Proposal balance change for August patch

[DoctBaghi]

@Sylux1000

• pavise UT becomes a civ bonus. Italians get a new UT (even very weak)

I’ll simply link my answer on the other topic, so if other people want to read it they can without me spamming the same posts:

Balance changes from July Update guys!

Well, that why I’m against it. Find another bonus it a pain in the ***. Both for the balance and the devs. They haven’t even changed atheism, which is really a useless UT, asking to change a decent UT it would be too much. Also, pavise as a UT work right now, it’s cheap, it affect 3 units, so changing it for no reason would just make things more complicated. And finally, the UT it’s historically accurate and it gives the civ some identity, wich is a secondary role of the UTs that we shouldn’…

Balance changes from July Update guys!

No, because the idea is to give them +1PA (or +1/1 if we want to exaggerate) that is stackable with pavise then in castle age, for a total of +1/2 plus the standard blacksmith upgrades. So if you give just pavise as a bonus, you just have +1/1, you still lack that +1PA. But they don’t need a new UT, and the idea is TO CHANGE their late game a bit, by giving them more durable arbalests. It easy for you and me that we don’t have to implement it in the game, they we don’t have to verify that …

@AbuzzJam4677680

More durable archers may make Italians more aggressive. Italians has never been an early aggressive civs in aoe2. This may dramatically change the role of and strategy played by Italians.

The idea is to give some help on their archers. Righ now, the italians have pretty standar archer for being an archer civs, and their xbows fall behind even other non archer civs, like aztecs, that lack TR but thanks to their great eco can outproduce italians.

The free armor upgrade is a small bonus that give them a small window of time after aging up when their archers are better, but in the end they would have just +1/1 like now.

The +1PA stackable was thought because with pavise, the italians essentialy pay for a worse version of the viets bonus, which is also better for other reason, so that way the italians could compete with other archer civs at least on the military side, with +1/2 arbs (as for eco, they would however be behind cvis like mayans, britons, viets and so on…).

@AbuzzJam4677680

At least this should change the water game meta a bit. I guess the age up discount would not be more than 25% as Byzantines only get 33% discount on aging up to Imperial age. This may help Italians a bit in early game. But I doubt if this buff is enough to compensate the nerf in dock tech. Late game water maps meta would be changed.

I fear that now this is out of the table. Condos have been buffed again, and now they seems to be in a really good spot, but buffing the cheaper age up bonus woul also buff their condos rush by a lot, and people would start complain again.

@AbuzzJam4677680

If Italians really needs a buff, I personally prefer them to play fast castle more efficiently rather than feudal rush.

Free armor or +1PA are more defensive kind of bonus, their effect on rush would be limited and a lot behind bonus like more range (britons), cheaper archers (mayans) or faster RoF (etiopians) or even free tachs like TR (tartars) , they would also lack any eco bonus.