How to make a killer monk viable?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Heyo,

For a new American civ, I’m considering a monk that kills enemy units instead of converting them, as if the enemy had Heresy researched. Obviously this is significantly worse than the standard monk that converts a unit, but I think it’s a cool idea, so I’m looking for ways to buff the monk such that it could still be viable.

There are different options for how this would be done, such as increasing work rate (conversion speed), range, possibly even affecting multiple units in a small radius, although this would be hard to balance. There may also be the option of having the monk autotarget units in its line of sight, which would arguably be OP for normal conversions, but may not be for this effect. There could even be an option to toggle between normal conversion mode and the buffed killer mode.

What I’m thinking right now is a combination of a couple of these: probably the toggle option, with killer mode giving +50-100% work rate and autotarget.

Curious how y’all would make this concept viable and useful, if at all.

2

Monks primary purpose is to pick up relics and store them into a monastery. They should be left alone for the most part. We don’t need some crazy gimmicky stuff.

They are the best counter to elephants in the game by far. Giving you access to a food ramp. In the hands of machine gun mouse clicker pro player monks are already deadly. They just require a lot of micro.

In general making masses of monks is a bad idea because each unit costs 100 gold. Put that in perspective 10 monks costs 1000 gold. Where is something like the militia line or even the knight line is significantly cheaper.

3

I would say that the primary purpose is arguably conversions, or first equal with relics.

4

Auto target killing seems to be a good idea since currently low elo player don’t use monk and high elo player micro too much just like Onager. I think giving player to choose between no micro but only half effect of convertion (kill but not change color) is a good start