civ grid is a bit tricky because otto is easily a 150+ elo boost, meaning you may be winning 50% at say 1400 elo but couldnt reach 1200 without otto and be 50% there with say france.
The thing is 1.5 years ago, otto was a noob civ meant to bash other noobs. it had lost its op rush and abus, but otherwise had little scaling and while ok on certain maps in 1v1, was not much for treaty or teams. Devs, to their credit, added thing after thing to breathe life into a legacy civ. Otto went from timings or bust to having a few units that could scale. Azaps, despite the average ottoAI user hatred of them, solve some pretty miserable matchups like lakota, humbaraci allow grens to punish FF falc pushs. Otto also gained some improve shipments and card to allow more deck flexbility. This is ok and good, and im not wanting to nerf otto into the ground.
That said, too much of a good thing is too much. Jans now scale into the late game, giving their abus perfect meat shields. their abus scale better than most civs 2x skirm, meaning otto shreds anything infantry. their cav archers are now also extremely good price, speed 7 and up to 30%attck/15%hp (beefy to begin with) and high dps so good luck touching the abus. Also, hand cav that you can never break snare from so you loose battle of manuever often vs civ with higher dps and or hp. Sipahi, now more plentiful to get. Minutemen that nuke heavy infantry so guess what, age2 pressure? pffft ez. Then the new church lets like 60 population of overpop for pittance of price. so now a civ that was already pretty easy to pilot has ways of removing your micro via raw hp/dps, timings, snares, and simple eco meaning macro is much easier to manage. put simply, up until teh highest levels otto player will work far less in supremecy than the opponent. This feels extremely bad to play into, watching jans abus z move onto you or them pop 20 moba nizaam and 5 bombards while you are getting vet techs in 3. It really went from simple, solid, but counterable to all pros no cons and i think the majority of the playerbase is tired.
How to fix? well some will call for blood and some will pretend their jan cannon 1kw sipahi every single game no matter the opponents choices is “totes skill” but i think reasonable would be tone the church overpop (really 200f sipahi, same price as a huss, is BS we can agree), reduce animation of abus to have set up time of .25 or so, so no 360 no scope should devs be happy with current damage output, and given reduce flight archery for CAs to 10% or none. Also age4 card that effects 6-7 units combat should be reduced to 10%, if boyar 3 units too much 7 surely as well. Also, their minutemen need to be .8 vs cav, you want super skirm militia they need to follow the rules. These are small changes that would make otto forced to adapt to say mass cav (i know, make uber goon killing azaps the “horror”) while still giviing them teeth in treaty or team mode. also, prehpas 600w tc since they get way more value out of their TCs. no all of these at once maybe, but something to make the coutner system mean something vs the std jan/cannon ez win or at higher levels most civs having no answer to CA/abus. imho shitter thoughts.
sorry for the sarcasm a bit, but i actually play alot of otto and i can threaten 1600 elo players as a prob slightly (or ill tell myself lol) 1300 to 1400 elo player so i feel this comes from otto player and foe of otto.
