Currently, the Ribauld costs the same rez, pop space and training time as a bombard.
It is a ranged unit that is vulnerable to other ranged units.
It is tied for the lowest range, with the grenadier.
It has torch damage reduction, but you shouldn’t be torching these, you should be sniping these with artillery and ranged units, and you can do so easily because of their low range, their slow movement speed, and the unpacking speed.
They rarely get a shot off.
Oh. Show us some relatively recent games where they are used to great effect and trade well, against human players at a non garbage elo. I never see these get built ever, because you’re throwing away 1k rez.
I’ll unlock my match history for a second once I finish this game , feel free to check out my past few games I had a french player use them on me last night
what I see as too strong is the repair of the siege by the villagers, defensively the mangonel near his tc is invincible with villagers healing him if it is an imbalance
In my humble opinion, the solution for siege is actually quite simple, and it is to make aoe4 siege more like aoe2, basically removing the ballistics on the projectiles.
To better explain it, make the siege projectiles not following a moving unit targeted everywhere, but instead make them hit the place where the unit was when the shot was fired.
That way using siege it would require a lot more effort and skills, and fast units would actually be able to kills even the biggest mass of bombards or Manganels.
Some projectiles could also be slower, and less accurate even against standing targets, this would help on further differentiate the siege units.
Another idea would be to make set up for the siege slower, which is another way to differentiate the units. For example, if the springs would take longer to set up, this would incourage more the use of the culverine.
To conclude, the remove of ballistics and tumb ring effects from aoe2 to aoe4 was always a mistake in my opinion, but it was especially a problem for siege as we can see, since it doesn’t require any skills to use, besides massing it.
Just removing ballistics won’t fix the issue. It’s not the damage the problem, the problem is that there are very little counterplay options when it comes to siege. For Chinese bombards for example removing ballistics would make no difference as you can’t really kill them anyways.
Maybe when it comes to mangonels ballistics would help though, but youbcan still dodge the shots if you are paying attention.
I love the idea of seige having a crew. Same with ships. Even if it was just that a siege unit could not operate a peak efficiency without a handful of dedicated units or perhaps the units were required to move the siege, that would really soak up population and force a large chunk of your army to babysit the siege battalion if you chose to mass them.
If that was the case, I don’t mind the seige units at their current price and HP since incorporating them into your army would necessitate a more conservative march across the map. No more swarms of autonomous clockwork bombards speeding over the horizon please
It’s better that you put this ON the top of the chain , it’s the biggest problem of aoe4 MP imo , fix siege , then you can work properly on balancing other civilizations …
I disagree hardly there.
Walls are perfectly fine in the feudal and castle age
In the Imperial age walls need to be obsolete by things such as bombards, otherwise defending Wonders and playing defensive over 1 hour will become the meta. Most wouldn’t like that I believe.
I think limiting the amount of vils that can repair siege to one would fix this. You can still salvage your expensive investment after a fight, but you can’t repair a mangonel through 4 springalds attacking it
In that case it’s fine since it’s the defender advantage. Its rarely used offensively though since vills going all the way to the enemy to repair siege means more risk to that villager.
If they already nerf hp and speed these vills will be even more vulnerable to a cav charge or maa push.
-50% damage on units (only siege made for killing building)(siege for killing grouped up units stay same)
-25% movement speed
+25 cost and time to make
REMOVE TORCH (ALLOW ALL MILTARY UNITS TO ATTACK AT A REDUCED DAMAGE RATE ON SIEGE. EVEN RANGED UNITS)
No repair unless idle (no shooting no moving). Alow siege engineering to allow mele units to repair. (having villagers there is lame)
not hard to balance a broken unit. Easy fix. Not sure whey devs cant try something like this
I think it’s good to refer to the siege ‘concept’ in Age of Empires IV because it does feel like siege aren’t a tweak away from being in a healthy place. Ultimately I think almost everyone wants to see a vibrant late game where as many types of units as possible are viable. Siege units in their current state are plainly oppressive largely because the only efficient counter to siege is itself siege. Clearly Relic are aware that the lack of counters to siege is a huge problem. If siege was weaker to fire damage, slower to pack, slower to retreat, that would make a big difference.
But for me it still might not be enough. Even if they were more vulnerable, I’m really not a fan of how effective bombards are against buildings, nor how oppressive mangonel are to foot soldiers. Buildings and walls shouldn’t dissolve to a bombard in the space of a few seconds. Bombards right now genuinely feel like tanks – it’s simply not a style of unit that I want to see in a medieval strategy game.
I actually think mangonels are worse. I don’t think any unit in AoeIV comes anywhere near the mangonel in terms of how many units it counters and how strongly it counters them. In AoE4 most units are strong against one or two other units – archers are good against spearmen, spearmen are good against horsemen and knights. Some units are more all-round, and good against a wider range of units, like Man-at-Arms and Knights. But mangonels are an extremely strong counter against every foot unit in the game - four core units (e.g. archer, man-at-arms), their unique variants (e.g. longbowman, palace guard), and several unique units (e.g. zhuge nu, landschnekt). That they can directly fire into the melee (due to the lack of friendly fire) removes a key disadvantage that existed in AoEII. Nothing about the mangonel design in AoEIV balances the removal of friendly fire.
The strength of the mangonel right now creates a situation where you are forced to either mass springalds in an attempt to destroy the mangonels before they destroy your infantry, or simply avoid using infantry, instead opting for massed knights which are the one barrack/stable/range unit that doesn’t get massacred by mangonels. Admittedly right now massed bombards is definitely more of an issue than massed mangonels, but I suspect if bombards were nerfed we’d start to see mangonels be massed more frequently (in the same way that springalds being nerfed shifted focus to bombards).
One thing I’d like to add which I haven’t seen here but I presume many will agree with:
Siege is repaired too fast.
No, its not a problem until 1200 ELO, but it is a problem. With 5 villagers I can repair a mangonel in the middle of a battle while its targeted by 20 man at arms. Hrmmm
Exactly this. I guess most people here agree on how melee should counter siege is one of the biggest issues.
BUT if Relic buff ranged damage against siege or nerf the capability of destroying buildings in imperial age, wonders will become a huge problem on nearly every map in teamgames.
