Step Lancers are broken - totally imbalanced

Why do we need the absolute power?
They clearly have way too much power.
Just nerf them a bit and keep doing that until you’re not sure, then more test data will actually be useful.

I think it is do able, Kamayuk introduced a new mechanic and it is a fun one to think about. I would rather reduce their HP/Armor or increase cost than attack power. If they got 6 attack they won’t be able to do what they are supposed to do and become the new Condo. Condos are now meh for early imp raiding and even worse vs Gunpowder so no reason to use them anymore.

Had the Condos kept the same and their vs gunpowder gimmick removed and their cost increased it would still be a fun unit but not an unbalanced one.

You literally said you know I’m right but you choose to ignore my argument. nice
Also even with trade routes food is still much quicker and easier to come by than gold, literally everyone knows this is a fact.

If I had said they’re literally half the price I’d have done a test with 100 SL vs 50 camels, and not 67 vs 50, but you prob also ignored it, and it doesn’t change the fact that at late game when there are little to no resources left people would have thousands of food stockpiled, but barely any gold left.

It was just an example, what I was trying to say is that both civs are easily able to kill halbs without risking their steppe lancers, but once again you completely miss the point.

Have you even played AoE2? If you had actually played you’d know those units aren’t available to every single civ, and even if every civ had them they’d still be spending way more to try and stop a unit that’s much cheaper and is being made into much bigger amount than theirs, and can easily decimate their army.

This is why I want their nerf to be specificly aimed towards unit that should counter then rather than a nerf to their overall power. The reason SL are broken is because they’re much more devastating than paladins even in equal amounts and they’re much harder to counter than paladins. This is why I want camels and halbs to be able to decimate them without having to make huge amounts of them, because if we start nerfing their overall stats they’ll get to a point where they’ll become useless again and everyone will just use paladins or hussars instead (and lemme tell you Hussars + Kipchaks/Cav archers are a pretty solid comp, and you can very quickly replace lost Hussars with Cumans, or for Tatars both Hussar and Cav archers get +1 pierce armor). Btw if you aren’t aware Cumans have the 3rd strongest Paladins in the game, only losing to Franks (2nd) and Lithuanians (1st, but assuming they get relics)

The reason Kamayuks aren’t absurdly broken isn’t just that their atk isn’t that high, the reason they’re balanced is that they can be easily countered by archers. They’re infantry, so foot archers have a fair chance against them, while they stand no chance at all against cav archers. Those are clear counters to Kamayuks. They’re being an issue? Just make archers/cav archers!
But currently what can we make against SL? Camels can’t cost effectively beat them, Halbs take 2s longer to produce than SL and u’d need double the amount of halbs to beat them (and making more barracks won’t solve the problem because ur opponent can just make more stables, also reminder that Kamayuks are castle units, SL are stable units), there’s no unit that can hold them back enough for ur archers to kill them while still being cost effective (reminder that the more u spend making archers the less u have to make units to use as meat shield)

This is why I proposed 2 nerfs: make them do less damage to camels and halbs so they can actually counter them, and make SL take 50% longer to produce. Currently making SL is no risk huge reward, so risks need to be added one way or another.

When in the ■■■■ are the devs going to do something about these???

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My bad, for some reason I thought they were doing some kind of collateral damage, they melt everything near them too quickly so it seemed like they did.

How about interchange the special ability of Keshik and Steppe Lancer?
Keshik has high gold cost and is hard to mass produce because it is a UU. On the other hand, the current gold earning efficiency is just meh, giving it to Steppe Lancer may be more tempting? Since it has a lower gold cost.

I think it’d be better to add those lancers to other civs, since lancer cavalry was really popular, especially in the Asian countries.

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God knows. Two weeks since launch and all we’ve really had update wise is stability fixes and server maintenence.

There are still a number of really annoying bugs which have been in the game since July, that were reported in the Beta forums but haven’t been touched.

No sorely needed balance changes either, such as nerfing the steppe lancers and the new civs in general.

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Tbh Steppe Lancers feel so strong rn I honestly don’t feel scared of Lithuanians and Bulgarians.

Exploit being situational does not make it any less of an exploit and does not mean, that it should not get fixed.

Based on this video it seems, that game keeps a list of units on each tile. Game could simply check whether unit is first (or one of the first) unit(s) on tile and if is not, then not allow it to attack. Of course there might be technical difficulties in implementing, but it is up to the developers to see whether and how they can do it.

Actually units should spread automatically instead of stacking in combat.

I already specifically said plenty of times, that stacking should remain as way of simplifying moving armies. I only want to limit it for combat.

This would be supported by units automatically spreading instead of stacking.

I find nothing satisfying in seeing 40 stacked up archers exploiting game mechanics, whole army of melee units attacking one wall piece, or these steppe imbalancers.

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Kts deal huge amounts of damage vs unprotected crossbows. Stacking helps to balance this. It’s only something you can do occasionally when you are lucky to find a gap, and it always comes at great risk of being oneshotted by a mango. This is why you never leave your crossbows stacked for longer than a short period. Kts can make use of their mobility to catch crossbows in open terrain.

In no way should an unbalanced unit called steplancer be the reason to remove such a nice mechanic.

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Knights are supposed to easily kill archer-line units (archers, crossbows, arbalesters) when they reach them. This is even said by knight tooltip in technology tree - “Strong vs. infantry and archers”.
Archers have advantage over knights when at range and disadvantage when reached. In order to keep their range advantage archers have to have meat-shield units or other obstacles in front of them. Stacking exploit reduces archers disadvantage at close range, which is not intended by the game and unbalances it.

I believe, that the only reason you and @MasterSncKnight are favoring allowing archers to attack while stacked is because you are loving using this exploit. But I don’t see this as a reason, to keep it in game, because it is unbalanced. Next time put meat-shield in front of your archers instead of exploiting stacking.

Gotta love when u write a wall of text and forget to click to send.

This would break the game a lot more than unit stacking does. Imagine if all units were even fatter than rams. That’s pretty much what this mechanic would end up doing. Even without stacking, a whole lot of melee and ranged units atk in the same tile, making only one atk per tile would make AoE2 unplayable.

Also I’ve been thinking, I think that trying to remove the stacking would only result in much more frustrating scenarios, mostly because of how the engine works. If you pay attention, units are only able to walk through each other when they’re in formation (more specificaly, both in the same formation), but once they get a target they leave formation and charge to atk them. You can see it much more clearly with melee units, they’re all walking pretty nicely together, but once they get close enough to their target they all spread like madman. The problem is that if you don’t allow units to atk when stacked I believe they’ll end up being stuck inside the other unit without being able to move, and this would be specially horrible for ranged units. Even if they tried to spread by themselves they just wouldn’t be able to move at all because they’ll be surrounded by units that are no longer in formation (that and even them wouldn’t be in formation themselves). I feel like that’s what would end up happening if we tried to “fix” it with the current engine.

Tbh I never use it myself, I just watch a ton of competitive videos and I’ve never seen this mechanic cause any issue. I rarely ever use foot archers, and whenever I do I always have some kind of meat shield to protect them, what I actually do most of the time is make cav archers (or UU like mangudais or kipchaks) so I don’t even need much of a meatshield for them since I can just hit and run until their army dies, but even so I still always have some meatshield for them, those being hussars or SL most of the time.

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They just need to cost more gold so they can’t be massed as easy. It is massing and stacking them that makes them OP. If problems persist, possibly reducing their pierce armor so archers counter them better.

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The problem is that they’re meant to be an in-between of hussars and paladin, if u make them too expensive they won’t be an in-between anymore

This wont fix the stand ground patrol exploit

I wouldn’t say it’s exploiting by stacking. That’s the equivalent of saying that I’m exploiting a wall that you keep running your head into. It’s pretty obvious when it happens that you shouldn’t try to fight it. If it wasn’t by design, you wouldn’t have knights bumping into each other with their larger hit boxes.

For additional comparison, infantry also fit into tight spaces. There is little reason that you’d want to, but they do. And there is a plethora of historical references to infantry and archers fitting into a tight space or chokepoint to beat greater or stronger numbers. There’s nothing wrong with mimicking that.

Lancers should not be able to stack in the same way that they can now, however. They seem to have smaller hitboxes than knights. I think the devs thought they would be weaker in practice to archers, as their description shows and if you don’t go purely into them they are. But once they’re massed they beat everything. In practice it just doesn’t work at all with the range.

A more accurate solution (or maybe just a help) would be to make lancers slower than knights. They aren’t heavily armored, sure. But when you are changing direction and carrying a lance, you have to move slower than in a straight line.

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The funny thing about this unit is that they made me think the kipchak is not as OP as I first thought lol (yup, these can totally rekt kipchaks).

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I don’t think their hitbox is smaller, they just don’t need to get that close to other units to do their work, while knights take a lot of surface area when hitting an enemy. It gets specially harder when trying to hit infantry, since they have smaller hitboxes, I think prob only 4 or 5 knights can atk the same infantry at the same time (I tested it and only got a max of 5 to hit one).

Yep, and it’s so broken that even without stacking they do much better at beating stacked archers.

Actually making the spear point upward negates that, and they’re always holding them like that when not attacking.