Suggestion to nerf Malians differently than recent patch's approach

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

Malians are (if played correctly) having a hard powerspike in early/mid age3, after aging up with the Grand Fulani Corral.
Almost noone these days plays into Farimba.

Since the powerspike happens in age3, THAT should be addressed.
Malians are vulnerable early age2, if they wanna cow boom and age up quickly.
The patch made them EVEN MORE vulnerable, which is far from ideal.
Now they are even more all-or-nothing than before the patch and their mid-late feudal game got a nerf.
The feudal was never a problem.

In my opinion, instead of nerfing the base-value of the cow-passive, the Grand Fulani Corral should have been nerfed, possibly even more drastically than the current nerf on the base value.

Right now, their super lategame, which already was on the weaker side, was negatively affected, while their semi fast castle became even more risky and their mid/late feudal weaker.

This is imo a the very (!) wrong approach.
The Grand Fulani could have been nerfed from 20 to lets say 15 or even 12 food/minute for every cow.
When aging up to age4, it the bonus could have improved a little or even gone back to the original value.

For deeper understanding check the graph for winrate/gametime for Malians in Conqueror level, ranked 1v1 from aoe4 world.
As far as I know, no data from the recent patch have been applied yet.
So, this is the PRE-nerf Malians.
Soon the Post-nerf values will be available, I’m expecting an even more punished part of the graph in the first ~10-15 minutes.

Mali winrate time
Mali winrate time883Ă—660 45.5 KB

You can clearly see, that they tend to lose games in feudal age, if the game ends early.
This is their weak point when trying to cow boom.
Why punish that time-window even harder?
Instead, the spike after that should be addressed.
Which would be possible, by reducing the bonus of the Grand Fulani Corral in castle age and bringing it back up in Imperial age, where again the winrate drops significantly.
Probably even increase that bonus in Imperial age, while giving it a more noticeable nerf in age3.

Checking Diamond level:

Mali winrate time Diamond
Mali winrate time Diamond878Ă—673 38.2 KB

My idea of a mild lategame-buff through improving the Fulani Bonus slightly in Imperial age, but reducing it for Castle age, would be great.
As Malian’s winrate spikes hard in early/mid Castle age, but falls off significantly in lategame.

Last but not least, the Farimba landmark could become more viable, once the Fulani Corall has a weaker age3.

2

I suggested 2 thine happen. 3 If we’re being technical.

Revert the cow food rates but instead nerf pit mine and house HP.

Next buff musofadi. 50s stealth, 30s cooldown, healing during stealth move to feudal instead of castle and 95 base HP. Also while in stealth gain 15% movement speed.

the issue with mali is they are extremely one-dimensional.

It’s because their gold income is so consistent and hard to contest that they can setup cow boom. But a nerf to pitmine health and house health will not reduce their income IFF they can adequately defend those structures. Which at the moment they do very well.

That’s why we should make it harder to defend YET reintroduce the power of musofadi which was advertised as the playstyle of the faction. Ambushes and pocket raiding.

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3

Hello Devs, did you read this?
Malian seem to be receiving BIG hits.
Most of the matchups completely destroy them by now, some have near-70% winratio against them on Conqueror rank.
It is HIGH time you fix the cow-nerf and give them some love.
Malian is the new HRE, just worse.

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4

Alright, the new winrates are out.
In Dia+Conq, Malian have a weighted avg winratio of 45%.
I did the maths myself.
The problem is, that most civs, which are extremely popular on the ladder in high elo, completely demolish Malians. While Malians are kinda good against the less popular civs, but that doesn’t help, when you never face these ones and 90% of the time play against civs, that hardcounter yours and all in you in Feudal or semi-all in you, while going castle age behind and then take the map.
On top of that, the map pool is a catastrophe and Malians are unplaybable on many maps.

Devs, please do something.
I’m about to quit this game.

If you make a civ, then make it viable.
It is unacceptable that a civ is unplayable against 50% of the other civs and 80% of the popular civs.

Waiting for hotfix.

6

Alright, I have had enough.
Malians had 2 matchups with 35% win in conq last patch, now they have 4 matchups with 25% winchance to 38% winchance.
I was hoping the mu against Mongol and Otto last patch were the worst that could ever happen.

The most irrational thing is, to make a civ, which doesn’t have crossbows and men at arms (Malian) and then make a civ that has a unit (Limitanei), which ONLY effectively loses against men at arms.
Like, do you even think about the design of other civs, when you make a new one?

Not even talking about Abbasid, which has Camels, that hardcounter the only heavy frontline unit of Malians, the Sofa.
The Sofa/Musofadi are the only Malian units which can deal with the Gulams, but you can’t make Sofas becaue of the Camels.
Malians don’t have crossbows, remember that.
Like, come on…

It is nice that different civs have unique units and all, they have their own flavours, but why do you design civs in a way, that they just break the stone-scissor-paper system?

I guess I’ll quit aoe4, it’s really no fun anymore.
What is the purpose of mastering a civ, if the balancing team and civ-design team make that civ unplayable in just 4 months within a few patches?
Shouldn’t every civ be viable in this game?
On top of that, Malians underperform on almost every single map of the last 2 map-pools, compared to other civs.

The new controversial civs got added in at way too rapid speed and they are completely out of control.
6 civs in a single patch is just way too much. Max 1-2 per year would be OK, not nice but OK.
But not 6 assymetrical civs with broken mechanics that change the whole stone-scissor-paper system in one single patch.

If you wanna spam civs, at least make them all viable and more symmetrical like in aoe2.
Asymmetrical civs are nice, but they take time and care to develop in order to keep them balanced.
You can’t just throw 6 super asymmetrical civs into already 10 existing super asymmetrical civs.

The same happened to aoe3DE, which is now unplayable.
A good year after its release, when it improved in terms of stability, performance and QOL features, the game was nice.
But then the spamming of civs and mercenary units, revolts and all that startet and the game went down the drain.
I’m seeing the exact same thing now happen to aoe4, but probably worse, as some civs have weaknesses that can’t be compensated for and others have strengths, which really hit into that spot.

To the extend that Malians have 25% (!!!) winratio against Abbasid in conq.
Basically, if you wanna win against a conq1 Abbassid, you gotta be a conq3 Malian.
Probly even then you won’t have a chance.

Similar against Byzantines, HRE, Delhi, Otto, Darc, OOTD.
7 matchups between 25 and 47.6% winchance.

The thing is, some of these civs are very popular right now, so you play against your hardcounter for the majority of your matches, as you can’t control what the enemy play in the ladder, unlike in tournaments, where you have a chance to counterpick or ban civs.

Just played some matches and feels like every 2nd match you play vs Byzantines or Abbasid eco wing.
There is abolutely nothing you can god damn do as Malians to win the match if the enemy is playing on a similar skill-level.
Recent ram buffs and Malian nerfs didn’t make it any better.

I did the maths with yesterday’s data and calculated the weighted avg win chance of Malians in Conq.
Got out 45%.
Like, for real?

16 civs, some of them having completely unreasonable mechanics (like byz spearmen), is just way too much.
You can’t make a civ without men at arms and crossbows and give spears that beat anything except men at arms to another civ.

7

You’re making me fancy playing malians again…hmmmm

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8

How so, if I may ask?

10

in my opinion I find the civs that are harder to play/win to be the most fun for me; in my endeavor to engineer victory!

Typically, I go about trying non standard play to see if something has been overlooked.

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11

Malians do seem to have dropped to bottom of the win rates pretty much at all ranks.

I don’t think limitanei should be that much of an issue in 1v1 ranked, you don’t want to let byz go imperial and spam them out, you should have your power spike before they do once you hit castle. Byz are slow to get going and archers with poisoned arrows should cost effectively beat limitanei, especially with bs techs.

I haven’t played malians but after reading this I will try them out, anyway aren’t musofadi basically your crossbow equivalent? I also believe them to be quite a good unit. Gulams are quite expensive in regards to their actual combat effectiveness, you should be able to trade well. I do agree that the camels basically make cav ineffective though.

I think it is too early to judge with only 30 games of that match up played at conqueror level, malians are definitely on the lower side of the win rates across ranks even so it is highly unlikely that the win rate be as low as 25% once 500 games have been played.

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12

Exactly…
The meta changed, the balancing changed and Malians got an (imo) wrong nerf instead of a small rework for the cows/Fulani.
Hence I opened this thread right after the (imo wrongly) applied nerf.
I knew this was gonna happen and now it did.
It seems incredible to me, that the balancing-team could not recognize the issues of the way that nerf was done.

Well, after getting all-ined in Feudal age over and over including Byz rams, I started to watch pro matches.
First of all, currently almost noone in higher elo plays Malians, because they struggle HARD against current meta civs.
Well and what I saw is, that they also mostly die in Feudal to Byzantines, even if they go heavy mass army and no huge cowboom or anything greedy.
Because they know the Byz WILL push and try and end them.
The Limitanei are incredibly effective in disabling Malian Javelins.
As the Javelins by nature do very little dps/cost against spearmen, but Limitanei have a damage-reduction on top if chosen.
You can combine the Limitanei with horsemen, longbows, javelins or keshiks, depending on what you need.
In age3, Landsknecht units and varangian guard units come on top.
To understand this, one has to play Malians and experience it.
They just have no frontline and rely on kiting. But when the enemy does a deathpush and their units almost don’t take damage from your backline while their backline shreds your frontline, there is not much you can do before your (forward) pitmine(-s) are/is gone.
It’s a handicap match which in 5 years we’ll read legends about.

Musofadi are great to kill isolated men at arms. Against Gulas they are less effective, but still favoured ressource-wise.
Gulams have higher dps, more speed and more hp than maa, which makes them a specialist unit against low armor target, not just to tank them, but also to shred them.
They offer a really high value/ressource and I personally think they are better than Maa almost generally, near OP.
So the combination of units is the problem.
When an Abbassid player goes Gulam + Archer (composite bows), a few spearmen and optionally a few camels to debuff potential Sofas and maybe even a Mango (they build them on the field, you can’t compete with that), you are pretty much done as Malian.
It’s basically a superhard-counter to Malians. On top of that, the Eco of Abba scales incredibly well. When you play against them and don’t hurt them bad really early, you have no much of a chance.
Not having crossbows and men at arms makes it very much more difficult here.
You don’t have a frontline because you can’t mass Sofas against abba, plus their spearmen are lethal due to phalanx and bootcamp, but you need something to kill the Gulams, which then is only Musofadi warriors.
These again get pulverized by their backline archers, which only need very little micro, because your Musos are naturally running towards the frontline.
That means, you can only fight when you outmass them heavily, otherwise dodge fights.
Mostly, the Abba outmasses you after a few minutes, when going Eco wing.
The old meta was going military wing age2, which is also great against Malians and secures either a fast age-up behind it or a 2nd tc.
If you go Mili wing and stable+range, the Malian can’t really hurt you early, as your infantry is really strong with bootcamp and your first 4 units are free and instant.
If the Malian masses early instead of going 2nd pitmine and cowboom, you will outscale him HARD very quickly but most likely still hold easily against an early pressure.

I honestly don’t think so.
What changed this patch, is, that Malians don’t get demolished AS bad anymore by Otto and have a slightly better chance vs Mongols than before, against many other civs their chances went down due to changes/buffs of other civs.
My bet is, Malians will have not more than 35% win vs Abba in conq level, once we have higher sample sizes.
Most likely around 25-30%.

If you go through the current highest ranked players histories, almost noone these days plays Malians.
The pickrate is extremely low, because the civ struggles in many popular matchups.
Except of some top-top pros, who are just good with whatever they play, due to being mechanically better than the enemy or having a higher apm/better multitasking/understanding of the game.

Edit:
A few more matches have been played and tracked now.
Malian winrate against Abba falls off more and more, the higher the elo is.
At Platinum ELO the wr is already only 40.8% (120 matches), at Diamond 37.1% (70 matches), at Conqueror 27.8% (36 matches) and at Conq IV 0% (5 matches).
I think, it is pretty obvious, that Malians need some help in the coming patch.
Probably give them men at arms in age3.
Maybe that would be too drastic though, not sure.
The fact that the Sofa is their only tanky frontline unit, is extremely problematic vs certain civs like HRE, Abba, Byz.
Something HAS to be done about this or these other civs have to be changed.
It just can not happen, that a civ has a winratio of less than 30% against other civs in high elo.

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13

They never fixed the market issue??? You get tolls on both passes going either direction vut it appears the toll values are promxity based as if eaxh outpust is a mini neutral market???

Mansa query being THE DEFAULT landmark is part of the issue with the stagnant playstyle of the civ.

The Outpost landmark is UNDERWHELMING because it cant get any defensive upgrades, trade is bugged and is no longer a thing for Mali early (like it is for mongols for example), and it has no other benefits??

Musofadi warriors have been relegated to nothingness. Yes, they use to be too efficient but now they’re functional but not special. They SHOULD be able to see thru sleath forest? it would make them functional if their sleath mode lasted 60s and recharged every 30s and their LOS was the 2nd biggest to scouts. They’re lackluster as raiding units bc their dps isnt high enough to kill villagers quickly, nor does their sleath last long enough to sneak in really close from a reasonable distance away.

If mali could force the enemy to flinch when it comes to expanding on the map, then mali cow boom and pitmines would respectably outlast a generic civ turtle boom.

14

Situation hasn’t changed at all.
28.6% win(40 matches) vs Abba in Conq.
35.5% vs HRE (31m)
36.2% vs Byz (47m)
41.2% vs Delhi (17m)
and 43.8% vs Jean (32)

Something has to be done about it.

In top conq it’s even worse, very small sample size though.
Because noone even tries to play Malians up there any more on regular basis.

3 matchups with over 50% win, 9 matchups with 33.3% to 0 % win.

Average 32.8% win.
Amazing!