What is this? Do steppe lancers need to be nerfed? Absolutely not.
Do Steppe Lancers need to be nerfed?
- They need a nerf
- They are fine
- They need a buff
20 Elite Steppe Lancers easily beating 24 pikemen:
Some of the pikemen attack some villagers. Some of the pikemen also might have gotten confused for a few seconds, trying to reach an unavailable target instead of attacking a nearby lancer.
But the main reason the fight went as it did was that the lancers stacked on two tiles, using stand ground patrol, letting more lancers attack at the same time.
This is how formations work in AoE2: units in a formation treat other units in the same formation (and occasionally units in other formations) as having no collision size. To some degree, this is essential for having formations work at all: with a patrol, the formation overlaps itself, and it would be a complete mess if the units in a mixed formation (in which a certain unit must always be at the front) had to move around each other without being able to overlap, during a patrol.
Incidental poll:
Did you know that you can make units patrol in a circle without ever reversing direction?
- Yes
- No
Steppe lancers benefit from stacking more than other ranged units, like cav archers, because it’s normal for all of a group of cav archers to be able to attack the same melee unit. It is not normal for lancers to be able to do so; and so lancers are balanced to have higher attack than cav archers, using a damage type against which targets are usually less armored. This makes their power when stacked up higher.
So my suggestion: change how formation collision works. When units in a formation are stationary, track their collision boxes. When two stationary units occupy the same space, don’t allow other units in the formation to move into the same space.
The normal behavior is to be blocked when one unit is in a space. This change would probably work if stationary units blocked others at the same limit of one unit; using two units instead would sort of just be accepting some of the old behavior.
Examples: when a formation files through a 1-tile gap, many columns of the formation overlap, but since they aren’t stationary, this change wouldn’t affect them. Someone could still stack a bunch of units this way; just not all of the rows at once. A 6x10 formation could have 10 units stacked, or 20 from two rows; it could not have all 60 units stacked.
If a formation is on patrol that reverses course and is paused midway through a reversal, all the units would overlap. But if the formation is given a new command, all the units are designated as ‘moving’ before calculating pathing for any of them, so all of them can move through each other once again.
If just some of the formation was selected before pressing the stop button, then the units that keep moving would not be able to pass through the double-density formation. If a formation that is not overlapping itself was stopped, but some units kept moving since they weren’t selected, those units could still move through other stopped formation members that are at single density, as long as this is how it works now. Note that with box formation with a monk in the middle, it can be desirable for the monk not to be able to escape a stopped box formation because then they can be attacked, and manually commanding the monk to move back to the center resets conversion.