So i was playing with goths today and think they are totally overpowered and need to get nerved asap.
Here’s why I support the request in this thread
- they win in equally balanced amounts without full upgrades (not even elite version) versus post imperial helbadiers
civ already very strong in feudal age with siege workshop and 2nd tc
buildings and units just meltdown easily because they have such a high attackrate
they outrun most other units
stats don’t show the whole story here because the range support and attackrate gives them a huge impact
they are too cheap
personally lost game with double the eco than opponent and 10 massing barracks while opponent wasn’t even imperial age (1900 voobly rating). Tried hand cannoniers and archers (as good as goths archers get), failed aswell
please devs just check the win rates, do some testing and fix
I think the Steppe Lancers should have their range reduced to 0.7 from 1. I say this for two reasons: 1, the current range does not match the graphic of the unit, as the lance does not reach that far, and 2, I created a lancer unit for an AOE2HD mod and found 0.7 to be the sweet spot for such a unit as far as balance goes.
Another way to balance the range is to increase the range of pikemen and halberdiers to 0.3 from 0, but this will make them OP versus all other melee cavalry.
Lower Steppe Lancers’ attack to be just +1 than kamayuks, which means non-elite attack 7, and elite 9. If this is still imbalanced, then try to increase its price to 70F, 40G or 80F 30G.
As someone that is currently maining Cumans and rly loves the Steppe Lancers, I do agree they need a nerf, but they also shouldn’t be nerfed so hard to the point they becomes useless.
I feel like their current stats are somewhat decent enough for their individual power, but the main issue I see for them is that the units that are supposed to counter them aren’t able to counter them at all.
Here are my opinions to some of the sugested changes:
I understand the issue of this exploit, and yes it’s a huge issue for Steppe Lancers, but for archers I feel like it kinda isn’t?
The thing is that archers need to find a proper spot to pull it off, so the player needs to get lucky and find a spot near where the archers are to pull it off, I personally don’t know if this should rly be considered broken because it’s rly situational. However, for Steppe Lancers it’s different because they can just do it anywhere they want, and thus becoming way more powerful than normal. I feel like a fix for that should only affect this unit and not others, I don’t rly know what to think about also fixing it for other units. Also we don’t even know if this mechanic can be fixed at all because of how the engine works, so we can just hope for the best.
I didn’t even know they were that fast compared to other units, and yeah their mov speed definitely should be nerfed, I’d say to either 1.4 or 1.45
I don’t think they should be nerfed like this, or at least not as much. They’re supposed to be an in-between of Hussars and Paladins, doing a nerf of -33% atk spd would make them weaker than Hussars, and I don’t think anyone would wanna make Hussars that cost gold, even with +1 range (they’re already as weak as them defensively). If this were to be nerfed, I feel like reducing it to around 2 - 2.1 would be much better.
Assuming the one from behind can still atk over the one on the front to hit any melee unit that’s attacking them, this would be great by itself, rly nothing to add to it.
Now this is the main issue I feel like should be addressed more than anything. Steppe Lancers shouldn’t be able to counter their counter units. I do like the idea to change the halberdier line to have 0.3 range assuming it doesn’t disturb balance all that much (at the end of the day cavalry shouldn’t try to fight them anyway, so the impact shouldn’t be that big I assume, and this would also be great since it could incentivate people to mix in some militia line units in their comp to help push halbs away, helping the militia line to have more purpose in the game).
Now here are the changes I rly want them to have:
Remove pierce armor (both normal and elite), this should help archers have more of an edge against them that they should have to begin with.
Make them take 33% more time to produce, if they’re strong with numbers then it should be a bigger challenge to mass them.
Make them deal negative bonus damage against halbs, camels and maybe even archer. Those units are supposed to be able to counter them, so I feel that better than nerfing Steppe Lancers against everyone is to make them much more weaker against units that are meant to counter them by lowering the damage they do against them. I’d nerf them like so:
– -6 damage against halberdier line
– -4 damage against camel line
– -1(-2 for elite) against archers (those shouldn’t be lowered much since they’d have already lost their pierce armor + archers should be weak to melee to begin with)
I feel like nerfing the Steppe Lancer on those amounts I proposed (+ the ones I mentioned from others with a bit of adjustment) should make them still have some of their strenght but they’d take longer to mass, losing some of them in combat would be more punishing and counters should have a much bigger impact against them, so even if a player manages to get a huge load of them they can still be taken down by their proper counters, and once taken down it’ll be rly hard for the player to mass them again.
Edit: I just did a test in the editor and edited the steppe lancers to have those negative bonus damage I talked about, here are the results:
I talked about it, maybe I wasn’t that clear abt it
I do think Steppe Lancers shouldn’t be able to attack while stacked (same for all other melee units that don’t have range), but I think that maybe archers should still be able to do so.
But they’re a melee unit, so removing their stacking ability doesn’t have to affect any other unit.
Even if the pikemen like range unit and mamelukes can stack, they’re not a problem.
There is a unit designed specifically to deal with stacked up units (mangonel, onagers) making it much more difficult to ‘abuse’ the stacking mechanic. It’s part of the reason why you don’t see players abuse the heck out of stacking by going for a huge mass of archers asap, but typically only go for 2-3 range production
The bigger the mass of xbows, the easier it becomes for the opponent to land a good mangonel shot. The issue is that this doesn’t apply to steppe lancers at all (and the fact that they have ridiculous stats)
Not allowing stacked units to attack is not feasible and breaks balance of this game entirely. I doubt it’s even possible to redesign the stacking mechanic specifically for lancers, and even it it were, it would be a very unpredictable and imbalanced unit. If you would patrol steppe lancers into an enemy army, units inevitably get stacked and you would have to micro them just to allow steppe lancers to attack other units.
There are several misunderstandings for many players imho.
One is not recognizing their strength is stacked up melee fights and charging them with pikes or camels and expecting good result. It is like attacking Samurai with Teutonic Knights. Yea TK have a lot of armor but Samurai also have attack bonus vs TK, it won’t be a great fight, and if you are outnumbered it would be a bad fight.
Attacking Steppe Lancer with low numbers is especially a terrible idea as they will be very easily kill the attackers before they can get a good a surround and deal a hit. That is especially true for pikes as they have low HP and very slow attack rate.
Tatars have extra attack bonus on hills, just on my last game my opponent attacked my 6 Steppe Lancers on the hill with 3 Knights losing all with 0 gain. Tatar Steppe Lancers deal 20 damage with elevation bonus, just three of them one shots pikeman, of course it would end very very bad.
I hope they won’t get Condottiero level nerf. They just need to be weaker vs ranged on castle age and lowering pierce armor to 0(non elite only) should do it. On imp they die very very easy by stacked ranged units especially if you can micro. Microing gets them bump into each other and removes their range advantage. They got a lot weaker on imp for the same reasons as Conqs gets weak. Ranged units gets more range, more stacked up damage while their range stays same.
What i love about them is like Saracen Cav Archers they can quickly break palisade walls and get in to deal damage. A fast anti palisade wall unit is great for more open games. Kudos to the dev who thought of it.
I think you’re the one misunderstanding the situation, Steppe Lancers shouldn’t be able to win literally every single melee fight in the game. At the current state they already completely replace the knight line by far, there’s just no reason for Cumans or Tatars to make knights over steppe lancers other than to defend from a rush while they have no units done. Steppe Lancers are half the price of Paladins and even tho they’re more flagile than them they still do great damage, and then have +1 range on top of it, making them be able to do a whole lot more damage than expected in group fights. Their biggest problem is that they’re able to do a lot more damage than Paladins and pretty much have no counters so far. All units that are supposed to beat them are unable to, including archers, and then on top of all of that they’re pretty much half the price of Paladins. Even tho I love to play with them ik for a fact they’re way too broken currently, and this is why I want them to be able to lose fights against units that are supposed to counter them, even when they’re in large groups.
Why they should have very strong counters like that? Well just look at the Paladins. Be4 DE Paladins used to be the only powerhouse unit in the game, they’re expensive but they have a lot of HP, great defense, great atk and great mobility. Why they aren’t completely OP and unbeatable with all of those stats? Because they have clear counters that can beat them down without much effort, aka halbs and camels. In RTS games you can indeed have strong OP units as long as they have proper counters, Steppe Lancers are already stronger than Paladins in equal numbers (assuming both are in mass) and they just don’t have any units that can counter them, and all of that for half the price of Paladins.
Also they aren’t countered by archers currently, in fact they deal with archers even better than knights. Stacked archers are able to beat knights because only a few knights are able to damage them while they all are able to hit knights, but Steppe Lancers can just stack on top of stacked archers and quickly break them down, and even if you micro with archers the other player can also just micro with his steppe lancers to land more stacked hits. There’s no escape for archers at all.
And you need to remember: Steppe Lancers only cost 30 gold, archers cost 45 gold, Paladins cost 75 gold, camels cost 60 gold, this makes Steppe Lancer the most cost effective unit ever seen in all AoE2 history by far, and they’re that cost effective against all matchups there are.
This is why I want camels and halbs to be able to easily counter them, the reason Paladins are allowed to be so strong is because those units are able to make quick work of them, so if we want Steppe Lancers to continue having part of their current power then they should be able to lose even more easily to camels and halbs.
As for archers, the reason I think they should have 0 pierce armor both normal and elite is because we aren’t having battles with them having 1 pierce armor, we’re having battles with them having 1 +4 pierce armor, both Cumans and Tatars have access to Plate Barding Armor (aka last cav def upgrade), and since I don’t want those civs to lose access to this upgrade I feel like setting their pierce armor to 0 would be the best option (and that would also give those civs a reason to go for Paladins instead, so they have a unit that can deal with archers better than Steppe Lancers)
Well, stacking allows archers to behave better than they are designed to behave, so I consider it a problem. You are not supposed to be able to reduce surface area of archers so much, as stacking allows. Also like shown in video that I linked, stacking also allows to attack walls/gates with more melee units at once than intended by the game. Yes, stacking can be countered by mangonels, but it still does not make sense to have 40 archers shooting from one tile. Stacking to increase combat efficiency does not seem to be an intended mechanic and so should be fixed.
More exactly I suggested, that when units are stacked, then only so many units should be able to attack from tile as would be able when unstacked. This would still allow accidentally stacked units to fight with reasonable efficiency, while removing any gain from stacking on purpose for combat.
40 stacked units would have much reduced surface area for enemy units to attack from, but also much reduced attack themselves, so it evens out. It is also more realistic, that crowded units can’t all attack simultaneously.
It is up to the devs to make some of the stacked units unable to attack, but I see no reason, why it should be technically impossible.
The thing is, it’s so situational I don’t see this being all that game breaking, archers need the perfect spot to be able to do that, and more often than not you won’t be able to find a spot in order to do that. This is y i personally don’t mind it
This is where the big issue is for me, for archers it isn’t much of a deal as well because they’re normally able to atk all at once because of their range, but when it comes to melee units that’s when things start to become way too broken, because you’re denying the most basic disadvantage of melee units that should exist in literally every single RTS game. This is the one thing I wanted to be fixed.
This is where it gets complicated to explain, because it depends heavily on how the game was coded and how flexible it is to changes. I’m a game developer myself (not from age, I have my own indie games), and ik how complicate it is to implement a change like that, and I feel that depending on how they coded the game there’s a chance that making a fix for it could be way too complicated or could even demand entire parts of the engine to be rewriten worst case scenario (I myself once had to rewrite my entire collision system in my game because I wanted it to be able to handle more features), but I don’t know at all how they coded AoE2, so doing something like that could literally take between a few lines of code and entire engine rewrite.
Mangonels are indeed a counter to slow moving archers.
But Steppe Lancers, especially those of the Cumans, are way to fast for a Mangonel to do anything.
Please show me a replay where you beat Steppe Lancers.
Not by a terrible player, but someone somewhat near your own level.
You need twice the numbers with almost any other unit to win a fight against Steppe Lancers.
But you can’t force a fight.
The Cumans player will just run away until he’s built up a big enough army and destroy yours.
Consider that Steppe Lancers are very easy to make, they’re made from stables and cost little gold.
Additionally the Cumans player can keep a town centre working while he’s going Castle Age.
So he’s going to have plenty of economy to mass his units.
Please answer the following questions:
How is the opponent supposed to create an army powerful enough to defeat the Steppe Lancer army?
How is the opponent supposed to get a fight while it’s still advantageous?
Show us a replay of how you’ve actually done this to a somewhat closely matched opponent.
I do think steppe lancers are completely broken for exactly that reason. It is a ranged unit with melee unit stats, but don’t share the same weaknesses as archers normally do. I personally don’t think removing the stacking mechanic is the way to go but simply making it more in line with kamayuk/throwing axe stats would be much better. 12+4 attack is absurdly strong for a ranged unit
Sure, that would be realistic, but at the same time, changes like these would make the game much less fun to play. They are definitely intentional decisions by ES back when they created this game. It would be very clunky and awkward if you have to manually spread out units just so they can attack, because they happen to be stacked. Not allowing stacking either would screw up pathfinding big time (and even if it doesn’t, it makes simple things like moving an army to a hole of an enemy wall extremely slow).
If you think about it, stacking is a great way of compensating the lack of army coordination units realistically would have. Normally, when steppe lancers would chase an army running away, the steppe lancers would aim for a different target, some steppe lancers would faster to get to the front targets, others move slower to reach the back targets, such that they completely surround the enemy units and attack them very efficiently.
If it was for realism, archers would fire from a much larger distance, archers can’t kite well, units don’t move at a constant speed, units can garrison inside military buildings, conversion takes longer etc. all which completely ruin the satisfying ‘feel’ and pace of the game.
In addition Steppe Lancers deal more damage with faster firing rate than Kamayuks and they are produced from stable which means they are easier to mass.
to the dev who thought of it.