Except I’m talking not aome situations. And guess what? This comp is already used in some situations as is by vikings. Against meso civs.
And thats what you would do though. Removing hp from the knight line means that pikes best them even harder then they already do.
And here is exactly my point. Your change isn’t just nerfing two units. Now you’re making sweeping balance changes thats going to leave stuff a mess for months just because you don’t like the archer knight meta.
And is something slowly transitioned into and is only used by a handful of civs instead of being a common build everyone uses.
Quickwalling is what you want to focus on? Archer micro very much was a thing. Also was a year and a half ago.
Except yourd talking about 2 units that only 7 total civs have, and 2 of those routinely use. The steppe lancer is something many feel could use a small buff
So much false information here.
Pop efficient? I’ll give you
Cost effective vs melee? Depends entirely on the melee but archers are usually better
Rushing after fc? Yeah because thry can clear up a feudal army quite nicely, but were not seeing much fc these days
Strong when having all upgrades? So are elephants, cav archers, archers, and eagles. Heck so are SL in many situations
Anti archer? Still rather have eagles, skirms, mangos, or huskarls.
Anti eagle? Rather have militia line or most infantry unique units.
Anti militia? Rather have archers honestly
Gold intensive raiding? Yep but id still rather raid with archers of light cav line
Too late they already are great in large numbers. The problem is getting there.
you can try playing with rotation delay instead of frame delay
frame delay isn’t fun, regardless of what you feel about the balance
rotation delay has more strategy to it. archers would still be very effective when used correctly, but there would be counterplay to just sending archers forward blindly
the big difference between aoe2 and other RTS games is that aoe2’s unit counters don’t really work until late-game. so aoe2 is more about who makes more villagers instead of the more exciting stuff
people these days don’t actually know how bad the crossbow problem actually is because the map pool is very beginner-friendly and you just see people wall & get to castle pretty quickly every game. when people actually played feudal and didn’t wall every map, having a mass of archers to upgrade to crossbows was way too strong
even if you have some melee units and then waste resources on bad units like skirms or delay your boom to make siege, the archers just retreat while sniping the melee units. so instead of nerfing crossbows, they nerfed feudal archer creation time which just makes the maps more about wall FC
adding rotation delay wouldn’t stop the archers from retreating, but it would stop them from winning fights against the counter-army. and if some of the melee units are faster, they can even hit a few of the archers
but nothing’s going to change. the devs love age of wall & boom, and xbow being too versatile assures that age of wall & boom is here to stay
How specific do I have to be? I’m sure you’re able to figure out that’s not what I meant. Less then 50% of games against less than 10% of civs
you’re 100% wrong. Vikings go knights more often than LSM-skirm, and Viking knights have only 100 hp. After the proposed changes Franks knights would still have >100 hp.
For Franks knights also have a much better transition, whilst skirms would drop of massively in Imp without bracer or archer armour.
that’s precisely the problem
better than Knights with the same resource investment?
I’ll give you I should have been more specific here. I meant in comparison with other melee units which are available to civs with knights.
The only counterexample this leaves standing is militia vs eagles, and the point was precisely that even Vikings still make knights as often as they make long-swords vs eagle civs. That really shouldn’t be happening when the civ is lacking bloodlines and gets +15% hp on its longswords.
(I did explicitly exclude UUs, so no, huscarls don’t remain. They’re “meant to be” a knight/skirm replacement UU, so I don’t know why you even brought them up.)
In the end we have a different design philosophy (see eg your stance that it’s fine for 2 civs to dominate the water meta), so we’re never going to agree on what a good balance is.
@TheBiz1
Could you explain what rotation delay is? It sounds interesting, but I wasn’t able to figure out what it meant. Google didn’t know either.
If what you say was true people would send infantry to kill rattan archers, cav archers or gbetos, but turns out even with a big frame delay infantry still dies to ranged unit.
Oh yeah, that’s why Khmer are good right, because they have been dominating for 20 years, right guys?
They have one, short but still. Also, if you ever play cumans, you might want to avoid making UU for your own comfort 11
More like it will make people whine about Franks being on top of a certain list even more.
If only there was an unit, that has more range than CA, deals bonus damage to archers and is dirt cheap to produce while being massable one age earlier, that would be great.
Even in those truely prehistoric times there was something called LAN. Oh and remember, 0 frame delay mangudais.
Because mangonels are just devastating and can shift the momentum of a game dramatically, even if the enemy is being a huge mirco nerd with their archers. Heck, people at all levels even sometimes kill the mangonel with their archers… which powers up said mango’s last shot and ruin their whole army 11
Uh besides the siege towers you can wipe out a long list ofr pretty mucha any unit 11
Like longswords:
-cheap
-fast to create
-anti building
-anti eagle
-anti pikes
-anti camels
-anti skirms
-fills rams
-anti goths
-infantry that doesn’t do too terrible against archers when they close the distance
See? that’s easy!
Btw what is this trend to make camels “more well rounded” It sounds like asking for pikes to get “more well rounded”
uh wouldn’t this be equivalent to frame delay when you hit and run, which kinds of ruin the point of not touching frame delay in the first place?
Specifically what he’s suggesting is that units shouldn’t instantly turn on a dime, and can’t shoot when they aren’t facing their target. This would mean a variable delay. When a unit is running directly away from the target it’s trying to micro, the unit would have a small delay where it turns around to face the enemy before firing. If the unit is simply side-stepping a target’s fire, such as a mangonel, or in archer v archer fights, the delay would be minimal or non-existent since the unit isn’t needing to turn around to resume firing.
This mechanic exists in Dota 2 and some similar titles, not really an RTS thing. I don’t know how it would work out. But in practice, it’d mean markedly worse results against melee units where the archer would directly retreat whilst firing, and mean practically no change against other ranged units or siege units in micro-nerd fights. I have no opinion on the idea, just thought I’d clarify exactly what he’s on.
they still see use as one of the most common openers, as a counter to meso civs, and in the late game against trash. we see them far more then most people project that we see them.
that’s because most games aren’t played against meso civs. the Militia line has its niches and is very good at those niches, just because you don’t like that has no bearing.
actually thanks for bringing this up - after the proposed nerf, Frank knights would become some of the worst knights in the game, with the exception of civs that lack bloodlines.
and yet Pikes, Camels, and other units would dominate them harder then they do before, so why bother going knights? especially when your knights lose to every bloodline knight civ in the game?
theres a difference between routine and seeing use. 2 of them use those units all the time. the other 5 they still see some use among, depending on the situation.
depends on what your fighting.
umm really? first of all LS is far more cost effective against eagle civs (only costs 20 gold, doesn’t take bonus damage, and deals 15 damage per hit before upgrades), whereas the knight costs 75 gold and only deals 10 damage before upgrades. the LS actually trains faster too.
vikings vs mayans - oh look. longswords.
vikings vs aztecs - oh look. longswords.
a couple other vikings vs meso matchups - that used archers + m@a + skirms but guess what i never saw in any of the meso matchups? knights from vikings.
from two years ago on vipers channel
hc3, early knights ineffective, swaps to longswords and berserks.
viper vs yo game 3 nac3, militia line vs meso
and that’s just from vikings vs meso, two times i saw knights used and both very ineffective.
now where is the evidence to show that vikings use knights as often as the militia line against eagles?
except you provide zero evidence to back it up and i literally just went through most s tier tourneys this year, and you know what they all do? disagree with your claim. so go ahead and provide the evidence that backs up your claim.
except you’re wrong here. i’ve actually proposed buffs to other water civs in the past to bring them up to the vikings and italians level, so once again you are spreading false information
see here where i propose buffing berbers, portuguese, and koreans all on water.
oh and here
I think something that really got overlooked in this heated discussion so far: Giving archers frame delay just instantly makes them useless cause they would get completly wrecked by mangos and skirms.
Currently, you can micro versus skirms and not trade evenly, but at least you force your opponent to upgrade to elite. With frame delay, you cant outmicro anymore.
Mangonels are even worse. Right now, mangos are rather something that messes up your micro than something that straight up kills your archers. However, archer with frame delay cant dodge mango shots if the get caught in their animation.
You might only think about the archer/kts interaction, but you need to think about how their counters interact with them as well. While AoE2 has some pretty nasty bonus dmgs, all units can beat their counters if outmassing. Which is a good thing! I dont want my 40 archers to be useless just because my enemy built a mango. This means we have to avoid situations in which counters get too strong. Giving archers frame delays while skirms/mangos still fire instantly would be such a situation.
SC2 has its units turn before shooting, so you’re wrong, this mechanic definitly has its place in other RTS. It was even specificially used to balance SC2 once (the Immortal got buffed by getting a turnable upper body, circumventing the time to turn around and making him stronger).
I really like how micro is considered to be a great and amazing thing in an RTS, considering it’s neither strategy nor operations nor tactics. Not totally sure where this logic comes from where removing micro from a game is a bad thing. Micromanagement is a derogatory term everywhere but the RTS community (and I mean in business and government too, not just gaming), and for good reason. QoL is by definition removing micro; the entire point of it is to make micromanagement less necessary so as to reward decisions instead of instant reactions, a trillion apm, and good ping. And no; you can’t actually have both, because the more you can negate a person’s decisions using micromanagement the more those decisions don’t matter. See e.g. a shooter. It doesn’t at all matter how good your decisions and strategy are if you’re playing against an aimbot with its capabilities uncapped; it will instantly kill you every time before you get a shot off.
How so? Granted, micro and strategy are two very things but how are you supposed to outmaneuver your opponent without moving your units in the proper directions?
Not really. QoL refers to a certain subset of micromanagement actions that are very repetitive like reseeding farms. I guess you could see them as removing annoying recurrent problems that wouldn’t really require any thought to solve. Micro actions like moving and attacking with your army or defending your base with buildings are quite different from that. Ofc, speed and mechanics are also very important, here, but still you need to quickly make decisions, e.g. about which angle to use.
Micro is just decisionmaking in faster pace with short-term impact while macro and strategy refer to the more long-term effects of your decisions. Both are essential to aoe and you remove either one of them, you ruin the game. Ofc, this doesn’t mean that some aspects of that can rebalanced. Topics like nerfing quickwalling are obviously very legitimate but with that you’d only shift the balance a bit and not remove micro.
You know it seems to me almost like those are two opinions. Not discounting them, of course, and I know a lot of people feel rather strongly about them, but they’re definitely opinions.
micro is always a part of RTS games. And a huge part of them.
I’m an experienced TTRPG player. Math is (almost) always a part of TTRPGs, and a huge part of them; but very few players will actively want more math in their games, because it turns out adding and subtracting sixteen trillion modifiers is boring as hell and takes away from the meat of the game. But of course, to some people, the math is the meat.
aimbot is a legit cheat mechanic tho
I don’t see how that affects my point. I’m using the most extreme example to show a basic trendline; reduction to the extreme is a non-fallacious logical thoughtline. If there was a human player so fast he could ‘legitimately’ play as if he was using an aimbot, well - you see my point. I’m not attacking the idea of speed in a first person shooter, mind you; the game is built around execution, not strategy or tactics. But given a scenario where one person can micro down 20 crossbows with 5, he can win the game with 5 crossbows, and therefore strategy, operations, tactics, and even metagame/build orders; all of these fly out the window. To me, anyway, RTS games are about the game’s math, not the game’s ping.
I tend to disagree with you here on most parts of micro. Are you going to focus fire or not? Thats a decision, yes. But “are you dodging all attacks in a feudal skirm fight or not” is no decision. 100% of players would decide to dodge. Its only about the speed and precision that is needed to do so, nothing else.
Btw i wouldnt say there is no place for micro in a RTS. But you will have to agree that clicking in the right splitsecond is hardly strategy.
Th OP is not that wrong, he is only outdated, when the melee pathing was so bad and xbows were destroying knights cause they were unable to surround them and kill them, yeah archs were OP because of the low frame delay they were cleaning knights with few steps.
After the fix i can say 100% confident that knights can roll out xbows most of the times now, so there is no need to add the frame delay to archer line, cause that would be bad for the unit, reducing the frame delay in CA,HC,mameluke and gbeto are the next steps to balance those units.
I think I remember some other statements too, but I couldn’t find them by searching for the keyword ‘italians’ in your activity history, and you have a lot of posts, too many to dig through.
I hope you can at least see where I’m coming from.
WRT vikings vs eagles, I was mistaken. It seems my memory was playing tricks on me. A couple of the things I remembered were actually Vietnamese or other civs.
Impressive job finding all those videos
I don’t quite agree with your analysis of a number of them - Knights were made before any longswords/berserks showed up in a number of the matches (probably with good reason I think - I’d guess the pros are better than us, even if we have hindsight) and in some of the matches which you label as ‘berserk’ I’d label the UU creation either as a desperation move or as a coup de grâce.
In the game labeled as “viper vs yo game 3 nac3, militia line vs meso” viper wins the game with archers & skirms, and uses champions as a coup de grâce. (Remember my complaint was specifically that longswords get overshadowed by knights.) To label this as “militia line vs mese” seems insincere, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. You might just have made a mistake whilst scanning through all those games. There’s a lot of them.
Quite regardless, it does seem vikings’ longwords are good enough against eagles.
Now onto the pettier stuff…
My complaint was specifically about the balance of longswords. Not militia, not M@A, not Champions, longswords. And yet here you are ‘refuting’ me by telling me militia, M@A, and Champions are good at their niche. Yes I know. I’ve even got a higher opinion of Champs than you do if I recall correctly.
so my point stands?
Yes Frank knights would get really unpopular if they had even 1 hp less than generic FU knights. It’d be hilarious (because 1 or 2 hp is pretty irrelevant), and it’s something some players would really like. (Remember that topic about someone wanting to make Franks less popular?)
It’s also completely irrelevant. If the devs can implement and buff a Korean wood discount without effecting the price of war wagons, and they can increase the portuguese gold discount without effecting the price of caravels, what makes you think they couldn’t nerf knight hp without giving franks inferior knights?
please…
It’s almost as if you keep thinking until you’ve found a ‘problem’ you can use to ‘win’ an argument and then immediately shut your brain down to prevent yourself from figuring out what the solution to the ‘problem’ is.
see there is a difference here - those posts were made about the current state of the game. what my opinion of what the water meta should be is different. but even if we threw in Portuguese, Koreans, and Berbers into the water meta - you have 5 civs that would be strong on water maps - and the other 30 would still play second fiddle to them. i’m still fine with that - some civs are naturally going to be better on certain map types
mostly to clean up feudal trash, and weren’t made in respectable numbers, except in one game, and didn’t really have a lasting impact did they?
doesn’t matter, the point of contention was knights vs infantry, and as you can see, vs meso, infantry play a much more prominent role, especially against the eagle, which you yourself said earlier that the knight was made.
and yet the knight line was no where to be seen. did he choose knights to counter the obvious eagle switch? or did he go the longer slower more tech heavy militia line? either way the fact is that against eagles we’ve seen the swordsman line against them, not knights.
maybe - but i got a plethora of other games where the LS was used over the knight too.
and gasp, we saw games where those were made and used effectively too. do they see less use then the others? maybe - but they still see use, and far more often then the “buff LS” hardcore fans would lead you to believe.
well yeah, but its not really a fair comparison, its like saying the archer sees more use then the skirmisher.
and yet how do many people target making them less popular? by nerfing their only real option? no. they target their economy. or maybe chivalry. they don’t touch the knight though do they?
you guys didn’t ask for that though did you? you just said straight up nerf knights. my point was to point out that your changes have far reaching implications and you’re barely scratching the surface.
you make it sound so easy when you say “nerf knights and archers” but now you yourself have already added “well rebalance counter units around the lower performance, and rebalance franks too”
so your idea isn’t simple and easy, and would lead to months of balance being out of wack. for what reason? because you don’t like how the LS performs? because you guys don’t like micro?
or maybe you guys are just ignoring the far reaching consequences of your changes
I understand your point that you want to see more “Longswords”, but why it is really needed? Militia line is fairly well used in the Feudal and Imperial age fight is good point that they are definitely not underused in whole stage of the game. Only Castle age they are rarely seen except engaging meso civs or Goths.
So, Vikings should use main Longsword in Castle age because they are Infantry civ? But do you think it is really good for “Variety” that all infantry civs turns out like Goths and they mainly train infantry in all stage of game? Yeah. Militia line is underperform in Castle age and Infantry civs have to use other option like Archers/Knights. but they often transition to infantry in Imp anyway. Isn’t it true “Variety” of the game that different units are useful in each stage of game and you need transition when age up?
Also think about Militia line counter which units. They counter all trash units and they have no trash counter. Therefore, If Militia line can compete/trade well with archers/knights means there will be no counter except same Militia line and opponents also have to train militia line. See how game goes on when Goths are engaged. Huskarls easily slaughter archers and opponents have to train infantry because they want to counter Goths infantry. Civs use mainly infantry in all stage of game and force opponents to use infantry is enough for one civ (Goths) and I don’t think other infantry civs turns out like Goths is good suggestion for game variety.
The kinds of decisions I was talking about are even more small-scale. For instance, if you have couple of scouts fighting against couple of archers and a spear. You don’t only decide if you engage or not, but at least if that answer is positive, you decide how so, like pulling one scout to the north, pretending to attack with the second, pulling it away again and only attacking with the third. These are what I’d call micro decisions and they happen a lot when move units or even vils.
For some more experienced players a lot of these may be rather automated (as a lot of strategy decisions might be, as well) but they still are based on skill and go beyond mere clickling speed and precision (contrary to stuff like manually reseeding farms). I guess, in the end, it doesn’t even matter if people call them decisions or not, as an rts game aoe can’t work without them. Otherwise you’ll get an tbs game like this one here^^ (Someone did not played the game before writing this Article. - Imgur)
