This is why stone walls exist though. I mean I can remember quite a few games where pros explicitly walled up with stone walls and/or buildings in order to use slow units like onagers. Not to mention people use rams on Arabia all the time to absorb archer fire which have a similar speed. At a trivial level the reason many people often don’t use onagers on arabia is because they often choose to not optimize for onager use. It’s not like the unit is bad vs certain civs once you’ve optimized your playstyle for their use. As for why people choose to play like this (aside from habit) …
I would guess this is because early imp siege doesn’t do it’s job nearly as well as the castle age version. Onager takes 2 damage from non-chemistry arbs, 3 once chemistry hits which is massive compared to the 1 damage taken in castle age and makes the micro very painful. It’s not until you get SE + onager that the dynamic in castle age is similarly replicated with higher damage taken being compensated for via extra range. But by that point it’s more of a meatshield + ranged dynamic anyway so it’s kind of moot. Since onager can’t form the backbone of the army you need to prioritize upgrades on “normal” units first lest all your expensive mangonels get taken out by some poorly upgraded cavalry or something. So usually what happens is the mangonels become too weak to bother using in early imp. Which means there doesn’t seem to be any palatable continuous path between mangonel use in castle age and onager use in imperial age. And on top of that BP + redemption monks and BBC are crazy dangerous by the time you can justify investing into onager and only about 1/4 of civs lack both.
In fact the list is: Britons, Bulgarians, Celts, Chinese, Cumans, Huns, Khmer, Magyars, Mayans, Mongols, Sicilians, Tatars, Vikings. Pike + onager works against khmer (sometimes), cumans (sometimes) and chinese, infantry + onager vs mayans, but the others are way more of a pain due various factors even if onager was cheaper/more pierce armour/faster to research/something else. SO can stay expensive, that’s not relevant to this dynamic and it’s very strong even in small (manageable) numbers.
So I’d say the unit dynamic could be improved slightly simply to let onagers bridge the gap between castle age and imp more seamlessly before things like bombard cannon are out and about.
Siege towers should be buffed, but i’m not sure how. Cost and the ability to do some damage could be a start
Mangos are fine imho
Non-siege Rams are a bit underwhelming compared to new elephants rams and even when you have access to then in feudal like cumans they are just not used. This speak volumes on their performances. Also the fact that every castle Age TC push features mangonels and not rams, which also feels wrong as they should be the anti-buildinf specialist
Scorpions could get more range or a bit higer damage or a bonus vs something, like cavalry, considering they historically were good againts single valuable targets.
In general i also think there could be more siege-relates techs. Atm, we just have siege engeneer, and we differentiate civ on SE civs and ###### civs. Adding 1-2 general techs would make siege more interesting and a bit more powerful and would also add layers of complexity in the game
We could have something like “siege units move 10% faster” and some civs would have it and some (like mongols) would not
The Mongol unique tech could he reduced to +30% and they would also get access to the speed technology, the same for Celts and their HP technology would change to +20%.
The generic Speed and HP techs could be available in Castle Age in the University already.
Obviously those technologies would not be given to all civilisations and only to those who need a buff.
With Siege Engineers being split it half of it could be taken away form some strong lategame civilisations.
Yeah but that’s super akward. You’ll need to wall like 1/3 of the which will require a lot of stone at a point when you wanna spend that on castles and if there’s one whole in your wall or opponent pressures sides will rams that’s probably gonna end pretty badly for you.
True but at the same onagers deals more dmg to archers so archer play looks away once or slips up with micro there won’t be much left. And obviously if you get to SO there isn’t any point trying to use arbs vs that.
If you play halb onager the basic idea is that onagers form the backbone of your army. Not sure why it wouldn’t. Again it’s just not suited for arabia.
Well if you intend to play onager clicking the upgrade should be the very first thing you do in imp but regardless bbc are always dangerous sure. Monks is less so I think because the whole strat of halb onager usually revolves around having your trebs kill your opponents base while your units protect these. You usually don’t go forward unless you cleared your opponents buildings that are in your range and can make a castle to solidify #### ###ition. And monks don’t really help vs trebs while bbc do.
Also quite a lot of good onager civs have good monks too so they can convert enemy monks but yet again that stuff usually only comes to play when your base is stone walled and there isn’t any option to raid you.
Well regarding stone costs I think its important to remember the marginal return. You can wall edge to edge for 600 stone which on the whole has a much higher return than any 1 defensive castle can provide at the cost of being less robust (e.g. petards). Plus you usually need to spend less. If you can get away with spending 300 stone thats a bargain vs civs like Mayans.
Onagers effectively have higher damage (more precisely a larger one shot radius) but they now also face the “blink and you lose it” problem as well because the arbs are doing 2-3x what xbows did. Especially since onagers not on hold fire are a time-bomb if any melee unit gets past lol.
Regarding onagers being a backbone that only works later except against the 4 civs I listed, at least from what I can tell. That extra investment needed to deal with bbc/monks (good point about the monks though) and vulnerability to a switch for the wider tech tree civs just seems to be a straw that breaks the camels back. Microing monks and onagers is also a royal pain.
IDK it just seems like the 75s research time, 1300 upgrade cost, mediocre pierce armour, 1100 SE cost, micro difficulty, firendly fire, the need for walls, and the need for supplementary units all combine to make for a very difficult to optimize transition for an average game on a wide variety of maps. It just seems overly expensive/delayed for what it does which also hurts infantry since a smoother infantry + onager transition would help balance them out.
SO is just so much stronger that its delay is easily justifed but idk if the same can be said for onager.
Yeah, It only useful in some specific case and CL league where civ pool is restricted and bottom tier civ also need to be used.
Investing huge upgrade cost of onager when opponents easily counter that with BBC which require no upgrade except chemistry doesn’t make much sense. would rather invest other units at least have mobility.
Then whole these composition too weak to BBC.
Well. Onager/Seige onager itself is very expensive tech/ also unit cost A LOT of gold and also needing extra investment to monks plus all necessary monk tech doesn’t make much sense. I don’t remember when Halb onager players also have extra resource to invest heavy on monk.
It need huge investment itself, needing halb support to deal with cavalry and also needing extra investment to deal with BBC/monk with give-up mobility. It is not the issue of only Arabia but wide variety of map only exception is 4v4 Black Forest. Actually 1v1 closed map meta is more evolved around civ with strong gunpowder and there is no place for Onager/Seige Onager in imp and not to mention heavy scorpion.
In my experience the choice is less about stone walls and defensive castle but mostly between stone walls and offensive castles as your slow and vulernable army comp really profits from having several offensive castles to solidify the forward position. Btw in the meanwhile there was a great arabia in TTL (villese vs valas game 1) that shows both the potential and difficulty of executing such a strat on open maps.
At least on open maps it can totally work vs a lot of civs but you probably need a good monk civ for that to convert enemy bbc/monks.
I very much agree. Still sometimes even regular onager can completely turn games so I’d be careful with buffing it.
Well not sure if all the civs with SO excel in mobile units but anyways when you might consider teching into SO you’re probably playing a map where mobility doesnt matter all that much. Say I’m teutons or slavs on arena I’d always prefer to play halb+SO+monk instead of going heavy cav.
Yeah because in toruneys you’re seeing the same 5 gunpowder civs all the time but when games feature a greater variety of civs you do see those units in play. And you don’t need to tech into all those units at the same time. For instance you can open monks vs someone who pushes with bbc. Maybe your castle dies but your opponents forward castle also goes down. Your opponent will retreat as they dont have a forward position anymore so both players will build up an actual army. Unlikely that your opponents invests much into bbc because you have monks. Great situation to go halb onager for instance. The meta revolves around early imp play but past a certain lvl die much slower and the games tends to continue after first imp fight.