I recently watched some kotd5 matches, but I think the game is so boring in high end staged at the moment.
Nearly every draft is 90% the same. It is barely anything else than archer meta. Same is when I play myself (but since the meta is so one sided and boring, i barely do atm).
On the other hand, nerfing archers directly can’t be the best solution, since they fall of in imp anyway, due to easy spamable skirms or hussars.
The devs last aproach with the increase of the upgrade cost was a good idea, but did not have a great impact. Archers are still already trained in feidal, so the higher upgrade cost delay xbows by 30-60 sec or so, not more.
Maye the stronger aproach would be a change the upgrade cost of CA. The 800 food are tough step for those, who go scouts or skirms, while archer civs handle that easily. On the other hand, going archers is only gold intensiv and 200 for CA is nothing. If CA was (just an example) 600f 400g, it would overall favor all other units in feudal.
Why do you think castle age costing 600f/400g instead of 800f/200g would favor less archers play than others ?
Are you thinking about market abuse ?
I didnt theorycraft anything yet, but I would expect that it would favor archers more than other units, because it would be easier to go to castle age, and we would need fewer farms to go to castle age.
When we play archers we often skip horse collar early and do not want to reseed all farms. Whereas other food heavy options force you ti go heavy on farm anyways hence they (eg scouts into knights+skirms) would not gain much by having fewer farms in feudal.
Moreover, archers already costing gold should provide a good setup to get quickly 600f/400g, you maybe only need 2 gold miners before transiting to farns. Whereas other military options would need to invest into the lumber camp way earlier, which may requires to rethink the build order much more.
I thought CA means cav archers until I saw the 800 food…
600food 400G literally benefits archer plays because usually scout players wont mine too much gold (the only gold costing unit is archer)
Yes. What an interesting thread that suggest nerfing archer by decreasing the food cost of Castle Age upgrade and increase the research time of Castle Age.
What other non-trash unit is there? m@a? they get destroyed by scouts, and archers.
I think it’s fine. The problem isn’t the civ setup, it’s the map. KotD is boring because it’s just arabia. All single map 1v1 tournaments ate boring in my opinion. It might be a controversial opinion, but I think they should always include multiple map types in 1v1 tournaments. Have open maps, closed maps, semi-open maps, hybrid maps, all of them.
If you want open map tournaments, have at least some variety of those, not just arabia. You’ll see a lot more diversity that way.
there is more to the game than 1v1 arabia. you don’t have to recommend changing the whole game every single time that particular scenario gets boring for spectators
xbow being overpowered in low-resource games (eg. arabia) and underpowered in 200-population post-imp games is just inherent to a unit that costs so little and has no effective counters. the problem of insufficient resources to produce anything else is an arabia problem, not a castle-age-cost problem
finally, your proposed fix doesn’t even fix the xbow spam problem. all we will do is make 1 fewer farm (saving 60 wood) and spend that villager-time on gold instead. the xbow timing will just get faster, especially in teamgames where DE added the idiotic setting that lets civs like mayans/britons guarantee that they’ll spawn in front 100% of the time