I will never get that whole deal with “random positions will make everything better”. If they remove position picking, then people will pick Huns/Chinese or whatever are the best civs that can do both flank and pocket. If you enforce random while thinking there are OP flank/pocket civs, then it eans you’re OK with the luckiest team winning?
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Imo one part of a solution could be to reduce gold income from trade but give a bit of wood + food instead.
Would make it harder to sustain gold heavy unit production and therefore reduce the power of the gold units.
But it’s obvious it can only play a part, there must be civ bonusses that make the other unit types stronger aswell.
If trade generates food and wood, doesn’t it mean you can just delete lumberjacks and farmers to free up space for more trade cart and get as much gold as before?
Come on man let’s be respectful to each other. Please! This is a topic discussion not a complain. 36% on theory may seem like a normal value but in practice with a 40+ mass of archers is a different scenario.
Open up the scenario editor and test that then come back and be honest with us.
Also I didn’t say double I said nearly double. So what’s with the defensive attitude? Don’t worry just put forward your disagreement like I did with supporting arguments.
Not if you read my proposal carefully.
But for me it currently looks like you want to “misunderstand” things.
Man, if you like the current stale team meta just speak your word, don’t make THIS type of game, it’s a shame!
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Which is still very wrong. It would start to sound kinda true if Ethiopian had +50% faster firing arbs, but any value below that is actually closer to no increase than double. So I would be more right to claim that Ethiopian archers are bad because they have almost no bonus than you to claim they are OP because they have almost twice the fire rate.
There is no need to because Ethiopian archers have the same damage as normal archers, so they are only ever going to be 36% better than an equivalent mass of no thumb ring archer. Scenario editor is also pretty bad to evaluate real game situations and especially with units that rely on micro.
Ok:
-you compared Eth archers after researching thumb ring to no thumb ring archers. But if their civ doesn’t have thumb ring when the Ethiopians could afford to research despite their less than stellar eco then they likely don’t have it and are likely not an archer civ. And is it unfair that Ethiopians archers are much better than the archers of a civ supposed to have bad archers? Of course not!
-You can’t expect people to agree when you walk in saying blatantly wrong stuff. When you say Ethiopian camels or Britons champs matter in TG you just sound like you watched too much old SotL vids.
If I wanted to defend the current meta then I would have been against the most important part of your proposal, the gold reduction. Which I didn’t say anything against. I don’t get how I’m misunderstanding the proposal, if trade gives you food and wood, then surely you would have an excess of those ressources if you kept the same eco balance as with the current system, so you would delete vills to avoid that, and you could use the freed pop space to build more trade carts. Which means same gold as with current system, unless you’re nerfing the gold yield insanely hard.
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- Trade income (effectively) is way lower than practically every standard ressource (only if you have few trade units and a clear path it comes even close to farming)
- Trade is very costly to set up
- You would need even more trade which woul lead to less efficiency
- I said we could add only a bit of wood and food, not as much as we take away gold. The thing is, if we reduce gold income of trade by say 40 % or so the overall income would be terribly low for the investment, that’s why we need some of the other ressource to compensate. How much is another question, but it shouldn’t be more than we take away gold
Edit: Sorry if I misunderstood you there, I just was irritated by your response.
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Makes more sense this way
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I agree with you Franks have the best paladin late game no doubt. Maybe something should be done to trim down the power spike they get in imperial. But then again back to the original argument are they countered in castle age with the regular counters e.g. Pikes, Monks? Yes, they are countered unlike Britons. The same question goes for Mayans? Yes, I know Mayans are top tier archery civ and are amongst the best but Mangonels and skirmishers still counter them.
No, Huns cav archers aren’t generic, being 20% cheaper is a strength, but at the same time lack Ring Archer Armor (Main complaint for Mayans lol)
Yes, I agree that’s a good balance to compensate for the cheap ca, they removed Ring armor upgrade to give trash units like skirmishers a chance to counter ca.
Then again feel free to suggest a small change that does not harm them or introduce new issues.
But you can counter both of those civs with a big rams push and skirms, with a cavalry team mate to take out their mangonels. Especially if you have some kind of bonus like Byzantine cheap skirms or Cuman castle age capped rams. Their extra range doesn’t matter as much with elite skirms with +2 armour because you’ll be able to tank their arrows while you push with rams so you’ll force them into a fight at their base where they can’t just kite away with hit and run. Focus your rams on taking out their ranges first so they can’t keep up with crossbow production and then they’ll have to waste more wood to rebuild back ranges, meaning less wood for military production.
Ethiopians and Britons are predictable. If you know what’s coming you can prepare for it. My guess is you keep losing to it so you think it’s overpowered.
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Ok:
-you compared Eth archers after researching thumb ring to no thumb ring archers. But if their civ doesn’t have thumb ring when the Ethiopians could afford to research despite their less than stellar eco then they likely don’t have it and are likely not an archer civ. And is it unfair that Ethiopians archers are much better than the archers of a civ supposed to have bad archers? Of course not!-You can’t expect people to agree when you walk in saying blatantly wrong stuff. When you say Ethiopian camels or Britons champs matter in TG you just sound like you watched too much old SotL vids.
Finally the one and only CactusSteak putting an argument 
.
Look Cactus, the fact that in Castle Age Ethiopians benefit from the double thumb ring is problematic. That’s all I was trying to get to not remove their other bonuses or remove their camels. If we want to talk about what’s unfair it’s definitely not this topic. Notice the title keywords: Britons, Ethiopians, Castle Age and Mangonels. Then take a good look at the balance suggestions I put forward.
I’m sorry but I think you are dragging the conversation away from the main point that is to keep Castle Age reasonable for every civ because look… the game is all about diversity but when you queue up in ranked It’s completely the opposite.
Well said. Agree wholeheartedly.
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Well you would have made your life easier if you said double thumb ring earlier and not tried to make it look super big. And you might not be lobbying to nerf Ethiopian/Briton cav and infantry but you still used them as arguments despite them being irrelevant to the matter at hand.
Anyway I don’t feel like I’m saying something controversial if I state that “double thumb ring” for Ethiopians is fine, most people agree it’s balanced for this civ and that they would be pretty bad if they had no thumb ring, because without it it would mean that Ethiopian archers are just straight worse than those of other archer civs as soon as said civs click Thumb ring.
You point out that I didn’t speak of mangonels, but tbh since Ethiopian archers have to get in range like any other archer it’s unfair to compare them to Britons. And they are worse against mangonels than Bohemian xbows with chemistry, rattan archers and geneose xbow since those guys deal 2 damage to the mangonel instead of 1. Which is actually a double increase in DPS.
And it’s all nice and well to want more diversity, but then why don’t you stop and consider the explanations of the people who told you that Britons and Ethiopians with your nerfs = 2 less viable civs in 1v1 and uncontested Mayan domination in TG?
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It sounds great, but in practice Ethiopian Crossbows still lose to Vietnamese or Italian Crossbows (after Pavise) with equal numbers. With equal resources spent, Ethiopian crossbows lose to Mayans, Portuguese and even Persians trash bows. They are about evenly matched with Koreans crossbows (which save only 5 wood).
Ethiopian archers do beat Britons’ (barely with equal numbers, ignoring creation speed bonus), and they are fun and easy to micro. They do a good job of preventing melee units from closing the distance, and don’t suffer from overkill as much as some other high DPS ranged units. They’re better than generic archers, but far from overpowered IMO.
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Only in 1v1, in TG the faster ROF is clearly better. Still, I think Mayans and Britons are the better flanks than Ethiopians.
The problem isn’t Ethiopians though but the stale meta that favours cav + archer civs with good scaling.
I will bring the table of nerfing S tier civs:
Mayans:
- Archer discount now is 10%/15%/20%.
- Longer lasting resources nerfed from 15% to 10%
- El Dorado cost raised from 750F and 450G to 900f and 600G
- Elite Plumed Archer -1 range, cost adjusted so is cheaper than Mayan arbalest post nerf.
Also add that Eagle warrior food cost has to be raised to 30F
About Britons:
As for the range, I wouldn’t disagree if we nerf their extra range, currently their extra range makes Britons close to undealable with skirmishers and mangonels at early castle age, as their Xbows are comfy to abuse this range all time, you could move all range to Yeomen (+2 Range), in compensation increase the Longbow range by 1 (Like how the Lithuanians change work) so Britons players are more motivated to invest into castles and transition into Longbowmen as their main archer unit, so in this sense, Britons gain even +1 range in castle age than before, but their arbalester is strictly with less range in Imperial.
Franks:
- Chivalry effect changed (From 40% fast working Stables) to the former Burgundian bonus (Fallen Knights return 33% of the gold cost, aka 24G is gained per killed Knight).
- Cavalry HP bonus now applies starting at the castle age.
I agree, I prefer the Ethiopian offensive bonus over most. Vietnamese and Italians defensive bonuses aren’t great once they are behind a meat shield, which is also where Britons really shine since they can be a safe distance from the front line. Ethiopians also lack a good option for meat shield, in late game archer vs archer battles. Halbs get shredded, they don’t get champions or elephants, shotels have low HP, and their cavalry is missing both bloodlines and plate barding. Admittedly this is mostly a 1v1 problem since allies are the meatshield in TG’s.
In TG’s the cost reduction bonuses (Mayans, Ports, Koreans) lose a lot of value once you’re at pop cap and with a good trade economy, while military bonuses remain good. Persian trashbows are also pretty useless at that point, so maybe Ethiopians stand out just by process of elimination.
I just find it interesting that in crossbow vs crossbow fights the Ethiopians are somewhere around #7 or #8. I think it puts some perspective on the strength of their bonus.
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Britons and Ethiopians are two of the strongest foot archers civs in the game and it is understandable that the counter to their especially strong units is to counter with your strongest counters e.g. fully upgraded skirmishers or lightcav/hussars (especially in terms of cost effectiveness)
Onagers are ok, but they are a bit more general gold unit, despite it being strong againt archers
Often against especially strong units the 2nd best counters may not be enough and the top best counter response should be used
Arbalesters with 11 range still dim the longbow.
I would suggest to just +1 range in imperial and +1 range for longbow, so there would be the arbalesters with 10 range and the elite longbow with 12 range, while the range of regular arbalesters is 8.
We also can do something more to reduce the range of British arbalesters to 9, which is just 1 more than regular, but that needs Thumb Ring back to tech tree.
That is bad. It makes the +18% faster bonus basically similar to free Thumb Ring but is the worse one.
If you wanna remove Thumb ring to nerf them, you can change the +18% bonus into that +10%/+20%/+30% or +9%/+18%/+27% in feudal/ castle/ imperial age. But it would make the accuracy unable to be 100%, so I just suggest to keep Thumb ring and maybe change the bonus into +5%/+10% in the castle/imperial age.
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For the Franks, I suggest to make them have to pay as same price as Bloodline for the +20% HP bonus. For the Mayans, maybe no longer gain 1 villager more when the game starts?
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I love the firing speed distribution over the ages It sounds more logical and indeed a better idea . Thanks for sharing <3