Saracens do lack an economic bonus compared to most other civs and that kinda puts them in an unfavored position.
Even before the wood reduction on the market, the 5% trade commodity bonus was already exceptional in team games where it always made sense to build a market for team vision. But markets were not that great in 1v1’s except for very specific builds and when you desperately needed it because you messed up your eco balance. The wood cost reduction on the market made it more viable to go for a market in 1v1’s and I’ll count the 100W savings as a small eco bonus. It’s still just a little bit silly that Saracens have 5% from the get-go whereas all other civs have to reach imperial to get 15%. I think this number needs to be re-examined.
One of questions that needs to be answered is what is the intended role of the market trade. Is it just to balance a broken eco? Should it enable power play? Do we want it to do both of these things? Because that’s what stands out with the Saracen bonuses.
Obviously the market trade can be exploited/abused by pro players to do these power plays. I’d argue that the market trade could help lower ELO players much more because they’re much more likely to have an unbalanced eco. The problem is, they’re just not aware of it. That can quickly be fixed by a few youtube lessons. If noobs can learn to push deer and quick wall, they can definitely learn how to click a button at the market (Saracens or not).
If most players don’t even use the bonus then nerfing it won’t objectively matter to non-pros and any change in pickrates will be purely due to perception.
After that video, TheViper tried to prove his point about Saracens being OP by picking them on the finals (vs. Hera) of the $2000 Arabia Invitational last Sunday.
And… it was an epic fail lol. A few Skirmishers + Mangonels allowed Hera to buy time and boom unrestricted. He resigned after Hera reached Imperial Age with a billion villagers.
Saracens aren’t OP, especially given the large buffs most civs have.
I don’t agree with that. In the end this is what the saracens have, historically they were good only in trading, they didn’t have a good eco except in trading. Every civ has it’s features, we don’t want to make all civs equal! And this is not the first time that he complained about something in the game, does he just want a game to be fit as he like?! For me the balance is good here nothing need to change
I didn’t said that most players don’t use the bonus, I said that they aren’t able to use it that effectively, so if you nerf it, then they would use it even less effectively, maybe to a point where it is unused.
Appreciate you guys thoughts! I agree that the market doesn’t need nerfed, that has been my thoughts, but I didn’t know if others agreed with Viper’s take. Ultimately to effectively play them I think you have to go with some market abuse.
Also the market bonus has been there for a long time and no one complained about it. Making the building itself -25 less wood didn’t change much. So I guess the reason for Saracens recent revival is the archers vs building bonus which can be made very effective by abusing the market, though.
Aztecs and Celts have roughly the same pick rate, yet Celts have 57% winrate vs Aztecs 53%. So either you believe Celts are significantly better than Aztecs or you accept that there’s at least 4% fluctuation in winrate due to unknown factors even for the civs that have highest sample count.
Then there’s the problem of Britons having disproportionnally low winrate compared to common knowledge. You claim, Britons are affected negatively by pathing improvements, and small sample rate. Then, explain to me why the same couldn’t be claimed for the other civs, especially for Saracens, which are mostly an archer civ, and have seen a -10% drop in winrate since last patch (similar to Britons).
A 4% error on top picked civs and Britons being 5th bottom is enough to claim these stats are flawed, especially in the context of Saracens.
If the pros really felt the Saracen market was overpowered, they would play Saracen’s more. The Saracen monk rush is one approach, but falls to common scout rushes. I suppose a Saracen pocket player could research banking, convert resources more cheaply, and then tribute them to other players for free. But that still doesn’t seem significant. Wood for island maps?
You used skewed data when that illustrated your point and conveniently forgot about it after. In 1st post you use Saracens winrate to illustrate a claim, then later you say Britons winrate should be ignored due to small sample size even though Britons have 3x higher sample count and similar stats.
Well yeah but what if the cav archer strat failed? He would have nothing to rely on as his eco is a mess and the bonus market gets worse and worse over time. He can’t even get imp in this state.
Even if he goes archers, it is the same. Skirms counter it. He doesn’t have food eco to produce cavs and so he is forced to make archer units.
And if he chose to make farms instead of lumberjacks, he would have very low wood income meaning no future farms as again, the market bonus gets worse over time.
A few walled towers or a defensive castle counter this srat pretty easily.
Check what strat he plays on Tournaments, not what he does on streams which is 90℅ trolling.
is also terribly wrong and misleading, because it fails to acknowledge the obvious underperformance of archer civs in those stats.
Using your same “statistician” reasoning we can also demonstrate that Britons are weak and Vietnamese are likely the worst civ in the game. More precisely we can say with 95% confidence that if a 1650+ player plays Vietnamese they have less than 40% chance of winning, wonder why pros still pick them then…
How is it wrong? How is it misleading? As you said, archer civs are sucking this patch, thus they probably shouldn’t be nerfed and probably aren’t a top 3 civ (inc Britons).
95% confidence interval is a lot different than a 0.00051440868 probability. Pros really aren’t picking them much, playrate was less than 1.5% on average before this patch, the jump this patch is likely more people going random. I have utter confidence in saying Vietnamese are weak right now though.
Going for ca here is indeed quite unusual but you can do a similar thing with archers and then it’s a totally competetive strat (it’s the tournament approach for sacens btw). You’ll make some farms but not a lot, still the eco is good enough to go one tc archers and mangonels which is super hard to stop. You don’t have the food eco to make cav but you don’t need that because there basically isn’t a counter strategy to this approach. Towers get nuked down instantly and castles need a lot of time, the rush will be there long time before you get the stone. And you still can easily get to imp. I don’t think it needs a nerf but it is indeed very strong.
I used the binomial inversion formula on this page. With the current Vietnamese winrate stats (34.7%) the 95% confidence interval is 29-40% winrate. If that was true that would not mean they are weak, that would mean they are terrible (since Aztecs, Mayans are considered good and seem to gravitate around 53% chance of winning). My point is not to say that Vietnamese are weak but that the data set is flawed and leads to absurd predictions. Even if Vietnamese were actually weak they would never have as low as 40% chances of winning, yet with this dataset we can claim they do with 95% chance.