I just tried the scenario editor. I set both players to Castle Age, which gives them Castle Age units, but only Feudal Age upgrades. I had 50 crossbows vs 25 knights (similar total resource cost if equal weight is given to each resource), and I manually tried to kite the crossbows, but tbh it’s a bit of a waste of time after the first few shots, due to the faster speed of the knights. The knights won.
thing is, you can start producing archers in feudal, knights you can’t start making until in castle age. equal resources fight in this situation, especially with only feudal upgrades, is not likely, because the first thing someone doing when they hit castle age is click both bodkin and xbow upgrade.
that said, yeah, knights laugh at archers.
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Well 40 xbows is realistic but 25 knights will take quite a while. Also bodkin and ballistics are huge tools against knights, thumb ring to an extent too. On other hand knights without castle age upgrades are only missing 1 attack and 1 pierce so it’s not a fair comparison.
And I don’t know how you micro’d but part of the xbow meta problem is their stacking into trees and choke pointd only allowing 1-3 knights to attack them but xbows being ranged can still attack. The DE melee bumping is still an issue, it might not make knights lose outright but their losses are more and their fights are not as efficient
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Try 15 Crossbows vs 7 or 8 Knights (equal ressources)
With +2 attack upgrade for xbows and +2 defense upgrade for Knights
This is a more likely scenario in early castle age.
On open grounds, this kind of early castle age fights should be better for the knights, on equal ressources.
That’s why the archer player doesn’t usually go for Pure xbows, but has to mix in some pikemen or some monks, when dealing with fully upgraded knights. Provided both players are of the same level and noone has an advantage in the game.
When you factor in that the knight player might probably mix in some mangonels and/or some skirmishers as well, it’s obvious that xbows are getting countered hard and that the archer player can’t get away with just going braindead full xbows.
I also think that a way to fix the scouts next to obvious melee problems is to reduce the archers dominance. Here some suggestions:
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to make scouts and infantry better at rushing and to “weaken” the quickwall meta let foundations have no armor (I think it already does?) and increase the damage taken by a factor of 2-5 so that 2 attackers can break through a villager building it. A house without doors can easily be passed and offers no protection. A 1/4th built wall can easily be climbed.
That way if you want to be safe you have to commit to walls before the enemy attacks which costs you some resources and time. That sounds like a good compromise to me -
increase the minimum distance between archer units (spacing). This is absolutely neccessary. There is no place to attack them when they stack together like they do and it makes it easy for archers to massively abuse tight spaces where for example only 1-2 knights can attack 10-20 archers.
They barely have space to reload their crossbows so even from that point of view there is no reason to keep it that way. You could even argue that they are shooting each other into the back if they don’t have lots of space between each other to shoot. Archers have the special advantage that they can attack from each row behind each other. Spacing at least makes that advantage not so huge -
if needed you could increase their rate of fire so that they have around 1.9 to 2 seconds attack rate with thumb ring. At the moment they attack faster than infantry/cav. In reality crossbows take very long to reload. Archers can shoot rather fast. This could be a way of balancing the crossbow only.
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increase the frame delay - maybe even double it so that it is easier for other units to catch them and so that they don’t have such a huge micro advantage which was even increased by removing lag.
I think melee units attack animation is longer than archers so archers can kite them for quite some time until they reach the archers and even then after each attack they have to reach the archers again which is really difficult with 0.99 speed (militia line) vs 0.96 speed. -
fix the pathing issues of melee. Give them 0.2 reach (a sword or axe also has some reach actually) so that they don’t have to stand exactly next to the unit which might fix some of the not-attacking-issues against moving targets.
Also you could reduce the attack animation time for militia and cav but still keep the delay between attacks. That means they can keep up better with kiting targets since now they stand still for less time before they chase again. Same treatment as with hussars.
Then if they are not actively attacking a unit at the moment let them re-evaluate their target 2-3 times a second so that they switch to targets they can actually attack (maybe a unit directly next to them). This removes the problem where a unit runs around other units to reach the unit it wants to attack which is highly inefficient. -
increase the crowsbow upgrade cost. It is so cheap for such a powerful upgrade. Elite Skirm upgrade is a lot more expensive. Also compare it to the militia upgrade cost. Here a comparison:
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Cost for usable Crossbow (2x range 350w):
Feudal age: 100f 50g (fletching) - total: 100f 50g 350w = 500 res
Castle age: 125f 75g (crossbowman) + 200f 100g (bodkin) - total: 425f 225g 350w = 1.000 res
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Now Long Swordsman (2nd Barracks +175w):
Feudal Age: 100f 40g (M@A), 150f 100g (supplies), 100f (scale armor) - total: 350f 140g 175w = 665 res
Castle Age: 200f 65g (LS), 100f (squires), 200f 100g (chain armor) - total: 850f 305g 175w = 1.330 res
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I just had an alternative idea to quickwalling. 1.5 Second windup-time before the foundation is placed which is like 0.8-0.9 real life seconds. That would make it almost impossible for 1 vill to do 3-4 foundations in time. These 1.5 sec could be a filling circle symbol from 0 to 100% in these 1.5 ingame seconds.
Not sure which suggestion is better.
I don’t see any reason to fix this. Scout rushes may be rarer in 1v1 games, but scout+archer feudal pushes are still mainstream in team games.
i mean if you want to bring realism into it, where are the archers getting all the arrows from?
also i would like to point out that you’re screwing Archers on this comparison. if you’re going to factor in squires and supplies, you should be factoring in the initial barracks needed to even make an archery range, and ballistics.
I did add the barracks into the calculation. Wood price is addtional to the initial barracks - thats why for infantry I wrote “2nd barracks” (175w). If you want to add a barracks for both it’s the same result.
350w for militia (2 barracks) and 525w for archers (barracks + 2 ranges) = still 175 difference.
Without squires militia is really useless. They can’t catch archers at all (0.9 vs 0.96) and wheel barrow villagers are also pretty much safe (0.9 vs 0.88) so your militia is crap and can only destroy buildings if they don’t get anhilliated by the faster archers.
If you factor in ballistics to make archers very effective I would want to factor in the attack upgrades for the militia as well to make them more effective.
Archers are effective even without the armor upgrades unless they fight other archers/skirms.
My goal was to compare “usable” archers to “usable” militia.
I guess we all agree that crossbows at the moment have a crazy power spike at the start of castle age and are considered the best castle age unit with knights not too far behind them.
So this suggestion is to help the militia line to be more accessible and a bit more useful in castle age. To do so we should half the price of supplies to 75f and 50g and maybe even reduce the long swordsman upgrade to 175 food and at the same time increase the price for the crossbow upgrade to 200 food 75 gold.
After all the counter to the crossbows, the elite skirmisher, is far more expensive to upgrade with 230 wood and 130 gold - another reason why crossbows have such a crazy power spike when you hit castle age.
That way the dominance of crossbows is weakened a bit by delaying their power spike slightly and giving militia the chance to be more numerous or elite skirms to maybe be reasearched just in time.
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The thruth is… DE introduced a new era where microing is easier than before (less lag).
That combined with the weird pathing makes Archer/Xbows a bit overpowered when compared to before… Anyone that denies that is nuts.
I think both militia line and light cavalry would be more used if they nerf archers a bit.
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Not sure if that changed too much for these units. If archers are dominant, men at arms openings will be very frequent. Maybe the large woodlines in the current arabia map scripting prevent that more often than on pre-DE arabia versions but then you got the drush which is very common right now. The reason why we don’t see light cav and longswords in castle age is simply because those units aren’t effective enough at that point in the game. Ls are too slow when armies of medium-sized groups dominate the field that’s why you see the militia line as an opening or maybe at some point in imp. Light cav just don’t have good enough stats as a main castle unit and food is too valuable at that point (changes in late game, of course).
Pretty simple: fix pathing
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Viper opinion: Scout rushes are less popular because players wall much more these days + quick walls help a lot. You see scouts more in team games.
Why suggesting changes to core game, just give negative armor to unfinished walls so quickwalling gets nerfed, something like progressive, lets say 25% unfinished building gets -10 armor, 50% -7 and 75% only -3 damage, that would fix such things like gate used like cages or even villagers walling scouts/knights which is ridiculous.
Walls are part of the game, if you remove them you would kill the game, not everyone is fast paced micro dependent player, just remove the fornite thingy.
New patch and they claim to improve pathfinding. What is your experience at this point? Is it really better? Will we see scout rushes more often after this change?
Seems like no other changes are made to make scout rushes more viable or did i miss something in the patch notes?
Your suggestions would be great! Just archers in Feudal is way too boring 
first of all, welcome.
second of all, this is a huge necro, try to avoid it in the future.
thirdly - scout rushes are a very common strategy nowadays.
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