Give them +2 Cav armor with Gambeson. It won’t magically make them good vs Knights but will make them much better vs Camels and Hussar. Finally M@A line being a proper counter and make Indian civ much more easy to deal with. Treatment is similar to Parthian Tactics.
Reduce tech research time by age. At late game you just waste 5 min worth of time just upgrading them. So to fix them what you can do is, reduce tech time per age. Like M@A upgrade in Feudal remains the same. However in Castle, it’ll be reduced by half of the time it takes if you didn’t upgraded on Feudal. Same with Long Swordsman upgrade on Imperial Age.
Scale HP + Attack per age across all swordsman line like Scouts.
Optional: Make them able to build Siege like Ram or Siege Tower. Maybe Imperial upgrade to Gambeson tech line can do the job.
armor in aoe2 works counter-intuitively. a unit with 0 cav armor takes full bonus damage from anti-cav units (eg 32 from halbs), a unit with 2 cav armor, takes reduced bonus damage from anti-cav units (eg 30 from halbs). currently infantry doesn’t have the cav armor class (not the same as 0 cav armor)
so giving cav armor to infantry would be a huge nerf, not a buff. camels and halbs would absolutely destroy infantry. I assume you meant to give them resistance against cavalry units? I think the only unit that has that is shotel warriors after royal heirs and it’s pretty janky.
Also would this affect cav archers?
Interesting, I think it would be simpler to just reduce the time it take to research the techs other than maa
I don’t know what you mean by this? scouts only get some extra damage when they hit feudal age. This is mostly so scouts can’t kill villagers in dark age
This is long lost suggestion of mine. New tech “Hoof Cutter” - All infantry (Yes, all of them) +2 attack bonus vs cavalry and camel. But I stopped asking this after April 2023 as weak Arabia civs like Malay, Dravidians, Koreans, Bengalis, Vietnamese, Bohemians are no longer as weak as they used to be against cavalry civs.
Honestly that doesn’t change vs Hussar. M@A isn’t as much of Trash Killer as it sponsors. That problem is very reason why you need +2 Cav Armor. It even gives player a choice to invest vs Camels. Right now only time proper M@A play you see vs Aztecs. Giving that will give more reason to go M@A vs Indian Camel civs which are sometimes OP.
Regardless I still believe new Supplies tech-line should work all across infantry in some way or another. Maybe buffing more to M@A line and slightly less to pike lines. New techs makes it more reason not to invest into M@A line despite being cheap. Problem is the timing spend on techs just for M@A.
problem comes when you mass them up. Problem is champs dying sooner instead of being able to kill. If you give +2 cav armor then a fully upgraded Champs will receive 1 damage from both Camels and Hussar. Thus increasing more survivality against overall Cavalry line. Champs dying sooner is the problem of infantry line not DPS rn. +2 doesn’t necessarily do a thing much.