I’m mostly talking about the generic Castle Age camels, which I think are a questionable cavalry counter.
Even fully upgraded ones barely defeat knights despite being just slightly cheaper. A knight + xbow combo defeats camel + xbow (or camel + skirm), because xbows eliminate camels before camels eliminate knights.
Heavy Camel is a better counter, at least in early Imperial. After the Paladin upgrade, the dynamic flips again, and generic Heavy Camels turn into just a very soft counter to Paladins.
I think they are worth training, they win 1v1 while costing 15% less and moving faster (so they are hard to run away from). So a head on fight with even resources would be 7 camels for 6 knights. According to aoe combatsim, camels win convincingly with 5 camels left (Lanchester’s law).
When in combo with xbows, it may get harder to win, because the camels are a more class canon frontline. We should probably throw the camels toward the knights and micro the xbows against xbows.
But even though the camels are worth on paper, they are not necessarily the best unit to go for against knights. Turks and Malians might rather want to go monks instead.
Moving faster than knights mean they can force an engagement, while the knight can always choose to run away from pikes.
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I mostly go with Knight + Xbow + Monks in early Castle Age, then transition to Cav Archers and Hussars. I only use a few camels to protect monks from light cav.
Camels absolutely destroy Knights in Castle Age.
Against Knights and CA generic Camels are usually a very good choice.
The issue is against other Camel civs with bonusses to their Camels. As same type counter this is usually a very bad matchup but as in most cases this also only occurs on open maps that favor camel play you have a big disadvantage.
Similar to Skirms this is one of the biggest design Issues of the game currently, making civs like Tatars in odd spots where they can’t even excel in “perfectly fitting” maps for their design because they just lose to superior camels of civs like hindustanis, Gurjaras or Saracens.
The difference between generic FU and units with bonuses on top has grown a bit too large in my opinion. Compare FU cavalier with something like savar.
If brits was designed today, they would have thumb rings.
Just compare hindustani hc vs. Generic.
Back to the camel topic.
I believe generic camels are decently balanced towards generic Knights.
As soon as you trough in the newer bonus boosted knights the balance goes out of wrack.
How do teutons knights face against generic camels?
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Yeah, no idea what they’re waiting for to nerf Hindustani Hand Cannoneers. Giving three stacked bonuses to a fully upgraded unit is already a recipe for disaster and Hindustani Hand Cannoneers get four!
+1 melee armor, +1 pierce armor, +2 range, plus a stealthy accuracy buff. Shatagni is also way too cheap for what it provides. You’d never see such absurd stacked bonuses given to any fully upgraded unit in the original game.
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Fully agree, the armor bonus should be removed from hindustani, that civ could use a nerf, doesn’t need any compensation
Because the civ is only doing slightly above average in win-rate.
There are almost 15 other civs more problematic than them.
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I believe the reason is that Hindustani lacks unit dealing damage. Hindustani have no knight or arbalest. Old Indians have FU CA but Hindustani lost Parthian Tactics. So devs gave them another 1 more range to HC.
Hindustanis have been the best Performing civ in some patches at least at high level.
Currently they are “a bit lower”. But they are still comfortably in the top 10.
Most of the time they were 2-4 th behind absurdly strong civs like Romans.
Don’t let yourself be deceived by the overall winrate, a winrate of 52 % across all levels and maps is s-tier. Only a handfull of civs get this and Hindustanis is one of them. Hindustanis isn’t a “slightly above average civ”. It’s currently maybe A±Tier, cause there are some broken civs out there. But they were S-Tier for the most part.
This attempt of relativating narrative tries to construct an alternative reality by not referring to the reality of the balance of the game and setting a irrelevant, arbitrary and - ironically, given the submittet statistical implication - inaccurate impression. When you go this statistical route you have to at least state the number you refer to instead of a language relativation.
Hindustanis are one of the best civs, and their top camels are one of the biggest factors for that.
Don’t buy in the narratives of these deceivers that try to relativate that.
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Portuguese have been below 50% winrate on statistics for a long time, but their organ guns got nerfed recently anyway.
For the same reason hindustani hc can and shoikd be nerfed, even if the civs was below 50% winrate.
The unit is busted
I think regular camels are in a good spot. In tournaments, I often see persian or chinese camels. Even against paladin, heavy camels have a very good matchup. I remember stopping a fully boomed frank player with tatars camels. Paladins can howerpower them if they have superior numbers (this is also true against halbs), but camels trade very well in the long run.
I agree, I played a lot with Hindustanis and with their economy, you can always afford this tech if you want to make HC. It’s not like yeomen or recurved bow or even paladin. For the price of arbalester, you get a unique unit at your archery ranges.
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I mean, in a Knight + Xbow vs Generic Camel + Xbow battle, wouldn’t the first composition actually win? Because those camels would likely die to the crossbows before they kill the knights. Generic camels are only slightly cheaper than knights, but they’re much worse against arrows.
And when it comes to cavalry archers, camels stop countering them once the cav archers hit a critical mass.
Their eco as well. And buffing generic camels= further buff of Camel civs. But most camel civs are fine. I will have the biggest concern on Byzantine if camels get a buff.
I would also like to see a tweak to camels. In fact there was a thread about tweaking it for years.
Maybe we could reactivate that or try to make a new one that is better structured to work out what are the issues with the current camel implementation.
I for my part would like to see tweaks to camels that allow strategical counterplay by the Knight civs. If EG camels would be more Gold intensive than the Knight line (which could be tewaked to need more food instead). Then the Knight civs could try to play the longer Gold game.
Or camels could be more specialised anti-cav or lose some of their speed in exchange for other changes like being cheaper or getting 1 PA. Stuff like this which change the way how games currently bottleneck in camel play on open map types.
Knight+pikes can be good vs camels. It is even faster and cheaper than knight+xbow.
Their base atk is lower than hussar.
Camels is hard to change as it is already effective against knight. If it is good vs xbow, camel will be bane in team games.
Did you somehow miss the part that this is a tweak?
Or do you intentionally neglect that i proposed sets of changes that btw EXACTLY compensate for the unit matchups that shouldn’t be changed too much, like lower speed => pierce armor in compensation so against ranged units the matchups don’t change much?
I think one of the selling point of camels over pikes is that camels can chase off knight. Not sure whether 1PA us worthwhile for that.
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