If you are following KOTD so far, you probably have noticed that not a single player uses infantry despite the recent “buffs”
Is it maybe Elo dependent?
The Militia line is an allround unit, that needs low micro. Maybe just not good for high elo, but good for average and low elo.
Cavalry archer units could be nerfed imo. They don’t feel fair.
The thing is, infantry is very tasteless, that’s why most of the civs get most of the techs. Is not like the stable where if u dont have paladin, its a no go. They should maybe remove the champion of most of the civs…
There infantry civs, only few like Bulgarians, Goths, Aztecs and Malay. The other issue that u may ask is, there are not that many infantry civs…
OP idea is not a nerf for archers and cav UU?
Too weak vs archer
Too slow
Not great pop efficiency
Only useful in the early game(dark age and early feudal) and sometime late game(trash war)
Hand Cannoneer specifically made to hard counter them, but in practice they don’t cause archer already counter them so hard, also cause they are generally bad.
Am I missing anything?
These proposals would make defending with trash units easier, discourage knight-crossbow aggressive gameplay and usage of monks in general and even might make scorpions more popular, but in terms of infantry line (I guess you mean the militia line) on Arabia its still going to be limited. If trash is too cheap and fast produced, players are going to make fewer aggressive units, try to do some sneak attack and then boom behind while defending with siege units. Its still a bad choice to do longswords to counter trash units right away.
If you want to make militia line more mainstream without changing any of their stats, you would have to directly nerf the competing units - Knights, crossbows, lancers, shawarma riders. All of their current stats should be reduced while further upgrades should be added to make them have their current stats. This will make it more difficult to get a quality knight or crossbow army and longswords will stay a competitive alternative.
It mostly comes to cost vs stats vs starting resources for the early game. In most standard settings you get about 2300 food from GAIA sources, multiple woodlines, walls have 250 hp and 2 melee armor while costing just 3 wood and very few seconds of villager time. All of these are responsible for the current meta.
Things that can potentially change that without modifying stats of any units - reducing hp on buildings, add more bonus damage for man-at-arms especially against palisade walls, lower build time and cost for barracks or alternatively higher cost and build time for ranges and stables, adding more food from GAIA sources like in fish n fish map, a predecessor for squires that’s even cheaper, thin forward woodlines. Not all of these together obviously but some combination of these can make infantry more mainstream.
Too food intensive.
Too many techs that barely make great difference or at least doesn’t synnergizes well with an actual gameplan:
ok, here we go again:
I don’t understand this argument at all. “It’s difficult to use, so you make less of them?” What does this have to do with skill or micro? If anything, this is evidence that you need more skill to use infantry. High-risk high-reward strategies and units are for high-skill players.
This is trivially true of all units. In fact, cavalry has the lowest need for awareness, while monk and siege need the highest.
Let’s say you have a ball of arbs. A single onager shot can flatten them. And, you don’t get any warning before the shot happens. This means you always need to watch out. The same is true for infantry.
Cavalry on the other hand has way more HP, and are never flattened in one shot (unless your opponent has like 10 onagers). Also, what do you do with cavalry against onagers? You just run upto them and destroy them. With infantry or archers, you need a LOT more skill, any 5-year-old can work with cavalry.
Check out this link of Viper killing mongol onagers with halbs:
https://imgur.com/a/GsTGgkJ
Anybody could have done this with knights/hussars. To pull this off with halbs, especially under a castle? You need the viper for that (or a 2000ELO+ player at least)
There are a few other video and circumstances I can remember, I’ll post them if I find them/if I have time
Think of infantry play like chess. For each move you make, you give 2 moves to you opponent if they are a cavalary player.
This only applies to like 20 people out of the 20,000 people actively playing every single day. It doesn’t work as an argument for the community.
Also, infantry battles would be way more fun to watch with bigger armies. Every modern war game has infantry as like 90% of their population. Are none of them fun to watch?
Celts, Teutons, Malians, Japanese, Dravidians, Incas, Sicilians, Slavs, Vikings and now Romans
so 15 of 43 more than 1/3… I don’t think the number of infantry civs is short, infantry just bad since AoC add BL.
For me the solution is very easy… you have 2 options
1, Make them way tankier (more HP)
2. Make the transition way cheaper
Also, knights vs longswords are highly dependent on longsword micro. Here:
Reddit - Dive into anything
This is such a huge point that it’s worth a sperarate comment.
So try to make the milicia line a unit to use in team game imperial age instead of 1v1 imperial age ?
Why «instead»? 20 characters
I don’t understand this argument at all. “It’s difficult to use, so you make less of them?” What does this have to do with skill or micro?
If you can not run away, you do not have to make the decision to run away or not. So you don’t micro. So it is easy. The outcome of the fight depends more on numbers and if it is the right moment to fight. So the skill is more in the ecomomy and strategic decisions but not in the micro.
I don’t think it is difficult to use infantry overall, The only difficulty is to avoid some fights. Fighting near a TC/Castle can be very difficult with Infantry, if you can not just destroy it. But beside that you just need the numbers to win with Infantry. You do not have to think much about counters because the Militia line has not much counters and is also not a specific counter against something. So it doesn’t matter if you attack a Knight, a Crossbow or a Pikemen. If the Infantry attacks a building its also ok, because the Building will actually go down. On the other hand Archers have to avoid Skirmishers and Onager and need micro for focus fire and atacking buidlings is mostly useless. And Cavalry needs to avoid Pikemen and it is worth to attack left and right because they are fast instead of picking every fight. On the other hand with Infantry it is better to just have the numbers and to fight whatever is in front.
Good lord, did you not read a single word I’ve written?
Engage with what I’ve said. Specifically, these comments. Read all those, you have literally said nothing new.
Really? So you don’t micro onagers or crossbows? Also, even if you cannot run away, you can still trade better with micro. If you don’t do it, that’s on you.
Arbs and HCs still hard counter infantry. So does Cav archers, Onagers, scorpions, and a whole array of unique units. Almost every single civ has a counter to infantry.
Do you even play infantry? Some of the claims you’ve made makes me really sceptical about your experience.
And please excuse my frustration here. Having to repeat myself when I’ve written down my arguments already is pretty difficult for me.
Good lord, did you not read a single word I’ve written?
Engage with what I’ve said. Specifically, these comments. Read all those, you have literally said nothing new.
Regarding Viper versus Onagers: I don’t see much mouse movement in the video. The halbs kill the Onagers because the Onagers have a minimum range. If the fighting place is open Infantry counters Siege, especially if the Siege is not protected. It is not like on Black Forest.
Reagarding Reddit. This website is on my Blacklist.
Really? So you don’t micro onagers or crossbows? Also, even if you cannot run away, you can still trade better with micro. If you don’t do it, that’s on you.
Onagers and Crossbows are ranged units, that need to be microed.
So this difference just effects Infantry versus Cavalry. An example is attacking villagers in the early game. Lets say 2 scouts or MAA versus 6 villagers. If you attack with the scouts and the villagers attack back, it is worth to go back and attack 5 seconds later again. This means the villiger player can not just let the vilagers work but has to constantly fight back if necessary and click them back to work when the scouts run away. The MAA can not so easily just run away and reengage. So it just depends more on if the MAA aare strong enough to kill villigers or not, but this kind of micro is much less effectiv.
Later in the game it is a similar thing with Knights and Longswordsmen against Crossbows and Pikemen. The Knights only want to fight the Crossbows but want to run away, if the Pikemen do hits. The Longswords instead can not run away and are happy to attack both Crossbows and Pikemen.
Micro benefits every unit, but I think it benefits Cavalry a bit more than Infantry.
Arbs and HCs still hard counter infantry.
I would not say that Arbs hardcounter Infantry, at least not with gambesons. If the Infantry number is large enough the Infantry will win even without micro. Against HC the HC win, but I don’t know what you want to micro there. Try to get as many hits of with the Infantry, or hide them in the back of your base.
So does Cav archers, Onagers, scorpions, and a whole array of unique units.
Cavalry archers yes. Onagers? I don’t think so unless the fighting place is closed. Scorpions somewhat yes, but if the fighting place is open, and the number advantage for the Infantry is decent, they can beat the Scorpions. It is more like a soft counter like Arbalest, but not a hard conter like CA or HC.
The problem of HC is that it is not that great against something else than Infantry. CA is the bigger problem for Infantry imo, because it is overall good. So against CA-civs Infantry is not a good solution, and this is also not solvable by Infantry-micro.
Do you even play infantry? Some of the claims you’ve made makes me really sceptical about your experience.
Well yes I am an Infantry player. And I like it because it is a more relaxed startegic game. I like to spend my time with different things than micro. I like to win games with strategic concepts.
Often Archers versus Longswords means the Archer player has to spend more APM for the fight. The longsword player can just care for your economy, and a minute later the fight can be won nonetheless. You need commitment and some good Infantry civs for this, like Malians or Vikings for tankyness, or Goths for a lot of units.
I also know that some MMA or Longswords rush can flaten my town. So while I would like buffing Infantry for myself I also think, that it is not that weak, and could become too strong for a lot of Elos. And I can imagine that it would not make pro players turn to Infantry. I remember this from some Mobas where some autoattacking meele heros are sometimes buffed to make them better for high elo, while they are actually broken in low Elo. And then high Elos doesn’t play them anyway.
I am not the biggest expert but Viking Longsword almost feel a bit stupid. You have a economic super turbo in the back, and you can just spam this one unit and fight and destroy everything. Sure with more micro than on my elo it will be more balanced or maybe even weak, but that is my point.
Because in 1v1 I favor gold profitable units (siege units or not dying gold units or low gold cost units) and in team games I favor more pop efficient units (better max pop army).
This is why I didn’t clip Viper’s POV. That clip is from memb’s stream, not viper’s. If you knew what you were looking for, you’d see multiple formation changes, changes to the movement direction after predicting onager shot locations, and even a bit of arrow dodge after the castle is up. You can’t even recognize micro when you see it.
I’ll try to find the viper’s POV clip for that gif. Then you’ll be able to see what actually happened.
Sure, but that doesn’t matter. That link highlights how microing infantry is important. If you don’t want to look at it, that’s fine, but that won’t make the evidence go away.
Which is why it is more important to micro the infantry. You can afford to be a bit more careless with cavalry. They can just run away afterall. With infantry, you need to monitor and control them regularly or you won’t do damage/they will end up dead.
Not true. HCs have a much higher Pierce damage, and in small number fights, are even better than arbs against cavalry. But also, HCs require very few upgrades. Heck, they’ll work with literally no upgrades if can keep them away from infantry, at least for a little while. They are also far better than arbs against siege, and high Pierce armour units like skirms.
I have presented my clips and videos showing why infantry micro is important. You can deny it if you want, but I think I’ve made a pretty solid case for my argument.
This is why I didn’t clip Viper’s POV. That clip is from memb’s stream, not viper’s. If you knew what you were looking for, you’d see multiple formation changes, changes to the movement direction after predicting onager shot locations, and even a bit of arrow dodge after the castle is up. You can’t even recognize micro when you see it.
Yes, it is not surprising that players like Viper have a ton of additional tricks they apply to everything. I can’t really talk about this level. I just have the experience on my level that Siege against Infantry is less say situational. It needs good unit coordination otherwise the Infantry just goes to the SIege and simply kills it.
From my experience Infantry is the goto unit against siege. Why? Because if the opponent pairs siege with Halbs, Cavalry has a hard time to engage. But meele damage is needed against siege. (Ok HC works too against some Siege units).
Sure, but that doesn’t matter. That link highlights how microing infantry is important. If you don’t want to look at it, that’s fine, but that won’t make the evidence go away.
Would be nice to have this evidence in the AoE-forum.
Which is why it is more important to micro the infantry. You can afford to be a bit more careless with cavalry. They can just run away afterall.
I think this is true regarding diving TCs and Castles. With Cavalry you can quickly run in the range of a TC and kill a villager and run away again. This is really difficult with the Militia-line, and in my experience it is better to avoid this alltogether, unless you have enough to straight up kill the TC, or kill a lot of villagers under the TC that don’t fit in.
But what about other situations like the fight against Siege, Halbs and Monks? With Cavalry you have to avoid the Halbs, somehow snipe the siege, coordinate Light cav against the Monks, avoid the Monks with Knights. It is a lot of avoiding, reengaging and coordination. With the Militia line you can just fight the Halbs, the Siege and don’t care much about conversions, because the Militia line is much less costly than Knights. Sure someone like Viper can apply tons of micro tricks to this and will do it more efficently, but a brute force attempt can also work with the Militia line, while a brute force attempt with Cavalry will be very suboptimal.
Not true. HCs have a much higher Pierce damage, and in small number fights, are even better than arbs against cavalry. But also, HCs require very few upgrades. Heck, they’ll work with literally no upgrades if can keep them away from infantry, at least for a little while. They are also far better than arbs against siege, and high Pierce armour units like skirms.
If you have the choice between Arbalest and HC, are HC just better? Arbalest feel much better to micro.
Alright, this discussion is getting interesting; let’s get deeper, shall we?
I don’t understand this argument at all. “It’s difficult to use, so you make less of them?” What does this have to do with skill or micro? If anything, this is evidence that you need more skill to use infantry. High-risk high-reward strategies and units are for high-skill players.
Like Aries cleared out, you make less decisions, not less army. Didn’t see that interpretation coming, mb. Essentially the point I’m defending here is the fact that you can flee means you make more decisions rather than less. You later said this:
Which is why it is more important to micro the infantry. You can afford to be a bit more careless with cavalry. They can just run away afterall.
I don’t really agree with the way you treat retreating as a simple and easy decision. Running away is a compromise, not a clear advantage, because sacrifices tempo and pressure to preserve your units. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone when I say that applying constant pressure is a pretty difficult concept to master in this game, and the player needs to know when to retreat in order to actually take advantage of this option.
I also saw you made arguments towards paying attention to your infantry; well, let’s get to that.
Let’s say you have a ball of arbs. A single onager shot can flatten them. And, you don’t get any warning before the shot happens. This means you always need to watch out. The same is true for infantry.
Cavalry on the other hand has way more HP, and are never flattened in one shot (unless your opponent has like 10 onagers). Also, what do you do with cavalry against onagers? You just run upto them and destroy them. With infantry or archers, you need a LOT more skill, any 5-year-old can work with cavalry.
High-risk high-reward strategies and units are for high-skill players.
Alright, I can concede that infantry’s counter being a silent killer compared to, say, a Monk’s very obvious warning can be pretty rough on them. From what I’m gathering about your arguments, the thesis here - and correct me if I’m wrong - is that commanding infantry is a rough life. You get punished hard because you can’t flee, you can lose them in an instant and a God-like player such as Viper’s highlight with the unit is achieving what a scout player can do by right-clicking once.
That’s definitely high-risk, but is it really high-reward? It’s not like there’s any clear-cut, inherent advantage to picking infantry as your main unit before counter wars begin. They’re less cost-effective than trash, slower than cav, can’t destroy buildings better than siege (although devs are trying really hard to make that happen) and even what’s supposed to be their biggest strenght (numbers and spam) doesn’t really pan out at high skill when you consider that archers are even better at getting strength from numbers than they are.
So really, I beg you the question: are infantry rewarding the skilled player proportionately (aka. high-skill high-reward), or are they merely demanding a minimal level of skill to be usable in the first place? I honestly think there’s plenty of evidence pointing towards the latter.
Also, infantry battles would be way more fun to watch with bigger armies. Every modern war game has infantry as like 90% of their population. Are none of them fun to watch?
Of course they are! I’m saying this because I like seeing infantry in war games and believe that they should have a place in AoE II as well. But I don’t belive a high-skill, mediocre-reward power unit distinguished mostly by what it struggles to do well is a good place for them, nor is it anywhere close to how they’re seen in other war games.
Don’t you think Infantry would be in a much better spot if picking them came with an inherent advantage over other gold units? In my opinion, it’s important that this inherent advantage is a reward for playing the unit better (instead of punishing you for misplays), so as to actually encourage players to master it regardless of meta. If we get that, I bet we’ll feel each minuscule change in the unit affecting the meta way more than before.
Anybody could have done this with knights/hussars. To pull this off with halbs, especially under a castle? You need the viper for that (or a 2000ELO+ player at least)
Thanks for the videos, I shall do some testing over the weekend since the numbers must have changed a ton since HD. Doing it on the current patch’s pathing almost feels like cheating, so hopefully by then we’ll know if the beta environment update has fixed then to pick which version to use.
This only applies to like 20 people out of the 20,000 people actively playing every single day. It doesn’t work as an argument for the community.
I understand that, but it doesn’t undermine my point, actually. I hope most ranked players are striving to get better, and your learning curve is a lot steeper if you try to focus on infantry play, for the reasons I mentioned above. Viper can do infantry tricks because he learned cavalry first and that skil translated to infantry, not the other way around.
Also, knights vs longswords are highly dependent on longsword micro. Here:
This.The last video on this list is the first hint at what I believe Infantry need to get picked up by pros. Surrounding other units so you can make use of numbers advantage is exactly the kind of play that gets skilled players excited to master a unit and choose them as the cornerstone of their army.
I firmly belive that, if we could find a way to buff the militia line in such a way to make surrounding effective and practical at lower number fights, then this would increase their use more than any stat buff. Now, I know it’s quite the extreme change and it may need months on the beta before anything, but I’d like to propose the following test:
When moving to assume a new formation, infantry gets a reduced collision box and increased movement speed (around 1.2-1.3), lasting ~0.75 seconds.
If the player gives the unit any command instead of formation change, the bonus is removed immediately.
When the infantry’s collision box is increased, a script is applied to push units that would be inside the infantry’s collision box. If there are no empty spaces immediately next to said unit, it can’t move until said empty space appears.
How’d you think that would go? I’m curious.
Ok I tried to find some statistics, regarding the performance of Cavalry and Infantry relative to elo.
What I found are opening stats on Aoe Pulse, Maybe its the best statistics we got regarding this:
Lets compare for the patches since the April balance overhaul “MAA any” with “Scouts any” (and also Range opener any) for the elo ranges 0-1000, 1000-2000 and 2000-3000 (on Arabia)
for 0-1000 elo:
MMA any: 50.29% win rate
Scouts any: 56.48% win rate
Range opener any: 48.72% win rate
for 1000-2000 elo:
MMA any: 51.77% win rate
Scouts any: 54.17% win rate
Range opener any: 45.72% win rate
for 2000-3000 elo:
MMA any: 50.25% win rate
Scouts any: 51.18% win rate
Range opener any: 48.35% win rate
It is maybe not the best statistic overall to compare Cavalry versus Infantry, but it seems like that Scouts at least are more suitable for low elo than MAA, while MAA is similar for all elos.
Maybe it is really just easy to click Cavalry on a target. It probably requires more skill to deal with Scouts than with MAA, skill that the high rated players will have more.
So what do I know? The numbers seem pretty clear.
I agree with you that retreating is a compromise. However, retreating is far better than getting your army wiped. I’d take retreat while keeping most of my army alive over maintaining tempo for just a little while any day. If you get your army wiped, you won’t be able to maintain pressure regardless.
To be fair, there is a slight advantage, which is that you need far less gold. There is one scenario where militia line is pretty good. That is, if your opponent is going knight-skirms. In that case, you can go champions-bombards in imperial, and your opponent is forced to switch into something else.
Now that being said, I do think that your overall point is completely valid. Infantry aren’t a high-risk high reward - high skill unit, they are a high risk - low reward - high skill unit. Which is why you rarely see them.
Completely agreed. Infantry are supposed to be cheap units which are multipurpose. Historically, infantry does everything from creating frontline buildings, do full on warfare in extremely large numbers, protect archers and backline units, help out with logistics, etc, etc. No army was complete without infantry. In aoe2, they are just a laughingstock.
We (the community and devs) need to find a way to make that risk-reward ratio worth it. I’m not sure that you can ever eliminate the risk, because the infantry is always slow. So, the reward should be worth it.
You don’t know that. I don’t know that. If anything, I’d argue that a lot of infantry tricks come from archers. The split micro he uses to dodge onager shots most definitely come from crossbow split micro.
This is quite an interesting change. I do see a problem, though. The increased movement speed needs a cooldown. Otherwise, I can just keep spamming split-line keys repeatedly to make my infantry move as fast as cavalry, effectively speaking.
The collision box idea is really neat. I can think of a lot of micro potential for infantry with these ideas implemented. For example, I might be able to block of cavalry by changing formation to reduce collision, squeezing into a gap, and popping out. It might also be possible to ambush archers, and prevent raiding with spears. Oh, and you can also defend your siege better. Lots of uses, while still needing skill and micro to be effective.
As cool as it is, though, I don’t think something like this will ever go through. On the other hand, I’m making plans for a mod - a sort of infantry overhaul - and this might fit in nicely 
You know what, fair enough. I am considering making a pretty long post on infantry, clearing up all these misconceptions. I’ll pull this from reddit and add it here.
Arbs do feel much better. They have better accuracy, and faster firing rate. You can also just save up your crossbows and upgrade them to get a nice arb ball pretty early. However, there are a few cases where I do like HCs more. The biggest one is if your opponent isn’t massing any sort of archers, and are going full infantry. Halb-HC-siege is a pretty decent combo in my experience. Another important factor is that HCs are much better against buildings than arbs are. HCs will eat through house or building walls. They also outrage TCs, which is pretty nice.
Hey, respects for reconsidering your stances after seeing evidence. I’d suspect that FC knights would also have drastically higher win rates at lower ELOs than higher ones, but I don’t think that stat is available.