So Pikeman is the worst unit in Castle age atm and it makes Cav civs occasionally hard to deal with, particularly if you are playing from behind. At the same time, I don’t think it needs a huge buff to be viable and Halberdiers are already quite good, some Pikemen from civs like Teutons or Vikings also do the job in Castle age, so I don’t think the buff should be a huge one. I was thinking of 3 alternative buffs:
Pikeman base armor changed to 1/0
Pikeman training time lowered from 22s to 16s (currently one of the issues in countering Knight spam is that you can’t always scout how many Stables/eco the enemy has so pre-emptively you are often forced into something like 4 Barracks and very often you must also overproduce Pikemen since Knights have an overrun factor, and if you lose your Pikemen mass it’s often very hard to come back once the Knights are on top of your production buildings)
Pikeman upgrade cost changed from 215f 90g to 90f 50g
Thoughts?
Buffs that go in the wrong direction imo:
a) + attack (makes it unnecessarily strong as a raiding unit)
b) + HP (Halberdier already has only +5 HP so this would require increasing Halberdier HP which is already solid)
c) + pierce armor (many units have bonus dmg vs Pikeman but still it shouldn’t be too strong vs TCs, CA etc., not to mention it would make microing down Pikemen from civs like Goths/Malians too hard with ranged units)
Now LS and Champion is even more useless as they can’t even kill pikeman. Maybe we have to give all infantry +1 bonus attack vs spearman only to offset that.
This one is well thought. But such huge reduction is not needed for the game rn. Maybe reduce it to 20s.
An alternative way is to increase their attack bonus vs cavalry 22 → 24 so that you don’t need to research Blacksmith attack upgrade against +2 knights. Personally I’ll pick this one over rest.
This is basically useless in the midgame if it only applies to Pikeman after the upgrade.
And idk if we want spearmen and halbs to have much fsater training times.
Sure, that would directly target the delay issue of the pikemen.
Whilst I think it can be part of a solution, I don’t think it should be the main part.
It’s good and possibly even necessary for the Power units to have that advantage.
I would possibly consider reducing the upgrade time instead of reducing the cost. Allowing to stay intentionally longer in feudal for a better eco and don’t have to wait as long for the spears to be upgraded.
Other Ideas I posted on different occasions:
Make spearmen faster so they can’t be outmanouvered as easily
Add a feudal upgrade that sits right in between spearman and pikeman, for a more gradual power development. Again allowing for more feudal against castle age play.
probably unpopular: give pikes range so they are more able to deal consistant damage against the cavalry, but lower the damage output
Well at lesat now we’ll know it’s mostly hot air coming from you…
personally i’d say 125F 75G in general it counter units should be cheaper to spec into Counter and considering how knights are free, I can easily see how he justifies such a significant buff.
40f 15g is too low reduction. I would make 140f 65g (-75f -25g).
LS would kill Pikeman even if Pikeman have +1 MA. My idea is that removing +3 attack of archers (except Skirmishers) against Spearman and donating +2/+4/+6/+8/+9 bonus attack to Militia-line, and increasing speed of militia-ine from 0.9 to 0.95. In this way, militia-line gain one job at least in the game, and Knight-Archer won’t be answer to everything.
Pikemen should have +1 range so that they fight in a block and anyone too close risks getting attacked by multiple ranks at once. Single pikeman = fodder. block of pikemen =a real danger
nobody questions that power units should be at an advantage, but already now, for example Crossbow gets shut down with minimal investments (elite skirms, mangonels…)… Knights should be strong, but not THIS strong, right now there are many people in as high as 1500-1600 elo doing a 1 unit spam in Castle age and it’s hard to stop. Knights should be strong but such people should learn to add Skirms and such to counter Pikemen, just like Xbow players add Monks/Pikemen.
Here’s a rando thought that’s not inherently a buff. Give all units or perhaps scouts better LOS in Feudal and Castle so they can more easily scout a Knight push and then start Pike production. That way it rewards players based on map awareness.
Halbs can be kind of OP in late game so any castle age buffs to pikes would need to be offset with a halb nerf to compensate. Or halbs need to stay the same at the very least.
Ive been saying training time needs to be cheaper for like the last year so thats what id go for. Cheaper pike upgrade is a close second option, the effect of being able to afford more barracks is similar.
Also Id like to point out that buffing pikemen implicilty buffs infantry as pikes are a good complement to infantry. In economics this is called cross-price elasticity where a change in the price of one good can change the demand function for another good.
Most of the civs even deserve to have Halberdier such as Huns, Cumans, Bengalis, Persians, Khmers etc… These civs can have better Cavalry (or Ratha and Elephants) to compensate lack of Halberdier but they shouldn’t have Halberdier, only infantry and semi-infantry civ should have Halberdier like Arbalest, Paladin, Hussar and Skirmishers with bonus are excluded from non-archer and non-cavalry civs. +24 bonus attack for Pikeman and removing Halberdier from tech tree a lot of civs also an idea.