Chinese don’t really play as a defensive civilization. They have strong early game (starting with extra vils gives them a very strong Feudal age, even if it leaves them extra vulnerable to laming). And they’re missing BBC, which is not quite a must-have for a defensive civ (Georgians do well enough without BBCs), but Chinese don’t have enough defensive bonuses to be a defensive civ without them.
I do think Chinese should get hand cannons, even if they don’t get any bonuses to them. Without a bonus, they would be fairly niche for the Chinese. Chinese are a civ that like to get lots of techs, and hand cannons don’t require a lot of techs. The one niche I can think of for hand cannons would be against huskarls, and Goths could probably use a small buff for their infantry anyways.
They have UT for 2x hp on walls and towers and I believe all upgrades on towers and walls. They’re just an archer civ but if at all a 2nd theme is required, defense fits them better than gunpowder.
Scorpions and rocket carts with UT should do fine vs Goths. They have also champion with full upgrades and the removal of supplies is indirectly a buff. Its ok to give Chinese hand canoneers and bombard canons provided it comes at a cost - one of the 3 gets nerfed - castle age cavalry (either lose husbandry or bloodlines), economy (just +2 vills for -175 food, -75 wood, or tech discount bonus removed), imperial age blacksmith (either lose both blast furnace and plate mail armor or just lose plate barding armor).
Giving them more options without any nerfs will make them extremely overpowered. Right now they are excellent on open maps, and average on closed maps. If you just give all gunpowder units, they’ll be terrific on closed and hybrid maps as well. The Mongol lancer mistake should be avoided.
Many many years ago, in the earliest version of AoE II, people were asking why there was no cannon or gun or siege engineer of China. And MS replied that for “game balance”.
Now they remove the camels but still refuse to add cannon, gun or siege engineer back to China. So they lied. They are not for balance, they just want to make China as a weaker civ in the game.
And for most of the civs, their civ bonus is better than corresponding tech.
For example, French knights have more blood than than the tech “blood line” gives.
They removed the 3rd tech of mill of China but reduced the civ bonus of the farmland of China.
MS keep destroying the balance of the game. They are hypocrites.
I hope MS can ignore this tiny forum and listen to their real customers.
And don’t forget their original fundamental ideas of the designing of the game.
No they didnt lie, it would still be OP now without a Chu Ko Nu rework. Heck, the Chinese are still one of the best civs in the game, we just need to see what happens with the MAA meta. Dont bring your nationalism here
[quote=“800buthappy, post:29, topic:274354, full:true”]
You can insist everything in this forum, it only has few active users.
But if such few users can determine the designing of the game, it could be very rediculous.
You can insist everything in this forum, it only has few active users.
But if such few users can determine the designing of the game, it could be very rediculous.
And my complaining is not for nationalism, I complain because the designer neither respect history nor respect game balance.
This would be about as outrageous as if you removed Writing tech in AOE1 from Sumerians and Egyptians.
We’ve been using blast furnaces for 1500 years before Europeans learned to. We’ve put up with using an approximation of Sui-Tang China as an excuse for not having most gunpowder units, but if you take away Blast Furnace form Chinese expect enormous backlash in the China market.
Plate Mail and Plate Barding, though, can be negotiated, because we didn’t really rely on complex-to-maintain plate, out of the needs of strategic mobility.
Btw, what is the reason behind the design of Chu Ko Nu countering rams? Game balance or historical reference? Bascially, Chu Ko Nu can shred almost everything when massed. I feel 0 melee damage is just the cherries on the cake.
Run up to ram housing.
Spray your arrows in the crew’s surprised faces.
Run away to reload.
Rinse and repeat.
Set unmanned (killed enough crew for them to abandon it) ram on fire.
I think it’s stupid for rams to have negative melee armor as they should be relatively durable constructs, but I suppose the crews are easier to disable than infantry ready to meet your attack.
That being said, collapsing under the weight of fire bringing down crewmen (see above procedure) is plausible enough, so each arrow doing 1 damage is reasonable.
At first I was gonna defend the new classification, for I thought it’s an interesting and unique take on the East Asian-flavored gunpowder units (fire lancers, rocket carts), so it doesn’t really matter that they don’t have HC or BBC. There are infantry civs missing infantry, siege civs missing siege etc.
However, that thought quickly evaporated as I realize Chinese regional gunpowder units don’t even stand out! Both fire lancers and rocket carts.
In conclusion… The gunpowder civ designation is off I agree.
OR… perhaps the level of disinterest of the uncivil self-servants (Confucian literati) needs to be strong enough to reduce the tech discount further.
In which case you’ll get huge backlash in China because that’s a very Manchu Qing thing, before that the literati were interested in new inventions as long as they could see benefit from them.
The simplest solution is to change the blasted designation, Chinese playerbase knows it’s roughly Tang to early Song China being represented, and doesn’t mind being a generalist civ.
Also, China never developed bombard cannons becuase of the megalithic nature of Chinese city walls. It makes no sense to develop an ineffective weapon.
I thought bombard started developed in Song Dynasty and used extensively in Ming Dynasty. Ming empire used early guns and bombard against Mongols and Japanese invasion.
But I am not sure if current Chinese represent Ming. Perhaps devs will introduce Ming in new DLC.
Even Western scholars agree that faced with megalithic city walls, early artillery was too ineffective to massively invest into.
So Ming China kept up with the times in field artillery, but for sieges, bombards were not the solution by far.
Well I’ll post them in a month or two once my China DLC idea thread gets there.
It’ll most likely be Early vs Late Ming though, as they were painfully different enough in economic capacity (loss of centralization over time), tech focus, doctrines, etc.