Reduce Thumb Ring and Pikeman upgrade cost and increase Cavalier upgrade cost

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Archer and xbow upgrade cost has been increased in the latest patch to minimize archer power spike in early castle age and early imperial age. But most civs didn’t get any compensation for this. Here is my suggestion on restoring knight-archer balance as it was before.

Pikeman upgrade cost is reduced 215 food, 90 gold → 175 food, 75 gold
Thumb Ring cost is reduced 300 food, 250 wood → 250 food, 250 wood
Cavalier upgrade cost increased 300 food, 300 gold → 400 food, 350 gold
Plate Barding Armor cost 350 food, 200 gold → 350 food, 250 gold.

Edit: I think Chain Mail Armor and Plater Mail Armor cost can be reduced too.

I think Arbalester upgrade cost increase was a bad decision. I wish this was reverted. But since there is little chance for that to be happened, I’m proposing increasing Cavalier upgrade cost instead. Also I always find Cavalier upgrade cost is too cheap for its cost, especially if you compare it with any other Imperial age upgrades.

Reducing Pikeman upgrade cost is not new and people were asking this for a couple of months, even before latest patch. After the patch, Hera recently became vocal on Pikeman upgrade cost being too expensive and therefore not being able to counter knight in early Castle age. I find it is very logical to give non-cavalry civ a slight boost on anti-cavalry option.

Thumb Ring is a mid to late castle age upgrade and usually better against melee units. Good cav civs usually lack this tech and even some archer civs don’t have it. Reducing its cost will be a good way to buff low tier archer civs like Vietnamese without affecting Britons and Vikings. Chinese and Mayans will be buffed as a result of this change which should be off set by other nerf.

Civilization Balance

Chinese
Technologies are 10%/15%/20% cheaper in the Feudal/Castle/Imperial Age → Technologies except unit upgrades are 15%/20%/25% cheaper in the Feudal/Castle/Imperial Age.

Mayans
Option 1 - Resources last 15% longer → Resources except food last 15% longer.
Option 2 - Thumb Ring is removed from the tech tree. Plumed Archer ROF 1.9 → 1.7

Vietnamese
Eco technologies cost no wood → Thumb Ring and eco technologies cost no wood.

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Would go so far to even reduce pikeman cost to 150f/70g

The rest sounds decent, cavalier might be too much. It’s not as much of a powerspike as arbs are though. And due to their gold cost + nature of the unit(has to engage and take losses) their viability begins to reach a certain limit, when halbs and hussars become so much more viable.

Imo the issue is knights specifically.

Wrt pikes, it’s almost shameful that they don’t force a transition from the opponent more regularly. We should be seeing more mutli comp armies than we currently do, due to the nature of counter units being so ineffective and countered so easily.

But that’s maybe because I’ve been playing too much aoe4, where spears force a transition into a complimentary unit from the opponent

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I totally agree with you. I think after the archer nerf, thumb ring buff would be a good compensation. Not only it compensate the cost, but also allow player to choose between which upgrade go first instead of always going for the unit upgrade.

I also agree with the Cavalier upgrade cost but it would be better to also include a paladin upgrade cost reducation. So that people will not blinding go for cavelier with their castle age knight if their civ does not have paladin

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Just why? Why do you need to make all bonuses with exceptions instead of just messing up a bit with the numbers?

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I think there are a lot of ways we can attempt to tweak the counters, especially if we now talk abotu the spearman line:

A) Make spearmen faster => harder to evade especially for knights as they are a bit slower than other cav

B) Add one or two techs that improve the bonus damage gradually. Especially one that is available in feudal but probably only makes sense to get if the opponent has already access to knights. But reduce the bonus damage of pikes a bit and probably even remove halb in the exchange

C) split the line in two: The pikeman and The bilman. where the pikeman has extra range in exchange for lower damage output but the billman higher (bonus) damage to compensate for that this would allow tweaks to civs, depending on how they are designed. Civs that have already strong castle ages can possibly just get the “weaker” of these 2 lines to make up for it. And civs that struggle a bit at that time get the “stronger” variant. Which one is the weaker or stronger ofc depends on the design and probably also mass (the +1 range ones possibly will thrive more in higher numbers and vice versa).

And ofc also some other ideas I already forgot. But these are the ones I remember the most which came up occasionally at various occasions already.

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150 food is too cheap.

Sure. But after an whooping cost increase on Arbalester upgrade, I think it is necessary.

That won’t happen. Even after my suggested cost reduction, unit upgrade will be way cheaper. And +1 attack +1 range is millions times better than TR. Unit upgrade will be picked as soon as you are hitting castle age all the time.

That sounds scary. Paladin upgrade cost is totally justified for its stats improvement. Can be reduced the time a bit though.

Because for Chinese, 5% cheaper tech in feudal is hilarious. And for Mayans, 10% extra food from animals and berry is still strong and won’t be sufficient. Another nerf will be required like archer discount reduction or removing TR. Anyway, removing TR from Mayans is also an option and I have added that.

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Not needed. The Arbalest/Crossbow nerf already destroyed many civs while Britons, Ethiopians etc. remained the same thanks to their eco bonus.

The game has been perfectly balanced for 20 years with these generic units/upgrades so it is unneccessary to buff/nerf them.

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You are right because the cost is far different at this point. But if TR is way too cheaper than now it would be a different story.

Thank you for misrepresenting my sentence by trimming part of it. imo the total upgrade cost of Cavalier and Paladin shall remain the same while increasing the upgrade cost of Cavalier

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I am totally agree with you. Therefore we should reverse the Arbalest/Crossbow upgrade to the previous patch so that the game would return to the perfectly harmonic state

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I don’t think that is misrepresentation. I understood your idea. But reducing Paladin upgrade cost is very dangerous imo. Also this doesn’t give those strong cav (Paladin) civs a nerf in the end.

Unfortunately that won’t happen.

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Sorry I miss that. I think I just do not clearly exprerss my idea so that you misunderstand what my meaning.

OP think that Cavalier upgrade cost should be increase. It is clearly a nerf for cav civ. And I don’t think paladin civ need to be nerf and I think the Cavalier nerf is aim on non-paladin civ. Therefore I suggest that reduce the paladin upgrade cost for compensation, which I think paladin civ is now in a perfect state.

And I think paladin upgrade time reduced is too OP for closed map team game

Sorry I just try to be ironic. I always think that balancing is a good thing that it is a continue fight between meta and unit which will never be equilibrium, while nice game play and style will be created and destory during the process. There is not a thing that should be stopped and blindly trust that everything is the best 20 year ago in a human involved game

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It’s okay.

Yeah. That was my whole target.

Maybe you’re right in general. There are only 2 - Franks and Burgundians that needs a direct nerf. I agree nerfing Spanish and Magyars don’t make any sense to me either.

I think a very small decrease like 10 seconds, won’t be bad.

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I guess we’re in store for a lot of reversions then :sob::sob:

I eagerly anticipate the harmonic state of Italians, port, Turks, HC, supplies, militia line, gunpowder projectile speeds, old Saracens, Incas that 98% only ever Trush, better mayans, franks, Vikings, Aztecs :grin: just off the top of my head

(I know you’re joking, I’m just adding to it)

You do realise by upping the cost of cavaliers it ups the cost of paladins as well? So you’re nerfing civs like Spanish, Persians, Byzantines, Celts (even if these 2 are niche cases you just made them even worse) even more…

While ironically simultaneously not actually nerfing civs like Berbers and franks as much due to their ecos (and in Berbers case, alternative units)

Dravidians and Ethiopians would beg to differ

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Agree with the pikeman upgrade, the rest we should wait

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Let me guess, you’re an archer player and your ‘thing’ got nerfed so now you think it’s unbalanced. Probably means that all archer players’ current ELO since the patch is more accurate.

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Funny that even before the nerf to archers stats clearly showed that knight civs had higher winning records.
And you speak of “more accurate”.
Something is just completely off with the perception of some people here.

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Cavaliers dont need a nerf. I just beat a frank cavalier early imp push with walls, pikemen and magyar cavalry archers

I was in castle age still when his cavaliers hit lmao

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Yeah, I do.

But you nerfed Italians, Vietnamese, Malay and Koreans for basically no reason. Now suffer the consequence 11.

Franks need to be nerfed individually. Berbers? Difficult to nerf them as they don’t seem to be as OP to get a direct nerf.

I won’t mind. Taking one step at a time. Problem is I don’t think that will be enough for low tier archer and semi-archer civs.

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Sorry for necro. I just realized Plate Barding Armor costs only 200 gold.

Plate Barding Armor cost 350 food, 200 gold → 350 food, 250 gold. Cavalier upgrade cost can remain same to keep balance change small.

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Plate barding only affects cavalry.

Bodkin and chemistry, not only affect buildings and units, one of them unlocks a couple of new powerful units for some civs, therefore the high tech fee

Nerfing PB nerfs every cavalry alongside cavaliers and hussars

It nerfs elephants, konniks, huszars, SL, heavy camels… None of which need nerfs, some of which actually need buffs. I can understand a nerf to hussar and cavalier, but not to the rest. So I really don’t think this is necessary

Even more so if you consider the tech lag from castle age