Why gurjaras are OP and need to be nerfed

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Hello, since the last DLC, I’ve played a bunch of ladder matches between 1k9-2k elo and casted some games from better players like straydog and I can conclude that gurjaras are completely busted. Here’s why.

the camel scout

the camel scout has nothing special until feudal, then he is unbeatable for most civs, except mesos. I can see the responses. “yeah that’s the point of the camel scout, beating the regular scout”. The bonus is way too high, +6 in addition to the 4 base attack is a total of 10 DAMAGE, you basically 5 shot a scout with another scout, it’s not like you have to make a spear and to finish the camel scout is almost as fast as the regular scout cavalry so it’s way harder to outrun it…

The sheep bonus

I’m not gonna talk about the bug that makes it impossible to color back the sheeps you were stolen by a gurjaras that just garrison them. At first glance, it seems to be a nice bonus, not strong, not bad, just ok but in reality its totally busted again. It generates 28 food per minutes, let’s say you garrison everything at 1 minute in game time, at minute 10 you already generated 252 food, which is roughly the time you get to feudal age. It means you can up feudal very early at like 18-19pop and make an archery/blacksmith opening with at least the wood upgrade and then make a transition to scouts a few minutes later. I’ve seen this kind of play very often in the ladder and it’s totally OP since you can also get to castle age around 20 minutes after. At 20 minutes, you generated 532 food…

mounted units +50% bonus damage

Let’s get to the funny part now. This bonus works for ALL mounted units including :

  • camel riders against cavalry and camels
  • scout cavalry against monks (yes lol). This one is particularly OP because you can now 2 shot a monk with just the +1 attack instead of 3 shot, which makes a huge difference in arena for example, or just generally because it makes it way easier to kill a monk with minimum investment
  • armored elephants also profit from the bonus, you deal 50% more damage to building LMAO

The castle age unique tech

military units cost -25% food, and its for every unit in your tech tree :

  • skirms cost 19 food instead of 25
  • elephant archers cost 68 food instead of 90
  • hussars cost 60 instead of 80, to compare the magyars one is 68 food and 64 for berbers (-15% and -20%), and he has the last defense upgrade which is way more important than the last attack upgrade)
  • camels cost 41 food instead of 55
  • armored elephants cost 98 food instead of 130
  • shrivamsha riders cost 52 food instead of 70
  • chakram cost 49 food instead of 65

AND the most stupid one, the two handed swordman, with a nice cost of 30 FOOD, because the devs forgot to take away supplies from their tech tree lmao. So you have a unit which costs 30f/20g. Gurjaras suffer against eagles ? That’s a ■■■■■■■ joke ? The most ridiculous thing is that these units are not even gold intensive so you spam them like a retard.

Gurjaras have a response to EVERYTHING in all game stages, there is not a single moment where you will lose a game because of your army composition. Don’t even talk about compositions that are way harder to get like halbs and siege or unique units compositions.
You have bracer skirms, HC, BBC, camels, a rly strong unique unit, hussars, shrivamsha riders, decent monks, two handed swordman with a 30 food cost…

All these bonuses added make the civ totally broken. the 50% bonus needs to be tuned down to like 30% and only for camels, the castle age unique tech food cost has to be tripled at least and the last armor upgrade on the cav should be removed. These are the 3 nerfs that are needed. At least 2 of these nerfs would make the civ way less dominant.

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I think the best way to nerf them is:

  • Start with one berry bush instead of two (slow down their uptimes, like how AOE 3 DE african civs were nerfed) so they can’t send all sheeps to mill and have to eat some before.
  • Mounted units bonus toned down from 50% to 33%.
  • Shri Riders slower (something like 1.5 speed) they can’t be faster than Cuman Hussars lol (In compensation they could be a bit better vs focus fire).

Kshatriyas isn’t a problem because they lack BF and no pikes or Ring Archer Armor, in trash wars they are quite bad and they need some food bonus to offset that.
Camel scouts are far from being a problem (costs 60g, and you never try to do one camel scout rush because is hard countered by archers with fletching + spearmen).

The lack of pikes makes the 7 melee armor Heavy Camels more than needed.
And lastly but less important, if this civ needs a nerf then Chinese, Mayans, Britons and Franks also need nerfs, as well Turks for Arena (I see people more vocal towards newer civs but the older ones don’t…)

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im more surprised we dont see any TG where tatar garrison sheep for ally gurjaras. can fill up to maybe 2 possibly 3 mills with how many TC booming

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They lack enough techs to be mediocre

And beyond the you are just listing the features of the civ. They get extra food from sheep but have an awkward start amd they get extra bonus damage on their mounted units.

Removing the last cav armour would also make them awful late game. Like, way worse than Viking late game. The nerf to the food UT would also make it a late game exclusive UT. The bonus damage reduction seems fine

That would just make them super hard to play I imagine

Why not? Celts used to have the fastest infantry, but it wasnt problematic that they added eagle warriors. Tbh the Shrivamsha prob needs a nerf to their shield in imp but nerfing their speed wont chanfe much

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Teutons are actually a top arena civ. It actually tends to be that the extra conversion on monks with some of the other stuff like the farms that makes them so good.

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wow ty I didn’t know Teutons are a top arena civ, my point is why people cry about Gurjaras and not Teutons? You can make any civ look OP by making the list in the “right way”, for example Spanish, 16 min Conqus, uncounterable BOOM (mind blown).

Gurjaras are solid in Feudal and Castle, in Imp they don’t rly have a true power unit and prioritize quantity over quality.

And anyway, is it a problem if a new civ is top tier? Khmer, Poles, Britons are also civs from different timelines of the game and are all fairly top tier and I don’t see people complain about those. It is the nature of the game that some civs will be top tier and some bottom, every game is like that.

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Does anyone get why they gave this civ three unique units? it feels like the camel scout is a bit unnecessary on top of everything else

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To balance out missing techs like pikes but they made them really gold intensive tho plus minus the castle tech ofc

Also can i just quickly mention how demeaning it turnes when green showed up and instanly noob bash someone for their nerf idea with uugh 500 elo idea

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Don’t forget that you miss out on 550 food to take in exchange so you basically have to push deer in dark age. It’s pretty good eco bonus, yes, but certain strats won’t really work because of it (maa for example) while a civ like lithuanians gets 150 food for free. So I think it’s fine just limit the amount of sheep one player can garrison because of nomad/mr maps and tgs.

Well you don’t get the atk here as light cav does exactly the same for generally better stats. You could get the atk on your light cav to 2 shot a sanctity monk though. But I’m not sure that investment is really worth it.

Yes but to counter say arb halb in early imp or xbow knight in castle age you need way more eco than your opponent and also oftentimes your castle UU which can be hard mass at certain stages of the games. So vs a properly timed attack playing as gurjaras can be pretty awkward.

That’s literally hindustanis only worse. Tune it down a bit but keep it applying to all units.

It’s funny how everytime you talk about arena you show that have you absolutely no idea how to play the map. Literally everything you say about it is wrong. I really wonder why you feel the need to discredit yourselves that much. It’s like reading balance comments from a guy that says arabia is unbalanced because fc knights has no counter 11

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Your usual take on arena that makes absolutely zero sense

You were the one gatekeeping opinions from lower elo players and there you are mocking a 2k 1v1 player LUL

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Am I the only one who is bothered that the OP made a paragraph about the Gurjara 2HS (a unit that only has 1 attack and a little bonus damage over a Persian longsword) being more OP than any other Gurjara unit? Did I miss out on something?

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I think but im not sure that the swordman thing got pointed out but yea its seems a bit overexegerated

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Can be made but, what is really weird with the shrivamsha is their very small collision size that allows them to get way better engagements cause they can kind of stack. Vs melee units it’s not so easy to execute but against ranged and especially buildings you can stack them and so get way more damage out than you should normally.

That’s really not the main thing. But if you do this it would be harder for less adaptable players to play gurjaras. And at high level it would force players to ungarrison their sheep to get the better timings. And they would still get them cause the berries are not that important actually, it just makes it easier to execute. I eg basically only eat the first berry bush in the beginning and then use the 2nd as straggler replacement in feudal when I macro up.

That’s actually a good one and together with the change of the shrivamsha collision size most likely already enough to make the civ “balanced”.
I would probably even buff frontier guards to 6 melee armor to compensate for it in the lategame. This would probably make their ele archers somewhat usable in some situations.

What I think and I already proposed in another Thread where I thought about a way to make gurjaras “full veggie” is that the eco bonus woould be more controllable when it was progressive. So it starts at 2 f / min in dark and then goes up to 3, 4, 5 in imp or even more. This way it’s a real tradeoff you take “when I eat my sheep now I can boost my timing, but it hurts my eco later”. Also it would make it punishable to make more than 1 mill early cause the food income in dark age isn’t that high and it would hurt your feudal timing to do so.
Finally with that tweak Gurjaras couldn’t pull of that good of feudal timings as they currently do anymore which is also partially one of the reasons why they are so strong currently: They have one of the best feudal timings paired with one of the best feudal ecos. That’s not exactly a common combination.

For all who don’t know I made a 20 build for gurjaras which you can use for 2 range archers, 1 range skirms or 1 stable scouts while walling behind:

It’s very tight build, but it’s there for showcasing what is possible with gurjaras. It’s the only civ that can make something like this.
Currently I uses different builds, cause I like to open maa archers with them and you can make the maa archer builds less tight which is definetely benefitial.

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Gurjaras definitely need a nerf but there is zero reason to take the last armor away and im shocked at the take on their infantry. No squires no blast furnace.

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What if they change the garrison from 10 to 8 so they still generate food but have to mixup a bit

Oh yea and mounted unit dmg from 50% to 33 is definetly good too

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well there is still cows

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Well the thought was that yea there are still cows but the general rate of food per minute would change

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While I agree that Gurjaras are too strong (not OP), you nerf every single aspect of the civ which makes it strong, rather than one of them.

Firstly, I love Kshatriyas. Such a bonus can only be a UT, because being civ bonus it will be busted. Koreans, Portuguese and Incas have the complimentary bonuses as civ bonuses.

Second, Gurjaras Scout/LCav need the extra attack vs monks since Gurjaras need to produce a first scout cavalry, while other civs are producing the 2nd scout.

Gurjaras are a puzzle in which their lack of BF, sad Barracks, UTs, UUs all fits in together. Disturbing one will need to change their balance.

Now about their food bonus. One simple idea-

Reduce the garrision capacity of mills to 5, so that they cannot garrision all 8 sheep.

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But then you’d be punished for having cows instead of sheep. I’d rather change cows to take up 1,5 population space in line with the higher food count you get on these.

Irrespective of that I think for a standard start gurjaras eco is kinda fine. What’s more problematic tje way I see it is the ability to garrison 20 sheep on some non standard maps like mega random. Like most mega random games are played are either random civ or gurjaras mirror bc lots of generations feature huge amounts of heardables which makes these games really unbalanced if you’re up vs gurjaras.

Maybe it’s just me but oftentimes I find the extra berries pretty annoying for pushing deer or luring boars so I usually take all the berries under tc first.

I really think maa is the weakest opening for gurjaras. Firstly you usually don’t have the best early game scouting because of need to push deer and less los on camel scout. And then it’s pretty hard to get the amount of food needed unless you ungarrison sheep which isn’t the way to go on open maps imo.

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imo it’s better to reduce the food income just in dark age, so they can’t make the insane timings like currently anymore.
And it would make them more balanced in the maps with lots of sheep and team games.

I think the gurjara player should be revarded with higher food income from the mills later on in the game when he decides ro leave the sheep in the mill during feudal.

also agian, there are cows. 5 cows are basically as good as 8 sheep in a mill, so depending on the map gen you still have basically the same eco as currently.