Where exactly is the game balanced around? From what I can guess it seems to be 1v1 Arabia. And many islands map for water civs.
We have ‘so-called’ weak civs that turn into powerhouse monsters in a 4v4 black forest/michi map with lots of trade and resources. Even more so, if the map is edited to have even more resources.
Koreans for example are considered weak. But they in rich resources maps turn into a deathball machine with bombard tower spam, war wagon spam, and onager spam. Same with turks, have you seen bombard tower spam and bombard canon spam from them? It’s hell.
Balance is not done according to arabia, that is a big misunderstanding, balance is up to most games played and complains, from the very low skill base of players to the top levels.
There are 2 or 3 guys here saying balance is not for team games, despite they have balanced BE according to team games in the last balance changes, but yeah most changes are focused in 1x1s style given how much it gets played and has little interference of other bonus stacking.
Koreans are no weak, they are predictable because players are used to do towers or get trushed by them, that will change over time.
Portuguese is basically a civ win in any island map, they destroy the nasty longboat from vikings, but forum warriors still demanding them to be also very powerful on land maps, same with italians, their bonuses are merely for water maps, if they boost them more, they will end up by being the new vikings, being good at every single random map.
yeah koreans aren’t weak man, they just never get chosen in tournaments, are sitting at a 40% winrate overall (with a 1.07% pickrate), a 39% winrate at the highest level (1.23% pickrate), and only have positive winrates on 3 maps, where they have less then 10 total games played across maps that are played less then 2% of the time.
meanwhile in Tournaments, Pros continue to choose Vikings and Italians, despite your claims.
we don’t want them to be “all powerful” we want them to have a fighting shot. and seeing as Arabia and Arena make up over 80% of all games played, it makes sense that these civs should at least have a fighting shot on land maps.
Water maps, where you say Portuguese specialize, make less then 2.5% of all games played.
so people who like those civs should be happy their specialty is playing maps that might not even be in the map pool, and are played only once in 25 games?
It’s an intricate question. I would call the game balanced if every civ has a place somewhere, and for each reasonably common setting there are no clear go-to choice.
Balancing for multiple settings isn’t mutually exclusive, at least not 100%. That being sad, there are still balance priorities. And no one can plausibly deny that the focus is arabia and 1v1. There are still balancing decisions that go back to team games (elephants) and hybrid maps (Persian nerf), for instance. Still most efforts can be traced backed to 1v1 arabia because this is what most people play as their preferred setting. Also trends/meta and ongoing tournaments have an impact, here.