Is Cathay just insanely strong in IE as the player faction?

[Vyss A'lare]

My start was a little tough dealing with skaven, chaos and Lokhir at the start but now that I'm approaching endgame Cathay seems to scale further than any faction I've seen. My peasant infantry are going toe to toe with mirror guard without issue due to the insane tech tree + harmony buffs. Dragon crossbows have to be one of the strongest archers in the game and melt everything. These seem a little too cheap for how strong they are.

The artillery feels like a better version of their empire counterparts and that's before harmony buffs. With harmony buffs they are absolutely nuts with insane rates of fire and better accuracy than modern tanks. Their only weaknesses seem to be area damage spam (makes their insane ma/md pointless) and ammo since with their 6s rate of fire on the artillery, they only last a few minutes.

That said magisters need a little rework, they get sky lantern mounts which nullifies their entire red line. Their buffs are really something else and let me use some peasant spears to wreck Archeon. Nothing like a T1 unit with 70ma 100md.

[A.Pot]

That is because against the AI, you regularly will fight enemies that are going to play to your strength which is to engage you in a head to head fight.

[Bluebeard]

I haven't played enough of Cathay, but I've heard they have an exceptionally strong economy. And in general I think economy is the strongest factor in determining strength of a faction. Unless you're a faction that can largely obviate it (Khorne, Beastmen, Oxyotl, etc..).

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

If you play as the Northern Provinces you can expand extremely quickly and gobble up everyone around you, so you end up with a very big economy early on and several armies, however I hate their lords

[Vexillarius]

Personally i think harmony is probably the strongest faction mechanic on and off the battle field. So easy to maintain close to 100% up time. There missile armies are just set and forget. Just deploy and come back in 5 minutes and its all over.

[Aleera]

Originally posted by Vexillarius:

Personally i think harmony is probably the strongest faction mechanic on and off the battle field. So easy to maintain close to 100% up time. There missile armies are just set and forget. Just deploy and come back in 5 minutes and its all over.

Counter argument.
30 seconds unbreakable via "By our blood".
Highelven Martial Prowess. Gives 14 base stats over 16 of harmony. But does not require other unit's nearby.
Let alone on higher tier Helven unit's, that have Martial mastery that give 20 bonus stats.
Murderous Prowess/Mastery is a huge swinging mechanic for the Delves.
Greenskin WAAAAGH laughs at the mere bonus Cathay gets. Both in battle and on the map.

I'm not stating it's a weak mechanic. But Cathay needs it, else it's generally subpar. Not to mention many mechanics are just flatout superior.

[Father Ribs]

It seems like strategically, as long as you hold the Great Wall, you can secure your borders with less effort than many of the other factions. Especially now that Tzeench can't teleport over the Great Wall.

I wish the caravan mechanic was a little more developed...maybe an option to add a bit of circumspect routing so you aren't heading past the VC 3 doomstacks on the way to your destination.

[Vyss A'lare]

Originally posted by Rianne:

Originally posted by Vexillarius:

Counter argument.
30 seconds unbreakable via "By our blood".
Highelven Martial Prowess. Gives 14 base stats over 16 of harmony. But does not require other unit's nearby.
Let alone on higher tier Helven unit's, that have Martial mastery that give 20 bonus stats.
Murderous Prowess/Mastery is a huge swinging mechanic for the Delves.
Greenskin WAAAAGH laughs at the mere bonus Cathay gets. Both in battle and on the map.

I'm not stating it's a weak mechanic. But Cathay needs it, else it's generally subpar. Not to mention many mechanics are just flatout superior.

True but harmony affect missile/artillery reload speeds. With Miao Ying that can lead to 4s fire rate for dragon crossbows... Nothing even gets close with how good their artillery is.

[Will]

Originally posted by Vyss A'lare:

My start was a little tough dealing with skaven, chaos and Lokhir at the start but now that I'm approaching endgame Cathay seems to scale further than any faction I've seen. My peasant infantry are going toe to toe with mirror guard without issue due to the insane tech tree + harmony buffs. Dragon crossbows have to be one of the strongest archers in the game and melt everything. These seem a little too cheap for how strong they are.

The artillery feels like a better version of their empire counterparts and that's before harmony buffs. With harmony buffs they are absolutely nuts with insane rates of fire and better accuracy than modern tanks. Their only weaknesses seem to be area damage spam (makes their insane ma/md pointless) and ammo since with their 6s rate of fire on the artillery, they only last a few minutes.

That said magisters need a little rework, they get sky lantern mounts which nullifies their entire red line. Their buffs are really something else and let me use some peasant spears to wreck Archeon. Nothing like a T1 unit with 70ma 100md.

I play this game as cheesy as possible
Yea Cathay is one of the strong ones, Zhao Ming is the strongest cheese LL in IE, as in he can defeat the most army by himself. And with some rocket artillery units, he can defeat multiple stacks of absolutely anything.

Actually I feel like all of the more balanced factions are the strongest, where as factions that's only supposed to be good in one thing like Bretonnia or chaos are bad. This is because by end game you'd have all the most elite units in every roll so for example Bretonnia may have good cav but your rank 9 jade cav from cathay will be almost as good, but you have better everything else so you still beat them. Where as if you're playing as Bretonnia, yea you'll have rank 9 grail knights that's stronger than all other cav but the rest of your army is still not that strong.

The harmony thing is ridiculous, it's basically a permanent buff. Should probably make it so that one Yin unit can only pair with one Yang unit, like you can't balance out 10 rocket artillery with one Yang unit.

[crobs69]

Cathay is strong no matter what

[yuzhonglu]

Cathay is Dwarves, but with magic and cavalry. I.e. Dwarves but good.

[meiam]

Cathay is strong, although they don't excel at anything so its balanced by that. Their T1 army is pretty weak, without harmony they'd get destroyed every time, but higher they compete just fine.

But their starting location are so boring... I hope that bring in a DLC for them with new location (and add option to send caravan anywhere on map).