Let's talk about why maceman is so bad

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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The Inca maceman has been reworked (buffed) previously, but is still just one of the worst melee infantry in the game. I want to see why since they have decent stats on paper, similar to a doppel or hospitaller.

I ran some tests, they fight evenly vs plumed spearmen in equal resources, despite being a halb unit while plumed spearman is a spearman. They also lose terribly to european halberdiers. This is because they have ranged resist instead of melee resist. I can’t say for sure if this is good or bad because they can survive a bit longer before getting to battle but they are worse at fighting than other halbs.

They seem to do 75 to 85 damage per hit to a group of bunched up units, their damage is listed as 36 but has 2.5 area effect. It is good on paper however in a real game fight enemy units are usually not extremely bunched up like the way I tested. For a unit that rely on area damage, they need to attack consecutively, not slowly with powerful attack. So their base damage of 36 with 2.25 ROF is pretty bad. They need to be fixed to 24 attack with 1.5 ROF just like other melee units.

Their pathing is extremely bad. No matter what I test them against, they seem to always walk around in circles and there is no way to prevent that. While the opponent units (spears, pikes, halbs) all have much better pathing. I don’t know what causes this but maceman pathing is so way worse than other melee infantry that’s why it is the worst melee infantry. Their pathing is only decent vs cavs, but against infantry which has smaller hit box, they just walk around and can’t attack.

Their siege attack is good on paper, similar to plumed spearman equal resources wise. But they have very short siege range, they need to be close up to the building to siege, instead of throwing torches with a range of 6, they use mace with only 2 range. That means the pathing is really bad when you click a building. The effective siege ability is worse than plumed spearman or other pikes.

For anti cav they are also much worse than plumed spearman, being slower, has 2x instead of 3x multiplier, has no melee resist etc…also their area damage is less effective when against cavs whose hit box is larger.

Also they have a plaza big button to spawn them. I don’t see why i would want a big button in an exclusive building to spawn the trainable worst unit for the civ. Other civs like lakota and Aztecs spawn powerful, unique and exclusive units for that civ. For Inca I would rather the plaza spawn huaracas or chimu runners than maceman.

So there is NOT A SINGLE THING maceman is good at, compared to plumed spearman or european halbs. Please devs fix this unit. Just make it similar to doppels and samurais or hospitallers. Then it is fine

5 Likes
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1 point on the plaza dance is that even with the train speed card which makes them spawn faster they still spawn significantly slower than skull knights do with equivalent amount of dancers as aztec despite being a far weaker unit when in reality they should spawn faster.

On paper as you said they look like a fine unit but the lack of melee resist compared to a doppel makes them actually quite bad for their cost and pop when fighting other melee units. You do get ranged resist which is nice and helps them get into combat with less losses vs ranged units however this doesn’t seem to be enough. Siege range of 2 as you said just causes even more pathing issues and I have no idea why it isn’t 6 like a spearmen.

Rate of fire should be changed from 2.25 to 2 as it’s extra bit of aoe doesn’t make up for a far slower rate of fire. When taking into account the issue with a siege range of 2 compared to 6 of a doppel or spearmen this actually causes your overall siege to be lower with all the time wasted bumbling about trying to path correctly.

The unit doesn’t need big changes just make the siege range 6 and speed up the rate of fire a bit and it would be significantly better than it is currently.

1 Like
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Nothing its good at? My friend you forgot the unlisted benefit and I find usual reason to make them:

For high yield sexual grunting vs the opponents. Truly, the neurons used processing these primal gutteral sounds by opponent must have some value, as same with haude rams.
:stuck_out_tongue:

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Just had a check to see if the supay ceremony(spawns macemen) had been changed at all and no it remains the same. With 25v on the plaza inca spawn them in 25 seconds. With 25v on the plaza aztec spawn SK in 14 seconds, inca takes almost double the time to spawn an inferior unit. This dance hasn’t been changed back from when the macemen were 3 pop.

Even with all cards sent and maxed out plazas the macemen still take 2 seconds longer to spawn despite being far worse and they are far worse and also don’t shadow tech and don’t have 4 upgrade cards just 2 compared to SK. Macemen need to spawn at least 20% faster than a SK does.

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Actually it was, the March update lowered them to 2 pop (Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition - Update 13.58326 - Age of Empires) and the April update made the Supay Ceremony spawn them 30% quicker (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-iii-definitive-edition-update-14-3853/).

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So it was far worse than it is now lol, 30% still isn’t enough though because with equal vills on the plaza the SK spawns faster despite being the superior unit which must be an oversight because it is hard anyway for inca to even get 10 priestess and their maxed out plaza is worse than aztecs. You’d expect 10 warrior priests to spawn them faster than 10 priestess as they’re worth more on the plaza but even with equal amounts of vills it makes no sense as to why SK spawns faster.

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The unit maybe needs a rework but you are seeing many points against it,

What need is there to mention that the unit loses against Halberdier because of ranged armor? Yes, practically, it seems that the ranged armor was changed to make it more useful both in a general gameplay for the needs of the Inca, because you already have a Feathered Lancer. The unit particularly fulfills other extra advantages of units similar to pikemen and halberdiers, Because they lay siege in area so they can attack attached buildings is a benefit, also a little siege armor makes it better to besiege fort style buildings or improved detachment and castle, well also get better resistance against artillery and siege units in general, Halberdier neither The thing is that it is a very selective unit on the part of European civilizations, it is practically not used, not even civilizations that have a good halberdier like Holland do it in 1v1.

If pathfiding is disgusting like any melee unit, it’s probably also worse because the unit has a slightly larger volume

The big button was specifically ruined by the changes because the maceman cost 3 population and consequently had better stats. Practically they would have to create another unit to make it similar to that of the Aztecs or Lakotas

Finally, if we talk about balance in general, the Incas would not need a buff, because they still have a good victory percentage and in addition they still have the ridiculous problem that the chasqui is used as a military unit, even though the rival does not have mercenaries or heroes. strong, it is still used as if it were cavalry

Something that I hoped would be solved in the current patch, but apparently the nerf to the specific letter was not enough

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Yes I realised the hit box of maceman is too big for a melee infantry. They are like bigger than a cav. They attack enemy with spaces in between, as if they have a fat invisible body. That’s probably why their pathing is so bad.

Yes Inca is not a bad civ, but it is because no one uses maceman. Plumed spearman does everything maceman does and does it better.

Even with range resist maceman is still worse than plume spearman at getting into the fight because spearman is 5 speed, maceman is 4.25. Then there is the mace swinging animation before the attack…

Also they have a unique ceremony, plus a big button just for maceman… those are basically wasted slots that can do other things because no one wants maceman

1 Like
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I think the original idea for them is to overpop abuse with the Kallanka, which is still very fun to do if you manage to fill up all of them, get to 200 pop and them pop them out.

At that mass they are great tanks and just eats buildings faster then people can respond.

But the problem is that kallanka arent that good to build and are nerfed pretty badly due to the changes with the garrison mechanic, plus you still need pop to queue the units.

If the Kallanka was better with more incentive to garrisoned (either I think it should be able to attack when garrisoned like a TC or improve its attack like with the stronghold) and if queuing a unit in the Kallanka somehow doesnt cost pop then mass poping heavy tanks right into the face of your enemy could be very fun

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It’s all in theory, but very difficult to do. Inca theoretically has the largest population possible, with 20 chasqui, 50 kallanka extra, population, plus a zapotech/carib/mapuche native, that is 85 extra pop space…but it is very micro intensive

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it very much but it kinda needs to be no other civ can do mass overpop again and again,

and even without the mass overpop back when you can do garrison micro, you can do some ridiculous stuff with bolas, turning Kallanka into an aoe death trap.

They just need some kind of payback for using the mechanics as something other then just building units.

I think making them defensive structures make sense, even if increasing inca defensive capabilities is not something that other people will desire.

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Go into a skirmish and get a mass of macemen and attack a wall pillar, 2 of them attack because of the abysmal 2 siege range and the other 20 stand around watching.

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Inca needs a unit that’s actually exclusive to the plaza. Something like the Manco Horseman from WoL would be a good fit. It’s really annoying that they get a purely pre-contact depiction despite their quick adoption of European technology and long period of resistance to the Spanish. A 3 pop heavy cavalry unit similar to Cuirassiers or even Lancers would be great and could help Inca deal with massed infantry. It could combine native and European tech by using an Inca halberd along with a horse and European armour.

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Except 1 pop units are much more efficient in Kallankas, costing 0 pop when inside while Macemen cost 1 pop when garrisoned and are much more expensive to train.

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It’s so weird that they decided to leave them without artillery and cavalry when

  1. That was the Aztec Gimmcik
  2. They actually got to have them in real life (?!?)
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There’s also:

  1. It’s very difficult to balance infantry only civs without using far fetched stuff like archers the outrage cannons. And obviously they’re not doing a good job of it if there are supposedly uber units like Macemen that are outclassed by Warhut units.

  2. There are other potential civs that lack anything other than infantry armies. For example, Kongo.

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Never noticed that but efficiency kinda doesnt matter since the raw reduction numbers are still the same, its reduced by 1 so the pop increase when you ungarisson will always be 40 in the end.

There is a short term benefit in that you dont increase your pop at all but that is a short term benefit when you are not at maximum pop and an inca kancha boom means that you are most of the time at max pop and kallanka themselves acts as houses.

the overpop is useful when you want to reach a critical mass of units and in those cases efficiency matters less.

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50 with the kalanka card no?

That said, the maceman i rate rather high preciscly because it got ranged resist. Now if it were a bit faster it’d be a perfect unit.