I mean, being fair here, and also off topic, cutting down a tree tends to be a little more difficult then taking out drywall or burning a building.
I haven’t at all found Arambai OP. What they do though, is slaughter knights. Knights being beaten, with knights being the easiest and most common Boom goal, will have an oversized effect on the player base. Crossbows will wreck Arambai though, and despite the mangonel line dying quickly to Arambai they still will be extremely lethal them vice versa.
My personal take on arambai is that they are fine except their excessive damage against buildings. Their effectiveness falls off quite a bit in imperial too. Perhaps it would be better to slightly nerf castle age arambai and buff a bit the elite version instead, though I am not totally sure that’s the correct idea.
burmese for sure are absolutely ridiculous. they basically are a conq and a siege ram within the same unit. but i only want a reduction to the damage vs buildings (at least for not elite arambai).
while i agree that burmese 2 castle play is pretty much an instant win if other team does not have that on arena team games (because even if burmese do not get the damage in it means that all enemy players have invested res into taking precautions and therefore the burmese teammates will just kill with the better boom), there are ways to defend arambai (especially on fortress).
in general i like the idea of arambai. a weak armored unit, that has high damage output but has low accuracy sounds like a fun unit. if only they have like -10 damage vs buildings it is a perfectly balanced unit.
Kipchaks seem to be a good counter, a Burmese player broke into my base using the 30 Arambi kill stone wall in 2 seconds strat, but my ally came in and saved me with massed Kipchaks while I destroyed his castles.
Anything ranged seems to do well, Briton archers, longbows, skirms on wide spacing seems to do well.
17 base damage and you compare it to camel or CA? ridiculous. it would just be a cheaper version of conqs. and that still is a really strong unit.
if the burmese player plays it right kipchak do not stand a chance. just compare damage and hp. in theory mangudai, CA and camel archer should do really well, but they all need a lot of upgrades before they really can compete. so the only real option is skirm + siege but that does not have enough mobility. to be able to defend arambai as a team then, every player needs to invest into that defense whereas the whole enemy team - except burmese - get free boom.
so while you might be able to defend the arambai, the follow up should always kill you if played correctly.
I like to compare Arambai to a mangonel on horseback. So, make Arambai attacks do friendly fire damage as well. They’ll still be powerful, but dangerous to one’s own units, so you can’t just park trash in front of them etc.
They’re also susceptible to massed scorps and skirms
I just throw this random bit here for entertainment.
How about reducing Arambai accuracy to 0% even after ballistics? This would effectively cut the damage in half, making it significantly weaker than a lot of units.
I still remember SotL Burmese overview he said don’t think about arambai fighting defensive buildings, and here we are.
Then cut their dmg in half? Idk if practically making arambai useless would change anything. Maybe Burmese players should never even build any ranged units that are not siege, except maybe feudal archers.
So many forum posts suggest arambai is still too op, which is kinda sad to look at given arambai practically non-existent accuracy.
Everybody says the opposite but Arambai has decent pierce armor for a ranged unit ( 2 for the elite ) and their hp is quite high. I agree that crosbows counter them but only if you outnumber them
So drastically lower their attack (2 for castle age arambai and 4 for elite arambai), make them having no base armor whatsoever even for elite arambai. On top of that, reduce its accuracy to 0%.
These nerfs will turn arambai into a weaker version of Genitor. I wonder if this drastic measure will make those people happy.