Japanese Discussion Thread

[lemmings121]

why with 200w tori?

just because its non ideal to go standard port consul > toshuga without 300w start, and people are talking about tori and its useless samurai... im just throwing ideas arround

[gamevideo113]

Would torii with 2 military wagons be op (instead of samurai)? In early colonial you wouldn't even be able to keep production up with both so i guess it wouldn't be that bad. Seems still quite powerful though.

[Kynesie]

What about give to japs the first food market update ?
You have to gather something like 1000f for age up so 5 % is like 50f. It seems more reasonable than a extra food crate.
Then japs use to make market and research tech at 4 min.so at 4 min you save 25g 25w. After this point, the buff don t snowball anymore , contrary to 3v instead of 2v...

[Garja]

Free market tech is such an ugly change. Thank god we didn't fall for the same trick of the old ASFP by using that.

[KINGofOsmane]

yea also dont like the market thing

[deleted_user]

Free market tech is such an ugly change. Thank god we didn't fall for the same trick of the old ASFP by using that.

*frantically unlikes post about market change*

[IntrepidExplorer]

Free market tech is such an ugly change. Thank god we didn't fall for the same trick of the old ASFP by using that.

What do you consider ugly about free market tech? India has cheaper houses for the exact same reason that this would work - it buffs their colonial time without being a buff that spirals out of control later. A single 5% free market tech, however "ugly" it seems, would indeed solve a perceived weakness that people have discussed a lot in this thread - Japan's stupidly weak early game. I think it's a great idea and should at least be considered come the next iteration of EP.

[Kynesie]

I can understand some don t like market change but it respects wanted conditions
-Boost japs's early game without boost mid/late game
-Don t change the first card diversity
-Don t make toshogu even more predominant.
-Minimalist change as changes in EP should be.

Don t hesitate to propose in this sense if you disagree...

Btw rodelro and dopell have utility in some situation, synergize well with cav, but samourai is a really useless unit

[gamevideo113]

For samurai i suggest to remove the price increase from the speed age3 card.

[Garja]

What do you consider ugly about free market tech? India has cheaper houses for the exact same reason that this would work - it buffs their colonial time without being a buff that spirals out of control later. A single 5% free market tech, however "ugly" it seems, would indeed solve a perceived weakness that people have discussed a lot in this thread - Japan's stupidly weak early game. I think it's a great idea and should at least be considered come the next iteration of EP.

The design is terrible. Create a tech (unique to Japan btw) and make it free. Might as well just review the base gathering rate? It is clearly an improvised fix.
For the record, India is such an ugly designed civ with tons of forced exceptions just to sneak in a civ with wood costing vills.
As for its efficacy, ye I don't think it would be too bad, but again it's sort of the same of giving another food crate. Also it makes market start useless.
In general, besides being ugly, I really dislike such change because it doesn't have convincing enough logic to justify it.

I can understand some don t like market change but it respects wanted conditions
-Boost japs's early game without boost mid/late game
-Don t change the first card diversity
-Don t make toshogu even more predominant.
-Minimalist change as changes in EP should be.

Don t hesitate to propose in this sense if you disagree...

Btw rodelro and dopell have utility in some situation, synergize well with cav, but samourai is a really useless unit

Ye technically (math wise) it does its work but design-wise remains a meh change. EP shouldn't open up for this sort of exceptions imo, or we can end up with a very inconsistent game. I guess we can test it anyway, just to see how good is from the balance standpoint alone.
Samurai is just an iconic Japanese unit, they had to put it there. With a musket unit and a pike unit as well in the same civ it clearly has little use. You can tell they tried to make a bit more viable by lowering ashi hand attack. Anyway I think samurai has something weird in multipliers vs cav and/or vs elephants iirc. We can maybe tweak that. It's not very different from a dopp otherwise. I think it could have some niche use (e.g vs China fortress combo). It's generally a bulkier anticav than ashi but again the problem with this unit is that ashi just overshadows it in all regards (speed included).
They even tried to make samurai more appealing by giving it more card upgrades (they have an extra combat up together with daymio). I don't think we can do much about this unit without making unjustifiably stronger than dopps.

By the way, I wonder if they originally wanted to have ashigaru available only from the fortress age. For sure that would have been more interesting design and probably even relatively balanced with old ashi attack and toshogu gathering boost.

[Rikikipu]

400w card !!

[lemmings121]

The proposed first food up is in interesting idea, and I dont see hows that bad design, thats how india wood upgrades always worked.
in theory, it helps jap slow early game, while having zero efect on late game scaling.. looks great.

About samurais.. just leave it be. "oh but its useless!", then you need to also change flail elephants, rajputs, that useless sioux cav, granadeirs, [...] not something that a balance patch should do, unless we want to completely revamp the whole game.

[Mitoe]

I like the idea of giving them the first market upgrade as well. It's going to be worth less than 1 vill all of age 1 and early Colonial, but should provide just enough food to help their age up time a little bit without pushing them over the top.

[Hazza54321]

i dislike giving free upgrades personally

[Rikikipu]

It's an ugly change. If you want to buff japan, you need to give players other opportunities and not only randomly giving them an upgrade whih requires zero skills to handle and also buff their 300w start whereas the issue is 200 wood start. In that regards, making the market cheaper (something like 60 wood)
is better (although not great) because you let the opportunity to the player to make a market and research the first food upgrade which provides decision making and early macro to the player.

[Garja]

I hope I can play some games with japan this weekend to test stuff

[Forjustice]

How about buff vils 5 percent when they gather food on cherry orchard only.

[Garja]

That would be a more elegant buff. Limited to orchards only and at least makes sense like dutch vills that get coin faster. Still not sure if necessary, it's potential too good because it also scales on market upgrades.

[Forjustice]

I consider on way to deal with torri gate it’s if we think samurai is useless,how about switch it to a consulate wagon which cost u 100w to build(maybe 75w)but personally i think torri gate is fine.

[yemshi]

I agree, Torri Gates should be left as they are. They are worse than Toshogu, yes.
But I don't think EP should encourage a very different playstyle to RE unless really needed.
By that logic we'd have to buff any age II wonder but the Summer Palace for China as well.
For european/ native civs it is also fine to use the same politicians each and every game. No French player will ever age with anything but 400w. That's fine, no?

[wardyb1]

No French player will ever age with anything but 400w. That's fine, no?

Is it really? In all honesty why shouldn't we be looking to diversify play styles? I guess it goes back to not wanting EP to be too radically different from RE but 400w will always be superior because of the amount of villager seconds it is worth in comparison to what's on offer. What does France look like if it is offered a similarly amount of villager seconds of food, or a larger number of cows that would eventually be more valuable long term.

I don't know but I feel like the idea that things shouldn't be balanced because that's how it always has been especially in regards to politician age ups is foolish and possibly limiting some changing play styles. You would never nerf the 400w age up because that would be undoubtedly be nerfing France and how they have always been played but would buffing Euro civs or all civs age ups to offer similar boons hurt the game or not? I'd be very interested to see this tested and see how it played out.

[yemshi]

The point I'm trying to make is that you would have to buff the 500f/7cows/tower 200c ageup by too heavily just to see it. You'd have to end up with 600/700f or so.
We wouldn't see variation but just a very new defining meta where everyone would go 15 cdb into 700f ageup to skip 700c for a FF and send 4 cdb and 1k w.

The same, I fear, would happen with Japanese Torii Gates. They'd need such a big buff to be competitively equal/superior in certain cases that everyone would end up using Japan as a rush civ because it'd simply the superior way of playing the civ.

[lemmings121]

also, another big problem is balancing. is already really hard to keep the balance with small changes, if you sudenlly make big changes like bufing ageups or creating new cards, the whole balance goes to hell.

(dont fonget ms/RE had actual employees working to balance this game for years and their result was trash. imo they tried to change too much everytime, and everytime they created new problems.. we need small and simple changes to have any chance of success here..)

[Inst]

Japanese shipments suck, though. The race is dependent on having 2x shipments because their base shipments are plain awful.

By the way, it should be possible to do a side-upgrade, i.e, modify Torii to support boom / tech better than the simple rush it's keyed to right now. Say, make it give a resource trickle, reduce cost of shrines further, make wonders build faster, etc...

[Inst]

One suggestion might be to make Torii spawn a number of cows, helping to deal with Japan's inability to function if it loses map control. You could make it spawn 4/8/12/20 cows, which are enough for 1/2/3/5 shrines respectively. This wouldn't do anything unless you commit to building the shrines for them.