Goodspeed wrote:- increasing the xp modifier so that germany gets slightly less shipments
German's civ bonus is that their shipments are stronger, if we then compensate by making their shipments less frequent then they might as well not have a civ bonus. I already disagree with the decision to give them a shipment malus. It's entirely the wrong way to compensate for the strength of their civ bonus. I don't want to make it even worse.
It's similar to what they did to Spain. Their shipments were so fast that they became OP, so they nerfed their shipments into the ground. Great job guys. You get trainwrecks like 3 lancers in fortress age and start wondering if 3 shipments of yours may be just as good as 2 shipments of theirs.
- 3 SW + 2 Uhlan -> 3 SW
I don't think this would have been enough to balance Germans. And this, too, is nerfing their civ bonus. It's also messing with an otherwise consistent game design which I'm not a fan of.
- uhlan slight cost increase (because of mentioned negatives of nerfing uhlan stats)
I addressed this in my previous post. In short, I think it would need to be a rather large cost increase in order to have enough impact to balance the civ.
- fortress shipments only give +2 uhlans
This is also a direct nerf to their civ bonus.
Out of the ones you mentioned, changes to SW (shipments) are most appealing to me. But I would sooner nerf SW's gather rate than remove uhlans from shipments. Another problem I have with this though is that 3 SW is such a core German feature and I can imagine German players love sending it. I know I do when I play the civ. I'd prefer not to mess with that.
The SW gather rate was seriously considered but we decided against it in the end. Honestly, Germans seem great currently. Like I said they are balanced and their army is now diverse, instead of 90% uhlan. I don't see the problem.
I always think part of germany's strength is that after a fight they get so much xp that they'll get a shipment or sometimes two - just like the other civs, except that for germany that means 6 free uhlans which is easily enough to push a won game in their favor. Basically, if the game is even and fights are occuring, germany will win that game because of the free uhlans. I thought it'd be possible to make the penalty scale later on, meaning that the later shipments in age 3 become slower. It doesn't really change the civ much, does it? You still do the same stuff, still get a comparably strong mass but it doesn't feel like your units are garbage and you're forced to choose between garbage and trash to aid your skirmishers.
One part I don't like about 3 SW + 2 Uhlan is that it's overwhelmingly good, which limits germany in options a bit. I would guess nerfing that to 3 SW only would force germany to be more passive in early colonial against other semi FF's, in that sense it does the same as the nerf to HP but again doesn't feel that bad.
You can use semantics to say that nerfing a civ bonus is always bad, but that line of reasoning doesn't make sense in this case. After all, part of germany as a civ used to be strong hand cav and weak anti cav. In practise you've already nerfed a big part of what makes germany unique (you're going cav skirm instead of skirm + anti cav like most other civs). Basically the nerf does mean that germany gets a more balanced army composition, which kinda takes away the weakness they have to cav + goon composition. Either way, you're already nerfing their most prevalent civ feature. You're actually nerfing all shipments (except for the merc ones) because they all come with uhlans, and I think I'd prefer 8 old uhlans of 9 current uhlans, so you're straight up nerfing those characteristic shipments more than you would by doing 3 uhlan -> 2 uhlan.
Actually, in handling a civ that is too strong you'll almost always directly touch the civ bonus or unique units, because there is very little else to even adress. Otto had their most unique unit nerfed, Iro had their uniquely strong start nerfed, Brits had their manors nerfed, france had their CDB nerfed, Germany had their unique army nerfed. It's how balancing works, and it's problematic that a very potent balancing tool of adjusting the civ bonus is being blocked by mostly irrational arguments; the result is that you have a civ that has only 1 good unit available, and then 5 shitty unit types (xbow pike dopp uhlan WW).. That just doesn't feel right, and I imagine its also very frustrating with regards to playing both EP and RE sometimes.