I can’t tell if you are being serious but how are Poles OP in Dark Age? Or in in Feudal Age? Their only food bonus is the Folwark which plenty of other civs are on par with economically.
The Szlachta Priviliges could get slightly nerfed as I pointed out before, in return for some improvements of their Imperial Age giving them at least some chance against the many stronger Archer, Camel and Heavy Cavalry civs in the late game.
Not sure what the best way would be: Plate Barding Armor, Paladins, Halberdiers, better Archers or even Siege Engineers.
I think you should ask a team mate/friend of yours to 1v1 you. You go Poles, he goes Goths. Let the Goth player boom, and test out who has the best imp spam
Seriously though, what are the Poles even supposed do against cheap Huskarl and Halberdier spam, lacking Hand Cannoneers and FU Paladins? They have no chance.
“playing defensive” is not something you choose in high elo. You generally have to be as aggressive as possible, unless you want to boom, and in case you wanna boom, you still need to make units to defend. A siege workshop. A monastery. There is simply no time to put more than say, 3 villagers to stone without losing to a full Pikeman/Mangonel push (for example). Starting to mass Knights at minute 28 (when you realistically can get a Castle), AND having the resources (iirc ~800 total resources) upfront to get the discount is not something easy to do in high elo games. In general, by minute 28, assuming no units die on either side, IF you go for cavalry play you should have produced already about 20-30 Knights. These 20-30 Knights are what allow you to stay afloat in case your opponent decides to go all-in and do a full push with his, by then, 40+ Crossbowmen. You cannot just start producing these Knights later because you need to fight the 40+ Crossbowmen now, if you don’t have enough army to fight them, your opponent won’t allow you to mass army later on and you won’t have anything to defend Crossbows raiding your woodlines, idling your farms, taking you off gold. Starting to produce cheap Knights sounds appealing yes, but it’s a case of “better to get the more expensive thing now, than the cheap one in 2 years”. This is a very important concept if you wanna be high elo in Age of Empires, which I guess you are not because apparently in your elo the lack of production until minute 28 (when you get a Castle) just goes unpunished, in high elo it does not.
there are no build orders for early Castle age, it’s generally always “adapt”. Regarless, there are objectively wrong decisions that are wrong 100% of the times, such as sending 10 villagers to Stone in late Feudal, or dropping 4 Barracks as Slavs in early Castle.
I don’t know how else to say this but Poles get a power spike in LATE Castle age and that’s it. Outbooming other civs as the Poles is all in your head, there are many civilizations that are FAR better if you plan to boom, for example Slavs bonus = Poles until Castle age, Persians have faster working TCs (if you do a standard 3 TC boom in Castle age, that translates to like 2-3 extra Vills/minute which is far more valuable than what Poles have), Burgundians have discounts + can do eco techs 1 age earlier, Chinese start with 2 extra vills and get discounts on a lot of things.
spamming cavalier with 4 total Pierce armor, even for 30g, is a waste of time and resources.
Aztec midgame is probably strongest atm actually, after that, maybe Burgundians or Ethiopians or something. All civs that can flood their go-to unit without having to drop a Castle + research a tech.
yep I bet in 900 elo it is. Classic case of a poor ballet dancer blaming his shoes here I guess.
you don’t save gold, you just wrote above that you are discounted by 33%, but also take 33% less shots to kill? So it sounds that at best you are trading equally resource-wise but being more pop-inefficient, and if the Arba player fights beneath a castle, 15 pikes + his Crossbow blob beat anything you can send at him as the Poles and you HAVE to push a Castle eventually to destroy it (Imp play is a lot about holding & capturing positions as we said).
you usually do cuz u have to, you can complement the Cavalier with some other unit, but the problem is, Poles don’t have anything good to complement the Cavalier.
Aggression → fight → capture territory → win. Unless you don’t play to win the game, at some point you have to face the Arba blob.
you can do the same with Turk Hussar for example, which is FAR harder to counter due to having tons of pierce armor, it’s nearly invulnerable to TC fire.
The counter to raiding is Stone Walls + keeping up vills production in the late game to replace dead vills, hard as it might be to wall your full farm eco it’s not “literally uncounterable” as you claim.
Regardless if you wanna go for that kind of strat, again there are far better civs that have much smoother transitions and better map control mid-game, for example Tatars or Khmer.
Mate we are gonna need an ELO check here because I suspect I am talking to a <900 player who has 0 clue of how the game is played at moderate/high level so this discussion might be a waste of time as your perception of the game is flawed by random events that in high elo don’t occur such as the opponent castle-dropping your main TC at minute 26 because neither side scouts or gathers the right resources or applies pressure or knows about army compositions.
So now you take earlier ages into account? Before you made statements that this thread is about imp only… Change your mind rather quickly, what? 11
Ok they are average in dark age. But almost no civ has a meaningful dark age bonus tbh.
They have the mining bonus plus the folwark. Have you seen heras maa trushes? It’s beyond broken.
So another time you just ignore the facts, you just claim that poles wouldn’t be strong in feudal. But everybody sees that’s just not true. They are one of the best feudal age civs. Don’t know if the best, but they are at least on par with the other feudal powerhouses.
Why is the lategame so important to you? Are you 1k elo? The midgame is where most games are decided. And poles just happen to have the best midgame in the game. And in the lategame they are strong enough to snowball that lead with their insane unit spams.
Poles just don’t need any of these lategame techs, they are strong in the lategame even without them, because of their insane midgame.
I didn’t spoke about a standoff. But I also think that goths will have a big problem against a mix of about 3 obuch : 1 skirm : 1 winged hussar. I speak about that I think that the poles lategame spam is even more deadly to many civs than the goth spam.
I think Obuch is the only unit the Poles have that can stand its ground in late game. But I don’t think Poles can really opt for a flood/spam the map type of play. The Cavalier are too weak realistically, and other units (other than Winged Hussar I guess) they have aren’t spammable. They have almost no FU lategame units, so the longer the game goes on the worse it gets for them. When it comes to trash wars, no Halbs, no FU Skirm. Only the Winged hussar has some potential, but im not sure if it’s enough to offset the lack of upgrades in your other trash lines.
To me Poles come off as a decently strong tower rush civ (but certainly not even close to old Koreans or old Incas strong) and thus have a good potential to snowball games in Feudal. But I would not pick Poles for Arena.
Have you seen Hera’s Magyars Scouts 20 pop rush? It’s beyond broken.
Don’t confuse the player being good with the civ being good. I will agree the gold mining from stone needs a small nerf but I don’t think Hera won those games because of the bonus, it’s not uncommon to die to tower rush especially for less experienced players.
literally some of the best choices vs Goth spam.
I think many people in here that you are talking to are significantly higher than 1k elo. I am not exactly sure how games in, say, 800 elo are played and how long they last but I would say in 1600+ elo, you win 15% of the times in Feudal, 30% of the times in Castle age and the rest in Imp. People in moderate/high elo brackets know how to wall properly, how to scout, check for upgrades and come up with reasonable army compositions to face what the opponent is doing. As such, it’s rare in mid/high elo that you are just caught off guard by 30 Polish Knights, as soon as you see a Castle by the Poles, for example, you know that the opponent will do either Obuch + Skirm or full Knights spam, so you prepare accordingly. 90% of the times it will be Knights spam as it’s the more powerful option to push and end the game fast, and those Knights no matter how cheap they are still die to Pikeman/Monk and can be walled off. It’s really not that different than playing vs a Franks Knights flood, the counters are the same and 5-10 extra Knights rarely matter if you set up your counter strategy properly.
Heavily disagree. I think the szlachta privileges cavalier is one of the strongest lategame units in the game. Maybe not as strong as the Mangudai but we all know that comes with a tradeoff.
Maybe they fall of against franks paladin a bit. But don’t forget, paladin is way more expensive than szlachta privileges.
And btw, zlachta priviliges cavaliers trade very efficient even against franks paladins.
Ho can you state a unit would be bad if it trades efficient against the most famous unit in the game while costing only 33% gold AND being versatile at the same time?
I don’t think you’ll see players try to counter Poles Cavalier with Cavalry of their own. I certainly wouldn’t. That would be the only way to play into the Poles strength, which would be of course a big mistake. Any civ with FU arb would play xbow/arb. CA civs could opt for CA/HCA
There I completely agree. But do cav civs have a real choice?
And against archer civs poles have huge advantages in the midgame: Towers, walls, castles all are easier to get to for poles as they have that mining bonus. And Poles can also go for the reduced knight line which completely shreds xbows in castle age btw.
So comparing Poles against archer civs when ONLY taking the lategame into account is extremely misleading, as poles should have big advantages over archer civs in the midgame and should enter the lategame with a big lead.
In competitive games it’s all about wisely choosing unit counters and compositions, not committing to one predictable strategy only because it’s your civ’s biggest strength.
Read the title of this thread again. It says: “Poles late game”. If the midgame was any concern we wouldn’t be discussing this.
I think so. Against Teutons you’d struggle because their FU Cavalier is just significantly stronger. you’ll have too much armor difference, and there’s also the option for Halbs with extra armor, and even TK would be impossible for Poles Cavalier to kill.
Persians would be able to mix in Trashbows with their Camels, so I’d wager the fight would still go very poorly for Poles, since trashbows cost only wood, your discount wouldn’t be enough to offset all the advantages.
Sicilians would probably do OK with the Hauberk tech, you’d again have a huge difference in stats between your and their Cavalier (and it’s not even a cavalry civ).
Malians Farimba Heavy Camel would decimate Poles Cavalier
Berbers have a smaller discount, but it applies earlier than Poles discount, so they’d have time to mass units. A mix of knights and camels in castle would be absolutely deadly still.
Saracens have all the options in the world, Arbs, Camels, Memelukes, CA…
Indians would be a poor matchup, they have a solid eco with the vill discount, and fighting Camels with Cavalry will still not end well.
Is all you do tear statements out of context? Just as now, it was you who brought up the Poles as supposedly “OP” at all stages of the game which I only had to disprove.
Armor in melee vs melee is usually not that big of a difference. Except ofcourse if you have insanely armoured units like TK or boyar.
And poles cavalier only misses 1 (!) melee armor…
BTW you can check all the knight line matchups by using aoe-combatsim.com .
Just use goths cavalier instead of poles and calc them in your head or whatever you have with 60 F 30 G.
You won’t find a single knight line trading cost efficient against poles knight line with szlachta privileges. Camels maybe, but that’s another story.
