hey guys spirit of the law here in this video i want to take a quick look at the bohemians and
what's been going on for them recently i've been chipping away at a bohemian civ overview and had
a few notes put together before the dynasties of india dlc dropped and took up a lot of my focus
getting back to my bohemian notes and checking them against their online stats at the moment
i was shocked at how much worse they've been doing the last month after a couple of seemingly
innocuous changes for this one i want to look at what those changes were how large of an impact
they had and why i think it was a very well done nerf going back to april 27th as part of a balance
update coinciding with the dynasties of india release the patch notes included two relevant
changes the first is bohemian monasteries are no longer affected by their wood discount bonus
the bonus in question reduced blacksmith university and monastery cost by a hundred so two
thirds of the bonus is still there and bohemians have an unusually long list of other bonuses
so on the whole it really didn't look like that much to me the other two changes are lumped
together and just say their unique bombard cannon upgrade the houfnice that just does less attack to
a bit smaller area though again as a percentage the changes seem relatively modest it works
out to 5 less damage against units and 10 less against buildings with a 20th of a tile smaller
blast radius the reason for these nerfs was bohemians on closed maps had a little over a 58
win rate which put them in the top three on basically the same level as turks and maybe
a little behind poles but the stats definitely backed the reputation as an s-tier arena sieve
that reputation really didn't come down to just one thing in particular to start with they get
free mining upgrades meaning a potentially earlier castle drop with a unique unit that's quite
difficult to counter in castle age on top of more gold income from the free mining tech combining
monks and siege is relatively popular on arena and not only do you have more gold income for that but
previously had the monastery discount as well letting you build roughly double the usual number
with the same resources easy to overlook as well is that siege workshops require a blacksmith to be
built first so that's another 100 wood you're definitely saving if you're going early siege
or fast castling they can then follow that up with early hand cannoneers or chemistry on their
crossbows in castle age and even their villagers in the late game are more efficient benefiting
from fervor an imperial age throw in monks not costing food and their unique bombard cannon
upgrade with potentially all gunpowder units also moving faster and the picture is they not
only start strong in arena but continue to have additional advantages kicking in right through to
post imperial with so many bonuses and different potential strategies it was surprising to see
then that since the nerf to monasteries and the houfnice attack they fall into 10th on closed maps
dropping almost out of the top quartile with a 5 percent lower win rate than they had previously
that's a big jump and for context a similar percentage jump again would put them below average
following the error bars they could realistically settle anywhere between 6th and 15th overall on
closed maps for which arena is the most popular this seems to be due almost entirely to their
loss of the monastery discount for example looking at win rates by games ending at different times
previously you can see they were doing especially well in 20 to 30 minute long games which lines up
well with the narrative of a strong monk and siege push whereas now they're maybe slightly
above average early on but without the same spike to me that's a great change as game's ending in
20 minutes because a civilization specializes in pulling off something almost impossible to stop
isn't very satisfying and leads to civ frustration more expensive monasteries means fewer of them
meaning fewer monks fewer relics and fewer easy wins something that also fits this narrative
is that they only fell slightly on open maps like arabia and nowhere near the same extent
which also makes sense as monks generally play a smaller role on those maps now while i'd put
a lot of the credit for the closed map drop on the increased monastery cost i do want to
quickly put the houfnice change into perspective and while it may also be playing a small role
comparing it to the regular bombard cannon before and after the changes it now has plus 10 attack
instead of plus 15 slightly reduced bonus damage against buildings the reduced blast radius though
unchanged is the extra 10 hp over the bombard cannon and plus one pierce armor keep in mind
because it's improving such an expensive unit it's also an expensive upgrade at 950 food and 750 gold
in some cases the upgrade doesn't have a practical effect and an example of that would be against
trebuchets where in any case they take three shots a really important case is onagers though
which houfnice can take out in one shot whereas despite seemingly having just enough attack the
regular bombard cannon doesn't consistently take it out in one attack i suspect this is
related to its blast damage leading to a bit less damage on a direct hit than you'd otherwise expect
of course when firing into bunched up groups of units the extra attack and blast radius
is definitely going to be helpful and that's the main place this new nerf would show up in practice
though compared to the regular bombard cannon it's a dramatic improvement a final notable case
is against buildings with siege engineers and masonry the difference is going from 16 up to
18 shots required which is again noticeably better than the generic bomber cannons 21 shots based on
these examples i would consider this a noticeable nerf to the unit and at least a contributing
factor to their win rate decline overall though the main thing i wanted to highlight here was how
surprisingly effective the recent bohemian changes were with just a few subtle tweaks at least going
by ranked win rates they went from an s-tier top 3 close map civ with a reputation at least
of being maybe the best to an A tier top 10 civ in line with others like teutons and cumans as
a solid pick but not oppressive it's a dramatic example of what a couple hundred extra would in
early castle age can do and that they found the right things to target to bring them back down
to earth obviously if you like to play poles on arena you're probably a little nervous at this
point wondering if they're gonna be next and we'll just have to wait and see about
that that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next time