Essentially, cav archer types switching from wood cost to food cost will allow cav archer types better ability to save on wood and focus more heavily on the cheaper long term food ratio. Foot archers would remain as wood cost ‘trashy’ archers, while the cav archers remain the premium mobile variant. It will also help balance raids from cav archer types by making their up time, and/or research time a little harder and longer to do all at once in exchange for having their mobility as the cavalry they are.
Basically cav archers lose the ability to be spammed while aging and teching quickly in exchange for better long term sustainability in the end-game which is scarier and more efficient.
It also frees up wood for wood-based units such as halbs/skirms/siege instead of doubling/tripling/etc down on wood-based units which hurts the endgame longevity.
This goes for all cav archers and cav archer type unique units.
Massive change, not hugely balanced, and also doesn’t fit with the idea that all arrow units cost wood and gold. Skirms throw spears, so they don’t count in the same way, but all archer units except hand cannons should have a wood cost.
10 Likes
You’re killing CA this way, making them relying on big farming eco just like Knights HOWEVER unlike Knights they need tons of upgrades on top of it. Basically good bye to any win condition going all-in CA.
Another OCD post, “this goes for all CA and CA type unique units”, why? enough of the OCD, game deserves diversity.
9 Likes
CAs are the unit that has the biggest need to be massed and that needs the most upgrade in castle age to be effective.
Let’s start with the first part: archers can be massed from the feudal age, which means you are going to have a good mass of crossbows in castle age. This is good for two reasons:
- You can upgrade your feudal army
- Ranged units need to be massed
Now, cavalry archers can’t be massed in feudal, and this usually means that you are going to need three archery ranges to mass them faster. This also means your eco is going to be bad, since you are spending ALL your wood into CAs, which means no extra tc or farms.
On top of that, you need:
- bodkin arrow
- thumb ring
- balistics
- husbandry
- bloodlines
- +1 def
This means that to make them strong you need a huge investment in them, while also having a weaker eco comparing to someone going xbows/kts. Xbows will give you more mass early and you are going to need less investment, since all you need is +2 atk, +1 def and balistics. Kts won’t have the mass advantage, but are simply the better unit till the CAs are not massed.
By changing their cost to food, you are making a unit that already requires a big commitment, unplayable in castle age.
Why do we need to change a unit that is not even close to overpowered?
8 Likes
What exactly is this meant to solve? Cav archers cant be “spammed while aging” anyway, unless you are talking about from Castle age to Imp? In which case you are not usually spamming cav archers anyway.
2 Likes
I think so CA can be used in team games where wood runs out and all eco is based on trade.
1 Like
Same for when wood runs out in 1 vs 1 and armies become reliant on what food remains and gold powered by relics.
Youre killing their potential for most normal games that end before wood is an issue to make them more viable in the 0.001% scenarios where wood runs out
5 Likes
Which is not a common occurrence
Which is also not a common occurrence.
Let me ask you again, why do we need a change that addresses a scenario that almost never happens and that, at the same time, massively nerf the viability of the unit in castle age?
They are already balanced: you need to sacrifice eco to mass produce them and make them useful
4 Likes
Even knight civs upgrade their archer techs for their eco defenses - to a degree, archer civs get their army techs and eco defense techs in a buy one get one free bundle.
This would be a huge nerf to huns, and archers civs in genreal. Suddenly, the Mayans (horse archers in the huns case) will be really bad civs due to this.
That’s mostly a problem easily fixed and centered around individual in-game eco management; It’s both a problem caused by and fixed by the same thing.
In the Mayans case, their foot archer(cav archer speed) can remain wood cost in my books.
In the Huns case, this would streamline their military to be mostly food based which would actually help their eco setup to be even more noob friendly and also fairly consistent in how they’re setup so as to allow their eco to fund most of their units by focusing on the better longevity tool that is food over wood and it would help their eco in the long run.
@BomberGriffin
The Huns need to rush to stop someone like the Teutons geting into the late game. The whole point is to rush you, and end the game early. Same case for the Mayans. Mayans for example are doomed facing late game Goths.
Having archers cost food would weaken these civs really badly.
Foot archers would remain wood cost.
This will generally effect civs starting in mid-late castle age and into imperial age with the cav archer change, so the early game goal really doesn’t change beyond changing up eco setups for castle age+ comps after the initial archer rush is done or other reasons or if foot archers are no longer the goal and a transition is made to another unit such as cav archers or knights or both, etc.
In Huns’ case, having an eco both suited for knights/Tarkans and cav archers would actually help them raid and boom, but with improved consistency and balance in where their eco focus will be placed.
In my books it’s an effective buff towards Huns. It may change how they’re played eco-wise, but their military endeavors will become much more flexible thanks to such a change that allows them to switch their composition on a dime without heavily investing villagers into different resources beyond what’s needed.
I think Hussar +Cav archers is a good late game composition. If you change the wood cost, the food cost for this composition is much higher and harder to achieve.
In the late game it may become even easier to achieve this as well as easier to maintain, as instead of running out of wood too early you’ll focus even heavier into farms which will power both the cav archers and the scout-line or simply take the rule into account to not lose units faster than one can spam them or keep them pop capped funds-wise. What you’re referring to matters more in the early stage when one is spamming them out initially rather than just keeping them up after pop capping, and spamming initially is mostly an eco thing; you’ll tend to have enough food if focused on mainly food rather than sending more vills heavily into the woodlines.
But food is obtained from farm, which requires you time and wood. In other words, you need more time to gather more food while wood from lumberjacks can be used to train Cav archers immediately currently.
1 Like
Often times not just saving wood for farms can lose the game in the long run. The wood is better off being used for farms and increasing the longevity of military and eco endeavors. Just because the wood is there and can be used ‘now’ doesn’t mean it always should be. It is much better to keep up food production and if in need of quick gold sell food, not wood.(when market prices are at the bottom)
No, it is not. You are nerfing one of their castle options and streamlining the meta even more to the xbows/kts meta.
Changing their cost to food means they are harder to mass in castle age, and when CAs are not massed they simply suck.
Why are you not explaining your reasons for wanting to nerf the cavarly archer to the ground in castle age?
Games usually do not last that long, they are really rare. This is not a buff
4 Likes
It’s a nerf to archer mains who have the ability to age up quickly/(with consistent timing) even though they’re spamming early archers in feudal by reducing their ability to switch directly into cav archers without changing their eco setup in or near before castle age.
It is not necessarily a nerf to cav archer play.
And if it’s seen as so much of a nerf, then increase the accuracy of cav archers in castle age.
Overall this is a long term buff for cav archers, with or without an accuracy improvement.
It’s an eco setup nerf to foot archer mains that wish to switch directly into cav archers without changing their eco setup.
It is not a cav archer nerf.
It is an eco setup nerf for archer into cav archer play.
It is a buff for cav archer and food focused military play. (Huns/Mongols/Tatars, etc)
And it pushes those heavily investing into foot archers to either change their lategame eco to switch unit focus or to simply focus on those foot archers into the end-game like most normally do anyways.
Finally, it helps to balance archer into cav archer play by effectively putting a cost that archer players will have to actually switch up and account for in their eco management to pull off.