Stats are in: Incas nerfed from winning civ to losing civ

Before the villager nerf, Incas were a top five 1v1 civ with a 52.33% win rate and 1.94% play rate.

With about 145,000 games analyzed on the new patch, Aoestats.io says:

Incas in 1v1:

  • Dropped 15 places, to the lower half of civs
  • Now have a losing rate (49.38%)
  • Are in the bottom 5 played civs at 1.38% play rate

Incas in team games:

  • Dropped 21 places, to the lower half of civs
  • Now have a losing rate (49.47%)
  • Are the second to the last played civs at 1.05% play rate

This amount of shift indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the critical characteristics of a civ. The Incas were switched from meta-breakers to generalists without any significant power units, military discounts, or economy bonuses.

Speaking of civ breakage, the Burgundians jumped up 34 places. From bottom five to top five. What?
Burgundians jump

Is this okay? Is this good for the game? This is why players cringe at the constant civ tweaking.

3 Likes

It’s still not a terrible winrate though. And gasp. At the highest level they have a 55% winrate. It’s almost like they are more diverse then people believe

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49% is balanced
And remember is preliminarly

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What it looks like that the biggest drop is in the low elos, where they can still achieve 47-49 % winrate.
And this is also not surprising, nowing that the strat was a noob basher.

And it’s presumably worse than they will probably end in cause people need to figure out how to play the incas regularly, as they are so versatile. Versatile civs take always more time to get familiar with, especially if they have so much unusual tools.

Burgundians jumped mainly because in low elos flemish revolution is basically a free win, as games tend to be much slower in pace. But also here we need to wait for more data.
At moment it looks like they did a nice work with the eco discount and it’s just that one tech which is still imbalanced.
As burgs are a straight forward civ, I think we can expect their winrates to be quite stable, after the best builds have settled.

Tbh at the same time we have Magyars with 55% win rate so not sure if this isnt just that we have too little top level games rn

Edit: I also imagine people will still want Franks nerfed even though they lost N1
Edit2: They are back at number 1 again

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If a civ is as “losing” as Aztecs or Mongols it’s likely it’s totally fine.

Tower rush in TG is mostly about “let’s change this 4v4 into a 3v3 and whichever team gets the upper hand first can come save their teammate entrenched ina feudal tower war” Was mostly viable with Incas because their bonuses were just way too stacked in their favour. In normal gameplay Incas will never be good enough to the taste of tryhards because TG doesn’t favour counter units but specialized units, since your teammates are supposed to counter your weaknesses anyway.

Funnily enough people love to present the Inca as a meta breaker when the tower rush was THE META of the civ itself. I mean why are so many people arguing they are bad now and that their unique units aren’t that good (when they totally are),if not because one strategy was just suffocating everything else.

Tatars bis. People have been spamming “Burgs weak” enough that the dev decided some temporary giga buff would make players change their mind.

The jump happened at all elos. I’m not the kind to place much trust in those stats but when it’s too big it’s too big, especially when it makes perfect sense based on the the buff they received. It’s pretty much impossible to say that Burgundian are any less than very strong now.

I suspect the stable discount might be imbalanced too now. Half cost paladin upgrade works when the civ doesn’t have a strong eco, which lets the enemy time to get halbs or heavy camels, now with a strong eco behind it’s more likely your paladin won’t even have to face an appropriate counter.

3 Likes

You forget, that they don’t have an initially strong eco. Among all elos their winrate under 20 minutes is below 45 %. Because they need to invest to get the better eco. Other civs get it for free. That’s the big difference.
Yes, they have potential the best feudal age eco, but they also need to invest the most to get it. (After cumans second TC is basically unplayble now).
Yes they live from their very strong midgame powerspikes, but their early game is still quite weak.

Malay winrate seems to have dropped despite getting buffed. Might be too few games. Or people trying out the new balance changes and realizing those things are still not that good haha

2 Likes

Malay buffs… yay I don’t like them much. They seem completely wrong targeted to me.

People probs try to take too much upgrades too early and it doesn’t end so well for them, but it’s also pretty easy to play 100% safe and only click double bit axe and horse collar after you clicked feudal. You still get the benefits earlier, while not delaying your age up and investing less. Because surprise surprise, saving food on eco upgrades alone is super good. Also taking bow saw in feudal isnt hard at all now, and the benefits are pretty big too. If this is a weak early game then wow.

That’s the kind of stuff that makes me doubt the relevance of these stats besides the super obvious stuff that doesn’t really need stats anyway (like the Burgundian buff). According to the very same page Khmer hover around 46% winrate. Which makes 0 sense.

You overestimate that bonus. Yes it is strong, but most other civs have 2 or 3 bonusses at the same time. I mean, even the viatnemese dicount of 100 % wood is actually on the same level as the 50 % food discount of burgs. Franks get free horsecollar, better berry farming and stronger scouts. Lithuanians get 150 food for free, almost as much as burgs save with their first upgrades.
The bonus isn’t as strong as it may look. Of course in interaction with the other powerspikes it makes the civ a quite strong one, but not overpowered. In all elos except below 1000 they have winrates far below 55 %.
Just Flemish Revolution is imbalanced. And it’s also the only explanation possible why they would have such a high winrate in low elos. Which low elo player ever would be able to make use of their midgame powerspikes? It can only be flemish revolution.

Except Incas only have 46.72% in feudal and early castle age (<20), and dropping. That’s comparable to bottom tier civs like Saracens (47.27) and Malay (40.31).
In contrast, mongols have a strong 53.03 and aztecs are solid at 49.32.
So the stats are correct. They prove incas are weak in feudal age and get trapped in mid castle age, but at the same time they are strong during imperial age. Old Turks had almost the same stats as current Incas in feudal and early castle age. So yeah, incas NEED a revamp that helps them in those 2 ages.

Now malay have better scores during castle age (47.35%/20-30 mins) and early imperial age (46.41%/30-40). This means their buffed karambit are doing their job. But their post imperial is slightly weaker (42.69%/40+ mins). This represents the nerf to their old infinite fishing traps.
Also their feudal and early castle age rating dropped, and their play rate went up. My guess is that people were curious about the changes and tried to test them but failed before making the most out of their buff during castle and early imperial.
The stats are correct.

They seem completely fine actually. I would maybe improve the non-elite kamayuk a bit to make it easier to transit into the ideal unit comp in lategame, but honestly they don’t need anything atm. They look fine.

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I would personally totally remove the blacksmith bonus and give them an extra llama and rework the team bonus. This would at least makes the bonus a bit less bad compared to the Lithuanian bonus who is practically better in any way as it is rn. And the bonus only kicking in castle age makes the bonus be near useless normally so replacing it may make their design better

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LOL…
Incan bonus is probably 10 x better than lith. Inca bonus is 2.5 free food to your bank for every built farm, for every team member. In a 4v4 it’s usually more than 1k extra food for the team over the course of the game.
Faster monastery is nothing.

Incan bonus is maybe not as strong as chinese, teutons or spanish, but it’s actually above average, as it helps every team member with any strat.

Im comparing the extra llama and the food bonus, not the team bonus.

And honestly I would rather have the Persian team bonus over the Incan team bonus (and the persian team bonus is okay at best). 250 food in a 45-60 minute match doesnt compare to killing crossbows 33% faster

Incas were fine before. Continue fine now.

Burgundians on the other hand… Memeish Revolution and a great eco to get you there… Huh.

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i wouldn’t obsess too much over win rates. those require too much context to get any information from

the pick rate is a more meaningful metric. the play rate for incas in RM settings (not just 1v1 ara/socotra) was abysmal before. it’s going to be even lower now

the civ needs to have something people want to play with instead of just being a worse version of other civs

civ tweaking is good for the game. but inca needed a buff

nerfing civs for some joke scenarios that don’t matter (like socotra) is bad. the nerfs were needed to the same 5 xbow+knight spammers that get picked 100% of the time, not the infantry civs that nobody was using

in this dumbed down RM environment with bad maps + position-picking, civs needs to be balanced for power not versatility. when you see the map before you pick civs and most of the pool is shallow pre-explored maps instead of proper RM maps, versatility doesn’t matter.

byzantine have the same problem. nobody wants to play them in normal-size RM games. they power crept all the other civs with UUs and UTs and superxbows and superknights, and this verstaile civ was left useless

3 Likes

I think it’s fitting to see the Burgundians as one of the top civs.

I am a bit worried however about the Malay, Burmese and Cumans because it seems they were hit hard by these patches.

That’s probably not surprising. The point of the civ was in team games to break the incredibly predictable and boring 2x archer flank 2x knight pocket meta. There is absolutely no sense in picking this civ for team games now (yes, I know they can do Arbs, but why pick this civ, rather than something like Britons or Chinese?). They are not as versatile as people think. Sorry, but the lack of stables is obviously a massive gaping hole in terms of versatility.

To be fair 49.38% is acceptable. But again, the play rate went from an already low 2% to cornering 1%… and I think it makes sense too, if you want a generalist civ, there are much better options than Incas. I expect that this play-rate will decrease further, as people will stop trying to explore a new way to play the civ and use a civ that works instead.

so basically the stats say that no one is happy with the changes :frowning:

Its because these buffs did not help cover any of the civ’s weaknesses. Just buff units that still aren’t viable in 1v1, plus nerfed the civ for islands.

This is the case for so many civs though. Civs that meaningfully get used in more than one way are rather the exception than norm.

Finally someone who actually plays the game speaks out.