Meanwhile, Knight’s description is also all-purpose cavalry. Knight is all-purpose practically but militia is all-purpose nominally.
Faster healing from monks can help vs knight but not vs xbow.
So infantry should have double healing rate in garrisoned buildings and other units heal rate will stay same.
3 Likes
Could be but I think they should have some other benefit as well rather than just this one. This change alone would be quite small.
Not really. So many units are quite weak and extremely niche - Scorpions, siege towers, all Elephant units, militia line, almost all infantry unique units except those that are anti-archer or have range. Some are terribly strong in a bunch of settings - Mangudai, Organ guns, Conqs, Janissaries, Houfnice, some cav uu. We could say the rest of the units are nearly well balanced wrt each other but these ones are not.
Its not. Squires or longswords upgrade don’t add much value irrespective of what main army combination you’re using. Its probably ok if you’re Bulgarians because that’s free, somewhat ok if you’re Romans or Malians against camel civs. Again very situational and specific to a few matchups.
Otherwise 3 maa is not going to justify longswords that’s crazy. In fact 3 units of any kind wouldn’t justify getting the next upgrade unless you plan on producing more and making it a substantial part of your army. You also can’t throw away 215 resources like that when you have to get crossbow-bodkin-ballistics or bloodline-husbandry-chain barding plus 2nd wood upgrade, gold mining. So many useful things to spend your resources.
And even if you assume players might get longswords once in a while, that’s not the intention of this topic. Making militia line viable in all ages implies discissing ideas to get to situation where players make them in sufficient numbers like how Knights, CA, Camels, crossbows, light cav are used today.
I can say with some confidence that they might use this with and against eagle civs. Might get squires for spears in some situations as well but squires to save the 3 maa or longswords upgrade to use those saved maa will almost never happen.
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Right, sorry, I meant to imply that you would be doing further investments, not just getting the upgrades for those three units. That’s the whole idea, that by having a little bit of a start, it makes it more appealing to do a larger scale investment.
That’s my whole thing. Right now, you do an maa Rush, but then there is no place to go with it, so you just suicide them. Squires could allow you to get a little bit more value back than it requires you to put in, so that keeps you using infantry a little while longer. I do agree that it would be predominantly infantry civilizations doing this, but that’s okay; it’s not like we complain when Cavalry civilizations use their cavalry!
Personally, I would like to see supplies give the militia line a healing bonus. In my opinion, the biggest problem with supplies right now is that it only helps you in the future, it doesn’t help you right now. If supplies gave something like plus 12 healing per minute to the militia line when garrison, that would synergize really nicely with towers, and further incentivize additional investment. Or you could do a little bit of both, increase the base healing rate and then have supplies double it.
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I believe that one of the main challanges for the militia line is that it underperforms vs melee cav. In feudal age men-at-arms lose vs scouts with bloodlines. In castle age, long swords trade poorly vs knights. In imperial age THS and champions trade even worse vs cavaliers and paladins respectively.
If you truly want to make militia line viable you need to consider two things :
- How do they perform vs ranged units?
- How effectively do they trade vs other melee units
By design they should perform poorly vs ranged unit. But they need at least the same speed as the ranged foot in order to not get bullied. They should trade well vs other melee units (spears and cav). At the moment they do not trade well vs many cav units (scout cav, knight-line, boyars). I propose to give them more hp to make them trade better vs cav and increase their speed to negate bullying by archers. In essence:
M@A: 45hp-> 55hp (still loses to bloodline scouts)
LS: 60hp → 70hp
THS: 60hp → 75hp (survive 1 SO shot)
Champions: 70hp-> 85 hp (Survive 1 SO shot)
All militia line have archer speed (0,96). Damage bonus vs eagles is reduced for every different upgrade (M@A, LS etc.) to keep that matchup the same.
These changes would make them more resistant to siege and ranged, better at evading archers and trade better vs cav. The improved performance is roughly the same for all cases as the hp is increased instead of eg. armor or dmg.
2 Likes
46 longswords can beat 22 knights leaving a few units by staggerd formation (equal resources). Also they can beat light cavalry by staggerd. Staggerd helps massive melee units to start attacking quickly.
If you do swordsman rush, you should build 18~30 farms for producing swordsman. The timing will be early castle, late castle, early imp or post imp. (idk how the rush in late feudal will be)
Its still not worth doing several longswords because of having a head start with 3 maa. It will be 2% better than going supplies maa today but a 2% buff over something this bad is not going to have much impact. It can work once in a while because no one will expect such a play but it won’t get more mainstream. And its not even all infantry civs for which this play is suitable. Maybe Malay, Celts because of a solid timing advantage. Maybe Japanese and Dravidians in hybrid maps with fish. Still quite niche where the risk vs reward of this approach will be favorable for the longswords player.
This can also be useful once proper changes have been made to give militia line a solid purpose in standard ranked maps.
Ranged units will hit and run. Knights and cavalry units will take the fight when there’s a suitable numbers advantage or in the presence of siege.
Boyars are unique units meant to be good vs melee, so that’s irrelevant from a balance discussion. In situations where you can force a fight like ram push or castle drop, longswords and above will trade decent against the corresponding knight-line equivalent. Counter attacks and not being able to force a fight is their problem.
While this is almost the stats of Vikings and won’t be a bad change, I don’t think this will solve the viability problem. This is something that might make infantry more powerful than today at sub 1k elos.
I believe this should be the minimum starting point. I’m in favor of increasing it to 1.0 flat or 0.95 in feudal, 1.0 in castle. An automatic increase like scout line.
Just saying, this picture is saved on my gallery for almost 4 months.
