Militia Line vs Archer Line Relationship : Taking Archer Range into Consideration

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Note : I’m not suggesting any Militia line change.

IDK if anyone has done this before. I was always curious, is LS better against Crossbow than MAA against Archer, or are they equal now with Gambeson? This graph is an attempt to find that out.

I have used a new variable, Time to catch up the archer = Range of archer/Speed of unit. The lower the time, the better the unit against archer line. In Y-axis we have a ratio of “Number of arrows Infantry can take” and “Time to catch up the archer”. I named this as “Probability of Infantry to Win” because the bigger the number, the higher the chance of infantry winning against archer.

Militia line vs Archer
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(For Armenians I considered LS in Feudal Age, THS in Castle Age, Champion in Early Imperial and Champion+Fereters in Late Imperial. I also threw generic Eagle for comparison.)

It is really surprising for me to find out that Castle Age is the best time for Militia line against Archer line. Meanwhile, that’s the weakest time for Eagle line.

Worth to mention Feudal Age is the only time when Archers can just hit and run forever as Squires is available only in Castle Age. Also number of hits to take down archer is also something to keep in mind. MAA kills in 5 hits, LS in 4, THS in 4 and Champion in 3. Perhaps this is the reason I feel like Champion is actually the strongest state of Milia line against archer line.

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Its a nice interesting analysis. I’d request changing the Y-axis legend as well in the figure and also add X-axis legend.

Interesting that theoretically this is the case. So if the game were like units are autospawned like CBA and you only need to fight. But I guess this is where economy and the number of other things to do become huge factors in actual games.

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Change into what? You mean like this?

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Well in X-axis we have various units. Adding just one unit will be confusing. So I used different age.

Indeed. I thought even in theory, LS would suck. I guess that’s not the case anymore thanks to Gambeson.

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Case in point:

Full infantry in Feudal age and early castle age!

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Something like “Number of archer line arrows the militia line can survive” for Y-axis vs “Age”.

Ya he could do plenty of other things and win against mbl in Arabia, especially with a big civ advantage.

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Infantry+ towers. Imo not really full infantry = viable…

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Against Goths? And Tower + MAA was always a viable strategy.

Oh that one? As I said I was interested on boarder picture as only Number of arrows is not enough. Anyway, I will do that when I get time. But I’m planing to make that for individual units and then put them on the same graph as mine.
For example, Militia survivability against archer is 15/20/15/18 in Feudal/Castle/Earlt Imp/Late Imp. But MAA and THS both surviving 15 shots are not same as Archers now have 3 more range. On the contrary, THS also has +10% speed.

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True. By castle age it was pure Longsword though.

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On that basis, full crossbow is not full crossbow if you make mangonels, skirms or monks. Full scouts is not full scouts if you also make spears or skirms. Full knights is not full knights if you also make monks, skirms or pikemen.

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And pure full xbow/scout/knight can still achieve more than pure full militia line.

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Not only because of the tactical advandage (range or speed) but because they don’t require an all-in commitment. You can go Archer into Xbow or Scout into Knight and have 2-3 TC boom meanwhile.
By my experience so far, if you don’t go only 1 TC, you cannot produce enough infantry to compete.

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I just developed a new Concept for Infantry.
Sorry if it doesn’t fit this topic perfectly, but it’s where the current discussion is going on.

The idea is to add a new compositional partner to Infantry. Similar to what I did with my Thread for new Trash Units .

But this isn’t a trash unit, neither it’s a Power Unit. It’s designed to work well together with the current Infantry in the Game, especially the militia line. This line is mostly weak to Archers, but also to some extend to Siege. It’s intended to be “all purpose” but atm it lacks on a lot of edges, not only against Archery.

So the new Unit idea is the “Bowman” (very creative, I know). It’s an Archer with Bonus against Archers and Siege. But instead of having a lot of Armor and Bonus vs Spears as the Skrimisher, it instead has extra Range. This is intentional to give it a usable feature tor micro, especially skirmishes. So much, that the unit will probably one of the best profiteurs of good micro. And this is totally intended, as the composition partner Infantry is one of the units benefitting the least. So it’s compensating for the Skill downfall of Infantry this way.

The best counters to it is probably Cavalry. But also Siege and generally defences should be good, despite not countering them as hard as regular Archers. Even good armored Infantry itself might be quite strong against it.

It has an Imperial Upgrade, but this is only almost exclusively to be put in for Infantry civs missing Bracer. Ofc there might be one or two civs that get it with Bracer, but only as a destinct exception. This is due to the Scaling of the unit as low Gold and Infantry support, which both scales very well in the lategame. Skirms also don’t get an Imp upgrade for good reason.

Here is my current design idea:

Name Bowman (F) Elite Bowman (C) Imperial Bowman (I)
Armor Class Archer Archer Archer
Produced at Archery Range Archery Range Archery Range
Production Time 27 s 27 s 27 s
Production Cost 20 G, 45 W 20 G, 45 W 20 G, 45 W
HP 30 35 40
Speed 0.96 0.96 0.96
ROF 2.4 2.4 2.4
Attack 3 Pierce 4 Pierce 5 Pierce
Atk Bonus 2 vs Archers 2 vs Archers 2 vs Archers
Atk Bonus 2 vs Siege 2 vs Siege 2 vs Siege
Range 5 6 7
Accuracy 80% 85% 90%
Melee Armor 0 0 0
Pierce Armor 0 0 0
Benefits from Archer Upgrades Archer Upgrades Archer Upgrades
Upgrade Cost 40 s, 150 G, 200 F 60 s, 300 G, 350 F

There might be some general changes needed when this is added, especaially a compensatory buff like extra HP for archers and increasing the Raneg of the (non-elite) Longbow by 1, just so it wouldn’t get outranged by the Bowman for Britons :wink: .

Edit: for the TO: This concept alone won’t do much to bring Infantry in the meta, so there will still be Changes needed to it. I’m currently thinking that probably the general idea a lot of people already proposed in the forum for kind of a “Bloodlines” for the militia line would be the most promising “easy” adjustment.