Lakota is kinda disappointing now… and ideas to fix it

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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I was playing Lakota the other night and I found them kinda disappointing. This was a team game, I went to raid with WC+ARs+BRs and I killed some vills with the first 4 axe because they weren’t paying attention. Then my Bow Riders got there and I was running around and got way less vills than I would have expected (I used to play more Lakota than I have been recently).

After a little bit they began building walls. I tried burning them, but with the nerf on Lakota cav vs walls I quickly discovered one layer of wooden wall was going to take too long to burn.

I ran around and found they hadn’t fully walled, I got one or two more vills then almost lost my cav mass by going too deep, but I got out.

It turned into a long slog of a late game brawl. I had a decent deck for late game (I know, I know, Lakota should end the game sooner, I’ve been using a ~similar deck for a long time though, so I can compare my experiences a while ago vs more recently).

Recently Lakota has been turned into a not very good infantry civ. They need something for their cavalry, so I’d like to suggest some modest buffs to the Lakota cavalry:

Bow Riders should have a 0.67 base multiplier vs villagers. They didn’t have a negative multiplier for a long time before it went to 0.75 before later going down to 0.5.

Reduce the negative multiplier on all Lakota units against villagers from the age 4 HP tech. Instead of -33% for 20% HP change it to -20% for the same HP increase (they formerly had +15% on Cav in age 2, so I don’t think they buff is unreasonable).

Siege: Each upgrade (Elite/Champion/Legendary) should add +2 siege range for Bow Riders. They have a weaker siege than Axe Riders (and a number of other cav units) so let them siege from behind them. It would be a helpful siege boost to not entirely replace the rightful nerf to the formerly insanely strong, but now perhaps too weak, Siege Ceremony. I don’t think 12 siege range Bow Riders would be game breaking.

Lastly reduce the base negative multiplier on the Lakota cavalry against walls to 0.75, and have the bonus against walls given by the Farm Big Button only add 0.75 for the same end game stats.

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I don’t think what you described matters that much. Lakota is generally weak in team game but it is not terrible, it is still usable. Your problem is you raided wit ha lot of army early and killed some vills but you also lost your own army, and making army so early delayed yourself more than opponent losing some vills. In another word, your raid was not effective enough.

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Imo the issue is their cav have been overnerfed. In 1v1s it’s basically an infantry rush civ and I’ve noticed more of that in team too.

Lakota’s eco has never been great and slowing down the enemy with cav raids is important, but that’s hard with Bow Riders only doing 10 damage per shot.

Late game the win condition is usually get into your opponent’s eco and do damage. Siege is way worse than it was (was too good but has been overnerfed imo) and kill lots of vills/factories or wonders. Now with the age 4 HP card (which you basically need late game, cav hp is gone) everything does substantially less damage to vills.

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for seige, if cetans weren’t completely shite the siege archery card would be more viable in age3 instead of a forced meme to use vs italy. Also for seige the age4 mortars do fine and its not hard to get up if enemy turtles and concedes map. BR I dont think need siege its just now the cav power is reduced, it needs some sort of scaling for infantry. nothing wild, but like a cetans learn to fire not like morons and 10% combat card for all infantry alone would be fine. after all if your enemy cant turtle the lakota rush would be op; with turtling be so prevalent the civ is out of the design of DE. Like in theory if devs ever did a general nerf to say walls or forts etc that would be a huge boost to the civ.

Its a delicate balance and fwiw in teams lakota is considered very strong in the hands of a good team combo. in 2v2s russia lakota is monstorous and dutch lakota as well. 3v3s AR or BR spam is also very strong but you need to raid super hard and yet not loose mass, a tricky balance. I think why it feels worse than it is, its just as you noticed lakota in 1v1 cant pure cav and that the understandable nerfs to cav left the rest of the civ lacking. either eco or slight buff to infantry i think would be good place since their infantry is just so underwhelming as the game goes on past a few minutes, even if the cav does scale.

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Lakota is not like Sioux.
Lakota needs mortar to siege, their cav are not brave as Sioux’s, they will scare of dragoon now makes less damage. Their BR also not good at raiding vils, get ridicule by Otto AR which are more efficiency.

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The funny thing is all the buffs to the Lakota infantry are kinda historically inaccurate.

I kinda miss them being able to pure cav and add W rifles later if skirms are needed.

I get that certain things were too good at one point, but there kinda has to be a happy medium right?

Idk, maybe I’m just longing for a time that will never come back.

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Absolutely!

Their whole shtick should be that they are based around cav and that infantry-based units are there in a much more limited form, on the peripheral.

Ideally they’d be reworked so they operate somewhat differently (like how Mongols are different to HRE in AOEIV for example) to other Native civs (considering the real-world distance and culture that’s being lumped into ‘just the natives’), but to be honest, any small changes would be appreciated if resouces are limited.

It’s also not just the (arguably more important) gameplay side of things that needs to be looked. The broad sweeping brush of ‘Native Cultural Consultant’ places a lot of very different cultural aspects into the same ‘inoffensive’ pigeon hole - for example the Tribal Marketplace is the tip of the iceberg there.

Devs can fix them in a number of ways, but I’d certainly take some advice for some of our forum users, especially AnaWinters who is very au fait with Lakota culture (being Lakota).

Here’s a general list of threads which touch upon different aspects of them.

What’s wrong with Lakota:

Economy:

Lakota (or lack of ) players:

Lakota HC cards:

Lakota Big Button techs:

TLDR - Lakota would really benefit from a big refresh.

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I’d agree a rework would probably be good, but it’s hard to say how much resources the devs want to put into reworking a civ with a fairly small player base (they did Ottoman, which has a large player base, and Russia, which I think is fairly popular?).

The stuff I suggested would be pretty easy to implement since it’s just a few stat numbers here and there.

So I’d say there’s what might be good, vs what we can get, and so take what you can get

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I don’t understand the logic behind hesitating to redo a civilization nobody likes to play anyways.

All the native american civilizations have huge, glaring holes designwise that can’t realistically be fixed until the entire group is redone from scratch imo.

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Lakota is more popular than most dlc and the other WC civs. Even more than some euros atm. This despite how “bad” it is suggests alot of people are enjoying the core experience. Redo would risk pissing those people off, kind of like the last redo. Not saying it cant be done just stating unlike haude or azzies which are strong but not played much, people like lakota as is compared to some civs atm. It has waxed and waned but almost always the most popular WC civ and more than ports or russia.

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Before yes…now no.
Lakota is not like Lakota.

20 charas

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Im using civ grid data which places it through patches, for 1v1, between 3-4% play rate which is less than expected avg of 4.5% but more than AR civs, haude, inca, and till last patch ports. Also more than azzies till this patch. I do note that after 1600 elo, Lakota playrate plummets. Its also used alot in teams and treaty, but i dont have good data for either so i can only guess. but its clearly not as unloved as some civs. just mostly pointing out that a rework has to be deep and thoughtful as killing off the existing players might not be worth new incomming ones if they totally shift things

Right now its 3.2% overall play rate or use the following:

9.4% Ottoman
7.5% Germany
7.1% USA
6.9% China
6.1% British
5.8% France
5.6% Spain
5.4% Japan
5.0% Russia
5.0% Dutch
4.9% Aztec
4.8% Portugal
3.9% Mexico
3.3% India
3.2% Lakota
2.9% Hausa
2.8% Inca
2.4% Sweden
2.4% Haude
2.2% Malta
2.0% Italy
1.2% Ethiopia
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That would only be the expected average if everyone had all the DLCs. Not everyone is going to have access to the DLC civs so they will probably be lower. And being around for longer should also mean people will be experienced with them and more likely to play them.

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there are no weighted avgs here because we could parse data all day on what other factors influence civs such as popularity, ease of use, even now f2p model familiarity etc. its just a base rate of 100%/22, for ballpark. im not trying to say it should be 4.5 or higher, simply the avg of any civ could be tied to that.
regardless, from ranking to avg play rates its lower than most civs but not the least played civ at all which was the point

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The TLDR with the Lakota is that they wanted to increase their player rate by shifting them to a more generic inf/art/cav army composition over the last year with their various nerfs and buffs.

So the Lakota now have Nine Cavalry Units but only ever use 3, maybe 4 of them at any level of regularity, because the other 5-6 are just copy/pastes of the first few.

Now their infantry are a lot stronger, which is just bizarre. It’s like taking the Huns and making infantry half their composition. Who the f*ck thinks that’s a good idea?

The Lakota need to be 90% cavalry, 8% infantry, 2% artillery. Cavalry should be filling in for positions that other civs use infantry and artillery for.
Will that make them difficult to balance? Absolutely. But it’s more accurate and it’ll make them a fun and interesting civ.

But I’ve pretty much given up at this point. With the failure to upkeep the F2P model of AoE3, it’s pretty clear to me that the game is dead. The only reason anyone would launch a F2P and then completely fail to upkeep it would be to prove to someone that a game is “dead”. They’re using its lack of numbers as justification to pull the plug on it.

So I’m out. I’m helping the Divine Edition team with the Lakota over there until it’s finished for Retold, then probably dipping from the community. It’s too obvious to me that the devs aren’t capable of caring for the game in a lasting manner to bother sticking around.

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Ah that’s a shame, but I totally respect that decision.

That’s a logical way to look at the F2P model - opening the floodgates to all by having a free element and then reducing the maintenance to absolute minimum.

However, I hope you’re totally wrong! :grin:

If there’s a sniff of standard bugfix, I’ll hold hope that it will be continued to be supported properly. Anything more than that such as a major update (like the previous Euro-focused one) and we’ll know that it very much still has the attention of the otherwise super-busy (AoMR) Devs.

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