I have played G&K in multiplayer a good deal by now (either league 1vs1, 2vs2, 3vs3 or FFA games) and these are the issues that are bothering me:
1. Great Wall. Was overpowered in vanilla and still is now. The GW (Great Wall) is banned in every league game, for obvious reasons. Its ability is far to strong stopping any and all posibilities for attack. In addition it works on the whole team making it even stronger in Team games. This thing needs to be reworked, badly. When a wonder is removed from every game by default because its too strong, it needs to be changed.
Solution: Stops barbarians from entering your territory, all enemy units that cross your borders in either direction have their turn ended. Still strong, but not game breaking anymore. Can get additional culture or faith, that doesnt matter.
2.Overpowered special units: another big problem are overpowered units or civs, mainly spain, england and arabs. These factions are also banned in league games because their special units or abilities are far to strong. England Longbowmen are grossly overpowered and so are camel archers, while spain gets game breaking amounts of money and happiness, as well as tile yield. seeing 4 cities by turn 25 is not uncommon when facing spain, enhanced religion in turn 50 as well, depending on wonders found. Theres not even a good fix to it.
3. great generals: With great generals more often than not what you see in multiplayer is the so called 'citadel wars'. Since they got nerfed in their bonus and buffed with culture bombs, they are thrown away most of the time. In addition they are spawning a lot more now. So what happens is ,You place a citadel, you enemy places one adjactend to yours, taking yours away. You place another one taking both away. You enemy places another one etc etc. I have seen up to 9 citadels next to each other. It sucks. It ruins the gameplay. Its no fun. Simply put a great general should not have a citadel and a culture bomb in one.
Solution: Remove the culture bomb of the citadel and make it an either or ability. either u place a citadel or you get a culture bomb not both. Citadels are strong. Citadel wars are ********.
4. Swordsmen: These guys are almost obsolete now. its far more efficient to build composite archers and a scout or horsemen to attack a city than building any swordsmen at all. They are weak, composite archers can hold them off even in melee and have huge positional advantages. Getting them upgraded to longswordmen takes very long and they require iron. Most people dont even tech iron early anymore because composite archers can defend and attack better while pikemen are already stronger and dont require a ressource.
Solution: Probably need a strength upgrade or slight cost reduction because of their special ressource requirement.
5. Air combat system/Bombers: First of all i believe most people dont even know how air combat works. Since the expansion getting air units is a lot more common especially in FFA games, cause early rushes are a lot harder to pull off now thanks to composite archers and games last longer in general.
So one the one hand, bombers are like artillery, just a lot stronger and with tripple range. Bombers have no real counter. the first problem with air combat is the fighters: fighters are useless. They work like bombers but have less range, power, and no upgrades vs cities or land units so as normal units, they are weak.
Now fighters have 2 special abilities, but the problem with that is, they cannot be used offensively or pre emtively:
You can either clear the way for your bombers with your first ability, but this only means If the other side has fighters, every fighter of yours that attacks occupies one enemy fighter for the turn. This ability is basically useless because it does nothing to stop bombers. You cannot attack bombers directly with this, only fighters!
On the other side, you can put your fighters on guard duty. this means that whenever a bomber or fighter attacks you, every fighter of yours will rush in and fight against the attacker once per turn. the problem with this is that ,first off all you can easily get 3 upgrades on bombers by default giving you 50% reduced damage against these types of attacks. The real problem is that bombers work surgicaly. You dont need to attack if your bomber is low on health, and you can attack the same target with multiple bombers taking it out asap while the fighters cant take out your bombers at all in the same time. Fighers cannot attack bombers, they can only defend against them.
As a result fighters are very weak and bombers are basically unstoppable, even by flak units, which do work a lot better however. Anti air units work like fighters in that the protect against 1 attack each turn, but they deal more damage and are very hard to take down with bombers, in addition they dont need any ressource, so they are cost efficient. However this technology comes only AFTER flight has been researched. So if you are in the unfortunate position that you researched fast dynamite (which by the way means almost 100% a loss in multiplayer these days), while your opponent went for public schools, industrialisation and flight, theres no way to stop these bombers.
Artillery on the other hand is almost useless now. The window of opportunity for artillery attacks is VERY small now, and after that you get outteched by faster public schools, and destroyed by far superior bombers while you cannot deal any significant damage to strenght 50 let alone 70 infantry with artillery anyway, which you can get very fast if you dont aim for artillery. The next upgrade step to artillery is so far back (rocketry) that artillery is pretty much useless now. It gets 2 shoted by world war 1 bombers let alone real bombers, while you can only get an upgrade for them if you basically entered WW3.
Solution: fighters should be able to attack bombers directly, and they should protect bombers from other fighters as well. We need real battles for air supperiority. As it stands theres no point building fighters. Just spam bombers and destroy everything in sight and if you engage fighters recover a turn or 2 sometimes. Because bombers are not stoppable what you see now is massive bomber spam with no fighters at all.
6. Tradition is bad and piety is terrible. They reworked Order, autocracy,Freedom and mercantile in pretty viable policies (allbeit freedom beeing a bit weak for competetive multiplayer, but still ok). honor was always good but still needs a rework to fall in line better with tradition and liberty as a viable starter policy tree and patronage got an indirect buff with the new city states.
Piety however is a mess for competetive multiplayer. it should get a complete rework and it should be made aviable from turn 1 onwards, like liberty/tradition/honor.
Tradition is also very, very bad as a starter policy. Liberty is superior 100% of the time, even after the switch of the settler. The problem with tradition is that the second policy is completely useless at the time u take it (free culture building) because u dont have the technology nor the settlements to take advantage of it, and you already have a monument in your capital. The next policy (+2food +10 growth) is also weak. These 2 need to be swapped and the +10 growth needs to be turned into +2 production in the capital. Free garison is completely useless in tradition because hey, i picked Tradition im not going big empire im going small. So what good is it to have no upkeep cost for 2 or 3 units? this could fit into honor easily, but not tradition. We need a complete rework for this one. The rest is ok.
The setback of tradition is insane compared to liberty, while the benefits are really small and not nearly enough to justify that.
7. simultaneous turns. Well yeah this game would be a thousand times better with turn by turn play as an option but i think it will not happen anymore at this point.
1. Great Wall. Was overpowered in vanilla and still is now. The GW (Great Wall) is banned in every league game, for obvious reasons. Its ability is far to strong stopping any and all posibilities for attack. In addition it works on the whole team making it even stronger in Team games. This thing needs to be reworked, badly. When a wonder is removed from every game by default because its too strong, it needs to be changed.
Solution: Stops barbarians from entering your territory, all enemy units that cross your borders in either direction have their turn ended. Still strong, but not game breaking anymore. Can get additional culture or faith, that doesnt matter.
2.Overpowered special units: another big problem are overpowered units or civs, mainly spain, england and arabs. These factions are also banned in league games because their special units or abilities are far to strong. England Longbowmen are grossly overpowered and so are camel archers, while spain gets game breaking amounts of money and happiness, as well as tile yield. seeing 4 cities by turn 25 is not uncommon when facing spain, enhanced religion in turn 50 as well, depending on wonders found. Theres not even a good fix to it.
3. great generals: With great generals more often than not what you see in multiplayer is the so called 'citadel wars'. Since they got nerfed in their bonus and buffed with culture bombs, they are thrown away most of the time. In addition they are spawning a lot more now. So what happens is ,You place a citadel, you enemy places one adjactend to yours, taking yours away. You place another one taking both away. You enemy places another one etc etc. I have seen up to 9 citadels next to each other. It sucks. It ruins the gameplay. Its no fun. Simply put a great general should not have a citadel and a culture bomb in one.
Solution: Remove the culture bomb of the citadel and make it an either or ability. either u place a citadel or you get a culture bomb not both. Citadels are strong. Citadel wars are ********.
4. Swordsmen: These guys are almost obsolete now. its far more efficient to build composite archers and a scout or horsemen to attack a city than building any swordsmen at all. They are weak, composite archers can hold them off even in melee and have huge positional advantages. Getting them upgraded to longswordmen takes very long and they require iron. Most people dont even tech iron early anymore because composite archers can defend and attack better while pikemen are already stronger and dont require a ressource.
Solution: Probably need a strength upgrade or slight cost reduction because of their special ressource requirement.
5. Air combat system/Bombers: First of all i believe most people dont even know how air combat works. Since the expansion getting air units is a lot more common especially in FFA games, cause early rushes are a lot harder to pull off now thanks to composite archers and games last longer in general.
So one the one hand, bombers are like artillery, just a lot stronger and with tripple range. Bombers have no real counter. the first problem with air combat is the fighters: fighters are useless. They work like bombers but have less range, power, and no upgrades vs cities or land units so as normal units, they are weak.
Now fighters have 2 special abilities, but the problem with that is, they cannot be used offensively or pre emtively:
You can either clear the way for your bombers with your first ability, but this only means If the other side has fighters, every fighter of yours that attacks occupies one enemy fighter for the turn. This ability is basically useless because it does nothing to stop bombers. You cannot attack bombers directly with this, only fighters!
On the other side, you can put your fighters on guard duty. this means that whenever a bomber or fighter attacks you, every fighter of yours will rush in and fight against the attacker once per turn. the problem with this is that ,first off all you can easily get 3 upgrades on bombers by default giving you 50% reduced damage against these types of attacks. The real problem is that bombers work surgicaly. You dont need to attack if your bomber is low on health, and you can attack the same target with multiple bombers taking it out asap while the fighters cant take out your bombers at all in the same time. Fighers cannot attack bombers, they can only defend against them.
As a result fighters are very weak and bombers are basically unstoppable, even by flak units, which do work a lot better however. Anti air units work like fighters in that the protect against 1 attack each turn, but they deal more damage and are very hard to take down with bombers, in addition they dont need any ressource, so they are cost efficient. However this technology comes only AFTER flight has been researched. So if you are in the unfortunate position that you researched fast dynamite (which by the way means almost 100% a loss in multiplayer these days), while your opponent went for public schools, industrialisation and flight, theres no way to stop these bombers.
Artillery on the other hand is almost useless now. The window of opportunity for artillery attacks is VERY small now, and after that you get outteched by faster public schools, and destroyed by far superior bombers while you cannot deal any significant damage to strenght 50 let alone 70 infantry with artillery anyway, which you can get very fast if you dont aim for artillery. The next upgrade step to artillery is so far back (rocketry) that artillery is pretty much useless now. It gets 2 shoted by world war 1 bombers let alone real bombers, while you can only get an upgrade for them if you basically entered WW3.
Solution: fighters should be able to attack bombers directly, and they should protect bombers from other fighters as well. We need real battles for air supperiority. As it stands theres no point building fighters. Just spam bombers and destroy everything in sight and if you engage fighters recover a turn or 2 sometimes. Because bombers are not stoppable what you see now is massive bomber spam with no fighters at all.
6. Tradition is bad and piety is terrible. They reworked Order, autocracy,Freedom and mercantile in pretty viable policies (allbeit freedom beeing a bit weak for competetive multiplayer, but still ok). honor was always good but still needs a rework to fall in line better with tradition and liberty as a viable starter policy tree and patronage got an indirect buff with the new city states.
Piety however is a mess for competetive multiplayer. it should get a complete rework and it should be made aviable from turn 1 onwards, like liberty/tradition/honor.
Tradition is also very, very bad as a starter policy. Liberty is superior 100% of the time, even after the switch of the settler. The problem with tradition is that the second policy is completely useless at the time u take it (free culture building) because u dont have the technology nor the settlements to take advantage of it, and you already have a monument in your capital. The next policy (+2food +10 growth) is also weak. These 2 need to be swapped and the +10 growth needs to be turned into +2 production in the capital. Free garison is completely useless in tradition because hey, i picked Tradition im not going big empire im going small. So what good is it to have no upkeep cost for 2 or 3 units? this could fit into honor easily, but not tradition. We need a complete rework for this one. The rest is ok.
The setback of tradition is insane compared to liberty, while the benefits are really small and not nearly enough to justify that.
7. simultaneous turns. Well yeah this game would be a thousand times better with turn by turn play as an option but i think it will not happen anymore at this point.