Hi people. As you know, the inca Balance raised hell among the popular opinion. While lots of people say that Noburu rush had to go (me included) some others argued that Inca identity is trushing, and that the civ will be lackluster with the upcoming nerf (line of thinking I also agree with).
Some, after thinking for a while, I came to a possible solution, making a little change:
-First, we remove the bonus that makes blacksmith upgrades affects vils. Yeah, I know, it’s a classic, but the true is that it main value was in feudal. Having +2 armor in castle age won’t make that much for your vils against Knights, Xbow or any Castle Age unit.
What we give in exchange?
Free infantry defense techs from the blacksmith.
Why?
well, 2 reasons:
1)It will still help a lot with the trushing identity, only than now, instead of vil rush, it will help with M@a+ towers.
- It will make them better in the middle and late game. Castle age is where aztecs really shine. At the same time, mayans have an amazing eco, leaving, Incas as the worst American Civ. But the Meta for both aztecs and Incas is kinda similar: open archers, then Xbows, then, Eagles. Even Mayans do that sometimes (in castle age).
Having free armor for their eagles will give incas Power spikes in early castle age and imperial age, making their mid game better, and somehow comparable with other meso civs mid game. Also, it’s an undirect buff to Kamayuk.
So, what do you think ?
Free infantry armor upgrades…can’t wait for an Eagle rush with armour upgrades already researched…
Would be, by far more broken than the tower rush.
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Easiest solution is to revert the change. It wasn’t OP, Incas don’t have a super high pick rate, nor win rate. Just a few people were making a lot of noise instead of improving their gameplay.
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it’s not about being OP, it’s about a bad playstile, often made for noob bashing. But with the difference that the incan rush is also not that easy to handle even at higher elos.
Towers are designed for defence and map conrol and their usage as an early pushing tool is an exploit of their implementation design.
AOE2 shouldn’t be played like this, commonly.
Koreans trush was much weaker than the incan one, but was nerfed quite heavy, nobody complained.
Why this much ado about incas?
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I have three things against it:
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removes a buff that is very useful outside of tower rushing as well, incas are a very noob friendly civ with this bonus, since the villagers can basically help a lot in fending off early feudal raids. The rest of the bonuses also make for a nice noob friendly civ, the free Llama helps with getting more consistent starts (e.g. gives you more time to find the rest of your sheep), and the house bonus helps noobs more than anyone, as they’re more prone to getting housed. For all those reasons, incas was one of the main civs I used to show to newcomer friends. With this bonus removed, a noob basically immediately needs to start practicing quickwall.
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removes a valid strategy from the game, meaning games overall have less strategic choices to pick from. In 1v1, it’s a strategy you can turn to, when you get bored of getting killed off in feudal by doing a preventative rush (at least that works for low elo anyway, had noob friends who got frustrated by constantly getting trashed by early scout rushes, this inca vill rush was like salvation to them). The strategy also keeps team games more interesting, because one player getting early trushed means the game can not completely devolve into a boom fest and there’s some early action going on.
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I just simply don’t like it when a civ gets completely redesigned, at least not when it’s been part of the game for such a long time in the way it is now.
4 Likes
I like the Korean redesign. It took some time for the players, but now koreans feel “ok-ish”. They are still one of the weaker civs cause they still have no eco, but that little archer armor bonus helped them a lot. I didn’t knew how strong the war wagon push is in castle age before. Koreans are now the new spanish. Besides it looks like they lost some of their lategame strongth because of that one tc push, but it’s ok.
I don’t think it’snecessarily bad to redesign civs which have the habit of preffering possibly toxic playstiles. Besides that, trushes are still a thing, with all civs. Some maps are just designed in a way it’s one of the best strats and sometimes your opponent just gives you the opportunity to heavily damage him with it. But you need to scout it first - this is the difference. With incas you just do it, regardless of scouting cause you know how hard it is to stop and you get away with it even if the oponent is prepared…
It would be quite strong. But I don’t think it would be broken, as extra armor doesn’t really help against maa and ls. I think it coud be a good solution, it’s maybe inspirede by the korean buff (?).
But I don’t know if incas need anything in the exchange, they feel quite strong at all stages of the game.
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It’s a pretty bad civ overall, but its passable on water. Doesn’t really have any specific strengths or gameplan. Koreans War Wagon is admittedly a nice unit, but not really sure that it’s enough. The wood discount is pretty lackluster. Overall I’d literally never pick this civ for any reason, ever, and am not too thrilled to get this civ when playing random. But that’s just my opinion of the civ, if some are having success with the civ out there, then I’m glad.
Subjective whether this is toxic… it’s not like a bug is being abused or something. When the Lithuanians had the relic bug, and people were abusing that, now that is toxic in my books. But incas are being played within the intended rules… so if some players don’t like the potential pressure that comes with open maps, there are closed maps to play. (not even mentioning the fact, people rarely pick incas, so it’s not like everyone’s facing this strategy all the time, and this nerf will unfortunately end up pushing this civ even lower on pick rates, to the point of obscurity)
OP suggestion sounds pretty good since it would allow Incas to have an advantage at earlier Feudal meaning they can still trush, and have an edge as the other meso civs in the mid game, considering that mayans and aztecs both have one of the strongest eco bonuses in the game and also cheap xbox or faster military production.
Reading AOEZone, some users came up with some other ideas to make up the nerf of the Inca vills with for example cheaper barracks technologies, who would be a decent eco/military bonus and would shine in the mid game where the 3 meso civs always struggle to stay in the game.
As for their team bonus is well know for being the weakest one in the game and its pretty much useless for every civ. And since the nerf will really hit Inca win rate in the coming weeks, making Inca farms smaller (2x2) rather than (3x3), which is historically accurate with Inca history
and would be a great eco bonus for them without being totally broken. Of course this would have to be a civ bonus, rather than a team bonus, so for example, the free llama or the 10 pop houses could be turn into their team bonus which would be much more useful for their team.
Disagree. The Bonus is way better than it appeals at first. The thing it that it doesn’t only makes farming a bit better overall but faster to get the food in. In my approximation how good that is in terms of booming it was basically equivalent to the chinese bonus.
The waiting time until a farm pays of it’s investment is one of the biggest downsides of them and the incan bonus helps exactly in this regard.
Of course booming benefits the incan bonus in comparison so it isn’t that strong in a real game with agression, but it’s not neglectible. It’s for sure not the strongest team bonus, but definetly also not the weakest one out there.
Most teambonusses aren’t that strong, there are only a few really nice ones.
Actually Spirit of the Law made the math for the bonus at calculated that building farms 50% faster means in best case scenario with a pitiful 1.3% extra farming rate in Dark Age (which is useless since with Incas you will never make farms at Dark Age for the extra llama) to a 0,5% in Imperial.
sotl farm inca bonus numbers
Dude you are not even close lol, chinese farm bonus is one of the strongest team bonus in the entire game. 45 extra food for EACH farm is huge
“Toxic” usually is used as a term to describe behaviour that is not against the rules of the game, but resulting in or even aimed at inciting anger and frustration in your opponent. Obvious examples would be fastslobbing one corner instead of resigning (in 1v1 ofc; TG this might sometimes be useful). In SC2 its surprisingly “common” to lift off all your building and fly to one edge when you lose to prolong the game by a few minutes.
Now we can ofc discuss whether or not the inca trush fits that description - it certainly is a less extreme example than the two i gave. But saying “its not a bug, so its not toxic” is clearly wrong.
Yes, your examples are very good indeed! 
I agree that hiding in the corner with 1 vil is quite bad indeed, and that is clearly intended to just annoy a player in a 1v1. But in my opinion, playing a civ to its bonuses strengths is not intended to just annoy a player (even if it may occasionally be a side effect).
I wrote
The intend is a “sufficient but not necessary” condition. Now again, we can discuss if “inciting anger and frustration” is something that fits the inca trush. As far as i see, it does for many players (not me; i hate maa more 11).
Don’t get me wrong, i dont blame this on the players who inca vill/trush. But any game has to aim of giving its players a good experience. So any strategy should give at least as much joy for the one to pull it off as it does frustrate the one on the receiving end. Else its just bad game design. For this reason, Riot never included mana burn in their game: Its a very frustrating mechanic that simply disallows one player from properly playing the game, without even giving the other side the sweet satisfaction of “you have slain an enemy”.
Back to the inca villrush, it seems the devs agreed that this strat frustrates the non-inca player more than it entertains the inca player. Therefor they judged it as toxic and nerfed it severly. I tend to agree, based on the reactions so far: Even most people who hate the nerf admit that it has to be changed, so there seems to be little enjoyment about the strategy.
I think it was a very bad reasoning (not your post, but the reasoning itself) to make the decision for. In this aspect you might as well just make all techs mode the new meta, as apparently, anything that even slightly deviates from what players expect → unfun. It already almost feels that way most games, do the same exact thing regardless of civ.
Its funny how often this complaint pops up and how rarely we get actual evidence or even just an idea for what it is based on. Scrolling through the forums recently is like “omg why give XY to this civ, THIS ISNT AOE ANYMORE” into “OMG WHY NERF INCA TRUSH NOW THEY ARE GENERIC”. Seems like the game is perfect: Both sides are equaly unhappy.
This comment is anecdotal, it’s just how I feel when I play ranked 1v1, I don’t have a huge variety in the games… scout base, lame if possible, pick one of the main meta options and go for it, raid with light cav/hussar if the game goes imperial.
The occasional tower rush is pretty much the only thing that makes for any entertaining game, whether I get rushed or I’m rushing.
unfortunately we might see more of that coming in the future
In late imp sotl is right. But before the faster availability of food has a much higher value than the amount on the farms. That’s why teuton farms are top tier and sicilian farms are ok-ish. Both have comparable “effectiveness” in the mid game, but teuton farms are just that much better because of the less initial investment.
Sometimes also mathematicians chose wrong approaches to estimate a value. Sotl also admits in several videos that he neglects that influence. Don’t get me wrong, I love his videos and his attempts to make it as easy to understand as possible, but he also gives hints, that some upgrades look better in his mathematical approaches than they really are. Like the extra carry capacity of hand cart and aztecs. Both lead to quite big increases of gather efficiency - in theory. But in a practical game you more often have then to manually drop res because they are there… In theory, but just not available in praxis.
And Incan Bonus is exactly the opposite. It looks bad in theory, but is much more valueable in praxis than it looks.
My idea would be to just nerf the bonus villagers receive from blacksmith upgrades in the feudal age instead of putting it off to the castle age. Either:
- Villagers only get armor, no attack. Nerfs them for vill fighting, doesnt nerf them in tower wars.
- Villagers only get pierce armor and attack(no melee armor). Nerfs them more in vill fighting, doesnt nerf them in tower wars.
- Villagers do only receive melee armor and attack (no pierce armor), does not nerf them in vil fights, but nerfs them in tower wars, and makes archers a better defense against the tower rush.
you safe 7.5 seconds of construction time on each farm. A villager without wheelbarrow takes approximately 30 seconds to gather 10 food of a farm. So your first drop off happens 25% faster. Over the course of Feudal age with lets say an average amount of 15-20 farms, this therefore gives you 37-50 free food. So, I still disagree. The bonus is basically nonexistant. The biggest impact probably will be on the first three, or so farms seeded, possibly saving you a bit of TC idle time in early feudal age. Which can be nice, but is very situational and doesnt give you any bonus thereafter.
The incas team bonus is just plain bad, but this is often (not always) the case with civs that are strong/have a very good utility in team games.
For the inattentive player, the faster build time on farms can actually cost wood, because they’re more likely to accidentally finish building the farm before the horse collar research comes in.
