All landmarks also reduce the cost of units produced from Archery Ranges and Stables within their influence by -20%.
I thought people played the French to Spam Knights in the early game?
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Issue with french is that they just feel outdated, same with HRE. They have been played the exact same way since day 1 of the game and are too one dimentional and predictable. They need new options.
Also the variant of the french has a better version of the exact same playstyle when it would have made more sense to make it an infantry civ so you actually have an alternative way of playing them.
Also their overreliance in cavalry makes it so that lots of civs hardcounter the french.
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Cavalry pathing (in general unit pathing) and charging impact is what is making these cavalries completely useless. In LOTR BFME, cavalries have charge impact to create chaos among enemy ranks. But in AOE4, only a few cavalry units in the front deal charge damage and the rest cavalry units that are behind charge without any impact. Then they deal no damage, do not spread enemy infantry and gets countered by almost every unit in the game. In Medieval era 1 cavalry was equal to at least 3-10 infantry units. This kind of balancing needs to be done, otherwise, people will keep getting bored, because units are not effective at all.
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I had already suggested in another topic (Suggestion: New Units and Mechanics to Classic Civs - January 2024) that the French could have more unique units, specially infantry. Even in history records, the French army knew that it lacked good infantry, so after the hundred years wars, apart from their crossbowmen, they created special bodies of infantry:
- Swiss pikemen, as mercenaries in the Italian Wars.
- Scottish Guard, the french Medieval Royal Guard.
- Swiss Hundred, another french Medieval Royal Guard.
The Swiss pikemen could hire them by mercenary house, or by the Guild Landmark, and the other two could be created in the Castle (Similar to JoanDArc’s unique units). Well, at least those are my ideas, about their stats, and let the devs handle that.
As a curious fact, and somewhat funny, is that the same historical French tried to “create a unique unit” of Archer. It was going to be called “French-archer”, but it did not work out, since the corps dedicated to this unit did not practice enough and could not meet the demand, in addition to never having a decisive victory for this unit. It’s quite fascinating stuff.
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My issues with the units talked above is that their thematic in the case the various guards units especially the Hundred Swiss. They also seemingly don’t bring much new swiss pikemen/hundred swiss would just be some big spearmen while the scots guards would be man at arms / archers. I know the wyngard units exist but I would argue that it really feels like a useless layer of quality rather than something expanding the roster.
The Franc archers were supposed to emulate the english longbowmen in the end they were just “longbowmen at home”. Jokes aside the french having better archers doesn’t feel right they already have improved crossbowmen and the discount from the keep.
Personnaly I would prefer to see changes for the canon.
The special ability from the landmark is a joke for what is supposed to be the only battlefield artillery alongside the culverin. I would like the “aoe shape” to change into something closer to normal and become a passive stance available with the age IV landmark. It would also give some competition to the red palace.