The damage from mangaonel projectiles is the stones coming with 100% damage in 1 hit, being easier to surprise the opponent, since the nest of bees would be a rain of fire in an area with the damage with a long animation duration, giving the opponent better reaction time.
I played the BETA and the Stress test and this unit was broken, maybe because of the damage it caused, I believe they made adjustments to make it weaker by pressure from the players, because the fireworks effect scared and really cleaned large masses of archers, but I believe that was why everyone was learning to play.
In the current meta (sringalds everywhere) I don’t see it as a viable unit, only in rare cases where the opponent only made archers. I feel that if the Chinese had similar damage to the mangonel this unit would be much more viable. The problem is, that would make the unit less real.
Nope its not balanced. In fact its a much weaker version of the Mangonel. Ontop of this there are many bugs, for example it does not benefit from the Chemistry upgrade despite being a gunpowder unit, it cannot fire inside water. It misses most of its attacks so it does not deal 8x8=64 damage. The Mangonel displays 3x12 = 36 damage and it deals this damage reliably. 2 Mangonel shots are enough to wipe out a group of Archers.
Meanwhile, the Nest of Bees which should be a superiour unit due to being unique, is in fact much worse and cannot kill the same amount of Archers with 2 attacks.
Hopefully this will change next week, along with nerfs to Springalds so that we can use this unit.
REALLY! funnier is that it’s a single unit that should have better status than a regular onager, as springalds have improved to the point where you only see this unit today.
Do you believe it should change in the next winter patch?
i dont think it will change in the next patch, maybe only later, like the spring 2022 patch (the irony)
i agree it should be better than it currently is, its only redeeming feature atm is the high hp from the landmark, if i wasnt forced into making them as chinese i would rather take the mango (eg vs english and their archer blobs)
Reducing the projectiles not only made it look less spectacular but bugged its animation. The Nest of Bees keeps shaking and smoking even though no projectiles are coming out. Its really obvious I’m surprised its not been mentioned more but I guess not many are playing China atm.
No, only Springalds need to get a nerf. I also think Nest of bees should get a slight buff, maybe on a AoE or accuracy to land all of thoses 8x8 damages.
You can micro around Mangonels or even easier with Nest of bees
For the Trebuchet many people think it’s broken because they just start the game and play giga turtle. In fact they got 16 tiles range but are low dps, very slow units and super useless against units, the english upgrade “Shattering projectiles” is complete buggy or uneffective.
Since I’ve never even touched the Chinese, don’t the nest of bees have a higher range than mangonels? Otherwise, it is pretty much an accepted fact by the majority of casters that the nest of bees is currently a worse mangonel, if for no reason other than it being easier to react to.
The current Nest of bees uses the wrong attack time animation, and the attack power is not even as good as the Mangonels. This is ironic. The Nest of bees was too strong in the closed beta, but now it is too weak.
I think the problem is with NoB’s attack initiation time(frame delay). The frame delay time for Mangonel is quite short, so it can reliably releases its projectiles. But NoB has to wait like 2 seconds until it shoot out its projectiles. So in a large scale chaos fight, the target of NoB often dies before it can shoot, then it switch target, you need to wait another 2 sec, maybe the new target dies during this period as well, and then you wait another 2 sec…in extreme cases, it could cause the NoB not shooting even once in a fight. All units have this problem, NoB just had it worst because of the very long frame delay.
But then again, I also think this type of AoE units are overpowered. A mere 4~5 mangonels can obliterate my hard-trained 50 men army in 5 seconds? That’s very disappointing, and it’s forcing people to mass springald, and the other player is then forced to build even more springald…but it’s not fun. I play history RTS to see big army combats, not ancient tank combats. Maybe what should be done is not buff Nest of Bee to mangonel’s level, but nerf mangonel to NoB’s level.
I know what you’re talking about regarding the differences in damage between closed beta and stress test/release (think almost double the damage?) but your screenshots are kinda wrong? isn’t the above image just bees with university upgrades (as shown by the stars)?
EDIT: I’m wrong. I read the armor and damage values on the screenshot incorrectly.
Nope they do not. This is false information. We already pointed this out several times. 8x8 damage is incorrect since most attacks miss. Chemistry doesn’t apply either.
I think the most powerful thing about nests right now is that some people think nests do more damage than they actually do, and so they keep their distance and take the nest seriously when really they could largely ignore it, push forward, and mop you up.
The problem on the closee beta was more on team games where one player could mass only nest of bees and it would kill everything. Cavalry would quickly melt and even springals were highly ineffective against mass nest of bees because of the area damage
Or the more likely reality they simply over nerfed it. There lies number of possible stat compositions between the current under powered version and the arguably OP one
I think the HP and armour difference is due to the lack of the imperial tech in the siege workshop tho.
Siege is in a really weird spot right now.
They feel insanely costy with really low impact but are absolutely terrible to deal with in mass grouped fights.
The mangonel for example is on so many levels just a bad AoE2 mangonel (less dmg, really static due to pack up/build mechanic, but therefore more tanky, without any bigger upgrades to scale with (more atkspeed is meh… no comparison to onagers)), but costs an arm and a leg to get out and needs so much setup to make it somehow useable in fights.
Overall I feel like Siege workshops and siege cost slightly too much and I’m absolutely not sure if the pack up mechanic is necessary here…
To make them scale more horribly in groups tho, the minimum range has to be increased alot to prevent siege only plays.
Not sure about their plans with everything in context, since units in this game are so much more costy than in other Age games.
