Starting with removal of 3 villagers from Hausa in the previous updates, and removal of schooners from Inca now. It might look as a solution removing main shipments in the game to balance the civs, but in reality it is temporary, in long term it makes things complex. Hausa is considered to have one of the strongest units in the game while having slightly worse economy and being slow compared to other civs. So that it’s becoming much more complex to balance hausa since an economic buff without nerf to military would be risky and removal of 3 villagers made the situation even more complex now.
Inca players at competitive level don’t go with schooners oriented bo’s as dock start is considered to be better but still, removal of schooners shipment for inca is similar case to hausa, main shipments shouldn’t be removed in order to balance the civs. In the future, it will be more complex to balance civs like hausa case.
What could be done?
Aoe3 is already a unique game, The deletion of main cards for balance focus, has the potential to do more harm than good in terms of the balance of the game, balance appraoch should aim to not get into change main aspects of the civs.
In fact I think that there are cards that should be universal, such as the 3 fishing boats of age 1, the ‘infinite native’ shipments and the infinite resource shipments larger than ‘300 infinite resources’. I even proposed that the Incas could have a shipment of 3 fishing boats. Even the Lakota have them, which are supposed to be entirely continental. Some "new" cards for ancient civilizations
On the contrary I’d also like to bring up the argument that this opens up those civs to having more varied and interesting build orders though. 3 villagers is perma meta, 9 times out of 10 a must send card right? So when a civ doesn’t have 3 vils there’s a bit more creativity in what the player can choose for their first card to send.
It’s more than concerning about why Inca doesn’t have schooners shipment now, Not like Inca water opening strategies were taking over the ladder or were considered borderline broken by any player playing the game competitively. Could devs give more detailed information regarding this change?
Schooners card is not available to French, Germans, Haudenosaunee, and Lakota for example
one of the newer cards in the game, the buffed extensive fortifications was removed from a number of civs, I think most notably US and Russia
I agree that a better reason needs to be given but arguably its removal isn’t the most disconcerting thing/
If i had to speculate a reason why, its that on water maps its too much of a boom to inca since they can just have vils on wood and not get punished at all in vil production since the kanchas produce food anyway. so all vils on food leads to more fishing boats and kanchas which gives more food and also pop space. There is arguably too much synergy there.
Inca water boom is not considered to be useful than other strategies it has, that’s what puts concern to this nerf, because the game should be balanced based on 1v1, if you add another game mode into consideration. then it becomes a mess to balance the game
This is inaccurate for top level. because there were no build that was ever useful combined with schooners, what concerns here is Inca schooner nerf shouldn’t be coming from 1v1 side as it never had useful strategies from there, and if the game is balanced around team games then there is a big problem.