When the change to siege incoming, which sounds like a good thing, something needs to be done to relegate range mass; especially range mass in a mix composition.
It’s not enough to make light melee stronger vs range units (which they should buff); but light melee cav NEED to absorb more range damage to force players to use the full counter system; instead of massing range with a few body blocker melee units.
Give light melee cav +2! range armor, starting in feudal. Meanwhile give all towers and static defenses +2 range attack bonus vs light melee cav. From static defensive/raiding perspective this change will result in a net neutral. BUT, vs range +2 range armor will make horseman and alike unkillable by range units! The good news is by NOT also increasing the light melee cav’s dps vs range units; the kill times will remain the same; just more horseman will outlast range volleys.
Also giving the light melee cav this bonus range armor will better incentives the trio comp over the MEGA mass range + horseman; or mass mass range + spears.
All they need is more range on horseman, doesn’t need to be sipahi level but they only buffed the horsemen range a very small amount previously. Buff it from 0.38 to 0.5, that will reduce the ability of ranged units to kite and also make it easier for horseman to beat siege(I’d also buff damage vs siege a little as well perhaps from +10 to +15). This would also reduce the amount of springald wars if cav was also an effective counter.
There was a lan tournament finals yesterday between the Canadian bros. I always mix the twins up bur one had Tov delhi , the other mali. Whoever had mali played it differently than javelin donso, but instead opened sofa.
Sofa is a heavy unit technically but their range armor is equivalent to a light melee cav. Long story short, the legit sofa mass kept getting deleted by full tov archer mass… I’ve stated this before–kiting or not, a counter system should always be effective when the resource amounts are comparable.
Increasing cav melee range would not negate kiting nor is kiting the real issue, it’s a combo of the cav units struggling to connect (kiting) but more so the cav melee unable to absorb the cant miss focus fire.
Bigger issue from a devs point of view. I think the devs want to perserve the concept of retreating. One for immersion and two to not make every engagement super decisive. They want “decently” length games not 3-4? Min games once the real fights start happening. However the current iteration of retreats along with some others things created this artifact of kiting.
I thought to address the range mass domination by buffing th light melee cav in a meaningful way to withstand the onslaught??
Okay another way to buff ALL cav. Having cav move in wedge formation should give them all plus 0.35 speed and prolong their charge by 10 secs. This might better allow melee to circumvent the range mass and negate the kiting.
To keep the wedge rom being abused with single uints, make the speed buff only apply when there is 3+ cav in formation. And only buff melee cav speeds!
I’ve tested this a few times and equal res of horseman always beat archers in a fair fight. It takes 42 shots from a regular archer to kill a horseman or in other words 42 archers will 1 shot a horseman assuming they have the same level of armory techs and the horsemen remains with a +2 ranged armor advantage. It takes 4 hits for a horseman to kill an archer.
This will change considerably depending on things like armory techs and other advantages like tower of victory bonus to attack speed. However even with those horseman will still comfortably win.
The horseman struggle more as the archer mass gets bigger as they can only hit the units at the front while those in the middle of the mass can’t be hit by the horseman until others have died which leaves a large amount of horseman just pathing around and unable to attack but even in this case horseman still win comfortably and this issue can be solved by further increasing range so 2nd line of horseman can attack from behind.
The horseman is very underrated probably because it was extremely weak at the beginning of the game when it had no ranged armor but now it is actually a solid unit, with a little more range to fix pathing issues it would be perfect.
Your tested sound like they are being executed by stationary AI??? no kitng and no micro? I referred the tournament to demo examples of peak unit utilization. But such outcomes are not limited to the pros, even diamond level micro can have similar outcomes.
Ppl are not just A-moving units into each other. If they did, then yes, horseman would be fine as is, even with the pathing and melee range delimitations.
How do we devise a system that keeps making sense at all skill levels and at common army masses??
Beasty, bee and i believe ML? have been seen on VOD admitting that range units are very very strong/OP. I think horseman should become the proper response to this powerful unit type.
I’ve tested both stationary just a moving and kiting and either way horseman win very significantly. When there are spearman it becomes trickier because if you micro poorly your horseman will take ranged damage and have to pull back from spears however in that case you should have archers to deal with enemy spears and in the end it comes down to who has the better eco/micro.
The answer for massed archers is not horsemen anyway as they are more of a raiding unit, the answer is mangonels. Horsemen function fine in feudal but later are mostly replaced by knights and mangonels. I don’t think anybody wants the mangonel buffing as it completely destroys any ranged units.
I don’t trust your experiments over what appears to me to be the more common outcome. Similar to what happened yesterday in the tournament.
Here is an example of 16 sofas vs 43 tov archers. Archers have +500 more resources worth of units, basically sofas need 3 more sofas to have the same total resources. Secondly, 3 sofas, 4? are missing Hp meanwhile only 2 archers are missing Hp.
But sofa should have a counter advantage vs archers in a proper counter system (we’ll circle back on this because of something you said).
The sofa got deleted meanwhile the archer mass persist.
Now on the idea that horseman are for raiding and mangonel are the counter to range?? How does one make a mangonel in feudal? If one can’t make a mangonel in feudal and you admitted that horseman are NOT the counter to archers, then you just admitted archers are not balanced, at least in feudal? And in reality mango shots can be dodge/mitigated, so do range units in practice do not have a proper counter??
War elephants can simulate attacking while on the move because their spear attack has longer tange their than tusk, so the unit will continue to vector towards th enemy attempting to get in range for a tusk attack, meanwhile the spear attack will execute on cool down as long as it’s in range.
Lie you suggested they should give all melee cav a 0 dmg 0 range attack with a very short cooldown to force all melee cav units to vector perpetually towards enemy targets.
However, im pretty sure devs a billion years ago said they want units to be able to retreat (i hope within reason).
Like in the video i posted, the outcome of that many melee cav vs that many archers is counterintuitive, and it’s only previous experiences that would have tokd you from the beginning that those archers were FAVORED in that engagement.
Yes that was exactly what i was proposed they need to attack while moving and not stop for attack.
Edit:I cahnged my mind they shouldn attack while moving range armor upgrade probably best solution.
Maybe the horseman formation was wrong if they were in line formation maybe they could be more succesfull.
I didn’t say they don’t counter ranged units but from castle onwards the mangonel is much more effective, same with raiding you swap from horsemen to knights or archers to hand cannoneer etc as the game goes on.
Anyway the sofa is actually a terrible example because it isn’t really a horseman but more of a weak knight. It is heavy melee cav while horsemen is light. Not only do they have the exact same attack vs archers despite the sofa costing 60 res more but the sofa has no range and is slower while the horsemen has 0.38 range and faster speed. Horsemen could clean up that mass much easier.
The sofa is more like the malians maa equivalent, especially once it has imported armor and it is best used tanking damage on the front line.
Give light melee cav a snare against ranged units and problem is solved.
It’s been 3 years and the Devs were unable to balance this mess.
Just copy the system from aoe3, it’s been working AMAZINGLY there since 2005.
There are plenty of ways to buff cav. For example you could make Horsemen stun Archers on hit just like Spears currently stun Cavalry. The question is which type of buff would be best for the game. And for this I think a thorough analysis is needed, which the devs together with the pros are probably best at.
Most of the pros come from sc2, so they want a starcraft2 approach.
I’d very much prefer the aoe3-approach which has proven to work best.
The devs come from company of heroes, there is no cavalry.
Hence the balancing and countersystem in this game is a mess, as Relic had no experience with this type of RTS when they accepted the project.
Relic was amazing in times of coh and coh2, I loved both games and played them tons, especially coh2.
Aoe does, after all, not at ALL seem to be their strong point.
Nobody wants snare, that point has been stated several times. Also i believe the devs in a earlier interview said they want the concept of retreat to exist and snare doesnt jive with said concept.
I think stun on charge is a great idea and ive said in a different forum charge should work like trample. If the cav units would charge thru the archer mass that woukd force a surround, and kiting would be harder to execute, as you’d have to regroup and circumvent the cav impeding your retreat.
This also would force archer mass to mix in spears to prevent the charge thru surround.
Okay, wedge formation will allow charge mech to last longer and allow the cav units to run thru the range mass, or any mass for that matter as long as thre is no spearwall to stop it.
This will finaly give wedge formation a function and better answer the mega mass range issues.
Since its not actually trample, only the first units hit would recieve charge dmg/stun (knights inflict charge dmg, light cav induce stun/shock).
