Cavs that can block one attack, cavs with charge, cavs with trample, etc.. like who is in charge of balance and thought this was a good idea? At least have these abilities unlocked by upgrading, don’t give them off the get go. This is why people complain its a cav meta, its always been a cav meta due to these ridiculous stats.
Every cav (almost) has had charge since the beginning of the game. Actually even melee infantry have one (most infantry and light cav don’t do extra damage on charge though).
Cataphracts also had trample back when they were considered quite bad and not worth making.
For a while the ideal comp was spears and crossbows with siege.
It’s no one thing creating a “cav meta” people are going on about. Also, most of those people are team game players playing on larger maps where mobility is king.
Infantry are getting buffed today, so we’ll see how that shakes out.
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Even in 1v1s its a problem. You can pretty much go only knights against a non-cav civ and win the game. This is conq4 gameplay. Enough knights with healing and this extra garbage kills the spearmen army over time.
In other competitive rts games a unit that is fast moving and has high damage should be countered in a 2 to 1 ratio from its counterpart. In this case, 1 spearman should be able to take on 2 or 1.5 cav by cost. However, the other problem is the time, even tho aoe4 spearmen is cheaper than the knight, you can’t even get enough of them out in time by the time 1 knight is out, requiring you to have extra production to stay equal in just numbers.
For this to be balance, you need to be able to spread your spearmen in low numbers around your base. In AOE4, this is completely opposite and an anti-balance pattern. You can’t properly defend cav pushes because they can group up in higher numbers and destroy a pack of spearmen if you were to split your spearman army around. This makes games so turtle and stupid. The cav player has too high of a risk to reward ratio with proper apm. On top of the extra bonuses like healing make this ridiculous.
You are glad the koreans aren’t playing this game, else it would be a nightmare. Knights have not been pushed to its limits yet and its still unfun and unbalanced. Imagine 5 army group raids across the map. Good luck with that.