[Poll] How good are Poles' Winged Hussars?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
21

What are you even talking about? That whole sentence makes no sense. Are you just trying to confuse me? ^^
And btw it doesn’t really can be checked with math, as being hit by tc fire comes down to micro/macro capabilities of the player. Even the best players can’t avoid getting hit by the tcs completely. (And even then the opponent could ungarisson immediately when you leave, so it depends on the macro skills of both players actually. That’s the decisive factor there, how often the raiding units are hit by the TC fire. (And btw there are raiding units that get positive value under TC fire, the serjeant eg and tatars and Turks hussars are quite close to it with getting about 75% of their value by just standing under TC fire, which is insane.))

Again, what are you talking about? And ofc, everything depends on micro. A player with good micro can get away with way less pierce armor on his raiding units as he can avoid being hit more often.

And even Hera evalueates the pierce armor as high as I do, the guy with the maybe best hussar micro. (which is actually more macro apm than micro). He rates berbers with their 20 % dicount less than turks and tatars with their +1 pierce armor. And for good reason: While the 20 % discount effectively increases the durability of your Hussars by 25 %, the +1 pierce armor actually increases it by 50 %.
Also it is better to have a bit more pop efficiency there because while you raid you still have to deal with the opponent trash otherwise on the map, so a smaller raiding party is actually benefitial in that regard. Nothing would be worse as if you have a bad big raiding party going down on TC fire while you lose an important postion fight on a different location. So it is benefitial to be pop efficient there.

22

I literally just explained the math in a previous post. Hussar-time by t= integral of hussars alive prior to t.

The bottom line is if you scale the number hussars by some scalar, you can cause the amount of hussar time spent raiding to be equal in the limit.

In this case that scalar is about 1.225 regardless of how often one runs into TC fire, regardless of how many hussars there are in the counterfactual. But for practical purposes 1.2 is sufficient to balance out the estimated raid time. You send 20 generic hussars and 24 winged hussar they perform similarly. Raids are relatively small. If you’re “raiding” with 30+ hussar you’re not raiding you’re flat out winning.

This is the same phenomenon that allows 12 longswords to get wrecked by a TC but 15 longswords to live with half their numbers. Pierce armor is useful but you have to analyze what the equivalent compensation in term of numbers can do. In this case, when combined with the farming bonus it’s not a huge deal. You just have to be aggressive to avoid pop cap issues.

The fact that Hera or anyone else isn’t aware of this relationship doesn’t interest me. Its trivial to model on any graphing calculator and trivial to test in the editor. Idk how many times I have to say “distinction bias” before you people start actually modeling and testing things before claiming that “a difference of X is a huge deal!!!”

23

Maybe you should make a thread that explains your “math” somehow. Currently it only looks like you raise some random numbers nobody can understand what they even should represent.

Ofc if you can freely raid with 30 hussars and the opponent doesn’t reacts to it, you win. But 30 winged hussars can go down pretty fast under TC fire and then you just lost 30 winged hussars - and the vill idle time caused isn’t that big of a deal for the opponent.

Are you talking about how many units are needed to take out a single TC? OK, i mean this could be an argument that you can possibly take out TCs with the winged HUssars. But if you mean this, why don’t you say "x winged hussars can take down a single fully garrisoned TC. That would be possibly an argument if this number isn’t much higher than for standard hussars.

Then show us your model please. With concrete examples. I mean I explained with maths why pierce armor is so important under TC fire. That Standard Hussars get 50 % of their value back by just standing under TC fire, serjants are actually giving more than their initial cost back (by damaging the opoonent eco) while standing under TC fire and so on.
This is math everybody can follow, as everybody understands that garrisoning vills causes idle time and you get value for the opponent garrisoning. Everybody knows that if you have a skilled opponent that garrisons quickly a big part of the value you get from your raiding units is from the idle time they cause in the opponents eco.
Ofc you always want them to kill as much vills as possible, but even the caused idle time can be enough (thats why you split your hussar forces, so you can cause idle time at multiple locations). Especially with cav archers you often get even more value from the caused idle time than the kills, as the opponent is forced to garrison “in advance” and ungarisson later cause you could always turn back und snipe just ungarrisoned vills.
Have you included this in your “calculations”? How do you estimate the caused idle time? How do you know how fast the opponent will react? How safe he plays?
All of this is experience, game-awareness and real gameplay related, it is basically impossible to model this accurately. So sorry when I’m sceptical there, but there are just things that can’t be modeled mathematically. And I doubt that even if you would try to model this, that the polish winged hussar would be as good as the standard hussar, cause it dies so much faster to TC fire. And claiming that TC fire wouldn’t have any impact there is just wrong. Everybody knows how important the garrison function of the TC is to survive raids and everyby with any sense of surviving will use this against incoming hussar raids.
And the claiming that TC fire wouldn’t have any impact in a realistic raiding scenario is just… weird. Who do you play against that doesn’t garrisons his TCs when you hussar raid him?

24
25

Ok now I understand your approach. YOu assume that the hussars continue raiding while under tc fire…
Thats’ rarely the case. I mean the opponent garrisons his vills isnt’t he?
Sometimes opponents have not enough TCs and try to garrison too many vills. That’s true. But rarely you can continue raiding for more than 5-10 vill picks.

No, most time when you take tc fire you don’t get anything but the vill idle time inside the TCs. I don’t think your calc is a realistic scenario.

But I’m currently curious if there is a critical mass of hussars so you can just take out the TC and continue raiding with them. I mean I haven’t seen it so far, but theoretically this could be a thing.

I mean if you lose like 25 hussars for taking out a TC and raid 15-20 vills this can definetely be worth it and as winged hussars have higher dps they can possibly be comparable to standard hussars in this scenario.

26

If you think something changes the calculation you should probably ask if it does instead of assuming it does.

The model is for volleys of arrows fired, it doesn’t matter if the volleys happen on average every 1s, 10s, 20s whatever. It doesn’t change the ratio, it only stretches the function over the x axis. They could be fighting under the TC, going in and out of TC fire, it doesn’t matter. I edited the graph to make it more explicit.

No matter what you do you will achieve similar idle time, villager kills, whatever in both scenarios. If you don’t believe me you can set up a bunch of TCs in an editor and have the hussars run around killing things. Similar results there too.

27

OK I now made a meaningful test, that’s an interesting thing:
Tatars/Turks Hussar need 11 to take out a fully garrisoned TC
Poles take 13
14 FU Hussars are needed for that.

But a key thing is, that Poles do it twice as fast as the others. So there is way less time to react for the opponent to react. 13 Hussars is also interestingly a quite low number, I expected it to be much higher.

WIth this in mind, Poles hussars might indeed a bit underrated by me. I mean if you have like 25-30 of them running into the enemy base you can just snipe the tcs with them, as the opponent has basically no time to react to it.
Maybe this tactic could possibly make up for the low pierce armor poles hussars have, that indeed doesn’t matter against tcs as long as you have high enough numbers to snipe these tcs.

That’s very, very intersting and unexpected.

You still have the wrong assumption that the hussars would raid vills while being shot, but that’s clearly not the case. In the best case they attack the tc and bring it down to lower health or even snipe it - so you can then raid freely in the followup.

Maybe you could better make a calc for the example I gave above, how strong Tc sniping can be with poles as poles winged hussars have twice the damage output against TCs. A polish winged Hussar deals about .6 s of lumberjack and .3 s of stone miner idle time every second he attacks a tc to the opponent (repairing is actually even worse for the opponent). So it could actually be a very strong tactic for the poles player to try to snipe opponent tcs.
In my tests it took the 13 winged hussars 65 secs to ungarrison the vills from the tc, 30 winged hussars got it in 25 secs. 14 standard hussars needed 117 secs and 30 standard houssars needed 43 secs.

That’s quite a big difference in favour of the winged hussars. This are meaningful statistics. Everybody knows how crucial the time variable is in responding to raids and hussars that are actually capable of sniping TCs are indeed a huge threat to everybody.
The key is though, to make it realistically worth going for it as poles, you need a party of at least 25, better 30, cause you want to snipe the tcs as fast as possible and you want to snipe as many tcs as possible with your raiding party.

But yes, if you can pull that off, poles winged hussars actually don’t look that bad anymore.

And you don’t need any constructed stats for that, everybody can undestand that this is a real threat winged hussars can pose in the lategame. (Btw burmese are even better at that tactic than poles with manipur cavalry. But that’s a quite expensive upgrade only for that. Malians farimba light cav is also better here, but not as good as burmese hussars.)

(I used a TC with masonry, but without architecture for this test. With Architecture the difference of the hussar lines is even bigger, but the winged hussars would need more units and/or time to take it out.)

28

I’m not assuming that at all and have explicitly stated things contrary to that.

I dont know why you’re bothering analyzing taking out TCs suddenly. That’s not what I was analyzing. The longsword example only uses the same principle, the effect of killing a TC is totally irrelevant. I was analyzing the amount of time, weighted by living units, that hussars can run around killing stuff. Since this is what “raiding” tends to be.

Also I can guarantee your tests are not using fully garrisoned bracer + masonry town centers. There’s no way 14 FU hussar are taking out a TC doing 2.1 dps.

You’re committing so many reading comprehension, methodology, and general epistemic errors that I can’t keep up. So good luck to you at separating justified belief from opinion.

29

Last time I made fully upgraded halberdiers against the Poles winged hussar, the kill/death ratio was more than 2:1 in favor of the hussar.

so…

30

Well if people are talking in this style, it’s usually because they made intentional mistakes in their presumptions. Then they don’t share their presumptions but just give the “results” and from there others need to try to understand what the presumptions have been just based on results.
Then these people can always claim “that are the wrong presumptions, you are so stupid! How can somebody not understand, it’s all explained so easily… blablabla.”. The truth is, you never explained it properly. So I will no stop trying to conclude your presumptions from your results.

Either you make your stuff comprehendable with all presumptions and steps you did or I can’t work with your results. If you make atypical calculations you must be precise in what you are doing there.
At moment it looks to me that you’re trying to hide vague presumptions behind a wall of mathematical idioms and just accuse anybody who who correctly states it isn’t domprehendable what you are doing there of being stupid, tbh.

And btw even your results are weird. You calculate a time of the hussars, how long they are active under TC fire. But if they don’t kill the TC (or anything else) during that time, that time must actually be assumed As “idle” hussars, not “working” hussars. Only if they make anything meanigful during that time that time can be assumed as “hussar working time”. I don’t even think something like this is even possible, cause hussars can “work” in different ways: Sniping siege + monks, getting intel, causing idle time, killing villagers - or also just do nothing. So I doubt that you can construct anything like “hussar working time” cause it is so dependent on what they are doing, how effective you are in getting value of them and how good the opponent is in defending against it. There just isn’t such a thing, that can even remotely associated with vill working time, as it so highly depends on gameplay what your “payback” is.

As I also showed with the example of Hussars sniping TCs. As winged hussars have so much more attak, they are actually way more effective against tcs than standard ones, while they raid as fast as standard ones. Cuman and Malian light cav raids faster than standard hussars… So depending on which hussars the pay off of different usages is also largely different. In the ideal scenario you want to raid with your hussars as long as possible, as it usually gives the highest payback to kill vills. But this is extremely depending on how fast you are and how much experience to bring them to the best raiding locations. And it also depends on the durability of you hussars. If you have a party of 24 winged hussars but they get shot down before you get to the raiding location where the vills are unprotected you get almost no value from these winged hussars. But if you have 20 fu standard hussars from which 5 survive until they can freely raid, you get insane value from them.
This example just shows how gameplay-related your “hussar working time” is. I think you just can’t define such a thing, as the different usages of the unit give such extremely different value.

And btw, that’s how I measure “top tier” hussars: Hussars that can give high value even under the worst conditions. And the worst conditions are that the opponent has a lot of TCs and only few unprotected areas of his eco that are only reachable by going through all that TC (and defensive) arrowfire. Because if the oponent is open to raids every light cav line can work and the differences are marginal. But the strength of a unit is measured in if it’s good in it’s job even under the worst possible conditions.

Then you were either just constantly chasing them while you allowed them to raid your eco or you had not high enough numbers. Lanchesters law can work against counter mechanics, just watch sotls video on lanchesters laws. Halbs still heavily counter winged hussars, but even a counter needs some mass to be effective. If you let eg 15 winged hussars fight 6 halbs the winged hussars win easily, maybe even losing only 3 units or so (that would be 2:1 killrate) (yes, I tested this in the editor). But that doesn’t means halbs wouldn’t counter them. It just means that the halb numbers were too low.

But actually that’s a point that is maybe not communicated enough: Counters only work if you have comparable amount of value. If you try to make counters with 1/2 of the opponents eco, they just can’t save you anymore, there is none of the counter units that can overcome a 2:1 value advantage. That’s why you often transition into boom if you get a small advantage early on. If you manage to outboom the opponent (which is then forced to make military trying to close the gap via raiding etc) at some point the game is just over because you have such a big eco advantage that the counter mechanics don’t work anymore.

These are the basics you need to understand (and why on lower elos counter mechanis are actually less impacful cause they often don’t know that small amounts of counters are basically useless). Best examples are elephants. They are so easily countered by halbs, but if you make only 1 halb per ele, the eles easily win. But with some experience you figure out how much counter units you need to deal with opponent forces. I also won some games with feudal archer spam: if you manage to force your opponent of wood with your archers he is very limited in the amount of skirms he can afford to make, you can easily pick of the few skirms he does because you have the numbers (value) advantage which is way bigger than the counter mechanics. That’s how the game works and imo newer players don’t need to know their counters, they need to learn how to set up a good eco and how to deal eco damage. That’s why we have buildorders, as they combine these two basic skills. Only after that the other things like strategy or counters become even influential on the outcome of the game.