i want LS removed and ths come to castle age. solution of everything. and a small speed buff. but this breaking some civs like malays, bulgarians
Yes because a 20 gold unit in castle age should totally have 12 base attack and have the strength that two of them can beat knights with ease, especially given how fast they are trained. can you imagine how strong this would make a civ like Malians, who have extra PA? or a civ like Goths, who get huge discounts and can pump them out faster?, Japanese who attack faster, Vikings with Chieftens? Malay and Bulgarians wouldn’t be that impacted because both the UT that affect those units are Imp age.
you want the militia line to be more like knights and archers expect to give up some of the bonuses they currently enjoy like
how incredibly cheap they are
how fast they are to train
and the fact that they don’t take bonus damage from most units in the game.
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Ok, so the logic behind asking a militia line buff is: as archer civs stick to archer line and cavalry civs stick to knight line through out the game, infantry civs should stick to militia line. But militia line is bad in feudal/castle so infantry civs can’t do that -> militia line should be buffed to keep up with kts/xbows in castle age.
Sorry to say, but for 1v1 games this logic is wrong, because base assumption is false: in fact, in imp, cav civs and archer civs are gonna transition away from kts and archer line because their production will not be sustainable. So just as militia line is never seen in castle, kts and archer line are never seen in 1v1 post imp because their production is not gonna be sustainable. In fact is very rare to see paladins in 1v1 games.
So, believe it or not, there are no unit viable through all a 1v1 game, from feudal to post imp, so players are gonna force to transition at some point in the game, and how these transition are performed is often gonna determine the winner of a 1v1 game. Having militia line (and UUs alike it) available and maybe with bonuses, is a huge advantage at a certain stage of the game, due to its uniqueness of being a low gold-cost unit that kills any trash unit, just like have good archer/kts is an advantage in other stages. If you change it to be able to keep up with knights and xbows, in order to avoid to screw the transition mechanics, you need to make it a gold intensive unit, losing this uniqueness.
So militia line is perfectly fine as is, and “infantry civs” are civs that excel in infantry transition, rather than civs supposed to use militia line during all the game (just like cav/archer civs cant make kts or archers through out the game).
In conclusion, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but before suggesting fancy balance changes, you’d better consider that AoE2 is NOT a rock/paper/scissor game, while it actually is a game of transitions, which IMHO is way more interesting and is the reason behind its longevity
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except pikes train faster, are far cheaper, and win very very cost effectively in numbers.
gasp, it’s almost like Knights cost so much more then 25-30 long swords.
except heavy camels aren’t underpowered, they do exactly what they are supposed to do. wreck melee cavalry, and they do it hard.
good news, if you have 3 longswords vs 1 knight the longswords win with 1 unit lost. 2 longswords come very very close to beating 1 knight, so you don’t even need 3 to 1, if you had 5 longswords vs 2 knights (225 food and 100 gold vs 120 food and 150 gold) the longswords win that fight too.
You may have noticed that that only makes my argument stronger?
Or perhaps you didn’t notice; you only tend to notice things that confirm things you already think.
225 food + 100 gold vs 120 food 150 gold. 
You know many high-level players often buy food in castle age @ 130 gold/100 food? (I rarely do it myself, but that’s because I’m not good enough to use the market well.)
And you completely forgot about my point that faster units should be weaker (relative to their cost) compared with slower units, just one paragraph after you stated that you think HC are fine (and as a corollary not at all inferior to Halbs)?
except one is intended to counter cavalry and the other is not. just because you want the game designed that way has absolutely zero bearing on anything.
often? no. sometimes? yes. but definitely not often.
this is again, purely your own opinion on what design should be, thankfully, you aren’t in charge of game design, because otherwise we would be running around with 20 gold longswords that train in 21 seconds and beat everything else in the game cost effectively.
depends - halbs are more cost effective, HC are more supply effective and better at forcing an engagement.
also buffing HC would require rebalancing all civs that get HC around the new stronger HC. so your answer is to radically rebalance the game.
This is not a discussion, because you don’t appear to try to understand my arguments, and you certainly don’t engage with them.
There are some matters where I recognise neither of us are wrong, we just hold different opinions, but still we’re not going to change each others mind.
We’re just writing down our opinions and arguments for the benefits of onlookers. It’s a show, a debate, a spectacle. Not a true discussion.
A spectacle can be somewhat useful but with you having 28 posts in this topic as of this writing (more than the OP), and myself having 12 posts, the fact we’re drowning out other voices is probably becoming the dominant effect. Honestly 12 posts is probably too much already, I should stop replying. And so should you, unless you actually have something innovative to add.
i understand your argument just fine. you don’t like the design of the game, because despite the fact units like Heavy Camel, which are cheap, fast to train, and cheap to upgrade, beat heavy cavalry hard, you want them to be better and more well rounded.
but on the other hand, you refuse to consider what else that would do to balance.
you said at one point you wanted HC to have 3 more baseline attack, and 3 less bonus damage, which sure, leaves them the same vs Cavalry, but it also makes them MUCH MUCH better against anything else, and you don’t change the cost, the upgrade cost, or the training time to reflect that point.
that’s just an example of why I don’t like your ideas. the same with the Swordsman line - you want to buff it by making it much stronger, but at the same time, its still going to be cheap and fast to mass, and the only real counter you would leave for the unit is the archer line (unless ofcourse that person is Malians), as they would cost effectively beat knights. this creates problems balance wise.
right now the Swordsman line is balanced around the fact that while yes, its cheap and easy to mass, it’s overall use is very narrow.
the broader you make a units appeal/value, the more it should cost and longer it should take to mass up. this is reflected in the cost and training time of the knight and archer lines.
you make it sound so simple yet you ignore the far reaching consequences of your changes.
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The overarching theme of these types of threads and arguments are all built upon one big assumption: whatever unit they are trying to “rebalance” are weak/situational/does not do their job good enough/does not work the way I think they should be/low exposure etc etc in their mind. With this massive assumption in mind, its only logical for them to buff LS/UU/Cav Archer/HC/whatever and does not consider anything about the possible consequences.
Balance idea is idea, but tossing ideas around like this is not good imo. I guess to each of their own.
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The problem is that you are assuming that a regular game will continue in post imp… most of the games end way earlier and in high competitive games, they will transition to hussar most of the times, becuase they are more versatile units.
The other problem is that militias should be a 100% aggresive unit (because they are too slow to catch any enemy unit), but they are not powerfull enough or spammable enough to take that role (unless you are goths)
You don’t want militias to fight toe to toe with knights and xbows, ok, thats understandable, they SHOULD be weaker than knights and xbows SHOULD be their natural counter. But devs should at least rework the militia line stats to make them a cheap gold free spammable units that could find some strengh outnumbering their enemies.
Militia line needs a buff. period.
I suggest +1 pierce armor from LS onwards and not on champion only.
think about it I never seen it proposed and its a simple and potent fix
Militia line is not only trash killer, but also buildings razer. +1 pierce from longsword and on will let them do that in castle age too, not only imp
Champion can get +1 melee armor or have the upgrade cost/time reduced.
Also +0.05 speed would be nice for a trash killer that must reach trash first.
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Create Long Swordsman (Cost: 60F 20G)
All-purpose infantry unit. Strong vs. buildings and infantry. Weak vs. archers at long range.
__
Soo… that was a f*ckin lie.
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it is all purpose. it deals solid damage to what it attacks, it doesn’t really take much bonus damage from anything, it loses to archers like it says, and if you check the knight
Create Knight (Cost: 60F 75G)
Powerful all-purpose cavalry. Strong vs. infantry and archers. Weak vs. Pikemen, Camel Riders, and Monks.
notice how its strong vs infantry.
the knight is supposed to beat the longsword.
also notice how it says “POWERFUL” and the LS does not.
working as intended.
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That’s pretty debatable. If it’s purpose is defined as anti-trash and anti-eagle then it’s not really all-purpose, is it? Everyone knows for a fact that they’re pretty subpar at anything other than that. Not taking bonus damage from knights and archers is meaningless since that’s not why they lose to them in the first place.
And they aren’t even strong vs “infantry”, unless you mean pikemen since eagles can nope tf out of that engagement. Also, yes of course the knight is supposed to beat the longsword - notice the point isn’t making them defeat what they’re not supposed to, it’s just all-rounding their stats so that they don’t trade so horribly against everything when the game isn’t the post-imp trash war.
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it still does solid damage to pretty much everything, having higher base attack then most castle age units.
it doesn’t say “powerful all purpose” it just says all purpose. it does reasonable damage to pretty much anything it can touch. that makes it all purpose. (camels, pikes, skirms, on the other hand definitely lose out on this).
and if eagles are running away from it, that means they know its not a good fight for them. food for thought but that seems like a good thing to me.
so how do you do that without breaking game balance? because everything i have seen proposed either completely redesigns the unit to be something else, or doesn’t accomplish what the presenter wants to happen.
giving it a speed buff isn’t going to help it trade better against knights or archers is it?
stats changes would do that, but then you venture into the realm of how do you do it without breaking it balance wise?
food for thought giving them just 1 armor and 5 health means 2 LS can beat knights.
I am all for buffing the Militia line, within confines of what they are supposed to be, because that doesn’t require you to rebalance the entire game.
reduce supplies and LS upgrade cost a little bit.
increase LS to .95 speed. increase 2HS/Champ to 1.0.
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I’ve been saying 1 melee armor and 0.95 base speed from LS and up. This serves two purposes: Armor for less awful trade vs the ever-present knight for a supposed all-purpose unit, speed to cause a few losses vs infinitely kiting archers instead of zero. Want to kite infantry indefinitey use cav archers. I’m pretty confident that this would help the militia-line in castle without sacrificing game balance. And even then I’m sure the long sword still wouldn’t be used much. Archers and Knights would still be top-tier as always and it wouldn’t be this change that would make them suddenly crap. Guaranteed you will still use those two a lot.
Applying these changes to the LS ensures we’re not touching Feudal wars where the M@a rush is viable.
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so giving them 1 armor means 2 longswords now beat a knight.
so how do i, as say franks, stop someone from killing me in early castle age with a LS flood?
but you shouldn’t be using infantry against archers.
except now i can flood civs with bad archers with longswords and laugh at them in early castle age. especially as Malians, Teutons, Burmese, and Japanese.
except 2 LS now beat a knight and are able to be fielded earlier and train faster.
They beat a knight and remain with a ~6 hp Long Swordsman. Who got the better trade?
Also, if they have amassed LS by early castle then how do you think their eco is faring? That’s a helluva lot of a food investment. You have knights, mobility. Take advantage of their eco being behind, raid them, further the gap. What are they gonna do, turn their LS back to base? Panic try to spam spears? You can still mop the LS in your base with half the knights in number or even less if you mix in a few archers. How is the other player gonna recover from a mass LS loss? Small chance unless you’re Goths.
This is like asking how am I supposed to prevent an M@a all-in if I’ve been going full-boom + naked archers? There’s always an answer for these things. Walling, counter-raiding.
When facing militia-line users know they’re taking a big risk. The food investment on the units themselves, plus their upgrades(rax+blacksmith) are big. You on the other hand can get crossbow upgrade which costs less than LS upgrade, not to mention archers don’t cost food. Knights are available right off the bat, too. Infantry needs several upgrades to get rolling. Why should the opponent’s strategy be punished hard with little effort on your behalf?
Yes of course, infantry will lose vs. massed archers any day any time and these changes don’t alter that. The point is making the trade less abysmal.
Except now, as a civ with bad archers, you should know not to go heavy on archers on late feudal/castle+ now that infantry is a core unit too; Instead of going archers with practically every civ like it is right now. Talk about castle meta diversity when we have stuff like Viking crossbows being a trillion times more useful than their infantry in castle age. Sad.
Why? Did I mention any changes to costs and train times?
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i don’t know, one cost 90 food and 40 gold and the other cost 60 food and 75 gold.
they don’t need to amass them, just get an advantage.
except those knights can’t even leave their base because the LS are already in their base. so GLWT.
the upgrades on knights are even more expensive.
and what if your franks or bulgarians? odds are you’re not even thinking archery range.
yes but i can also start massing up militia line sooner. and what upgrades do i need? m@a? common opener these days. LS? get it right after i hit castle and start the flood.
knights need bloodlines otherwise that whole 6 HP surviving thing is a lot bigger.
no, but since you didn’t mention them, why should i assume you change anything? if you’re changing something MENTION IT. it FACTORS INTO BALANCE.