As Hera analyzsed correctly, the Infantry line is very weak at the moment.
He recommends having higher movement speed, but that would of course make other units weaker and not represent the character of the Infantry anymore.
My suggestion: Add the option of “Running”. Every unit can “run” for a very short time of e.g. 3 seconds. Just in real life: Infantry is slow, but not stuck at walking 3kmh all the time. Instead, for a short time, they would run up on a hill and chase down archers.
This would make the game more realistic and at the same time buff the Infantry line.
another pro: Infantry is strong at low elo and weak at high elo (Hera says).
Adding a “run” button would not make it much stronger at low elo, as it requires high micro, but would enable skilled players to make infantry a viable option for their play.
I made a similar Suggestio for Elephants:
And I still think this would be much better suited for the Eles than for Infantry, both in a Historical and a Gameplay context.
For Infantry I would like to have a special ability that helps “keeping alive” individual units. As infantry is notoriously weak individually, it would be very revarding as a micro feature to be able to care about the life of individuals. Hera also made a short statement about that in his video, that they just die way quicker in combat than Knights, therefore can’t really pay back the investment over prolonged time.
What I’m speaking of would be a very slowly (like a minute or so) recharging ability that makes the unit for a very short time (2-5 secs) (almost) invulnerable. So you need to be very caretaking with it, if you just press it once for all your units in a battle you probably won’t get much out of it. The ability could potentially even be associated with some kind of cost, to make it even more revarding to only use it with purpose.
In general the “run” feature is definitely a micro ability that can and imo should be implemented at some point for a generally slow unit to make it more viable to see play - especially at higher levels.
Militia line was designed to be countered by archers, and this is a problem.
This is why they only 0.9 speed. I would change this to 1.0 so they do better vs archer and villager.
This is why they have less pierce armor(initialy they had 0 PA). Militia line should have the same PA as Knight and BA line.
Militia line should still be countered by archer after those change simply because of how the unit works.
Militia line is too expensive to upgrade in castle age. Idealy militia line should be cheaper to invest in than cavalry. Right now knight is stronger(on top of being faster) for less investment than militia line.
Supplies is awkward to tech into, because unlike other techs it doesn’t benefit from already existing units. Although the cost break even after training 11 units, I think it’s only worth researching if you have decided that you will build 15 or more units beforehand.
What I think infantry should have been:
Low investement to tech into.
Doesn’t get countered to hard by anything, aren’t too much of a hard counter to other units either. (Other units will still counter with micro, not so much with stats)
Performs better than most cavalry/archer vs building, maybe also wagon and ship units.
Just get rid of 2 handed swordsman and skip straight to champion in imperial age. That way there is one upgrade per age, which is more logical. Also make the upgrades research instantly or at least much faster.
But then what happens to civs without champion? Will it just be removed for civs with access to champion? Civs like Bulgarians would be powerless without TWS, and broken with champion.
The point about it being micro-intensive so it would help experienced players and not so much lower elo players is spot on
Adding it to elephants is also a good idea, elephants do charge irl
It might be a radical change, but I think it would fix a lot of what’s bad about infantry, and at the same time provide a higher skill ceiling, and even more bonuses for potential new civs
It could be made in a very slim and minor way, not to disrupt. E.g:
“Run” only lasts 3 seconds, speeds up by 30%, can only be done once every 2 minutes. Realistic, and not OP
so Run in itself would not disrupt anything, it would rather give highly skilled players the option of using infantry a little bit more effictive in certain situations.
One thing bother me that it seems that infantry benefits the least compared to archers and cavalry. Archer atk upgrade increases +1atk, +1 range per upgrade. They benefit a lot from +1 range and they have low base atk so the attack increase is a lot.
While knight move faster and attack slightly faster, they also benefit more from atk upgrade than swordsman. The armor upgrade combines to their higher HP is just better than infantry.
Infantry armor upgrade deserve a little bit better. Like get extra hp, reduction of food cost/ training time with armor upgrade.
I think just making it cheaper and faster will suffice.
Ofc this would then require to make the spearman line upgrades a bit more expensive in compensation.
