A disappointing thread, not only the OP but most of the replies as well. Again I notice the pattern that if people don't get exactly what they want, the patch sucks. Surely you all can see that it's not possible to give everyone exactly what they want. Did we not improve balance? I think we did.
Anyway while the reasoning behind changes was explained before, some good points are brought up in the OP so I will reply to that as well as the Sioux discussion the thread seems to have devolved into.
- Native Scout snare effect removed.
Ok. So the native scout is now completely different and a very uninteractive unit in age 1. In previous patches you had to play slightly differently vs France to avoid fighting the scout or to escape it, now you can just pretend like it doesn't exist. It wasn't even a balance issue. The number of times someone actually lost a game because of the native scout snaring you is very very low. I feel like this change is just popular because people don't like having to play differently vs the scout, and all this change does is remove some of the skill from the early game.
Although this is a highly popular change meaning it won't be simply reverted, we can and will look at nerfing the scout differently. Halve attack or HP for example.
Ports - Genitours home-city shipment decreased from +6 range to +5 range.
...
This actually just accomplishes nothing? Jinetes with this card are still unbelievably strong, arguably no weaker at all from previous patches.
What it accomplishes is exactly what it says: genitours have -1 range. How this is nothing is beyond me. The idea of the change is that skirms should be better against genitours than they currently are, and this change will make sure that in larger fights (which is the norm at that point in the game) more skirms are firing at the genitours than otherwise would be. Anyway this change is easily tweakable and if genitours are still an issue we can make it -2. I don't see what the hurry is.
Russia - Settler batch cost decreased from 270f to 255f.
"17 Strelets" home-city shipment increased to 20 Strelets.
Ok. You now save maybe 200f per game, assuming the game hasn't already ended at the 8 minute mark as many Russian games do. And people think this civ is broken now? It was considered the worst civ last patch by many and it still is. A disappointing and unoriginal change.
Also the unsendable (because it's bad) Strelet card is still unsendable. Nice.
"Yeah well that's only like, your opinion, man." from the Big Lebowski. Sadly that can be the answer to about 99% of the posts ITT including the OP. If Russia went from shit to pretty good with these changes, and the changes didn't change how the civ plays, we did our job. If you still think Russia is shit, you may be right but almost everyone else disagrees and surely you can see why, when making changes, we should act on the majority's opinion.
Spain - "Unction" home-city shipment damage-aura effect decreased from 5% to 4% per Missionary (i.e. maximum potential damage increase reduced from ~63% to ~48%). Missionary cost decreased from 100w, 100c to 50w, 50c.
Just... why? In what universe was this change actually necessary? This change feels like a change where someone said "hey it would be cool if this was viable, so let's buff it" instead of actually addressing issues with the civ.
This change does address issues with the civ (lack of colonial options and lack of long-term options) and does so in a way that uses a fun mechanic which is unique to the civ. If we can make this a viable card without breaking Spain we will have made it a much more interesting civ than before, without changing their FF builds in any way which we didn't deem necessary (other than the shipment changes, which are small).
And then there's the disappointing LACK of changes.
India - Weak civ remains weak because people are afraid of buffing and making it strong.
Sioux - The same.
Iroquois - Got some very minor buffs, but realistically didn't solve any of the civ's problems. The same problem.
Otto - Well... I don't know anything about this civ so I won't talk. At least the jan nerf got reverted?
Yes there is a lack of changes, and there are good reasons for that as I'm sure you could have figured out if you'd thought about it or asked me before making this thread.
We decided early on that we wouldn't change too much per iteration, in order to keep a solid grasp on the state of balance. Knowing the state of balance becomes extremely difficult if we change things around every patch version. Because these civs are unpopular we decided to fix the rest of the civs first, although we have already made changes to these civs to steer them in the right direction.
We absolutely plan to change Otto and Sioux in future patches because these civs are clearly not in a good place right now. Iro is a different story, because some players who are experienced with the civ are saying they are not as bad as everyone thinks. This is definitely something we'll look at in the future though.
Making a lot of changes sounds great, we can try to fix everything with 1 patch, but the chance we'll kill inter-civ balance in the process is 100%. ASFP made this mistake and we learned from it.