Give cumans Heavy Camel Riders and remove Paladins and maybe Chevaliers?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Like the title says. Im not in even a small way a good player, but Historicly Paladins were created (i thought correct me if im wrong) to defend from raiders. So as someone who likes to play somewhat Historicly i never go Paladins as Cumans, but when the enemy does them, i can’t seem to counter them. So thats why i would love to see heavy Camel riders in place of Paladin.

Sorry if i sound annoying or whatever, but im just curious if this could be an option?

Cheers all and hope you have a nice day!

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Paladins are like the order of high knighthood, responsible for upholding chivalry. Also, the Cumans integrated into European culture eventually, so it kind of makes sense they have them. It is wierd how they lack heavy camel though, they may as well not have camel, because it has no long term viabilty currently. Also, if you aren’t willing to use units because of historical accuracy, I would expect you to not do so great playing Cumans. Cumans do have Halbs, which is how you should really counter Paladins usually.

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Cumans have halberdiers, so you don’t need heavy camels to counter cav.

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They’ll become a worse version of Tatars imho.
After all at the moment Cumans have only Siege onager (without Siege Engineers), and Paladin that Tatars lack as power units, and champion, not a power unit but serviceable.
On the other hand Tatars have more than FU cavalry archers and Hussars, bombard towers, hand cannoneers, FU heavy camels, Siege Engineers, fortified stone walls and a good navy as well.
Take away Paladin from Cumans and imho their strength is going to suffer greatly.

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Cumans with Heavy camel will be beyond OP, good luck trying flee .

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I don’t even think the reason is the speed of camels, which is already more/equal to any other gold cavalry unit , but probably the possibility of mixing heavy camels with Paladins thus winning against almost any other cavalry civ.

Plus it would dethrone Persians as the only civ with FU Paladin and Heavy Camel.

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And Persians don’t even have SL, which although pretty useless, makes Cumans one of the civs with the most complete stables, especially if they got Heavy Camel.

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This is a fair proposal if Cumans get something solid instead of this gigantic nerf. Like bracer which will effectively make them a CA civ. Or something else to do with their steppe lancers. Otherwise its just a huge nerf. Camels for almost all civs is made to counter other cavalry whereas Paladin are generically strong unit. Removing Paladins to give Heavy Camels is a huge nerf for TGs and semi-closed maps. And this is a civ that’s already mid or bottom tier on most settings.
If you find it difficult to counter opponent Cuman’s paladins with camels in closed maps, just do halbs or maybe halbs + kipchaks. In open maps, just dont let your opponent 2-tc boom peacefully in feudal age to get ahead of you in eco.

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Cumans as a civ are in a bad spot - I was going to make a separate thread about them, but then decided not to.

Overall, Cumans are a civ that has 3 good things: Kipchaks, which, in spite of lacking Bracer, are fairly good (especially the FU Elite version) and can output substantial DPS. But they are locked behind a Castle and not easy to mass. Do not be fooled however, this unit is 100% solid, they have a lot of tech to become viable and are locked behind a Castle, but when massed and screened by some Hussar/Paladin, they demolish most unit comps in this game.

Then, they have Paladins, which are a weird unit because they can work but also can die to mass Halbs in 1v1. Overall, you shouldn’t rely SOLELY on Paladins to win a 1v1 game, but also mix in some secondary unit, and Cumans here fall hard, because the typical units to mix in are Skirmishers, Scorpions or infantry and of these 3, Cumans can only mix in Champion (which IIRC also doesn’t have supplies in spite of having full upgrades). Extra speed on Paladin, while nice on paper, is also a questionable bonus because typically with Paladins you want to have 1 big fight head on vs the enemy army, or raid, or destroy fortifications, and speed is not needed here. It’s not a 100% useless bonus, because for example you can run from Camels better, but it’s not as strong as, say, Persian +2 damage vs archer bonus, either.

The third “power unit” they have is… well, Champions, which is more of a niche power unit than a staple. They have an allegedly good eco bonus (if you get away with it), but it’s also very binary, either you do get to full boom with 2 Feudal TCs, or you die in Feudal/early Castle. It’s not uncommon to not be able to pull off the 2 TC play or pull it so inefficiently because you are forced to make so much army that at that point you have a lot of idle time and the 2 TC play ends up not being worth.

The places where Cumans fall hard however are:

  • Lack of Arbalest (leaving the only counter to full pikeman as essentially Kipchak)
  • lack of Bracer (making Skirms and cav archers somewhat underwhelming - ideally you wanna do Archery Range cav archers because they are available from early Castle Age and easily massed)
  • lack of Siege Engineers (making their Scorpions very trash, their Onager very average for 1v1 and their Trebs average)
  • lack of Gunpowder (at least with “meh” Siege Workshop, they could get Bombard Cannons even if it is historically inaccurate)
  • lack of Heavy Camels (as someone else was saying, this makes going full Camel or 70% Camel 30% Knights which is a common strat in many matchups, not viable because the bonus dmg that Heavy Camels gets is substantially higher than the one of regular Camels). It’s also worth noting here that the speed bonus works only in Imperial Age, Castle Age Cuman Camels have SAME SPEED as generic Camels, and it is in Castle Age that speed is most important. An extra 5% speed in Imperial would hardly break the game, even if we are talking about team games like Black Forest because you would just need to be a bit more aware of your army positioning vs a Cuman player which is fair. So I totally disagree with who says that Cumans getting Heavy Camel would break the game.

Overall, I think Cumans could become a good civ if they got Siege Engineers. Their identity should be cavalry and siege. This would also allow them to have a counter to full pikes in the form of Scorpions with SE. In return, the 2 TC from Feudal could be revamped and perhaps you could spawn only at 1/2 the speed from the 2nd TC. Worth noting that 2nd TC in Feudal also takes extra time to build, which should not be a thing (all TCs should take same time to build) because the “handicapping factor” should be only ONE, reduced villager spawn rate or increased resources cost. In short, the decision of whether to go for 2 TC or not in Feudal should be more fluid and less extreme, right now it’s basically either a super win more, or lose immediately with no in-betweens, but if the 2nd TC cost less and spawned at a reduced rate, for example, you could justify it as an eco bonus comparable to, say, that of Celts, that will amount to 5 extra vills in the mid game.

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Who tf uses normal scorpions in imp, siege engineers or not? And many civs have to deal with bigger holes than the Cuman ones, like are we legit discussing how a civ with halbs, hussars, siege rams, paladins and a CA UU is bad late game?

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Well, they were sometimes known as the Twelve Peers. Now historically they were the foremost members of Charlemagne’s court, although many of their famous exploits are ficitious representing Christian martial superiority over the Saracen “hordes”.

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Also, they were the inspiration for The Knights of The Round Table