Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of civs that have some sort of lategame tower or defensive building focus tend to have low winrates at higher elos. Currently, Bulgarians, Koreans, Sicilians, and Teutons are all below 46% winrate at high elos.
I think this has a lot to do with the relative unviability of the Keep and Guard Tower upgrades.
The problem is, despite giving 50% more HP and +1 attack, towers are completely ineffective against Trebuchets, and even the Korean ones with +2 range are pretty mediocre at best. This is worsened by the fact that in the lategame, your armies are bigger, so you can’t really use Keeps to protect weak units in a pinch.
Towers are quite powerful at lower Elos, however, so they can’t really get general purpose buffs like more range, attack, or HP, or the age of constant tower spam will return.
What I’d like to see is more utility buffs to the tower line, to make them more effective at a broader variety of things.
Guard Tower
5 Garrison Capacity → 6 Garrison Capacity.
This might seem small, but currently, Guard Towers cap out at 9 damage in castle age. This means that if you garrison villagers inside, while you can get up to 25 theoretical damage from the villagers, you can only use 18 of it, losing 7/25 damage (or 28%). Increasing the garrison capacity to 6 allows 30 theoretical damage, of which you get 27, losing 3 damage instead(or 10%).
6 HP Healing/Minute->9HP Healing/Minute
Again, this might seem like a small buff, but in combination with Herbal Medicine, it allows infantry or archers to be healed by 54 hp/minute, instead of 36. This makes towers far more viable as a healing post, as a single tower would be able to heal 320hp/minute, or the equivalent of two monks, the same cost as Herbal Medicine.
These two alone might seem like relatively minor effects, but together, it dramatically expands the utility of towers in the castle age, and Keeps should go further, still.
Keeps
5 Garrison Capacity → 9 Garrison Capacity
Again, this is tailored to gel with their damage bonus; 9 villagers gives exactly 3 extra arrows, and 0% lost damage. This compares with currently, where Keeps gain only a single extra arrow, and lose 10/25 damage, or a painful 40%. This also synergizes much better with higher Imperial army sizes; it allows the tower to generate up to 6 extra arrows when fully garrisoned with arbalesters.
6 HP Healing/Minute → 12 HP Healing/Minute
This brings Keeps up to equalling Castles in terms of healing rate. This is a buff specifically targeted at higher-elo play, allowing the effective healing of 4 monks on garrisoned units, with appropriate micro. This is similar to what Teutons already have, but they are actually discouraged from using Towers, thanks to Crenellations, which heavily encourages the use of Castles, instead.
The goal of these changes is to make towers more viable in the later stages of the game, encourage healing gameplay, and improve these weaker civs specifically at higher elos.