HI! recently i started playing some archer faction, but i don’t like the obvious Britons/Mayans dicotomy.
i found the vietnamese quite interesting with a lot going for them, but i have several doubts for them in terms of performances, so i wanted to know if it was just my impression, and thus gain some intel on how to use them better, or if there is some serious limitation
My points are:
1- HP buff to archers is not that significant, since HP is nowhere near the most important stat for archer. In addition, a percentage buff on a low HP unit is not very good i think. Arbalests end up having 8 HP more…not a lot! might survive narrowly a hit more here or there but nothing more than that. and it does not even affect the rattan! this is the only direct bonus to archers they get, so better be good no?
i know that cavalry archers profit a bit more, but they are not that great at cavalry archers, which is already a not great unit type by itself.
imho it would be better as a flat increase, bloodline stile. so something like +10 HP in feudal. the final result is almost the same, but at least early game archers are seriously more resilient, while being basically the same in imperial, with the tradeoff of slight weaker cavalry archers. or maybe is a strong bonus and i’m wrong?
2- the rattan archer is not great. it’s very expensive, it has a delay in fire rate, it has relatively poor range for a not impressive damage. chu ko nu has the same range, but much more damage, plumed has the same range, but much more HP and is faster and cheaper, even generic arbalest from vietnamese looks better being cheaper and not that much weaker (with better HP also!). i know they are good against other archers and resilient to skirmisher, but if you are fighting skirms with rattan you are doying something wrong, and while they deal better to archers, they are not as effetive with anything else with their delayed shot
so maybe a combination or tweaks could help them and justify making them over arbalesters. make their range 5 from the castle age, have their HP buff bonus affect them, make the elitè variant shot a bit faster (equal or closer to arbalest). maybe not all of these but something along these lines. or maybe they are strong and i’m wrong?
3 and final, the well known paper money problem. it’s not a bad tech, but it’s only really useful in teams games and very dependant from number of allies and situations. i think team play is already supported trought their team unit and scout TC.
to make something similar in flavour and still useful in teams but not as useless in 1 vs 1, the tech could maybe make market wood selling price increase by a lot for all members of your team, giving your team an edge in gold using market, or could change the rattan gold cost into wood (PAPER money after all you know?) similar to the magyar unique tech, or some other way of using wood more effciently in the late game, since they already have a wood bonus that sinergize in terms of flavour
4 bonus point: in an ideal world, i would have the imperial sirmisher as a new generic upgrade for the skirmisher not only reserved for vietnamese, and a new team bonus added to truly help archers, similar to the britons