I feel you may have misunderstood me. There have been a lot of responses saying that Vietnamese are fine because the Pros say they are good and because they get picked in the drafts often. This graph was to show that in practice the pros perform average with them at best (giving benefit of the doubt to the confidence intervals) which doesn’t really align with said comments (I am aware it’s more nuanced than this when it comes to drafting).
Personally I believe that Vietnamese need a buff because because statistically they are one of the worst civs on both open and closed, solo and team games. I am also more vocal for this civ because they are my most played civ (in contrast to say tatars who are in a similar position but whom I don’t really play so I don’t feel I can comment on).
I know this is contentious but I strongly believe in balancing for the whole player base and not just the pros / “used perfectly” (it’s why I created the stats on > 1200 Elo as I feel this provides the best balance between representing the playerbase whilst requiring a certain level of game knowledge to rule out the most egregious mistakes). Having said that even with the Pros there is potentially some evidence to say they are slightly under performing [47%, 50.5%], albeit not to an extent that requires changing; I mention this to highlight that it’s not a case like Chinese where they over perform with the Pros and thus we should be able to buff the Vietnamese without breaking the Pro level balance.
Stats only give the most macro level view though. My own experience + watching high level reply’s + the win rates vs game length stats + walking through various scenarios leads me to believe the issues are that they only have a mediocre eco bonus, lack a castle age power spike and (excluding very early feudal and late imp) aren’t actually that great at their supposed “anti-archer” role.
How to buff them without breaking them is very difficult and I honestly don’t know. My favourite ideas atm (which I appreciate have flaws and need way more evaluation/tweaking) are:
- discounted or free e-skirm (both CA power spike that plays into their supposed identity). And/or
- reworking elephants to reduce their risk to pikes (see my above post)
That being said their biggest weakness in the stats appears to be against cav civs of which these changes do nothing to address. I guess a harder question is wether we want to stick to their anti-archer role, or give them a buff which helps against cav civs which is likely to make them a more generalist civ.