I beg to differ. Yes horsemen aren’t particularly good early on but that doesn’t mean mutch. French are able to roll out Royal nights as fast as age 2. In multiplayer you give the Rus or French any time at all and they would horse boom. There were no available counters aside from springalds for most civs.
Pro players beg to differ, horseman was the go-to fedual unit at the end of last patch. People were countering knights with horseman amusingly enough.
I get what you’re saying. But the overall scheme for combat is the rock paper scissors as questionably implemented as it is. Yes cheep horse counters expensive horse but horse should be countering horse. (If you follow that good on you) maybe the solution shouldn’t be so heavy handed as relic has done here but saying you’ve never dealt or received French knights is quite a statement.
Please keep this thread up, until this nerf is removed, now scouts are more viable than actually using a military unit. Please revert horsemen changes, horsemen never caused any issues. Relic promised scout nerfs, but instead nerfed horsemen. Stop it and please revert it.
Math speaks devs, please understand
4 Likes
When did they promise scout nerfs?
2 Likes
very early, they told in one of the streams, I don’t remember which.
You will get banned hahaha
sure no problem, as I don’t see much future in AOE 4 as the updates have been let down. I rather play AOE 2 fan servers and AOE Online. If calling out bad balance decision hurts, then don’t work in the industry.
1 Like
But you are being obnoxious by posting everyday until they hear your claim. Lot of people voice their needs for the game but you don’t see them posting everyday. it’s childish… But it’s your decision anyway.
Have a good day.
I am not Math and facts speaks
thanks to this poster
I got this from u/123mop on reddit. Posting here as I feel it’s a better place for the devs/players to see things. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/r5b2f6/horsemen_are_weaker_against_ranged_units_than/
Horsemen received +1 ranged armor and reduced hit points in this patch. Obviously this makes them weaker against everything that isn’t ranged units, but what about against ranged units? Well, it makes them weaker against those as well. For this post we’ll assume that for every ranged attack upgrade the enemy has, you have the corresponding ranged defense upgrade. There is a potential niche situation where you have the ranged armor upgrade and the archer player doesn’t have their ranged attack upgrade in feudal, and in that one case the horsemen are more durable against archers, but like I said it’s pretty niche.
Archer vs horseman:
The classic feudal age matchup.
Pre-patch: 5 damage per hit vs 155 HP. 31 arrows to kill.
Post-patch: 4 damage per hit vs 125 HP. 32 arrows to kill. One MORE arrow to kill, so a very marginal benefit for the horsemen here.
Veteran archer vs Veteran horseman:
Pre-Patch: 7 damage per hit vs 190 HP. 28 arrows to kill
Post-patch: 6 damage per hit vs 155 HP. 26 arrows to kill. Two fewer that pre-patch
Elite archer vs Elite horseman:
Pre-patch: 8 damage per hit vs 225 HP. 29 arrows to kill.
Post-Patch: 7 damage per hit vs 180 HP. 26 arrows to kill. Three fewer than pre-patch
Town center vs Horseman:
This one is quite important for the horseman’s ability to raid the enemy. As town centers have more damage than all archers before the elite upgrade this will be even worse for the horsemen.
Pre-patch: 8 damage vs 155 HP. 20 Shots to kill
Post-Patch: 7 damage vs 125 HP. 18 shots to kill, two fewer than pre-patch.
Veteran horsemen:
Pre-Patch: 8 damage vs 190 HP. 24 shots to kill
Post-Patch: 7 damage vs 155 HP. 23 shots to kill, one fewer than pre-patch.
Elite horsemen:
Pre-patch: 8 damage per hit vs 225 HP. 29 arrows to kill.
Post-Patch: 7 damage per hit vs 180 HP. 26 arrows to kill. Three fewer than pre-patch
So even against the lowly archer, where the 1 pierce armor matters the most, the horsman is weaker except in feudal age where it can survive one additional arrow. Every other ranged unit has more damage and so is less affected by the one armor, excluding the zhuge nu. The zhuge nu is going to be worse against horsemen. Crossbowmen, mangudai, longbowmen, horse archers, hand cannoneers, tower war elephants, and camel archers all kill horsemen much faster. As an example let’s do the crossbowman.
Xbow vs veteran horseman:
Pre-Patch: 12 damage vs 190 HP. 16 shots to kill
Post-patch: 11 damage vs 155 HP. 15 shots to kill. 1 bolt fewer, but this is a larger difference than for the archer because it already takes fewer bolts. The % difference in time to kill is larger.
Elite Xbow vs Elite horseman:
Pre-Patch: 15 damage vs 225 HP. 15 shots to kill
Post-Patch: 14 damage vs 180 HP. 13 shots to kill. As above, 2 bolts fewer so actually not as many individual shots fewer as for the archers, but the overall boost to killing speed will be greater.
Regarding post imp with biology and incendiary arrows, I’m not 100% sure how decimal value damage is handled in AoE4 so I can’t speak to this with certainty, but I’m fairly confident that post imperial age technologies make this disparity WORSE, causing horsemen to die proportionally even faster if both players have these techs researched (notwithstanding unique biology variants of the mongols and french).
So the horseman before the patch vs after, are worse against virtually every ranged unit at virtually all stages of the game. On top of this they are also worse against every non-ranged unit by a substantial margin, and spearmen have become stronger against them as well. Before this patch horsemen were not considered particularly good, failing to be a powerful counter to ranged units as they were intended to be. After the patch I would recommend against making them in basically every situation. They were bad before and are worse now.
This change is so bad it makes me wonder if they were intending to reduce the resource cost of horsemen but found it made them too strong, and reverted that changed without adjusting other changes they had already made.
Edit: As a special bonus note, horsemen now take one fewer shot from springalds to kill in both castle and imperial age.
I got this from u/123mop on reddit. Posting here as I feel it’s a better place for the devs/players to see things. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/r5b2f6/horsemen_are_weaker_against_ranged_units_than/
7 Likes
Unfortunately there’s no math involved in the Relics “design process”.
Switch numbers around and see what sticks.
2 Likes
So it’s proven. Horsemen were totally nerfed. Good job Relic.
2 Likes
Great full math, I did most of the core math and started a poll here - https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/please-balance-dont-nerf-horsemen/186460/30
We need to unite our voices together in one mega thread and we can see the poll results and get Relic to listen to the community!
1 Like
My understanding is horsemen were nerfed because they were performing too well against knights. That’s fine - debuff horsemen vs other cavalry. Don’t freaking nerf their HP.
What they need to do is buff horsemen to be a more effective against blobs of archers and siege and less effective against other cavalry. The update significantly screws up 2 things:
- Horsemen are even worse against early man-at-arms, which was already a problem for the civs that don’t get early MAA or early knights.
- Horsemen are even worse countering archer/siege blobs in late game.
What needs to happen:
- Keep the pierce armor buff
- Revert the hp nerf
- Get a damage/armor nerf against other cavalry so they aren’t competitive against knights (let’s be honest, armored knights should wreck unarmored horsemen in melee). I think you could combine a cavalry-specific damage and armor nerf such that they’re worse against heavy cavalry but still have the same fight dynamics against each other. On the other hand, maybe just a damage nerf against armored cavalry so they still live long enough to threaten archers and siege. I’m not sure we actually want heavy cavalry to kill horsemen faster, but we also don’t want horsemen vs horsemen fights to last 15 minutes.
- Get a damage and/or armor buff against siege.
5 Likes
Horsemen just needed a little love against stacking archerblobs in feudal, so a slight buff.
+10 hp for feudal horsemen only would’ve done the trick.
The patch intended to keep them the same against archers in feudal but make them worse against literally everything else in the game at any time.
2 Likes
True fact, they are weaker against longbow ahah
2 Likes
another option: leave their hp as is but give them 2 pierce armour
simply enhancing their position as anti archers, without making them better again anything else
do you know where this comes from? where did you see/hear it?
1 Like
From nowhere. Knights and men at arms were already Soft counter of Horsemen (the hard counter are logically pikemen and now more), the nerf to the HP does not make any sense.
1 Like
If horsemen are going to be walled off to be exclusively an archer counter, then I really don’t see a point in Mongol early horsemen. They get an early horseman that specializes in countering those dark age archers that don’t exist. This reinforces the dark age scout production from Mongols as the superior choice.