Sorry, it was a bit of a quip. My brother goes into these really wordy explanations over text that I have trouble understanding. You’re not as bad as him, though. I actually understand your point.
Okay, wait. I never said nerf all top civs, I specifically said “nerf franks”. I have two criteria for a nerf:
- Have win rate over 55% in one of the common scenarios
- Be Franks (i.e, have a super high play rate on top of excellent win rate)
So no. I’ll pay for a monthly subscription service if the devs nerf this civ. I want to stop seeing this civ 1 out of 10 games when most other civs are only seen 1 out of like 20-30 games.. Least popular civs are seen in like 1 out of 200 games.
My statement above explains this. I’m not asking to nerf all top civs.
Hey, we are in completely agreement here. But I don’t see the devs doing this. Franks win rate drop wasn’t due to infantry buff, but because of strong camel civs like Malians, Gurjaras and Hindustanis.
I checked it now.
And I was wrong. It wasn’t the romans getting slav farms.
It was that all farming has become more efficient through the bord. About 10 % in the early game.
And it gets even weirder. When testing the Heavy Plow + HC farms I got 400 F from them in basically the same time as formerly 375 F. It makes absolutely no sense anymore.
What the heck have the devs done to Farming?
Edit: And with Crop Rotation the Farming efficiency goes down by about 2 %. I have no Idea what is happening there, but as it looks rn, Crop Rotation is actually a downgrade. I got 576 F from the crop Farms. It seems like the HC upgrade would cause this. I have the feeling devs modified the amount of food that is deposited by the Farms regrowth. It might be a reaction to the fact that with the current farming Villagers already gather close to the former .4 f/s regrowth of the Farms. So if HC doesn’t give a higher effective regrowth, the upgrade would actually be an effective downgrade cause they wouldn’t Farm faster but have higher carry capacity.
We maybe need to checkt the Genie editor what really happens there.
PEdit: I couldn’t find anything in the Genie Editor. It just looks to me that for some reason with HC researched Farms deposit more food than they take from their storage. But it’s not consistant. Dark age Farms deposit 4.5 % more, HP 6.7 % more and Crop Rotation Farms 4.7 % more.
I have no clue what’s going on there.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think the stats for Chinese demonstrate that pros/very high-level players are atypical enough that they should be ignored, at least in this case.
Sure, I agree – but since that ideal situation isn’t reachable for the majority of players, I think this is an argument in favour of my position, not against it.
True, but trying to balance around tournaments would be impossible. They almost always have unusual features like civ drafting processes and non-standard maps, plus they don’t provide enough data to draw any very reliable conclusions.
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In this case, absolutely. But the idea of ignoring the top players as a general rule is something I consider too extreme. It implies, for example, that perhaps (pre-nerf) Chinese should have been buffed, since they’re lackluster for the majority of players, and only strong at the highest levels (which we’re ignoring). You might argue that pros have too much influence, and they probably do. My biggest issue is people not using their critical thinking skills whenever Viper/Hera say anything, and taking pros’ opinions as gospel (and usually out of context). But I think they’re a great source of qualitative data as long as you account for bias and context, and weigh in other relevant data.
I’d agree more if the general scaling of civs was worse and there were a lot more Chinese-style exceptions. I think it’s easy to overstate the actual meta differences between upper-mid and top elo, and there are some, but its mainly a difference of cleaner execution of the same (or very similar) strats. The skill gap in AoE2 can be massive, but the meta gap is much smaller once you cross certain thresholds (and trying too hard to balance below those thresholds is pretty problematic IMO, and bleeds into the “auto-everything” discussion). So while the majority of players can’t reach pro levels of execution, they certainly tend to reach towards things that have been demonstrated to work at the highest levels, with necessary adjustments to accommodate more mistakes and/or a slower pace.
Indeed, and I wouldn’t suggest such a thing - high rated ranked games (perhaps not of the top 1, but 5 or even 10%) are a more grounded source for the statistics you’d want to help with high-level balance. I mainly mention tourneys because they’re pretty important to the game’s visibility and reach, and even under non-standard conditions, very lopsided civ-determined outcomes are, I think, still bad for the game. And many times, the changes pros call for are reflections of issues that pervade a wide elo range (e.g. how Flemish Revolution was finally nerfed due to it being perceived as a game, and perhaps series-defining cheese in TTL)
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Yes, or at least an Art of War scenario teaching people how to use them.
I have mixed feelings about the Chinese civ design, to be honest, and I think my positive feelings towards them are mostly motivated by nostalgia and purism. Their villager bonus is balanced by a significant resource penalty that makes no thematic sense, their Town Centre population bonus feels like it’s there solely to make the villager bonus work, and the demolition ship bonus feels random. The villager and technology bonuses together are potentially so strong that they have to have glaring ahistorical holes in their tech tree. The result is a civ that’s underpowered for most of the playerbase, and possibly overpowered for pros. I would find it hard to argue that it’s a good design. It’s at least inelegant design.
Yes, this annoys me disproportionately for some reason.
I don’t really know why I care much about this, to be honest. For the most part, balance decisions don’t seem to be made purely around pro play, and I think those that are are usually done in a way that doesn’t impact lower levels too much. Plus I really appreciate the buffs for Koreans and Vietnamese in this patch.
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As a low elo legend, I have won with both civs using cav archers, which had never happenes to me before. So yes, I am happy for low elo players
Has someone tried to abuse market with hindustanis? I think it is a strong buff despite coming into play in late castle age. At least, for low elo players…
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What does this mean? 
I have seen many people use this term low elo “legend”
Any one can explain to me exactly how did this term start in AoE2 community? If you google this term, only AoE2 appears in search result even though other games also have elo system.
It originates from T90, who uses the term to refer to low-Elo players who do something really noteworthy and atypical of players at their level.
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To add, he has explicitly said that LoLs are below 900-1000 Elo. He has a term for mid-Elo folks as well, although I forget what it is.
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Mid Elo Maniacs it is
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I was wondering what the second “M” was.
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And then ofc we have High Elo Hoangs.
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LOL, the Chinese is now the worst civ in the game with an average win rate 42.95%, 4% lower than the second last. It is also worse than average in 1900+ELO.
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honestly the tech discount is good, but it isn’t overrated or anything. imo they should have left it as is.
the unit discount imo is far more useful than tech discount, especially chinese only get a measly 5% in feudal and 10% in castle, which imo is way more important than imp.
then in imp you have 15% which is nice for expensive imp techs, but then again expensive is relative so if you get techs thats only available to chinese (UT, ELITE UU) then its not really discounted at all. lastly, chinese having difficulty up against raids as their cav isn’t anything special.
Expected tbh. And that was exactly the target of this change.
And Finally Chinese not OP anymore.
MBL rates Chinese at A tier, which still say the civ is good on arabia.
Here is my hot take on chinese. We should all just leave this civ and its balance to the pros. Hera once asked, “can’t we (the pros) have this one civ?”. Let them have it. It feels like Chinese have a weird balance to them which doesn’t work at lower Elos. That’s fine for just one civ.
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I disagree. I’d rather change their design slightly to make them easier to balance rather than pigeon-holing Chinese to tournaments only and turning them into an involuntary handicap for everyone else.
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