Rathas seriously need a buff

You have also to state that rathas were a weird choice. First on Arena, they can’t use their Mobility.
Second cause ALL Burmese trash units deal serious bonus damage vs it.
Bengalis have good Arbs and you can transition to anything from there. Go Infantry or Elephants.
And ofc Siege and forward Castles.

Also needs to appreciated how strong the skirm micro vs the rathas was. With skirms missing 3 armor! 7 Ratha shots kill them whilst you need 23 skirm javelines to kill 1 Ratha. The Rathas should have the upper hand here. (If you account for the longer reload time of the skirms).

Still think that the better way to close the game would just have beem ar + siege and then add whatever counters what the burmese player does. Rathas are imo just not a good Arena unit.
And in general the design of rathas doesn’t makes sense in how the game is currently set up. It tries to be 2 different unit types at once that complement each other. But that means to be somewhat balanced it needs to have big tradeoffs. And these ttradeoffs just happen to make it a “Jack of all Traits” and not excelling in any single aspect. Which means it’s always worse than a well designed unit comp where each unit has it’s specific utility and the units complement each other.

I think Devs need to make Ratha either a basically cav type of unit (probably with some weak arrows but no archer/CA armor class) or a CA type unit with higher damage output, probably even specialised against certain unit types like spears.

Yeah. I also think against Burmese, they should go for Archer. Manipur Cavalry comes way too late and even then you can add Halb.

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Arb and siege would have been the better approach here because of the timing, I agree. However generally rathas are a great arena unit because a large mass of them is incredibly hard to counter. If vilese had continued the engagement he would have killed the skirms but as there neither was a proper siege follow up nor a forward castle he pulled back. The imp play by him was somewhat inconsistent imo. Ratha onager and then forward castle would have finished the game. Or you don’t go that aggressive and go ratha light cav which burmese don’t have an answer to except for elephants which would have been impossible from liereyys position. Villese wanted to do but the light cav numbers were way too low.

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Can you please not compare this garbage to the most supreme unit in the game.

Thats all they got. Its basically a cavalier that dies to skirms in melee mode and a non-elite cav archer that cant kill most melee units. Both of these are terrible downsides to the role they’re supposed to play.

They don’t work any way.

yes, yes because the civ has Paladin, Camels, Heavy CA, hand canoneers, bombard canons, fully upgraded infantry, arbalest with thumb ring etc so it makes sense to give a uu that costs 60w, 60g to have as a support unit to some of these great options.

Liereyy would have held with monks, halbs, onagers. 80 food 70 gold is A LOT. People do Light cav-CA combos because light cav cost food while the CA like unit costs wood and gold. That’s why Villese went for that combo. Elephant archers + light cav is not easy to afford early in imp and Villese was on a clock because of being 0-5 relics.

Battle elephants against 6+7 halbs and 10+ monks would just be so much resources down the drain

Khmer are classified as an Elephant civ - people barely make elephants with them in 1v1. In the past 5 S-Tier tournaments how many Elephants did you see? Alternatively, how many elephants did you see even in the closed map Wallhala tourney?
It doesn’t matter what they “classify”, Elephants are just closed map 4v4 units. Like the Rise of the Raja civs, there need to be good alternative options with full upgrades like knights in castle age, hussar in imp along with great archers or siege.

I think one of the games in Wallhala, Running did Battle Elephants against Berbers in Regicide fortress. Running surprised the Berber player who started pushing with Elite Camel archers and trebs. Berber player just added pikes and killed all the fully upgraded elephants with Camel archers, few monks and pikes. That’s how bad they are. They’re never viable in an even matchup. You can go elephants when you’re playing someone who is much beneath your level and have fun. Otherwise you simply can’t.

what opportunity? They don’t have gunpowder for a fast push. And also you’re saying he should have gone for Elephant units. How on earth can he push fast if he had gone for those? In the game as it was, Rathas needs castles and several upgrades. And also he needed light cav upgrades to kill monks. Hence the delayed push. The only kind possible with Bengalis.

Dude, like Khmer have orders of magnitude better eco for Arena and you still can’t afford to go straight elephants for most matchups.

LOL. Meso, Teutons and Turks apart, literally every civ has that. And those are 1 hr+ post gold units.

Most important for closed maps.

Most important for open maps.

Britons have much better eco with the sheep and tc bonuses, 10+ range Arbalests/uu, Warwolf on trebs which helps them win treb wars.

Identity to be an unusable garbage civ?

Extra p.armor on scout line and free light cav upgrade for open maps. Top-10 uu in the game, free chemistry, extra hp and range on canons for closed maps which is their strong category.

LOL max dude. Are you serious? What about the ton of eco bonuses and cavalry bonuses, castle discount, gunpowder etc.

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I remember that match. No they are not bad. They are good against pikeman (No Halb for Berbers). Running lost because he threw 20+ villagers and 4 trebs to make a forward castle which was also not necessary. If he continued with BE and put the castle on safe spot, it was an win for him.

Anyway, both BE and EA needs a buff or redesign at least. Not sure about Ratha. Maybe it is better to give Bengalis another civ bonus.

I think now the best way to buff Ratha is to make the 25% less bonus damage applied to the unit as well, having soo many counters while being more expensive to upgrade than Konnik is just too akward.

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HCA, Magnudai, Conqs, WW all receive all bonus damage from Archer, cav, cav archer class. I don’t get why it is suddenly become issue for rathas. Just reducing bonus damage vs Elephant for pike/halb in general is more right approach (I think only need adjustment here is Persian War elephant, it has enormous amount of HP and need huge bonus damage,)

Bengalis are one of thepopular civ in closed map since Wallhalla and players massing rathas almost always, the unit need more love is elephant not Rathas.

Well you don’t need all upgrade when you mostly use range and only switching melee to snipe seige or take down building.

Because Rathas are essentially 2 units in 1, if you want to take care of the ranged ratha weakness (skirms) then you want to go for melee, but this game showed that doing that doesn’t even help and then why you use Ratha here?
The other units you name are way easier to upgrade so no point to compare.

I think the best way is to make rathas a trash unit that does well together with eles. WIth Bonus damage against monks and spears.

It still help when facing small number of skirms. Skirms are countering archer unit by attack (offensive) and defensive (high PA). Negating one of those already have an advantage over other CA type units.
It just don’t allow kill-all unit for even destroying mass skirms. You can always adding support unit vs skirms such as FU light cav, Battle elephant or seige elephant.

No it need similar amount of upgrade for ranged rathas.

I wonder why that garbage then absolutely rekts mangudai 11 Have you seen those two units match up against each other? Mangudai stand no chance whatsoever.

:joy: Because you fight ratha head on with mangudai???

What else do you do? A-move cavaliers into halbs?

I didn’t watch the match, but isn’t the issue with EA always the food bottle neck. And to pair that with food heavy LC? I can see the logic behind going ratha instead.

Also not so sure about EA murdering halbs. When you consider the cost involved. And the fact you need to let off pressure at some point to mass enough EA that can even tackle halbs, since they can’t kite like CA can, so you need enough before you engage.

I think as Bengali you’re screwed either way. Whether it’s ratha or EA.

Both are cav archers so not sure what you’re implying. And I’d really stop using those smileys. They make your comments seem even more stupid.

stop watching these Mikeempires videos to judge a unit. The real game fights never happen like that. In game, there’s a 40-50 min period to get to Elite uu with all upgrades on all open. And generic unit lines are important to get to that late game army.
And even post that, there’s the concept of adding siege. Mangudai with Mongol hussar, drill siege ram is much much better than Rathas with light cav and Bengali siege elephants. There might have been some pro player games from less than a month since the DLC release where there were heads-on Ratha-Mangudai even number fight and Rathas won. But that just players testing out the unknown matchup and all it means is Mongols need to add more hussar and siege and not take an isolated fight.

What he means is Mangudai move faster and just like how you can run away from units like War wagons, imperial skirms, rattan archers or Camel archers without taking a bad fight, you can just snipe siege and run away from Rathas when u know its going to be a bad fight. And also unit1 kills unit2 in a heads-on battle and unit2 is a great unit, doesn’t imply that unit1 is even better than unit2 overall. Like hussite wagons kill plumed archers but plumed archer is a much better unit overall. Factors like cost, training time, mobility, dps against multiple unit types, hp-armor all come into play.
Rathas would be a great unit if they costed like 30-40w, 40-50g OR had more dps, thumb ring and belonged to a civ with stronger eco from the start

It was definitely necessary to push from there. Why else would a 2500+ player loses 20 vills to a forward castle in tournament finals. When you have the worse civ, you can only win with the sudden element of surprise by overwhelming your opponent. Regular game, you can’t kill cheap hussar-Maghrabi camel archer-bombard canons with Bengalis while being behind in relics. The elephants was an unexpected move but didn’t work. And more often than not, it won’t work.

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What about blacksmisth upgrades for cav affect rathas too?

what could be wrong with a unit with +6/+8 P armor?

or evne more with PT

But it could be an option IF rathas get a seriose tradeoff like taking even more bonus damage or having less HP. I think i made one thread about this idea once

Bored of this dumb sarcastics ways… BUt well… maybe with resistance bonus for eleplhants Bengalies could lost any last armor upgrade. Or base ratha could have less armor to compensate.

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Actually this was my idea at that time…
Kinda like it still.
But then ratha needs to be cheaper/trained faster aswell, no?

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Or keep, ratha strong in castle age and make its Elite upgrade cheaper but weak. This way, could be the strong unit in castle age and support for elephants in Imp

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Then it needs to lose PT, but also reduction to gold cost. Eles already sit heavy on your gold so you can’t really afford a second gold heavy unit.
Also needs to be stronger vs halbs then.

I think the biggest issue with bengalis is that they have that 4 different units they can go for, but basically no “comp” that is affordable if you don’t get a advantage that gives you a clear edge over the opponent.

Arbs
Eles
EA
Ratha

All are strong, but there’s no composition you can really aim for.