Lithuanians, Poles, Persians and Romans now have alt upgrades for common units (Hussars, Cavalier and Militia line) so we now have a precedent, Japanese will get a boring +2 vs archers for cav archers, which is an ugly design tbh, and that doesn’t solve anything for the civ, if you want to make Japanese more interesting then they need the same treatment.
The upgrade could be like this:
1000f 700g and 60 secs of researching (Because will have some better stats so they are more expensive to get).
Attack: 8
HP: 70
Attack bonus: +2 infantry, +4 vs Spearman
Attack delay: 0.80
Range: 4
Accuracy: 90%
Melee armor: 2
Pierce Armor: 0
Speed: 1.4
My understanding is that the yabusame wielded a sort of longbow done by horseback… which sounds terrifying
Yes like AOE 3 Yabusame (which has a very long range for a ranged cavalry there) but in AOE 2 having a long ranged mobile cav archer is broken so balance first.
You didn’t even say whos evolution is this. Horse-archer?
In general, I support introducing variety, although it should not become so large that the game is impossible to master.
Yabusame just means “art of horse and bow”, it’s not a unit/social class/clan or anything like that. The current implementation of Japanese Cavalry Archers is fine as-is.
Exactly. It is a ceremony, not a unit, strickly speaking. But there is Yabusame in Aoe3 so…
Maybe it should be renamed Yabusame Archer rather than just Yabusame, then it sounds more like a unit.
Anyway the Japanese haven’t used Yabusame, the specific ceremony, to title the horse archers in their army. Ideally, the AoE3 unit should be renamed to something that has nothing to do with Yabusame. For the AoE2, it can be the name of UT to offer the benefits to CA but in excange of Bloodlines or Husbandry.