Due to other nerfs and global changes, Malta needs to have some nerfs reversed altogether:
Revert 2% XP nerf
Buff Age IV Sentinel Card: Retain 2-pop muskets, however Increase stats by 50%, increase cost by 35% only, and increase range by 2 (keep the +2 LOS intact).
Reduce cost of German Tongue by 25w to 425w.
Slightly improve non-German Tongue cards by adding a +1% HP bonus to them per tongue card sent.
Russia:
Slightly slow across the board. New changes were welcome but did not help balance and were underwhelming.
Change the starting five 100f crates to one giant 500f crate. Helps very slightly and only very early game.
Decrease villager cost to 255f, putting each villager cost to 85f. Scaling for this is minimal.
Increase Poruchnik base HP by 15 to 135 so they scale better for their cost. CM breaking point unaffected.
Ottomans:
Azap rush is officially a cheese rush that is too powerful too fast and a no-brainer opening due to their speed, range, and siege combo in one unit and just how fast so many of them can be made and afforded early game.
Increase Azap train time by 3 seconds.
Increase Azap cost by 5f.
Reduce Azap siege damage by 1.
India:
Still an absolute powerhouse despite recent changes (buffs mostly cancelled out the nerfs).
Increase house cost by 5w.
China:
Also still a powerhouse despite changes.
Increase cost of village by 5w.
Italy:
Fort Spam.
Retain ability of architects to build forts, but add 200w 200c cost to Forts built by architects. This makes Forts have a 66% discount rather than being for free.
Double the build time of forts, so instead of taking 16 seconds with full architects and freemasons, have it take 32 seconds.
These changes will keep the strategy open as an option but make it more punishable.
Would actually prefer to see each card do +1% hp for Tongue units than getting more. Otherwise looks good.
I like 1. Don’t know about 2.
Have to be careful with the Poruchiks. Once you send New Order Regiments they need an extra shot to kill. Maybe 4.5 speed would be a safer buff?
I’d still like to see +1 range at vet and guard and remove the range increase from Strelet Horde.
Ottomans, India and Chinese nerfs look well calibrated.
Might still be too cheap/too fast building. I might say remove the requirement to send the fort card (meaning just send Freemasons) and have them cost a bit more (50% cost?) and maybe add +8 more seconds.
I would say, let the foundations of Forts still be laid by the Explorer, but Architects can help the Explorer build them. Therefore, construction is faster but costs the same.
Supremacy balance is in the absolute trash. can’t win a single game now as brits. I also feel like every single patch, there is a wave of either extremely good smurfs or people are somehow exploiting and revealing the map. it is uncanny every ********************** game
People are fielding the perfect # of troops to counter what you have, every single game now - you turtle, they rush + unit spam, you build an army, it’s countered perfectly by what they have
I disagree, the xp curve nerf has been brutal to India’s ability to have access to their powerful shipments in time which was what the core of their gameplay was based on.
Any further nerf would render them unplayable.
I would argue for the opposite instead, give them back their pre-nerf shipment xp, and then we can have a conversation on adding +5w to the cost of their houses.
The Freemasons card (Age 3) gives architects +25% speed and +65% build rate and enables them to build outposts and walls.
You start off with 1 architect and get access to one more with each age up (200c).
My question is: why does this card exist in the first place. The build rate penalty exists specifically to counter the free building cost. If you have a card that negates this, you’re basically undoing the biggest balance point you have on the unit.
We’re all complaining about how 5 architects with freemasons build a free fort in 15 sec in Age 5. How is that any more broken than being able to build every other building in 10 seconds or less for free? At its core, the problem here is the 65% build speed bonus combined with allowing 5 architects to build on the same structure at once (which also significantly reduces build time). No one complained about a single architect hammering away at a fort for 20 minutes or whatever it is at baseline. And the devs thought the -65% build time on the card wasn’t broken in and of itself. Put another way, it’s the multiplicative stacking of the bonuses here yields unintended effects.
So if we want to fix it at its root cause, do we:
allow only 1 architect to build on a building at once, but keep the -65% build time on Freemasons
nerf the -65% build time on Freemasons card so much that when stacked with 5 architects, it is no longer considered “too powerful”
The card is fine the issue is that the forts build time is the same as a regular outpost whether you send freemasons or not which is obviously a bug. If the forts build time was very slow but freemasons somewhat alleviated it that’s fine but it should be lowering the build time of a fort with 5 architects and freemasons to like 60 seconds not 15 seconds like an outpost.
I don’t think constructing with multiple builders needs to be banned outright. Just make them like other villagers where additional builders don’t contribute linearly to construction speed (2 villagers build less than twice as fast).
They should just split the effects between two cards so you don’t get such insane utility out of a single card. Something like this.
As for the current issue with Forts, it sounds like that’s just a bug exploit that will eventually be fixed.
Is it really fine though? It’s not just forts that can be built for free nearly instantly, it’s every building in the game: TCs, estates, anything. People are complaining about the forts, but the effect isn’t limited to forts. Get to Age 5, buy 5 architects, send a card, and you can build your entire base for free, not just the forts. IMO, that’s too powerful. The trade-off with architects is resource cost for time. You pay in time and this mechanic removes that cost. IMO, it’s too strong as a mechanic and the solution is to remove the card entirely, not to merely require a second card to break the balance.
I’m still a fan of applying moderate nerfs and see where the strategy goes from there. Killing it completely takes away its novelty. Having it as a novelty to begin with is interesting and should be more high risk for the reward, which are what my suggestions allow.
Reaching Age 5 frequently happens outside of Treaty? Italy is considered one of the two worst civs in treaty so I don’t think imperial age free forts are all that powerful, or free buildings, when we’re talking about the imperial age.
Personally I’d set the build limit of architects to 1 at age 1 and increase the build limit through a church or Lombard tech like how ottomans increase villager build limits. That would address supremacy balance pretty easily with multiple architects without messing up Italy in treaty (which needs some major buffs at the moment).
Treaty exists. I don’t play it, but it exists. The devs have made an effort to create balance in the game at the Post-Imperial phase. That’s a good thing.
I play vs AI (in teams). Age 5 always happens. In 1v1 vs human opponents, you may indeed be right.
I made that point because I thought you were saying the issue doesn’t matter because those supremacy games don’t see Age 5 and therefore never see the situation where you could use this exploit. That argument I disagree with, but if that wasn’t what you were saying, I apologize for misunderstanding
hausas ageup time in painful and their age 1 is already difficult to get vills cued up on time, why would their starting food be the thing that needs nerfing???