- Yes please, the Age of onagers is upon us and I can’t wait
- No, civs lacking BBC will be too sad, stuck, vs halb-onager combo on closed maps
Ballistics for scorps was a bold, yet brilliant move. How about being even bolder? I vote YES, even though my favourite civ. lacks BBC and will indeed feel very sad vs Celts on Arena.
It’ll just be another bad matchup, like there are quite a few on Arena. (On Arabia, it’s an even matchup, and I’d even say I’d feel comfortable vs Celt post-imp ballistics siege, thanks to my hussar spam ftw).
Speaking of ballistics siege, I feel like ballistics for siege with 12+ range (BBCs and trebs) would be a bridge too far.
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Ballistics onagers would still be stopped by castles, BBCs and trebs, no.
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Countering a halb-BBC combo would become a nightmare, especially for the half of civs that lack BBC and thus can’t even try to mirror the strat.
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(Plus giving basically everybody the imperial techs Arquebus and Warwolf for free doesn’t sound right; in the Roman case, it was a part of a civ. bonus that was given to everybody).
1 Like
Is there any option for: “No, this breaks the game fundamentally and renders many single player maps/ multiplayer matches broken?”
Unlike Scorpions, I feel Onagers have huge damage to compensate for somewhat mediocre health and no ballistic. This allows onager vs archers to be somewhat skill based.
Having ballistic onagers ruins archer play and scorpion, imo. Probably add nothing but create a pandora box of balance mess.
I will be glad to be proved how your point works well if the case happened.
10 Likes
In AoE1 heavy catapult is trebuchet and siege onager in one unit with ballistics and its not very fun unit to fight against if its massed so I think this idea would be very, very, very bad.
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Mass ballistas always a funny game in that one. It’s like playing scorpions but it’s faster and more health + damage.
wow those are two super bias options.
Looks like European elections in the 30s.
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Ballistas or Helepolis can at least be countered with few catapults since they outrange them and mostly die with single shot.
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Yup, once you get a mass ball of ballistas, only a few units can counter them.
Then again. It’s really suck to tech up against mass ballistas because of bad cost effective, population space, and too much time.
No doubt if what OP proposed happened, it would either nerf onagers so hard in very far future or turning it into a bad balance of a mess.
I recommend you go bold and try it out in a data mod 
It has a similar effect as increasing projectile speed of onagers and manonels
For those who wonder why isn’t added, FE planned this for Koreans as team bonus at some point years ago and was left away because was broken.
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What? Never heard of that. Can you share the link?
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It might be ok as a unique tech for a single civ – then it could be balanced out with missing techs (e.g. siege engineers, siege onager). But I think it’s easy to see why it’s a bad idea as a team bonus or something generally available.
6 Likes
Ballistics Onagers would be broken, but I see no good reason why gunpowder units can’t be affected by Ballistics (at least Hand Cannoneers). Arquebus would have to have a different effect, or having it give all gunpowder units Ballistics instead of just HCs could be the defining feature.
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Onagers and BBCs have attack ground, so you can manually attempt to aim. And Portuguese have a UT that provides ballistics to their BBCs (and other gunpowder units), so we can already see the impact in game for BBC. And I have seen occasions where the Portuguese UT caused a BBC to miss shots (sometimes repeatedly)
Trebs, meanwhile, are so innacurate that they generally aren’t worth trying to use against units (against other trebs and BBCs sometimes, but generally only Britons would want to consider using trebs against generic units)