So elite upgrade for chu ko nu apparently reduces the fire rate of the unit, from what I read from age of empires wiki, the fire rate is reduced from 3.44 to 3.89, once the elite upgrade kicks in. It is also mentioned by a SOTL video before.
The elite upgrade is already not so worthy since it doesn’t improve the attack, only +5 hp and 2 more arrows. The extra arrows will ALWAYS miss. They miss 100% of the time vs units, even with thumb ring. They will only hit those extra arrows against rams and buildings. So the elite upgrade basically trade 13% attack speed for 5 hp, for a huge cost. It is not worth it unless it is against siege or buildings which is situational. In general elite chu ko nu is worse than non elite one. Devs pls fix that so elite one fires as fast as non elite
Are you sure? I just tested it, and vs different unit, the Elite Chu Ko No always deals more damage than 12-PA, so the secondary projectiles seem to hit just fine.
I mean the two extra from elite upgrade. There are 2 extra arrows for non elite, 4 extra arrows for elite. The last 2 arrows always miss. So elite one will hit with 1 or 2 extra arrows but will miss 2 or 3
While the accuracy on the additional projectiles is indeed below 100%, its not 0%. The elite Cho Ku Nu deals 9 to 11 damage to a paladin per salva. The first arrow does 14-7=7 Damage (yeah I typed the wrong number earlier lol), meaning 2, 3 or 4 of the additonal arrows hit. For the non elite, in nearly all cases both of the additional arrows hit, sometimes only 1.
I agree its a bit underwhelming, but its not like Elite Cho Ku Nu is bad in any way and while the two additonal arrows miss often, its by far not always.
I tested vs infantry or archer, they always miss. Against cav or elephants, they have a bit higher accuracy because the enemy hitbox is bigger. But still only hit when close. From max range, or if the target is moving, the extra arrows always miss. Only Against rams those arrows will hit
I also did vs war elephant, a huge target. Up close, elephant not moving, seems a scenario impossible to miss shots, still only 2 or 3 out of 4 extra arrows hit. The last 1 always miss. The second last one hit like 50% chance
Chu ko nu is the one of the archers that benefit the most from thumb ring. Besides, the extra 2 arrows of elite version are great against siege and massed cavalier. They can deny rams attacking your castle. With micro, they can kill onagers though they can die hard to onagers. Imo, the extra 2 arrows makes them more like hand cannoneer affected by ballistic and good against high PA target even with slightly slower firing rate.
The arbs are not as good as CKN in general, CKN always has more damage and lower gold. But the debuff is more like oversight. The two extra arrows take a longer animation to finish, thus reducing the rate of fire
I’m sorry, but is all test is done on 1 target? What about fight in group? Those miss arrow gonna hit next unit and add DPS anyway, right?
Also, real life Chu Ko Nu is not accurate compared to normal crossbow or bow; in exchange to shoot many arrows in short amount of time. So this seem accurate.
Well, in term of accuracy, Chu No Ku is like crossbow version of revolver, more bolts it can load to shoot, slower for it to completely reload all bolts in it, especially that revolver have speedloader to load 1 set at once while Chu No ku don’t have it.
As for gameplay, I don’t know enough to judge that this slower reload make unit worse or not.
Elite Chu Ko Nu upgrade is 1 of strongest upgrades in the game, this unit is well worth it, with TR and Rocketry kills about anything except Onagers, well known Chinese stomper in Imp, hell I’ve seen it even do OK vs Paladin where an equal mass of Arba gets hard stomped in the same fight.
Fresh players saying 3.8 firerate is a nerf when it’s actually a buff, if you’ve ever used CKN before you should know that you need to wait for the main arrow to reset too before firing again, which basically means that you always should stutter-step micro the unit and never AFK it.
I agree that an upgrade that while beeing an overall upgrade still nerfes the unit in one aspect feels really, really bad. The same thing for Lcav (or war galley): It just feels bad to have to upgrade a units because the stat boost is so huge, but to see how it suffers in one specific stat at the same time.
However, elite Cho Ku Nu are absurdly strong units. Buffing them is a complete no go. If we want to buff their fire rate to the elite versions (which would be reasonable), then at least one of the additional arrows need to disappear as compensation.
Theybfire too slowly. They are not more useful than arbs. Which is like japan, have a unique unit that,is not more useful than regular champion. Arbs are shooting at every 1.7 secs, elote CKN is 3.11 secs, after thumb ring, almost half the rate of fire , but not double the damage
I would take the “every 3.11s: one 14 damage arrow plus 4 times ~1 damage secondary arrows” over the “every 1.7s: one 10 damage arrow” any day. And the main ckn arrow alone does at least twice the arbalester arrow damage as soon as the opponent has 6 PA, which is any unit Ckn and arbalesters do not hard counter already.
What put the Ckn behind compared to the arbslester is mainly the -1 range (plus the castle production). This is a big deal. Just like for the italian gxbow.
And chukonus have their niche and pro still regularly massed them in recent team game tournaments (close maps like fortress).
Chukonus are not as viable than arbalesters on open maps, true, but it should be the same for at least half of the civs.
I personnally rarely play UU on open maps except for koreans, goths, vikings, mongols, spanish, turcs, slavs, cumans. Because most of the time, the production speed is a big limiting factor and the castle a too big mid game investment. And I am personnaly fine with that; when playing aoe2 I enjoy using the common units.
In addition to the civs I mentioned, there are surely a few more options like mayans, burgundians, tatars, gurjaras berbers… But surely not that many more… Which would make at best 25% of the civs.
On arena that is another story, as the game is very focussed on castles. And then I would definitely make chukonus instead of arbalesters, as there is no time to mass archers to begin with.
What about you ? When you play a game (lets say on arabia, as you made a topic about it recently), with which civs do you feel that putting down a few castles and starting mass production of UU will give you the win ?