So the meta right now in 1v1s is go slingers or die. Basically it’s a skirmisher that beats melee units and unlike axeman, needs no upgrades to build. It makes tool age fights so dull.
Even in team games it’s pretty strong, since you can just knock out one opponent early. Now that they have a bonus against chariot archers, they’re not that bad against some civs in when transitioning into bronze either.
A good start would be removing the +1 damage from stone mining or requiring smth like a 50 food 50 stone upgrade to be able to build them
ive found slingers to be useless(in the campaign at least) because they do so little damage. But ive never been very good at AoE so there is that
It’s got 25 life that never upgrades though. A strong gust will knock it over.
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Slingers only become powerful in large numbers. This doesn’t really happen in the campaigns, where you only have 50 pop and rarely have much time to build up. And having only 25hp does not mean much if they can kill everything before them get close.
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I like slingers. Currently they are strong. Very useful in Tool early to explore, and harass the enemy.
There are two things with them, first they have very little life and they die easily, even against lions. An improvement would be interesting.
The second would be to take out the extra damage against towers and walls, so a couple of towers would stop them easily.
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Yes, they are strong when massed.
The easiest solution to lower the potential for slinger armies to destroy your economy is to spread your villagers to gather at multiple locations. Avoid building farms next to your town center, use multiple storage pits for wood/gold/stone gatherers etc.
Usually in games where I was rushed with a large amount of slingers (10-15+) I was already almost on Bronze Age, and the damage they did to my economy was negligible. A stable and 2-3 cav units, combined with some slingers on your own will beat those Tool Age armies very reliably. Also, 3-4 barracks and spamming short swords makes mincemeat out of them. The Bronze Shields help a lot aswell.
Just don’t waste time to gather stone and build towers around your city against them.
Also, try to put the fight to him aswell, by attacking his economy with units of your own, so he can’t continue to spam them at the same speed. But I agree that Slingers could use a tweak (better performance against Archers, and weaker for harassmen), but not much.
If someone massed slinger units…attack his economy, they cost a lot of stone per unit. If someone is wasting 40 food per slinger prior to the bronze age, lets say at 10 units = 400 food plus additional resource priority of stone, if you raid his base simultaneously, he has no fall back plan, your both in the same boat, however you have more food to advance to the bronze age quicker, get back in the fight a lot faster than he probably can with 400 less food. Just keep the pressure on his economy the whole time.
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They don’t. 10 stone is nothing, 2 stone miners allow to produce slingers from 3 barracks easily. On top of that all civs start with 150 stone, so it’s at least 10 slingers for only 40 food (50 stone for getting mining upgrade) or even 15. So Slingers are easy to get right from Tool Age.
Also, if you rush the Slingerspammer yourself, how do you have more food? You need Axes/archers/slingers/scouts yourself, which cost just as much food or even more than slingers. And even then, massed slingers with a bit of hit&run will beat those units relatively easy.
On top of that he’s in your base and kills villagers, so this statement doesn’t make much sense…
I played the original age of empires game when it first came out in 1997, and I watched some games recently for de on twitch and youtube, I just want to say that almost in all the games especially on smaller maps or 1 vs 1 games, it turns into slinger wars in tool age , who ever has more slingers wins the game … which is not fun at all .
Atleast in the the original aoe tool rushing was more fun with more variety , tower rushing , archer rush, scout , axers … although archers rushes were the most common tool rush back then , the idea of the slingers in ror was to counter archers in tool age but what happened they absolutely killed the bowmen in tool age .
I totally agree with the original post, slingers should not benefit from any attack bonuses from stone mining or any other upgrades. That would be a good start to balance things out in tool age.