UPatchHD Balance is crap :D

My opinion on the Upatch HD balance:

- All chariots have double attack vs. Priest:

I was just wondering if they had the double of the triple for chariot archers.. seems good but removing the wrong thing to debuff them in my opinion, your priests are more resistant to chariot archers, who will make priests when you have chariot archers, I don't know, completely inconsistent debuff..

- War Elephant: fixed missing attack bonus vs. buildings:

It's not a fix it's an addition, The option to have the choice to upgrade to Heavy elephant to gain this buff was a good point
and it could be used as diversity on games of course but on custom scenarios as well.. (example: in my Siege scenario I needed an unit acting like a visual ram attacking the tower at wall, if these
War elephants that I chose would've had bonus attack vs buildings they would melt the tower and the wonder way too hard and I would've had no options left compared to the case where I would need more damage
on buildings in which I could've mixed or change them all by Heavy elephants.) Killing a bit the: hey I might need more damage against his buildings so I upgrade to Heavy elephants, less strategical choice, less diversity.


- Fixed the extremely large trample damage area of War/Armored Elephant and Scythe Chariot. Their damage area is now reduced to medium-large:

Once again not a fix, you just changed it. So, that's a direct debuff,the War elephant particularity is to be a power spike unit, you avoid to show it,
you surprise with it so you fight your opponent with it when he has no priests or fast kiting units, finding this opportunity can be rare and should be rewarded, so the debuff isn't really deserved.
A fact to consider is also that u are wiping away the gameplay visibility of their specificity ( Before when an elephant was trampling, he was clearly trampling you could see the units getting
walked on in front of him, now It's like any other units, no particularity, it would be like removing the visual one shot of cavaleries upon charging pikes or the one shot from cavalries
charging infantry in some games looking realistic, and that's what is making the game dynamic.) Of course it's pretty cool to avoid attacking your allies nearby, but still, that's a dynamic,
"hey dude don't approach my elephant they trample".
For the scythe, the debuff is more understandable as it is supposed to be a garbage resources units but it's also a powerful unit compared to cataphractes. Now same thing killing the game visual dynamics
"don't approch the scythe, you should die". At this point just buff more the cataphractes.

Comment: Previously enemy units were taking damage from 2 tiles away or on the other side of a wall by elephants:

Yes that's what I'm saying you're killing the game diversity and visual dynamics.. (Again an example in my siege scenario, upgrading the armor of your archers was an existing strategy because they could
get hit through the wall). And from a realistic point, who said such a big elephant couldn't reach over such a small barricade..

- Siegecraft: Bonus attack of villagers against walls and towers is now reduced:

It would be amazing to know by which amount but indeed,it is a good thing in my opinion, even though it was still an Iron age upgrade, no units with such move speed could melt a fortified walled base such an unpredictable way,
which makes the fortification upgrade non sense as well as the walled base itself, in my opinion way too much power has been given to the villagers in the game, kinda greedy.. maybe it would had made more sense if the
villagers weren't actual ferraries.

- Fishermen gathering rate fixed (was much faster than any other gathering):

Fixed? there's nothing to fix, it's just perfect as finding fishes with a villager to fish is rarely a overpowered spot and it makes diversity on the strategical choice of which resource to gather, and don't complain that finding a
bunch of shore fishes could create unfair randomness because in shore maps there's more chance that everybody has its shore fishes than that everybody has the same number of elephants, so in fact it even balances the elephants
unfair randomness in shores rm.. Killing the vanilla game knowledge of the people over 20 years for nothing but to make it worse, I don't know.. not necessarry.

- Food in fish is proportional to size (Shore fish has less food, Whales have more):

So now the villagers are gathering slowly the fishes, they often have to travel more to get to them AND they have less food, ok guys avoid the fishes now be scared of them.. If you reduce shore fishes food it's an additional
reason to let the gathering rate untouched.. like, what happened? you lost against somebody and you saw he was fishing the shore fish so you got mad after the shore fishes?.. In addition, building your pit storage-wood line
next to the shore is kinda risky against the boats, just saying.. fear the shore fishes. Giving more food to the bigger fishes is a good thing but in random maps it only may increase the "control the water to win" effect, I mean especially if you had the idea of putting more deep water fishes in the random maps.. right!

Hundreds of other small bug fixes and improvements:

If you don't say what it is, I just can hope the small bug fix isn't like this shore fish "fixing", stop fixing the 20 years knowledge of the vanilla game.. well I'd be glad to know about the bugs though, sad that I can't even read about it..

- More gold and stone on maps:

More gold! finally they understood rm maps needed more gold! But then you read about more stone and you are disapointed, slingers the most powerful rm tool unit, walls and towers often banned as illusional rules by players, well
mainly walls because of the fake wall spams all over the map, and you tell yourself, we need more stone, yes makes sense.

- More fish on all water maps:

"Control the water to win" becomes now "Control even more the water to win" keep that in mind, raw food is extremly valuable and worth so that's clearly what it is.

The Rise of Rome Expansion improved some aspects, but not enough. UPatch HD tries to address the remaining problems in a subtle way that preserves the original gameplay:

I loved so much the way you preserved the original game that I just mentioned you were "wiping 20 years of knowledge of the vanilla game to make it worse".

This is what a major official patch would have done, if such was ever released. Most base unit stats (attack, armor, HP, price, etc) are the same, units available for different civilizations are also unaltered (except for Hittites).

"Who are getting destroyed by all the civilizations by slingers in the tool age", worth it? we will see, stay tuned!

And most importantly - balance was adjusted according to user feedback and votes from surveys gathered for 2 years:

Now you understand why most of it make no sense, type "the majority is always wrong" on google, but more importantly the majority detains the mediocrity because you blend the top ideas with random garbage, it could even be trolls..
Nice source of ideas..

- Farm upgrades give you +75/+100/+125 Food (instead of +75/+75/+75):

Less defeats due to lack of wood on maps based on a strategical choice, more time to micro other stuffs by getting rid of the farms micro based on a strategical choice, might be the first relevant point that could be worth changing
the vanilla game.

- Hunters work 15% faster than before:

Increasing the unfair randomness of Elephants, might not be worth changing the vanilla game.. Increasing even more the gap with shore fishes.. run away from them definitely.

Comment: previously they were as slow as Foragers, which made them far less useful:

No it made them AS useful as all the resources but shore fish and special trees..

Gold and stone miners work 15% faster (to compensate bug fixes to technologies):

Or also you can let the vanilla game knowledge as it was and let the players get more rewards from the upgrade which makes more sense than buffing the slingers once again. Why saying "fixes" it was how it was, there's no glitch , no bug
therefore nothing to "fix", please..

- Jihad: villager carry capacity penalty reduced and now more consistent for different villager types; villager speed bonus to +10%:

As we were talking about the greed of the ferrari villagers, here is a good example of the greed that, perhaps made developpers ideas mix medieval rts and car racing games, I thought the siegecraft point was good but you are
in fact buffing siegecraft at the end, got it!

- Short Sword directly available in Bronze Age without any researches; Broad swordsmen have +10 HP, Long Swordsmen have +20 HP:

The hype of removing content, -1 upgrade possibility.. nice. This point will touch something that is way too complicated for the user feedbacks for sure, the point is that you need to understand how to use infantry,
and of course you buff it so you can use it without a brain, which means, we up bronze, we go for what? straight infantry. But the infantry was the most tricky to use so far because; for it's raw power it is simply too cheap,
but you needed the synergy of other units to make them actually work, you need to mix them with archers to force the engages so they're not kited and you need stone throwers to reduce the power of foot archers,
this way the broad sword was the final mix of the cheapest and strongest unit that by choice would lead you to victory. Now mixed armies are rarely used by players with low reflection on strategies ,so, obviously
they ask to buff it. But at least you're going to be able to use your +20HP overpowered no brain legion spam as well so it's fine.. pure majority feedbacks, makes sense.. casual players who want to adapt the game to their needs
of increasing their winning chance against good players, yes.
So when there's gonna be chariot archers, spam chariot archers and if not, spam broads, the binary cheat unit contest.. 10HP is not a lot? on a low HP unit it is.
It helps fighting the slingers on the bronze transition but it is still fixing a problem to encounter another.
All you need is to debuff way more the chariot archers and keep the infantry as they were, no need to fall in the trap of putting them at the cheated power of the chariot archers competition.. wrong way to go.

- Heavy Cavalry +1 armor:

A deserved buff indeed.

- Cataphract now stronger (+20 HP,  +1 armor/pierce armor, +1 attack vs infantry); upgrade cost reduced:

A deserved buff indeed.

- Elephant Archers cost 180F, 45G (previously 180F, 60G):

Well you know what makes elephant archer less weak against priest and fast kite units.. their range, and they still can be used as a surprising power spike being massed, pushing it on the edge of overpowered.

- Slingers have higher bonus attack vs mounted archers (bonus vs foot archers unchanged):
- Camels have bonus against all mounted units (missing bonus vs elephants added):

They're now interesting against the Elephant archers that you've just buffed, an interesting addition as counter units that makes the elephant archers even more specialized on the power spike strategy only like the War elephants
Slingers also contributing to reduce the too high power of fast mounted archers which makes the infantry buff even worse because it will become an infantry contest. Not fixing anything here, turning in circle..

- Changes in attack reload speed (fire rate) of units: Chariot Archers: 7% slower; towers (except Ballista Tower): 7% faster (= same fire rate as foot archers):

So thats the false debuff here, obviously you still can kite with them and they will deal the exact same dps, of course it's still a debuff as the lack of micro can affect them but still too light debuff.
Towers buff deserved.

Changes in train/build time of units: swordsmen (including Legion): 8% faster; all archers (except the Bowman) and all elephant units: 10% slower; Camels 6% slower (were too fast to train compared to Cavalry);
Farms: 20% faster; towers: 10% faster:

I don't need to comment that , creating the best gap between archers and infantry to make it become a huge infantry contest which makes sense again because the majority wants to win over the stronger players with less micro
and strategies, so you go full no brain spam infantry all in, that's the most powerful thing and they're happy, because if the meta game is to make projectiles bad then good players will also go full all in no projectiles,
and the no brain is happy about that because what was creating the gap in the gameplay was how the good player was dodging the projectiles meta compared to mr. no brain, that's why the majority feedbacks chose that.
Never let the majority make a good game or they'll make an evil crap instead, AOE1 was a masterpiece because it was created by a small portion of talented devs, that's the difference theorically.
Who the hell will want to make camels against an infantry fest? that's my question. When you'll need them against chariot archers, their training time debuff will annulate each other which makes the chariot archers training
time debuff less efficient. Imagine getting a civ with broads and chariot archers "watching shangs",that's a nice civ gap outcome.. all messed up. The balance is very light, you change a small thing there all explodes the
other side.. you need to be more careful.


Siege weapon projectiles (stones and bolts) are more realistic - travel faster (they were very slow), but are also slightly slower to reload to compensate that:

Nope good player you wont dodge it, because the majority noobs are reporting for duty, and they want their piece of the cake.

- Improved damage area of Catapult (unit), Heavy Catapult and Juggernaught - reduced to 2x that of Stone Thrower (previously it was 3x - huge and unrealistic).
This also means less of your own units killed by friendly fire, especially when attacking buildings:

Huge debuff that could be deserved but it's indirectly buffing the balista, removing the big difference diversity and changing 20 years of vanilla knowledge. Could be good for the realistic purpose but we would be waiting
a good debuff for the balistas..

- Helepolis has slower fire rate, but also +10 attack to compensate that.

I guess if you aim to compensate you didn't get my previous point obviously, even the balista alone got their best counters debuffed when balista are just the potential must go unit to dps fights.  
When you make such change that affects 20 years of the vanilla game knowledge at least inform about the raw stats you changed, not just "eheh we slowed down their fire rate but you'll have to guess for how much to know if it's worth"
Not very professional to prove people it's worth the upgrade.. The balista is still overpowered and you still can kite with helepolis on their reload.

Civilizations:

What you didn't understand is that there's no way you'll manage to balance these without completely changing them anyway but I'll comment some:

Persians: Elephants move 40% faster; Get Wheel, Artisanship and Coinage:

You are adding some more racing wheel ferraries aspect to the game, that's cool but remember the vanilla game? One of the only civ that would be used to twist wheel ferrari racing when people were finding it dumb?
Wheel + persian hunting bonus + another hunting bonus.. Get some random unfair gap number of elephants, rush bronze like a ferrari 2.0,you have the broads you are ready to win.. whatever, curb your balance.

- Shang: Get Ballistics; Walls have +50% HP:

Yes, get ballistics for the best civ of the game that you just made almost a cheat civ, you're getting good at balance. But at least one more civ will have hardly dodgable arrows so it's good,
we never know, a noob gets shang he could win without his left hand, it would be great.

Overall thoughts: Not worth playing the apprentice magician in balance, the UpatchHD balance ended up being way worse than the 1.0a.

Conclusion: the Balance isn't good, just as bad as you should expect from the messy majority feebacks ideas but the Upatch HD has very interesting features,
- Tool to create your own Mod balance.
- Languages.
- 2 useful hotkeys.
- fast mouse commands fixing.
- Some fixed errors.