I dont understand why people think spanish is a weak civ. They have fu blacksmith, fu stable,fu barrack,fu dock,nearly fu uni,fu monastery, average bonuses. Spanish is not a weak civ!
The main point about why conqs are too strong is, conq does not have a mobile counter. Maybe cav archers counter but they need many upgrades(ballistic,balcksmith upgrades etc). Maybe nerfing the main attack damage of conq and giving it a bonus damage can balance.
Spanish bonuses arent nowhere near average…compared to any other civ except maybe Goths their bonusds suck. At least Burmese have some decent savings and a good agressive man at arm opening, Spain has nothing
Because statistics are a thing and Spanish underperform on most maps.
Spanish is best late game civ thanks to FU trash units + blackmish tech cost no gold + supremacy but in early stage of the game, Spanish is very bad civ. There is no eco bonus in early game other than 30% faster building villager which is already weak eco bonus. Therefore, Spanish is trash until they get Castle and start to create Conqs but at this point, Spanish has very high percentage to die in early game.
I have to address some remarks I disagree with here:
Monks are a VERY inconsistent counter to Conqs because Monks have 9 range, realistically if you react late it can be even 8 when you click the convert. Conqs have 50% or so accuracy from 6 tiles range and only need 2 shots to kill a Monk without Sanctity. On average, 4 Conqs 1 shot a Monk before you even reach the MINIMUM conversion time, so essentially, most of the times, Monks don’t even get a chance to convert a Conq. Most notably, Conqs produce faster than Monks, each Monk is 100g also and gold is not a resource you necessarily wanna burn though so fast to counter a temporary power spike by the enemy. You also need like 3-4 Monasteries to compete with 1 Castle and that’s unreasonable as 4 Monasteries is 700 Wood (roughly same as 1 Castle).
If we add anecdotal evidence to this theory, I have yet to see a game where a FC Conqs all-in was successfully countered by Monks. Normally, when I saw Conqs lose in the past, it was in old iterations of Arabia where you could EASILY full wall and it was a mix of very good map for the defender and very good house walls stalling the Conqs long enough to allow the opponent to get to 20-30 Skirms.
No, Mangudai, when you get the first 6 out, if you go vs 3 fully upgraded Skirmishers, that’s a brick wall, you must run back. Conqs, 6 Conqs murder 3 Skirms. This early steamroll potential of low numbers vs low numbers is why Conqs is more lethal (specifically, +2 armor is useless vs Conqs but very good vs Mangudai as it drops their damage from 3 to 2 requiring 18 arrows to kill 1 Skirmisher). Conqs need 3 shots vs Skirmishers no matter the upgrades you do.
Arambai is a good example of a balanced UU, has situations where it’s strong but has a lot of drawbacks (awkward projectile, lack of +2 armor, comes in a civ with awkward tech tree…)
HCs are a good unit after the SPEED buff and the +5 HP, they are good now, just you can only start massing them in Imp and most people go for Arbalest (which you can mass in Castle Age), but if a game started in Imp, you’d see Handcannoneers way more.
this is just a lot of buzzwords “not just stats” etc. to basically force people to accept that Conqs should be kept as they are. It’s not like Spanish MUST play Conqs for the rest of the game, which your post seems to imply. They can easily transition to Knights (150f to get +1 armor, you probably already have Bloodlines from Conqs), Skirmishers (you probably have already the 1st archer armor, and you need only Fletching + Bodkin + E.Skirm)… transitions from Conqs when they fail (if they fail) are smooth, it’s far from impossible, it’s 1 of the smoother transitions for sure. You also pay no gold for Blacksmith.
Lots of words to say nothing in this post anyway.
War Wagons are also nasty, they do less damage, but are tankier… at least with War Wagons, your Skirms can’t get obliterated by 1 bad fight and the Conqs being micro’d with Z V (split formation) or 1 guy running in front of all to dodge shots. War Wagon is definitely borderline OP, maybe OP, but it has its disadvantages.
Janissary cannot run from 1 woodline to another and, if caught out of position by 10 Knights, dies. Knights, for example, are a strong Janissary counter in sufficient numbers, but they are not a Conquistador counter.
I don’t see the problem with Hussite Wagons, equal resources of Knights beat them iirc. Definitely they can be very annoying. I guess civs without redemption are at a loss here a bit. But you have roughly 3 counters: equal resources of heavy cavalry, Redemption Monks, Mangonels. Some of these counters aren’t perfect as we would wish (Mangonels), but it’s still better counters than what is available vs Conqs.
annoying also, sure, but again, no mobility. Dies to mass Knights. I understand there will be halberds protecting, sure, but at least they can’t run around the map like Conqs.
Turks are S tier on Arena because they get early powerspike in Imp due to free Chemistry (read: insta Bombard Cannons and not wait nearly 3 min more), and also their 200 pop desired comp, which is like 5 Bombard Cannons, 40 Sipahi heavy CA and the rest +1 PA Hussar (better than FU Hussar) is 1 of the strongest 200 pop comps in the game. Nothing to do with Janissaries which are rarely used in 1v1 games that aren’t for fun.
I see Arambai as a strong CD into UU unit. Conq is over the top. Projectile speed buff, now they never miss, they have insane HP, PA and melee armor and enough damage to make Skirm armor irrelevant. They did not need the projectile speed buff. Handcannoneers did but Conqs DID NOT.
most people judge off of past versions of Arabia, historically, Spanish were weak because they had no eco bonus (most civs get roughly ~200 resources one way or another through faster gathering, a free upgrade, etc.). They also cannot go Crossbows (which is also the strongest early Castle Age unit), so from a Spanish player you never need to fear an early Crossbow timing. Those are the 2 main reasons, but other than that, the rest of their tech tree more than compensates for these disadvantages should you be able to survive the early game (non-trivial).
They are better but they arent good. Theres a reason Bohemians barely make use of them
They are still way worse than arbs. Also Conqs are fine when compared to other UUs
Does anybody know why we don’t see as much conq + knight play anymore?
I mean that was pretty meta once and the units supplement each other almost perfectly. But in most cases if someone plays conqs he doesn’t adds knights usually. More often mangonels which take away the mobility component of the composition.
Was it ever a common comp? I mean knights don’t give you anything if your opponent plays xbows as on the eco you usually have when playing conqs you probably cant get high numbers. And also monks can convert both units. Plus both units cost similar res. Mangos by contrast are way easier to get out if you don’t have much eco and more effective vs ranged units.
Yep. At least on open maps. But probably more pre-de.
So what changed in de? Most likely the way we micro archers. The thing is pre DE it wasn’t as easy te evade bullets with the archers with the methods we currently use. Therefore the knight + conq combo was much more powerful as the archer had to decide to engage or run away. Currently they can basically do both at the same time.
One idea for a solution could be to give all bullets a straight line like the scorpions rather than how they work currently. That way a single direction could be avoided by archer micro, but not 2 different angles.
This would possibly make all gunpowder much more usable in fights, especially in bigger scale battles, where they currently suck.
(ofc this would mean for conqs that they need a small nerf somewhere else)
Why I talk about this is actually right the opposite as the TO claims. Conqs actually don’t get really better when your mass is too big already. They are basically the opposite of a “mass to win” unit.
And I think it’s somewhat ironic that these gunpowder units, the last class of unit to enter the game, are actually quite bad in mass unit battles. It’s just really weird design imo.
they are ultimately a counter-unit so you shouldn’t expect people to use them vs everything. They are better than Crossbows vs small Knights numbers and better vs infantry. The game has 2 general-purpose units, Knights and Archer-line, everything else is situational, complaining that HC aren’t good is like saying that Mangonels aren’t good vs Aztec Castle Age all-in.
you add Knights if you need to take care of Skirms or Mangonels, the problem is that people learned to micro so you can just split formation and deal with Mangonels with the Conqs.
As for Skirms, unless it’s overwhelming numbers, again Conqs trade cost-efficiently vs them, something like a 6v6 fight favors the Spanish with proper micro (or with any micro really, since Skirmishers to be effective need E.Skirm (230w 130g, especially 230w is a lot for early Castle age eco) and Ballistics (another 300w 175g). Conqs meanwhile need only Bloodlines (even that’s debatable).
It is just super expensive for a civ that has sacrificed their boom to get a castle up earlier
Or at least thats how I see it
Probably also. One of the things you want to achieve with conqs is a timing advantage over the other civ that needs to invest in bs upgrades, and even if spanish save there, they still have to pay a lot of food for the armor for their knights. Mangos on the other hand, like conqs, don’t need any tech investment.
I mean that’s also something we could possibly discuss about, why especially gunpowder units need almost no tech investment. I think we already had this in the HC thread I think. Wouldn’t it be a “solution” to add some gunpowder related techs that make gunpowder more viable for larger scale lategame battles?
The problem of gunpowder units is that they have generally high damage and low rof.
When their number is low they are extremely good because they can oneshot even the toughest unit, when their number is high they waste a lot of damage in useless overkills.
Just imagine you have 40 arbalesters and enemy sends 20 cavaliers to clear them. It’s perfectly fine if you focus fire all of them on the nearest cavalier, you’re wasting almost no damage. If you had 20 hand cannoneers on the other hand you’d wasting like 70% of your damage if you focus fired them at once. With other gunpowder units is even worse since they have even more damage output.
And if you don’t micro I believe they’d engage the nearest unit, wasting a lot of damage anyways.
This is not something you fix with a tech, it’s the unit design.
this is a good post. I want to add to it by saying that Elite Skirmisher is 1 of the hardest units to tech into right now. You are ALWAYS forced into E.Skirm. in early Castle Age, typically by Crossbow or CA play. At the same time:
I think many AoE2 pros discussed this, E.Skirm upgrade needs a buff, either less time to research, or lower resource cost, or cost resources that are less valuable in early Castle, such as maybe Gold and Food.
Definitely. Eskirm is very bad at the moment.
Wouldn’t say bad. Eskirm is an extremely strong powerspike in knight vs archer matchups. The problem there isn’t the eskirm itself but how it interacts with the main unit comp against cavalry.
In general skirms are actually quite bad unit, but it’s the way they interact in the unit counter wheel that makes them situationally very strong unit.
And if we neglect that situation in our approach we might make things only worse.
Eskirm see play in like 90% of high level matches and they were nerfed befpre because they were too good. They are just fine
yet Crossbow is hard meta at highest level and the 2nd best comp is probably Pike siege. Eskirm Knights are top 3 at best.
Literally every game which features any sort of archer unit features skirms. And thats A LOT
Im just saying that skirms were nerfed for a reason
Literally right now Viper won with Jannissaries the ww cup