Knights and cavaliers are unplayable

Recently I was playing persians against Mayans and the other player was the aggressor. I defended well in castle age with mangonels but he managed to get 50 arbalests after hitting the imperial age. I trained 35 cavalier with the last armor upgrade. When I engage his archers even without chemistry archers melted my cavalry. I managed to kill only 9-10 archers. Also in another game some 30 xboxs easliy killed my 15 knights without taking much loses.
The knights can’t engage the archers, sometimes they just wait or bump each other.
One can easily make 2 times the archers than opponents’ cav. I think archers shouldn’t be the hard counter to the knights, they must have pikes in front to engage
Only paladin is viable bc of hp and high pierce armour.

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Range units are incredibly strong in huge mass. So it’s OK what happened. Your mistake is to let him get that much unit. Then you should counter with skirms or upgrade to siege onagers.

Since most of the problems are due to terrible pathing/patrol bugs, I would not say that “ranged units are incredibly strong in huge mass”, but rather than “melee units are incapable in huge mass”

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I just tried this in the scenario editor. I had both set to castle age, and had 24 Ethiopian crossbows vs 12 Franks Knights. The knights easily won. I can only think that your enemy’s crossbows had more upgrades than your knights.

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Try to micro? Hit and run is an easy tactic and yes fetching, thumb ring or ballistics make huge difference.

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Is that in response to me? You can’t outrun knights with crossbows. I was doing hit and run, but after the first few shots you can’t escape the faster moving knights.

This is totally true. We can ignore the theory crafters shooting you down.

Anyone that actually plays knows how poorly melee units fair.

Agreed. And there’s long threads on reddit and steam forums about this and how archers are doing too well in the current meta.

Besides the melee bumping and idling issue, archers being able to stack, while melee generally wont, further aggravates the issue.

And these are cavaliers/Knights, nevermind scouts and other cavlry which get obliterated even easier

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ROOOOFL did your test include buildings and/or terrain in the way, as well as LOS issues. Did the AI control the cavalry? You understand the AI micros individual melee units far better than the average player? And doesn’t suffer from the idling /bumping issues humans have. Theory crafting in the extreme…

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I think the balance is OK. First you have to try to mass Archer. If you lose them because they were trapped or got hard Mangonal shot, it’s hard to get the large number again.
Knights does not need to mass to be effective for example to raid or spamming. That’s a huge difference.

I just tried it the other way round, with me controlling the knights, and didn’t see any idling or bumping issues. Again the knights won easily. The AI wasn’t doing hit and run with the crossbows, but it seemed to make little difference when I was controlling them.

and you had the terrain and buildings in the way? lucky you man! now go play MP and honestly tell me the same thing

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The only thing which i think should be nerfed is the archer stacking, it can get really ridiculous sometimes. Aside that, it’s not that much that archers are too strong, it’s melee which just sucks with this horrible pathfinding. I am starting to lose hope of seeing a proper pathfinding some day…

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Well, it’s pretty obvious that this is the result if you don’t micro archers. Actually, more interesting to see would be the other one where you used micro on archers and still lost.

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Maybe you could share a video of you controlling the crossbows and winning the scenario in my video?

This example is pretty bad and totally not compareable to how multiplayer is played out. So this example doesnt say anything meaningful to me.

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Did anyone ever try to compare it to Voobly or HD Version? Maybe a streamer can do such a test and show the results on youtube.
Example Setup: 2 players test 50 Archers vs 30 Knights on open field and also in a 2nd test with a forest close to them in at least 2 game versions (DE + Voobly or HD) 3+ tries each. They micro as good as they can and compare the results how many of each unit survived.

That would be very interesting and would show some evidence to the problems we have with pathfinding affecting outcomes.

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I just did 30 ethiopian crossbows vs 15 frankish knights, with all castle age techs. I won with 21 crossbows left

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On an open field without elevations or narrow places where only 1-3 knights can attack at the same time?
And I guess you microed the archers. What with the knights? AI? On Patrol?

I can assure you that at the pro-scene the biggest complain isnt the map pool, the matchmaking or anything else. Its the melee pathing that is killing the game. And sadly the devs havent given any solution or fix to this since launch. The difference between voobly pathing and de pathing for melee units is like day and night. So i really hope in the next months they finally give a solution to this, because playing with cav civs is much harders nowadays than archer civs.

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