Is Scythia's People of the Steppe fair?

[Sostratus]

Scythia was released with the ability to get a free light cavalry unit, or their unique horse archer, whenever they train a light cavalry unit (or their unique horse archer.)
In vanilla and Rise & Fall, you only needed to possess the horse resource to build unlimited of these units, making this ability essentially +100% production towards light cav all game.
In gathering storm, building these units costs primarily horse resources. So now it's like +100% horse accumulation and +100% production towards light cav.

Civ6 also has the Venetian arsenal, which gives you 2 for 1 naval units.

Are these kinds of abilities- 2 for 1 units- a good addition to the game?

They seem very hard to balance. For example, if the zulu had 2 for 1 anti cavalry instead of cheaper impi, or nubia had 2 for 1 ranged instead of Ta-Seti, they would probably be the best civs out there. Light cavalry's somewhat less than ideal tech path, combat strength, and the fact that anticav is a resourceless counter unit, seems to be the only thing that keeps it in check. I'm ignoring the total scythian package- Tomyris' additional combat bonuses are certainly something to be feared.

 

[bengalryan9]

Don't forget about England - they get free units for all kinds of things. Build a harbor? Have a free ship. Found a city on a different continent? Have a free melee unit.

Can't say I'm really a fan of free units in general, though I don't mind the Venetian Arsenal because it's a little harder to get.

 

[Sostratus]

Don't forget about England - they get free units for all kinds of things. Build a harbor? Have a free ship. Found a city on a different continent? Have a free melee unit.

Can't say I'm really a fan of free units in general, though I don't mind the Venetian Arsenal because it's a little harder to get.

Its not free units in general- those have been around for a long time- it’s the concept of getting a free unit every time you build a unit of the matching class.
Victoria’s Pax Brittanica, perhaps the fastest mutating ability in civ history, originally gave a unit on city capture in addition to founding; but they scrapped that entirely due to interactions with free cities. But even then, the condition to get the free unit was more than “build a unit.”

Pax B was changed many times, but Steppe People & Venetian Arsenal have never been changed, suggesting they are okay with them as is.

I was thinking about custom civs and how one might integrate 2 for 1 in a fun way, but it just seems so prone to being broken. I know vs scythian AI I’ve struggled against their hordes, even when spamming anti cavalry.

 

[The googles do nothing]

It's only 'unfair' because it comes at a point in the game where other civ don't have many units and don't have walls. It's limited early by the unit maintenance costs but that doesn't stop the horse spam much. If there was a civ or civs with 2 for 1 past the classical era it would work fine, especially if it was a unit that had to be hard built.

 

[UWHabs]

I mean, there's lot of things in the game that are "unfair". I think the better question here is whether some of these abilities have been unintentionally made even stronger given other changes.

Venetial Arsenal I don't think has necessarily gotten much better, since 1. it comes later in the game and 2. by that point, almost all ships have no upfront resource costs, but instead use per-turn maintenance

Scythia as mentioned has effectively caused Scythia to have double accumulation of horse resources, so in that sense, the ability has gotten a bigger boost than previously. However, they're not the only civ that has a bonus to resources, and I think the marginal difference between how it works for them vs England or Canada or whoever isn't a big point.

The only part to me that makes these bonuses slightly more valuable than at first glance is just the way multipliers work. For example, Norway gets +50% to some boat production, but that bonus is actually worse than you think, since if you slot in the +100% production bonus card, then their +50% drops in value. For example, if you get 10 hammers a turn, and a boat costs 100 to build, and you're using the +100% card, then their +50% bonus only drops the time to build from 5 turns to 4 (10+100% vs 10+150%). Whereas Scythia getting double units, that bonus is still worth double whether they're slotting in the policy card or not.

So yeah, due to resource limits, their bonus is certainly more valuable now than it was before, and it was pretty strong before, so you could certainly argue it's too strong. But on the whole, I don't really mind civs having "unique" abilities, and free units certainly counts to that.

 

[XplosiveLun]

You guys forgot the gold maintenance. You got twice the amount of units but it also doubles the gold cost. Don't even mention kurgan, it provides only 1 gold and only really shine with good spot... giving only extra faith. You have to be really quick to make use of your horseman swarm. Or you can easily bankrupt yourself with that many mouths to feed. You have to be really quick in conquest. The time frame for Scythia rush, in my opinion, is short. Horsemen and horse archer do not age well. They fall behind in strength after walls are built and knights are available as better choice.

 

[schondette]

Perfectly fair considering its pretty much all she has. Her UI is mediocre and ment to support the cav spam. With reference to the bonuses of other civs. She's moved from broken to pretty good in the past couple years. Does have beautiful civ colors though. Don't see any problem here

 

[leandrombraz]

It could be balanced by trading quality for quantity: Scythia gets two Light Cavalry but its strength is reduced compared to other Civs.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Never had a problem with Scythia getting 'extra' Light Cavalry/Horse Archer units because it is one of the few mechanisms in Civ VI that is completely Historical and therefore completely justifiable.
The great strength of the pastoral ('nomad') groups like the Scythians, Mongols, Huns, (or Lakotah and Comanche, for that matter) was that virtually all of their adult males were by their lifestyle trained as effective mounted warriors. The requirement to be able to ride and protect the herds and pasturelands from both foreign and natural (predatory animals) threats meant that everybody could ride and shoot, and sometimes use lance, javelin and sword as well. Other, more settled Civs could never put more than a fraction of their manpower into an army, because:
1) Most of them didn't have the required skills, and training them took time and cost the government money it didn't have.
2) SOMEBODY had to stay home and tend the crops for a good part of the year: those 'civs' that had peasant levies like the Saxon Fyrd could only call them up between the planting and harvest, and better get them home in time for harvest or everybody would be starving by Christmas - and the Fyrd had to bring their own weapons, which precluded them being armed with anything fancy (and the 'Great Fyrd', the poorest of the peasants, was mostly armed with farm tools: wooden pitchforks, scythe, hoes or clubs - once the enemy stopped laughing, it was likely to be a very short battle against Vikings or Norman Knights - the Great Fyrd, by the way, had had to be sent home before Hastings in 1066).
The Greek Hoplites were similar 'citizen-soldiers', but because they had to provide their own panoply of shield, armor, and weapons only the Upper Middle Class was eligible: Athens could only field about 10,000 Hoplites out of an adult male population of over 100,000, not counting 'foreigners' living in the city: a Scythian Civ of the same size would be fielding 50,000 or more.

As to the 'short life span' of the Horse Archer, that's not specially Imbalanced either. The pastoral groups were very dangerous on their home ground and against other pastoral groups (hence the constant movement of peoples on the steppes: Cimmerians replaced by Scythians replaced by Sarmatians replaced by Goths and Huns and Bulgars and Magyars and Pechenegs and so on and on) but only rarely did the pastoral raiders become conquerers: Medes and Persians moved in on already-collapsing Assyrian/Babylonian civs, and much later Pathans did the same to a tottering Persian Civ and finally Turkish (Seljuk, then Ottoman) 'tribes' were invited in as mercenaries and took over the Arab caliphates from the inside.
All the nomad groups north of China raided China, traded with China, sometimes even married into the Chinese state (the Tang Dynasty was at least half-nomad and a large percentage of the aristocracy of northern China at the time had 'northern barbarians' in the ancestry), but until the Mongols none of the pastorals ever conquered the entire Chinese domain - and the Mongols have to be treated as a Special Case among the pastoral groups.

And, of course, in the end the pastoral 'culture' that had dominated the steppes for at least 2500 years came to an abrupt halt in the 16th century: once they had gunpowder (specifically, the Streltsy musket men) the Muscovites who had been paying tribute to the Great Horde a century earlier moved right down the Volga and the Don Rivers and conquered the Great Horde (Mongol successors) and the Khanate of Kazan in less than 50 years.

That the Scythians are dangerous on Home Turf and can harass field armies in the Classical Era but have to keep up with the Technology that makes their Horse Archers obsolete is near-perfectly done. Civ still models the wide-ranging nature of pastoral civs' economies badly, but at least the military aspects of the Scythians they got right.

 

[Sostratus]

The title of this thread is a bit clickbaity - I don't think scythia is OP except maybe in multiplayer. I think the ability is very thematic.
But if the only thing that makes people of the steppe not completely overwhelming- again, just talking about the civ ability, not Tomyris' leader ability - is the fact that light cav as a unit promotion class is underpowered; that is, there's an underlying part of the game that isn't balanced - then 2 for 1 units is probably not very good for game health. Even if the ability is fun.
The Venetian Arsenal is a great example - anyone can get it, we tend not to push for it because navy isn't that important, but if you have it, no one will ever beat you in a naval fight.

Coursers exist now, so scythia certainly can keep momentum going. But I see abilities like this as similar to Mattias Corvinus' Raven King before it was nerfed: did you always get a well positioned CS? No. Could you always get suze over it right away? No. But when you did, you could sword rush someone far earlier than they can handle and it was an almost certain win. The expected value of the ability may not be outrageously high, but the variance is high and allows for extreme scenarios of "I win, you have no counterplay." Similarly, while People of the Steppe in the context of the current meta is fairly stable, the venetian arsenal isn't - and almost any other land unit class would would break the game if given 2 for 1.

You guys forgot the gold maintenance. You got twice the amount of units but it also doubles the gold cost.

2 for 1 doesn't just have to mean you have twice the army you normally would. It can also mean you build the same army in half the time, time which can be spent doing other things. (Like making siege units, building districts, etc.)

 

[Victoria]

The title of this thread is a bit clickbaity

Well I thought you meant their hair Colour.
In SP this 2 for 1 thingy is fine. Not going to comment on MP.
Still would Iike England’s freebies gone but that is personal, if anyone could double up on boat making it would have been the Dutch.

 

[XplosiveLun]

2 for 1 doesn't just have to mean you have twice the army you normally would. It can also mean you build the same army in half the time, time which can be spent doing other things. (Like making siege units, building districts, etc.)

Good point. Get 2 for the price of 1. Totally missed this point.