Yeah, Persians have always had a strong late game. And I love the Kamandaran tech, it’s new and creative, I just think it needs a couple tweaks to be balanced, like a lot of things, and other weaker civs, need to be bumped up in power in order for techs like this to not be OP.
Of course skirms still trade well against xbows, but xbows can be decent enough against everything else except siege. Throw in some knights or lightcav for the skirms and siege. As has been mentioned in the thread, Xbows and cav cover each others’ weaknesses quite nicely. I’ve seen them used with wild success on DM and arena. The thing that makes Trashbows still powerful in Imp is that they have around twice the damage output of skirms vs. halbs and lightcav/hussars, which, along with FU hussars and halbs, makes Persians easily the kings of trash.
As for Lithuanians, I could be wrong, but my intuition tells me that giving (nearly free) Garland Wars to the knight line as soon as mid-Castle is going to be crazy strong 9/10 times. The best counter to a strong cav civ will always be a strong halb/camel civ, but I suspect that the ideal meta/build for the Lithuanians hasn’t fully been figured out, and they seem like a very strong civ with lots of Mastapiece potential. Even in some of his recent rated games, I think Viper still hadn’t fully “cracked” Lithuanians - I think among other things he was trying to use the Leitis as a general purpose unit, which doesn’t work that well given its cost.
It would be a lot easier to see merit in your points, and they would generally be better received if they engaged the actual arguments at play, rather than just being contradictions.
Right. Which are both countered fairly well by crossbows. Nobody is saying that there’s a unit that’s good against everything; that’s not how Age2 is designed. However, the Persian cavalry/trashbow combo is a very simple, very strong synergistic combo that can deal with most army compositions with a little bit of micro, and it further helps that only one of those units costs gold. There are not many strong 2-unit army compositions, and very few where only one of the 2 units costs gold.
I mean that you’re contradicting the opinion that I gave after my having given reasons to justify that opinion, while not providing any counterargument, or justification for your disagreement. Obviously you’re entitled to express your opinion, and disagree with mine, but doing so without providing reasoning doesn’t really enrich the conversation, or help us understand your viewpoint. You may have valid reasons for thinking that Kamandaran is not OP, but until you express those reasons, I’ll never know what they are.
They do fairly well, but matchups like this are ultimately up to who has the best micro/unit control. If the Trashbows focus on the Genoese crossbows, and the cav on the skirms, they can trade well enough. The Persian can even opt for Hussar instead of knight line, which in the long run will dissipate the gold supply of the Italian. And obviously, only Italians can use this combo. There are other combos that can work well against cav/trashbow, such as Halb/Siege Onager, but again, this costs gold, and micro tends to be the deciding factor in engagements like that.
So, SOTL posted a video about top 5 trash civs in DE and Persians were #1. If this was an OP tech @SirWiedreich@letmepickthis both SOTL and T90 would mention it, as T90 did talk about Cumans being OP before the nerf and almost everyone agreed on that
With Mayan UT (0 min range for skirms) they actually quite become a trash cav archer for Mayans (since they are technically archer-line and affected by Archer upgrades this will make them very decent)
Cumans was OP and it was obvious. they got a big eco boost with the best unit of the game. They were so OP that any other civ were wreck by cuman. So during the cuman glory period, you could not tell if another civ were op. Now, i see persians a little bit too powerfull.
I’m curious as to what it would take for you to consider a unit/tech/civ actually OP. What if there was a civ that got free Paladin and +10 free attack for cavalry in Imp? You would still theoretically “have options” to counter that in the form of halbs, monks, camels, but that doesn’t mean that the civ wouldn’t be way too strong. The point being, we need a better reference point for balance than the existence of theoretical counter options.
The point I was making is that Xbow/Cav is strong because it’s versatile combination (as is SO/Halb), so much so that it has the potential to do very well, or trade roughly evenly, against just about every other possible unit composition. The ones you listed, while they can theoretically counter Xbow/Cav (and theoretically are countered by it), are not versatile at all against most other compositions. In fact, there’s one common low-gold unit that shreds all of them (Hint: it rhymes with “Stampion”). Even more so for most infantry UUs, or specialized units like cataphracts and scorpions. Furthermore, the examples you mentioned are, well, trash units, and most civs won’t want to go toe-to-toe with the strongest trash civ in the game. (I don’t want to spoil who it is, but it rhymes with “Versions.”)
The point I was making about micro is that even in a “bad” matchup for the Xbow/Cav combo, you can trade decently against counter-units with some basic micro. Micro tends to be most important in situations with mutual counters (e.g. the examples we mentioned, or mangonel vs crossbow.) That is absolutely not the case for a lot of matchups.
Camels vs knights? Swordsmen vs trash? Huscarls or eagles vs archers? Micro is largely irrelevant.
Uh…Spirit of the Law almost never editorializes about changing balance, it’s really just not his shtick. He dispassionately discusses the mechanics of the game, and even upsells civs based on the ideal ways in which their bonuses can be employed. For example, even in his Vietnamese civ overview, he mentions nothing about Vietnamese needing changes or being a weak civ, although they’re widely viewed as the most underpowered civ. As for T90, him not having said something yet is hardly evidence for him not believing that the tech is a little too strong right now, much less that objectively being the case. Regarding Cumans, the devs even said months before release that all the new civs were initially going to be made overpowered to motivate people to try them out, and then nerfed afterwards, so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Cumans and other 3 civs were, in fact, overpowered at release.
Nobody is saying that Kamandaran is as OP as pre-nerf Cumans or Steppe Lancers, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be nerfed to make it more in-line with similar techs (see original post). I largely agree with the changes @Nonsequitorian proposes, and although he doesn’t say it’s OP, it’s only a semantic disagreement I’d have with that characterization, as I’d argue it seems to me that everything that deserves a nerf is inherently overpowered.
The easiest comparison to make with Kamandaran is Forced Levy, and Kamandaran is better in literally every possible way (usually indicative of poor balance):
-Forced Levy isn’t available until Imp, Kamandaran is available in Castle. Not only does this give the Persian a longer portion of the game to save resources with his UT, but it can also be taken advantage of at a time when Persians have perfect crossbows for the Age (as opposed to FL, which only becomes available at a time when most civs can access stronger infantry than Malay). For reference, Kamandaran crossbows in Castle are cheaper than Mayan crossbows and cost 100% less of the all-important gold. So in addition to being a high-powered cavalry, naval and eco civ at every point of the game, Kamandaran Persians in Castle are also a better archer civ than many top tier archer civs, like Mayans, and are the undisputed trash kings in Imp.
-Kamandaran is stupid cheap. It costs less than 1/3rd of what Forced Levy costs.
-Kamandaran is basically 2 techs rolled into one. It changes the gold cost of a unit to another resource, as does Forced Levy, and is more advantageous since it does so with a higher gold cost unit. It furthermore flat out reduces the total cost of the unit by 20, like a better version of Supplies for the archer line.
So yeah, it’s cheaper than FL, has a bigger effect, and is available earlier, and given to a civ that already had a higher win rate than Malay (Malay being subsequently nerfed). Sounds OP to me, but call it what you like.
Cumans were the most OP civ in the game ever. It was no question why it was always talked about.
Persians were not even near top 5 let alone number 1 trash civ before this tech. That’s how good it is. Also Persians get an early game bonus, their docks and TCs work faster so they get a villager and fishing ship lead, advance faster to the next age, have FU paladins, FU camels, FU halbediers, FU hussar, siege ram, and now get one of the best late bonuses. Essentially now they can easily counter halbs which was their weakness. They don’t have good skirmishers or militia line but now their gold-less crossbow line basically means they can easily take out counter units to easily push with their gold units. There isn’t really any age where this civilization has a weakness. Usually every civilization has a weakness in some age but now the Persians don’t have one.
Their XBows come in Castle Age
So, they have a normal military in the feudal age.
Correct, but you can protect the halbs with skirms.
Your point about SOTL is correct, but this point is not valid.
T90 always talks about a civ being underpowered / quite strong. So one of the good reasons that Persians are very strong now indeed but not OP is him not pointing out anything about this
Damn, I always call this tech Mayan UT
I call something OP if it’s too hard to counter.
Is it too hard to counter when you can mix skirms and halbs? (or light cav and skirms)
When both are trash? No.
I’ll generalize my words, if this tech was OP, we would already get a nerf during the December update since only the new civs were made OP to attract players. AoK civs never needed attraction.
Yeah but their TC is working 10% faster than yours.
Then they just destroy your skirmishers with hussar. You can’t micro skirmishers like you can micro crossbow. Crossbow can easily dodge since skirmishers fire 75% slower.
You aren’t going to be doing much damage to their trebs or siege rams with halbs and skirmishers. Persians will win that matchup every time.
Persian xbows get neither thumb ring nor bracer, so they should lose againts regular elite skirmishers. They’re a really good option, for sure, but I think they don’t win trash wars per se.
And you can counter the skirms with hussard… Are we gonna stay longer talking about the rock-paper-scissor argument? you ALWAYS have a response to everything. Kamadaran trashbow does not beat everything in this game. But it’s not argument to say that kamadaran is perfectly balanced right now
not every civ have FU skirms. many of them lack bracer or last armor upgrade (or sometimes both). Same for halbs. What’s lacking for persians? Bracer. ONLY bracer. and now they get trashbow in addition of that. Persian was already fine in term of trashFight. Not top 5 but definitevely top 10.
For your argument about december update : hmmm… i can give you many many many games that takes months to address some issue. They mainly changed new civ because they were OP (on purpose) and saraceens since they were as good as new civ after their up.
And nobody tested kamandaran persian trashbow because everyone was busy with stupid steppe lancer.
They only lack bracer and arbalest ofc. So their trashbow are the best in castle age (even better than mayan!!) Funny for a knigh civ with a global eco bonus.
and arbalest ofc. So their trashbow are the best in castle age (even better than mayan!!) Funny for a knigh civ with a global eco bonus.