-60% clearly is too much and makes Poles OP, but what percentage would make the tech fair? Keep in mind that the investment of getting a Castle + cost of UT must be factored into the final Knight price also.
Increase the cost from 500f 300g to 700f 500g, how comes this tech is way cheaper than chieftians (that also needs to cost less than now) and still Poles have 2 eco bonuses while vikings one.
The 60% should stay as is because the lack of Plate barding armor and Paladin.
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is full Imperial age Cavalier suddenly so bad it needs help? +4 armor basically matters only vs archers, Poles Knights are still insanely cost-effective vs any melee civ except niche stuff like Teutons Knights and maybe Boyars, I reckon they trade insanely vs anything else.
Imperial age Cavalier spam is as oppressive as late Castle age full Knights imo.
Just make the tech more expensive as other have said. It’s interesting option. The problem with Poles is that they have 2 (good) eco bonuses
Is like whole idea of the UT because the lack of halbs vs cavalry.
Is OP in imperial but at least there’s an obvious downgrade here, but go and check how pros abuse the UT in castle age to the point opponent is just forced to go Imperial (because can’t stay anymore in castle age).
Making it more expensive is the way as it makes harder to go to such OP knight spam.
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I would make it cheaper but also reduce the effect to values like 33 % or maybe 40 %.
It’s still a strong tech then, but would change it to be more a nice pickup in mid to late castle age than a new “button”.
I remember that Hera and Liereyy in Several games in Warlords just banned Gurjaras, Burgundians and Poles. It seems that they just don’t want to deal with any of these “broken” things in their games.
And Poles have a lot going for them even without that tech. It’s really unnecessary to give it to them.
Then is just simply slightly better than Berber/Portuguese discounts.
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Perfect balance would be Increasing the cost and switching the tech to imperial age.
But poles have insane eco bonus and Berbers, Portuguese basically have nothing else outside of that discount.
I don’t mind percentage become lower.
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Poles have insane tech tree also, with FU Arbalester, SE Bombard Cannon, for some reason they even get Siege Ram.
Also them mining gold from stone gives them far greater spammability of gold units, basically they play with 4 additional gold piles before you count the extra golds.
Oh the UU is insane, probably like top 5, not quite as good as Mangudai or Coustillier, but it’s up there.
Poles can play a low eco Byzantines spam style too with something like Obuch + Skirm.
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I wouldn’t mind seeing it tuned down to 50% because in some specific situations the cavalier spam is so obnoxious but generally I’d agree with other people that the problem isn’t imp. Most civs either halb, camels or even cav archers work great here.
The way I see it the cheap knights are most broken in late castle age. After poles got their boom going when opponent clicks imp you click UT and easily have all the food and gold to spam knights from a lot of stables. You create a mess in your opponents eco and then decide if you continue to push, maybe forward castle and rams or halt production for 1 min and click imp yourself.
That strat is way too strong imo which is why I’d also prefer the cost increase of the UT.
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Make It 33% and why in the world i would use Poles cav when i Need a Castle and a tech to have worse cav than portuguese for slight cheaper?
I mean portuguese have FU Cavalier with 60 Gold cost from the start without needing anithing and everyone considers portuguese somehow UP…
Poles have 30 Gold knight (half cost) but no last armor and requires a Castle and a tech. Make It 33% and they cost about 50 gold, so only 10 Gold less than portuguese. Would be trash
I think 50% is the lowest It can go, but the main reason why Poles are OP, as some pros like Viper already have addressed, is their broken eco with double eco bonus for no reason
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I don’t think Camel even remotely counters Poles Knight spam, Camel trades about 1:1 vs Castle age variant and Imperial Camel trades about 1:1 vs Paladin (wrecks Cavalier).
in early Imp too because you get +4 attack and Cavalier upgrade and with Poles eco getting Imp is not very hard.
Well I meant camels vs cavalier so obviously heavy camel which works pretty well even vs spam. In castle age camels indeed dont do the job vs knight spam.
Can be good if you can use mobility to raid. But in a straight up fight vs cav counters the strat doesn’t work too well in my experience. It’s still a decent strat I think but also it’s certainly not op imo.
wouldn’t be so sure about that. Heavy Camel might have a slight edge vs Cavalier, but long-term Poles can spam Cavalier forever, while you can’t spam Camel forever. Ultimately in Imp, gold efficiency also matters and you are trading a 60g unit vs a 30g one, technically if we assume food is a trash resource, each Camel must kill 2 Cavaliers for it to be worth it and we all know that that won’t happen.
Poles have 3 eco bonuses. The crazy thing is how well they synergize. If you are playing them, you have folwarks, which grants you extra food. This extra food means you can have fewer on food, and move those vils to stone. This means you’ll collect enough stone for a castle way faster, while also gathering enough gold for age up. Now you get to castle age, quickly build a castle and get Szlachta Privileges. You only need to really invest 5+ vils in gold at this point.
But it just gets better. Cheaper knights means you need less gold to begin with, but you also gain gold from stone. This means you can produce far more knight like units than your opponent ever can.
On top of all these, you have insanely strong winged hussars, which will destroy both archers and champions (the supposed trash counter).
If you nerf the gold mining bonus, you’ll nerf everything else. IMO, nerf it to 1 gold per 4 stone and everything else will fall into place.
I think that you need to nerf the eco bonus first
I’d start with the stone/gold bonus, then the folwark and then the HP regeneration on vills before nerf Szlachta Privileges
I had this situation quite often by now. Most of the time on closed maps which might change things but my experience is cavalier spam doesn’t work vs heavy camel.
Poles can ofc make obuch and that’s when it really depends what your civ has to offer here and if you don’t get a transition fast enough you might die vs poles melee spam.
From the games I had here pure cavalier spam vs heavy camel only works if you get a lot of siege behind and kill your opponents defenses and production buildings.
closed maps changes things a lot imo.