Samurai suggestion

[SirWiedreich]

I made a thread about this as well.

Request: Let Samurai Toggle Melee/Ranged

For quite a long time, I’ve found the Samurai to be a rather underwhelming unit that embodies an interesting concept, but doesn’t really have the strengths to take advantage of it most of the time. It’s not a bad unit per se, but the cases in which it’s optimal are few and far between. A useful comparison is with the Jaguar warrior. Theoretically, the Samurai is good against unique units. In practice, it is good against maybe less than 1/3rd of unique units. Theoretically, the Jaguar Warrio…

I agree that it would be quite difficult to balance, although I maintain it could be done (some possible leads in the linked thread). I see it as an interesting design problem that’s attainable, yet hard enough to discourage enough people from wanting to open that can of worms.
That said, I fully expect the devs not to bother with all the trial and error that would entail. TBF I’d be thrilled with 1 more PA on Elite, and perhaps a small speed boost. That gives it a lot more of the effect I’d like without all the balance calculus.

@Kamandaran

Now you could give them more pierce armor to help with this but this would have the undesirable effect of also buffing them against normal archer units and just turn them into another Huskarl.

There’s a ton of wiggle-room between the 8 base PA of a Huskarl and the 1 of a Samurai (even considering the final armor tech). For better or worse, devs have handed out high PA to units like candy since AoC. Sure, it’s not the most original solution, but it’s the best combination of high effectiveness and low disruptiveness I can think of. I still like the idea of a toggling Samurai, I just don’t think it’s realistic.

@SMUM15236

To keep balance simple, it is better to reduce Samurai cost. 10 food reduction is probably enough. or maybe 5 food + 5 gold.

A little too simple IMO (but better than nothing). This solves the problem of Samurai providing questionable cost-effectiveness (lategame) relative to swordsman line, but doesn’t solve the problem of Samurai being insufficiently differentiated from swordsman line, or of being unable to use its bonus in a meaningful way vs. most UUs (the latter being what most people seem to want to address when they suggest changes to the Samurai). Japanese lategame has a lot of cheap units to rely on, would be nice if they had more of a power unit (besides HCA) in the Samurai.