These particular nerfs actually target some of the more overtuned aspects of Ethiopia so I think they’re mostly fine. The fact that you could win any Explorer fight with an Abun healing you in the background felt kinda cheap and training a bunch to gather really quickly was quite strong. The exception being Big Benny down to 600 which is way too harsh in my opinion (700 would be perfect).
The problem is Ethiopia’s design makes them weak and difficult to play outside a few gimmicky strategies propped up by the things that just got nerfed. They’re kinda like Aztecs where they get repeatedly hit by nerfs targeting the wrong things which increasingly incentivizes their niche broken strats because that’s all that is left for them that is viable. When they finally get targeted nerfs to close the actual exploit, the civ is so hollowed out by the previous nerfs that not many options remain.
They need to buff other areas and revert some of the older nerfs to compensate. For example, with the state Ethiopia is in, I think they could move Jesuit Influence back to being an age 1 card.
Ethiopia’s design is also just baffling in some areas. Why do MM give a gather rate boost and not a yield boost? Of course people are going to spam Abuns and set the things to coin only to FF when they’re designed like that. But once that’s done the things run out right away and need to be tediously rebuilt. In an ideal world they wouldn’t have MM at all, and they could get something like a Church Forest that could be a slower but infinite source of resources.
There are also a ton of little issues that make the African civs tedious or not viable.
Having all natives, mercenaries, artillery, militias, many techs, and most unit shipments cost a single bottlenecked resource while also leaving gaps in their roster that must be filled by these units is a very bad design. You basically have to pick only 1 or 2 of those options because you simply can’t afford more than that. It’s especially bad with Ethiopia since your main source of Influence is finite. If they split the cost of these things with other resources (ex natives partly wood, mercs partly coin, militias partly food, etc) it would let you stretch what you can do with your influence.
Then there’s Fields and Granaries that are such a PITA that they should be deleted from the game entirely.