Fail_Safe: TMOUllrich: Whats the reasoning behind this Iroqouis mega nerf thing?
What mega nerf, they got a different playstyle that's all
Well put. I've seen a fair amount of confusion about the Iro changes, so I'll do my best to explain
Basically, in the current patch, Iro is horrible in the second age. They have sub-par RI Aenna) and sub-par cav. That forced them to only work with Tomahawks in the second age, which while a decent unit, can't cut it without another unit complimenting them.
So we decided to boost them in the second age, as the other changes we were making move towards more second age fighting (removing TC bonus against cav makes protecting your eco while FFing harder and because RI - in this case Forest Prowlers - are usually the bulk of a FF army, that strategy got worse because of the boost to cav against RI). Now, Aenna is an awesome unit (all food!) which now beats HI and can run away from battles (5 speed) which makes Iro quite versatile in the second age, Tomas got better at protecting them against cav, and (!) we gave Kanyas some nice boosts.
However, in the current patch we saw Iro as a middle of the road civilization, not too good, not too weak, so we needed to cut something down as well if were going to boost them. A forrest prowler and war chief nerf were overdue. The forrest prowler is incredibly good for its cost (and can stealth) and the war chief dominates games with his crackshot.
That leaves the card and firepit nerfs. If we boost Aennas and Tomahawks, we have to address the issue that Iroqious has the best infantry upgrade cards in the game (they have a ton of them and for the most part they affect ALL infantry, something that's quite uncommon). We wanted to give Iros the chance to fight in age2 without making them OP as the game went on, allowing them to advantage of all those cards. So we took the cards down a bit.
The firepit changes, as you know, were accross the board for all of the native civs. Basically, we felt that at certain points in the game (when you can boom like crazy and other civs can't keep up, when you have even armies and attack dance takes the day, when you can swiftly take the water by momentarily sacrificing your eco, and when you can switch to farms/plantations in the blink of an eye), the firepit advantage was just too much, and was creating imbalances. In boosting Iro (and Aztec) in other ways (sioux was too good to begin with), we didn't want them to be able to abuse those critical points in the game.
Iroquois is still an excellent civilizatoin. They have quality units from the 2nd age to the 4th, a plethora of upgrades, and are the only civilization that can really make a (still) smooth transition from mining/hunting to gathering from mines/plantations. As Failsafe said, you'll need to find a slightly different playstyle, but Iros will be quite good. =)