Try to prove this statement wrong

“There are no civilizations in the game with entirely generic units.”
I don’t think there is a way to prove this statement wrong, because I think literally every civilization has units that are benefitted by either civ bonuses or unique techs. However, I’m curious which civilization is the closest to having entirely generic units.

Huns. Very simplistic tech tree. Nothing remarkable about it. Good knights and horse archers that’s it.

I disliked playing the Hans since they don’t have any wow units, other than paladins. No siege onagers, hand canoneer, bombards, and other cool units.

Even their castle unit is rather boring. A fast horse unit that’s anti-building. When knights somewhat do the job okay already.

2 Likes

Does cheaper units count?

Yes. If there are any changes or benefits at all that make a unit even slightly different from average, it doesn’t count.

The statement is correct, and it’s easy to establish that it’s correct just by looking at a list of civ bonuses and unique techs.

There’s at least one civ that gets only cost reductions (Malay) and a couple with only generic land units (Spanish, Chinese).

Huns have more accurate Trebuchets.

The closest i could find is chinese with only 50% more HP on Demo ships.
Spanish have faster firing gunpowder units

2 Likes

Lets try:

Magyars are a civ with only generic units. Magyar Huszars are like normal Hussars. They cost just 80 food. There are some differences to normal Hussars like 10 more HP, but that does not make them a non-generic unit, since it is normal for generic units to be affected by civilisations bonuses. Turk Hussars for example have more pierce armor. But they are still Hussars, and the same is true for Magyar Huszars. They are Hussars.

1 Like

They have scorpions with 4 extra attack.

CA +1 attack and +1 range

1 Like

“There are no civilizations in the game with entirely generic units.”

You could create a mod for a new civilization with no eco/military bonuses and no unique unit/techs. But I don’t think that’s within the spirit of the statement you’ve posed.

But when you ask whether someone can prove a true statement “wrong”, I ask what would the value be in doing so?

Example:

“Two plus two equals four.” , then go on to say

“I don’t think there is a way to prove this statement wrong(false).”

ok every civilisation has one Unique Unit, wow.

But it’s even true for AoE1 where there are no unique units and half as many civilisation bonuses per civilisation.

You are basically looking for a civilisation that only has bonuses for buildings and technologies?

Unless you count villagers, I think there’s Shangs.

IMO, the civ with most generic units (relative to other civs) in AoE2 is Slavs. They have Druzhina, but it is very expensive, and most games don’t last long enough to justify getting it. Free supplies and cheaper siege (treb is not included) is okay, but not great. Their farms are faster, but Khmer and Poles have arguably better farms overall. Slav Hussar are generic and other civs spam them better. I think they were initially designed to be ‘Franks for Arena’, but they lack BBC so they are beaten by civs that have it.
Of course, their UU is unique, but usually too gold intensive for 1v1. In TG, Boyar can be good against paladin without being too weak against arbalest, but the new camel civs have taken over. Overall, Slavs have suffered from power creep of the civs released after it.

Even with no civ bonuses that benefit a certain unit, the difference in techtrees would still make that unit different from others.

What about Byzantines? It’s mostly basic units you’re playing with most of the time, but some are a bit cheaper. Cataphracts are risky to try and pull off.

That would be magyars for sure, cheaper isn’t exclusive from them, as berbers have the same free bonus and gurjaras behind a tec so they are pretty much the most generic civ in the game.

Just use the ‘full tech tree’ mode, I think not even civ bonuses work under it. so everything is generic with just a visual difference.

and to come back to the initial statement, every civ will have probably something ‘generic’ in their roster while other stuff gets buffed for the civ.
It’s a difficult statement to prove right or wrong, because as many people in the thread seem to think that cost doesn’t make a unit better or worse, which is heavily argued about.

Head to head Cheaper Byz trash will win the war of Attrition over other Trash units that are generic at regular price, it’s just facts, you can’t deny their trash being cheaper doesn’t make them spend less resources on them than you with a normal priced ones.
A different factor would be Byz non-generic cheaper trash vs non-generic trash with faster movement-speed a la Lithuanians, the most even comparison would have to be both skirms, since Liths don’t get the final armour upgrade for their Halbs which Byz do get so Byz Halbs would just straight up win in this comparison.
But Skirms, we have some that move faster and some that are cheaper, in a straight no army moves and they just wail at each other Byz has the resource advantage again technically speaking, but if we take into account army reinforcements Lith Skirms would arrive faster to resupply the army, thus probably gaining a net advantage in army numbers, most likely leading to a victory there.

So even if we have two non-generic units which both don’t get technically damage or armour advantages, there’s still a probable winner in whatever category you want.

So saying stuff “who is the most generic civ” or “is there a civ who’s just generic”, is to me not actually caring about the differences and what Age of Empires 2 baseline offers, the “Full Techtree” gamemode exist for your desire to play with fully generic Chess Pieces.
There’s no need for a fully generic civ to exist, because it would not have any advantage, it would be your Mario in Smash Bros, a generic standard character not having anything he is strong at, but also not terrible either.
If you wanted to have that available on ladder, go make a custom civ with no civ bonuses and a full tech tree and test it out versus a regular civ or all civs, maybe let bots do a thousand battles vs each other against that generic I guess it isn’t even a civ, but like you can do that, and see if it’s actually worth it to care for something genric in the sea of Civ that have their strong suits in Age of Empires 2.

1 Like