Slavs are one of the worst civs on water and hybrid maps, while not being particularly good on open maps either. The only map type on which Slavs are generally considered to be a good civ are closed maps; however, even on closed maps, there are other civs that I personally would prefer over Slavs, such as Burgundians or Cumans, among a decent amount of others. Therefore, I suggest the following bonus:
Slavs
- Hunters generate gold in addition to food.
The idea behind the bonus is to make Slavs more unique and stronger, both on open and closed land maps. I did a very quick test in which I noted how much food a realistic amount of hunters would gather from the boar and deer. I sent a 7th villager to lure the boar, and by the time that villager returned to the TC, another villager had been produced, meaning I started collecting the boar with eight hunters. I then continued sending all the following villagers to the boar to simply see how much food I could gather from it. I ended up with eleven hunters gathering the boar. The hunters gathered 311 food in total. For the deer, I used four hunters, which led to 122 food gathered from each deer. The gold value I am suggesting to make this bonus balanced would be around 7% to 10%. The following values show the amount of gold a player would be able to gather on a standard map with two boars and three deer.
7% = (21.77 * 2 (boars)) + (8.54 * 3 (deer)) = 69.16 gold
10% = (31.1 * 2 (boars)) + (12.2 * 3 (deer)) = 98.6 gold
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Slavs for sure are underplayed but they don’t need another eco bonus because the faster working farmers is by its own a very strong one, and look at Poles and see why having 2 eco bonuses is a bad idea.
2 Likes
It’s slow though. It’s strong but it takes long time to actually become powerful. They aren’t a good closed map civ either due to holes in tech tree. Usually slower civs have better trees for closed maps(Eg Italians /bohemians)
So they fall into a weird middle ground.
That 5pop per military building is also a tiny (but free) eco bonus.
The 3rd “eco bonus” revolves around a mediocre unit line (LS line)
And finally the 4th “eco bonus” for siege, again, kicks in very late. So they have quite a lot of lag between starting the game and mid castle age, all of this goes against their design as an open map civ, when you’re competing against massive early eco and/or military bonuses on Mayans, franks, Mongols etc
Not saying they need a buff. But it’s understandable why people don’t see them as a strong civ.
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The difference between Poles and Slavs is their tech tree, though. Poles don’t really have any holes in their tech tree, considering 1v1s. The only major technologies they are missing are “Halbedier” and “Paladin”. Both of which I would argue are not that important in a 1v1 because their lack of Halbedier can be offset by a combination of Obuch and Pike, and Paladin is so expensive that it rarely gets teched into in 1v1. And in team games, Slavs only really start to outshine Poles in the late game once the lack of Halbedier and Paladin really makes a difference.
I would personally prefer like a reworking of some of their miilitary options. Miltiia in general ##### ### outside of Dark Age, and thus free Supplies/Gambesons comes in too late to be anything more than a slight discuont for a Champion tech switch. Druzhina is extremely expensive and highly situational (this gives them very generic Infantry play) this basically gives them near completely generic Infantry gameplay outside of their Eco Bonuses and certain situations in the very late game.
Their Scout/Knight play is their main strategy yet is 100% completely generic at all stages outside of the Farm Bonus giving extra food, compare this to the 15+ CIvs that also do this well, yet have stronger more interesting, direct bonuses for this line of play, and also are universally more versatile and interesting in terms of options compared to Slavs. The most nasty comparison being Khmer whom’s own Farming Bonus and Tech Tree gives them near identical Scout/Knight play to Slavs, yet who have so so much more going on for them in terms of interesting gameplay.
Their Monks/Siege is now decently well defined compared to other Civs, not much to say in regards to that outside that they miss Bombards restricting further what they can do quite heavily in Imp.
I would say it’s a very inconvenient eco bonus. I would rather them buff the farming bonus instead. They can make it stack through ages like 10% in feudal, 15% in castle and 20% in imp. I remember they used to have 20% farming speed, which was why they could compete with other civs, and ever since it was nerf into oblivion, slav became a really bad civ.
The thing is that the Farming Bonus is already a meh early game bonus that becomes progressively stronger as the game goes on, this just doubles down on that