I’ve read a lot of suggestions on how longsword should get buffed, so they get played in Castle age. Lower costs, more speed, attack, pierce armor etc.
But in my opinion most of these changes would destroy the identity of the militia-line.
Fron what i read and played there are 3 big problems for LS:
High foodheavy cost (supplies is to expensive upfront)
Their counterunits (archer and knights) dominate CA
They excel at nothing (except killing eagles)
My solution:
Merge Supplies into the longsword upgrade with no extra cost.
Make pike/ram pushes more viable by lowering ram costs from 160w 75g to 120w 75g. To balance imp you would add woodcosts to capped/siege ram upgrades. Also remove the 12 bonusdmg mangonels have against rams. They are strong enough without.
Neither archers nor knights can stop pike/rams. Longswords would be the best option. Mangonels would of course also work, but the pike Player could simply add their own mangonels for that. This would give especially more identity to the infantry/Siege civs like celts, slavs, vikings and teutons in CA.
More ram/pike = lese crossbow/Knights = more LS = more scorpions
exactly, but you dont make LS against skirms in CA, you make knights, mangonels or LC. Pikes are mostly used only defensivly against your knights or to guard your offensive monks/archer. they aren’t used as the bulk of your army in ca.
yes, except goths there isn’t really a civ where i think this would be all too dramatic and let’s be honest goths are used to change. instead we could get a new cheap barack-tech, that gives rams hp-repair for every garrisoned unit.
Those two statements are somewhat contradicting. The usual pike/siege-push in ca is mainly mangonels+pike. i want the possibility to shift it towards rams + pike. since you can garrison pikes they aren’t as easily killed by archers and skirms. rams are also a lot tougher to snipe for cavalry than mangonels
they aren’t supposed to be the bulk of your army. they are a counter unit.
they take no bonus damage from any trash unit (unlike knights or archers), and deal insane bonus damage to eagles (unlike knights and archers), they also train much faster then the other ones as well.
except your changing the entire dynamic of the game - for what? because you want to see more longswords? they already have their relevant niche.
i think you missunderstood me there. i was talking about the pikemen, not the LS. i completly agree, that LS are fullfilling their niche job really well. (killing trash and eagles) which is why i don’t want big changes to the unit.
however you can’t deny that you see LS only very rarely in castleage. pikes without rams are better countered by archers/skirms and skirms without pikes are better countered by cav. because of your low budget you can’t support a huge unitdiversity in CA. the upgrades are too expensive. making ram/pike more viable would allow LS to fullfill their niche role as a trashslayer in CA and ram/pike isn’t a huge gamechanger since ram/halb (countered by champs) is allready a part of the game