Teutons: a balance suggestion

Nah. For instance, Conquistadors, War Chariots and Arambai have the cav archer armor class, and yet they aren’t affected by Parthian tactics, because having the armor class isn’t enough to make them actual Cav archers.

I’m going to test the first one (ok according to this AoE2 Calculator it’s nullified) , but otherwise I’m sure both HC and Huskarl deal full bonus damage against each other.

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You’re right, Huscarls take full bonus damage from HC, they take -10 pierce damage. After all, damage output is 17.
Codos are beter example here.

But all units you talkin about, take bonus damage vs CA. They are not affected by Partian Tactics becouse mechanic around this tech, not depending on their armour class.

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I think units benefitting from monks upgrades could be an interesting idea for a new kind of unit, but let’s be serious, devs certainly won’t completely change a unit which has been around since AoK. People here in the topic seem to think of TKs as “standalone” units, which I think is the wrong approach. One needs to consider them as a part of an army composition, in particular with siege, which covers the tks weaknesses. I think TKs are fine stat wise, they just need to be a bit less expensive overall, given that they are a situational unit and not some super-versatile unit like e.g. mangudais.

Teutons’ siege is good from a tech tree standpoint, but does not have any particular strong point except ironclad, which is again somewhat a expensive and situational tech. Teuton’s siege is far from being “really good”, such as celt or mongol siege is and teutons need really badly siege to force a fight with the enemy on open maps. Why? Because they lack both mobility and good ranged units: knights with no husbandry, no light cav, skirms with no bracer and no arbalests…Teutons need something to stop ranged units from just doing hit and run tactics and that something is siege, expecially onagers.

I’m not proposing to make the teutons brokenly op or to give them units/techs they are not supposed to have, all they is just to be able to better use the tools at their disposal by decreasing the cost of teching into siege, which is really expensive otherwise. Just that would improve a lot teutons’ versatility without ruining the civ identity.

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The only trouble with accelerating their move into siege is that siege doesn’t really have much in the way of counters. Get enough siege onagers and you become invincible against just about everything except for fast melee units, and Ironclad makes them much more resistant against even those.

So Teutons are already very strong at that point. I watched a game on youtube where Viper played them, had a ball of onagers and halbs, and become almost unstoppable.

A suggestion someone else had resonates with me; what if you swapped the Crenelations and Ironclad upgrades? After all, ironclad only really becomes cost effective once you’ve got quite a few siege units, which doesn’t happen until later in the game, while the Crenelations infantry firing arrows bonus becomes steadily less useful the later the game goes, due to their lack of Bracer.

Meanwhile, giving them 13-range castles in the castle age would mean they’d be really good at map control earlier on, which is the main tool slower civs use to fight back against faster ones.

As far as reducing the elite upgrade is concerned, I can agree with that. Even in the best case, you’re not going to be pumping out huge numbers of Teutonic Knights, they’re just too niche for that. Honestly I’d like to see the majority of the Infantry UUs have their elite upgrade cost reduced, with larger reductions going to the more niche units, like Samurai and Jaguar Warriors.

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I always thought they should be inversed

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Do you even hear yourselves, 13 range in the castle age? Outranging imperial age longbows and bombard cannons in the castle age. Snipe some castles in the castle age without the enemy being able to do anything.

Maybe, not such a good idea.

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Why are imperial age longbows relevant? Or Bombard Cannons?

The only argument I could see being relevant is the fact that Trebs aren’t available and so you could theoretically park one outside the range of an enemy castle and auto-win the fight, but Koreans have been able to do that with their towers for aeons(for free!) and it’s not been broken.

So I’m not really seeing the problem? Do you have any examples?

Towers are much easier to take own (specially in the Castle Age), than Castles are.

A 13 Range Castle would be a nightmare, specially in before Trebuchets.

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They are relevant cause even at their post-imperial form they would already be outranged at castle age, which makes zero sense. Also, the difference would already be a +3 in the castle age between anyone elses castles, koreans have had a +1 at castle age. 13 range in the castle age is very huge coverage, especially because every extra range that you have means 1 extra length of a tile of complete securance for the area, since you can’t fight that back at all. Towers barely do 1 damage to castles anyway and count in the fact that Teutons get extra arrows from garrisoning, that castle is gonna be tearing up the opponents one big time and can even shoot at halfway on its sides without it ever being able to counter back.

A tower is also much, much cheaper. Build five towers and it’s harder to take down than a castle. They have more health AND more damage.

That said, it’s meant to be a buff to the civ to make them stronger, of course it’s harder to take down, it’s supposed to be that way.

Yeah, but the Koreans get that for free, the Teutons have to pay through the nose for it. That more than balances it, in my mind; in reality, the Teutons would have to much delay their second castle in exchange, which means they’d actually be covering less area for quite a while.

Not towards buildings they don’t.

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What I’m after is that now it would be completely OP offensively. Korean towers don’t do that cause their attack is lower, ie. they do 1 damage to buildings and lower to units too and are easier to destroy even by building your own castle. A castles high damage coupled with the epic garrison bonus and epic range, would be completely OP in the castle age. Think about an offensive castle in Arena for example. Half the enemy base would be completely covered, probably even snipe their original tc and nothing could counter it, since it has more damage and range. In imperial this is ok because of trebuchets. All civs have a way to do something about a teutonic castle. But not in the castle age. Enemy sends some rams, unload your TKs on them and they’re gone, put them back inside to get all that dps back while healing them if they were unlucky to get scratched. If you go into a castle duel, teuton player has (if the stone happens to be available) much more room for villagers to repair their own castle than the opponent does. It would just force the opponent to suddenly drop everything and go to imp to get trebs. Which, might not be the ideal solution.

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I’m honestly not sure that would be possible in any normal game.

Because think about it. You’d have to START with an offensive castle drop, or everyone will already be in late castle when upping to imperial to counter with trebs is relatively easy. That means you’d have to research Crenelations on that castle, before your opponent realized what you’re doing, and that means you can’t even build those defensive TKs while the research is ongoing. You’d have to succeed at that, while winning in a game where you’ve dumped a huge amount of stone into the castle+crenelations AND sent a significant portion of your villagers forward to do the castle drop in the first place.

And if they send a few rams at you, you’re looking at dumping even more resources into otherwise-useless TKs for defense.

While I can envision scenarios in which it would be difficult to counter, those scenarios rely on already having a decisive advantage that would probably lead to your victory anyhow. After all, dropping two castles on their doorstep would cost a similar amount of resources, would also win a castle war easily, and would almost certainly be more effective in most other scenarios.

Basically, I don’t think it’s as strong as you think.

When the castle is there, it’s there like a normal castle drop. However, waiting 60 seconds to get crenellations does not move anyone’s buildings anywhere, when it’s done, you are covering that area and if the opponent happened to have something important there, well, too bad. Obviously you probably already have units in the field, you can comfortably start making TKs after crenellations. Besides, it’s still 250 stone less than 2 castles (actually you could say depending on situation 350 less when compared to other civs, since teutons save on murder holes), while it can perfectly comfortably shoot at anything without being at risk, unless the opponent wants to take a castle war, at which the teuton player would be at an advantage. Also, if you just get lucky or scouted and planned well the opponent might already have a castle in place, that is already in your range but you happen to be outside of theirs. And after that crenellations is made and you have denied half the base from your enemy, popping the next castle up is just crazy, since the first castle can defend it’s base from such a long range. Also sending your villagers in for a castle drop is not an unseen strategy, however this time it could actually kill the enemy villagers from a much longer range than usual, making it’s creation as safe as before but with a much greater reach behind the wall.

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It is by no means ‘half their base’; after all, you’re still building it out of range of their castle, which will most likely be on the front. You’ll end up covering maybe 10% more of their base than in a typical castle drop, the main advantage is the guaranteed victory against their castle.

And given that Murder Holes is very rarely researched, it would be silly to count it. In reality you’re talking about saving up 1050 stone and using it extremely aggressively, and if your castle drop fails, you’re going to be way behind them and almost certainly lose. It’s a very all-in and risky strategy.

No safer than a normal castle drop, either. You’re gonna be building the castle in the same place, it’ll just have range on the enemy castle. The only difference is, once you’ve got the stone for the castle you’ve gotta keep investing, making your economy weaker by comparison to theirs.

Seriously, you keep pointing out the strengths while ignoring the many, many weaknesses. It’s like saying War Elephants are unstoppable because they’ve got so much health and damage, while completely ignoring their even greater weaknesses.

Simple math: 13 range compared to 10 range, is range-wise 30% more coverage. Area-wise however, it is 67% more.

This is why I mentioned specifically, depending on situation.

Yeah and if it works might be very well worth the effort. There involves risk in normal castle drop too. However in the end all of this is hard to foresee for certainty how players might be able to make use of this, but it is important to take everything into consideration. Might be worse than I think, might not be that worse as I think.

The difference here is though, this same castle has 67% more coverage than without crenellations, having the potential to affect the enemy eco much worse than otherwise, making the potential risk also have more potential for a greater reward.

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Come now. When every version of the pike is making basically double damage to Eles compared to what they do to normal cavalry, ie. that thing actually having a hard counter by default at any stage of the game, basically since barracks is the building you need to build to even allow other normal military units to be made, while the thing we are arguing now has no proper counter to it at the stage it would be involved in, if one happens to get it rolling.

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Any strategy that relies on acquiring a massive resource advantage in the castle age is by default highly risky at best. What you are proposing combines this high-risk in terms of resources with an already high-risk strategy, the castle drop.

You’re talking about doing a late Castle drop, apparently just hoping that your enemy does not take advantage of this situation to seize all the map control in the universe, and then defending aforementioned strategy with extremely expensive and nearly useless Teutonic Knights. If you seriously think this is going to work against anyone but a complete idiot, I really don’t know what to tell you. Frankly, under those circumstances, anyone who manages pull that off more than deserves to win.

The TK is actually pretty darn good if you need to defend your castle from rams. But so are petards too. Anyways, the TK might not be otherwise useful right now, but at that point in the game it can be a good investment, since in this particular setup it is playing 2 roles: it defends the castle from rams and it adds to the castles dps when not doing that, so you don’t need 2 kinds of units for it, although archers would add more dps to the castle they don’t fare well against rams and are a somewhat bad investment as teutons anyway. The TK in castle age defending your castle base is actually very good, one of the few things it’s good at, since it doesn’t need to move and can hide immediately afterwards inside the castle to heal with free mushrooms. This tactic is especially op in the game of thrones mod where there are no trebs so it works even in the imperial age against the only thing you can kill castles with, rams.

The thing is about the castle age, that everything must have a counter to it. This would have none. Castle age counters to castles are rams and castles themselves. You could just waste an opponents castle for free or make him pay for repairs without you having to worry. That is not balanced at all.

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Again, so can the Koreans. Less effectively, perhaps, but also for free.

I remain thoroughly unconvinced.