I think trying to Improve the Boyar might be a good idea.
Would it be possible to give Boyars 1 more pierce armor? I think this could be the x-factor for them to be a very useful transition in late Castle Age.
It’s really hard to make a good cav UU as the Knights are already so strong in their “job”. There is very little space to give it an edge without completely overbuffing the UU.
With the extra pierce armor the Boyars would be especially good in raiding in smaller groups. It could be a nice tool when you try to outboom the opponent and otherwise tried to defend with monks, siege, pikes or skirms against the opponent attacks. Slavs farms are already no joke in the midgame, so the opponent would have to fear being outboomed - and have problems later on against the cheap detinet castles and trash unit spam.
That’s when that 1 more PA for the Boyars could come into play cause with that they could stand under TC fire even in low numbers much longer than currently.
In castle age Boyars have 2 PA and 100 HP, the same as Knights.
Only in Imp with the elite upgrade they get 3 PA. They still have way less HP than Paladin and therefore are less effective than paladins vs archer civs.
Also because of the castle restriction.
How less than a paladin…
In castle age with 5 PA they would need 60 xbow shots.
Elite ones would need 75 arbalest shots.
And that’s on top of being wayyy better than knights in melee and only needing one upgrade to be better than paladin… def balanced.
Boyars are designed to be heavily armored in melee combat, not to be an universal cavalry strong vs everything
No, not even close
Magyar Huszar is stronger than any hussar but doesn’t get conversion resistance.
Tarkan isn’t better than paladin in melee, in fact one of the worst units in melee. But vs archers is great and in fact it see uses
Cataphract has a good design, infantry killer and doing great vs camels, but is worse and weak vs heavy cavalry and bad at taking arrow damage.
War elephant is the ultimate elephant unit that stomps everything, but is wayyy more expensive to get and esp to upgrade, and is slow.
And soo on, cavalry UUs (and that applies to any UU) can’t just be better at everything and strong vs anything otherwise is simply broken and unfun to play against, Leitis had that same issue and lost PA because of that, Ghulam lost HP also for that.
And for you, Leiciai, Cataphracts, Coustiliers and Keshiks aren’t better than knights and still see use in high level games.
It still has the disadvantage of being less casually available.
So neither it can “just be better at everything” nor… I was even talking about that (!!!)
Are actually the perfect example. Cause they are basically better than Knights in everything than the Knights. If I apply your implied underlying method of evalueation.
Yet the unit is neither recognized as being too strong nor avversed cause of that generalistic dominance over the Knight line.
It’s not
But I don’t even want Boyar to be that direction. Cause even with more PA (which was actually about the Castle Age version, not elite) they would still be even harder countered than the Knight line by Halbs. In several different ways like eg the mentioned convenience and the higher Gold ratio.
The proposal was mentioned to make Boyar more appealing to use in certain castle age Scenarios, trying to give them a clear edge there over the Knight line’s convenience.
Maybe it’s not the “perfect” tweak. IDK. Praxis often shows different than theory. But I actually try to specifically target only one of the stats to make it try to be more useful in a limited amount of scenarios. NOT all scenarios. It’s actually kind of weird to me that this one stat specific buff is immediately received as if it was one of this commonly seen ones like “just make them cheaper!”. That looks for me a bit twisted.
If you think the boyar should be basically only used against other cavalry civs (which slavs actually have quite solid good tools against) then you could instead also try to make that kind of effect happen by increasing the melee armor. Cause non-elite Boyar have quite low melee armor than their elite variant. Making the usually seen FU post-imp scenario matchups looking way better for the Boyar than the Castle Age standoff.
Remove bloodlines and add thunb ring sound very bad to me. You are adding a useless upgrade since they lack arbalest in echange to remove a cruciale upgrade for their cavalry which is the main asset…
Imho slavs are interesting enough. Their late game Boyar + cheaper scorp is fun to me.
What i would do is just add a bit of love for their infantry, like something more interesting than free supplies or something even small in addition to that
And druzhina made a little bit cheaper as now is a very expensive tech, and maybe made it clear in the unit card that their infantry get that upgrade when your opponent did it
What more love do they need than the strongest infantry UT in the game?
IDK - I feel as though Slavs are pretty unique. Cool and interesting UTs, powerful eco. Good Cavalry civ, good Infantry civ, good Siege civ.
Just because some civs might get a more interesting eco bonus in some areas (Poles and Khmer wrt farming bonuses), does that mean we need to change every other farming bonus in the game? Let’s change Chinese’s farm bonus as well while we’re at it, since it’s too boring! What about Sicilians, Tetons, and Franks, their farming bonuses are boring too!
If a new civ gets Khmer bonus except for lumberjacks, do we need to change Celts and Burmese?
Slavs do knight spam great because their UU is a unit that has a ‘bonus for knight line’.
Actually… a very interesting thing to think about.
Lastly the meta shifted more and more towards booming behind mediocre macro agression.
This usually makes food bonusses in the early to midgame very strong as we see with a lot of other civs like gurjaras, hindustanis, franks, chinese…
But seemingly not for slavs.
Why?
And if and when the meta changes, does this then makes slavs bonus better or worse?
Imo they are just boring to play as since they arely use any of their bonuses since the discount isnt that strong and free supplies is irrelevant. They are a less fun Bulgarians. They only use the farming bonus in most games, and that bonus itself is boring because its an slow bobnus that doesnt open any new strategies, give amy powerspikes nor anything like that. Its just dull.
Druzhina is cool but it arrives very very late, Boyars are just Paladins and Detinets just gives you Kreposts. In themselves they are all good but the civ just lacks somethibg spicey
It would be nice to give some brand new bonuses. For example, the entire cavalry armor tech line is removed, but the infantry armor line can affect cavalry, etc.
Introducing a new UU is less likely but also a good option, such as the Streltsy I mentioned. Then make the Supplies could affect UUs for the Slavs.
Free Supplies could be removed if we could get something new like above.
Yes but only makes boyar easier to create in castle age but in Imp the gold cost start to hurt, if the gold cost was lower but food cost higher then is harder to use in castle age but much better in imperial (especially where Detinets starts to give a large effect).
Its not since lumberjacks work faster. Faster farmers is slightly better for knights and imperial age infantry, but its worse for low eco strats or archers