With the new changes to China in the PUP the devs are experimenting with the civ bonuses and many people consider the changes to go against the civs identity, so i think it is a good time to reevaluate if we actually like the civ identity.
As it stands now China is undoubtedly the most polemic civ as depending on the context it can be very strong or very weak, varying a lot more than any other civ thanks to its design as a late game civilization (power spike in imperial age + dynasties meaning an effective age 4.5). This results in often oppresive victories or helpless defeats and general dissatisfaction when playing with or against it.
It could be argued endlessly how to “fix China” but thats not the point, the question here is if the civ should continue as a late game civ or be changed into less late game focused civ.
All civs should be relatively equal at all ages. No civ should have such massive power spike that opponent cant do anything against it. All I want china to have is balanced gameplay that it can do booming and aggression and has its own identity and doesn’t just purely spam same units as others which its rn.
Everything they have nerffed about china has always had a some form of counter and way to deal with them. Regardless the lower sanctum of elo has chosen to moan about every strategy this game has or had and many of them have been removed / nerffed to be hardly viable to use and this trend continues. Developers intend game to be one dimensional strategy game where everyone does the same standard play.
Fact is developers need to stop eating eels and start reworkin china from the scratch. Identify what is the civs identity. They have steadily removed chinas identity (gunpowder) and every patch takes it further away from identity.
Whole chinas concept is not working and doesn’t work well. Its very clear that developers have no idea what to do and just pull random crap without thinking anything. Taxation problems are not solved, new spirit way is biggest joke of the patch. To utilize the buff china needs to delete its own units and pay double the price to unlock dynasty units and pay lot to produce units that are supposed to fill niche role in army and supposed to be made handfull per match?!?! Top of that they expect china to sit on the mighty chinese wall and use handcannoneers to shoot birds while opponent just pokes a hole and goes through. Get rid off this stupid mongolian era china wall ■■■■.
I want meet the person who eats those eels and hear what is the thought process of making stupid changes constantly and never considering where it leaves civ.
How true. We may disagree on other topics but I fully agree with you on Chinese changes as I am also Diamond III Chinese player. Suggest changes for China to be a better-designed civ. Taxation
Imperial Palace now allows IO to collect tax immediately. No need to drop tax.
As a counter-buff, change Chinese tax collection capacity to 30/60, or even add Imperial tech so that it would be 30/60/90.
Dynasty
Second Landmark should receive 25% discount.
As a counter-buff, Song bonus reduced from 33% to 25%.
Gunpowder
Give back pyrotemics, it is China’s identity in Age IV.
Even the Grenadier nerf is quite harsh, but I think it is agreeable if Ming got 25% discount. However, don’t nerf Chinese bombards without giving culverin.
I actually think FireLancer and Grenadier both needs rework. Make them longer attack range or ignoring armor version of Horse/Handcannoneer may be better. Large Radius of AOE is hard to balance.
Dynasty Unit & Building
Village/Granary/Zhuge Nu is fine.
Please make Chinese player gain something entering Yuan or Ming. At the moment, dynasty units/buildings in Yuan/Ming are all trash except Grenadier which would be nerfed to the ground in PUP.
Even Song’s 33% villagers’ buff is better than Yuan’s mobility and Ming’s HP buff late game 1v1. You will always lose villagers. Developers need to have a way out.
Economy Balance
Give China additional villager at start
Reduce IO’s supervising to 10% additional resource. Add tech in Age III in Imperial Academy to research back to 20%.
While some interesting ides, but there is some problems that this doesn’t fix or address.
This makes civilization even harder to play. More you have micro manage IO = harder the civ becomes. Early on when there is not much to do this isn’t issue but in mid / late game player needs to prioritize more important things than IO tax collection. Player is not going to give thought on getting small amount of gold every x seconds when they need to multitask in multiple fronts especially if fight is happening.
So the tax collection is still put in minimal role. While its a nice it still isn’t good enough. It needs to be automated at later stages of game, especially when many of the tax buildings may not have IO near them.
Dunno about Song (I hardly go for song and if I do go I go after castle), but 25% discount without additional benefits from dynasties is bad IF unit prices stay same and their viability same. They either need to reduce the FL / Grenadier cost or keep them core part of army. Any half arsed solution trying to make them “support” units is stupid
The issue is also this. Every other civilization gets 4x landmark bonuses. This can be extra TC or lot of gold income etc. For example French gets stables +20% training time reduction for stables. This combos with keep bonus insanely well with 20% cost reduction. 10 stables around keep means 12 stable production and 2 stables produce knights for free which is one of the most ridiculous bonuses out there because knights / lancers are best unit in game.
Then the factor that china has to make the choice between -35% villager production, 10% movement speed or 10% hp to military. Other civilizations do not have to pick one bonus but they can pick 4 out of 8 bonuses. This is super bad because landmarks of china are worst in game and got very niche role.
Either china needs to keep dynasty bonuses when they enter new dynasty or have way to revert back and forth between dynasty bonuses because song becomes useless at some point of game and at some point useful.
Don’t really know about this. 7th villager is nice, but losing 10% of resources for one villager gain is hardly worth it at. IA is 2nd age landmark so I assume you mean IP?
IF you make taxation fully automated it will be op as fuck… With high capacity and no need to drop, it will be already useful. I don’t think it will require player to actually MICRO the taxation. With this IO could collect tax far away from base if needed.
The key problem is that we cannot make Chinese late dynasty too strong, which would destroy turtling team games and nomad. However, at the current state it is completely irrelevant in 1v1.
If later dynasty inherits the bonus, it is not only historically inaccurate, but also make it even harder to balance Chinese early game and late game. In my opinion, I think this Yuan/Ming issue can be fixed into several ways combined:
Make Yuan Cavalry-focused and Ming gunpowder-focused, which is historically accurate, and make user to switch their focus and game style.
For example,
Song has 20% villager reduction + 20% additional building speed
Yuan has 15% movement speed + 15% cavalry HP
Ming has 15% Infantry HP - 15% gunpowder cost
Buff Economic bonus of Dynasty Buildings, it will not enrage other civ players. Actually granary is a good start, but Pagoda is still a meme. Ming also lacks the unique building.
It will require extra micro unless IO is set to run around automatically like it can be done now. I have never manually collected taxes after 8-9min mark because I got more important tasks to do like controlling 1-4 unit groups and everything else.
I would be lying that I didn’t love the idea of Yuan, because I play fast castle lancer and I can tell you rn. It would make chinese completely broken civ. Lancers / Knights are by far the best units in game and nothing really counters them effectively other than lancers or knights. Getting 15% movement speed for them and 15% HP makes them essentially as strong as French knights. I would take this in heart beat, but it would be broken.
Ming other hand is not good if we look at changes in upcoming patch. China has no siege value anymore. Every other civ has better imp age options to counter chinese bombards and because they’re made so slow and clockwork can’t be supervised it would push it to hand cannoneers / Grenadiers but -15% would be still several times worse than current spirit way
Taking 900food450gold to get 15%HP cavalry bonus, while removing the 25% villager time bonus, is still extremely expensive. It is only workable when you are actually massing knights.
You should know that:
English +25% attack aura.
French knights superb
Rus Age IV +4 attack, +20 HP tech & Warrior Monk
Mongols HP bonus, stone & network
Delhi +3 attack
Only China & HRE & Abbasid has no direct buff to cavalry, while Abbasid has camels, HRE can rely on its infantry, not to say the new meta HRE monk + knight.
Limiting it to Yuan is both historical and shines if you decide to end game with cavalry. Remind you that you are losing Song bonus so it is actually a gamble. in late game 15% is not that strong tbh.
Only with major instant buff, players could have the incentive to go Yuan/Ming. Price reduction or HP bonus to specific units could just do the trick. You can reply under my newly-created post to see more about it. Just discussion.
I think for knights +15%HP is not that broken tbh. France hardly goes to Royal Institute in 1v1, which even provides +35%HP is Age III which is insane. But you know, the economy, you cannot afford it if you needs to build other auxiliary units.
China has worse economy than France before Age IV with equal TC. By the time of Yuan, France will have much scarier amount of knights than Yuan China, and France is not even auto-win in competitive matches, although currently the strongest.
Another method is to give -15% cost of cavalry , but I think it is even stronger than +15% HP. It is very necessary for Yuan & Ming to focus on cavalry and infantry to differentiate and let player have the incentive to invest that much and make the choice.
Abbasid have +15% HP Infantry as well but they are still crap. +15% is not as influential as you think perhaps.
I do agree that French is ridiculous thanks to 20% production speed and 20% discount on knights around the keep.
If they go for royal institute then opponent has no way of matching cavalry fight and overall spears are just trash vs cavalry. Only situation where they are good is head on fight but cavalry you wont have to ever pick head on fight.
Also there is issue with the focus on cavalry of infantry. Age 3 costs 1800 and age 4 3600. So age 4 should be better than age 3 which creates again the problem why go yuan when u can go ming?
I do agree that as China it should be encouraged to go Ming instead of Yuan. Both civ identity and history.
However if you ever play 4v4 before you will know that in many scenarios infantry are too slow and only cavalry could handle the large maps late game. It is where the fast cavalry shines.
Thats what I have been saying for 6 months and many are just blablabla. Cavalry is almost always better regardless of the mode. Less impactful in 1v1 / 2v2 because of map size being smaller and easier time to force choke point situations but still there is so much space to go around and if player controls cavalry properly then spears won’t even get their signature brace wall affect because there won’t be charge and 1 on 1 spear can’t fight knight / lancer
Glad you’r enjoying. For me its getting super boring. 80-90% of games in 2v2 contains english or french and its always the same. Every time there is french its 100% cavalry game. There is close to 0 variations. Before siege nerf I saw much wider range of unit comps and now its more one unit comp than ever before.
Yesterday I checked 18 matches that I played in 24hour period and 16 of them had French in it.
Whenever I face mongol or delhi I just hope I get either tower rushed or delhi goes mass elephant sacred / relic control but meh no
In general, a civ being mediocre the whole game and trying to survive until 45 minutes or more where they become unstoppable is not good game design. While somebody has to be the strongest late game civ, and it is fine if it is the Chinese, their only viable strategy shouldn’t be survive until late game and steam roll the opponent. Late game being something of a strength for a civ is fine but right now the difference between their early game and late game strength is too extreme
