I’ll have to go back and update with the clip from the tournament. But i believe it was puppy vs beasty? Abbasid composite bow mass vs Ottoman sipahi. No mixed composition, just bows kiting vs horse uselessness.
Mind you i think we can mostly agree sipahi are arguably THE best light melee cavalry unit; thouh they have a slightly lower speed than standard horseman, they have the longest range melee attack, second only to War Elephants.
So why exactly did a respectful mass of sipahi die to abbassid composite bows in an open field*?
Mind you again these are 2 professionals, each performing at highest obtainable (technically unobtainable) skill ceiling. If th counter system can’t behave for the bestest, doesn’t that suggested it’s lacking?
Also there is imbalance at spears too when horseman charges them english spears embrace the charge and stun the horses,i dont see that on other civs.Maybe if the horse charges to the bows can stun the bows or make them unable to move?
It seems normal to me that a mass of archers from Castles and with the second technology of ranged attack and compound bows kill everything vs Feudal units.
That’s not to say that horsemen don’t need the range buff, because they do.
I actually do not hate your idea??? What IF charging calvary could root targeted range units for a moment?
Or better yet, what if charge mechanics work more like cataphract in that the charging animation would NOT stop at first contact but rather allows the charging unit to continue passing threw the infantry mass which would make surroundings said mass more likely.
Which segway into how they SHOULD fix cataphract charge mech. Allow charge to target a unit or target ground. In the case a unit is selected the cataphract or any other charging cav will constantly vector toward said unit. And if sufficient charge remains when the target is reached, the charging unit will attack and continue thru the unit.
For example, if the mass of sipahi were to select as a target the furtherest fleeing abbasid bow and was permited to run thru the mass of archers to reach said target THEN go thru said target as well, that would have resulted in all of the archers being surrounded.
If they add charge mech to all horses ranged units become trash because you can pass the meele units that defending them,catapracht in that way is very op you can bypass the meele units and attack the crossbows directly and kill them.
Cataphract charge is negated by spearwall. So there is that. I will say spearwall sometimes even for standard knights bugs out or is delayed, but in a perfect world spearwall would prevent charge thru.
Except for cataphracts, body blocking will still protect the intend target from receiving the intend damage. However the charging unit shall continue to vector towards the original target and if sufficient charge time remains, run thru the original target.
So with spearwall and charge time elapsed being the only delimiters, non cataphracts melee cavalry will always attempt to vector to, then thru their original targets. The first enemy unit encountered along the vectored trajectory will recieve the charge damage.
For cataphracts, everything above will apply except the damage will be applied to all units within the trample area of effect.
Imo its a necessary buff for all melee cav. They should have always function in this manner especially Since this game doesn’t believe in snare.
Ways to counter balance this idea is to have spearwall stun for longer and stop bugging out. And in the worse of cases further increase how much spears devastate cavalry.
In theory the horseman should work somewhat better against siege and ranged units than the knight, as the knight is more versatile being effective against MAA, horseman and raiding.
The video you saw of Beasty’s sipahis are simply Feudal units against a mass of Castles units with 3 upgrades.
Maybe the horseman can be more similar to the Sipahi in range, I don’t see much else.
exactly. So while this may be an issue in the niche mode of 1v1 (somewhat tongue in cheek dw) the impact of any proposed buffs to cavalry, especially knights, would be catastrophic for team game balance and unit diversity.
It occurred to me yesterday, while doing a Romans concept for AoEIV, and I was looking at the ability of cataphracts, an idea to boost light cavalry:
In Aoe3 the Melee cavalry has the “Trample” ability to cause area damage to units with the defect that the Hussar gets "slightly hurt" when passing like crazy. It is quite useful against grouped ranged units, with which there is not much risk of receiving as much damage. Could the same be done for AoE IV?
I see that the Byzantines literally have that ability with the Caraphracts, of course they do not suffer any “Debuff” because in theory they have “So much armor” that it does not matter if they pass over anything.
You could do a mix of both powers but for the Horseman, it would look like this:
“TRAMPLE”- Horseman’s Skill. It advances a distance without considering the collision of units while dealing 5 damage to the units it passes. While in this mode he receives 100% more Melee damage.
I thought about it and I could receive a melee debuff equal to the Sipahi. It would be a lot of fun, also a way to counteract the mass of archers with horsemen in a realistic way. In other games this Crush thing looks pretty good:
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS: light cavalry charge “Trample”
The problem horsemen have always had is that if you have a critical mass (usually around the same resource count) you destroy archers - but if you are short, they just do what happened in that game. The exact ratio is further skewed by blacksmith techs etc. This doesn’t really apply to any other counter.
I’m not sure how you do it without making archers useless though, which would radically change the whole game.
I think running through units is going to produce a lot of weird scenarios. Rooting could work - but I’m not sure how. (Freezing a unit you hit would be better than nothing, but wouldn’t stop the rest of the 50~ strong formation stutter-stepping back).
Horsemen and Horsemen equivalents could all have some debuff aura that makes archers slower. This would help counter-act some of the pathing issues horsemen have. But it might also impact the game in wider ways.
The other perhaps more fundamental change is making “formations” (however so defined) slower. Because part of the issue is big blobs of archers/Zhuge Nu etc being so maneuverable. I guess you could do really weird things in the code, like giving archers a debuff when shooting horsemen for a second or two after moving.
Or you could just give horsemen yet another point of ranged armour.
You didn’t delve into your alleged weird scenarios? Also this running thru mechanic IS already implemented in game, cataphracts trample. This should give you a working baseline for your opinion, i believe.
Current trample is UNDERWHELMING!!! because it doesnt vector toward a unit target. Rather it’s a ground target. Why doesn’t trample work like standard charge mechanics which home in on their target???
So we already have each SEPARATE mechanic:
Run TO
Run Thru
Combined them.
And to a point someone else made earlier. I agree that horsemen SHOULD have higher efficiency vs range THAN knights. The connudrum i believe comes from the simplicity of how damage is attributed or negated in this game. If you add more range armor to horsemen then you run into the original issue that got horsemen nerfed in the very very beginning, which is how well do perform late game under static defenses raiding. If you increase their dps vs range, it increases small engagement dps efficiency but does nothing to large masses since they’ll still just get deleted like in the video reference.
So we’ll fix this issue the AOE three fashion . Increase all MELEE cav range armor by 2 starting in feudal!! But at the same time increase all static defenses (towers TCs KEEPs) to have a BONUS damage of 2 attack vs MELEE cavalry!! This will be a slight nerf to knights since they did NOT receive the plus 2 range armor, but knights IMO can withstand this slight nerf just fine. Especially if the previous ideas of running thru charged units is implemented.
(Note: if plus 2 bonus is too strong vs knights reduce the bonus to plus 1 and this way it’s a slight nerf to knights and a slight buff to horsemen under static defenses)
The abovementioned would relegated feudal archer damage to 1 damage per strike vs a feudal horsemen, no blacksmith upgrades.
