[NFP] October Update

Yeah, his early rush is tremendous.
Another bonus that he has is that his super early culture boost (both from unit production and mines) allow him to reach Agoge (+50% faster unit production speed) and Political Philosophy (+4 combat strength from Oligarchy) very early, and that further boosts both his ability to produce a large blob of archers, as well as further boosting the strength of any melee unit blocking ahead of them.
Stack all those factors together and you have one hell of a strong rush potential.

Rushed down Cyrus in my last Deity game with that opener, and I'd say that is pretty impressive since Cyrus is among one of the worst opponents to face when you want to rush someone (due to Immortals having a ranged attack and still decent melee strength).

Gaul is no joke in the early war department.

 

I encountered this in my current Byzantium game, except in this case, they were both already upgraded to cuirassiers.

 

Yes after which they got stuck having to SHIFT ENTER next turn

 

The rush is the strongest ability but Gaul have very impressive early culture. Culture from unit production is what allows you to Archer spam without losing a step, since you get to political philosophy on time, and culture from mines is incredibly strong, since mines are the best non-unique tile improvement anyway and that's a lot of early culture. Gaul get to Agoge faster than anyone except Rome while delaying monuments.

The Oppidum adjacencies are a negative in the long run but I've found unlocking it and Apprenticeship early is surprisingly powerful, since you get a pretty decent production push very early into the game.

Gaul's biggest issue is the coast. If they lack land and can't kill a neighbor quickly, they are horrible, playing them on Archipelago was miserable.

The October update looks interesting. Pirate scenarios don't really interest me but I will wait to see what they actually look like. I do like the sound of a Gran Colombia nerf, the Recruit Partisans change sounds good and the AI improvements make me optimistic, especially removing focus away from Holy Sites and increasing their valuation of Pyramids and Oracle.

Gran Colombia are really strong in multiplayer as well. They were instantly nerfed in the Better Balanced Mod that is used in every multiplayer game in the CPL. I don't think they are as OP as vanilla Scythia, Sumeria or Nubia, but those civs are also nerfed in the mod.

 

I feel like I need one more game with Gaul before saying this, but I will go ahead and make a hot take. If you play Gaul correctly in a domination game, they are just as strong as Byzantium, maybe stronger. Maybe I just had a good game but that's just my initial feel despite the Byzantium bugs, which I did not use.

 

Byzantium are amazing on naval maps though. Those Dromons are ridiculous.

 

I'll second the Dromons. In my last game Phoenicia lost two cities in succession, the second one with Walls built, to two Dromons and a single Spearman. The Dromons simply boiled their defenses away in a couple of turns. Impressive, and a little scary if I'm not playing Byzantium and have coastal cities!.

 

Oooo I need to try that next!

 

I'm currently land locked in my Byzantine game, so no Dromons for me. . Going the crusade belief route. If I can avoid having Poland wipe out my religion. Seems AI is more aggressive wiping out religion from a recent patch. I'll eventually conquer some coastal cities here soon though.

 

I always feel that if someone says that such-and-such a civ is OP, what that really means is they are fun to play. Rather than nerfing any OP civ, I'd rather see weak civs strengthened a bit to catch up.

 

So far, all the new civilizations from the NFP has a Combat Strength bonus:

• Ambiorix (Gaul) gives +2 CS to Melee, Anti-Cavalry and Ranged units for each adjacent unit (you can't flank them).
• Byzantium's units receive +3 CS for each Holy City converted to Byzantium's Religion.
• Lady Six Sky (Maya) gives +5 CS to units within 6 tiles of the Capital.
• Menelik II (Ethiopia) gives +4 CS to units on Hill (you can't have the highground).
• Simón Bolívar (Gran Colombia) has Comandante General, which gives +5 CS to nearby units.

This is a weird trend. Somehow, Simón Bolívar does not have the biggest Combat Strength related bonuses of all. Even if, ending with +2 Movement to all military units means some easy and safe Pillage spree.

The team were more afraid to give such Combat Strength bonuses before, and were either highly conditionnal or limited for a short period of time, only Mongolia and the Zulu seem to be the exception, mostly because they are the "only" civilization completely geared toward War and Domination.

I mean, I managed to get +92 CS with Ambiorix. Sure, this is not replicable in real gameplay, but here the trend: they propose really powerful civilization in that NFP. I am not complaining, this is a common practice when you have to sell DLC. Looking how "Scenarios & Civilizations" went, with Khmer being so "bad" it ends up with Australia (a powerful civilization) to be the least sold of all. They do not want to end up in the same situation again.

So I understand why they are proposing only "powerful" civilization. Now, are they "really powerful" or "overpowered"? Here the whole question!

 

I'd strongly disagree that "OP" and "fun" are even remotely identical descriptors. Korea is arguably OP, but they're a solid contender for most boring Civ in the entire game. By contrast, you can do some hilariously fun and stupid stuff with Eleanor and the Khmer, but they're both downright terrible against anyone of a remotely equal skill level.

A theoretical Civ with the bonus of "Doubles all outputs and always wins in combat within owned territory" would be super broken, but would probably not be fun to play as, would absolutely not be fun to play against, and would effectively reduce the number of Civilizations in the game to one. The latter is why some level of balance is important: if there's an echelon of Civilizations that are just objectively better in 99% of scenarios, the Civilizations below that effectively do not exist, and DLC that adds the former sort of Civ effectively removes content from the game.

While the 'ideal' might indeed be "make everyone broken so that nobody is", this isn't really sustainable. Managing 50+ "equally broken" Civilizations would require a level of attention and understanding of the game that it's very apparent nobody on the development team has. Nerfing, if "less fun", is much easier for that sort of developer.

Furthermore, the response to recent Civilizations with "maluses" (such as Mali and the Maori, and more recently the Maya) has been generally very positive (the Maya less than the others, but mostly because they're a V civ trapped in VI). But these maluses are themselves just pre-baked "nerfs"; if nerfs themselves were undesirable, these Civilizations would be much less popular than they ended up being. Why can practices like this not be applied to the present tier of "OP" civs? "It's always been like this and there's no need to change it" isn't a particularly compelling excuse when V and VI already upend a lot of series traditions (for better and for worse).

For example, changing something like "+1 movement to all units" into "+1 movement to all units who start their turn within 9 tiles of a loyal city" results in an ability that is still very powerful, but also presents a new "mini-objective" to pay attention to when actually using it. This would arguably make the Civilization more fun to play, not less, because one of VI's biggest issues is how boring it can get when you're steamrolling everything. Alternatively, something like "+1 movement to all units, but all units are 25% more expensive until the Industrial Age" would give them a very clear strength and weakness that both the player and their opponents would need to adjust their plans for (GC would want to rush Industrial, everyone else would want to kill them before they reach it.) These are completely arbitrary suggestions and you could take balance in a number of different directions that have nothing to do with these.

 

I agree mostly with your post, but

Still the strong majority of players plays only against AI.

In context of the common weakness of AIs making smart decisions in general and the (comparably undemanding) civ6-specific playing strength of AIs on the highest difficulty levels I welcome diverging Civilizations: in single player the human can purposely avoid or choose playing those "objectively better in 99% of scenarios" and so modify the difficulty level.

Hint: of course it would help, if the setup would support easier inclusion / exclusion of specific AI Civilizations.

[edit: eg. impossible, low, standard, high, secure probability of appearance]

 

A) OP and broken are not the same.
B) There are always exceptions, and whether or not Korea is fun doesn't affect Gran Colombia being fun.

 

I often actually look at it the other way - if there's a super OP civ, I will often avoid playing them, because it makes games against the AI too easy. Were I playing competitive multiplayer, yeah, I would never play lesser civs, but personally I actually find it more fun to play a weak but unique civ (like, say, the Khmer), rather than an OP civ. Especially I find if the bonus for the civ ends up having a larger effect on part of the game that it eliminates pieces of strategy. Like, one aspect of GC that to me makes them not fun to play is that it's very easy to turn all their infantry and siege units into cavalry, essentially. If you're getting +2 or +3 movement on all your units, why bother building cavalry when your swordsmen have 5 movement points? Similar to why a lot of the time I don't really like playing Sumeria - you can plop down ziggurats and you don't have to worry about building campuses and theatres. Sure, sometimes it's fun to play for the lolz, but I'd rather play someone who has at least some challenges.

A lot of it also comes down to the fact that even the most OP civs in the game in the hands of the human aren't necessarily crazy OP in the AI's hands. It's not like AI Korea goes to space sub-100 turns, or AI Kongo is winning a culture victory every game before you have a chance to stop them. So in that sense at least, I don't find any civ is truly gamebreaking. But I do think there are tweaks that can be made to drop some civs in power and at least bring some strategy back. Like, the Byzantines are super strong, but at least it takes a little bit to make sure you're converting cities on the road, so while they're really easy to win with, it's not like they give you a free battering ram on their mounted units all the time.

 

I think more than just being OP, Gran Colombia are incredibly boring (at least imo). Their bonus ability is just to have stronger and faster units, with extra abilities from great generals like insta-heals that are just completely nuts. None of this makes them fun to play. The AI is already god awful at war, any civ with war bonuses can easily murder them and GC does this faster and easier than most other civs (there are stronger ones still like Nubia, Scythia and Sumeria).

Reimagining their bonuses in a more interesting way will be better for both single player and multiplayer, even (and perhaps especially) if it makes GC weaker overall.

By the way, I don't know how many people care that much about Firaxis making multiplayer balance patches that don't overhaul most of the civs in the game. Playing civ 6 multiplayer without a mod that rebalances civs is terrible already, and one GC nerf isn't going to fix how awful spawning next to unmodded Scythia, Nubia or Sumeria is, or fix how a Korea with any degree of isolation basically wins the game on the spot. Most people I know just play with a balance mod, that's how civ 5 also worked and that will always be the way to play MP because Firaxis (rightfully) focuses on the bigger single player audience.

 

Well, I'd like to say that Cyrus is the best target for early rush, as immortal lowers his city defense.

The worst target may be Chandragupta and Gandhi.

 

"The best" target, lol.
Immortals both raise his city defenses (albeit not to the same level as swordsmen), but also give an extra ranged attack to the city.
That's not even counting all the other Immortals that rain down hell in the general area.

You might think that Chandra is worse to kill (I'd agree), but Cyrus is certainly not "the best target" to kill off early on.
That's just silly to even claim.
I'd choose to face archers and swordsmen any day over defensive Immortal spam, simply because the dual purpose of Immortals make for a very efficient use of limited tiles on the defense.

 

1: AIs will priortize UUs, so this makes Cyrus having much little city defense compared with others who prioritize horseman. Also, as others prioritize horseman, they get archers as a bonus, archers are very good defend units. Cyrus will simply beeline his UU and does not get either horseman or archer.

2: Horses is much more widespread than iron. Iron is rare. Also AI won't look at resources when placing cities(as least not as careful as human players, who will settle cities simply because of strategic resources and delay his settlement until resource being revealed) So this result in Cyrus having no iron in his initial 3 cities unless he is really lucky, preventing him from getting Immortals.

3: As a result, Cyrus will only live with warriors and slingers until he settles a 4th city in special search for iron. And a country with warriors and slingers is much easier to be taken down than his counterpart with horseman and archers.

 

Yeah, but this Cyrus had plenty of Iron and thus Immortals that he spammed, so whether or not Iron is statistically overall rarer compared to horses is irrelevant to what I was facing in my particular game.

Noone claimed that Persia is statistically harder to rush down than Chandragupta, so why are you even arguing over these semantics?