It’s really hard to kill Great Bombards and Heavy Cannons with Arrow knights.
I’ve been playing a lot of Aztecs lately, and I’ve found killing heavy cannons to be nearly impossible. Some civs will turtle, so I boom and age and contain. Personally, I enjoy using ERKs, JKPs, Coyotes and AKs. I’ll use stealth JKPs and Arrow Knights, but it’s really hard to kill artillery.
A few days ago I rushed an Ottoman player. He turtled hard (CM and sent 3 upgraded Outposts). My rush slowed him down. I aged and took the map and he made age 4 and just sat in base spawning Bombards until he had enough that I couldn’t kill them. He used the Mosque techs and came at me with ####### Jans and Spahi and a huge mass of bombards.
I kinda feel like Aztecs need something to help them deal with Artillery. Maybe a 1.34x multiplier on ERKs? ERKs are less efficient against Infantry than they previously were so maybe a small bonus against artillery would be in order.
This has been the story since 2006. Arrow knights simultaneously underperform and overperform in their roles. They’ve always been terrible against heavy art. Some advice from a repentant aztec main, you can always throw erks into melee to hold the line, or utilize pet jaguars. Pumas can run into bases to siege factories pretty well too as they’re very fast for a high siege unit. Regardless, it is very obnoxious how fast otto can spew out bombards now, I have absolutely no idea why they spawn faster now than on TAD.
Try to get arrow knights to target their explorer, then have some stealthy jaguars sneak in on top of the bombards. It feels amazing if you can pull it off.
“The bigger the artillery piece, the harder the anti-artillery hits”
So, maybe for units like the arrow knight, we could have the same base damage as is now, PLUS, a porcentual extra attack based directly on the maximum hp of the artillery piece it’s attacking.
I would be curious how they perform in tests cost for cost because one of my issues with them is my intuition. I’m used to having 3 culv and being able to snipe great bombards, but the equivalent cost for cost would be 12+ arrow knights. When I have that many arrow knights I seem to do okay vs arty, but I have to force myself to make that many.
And they still get blasted to bits by Great Bombards…
I wonder if it would be possible to give them 5-6 Siege Attack vs units with a 4-5x vs artillery. They’d basically only be good vs Artillery and buildings at that point but it would seem worth it.
A 1.34x on ERKs vs Artillery would also seem nice. It’d be nice to have a second ranged option, even a weaker one.
There’s never going to be a properly balanced infantry unit that counters artillery. I think they ought to lose the infantry tag completely and become ranged shock infantry instead. That would reduce artillery damage against them to half or a third of what it is now. It would be no different from the existing anti-artillery light cav like Yabusames and Siege Eles and still leaves them weak to skirms like the dumb heavy infantry change.
Throw in a bit of siege resist and this could let AKs lose their bonkers range in favour of tanking artillery fire. It is already fantasy to have an archer that can outrange a cannon and at least this could be explained away by saying they “dodge” a cannon ball instead. Maybe even have some kind of dodge mechanic that gives them a brief immunity when they take massive fatal damage so they are able to get at least one shot off in the face of massed artillery.
I also think adding in some poison or fire effect to their attack for lingering damage would pair excellently with their role. It would let them eke out a bit of extra damage that bypasses ranged resist and continues working even if they got sniped after their first shot. I don’t think poison stacks so it would mostly be a buff for smaller groups of them or with hit and run tactics.
I had several themes talked about Aztec units (AK and ERK) are over nerfed and all of these discussions were full of taunt by most people who were not using Aztec.
Now you raise this issue again I am afraid you will be targeted.
It pretty much works this way already. In my opinion, having an extra hidden multiplier for one single unit is a bad way to handle it.
They don’t have to counter cav even if they become ranged shock infantry. They can specialize in being anti-artillery and not have any bonus against heavy cav. The tag would just give them resistance to cannons in exchange for vulnerability to infantry.
It absolutely would. However they do have a ton of ranged resistance which offsets this slightly.
There’s also the example of Siege Elephants which already suffer from this issue. For that alone it could be a good idea to give Azaps a ranged multiplier against siege units (~x0.75 would probably be good enough). I also think Azaps have way too much range and reducing that would also help here.
