Your boar, deer, berries last longer → you save wood on farms
Your trees last longer → you enjoy more efficient trips since lumber campus are efficient for long time
These are some advantages in early game
Not to mention you can mine stone and gold for more time as well
The thing with Mayan villager bonus is that feels like a bit of Chinese villager bonus and a bit of Goth loom bonus. So I suggested it to remove it entirely to prevent overlap.
Mayans are the only civ with 3 Eco bonuses: extra vill, longer lasting resources, savings on a prime unit. Chinese are also close.
Technology discount is 15% starting from feudal but does not affect unit upgrades, only technologies. A slight buff in feudal (unless you research m@ which is highly unlikely as Chinese) but a decent nerf in castle and imperial. Not having discount on the three most common unit upgrades in castle age - xbow, Elite Skirms and Pikes will hurt them a lot.
Hopefully such small buff in feudal won’t be a big deal. Instead it will help to minimize their performance difference between high and low elos.
Mayans
Longer lasting resource doesn’t apply to farms and fish traps any more. Mayans just save too much wood throughout the game. Extra around 220 food makes sure you can get Horse Collar before you make your first farm. Longer lasting woods means you don’t need to refresh lumbercamp as much as other civs. And finally cheaper archers also help to have more farmers as you need less on wood.
Lol so you basically sand-down their bonuses into basically a generic state. This is too easy this way, if developers wanted they’d do it long ago.
The whole point is to come up with an elegant clever nerf that wont damage their identity.
Mayans problem is not the extra vill, that’s quite unique and impossible to be nerfed, its either removing the bonus or leaving it as is. The problem is that it comes on top another Dark Age bonus, which is arguably one of the best ones, 15% extra lasting res means 180-300 extra food in Dark Age (Early Feudal), 180 of those is hunt, which is so valuable.
So if you want to sand-down somewhere uninspiringly go to this bonus and restrict it for all res sources that are not hunt. Needless to say Im against sanding down.
Chinese need a mid-game nerf, a decent way to do it is to have them start the game with -75 stone, it’s precedential since they already start with -50 wood, yet doesnt affect their weak Dark Age / early Feudal Age. They can still Tower defencively if they wanted, they would just have problem to create a smooth booming game which is so important in this boomy meta.
If the Chinese only start with 125 stone then they will run in the same problem as the Sicilians did when they were released: they not only ruin their economy later on but they also can’t even repair their emergency tower.
It kicks in at 10 min of the game as you get around 220 extra food and can comfortably research Horse collar before putting down their 1st farms. It kicks in again when you need to reseed your farms as you are getting 15% extra food from farms. With Horse Collar you get 37 more food, almost 2 more minutes to reseed.
Which comes with a total 0 eco bonus while Mayans have 2 some of the best eco bonuses.
No extra villager from the end of Dark age, nor any sort of mid game eco like saving woods. No cheaper units either.
Again no mid game eco.
Point is - Mayans have consistently better eco than all of the civs you mentioned throughout the whole game.
11
Pretty sure you don’t know Mayans get extra food from farms (and fish traps).
Laughs in most definitely the best eagle in the game.
Mayans economy is fine there is a lot of economy better than mayans ( vikings slavs franks brits chinese aztec etc…)
Mayans strength is getting full walled easily and spamming archer while getting imperial fast.
The vills bonus dont do that much quite unnoticable in fact.
The ressources last 15% longer is essentially for late game gold stone and food
It also make refreshing of lumbercamp less often than other civs but its quite negligable
Mayans farmers which works slower is terrible as well.
If Mayans gets their archers discount (plumes can have an ajustement )and team bonus nerfed to lets say -33% in a first step ,i dont think the civ will be op in semi closed map anymore it also make them less op on flank tg as flank player have exactly the role where mayans shine by spammings archers and getting imp as soon as possible.
For Chinese, just nerf the economy (bonus vills , tech discount ). Nerfing tech tree and chu ko nu will not do anything.
The only thing i really dislike about mayans is having these absurd strong eagles. Why would they have better eagles than aztecs and incas, when incas for example are already weaker than they are?
Maybe Eagle HP in general could be increased from 50/55/60 to 50/60/70, then Mayans could get +30 to end up at the same 100. Aztec and and Incan Eagles would end up a little tougher, and Mayans’ would be weaker in comparison. Generic Eagles already seem a little squishy for their high gold cost, especially when they’re replacing cavalry with bloodlines, at least until Imperial techs come in.
Would be fine for incas but it would make aztecs stronger, who are already at a very good spot…so not a fan of it.
From a balancing aspect incas probably should get the strongest eagles. Mayans wouldn’t be overpowered anymore and incas had sth. useful in this game. Personally i would’ve liked to just switch the boni of the civs. The problem is, that kamus and slingers get a boost of the current UT as well, which would be too much.
True but it is what it is. Maybe Elite Kamauyk upgrade cost is raised a bit and it gives you +1/+1 armor. Then swap the effect of El Dorado and Fabric Shield. A little Slinger nerf won’t harm that much.
The problem is Mayans Eagle will be very bad against melee units in that case and they also lack Champion + Supplies. I think their Eagles need to be good against melee units. That being said +40 HP or +66% HP is just too much compared to Mayans A+ tier eco.
Even mayans eagles are not really good vs melee units. Don’t see the point of it anyway tbh. Are you referring to infantry? cause archers will kill them…and for cav they still have helbs.
Would 5 HP really make much difference in Castle Age? 10 HP would help Aztec and Incan Eagles compete in Imperial Age, and Mayan Eagles in the late game would be unaffected (IMO they feel about right when compared to other civ’s cavalry options).
For comparison, if facing 30 generic Castle Age crossbowman, a meso civ can make 17 Eagles to win the fight (340 food + 850 gold, or 1190 resources spent). Most civs can make generic Light Cavalry in this situation, and it requires 16 to beat the same 30 archers (1280 food). These are admittedly similar, but there happen to be 3 civs that get +1 Pierce Armor on their Scout line in Castle Age (Indians, Turks and Tatars), to bring them to the same 3 Pierce Armor as the Eagles of the 3 meso civs. For these 3 civs, it requires only 11 Light Cav to deal with the 30 crossbows (880 food). I don’t see an issue with Eagles falling more in the middle between good Light Cav and generic Light Cav civs when facing archers in Castle Age. Obviously they shouldn’t beat Turks/Indians/Tatars in this scenario, but 5 HP would not come close to changing that.
Problem for Eagles are their counters are weak which is infantries (finally they got buffed. I think Eagle won’t dominate game easily now). I proposed further buff LS/THS/Champion like 2/3 armor 7/9/10 attack with nerfing OP attack bonuses like +4 Garland War to +3 and Burmese +3 attack to +2. They would be weaker than before in melee fights but they would be great meat shield and arrow soaker like Serjeant.
Serjeant is well designed unit but its high food cost is big problem in Castle Age. food cost should decrease to 50 and arbalest should get thumb ring in order to strengthen arbalest Serjeant play. In return, 50% OP anti bonus damage resistance should decrease to 33%.
Devs introduced so-called a infantry civ (Sicilians( but they gave OP bonuses for cavalries and archers instead of giving these bonuses to infantries. Bonus damage resistance is almost useless for infantries because there is very little units has bonus damage against infantries. Sicilian now use infantry only in Late Imperial because Devs give bonuses for cavalries and archers. Devs simply don’t know what they are doing.