Aren’t the counter of Xbow and HC the same? THe main difference being that the HC will leave a huge hole in cavalry charging them but in exchnage they cost the same ressources as cav.
AOE is a rock paper scissor if you look unit to unit one by one. When you look at army comp, it’s more complicated. Usually if you want to cover all of the weakness of you army, you need toons of gold. Here you don’t. Hussard and trashbow cover a lot of weak spot. And if you add FU halbs … it becomes crazy.
Very strong unit sometimes get nerf. We have seen nerf for eagles and other unit that were a little bit too strong at a moment of the game. Here trashbow are very strong alone but if you look at the other good point persian have, it become OP (at least in my opinion, but the margin between OP and strong is sometimes difficult to distinguish).
Just an example: If you give imperial skirms to some civ, it will be crazy. But is imp skirms OP for viet? No, because they lack a lot of other things (no black furnace, no hussard, no early eco bonus,…)
Welp, your exemple is meh since the imperial skirm is a team unit, so Aztecs/Byzantines/Incas/Lithuanians get to use it all they want as long as they have a Vietnamese buddy. The deal with the trashbows is that to use them in castle age you need to put 650 stone in a castle (that you probably won’t use for your UU since it’s so impractical) and then research the tech. Of course it pays itself after 4 Xbows but you have delayed their production so much that an enemy going mass crossbow will be way ahead of you. And then when the game goes to imp they become irrelevant as they won’t make the cut against arb, heavy camel, cavaliers, champions, onagers, heavy cav archers, UUs… So they will really matter again in trash war, where they will be better against skirms against arbs and hussars but worse against skirms/genitour. You can argue that the Persian have good cav that cost gold and food and thus the Xbows will compliment them better than HC, but Persian cav is merely generic. In 1v1s where the trashbows will matter the most the Paladins and War elephants are way to expensive to play a role most of the time. If Kamandaran was given to say, Malian or Lithuanian it would be OP (Farimba and relics+Elite leitis are way easier to get than paladins/WE) but it’s given to an economic civ with a good cav tree and that’s all
Persians have the best cavalry in the game. At least if you don’t consider DE civs. That is really invalid.
Are you reffering to War Elephant?
I’ll give you that, this is another valid point.
Which you will by teaming them up with a Vietnamese player.
And this becomes a crazy addition to Persians and with this, they will be too strong and maybe even OP. But this is an addition and not a Persian UU, so maybe irrelevant to the topic (I mean, this post and not the quoted one)
best cav
imp skirms was a bad example since it’s a team bonus, i shouldn’t have talk about it. In teamGame trash unit are less important since gold are infinite. I just wanted to point that viet are balanced in trash war since they don’t get FU halb & FU Hussard and they don’t get a crazy eco with it.
Just a reminder: Persians only lack bracer on regular trash unit… and now they get another trash unit 
I wouldn’t say that having a complete tree is equivalent to having the best cav. I mean sure you can get Paladins, but who cares if your opponent is Malian and his Farimba cav killed all your dudes first? Or if he is Lithuanian and he got at least a relic. Or if he is Hun and he can replace his cav faster. Or he is Cuman and he can just run past your cav and kill your villies. Or he is Malay and his elephants stomped your base while you were still in feudal. My point his that many civs have much better bonuses than bonus damage to archers. For the UU, I was indeed refering to War elephants.
Btw it looks like the dev team deemed Kamandaran nerf worthy and now the trashbows are 60 wood instead of 50. I guess it’s quite small?
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Yeah they need to do more than this.
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Well bless my biscuits and cover me with gravy, we just got an update and the tech was nerfed. Also, if we’re going to use pros/casters opinions to support our arguments, Viper in his video review said he didn’t think the nerf was quite enough.
I wouldn’t quite put it that way, because of their team bonus which gives +2 attack vs archers (including cav archers). Not huge, but it makes them the best archer killers after Lithuanian knight line with relics. And even “generic” cavalry, especially cavaliers, are very useful in Imp. To put it in perspective, Persians are in the top 4 paladin civs (along with Lithuanians, Franks, and Cumans). I’m not going to go through the tech tree and count, but they are also one of very, very few civs with FU Paladins, Camels, and Hussars, (and a tanky cavalry UU to boot).
Regarding the viability of Kamandaran, I think in the average game it’s more likely to see use than not. As for the expense of making a Castle, Castles are seen fairly frequently in late Castle or early Imp to defend key areas, deny resources, or get an edge on treb production in Imp (regardless of whether the civ has a good UU). Kamandaran is a cheap tech that’s easy to pick up and provides a lot of value anytime from early Castle to early Imp (and obviously gains power again in late Imp when gold runs low), and does so with minimal strain to your economy. And as a Persian, you don’t need to beat crossbow civs at their own game, you can rely on cav as your main army, and use xbows as a cheap supplement/pike killer, or send them on suicide raids.
Well that’s exactly the point isn’t it? It makes them comparatively that much more viable. In the same paragraph you make the point that Trashbows are bad because of the availability of the enemies’ gold-intensive late game power units (arb, heavy camel, onagers, heavy cav archers, UUs - the last three of which have expensive upgrade costs that are not far behind the cost of paladin) but then go on to talk about how the Persian’s similar gold-intensive late game power units “are way too expensive.” Both players will be feeling the pinch in early Imp, and for the same reason that Persians are unlikely to immediately have their powerful units, so are other civs unlikely to immediately have theirs. So there’s a pretty good window in Early Imp for trashbows. And honestly, most of the time I wouldn’t mind trading my wood in the form of Xbows for my opponent’s gold even in Arbalests (although ideally they’d be support units to my cav more than they went head to head with enemy archers).
Another way of looking at it is to think of the trashbow as performing a similar role to the Inca slinger (though obviously without the bonus). Part of the reason that Persians were not traditionally a much stronger civ is due to their major vulnerability to pikes/halbs. It wasn’t worth making their xbows in late castle, and their swordsman line dead-ended in Castle, so they didn’t have a lot of good answers to halbs until they could tech into hand cannons in mid-Imp. (In Castle and early Imp, the thing the Persian is most likely to be afraid of is pikes/halbs.) Trashbows fill the anti-pike role much better than skirms, and without being a gold sink, and can be massed long before hand cannons are available.
Obviously it’s not the best cav in every situation (but then nobody’s the best in every situation, are they? - You’re comparing the best case scenario for these civs with the worst case for Persians). But it’s good enough that I consider it top tier. (Having a full FU stable is very rare in Age 2, especially compared to infantry bonuses, which seem to be given to every 2nd civ). Of the situations you mentioned, only the Lithuanian and Malian matchups would bother me, and Lithuanians with 2+ relics have by far the best knight line in the game, so they would beat everyone else head to with knights. Then again, Persians have FU camels. Malians also have the opportunity to have the strongest cav for a window in early Imp, but if the Persian weathers the storm, he has the opportunity to have better cav when he gets Paladin. Even assuming they lose those 2 matchups, 3rd place isn’t bad. As Persians, I’m not very scared of Huns - camels counter everything the Hun will want to make, and the stable speed bonus is not a huge obstacle (just build another stable). Persians also have a much better eco from basically mid-Feudal onwards. The Cuman speed boost is nice, but it hardly makes cav able to dance around other cav (or camels) in the way you imply. And a Malay FC elephant rush…well, everyone is vulnerable to that if they aren’t aggressive enough in Feudal and let the Malay FC. Arguably Persians are one of the best civs at defending against that strat due to their 2X hp TCs and their TC speed bonus, which cuts down on Age research time to a lesser extent, but also produces villagers faster. Anyway, all fair points, but bottom line is that Persians are (and always have been) a cav powerhouse civ, and now have an option that majorly increases their ability to counter their greatest weakness, increases their tactical flexibility, and in most cases gives them a strong edge in late game trash fights.
Holy crap that’s a lot of words.
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I like you mr porcupine dude.
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Fair enough I guess (and I will add some random filler cuz I just found out posts must have at least 20 characters 11)
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