Unit/Civilization Balance Changes:

The game should never be balanced around treaty primarily. 1vs1 Supremacy is the definitive RTS gamemode. Every civilisation must be competitive first and foremost in 1vs1.

The latest patch completely missed buffs and adjustments for China even though its been widely known to be one of the worst civs. Since DE it has been nerfed heavily via reduction of British consulate, which also affects India and India is still vastly more powerful. Every civilisation has received the best possible crate start in every game. Swedens crates just got adjusted to be the same as China: 200 food, 300 wood. However due to the strength of the torp, Sweden still gets to age faster than China and has much stronger economy, ontop of being able to build a TP. China doesn’t get 3 villagers. They get only 2 villagers in Age I unlike most other civs. Sweden gets 3 villagers aswell, ontop of having torp gathering for them. Some people call Sweden “too slow” yet its still vastly superiour to China in every way.

The current competitive build for China includes a village and a TP, meaning China has to gather up to 90 wood in Age I. (You could also go for a 2nd village, its 10 wood difference, but the TP build is superiour to having 1 more villager.) They also have 1 Goat, which isn’t equal to 100 food due to decay and because it takes longer to gather than a food crate.

The result: China starts age 2 at around 3:15-3:25 minutes into the game (only by consuming their goat, otherwise it would be even slower). This is way too late and China is unplayable in 1vs1 competitive because of this. France, easily among the strongest civilisations in the game with no real bad matchups, gets to Age at around 2:17 with their 12/10 and reaches Age 2 by around 3:45, ready to send 3 Hussars before China even hits Age 2. The amount of tempo and control over the game is absurd and its one of the reasons why China is unplayable against starts like these. This build has gotten so overpowered that we have seen an overproportionate amount of France picks and France mirror matches.
This is not the only example of course. All other civs are so much faster than China, they get to dicate the pace of the game before China even gets to Age 2.

You have seen zero China play in the recent tournament, and no one is going to be playing China in the next big tournament (unless to counter greedy Portugal, but you could just pick Portugal yourself) because there is simply no way to play China in this current situation. Its going to be France, Portugal, Germany, etc the known top tier civs which all got even more consistent with fixed crate starts.

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