doesn’t make knights anti infantry though - if they aren’t winning cost effectively they are going to lose in the long run.
no on sees the enemy making pikes and goes “let me make knights to counter that”.
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True, but you may want to do that trade in some situations if You get an important adv like securing a hill with gold, or if the trade leaves the enemy eco open
I would love to debate the tempo / eco trade argument, but it is irrelevant to the main post.
The only reason I brought up my point was that Steppes probably shouldn’t be the “Cavalry anti-infantry” unit. There is already a unit that is more versatile that does it better. AND the game doesn’t really have a niche for a unit to be that… The meta doesn’t care if you make Longswords. Knights and Archers consistently beat that with high regularity.
Camels have a purpose. Skirms have a purpose. Pikes have a purpose. Longswords… uh… have less purpose. Why counter the thing that is already unable to compete? And if you make Steppes good against Spear-line, then civs with it just have an easy to mass Cataphract. Which is terrifying.
yes but when you take that trade you realize you’re losing in the short term for a long term gain. but the fact is that is only a short term situation. when we call something a “counter” were talking cost effectiveness. no one disagrees that skirms counter archers, but if you got 5 archers and the opponent only has 1 skirm, it can still be a favorable fight.
except they were talking about giving this unit a bonus vs spears and eagles, units which knights traditionally don’t trade very well with.
they are great for countering trash units and eagles.
except the cataphract has more health, and takes less bonus damage. this doesn’t. furthermore were not talking about giving it insane attack speed like the cataphract or even +18 attack to infantry like the cataphract. nor heaven forbid trample damage.
You are being needless pedantic. Of course the Cataphract is better. Condensing Steppes weakness away from spear-line removes it’s Goldless counter. This inherently breaks the game balance. The reason it works for the Cataphracts is because it’s Unique Unit. The reaons it won’t work for the Steppe Lancer is because the role described isn’t desirable in the meta, and if it does find a home will have no eco up trade check.
but it loses to pretty much any other gold unit, much like the longsword. and its not taking away the weakness completely. its not like they are going to make steppes take reduced damage from anti cavalry units. they are just going to do a bit of extra damage.
and because it gets wrecked by archers and knights.
we aren;t talking about making steppe lancers cataphracts here. a couple points of bonus damage to help. that’s it.
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Steppe lancers are an extremely weird unit right now.
They can be useful when mixed in with knights, and once you have a castle up fighting archers, tartars with Keshiks and Steppe Lancers will have an effecive army extremely cheap on gold. But in low numbers and on its own Steppe Lancers are pretty meh.
However, they really do not need a lot to be effective and useful. Once they get the Elite upgrade and you have a sizeable army Steppe lancers already demolish Cavaliers in a fight with equal ressources spend. The problem here is manyfold:
- What is a sizeable army?
13 Tartar Elite Steppe Lancers (1430 ressources) will lose a straight up fight vs 11 Cavalier (1485) ressources, but can beat them with proper stop micro
26 Tartar Elite Steppe lancers (2860 ressources) will absolutely demolish 21 generic Cavaliers (2835 ressources) even without micro. 26 Cuman Elite Steppe lancers lose this fight and for Mongols is pretty even actually.
I think these are reasonable army numbers to work with. Starting from army numbers above >20 the Elite Steppe lancer actually will perform better in melee fights than the Cavalier. The problem is, that the generic Steppe lancer is pretty bad. Even Tartar Steppe lancers with silk armor (pretty utopious) will lose vs generic knights in the 26 vs 21 fight, while the elite upgrade is extremely expensive. So building up a sizeable army of Steppe Lancers during castle age, keeping them alive and then upgrading them to Elite is just bad in castle age, not realistic to be kept alive, and not realistic to upgrade immediately because of the high cost. All of which while any civ despite Tartars will still fair better with just going for knights.
So the easiest way to fix this would imo be to decrease the cost of the elite upgrade from 900 good 550 gold to 500 food 250 gold. (cavalier upgrade is 300 food 300 gold as comparison and gives the same stat increase, resulting in an admittedly lower percentile stat increase to the knight)
A more interesting variant imo would still be as I suggested several times before to make the Steppe lancer a unit that actually benefits from hit and run tactics.
Right now it has low attack and low attack speed, and I suggest to change this to high attack low attack speed.
11 melee Attack (14 elite) 2.5 Attack speed would be an over all DPS increase of 11%(14%) for elite and make it more rewarding to use their range for hit and run. In that case the Elite upgrade can keep its current cost, as the unit in general will be useful.
Giving the Steppe lancer bonus damage vs the spearman line would work too in my opinion, but I would refrain from giving them bonus damage against eagles. Meso civs (and goths) right now are pretty much the only weakness that Tartars have. Giving them a unit that counters eagles would not be the right decision in my opinion.
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I think you think I’m arguing something different.
You do realize my entire argument was in retort to:
“As I see, everything in Steppe Lancers aim to be a anti-infantry cavalry unit. Imo, I would remove the PA and give +1 melee armor or a little bonus against infantry or like leitis but just 2 or 3 armor points ignored.”
And my point was that this is just building a bad Knight. Which we already have. It’s called Steppe Lancer, and no one plays them. It doesn’t solve their lack of niche problem.
so how would you fix the steppe lancer then?
I don’t know.
But I don’t have to know to be able to debate iterative changes. That’s how life works.
I personally would drop their food cost by 10, as they are actually more prohibitively hard to build than Knights, which shouldn’t be right for a unit that is clearly supposed to be middle of the pack.
I’d probably give them 2 or even 3 Pierce Armor instead of 1. This makes them have a role that is not currently being used.
I very much worry that this is too strong for specifically raiding though. I wish I could cleanly give them extra armor against non-building archers, but that’s not really that elegant.
But long story short if they have speed and pierce armor people would play them.
what? something reliable against archers? you mean like say…light cavalry, which fill that role? taking a unit that has a range and stacking advantage over melee and making it good against archers too is a bad idea.
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Hence the I don’t know.
“People are really good at detecting when something is wrong. People are really bad at determining what is right.” -Mark Rosewater on general game design and user feedback.
I think we can all tell that the unit doesn’t really fit.
But that’s how it goes when they introduce a pseudo “base” unit into a game when it didn’t really need it. It’s probably more correct to just cut the unit entirely, but I doubt that will happen. And it’d make me sad. I think the unit looks really cool.
The extreme states would work, but are also inelegant. Like removing Knight line from civs that get it, and buffing Steppes to be their Knights. But I don’t think anyone actually wants that.
Edit:
My original thoughts on the subject from a year ago. Nothing’s really changed. They don’t fit.
I don’t understand how this is related to my comment explaining how broken 3 p.armor lancers could be.
So u mean u want to transform Lancers to be more like Tarkans.
Ya I guess something like 75 food 55 gold 3 p.armor, 30s creation time lancers would be fine.
Cool idea. Just give them a very low base attack to make them not worth using against melee like Knights or Camels or Eagles, add bonus damage against archers and cav archers (but not skirms), and the unit itself could then have a niche. Not sure if this would be the best approach, but at least the unit would be good at something.
yes because tatars, mongols and cumans totally need more answers to archers. why would i make steppe lancers fill a role that those civs already have filled?
Well cumans and Mongols aren’t the best civs against archers.
But my concern is more the historical accuracy, Steppe lancers were used to pursue enemy flleeing infantry and for hit-and run tactics. I never heard they were used effectively against archers.
yeah historical accuracy is probably easy to overlook in this case. I don’t really have a better suggestion for the unit still. Truth is that Mongols and Tatars both have a really good tech tree even if Steppe Lancer just wasn’t a thing at all in the game.
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mongols have literal fast moving onagers, they have cavalry archers that fire faster, and extra HP scout units.
Cumans have fastly created hussars with full armor, they have paladins, elite skirms with full armor.
and thats why i think they should have a bonus against eagles and pikes.
I never said they would be terrible against archers, but in mid game they have nothing special to deal with them.
Tatars on the other hand have silk armor, which allows their scouts to be effective against archers at all stages of the game.
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knights are a handy one to use. not something they want to use long term (Except cumans) but they definitely hold up for mongols until you can get your deathball rolling.