I was very sceptical regarding OotD during the Early Access for content creators already. Then I have played them myself and feel like they are not only boring and lack in options, but the whole 2 pop double res thing does not work out for them. There is no good flow to it and aside from early skirmishes they never really feel powerful. Elite Army? Where?
The eco is bad. There is no real mechanic to it, no passive res, no good cost reductions. It just is not a good eco.
And then the units: The melee inf is way too slow to justify the double price. How can a unit that costs twice as much in pop and res than other units of their line have one pop movement speed? That’s just not working out. Also the stats are not good enough to really make up for the higher costs. The special techs also are very underwhelming and the whole civ’s concept is very much flawed. Also the gilded knights are just a meme unit, they are not good enough for what they cost. Golden cuirass? Sucks. War horse charge? Sucks. The Crossbow bolt tech? Sucks. The lategame? The freaking worst.
I just watched Beasty play Numudan. The game lasts an hour. Beasty got the middle with ~7 8k gold mines and took them all. Numudans Zhu Xi was producing non stop gold units, because he fast castled and got 5 relics + taxes, which are crazy overtuned. At no point Beasty’s OotD looked good. The units were just underwhelming, the masses of the opponent ruined them over and over again. Also watch Beasty’s recap that goes on for a while after the match. He is more talking about Zhu Xi’s insane tax money, but he also stated that he would have won this match with any other rather weak lategame civ. But with OotD he couldn’t do anything. The whole 2 pop thing is not working, the eco is not working, the civ is not working. It might be a low league prime civ, but only for the wrongest reasons. OotD is the weakest civ of the new civs and probably also the weakest civ in the whole game. They need a lot of help and changes/buffs in various areas.
Feel free to join the OotD buff thread: Ideas how to improve the Order of the Dragon
And here is the match I talked about that shows perfectly, what is so very wrong with OotD. The game starts at 2:26 hours and the recap comes directly after that: