Fixing Chinese Han

[Yekaterina]

@BreakfastBurrito_007

Pikemen are only available in P2.

In P1, the only place where you can train archers is from the CC... So if 12 Cavs come to your base at min 5 then you have little to defend with unless you make more archers than women -> you can't afford it because you have spent your wood on paddies already. This is not to mention a camel rush - your enemy can take out your eco then outspam you in camels. GG

Right now this civ is unplayable in the lobby, because the Han player either dies of a rush, or sacrifice their boom for archers, or if they are given the chance to boom, Ptolemies or Macedonia or Spartans will wipe them out in seconds. Crossbow +archer + pike + spear is no match against javlin + pikes or slinger + pike, not to mention cavalry.

I suppose the only possible play with this civ is doing an archer cav rush, but you are just no match against the Ptolemies whatsoever

[Yekaterina]

Mercenaries are quite unaffordable in P1 without a strong economy to back it up. Even if you do train a bunch of YueZhi mercs, they will be idle after the fight -> poor efficiency

 

My solution: give crossbow identical stats as slingers, then make YueZhi javelin mercs available in P2.

Another idea is NanMan elephant mercs, but that might be far fetched.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Proposed Changes:

 

A. Practice Range

• Old Phase: Town (II)
• New Phase: Village (I)

 

B. Rice Paddies

• Old Cost: 50 sec, 100 wood
• New Cost: 40 sec, 80 wood
• Females food.rice gather rate reduced from 0.6 to 0.5 (like other females)
• Main benefit is that you can cram more rice paddies into a smaller space

 

C. Crossbowmen

• Old RepeatTime: 3000 ms
• New RepeatTime: 2000 ms
• Brings their DPS closer to Slingers and Javelineers

 

Anything else?

 

EDIT: Added Crossbowmen

Edited February 21, 2022 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Yekaterina]

I really don't want practice range and melee barracks to be separate, because that makes defending against rushes very very difficult. It's too expensive to make 2 buildings and you risk both being captured. If you make just ranged barracks - can defend ranged cav rush, but you can't resist an infantry push from a jav / slinger civ. You also can't defend against spear cav.

30 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

New Cost: 40 sec, 80 wood

Then you must allow 4 women per field. The idea is: for every other civ, you invest 20 wood per farmer to produce 0.5 food per second. To supply 1 barrack and 1 CC you need 5 fields, or 12.5 food per second (assuming you have enough wood). This value shouldn't be any different for the Han. So if you want 3 farmers per field, then you need to make the cost 60 wood instead.

I would much prefer a farming rate bonus over smaller cheaper fields.

 

[Yekaterina]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone @Lion.Kanzen just in case my previous explanation didn't make sense: 

In order to boom (build population and economy quickly), you need to hit certain checkpoints. 

THe first checkpoints is, 4 minutes after the game starts you need 1 barrack + 1 CC producing units non-stop. Some players might get this set up at minute 2. In order to supply this rate of unit production, you need to gather at least 12.5 food per second no matter what. With any existing civs in A25, this can be achieved by 25 women farming on 5 fields, so I need to spend a total of 500 wood to build these fields. 

AT minute 6 you will need 2 barracks and 1 CC pumping infantry non-stop. To supply this you need 20 food per second. That means 7 or 8 fields, with 35 to 40 farmers, and a total of 800 wood spent on farming.

I normally get a third barrack before going to town phase, at that point I need 10 to 11 fields to supply my production and the cost of P2, mining techs. By this point I have spent 1000 wood on building fields. 

note, I did not mention farming techs because that's the same for every civ.

My problem with the Han at the moment is, these smaller fields means you will need more fields and hence more wood than the listed values above for other civs, so it makes booming with the Han more difficult in early stages. 

So the total wood you need to produce 12.5 food per second must be exactly 500 to make the civ balanced with respect to others. It doesn't matter how many fields or women you need, although the less women the better (so more can work on wood)

[maroder]

21 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

So the total wood you need to produce 12.5 food per second must be exactly 500 to make the civ balanced with respect to others

disagree. As long as it balanced with other strengths and weaknesses, I don't see a reason why this value has to be set in stone.

[Yekaterina]

32 minutes ago, maroder said:

isagree. As long as it balanced with other strengths and weaknesses, I don't see a reason why this value has to be set in stone.

I suppose anywhere between 490 wood and 510 wood is fine, but it is hard to balance other things with food production since food is the very basis of your population.

Anything too different from other civs means a lot of whining from lobby players and this civ getting banned. Iber, carth and ptol are already getting banned in games. In A24 all archer civs were banned. We don't want this to happen again, right?

You can get civ differentiation from actor models and perhaps a few new buildings that are useless (e.g. Ishtar gate, Laozi gate, Pillar of Ashoka) or weak units that have little military significance (Macedonian champion crossbow) just to keep the single players and city builders happy. If you touch the main economy or basic units of a civ, you will get dozens of angry complaints like the beginning of A24. 

One idea to get differentiation, however, is to make Han start with sword cav instead of archer cav. We don't have a civ that trains sword cav from the cc yet!

@LetswaveaBook @BreakfastBurrito_007 what do you think? P1 sword cav rush?

Edited February 21, 2022 by Yekaterina

[alre]

you spend 200 more wood in fields, but you also spend 200 less food in women (21 against 25), that's more time efficient and also more population efficient. I'm not convinced by your argument @Yekaterina

[Yekaterina]

11 minutes ago, alre said:

but you also spend 200 less food in women

It doesn't matter how much food I spent in women, because as long as my berries are still there, I keep pumping out women. I start the first farm at minute 2:30 if I don't have extra berries. By this time I should have around 30 women + my starting citizen soldiers. Before that, my food income depended on berries and hunt - same for every civ, including the Han. But now, you suddenly ask for 200 more wood for me to build farms. 200wood at minute 2:30-3:00 is a big price for me. Yes, later on I can save 4 more women to chop trees, but, at 2:30 when I need to build farms, I can't afford the extra 200 wood! You might be able to get away with building 1 farm at a time and wait for the 200 wood to be collected, but that is very inefficient as with any other civ, I would be researching the farming tech by now. 

[Nullus]

35 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

You can get civ differentiation from actor models and perhaps a few new buildings that are useless (e.g. Ishtar gate, Laozi gate, Pillar of Ashoka) or weak units that have little military significance (Macedonian champion crossbow) just to keep the single players and city builders happy.

The issue with this is that, in my opinion, differentiation should encourage different playstyles, not just have visual differences. If the differentiation is inconsequential, there is no real difference in the game, and the gameplay becomes bland. If different civs encouraged different playstyles, there would be some actual variety. If we want real variety, some civs will have to have advantages in certain situations.

[Yekaterina]

2 minutes ago, Nullus said:

If different civs encouraged different playstyles,

We are already encouraging different playstyles. For example, Spartans and Ptolemies encourage infantry, Carthaginians encourage mercenary rushes, Persians encourage cav and Mauryans encourage elephant spam. When Han comes in, we will see some new strategies involving clever use of techs and siege weapons, as well as placements of ministers. I am ok with changing the paddies a bit, but the proposed costs and farming rates above are simply unacceptable. 

 

5 minutes ago, Nullus said:

some civs will have to have advantages in certain situations

But not too much! Consider any game with a random civ: you can't allow one civ to be able to destroy another civ completely at any given time. Right now, the Spartans can do a  full infantry push against the Persians in P1 and they will have 0 way to defend against it.  Don't try to dismiss me by saying 'build defence towers', because you need to spend so much wood for these towers and they can be captured very easily even when fully garrisoned. The Spartan hoplite health bonus makes the towers useless. It effectively adds 1 more archer to your army but that's nothing if they have equal numbers off hoplites and skirmishers. Furthermore you never know when an infantry attack will come. Ironically, Ptolemies can't defend against a camel rush unless they also mass produce camels. If you are playing as the Persians against Spartans, then you are destined to loose if your enemies does an early attack (unless you spam enough cav, but then your eco is rubbish and you lose in P3 push :/ ). The most deadly thing about an infantry push on a small map is, you can never tell when the enemy will come. Even if you play on revealed map, they can suddenly charge everything into your base and it takes like 30 seconds for them to arrive. 

[Nullus]

I realise that making one civilisation too powerful could be a problem. However, at the moment, there aren't really very many styles available. There are a lot of different troops, with different strengths, but not many different styles available. By style, I mean an overall strategy, e.g. rushing, turtling, booming, harassing, naval supremacy. Currently, the only viable styles are booming and rushing.

I think that the best way to balance civs while still allowing differentiation would be to give each civ a significant strength, but also a weakness that negates the advantage. That way, each player has a chance to use a powerful strategy, but the other players also have an opportunity to stop that player. For example, the carthaginians, on a map with little metal, would have the opportunity to use a powerful mercenary attack, but only if they can establish a trading route to generate metal. To use their mercenaries, they would need to get and defend a trade route, while to stop this player, the other team would need to break this trade route or kill the traders. Admittedly, situations like this probably don't occur frequently in the current game, but they could improve it.

[Lion.Kanzen]

4 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

I suppose anywhere between 490 wood and 510 wood is fine, but it is hard to balance other things with food production since food is the very basis of your population.

Anything too different from other civs means a lot of whining from lobby players and this civ getting banned. Iber, carth and ptol are already getting banned in games. In A24 all archer civs were banned. We don't want this to happen again, right?

You can get civ differentiation from actor models and perhaps a few new buildings that are useless (e.g. Ishtar gate, Laozi gate, Pillar of Ashoka) or weak units that have little military significance (Macedonian champion crossbow) just to keep the single players and city builders happy. If you touch the main economy or basic units of a civ, you will get dozens of angry complaints like the beginning of A24. 

One idea to get differentiation, however, is to make Han start with sword cav instead of archer cav. We don't have a civ that trains sword cav from the cc yet!

@LetswaveaBook @BreakfastBurrito_007 what do you think? P1 sword cav rush?

what would be OP?

So I he farms will be a point to start the cost.

[Lion.Kanzen]

I don't understand the multiplayer base.

They were happy with the A23 slingers.

The slingers part was my mistake.

But it was fun.

[Lion.Kanzen]

@Yekaterina What do we need to do a Crossbowmen Rush?

What status would be ideal?

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

@Yekaterina @Lion.Kanzen @wowgetoffyourcellphone 

I wonder if there is any historical basis to put spearcav for han in p1 rather than archercav. Spearcav in a25 have been not very powerful, they will get a buff it seems for a26 (based on popularity, +1 hack/pierce). In a25 spearcav have been great for countering cav rushes and also doing their own sort of rushes. Spearcav are only in p1 for 2 other civs, mace and rome.

I think archercav being changed out for spearcav would go a long way to protect them in p1.

I also think crossbow rush would be epic/terrifying. It would be cool to have this as an option.

Side note:

@Yekaterina at this point I think iberians are most vulnerable to archer cav because their towers can't cover as much territory (250 stone vs 100 stone cost) their walls often work against them with horse archers, and they dont have any non skirm unit until p2. This is provided iber player has not gone for rush and has only 2-5 cav.

Edited February 21, 2022 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Lion.Kanzen]

2 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

@Yekaterina @Lion.Kanzen @wowgetoffyourcellphone 

I wonder if there is any historical basis to put spearcav for han in p1 rather than archercav. Spearcav in a25 have been not very powerful, they will get a buff it seems for a26 (based on popularity, +1 hack/pierce). In a25 spearcav have been great for countering cav rushes and also doing their own sort of rushes. Spearcav are only in p1 for 2 other civs, mace and rome.

there is no problem. Historically the Chinese have it all.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

4 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

00wood at minute 2:30-3:00 is a big price for me. Yes, later on I can save 4 more women to chop trees, but, at 2:30 when I need to build farms, I can't afford the extra 200 wood! You might be able to get away with building 1 farm at a time and wait for the 200 wood to be collected, but that is very inefficient as with any other civ, I would be researching the farming tech by now. 

This is a good point about those farms. This is why I think their bonuses/costs system should be replaced by simply keeping their small area and giving them 5 workers per field as well as 100 wood cost. There is a huge bonus to having small farms in rush protection and eco management.

Han would be crazy berry dependent if their farms costed extra wood per food output.

[Lion.Kanzen]

6 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

@Yekaterina @Lion.Kanzen @wowgetoffyourcellphone 

 

I also think crossbow rush would be epic/terrifying. It would be cool to have this as an option.

That's the idea I was hoping to see when I played them yesterday afternoon.

In the end the only thing I saw was, spearman + archer + sword cav.

Some catapults.

[Yekaterina]

20 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

think crossbow rush would be epic/terrifying. It would be cool to have this as an option

Why crossbow rush? They are not significantly different from archers, and only available since P2. In my proposed changes mod I gave crossbows identical dps to slingers at a range of 45 metres (basically slinger unit for Han). I tried my stats in the scenario editor and eventually 10 archer +30 of my crossbows + 20 spearmen was on par with a Celtic army of the same size.

[Lion.Kanzen]

8 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Why crossbow rush? They are not significantly different from archers, and only available since P2. In my proposed changes mod I gave crossbows identical dps to slingers at a range of 45 metres (basically slinger unit for Han). I tried my stats in the scenario editor and eventually 10 archer +30 of my crossbows + 20 spearmen was on par with a Celtic army of the same size.

That's why I was asking you how to improve that unit.

[Yekaterina]

2 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

That's why I was asking you how to improve that unit

I made it identical to slingers. But, in practice range you can train tier 3 crossbowmen by default!! 

[Yekaterina]

Another idea: give champion cavalry crossbowmen penetration ability?

Or, higher firing rate for lower damage per shot? Maybe we can have a gatlin gun unit, that would be funny.

Or, shoot 3 arrows at a time?

Edited February 21, 2022 by Yekaterina

[Lion.Kanzen]

9 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Another idea: give champion cavalry crossbowmen penetration ability?

Or, higher firing rate for lower damage per shot? Maybe we can have a gatlin gun unit, that would be funny.

Or, shoot 3 arrows at a time?

sounds like fun.

Penetration feature for cav.

With the infantry I like the 2 I don't know which one to choose.

Gatling idea sounds lovely.

[Lion.Kanzen]

@Yekaterina

could you do experiments?