Base armor shold be 4/4. Hp 120
They should get auto armor upgrades in imp(+1/+2). Hitpoints (+30) and +2 attack.
If someone can convert and defend an enemy building, it should be rewarded.
No?
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There already is a upgraded version of the Xolotl Warrior in Post-Imp starts. It has 130 HP, 12 attack and 4/4 armor. They could automatically upgrade in Imperial Age or maybe get a small āEliteā upgrade, maybe something like 50% of the cost and research time for Cavalier.
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No difference. Itās almost impossible to make some Xolotl, so currently it cannot be a game changer.
Or unlocked when upgrading your castle UU to elite.
No,as this is a meme unit.
Then what about converting a regular barracks, archery range, siege workshop or stable as any civ that has cavalry ? Should it also unlock stronger units for it ?
The xolotl is just to mean the stables wonāt be entirely useless when converted, nothing more. But itās fitting the xolotl is no stronger than a knight as heās supposed to have stolen the horse instead of having had a long training with it.
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My idea has always been that the Mesoās Imperial UT should also apply to the Xolotl Warrior. Still very balanced, but more flavourful.
I mean if the Japanese can have cavaliers with that history of horsemanship, I dont see why not.
I hardly see the comparison, they did develop some shock cavalry (especially the Takeda who took inspiration from european tactics) on top of an already existing horse archery tradition (yabusame), while horses had been estinguished for a long time in the Americas by the time the Spanish arrived. And the Aztecs would be knocked out within months of first contact.
The same europeans that they imitaited shock cavalry from noted that they āwere no horsemenā.
Among things of note were that even the middling armor used was enough to prevent their horses from galloping due to the weight, for how small they were. As for the yabusame - those couldnt even shoot backward while retreating. At most, they would fire forward and to the sides, similar to the roman approximation of horse archers.
And for all that, they have cavalry archers that can beat up Tatar, Persian, Mongol, Turk and Saracen CAās.
If the game can approximate that from whats basically a mounted infantry, then access to a cavalry unit to meso civs should only need to lightly reference how well they were adopted by the natives of the Americas once reintroduced. Because the South, Central, and North americans took horsemanship alot father than the japanese did, even despite the late introduction.
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The issue is that the conquistadores were already at the very edge for AOE2 so by the time you see Natives using horses in significant numbers such as the Apaches weāre solidly into AOE3ās territory. The Aztecs and Incas had conquered their empires without horses, let alone the Mayans before them. To a similar reason that we wonāt see Britons using the rocket cart, despite taking some rocket technology from India and using it during the napoleonic wars (and indeed they have that in AOE3).
Saying that āthey were no horsemenā merely means they werenāt impressed by what they saw, but if they compared to european knights the bar war set highā¦ but itās still a higher riding level than the Aztecs who had never seen horses and had an entire army freezing when seeing a small cavalry charge.
As for the quality of their horse archery, a yumi bow is indeed far too large to be practical on horseback. This links to the idea of replacing the horse archer by a mounted longbowman who has to dismount to shoot, similar to the Franks Britons and Burgundians notably.
Xolotls should really move faster than unupgraded knights, due to the lack of metal armor in mesoamerican use.
Whoa thatās news to me!
When I tried to make a more historically accurate Japan (admittedly motivated by hostility toward any positivity when stereotyping Samurai culture), I still ended up giving them top-shelf cav archers second only to Turks, for the simple reason that I couldnāt work out how to make them usable otherwise, they really arenāt that competitive in other fields, while at least the Higoyumi, however awkward on horseback, had good range and penetration.
I figured that instead of 6 base range to normal cav archer 4 base range, itād be much less ridiculous to just let them have Parthian.
You are making me reconsider, because Samurai did really shoot their longbows from horseback, a bit less well than on foot, but still remarkably high-powered and long-ranged compared to composite shortbows. Hmmā¦
Well, thanks for the knowledge!
I was talking more along the lines of how far we could feasibly pull game abstractions.
The allusion to japanese horsemanship was more to describe the tendency of the game to exaggerate as needed for the sake of balance. Granted, it may not be a good comparison to draw when when civilization had a stunted cavalry development and another had nill.
So, a better comparison might be this: they already have a siege workshop and blacksmith. Whats a moderately stated cavalry unit in the niche case that someone converts the right building?
I dont know what the draw weight of a yumi bow was, but composite bows have a highbar in draw weight at 230 lbs for a crimean tatar bow and there are 21 turkish bows in the topkapi museum that were between 110-120 lbs. Mongols used bows with up to 160 lbs, but I dont know the standard.
The Song chinese have recorded a standard of 150 lb for foot archers and 120 for mounted archers. Those could be a good point of comparison for you.
All I gathered is that the difference between the draw weights was pretty small for the horse archers. Like, you could have samurai as a longer ranged, high powered cav archer but I cant really find an IRL example to draw from.
It becomes more complicated when you consider that all the big horse archer civs had a dedicated tactic where horse archers were used with a very specific tactic that japan never had and were always used in parallel with a heavy cavalry.
You might be best off having the samurai be an upscaled version of the immortal form Chronicles - melee mode is a similar to 2HS and ranged mode is a like a 6 range arbalester.
Focusing on CAās, if you want it to me MORE historical, takes a level of skill in horsemanship that japan never really had the need to develop.
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From what I can find weights varied wildly, but averaged around 120 pounds for the Higoyumi. Piercing targets at over 130m was recorded with them, but thatās reasonably commensurate with most other composite bows.
The thing with a shortbow though is that it has a very different draw force to distance curve to a longbow, if I recall correctly.
Japan also due to political reasons and caste status posturing never separated cavalry for distinctive unit use until the Takeda did it.
However, Iām pretty sure the ritualized horse archery shooting matches samurai had before them indicated the asymmetrical longbow were fairly decent in horseback use. And a mounted samuraiās armor should be MUCH better protection than your typical nomadic cavalry archer conscript could have (just the clothes on his back).
The problem with foot samurai archery is that it surely didnāt take very long for them to figure out having both weapons on your person in a foot duel is far more of a hindrance than having both in mounted combat (i.e. no saddlebags to put the bow in)
Hmm, maybe we should take this to my thread for the details, but before we do soā¦
You did remind me that Xolotl Warriors could also become hybrid units with a mode switch. I mean it was only a matter of time after learning to ride that someone would bring skirmisher (archer) kit onto a horse with them!
I wouldnāt doubt that the asymetircal longbow of the samurai was comparable to that of the central asians. The damage, at least should be no lower or no greater.
As for the armor, Iām afraid I have bad news for the samurai here. You would be right, to assume that for the parthians and maybe early turk nomads, but succeeding turco-mongol-perisan peoples steadily evolved horse archers in terms of arms and armor.
Iirc, the sassanids blurred the line between cataphracts and horse archers with a meduim cavalry that featured a mail armored rider that could shoot arrows or perform in melee. Then the mongols stepped that up with equipping the archers with looted chinese lamellar as an upgrade, stronger bows and a better organization system. The timurids made the final addition of incorporating a specialized vambrace/gauntet that let the horse archers be effective in melee combat - the net total was adapted by the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars.
In the end, the horse archer was a well armored rider on a moderately barded horse that would function as a medium cavalry after spending all the arrows in the quiver.
A video to go in detail on the subject of nomadic peoples arms and armor at their apex.
If I recall correctly, Parthian cataphracts also carried bow and arrows.
Chinese cavalry normally carried spear, bow, and a sidearm (mace or single-edged sword being most common in later periods) at least since the invention of stirrups (so Eastern Jin onward).
I should point out that most Western ideas about pastoralists are extremely wrong. For example the new Khitan pasture is hilariously stupid. Pastoralists rarely killed their animals, they were a capital asset, and pastoralists largely survived on their dairy products and foraged vegetables for most of the year. It was also difficult to preserve meat on the plains with usually little salt available by trade, with smoking and other forms of fire-drying the only ways available.
It didnāt take long for the Mongols to degenerate because they lacked culture able to sustain productivity. They either assimilated into local cultures or collapsed. For example, the end-Yuan revolts saw millions of ordinary Mongol tribesmen joining the Han Chinese rebels as cavalry and even infantry, simply because they were sick of the tribal heads exploiting them. The ordinary Mongol had had quite enough of needing to sell their children into slavery to be able to afford the arms and armor each soldier was required to bring to their mandatory military service.
The others (Iranians, Central Asians) are fine, but the Mongols are not, perhaps, the most effective example of typical Steppes productivity.
Also, game design is an issue here, the cav archer and lancer HP disparity is significant in this game, and their gap from heavy cav is huge.