[POLL] Best game balance for ranged damage against rams

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Which of these projectiles from fully-upgraded units (including Elite upgrade) should do more than 1 damage per hit to a Battering Ram for the most enjoyable game experience and best balance?

  • Bombard Tower cannonballs
  • Trebuchet rocks
  • Any projectile that is on fire due to Chemistry
  • Bombard Cannon cannonballs
  • Cannon Galleon cannonballs
  • Conquistador bullets
  • Janissary bullets
  • Hand Cannoneer bullets
  • Organ Gun bullets
  • Hussite Wagon main cannonball
  • Hussite Wagon secondary bullets
  • Fast Fire Ship flames (4 attacks per second)
  • Galleon bolts
  • Longboat and Thirisadai main arrow
  • Longboat and Thirisadai secondary arrows
  • Caravel bolts
  • Castle main and secondary arrows
  • Krepost main and secondary arrows
  • Tower and Donjon main and secondary arrows
  • Castle and Tower projectiles affected by Heated Shot
  • Town Center arrows
  • Fortified Church arrows
  • Harbor main arrow
  • Harbor secondary arrows
  • Scorpion main bolt
  • Scorpion secondary bolt (Khmer, from Double Crossbow)
  • Ballista Elephant main bolt
  • Ballista Elephant secondary bolt (from Double Crossbow)
  • Archer-line, Cavalry Archer, and Elephant Archer arrows
  • Skirmisher main javelin
  • Skirmisher secondary javelin (Mayans, from Hul’che Javelineers)
  • Kipchak main arrow
  • Kipchak secondary arrows
  • Chu Ko Nu main arrow
  • Chu Ko Nu secondary arrows
  • Composite Bowman arrows
  • Longbowman arrows
  • Plumed Archer arrows
  • Rattan Archer arrows
  • Camel Archer arrows
  • Genoese Crossbowman arrows
  • Ratha arrows
  • War Wagon bolts
  • Slinger stones
  • Arambai darts
  • Mangudai arrows
0 voters

This poll doesn’t ask how much more damage than 1 each unit should do because that would make the poll too complicated, but even this limited poll can be interesting. There are also different ways of doing extra damage against battering rams:

  • Exceed the battering ram’s pierce armor (trebuchets, and Bombard Towers attacking a Siege Tower)
  • Attack is melee damage, not pierce damage (cannon galleons)
  • Do 0 melee damage, which does nothing against unpacked trebuchets and upgraded Armored and Siege Elephants (or Teuton rams with Ironclad)
  • Do damage against Ram armor class, which affects unpacked trebuchets and Arrmored Elephants but does less against capped and siege rams
  • Do damage against Siege armor class

Note: I’m not recommending that it be done, but if you wanted Chemistry and Heated Shot to both raise damage against rams by 1, you could do it by giving all affected units base 1 damage against Ram class, and each tech increases it by 1. This is better than having 0 base and each tech increases it by 2 (like the original Saracens team bonus, which stated +1 but gave +2 which was effectively +1 in most situations), so it goes from 1 (minimum damage) to 2 and then to 4. But if Siege Rams still have +2 Ram armor, these projectiles with +3 attack would still do just 1 damage to them, and this would also buff units that have another non-negated attack class like having 0 melee attack or a bonus against Siege armor class.

Or you could make melee and pierce damage special in the damage calculations, so minimum damage is raised to 1 after pierce and melee calculations, and any +1 bonus is actually a +1 bonus. The armor-ignoring flag likely already treats melee and pierce damage as special.

2

Are…are rams a problem?

3 Likes
3

This is really just a ‘nerf Chu Ko Nus’ post, as the unit that doesn’t match other similar units.

Replying to myself:

Or you could make melee and pierce damage special in the damage calculations, so minimum damage is raised to 1 after pierce and melee calculations

I guess the problem with this is Fire Ships (not Fire Galleys), which do 1 melee damage in addition to pierce damage: this melee damage makes them extra effective against monks or spearmen without armor upgrades for example, but it seems like its real purpose (or at least its most important consequence) is that against ships with melee armor, like Turtle Ships, Transport Ships, Portuguese ships with Carrack, and Roman galley-line and Dromons, Fire ships do 1 less damage.

If this change was made, ships would no longer benefit from having 1 melee armor when attacked by Fire Ships. Giving Fire Ships +2 melee attack would not be a good solution, because then they would destroy land units with 0/0 armor even more. You could reduce the anti-ship (and anti-turtle-ship) attack of Fire Ships by 1 to keep their attack the same in the standard case, but again: gaining 1 melee armor would no longer help ships.

For Turtle Ships and, I guess, Thirisadai, you could easily still balance them; for Transport Ships, if it’s an issue you can probably just give them 1 anti-ship armor, or keep it at 0 and it’s fine either way; but at least for the Portuguese and Roman cases, they would lose out from this change.

I don’t know how much of an issue this would be. Probably the advantages of the change would be worth it: you could always change Carrack and the Roman bonus if you wanted. There are quite a few +1 bonuses that do absolutely nothing, probably because of designer misunderstanding; such as the +1 Organ Guns have against Rams, the +1 Fire Galleys have against Fishing Ships and Turtle Ships, and (except against farms, fish traps, and unfinished gates) the +1 Fire Galleys have against buildings.

I guess other units would be affected as well, for example: skirmishers fighting other skirmishers. So it really isn’t immediately obvious as a good change to make; you’d have to think about all the consequences.

4

this is a buff bombard towers poll. dont have to be as strong as in age of kings. just 12 bonus dmg instead of the 50 meele dmg it used to have

5

I would be more conservative, like +6 damage to rams (which is +4 vs siege rams), but I also voted for bombard towers here. So they do something more similar to what a Yasama tower does. Even if they did just 3 damage to all rams, that would be the same as a watch tower since they shoot at 1/3 the frequency.

In AoK and AoC without patch 1.0b applied, Bombard Towers did 120 melee damage.

I think it’s kind of funny how 3 out of 4 voters so far, including me, voted for Fast Fire Ship flames. Why? “Because rams are made of wood, and they burn!” But other siege weapons are also made of wood? It still sort of makes sense if you think that the extra HP that rams have is fake, and so certain types of attacks do more damage. But what about siege elephants? Do they burn easily as well?? (With current balance, they do not since the extra damage fire ships have is from melee damage, and siege elephants gain melee armor.)

1 Like
6

I tried to find the answer “none” among the choice list.

4 Likes
7

I think the poll might have been bugging (giving an error and not posting) when I set minimum selections to 0. But you really think that, for example, a unique unit that’s described as having a bonus against siege should not do any bonus damage against rams? I almost left Mangudai out of the poll. Maybe I should have split it into separate polls (like “land units that do pierce damage”), so people could just respond on one section without affecting percentages for other sections, because I think a lot of people are just not looking at all the options.