How to nerf Knights?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
64

I think a tech that increases spears bonus damage in feudal can work.
Cause if you are against a civ like franks you can expect it to go for that faster castle to get the knight powerspike asap. So you can at least in theory prepare for that by intentionally delaying your own uptime to get more spears and that tech out before you click up.
Against civs with a mediocre rush you potentially would chose to play standard as these civs would be more likely to stay longer in feudal, potentially adding archers or skirms to deal with your spears.

At least i could imagine that as at least an imaginary counter strat to the fast knight rush civs. Ofc it’s currently only a theorycraft.

65

You can’t (or shouldn’t) expect Franks to go for fast(er) castle knights. Like I said earlier a huge advantage of the strategy is that if you do scouts into knights or FC knights or whatever if you notice the enemy pre-emptively massing a defensive setup you can switch to booming. Since you will already have most of the farms it’s not a huge cost to boom rather than go knights.

If the threat of a boom wasn’t there Franks wouldn’t really be a problem because it’s relatively easy to full wall + mass spear and that would hold off any knight aggression.

66

Nah, it’s a single counterpoint, not a comprehensive map of how I view game balance. Point is, I don’t know that we need to go all in on a major TT decrease when tweaking multiple aspects of the unit allow for a more finely tuned and well-targeted buff. I agree that TT should be lowered, but probably also stacked with some other kind of buff. Even something like taking 50 food off the Pikeman upgrade may be worth considering.

I generally favor incremental buffs, even if the end goal is a significant change. Seems to make the process smoother, and gives players time to adjust (although that would ideally imply the devs making more frequent balance updates). That’s all. Point taken that even 50-60% faster training pikes aren’t going to suddenly become the new OP meta, but that doesn’t mean the problem should be confronted entirely in terms of that one aspect. I particularly disfavor the idea of Halbs inheriting a 50-60% TT decrease without some other nerf.

I don’t think the risk-aversion is all bad (nor is it ever-present: it’s obvious with infantry buffs in general, but then devs will make new OP civs like Gurjaras, and give tiny nerfs to Poles and Hindustanis). But I agree that in some important aspects the devs seem to lack vision and tend to overly rely on a “guess and check” methodology of balance, rather than being centered around critical design principles.

Something like this sounds reasonable, at least for pikes. Halbs will inherit the TT buff as well, of course, so it’s worth looking at whether that would merit some tweaks for them.

68

I actually think in this scenario it’s actually the totally wrong way to go.
It’s better to go the risk of probably shooting a bit over the goal and then take it back partially.
It’s more likely players will accept that than a slow creep.

It’s pretty clear any decremental to the Knight line will be unpopular. So it’s better to make it once and for all and if it goes too far, you can even redeem with reverting parts of it.
From a strategical point of view.

On the other hand it’s also clear for me that the Knight lovers in the community will exactly try to use that to make the changes as small as possible, as the devs will receive negative feedback for each time they try to creep towards a destined optimum in the balance.
So IF the devs decide they want to do something in that direction they should avoid creeping, but make one single nerf, probably risk overshooting and then redeem.

The comparison with the militia line isn’t really there as the militia line doesn’t has much “love” in the community. But with the creep tactic devs make the line continously more popular, so there the creep tactic is indeed hitting the right spot.
But nerfing Knights with that creep tactic is from that perspective of acceptance by the community surely the worst path the devs could go. It’s basically guaranteed to cause toxicity in the community. As then half of the community will say “they nerfed Knights to the ground!” whilst others say “this changed basically nothing!”. So no, it’s definitely the worst approach devs can go.

If devs think a minor change is enough and are sure it’s hitting the stuff on the spot, they ofc should then go for it. But they need to be sure then. Cause if they don’t hit the spot, they probably won’t touch Knights for a long time cause of the community reaction.

Also one more reason to change Camels to be less anti-Knight but more balanced type of unit. This will generally be received as some kind of redemption by the Knight lovers after months of super camel civ oppression.

69

I don’t think the certainty of this conclusion is well justified. More extreme and disruptive changes are more likely to provoke more extreme reactions. For the people against the change, processing smaller changes over a longer time will dampen the amplitude of any particular moment of discontent. For those who support it, even small changes will be ground gained, and it will be good to know that the devs are at least invested in that problem, with more to come if the first efforts are insufficient. Disagree, of course. For better or worse, devs have already shown more of a preference for incrementalism, so I tend to think that’s more realistic.

Whether changes are fast or slow, the more fundamental problem is whether the vision and will to do these things even exists (-whether this particular problem is even on the devs’ radar ATM).
We can theorymax all day, but there’s that awkward moment when you realize that even if you have all the “right” solutions for what to do and how to do it, someone who has never heard of you is calling the shots.

Anyway, I don’t think the change mentioned earlier (moderate TT decrease, +1 vs knights) is big enough to need to be broken down. I like addressing the issue in that way precisely because it’s already minimally disruptive, with no need for a slow roll.

70

Well that is certainly a more nuanced view that has my respect. It does have its drawbacks in terms of convergence time though and we all know which units that refers to lol. Also theres something to be said for which space the gaps should be analyzed in. A large change in raw stat space may be a large % but when mapped into the relation space it may be smaller than expected. The reverse can also be true. Its nuts how 1 point in cav damage changes so many breakpoints despite being a 4% change. It turns into a 20% change vs non-bloodlines cav for example.

Regarding the halb inheriting the training time change, devotion of more than about 60-80 villagers toward pike production is rare. Which means saving more than 2 barracks worth is going to be rare. 350 res is like 6-10 seconds of eco, so noticeable but not huge. Plus hussar + X spam isnt exactly underpowered lol.

71

Move Bloodlines to Castle Age, call it stirrups, Knights can only be made with stirrups. To maintain xbow balance, xbow now a seperate unit that needs to be massed from zero starting castle age.

72

Realisticly if you try that incremental stuff we will see this:
TT increase from 30 s to 35 s.
Outrage of the Knight liver Community.
Never try any creep or increment a Knight nerf again.

Stirrups is already in the game.
Blloodlines is often also only researched in castle age already as especially for the fast knight rush, this upgrade isn’t as important as just haing a few more knights.
One of the many reasons why Franks have the best Knight rush, cause they get that for free at a time a lot of other civs can’t afford it.

But yes, a tech requirement for the Knights could be an attemp. I personally don’t like it too much, cause it’s messing up with the typical streamlined Knight builds…

But maybe it’s even what we currently need, disturb that streamline a bit so other strats have a chance to grow out of that lock-in effect (?)

73

Okay.
What do we call current stirrups?
Secondly, what about civs without bloodlines?

And you continue to prove why im glad ideas like these arent taken seriously.

74

Cavallry shoudl be strong against Archers and weak against Infantry. This shouldn’t be just true for trash units but also for gold units. When you compare the Knights-line to the Swordsman-line, the Swordsman-line is more gold-efficient what matters in the late game, but food wise Knights are more food-efficient what matters in the castle age. I suggest that Knights should cost a little bit more food.

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75

Then gold infantry needs a trash weakness.

76

I actually would like to see an slinger type trash unit tbh.
Maybe not exactly like the current slingers, but the current slingers can be used as a orientation.

I once made a proposal like this in the Lightbowman (UU for Songhai which miss Chemistry) .

Maybe if it’s turned into a common unit, the spearman needs some minimal resistance to anti-infantry attacks so this unit doesn’t completely outclasses skirms v halbs.
If I look at the stats rn, I would potentially even reduce the bonus damage a bit. I think I intentionally made these UUs intentionally a bit OP, so they can be tuned down later, Which is imo the better way than trying to creep up something that’s too weak initially.

77

Well can always rename bulgarians tech, it doesnt even make sense for them. They not only civ to use it, use it prominently or first to use it. And bloodlines is researched by knight players after clicking up and thats the only use. So if you want to nerf knights without scouts much else then this would be sth

78

Bad arguments are still better than none :stuck_out_tongue:

79

I gave you arguments bassd on logic, but good try

80

Then gold infantry needs a trash weakness.

The question wasn’t if Knights need nerfs but how a nerf should look like in case. If Knights were to strong, only Knights would need a nerf.

5 more food cost for example wouldn’t change too much. Swordsman would still be less food-efficient, and less population eficient. And swordsmen would stil be weaker against archers than Knights.

81

As someone who studied maths… I havent seen any logical argumentation being used actually.

But back to the topic.

After watching some of the TTL games my point of “Heavy Cavalry falling of in the lategame” still holds. I’ve seen games where the Halberdier switch basically completely stopped heavy cav in the lategame.
There are a lot of different reasons for that.

One ofc that the heavy cav has this high gold cost.
But also more subtile ones, like with growing Army sizes mobility becomes less and less valueable as there is just less free territory to cover and outmanouver the opponent.
But also, as the games become more macro intneisve the hussars can raid basically as efficient as heavy cav with way less investment. The sheer power of the units becomes actually less impactful for raiding units as long as they just get to where you want them.

So there are a lot of factors involved why the cavaliers are so often falling of. The Paladin is a totally different type of upgrade. It’s actually basically some type of “Button” that allows you one big last push to overwhealm the enemy forces and then #### ### to death.
It’s a totally different style to the typical usage of heavy cavalry, a brute force method.

And ofc the fall-of of the Cavalier against the Halbs is partially because of the Paladin. If Paladins weren’t as strong against the Halb/Arb combo, Halbs wouldn’t need to be as strong and therefore Cavalier wouldn’t fall of as heavily.

That’s why I think a change to the ressource distribution of the Knights, making them less gold intensive but more heavy on food can reduce the early castle age powerspike while at the same time make the unit more usable even in the very lategame.

The TTl also showed a lot of the strengths of Knights in the midgame. I saw a lot of Knight play even from archer civs like Japanese. Whilst it’s not that uncommon to see Knights as Skirm counters, in this tourney they are often more than that.

For me it’s clear that Knights are currently too dominant in the meta and would potentially even way more, especially in the tournaments, if there weren’t these opressing Camel civs.

And also therfore still my pledge to change camels. I personally would make them more of agenearlist than a Knight counter (and increase the Gold cost). But there is theoretically also the other way areound and make Camels even weaker against everything but Knights but reducing the Gold ratio.

Both are fine, but the current camel design of sitting somewhere “in between” that makes it super hard to find solutions against the top camel civs with the Cavalry (Archer) civs.

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83

Is this just a “for fun” discussion or are you serious about finding the most optimal way to nerf the knight in general.

I pose this question for one reason. Because if you are serious about this, you will need some sort of super computer capable of running hundreds if not thousands of simulations at once.

100 knights vs 100 camels, 1000 trials = control

100 kts vs 100 camels (nerf knight movement speed by 0.1), 1000 trials - compare results

Do this again for every single unit in the game under multiple different circumstances.

I hope you get the idea.

If u are not serious, then this discussion is just “for fun” unless you have a way to test your proposals.

84

If you aren’t here to discuss things and make propositions on how to improve the game than what the hell are you doing here?

We’re not here to do a master thesis every time we have a balance idea.

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85

This is applying a double standard. At a bare minimum it implies that no changes should be pushed to live without orders of magntude more testing than is economically feasible. The developers almost certainly dont have the resources to do that for any change theyve ever pushed out.

The current status quo was not designed with such rigor and there are literally thousands of games to indicate knights are too strong. Whether its the ability of people to gain elo doing a knight rush or examples where a pro’s pike defense gets overrun or just the prevalence of the strategy compared to what should be a hard counters. Its mostly restricted to a certain elo range so the solution should target that range.

Most design problems in AoE2 are not hard to solve in the sense that picking a solution close to optimal is generally feasible without tons of simulation. Obviously the feedback once it gets pushed to live will enable you to be more accurate but picking that first close point is not hard. As long as you put in the effort regarding the underlying mathematics and are efficient regarding testing setups it can be done.

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