The latest patch buffed the bonus damage and pierce armor of Slingers, and I’m excited. Buffing Slingers was one of the suggestions I gave in a recent post, and it seems the devs were thinking the same thing. They now have +3 bonus damage against archers, which doesn’t sound like much, but is actually huge. They now also have 3 pierce armor, which can be improved even further with the Shield upgrades.
While they don’t have much attack, they can upgrade it three times, while regular archers can only upgrade it once. Unlike normal archers, Slingers can upgrade their pierce armor in addition to their base pierce armor, which normal archers also don’t have.
What this all means is that the Slinger might actually be viable as a Skirmisher-esque general archer counter in all ages, not just the Tool Age, and I’m excited, as hard counter units are very important to improve the balance and polish of RoR.
Will this put a nail in the Hittite coffin? The big thing was their bowmen could actually do 2 damage to slings whihc doubled their kill speed vs them which may not seem like much. If anything Bronze and Iron upgrades for further anti archery could go a long way instead or on top of.
The Assyrians are also missing Slingers, but they also have good Catapults, and now that they have 4 pierce armor, they’re a viable counter against ranged units. So the Hittites are in a uniquely cruddy position.
Correct but Assy has that villager speed bonus to give the edge which could get faster age up to give the the axe jump on enemies before too big a ball of slingers comes out. Hittites needed to rely on archer powering through slingers. Granted the meta may be different than Ir remember learning about.
I like the buff to the stone throwers line and to slinger. I think this is a step in the right direction.
Isnt Hittites catapults supposed to be top tier ? For me it is HTT > SUM > ASR > others.
And missing slingers is supposed to be a weakness for the 2 civs. They dont need to have OP archers to compensate.
I think in the current meta, they can pair their archers with axemen or scouts.
This makes them better in Tool age than Hittites, but probably not as good as LacViet, Cartage, Phoenicians, and Shang.
This sounds like unhealthy brute force to me. Granted that they could do it until now. Which is a little ridiculous as they have been known for they oppressive Iron age since Rise of Rome.
Now they have to use axemen and scouts against slingers in tool age, like civs like Sumerians and Macedoneans.
I doubt they listened to me specifically. I only made my post a few days ago. Hardly long enough to influence anything. We’re just on the same wavelength, which happens a lot.