Look, there's plenty of things that are OP in this game, and as a Hungarian, seeing Huns being powerful is a delight for me normally, but by all that is holy in this world, the Huns are completely BUSTED in this game.

I prefice this by saying this is my 3rd playthrough of the game (well, 3.5 I had half a game before that bugged out and I abandoned it) so I already knew how to win, the game would've been pretty easy for me regardless. That said, the Huns are overpowered beyond ridiculousness and here's why:

Not only do the horse archers have a ranged attack that can't be retaliated against, they have a DOUBLE attack. You can 1 round win against pretty much anything.

But it's not just that they can win against anything in a single round suffering no damage, no its even more ridiculous, because they multiply! You get free units just by fighting with them. You can split them into groups of 3 and gain a new unit each fight. You can hunt down deer and bears even to gain more units before you even go to war. You can ransack one outpost and get enough food to go from 1 horse archer to 4 instantly.

And that's not all, you also gain access to a much earlier and cheaper version of the Hamlet, the best district in the game.

I can't believe this is a thing.

I mean yes you are unable to attach territories during this time or create new  cities, but you don't need to. For one, you could literally beat the entire game with your unending infinitely multiplying army of mega-chads, but by doing so you also conquer all the cities of the players you eliminate so you know, you don't suffer the no city-building penalty in actuality, because you gain a truckload of cities for free. Cheaper than free actually, since you GAIN units not lose them when you fight.

I literally 1v3-d the AI on the starting continent on serious difficulty with ease, it wasn't a challenge at any point, I haven't even lost ONE single unit the entire time. Hells, I haven't even gotten any of them damaged under 90% hp. In multiplayer this would be the most unfair and unfun thing to play against that I've ever seen. They don't even have a low combat strength or anything, they have a reasonably close one to other units of their era, except they attack 2 times so technically they have twice the combat strength, and suffer no retaliation attack either.

And then I just put them on ships and sailed them over to the other continent with AIs on it and started to conquer that too. Haven't finished yet, but I think if I actually really set my mind to it, I could've probably won an elimination victory before the 150 turns are over. Heck, I might still be able to do it, I'm only at around turn 90. I wonder what happens if you win before the game's technically over.

Lord_Funk wrote:

@StorytellerDave yes the huns are OP as far as fighting goes. Their other emblematic building though is really bad. To build otposts that can not be atatched for an entire rea, is the resaon i don't play them much. I see their embelamtic quarter as a real handicap and not something to be happy about.

Here's the thing - the outposts can still build stuff that you will need later - artisans quarters, horse ranches, mining stuff and even the unique hamlet thingy that gets a broken amount of resources. So you can prepare these outposts to be top tier the moment you do assimilate them at the end. It can even build more horse archers - granted its slow, but it's an overpowered multiplying 6 speed double attack unit, so how fast you're building it doesn't much matter, they're going to be worth the wait.

Anyways good to know the team are fully aware of the balance situation.

IceQ4 wrote:

dude every nation is kinda OP if u follow it trough it all depends. i just had a playtrough where i had 8k gold per turn with 7 cities on the end :D and the science and religion was finished like 50 turns before the scenario ended i dunnow bout a nation beeing op in overall ngl i never understood why ppl crie so much bout fighning when u have the economy to trample on all why u even care. i could've pooped out 50 knights i would've have shed a tear. my cities all where so full of people i even stopped buliding and just wanted  to finish the game it was getting boring in just clicking every single turn every city a new thing to get done..(would be nice to be able to set repeatables in the cities so you could forget about them)  i just hope they adjust the amount of micromanagment per turn so that stuff in overall may take longer...

Yeah I know, but man those are baby stats compared to what the Huns do. Try them and you'll see. This is my 3rd playthrough mate, I know the balance, there's kinda op, and then there's GODLIKE LEVEL WHAT WERE YOU THINKING OP. Huns are the latter.

@Lord_Funk 

Are you aware that you can build the ordu district in cities and it acts as a hamlet without the popslots, it's like as powerful as the celts district without the faith bonus.The reason I am bothering you is this is it's not very well communicated before picking the culture and has a substantial impact, by exploiting food + Industry on rivers or just +7 exploited tiles for 1 district.

Aside  - Huns can't get the expansion VPs without taking cities and the unit only has 25 strength which is rather lacking vs 30+ like romans, teutons and elephants. Maybe walls and mil tech need to be a focus when AI see huns.

itcouldbeaboat wrote:

@Lord_Funk 

Are you aware that you can build the ordu district in cities and it acts as a hamlet without the popslots, it's like as powerful as the celts district without the faith bonus.The reason I am bothering you is this is it's not very well communicated before picking the culture and has a substantial impact, by exploiting food + Industry on rivers or just +7 exploited tiles for 1 district.

Aside  - Huns can't get the expansion VPs without taking cities and the unit only has 25 strength which is rather lacking vs 30+ like romans, teutons and elephants. Maybe walls and mil tech need to be a focus when AI see huns.

Here's the thing - all those units need extra techs to be produced, plus also resources that you may or may not have. And they don't multiply.

But let's say the huns are somehow WAY behind and there's romans with 30 strength units already out. Huns still attack twice and get no retaliation, meaning it's not REALLY 23 strength, it's 46 + no hp drop on attack. And they move at 6 speed and can get 1-3 extra units for one ransack of an outpost or luxury spot.

There's no amount of walls or units that can realistically stop a Hunnic horde, the double attack is just insane. It needs to go immediately. Also the food cost for multiplication needs to be 50 or higher.

I would say a fair trade would be only other horse units can produce food in battle, turn down to one attack but allow movement after attack (which would make WAY more sense for how the Huns actually fought in battle [extremely close shots from a few feet away while blazing past on horseback]).

StorytellerDave wrote:

Look, there's plenty of things that are OP in this game, and as a Hungarian, seeing Huns being powerful is a delight for me normally, but by all that is holy in this world, the Huns are completely BUSTED in this game.

I prefice this by saying this is my 3rd playthrough of the game (well, 3.5 I had half a game before that bugged out and I abandoned it) so I already knew how to win, the game would've been pretty easy for me regardless. That said, the Huns are overpowered beyond ridiculousness and here's why:

Not only do the horse archers have a ranged attack that can't be retaliated against, they have a DOUBLE attack. You can 1 round win against pretty much anything.

But it's not just that they can win against anything in a single round suffering no damage, no its even more ridiculous, because they multiply! You get free units just by fighting with them. You can split them into groups of 3 and gain a new unit each fight. You can hunt down deer and bears even to gain more units before you even go to war. You can ransack one outpost and get enough food to go from 1 horse archer to 4 instantly.

And that's not all, you also gain access to a much earlier and cheaper version of the Hamlet, the best district in the game.

I can't believe this is a thing.

I mean yes you are unable to attach territories during this time or create new  cities, but you don't need to. For one, you could literally beat the entire game with your unending infinitely multiplying army of mega-chads, but by doing so you also conquer all the cities of the players you eliminate so you know, you don't suffer the no city-building penalty in actuality, because you gain a truckload of cities for free. Cheaper than free actually, since you GAIN units not lose them when you fight.

I literally 1v3-d the AI on the starting continent on serious difficulty with ease, it wasn't a challenge at any point, I haven't even lost ONE single unit the entire time. Hells, I haven't even gotten any of them damaged under 90% hp. In multiplayer this would be the most unfair and unfun thing to play against that I've ever seen. They don't even have a low combat strength or anything, they have a reasonably close one to other units of their era, except they attack 2 times so technically they have twice the combat strength, and suffer no retaliation attack either.

And then I just put them on ships and sailed them over to the other continent with AIs on it and started to conquer that too. Haven't finished yet, but I think if I actually really set my mind to it, I could've probably won an elimination victory before the 150 turns are over. Heck, I might still be able to do it, I'm only at around turn 90. I wonder what happens if you win before the game's technically over.

Yeah, I saw this on The Spiffing Brit's video where he played as the Huns--> Mongols.

B-29_Bomber wrote:
Yeah, I saw this on The Spiffing Brit's video where he played as the Huns--> Mongols.

Saw the video actually, he posted it like half a day after this post and yeah, I'm not surprised he did, this thing is broken and spiff has a good nose for finding broken things in games.

I agree with this.

I already realize that it's too easy to kill other three cultures on my continent. I tried a Phoenician-Huns-Mogonlian game. The whole point is get some nice harbor in the best locations, send the first team of 4 Hunic horse archer to the other continent as soon as possible and all cities in your home continent can stay idle. I captured all 7 AI's cities at roughly turn 55 and spend roughly 15 turns search their fleeing armies and eliminated all foes at roughly turn 70. 

I think double attack is still acceptable to me as the combat strength of Hunic horse archer is kind of low. But nomadic seems too powerful. My initial 4 hunic archers turn in rougly 20-30 Mogolian archers at turn 70, which seems not to be nomadic but vampires

YichenZhu wrote:

I agree with this.

I already realize that it's too easy to kill other three cultures on my continent. I tried a Phoenician-Huns-Mogonlian game. The whole point is get some nice harbor in the best locations, send the first team of 4 Hunic horse archer to the other continent as soon as possible and all cities in your home continent can stay idle. I captured all 7 AI's cities at roughly turn 55 and spend roughly 15 turns search their fleeing armies and eliminated all foes at roughly turn 70. 

I think double attack is still acceptable to me as the combat strength of Hunic horse archer is kind of low. But nomadic seems too powerful. My initial 4 hunic archers turn in rougly 20-30 Mogolian archers at turn 70, which seems not to be nomadic but vampires

I dunno, I think that even if they didn't multiple, the double attack is just extremely strong. Like, yeah the combat strength is low, but that doesn't matter because in reality it has 2x the combat strength. No unit in that era has 46 combat strength (about 48 if you count the no retaliation as not getting the damaged status) so it's the strongest unit by far - provided that you are the one to attack first, which you will do since you have a speed of 6.

If I had to choose between double attack and no retaliation I'd say no retaliation fits them better as archers, and perhaps move after attacking but no additional hits.

Meanwhile the ransack values have to be standardized more and the required food needs to be much higher for duplication imho. It makes thematic sense for nomads to gain extra pops on the move so I wouldn't want it gone completely. It's a nice side-objective to have as long as it's nerfed heavily.

Yeah. I just witnessed this in my playthrough. I don't know how to balance it. But having ordas and multiplying horse archers seems to make an easy game into a cakewalk. In MP you might find some strategies to combat them, but they seem to have all the advantages and no real disadvantages.

Some sort of mechanics or balancing measures should be in place to make them less OP or to raise other Civs to combat them. Because I did like my ordas and the horde mechanic.

One thing I really liked was that units require pops aswell when cities are building them. This simple mechanic in my mind does wonders to the game. But then the Huns enter the game and just multiply without any penalties to your economy actually benefiting from wars. 

Lord_Funk wrote:

They have said in streams that they are looking to put back some kind of army limit/cap. It might not be in the form of Generals they said, but some kind of cap. It could be a soft cap maybe and You can overcap but at a high cost (like it was with the generals), or something else. If they do that then You will not be able to just keep ransacking and fighting to get more and more Hunnic hordes that You split up into more and more armies. We will haved to see how excatly and in what way such a limiter or cap will be implemented bofer we know. If it either won't do much to prevent this, if it will NERF the game and only feel punishing, or hopefully be balanced.

I highly doubt that a cap would fix the issue, because having even 1 full stack of them (4-5 depending on the tech level at the time) is an army that correct me if I am wrong, can't be defeated by any unit of that era of the same number.

Let's say 4 horse archers vs 4 praetorian guard. First round - 2 guards immediately die from 8 horse archer shots. Guards turn - they attack, maybe kill 1 horse archer, then next round they either both die or one survives to deal a bit of damage then dies.

Double attack has to go. The only way to balance this is for double attack to go the way of the Dodo.

I don't know about the Gauls, I haven't played them before nerf. I understand however the fear of overcorrection. And that's present here, but in the form that if they keep the double strike the other nerfs would have to be so severe it would make it unfun to play. Like, you'd have to reduce their combat strength to like, 13 for it to balance it, and that's just not very fun, it causes issues whenever you're not the first to attack.

Justeer wrote:
I don't know how to balance it. But having ordas and multiplying horse archers seems to make an easy game into a cakewalk. In MP you might find some strategies to combat them, but they seem to have all the advantages and no real disadvantages.

Here's what I'd do:

Step 1 - No more double strike, but they can move after they shoot

Step 2 - Increase to 25 base combat strength and a range of 2 instead of the current range of 1

Step 3 - Require horseback riding researched and at least 2 horses AND increase the cost it takes to build them

Step 4 - Increase the food required to spawn more copies from 20 to 50, and reduce the amount of food you get to a set amount instead of it being equal to the gold.

For example let's say ransacked outposts always give 25. Luxuries only give 15. And then set an amount for each unit type, like, animals give 10, horsemen give 10, scouts/civillians only give 5, elephants give 20, etc...or however much food turns out to be the most balanced in testing.

Just to add my 2 cents as another victim of Hunnic bullying - in Lucy OpenDev, Vlad went Hittites (+1 combat strength to all units) in Ancient and then Huns in Classical (+3 to cavalry and their other big bonuses). After I got into a war with him I realised his basic cavalry horsemen were now combat strength 31 (!) and even my spearman-heavy army (strength 20 with +5 against cavalry) didn't stand a chance. They never even got a chance to die against the double archer unique unit.

Even if I had got myself an overpowered economy/industry to fight them (I've seen people on the forums claiming they nearly had 1k food/industry at certain times) I don't see how even with double their unit numbers, an army of spearmen - the best "same-era", anti-cavalry, non-unique unit - could provide at least a reasonable challenge to them (25 vs 31). Having said all this, I do still enjoy the idea of a Hittite-Hun-Mongols player becoming an apocalypse tier invading doomstack to a certain extent.