Am I the only one who feels that siege weapons are dumb af? Like I got in a game where we both reached age 4 well guess who one, 1 chose to go with gunpowder units the other one with springel and arietes, the second one the one using shit wooden structures that cost 100 woodvs the one going with gunpowder weapons which deal 0 dmg to arietes and get killed by springalds and a rush of dogshit units meanwhile you’ve arietes tanking 20 villagers because cost x efficency the arietes outmatch any gunpowder extremlly expensive unit into a whole new dimension
As far as I remember, in Age II the solution against battering rams in balance terms was that they had -3 anti-melee defense, therefore all melee units did +3 damage to them.
Considering how the armor mechanics works in Aoe4, this negative armor can’t happens.
Well, is not as Rams were so broken since the release: When the game was released, (Season 1), all melee units did 20 damage to them in Imperial because they attacked them with torch damage (20 in imperial).
When in a certain patch they changed that mechanic to attacking normal melee weapons, that advantage was lost. In fact, considering that there are already units that receive “Extra Damage” from certain sources (Sipahi with his ability activated vs Melee, Janizaro against range), the same could be done with the Rams, putting an event like “Receives 25% more damage from melee units”.
If after this change you want to balance later so that they are not destroyed so easily, you could enable the “Siege Ram” technology so that it has +3 or +4 melee armor, and finally has its “ram head” that we remember so much of Aoe2.
Why -3 armor happens in Aoe2? Ram in AoeII Explanation
In reality this happens in AoeII because in reality, units at 0 melee armor, really have 1000 armor, and units at 0 attack have 1000 attacks. So, a unit with a armor of -3, actually has 997 armor, and every unit with 0 attack (1000) do 3 damage aggainst them.
Yes, it’s like they wanted to bring a solution to AoE 2 in gameplay that looks like AoE 3 or viceversa…
Rams have a lot of armor against range.
But you can destroy them very easily with melee units or springald.
Cavalry would beat an army of only siege units.
Of course, the siege is very weak, at least the culverin wouldn’t have to be so weak…