Elite Genoese Crossbowman upgrade is underwhelming

+5 HP and +2 atk vs cavalry for 900 food 750 gold but not a single piece of range or attack. Meaning the upgrade is terrible unless you’re battling cavalry, and even then it isn’t great because you could make almost 20 more Genoese with those resources.

Elite genoese are so expensive and can’t battle anything else than cavalry in imperial age with less range than Arbalester.

I believe they should at least receive 1 range for elite upgrade to match other foot archers.

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They aren’t that weak i have seen them getting fair trades vs plums.

+2 vs cavalry is quite a lot in numbers, i think the problem is having units like leitis that cost less resources to upgrade and boost them with 30 hp+2 attack, etc, if you compare those 2, yeah the upgrade seems like garbage.

But ignoring broken civs, the elite from genoese is like the elite chokonu, for elite choknu it seems like +2arrows and 5 hp is not worth, but see how that impact vs rams, same the genoese vs cavalry.

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I mean Elite Chu Ko Nu get 2 damage against everything due to getting 2 extra arrows so they get 2 damage against everything + some more against rams while genoese only get 2 damage against cavalry

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Yeah, it’s an extremely expensive upgrade for what it does. Perhaps +1 attack and big reduction of training time would make it more useful…I think this will be changed in some way in the next balance patch

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You guys all do realize there are a lot of units that are weak to Genoese crossbows right? Just play a game of CBA pick civs and you’ll see that one of the best options to pick are Italians because they’ll be able to counter most of the UU (including tarkans). But custom scenario aside, we’re talking about a unit that can counter two sets of units cav AND infantry units. Most people are going to go one of three options, cav, archers or UU. With the odd exception of infantry from time to time. They basically counter 2/3 trash units and there are how many different types of cavalry units? 4? Not including UU of course. So to say that the upgrade is underwhelming you should first look at the unit itself and see how it fairs against all units in general before figuring out what type of upgrades you want to suggest. Perhaps weakening the unit itself as mentioned above so that there is a bigger gap between a minor upgrade would probably be a better fit.

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U can’t compare it with plumes. They are way stronger, more HP, more pierce armor, train faster and move faster. Better range makes a huge difference.
GC are trained for cavalry counter but thats it. In the end not that great at all. They need a real buff.

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Or 1 armor (melee or pierce). They have a cool shield, after all.

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Or discount the upgrade cost, to be closer to the arb upgrade cost.

+1 range sounds like a really bad idea. As the others implied, the unit has to be counted by archers and siege.

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They still get countered by skirms and siege, like normal arbs. Still, I would rather have +1 damage than +1 range, makes them different from arbs. Extra armor could also be nice, alternatively, maybe +1/1. Either way, I would like to see a reduction of the TT for this unit.

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THIS

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Ships too. Italians are said to dominate water maps. But the GC is an underrated reason for why Italians also dominate mixed maps, because of the ship bonus. 50 HP and their 1 base melee armor is also just barely enough to survive one Onager shot from max health. Normal GC’s can survive one Mangonel shot too. I think it’s more accurate to say the GC is an archer with resistances to most of the common archer counters, rather than a hard cavalry counter. And for units the GC still struggles against, like Skirmishers and Eagles, the Italians have the Condotierro and cheap Hand Cannoneers, respectively. Sure, GC takes a while to get going. But a GC/Condo/cheap gunpowder combo is one of those things that’s tricky to stop when it finally gets going.

Italians are never the first pick for mixed maps at high level, they are way too weak on land. Civs like japanese or malay perform much better there, as they are strong both on water and land.

heck vikings aren’t even normally picked on hybrid maps, due to no fire ships.

This has been brought up many many times.

People discussed for months (literally) how this upgrade needs to change…

This started probably beginning of the year already… Has anything changed? No.

Because the balance team only cares about the tourney meta and keeping those guys happy.

Why fix a civ that competitive players don’t care about?

Upgrade needs a price reduction.

Upgrade needs an effect increase whether its damage, MA, hp, bonus vs anything.

GC needs a TT reduction.

These aren’t opinions they’re facts. No one can realistically say the GC upgrade is worth that price, and that the GC trains at a competitive speed to other UU archers… Im not saying they’re useless either. Just no where near on the same level as the top tier civs.

The only reason none of this has changed is because the balance team simply doesn’t care…

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I think part of it is also because the devs have been focusing on other stuff, but yeah, some of the balance issues have been around more or less since the start of DE (like the CA frame delay issue).
Next balance patch is probably going to be pretty big, let’s wait and see how it goes…and hope for the best.

Idk they buffed civs like Tuetons recently which was definitely not a tourney civ/pro friendly (slow moving not micro intensive). I think you sell the devs short my friend!

Also, I think when devs do buff low tier civs pros try them out and sometimes new metas develop with previously trash civs. I’m very hopeful that the 1 year anniversary balance sees love for Turks, Italians, Portuguese, etc.

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TT reduction or Stat buff is more likely to be introduced imo. And I am satisfied even if only stat buff or TT reduction is introduced. Elite upgrade of other foot archer is around the price of upgrading GC.

Rattan archer upgrade costs 1000F, 750G
Longbowmen upgrade costs 850F, 850G
Chu Ko Nu upgrade costs 760F, 760G with their civ bonus.
Plumed archer upgrade costs 700F, 1000W, which is the only one does not cost gold (match cheaper archer theme?)

Arbs upgrade cost: 350 food 300 gold

Is there a reason the EGC upgrade needs to be more than this?

The other archer UUs can be used as a substitute for arbalesters, whereas Italians may easily be forced to mix in Arbs, forcing them to upgrade 2 unit lines. This is another reason why the EGC upgrade cost might be made lower.

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Not range. I agree it needs to be buffed significantly, but we cannot bump up the range. Once you bump up the range it’s a more durable and more effective version of the Arbalest with zero downsides. It’ll kill cavalry and be more resistant to archers than the generic counterpart. This wouldn’t ruin the civ on open maps (where the transition is the disadvantage of the unit, not it’s inherent unit shortcomings) but closed or pre-fortified maps would be horrible.

A genoese with one more range is strictly better than a FU arbalest given 2 extra armor and 1 extra pierce armor, and would win a fight with equal numbers. It also denies your opponent cavalry, and like all archer units, kills Infantry just fine. Your only option to handle it at that point would be siege, and Italians get BBC and FU Hussar to prevent you from utilizing it.

The two options I will support in terms of “let’s test it out” is upping the damage a bit on the Elite version and reducing the training time. I’d also be okay with giving it anti-Ram attack, as Siege (in general) is already brutally effective against Genoese and the Italians don’t really want to mix anything else into the Hussar-Genoese-BBC composition just to deal with that massive HP sink on the front that makes a micro nightmare out of an already shorthanded unit on range.

My suggestion for changes:

TT - From 22 (19) seconds to 16(13) seconds
Elite upgrade cost from 900f/750g to 450f/500g
Added +2 (4) Ram Attack
(maybe) Elite upgrade +1 attack

Cost probably tweaked up a bit if the attack gets raised, since increasing damage on a backline unit is generally a big deal. Might not change the cost at all.

Give Elite GC 0 melee attack? But I think this enables them to counter another main counter-archer units. This may even worse than +1 range. With +1 range, Elite GC misses one soft-counter, arbalests but they are still countered by skirmishers and siege. I understand your point against elite GC +1 range, which may replace arbs completely unless they still have long TT.