Disclaimer: I’m talking about history within the game, this is a game balance discussion, not one about history.
Ottomans were, for a long time a civ with a very good military and poor economy. They have incredible age 2 builds available to them, largely based off of crates sent from the home city to power the production of powerful units that punched above what their cost implies. Add to that an amazing FF with great cards and you have a powerhouse of a civ. It has also long had great FI and Revolution builds. Basically, they can do any momentum based play well.
Their weaknesses largely revolved around a few things:
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Difficulty killing Dragoons. Abus have long been an incredible unit, but historically they were balanced out somewhat because while they were unusually good against skirms, they traded that uniqueness for being unusually bad against Dragoons. Ottoman’s best anti goon options were basically CA/Abus or Jan/Abus. Both of those were weaker than normal against Dragoons, allowing a sufficient goon mass to be part of the win condition for multiple civs.
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A slow economy. For years Ottomans had a slow economy. This forced Ottomans to be very careful not to lose their army. Getting your whole army wiped out was hard to do, but if it happened you often had just invested such a massive amount into it that remassing wasn’t possible. It would take way too long unless this was late enough that you had a lot of vills.
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Late game. Ottomans lack of Fencing School made things difficult because at the stables and Artillery foundry they only had access to 2+ pop units with the training speed reductions. Going heavy cav + cav archers + Abus was a pop inefficient rock, paper, scissors comp. Jans trained slowly so your 1 pop unit was slow to mass. They also weren’t great against heavy cav.
Azaps removed the weakness vs light cavalry. The unit might actually be fine alone at this point, it has received some earlier game nerfs over time. But it wasn’t the only change.
The Ottoman economy has been sped up slightly. Alone this was probably a great change.
The Ottoman’s have received a number of late game buffs. A version of fencing School was added, it’s less effective for natives and Mecs, but those rarely matter. This in addition to units that are upgrades on the Hussar and Grenadier, along with a new unit to round out Ottoman’s roster was too much.
I’m sure someone will point out that the winrates for Ottoman aren’t significantly out of line, but as it has been pointed out, the ELO system is designed to get you to a 50% WR. There’s a number that has been floating around that says Otto mains may be running with a WR that’s inflated by 150 points. Meaning they are often fighting players with greater skill than they have to keep their win rate in check.
Something that will need to be understood, is that the nerfs required to bring Ottoman’s elo inflation down WILL result in a short term drop in the win rate of the civ. This should stabilize after a few months as players’ elo lowers so they are winning about 50% of the time against people who match their skill. Bring inflation down will require short term pain. There will likely be a gut reaction to say “Ottoman was overnerfed, buff it again”, but the WR should return on its own, and the urge to fix it manually will have to be ignored for a while.
Now, what do I suggest we do about this?
Partially Reintroducing Weakness #1:
Azaps should be 4 speed. Azaps do incredibly high damage to light cav, so Ottoman’s still have the best anti light cavalry unit in the game, but this will slow their army down to better allow asymmetric warfare using heavy and light cavalry to raid and stall for time to delay ottoman pushes. This will not put Ottomans back to where they were previously, but at least their extremely powerful army will be slow again to make retreats harder if a fight is bad
(This is kinda an indirect fix to #2).
#2: I don’t believe an economic scaling nerf is actually what Ottomans need. So I suggest not touching this. Reducing the mobility of Azaps should somewhat help by allowing ill-advised pushes to be more easily punished. Even with the improved eco losing their army still hurts more than normal, just not as much as it did.
Partially Reintroducing Weakness #3:
- Acemi Oglan School (cheaper HI in age 4) should be nerfed. It was fine, but the addition of Matrakci School (infantry train faster) has made it too strong. I’d suggest -15% Janissary cost (Jans get a lesser nerf because they are iconic and should be a core unit), -10% Nizam cost (no change), -20% Azap food cost (wood cost will no longer be reduced), and -10% Humbaraci cost.
- Matrakci School should be changed to either -25% infantry/shock infantry training time and moved to age 1, or it should be combined with Engineering School for -20% Infantry/Shock Infantry and Artillery training time. The latter suggestion is actually a small buff in some cases, but for late game and treaty it’s still a nerf overall.
Asymmetrical civ design is a core part of this game. I think a lot of issues players have with the Ottomans come from that core tenant of the game’s design being thrown out of wack.
Demonstrations of Asymmetric Civ Design:
Russia has a great early game and late game but a poor mid game and early weekness to heavy cavalry. Later on they have cheap but weak Skirmishers.
India has a strong early and mid game but falls off later.
Portugal has a terrible early game, but a good mid-late game.
French are okay at everything except water. Then they have a good late game.
I think the changes I suggested above can restore exploitable weaknesses to Ottomans, while keeping many of the cool new additions that have been made largely intact.