I was thinking about this particular topic again recently, and now thought to look up if someone else had considered it at the forums.
I made a topic about the Nightwatch unit before and how it's kind of useless. But it really applies to Esus altogether. It doesn't have any particular buildings or units worth making for 90% of the game, and its best effect, that you can keep your units within enemy borders on war declaration, is usually not needed anyway.
The good and bad parts:
- Shadowriders are amazing, but you can only have 4 and they come very, very late.
- Keeping units within enemy borders allows for very sneaky moves. Humans will hate you for doing that though, and you will never get open borders as Esus in any later games.
- Gibbon is very powerful and available early. Can feed your other units xp quite nicely with the illusions, especially marksman units.
- Very easy and cheap to spread
The bad:
- No priest with special powers
- No high priest either
- No buildings
- No wonders
- Only 1 hero
- "Steal" ability is nigh-useless
- Nightwatch is useless
Now many of these things are shared by Empyrean, but Empyrean has one of the best high priests, one of the best heroes and both their units have a useful niche of denying stealth and stopping enemies in their tracks.
The best thing related to Esus are Shadows, by a long shot. However, they are available without the state religion. This is unique, since all other religions only allow for temples and acolytes of their religion to be built.
Adressing the easiest thing first, let's compare the Nightwatch with a longbowman. They are available at the same tech (Bowyers) and have the same cost of 120 hammers, but their stats differ greatly.
Nightwatch | Longbowman |
3 attack, +2 poison (5 total vs units it applies to) | 5/6 |
| +25% city defence |
| +25% hill defence |
Both can use bronze and iron weapons.
At best, the nightwatch has the same attack value as a longbowman. Nothing is weak to poison, but many units are resistant or immune to it. At worst, the longbowman is in a city and has more than double the defensive capability as a city on a hill is being attacked by a unit immune to poison.
I think this is a pretty simple fix: I would give the Nightwatch 4 base attack and +50% city strength, considering they seem to be very familiar with operating in (especially large and criminal) cities. This means that a Nightwatch can have better offensive potential than longbowmen, especially when it comes to assaulting and not just defending cities, and will also be better in defending cities built on flatland.
But after that, I feel it gets a lot harder. Other civs have amazing heroes (especially Chalid, but almost all of them), great unique government options (like Sacrifice the Weak, Arete), unique wonders (e.g. Mines of Gal-Dur, Tower of Complacency), multiple amazing units (like Drown, Diseased Corpse, Stygian Guard, all the priests...), unique buildings (Basilica, Asylum) or even a unique terrain (Ancient Forest). I feel like it's hard to change something about Esus without going into the territory of making up new content, where I would feel uncertain about how to fit it into the original vision.
The easiest single thing would probably be to make Shadows Esus-state-religion-exclusive, since they are just that good. But I assume there is a reason they were kept available to everyone in the original mod.
I have not tried most modmods, and those I tried I must say I have since forgotten what they did to Esus. :/
What do you people think, how should the religion be made more attractive?