Cav needs a nerf! its all over reddit

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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The game has turned into a cavalry race. Infantry feels almost useless right now. You end up with slow units chasing cavalry around the map while they freely raid villagers with very little punishment.

I have over 3,000 hours in Age of Empires IV and I genuinely love this game, which is why this is so frustrating. The current cavalry balance, especially the new “super cav”, feels completely overtuned and unhealthy for the meta.

When it takes three spearmen to reliably deal with a single cavalry unit, that is not a real counter. That is a losing trade in cost, population, mobility, and map control. Spearmen are supposed to counter cavalry, but in practice they cannot keep up, cannot force engagements, and often still lose efficiency unless massively overproduced.

Right now, the game rewards mass cavalry far more than mixed army compositions or strategic diversity. Infantry-based playstyles are being pushed out because they simply cannot respond effectively to the speed, durability, and raiding power of cavalry.

This does not feel like healthy balance. It reduces strategic depth and makes matches feel repetitive — whoever commits harder to cavalry gains map control and momentum.

I am not complaining because I dislike change. I am complaining because I care about the long-term health of the game. Cavalry needs meaningful counterplay again.

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I feel it something sort of a map design problem. In 1v1 it seems fine. But in TG (especially 4v4 I think), most of the maps become huge and open, which leaves mass cav naturally the optimal strategy. So I think it might be a viable solution if we can have some new maps designed specifically for infantry to shine among current maps?

(e.g. smaller team map with hourglass like topology, with only one chokepoint between 2 teams)

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Just fix spear brace so it doesn’t go on cooldown when cancelled. Then tweak spawn points on big team game maps so everyone is closer together.

It feels totally fine in 1v1. Maybe a couple specific cav units could use a nerf

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Isn’t the issue with team games that they are classified 1 size larger than they are meant to? At least it feels that way. It encourages more casual, defensive play due to the travel length it takes to be aggressive, so the result is that people boom for the first few minutes then go all in on massive Heavy Cavalry armies, roaming player to player.

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Cav will always be good specially in the team games where you need to move long distance.There are ways to balance it.

Option 1:Adding towers ability to call spear militia.They will have hp of the villager but attack of the spearman.It will cost 100 food to summon them and they will have death timer also cant able to leave the area of tower and will cost no population.They will spawn if you purchased an upgrade in the tower for arrow upgrade 2 militia,for springald 3,for bombard 4 militia.

Option 2:Lowerin cavs siege attack so they cant burn down defences immediatly.

Option 3:Adding towers a good anti cav attack.

Option 4:Making all spearman Abbasid spearman so they can attack with longer reach.

Option 5:Adding crossbows a special tech that incerase damage against knights so they can snipe them down but this one also broke the game.

Like the comments says this is mostly a team game issue and if you dont go cav and raid you usually lose.

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I thought maps had that issue and they fixed it a while back.

Even in custom games when you use the “correct” size they are very big for 3v3 and 4v4.

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Maybe a buff to the spearman bonus to Cav? That way it doesn’t over power their harass ability early on but does make them again the best counter to cavalry?

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Essentially a +20 instead of the +17 bonus damage as a way of making it slightly more effective

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I feel like inf total is useless. Its mostly cav spam and archer spam

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I don’t think there is something insanely wrong with Cavalry besides that we have too many civilizations that focuses on it. There is something to be said about the notion that Knights have been designed to simply be an all-powerful unit, which they are in AoE2 as well. The problem simply stems from how many civilizations get Knight +, making them even beyond amazing for cost/production rate and somewhat breaking the counter system in the regard that it takes far more effort to deal with them than reverse.

As is the case with any counter system, it is a fine balance. Making counters too powerful will defeat the purpose of gold units, and so, they ought to have some kind of advantage. So again, I imagine how accessible and cheap some of these Knights are, being a large part of why they feel like such a scourge in this game.

However, that subreddit is a festering wound that cannot stop complaining. The AoE4 community is a very whiny one, and instead of creating content like art, cinematics, stories, theories, essays, they simply cannibalize and complain. I imagine this to be because AoE4 so heavily focuses on multiplayer with little whimsical fun, PvE and creative tools being neglected, leaving only sweaty players to complain about their sweaty games. There used to be better content before, but they’ve fallen off over the years. I think it is terrible that the only content that AoE4 has in abundance of, are commentators, but that is what happens when you neglect to appeal to anyone but multiplayer fanatics.

So, what is there left to do when the game’s lasting memory only extends to the balance of your last multiplayer game? You complain about what happened in that game, of course. If the game served other means to enjoy yourself, perhaps there could’ve been a wider community focusing on other parts of the game, but as it stands, the entire community always falls in line with every new complaint that is being posted every week, because they’re all of the same dreaded mind.

There are no other micro-communities within AoE4. There used to be people posting their own civilizations, sometimes people taking screenshots, very rarely someone posting artwork, and with the likes of Age of Noob and Chilly Empire offering more extensive analysis on history, art and finer mechanics. But, no, all we have now are “pro” players making “content” (playing the game for the trillionth time wow).

For such a good game, the community is terrible. I entirely, entirely put the blame on Microsoft dropping the ball on launch by not delivering critical features like a proper editor and focusing too much on multiplayer above anything else.

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Even Reddit users are tired of these topics:

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Maybe an extra +3 against specifically “heavy cavalry”.

I don’t think spearmen need a buff vs horsemen.

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Okay that would be interesting if it was some.type of different bonus depending on the cav type, heavy vs light?

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Reddit dont represent the majority of playerbase

The brace for spears should not be cancellable for a start

Issue is they added too much variants, which all of them focus on Cavalry

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I feel Sengoku actually has very interesting infantry (like ikko-ikki monk and kanobu samurai), yet mounted samurai too strong making it a “cav civ” (Japanese is actually supposed to be an infantry civ I think)

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