Viceroyalty of New Spain - Hacienda and Soldados for the Spanish

[pope henry viii]

The April PUP provides the following change:

Viceroyalty of New Spain (III): Soldados are now balanced with regular combat values (-10%) and need to be updated manually to Guard and Imperial status in the Hacienda.

I think this is a good change, but I would suggest the following are also desirable in addition:

1. Remove the ability of the Hacienda to spawn Soldados.

2. Change the effect of 'Grenade Launchers' for the Spanish so that instead of enabling them to train Grenadiers, it disables the training of Musketeers and enables the training of Soldados in their place. It should still unlock 'Incendiary Grenades' for research. Giving it the effects of 'Refurbished Firearms' may be appropriate, though I could see an argument for adding the LOS boost for the Soldados without giving them the special attacks.

3. 'Viceroyalty of New Spain' could be rebalanced - it might be moved to Age 2, gain a wood cost, and perhaps have some other bonus, e.g., that of the 'Fortified Haciendas' card that is available to the Mexicans through the Federal State of Durango or through the Yucatan, California and Texas revolutions.

[Catalytic]

Haciendas were supposed to be unique to Mexico. Soldados were supposed to be unique to Mexico.

The Viceroyalty card for Spain opened up the option for Spain to build haciendas which train soldados (Mexican ones don't) and now they've got balance issues with cheese strats involving pumping out soldados. This is why we're seeing this particular nerf.

IMO, the hacienda needs to go back to being unique to Mexico and to Spain's revolutions (Chile, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina). Baseline Imperial Spain should continue to follow the classic Euro civ economic model (mills, estates, 2 factories). This would make balancing the economic model easier, and maintain the uniqueness of the civs inspired by Spain's colonies.

[arcadia1228]

"Suppose to be unique to certain civs" is not a viable option for AoE3 since devs want to add more consulate-type units to Home cities. Literally, every civs have its own support consisting of other civs' unique units.

As devs see the reason for the declining popularity with AoE3 Original as "no update, no change, left to forgotten in a decade", thus they would add more changes to DE, and those changes won't be rollbacked unless something is become too OP to counter with any strategies.

A similar debate is ongoing from AoE forums.

https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/april-pup-notes/227969

[Catalytic]

Originally posted by arcadia1228:

A similar debate is ongoing from AoE forums.

https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/april-pup-notes/227969

You could have saved me some time by telling me I'd have to read more than 100 posts to get to the part where anyone at all starts talking about units unique to a civ finding their way into other civs' rosters. The only argument I'm seeing in favor of this is "well, others civs have it" citing very niche applications, like light cannon being added to the Maya revolution for Mexico, or civs specifically designed around using other civs' units (Malta).

No one's addressing the core issue here that you have a very strong economic building that is highly versatile and can function as a factory for free units being enabled outside of the factors that balance it in its proper context. Mexico gets the hacienda and it's entire civ is balanced around having it. You pay 600w for each one and you accept the considerably weaker Mexican infantry roster. Spain as a civ was never balanced around that. It was balanced with a fast start, strong boom in Age 3 with Marvelous Year, and 2 factories in Age 4. It's very strong with that.

Adding in haciendas is thematic. It evokes the viceroyalties of New Spain. Personally, I love that. I have put that card in every Spain deck and played it every game since the PUP when they added it. But it was too strong of a buff when you go FF, send this, then send the sheep card to max out production of the free soldados. Spain's infantry roster was never balanced around having soldados like that. It was balanced around grenadiers that sucked and which required a card to make even marginally useful. You had to bring cannons if you wanted to siege anything down with FF early pressure which is expensive, costs cards, etc. The point here is that the hacienda turns into an Age 3 factory for some very strong, highly complimentary units designed for a civ with a weak infantry roster - and now it's causing issues.

So what do the devs do here?

* Double down on the hacienda and make it a baseline part of Spain's Age 3 game play, then gut the soldado to bring it into line power-wise?
* Move the haciendas to Age 4 and encourage FI strats to abuse the same thing we're seeing now, but with a bigger investment of effort to pull off?
* Remove the unit that's fundamentally causing the balance issue and stop the haciendas from spawning soldados? Haciendas become glorified mills/estates/livestock pens which no one thinks are broken
* Remove the hacienda entirely from Spain and leave it as being unique to Mexico or accessible only if you revolt to a New Spain nation (Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina) and lose some of the colonial flavor of the hacienda?

What if they just stop livestock being usable as workers? It makes no sense that shoving 20 sheep onto a hacienda makes it as efficient as investing 20 villagers. If you cut that part out, now you have a balance point where to get the soldados, you have to give up the villager production time on food/gold effectively paying the cost for the soldados instead of getting them for "free" using the cows/sheep.

[Maxillian]

What also can be considered, is to make it so you have to recruit the soldados in the traditional way, so you have to pay for them. Than give them a very slow recruitment time, forcing them to be more of supplementary unit.

The slow recruitment time could than be lifted, if you choose to revolt into one of the New Spain nations.

One could even consider making the free soldado mechanic unique to the Mexico revolt.

[Catalytic]

The soldado is a good unit. It found a place that finally solved the grenadier problem: how do you make this thing something that anyone would want to use? I'd be perfectly fine with it becoming the standard Spanish grenadier. Give them a custom Grenade Launcher card that enables the Soldado as a replacement for the Grenadier and enables the mortar attack.

The art fits Spain perfectly. He wears the uniform of the Spanish army. It's a great complimentary unit to their roster, but you've got to send a card to get it and then pay the training costs. You leave all of the normal balance points in place on the Soldado (you pay for it, you wait the train time, you buy the upgrades each age, and it takes 2 pop) and it's fine. Further, it establishes the Soldado as an elite Spanish army unit that makes its appearance in the Mexican roster make that much more sense, since it's the powerhouse unit of their infantry line-up. It's a special unit for both civs: opt-in for the Spanish, baseline for Mexico. And further there's an interesting symmetry. Mexico gets the soldado, but can opt in to the standard musketeer with the Criollos card. Spain gets the standard musk, but could opt into the Soldado.

The more I think about it, the real issue here is just a cheese strat that relies on haciendas generating the things for free. That's what breaks the Viceroyalty card. Otherwise, it's a very nice boom card worth ~1200w which is in-line with an Age 3 card. Maybe you could get a few settlers out a little quicker but it's not broken during that Age 3 boom phase to invest villager-seconds to do that. Otherwise, it's just a glorified mill or estate. If you make this card so it's the boom card and then had a second card to enable the soldado with its normal constraints, I think you fix both problems and still have 2 very viable options for the Spanish player.

[pope henry viii]

Catalytic-

I think you've reached a similar conclusion to my suggestion in the initial post.

In principle I think the key point which everyone should be able to agree on is that the combination of Haciendas, Soldado access, and 'free' spawns in one card is the problem, and the biggest problem is the 'free' spawns.

I have one concern about being able to train Soldados at the Barracks or Artillery Foundry. They have a slow train time and are expensive, so I'm not sure it's a problem that really needs solving in any realistic circumstance, but given the ability to train 5 per building and the ability to build many of those basic buildings, in principle they can be massed much faster than they can using Haciendas (2 of them with 40 villagers take a full minute to spawn 10). One option would be to tie them to Forts (like the Criollos card does for Mexico), but as a Euro civ Spain doesn't have reliable access to Forts, so I don't much like this (though it would play nicely with the idea of giving Spanish revolution options better access to Soldados, given the ability to spam Forts). Another approach could be to implement a build limit (as with the Turks and Nizam Fusiliers).

I think replacing (rather than supplementing) base Musketeers would make a unique Grenade Launchers card more interesting. Having to give something up in exchange for something new/special is usually good design. I also like the idea more broadly of changing existing 'generic' cards so that one or a few civs have slightly unique versions of them. (Other prime candidates for this treatment are Theatres (see German Witch Hammer), Fencing/Riding/Engineering/Navigation School (see French Royal Fencing School), Balloon cards (see French Aerostatic Corps), Battleship cards, Explorer cards, Church cards, Balloon cards,Agents/Assassins and Pioneers).

Leaving Haciendas as-is apart from removing the Soldado spawn ability is certainly a reasonable approach, too. I think you're right that it's valuable enough to justify as a boom card (especially with the synergy with livestock) without the Soldado spawning ability.

-

Though it seems like you have concluded that livestock gathering is not itself a problem, I want to comment on the following:

shoving 20 sheep onto a hacienda makes it as efficient as investing 20 villagers

Sheep are not nearly as efficient as villagers. They take over three times as long to spawn Soldados, and are relatively slower at doing that compared to villagers than they are at gathering resources. The main benefit to using livestock is in avoiding the opportunity costs of having to devote villagers to it.

-

Hacienda work-rate differs depending on the workers. I have tested it with a few arrangements. The time it takes to spawn a Soldado, specifically, is not affected by 'Liberation March' or 'Standing Army', or any boost to villager work-rate.

Numbers are based on the tool-tip, which should match the game-clock. I timed it out of game and can say that the ratios are right.

Unmanned, it takes 90.5s, i.e., ~0.75/min
With 20 sheep, it takes 41.72s, i.e., ~1.3/min
With 20 cows or llamas, it takes 30.59s, i.e., 2/min
With 20 villagers, it takes 12.93s, i.e., ~5/min

So 20 sheep on a Hacienda are worth 0.55 Soldados per minute, whereas 20 villagers are worth 4.25 Soldados per minute. That means a sheep is worth ~1/7.73 of a villagers for this purpose.

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(For reference, sheep gather food at a rate of 0.20/s and coin at a rate of 0.14/s.
Times 20 for 4/s and 2.8/s respectively. (I would guess that sheep are set to 1/5 of villager base rates, so are better at gathering resources than spawning Soldados.)
The Hacienda (without upgrades) contributes its auto-gather rate of 1 food/s and 0.68 coin/s.
So 20 sheep on a Hacienda collect 5 food/s and 3.48 coin/s (or if the tool-tip is to be believed, 3.40 coin/s, presumably due to rounding on the individual rates displayed).

A Soldado's nominal value is 90 food and 80 coin.
Its food value is 90s of bare Hacienda time and its coin value is 117.65s of bare Hacienda time, so 207.65s total bare Hacienda time (this is way off the spawn rate - if you calculate using Hacienda rates affected by card and techs, it is closer).
Unupgraded villagers on an unupgraded Hacienda (calculated at Hacienda auto-gather times 21) should pay for a Soldado in 10.17 seconds.
For a Hacienda with 20 sheep, we get 18s worth of food and 23.53s worth of coin, so 41.53s (not far off the value derived from spawning them directly).)

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EDIT: An oversight on my part - when testing I had gather rates at +100% handicap for the player to make things go faster. This handicap doesn't affect spawn rates, which means that my data above is biased in favour of resource generation being better than it actually is compared unit spawning.

An unmanned Hacienda takes ~415.3s to generate 90f and 80c, while one with no upgrades and 20 villagers takes ~20.34s, and one with 20 sheep takes ~83.06s. So the analysis above of comparing resource equivalents is flawed - actually I see that it takes much longer to generate equivalent resources compared to just Soldados.

That said, villagers are still much more efficient than sheep - just that (without upgrades) spawning Soldados is a lot more time efficient than trying to generate their value in resources. With all cards and techs villagers should reach a rate of about 250% of base so late game the resources will be worth more in absolute terms than Soldado spawns. I suppose the balancing idea is supposed to be that you get flexibility with resources and the value of the Soldado spawn is in the opportunity cost of locking yourself in and potentially wasting time if you have to switch function. Doesn't fly in practice however as if you can make Soldados for ~40% fewer villager seconds than buying units then you should. It needs a rebalance, but livestock still aren't really the problem.

[arcadia1228]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

You could have saved me some time by telling me I'd have to read more than 100 posts to get to the part where anyone at all starts talking about units unique to a civ finding their way into other civs' rosters.

I should have said about it that the page is long, sry.

Anyway, continuing about the topics;

What makes Spanish Soldados strong (and makes other players angry) are Free spawning, and strong base stats synergies with Unction.

Then why devs didn't nerf Hacienda's spawn rate? I think Spanish Hacienda is more like Community Plaza than Factory. It requires settlers to work. About Community Plazas, as far as I know, they didn't get a good impression from players.

Originally posted by pope henry viii:

Hacienda work-rate differs depending on the workers. I have tested it with a few arrangements. The time it takes to spawn a Soldado, specifically, is not affected by 'Liberation March' or 'Standing Army', or any boost to villager work-rate.

Numbers are based on the tool-tip, which should match the game-clock. I timed it out of game and can say that the ratios are right.

Unmanned, it takes 90.5s, i.e., ~0.75/min
With 20 sheep, it takes 41.72s, i.e., ~1.3/min
With 20 cows or llamas, it takes 30.59s, i.e., 2/min
With 20 villagers, it takes 12.93s, i.e., ~5/min

So 20 sheep on a Hacienda are worth 0.55 Soldados per minute, whereas 20 villagers are worth 4.25 Soldados per minute. That means a sheep is worth ~1/7.73 of a villagers for this purpose.

If the guy above said is right, Hacienda's spawn rate is not affected by techs or cards. and 30 sheep are not having enough spawn rate to spamming Soldados.

And you can spam 8.5 Soldados per/minute when 40 Settlers working, which equals 765 food and 685 coin. But that 40 Settlers can generate 1165 food (=0.67*1.45*60*20) and 660 coin (=0.5*1.1*60*20) if they are tasked to fortress age mills and estates. 660 coin goes to 960 (=0.5*1.6*60*20) in the Industrial Age.

(alternatively 914 food and 471 coin if 40 Settlers are working in Haciendas)

https://aoe3-companion.web.app/

Besides that, Spanish win rates are not that good even for notoriety by Spanish Soldados. The win rates range is 40~55%, and gets lower in high ELO.

[Maxillian]

Originally posted by pope henry viii:

Catalytic-
I have one concern about being able to train Soldados at the Barracks or Artillery Foundry. They have a slow train time and are expensive, so I'm not sure it's a problem that really needs solving in any realistic circumstance, but given the ability to train 5 per building and the ability to build many of those basic buildings, in principle they can be massed much faster than they can using Haciendas (2 of them with 40 villagers take a full minute to spawn 10). One option would be to tie them to Forts (like the Criollos card does for Mexico), but as a Euro civ Spain doesn't have reliable access to Forts, so I don't much like this (though it would play nicely with the idea of giving Spanish revolution options better access to Soldados, given the ability to spam Forts). Another approach could be to implement a build limit (as with the Turks and Nizam Fusiliers).

Alternatively they could just keep their recruitment tied to the Haciendas, meaning you only have two recruitment sources.

Or make them recruitable from the tavern, which Spain can only build one of, but it feels weird, considering Soldados aren't mercs or outlaws.

Last option would be the Town center, there are cards however to expand their limit.