You oversee that archers are also produced slightly faster than knights. And the initial bonus of having to place way less farms.
It’s not unlikely to have a matchup 25 knights vs 50 crossbows + 10 spears, which of course the crossbows usually would win with ease.
And that’s for a unit which gets a lot of it’s power by damaging the eco…
I totally understand why some people say archers are overpowered. And it maybe would if there wasn’t the mangonel.
Not convinced winrates are significant but please if you take them as an argument do at least correctly.
You’re not wrong here but still a little more complex. Huns most important core unit is the cav archer. Is that cavalry for you? Not saying it’s the same as an xbow but with respect to micro (which seems to be your point) imo it comes closer to an archer unit. Indians don’t have knights but you might counter archers with like light cav so okay. Teutons are not a full cavalry civ. You certainly have great cav but on it’s best maps they usually use infantry and siege.
The statistics are there but also you need to read them apropriately. Chinese is a hybrid so you don’t count them11 They have good cav but they still focus on archers. Btw since we talking 1650 here. At this level people play a lot of archers and/or siege+pike vs Indians which is why Indians oftentimes need to respond with cav archers. In the end it’s 50/50 archers/cav I’d say.
You can’t calculate 1v1 in units. The archer has will usually have twice the numbers.
If you made a list of the least versatile (which obviously doesn’t mean bad), Mayans and Vikings probably both are in the top3.
you said archers need less anttention and APM, what else but micro is that supposed to be then?
Archer micro needs not much apm.
If closed maps were the most played (i.e. not arabia) then archers would probably overpeform cavarly. Feels like a lot of people only see things in perspective of arabia
Small correction, top 5% of players goes around 1500 at this point. There’s not a lot of players once you get above that ranking. It starts scaling quickly.
I’d like to add to this discussion that lower level players are very VERY much prone to over-micro. I’ve seen it consistently in my climb from 1100 to 1500 myself. If anything, there’s a little less micro now because people are focused on macro which is far more important. Once you get to the really high levels you see active micro with really good macro as well.
Really, please provide me with a realistic situation where you need more APM to micro knights than archers? I really fail to see that. Archers need MUCH more apm than knights and can be lost much quicker resulting in you losing the game if not paid attention to.
Also looking at pro players playing the different units:
Slam vs Jordan using cav:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/89446841/analysis/
around 43 eAPM
Slam using archers:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/89448809/analysis/
About 52 eAPM
Hera using knighs:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/89496566/analysis/
About 72 eAPM
Hera using archers:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/89480943/analysis/
Around 85 eAPM
MBL with knights:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/84462079/analysis/
around 48 eAPM
MBL with archers:
https://www.aoe2insights.com/match/84444631/analysis/
around 58 eAPM
Matches were randomly picked to be at least within 10 minutes of equal game length, as game length is a huge factor in affecting eAPM, with every of these three pro players the difference between going archers or knights resulted in about 10 difference in affective APM averaged over the match duration.
What is eAPm?
And how low are these values?
Pros have like 400-600 apm or so…
It’s very complicated, but it takes way more apm to use knights effectively than archers for various reasons. One of them is that you way more often split your forces with mobile units than with immobile, so you have more to manage at once.
Whilst you can have great success with one big archer ball, it’s way harder to achieve the same with knights as you throw away a big part of their utility.
Do you understand what I mean?
I understand what you mean, but I do still not think that this comes down to more APM in total or makes them more difficult to play than having to literally micro manage every single attack of your archers.
eAPM means effective APM. As in, every in game action. This does not take into account hotkeys or similar, but just counts how many ingame actions a player makes.
As in selecting a villager, pressing the build hotkey, pressing the house hotkey and placing the foundation down may be 4 APM but only 1 eAPM.
So than it shows actually exactly what i’m talking about.
The more multitasking you have to do the lower will be your eAPM. And if you split your forces more often what you do if you go for more mobile options, you have more mutlitasking to do and your eAPM goes down while your APM stays (almost) the same.
Archers clearly need bigger APM.
Yeah not sure I buy the knights take more APM then archers argument. But regardless, knights dont hard counter archers. Situationally they do, but situationally archers counter knights, so they’re balanced.
Firstly, the win rate alone doesn’t represent the power of a civ. You need to see the play rate too. Like for example, Indians have a good win rate but only 1.98% play rate(around 15th from the bottom), which means they aren’t preferred as often as other civs. And moreover Britons, Vikings have just 1% lower win rates than the civs that you’ve posted here for 1650+. And even at 1250-1650, three of the top-5 most played civs are non-cav (Mayans, Britons, Mongols)
Secondly, these stats will be biased towards cav civs because 70+% of the games are Arabia which is an open land map and cav civs do well there. If you check Arena you’ll see a different set of winning civs. Some civs like Malay are really good for hybrid and closed maps but have one of the lowest winning rates in ranked games. That doesn’t mean they need a severe buff.