Balance Update #3​

Egyptian palintonon​

Greek, Persian and Babylonian palintonons all require a fortress to be produced, and their palintonons train in 30 seconds. For Egypt, they can train the palintonon from their siege workshop; a building easier to obtain than a fortress. It was for this reason that the Egyptian palintonon original had a 60 second train time. However, we felt that with the recent changes to siege, having double the train time might be a bit too harsh on Egypt. For this reason we decided to reduce the train time to only 45 seconds.

Egyptian palintonon​

Greek, Persian and Babylonian palintonons all require a fortress to be produced, and their palintonons train in 30 seconds. For Egypt, they can train the palintonon from their siege workshop; a building easier to obtain than a fortress. It was for this reason that the Egyptian palintonon original had a 60 second train time. However, we felt that with the recent changes to siege, having double the train time might be a bit too harsh on Egypt. For this reason we decided to reduce the train time to only 45 seconds.

Egyptian age IV walls​

Out of the four currently released civilizations, Egypt is the only one that has access to age IV walls. In general, upgraded walls improve rapidly, gaining double the health with each upgrade. Regarding age IV walls, this implies that they have 9000 health, and cost the same as age II walls. We felt that these walls were a bit too difficult to break through, and that they resulted in stale, slow games (very unlike aoeo). With siege being nerfed (though not against walls), we feared that this may become more common. Importantly, we believe that if any civilization should have these crazy walls, it should probably not be egypt. So instead of giving the other civs access to age IV walls, we decided to remove them from the game altogether. This should effectively lead to more action packed games.

Champion upgrade for Champions​

Originally, the Champion Champion (indeed) upgrade involved the following:+50%Damage+50% Health+50% Cost+1 Population Count. Due to the increased cost/population penalty, it was not a very popular upgrade to get. This is compounded with the fact that the Champion is not a popular unit. For this reason we decided to make these changes - a more generic champion upgrade that does not involve any penalties.

Catapult/Ballista​

There were some technical difficulties with decreasing the splash damage on any unit. Therefore we decided to reduce the damage these units deal instead. The same reasoning from the original siege nerfs still apply.

Town center​

Also for the town center we ran into some difficulties when trying to change the increase in damage/health that every age granted. This change is aimed to achieve the same result in a different way. Again, the old reasoning for nerfing town centers globally still applies.

Greek temple​

Unlike the temples from other civilizations, the Greek temple only offers priests (and their upgrade). Though priests are the only source of healing for the Greeks, we felt that a cost of 300 wood might have been a little too high. We observed very few Greek players willing to make this investment. In line with the reduction in siege workshop costs by the original balance team, we felt that Greek temples should receive something similar.

Egyptian camel riders​

Egyptian camels have great utility, as they effectively counter both cavalry and archers after their champion upgrade. With their 11 speed, they belong to the class of fastest cavalry units in the game, which makes for an excellent raiding unit as well. Moreover, the philosophy behind age 2 Egypt has always been that the civilization had cheap units that trained fast, but were a little weaker than the other civs. Indeed, the camel rider is relatively cheap and trains quite fast. However, with 430 health it makes for quite a beefy cavalry unit, when compared with the other civilizations. Since the unit has so many different roles, we felt this combination was a bit too strong.

Discuss it here