The existing sappers technology improves the ability for villagers to knock down enemy buildings and walls. It is not often researched.
Two ideas:
Decrease the cost.
Allow it to be researched during the feudal age at the town center, instead of [imperial] age at the castle. Stopping villager production at your TC during research would make this a fair tradeoff.
Sappers would become a viable anti-tower-rush technique. As soon as you realize you are being tower rushed, stop villager production and research sappers. In fact, the game could revert to the original hit points of feudal age towers so they are more useful again defensively against military units.
This improved sappers would also support a feudal age rush on arena or black forest, as walls could be broken more easily, at the cost of taking your villagers off production and putting them in harms way.
It’s an Imp tech. It also allows villagers to fell trees in only one hit. I never thought about this tech too much, personally I get it after all eco upgrades, as technically it’s the last thing I can do to increase production.
Presently, the tower rushing civ needs to invest wood+stone (for the towers), villagers (travel time, build time, i.e. lack of production), and loom. Often, they also add fletching. Incas need to add scale mail armor and often forging (or the villagers don’t get any fighting bonuses). And, with feudal sappers, under your scenario the Incas would also need to invest food+gold and TC idle time to research sappers.
Whereas, the civ being rushed could now just invest in sappers and loom rather than counter towers.
I didn’t know that. Oh but it’s just to knock them over, not to actually gather wood from them.
It does sound a bit strong, even if it’s 400 food and 200 gold in feudal. Then again, you might not bother researching it if you have the resources and were thinking of idling your tc anyway - you could save up for castle age.
This is doable in feudal age on arena anyway. Stone walls have 900 hp in feudal and 1800 in castle.
An example (timestamped)
The problem with black forest is the choke points, and the option to make like 6 layers of stone walls. Harder to do that in arena, when you have a lot of area to re-wall, or are at the very least restricting you’re space a lot for eco etc.
But it increases production for around 5% or so, since it usually takes three hits. And if you have all eco upgrades, you spend a disproportionate amount of time chopping compared to collecting.
Sappers is probably the most useless technology in the game at the moment. Even Atonement is more useful, and at least that one is sometimes useful in the campaigns. (Of course, some unique technologies are even more useless/situational.)
Making Sappers actually useful in some situations would be a great idea.
You answered your own statement… What is your opponent spending their res on while you waste res on sappers, and fall behind on vils, further compounding the res issue… Just so that your own vils (who again wont be producing) can go kill buildings faster.
That’s 3 layers of resource loss in a period of the game when you have minimal vils.
Good luck! Except for some super cheese circumstances this tech won’t be “too powerful”
I think the point is, if you make it cheaper (imagine fletching price) then it could be op, but if you don’t make it cheaper it still probably won’t address the OP’s issue of it not getting researched enough. Moving it to feudal wouldn’t make it viable to research in feudal say.
Perhaps if the cost was 300 food 100 gold, rather than 400 food 200 gold, then it would be affordable in feudal age at the cost of significantly delaying aging up. Most players will have that many resources. Yet, it would still be expensive enough that players would avoid researching it unless they really needed it (being tower rushed or planning early castle age aggression).
Bringing Sappers to feudal would only make the tower rush more threatening. You’re already in an asymmetrical situation at that point and you don’t want enemy vils taking down your ageup/eco/military buildings. Vils with sappers do more dmg to buildings than FU champs, especially inca vils.
