Should Arson be an instant tech in Castle Age?

longswords aren’t useless against trash.
the only one they can’t beat straight up is the Light Cavalry, and that’s due to the addition of bloodlines.

There are only 3 trash units and if the LS can only beat two of them what’s the use? Champions can pwn all trash.

they also beat eagles. also, Light cavalry are by far the least seen trash unit in castle age, furthermore, i’d bet some of the ones that get stat buffs could beat Light Cavalry. like i said, i’m fine with some minor buffs to the LS, but to compare them to Knights and Archers is just faulty.

But then longsword upgrade should at least be faster and cheaper. One of my biggest gripes about the militia line is how stupidly slow it is to tech into it. Especially is for some reason you want to go champs in late imp and you are starting from just militia or maa, it takes forever to get champions. At least let us have speed of transition as and advantage, since it’s not like militia line stats are stellar.

this i agree with. go see my post on changes and you’ll see i’ve reduced the price and upgrade time (slightly, 40 seconds, same as man at arms).

Eagles are primarily seen in the late game and they are pretty much weak to all melee units. The only reason eagles are so popular is because they look really cool.

true, but the difference is that the militia line beats them better then any other unit cost for cost.

faster then most melee, tons of attack bonuses, strong against archers…

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I was just about to edit the post to include archer and I don’t know about any of their attack bonuses except their bonus vs Monks.

+8 vs Monk
+3 vs Cavalry
+3 vs Siege weapon
+2 vs Camel
+1 vs Ship
+1 vs Fishing Ship

monks, cavalry, siege. all 3 important in castle age.

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Pretty small bonuses but they are still really cool.

That would be nice. Iirc you also proposed a slight speed buff, which would also be nice (from ls onwards). I think maa (beyond the initial push) and ls could fill a situational use as a cheaper, faster “siege”, that is breaking in the base of a turtling enemy who neglected their military/defenses. That’s one of the reasons to move arson down to feudal. You could mass some maa, upgrade them to ls and apply some strong initial pressure while you transition into something else, e.g. knights.

Whenever I thought about Arson only swordsman line come into my mind although it affects every single infantry unit in the game. From reading the whole thread seems like everyone is like me - thinking about only LS → Champ. Giving it for free to everyone will be a big (or maybe not that big as I’m thinking) to American civs and we all can agree that none of them needs buff.

At most it can be like this.

That’s probably bcz to give some infantry UU to shine. LS and THS may have 0.95 speed instead of 0.9 though I’m against extra speed for Champs. I agree with supplies and LS upgrade cost and time reduction especially supplies. 150 food for supplies in feudal seems pretty huge to me as you need to create at least 10 M@ afterwards to justify the tech. Can be lowered to 120 or even 100 imo.

But not all civs have infantry UUs and even if they do, you need a castle for those, which is typically is up only from mid-late castle age. I see no reason to have the militia line (from ls upgrade onwards) upgrades being so slow to research and also relatively expensive.

Very good point here. However I believe that free arson could encourage infantry play in Castle Age so eagles get countered faster. Also a different technology could take the place of arson which wouldn’t affect eagles for example.

I’m not sure about this. It is only +2 attack vs building after all. LS play in castle age is very very civ matchup dependent. On the other hand American civs will benefit for sure as they will go for eagles regardless of civ matchups.

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