Why does it grant the veteran upgrade as an age 4 tech?
I feel this bonus is negligible as people would definitely upgrade longbows/rangers to veteran in age 3.
If giving them guard upgrade for free is considered overpowered, maybe reduce the upgrade cost or sth?
Because everything about Rangers is unnecessarily convoluted and nonsensical. They really ought to axe the silly swap out and make Rangers available by default in Age 4 alongside Longbowmen with their own separate upgrades and cards.
Then they could move a scaled down version of Queen’s Rangers to Age 3 where granting the Veteran upgrade makes sense (or just have them shadow tech like normal).
Yes and the very unnecessary “card icon and tooltip swap” with the ranger card (another redundant effect).
The age 1 turtle boom into FI for free guard pikes and vet rangers is a super cheesy build and doesn’t need a buff. I was using it a while ago (I was annoyed with some other obnoxious strats so I embraced the cheese for a while).
Don’t buff it
I wonder if they could just cut to the chase and do something like make you pick between Longbows or Rangers upon age up.
Or make it so you have to send the age 4 card to access rangers like you originally did. And make the church card it’s own special thing.
Honestly I think this makes the most sense. Having Rangers as a Bersagliere equivalent seems sensible as all treaty games end up with Rangers being used over Longbowmen anyways.
I think the the Baker Rifles home city card should be moved to the Arsenal as an expensive researchable technology there. The Ranger Combat card should be combined with the Coldstream Guards home city card, which should now read “increases attack and highpoints for all British gunpowder infantry by 15%” (this can be expanded to include Black Watch Highlanders as well).
So to not affect treaty games the Queens Ranger tech should still send 30 Rangers but now only change any existing longbowmen unit shipment into Ranger unit shipments, and research the Baker Rifles technology in the Arsenal if not already researched.