Arbaletriers should be a French unique unit, but not that unique! That’s for Italians. Regular and Elite Arbaletrier should have 0 armor and only 14 damage at Elite upgrade with Crossbows and Arbaletriers. Gambesons should be +3 melee armor and +1 range armor. Arbaletrier should have less move speed than Longbowmen and Crossbowmen, and should cost more, they carry a shield. And Crossbow Stirrups should reduce reload time in just 20%
Giving Longbowmen +10 HP, this because shooting a Longbow creates more mussels than shooting a crossbow or a normal bow, and having no armor they will require more physical training to defend their selves.
I had some thoughts about Network of Castles too!
Network of Citadel technology is not required. Network of Citadels: Enemy presence is no longer required. Town Centers, Keeps, Landmarks, Outposts (half effect) and Towers (half effect) grant nearby:
Totally agree. Arbaletriers are insanely armored units and they’re still light infantry, what do you say? The armor must be below that of MAA or knights, that amount of armor is completely unreasonable.
English is perfect like they are, you can drush, frush, fast castle et strong imp, you can play aggro at any age and booming at any age (like mongol basicly).
All civ should be like mongol and england who have a lot of option (and that can be even better with a small landmark balance).
The French are the best example, they have many more unique units, technologies and buildings than other civilizations. I really wonder, why this only for them? French have no weak points compared to the rest.
Wait what? How? I think french is the least unique civ. French has four biggest selling points:
Knights in Feudal
Slightly faster villager production
Guild-hall landmark
Cheaper cost around keeps (comes too late into the game/post castle or imperial)
French has two unique units which are not too different from other civ. Compared to abbasids and dehlo its nothing they have so many techs. For knights the healing becomes more ineffective as the game progresses. Healing does not scale with HP. And Royal Bloodline comes too late into the game. French Imperial is not too impressive and will die before they can utilize royal bloodline.
As for crossbows they are now descend units now because of mangonel nerf. In my personal opinion they need to buff back mongonel to some extend so it can be effective against mass infantry.
This isn’t ranged armor its melee armor. Melee armor becomes irrelevant later in the game. MAA and Knight get ranged armor as well thats why they are called heavy.
The reason why french has high win rate now is because of mangonel nerf and abbasid rework. Abaasid was absolute counter to french and always resulted in defeat. Mongonel on the other hand was very effective with spears against every french composition e.g Knight + Archers/Crossbows. French cannot compete in siege supriority and always lost in lategame.
Current win-rate isn’t because french (Knights/Arbaletriers) units just suddenly got buffed. They are there since day 1 and if these were that broken they would have dominated in all patches. I have raised concern that mongonel nerf needs to be reduced it can counter all infantry masses.
HRE MMA are not too big of an issue. They don’t have stable and unlimited food source like english does in Feudal. English can just quickly build farms and few villagers on gold can let them spam MAA non-stop. Any civ that does not have access to MAA cannot stay in feudal for too long and will die kiting MAAs.
Remove their (and other ranged units) ability to make seige.
Have the accuracy of their arrows reduced against horsemen/calvary that are on the move, say like 20-30%. Players should not be rewarded when they mass longbowmen and have no melee/meat shields in front of them. Currently you lose atleast 25% of your calvalry when just trying to close the gap between you and the longbowmen/archers. By making arrows miss moving targets on horses it would reduce the archer spam and make players have front lines.
WHY can longbowmen hit villagers who are up against a stone wall? Their arrows arc over the stone wall and go straight down? Please fix.
At least making to Longbowmen win against Arbaletriers, it makes too much sense, and Arbaletriers shouldn’t be that unique, French already got many unique units and it’s unfair for the English that his unique unit can win what they are supposed to win against, that’s it, not saying that Longbows should be stronger against all others units. And giving to the English Culverins, IDK why wouldn’t they have it? That makes no sense. Balancing indeed, maybe reducing Mills’ Influence in 5% and changing TC bonus from +100% attack speed to +30% attack damage .
And perhaps changing Network of Castles, because I see it a bit OP at offensive and very simple. So I suggest this:
Network of Citadels technology is not required. Network of Castles now names Network of Citadels. Network of Citadels: Enemy presence is no longer required. Town Centers, Keeps, Landmarks, Outposts (half effect) and Towers (half effect) grant nearby:
Defensive structures and units +30% attack speed.
Units +10% HP (except siege units and boats).
Units +5% move speed (except cavalry).
The Network of Citadels stuff is just an idea, maybe it would be ok or very strong, but it’s better than only attack speed.
I think the problem with the English is exactly this…English players are able to just mass one unit cheaply and expect to win the game. No other CIV has a special unit that can be massed and be as effective.
Longbows beat arbs easy. Don’t tell me you are fighting them when they put down their shield? Just move outside their range, you can still shoot them. Also you got insane 50% attack boost. It kills basically everyhting. Even more so in imperial where they get the volley thing that makes them fire 3x faster. Taking 0.5 sec to reload instead of 1,5 sec. And what is their damage after incindiary arrows are researched? Like 15? Other units armor are suddenly not very protective.
The issues with the English mainly lies in the Network of Castles/Citadels being insanely overpowered. 25% should be the max attack speed increase (not 50%, that is madness) and outposts shouldn’t give the bonus or only a much weaker version. NoC is somewhat always active, with it English units are just much better than any other civ’s units. English HC’s with Network of Citadels easily outperform Streltsies. NoC makes every unit so much stronger, although it is supposed to be a defensive ability that should help defend. Yet outposts are being build everywhere and it is always active. The range is so big that destroying outposts beforehand with siege doesn’t really help and is also hard to accomplish. And NoC makes siege so very broken. 50% attack speed for siege is just not okay. Everything fires so fast and siege already is so strong, it should be completely excluded from NoC.
The other issue is the farms bonus that is way too strong for feudal. It should be reduced for feudal and reach its full potential in castle. The English can be aggressive while very well protected against raiding, which makes it very easy for them to boom and reach imp. And thanks to NoC and enclosures, their imp is so strong that there is almost no civ than can beat the English in the very late game. Even the Chinese struggle since the rise of the English. The English reach imp so much healthier and… yeah, I said everything there is to say about NoC. It’s overpowered.
