But qhats the source on that.
1650+ has a small sample size.
Ermā¦ i played on voobly alot on 19+/2k+ basis, I watched streams, knew alot of people playing on voobly. Like atm I cant give you a proper data source, but it is general knowledge. It simply was that way.
I know 1650+ has a small sample size, but it simply doesnt matter what people at 1300 or 1400 do with their civs for proper balance discussion. I know people from that rate and its like they play a different game. Different rules apply. Thats why we argue about the top level.
If balance discussions should account more for lower levels is a whole different discussion, but the fact is 1250-1650 level is not really relevant for balance discussion.
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Yeah! here and in voobly userpatch. Despite DE pathing problems, this is true and it always been a thing. The xbows / CA deathball (able to one shot +2 knights) is scary.
I watched a top 200 ranked player today microing archers and always targeting the lowest HP cav, and like me, he was nowhere near being able to move the mouse pointer quickly and accurately enough to do it with the shortest possible interval between shots, so Iām not the only one who finds it hard.
Even if you donāt hit the same target each time and just focus on the most left knight it will be better than stop micro because youāre bundeling the damage output.
I made a small video, donāt take it too seriously though because it is heavily influenced by micro.
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At last, someone else has made a video - thanks for sharing! I actually had the same number left as you by using stop micro and having the crossbows start close together, but I noticed that they were often targeting the same knight anyway. In the video I shared in this thread, I think the main problem of them being more spread out is that it causes them to target different knights, but I havenāt tried having them spread out and manually trying to just target the lowest HP knight all the time, without moving. NIK0LAI is still achieving a much better result than both of us, though.
The knights would have done better in your DE test if patrolled in, itās a pain thereās no way for one person to quickly make them do that before microing the archers, at least Iām not aware of any way to do that other than using 2 copies of the game on 2 PCs in a lobby?
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In both examples the knights were patrolled to the most bottom part of the corridor using a trigger.
Ah, good work. What might be causing it is the blue outposts. Iāve noticed in my own test scenarios that adding outposts like that can stop the other side engaging. I think itās because when patrolling, theyāre effectively under AI control, and the AI uses the total size of the enemy military to choose whether to engage or not. The tests Iāve done suggest that it includes outposts in the size of the enemy military, and this can make it regard the enemy as too large to engage. Thatās all speculation, but Iāve seen the other side fail to engage when I added outposts for visibility, but they engaged as normal when I deleted them from the scenario.
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With a patroll move they donāt do decision making on wether to engage or not depending on enemy army size.
In my first attempt the outposts werenāt enclosed in the forest, which caused the knights to attack them. I can see how the outposts might still distract the knights from purely focussing on the archers. Iāll take that into consideration next time.
i made knights as cumans the other day. this proves they are in fact playable
If you had said saracens or malay it would have meant somethingā¦ Cuman knight line is great since they get the fastest paladin in the game. They really arenāt an example of āeven these guys can use Knightsā
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Thanks alot for making a video comparison. That is really helpful. You also have to consider that from what I saw you didnāt even use the range advantage from the crossbows. You started shooting once the knights were already attacking. That would have made it even worse for the knights.
Btw. what upgrades did you give the units? I saw in the HD fight that the knights had +1 attack and +1 defense. +2 Defense would have made a difference unless if the archers also only had +1 attack.
I think Archers with +2 attack +1 defense upgrades and knights with +1 attack and +2 Armor upgrade would be the way to test them but unless you had different upgrades in both fights it is an impressive show of how much better knights performed in HD edition.
Itās day and night considering in DE 15 archers survived with most HP left while in HD 3 knights survived.
Also in DE the stop move from the crossbows seems so much smoother as if the archers started moving more instantly. Might also have to do with FPS allowing for more consistent click reaction on top of melee pathfinding problems in DE and a bit with the 1.7 game speed vs 1.5 game speed but the result is very clear.
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Archers are broken, but only if you micro them. They should be nerfed.
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Iām not sure itās quite as clear cut as that. 2 of the knights in DE didnāt engage for some time, and 1 of them never engaged. I donāt believe this would happen if the players were the other way round, or if it does, it could possibly be eliminated in some way, e.g. if it is the outposts, maybe setting the knights to defensive stance would stop it from happening by moving the outposts beyond the range theyāll engage within. Because of the concepts embodied in Lanchesterās square law, that small change in numbers has a big effect.
Also, thereās a hard switch that happens when the archers can no longer 2-shot a knight. Because the game doesnāt reduce the attack of an injured unit, the archer numbers dropping below that level has a massive impact on their effectiveness. So the failure of 2 knights to engage initially combined with this can make a very big difference, but it could be eliminated if we can work out why they failed to engage, and stop that from happening.
Can anyone see any other reasons why the different outcome is happening? Arpheus2 mentioned a more consistent click reaction - I looked at timings for the archers to fire 10 shots, and counted 12 seconds for DE vs 16 seconds for HD, which is more than is accounted for by the game speed difference.
It looks to me like the knights were attacking more of the time. In DE it looked like knights were stationary whilst attacking and then had to catch up to attack again, and it didnāt look like that in the HD video.
Besides every side effect u mentioned its simply 2 things.
- The knights simply hit more often.
- The archers on DE stay closer.
And tbh while a good video the creator has not even really abused the DE stacking possibility to great effect.
So in the end: Archers feel more smooth, stack better, while its the other way around for knights. They seem to block each other more and having a harder time to get a hit in.
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really good comparison, and finally shows off how bad melee is vs archersā¦ there were some micro issues in the HD version, but it still conveys the point very well.
i wonder wtf the devs did to mess it up so badly. i thought it was supposed to be the same engine?
wrt melee units, another issue is possibly the melee attack animation in DE causes a delay in movement. as opposed to archers firing instantly, the melee units almost need to stop, finsh the attack, then move, as well as the horrible targt aquisition (we see knights idling behind the back line besides that rogue knight that doesnt engage at all)
and then of course the archers flowing like a compressibly gas in DEā¦
I downloaded the video to get a better look, and as far as I can tell, itās the same in HD, the knights are still always stationary while swinging their swords. Itās harder to see because of the more jumpy animation, but I think that is true.
Another thing is the knights are, of course, not being optimally microd. As fewer than half of them can engage the front line of the archers, it would be better to send half of them around the rear of the archers. Weāre comparing reasonably optimal manual micro of the archers against just patrolling in the knights. It only seems fair for the knights to have the same amount of human attention used on them, but of course this is harder to do. It could perhaps be simulated to some extent by starting the scenario with half the knights to the rear of the archers.
It seems as though they increased the pathing calculation speed in DE, which results in it being easier to micro the archers. Knights appear to not attack right away, meaning the archer moves away before the first attack is successful. Before, the archers couldnāt calculate their path as quickly, so the knights would always get an attack off.
If the knights first attack occurred more quickly (preferably near-instantly), this would fix the problem while maintaining performance gains. It also appears that larger units may have more difficulty calculating paths, so probably has two issues causing this.
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I think to make the archers behave like in HD they need more frame delay which is the equivalent to the attack animation of melee units.
Also Melee units take too long to move again after hitting - not considering the bad target aquisition.
They also need a larger ārangeā to hit than felt 0.0 where they need to stand exactly next to the unit. A sword has 1m length + your arm length so give every melee unit 0.2 range so that we donāt have these weird issues where the knight reaches the archer, wants to attack but wonāt attack because the archer is just moving away.
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