the point is, you want the advantages of an anti archer unit, without giving up the advantages you already have. that is the point being made.
the ETK isn’t Supposed to be good vs archers/hard to kill by archers.
its designed from the ground up as an anti melee units. it even says in the units description in the tech tree its supposed to be bad vs archers.
Teutonic unique infantry unit. Slow and powerful. Strong vs. melee units. Weak vs. archers and Scorpions.
if its taking 34 arrows to kill, it’s not exactly weak is it?
I don’t think TKs need buff stat-wise, they are already a pretty strong, albeit situational unit. Perhaps a discount on the elite upgrade could be helpful, since 1200 f 600 g is pretty expensive for a situational unit.
The player train the mounted Teutonic Knights at the castle instead of the unmounted one.
The mounted Teutonic Knights have the good moving speed and can get the bloodline and barding armors like other cavalry but their basic HP are low (maybe 50), which make them easy to be “unmounted”.
Similar to Konniks, if the mounted Teutonic Knights gets killed, they will be switched to current unmounted Teutonic Knights, who have great damage and HP but only 0.7 (or 0.8 now) speed.
That would have been brilliant as the Germans were known for dismounting and fighting on foot when things got dire. A shame that role would be taken by the Konniks.
Also I want to thank you for additional ideas as using supplies. I added the idea in the initial post of this thread. Edit: I also added now other ideas in this thread to the first post.
For the second idea, to decrease the attack of the Teutonic Knights in favour for their pierce armor, I want to extend the explanation: Unlike Paladins, that can easily be countered by Halbs, it is difficult to counter Teutonic Knights in melee combat. When a teutonic castle is next to the one of the opponent – both sides already in early Imperial Age and the opponent with bombard cannons or trebs – the Teutonic Knights may walk to the opponents castle. He then has to step back with his bombard cannons and archers. This prevents him to do further damage to the teutonic castle and hence buys time. On the other side the teutonic player looses some units (bot not too much) in exchange. The game balance should be O.K. because the Teutonic Knights still loose against every archer unit or hand cannoneer because he is slow and can easily be kept at distance.
Here a concrete example that follows this second idea in this thread: After the Elite-upgrade, the Teutonic Knight still has an attack value of 13 (-4 compared to today and the same like a Champion) but an increased pierce armor of 4 (+2 compared to today and still two less than a non-elite Huskarl).
Which imo actually justifies the cost… They have good options. So if you reduce the cost of those options it means they are more likely to access those options simultaneously, as opposed to other civs that don’t have those options so are forced into using very specific upgrades.
The GC upgrade is even more situational does a lot less yet is a similar price(300 less f but 150 more g). Where’s the logic there?
The GC is mainly better vs cavalry, compared to the arb. The ETK is not only better than champs vs melee it’s also better vs buildings. If someone can legitimately argue a cost reduction on ETK than GC need it even more sine their upgrade does a lot less for them…
Teotonic Knights are really strong. But as we already know mobility is one of the biggest strength you can have in most of the maps. Same probleme as Battle elephants.
I think it might be cool to raise their speed to the same level with battle elephants. They are still slow but least as fast as elephants do. Or reduce the upgrade cost to more easy go for Imp.
If the problem is that TKs get overshadowed by champs, maybe removing Teutonic supplies would mean we’d see them more.
This specifically answers the OP by not buffing Teutons in any way, shape or form
Someone said Teutonic Knights are in their best state ever; I’d argue the exact opposite, actually.
The trend has been constant buffs to Champions with precious little change to TKs. The latest patches saw TKs getting a bit more speed while Champions got TWO melee armor!
There’s a critical breaking point to consider; whether or not Champions can trade cost-effectively with common melee counters, like Paladins. And they can. This means that Champions can fill the same role as Teutonic Knights. Admittedly they can’t do so quite as well, but that doesn’t really matter, because no halfway decent player is ever going to engage TKs with melee units anyway, so all that’s really relevant is their weakness to their counters, and TKs are MUCH weaker to archers and siege than Champions due to their higher cost per HP and lower speed.
As far as defending siege is concerned, TKs really aren’t a good choice, because their armor is only good at defending themselves, and your enemy isn’t going to be attacking the TKs, they’re going to squeeze through and attack the Siege. In that case, what you need isn’t durability, it’s maximum damage in as short a time as possible, and only Halbs offer that. You need to kill the knights before the knights kill the siege, and TKs just aren’t the best at that, no matter how you look at it.
And if you want population efficiency, you’re gonna make Paladins, not TKs, since they’re even more population efficient with their bonuses to melee armor as well.
Basically, TKs, despite being stronger than ever, are more useless now than they’ve ever been. They weren’t worth using over Champions BEFORE the melee armor buffs, why would they be worth using over them now, when champions are WAY stronger and TKs are only mildly buffed?
