Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here.
A new patch for May just came out and, as always, it shakes things up for a few civilisations,
while also adding some interesting new features.
To start things off, a general change for all civilisations
is that their Fishermen can now drop off food at Docks.
Villagers gathering other types of food aren't technically allowed,
though you can be sneaky about it, and Villagers who are carrying other types of food
can be switched into Fishermen, and you can then manually drop off whatever they're carrying.
It's obviously not something that's gonna work on a large scale,
but it's a pretty nifty trick in the early-game.
even without that little exploit, it's still a nice useful feature
to pick up shore fish around a Dock with whatever Villagers built it.
Another general change is the training time of the Fire Galley was increased,
maybe to help make the regular Galley line more viable.
It's only a 5-second increase so, in the average game,
I don't think it's going to make too much of a difference.
Getting into the civilisation-specific changes,
the first is a big change for the Bulgarians,
which is that they lose Paladin,
but their unique tech Stirrups now affects Knights and Cavaliers.
Stirrups, of course, increases the cavalry attack rate by 33%
which, even a quick test will show, give them probably the strongest Knights in Castle Age.
They still need to build a castle in order to get the tech,
but my first impression is that their late-Castle Age Knights are gonna be crazy good.
Remember that Cavaliers also benefit,
performing almost on the same level as Paladins in melee fights
without having to pay for the Paladin upgrade.
I always thought the weakness of their unique unit
was its upfront cost compared to the Knight line,
while this buffs the Knight line in the mid-game
and in the late game makes the Konnik look way more expensive to upgrade in comparison.
The only argument for this change I can really see is that
it simplifies the description, so instead of saying
"these cavalry get it and this one doesn't", you can now say "all cavalry",
But the downside is I think it might change the Bulgarians' identity
from "the civilization with the cool hybrid unique unit"
into "just another civilization that spams a lot of Knights."
The next change is for the Ethiopians;
their Torsion Engines unique tech now gives Scorpions a wider area of damage than they had before.
That makes it more important than ever to spread out your units when you're going against them,
though I think I still prefer the Torsion Siege Onagers.
The next update is for the Goths.
This is the third patch in a row that they've had a change.
This time, they get Loom as a civ bonus, without actually losing any gold.
That's quite a strong early-economy bonus that saves 25 seconds of town centre time,
which could theoretically be used to make either one more Villager in Dark Age
or even go up a bit faster, assuming you have the food.
Free Loom also means that players will find they lose fewer villagers to boars
on top of already having a +5 attack bonus against them.
Beyond just helping out your early economy, though,
saving that 50 gold for loom also means you have more gold to put into Militia,
and it works out that Goths can now make 6 Militia with their starting gold,
where most civilizations need to collect 10 extra gold to even just make 3.
Overall, you can see this one change has quite a ripple effect across
both their economy and their early military.
The next change was for the Indians,
whose Fishermen now work 10% faster instead of 15% faster, and they no longer carry 15 extra food.
This is a pretty big nerf to their early economy on some maps,
but ultimately, I think it's necessary to increase the variety of civilizations
on maps that have a lot of shore fish.
The next change is: Khmer farmers have their work rate reduced by 3%.
In a simple test, I found that still puts them around 9% ahead of generic civilizations in Castle Age,
and of course you get that food continuously trickling in, which has its own benefits.
Since they don't have to drop off the food, you also don't need to worry about placing them poorly,
so overall, it's still a really strong bonus.
Another nerf to the Khmer is they lose Bombard Cannons,
giving them a bit less flexibility in the late-game and making it harder for them to counter Onagers.
Next, let's take a look at the Lithuanians, who had their unique unit costs go from
50 food and 80 gold to 70 food and 50 gold,
so slightly cheaper overall and certainly less gold-intensive.
Leitis have always had the drawback of needing castles,
but their cheaper costs could now partially offset that.
In a quick test, they definitely outperform the Knight with equal resources,
which was true before, but obviously not by this much.
The lower gold cost in particular is going to make them more viable in the late-game than they were before,
though of course the Paladin still has higher pierce armor and HP.
Another buff to the Lithuanians is their unique tech, Tower Shields, was made cheaper,
and had its effect increased to +2 instead of +1 pierce armor.
This has always been a bit of a weird tech since they're missing the last infantry armor upgrade,
meaning they end up being strictly worse than fully upgraded trash units.
As it stands, their Halberdier are still down one melee armor, but the Skirmisher now has 10 pierce armor.
Any unit that did 11 pierce damage before is suddenly gonna go from doing 2 to just 1 damage against them.
For other units like Arbalests who did 10 damage already,
they're just gonna do the same as they did before.
Overall, I'd say it's a bit of a buff, but they're still not top-tier trash in my opinion
even with 10% faster movement rate thrown in there as well.
But where the devs give, they also take,
and one of the big losers in this patch was the Persians,
who lost their 5% faster work rate in Dark Age for the town center and dock.
Between faster Villager creation and a faster advance, this was comfortably an extra villager going into feudal age,
not to mention potentially being ahead in fishing ships as well.
Considering Persians were top-tier and maybe even the best civilisation in the game last patch,
I think, for the sake of balance, this was a good change.
At this point, their goldless crossbows are the only way that they're different from HD.
The Slavs' Boyar also had a bit of a tweak,
now moving slower but having their pierce armor increased.
Pierce armor is often more important than speed against ranged units,
and against Arbalests, for example, they'll now take 50 instead of 38 shots, negating one of their big weaknesses.
They will of course perform nearly identically against melee units,
hopefully making the unit a bit more common to see.
But, speaking of slow units... the Teutons.
Now, their identity has always been as a slow but unstoppable force,
and what I like about the recent changes is they've been doubling down on that,
and they did so yet again in this patch with even more melee armor.
In this patch all of their Barracks and now Stable units as well
get +1 melee armor in Castle and another +1 in Imperial Age.
That's everything from Champions and Halberdiers to Scouts - theoretically -
and, maybe most importantly, to Paladins.
Those in particular have 7 melee armor now,
automatically putting them right up there as maybe the strongest Paladins in the game, considering other Paladins max out at 5.
This is an automatic and free bonus upon hitting those new ages as well,
so it's something you don't even have to think about.
The Teutonic Knight's speed was also increased to 0.8 tiles per minute,
up from 0.65 back in Age of Conquerors.
That's still slower than the Halberdier, but they've definitely gone from a trudge,
to a plod,
and now an all-out shuffle.
...Scary stuff! 😨
So overall, it's a pretty big buff to all of the Teutons' melee units,
on top of the recently increased discount to their farming bonus.
So those are all of the balance changes to these civilisations,
But there's also a few other notable updates,
and I'll highlight what I think are the most interesting.
The first is a reduced number of wolves on many maps,
which is popular with everyone except Magyars.
It doesn't say exactly how much less common they are,
but to take an example, it looks like 1vs1 Arabia now has just four,
which is about half of what it was before.
Suddenly building walls and forward buildings should be quite a bit easier.
There's also a long list of map changes that I won't get into too much -
it's mostly just resource distributions to make things more fair and reduce elevation.
A few notable ones are that Serengeti now has more resources,
with 5 zebra and 3 ostrich per player, a closer wood line,
and more gold around your town than previously.
It's also now in the map pool, along with a few other reshufflings.
Multiplayer matchmaking should now be more fair as well since it no longer uses Elo's sum,
though...theoretically, using sum should have been balanced before.
That is, unless it's saying that it would match a party of
two players with 1000 Elo against random players who were 2000 Elo.
Obviously, that wouldn't be ideal, so if that is the case then it's a good thing they fixed that.
You should also be able to see more games in the unranked Lobby which, up until now, had been capped at 50.
There are also some interesting new options added to the UI.
The first is it now displays future technologies.
Basically, if something is going to be available to you at some point in the game,
it'll show up, but it'll be greyed out.
That's definitely helpful for future planning if you don't have your civilisation's tech tree memorised.
Another helpful change is the in-game grid now also features a lot of customisation options.
You can now set how noticeable you want the grid to be,
with no grid in the middle, a strong white grid on one side,
and a strong black grid on the other, with the gradient in between.
Basically, you don't need to look around for just the
right grid bot any more and you can basically do it yourself.
You can also decide when you want the grid to turn on.
For example, you can now set it to turn on only when you select ranged units
or, even better, to turn on just when placing buildings.
Immediately, I'm reminded of every game I've lost from leaving a gap in the wall.
Another UI change is the icons in the bottom left corner
and in the tech tree now match your player colour, instead of always being blue.
Personally, that never bugged me that much, but I imagine some people out there are pretty happy about this.
And finally, of course, there's a new theme for this patch and a new event with things to unlock.
The theme for this month is medieval technologies and the visual rewards are all siege-related.
There's also two new cheat codes you can permanently unlock by completing challenges.
The first is "Going Above and Beyond", which unlocks the 256x mod.
If you're unfamiliar, that lets you research most techs 256 times.
You can imagine how quickly those 20% faster Lumberjack tech stack.
I made a video before looking at the most broken combinations with the mod
and all I can say is this is a great cheat code to include.
I am wondering what happens for people who buy the game after the event ends,
since, the way I interpret these events, it's a one-time chance to unlock.
Hopefully, there's a plan for that and they aren't completely left out.
The other new cheat code removes the research cost of techs entirely,
and you can imagine how silly things get when you combine these two cheats.
So that's the patch heading into May 2020.
I think my favourite changes were the Persian nerf, the Teuton buff, and the new grid features.
Like I said, I'm most hesitant about the Bulgarian change and the dock drop-off,
which might be a bit too easy to exploit, though neither change seems really game-breaking to me.
The nice thing about such frequent updates is even if something isn't working,
it's usually addressed a month later anyway,
so I'm looking forward to playing around with some of the new tweaks.
But that's all for this one; thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you next time.
[Outro music: "A Thief at the Museum" by Moss Harman]