I know I think so too, I’m just responding to this guy, who says and it’s true that HER isn’t having any changes, and Meinwark isn’t used much, so it would be nice to see some.
But I agree that it is really strong if you know how to use, you can make good games with it.
the problem is that it is not used so much and it is a waste, what we are talking about is the static, because everyone uses HER in the same way, it would be nice to see them used in more disparate ways.
Meinwerk suffers from the fact that Aachen is fundamental for a good eco. Without Aachen, the HRE eco grows very slowly, is annoying to set up and susceptible to raiding. That’s what I mean when I say HRE is too dependent on their landmarks and doesn’t really exist as a unique civ outside of them.Their army is the least diverse and thus the weakest in the game, because you only need to get to crossbows or other anti armor specialist units and you completely counter the one tiny strength HRE has. The rest of their units are garbage. Meinwerk improves that by giving the army at least some kind of boni over others, but if the opponent goes for late imp comps with handcannos that are either cheaper or better than the HRE ones and unique units that HRE can only dream of, then you will always be inferior. The knights can carry you only so much. And using prelates for the army is just not worth it aside from some castle, early imp push. In the real lategame, when you throw resources at each other, they are fairly useless. What dominates are the aoe buffs from the other civs like Mehter, NoC, Unique units or upgrades, ToV, Camel inf buff+15% more hp + insane hp Ghulams (310 hp and 10/10 armor. Best frontline in the game). It’s stuff that is inherent to the units and does not need to be applied per single target cast.
Inspired Warriors needs either be changed in its mechanic to have it be more easily and reliably applied or needs to be made plain stronger to make the hassle of using it worthwhile. It would be high effort and high reward. A buff could be that Inspired Warriors in addition to its current effect improves the range of any unit with range (also siege) by 1 and the movement speed of any melee unit (also rams) by 15%. Those buffs would be notable and you would be rewarded for using prelates and trying to keep your army buffed. On the downside you have the disadvantage of an annoying mechanic and the prelate’s slow movement speed. The trade off would thus be much fairer.
And because the Aachen eco can be very good, so that stronger units might become difficult to balance for the HRE, the Aachen effect could be reduced from 40% to 30% or smth like that, while offering a means for non Aachen play to better integrate prelates into the eco. Maybe nerf inspiration in dark age and feudal to 30% altogether and allow castle age and imperial age special upgrades to eventually bring it up to 50%.
This civ is only really competitive due to Aachen. Without it your eco and lack of any bonus in that regard (cost reduction, prodcution speed, increased effect) is striking. The other civs simply work much better and are way more stream lined.
And it’s a fact that HRE has the least amount of unique upgrades, units and boni. They literally have 2 unique upgrades for the same unit that also do very similar things and outside of that only 10% movement speed for inf. Not even 15% like all the other movement speed boni in the game, no it’s 10%. That’s it.
The weakest unit with very high cost in the game, the Landsknecht, is a niche unit at best. It only really excels in pure melee inf and horsemen battles, but HRE is the one civ that has only melee inf blessed with boni and nothing else, So Landsknechte are actually only really useful in mirror match ups. Against any other comp that is not pure spearmen and MAA or Horsemen, Landsknechte are not worh their cost. They just are not. They are more of a trap. Even if you win an engagement with them, most of them have died and your costs were eventually higher than the opponent’s, because they only have 3/3 armor and 114 hp when fully upgraded. Every unit and their mother can counter them cost efficiently. Just use some kind of range and go for the staggered formation. It’s a joke of an unique unit whose reputation is way better than its worth. And this unit does not even have their own unique upgrade like every other unique unit in the game that is not Chinese or has not been recently introduced. There is not a single unique vanilla unit that has no unique upgrade to it except the Landsknecht.
HRE can’t beat Ottoman. They can’t beat French anymore. If you survive well enough, Arbaletrier will ruin you, because they counter simply everything HRE can do. It’s ridiculous. HRE can’t beat China lategame. They struggle now in match ups, which were their strongest (Delhi) for the worst reasons (feudal MAA, oh wow, what a great civ… /yawn). They still can win games, but it’s only due to Aachen, stupid Burgrave rushes or simply out ecoing the opponent. But they can’t win through army, through a unit comp, through various different approaches and tactics… No, if they win, it has happened in the same manner since the civ was freed from all the launch bugs with the slight difference that rushing to castle is now a death sentence and you need to play more feudal.
HRE has 3 unique military upgrades (two are hidden behind Meinwerk), an inferior buff mechanic and only one unique upgrade altogether in the imperial age which is for walls and towers. And they also have THE WORST unique upgrade in the whole game for their navy. Fire Stations is a joke. Then there is Aachen, Regntiz and Burgrave with an usually earlier imp timing than everybody else thanks to Swabia. That’s the civ. It’s only landmarks. There is nothing more to it. It’s pathetic. But every other civs gets new stuff, you can see progression, Rus can build stone walls, Ottomans can build Great Bombard Emplacements, new units, techs and so on. But not HRE. And it offers so much material. It’s not like “this civ just doesn’t offer anything”. No, there are tons of possibilities. There were so many influences, so many unique kinds of units and mercenaries. But the result is MAA with maces and Landsknechte that do not do justice to their histoircal role, since they actually were the core of the army and a Renaissance solider/mercenary as well. They should not even exist in castle age.
When I played this game ( many months ago) it was just because of HRE, they are fun but you get bored pretty fast since they don’t have cool units and we know historically they have, if they are smart, they should add more unique units on an expansion pack ( lest asumme the game will have an expansion like any other successful RTS)
They really took the Holy Roman Empire and did nothing with it. Cool, units that have more armour? One unique unit that does splash? And sorry, the monks are NOT part of anything. You could remove their buff, make it the default villager gather rate, and no one would notice the difference. Sure, they’d be “mechanically” stronger–but who fucking cares? you can make anything “mechanically” stronger by giving it some ridiculous stat. The monks do not add anything to make them feel different.
What exactly did they do with that civilization to make it feel unique? to represent what the actual civilization was like? As far as I can tell, it is only visually different, and most of its “bonuses” are some unhinged, irrelevant economy or slight stat alterations that does nothing to represent the HRE.
This is the unfortunate common theme with AoE4. Designers are just afraid of making civilizations represent the real ones. For all I know, they might’ve designed HRE with a placeholder name, before being done with it and at the end deciding what civilization it could be.
China is the closest they have gotten to representing the civilization in a mechanically fun way. And even they keep getting pruned patch after patch because people take the game far too seriously to accept actual asymmetrical design.
The defensive game play mechanic and defensive tier 4 building was nice but it simple doesn’t work with current meta.
Something really needs to be done. HRE vs French has become impossible. HRE has nothing to answer French aside from a better eco, but what does that matter if your units are just trash? Arbaletriers are so incredibly overpowered without any way of counterplay except for Mangos, which die too easily to Knights and springalds, so they don’t actually do much and are such a big investment as well as immobilizer for your army, it’s terrible.
And then Relic even went ahead and buiffed the Arbaletrier… The counters to crossbows do barely anything against this ridiculous unit with their tons of armor but no heavy tag. The Arbaletrier might be the most ill balanced unit in the game, because it has direct and very effective strengths against their counters. Either nerf the Arb armor by a lot, allow horsemen to deal massively more dmg to them or tag them as heavy, so Crossbows can be the one unit to hard counter arbaletriers. How can a light unit have more armor than most heavy melee units and still be a light unit? Look at the insane trade off for the Landsknecht for having an aoe attack and then look at the zero trade offs for Arbaletriers… This unit is too strong in general, but it especially ruins the match up vs HRE, because it counters everything HRE can do plus HRE has a much worse feudal than French. And no unique units, techs, basic structure, only landmarks. Yada yada yada…
The HRE suffers from a reputation that was true long ago and has not yet been realized as the failed civ that it is.
In this thread there are quite some ideas for new unique units for HRE, which is a necessity unless you want to remove HRE from the game.
But there is more to be done. I think that quite an overhaul is in order for the HRE with significant changes for every stage of the game. The civ as it is is trapped due to having overtuned landmarks which supposedly justify to not give the civ anything else and also impede every chance of diversity and a variety of tactics. The civ stops existing in imperial age and is nothing but a basic unit civ that only has outstanding towers and nothing else.
It has not always been the case, but since every other civ has received a lot of changes, new mechanics, techs and units, the HRE is now the BY FAR worst desgined civ in the game.
HRE losing to french since release, lol
And it’s getting worse with the progression of the game. I think that can be pointed out. Ottoman is also barely beatable.
Best part is: Ottoman gets more out of their Imams since they were buffed into insanity with their heal aura than HRE and HRE is supposed to be built around Prelates and Ottoman is not. That’s how bad HRE is right now when looking at Civ uniqueness. And Ottoman also have Mehter, op SIpahis and Janissaries, all units you always want. What do you want with HRE? MAA till there are crossbows and then only trash units that are the worst in the game.
Prelates should be units, you always want to have with your army. Landsknechte as well. But that’s not the case. HRE has the least amount of unique units and the ones you have, you do not really include into your army. It’s a joke.
Yes, I think that eventually new UUs will arrive…the HRE only have two UUs and the rest of the civs have between 4 and 6 UUs…
Because French got so much more possibility… (No)
I’d say yep they should add something on HRE and French but Idk devs prefere to nerf keeps (idk why) and mess with the balance again because of fews with high influence, that feels sad tbh
Are you using prelets in your battles their buff makes the hre knights and handcanons op i suggest you to try it
As long as the concept of an “anti-siege” siege unit exists in AoE4, I’m fine with the Keep nerf.
I also think that HRE needs more variety of technologies and units to offer a varied and fun game.
Bringing back some old favorites from the previous thread on “How to improve HRE” that apparently got abandoned after I tried reviving it back in March.
The Ritterbruder is not bad, but I prefer not to center the HRE so much with the Teutonic Order as it happens in AoE 2, but rather focus it more generally with the regions of the empire, as it happens with the Germans of AoE 3…
Well, right now the HRE has close to zero resemblance with the Teutonic Order. Tapping into the Order would be really nice (to resemble a full medieval unit for the castle age, since Landsknechte should be age 4) + giving the HRE some kind of other special unit. Either an update to the Landsknecht, to make him more a Landsknecht and less a fairy tale unit, the Black Rider, Arquebus Landsknecht or hessian Jäger, although the Jäger time line might be a bit late. Then again we allow some civs to reach the 17th century, while others barely scratch the 16th. Just as a reminder: The reformation did not end the HRE. It existed for another 300 years. The Hussite Wagon was also suggested as well as various kinds of mercenaries.
Making the MAA a real unique unit would also be a fitting addition. The problem of the HRE MAA focus in AoE 4 is that they are supposed to do everything: Be frontline, all around damage dealer and anti armor specialist, but they get very hard countered by crossbows and other than knights, they really get countered to the point of being useless. That makes HRE as it is (aside from other issues like the severe focus on landmarks) very one dimensional. Either you build masses of MAA or masses of really boring baseline units that are inferior to pretty much every corresponding unit of the other civs. if inspired warriors was not so bad, but instead a reliable buff that is notable, the HRE would gain a lot of variablity.
A lot needs to be done with the HRE, but the very least that needs to happen is the following:
Make the landmarks a real choice and an addition to the civ, instead of having them be the essential civ enabler. The HRE should be a unique civ outside of landmarks. Buff the basic civ, nerf the landmarks. The HRE is the only civ for which the landmarks decide how unique it is, which guts the civ more than helping it.
Adjust the economy accordingly and rework the Landsknecht to be an elite Spearman with maybe a formation bonus that can be used against everything, but with pros and cons (there should still be a reason to build normal spearmen).
Give the HRE at least one additional unique unit and improve the Holy part of this civ. Make prelates an important part of the army instead of this sluggish, one target cast unit that doesn’t even heal very well. The prelate should be a unit you always want to have with you. Relic play specialities could be a thing for another unique unit you can only have one of that could be part of a landmark like Regnitz or Burgrave.
And that’s it. That would give the HRE so much more variablity, it’d be a real civ. Right now it’s just eco, massing one unit that is supposed to do everything, the rest is baseline units to mass, while strong techs are hidden behind an inferior landmark and the one mechanic (inspiration) this civ is supposed to be centered around is so bad and gameplay unfriendly that it barely finds any use and definitely none on pro levels. Imagine pros not using the Mehter because he sucks. That’s the HRE prelate situation. Swabia also only exists, because Relic realized that the HRE lacks stream lined eco growth and thus needs the option to catch up on villagers in the very last age you can reach. Swabia, Burgrave and Aachen are the core reprensentations of why the HRE is not a fully designed civ and offers so much less than the others.
Yes, I agree… the HRE needs an urgent rework… more UUs, improve its landmarks and make it versatile against other civs…
HRE empire is 2 tier above the vast majority of civs. idk its maybe a you problem
I have no problem with the HRE, it’s a very good civ, but compared to others, it could be even better… since the game came out, the HRE hasn’t been touched and we just want it to be on par with the others… For example, the Chinese and the Malians have 6 UUs, while the HRE only 2 UUs, doesn’t that seem very unbalanced to you?..
