It was great in the closed beta and I don’t understand why they changed it for the public beta.
Without this mechanic archers don’t need protection anymore, it boosts archer-only rushes (making the longbow rush even worse to deal with) and makes palings kind of redundant.
I really hope they changed it just for testing purposes. This mechanic absolutely needs to be in v1.0.
There are better players then almost everyone on those forums here which do the balancing (as example forgotten empires is working on balancing the game, which also did that for AoE2).
We can be quite sure that the actual release version will have a text wall of changes and adjustements.
There was too much micro in the game!!!
I surely hope this is the case.
I think they meant something else actually.
They said “when enganged in melee combat”.
I think they were actually referring to some form of “snaring”.
A lot of people said that the balance changes were either not implemented properly or actually broke some aspects of the game. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case.
Don’t know about that, as you can see in this video the archers still pull their daggers out, but far later than in the closed beta. They probably thought that their “melee range” reached too far.
Yeah this was during the stress test.
I doubt they intended to remove archer melee.
The patch notes aren’t that clear.
no longer “tie-up” doesn’t seem to mean “no longer have a melee attack”
I prefer that ranged units remain ranged. I fully understand that if I had a bow in my hand in a sword fight I would grab a dagger. But I find it cleaner in a game setting to draw black lines so that ranged units are always depicted as ranged units. There’s no question what the DPS or other stats of their daggers are, etc. Great change imo, assuming this change was made.
Add snare, and that automatically nerfs the Longbow OPness
I prefer that ranged units keep their daguer, it give more logic to the game and more historique acurate.
It will allow people to learn has they play, seing the units react.
We do not need to turn the game into a cartoon batlefield of rock/paper/sciser, that last 2 minuts, where the only strategy is to rush.
Game will be dull and people will leave, since game will bore them, always seing the same gameplay.
I am still in troma from seing aoe online, if only i could foget that cartoon game of art.
To me snare effects are anti fun in an rts. It’s different than a moba where you are controlling 1 character and if you’re slowed you’re slowed. You normally are moving units as groups so when half of the units you have selected are snared It’s super clunky to try and disengage because unsnared units end up moving slowly as well. It ends up feeling less like a snare effect and more like a bug / unit control issue.
Oh wait… No, thank you 
I wonder if that could be changed to make snaring less clunky.
Like snared units being disregarded by the others for speed calculation purposes. Or maybe a formation-like option to make every selected unit move with its own speed.
please dont make the game as stupid like aoe2 been melee crossbows just shooting you in the face , dagger in close combat for archer is a must , for balance purposes and in game realism and depth .
I prefer the use of combined arms over mono-armies, it makes for a more interesting and spectacular battlefield. So any mechanics that encourage using a mix of troops is good.
I dont fully understand what the patch notes mean but I hope this does not mean ranged units will not react to being melee’d. What would this mean for the Streltsky since being a hybrid unit is its main characteristic?
The difference is that normal archers are horrible at melee. (they whip out little knives that do like 3 dmg)
Thus making charging horsemen more devastating to unprotected archers.
You essentially “disable” their ranged attacks by charging them.
Strelsky seem to be at least on par with MAA at melee.
Except that this was changed for some reason for the stress test - it’s in the patch notes they released. That’s why these feedback threads are popping up on this topic.
I’ve explained that I don’t actually think thats what they intended.
“don’t tie up” doesn’t mean “don’t melee attack”
I really liked that feature from the closed beta (I mostly remember this type of mechanic from Relic’s Dawn of War series). I think archer units should not be able to fire their bows while being hit by melee weapons. Since they have 100% accuracy I think locking up archer units in melee should be the goal and it would help low-tier horseman counter them a bit better. Even if you want to keep archers as strong as they are now, I still think you can balance that with numbers while giving the very nice flavor of them losing their ranged attack once in melee.
But you could see in the stress test that they don’t switch to melee attack when tied up. At least longbowmen just stand there self-healing with “camp fire” ability and shooting cav units in the face still with their bows.