Should Samurai be overhauled/changed?

[SirWiedreich]

The way your poll is set up is a little odd since one of the choices has two options. It would be more informative if it was broken down into 3 options: no change, ranged/melee toggle, or some other kind of buff.

I made a thread about this a little while ago:

Request: Let Samurai Toggle Melee/Ranged

For quite a long time, I’ve found the Samurai to be a rather underwhelming unit that embodies an interesting concept, but doesn’t really have the strengths to take advantage of it most of the time. It’s not a bad unit per se, but the cases in which it’s optimal are few and far between. A useful comparison is with the Jaguar warrior. Theoretically, the Samurai is good against unique units. In practice, it is good against maybe less than 1/3rd of unique units. Theoretically, the Jaguar Warrio…

@MatCauthon3

making it swap would basically mean you’d always keep it in archer mode. very rarely would you need melee mode.

This is discussed in the other thread, but I don’t know that this necessarily has to be true about a toggle samurai any more than it is with the Ratha. The bonus damage is a complicating factor for sure, but that can be mitigated by reducing the base pierce damage, or in other ways, such that the ranged form has quite low DPS except against UUs.

@TwerDefender

I think Samurai are in a good place.
the only issue they have is that we rarely see them

IMO rarely being seen/made =/= in a good place, I get that it theoretically serves to preempt a few other other UUs, but mutual cancelation is a poor role for any unit, and isn’t much of a factor in most other antagonistic pairings (e.g. eagles vs longswords, knights vs pikes). The problem is, in addition to not countering that many UUs well, the Samurai isn’t really even a better version of the militia line that justifies its much higher cost.

@bigbossbro08

That way, Samurai can have bigger role as it is now. They can have pierce armor instead of melee armor now. Take away bonus damage vs UUs.

Why make them a foot Ratha? There are other ways of doing this, such as giving more UU damage/better stats to the melee form. If you take away their bonus damage in melee form, they become meh-to-bad vs the only units they’re currently good against right now (melee infantry UUs).

@PlumpDucklin

I would go as radical as reduce food cost from 60f to 50f. Increase PA from 1 to 2.

The way I see it, there are 2 main ways to buff Samurai. One is to make them actually good in their stated purpose as a versatile UU killer (giving them toggle would be IMO the best way to achieve this). The other way is to actually make them an infantry power unit that players would choose to make over the militia line. This could be done via reduced cost, increased armor, attack, speed, etc. In the past I’ve argued for this myself, but it seems like kind of a lazy solution compared to the toggle mechanic. PA/HP/Cost buffs would make them somewhat better where they’re already good (e.g. melee fights where they can close in), but still about equally bad vs. ranged units and cav. This would be better than nothing of course, but I think the devs have the opportunity to make a very interesting and versatile unit with a ranged/melee Samurai. If nothing else, I would want this functionality in the scenario editor.