Do Monaspa really need that much melee armor? Base Monsapa have 3 and the Elite Version 5. It definitely doesn’t suit their glass cannon role. In my opinion they are totally fine with their attacking bonus (from nearby monaspa and knights) and their passive regeneration.
Btw base Monaspa (3) almost have the same melee armor as base Bojars (4) 
What do you guys think about this unit? I personally think they should get nerfed -1 or -2 in the melee armour stat.
They have 75hp/90hp instead of the 100hp/120hp/160hp, so I think the objective is to make them good against melee units and weak against ranged units, just like leitis/cataphracts.
So I would rather nerf them by removing 1 PA, even though it is impressive that they can beat knights/cavaliers in a 1v1.
thats weird thing, they win against a knight while not even factoring in their porential bonus attack (nearby monaspa and knights).
A Knight costs 60 food and 75 gold
A Monaspa costs 60 food and 45 gold
Melee armor is fine, I think is their attack speed that’s too much, currently they attack fast as Knights with higher base attack that can scale up better with more numbers, I mean even in low numbers, Monaspa win vs Knights and that shouldn’t be happening as they are supposed to be stronger in larger numbers.
Nerfing their ROF from 1.8 to 2.2 would fix that issue, but also from every 7 Monaspas/Knights nearby the attack speed is also improved by 0,1, so Monaspas will be wayy worse when unmassed but when fully massed again they are stronger again (as they should), this way people simply won’t be going full Monaspas as soon they get 1 castle up, and also will force the intended mix with Knights (that add to the Monaspa strenght). That also means when Monaspa numbers go down, it becomes even easier to handle them.
Other nerfs to consider are also increasing their gold cost from 45 to 55 (Monaspa is 105 resources… just saying) and increasing their training time from 14 seconds to 17 seconds standard (elite ones still at 14 seconds).
Monaspas are already same as frail as Leitis vs ranged, in castle age they take just 2 more xbow shots, Elite take -1 less Arbalest shot.
the armor is probably a tweak to make monoaspas less oprresive against the counter units as they have a lot of bonus damage. In exchange for less HP.
The civ is designed around abusing Monaspas. With basically every new DLC we got at least one (intendedly) OP melee cavalry unit, it seems to be a selling concept of FE.
But I feel with how good Knights already fill the Cav role in the game and we’re basically out of creative ideas now the only way to make them attractive is to just make them increasingly more powerful…
BTW I have a creative idea for a new Cav UU that wouldn’t be OP. It was first thought as an idea for Romans.
An anti-Raiding cav with low armor, but high speed and bonus damage against the most commonly seen raiding units whcih could be trained very fast from Towers aswell. This would be an entirely new tactical concept we don’t have so far in the game.
Exactly, they are weaker against bonus damage, and chippers.
I wanted to make kind of the same post just a few days ago 11
I strongly agree that they still are too strong and too easy to mass.
My first thoght was as well to reduce their melee armor. But honestly, I think increasing their cost, increasing their training time or even lowering their base attack could all be viable options too.
non-elite Boyars have 6 melee armor now
They have -40 hp compared to most other cav unique units. So they’d die sooner than other cavalry uu against counter units and ranged units. Strong melee armor will keep them good against melee units. Sort of like Boyars trading speed for that extra melee armor.
Have you ever tried Leitis against knights? Boyars? Which cavalry uu costs high and yet loses against knights? And lets say if something does, why would anyone collect thousands of stone to produce such a unit.
Cavalry uu which don’t have any special property like Cataphracts should have an enormous advantage over the knight line. Otherwise nobody will ever make such a unit.
That’s just true for Leitis, coustillier with some hit and run as well, so many unique units. Unique units require 650 stone for a castle. Stone collection rate is low and collecting stone very early will put the player severely economically behind. So a cavalry unique unit needs to be strong. Whatever seems to be the problem of a Monaspa is purely because of early stage Georgian eco and military benefits.
If you nerf the Georgian early game a bit, they won’t get a big lead and produce that many Monaspa so early. Removing the hp regeneration on scouts or giving them a -50 wood penalty or reduced radius of churches will simply fix that.
You could probably lower the base rof to 1.9 and increase it by 0.05 for 14 units. 2.2 rof is abysmal. Knights shouldn’t dominate over cavalry unique units.
Cost to 55 definitely no. It becomes more expensive than Coustillier overall and would cost more gold than Leitis which are stronger units. You could probably increase tt to 15 seconds or increase the number of units for extra attack for non-elites.
they have 4 melee armor without upgrades, monaspa has 3 without upgrades. get your facts clear and dont try to correct things that arent wrong.
you talk a lot about leitis and coustillier. problematic units that should get discussed on a different forum. we are here talking about the Monaspa and its melee armor stat.
Regarding the other cavalry Uus, Hera made a video about that topic:
While he agrees Monaspa is overtuned, is fine with the new direction taken on the recent Cavalry UUs.
ironically from a game design perspective I think it would make more sense when standard cav had higher base attack and less HP and the UUs vice versa.
higher HP means a higher long-time value compared to the more easily available standard cav lines
atm the way the devs try to achieve that is by heavily reducing the base gold cost of the UU cav units, but this causes several other issues with these unit, making them felt oppressive in a lot of situations
Sorry my bad about Boyar. I thought the non-elites also got 2 extra melee armor when they were buffed.
They’re not problematic units, that’s my point. Nobody complains about these units after their respective civs’ early game got nerfed. That’s what is needed for Georgians/Monaspa. The changes to the civ should delay the point where they have a bunch of Monaspa but stats on the unit itself doesn’t need a nerf.
He says the same thing about requiring a castle and damage output of melee units not being the craziest thing. And I still believe the overtune is a Georgian factor rather than Monaspa itself.
Such a design and appropriate balance on ranged units would have been interesting.
Now that Monaspa is a hot topic, here we go, don’t think is quite normal to just push back Rattan Archers + pikes with simply Monaspa.
As well charging Battle elephants + Halbs + Elite Rattan Archers with even more Monaspas…
What do you mean with that?
In general archers and CA have way more (abstract) weaknesses than cavalry. And most archer UUs somehow mitigate some of them. And we have a very diverse pool on archer / CA UUs all with specific strengths and weaknesses. I like that.
But this is only possible cause Archers have more weaknesses than cav which can be targeted easily with design. Look at the compbows. They mitigate the weaknesses to Cavalry and Skirms. Funnily compbows are one of the least played archer UUs, comparable to chu ko nus. But most archer UUs see their fair share of playtime without being even close to be oppressive.
And that’s actually the bottom line I want to go to. With the current Knight design I just don’t see attractive cav UUs that aren’t OP. Because tbh… Knights are already close to OP - and super easy available.
There are only 3 ways how you can try to counter them. Counter units - camels and pikes. Monks. And walls/defences. But the ladder 2 of them rarely work. Leaving basically only the counter unit lines as options. Which are slow and predictable. Against camels you add your own pikes, against pikes you add skirms. There is not a lot of space for improvement on that line, as it is already so strong and has very easy and effective followups. Which means any cav UU that tries to be attractive when knights are available has to be an absolute banger.
What I meant was, if knights were weaker than now but still balanced to counter ranged units and eagles, that’d have been interesting. Didn’t mean to say current archers and ranged uu are imbalanced, agree with rest of your post.