First of all, thanks for a new themed event. It gave me a great opportunuty to play the Teutons galore and have a much better taste of this civ. However I’ve been noticing some patterns that a typical Teutons play falls into. So I’ve had a few thoughts on what may be wrong with them.
What I have problems with are their unique techs Ironclad and Crenellations. The former is a Castle age tech and the latter is Imperial, and I do believe this needs to be swapped.
I would assume that the towers in competitive AOE see most of their use in Feudal age when they can do damage, apply pressure and control territorry, while Castle age units render them pretty useless. The Teutons’ extra garrison bonus and Castle Age crenellation would emphasise a distinctive strategy of a slow encroaching / tower push. At this phase it would be incredibly usefull to garrison towers with spearmen that can provide extra arrow fire and ungarrison to see away a ram or a few knights. This could be a great Castle age push or defensive strat.
Ironclad, on the contrary, provides you with a somewhat useless siege melee armor during the phase when all you have is a couple of mangos or rams and you micro them anyway. This would be much more accute in Imperial Age when a player might consider switching to mass siege in hopes to overwhelm trash spam or make a siege deathball or whatnot. This is the situation when any extra siege armor would really pay off.
Lastly, these famous extra melee armor Paladins are also a misdesign in my opinion. This is an extremely powerful unit and, honestly, there is not much sense currently to invest in ranged / towers / crenellations techs or playing really anything else than post-imp Teutons Paladins. In the end, we simply get one more Franks civilization and miss all the fun of the unique Teutons style since there’s not much point to go after their unique techs and bonuses if you want to win.
They seem somehow balanced to me. Yrah, it could have been made ina different way, but i think it’s okay. Maybe +2 for paladins it’s too much and should be +1, but besides that i think is fine
I prefer siege/keep/halberdier pushes against archer civs, especially cavalry archers. Due to no Husbandry, I see the +1 bonus cavalry armor as a buff to defending a boom over an attacking buff, at least until the +2 bonus. Doubly so with the Teuton’s faster growing food economy, conversion resistance, and double Monk healing range. I think Teuton Castles are strong enough without Castle Age Crenellations, as alongside free Murder Holes and the anti-melee/ram Teutonic Knight, Teuton Castles have the very underrated free Herbal Medicine. Spirit of the Law recently released a video titled “Is Healing Worth It?” with a section for showing the speed of Herbal Medicine Castle healing (though I knew its speed before the video), and it’s up to ten times faster healing than one Monk, depending on the number of damaged units. With free fortification upgrades, double garrison space, and cheaper farms, Teutons could even justify an Archer opening into defensive Crossbows and towers, which might setup an easier transition into siege/keep/halberdier because the economy is already setup for wood, gold, and stone.
Iron Clad is more useful in the late Imperial Age where the extra armor is more noticeable against trash units, I agree. Though I’d still keep it in the Castle Age for the few times where it may be useful against full Camels, or for Battering Rams due to the melee armor countering the “bonus” damage from Villagers, Chu Ko Nus, and Kipchaks which comes from the Battering Ram’s base negative melee armor.
Crenmeelation in castle age would be too strong in my opinion.
+2 armor on both all Infatry and all cavalry. . Imagine this bonus back in Aoc. The bonus is just too broadly spread!
Teuronix knights are also less unique now with armored champions.
I have suggested it before but here again:
Change the +1/+2 free armor to siege only. And change ironclad to give +1 to Infatry and cav and +2 to siege.
In total same armor for siege, only +1 to cav and Infatry and it need a castle age tech first.
Alternatively change the armor bonus to cav only atleast to remove the competition with their unique unit.
Even thought the winrates indicate that teutons are balanced (a bit on the stronger sight), I see this as a illusion with buffs outdoing each other and being too extreme(see Leithis, keshik prices, goth getting free loom which was removed from aztec back in aoc because op… ).
These overbuffs balance each other s winrates out when all civs are op in their on way, it is not the way I would like the game, balanced.
Tbh the garrisoned infantry fires extra arrows feature is rather useless anyways. If you get crenellations you’d do that for the castle range. Also more range for castle in castle age doesn’t sound balanced to me. But irrespective of that crenellations would probably be too costly to ever get it in castle age either way. Certainly it doesn’t make much sense for towers shooting extra arrows.
And more generally, the thing about Teutons is that they might be the single best arena civ while they have weaknesses on open maps (bad archers and no husbandry). So what the extra melee armor achieves is making up for their slower knights while on closed maps this isn’t all that important (nice for scout fights for relics, though). Conversely, if you buffed Teutons’ push potential you’d even make them stronger on these kinds of maps where they are already super hard to win against.
What the fuck are you talking about? if the bonus is so broken FE could just reversed that three patches ago, and what proof you have that the melee armor bonus is broken? Are the Teutons too abused with this?, this invalidates any of their weakness? Did you heard any pro nowdays saying that is OP?
I heard Viper and Nili criticizing it as well. And FE is not very eager right now to adress bad balance, they are busy with saving AoE3 from being a failure. But yeah if you just look at open arabia maps you see teutons being at 52% which is their worst land map arguably then you know that they must be OP on arena, which they are with 60% which is way more than aztecs could ever dream off on arabia.
The same that criticized the EA buff yet it helped them to be much better, Pro opinion is valuable but not a god final word.
AOE3 DE well… just wait and see
Aztecs are like 4 times stronger in Arabia than Teutons in high levels to be honest, and why you get concerned about that, I prefer see them being strong in that map than a weak civ
you missunderstood me. I tried to say it in my post before. Their winrate appears to be balanced and i dont think teutons are extremlez opl like cumans were at the start.
I strongly dislike the design, the idea behind adding armor to basically everything for free. Making the unique think about the Teutonic knight less unique.
free tech here, free armor there, boring uninspired buff getting tossed around and also suggested.
They didnt need a stronger palading, they had cheaper farms to offset husbadry in a way. They didnt need armored champions, they got teutonic knights. I dont like adding “random” bonuses which are so far unused that marginally fit the theme to buff civs that the community demmed “bad”.
Teutons didnt even need the buff, they were good (average in winrate slightly below 50%, just not the best on open maps), not very mobile, so the pros disliked playing them. It literally needed the best paladins + cheaper farms for them to get played.
Its breaking the game with ever more strong bonuses.
Be lucky that they had Malians with the PA bonus already otherwise Goths would have got extra pierce armour on all their melee units as well to balance the mean lack of two armour upgrades in imp just to stop being badly designed. And more PA is THematicaLLY fitting
If teutons were the slow but armoury civ from the beginning why they still have squires ? Why were they without silly free armour each age on top on the blacksmith upgrades for 20 years then ? Or is that just a cheap explanation to justify the lazy buff with just refering to their UU ;D
New Tatar bonus: All units can collect gold
New Italian bonus: All Archery units deal bonus damage to cavalry
New Slav bonus: All Stable and Barrack units get extra Melee armour
New Inca bonus: Spears have +1 range
New bulgarian bonus: Stable unit spawn a LS after death
New Japanese bonus: All units deal bonus damage against UUs
New Mongol bonus: All CA deal bonus damage against siege
New Chinese bonus: All Archers shoot multiple arrows
There is literally only one civ that has this overlap between bonus and its britons with their civ bonus, UT and UU and it was done because it was their first design and they really wanted a archery civ but was never repeated after. It is nothing you take as a positive example and try to shoehorn a bonus in to teutons and claim as if that was your plan for 20 years already and just ignore that its silly design at least they stop being on our list of failed civs
The big perk Crenellations brings is the ability to kill BBCs. This really is an Imp ability. You could swap the UTs, but I really dont see the point.
As for their Paladins, their lacking husbandry makes the heavy melee armor make sense.
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I hesitate to put much care into what a couple pro players say in passing, especially when the civ is fairly balanced by the stats. Passing remarks are just that: fleeting and generally not thought out.
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On a different note, I wouldn’t mind seeing infanty UU civs modified in some way to increase the viability of their UU as compared to champs.
60% isnt balanced and Arena clown say themselves if they wanted to win every game on ladder they would pick teutons every game since they have only britons as a bad matchup.
yes its a better civ because its a buff, but it doesnt add variety when they couldve done it differently and added more variety. like giving cheaper archers to italy. is it stronger, of course it is. is there a better option, of course
i definitely prefer geojak’s idea…
yes teutonic paladins are nice, but as medusa said, we basically just have another franks on our hands…
In Age of Kings there is no descriptions like “archer civ, infantry civ” there was just offensive and defensive. Byzantines and Teutons are defensive, others offensive. Now if we check description of Teutons it says infantry and also their halbardiers much better against cavalry. I think 1 melee armor acceptable 2 melee armour overpowered (offensive). i think making “but units move %10 slower” is going to be better (I know they don’t have husbandry but they have squires). You know what happened to army of Frederick Barbarossa, they were too slow (heavy armour) for mobile cavalry archers.
I would rather +3 range to better melee armour for siege units because I think you will have units to protect them (these units has extra armour). So I think better upgrades should be in Imp and I hate a castle which is can shoot my cannons from long distance. And please consider there is no unit which can outrange castle in castle age.
I can oppose this bonus because I thought Teutons are balanced but they added armour bonus. And I think they made lots of bonuses to militia line. Like Bulgarian unique tech and Teutons gives bonus same way. Malians gives pierce armour, and Burmese bonus is basically free version and extended use of Aztec unique tech.
You mean they criticized the change initially - I don’t hear them saying they need to be nerfed right now
Arena is played on 7% of the games. I don’t know whey you think that they should be balancing around a 7% used map - where are the nerfs you are suggesting for Celts, Berbers, Ethiopians, and Indians that have a better win rate there at 1650+?
For me teutons are balanced as they are weak in long games because they dont have even light cavalry. And their bonus of +2 is almost inexistance against alvs so they are a cheap way to counter them
That’s a pretty significant nerf for a civ that is win rate balanced. Armor for siege is much less important than infantry / cavalry and you are locking the reduced bonus for infantry / cavalry behind a tech cost
There are only 10 civs that even have Paladin and Byz / Celts versions are not used at all so effectively 8 total. It’s one of the rarest upgrades so I don’t know why there’s this backlash against having Paladin civs exist
Frank and Lithuanian paladins are debatable as better anyways given they have husbandry and other offsetting bonuses
Not all bonuses need to be super unique - but this is definitely better than say the Cumans +15% speed but remove husbandry for example that’s nets to a +5% speed in Feudal / Imperial. This is a trade off between speed and staying power which is much more interesting than a free tech + small buff
