There is literally no reason not to go anything other than cavalry in team games. This mechanic is completely broken and needs to be fixed. You are automatically at a grave disadvantage if you do not go horseman/knights.
Tell me i’m wrong.
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mobility is an advantage, but then how are you going to end the games at once, victories by landmarks are not viable
Once the wall is breached and a knight/lancer blob gets in it is often GG due to their speed and ability to ravage a players economy before their units return/chase them down. Ironically this isn’t as hard if you are spamming Knights/Lancers as well.
But yeah, team game meta is dominated by cavalry spam which is honestly rather stale.
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I dunno man, while Cavalry tend to dominate team games, I don’t find it the reason that makes team games go whack.
It can be quite map dependant. There nothing that a good back-wall or descent towering won’t fix. (Even a palisade wall in the back is enough)
Also having a small group of archer cav / knights or when econ is tight, just spears on patrol in the backline (if you have trade) is enough to fend off most harassment without sacreficing your microing in the front.
Other than that, cav-heavy boyz falls like flies against spears+crossbow once you regain controll or manage to block the hole in the wall fast enough.
Also start sending some small raid groups of your own into their backline. I find this often more effective as they will often pull their raiders back to deal with yours.
Mobile armies being superior has ALWAYS been the case in Age of Empires series. Hell, it’s been that way for every traditional RTS I could think of (Star Craft, War Craft, etc.). The maps are larger, so it makes sense to have a faster moving unit composition to go after your opponent’s base or to reinforce your teammate.
It’s not going to change. If you want an infantry-based civilization, then you need to learn how to 1) wall and defend the wall, 2) have a heightened sense, increase sound notification if you have to, of the map, 3) strategic “map crawl” with castles.
The problem with low ELO players is that they simply don’t notice game notifications as well. They did a good job stonewalling everything but they just fail to hear the attack notification.
Yeah, other than that, it won’t change.
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You are wrong.
In the game there is a good “unit counter system” except Malian scouts (current)…
You will lose if you play full cavalarie and your opponent plays spearman.
You will have a great disadvantage of not using the right units and misinterpreting the gamestate.
Knights: I see counter-pike. **run away to hit vills **
same story in aoe2, except: there are camels + CA.
and more importantly: MONKS
if 2-3 knights run around - monks were solution, not slow pikes.
but mostly, i blame maps. They are too big and too open.
reread, OP were saying about team games.
Runes are different.
If opponent playes pikes, you run to another one.
If another one play pikes, you jump 4vs1 with fast knights against one opponent and destroy him.
you trying to apply 1-1 logic into a little bit different settings.
so OP’s statement should be that every team should have at least one cav player?
To me, Cav is an important component in a “balanced” team or game plan.
I don’t understand why it makes Cav overpowered in teamgames.
At Diamond level and up team games I’ve literally seen teams of 4 go all cavalry. Horseman, knights, lancers, etc… all of them. They just go from base to base slaughtering villagers. Run away. Rinse repeat. Spears do nothing against this so don’t go all “lol gg noob just build spears”, spears do not scale on bigger than 2on2 maps at all. Same with TH defenses and towers, cavalry just burns right through them and defenses do diddly squat against Knights.
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Ironic.
We’re talking team games here. OP is correct.
this is completely overdone -sure it has advantages to have a mobile army, but it doesn’t make it “broken”, or something you have to fix?
the question: did you play team games?
if not - try.
if played - i do not understand how you did not meet cav squads.
it makes games unbalances == broken for TGs.
If you watched Octogone 2 - than you will see how knights dominated on a few maps.
Someone just spam knights and that’s all.
yes I play TG (currently diamond) of course also against cav civ’s ), but have no problem with it and do not understand what is unbalanced or Broken.
this is now a comparison to a FFA where you want to make many kills (king)… has not so much to do with teamgames (my opinion) … more with the fact that you want to be mobiel to be possibly fast at another place to snipe a king.
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I build a ton of pike and hope I survive the first raid in my online games
You’re right in the strategical sense. Mobile units will always be key units on larger maps if they’re balanced for 1v1 maps. Forcing 2-4 players to do a safety investment vs a single knight civ is unfeasible, and its generally better to have a knight civ of your own do an equal amount of damage to the opponent to compensate for your own losses instead.
Tactically though, I don’t see how we could “fix it”. A teamgame specific nerf to cavalry to compensate for the travel time utility would buff archer deathballs to the point that we’d prolly see a lot of 2x english setups. I can’t think of something, except some team-game specific increased defenders advantage besides the increased travel distance. Maybe a limited team-shared kremlin-gremlin ticket pool for the early game?
The big map, fast units trend has been a thing forever. It was the same in sc2. I don’t know if we can call it broken, but I’d be happy to hear suggestions on how to increase the diversity of plays.
In a 4vs4 have 4 players go French and have everyone rush 1 player with feudal knights, by the 8 min mark that player could have over 20 knights in their base. If the team that is being rushed works out what they are up to by the 5 min mark then they only have 3 mins to try and find a counter. What normally happens is that player dies, calls their team a noob and the game is over. In order to defend this the team has to guess that they could be going all in knights, scout like crazy and also guess which player they will target, they must all make units to counter the knights and if 1 of the players goes FC then the player that is being rushed will most likely die.
I wonder how this would playout with Conqueror players, my guess under Diamond this strategy would work majority of the time.
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I played a 3v3 yesterday vs Mongol, French, Rus players on Danube River. I was nervous at first, like great, here comes swarms of harassing cavalry. Well, I don’t think the players were very good… but we were able to defend ourselves pretty easily with the natural river and a simple wall. It took them a long time to route their cavalry around and were easily cornered if they went too deep on our side of the river. We suffered almost no losses in the feudal age and most players went straight to castle. By 15 minutes I had a massive army of upgraded infantry - spears, crossbows, maa. I made some rams and pushed in, they died, it was one of the easier games I’d played. Basically 1v3’d them. I had 80 infantry to their combined 60 cavalry/infantry.
I play Abbasid though so I’m probably least affected by cavalry since I have camels and strong infantry. Maybe we just need more turtle-friendly maps, cuz I really don’t feel like cavalry has the space to be OP on maps like Danube River. Prairie, Dra Arabia, etc. are definitely cavalry favored tho.
I also feel like the nerfs to walls make cavalry more attractive. There’s simply not enough stone quarries to maintain map control via stone walls on an open map. And it takes too long to react to a breach if you don’t have cavalry yourself. Takes just 1 ram or cannon to turn a ball of cavalry into a 60 second free-for-all on the trade line or farms. That’s usually how the stalemates get won in plat-diamond.
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