Seriously, they still do 3x - 5x damage then mongol lancers with fire upgrade.
I havenât seen them used to win a team game for weeks.
7 Likes
I know its pretty annoying. China right now is on âdont let them do Xâ civ and feels like they end up making hydrogen bomb late game and you should take them out early.
1 Like
Iâm a china main and I can say that not in any way at all do they need a nerf, they get wrecked by anything because the most they can have is +3 armour on ranged and melee, so here comes 10 Knights with 40+ attack to just wipe my units, they have a pathetic attack of around 23 and their charge attack is only good at taking out archer clumps, thatâs if they get their before all hitting the floorâŠ
ohh and if thereâs some man at arms there then great, 50 lancers have just taken about 3/3 of the front lines health away and now about to get slaughtered, they are a hit and run unit, they have good siege, they get wrecked when it comes to any kind of fighting, so no, they donât need a nerf, they need a buff.
3 Likes
buff Fire lancerâs HP by 40 points. So from 155 to 195 HP in Castle age
In team games, it is frightening, when somehow 40-60 firelancers get behind your defenses - itâs almost certainly gg, unless the China player makes a mistake at that point. You can say, donât let them, and you are right, but is one of the more frustrating ways to loose a game, I think there is no debate about that.
That is true, it got more rare, but I had two occurrences last week, maybe the Firelancer meta is on the come back 
1 Like
I think the Chinese are corect now and fire lancer I donât agree with a nerf but just more ranged armor to counter the ranged units, on the other hand a small nerf on grenadier would be more interesting but I donât think about the damage nor the area of effect but mainly the range which is equal to the escopetier (which doesnât make sense to me), and would allow if the grenadier had 3/3.6 range it would add a possible micro with archer for example since mangonels is useless.
I have noticed you for a long time, as long as you mention the Chinese, you have no good words! Your proposals are always subjective and have no credibility!
1 Like
There is a reason. FLs were the reason I joined this forum. Then their bombards spam and now granadiers. Sure I donât have good words for China. I have played against other op civs but didnât considered them to be kill-joy. China is kill-joy. Here they come with stupidly broken bombard that take down your entire anti-siege and immediately gets healed by villagers.
I agree that china early game is somewhat weak but their late game is annoying. Even pre-nerf HRE was still nice to play against. Even with three relics it waasnât end of the game. China on the other hand scale far beyond any other civ can.
Full disclaimer: I play mostly 2v2 (used to play 3v3 and 4v4 but left because of lategmae being all about chinese players). I donât play 1v1. In 1v1 chinese might be underwhelming and wonât reach its potential which it does in any other game mode.
Do you have any good suggestions to make the current Chinese strengthen the early stage, so that the Chinese 1v1 winning rate can be improved! Under this premise, there is absolutely no problem in weakening the Chinese in the later stage! Instead of just complaining about how powerful the Chinese are in the later period! In fact, its late stage strong performance is only two points, 12 range bombing and Grenadier! What else is there besides these? This is also what the Chinese have spent a huge investment in exchange for! Bombing has also been fully weakened, and the rate of fire increase of Chinese bombing has also been reduced from 33% to 20%. Fire Lancer is now nerfed to normal! Other civilizations have all kinds of advantages, some about the economy, some about the combat bonus! I think the main way you play 3v3 or 4v4 is to not harass or fight in the early stage, and start fighting in the later stage! The Chinese at that time were out of the dangerous period, and had spent more, rose to the Ming Dynasty, and then you felt that the Chinese were very op. This is an unfair assessment!
4 Likes
I had a teammate who did a build where he attacked an opponent with 60 scouts at 11 minutes, and that was enough to destroy their landmarks at that point, so that kind of thing isnât unique to fire lancers.
4 Likes
The bombing is only 480hp in the later period. You can use Springald to deal with it. 5 rounds of shooting can kill 1 bombing. This is not difficult! Astronomical ClockTower is no longer supervised by Imperial Office. So the large -scale bombing of 720HP can be ignored. You think Grenadier is very OP, and there are two methods that can effectively eliminate it! Use Mangone and Nest of Bees! Another one, try archer, and then set the formation to disperse.
China main here, coming to write again, Fire lancers are stupid weak, they cost more than normal horseman, they have less health overall and have lower attack/armour/speed, the only thing they have is good seige which is literally 10 more than any other horseman/knight etc⊠they got slaughtered by any melee units, get slaughtered by any ranged units, they are naked siege runners, nothing else.
their explosive blast is comical, sure it does good against unarmoured units like vills or archers (if they havenât upgraded any armour) but apart from that they are trash units that are very costly.
7 Likes
First off they got a HP buff when they initially got ânerfedâ
https://www.ageofempires.com/news/aoe-iv-patch-10257/
Second, its the ability to produce them cheaply in castle age en-masse that allows them to end a game in without any counterplay to their insane torch damage. Just one opening in a wall, or play ing mongols and itâs over.
Iâve just given them a try in a 1v1 game against the hardest AI.
First of all, it isnât correct to say that they do 3-5x the damage of mongol units with the +5 torch upgrade, itâs 36 vs 21. Looking at some landmarks, every one I looked at had 0 fire armour, so itâs 1.7x.
I did beat the AI easily enough, but there are a couple of things that can be done to counter it:
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The AI did actually do this, you can make your landmarks hard to find. One of its landmarks was on the other side of the map, and if it had thrown lots of villagers at rebuilding the ones Iâd destroyed, it probably would have succeeded in rebuilding one before I reached the last one. And I was playing with a fully revealed map, I may well not have been able to find it at all quickly if Iâd had to scout all over the map for it.
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The AI should have had the game won while I was massing the fire lancers. It came at me with a decent army, but was too scared of my barbican of the sun. If some of those units had been replaced by 6 rams, and it had gone straight for ramming my barbican of the sun and TC, I couldnât have stopped it, as the fire lancers are pretty useless against any sensible army.
Also, itâs not cheap to get to the stage of massing the fire lancers, as you need 3600 resources for the two landmarks compared to a player staying in feudal. I feel like an opponent who stays in feudal and spends those 3600 resources on additional military and rams should crush the chinese playerâs base before they even start massing fire lancers.
If we contrast this with mongols, where Iâve played their maa with the +5 torch upgrade quite a lot, you spend less to be able to start massing the maa, and while massing them you have units that are much more able to fight off any enemy attack than fire lancers.
Edit: I just tried it in an online co-op game against hardest AI, and honestly, itâs a meme unit. Both opponents had a landmark away from their starting base which I couldnât find. I completely destroyed every single building in both of their bases, but it basically does nothing because the wood cost of rebuilding everything is less resources than the resources of making new fire lancers to replace the huge numbers that will die. We did eventually win but from starting to make them I had to spend the rest of the game in castle age as there wasnât any chance of going imp due to the need to continuously spam more fire lancers as they die so easily. I still think youâre better off with a real army that can kill enemy units, and some siege to take down the buildings. With nothing but a mass of fire lancers youâre basically gambling on being able to find every landmark to kill off the opponent, and if it doesnât happen, youâre not in a great position.
Rather than being nerfed, Iâd suggest rebalancing them so they become a realistic alternative to rams, e.g. more HP or armour and lower torch attack. At the moment, Iâd much rather have e.g. 6 rams accompany my army than 12 fire lancers.
Just tried fire lancers again, wow they really are so bad. The AI had packed all its buildings next to each other so my fire lancers had to go through the tiny gaps to reach the landmarks, and they simply couldnât reach the landmarks with a mass of knights in the way. Literally 60 fully upgraded elite fire lancers dead in seconds without even reaching the landmark.
Just had one. Sniped me so fast I didnât even hear the alarms going off.
What was the game time?
Fire lancers need a buff. Either an HP/armor buff OR a reduction in cost and train time.
2 Likes
I think torch dmg reduction and buffing stats/lowering the cost is the way to go. It is a meme unit now.