Don’t get me started on samurai grens.
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State militia spam all the way… making the ACW look like a kindergarten brawl.
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Should never have been a thing.
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My reply on behalf of all replies, but yours especially:
If heavy cav is the only viable counter against grenadiers (or otto grenadiers), why does heavy cav not get a bonus of 1.5 or 2 against grenadiers?
Because even if my opponent reacts fast enough, he usually loses much of his infrastructure, due to my grens having a lot of hp. sure he can kill them with his heavy cav if manages to make enough, but the heavy cav does by no means hardcounter my grens.
So if it is true what you and others have suggested: that grens are NOT supposed to counter every unit (due to their high cost and investment in cards etc), why not 1.5x or 2x multiplier for all heavy cav against grenadiers? It would encourage me to use azaps or dargoon-equivalents.
Because that’s not how multis work. You’d have to give grens some new unnecessary tags that would make the game more confusing. It’s good enough that the gren has negative multis.
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That may be true, but there’s the “grenade trooper” tag, seems easy enough (but I never modded, so no idea).
Because as it stands I can take the annoyance of loosing some or all grens, because it usually means my opponent loses his base, so 2 or more waves later he’s dead, just takes more time.
IDK why I should use different units if grens do the job by themselves. Why do people complain on this here forum that I only use grens when they are obviously meant to be used like that by the devs, as other posters here have noted, too.
EDIT: TO reiterate what I mean: yeah grens don’t kill heavy cav fast, but neither does heavy cav kill grens fast. so the negative multipliers for the grens do next to nothing (which is fine by me, though)
Your error is assuming what the devs do is intentional.
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I never use Grens against anything but buildings.
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You are missing out, they do great against everything (if you mass them and upgrade them - I recommend playing otto for this strategy).
Another thought I just had:
I do not meet a lot of aztec players, but how would they counter my grenadiers? Arrow Knights might kill them, but their damage is sloooow, which means: bye bye base.
Coyotes are much too flimsy, they die to massed grens because of the area-effect damage.
Is there any aztec unit I missed? Not too familiar with them.
I feel that grenadiers are in a strange limbo where they are either superbusted or completely useless. Is what I call “The Team Fortress conundrum”, when an item is overpowered if you and your team are winning but doesn’t acchive anything if yopu are lossing; basically, just being useful if you are already doing well and thus redundant.
This comes directly from the way AoE3 manages grenadiers. For this game, grenadiers are basically light artillery which main job is taking down buildings. Thus, the better grenadiers are such that are better at taking down buildings, such as the napoleonic guard. But this comes at the balancing cost that grenadiers are as useless in man to man fighting as the other artillery. This contradicts, actually, the most known about role of the grenadiers as crack infantry. We could say that AoE grenadiers are stuck with their XVII century job as fortress assault units despite this actually being phased out pretty soon. And we even got an interesting attempt to make grenadiers more battlefield worthy in the grenade launcher card, that was actually one measure adopted by Peter the Great of Russia to try to solve the same issue.
If we really wanted to solve this issue we must stablish what role do we wanted for them to play. I would say that elite infantry, but we face ourselves with the problem that I guess was the reason for the devs to put grenadiers in the light artillery cathegory: they would overlap with musketeers in the heavy infantry bonus vs cavalry role.
My ideal solution would be make them more like Soldados: more costly and with a grenade charged attack/high siege damage. However, to make the role more unique and distinct, I would put them behind age III and keep their tag as heavy infantry but don’t give them any bonus in hand combat, instead giving them far more hand damage and a musket damage equal or even less of that of the musketeer. That way, the battles would be won not by mindlessly massing one unit but making an actual composition of Skrims, Grenadiers and musketeers. But that would let us into one of the most missterious issues about the game: why do devs abandoned the idea of making a full “heavy cavalry” class? Suppossedly their role overlaped too much with hussars, but then we got both crossbows and skrims. In which circunstance are similar units suppsed to work?
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Most gren type units suck because they are heavy infantry that don’t work as heavy infantry. Gren units without the heavy infantry tag like the fire thrower are far superior.
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Interesting historic analysis, though I would say they function as Elite-infantery at least.
But your grenadiers would function more like giant grenadiers work now, they actually get a multiplier against heavy cavalry and ok hand-attack while keeping their siege and anti-infantery power. Sadly not cost-effective though because they are mercenaries.
They only suck in the early stages, mid/late massed grens are a nightmare.
Only ottoman grens, any other gren sucks and is easily just kited by skirms or slaughtered by a few cav.
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the uh, same reason why cossacks or mahouts don’t have a multiplier against artillery? They don’t need it? Soft counters are a thing in this game, especially on high dps units.
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90% of the reason any of your strategies work is because you’re using Humbaraci, which are notoriously overtuned.
The entire Ottoman military is overtuned. Try the same strategy using Pavlovs and see if it works as well.
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Grenadiers (the normal ones, not Humbaraci) are underpowered, not because they lose to cavalry. But rather:
- In Age 2, Grenadiers cannot fight cavalry (which is fine), deals lower or about equal siege pop-wise (and resource-wise, relatively) compared to Musketeer or Pikeman (which is bad), needs an Artillery Foundry to create (which is bad).
- In Age 3 Grenadiers suffers from the “dies-in-one-shot” syndrome when fighting against Falconets. This is bad for >= 2 pop Heavy Infantry, as it means they survive half as well as Musketeers against artillery. You will notice that Veteran Humbaraci avoid “dies-in-one-shot” due to siege resist (this could be used to buff Grenadiers, as long as they do not also gain attack multipliers against artillery).
The funny thing is Grenadiers actually become somewhat useful when fighting Asians and Aztecs (at least theoretically), as these civs do not have strong (or any) Falconet replacements, and Asian cavalry has reductive (less than 1x) multipliers against Heavy Infantry, which includes Grenadiers.
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But the point is that they shouldn’t be light artillery. Rather than building a foundry to field them, if they were in the same barracks as infantry would free so much resources.
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I’ve brought this up before and I’m supportive of any post pushing them as Elite rather than weird peripheral units.
They should be seen first and foremost as Elite Heavy Infantry. We should change the optics on them from the weirdly tagged unit who’s role is often in limbo compared to the more concrete alternatives, to a tough, ranged Heavy Infantry unit that excels at siege as well.
Their niche should be as you’ve mentioned, should Heavy Infantry with excellent siege attack along with great melee and HP, balanced with cost/pop and no melee multipliers. They could even be the only vanilla Euro unit that gets combat Promotions enabled whether by default or by shipment to further reinforce that these are the ‘special’ forces (though let’s leave the promotion aspect out for the moment).
Standard Musks/equivs would still be churned out in far greater numbers due to costs and pop, however Grenadiers would find more of a role as the unit you would sprinkle in to an attacking force to give some better siege capability as well as being a little more enduring than the other infantry.
As for the Humbaraci - he can stay as is. Feels more unique plus the two aren’t really historically linked as units once Euros move away from grenade-throwers to elite units.
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