As the title suggests I don’t believe that Turks have a good answer to archers with a few pikemen to protect them. Especially in open maps. Turks cav archers aren’t that good either cause now the enemy who is massing xbows can easily research elite skirm and add them in and now the cav archers aren’t trading cost effective.
Turks need elite skirm! They are the most situational civ in the game literally only good at Arena
By the same logic you cant beat monks/mangonels because you can always add in pikemen.
To beat xbows + pikes tuks can: make their own xbows with faster gold miners; go cav archer + mangonel, scorpions, janissaries + mangonels, knights + xbows.
Turks are actually decent on arabia, with excellent mobile units and an okay eco bonus. HCA + hussar is very strong and you can keep the HCA alive for a very long time. Absolutely not a top tier civ but not useless.
Finally, turks have all 6 blacksmith upgrades for their skirms, so they are not so bad that they are not worth using, especially against civs with only pikemen.
People have been complaining about the turks lack of trash options for decades, there have been a bunch of balance patches and turks have not had their trash buffed. That tells me that there is not a good case for changing anything now.
I don’t see how this has to do with Turks at all.
I guess you can open scouts for Feudal. Then in Castle Age, when your opponent has his archers/pikeman thing going, just hide in your TCs (you can probably safely add Town Centers against archer/pikeman) until you have a Castle up then you can outrange the archers with your unique unit. If your opponent is splitting his archers/pikeman all over your base then you already have a Stable to make a knight or two; your opponent really does have to keep his archers together. You might have to place your Castle next to one of your Town Centers to get it up safely, but it’s fine.
If you do the opening as above and still have map control with your scouts against archer/pikeman upon hitting Castle then you could just go knights into cav archers but OP assumes you lost map control in Feudal/early Castle.
In 1v1 you should be able to stall long enough against archers/pikeman just by hiding in Town Centers/reposition villagers to get a Castle up on a gold. In team games you shouldn’t worry about anything after Feudal Age in open maps if you’re playing correctly since team games are a Feudal fest right now.
Why is OP trading with cav archers is the real question though.
their own xbows + mangonels or knights if enemy is adding elite skirms. 15% faster gold should favor turks generally. In wallable maps jannisaries + mangonels are very annoying to beat
No elite skirm hurts mostly in specific matchups like turks vs malay or mayans, but most of the time they can do well without elite skirm/pike. They even had 49% winrate at 2k+ level on Voobly on arabia.
Turks are fine.
no theyre not. thats not how it works.
49% winrate might seem close to 50 but thats not how it works.
20/34 civs are above the 50% mark. so, more than half of civs are above the halfway mark. is a positively skewed graph. that puts turks in the bottom 9 (out of 34). bottom quarter.
and the reason for this is the bottom quarter civs get smashed by everyone else.
Turks are 49%, but Franks in comparison are 63%.
They even had 49% winrate at 2k+ level on Voobly on arabia
that isn’t an accurate way to portray it sorry. the 24 other civs are all passed the 50% mark.
I’ve argued this before and I’m sick of repeating myself.
The average winrate of all civs by definition is 50%. It doesn’t matter in which way the graph is skewed, it means that they’re only 1% off of being ‘average’ on a specific map with outdated data. On more closed maps, you might expect turks to have a higher winrate (i.e. more than 50%)
you could make an argument that Franks were 13% above average and perhaps too strong for arabia, but expert players disagree, the reason is the pathfinding in DE shifted balance entirely. I.e. knights in DE are much clunkier than they used to be.
In other words, people constantly interpret the data in a wrong way. Expert player opinions are much more valuable in my opinion
“in my opinion someone else’s opinion is more important than data” said no analyst ever…
real balance is almost always done based on stats, not on opinions…
Any analyst would know that it’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to balance the game on data. There are (35*34)/2 = 595 matchups, there are only a handful of top players with very distinct playstyles, played on dozens of different maps. Each map itself has so much variance on it’s own, which decide how the game is played out. (e.g. a gold rush with a back gold allows for drush fc, which favor specific civs, which favor specific players). Also, games of unequal skill level massively increase the variance. you probably need at least one million recorded games of expert players playing the current set of maps.
Even if you can manage all of that, you still have to take into account that players play the civ sub-optimally. For instance, korean towers were completely broken at one point, but it took quite a while before people realized that their towers built 25% faster. Inca vil rush is only recently discovered by expert players. And there is also the factor that expert players either pick, go mirror or choose random. That is three different cases that you have to analyze seperately, you have to neglect the ‘random’ and ‘mirror’ data entirely. Last but not least, balance changes makes civ matchup data useless and you would have to start over again.
aoestats.io had almost the perfect circumstances for analysis (most players picking random vs random, most playing one map, few balance changes), but even that data is very limited and so often wrongly intepreted. One of the main reasons is civs that do well vs ‘an average civ’ don’t necessarily perform well vs top civs.
come back when you’ve spoken to someone on a balance team… you obvously don’t how the data is anaylsed, it isnt just by looking at raw stats without any application and then picking changes out of thin air…
Do you even know the meaning of the word ‘data’? By definition, you have to use raw stats of matches, and in order to do an analysis, you have to exclude all factors that increase the randomness factor.
that is what this forum has been doing, I’m saying that balance is heck of a lot more complicated than looking at aoestats, choosing a change. I didn’t propose any changes for turks, so I’m not sure what makes you think I did
So what is YOUR motivation to change turks? Even the (only) flawed data we have doesn’t support buffs for them at all. Have you done any analysis at all then? No disrespect, but I think the opinion of 1500+ are based on a much better understanding of the metagame.
Welp, it’s true that not only aoestats isn’t relevant for DE, but Turks are also good at arena/BF, while other civs that sound good on these maps aren’t as good as they should (like say Goths/Portuguese)
Welp, unfortunately it’s often like that but not always.
Janissary.
It’s got 8 range in castle age, so it outranges literally everything in CA besides Briton xbows and khmer allied scorps. Mix in your freely upgraded LC in castle age and Janissary + LC really should handle absolutely anything.
In castle age where gold is plenty, even in a 1v1 you should have no problem handling threats that don’t outpace the Janissary and outdamage the LC, meaning pretty much Conqs or mass heavy cav. If those are your problem, wall your flanks, try to get up an age, and raid in the meantime with spare LC wherever you can. Try to prevent or delay any forwards.
EDIT: on the winrate thing.
It’s sometimes a good indicator of strength, namely when there is a very high pick rate. High pick rate is the most important factor. When a civ like the Turks has a low win rate, consider the possibility that it’s more to do with a low pick rate, meaning few people play it, and they play it less often, therefore are less comfortable with their options. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re underpowered. Examples of options that are underpicked and underutilized globally but are extremely strong options exist through all games with trackable pick/win/loss rates.
If you’re using win/loss stats as your basis for making a claim of strength, you shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Janissary is situational and you need to have a wallable map to secure that strat. Thats why they are a natural way to go in arena.
In arabia things are different. The author of this tread refered to open maps specially and in that case its more logical to go xbows if you are starting from feudal fights.
They still have the LC, mangonels are always viable in CA if that’s the case.
You only really need to wall your flanks if you’re up against a more mobile unit. Otherwise you should have no problem keeping the pressure off.
You maybe right, but I am a Türk and many of my friends are as well naturally. We naturally choose Turks in single and multi most of the time but after gold runs out, and without a decent trade partner they have no hope in the late game of a normal game as long as they don’t do fast imp.
They need a trash unit and they need it badly.
I think a tech called “Tımar” would solve it.
Tımar should change the knightline to trash unit and their gold cost to +%150 food while for the cost of their armors’ reduced 1 for both melee and pierce. In addition also change the farm’s build need from 75 wood to 125(or150) food and should give %25 more food from farm.
That would solve their problem real fast, and becuase it is a late game tech, and becuase it is optional one could also have the chance to have it or not instead of crappy 20 health point to cav. archers (at least gave them some range instead, archers should be precise not tanky).
Their situation is historically wrong as well. At their height Ottomans did not need any ally to fight whole Europe at once, while the tımar system was intact (before Suleiman the ignorant broke it like every tool he used). But in the game their economy forces you to either go fast imp or loose the game In one on one or always play at least two vs. two with spanish, astecs or berbers as ally. Yeah there are options now but a thriving civ of its time should be more flexible at least like Byzantians or Spanish.
Turks can do many more strats besides Fast imp (and anyway you rarely attempt this outside of Arena)
Welp, technologies that reduce a unit stat are an AoE3 thing, and anyway those Cavaliers would still be well above average (only FU cavaliers and Paladins would be better) for a price of 60+75*1.5 = 173 food, which is slightly less than 2 hussars. This would be waaaaaaaaay too strong.
So a Turk farm would end up giving 250 food. Besides the fact the +25% food is a chinese rip-off, this+food costing farm would radically change the Turks from the “manage your gold civ” to the “I need just 1 res civ”, which is boring.
But Sipahi is a Castle age tech, and Artillery in Castle would be useless.
Those crappy +20 HP is what allows them to kill all other cav archers besides War wagons and Elephant archers. But unlike those, the Turk HCA is still super fast and can use his bulk to raid for longer under arrow fire. Not to mention for Turk the LC is auto-upgraded so that you can easily combo them.
I’m pretty much sure they never got pitted against all European countries together. And they had tons of gold, one reason being that they had control over trade routes from South and Eastern asia. It’s much better historically than say, no crossbows on Spanish.
I’ve tried to find what Soliman did to the system but it’s mentionned no where, even in the Turk version of the article (Timar - Wikipedia) And still according to this, the system was likely abandonned because there were too much people and not enough land to give.
Or you can use your faster gold mining speed for archers, and then in castle it helps for Xbow, knights, camels, mangonels, CAs, monks, and technologies. I’m not going to pretend their eco is top-tier material but it’s definitely better than actual bottom tier civs like Goths or Vietnamese.
Compared to Spanish and Byzantines they look weaker but compared to Portuguese and Viet (other civs with bad early game and good late-game) they are much better. Also, if we take into account high level 1v1s Arabia on Voobly (https://aoestats.io/stats?elo=2000%2B#?orderby=win_rate), which are a really harsh place for late-game civs, they are actually really close to Spanish, and almost at a 50% winrate, which is balanced. Of course now there is DE, that buffed some civs below the Turks in this list… but it also nerfed Spanish by making tower rushes weaker.
"Welp, technologies that reduce a unit stat are an AoE3 thing, and anyway those Cavaliers would still be well above average (only FU cavaliers and Paladins would be better) for a price of 60+75*1.5 = 173 food, which is slightly less than 2 hussars. This would be waaaaaaaaay too strong. "
Let it be 250 food then.
“I’ve tried to find what Soliman did to the system but it’s mentionned no where, even in the Turk version of the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timar) And still according to this, the system was likely abandonned because there were too much people and not enough land to give.”
What killed Tımar system is İltizam, meaning giving the right to tax a land for cash to a certain financer, that lead to Duyuni Umumiye (The General Order of Depts). İltizam became the rule in Suleiman’s era. And in his era the population started to diminish for the first time in Ottoman history while the land was close to be its’ biggest. What you suggest here is inconsistent with the reality of that time. The wiki you look at the problem from another style. The problem was the growing pressure of “Dewshirme” or the Janissaries above Sipahis. There was always competition between these two classes of tecnocrats in Ottoman rule (which was a good thing in a democratic sense) but in Mehmet II era it is solved in favour of the Janissaries which led the overgrowth of the Janissaries’ coersion and their resources. That problem exploded in Suleiman’s era as well (1528 is in Suleiman’s era.), because Janissaries’ were becoming more generalist officers instead of specialists and their education was not helpful on the different socioeconomic problems of the growing land of the empire, and with time their responsiblities grow even futher where they could not keep up with.
The rest of the wikipage is what I meant above. Problem here lies with our understaning of success. “the value of an action or ‘success’ can be determined by its outcome”; even if we don’t know what Suleiman did in his era it is quite clear that after his era the development and strenght of Ottoman Empire did not grow, it diminished instead. If he had done something good, ıt should took the quite the opposite trend and Ottoman should have got stronger, like how his predecessors did.
That’s mean 4 cavaliers = 1000 food… The deal is that with such good cav, either they cost too little food and they stomp everything or they cost too much and aren’t worth producing since you could just produce 4 hussars and send them suicide in trade lines/enemy eco… If I remember well I’ve seen the subject of trash knights being discussed on Reddit and basically only Knights that lack all Imp upgrade would be a balanced choice to be a trash unit.
For the whole broken system thing, I understand now, but since it’s Ottoman history, it can be included right? I mean French failed numerous time to make good use of archers, be it their own soldiers or foreign mercenaries, so they get trash tier Xbows and that’s fine.
You have to make Turkish regular Skirmishers… back them up with some BBC and keep your hussars behind in wait until pikemen get thinned out. BBCs can blast damage xbowmen and pikes so get as many shots off as you can. If you want you can also try heavy Cav archers + BBCs… HCA has to hit and run a bit from pikes… get them into castle, janissary, or BBC fire…