I think it’s maybe because people misuse the market or are thrown off easily of their plan, in a similar fashion that people can lose as Khmer because they try to imitate a super tryhard 16 pop scout rush build they watched on youtube and end up losing to the enemy scout rush because they have no barracks.
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Literally falling for one of the classic blunders!
Always have Barracks, even as Turks, you never know when you will need Infantry.
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that’s why i was using the 1650+ numbers instead of overall. someone 1650+ is less likely to misuse it.
i mean crap, if i use everyone i can win with basically whatever i want. tatars longsword build would work at 1k elo.
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?? I just checked for Arabia it’s 50% under 20 min (and I still don’t like using the stats too much) I guess technically the bonus is balanced in the sense that there is the downside of the eco bonus not being so straightforward and the archers having no bonus to help them fight, the upside being the enemy can’t just spam walls and become untouchable. Now there are people who criticize the bonus for being too snowbally (like the OP) others don’t like it because they feel Sarracen should be a camel civ.
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What is the weak of saracens in Castle Age? They still have FU Castle age and Knights. In Imp have the second strongest heavy camel, full Blacksmith, Mamelouk…
Their Knights are a dead end, and they have no viable Eco Bonus to propell them to make the expensive Castle Age units, or any way to go for Fast Imp.
All Saracens do in Castle, is Crossbows. If they go Knights, they are just wasting Food and gold, since they have no Cavaliers, and you can use the opportunity to go Imp yourself.
No really, Malians is more effective against non-Cavalry units, and Berbers is more cost-effective.
Still have knigths and can do a proper Castle Age
knights that have no transition into imperial age? yeah.
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You can make a few kts early on, but you cant go for the 40+kts flood.
Their overall weakness in (late) castle is just that their bonus starts to fade away, making them very generic.
How about that Obsidian arrows and Saracens extra arrow damage doesn’t work against stone fortifications (towers, walls and castles)
Don’t underestimate saracen knights, they’re still knights after all and a clever use of the market coupled with sudden transition from archers to knights can crush the opponent and win games in matter of a few minutes. Specially when they massed skirms and made a coule of mangonels to fight your archers. It’s a bit YOLO but still a strong situational strategy.
About the topic, while I don’t feel the archer bonus is OP, I admit it’s strong only when you won the fight. So it becomes an all in aspect of the civ. Either you lose the battle and stay behind due to lack of a strong eco bonus, or win and crush half the enemy base. Specially when you reach castle age and can destroy even production buildings.
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Not nerf, but remove such a thing completely from the game, not only Saracens, remove the stupid obsidian missiles too from the game.
A thing like making the archers able to melt buildings should not be in the game at all, it is completely a big joke. Maybe you can just keep this bonus for only CA not archers, actually Saracens bonus vs buildings was only for their CA.
But if you want my opinion as i said, archers should never be able to do this and even CA too. I suggest to remove thses things from the game and give the Saracens/Mayans another UT/bonus.
Obsidian arrows no longer do bonus damage against walls and gates.
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No, it still does, due to the way it was implemented it used to have a bonus against standard building armor class and Stone defense armor class.
All buildings have standard building armor class and only stone fortifications (and a few other notable buildings) have Stone Defense armor class. This led to Obsidian arrows having two sets of bonuses against Walls, gates, anything with Stone defense since it hit both armor classes. The bonus specifically to stone defenses was removed, so now it does the same bonus damage to all buildings instead of doing double damage against walls.
If you meant to say this, sorry for stepping on your toes, that wasn’t clear.
Edit: very proud that I got the names of the armor classes right, before checking the wiki to confirm it.
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Yeah that extra set of bonus damage is the one I’m talking about. Not that obsidian arrow no longer works on stone walls.
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That could actually be an interesting version of obsidian arrows, now that you guys mention it. Make it work against any building except stone defenses.
The tech still has value, taking out buildings is good. It is even still a good way for gaining entry into someone’s base, its most profitable use, except if the opponent went out of their way to invest in stone walls to counter it. But even with that counter on the field there is still plenty remaining value in having the tech.
Does it change something except on arena et BF? And as far as i know, Mayan are rarely used in BF (i don’t play this map so i could be wrong). Nobody makes stone wall in open maps and open maps are the most common maps.
Saracens have weak early game and no eco bonus and always go for archers, you can easily go for skirms and tower woodline and they are done.
market bonus, nice try.
yeah that’s why the pros have them rated as one of the worst civs in the game. oh wait. they have them as a solid top 10 to 15 civ.
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Well he is right to say nowadays Saracen players play too much archers. Like half the reason even their camels are rarely seen, let alone mamelukes, is that people always take them as flanks and never as pockets in TG, even tho infinite gold would be the best thing to encourage mamelukes.
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