I've some feedback from playing a bunch of games as the new civs!
Khazars: human can deal with it, but AI is currently pummeled by barbs, and acting more like the historical role of Kiev / Poland (buffering western europe) than master of the steppes, since they use all their hammers to fight the barbs.
- eg when I played Rus (Kiev), Khazars were my meatshield
- one solution can be to have a similar UP / mechanic as the turks, but with some variation to differentiate the two (eg perhaps Khazars at perpetual peace with barbs unless conquering a barb city)
Wu & Shu-Han:
- Qin has a large core and historical area, but Wu & Shu-Han don't have most of china proper even as historical areas. I think realistically if Shu-Han / Wu were to unify China instead of Wei, they would have similar territorial ambitions
- can add more gameplay variation like more Indochina / Tibet focus for Shu, Phillipines conquest area for Wu etc
- perhaps we can shrink Wu's core but expand its historical area to at least cover northern China
- Shu-Han's re-spawn during the 3 kingdoms era has Nanman archers and other weak units, compared to Crossbows etc for Wu (and Wei tends to be advanced as well)
- I think perhaps because of lack of iron access? but makes Shu entirely uncompetitive and much weaker than historically
- perhaps we can temporarily add Iron to Shu spawn area just for 3 kingdoms as a hack, or otherwise make its spawn units stronger
- Shu can also use a more "modern" UU, from searching online I've found:
- "Flying Army" (飞军 / fei jun): Light, highly mobile infantry, especially used by generals like Zhao Yun.
- Mountain Troops: Because Shu was based in mountainous Sichuan, they specialized in rugged terrain fighting — ambushes, narrow passes, defensive warfare.
- Shu and Wu's UBs are also quite weak:
- I recall in base DoC Wu's taixue had 3 scientist slots and 1 statesmen, if that's exessive, perhaps just 3 scientists
- Wu also was more river-trade / naval focused, so can potentially base UB on that instead if not Taixue
- Shu's patronized confucian academy similarly just adds 1 statesmen, perhaps one of the below may be better, some focusing on Shu-Han period, some on Sichuan area advantages overall
- Forge ("Wuzhuge Workshop"), market ("Shu Brocade Workshop (蜀錦坊)"), or mountain-themed ("Cliffside Fortress (山崖城堡)", Daoist Mountain Shrine (山中道觀))
Vietnam:
- love the earlier start, but if played by human, the 150% tech rate is quite a nerf compared to contemporaneous neighboring civs who have ~120-130, and if you lose the Chinese shore, you have a similar territory to Khmer but Khmer has a much better tech rate
- to keep Nanyue weak, but Vietnam competitive, perhaps reset the modifiers when "losing the Chinese shore" conditions are met (better for AI) or after a certain time (more interesting for players)