The issue with Ballistics is that they miss any unit engaging with your own unit. When an enemy cavalry runs at your catapult, the catapult is going to fire at the spot where it thinks it’s going to be when the stone lands. This is going to be a miss because the cavalry stops to fight your unit. The stone, however, does not, it’s going to land right in the middle of your army, where the cavalry would have been if it had kept going. Not pleasant. This is going to keep happening for as long as the enemy is in your midst as well.
The other problem is that catapults will always fire at the first thing they see unless told otherwise(and if you have time to tell them fire at something specific, you could just groundfire instead so ballistics is worthless in that case anyway.) The problem is the first enemy they see, is not the one they should hit because of how units move around in Age of Empires. The first unit is almost always the head of a formation, alone. Ballistics help you to hit him, alone. Without ballistics the stones are going to land behind him, where the rest of the formation is, doing more damage.
That’s not to say there aren’t some cases where ballistics for catapults is not preferable. If you’re just attack moving your army of catapults without support units(because the rest of your army died or you left the catapults to take out the base after their army was dead or whatever) and there are some solitary(so single units, not a large formation) cavalry on attack move coming to take out your catapults, ballistics is going to prevent them from doing any damage. Without ballistics you would lose one catapult per one enemy cavalry in such a case. Obviously ballistics is preferable in a game this happens a lot.
Ballistics also enables your enemy to just do zigzag with his army and never get hit while approaching but if he has time to be doing that, you have time to be ground firing with your catapults so we can argue that it is a problem of player skill instead.
Most of the games are played on Fast speed, which makes it even trickier if the unit is moving.
Yeah okay, I might have wasted a page of text then. If you have problems hitting units while they are moving, don’t go priests. It’s doomed to fail horribly xD
BTW. There’s a trick you can do to attack move with priests that might help. Select a single soldier with your group of priests and you can use attack move to get the priests to auto-convert the closest enemy. Of course this means your group of priests are all going to convert the single target and run out of faith so it’s not a suitable trick for massed priests but if you only have a few with your (melee)army, it can come in handy.
How do you end up with that many villagers? I mean, if you get faster to Bronze and get more Town Centers then I get it, although it still seems too big a difference. But before Bronze Age isn’t it pretty much the same since everyone has 1 TC and the limitation is training time and not the amount of resources, since everyone has enough for constant villager production?
You don’t end up with quite that many villagers. You are absolutely correct in that TC work time, not food, is the limiting factor before Bronze Age. So instead you can have a faster bronze(with less villagers obviously) or a larger army. Let’s say basic 26 vil bronze chariot archer spam is your pick. With Shang you need 190 less food for this. That’s a pretty big thing because food is a slow gathering resource. In fact, if we want to translate that into villager time, it’s seven villager minutes of gathering food from perfectly placed berries next to a granary. And you can cash in on this from the start right after your seventh villager is done. Instead of six on berries for constant villager production, you only need five. This means you can gather wood earlier, which in turn means you pit faster and dock faster. So the difference ends up being a bit more pronounced than just that 190 resources, between 200-250 is a fair estimation depending on what you spend that villager time on. This means when you reach bronze you can afford two more chariot archers or an extra town center compared to your enemy. In an even game, that’s a huge difference.
The even bigger difference comes when in bronze and booming. You need six villagers and six farms for every town center to create constant villagers from it. Now with Shang you only need five villagers and five farms. That’s 75 resources and one villager you can use for something else for every town center you are booming from. For example, a basic 3 TC boom, you can afford one more archery range for making composite bowmen non-stop with that and still have some extra left. Or if the enemy has 4 TC boom, you can afford to do 5 TC boom and be (almost)equal on army. That’s little under 25%(22,58% to be exact) higher growth rate(75 more res needed than regular 4 tc boom.) That’s just a biiiiiiiiit insane if you think about it. So in a 250 pop cap game, when you’re at 100 vils shang player will be basically maxed out on his villager population(at 122/125.) Thus outbooming a shang player of equal skill simply does not work. Because of their strong bronze age tech tree, they are also very hard to stop early on. They don’t have any real weaknesses before the ultimate late game but by then they should be so far ahead nothing matters.
Hopefully this cleared up how the Shang advantage plays out on land maps. Naval maps the difference way smaller because it only applies to villagers, not fishing boats. There Minoans enjoy a similar position. Shang also has a mean tool rush but that’s not really a thing in your kind of games.
With Sumerians I sacrifice too much for faster-firing catapults. They lack too many things and while I’m no expert they do seem to be in need of a buff because I’m not sure what is it that they do that someone else doesn’t do better.
Catapults ^^
I see they likely nerfed Phoney’s wood ‘bug’ bonus to work as intended (and also slowed walking speed of Yamato and Assy, so some stronger civs from long ago got toned down a little) so Phoney is less overpowered with wood from 20 years ago
They didn’t fix that from 20 years ago, they fixed that 20 years ago in patch 1.0a/1.0c. Also when they nerfed Shang vils to 40 food from 35 and removed the last of the cheats from multiplayer.
What they did fix for this are all of the market techs though, so you shouldn’t put too much weight on them anymore. Craftmanship, for example is almost useless for only wood gathering now(because tree has 40 wood and is thus spent with 3 trips with Artisanship already.) Were talking increase of 9% total gathering rate(walking included) for 440 resources spent. Which means it’s more efficient to just make more villages to gather wood until you are hitting your max villager population(98 woodcutters if you had infinite popcap.) The same thing with woodworking, it’s only 12% increase but you want it because by then, you only have a single TC and it’s way cheaper(mathematically worth it at 31 woodcutters if you have multiple TCs.) Of course you get them for range anyway if going navy or archers.
Suddenly the Gold and Stone mining techs are the most important techs out of the market if you’re using either resource because they’re cheap and 30% gather rate translates almost perfectly to total gather rate because the pit is right there. Wheel of course still first thing you do if doing chariots or can’t build walls for some reason so you need the villager speed but for economy? Nope., It’s only worth it at around 100 vils because it gives you a total gather rate bonus from 0%(farms) to 7%(woodcutting). Better spend those resources on extra vils until that point. Coinage also got nerfed from 25% extra gold to 10% extra gold so while it’s still important, it’s a bit less of a rush tech than before and doesn’t hurt bronze gold civs quite as hard.
Yeah, Assyrian got nerfed to the ground. The villager speed bonus is negligible(4% faster wood from stragglers at the start, 1-2% faster wood from first pit on) and Hittite archers are just plain better now because they nerfed the extra fire rate to 25% from 40%. The Hittite tech tree is also better(although they got a few nerfs as well, no more Centurion, only 50% extra catapult hitpoint) with the only thing going for Assyrian being full tech priests and yeah, not a trade I’d take for worse everything.
Yamato is still pretty good. Cavalry has gotten way better due to attack move and they buffed the Cataphract pretty heavily. Of course Heavy Horse Archers are not quite as awesome as they were before because melee units have gotten so much better with attack move but they are still very good. A solid choice for any mobile map and still don’t get any siege worth mentioning. Their scout rush was nerfed indirectly by the better pathfinding for villagers though. A couple of scouts do nothing to a bunch of woodies because ten villagers will surround a scout and kill it before any vils die with one click now(yes, upgraded scout.)
How do you end up with that many villagers? I mean, if you get faster to Bronze and get more Town Centers then I get it, although it still seems too big a difference. But before Bronze Age isn’t it pretty much the same since everyone has 1 TC and the limitation is training time and not the amount of resources, since everyone has enough for constant villager production?
2) They’re gold intensive civ that’s pretty much done for when gold runs out. And in games with 5+ players that’s gonna happen now and then. Actually come to think of it, it’s just one major issue, the first one. The thing is, culturally speaking Babylon and Shang have many plus points, and I’m mostly trying to find a balance between playability and enjoyment, meaning that I’m willing to go for a bit weaker option from powergaming perspective if that means I’ll get more fun out of it. Of course, if the choice ends up being too weak to be enjoyable then I switch to something else.