Skirms also die pathetically easily to anything melee that isn’t a spear. And their ability to kill villagers is rather limited early game (only deal 1 dmg/shot until they have castle age upgrades) - they can harass, but that’s about it. You don’t need a large army to kill skirms: a few scouts can take out a large army of skirms. I believe 5 scouts take out 20 skirms (basically 1/3 the investment to kill skirms)
Skirms are also pretty ineffective against MAAs, now that they can’t outrun them. Need a tech advantage to deal more than 1 damage/shot.
Skirms die to everything except archers and kill nothing but archers and skirms. The only reason they’re strong is because they’re ranged and counter the only other ranged unit in feudal.
If this were true you won’t see highest level of players doing skirms in most of the games in all tournaments. Your cav units don’t kill a group of opponent skirms as fast as they’d kill your archers. Due to the pathing they’d just bump into each other. Yoi have to produce knights with +2 armor or more than 1 mangonel to kill the skirms effectively. But that’s a lot of investment and knights are vulnerable to conversion. And lets say you don’t invest that much to kill them and ignore the skirms, due to their high p.armor they can dive under your tc and idle your eco even if they can’t kill vills. So its good value for money, and how good a unit isnt always determined by isolated head to head battles vs other units, its about practical utility.
And also don’t die fast under towers and tc fire. This is huge. Early stages of the game, player base is compact and walled. Melee units have limited scope for doing damage which is why everyone goes for ranged units after the first few scouts or maa in standard open maps.
And if there’s a good number of MAAs, they’ll run the skirms down and kill them instead. Same base movement speed, and the skirms can’t attack without stopping.
Same hp and melee armor as archers… Difference is the minimum range and archers deal more than 1 damage/shot (and launch more volleys). Even if the minimum range increases time to kill, they’re still dealing significantly less damage than the archers would.
I sometimes put archers on stand ground and station them just outside TC range. Similar effect of idling farming eco. Though if you’re able to do that, you’ve probably won (unless your opponent is idling your eco about as well)
Even without armor upgrades, accompanying spears are far more of a threat to the knights than the skirms (or scouts in Feudal age).
Should take about 10 unupgraded knights to take out 30 elite skirms (with full castle age upgrades), and likely a bit more with micro (but only a few more). A far cry from needing both armor upgrades to kill the skirms effectively. The armor upgrades make things far more cost-effective, but they aren’t strictly needed for a good trade.
And a single mangonel volley will flatten a group of skirms. Direct hits are instant kill (40 damage vs 35 hp and max 2 melee armor) and those caught within the blast radius are left with low HP (makes them really easy for other units to pick off). The catch is that players can often dodge around the shots, but that takes attention (and skirms fire slower, so it takes more attention with them).
Skirms do get used at high level, but they’re still a counter-unit, not a general purpose unit. And while idling is often sufficient value, it’s not as good as vil kills (especially if those kills are combined with idling eco).
That’s the main problem - you can’t have a lot of them because food is limited and utilized for vills and techs. Plus skirms have range, they can always spot bad fights and get pulled back vs lot of maa. If you pull back maa this way you’ve invested a lot for no returns.
I was talking about a group of skirms killing archers before scouts can kill them. Multiple skirms can fire on one archer and kill it. While scouts will just bump into each other trying to target the same skirm. Once its past 10+ feudal units the player who has more skirms is more likely to get better value for resources spent.
This will idle 3 or 4 farms while the monstrous skirms can just dive under opponent tc, force more vills to be garrisoned and cause more idle time or force scout production.
Nobody is going to spam skirms against double stable knights. Its suboptimal to go heavy on knights in early castle age unless the knight player is confident they have a strong castle age timing advantage, otherwise there’ll be monks behind the walls. So usually those who want to be aggressive go for an xbow or CA opening and add a mangonel or few knights just as support units to kill skirms. Higher the elo goes, lower the chances of that happening as knights without +2 can get killed in 3 hits by a group of 20+ elite skirms. This is why you see a lot of skirmisher play in S tier tournaments.
You can flatten only if the mangonel’s ground attack lands in the center of a tightly packed group of skirms, otherwise you’ll kill just a couple of them. This is why I suggested either secondary projectiles of mangonel and rocket carts should get +3 or +4 vs skirms so that the skirm player is always forced to pull back or -1 base attack for elite skirms with +1 bonus damage vs archers and spears so that dps vs those units remains as such while they become less effective vs melee units.
Literally won a game because you said this. So strong.
Just pull the archers back.
Laughs in Mapuche.
I think Skirms are just a little too strong in general but not strong enough vs archers and cav archers. The pierce armor critical points are just so game defining. If skirms don’t have the upgrades they can’t fully counter archers, while if knights and such don’t have the armors, they take significantly more damage from archers and such.
I think the Mapuche are the civ I dislike the most in team games, It’s a pain to play against them.
The Kona is ridiculously battle-ready, with no need for upgrades. Equivalent to a Knight with Bloodline, Husbandry and Scale Barding Armour. But I really can’t stand the Bolas Rider. It’s a bloody stupid unit.
If you’re losing against Kona, you lost long before it got to that point. Konas are, arguably, the worst unit in the Mapuche roster. In all my times of playing Mapuche never have I ever thought “Konas would be a good unit in this situation”. What are they even for?
Bolas Riders on the other hand, like generic CA, are borderline OP.
I’m talking about TG: when the Mapuche are in a pocket position and can go FC, they’re ridiculously effective.
When the Mapuche are in a flank position on semi-closed maps, where the pockets usually makes a FC Knights play, Mapuche makes skirmishers in feudal age and Boals Raiders in castle age.
To sum up, the Mapuche are a fantastic civilisation in Hideout-style maps. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a flank (Skirmishers → Bolas Riders) or pocket (FC → Konas) position.
This is what people do in games today but archer civs depend on doing damage with their timing advantage in early castle age. A reason why civs like Britons, Ethiopians don’t perform as good as they should in theory, in 1v1s.
Haha, late castle age there could be some exceptions but I’m referring to the context of early castle age opening. 22-27th min in a standard Arabia game. If you scout opponent double stable knights, as the mapuche player you might open 2 range bola fast ballistics or 2 monastery monks and 1 range bolas. Its very unlikely you’ll go for 30+ skirms. So the scenario he described where its 10+ knights without +2 armor destroying a group of 30+ elite skirms in early castle age, is unlikely to happen in higher elos where players actively scout their opponent before producing too much of one military.
Its ridiculously strong vs archers, just takes 1 damage after +2 armor. The recent scorp nerf makes it even more difficult to kill them.
Not necessarily. You can give 1 p.armor to skirms and -3 damage from all archer armor class units (like royal heirs for cavalry armor class). That way skirms will continue taking very little damage vs archers but die faster to tc, tower, scorps and other siege units.
And quite rightly, the latest buff (at the end of December) was also described as unnecessary and silly. But the Kona are incredibly even more annoying.
I suppose they might be okay in that position, but Konas still require a castle and have no scaling ability. Being unable to face any unit in a fair melee and being limited to 3 pierce armor really makes them fall off hard.
Skirms need as many armor upgrades as the archer player has attack upgrades, and as many range upgrades as the archer player has. Effectively requiring double the number of upgrades. Sometimes they can get away with less, but those cases are rare. If a player doesn’t plan to go skirms, teching into skirms puts them behind from the get-go.
I was meaning if they don’t have them researched. Taking double damage because you’re missing a single upgrade is game defining.
I expect it’ll be the 28th, the same day the Mac version goes live.
Maybe I just need to play them in spite of how weak I think they are, but they never struck me as being even as strong as knights.
Even though it supports my argument that skirms are too powerful, this is irrelevant to what I’m talking about. When you hit castle age at 21 or 22 something, you’re not going to have stone for a castle, elite skirm, bodkin, ballistics and that UT. Even if you play Nomad or closed map, there are better ways to follow up a castle drop instead of UT + elite skirms.
But on open maps, skirms is the META. As I’ve explained before their low risk good reward unit in that stage of the game. Due to walls, an aggressive opponent will prefer ranged units and those get countered by skirms. If the opponent is greedy with no army skirms can still disturb behind woodlines, dive under tc or tower fire and create a lot of idle time. Every other unit that kills skirms is expensive in terms of net resources and is either vulnerable to monks or cavalry.
You’ve completely misunderstood my point. If skirms are changed to have 1 p.armor, but -3 damage from archer armor class units like Ethiopian UT vs cav, they’ll still receive the exact same damage against archer units as today but will take more damage from tc, tower, scorpions. So the skirm vs other non-siege units will remain the same but they’ll be more vulnerable under opponent’s defensive structures.
I think I got that result without the UT. Not certain, but pretty sure. I think they did have Ballistics though.
Yes, they’re too good in general, not good enough as a counter unit.
That’s another problem that needs to be fixed. Ranged units (and cavalry to a lesser extent) are just too good against walls and walling.
I guess I wasn’t clear, I think that’s a good idea/direction. (Even if it does remove the Mapuche skirm rush.) You just need to actually give them the super armor to reduce the taken damage to 1 from all same age archers and 2 or less from next age archers.
I think I would go with 2(3) pierce armor for (elite) skirmisher (let them use that shield) and archer-line would have -3 attack vs them, and cavalry-archer-line would have -4 attack vs skirms (comparables would have comparable values). Then Crossbow + Bodkin or Cav Archer + Bodkin could do double damage to an unupgraded skirmisher, but a single upgrade (armor or elite) would be enough to bring it back to 1.
