Musket infantry will now shatter Aztec Eagle Runner Knight
Musket infantry is now stronger against Aztec Eagle Runner Knight. Especially Sweden’s Carolean and Giant Grenadier combination will shatter Aztec Eagle Runner Knight. With the latest update, Eagle Runner Knight’s ranged attack will have a negative 0.75x multiplier against infantry. Aztec can no longer easily kill musket infantry simply by producing an Eagle Runner Knight. Aztec also needs to craft Jaguar Prowl Knight and Otontin Slinger to kill musket infantry.
It’s a bad thing because Aztec Eagle Runner Knight was a broken unit especially in treaty games. The Aztec Eagle Runner Knight’s ranged attack will get a 0.75x negative multiplier against infantry, making this unit more balanced. Already with the latest update Aztec Eagle Runner Knight is now better against light infantry. In the treaty games, especially the Swedish civilization had a hard time stopping Aztec Eagle Runner Knight. The developers wanted to balance this out by making the Aztec Eagle Runner Knight worse against musket infantry. I am not cluttering the forum unnecessarily. I write whatever the facts are. I am neutral.
They have never been that good, is an expensive unit for weak Aztec eco. People always want to counter them with skirmisher when direct counter are pike unit type.
There are dozens of similar threads on the forum. The titles I opened may be similar, but they are not exactly the same. But anyway, thanks for enlightening me on this.
Hand cav will be stronger too and and dragoons aren’t getting nerfed, so we can look at this as a hard nerf to aztec. Aztec weren’t overperforming in supremacy, so the nerf seems hardly warranted. According to the data they have less than a 50% win rate and considering their underrepresentation and that many players do not know how to play against them, they are very likely in an even worse state than they appear.
treaty ignores so many balancing factors it is a fools errand trying to balance them for treaty and supremacy at the same time where unit cost and early and mid game economies are nearly irrelevant.
musketeers are straight up suppose to counter dragoons, something is wrong if pop for pop musk cant beat dragoons unless the specific unit is meant to do so (aka rifle riders).
musketeers counter cavalry, including dragoons, and soft counter melee infantry. its what they are meant to do, counters generally perform upwards against things they counter.
musketeers are in turn particularly weak towards skirmishers and cannons.
ranged shock infantry, with other words dragoons without horses.
shock infantry=cavalry its why units with bonuses vs cavalry also get bonuses vs shock infantry.
dragoons where never really THAT good vs artillery, their main advantage is that artillery does poor damage to cavalry but in terms of their own damage output they are on par with musketeers pop for pop vs artillery. dragoons only do 11 dmg a shoot towards artillery, a falconet can take 19 shoots before it dies, id hardly consider that a counter, even if we pop normalize it its 8 shoots to kill a basic art unit pop for pop. by comparison skirmishers kill musketeers in 5, even less with tech, and have a massive range advantage.
eagle runner knight make up for this by having higher damage overall and like dragoons also take reduced damage from artillery.
i think you misunderstand what a counter means or at least over emphasis how much a counter comes down to multipliers and underestimate how much is due to other aspects such as resist, type and base stats.
I think the point they’re making is dragoon since they have a multiplier against artilerry you can put them in melee mode against cannon and it turns out well, but Eagle Runner Knights do not counter artillery.
Fair point I suppose but not too concerning.
I could argue that perhaps they should get a bonus vs siege so they can deal with manlets, grenadiers and flame throwers. Actually that’s not a bad idea.
Light cav and ranged shock inf very well should be weak to musks and the like. The whole point of light cav and analogues is to be a less pop effective musk replacement with the benefit of being less vulnerable to skirms and cannon.
That aside, ERKs still beat musks in even pop - the negative multiplier only means that they each do an even 23 damage to each other and the ERK still has more hp/range resist/speed/range. Go look for balance at ruyters and goons - the more basic ranged cav types - and look at how those get smoked by musks.
Also, why are you still pushing for monocomp? Should skims get to kill shock inf? If this change forces out more JPK/Otonin thats only a good thing.
like a faction can be bad and still have a busted unit, that means the faction needs to be looked at and isnt an excuse to never touch the busted unit for the sake of “keeping the faction afloat”. if a faction only works because 1 unit is busted the faction is in a terrible state and should change.
Aztec clearly wasnt suppose to be 100% reliant on ERK, they have plenty of other interesting units people just didnt buy.
ERK have good dps at range, but they and the civ itself have weaknesses to hand cav that can be exploited.
Take a Cossak vs ERK for example which has exactly the same cost as a ERK but slightly faster to train will show how ERK are weak in melee.
Cossak kills ERK in 7 hits while it takes 9 hits for the ERK to kill the cossak in melee. Thats 3 more seconds than it takes a Cossak to kill an ERK.
Cossak kills dragoon in 8 hits white it takes 7 hits for a dragoon to kill a cossak in melee.
Dragoon cost 15 more food and coin and has 7.25 speed compared to ERK 6, so with dragoons you can kite forever and chase down cavalry that are trying to raid, which is something you can’t do with ERK. Because of the kitability, a small group of dragoons is a threat to a larger group of cav because of microability, but a small group of ERK can easily be overwhelmed by a larger group of cavalry.
This is a significant weakness of ERK that can be capitalized on by microing multiple groups of cavalry in order to pull the aztec army apart, and then using the speed of your cavalry to overwhelm the divided forces. Of course this kind of play requires skillful micro and an understanding of the weaknesses of the civ which is are often lacking. In the current patch its much easier to beat Aztec by simply going mass skirm, which they are also weak to.
Aztec are arguably particularly vulnerable to raiding as the community plaza provides for an additional raid target and the pathfinding to garrison from it intothe TC isn’t so great. This vulnerability to raiding is another balancing factor that doesn’t come into play in the no-rush game mode and easily overlooked.