What are the Civs most worthy of receiving balance changes?

No, I didn’t use aoe2stats as their data wasn’t updated.
This is more accurate:
https://gowerc.github.io/aoecps/outputs/report.html

It doesn’t really matter why the civ has a high winrate. As the Devs mentioned before, while they want to have an balanced meta for interesting games at the pro level they also want the average player to enjoy fair games.

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It absolutely saves you resources because farms have a non-trivial wood cost and farmers have a slower gather rate than lumberjacks. I.e. you gain extra villager time to spend gathering gold or wood or stone or whatever. But I don’t want to derail this thread into something Saracen specific over the general point that it’s hard deciding what changes can be made if people aren’t using things which are already available.

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Frank are borderline OP because their only weakness is late game trash fights. They have a strong eco, a strong scout rush, knights with essentially free bloodlines, a cheap UU from cheap castles that counters knight counters, and some of the best paladin in the game.

on certain maps. They’re not very good on water (e.g. no bracer), not the best choice on hybrid maps (not the worst either), they’re not a good pick in super closed maps like Black Forest or Arena at all.

I haven’t looked at the breakdown of winrates, but I imagine that Franks have a somewhat opposite effect to Chinese. Franks are super easy to play even if you’re at a low elo. The berry bonus is nice, because even LEL players will remember to collect berries (unlike pushing deer or luring boar, which not all LEL do consistently), LEL players also often forget eco upgrades, so the free farm upgrades are really useful, in fact, LEL players often forget blacksmith upgrades or get them way too late, but early in Castle Age, even unupgraded Knights are pretty strong, so I can imagine that win rates with Franks at low elos are higher than they ‘‘should’’ be.

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And now ask yourself, what is the other thing that Franks can do outside of Scouts into Knights, have you ever seen a Frankish Archer rush or something? 11

Yes they are bad on water maps. However, on black forest (which is usually a team game) they have one of the strongest paladin in the game. On arena they have a cheap castle drop and paladin/HC makes a good army.

Paladin is not very good on BF. Will get absolutely shredded by the incoming wall of siege/ranged units.
It runs into a similar problem on Arena to a lesser extent.

The article shows similar nonsensical correlations such as Mayans being OP but not Aztecs/Britons/Chinese. Even better, the conclusion is that in order to maximize your chances of winning, you should pick mostly Celts, Huns, and Teutons. Not Franks.

Yes it does. You are trying to use a mathematical tool in a context where it shouldn’t be. I literally showed you 3 reasons in my previous message why a civ could have high winrates without being unbalanced. Your own source contradicts itself by overly relying on winrates. I could propose other indicators, such as the average Elo of each civilization, and suddenly Franks would look underpowered.

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Well you also don’t go for archers with Lithuanian or other knight civs… So I don’t really get that point.

Though I have actually seen some pro games where the game was won with castles / throwing axeman.

Franks can go infantry as well as cavalry, but usually they don’t need to go anything besides scouts knights because they do that so well. Late game they can also go HC. Also, in the hidden cup qualifiers I believe Jordan used crossbows to counter camels…

I could write a similar paragraph for half the civs in the game. In fact you can replace “Franks” with “Lithuanians” here and only minor changes.

Reply honestly: if no stats were shown to you, would you have legitimately claimed that Franks are OP and the next civ to nerf?

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I honestly don’t know because I haven’t played much BF, but I would think that Paladin in a team game would serve as a better meat shield vs range/siege than most other units as it is very population efficient at the very least.

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Usually better off with trash as meatshield, just due to the sheer amount of firepower present, Paladin is too expensive to absorb hits. Better off spending gold on your own siege and what not. And mobility matters very little when most of the pathways are walled off.

You can almost consider BF like another game. What units and compositions are strong on Arabia are not necessarily strong on BF and vice versa.

I still think my point is, Franks tech tree is very limited to cavalry, hence strong eco bonuses are justified.
Is funny how people want Franks nerfed more but Chinese with a broad tech tree, strong eco bonuses in ALL STAGES OF THE GAME and an OP uu aren’t aimed lol.

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Honestly I don’t know because I usually do ok vs franks players. Based entirely on that I would not claim them to be OP. However, I would have to look at a full community not one player to come to the conclusion that they are OP. (Also I said borderline OP, I think a nerf would be nice but I don’t think it would be needed)

Also, Lithuanians don’t have as good of eco past dark age, they need to invest in bloodlines and take time to get relics to make their knights above average and they don’t have as good of a pike counter as franks. (But they do better in trash fights.)

Lithuanians have a clear power spike in the early game and in the lategame. But they have nothing going for them in early castle age.
Franks on the other hand have little power spikes in every age making them very consistent to play.

Btw, I did get your point. If I get Franks randomly or by choice I perform good because I know how to do an standard scouts into knights rush. If I get Cumans I don’t really know what I’m doing because I never play them. And it’s the same for a large part of the community…
In my opinion Franks should be one of the best performing civs on Arabia!

But a 55% winrate is just too much. This is just the average meaning there are many matchups where the winrate is even tilted much more then those 10%.
And the data is only from players above 1200 ELO. Most of the players in the 1200-2600 ELO range know much more build orders then scouts into knights so this cannot be the sole factor…

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I think they can go infantry just fine, even though they are pushed toward cavalry. I do think that Chinese in the hands of an experienced player is much scarier than Frank player.

I’m not really arguing that Franks are stronger than Lith, just showing that you can always come up with an explanation for everything by simply enumerating strengths of a civ without considering weaknesses.

It could actually be the full explanation for the 55% winrate. Maybe Franks have a 50% winrate against most civs but exceptional winrate against certain civs due to something. For example, we know that this is the case for Goth and Incas. If that’s the case the proper fix is not to nerf Franks globally (like the eco bonus) but find what makes them stand out and nerf this thing. Maybe it’s that Franks can castle drop easier than other civs and many people have issues countering it. Or maybe throwing axemen gives them an unexpected edge in a lot of matchups. I don’t know.

Without knowing if there’s a problem with the civ, blindly looking at stats and nerfing the berry bonus is prone to disaster. It will either have no effect at all, or completely dumpster the civ for no reason.

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Just to add to this, there’s a big gap between these statistics and cause-effect. These win rates are useful because they allow us to see the aggregated effect of player’s decisions and how they affect the win-rates. However it’s very hard to know which individual player decisions we want changed, much less which balance changes will bring about that change in behavior.

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There could be a fourth category:
Meh civs.

Those are the civs with meh winrates and that are taken by pros only because of meh reasons. For example, Hera picked vietnamese in islands (?) because he wanted to save vikings for later…
Civs in this category could be byzantines, magyars, vietnamese… ?

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