Sea beggars are broken?

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harlonreinlu

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 10, 2023
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Hi guys, curious what you all think about the Dutch unique unit, the sea beggar. I've never actually played a game with them. They look pretty decent, the gold and culture boost will help any game, and polders are really nice also (they come a little bit too late in game imo). The piece d'resistance though is the menace and god of the seas once they are unlocked. The fact they come at astronomy as opposed to everyone else getting the corvette (replaced unit) at navigation means there is a window where sea beggars are far too powerful. It takes multiple caravels to equal a sea beggar without considering promotions. The buff to attacking cities is very strong (125% damage bonus if I remember correctly). Of course, the most unbalanced aspect is the prize ships promotion. Keep in mind, I've never played a Dutch game. I always play Aztecs, and recently had a game where I was gifted a single sea beggar by a militaristic city state. By the end of the game (Dom victory), I had over 30 ships. I hadn't built/bought a single ship the entire game, they were all zombies that had survived and been upgraded. This ability to snowball exponentially should be looked at. What do you all think?
 
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I think even if those are unlocked at astronomy, they are still expensive to build immediately. It will take you a fair number of turns to complete. So it's still a trade off. While you built the ship you could have built a building. A few ships in the early game won't make a huge difference. Will you gain a new city with a few of these? Well idk... I haven't played the Dutch either lol
 
Bryan317 said:
I think even if those are unlocked at astronomy, they are still expensive to build immediately. It will take you a fair number of turns to complete. So it's still a trade off. While you built the ship you could have built a building. A few ships in the early game won't make a huge difference. Will you gain a new city with a few of these? Well idk... I haven't played the Dutch either lol
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The production cost doesn't deter the ability to snowball. With a harbour, your buying sea beggars outright. I've never encountered a fleet of sea beggars, thankfully the AI isn't smart enough to spam them like a human would.
 
Naval superiority hardly wins you the game as it can't translate as well to an advantage on land which actually matters. This is why any naval UU should be quite good. Kits should be looked at all together balance wise in my opinion and as someone that has played the Dutch (only 3 times or so though), I don't think they are particularly overpowered. They also didn't have an abnormal showing in a string of simulated AI games researched by Vern.

If this thread is suggesting a nerf, what is it?
 
Netherlands in general are just top tier. Polder is great. Unique ability from resources is great. Unique unit is great.

And their abilities carry them through the eras.

Yes the unit is phenomenal. Can make for easy city capturing.

However when it comes to capturing units, on higher difficulties, you really shouldnt be able to keep the newly captured unit. The ai should have killed it on a counter attack on their turn. Which still saves your own units from being attacked.
 
Captured units can move now, so that's another buff for the Sea Beggars.
 
Solic said:
Naval superiority hardly wins you the game as it can't translate as well to an advantage on land which actually matters. This is why any naval UU should be quite good. Kits should be looked at all together balance wise in my opinion and as someone that has played the Dutch (only 3 times or so though), I don't think they are particularly overpowered. They also didn't have an abnormal showing in a string of simulated AI games researched by Vern.

If this thread is suggesting a nerf, what is it?
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Naval superiority hardly wins games on maps with minimal coast. Go play on archipelago and wreak absolute havoc with a fleet of sea beggars.

I don't see ai game results as useful, AI doesn't have the human ability to mesh long term strategy with unit management. It's still ridiculous I was able to have an entire Naval fleet by the end of the game without building a single one. Didn't feel fair at all.

It should be nerfed by either removing the prize ships promotion, or changing it to something less powerful, i.e. gaining more XP for winning battles or something.
 
greenfieldpark said:
Netherlands in general are just top tier. Polder is great. Unique ability from resources is great. Unique unit is great.

And their abilities carry them through the eras.

Yes the unit is phenomenal. Can make for easy city capturing.

However when it comes to capturing units, on higher difficulties, you really shouldnt be able to keep the newly captured unit. The ai should have killed it on a counter attack on their turn. Which still saves your own units from being attacked.
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Problem is that a captured ship receives a full turn of movement immediately, meaning it can usually escape whatever battle is going on around it and heal at a friendly city.
 
harlonreinlu said:
Naval superiority hardly wins games on maps with minimal coast. Go play on archipelago and wreak absolute havoc with a fleet of sea beggars.

I don't see ai game results as useful, AI doesn't have the human ability to mesh long term strategy with unit management. It's still ridiculous I was able to have an entire Naval fleet by the end of the game without building a single one. Didn't feel fair at all.

It should be nerfed by either removing the prize ships promotion, or changing it to something less powerful, i.e. gaining more XP for winning battles or something.
Click to expand...

Continents is what the mod balances on. I'm also not making the argument that on maps with very low coast naval uu's should be buffed immensely.

AI games are a useful proxy when usually balance decisions are made on a few anecdotal individual player experiences that usually don't play multiple games with 1 mechanic.

It sounds more like you want to remove unit capturing as a whole. Seems like a new congress proposal. I disagree to be honest, because it's an interesting mechanic that differentiates the experience from other civs and I personally didn't feel the Dutch were OP when playing as them. Haven't played with the new France however.
 
As long as captured units still have 0 XP it's hard to find a use for them.
 
Sea beggars are incredibly strong, especially on last patch where City States wouldn't build fortifications. You could easily capture most CS in just one turn.
 
I'm not a fan of the early unlock, personally. I think the Sea Beggar is phenomenal enough without it, and early unlocks cause some abusable advantages that should be avoided unless there is a really strong thematic or strategic reason for them.

Because early unlocks don't affect obsolete techs, you can build caravels and Sea Beggars at the same time. This means you can just build caravels and immediately upgrade them to Sea Beggars on the same turn. This is cheaper than building Sea Beggars directly. The later in the game a UU unlocks, the more abusable this is. You can avoid the navigation tech (which obsoletes Caravels) for a while; long enough to start adopting Imperialism tenets and build/upgrade Caravels at a discounted cost, because the scaler gives a reduction to unit upgrade costs.
 
Now I wonder about the feasibility of a Units column that obsoletes a specific UnitClass.
 
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