Portuguese Buff not enough by far (land)

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
101

I still don’t want to give up the suggestion of halved frame delay for archers and hc as a bonus.

Curenntly Portuguese are just super genereric and don’t play out very special or interesting.

I think this would make them intersting, fun, stronger in feudal and Castle and not much better in imperial age. At the same type it seems balanced when compared with Ethiopian archers.

While I agree turning ports into another archer civ is maybe unwanted, it doesn’t change much since ports anyway go discounted archer most of the times.

And I do think that pure gunpowder civs are doomed to be bad and can’t exist without their UU, that’s why Italians are a failed gunpowder civ too and play archers.

I am checking aoe stats everyday… Can’t wait for Portuguese winrate revelation! (buff or no more buff, it all depends!)

102

Italians are an archer civ, not a gunpowder civ.

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103

And they do have cost-efficient HCs and BBCs as it is.
20% cheaper is a lot, and goes a long way to make a unit viable.

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104

Yes I’m not denying that, I just pointed out that they are labeled as an archer civ, and they do have an archer UU and an archer related UT, and 2 out of 3 FU archer lines.
Then again HC being trained at the ranges are counted as archers in the bigger picture.

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105

I think after playing with the most recent patch that the genericness of the Ports was actually enjoyable. Really surprised me. But being able to choose between Knights & Crossbows to counter my opponents weak point was somewhat fun. That might be a good reason to choose a buff which doesn’t differentiate between knights & archers.
They do really need a power unit in the late game though. Lacking Paladin, Siege Onager, Siege Ram, Squires… I feel like a powerful UU could fill that hole, but Organ Guns just don’t cut it. It just doesn’t feel fun when my whole army is out-matched in Imp.

I would be in favour of giving Ports Squires, and to preserve variety take Squires away from some other civs with good halbediers or FU champs. I know it would hurt that other civ & its fans, but sacrifices must be made. (For the same reason take away Supplies from Teutons.)

Maybe the UT could increase the accuracy or range or gunpowder (or only HC) and then HC could become the power unit Ports need. (I know Turks & Indians already get extra range gunpowder. Turks get +2 on a small number of units, and the Indian bonus could be stolen or overshadowed. Ports need it more.)

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106

It seems that arquebus is broken because it consider the projectile speed similar to arrow’s one, according to one recent post.

So fixing arquebus should be enough for meeting your requirements.

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107

It seems aoe stats has Updated.

I said previously that I would eat a hat if the 5% buff would solve anything. Luckily I am saved, because so far the winrate seems completely unchanged (I only checked all elo, even went don’t in teamgames all elow)

108

That doesn’t mean much for a number of reasons:

  • those stats are continually misinterpreted (nothing really to say here that hasn’t already been said).
  • the portos still have one the lowest pick rate, so that win percentage cannot be representative of the civ or the population, and for sure we can’t say that those results are different than the ones from the previous month.
  • it is simply possible that in one month people were able or interested on testing/understanding how the new ports meta.
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109

Isn’t pick rate and winrate mostly independent? Don’t see the connection. Could you elaborate?

If the buff was significant then it should have had a stronger affect then sample variance already with 900 games analysed.

110

No, those 2 cannot be considered indipendent variables, one affects the other.

The higher the pick rates is, the most games are analized basically, a civ that won 6 games out of 10 cannot be considered on the same level of a civ that won 600 games out of 1000, those 6 games could have been biased by a number of factors, like luck (a good map or matcup for example).

Then a civ that is played a lot, most likely has its meta completely undercovered and mastered it by many players, that means that it’s more likely that he win vs a civ that instead isn’t used often, and people when use it don’t really know how to properly play it.

Also, usually the higher is a civ win rate, the most popular the civ is usually, while weak civs are rarely picked, or even statistically worse picked only in favorable map/matchups/context, that just contribute to inflate and bias the results.

The 2 variables have to be considered as dependent, and analyzed properly as 2 dependent variables.

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111

You have like 2 weeks worth of data, vs literally months before that

At the highest level they have already been played twice as much as they were be before the patch. Food for thought

112

Honestly what do you expect with the slight buff. Before it was far the worst civ and now they are still the same.

But I recently played with Portuguese, same as Koreans and they are not that bad. Most player just play it wrong.

But yeah I still agree they need a second buff.

113

I’m skeptical too that this buff is enough, but I would prefer that people would bring personal experience and fellings about the new portos instead of statistics that aren’t correctly read.

The +5% buff (20% in total) actually let you save tons of gold in castle age, and it allows you to prolog the fight in late imp for a long time.

It also allow them to go for a 3 militia rush without the need of collecting some gold in dark, than can be followed by scouts, all without collecting gold, at least until you need to go to castle age or you need some upgrades.

114

You are comparing 6 wins out of 10, but our situation is more like for Portuguese 400 out of 1000 vs maybe 4000 out of 10000 for more popular civs. But we already have enough data for Portugal so that variance is reasonable sma with this much of samples.

So pick rate doesn’t work with your argument here.

Civs that get picked more often are maybe resulting in sligly higher winrste since they are actively chosen and people knew what they are doing,while Portugal is rarely chosen and then has more percentage of random cases . I think this effects is neglicable thought on winrates.

115

Well at least they are no longer the last on winrate. :grin:
Still close to last though… both 1v1 and Team Games.

I keep my suggestion to give them “Free Ballistics” and test out how it goes. It’s a very good early Castle Age buff (It can maybe be OP).
or
Extend the gold discount to Units AND Technologies. But “gold discount” is a bonus that affect mostly the Imperial Age, and not all games go to Imperial Age…

116

That was just an example.

On the amount of data I disagree, but the problem is the difference between the samples.
Both between the samples of games played with each civ (mongols sample is for sure bigger than the portos sample, so the 2 win rates can’t be directly compared).
Both because the sample of pre-patch is way bigger than the sample post patch.

But you can’t say that, you first have to correct analyze the datas.

117

No, I will try to make the point again.

If you compare mongol sample of 6000wins out of 10000 (imaginary numbers) to Portuguese with 600 out of 1000 then it makes no difference. The variance is in both cases so small it can be neglected.

6 out of 10 that would be different. But this example of your doesn’t exist on aoe stats.

Sample size is irrelevant once a sufficient amount of data is collected to get a reasonable accurate result.

Being of by 1% or 0.1% of the true winrste is irrelevant. The result is good enough and Portuguese and Mongols samples sized can be directly compared, and also with last patches results.

118

The difference is huge, even in the second case.
Just to put some numbers, mongols have a sample of 10.000, portos have a sample of 2.000, it is enough to question if the 2 win rates can be directly compared.

But that’s is because it is relative, a sufficient amount of data may vary with the size of the population.

119

No, we are using an staticical estimator to find the true theoretical winrate for the civs. And the variance of this estimator is ever decreasing with more data. 2000 data way enough and having 10000 instead doesn’t change anything.

Just look at the estimator #wins/n
The variance is already divided by n square. It goes super fast to zero.
This is simplified but really, 2000 having more data doesn’t mean it can’t be compared.

120

But that doesn’t make it reliable, as you said it’s an estimate, but if compare it to the old pre DE statistics the sample is too little.

Also, there is still problem of players that maybe didn’t had the time to figure out the new portos meta, less than a month could be a too little span of time.