I also suggested that I think that the mongol hunt bonus needs to be 30% rather than 40%
I’m not convinced that the new Goth bonus is OP at all. I don’t think that its OPness will truly be tested until we see it played out in a competitive tournament setting. And I’m sure that pros will be able to figure out ways to deal with it. Sure, tops might be top tier on 1v1 Arabia now so it’s certainly a super strong bonus in open land map 1v1s …but goths are an aggressive civ that was king of always supposed to shine in open land map 1v1s. They’re Barbarians like Huns and that’s the sort of setting they’re supposed to shine at. If it makes them a top tier civ on the maps that they’re supposed to be good on then I don’t mind that at all. There are plenty of other top tier civs on 1v1 Arabia and I don’t think they’re gonna be absolutely OP.
But, like I said, we’ll only really know how good it is when it’s tested in a competive tournament setting. I’m sure it will get plenty of wins but I don’t think it will be any more civ-winny than the other top tier 1v1 Arabia civs are on 1v1 Arabia. I doubt they’ll suddenly destroy Mayans, Slavs, Franks, Aztecs, Britons and Incas, etc, on 1v1 Arabia.
Mongols will not Overpowered when they get Steppe Lancer and 30%HP Bonus.
because they cavalry lack last armor upgrade. which means in late IMP will be more painful to face archers.
This was seen coming a mile away by pros and some of the higher rated players would’ve seen this instantly coming. Yet we keep getting recommendations made on these forums, on reddit without questions passed into the game trough patches. If a pro player sais “this is going to be broken” it should not be done without testing or having pros test it or have a testing group of high rated players to test this before introducing it into a patch.
Yes it’s a lot of work, but it prevents from you from having to hotfix stuff like this. Goths currently are in need of a nerf with hotfix patch. Which again ruins recorded games.
Well, I’ll be convinced when I think it’s true, lol.
If it is OP I don’t think we should remove it. Just stagger it so it’s less than -35% for dark age. There must be a sweet spot between “The goths are OP on 1v1 open maps now” and “the goths suck again now” and that sweet spot is “Hey, the goths are really strong on open maps, as they should be as an aggressive barbarian civ, but so are plenty of other top 1v1 Arabia civs.”
Like I said, I’ll agree it’s broken and OP when we don’t just get goths picked by pros on maps like Arabia in a serious tournament setting … but we get them getting civ wins over Mayans, Aztecs, Slavs, Chinese, Franks, Britons, Incas, etc, in a serious tournament setting.
I agree until on open maps we see them versus those top tier arabia civilations its not right to call goths overpowered but so far it looks like they are indeed overpowered from that video alone and couple of more like that.(sadly both t90 and viper played versus mongols we cant make judgement call on whether they are OP or not %100)
They’re not Cumans level broken or Goth level. But the matter of fact is still that Mongols early feudal and Mongols post-imp are the civs two strongest points, where as their castle age was just standard. Steppe lancers were nerfed to the point where they’re just barely worse than knight line, now Mongol steppe lancers have 30% extra HP, what do you think happens? They’re superior to knights, really strong choice and covers for the weak point that Mongol castle age was.
Well, you’re going to make scouts with mongols, so you would reach castle age with stables, and probably, before your opponent… That’s the problem with steppe lancers: gonna prolongue your feudal age momentum up to thr moment you’re get a castle and mangudai.
Read what dmrangerpk replied to me. Especially this part:
SL - In order to sustain SL off 2 stables this would cost 140f/24s or 5.83 f/s, at 0.32f/s this requires ~19 farmers to sustain (wiki gather rate used as source). Goldwise its 80/24 or 3.33g/s at 0.42g/s ~8 miners (gather rate includes the first mining tech)
Knight - 2 stables aswell, 120/30 or 4f/s + 150/30 or 5g/s This comes down to ~13 farmers and ~12 miners.
On top of the fact that SL cost 27 vs 25 vills to sustain there is also the upfront cost. Villcost aside gold has no upfront cost, but the additional farms cost an additional 360 wood.
Long-term food is definitely much better, but if your goal is to get an early lead and force fights then knights are easier to sustain and a much more well-rounded unit.
Goth aren’t broken. All you need to do is to wall properly aka make a palisade wall betweeen your lumbercamp and tc and then focus on getting out archers to clear it. It’s probly also not wrong to scout your opponent instead of luring deer to see where the drush is going and maybe distract it a bit, to buy a little bit of time. What you see in viper’s video could happen, because Tim didnt wall between his tc and lumbercamp. To be fair his map was complete trash, fwd main gold, all open. Viper probably also over invested into militia, it was more of a troll than try hard play, well Viper is famous for trolling in random games a bit because it’s fun and entertaining for the viewers (obviously i like that as well).
The goth win in t90’s video is also easily explainable: mongol went for a really fast up and didnt wall either a single tile until the drush was in. He also didnt scout the drush and went for greedy full deer lure. The combo of poor scouting + greedy fast upping cost him the game.
When watching these videos keep in mind, that both, Viper and t90 are absolutely biased. They said before they don’t like this change and especially t90 is trying to use his audience to bring this view to a broader amount of ppl. If you now think everyone of the pro scene thinks this is OP, this buff makes goth broken, thats not the case, for example Mbl thinks completly opposite and still sees goth as bottom teir civ.
Fast Feudal into stone walls could also help with this. 900 HP in Feudal, takes three damage from MaA, smaller surface size for less enemies attacking at a time. Versus 750 HP houses that take 8 damage from MaA and are larger for more enemies attacking at a time. Tim tried stone walls, but not enough as he kept mixing in house walls that mass Militia quickly tore down. Early palisades around your wood, berries, gold, with extra space for later stone walls behind, with yet more extra space in the wood line for a walled-in archery range to mass archers is the play against Goths staying in the Dark Age. If this doesn’t work, then I’ll say the change is OP. But I haven’t seen this yet because early walling and Feudal stone walls are not a part of the meta outside a few civs.
And no, other arguments about idle time for building extra walls and repairing them will always obliterate your economy will not convince me otherwise, when defensive towers are a thing.
Thanks for sharing, hadn’t seen that game before. Here are my thoughts on the game in question:
-Red was sloppy with his walling in Dark. The house quickwall was good, but he dallied in walling off the other side of the woodline (he should have had more than 1 vill there, and partially built several palisades until the area was closed off). 10 more seconds or a little more proactive walling on red’s part would have saved him a lot of damage from the early pressure. Many pro ranked and tourney games have been lost due to insufficient walling (or undetected holes in walls), and this is one of them.
-Red should have tech switched into knights faster. It’s hard to tell exactly what was going on since it’s a POV, but it looks like red continued making several xbows even after he saw Jupe’s Castle and Huskarls, which is obviously a bad move. In fact, he probably should have known that Jupe would go for Huskarls in Castle anyway, since red had shown his hand in archers quite a while ago, and Huskarls were the obvious counter.
-In Castle, when Jupe attacked red’s base after killing his xbows, red should have used stone walls/gates. You see him trying to use palisade gates to stop castle age units, and it obviously doesn’t work.
The bottom line is that red was unprepared for this strategy. Any strategy will be very strong if your opponent is not properly prepared for it. If I’m being Frank, I think part of it as well is that high level players are not used to having to take a Goth opponent very seriously.
As I said earlier:
There are going to be a lot of early casualties to this strat, but once players learn how to wall/push out with archers in Feudal, wall and FC into knights or CAs, or even counter with infantry for civs like Burmese and Japanese, this will still be a strong strat, but will lose a lot of its bite in terms of the surprise factor.
By contrast, the Lithuanians can do a faster version of this rush, which gives your opponent several minutes less to wall and prepare, but nobody is getting their medieval undergarments in a twist and screaming for Lithuanians to be nerfed. Lithuanians furthermore have the element of unpredictability, since they could drush you, or they could just go for a faster Feudal with the extra scout, but you’ll never know until you scout. If you’re against Goths, you know they’re going to drush, otherwise they’re letting their bonus go to waste. Obviously the Goth bonus gets stronger than the Lithuanians if you go full Hoang style, but that’s just more res wasted for him if you wall and defend properly.
There are other similar strats, like the Noboru/Inca vill rush, that have gotten results in major tournaments. In NAC3, The noboru rush definitely got results, and people couldn’t figure out how to counter it except to mirror. Yet nobody is arguing for Incas (easily a top 10 on land) to be nerfed.
Honestly, I think some people are just afraid of Goths finally being decent after years of being lackluster but having a pretty good Imp. They’ve already chosen their favorite civs, and they don’t want some upstart changing the meta and forcing them to adapt and play differently.
With all due respect to the parties involved, this is a garbage-tier bonus. It doesn’t really help on boars since people lure them anyway, and only saves a little walk time on deer. While it’s obviously inspired by the Khmer farm bonus, the farm bonus is much stronger.
It goes both ways, hence the importance of scouting. If you wall and the Goth doesn’t rush, yes, you’ve wasted a little time and res defending your base, but the Goth has wasted his whole dark age bonus, and in Feudal most civs will have an eco bonus that give them a leg up. If you do wall, you’ve potentially saved yourself (and to some degree, the Goth bonus will be somewhat wasted as well as his drush will be less effective).
Couldn’t agree more.
Goths have always been a divisive civ, and even at their weakest point in HD, there was always some clique of noobs that didn’t know how to counter them and complained about how OP they were. However, the results at the pro level and in thousands of ranked games say otherwise.
This is not even in that ballpark. You’re seeing a lot of success with the Goth strat being used against unprepared players. Cumans had an insane early eco/defensive bonus, and the Steppe Lancer, a unit so badly designed that it even countered units that it wasn’t “supposed to” at a very low price for a cav unit. By contrast, Goths are now very strong in one situation for one strategy (long drush), but it’s by no means unstoppable, and can be reasonably countered by good walling/scouting, and archers.
Straight up. I think in my thread on Goths, I suggested staggering the bonus to 25/30/35/40 from Dark to Imp, and that might be a good solution for people who are going nuts about the 35 in Dark.
Yeah, this is a good point. Viper is in a league of his own. He’s played games that made the pre-buff Khmer look OP, with scorp or ballista ele “mastapizzas,” which nobody else has seen consistent success with in 1v1s. If you got your ideas on what is balanced solely from what was viable/strong with Viper commanding the civ, you’d have a very weird balance that wouldn’t scale down well to lower levels. The T90 video is a better example, in that’s not the best player in the world, but it’s still against an unprepared opponent who made mistakes. So again, most of us on the “Goths aren’t OP” side of the argument want more data points than a couple games against unprepared players.
That’s exactly right. If there’s anything we learned from this, it’s just that good scouting, while always important, is absolutely essential against early aggression, which should be expected from Goths.
Also a good point. While I think pros’ opinions are more relevant, than say, some random noob on this site calling for Chinese to be buffed, let’s be careful not to ascribe infallibility to pros, or assume that they’re all on the same page. They’re not. As for T90, love him to death, but he’s definitely given to hyperbole as that’s a key part of his job - hyping things up, and often exaggerating the strengths of a unit, civ, or strat. I agree with his take on a lot of things, and generally respect his opinions, but he isn’t some kind of balance god of AoE2.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/558820296 (relevant game starting at 1:22:00) What is ironical is that to illustrate the fact Goths can get outspammed by other civs , the day before the patch, I used a game where a Goth player dies to mass Teuton cav/infantry. And less than a week after the patch, Hera loses to mass Teuton infantry as goths…
Goths are straight out ■■■■■■■ broken, this should’ve been hotfixed already, massive ■■■■ up in my opinion to let them get patched like this to begin with.
I am a subscriber of TheViper and love how he plays, but today he called the new goths update “stupid”, and I dont think it is stupid.
It’s a way of playing that differs from the typical “start to attack on feudal” gameplay, although they could just find some helpful possibilities for other civs. But the goths in real life started conquering the world in the very Dark Ages just after the roman empire was no more, and in fact they reigned here just after the romans, so a Dark Age buff is sooooo realistic. Maybe other civs having access to better walls could help against goths, but I don’t find this choice stupid, but original.
It’s the same Viper who applauded the farm changes for Khmer which is a superb buff, and fun…
