The fact a scout Rush exists kind of disproves your point, don’t you think? If food really were so impossibly difficult to get early on, then all anyone should ever do would be Archer rushes. After all, not only do Scouts cost pure food, versus the more accessible gold and wood, they actually cost more resources total.
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In comparison, cheaper than knights (but still kind of expensive), slower and quite tanky (is the same guy, same armor, the difference is the horse, but that alone shouldn’t be +2.5x the hp)
But I want to focus that mounted units cannot fight in melee, they used to charge retreat and repeat. And there is a reason to it, a mounted knight are dangerous because they can only attack the upper body, but are very predictable and easier to defend because they can only attack the upper body.
At the end of the day gameplay is more important than acurracy, I don’t mind KTs have no charge in AoE2, I jus don’t like infantry is crap against them
Not necessarily. I’m not saying that producing a food unit is inherently bad. Only that if you’re options are creating two units of similar utility, that you’d be advantaged by choosing the unit that has a lower food cost as that’d require less villager seconds of work to gather the resources.
A scout rush, offers different utility than other feudal units. Even without considering their stats, their mobility is a great asset.
Conversely 2 long swords to 1 knight offer similar melee utility. LS are better at taking down buildings, but knights are more mobile, have higher pierce armor, and consequently are better at raiding.
If a LS had a 1000 hp and did a 1000 attack, it wouldn’t matter it had a higher proportional food cost, it’s utility would justify the cost when considered in villager seconds of work. But two LS and 1 knight offer at best comparable utility, but the LS comp requires more food and consequently more villager seconds of work.
Because food requires more villager seconds of work to gather, on paper your investment into that army comp should provide greater utility.
When you boil it down, it takes more villager seconds of effort to produce an army of LS than a comparable army of knights. I really don’t know exactly but considering the food gather rate and the extra wood I’m going to guess and say it takes 20% more villager seconds of effort to produce 2 LS than a knight. The true figure may very well be different but it is certainly more to produce the LS than the knight. If we say it takes 200 villager seconds or work to gather the resources for a knight and 120 villager seconds for a LS (240 to produce 2 LS), then if we want the LS and the knight to provide the same utility, then we’d expect 10 LS to be a match against 6 knights. the expectation is that LS are about 60% as good as knight. in reality, 31LS vs 15 knights is a slight victory for the knights. So LS are less than 48% as good as a knight and that’s before their pierce armor and mobility are considered.
Also food functions in a different context in castle age than feudal. Any food beyond the 50f every 25 seconds can’t be spent on villagers. you can spend it on techs, units, save up for castle age, but any food collection beyond that rate can’t produce more villagers. That is not the case in castle. spare food can be used to grow your economy faster than 1villager every 25 seconds by having villagers queued up at multiple TCs.
Hypothetically you could make knights at the same rate (as measured by utility) your opponent is making LS and then using some of that spare villager effort, gather more wood and food to grow your economy faster. Not a lot faster admittedly but measurably.
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Also in feudal I think it is reasonable to assume you might have some deer or berries left. Deer gather very quickly, and while berries gather pretty slowly they have a much smaller wood investment. So food in feudal isn’t necessarily as hard to gather.
Depends on your map, and how many herdables, berries, hunt you have. More easier to gather food and scouts can be easy peezy. Less sources of easy to gather food, and you have to farm earlier, and scouts are harder to produce.
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What about give knight-line a little charge attack (lets says +10), reduce -1 attack base and change the ROF from 1.8 to 2.
I think the knight line is fine in imperial, I think it’s just a bit too strong in castle. I think only the knight needs any changes, and I think the easiest place to do that is hp. there is a 20 hp difference between cavalier and knight, but a 40 hp difference between cavalier and paladin.
Also I think targeting hp is extra advantageous because of bloodlines. “normal” civs will have a 10% weaker knights, but any cavalry civ with bloodlines will only have an 8.333% weaker knight. If you’re a cavalry civ you’re less effected by this nerf. I don’t want cavalry civs to have to start picking LS because it’s now the better unit. Cavalry civs can still be cavalry civs, lets just give the LS a chance to shine sometimes.
Then when you go up to imperial and research cavalier everyone is back to normal (except for Saracens I guess who have the knight but don’t get cavalier, but choosing knights in imperial age with Saracens would be an extremely off meta play so I’m not concerned)
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I think infantry do provide a utility that Knights cannot; the ability to easily destroy buildings. Per cost, infantry are two and a half times as effective as knights against buildings. As a matter of fact, after arson, infantry actually become more effective than battering rams.
And unlike battering rams, infantry force a power unit response. You can’t fight them off with skirmishers or Pikemen or villagers. With gambesons, even Town centers are remarkably ineffective, to the point where you can kill a fully garrisoned Town Center with just about 11 long swordsmen.
And that is where I think a lot of players, even Pros, are not yet playing them with quite the right instincts. They are cheaper and tankier than people are accustomed to, and they do more damage than people realize. Trading half a dozen longswords to destroy a vital production building can easily turn the tide in a fight, even if you lose the longswords in the process.
I don’t think that longswords should be a unit that is beating these power units in a straight fight. That’s not their purpose. They should be brought out for specific purposes, just like skirmishers or pikemen.
LS do perform very well against buildings compared to a knight. Approximately half the cost of a knight yet do 50% more damage. an equal cost of LS will be devastating to buildings compared to knights.
It’s irrelevant though if you can’t mass enough of them because of the higher villager second cost to survive against your enemy units on the way there. Until those LS are massed, upgraded, make the trip, and survive against your enemy’s units, that ability is purely academic.
LS could do a 1000 bonus damage to buildings but if they moved .1 tiles per second and had 1 hp it’d be meaningless. They have to make it to your enemy’s buildings alive. One alive knight will do more damage to a building than a dead LS.
Also remember LS are slower than knights so take more time to get from your base to your enemy’s base. at some point you have to send your army forward and whatever additional units you could make, won’t get to your enemy’s base in time for that decisive confrontation. If your enemy making knights already has the melee advantage when your LS leave your base, and your enemy can produce a few more, good luck being able to use that bonus damage. Lanchester’s square law is going to wreck you. That’s another advantage with knights. You give your opponent less additional time to prepare from the moment you send your knights forward to the time they arrive at your enemies base.
Then from that point on they’re producing the cheaper (when considered by villager seconds of effort per combat ability) knight and you’re stuck shlupping your slower LS from across the map. You could buildup your LS and lost the initiative. You could try making forward barracks, but your enemy has leftover and now additional knights to kill off those builders.
It also occurs to me that because you have to produce two LS offer comparable utility as 1 knight, you also have to make twice the additional houses. So on top of the slower food gather rate, and the extra wood investment for farms, each LS is now costing an additional 2.5W, 2.5 villager seconds of house construction, and whatever villager walking time is incurred, when compared to going with knights. Admittedly it’s a relatively small cost, and if you’re a smart player you’ll try to have a nearby villager add those house to your wall for extra defenses so serves multiple purposes, but it is nevertheless and additional, non-negotiable, cost that is incurred by opting to go for LS as opposed to knights.
This isn’t a question of “are there situations in which the LS is better than the knight” because of course there are. This is a question of when everything is fully considered, when you advance to castle age, and you’re choosing between knights and LS (obviously this wouldn’t be every game, maybe it’s obvious you’ll going with crossbow, camel, cav archer, battle elephant, whatever… but in the games where you are choosing between knights and LS), do you maximize your probability of winning by investing in LS as opposed to knights in a desirable percentage (20% - 40% I think is range where the optimal percentage lies) of circumstances.
I believe for the reasons I’ve outlined in this topic the answer is that question is no.
I don’t want LS to curb stomp knights. But they take more villager seconds to produce, don’t even beat knights when resources (not villager seconds but resources which favors the LS) are balanced, and are slower than knights. All I’m saying is that for LS to have a use case against a more population efficient and mobile option, is that they can edge out a slight victory when villager seconds are balanced.
So in a previously mentioned example 31 LS go against 15 knights, and there’s like one or two knights left. Instead I believe the optimal balance would be if those 31 LS take the same amount of villager seconds to amass and upgrade and at least be an even fight maybe eke out a narrow one or two unit victory. Infantry civs will do well, strong cavalry civs will do well.
Doesn’t really matter in the mid game because the market prices are still decent. You can just take advantage of the better gold collection rate and buy a bit of food in the short term before your opponent has used the market. Just fix your economy and spend your resources on what you need right now and the immediate future. By castle age, it’s not about rigid build orders or precise numbers of villagers on each resource anyway, you have to eyeball things to an extent or you’ll get overwhelmed with the multi tasking. So you don’t have to just assign the exact villagers on each resource and wait until they collect what you need, especially when you’re floating a resource you don’t need immediately. I understand there is a Spirit of the Law mathematical side of the game, of course it’s important to know that stuff, but a lot of that goes out the window in the short term when you just need to achieve your immediate goal in the moment, even if it’s not the most efficient way to macro in the long term.
But Longswords are not supposed to serve the exact same purpose as knights. Knights have mobility so they can raid and jump in and out of danger easily, especially with Husbandry. Small groups of Longswords are pretty useless at raiding woodlines in comparison. They are designed to counter trash units, take out enemy production buildings and destroy TCs when you have Arson, armour upgrades and enough numbers. They also don’t suffer from the same weakness to pikes and monks, since 1x converted Longsword is a much smaller percentage of your army lost, but the conversion still wastes the monk’s faith. Also you can overwhelm the monks with sheer numbers and it’s very hard to micro monks vs. an big swarm of Longswords. Taking out buildings and TCs is much harder and riskier with castle age knights. Yes, Longswords and Knights are both melee units but they’re not supposed to serve the exact same purpose.
I can’t agree with your conclusions. For one, you can start castle age with a body of infantry already there, while they need to construct knights from scratch, so you should always start with the advantage.
The thing is, as a purpose-built unit, you would never be in the scenario you highlight in the first place. You should never be trying to smash through knights with longswords in the first place, any more than you should be trying to beat archers with pikes or knights with skirms; that’s not what they’re designed for. LS ability to engage knights on a relatively even footing is more than enough, since it compels the enemy to change their strategy to counter them, where with harder counters, even one or three units can be enough.
I think your main reasonable point is that it IS difficult to get infantry into the right place at the right time. That much I do agree with, and I could reasonably support some sort of way to improve their agility for long-distance travel.
I agree. I think the main role of LS is to do damage on building. However LS are not very good to destory building in practice because you need to surround the building with their slow movement speed. By the mean time knight may already deal 50% HP of that building. If it is the case, I suggest that the tech Arson can give +1 or even +2 range to LS when targeting building. LS will throw the fire into the building like AOE3 and they no longer need to try hard to surround the building slowly and ineffectively.
For coding part, AOE2 already have the mechanism that villager will switch to range mode when target boar or deer.
I’ve already explained how a high food income is slower to gather and requires more investment than other mixes and it has absolutely nothing to do with villager allocation but villager gather rates. Your eco on a greater mix of food is going to be overall slightly less efficient than a less food heavy mix. I don’t know how else to explain it to you.
As I’ve said before, it isn’t a question of whether LS have situations in which they’re better than knights, but if you’re advancing to castle do you maximize your probability of winning by investing in LS as opposed to knights. It is irrelevant if LS are situationally better than knights, if 90% of the time you’d have been better off investing in knights as opposed to the LS. Pointing out a case where LS are better than knights in no way addresses the underlying fundamentals of the comparison.
This is a good point. You can build MAA throughout feudal and start with a lead. I have to give you that one.
Still I don’t see a lot of MAA in feudal. I think you see more scouts and archers, but if you’re an infantry civ then yeah I suppose. Even a modest number of extra LS from feudal MAA could sway an otherwise close battle. I still think the LS is lacking, but you’ve got me on this one. LS definitely have an advantage by being able to be produced (as MAA) in feudal.
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Really? I see MAA pretty frequently 1v1, both on the ladder and in pro games on YouTube etc. Maybe I’m overestimating how frequently I see them since MAA into archers is a favourite strat of mine.
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Maybe. Not exactly like there’s hard stats on this stuff. But if there’s more MAA play than I think, those units can carry over into castle age and make the decision to stay with LS more advantageous than I’d considered in my comparison.
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Ok but why do Longswords need to be an alternative to knights? If knights is the better play, just go with knights. I get that they’re both melee units, but they’re so different in my eyes, it’s like comparing apples with oranges. MAA in feudal is not uncommon and late game champs is not a rarity either. Especially since gambesons. And even Longswords in Castle age can work if your opponent is unprepared. Even if they are prepared, a super aggressive Malian Longsword push for example is pretty difficult to defend. If you accept that they serve different purposes, why do you want to push people away from using knights and towards Longswords?
I think in an optimally balanced game a unit shouldn’t be rarely used because the alternatives are generally better. MAA is used in feudal (to the degree is up for debate but it is seen). MAA is probably a meta-meta choice, it counters counters to the most frequent feudal units, spears and skirms. Champs are used plenty in imperial.
The big push over the last…two-ish years has been castle age infantry. It seems for whatever reason you desire to ascribe, that historically castle age infantry wasn’t viable, and it’s an open question as to whether they’re in a good state or need more buffs.
Any good player won’t have a mono-comp army but one or two units are going to have a considerably larger role.
LS aren’t identical to knights, but I think they’re a good deal more similar than XBows to either LS or knights. I think that’s why team meta is archers and knights. Xbows fit one role, knights fill another, complimentary role. If Xbows, knights, and LS were all equally useful 100% of the time, then you’d see LS picked once on a team in 2/3 of 2v2 games.
Well I don’t think anyone sees this. So naturally then one can wonder if there is an imbalance in the utility of those three units and if so where does that imbalance come from?
Xbows and LS I think on paper compliment each other fine. LS beat skirms. not the best against mangonels but better than archers. can be a meat shield against cavalry. LS can take down buildings.
LS I don’t think are complimented by knights as well. knights have greater mobility than the LS. LS would just slow down the knights. monks or pikes the knights can run away from and attack when conditions are more favorable, but LS would just bog them down.
So admittedly it’s somewhat qualitative but it seems like the LS and xbow are more dis-similar than than the LS and the knight. so by virute of xbows being more dis-similar to LS than knights, through the transitive property we can say that knights are more similar to LS than xbows.
Now that we’ve established some baseline understanding of their similarity then why aren’t Xbow/LS team comps more popular? probably because knights maximize the probability of winning.
if knights maximize the probability of winning compared to LS, then that is an imbalance. Not saying knights can’t EVER maximize the winning probability, but if they USUALLY maximize that probability then that is an imbalance.
Maybe you consider the fact that knights are usually the better overall pick a feature and not a bug. Even I think the game would be more fun if that was true to some extent. knights are more mobile and therefore lend themselves to more exciting fast action gameplay. But I think a more optimal ratio of win probability maximum between knights and LS should be around 30% for LS and I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that.
You make some solid points, but I think they’re all more relevant for team games and closed maps. I don’t think team games (especially on Arena etc.) should be used as a baseline reference for balance changes and unit choice, because the very nature of team games are always going to be more lopsided with mono unit choices than 1v1. I was talking specifically about 1v1 open maps like Arabia, one of the most common games seen online. In those games, MAA in feudal is pretty common and it kills scouts play and it can even be hard to defend with archers if the MAA player has his own archers following up behind.
The 1v1 vs team game point is fair.
and to your point I don’t want the LS to be too similar to the knight. I think the game would be worse if they were too similar. I just want to give them a chance to shine. I like how they are very good at taking down buildings when compared to a knight. they just need to survive that long. I think they’re in a good place in regards to archers, but I think knights are a bit much for them.
Maybe a 50/50 LS/Pike army could work. (though that’d also need the pike upgrade. not a lot but still another cost). enough pikes to ward off knights, enough LS to threaten buildings. Maybe. But one or two mangonels could ruin your day. you could add scouts or you could just add knights. IDK. making a LS centered comp work is just harder than a knight centered comp I think.
Historically they were the most common and employed military force, so AOE2 is totally in the opposite side of realism.
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