If you make 1 then sure. If you need to want to get an initial army of 26 out of 2 stables then you are saving 13*6 = 78 seconds.
… and they’re cheaper so you can maybe even go 3 or 4 stables and then you’re saving like 3 minutes.
If I’m facing 30 crossbow without ballistics (early castle), I’ll take 26 Steppe lancers in 2 minutes over 20 knights in 5 minutes any day. Very easy to dodge fire with SL and close gap and then take a good engagement. knights just get picked off one by one as they trickle in.
Steppe lancer really need a buff, they are so weak against everything, they need more hit points, they just have 60 hp, i think they should be at least 75, and their armor too weak, they only good in killing vills, but in fight with other units they are completly usless.
I am all for Regional Units, but when they make sense. As cool as the Steppe Lancers are, they should have been either a UU for one opf the civs, or just a Scenrio Editor unit like the Mounted Samurai.
sure, except how the time comparison can be 2 mins and 5 mins…
for this scenario, I can only assume u spam SL with 4 stables but knights with 2. Totally illogical to me. If anything, I would do 3 for SL and 4 for knts, for the sake of balancing training time.
That’s the thing: In early castle they are not that much cheaper Sure, they cost 20 over all ressources less (15%), but they cost 10 food more. In early castle age gold however is much more abundant and easier to get than food, which is why I suggested here (Balance discussion on the steppe lancer - #76 by MustySnizl) that the food cost should be reduced to improve its role as an early castle raiding unit.
Gold mining is 25.3/minute in after feudal upgrade.
Farming is 22.7/minute with wheelbarrow + 60 wood for every 250 food.
So the steppe lancer costs 16.8 wood, the knight 14.4
Wood after double bit axe is 21.2/minute
So a knight costs 6.29 minutes of working time and a Steppe lancer 5.65
So while they cost 15% less ressources, the effective amount of work time that is saved is only 10%, so they are on line with Berber castle age knights. It’s not that much of a difference.
I really don’t know where people keep getting this weird idea that SL should compete with the knight line. All SL civs have a knight or knight equivalent.
The SL is NOT A KNIGHT.
Make it cheaper or increase some other stat which improves its raiding potential. There’s far too much balance work involved in trying to make it a knight equivalent while one civ gives it 30% extra hp, and the other has an amazing paladin as it is, and the 3rd literally has what some of yall are trying to turn the SL into… A cost effective knight alternative the keshik.
Wtf is so hard to understand that there exists alternatives to knight line? Raider /siege killer anything except frontline fast tank like the knight.
Bad comparison. The Magyar Hussar is an alternative to the regular Hussar, that is just better in almost every aspect, completely replacing it, except against monks.
Don’t explain your point, and then tell people they are stupid if they don’t understand it… nice.
That would be a pretty pointless unit. There are two primary reasons the light cavalry line is trained: They don’t cost gold and they are better against monks than knights. Unless you give conversion resistance to the Steppe lancer, the “better, but more expensive” Hussar will simply stay the Knight.
What if the buff would come only for the elite SL, that way one could open with them in castle for raiding (despite what people say, in my opinion they do a great job at raiding), then in imp you keep using SL and with the elite upgrade they could be the main unit.
Steppe Lancers need to fill a role. Either bonus to vills but I think it wont be used as much as it should. Or as anti Archer or cav Archer. Then the only need to raise the pierce armor. Steppe Lancers will be still weak against Knights or infantry and easily to countered.
It as anti-Archer unit, then my proposal would be
-1 attack
+2 pierce armor
+5 against Archer class unit.
With the proposed buff in the original post, they’d be a much better cavalry unit against halbs and pikes than the knight or scout line. There’s your role
The current meta is Knights and Archer. I don’t like to push anti infantry. The problem is infantry cannot answer against Archer range units and cavalry only pikeman.
that’s entirely design. look at what the tech tree says about the units.
Create Archer (Cost: 25W 45G)
Ranged unit. Strong vs. units at long range. Weak vs. Skirmishers and units at close range.
Create Militia (Cost: 60F 20G)
All-purpose infantry unit. Strong vs. buildings and infantry. Weak vs. archers at long range.
Create Knight (Cost: 60F 75G)
Powerful all-purpose cavalry. Strong vs. infantry and archers. Weak vs. Pikemen, Camel Riders, and Monks.
it’s all right there. clearly the knight is meant to beat non pike infantry and archers. archers are supposed to beat infantry as well.
the role of the militia/infantry was never to be a power unit in this game, and that is reflected in the fact that the militia line is the only baseline general gold unit that doesn’t have a trash counter to it, which both the archer (skirmisher) and knight (pikes) do.
we also need to consider which civs actually get the SL, none of them actually have good champs (the counter to end game trash spam), and especially for tatars, they arguably have a tough game vs goths for example… they have the worst 2HS in the game (missing 2 armour upgrades and supplies), nevermind champ
and arguably the tatars have weaker counters to mali halbs(if they’re supported with skirms or something to chase off CA)
so if the SL was truly to become anti infantry it would literally fulfil a gap for at least one civ…
ROFL i literally did, in the previous post, or do you want pictures?
I do like SL as being an infantry counter rather than an archer counter. They already do pretty well against pikes, in my experience, as long as you have about 3 of them.
They do well against pikes in low numbers. Once you have about 10 SL it’s actually hard to kite effectively.
Though I like the anti-infantry role at first, maybe they’re gonna compete with cavalry archers in that area since they already counter infantry pretty well with their range and speed, and all SL civs have excelent cavalry archers.
Also, as I said, it’s almost imposibble to make use of their +1 range for avoid getting hit by pikes once armies are big enough. So, the only way to make them good against pikes I can come up with giving them an anti-infantry armour class which already is cataphract territory (I wouldn’t like their uniqueness to be lost).
No need to worry about malian halbs when there are only malian pikes. And while they do tank better than halbs their damage output is quite bad, even against cav. Actually, their attack is so low that they even lose to turk spearmen, so you could theoretically use tatar infantry against them just fine.
The plan was never to make them an archer counter anyway (1 pierce armour!)
You can patrol them so that there is a row of lancers that takes hits for their buddies behind.