Hello there. I want to share some thoughts about unit balance in feudal play and what I consider the main issue with the current meta.
If we make an analysis of the unit compositions in pro players, I’m pretty sure we will find a clear dominance of archers when it comes to feudal play, followed possibly by scauts. Skirms would be in the third spot and the last one, maybe for spears or maa.
Archers can kill or trade efficiently against any other unit in the right numbers, except their counter unit.
Scauts can do almost the same and they have the advantage of the speed to run away or catch other units.
Maa though, can be killed by archers and scauts quite easely. They even can be killed by skirms. They are slow, cost a lot of food ( which is the most expensive resource in early game). They are strong in early feudal, but just because it’s the only unit available in dark age. Supplies don’t solve this problem because it’s quite expensive and will iddle your production too much ( you have to research maa upgrade too).
I find maa playable (but weaker than the meta) with certain civs like goths, slavs, maybe bulgarians? Could make an argument for celts or malians due to the extra speed or +1 defence. Every other civ can’t play maa without being smashed if you confront a decent player. Don’t get me wrong, I think infantry line is more or less balanced after feudal age. I just want maa to be a valid option aswell.
So what is my propossal?
1- Move supplies to castle age and squires to feudal.
2- Reduce food cost and increasse gold cost for maa. Maybe 45 food 30 gold? Supplies can reduce gold cost to 10 and let food cost the same.
I think the current balance between the three groups is pretty good, and archers are meant to be a counter to infantry. True, MAA are hardly used as a ongoing feudal age army, but they have their own role as early feudal unit and as a counter to eagles when playing against a meso civ. MAA do pretty well against scouts by the way, I think a MAA wins in a 1v1 from a scout because it has the same stats except for one more attack. The reason you see them dieing to scouts a lot is that scouts can avoid them until they can take a favorable fight, usually due to having a numbers advantage and upgrades like bloodlines.
Although I don’t fully agree with your analysis, your proposals are pretty well thought through, especially the first one is worth a consideration. The second one is a bit unnecessary imo; if something like this is done, then I would make supplies change the gold cost from 30 to 20 (10 is too low).
Yes, sorry for my broken english. I wanted to say “reduce the gold cost in 10”, from 30 to 20. I think we agree maa don’t need a big buff at all. Just a little push to make them viable. WIth the current meta, you can’t justify expend 60 food 20 gold in a unit with the same strenght and much less speed than a scaut. If you add bloodlines to the mix, then maa are totally smashed in feudal.
I would bring arson to feudal age too by the way. This will bring maa a nice unique personality as feudal siege weapon and a counter unit to walling strategies. I think those minor changes will make them more viable without affecting the meta at all.
M@A is quite strong unit vs unit, but they are a bit too slow to catch villagers and cost a bit too much food for feudal and early castle… I agree that the food cost should be lowered or supplies only cost gold or something to reduce the high food cost. Also consider making them 0.95 speed from 0.9 could make them more viable.
Also worth mentioning is the bad pathing in DE makes all melee units much worse compared to ranged that does not need to walk all the way to their target to do damage.
I think maa speed is ok if you can research squires in feudal. They are slow but they definitely can kill vills. Men at arms with squires can even catch archers too (killing them is another story).
I actually find pathing more realistic and interesting in DE than in Voobly. Units can block chokeholes and act as a shield for other units. This adds another strategic dimmension to the game. Maybe things could be more fair if they lower accuracy for archers a little bit but that’s another subject
This is one of the two major reasons why I don’t like the supplies tech; while it decreases the cost of swordsmen, it doesn’t otherwise increase their utility in Feudal/Castle (the other being that it nerfs the already-power creeped Goths, but I made a whole thread about that), and the advantages that cav and archers have over them are as obvious as ever. Good intentions, poor execution.
I still think supplies should be scrapped, and instead the swordsmen line should be given a series of small stat buffs, mainly to make them slightly more beefy and resilient to arrow fire. The idea of slightly increasing their speed was one of mine as well, and I would furthermore give them +1 pierce armor, +5 hp, and -5 or -10 food cost. They would still never be nearly as fast or tanky as knights, but they’d be able to weather archer fire slightly better. Even historically, a dismounted “man at arms” was basically a horseless knight, so I see no problem making them a little tankier.
As for increasing their gold cost, I don’t see this doing much except making them less appealing. Upping their gold cost to 2/3rds that of the archer line without making them any better against archers (or cav) seems needlessly punitive, even if there’s a tech you can pay for to reduce that back to “normal”.
Hey. I’m not sure that archers dominate the feudal age quite like you describe, they are more of a risk vs reward type unit. For all feudal age they are countered by scouts, but unlike scouts can be upgraded cheaply for a very powerful unit. So if you cant straight up kill your opponent in feudal, archers are more valuable to harass with and keep your advantage to then get a massive power spike in castle age.
M@a are not designed to be part of a counter triangle with scouts and archers, there’s 6 feudal units and m@a counter 3 of those quite effectively. They are also the definitive early feudal unit, and feature in ~50% of pro 1v1 arabia games. A handful of civs can pull off mass m@a, usually when your opponent is unable to gather much gold for archers, but typically they feature in a brief window and thats okay.
Supplies is available in the feudal age just incase you want to go mass m@a, or so you can get it after you click up and do longswords in castle age (also a niche strat). Its fine for upgrades to be available before you typically get them, take yeomen as an example.
Personally I think m@a are actually perfectly well balanced, even slightly too strong.
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Hey. I’m not sure that archers dominate the feudal age quite like you describe, they are more of a risk vs reward type unit. For all feudal age they are countered by scouts, but unlike scouts can be upgraded cheaply for a very powerful unit. So if you cant straight up kill your opponent in feudal, archers are more valuable to harass with and keep your advantage to then get a massive power spike in castle age.
M@a are not designed to be part of a counter triangle with scouts and archers, there’s 6 feudal units and m@a counter 3 of those quite effectively. They are also the definitive early feudal unit, and feature in ~50% of pro 1v1 arabia games. A handful of civs can pull off mass m@a, usually when your opponent is unable to gather much gold for archers, but typically they feature in a brief window and thats okay.
Supplies is available in the feudal age just incase you want to go mass m@a, or so you can get it after you click up and do longswords in castle age (also a niche strat). Its fine for upgrades to be available before you typically get them, take yeomen as an example.
Personally I think m@a are actually perfectly well balanced, even slightly too strong.
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I watched lots of pro games in the last two years and I don’t remember a single one where mass men at arms were the way to go (if you don’t count on some trollish mastapieces). I’m open to change my mind if you link me some good examples in high level tournaments. But If you do that, I think you will notice that players tend to make 3, 4 or 5 men at arms at most. Then, they switch into archers inmediatly. If you take a look at team games in big tournaments, they always go for the scaut-archer composition too because it’s stronger and cost effective. Even goths, which is the most valid civ to make use of infantry, have to rely almost every game in archers and scauts to survive till castle age or imp.
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I still think supplies should be scrapped, and instead the swordsmen line should be given a series of small stat buffs, mainly to make them slightly more beefy and resilient to arrow fire. The idea of slightly increasing their speed was one of mine as well, and I would furthermore give them +1 pierce armor, +5 hp, and -5 or -10 food cost. They would still never be nearly as fast or tanky as knights, but they’d be able to weather archer fire slightly better. Even historically, a dismounted “man at arms” was basically a horseless knight, so I see no problem making them a little tankier.
I think those changes could or could not work, but they are complex and they will affect other parts of the game that are fine now, like maa-eagle balance for example. Changing two techs form catle to feudal and reduce food costs a little bit seems a good and less invasive solution to me. Maybe if that doesn’t work, they could start to think about more dramatic decissions.
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As for increasing their gold cost, I don’t see this doing much except making them less appealing. Upping their gold cost to 2/3rds that of the archer line without making them any better against archers (or cav) seems needlessly punitive, even if there’s a tech you can pay for to reduce that back to “normal”.
Food costs are the most expensive ones in feudal age, because of the small economy and the need to produce vills constantly. If you try to produce mass maa in early feudal, you will notice you lack food much faster than gold. I don’t know if raising gold cost up to 30 is a good idea or not but if you make infantry 45 food 20 gold as their base price, then supplies should be deleted or changed again (which could be ok too).
This is largely true, although just a spearman or two added to a mass of archers goes a long way to even the playing field against scouts, and any kind of chokepoint (a woodline, between houses, etc) makes it a decent trade for the archers as well. So I consider scouts a soft counter to archers, the really hard counter in Feudal being skirms. And there are other benefits to making archers as well, such as sniping villagers behind walls, or getting to castle faster since you don’t spend food on them.
Yep, that resonates with what I’ve seen and my understanding of the pro meta as well. Drushes (militia) are are common enough, and sometimes players will get the m@a upgrade, but it’s unusual to see more than a handful of them. And from that point, the swordsmen line often becomes irrelevant for the rest of the game, or at least until early Imp, the notable exception being to counter eagles. And yes, even for Goths, most pro games I’ve seen that involve them see heavy use of archers/cav, the main exception being Arena or Regicide Fortress games where the goth player has an easy fast castle and goes for huskarls against an archer civ. And nowhere is the lack of infantry more conspicuous than in team games, in which players either go archers or scouts in Feudal, almost never infantry.
Part of what makes civs like Franks and Mayans so powerful is that they can be successful with their same favored army compositions from Feudal through Imp (obviously adding in things like siege that become available, but that’s more of a supplement than a tech switch). Even civs with strong infantry bonuses have trouble doing this, and that’s part of what’s being addressed here.
Perhaps. Seems like an easy fix, since it only involves one unit. At most, swordsman could lose 1 of the bonus attack they have against eagles to compensate for their strength gained. Other than that, these changes would have negligible effects beyond making swordsmen less awful against archers. The thing is, the devs knew that making infantry more viable would require some fairly “invasive” solutions, and Supplies is what they came up with. The upside is that in makes infantry more viable for most civs, but it’s downside (which has yet to be dealt with) is that in dumps all of the problems with that solution on one civ, Goths, who need a buff that may change them drastically.
It just makes more sense to me to globally improve the stats of the swordsmen line slightly so that it is more useful without undermining any civ’s major bonus, but obviously there are pros and cons to either way of doing it.
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I watched lots of pro games in the last two years and I don’t remember a single one where mass men at arms were the way to go (if you don’t count on some trollish mastapieces). I’m open to change my mind if you link me some good examples in high level tournaments.
Just a very recent one:
Edit: The Match starts at 06:34:00, just in case the link is broken.
As you know, NAC3 has started and it’s a nice place to see what pros consider the best strategies in DE. I reviewed the first six arabia games uploaded by Nili to youtube to see what players do in feudal:
Liereyy vs Laaan -> full archers vs 3 maa into full archers and skirms
Yo vs TheMax -> 3 militia into full archers, 3 militia into full archers
Viper vs Hera -> 4 maa into full archers, 4 maa into full archers
Tatoh vs Daut -> 4 maa into full archers, 3 maa into scauts and skirms
Hera VS Villesse -> 3 militia into full archers, scauts and skirms
Yo vs Daut -> 3 militia into full archers, Scauts.
Archers as main army: 9 times.
Scauts as main army: 3 times.
Maa as main army: 0 times.
I didn’t count how many units have been created in feudal but I’m pretty sure it would list as it follows, from max to min:
Archers
Skirms
Scauts
Maa/Pikes.
Archers are the most powerful unit in feudal. I’m surprised to see scauts being used so little. Maa are still the worst option and pro players only make 3 or 4 at most to surprise their rivals in early feudal.
I was referring to the second match of TheMax vs TheViper. (Day4 of NAC, starts at about 06:34:00 in the video above.) This is more a drush with a crazy amount of militia, but they are upgraded to maa later. However, I agree that maa are not the most used unit, but they are in use in almost every game mentioned above. Overall, I disagree with your opinion that maa have to become a better/cheaper unit. They have their niche and they are used very often in small numbers. Stronger/Faster maa would even further decrease the amount of skirms we see on the fields.
I made a review of the first 6 arabia games played in NAC3 in the post above of my first answer to you. As you can see, nobody made more than 4 maa and almost every player went for full archer builds. Yes, a lot of players went for drush or 3/4maa but it’s just because it’s the only unit available in dark age. If archers were available in dark age, I’m sure players won’t make a single infantry unit until imp (except in some special cases to counter eagles or mass pikes). I don’t consider the actual situation a good balance at all.
Some people could say they like the game as it is and I can respect that, but the numbers are there.
