pikemen simply snare and body block, killing musketeers is where the leather cannon/xbow shine. it is more micro intensive than having caroleans shoot back and deal bonus damage at range vs cavalry, and thats the point.
dutch and aztec anti cavalry is fine age 2, germany can and will use pikes, ive played enough games in vanilla against them to be sure that i cant just go musket/hussar and get free wins. and brits use pikes constantly in a lb/pike comp, it is not a rare unit for British players to make.
as for significant changes, they have already happened and will continue to happen. this is part of being a supported game. it was only a few patches ago that Sweden was already overhauled with the addition of guaranteed mercenaries and gained crossbows and a crossbow shipment, as well as having Carolean bonus damage vs light cavalry removed, their charge mechanic entirely reworked, and their rof/damage rebalanced.
as for tourney impact, Iāve gone ahead and visited the esoc website to judge current balance, and these two threads have shown that balance is out of whack. there is a 10x difference in pick rate between the most and least picked civilization according to this thread, with the most picked civ the porteguese having an over 70% win rate while 4 civs have a sub 40% win rate. Tournament statistics - ESOCommunity (eso-community.net) winning percentage - Page 2 - ESOCommunity (eso-community.net)
I donāt remember it being this bad in vanilla. even the Portuguese there never dropped below a 45% win rate if I recall correctly, and while that was general population vs tournament statistics Iām confident in saying that balance is not the best it has ever been and that certain civs do dominate the tourney scene. esoc people also donāt seem to be enthused with the sweden design regardless of balance as seen here: Sweden has just completely ruined current casual games - ESOCommunity (eso-community.net)
Iām not really familiar with the esoc community and tourney scene, so this may just be an amateur tourney and really bad players in that thread, but its what I gleaned from available sources.
Itās not, musketeers can simply snipe pikemen from a safe range. And you canāt really have a mass of both pikemen and xbows, thatās a lot of wood, so you will lose to pure muskets. The time it takes to get that much wood for trash units is better spent going FF. Just look at Germany.
leather cannons and xbow deal much more damage to muskets then muskets deal to pikemen while having a significant range advantage. this also plays into micro with cover mode and kiting back as the ranged damage dealers lay down the dps. as for mass, thats where the return of the xbow shipment and leather cannon cost buffs come into play. it is possible to kill a large amount of musketeers with a decent xbow mass backed by leather cannons, thatās a fight id always take as a defender.
there is simply no way to beat a decent German player with a pure musket rush vs their crossbows, and Sweden has the bonus of their torps, a huge economic bonus that Germany doesnāt have.
Again, you are assuming that the Sweden player will want to make any xbows and pikemen in age 2. They will not want that, just like no German player wants to do xbows and pikemen in age 2. They will just FF, because it is wiser to spend the enormous villager time to go to age 3 instead of fighting with wood units in age 2.
And as others have pointed out, Germany works like this because of the free uhlans they get. They donāt actually need to make any pikemen at all, and their xbow shipment will cover up the prices very well. Also, the risk of getting uhlaned in your base prevents a lot of people from committing to attacking Germany. But they are not unbreakable. The xbows+2 uhlan shipment that Germany has can hold almost any rush by themselves.
It may look like forcing them to FF is a big nerf to them but it is not. They will be able to FF much faster than Germany and still keep their boom, simply because they get more shipments. So the change literally amounts to nothing.
Ok. I read the whole thread. I think that the proposal is definitively a nerf, and Swedes need a nerf. I just donāt know if is the necessary nerf.
Let me just give my 2 cents:
Swedes cannot semi FF like Germany, because Swedes waste much more wood on Torps. They need to stay in age 2 for a while to build a decent number of Torps.
Sweden doing units that costs wood hurts considerably the Torp boom.
On the comment that I made on this thread I explained that I tried out a build with archaic units and outlaws, that was based on a calculation that I would get more units out and the huge population space that outlaws occupies is not that hurtful that generally since Swedes do a lot of Torps anyway.
But this build is just not good. I was trying to not play the meta and create my own stuff since Iām starting to get annoyed because I just copy stuff from pro players. But the harsh true is that this build is not good, and will never be good because you need to use your wood on Torps, and donāt want to do units that consumes said wood.
Moving Caroleans to the fortress age will just make Swedes open Stable and do Hussars every single game, since a food and coin unit fits the macro of the civilization much better.
This change do changes drastically the meta of the civilization indeed, and weakens he civilization that is deserving a nerf at the moment.
I just donāt know if this particular change addresses the core problem with the Swedes
Well, on my experience British players only do Pikeman and Longbowman after they send it Virginia Company. Otherwise they just go for Musketeer and Hussars.
Too fully compare both civilizations, I think we would need to give Swedes a age 1 card that reduces the cost of the Torps by 35%, and even then I donāt believe that the comparison would be fully realistic, because there are more variables to be considered like:
Longbowman being much a stronger unit than Crossbowman.
British have a easier time to switch their macro. Because, if you build your Torps nearby trees to gather wood, you cannot realistically delete all the Torps and rebuild it to gather coin afterwards.
You are basically stuck on wood for the rest of the game, while British can only switch their villagers to other resources.