On this I agree. Even Imperial Camels are not a good solution vs mass Cavalry Archers. Much more profitable to use skirms and protect them with the camels.
Thats okay, they’re Paladin with civ bonus and UU cavalry, beating civs with not FU Heavy Camel is fine.
This one is controversial and i don’t understand why the gold cost is low either but Leiciai are glass cannons against ranged units so it’s still not totally broken.
No, I’ve seen this matchup in real games, scenario editor and in the simulator. Even with perfect hit and run, the best Magyar CA(50) die to generic (Tatar) Heavy Camel (50) convincingly even with perfect micro. No chance against Imperial Camel in a head on. I believe only Mangudai beat Heavy Camel because of the fire rate and frame delay and lose 7/10 times against Imperial Camel.
I didn’t mean that camels are completely useless against cavalry archers. I was saying that it’s more cost-effective to make skirms and protect them with your camels.
Especially since when camels chase cavalry archers, there’s always a moment where the chase ends in a corner between buildings or trees, or straight into a halberdier trap.
You have to imagine situations the way they really play out in the game.
They have only one job, and if they can’t even do that in some cases, what’s the use of them? They’re also worse against elephants than Halbs. They don’t even counter cav archers once the cav archers reach critical mass.
True but that goes for every counter matchup, arb+ like 5 hussars can beat outnumbering Eskirms, hills and castles working in the favor, thats just RTS. Forcing the fight to your advantage is on the player, the unit is doing its job.
They can actually chase down the knights, kill and still have enough HP to raid the now defenseless base.
They are never advertised as Elephant counters and it makes sense, Elephants are much larger than camels and it doesnt make any sense for them to beat melee vs melee
Yes they do, camels are faster than CA and CA’s significant frame delay means they always end up taking hits and getting whittled to eventual loss.
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It just means that camels are a counter for cav archers but not a hard counter.
By that logic, nothing has a hard counter in this game
Saracen, Gurjara, or Hindustani camels do counter heavy cavalry well.
It’s the generic, sub-par camels that don’t always do well against top-tier heavy cavalry, despite countering cavalry being their only job.
Hard to judge though because they are also faster and deal bonus damage.
Generic camels are situational. I remember even making mongol camels in the past and winning because of it. They aren’t supposed to be well rounded like knights, they are supposed to do one thing, kill cavalry. This is why the synch so well with Arbs or Skirms. Skirms kill pike and arbs, and camels kill cavalry.
There are :
Archers /cav archers hard counter = Skirms
Cavalry hard counter = Camels and hallebardiers
Infantry hard counter = HC
These are hard counter.
I would actually say generic camels are a soft counter for cavalry. However, that’s intentional. They are supposed to counter from their numbers, not their stats.
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Archers/CA can just add knights against skirms. CA can run away from skirms. Cavalry can add crossbows or mix halbs against halb/camel. Infantry can be paired with siege or skirms. This making them all situational counters
No, skirms are a hard counter for archers. Archer + cavalry is situational.
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Just 2 knights completely wipe out 15 skirms without a sweat
I dont understand what you are talking about 
The dialogue becomes complicated. You say there are no hard counters in the game. I’ve listed the hard counters for you. Skirms are the hard counter to archers, not to knights…
You mean with the same number, knights win camels ?
To my understanding this is not what hard counter means though it is somewhat of a vague term. I would say to be a hard counter you need to be able to win “hard” in an equal cost fight. Camels don’t do this vs knights. They could win maybe cost effectively in an equal fight, but they don’t win so hard that they have considerable extra units to spare. Pikemen, Huskarl, Handcannons, Crossbow, all have things they hard counter. However, the camel sacrifices being a hard counter via bonus damage so that it can run down fleeing cavalry. In short you won’t get amazing fights, but more or less good fights from generic camels usually.
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For me hard counters are for example:
- Knights, scorpions, onagers against skirms
- xbows, cav archers, HC against pikes
For me pikes/camels are soft counters against knights, and skirms are soft counters against xbows/cavarchers.
And this makes sense within the aoe2 unit design, where gold units are better overall, and units are mainly balanced around 1v1 no trade. “Counter units” (especially skirm and pikes) are weak and cheap units that soft counters a specific group of strong units, but get hard countered by the other strong and expensive units.
I don’t see it a necessarily being a problem.
Generic FU heavy camels beat most heavy cavalries such as any paladins/savars/Eleitis/EBoyars, etc in every way: speed, pop efficiency, cost efficiency, gold cost, traning time, upgrade cost. The only exceptions are the ECataphract and maybe the EMonaspa in big numbers.They do their job in imperial age.
In castle age, this is not only about camels doing their job or not, but also the civs designed power spike. There is the 60f30g pole knight is cost efficient against generic camels, but this is fine if Poles have a weak early game, a weak late game, or need a big investment to afford the UT. Same for Sicilians.
Also, full camels is a good counter to the common knights + skirms. So by just having camels, a civ heavily discourages a common strategy and forces the knight civ to go either double gold comp or doing something it is not so good at and scales poorly.
If you play Turks camels+xbows against Franks knights+xbows, you can avoid engagement and go imperial where Franks xbows wont be that frightening.
Camels are cheaper than knights, and beat knights in equal numbers. Both camels and knights have base 100 hp, but camels deal 15-2==13 damage/hit while knights deal 10. So knights need 10 hits to kill while camels need 8 (though knights do attack slightly faster). Result is that in a 10v10, camels will beat knights with ~4-5 survivors. This does assume equal upgrades, as unequal upgrades should be able to flip this fight. And it also should be noted that adding/removing 1 unit flips the matchup (though not consistently)
Pikemen, meanwhile, consistently lose to knights in a 10v10. Pikes are very dependent on cost efficiency when working as a counter.
If you define hard counter as winning both pop- and cost-efficiently, then camels are a hard counter to knights, but pikemen aren’t. Personally, I think knights are close enough to flipping the matchup that I don’t think camels are actually a hard-counter to knights, but camels can easily shut down knight gameplay (something pikes struggle to do due to the knights’ mobility).
I’ll also note that heavy camels have a similar performance against paladins (with heavy camels consistently winning the 10v10, assuming both are generic, but adding/removing 1 unit turns the matchup into an unbalanced coin-toss)
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Almost all camel civs have sub-par spear lines anyway, so they’re already forced into Camels or other options.
I do agree that Camels are a good answer to Knight + Skirmisher. Other than that, are we supposed to make both Halbs and Camels, or just pick one if your civ has both, like Persians or Byzantines?
I think picking one is generally going to be the better option. Investing into two different unit lines simultaneously is generally a mistake, and will often lose to an opponent who invests wholly into a single unit line. Tech switching is a process that takes time, so you usually only want to do one tech switch at a time. And some tech switches are easier than others (monks and castle age siege are particularly easy ones, which is why they’re used to buy time if you’re castle dropped on Arena when you’re 3TC booming)