I just figured that the new bonus of Koreans allows them to have fully upgraded HC without any other investment. They only would need to research chemistry, and then they would be able to spam HC with full armor upgrades.
Would this be viable in certain circumstances (like against meso civs or goths in arena)?
Koreans don’t have eco bonuses for fast imperial. Their wood discount won’t apply to the BBC or HC, and the stone gathering bonus won’t be used at all… And they cannot skip the blacksmith if they want to build BBC. But maybe in other circumstances this bonus can be useful to defeat high pierce armor foes after doing a castle push.
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Honestly in all situations where you could try to go for HC fast you would be better off going for war wagons instead since they are available earlier and benefit way more from the free armour.
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But WW dont hurt huskarles… Last weekend I massed 15 warwagons in golden pit and a hord of huskarles killed the full squad effortlessly. It amused me how invencible they were against my wagons
In this case you should go for archers to cripple them in feudal, as trying to go for hand cannons straight would mean they can get anarchy up and running at their leisure.
Archers do not hurt huskarls, this is readily confirmable.
Also, Huskarls have serious bonus damage against archers, which is one of many reasons why HC isn’t a clean counter. HC would perform much better and hit it’s critical mass much sooner without that factor. With that factor, HC needs a very large mass, hard to reach against the goth spam once it’s going.
I think you won’t see that much value from this over the armor changes, generally if you’re in a spot where the armor on your hand cannons matter, you’re in a bad spot. As for the armor’s real impact, the second level of armor is equal to the third in terms of surviving Eagle attacks (both will allow you to tank three hits and die to the fourth) so it’s really only saving you the upgrade costs you might have already got in Castle age against melee attackers.
Oh i see. I didnt know they dealed extra damage to archers… (10 extra damage??? 
)
So ,against those huskarls, would have it been better to have gone koreans onagers once the spam started? (While teching into champions, of course)
The third armor upgrade is still valid against archers or skirms, at least. Now i understand why some people suggest to buff HC with only 5 extra HP…
It might help here or there but I don’t think it has enough impact to base your strategy around it. When you end up playing arena vs civs like these you might need hc (as countering infantry with high pierce armor is one of Koreans weaker spots) but tbh I’d just go forward castle drop here because those civ matchups aren’t great for koreans (I assume you need champs/SO or champs/hc to stand a chance there).
… or just go very aggressive in earlier stages of the game before goths can spam infantry.
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One other civ does this way better.
The Turk Fast Imperial into HC is simply superior. It hits 100 seconds earlier. HCs are pretty decent just straight out of the box. The armour upgrades mainly help against enemy archers. But nothing is preventing Turks from getting those anyways on the way to imp (plus chemistry is more expensive than padded archer armour + leather archer armour combined).
The Turk FIHC strat can work if you manage to catch your opponents off guard on a map like arena. In team games it can bring something that can destroy castles if your opponents decide to do that for defence instead of making army like a normal person. The same strat with Koreans will obviously be much weaker.
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Koreans have a bad match up against Goth. There is no solid option against the Goth in late game. HC is one of the best you can do. The best thing with Koreans against Goth is early pressure with Archer and tower rush.
For goth and meso civs rushing HC upon reaching imp is a good strategy. The problem is if you aren’t quite ahead by imp you are probably going to lose anyway cause late game huskarl/eagle spam is too strong with their raiding. Idealy you win feudal or early castle and/or get ahead enough that you have HC massed before they get going. That said if the game gets to imp, HC is your best option probably.