I think the biggest point about archers is knowing when to move out, and also knowing which buildings to add (Monastery, more eco, siege etc.). These decisions have a huge impact on Archer play whereas staying too long in Castle age on Knights, for example, is never very wrong, at worst you give up a bit of eco and recapture it with +4 Cavalier.
Insisting that xbow mass (40+) can be overrun with kts without having more than 1/2 the numbers is not only wrong, it distracts from the actual issue.
While finally watching TTL semifinals and finals, I payed some extra attention to the kts vs xbow engagements and yes - in nearly all cases, the Kts won.
But we never saw a mass of xbow beeing cleared, and we hardly ever saw kts engaging with half the number of xbows. Fights usally looked like this:
12 xbow vs 10 kts (the xbow actually won, see below)
23 xbow vs 14kts and 13 lcav (cav ofc steamrolled)
15xbow vs 8kts, 1 mango, 3scouts
23xbow vs 11 kts (an engagment that could go either way, but the kts won convincingly)
12xbow vs 8 kts (one of the few xbow wins, because not even +1 was in for kts)
5 (feudal) eagles 10 xbow vs 8kts (+1, no +2) and a few feudal skirms (easy win for the kts)
15xbow vs 12 kts and some skirms
10xbow vs 6kts
11xbow vs 7lcav (thanks to the attack upgrades, the difference to kts was rather small there - the lcav won)
So in all those fights, the fights went very well for the cav player. They usually had more support, way better numbers, and every single fight took place on very open terrain. Only 2 fights were won by the xbow: One where 2 monks showed up that were not in vision initially, one where villagers were in danger and the kts had to take the fight before upgrades.
And honestly, thats 100% expected. 20xbow might win against 10 kts, but as long as they are in a somewhat save position, the kts will just wait. Nearly all the engagments happend after minutes of the xbow trying to do eco damage while the kts just waited for enough mass/upgrades; the only wins for xbow happend when the kts player misjudged the siuation or was forced to engage too early.
I then remembered one game with a huge xbow cleanup (Kingstone vs Viper from RBW), and went back to check what exactly happend there. There indeed was a mass of 28 xbow that got cleared by just 16 kts (a bit more than 1/2, but pretty close). The fight was very one sided, but everything was on Kingstones favour: He had a very heavy upgrade advantage (+2 attack vs no armor, so 3 shotting xbow; on the other hand, no TR), the xbow had just taken a mango hit to the face and were below 80% hp on average, the terrain was very open with the kts on the highground, and Kingstone used a pathing trick that did only work on just that patch (at least in that fashion) and shocked everyone. But the most interesting thing is what happend before that engagment: Kingstone, despite facing less xbows with even less upgrades, did NOT engage as long as the xbow had some cover. So again, the problem is not that xbow cant kill kts when both are massed; it takes absurdly onesided circumstances to clear even just 28 underupgraded xbows.
The actual problems are that xbows never get to fight the kts on favorable terms, and that they are barely ever fully upgraded (TR is usually missing). So if we want to change the xbow/kts interaction, imho, we need to solve those problems.
If we look at how the xbows are usually used, its as a harassment unit; you send in 10 xbow, kill as much eco as possible, and prepare the next army. The problem is that it often difficult to do enough damage, before the kts show up and clean up; because the cleanup can be so onesided, you need to do a lot of damage. Imho even a small change in the xbows ability to do eco damage might change this dynamic a lot, because not only do you actually cause more damage, but the higher rate of damage you do also means the kts player is forced into less favourable engagments. +1 or 2 damage to farms and/or buildings (not palisades) might make it a lot harder to contain the damage the xbow do in your eco.
The other problem is TR. TR was always a bit too expensive, but with how strong archer play used to be this didnt matter too much. Imho the recent nerf gave to opportunity to make TR a bit cheaper, rewarding full xbow play more. This will also help CA a lot, as they are absurdly dependent on that upgrade; one could also think about slightly decreasing its importance (by buffing base accuracy of CA).
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This was some time ago.
These times you have basically to move out once you have enough to kill villagers. Otherwise you lose too much time and the opponent will punish you.
One of the reasons why we see these super fast feudal archer builds more and more these days.
It’s not necesarily a bad thing as this means the archer/xbow balls aren’t as big as they used to be. Therefore there is less chance for super decisive mangonel hits.
I generally think the reduction of mass of the big archer balls is actually tendencially a good thing. It was always highly volatile and this is a bit reduced now.
But we have to see that the design was for higher masses of archers and only a few other units added.
These days we often have lower numbers of archers or xbows but often a lot of spears or pikes accompagning them. Often even additions of Knights and/or mangonels to deal with the Skirms or mangonels of the opponent.
This complexity makes it really hard to deal with the Cavalry powerspikes. Also you have very limited variety as you need to be prepared for the cav to jump on you at all time. You need enough pikes to fear away them. And the Pike upgrade is expensive and takes long.
Cavalry civs on the other hand often just can use towers to buy time. Which I am not against, but as archer civs with your archers forward you don’t really have that kind of tool against the Knights. Especially not one you can make in Feudal already.
What could be some kind of solution would be an addtion of a new infantry unit that soft-counters Knights but doesn’t need as many upgrades as the current ones. So when you are behind (not too much with any civ, not only archers) in your Castle age timing and you already have to expect the Knight rush you could make that unit to fear away the Knights. Isn’t a replacement of Pikeman as it should cost Gold and should have way less bonus damage, but it could function as a way to somehow “bridge” between the Spearman and Pike powerspike. At the expense of when you pivot to pikes your other infantry addition wouldn’t scale.
In the continueation you have to make the decision whether you want to pivot to pikes or stay with that alternative that is in it’s effecitveness somewhere in between spears and pikes against the Knights.
This type of unit could come as a new Power Infantry Unit
In the current state of the game it’s probably the best situation to introduce such a new Infantry unit. The meta is very stale and established. Infantry only plays active roles in the very early and lategame really. Cavalry is dominating on various map types (even on Arena, though there it’s mostly light cavalry).
It’s the optimal setting to add a new Infantry unit that somewhat restricts that Cavalry dominance in the midgame. But it needs to be an Infantry which is strong enough on it’s own and doesn’t function as a Knight counter only. Just a soft-counter that’s enough to fear away the Knights when you have a big enough mass of them. Also it needs at least one counter unit that is less gold intensive. Potentially even more. (Eg the militia line, a slinger-like archery unit. And it could also be softcountered by xbow, CA and Scorpions. As long as it provides enough utility on other ends (like raiding and pressuring) and is iconic enough for a power unit.)
Agree, this kind of engagement rarely ever happens these days anymore.
Thing is, why should the Knigth player even take that kind of engagement? (This is the simple version, but it’s ofc more complicated in reality)
Yeah, that’s the thing. As Knight player you just wait until you have the mass that just gets the better trade. As xbow player you try to deal as much eco damage before this can happen. That’s why you add stuff like pikes, Knights or Mangonels to your mass. To make the opponent need more than just a few Knights or Skirms to jump on you.
The times were you sit back and try to mass your xbows until you have that “critical mass” are basically over.
Nah, it’s really depending on micro. 28 is a considerable mass these days as it let’s you 2-shot knights. But it’s still a considerable mass as you won’t lose all of them against a mangonel. If you pay close attention you probably can even outmicro a single mangonel with very few losses.
The critical information i miss from you is that it’s not hard to get to like 20 Kts. And 20 Kts clean up 28 xbows so easily, it’s not even funny. I know it’s more investment. But its worth that investment, you get out of that fight with so good knight numbers you can deal a lot of damage to the opponent with.
That’s the difference between a mass of 50 xbows vs 20 knights when both players to an all-in or 28 xbows vs 20 Knights when only the Knight player is at 1 TC at this stage. Then the Knight player often has like 12-15 Knights left and the xbow player has nothing to defend. Ofc he would have added that 2nd TC earlier, but 12-15 Knights can do a lot of damage to a 2 TC eco.
And as I said the times of the huge archer balls are seemingly over. And I think that’s kinda a good thing cause it makes the games less volatile with the mangonel shots.
But that leaves the Knights with an advantage, as the Knight player is way more flexible in his macro approach. He can always opt for either adding more military or more eco and the xbow player needs to adapt to that.
What I also see here is that you only look at basic “Knights against Xbows” standoffs. But I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Most of the times the units don’t actually fight each other but instead try to deal damage to the opponent eco.
Also Knights need generally less attention than archers which makes the macro play easier. One of the big reasons why Knights are so heavily used rn is that you can so easily split them and just run into the opponent eco. It’s way more demanding to react to this in a proper way than to do that. So in general when playing with Knights you have an advantage in terms of “attention economics”. The macro is just easier for the Knights player in this matchup. At least if there are raiding opportunities.
And ofc this makes the whole discussion about “KTs vs XBow” so much more complicated. As it indeed isn’t as easy as a simple “who wins in a fight with equal ressources”. This plays a role, for sure. But most of the time they don’t fight each other and when they fight it’s usually the Knight player who determines the condiions of that fight. Ofc he can be wrong in his assessment, but as you analyzed:
In most actual fights that happen between Knights and Xbows the Knights actually win. Cause they only take that fight when they think they’ll win it.
I’m not sure I want to change that, actually. I just want to reduce the dominance of Knights in the current meta.
It could potentially even be a good thing if the Knights would win these standoffs more consistingly (pathing greets). But instead there would just be better ways to counter Knights (raids).
I don’t need 28 Xbows to kill 14 Knights. It’s not necesary. I add pikes to my xbows these days anyways.
The biggest problem I see currently in any matchup is the interaction of xbows and mangonels. The other interactions are fine for the most part. Ofc there’s always potential for little tweaks, but the only one that I consider “entirely broken” is that mango vs xbow playout.
I thik it’s ok that mangonels counter xbows, but I would like to see it play out less volatile. Xbows don’t get immediately flattened when hit directly, but mangos having more consistant damage ouput even when the bows try to dodge the mango shots.
But this doesn’t has to do with the topic of KTs.
The thing I criticize the most with the current Knights design is the amount of eco damage you can deal with only very few of them. This leads to Knights being absolutely broken on Open maps as you can make like 5-6 “Raiding parties” with 3 knights that can terrorize an entire eco.
This has little to do with the interaction with xbows actually. It’s really just about how Knight raids are so absurdly hard to deal with, especially when they occur at different locations all the time. It’s a macro nightmare.
I think that can be done. But indepently.
The big archer powerspikes on the age-ups ever made issues (like with the famous vikings 3 TC Fimp Arbalests). I think it would only be benefitial to the game if the line would have a smoother powercreep. And TR (can be cheaper or have increased effect) and Ballistics are surely techs suitable to adjust that in the midgame.
I personally would prefer making the pike upgrade cheaper or adding another tool to deal with the knight raids more effectively/increase the numbers needed to make a succesfull raiding party (atm it’s about 3 knights which is actually really cheap for the amount of damage they can deal).
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the problem is also that people got better at reacting. Some even get town watch these days and you really can only easily kill the outer woodline vills, entering his base is something you can do only in EARLY Castle age (when there are no Knights yet) and this was mostly killed by Xbow nerf.
If you write “enough to kill vills”, I read that as 8 Xbow. Make it 9 to account for poor accuracy sometimes? But the question is also, let’s say it’s mid-game (somewhere around 23-26 min) and the opponent has +2. If you kill vills, you will get cleaned up. There is a consideration to be made about losing mass (Crossbows as bas as they are, do a decent job of defending from behind a wall vs Knights), but also, how many vills is enough to justify the loss of 8 Xbow? I would argue 1 isn’t enough, let’s say at least 3? Ideally even 5. Depends if it’s early Castle or late Castle, 3 vills dead in early Castle is huge damage but minimal damage in late Castle age.
I think also people don’t do those balls of 30-40 because people learned that you can defend those with towers/castles or simply spam siege at home. If you put all your eggs in 1 basket, that’s an invitation for Knights to go raid. This is also why you see low elo archer players make a #### #### of 40+ Xbow but you nearly never see this in high elo and you see 20 xbow and then people start to add eco, monks etc.
In general I think archers shouldn’t be designed around (viable when in a ball of 40) for several reasons, not last the fact that microing 1 group the whole game as opposed to multiple has a fairly low skill ceiling.
these days, the way I view the game is basically, Knight spam on 1 side and hope to get lucky that opponent doesn’t rewall well, and Pike spam on the other and race to imp. In Imp pikes become stronger, mostly because they are a long-term unit while Knights start to be expensive gold-wise in Imp.
I personally would make FU Xbow do 3.5 damage to Knights (I know half-integers aren’t accepted, I am merely suggesting what I feel the right damage balancing-wise would be), or make Chain Barding Armor FAR more expensive. Something to encourage the Knight player to add Skirms.
archer meta was “stale” too, but it turns out archers were always weak vs knights, only you could hit very specific timings. Notably the early Castle age timing was very deadly because even if you managed to get Knights out after, you suffered immense damage in the form of 3-8 dead vills PLUS idle time (the idle time especially meant you could never afford chain barding armor etc.).
But really Xbow was always weak to Knights, maybe reverting the Xbow nerf but making Chain Barding Armor cheaper could be a good middle ground. Or make Archers do the equivalent of 3.5 damage to FU Knights in Castle age, so that the confrontation between the 2 power units isn’t so 1-sided.
Compared to what, based on what assumptions? 20 fu kts is 5210 ressources (including the 2 stables and 12 farms you need, but not considering the houses). I agree that it is entirely possible to get to 20 kts, mostly because its easy to keep them alive, but its not like you just make 20 fu kts for fun - thats a real commitment and more investment than Imp and pala upgrade combined.
Im not even saying that you’re wrong, just that what you write is so vage its not clear what you’re actually saying.
What I try to say is that this pure KTs vs Xbows play doesn’t happen anymore.
And it’s mostly that we don’t see any Xbow all-ins anymore.
And this means it’s usually always a choice of the KT player when he wants to take the engagement - and he usually choses to take it only when it’s in his favor.
Doesn’t mean a won engagment necesarily leads to a V. Especially if there are a lot of pikes involved. Just saying usually the KT player just takes the engagement with a higher mass and wins it.
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I came to 4140 if you include all Blacksmith upgrades and all Stable upgrades. Even so, many times people skip the 2nd attack as it’s of negligible impact and still it’s 1k resources below your advertised value.
Stop spreading false info in an attempt to justify how Knights are allegedly balanced. If you do your calculation for Xbow, you really come to comparable resources spent, in the case of Xbow you need 200w for university, a massive 475 res for Ballistics (without which your Xbow sucks pretty much) and a massive 550 res for Thumb Ring (not a must, more a “nice to have”).
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its not false info lol. Your calculation probably was missing the infrastructure needed?
I didnt even make any statment there. I just asked what “not hard to get” meant (a question thats still kinda unanswered).
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of course it was missing the stables needed LOL, you might as well add the starting TC cost and the cost of the farms then.
Can you stop loosing the temper when you are wrong and leave us a peaceful and reasons discussion board here
I don’t think this is a “fair” approach for the assessment of that type of fight.
For the xbows it also misses the Unitversity, Thumb Ring and Ballistics cost. Ofc it’s not always these techs are researched at that stage. But without these techs xbows have a even harder time fighting against Knights. On the other hand both archer defence and melee uptakes are fairly uncommon to see at this stage.
Then ofc it’s really weird to say that you would 12 extra farms for 20 Knights. SInce when Farms have only 100 food on them? Ofc it’s important for the analysis of the matchup that Knight economy needs more farms. It’s one part of what I explained earlier, that the Knight player often waits until he has the bigger mass - also because it’s often the case that the archer player stayed a bit longer in feudal and has a bigger archer mass leftover to be upgraded.
But this addition of Farms also pays off after the engagement as it allows the Knights player a way smoother transition to booming than the archer player.
The most “correct” approach I would could come along here would be to estimate how much time the Knight player needs to get to that mass he needs to clear the xbows and approximate how much evonomy damage the xbows (and knights raids on the other side) can do during this. And then ofc also calc how much value the leftover Knights after the fight can give…
And then we would still have the issue that we only look at one specific fight. We don’t even know how good it’s representative for pure Knight vs Xbows play.
Because we rarely see Knight vs Xbows anymore. Usually the xbow player actually adds Pikes. And for good reason. So the whole “Knight vs Xbows” approach is flawed from the very beginning.
It’s a constructically constructed imaginary fight as representation for very complex mechanics.
If you’d make that calculation for Eles, you would see Eles completely destroying both xbows and Knights. But nobody makes Eles.
This shows just that this type of calculation just isn’t representative for measuring the power of individual units.
And lastly it implies the attitude that you should get away with “just” Xbows or “just” Knights. An attitude that can actually only come from a Knight only Player. Cause everybody who ever played archer civs at mid elo knows you don’t get away with just xbows. Maybe Liereyy can, but Liereyy has absurdly clutch micro skills.
And lastly it’s very telling that this thread has declined to a pure “xbow vs Knights” fight again. It’s super weird. It looks like there is a community of Knight lovers that see the Xbows as their main enemy. And use any hypocritically constructed bogus to let it look like the xbows would be super favored in the matchup. Meanwhile the Archer civs struggle to find the right additions to their xbows to deal with the various threats that can be used against their super squishy “power” unit.
It’s actually totally ignorant to reduce this thread to “xbow vs Knights”. As if there wasn’t anything else in the game that can make a difference. Like added economy, trash units, mangonels, Castles, Timings…
Meanwhile even Sotl has noted in his last video about the top civs that on Arabia there is a complete domination of Knights and Camels.
So what are we even talkng about here?
Does it really matter if xbows would win a “fair fight” when both players make an all-in play? Or does it matter that realistically you actually don’t get away with an xbow all-in these days? And even established Xbow civs like Japanes these days actually pivot to Knights after upgrading their leftover feudal archers?
What does matter? Constructed hypothetical standoffs that rarely ever happen?
Or statistical analysis and observation that the current Arabia meta is completely dominated by Knight play?
Just to share the mentioned sotl video as it looks to me, a lot of people here actually don’t even watch sotl anymore. Which is weird, given that’s probably the “core” of the youtube presence of our game.
There we see the best 5 arabia civs are: Hindustanis, Franks, Berbers, Teutons and Huns.
4 that are known for their Knight heavy midgame and one civ with overowered Camels to counter these Knights.
Not a single archer civ in there.
And some people really try to argue here that Xbows would beat up Knights…
What is this nonsense?
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Not gonna answer your other rambling here, because frankly, its pretty hard to get your point - you “answer” to things that were never even said and bring up all kind of different stuff without a coherent structure.
But i find it immensly funny how you call Japanese an “established xbow civ” and see them going kts as prove that kts are OP. Remember, they dont have any bonus for going archers. So the fact that they are an “established archer civ” in the first place just shows how strong archer play was until the recent nerf.
To be fair, you need to compare farms, houses, and production buildings, but not TCs.
For xbows vs knights, the production buildings should be the same cost, the xbows need more houses and the knights need more farms (farm costs >> house costs).
I disagree. Japanese are also for me an archer civ because they got FU arbalests, bad imperial cavalry and no funky infantry like eagles or huskarls.
Going knights in castle age does not necessarily show knights are OP as japanese got FU knights in castle age, but since they miss the imperial armor we shouls scratch our head if they always go knights as their army become useless once imperial age. Just like if Huns or Cumans were going full xbows every game…
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yea and knights are outplayed by horsearchers, for everything there is a counter
Meanwhile, where are the xbow and arb dominance games of civs like
Magyars
Khmer
Sicilians
Poles
They all have perfectly suitable Arbalesters, some of them even have neat bonusses like reduced bonus Damage, LOS etc. Others have good units they can pair with the Arbs
And besides Japanese might not have a direct bonus to Archers. Their Cavalry falls of in the lategame.
Also they have the best spearman line in the game which is the most used unit addition to the archers and therefore makes their archer play much stronger.
Also with the better maa rush it’s the common followup to go archers.
So yes, civs can be perfectly established archer civs without having any direct bonus to archers, such as civs can be knight civs with > FU Arbalesters. Or with.
Also notable are civs like
magyars
huns
tatars
cumans
Which are actually CA civs that go almost exclusively Knights (or other melee cavalry) these days.
So your “point” ot
Actually turns around at you. Cause there are currently way more civs that actually don’t have good cavalry or are designed around other power units that currently basically only go knights these days.
After your own logic this is the clear indication how OP Knights are in the current meta.
Not to mention infnatry civs like Goths or Celts that usually also just go Knights in the midgame. Why no Militia? Like literally, Goths have 30 % discount to their Militia. One of the biggest discounts in the game. Still, Goths usually make also Knights despite theie stable being quite bad,
So with your own way to analyze that, it’s kinda obvious that it’s actually Knights that see the most play of civs that not only have no bonus to them, but actually have a very bad stable…
On the other hand we see civs with bonusses to some other unit types that actually are basically played as if they were Knight civs.
When you assess that Japanese should be seen as Knight civs whilst they are one of only 14 civs with >= FU archer line and missing the last armor, this only shows how heavily flawed you are against the usage of archers.
Idk where your archer hate comes from, but this isn’t the place to push your agenda.
Also literally, this thread is only about the dominance of Knights. It’s not about Archers. Why you try to make it a completely different topic? Why does every time I speak about the dominance of Knights in the current meta it only turns into a “Knights vs Xbows” fight. And why it always looks like the Knights have no chance in this battle desite all stats show the complete opposite in the winrates? That Knights are totally dominating the meta?
Is this really so hard to understand? 11
And this thread wasn’t even intended to discuss that. Cause it’s so obvious in all statistics that’s the case. Only some people like you tried to turn this thread into a discussion whether this is right. With werid hypocrit bogus setups that aren’t even realistic.
It’s actually 'you that doesn’t have a real point and try to set something crude up to hide you don’t actually have one.
The reasons why Knights are so dominant are complex.
The most obvious one is that you can deal a lot of eco damage with just 3 raids raiding the opponent eco. And the effect of raids is super hard to “assess” in numbers as they are so heavily depending on a lot of “soft factors”.
And you try to exclude all these soft factors from the discussion. Which is super weird tbh.
Make your calc with Eles. Then the eles will destroy knights and xbows. Does this mean Eles are OP?
That’s how silly your “points” are. They just lack any sense of reality.
Where is the mentioned CA Play? I can’t find it. Most CA civs just go Knights these days.
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So you wrote 4.3k characters to argue something that not only is the premise of the thread, but also was never challenged by anyone?
To be honest…yes, that indeed is a behaviour that is hard to understand 
Sorry that I tried to respond to you.
Seemingly wasted time, so won’t happen again.
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One idea I already supported for a long time in general was the introductionof a second “loom” - type upgrade in the midgame. This wouldn’t only affect Knights but raids in general.
This tech would mostly increase the HP, prbobably give a bit of Melee armor.
The idea is not to push raids out of the meta. But instead to rduce their value they give.
This would lead to more raiding opportunities as people would be more bold with their expansion / base layout. Meaning less walls, more “open” bases and so on.
As I think the ways the Bases are constructed atm very heavily restricts the gameplay. And they are constructed in a fashion you can only describe as “anti-raid” layout. A lot of TCs quite close to each other. All basically only at the starting ressources.
One of the reasons we eg don’t see CA play anymore imo. First you can’t build this type of bases while you try to mass CA in the midgame. You don’t have the res to do both. Second even if you go low eco to mass the CA you often have basically no opportunity to run through the opponent eco and idle it. Yoz’d lose too much CA to strayfire.
With vills being a bit harder to kill, it would first need slightly larger raiding parties in the midgame than currently to deal damage. Therefore you can’t add 5 Tcs behind your raids anymore. And you would also be a bit more prone to take risks and try to go for more far away ressources.
There are only 3 issues with that I currently don’t have a good answer for:
A) Garrison space. With expanded eco with less TCs you wouldn’t have enough for all your vills. Meaning that there will basically always vills to pick off that don’t fit in the defenses. This is partially compensated by these vills being less fragile.
B) It would also negatively impact Raids as comeback mechanic. Whilst it wouldn’t affect such strategies like raiding the eco of a trusher as at that point the tech wouldn’t be in, it could affect lategame scenarios where light cav (or any other good fast raiding unit) can give you a comeback chance or also just decide a up to then basically even game. I don’t want to change this much, as I think this kind of comeback mechanic is very important for the game. I still think that harder to kill Vills would not impact that very much. As this scenario is more dependent on if this kind opportunity opens to one player or not. I usually try to counteract it with stonewalling my bases and placing strategic castles. Also having some spread-out barracks to make halbs there can help a lot.
Still, that change to give a 2nd loom type tech to vills in the castle age could negatively impact this comeback mechanic.
C) Forward Castle drops. Yeah vills with extra HP can way boldly go forward to drop Castles. This could be counteracted with Castles just having a bit less anti-Building Damage, so these Castle Drops would be easier to contain. I think that would be only good for the game, cause as far as I know less experienced players still struggle a lot against these kind of strategies.
I don’t think this would fundamentally break the game. We already have civs like Bohemians and Incas in the game which vills are way harder to raid. And nobody complains about that. These civs actually don’t overperform by any means on the current Arabia meta.
So it’s kinda obvious to me that this kind of tech can work without braking anything fundamentally which would make the game “unfun”. It only breaks with the expectation that vills should die like flies to raids in the midgame. But sometimes we have to break with expectations for a greater good. These expectations only have established as Raids have become the dominating basic strategy in the meta. To re-establish some more strategic diversity, we need to break with some of these expectations anyways. Otherwise we only reinforce the meta instead of diversifying it.
These higher health villls will most likely also bring CA back more in the meta as you usually have way bigger raiding parties with CA than with any other unit. Meaning you will most likely always have a big enough mass to one-shot a vill regardless wether that vill has 40 or eg 60 HP.
In the elephant Thread I named the tech “urbanization” which gave 2 effects: Vills get +20 HP and +2 melee armor and Foot units require 20 % pop space.
If the tech would only be for vills, I would name it “Tanning”. Still would maintain the +20 HP and +2 melee armor, as this is in my opinion a reasonable increase for the durability of Villagers in the midgame.
Ofc we need to pay attention to civs like
Bohemians, Incas, Spanish, Poles
Which have Villager bonusses already that might turn a bit too powerful in conjecture with the “Tanning” tech.
knights are an instant poper spike i ncastl eage, no unit upgrade needed.
longsword men need to be upgraded first and even with upgrade only trade equal with trade with being slow, no raid ability, demolished by archers too.
now imagine the two hadned swordmen was available i ncastle age.
you could further upgrade your longswords, lots of castle investment, but if you do, you would get a infatry that actually wins trades against kngihts until cavalier comes in in imp.
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sure but Longswords can be made from the default Barracks, while you need an additional Stable to make Knights. Furthermore I would argue you need at the very least Bloodlines to make Knights worth it and the cost of upgrades to LS has been greatly reduced across many patches, time ago Supplies for example was 150f 75g iirc. Also, and I will beat this aspect to death, longswords don’t have mobility but have other advantages. For example, LS + Pikes, a common complementary unit for LS (made from same building) is harder to beat than the equivalent from Stables (Light Cav + Knights). Second, LS have really high damage vs buildings compared to Knights, even before you consider Arson. Third, the upgrades for LS are cheaper than those for Knights (notably 2nd armor upgrade is cheaper and Squires is cheaper than Husbandry). Fourth, Longswords are less gold-intensive, which might be relevant sometimes.
A group of 20-30 LS can also break a TC in seconds, sure individually they have less PA than Knights, but each time the TC kills a LS, you are also losing only 65 res compared to the Knight’s 135.
LS are a good raiding unit, notably they can take down buildings (especially production buildings, which in early Castle age are not easy to replace). Archers is a hard counter yes, but if Archers weren’t in the game, LS would be the best unit in the game instantly.
I think they are balanced, might not be meta because at highest level the emphasis is on clicking faster, over raw stats, but even in elos as high as 1700-2000, you can sometimes go full LS and win the game.
don’t 2HS have like 12 base attack? I am not sure such a unit would be fine in Castle age. Maybe for 1 specific civ.
The main issue with full LS play in Castle age, is that Knights need some ~20 farms to pump 2 Stable Knights (typically enough to carry you through the mid game), while LS need 3-4 Barracks, even after Supplies this means 24-28 farms and in early Castle age you can’t afford so many farms. Dropping additional farms at the start of Castle age kills your eco because you are not dropping Monastery, Siege shop, or additional TCs. This is the main reason why LS are “bad” in Castle age.
In Imp, they are bad due to their interaction with Hussar (but if we go by the notion that each gold unit needs a trash counter, it seems that Champions should lose to Hussars given how Xbow also loses to Skirms and Knights lose to Pikes).
I wouldn’t be against giving 2HS/Champion ONLY a +3 vs Scout-line but that’s as far as I’m willing to buff Militia-line which I think is in a good place otherwise. In buffing Militia-line, we need to remember that many “infantry civs” can play a flood like Goths, even without the discount Goths get, it’s not very hard to do a Halb + Champion army. Not every civ has good Arbalest or HC to begin with to counter such a strat so I would be wary of buffing Militia-line because really if you buff Militia-line, you need to consider how they perform when mixed with Halberdiers, and Halberdier is already a good unit in Imp, arguably too good.