For starter, let swordsmen be useful again for early rush and late game.
(1) m@a movement speed 0.9 → 1 (prevent spear/skirm hit-and-run in feudal)
(2) light cav share same armor class with eagles (late game cost effectiveness against hussar and potentially more useful in competing relics in arena, mid-game)
(optional) bonus dmg vs spears: even archer do have +3 vs spears, swordsman +3 vs spears would not be a big matter.
I like the idea of giving them bonus vs scout and spear. Dont think they need vs skirms they get thiere power from atk bonus already and is quite weak vs anything not archer.
I like that militia should be little faster then archers and skirms. Maybe with squires maybe slightly behind without. As melee you still need abit more mass then archer cause you lose to running after them and micro.
I am more in favour of a major rework for swordsman:
The current issue is that swordsman lines dies too quickly to most power units, such that you have spend a significant amount of resources and times just to replenish the losses. Furthermore, since most units are either faster than swordsman or can attack at range, being “relatively resource efficient” or “even in a fight” when fighting against a unit translates to very bad strategic results (knights can retreat, archer can harass, but longswords just dies). Rather, swordsman should “guarantee” (exaggerating a bit here) wins in a fair fight, as their slow speed and lack of range means that they have no other strategic options. They should pose enough of a threat to force the enemy to respond.
Ideally, swordsman should be a damage sponge that is very hard to kill. However, their attack could be lowered so that they kill slowly (except vs buildings). Note that, I am generally not in favour of making swordsman significantly faster or cheaper, as that just means they will be competing against pikeman or eagles in their respective roles.
I like the idea of militia line fit a role of forcing a reaction. Like with bonus vs build or what we can come up with.
I think if we just make them a dmg sponge they wont replace eagle or spearman. Spearman is a knight counter and/or a protector vs cavalry. So they work well with Siege and ranged, as they counter the counter of siege and ranged. And eagle works close to like knight do, cause of the high speed they have.
Depending of what specielty militia like gets, it can make sense to start thiere powerspike later. MAA or even swordmen.
I read the speed increase a lot.
But we can’t jsut bump all units up to have good enough speed. Cause then all units have similar speeds and still. Those units who just have minimal higher speed than others can chose when they take a battle and when not.
I think a better way would be to make the militia line able to build Siege towers. But a cheaper variant. Atm they are just too expensive, especially for early game economy.
This would have 3 benefits
A) you can jump over walls even when the opponent has repairmen there.
B) you can use the Siege towers when the opponent has ranged units to get in a fighting position or run away
C) Especially on bigger maps and TGs this solves the mobility disadvantage of the Militia line on the strategical level without changing the combat relations
Because it would otherwise influence Maps like Arena or Hideout too much, I think this should only be possible after the MAA upgrade. But ofc we will see it at leas being tried in these maps - but I think this is only good and interesting - also good for getting a direct feedback for the balance of this feature.
Really? I literally almost never saw a MAA opening in the recente NAC5, and only occasionally in HC5 qualification, and even rarely with good results
It’s a strat that is very expensive and fragile and countered by 1 Archer…scout and Archer opening are infinitely more common
Also not true. After squire militia becomes only ########## faster then archers (0.96 vs 0.99), nowhere bear enough to “change the Dynamic”. Swordsman still het trashed by any decent micro of archers, to the point they added gambeson for that, and even that wasn’t enough, so no…does not change any Dynamic sadly
At higher levels, we see very little militia type rushes these days.
There was a time they were very popular and forced all to learn to defend against it.
But in low to mid elo, at least according to the stats, maa rushes are still quite successfull.
Tournaments are different from 99% of play. It’s true that MAA rushes are risky, but they also can pay out enormously if the enemy makes any mistakes. It’s perfectly fine for a strategy to not be viable at the top 0.1% of players.
That said, a big part of WHY it isn’t viable is because there’s no path forward after doing it. You basically are guaranteed to lose the MAA at the end, which is a problem that Feudal Squires would fix.
Gambesons was added to make infantry hard counter skirmishers, not archers. The effect on archers is pretty minimal.
Anyway, the dynamic that changes is that infantry can escape, where they couldn’t before. That’s a massive change in relative power; it means archers go from one of the hardest hard counters in the game, to a much softer hard counter, more akin to spears vs scouts. Yes, spears hard counter scouts, but scouts don’t have to take the fight, and that keeps them balanced.
2021 and early 2022 if I remember correctly. Meta was MAA with all civs then archer into Xbow. Regardless of civ, that was 75% of the game on pro scene.
I strongly disagre. 0.03 speed can never be a serious argument for any significant change in the relationship of two units. They can escape? Well yes but xbows have 7 range, by the time you escape you took severe damage already.
Also if you are going swordsman, which is a pretty non-movable threat, you need to push otherwise you have just wasted eco into military that is not put to use.
If i push away your LS with a few xbows that’s a huge win for the xbows player even if the does not kill anithing, cause it gets time to Mass units, Wall, expand, and so on, while you spended so much on that army to get nothing in return
You don’t upgrade a unit to escape basically, you upgrade it to do more damage…
If militia was 0.96 Speed base, same as Archer, then It would be different and squire would actually change something, but we know that celts MAA are even faster than that, and they still get caned by archers as always with basic micro
Think about the scouts vs spears dynamic. Spears are a powerful deterrent, yes, but they cannot catch the scouts, and if they get outnumbered they can even lose. Being able to run away is their single biggest advantage, and it’s enough to completely shift the way a fight goes.
Similarly, well-microed longswords would never be in a position to take damage in the first place. Having higher speed means avoiding damage completely. After all, the longswords are rarely going to be going after the crossbows; far more likely, they’ll sneak in and tear down the archery range producing the crossbows. It doesn’t take too many destroyed buildings to turn the tide of a game, and longswords are very, very good at tearing down buildings. Second only to rams!
The other effect that is actually a benefit, is forcing the enemy to keep his archers close to home. Right now, the archer player can chase the MAA all across the map and then effortlessly attack their home base. With this change, they’d be forced to stay closer to home lest they be attacked. If the MAA can keep even a handful of archers distracted, that’s a major advantage in fights that take place closer to their home base.
Remember: The goal is NOT to make infantry hard counter archers or anything like that. It’s just to make their dynamic more even.
if you wait for path fixing you might never fix milita lol
that said path fixing would only strengthen cavs and archers not milita, path fixing won’t make champions stornger if they are slower to begin with as they are too slow to have a path issue.
its a forever death loop of never ending pathing problem 11
i would disagree with the way you are looking at it.
the higher elo you go the less archers you need to kill a more number of militia-line . milita line do not need speed to “beat archers” they need speed to stop being bullied by archers as archers can out run milita WHILE attacking. that in it self is stupid and awkward as archers are doing 2 tasks and still out run the milita-line. thus you see high elos using 1-2 archer to literally deter or kill 3-5 MAA and even in low elo they will use 2-3 archers to beat the 3-5 MAA. in most cases the archers would be untouched.
if you use 5 long swords to destroy a building and you lose them by idling 2 xbows. you still lost more rss than that 1 archery range cost which can be repalced before it is even destroyed. and those xbows are still alive and can join the with the other xbows that were on the offense all along.
5 long swords do not need 5 xbows to respond, they need 2-3 and thus the archer player will always have room to both defend and attack vs milita line. as long as the milita line poses zero threat to archers this dynamic will never change.
if you want to go with the fantasy of milita line’s primary job is to take down buildings. and then you think “give them more damage to buildings” at some point you would be making rams less relevant. and if you give milita line more pierce armor instead you are just making them into arms and making them into brain dead game play where you make them , right click the buildings and leave them to die along side the buildings with zero micro.
you can go about it in 1 million way, and even if you make the milita line faster like in celts case they will still be countered the same way as mentioned above. BUT at least in celts case if you don’t micro your archers carefully or look away milita line can catch up and kill them. which should be the baseline for all milita line. all milita line should be fast enough to catch you offguard if you are not microing. the fact that you can do 9000 tasks while milita line are still “crawling” towards your archers and then move your archers a bit , go back to doing other stuff. that’s a bad design and bad feeling for the milita player.
milita line should not be MUCH faster than archers, in fact they just need to be 0.05 faster than archers in feudal and 0.1 faster after squires. so so that if you fire and run with your archers they won’t out run you WHILE firing to the point where all your milita line will die BEFORE even reaching them.
so that if you look away, and underestimate them, they will catch up and punish you.
and even if you give them that much of a MS boost, they will still be beaten by everything they are beaten by now such as archers. all what the small MS boost would do is prevent archers from bullying them, but archers would still counter them.
there is a difference between bullying and counteirng, the first means milita line is a literal meme, the second means they at least require the archer player a minimal attention.
Why lose the longswords?
I think that’s what you’re missing; with higher speed, you don’t have to lose them anymore. You can just evade them, attack from a different direction, evade them, attack from a different direction, forever.
The enemy can’t ignore them, because they can take down buildings far more effectively than any other unit in their timeframe. That’s really their wheelhouse; not catching up to enemy units, but forcing the enemy to respond via high building damage.
It doesn’t even require the destruction of the target building; even forcing a villager to repair, and costing resources for repairs, is enough.
Players just need to be able to escape.
again, you are assuming that the higher speed is cavalery level speed. this is not the suggestion. the suggestion is to give htem enough speed to out run archers if they attack move, the archers can still run if they don’t attack. and no, forcing a villager to repair is not enough. if it was, militia line would be all over pro scene and yet it hardly exists.
what you are talking about is the theory of what milita line is, but not the reality. maybe this is also the vision of the devs for them but again not the reality.
and once again, they are not supposed ot be rams, they are supposed ot be more flexible mobility wise. so ofc they should be able to attack from different angles and they already can do that.
0.05 faster than archers won’t change anything about their functionality, it will just make it so that 1-2 archers are not enough to brain dead beat 5 MAA
i see you do the same comparison here again, scouts being able to out run spears is not the same thing as longswords out running archers. scouts are MUCH FASTER than spears to the point where they can find other angles to do damage. longswords can EVER SO slightly out run archers to the point where they can hardly fend them off.
meaning, long swords can’t use their mobility to find new angles if they are chased, the best they can do is waste some time and eventuality die or go back base and put you on the defensive.
scouts can keep going on circles around the spears and your base putting a huge amount of pressure on your micro.
so even if your argument is “squires is made so that long swords can run away same as how scouts run away from spears”
that argument does not stand in the sense that scouts don’t run away from spears, scouts get around spears to do damage. which is impossible for long swords.
you don’t want long swords to be that fast, you want long swords to be fast enough to not be bullied , but not too fast as to become scouts.
so while scouts are around 50% faster than spears, long swords need to be 10% faster than archers. in which casse 10% means you could walk half the map and not get out of archers vision. but if they get too close and cocky you get to kick their ass.
meaning, if longswords are 10% faster, archers will still beat them cuz with micro they will kill at least half the long swords before they even reach. but they won’t bully the long swords to the point where they can play cocky and feel zero pressure and yet kill them all.
The longswords are not going to actually kill the archers. It’s not really worth even thinking about that; archers are meant to counter infantry after all. The only time you’ll see archers dying to infantry is if the archer player makes a big mistake. But then, that’s not the purpose of infantry, is it? Their only real advantage over cavalry is being cheaper and doing more damage to buildings, and that’s exactly what they’re good at.
As far as actually running away is concerned, you overstate your case. Especially in small numbers, with Squires, it’s very easy to split your infantry and get them away without much effort. You split your army, let one half run away across the map while chased by the archers, and bring the others back to attack. If the archer player splits his archers, he makes them far more vulnerable(can’t really micro both at once, after all); if he sends them back, he allows the other infantry to attack from a different direction.
The thing you’re forgetting about this dynamic is that archers require a mass; spears do not. A single spearman is enough to deter 2-3 scouts, because spears function just fine without micro. Archers, by contrast, die very rapidly and to little effect without proper micro. An infantry player could endlessly harass an archer player and keep them at home through their period of greatest strength, when their Xbow transition comes in.
And if they lose that, they lose a HUGE part of their chance to win the game.
you just made the point we are all trying to make, infantry can’t beat archers unless you literally afk with them. there is a difference between "countering infantry’ and stomping infantry. we don’t want milita line to beat archers , we just want them to pose a threat if the archer player is trolling lol.
and then you go to a point of “splitting your army” as if splitting an army is a thing only the militia line can do. if you split 6 long swords intto grps of 3 you just need to split your 2-3 archers into 2 grps as well. what you are talking abotu is strategy, even assuming you won with a strategy it does not mean your unit is balanced, it means your strategy is better.
so your argument that militia will be better with strategy, so are all units. so it’s not unique to milita in a way that can make them feel worth their price.
to begin with every argument you made is wrong by evidence, the evidence of how little milita line are used in comparison to other troop types.
here is one thing you have to think about, even militaline-specialized civs will most likely not use them. while archer/knight specialized civs will almost always use them.
if your civilization is SPECIALIZED in the unit nad yet it’s unused, there is a clear problem with the unit.