Since the phosphorus play (fc uu with low eco) from most of the common phosphorus civs have been nerfed in this patch, the skirmdemic situation will become a lot worse with repetitive gameplay. Assuming there’ll not be much changes to resource spawning distance to minimize rage quitting, here are some of my suggestions.
Elite Skirmisher upgrade cost restored to 250 wood 160 gold. I believe these were the values before skirms were buffed to handle the attack-move bug of crossbowmen.
Melee cavalry, stone defense structures get +2 vs skirmisher armor class in feudal age, +3 from castle age onwards. Secondary projectiles of mangonels and rocket carts get +2. Idea is simple - Make the counters a bit more effective.
Melee infantry except spear-line take -2 damage from skirmishers. Since they’re not the units skirms are supposed to counter, these units (like varangian guards, ibiripema, temple guards, longswords, warrior priests, flemish militia) should be taking just 1 damage from skirms even without expensive upgrades.
Since the above changes could make fire lancers too powerful, -5 hp and +4 seconds training time for fire lancers and elites.
The problem with skirmishers is they are too generally good and not good enough vs archers, or rather that they are as good in general as they are against archers. To fix that, this is my solution:
Skirmisher pierce armor is reduced from 3/4/5 (base/Elite/Imperial) to 1/2/2.
All archer units get negative bonus damage against them to reduce damage dealt to a flat 1 regardless of upgrades.
Skirmisher cost is increased from 25f 35w to 30f 35w.
Thumb Ring no longer applies to them.
This should make them better as a rapid response to archers, meaning players will not be pressured to invest so heavily into them on the possibility that their opponent goes archers. This reduced pressure, plus the other nerfs, should make them less attractive as an option.
The Skirm meta was in huge parts because of the pathing and already reduced a bit because of that. Before that we had a Knight dominated meta when the pathing was disadvantagous for ranged units.
In general I see a few ways to improve Skirms interaciton within the game.
One “easy” one to make them never become a meta dominating unit again would be to let the attack upgrades not affect their base damage (range is still increased) but their bonus damage instead. Ofc this would be unique to skirms (could be extended to counter units in general though).
Another would be an overhaul of the unit. Reducing the Pierce Armor, but either increase their range or their DPS against the units they are supposed to counter.
And ofc there is always the idea to add a “Shieldman” unit which is a melee skirmisher counter, Able to tank a lot of Javelines for their cost, but weak against everything dealing melee damage.
By concept, they’re meant to be a unit that doesn’t die soon vs ranged units but doesn’t get a ton of bonus damage vs them, opposite of halbs vs cavalry units. So I don’t think they should lose p.armor. Cost increase could be a good change as well but that alone won’t suffice.
Based on a video where Lewis and RedPhoshporus were testing new patch, the archer pathing is significantly improved and melee patrol stack has been nerfed. So ranged units should become much more powerful this patch, which means more skirm spam.
This will be a great change as well but this alone might not be enough since they’ll still be very hard to kill with few melee units or siege. Something other than archer units should be able to kill them fast so that moving out with a bunch of them and a few support units isn’t a very low risk option.
Maybe we could do something like less p.armor but take reduced damage from archer armor class units. That way they cant dive under tc, towers and take much more damage from scorps.
The other two points were just minor tweaks to adjust some (IMO) long-standing issues.
Although… I doubt that will be enough to actually make them a threat to archers. Some other thoughts I had were these:
Give them ballistics automatically. (This could also fix the “OP Conqs” issue.)
Give them 0% accuracy but make their inaccuracy area scale by their number of units and make “missed shots” deal full damage to whatever they hit. This would be a brand-new mechanic, that may or may not be well received.
Give them a blast width, pass through damage, or some other ability that scales by the number of enemy archers
Perhaps they get a faster attack speed based on the number of enemy archers nearby.
I just remember I once shared an idea that is possibly more relevant to this topic than ever.
What i referred to was that skirms and spears had too little “commitment” associated with them and it was too easy to add the spears when going skirms and required no eco managment.
So the conceptional idea was to increase the relative wood cost of Skirms and increase the relative food cost of the spears. As we all know today how much more valueable food is at certain phases of the game my idea would be to change:
Skirms: 55 W / 15 F
Spears: 10 W / 45 F
Alos effectively increasing the cost of 1 Skirm + 1 Spear to 65 W / 60 F. This could be compensated by a small reduction in production time.
For spears perhaps, but I find the opposite is true: it takes too much investment for skirms to fulfil their purpose. They practically require two upgrades for every one an archer has, making the minimum investment too high for a rapid response unit. In contrast, all you need is a single spear unit for it to have an appreciable impact against the enemy scouts.
That would just be a buff to Skirm openers. I don’t think the little eco commitment can compensate for it.
I think this is still a “nerf Skirms” thread primarily.
I agree on that. That’s why I tried to propose a change that affects the Skirm openers more than the Skirms as counter tool against pierce units.
That’s what I tried to express with the commitment part. if you have to commit anyways because you need that counter it’s not an disadvantage. But if you try to use a unit like the Skirm as a non-commitment tool (as pros do) then the eco commitment can possibly nerf that.
I think it would be easier to make the Skirm counter transition when Skirms train a little bit faster but cost more (like my 55 W / 15 F idea). And at the same time reduce their non-commitment opening potential.
i don’t claim to know it works, but I just wanted to share my perspective. It’s one approach of many.
(my favorite thing would still remain to add a specific skirm counter melee unit, but i don’t know which it could be now after we missed the opportunity to add something like the “shieldman” trash unit in TVS (which is despited that still a great DLC))
My bad, didn’t understand your negative damage part correctly but yes I think they should die sooner under tc, towers and only be resistant to archer class units.
I wouldn’t give free ballistics effect, Arambai effect or area damage. Conqs being overpowered in early castle age is a gunpowder uu design issue - no technology being needed for ridiculously high dps.
I think it needs to be the other way, more food cost for skirms, lesser for spears. Like 35 wood 35 food for skirms, 30 food 30 wood for spears.
Agree, the Skirms should possibly be those with the higher Food cost from a design perspective.
IDK if I would go that far in cost changes though, bt it could be:
Skirms: 40 F / 20 W
Spears: 20 F / 45 W
Which looks weirdly enough like a nerf for Spears, but it’s a nerf for Skirms effectively.
Super high wood cost spears makes the Korean discount super powerful since before the big gatekeeper was food but if it’s low food and high wood cutting that in half means it’s way too splashable
Probably too much bonus damage. I think +1 would do. That means Feudal skirms would take 2 damage/arrow from TCs if they have armor and the TC doesn’t have fletching (3 with net neutral blacksmith upgrades). Melee cavalry don’t need the buff - they already super hard counter skirms (as in scouts take 1 damage even if the skirms have fletching and they lack the armor upgrade - and that doesn’t factor in their ability to exploit minimum range). Mangonels and rocket carts definitely don’t need the extra bonus damage - wouldn’t do much anyways since they already flatten full-HP elite skirms.
With how little damage skirms do, this won’t do much. Skirms already deal just 1 damage to MAAs while elite skirms deal just 1 after gambesons. Main impact would be that skirms would always deal 1 damage, even if the infantry are missing armor upgrades (which aren’t expensive - infantry armor upgrades are among the cheapest blacksmith upgrades and gambesons is also fairly cheap).
In my own experience, the skirms can get by with a few missing techs, at least while the numbers are low. The attack upgrade is mainly needed to keep them from getting outranged. The armor upgrade makes them trade significantly better, but if the numbers are comparable, then skirms will win against archers even without the armor upgrade (which only does something if the archers have fletching). Similar story with Xbows vs Elite skirms - the xbows only deal more than 1 damage if they have attack upgrades over the armor upgrades.
Skirms are a rather weak unit. They’re only good against other ranged units and spears, and are very hard-countered by their counters (sometimes even when the skirms have a tech advantage). Main reason why they might get used instead of archers is their notably faster training speed (making it easier to mass numbers), their pierce armor, and the fact they don’t need gold (useful if you don’t have a mining camp, or in late game once gold is precious).