As the title says.
In general I like the most changes in the PUP. Some of them are really good.
But this one would be a huge mistake. The high production speed for skirms is essential. They are a counter unit that you need to be able to rush down when needed.
The mentioned “skirmisher meta” was referring to skirmisher openers, especially on closed maps which are less affected (or at later stages of the game even completely unaffected) by the change in the PUP.
This meta was a result of the current bad “pathing” of melee units. But it’s actually less “pathing”. It has an effect, but not as much as people think. Unfortunately I didn’t had time to test it myself, but I tried to observe the behaviour and got 2 main factors which I think is what’s happening.
A) Target selection is off. Melee units try to attack units which path is blocked by other units instead of the closer ones they can reach easily
B) The bumping behavior causes “shockwaves”, cataclysmic chain effects that caus entire groups to get stuck. Even with faster units like Knights. You can “cut off” the opponent splitted Cavalry with your ranged units, even Skirms and deny to get pincered.
These are the main effects why we currently have a more ranged unit focussed meta in my opinion and the Skirms counter the other ranged units as “same type counter”. Which is ofc an issue on it’s own.
But nerfing Skirms like this is the wrong approach and WILL cause huge issues in the balance of the game, as Skirms ARE the only available counter in the feudal age against Archers. And against good archer civs now a lot of civs will have issues against their archer openers.
Please forgive me that I can’t be more precise and also only give my personal impression here with no proof. I wanted to wait for that until I got more into it, but I feel I need to speak out here before this in my opinions really bad “balance” change will come live. Forutnately we hopefully will have some weeks to test this in the PUP now.
