Samurai are such a misunderstood unit. They are not “better Champiosn” like some people want to make them, they are UU counter-units. They counter other Unique Units.
1 Like
Well, more civs get Halbs than Hussars, and on average Halbs are better upgraded than Hussars. Only the Elite skirm is more available, and I’ve noticed people make them even if they are Burmese/Franks so I guess from a theorycrafting point of you they are the most build military. And with all the wood flowing late-game, the wood cost of a halb/skirm isn’t a “risky investment”
No, lacking techs doesn’t cost as “savings” especially when they have a strong effect for a relatively low cost.
3 types of units that die to swordsmen btw. And if you push the Byzantine player in using these defensive units, you’re still forcing their focus away from Cataphracts.
Then why isn’t everyone playing Saracen+Mamelukes+Market abuse? (spoiler: because despite being fast and ranged, the massive bonus Halbs get against Mams severely hinders their viability. No, halbs aren’t too slow)
According to your logic the upgrade cost of the Byzantine Paladin is only of 800 food and 450 gold. I wonder why people waste their time playing as Huns or other puny cavalry civs.
Well, if he has less there won’t be enough trample damage to overcome the disadvantage against genric Cavaliers.
Regardless of scenario editor tests that neglect micro, cost and all that, there is one single criteria that should have made the whole deal obvious: why aren’t people playing Byzantine to counter meta civs like Aztecs, or to deny the enemy a whole part of their trash if they are that good?
They do. In feudal, a spearman alone is a good deterent for 3 scouts. Place our spears on your key ressources and you’ve successfully defended! In Castle, pikemen aren’t held back by their speed but more than the fact they are useless without being upgraded first, and that gold isn’t an issue in castle so you’re better off with ur own knights/mass Xbow. In Imp, not only does the Halb upgrade gives them a crazy strong bonus, but they’ve got a new buddy: the Siege ram. Halbs+Siege Ram = ded cav civ. One of the reasons, for instance, why Berbers aren’t OP top tier despite having the most cost-effective cav. Basically, Rams cover the Halb’s weakness of being unable to do anything versus archers and buildings. Of course you can answer to that by teching into champions. You’re still going to feel the pain of having to upgrade your militia all the way up to FU Champ (if you have it!) In the end you’re still forced to invest in a unit you didn’t made any plan on. Huns two-handed swordsmen can save you from such a tactic. You’re still going to not be happy to invest in them rather than your good units.
Being only trained -33% faster means two stables can output your Byzantine Castle. Regarding the ratio or completely forgetting Halb cost 60 of easily replaceable ressources while being produced only 2 seconds slower than Catas. So 3 barracks that spam halb would easily provide that 50:150 ratio.
3 Likes
Another thing to consider is how increased speed would effect their performance against Skirmishers.
Remember, Skirmishers have a minimum range. They’re supposed to counter Spears. Make them too fast and that blows up in your face really quick.
3 Likes
Spear line cost less resources in general, the wood cost is actually better since spending 80 food for a bad unit like light cav in castle age and early imperial age is not viable while you’re trying to boom to 100+ villagers. Not every civ gets Hussars, and many of them don’t get viable ones. Other than Malians and probably Chinese, nobody uses light cav instead. Now even if you don’t get halb, pikes still counter Cavalry when coupled with other units.
Arbalests or heavy scorpions with meatshield like halbs or Hussars, that’s their counter. Also monks. Also you mention the imperial discount and bloodlines savings (lol), it’s not just their costs, it’s the ridiculous amount of passive time to gather stone and build 3-4 castles, The thousands of food and gold to upgrade don’t just accumulate without stopping military production. And if he can stop the military production, then it’s not the unit, it’s the opponent what’s wrong.
The infantry civ should be able to overrun byzantines by the time Catas can get upgrade
And the main topic is still the spearman lack of speed.
They’re already one of the fastest infantries around, the lack of speed is compensated by the huge bonus damage they get against cavalry. See Camels, they’re expensive and they get much lower bonus but they can catch up with the cavalry. If spearmen can do both at such low cost, it’s not balanced
3 Likes
Thus it leads to my previous statement that we don’t have enought data. Just because more civs have habs doesn’t mean more civs produce them. Also because while less civs have hussars, most of them have fully upgraded hussars while many civs that have habs don’t have a fully upgraded line of them.
Maybe you are being fool on purpose but cataphracts are good even without those techs so yes, they are saving on those techs (imperial age 33% cheaper is saving anyway). On the other hand, paladins aren’t good without those techs.
Camels are way to fast for swordsman. They over run knights. And it is not like Byzantine doesn’t have onager or full upgraded crossbow to counter sword.
I am not saying to abuse the market. I am saying they have a bonus that helps them selling resources with greater return. Saracens don’t have any discount in units so while they sell with greater return, they are limiting themselves by slowing their eco. Also Mamalukes are some of the fastest unit in the civ. If you aren’t busy on the other side of the maps, no foot infantry can reach you. And they are slower than scouts of hussars. Which brings to my main point.
Even 20 cataphracts have a big trample effect. Maybe 5 units don’t have that much effect but 20 is already a big number in an army composition.
I mean, people are? Just because pros don’t play it because they have a set of better civs doesn’t mean nobody plays them effectively. Aztecs have monks that deter horses, eagle warrior against archers (+4 attack), siege onager fully upgraded, jaguar warriors to counter the threat to eagle warriors and huge economic bonus to support all of this.
A spearman is a deterrent in like 4 tiles near him. That’s it. I don’t know why you bring up gold costing units. I am not saying to make pikeman as good as those units but their puporse is to defend against horses which they can’t and that is the reason a knight rush, scout rush are so effective. Meaning even if they eventually die, their tradeoff of resource is way better than pikemans because they will kill villagers or slow much your economy.
Ram and halbs are easily countered by 1 single range unit which is the mangonel.
But not instantly. It is a spam of continuos halbs which will never reach that ratio (cataphracts 2-3 shot halbs) or it would mean you have 50 villagers on eco in imperial age.
I feel like the discussion is shifting too much on Byzantines that i make it seem like the best civs of all time. I am not saying this. I am just saying cataphracts are almost undefeatable against infantry civs.
Spear and pikemans can come close even now to skirmishers. They have better speed 1.1 vs .96. To effectively counter pikeman with skirmishes, you would need a relatively big number of them.
I have to come here and correct myself. This is not a case and seems like it never was. No idea why I’ve thought so lol.
2 Likes
Samurai does have an attack bonus against Unique Units of +10 (+12 Elite).
Check the actual message I quoted from. I meant cataphracts don’t have bonus armor against the samurai attack bonus, but I was claiming earlier that the cataphract does have.
However otherwise taking part into the samurai vs cataphract conversation, cataphract is the supreme one, but they trade equally enough that you should be using them, just as using champions vs champions, although population efficiency still makes catas the better unit in the matchup. Even Jap halbs are still bad.
E: I might as well fix my quote to be longer so it isn’t so misleading.
1 Like
Sounds like you struggle to wall your base properly. If you’re on the backfoot you’ve to defend your bases properly and have units where you can’t really wall
Ah they carry them 2 handed and attack with 1 hand. Well I guess it’s an animation problem maybe? If they made them attack with 2 hands would not bother me at all, however I think that could be saved later since there’s more pressing concerns imo that need addressing right now.
1 Like
That does look silly.
Hope they amend the graphics in one of the coming upgrades. We can only hope I guess.
1 Like
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the developers’ team, do they have one team for graphic design and one team for game balancing/programming? Not everyone handles everything at the same time?
Honestly? All I know there’s devs. No idea how many and who would work on what.
I could see at this time a graphics designer is not actively working on this game, instead maybe working on AoE3 DE or AoE4 and when an issue of enough importance would rise in the AoE2DE they might divert their resource from there to here. And I doubt that unless it is truly game breaking, they’ll be focusing on the new games instead. Money talks. :S
There are like 15 FU Halbs civs, 19 if you count those which have bonuses to compensate. With Hussars we can only reach 17. Also, the Hussars that aren’t FU are just horrendously bad, since they lack Bloodlines + at least one blacksmith techs, while the only truely lacking Halbs is the Tatar one. Of course the importance of trash make it so that even if you’re Malian, you’re going to make pikes, eve if you’re Viking, you will make Light cav and so on.
Byz Paladins are better than all Cavalier but Malian (and Berber cost-wise). Their actual drawback is that Cavaliers without Blast Furnace and Bloodlines suck so hard there is no way they survive while you wait for the upgrade. Just like Cataphracts that need both their Elite upgrade and Logistica to get their full strenght.
Well, they ran away and accomplished nothing. Unlike Light cav they also suck at raiding cuz no pierce armor. I mentioned the fact all three Byzantine discounted units suck against infantry because you deemed this discount a “strenght” for getting to the anti-infantry unit. So since you’re not going to use them at all and just use your completely generic archers instead. Hence the savings are irrelevant. Saracen bonus is still better.
And yet people indeed complain about the Halb’s heavy bonus damage against them. It’s almost as if you couldn’t micro manage your army forever in a game where tons of things happen at once, be it Mams or raiding cav…
Well, the problem is still managing to pay all these upgrades, and besides Elite Skirms you will have trouble paying even for Hussar/Halb upgrade with all the bucks you’ve sinked in Catas.
Yes, just like some people main Teuton and spam Teutonic Knights in their casual games. That’s 100% OK but not the kind of games you base balance on.
You insisted about infantry civs lacking heavy cav, FU Arbs and or Heavy scorpions being helpless against cataphracts. Aztecs have their monks but their 95 HP won’t protect them against the Byzantine FU monks. So: why aren’t the Byzantine a civ win vs Aztecs? (answer: Cataphracts are actually that expensive to field)
Then why do I often see people withdrawing their scouts as soon as they see 1 spearman? The most they can do is gang up on him and try to micro the lone dude. And they end up with 4 scouts all on the verge on dying. But yeah, spearman = bad
I brought this because the actual reason pikemen aren’t that seen is that gold is indeed less of a concern in castle, and having to upgrade the unit before it can counter knights makes it harder to use. Just like you rarely see light cavalry because you must upgrade them first.
Then why are some arhcer/cav focused civs deemed weak to such a push? Not hard to see why: the amount of Mangonels you would need to prevent the enemy to reach them would be super taxing. Also, Siege Rams can take several mangonels shots, are faster, can be even faster if garrisoned and can one shot several mangonels at once. Lastly, the Onager upgrade is quite expensive and slow to get.
Let’s forget the halb spam (or whatever else spam for that matter) will be fully operational way before the Cata spam is shall we?
Well, it is relevant since they happen to have a halb bonus and have a unit which selling point is not suffering against halbs.
Oh I forgot:
Wouldn’t Teutons be much better at this little game? And what about Slavs with Boyars instead of Cavaliers?
2 Likes
I had to check this and only the Goths and Mongols had a hussar with bloodlines but missing a blacksmith tech. x) I thought there would been more who only miss a blacksmith tech but had bloodlines. On the other hand, only 6 hussar civs aren’t FU (not counting cuman husbandry cause of the civ bonus) so that makes 4 civs with missing bloodlines and a blacksmith tech (2 for koreans).
Btw, 11 civs don’t get FU halbs (not counting celts squires cause of civ bonus)(yeah the tatars are bad :S ). Malian pikes I wouldn’t call that bad, it still has relatively high attack bonus for cav and now it’s just well armored against ranged attacks. Skirms and arbs only do 3 to them instead of 6.
I was testing this yesterday when I was reading the deleted post, I was surprised lol, I knew cavalier attacks faster than paladin so I thought it would win but cavalier couldn’t win even once, I checked the difference between the attack speed and it was just under 6%, while the paladin was a higher difference in hp. The cavalier is never going to even get an extra attack out against the paladin since the difference in attack speed is lower than how long a fight between the units lasts. Obviously against something like buildings a FU cavalier is better than byz paladin but in fights, not so much and against a castle not either cause of the lower armor. Good stuff. Just shows that the paladin is actually a useful upgrade for the byzantines after all.
Imo the bonus damage against the mameluke is fine, that unit is just strong when massed.
Yea, better leave the hussar out in byz army cause it costs so much and just sucks. Just try to deal with the bad light cav and use the gold for something better. 
xD But if you really need to get it, it’s worth ain’t the greatest. :S
Very much this. On the other hand, just picking byz to be auto win against infantry civs would be stupid I guess, since infantry is the weakest anyway. When the catas get online they are really good but, it’s just too late mostly. :S
Catas will win the halbs cost effectively, however, this is also intended. The unit is so expensive and long to upgrade. So Evil’s point is moot.
Indeed.
This whole game was rigged anyway, you don’t let your siege to be engaged as stupidly as an ai would.
Well, I should have elaborated and mentioned that since Halbs rely mostly on their bonus damage, lacking Blast Furnace or Plate mail armor is not too big of a deal for them, while a Hussar that lack Bloodline and a Blacksmith upgrade are significantly worse at their job.
Regarding the whole Halb = bad thing, I should have mentioned some people think Halbs are actually OP and deal too much damage to cavalry (I don’t agree tho)
1 Like