Its been argued that the archers in AOE are OP. I think the balance is fine except for imp. The elite skirmishers from castle age are the same ones you have to create in imp, but by then, you have elite longbows with 12 range and that kind of thing. Perhaps we should give every civ imperial skirmishers, an upgraded imp version. That would make infantry and calvary more powerful for imp and maybe add some balance. Any thoughts?
For me the issue with archers is that melee pathing is pretty bad in DE. This makes archers better. The difference in feudal age is small, but will grow bigger when tech increase.
For me the first solution will be fixing melee pathing. After fixing melee pathing we can have a look the new balance between range units and melee units. If archers still OP, than we can have some balance changes for archers.
5 Likes
Certainly Not every civ should get them but the Idea of Imp skirm as a Generic Upgrade hast Always come Up here and there and i would be fine with it being available to more civs. After all its an expensive Upgrade with not that much added Stats, so it shouldnt be too hard to Balance.
In the other Hand you have onagers against archers in Imp.
Personnally i would make can See enemy Position the Vietnam Team Bonus anyway.
This line is quite interesting. In the original AoK, all trash units were upgradeable up to castle olny. ES realized the light cav and pikeman were too weak in late-game situations and thus added the Husssar and Halberdier upgrades, while they didn’t buff Elite skirms. On top of that, the new Thumb ring improvement was added to increase the firing rate of all archers… except skirms. Actually, Thumb ring ups the accuracy of skirms from 90% to 100% which isn’t quite big of a deal. And this decision to not buff elite skirms turned out to work just fine during 20 years.
4 Likes
Probably because ESkirm serve his purpouse very well, when LCav and Pikes were really underpowered even for trash. ESkirms really dont need to be bettter against Archers when fully upgraded, but Pikes and LCav are simply weak in their roles without Imp Upgrade or some Tech.
Maybe we will have some fun and make list of civs with ImpSkirm?
My list:
- Aztecs
- Britons
- Byzantines
- Celts
- Etiopians
- Goths
- Incas
- Italians
- Magyars
- Slavs
- Spanish
- Vietnamese
- Vikings
List is almost random 
Agree, but vietnamese should need another buff in exchange, because they would be indirectly nerfed (because some civilizations would receive a better archer counter).
I would make them to receive the imperial skirm upgrade for free upon imperial age.
Yeah, i could live with that, maybe even give them both skirm Upgrades free. Or make them save 20% on all archery range techs and upgrades