So I think the Flemish Revolution is the most problematic tech in the game. All the other problems in the DLC can be easily solved with stat adjustments, but the Flemish Revolution is such an all in tech that it is very difficult to do so. I hear, that it is a feature from Age of Mythology. Is it balanced there? If so, how?
So let me first explain my problem with this tech and suggest a couple of things how to solve it (I would prefer to just remove it entirely, but well, given that they made a unique unit for this tech, I doub that is a realistic expectation).
So the Problem with the Flemish Revolution is two fold. First of all the Burgundians are a strong cavalry civ that will field Paladins from early imp on. That makes archer civs struggle a lot at this point, while with better eco, or other bonusses or just generic Paladins you could face them head on. So most likely cav will be your go to unit. Now, Flemish Revolution is than suddenly giving you a huge number of counter units to cavalry that will just run all over your army and base. So you have to prepare a counter to them (archers, or champions) ahead of time. And I mean really ahead of time. Killing 120 2HS is not possible with just a small amount of archers.
Now you could say that you just nerf the stats of the unit, but the Burgundians are sacrificing their complete eco for this push. So, if the unit is too bad it will be a tech never used. So either it is an all in button that can overwhelm your enemy, or it is a button thats never used. So what to do about it?
Stat tweaks.
Regardless of what I just said I am trying to go for some stat tweaks, as I think this is the most realistic thing to happen:
Reduce pierce armor of Flemish Militia to 0 and give them the spearman class. This will make it easier to counter them with archers, and does not force you to build a full army of archers before the enemy is researching the tech. In addition make the player lose all ressources villagers are carrying at the moment instead of adding them to its ressources. This will either force the player to micro the villagers a bit more, or make it more difficult for them to reboom behind it. Meaning they need to do much more damage to the enemy in order for the investment to make sense for them.
Change the mechanic to be a more “protect from cav raids” mechanic. While this is even more gimmicky than the current one I still would feel more comfortable about it being in the game than the current functionality: After researching the tech add a button to towncenters that works like the town bell, and converts all villagers to flemish militia once they reach the towncenter. This conversion has a timer (can be introduced the same way as monk charge) of, lets say for now 3 minutes, then the flemish militia becomes a villager again. This button is a permenant feature after researching the tech and not a one time use.This would allow you to protect your eco from big raids, but also harm your eco if you overuse it, as you will basically have idle villagers for 3 minutes. This time should be long enough to hurt you when overused, but allow you to kill raiding cav units, but short enough to not allow you to use it to bash down your enemies base with it.
Just keep it in the normal frame of the game, make the tech allow you to create flemish militia from barracks. The food cost of the unit can maybe be adjusted then but besides that it is a very strong unit by itself, maybe its anti cav attack can be slightly improved in that case, but it probably doesnt even need that. Maybe this can be done together with adding an anti cavalry attack bonus to villagers. So that if you have something like 5 Hussars in your eco villagers can actually fight them back. Maybe something like +20 vs cav. Similar to pikemen.
What do you think about these ideas? Do you have others, or do you have a valid reason to think this tech isnt problematic in its current state?
I dont play AoM on a competitive level, but i think its a bit more balanced there as it is more allin. In AoM, you cant construct TCs freely, rather, there are a few locations on the map where you’re allowed to build one. Therefor, you wont have more than 3-4 TCs even in lategame, making a reboom impossible. It gets even harder because in AoM, military units usually take up 2 or more popspace. When you use “Ragnarök”, you are heavily over popcap, meaning you can only start rebooming when you lost a big part of your army.
Compare this to AoE where you start creating vills from 6-8 TCs once you researched the tech, meaning you can just reboom while the try to deal with your surge of military.
Actually i don’t think this tech is OP at all and i will till you why. This tech is like last chance to turn the situation if you are dead anyway, so if you are Burgandians and you actually have the high score and the control of the map why to do this tech else if you want to troll?! Second thing if you are far behind and hit imp with bad control then you just researched this tech, i bet this will help you because you actually far behind and you don’t have the control of the map so it is just like the last counter and i don’t think this will work on high levels players; i saw MBL did this tech against Hera and Hera was the one who took the control of the map, when MBL researched this tech trying to hold on, Hera stopped it and he just “gg”, so i don’t think this tech is OP at all and you will have no eco behind it at all.
So when would you ever use it? If you sacrifice all your villagers for it, how can it be a comeback?
Either you have good eco and can use the tech to kill your opponent, or you have bad eco and you wont get a lot from the tech, and will have even worse eco after.
A way to fix this would be to give you a fixed amount but remove all your vills for it. I.e. all your vills are removed from the game and you get 80 flemish militia. Then it would be a comeback mechanic. Although that might hen just lead to a fast imp into flemish revolution strat. But if its dependend on the amount of your vils it isnt.
Man this tech actually depending on eco. You can’t have this tech if you don’t have eco, and you can’t have eco, if you don’t have good numbers of vills, so if they player far behind in eco then this mean he is not on the lead with vills/military so when he hit imp after spending 1000food, 800 gold and he was not taking the control i bet this tech will give him something. Actually do you want to know my personal opinion?! I this this tech is just a troll or meh tech like the flaming camels. I don’t see anyway to make it worthy unless you are the one who took the control then just want to do a knock out punch by this tech to end the game with good eco behind. Actually the Sicilians 50 Sarjants from 5 TCs is waaaay better than this tech
I agree, but that one doesnt have a tradeoff attached to it, so it is easy to balance. You can adjust the cost, change the units stats and adjust the amount of units and if you find the right numbers it will be balanced. Thats not the case with flemish revolution.
How would the tech give you anything if you have bad eco? If you dont have enough military or vills you wont gain anything from it. But imagine the scenario, you are both at 120 vils, and have around 50 Paladins. It is an equal game, but then you research flemish revolution and just run him over with 170 military vs 50. And if it doesnt work in that situation, well then it indeed is useless making it problematic too.
I think it is just early to judge on this tech, i think we need more time/games to see how this tech working and what will we get in the stats. Anyway Burgandians now are crazy without even this tech, they have strong UU with early eco upgrades and Cavalier upgrade im castle age, i think the devs will give it 1 or 2 months for players to get acceptable results about these 2 new civs
Maybe you are right, and it will work out somehow. Its just that to me this technology is conceptually so flawed, that I don’t see it being anything but a binary “win the game or lose the game” button. I thought about some ideas how to make it a technology that can be balanced and wanted to hear opinions from the community.
Yes exactly, this tech is like this. It is just the last chance “do or die” and if you want my opinion, this tech is useful for player behind score not the lead, then what to do?! Just try to defend your self until you have good numbers of vills then hit this button trying to save the situation. It is CALL THE AMBULANCE…BUT NOT FOR ME
I’m with you that it is very hard to balance since it may can be very very strong or very very weak (anyway I see the sicilian tech with the 50 Sarjants better imo). And maybe but just maybe I’m heavily influenced by the fact that I don’t like one-time-use techs, but anyway I will try my best.
I think it does not help that much as a “last chance”. When you are defending and barely hanging on you will have difficulties to afford this tech I guess and even if you do, you may get a huge power spike to clear your oppents army in your base or force them to retreat. But what after that? If your opponent has castles up you may have a hard time to push those (and lose a lot of your units by doing so). You would have to prepare siege before getting this tech because you don’t have any vills left to get ressources (so an additional huge cost in a pinch?).
(If I remember correctly I’ve seen this a few times by professional players like mbl etc. where they still lose after the revolution when used defensively)
I see this tech more like an death blow when the game is even. Where you can get from 80 to 200 military in an blink of an eye to overwhelm your opponent and snowball the game in your favor. Similar if you have a lategame trashwar where gold is very rare. Getting 120 Gold Units that can’t be killed by trash can rapidly turn an even game I think.
Of course there is not enough experience with this tech yet, but I assume that it would be kind of weak in the first example and OP in the second or other scenarios.
I really like your second idea “protect from cav raids” (maybe not only cav but also eagles?).
One thing I want to mention there is that the villagers should keep the last task they where working on, so that they automaticly start to gather the same ressources they gathered before when the timer has run out. An exception could be if you manually task them to attack a specific unit after they turned to the flemish militia.
I personly would like to see that button at the vilagers interface (similar to the garrison button) and at the TC (similar to town bell). This allows a better controll on how much eco you want to sacrifice to defend the raid (for higher level players) and also just to smash the TC-button in emergency (for lower level players).
I think this would make the tech way easier to balance and less situational and therefore used more.
btw: Please excuse any punctiation and other grammar mistakes.
Might be an option. My suggestion was clunky in its use on purpose. I believe it could be OP if you can just select a few villagers. Imagine you have 20 hussars in your eco. Without the reworked flemish militia you would have to send your army back, wait for pikes to train from barracks, or get tons of idle time. If you can select just the right amount of villagers to turn into flemish militia to fight them off this would be a huge buff, without any downside. If you have to convert all your villagers in the area you still get idle time and have to think if it is worth to do so or not.
At least that was my idea behind this. Maybe having more control over it would make more sense, and makes it more usable. I’m not sure.
I don’t think stat tweaks could balance something this extreme.
i like the “protect from cav raids” theme, here are some other ways to achieve that:
The unique tech just allows you to create Flemish Militia from TCs, but with a fast creation speed.
The unique tech allows you to create normal Flemish Militia from castles, and “Temporary” Flemish Militia from TCs. “Temporary” Flemish Militia have an extremely fast creation speed, and maybe a lower cost , but they will die after a certain amount of time.
The unique tech gives you the permanant ability to manually tranform any vill to Flemish Militia. This transformation takes a short amount of time to complete and costs resources for each vill transformed. (the unit will probably need to be heavily nerfed for this to be balanced)
Flemish Revolution UT is alright, but the Unit needs a nerf. It should not be such a strong Champ-Pike hybrid, and should be more of a middle ground between them, while as it is, it is stronger than the FU Champion.
This is a much more coherent approach for the tech. At least the first two points. I don’t like the current all-in aspect either. It’s a game ending mechanic (either in yours or your opponent’s favor) with almost no counterplay.
How much bonus damage they deal would have to be figured out. Whats to keep in mind is that you still have to have your vilagers around TCs and not Mills or similar camps. When you vills are around a TC anyway you could just garison them and wait for your Pikes to come. You can garison your villagers up to almost 40 seconds without losing any farm income anyway (since the farm can store a little food that can be collected faster afterwards → for more info see Spirit of the laws video “Sneaky AoE2 Farming Hack”). The point is, if you garison your vills you dont have the risk to lose them to the raid where you still have that risk when they are flemish militia. Just flat-transform all vils would make this mechanic unusable for better players since you will sacrifice too much I think.
Whenever I play against the AI, I tend to research all the technologies but Flemish Revolution will have a disastrous effect on my economy and if you are changing it make it more like supremacy as I really like that one. Question: In a fight, who will win a Spanish villager or a Flemish militia?
It wouldnt be all vils, it would be all the vils in the area around your TC. How big the area affected is could be changed to make it balanced. But yeah, maybe its better to just select the villagers you want to transform manually.
Anyways, Im personally leaning more towards my third suggestion, as it is the least gimmicky.
Spanish villagers don’t have to give up being the most useful eco unit in the game to gain that power, the Flemish Revolution tech would be completely pointless if they didn’t even gain that much from it.
