It is not a thing in lower elo (not YET, once players get better overall we would see it regularly in low elo too). But once you climb the ladder up stealing dear is guaranteed to happen. You see that basically in every higher level game one watches on twitch.
But slowing down scouts who carry deer would solve the issue since you can snipe them with spear or horseman then, or even with the tc.
What you mentioned “killing deer before the russion player does it”, yes that is common and should be done, still, since rus starts multiple scouts they can simply take the deer near your base and bring it home easily. Each deer is 250 safe food beside the tc which is worth a lot. They can collect around 2000 food which is not even safe but also give a faster gather rate.
Even on lower elo one should do that, but here it seems that multitasking is the issue preventing it
Dark Age: Rus get free gold from hunting and they can age up really fast. They can train Scouts in dark age without interrupting villager production.
Feudal Age: They will use scouts to steal your hunts and secure more food, can easily go to castle age by stealing hunts and selling tickets.
Castle Age: They can start training warrior monks and steal your relics AGAIN. They have so much HP and are really fast. Securing gold they can go to imperial really fast.
So yea, you are always on disadvantage. You can either try to counter which will hurt your economy but RUS will be unaffected.
I think following changes will be more suitable than drastic changes.
Hunting cabin should produce scout in second age.
Scouts and Warrior monks should slow down when carrying hunt/relic so they can’t just run away.
I think the system is good and cool as it is and makes a game interesting. Almost every civ has a mechanic that is strong and if you do not react to it you might have a problem or you should at least try to focus on your own civs strength.
Also it doesnt come for free but is macro intense.
I have similar thoughts, and my proposition for a fix was similar to OP’s.
The problem, as stated, is that Rus can get to Castle without ever building a gold mine. Other civs have methods of gold generation outside of mining (Chinese taxes, Mongol raiding bonus… Delhi get free tech, HRE can increase rate of production with prelates), but they can’t generate 400 gold within the first 3 minutes of the game. I think it’s fair to say that there’s some unbalance there.
My idea to fix it would just be to adjust the “250 gold/min” bounty cap (from what I understand the actual number is much higher than that) and increase it to a “400 gold/min” bounty cap proportionally. Then you either remove or strongly nerf the gold directly received from hunting–it would still count towards your civ bounty acheivement.
You’d let rest adjust naturally, e.g. a sheep/deer/wolf would contribute to the same proportion of your bounty, a hunting cabin that previously generated 19g/min would now generate 30-31g/min, and you would need to build the same (insane) number of hunting cabins to actually acheive max bounty per minute. This would effectively take all that gold that the Rus get in the beginning of the game, inflate it gently, and spread it out over the course of the game.
To put it another way, you would take all that easy money from the very beginnning of the match, and make them wait for it (and spend more wood for it). Fairly comparable to the original suggestion, so far as I can tell, might have the desired effect of slightly curbing the Professional Scouts meta, too, but not by too much.
Eureka! I figured it out! The perfect solution. Please excuse my double-post.
Before I start, it looks like somebody had almost the exact same idea as me and posted it to Reddit. But it’s not on these forums, and my version is slightly different, and I really think it’s the very best solution to what many people see as a problem.
You leave everything as it is, but instead of Rus being awarded bounty from kills, they get it from harvesting resources (it would still work from kills for wolves). So 5 bounty for every 250 food gathered from sheep, 10 for every 350 from deer, and (is it 50? 75?) for every 2000 food harvested from boar. You could even have it trickle in proportionally: if your villagers have only harvested 175 from a deer, you’ve only been awarded 5 bounty for it so far. This may or may not be a little harder to implement than other suggestions because I’m pretty sure the current engine doesn’t have a way to track something like this.
I really think this is the best solution because you leave everything as is, but you limit the Rus player’s ability to collect all of their bounty within the first couple of minutes in the game. You’d still need to fight for those resources (which I think is appropriate and fun), but it wouldn’t necessarily be a mad scramble to get an army of scouts on the map to kill everything right away (and against a player with massive food collection buffs, too).
This wouldn’t do anything for the Professional Scouts meta, but it’s a problem that needs to be solved outside of this because it doesn’t just apply to Rus matches… in fact, I would argue that a PS meta has a place in the Rus/counter-Rus playstyle. It may disincentivize diving under TCs for half-eaten carcasses, too.
Would a change like this hurt anyone’s feelings too bad?
The Rus are a pretty cool unique civ, thats why it has a lot of “problems” but right now players are letting Rus play UNPUNISHED (because its “hard” and the only punish meta right now is to deny deers?), and you always see the Rus going the same build, same strat, same everything
Rus die 99% to early ram push, when the enemy starts losing all the time to ram push, the enemy 1.wont pick Rus again 2. adapt and will not go fast caslte/relic/horsearcher and we will start to see more depth to this civ
I wouldnt nerf or change anything…yet, time will fix this
Rus have stayed in second age many times in high-level games that I have seen vs RAM push. They have heavy cavalry in second age and a decent eco, so we already know the civ needs a little tweaking.
