While the archers line got a small nerf on the Xbow upgrade and the Arbaleset upgrade, it still quite boring how archers play dominating the feudal and still ad they are in castle even with the xbow nerf.
The MAA archers or even now direct archers with 20 pop or even 19pop became somehow boring and killing the fun and diversity in the game especially team games.
I don’t know what to do honestly, but it just became so boring that you are forced to play archers and skirms in every game. Maybe archers should get more training time in feudal for example?
On the other hand what kills the other types is how defending against scouts and militia line is so easy. All you have to do is either quick walls and scouts do notning, or 2 spears. The quick walling itself became pretty much annoying lately even in tournaments it kills fun and devs should do something about it honestly.
Another thing scouts take so long to kill vills, and even you can fight back with vills, but archers much better and can be snowball that hard to deal with. Maybe scouts should have like +1 attack to their base attack for example?
I think we had enough of these “nerf archers pls” threads already.
They only made things worse.
Win the games in the match, not in the forum.
The thing with TGs is way more complicated issue… and it would only getting worse if we would start nerfing archers even more.
I understand that a lot of people want to be the pocket and carry the team. And i understand it’s a tough competition for that spots cause there are so many cav players out there. And it’s even harder if you get sometimes outshined by your flanks. But there are a lot of factors that play into that.
Unfortunately in a 3v3 there is only one pocket and even in 4v4 there are just 2 pockets and 2 flanks. So in general we actually need more people wanting to play flank in TGs.
But this becomes increasingly harder to find people willing to be flank the more we nerf archers for 1v1s.
the fact that archers is the meta is simply not true, not even in TGs, there are maps where Scouts are meta, for example Land Madness or that box turtles map where you do the early Mill.
On Black Forest/similar maps of course Archers are meta because they are CLOSED maps. Even on Arabia you often see a mix, someone goes Scouts and someone Archers.
People being biased to drive their own favored meta is what’s happening in this thread.
Actually now you say it…
I just remember when watching koala, a map that should actually be perfect for archer openings…
I was surprised there were several games where the pros chose to open scouts with cav civs.
I still haven’t comprehended this. IMO this makes no sense. But it shows imo that archers are definetely not OP.
the problem is always the same, and the threads are always the same
there is no counterplay. archers have no rotation delay and skirms are useless in teamgames. balls of archers can still 1-shot-kill most things because of minimum damage
the devs power crept and dumbed down the game too much by letting mayan/briton/etc. always spawn in front and franks/etc. always spawn in back
the ladder maps suck. there is no economy for anything except archer spam, especially as civ pickers easily perform mill-less 8-minute feudal rushes even at really low ratings. the early rushes lead to early game overs when the maps have no fishing to balance against that
xbow didn’t get nerfed. the only thing that got nerfed was the xbow spammer’s ability to get to imperial age quickly
1v1 spectators who don’t understand normal games on normal map sizes will try to tell me how i’m wrong
Maybe it was a big mistake from the original design to make the Xbow an upgrade for the archers after being able to mass in feudal. In AOE4 they learned from the fault and made Xbows another unit and arcehers another unit and make MAA effictive line in the game by making it counter archers, too late for AOE2 to fix this.
Now maybe some of people would ask why are you saying this?
Because you just feel it is “Age of archers”. Some people like to go 19 pop archers, some people like MAA archers, some people like civs can go 19 or 18 pop MAA into archers, some people like 21 MAA archers, some like Xbow with building bonus, some like Xbows with more range, some like Xbows fire faster, some like civs with Xbow free thumbring, etc.
It is just ridiculous how archers have a huge power spike anytime, any civ, any map. Even when you watch pro games, 99% of them archers/skirms play. In castle age Xbows/Eskirms. Did you watch KOTD4? It was king of skirms and archers despite the map was so open but rarely see scouts.
I don’t know about your level. In my level (even pros level) archers are the meta then you shift later.
IMO the devs should remove the Xbow upgrade from many civs to spice the game. Franks, Lithuanians, Poles, Hindus, Gurjaras, Huns, Mongols, Khmer, Burgundians, Magyars, Teutons.
Nobody forces you to play archers with any of these.
You can always just make the standard scouts into knights with them, it’s still a very strong meta strategy.
As I said some civs should not keep the Xbow in their tech tree to give more identity and spice the gameplay and force the players to go with the civ identity rather than xbows with Franks, Huns, Lithuanians, etc.
Manwhile the ladder is still dominated by knights.
We have civs like Khmer or Magyars with totally fine Arbs that rarely play xbows at all.
Why don’t we talk about this?
I have 140 1v1 games and am 1400 elo (top 10% players I think) and have 1400 team games and am 1200 teamgame elo and have yet to encounter a single mill-less 8-minute archer rushes, what do you consider really low ratings 11?
i see people under 1400 teamgame rating performing rushes that experts couldn’t even dream of pulling off in original AoE2
pushing deer is too easy without lag. it lets them forego mills for too long (especially mayans). villagers can command queue for zero idle time. houses cost less now.
nothing is wrong with interface improvements, but the cost is that pacing of the game has been completely destroyed
mid-level & low-level players are already facing a double of the strongest army composition (scouts + archers) in their base before they can even dream of setting up a defense. people commonly die before their ally can even afford a market for cartography. this kind of game does not function without perfect matchmaking, and the matchmaking will never be better than C-tier based on the inaccuracy of ratings and number of concurrent players