After the dark ages European spearmen would have changed to other polearms. in AOE2 you had the Pikemen who carried a Voulge and a Halberdier who carried Halberds but the AOE4 spearmen just use spears the whole time and they look kinda stupid. Why settle for using a two handed spear when you could have the spear and have stuff on the sides of it so you could swing it and stab with it?
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I swear the English ones had billhooks did they not?
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Yeap, pretty sure they do change, I noticed them changing throughout veterency and elite upgrades when playing as Chinese.
(Although it might be changing with blacksmith techs, I need to confirm that)
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It would be nice if the english just straight up had unique Billmen infantry.
would make them much more interesting as a civ.
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The Bill was not unique to England. In France this would be called a Guisarme.
I completely agree with you. English did not have enough unique units imao. Giving them bills to add more variety would be nice.
Same as the pavise, mace, etc. (and yet they only gave the French and HRE those units)
It is a game design choice to restrict most unique units to specific civs. Even though we can easily see the historical record and find out that every european civ has massive similarities.
However the having Billmen for the english is a good representation of their history.
Yeah that would make them really interesting, make their “spearman line” into billmen (perhaps like a weaker man-at-arms but with a bill)
It would easily make England are more infantry-based civ and would make for very interesting civ matchups.
Sorry to be so discouraging, but these decisions have been made. The correct subject line of this thread:
Spearmen should have gotten new weapons when you upgrade them.
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…and it all comes back to the English again
The English need another unique unit, and their artillery sucks as well.
The French should lose the organ gun (which needs to be buffed right after France loses it, btw). The organ gun should be a unique English unit, and it needs to not be garbage so that it actually gets played. I don’t see the French using them anyway, even if they get buffed, when they have a better bombard, and the culverin, which are both super useful in the inevitable artillery sniper wars that the game descends into… Pretty OP. They even get a landmark for 25% more damage? Crazy.
“But the French got organ guns from the English so they should h”
No.
It would be bad for the gameplay if you couldn’t tell the upgraded version of a unit from the base one, so I would hope that the unity upgrades provide visual cues.
I don’t think blacksmith type upgrades generally come with visual cues though (in other RTS games in general).
Tbh HRE and France could have been one faction and you could have choose between one of them age3, both shared the exact same legacy (carolingien empire)
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Bills were farming implements that could be easily modified by adding a spike to the end making them into battle-ready billhooks (a bill with spear point at the end).
Bills were in such widespread use in England, for cutting up brush, branches, shrubs and even small trees, it was a cheap and effective way to equip their troops especially since lots of people would likely be more familiar than they would be with a spear because of their common use.
In my opinion, there should be a spearmen tech that turns them into billhooks and adds +(x) additional damage to them.
Another tech should make them cheaper and take slightly less time to produce.
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