It’s an interesting design choice to give italy versatile xbow with no skirm in age 3, and this merc skirm that counters other skirm and has high melee damage with no negative multiplier, I guess you’d want this if your opponent is just kiting your pavisiers with skirms. in theory schiavone pavisier can be a versatile age 2 comp as it might only be soft countered by melee cav with schiavone’s high melee dmg and pavisier’s melee resist mode, but how in the world would you get the resources to field such wood and gold intensive units in age 2 idk.
The unit I’m most worried about is the lancer though, 800 hp melee cav in age 2 is no joke. I play china and normally I like to open mongolian into standard army, but am I really going to try kiting these things with a few keshiks? I see they also got nerfed to 700 hp in recent patch.
I wonder if the papal units’ damage absorption can be a weakness, does the absorbed damage go through the resistance of the papal unit, the resistance of the unit that would have received damage, or none at all? If the latter, and you have say a bunch of skirms, can you focus fire enemy HI to deal more damage to the papal lancer by bypassing your negative cav multiplier and/or their ranged resist?
Theorycrafting lombards, you’d want to age up with 1 and 2 settlers, but then should you set 300 to each resource asap like a mexico revolution, or is it better to spend this on techs to increase vil count? Do you need a rax or want a tp during age-up? I see most builds just invest 300f to start, then send the 700 gold lombard, and get late rax, seems like a slightly greedy opening for not much eco payoff.
Speaking of, I also wonder how viable it is to get a 2nd architect if you open with say a lot of gold treasure, and how long would it take for an architect to pay for itself?
Back to lombards, if I’m understanding this correctly, each lombard can have a maximum of 6f 4w 4g trickle going at all times, seems crazy, but let’s do the math. 6+4+4=14, 14x5 lombards=70 vil eco, minus 300 each resource every x seconds, where x is the time it takes for 300 of each resource to deplete from 5 lombards, I think it’s like 15-16 seconds. So, maybe my math is off, but I think you need about a 60 vil eco to support 5 lombards continuously, which will produce a 70 vil eco? Assuming a vil gathers an average 1 resource/s, 900/15 = 60. Of course you don’t actually need 60 vils to get 5 lombards going, you can just keep reinvesting as long as you have 300 of each to start. Assuming that’s what you do, it means lombards are essentially 70-60=10/5 = 2 vil eco each? But I guess you don’t always have to reinvest, so you can set up resource spikes for yourself, and this is with all cards, without I believe each lombard would be worth about 1 vil in resource profit. I theorize that lombard gather rate in lategame/treaty will be strong while being tame in most 1v1’s.
But this is a rough calculation, it doesn’t take into account the 3:2 ratio at which food is gathered compared to other resources in lombards, or the different rates at which vils gather coin/wood, instead rounding all resource collection to a rate of 1/s. Finally it also fails to consider the added xp trickle to lombards, maxed at 1.5/s each, or the diminishing returns such xp trickles will give.
I hope the papal guard age-up enables guard upgrades for pavisiers, I saw in a video the description said it just ships papal guards, if so that’s a little disappointing to have so many upgrades for pavisiers only for them to become irrelevant lategame.
