Ugh I should have known this since I have too many ours on aoe but what the heck? A unit that looks like its full armor stronger version of a knight is weak to archers? How unintuitive :*( I switched from archers to harbs after seeing cataphracts and he melted an army of them 
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yes, this is how it works, catas have low pierce armor and not very high attack. Also quite high cost.
Halbs get some of theier bonus negated, catas do bonus trample damage against them.
It’s really mean, if you don’t know you’ll be surprised by it. But As counterintuitive are genoese crossbowmen, huskarls, and condottieri. Not to mention the mangudai, but this is a strong unit anyways.
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Halbs do okay against a small number of Catas, but when they get massed the trample damage + the bonus versus infantry makes it really inefficient as the number of catas increase.
Indeed, archers are better, but you’ll still want to have a lot of archers and something between them and the cataphract, or else that trample damage combined with the tendency of archers to bunch up and stick together can make a large Cataphract army trade better than it probably should. The real counter to the Cataphract is the cost of upgrading them, though, so don’t let the Byzantines expand and gather all the gold they need to afford them and you don’t have to worry about what unit counters it.
Catapracts negating bonus damage since Age of Conquerors. Not Age of Kings. So since 2000 instead of 1999.
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This may be a good entry into a more general discussion. I find that for me it often pays to not switch a unit out completely but to add to your current composition, especially if that means you now have both a melee and a ranged option and/or both a gold and a trash option. I make knights and the opponent makes pikes? I can add something like crossbows, skirmishers or cavalry archers, without fully stopping knight production. Knights can still hit and run on villagers, they can still break down palisade walls and they can still serve as meat in front of the ranged units.
In your case that might have worked as well. You keep massing the arbalestiers but add halberdiers in front. The halberdiers will still melt to the cataphracts, but they’ll do decent damage in return and for every halberdier that dies there’s an archer behind him that doesn’t. Because non-massed archers without any meat are pretty weak to most melee units.
It also strikes a good balance between having a plan for your game and adapting on the fly: you pick one unit you want to go for, and decide on the second one based on what the other guy does. That way you can at least somewhat prepare your economy and such for what you’ll be making, and you still won’t be caught out with completely the wrong composition.
But that’s all a bit of a tangent. Yes, cataphracts are confusing. And that’s one of those areas in which I agree that getting more and more civilizations can sometimes hurt the game a little, because the more weird unique units there are the more we have to remember about them.
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They actually don’t negate bonus damage from samurais however. They trade kinda badly with them, even though they are infantry. Never made any sense to me.
because the bonus they get is against anti cavalry bonus damage and samurai specifically target the UU armor class.
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Yup, I know. Still, I think catas should negate too for the price they cost
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Samurai are kinda meh as a unit too let them have their time to shine xD. Especially since they still lose convincingly against catas, Japanese players will prob still favour arbs/HCA in this case.
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Samurai certanily could use a buff, but they should’t really perform well against an extremely expensive anti-infantry unit. That just doesn’t make any sense from a game design perspective.
- Cataphracts have 2x the hitpoints
- Trample damage
- Mobility
How can Samurai win?
Cataphracts can kill Arbalests too, as long as the Byzantine player uses his brain and doesn’t patrol them into 60 Arbs in a big hill.
You should try it yourself, if you don’t believe me.
they don’t win 1v1 they win 2v1 better then any other unit in the game against them, except maybe archers. they do 23 damage an attack fully upgraded, after armor, only cost 30 gold, train in 9 seconds, and attack insanely fast.
No, Cataphracts rekt every Infantry in the game. Period.
That’s very nice of you to not even bother verifying that statement.
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I’m only surprised the mameluke did so well against them, here i would expect it the other way around.
With some micro involved, catas lose to almost every archery, except slingers and skirms of course.
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That’s assuming resources to have equal value. By the time you have FU catas (if ever in 1vs1), gold is much, much more valuable. It’s not realistic.
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That makes sense. It was an arena game I had chinese i thought my boom would be more dangerous I guess i was wrong
I just wonder why somebody would go full catas against archers… it just makes no sense. It’s only useful against infantry civs like goths, malians or vikings.
And you are right, castle catas are even worse then fu ones in comparison - and a japanese player might actually already have added some samurai just as an extra production for his strong infantry. So it might not be a good idea to go into catas against a japanese player, even wehn fu catas can beat samurai later on.
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