There are 2 units in the game that have been removed from the Chinese techtree Bow Cavalry and Qing Rider, both are fully functional in the Scenario editor, have their own stats and attack bonuses. The Bow Cavalry doesn’t receive Medium/Heavy/Champion upgrades from neither Cavalry nor Archers but the Qing Rider does get Cavalry Upgrades and even has the visual changed for those upgrades.
The Bow Rider has bonus damage vs. Infantry and Archers, which seems pretty strong for a ranged unit.
The Qing Rider has bonus damage vs. Archers like you would expect from a cavalry.
I wonder how late in development those 2 units were cut from the game. Maybe the Chinese originally had unique units for each Major God like the Greeks? I could see the Tiger Cavalry and ChoKuNu being unique units. The White Horse Cavalry kinda looks like it filled the gap of both removed units to some degree.
It would be strange for one Major god to have a human unique unit when the other two don’t.
Also if they would have planned to use them in the future they would have likely not made them accessible in the Editor.
It’s really cool to see them not scrapping the units and giving us access to them in the editor instead. I wish they did that with Extended Edition the units that were removed in Retold too.
Hippocrates, Khopesh Swordsman, Bogsveigir and Onager could all be really useful in a lot of scenarios.
I don’t think most people miss the remove Chines units from Tale of the Dragon though.
They are used in the opening cutscene of the Campaign Mission 6: Reality’s Collapse. I hope it can be useful for some future Mythic Battles or custom scenarios at the very least.
Damn, it sucks that these were removed. I was really looking forward to a horse archer especially. It feels odd that China doesn’t have access to any cavalry units until the Heroic Age.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the files, it looks like Bow Cavalry is upgraded with cavalry upgrades but visually changes with archer upgrades. I guess they never implemented it properly.
I’m kinda torn about how much I like the Chinese units.
I like their Classical Age units and generally limiting Cavalry in Classical Age is kinda of an AoM thing. It’s not supposed to play like a Cavalry heavy game for the most part unlike AoE2 or AoE4.
But some units are just kinda too similar.
The Fire Archer and Cho Ku Nu feel like they fulfil the same role. Yeah the Fire Archer does a little more damage against buildings and has a little more bonus vs. Infantry but that doesn’t feel too different.
The 2 cavalry units also feel like similar. The Tiger Cavalry is mostly just better then the White Horse one and they even cost less Gold which makes them more affordable in the late game.
I don’t think that another generic cavalry unit would have made it any better.
The Bow Cavalry would also compete with 2 already existing archer units.
Maybe if the Cho ku no and the 2 cavalry units should have been unique units while the Qing Rider and Bow Cavalry are the generic ones.
Oh ok interesting.
I hope they fix that, even if the unit is not actually trainable. A useful asset for custom scenarios.
