What I wish to advocate in this post, is that the developers lean more into the idea of the “Reformist Tsar”–before this update, the only thing “reformist” about this card was the techs “Westernization” and “Patrine Reforms”, but now the St. Petersburg Dragoons and the Lifeguard Jeagers actually do a little bit of reforming. St. Petersburg Dragoons replaces all of your cav archer cards with Counter Dragoons (silly name imo, just call them St. Petersburg Dragoons), and the Lifeguard Jeagers replace your Opri shipments (kinda weird), with Counter Jeagers (again silly name, just call them Lifeguard Jeagers). But honestly, this feels underwhelming–for being a “Reformist Tsar”, you really aren’t reforming that much, at least that’s how it seems to me. So here are my ideas for making both these cards, but really Russia as a whole more interesting…
St. Petersburg Dragoons, age 3, 1000 wood: Ships 9 St. Petersburg Dragoons, which have more HP and hand attack than normal dragoons, but less Ranged Resist. They also have a charged hand attack. Replaces Cavalry Archers with St. Peterburg dragoons.
Unlike now these won’t be age 4 stat dragoons, they’ll be age 3 goons with +10% hp, +20%(?) hand attack, and a charged hand attack, but only 20% RR. The compendium for the game says that Russia’s Dragoons were the main battlefield cavalry within their army and that, unlike many other countries’ dragoons, they were not limited to reconnaissance and small skirmishes, but were trained in melee combat and were drilled in tactics such as cavalry charges and flanks. To make up for the higher-hand attack and charged attack, they’ll have a negative multi vs. Skirm, like other high-hand attack Dragoon units.
Lifeguard Jeagers, age 4, 2000 coin: Ships 12 Lifeguard Jeagers, and replaces Streltsy in your roster.
Now I know people like Strelsy, but it seems by the time the Lifeguard Jeagers appeared, Streltsy were out of use, so replacing them with a less spammy but better unit would be cool, and you could still choose to not get this tech if you want anyway so as to keep them. The idea for the unit is that it would be a mix of a few types of skrim–shorter range (18) but higher hp like many of the minor civs skrim, the bugle from Basilinggers (yes this troop did have bugles), although it wouldn’t stun like the Basilingers do, and they would also be two pop and have higher RR like normal Jeagers do. A mainline 2 pop unit isn’t really something we see much from Russia (cav archers), so I thought this unique Skirm might be interesting.
Let me know what you think!
P.S. Russia needs to lose the age 1 infantry train time card, you can insta build without it anyway.
