The pro players at top rank play the Mongols as infantry or tower rushing civ.
They train less cavalry units than the infantry units like spearmen, archers, xbows, handcannoners and MAA.
In my opinion, if the civ strength is cavalry, nomadic and aggressive, the bonuses must focus its cavalry units and the players have to use their cavalry to get the most out of the civ. However, for the Mongols it is not the case. They have three unique cavalry units at their disposal and they have the weakest lancer type and mounted archer unit. Both fails their role to make the civ a cavalry civilization. Plus, Kurultai, Yam and Khan’s skills all affect infantry and siege units. This makes their cavalry pointless and not the focus of this civilization. This exactly is conflicting with the strength (cavalry) of the civilization.
Therefore, I have a few change requests:
- Yam should affect cavalry units (bonus should be better), as it was the stables all around the steppe to supply fresh horses for the messenger.
- Kurultai should offer unique nomadic technologies for the Mongols instead of the attack bonus. The reason why I do not agree with the attack bonus is that it is not very effective and resource wise it is waste of resources and mostly ranged units are more effective when it receives more attack bonus or simply can land their hits without much issue as they are ranged. Melee units die faster, pathing issues and especially the Mongol Mangudai wont be around the Kurultai and the Kurultai cannot keep up with the Mangudai or even Keshik. This is pointless bonus for such aggressive, fast and cavalry civilization as this landmark restricts the maneuver of the Mongol units.
- Khan’s skill affect all types of units. This is another problem. Focusing everything and making the strength of the civilization (cavalry) pointless. Khan is the master of the mounted units and must be able to motivate or improve the morale of the cavalry units. There is a quote " A Mongol without a horse, is like a bird without the wings". So please try to focus the Mongols to its cavalry. Without cavalry, the Mongols cannot be defined. It is historically and civ strength wise conflicting. Even new players end up disappointed because the civ says cavalry is their main strength, but when played with cavalry the civ is the worst.
- The Mongol civ’s unique upgrades for cavalry are way too expensive. It requires too much stone to have the weakest lancer a little bit better but still stays the weakest. It is massively conflicting with the strength of the civilization. There is no point to train cavalry units if they are actually more expensive and less effective on the battlefield. This needs to be addressed.
- Keshik and Mangudai are the weakest in their type. Most civs that do not focus cavalry as their strength have more powerful cavalry units than the cavalry focused Mongols. This is against the civ strength and conflicting with each other and turning off a lot of new players. Most people play the Mongols to have the most cavalry units. This is the rule Number 1.
- Remove infantry related improved technologies from the Mongols. It is against the Mongols’ civ strength (cavalry)!
- Let the Mongols have weaker infantry units, but give them heavy horse archer unit to cope with this and let it have more damage bonus against infantry units and do fire on the move, but slower with high damage only against infantry. Decent against cavalry, but less than the Rus horse archer and has same attack range.
- Blacksmith upgrades’ change request:
The blacksmith’s melee and ranged armor technology needs to be separated into three:
cavalry armor & infantry armor & ranged armor upgrades.
This will allow further focus into specific unit upgrades (will allow civs’ to focus their strength unit type and also punish their unit that are not considered as their strength). Current melee and ranged armor upgrade affects both cavalry, infantry and ranged units. This allows to focus all infantry, ranged and cavalry at the same time and leads to stalemate faster and easily. But by separating this will allow cavalry civs to have stronger cavs with weaker infantry if they haven’t researched the infantry armor and so on. This simply increases the focus of specific unit types of each civ and will make battles more enjoyable as their strongest unit types will have better stats (or should have extra upgrade in the blacksmith that is like tier VI?)
I hope you guys will consider these changes!