I’ve done some tests and I can say for sure Kipchaks don’t feel even remotely as good as before, to the point all other cav archer units seems to be doing better than them, but not only that they were already the most fragile ones, and now they’re even more fragiles. I don’t want they the way they were before, since now they do feel balanced for their price, but their main point was to be a fast firing cav archer, and they’re now one of the slowest ones at that. If anything i want the description of the unit to be changed to reflect that, they’re no longer fast firing cav archers.
I also feel like they might need some buffing on their creation speed, because rn I feel like pro players would much rather go for normal cav archers than kipchaks, since they can be trained much faster with the unique tech, but I can’t tell for certain.
This unit is still isane.
0 frame delay combined with high movement speed is all it takes. Rate of fire is not that important (and also not that bad).
It is definitely a micro intensive unit. If you just patrol in you might be right. But I’m pretty sure I can promise you that no pro player would prefer normal cav archers over them. I even think they are still broken - they just need some skill to use).
It’s just so strong that they can hit and run without any delay. With that in mind I also think the “fast firing”-description still fits.
“0 frame” and “fast firing” are 2 different things, they’re not fast firing anymore (seriously, fast firing is directly linked to the rate of fire). Also they do less damage and are more fragile than cav archers, so unless the player’s a micro legend they’re straight up weaker than cav archers. And don’t forget that Cumans can create cav archers 80% faster, so they can much more quickly spam huge armies of cav archers instead of just using a few kipchaks, thus why I said that they now deserve a bit of a buff in their creation speed.
Also I feel that units should be viable in all elos, not just for pro players.
But that’s your imagination of what “fast firing” means. That’s not objective at all.
If I am able to shoot an arrow immediately while everyone else needs a small windup before they can shoot, I think it’s perfectly fine to speak of me as being fast firing, even though the amount of arrows I shoot within 2 minutes is not higher than that of everyone else (Kipchaks fire multiple arrows though, so even that is true for them in some way).
About balancing: Yes, in order to win against cav archers you need extremely good micro. But this game is no only about fighting against cav archers. Against melee units you can hit and run soooo much better and smoother with Kipchak rather than normal cav archers. And that should even be possible for lesser skilled players (even if they are not that efficient with it).
I’m very sure that Kipchak should not be buffed in any way. I expect them to be okay’ish in low elo and still broken in high elo. And I think it’s totally fine (even a good thing!) to have units that need micro and therefore are less viable for lesser skilled players. There are also plenty of those units out there, especially monks. Don’t use them if you can’t, but please don’t ask for them to become stronger just because you are not good enough to handle them - that’s a horrible way to do balancing.
I thought any person would be able to understand basic logic but looks like I need to explain every single detail.
0 delay is NOT rapid succession.
Also firing multiple arrows at once doesn’t count because u’re doing the action of “firing” only once (unlike the chu ko nu).
I also took the time to check the rate of fire of other units, and hey guess what, other than the obvious chu ko nu there’s another unit who like them is also considered fast firing.
And I checked, Mangudais fire faster than any other cav archer (or any other archer other than the chu ko nu)
So no it’s not “just my imagination”, it’s a straight up fact.
Also again, I don’t see how 60 cav archers are worse than 30 kipchaks. Even good micro wouldn’t make them have more power than pratically double the amount of cav archers (and that with equal amount of archery ranges than castles, don’t forget that people can spam archery ranges much more easily than castles, so in practice it’s an even bigger advantage for the cav archer). Also if the opponent is seeing u making kipchaks and microing them they won’t just continue making melee, they’ll go for their own archers and skirmishers (that and most armies have archers in their comps, heck the meta rn is to either frush with archers or to rush crossbows/knights at castle, so it’s very likely that the opponent will have an answer to kipchaks, and now that they lack husbandry knights can catch up with them at castle)
Also I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be some units that require a bit more of micro, I have nothing against onagers and monks, the problem is when u have units that can beat the game by themselves because of huge micro but are useless at low elo, it’s exactly this that’s killing Starcraft 2 balancement and has been making balancing the game a living hhell. You make an unit a bit stronger it’s completely broken at high level, you make it a bit weaker it’s now completely unviable in all elos. You make a unit that can only be countered by spells, it’s absurdly broken at low levels but completely unviable at high elos. Everything’s extremely unstable to the point u’re forced to learn to play the elo rather than learn to play the game, because what’s viable at high level might not be viable at low elo and vice versa, I don’t want the same to happen in AoE2 (it’s already bad enough that no one can practice using onager against AI because of their perfect micro that renders any onagers u make completely useless)
And rly, saying “just micro” shouldn’t be the answer for everything, because if it were like that then archers should be nerfed, because AI archers are able to beat equal numbers of skirmishers since they’re constantly individually microed by them (this happened to me and I already discussed abt it in another topic, both me and the AI were at feudal age with full upgrades, if the fight wasn’t close to my base I would have lost everything since the reason i won the fight was because i kept making more skirmishers to reinforce, and no they didn’t have hill advantage).
Also the main point is to remove the “rapid fire” from their description, because this is not true anymore. When they were introduced they fired almost as quickly as mangudais, but now they fire even slower than normal cav archers.
I dont think they have lost their identity; they are still a mounted chu ko nu. Regarding the rapid fire issue, they throw 3 arrows at once, now they shoot 2, they still destroy siege
Okay, I have to admit, you have a point with the wording - I still think it might just be an atempt to describe their ability of shooting multiple arrows at once. But yeah, doesn’t seem to be 100% accurate…I think I get your point now.
I still think your understanding of the game itself is lacking a lot though.
They are not and the game would be terrible if they were. That’s just a pointless comparison. Even 30 cav archers are more expensive than 30 Kipchaks. Why should 60 vs 30 be a fair fight???
Yeah, production time matters to some extent, but certainly not that much and certainly not more than ressource cost. So what do you even want to express by using that example?
Yes and that is GOOD for the game!!! That’s why it is a strategy game. You make a unit and the opponent is able to respond with something that your unit is not that great against. What’s your problem with that???
You even wrote yourself that no unit should be good against everything, but right here you seem to be arguing in exactly the opposite direction.
And your whole point about micro and Starcraft: I think I get your point, but if the Kipchak is already pretty strong at high level play (which it is!!!), the solution is for sure not to make it stronger. You get use your argument to make a case for removing it from the game or reworking it and removing the micro aspect (which are all solutions I dont agree with), but using that as an argument for a buff would be just stupid.
So if you were just concerned about the wording and tried to come up with a solution for it by changing the unit, but didn’t think it through - I get your point, the wording does seem to be not 100% accurate. But your solution of buffing the unit in any way is just a bad idea gameplay wise - if we can agree on that, I’m totally fine with your thought about the wording.
This comparision is because ik how pro players can get a ton of resources without much problem, so once they get to that point kipchaks wouldn’t matter much since they could potentially win the game there by quickly spamming tons of cav archers (tho yeah, if they don’t manage to kill them quickly and it gets to a point where resources become harder to get then kipchaks start to look much more viable).
Also we can’t tell for sure if kipchaks are still super strong at high level of play, the patch just released and after playing a game in here it feels like they do around half the damage they used to do, so I feel like we need more time to see exactly how strong they currently are.
I just added that there because I felt that maybe they could potentially be so weaker to the point their spammable cav archers could overshadow them, but if they are indeed properly strong then I have nothing against it.
That’s again pretty poor reasoning though.
If a pro player can get “a ton of resources without much problem” for cav archers, the opponent can also get a ton of ressources for Kipchak. In pro vs pro matches ressources matter just as much as in any other game.
I agree that we need to see and wait for a while, I’m just pretty sure that nothing what made Kipchaks actually strong was touched in the last patch.
Maybe they are weak enough against archers now so that they are not broken - I just doubt it and think they are still unstoppable against melee units.
Uhh no? Their damage output got mostly nuked out of existance. Their fire rate got slowed by around 20% and the elite fires 3 arrows instead of 4, aka -3 damage, which means give or take -20% damage per atk, those together means their current DPS is only 64% of what it used to be, aka HUGE nerf.
On top of that, they’re now even more fragile than be4, their speed bonus is reduced in imperial and is pretty much non-existant in castle age now that they don’t have husbandry anymore.
It feels like u’re not understanding that I’m talking abt the same player, not comparing one’s kipchak to another’s cav archer. If the player is getting resources quickly enough, it can be much more viable to him to produce 40 cav archers instead of making 20 kipchaks, even if he has the resources to make much more kipchaks his castles aren’t fast enough to spam them quickly enough, but his archery ranges are more than fast enough to quickly mass cav archers because of Steppe Husbandry (also just checked the wiki, and it makes it 4x faster than normal, so pretty much a single archery range can produce cav archers as fast as 4 castles can produce kipchaks). This is what I’ve been trying to say, there’s a reason civs like Goth are rly fearsome at late game if left unchecked. Strong unit spam can be devastating assuming the player has the economy to sustain it (the only question is if the player will have enough economy to keep constant production of cav archers).
I didn’t say they shouldn’t have a huge nerf, just saying that their DPS is worse than CA rn.
Also altho not bad, if i wanted a unit that kills siege rams I’d pick mongols, Mangudais do everything that they do but better, are tankier and can even be microed as effectively.
That + I wouldn’t need to pick a civ that lacks basic stone walling.
…talking abt it, I should go back to playing mongols more often.
Ah, age of empire wording, the wonderful thing that tells you Teutons are an infantry civ (firing arrows from building after a castle tech lol), that Celt’s bonus is that sheep can’t be stolen, among many more wonders. long story short: the kipchack description is now going to join this long list. I think @MasterSncKnight is right about normal CA looking more attractive thx to Steppe Husbandry. That’s a good thing cuz now that Steppe lancer aren’t autowin anymore and that Kipchak have the same HP as a Missionary (lol) and can no longer outdamage a Castle, people will realise that insta-spawning cav archers and FU hussards with a no gold castle age tech is quite a lot at once. I’m surprised they didn’t nerfed it yet, as even with OP steppe lancers available people were transitioning into Hussars quite fast because of the advantadge the tech provides
Yeah, at first when I played Cumans I didn’t even go for SL since I was unfamiliar with them and I just rly wanted any meat shield to protect my op kipchaks, so I just spammed Hussars instead. I only started to make some SL when I started to see people complaining abt how OP they were, now that both got nuked I’ll continue mixing kipchaks/cav archers with hussars (not that good at economy to spam cav archers like I believe pros would)
I did a match as Cuman vs AI yesterday and I did some good hit and run with Kipchaks, but I could no longer just make them kite wholes armies to death without any risk. My little raiding party did kill a good bunch of heavy Indian camels before going down, wich show they have good potential still. When I compared their new values to other cav archers, and their base firing rate of 1,8 was almost the same as one of a Mangudai with the Mongol bonus (1.7), while their current RoF of 2.2 is almost the same as the one of a Mangudai without bonus (2.13, you can test that in the first Attila mission). After transitionning to HCA I kept making kipchacks since I wasn’t going to let my castles idle, but I can’t even say the kipchak nerf made me do this since even before the nerf I would just spam CA because it’s so much easier. I expect a nerf to SH’s effect, after all that’s two units from 2 buildings buffed for no gold. Compare it to Chivalry that is only 40% faster, to get your good knights and your bad light cav, and that for 400 gold. Reducing SH’s effect to 40% will still make it a good tech, just 1 that doesn’t allow you to beat whole armies of skirmishers and genoese crossbows with just cavalry archers (it was against a Hardest AI and I think I would have lost if I kept trying to use skirms only to beat that lol)
Don’t know if your math is 100% on point (actually I’m pretty sure it’s not since you don’t account for armor xD), but let’s assume it is: You still don’t just stand there and fire. You hit and run - attack speed doesnt matter a lot for that since you probably wont perfectly time it anyway.
So it is weaker, but not as much as you think.
okay now I get you - but so what? You find a very niche situation that occurs in 1/10 games at max where CA might be a better choice than Kipchak - congratulations, but how does that show that Kipchak are too weak?
And ressources still matter in that situation…btw. Goths also get carried more by their discount rather than their production speed (not saying the production speed doesnt matter though).
I’m pretty sure noone will mix Kipchak with CA - cause if you have CA in there you can’t abuse the 0 frame delay anymore and then CA are going to be the superior unit and you would go full CA (you won’t though, because Cumans has no bonus for them except production speed, no bracer (which is huge!!!) and a ton of other good options for their gold).
In an even match, you shouldn’t have the eco to do both upgrades, there’s no point in mixing two CA units when you can use those resources better elsewhere.
