They seem very weak for how much you need to invest in them to have all their benefits. Their hit animation seems very sluggish, even after all upgrades, when compared to crossbows.
If comparing regular xbows to their souped up unique unit counterpart e.g. chu ko no, even though chu ko no are extremely good and better than arbalesters, regular arbalesters are still very very good.
Meanwhile, comparing heavy calavry archers to their unique unit counterpart e.g. mangudai, whilst mangudai are obviously amazing as everyone knows, heavy cav archers seem like the handicapped/geriatric version of mangudai.
Heavy cavalry archers are one of the strongest ranged unit in post imp when you have access to the key upgrades. There is a small dozen of civs who can and will make great use of HCA in post imp.
Unlike arbalests, who fall quite badly in effectiveness as the late game progresses, HCA act as a very pop efficient, tanky and mobile army.
Yes, they are quite slow to get going, require a lot of upgrades and are generally not very usable in castle age/early imp. But these are the trade offs for being such a strong post imp unit.
It feels like that because mangudai doesn’t have the hit delay. They fire almost instantly. And I agree with you. Should be the same for the heavy cav archer.
Seems like Frame Delay of animation of castle cav archer shooting was increased which resulted in them having higher effective Frame Delay than it was back on Voobly.
Add on top of it the fact that units cancel their shooting actions and then don’t shoot for a considerate amount of time once you interrupt their shooting animation (aka. micro).
All of this makes cav archers the most frustrating castle not unique unit to micro on DE.
Most probably, castle age cav archer is the unit that has suffered the most after knights in transition to DE.
The answer to all of that is just fixing their bugging out when microing and maybe lowering their Frame Delay.
You could say that champion = bad berserk or that cavalier = bootleg boyar. It’s not because one civ has a straight upgrade UU that the unit itself is bad.
Mangudai have a frame delay too, even if it’s smaller than the normal CA.
I don’t feel that way when I use them, plus according to this Age of Empires II Tech Tree they actually have a smaller frame delay than HCA.
Cav Archers have always been a unit that was very dangerous in high level play and underpowered for the average player.
The thing is that you need to invest a lot
of micro time to make them worthwhile in castle age.
However, lowering their frame delay might be a good idea as it makes them easier to micro for the average player.
Making them cheaper or more powerful is probably a bad idea. I do not want to go back to the time when almost every high level game was an Arabia Hun war ( like it was before HD came out…).
agreed, but i think their accuracy also needs to be increased, at 50% they are almost useless without thumb ring, so not only do early CA suffer for CA civs(eg huns), but they are almost useless for non CA civs (burmese) as opposed to xbows with a whopping 85% accuracy
something else people havent mentioned: foot archers can compress like gas into a single tile, but how often do we see this amazing melee saving “tactic” work with CA? afaik cavalry bump so cant do this… it also means their micro in larger groups, coupled with high frame delay is considerably harder vs foot archers
Aside frame delay, which seems to be the general consensus, I would also really be in favor of buffing the base accuracy of CAs. It doesn’t really affect the late game (since thumb ring is already researched), but it does make base CA a little more viable. Thumb ring is quite expensive and it’s not like CAs are cheap either.
CA in Castle Age is pretty weak atm. And one of the problems is that it requires too many upgrades to at least be called “decent” (bloodlines, thumb ring and blacksmith).
I think CA could see a buff to Accuracy and a small buff to the Frame Delay too. Right now I think the stats difference between Mangudai and normal CA is too huge. CA = 50% accuracy, 10 Frame Delay Mangudai = 95% accuracy, 5 Frame Delay
Don’t get me wrong though… Mangudai should still be stronger, but not by that much!
Not sure if that reply was to me, but yeah I didn’t read most people were saying the same thing I did.
I just rushed to post my idea because I love CA civs lol.