Well cavalry archers and pseudo cavalry archers (arambai, war wagons, conqs) would have the same problem.
In general all the fast cavalry unist are designed to use their mobility.
And thinking about this feature I think it will actually be used a lot for offensive purpses. As luring your opponent knights that tryt to surround your archers over that will make this manouver attempt basically impossinle.
Leading to Cavalry having basically no chance to beat archers in combat. As they are stripped of their mobility advantage.
In general if the mobility is the target point, why not directly change that stat for either the cavalry or the counter unit?
An inconsitency in speed would make the units feel very awkward to handle.
Also the proposed traps or hiding pits for the spearmen are a bit critical as they take away that element of interaction which is very important at the highest competitive level.
There is one more vague Idea I had for a longer time already.
We often see Knights picking of isolated lower numbers of spears and pikes in castle age. Ofc this is legitimate to use the temporary numbers advantages, but this makes it really hard for the defender as his units just lack the mobility to cover all his eco with only one bunch of units. As defender you usually have to leave a lot of your spears stationary to protect certain eco spots and can only chase with a very limited amount of units.
I would like to see some adjustments for this interaction, make it harder for Knights to pick of stray spears/pikes.
Here a speed debuff would make sense. Whenever a Knight attacks a spear unit it gets slowed down for a limited amount of time. But what about Spearman a bit of anti-Knight armor? Like we have with the condottiero and Gunpowder? So even if you lose the Spearmen to the Knights, it would take longer, buying you a bit more time. (This ofc can/should be compensated with less bonus damage of the Halberdiers)
This also could be a Feudal age tech, that adds this anti-Cav armor to the spearmen.
And it’s also easy to explain, as the length of the spears naturally make it harder for the Cavalry to close the dsitance and damage the spear units.
Can someone explain me why ther is such a high avversion to any changes to Knights?
Like in other threads where I suggest just tweaks like changing the cost to 75 F, 60 G there are immediate outburst in a fashion like “this would make knights completely unusable against xbows!”.
Why are Knights the only “untouchable” units in the game?
What if we lowered Knight melee armor to 1 (2 > 1)?
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can make a small difference.
In the other thread I already proposed to give pikes one more attack which leads to the interaction that you wouldn’t need to match the bloodlines knights armor upgrades with your attack upgrades anymore (you’d still need the feudal attack upgrade against the castle armor upgrade).
But otherwise wouldn’t change much. In castle age there are only few other viable melee units for all civs. In imp the other viable melee units usually start to dominate at some point anyways due to the high gold cost of the knights.
But yeah it would make the pike transition against knights easier.
Give knights +1s train time. Keep caviera and paladins unchanged I ntrain time.
This will lover the power spike a little bit as its slower to mass. The idea is, knights don’t need any upgrade and can be made from the get go.
Lastly nerf paladins hp by -5.
Or change nothing also fine
Paladin is already a situational 1v1 unit - most civs that are pigeonholed into Paladin late game - Franks, Persians to name two, also struggle in the late game because of a mix of research time, limited gold, and Paladin not being effective enough at wiping bases before opponent rebuilds. Really when your civ has big emphasis on Paladin late game (Teutons, Franks), almost always that civ is bad late game in 1v1 Arabia.
I don’t think this addresses the core issue, the core issues with Knights can be boiled down to 4 aspects:
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very forgiving unit to use micro-wise (good vs most unit types, even beat Pikes, the main counter unit, if they are in small numbers). Has the best “base stats” in the game in the sense that most other units have 1 stat that is nearly always awful (for example Xbow has awful HP).
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very easy to macro Knights eco (you don’t need to do stuff like send to wood, drop university for Ballistics etc. Basically early Castle age for Knights play looks something like this: 8 on wood, 20 on food, the rest on gold, gather point on gold. Whenever you have enough wood, either drop forward Siege, or add TCs. It’s one of the easiest macros in the game.
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mobility means you can pick engagements which in a way detracts from the skill, because say you are on Xbow, if you are caught out of position, you are caught out of position, and die. Moving out with Xbow requires more gamesense than moving out with Knights
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you can heal low HP Knights which is incredible value.
I am fine with aspects like 4) being part of the “identity” of the Knight, but aspects like 1) for example I’m less fine with, many 1500 elo players have low APM and cheese to 1500 elo by doing something like 3 Stables Berbers Knights and periodically buying food, at that point unless your Pikeman spam macro is pristine, you generally lose. Meanwhile BOTH macro and micro of 3 Stable Berbers Knights are nearly trivial.
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Don’t forget that with knights and their mobility you always have the option to just go raid with them instead of facing the opponent army. Only cavalry units have that realistic option when the opponent has better numbers and you can’t take the direct engagement.
So there are very few situations where it doesn’t make sense to go Knights on semi-open Maps. Like Hera also said about the Scout opener: “It’s never bad”.
And with archers if you don’t have the right mass and/or addition (pike/skirm/knight/mangonel), you can lose them in an blink of an eye.
You also often have to keep all your archers together as splitting them makes them so much more vulnerable to cavalry (Knights especially).which then requires you to pay attention to them all the time as a single mangonel can just vipe them out if you don’t pay attention at that moment.
And I think that this interaction with the mangonels also is one of the reasons why a lot of people don’t like playing archers. Why has a single mangonel shot to vipe out entire armies? can’t it be more like it needs 2-3 maybe even 4 mango shots but each shot has a way higher spread so it can’t be dodged completely?
I think it’s definitively a reason why Knights are so much more favorite as they are so much more “forgiving”. On the other hand Archers have the Powerspikes to use, but I think very few people on below like 1k4 elo or so actually know how to use these powerspikes effectively and/or even get in the position to use them.
Maybe the solution isn’t necesrarily in directly nerfing knights but instead adjusting the archer line so it’s more “forgiving” aswell, but tune down the powerspikes a bit in compensation?
For the fall out of favor of the CA I blame the current base layouts of like 5 TCs quite close to another. First, you can’t do that stuff while you’re massing CA. Second it’s basically impossible to idle with your CA as whe you run through these bases you would lose way too much of your CA mass.
I hope we get back to the more expanded, less boomy meta we had some time ago, then CA will probably get back in the meta again.
But archers are easier to mass (even start at feudal) and impose far less burden to eco.
You mean CA meta in castle age?
In theory… practically only players like Liereyy can get away with a one-TC archer all-in. But also he most often currently opts for adding TCs.
There are a lot of issues with this as eg. a single mangonel hit can decimate that mass so heavily that you can’t come back due to the eco disadvantage you put yourself in.
Finding the right archer mass to fit the situation is actually quite complicated and needs a lot of experience. You generally/optimally want just a high enough mass that paired with the addition you add as comp the opponent can’t jump on you. If you make more than that you force yourself to make huge eco damage which isn’t as easy with archers against well defending opponents.
If you add less than that, the opponent just jumps on you and you are left with basically nothing to defend.
So yes, archer play is strategically way more complicated and requires to pay close attention what the opponent is doing. There are exceptions like the famous Vikings 3 TC into fast imp Arbalest. But most of the time the archer players actually have to try to play out the Knight player who is setting the pace.
Exceptions were usually only the 3 “eco” powerhoses in the archer civs: Vikings, Mayans and Aztecs.
Yep, has basically completely vanished from the ladscape. Not saying that DE in general was a CA feast, but the lack of massing CA in Castle age currently is very sad in my eyes. I which we would see more CA play. Even Tatars with their free thumb ring don’t do that anymore despite them being suited the best for that.
Also weird nobody already spoke out about the obvious lack of mass CA play in Castle Age. Many CA civs currently just make Knights or Steppe Lancers. (SL seem to be thriving in the current meta. I think their higher mobility plus the abiltiy to bust through quick walls makes them super useful against the current base layouts to deal a lot of eco damage with very few investment)
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this was true before the nerf, but in practice, the Xbow upgrade nerf killed these semi-FC builds that hit you with Xbow timing at 19-20 min. Now the timing is 20-21 min and it turns out this is exactly enough time to house re-wall behind, drop a Siege shop or mass enough +2 Knights.
Some civs like Ethiopians might do Castle age all-in better than others but you rarely see Xbow civs commit to Xbow these days, generally it’s some early Xbow into pike/monks 3-4 TC boom and hope to win the race to Imp.
Also It’s not true that Archers are cheap, yes they cost less than a Knight but also are weaker, once +2 kicks in, I think 1 Knight comfortably beats 2 Xbow (equal resources), understandably Knights have a huge edge in mass battles, too, to the point that I would call them an Xbow hard counter.
This not to mention if you are up against something like Franks or Berbers who can pull an even stronger early Castle all-in due to civ bonuses, imagine you are playing something like Ethiopians vs Franks, you really need pristine macro, micro, decision making, to the point that you need to drop production buildings in right order, starting with Monastery (unless he tricks you with single Stable), then Siege shop (to counter his siege shop), and make sure your farms aren’t idled by the Knights, else bye bye Pike production and GG.
At least as Ethiopians you have Pikeman upgrade free I guess, imagine if you are something even slower like Koreans.
Easiest way to solve this would be to give a HUGE nerf to Chain Barding Armor, make it cost something crazy like 350f 350g because that’s how strong it is, but this would also leave a new player second-guessing why not all upgrades are roughly evenly priced like they are now.
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While your other points are good, this one is really weird. Heavy kts play requires lots of farms, sending all vills to gold will simply result in a useless gold stockpile that gets bigger and bigger. Placing farms pre-handcart is a rather timeconsuming aspect of macro and saying that building a university and pressing a single button to research ballistics is somehow more tedious than placing 15 farms is just weird.
Its the other way around…single archers are killed by +2 kts, but that changes with mass (weird pathfinding bugs not accounted for, because theyre bugs). As you correctly say, 1 kts kills 2 cbow very easily. But 10 kts might struggle a bit vs 20 xbow, depending on terrain and micro. And 40 xbow with even modest micro slaughter 20 kts, as at that point they can just oneshot the closest one.
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Ok so. We agree in small numbers (1v2) Knights have the edge. In medium numbers (10 kts vs 20 Xbow), I would say Knights have the edge mostly because I’m not a fan of “hiding Xbow in forest pocket”. I think that’s an exploit, and I never do it myself.
As for 40 Xbow vs 20 Knights, I think that largely plays out like the 10 kts vs 20 Xbow. Sure, during the walking time, which is roughly unchanged whether you play out 1v2 or 100 vs 200, Xbow do more damage. But, Knights have a mass consideration too, specifically 20 Knights surround and kill faster than 10 Knights. Overall, this means that the 1 shot factor plays a difference, but a minor one, because once the Knights close the gap, a few early kills by the Knights result in your Xbow not 1 shotting anymore, and the advantage is gone. At the same time, the roughly 16-17 Knights left maintain an advantage in the sense that it’s still quite a bit amount of Knights that deal damage. This not to mention that you can do the split formation trick while you close the gap to minimize damage but let’s not go into advanced tactics because this also is borderline an exploit.
What you say, the “1 shot factor” actually becomes more relevant once you provide a meatshield for the Xbow, or you play a closed map like BF, and there the Knights are forced to fight enemy Knights/Pikes etc. and here Xbow when massed has a huge advantage, yes).
2 Stable Knights can be sustained from early Castle age eco alone because it’s roughly 6 on food per TC, and 6 on food per Stable. The 20 farms you should have at the start of Castle age should suffice to sustain your Knight production. For 3 Stables, you need to add more farms, but this is generally trivial. It’s really 6 farms and that’s it if you are going 1 TC all in.
Meanwhile, on Xbow, 1 TC or not, you need to add Ballistics (otherwise you don’t hit fleeing units), you likely need to add a Monastery to defend the early Castle age where Knights have an advantage, at some point you might have to add Pikeman (which is actually a fairly tricky unit to macro behind because it requires a lot of farms but also a lot of villagers on wood and several Barracks).
If we go by “Archer player must play Xbow + Pike” and “Knight player must play Knight + Skirm”, you really rarely see Knight players adding Skirms, which WOULD be what would make Knights tricky to macro (elite Skirm upgrade, adding Bodkin etc.)
Basically Knights are easy to macro because you can very often play pure Knights, sometimes with a few Light Cav mixed in to get rid of the only counter, the Monk (as we all know, Knights counter Pikes Kappa), whereas on any non-Knight civ you are constantly juggling add University for Ballistics, add Monastery, add another TC because your woodline ran dry, etc. Definitely playing Xbow is FAR harder both APM and micro-wise these days, with Knights you can patrol in vs most armies and these days you can even suicide a few into the enemy eco, unless the enemy has pristine macro (1700+ level), it’s nearly always worth it because they panic, reshuffle vills to the wrong resources etc.
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I mean its 100% fine to not use a units potential because you like to play a different way, but please stop making balance suggestions around your suboptimal play style.
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Well, what’s with all these “Nerf xbow!” threads we have repeatedly here in the forum?
Where players with Knights run their Knights in a chunked up xbow mass blindly and get killed.
Cause the standard play (at least at high level) is that at that point to either just outmass the xbow (if it’s 10 kts vs 20 xbow you go forward, look for reinforcements while seeking for an opportunity to raid. Whilst you do that you add 10 extra knights , come back and pincer the xbows.
When the opponent manages to add another 20 xbows you usually add mangonels at that point, cause it’s really, really tough to micro down kts when a Mangonel is threatening to vipe your mass out.
So pls don’t speak of
If you aren’t even aware of how the current meta strat for these situations is.
And clumping xbows together might work on lower elos (can’t say, don’t have the experience). But doesn’t work on higher elos.
Why?
Cause a clumped up mass of xbows isn’t moving. You can just let them sit there as it doesn’t deals eco damage.
Occasionally we see at higher elos that they use obstacles like trees and houses. Which I think should have less impact in the outcome of the fight as it currently does. But It’s still a risky move that you only can perform when you know there’s no mangonel nearby.
So please don’t speak of
When talking about things you appearantly don’t have any insight WHEN it’s actually viable. Cause it’s utility agains skilled Knight players is very, very limited.
If you really think, this would be the optimal use of xbows against Knights well, then you don’t use your Knights “optimally”. Nobody forces you to try jump on clumped up xbows.
(BTW this is such a typical opinion of Knight players who seemingly have the opinion that they have to win every engagement if they just have the right “mass” of KTs to deal with it. Which is in some ways true cause it’s working in most situations. When you learn how to play xbows you figure out, that’s hardly ever the case with them. It’s so weird to read these complaints of the KT players on the rare occasions when this doesn’t work out as they think it should. We don’t see this with xbows players. Why?
Cause Xbow players just know, they can’t get away with that. They need to adjust constantly to the situation, as “just outmassing” rarely ever works.
And wen need to get rid of this expectation that KTs are the only unit you can make in basically any situation without the need to add anything. It’s really not healthy for a game that has the word “Strategy” in it’s categorization. Strategy means more than spamming just one unit type the entire game.
At least try to use some skirms against the xbow/pike comp pls. I mean you literally have access to a unit that’s the only one that counters an entire power comp. And you don’t even mention their sheer existance. You only talk about Knights…
That’s the realy telling story here. That the KTs players just don’t even mention the existances of the counter units they have access to. Which implies that they are actually used to “Knights for every purpose”. Which is imo completely defying the strategic part of the game.)
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Holy what a weird ragepost you just made.
I never claimed that xbow are op, nor did i say that their interaction with kts was 100% perfectly balances, nor that there is no counterplay to a big archer mass.
I only pointed out that a mass of archers will kill group of kts of similar cost. Just because I mention one strength of a unit does not mean it has no weaknesses. Yes, we can talk about the mobility problem of xbow. Yes, we can talk about how they are weak to mangos. But the entire discussion gets really pointless if we have this discussion under the premise that (massed) x bow can be cost effectivly killed by kts, because thats simply not true.
LOL
First I think no archer player below #### ####### elo can do this against a Knight player with the same skill level.
Second, even on higher elo the matchup is extremely dependent on execution of both sides.
And at this level usualy the Xbow players prefer adding pikes to their archer mass. Knight civs usually only add skirms AFTER the addition of pikes. Which is clearly the indication that the Knights still have a strategic advantage (as they are the ones who can decide whether they want to engage or not).
Yeah the Knights player just can wait until his mass is big enough to take the fight 11. The xbow player needs to be prepared to be jumped on at any time.
It IS true. But it’s very depending on mass and micro of BOTH sides. Yes, if you only patrol your Knights against a mass of xbows with equal value a skilled 1k2 xbow player can kill them. No problem.
But you CAN MICRO Knights aswell. You can try to get a good surround for example.
When you bluntly assess that Knights can’t win against an equal mass of xbows you’re just completely ignorant. Cause this exact thing happened actually a lot of in recent times where we had the “XBOW META”. It was generally more in favor of the xbows at the highest level due to the attack move micro that made it really hard for the Knights to get a good engagement. But it actually happened quite frequently that the Knights acutally won that engagement with comparable masses.
This kind of engagement rarely happens anymore cause after the attack move micro has gone, only the very best xbow players can now get away with “just xbows”.
This assessment is just completely ignorant to the reality.
No, you just didn’t said a word about this. With that you implied that you see Knights should be able to handle xbows on their own. And also, as you didn’t said anything about the way how you also basically implied that you want your Knights to win against microed xbows without the need to actually micro your Knights aswell to get the edge.
It was only about mass for your Knights.
Sometimes it’s not only about what you say, but also what you don’t say.
I don’t think it’s very nice to call someone wanting to play the game properly “suboptimal”. Similar bugs have been recognized by the devs in the past, when they e.g. fixed melee units stacking and breaking walls faster than intended. With Xbow, this hasn’t been addressed yet, more so I reckon because it’s low on the priority list of the devs. But it is 100% an exploit, if you really read the unit cards, for example it says “Xbow are weak vs most units at close range”. The stacking inside a forest pocket makes them strong (contrary to the unit card) so you can’t say that I am coming out of the blue, there is a counter unit wheel that is recognized by everyone and Xbow is meant to die to everything in melee.
In any case, even if we admit that stacking inside a forest pocket (or you can do it with stone walls, e.g. Britons are particularly nasty with this, stacking 40+ Longbowmen inside a 1-tile wide Stone wall you can beat even Franks Paladins)… even if we admit it, there isn’t always the opportunity to hide inside a forest.
Not only do not all engagements happen inside a forest, but also, not all forests have those convenient pockets where you can fit Xbow inside. So even if we admit this is intended gameplay, it is relevant in maybe 10% of cases, in the remaining 90% you can assume a vanilla interaction like “+2 Knights stomp Xbow in equal numbers”.
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I also have to add 1 thing, that probably has alredy been mentioned, but it’s worth repeating: most archer players don’t bother with archers anymore also because of the high cost of Arbalest. Arbalest always lived and died by hitting the Imperial timing, and killing a lot of enemy eco while +2 Knights couldn’t do anything as the damage was too high. With the Arbalest nerf, no matter how you set up your eco, you just can’t hit the timing anymore, because if you do 3 TC and macro for food + gold, you won’t have enough pop/resources to afford all 3 upgrades (Bracer, Chemistry and Arbalest) if you hit a low pop Imp (let’s say 70 vills), and if you go for the 90+ vills (delayed Imp), then the Knight player isn’t too far behind to Imp and he will get +4 before you do too much damage. Now let’s see at variations of Arbalest timing:
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add Trebs (needed if opponent is full Castle age and typically the counter to this Arbalest timing was always Guard Towers/Castles spam) → can’t anymore because your 70 or so Vills eco 28-30 min Imp timing doesn’t allow for 650 rez of Castle + idle time of some 15 vills walking forward to drop Castle + at least 2 Trebs (800 resources). 70 pop eco just can’t sustain this while simultaneously affording Arbalest (all 3 upgrades are a whopping 1850 res, comparable to Paladin upgrade!).
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add Halberdier → need TONS of food + wood, pure Xbow was easy to macro, but if you add Pikemen suddenly you are looking at 210 + 90 for Pikeman upgrade, at least the Feudal upgrades (250 res), and Halberdier upgrade (900 res and nearly same gold cost of Paladin!). Again a 70 pop eco simply can’t sustain Halberdiers, you either get upgrades, or you get numbers, you typically can’t have both. And without Halberdiers, or Castles, your fast Imp Arbalest is defeated by TONS of strats, including:
a) 5-6 ranges full Castle Age Skirms (you trade about 1 for 1 vs Imp Arbalest and you should have the better macro if you are stuck in Castle age)
b) stone defense spam (Guard Tower, Castles etc.)
c) occasionally you can do such a strong Knight spam that even Castle Age Knights can trade vs Arbalest although it won’t be a very pretty trade, you also have to consider that he sunk 1800 res into the Imperial age itself so even if you trade evenly resource-wise you are generally still ahead)
d) give up eco and wait for +4 (rare that you are forced to give up eco as the Knight player but even in the cases where Arbalest timing still managed to find some damage, you are not always out of it).
Really when you consider all these points together, Arbalest timing is a hassle for low-to-medium reward. Don’t bother. At pro level, you already see people playing Archer civs purchasing the +3 and Chemistry, but skipping Arbalest upgrade and opening directly Halberdier in Imp.
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Yeah Archer play needs a lot of strategic knowledge of the game.
A lot of players only talk about the micro aspect, but the archer micro isn’t actually that hard to learn.
Add to this that you need to always look over your archers as they can be jumped on at basically any time
most archer v knight games on low to mid elo actually end like this. Archer players just don’t paying attention at the crucial moment.
And of you can say “the archer player doesn’t played optimally”. Yeah, true. But it’s a huge differnce on who can determine when a Fight is taken and who can’t. The Knight player has easy talk as he isn’t required to pay attention to his Knights at all time.
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