compared to Greek Villagers, which is fine. Egyptians have their Pharaoh to boost their economy and Norse don’t need to waste villager time to construct buildings.
The strange part is what rates have been chosen.
Laborers are about 10% worse then Greek Villagers at everything.
Gatherers are about 5% worse then Greek Villagers at everything but with the exception of farming.
Why are Gatherers good at farming? They are Gatherers not farmers.
And it also feels thematically wrong for the Norse to be so good at farming.
At the same time it feels very wrong for the Egyptians to be the worst at farming.
Egypt was one of the best places for farming for almost the entire human history.
Grain from Egypt fed half of the Roman Empire.
Also Egyptians can only get +5% Farming speed though Mythical technologies while Norse can get +20%!
Considering that Norse are currently over performing and Egyptians are underperforming, maybe those numbers should be changed around.
Make Gatherers 5% worse then Greek Villagers at everything but 10% worse at farming.
Make Laborers 10% worse then Greek Villagers at everything but 5% worse at farming.
I do agree with you about the workers gather rate being balanced leaning more towards the historical side but it is quite of a complex and tricky equation to balance. There are other stuff that needs to be accounted when tweaking those gather rates like many egyptian buildings costing 0 resources, dwarf’s gather rate, myth upgrades and also military units cost etc.
Balance of the economy of all civs should be the highest priority when it comes to balance an should be done with the most attention, since economy is everything in RTS and playing uneven economic matches from the get go is a disgrace.
That said, I hope they revisit and carefully tweak those gather rates in the future to see if there is something that can be done. The Ra berry change was a step in the right direction and make a lot of sense.
Farming doesn’t influence the resources needed for the construction of buildings though.
When looking to balance the game they should always think about making it more historic with the balance change. Adding a historical strength or weakness.
If that is not done then civilisations/major gods/pantheons will eventually just become a shallow skin for a collection of balanced numbers.
I don’t really like that change. I think faster berries is a bonus that should have been preserved for other future pantheons where it is more fitting historically and it also didn’t really help Ra and on top of that it contradicts his god power that buffs farms.
Ra should of got a farming bonus of some kind instead of a berry bush gathering bonus. Ra is supposed to be the farming one so he should have more then just a god power that represents that.
I heard someone talk about Rain where they think it should be changed to only effect Ra and his allies farming which would make me happy.
I think Ra should get half of Ptahs technology Shaduf as a bonus.
So he gets -25% cost and construction time for farms.
With Shaduf it goes down to -75% which is pretty big.
When you go with Best you get a very slightly higher gather rate on your farms instead.
This way you will likely transition to farms relatively early and Rain can help you with that.
At the moment you really want to delay the farms transition and his new bonus makes it even worse, you want to not just exhaust all the hunt you now also want to get all the berries you can before getting farm, pushing the time Rain becomes useful even farther back.
What if Rain reduced the enemy farming rates by flooding their farms? That would make the God power so much more useful, even in late game.
I like the Idea of replacing the Berry bonus with a farming bonus, but given how inefficient farming is, It’ll probably have to be big to incentivize it over looking for more hunt on most maps. Not to mention The Egyptians are ALWAYS hungry for more gold- Perhaps a bonus to make gold mines last 10% longer for Ra, given how Egyptians need gold to farm for some reason?