Atm the spears “thrive” through their absurdly high damage output against the cavalry.
But what about if this damage output would be reduced and instead replaced by taking less damage?
This could be especially interesting for the interaction with Elephants as with a good implementation spears could have no extra bonus damage against Eles but instead just take a lot less damage from them. This would allow the ele player to mix in some other unist to deal with the Spears. Archers, Monks, Skirms, HC, Infantry…
On the other side it could also make it a bit harder to pick off smaller groups of pikes with Knights in the midgame as they would naturally resist a bit of the Knights damage outpost, giving the Pike player time to reinforce.
I could imagine a tech “Spear formation” that would be available in feudal and gives all the spear units some “anti-armor” against the differen types of melee cavalry. The tech would be kinda costly for feudal so it’s usually only a real choice when you are aloready on the way op to castle age.
And ofc to set this off, pikes and halbs would have less bonus damage against the different cavalry types.
Ok, that sounds interesting… axtually I would make the intersction with elephants the opposite… pikes take.less damage from regular cavalry, but full damage from eles…
So you like the current interaction between pikes and eles?
I think the pikes just deal too much damage too the “chonkers”. Why do yoe even make these fatties if they melt even fater to pikes than knights?
if you remove spear damage bonus and give them armor against cav, they would be useless because they would take forever to kill cav with their pityful damage and the masisve cav HP. atm spears are good against cav because if you position them well or manage to force the issue, they will punish them hard. with this change, even if you struggle ahrd to force the fight, cav would get what? 4 damage from pikeman? not even worth the bother then
Imho spears work best when protecting other units: Their huge damage actually forces the opponent to engage the spears first, before attacking the more valuable targets they protect.
Giving more survivabilty to spears in exchange for some of their damage might work out, but in most engagements id argue it would be a nerf. E.g. pike+siege would probably not be viable anymore, because hussar can just snipe the siege. Spears will also have a tough time protecting monks, and so on.
So overall, this change would buff spears when used “the wrong way”, and nerf them when used together with other units. Since i prefer diverse army comps, I think this would overall be a bad change.
I speak about giving them 2 cav armor and remove 4 anti-cav damage (possibly a bit more for halbs, but halbs have more interactions and there’s a lot of tecks not all civs have access too, so I need to check all these interactions to make a good call). Againt Eles on the other hand they could possibly get even a total of 5-6 reduced damage but to set this off almost completely remove the bonus damage against them.
So it’s not like completely shifting over the counter mechanic, just a tweak to the sheer damage ouput. Reducing it by less than 20 % against the normal cavalry.
It’s really only a tweak, not something completely changing the interactions. And it solves aswell the issue with the Knight powerspike that spears look very u####### At least it gives the feudal player a tech to make the spears a bit better.
I had this Idea once myself. But probably it’s best to “safe” this for new infantry units like the kamayuk? WIth the complicated micro around using the +1 range the most effective it might actually be better suited for a new infantry unit, as this would mean it has a “learning curve”, so despite being slow and having only little range higher ranked players can still use it better because of the hard 1 range micro.
The slight nerf to pike/siege (in the lategame) is actually intended. It’s one of the most abnoxious combos to deal with and a lot of civs don’t have a good answer to it (others have super strong answers in UUs like Byzantines).
BTW I think 1 range to spear line could be an interesting civ bonus for a civ lacking some of the other upgrades.
And speaking of upgrades with having these 3 upgrades instead of the current 2 it allows for a more “gradual” adjustment of the Spear lines on individual civs. Likesome civs could get Halb but miss spear formations and others could even miss Pike (gurjaras, turks) but get spear formations, so the line isn’t completely useless.
But it’s intended to be the “weakest” of the spear line upgrades. At least how I see it.
Halberdiers are already very strong, they don’t need this kind of massive buff, or any buff. Pikeman was the weak part, but they just got buffed in cost. We’ll see if it’s enough
I don’t think that the spear line needs this sort of change, though I could see it being applicable to other units. The Spear-line (as it currently is) is very effective at guarding other units from cavalry. Survivability at the cost of bonus damage would actually hurt them in that role.
Now, I could see Condottieri getting resistance against gunpowder units (they’re supposed to be an anti-gunpowder unit, but in my experience are hard-countered by Janissaries and Conquistadors and still take a large amount of damage from hand cannons). Samurai, I think, would also benefit from receiving less damage from other unique units (this would help keep them viable against the champion buffs). So there are other units that would really benefit from a mechanic like this.
I don’t like the idea of changing pikes / halbs. They already have a big weakness in their lack of mobility and weakness to ranged units, other infantry, castles/TCs/towers and microed Steppe Lancers. Even Cavalier/Paladin can overwhelm them with numbers advantage, especially if your pike/halb line tech tree is lacking any upgrades.
Their only purpose is to counter cavalry / be a meat shield for other units. If you mess with that balance, then high mobility civs will just dominate. Elephants need support units. The whole point of this game is creating a well balanced army, not single units. If you want to play single units, play team games only and get your team mates to cover your weaknesses. Otherwise you need to make support units. E.g. Elephants, scorpions, skirms or any kind of Gold unit/siege/trash composition which suits your civ.
Elephants are supposed to be a game finishing unit. The best way to use them is to start with ranged units as an opening, making him counter with skirms or mangonels. Hide your stables either in your base or somewhere sneaky on the map like the corners where your opponent won’t look. Build up your elephant numbers from multiple stables and get all your upgrades. Pre-attack him first somewhere with your ranged units left over and force him to react to your crossbow. He will then move his army over to that side of his base to defend. Meanwhile you send your 30 or 40 fully upgraded elephants to the opposite side of his base. If he’s not paying attention, he won’t realise the 2nd attack notification is somewhere else in his base and by the time he realises it will be GG. If he hasn’t scouted your stables, he won’t have tech switched into pikes/halbs so even when he sees your elephants arriving he won’t have time to transition into them. Obviously if you do scouts / knights opening it will be easier for him to counter your elephants because he will already have pikes + monks on the field.
If Halberdier have +1 range, maybe its base damage would be decrease and keep the bonus damage againist cavalry. Just like what they did in Chakram Thrower
For example
Spearman +0 range same stat
Pikeman +0 range same stat
Halberdier +1 range and same attack stat as pikeman which is 6->4
This is totally unchanged. I only change the interaction with melee cavalry.
And this I think needs to change. Especially in the midgame with Knights vs Pikes. If
they need to be good at that job, ain’t they? When a unit literally only has one job, but effectively struggles in performing that one single job it has an issue. And that’s one of the aspects I try to tackle here.
With the current high mobility abuse meta it became more and more difficult to protect all the vulnerable spots with the pikes, as when you need to split them they can be picked off by the Knights too easily. And this is exactly what is targeted in this idea. That you can split them up more to prodect more vulnerable spots. Meaning in the result also less requirement of valling or building up base layouts which only can be described as anti-raiding with multiple TCs so close to each others their shooting radii basically overlap already. Often not enough farms to keep them all running, but it’s more important to have that “protection” first.
A protection that should be achievable with Pikes, don’t you think? And thr reason for that isn’t that Pikes would be “bad” vs cavalry. Just that’s impossible to split up enough of them to the vulnerable spots to buy enough time for the “main force” to get there and turn the fight into the favor of the pike player. Also don’t forget that this play needs a lot of attention from the Pike player aswell as he needs to assess all the vulnerbale spots and have enough pikes at each of them to at least buy enough time for his main force. And he needs to make sure the main force never gets “out of position”.
So this idea is to give the Pikes back their role to defend against Knight raids effectively and we aren’t forced to make these anti-raid bases anymore.
When the Bases are designed more like they were formerly with good expansion, map control and ressource access, their is also more “opportunity” to raid. And therefore more military interaction. More skill involved.
So the Balance is already messed up? Cause that’s what currently happening.
What the heck are you talking about? First the game is way more than creating a “well balanced army”. And atm the one unit that is basically it’s own “composition” is actually Knights. Except against Camels they are faster than anything that can threaten them so they can even outmanouver the Pikes as described and beat them up in small groups. And I don’t make Pikes better in any other matchup than against Cavalry, so pikes also aren’t getting anyway close of being a mono-unit comp.
I have no idea what you want to refer to here, but the whole passage is weird.
What? Who said that? First I disagree. Second I don’t think a mono-unit design should ever accomplish that. That’s silly.
Really? Do you want to tell me “how to use eles”? That’s absurd. You can believe me I tried a lot of stuff to “make eles work”. But figured out very fast:
Eles don’t give you anything that Knights don’t give you. But vice versa they lack so much in mobility. And that’s just enough to make them fall behind a lot in the midgame as - unless you have a big mass of them what is very expensive - you can’t really deal eco damage with them. At the same time they can’t even run away from their counters which for some instance counter them even more than the Knights.
And that’s one part of the Puzzle that is “fixing eles” for me. Yes Eles need the Pikes/Halbs as counter. Cause every unit needs one. But when Eles could just “hold the line” a bit better than the Knights it would give the opportunity to the composition partners to reversely deal damage to the Pikes. That would be one of possible advantages of the Eles, that they would synergize a bit tbetter with the composition partners like the mentioned archers, skirms, HC, Scorpions, Militias, Monks…
And on the other hand possibly die even a bit harder when sent in alone against a full Pike/Halb spam (just slower).
Also I want to adress that “pikes/halbs protecing siege” narrative we have here. Casue for me they are even already a bit “too good” in that regard. We see it with the Houfnice / Halb combo. In my opinion it’s a bit “too easy” to protect the Siege against cavalry with the Halbs. We often say that “A lot of civs struggle against Halb/Siege”. And that’s certainly true. I want to reduce that a bit. And one way to do so is to reduce the sheer damage output of the halbs vs cavalry. Giving the Cavalry more chance to snipe the siege,
It’s jsut a little tweak, but it would take off the dominance of these kind of comps in the lategame a bit. Just a bit, so other types of army comps are a bit more competitive there.
Again, we see it on the Halb/Houfnice comp (which is only marginally better than the halb/BBC comp a lot of other civs have already), how overcharged this combo is already in the lategame that just 2 marginal civ specific bonusses can bring it “over the top”. And for balance sake this is a clear indicator that the synergy between halbs and siege is “too good” at the moment. And needs to be adressed.
I don’t claim that my way of adressing it is “perfect”. But I think it is a good “tradeoff”. As It would nerf the currentl Knight powerspike in the midgame and therefore giving cav a bit better utility in the lategame against siege would compensate for that.
And I think that they are a bit too good in that role but for some weird reason lack in their main purpose: Protect eco against cav raids, especially in the midgame.
I would like if there was an alternative upgrade like “Billman” that would basically just do what you describe there, available to some civs like Britons instead of Halberdiers. Just to have a bit more variety there.
But most notaböy these would actually be even better in protecting siege, so they only should be given to civs which don’t have the best siege, otherwise we wil have the houfnice effect again.
The key point being, a game finishing unit, when you’re already ahead. Like a forward castle when you’re already on the way to imp. Not a hail Mary attempt to get back in the game. Plus you ignored the context of having secret stables your opponent has not scouted and thus hasn’t prepared pike/halb/monks to defend.
Pikes/Halb have just had a buff with their upgrade cost and research time with the latest update. Let’s see what happens after a few months with the new infantry
It would be nice if eles would be a bit more like that in the midgame tbh.
Atm it’s right the other way around. Knights are that type of unit in the midgame. Eles are just to slow to pose any eco threat so the opoonent is often just fine adding more eco and only care about the eles when he has that eco lead to pump out whatever he wants.
Not even that 11. Cause they are too costly to get into. You usually are just better off with deleting vills and add more of the stuff you already doing.
I see that ele floods are sometimes the “dream” for low elo players that want to have that “unstoppable force”. Butif the design is around this that automatically means that they need to lack so much on other ends that they become basically useless for higher ranked games.
I mean it would be ok if devs communicates that like that: “Eles aren’t designed for competitive play” or something like that. But then the Ele civs also need something in compensation for lacking one major aspect of their design in competitive play.
I also made several proposals on different other threads how I think Eles could be “tweaked” so they become more useful in competitive without affecting low elos much (speed charge eg).
But how they are designed atm it also requires the pikes to have super high bonus damage against them in the midgame as a some civs lack halberdier and the chonkas are just so pop efficient that you need really a lot of pikes to stop an ele pussh there. And if it wasn’t like this we would see a lot of “civ wins” in the lategame as these civs lacking halb wouldn’t have an answer to that mentioned ele flood.
A unit that can’t be really countered just doesn’t has a place in competitive AOE. Maybe it’s a dream for some casuals with a certain mindset, but competitively it’s just not possible.
You can buff pikeman stats without any trade off tbh. Let’s just see how cheaper pikeman upgrade works.
I don’t think that is their main purpose. And there are a lot of other suggestions have been proposed to nerf knight rush - TC getting bonus damage against them, a weaker version of “Tigui” UT, more MA for houses and walls to name a few.
