As crossbow and arbalester upgrade cost has been increased by 50f/50g and 100f/100g respectively, I thought it will be good to keep a record how knight vs archer dynamic was performing before this change.
I have decided to exclude all OP knight and archer civs because most of the time they will have a net positive win rate.
My OP civs are - Burgandians, Britons, Chinese, Franks, Mayans and Vikings. I was about to include Burgandians because in Arabia, they are not really OP. But at the last moment I excluded them. All these civs are almost universally agreed upon to be in need of nerfs. I think they will have high win rate than others and skew the stats.
This left me following civs to consider:
Archer civs - Bohemians, Byzantines, Dravidians, Ethiopians, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, Malay, Saracens, Portuguese and Vietnamese.
Knight civs - Berbers, Bulgarians, Cumans, Huns, Khmer, Lithuanians, Magyars, Malians, Persians, Poles, Sicilians, Slavs and Teutons. I considered Tatars and Spanish for a while but they are not proper knight civ imo.
All stats are taken from aoepulse.com
If you find any mistake, please inform me. I’ll fix and edit it. Also forgive me if my coloring is not good for your eyes. Will do my best to improve in the future if time permits.
Edit: I have no idea why the picture has such low resolution. I want to upload my excel file here so you can check it out by your own but file format is not supporting.
From stats we can see knight civs have a small 3% advantage over archer civs. Most of this coming from 2 reasons:
- Koreans is absolutely terrible against knight civs. Malay and Vietnamese are also very bad.
- Huns and Khmer are too strong against archer civs. Berbers is very close to them.
Note: I’m not proposing any balance change yet. I’m just keeping the record. And will see how much new patch change these stats.
Note2: Also notice that how Magyars is slightly underperforming against archer civs. So my personal conclusion is - It is not knight is an OP unit. But once Mayans, Chinese and Viking are out of the picture, almost all good eco bonus are inside knight civs pocket. (Pun intended)