Ah, my bad! Haha. Yeah I wouldn’t say playing archers is an instant win, the goal is for a strategy to be viable, but also counter-able so that the game needs to remain dynamic. Currently both knight and archer plays are viable but have their counter plays, at least from what I see on the ladder.
What? This is literally the exact opposite. You can send knights into your opponents eco and leave them alone for quite some time, they will effectively clear up any villagers and if they run into the tc the forced idle time is usually still worth the damage they are taking. If there are pike you can just run away, low numbers of pike wont kill your knights.
If you dont micro archers, they wont even kill anything before you are having ballistics. And losing a couple of knights is okay, losing your archers is not. Also one mangonelshot can kill your whole army if you dont pay attention.
Im sorry, but saying archers need LESS micro than knights is ridiculous.
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I didn’t said micro. But yes, knight micro is way more demanding than the archer micro if it comes to a standoff. Archers are comparably easy to micro (except vs mangonels, which is also partially luck).
I know it looks like archers would become better and better with higher elo, but there is a threshold where players learn to also micro against range and make more use of mobility and get more value from knights again.
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No, they aren’t.
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A thread complaining about archers being properly countered by those units by design…
Nice!! what’s next? Knights take to much damage from Pikes and Camels???..
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my point is that they are being easily overcountered.
Your point is wrong because half the units you listed don’t counter archers and the other half can be addressed adding a siege workshop 11
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except your point is false.
half the units on that list are at best a situational counter. and i wouldn’t even call that a COUNTER.
archers vs knights comes down to pure micro and numbers.
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Look at the stats, archers barely do any damage against cavs. It hurts to say but kt and scs are a counter to archers, unfortunatelly, it shouldn’t be like that.
Watch any pro game please.
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Why not? Archers > Infantry > Cavalry > Archers.
Also a mass of knights vs a mass of archers depending on choke points can easily go the archer way.
And they are way cheaper and do not compete with villager production.
Archers is way more meta nowadays than knights if you know what you are doing (i.e. dont get caught in the middle of the map without a meatshield or chokepoint)
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So, since many people dont agree, lets talk about facts and statistics:
Win rates: elo 1250~1650
All of them cavalry civs. No exception, all of them full cavalry civs.
Now 1650+
1 archer; 3 cavalry. I would put chinese with some sort of hibrid because they have a awesome stable as well.
The statics are there. We cant argue with them, cavalry is performing better than archers in most relevant elos.
I totally agree with that. The thing is, should it be that hard? The game could definitely have a little bit of balance there.
At the lower half of this elo range, people don’t necessarily have the micro to make use of archers in a way that’s effective. They often don’t have the ability to multitask, and lose their archers/crossbows to things that a faster player would react to. The lower elo you go to, the worse archers will feel, because of lack in skill.
At lower elos, knights are just overall more effective, because they’ll take OK fights in most cases, even if the player isn’t paying too much attention to them.
Let’s also not forget that arabia is a map that favors cav over archers. There are several maps where archers completely dominate.
but archers are cheaper and easier to mass up and available earlier, and have the range advantage and can micro and stack better. they also don’t bite into your food economy.
go watch some bloody pro games and tell me knights win straight up against archers.
again, depends on numbers and micro
sure lets talk facts and statistics.
most banned civs? Aztecs - who use archers, Chinese, who use Archers, Mayans and Vikings - both who use Archers.
also i find it funny how you call Berbers and Huns and Teutons here cav civs when Huns also frequently use Cav archers, Berbers love to rely upon their UU which is a cav archer, and Huns love Halb Siege Pushes.
and yet here you say “well chinese are a hybrid”. and i wouldn’t call a stable that caps at Light Cavalry and Cavalier and both being generic as “AWESOME”.
furthermore your stats include the 1250-1650 elo range, which literally includes people who don’t micro. and lastly - the Indians don’t even get the KNIGHT which means your qq about them is IRRELEVANT.
I never said that. I said they are overcountered.
They are banned because of the jumpstart eco bonus and they versatile military tech tree.
Also, HC is a thing for the top 20 of the players. I’m talking here about the mass of players. The game should be balanced for them too, you know?
they aren’t over countered. half your friggen list is situational at best and comes down to numbers.
aztecs mayans and vikings have versatile tech trees?
the majority of players don’t even bother to micro, so OF COURSE knights are going to win those battles.
literally the top 10% of players is 1600+. the mass majority of players fall under 1k. at that level players are floating resources, not microing, and not even using solid strategies - i’ve seen teuton cavalry archers work at sub 1k elo.
tell me this - if you balance archers around not being microed, what happens when you put them in the hands of someone who can micro?
I disagree. Just looks at the stats, archers barely do damage against cav that have mobility, hight hitpoints and high pierce armor, if that isnt a counter I dunno what it is then…
Dont they? They are still very versatile in many aspects. Mayans are the most one dimensional civ there, tho they can still have several different kind pushes.
They are 50k players active 1v1 players, top 16++ are barely 2% of it.
I’m not a game dev. I’m a player bringing an issue that I found very frustrating to players that likes to play archers. Do I have the answers? I could come up with a idea or two about that no doubt of that but I’ll leave that for the game devs.
okay food for thought for you.
to sustain 2 archery range production of crossbows you need a total of 12 villagers. 4 on wood, and 8 on gold.
to sustain 2 stable production of knights you need a total of 12 farmers and 12 gold miners. that doesn’t include the lumberjacks needed to sustain those farms either.
that means for the same amount of production (2 knights vs 2 crossbows) i need over twice as many workers. which means i can pump out twice as many archers as i can knights with the same villagers.
if only there was a range and micro advantage archers could take advantage of.
aztecs have solid infantry, and their archers are okay but fall off in the late game, they got solid monks but those disappear after castle age and their siege is solid. but they have no cavalry to speak of.
Mayans have eagles, arbs, their UU, and that’s about it. their siege sucks, their monks are par for the course.
Vikings have solid infantry again - but are capped at pikes (like Aztecs), and have solid archers but their cavalry is terrible and their siege is par for the course.
i wouldn’t call that versatile at all.
and the mass majority of players DO NOT PLAY well. so we should balance the game around people who are floating resources, not spending it, and waiting for the late game to do anything? attack moving armies in late game will always favor cavalry.
really? because you’re the first person i’ve seen all year complaining about how weak archers are. heck we had a thread less then a year ago calling archers overpowered.
you are the one who is advocating for this change - tell us how you do it.
keep in mind that an archer costs 70 resources and a knight costs 135 resources.
look around this thread. 17 unique posters. what do you see? how many agree with you? something to consider.
when you’re playing archers - and you’re in castle age - how are your workers distributed? optimally? are you floating resources? are you maintaining constant production without having too many units in queue? are you keeping your resources low?