Armory vs line upgrade balance

Age of Mythology: Retold Discussion
1

What do you think about the balance between armory and line upgrades in retold?

In retold there where 2 chamges compared to og:

  1. first (copper) armory upgrades price droped by 50%
  2. second and third line upgrades got buffed, providing 10, and 20% additional attack bonus than before.

So 1st armory upgrades cost a total of50% more than a line upgrade, but have practically the same effect to all your units.
But 2nd and 3rd upgrades cost ~85% more than a line upgrade, but privide 50% and 33% damage, and a bit less- 11% vs 15% and 12.5% vs 20% effective hp if we compare the the level of line upgrade (but that was in og as well)

It seems the 1st upgrades are definitely worth it If you combine 2 different units, it actually save you resource as your gain a line upgrade for all your units for just 50% more resources.
But the 2nd and the 3rd become much less attractive, having both their relative price up and their effect goes down compared to line upgrades.

2

I’m having trouble parsing what you mean—the upgrades are:

Medium | Heavy | Champion Infantry
150F 150G 20 sec | 300F 300G 30 sec | 500F 400G 40 sec
+10% HP&ATK | +15% HP, +20% ATK | +20% HP, +30% ATK
(and +1 LOS for all three but lets ignore that).

That means you get:
+10% ATK, +10% HP : 150F 150G 20 sec | Classical
+30% ATK, +25% HP : 300F 300G 30 sec | Heroic
+60% ATK, +45% HP : 500F 400G 40 sec | Mythic

Thoughts: Only applies to one line of units, with usually Infantry | Ranged | Cav. 3x the cost makes them more expensive if you get all of them, but more individually impactful. Reduced vulnerability is generally more valuable than increased HP depending on existing armor (more effective given higher base armor).

The lines also cost different resources (F vs W for melee/ranged), different resource spreads (cav being food heavy), & can apply different HP increases (archers get +10% flat each line tier), but we’ll treat the infantry line as representative.

For a 40/10% hack/pierce armor unit, the extra HP (without armory techs) is worth:
+83/22% eHP
+108/39% eHP
+142/61% eHP

The armory line upgrades provide 10% values at all levels, and cost (weapons, armor, shields):
Copper: 100F 100G | 75F 75G | 75W 75G : all 30 sec | Classical
Bronze: 300F 300G | 300F 200G | 300W 200G : all 40 sec | Heroic
Iron: 600F 600G | 500F 500G | 500W 500G : all 50 sec | Mythic

That means all human units get:
+10% ATK, 0.90x Hv/Pv (for 40/10% base= +85/23% eff.HP)
+20% ATK, 0.81x Hv/Pv (for 40/10% base= +106/37% eHP)
+30% ATK, 0.73x Hv/Pv (for 40/10% base= +129/52% eHP)

The survivability increase from choosing Line > Armory is the same as choosing Armory > Line in total value per age, but it’s applied at once (at the cost of being only applied to a single type) & is cheaper than all three armory techs at the same time—they’re also stacking buffs, so ultimately you want both, and part of the balance is there. If you just want survivability, the two armor techs are equivalent to the line upgrades, stack well with them, and cost the same price but take a longer time.

If you want to maximize a certain kind of resistance in a certain age, for a specific unit type, you’d prioritize pairing their best/worst armor with their line upgrade, w/ line having priority. And always prio armor techs over weapon techs. The armory offers less damage individually, but it going to all units accounts for the disparity (+10%x3/20%x3/30%x3 army improvement from just weapon techs).

In summary: I think the armory / line upgrade pricing is fair.

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3

I was emphisizing more on the changes inreduced in retold:
In the past the forst armory upgrades cost double what they cost now. And line upgrade was always 10% attack on all levels.

The result is that with the line upgrade you pay more and gain more the higher the upgrade.
Yet with armory you pay more, especially between the 1st and 2nd upgrade which cost 3 times more, but you don’t get any bigger effect
So I was wondering what people think about this logic.
The other differences where here from the og game, so I didn’t really talked about them. But thanks for the input!

I made the mistake to assume only armory upgrades gets better after line up upgrades and just messed up the numbers, as it goes both ways anyway (if you have more armor each hp worth more and the more hp you have the armor worth more)- your numbers are the correct ones.

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