I find the number of votes for the Rifle Rider interesting. As a unit it’s either insanely good or easily the worst unit on the list depending on what the enemy is making.
I find myself wondering if it has anything with what civs people play.
I tend towards civs with good light cavalry, so they aren’t too good vs my preferred compositions. If you play Musk/Falc or Musk/Huss civs they’d be a thing out of your nightmares.
Rifle rider is the noob exterminator unit xD…noobs tend to make only musketeers, and occasionally some hussars
So at low level rifle rider is god tier unit so they get a lot of votes
Yeah it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. It’s just weird how they initially chose that distinction despite it not lining up with reality at all.
I was going to say they should at least get rid of the “hand cavalry” multi that only Chinacos have but it looks like that may have been changed to heavy cav. So now Chinacos also counter Rifle Riders.
But then you have ranged heavy cav, like harquebusier, ranged melee heavy cav, like chinaco and meteor hammer, and melee only ranged cav which is berber camels (despite being only melee berber camel is tagged as ranged cav)
Hakkas and Oromo already demonstrated heavy ranged cav is unviable. The only ones remaining are niche mercenaries that have overturned stats that mask the flawed design.
They’re still very obviously melee units even with a little extra reach.
This is the only one that doesn’t really work. But a new “camel” tag might be able to cover it.
Another “heavy ranged cavalry” tag that covers units like Rifle Riders would be enough to cover units with both tags.
That’s actually reassuring it wasn’t intentional to make a weird multiplier exception. But it still makes no sense for Chinacos to have a multiplier vs either.
Oromo may work better if the charged ranged attack only applies to inf and cav, not to artillery.
I miss sometimes the old Hakka. I know, the Harquebusier exists, but still. A card to change the Hakka to the old Hakka, maybe.
I meant the old Oromo who were always worse off in range mode. They’re much better now.
The old Hakkas were worse than the new ones. But the new ones are kinda boring just being Dragoon with low range and stupidly high melee attack. I’d like to see something that’s a mix of both. Give them back their melee multiplier vs all cav, but also give them both the heavy cav and light cav tags. That would make them vulnerable to other goons from range, but dominant in melee. Also get rid of the x0.75 vs infantry and just reduce their base melee attack by 25%.
As for the other ranged heavy cav, Harquebusiers have all the flaws of the above two, but stats so high that they’re still viable. Mounted Rifleman are not viable and need a total rework because a ranged cavalry unit hard countering light infantry units is not okay.
I’m actually okay with some of the big sword = big melee change for the heavy infantry units if it is done consistently enough that it improves visual clarity and the stats aren’t too out to lunch. That way you could tell at a glance that a guy with a spear or bayonet has lower base damage but higher multipliers and a guy with a sword or halberd is higher base damage and lower multipliers. But given the fact that there are a ton of new units that completely obliterate the conventional visual cues (ranged cav that hard counters skirms, counter-skirms that are visually identical to other skirms, etc) I don’t have much hope for that.
I’m mostly suggesting it as a way to make Hakkas distinct yet balanced but it doe’s kind of fit with units that are historically medium cavalry. Originally Sweden was supposed to lack light cavalry and have to supplement it with mercs. But now that both Hakkas and Black Riders are high melee light cav there’s no benefit to supplementing their roster with mercs. Making Hakkas “medium cav” that gets countered by other goons makes them distinct enough that Black Riders could have a place again. Something similar could be done with other historcally medium cav like Chevies to make them even more distinct from WW. It would also help fix any future medium cav so that there aren’t any insanely OP units that shred all their counters like the first Hakka rework or Chevies before they added the x0.6 vs light infantry.