The latest patches nerfed them too hard and hera went from making a vid to say they are the best OP civ in feburary to putting them in C tier in his latest 1v1 list in June
I think Slatza privleges is not a good tech thematically and its overrated in game. Winged hussars were heavy cavalry historically but all Poles have is this weak medium cavalry option for both the hussar and cavalier.
Because they miss the last armour the cavaliers are such glass cannons that the spam dosent matter. Hardly swings a fight in post imp. And in early castle age where knights are huge, slatza privlages is too expensive anyway making their cavalry generic
Stone mining bonus dosent seem as stong as well with the gold trickle taking ages. Recently i had to go on gold even though i was trying to skip the gold mine to go up to castle age but the gold stone trickle was so Sloooow
I think the best thing is like Sicilians, they should just rework the bonus and get rid of Slatza privileges and give them something else, either give them last armour, or paladin without last armour if last armour would be too OP on winged hussars
Btw, winged hussars die hard to halb and range so its not that OP anyway.
Just what do Poles do vs halb, arb with last cav armour missing, last archer armour missing?
What do they do vs HCA?
TLDR
Too severe nerf and a clunky not thematically correct castle age tech. Change tech and give last armour to cav or paladin or both
Also, 37% win rate on KOTD 5
Not this again. No. If even the people who wanted Poles are unhappy with how they were done, just remove them completely and add something actuallly unique and interesting. They’re a copy of Lithuanians and Magyars anyway with some Slavs elements in it with some of the most gimmicky mechanics the game has seen so far.
Lol how does that follow?
Dont like cockroaches in the house? Blow it up with an rpg?
No, we dont need to get rid of Poles. Its a good civ just needs a slight rework just like they did for sicilians
7 Likes
First remove bombard cannon, bombard tower and redemption from Poles then we can talk about buff.
4 Likes
Poles have a ridiculously open tech tree I agree. I’d rather be in favour of a nerf than a buff, considering how broken they are on closed maps.
1 Like
Open tech tree? They hardly have anything fully upgraded
Last armour missed for archers so skirms are shit. That affects hca and arbs. No halbs, no gambeson, no last cav armour so their cav are shit.
To get their cav half decent you have to pay expensive ass castle techs and then they still get reckt by arbs or halbs.
37% win rate. Fallen out of favour with pros. Didnt even see them picked in the final sets of kotd
On closed maps theyre out hustled by the likes of portugese.
You guys dont know what your talking about lol
3 Likes
Poles are fine, they don’t need any sort of buff.
2 Likes
And who says the need to be top arabia civ just because of a 36% WR??? Lol.
If anything Poles should completely lose Arbalest, the civ has a wide tech tree and that unit just fits too well with their Winged Hussars and Obuch.
And lmao shit cavalry… a civ with trample dsmage winged hussars and 30g cavalier is anything but shit.
8 Likes
Was the nerf only about gold generation from stone gathering ?
Please do not deform reality. It is not 36% win rate on Arabia, it is 37.5% win rate on Arabia in Kotd5, where the best players play and only pick the best arabia civs:
- 1 win against Mayans, Hindus, Franks, Khmer, Chinese, Malays
- 2 losses to Ports
- 1 loss to Franks, Khmer, Malays, Jpnese, Incas, Aztecs, tatars, byzantines
It is not like they were playing against Bohemians or Sicilians.
On 1v1 Arabia they are currently at 47.6% win rate.
I agree that they do not need to be a top civ in Arabia. It sound like OP feels betrayed because he decided to main Poles hoping they were OP on all maps and it turned out they are not OP on Arabia…
It is funny how we either say Poles hussars are OP or bad, but never meet a middle ground.
I agree with Furtherlime that they are squishy against Arbalesters, but:
- Arbalesters are also squishy against them
- You just need a few Onagers or a good flank attack to take care of arbalesters
- Only 50% of the civs gave Arbalesters. The other civs do not have any good option against them.
And against halberdiers, they do not die that hard, and Poles have skirms, arbalesters, obuchs (and champions), so it is not like Poles have to response to Halberdiers either. And it is also not like FU cavaliers / Hussars from other civs do not die to halberdiers as well.
So I feel that Poles hussars are far from being weak.
5 Likes
I think the farm / folwark bonus leaves their economy too open to raiding. Maybe just give them the same bonus for farms around the TC too, not just the folwark.
1 Like
I can’t say for sure if Poles are strong or weak. But what I can certainly tell is the civ feels really weird in many aspect. I can’t tell for sure why, but the whole civ feels really gimmicky.
And I can’t stress enough how much I despise the folwark. Who would have thought that “perfectly placed farms” would have actually made the base layout look horrible.
I’ve enjoyed all of the new civs except for this one.
2 Likes
no i disagree with this. The whole point of folwarks is risk vs reward. If it were around a tc too, then it’d just be a slightly different slav bonus. It also synergies with their vill regen bonus
I do agree the folwork is kinda annoying, cool in practice with risk vs reward but its really annoying to manage if u get raided. You need to constantly think about folwark placement and cut all the straggler trees.
The problem is if get to mid-castle age with folwark farms and the ut, then the knight spam is insane. Ofc late game its not that great, and early game they have lots of weaknesses. making it harder to pull of the civ. Personally, i enjoy playing poles but do think they could use a few touch-ups.
As for versatility, they are pretty versatile in able to go obuch, FU arb except for the last armour (meaning good until like early-mid imp), cheap knights, winged hussar, monks, etc. The reason they dont seem versatile is late game, your cheap knights are basically trash units, your arb isnt FU, and you are missing halb as well.
I get the sentiment but Slatza Privileges and stone mining bonus are quite powerful. The reason why Slatza doesn’t seem too strong anymore is the folwark nerf. It delays them quite a bit and by the time Slatza is done, other civs seem to have enough defenses to handle it. But if you return the folwark bonus, the knight spam will resume. The problem was that castle age Obuchs were too strong, with that they have fully upgradable xbows, redemption monks and Slatza privilege knight discount was huge. Instead of eco - one or more of those things should be nerfed and the folwark bonus should be restored or reworked to be constant per age like +15, +20, +30 instead of 8% or 10%. That will make them be faster, let them have the eco but limit the strength of their options.
I think the opposite. Keep eco as is and strengthen the units
I think slatza got to go. Poles historically were a heavy cav civ. Then give them halb and handcannon or paladin
I would also personally prefer if Szlachta was gone for good and poles instead had the Winged Hussar as secondary UU. Maybe hidden behind a UT.
I don’t think these kind of broken techs belong into AOE2. Yes it’s somewhat balanced by the high cost, but the almost trash cav spam is just super annoying and only satisfies sadistic minds that want to stupily overspam helpless opponents.
And that’s really sadge cause devs had the opportunity to add an iconic UU for the poles that would be really interesting to play with.
Instead we get Cav UUs like leitis, konnik, coustillier with weird anti-counter gimmicks that don’t even have a real historic background. Don’t say they would need to be removed, but why we get those and not the winged hussars as UU?
I feel like Schlatza wouldnt be nearly as opressive if Poles didnt also have practically the best late game food eco
also kotd5 is not a large enough sample size.
1 Like
Since we are at it, I’ve always feel it as weird that the Winged Hussar is an alternative upgrade to the the light cav instead of a direct upgrade, given that it’s a plain better unit: +5 HP, +2atk, and +1 melee armor. It even cost more, so there’s not any tradeoff to make it alternative.
It would have been more appropiate and “elegant” to make it an upgrade over the Hussar, costing 100f 200g (te difference between Hussar and W. Hussar) and making it research very fast, so there’s not a loss on research time.
It also arbitrarily breaks the idea of units representing abstractions of wafare concepts. The hussar has always been understood as generic light cavalry. Replacing the upgrade with a UU says to the player: “Poles and Lithuanians didn’t have hussars, they had winged hussars instead”. And its completely contradictory with this abstraction of unit lines.
2 Likes