My Suggestion for the British Longbows

Hey guys, I have thought about the British Longbows and why they were so dominant Online, I think I came up with a decent(ish) solution to it, but first lets address the problem:

The Longbow currently has 3 issues:

  • It doesn’t have a Ranged Counter (Skirmish from AoE2/3, but that is a design decision so I won’t mention this anymore)
  • They pick-off Villagers very fast because of their massive range in Feudal.
  • They are extremely easy to produce from the The Council Hall.

My suggestions are:

  • Reduce their range to a basic archer in Feudal, but give it back entirely with their unit-line upgrades. Since they don’t feel broken in Castle or Imp, I think that just a straight up nerf would not be a good balance change for them. Reducing their Feudal Range which is where they are the most busted will make it harder for them to pick-off Villagers so easily, but giving it back as the unit gets upgraded in Castle/Imp maintains their strengths where there is also Siege to counter them.

  • The Council Hall needs to be toned down a little. Maybe it shouldn’t directly produce Longbowman but instead speed-up the production of nearby Archery Ranges? The problem is that English start producing their Longbows (WITH INCREASED SPEED) while everyone else has nothing but a Barracks, so by the time you build a stable, the English already have massed enough Longbows to one/two shots all your cavalry.

I gave this topic a lot of thought as I have been in both sides of a Longbow rush during my many games in both betas, it can be very frustrating when the only proper way to deal with them is to go up faster and get cavalry earlier… which isn’t ideal because you will damage your eco a lot, to the point where the English player might not even need to damage it himself.

Thats all, thanks guys!!

4 Likes

You have good suggestions. I like the speeding up of nearby archery ranges. That’s a solid idea.

2 Likes

Longbows actually don’t have a range advantage anyways. If you want to fire an arrow at long ranges you would want to get a shorter bow design because the shorter arrow could fly farther. That is why Korean archers used such small bows rather than the racial argument that Asians are too small to fire a longbow (the draw weight of a bow isn’t determined by its size and even if it was the Japanese used the world’s largest bows)

I don’t care too much about that tbh, I just want the game to be more balanced at higher levels.

I want this to thrive competitively, everything else is secondary.

Right I am saying that it would be more balanced by eliminating their fictional range advantage.

Its fine for later stages, if you just remove that without giving anything in return the unit will be lackluster.