Broke chariots

@StriateRobin896 said:
I would add also an upgrade to axemen in terms of better health, attack and armor as well as bronze age look for them with some visual armor, better axe ( bronze one ) as well as option for recruiting different mid game unit like javelin man or spearmen

I agree with axeman upgrade, not sure if a spearman unit is really needed, but maybe as a very weak trash unit to counter cavalry it could work.

@qweytr24 said:
Chariots are not overpowered. They are easy enough to counter with cavalry and camels. Cavalry may cost gold, but gold is everywhere in the early game and it’s not any harder to get than wood or food. I haven’t had a single game that would last long enough for gold to run out.

Also, getting chariots out is slow because you have to research wheel first. You can already have cavalry in the enemy base before they can make a single chariot.

Chariots are over powered. they are far cheaper and easier to get than camels slash horses
There is alot more wood on the map and it is alot safer than having to go out to the gold sources.
They out range slingers and archers alike and they just run past them into your base once destroying your walls.
once amassed they are unstoppable

Maybe the axeman could research some anticavalry/chariot training, and deal a little extra on them. Currently vs a scythe chariot with full upgrade, the axemen do 2 damage, which is is almost as bad as clubman vs elephant lol

@Penelinfi said:
Maybe the axeman could research some anticavalry/chariot training, and deal a little extra on them. Currently vs a scythe chariot with full upgrade, the axemen do 2 damage, which is is almost as bad as clubman vs elephant lol

Or elite slinger, like Rome Returns mod.

That would be the alternative for ranged units, as slingers are useless vs scythe chariots :slight_smile:

@Penelinfi said:
That would be the alternative for ranged units, as slingers are useless vs scythe chariots :slight_smile:

no because scythe chariots would still bum rush villagers past the axe men

Chariot archers are a bit overpowered, but not really broken. The problem is magnified a bit by matchmaking - if you haven’t played AOE/ROR competitively before (or recently, anyway) and you’re playing vs people who have, then yes, you’ll probably lose a lot to chariots. If it wasn’t chariots it would be fast cavalry or a tool rush.

As someone who’s decent but by no means an expert, a few thoughts from playing people at a similar level:

  1. If you go cavalry and I go chariot archers, all else being equal I have to wall in or die. You can build cav as soon as you hit bronze, I have to wait for wheel to research. Even if I get some CAs out, in low numbers cav beat CAs. Only in larger numbers does it swing the other way.

  2. You can wall too. If you’re worried about speedy chariots avoiding your army and hitting your villagers, some selective walling can go along way. Yes I can get siege, but that removes the speed advantage.

  3. If your cav rush is unsuccessful, try adding some slingers into the mix when you’re preparing to defend against a counterattack. Cav + slingers is pretty good against pure CA armies. Later bronze, try mixing in some compies - they’re cheap and do good damage.

  4. Stonethrowers. A few games where I’ve been facing a significantly larger CA army, a couple of STs have swung things in my favour. They may be more or less effective depending on your micro and your opponent’s, but they can make all the difference.

Also, for games that are decided in bronze or early iron, it doesn’t matter whether a unit costs wood or gold. Neither is inherently more valuable in most games, it’s just a matter of how you allocate your villagers.

(Note: I don’t know how much of all this holds true at expert level, but hey, most of us will never get there anyway. You can definitely be competitive against most players without spamming CAs.)

@“teutonic tanks” said:
The most broken unit aren’t even charriots, but slingers. Atm most of the games with decent players are decided in early toolage when you outmass the enemy with slingers. There is no counter for them in toolage and they even kill towers/walls like flies.

Given that slingers don’t get armour, wouldn’t axemen (in similar numbers) deal with them pretty well?

@“teutonic tanks” said:
On voobly we had some sort of aoe1 mod where cavalry was affected by the shield techs in storage pit, hich worked really really well. In bronze cavalry was strong enough to deal with pure charriot archer swarms, the charriot player was forced to add monks/hoplites/camels as support and in Iron age you finally had a real counter for horse archers beside catapults. It increases the usage of cavalry counter units, which are barely usable atm since they get dominated so hard by charriot (archers)

I almost like this idea, but wouldn’t it take things back to the old yam cav rush days? Cav are still the strongest early bronze rush unit as it is, this would seem to give them a much larger window of dominance. Then again, it would set up a more distinct paper/scissor/rock scenario between cav/camels/CAs.

I quite like the idea that someone else gave, of giving pierce armour to stonethrowers instead. A more subtle change, but I think it would lead to more varied compositions without having more games ended in early bronze.

@AvallachAOE
the thing is you can simply hit and run with your slingers vs axeman; also axeman have 0 pierce armor and slingers move as fast/ a tiny bit faster than axeman. Axeman can only win if you are very, very fast and immediately spot enemy’s barracks, but even then slingers have a decent chance. It’s simply way safer to go slingers, you need to invest less in upgrades as well (all you need is stone mining, while axeman Need attack up, axeman up and def up). The worst is that they shred towers/walls making defenses even more useless

About yamato i think they should be nerfed in general, the -25% for kts should be changed to -15%. Yamato is probly the best civ atm.

Giving stonetrowers pierce armor wouldnt be enough, since CAs have still an incredible mobility.

@Kp_centi said:
Chariots are broken and they need to be nerfed. you literally cannot play a game without them
archer chariot is 40 food 70 wood.
scythe chariots 40 food 60 wood.

people just spam them and run them into your base and the only units that can actually keep up with them are horses and camels but those cost ungodly amounts of food and gold
Camels 70food 60 gold
Cav 70food 80 gold

The health that chariots also have make it so you can’t just use towers to keep them out of your base
their speed means you can’t use archers which just so happen to also have the same range as chariot archers but less health???

I’m not going to play this garbage if its a chariot cluster ****

um, no. you just don’t know how to play. learn to deal with them.

age of chariots: DE

Chariots aren’t even that good. You can counter the (relatively weak) archers with slingers, and melee chariots aren’t too great until you get the scythe chariot upgrade, which itself requires a sizable investment. By the time the enemy uses scythe chariots, chances are you have the resources to counter 'em
 if you haven’t already attacked 'em before they were done upgrading.

@“teutonic tanks” said:
Giving stonetrowers pierce armor wouldnt be enough, since CAs have still an incredible mobility.

Well, that’s where a bit of walling comes in, same as I have to do against cavalry. Cavalry are just as mobile, and can do just as much damage if they get amongst your villagers. The question is how to deal with a large blob of CAs where it’s army vs army, and maybe STs could be a part of solving that.

@HandSoloh said:
um, no. you just don’t know how to play. learn to deal with them.

The OP does sound like a beginner, and that’s probably where most of his difficulties come from.

But do you think CAs are perfectly balanced as they are, or could some tweaking be warranted?

Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.

@Penelinfi said:
Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.

It’s already hard enough to get a critical mass of chariots. How many times have you done that against a player of your own skill level?

@Penelinfi said:
Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.

The problem is that this would make it harder in early bronze to defend against cavalry. Ideally there’d be something to weaken mass CAs without weakening them in smaller numbers. That’s why I liked the stonethrower idea.

@AvallachAOE said:

@Penelinfi said:
Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.

The problem is that this would make it harder in early bronze to defend against cavalry. Ideally there’d be something to weaken mass CAs without weakening them in smaller numbers. That’s why I liked the stonethrower idea.

a good cavalry player will usually keep mass CAs from happening. cavs and camels just eat CAs alive in equal numbers.

@HandSoloh said:

@AvallachAOE said:

@Penelinfi said:
Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.

The problem is that this would make it harder in early bronze to defend against cavalry. Ideally there’d be something to weaken mass CAs without weakening them in smaller numbers. That’s why I liked the stonethrower idea.

a good cavalry player will usually keep mass CAs from happening. cavs and camels just eat CAs alive in equal numbers.

Yeah that makes sense for 1v1, and probably team games at a high enough level (higher than mine).

I guess that’s part of why most of us seem to be talking past each other - it depends so much on the level we’re playing at, and the types of games. Tough to balance for all of that.

no reason to balance a game for beginners. they’ll be ok after the learning curve.

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