would you mind doing the same test for paladins and halberdiers?
Pike vs Knight (1v1 full up)
Halb vs Cavalier (1v1 full up except paladin)
Halb vs Paladin (1v1 full up)
Note that Knight has 2.25 times as expensive as pike.
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Thing is the game needs to be changed fundamentally for this to be balanced.
A better idea could be Supplies effect changed “Militia line cost -15 food” → “Militia line food cost is halved but gold cost is doubled and +1PA”. Remove Gambeson and adjust the cost of Supplies. Lastly add +5 HP to THS and +10 to Champion.
Then you’re admitting they are not “Trash counter”.
I’m actually in favor of keeping them weak against LC line. In fact, it will be actually better in that way so that we can finally make Militia line (for some "Strong Infantry Civs) a go to unit or meta unit and not forcing those civs to play archer/knight/Camel/CA/EA.
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I don’t think militia line has too many techs. Recent militia upgrade time reduction solved this problem more or less. Overall I like this approach of reducing research time instead of reducing amount of technologies needed for infantry.
Still I would like to see some changes to militia line:
- Small resistance to light cavalry for long swordsman, 2h swordsman and champion. This will make militia actual trash killer.
- Small conversion resistance (like +1 min/max time) to make it harder to counter LS raids with monks in early Castle Age.
Resistanse to light cavalry can be implemented same way as resistance to cavalry from Royal Heirs (Ethiopians unique tech).
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Agree, we actually have almost all civs with the “identities” of arher, cavalry, ca or infantry.
When it’s like “Infantry > Cavalry > Archery > Infantry” we would always come to the situations of civ wins in these matchups. Archer civs have acess to halbs or camels to deal with camels, knight civs have skirms to deal with pikes + halbs. But it’s prettx clear that the current desig of Infantry would make it tough for cav civs when they would just get straigh-up buffed. As until HC they don’t have a direct counter tool (usually they just go raid, which in most cases does more damage to the infantry player than they can do with their infantry).
But that’s also exactly one point that needs to be adressed for Infantry, the amount of eco damage you can do with them in relatio to the investment. Atm - and this is actually what this thread is about - it’s just too costly to get the infantry out. And even then it’s tough to deal eco damage as the current meta bases don’t have much exposed area, most of them are covered almost entirely by the ranges of the TCs.
So either there needs to be a new unit that is specific to counter infantry or one of the established ones needs to be adjusted to deal with the militia line. And I have no issues with that being light cav or maybe even heavy cav. For me it’s only important that infantry gets it’s place where it can shine - and we see it in the example of the serjeants that there is definitely potential. Though ofc the serjeant isn’t perfectly balanced, but at least it shows what Infantry pressure could look like in the future.
I personally would prefer a specific anti-infantry archer type locked behind a costly tech. And then some of the unique infantry could get a bit of infantry armor (eg the jaguar) so their would be an addtitional motivation to make the UU infantry units. But I would also see no issues in buffing light cav or even skirms specifically against the milita line to give (almost) all civs a suitable trash counter.
Maybe is time to discuss about the range of the TC and the fact that blacksmith upgrades don’t change it seems a patch in the design.
Why no reduce the base range of the TC to 4? This make it able to properly defend 8 farms instead of 20 in dark age, And do it fine in Feudal with fletching.
Of course, BS upgrades should work on it as any defensive building. Still have 6 range in Castle Age, so pushes with mangonels still work.
7 range in Imperial Age doesn’t sound bad too.
Interesting concept that doesn’t exist in game. It exists for a lot of units though.
CA is 2 civs - Mongols and Tatars. We officially have more Camel and Elephant civs than CA civs.
Except, Infantry < Cavalry in 95% situations when the Infantry is militia line.
If try to mean gold unit + trash unit army combo, militia line indeed doesn’t have any trash partner. And I strongly believe having a trash partner is just as important as having a trash counter to make the unit a meta. Since there is little to no chance of us having another generic trash unit, I think we should make them a real “trash counter”.
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What I tried to tell that this counter wheel doesn’t make sense when the civs have the same ########### of unit classes. And it only “works” in respect to the archer/knight dualism as both have a trash addition that works with them which brings us to
And that’s ofc soemthing important to note. I tried several desins for that. One is the Shieldman that has a bonus vs archers and high pierce armor, the other is the “bowman” which is an anti-archer archer with the difference to skirms that it doesn’t has pierce armor but instead higher range and a higher damage output against archers, but no bonus against infantry or spearmen - which makes it less useful to pair with cavalry. Especially the higher damage output and range might be the tweak from the skirms to make it useful as an addition to the militia line which currently suffers a lot from the fact it takes investmentwise much more damage from archers than skirms do to them in return. Even dtavidian skirms can’t make the combo militia + skirm work and they fire much faster.
And you already made similar designs, i think you also made one shieldman design as far as i remember.
Idk.. I think it would be better when Infantry would directly be buffed to be more able to raid under TC fire. Like we see with serjeants.
And generally I think TCs are just a bit too affordable for what they provide. Imo it would benefit the game when they were either more expensive or take longer to construct - so we need other ways to protect our eco when we can’t affort as much of the TCs as we do currently. This would naturally also bring back CA in the meta cause they are the ones currently suffering the most as they are required to idle the enemy eco - what they can’t when they would immediately die when they would dive.
Stronghold replaced by Gallowglass or Chain armor - Infantries +1/+1 armor. Woad raider PA reduced 1 → 0. Elite Woad Raider upgrade cost 1000 food, 800 gold → 850 food, 675 gold.
Should have been a generic tech at best available in Feudal Age in Barracks.
Yeah. I have seen some of them. Some people even proposed to change siege tower into a trash unit after Survivalist made them work. That unit does remove one of infantries problem after all, the speed.
I’m sure I never asked to have another generic infantry line.
I would much rather the Woad Raider be replaced with an actual Gallowglass unit, and not Gallowglass be mentioned in a technology.
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No way. Strongholds is awesome. People vastly underestimate its power.
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This is a useful test, thanks for posting the results. It would also be interesting to see the units compared in groups against each other, instead of only single units 1v1.
We should leave one like Bloodlines and TR. Maybe even two.
I also used to like that. But the cost and time to switch to them is so huge that I think it is a bad idea.
Personally I don’t have any problem with that if it is just a rename and reskin.
The healing factor is nice. But faster firing one is still not noticable.
It depends. If those tech would be really impactfull and rare among the civs, but cheap and fast to research then you could make the switch.
Sorry when I interrupt here.
I would try to lay out a sophisticated concept for Infatrny in the future featuring
3 new units: Shieldman (trash Infantry that has high pierce armor), a heavy infantry armed with a poleaxe (gold heavy, inteneded to be the bulk of Infantry armies) and also a new trash archer, the lightbowman that counters light infantry.
In the concept the role of the current militia line would be an easily affordable unit for infantry openers in the respective ages and a “generalist” that isn’t excelling in anything special, but counters heavy armored infantry. It gets it’s main advantage from being very cheap and easy to upgrade, so taking the conceptual idea from this topic.
As there are a lot of interactions to consider and only a limited amount of tweaks the concept will be fairly workintensive to elaborate. So I would only try to do it when there is interest in that - and ofc when there is something that you would like to see there or NOT to see there you can already state here before I try to elaborate it.
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That’s one way to do that. But a strong and impactful and rare tech is supposed to be expensive and slow to research to balance.
I think militia line terribly lacks toughness (HP+armor). All the 3 barracks line units have almost same HP. I think militia line could get some HP and then Gambeson turn into more HP instead of PA. Then we can actually remove supplies as base stat is also good enough with the extra HP.
Not all crucial techs are the same. Look at bloodlines. Is cheap and fast for what it gives. The balance is made by its availability more than the price or time in research.
Even nowadays militia dedicated techs are cheap and fast… the problem is that doesn’t impact too much.
I think gambesons could stay and add another dedicated tech that gives Hp, as I said in a previous post.
Make militia-line base a weak overall unit but use these techs to buff strongly in certain areas to give different flavor among the civs.
Sorry. Be realistic. You know this will never gonna happen.
True. But I’d still prefer just one bloodlines or TR equivalent tech for infantry.
Archers and CA need 2 university techs as well. And CA even need one extra tech from Range which foot archers don’t. But I think I won’t compare ranged units with melee units. Also militia line has 4 unit line upgrades already. So there should be just one bloodlines like tech imho.
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I know that what I talk isn’t about tech or upgrade but just want to suggest a bit.
You know, if we talk about infantry, mostly we would heard about troop formation.
So I’m thinking about getting idea from AOE3 that by changing formation would change stat slightly for each unit but would affect more on infantry (or maybe only infantry), like:
- Line formation: +unit pierce armor (heavily group shield in one direction = better hold against arrow)
- Square formation: +unit melee armor (since this formation about bracing against cavalry charge)
- Staggered formation: unit speed +% (more space = more mobility)
- Flank Formation: unit attack or atk speed increase (attack on flank is doing more damage)
Or maybe increase 1 stat while decrease 1 stat (like increase atk while reduce armor, etc).
Also, this formation effect only come out if infantry group up to certain number (like monaspa).
With this, infantry would be a bit stronger which also involve with Micro that infantry lack of.
Not sure would this is too much work or unachievable or not. Would this idea ok?
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As someone mentioned before, I do believe the purpose / role of the militia line should be discussed and clarified.
Sometimes, the line is seen as a trash counter, sometimes as a line to take out buildings and other times as a meat shield. It might be all of those roles and it might vary depending on the civs, but the more I think of it and the more I believe that having a common accord of the purpose of the militia-line might help the discussion.
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