To be fair, Winged Hussars can be batch trained, Tokalas can’t be. At least per the printed price tag Tokalas are also more expensive. Running on VS calculation off of Plaza Seconds would likely be best, though it’s more of an opportunity cost calculation. 15 vills aren’t gathering and 10 healers aren’t making something else.
From a gameplay perspective it makes sense that Tokalas will be better. I will also say, as someone with a fair amount of Lakota experience, you probably aren’t maxing your Tokalas most of the time. I basically don’t bother with Tokala-exclusive upgrades, though I think they see some use for a fast-burn-run right after a treaty ends on some maps because you can mass them during the treaty.
Certain elements of Poland are kinda busted right now, so I still lean towards my perhaps overly cautious suggestions earlier in the theard, assuming support continues for a long while the unit could be buffed again if a 30% base damage increase, some card rejiggering and a small speed boost with Vet wasn’t enough. Winged Hussars also have a lot of cards to help them so all of those will further reinforce the increased damage if my suggests were implemented.
Running quick numbers off of what I suggested and a FU WH has like 85.8 melee [edit, missed a +10% attack, should be 89.7] and charged damage with more siege and speed than they currently have at the cost of being slightly more expensive late game (I shrunk the discount) and losing a +5% hp from a card.
As Kingfinsher have also said a unit that is trainable is treated very differently from one that isnt.
If I showed you a maxed out sipahi and compared to it a maxed out Cuir and say that the Cuir is clear underpowered would that make any sense?
my point is that our expectations of what this unit should look like is very warped as its literally the first of its kind really and given how wonky the devs is with execution just immediately looking at the numbers on the UI
for example after digging through the data, this unit has a hidden 3.75 range on all of its attacks which i was thinking would be a good thing to add and it changes how the unit would fight but that doesnt show in the UI for some reason
and it should also be clear what the role of the unit is. Is it supposed to be something you monocomp? or soemething you have in small batches charge in charge out?
Poland overall is in a very wonky state and before we change this one I would rather tackle all the other weird stuff about it first since for now its fine compared to everything else. If Im going to change anything I would just increase the multi to maybe 2 at best and confirm that range works the way its supposed to cause then the unit worke very differently
That’s interesting, and plays into the hard to quantify portions of the unit.
I’d argue it’s tied directly to the Retainer spam, which is currently basically superior in almost every way. Also if we nerf their skirms, retainers, church card, eco (and probably at least 3 of those need a nerf), they won’t have a lot left, so a WH buff would seem reasonable.
Not really trying to mono-comp, but Winged Hussar + CA isn’t anywhere near as good as CA + Retainer spam. Also upgrading WH to train just a few is expensive, impractical outside of treaty, and kinda sad.
This still feels like a good idea, and if anything the extra range makes me feel more comfortable with not messing with the hp much. The math on hp and damage per cost and pop was pretty bad. It needs a little something at least.
Retainers im somewhat ok with but personally I think their multi should not be against all cav, its the Chinaco mistake all over again, the unit is clearly designed to melee against other melee cav to “guard” for the winged hussar and the winged hussar murders their counter from range which is ranged heavy infantry.
They should lose badly against range anti-cav which for the most part like musks (they drop like flies to caro) but they also counters dragoon types which is not ideal
maybe at best remove one of the HP cards but they already have royal guard so im not too miffed about that checking it quickly they get +60% HP from cards and techs that is not from the standard line upgrade
compare that with arguably their probable counter target the Cossack only gets +45% HP and their base HP only differs by 15
And maybe a slight slight cost rebalance cause right now their base cost is less villager seconds compared to the cossack for a unit that is a hard counter.
Church I would just remove the uhlan and replaced it with that xbow royal guard unlock like the other civs, for some reason you get the uhlans through both the church and a home city card.
The Tokala soldier can be trained or shipped. Yes, it’s vils not doing something else. But guess what else is vils not doing something else? Vils making food and gold to build Winged Hussars. All that matters is villager seconds and I’ll wager the gap ain’t that big. The units should be somewhat comparable. At least usable. Poland certainly shouldn’t have the ABSOLUTE WORST lancer. That makes zero sense.
No. The Cuir is a halb on a horse. Everything else we’re discussing here is a lancer and has multipliers, which heavily influence their use case. The Cuir has no terrible matchups but also few incredible matchups, anything it closes up on, it’ll do some solid damage to. It’s really just an AoE-based unit. It’s a generalist, not a specialist. France has Hussars which are a bit more specialised for messing up backline, as a non-generalist option.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a parallel of my original post proposal. Perfectly reasonable, perfectly sensible.
I’m not arguing for a Poland buff. I’m arguing that Poland’s flagship units should be usable. That combines a nerf of the Retainer with a buff of the Winged Hussar. I wouldn’t be averse to other elements of the civ taking some nerfs also if they turn out to be OP on the ladder. Wouldn’t want to see the Piechur nerfed, but I would like to see everything be functional and balanced.
I mentioned it before Winged hussars are not true heavy cavalry role rise they’re somewhat closer to normal hussars, Lance Charge and stampede mode do enable you do burst through light formations and reach the backline but sustained attacks on the front like with Lancers and Curassiers is actually better done with retainers with their melee resist.
ok after just messing around with them in AI games I think that hidden range is doing a lot of heavy lifting once you realise they can attack from range you stop trying to charge them in and they just stack damage like no other
they also have the same issue as the Oromo Warrior and mahouts they are units that thrive in low economy environment where if you are willing to forgo eco to get a critical mass of them they just start murdering everytyhing and since their cost are spread across so much pop you need so little eco to sustain them.
Another annoying niggle is that tbh im starting to think the charge attack is holding them back somewhat since it has a very long wind up animation where as their nearly 4 range melee means they can micro snipe cav to no end
the only thing i would do tbh is maybe change th multiplier and reduce the cost
The Vanguard definitely needs to be rebalanced. As it stands, it hard-counters or trades efficiently against almost everything in the late game. Perhaps applying a damage penalty against infantry like 0.7, combined with a higher resource cost, would be sufficient.
Why can’t the devs just normally make the Winged Hussar a 3-pop Lancer and use the Cuirassier as its balancing baseline? That way, players would intuitively feel, 'Oh, Winged Hussars are just higher-tier Lancers that stand on equal footing as a 3-pop peer to Cuirassiers.
Sometimes you don’t need the discount and there are other cards that have a stronger more immediate impact, like the shock riders card, you can get quite a few of them.
With the Pig harvesting card you can almost stop growing crops at a certain point and put most of your villagers on coin. and you have enough to spam out winged hussars.
Bumping up Winged Hussar melee resistance up to 40% and increasing their HP would help out a lot. This would give them a better niche of being a tanky lancer cavalry.
