Not actually. They even changed more than that. In Chronicles, Fire Ship(Trash Unit) is for countering siege and soft counter to war galley and thats it. Also Fire Ship was much slower in attack. Stats were more raw instead of weird bonus damage shenanigans rn.
Hulk counters Fire Galley. Altho its more 1:1 in result. They are basically Kamayuk and melee. While Fire Ships are….. Kamayuk ish and melee ish…
Then you have Hulk having bonus damage against War Galley. It counters as it intends do as you expect it. But Chronicles atleast mimicked Knights vs Xbow meta how much it’ll do is something yet to know.
Fire Galley is now on par with speed with War Galley. Meaning you’ll still be massing tons of fire galley more than ever. Atleast navy vs navy battles.
War Galley virtually remained unchanged. You would more likely to use it against land units than water.
To me it feels like depending on civ choice you’ll be using Hulk and Fire Galley then have it backed by war galley/canon galleon to protect it. Maybe Hulk may get more use since it wins by very slight margin and cheaper.
Demo is basically useless now with upgrades blocking it instead of having medium/heavy warship upgrades and weakened stats but still too early to tell.
Also delete those extra uni techs for Fire Ship. I mean they feel more like civ UT upgrades instead of every civ having it. Also fire ships used by specific regions and for defensive measures.
I like their implementation, it’s an iconical medieval ship that was definitly missing in the game.
For the design, I’m curious where from they picked inspiration cause some details are not what I know of an Hulk, but sources may differ and design choices too.
For the usage ingame, I think having a ship line that is meant to counter fire ships is a good idea. But it’s not just that, it’s also the overall changes for civs with unique ships that will not get access to all the ships ingame. It’s an overall rewamp of the naval fighting logic that will help improving the naval warfare in the game.
I wait to see how they work ingame. The ramming ships in Chronicles were cool, and doing boarding style is complexe in Age of Empires 2, the original alpha idea of converting ships was interesting but tricky and could turns OP. I mean a ship capturing another, okay, halving the crew on each then, how do you simulate that ? health reducing after capturing ? That’s the difficulty between realism and game confort, sometime you have to do compromise to introduce a mechanics without destroying the game identity.
The point of boarding ? Answer is simple, middle age was about ship boarding fights. Why simulating it like that ? Because the game does not include a “crew” stats on the other ships, so the only viable way to add some kind of boarding units is “a ram on see”, as the monorem-line is in Chronicle.
Yes there are other way to do a boarding ship, that’s true. But the question is more: How to keep the game identity as it was and adding a new ship type.
It’s all about compromises and how to improve the game, expand what it was on release back in age of kings.