Given that mangonels unpack in about one second, are 100% accurate, have pretty good splash damage cause zero friendly fire and seem to have a very short minimum range, I find some people spamming them and being hard to counter. If I don’t have pretty buffed up heavy cav to soak some damage and get close to them, my whole army is gone. It takes a couple of well placed shots to obliterate low hp units.
It doesn’t help that in AoE IV, infantry likes to clump together to attack no matter the stance and that people usually surround their mangonels with pikemen so the only good counter is neutralized. I don’t find springalds having sufficiently good range or being good for anything else to be worth wasting resources on them.
I believe that just by making their pack/unpack animations significantly slower that’d be a good nerf.
People complained about the nest of bees during the betas but I feel like the mangonels are just as OP. Thoughts?
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They’re not 100% accurate they’re actually one of the few things that CAN be dodged in this game. They are strong but they cost a lot and are vulnerable if not properly protected so there is a risk that comes with them too.
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They are very strong, but springalds completely nullify them.
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I really thought they were fully accurate as other ranged units. Then I suppose the projectiles are too fast.
Yeah, I’ve heard people also spamming springalds but I guess I can’t use them properly because they fire on whatever the hell they want (a f… priest for example) and I have to micro too much to target the mangonels and since those unpack and fire so fast, my army is gone and my springalds are now alone and easily taken down.
Unit auto-targeting is a real s… show in this game. Games are often too dictated by a siege arms race, not strategy. I don’t feel like being too strategic wins the day in this game. It’s mostly a combination of locking resources and some few lucky shots/engagements.
It’s still fun at times but too often I feel like I’m just throwing lots mixed units at my enemies in hopes that somehow I come out victorious facing a equally random mix of opposing units.
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I think another problem with the battles is the lack of defensive stance which makes microing almost impossible. The troops engage a head on clash and it is like a meat grinder afterwards.
Using spread formation or line formation are the easiest way to make mangonel shots less impactful. That and having a group of horsemen hotkeyed and using them to rush in and take out any siege weapons.
Perhaps that’s it too. In AoE II I feel like I have more granular control of what my units should be attacking and when. I can really apply strategy to the battle. I don’t feel like I have that control in AoE IV and from watching some matches in YouTube I see similar engagements.
Meat grinder as you put it is exactly how I feel battles unfold.
Spread formation is fine if you’re caught off base by mangonels moving across the map, but once units start fighting, they forget their formation and bunch up. You have to keep separating them and good luck if you didn’t CTRL+group them beforehand. Somebody said that units in AoE IV behave like a liquid and that’s true.
Well yes, you have to practice microing your units in the battles, especially if they have a mangonel in the back. I find double-clicking a unit type to grab them all works decently if they weren’t already control grouped.
Completely agree, they track units with 100% accuracy until the last moment they fire, it makes it very difficult to dodge, especially when there are a couple firing. They are also way to fast in both speed and in packing/unpacking.
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Mangonels are badly designed in this game… Is stupid that you cannot avoid the shot… yet mangoes is the only counter to gunpowder units at tier IV
Well I’d you have 3 you only need 1 bflig shot and that’s it full wipe
I think mangonels gain the impression of being op since they are a hard counter to all infantry and a soft counter to horse archers. I recall seeing a similar post calling on how “op” Chinese grenades are because of their aoe damage. I think the main problem is that people clump up units and don’t utilize spreading out or counters. When your group of 30 archers gets deleted by 4 mangonels, that is because you are using a tier 2 unit vs a tier 3 unit which is designed specifically to kill those units. This isn’t in the same vein as fully upgraded French knights destroying their main counter, spearmen. Now if mangonels easily destroyed springalds and cannons, then we have a serious problem.
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Personally, I think Mangonel is a bit overpriced for what it can actually do. Many people claim that it has 100% accuracy but in reality it doesn’t. There are few ranged units in AOE4 which do not have 100% accuracy. Mangonel is one of them. Its shot can be dodged(or missed). It’s just not as easy as AOE2.
To further explain about my opinion I will talk about specific stats and compare it to AOE2 version. AOE4 Mangonel fires 3 projectiles per shot, each of them dealing 12 dmg. AOE2 Mangonel fires 5 projectiles per shot. However its damage is not evenly spread. Only 1 projectile does 40 dmg while other 4 projectiles does 1 dmg.
Now let’s say that your target has 3 ranged armor. In AOE2, dmg from 4 minor projectiles will be still counted as 1 dmg per each because of dmg calculation and main projectile will deal 37 dmg, which sums up to 41 dmg if every projectile lands perfectly. In AOE4 however, the target will only take 27 dmg because armor value applies to each projectile separately.
AOE4 Mangonel has far better chance to hit than AOE2 Mangonel, so 27dmg per shot might seem too much but the thing is the relative HP value of every unit has been significantly bumped up compare to AOE2. Generic AOE2 archers have 45 HP when they are fully upgraded which means even 1 Mangonel shot can be super deadly and I don’t think I have to mention about Onagers(upgraded Mangonel). Fully upgraded AOE4 archers on the other hand, have 95 HP. Which means it would take at least 4 Mangonel shots to take at least 1 archer down. So Mangonel shots are much less punishing than AOE2 even if it has higher accuracy.
Because of this reason, units with high armor such as Knight/Lancer/MAA/Elephants can shrug off Mangonel shot as if it is nothing. Fully upgraded Knight only takes 12 dmg from 1-perfectly-landed Mangonel shot and you all know how much HP does Knight have. So AOE4 Mangonels are only good against units with low armor and even that seems unconvincing because of the generally high HP values.
So I would say Mangonels are not OP. In fact, I would go further and say they are a bit waste of good resources as of right now.
Sprinol, bombard and culv hard counter them , so they r perfectly fine . And u can easily run away from them . They are rather waste of resources if ur opponent has brains to make sprinol.
There is this tactic of literally moving your town center, and raiding with it.
While moving your stuff is a core Mongol feature… having a huge mobile tower, that moves, has a shite ton of hp, and can do so from the start of the game, seems op.
I played a few more games and looked more closely at what happens and I now somewhat agree that mangonels are not OP, but AI logic and other factors make them OP under certain scenarios:
– Mangonel projectiles are hard to see when in-flight. In general the game lacks siege projectile readability (hello trebs) but since you can technically dodge mangonel fire, you should be able to more clearly tell the trajectory. For the exaggerated use of smoke in this game, I find its use in “tracer” shots seriously lacking.
– Units clump together no matter the formation. This is especially infuriating when you are close to an enemy defensive structure and all of your army rallies to attack one single tower. In customary AoE logic it goes like: “Tower is firing at that one single knight? ALL MEN ATTAAAAAAACK!!!”. A couple well-placed enemy mangonels taking advantage of this AI stupidity can decimate your army. We really need functioning stand-ground, defensive and offensive stances, or at least seriously reworking that aspect of the AI. I find myself usually leading with siege to take down enemy defensive structures, Game of Thrones Season 8 style.
– Mangonel counters like springalds do not focus fire on their specialty. I haven’t really figured out what they prioritize (nearest unit? specific unit type? etc), but they seem to love targeting monks and villagers. This is made worse for the fact that if you have 5 springalds, all 5 of them fire at the same single unit, overkilling it and wasting precious reload time. This is also an AI problem.
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