Scorpion shall never have more range than BBC. 8 base range is enough for heavy scorp.
I’m not familiar with the short term most people use here, so by BBC what do you mean?
What if there was a new Siege unit, the Springald, that has a longer range then Scorpions and Mangonels/Onager, does benefit from Ballistics, does bonus damage vs. Siege and Cavalry (+Camels and Elephants) but does only damage a single target, no bonus damage against buildings and a low rate of fire (unlike AoE1 Ballista) and there for low DPS.
This unit would be bad against Infantry and Archers unlike the other siege units. Unguarded they would still be weak against cavalry because of their low HP and low rate of fire.
Not sure how many civilisations should have access to this unit though.
Scorpions themselves also need some love too, but that has been discussed a lot already. Make them benefit from Ballistics by default.
More than a complete new siege line, what if springald becomes a regional upgrade for scorpion?
The Springald is supposed to be a single target unit and have no pass through damage.
So kind of the opposite of a Scorpion.
Scorpions are very good against Infantry and Archers.
Springalds would be good against Cavalry and Siege.
Having both could be pretty powerful so maybe they should be a replacement, but then for the whole line on the other hand Mangonels are already better at most things Scorpions are good at.
BBC: BomBardCannon
My suggestions are below
- faster scorpion balistic
- reduce training time from 30s to 27s
2 scorpions have 1 mongonel power, so it seems good to increase their accuracy or adjust their training time.
Ballista also shoot metal balls in addition to javelins. We can make a siege unit that shoot metal balls straight and deal melee dmg and replace siege towers. We lack a unit that synergize well with longswordsmen. Maybe it cost mostly gold and have higher speed to catch up longswordsmen. The composition shall be good against archers at least.
If they implement a Springald like in AoE 4, it has to be Anti-Siege as the Scorpion is supposed to be Anti-Infantry
Would be interesting to see a new generic siege unit getting added,last time we got new generic units was back im HD days.
Hot take:
Add new generic building: Artillery Foundry
Trains Bombard Cannons and Hand Cannons
Remove them from Siege Workshop and Archery Range.
Cleaning up those crowded buildings.
This should be first done to the stable as it has so many units now.
Which civilisations can even train 4 unity in their? I don’t think any civilisation has 5 stable units.
Most civilisations have 4 Archery Range units.
Just look at gurjaras with full tech tree on.
They need more speed, lesser pathing related issues and take a little bit less damage from other siege units. Your suggestion is good but even with that, their main usability will be limited to driving ranged units away or killing pikes.
Full Techtree is not the normal game.
It’s basically like a crazy mod.
Who really plays that mode? It’s like playing with cheats turned on.
The problem is that mangonel still kills scorpions in 1 hit, while having equal or greater range than scorpions. Ultimately, no player is going to create a relatively expensive siege unit that can be one-hit-killed if it does not fulfill a special niche, especially if mangonels can do the job better. (1 mangonel can kill a group of archer in 1 hit, 1 scorpion can wound a smaller group of archers while they retreat.)
Ultimately I think that the idea of turning scorpions into “snipers” (long range units) is a good idea, since if they out-range mangonels, then they can be viable by firing outside of the mangonel range, which avoids the issue of being one-hit-killed by mangonels. Of course, if this buff is too much, the firing rate can be slowed down accordingly.
If militia become better, current scorpions as the counter, will be more meta relevant. I am not fond of reworking scorpion when I expect there will be more militia buff.
Even if militia become better, I honestly don’t see it. I did some test runs and even with the splash damage the mangonels still ended up doing better. And that’s with the mangonels going completely without micro, while microing the scorpions to the best of my ability.
What I like about this idea is, it allows you to focus-fire down a single enemy while still damaging enemies over a much larger area. Right now, two scorpions attacking a single enemy with 3 pierce armor do about 5 DPS, while 1 mangonel does 6.16. With this change, 2 scorpions would be dealing 8.33 to that primary target, so for single-target damage they’d become the best choice.
I think champions can be kinda good against halbs+onagers but not good vs halbs+scorpion
It was the only way to historical role play Indians before DoI.