That alone wouldn’t be a huge problem, but they’re also the lowest win rate across all elos, and aren’t particularly much better at team games, so yeah, they’re pretty miserable right now.
It seems like Gambesons is probably one of the main reasons; as an almost all-archer civ, losing a big chunk of their damage has to hurt them significantly. Which is fine, it’s great that infantry is seeing more play, but man is their current situation rough. What could be done to fix them?
They have two big problems, in my opinion.
The first is that many of their bonuses don’t kick in until much too late. Paper Money and the Imperial Skirmisher are both extreme lategame bonuses, and Conscription, while nice, doesn’t have much effect as a power spike in the early castle age, because you simply don’t have enough resources to take advantage of it!
The other half of their bonuses don’t achieve what they’re meant to do.
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+20% archer HP doesn’t functionally change how well archers play; for melee units, an extra 20% hp can mean trading cost effectively with units they normally don’t trade effectively against, but when it comes to archers, you are almost always in an ‘all or nothing’ type scenario anyway, where a little extra HP doesn’t matter unless you’ve already screwed up. If your archers get caught out, they’re going to die whether or not they have 20% extra HP. Plus, it sorta makes them overlap a lot with the Rattan Archer, which also fills the durable archer niche. Vietnamese essentially have 3 different options to achieve different variations on the same thing.
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Chatras is a tricky one. It makes them quite a bit more potent against things they already counter, but has relatively little impact against the things that actually counter elephants, like monks and halbs, and since those are the main things you have to worry about, you can’t really change how you play them, and as such they don’t offer much in the way of opportunities to take advantage of, with or without this tech.
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Last of all, their ability to see the enemy spawn location, while convenient, doesn’t really do much when they don’t have the necessary eco upgrades to do anything about it. Other civs with more rushing potential can take advantage of the info in team games, but what is the vietnamese player going to do about it? Not much, in practice.
Ideas for changes.
Now, my #1 priority here is to preserve their identity. It’s easy to basically come up with a whole new civ, but I don’t want to do that; I want them to remain identifiably themselves, just better. So which of their bonuses need help?
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+20% Archer HP. This is the first and most important change, since archers are the core of this civ. They’re meant to have tanky archers, but they need to be tanky in a way that’s actually practical, but also not in a way that overlaps with their unique units. So, what still counters their unique unit? Skirmishers! What if their archers got +1 anti-archer armor? That would make them more difficult to counter, taking 33% less bonus damage in feudal and 25% less in castle age.
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Chatras - A similar approach here. +100HP isn’t worth much when halbs are on the field. What if instead of giving them 100HP, it gave them 50 again, but with maybe 15 elephant armor? Pikes would do 35 instead of 47, making these elephants much tougher against them, but not overwhelmingly so.
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Their last problem is an inability to really capitalize on their early knowledge. So what about this; What if they could collect wood 50% faster from straggler trees? Most players save them for later or ignore them entirely, but they could be a powerful way to get started, as well as making for a somewhat unique bonus.
These are just some thoughts of course. I’d be interested in seeing what others think!
