Cavalry cannot charge uphill. Thus if you are uphill, you don’t get exploded by fire lancers.
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Keyword: past; meaning after
The Chinese are still quite weak in early castle, while the Mongols hit their final form.
About the Rus, first of all you should be crushing the Chinese with early knights, and mounted monks in 3rd age. If you aren’t - you can still build multiple layers of cheap walls. And even if that fails, your main force is knights, mounted monks and horse archers. Fire lancers can’t outrun that.
My bad, I did misread that. I think the unit is totally fine in 1v1, and idk how much Relic wants to balance around team games, but the issue is team game maps are generally a lot bigger and particularly in 3v3/4v4 it’s harder to end games early, and is where the fire lancer has the potential to be overpowered. Specifically in open maps like dry arabia, it’s not feasible to wall in 4v4 and it can be hard to win early, and if they Chinese get to them they do melt landmarks so I at least see the argument.
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It’s possible to be a graphical bug or a removed feature. It is mentioned in the campaign and I have seen posts about it. (for example if a charge is stopped by a spearman, the knight keeps the lance visually but can’t actually charge again for a number of seconds).
Possibly that, as the devs stated that they removed any hill bonus aside from LOS afterwards.
I see your point. Honestly I don’t think they should balance for team games. It might be possible to balance, but Blizz is already struggling to balance 1v1s in SC2, with 3 races. AoE4 has lots more already.
I just don’t think it’s possible. Team games are for fun, and not something the game should ever be balanced around. The amount of tactics you can pull when 4-8 player are involved get astronomical.
Anyways I like your comments on the issue.
There’s no attack or range bonus, but I am like 70% sure the melee unit charge doesn’t work uphill, pretty sure I have noticed it in game but I haven’t tested it in depth. Annoyingly AOE4 mechanics are often obscure or undocumented, and in some cases it’s hard to seperate what are bugs and what are mechanics.
Buff the Chinese early game, and tax system or dynasty cost, and I think we can put some nerfs on fire lancer and chinese bombards (and perhaps bombards in general).
Though I think Firelancer only needs to be nerfed for landmark sniping. It should still have great damage against siege and non landmark buildings IMO.
Clockwork bombard is terrifying. Chinese range buff is amazing, and then you get +50% health.
Taking them out with artillery is difficult, and torching them while they try to run away takes a long time lol
Also, villagers repairing siege in general incredibly quickly needs a nerf… The speed at which is happens is absurd. Great way to snowball
Right, I’m personally not sure how they should or will balance team games, and it’s hard to judge what is balanced in that mode as none of the pros really play team games yet. So all I can go off is my own experience and I haven’t seen the fire lancer in action and forums, and who knows what level people are posting at. Especially when some posts sound like they are spending 30 minutes setting up a base, hard to tell if they are just not strong players and have little military or if it’s just terminology.
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Yeah. Hard to tell. The Chinese are balanced around the fact that they’re OP lategame. Teamgames tend to be insane macro games. Unless it’s pros that target a single player and eliminate them. Which makes sense. But the average player wants to just macro.
I’d say that usually lower skill players prefer team games. I know I do haha. But these arguments are so basic ”We’re in a teamgame and this one guy did something… etc”. There’s 2-4 players on each team. Even if you’re really good, you can’t carry a bad team. It’s so so so hard to say that the Chinese are at fault here.
Anyways my end point is that I really don’t think the fire lancer is an issue. These are low skill games, maybe it’s OP in teamgames, but we have to pro data on that.
As people say - its hard to balance around team games. Perhaps especially 3v3 and 4v4.
Because the obvious response is “don’t play de-facto no-rush for 25-30 minutes and so your first contact is 100 Fire Lancers running into your base and killing you in 15 seconds.” Equally however it is kind of stupid they can do this - and there isn’t really a good counter, because the lancers can just run through the enemy. If you lose a few it really doesn’t matter, their base is toast and the Chinese player can just remake whatever.
At the same time though I’m not sure this is a bigger issue than someone getting about 40 MAA, 10 Mangonels and 10 Springalds/Bombards and just attack-moving through opponents - as with that many Mangonels even Knights disappear in about two volleys.
Since the campaign also has different buildings etc. I think hill bonus probably is mentioned due to being included in earlier iterations and later on removed.
In the norman campaign where you place palings with longbows for the first time, knights also charge uphill.
So I can only guess that they forgot to remove all remarks considering hill bonus or it is a specific feature for one mission.
Huh, I tested on hill and dale and cav can indeed charge, unsure if it’s a bug or just a change that isn’t reflected in game text/dialogue.
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TL;DR, fire lancers are more efficient at dealing damage vs buildings than even cannons. Probably need to nerf the DPS of the torches a tad, or give them a cap to bypass fire armor, to bring them in line for 4v4s.
1v1 fire lancers, not overpowered. Offset by cost of resources to reach yuan, and build.
4v4 fire lancers, extremely overpowered. If a chinese player builds a landmark behind his allies, which is entirely feasible, they then become a horde of units that you can’t base trade with, can’t catch, and will continuously have you on the backfoot as you can’t push out safely without losing landmarks. This is in addition to the longer time to reach the opponents, which fire lancers naturally excel in due to the yuan +15% move speed and 1.88 base movement speed.
it essentially becomes a game of if you’re stone walled, and if you’re able to prevent those walls from being breached at all.
Beatable, absolutely. But it’s an absolutely cheesy strat that seems to dominate 4v4 at the moment.
For stat references, an imperial age torch does 20 damage. A fire lancer torch does 45 damage.
This takes fire lancers 16 hits to kill a house, 700 HP, compared to 35 for other units.
The Abbasid landmark in imperial has 22,000 HP and 5 fire armor. A regular imperial torch, 20 fire damage, will take 1466 hits to kill it.
A fire lancer takes 550 hits, at 1 attack per 2 seconds. This means 100 fire lancers can kill the abbasid player in ~12-14 seconds if the house of wisdom is the only thing left. 100 Horsemen would be taking
around 30 seconds to kill
For comparison, fire lancers will kill an abbasid player faster than 12 bombards (the equivalent cost) can presuming they each started within range. 12 bombards take around 20~ seconds un-upgraded.
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You mean that increased HP wooden wall which is melted in like 2s by Fire lancers? yeah 100% worht it to wall yourself bruh 
If anybody thinks FL are on a good spot they are other pro-China-biased or braindead
Its capability to tear down buidling should be reduced and unit would be fine … untill than its just cancer-unit
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After the winter patch, the devs not only don’t nerf the Fire Lancer but they even increase the torch damage of Elite Fire Lancer by 10
Just stone wall your landmark and put some keep beside them with oil.
Or dont play mongol in 4v4
Mongols used to be hard to deal with with fire lancers as they could move around. It’s always hard to find the last landmark. I don’t know if it’s easier since the movespeed nerf we’ll see.
For some reason the easiest to snipe for me in over 200 4v4 games is English, French and HRE. Chinese you can forget about it. Abassids is very easy and usually the priority target.
Are you sure they didn’t cheat? Cuz I played a 4v4 and suddenly a chinese player had a huge horse army with only 30 vills. 