Hand Cannoneers are still underpowered

Yeah, I had hoped for a scatter mechanic that made their damage perform similarly to Arambai, but faster firing across the board would help to mitigate their currently lackluster (actual) DPS.

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I’d be careful to differentiate between dynamics such as difficulty transitioning to the unit and the statics of how does the unit fare up to other units. The latter is basically a question of “How does this perform in equilibrium” while the former is a question of “What kind of difficulties arise on getting to that equilibrium/which equilibria are reachable”.

Things affecting the transition to the unit are the long research time of chemistry, the training time, and current enemy composition.

Things affecting the equilibrium performance are the unit’s stats (cost included), other unit’s stats, and the short-term enemy composition. We should expect these equilibria to be relatively short lived or relatively balanced, because good players don’t keep themselves at a disadvantage by blindly spamming the same thing.

The lack of use of a unit could be due to either of these things and from a balance perspective they imply very different things. Consider the matrix below describing the relationship between a unit’s transition cost and effectiveness.

already being used fast / cheap transition timely / tolerable transition slow / expensive transition
weak in equilibrium Transition away from over time Performance pays back transition, but inefficient over time. Works as a stop-gap at best in practice. Performance does not pay back transition. Still useful to slow a civ down or keep compositions in check Unit is avoided
balanced in equilibrium Keep Alternatives in Mind Unit greatly pays back transition. Useful to speed a civ up or make up for weaker early game Performance pays back transition. No significant trade-off over time. Performance does not pay back cost of transition. Still useful to slow a civ down or keep compositions in check
strong in equilibrium Keep producing over time Unit is prioritized Unit greatly pays back transition. Useful to speed a civ up or make up for weaker early game Performance pays back transition. Very good efficiency over time. Works as a game-ender if enemy cant counter-switch.

Keep in mind time and resources are both costs for the transition. As the game state changes the box that each unit ends up in changes. It’s one model for why tech switches even happen in the game. Problematic units tend to reside in (weak, slow) or (strong, cheap) for way too many different scenarios.

Anyway it’s pretty obvious looking at the matrix where hand cannons sit. The only situations in which it’s quite strong are when infantry are on the field. When mostly cavalry are on the field it’s somewhere between weak and balanced (halb + HC is still decent). When arbs or skirms or CA dominate the field the unit is pretty bad. Siege can be sniped with BBC only by players who know what they’re doing with attack ground (and Japanese and Khmer don’t have BBC). This seems like it fills the niche OK in terms of the vertical axis.

But now look at the horizontal axis. The civs most likely to use gunpowder are the civs with the best transitions, Bohemians and Turks. This seems to indicate the problem is not with the vertical axis, it’s with the transition being slow. So if shifting to the left has much more impact than shifting toward the bottom, why not shift toward the left? Cut the training time by 20% or more. All it does at the end of the day is save on ranges (and reduce resource float) which is pretty safe as far as imperial age unit buffs go. It’s also super easy to reverse if it turns out people have just been underestimating the unit.

I’m not saying this is needed but if you’re going to buff something at least take the time to analyze along which dimension the most impactful and least risky buffs lie.

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HC dont need techs other than Chemistry, or some armor (not necessary tho)
So they are quick once in Imperial
The problem is HC are too weak in general, and a pain to micro
Increasing RoF solves both problems

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You make the classic mistake of reversing a one-directional conclusion.
If A => B it isn’t nevessarily B => A.

In the other thread we had very lengthy discussions why it feels like HC suck.

One of it was that bad rof with a lot of overkill. One other was that skirms often do the job even better against arb + halb which is the most common comp to face for the cav civs. Third was the high gold ratio that lead to transitioning into a non-sustainable unit production to counter less gold heavy and therefore more sustainable unit production.

And a lot more.

It’s really complicated stuff.

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Huh “pain to micro”? :joy: And they are perfect at what they’re supposed to do, countering Infantry.

No they are not and that is why you see people complaining about them time and time again.

People complain about everything, even not yet released units that we have no usage record of. Some wouldn’t cease to do so even giving perfect balance.

By the way, weren’t people saying during the pros playtesting that the new Shatagni Hand Cannoneers are OP?

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Pretty sure someone did in a stream yes. Original Poster likely is referring to regular Hand Cannoneers, not those of the Hindustanis.

Regular HC still succ, and that is a big problem. Hindustani HC is a matter yet to be seen, I wouldn’t start calling them OP already, that won’t be fair.
Infact even Hindustani may not go for HC that often in actual games on competitive maps like Arabia, Nomad, etc. which form 90% of all play in AOE2

But why is calling them underpowered (or any new unit, for that matter) fair?

All of the new units, new civs, are a matter yet to be seen. Apply same logic to everything you do, not just cherrypick.

And idk, I don’t think HC suck, they do their job very effectively and still pack a punch against cavalry. Even in teamgames you see people transitioning into HC eventually (unless there are better generalist options available). They just don’t make them early Imp when they still have a Crossbow mass left over to upgrade into Arbalests instead.

I don’t know how you use them that they don’t work for you, honestly.

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Then have you never seen a game of Low Elo Legends casted by our beloved T90official?

Because in those cases a consensus has already formed that those units/techs are weak and may need to be buffed
Such as the Elephant Archer, all the casters yesterday I saw were really surprised by the low performance of this unit after losing 50HP and lots of PA.

It isn’t a single civ’s UU anymore. Now being a regional unit exclusive to few civs, it seems fair for it to be highly situational, similar to Steppe Lancers which are much worse off.

I can understand bad micro resulting in them dying, I’ve done that myself, but that’s not the unit’s fault. xd

Which consensus? You spamming every single thread how every single thing is underpowered (funny, you call CloudAct out on doing the opposite? What was it you said about glass houses?) is not a consensus, it’s your spam. For Hand Cannoneers, I’m still not sure what you mean by the unit being weak. The unit isn’t, just the use case or window to use them is very narrow. If you go Archers, you’ll first do Arbalests. Later, if the enemy is heavy on Infantry, you’ll want to do Hand Cannoneers, but you’re likely going to look at gold availability.

Them costing food will make it also awkward if you’re heavy on wood and gold, because of their food cost. However, they require nearly no upgrades, so someone going Heavy Cavalry can supplement their army very well with just a few Hand Cannoneers, not needing 40 of them to mow down incoming Halberdiers. Hand Cannoneers do their function very effectively.

Afaik, everyone has only played the new civs against eachother, and not among other civs, so the general idea of how strong or weak the new civs and their units are is already going to be flawed. We’ll see their state better and the first few patches after a release will balance every under or overperforming units quickly, as seen in past launches.

From what I’ve seen, everyone’s made EAs and some civs were even pretty strong with them (I think Gujaras or Bengalis, don’t remember which, think was the one who gets Ratha), but you have to consider that they only played those against other Indian civs.

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Buffs to the unit stats do basically nothing to solve those issues without causing scope creep like making generic hand cannons extremely strong vs cavalry. The whole point of the matrix is to show you are constrained by the design vs various comps.

Anyone can make hand cannons useable. Just pick a random stat and buff it then repeat until its used. Making sure buffed hand cannons + halb/hussar cant faceroll franks, slavs, Burmese, etc. is another issue.

Also last time i checked attack move combined with defensive <> no attack switching solved the overkill problem becausr it causes staggered firing. But i could be misremembering.

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I think that’s the whole point of my input here.
Ofc it isn’t a problem making HC strong. But it would be better if it is designed to fit certain common situation you end up in the lategame.
The question is then if HC should be the last powerspike in a (or different) chain of counter choices or shall there be at least one unit the opponent would like to transition to. If it’s the last powerspike it’s important that it is not too strong, so the transition is only viable if you have still access to a lot of gold eg. If it is the other because of the lategame situation and the associated complexity and cost to make a transition (though HC are way cheaper than most other transitions) it needs to be a quite strong powerspike.
I don’t think it is a good idea to just blatantly buff the HC in one or different ways without having in mind what function they shall have.

So what are the most common lategame comps? Arb + Halb, Cav Archer + light cav, heavy cav + skirm, halb + siege. Most often with support of onagers, BBC and Trebs. Have I forgot something? Oh yeah, full trash comp. Sometimes also infantry floods, but it is rare due basically only 1 civ has an outstanding one.

The HC most often comes with Cav Civs. These most of the time already have out skirms against the non-cav civs. The skirms counter Arb + Halb but are countered by light cav + siege. They also counter cav archers fairly well, but have problems against the light cav meatshield. So what can HC possibly add? One option was to make them total DPS monsters, killing the meatshields of the opponents so the skirms and heavy cav havve better access to the enemy backline. But then HCs need to have weaknesses against stuff like siege otherwise they would just end everything. Lower range + low HP for example. Also if they are designed to kill light cav they need to have ballistics. That would be a viable concept for the HC, a frontline buster, designed to kill trash meatshields.
And that would indeed be an interesting unit design. A unit that costs a serious amount of gold to kill trash meatshields in the lategame.
Good vs Halbs + Hussars, but bad vs archery, light cav and siege.

How is this achievable? By giving them some kind of “splash damage” - For example extremely low accuracy with a wide spread, so that with every “salvo” a lot of opponent units are damaged, possibly even with full damage. To make them especially good vs light cav but bad vs heavy cav their shots could have both melee and pierce damage (then they also need no bonus vs rams) but no bonus vs infantry anymore (possibly a minor bonus vs cav, to compensate for light cav having so much more hp than halbs). This in conjecture with the heavy cav having a lot more HP could make HCs considerably good vs light cav while struggling against heavy cav (+siege or skirms). With lower range and HP than currently (like 1-2 less range) they would be quite vulnerable to siege. Against archery you could and probably should try to bring in your skirms or heavy cav in so they can tank some of these shots.
This kind of design would fit a lot of lategame situations cav civs are in. But it wouldn’t be the “last killerblow” as the opponent still can add siege or try tojust outspam with a full trash comp where the skirms try to focus down your HCs.
You could possibly even argue to raise the gold ratio of HCs in this context to make sure nobody can just spam them like nothing but instead uses medium sized groups in addition to the already established composition. But I think the cost for the unit needs to be figured out by the feedback of the community and how they perform in the end.

So that would be one Idea how the unit could be designed in a way it would be fairly useful and a nice powerspike. But not OP, cause there would be some possible counterplays / transitions against it.
What it could hinder a bit would be a champ transition of the opponent. Which is a bit sad ofc as Devs put so much work in making Infantry more viable. But tbh I think even without useful HCs the Champ lines outside the inf powerhouses could still use some love. Even better if then there would be useful counters for most civs you can transition to if the line itself becomes stronger.

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But that is their first test, mostly outside of ranked. Too soon to call it a consensus, because they can change their opinion later

This remind me abour Viper switching opinions regarding elephant archer (indian UU) one year ago! Someone echoed the opinion of proplayers, and with the time we saw the true usefulness of elephant archers (their most famous battle was in a battle against tatars during a tournament)

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I really like this logic. I also wonder if swapping food for wood cost will also shift them in the correct axis.

HC were never meant to counter halb + ARB. It’s like complaining mangos aren’t good enough at killing cavalry, so they need a buff

You can’t just buff something for the sake of it. I would love to know where this repeated concept comes from. There would be something wrong with the game if HC actually countered that comp

As a kid I always thought gunpowder should naturally be better than FU arbs.

Late I do not je out the truth, I am sad this is only the case in aoe4

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