I’m starting to feel the need of swapping free conscription bonus with Aztecs. Or at least change it to foot archers train 18% faster. This will be very similar to Britons TB but very specific and as a civ bonus won’t be OP.
Just remove conscription fron their tech trew and split the free conscription bonus from feudal age or fully move it forward to castle age.
Aztecs would still have faster creation in dark age and in imperial age after conscription
Yes, Italian is kinda similar on land maps but at least they are strong on water maps and people pick them very often on those maps. Even on pro scene, Italian are very often seen in action because water maps are almost guaranteed to happen. Meanwhile, The Viet don’t get the same treatment on water maps so people don’t even bother picking Vietnamese in tournaments these days.
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Some ideas to beef up their early and mid game…
- Economy tech cost -100% wood. → All tech costs -50% wood.
- Paper Money becomes a Castle UT, and Chatras becomes an Imperial UT.
- Paper Money costs reduced to maybe 300 food and 400 wood (300 food and 200 wood after the wood discount bonus), and in addition to the current effect also provides an instant 300 gold as an emergency button.
If we need more…
- Imperial Skirmishers become an regional unit for the Vietnamese, potential Chams and potential Lolos, and even for surrounding jungle civs like other Southeast Asian civs and Bengalis, and then free Conscription became a new team bonus.
- Battle Elephants have +50/+100 HP in the Castle/Imperial Age as a new civ bonus, and then Chatras gains new effects.
[Edite]
Questioning some of the ideas in the thread:
- Conscription should be broken in the Castle Age even if it’s not free. Having +33% training speed makes their Knight rush the most powerful class in the game.
- Elephant Archers are unnecessary for Vietnamese. The HP bonuse will make EA too strong. Also, the Vietnamese had had a well-deserved army of horse archers for a while, but don’t seem to be known for their use of elephant archers.
- The HP bonus is not as useless as people might think. It’s just a bonus that is more beneficial in the late game than in the early game, since the late game is mostly fighting in group and less microing. I think it’s good to keep it after we’ve buffed their early game in other ways.
This is a straight nerf until castle age. Only eco techs cost wood until then. And from castle age onwards, the benefit would lie only in thumbring, skirm upgrades and some university, dock and castle techs.
I had been thinking for a while on giving +30hp (like chattras originally) as a civ bonus, and then using chattras on top of that for more (maybe +70 if we want to avoid an overbuff?). This is like sarracens received with zealotry. +30hp for elephants in castle age is good enough against pikement, while against halberdiers was deemed not enough. However, buffing elephants wont solve vietnamese issues outside of closed maps.
Because of this, I would split the bonus across ages. For instance, 16% in castle age, 33% in imperial age. Or 11% feudal, 22% castle age, 33% imperial age.
What are Chams and Lolos?
I think the cheaper Thumb Rings and Ballistics are pretty helpful to cover this loss.
Even we can make it -100% for economic techs and -50% for military techs, as an extension.
Elephants should never be able to resist the spearman line well. Use your archers/skirmishers to cover each other. You’re an archer civ.
Anyway, it is not a bad buff. Better BEs are always welcome.
Just a better version of the Aztec bonus.
Even if the Conscription is removed for Vietnamese, it’s still too similar to be creative.
Kingdom of Champa (192-1832), established by the Chams. They are a long-time rival with the Vietnamese, Siamese, and Khmers.
They are already mentioned in the history of civ of game text.
Lolos, or Nuosu, once established the Kingdoms like Cuanman, Nanzhao, and Dali, or served as the main group of these kingdoms. In modern times, the Chinese call them Yi people.
Ah, I thought you were meaning burmese and malay and the grammatical corrector trolled you.
I know. Without making up new mechanics, it is hard to be creative. Maybe we should look at age of empires 3, 4 and age of mythology (and star wars gallactic battlegrounds) and copy some mechanics from there. When vietnamese received their wood discount bonus, khmer received a new mechanic from AoM (farmers teleporting food). Since them, some “original” mechanics have appeared like gurjaras garrisoning herdables in mills.
Now we are talking!
Agree. Just buff the unit for everyone!
I really hate Saracens and Burmese repetition bonus. Don’t want to see that again. Just merge it to Archery Range units HP bonus. And then get a new UT for Vietnamese.
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I think Vietnamese Elephants should have an attack bonus vs. pikes. That way pikes still do the same damage but they take a bit more damage so they’ll die faster. That way the cost exchanges of resources invested in fights will be a bit fairer. Elephants are so slow and expensive that it doesn’t seem fair that they can be so easily countered by something as cheap as pikes which were also recently buffed with their upgrade cost reduction. Could possibly give elephants an attack bonus vs. monks too. I don’t think it would be too OP since elephants are still slow and monks will still have the same amount of time to convert, it just gives the Vietnamese player a bit more opportunity to kill a few more monks.
Alternatively, the only other change I can think of is to leave elephants alone and just give them Hussar + Blast Furnace instead. Hussar / Halb + imperial skirm/Rattans + BBC is a decent late game comp.
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What if Paper Money just became a civ bonus instead? Early game it’s hardly much different from let’s say Spanish bonus, and you don’t even have enough villagers to act as ‘one relic’ so to speak.
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My personal thought is that developers gave imperial skirm to vietnamese partially to counter the enemy’s pikes better.
But in the end, vietnamese almost never use imperial skirms together elephants…
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Elephant + Skirmisher is one of those combinations that sounds really good on paper, with Elephants performing well against enemy cavalry, siege and swordsmen, while the skirmishers deal with enemy spears and archers, even able to snipe some monks as needed. However in my experience this has 2 problems:
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the expensive units with a gold cost are the meat shield in the front, and must be constantly spammed for replacement. The replacements are slow getting into position, and eventually you will run out of gold and need to swap to hussars. Compare this to a comp of something like Cav Archers or Abalesters with a Hussar front line, now the meatshield is expendable and the expensive units are more protected in the back.
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Their poor mobility means less effective at protecting vulnerable units. Elephants may beat enemy knights and hussars in a straight fight, but they can’t do much when those run around behind to attack your skirmishers, siege or villagers.
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The other problem with elephants is their size. Similar problem with other large units like Ratha and War Wagons. They all bump into each other so they can’t get as good a surround as knights or camels. I feel like Elephants would benefit from more trample damage to surrounding units.
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I noticed that the chatra umbrellas don’t seem to be valued much in Vietnamese culture, while Burmese and Siamese (Thai) culture seem to value them more.
Maybe this can be changed to
- Elephants and Archery Range units +20% HP.
- Get Hand Cannoneers.
- New UT “Jiaozhi Firearms”: Hand Cannoneers and Bombard Cannons cost -50% gold.
Problem number 3 - This army composition dies to Pikeman+scorpion.
Don’t know the last 2, but first one can be done.
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This used to be the case. Elite battle elephants had quite a lot of trample damage. Then the paladin pickers started complaining about team games and closed map games. This was especially about khmer, whose battle eles were insanely strong. So, devs nerfed eles to the ground. They are the single most nerfed unit in the entire game throughout its history. It’s about time they got a buff.
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I don’t get the feeling that trample damage would be much help to Vietnamese elephants in particular. The enemy has little reason to engage them like that, and every reason to run around behind them and kill their backline of archers, instead. After all, the archers already counter the Halbs that take the elephants out.
In retrospect, this kinda makes the addition of more elephant armor less important. Maybe what they should get instead is additional pierce armor. What if Chatras gave them +1 pierce armor? That would make them significantly more resistant to archers and town center fire, helping them to make a reinforcing loop with their archers. Archers or skirms counter the pikemen and monks, while the elephants counter the enemy siege and soak up archer fire.
Edit; In fact, their lack of Blast Furnace means their splash damage is actually very sub-par against particularly tough enemies. Adding more might bring them up to par with other types, but that still wouldn’t make them good. I’d prefer they accentuate their traits as damage sponges rather than try to make them mediocre at something they’re currently bad at.
Vietnamese are an anti-archer archer civ. But such a civ is too niche to be of any use on most maps. However their bonuses on wood has the potential to make them play as a water civ. However Vietnamese lack “Shipwright” and “Fast fire”. So they need something to fix their ship cost later in the game and it preferably should be on galley line.
[REMOVE] Economic upgrades cost no wood.
[REPLACE] Military unit creation buildings cost -20% rescources
With the above discount bonus, Vietnamese can start with a wood advantage for ships. In the later stage, a discount on their galley line makes up for their lack of ‘shipwright’. It makes sense to give them a good tech to boost the castle units too. The cheaper 520 stone castles can be spammed. Imperial skirms and treb push could be a viable play for Vietnamese. The castle bonus can also play defensively on land as well as water.
Honestly, in retrospect I’m not liking ANY of these ideas except maybe straggler trees. My idea for elephants to get bonus armor or pierce armor both overlap too much with other civs, and still won’t make them much good for anything. Extra eco bonuses won’t do much to fix their extremely vanilla castle age. I also don’t like my idea to give archers extra pierce or archer armor anymore, since they seem just fine against archer civs, it’s everything else that have problems against.
Their problems now seem to me to be this:
Their eco bonuses only apply if they can take them. This leaves them extra resources to defend with if they’re booming and need to defend, but offer few options for extra aggression than usual.
Archer bonus is basically only good against other archers, to the point they’ll just win those generally, hence their high winrate against other archer civs, but makes very little difference against other civ types.
Their Battle Elephants are too vanilla, and Chatras comes too late and is too weak to make up their lack of Blast Furnace. This leaves them an extremely narrow window of usefulness in the late castle age and early imperial age, but even just the Cavalier upgrade renders them almost useless. They’re also not much good for tanking for any of their other options.
Conscription’s power spike is somewhat irrelevant for any of their options. Battle Elephants are too expensive to spam much, and archers aren’t a unit you typically NEED to spam that much. It’s a tech that’s just not useful to them at all.
So on the whole you have three archers that are basically good at exactly the same things. Battle elephants that are useless. Melee units that lack Blast Furnace which renders Paper Money almost irrelevant since there’s no way it’ll make up the difference in power from losing that tech. Essentially their ONLY good bonus is their eco bonus.
Grrrr.
I think it’s time to take more drastic measures.
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Remove Free Conscription. It’s just not a good bonus for them, no matter how you look at it.
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Instead of seeing enemy Town Centers, Vietnamese now see all neutral sheep. This will have a similar effect to seeing enemy town centers, and also help them get a more consistent start, AND help them locate any free sheep around the map, helping their start dramatically.
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Give their archers -50% Frame Delay. THAT will actually make them more durable. Roll this into the same bonus: Archers fire more quickly and have +20% HP.
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Chatras is now a default Civ bonus. Elephants have +100 HP by default. This means they can actually DO something with those elephants in early castle age without needing to build a Castle.
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New effect of Chatras: Elephants now absorb 50% of damage dealt to nearby non-elephant units. Now they actually have a reason to USE elephants. This should be a fairly expensive tech.
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REMOVE Two-Man Saw from their tech tree. Paper Money now gives +15% Wood Chopping in addition to the gold effect.
If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will.
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I appreciate your sincerity, and I also agree that maybe the solution lies in an early eco bonus such as with straggler trees.
In the past, other civs that struggled to get out of the bottom tier only came out after an additional eco bonus, like the recent Portuguese berry bonus, tatars spawning sheep, etc . So I think the logical way to buff them is giving that little push.
However, regarding your other ideas, I dont think they need a complete rework. We have recent examples of bad civs with huge weakness that, instead of a complete overhaul, they were buffed specifically to fight those weaknesses: burmese received the new manipur cavalry against archers, bengali received a bonus against skirms, etc. I know that lots of people don’t like this approach (they want to maintain the weakness as part of the identity) but sometimes there is no other way. I case of Vietnamese, if their weakness is cavalry/mobility, developers could decide to give them a buff like “buildings/siege deals extra damage to cavalry” and call it a day.
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