Also the same video 32.14 => 15 HCs fire twice at 1 light cav which runs right at the HCs. Not even taking half of its HP 
OK. I donât know why a turks player would ever chose HC over elite jans, but ok.
Itâs a bit complicated bec camels do quite well against HC. Ofc you could argue that camels are trash against arbs, but this is actually one of the things were I say: Thatâs completely fine in itâs current state. In comparable numbers or value camels should be quite good vs HC. Itâs not their main task to kill camels. You usually have halbs to do this or at least protect your HC (ofc not turks, but usually).
So that camel engagement is fine for me. But you are right, the HC donât kill much of the pikes either. And thatâs the concerning one.
He does not have eco or production to proceed with it. EJ is an expensive upgrade. Turks are also very hard to play with 0 meaningful eco bonus combined with mandatory expensive unit compositions but this is a different story. Problem is that HC is a borderline meme unit when they cannot even be more efficient than trashbows. I am just wondering how would Turks skirmisher with bracer would be placed in this list.
Already explained why thatâs a foolish proposition. For multiple reasons, but the main one being access to HC is basically free and access to Arbalest is not.
Camels take an extremely long upgrade time, and need nearly full upgrades to compete with Paladins. As a result, fully upgraded Byzantine Heavy Camels (which miss two) lose 1v1 to Teuton/Frank/Lith Paladins. A.K.A. You need basically every tech to make Heavy camel fully counter Paladin. Oh look, the upgrade to access them is more expensive and takes longer than Chemistry. Almost like I made a point.
No it doesnât. You wouldnât make this same argument for HC vs Heavy Cavalry Archer, because you arenât an idiot. Even though all these units are good against infantry, and HCA has a specific bonus against Spear-lines that make it fantastic to limit halb as anti-cav, you wouldnât make this claim because it is foolish and ridiculous to compare two units with vastly different upgrade costs and then claim the one that costs less is bad because it doesnât perform as well.
Unfortunately, you are making a similiar, extremely poor comparison to Arbalest:
This is what it takes to upgrade Arbalest to full fighting power:
2175 food
1500 gold
550 wood
all of which is staggered through multiple ages, which means you should consider this number to be a bit more expensive than the values indicate because you need to grab some in earlier ages.
And this is what it takes to upgrade Hand Cannons:
800 food
600 gold
The biggest chunk of that comes out of the Armor cost. If youâre alright fielding HC without armor while you get that done (which you may very well if you need them against Infantry) the number looks even lower.
Comparing these two units is a foolish endeavor. Even if you want to compare Xbows, Xbows are still more expensive to upgrade in Castle age than it is to upgrade HC in Imperial age, which is my point. You donât need to build-up the upgrades to get to that stage, you switch in, and the unit is there.
Inca players not making Slingers against full infantry because players are imperfect and they get stuck in meta? Weâve seen this time and time again, so often I unironically made a thread advocating to give Incan Slingers a buff just so theyâd be listed in patch notes so people would remember they exist.
If your entire point hinges on âyou donât see hand cannons in Hidden Cupâ Iâve got some bad news for you. That bad news is âMost civs that have HC are not picked for their HC but rather a cav strat, and cav isnât terrible, and Halb isnât a clean counter, and HC doesnât counter Camel. Hand cannon is literally there so the civ doesnât have a civ loss to the Japanese and/or other strong anti-cav civs.â
Which is what I keep telling you. The units have different purposes.
You are not comparing them in their main task. Their main task is a late transition backline unit. You can never compare these two in this task. They are not comparable. As a unit you didnât tech into yet but you need now, Hand Cannon is literally incomparably better than Arbalest. If it was in any way comparable to the Arbalest, weâd have a problem. We donât. Further, if this transitional unit countered melee units, any melee units, period, better than the Arbalest, weâd have the same, completely reversed problem.
For what? What are you making the archer attack upgrades for? Because youâre assuming your opponent is going to be so balled over by Archers that they canât wait until Castle age to blend in siege to push away archers, and is going to need skirmishers? Youâre airballing. This is a total blank assumption. Any civ that doesnât have a strong lategame archer option has plenty of quality options to handle Archers without grabbing the Archer upgrades.
Nothing Iâve said is false. Donât even start. You just claimed that
And now youâll claim I ignored you and made false claims. If this is how you ârespect argumentationâ itâs a solid âFâ from me.
Without Arbalest, but all the rest of the upgrades (which is the test you are comparing to to assert Iâm both ignoring you and making false claims) the cost looks like this:
1825 food
1200 gold
550 wood
Which is still a world more expensive than the HC. The test does not indicate castle age X-bows. It indicates Imperial Age Xbows, which is the above cost. It is you who is making false claims. Again.
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again.
So please donât bend my argument with your false claims. Especially when youâre going to turn around and assert that youâre being respectful whilst falsely accusing me of making incorrect statements.
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So you say it is foolish.
But you actually try to make an argument with it to stay that bec of the higher upgrade costs arbs should be better in ANY situation than HC.
Decide what you want, but please donât try to fool us with your bigoted argumentation.
No point of making HC, when you arrive to Imp, you have 50 Arbalest and you have to wait for Chemistry to get HC-s slowly.
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I do seriously believe the Arbalest should be better in every aspect, once fully upgraded, than the Hand Cannon. Itâs not a conventional counter unit, like a skirm or a spear. Both of those exist through the entire game as a check on the progressive buildup of the unit and as a gold-less counter to them, at the expense of being a purely defensive unit. The hand cannon is incomparable to these as well:
- Not available in the early stages.
- Not upgradable.
- Costs gold
- Has serious offensive potential.
In that, it fills the role of the Arbalest for civs that donât have it, readily, at a lesser investment, with a lesser return. Itâs not a standard counter unit or a standard ranged unit. The lack of tiered upgrades restricting itâs use is totally unique to that and you canât ignore it.
six civs in the entire game have this option. what about the other 14 who donât get Arbalest.
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The unit has different advantages for different civs. In general itâs an option, and not a terrible one, just an awkward one.
As an example of an important interaction take franks vs teutons. Hand cannons kill teuton halbs in an expected 13.8sec but throwing axemen kill in 18 seconds and frank xbow take 33 sec. Itâs not even close, and hand cannons canât be countered by teuton infantry, unlike throwing axemen.
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For Franks, Teutons, Burgundians, and Spanish HC is better than the archer or skirmisher line at zoning/killing out halbs and camels simultaneously. Also better at killing Mamelukes. Is it mostly because their archer techs suck? Yes 11. But thatâs the tech tree they were dealt. Can also use siege or UU.
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For Goths itâs mostly just useful for killing Cataphracts and strong infantry like bagains 2hs. Can also use heavy scorpions.
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For Persians thereâs trashbow now, which means HC are relegated to specific civ matchups. Still much better against the anti-cavalry infantry like Vikings or Kamayuks or ETK or Malian pikes. Can also use siege or HCA.
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For Indians and Berbers, camels perform very poorly against basically all infantry. HC is faster/cheaper to tech and better than cavalry archers against these. If one goes cavalry archers then HC are kind of mediocre except against eagles or huskarls.
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For Tatars, and Turks they tend to go HCA so itâs the same story, Eagles or huskarls. Turks fast imp obviously is a thing.
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For Lithuanians itâs mostly useful as a way to counter infantry + halbs in a stronger way than xbow. Against straight halbs or camels xbow is better. The leitis also makes high melee armor units not a problem but thatâs an expensive and castle-limited switch.
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For Khmer, vs halbs arbs are probably better but only because of the range. HC is way better vs infantry like gbetos or axemen which could kite the elephants. Can also use scorpions.
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For Malians, their arb is the same as FU xbow dps wise. HC vs non pike infantry (like their own gbeto). They also have faster university. Can also use HCA or arbs.
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For the top 6 civs the obvious answer is huskarls and eagles since all of these are good archer civs. For Saracens, much of the Indians comments apply regarding infantry vs camels. Korean cavalry and infantry especially are lackluster meaning anti archer infantry needs to be countered with hand cannons.
I left out a bunch of stuff here but the point is there is an obvious theme. The hand cannon is good depending on what else you have. Goths would use it against different units as Koreans. Saracens and Indians would use it for a different reason than other civs. The no thumb ring civs would use it as a replacement while others would not.
The easiest way to think about the hand cannon is that its good (or great vs infantry) at a bunch of things. You can list them out. As you add other units to a tech tree you do one of two things: cross out units indicating HC is sub optimal even in the short term, or put a â?â Indicating HC is good short term, but not long term. Every civ will have different markings on that list depending on their tech tree.
Meta units like archers and knights tend to not suffer other units displacing them like this. If they are good at something they tend to be optimal choices, or at least on equal footing. But that doesnât make units that do suffer displacement bad, it just means you have to know your stuff.
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No Ballistics + slow projectile speed + slow rate of fire is such a horrible combination that can be abused so hard. With cav you can just move diagonally to them and so many misses or 50% damage hits.
That is why in the very first post of this topic I made these suggestions to make them being affected by ballistics (give portuguese more accuracy instead of ballistics for HC) and increase the projectile speed to 7 like archers. Even after just these 2 changes they would become far more reliable and far better.
There would still be massive overkill but at least a single fast unit walking past them would finally be hit instead of missing all bullets into thin air.
There is also no logic behind archers being able to lead a shot and HC not being able to. It is the same idea behind to lead a shot. The accuracy is then what reflects that HC are harder to use and to hit targets but leading a target (ballistics) should be the same for both.
I can understand that they donât give ballistics to Siege (Mango/Scorp) because that would be extremely powerful but ranged units that are not siege should all be affected by ballistics in my opinion - including HC.
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but itâs smoothbore so it goes wide and nails the neighborâs dog.
The idea that generic gunpowder would be accurate at all is illogical to start, let alone a moving target.
Hand Cannoneer do not counter Eagles or Huskarls.
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Hand Cannoneers do not even properly counter Pikes or Champions, either. They are not cost-effective at all.
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A snippet of five HCâs sitting under a castle, and no context. He says he loses three fights but we donât get to see any of them. Then, top-tier freakout from Stark, no complaint there, but if this is the argumentation, this feels like itâs pulled straight out of âOnagars are broken IIâ
He had many HCs, but he lost them before the clip.
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Did he mismicro them by trying to walk fire the entire group, and blow 800+ damage on a single champion? Did he miss shots due to badly timing it because heâs not familiar with the frame delay or the fire rate of the unit? âHe lost themâ means about as much as âLook how strong these OnagArs are, pls nerf.â
Was it 60 vs 20/30? 50v40? 80 vs 25?
This is not quality argumentation.
Only if you donât do what is trivially obvious to do:
Use 2hs or champions as a meatshield. In particular stand ground box formation 2hs + hand cannon is devastating vs huskarls and eagles.
It combines the zoning out power of HC with the melee power of 2hs/Champs. It is significantly more effective than either unit alone.
Thy will not last long enough, and the other player will always click your bigger mass.
Not everyone A-moves.
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Exactly. A few weeks ago I made HC+Farimba Light Cav as Malians vs Viking Champs+Pikes. I didnât have enough Castles to make Gbetos. What happened? The Hand Cannons could kill nothing. After that I decided I will never make this sh.it unit again, Malian Arbs without Bracer are 5 times better, than HC.
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yreah box formation is terrible, sorry.
You have units that can move and you decide to use only part of them to protect your vulnerable ranged units. Itâs really, really bad move. also against attack move.
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Turk Skirms with Bracer, are better than HCs against Pikes, because you are not spending any Gold at all.