Question: can 20 generic Paladins beat 60 Longbowmen?

A friend of mine made the claim to me that 20-ish Paladins can EASILY destroy an army of 60 Longbowmen (even assuming the longbows use a bit of micro).

Asking you the AoE Community: can such a thing be done?

Why don’t you use the editor to test it? I don’t get the point here…

Firstly, because in the Editor, it is only the AI vs the human.

Secondly, I am curious to know what everyone else in the Community thinks.

Do you mean literally longbows rather than elite longbows? Do the longbows also lack imperial age upgrades?

You can test easily enough in the editor if you control the longbows, and take control of the AI first to make it patrol the paladins in.

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DO the scenario and play it with your friend…
That’s the point, is something testeable easly, I don’t see what is supose to be thinked…

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I just tried this myself with 60 fully upgraded elite longbows vs 20 magyars (generic) fully upgraded paladins. I’d say your friend is probably not very good at micro. If you use hit and run where you focus fire on a single paladin each time the longbows fire, the longbows win easily (when the paladins start off outside their range, so the longbows engage from when they first come into range). If you instead do stop micro, so the fire is spread out across multiple paladins, the longbows lose.

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I mean Elite Longbows, fully upgraded, against fully upgraded generic Paladins.

My friend loves to play Huns a lot…and he claims to have completely eliminated 60 Elite Longbows with just 20ish Paladins. I told him he was wrong…but he insisted that it did happen. And it got me thinking… is he correct?

My first instinct was to just ask here, in the Community forums. But yes, @Martinurello , I should test it out in Scenario Editor. Just that my friends are not always available, plus, I do not want to do so many tests doing it against the AI, since the the AI already is crap with micro, ha ha.

Okay, so 20 Huns paladins should perform the same as the Magyars paladins I tested. It definitely could happen, depending on the micro skill of the Britons player and whether they were 100% focused on microing that battle.

If you stand ground patrol with the Longbows you should win easily, everytime.

How much you win by is mostly dependent on how tight the patrol stack is, but 20 is just not enough to take them either way. Generally longbows will have ~20 left, more or less based off the density of the patrol stack. No micro is needed besides setting them to stand ground and patrolling them in or in place and having the paladins engage.

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Interesting, yes, just tried simply patrolling them in (and the paladins patrolled in as well), and the longbows won. It’s a bit random, but they had 10 left on the first try, and 17 left on the second try.

I tried leaving the longbows in place, first patrolling them, and stopping them when they had doubled back to the smallest stack, and then patrolling the paladins in, but the results were very variable. On one occasion the longbows won with at least 10 left, but on another occasion, where I did exactly the same steps, the paladins won.

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Units can choose to focus bad targets, and when they do it’s almost certainly because the unit AI is weird and caused it to attempt to re-engage from a different angle. Setting stand ground for ranged units prevents units from wasting time relocating if their chosen target has moved out of position, which is basically the only way Paladins in that low a number can win (runner micro distracting.)

Stand ground patrolling creates very dense unit stacks however in a lot of cases, so for most archers (especially non-Longbow ones) it can be dangerous if your opponent has utilized and upgraded Siege. Stand Ground Patrol stacks + Onager shots = game over. It’s not as bad for Longbows since they can generally just shred the Onagers with high enough numbers, but it’s still oftentimes something to be cautious about especially in a hectic game with lots of things to focus on.

I think you need practically about 45-50 longbows to one-shot a pala. It’s rather obvious 20 palas can’t kill enough lb to make it two-shot in time to have an impact in the outcome.
So pretty sure 60 lb destroy 20 palas. If you make it 60 v 30 the outcome may be reliant on terrain.

Longbows are quite powerful, especially when massed. Palas aren’t the best choice to counter them. That’s what makes britons so dangerous, especially in maps where you can find good spots for them.

Still, In open maps the mobility of the cavalry is usually more valueable.