So, I personally feel REALLY irked by the decision to require horsemen to have a wood cost. I get that they are supposed to be “cheap” and that wood is supposedly “cheap”. However, whenever games run long, the gold never runs out… but wood does. So does stone. Food of course never runs out either.
But this creates an ugly situation. The horsemen gets replaced (or never used) because knights start dominating. And then to add insult to injury, the horsemen isn’t made in the late game either, because the knight is far more economical than the horseman.
So when is the horsemen ever supposed to be made? The answer is never. And that’s just sad. A fix for this would be to add a 20 wood cost to knights, and make the 20 wood cost on horseman to be 10 gold. And yes, this would make knights more expensive and probably would mean there would be less of them, which would be a good thing for the game’s unit composition.
But most importantly, there would come a point in the end game where spamming horsemen would be superior economically speaking to spamming knights. This would make actual knight usage into something not done often.
Horsemen are pretty useful in Feudal for certain civs. There is also far more wood in a map even in Arabia than gold. The largest gold deposits are also contested ground. Maybe you’re playing teamgames where its easy to setup trade, but really its no different from AoE 2 when people just have tradelines anyways. Gold will almost always be the bottleneck resource for units. Stuff like Spears, Archers and Horsemen are trash units and shouldn’t be expected in the late game anyways. Yet spears, archers and horsemen are pretty common in feudal to castle. The only civs who don’t go horsemen are the French, Rus and HRE since they get stronger options in Feudal.
Technically nothing runs out if you have a market.
Farms take wood to build and reseed.
If you’re English, farms can generate gold, but still requires that wood.
But markets can return all the resources. For example you could make 100 traders, 25 sent to trade for food, 25 to trade for wood, 25 to trade for gold, and 25 to trade for stone. As long as they are trading they are generating.
I played a good game where I killed the enemy AI and walked his TC so he could only make vills and wasn’t able to collect any resources. And I just made 4 markets and like 170 traders.
Fun fact, you can only have 100,000 of any resource.
Regarding the OP, I think the horseman should have an upgrade perhaps so they cost only food, so they are able to be cheaply spammed in a pinch in late game for raiding etc - similar to aoe2 hussar… unless there can be a military scouts upgrade so scouts can do such a thing.
For me horseman is a pretty bad a unit to go massive production. They are light armor, can make not much damage. They are not even strong against unprotected vills.
The only usage I found for horsemen is to have a small group along your spears or man-at-arms army, to counter the enemy archers. And they can be replaced by your own archers.
I like the unit curve in aoe4 more than in aoe2 (minus springald spam). it intuitively makes more sense that in the very endgame you are spamming knights, hand-cannoneers, and cannons rather than spears, light cav, and skirmishers.
That is why we keep starting in the dark age each game, because our markets keep crashing due to the value of gold being worth nothing. We don’t learn our lesson.