Shieldman - New Trash Unit

Hello, today I want share an idea for a new defensive unit that always found it weird for me that doesn’t exist in AOE 2… Simply a unit with a long shield and a short spear as weapon focus on absorb damage and block paths.
As I had thinking it these could be their stats:

Feudal Age / Castle Age Upgrade (Elite Shieldman)
HP: 50 / 60
Armor: MA 2 PA 2 / MA 3 PA 3
Attack: 3 / 4
ROF: Same Pikes
Speed: Same Pikes
Cost: 25 F 35 W
TT: 22 sec

What do you think about it? Could fit without make a mess in balance? COuld be the trash unit to counter a new buffed militia line? I hear you

Screenshot for reference:

4 Likes

So basically Sergeant Sicilians? I think you have interesting idea but wrong apply, shield man should have like 4Pa at least and 0 melee and trash cost and 0 attack or 1 attack but skirms still better so I don’t know about this idea.

1 Like

You know it’s funny because there’s a unit just like that in M2TW and it’s called Sergeant Spearman, they excel at defending chokepoints.

You could see it as a “defensive Sergeant” but not a Sicilian sergeant itself. It should be a “turtle” unit, good to gain time and absorb different kinds of damage as I said in first coment. And yes, their attack should be very low, I think 3 in feudal and 4 in Castle without any bonus is pretty low.

Yes, I remember them. In almost every medieval game you have this unit with tear shape shield and a spear

0 melee armor and 0 melee attack? They have a giant stinking shield and a spear.

I would have these be the stats. More interesting imo

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I don’t understand why you would make this unit over skirms.
The DPS is so damn low, it’s basically only a arrow soaker. And skirms can to this already, they survive even more arrows than this.
Plus they theoretically have the benefit that they could also counter enemy ranged units.

Is not a skirm replace, is a kind of short-term solution. Suposing you don’t want or can’t to build an archery range, you could hold archers with this unit while massing something else. This unit would be an all-purpose trash to hold position, not an specific counter

The problem is, if a trash unit is an all-purpose short-term solution to hold position, it’s an all-purpose long term spam option to drag the game to infinity also.
Because of the nature of how trash works in the game.

Fortunately your unit isn’t such a thing yet, but if you want it to fill your purpose for it and buff it accordingly, it will become the other thing also.

I don’t have anything against a new infantry type with specialisation, something that can hold better than militia.
But it has to be a gold unit then.

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You can tweak stats, there is such a thing as balancing. This would be weaker than skirms vs archers but stronger vs melee, strong in chokepoints. It does have pretty decent pierce and melee armor.

No infantry unit is good in chokepoints.

Yeah, but the concept in making it a trash unit can’t work as intended bec as I said, it would make it just a spam killing every mid- to lategame aggression, dragging the game to infinite.

The pierce armor is decent, but a decent melee armour is something like 6 upwards. Sounds weird, but under this melee armour doesn’t has big influence. Look at Teutons, who cares about there 2 extra melee armour really? Even if it buffs power units like the paladin, it’s just such a minor thing and can be overcome so easily by just a few more units to snowball.

I would like to see a serjeant-like unit in general in the game. But it needs to have considerable gold cost, otherwise it would be completely inbalanced.

And I think it’s a nice idea, to have a probably quite high gold cost spammable infantry unit that just buys you some time when you desperately need it. I think it would be a nice addition to the game. But it shall come with that offset, that you have to expend a lot of gold for it.

Steppe Lancer(was) and Kamayuk aren’t good in choke points?

So now it is OP because you can spam it? I wonder why this doesn’t work for halbs…

It makes Halbs a lot stronger, lol
With base stats, a Paladin wins vs a halb with 52 hp leftover and deals 1.37 more damage per rss. With the extra 2 melee armor, it deals 1.60, that adds up fast.

6 melee armor as a base is extremely good. Boyar used to have 6 base melee armor and was considered anti melee

And they buffed it to 8 now. Why do you think they did it? For joke?

No infantry.

Maybe one of the best inf in chokepoints. But still terrible against any trash as meatchield + siege.

Infanry is slow, no range and low HP. That makes them naturally bad in chokepoints because of the characterisics of siege.

If you are putting inf into a chokepoint when you know the enemy has a lot of siege nearby than you aren’t very good. Archers are probably even worse in chokepoints if that is your reasoning as they usually have lower hp

Ok, so with this logic I can not bother to tech into armor upgrades since melee armor is useless?

Don’t lay anything in my mouth i didn’t say.

I’m not. According to you, Knight line has crappy melee armor


Is there space to add more barracks units?

Barracks at most holds 4
Stables at most holds 4
Range at most holds 5 (I think?)
So Barracks and Stable can both get another one, or regional units as well. This is assuming the limit is 5

To me and my low elo game sense it seems like this would be pretty much the ideal unit to combine with any kind of ranged unit. It is already meta to combine a ranged unit with a melee unit in front as a meat shield. A trash unit specialized in defense is kind of the definition of meat shield. Knights and skirms vs crossbows and pikes seems like it would become a much more obvious choice ones the “pike” basically has the defensive value of a knight. (Although granted, there is still something to be said for also mixing in actual pikes, but those use the same blacksmith upgrades as these shieldmen anyway.)

Maybe it would be cool to have bonus damage to cav if the shieldmen are in formation but not if they aren’t