hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to continue our Through the Ages
Series where we look back at how Age of Empires 2 civilizations have evolved between their original
design in 1999 and today this time we're going to be looking at the final age of King civilizations
I've yet to cover the Chinese and britons which I'd put off so far mostly just because their
total number of changes are relatively small that said Chinese have always been in a very
unique spot when it comes to balance creating an interesting dilemma for the developers as we'll
talk about and Britain's with their longbows are of course always a fan favorite so I'm
looking forward to getting into this one we'll start off with the Chinese who were originally
designed as officially an Archer civilization but with adaptability being Central probably
best reflected in their discounted Technologies their bonuses today are almost identical to their
first iteration with extra villagers offset by fewer starting resources cheaper Technologies
Town centers supporting more population demo ships with more HP and Farms with extra food though you
may have noticed a lot of the details in these bonuses have changed the chu ko nu is of course
their high damage output archery unique unit and not to get too hung up on it but under the hood
the chu ko nu is very strange even stranger than you probably realize at this point it's well known
that their extra arrows carry zero melee attack giving them extra damage against Rams because
of their negative melee armor but even more odd is that chu ko nu have a hard-coded zero attack bonus
against buildings in Cavalry that's quite unusual and the only logical explanation I can think of
is that at one point the developers played around with the idea of the chu ko nu having extra damage
against those things meaning the chu ko nu may have almost been the first anti-cavalry archer
in addition to there now being an anti-anti-archer Archer another Quirk about the Chinese has always
been their historical accuracy or perceived lack thereof from the beginning they missed
out on hand Cannon ear bombard Cannon and block printing despite the fact that the age of Kings
manual itself credits China for inventing or at least trailblazing those things we won't hash out
the old arguments about whether or not China used these Technologies in the same way as Europeans
but from the start this was something noticed and appeared in early interviews with developers the
original impression that players and devs seem to have was that Chinese were a little too strong in
Age of Kings thanks to their extra three starting villagers and that became a focus and he conquers
expansion the following year in that expansion their first big change was their starting
resources were dropped by 50 wood on top of the original 150 food which was quickly patched to
-200 food meaning they couldn't even cue a villager at the start of the game this is also
when unique texts were added with rocketry being introduced in Imperial age giving scorpions and
chu ko nu even more attack at the time Sandy Peterson the legendary lead designer of the
conquerors expansion said he thought it was a very good Tech and had needed to be toned down
prior to release in addition the chu ko nu gained a passive plus two against Spearman with actually
most archers picking up either plus two or plus 3 against Spears in the conqueror's expansion this
is how Chinese were for over a decade during which period they were probably best known
as the broken Nomad civilization on account of starting with six villagers funny enough Sandy
Peterson was asked in an interview about the Chinese Nomad start in age of conquerors and
at that time he felt it was a disadvantage to the Chinese to have so many villagers to keep
track of though the community figured out pretty quickly that three extra villagers were more than
worth being down 250 resources remember this was also a time that villager fights were very common
and a forced peace treaty wasn't added until far down the road to prevent this sort of thing of
course Chinese could afford to have a three-on-3 villager fight while having three completely
different villagers setting up their initial Town following this the fan made and later official
forgotten expansion in 2013 didn't initially make too many radical changes to the Chinese the
main change was expanding their extra TC housing bonus to also include plus five line of sight the
obvious rationale here was that starting with 6B villagers as Chinese but having no food was only
an advantage if you could find sheep quickly and start queuing villagers which greater town
center line of sight would obviously help with this is also when castle age unique texts were
added giving Chinese the Great Wall Tech adding 30 more HP to many defenses though notably not
castles it's actually quite an unusual unique Tech as it costs a bit of stone which is something that
developers generally shy away from and Great Wall itself is generally seen as we'll say optional or
situational chu ko nu were also given a slightly faster creation time though overall you can see
they obviously felt Chinese were in a pretty good spot already as all of these are relatively minor
changes it was during this period that online win rate statistics started to be tracked first by
aeistats.io and later by other websites where something very peculiar about Chinese started
to be recognized if you're not sure what I'm referring to let's look at some numbers looking
only at 2400 plus rated 1v1 Arabia games over the last year Chinese have about a 61 percent
win rate and our second overall behind only the polls likewise to take the king of the desert 4
Tournament as one recent example Chinese were the third most banned civilization in the tournament
and were the highest pick priority when available now this sounds like an overpowered civilization
yet watch what happens when we shift the ELO that we're talking about moving down to the
2000 to 2400 rated games which keep in mind is still the top one percent of rated players
Chinese drop down to 8th overall with a 54 win rate moving down again to 1600 to 2000 rated
players they drop to 16th overall with about a 50 win rate continuing this we see a straight
monotonic decline in Chinese rankings with each lower ELO interval that we look at until
we reach these sub 800 ELO players where Chinese rank dead last with a little over a 44 win rate
explanations for this range from their difficult start to their flexible Army compositions that
are best used by higher skilled players to be clear most civilizations are not like this and
here's a comparison with three other popular civs just to give an example of how strikingly
pronounced the pattern is for Chinese now going into Definitive Edition I'd say this was well
known within stats loving circles and certainly the developers would have had even more insights
about this from their own data which brings us to a dilemma if you're a developer going into
Definitive Edition planning for massive overhauls to many civilizations how do you approach Chinese
on the one hand expert players are telling you to Nerf the civilization as they don't even want to
face it in tournaments whereas on the other hand for the bottom 80 percent of players that is 1300
1v1 ELO and lower the civilization is objectively doing terribly ranking in the bottom five in fact
the obvious and easy way out would be to adjust their start to make it more standard and that way
experts would get less of an edge by knowing how to handle it perfectly and Casual players
would be less punished but at the same time that's arguably just taking away something that's unique
about the civ so what did they do well it may seem surprising but the initial plan seems to have been
to buff them where in definitive Edition the first big change is that they gained block printing it's
tempting to assume this was in relation to the historical accuracy criticisms but there was
actually a lot of pushback against this from the competitive scene as onagers were considered one
of the only effective ways to deal with the Chinese late game exploiting their lack of
bombard Cannon but suddenly this made their monks able to convert onagers making them even better in
some cases they were also indirectly buffed with sheep spawning closer to the town center as part
of a map scripting overhaul making their odd start a bit less punishing the offset to all of this is
they received a big Nerf on Nomad where they no longer received their three extra villagers prior
to making a town center which then delayed how quickly that could be built the consensus was
this one change sent them from being clearly the best to completely generic and unpopular
on Nomad and looking up their stats right now it doesn't look great probably in reaction to
the concerns raised about Chinese now being even better in some situations against onagers Chinese
soon after lost Redemption so now they would be completely unable to convert Siege at all but
keep in Block printing for historical purposes the net result of these changes was basically
maintaining the previous status quo where Chinese were very good objectively in the hands of experts
and very weak when used by low-skilled players with onagers back to being at least one way to
counter their late game Army most recently they also received a minor Nerf changing their plus 45
food team bonus on farms to just plus 10 which in the early to mid game at least means Farms coming
up for receding about a minute earlier than before this is where they stand now and as we saw it
there's still an odd disconnect between high and low skill players that probably can't be avoided
based on the nature of the civilization's design from the very beginning but now let's move on and
check out our final age of King civilization the britons like Chinese they're technically an Archer
civ but this time we're based much more explicitly around the Archer line and have probably the most
iconic Archer unique unit in the game looking at their original bonuses they were again similar to
today but with one very notable difference notice their first bonus is that their Town Center's
cost 50 less currently this bonus is worded as costing 50 less wood so you might think this
sounds pretty good giving them originally another 50 Stone discount but it's even crazier than that
as Town centers used to only cost wood in Age of Kings meaning this discount handed britons
a potentially incredible boom in early Castle age at the moment you're limited by your starting 200
Stone to build two additional Town centers but back in the day anytime a Britain player had
138 wooden Castle age they could just throw down another one Sandy Peterson commented going into
the conqueror's expansion that britons were among the four that needed the most tweaking
elsewhere mentioning that britons would still make more than one town center after the stone cost was
later added just not more than two or three which gives you an idea of how players were exploiting
the cheap Town centers by building significantly more other than that their bonuses have remained
pretty much the same with foot archers gaining plus one range in Castle and Imperial Shepherds
working 25 faster and archery ranges working 20 faster the longbowmen for its part was also
basically the same as it is now it just took a bit longer to train and didn't have plus two attack
against spearmint something I didn't know about them until researching this video is that they
were originally planned to have a minimum range much like skirmishers but that was removed just
before release immediately in Age of Kings their extra long range made them a fan favorite with
Sandy Peterson saying he considered it a strong Contender as the best archer in the game albeit in
a game it had far fewer Arch unique units than we do now the following nearly conquerors expansion
of course brought a much-needed Nerf to their Town centers now requiring a hundred Stone to
build which britons didn't not receive a discount on also important to remember is that this is when
thumbring and Bloodlines were added making Cavalry stronger and archers more accurate as well as fire
faster yet neither Tech was given to the britons this is an interesting decision as you're taking
the prototypical Archer civilization and denying them accuracy on their archers while many of their
competitors would be improved this is also when longbowmen gained plus two against Spear units
and when the unique Tech Yeoman was added giving plus one range to archers and always surprisingly
to me plus two attack for towers with the britons now sufficiently nerfed the next round of changes
came in the Forgotten expansion and subsequent DLCs where britons were largely improved with
an expansion of their Tech Tree they were given both Canon Galleon and heavy scorpion as well as
having their unique Tech Yeoman move down to Castle age and warwolf added an imperial for
their trebuchets longbows were also made a bit faster to train though you can see none of these
changes are really earth-shattering and obviously they felt britons were in a pretty good spot the
stats that started to come out at this time also suggested that britons were fairly average though
in the community they were respected for their extra range on especially Castle age crossbows
even in Definitive Edition there have been very few changes to britons with the most
notable that they were given treadmill Crane in dynasties of India and recently the crossbow and
arbelster upgrades were made more expensive which obviously impacts britons at the moment they're
a little above average on 1v1 open maps and a little below average on closed maps and of all
the age of King civilizations I would actually describe them as one of the most stable across
the years with very few dramatic changes that said at the moment where they really shine it
says a good team game civilization on the flank battling it out with Mayans as the best team game
Archer civ by win rate they're still unique as the Archer civ with extra range and I would say
an example of a well-designed civilization that has a lane and sticks to it where players should
have a pretty good idea of what to expect from them the first time they play them in a way that
makes them a perfect contrast with Chinese who are about as confusing of a civilization you can
possibly throw at a new player so that concludes the age of King civilizations though I think I
will continue the series if there's interest and move on to the Conqueror civilizations in
the future which I actually jumped the gun on and started already with Aztecs and Mayans huge
thanks to Seb James John joxster Justin Kyle Samantha Woodruff armiral zarkon and everyone
else on patreon for their amazing ongoing support thanks for watching and I'll see you next time