Restored melee functionality for ranged infantry

Since the mangonels have been weakened, the main force of the army is now the ranged infantry. When the number of ranged infantry reaches a certain level, they will become a death ball and nothing can approach them. If the melee function of the ranged infantry is added back to the game, Is it possible to reduce the power of the ranged infantry a little? This forces the player to use other units to cover the ranged infantry, and the cavalry will be more powerful against the ranged infantry.

What do you think?

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To make this simple I’d just add the minimum distance range for all ranged units, same mechanism as mangonels have already. This way ranged units would work as intended and became more vulnerable to their counter units like horsemen imo. But sure, the melee functionality could be a good compensation for this change.

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While I like the idea originally of adding min range to range units; you’ll have an issue where melee INFANTRY would simply charge and swarm the range units rendering archers and crossbows useless; same thing with crossbows vs knights. Keep in mind crossbows already suck because they are not cost efficient counters to maa or knights; this change would make the crossbow utterly useless.

I’m all for giving ranged units melee damage when they are face to face with other units. Makes no sense to me how ranged units can beat out Spearmen when they are face to face. Should not be that way.

That’s exactly what we wanna to achieve. You shouldn’t be able to just mass archers and melt melee infantry easily, range units HAVE TO BE squishy and you should always build other melee units to protect them.

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What you just said created another broken NON counter system?? We started off with archer beats spearman always, spearman beat horseman always. horseman beats archers always.

Then we have an issue with critical mass in regards to archers… you wish to address this issue I see by creating a minimum range for all range units. Well all that will do is create an even EARLY critical mass issue for a ball of melee units??

Also like I said before the crossbow is ALREADY inefficient vs the units it counters and NEEDS to be in said “critical” mass to be efficient, otherwise you’re left with a tall task of heavy micro and having other units to body block.

A BETTER solution is create a malice similar to how camels have vs cavalry. Make it so archers/horse archers have a negative damage vs melee Calvary. This will better support the counter system.

Few corrections:

  1. Archers should effectively punish light armored units like spearmen - no doubt.
  2. All ranged units should have minimum attack range set to around one line of units, this means even the group of archers surrounded by melee units should be possible to attack from the distance but not the first line of archers directly facing enemies.
  3. Ranged units should have melee attack to still be able to deal some dmg.

Look my post above.

You can still kite with range units and no1 I guess will rush 5 spearmen against 5 archers - archers just kite them to death so I don’t think you are right here. Even if somehow they close the distance to archers you can always split them and force spearmen to split, too.

I just strongly disagree with you. I can see many pro players going for crossbows in castle age and I’m far away from the opinion that they are weak. I’d rather say they are even more versatile than archers.

I totally agree.

I would add one additional thing, archers arrows should miss moving targets say like 5-10% for melee units, 25-35% for calvary. They have 100% accuracy, even over stone walls when the target is right up against the wall LOL.

Agree with you, it’s reasonable to give archers a chance to miss a target while shooting, and also to reward players who actively use maneuvering. Archers should have a higher hit rate when the target is fighting or not moving. This encourages players to use part of the army to contain the enemy, so that long-range units such as archers can play a greater role. The current ranged weapons have a 100% hit rate, which makes it too difficult for melee units to play. Now they are only used as meat shields to cover ranged units, not the main force of the attack.

Of course, due to the addition of hit rate, the armor of heavy armored units such as MAA or Knight should be adjusted, but I still hope that the hit rate system can be added, which can also solve the previous problem of mangonels units being too strong.

The problem with miss chance is that this relies on RNG and this is the problem because every RNG mechanism is very undesirable, especially at high competitive level players don’t like to rely on RNG in almost every game.