Militia line deserves an attack bonus against Scouts. Archers get them vs Spearman line

Miliita line aren’t even that good against scouts if you think about it. In fuedal age, you can afford to make more scouts than you can afford to make militia line since militia has a guaranteed death against faster moving archers. You also start with a +1 scout advantage if you didn’t lose your scout. Someone going scouts in fuedal can often afford to make 5 or more scouts before they transition to archers or skirms. Someone fielding militia line is usually getting 3 at most even if they upgrade to MAA. The scouts can afford to engage and hit and run militia line and there’s going to be more of them fielded. It should be punishing for scouts to melee militia line.

And not only is there an early game problem with scouts vs militia, but late game Light Cav/Hussar doesn’t even perform that badly against Champion. With no gold cost you can easily throw hordes of Hussars against Champs and attrition them. There’s never a point where someone fielding scout line thinks “man I really need to keep these scouts away from his militia line or they’ll be in trouble!”

Meanwhile, Archers and Cav Archers get attack bonuses against Spearman line despite handily beating these lines already. It makes sense because it’s pretty easy to flood a huge amount of Halberds late game and you want archers to be able to kill them quickly to create openings for knights to do work. The same is true of militia line vs scouts though.

I think a +2 or maybe even a +4 bonus is in order. It may even be worth giving this bonus to militia against all trash units. To avoid upsetting dark age balance, it might be wise to start this bonus with the MAA upgrade so it does not apply to militia.

Side note - I am seeing a lot of pro games sending spearman and scouts forward during fuedal age. You’d think that going MAA would be a great counter to this but everyone knows MAA is garbage outside of the initial early fuedal ambush so they don’t bother. They won’t even perform that well against the scouts/spears either.

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well yes, they should have bonus against all 3 trash units. Hussar can just trade against militia line so efficiently, it’s not even funny. Skirm still do good damage against civs without gambeson and there are more than half of them out there.

Spirit of The Law has a video on scout line vs militia line and it’s pretty hilarious how bad militia are against scout line. In theory the militia “win” but that’s not really how it plays out in game.

If anything, I will ask the opposite. Then we can no longer say that “Militia line doesn’t have a trash counter. Hence they shouldn’t be as good as archer and cavalry.” And this will open the door to change Militia line into a meta unit.