Hello there! In the past I gave exensive feedback about some of the issues of the Chinese. Of course I am not the only one who noticed this and many players have written down their thoughts on Chinese problems. I am copying a post from reddit here because I think it deserves dev attention. Link to the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/qp77pz/everything_wrong_with_the_chinese_civ_from_a/
Tl;Dr: and my own notes:
- Imperial official (IO) cooldown which prevents them from gathering tax from the same building is a big issue
- Especially when officials gather 19 tax from 1 building and 1 tax from another, adding cooldown to both
- This cooldown forces players to manually micro officials to collect tax once 20 tax has accumulated in the earlygame
- In most games its impossible to collect all tax.
Especially on mining camps in the middle of the map because officials will not travel to them to collect tax and drop it off Town Centers near your starting position. Same with production buildings you build near the front to reduce reinforcement time.
My suggestion to fix this was to allow Imperial Officials to drop off Tax at keeps.
This allows players to easily gather tax from all buildings since you will be building Keeps at the front and near important mining camps.
- Granary tooltips are inconsistent
- The granaries are too big (4x4 Farms of space) making it too difficult to place them because once you unlock them you already have your farms set up
- Even though its a large 4x4 building, a granary only has a 2x2 drop off point, meaning there is a longer walk time than a normal mill to return food which reduces its effectiveness
My suggestion would be to upgrade up to 3 farms to granaries. Granaries should not take up 4x4 farms of space.
The post by user Burning_Titan:
Imperial Officer (IO)
- If you have auto-tax on, as is the default, an IO will abandon the building it’s supervising if it is carrying 20 gold. Instead it will go return that gold to the TC and auto collect tax. This is why you sometimes have your IO sneak away from their post.
- IOs with auto-tax enabled can be considered idle villagers, meaning that if I use my idle villager key bindings, it also selects IOs and whatever orders I give to those idle villagers will also be given to the IO, taking them away from the building their supervising.
- If I give the command to collect tax from a building and then shift-right click a TC this makes the IO collect tax and then garrison in the TC. Meaning I cannot shift-click return the tax to the TC.
- We need a hotkey to cycle through secondary economic units, like IO’s. I currently have to cycle through them by manually clicking on the left UI button.
- IO’s collect tax using a 30s cooldown in the most inefficient manner. They will take 19 tax gold from one building, and then take 1 tax gold from another and put both buildings on cooldown, even if that building they took 1 tax gold from had hundreds of tax gold. Please make IO only auto-collect tax gold from buildings with enough tax gold to completely fill their capacity. For example, at the start of the game, they would only collect tax from buildings with 20 tax gold. I essentially have to turn auto-tax off and manually micro this unit every game. If I do not, an IO that has escaped their job of supervising a building will collect 19 tax from a building instead of waiting for the 20 tax gold I was waiting to build my landmark, thus putting me behind 30s.
- I can micro IOs because I have experience playing RTS’s, and that’s essentially required to use IOs effectively. The current optimal way to open with china involves having an IO supervise a starting mill, and manually micro the IO to return 20 gold from the mill and woodcutting lodge whenever they have 20 tax gold. I have to do this tax collection micro manually 5+ times within the first 3:30 minutes of every game. This is makes my start quite micro intensive, and it should be no surprise that new players can’t do this. I don’t want carpal tunnel before I turn 30, so I think you should make the IO collect taxes from the building it’s supervising automatically, and return that tax gold to a nearby TC while still being considered supervising the building. Then they should return to that supervised building. This would make the civilization much more approachable.
- The wheelbarrow upgrade reduces the amount of tax gold that resource drop offs generate by 33%, because they return to their resource drop offs less often. Internally, you should make the tax collected a float instead of an int, and just display an int. With the wheelbarrow upgrade, this would mean that villagers drop off 1.5 tax each time they return resources.
Granary
- The building tooltip says it gives a 15% bonus per nearby granary, but the buff icon if you select the building says it gives a 10% bonus. I created a private sandbox and logged the resource collection of this building in multiple scenarios over 5 minute periods and have confirmed that each granary only gives a 10% bonus. But that’s not all, because it still could be a 15% bonus. You see the granary is a large 4x4 building, but has a 2x2 drop off point, meaning there is a longer walk time than a normal mill to return food. So either it is only a 10% bonus and the building tooltip is wrong, or it’s 15% bonus with a longer walk time mattering and the selected tooltip is wrong. Please clarify the tooltips and fix the longer walk times.
- In most scenarios rather than going from zero farms to 30 farms all at once, I think it’s best to add farms and mills on gradually over time. This is a problem for the granary because the optimal way to place the granaries are in a triangle pattern completely surrounded by 20 farms so that they all get 3 stacking buffs, for a total of a +30% farming bonus to each farm. This makes adding one granary with farms at a time really awkward and suboptimal because you only get a 10% bonus for 250 wood. It’s best to spent 750 wood + 1500 wood on farms all at once to place this weird looking triangle structure, which is quite expensive to do considering I’ve spent 1800 resources on getting the dynasty to unlock it. Not to mention that generally by the time I have enough food to get the Yuan dynasty I already have farms so placing my previous mills and farms so that I can later create a triangle structure is impractical. I think we’d be better off having each granary give a +20-30% bonus and not having the auras stack.
Imperial Academy
- In my games I seem to be generating more tax gold than my IO’s can ever collect, essentially meaning I’m not getting most of the tax gold bonus, and that the double tax gold bonus from the academy isn’t worth it. The upgrade to tax carrying capacity is worth more than the building. I’d like it if you considered having no tax collection cooldown, and that IO’s instead just only auto-collect taxes that would fill their carrying capacity like my suggestion above.
- At the start of every game I build my buildings in a defensive pattern around my villagers and TC, but later if I want to get the most out of an academy I need to build it and all of my production buildings all near my TC somehow. This generally means I either don’t use most of the influence area, or I give the IO too long a walk time to collect all the extra tax gold. I’d like it if the academy was considered a drop off point for tax gold so I could use the entire influence area.