as you can see, the only time the civ gets above 50% winrate is for super low elos due to feitoria cheese in 1v1.
i truly believe that a civ that has no powerhouse unit, so with bad pop efficiency is doomed to underperform in any late game team game, which will tank the winrate.
not a single FU generic cav unit (no hussar, no paladin)
no heavy cav archer
bad siege (no siege ram/onager/heavy scorpion) that solely relies on bbc, which have ballistic but generally still outclassed by bohemians, or turks
slow infatry without squirrles
generic FU archers
FU handcannons with bonus ballistic, not nearly as good in teamgames as in 1v1 thought.
I would like to suggest (again) a fix to help portugal and adress 2 issues.
portugal has too many water bonuses (+hp ships, caste age UT for ship armor, lower gold cost but lacking shipwreights, bad ship UU)
I suggest, replace the ship armor UT carrack with a history based new infantry UT. offset this change by increasing the (elite) caravels armor accordingly since that UU sucks in 90% of all situations as shown by spirit of the law (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ytMbMXHaKg), while at it rename the elite caravel to carrack which is the historically correct upgrade name Carrack - Wikipedia
replace the castle age UT with Carrack Black Swords
portugal just got a big nerf to their only strong stragety (fast castle organ gun). they were fine, atleast they had 1 strong strategy (which was taken).
but i agree, power creep is definitely a thing, and has been for years in DE
The Portuguese are really good in water maps, and team maps like Arena, in both team games or 1v1. But yes, are somewhat lacking in power units and quite bad in open maps. The Organ Gun is decent, but is a situational unit.
Both their barracks and stable units are serviceable and are only missing one tech. They are a naval and gunpowder civilization that excels in these branches.
Portuguese BBC being outclassed by houfnice is perfectly normal because Bohemians have terrible stables and docks, unlike the Portuguese.
I think Ports are fine, definitely 49% is not strong but nothing in urgent need for buff no?
In particular, Ports are more like Chinese in some sense (good eco thanks to berry bonus & discounts, good tech trees, nothing too outstanding) and that makes them a good midgame powerhouse (which is difficult for most players imo)
Most of your arguments can be used on Chinese as well (no late game options, suck at team games), and they share a similar win rate graph (much higher at higher elos nonetheless): Uploading: image.png…
Is Chinese in urgent need of buff either? I don’t think so
These 4 civs are ranked very high by pros and seen very often in tournaments. Tatars are a bit worse but very good on Arabia. Chineses have the best eco in the early to mid game. Byzantines are good both on land and seas.
These cigs indeed lack very strong units like paladins, so if the game goes late and they don’t use their bonus they may loose, but I don’t think they are weak.
shifting some of porutuges overbearing strength on water maps to infatry would help give the civ a bit more character, also it would match their history as they had a crusader knights tradition and the afrometnioend carack black sword would make for a great new millitia UT.
Portuguese suffer from the “good at everything, excel at nothing” issue.
They are better than the majority of Civs on most maps, but there are still plenty of Civs better on each specific map. Dunno how to fix this without making them too powerful.
The Castle Age UT would be a good angle, as it currently does almost as little as the Mongol’s one (ships mostly deal bonus damage, making melee/pierce armor almost meaningless).
If we want to keep it a naval UT change it to “Ships get +1 or +2 ship armor.”
Another idea is a Castle Age UT to improve monks. A wild idea “Monks can heal siege units”. The research time would need to be very long though to not make Organ Gun + Monks too oppressive in a forward Castle situation.
Another idea is to replace it with an eco bonus of some sort.
i believe the current tech does already give +1 ship armor additionaly to +1 melee and pierce armor. the effect is still small. they already have more hp on ships too as a civ bonus anyway.
offtopic but:
portoguese history is poorly displayed in the game. it would be great if it could mention for example the knights templar/order of christ.
would be even better than the organ gun UU, which isnt particually special for portugal, they could receive the crusader knights
The current patch has been live for less than 3 weeks, so the data is small and not fully accurate. Some matchups might not even have happened yet.
There has been a massive number of changes. Its possible the usual build of Portugese is less optimal due to chickens and maa and this effect can be temporary. Eventually players might adapt or be more prepared to face maa.
Looking at the overall stats might not be a good way to judge a civ since every map isn’t played an equal number of times. At higher elos, 50% of TGs are on Arabia, at all elos 60+% 1v1s are on Arabia. So that’s going to heavily influence winrates. While in this case Portugese do seem to perform worse in most of the common maps in the current patch, in general civs not so good in Arabia might have weaker winrates even if they are good in other settings.
While 1v1 Arabia has reasonably good balance and a decent play rate distribution over civs, TG Arabia is heavily biased towards 6-7 civs. You might see an abnormal high play/pick rate for Ethiopians, Mayans, Britons, much higher when compared to highest play rates in Arabia 1v1s or closed map TGs. So TG stats comes to how the 2x range archer production competes against these civs.
That’s because all their units are cheap, techs are faster and they get feitoria. Again I think this is a very early judgement based on the limited 3 week stats. Their tech tree has been the same and if you check AoE Pulse to get stats from previous patches, you can see that they were 52+% winrate on Arabia last 3 patches combined (18 months I think). So its not like the lack of Paladin and heavy cavalry archer are hurting them.
You have to accept that every civ can’t have great infantry. There are around a dozen infantry civs which don’t get gunpowder and until 2 weeks ago some of those civs were nearly unplayable. And while gunpowder with Arquebus might not be that great in 1v1 Arabia, there are settings where its a powerful upgrade. This is the Portugese design, its good, and unlike some other civs which are still awful on land due to navy related bonuses, Portugese are well-rounded. There’s no need to overload a civ with bonuses for all settings.
Portuguese is still at the very least (worst) a top 10 civ. It’s somewhere between A+ or S-.
Good early eco/wood bonus, cheaper gold units, wide tech tree. It is A tier on practically every map in the game (Arabia, Arena, Black Forest, Migration, etc).
