Polish definitely need a mix of buffs and nerfs. As have a lot of civs at release.
They are really slow early and they scale too hard off of the high gather rates later. They need to get going faster and not scale quite so hard.
Things like a 7 vill start, and a 5 vill shipment with some reworking of the existing “vills per building” type cards would certainly help. It’s also possible, though I’m not fully convinced, that their TCs shouldn’t be included in the discount for lower hp trade off.
The Farming Specialization for Folworks shouldn’t increase the base gather rate. It should count as an upgrade like Sustainable Agriculture does and be calculated similarly. That won’t be a nerf early game but will hurt later.
Retainers are an issue both early game and late game. Early game the wood cost is pretty high given how slow your economy is. Later with National Cavalry they lose their main weakness and given their low pop cost become pretty op imo.
The pig economy is great, but it’s not the cake, just the cherry on top. You can’t just invest in early or even early mid game in 30pigs and the cards needed to make the folwark consume them automatically. Pigs take almost 5 minutes to fatten, and 5 minutes for an investment to pay off is huge in the early game, you will most surely lose to a decent opponent.
But you have an age 1 card that gives you a folwark builder and improves folwark gather rate for food in 30%. That, combined with the church tech that halves most economic upgrades, you end up with safe and solid food gathering from folwarks from an early age. Once you start having a food surplus, you can then make the 30 pigs.
Early game there’s huntables. No card required, no wood investment required for the folwark, no wood investment required to make the folwark a food folwark.
Personally I’m not really seeing the deviation from the pattern, of very high investment and slow start. I’d be happy to try to math numbers both ways on this, but I think the core issue is neither options make Poland likely to survive early pressure or springboard into particularly fast ageups.
The core of my argument is this is fine providing the civ as a package isn’t overperforming on the ladder. And as I believe it’s going to underperform, I wouldn’t want to see the niche ways it deviates positively from other civs, be chipped away at, as I don’t believe it’s necessary.