I think the more vills you pull to repair, the more walking time you are causing - and if you have any ranged unit (skirm in particular), you need to replace vills at some moment that causes extra walking time
Also you need some wood to repair the house, I think a vill repairing a house is something bigger than 25/min
The thing isn’t the amount of vills needed to outrepair the maa. The thing is the reaction time and exectution to send the vills there.
Which I get, at high elo this won’t be as much of an issue - we’re already used to do this against japanese (which have similar damage output). But on lower elos this will lead to way more maa rushes breaking in and causing havoc.
Its so hard to balance infantry because it will essentially either be utterly broken or useless with little room for a middle ground. This is because fundamentally units are not realistic in how they behave and how much they cost in AOE2.
Most of what a militia line can do, the knight line just does better, as long as you have access to knights there is little reason to make militia line.
The devs solution to this is to turn the militia line into a mini-siege unit, but this also then begs the question of why would you invest in militia line if you can just build siege which do the same thing better.
Now if you look at real Medieval armies they were by and large made up of infantry, that’s because horses and heavily armoured knights wree actually very expensive. But this is just not reflected in the game, at the moment the knight is only marginally more expensive than the militia line so you can just build your entire army out of knights and many civilisations are built around this idea.
We would have to drastically increase the price of knights so that the only viable option for having a massive army is to build infantry. But obviously that gets countered hard by archers and we’d end up with a game where cavalry is not viable at all and archers dominate everything.
So in order to stop that from happening, we’d have to basically make knights impervious to pierce damage to that a fewer number of them can hard counter archers, but even then a few halbs thrown in the mix would prevent that from happening.
Its a real mess, there is no easy solution to this.
Not only that but also because the line doesn’t have a dedicated trash counter like the other gold lines. In other words, it breaks the rock-paper-scissors mold of the basic lines (archers, infantry and cavalry).
Whether this mold is essential, I can’t comment on. I’ve merely observed what happens and, from comments (rather than my own experience), I’ve seen that this has apparently been resolved in aoe4. It’s probably also too late to remodel the entire counter system, and maybe many ideas that have already been put forward here and on Reddit might be enough to remedy the situation.
Actually to mak theat graph “healthy” it would be the “easiest” to let the light cav line counter swordsmen and on the other end sworman counter heavy cav.
I don’t see why you want skirms to be countered by archers, that’s absurd. Ofc you can argue that the choice of skirmisher was a bad one and instead should have been something like a crossbow used by an unlearned soldier. But I feel it’s too late to switch that entire identity even with the trouble that design flaw inflicts.
And whilst there are some arguments for certain anti-infantry cavs to make, the current design of light cav is already too strong to give them that kind of bonus.
Ofc it would be an idea to add a specific infantry counter trash unit (I advocate for a lightbowman, but in my collection of hypothetical trash units it could also be a footed axeman or specialised trash cavalry.
Atm there is just little to be countered by that…
And my concepts would work even without a dedicated trash counter. I wouldn’t be against that, but I don’t really see this currently with how devs are approaching the changes. It would require a big overhaul which thay fear could be rejected by the community.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear. This graph isn’t a proposal, it’s just a comparison, probably useless, of what I’ve observed. So it’s not that I want anything.
If aoe2 at least followed the middle model, where archery > infantry > cavalry and where gold units beat trash units, the archer should beat the skirmisher (also, realistically, an archer shoots arrows faster than a javelin throws its spear, although a javelin can penetrate armor more than arrows).
So the skirmisher was a confusing addition. Is he a heavy unit (gold) or a light unit (trash)? Besides, as in aoe4, archers were light units, crossbowmen heavy. So whose role does the skirmisher occupy here?
Yeah well that’s what I said. The ship of radical overhaul has sailed, and I believe there are still many concepts, including yours, that can solve the militia problem without major changes.
Well I see chances if Devs first add the units as Uniques or regionals. When they then receive good feedback from the community they could be spread wider - though the old ones will be probably kept for the majority of civs.
This is how I got to making this thread. The idea is that devs might get an idea for a regional or UU from it or other peoples concept ideas and whatever happens from there…
I mean if you produce 6 maa, arson, get a timely follow up with ranged units and opponent did nothing you could say maa finally managed to punish greedy play with the new changes. But if its regular play, opponent should be having more ranged units by then especially at your level. So it might be worth it against Phosphorus, hoang type strats but otherwise more than 4 early maa should still be less common at higher elos.
Repairing takes half the cost, the 1st vill repairs 750 hp/min, which is 12.5 wood/min and every additional vill repairs at half the rate which is 6.25 wood/min. So the extra vill’s repairing cost is just 6.25 wood/min and idle time from not collecting wood is 25-26/min, effectively approx 32/min worth of loss. 6 maa post changes is still 420 resources + 140 for the upgrade cost + another 100 for arson. So that’s 660 resources. The idle time of 3 vills, pulling back low hp vills and sending more has to go on for at least 6 mins for this to be worth the cost. Maybe for Goths, Slavs, Bulgarians, Dravidians, Japanese, Burmese it might be worth it, but not for most of the other civs.
Yea I think I mentioned that infantry wont be for every civ after patch, but I think esp. Dravidians would be good with all the bonuses
How so? I’ve never played AOE4.
According to the Wiki, aoe4 separates units into heavy and light units, with the archer (light) countering the spearman and the crossbowman (heavy) countering the swordsman, and the latter being much more resistant than its counterpart in aoe2.
But like I said, I don’t play either. I’ve only seen some comments on Reddit about how in aoe4 infantry plays a bigger role in matches, and a brief discussion comparing this aspect in aoe2 and aoe4 in aoezone. I think Skadidesu might know more about this.
Isn’t that also because infantry also plays other auxilliary roles such as building siege weapons out in the field which infantry in AOE2 don’t do? I have actually suggested this in other threads, that infantry needs some sort of role that is currently not present in game and would require some major re-design (yes I know its unlikely) but for the sake of theorising, it would need to do something that another unit can’t already do better. Building and operating siege weapons is definitely one such role. Another is to give them the ability to take over enemy buildings, so instead of having monks convert buildings, you can have infantry take over a building. Building fortifications is another one, for example make them make fortifications such as towers and castles at a much faster rate than villagers, or give villagers a build penalty for those kinds of buildings.
At the moment infantry just has no clear role. You can see this even with civs where infantry is viable because of some bonuses, its usually achieved by making the infantry behave closer to a cavalry unit (faster speed, higher pierce armor, etc..) and that just further confirms that the game treats infantry currently just as a shittier version of a knight.
AoE1, AoE3, AoE4 and AoM all solved this issue. It’s not black magic.
Very simple 2 step process:
(This doesn’t fully apply to AoE1 because there are barely any real counter units.)
People already mentioned how it works for AoE4.
Archers counter Spearman.
Crossbow counter Man at Arms.
Relatively simple.
AoE3 is not as good of a comparison because half of the Heavy Infantry units are ranged. But they are all countered by Light Infantry (essentially Archers) while they all counter Cavalry.
Also Heavy Infantry is often the unit with the best base stats most of them have a strong ranged attack and many melee ones have AoE damage.
But I think AoM might be the most interesting comparison. In AoM every civilisation has a dedicated anti Infantry unit (besides the Chinese) and in most cases it’s actually an Infantry unit itself.
Greeks: Hypapist (Infantry)
Egyptians: Axeman (Infantry)
Norse: Throwing Axeman (Infantry and Archer class)
Atlanteans: Cheiroballista (Siege Weapon)
Chinese: Fire Archer (Archer)
I suggested this before but the easiest way to “fix” the Milita Line is to make it strong but add a new generic unit that counters them.
Long Swordsman should have 2/2 base armour and 10 attack like a Knight.
Then add a new Axeman line to the barracks that does bonus damage against the Milita Line (not all Infantry) and similar Infantry Unique Units.
The Axeman gets 0 base pierce armour to be weak against Archers.
Axeman also don’t need to be a trash unit.
A big reason why infantry works in AoM is also because melee attacks slow down units for a short while, allowing even “slow” melee units to chase down fleeing units.
The main reason is that they just have good stats.
In AoE2 you have to choose between countering Cavalry or doing reasonable damage to anything else. Pikeman are useless against everything that is not Cavalry while Long Swordsman lose against Knights.
In AoM most Infantry counters Cavalry while having good enough base stats to be able to do pretty much anything decently.
Hoplites only need +25% vs. Cavalry to be the main anti Cavalry unit of the Greeks.
One of the in-game good stat example Serjeant.
Anti-archers examples huskarl and eagles
Anti-cavalry examples berserker and kamayuk.
How about certain infantry civs can send militia-line to ‘pack’ towers in 20s? And miltia-line garrison inside to move and ‘unpack’ the tower to attack. This will be trebuchet-alike mechanics but at least makes towers and miltia more viable.
I think in general it would makes sense it Towers were “Teutons” towers with 10 Garrison, increased amount of possible added arrows and Infantry units adding arrows like VIllagers.
I don’t understand why this never occured to anybody that this could be a general treatment instead of reducing the cost of towers like we had not so long ago.
Teutons could either “double down” on that or have something else tweaked. I feel like in the currrent state of the game the farms bonus of teutons falls a bit short in comparison. It could be 50 % instead then.
So…
It has been a few week now since the Infantry patch was released.
Time to have a holistic look on the changes, how they would be best classified in the apsect of concepts in this Thread. See what the predictions for the changes were and if this is reflected in the Stats.
Maybe let’s begi with having a look at the stats at first because they might be gone in a few days when jerbot actualizes aoestats.io . Unfortunately we don’t get to see the opening winrates anymore, but we can infer from the results of some infantry civs what the effects are.
When we just have a look at the “patch delta” we see a lot of infantry civs jumping up quite a bit:
| Civilization | Picks | Play Rate | Win Rate | Patch Delta | Game Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Italians |
7,084 | 1.78% | 51.95%±1.16 | 30 | 42:47 |
 Japanese |
10,462 | 2.63% | 51.08%±0.96 | 25 | 41:26 |
 Bulgarians |
8,578 | 2.16% | 52.03%±1.06 | 18 | 40:55 |
 Dravidians |
4,130 | 1.04% | 50.73%±1.53 | 18 | 41:50 |
 Britons |
11,928 | 3.00% | 49.08%±0.90 | 14 | 44:29 |
 Mayans |
7,892 | 1.99% | 50.20%±1.10 | 9 | 42:08 |
 Saracens |
7,102 | 1.79% | 49.94%±1.16 | 9 | 42:12 |
 Goths |
10,042 | 2.53% | 50.50%±0.98 | 7 | 41:50 |
 Spanish |
11,673 | 2.94% | 50.99%±0.91 | 7 | 43:27 |
 Ethiopians |
11,477 | 2.89% | 52.35%±0.91 | 5 | 41:15 |
 Incas |
5,953 | 1.50% | 51.65%±1.27 | 4 | 41:42 |
 Burmese |
4,248 | 1.07% | 48.54%±1.50 | 4 | 41:20 |
 Malians |
7,397 | 1.86% | 52.79%±1.14 | 4 | 41:23 |
 Vikings |
6,286 | 1.58% | 53.75%±1.23 | 3 | 42:31 |
 Portuguese |
7,527 | 1.89% | 49.45%±1.13 | 3 | 43:18 |
 Aztecs |
10,440 | 2.63% | 47.53%±0.96 | 2 | 41:55 |
 Koreans |
9,889 | 2.49% | 49.28%±0.99 | 2 | 42:06 |
 Vietnamese |
10,038 | 2.53% | 47.54%±0.98 | 2 | 42:58 |
 Armenians |
6,790 | 1.71% | 48.91%±1.19 | 1 | 40:43 |
 Burgundians |
7,319 | 1.84% | 45.74%±1.14 | 1 | 43:23 |
 Huns |
11,930 | 3.00% | 52.89%±0.90 | - | 42:34 |
 Romans |
6,783 | 1.71% | 55.01%±1.18 | - | 41:15 |
 Malay |
5,761 | 1.45% | 52.39%±1.29 | 1 | 41:06 |
 Poles |
6,732 | 1.69% | 47.76%±1.19 | 2 | 43:12 |
 Magyars |
13,394 | 3.37% | 50.13%±0.85 | 2 | 41:54 |
 Mongols |
21,284 | 5.36% | 51.13%±0.67 | 2 | 41:53 |
 Byzantines |
9,744 | 2.45% | 47.18%±0.99 | 2 | 45:17 |
 Celts |
8,161 | 2.05% | 50.74%±1.08 | 4 | 41:34 |
 Bohemians |
7,320 | 1.84% | 51.27%±1.15 | 4 | 43:19 |
 Slavs |
6,799 | 1.71% | 49.71%±1.19 | 5 | 42:21 |
 Tatars |
5,007 | 1.26% | 47.63%±1.38 | 5 | 42:15 |
 Berbers |
6,200 | 1.56% | 49.34%±1.24 | 5 | 42:42 |
 Gurjaras |
4,547 | 1.14% | 43.66%±1.44 | 5 | 42:59 |
 Hindustanis |
8,562 | 2.16% | 52.24%±1.06 | 5 | 42:43 |
 Persians |
13,174 | 3.32% | 50.87%±0.85 | 6 | 42:57 |
 Khmer |
11,485 | 2.89% | 48.09%±0.91 | 7 | 42:58 |
 Lithuanians |
9,803 | 2.47% | 49.05%±0.99 | 7 | 43:24 |
 Franks |
17,697 | 4.45% | 49.89%±0.74 | 9 | 43:00 |
 Teutons |
11,748 | 2.96% | 50.10%±0.90 | 9 | 44:02 |
 Turks |
8,666 | 2.18% | 49.63%±1.05 | 10 | 41:42 |
 Chinese |
11,057 | 2.78% | 47.92%±0.93 | 10 | 43:20 |
 Sicilians |
8,057 | 2.03% | 50.25%±1.09 | 13 | 40:52 |
 Cumans |
7,865 | 1.98% | 48.05%±1.10 | 14 | 41:34 |
 Bengalis |
3,664 | 0.92% | 48.44%±1.62 | 16 | 41:26 |
 Georgians |
5,575 | 1.40% | 47.30%±1.31 | 25 | 42:38 |
Italians ofc had a minor rework, so this is a special case anyways.
Japanese, Bulgarians and Dravidians seem to have improved the most. They are also probably the most known for just having the best amplifying bonusses for the standard MAA rush. Goths, Burmese, Romans, Malians and Vikings only see a mediocre winrate increase. Aztecs and Armenians almost nothing.Celts for some reason even dropped in winrate.
For me it really looks like the civs beneffiting the most were those which usually only want to open MAA and then transition into other units as the game continues. Civs like Slavs which usually only play Militia as an lategame option even dropped in Winrate.
And the winrate Jumps for some Civs are massive. Japanese made a 3 % Jump (though some of this comes probably from the Chicken Maps). Bulgarians and Dravidians increased by 2.6 %. That’s a lot, given that they didn’t receive any targeted Buffs, just the changes to the militia line.
Now I have tried to look at different elos, but there the results were inconsistant. What I mean that some of the civs seem to have only increased in winrate on certain elos and it’s not really explainable why they shouldn’t on others in between. It would be interesting to see if these winrate increases come from mostly “low elo” or “high elo” play or whatever. But as far as I can see it the influence of the elo on the increases is actually not very big. At all elos some civs got quite good winrate increases. The biggest outlayer is probably Dravidians which seem to have gotten very elo-dependent increases. The civ is tricky, probably at lower elos people don’t know what the righ transitions are. Possibly also not using the eco bonus well as it usually requires build adaptations to do so. But that’s only a guess.
Also it is appearant to me that in almost all cases the winrates of the good Infantry Civs come mostly from a good early game winrate. Some of them like Goths have a tip at the very long games point again, but most don’t. Most of them fall off immediately in the midgame, depending ofc on other meaningful bonusses like economy. So it’s to me very clear, that it’s mostly driven by the initial militia line rushes.
But it’s not like the winrates are completely plummiting. It’s usually less than 10 % drop and 15 % for 30-45 minute games. It’s ofc a huge question to answer why the drop isn’t seemingly bigger than before the patch for some of these civs which were already known before for their maa rushes.
Next post I will try to class the changes done, what i predicted for them and if the prediction was right or not from my personal observation perspective.
I have claimed before the patch that militia line’s fate had already been irrecoverably sealed the moment Thumb Ring and Bloodlines were introduced.
I still claim the same.
The militia line is now viable for a lot of infantry civilizations and it’s a good improvement. But the thing is, you still have very little reason to train them even if your civ has fully upgraded militia line, because it’s not enough—you also wanna have extra bonuses to offset their numerous weaknesses.
Whereas you can easily go with knights or archers even if your civ gives you zero bonuses to these units. Or even if your civ lacks some upgrades for these units.
